Oregon PSL organizers invite you to imagine a socialist future

Less than a month to election day, and some young voters, traumatized since the pandemic with wars and escalating climate disasters, see no reason for hope.

Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): It’s a very pervasive feeling and it’s a very pervasive feeling for good reason that, you know, that we’re all sort of led to believe that the amount of power that we have is to cast a vote every two or four years, and then accept the result, whether it’s blue or red, and then just, like, keep going to work, keep doing what you have to do to, to, like, just get by with the barest survival.

[00:00:39] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Before I joined the party, this is also how I felt, like Rob said, like, I was totally in that place of feeling like my vote was worthless, and like I had no voice in this political system.

[00:00:51] It’s so much easier for many people in this society to imagine the apocalypse, to imagine the complete breakdown of society through—You know, we have movies about civil war, you know, hypothetical civil war in this country, movies about the apocalypse, movies about torrential floods and biblical crises that destroy the fabric of society. It’s easier for people to imagine that than to imagine a socialist future.

[00:01:21] And that’s also what this campaign is about, is getting people to imagine what a socialist future could look like.  We want to help people move into that place of a positive realization about the future. And one way that we do that, I think, is by looking at the rest of the world.

[00:01:44] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): The Claudia/Karina campaign, the Vote Socialist 2024 campaign, I mean, it is a presidential campaign. We are running to collect votes in this election. But that’s not the only thing that it’s for. What we are building in the party, and what we’re building in the campaign, is a movement that can build the power that we need to solve these massive problems that we’re facing.

[00:02:12] So that is to say that we are on the ballot and we are organizing at the ballot box, but we’re also organizing in the streets. We’re organizing to win reforms from this system while we can, with the recognition that as long as the people currently in power remain in power, those reforms will be tenuous at best, can be taken back at any moment.

[00:02:33] I mean, ultimately, we are working to build the movement that will take power for the working people in this country, and solve those problems at the scale that we believe they need to be solved.

[00:02:44] And, you know, we talk about socialism, about changing the entire system, this is what we’re really getting at. We’re talking about working together, not watching as other people do it, right? It’s all of us together being involved in the movement that is oriented toward addressing our actual needs.

[00:03:06] This is what it brings up for me is, is becoming part of the movement with the other working people of the country, of the world, to take that power that we are in power to solve the problems that we have.

[00:03:24] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): You know, Rob mentioned something about, we’re not just fighting with our class, but we’re fighting with the working class around the world. And the working class around the world are on the move. Millions of working people all across Latin America are on the move, building and defending socialist projects. millions of people around the world are on the move, defending themselves against U. S. imperialism and Zionism, and those people, they’re not in despair, and they have bombs dropping on them, but they’re willing to fight.

[00:03:55] We know from decades of experience that you don’t fight the right wing with the center. You don’t fight neofascism with the center. You don’t fight it with compromise. You fight it with a strong left. And right now in this country, we are rebuilding a left that has been under attack for a hundred years. When we talk about building a movement, we are rebuilding the entire American left.

[00:04:25] And that’s the kind of movement that we need to build here, is a movement of people who are ready to fight, and whether it’s at the ballot box, whether it’s door knocking, and whether it’s in the streets, you know, really confronting the police, confronting the state when they try to suppress our right to protest, that’s the type of movement that we need.

[00:04:44] So that’s what I say to young people is like, just, just try to get them to look around, you know, to see themselves as a smaller piece of a bigger, much, much, much bigger project and a much bigger vision of history. Right now, the moment we’re in is a small piece in history, and there’s so much more ahead of us.

[00:05:09] Claudia De la Cruz (PSL presidential candidate, Free and Equal Debate, Feb. 29, 2024): My name is Claudia De la Cruz and I am a working-class, second-generation immigrant, mother, organizer, educator, and a proud Socialist. I am also a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which is a party that has existed for the last 20 years, that has been in the front lines of struggle, across different fronts of struggles:

[00:05:32] Everything from defending our rights to housing, our rights to health care, against police brutality, against imperialist wars. We are actively engaged all across the country, organizing, educating and mobilizing working class people to end the dictatorship of the billionaires, which is ultimately the root of our problem.

[00:05:54] The U.S. does not lack resources, it does not lack the ability to provide housing, create jobs, provide free healthcare and education for everyone in society. Instead, we have a society that produces misery, that creates 160 million people who are living in or near poverty, that produces over 500,000 people who are living in homelessness.

[00:06:19] But we have a handful of billionaires that are benefiting from our misery and suffering. Billionaires and millionaires who profit from the endless war and occupation. We need solutions that meet the scales of the problem. We cannot continue to think that we can reform capitalism. It is urgent to get the billionaire class out of power. Our Vote Socialist 2024 campaign is here to expose the brutality and organize, mobilize for the transformation of society. VoteSocialist2024.com.

[00:06:55] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Yeah, so, we actually just launched our organizing hub. We call it the Portland Liberation Center. It’s our main location for all of our meetings, forums, volunteer orientations for the Claudia/Karina campaign. On Friday at our grand opening, we had live music and food and visual art displays from Artists Against Apartheid. So that has been one of our big campaigns this year, is building up that space and bringing more people in to learn about socialism, to learn about Claudia/Karina.

[00:07:31] And as part of our work for the Claudia/Karina campaign, we did petitioning in Washington State much earlier this year, I think in May, to get Claudia/Karina on the ballot in Washington. So we went up to Vancouver for a couple of weekends and gathered several hundred signatures so that they could be on the ballot there, but because ballot access is so difficult in Oregon—Rob has more information about this—but it takes us, we need, like, 24,000 signatures in Oregon to get on the ballot.

[00:08:06] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): We’re not invited on the debate stage with either of the ruling class parties. We’re fiercely kept off the ballot, even when we managed to get the signatures, which is already a high bar—in Oregon, that’s a super-high bar, like, we could get on the ballot in 14 states with the number of signatures we need in Oregon—even when we clear the signatures barrier, like we did in Georgia and Pennsylvania this year, then it’s not over, right? Then the Democratic lawyers are coming after the campaign, finding technicalities to get us thrown off.

[00:08:43] So I think they understand the danger posed to the current system by our program and by our leaders.

[00:08:54] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Yeah. About six months ago, there was a CNN roundtable discussion with your John Doe/Jane Doe voter-type people. And this was when Biden was still in the race, and his poll numbers were dropping every single day, and it was just looking like this dire situation. We were sure that Trump would win against Biden, right.

[00:09:18] And at this roundtable discussion on CNN, one of these young Black people said, ‘You know, I’m thinking about voting for Claudia de la Cruz.’ On CNN! And we all watched and we were like, ‘Wow, that’s so amazing.’

[00:09:32] And then the pressure built so much that Joe Biden had to drop out. The Democrats realized that they could potentially lose the state of Georgia. They could lose the state of Pennsylvania. They could lose these important battleground states to Trump if they kept Biden. And so they had to pivot.

[00:09:50] They had to make this really big last-minute decision, basically, to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, who won zero votes in the 2020 primaries, was at one point a deeply unpopular candidate. No one voted for her for this election. She’s gained no votes, right? So it’s a big gamble, actually.

[00:10:15] And at the same time, she’s also part of the Biden/Harris administration that has been carrying out the genocide in Palestine, which millions of people in this country are angry about, and have said in polls that it would influence their vote.

[00:10:32] And so then fast-forward to the last few weeks or the last month where, like Rob said, the Democrats and the Republicans have colluded in the state of Georgia, in the state of Pennsylvania to kick third parties off the ballot, not just Claudia De la Cruz, but also Jill Stein and Cornel West. They don’t want any threat to their power.

[00:10:54] The more that we win people over on that kind of small scale, it builds. And they are afraid of the power that we have to actually change people’s consciousness, to actually win people over to a program of socialism that demands a new system. Because ultimately that’s what this campaign is about, is that we need a new system.

[00:11:22] Claudia De la Cruz (PSL presidential candidate): And so when we’re thinking about socialism, let’s think about socializing, redistributing, reorganizing, that is what we are proposing. And it’s something that could be done in this country if we’re able to take back the money that has been kidnapped by the billionaires and the millionaires in this country.

[00:11:41] So we don’t need to go too far. Every socialist experiment that has ever existed has been invaded, has been sanctioned, and has been fought against. There’s a reason for that: Because it provides a path for the majority of people in the world, the billions of people in the world that are at the mercy of five—five individuals that own more of the wealth in this world than the majority of people in this world. And so when we’re talking about socialism, that’s what we mean, taking back what is ours.

[00:12:12] The many who produce the wealth should control the wealth. When we’re talking about national unity, we all agree that we have the basic human right to education, that we have the basic human right to housing, to healthcare, that we should not have to pay to be able to access those human necessities.

[00:12:34] Therefore, let’s find our common ground in the fight of defending what our human and civil rights are.

[00:12:44] John Q: That’s presidential candidate Claudia De la Cruz. She’s an official write-in candidate in Oregon.

[00:12:51] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): We just made the tactical decision to go for the write-in status in Oregon. A write-in campaign is basically like running a union drive: you really have to convince people on an individual level why they should write Claudia/Karina in because they’re not on the ballot, they’re not in the voter pamphlet. We have to be the ones doing that on-the-ground outreach.

[00:13:13] So we door-knocked in Washington, and we’re still door-knocking here in Oregon. We have a few more sessions lined up before election day. We do tabling to meet people, you know, at farmers markets and grocery stores and things like that to talk to people about the campaign. People are really excited about what we have to say. We have solutions that actually meet the scale of like how big the problems are, whether that’s climate change, whether that’s the genocide in Palestine, whether it’s inflation and, you know, wealth inequality.

[00:13:30] Go to VoteSocialist2024.com, you can donate. You can sign up to volunteer, and when you sign up to volunteer, you’ll get emails, where you can get connected to other more upcoming opportunities as well as webinars and things like that. We have volunteers who come from really rural areas who can’t always come into town for door knocking or outreach events. But they can get access to material that they can print out for themselves and they can put a posters in their own neighborhoods.

[00:14:18] We have less than 30 days now before the election. And so, upcoming, we are going to be doing wheatpasting around the Portland area. That just helps get that visual reminder of our campaign and uses art and design to win people over to the, like, I was talking about that socialist vision of the future.

[00:14:39] Claudia De la Cruz is coming to Seattle on Oct. 10.

[00:14:45] We have a study group coming up on Saturday the 12th, where we’re going to talk about a great book about Palestine.

[00:14:54] We have a forum also, it’ll be 6:30 on Friday the 25th and that will be 100% about the election.

[00:15:01] And yeah, you can also sign up for the PSL Portland email list by going to pslweb.org/join, and you can submit an application or you can contact us, leave feedback and just say, ‘I’d like to be added to the list.’

[00:15:16] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): So in Eugene, we’re going to be tabling at Saturday Market, this Saturday, Oct. 12, at least from 11 to 1 and maybe for a longer time than that. This is in the Free Speech Zone where we’re permitted our free speech at Saturday Market. So we’ll be there and you can connect with us. We’ll probably be there several other weeks between now and then.

[00:15:37] But as Mariah was saying, if you go to VoteSocialist2024.com to keep apprised of the events, then you’ll get those event announcements.

[00:15:46] To connect with our branch here in Eugene, you can sign up for our mailing list and our Substack account, which is a good way to keep apprised of the events that we have coming up. You know, the next month, our events are going to be largely centered around the Claudia/Karina campaign because the presidential campaign takes up all the air in the room around this time every four years. So we’re going to be talking a lot about Claudia and Karina.

[00:16:11] But, throughout the rest of the year, throughout every other year, we’re organizing study groups, we’re organizing rallies, we’re organizing events, organizing educational forums, and we’d love to have anyone come join us. So, hopping on our mailing list is a good way to do that.

[00:16:26] John Q: And they say: Don’t forget to write in Claudia for president.

[00:16:31] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): You’ll get your mail-in ballot in the mail and there’ll be a section for president and vice president of the United States and there’ll be a section for write-in, and you just fill in the bubble for write-in and write in ‘Claudia De la Cruz.’ And I recommend that you do a quick web search to make sure you get the spelling right, and to read more about our program, read more about our campaign, read more about our party, and the other work that we’re engaged in around the country.

[00:16:59] John Q: Activists from Portland and Eugene with the Party for Socialism and Liberation ask you to write in your vote for Claudia De la Cruz. For more information, see VoteSocialist2024.com.

Image: Still image of Claudia De la Cruz courtesy Free and Equal Debate video; Oregon organizers (top right) Mariah Denman and Rob Fisette.