Claudia de la Cruz & Karina Garcia -(Vote Socialist this Tuesday) - New General Thread for the 4th-5th of November 2024
Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia are running for President and Vice-President of the United States on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Claudia de la Cruz was born and raised in the South Bronx, New York to immigrant Dominican parents. As a teenager, she regularly participated in campaigns calling for an end to the U.S. blockade in Cuba and calling out police terror. While completing her degree in forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a City University of New York college, de la Cruz helped create Palenque. Palenque was a group focused on bringing together young people to study the history of struggles and resistance by marginalized groups. During the Iraq War, de la Cruz organized some of these members as well as church members to rally against the war. She also helped found Da Urban Butterflies, a youth leadership development project for women from Washington Heights and the Bronx. Later on, de la Cruz co-founded The People’s Forum in New York City, a place dedicated to making space for working-class people. De la Cruz is also a mother and a pastor for the United Church of Christ, a Christian denomination that has historically been involved in social justice work.
Karina Garcia grew up in East Harlem, also known as El Barrio, in New York, as well as California. She attended Columbia University on a full scholarship and organized fellow students to speak out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and to advocate for immigrant rights. After completing a degree in economics, Garcia became a high school math teacher in New York City. During that time, she advised a student group on issues like police brutality and school budget cuts. In 2012, she took up an organizing position at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. She is also a mother and writer for Breaking the Chains, a feminist and socialist magazine under the PSL.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation is comprised of leaders and activists, workers and students, of all backgrounds. Organized in branches across the country, their mission is to link the everyday struggles of oppressed and exploited people to the fight for a new world.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation believes that the only solution to the deepening crisis of capitalism is the socialist transformation of society. Driven by an insatiable appetite for ever greater profits regardless of social cost, capitalism is on a collision course with the people of the world and the planet itself. Imperialist war; deepening unemployment and poverty; deteriorating health care, housing and education; racism; discrimination and violence based on gender and sexual orientation; environmental destruction—all are inevitable products of the capitalist system itself.
For the great majority of people in the world, including tens of millions of workers in the United States, conditions of life and work are worsening. There is no prospect that this situation can or will be turned around under the existing system.
The idea that the capitalists’ grip on society and their increasingly repressive state can be abolished through any means other than a revolutionary overturn is an illusion. Equally unrealistic are reformist hopes for a “kinder, gentler” capitalism, or solutions based on economic decentralization or small group autonomy. Meeting the needs of the more than 6.5 billion people who inhabit the planet today is impossible without large-scale agriculture and industry and economic planning.
The fundamental problems confronting humanity today flow from the reality that most of the world’s productive wealth—the product of socialized labor and nature—is privately owned and controlled by a tiny minority. This minority decides what will be produced and what will not. Its decisions are based on making profits rather than meeting human needs.
There are really only two choices for humanity today—an increasingly destructive capitalism, or socialism
We need more discssion about how the American "parties" aren't really political parties at all, but more like fan clubs for a subset of utterly unaccountable politicians, and how the party structure is not only a top down structure where the actual members, the political and donor class, demand fealty from the fan-club members but are not in any way under the control of the fan club.
Like afaik the parties have very little structure and there just isn't a mechanism for party members to control, whip, recall, or otherwise maintain control over senior party members and electeds.
Like afaik, the rank and file cannot
eject members from the party
force electeds to resign
beat electeds in to compliance with the party
Or anything else at all. It's completely one way - money and volunteer time and noospheric meta-submission flow up, shit rolls down.
There really aren't many ways in which the us political system has any democratic features, but this, where the state itself is in the control of two political cliques, at least one of whom has no accountability to it's membership and arguably has no rank and file membership, is one of the bad ones.
This is something I always bring up with potential PSL prospects - that we are a membership party and how that is fundamentally different from the politician parties they're used to.