SL Speaker at Chicago United-Front Protest

“Join Us in the Fight for a Workers America!”

Break with the Democrats! For a Workers Party!

We print below, slightly edited for publication, the speech delivered by Spartacist League speaker Paula Daniels at the April 26 united-front rally for Mumia in Chicago.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, “voice of the voiceless,” is a marked man because of his political convictions and beliefs. Our task is very clear; it’s very urgent. The question is how will we free Mumia?

We have the seeds of Mumia’s only hope for freedom here at this rally today: the social power of labor. We have ATU representatives, AFSCME, UAW—maybe there are others out there—and the thousands of union brothers and sisters that these unions represent. That’s power! We can make the buses and trucks stop, we can bring the factories to a halt, we can dim the steel mills. But we have to know where we are going and what the obstacles are. Labor needs a leadership based on the independence of the working class from the bosses’ state and political parties, not one tying us to the Democratic Party. Imagine if the unions had a class-struggle leadership that waged strikes instead of cutting deals, that supported strikes instead of calling them “illegal,” that promoted international labor solidarity instead of pushing poisonous chauvinist protectionism—a labor movement that took up the struggle for all the oppressed, from Mumia to immigrants to gay rights. We would be operating from a position of power, not prostration!

The fight to free Mumia and all the class-war prisoners, the fight to abolish the racist death penalty, is inseparable from the struggle for workers rule. What is the death penalty in this country if not a system of legal murder, a legacy of chattel slavery? And when they can’t get their targets in the courts or the prisons, they let their street cops do the dirty work and act as judge, jury and executioner. Those cops that were acquitted yesterday for killing Sean Bell were acquitted because that’s not a crime to the bourgeoisie—that’s their job, as one of the speakers said!

We in the Spartacist League stand for the abolition of the death penalty on principle and everywhere—for the guilty as well as for the innocent. We do not accord to the state the right to decide who lives and who dies. Our opposition to the death penalty extends to the deformed workers states: China, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea. As Trotskyists, we know full well that the Chinese or Cuban bureaucracies, for example, mete out repression to all those they view as opponents, including socialist militants. You don’t have to be a counterrevolutionary. Nonetheless these workers states, despite their deformations, continue to represent qualitative gains for the working class internationally. Compare Cuba to Haiti. Compare China to India. That’s a class difference.

Today the Democrats and the reformist left, such as the International Socialist Organization, the League for the Revolutionary Party, etc., stand united in their efforts to “Free Tibet,” with the reformists joining the bourgeois rulers’ drive for counterrevolution in China. Let me tell you that the extension of the Chinese Revolution into Tibet ended slavery. It ended the status of women as beasts of burden and paved the way to open the road for social progress in a backward society. We say: Unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state! We are unconditionally against capitalist counterrevolution and imperialist intervention. The working people of China must fight for a workers political revolution, to replace the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy with the rule of workers, peasants and soldiers councils.

While I’m speaking about the left, I want to say it is a damning indictment of those who call themselves socialist, who claim to fight for freedom, that they did not mobilize their forces for this demonstration and are not here en masse.

We owe a great debt to Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, not least for leading a successful workers revolution in Russia. The Communist International under Lenin and Trotsky intervened into the Communist movement in this country and hammered home the question of special oppression of black Americans. They made the point: black workers in this country are doubly oppressed, not just by skin color, but as workers. Black women face triple oppression—as women, as workers and because of the color of their skin. The Bolsheviks insisted that the communists in this country need to fight against the oppression of black people and to win black workers to the fight for a workers government. We in the Spartacist League seek to impart to a new generation the importance of the black question and its centrality in the fight for socialist revolution, the only road forward to black liberation.

The Democrats and Republicans may diverge on tactics here and there, but fundamentally they are united in upholding this rotting, racist capitalist system, and they will get the “best man” for the job, even if he is black or a woman, as the case may be. Now, I will concede that should a black man or a woman sit in the White House, that would be a significant development in this country. But—it is a big but—the truth is, be it Clinton or Obama, it might be a shiny new pail, but inside it’s the same old garbage. Neither offers any qualitative change for working people or the oppressed.

I know some of you say: “But wait, wait, we gotta vote for the lesser evil!” The “lesser evil” brought us Hiroshima, it brought us the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, the end of welfare, and more recently the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which virtually eliminated the right to habeas corpus appeals for those sentenced to death in state courts. In a period of greater class consciousness, it will become ever more apparent that the program of the Obamas, of the “friends of labor” in the Democratic Party, and the “sisters” in the bourgeoisie, is counterposed to ours.

Again, it is the power of labor that can free Mumia Abu-Jamal. That enormous power, here in the street, once freed from the illusions that the class enemy is on our side—once the working class is turned into a class for itself—will be a force to be reckoned with. We ask you to help us build that revolutionary workers party that fights for Mumia’s freedom, for black freedom, women’s liberation and defense of gay rights, for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. We need October Revolutions along the lines of the Russian Revolution internationally. That’s what the Spartacist League, the American section of the International Communist League, is all about. The first American Revolution gained independence from the British, the second smashed slavery. It’s time for a third, a workers revolution. Join us in the fight for a workers America! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty!