Portland

Socialist Alternative Witchhunts Reds

On our subscription drive trip to Portland State University this year, our comrades were busy discussing the revolutionary Marxist political program advanced in Workers Vanguard with interested students when a group of people approached our literature table and launched into a hysterical screaming fit. Foaming with rage at our opposition to reactionary “age of consent” laws and our forthright defense of NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) against state repression, they slanderously raved about predator “pedophiles” and “child rape.”

Were these Christian fundamentalist yahoos? No, in fact they were supporters of Socialist Alternative (SAlt), a reformist organization most recently known as the best builder of the “movement” for imperialist running dog Bernie Sanders. In line with its promotion of capitalist politicians, SAlt deeply imbibes the perverse morality of the bourgeois rulers’ anti-sex witchhunt. At our table in Portland, they sought to wield family-values demagogy to try to silence the reds and drive us off campus.

When the gathering crowd of students showed no signs of taking up pitchforks against us—instead, several approached us to buy our literature and ask thoughtful questions—one of SAlt’s cohorts called the cops in a failed attempt to have us arrested! That these purported socialists would appeal to the racist strikebreaking cops to silence their opponents in the workers movement is a grotesque measure of SAlt’s political bankruptcy. But it is entirely in keeping with their profoundly anti-Marxist position that cops are “workers in uniform” who should be welcomed into the unions.

Helping lead SAlt’s Moral Majority squad in Portland was one Justin Norton-Kertson, who is seemingly no stranger to staging such provocations. In May 2015, Norton-Kertson reportedly assaulted a supporter of Class Struggle Workers-Portland (affiliated with the Internationalist Group) who had the temerity to criticize SAlt at a public meeting. As recounted in an “Open Letter to Socialist Alternative and 15 Now PDX” by Class Struggle Workers-Portland (21 May 2015), “Justin Norton-Kertson, the main spokesman for 15 Now PDX and a supporter of Socialist Alternative, physically attacked one of our comrades” and “proceeded to threaten further physical violence, repeatedly threatened to call the police, and repeatedly made vile sexist remarks to female trade unionists who objected to his aggression, threats and torrent of abuse.”

SAlt has a long history of prostration before the class rule of the bourgeoisie, the state that defends it and the revolting morality that is used to ideologically preserve it. In contrast, as genuine Marxists, our purpose is to forge a revolutionary workers party that serves as a tribune of the people, able to react, as Lenin explained in What Is To Be Done?, “to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.” Groups like NAMBLA who are slandered, framed up and witchhunted by the capitalist state must be defended! Only a party that actively champions the rights of all the oppressed can lead the struggle for proletarian socialist revolution.