On Sunday, Socialist Equality Party (US) presidential candidate Joseph Kishore and vice presidential candidate Jerry White spoke with Chris Richards, host of the Eclectic Radical Show, and co-host Bess Goden, about the fight for socialism in the United States and around the world.

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The interview dealt with pressing issues facing workers and youth around the world, including the ongoing US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the increasing threat of nuclear war, the genocide in Gaza, widening social inequality, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the class struggle.

Kishore began the interview outlining the purpose of the Socialist Equality Party’s intervention in the 2024 elections. “Our campaign is about fighting for socialism,” he said. This involves “developing an understanding in the working class that socialism is the way forward.”

Stressing the international character of the campaign, Kishore added later on, “We are not just running to develop a socialist movement in the working class here. All the problems that we confront, that workers confront, everywhere are global problems. World war, dictatorship, inequality, the pandemic … these are global problems.”

“With the war and the genocide in Gaza,” Kishore explained, “you have, we refer to it in the New Year’s Statement on the World Socialist Web Site, the normalization of mass death. And you have the normalization of nuclear war, and the normalization now of genocide. It all speaks to a ruling elite that is careening society towards barbarism and which has absolute contempt for human life.”

White explained that the bipartisan war policy pursed by the Democratic and Republican parties “is deeply unpopular in the population.

“The only way they can impose such a policy,” said White, “is increasingly through the suppression of democratic rights. That’s why a couple of weeks ago Biden was on the border, dueling with Trump over who could attack immigrants more. And Biden said to Trump, ‘Join me’ in passing the most reactionary anti-immigrant legislation.”

Explaining the relationship between war abroad and the attack on the working class at home, White said, “Last year, you saw Macron, in France, increase the retirement age. There were mass, mass protests in the streets, and then, by executive fiat, he imposed it. It’s not separate from the fact that the French government is proposing sending NATO troops into Ukraine; they are all talking about ‘war-time’ economy.”

The interview covered many other subjects. It is available in full at @TheEclecticRad or by viewing the embedded video above.