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KELSEY LAWRENCE: Jane Van Dusen is 24 years old. She's a registered nurse. She rides around town on a motorcycle. She belongs to the Socialist Workers Party. And she's running for mayor of Minneapolis on a platform of ending oppression and making life better for the working people.

Ms. Van Dusen did not file for the primary September 25th because under the new party designation bill, only members of the two major political parties, the Republican and the DFL, are eligible, even though the Socialist Workers Party has run in every election in Minnesota since 1938, she said. But she collected the required number of signatures on a petition to run in November. Ironically under the old rules, she probably would have been eliminated in the primary. Ms. Van Dusen as a nurse is especially interested in health care.

JANE VAN DUSEN: Health care is a burden on not just poor people, but just regular working people, middle class, working people, women, and especially Black people and oppressed nationalities in this city. I see health care, as I said before, as a human right. I think it just-- it stands out so blatantly to me that everybody deserves quality health care. If they're sick, they deserve to be healed or cured or whatever you want to call it.

But the fact of the matter is that it's so expensive these days. And I've seen certain instances where people were denied certain health procedures or technical things that they needed to get better or to rehabilitate themselves. And this always just glared at me and I couldn't quite grasp it. And that's when I first began questioning everything going on.

Now I see that it's something that we can supply to people. I see corporations in this city like, Honeywell, Dayton's, IDS just making profits off the people that work there off the backs of women and Black people and just the majority of people that work there. And if I were mayor, I'd see that those profits were cut down to a minimum, and that extra money would be used to provide quality health care for every citizen in Minneapolis because I believe that's a human right. And no one has the right to deny that to any human being in this city, in this state, in this country or anywhere in the world.

SPEAKER: You'd finance that, in other words, by increasing taxes on the big corporations?

JANE VAN DUSEN: Right. I tax corporate profit 100%. In our program, Socialist Workers Party program, we call for taxing all incomes over $25,000. We feel $25,000 per year and below is too little to live on, $25,000 being the highest that somebody should be able to live on.

SPEAKER: And anybody under $25,000 should not have to pay taxes, you're just saying?

JANE VAN DUSEN: Right. And we would tax everyone over that in order to equalize out the income per person. This country, it's technology, this is another thing that always glared at me in the face, this technology. We were able to put men on moons, we're able to send out these space labs for weeks and weeks and weeks, but yet, there are so many simple things we can't do. We can't provide quality birth control that's safe and effective to women in this country. We can't do that.

And that's a contradiction I can't reconcile in my own mind. And when we can do those highly technological things and not provide quality health care, food, and shelter for every citizen in this country, then I think something's wrong. And that's why I became a Socialist and that's why I'm running for mayor on the Socialist Workers party ticket to tell people that there is a socialist alternative, that there is an alternative that says these things don't have to exist any longer.

SPEAKER: What about crime in Minneapolis?

JANE VAN DUSEN: That's society capitalist. Society has bred a lot of the problems that we see today in Minneapolis and we'll see in any other city as well, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco. And that the problem itself isn't crime, the problem itself isn't drug addiction, but it's capitalist society.

They say that crime runs rampant in the street. There's more murders, there's more drug addicts, things like this. They say Black people are criminals for wanting to control their own communities for fighting for that. But I don't think that that's the problem. Black people aren't the criminals, it's the society that's the criminal. And capitalist society almost always turns the victim into the criminal.

And if I were mayor, I'd see that the police department were abolished. The police department in Minneapolis is known for its attacks on the Black community in Minneapolis. It's known for setting loose its K-9 corps in the South Side Black community. I would call instead to replace that police department with defense guards in the Black community made up of the residents of that community that would protect and defend the rights of the people who live there of the Black people in that community.

SPEAKER: They would have the authority to do whatever was necessary to maintain order in the community.

JANE VAN DUSEN: That's right. It's their community.

SPEAKER: But they then would become policemen, would they not?

JANE VAN DUSEN: Not policemen in the sense of the word that we know today.

SPEAKER: But whatever you call it, they still have the--

JANE VAN DUSEN: They'd have the authority to defend and protect their rights.

KELSEY LAWRENCE: Realistically, what could Jane Van Dusen do as mayor?

JANE VAN DUSEN: It doesn't make any bellyaching about what I stand for. I stand for workers control of the factories. I stand for abortion. I stand for equal rights for women. I stand for preferential hiring for Black people and for women. I stand for Black liberation, all these things.

And if I'm elected mayor, it's going to be because the majority of the people in Minneapolis see this as the positive alternative, see this-- see socialism is the only answer to their problems, that they can't get this out of the Democratic Republican Party and their bankrupt politics, that they can only get it from the Socialist Workers Party and for calling for a Socialist America.

I'd open up my office to organize all these movements to struggle for change. I'd open up my office for women to come and organize movements to fight for equal rights to stop discrimination on the job. I'd open up my office for Black people to fight if the police department is attacking them. They could use my office to organize against that, to build a movement that could fight for the defense of their rights. And these are the sides I'd take.

SPEAKER: How do you translate the people's wishes into getting the work done say in the area of mass transit?

JANE VAN DUSEN: For one thing, there could be some experience they had in some other part of the country. We could use that. But we would see who would be the people that knew about mass transit. Probably the bus drivers, for one thing, could offer the representatives from-- say the Bus Driver's Union could sit down with the leaders, the democratically elected political leaders of the city, could sit down and discuss different plans they have.

Different plans would be submitted from-- anyone could submit a plan to a certain planning commission that was democratically elected by the people. And we would weigh these things, and we would discuss them and plan them out and present the proposals to the people explaining what was going on and things like that.

You're going to have to have smaller bodies, but it's just not going to be everyone going along at the same pace. There's going to be different leaders at different times. But there are going to be leaders of the struggle that the people of democratically elected to positions. And if the people don't like some of the decisions that are made, then those decisions will be changed because they'll be demanding them and they're the majority of the people. And that's what a socialist society is based on.

KELSEY LAWRENCE: Jane Van Dusen Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Minneapolis. I'm Kelsey Lawrence.