While the two major party presidential candidates crisscross the country – or at least the handful of battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome of next month’s election, Rachele Fruit made a stop for a few days in Minnesota last week. Fruit is the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party, and Minnesota is one of the six states that will have her on the ballot.
Fruit, who is Jewish, was spurred to enter the race on Oct. 10, 2023, when she was at the Miami Beach memorial service for the Oct. 7 attack in Israel.
“I was running for U.S. Senate in Florida, and I talked to the press. And people were shocked that we were there because the socialists are pro-Hamas,” Fruit said in the SWP office in Minneapolis. “I explained that our heritage is the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party, which fought against Jew-hatred for decades. It was part of uniting the Jewish population and the working class movement. Lenin said they couldn’t have won if they didn’t oppose Jew-hatred. Even though it was overturned and a counter-revolution in Russia, we go back to that history.
“We’re different. The name of our party comes out of history the working class here in the US. But we are a communist party. Small ‘c.’ We are the communists of The Communist Manifesto.”
Fruit said the “Big C” communist part is associated with the dictatorships of Stalin and Mao in the USSR and China, respectively. And despite sharing the word “socialist” with the Democratic Socialists of America, Fruit said there’s a big difference between the two parties.
“They are pro-imperialist,” she said. “Every socialist country, like Scandinavian countries, they’re not against capitalism. They think it can be made a little bit more humane, and that’s how they campaign for reforming things. Well, that’s not going to cut it.”
The DSA has, since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, been vocal its anti-Zionism, culminating locally in the Minneapolis City Council’s divisive ceasefire resolution that passed in February. The SWP had a representative at those meetings, Gabrielle Prosser, who was speaking out against the resolution, and the party has made its Zionism a central issue. Prosser is running as a write-in candidate in the 5th Congressional District race.
“The fight against Jew hatred has been front and center since the beginning [of the campaign] she said. “You have to be direct about it and and we have had virtually no pushback from any worker that we’ve met in the last seven months on the picket line. As virulent as the antisemitism is in this country and growing, it’s not, it’s not a predominant view in the working class at all.”
While the SWP is on the ballot in Minnesota, Vermont, New Jersey, Washington, Tennessee and Louisiana, Fruit’s travels have taken her around the world. For her it’s not about the results of the election, but about growing her worker-centered political movement.
“We need a party of labor, which is the first thing that my campaign is about,” she said. “Explaining why we, the working class, needs a party. It needs to break with the Democrats and Republicans that represent the bosses. And we need a party that fights for the working class, and that includes allies, small fishermen, truckers. How many truckers are there in this country? That’s a layer of the population that’s also being exploited by the system.”
Fruit has been visiting picketing workers who are striking around the country – and that was before the longshoremen strike that started at midnight on Oct. 1.
“One of the themes of this campaign is workers are in a mood to fight, and we have seen that verified every day of this campaign,” she said. “We’ve been walking picket lines all over the country, meeting with workers who are looking for a way forward.”
Fruit herself is a member of the union Unite Here Local 355 in Miami, where she works as a housekeeper at the Fountainbleau Hotel, and said she’s been a member of several other unions. She has also run for office several times, first in a Detroit City Council race in the mid-1970s.
“What our campaign is based on is solidarity with workers and struggle,” she said. “[We’re] trying to point to a way for this to develop into a real workers’ movement where one fight supports another fight. This is what it’s going to take for us to achieve a party of labor workers have to see themselves as part of something much bigger than their own personal situation.”
“For her it’s not about the results of the election.” As Americans, as Jews, we don’t have that luxury. I hope no one wastes their vote on a candidate who proclaims that the results of this election don’t matter.