For proletarian internationalism

Partisan Defence Committee

The following is an edited and abridged version of the remarks by Eibhlin McDonald of the SL/B at the 5 May PDC rally in London.

We think it’s particularly important to campaign for Mumia’s freedom here in Britain given the alliance between the Blair government and the Bush regime. Their combined military might makes the British and US imperialist rulers the most dangerous force for terrorism on the planet. Campaigning for Mumia provides an opportunity to deal a blow against the American ruling class that wants to see Mumia dead, and against British imperialism which plundered the world for centuries before handing over this role to the US.

We place all our faith in the working class and none whatsoever in the capitalist state. In Britain we find a wide resonance for Mumia’s case among the trade union movement—the postal workers union; London Underground RMT and also in Scotland and Belfast. Union-centred mobilisations in Britain for Mumia’s freedom would have an impact in the US. It could also help rebuild the confidence and fighting capacity of the unions to do battle against the viciously anti-working-class Labour government.

There is a mountain of lies about how British parliamentary democracy is (and has been throughout its existence) a beacon of justice throughout the world. For us Marxists, the state is the executive committee of the capitalist class: it’s inherently racist, anti-working-class and cannot be reformed but has to be shattered through workers revolution. And there is no way around capitalist injustice, racism and war other than through workers revolution. The British state doesn’t have the death penalty, but it executes people and expects to get away with it: look at the case of the Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes.

This didn’t begin with the so-called “war on terror”, as can be seen in the incredible number of black deaths in police custody over decades. And what does capitalist “democracy” offer Britain’s Muslims who are among the poorest sections of the working class? One man of Algerian origin who has been on the receiving end of the “war on terror” since December 2001 —including jail without trial, “control orders” and the threat of deportation —aptly said: “I have fewer rights than an animal” (Guardian, 28 March).

There are very strong parallels between Mumia’s frame-up and the normal workings of British imperialist “democracy” for oppressed Catholics in Northern Ireland. Last December our comrades showed our Mumia DVD to trade unionists in Belfast, mainly women, who strongly identified with Mumia. When one trade unionist asked why the mainstream media hadn’t taken up the Beverly confession, a member of the audience answered “because it shows that they knowingly framed an innocent man”. Another woman said it was just like the Guildford Four. When the IRA confessed they did the Guildford bombing, the state ignored this and kept the innocent people in prison. The footage of American Civil Rights protestors being attacked by white racists reminded them of Belfast, not in the 1950s but in 2001, when Catholic parents and children attending the Holy Cross School faced baying mobs of Loyalists. This is part and parcel of Blair’s imperialist “peace” deal, which as we said would necessarily be at the expense of the oppressed Catholics and would not do any good for working-class Protestants either.

Campaigning for Mumia has the potential to rekindle the traditions of internationalism among the working class. Genuine internationalism is counterposed to the strategy of reformists such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Socialist Party and others in the Stop the War Coalition (StWC). To the millions of people who have demonstrated against the Iraq war, the reformists’ strategy is to plead with Tony Blair (or Gordon Brown) to stop acting as “Bush’s poodle”. This demoralises activists and derails their struggle into pressuring for a more “humane” foreign policy for British imperialism. This only adds to the mountain of lies that imperialist “democracy” can be persuaded to end war and pursue a “peaceful” foreign policy.

An example of proletarian revolutionary internationalism was seen in our statement issued last month when British soldiers and sailors were seized by Iranian forces in the Shatt al-Arab waterway. There was a huge chauvinist hue and cry in the British press against Iran. We said that US and British imperialism are the aggressors and they have targeted Iran, a semi-colonial country. The British forces claimed they were intercepted not in Iranian, but in Iraqi territorial waters, according to a line drawn by the British imperialists in the past, though it has never been agreed. We called for defence of Iran, and said that it needs nuclear weapons to defend itself, because having nuclear weapons today is about the only guarantee of sovereignty and we made the obvious point that British troops should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now.

What’s necessary is not a change of foreign policy, but the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism—the system that inevitably means wars and plunder. The history of British imperialism gives the lie to the notion that if only it stood more independently things would be better. Britain dominated the world for centuries, based on vast profits built up out of slavery. This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the legal abolition of the slave trade in the British empire. The commemorations focus heavily on parliamentary abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, in furtherance of the notion that, in the end, parliament ensures that justice is done. In fact British parliamentarians such as William Pitt began to agitate for an end to the slave trade—not slavery itself—because sugar production was declining in the British-dominated West Indies at the time, but French-controlled Saint-Domingue (in what is now Haiti) was booming, it was the richest colony in the world. Pitt’s agitation was primarily motivated by the need to cut off the labour supply to Britain’s French rival. Another factor in ending the transatlantic trade was that new generations of slaves were being born in the American South.

Slavery in Saint-Domingue was abolished through a social revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. Beginning in 1791, he trained an army of former slaves, took on and defeated the very best armies that the French and British empires sent to defeat him. This was inspired by the first American Revolution—the War of Independence—and by the French Revolution. In the British West Indies, the 1831 rebellion in Jamaica was decisive in putting an end to slavery. These rebellions resulted in the legal abolition of slavery in parliament in 1834. The slave owners and the British ruling class were frightened to death by what they had seen: slaves rising up against their masters and taking over society.

For the bicentenary, many reformists are calling for some form of reparations for slavery, or at least for the imperialists (particularly the G8 powers) to end poverty in Africa. The only road to “reparations” for the huge injustices of slavery is by ending the capitalist system that maintains Africa in dire poverty today. It is obscene to appeal to the British ruling class, who ran Africa with untold brutality including long after the abolition of slavery. In the 1950s in Kenya, in response to an uprising of the Kikuyu people, they killed an estimated 100,000 people. Equally obscene are appeals for imperialist intervention in Sudan where in 1898 British General Kitchener massacred 10,000 Sudanese. His army later bemoaned the cost of the bullets used to shoot the wounded as they lay on the ground!

When slavery was abolished it was replaced by the wage slavery of capitalism, to which racism was grafted on. It took a second American Revolution—the Civil War—to end chattel slavery in the US. The Spartacist League/US uses the slogan “Finish the Civil War!” to express our perspective of proletarian revolution and our understanding of the centrality of the black question. Our fight for black liberation through socialist revolution ensured that we took up Mumia’s case and made it known internationally. As sections of the International Communist League, our American section is dedicated to building a multiracial revolutionary workers party to lead the American workers revolution. The Spartacist League/Britain is dedicated to building such a party to lead the fight to overthrow British imperialism.