Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, two working-class women running for President and Vice President as candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), launched their Detroit campaign on Sunday.
The local event, which took place at Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center, included members of Detroit’s PSL branch speaking about the campaign, as well as community members interested in learning more about it and how to help. While the candidates were not physically present, De la Cruz Zoom-ed in to speak about their campaign to attendees virtually, and discuss the difficulties of getting on the ballot as an independent candidate, as the requirements are unique for every state.
Building an independent movement of the working class in order to “End Capitalism Before It Ends Us” is the main mission of De la Cruz and Garcia’s platform.
The campaign’s overall programs include: “Seize the Big 100 Corporations,” “Create a New Economy for the People,” “Overthrow the Dictatorship of the Rich – Build a Democracy that Serves the Working Class,” “End the Rule of Money and Lock Up the Corrupt Elite,” “Cut the Military Budget by 90% – Peace, Not War with China & Russia,” “End the War on Black America,” “Defend Women’s Rights, Full Equality for LGBTQ People,” and “Save the Planet from Capitalism.”
Ahead of the Detroit campaign launch, we talked to presidential candidate De la Cruz about the campaign and what it may mean to Michiganders.
What issues that your platform is focusing on do you think uniquely affect Detroit or Michigan overall?
“I think all of the issues affect Michigan highly. The basis of our campaign is the reorganization of the system in which we currently are living under, which is capitalism, which creates the levels of poverty that we have in this country, the levels of inequality that we have. So, when we approach the platform of a campaign, we like to say that we need to look at the platform holistically. It’s not a single-issue platform, it’s not a platform that promises people things that will have to be broken. We understand what capitalism is and what it has produced in society, the cancer and illness that it is, and we think that we can’t just deal with the symptoms, we have to deal with the problem and get to the root of it.”
Michigan just had our primary election and we had over 100,000 people who voted “uncommitted.” How do you feel about that “uncommitted” vote?
“There's several things that I feel about the uncommitted vote. I think it’s a great show of force. I hope Minnesota does it next and I hope it just spreads throughout the U.S. [to show] that people actually go and show force because the force of the ruling class will only respond to force. Now, we also need to determine what our force is going to do, because we’re not only here to threaten them and say, ‘Well, once you do this ceasefire, we’re good with you.’ I believe Palestine deserves full liberation, full and total liberation. I believe that Palestinians who have been displaced have the right to return and they have the right to return home, which means that they also need reparations for the damage that has been caused. Those are my beliefs, and in that belief, I feel that just voting ‘uncommitted’ as a threat, with the possibility of going back to the Democratic Party, is a problem. We need to be uncommitted to the Democratic Party, we need to be uncommitted to the Republican Party, and we need to be committed to liberation. Being committed to liberation means building our own instruments of working class people. I think that this was a great sounding the alarm in letting them know, ‘Listen, we’re not gonna side with genocide, we’re not gonna side with you doing what you’re doing.’ Then we need to kind of bring it up a notch. ‘We’re not gonna side with the genocide and we are not in agreeance with all the different ways in which you have attacked Palestine and the Palestinians and have forced them to live in the conditions that they have and we’re not going back to that abusive relationship of supporting colonization.’ So, we need to build liberation, and start envisioning, having a radical imagination and then a proposal on what type of process is necessary to build freedom for Palestinians. I think it’s a great show of force, I think it was necessary to do, I think the goal is kind of along the lines of Abandon Biden. I would say, we need to abandon capitalism, we need to abandon U.S. imperialism, and we need to create our own paths toward liberation.”
When it comes to what’s happening in Palestine, what would do differently than the Biden Administration?
“Israel cannot exist without the United States imperialist forces, without its weapons, without its financial support. We need to stop financing Israel and we need to stop supplying weapons to bomb babies and mothers and whole families in Palestine. I believe that again, if we are committed and if we are politically willing, we could transform the course of this country, we could make a shift that would have an impact, not only to the people here in the United States, not only to the people in Palestine. We need to decolonize and give Puerto Rico its freedom and liberation, we need to pay reparations, we need to do the same thing with Hawai’i, we need to do the same thing with Guantanamo, give it back to the Cuban people, we need to lift the sanction, we need to lift the blockade, and we need to start developing relationships with nation states on the basis of respect and collaboration and solidarity and respecting people's democratic processes… I think Gaza, Palestine, is the epicenter of the anti-imperialist fight and we need to be able to understand that this is an anti-imperialist fight. We’re fighting to decolonize Palestine so that the Palestinian people can decide what the course of their destiny will be, and that is what should happen with the rest of the world.”
One of your programs is to “End the War on Black America,” and as Detroit is one the biggest Black-majority cities in the nation, I wanted to ask more specifically how you would provide resources for Black Americans if you were to become president?
“When we’re talking about ‘End the War Against Black America,’ we’re talking about reparations, we’re talking about taking the measures that are holistically and comprehensively allowing people to live. For us to be able to do that, we need to uproot the system. When we’re talking about the increase in hyper policing in our communities, that is not necessary, that doesn’t provide safety, that doesn’t serve the people, we don’t need that type of presence in our community. So, how do we divest from that? How do we crush the profit motive of the prison industrial complex? Of mass incarceration? The war on drugs has only served for hyper surveillance, for persecuting, for jailing our people and so how about we legalize certain substances? How about we invest in preventive health care? How about we invest in rehabilitation? How about we actually invest in life sustaining programs rather than investing in death and destruction, internally and externally. When you look at this part of the platform, which is ‘End the War Against Black America,’ it’s very much connected to ending the war machine in general, out in the world and in here, as well. We also need to give reparations to Indigenous people, just as we need to repair the damage that has been done in Gaza, in Puerto Rico, and in other places. The only way that we can do that is if we have the power to be able to take back these corporations that are the main polluters, the main waste throwers. The places that are being intoxicated by these corporations are very close, if not in, spaces where Black and brown people live, like the water in Flint, for example.”
Do you have anything specific planned for coming to Detroit?
I’m part of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, we are a 20-year-old party, and we have members all across the United States in different cities. Detroit is one of the places where we have a PSL branch. Our comrades are taking on the campaign as their campaign as well, because ultimately, this campaign is not about Claudia and Karina, and it’s not even about the PSL either, it’s about working class people. So one of the things that we’re encouraging branches to do is to be able to take up the campaign and create their own launch parties and be able to talk about the platform and the campaign because we are representative of that body as PSL members and leaders, but they are also that. I’ve been to Detroit several times. I did a lot of political education work and continue to do so with different organizations, the General Baker Institute is one of them, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, so there’s different organizations that I have a historic relationship with and I’ve been to Detroit many times. It holds a dear part in my heart, and I feel like unfortunately, it was driven to bankruptcy, and it’s very telling of what we can expect in the rest of the United States as well. It’s very much a projection of the ways in which capitalism has the ability to eat itself up and eat away in our communities. I’m hoping to be in Michigan sometime at the end of the spring. I believe that that’s what we're planning to do.
Will socialism be on the ballot in Michigan in November or does that still need to be achieved?
We are working on it. We are working. We are so excited for many different reasons. We have received so much support and it’s very telling of the times in which we are in. People are fed up and people really do want change. There’s a whole bunch of young folks, particularly Gen Zers, very young, high school, college students, that are committed to making things happen. We have over 5,000 volunteers all across the United States. We know right now strategically that we will have, at the very least, 23 states that we will be on the ballot in, those are the forces that we have right now that we can count, but we still have time. Michigan is a very interesting state for many reasons because it’s a very important state and it’s also a swing state. We would love to be on the ballot, we are working on it, and we will get on as many ballots as we possibly can with the forces we have. We don’t have the support that the mainstream candidates have and that's fine because we don’t want the backing of corporations and banks, we want the backing of the people and for as long as we have the power of people behind it, we can get on the Michigan ballot.
Some people are scared to vote independently as they feel that it is a “wasted vote” or will take away from the Democratic Party’s votes. What would you say to that?
“We keep going into this ‘who is the lesser of two evils?’ It’s poison, and poison will kill you regardless of how it’s packaged and we need to get to that consciousness. A wasted vote is continuing to legitimize them poisoning our people. We live in a society that not only poisons us ideologically, spiritually, but materially and physically as we talked about like Flint, poisoning people through water, the water situation across the country, the dirty pipes that are poisoning people. That is what these people are allowing and have allowed for decades to happen and they’re not going to change now because we give them another opportunity. A wasted vote is continuing to believe that somehow people who do not have our interest at heart will do anything to protect us. They haven’t done it before, they’re not going to do it now, and if we don’t have that consciousness in this historical moment in 2024, then I don’t know when we will have that consciousness. In 2023, we saw record high numbers of police killings. Biden was supposed to be the person who did something different, and instead he increased police budgets all across the country. So it’s not an issue of Biden himself. It’s not an issue of Trump himself. It is that both parties belong to Wall Street, corporations, banks, and the Pentagon and AIPAC and all the PACs that exist there, those are the people that are running this country. For as long as we think that somehow the ‘lesser of two evils’ is gonna save us, we’re going to continue to be poisoned in all sorts of ways. If we want to save ourselves and we want to save our communities and we want to protect ourselves, what we do is start building our own instruments that are divorced from the capitalist system.”
Third-party candidate Cornel West came to Michigan a couple of times recently, have you had any contact with his campaign about collaboration in some capacity?
“In the past, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the organization that I co-founded, which is The People’s Forum, we’ve had the opportunity to do many, many events and do a lot of work where he’s been invited to come in and he has. We haven’t talked about the campaign. I feel like there’s something very significant about our campaign, which is that we’re running explicitly as socialists because we believe that there’s no reforming capitalism, that there is no regulating a beast that feeds off people’s exploitation, there is no regulating that, they will continue to do that. So, as socialists, we’re putting forth our socialist solutions and socialist platform, going beyond this electoral year, and contributing to build an independent movement of working class people that works every day to make the changes necessary to be able to build the force to be reckoned with, which is the working class force.”
Do you think there is a better way that the voting system could be done?
“The Democrats and the Republicans talk about voter fraud. Voter fraud is having an electoral college. We need to be able to banish the Electoral College. People need to have one person, one vote. We need to expand a people’s democracy, which means that we need to be able to have spaces in which people are democratically making decisions about how the resources in their communities are being spent and what type of social programs, what type of political programs, they need in their communities. We need to be able to do away with Congress. Why do we need Congress? They take bipartisan decisions on things that have criminal impacts in society. Why do we have a Supreme Court if all they do is roll back the civil rights and the human rights that movements have fought for? When you’re talking about voters and what can we do differently, within the capitalist system in which we live, voting just serves to legitimize the ruling class. It has allowed us to have a level of say in certain things, to be able to utilize the so-called democracy and legal structures in our interests for certain things, but we don’t have control of the ‘democratic process’ in this country. We don’t elect the president, corporations and the Electoral College do. Going back to my first point, we don’t have the capacity to solve the issue from the roots, we will continue to reform, and reform is not enough. Voter suppression is still real in this country. There’s many hurdles that are placed, in communities of color primarily, so that people don’t have access to voting. Why is it that ex-felons can’t vote when the majority of these folks are in prison for nothing more than crimes of survival? There’s a lot that we need to consider that goes beyond the question of voting, but the question of democracy. The democracy that we have in this country is not a popular democracy, it’s not a people’s democracy, it’s a democracy that serves a ruling class, and for as long as we don’t have control, to create processes, institutions, spaces that are democratic and serve the people, we will continue to do the same thing, go and vote every four years for the lesser of two evils and legitimize their shit.”
How do you think that people in the U.S. can ever come to agree on what you think needs to happen?
“That’s why movement is necessary. People don’t just become convinced, I think people become politicized, become aware. Our people know the situation is chaotic and is wrong, what they don’t know is that there’s another option and they won’t know that there’s another option unless we organize, unless we are in the community speaking people’s language and telling them that they don’t need to subject themselves to the misery that capitalism imposes on us. We need to re-educate ourselves. We need to be able to look at our legacies that are revolutionary legacies that are historical lineages that provide us with strength and provide us with the confidence to go into our communities and organize, educate, mobilize, agitate. We need organizations that people can come into and sign up for, that are not financed by these hedge funds, that are not financed by the Democratic Party, because if you do that, then you’re funneling them right back into the system, right back into the very system you’re saying you're standing against. So how is it possible to wake up the consciousness of our people? It’s activating it more than anything, it’s educating, it’s political education and also giving them a vehicle to be able to act. People don’t just come to consciousness out of the blue, the conditions that they experience in contact with ways of articulating what is happening, and an instrument to do something to change it, that’s the only way societies have been transformed. That is the only way that you will get organized, unified, strong movements, and that’s what we need in this country, we need that.”
Is there anything else that you think is important to add?
“We can’t wait, we are in very historic times, we can’t wait for our liberation. Life is moving and it’s moving in a direction that is scary, in a direction that brings a lot of hopelessness to people. If we don’t have an organized struggle, if we don’t have political organization, if we don’t have community, it is very easy to fall into depression. So, we need to be able to understand this historical moment as a wake-up call, as an urgent wake-up call. I mean, Aaron Bushnell, come on, it’s a desperate act, and is a desperate call, for people to do something more. We cannot allow what has happened in the last five months, what we’ve witnessed in the last five months that has been happening for 75 years, to not be felt, not be seen, not be remembered, not have some sort of catalyst, some sort of transformational hold on us. We need to do things differently. We need to be able to shift the very core of society. So, I think it’s very important that young people understand the moment in which we’re living, understand that the movement has ebbs and flows, ups and downs, and at a certain moment, we will need to do more than march, we will need to do more than mobilizing, and we will need to have the political organizations to hold us. So, join a political organization, join an organized struggle, and divorce completely from the capitalist system. It’s not there to serve and protect us, it’s there to end us and the planet. Continue to take on the streets as much as possible to be able to bring awareness and radicalize and politicize other people. The idea of being in organized struggle is to continue to be or become part of an organization. That is our shield and that is our spear. That’s the only thing that will keep us safe.”
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