Class Struggle 127 Summer 2018/19

   Class Struggle 127 Summer 2018/19 by Dave Bedggood on Scribd

Yarmouk and Gaza, Palestinians under Continuous Attack

"Yarmouk starves and we see faux solidarity" from https://sarabiany.wordpress.com/tag/yarmouk-camp/

Victory to Palestine! Long live the Syrian revolution!

The trigger for the latest Zionist barbarity in Gaza was Trump’s change of position on Jerusalem, which was a clear signal that the U.S. is not interested in a Palestine solution. The U.S. has junked the UN resolutions on getting a settlement before arriving at a solution for Jerusalem. That caused a massive- and angry Arab response which fueled the mass Gaza protest. It licensed Netanyahu to go after Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah and Iranian forces in Syria. Netanyahu got the green light to ramp up the rivalry between Israel and Iran and he repaid Trump in kind with ‘evidence’ of WMDs in Iran as a pretext to break the nuclear deal and impose more draconian sanctions. This forces the EU powers to make a decision either to stick with the U.S. bloc or risk the loss of U.S. markets by moving towards Russia and China. That dilemma faces them now, (e.g.) as Nord Stream pipeline from Russia to Germany nears completion.

Gaza is a pawn in the growing inter-imperialist rivalry between the declining U.S. and the rise of Russia and China, a pawn where Israel and Iran are the main regional proxies. As the focal point of the only post WW2 colonial settler conquest in the Middle East, Palestine remains at the center of the Arab revolution against the imperialist counter-revolution.

As Russia gains over the U.S. in Syria and draws Turkey, Iran and Qatar into its Eurasian bloc, the U.S. is devoid of even a Kurdistan protectorate. Trump wants out of Syria and wants to keep his promise to “let Russia handle Syria.” But U.S. troops are still in Syria and Assad wants them gone now (there are oil fields there) and is willing to attack. The U.S./Russia “Bromance” agreement to put their differences to one side and collaborate in a “war on terrorism” was always just this problematic in practice. But assuming no large scale Assad attacks on Deraa, the agreement now looks more likely, as Russia grumbles about its ally Iran’s intentions in Syria and across the Levant. The U.S./Russia agreement is to smash the Arab revolution. As the military defeat of the Syrian revolution looms the prospects for revolution in Iran are growing, which has to make Putin contemplate his cost projections! For now we can expect Russia’s Astana plan for a new constitution and the likely partition of Syria to embed the Russia/China bloc.

We nevertheless foresee a widening of the inter-imperialist conflict and more possibilities for full-on proxy wars developing. These conflicts are driven by bigger economic frictions that cannot be put aside. In this light, the success of el Sadr in the Iraqi elections could mean that the U.S. and Russia/China might clash over Iraqi oil, where both imperialist blocs have about equal stakes. It is possible that Iraq will once more become the focal point of their “Great Game” for the whole of Eurasia, throwing the Iraqi masses once more into the crucible.

“Moscow did not condemn Israel’s strikes, as it had in the past, instead calling on Israel and Iran to resolve their differences diplomatically.” NYT (May 10)

Russia has been making a play to neutralize Israel for several years and has an agreement to develop offshore gas fields near Haifa. If for the moment Netanyahu plays blood brother to Trump after the embassy move, he is nevertheless seeking ways to inveigle the U.S. into war with Iran, a strategy the Zionist regime has pursued since 1990. A former Mossad general has revealed to Eliot Engel on MSNBC (5/25/18) that Israel now is engaged in a “rolling escalation” of attacks on Iranian forces in a war with Iran that “already exists,” with the aim of making it impossible for the U.S. to stay out of this war. Like Trump, Netanyahu wants to break Russia out of its alliance with China, so as to permit this war with Iran without world war. But Trump has not taken the bait yet and has only given the green light to use up some U.S. furnished military supplies on Iranians in Syria.

And just because we of the Communist Workers Group (CWG) oppose Iranian and Russian intervention in Syria, don’t think for a minute that we condone or refuse to condemn the Israeli escalation. Without support from Russian bombers, Iranian “Revolutionary Guards” and the Hezbollah, the people of Syria would have toasted the overthrow of Assad years ago. While Assad bombs Palestinians in the Yarmouk refugee camp Israel guns down peaceful protests in Gaza. Israel is not bombing Iranian positions in Syria to support the Syrian masses. Rather, taking the cue from Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement with Iran, Israel is showing it knows when it is obliged to use up stockpiles of “equipment” which U.S. taxpayers (the most generous people in the world) will be required to replenish. On both sides of the aisle Democrats and Republican legislators are preparing to sell us World War 3 in hopes of securing new sales orders to keep their benefactors, the military industrial capitalists in the black. As a reward for its great death-dealing customer, the U.S. administration picks exactly this moment to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the colonial settler state! As long as they can deceive the U.S. masses they do not care that the world knows the U.S. has no more interest in Middle East peace than its pet monsters Netanyahu and Assad.

Lest anyone do any critical/historical thinking on the subject of Middle East imperialist criminality, Senator Schumer of New York introduced a bill to make advocacy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement a crime and to explicitly outlaw criticism of Israel, with staggering financial and jail penalties! This proposed law follows the enactment of a similar South Carolina statute. And if some in the Knesset right get their way, it will be illegal to even photograph the Israeli troops, since photos are used to shame them!

While branding Palestinians as aggressors, the U.S. regime simultaneously cut off aid funds for humanitarian organizations in Syria. Far from the fake left’s alternative facts mantra that the U.S. is trying to overthrow Assad, the funds cut slashes the budget of the White Helmets (Syrian Civil Defense) by one third!

For decades liberal Zionism has argued that there is no one on the Palestinian side to negotiate with as they are all terrorists.  Holding high the banner of Israeli “democracy” they admonish the Palestinians and the left to use non-violent civil-disobedience in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi to address their concerns, just as their latest allies in the USA, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) do. This ruse is again being exposed this spring in Gaza, just as when Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a Zionist home demolition with a Caterpillar backhoe.  In 2018 Gazans bravely face gradual extinction due to contaminated water, limited electricity, brutally restricted access to the world, limited food and medical supplies. Today, when peaceful protests are launched at the barbed wire, IDF snipers are given orders to shoot to kill unarmed civilians. The true program of Zionism is to eliminate the Arab presence inside the green line and ultimately across the West Bank, and by making Gaza unlivable, to ethnically cleanse the refugee camps just as Assad is doing in Yarmouk.

Learn and remember that despite the apparent animosity between Israel and Iran they are both undemocratic counterrevolutionary capitalist theocratic regimes.  Pragmatically and strategically they are united with Putin, Trump and Assad in their opposition to the resurgent Arab National Revolution going permanent as it runs up against the limitations of imperialism/capitalism and seeks a socialist solution. We call on the international working class to rise to the defense of the Palestinian people, of the Syrian people and the working masses of the Middle East.

Victory to Palestine! Long live the Syrian revolution!

U.S./NATO and Russian/Chinese imperialists out of the Middle East now!

Down with the proxy regimes that divide and rule their masses!

For non-sectarian unity of all popular Arab, Iranian and Kurdish forces for national self-determination!

For an international communist movement that can intervene militarily for the Permanent Revolution throughout the Middle East!

For a Socialist Federation of the Middle East!

Communist Workers Group (USA)  http://www.cwgusa.org/?p=2115

Class Struggle, 124, Autumn (March-May) 2018

   Class Struggle 124 Autumn 2018 by davebrownz on Scribd

Nous ne somme pas Charlie Hebdo!

Charlie Hebdo Rally unites  hypocrites and Zionist butchers Netanyahu with  social imperialist Hollande, with Palestinian capo Abbas

Most of the Left publications we have seen identify the violent attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo as an attack on the sacrosanct free press. We do not. All historical evidence says the “Free Press” is a fiction in class society.  CLASS WAR and the Liaison Committee of Communists see this as a reactionary attack on what the perpetrators say is blasphemy.  Far from being  a “left” publication, it is a liberal after birth of  the 1968 events;  Charlie Hebdo’s satirical viewpoint today is decidedly bourgeois and in as bad taste as the term bourgeois connotes in France.

Revolutionary workers and socialists oppose censorship.   Bourgeois laws that impose censorship are always directed against the publications of and speakers for the working class, sooner or later, and usually sooner.  We see tremendous hypocrisy both in calls for censorship from the Wahhabi inspired right, presumably the backers of the assailants in Paris, and from the parallel calls by French and western liberalism who routinely confuse freedom for the bourgeois press with freedom of speech. 

First and foremost these attacks must be put in the context of the “war on terror,” which is really an attempt by U.S./EU imperialism to contain the Arab National Revolution. To win the ideological and propaganda aspect of this war the ruling-class-owned “free press” reduces the class war to a “clash of civilizations” between the ‘barbarian’ hordes and the ‘enlightened and democratic’ west. The ‘free press’ wants to hide from you the fact that the war is a consequence and a cost of doing business in the region, because the subjective factor, the anti-imperialist aspirations of the masses, challenges the  economic interests of  declining U.S. imperialism and their comprador henchmen for control of  states and aspirant states sitting atop the oil and on the geo-strategic pathways for the delivery of that oil.

We denounce individual terrorism as it is not a legitimate tactic of the revolution (democratic or proletarian).  Individual terrorism, even for the most salutatory motives, permits propaganda victories for and repression by the enemy social class. We are for the effective action of the masses to wage decisive warfare against the ruling class oppressors and imperialist exploiters.  The Charlie Hebdo event was a terror attack and does not correspond politically to any small unit action by any power of the working class. It does not advance the revolution; it pushes the masses already trapped by Social Democracy and the Stalinists’ forms of social chauvinism further to the right.   

Some youth mistake the terror attacks of religious zealots for defense of Islam and are drawn, by the vacuum of leadership in the revolution, to jihad.  Every Islamic warlord who wants to disguise his bourgeois ambitions to become an oil magnate as a caliph who exploits the weakness of the revolutionary leadership by  calling upon oppressed and unemployed young Muslim workers around the world to join the jihad against the 'West'.  Their military operations and terror attacks are then characterized by the corporate bourgeois media as “asymmetric warfare” initiated by the Sunni Fellahin and not as a response to the armed-to-the-teeth imperialists’ centuries-long history of brutal subjugation.

Let there be no mistake, CLASS WAR takes the side of the Arab revolution.  But the forces of the religious right in the Arabic speaking world are not a part of it. They are the internal enemies of the revolution and are either past or future partners with the imperialist masters.  What future could an ISIS or any Boko Harram regime hope to have while embracing the market and private property, as matters of religion and culture, without the sponsorship of some imperialist master?  Each of these movements aspires to rule after the fashion of the Saudi monarchy, any of their professed republicanism not withstanding and even immaterial.

The revolution stands for the greatest religious freedom and this immediately puts revolutionaries in collision with all theocrats, each of whom seek a monolithic religious state and in this their enmity towards Iran and/or Israel is a fake.  Only the greatest religious freedom can permit the organization of inter-communal militias to guarantee the safety of each and every community.  The workers, as the revolutionary class, have the responsibility to organize these militias.

Right now Syria is the front line of revolutionary struggle; the working class position is for the defeat of the Assad dictatorship. Stalinism, in the form of the Syrian Communist Party and the neo-Stalinist sects (Marcyites, Castroists, etc.,) has played a reactionary role in Syria; consequent of their stagist theory of revolution, which finds progressive agency in the national bourgeoisie of semi-colonies.  When the spark of the Arab Spring ignited the Syrian masses the neo-Stalinists ignored the butchery of the Assad regime, which they cast as progressive, and placed it in a “progressive” bloc which they have conjured out of the Russia-China alliance.    

Alongside these fakers to leadership, the faux Trotskyists (ICL, IBT, Socialist Fight, Revolutionary Tendency, etc.) see the hand of the CIA behind every anti-Assad action and so ignore, denounce or oppose the legitimate uprisings of the masses that took form in the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC.). These LCCs  struggle to maintain independence from imperialism while battling the Assad regime, the jihadists and now ISIS.    

Now Washington is cozying up to Assad in its tack toward returning Iran to the pro-U.S. imperialist fold.   The U.S. no longer objects to Iran’s building of nuclear facilities in areas under Assad’s control.  And we hear none of the alarm we are accustomed to whenever the Geiger counter ticks in the region giving excuses for  Israel to launch first strikes. Instead, Zionism is given a green light to attack anti-Assad rebels in Syria, expand settlements in East Jerusalem and welcomed as a victim in the anti-Semitic attacks that followed the Charlie Hebdo bombing.

We denounce the French regime and its entire response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. The Hollande regime is social-imperialist in a way that is as brazen as any we have seen in the century since Social Democrats supported their bourgeoisie at the outbreak of WW I.  We condemn the CP for being errand boys for Hollande and for supporting every imperialist attack going back to the days of the Algerian independence struggle. 

France has played a nationalist propaganda card in support of the U.S.-led war no. 3 in Iraq, both by manipulating the mass revulsion against the political assassinations at Charlie Hebdo, the real attack on free speech of the Islamist right, and by redoubling its commitment to the U.S. war, sending the aircraft carrier and battle group Charles De Gaulle to join the U.S.-led air campaign.

Official France, of the bourgeoisie, has allowed itself to be viewed as an ally of Israel, which it is, a police force in Mali, Chad and the Central African Republic and the U.S.A.’s no. 1 client for threats, bombing and logistical support against the Libyan revolution.   

We call for a “Lets go home” movement amongst the French troops and political strikes against Obama and Hollande’s wars. Revolutionary workers in the imperialist centers of the U.S., France, and the U.K. must take a defeatist position against their own bourgeoisie and advocate for their labor organizations to form up international workers brigades to support the Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi revolutionaries that build the inter-communal fight against imperialism, Assad and ISIS.

France has deployed 120,000 troops to augment its police in defense of Jewish institutions.  France with 500,000 plus Jewish citizens has the largest concentration in Europe, but we have no confidence that this deployment will prevent real anti-Semitic attacks.   Similarly we don’t see the armed bodies of the bourgeois state protecting France’s Muslim population in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, the police particularly suffer from the same racist reactionary mindset as their brothers in blue in the U.S.A. and are anti-Muslim,  anti-immigrant, anti-Roma and not incidentally anti-Semitic and belong to a variety of reactionary groups from Le Pen’s National Front to the Croix de Feu and latter day neo-fascist groupings. 

We distinguish between real anti-Semitism and self defense by Palestinians and their supporters who stand against attacks by Zionists on the streets, as has happened numerous times over the summer of 2014, when tens of thousands in France protested Israel’s “Mowing the lawn” war on Gaza. The police, in all capitalist countries, are the guarantors of the availability of the option for authoritarian rule.  The nominal champions of democracy, the Social Democrats, have as usual enabled the state forces of repression to expand their budgets and operations and this can only be bad for the working class and its manifestations.  

France is right at the center of the capitalist crisis in Europe.  The World Bank has just announced their 2015 forecast for the world capitalist economy and it is flat at 3% growth. The world population is expected to grow 3% and this renders the “growth” fictional.   But in France there is no forecast for 3% or even a larger fraction of 1% growth, while France almost as much as Germany is the holder of the bad debts of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece.  So the bourgeois regime can be expected to attempt to take more austerity out of the life and flesh of the French workers and anti-Muslim hysteria will serve that purpose and has even begun to do so now.

Minority religious communities need to be defended and we can only entrust this task to the working class.  The way to put an end to rightist violence against Muslims and Jews in France is for militant workers, their organizations and inter-communal defense guards to smash the fascists on the street, putting no faith in the troopers of the state.   Unlike the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), and not them alone, we declare the plain truth that cops are not workers but the gunslingers of capital. Their only relationship to the means of production is their role as strikebreakers.

In the U.S.A. we are calling for the expulsion of the Police Benevolent Associations from all labor movement bodies and for the formation of workers tribunals and militia exactly to begin suppression of racist violence, racist police murders, and for community prosecution of racist murderers.  In this way black, brown and immigrant communities will be defended by the working class as a whole.  Naturally this puts the LCC in collision with identity politics which we see as ultimate props under bourgeois property relations.  Since each identity politics denies or subordinates the class question to their utopian project, be it feminist, nationalist, or other separatist tendencies, each of which would leave the oppressor capitalist class fundamentally unmolested in the commanding heights of the reproduction of their social order.

Liaison Committee of Communists 

30 January 2015

Notes:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/01/18/french-hate-speech-laws-are-less-simplistic-than-you-think/

The specific wording of French law forbids “insult,” “defamation,” or “provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence”…“toward a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race, or a determined religion.”

 French citizens are perfectly free to challenge or blaspheme religious ideas, symbols, practices, and even leaders. Obnoxious, insulting, highly offensive speech is protected speech. Charlie Hebdo has been sued not only for its depictions of Muhammad, but also for caricatures of the pope. In fact, Catholic groups have sued it for anti-religious speech more often than Muslim ones. Charlie Hebdo prevailed in all of these cases, except for one (which was initiated by the Catholics).  

USA: Lessons of the ZIM picket in Oakland

   Class War Supplement Lessons of ZIM Picket

From Palestine to Ferguson

 

Conjunctural Thesis on the Class Struggle

1) The brutal bombardment of Gaza by the illegitimate colonial-settler state of Israel has been authorized by U.S. imperialism and in particular by the Democratic Party leadership in order to prevent the Palestinian masses from launching the next intifada. Such an uprising is both the logical and a pragmatic step by the Arab masses toward uniting the workers and oppressed across MENA in struggle. Inevitably the struggle to accomplish the unfinished tasks of the national democratic Arab revolution come up against the restraints of the imperialist order and the emerging proxy war that traps the toiling masses between the dominant USA/EU imperialist bloc and the emergent China/Russia bloc. The Arab Spring, the Syrian revolution, the spread of the counterrevolutionary ISIL across Syria and Iraq and the massive mobilizations today in Pakistan are products of the unresolved contradictions of imperialist domination of the Near East. 

The US is facing defeats on all fronts abroad because of the unpopularity of these failed adventures in the military occupation and oppression of the masses abroad to solve the US crisis of overproduction. This proves that imperialism cannot project the class war with impunity abroad without exacerbating the class contradiction at home.The militarisation of US imperialism is now being used to subdue its domestic population. The police in Ferguson are outfitted with army surplus gear and its high command is trained in Israel. Zionist Israel is the child of its imperialist master and its existential crisis foreshadows that of its master. The defeat of Israel is political, as its democracy is run by the military and war resisters are thrown in jail. Its legitimacy as a capitalist democracy is blown apart with the bodies of the children of Gaza. It is no accident that the global refrain “we are all Palestinians” is now one of the chants of the mass protests in Ferguson. Just as the Palestinians refuse to negotiate their submission to a colonial settler state, the black working class masses in the US are not prepared to submit to curfews and executions.

2) Long ago pacifist leader Martin Luther King observed that the USA could not maintain a militarist foreign policy without that same violence coming home and exploding in the cities of the USA. Today the unresolved and unfinished tasks of the American democratic revolution are exploding in Ferguson and the internationalist connection is not lost on the youth, on the African-American community, on the Palestine solidarity movement and even on foreign governments (even the brutal Egyptian dictatorship weighs in against the American racist brutality-obviously to cover for its own murderous suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood.) We see the international economic crisis exploding in brutal police repression of marginalized and disenfranchised communities of black and brown people across the United States. The Malcolm X grass roots movement has taken the lead in cataloging and popularizing the fact that every 28 hours American Police kill a black or brown person somewhere in the “home of the free”! This level of special oppression is required by the capitalists to keep the black and brown population in check. Every objective analysis of the conditions of the oppressed in the ghettos, in the devastated urban centers like Detroit, and increasingly in the suburbs where affordable housing can be found, catalog the predictable results of decades of declining educational opportunities, pauperization, de-industrialization, criminalization of entire populations (including immigrant children and families), the profitable growth of the private prison industry populated by victims of the capitalist crisis and fed via an attack on public education and unionization both in public and private industry. 

It is no surprise that Ferguson has exploded!   The ruling class had their warning after Oscar Grant’s murder at the Fruitvale BART Station. The political class and their police skated by after the response to the murder of Trayvon Martin was pacified by time and a Teflon racist criminal justice system tied to the corporate media and acting as an integral tool in the ruling class system of defusing public outrage while slandering the victims and violating their human rights by regularly portraying the victim as a criminal and protecting and excusing the armed thugs of the state. So in the immediate aftermath of the police murder of Michael Brown a police-edited videotape was broadcast on all major corporate media purporting to show Michael Brown robbing a convenience store. The Purpose of this racist hatchet job was as always to taint all possible jury pools in favor of the police lies, thereby making impossible the bringing of murder charges against any cop by any Grand Jury. This is an old police trick dating from before the electronic age.

After the Occupy Movement of 2011/2012 and the response to Trayvon Martin in 2013 we witnessed the enhanced proliferation of military hardware, moving from the stockpiles of Iraq to the inner cities in the USA. This is nothing less than a Bonapartist preparation to suppress the righteous uprisings of the masses and we watch them spread from Fallujah to Aleppo, to Gaza, and now to Ferguson.

3) The ruling class long ago understood that in order to delegitimize the claims to, and righteous demands for social-economic justice and equality for the black and brown community, black and brown leaders would need to be “whitewashed” and turned into their imperialist puppets and tools. The “Post Racial” America had to be declared and feted just a little more quickly than the “Post Misogynist” America in order to maintain the status quo in the face of what was about to unfold in the economic realm. For ruling class media, political elites and even among left and “culturalist” academics the “class question” was put to rest as the “End of History” was feted in 1989. Yet with the black and brown population still oppressed and drowning at the bottom end of the economy and with economic collapse on the not so “distant” horizon (as the “irrational exuberance” and reified Ayn Randism was collapsed by the concrete reality of the crisis of overproduction of capital and the implications of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.) A heavy hand would be required by imperialism both at home and abroad to smash the uprisings of the workers and oppressed. The capitalist class saw the writing on the wall.   Their most astute observers knew economic crisis would quickly deflate the speculative party and Obama was elevated mid stream over Hillary. Post Racialism became the order of the day! And today in “post racial” America the class contradictions are exploding in what look like revolution and counter-revolution in the “show me” state! We remember Dred Scott! We remember John Brown! We have no illusions in the fake post racial America. We know it is a construction of the ruling class and another one of their myriad tools of pacification.

4) The ruling class has known for decades the day of the black President would be necessary. The black “true patriot” (imperialist Colin Powell) and “black conservative justice” (misogynist Clarence Thomas) were elevated in the post- 60’s backlash period both as a counter to the legacy of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and the anti-imperialism of the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the various “movement” and working class anti-imperialists. Clarence Thomas was elevated to their top court to further denigrate and disempower the women’s liberation movement (and in particular to attack it where it overlapped with the working class and Black movements). But the elevation of model conservative black politicians to positions of power did not change the actual material conditions. The Clinton administration brought about the “end of welfare as we know it” and the brutal attack on the condition of poor and black and brown women with the odious (and sometimes even fatal) requirements of the “welfare to work” programs. Millions of black and brown men were relegated to prison labor for pennies an hour, increasingly for private prison-industrial complexes, one of this depression’s few growth industries. Meanwhile black and brown women were chased off welfare into poverty and menial work in order to qualify for the minimally available social assistance.   All the while, the class of model ’Negroes’, those trained to talk standard corporate dialect and endorse and abide the parameters of the capitalist rule, those referred to by pre-eminent black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois as the Black Bourgeoisie, were prepared and elevated to catch the flack and defuse the situation when the inevitable fightback hit the streets.

5) This layer contains the most commercial spokespersons, the most renowned moralists, as well as countless preachers, poverty-agency operatives and hack politicians who know how to ride a wave. Today they are tasked with defusing Ferguson. At the executive level arch-hypocrite Obama says we will go to any lengths to bring to justice anyone who kills Americans, yet the Ferguson police department escorted Michael Brown’s murderer out of town to a safe undisclosed hideout. We watch what looks like an occupying army standing in formation with guns aimed at masses of unarmed civilians, many with arms in the air. No doubt ‘whitewashed’ black commentators will accuse some outside agitators of using them as human shields while they created mayhem!   The governor stepped in and sent the state police with a black chief spokesperson, but his credibility faded quickly…..then the National Guard was sent in but they were not tasked with protecting the people, but only with protecting the police command headquarters.   We call upon all worker militants on the scene to fraternize with the National Guard enlisted ranks to convince them not to follow any orders to commit state violence and to revolt should they be given. Back to the barracks and home!

Then the FBI showed up with all the authority of the Obama White House, but contrary to all logic the fact of 6 bullet wounds, two to the head, has not resulted in the immediate arrest of the murdering cop. So the FBI stands around with no real role other than to be the token serious Federal interest in the case, and the protests just get bigger naturally enough. So now Attorney General Holder is sent in to promise a “thorough and independent investigation.” We would like to know how there can be an independent state investigation of the state. The bench is getting thin and folks can see through it. The bourgeoisie increasingly sees no way out except crushing the suburban uprising. Crushing this uprising before it becomes a St. Louis uprising or even the Mississippi River uprising.   Even the black President cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again. So the “Post Racial” era comes to an end. We knew it had never been initiated, that there were clues along the way (every 28 hours!) but now the brave youth of Ferguson have stood up and say NO MORE! The Communist Workers Group stands with them!

6) While it is clear to revolutionary Marxism that the daily slaughter of workers and oppressed is the consequence and cost of decaying capitalism, that the systemic problem is not the fault of any one individual or group of individuals who can be identified and replaced, and that the open defenders of this decaying class system are little more than puppets acting with limited independence from their puppet masters to enforce the right of the 0.1% to own and control the wealth of the planet, there are layers of enforcers among the communities of the oppressed and working classes that are more insidious than the likes of Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama and Eric Holder.   There are those who evoke Martin Luther King and tell us to back down and turn the other cheek. But we put our arms in the air and they shoot at us. What do you expect? We have black state police officers who admonish the youth for provoking violence with looting and Molotov cocktails, conveniently forgetting that only a week ago “Big Mike” was shot down, unarmed with his arms in the air! The political class, the moralists, the pacifists, all want to gather you inside the church and get you back off the street and back into the bourgeois political process in order to make good the deal with Hillary that she would be next in 2016, under the threat of an even worse Republican boogey man. 

Among this layer of operatives, moralists and pacifists are the very “socialists” who help to maintain the rule of the capitalist class by elevating the capitalist Democratic Party to the level of the essential and only pragmatic solution and road forward and away from reaction in every election cycle. The Communist Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, through and alongside the Trade Union bureaucracies, construct the American popular front in which the political independence of the working class and oppressed is subordinated to imperialism with a promise of a seat at the table. Thus we see the International Socialist Organization calling upon all workers in their orbit to follow the Reverend Al Sharpton and the New York Labor bureaucracy in a “We Will Not Go Back March” exactly to canalize and dam up worker frustration with murderous police tactics. Irrespective of the nominal intentions of Messrs. “Socialists”, Sharpton and the bureaucrats are stone Democrats and identify their interests with bourgeois class rule. Where workers live in the lower-rent suburbs the “seat at the table” is in the last row of the waiting room at the unemployment office!

7) The leaderships that hide the workers’ historic program for socialism from the masses do the work of the ruling class. What the uprising in Ferguson shows us is that decaying capitalist imperialism will have to take up arms against the oppressed not only in Fallujah, Rio de Janeiro, Gaza, Aleppo and Donetsk, but that not even the USA can resolve the crisis at home without unleashing class war. The leaders of the workers movement who talk socialism and workers power and Black Nationalism and women’s liberation on Sunday and on Holidays, on the morrow tell you not to organize your fighting workers/labor party, not to organize your own community assemblies, not to organize your own collective self-defense, and not to organize class struggle caucuses to revive your unions! No, they tell you to elect a new crop of ‘white washed’ progressive Democrats. Take Seattle, Washington where fake socialist Kshama Sawant tells workers that the police are workers too and endorses the new police chief as a progressive! Take Richmond, California where fake socialist mayoral candidate Mike Parker withdraws from the campaign, telling workers they have no need for political independence and should vote for the capitalist Democratic “progressive” candidate Tom Butt. There are already many preachers out on the street trying to contain the masses and bring them back to the fold, but that system is broken. Occupy may have withered away from misleadership, but the contradiction of decaying capitalism drives the masses into the streets out of sheer necessity.

8) The solution that is missing is the coalescence of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic revolutionary workers’ party that charts a course for independent working class political action, which forms up the popular democracy in every workplace, community and school and which will develop and assert the workers’ historic program through mobilizations, strikes, occupations, and direct challenges for power, as the power of the capitalists to rule effectively becomes increasingly less tenable and more and more dependent on the overt violence of the state.

  

9) So while the world is in flames and the CWG comrades participate in their trade unions and community organizations, they have marched on the Ports of Oakland against the Zionist slaughter, they organize against those in the union who deny workers their independent party, they have mobilized in the anti-fascist and anti-Klan actions, they have stood with the workers and oppressed of Brazil, Korea, the Ukraine, Syria and Egypt as they have had to rise up against the imperialists over the last year. And again today in the USA we take our program of political independence and working class labor-black-brown self defense to the beleaguered and oppressed communities who daily suffer the violence of the state. We say there can be no end to police brutality under capitalism. Thus we oppose the advocacy of civilian police review boards; they are not a solution. When, in the 1960’s, these review boards were demanded by the Black Panther Party and SDS, this represented for them a break to the left away from liberalism, although not a qualitative one as is usual with the ultra-left. Today, after the experience the working class had with such “independent” review boards such as John Lindsay’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the raising of this demand by the Freedom Socialist Party, the Chicago Socialist Campaign, and Sawant’s Socialist Alternative, amount to a sop to liberalism and an assurance to the bourgeoisie of the utterly pacifist intentions of these groupings. The bourgeois state killers in blue cannot be made accountable to any other class but the capitalists. To think otherwise is to invite bloodshed on our side of the class line, until pacifist illusions can no longer be held.

We oppose the police unions being considered part of the labor movement; police are not workers and we do not defend them or welcome them as any part of the solution. We explain the police “protect and serve” big capital at your expense. They do not arrest Chevron for poisoning your air, they do not arrest BP for spoiling the Gulf and killing workers, they do not arrest the fossil fuel industry or the bankers who are poisoning the planet and they certainly do not arrest their own for killing you! In fact to end the rule of the capitalist class, the police and national security state must be arrested and only the mobilized masses of the workers and oppressed can do that.

Drop the charges against arrested protestors! We know who the real criminals are! 

300 dead black and brown workers a year and no cops arrested and punished. This capitalist system has no intention of seeking justice. We do demand the arrest of killer cops, However this is a transitional demand, because only popular tribunals of the workers and oppressed which organize their own defense guards can “Jail Killer Cops” and bring justice to the workers and oppressed.   

No faith in the bosses’ courts! Build organizations of labor and the oppressed to enforce justice!

08/20/2014

Communist Workers Group/USA.