Reformist Left: Traitors to the Working Class

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below Spartacus Youth Club member Hal Salt’s speech at the New York Holiday Appeal, slightly edited for publication.

My name is Hal. I’m with the Spartacus Youth Club, and I want to say a few things about what we do, who we are. We’re the youth auxiliary of the Spartacist League, the American section of the International Communist League. We have been active in bringing Mumia’s case to students and young activists across the country. We are here in solidarity with the class-war prisoners who are imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression and imperialist depredation.

We intervene in the struggles of students and workers with a revolutionary Marxist perspective, in opposition to the capitalist class and its parties, whether Democrat, Republican or Green. We seek to mobilize youth behind the multiracial working class. The transit strike here in New York City in 2005 demonstrated the power the youth must look to. It is the working class that has the power to radically change society because it creates the wealth of society—it creates everything we have, everything we use—and it can bring that production to a halt at any time. It is the working class that has the social power and historic interest to end this wretched decaying system of capitalist exploitation once and for all. It was the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917 that proved this understanding. And this is our model today.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Party led the working class of Russia to seize state power, thereby establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, and expropriated the capitalists. The Bolshevik Party, a vanguard party that was the proven tribune of the people, fought against all aspects of social oppression—from fighting against women’s oppression in the family and discrimination against gays, to freeing the oppressed peoples of the tsar’s empire and stopping the pogroms of the Black Hundreds against the Jews. The estates of the landed nobility were abolished, the land nationalized and industry collectivized. The new workers state had taken its first steps in planning the economy in the interest of the toilers.

Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the October Revolution, the central gains of the revolution embodied in the establishment of a planned economy remained. We alone defended the Soviet Union until its final undoing in 1991-92. The rest of the so-called left, like the grossly misnamed International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the Revolutionary Communist Party, were firmly in the camp of U.S. imperialism, supporting counterrevolution. Today we fight in defense of the remaining deformed workers states of Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam. We fight for workers political revolutions there, to oust the anti-Marxist, anti-working-class Stalinist bureaucracies and establish workers democracy. Meanwhile the fake left continues to side with imperialism against those workers states.

Central to the defense of the remaining workers states is the struggle for socialist revolution here in the belly of the imperialist beast. And what is key to making socialist revolution in America is the fight for black liberation. Black oppression is the cornerstone, here in America, of capitalism. American capitalism was founded on black chattel slavery, and today black people remain an oppressed race-color caste forcibly segregated at the bottom of society, while at the same time composing a strategic layer of the working class. Contrary to what is prevalently pushed by liberals and fake socialists like the ISO and Workers World Party, that racism is the result of bad ideas and can simply be ended by changing those ideas, we understand that black oppression has a material basis in capitalism to this day, and can only be ended through the forcible overthrow of capitalism. Being the party that acts as the tribune of the people means championing the fight to free all class-war prisoners. It means defending those in the cross hairs of the capitalist state despite political differences. It means championing the fight against black oppression, and Mumia’s case is what black oppression in America is all about.

Here in New York we do a lot of work on Columbia’s campus, where we are known as the revolutionary communists. We are known as those who fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, giving presentations to groups all over that are interested in his case—at SUNY Purchase, at Smith College, at the University of Maryland—where we explain how he is an innocent victim of a racist frame-up, railroaded to death row for his political beliefs.

But we don’t just introduce students to the facts of Mumia’s case—we present a strategy to win his freedom. Students, like workers, imbibe the false notion that the courts are neutral and that if you only present the truth to the courts, the truth will set Mumia free. But that bourgeois lie is exactly what reformists like the ISO and Workers World Party perpetuate in their calls for a new trial, in their groveling appeals to the liberals who are more concerned about the image of racist American “democracy” than they are about freeing an innocent black man. These reformists are the ones who have demobilized the masses who were out in the streets a decade ago on behalf of Mumia. We know that there is no equality between oppressor and oppressed in the capitalist court of law. We know that the death penalty that hangs over Mumia’s head is the legacy of chattel slavery and the ultimate weapon in the ruling class’ arsenal to stop modern-day slaves in revolt. We support every legal means to secure Mumia’s freedom while placing no faith in the courts and all faith in the power of the working class. Our communist understanding offers the strategy that is required to free Mumia.

Recently the hell that is capitalist America was shown clearly in the case of the Jena Six, who are six black high school students from Jena, Louisiana, who last year sat under the “white tree” on their campus. After months of racist harassment and threats, including the hanging of lynch ropes from the tree after they sat under it, they were charged with attempted murder after a white student hurled the “N” word at them and ended up mildly injured in a scuffle. Members of the Spartacus Youth Club went to Jena on September 20 to bring our revolutionary program to the tens of thousands of outraged protesters, including many black students. We took a side with the Jena Six, demanding that all charges be dropped.

Sweeping the country since then has been a rising tide of racist reaction. At Columbia a noose was found on a black professor’s door after anti-Muslim, anti-communist graffiti was found in the bathrooms. Students furious with the racist incidents on campus protested outside the building where the professor’s office is. We were front and center, with our signs calling for black liberation through socialist revolution and for students to protest the lynch rope provocations. We argued with students that the climate at Columbia is not confined by the campus gates and that all over the country provocations like this have been occurring; that the solution is not faith in the administration or more cops on campus, but socialist revolution to smash the material basis for inequality and racism. We argue, much to the shock of some students, that the sons and daughters of Harlem should be allowed to go to Columbia. Trust me, when we get up and shout, “Nationalize Columbia! For open admissions and no tuition!” the reaction is shock that we would dare challenge Columbia as a bastion of race and class privilege.

Just recently I was quoted in Columbia’s campus paper, the Spectator, for a speech I gave at a protest against David Horowitz when he came to campus. I said that America was founded on the ruthless exploitation of blacks and argued against illusions in the Democratic Party. In response to this, David Judd, a well-known member of the ISO at Columbia, grossly accused us of being “destructive.” Well, what really bothers him is our revolutionary program and our exposure of his group’s and other fake socialists’ “Anybody but Bush” pressure politics, which in effect lead people to support the Democrats, chaining them to the class enemy. He went on to whine that all we do is “denounce everybody…as reformists who are selling out the working class.” Well, everything has its name, so we might as well use the right one! What else do you call groups who side with the class enemy, who tell workers to have faith in capitalist so-called democracy, and even advise their own oppressors how best to advance their program of imperialist slaughter and conquest, like when they signed a petition calling on Bush and Cheney to disarm Iran! What else do you call a group that says that the so-called democratic capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, which returned Russia to capitalist enslavement, was “a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing”?! Well, besides traitors to the working class, you call them reformists.

Youth must ally with the working class in the fight for the future of humanity—a socialist future of humanity. If you want to fight for a world free of imperialist slaughter from Iraq to Afghanistan, free of racist attacks, of mass incarceration, legal lynching, degrading exploitation and starvation, I encourage you to study history, to study Marxism and to get active with the Spartacus Youth Club! Youth must ally with the international working class to overthrow global capitalism because the fact remains that, despite the bourgeoisie’s “death of communism” triumphalism, socialism is the only way out of a capitalist world condemned to imperialist wars and capitalist depredations. Free Mumia! An injury to one is an injury to all! Free all class-war prisoners! Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!