John Parker (California)

John Parker is a long-time socialist, activist, anti-war and anti-racist organizer. He is the founder of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, and a leader in the Socialist Unity Party. He is running for U.S. Congress in the 37th District that incorporates much of South Los Angeles, and will be on the ballot as a Peace and Freedom Party candidate. Parker isn't asking for reforms.

"What we need is a whole new system. Racism, war, poverty and the destruction of the planet are built in to capitalism. 

We need a powerful, united people's movement to overcome the tiny handful of billionaires that are exploiting us all, funding and enabling genocide in Gaza, and driving down the living standards of the global working class."

• End the genocide in Palestine. Permanent ceasefire NOW!
• People and planet over profit!
• Abolish racist police terror!

Anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-gender oppression.

Marx, Lenin, Lucy Parsons, Clara Zetkin, Harriet Tubman, Geronimo, Ho Chi Minh, John Brown, Amilcar Cabral, Rosa Luxembourg, Assata Shakur, Mao Zedong.... the list goes on.

Check out Struggle-la-Lucha.org.

The courage to stand with the people. Inability to be bought and sold by war profiteers and the rich.

The core responsibility of this office is to fight for those who do not have a voice—the majority of poor and working people in our districts.

The struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the arrest of Nelson Mandela drove me to become politically active.

I was a dishwasher in New Jersey until I left for junior college and New York University.

The United States is a waning empire. As the ruling class scrambles to ensure their continued viability and profits, living conditions for the majority will continue to crumble. Poverty, homelessness, even illiteracy will skyrocket as more public dollars are diverted to the war economy and away from essential public services and needs.

All reforms should raise consciousness of our constituents that this system must change. We cannot reform our way out of poverty and exploitation if those reforms maintain the status quo.

John Parker is the coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice and leading member of the Socialist Unity Party. He accompanied former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on many anti-war delegations abroad. Parker was only 18 when he organized his first union election--at a small steel plant in New Jersey. An African American, he has worked at a variety of other jobs, including teaching at a public school in Newark.

After moving to Los Angeles with his family in 1998, he became a leader in the anti-war movement. Parker sparked the minimum wage increase proposals in Los Angeles by being the first to author and initiate the Los Angeles $15 minimum wage ballot initiative in 2013 that would have taken effect immediately upon voter approval.

Parker recently attended the inauguration of socialist President Xiomara Castro at the invitation of her Libre Party, due to his solidarity work with Honduras after the 2009 U.S. supported coup.

Legislative/Legal Struggles:

   • Initiator and author of $15 Minimum Wage Ballot Initiative of 2014
   • Leading current lawsuit against Kroger’s for closing Ralphs grocery store in South Central Los Angeles, on behalf of the plaintiff: Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Los Angeles

• Call for an immediate cessation of U.S. wars and proxy wars and the funding of wars and occupations; divert the funding to vital social programs and for use in programs to reverse environmental damage, prioritizing global warming.
• Immediately call for a state of emergency in Black and Brown neighborhoods to address police murder with the initial step of ceasing the use of deadly force by police in communities where a majority of residents are Black or Latinx.
• Institute a referendum calling for the conversion of privately owned vital industry into public ownership

It has become crystal clear during this pandemic and the current push by the U.S. -led NATO for World War III, that the institutions in this country, and those who support them and enable them, can no longer be trusted to provide even the most basic protections of life, and increasingly threaten the existence of others beyond its borders. It is therefore time to take a sober look at our world and the rapidly deteriorating effects this systemic incompetence is having on our communities, our workplaces and our families.

The two-party system in the U.S. of Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin, funded by and serving the same corporate masters. Their politicians, in general, will continue to make decisions of war, climate change, growing economic impoverishment and racist and sexist state repression based on the sole motivation of maximizing profits for their masters - who have ultimate control over the use of those profits. It’s our work, day in and day out that make those profits possible, yet this system does not allow us any real say in the consistent decision to spend trillions on war and relative pennies on social necessities. This will only change when corporate and financial monopoly ownership of the industries of production and finance are transferred to the majority – to those who it oppresses and exploits. This campaign is about building a movement to make that systemic change possible.

I look up to those who struggled to make this world a more just and equitable world. People who believed in using science and applying that science to the understanding of society for the betterment of working and poor peoples, especially those most oppressed by capitalist society. Therefore my heroes are Harriet Tubman, George Jackson, Karl Marx, Lucy Parsons, Martin Luther King Jr., Lenin, Macolm X, Mao, Claudia Jones, Ho Chi Min, Rosa Luxembourg, Amilcar Cabral, Che, Fidel, Leila Khalid, Patrice Lumumba and many many more who have said over and over emphatically in word and deed – that this system of exploitation, oppression, war and poverty must come to an end.

The first historical even I remember occurred while watching the civil rights marches with my parents at the age of 6.

My first job was as a dishwasher at the age of 14, which lasted for 1 year.