On Tuesday, the Socialist Equality Party in the United States announced that it has selected its candidates in the 2024 elections, Joseph Kishore for president and Jerry White for vice president.
The SEP has established a website for its campaign, which is accessible at socialism2024.org.
Kishore, 44, has been a member of the SEP in the United States since 1999. He has served as the party’s national secretary for nearly 16 years, having been first elected at the party’s founding congress in 2008. He ran as the SEP’s candidate for president in 2020.
White, 64, is the labor editor of the World Socialist Web Site. He ran as the SEP’s presidential candidate in 2008, 2012 and 2016.
SEP (US) National Chairman David North explained the purpose of the SEP campaign in a statement announcing it:
The Socialist Equality Party is intervening in this election to raise the political consciousness of the working class, to develop its understanding that no solution can be found to any of the problems confronting working people except through the ending of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism, and that this great historical task can only be achieved by adopting a global strategy aimed at the mobilization of the power of the American and international working class in a unified struggle against the world capitalist system.
North emphasized that the SEP campaign would be directed to the international working class. He said:
What happens in the US affects every country in the world. Given the global impact of the US elections, every person in the world should have the right to cast a ballot in November.
He added that the SEP would seek to unite workers internationally and “fight against the vicious chauvinism of the capitalist parties.”
By running in the election, North said, “The Socialist Equality Party will advance a program that calls for the end of the corporate-financial dictatorship, the establishment of democratically controlled public ownership over the financial-corporate conglomerates, and the dissolution of the vast military-industrial complex.”
North explained that the SEP is “not a mere vote-catching organization, shouting demagogic slogans, mouthing platitudes and adapting its program to the lowest common denominator.” Rather, “The SEP is a party of history,” with “theoretical, political and practical work … based on a vast experience of revolutionary struggle, spanning more than a century.”
He continued:
Our traditions are rooted in the international principles and program of Marxist socialism, as it has been defended and developed by the Trotskyist movement, which was founded in 1923, in opposition to Stalinism, social democracy, reactionary nationalism and countless varieties of middle-class politics.
In accepting the nomination of the SEP as its presidential candidate, Kishore stated,
The two likely candidates of the Democrats and Republicans, President Biden and ex-President Trump, represent two factions of the capitalist corporate-financial oligarchy. They speak for, and act on behalf of, the billionaires, the super-wealthy Wall Street shareholders, the corporate interests, and the military-industrial complex and their program of war, dictatorship, inequality and poverty. As the SEP’s candidates, Jerry and I represent the interests of the working class, the vast majority of the population.
Explaining the essential features of the present leading figures of the two-party system, Kishore noted that Trump “is not running so much for president, as he is for dictator.” The Republicans “seek to exploit and misdirect social grievances by marketing the snake oil of reactionary nationalism, pitting American workers against our class brothers and sisters throughout the world.”
As for Biden and the Democrats, he said, “their central program is expanding war. Biden’s provocation and escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine, now in its third year, and support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, are part of a global imperialist and militaristic agenda that is leading mankind to the catastrophe of nuclear annihilation.”
“Neither the Democrats or Republicans have anything to offer working people and youth,” Kishore stated. “While endless sums are made available for war and bailouts of the rich, millions of workers struggle to put food on the table amidst soaring prices.”
The interests of workers can be secured, Kishore explained, only through an industrial and political offensive of the working class bound up with the fight for socialism. He stated:
Socialism means genuine social equality between all people. It means abolishing an economic system based on the exploitation of the working class, in which massive wealth is concentrated in the richest 1 percent, and CEOs and Wall Street executives “earn” more in one day, and even in one hour, than the worker makes in an entire year. Socialism means a society run by those who produce all the wealth, the working class. It means an enormous expansion of democracy by establishing working class control over production on a world scale.
In his statement accepting the nomination of the SEP for vice president, White drew attention to the history of the class struggle in the United States, noting:
We will be told for the one millionth time that socialism can never win a hearing among American workers. This is a lie. Nowhere else has the class struggle been as explosive, from the eight-hour day movement of the 1860s that culminated in the Haymarket Affair, through the Great Pullman Strike of 1894 led by the founding figure of American socialism, Eugene Debs, to the struggles for the industrial unions in the 1930s spearheaded by socialist-minded rank-and-file workers, to the mass civil rights movement of oppressed black workers in the 1960s, the American working class has produced more than its share of heroes and martyrs, victories and defeats.
White added, “The central problem has ever been to break free of the Democratic and Republican parties and their various middle-class satellites. To the American workers we can say, together with Debs, ‘Get out of the capitalist parties. You don’t belong there.’”
He concluded by stating that the SEP will be “forced to work within the constraints of the American capitalist election, which seeks to bar all third parties, and especially socialist parties, from being seen or heard. But our election campaign will be waged against these constraints. It will be waged on the international arena, it will be waged in history, and it will be waged for Trotskyism—that is, genuine socialism.”
Readers of the WSWS can find more information on the Socialist Equality Party election campaign and sign up to get involved on the campaign website, socialism2024.org.