Workers Vanguard No. 856
14 October 2005
Workers Vanguard No. 856 |
14 October 2005 |
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The Millions More March
"Progressive" Union Bureaucrats and Farrakhan: A Cynical Lash-Up
The murderous abandonment of black New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina graphically displayed the capitalist rulers’ racist contempt for black people. The catastrophe, resulting from decades of misrule and neglect by both Democrats and Republicans, demonstrated what the statistics have revealed for years: that material conditions for the mass of the black population today are not fundamentally better than they were at the time of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s. Today the state of public education and health care in the U.S. is about on a par with the Lake Pontchartrain levees. And in the U.S., for black people the abuse and impoverishment is always compounded by the racial oppression that is the cornerstone of the capitalist system.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we wrote in “New Orleans: Racist Atrocity” (WV No. 854, 16 September):
“The masses of displaced people must be provided with jobs—union jobs at union wage scales, with health care, housing, clothing and all other necessities. Instead of being regarded as victims, these working people can be incorporated into a force for their own revitalization.… There is one and only one force in American society that can change the current political balance in favor of working people: a revitalized labor movement.”
Even to meet the basic needs of the working people—for jobs for all, for quality, integrated housing and education and medical care for all—requires sharp class struggle against the capitalist profit system. This means a fight for the independence of the working class from the capitalist government and its political parties. The working people need their own party—a multiracial revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government. Crucial to the struggle to sweep away the American capitalist system is the understanding that the emancipation of black people is integral to the emancipation of the entire working class.
But the current leadership of the labor movement accepts the framework of this racist profit system and harnesses the unions to the capitalist parties, especially the Democrats, crippling working-class power through the lies that putting the “lesser evil” in office and lobbying the government are the vehicles for change. The labor tops’ class collaboration means accommodating, or even promulgating, the most backward racism and anti-immigrant bigotry.
Posing as an alternative to the mainstream pro-capitalist labor tops are some left-talking union officials who organized the Million Worker March Movement (MWMM) last year. An article in Workers World (8 August) by Clarence Thomas, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 executive board member and MWMM spokesman, and United Auto Workers Local 1981 member Larry Shoup talks of the “politically bankrupt Democratic Party” and declares, “Workers must break with this sellout party and form an independent political party by and for the U.S. working class.”
Fine words. But what the MWMM is doing is lashing up with the anti-woman, anti-Semitic demagogue Louis Farrakhan and his “Millions More March”! This rally, called for Washington, D.C., on October 15, will commemorate the pinnacle of Farrakhan’s career, the 1995 Million Man March for “atonement.” We denounced this reactionary, racially exclusionist mobilization in “Million Man March Appeases Racist Exploiters” (WV No. 631, 20 October 1995):
“They forgive the oppressors and exploiters for their enormous crimes against black people, working people and poor, while blaming the oppressed for their oppression. To hell with atonement! What’s needed is integrated class struggle to fight for the liberation of black people and all the oppressed.”
A host of Democratic politicians, starting with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (both of whom signed on to the initial call) and including the Congressional Black Caucus, has endorsed this year’s march, hoping to further the Democrats’ electoral fortunes as outrage over New Orleans and the bloody occupation of Iraq fuels popular opposition to the Bush administration. Another prominent supporter is Bill Clinton, who as president supported the 1995 “atonement” rally and now tells the black newspaper Amsterdam News (10 May) that the Millions More March “is a very positive idea.” This is the man whose response to the Gulf Coast disaster was to rush to the side of George W. Bush, along with Bush Sr.
Whatever their words about “class independence,” the work that the Million Worker March Movement is doing today to channel anger at Bush among trade unionists and black people into the Democrats is what the MWMM was set up to do in the first place. In building the October 2004 “Million Worker March” in Washington, D.C., Chris Silvera, secretary-treasurer of New York Teamsters Local 808, called it “a crucial vehicle for voter mobilization. The timing of it, coming two weeks before the election makes the march the cheapest, most effective get-out-the-vote initiative ever undertaken by the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO.” We summed up this outfit at the time in our headline, “Million Worker March: Tail of Lesser-Evilism” (WV No. 831, 3 September 2004). It is a sign of the demoralization of the labor misleadership that, coming off Kerry’s defeat, its “left” components are doing the donkey work for the anti-working-class, reactionary demagogue Farrakhan. But it’s not just the left-talking types: Teamsters president James P. Hoffa has also thrown his support behind Farrakhan’s march.
Rubbish Recycled
Trying to clean up his act, Farrakhan is trumpeting a call for “unity with our Brown, Red, disenfranchised and oppressed Brothers and Sisters in America, Caribbean, Central and South America, Asia and all over the world.” But this march is truly rotten garbage in recycled pails. As Farrakhan did ten years ago, the Millions More Movement today offers the rulers the benefit of the division of the oppressed into antagonistic sectors while promoting religious superstition, which feeds anti-woman, anti-gay bigotry and preaches guilt and appeasement instead of struggle. One of the ten listed “issues” of the Millions More Movement is “Atonement, Reconciliation and Responsibility” in the “name of our God (The One Creator).”
Farrakhan also, as always, offers bankrupt notions of black capitalism. We agree with Malcolm X when he said, “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.” Calling for a “Black Economic Development Fund,” the Millions More Movement says it “will produce and distribute its own products and supports ‘Buy Black’ campaigns,” which can only aim to drive out competing Asian, Arab and Latino shopkeepers from the ghettos.
In a speech to the September 24 antiwar demonstration in San Francisco, Clarence Thomas ludicrously claimed that the “honorable Louis Farrakhan is evolving to embrace the class struggle”! The pseudo-socialist Workers World Party, chief publicity agent for the MWMM on the left, lauds Farrakhan’s new “theme of unity” bringing together “those of us of different ideologies, philosophies, methodologies, denominations, sects and religions, political and fraternal affiliations” (Workers World, 29 September).
A “theme of unity” with gays and women? For the Nation of Islam, homosexuality is a “sin.” When Farrakhan looks at oppressed black women, he sees a slave in the kitchen who should go to hell for having an abortion. In a 22 August Final Call article titled, “Women Mobilize for the Millions More Movement,” Farrakhan sneers, “Today you hardly know how to boil an egg and you want to get married. Women have become a top breadwinner.… The woman is in a degenerative state.” The social backwardness at the core of the Millions More March was reconfirmed by the vile remarks of Washington, D.C. Baptist Reverend Willie Wilson, national executive director of the march, who ranted in a July 3 sermon that “lesbianism is about to take over our community” and that black families are breaking up because women are making more money than men.
Lamenting Wilson’s comments as “unfortunate” was the International Socialist Organization (ISO). But whatever the ISO’s misgivings, its newspaper Socialist Worker (22 July) calls the march a “desperately needed response to the myriad of attacks that African Americans have endured” and states that “organizers promise that this year’s mobilization…will be different—and will welcome women and gays, socialists and others who support its goals.” This is a shameless apology for anti-gay, anti-Semitic bigotry. A key organizer of the march is all-purpose bigot Malik Zulu Shabazz, protégé of the now-deceased, equally demagogic Khallid Muhammad. Shabazz gained widespread attention in 1994 when he gave a warm-up speech for Muhammad that blamed “the Jews” for everything from killing Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, to controlling the Federal Reserve.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Last month, Million Worker March organizers including Thomas and Silvera joined Shabazz, Wilson and Farrakhan to meet with Hurricane Katrina survivors in Houston. Shortly after Silvera’s return, he spoke at the September 15 New York City united-front rally initiated by the Partisan Defense Committee in defense of Lynne Stewart, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur and against “war on terror” repression. Saying that “the time for revolution is here and now,” Silvera had nothing to say about actual class struggle, instead calling on the audience to go to Washington for Farrakhan’s march.
In the discussion period, a TWU Local 100 transit worker responded to Silvera (who had to leave the meeting early). After speaking of the need to mobilize labor to “get rid of this rotten system and set up a system that’s actually operated for human need,” the unionist addressed the treacherous role of the labor bureaucrats in abandoning any real struggle in the past period, for example by not backing up the embattled AMFA mechanics on strike against Northwest Airlines, and stated:
“They just can’t resist support to Democratic Party lesser-evilism because that’s what’s ‘realistic.’ The Million Worker March in 2004 was seen, and Chris said it, as the best vehicle to get out the vote for Kerry—the guy who said he could run the Iraq war better, the guy who’d really prosecute the war on terrorism. Our union has gone and endorsed [NYC Democratic Party mayoral candidate] Fernando Ferrer. This is the guy who said it’s not a crime to pump 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo. And what about the rest of them: Abner Louima, Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs—the list is huge in New York City alone. You cannot support the Democrats and fight cop terror, and the labor movement has to fight cop terror and take up the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, as was done in 1995 when the death threat came down, with a big labor-centered mobilization in conjunction with international protest…. That’s the kind of thing that has to be done, and it won’t be done by these labor misleaders.”
In lending support to Farrakhan and his reactionary black nationalism, the “progressive labor activists” are directly undermining the very purpose of the unions: to unite workers in struggle against the bosses. On its Web site, the MWMM hails Farrakhan’s march as “a very important vehicle for convening a national Black united front to help reunite the fragmented forces of the African American liberation movement and to help facilitate the unity of Black workers.” The article by Thomas and Shoup in Workers World declares: “We have to speak to and fight for working class control of economic development, including control of investment and community development.” The unity the MWMM embraces is not that of the multiracial working class in struggle against racist capitalist rule. Accepting the framework of the capitalist system, the MWMM’s black nationalist outlook advocates unity with black entrepreneurs, their spokesmen like Farrakhan and black bourgeois politicians. This perspective can only reinforce the racial divisions fostered by the capitalists to weaken the working class.
What is needed is a new labor leadership, based on a program of class struggle and the political independence of the working class, that would mobilize the unions’ power in the fight for black freedom. There must be a political struggle to break labor and blacks from the Democratic Party and to forge a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Acting as the “tribune of the people,” such a party would fight in defense of all of the oppressed: for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, for free abortion on demand, for full democratic rights for gays. Only by replacing the blood-drenched, irrational capitalist system with a workers government can there be genuine social equality. For black liberation through socialist revolution!