A View From The Left (Hell, Just From A Liberal View) - The Right to Boycott: Defending BDS

The Right to Boycott: Defending BDS

 

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The Right to Boycott: Defending BDS

 

When: Saturday, October 29, 2016, 10:00 am to 1:00 pm

Where: Central Square Library • 45 Pearl St • Cambridge

Economic boycott is a time-honored tactic for social change, one used to protest unethical labor practices, racial segregation, military activity and oppressive governments. Today, across the country, state and federal lawmakers––at the urging of the Israel lobby––are attempting to suppress the Palestinian-led campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a non-violent movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.
Come learn how advocates for human rights and free speech are fighting back against the crackdown on human rights activism.
Coffee and Sign-in at 10:00 a.m. Program begins at 10:30 a.m.
Speakers:

Nadia Ben-Youssef is a lawyer and human rights advocate serving as Adalah’s first USA Representative. After four years leading Adalah’s international advocacy efforts on behalf of the indigenous Palestinian Bedouin community in the Naqab (Negev), she is now developing the organization’s US advocacy strategy to influence American policy and practice in Israel/Palestine. Much of her work in the United States has focused on building a transnational movement against supremacy and state-sanctioned violence. Nadia is a member of the New York State Bar, and holds a BA in Sociology from Princeton University, and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.
Tamar Ghabin is a Palestinian-American organizer who currently works for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation as the government affairs associate. Additionally, she is currently the head of distribution for the Arab Studies Institute’s new pedagogical project, Gaza in Context. Tamar received her BA in International Affairs from Northeastern University in 2015. As an undergrad, she was very active in Students for Justice in Palestine, and continues to be connected to SJP as an alumna.
Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, Jewish Voice for Peace Boston, the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine and the MA Freedom to Boycott Coalition.

 

Upcoming Events: 

The Right to Boycott: Defending BDS	Saturday, October 29, 2016 - 10:00am	Central Square Library	Cambridge
Iyad Burnat: Bil'in and the Nonviolent Resistance	Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - 7:00pm	Encuentro 5	Boston
Berta Caceres movie	Saturday, November 12, 2016 - 7:00pm	Our Savior's Lutheran Church	East Boston
The Next Four Years: Building Our Movements in Dangerous Times	Saturday, December 3, 2016 - 9:00am	Simmons College, Paresky Conference Center	Boston
Sing-Along Fundraiser - #NoDAPL - Jan. 14, 2017 - save the date!	Saturday, January 14, 2017 - 7:00pm	Calvary United Methodist Church	Arlington

More Peace and Justice Events.    How to Submit Events
 

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A View From The Left- It’s No Crime to Film the Cops

Workers Vanguard No. 1098	21 October 2016

It’s No Crime to Film the Cops

In 2014, cellphone video of the New York police choking Eric Garner to death sparked protests nationwide. His dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for tens of thousands, symbolic of life for black people in America seeking to survive in a racist, segregated society rigged against them at every turn, and under constant threat of cop violence. The NYPD, outraged at being exposed for its killing of Garner, never forgave Ramsey Orta, the man who caught it on video. In the years since, he has been targeted for reprisals, repeatedly arrested, harassed and threatened by the cops. On October 3, he was sentenced to four years in prison on drug and gun charges resulting from this vindictive campaign. Free Ramsey Orta!

Orta is not the only person who has been victimized by police for filming their atrocities. Chris LeDay, who posted video of the killing of Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge police this July, was arrested at his workplace the next evening on accusations of assault and battery. Unable to make the bogus charges stick, the police then jailed him overnight for unpaid traffic fines. Abdullah Muflahi, the owner of the convenience store outside which Sterling was shot, also filmed the killing on his cellphone. He was detained for six hours—four in the back of a hot police car—and his store’s CCTV system, including camera and video footage, as well as his cellphone were all confiscated. Kevin Moore—who filmed Baltimore cops tackling Freddie Gray and throwing him into the police van in which he was given his fatal “rough ride” in 2015—was also arrested and then released without charge. He has described his experience of cop harassment: “They ride past me taunting me with their phones up.”

The thugs in blue not only engage in reprisals against those filming them, but also seek to confiscate the videos before they can be circulated. Diamond Reynolds heroically filmed and streamed the aftermath of the cop shooting of her boyfriend Philando Castile. She was then handcuffed and detained until 5 a.m. The police have even collaborated with social media companies to shut down livestreaming of their deadly actions. In August, Baltimore County police attempted to serve a warrant on Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old black woman, at her home. Seeking to document their treatment of her, she livestreamed the ensuing stand-off to Facebook. At the cops’ request, Facebook shut off her account and deactivated the stream. Having ensured there would be no video evidence, the cops then shot Gaines dead, while she was holding her five-year-old son.

Repression against those who film the police is an expression of the cops’ desire to cover up their crimes and intimidate any who would seek to document them. Every video of police brutality and harassment gives lie to the myth that they “serve and protect” anything but the property and domination of America’s racist capitalist ruling class. More broadly, state forces seek to hide the evidence of their repressive role.

While most courts have ruled that people have a First Amendment right to film the police, a federal court in Pennsylvania ruled in February that, in general, there is no right to do so; the ACLU is appealing this decision. But, court rulings favorable to the oppressed are no guarantee that the cops won’t violate people’s democratic rights. Moreover, they do not alter the fundamental role of the police—violent repression of workers, black people and immigrants.

State murder across the U.S., especially of black people, is nothing new. It is an extreme expression of the forcible segregation of the mass of black people at the bottom of society, a legacy of slavery. What is new is merely the degree to which, with the proliferation of smartphones, everyone can now document the harsh realities of this barbaric system. Years of protests, years of videos, years of preachers and prayers and pious promises by cynical Democratic Party hacks have not dented these harsh realities one bit. A week doesn’t go by without the racist police executing another person, whose life is memorialized by another hashtag.

The righteous anger against the thuggish police must be transformed into a struggle against the social order they defend, a struggle to make the working class the rulers of a new society. What is necessary is to uproot entirely the capitalist state and the system it defends—one where the capitalist exploiters idle in luxury while the mass of society is condemned to a life of toil, should they be lucky enough to find a job at all. The fight for a socialist future begins with unlocking the power of the integrated working class. The key is forging a multiracial revolutionary workers party committed to the fight for a workers government.

When Buddha Swings-With Max Daddy Dizzy Gillespie In Mind

When Buddha Swings-With Max Daddy Dizzy Gillespie In Mind 

By Seth Garth

 

No question Fritz Taylor was crazy for jazz, crazy for that swing music from the likes of Duke and Benny, crazy for the Dizzy and Charlie cool breeze be-bop daddy jazz blowing out that high white note to the China seas off some swag club in Frisco town although the more modern, techno-jazz left him somewhat cold. The jazz craze of Fritz got a workout, got a talk workout every time somebody mentioned a jazz name or hummed some be-bop beat and that would start a fire in his head, a good fire unlike the others fires which disturbed his peace, the fires of his anxious passions from which he had to run.  

One night, to give an example of how quickly Fritz could pick up the slightest thread if push can to shove, he had been sitting at a table in a church basement getting ready to have a dinner being prepared by the good folks of the Catholic Worker movement up in York, up in Maine seashore country, along the coast. These good folk had volunteered to feed Fritz and his companions. (Although this screed is not about Fritz’s history with the Catholic Worker movement just let it be said that he had a long association going all the way back to his Grandmother Riley who was a Catholic Worker supporter even though he himself had long ago given up the tenets of the Church.) Sitting at the table was a distinguished looking man about his age, maybe a bit younger who casually asked probably in the interest of table-talk if anybody liked jazz, liked the be-bop sounds of the likes of Dizzy Gillespie.

That was all Fritz needed, all he needed almost before that gentleman finished his sentence. Fritz yelled across the table (there was a lot of noise from other conversations at other tables as people waited on dinner), “You mean the be-bop max daddy of cool breeze jazz? Sure I do although I didn’t get around to digging Dizzy, digging jazz until about ten or fifteen years ago.” The man nodded probably assuming that would be the end of it.        

No so lucky, although as it turned out after Fritz laid down his screed that man and he continued comparing notes about likes and who they had heard in person or on vinyl (Fritz mainly on vinyl or discs really since he was a late starter). But not before this:

“Hey I, like a lot of you if I am not mistaken about ages here, was a child of rock and roll, of the original rock and roll what they now call the classic age of rock, you know Elvis, Bill Haley, Bo Diddley, Wanda Jackson, Jerry Lee, Carl, those guys who helped bring us off that soft-sell stuff our parents liked and expected us to like. So I had no time, no rebellion against time to listen to some of that jazz stuff that would have saxs once I got hip that made the rock sax players look sick, except maybe Bill Haley’s sax player.   

“I also went through the folk minute of the early 1960s you all know that with Dylan calling the tune for us about a new day coming and others calling on us to chuck the old ways, like Joan Baez and Phil Ochs, people like that who made us think. As part of that folk minute I got into blues, first country blues with Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell [a couple of people nodded in recognition] and then the wild men like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf who amped the music up with electricity [more nods of recognition]. Funny how that blues stuff once I got into jazz had a lot of what jazz had to offer especially with guys like the Duke and the Count but I never made the connection then.    

“Like a lot of people, maybe most people as far as music goes, I basically stayed with the music of my youth, mostly stopped looking for new sounds except for a quick stop at some outlaw country music and a little Cajun stuff. Then in 1999, and that year is  important to note, I was listening as I usually do to NPR, to a talk radio show I think when I heard this music, music that turned out to be Mood Indigo by Duke Ellington. See the show was featuring Duke’s work both because the radio host was into jazz and because that year was the centennial of Duke’s birth. Naturally once I got that beat in my head like has happened before when music “spoke” to me I continued to listen and was floored by the man’s work.

“Like a lot of things that I really like when I get the bug the next day I went out a grabbed a bunch of Duke’s stuff at a record shop in Harvard Square (really a CD shop at that point) and played them for the rest of the day. That was the start. Then I pushed on to guys like Benny Goodman, the Count, Big Early, Sweet Baby James, you know the big band stuff. Eventually to the be-bop daddies like Dizzy, Charlie, Fatha Hines, the cool breeze stuff that broke from the big band sound and got a lot more into improvisation, although not just random blowing but picking up from where another guy left off, picking up a chord change and running with it. The search for the high white note that blew right out the door and changed the climate. Funny about be-bop though I should have “dug” it a lot earlier if I thought about it since I was crazy for the “beats,” for the mostly white hipsters like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, of the 1950s who were searching for their own rebellions because the music that defined them was be-bop jazz, that cool stuff that got played in the background at the coffeehouses and clubs where they read their poems and writings.                    

“Funny too because from way back when I was seriously interested in Billie Holiday although I never really associated her with jazz but with the low-down blues, with getting me well from listening to her pain alleviate my own. One day I looked up who was backing her up and lo and behold there were Lester Young, the Prez, and Johnny Hodges blowing sexy sax to high heaven behind her. Who would have guessed.

With that Fritz had finished his rant. Then that distinguished man who started Fritz’s avalanche started talking about all the great he had seen back in the day before they passed away, Dizzy, John Coltrane, the Duke, Thelonious Monk, and a million other be-bop cats. Also had a ton of anecdotes about jazz that put Fritz’s own knowledge to shame (and looks of sincere admiration from the others at the table whose knowledge was somewhat less robust than his or Fritz’s)

Here is the wild part. That place, that church basement where the group Fritz and the jazz man were talking their talk while waiting for their supper was the place where a local group of Catholic Workers in York were hosting a group of walkers, Fritz and the jazz man included, who were walking in the 5^th Annual Maine Walk for Peace whose theme for the year was to “Stop the Wars Against Mother Earth.” The Walk had started up in Penobscot Nation over one hundred miles to north and would finish the next day with a vigil at the Portsmouth Naval Base in Kittery at river’s edge. Fritz had picked the Walk up in Lewiston ninety miles up a few days before.  The distinguished jazz man had started from day one at Penobscot Nation. See that man was not only a jazz aficionado but a Buddhist monk from Japan (now residing in a Buddhist monastery outside Seattle) who was leading the group of several Buddhist monks and nuns chanting and beating their drums who were leading the other Veterans for Peace and social activists who were co-sponsoring the event. He had “gotten religion” about jazz when a lot of the jazz greats he was knowledgeable about had hit Japan where they were treated like royalty at a time when they could hardly get a hearing in the United States, the quintessential homeland of jazz.

Yeah, Buddha swings.      

 

Free THe North Dakota Protesters-Stop The Wars On Mother Earth-Again!

Click on link below to see the latest report from the front line of the struggle against thssoe who would continueto degrade Mother Earth- Stop the wars against Mother Earth 

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dakota-access-pipeline-141-activists-arrested-tense-clash-police-n674361?cid=par-xfinity_20161028 

A View From The Left-Elections 2016-Racist Bigot vs. Imperialist Hawk

Workers Vanguard No. 1098	21 October 2016

Elections 2016-Racist Bigot vs. Imperialist Hawk

We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

We print below the talk given by Mónica Mora at a public forum in the Bay Area on October 16. It has been edited for publication.

One of the key points in my talk was captured in a statement by a young black woman from Ohio who was interviewed in August about her voting preferences. She said: “What am I supposed to do if I don’t like him and I don’t trust her? Choose between being stabbed and being shot?” Well, that is precisely what we face in the upcoming presidential elections: no choice for the workers and the oppressed. The situation underlines the need to build a multiracial workers vanguard party, part of a reforged Fourth International.

The Republicans have nominated a vile presidential candidate, Donald Trump. Trump is articulating, in its most explicit terms, the racist bigotry at the core of American capitalism, its ruling class’s values. Also, we have Hillary Clinton, someone with a blood-drenched résumé. Beloved by an ex-CIA director, various neocons, former Reaganites and some in the Republican leadership, she is no lesser evil but, as we put it recently in our press, “a proven, gold-plated war hawk.” It was nauseating to watch her speech at the Democratic National Convention; it was essentially a military recruitment video.

Clinton is proud to embrace Ronald Reagan’s legacy. She asks Trump: What would Reagan think of you? Well, I don’t want that anti-communist Cold Warrior to come out of his grave, I tell you. He’s somebody who, in 1985, laid a wreath on the grave of Nazi SS murderers at the Bitburg cemetery in West Germany.

James P. Cannon, one of the founders of American Communism and American Trotskyism, once remarked that as capitalism decays it loses the power to think for itself. You can see that clearly in this election. Trump is a dangerous racist demagogue. Although not a fascist, he has emboldened fascist groups around the country. Trump seeks to tap into the fears of white working people who face an increasingly bleak future. He blames immigrants and blacks for the worsening conditions created by the capitalist class’s anarchic, irrational profit system. These conditions are part of the Obama administration’s rotten legacy, carried out with the help of the so-called friends of labor in the Democratic Party.

Bourgeois elections allow the population to decide every few years which representatives of the ruling class will repress working people and the oppressed. Fundamental change will never be won at the ballot box. The capitalist profit system must be swept away and replaced with a planned, collectivized economy under a workers government. For that, we need a party modeled on the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, which made the only successful workers revolution in history in Russia in November 1917.

Because the Republicans are viewed as the party of big business and white racism, the Democrats can mobilize wider support for war and repression, particularly among workers and black people. There is a very long list of bloody atrocities carried out by U.S. imperialism under Democratic Party presidents. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War. Bill Clinton launched the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. Now we have Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama and his drone presidency. Under Obama, millions of people have fled their devastated home countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia—thanks to the savagery of the American imperialist masters.

It is in the interest of the working class, particularly in the U.S., to oppose all the wars, occupations and depredations of the imperialist bloodsuckers. Any force, however unsavory, that attacks, repels or otherwise impedes U.S. forces strikes a blow in the interests of the working and oppressed masses of the world. For that reason, in the U.S. war against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, we have a military side with ISIS against the U.S. and its proxies—including the Syrian Kurdish nationalists—despite the fact that we abhor and reject everything that the ISIS cutthroats stand for. (The anti-woman reactionaries of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS are all first- or second-generation offspring of the U.S.-sponsored “holy war” against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the ’80s.) We say: U.S. out of the Near East now!

The Myth of the 1 Percent

This summer I went with my comrades to intervene with our communist press at the People’s Convention in Philadelphia, one of the events around the Democratic National Convention. We met a lot of disappointed supporters of Bernie Sanders who were “feeling the Bern.” Sanders passed himself off as a socialist for however long he was around in the race for president. In fact, he is a capitalist politician, an imperialist running dog—and I guess now he’s a lapdog for Hillary. With the population so disgusted by the elections, Sanders has been especially useful for the bourgeoisie in luring some workers and youth back into the Democratic Party.

There were reformist socialists at the People’s Convention too, for example, Socialist Alternative. They pimped for Sanders in the primary campaign, rallying behind his calls for a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” Well, we went to Philly to open eyes and tell the truth: for the past 25 years Sanders has been a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus. He’s supported U.S. military adventures abroad as well as the police at home—who he thinks have a “hard job.” (Those were his actual words after the killing of Michael Brown.)

The Nation magazine put out a special convention issue called “We Still Need a Future to Believe in: How to Build the Political Revolution.” It includes all kinds of vapid liberal ideas and appeals, in the spirit of Sanders, “to hold the Democratic Party accountable for its epic failure to address the needs of the majority of people in this country.” The Democrats are a capitalist party that represents the interests of the oppressor, not the oppressed. And “the people” is a classless term that blurs the nature of capitalist society. “The people” do not share common interests; they are divided into contending social classes. There are two fundamental groups: the bourgeoisie or capitalist class, owners of the means of production and exploiters of wage labor; and the proletariat or working class, the class of wage-laborers, who have only their labor power to sell. There is also the petty bourgeoisie, a diverse and highly stratified social layer that includes students, professionals and small businessmen. Although numerically large, the petty bourgeoisie lacks social power and its own class perspective; it thus cannot offer an alternative to capitalism.

The conversations in Philly reminded me of the ones I had back during Occupy Wall Street. The heterogeneous Occupy protests claimed to speak for the 99 percent and against the 1 percent. This bourgeois-populist outlook obscures the fact that ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the tiny capitalist class (more like the 1 percent of the 1 percent). It liquidates the working class into a sea of have-nots, mixed in with cops, priests and bourgeois politicians. At best, activists saw the workers as just one more sector of the oppressed.

When we say that the workers are the only revolutionary class in capitalist society, this is not a moral question. The working class is powerful not only because of its numbers—its power comes from the strategic place it has in the production process. Think about the L.A. and New York/New Jersey ports, the NYC subway system, the auto plants. And the working class has the objective interest to end a system based on its own exploitation. But the proletariat needs the leadership of a vanguard party to become conscious of its historical task and interests. It takes a revolutionary party to lead the workers’ fight to smash capitalist rule and establish their own state power.

Many youth are looking for a way to reform the system and view socialism as a form of capitalism with better social services. Well, no. The capitalist system, which breeds poverty, oppression and war, is fundamentally not reformable. Socialism, an egalitarian society based on material abundance, requires the overthrow of the bourgeoisie on an international scale.

So, what happened to Occupy Wall Street? Well, in 2012 it liquidated into the campaign to re-elect Obama. In Philly, sad faces disappointed that Sanders was no longer running started looking to the Green Party.

The Green Party is a small-time capitalist party with a thoroughly bourgeois program. Green presidential candidate Jill Stein’s program calls to “restore the National Guard as the centerpiece of our defense.” The same National Guard that occupied Ferguson to put down protests against racist police killings! Just like they occupied the ghettos in the ’60s to murderously crush black rebellions, and shot and killed anti-Vietnam War protesters at Kent State. The National Guard exists to carry out violent repression against the working class and the oppressed. In no way do the Greens want to change the fundamentals of the private property system.

The Green Party argues that third parties provide “an ‘emotional bridge’ for voters who are weary of supporting one major party but are not yet ready to vote for the other.” In the context of the current electoral circus, where both ruling-class candidates are very unpopular, especially among people under 30, the Greens keep people chained to illusions in bourgeois democracy. And reformist socialists are helping them. The International Socialist Organization calls for a vote for the Green Party, calling it “an independent left alternative in the 2016 election” (socialistworker.org, 10 December 2015).

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The fraud of bourgeois democracy is especially evident in the experience of black people in the U.S. After the cops killed Keith Scott last month, I watched an interview with a 24-year-old black man. “My people are tired,” he told the camera. “We need answers, man. It’s no reason that I should wake up every morning scared for my life because I am black.”

The videos of the ongoing killings by the cops have led blacks, whites and others to march in the streets, despite intense police repression. But the petty-bourgeois politics that dominate those protests don’t provide any answers. Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, argues that “the first and primary task is to ensure that the country is not run by a fickle fascist”—i.e., vote Hillary Clinton, Mrs. Mass Black Incarceration.

Going along with illusions in the Democrats, there are also hopes that the capitalist state can be reformed. It’s common to hear calls for federal investigations to clean up the racist cops, for community control of the police, for civilian review boards. Only a Marxist understanding of the state provides the answer to why none of these schemes have made a dent in the brutal, racist police terror in the streets.

The state is a machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another. It consists of special bodies of armed men committed to the defense of the dictatorship of the ruling class—the bourgeoisie—against the exploited and oppressed. In racist capitalist America, a country founded on chattel slavery, this means perpetuating the forcible segregation of the black population at the bottom of society. Cops are the thugs in blue whose job is to terrorize the ghettos and barrios, and the working class when it struggles. When Verizon workers were on strike earlier this year, the NYPD was there to ensure that scabs could cross the picket lines.

To address the special oppression of black people, the Spartacist League advances the program of revolutionary integrationism developed in the 1950s by veteran Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser. This Marxist perspective is counterposed to both liberal integrationism, which holds that black equality can be achieved within the confines of American capitalism, and black nationalism, which despairs of the possibility of overcoming racial divisions. Marxists seek to mobilize the proletariat against every manifestation of black oppression to open the road to black equality through the construction of an egalitarian socialist society. (I encourage anyone interested in deepening their understanding of this question to read our pamphlet Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism.”)

The program of revolutionary integrationism flows from the understanding that the American black population is neither a separate nation nor a separate class but rather is an oppressed race-color caste. Black workers are not merely victims, but constitute a strategic component of the U.S. working class, unionized at higher rates than whites and represented in key occupations such as longshore, manufacturing and transit. They form a living link between the potential power of the proletariat and the anger of the masses in the ghettos.

The American ruling class is a master at sowing poisonous racism to divide the working class and cripple its struggles. But the objective basis exists to break down racial divisions in the course of joint struggle. In order to emancipate itself, the working class must take up the fight for black freedom. Moreover, there is no other road to eliminating the special oppression of black people than the victorious conquest of power by the U.S. proletariat.

Some youth today embrace the false belief that black oppression is the result of “white skin privilege.” They are being told that all white people benefit from racism. This framework—including such ridiculous things as privilege checklists—encourages navel-gazing and fosters white liberal guilt, while dismissing the possibility of integrated struggle. White workers do not benefit from black oppression. Racial oppression drives down wages and living conditions for working people of all races—you can see this clearly in the low-wage, open-shop South. The theory of white skin privilege is an alibi for the capitalist rulers, the real beneficiaries of black oppression.

In the protests against racist cop terror, we oppose the policy of “white allies” marching at the back of demonstrations. Our integrated contingents and sales teams often face race-baiting, which serves the purpose of eliminating political debate. For instance at the DNC protests in Philly, when my white comrade spoke against illusions in Sanders, one of the local activists told my comrade she didn’t have enough melanin in her skin to tell people what to do. This is pure demagogic race-baiting. We have a revolutionary program and revolutionary politics in our blood.

It took a revolutionary war to end slavery. And it will take a socialist revolution to shatter the chains of wage slavery. There will never be justice under capitalism for black people, the oppressed or workers. There is no justice for Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Tamir Rice, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Keith Scott or the many other victims of racist cop terror. We say: Finish the Civil War! Forward to a workers state! Our aim is to construct a revolutionary workers party that can unite the working class across racial and ethnic backgrounds on a program for its own emancipation—a party that will stop at nothing less than abolishing capitalism. Those who labor must rule!

For a Fighting Labor Movement!

When rampant financial speculation in the housing market triggered the economic crisis in 2008, the capitalists made working people pay. Trillions of dollars went to bail out the banks, insurance companies and auto bosses. White workers and a huge number of Latinos and black people lost their homes through foreclosures and many were left without jobs. The cheap talk now about a so-called recovery means that the bourgeoisie’s profits have recovered.

Another consequence of the economic crash was a drop in demand for labor, which had serious consequences for immigrants. The Obama government has deported over 2.5 million people, more than the sum of all the presidents who governed the United States during the 20th century. Undocumented immigrants have been swept into overcrowded detention centers where denial of medical care is routine. It’s common to hear that immigrants die in la migra’s custody. Many detention centers are privately owned by huge corporations that make a killing on human misery.

The bourgeoisie’s anti-immigrant repression is used to maintain immigrant workers as a brutally exploited, low-wage workforce when needed, and deport them when the work dries up. Much has been said about Trump building a wall on the border with Mexico, but the bricks have already been laid down by the current administration. Last year, Obama poured more than $12 billion into Customs and Border Protection. His Priority Enforcement Program feeds records from local police arrests into a federal immigration database, creating a fast track for deportation. And Hillary intends to continue this nightmare for undocumented immigrants.

The cruelty inflicted on the victims of fast-track deportations has been highlighted in the British paper the Guardian. For instance, there is the story of Carmen Ortega. She was charged with possession of a controlled substance. She is a 62-year-old grandmother with Alzheimer’s who was ordered deported to the Dominican Republic, a country where she has no remaining family, after living in the U.S. for 40 years.

Fighting for the rights of immigrants is an elementary component of warding off attacks on everyone’s rights, and of the defense of the workers movement as a whole against capitalist divide-and-rule. Immigrant workers are not just victims. They form bridges to workers around the world and many bring with them traditions of militant struggle from their home countries. The Spartacist League calls for full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations! Latinos, the largest minority in the U.S., can and will play an important role in helping to build a revolutionary workers party. Just as black workers must be broken from anti-immigrant, anti-Latino chauvinism, Latino workers and youth must be broken from anti-black racism.

The pro-capitalist union bureaucracy is responsible for tying the working class in this country to dead-end Democratic Party politics and for promoting “America first” chauvinism. Pushing “American jobs for American workers,” the bureaucrats poison workers’ consciousness. Protectionism scapegoats foreign workers for the loss of jobs while promoting the lie that workers in the U.S. have a common interest with their American capitalist exploiters.

We base ourselves on the lessons of past class battles. Industrial unions such as the Teamsters were formed through convulsive strikes in the 1930s—and it was Reds that led many of these strikes. They gave a taste of what workers can do to fight and win. A class-struggle leadership that relied on the mobilization of the working class, not the political agencies of the bourgeoisie, made a difference. We need to study those lessons today to lay the basis for a successful working-class offensive against the exploiters.

Writing in 1921, James P. Cannon, who would go on to play a leading role in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, explained:

“Let the labor unions put aside their illusions; let them face the issue squarely and fight it out on the basis of the class struggle. Instead of seeking peace when there is no peace, and ‘understanding’ with those who do not want to understand, let them declare war on the whole capitalist regime. That is the way to save the unions and to make them grow in the face of adversity and become powerful war engines for the destruction of capitalism and reorganization of society on the foundation of working class control in industry and government.”

—“Who Can Save the Unions?”, reprinted in James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism (1992)

Capitalism Means War Abroad, Misery and Repression at Home

There are more than 43 million Americans who live in poverty today. That is over 13 percent of the population—the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to the streets of Detroit, from Louisiana in the Deep South to the heartland of Oklahoma. Their percentage of the population is up sharply since 2000. In 2013, more than half of U.S. public school students lived in poverty.

As a reflection of the terrible health care system in the U.S., the rate of women who die in childbirth is the highest among advanced countries—more than three times the rate in Britain, for example. Things are even worse for black women, whose maternal death rate is over twice the national average. The infant mortality rate in this country puts it at the bottom of the list of 27 developed countries. Underlining the oppression of black people is the fact that, if Alabama were a country, its rate of almost nine infant deaths per 1,000 would place it behind Lebanon, while Mississippi, with 9.6 deaths per 1,000, would be behind Botswana.

It’s been stated over and over again that the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world, both in terms of the actual number of inmates and as a percentage of the population. A 13-year-old black student, who was convicted of battery after bumping into a teacher while playing in the hallway captured the feeling of many like him who try to build a life while having a criminal record: “You feel like you’re drowning and you’re trying to get some air, but people are just pouring more water into the pool.” A lot of poor and working people feel the same way and are fed up.

Since 1980, the number of incarcerated people in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Today, women are the fastest-growing demographic in America’s jails. Eighty percent of them have children, most are single mothers convicted for property and drug crimes and “public order” offences, which include prostitution. About 18 percent of New York residents are black, but black women constitute more than 40 percent of the women incarcerated in that state. Only in 2009 did the state finally ban the use of shackles on women when they give birth. This law is rarely followed by the sadistic prison guards, who, despite requests from doctors, still make women endure the pain and humiliation of wearing handcuffs during labor.

The conditions of women prisoners are so horrendous that even accessing basic sanitary products such as pads, tampons and toilet paper is a struggle. With the economic crisis, voices among the bourgeoisie have increasingly complained that the maintenance of the country’s vast complex of prisons is too expensive. Despite the hopes of many that life under Obama would be different because he is a black man, the reality is that he committed even more money and resources to drug law enforcement. We call for the decriminalization of drugs, just as we call for abolishing all laws against “crimes without victims”—prostitution, gambling, pornography, etc.

The condition of women behind bars is just one raw example of women’s oppression in capitalist America. Abortion rights are under sustained attack and quality, affordable childcare barely exists. Despite legal equality, women remain oppressed. Women’s oppression is rooted in the institution of the family, and can only be overcome through building a socialist society that will replace the family by making child rearing and other domestic labor the responsibility of society as a whole. The struggle for women’s liberation is inseparable from the fight for international workers revolution.

Marx said there is only one way of breaking the resistance of the ruling classes. That is to find, in the society that surrounds us, the force that can by its social position form a new power capable of sweeping away the old. The working class is the force that can form a new power, but it needs the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party, built through the fusion of advanced workers and revolutionary intellectuals, that fights for all of the oppressed.

Now the old is even older. Still, in these elections, we have a task that is as relevant as ever. To raise the consciousness of the workers and those who want to take a side with them, we must explain that communism is not only possible, but what it means and how to get there. We want to build an entirely different society, where class divisions are eliminated and the wealth created by those who labor is no longer enjoyed by a few, but by the working people as a whole.

I want to finish by reading a short quote by Cannon:

“Power is on their [the workers’] side. All they need is will, the confidence, the consciousness, the leadership—and the party which believes in the revolutionary victory, and consciously and deliberately prepares for it in advance by theoretical study and serious organization. Will the workers find these things when they need them in the showdown, when the struggle for power will be decided? That is the question.”

—“The Coming Struggle for Power,” America’s Road to Socialism (1953)