White House Sacks Mumia Supporter

White House “green jobs” advisor Van Jones was unceremoniously dumped by the Obama administration on Labor Day weekend, nominally over his signing a 9/11 conspiracy-theory petition in 2004 calling for an investigation of the Bush administration. Jones’s resignation had been preceded by a weeks-long campaign by Fox News attack dog Glenn Beck that escalated after ColorOfChange.org, a group Jones helped launch in 2005, organized an advertising boycott campaign of Beck’s show to protest his calling Obama a “racist.” The ravings of Beck and the right-wing blogosphere claimed (falsely) that Jones is some kind of closet black radical or even a “Marxist.”

In 1994 Van Jones, one year out of Yale Law School, helped form the now-defunct San Francisco Bay Area group STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement). Despite its radical pretensions, STORM’s liberal activism was neither “Marxist” nor “communist.” In the following decade, Jones moved on to become a “green jobs” anti-poverty advocate who embraced the capitalist market. He wrote a 2008 best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy, and subsequently took a post with the Obama government. The right-wing drumbeat over his long-ago left posturing and the more recent 9/11 petition was an embarrassment to the Democratic White House. But Van Jones became an intractable liability when, as the Washington Post (6 September) noted, “his advocacy on behalf of death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal…threatened to develop into a fresh point of controversy.”

Mumia is an innocent man who has been imprisoned on death row for nearly three decades. A former Black Panther Party spokesman and supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE organization, he was framed up and convicted of the 1981 killing of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Since then, one court after another has refused to even consider the massive amount of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner (see Partisan Defense Committee Fact Sheet Big Lies in the Service of Legal Lynching).

As Marxists, we don’t care whether or not Obama has Van Jones in his administration. And it’s hardly surprising that Obama would dump anyone even remotely associated with Mumia, a man the American ruling class wants to see entombed for life or dead. Yet reformist groups like Workers World Party (WWP), which hailed Obama’s election as “a triumph for the Black masses and all the oppressed” (Workers World, 20 November 2008), appeal to the White House for “justice” for Mumia. A September 9 e-mail by a leading member of the moribund Bay Area group, Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, dropped even a pretense to “labor action.” Bemoaning the right-wing backlash, the e-mail explained that “a few current Mumia supporters” had thought that Van Jones could be prodded to “set Obama straight on Mumia’s case” and “whisper something a bit more positive in Obama’s ear.” This is the same Obama who in 2008, while professing ignorance over Mumia’s case, nonetheless assured right-wing radio broadcaster Michael Smerconish, “In my mind, if somebody killed a police officer, they deserve the death penalty or life in prison.”

For years, the liberals and reformists have peddled illusions in the capitalist courts, calling for a “new,” “fair” trial for Mumia from the very courts that knowingly convicted this innocent man. Today, with judicial appeals all but exhausted, they seek to place Mumia’s fate in the hands of Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder. The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (ICFFMAJ), the International Action Center, initiated by WWP, and the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) are all now petitioning Holder “to immediately commence a civil rights investigation to examine the many examples of egregious and racist prosecutorial and judicial misconduct.” Obama’s answer was to ax Van Jones.

While advocating that every legal avenue be pursued on Mumia’s behalf, we have warned against illusions in capitalist “justice.” Our fight to free Mumia and abolish the racist death penalty is rooted in the revolutionary perspective of winning the working class to the understanding that the bourgeois state is not some “neutral” agency that serves society as a whole but rather exists to defend the rule and profits of the capitalist class against the exploited and oppressed.

This perspective stands in sharp counterposition to the illusions peddled by the liberals and reformists. Outside the NAACP convention in July, where Obama and Holder were keynote speakers, the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) held a banner pleading: “Obama & Holder
We Need You Now! Free Mumia.” As we wrote in “Mumia Is an Innocent Man! Free Him Now!” (WV 941, 28 August):

“Who are they appealing to? Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism—the most bloody and rapacious imperialist power on the face of the planet—and the overseer of the slaughter of countless peoples in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. His attorney general is the warden-in-chief of the prison dungeons holding political prisoners such as Mumia and over two million people, disproportionately blacks and Latinos. It would be hard to find a more savage indictment of the reformists’ fundamental belief in the ‘democracy’ of capitalist class rule.”