Politics1 - Guide to the 2004 Workers World Party Presidential Candidate

POLITICAL: Member, Workers World Party National Committee. Regional Coordinator, International ANSWER (WWP front group), Los Angeles office. Regional Coordinator, International Action Center (WWP front group), Los Angeles office. Coordinator, Los Angeles Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (WWP front group).

PROFESSIONAL: Former classroom teacher. Militant unionist and communist political organizer (since age 18). Correspondent, Workers World (official WWP newspaper).

TERESA GUTIERREZ of New York
Workers World Party
Vice Presidential Nominee

Teresa Gutierrez has been a communist political organizer for her entire adult life. She later moved to New York to become a full-time activist in the Workers World Party. Over the years, she has also been active in the leadership of many of the WWP's various political front groups such as International ANSWER (Co-Director) and the International Peace for Cuba Appeal, and is also a powerful member of the WWP's Secretariat (governing board of the WWP National Committee). She has travelled to repeatedly to Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and elsewhere ("countries targeted by CIA subversion and Pentagon aggression") over the years to denounce US "imperialism" and "express solidarity" with Marxist forces. In her various published remarks, Gutierrez speaks like an old-style Leninist. She refers to business owners as "capitalist pigs" and corporate globalization as "bloodsucking, murderous imperialism." Gutierrez advocates a changed through armed uprising instead of elections, calling on the workers to "seize" control. "We have a duty to turn this [the US] -- the headquarters of imperialism -- into the center of revolutionary gravity," she explained. FYI: Gutierrez -- like the WWP's previous Presidential nominee -- is also an out lesbian.

Although the Workers World Party (WWP) theoretically describes themselves as "revolutionary socialists" who support worker revolutions, the WWP supported the Soviet actions that crushed true worker uprisings in Hungary in the 1950s, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and Poland in the early 1980s. The WWP was largely an issue-oriented revolutionary party until they fielded their first candidate for president in 1980. WWP Presidential nominee Monica Moorehead was on the ballot in 12 states in 1996 (29,100 votes - 0.03%) -- and was again the WWP's Presidential nominee in 2000 (ballot status in 4 states - 4,795 votes - 10th place - 0.004%). The militant WWP believes in direct actions over democratic elections. FBI Director Louis Freeh attacked the WWP in his May 2001 remarks before a US Senate committee: "Anarchists and extremist socialist groups -- many of which, such as the Workers World Party -- have an international presence and, at times, also represent a potential threat in the United States" of rioting and street violence. The WWP also sponsors or directs numerous popular front groups including International ANSWER (one of the most prominent anti-war groups in the US), All People's Congress, International Action Center, Nicaragua Network, Alliance for Global Justice, Pastors for Peace, Korean Truth Commission, Movement for a People's Assembly, National People's Campaign, Independent Commission of Inquiry on the US Invasion of Panama, Campaign to Stop Settlements in Occupied Palestine, and many others. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark -- who served under President Lyndon Johnson -- has served as a spokesman for various WWP front groups and causes since the early 1980s. The WWP espouses a staunchly Stalinist-style communist line -- pro-North Korea and pro-Cuba -- and dogmatically denounces US imperialism, sexism, racism, the police, and capitalism. According to the WWP's newspaper, the Parker-Gutierrez ticket plan to "encourage mass action and class struggle and will warn all those struggling for a better world not to rely on capitalist elections to solve their problems. Their campaign will also extend a hand of solidarity to the most oppressed, many of whom to this day are still denied even a minute semblance of bourgeois democratic rights and fill the prisons in this country." The WWP ticket is likely to appear on the ballot in only a few states in 2004.

Parker-Gutierrez Campaign
c/o Workers World Party
55 W. 17 Street
New York City, NY 10011
212.627.2994
Fax: 212.675.7869
Email: ww@workers.org