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| The killing of Kenneth Harding |
Organize Political Strikes Against Racist Cop & Vigilante Killings!
Organize multiracial labor/community self defense guards!
Last year, on July 16, 2011 the unarmed Kenneth Harding Jr.,19, was shot in the back, by the SFPD, for allegedly not paying the $2.00 fare on the MUNI “T” line (This murder enraged the Black and Brown communities beleaguered by unending racist cop and vigilante murders, like those of Oscar Grant, Raheim Brown Jr., Luther Brown, James Rivera and now Alan Blueford, Derrick Gaines and the list of victims keeps growing!
These murders took place on streets or in schools you all know, but only a little further afield in other victimized communities like yours, rightist racist vigilantes and neo-Nazis express themselves politically with gunplay and rising fatalities. These events took place in an atmosphere of approving police opinion, where a Black or a Brown person is killed by cops once every 32 hours nationwide and the corporatists of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) campaign for more bloody “Stand Your Ground” laws.
Thus we have the Trayvon Martin murder in Florida and the attack on the Sikh Temple in Michigan to accompany Bloomberg’s NYPD snooping and harassment campaign against Muslims (illegal secret NYPD agents cross the river into New Jersey!) No paranoia or hysteria is involved in noting that the prison guards have been the recruiting ground of the Nazi party for a generation and they are recruiting police nowadays and sending their youth into the army (and not just in Greece, as the papers would have you think and where the fascist Golden Dawn party got more than half the police vote.)
We stand shoulder to shoulder with the activists, friends and family of the Kenneth Harding Jr. Foundation, Occupy, Decolonize Oakland, and Labor Black and Brown who shut down a section of MUNI in a direct action on the July 16th anniversary. Today we stand with the street actions of blue collar Anaheim, CA, which challenged the racist police murders of Manuel Diaz and Joel Acevedo. This can happen in your neighborhood tomorrow!
Like foxes guarding the hen houses, the reformists, church leaders, pacifists and the petty bourgeoisie generally want to channel your anger off of the streets and into electoral frauds and phony Police Review Commissions. This flimflam was put over in New York in the Lindsay era (1966-73) for that purpose. We remember the “Civilian Complaint Review Board” like we remember the victims and we say “don’t fall for it!”
We ask where is the revolutionary party of the working people and the oppressed? We ask because like such a party we and only some few other individuals call for Labor-initiated, Community/Labor Defense Guards for the neighborhoods targeted by the capitalists for racist terror. This terrorism is a policy. It has the overarching purpose of revitalizing racist ‘white skin privilege’ among suckers and shopkeepers, of frightening the white elderly into believing they must identify with the “haves” of America and their police, and to mask real racketeering of government institutions (see the Sean Gillis story.) We want to build such a party to unite the working class and its allies for the defeat of all oppression and its root causes in the dictatorship of the capitalist/imperialist elites.
Learning from the ILWU October 23rd 2010 political strike to Jail Killer Cops who murdered Oscar Grant, the James Rivera family, in Stockton called for a “May 31st General Strike demanding: No Work, No Schools, Shut it Down!” It was in this spirit that the July 16th MUNI shut down was called. The movement against racist terror is beginning to look to strike actions to shut the bosses system down! Labor must reestablish its leading role in the defense of the most oppressed and organize the fight against racist terror across the entire working class.
Networking of the families of victims of racist state and vigilante murder is essential and building. But the victims’ families cannot win justice alone! The weight of organized labor arm in arm with the Black and Brown communities is required to end racist vigilante and cop terror/murder. Only by united action can labor, Black and Brown people defeat the terrorism capitalism uses to demobilize us!
Rather than adopting the families of the victims as “labor’s own” as our motto “AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL!” demands, the class collaborationist labor fakers who have captured our unions run from the families of the murdered Black and Brown youth. It is against the interests of labor to ignore the victims of racist capitalism’s state terror. Ignoring our class duty to the most oppressed perpetuates a slave mentality that arrests the development of class unity and class consciousness.
The enforcement of austerity on the working class and poor is carried out internationally as the capitalists seek to boost their profits in a world crisis of their system. The violence of the state against our youth is how the ruling class acts to prevent labor, Black and Brown awakening and unification. The capitalist class is afraid of multi-racial working class unity in action for good reason!
To survive labor must organize alongside the terrorized Brown and Black communities, achieve political independence from the bosses twin capitalist parties and develop a transitional program to help the masses progress from where we find ourselves now to the logic of smashing the capitalist state through the building of our own working class democratic organizations.
To be successful we must unite rank and file workers by building class struggle caucuses in our unions which initiate anti-racist self-defense and strike actions! We need to build action committees, factory committees, workers and oppressed peoples’ local, regional, national and international assemblies to organize our own self defense. These will challenge the controlling power of the 1%.
Self-organization, indefinite general strikes and insurrection are all tools the working class will need to employ to end racist capitalism. Multi-racial class unity in action is the glue that builds our movement. To unite the entire class around a winning program we need to build a revolutionary workers party based on the method of the 1938 Transitional Program of the 4th International.
Defend Fly Benzo Bayview/Hunter Point persecuted community activist and leader! Hands off Sean Gillis who exposed the Oakland EMT for failure to investigate the withholding of medical treatment for Oscar Grant! Rehire Dorian Maxwell who blew the whistle on MUNI unsafe conditions.
Develop transitional demands that link immediate needs to the logic of a workers government:
- Cops off public transit! Cops out of schools! End stop and frisk nationwide!
- Form up labor Black & Brown defense guards at our union halls and in our communities to defend our communities from racist killer cops, vigilantes, scabs, union-busters, KKK and neo-Nazi’s.
- Establish labor Black & Brown tribunals to arrest & try killer cops, vigilantes, scabs, union- busters, KKK & neo-Nazi’s.
- Demand labor federations form up unions of the unemployed and precarious workers!
- Free Public transit for youth and unemployed.End school closures!
- End charter schools and university privatization! Nationalize private educational institutions & run all education under student, parent, teacher & worker’s control!
- Free education from day care to university level. Open admissions and free tuition!
- Jobs for all at union rates! Share the work! 30 hours work for 40 hours pay! For a sliding scale of wages & prices–abolish poverty!
- Build a general strike movement to prepare the indefinite General Strike!
Communist Workers Group
cwgclasswar@gmail.com
August 18, 2012
reblogged from CWGUSA blog
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