The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Protest Against Massacre of South African Strikers

Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeoisie decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
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Protest Against Massacre of South African Strikers

On August 30, some one hundred trade unionists, students and leftists protested outside the South African Consulate in New York in response to the August 16 massacre of 34 striking South African miners at the Lonmin Platinum-run Marikana mine northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. The Partisan Defense Committee (PDC) initiated this united-front protest with the demands:

Protest Massacre of South African Strikers!
Free Jailed Miners—Drop All Charges!
Victory to the Striking Miners!

Participants at the protest included Kevin Harrington from the Transport Workers Union Local 100, members of the New York chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Spartacist League supporters and anti-police brutality activist Matthew Swaye of Stop Stop & Frisk. Other endorsers of this demonstration included union officials from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers in Britain, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21, International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422, Wisconsin’s South Central Federation of Labor and United Auto Workers Civil and Human Rights Chicago Chapter. Many of the trade unionists who endorsed this protest come from industries and unions that have been under attack here in the U.S.

The South African cops of the Tripartite Alliance government, made up of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the COSATU trade union federation, perpetrated this slaughter—one of the worst in South African history. Now the South African government is resurrecting an apartheid-era law to charge 270 miners with the murder of their own comrades. Drop all charges! Victory to the striking miners! For international workers solidarity with the South African miners!