"America, Where Are You Now...."- Stepphenwolf's The Monster-Take Two

A YouTube Film Clip Of Stepphenwolf Performing Monster. Ah, Those Were The Days

Commentary/CD REVIEW

Steppenwolf: 16 Greatest Hits, Steppenwolf, Digital Sound, 1990

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

The heavy rock band Steppenwolf, one of many that was thrown up by the musical counter-culture of the mid to late 1960's was a cut above and apart from some of the others due to their scorching lyrics provided mainly, but not solely, by gravelly-voiced lead singer John Kay. Some bands played, consciously played, to the “drop out” notion of times, drop out of rat-race bourgeois society and it money imperative, its white picket fence with little e white house visions (from when many of the young, the post-World War II baby-boomer young, now sadly older), drop out and create a niche somewhere, some physical somewhere perhaps but certainly some other mental somewhere and the music reflected that disenchantment, Much of which was ephemeral, merely background music, and has not survived (except in lonely YouTube cyberspace). Others, flash pan “music is the revolution,” period exclamation point, end of conversation bands assumed a few pithy lyrics would carry the day and dirty old bourgeois society would run and hide in horror leaving the field open, open for, uh, us. That music too, except for gens like The Ballad Of Easy Rider, is safely ensconced in vast cyberspace.

Steppenwolf was different. Not all the lyrics worked, then or now. Not all the words are now some forty plus years later memorable. After all every song is written with current audience in mind, and notions of immortality for most songs are displaced. Certainly some of the less political lyrics seem entirely forgettable. As does some of the heavy decibel rock sound that seems to wander at times like, as was the case more often than not, and more often that we, deep in some a then hermetic drug thrall, would have acknowledged, or worried about. But know this- when you think today about trying to escape from the rat race of daily living then you have an enduring anthem Born To Be Wildthat still stirs the young (and not so young). If Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone was one musical pillar of the youth revolt of the 1960's then Born To Be Wild was the other.

And if you needed (or need) a quick history lesson about the nature of American society in the 1960's, what it was doing to its young, where it had been and where it was heading (and seemingly still is as we finish up the Afghan wars and the war signals for intervention into Syria and Iran, or both are beating the war drums fiercely) then the trilogy under the title "The Monster" (the chorus which I have posted above and lyrics below) said it all.

Then there were songs like The Pusher Man a song that could be usefully used as an argument in favor of decriminalization of drugs today and get our people the hell out of jail and moving on with their lives and other then more topical songs like Draft Resister to fill out the album. The group did not have the staying power of others like The Rolling Stones but if you want to know, approximately, what it was like for rock groups to seriously put rock and roll and a hard political edge together give a listen.

Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom

(Monster)

Once the religious, the hunted and weary

Chasing the promise of freedom and hope

Came to this country to build a new vision

Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope

Like good Christians, some would burn the witches

Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken

Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean

Many the lives which had come to an end

While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland

We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

The blue and grey they stomped it

They kicked it just like a dog

And when the war over

They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has it's share of injustice

Kind was the spirit in many a way

But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping

Now it's a monster and will not obey

(Suicide)

The spirit was freedom and justice

And it's keepers seem generous and kind

It's leaders were supposed to serve the country

But now they won't pay it no mind

'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy

And now their vote is a meaningless joke

They babble about law and order

But it's all just an echo of what they've been told

Yeah, there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watchin'

Our cities have turned into jungles

And corruption is stranglin' the land

The police force is watching the people

And the people just can't understand

We don't know how to mind our own business

'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us

Now we are fighting a war over there

No matter who's the winner

We can't pay the cost

'Cause there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watching

(America)

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

© Copyright MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--

Born To Be Wild

Words and music by Mars Bonfire

Get your motor runnin'

Head out on the highway

Lookin' for adventure

And whatever comes our way

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

I like smoke and lightning

Heavy metal thunder

Racin' with the wind

And the feelin' that I'm under

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

Like a true nature's child

We were born, born to be wild

We can climb so high

I never wanna die

Born to be wild
Born to be wild

© MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--

THE PUSHER

From the 1968 release "Steppenwolf"

Words and music by Hoyt Axton

You know I've smoked a lot of grass

O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills

But I never touched nothin'

That my spirit could kill

You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round

With tombstones in their eyes

But the pusher don't care

Ah, if you live or if you die

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, I say The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man

You know the dealer, the dealer is a man

With the love grass in his hand

Oh but the pusher is a monster

Good God, he's not a natural man

The dealer for a nickel

Lord, will sell you lots of sweet dreams

Ah, but the pusher ruin your body

Lord, he'll leave your, he'll leave your mind to scream

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, God damn the Pusher

I said God damn, God, God damn The Pusher man

Well, now if I were the president of this land

You know, I'd declare total war on The Pusher man

I'd cut him if he stands, and I'd shoot him if he'd run

Yes I'd kill him with my Bible and my razor and my gun

God damn The Pusher

Gad damn The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man\

© Irving Music Inc. (BMI)

--Used with permission--

The End of Bourgeois Economics Workers Vanguard No. 1054	17 October 2014

TROTSKY

LENIN

The End of Bourgeois Economics

(Quote of the Week)

Prior to World War I, Rosa Luxemburg—then prominent in the German Social Democracy’s revolutionary wing—began preparing for publication a popular version of her cadre school lectures on Marxist economics in order to educate workers as to their historic task as gravediggers of the capitalist order. The first chapter of Luxemburg’s unfinished book appeared in English as a pamphlet, issued by the American Trotskyists’ Pioneer Publishers in 1954 and subsequently reprinted in London and Colombo, in then-Ceylon.

As Marx demonstrated, the inherent tendencies of capitalist development, at a certain point of their maturity, necessitate the transition to a planful mode of production consciously organized by the entire working force of society—in order that all of society and human civilization might not perish in the convulsions of uncontrolled anarchy. And this fateful hour is hastened by capital, at an ever-increasing rate, by mobilizing its future gravediggers, the proletarians, in ever greater numbers, by extending its domination to all countries of the globe, by establishing a chaotic world economy, and by laying the foundation for the solidarity of the proletariat of all countries into one revolutionary world power which shall sweep aside the class rule of capital....

The Marxian doctrine is a child of bourgeois economics, but its birth cost the mother’s life. In Marxist theory, economics found its perfection, but also its end as a science. What will follow—apart from the elaboration of Marxist theory in details—is only the metamorphosis of this theory into action, i.e., the struggle of the international proletariat for the institution of the socialist economic order. The consummation of economics as a science constitutes a world-historic task: its application in organizing a planful world economy. The last chapter of economics will be the social revolution of the world proletariat.

 

—Rosa Luxemburg, “What is Economics?” reprinted in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (Pathfinder Press, 1970)

 

 

Ireland: Anti-Abortion Hell for Women

Workers Vanguard No. 1054 17 October 2014 Ireland: Anti-Abortion Hell for Women   The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 228 (Autumn 2014), newspaper of our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain.   DUBLIN—It’s been nearly two years since the horrific and utterly preventable death of Savita Halappanavar in a Galway hospital due to medical authorities’ refusal to terminate her pregnancy. Protests rocked Ireland when it was revealed that Savita, admitted to hospital suffering a miscarriage, was denied an abortion that would have saved her life because, as her husband was told, “this is a Catholic country.” Last year, in the wake of the protests, the Fine Gael/Labour government brought in new legislation—the “Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act”—to deal with the abortion crisis. Now the barbarity of the Irish clericalist state towards women has been laid bare, again: a young immigrant woman, pregnant as a result of rape, is denied an abortion, rendered suicidal and forced to undergo delivery of a baby by caesarean section. In an interview with Kitty Holland published in the Irish Times (23 August), the young woman told her harrowing story. Shortly after arriving in Ireland last March she found out that she was eight weeks pregnant as a result of the rape she had suffered before fleeing her country. She asked for an abortion at that time, which would necessitate travelling to Britain. For non-EU immigrants, travel to Britain for an abortion involves huge obstacles, including a lengthy visa application process and extortionate costs. The woman explained that with weeks passing she became very distraught; however only when she became suicidal, around the 15th week of pregnancy, did she qualify for assessment by the state for a “termination of pregnancy.” This assessment, mandated by the new law, amounts to an inquisition by two psychiatrists and an obstetrician who determine if the woman is “genuinely” suicidal, and then decide the options. In this case, the assessment didn’t take place until around week 25 of the woman’s pregnancy and she was informed that, suicidal or not, she was too far along in the pregnancy to permit an abortion. Over the course of the next three weeks, the woman twice went on hunger strike. She ended her first hunger strike when told that she could have an abortion, only afterwards to be told that she would be forced to have the baby. Twenty-six weeks into the pregnancy, the baby was delivered by caesarean section. In the wake of Savita Halappanavar’s death, liberals and leftists demanded that the government finally “Legislate for X,” referring to the Supreme Court ruling of 1992, which overturned the ban on a young suicidal rape victim travelling to Britain to seek an abortion. That ruling, made in response to huge social protests, ordered the government to make limited provisions for abortion where the life of the woman was at risk, including through suicide. For the next 22 years each Irish government refused to touch the question of abortion legislation, and for 22 years reformist groups like the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party limited their calls to the framework of “Legislate for X.” Now they have their legislation. Not only does it not increase the availability of abortion, it introduces up to 14 years in prison for carrying out an abortion. In contrast to the wretched social democrats, we Spartacists have consistently called for free abortion on demand; i.e., what women living in Ireland need. We have no illusions this will be easy to achieve. However the truth is that the only way to win any meaningful abortion rights (and decent health and childcare provision) is through mass struggle against the capitalist state, the church and the reactionary anti-woman forces behind it. Only such struggle, based on the working class, can lead to free access to this safe medical procedure for women from all classes in Ireland. It is not out of naiveté that the social- democratic Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party limit their calls for abortion rights to what might be “possible,” despite defeat after defeat. In thrall to the capitalist order, reformists seek to corral mass outrage—such as the eruption in the wake of the 2012 abortion atrocity—into “struggle” neatly bound by what is acceptable under the rule of the capitalist state and Catholic hierarchy. Hence their demand to “Legislate for X.” Newly elected Socialist Party TD [member of lower house of Irish parliament] Ruth Coppinger issued an 18 August statement demanding “Abortion must immediately be made available in cases of rape, incest, fatal foetal abnormalities and where there’s a threat to the health of a woman” (socialistparty.ie). But what about the vast majority of unwanted pregnancies which are just that—unwanted? Coppinger rightly says that the “8th Amendment must go,” that is the 1983 amendment to the Irish constitution that enshrines a ban on abortion. However, she looks not to mass mobilisations but to the Labour Party which she calls on to “ensure there is a referendum to get rid of the 8th Amendment by the Spring of next year at the latest.” Labour—the very party that just last year, together with Fine Gael, legislated for up to 14 years imprisonment for procuring an abortion—is now expected to aid in the liberation of women? All the reformist and liberal campaigns for abortion rights refuse to take on the church, fearing the enormous reactionary backlash the bishops can and do unleash. From education to healthcare, in Ireland the Catholic church and the state are utterly intertwined. While much of the population is far less beholden to the church today, especially after the revelations regarding the brutalities of the church-run “industrial schools,” Magdalene laundries and the “homes” for single parents, the church hasn’t relinquished its hold over Irish society. Today, over 90 per cent of schools are owned and run by the church, with the state paying the teachers’ salaries. Similarly, while hospital staff are often state employees, the “ethos” of many hospitals is still laid down by religious orders. The notorious Sisters of Mercy and Sisters of Charity still run two of the largest general hospitals and one of the children’s hospitals in Dublin. These are the same orders that carried out the decades-long physical and mental torture inflicted on the child inmates of the “industrial schools.” The chairman of the Board of Governors of the National Maternity Hospital and the other children’s hospital in Dublin is none other than the Archbishop of Dublin. This is not to mention the number of unidentified lay Catholic organisations, such as the sinister Opus Dei, that ensure their members occupy key positions in health and education. Birth control and abortion remain restricted throughout the capitalist world by the state, by the institution of the family and by organised religion, which all serve to enforce the oppression of women. The road to emancipation for women will be opened only with the destruction of the capitalist system through workers revolution.

Mexico-Outrage over Police Massacre of Students in Guerrero

Workers Vanguard No. 1054 17 October 2014 Mexico-Outrage over Police Massacre of Students in Guerrero   MEXICO CITY, October 13—Several mass graves have been found in the outskirts of Iguala, Guerrero, which may contain the burned remains of 43 rural teachers-in-training from the Ayotzinapa teachers college who went missing following clashes with police over two weeks ago. A local drug cartel known as Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors)—allegedly linked to the wife of the Iguala mayor—is said to have collaborated with the police in the attacks on the students, during which at least six people were gunned down, and dozens disappeared. Results of DNA tests have not yet been released to confirm the identities of the bodies in the graves, but many fear the worst. Since the gruesome massacre, Iguala’s mayor and his wife—both members of the bourgeois Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—as well as the police chief have reportedly gone into hiding. Events in Guerrero have sparked an international outcry from many different quarters. The Obama administration, which has mercilessly gone after Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden for lifting the veil on the dirty deeds of the U.S. imperialists, has demanded a “transparent investigation.” Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) promised that there will be no room for impunity, as he dispatched the newly established Gendarmería and other federal forces to take over police functions in Iguala. As our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México warned in the September 29 leaflet translated below, there must be no illusions that justice for the workers and poor will come from any agency of the bourgeois state. Several mass protests have taken place in Guerrero state, Mexico City and elsewhere. On October 2, the annual demonstration commemorating the victims of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student protesters in the capital became a massive display of solidarity with the Ayotzinapa students and their families. Tens of thousands came out across Mexico and internationally on October 8 to demand that the students be returned alive. *   *   * In three separate violent incidents that began as an attack on rural normalistas [teachers-in-training] in Ayotzinapa, municipal police under PRD command and armed civilians opened fire in Iguala, Guerrero, on September 26-27, leaving at least six people dead and 17 injured, with dozens still missing. The despicable PRD mayor of Iguala ranted that the students from Ayotzinapa “were hired to come and cause trouble.” This is just the latest attack against normalistas, who study in very poorly equipped schools and often graduate only to swell the ranks of the unemployed, while much of the school-age population, especially in rural areas, attends schools without teachers, electricity or even buildings. Workers at the nine rural teachers colleges in Guerrero state went on strike today to protest the attack. Active and massive solidarity with the students of Guerrero is needed: An injury to one is an injury to all! As we wrote in December 2011: “The demands of rural normalistas have changed very little in the last 50 years, and in all this time the response of the ruling capitalists/landowners—especially but not only in Guerrero—has varied from class disdain to the most vile police/military brutality.” At the time, the police had shot down two normalistas while they were protesting on the Autopista del Sol Highway that ends in Acapulco after winding through Guerrero, one of the poorest states in the country. Lacking any independent social power, these desperate students seek to make their struggle known, often by occupying buildings, taking over city buses or blocking highways—and they far too often face brutal state repression. What is necessary is to link the struggle of these students with other struggles, based on the understanding that the working class has social power. With its hands on the means of production and with its ability to withdraw its labor, the working class can bring down capitalism and the armed bodies of men (the army, the police, the courts and the prisons) that defend capitalist exploitation of labor. The recent horrendous attack occurred while many thousands of students at the National Polytechnical Institute in Mexico City are on strike, and as workers at Mexico City high schools organized in the SUTIEMS education union were ending their strike last weekend. Both the SUTIEMS workers and the striking Polytechnical students have raised their voices against the government’s anti-education reform, which is really just an attempt to destroy the SNTE teachers union and a reflection of how little the bourgeoisie cares about educating the masses of the population. And education is something that Mexicans care deeply about, seeing it as the ticket out of poverty for their children. The massive strike against tuition at UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] in 1999-2000 attracted wide support, especially among workers and the poor who can only dream of ever attending the elite private universities that the bourgeoisie sends its children to. We stand for nationalization of the private universities, for open admissions and an end to entrance exams, for no tuition and for state-paid stipends for all students. This is the only way that higher education can become a reality for most youth. Protesters in Guerrero are demanding that the mayor of Iguala resign and that the police be investigated. Twenty-two municipal cops have been disarmed and detained by the government, while the federal police, the army and state and ministerial police have taken control of Iguala. Make no mistake! These forces are fundamentally no different than the ones that were removed—they all serve the same master. The bourgeois state cannot be reformed to serve the oppressed. To end once and for all the murderous state violence directed against workers, poor peasants and other oppressed sectors, the working class must destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with its own class rule: the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. To this end, the proletariat must break with all bourgeois parties—not only with the PRI and the PAN [right-wing National Action Party] but also with the PRD and Morena [former PRD presidential candidate López Obrador’s Movement for National Regeneration]—and forge a revolutionary workers party that can lead the struggle to put an end to capitalism.

Ferguson Two Months Later-Thousands Protest Racist Cop Terror

Hands Off The Ferguson, Missouri Protesters-Stop The Police Killings Of Black Youth-Free All Protesters Now!  (August 2014) 

Frank Jackman comment: 

It has always been easy for the American imperialist capitalist government and their police to treat black youth, especially black males and increasing Latinos like they have treated the peoples of Southeast Asia in the past, and in Iraq and Afghanistan more recently as so much collateral damage when they pulled the hammer down. Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and a myriad of others shot down over the years by the police and/or vigilantes cry out for justice in Ferguson, Missouri this day and will not accept another whitewash. 

*******

Workers Vanguard No. 1054	17 October 2014

Ferguson Two Months Later

Thousands Protest Racist Cop Terror

 

The following article is based on a report from a Workers Vanguard sales/reporting team in the St. Louis area.

Two months after a cop gunned down unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson remains a focal point for anger over racist cop terror. Since the initial outpouring of protest following Brown’s killing, St. Louis-area cops have blown away three more black people: Kajieme Powell on August 19, Michael Willis Jr. on September 17 and 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers, mowed down in a hail of 17 bullets by an off-duty white cop in the city’s Shaw neighborhood on October 8.

The episodic flare-up of protests in the wake of the National Guard siege of Ferguson in August has elicited a vicious racist backlash, centered on expressions of solidarity with Darren Wilson, Brown’s killer. Ominously, Ferguson police sported “I Am Darren Wilson” wristbands until the Department of Justice, in the interest of cleaning up the image of the thugs in blue, called for them to be removed in late September. Black protesters outside of the Cardinals baseball playoff game on October 6 were met with racist vitriol from white fans, including chants of “Let’s go, Darren!” One of these bigots had “I Am Darren Wilson” taped to his replica jersey.

The extended weekend of October 10-13 saw a series of protest events, including marches, sit-ins, meetings and civil disobedience, initiated by Hands Up United, a black youth activist group formed after Brown’s killing. Two days before these “Ferguson October” protests, the shooting death of Myers had local residents and activists back out in the streets, facing cops in riot gear.

In the largest draw of the weekend, thousands marched through downtown St. Louis on October 11. In addition to a core of local residents, a broad multiracial mix of trade unionists, anti-racist activists, leftists and students from across the country took part. That night, there were protests at the Ferguson police station and a sit-in at a QuikTrip gas station in the Shaw neighborhood, where several were arrested. Civil disobedience actions two days later resulted in additional arrests.

The central demand of the organizers of the “Ferguson October” protests was for Darren Wilson to be prosecuted. At the October 11 march, there was widespread and justified anger that 64 days after Brown’s death, the cop who killed him still walks free, while black youth keep getting shot down.

We distributed hundreds of the August 20 Spartacist League leaflet “Ferguson: The Real Face of Racist Capitalist America” (reprinted in WV No. 1051, 5 September), which notes that in this society, a cop’s badge is a license to kill black people. With government officials seeking to quell the protests convulsing Ferguson at the time, the leaflet warned: “The authorities want to herd the mass outrage back into the ballot box, while Democratic Party politico Al Sharpton chimes in to scold Ferguson residents for low voter turnout. There should be no illusions in the Democrats or the federal government, which oversees this rotten system that the cops ‘serve and protect’.”

We spoke with many black youth who expressed frustration over the inaction of black Democratic Party politicians and with a system they see as corrupt from top to bottom. They view Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson as sellouts only out for the TV cameras and money. Such sentiments were captured by hip-hop artist and Hands Up United organizer Tef Poe, who noted in a Time (16 September) article: “This is the moment I asked myself, ‘Why did I vote for Barack Obama twice?’”

Dissatisfaction with the “system” and one or another Democrat is not going to amount to much absent an understanding of the class divisions within this society. The Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans, represents the tiny capitalist class that profits from a system rooted in the exploitation of labor and the subjugation of black people at the bottom. The very job of black Democrats is to co-opt or otherwise hold back the struggles of the black masses. So far as we could tell, no black elected officials were on the platform at the end of the march. But there were plenty of preachers as well as young activists calling for voter registration.

During a mass meeting at St. Louis University the next day, black youth heckled a gaggle of religious leaders and the president of the NAACP, demanding a “plan of action” from the speakers who were offering up love-thy-neighbor and other liberal pabulum. Playing to the crowd, headline speaker and radical academic Cornel West suggested: “The older generation has been too well adjusted to injustice to listen to the younger generation.” West, a onetime Obama supporter, has had his own falling out with the president. His more spirited rhetoric masks a strategy that at bottom is the same as the other preachers at the event: looking to the Democrats to “revive some democratic spirit and democratic possibility.”

A number of reformist groups, such as the Revolutionary Communist Party and Socialist Alternative (SAlt), mobilized heavily from across the Midwest for the weekend protests. These groups have picked up and run with the call to arrest Darren Wilson. Whatever punishment might be meted out to this killer cop will surely be not nearly enough. The fact of the matter is that the cops are not going to be held “accountable” for their crimes. The simple reason is that their purpose, regardless of who is in office, is to enforce the rule of the capitalist exploiters through the violent suppression of workers, blacks and all the oppressed. Even if Wilson is in some way punished, it will simply be for appearances so that the Ferguson police can better go about their business of repression. But the fake socialists would have you believe that by removing a few bad apples, the class enemy’s guard dogs and the rest of its state apparatus can be made to serve the exploited and oppressed masses.

After the march, we attended a SAlt public forum titled “The Whole System Is Guilty,” which drew 60 people. This outfit holds that police are “workers in uniform,” a position SAlt’s speaker conveniently neglected to mention before we brought it up in the discussion. Our comrade explained that such an embrace of these hired guns “is contrary to the Marxist understanding of the state, which is the armed bodies of men—the courts, the cops, the military—who defend the interests of the bourgeoisie.” The SAlt spokesman disgustingly responded that many people “have to go find jobs like the police department” and that we should “have a dialogue with them.” SAlt’s touching faith in the capitalist state notwithstanding, many black youth realize that if they try to have a “dialogue” with a cop they are more likely than not to end up face down on the sidewalk.

Mobilizing the social power of the multiracial working class independent from and in opposition to the capitalist state and its political parties is vital to the fight against cop terror and racial oppression. Members of the United Auto Workers, Communications Workers of America, Service Employees International Union and the Chicago Teachers Union were at the march. Our perspective that labor must take the lead in fighting black oppression was well received by many workers. While AFL-CIO officials had decided to sponsor buses for trade unionists and others from out of town, the only labor banner we spotted was from the St. Louis Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU).

One CBTU member complained that although a lot of labor people were there, the unions had not mobilized the ranks, in force, as organizations. As a component part of the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy was not about to do so. In supporting the march, its primary interest was bolstering the fortunes of the Democrats, especially with the midterm elections on the horizon. The key to unlocking the social power of labor is the fight for a class-struggle union leadership.

The capitalist state cannot be reformed to act in the interests of workers and the oppressed but must be destroyed and replaced by a different kind of state where those who labor rule. Our purpose is to build the revolutionary workers party that can lead the fight for a socialist America. Only then will there be justice for the mass of the population.