Orlando and the Right to Bear Arms

New Black Panther Party carrying weapons

The mass killing of 50 gay people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, has once again thrown the question or the right to bear arms into the limelight. The reaction to this crime is to blame it on homophobia, Islamic ‘terrorism’ and freely accessible guns. This builds support for the ruling class agenda to disarm the working class or anyone profiled as a potential “terrorist”. We disagree. The right to bear arms is a fundamental democratic right that we must defend as the capitalist ruling classes everywhere resort to armed repression to force the working masses to pay for the terminal crisis of capitalism with their livelihoods and their lives.

Two examples of reactions to the Orlando shooting calling for gun control:

“It's that outmoded part of the constitution allowing the citizenry to bear arms that's the big stumbling block.” And: “Our constitution is antiquated and obsolete. The constitution should have been altered several times...now it's more of a slave to the wealthy and powerful to use against the very people it was intended to protect.”

We reject this argument. The US constitution empowered property owners which included slave owners to own and bear arms in popular militias to defend a ‘free state’. It represented the bourgeois constitution that legitimates the ruling class to shoot the property-less when they rise up. Now that bourgeois democracy extends to all citizens as property owners including workers who own their 'labor' to sell, all can bear arms.

To suppress that right for all will not take it away from the state which is now routinely executing unarmed people on the streets. The response from black activists is to bear arms in public to assert that right which communists support. This is the embryo of a workers militia and workers defence committees against the police attempts to execute blacks and the bosses’ attempts to hire thugs to shoot militants to smash strikes and occupations.

The fact is that the US has created conditions at home and abroad in which 'lone wolves' (individuals acting alone motivated by ‘terrorists’ or not) kill scores of people. These killings cannot be stopped by banning guns. Nor will a ban stop deaths from gun crime which kills more people a year in, for example, Chicago than in Libya. Gun crimes are overwhelmingly the result of ‘crimes against property’ which are endemic in capitalist class society where the proletariat is driven into poverty.

This is not about individual 'psychology' but class power. As the crisis of US imperialism develops the state will arm more paramilitaries to wipe out popular resistance as 'crime' or 'terrorism'. Do we give up the right to arms and surrender, or organise armed resistance? We don't deny that right to those oppressed by the US abroad, why deny it in the US itself where the US working class has the potential power to change the system?

The solution is to defend the right to bear arms so that the exploited and oppressed working majority can overthrow the militarised state and impose a workers' state which can be defended from armed counter-revolution!

Against those who have little faith in workers not shooting one another or executing non-workers arbitrarily, this wilfully ignores the reality. The capitalist state employs police and the military to execute scores of worker every day.

Workers need to be armed to defend their class despite being divided and driven by capitalism to kill one another. With capitalism in terminal crisis attacks on workers can only get worse so that they need armed militias to defend themselves.

If we take historical examples, the Russian revolution would not have succeeded without the arming of the proletariat. The Tsar in 1905 proved that when he shot down the unarmed masses. Kornilov who tried to smash the revolution in 1917 failed because the workers were armed and his own ranks mutinied and joined the revolution. The coup against Allende in 1973 drives home the fact that unless armed, workers united will always be defeated.

Of course being armed is not sufficient as the revolution in Germany 1919 proved. The armed masses who mutinied were fooled by the abdication of the emperor and by the treacherous Social Democratic Party into disarming and voting for a new republic. The proletariat needs to be organised and led by revolutionaries to build workers militias.

Meanwhile those who are fighting for basic democratic rights as in Syria are forced to take up arms to defend themselves from imperialism and its reactionary agents. That is the principle at stake: the right to bear arms in self-defence from the armed force of the capitalist state!

USA: Organize Labor, Black & Brown Self Defense!

Organized Black Self-Defense

There is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
The Working Class Must Never Forget Michael Brown!
Organize Labor, Black and Brown Struggle!

The majority white Ferguson Grand Jury in refusing to indict Darren Wilson is has whitewashed the summary execution of Michael Brown. This outrage will embolden every racist cop in the United States to continue their terror against the black, brown and immigrant communities. The cops know that all they require is a complaint for ‘sufficient’ cause to kill a black person; that their weight with the justice system is so great that they can routinely commit legal lynching and walk away free.

The Ferguson Grand Jury was a “Star Chamber” of the most objectionable type, with the proceedings dragging on for months, with a majority white jury that was not sequestered during the media hype and a prosecutor who made certain there would be no indictment. New York State Chief Judge Sol Wachter once remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”

In cases of police killings, indictments are extremely rare. The Brown family will likely not even find any compensation in a civil court for the death of their loved one, as the media hype will have tainted every jury pool. The report of the Grand Jury was nevertheless a freak report. In 2010, in 162,000 Grand Jury cases in the U.S., only 11 failed to bring indictments. That's .0000679, i.e., 6.79 times per 100,000 cases. This fact has to be known by Obama, legal scholar and leader of the Democrats. The Democrats have no fundamental commitment to defense of Black lives or to Mike Brown's good name, but only to the superior bourgeois rights of property.

There will never be justice for the black, brown or immigrant persons in the capitalist courts. As we wrote in our Class War supplement, “There is No Justice in Capitalist America!”:

“It has been reliably established that a black person is killed by cops or vigilantes every 28 hours in the U.S.A. Only the most flagrant abuses of police brutality and terror come to light, while the black, brown and immigrant communities face daily harassment, beatings and murder at the hands of the racist cops."

Darren Wilson will either be reinstated to full duty and pay to be able to freely conduct racist gunplay in Ferguson and the St. Louis area, or he will broker his resignation and leave with a nice pile of money. Meanwhile, the protesters demanding justice will be facing massive state repression at the hands of the militarized police forces, the FBI, the fascist KKK and the National Guard.

It is only the organized self-defense of the masses based on a political program of struggle that can curb the excesses of an increasingly Bonapartist police state. There will be ever-increasing racist gunplay and there will be many more Michael Browns until the masses start to organize Labor, Black and Brown community self-defense militias and carry out labor-centered actions to counter the racist violence through political labor strikes. “They shoot us down, we shut them down!” A fighting, multi-racial labor movement would have launched a general strike in reaction to Michael Brown’s murder.

We in the Communist Workers Group are not alone in calling for these self-defense organizations, but these run headlong into the resistance of a trade union bureaucracy that has anchored its fortunes in the capitalist Democratic Party and who are happy to collect the dues of the Police Benevolent Associations, telling us that the killers in blue are union sisters and brothers! So our first task is to drive the police out of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federations. The police are not workers. They are the hired guns of Capital.

No more Fergusons! Right now, the frequency of police killings is increasing and is at epidemic levels, with more Americans killed by cops in the last decade than have been killed in Iraq. In order to reverse this trend, the social vanguard of the labor movement, the black, brown and immigrant communities need to take to heart the historic lesson of the Deacons for Defense and Social Justice, the best days of the Black Panther Party, Robert F. Williams and the Minneapolis Teamsters Union Defense Guard.

The pacifists have led you into blind alleys and into T streets for the police to ambush you, while politically disarming the masses with impotent attempts to ‘reform the police.’ We will remember the advice of Malcolm X who said “We’ll be non-violent with those who are non-violent with us.” Until such time as racists fear for their lives and well-being, they will feel entitled to act out their perceived white-skin privilege with deadly force and none of the behavior of the bourgeois state will give them any reason to believe otherwise.

• An injury to one is an injury to all!
• Defend Ferguson protesters!
• Drop all charges and for the immediate release of all Ferguson protesters!
• For organized trade union contingents to Ferguson to demand justice for Michael Brown!
• National Guard out of Ferguson! Down with the militarization of the police!
• No stop and frisk! Defeat racial profiling! Down with La Migra and police attacks on immigrants!
• For immediate full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
• No faith in the bosses’ courts!
• We need our own institutions to gain justice!
• Turn the meetings and mobilizations into organizing meetings for Labor, Black and Brown self-defense guards and tribunals!
• Form up multi-racial Labor, Black and Brown self-defense guards to defend against racist police, KKK and vigilante terror!
• For workers’ tribunals to bring murdering racist cops and vigilantes to justice!
• Build Labor, Black and Brown political strike actions to bring these criminals to justice!

Communist Workers Group – USA (CWG-US):
Email: cwgclasswar@gmail.com
Website: www.cwgusa.wordpress.com

Marikana Massacre! Down with the ANC! For a Workers and Poor Farmers Government!

South African Police Massacre 34 miners at Marikana

The cold blooded killing of 34 miners by SAP (South African Police) at Marikana on Thursday is a deliberate warning by the ANC (African National Congress) that a militant breakaway of rank and file unions from COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) will not be tolerated. The evidence is there that the ANC and its SACP (South African Communist Party) leadership instructed the police to ‘shoot to kill’. The global crisis has put pressure on ANC to make South African workers pay for the crisis. The militant miners are the vanguard of the proletariat and have begun to break from the Tripartite regime (ANC/SACP/COSATU).

The militant miners were members of the AMCU (African Miners and Construction Union) a breakaway union that split from NUM (National Union of Miners) when its founding leader was disciplined by the NUM for leading a 2 week mine occupation for his reinstatement by the company. As the NUM has become more bureaucratised and oriented towards the better paid workers the AMCU has grown to represent the poorest and most militant workers.

This poses a problem for the ANC as imperialism demands that it uses COSATU to discipline the workers but workers are breaking from COSATU to form independent unions to resist paying for the imperialists’ crisis. The ANC has no choice but to try to blame the striking workers and turn other workers against them, and when that fails, to ‘shoot to kill’. Thus South Africa is entering a revolutionary situation of open class war to decide which class will control and benefit from its vast labour and mineral resources.

Imperialists Mine Southern Africa for super-profits

This clearly exposes the role of the ANC as a capitalist party that runs the SA semi-colonial capitalist economy on behalf of international finance capital. SAs historic role in the imperialist division of labor was to serve British and US mining capital such as Anglo-American and Lonhro – now Lonmin that owns the Marikana platinum mine. The owners make huge super-profits at the cost of workers poverty and lives. Apartheid slavery was the method used in SA until ‘94. Equally or more barbaric conditions still exist all over Southern Africa. Africa was divided up by the imperialist powers into many artificial states that cut across whole peoples and nations as well as the rich mineral belts of gold, copper, diamonds, platinum, etc., all plundered by imperialism. Masses of workers migrate across Southern Africa to work for imperialist corporations or traders. In the DRC warlords from Rwanda and Uganda control mining in the North-East while the Chinese mines flout labour laws in Katanga. In Zimbabwe the army and ZANU-PF control diamonds. In Zambia and Tanzania Chinese and other mines have a poor safety record. As the global crisis worsens, we see the conditions of miners deteriorate across the whole of Southern and Central Africa as the rival imperialist powers compete to pump surplus profits out of the mines. This means that to defeat imperialism and their client regimes and warlords in Africa, workers have to unite across the colonial borders to create a Socialist Federation of Southern Africa!

Popular Front

The brutality of apartheid gave way in ‘94 to the ‘power sharing government’ with the ANC as the party representing the black majority. But the black majority never got to rule. The ANC and the Stalinist SACP joined forces in the early '50s as a vehicle for national liberation and the end of white racist capitalist rule. But it could never fulfil this task. Even before it shared power in government with the white bourgeoisie, the ANC was a “popular front party” in which the black working masses were subordinated to a black petty bourgeoisie who aspired to become black capitalists serving imperialist finance capital. The fake Trotskyist left betrayed the socialist revolution and became apologists for the Stalinist ANC popular front. The Cliffite, Mandelite, Barnesite and Militant tendencies voted for ANC as if it would bring about the ‘Freedom Charter’. A few Trotskyist currents such as the British “Workers Power” called for a vote for ‘workers candidates’ and a break from the ANC. As the Trotskyists predicted, the ANC victory turned ‘national liberation’ into a new form of imperialist domination and over the last 18 years the ANC has presided over the super-exploitation and impoverishment of the masses while pocketing its share of the spoils of imperialist plunder.

Today the Trotskyist program demands a break from the ANC popular front regime. Against the Stalinist lie of bourgeois democracy for the masses we can see that to survive the ANC must use the guns of bourgeois dictatorship to kill the masses. We reject the call by Julius Malema for strikes to change the ‘corrupt’ ANC leadership. He is trying to keep the workers in the popular front to be betrayed again and again. What we call for is a political general strike to bring down the ANC regime to expose it fully as the agent of imperialism. A general strike will force a showdown. The regime is fragile and it will try to use the army to stay in power. We have to spell out that the strike committees and defence guards of today must become workers councils and workers militias, and that the ranks of the army must be won over to defend workers from a military clampdown. This is eminently possible as the rank and file of the military has unionized despite the attempt by the ANC to crush the organizing drive. The unionization of the military drove a wedge between the most militant youth and the leadership of the Tripartite regime. Workers’ councils and militias will become the basis of workers power and a Workers and Poor Farmers Government that will empower the working masses to fully participate in the permanent revolution for socialism.

Trotskyist program: Permanent Revolution the order of the day

We support the immediate demands of the WIVP for workers in all unions and all sectors to go out on strike against this massacre and to form self-defence squads against further repression. We also support the WIVP call to build for a general strike, and to break with the ANC and SACP!

• General Strike to break with the ANC, Smash the Popular Front!

• Down with SACP Stalinist traitors!

• Rank and file take control of COSATU, throw out the corrupt leadership!

But a call for a general strike to break with the ANC must show what will replace this regime. We need socialist demands for workers councils, workers militias, for the ranks of the army to refuse to shoot workers and form soldiers’ councils.

• For a general strike to bring down the capitalist Government and form a Workers’ Government!

• Build Workers and Soldiers councils, and Workers militias!

• For a Workers and Poor Farmers Government!

• For a Socialist South Africa in a Socialist Federation of Southern Africa!

Liaison Committee of Communists 
(Communist Workers Group - NZ/Aotearoa; Communist Workers Group - USA;  Revolutionary Workers Group - Zimbabwe)

For a New World Party of Socialist Revolution.
20 August 2012

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