SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign

Left, Rachele Fruit, SWP candidate for president. Right, Margaret Trowe, SWP candidate for vice president.
(Figure & Caption Source)

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has announced their candidates for US President in 2024. The big reveal happened at a forum in Union City, NJ, and is described in two articles in this week's Militant here and here.

I have several immediate reactions:

• I'm glad they're running candidates. Despite the fact that their program is incoherent and I'm never gonna vote for them, I'm sentimentally attached to the effort. I put too much work into the Linda Jenness/Andrew Pulley campaign in 1972, and especially into the Peter Camejo/Willie Mae Reid campaign in 1976, for me not to care. I'm proud to say that Willie Mae was a good friend of mine back in the day. So Godspeed (or Lenin-speed) to the new candidates.
• Despite my not voting for them, I support them on several specific issues. First, they recognize Hamas for what it really is--namely a fascist thug gang that wants to murder all Jews. Unlike our other Trotskyist friends, the SWP understands that Hamas isn't even pro-Palestinian--all they are is pro-fascism and pro-murder.
  Second, they understand that Trump's legal problems are not because he's such a great criminal, but rather it's an attack on the civil liberties of all Americans. Indeed, they explain that better than I can. My response is to vote for Trump (which is what I intend to do), but I'm happy to have the support from my old friends in the SWP.
• There is nothing in either article about getting on the ballot anywhere, though they are working to get Joanne Kuniansky on the ballot for the New Jersey Senate seat.

OK--enough of a tease: the lucky candidates are Rachele Fruit for president, and Margaret Trowe for vice-president. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know either of them personally, despite the fact that we were comrades back in the day. Ms. Fruit apparently joined the Party back in 1970, which makes her roughly my age. As best as I can tell from her biography, she's a native of Philadelphia.

She has run for public office many times in the past. Indeed, she's currently running for the US Senate seat in Florida, open due to Rick Scott becoming governor. There is no explanation about who is going to take her place in that campaign. This seems unserious.

She ran for a Detroit Common Council seat in 1973, for governor of Georgia in 2018, and for governor of Florida in 2022. Most people will find it odd that one person runs for various offices in three states, but of course that's what SWP candidates do--they make no effort to go native and be from someplace specific.

We can infer that Ms. Trowe will turn 76 this year. It seems she grew up in Oakland, and she currently lives in the East Bay. From 1997-98 she worked as a meatpacker in Marshalltown, Iowa. If she's a typical comrade she has been posted in many places across the country. Her only run for public office was for vice-president in 2000, playing second fiddle in James Harris' campaign.

Both of our candidates are proud union members, and see that as a key selling point for their candidacy.

Fruit is a hotel worker and a member of UNITE HERE Local 355. Before that, she has been an active member of the American Postal Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, the International Association of Machinists and the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

Ms. Trowe reports the following list:

Margaret Trowe is a unionist who has worked in the shipbuilding, garment, chemical and food production industries. Currently a member of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 125, Trowe is on a leave from her job as a production worker at the Ghirardelli chocolate factory in San Leandro, California, to campaign for vice president.

Apparently comrades change unions as often as the move across states, and only slightly less often than they change their clothes.

Which is sad. Ms. Fruit--who is at least 70--is still working in a hotel. Is she a maid? Had she stuck with just one of those union jobs for--let's say--30 years, she'd be collecting some kind of pension by now. Or at least she'd have a 401K. But as it is, she has to keep working into her 70s.

Ms. Trowe is just as poorly off--still working as a production worker on the chocolate line.

The Party did their comrades a grave disservice by moving them around so much--and for what looks like zero political gain. How do you earn trust or gain a reputation if you never live in a place for more than a few years? 

The list of unions our candidates were/are members of is praiseworthy. Apart from the Postal Workers, all of them are private sector unions. Put another way, they provided real goods and services for consumers who voluntarily paid for what was produced. Mss. Fruit & Trowe are actual, productive members of the working class. No mooching off the taxpayers for these two ladies, which puts them streets ahead of other Trotskyist grouplets who champion the causes of public sector workers (eg, Jeff Mackler--long time member of the teachers' union). By contrast, our friends over at Left Voice are grad students and college professors, clamoring for ever more generous welfare salaries for public college employees, at tax-payers expense.

It's weird that the campaign never mentions two unions that have been much in the news recently: Starbucks Workers United and the Amazon Labor Union. These are serious--if not entirely successful--efforts to unionize workers who are hard to reach. I understand the SWP doesn't want to be in the same bed as the petty bourgeois fakers over at Left Voice, but in this case there is a confluence of interest and the Party is remiss in not getting on board.

Ms. Fruit summarized the campaign's program here:

“The capitalists’ profits come from exploiting wage labor. The wealthy minority holds state power by dividing the working majority,” Fruit said. “The SWP joins the fight for unity in the working class, for building and strengthening the trade union movement and labor solidarity, for opposing Washington’s wars, for a government-funded public-works program to provide jobs and put an end to divisions between employed and unemployed, and for demanding amnesty for immigrants living and working in the United States.”

My response in bullet points:

• The first sentence is just wrong. In a competitive free market (such as mostly exists in the USA), it is impossible for anybody to be oppressed in the Marxist sense. The second sentence is a gross exaggeration--the "wealthy minority" of whom she speaks is only 0.1% of the population, and despite their economic wherewithal, they're nowhere near numerous enough to "divide the working majority."
• Regards "Washington's wars," the Party seems to be supporting US foreign policy more than opposing it. They support the US arming Ukraine, and they back the US policy regards Hamas (though they appear to have more backbone than Mr. Biden). 
• About immigration, I point out here that the Party's position is somewhat more nuanced than what is said in the above quote.

Margaret Trowe said nothing but the truth, here:

“The Socialist Workers candidates urge workers to organize and act to prevent the Democratic Party’s assault on freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution,” Trowe said. “The Democrats’ witch hunt against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — the attempt to throw him off the ballot, ruin his family and send him to prison — is a blow to political rights workers sorely need. Whoever is targeted today, it is working people who will be targeted tomorrow.”

Enough said. Vote for Trump!

Further Reading:

• Oppression!
• Three Militant Articles on the Economy
• The SWP's 2020 Campaign Platform