Campaign Updates Week 13 - Election Week
"I already voted for you!"
Greetings comrades, friends and supporters from the campaign trail.
This Tuesday is the big day. This experience has been transformative and insightful. I’ve seen how working-people across the area are tired of the conditions imposed on them by the capitalist system and are ready to take an independent road, away from the two-party setup.
Regardless of the outcome, we’ve won many victories that can’t be taken away. We’ve shown it’s possible for a working-class person, as opposed to some upper-middle-class savior who is running to “advocate” for working-people, can run for local office on a revolutionary working-class message in the Rio Grande Valley. We’ve shown that working-people can become mobilized in short order, if they feel there’s somebody or something worth voting for, against the naysayers who look down on working-people as ignorant and apathetic. We’ve shown that we can use the capitalist system’s own mechanisms to make the capitalist parties and their emissaries publicly answer our criticisms and exposés. One can go on.
So a dear thank you to those who’ve supported this endeavor from the beginning. Those who volunteered their services and expertise or any other kind of morale support. This campaign exceeded my conservative expectations in many ways. I figured this would be a protest campaign and would get moderate support from working-class people. Many times throughout this experience, local working-class supporters eagerly pushed and asked me to provide more than I could.
I saw that the campaign began to mean just as much, if not more, to them as it did to me. Subsumed into our campaign was the feeling of injustice and indignation at how they’d been treated by the capitalist system. Their angers, frustrations and slights finally has a political expression. They’re in a mood to fight. It’s been surreal to hear them say, “I already voted for you!”
This past Saturday, I had pizza with my former steel/metal factory coworkers. It was good to reunite and talk politics. We discussed the conditions at our respective jobs and the need for a union-movement down here in the Rio Grande Valley. Unions are what guarantee working-people even a semblance of rights and due process on the job, where without unions employers have free reign over the workers.
The discussion continued outside the home of two campaign supporters and voters in Edinburg who reached out to me online. They weren’t sure who they were going to vote for and decided to watch the September 30 Futuro RGV forum which was streamed on social media. They said after watching for about “5 minutes,” they knew whom they were going to support.
Joe, on the left, is a former packaging worker. He told me about a packaging company he used to work for in McAllen and his experience there. He said that after one of the air conditioning units broke at the factory, temperatures regularly reached well over 100-degrees Fahrenheit. It got to the point that the workers shut down production and demanded that the bosses fix the issue. It was fixed later that same day.
He brought this up in the context of the need for unions in every workplace, something on which we all agreed. His partner is also a working-class person who comes from a working-class family, with lineage to Edinburg going back to a time when the city was called “Chapin.”
Lastly, I am remiss I could not make a protest against immigration raids this past Sunday in McAllen. It’s important that we go out any time we can to advance the demand for amnesty for undocumented workers in the U.S. to unite the working-class and undercut boss attacks against immigrant workers and unionists. Amnesty is a key question for the labor movement and the working-class. We must overcome both capitalist party’s attempts to divide us.
Please go out and vote this upcoming Tuesday and tell your friends. Let’s make sure the working-class leaves their mark in this upcoming election. And above all lets move forward in building that working-class movement in the RGV together.