September 15 Oakland Rally

PDC: For a Class-Struggle Defense to Free Mumia!

"Labor Action Committee": No Labor, No Action

OAKLAND—On September 15, some 100 people rallied outside the Alameda County Courthouse in downtown Oakland in support of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The protest was called by the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (LAC) under the slogans, “Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Innocent! For Labor Action to Free Mumia! End the Racist Death Penalty!” The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—endorsed the rally on the basis of these slogans, for which we have historically struggled. We fought to make this rally a genuine united-front action: bringing together diverse organizations in the urgent fight to free Mumia, with full debate over contending strategies and political programs.

A Black Panther Party spokesman in his youth, an outspoken journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless” and a supporter of the MOVE organization, Mumia was convicted in a political, racist frame-up on demonstrably false charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. More than five years ago, Mumia submitted to court the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. But court after court has refused to even consider the Beverly confession and the mountains of supporting evidence of Mumia’s innocence (see the July 2006 PDC pamphlet, The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent!).

As Mumia’s legal appeals reach their final stages, the PDC is fighting to revitalize mass protest centered on the labor movement, understanding that the only pressure that will have an impact on the capitalist rulers and their courts is the fear of the social consequences of executing this innocent man or entombing him for life. On campuses and at union workplaces, the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Club distributed the PDC flyer mobilizing for the rally (see “For Class-Struggle Defense to Free Mumia Now!” WV No. 875, 1 September). Based on the slogans, “There is no justice in the capitalist courts! For class-struggle defense to free Mumia now! Abolish the racist death penalty!”, the PDC contingent made up about a third of the rally. Despite the urgency of Mumia’s cause, it is painfully clear that the LAC, along with Socialist Action (SA) and its Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as other endorsers, did virtually nothing to build this rally.

PDC representative Kathy Ikegami, the rally’s first speaker, stressed that “the racist capitalist rulers—both Democrats and Republicans—are united in their determination to see Mumia dead because they see in him the spectre of black revolution. It’s a warning to all who challenge U.S. imperialism at home and abroad.” She continued:

“The fight to free this innocent man has reached a critical juncture. Since the PDC and Spartacist League took up Mumia’s case in 1987, we have fought for class-struggle defense to free Mumia. We have advocated pursuing all possible legal proceedings in his case but place no faith whatsoever in the so-called justice of the courts.

“In 1995 millions marched for Mumia and stopped his execution. So where is that movement today? It was demobilized and demoralized by reformist leftists who deliberately subordinated the call to free Mumia to the calls for a ‘new trial’ appealing to bourgeois liberals who see Mumia’s case as an isolated ‘miscarriage of justice’ rather than the conscious political frame-up it is. These are counterposed strategies. The fight to free Mumia means a class-struggle fight in opposition to the capitalist state—its courts, its cops, its military. The ‘new trial’ slogan builds illusions in the very justice of the courts that have upheld the racist frame-up for 24 years. It means giving up the fight to mobilize the social power of labor to free Mumia!”

Reformists, Labor Fakers Demobilized Support for Mumia

Ikegami noted that the LAC “called this rally calling to ‘Free Mumia’ though they have marched in lockstep with those calling for a ‘new trial’ since their inception in 1999. They obscure the class nature of the capitalist state, they deep-six any critical mention of the Democratic Party, they provide a ‘labor’ face to the political program of seeking ‘justice’ from the capitalist state enemy.” Most subsequent speakers took umbrage at our exposure of the liberal-reformist strategy of reliance on the capitalist state. The LAC’s Carole Seligman, a supporter of Socialist Viewpoint, complained, “Our job is not to denounce each other, not to split hairs, not to polemicize against each other at a public rally for Mumia.” On the contrary, political debate is crucial to reversing the demobilization of mass support for Mumia and raising the consciousness of those fighting for his freedom.

In his speech, Jeff Mackler, national secretary of SA and a coordinator of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, launched a demagogic attack on the PDC. Equating our opposition to the “new trial” slogan with opposing Mumia’s legal efforts, Mackler ranted, “If there is a single person out here who is against the motion that had been brought to the court by Mumia Abu-Jamal and by his legal team…if you are against the new trial, you are a goddamned fool.”

This tirade by Mackler, who has for years been a prime mover of rallies calling for a “new trial,” willfully and ignorantly conflated political demands around which to mobilize mass support for Mumia and legal actions pursued by Mumia in the courts. Since he is quite familiar with the PDC’s legal work on Mumia’s behalf extending back to the late 1980s, including years spent on his legal team, Mackler’s charge against the PDC is both absurd and cynical. Our legal assistance included tracking down a mountain of evidence that Mumia is innocent, notably the Beverly evidence, which makes it clear that Mumia’s case consists of a conscious, racist political frame-up of an innocent man. Since this doesn’t sit well with liberals, Mackler and SA have all but disappeared the Beverly evidence.

Even as the PDC’s Rachel Wolkenstein and Jonathan Piper served on the legal team, we fought against illusions in or reliance on the capitalist courts. At the Oakland rally, Mackler said that he holds “no illusions in the criminal justice system.” Utterly belying that claim, Mackler hailed the December U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that Mumia’s appeal could go forward on only three of the more than two dozen legal issues Mumia raised as a “major court victory” that would “stun the Pennsylvania legal establishment” (Socialist Action, December 2005). Mackler’s article called the possibility that the court would reinstate Mumia’s death penalty, which is what the prosecution is gunning for, “the worst—but least expected—scenario.” That same month the state of California executed Tookie Williams in the face of a massive public outcry! In denying clemency to Williams, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed to Williams’ praise of Mumia, among others, in his book Life in Prison. Tookie Williams’ execution was a real signal that the state intends to see Mumia dead.

Mackler’s speech captured in a nutshell SA’s deeply reformist outlook. But in running Mackler for U.S. Senate in explicit opposition to both the capitalist Democrats and the bourgeois Greens, whose candidate is Todd Chretien of the International Socialist Organization, SA has drawn a crude class line, and on that basis the Spartacist League has extended Mackler critical support (see WV No. 876, 15 September). As Mackler ended his speech, our contingent chanted: “Vote for Jeff Mackler against Democrats and Greens!” But when presented with the SL’s statement of support, Mackler turned green around the gills and vociferously declared that he rejected the support of our revolutionary Marxist organization. Well, if Mackler drops his opposition to the Greens, we’ll drop our critical support to him.

The LAC barely distributed its own rally flyer, which was not even posted on the LAC Web site (which hasn’t been updated since February 2005!). LAC rally chair Jack Heyman, a longtime member and former official of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10, provided some thin labor veneer for the “labor action” rally. Heyman mobilized no union presence. For his part, Mackler thanked the LAC for calling “this important rally at this important time”—for which Mackler’s two organizations mobilized all of two people. Meanwhile, Todd Chretien did not even bother to show up to the rally that he had endorsed.

In his remarks as rally chair, Heyman echoed recent WV polemics, declaring, “It’s dangerous to say Mumia is just one legal decision from a new trial and freedom.” And Jason Wright, the speaker from the International Bolshevik Tendency (BT), which along with Heyman has been a key player in the LAC since its inception, criticized “comrade Mackler” over the call for a “new trial.” But these comments were just window-dressing for Heyman and the BT’s years of building protests, committees and coalitions in which “unity” means a nonaggression pact with those who call for a new trial. It also means charging the PDC and SL with “sectarianism” for our fight against the liberal illusions codified in that call. But as Trotsky once quipped about Stalin’s venomous lies, even slander should make some sense. Just a week after the PDC endorsed the Oakland rally, the BT Web site featured a brazenly lying and pathetic piece titled “On Recent Spartacist League Polemics” that denounced the SL’s purported “desire to avoid working with us in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal”!

Heyman and his BT friends have long insisted in the face of our criticisms that they oppose the call for a “new trial.” But the LAC was born waving the “new trial” banner. This bogus outfit was launched in January 1999 in explicit “solidarity with the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,” one of the most persistent proponents of the “new trial” slogan. Among the LAC’s first acts was to issue an international appeal to build rallies in April 1999 around two central demands: “Stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal” and “A new and fair trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal.”

On September 15, Heyman spoke of the 24 April 1999 West Coast port shutdown by the ILWU and underlined that the ILWU “marched in 1999 with 25,000 other people.” As the PDC spokesman at the rally noted, the port shutdown in support of Mumia was a powerful example of “the kind of social power that must be mobilized in a class-struggle fight to free Mumia,” but “Heyman himself undermined this action by tying it to appeals for a ‘new trial’”—the demand pushed by the organizers of the rally that same day. While drawing large numbers, the April 1999 rallies were a crucial point in the demobilization of Mumia’s supporters. Tailoring their demands to what would be acceptable to bourgeois liberals, who viewed Mumia’s case as an aberration in an otherwise fair and impartial justice system, meant rejecting the very reasons millions internationally had rallied behind Mumia: revulsion against the injustices inherent in capitalism—poverty, racial oppression, war.

The LAC initiated a May 2000 “Labor Conference for Mumia” that appealed to the Clinton Justice Department to “launch an official investigation into Mumia’s case” and resolved to lobby delegates to the Democratic National Convention to pass a motion calling for a new trial. This groveling appeal to the “Democratic” Party of U.S. imperialism could not be a clearer example of the irreconcilable gulf between the strategy of mobilizing the independent power of the working class and that of reliance on the agencies of the capitalist class enemy. The labor fakers and reformist socialists at that conference also adopted a motion calling for “A Broad Labor Campaign to Win Justice for Mumia.” The puny efforts they put into building their own September 15 rally expose their “broad labor campaign”—and the LAC itself—as the frauds they are.

The BT and the Fight Against Black Oppression

While in recent years the BT has made a show of taking up Mumia’s cause, a defining feature of this dubious organization since its inception in the early 1980s by embittered ex-SL members has been its contempt for the fight for black liberation. While the BT has always pursued an unnatural obsession with our organization, it had not one article about Mumia in its journal 1917 until 1996, and published next to nothing on the black question in the U.S., the strategic question of the American socialist revolution, for the first six years of its existence. These were the Reagan years of rampant cop terror in the ghettos and an upsurge in racist mob attacks and KKK/Nazi terror.

The BT did, however, sneer at SL-initiated labor/black mobilizations against Klan/Nazi fascists in the 1980s, our launching of Labor Black Leagues and our declared aspiration to become a 70 percent black party as “community organizing,” a “retreat from the working class” and as “accommodating backward consciousness.” And there was the bombing of the Philadelphia MOVE commune in May 1985—eleven black men, women and children burned to death. While much of the reformist left cringed from the elementary duty to defend MOVE, we sought to sear this atrocity into the memory of the working class and to that end held a rally in New York City in solidarity with MOVE.

The BT’s response was not to protest the MOVE bombing but to ridicule our rally in solidarity with the victims! In 1917 (Winter 1986), published more than half a year after the MOVE massacre, the BT wrote, “In its capacity as convenor of a memorial meeting for the MOVE victims the SL thought it impolitic to differ with its guests. Accordingly SL speakers confined their remarks to denouncing the authors of the hideous massacre on Osage Avenue and advocating the struggle for socialism via construction of a mass-based Spartacist League.” The BT saw the occasion as the time to denounce a spokesman for the victims of racist government slaughter and to attack the SL for not turning the memorial meeting into a political free-for-all against MOVE!

Before it had ever published an article on Mumia, the BT did make a press splash at the height of the emergency protests during the summer of 1995—in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. On 16 June 1995 this capitalist mouthpiece ran an article titled, “Not Much Left: ‘The Movement’ Is Pretty Still Nowadays,” smearing all the organizations defending Mumia. First and foremost, the WSJ went after the PDC and SL, picking up the BT’s slanders of the SL as a deranged “cult.” It is striking that the reporter located materials of the organization that had written the least about Mumia in order to attack the organization that had made his case an international cause. The PDC flyer for the September 15 rally commented, “The intent of the Wall Street Journal in smearing Mumia’s supporters was transparent enough. How and why the minuscule BT was so readily wielded as a tool for the WSJ is not.”

With the fight for Mumia’s life and freedom at a critical hour, mass protests based on labor’s social power are urgently needed. Unions representing millions of workers worldwide are on record in support of Mumia. But those millions need to be mobilized in class-struggle action to demand Mumia’s freedom. That they have not been mobilized is centrally the responsibility of the pro-capitalist union misleaders, aided and abetted by such pseudo-socialists and labor fakers as make up the LAC. As the PDC speaker at the September 15 rally emphasized: “What is required is political struggle to unchain labor’s power. This struggle is totally linked to the fight to forge a Leninist vanguard party to lead the working class in socialist revolution. Such a party must act as the champion of all the exploited and oppressed, recognizing that the fight for black liberation is key to the struggle for workers revolution. Free Mumia now! Abolish the racist death penalty!”