|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Labor, Minorities, Women Under Attack Capitalist Injustice and the Supreme Court Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party! A series of reactionary Supreme Court rulings last month, followed by Donald Trump’s nomination of ultraconservative Brett Kavanaugh to a newly vacant court seat, has struck fear into huge swaths of the population. And for good reason. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would give the Supreme Court a solid right-wing majority lasting perhaps a generation. This would strengthen the hand of the capitalist rulers in their drive to crush the already attenuated rights of the working class and oppressed. Having targeted the unions, blacks, immigrants and other minorities, the forces of capitalist reaction have their guns set on eliminating women’s right to abortion. In late June, the Supreme Court declared war on public workers unions, the largest remaining concentration of organized labor, when it ruled against the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in the Janus case. The decision eliminates the agency shop in the public sector, under which all employees have to pay union member dues or “agency fees” if they choose not to join the union since they benefit from the union bargaining on their behalf. As we noted in “Janus Case: Assault on Labor” (WV No. 1133, 4 May), the intention is to bankrupt, e.g., destroy, the unions by bleeding them of members, posing a direct threat to all of labor, including private-sector unions. Even before Janus came down, a court case was initiated in Washington State demanding that a large state union “disgorge and refund” fees that nonmembers had already paid. This would be larceny with legal sanction. The Janus ruling will particularly hit hard against black workers, who are heavily represented in the public sector. In yet another blow to black people, the Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s system for purging voters from the rolls. This was a continuation of the attack on voting rights for black people and the poor; in 2013, the Court had already effectively gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. (read on) |
|||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.
Adopted at the Third International Conference of the ICL in early 1998, the declaration presently exists in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, Polish, Italian, Turkish, Indonesian, Greek, Korean and Tagalog. In this post-Soviet period, marked by a deep regression of proletarian consciousness, we continue to be guided by Trotsky's statement that "the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow; it must swim against the current." Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!
