Mel Mason for president!

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Socialist Action urges working people to support Socialist Workers Party candidates Mel Mason for president and Andrea Gonzalez for vice president of the United States. The Mason-Gonzalez ticket represents the only real alternative to the Democratic and Republican political parties in the 1984 elections.

In a January 26 statement in response to Reagan's "State of the Union" address, Mason presented a series of demands that are at the center of his campaign:

• "Not one penny for U.S. wars in Central America and the Middle East!

• Stop the U.S. war against Nicaragua!

• Use the trillions of dollars now used for military purposes to launch a massive public works program to build much-needed housing, hospitals, mass transit, and schools. If, along with such a public works program, the workweek was reduced to 30 hours with no reduction in pay, millions of jobs would be created."

These and other planks in the SWP election platform clearly establish the campaign as independent of the two capitalist parties.

«The Democratic and Republican parties are both servants of the ruling rich," Mason said in his initial campaign statement. "Working people need their own mass-based political party to represent us in the political arena and lead political struggles in our interests 365 days a year.

"We need a party of our class, a labor party based on a fighting union movement, that will champion the interests of workers, farmers, Blacks, women and every other victim of this decaying society," Mason said.

Mason and Gonzalez are against Jesse Jackson's strategy of reforming the Democratic Party. They advocate the formation of a labor party and of an independent Black party to fight for the interests of all working people.

The Mason-Gonzalez ticket is the only one to express the need for independent political action which can point the way forward toward the establishment of a workers' government in the United States. • Hatcher (a vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and currently Jesse Jackson's campaign manager); former Detroit Congressman Charles Diggs; the vacillating Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones); and Jesse Jackson, who fulminated against the Democratic Party but joined the other misleaders in sabotaging efforts of the politically conscious nationalist militants to build an independent Black political party.

Those misleaders succeeded, with the help of a little bureaucratic manipulation, in counterposing a Black agenda and a National Black Political Assembly to an independent Black party. At subsequent meetings, their orientation toward Democratic pro-capitalist politicians continued. At the 1976 meeting they told the 1,000 assembled activists that a major progressive Black politician had promised to be their presidential candidate in that year's elections.

Ron Dellums was the big "catch" unveiled on the last day of the convention. The Great Black Hope thanked the party progressive candidate.

The party that resulted from that convention unequivocally proclaimed itself to be opposed to both the Democratic and Republican parties. It called them bourgeois parties of a "regime that... represents the interests of a minority." NBIPP characterized itself as a progres sive party that "exists to serve the interests of the working class and the poortherefore our party will actively oppose racism, sexism, capitalism and imperialism."

These positions adopted by the founders of NBIPP cannot be maintained or implemented if NBIPP is involved in supporting "progressive" or so-called independent Democrats-thereby also supporting the Democratic Party. In the context of the 1984 presidential elections, some NBIPP members advocate supporting Jesse Jackson, continuing the serious error made by those Chicago members who supported the Democrat Harold Washington for mayor.

A major justification offered by some