A View From The Left-Democrats Pushed Mass Incarceration-Bill Clinton Lashes Out at Black Protesters

Workers Vanguard No. 1088	22 April 2016

Democrats Pushed Mass Incarceration-Bill Clinton Lashes Out at Black Protesters

In Philadelphia on April 7, some Black Lives Matter protesters confronted Bill Clinton over his racist policies that have inflicted lifelong suffering on poor and oppressed black people as a result of mass incarceration. Clinton’s subsequent tirade against “black on black” crime was aimed at not only the black and anti-racist youth present, but also at any opponent of racist capitalist order. He mounted a vigorous defense of his policies as president. The New York Times (9 April) reported on Clinton’s diatribe: “‘I don’t know how you would characterize gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,’ an animated Mr. Clinton said, waving a finger. ‘Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t,’ he said of Mrs. Clinton.”

Evoking the spectre of neighborhoods of black demons running amok, Clinton’s racist garbage was designed to target those standing up to cop terror (the main source of violence against poor black people), notwithstanding real fears of violence in the ghettos and barrios, born of desperate conditions and hopelessness. Clinton’s ranting was to conceal the systematic racist oppression that has thrown thousands of black and Latino youth into total destitution and despair—and his huge contributions to that. On top of this, he contemptuously dismissed the protesters as showing up to just get their faces on TV. Clinton’s arrogant, unbridled racist contempt is despicable.

These young protesters are one big distraction for Bill/Hillary Clinton and their beloved “liberal” supporters spanning from the Congressional Black Caucus to bourgeois feminists to Wall Street. Nothing is more important to all of them than getting another Democrat in the White House to continue murderous imperialist aggression abroad and vicious austerity at home.

From a “progressive” capitalist perspective, the Democrats figure they’ve already got most of the black vote locked in place, so now they perhaps can gamble on a few strategic moves to “let Bill be Bill.” Even if Clinton had “lost it” or even “apologized,” with some manufactured tears, and a pained look added to the mix, it would all be a pretense and more crap, no less than that of the proven mythical epidemic of crack babies (see “‘Crack Babies’ Furor Was Big Lie—Down With Racist ‘War on Drugs’!” WV No. 933, 27 March 2009).

What we see is a division of labor: Hillary pouring out her “love” for black people and hubby Bill slapping them upside the head at the appropriate time to show white racists that the Clintons will keep on being tough on black people.

A similar “signaling” to the racists was done by Clinton during his run for the presidency in 1992. Many people remember the Rainbow Coalition conference that June when he attacked black rap artist Sister Souljah (today an author) as being supposedly anti-white in order to embarrass Jesse Jackson, then the leading black figure in the Democratic Party. The “man from Hope,” Arkansas, thinks he can keep black people in their “place”—except when he can’t, which was the case with the Black Lives Matter youth in Philadelphia.

How Clinton got to be a “brother” or America’s “first black president”—mainly for an older generation of black capitalist politicians, celebrities, petty-bourgeois entrepreneurs, etc.—flowed from his social interactions and some appointments to his cabinet of a few black people. Meanwhile, thousands were shoved into hellhole prisons as a result of his ratcheting up of the “war on drugs.”

Given how the capitalists lie, cheat, steal and kill to perpetuate their obsolete, anarchic profit system, it’s necessary to foresee and prepare for their assaults. The burning question of the moment is: How do we go forward in forging our party, a multiracial revolutionary workers party fighting on behalf of all the oppressed and exploited? That is what the Marxist Spartacist League, since its inception over 50 years ago, has been consistently fighting to build.

As part of this preparation we combat illusions in the benevolence of the ruling class and their parties under this decaying capitalist system, which impoverishes and murders the oppressed and exploited here and throughout the world. President Obama, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Clintons are in the same party—the capitalist Democratic Party, the historic party of slavery. Not to mention current Democratic presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders, who notably also voted for Clinton’s 1994 omnibus crime bill. Each covers for the other.

In the face of any serious struggle that threatens to go outside the bounds of capitalism, the ruling class will unite to contain and repress such struggle. The road forward is not to “pressure” the oppressors to reorder their priorities. The profit-bloated capitalists’ only priorities are to forcibly hold down workers and the oppressed.

It is vital to mobilize the only class in society that has the social power and the interest in smashing all forms of oppression: the workers at the point of production, the producers of profits for the exploiters. Black workers will be a crucial component of the vanguard leadership of the struggles of all those trampled by this system. They are a key unionized part of the labor movement and, organized in a revolutionary workers party, are slated to play an exceptional role in an American workers revolution.

In this brutal racist capitalist system—a dictatorship of the rich—black people have historically been the recipients of extra special oppression. Anti-black racism is a weapon of the exploiters to keep the working class divided and weak. The tiny group of fabulously wealthy capitalists feasts on these divisions. To break its chains, the multiracial labor movement, including white workers, has a giant stake in combating black oppression to overcome divisions fostered by the capitalists and their various mouthpieces. Labor is weakened even further when its natural allies in the ghettos and barrios stand alone in battling for their rights. The primary responsibility for this state of affairs lies with the pro-capitalist labor leaders who have for decades tied labor to its class enemies.

Overturning capitalist rule will be an arduous task. It took a series of tumultuous struggles to finally get rid of black chattel slavery. It ultimately required a civil war—a social revolution—to eradicate slavery and, to the bitter end, the slaveholders and their apologists proclaimed that their rule was divinely ordered. The capitalists today believe something equivalent to the slaveholding class they replaced.

Our class won its greatest victory when the Bolshevik-led 1917 October Revolution—the only successful workers revolution in history—proved that the capitalists are not invincible! Following decades of betrayals by the anti-internationalist, anti-Marxist Stalinist leadership in the former USSR, capitalism was restored in 1991-92. We uniquely fought that. These and many other vital questions and lessons must be studied and assimilated to go forward.

As long as the capitalist system exists, the possessing class will pit different sections of the oppressed against each other. That’s why the fight for black liberation through socialist revolution is bound up with the struggle to emancipate the working class from capitalist exploitation. There are common interests between exploited workers and oppressed minorities—from the need for quality, low-cost, integrated housing and free education to jobs for all. Militant multiracial class struggle can break down seemingly permanent divisions. A fighting Leninist vanguard party acting as a tribune of the people will lead these struggles to the overthrow of capitalism.

A socialist revolution (and we’re not talking about Sanders’s “political revolution” to put lipstick on a pig) will rip the power and wealth out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters. Those who labor must rule! Capitalism cannot be reformed.

Don’t believe the myth of the harmony of interests between the oppressed and their oppressors. This lie is spouted by charlatans including the labor fakers and various “socialists” backing Sanders, all of whom hiss and sneer at our revolutionary program calling for workers socialist revolution. A workers government, a workers America, will be a big step toward putting an end worldwide to the last class-divided, barbaric society in history: capitalism. Black oppression will be uprooted with it. Then we will have the resources to begin to create living conditions worthy of human beings.