Vol. 77/No. 8      March 4, 2013

The article opens: “The Los Angeles headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party is a storefront next to a taqueria on Western Avenue. The concrete path behind it is ringed by concertina wire. On Saturday afternoon, a man unloaded Air Jordans onto the hood of his Buick Regal around the corner and hawked them to passersby.”

“I think she was trepidatious about being in a typical L.A. working-class neighborhood,” Sandler said in a Feb. 19 phone interview. “Workers reading the article will immediately pick up on the author’s anti-working-class bias. We got a good laugh out of the article with vendors in the area. The man who sells shoes was among the first who signed our petition for ballot status. I joked with him that he got free publicity. ‘Yeah, but they didn’t include my picture,’ he protested in jest.”

“Sandler’s campaign has barely registered with the body politic,” Holland wrote. “But that’s OK: His goal is not to tally up votes, but to plant the seeds of revolution.”

“It’s important to have labor and the working-class point of view in the election, because we’re in the midst of a crisis,” Sandler tells her. “We present a road forward ultimately for working people.”

“Sandler, 67, is graying, bespectacled and affable, bearing some resemblance to the Wizard of Oz,” Holland wrote. “After a middle-class upbringing in Denver, Sandler spent 40 years as a steelworker, punch press operator and boilermaker. Most recently, he has been assembling power boards for a small Los Angeles company.

“His campaign is largely built around door-to-door canvassing in South Los Angeles, Boyle Heights and other working-class neighborhoods. Sandler and his supporters are calling for a massive, government-funded jobs program to build hospitals, day care centers and clinics in the city.”

“Man, do they want to talk about the capitalist crisis,” Sandler told the reporter. “As the struggle heats up, you’ll find more and more people talking in class terms.”

Holland notes that Sandler joined the SWP when he was an activist in the Black rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. He watched how the party participated and helped lead these struggles and decided to join because he decided it was the best hope of getting the U.S. out of Vietnam.

Sandler tells Holland he enjoys living in Los Angeles. “It’s a gigantic, working-class city with all the contradictions this stage of history brought us,” he said.

“The Socialist Workers Party grew out of a schism in the worldwide communist movement over Stalin’s break with Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, whom he ordered assassinated. But the party also has a long history of factionalism,” Holland opines.

“While a student at UC Berkeley, I witnessed the divisions firsthand. Party members directed much of their vitriol at other leftists who pushed a different political line,” she wrote.

Holland refers to a 2011 article in the Militant, it seems in an attempt to make Sandler and his party look foolish.

“He came in for a political spanking himself,” she wrote, “by the party newspaper—the Militant. Sandler had drafted an article about an L.A. teachers rally protesting layoffs and cuts in school funding. Editor Steve Clark not only refused to run the story, but also printed a stinging rebuttal of Sandler’s positions, suggesting they perpetuated a ‘bourgeois fable.’

“Sandler said he found the critique ‘very useful,’” she writes.

Clark’s article, “Higher Taxes or Layoffs of Teachers? A Fake Trade-Off” is available on the paper’s website, themilitant.com, in the June 6, 2011, issue.

The Los Angeles Times article helped get across the working-class course the SWP fights for in its campaigns, despite the fact that, according to Sandler, the author ignored much of what he said.

She omitted, for example, “the fact that we sell books door to door,” said Sandler. “I think she couldn’t grasp that working people are anxious and willing to read serious political books.”

“She also omitted the context of the quote attributed to me that ‘every bus bench is home in L.A. to somebody,’” Sandler continued. “I was responding to negative comments she made about the economic situation in Cuba. ‘You won’t see that in Cuba,’ I pointed out.”

“By the way,” Sandler told the Militant, “we got an immediate unsolicited contribution in the mail of a significant amount from a reader of the Los Angeles Times from Northridge. When I called him up to talk, he told me it was the first time he had given to a political campaign and signed up for a subscription to the Militant.”
 
 
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Omaha: Socialist Workers Party files for ballot in mayor, city council races
 
 
 
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