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	Workers Vanguard No. 874	4 August 2006

At Bay Area Rally for Mumia

Class-Struggle Defense vs. "New Trial" Reformists

On June 9, about 60 people gathered in San Francisco for an event sponsored by the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. The reformist group Socialist Action (SA), which dominates this “Mobilization,” was, again, pushing its touching faith in the capitalist “justice” system. Thus, the slogans on its call for the June 9 event included: “One court decision from execution! One court decision from new trial & freedom!” SA and other reformist outfits have consistently appealed to the mainstream liberals who view Mumia’s conviction as an isolated “miscarriage of justice,” rather than what it is: a conscious racist frame-up of an innocent man. The death penalty hangs over the head of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an articulate spokesman for the oppressed and exploited, a former Black Panther member and a MOVE supporter.

Behind the slogan for a “new trial” stands an entire strategy counterposed to the necessary mobilization of the social power of the working class to fight for Mumia’s freedom now. As we wrote in “For a Class-Struggle Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” (WV No. 872, 9 June):

“The call for freedom for victims of the capitalist frame-up system has historically been a staple of the workers movement: Free Sacco and Vanzetti, Free the Scottsboro Boys, Free Huey Newton, Free Angela Davis. The demand for their freedom expressed the belief that their imprisonment for even an hour was an outrage. Since 1995, the call to free Mumia has been explicitly rejected as the basis for major mobilizations by the reformists of the Workers World Party (WWP), Socialist Action (SA) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), among others.

“At a January 1999 ‘Emergency Leadership Summit Meeting,’ representatives of SA, Solidarity, WWP, the RCP’s Refuse & Resist, International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal and others adopted a strategy and slogans for the April 24 ‘Millions for Mumia’ demonstrations and beyond. Following a debate, the ‘free Mumia’ slogan and opposition to the death penalty were rejected in favor of calling for a new trial.”

Thus, while attending the June 9 rally, the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee took no political responsibility for its explicitly reformist character—i.e., we did not endorse it. Over the objections of SA honcho and Mobilization spokesman Jeff Mackler, a comrade from the PDC (a legal and social defense organization associated with the SL) was able to address this gathering. Powerfully counterposing a program for a class-struggle fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty to SA’s strategy of relying upon the good graces of the bourgeois state, comrade Carla Wilson explained:

“We place all our faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatsoever in the so-called justice of the capitalist courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings for the cases we support, we recognize that the courts, prisons and police exist to maintain, to organize violence and terror, for the rule of one class over others….

“In the summer of 1995, after a death warrant was signed, a powerful movement demanding that his life be saved erupted across the U.S. and around the world. His execution was stayed. But he is still in grave danger. Following this massive movement of millions in his defense, thousands of people were actually demobilized by reformist ‘socialist’ organizers of protests for Mumia—from Workers World Party to Socialist Action to the ISO [International Socialist Organization]. They tailored their appeals to what was acceptable to Democratic Party liberals who fled Mumia’s campaign in droves because they could not stomach that [Arnold] Beverly’s confession exposed the fraud of American ‘justice’ and showed the unity of purpose between the cops, the courts and the capitalist government—the same government responsible for killing Haditha civilians today in Iraq....

“What’s needed is a labor-centered fight, a mobilization of the labor movement and thousands and millions of others in the streets, built on the principle of political independence from the capitalist class enemy and its state. The labor tops’ allegiance to the capitalist system is one of the chief obstacles to this. And it’s important now that we try to mobilize to unleash labor’s power in defense of Mumia and all the oppressed. Millions of voices must once again be heard demanding Mumia’s freedom and the abolition of the death penalty. This is one of the struggles that will help to forge a revolutionary workers party that will fight for socialist revolution to get rid of this racist capitalist state.”

SA’s Mackler felt compelled to respond from the rally platform, and he fully confirmed the programmatic gulf that separates a class-struggle defense policy from that of the reformists:

“If there is a new trial even before a racist criminal justice system, the San Francisco Labor Council will have representatives there because it passed a resolution calling for a new trial and Amnesty International and the European Parliament and the president of the California State Senate and the American Federation of State and County Municipal Workers, the SEIU and the postal workers, they have all called for a new trial along with thousands of organizations and millions of others. Their representatives will be in the courtroom….

“We do not need to denounce anyone like the San Francisco City Council who six months ago passed a resolution for a new trial for Mumia or the National Education Association representing 1.8 million people or the California Labor Federation, 1.8 million.”

Let’s be clear: the difference between us and the likes of SA has nothing to do with “denouncing” other forces that have gone on record in defense of Mumia. As Mackler & Co. are well aware, it was the work of the Partisan Defense Committee and the SL that first brought Mumia’s case to the international workers movement, liberal Democrats, civil rights organizations, death penalty abolitionists and the left, when many refused to come to his defense. Since taking up Mumia’s case in 1987, the SL and PDC have advocated pursuing all possible legal means in Mumia’s case and mobilizing the broadest possible forces on a principled united-front basis. At the same time, we realize that the courts will respond only if the pressure of the organized working class and its allies, organized independently and against the class enemy, is brought to bear.

We denounce the so-called socialists’ abasement before bourgeois public opinion and the damage they have done to the cause of freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal. A lesson can be gained by looking at the case of professional boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, framed up in the mid 1960s on false murder charges because of his advocacy of the right of black armed self-defense. After an international protest campaign, Carter won a new trial. He was convicted anew, the liberals fled his cause and Carter spent another decade in prison. Today, many of the liberals to whom the reformists appealed for Mumia’s defense have fled, while the workers, blacks and youth who were the foot soldiers for Mumia are politically demobilized. Central responsibility for this rests with the strategy of reformists like Workers World and Socialist Action who rejected a class-struggle fight for Mumia, instead organizing activists on the basis that justice could be won from the capitalist courts.

Mackler & Co.: Reformist Demobilizers

The fact that, in a liberal enclave like San Francisco, the June 9 rally drew only 60 people speaks for itself. The reformists’ strategy demobilizes not only protest on the street, but on the legal front as well. Thus, while Mackler recounted much of the evidence that proves Mumia innocent, he deliberately avoided one key piece of that evidence—the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that Beverly and not Mumia shot and killed Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, the crime for which Mumia was framed up and sentenced to death.

Why? As comrade Wilson pointed out in her speech to the June 9 rally, the Beverly confession makes clear that Mumia’s case consists of a conscious, racist, political frame-up of an innocent man. This is an “inconvenient truth” for liberals and their reformist tails. Dave Lindorff—a regular contributor to the radical-liberal CounterPunch—was an early and loud voice trashing the Beverly confession. His book Killing Time (2003) has been lauded by, for example, the ISO. For its part, Socialist Action has totally disappeared the Beverly confession. (For more detail on the Beverly confession and the liberal left’s response, see the new PDC pamphlet, The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent!)

In this same spirit, Mackler & Co. put a gloss on the capitalist courts’ placing Mumia’s case on a “fast track,” when in December the Court of Appeals ruled that Mumia could raise three issues on his appeal. For SA and Mackler: “The worst—but least expected—scenario would be one in which Sabo’s unconstitutional sentencing instructions are upheld, and Mumia faces execution” (Socialist Action, December 2005). Least expected? The harsh fact is that every court to which it has been presented has refused to hear the Beverly evidence, and the Court of Appeals—like every other court in this case—has refused to hear the countless other violations of Mumia’s rights. That is what makes our efforts to bring Mumia’s case to the working class, the left and organizations of the oppressed and youth so urgent at this time.

In the course of such a campaign, we seek “unity in action” while in no way compromising “freedom of criticism.” That means we will join with others to demand Mumia’s freedom and the abolition of the racist death penalty while maintaining our political independence and programmatic integrity. Such a policy differs starkly from groups such as the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (LACFMAJ). At the June 9 rally, LACFMAJ’s speaker Carole Seligman did a credible job of dealing with the Beverly confession and raising the need for labor to take up the fight to free Mumia. However, she avoided any explicit criticism of the SA-led Mobilization’s perspective. Thus, the LACFMAJ essentially provided a “left” cover for the reformists.

As against such political waffling, James P. Cannon, the first secretary of the International Labor Defense and founder of American Trotskyism, excoriated the reformists of his time and their “policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy,” a policy that “seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle” (“Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” Labor Defender, January 1927; reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator [1958]). It is to this revolutionary tradition that we look when pursuing the fight to free Mumia now and to abolish the racist death penalty!