The Party for Socialism and Liberation announced its presidential ticket for the 2024 election cycle in a video on social media late last week. The organization selected party activists Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia.
In the announcement video shared on both YouTube and X, De la Cruz and Garcia introduce themselves as the organization’s official nominees before offering a critique of the current political system and outlining several issues they aim to address in their campaign.
“We’re told this country is a democracy, but more and more, it feels like a corporate regime,” De la Cruz says in her portion of the introduction. “No matter which party is in power, only the rich come out on top. Today, the richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90% of Americans combined.”
“On top of that, heat waves, floods, and hurricanes are becoming a regular occurrence,” adds Garcia.
The ticket additionally touches upon the “culture war,” what it regards as the increasing prominence of artificial intelligence and its potential impact on job stability, and the threat of World War III. Both candidates stress that people must “seize big pharma, seize big tech, [and] seize the big banks, instead of letting them run our government.”
According to the ticket’s official campaign site, De la Cruz is a theologian, and Garcia is a Chicana organizer. Both candidates have a long history of involvement in political movements closely aligned with the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s goals. Additionally, they are both mothers and “popular educators,” or educators who emphasize a pedagogy rooted in the concepts of class and political struggle.
Readers can view the full video below:
https://twitter.com/pslnational/status/1701013888719106063
The Party for Socialism and Liberation is a communist party based in San Francisco, with a core mission of advocating for the complete abolition of capitalism. It originated from a split with the Workers World Party in 2004 due to disagreements with the direction of the WWP’s leadership. Notably, the party does not disclose its total membership numbers.
Almost 20 years on, the reasons for the WWP/PSL split are still publicly unknown.
I encourage everyone to give their platform a look.
https://pslweb.org/program/
Some highlights:
* All forms of bigotry, discrimination or the promotion of hatred against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and queer people, or against anyone on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, will be eliminated, including in marriage rights, employment, housing, adoption and health care. It will be prohibited to advocate any form of bigotry, discrimination or hatred against LGBTQ people.
* The “professional politicians” and big-business political parties will be replaced with the political organization of the working class.
* Sexism and other forms of male chauvinism and oppression of women will be eliminated as an immediate task, recognizing that this goal will not be achieved automatically or by decree. It will be prohibited to advocate any form of sexism or male chauvinism.
* The rights of freedom of speech and political involvement will be extended to all. These rights will only be abridged in the efforts to eliminate racism, xenophobia and all forms of bigotry, or to prevent the re-establishment of the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression.
* A workers’ government would begin to build socialism by expropriating the privatized wealth of the banks, industry, agribusiness, mines and other wealth-generating properties, eliminating the vast control the capitalists have over production. This would be done without compensation to the capitalist owners who have stolen so much for so long from the workers and oppressed peoples of the world.
Leoonard Peltier resigned from the ticket because his attorney was hoping President Trump would give him a pardon, during his last period in office, and the attorney thought a pardon was more likely if Peltier weren’t running for vice-president.
Wow. New names actually? No Gloria La Riva?
Post-2020 election it seemed there was some internal discord according to a left-wing poster at the Talk Elections forum. PSL being a cadre party it’s everyone devoted to the cause don’t spread dirty laundry, but the dirty laundry got out for once. A month later all the laundry disappeared became white again, maybe the old governing class got ousted. It tended to look that way during the 2020 election with the replacement of the VP nominee. The PSL nominated La Riva/Peltier. The California Peace & Freedom Party (which due to the limited ballot access and California’s size is the lion’s share of votes received, ditto Rocky De La Fuente in the 2020 election) nominated La Riva and a guy named Sunil Freeman. Peltier resigned the vice presidential nomination immediately after citing health and constraints on being able to campaign (which is a WTF? the guy’s in a prison cell, what campaigning was he planning on doing?).