BY DAN HARRIE

The article below appeared on the front page of the October 26 issue of the Salt Lake Tribune under the headline, "U.S. Socialist Says Bring On The Revolution."

Socialist Workers Party presidential nominee James Harris knows he will lose the election. But the radical meatpacking employee believes his candidacy will hasten a coming revolution.

"There has to be revolutionary change," Harris said. "If people really thought they could change their conditions through voting, they would do it."

But the trend in U.S. elections during the past two decades has been to stay away from the polls. Harris said low voter turnout is not the result of apathy, but of alienation from the capitalist parties in power.

Friday, the 48-year-old Atlanta resident brought his campaign to Utah - one of about a dozen states where he is on the presidential ballot.

His bid is not about winning, but about spreading a message of socialist salvation for the working masses - a movement he insists is picking up momentum as citizens recognize the imminent economic crisis that political leaders ignore.

"Working people need a break from the parties of the rich.... Democrats and Republicans are moving to the right, while we have found more and more interest in what we as Socialists have to say," Harris said.

There is no mistaking the Socialist Workers' platform for that of the two major political parties. Instead of balancing the budget and reforming welfare, Socialists demand universal employment, a shorter workweek, expansion of affirmative action and an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Harris also advocates throwing open the U.S. borders and granting automatic citizenship to all who would come.

He denounces the current debate about curbing illegal immigration as cynical "scapegoating" by the capitalists who are really responsible for U.S. economic problems.

"No immigrant worker ever fired any worker in this country," he said. "It's just an attempt to raise the specter of somebody else being the problem."

Racism remains a severe problem in the United States, but has improved a great deal from the 1960s because it is "less acceptable to the working class," Harris said.

A Detroit native, Harris' first political involvement, was in the civil rights movement. He participated in a citywide school strike in which blacks established their own "Freedom Schools" to study African-American history neglected in the public system.

Later, he organized a black student union at Cleveland State University and led protests against what he called a racist Vietnam War. Revolutionary Politics have taken him to Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

He scoffs at claims the democratization of Eastern Europe has discredited socialism.

The breakup of the former Soviet Union, Harris said, "was one of the most progressive things that has happened in decades. It was the overthrow of a Stalinist regime that was not socialist, it was counterrevolutionary."  
 
 
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