On Saturday, August 17th, comrades in red gathered at Gordon White Park in the West End of Atlanta. The Party for Socialism and Liberation organized a canvassing event for their 2024 presidential candidate, Claudia De La Cruz, and running mate Karina Garcia. Party member Jasmine Williams addressed the assembled group, “I’m a cultural worker, an organizer with the PSL, hailing from the West Side, the best side of Atlanta, and I’m voting for Claudia De La Cruz.” 

Williams made three politically “grounding” points: the two-party system needs to go, so does capitalism, and the Claudia and Karina campaign is an “invitation to fight for working-class political power.”

Her comrades cheered her words, many of the same people who collected signatures with Williams to put Claudia and Karina on the ballot months ago. In Georgia, the number of signatures required for presidential candidacy is 7,500, and the Georgia Secretary of State accepted 7,682 to put De La Cruz on the ballot, along with independent party candidate Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

The ballot measures were challenged by the Democratic National Committee and the state Democratic Party, ostensibly to ensure more votes for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. In a swing state like Georgia that’s trending “purple,” the Republican and Democratic parties fight for electoral advantage. Democrats appealed, and Fulton County judges ruled to remove Claudia de la Cruz from the ballot on September 12th. 

Estevan Hernandez, Co-chair of the Georgia PSL Campaign, responded in a statement, “This is the result of an effort by the Democratic Party to sabotage the democratic rights of Georgian voters.” The PSL planned to appeal the decision, but on September 16th, the Georgia Supreme Court paused the disqualifying order. The state’s ballot will list Cruz as a candidate, a move supported by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. It is unclear if votes cast for De La Cruz will be counted or disqualified by the court. 

The campaign said it would appear before the state’s highest court on September 24th, stating in an Instagram statement that the appearance would be the “final showdown in our ballot access fight.”

On September 13th, the PSL hosted De la Cruz at the Clarkston Community Center as part of her national campaign tour. She referenced the statistic that more than half of electoral voters in the United States favor a third party and called out voter suppression. In De La Cruz’s words, 189,000 voters were “purged” from the rolls in Georgia this year to maintain “the democracy of the rich.”

 Jasmine Williams and her comrades in the PSL vote to envision a future beyond the two-party system. 

Williams said a socialist vote shows “the ruling class, the billionaire class in this country, that the people are ready, we’re hungry, we’re starving for change. This will be a show of force.” The goal, in Williams’ words, is not necessarily to win the election but “to educate people on the fact that … we have a system, we have an ideology, we have a program that has been proven to work, and that will work if we build it.” 

Williams is a Black queer artist and organizer who grew up in the South, and she believes socialism is the answer “in a system that prioritizes profit over people.” 

A muralist and printmaker in Atlanta, Williams joined the PSL in 2022 and now practices her politics as a “cultural worker.” Williams defines culture beyond the art “product” that people make, “it’s how we walk, how we talk, how we love each other, how we protect each other, how we fight for each other,” she said. 

Williams fights for her community in Atlanta, most recently the displaced artists at MINT in Atlanta, a nonprofit organization that provides studio space for emerging artists. In early August 2024, MINT abruptly closed and evicted their rent-paying artists. A statement released by Williams and fellow organizers read, “Workers of all kinds are constantly disrespected through low and inconsistent wages, then to be disposed of by both corporations and nonprofit organizations alike … Cultural workers are an important part of society, and we demand respect and dignity.”

The statement spread online and on social media calls for signatures in solidarity and support for the affected artists. 

The response has been positive, accruing thousands of signatures and affirming Williams’ political alignment, “It’s been wonderful to see these people exemplifying culture … it’s truly an indictment of the system.” Dianne Mathiowetz is an Atlantan and has been a member of the socialist Workers World Party since 1972. 

She has been a longtime host of WRFG 89.3’s “Labor Forum” radio show (unaffiliated with any party), and she said, “When you have this set of revolutionary politics, everything you do is impacted by that. Everything is connected to your core beliefs.” 

Mathiowetz only plans to vote for president if Claudia De La Cruz is on the ballot. 

“An election does give an opportunity to show folk that these two parties are really the same and that an alternative would be better for them,” Mathiowetz said. 

She cites a long history of socialists running for president, like Eugene Debs, who won almost a million votes from a federal prison in 1920. Even if the election comes down to “capitalist candidate A or capitalist candidate B,” Mathiowetz said, comrades “talked to thousands of working-class people, and hopefully that’s had some impact.” 

In her speech at the Clarkston Community Center, De La Cruz called on Debs’ legacy. “He was a labor organizer who was imprisoned here in Atlanta for 10 years for speaking out against World War I, for saying that any and all imperialist wars are for the benefit of the ruling capitalists.” She referenced a speech made by Debs: ” The Republican and the Democratic parties are two wings of the same bird of prey.”

De La Cruz emphasized that both parties support Israel and continue to fund what the U.N. has declared a genocide. She wore a keffiyeh, a scarf symbolizing solidarity with the Palestinian cause. She condemned the billions of dollars sent to Israel and insisted, “I have more in common with the Palestinian people than I have with any of these two parties.”

De La Cruz is a Latina single mother from the South Bronx, New York, “the poorest congressional district in the United States.” She’s been an outspoken advocate for Palestine since she was 14. She believes socialism “doesn’t show our kids that war is the way.” Instead, it instills hope in “our people … our capacity and willingness to transform society to work for us.”

Comrades like Williams, who canvassed for De La Cruz, found a way out of nihilism or reformism with socialism. 

“When your political grounding is just anti-capitalism and not rooted in a solution, it’s easy … to think that a candidate can save you, or that a nonprofit can save you, or a grant, or a governmental organization or the courts,” she said. She believes instead that to show solidarity, in the most socialist sense, is to save each other. 

Before dispersing in pairs to canvas Atlanta back in early September, Williams’ comrade Satya Vatti spoke. “Actually meeting people where they are in their communities,” Vatti said, proves that PSL is “building political power for workers and students and really the oppressed people in this country,” the people the Claudia De La Cruz presidential campaign aims to represent.

Zoey Laird

Zoey is a writer from Atlanta, Georgia. She grew up in Decatur and has lived in Gresham Park, College Park, and now Grant Park. Her writing about the Stop Cop City Movement was published in Scalawag and Mainline Magazine. ANI (Atlanta Narrative Imagination) is a project she created as an outlet for creative energy to be shared in many different mediums. She believes that the stories we tell shape the way we see the world.