Spartacist Speaker at Melbourne Rally

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Lex Wotton and All Class-War Prisoners!

Printed below, slightly edited for publication, is a speech by a Spartacist League (SL) supporter to a 10 April Melbourne rally protesting the imprisonment and persecution of black U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. In a blatantly racist, political frame-up, Mumia was sentenced to death in 1982 on false charges of killing a Philadelphia police officer. He has been entombed on death row ever since.

Mumia was first targeted by the police and FBI in his teenage years as a Black Panther Party spokesman and later as a MOVE supporter and award-winning journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless” for his searing exposés of cop brutality and racist oppression. Since his rigged trial at the hands of notorious “hanging judge” Albert Sabo, the courts have consistently refused to hear the mountain of evidence demonstrating Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of another man, Arnold Beverley, to the killing of the police officer. Mumia’s death sentence was overturned in 2001, but the Supreme Court vacated this decision last January, opening the way, once again, for his legal lynching to proceed (see “U.S. Supreme Court of Death Rules Against Mumia Abu-Jamal”, Australasian Spartacist, No. 208, Autumn 2010).

The SL has long championed Mumia’s case, particularly through the Partisan Defence Committee (PDC), a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defence organisation associated with the SL. We stand for pursuing every legal avenue on Mumia’s behalf while putting no faith in the “justice” of the capitalist courts and all faith in the power of the working masses. In the U.S. and internationally we fight to mobilise the social power of the multiracial working class to demand freedom for this innocent man and abolition of the racist U.S. death penalty. We oppose the death penalty on principle and everywhere––for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies. When Mumia faced a death warrant in August 1995, worldwide protests that included trade unions representing hundreds of thousands of workers played a crucial role in staying the executioner’s hand at the time.

The 10 April rally, called by Anarchist Black Cross, the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group and the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP), was built around the demands: “Free All Political Prisoners!”, “Mumia is Innocent! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” and “Abolish the Racist U.S. Death Penalty!” Speakers included individuals from the above groups, as well as the Indigenous Social Justice Association and Radical Women, which are both associated with the FSP. We in the SL attended and spoke at the rally in solidarity with all class-war prisoners and the fight to free Mumia. To this end we carried a PDC placard which called to “Mobilise Union Power to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” and “Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!” However, we did not endorse the demonstration, a key reason being the classless, liberal rally demand to “free all political prisoners,” which draws no distinction between those who are victims of anti-working-class repression, and reactionaries (e.g. fascists) who sometimes also find themselves in capitalist jails. Consistent with this classless demand, the propaganda on the leaflet issued by the rally organisers made no reference to the need for a proletarian-centred struggle to free Mumia or the necessity to fight against the capitalist system as a whole.

In Australia we link the fight for Mumia’s freedom to the just struggles of immigrants, Aborigines and trade unionists against the repressive and deeply racist Australian capitalist state. Highlighting our opposition to racist terror against Aborigines we carried a placard calling for “Cops/military out of NT Aboriginal communities! For a class-struggle fight for Aboriginal rights!” Our speaker denounced the state persecution of imprisoned Palm Island Aboriginal community leader, Lex Wotton who was outrageously sentenced in 2008 to six years prison over the 2004 protest that erupted in response to a coroner’s whitewash of the brutal killing of Aboriginal man, Mulrunji Doomadgee, in the Palm Island police lockup. Linking together the struggles of Mumia, Lex and others we carried a placard “For union action to free Mumia, Lex Wotton and all class-war prisoners!” Against those who promote faith in the capitalist state we carried a sign demanding “No illusions in Royal Commissions—There is no justice in the capitalist courts!” Emphasising our revolutionary program, other placards included: “ALP rules for racist Australian imperialism! Break with Laborism! Build a revolutionary workers party!” and “Down with Racist Australian Capitalism! For Workers Revolution!”

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Mumia Abu-Jamal, “voice of the voiceless,” is not simply on death row because of a few corrupt cops, a racist judge or an unfair judiciary. He was framed and sentenced to die because he represents the spectre of black revolt against a system that’s based on racist oppression. His case, like that of Lex Wotton, like that of Leonard Peltier [American Indian Movement leader who has spent more than thirty years in prison on frame-up murder charges], shows that fighters against oppression and all working people are up against a machine whose purpose is to suppress the working class and oppressed in defence of the power and the profits of the capitalist rulers. The core of this machine consists of the police, the military, the courts and prisons. And at the pinnacle of this systematic legal violence lies the death penalty, legalised murder. In Australia the death penalty has formally been abolished, but the fate of many Aborigines, from John Pat to Mulrunji Doomadgee, attests to the de facto existence of the death penalty in the jails and in the prison cells of White Australia.

This machine has a name and it is called the capitalist state. It has a purpose, and one purpose only. And that is to defend this irrational capitalist profit system, a system that cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. Now some people may tell you that Mumia needs a new or a fairer trial, or that perhaps police need to be subject to community control, or perhaps the government should carry out Royal Commissions to investigate racist police killings. I say beware of that! Those people who tell you that are selling you a bill of goods. And I include groups like the Freedom Socialist Party here in this category. What they are telling people to do is to look to the very state whose purpose is to enforce the subjugation of the working class and oppressed. And let’s be very clear, the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in Australia, did precisely what it was designed to do—whitewash systematic racist police killings.

When the cops break workers’ picket lines, when they bash Indian students protesting against racist murder, when they raid the homes of Muslim people in the middle of the night in the name of the racist “war on terror,” those cops are doing their job! That’s what they’re paid to do! That is, the cops, the courts, the government are all part of the problem.

The solution lies with the working class, whose hands on the levers of production, transportation and communication give them the power to bring this capitalist profit system to a halt. The fact that those profits are derived precisely from the exploitation of the labour power of the working class gives workers an objective interest as well as the social power to do away with capitalism. The 1917 Russian Revolution proved that it can be done. The capitalist state can be overthrown. It can be smashed. In its place the working class can erect their own state, the prerequisite to paving the way toward a socialist society.

Now it’s palpable today that the working class do not have the social consciousness of their power or interest to do this because they are saddled with a Laborite leadership that imbues them with social backwardness, nationalism, reliance on the capitalist state. You only have to look today at the prostration of the union leadership in the face of the ALP government’s attacks against the working class and unions. The same capitalist Rudd government that enforces imperialist occupations from Afghanistan to Iraq to East Timor, carries out the occupation of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and wages war against Muslims, refugees.

To unleash the latent social power of the working class requires breaking the working masses from the politics of the pro-capitalist union tops and Labor Party. It needs the conscious intervention of revolutionary Leninists who go to the working class to point out that their emancipation from the chains of capitalist wage slavery requires a class-struggle fight in defence of all the oppressed. The Spartacist League fights to build the multiracial, internationalist vanguard party necessary to lead the working class to overthrow capitalism, to establish their own class rule. It is only this that can lay the basis for the elimination of the material roots of racist oppression and build an egalitarian socialist society based on a collectivised economy. The fight to free Mumia is the fight for black liberation, is part of the fight for a socialist revolution and the liberation of us all! Free Mumia and all class-war political prisoners! Down with racist Australian capitalism! Thank you.