Spartacist Speaker at Melbourne Rally For Mumia

“For a Workers Republic of Australia, Part of a Socialist Asia!”

Break with Laborism! Build a Revolutionary Workers Party!

We reprint below, edited for publication, the speech given by Spartacist League speaker Margaret Rodda at the 17 May rally for Mumia in Melbourne.

The Spartacist League, Australian section of the International Communist League demands the immediate release of Mumia Abu-Jamal. We fight to win the international working class to making the cause of Mumia their own. We place all our faith in the working class and none whatsoever in the capitalist state.

It’s not surprising that during this campaign Mumia’s case has resonated amongst wide layers, from within the multiracial trade-union movement, to the besieged Aboriginal people for whom being picked up by the police can mean bloody terror if not death. From the incarceration of refugees, to the whitewash acquittal of the cop who killed Mulrunji and the ongoing state persecution of Palm Islander, Lex Wotton, workers and the oppressed face a system of capitalist injustice.

Highlighting the vicious racism endemic to capitalism is the reactionary military and police takeover of Aboriginal lands in the Northern Territory—a naked land grab, now prosecuted by the Rudd federal ALP government. It has meant more Aborigines in prison and more deaths in custody. We oppose the quarantining of welfare payments and its extension to the broader population and demand cops and military get out of Aboriginal communities! Just as we must fight to defend trade unionists in the crosshairs of anti-union laws, Aboriginal people, refugees, and those targeted under draconian anti-terror laws must not be left to fight alone! It is necessary to mobilise the organised workers movement in a class-struggle fight against racist anti-working-class capitalist reaction.

It is particularly important to fight for Mumia’s freedom here in Australia given the reactionary U.S./Australia alliance, today staunchly upheld by the Rudd Labor government. This alliance was forged in the bloody massacre of millions of workers and peasants from Korea to Indonesia to Vietnam. It incorporates the U.S. spy bases that target workers and peasants from Iraq to China and North Korea for imperialist military intervention. The struggle for Mumia’s freedom is an opportunity to strike a blow against the American capitalist rulers who want Mumia silenced, to strike a blow against jackal Australian imperialism which plunders and exploits millions from Fiji to the Indonesian archipelago and beyond. We say: all Australian cops/troops out of the Solomons and East Timor! U.S., Australia, all imperialist troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now! U.S. bases out now! Hands off Iran!

We oppose the death penalty on principle. We do not accord the state the right to decide who lives and who dies. Our opposition to the death penalty extends to the deformed workers states—China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. As Trotskyists, we know full well that the Chinese bureaucracy, for example, metes out repression to all those it views as opponents, including socialist militants. Nevertheless, despite their deformations, these workers states with their collectivised property forms continue to represent qualitative gains for the working class internationally.

Today as the Labor Party joins the imperialist outcry over Tibet, the bourgeois Greens and sundry reformist groups such as the Democratic Socialist Perspective, Solidarity and Socialist Alternative, champion the reactionary “Free Tibet” movement, the spearhead for capitalist counterrevolution in China. The extension of the Chinese Revolution to Tibet ended the rule of the pro-slavery “Lamaocracy” and the status of women as beasts of burden. It opened the road to social progress. We stand for the unconditional military defence of the Chinese deformed workers state against capitalist counterrevolution and imperialist intervention. Working people of China must fight for a proletarian political revolution, to replace the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy with the rule of workers, soldiers and peasants councils.

In fighting for Mumia’s freedom, we seek to rekindle the traditions of internationalism amongst the working class. Genuine proletarian internationalism is counterposed to the strategy of reformism, which at bottom seeks to pressure the capitalist state to be kinder and gentler. This is at best a pipedream. Under capitalism, the state—consisting at its core of the cops, military, courts and prisons—exists to maintain the rule and profits of the capitalist exploiters. It can’t be pressured to serve our interests—it must be smashed through socialist revolution and replaced with a workers state.

We look to the power of the multiethnic working class. The seeds of Mumia’s only hope for freedom are represented in the support from trade unions internationally, including some here today, and the thousands of union brothers and sisters these unions represent. Their power lies in the fact that they can bring the capitalist wheels of profit to a halt. But a key obstacle to mobilising the working class in Australia for Mumia’s freedom, and in its own interests, is the politics of Laborism, which preaches nationalism and reliance on the capitalist state. Workers need a leadership that, in breaking from Laborism, fights for the independence of the working class from the bosses’ state and the political parties that uphold the capitalist system, not one that channels workers anger back into the Labor Party, which in power administers capitalist reaction on behalf of the ruling class—as Hawke and Keating did, and Rudd is now doing. Based on this perspective, during last year’s federal elections, we called for no vote to the ALP, a bourgeois workers party, and no vote to the capitalist Greens.

We need a fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions that is prepared to wage strikes instead of cutting deals, that looks to the social power of the proletariat not to the bosses’ arbitration courts, that backs up other strikes instead of bowing to government laws against secondary boycotts. We need a fight in the unions for a leadership that promotes international working-class solidarity instead of pushing poisonous chauvinist protectionism, which divides the working class and ties them to the bosses “at home.” Those that lead such a class-struggle fight in the unions will, of necessity, be linked to a revolutionary workers party.

Our struggle to free Mumia and all class-war prisoners is inseparable from the struggle for workers rule. For this task, workers need a revolutionary internationalist workers party that fights in the interests of the proletariat and against all instances of discrimination—what Lenin called a tribune of the people: that fights against racism, for women’s liberation, for gay rights and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants! The fight to change consciousness is not easy, particularly as political consciousness has been thrown back since counterrevolution in the Soviet Union; but this makes it no less urgent. Only when workers rule will the road be opened to building a classless society where social injustice, along with the exploitation of man by man, is a relic from a distant past. Join us in the fight for a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty!