Racism is standard for capitalist America

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(Above) Socialist Action supporters at April 11 rally in Oakland, Calif., for political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Some 120 people demanded, “No execution by medical default!” A recent report by activist Susanne Ross, who visited Mumia in the prison infirmary on May 28, indicated that he appears to be slowly recovering from health problems associated with acute diabetes. Mumia was still in a wheelchair because his swollen feet and legs make it painful to stand. Ross reported, “Mumia spoke energetically and his mood was very positive. He spoke of how close to death he had been. Had there not been an international outcry about the lack of appropriate treatment, in fact AGAINST the “treatment” that was bringing him so close to death, he was sure he “Baltimore: We Have Been Here Before”—that is the title of a perceptive piece by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Of course, every such uprising like the one sparked by the death of Freddie Gray while in custody of the Bal­ timore police has some unique features. Perhaps the most bizarre was the decision to play the first Major League Baseball game in history without a live audi­ ence (Orioles beat the White Sox 8-2) and the shifting of a series with the Tampa Bay Rays to St. Petersburg, where Baltimore played as the “home team.”

A more substantial—and encouraging—difference was the gutsy move by a young prosecutor to prompt­ ly file criminal charges against six cops involved in the “rough ride” homicide of Gray after his illegal arrest.

The Rev. Jackson, aware of the different response in Baltimore, reminds us of the underlying similarities not only to the recent protests against killings of Black men by police in Ferguson, Staten Island, Tulsa, and other places but also a landmark study produced be­ fore most readers were born.

He writes, “In 1968, after race riots had erupted in Watts, Chicago, Detroit and Newark, Lyndon Johnson convened the Kerner Commission to investigate the causes of the riots. The Kerner Report described a nation ‘moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.’ It called for better train­ ing for the police, but also for new jobs, new housing, an end to de facto segregation. Police misbehavior was often the match that sparked the eruption, but there would be no answer without fundamental change.

“Baltimore and America have changed, but for too many in our ghettos and barrios, the reality is the same. The New York Times reports on 1.5 million ‘missing black men,’ one of every six aged 24 to 54 who have disappeared from civic life. They are either dead or locked away. Jobs have dried up as manufac­ turing plants closed and were shipped abroad. Mass incarceration—with African Americans still suffering from racial profiling and injustice—destroys possi­ bility. The official black unemployment rate is twice that of whites, but that does not even count those who want a job but have given up trying to find one.”

In addition to the enormous losses in decent paying union jobs once held by African Americans in manu­ facturing—which more than offset the modest prog­ ress for a while under affirmative action in education and employment—not mentioned by Rev. Jackson in this article are the setbacks in the public sector. This erosion of an important source of good jobs for Af­ rican Americans has accelerated on the watch of the first Black president with massive cuts in the Postal Service and Social Security community offices.

The Obama administration’s attacks on public edu­ cation have also hit Black educators particularly hard.

The pressures of teaching to the test to avoid loss of funding under the rewards and punishments of Race to the Top were dramatically and ruthlessly revealed in Atlanta. Some teachers, with the knowledge of top administrators, allegedly gave improper help to stu­ dents during testing. If true, while understandable, it was wrong—and reprimands, even suspensions, could have been expected.

Instead, a 2013 Grand Jury indicted 35 mostly Black teachers, principals, and the superintendent on rack­ eteering charges. Most took plea deals to avoid the legal expenses of a trial. Two died before they could be tried. Eight were recently convicted and received prison sentences of up to seven years—more than most violent offenders get for a first offense. And a whole lot more than the community service sentence received by the former four-star general and CIA di­ rector who leaked secret documents to his non-vetted mistress-biographer.

By just about any important measure you choose— employment, income, savings, housing, health care, accessible transit, accessible grocery stores, quality schools, affordable higher education—African-Ameri­ cans are worse off today than when the Kerner Report was issued nearly 47 years ago.

... Climate (continued from page 6: “The climate in crisis: This changes everything!”) compulsion to indiscriminate growth, but that capital­ ism turns labor power and nature into commodities. It drives an individualized consumerism that is incompat­ ible with collective values. It is insensitive to the envi­ ronment. After all, for capital, nature is an input, and the full costs of how it is exploited by any corporation are someone else’s problem.

A system based on private ownership of production can’t support the kind of planning that could avert envi­ would not be alive today.”

And the “match of police misbehavior” is now more like a flame-thrower. Dr. Martin Luther King opposed riots for both moral and strategic reasons, but he understood them and recognized their violence was different than that of police and white supremacists. Shortly before his murder—which ignited a wave of big riots—he famously said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

We need to do more than just say “we hear you.” This is not just a “Black problem.” African Americans are overwhelmingly working class and that alone makes their injuries our concern. And while Blacks may have claim to being the worst oppressed of all workers, there are plenty of pale pigment that share many of their just complaints.

Not far from the ghetto where Freddie Gray lived is a slum known as Billy Town. The name came from the pejorative “hillbilly” used by Baltimore cops to iden­ tify poor whites from West Virginia who came to Bal­ timore for jobs during World War II. The subsequent deindustrialization of Baltimore left them and their progeny facing similar economic challenges—and re­ lations with the police—as poor Blacks.

Dr. King recognized that such groups should be natu­ ral allies and he devoted a lot of attention in his final years to building a Poor People’s movement that could unite them. The Rev. Jackson has undertaken similar projects through Operation Push, including reaching out to not so poor predominantly white unions on oc­ casion.

Last Friday [May 1], several Minneapolis unions or­ ganized a May Day march and rally as part of Interna­ tional Worker’s Day. That holiday with American roots has long been ignored by the mainstream labor move­ ment in this country, but Minneapolis is noted for of­ ten going against the current, and there were other labor-endorsed actions in several cities.

This year, there was an added dimension, as de­ scribed by Barb Kucera on Workday Minnesota, “Young workers were in the forefront at a Twin Cities ronmental catastrophe. The owners of capital are com­ pelled by competition to look after their own interests first. Any serious central planning would have to over­ ride property rights—an action they would resist.

This is the crucial point, because if we conclude that the environment can’t be regenerated under capital­ ism, then this is what becomes the great game-changer. Instead of lobbying corporations and states to modify their behaviour within capitalism, we must organize ourselves to replace the system.

We need to fight as hard as possible for reforms that limit environmental damage, but such a battle for re­ forms must be used to build a movement, led by a party, that can take us beyond capitalism. May Day event that brought together advocates of the worker rights, immigrant rights and Black Lives Mat­ ter movements. … The day’s actions are ‘not just about staying alive’ in the face of police brutality, but ‘also about making sure we have the wage to take care of ourselves and our families,’ said Mica Grimm, an orga­ nizer for Black Lives Matter.

“Thirty-four-year-old Luke Fahey, wearing a ‘Black Lives Matter’ t-shirt, stood by his bicycle as the May Day marchers gathered. He said there is an ‘intersec­ tionality’ among the issues raised by the demonstra­ tors, which included calls for higher wages, drivers’ licenses for undocumented workers and an end to violence by law enforcement. ‘I believe it goes beyond just police brutality and fair treatment of workers’ to larger concerns like corporate power.”

Such steps are important and need to be expanded. But the fundamental problems require political ac­ tion that can lead to a government run by worker ad­ vocates in the interest of the working-class majority. Dr. King was studiously nonpartisan. Rev. Jackson has devoted his life to reform of the Democrats. And now the “independent socialist” Senator Sanders wants to lead us into the Democrat primaries as Rev. Jackson did in the Eighties.

“No Justice, No Peace” is a popular slogan in move­ ments for social change. We will find neither in the party whose nomination the “socialist” Senator seeks. It is the party of war abroad and attacks on civil liber­ ties at home. It brought us NAFTA and now peddles TPP. It has championed fracking while wrecking the prospects for climate agreements.

It is the party that twice imprisoned Eugene V. Debs, who learned his lesson the first time and did just the opposite of Bernie Sanders—Debs left the Dems to be­ come a Socialist. It has been, in fact, the graveyard of progressive causes for over a century.

Class matters. Our future depends on uniting those who work or seek work for a living on the job, in the streets—and in a party of our own. n Sadly, Klein doesn’t offer a political strategy. She in­ vests her hope in an amorphous movement to replace “extreme,” neo-liberal capitalism with a regulated, be­ nign capitalism. She doesn’t recognize the existence of a class struggle in which the choices are more starkly posed.

To save civilization, humanity, and life on Earth, capi­ talism must be eradicated. It will take a revolution to do that. There can be no revolution without a revolution­ ary party. A revolutionary party is not self-proclaimed. It must earn recognition as such by millions of workers. A full programme and sustained revolutionary practice in support of it is absolutely required. Socialism or bar­ barism—the choice couldn’t be clearer. n SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 2015 5