“Class Struggle to Free Mumia!”

We print below the speech by a Partisan Defense Committee spokesman at a May 17 protest to free Mumia Abu-Jamal outside the U.S. consulate in Toronto, called by the May 17th Committee to Free Mumia. The PDC issued its own mobilizing call, “For Class-Struggle Defense to Free Mumia Now!” and brought out a contingent of 24 people, at least a third of the demonstration.

We have long insisted on the need to mobilize labour’s power to fight for Mumia’s freedom, based on the massive evidence of his innocence. At the rally, both a May 17th Committee spokesman and a speaker for Socialist Action (SA) read out statements calling for a new trial for Mumia—a bankrupt program of relying on the capitalist courts for “justice.” SA even flogged a pamphlet showcasing Mumia’s former attorney Leonard Weinglass, who refused to present the evidence of Mumia’s innocence—centrally the confession of Arnold Beverly—and was fired by Mumia six years ago.

One of the components of the May 17th Committee was the Bolshevik Tendency (BT), neither of whose two speakers uttered a word against the reformists’ “new trial” call that has so undermined mobilizations for Mumia’s defense. Instead, the BT reserves its polemical fire for the PDC, accusing us of “sectarianism” in a May 27 website posting because we declined to add our name to their demonstration call. BT et al. insisted that a condition for endorsing this event was endorsement of a lowest-common-denominator “statement” which, reflecting the BT’s longstanding indifference to the fight for black freedom, could not even choke out that Mumia was a former Black Panther and a supporter of the MOVE organization. Their purpose in this is to pursue unity with the liberals and reformists who preach reliance on the bourgeois state, and the BT’s slanders against us are cut of the same cloth. For more details on this score, see “The BT and the Fight to Free Mumia” (Workers Vanguard No. 876, 15 September 2006).

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I’m Miriam from the PDC. We’re fighting for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Because he was a Black Panther, and because he was a supporter of the MOVE organization, and because he was an outspoken opponent of racist oppression, he was targeted by the racist ruling class. Mumia is an innocent man. We’d better put that right up front. His is a voice of defiant opposition to the oppression of black people, and the ruling class wants him silenced.

What will it take to free him? It will take the organized power of the labour movement and its allies to create the kind of pressure that will impact on the courts and win him freedom. The people that run this society, that create the wealth—the multiracial working class—has to be mobilized for Mumia.

This understanding has guided the Partisan Defense Committee since our inception, and since 1987 as well when we were asked by the MOVE organization to take up Mumia’s case. And it guides us in the rallies that we’ve initiated in the recent period here and in the U.S., and in Britain and in Germany. We’re proud of this struggle to free Mumia, we say “class struggle to free Mumia!”, and we stress as well that there can be no justice in the capitalist courts. No justice!

In August 1995 Mumia won a stay of execution on the basis of worldwide protests, and the labour movement was very centrally involved in many of them. From 1995 to 1999, much new evidence poured out, further blowing the state’s frame-up to bits. This evidence was rejected. Meanwhile, the reformist left groups—in Canada, the Socialist Action group and the previous speaker from the I.S. [International Socialists]—started to call for a “new trial” for Mumia. Instead of mobilizing to free this innocent victim of a racist frame-up, they mobilized on the basis that he could get a new and fair trial from the same courts that put him on death row in the first place. But they’re wrong!

There are others, for instance the Bolshevik Tendency, who give these groups a left cover. They treat the call for a “new trial” as just another tactic among the “friends of Mumia.” But they’re wrong too. It amounts to pushing faith in the capitalist state. It’s the program that demobilized those masses who lined the streets ten and twelve years ago. We have to turn that around.

There is a mountain of evidence that shows Mumia’s innocence. And part of that evidence is the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly, who said he killed the cop, not Mumia. But this confession was rejected by the racist judges, because for them a court of law is no place for evidence of innocence for this fighter for the oppressed, the voice of the voiceless.

We of course favour all legal proceedings for Mumia, but any illusions in these courts are simply deadly. The capitalist state and its courts are organs of repression against workers and all the oppressed, and this is true in Canada as much as it is in the U.S. The mass movement for Mumia must be revived on the basis that his frame-up conviction and his death sentence were political. The working class has every interest in fighting to block his execution, an outcome which would further bolster the machinery of state violence against the working class.

The PDC is a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Trotskyist League. Our fight for Mumia is inseparable from building a revolutionary workers party—a party that will champion the interests of all the exploited and oppressed and lead the working class in socialist revolution to bring down this capitalist system. So join me now in chanting: Mumia, Mumia must be free! Abolish the racist death penalty!