Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 859	25 November 2005

For Class-Struggle Defense!

We print below the opening remarks by Rachel Wolkenstein of the Partisan Defense Committee at the September 15 New York City rally against government repression, which she chaired.

This rally and others which will follow in Chicago, the Bay Area and Los Angeles were called by the Partisan Defense Committee a couple of months ago. Our purpose: to rally against Lynne Stewart’s conviction and before her sentencing. She faces 30 years’ imprisonment—this would be effectively a life sentence. We rally to show defiance of the one-million-dollar bounty placed on Assata Shakur’s head like a fugitive slave warrant. We rally to mobilize to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty.

Since the September 11 attacks, Bush and the Democrats have used the bodies of those killed in the criminal attack on the World Trade Center as a bloody shirt to launch the so-called war on terror as well as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The reality is that the “war on terror” is nothing but a pretext for a frontal assault on democratic rights and an attempt to invoke “national unity”—the notion that the exploited have the same interests as the exploiters who rule this society. Under this “national unity” umbrella, the capitalist rulers carry out their brutal policies toward black people, the poor, immigrants, and have launched a repressive assault on the working class and leftists.

These rallies could not be more timely. The criminal racist policies of the capitalist state carried out by its two parties, the Democrats and Republicans, have been laid bare in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The class and race divisions in the United States are clear. The devastation and death, which has been inflicted primarily on black and poor people, was not caused by nature. It was manmade, produced by the rulers’ criminal neglect and contempt toward the poor and blacks. The death and destruction there was caused by the operation of the capitalist system. This anarchic, profit-driven system cannot even provide for the safety and welfare of the population. That system has to go!

The same capitalist state which is responsible for the savage occupation of Iraq and the human disaster on the Gulf Coast also attempts to silence, imprison and kill the voice of the voiceless, Mumia Abu-Jamal, radical attorney Lynne Stewart and Assata Shakur. These are fighters who raise their voices, give their lives and energy in opposition to the policies of this racist capitalist system and in defense of the very kinds of people—poor, black, those specially targeted by the state—who have been criminally victimized in the aftermath of Katrina.

My name is Rachel Wolkenstein. I have been counsel for the Partisan Defense Committee since it began in 1974. I was part of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s legal defense team from 1995 through June 1999, in charge of the defense investigation. It was this investigation which led to obtaining Arnold Beverly’s confession that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. In July 1999, I resigned from the legal team, along with Jon Piper, when lead attorney Leonard Weinglass and co-counsel Dan Williams precluded Mumia from putting this evidence of his innocence before the courts.

The Partisan Defense Committee is sponsoring this united-front rally to bring together, in defense of Mumia, Lynne and Assata, speakers and organizations across a spectrum of political beliefs, each raising his own views on these vital cases and how to fight to win. The PDC is based on the principles of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League. We have a Marxist worldview; this is a class society. A handful of capitalists control and reap the wealth of the world for their own benefit, but this wealth is created by the many who labor. We say: Those who labor must rule!

The interests of the capitalist class, including the political parties which represent it, are totally opposed to the interests of the working class and minorities. And in the United States, black oppression is the bedrock of capitalism. Thus, the PDC is partisan, unconditionally, on the side of the working people and the oppressed. We stand for pursuing all legal avenues in defense of the cases and causes that are in the interests of the working people. But we place all our faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatsoever in the justice of the courts.

The capitalist system and its courts cannot be fundamentally reformed. We stand for the independence of the working people from the capitalist state and its parties—Democratic, Republican, Green—regardless of whether the politician is white or black. Class-struggle defense means mobilizing the social power of the working class with its allies to create the type of pressure needed to obtain Mumia’s freedom, overturn Lynne’s conviction and defend Assata from the bounty hunters—a mass movement, centrally based on the independent power of the working class.

The PDC is also non-sectarian. That means we defend any member of the workers movement—workers, leftists, fighters against black oppression—who suffers persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or opinion. These are class-war prisoners. We stand on the old IWW (Wobbly) slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all!”

Since 1974, we have conducted legal and social defense work in accordance with these principles. The PDC cut its teeth organizing international defense campaigns for Latin American leftists in the grip of bloody military dictatorship. We launched fundraising campaigns for striking British miners in the mid 1980s, as well as for the people of the Afghan city of Jalalabad when it was besieged by CIA-backed Islamic reactionaries following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. We have initiated mass labor/ black mobilizations to stop the KKK and Nazis from marching in cities across the country, including the nearly 10,000-strong mobilization in New York City in October 1999.

In Oakland in February 2002, the PDC and the Labor Black League for Social Defense initiated a united-front demonstration centered on the powerful ILWU longshore union in defense of immigrants and against the USA Patriot Act. The PDC, along with the Spartacist League, has filed friends of the court briefs in the Federal Court of Appeals and in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the government’s “enemy combatant” policy in the case of Jose Padilla. This is the government’s attempt to establish its so-called right to disappear people.

Twenty years ago, the PDC revived the tradition of monthly stipends for those in prison for standing up to racist capitalist oppression. Over the years, we have provided financial support to 35 prisoners on three continents. A number were former supporters of the Black Panther Party, notably Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), who was in prison for 27 years for a murder the cops and FBI knew he did not commit. Among the first stipend recipients was Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor of the 1985 bombing of the MOVE commune in Philadelphia by the FBI, the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] and the Philly cops under black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode.

In 1987, MOVE prisoners asked us to take up the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and we threw ourselves into his defense at a time when he was virtually unknown. Beginning in 1989, we held rallies across the country and internationally to mobilize support for Mumia and to fight to abolish the racist death penalty. We have emphasized that this is a political death penalty case which illustrates the racism endemic in this country in its cruelest, most vicious form and lays bare the essence of the capitalist state. We are opposed to the death penalty as a matter of principle. It is not for the state to determine who is to live or to die.

Our work succeeded in getting broader forces to take up Mumia’s case, although most of them generally did this not on the basis of class-struggle defense. Others have been agnostic on Mumia’s innocence, thereby effectively denying that this is a political case. Mumia is an innocent man! He is the victim of a racist political frame-up. There have been illusions sown in the courts by campaigns based on the call for a new trial for Mumia, rather than a call to free Mumia. There is no justice in the capitalist courts! This campaign for a new trial effectively demobilized a whole generation who had come out for Mumia in the hundreds of thousands at the time of his 1995 hearings in the face of the death warrant and into the later 1990s.

The question of defense of Mumia, Lynne and Assata and the overall fight against government repression, the defense of blacks and others throughout the Gulf Coast victimized by the capitalist rulers, the defense of the trade unions—all are dependent on our understanding of the capitalist state and its courts, and that the system as a whole has got to go! The power to defend all intended victims of this racist capitalist state is going to come out of the social power of the working people and its allies. That means labor strikes, mass protests and demonstrations organized around the power of the integrated labor movement in this country and internationally. The speakers here tonight are activists and leaders. And I say that with Lynne here, because that is her main role, not as a defendant or a victim. They are all here to explain, to rally new supporters and, importantly, to debate the way forward, the best way to fight government oppression. Free Mumia! Hands off Lynne Stewart! Hands off Assata Shakur! This rally is one part of that very important struggle.