Bay Area LBL Holiday Appeal Speaker:

“Obama’s Promise of ‘Change’ Is a Cruel Hoax”

We print below the speech given by Labor Black League representative Adwoa Oni at the Bay Area Holiday Appeal on 7 December 2008.

The Labor Black League for Social Defense stands for mobilizing the masses of black and working people for militant integrated struggle against the brutal system of racist oppression that is capitalist America. Initiated by and fraternally allied to the Marxist Spartacist League, the LBL is part of the revolutionary movement of the workers and oppressed against the bosses and for socialism.

The election of Barack Obama serves as a powerful propaganda weapon for the U.S. bourgeoisie at home and abroad. But Obama’s promise of “change” is a cruel hoax. As the next Commander-in-Chief of bloody U.S. imperialism, he will preside over the racist capitalist system, which is based on the brutal exploitation of working people. Racist oppression, grinding poverty, police violence and massive incarceration are all endemic to the American capitalist system, and that will continue to be the reality for black and working people. It will be Obama’s job to contain potential social unrest and impose austerity measures upon working people on behalf of the racist ruling class. In this, Obama is following the same script as black Democrats who have been employed as mayors and police chiefs of major urban areas—from Oakland to L.A., to Detroit, to Philadelphia and elsewhere. Their job has been to keep working and black people down and to oversee rampant cop terror. We have not forgotten the 1985 Mother’s Day bombing of the MOVE commune, carried out under Philadelphia’s black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, that burned alive eleven people, including five children, and was allowed to burn down a whole black neighborhood. That is the role of the black Democrats and Barack Obama!

Class-war political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case is at a critical stage following the rejection of his appeals by the bourgeois courts. Yet at a Mumia event sponsored by Socialist Action, Jeff Mackler (Socialist Action’s leader) silenced any mention of class struggle and socialism in order to embrace the little bourgeois politico Cynthia McKinney. However, an LBL spokesman intervened from the floor and forthrightly put forward our class-struggle perspective. She said: “And one fundamental truth is that black oppression is the cornerstone of American capitalism, and…I don’t see anybody addressing that because the system that put Mumia in jail and condemned him to die is the capitalist system itself.” That intervention exemplifies what the LBL fights for—our fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal is rooted in the struggle to make the multiracial working class conscious of its class interests in the fight against the entire depraved capitalist system, particularly the understanding that in America the fight for black freedom is central to the struggle for the emancipation of labor itself. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Free the MOVE 9! Black liberation through socialist revolution!

As overseer of the whole bloody plantation, Obama vows to escalate the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and at home. Meanwhile the retrial of the San Francisco 8, former Black Panthers, brings Gitmo to the West Bay. The original charges were thrown out because the so-called “evidence” and “confessions” were extracted through torture. Torture and rendition have always been part of the capitalists’ arsenal of repression. We say: Drop the charges! Hands off the SF 8!

Drop the bogus charges against longshoremen Jason Ruffin and Aaron Harrison! [These two black ILWU longshore union members were beaten and arrested in August 2007 for the “crime” of trying to return after lunch to work at the Sacramento port and appealing to their union for help in doing so. See “‘War on Terror’ Assault on Black Longshoremen,” WV No. 926 (5 December 2008).] The government’s “war on terror” has long had the ILWU in its sights, yet outrageously the leadership of the ILWU has wrongly supported the maritime security measures under which the two ILWU longshoremen are being prosecuted by the government. The prosecution of Ruffin and Harrison is the bitter fruit of this treacherous policy by the union tops. Outrageously, security guards on the docks, whose job is to police the workforce and enforce the government’s anti-union laws, are members of the ILWU. We say: Security guards out of the unions! Cops out of the unions! Organize the largely immigrant port truckers! At a rally in October in front of the Yolo County courthouse supporting Ruffin and Harrison, an LBL spokesman declared: “The LBL...calls on the union movement to organize the unorganized, like the port truckers, and fight for citizenship rights for all immigrants. Down with the I.C.E. raids!”

Down with Proposition 8! The LBL opposed the reactionary Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. Black working people have been in the forefront of social and class struggle in this country, but the black church has also promoted social backwardness and bigotry when it comes to issues of abortion and homosexual rights. While Obama said Prop 8 was “unnecessary,” his declaration that marriage is a “sacred union” between a man and a woman was exploited in black neighborhoods by the Prop 8 bigots. More than 60 percent of black voters backed Prop 8. We combat every manifestation of homophobic bigotry just as we fight anti-immigrant prejudice among blacks or anti-black racism among immigrants and gays. In America, family law has always been saturated with racism: black slaves were denied legal marriage. One hundred years after the Civil War, some states still barred black-white marriage. Church and state out of our bedrooms! Full democratic rights for homosexuals! Full citizenship rights for immigrants! Finish the Civil War! Forward to a workers state!