The Independent Socialist Group voted to support the Andrea James campaign for Massachusetts Governor and is publishing the following statement. If you are interested in how to organize for independent working-class politics, contact us!

Many are looking to the 2026 elections as an opportunity to fight back against the unpopular, anti-working class Trump administration and its program of ICE terror, wars for oil, record corporate profits, and imperialism. Trump and the Republicans cut already minimal social benefits while the Democrats join in spending trillions of dollars for the military and militarized police forces. There’s a war against working class people through more intense exploitation of our labor, attacks on unions, massive increases in the cost of living, and declining living standards. Working class youth lack a decent future as housing, education, and taking care of a family seems out of reach.

The Democratic Party is attempting to take advantage of the mass hatred of Trump in order to shore up its position in the midterm elections. The Democrats share the responsibility for Trump, having failed to defeat him twice in presidential elections, as well as helping to create the conditions for his initial election victory and his return to the presidency through their pro-corporate policies. The Democratic Party’s support for a genocidal war against Palestinians, and its anti-immigrant and pro-war platform gave working class people little reason to “vote blue” in 2024, and the Democrats are no real resistance or alternative to Trump and the Republican Party.

State and local politics are part of a front-line battle against the Trump regime, its effects, and how a real opposition to Trump and the Republican Party can be organized. ISG consistently raises the urgent need for the political independence of the working class. What does this mean? The Republican and Democratic Parties are corporate, pro-capitalist political parties, bought and paid for by the billionaires and owners of the big corporations. Working class people do not have political representation on a mass scale in the U.S., and we pay a heavy price for this. Despite the enormous wealth generated by working people, we suffer from a severe lack of social benefits including no universal healthcare and the loss of abortion rights, the attacks on social programs like Medicare, SNAP, and housing assistance, and increasingly unaffordable childcare and higher education. Generations of lesser-evil voting, a perpetual pendulum of voting for one corporate party over another never reverses the cuts and war-making done by either corporate party. 

Working-class people need a workers’ party that can unite and organize us together as broadly as possible to stand against both the Republicans and Democrats. A political party of, for, and by working-class people can be funded and backed by unions, which have net assets of $32 billion they could use to help fund a workers’ party and support campaigns. A workers’ party would include not only unions and their members, but also community organizations, left groups, individual activists, and working-class people. A workers’ party would remain independent by taking no corporate funding, being only accountable to its working-class members.

Independent left or progressive electoral campaigns have the potential to lay the groundwork for a workers’ party. These can include left Greens or other independent parties that have a broad reach and could help mobilize and activate many working-class people to take action on a few key demands of their campaigns, such as a higher minimum wage, a rent freeze, free public transit, and supporting unions. If left and progressive campaigns organize people through rallies, stand-outs, protests, etc., it could have the power to build a larger movement that would have the ability to achieve these demands whether or not the candidate wins.

Despite the dominance of the Democrats and Republicans, there are often independent campaigns to the left of the corporate parties at the local, state, or national level, but they usually don’t get much media attention, since the corporate media deliberately ignores independent politics. Independent candidates, especially ones that lean progressive or left, often use the ballot access of the Green Party in order to boost their profile. In the 2024 presidential election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein won 862,049 votes while another independent left candidate Cornel West won 82,644.

ISG believes the best way to help build a workers’ party is for working people to unite behind the strongest left candidate, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, with a program we  can support, and who has the greatest potential visibility and likelihood for gathering a significant number of votes. A strong independent left election result can be used as a launching pad to win immediate demands raised in the campaign platform, and for efforts to organize a workers’ party. As we have highlighted with the record of Kshama Sawant on the Seattle City Council in the past, independent left campaigns can be more than symbolic and can win real gains, as Sawant’s campaign did in leading the movement that won the first $15/hr minimum wage in the country.

We acknowledge there are always far left campaigns, many of which may run explicitly as “socialist” or “communist.” These campaigns usually have a much narrower program and often don’t see the need for a broad, mass workers’ party or the need to organize working people who don’t already consider themselves on the left. In assessing which independent left or progressive campaigns to support, we need to evaluate whether they have the ability to build the power and organization of the working class in a meaningful way that could help bring forces together to form a workers party.

Andrea James for Massachusetts Governor

Andrea James, an activist with a record in the anti-racist and criminal legal reform movements, is running for governor of Massachusetts as an independent against Democratic Party politician Maura Healey. In a recent interview with Boston.com about her campaign, Andrea James said: “We need to establish a state system that covers all health care for everyone with no copays or deductibles. We need fully-funded schools in every city and town, and we need to raise the minimum wage to $25, and fund free child care so that people can work.”

The Andrea James campaign has put forward a platform with a wide range of progressive demands, including housing for all, universal healthcare, and free public higher education. Her program includes calling for caps on utility costs and working towards publicly-owned utilities, fare-free buses and expanded public transportation, and reforming the criminal system and redirecting funding to “mental health care, addiction treatment, housing, education, and good union jobs in all communities.” She opposes the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and the state terror of ICE. Her campaign supports restoring the right to strike to public-sector workers, and requiring card-check neutrality for union organizing at companies receiving state contracts. The “Labor for AJ” page of the campaign website highlights a petition to “Support The Public Sector Right To Strike.” In its call for a “Just Transition,” the platform states: 

“As governor, I will declare a climate emergency and launch a whole-of-government mobilization to reach 100% clean energy on the fastest responsible timeline. We will stop fossil fuel expansion, rapidly scale offshore wind and solar, electrify buildings and transportation, and fund climate disaster readiness in every region of the state.

But a just transition isn’t just about energy systems. It means creating a statewide Environmental and Climate Jobs Corps that will put people to work in retrofitting homes, restoring ecosystems, and strengthening public infrastructure. It also means creating jobs in low-carbon sectors of our economy, in education, healthcare, the arts, and community services. There is no shortage of work to do. We will direct state capacity, investment, and procurement power toward protecting workers’ livelihoods and building a resilient, low-carbon Massachusetts that leads the nation.”

Andrea James has also broken with the Democratic Party, stating “All my life, I have been a member of the Democratic Party. But the more I organized for change, the more resistance I met from the Democratic Party Machine. The Democrats took the support of our communities for granted while cashing checks from corporate donors.” 

Maura Healey and the Democrats’ track record in Massachusetts speaks for itself. Healey has long opposed the right to strike for public sector workers and has intervened against striking teachers. The Democrats fined teachers as much as $625,000 for striking to win improved pay for members making as little as $20,000/year. Healey opposes the proposed rent control ballot measure, and gave huge tax breaks to the rich via the short-term capital gains tax and estate tax in order to offset the new taxes levied on them by the Fair Share Amendment. Healey also supports the Antisemitism Commission which seeks to attack teachers’ free speech through defining antisemitism as including criticism of the state of Israel, and she has brought AI technology in through state partnerships with Israel’s Sheba Hospital. Healey also recently proposed large cuts to the health insurance of 500,000 MA residents as well as a cap of $1,000 for dental coverage for 2 million MA residents. Boston Mayor Wu has increased funding to police, despite initially running on defunding the police; plans to cut 400 teacher’s jobs in Boston, and brought Boston police out against pro-Palestinian protestors.

We call for a vote for Andrea James for Governor of Massachusetts, and we call for working class people to get involved in her campaign’s activities, including stand-outs, meetings, canvassing, leafleting, etc. We call for the campaign and its supporters to continue organizing after election day with union activists, progressives, left groups, and others in order to build a movement for a workers’ party in Massachusetts. We call for other left and worker’s organizations to take similar steps to support and get involved in the campaign. 

While we call for a vote for Andrea James, we recognize that the campaign, so far, does not have a commitment to the construction of any independent political party. We hope to influence the campaign to include an orientation to building the foundation for a new political party for the working class. This could help carry momentum and activists forward to win the demands raised in the campaign and unite with other independent left and progressive campaigns.

While it’s positive that the campaign clearly emphasizes its independent character, without running on the ballot line of an existing party or linking the campaign to wanting to help build a new political party, no independent political force stands to gain the benefits that come from a potential strong vote result.

We also recognize that the campaign does not currently have a strong connection to organized labor, which has the resources and membership to make any campaign much more of a serious challenge to the corporate duopoly. The campaign does not explicitly raise socialism as a clear alternative to capitalism. We believe that capitalism is a dead end for the working class. More people are questioning corporate rule and their political duopoly. Raising the need for socialism would help any independent left or progressive campaign.

Nonetheless, we believe the Andrea James campaign can build support for independent left politics and represents a clear alternative for working class people to vote for in this election. It’s an opportunity for progressives, activists, socialists, and working-class people to actively organize for key demands her campaign raises that we need to support in the fight against the pro-corporate politics of Healey and the Democratic and Republican parties.

For more on ISG’s approach to electoral politics, please visit the “Elections” section of our website. Here are some specific articles we would like to highlight:

• Mamdani’s “Governance” or Class Struggle?
• How a New, Union-Backed Workers’ Party Could Win In the Next Elections
• The “Dead End Politics” of the Democratic Party
• Why Labor Unions and the Working Class Need a Workers’ Party
• Why Elections Matter in the Fight for Socialism
• The Need for Independent Working-Class Politics

Photo from the Andrea James campaign website www.ajforma.com