For Class-Struggle Defense!

(Quote of the Week)

In advancing a class-struggle strategy in the fight to free death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, we follow in the tradition of the early International Labor Defense (ILD) led by James P. Cannon, a founder of the Communist Party and later of American Trotskyism. In an article written just days before the execution of anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, the ILD emphasized the need to combat illusions sown by liberals in the “justice” of the capitalist frame-up system. Today, as Mumia’s fight enters a new critical stage on the legal front, it is all the more urgent that his supporters around the world mobilize in mass protest centered on the power of the labor movement.

In the many years of struggle for the liberation of Sacco and Vanzetti, tens of thousands of workers have learned this: that there is one power that is irresistible, one upon which they can rely for base, militancy and strength—the organized might of the working masses.

They have learned that the liberals, with their counsels for moderation and exclusive reliance upon the essentially just nature of the courts and the machinery of the law, with their faith in the efficacy of wire-pulling, interviews, have accomplished nothing but the weakening of the movement for Sacco and Vanzetti. The liberals, inside and outside the labor movement, have only spread illusions in the ranks of the workers, and kept them acquiescent and in leash until the last moment when the executioners reach out to turn the electric switch of death….

We do not ask for mercy for Sacco and Vanzetti from the corrupt reactionaries of Massachusetts. We call upon the workers to exert their invincible power to obtain their release so that they can rejoin actively the ranks from which they were seized.

—“‘Friends’ of Sacco and Vanzetti,” Labor Defender, September 1927