LBL Speaker at Harlem Mumia Rally:

"Strike!" and "Free Mumia!" Should Ring Out in the Same Breath

The following speech by New York Labor Black League spokesman Tom Cowperthwaite, who is a member of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, was delivered at the October 28 New York City Partisan Defense Committee rally demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Unbroken and unbowed, Mumia Abu-Jamal is a courageous fighter against racism and injustice who has spent nearly a quarter-century on death row. The unions and the entire working class have a stake in winning freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal! The capitalist system thrives on the profits derived from the exploitation of workers and undermines working-class struggle in this country by dividing the working class along race lines. Racial oppression is a cornerstone of American capitalism, and the bosses and their politicians keep black people on the bottom. Unions, organizations and individuals that struggle and speak out against exploitation and oppression are targeted and attacked. This is why Mumia—a former Black Panther, supporter of MOVE and an eloquent spokesman against racism and injustice—was framed up and faces the death penalty.

The fight for Mumia’s freedom is what our class-struggle program for black liberation—revolutionary integrationism—is all about. The integration of black people into American society on the basis of full economic, social and political equality can only be realized through a proletarian revolution that uproots the capitalist system and ushers in an egalitarian socialist society.

Black liberation cannot succeed apart from united class struggle against the capitalists; working-class emancipation cannot succeed without an implacable fight against anti-black racism. Taking up the fight for Mumia’s freedom is part of the fight against racial oppression and working-class exploitation.

We in the New York Labor Black League for Social Defense are dedicated to the fight to free Mumia and abolish the racist death penalty. The way to fight for Mumia’s freedom is as part of a deeper social struggle, the class struggle. Mumia fights with the weapons he has—his voice and his pen. We must fight with the weapons we have—and our mightiest weapon is mobilizing the multiracial working class, which by its numbers, organization, discipline and consciousness can deliver blows against the capitalist exploiters and eventually overthrow them. Fraternally allied with the revolutionary Marxist Spartacist League, the LBL fights for a class-struggle alternative—a reinvigorated workers movement with a class-struggle leadership that fights to win, all the way to a workers government!

As a transit worker and a member of TWU Local 100, I’m proud that we showed our union power for three days last December. We paralyzed the racist, union-busting MTA and the city itself. That’s the same power we need to free Mumia and all class-war prisoners. Mumia wrote: “When the New York Transport Workers Union (TWU) went out on strike, their action sent shock waves across the nation and rattled the rulers. Immediately, like a slave driver who claims he was ‘betrayed’ by ‘his’ ‘people,’ New York’s mega-billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, unleashed an ugly verbal missile at those who demanded a fair contract under which to work.” Bloomberg railed that the leadership of our overwhelmingly black and Latino union was “thuggish,” but when we were on the picket lines in East New York, Coney Island, Harlem, Sunset Park and every other corner of this city, working and poor people gathered around us to say, “Right on! It’s about time the unions fought back!”

Blacks and Latinos supported our strike in significantly higher proportions than any other section of society. Before, during and after the strike, my friends and I in the LBL were sending out the message that Mumia is one of our own. Quite rightly, Workers Vanguard issued a special supplement on the strike that included an article on Mumia. [See “NYC Transit Strike: Union Power vs. Class Collaboration,” WV Supplement, 6 January.] He is a prisoner of the same capitalist class that slams us with dangerous working conditions, sinking pay and benefits, union-busting injunctions, Taylor Law fines, racist cop brutality and the blood-drenched “war on terror.”

In every workplace, the words “Strike!” and “Free Mumia!” should ring out in the same breath. Especially now, we who are outside the prison walls must not forget Mumia, nor our obligation to appeal to labor and the entire working class to act now—stop the executioners! In 1995 when the first death warrant was signed, a worldwide protest by unions, civil rights activists and death penalty abolitionists forced the rulers to grant a stay of execution just days before Mumia was scheduled to die. Today, we need even larger mobilizations of union power. We need to turn those names of unionists on petitions, those motions, those resolutions into labor protest and strike action.

The Death Penalty: “Legal Lynching”

When I ran for delegate to the TWU’s international convention, my campaign program and proposed resolutions emphasized that our union must fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal as part of the need for labor to champion every struggle for black rights and black freedom. Marx wrote, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Black people are the “last hired and first fired” in this country, a race-color caste segregated at the bottom of society. Of course, the racist rulers continuously and grotesquely blame the oppressed for their own oppression. But black people are not powerless victims. They are integrated into the economy and a strategic component of the American proletariat.

We say: “Finish the Civil War—For black liberation through socialist revolution!” It took the Civil War to emancipate black people from chattel slavery, but the unfinished business of the Civil War is still all around us: the hellish conditions of ghetto life, bipartisan attacks on the remaining gains of the civil rights movement like voting rights and affirmative action, mass unemployment and mass imprisonment of black youth under the racist “war on drugs.” Last year we witnessed a man-made racist atrocity in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Democratic and Republican politicians consciously prevented the evacuation and then the rescue of tens of thousands of mostly black residents. The ruling class left black people to die, and they’re still brazenly pursuing their goal of so-called “urban renewal” (meaning black removal), gutting unions and disappearing entire black neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward.

All this illustrates again and again that racial oppression is inherent in the capitalist system. The LBL fights the poisonous racism that divides the working class, not only because it cripples its immediate struggles, but also because it undermines workers’ ability to acquire class consciousness and thereby engage in united struggle and build a workers party that can lead a workers revolution.

We call the death penalty what it is: “legal lynching.” It is a legacy of chattel slavery, when for centuries blacks were not considered human beings, but property; when to kill a slave had the stamp of law. It’s in the nature of American capitalism that black life is held cheap and black lives are expendable. Democrats and Republicans compete with each other over who can be “tougher on crime,” so even the lethal spirit of slavery still exists with Jim Crow lynch law carried out by cops on the streets and carried over into the prisons. We know that the death penalty is race-biased, class-biased, arbitrary, barbaric, cruel and unusual punishment. It is the ultimate weapon in the capitalist state’s arsenal of repressive power, and we in the LBL oppose it on principle.

The New York LBL was founded in 1986 following a successful campaign to defend a black token booth clerk, James Grimes, who was facing a gun rap after defending himself on the job during an assault by muggers. We said that Brother Grimes had the right to carry a gun and defend himself. We knew that the capitalist state and the capitalist courts would try to railroad a black transit worker. By organizing dozens of TWU brothers and sisters and other unionists in a show of union power and solidarity, our LBL predecessors turned the tide in Grimes’ favor and all the charges were dismissed. That show of union strength on a much, much larger scale is what we need for Mumia now.

The LBL helped build the PDC-initiated mass rally that drove the Ku Klux Klan off the streets in New York City on October 23, 1999. Along with many other cases and causes taken up by the PDC, we fought for union action against racist cop terror in the cases of Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Alberta Spruill and many others, noting that police brutality can never be “reformed” out of the capitalist system which the cops are hired to enforce.

We fight for class struggle against bloody U.S. imperialism and its invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and fought for military defense of these countries against U.S attack. Imperialist war is not caused by bad policy or bad politicians, but is built into the capitalist system itself. We fought against the mass detention of Muslims and immigrants after 9/11 and completely oppose the bipartisan “war on terror,” which is a pretext for rampaging imperialist adventures abroad and to carry out domestic repression at home aimed at immigrants, blacks and unions. Every repressive law and court decision is aimed at bolstering capitalist rule and will eventually be directed at and used against the working class. We fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and for union action against la migra raids and deportations.

We fight for women’s liberation, for free abortion on demand and for full democratic rights for gays. The recent killing of Michael Sandy, a young black gay man, on the Belt Parkway in south Brooklyn is a symptom of the vicious anti-gay bigotry pushed daily by the ruling class and their right-wing religious handmaidens.

The LBL condemns the Feds’ “war on terror” against attorney Lynne Stewart—the “war on terror” witchhunt against Lynne Stewart and her legal assistants, Mohamed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, who were sentenced just days ago [see “Overturn Terror Show-Trial Convictions of Lynne Stewart, Mohamed Yousry, Ahmed Abdel Sattar!” WV No. 879, 27 October]. We brought LBL and union members to court sessions to join in widespread solidarity demonstrations with them. They shouldn’t spend a minute in prison for defending the blind Sheik Abdel Rahman, providing the legal representation supposedly guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment. This witchhunt clearly threatens everyone’s rights. We say: Throw out the convictions! No jail time for Stewart, Yousry and Sattar!

Build a Workers Party!

The history of the struggles of workers and oppressed against capitalism shows that the bosses’ courts are not in the business of providing “fair trials.” They’re in the business of maintaining capitalist “law and order” and the entire anti-labor, racist frame-up system. Illusions in the neutrality of the capitalist state, which is an instrument of organized violence by one class against another, are fatal to the independent mobilization of the workers and oppressed against their class enemy. As Sister Erica from the PDC described, a host of phony socialist groups, liberals and black nationalists derailed the struggle for Mumia in the late ’90s by pushing the demand for a “new trial” and sowing illusions in the same government that framed him up. During every political show trial in this country’s history—Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, the Rosenbergs—the liberals and reformists have sown false hopes in the supposedly evenhanded scales of justice. In doing this, they demobilize the masses who rally in defense of those who symbolize their own oppression.

The government and courts only intervene into the unions to hogtie and destroy them as fighting organizations. Just look at the recent court injunctions, fines and prison time imposed on TWU Local 100. Yet there are many trade-union opportunists who drag their own unions into the bosses’ courts and, in the guise of “fighting corruption” and for “union democracy,” appeal to the union-busting Labor Department to intervene to “clean up” the unions. This is criminal! In Local 100’s current union elections, just about every slate has candidates running for top positions who have been involved in suing the union and their opponents in the same Taylor Law capitalist courts. The LBL says: For complete and unconditional independence from the capitalist state! Cops and security guards out of the unions! No to union-suing! Labor must clean its own house!

The gains working people have made were wrested from the rulers through militant struggle. What’s needed is working-class independence from the bosses’ state and political parties. The trade-union bureaucracy’s program of appealing to, supporting and showering money on the Democrats—that other party of racism and war—is fatal to successful class struggle and even winning strikes. Since the state’s top cop Eliot Spitzer issued the injunctions attacking the TWU, it is grotesque that the Local 100 Executive Board and Toussaint leadership are now zealously campaigning for Spitzer for governor in the upcoming election. During the last three contract fights, when Mumia was writing articles from death row defending New York transit workers, pro-death penalty Spitzer was writing strikebreaking injunctions against us! Spitzer was the jailer of our local union’s president, Roger Toussaint, following the December strike. This program of class collaboration, shared by all wings of the trade-union bureaucracy, explains why the outcome of our strike is still in limbo and why we still have no contract.

Our strike was cut short and our power held back by our own union brass and the heads of all other major New York City unions. Instead of backing us up on the picket lines and boldly defying the slave-labor Taylor Law, they worked around the clock to get us back to work and smother the labor militancy it sparked. The AFL-CIO and Change to Win trade-union bureaucracy are the bosses’ loyal “labor lieutenants.” They waste millions of dues and COPE [Committee on Political Education] money trying to get capitalist politicians elected rather than leading class struggle and defending class-war prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal. It will take a political struggle within the unions to transform them into class-struggle organizations. Getting our unions to fight for Mumia Abu-Jamal is part of that struggle, which is international in scope.

The workers’ greatest victory and the imperialists’ greatest defeat in history was the Russian Revolution of 1917, led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party. The failure of the revolution to spread internationally and relentless pressures from imperialism laid the basis for the rise of a privileged, nationalist bureaucratic caste which usurped political power from the working class and repudiated the struggle for international workers revolution. Although a degenerated workers state, the Soviet Union remained a powerful counterweight to U.S. and world imperialism. It proved the superiority of collectivized property and socialist economic planning, guaranteeing jobs, housing, free health care and education to an entire population, most of which is now totally dispossessed and impoverished.

The collapse of the USSR greatly emboldened the U.S. rulers. We were for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. Likewise, today the LBL continues to defend the deformed workers states of Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam, while also calling for workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies, for workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. Today, it’s the duty of class-conscious workers everywhere to welcome North Korea’s testing and possession of nuclear weapons. In the case of Iran, a Third World capitalist country also targeted as part of Washington’s “axis of evil,” we think that Iran needs nukes too.

What the multiracial American working class desperately needs is its own party—not a pro-capitalist labor party like the one in Britain, not another shill for the Democrats like the Working Families Party, not Green Party eco-capitalists who want “kinder, gentler” imperialism—but a revolutionary party that wages hard class struggle and fights for a planned economy under workers rule. A workers government will take American industry away from its incompetent, corrupt owners and use the productive wealth of this country to build a decent society for all. We built this country, we can run this country!

That’s what the LBL stands for. There will be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black, white, Latino and Asian workers led by a multiracial vanguard party. So to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, to get rid of racist capitalism, to fight for socialism, check out the Labor Black League’s ten-point program. Study with us. Join us! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty! For black liberation through socialist revolution!