Socialist Equality Party candidate for US vice president takes campaign to Virginia

The Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US vice president, Jerry White, recently conducted a tour of the state of Virginia, where the party is seeking to get on the ballot. White spoke at public meetings in Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads region, explaining the SEP’s fight to mobilize the working class against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and American imperialism’s expanding war of global conquest.

Virginia is a center of the military-intelligence-industrial complex, including the Pentagon and the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. At the same time, it is home to a large ethnically and racially diverse working class, which is centered in the state’s manufacturing, logistics and technology industries.

Virginia is also a “swing state,” which the Democratic and Republican Parties are vying for control of in the upcoming election.

In Northern Virginia, the George Mason University chapter of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) sponsored an election meeting for White on April 8, introducing the SEP’s campaign to workers and young people in Virginia. In the port city of Norfolk, a meeting was held near Old Dominion University (ODU).

The meetings were held using Far-UV Ray technology and attendees were offered N95 masks free of charge to help fight the spread of COVID-19. White noted in his speech that the pandemic was not “over,” and that some 1,000 people were still dying from the virus every week. The vice presidential candidate noted that the public health technology being deployed at the meeting was the same as that currently used by the US President on Air Force One and at the Pentagon. He said these basic protective measures should be available in every school, office building and workplace.

White began his speech by stating: “The Democrats and Republicans agree on far more than they disagree with. They both support endless wars, austerity at home, and repression against internal dissent.”

White’s comments focused on the destruction that six months of the Israeli bombardment and deliberate starvation of the Palestinian population in Gaza had left in its wake. “For the last half year, the world’s population has witnessed the greatest war crime of the 21st century, and one of the greatest war crimes in history,” he stated. 

White relayed several of the most harrowing statistics facing the Palestinian population, including 1.9 million out of 2.2 million displaced, over 40,000 murdered by Israeli weaponry, and nearly 75,000 people grievously wounded.

While the United States’ government has feigned concern for the loss of civilian lives, it has consistently supported the Israeli bombings in deeds by making over 100 shipments of weapons to the fascistic Netanyahu regime.

These crimes have produced a mass radicalization. Millions have protested around the globe hoping to bring the genocide to an end. But White stated “the responses of all of the capitalist governments including Biden has not been to bend to the will of the public but to increase repression against anti-genocide protesters with the specious and slanderous claim that youth are all antisemitic.”

White relayed the experiences of student groups at the University of Michigan, where a new anti-protest policy has been instituted banning all “disturbances” on campus. This has occurred at GMU also, where “similar measures are being taken against recent protests against the genocide.”

This has been encouraged by the Democratic Party at the highest levels of the state. The Biden administration has carried out its witch hunts on campuses in alliance with real antisemitic groups aligned with the Republican Party who support the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” that blames Jews for bringing immigrants to the US to replace whites.

“The fact that Biden is aligning himself with such reactionary forces must put an end once and for all to the claim that [his] re-election is going to defend democracy against the dangers of dictatorship,” White stated.

White briefly traced the history of the present conflicts, which are rooted in the aggressive attempt by the US ruling class to counteract its weakening position in the global economy after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. “Capitalism inevitably produces war. It’s not in the heads of this or that leader. The decline of American imperialism in its economic position has led to these three and a half decades of endless war,” he stated. 

The Gaza conflict was “only one front on a far wider and broader world war that has already actually begun.” White connected it to both the US and NATO-backed war in Ukraine against Russia, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives, as well as the ongoing confrontation with China, the US’s largest economic competitor.

White gave an example of the thinking of the US capitalist foreign policy establishment when he cited an essay published in Foreign Affairs journal by a foreign policy expert, ominously titled “The Big One: Preparing for the Long War with China.” 

“It’s very important to understand that as passionate and committed as young people have been with the protests demanding the divestment of university administrations from military contractors that back Israel, none of these problems can be resolved on the campuses,” White stressed. “You are dealing with US imperialism… The entire American government and political establishment is massively invested in expanding war.”

And to defeat that, young people cannot limit themselves to campus protests but must turn to that social force which has the power and is uniquely situated in society in order to wage war against war. That’s the international working class. That’s the hundreds of millions of workers in the United States, in the factories, in the Amazon and UPS warehouses, workers, teachers who are facing massive budget cuts, other sections of workers who have absolutely no interest in these wars, and have, in fact, the interest in opposing these wars. 

Discussion at both meetings following White’s remarks was deeply engaged. Students asked the candidate follow-up questions regarding the meaning of “imperialism,” the degeneration of the trade unions and if it was valid to claim that the war in Ukraine had been caused by “Russian aggression.”

In response to a question from a GMU student about uniting the “left,” White explained. “Political parties are tested out in historical events. There are many events that have clearly demonstrated we’re not talking about minor differences but positions that reflect opposing class interests. A case in point was the Democratic Socialists of America, whose elected leaders have endorsed the US-NATO war against Russia. 

A railroad worker and supporter of the SEP’s campaign responded to the question about what workers could do to break from the reactionary trade union apparatus by recalling what occurred in 2022 when 120,000 rail workers attempted to go on strike against their employers.

He explained the workers voted to strike but were prevented from doing so by the trade union leaders, who had worked with both parties in Congress and Biden administration to outlaw their strike. He said, with the assistance of the SEP, railway workers organized a rank-and-file committee to oppose the treachery of the union bureaucracy and the outlawing of their strike.

In the end, Congress voted to ban the strike and impose the pro-company contract backed by Biden. The worker denounced the pseudo-left members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress who voted for the bill: “What kind of socialist breaks strikes?” the worker declared.

White was also critical of middle class identity politics of race and gender, which dominate campus politics. Noting that students are counseled to beware of committing “microaggressions,” he asked: “but what about a macroaggression called World War Three?” He explained that representatives of the Democratic Party were experts at manipulating genuine grievances and “tying that to the aspirations of a very affluent layer of union bureaucrats, of academics and business executives” who are not interested in overthrowing capitalism “but joining the ranks of the ruling class.”

The party’s campaign was welcomed warmly by students, many of whom expressed a disgust with the Democratic and Republican Parties and their candidates in this election. “You really have no choice,” replied a nursing student at Old Dominion University, agreeing with White that Biden was a “warmonger” and Trump a “would-be dictator.”

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Regarding the situation facing nurses, she explained that the situation was “absolutely ridiculous… Healthcare is something anybody should be able to go and get free.” She explained that hospital administrators were “scapegoating nurses” for medical errors. “We’re still human,” she explained. “We can’t just not make any mistakes and putting that on somebody who is probably an overworked healthcare professional who’s not getting paid enough is just ridiculous.”

The student explained she was a certified nursing assistant (CNA) and had been working alone with at least 185 patients on one of her shifts. “I was under 18 at the time, it’s like nothing is right,” she said.

White explained to her that what was required was socialism. “Profit must be taken out of medicine as part of the socialist transformation of economic and political life. Socialism means equality. It means the working class, which creates all the wealth with our collective labor, controls that wealth and uses to guarantee free healthcare, college education and other basic rights, not to bail out Wall Street and wage imperialist wars.” The student said she was eager to learn more about the SEP and to follow the IYSSE on social media.