Class War, Vol 1, No 5, Summer 2013

   Class War Vol. 1.  No. 5 by JohnnBrown

NO STOP AND FRISK, DEFEAT RACIAL PROFILING, COPS OUT OF SCHOOLS! COPS OFF PUBLIC TRANSIT!

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  

USA: Defeat Racial Profiling in N.Y! Down with the Bloomberg-Kelly Terror!

The following statement was distributed by the Communist Workers' Group and Labor Black& Brown supporters at the June 17th 2012 march to STOP RACIAL PROFILING and END STOP AND FRISK:

Defeat Racial Profiling in N.Y.! Down with the Bloomberg-Kelly Terror!

End "Stop-and-Frisk" NOW! Cops Out of Schools NOW!

For Labor-Community Tribunals! For Workers'-Community Defense Guards!

Spin masters of the twin capitalist parties peddle the big lie of a "post-racial America." But you won't find it anywhere the oppressed live, where class warfare is the 21st century norm, with Bloomberg and Kelly waging a war of terror on Black, Latin and now also Muslim immigrant communities. These bosses political program targets and tracks non-white youth for the new slavery, the prison-industrial complex, America's biggest racket-which taxes the working-class to enslave the poor and profit the prison industry and cops!

"Full Employment" is the law, by act of congress in 1946 and '71. Is the prison-industrial-complex the Bloomberg-Kelly regimes' idea of full employment? We want JOBS FOR ALL at union wages for all who can work! The working class must reject its dismemberment and impoverishment! The work week can be reduced to 30 hours with no reduction in weekly pay, and implement a sliding scale of wages and hours can further reduce the work week if need be to accomplish real full employment and also protect workers' purchasing power. Labor was promised the Employee Free Choice Act which the politicians have all forgotten! We can’t wait for legislation and we need Labor to lead, to organize the unorganized, to organize Local Unions of the Unemployed to use the fight for full employment to unite all working class and oppressed and form the rudiments of working class self-defense. We know the bosses won’t do this and the current crop of union and community leaders will not take the lead, therefore it is the task of the rank and file to take our unions back by organizing class struggle anti-racist caucuses to organize the fight back!

For the bankster-racketeer capitalist class, the racist technocrat billionaire Bloomberg and his henchman, the Giuliani/Kerik-associated Kelly are the perfect enforcers. They put over racial profiling sotto voce with "Stop-and-Frisk" and Cops in Schools. They said they would take guns off the streets, eliminate the crack epidemic and suppress gang violence. But this was just propaganda for the un-initiated, pure spin to pit the White workers against the Black and Brown youth and immigrants! 

DOWN WITH THE RACIST PROPAGANDA MACHINE THAT DIVIDES THE WORKERS!

Champions of the working people and the oppressed desire thoroughgoing, comprehensive social justice, and by any means necessary. So does the growing national network of Mothers and Families of Victims of Racist Police and Vigilante Violence which has the capacity of uniting and building militant anti-racist violence movement!

"Labor Black and Brown" joins and supports the call, and further calls by the families of the victims for political strikes and indefinite duration general strikes against capital's war on Black and Brown youth!

We will place no confidence in and will not be satisfied with or otherwise be shucked by any revivals of Lindsay-era "Civilian Complaint Review Boards." We saw them! Their game was only to demobilize the victimized, and right away they had diminishing legal powers to go with their complete lack of moral authority among wage earners. Refute this category of flimflam by withdrawing the robber barons' profits! Shut the City down!

Labor Black and Brown calls for Labor-initiated, Labor-And-Community Tribunals to investigate, arrest and try racist killer and brutalizer cops! This is the only way we can establish the truth of the many atrocities and all their inner- and interconnectedness and monstrosity. This is how we will see WHO BENEFITS? Even in conditions where we cannot arrest the butchers or carry sentences out, the great social authority of such Labor-Community Tribunals would thunder through the skyscraper canyons!

We need a Labor-And-Community Workers' Defense Guard for Black and Latin and now also the Muslim immigrant communities. In the existing conditions of the class warfare waged against these sisters and brothers in working class neighborhoods by the cops, the targeted youth l enjoy no personal security and can expect no normal future without this form of self-organization for self-defense. Such organizations are the battalions which much be formed to end the rule of the racist imperialists-the 1%.

Some may say "LB&B" is surely not their fathers' civil rights movement, with no evident pacifism. Most may hope for a non-confrontational path, but our class enemy is not interested, as he has shown over and over, from the bombing of the MOVE family in Philly to the NATO bombing of Libya the bosses will unleash their violence even against the pacifists as recently seen at Zucotti Park. We think if the pacifist Occupy Wall Street protestors were not predominantly white we would have seen many cadavers. We know consciousness tends to lag behind and resists the conclusions of objectivity. But we also know the facts shout their message. If they could speak they would call for an organized Rank and File Labor-Black-Brown-Immigrant Self-Defense Guard.

Right now we can and must fight to get cops out of the schools! The police armed camp ruins the learning environment for students of every ability. It provides DNA samples of the entire non-white school population to a "national suspect’s database (!!!)" It suppresses all test scores and graduation rates by chasing kids from the schools by placing intimidating uniformed gunmen there who don't like our kid’s faces.

But to drive the police out we will need Union-Community unity for Parent-Pupil-Teacher control of the schools. And we may need the muscle of the Labor-Community Defense Guard as well. This generation needs an honest education in how the world works, for the benefit of the imperialist. Rise up the analytical tools and program, the compressed knowledge and experience of generations of industrial workers. Develop the tools and program needed to find the road from exploitation and oppression up to a workers directed socialism of species and planet survival and regeneration. Our kids need to learn how to force the exploiters and oppressors to open their books and expose every "business secret," so that we may have society in place of a dog-eat-dog racist Gotham, U.S.A., and imperialist-divided world!

Labor Black and Brown began on the west coast and is a growing movement across the country. We are here today to tell you to neither be afraid to try nor be discouraged by self-interested "leaders" who block your path. Honest, self-sacrificing leaders will arise among yourselves, and this means they won't be Democrats or Republicans. Or Greens, Liberals or Conservatives, all of whom also stand in line to carry water for the same racist "1%." Some who have things wrong now will change their minds. Others can be "dis-elected" or can be bypassed by your own initiatives in organizing and in action! Let's change our world. This will require putting the robber barons, who chose Bloomberg from among their own, out of business for good. We can do this. 

Organize LABOR BLACK AND BROWN LEAGUES IN YOUR COMMUNITY!

CWG (USA) | July 21, 2012 at 1:19 am | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/p2Aeyl-1y