Events that clearly reveal bloody class relations Washington and Wall Street prefer to keep obscure are usually written off as tragic, inexplicable, or unexplainable. The Martin murder is one of these events. When the facts in the case became clear, reaction was quick, direct, and had an instantaneous and mass character. Marxists like myself participated along with fellow workers. No amount of media agnosticism about what happened when Martin and Zimmerman intersected on the night of 26 February could deflect the healthy and natural anger at such a clear case of injustice and racism. Normally sarcastic and self-satisfied media figures like Jon Stewart scrambled to reassure their viewers that we would "never really know" what happened before Martin's death, but that it was a tragedy. A comrade of mine with long experience of the injustices of capitalism in the United States pointed out to me that, far from being tragic, the Martin murder was perfectly normal, a predictable if no less outrageous event in a society based upon exploitation, austerity, all manner of oppression, and all varieties of one-sided class war at home and abroad.
All of which makes the response of the Socialist Equality Party, in attempting to liquidate the racial aspects of the Martin murder, all the more distasteful, if not completely unexpected.
On 5 April 2012 the party's website carried a statement entitled "The Killing of Trayvon Martin and racial politics in America." It is written by Joseph Kishore, director of the SEP's 2012 presidential campaign.
The statement begins:
The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida on February 26 has sparked opposition and protests throughout the country. There is widespread popular outrage over the senseless shooting of an unarmed young man, and the fact that his killer, George Zimmerman, has not been arrested or charged with any crime.
The background to the killing of Martin is the promotion of law-and-order vigilantism and the passage of reactionary legislation like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. Police and prosecutors have cited this law in justifying their refusal to take action against Zimmerman.
Is the Martin murder really senseless? In my opinion, there is little difference between Zimmerman and the cops, mercenaries, and soldiers the US government puts on streets at home and abroad, whose job is to harass and terrorize and generally make life hell for workers they happen to meet. Zimmerman, because he was judged too unstable even for the cops, decided to appoint himself a so-called Neighborhood Watch officer, in effect a self-appointed bully and vigilante. Like many others whose mainsprings have been bent by the merciless contradictions of capitalist society, and who have no shred of a sense of solidarity for their fellow man or woman, he was obviously looking to position himself to do some "good" at another's expense. All TV cop shows and all action movies tell the same story. Zimmerman sat at the feet of great teachers, and only carried out their fantasies in the real world.
Kishore writes that the background to the killing is Florida's Stand Your Ground law. But to me the Stand Your Ground law is one small portion of a larger background it is the responsibility of Marxists to explain. Increased social contradictions of poverty and unemployment, the collapse of public education and economic prospects for workers, deskilling and speedup for those who remain employed, and a series of plundering wars abroad are context for the Martin killing. So is the general brutalization of relations between people, the unprecedented levels of violence against Black youth by cops, and an atmosphere of terror at the prospect of Black youth created by laws and rabid 24/7 media.
When I and my co workers began discussing the case, the boldest and most backward immediately asked, "What was he [Trayvon] doing in that neighborhood at night?" The facts were laid out for her with a will, and she retreated, as many working class bigots have done over the last six weeks, from the 'blame the victim' mentality promoted in our class over decades.
Kishore continues:
At the same time, the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression contributes to immense tensions building up in American society, which find expression in different forms, including violent actions by disturbed individuals such as Zimmerman.
Racial prejudice may have played a role in the killing of Martin, who was African-American. The initial public reaction, however, did not focus on race, but rather on the gross injustice involved. As Martin's mother, Sabrina Fulton, put it, "It's not about black and white, it's about right and wrong."
While I am no more a psychologist than the next blogger hobbyist, I agree with Kishore that Zimmerman is disturbed. US society produces by the millions not-so-youngish men with infantile tempers and an inability to mature. Many live at home with their parents instead of striking out on their own; they fetishize violence in films and video games and dream of futures were they will save humanity from slobbering hordes of zombies. [In US culture for the last 45 years the zombie has been an ideological place-holder, of course, for the Black proletariat]. In Afghanistan today such men urinate on the corpses of civilians they murdered in cold blood. Many of them join the cops or become prison guards to lord it over the sheep whom they hold in such contempt. The fact that these sociopaths are typically Caucasian [or White, or whatever sociological shorthand is most comfortable for you], and their victims are not, is another fact of capitalist life in the United States that is seldom mentioned.
In quoting Martin's mother to the effect that this murder is not about "black and white, it's about right and wrong," I think Kishore may be dealing a little from the bottom of the rhetorical deck. Deferring to the victim's parents for scientific insights because they reinforce one's argument really isn't done. Zimmerman's race may not be the issue, but his history of 911 calls that night, and many nights before, clearly indicate that Martin's murder had everything to do with the fact he was Black. Had Zimmerman been waiting for a lone Black teen pedestrian in a hoodie, whom he could maneuver into throwing a punch at him in order to justify homicide? The Stand Your Ground law may have prevented Zimmerman's initial arrest, but had he been arrested there is no guarantee he would have been charged with a crime anyway. Very few cops are ever charged with a crime when they kill with impunity. Zimmerman's actions may have been written-off as a ghastly "tragedy" with only one moral: Black teens should not wear hoodies or go outside.
But the past several weeks have seen a concerted effort by sections of the Democratic Party political establishment and its supporters to seize on the killing of Martin to promote the reactionary politics of racial identity. Toward this end, these forces have put forward a grossly distorted picture of American society, politics and history—one in which race, and not class, is the central issue.
Jesse Jackson, for example, writes in a recent comment in the Guardian, "Racial profiling is all too common in the US, and has led to the killing of a young man." He compares the killing of Martin to that of Emmett Till, brutally murdered by racists in Jim Crow Mississippi in 1955.
Not only is race the basic issue in the killing of Martin, Jackson insists, it is the basic issue in American society.
Since when did feckless, cynical opportunists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton become the main enemy? As a reformed Jackson voter [Class of '88] I am second to no one in appreciating his role in deflecting and shunting any popular struggle into the party of lynchers and atomic bombers, the Democrats; I am second to none in despising Jackson and Sharpton's self-congratulatory and preacherish mode of oration, far from the volcanic simplicity and grandeur of Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, and E. D. Nixon. But if Jackson and Sharpton show up, it means the fire already started, and the most farsighted in the ruling class know they must stick at nothing to prevent mass outrage from finding an independent rank-and-file character.
Because oppression in all its forms in the US is fundamentally a class question, does this mean that people who shine a light on racial profiling or the size of the Black prison population are playing the skin game and muddying the waters? My co workers, Black and white, recognized the racial component of the case immediately. So did bigots; that is why the media bigots have so far been in such disarray about the case, first trying to defend Zimmerman, then trying to defame Martin, then being whipsawed back and forth.
Like many SEP journalists and speakers over the years, Kishore takes special pleasure in targeting the middle class radical left politics of the International Socialist Organization in relation to the Martin case. At this stage, a Marxist criticizing the ISO for their political positions is like the man who sent coals to Newcastle. Greater polemicists have been there and done the good work. Until the class struggle heats up, and the ISOers begin to play a more outright destructive role in actual working class struggles, it is hard to an observer who does not see the ISO as a competitor or an enemy to work up much venom.
Kishore writes, however, with fine invective:
Not only is race the basic issue in the killing of Martin, Jackson insists, it is the basic issue in American society.
The same line is put forward, if anything more crudely and hysterically, by "left" outfits like the International Socialist Organization, one of many middle-class groups for whom race is a virtual obsession. The ISO's Sherry Wolf, in a report on protests in Sanford, quotes uncritically the statements of Jackson, NAACP President Ben Jealous and Al Sharpton. An ISO table set up at a demonstration, she notes, called for an end to the "new Jim Crow," a phrase included in virtually all of the articles on the Martin killing posted on the ISO's web site.
An earlier editorial from the ISO concludes by stating that it is necessary to "put the struggle against racism at the center of all our efforts to win change," while another insists that "every inch of US society is propped up by institutions that are racist and discriminatory to the core."
What is necessary is a "new civil rights movement," the ISO insists—meaning a race-based movement subordinated to the likes of Jesse Jackson and Sharpton, and, therefore, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.
It is noteworthy that in all of the statements of the ISO on the matter, there is virtually no mention of the immense suffering of tens of millions of working people and youth of all races in the US, not to mention the rest of the world. These people are indifferent to the actual plight of working people.
The picture Kishore paints of the ISO as a menacing octopus with arms reaching out to strangle multiple struggles is a different ISO than the one I am familiar with. When joking about them with fellow comrades, for instance, we usually refer to the ISO as the Izod Socialist Organization. They have a reputation for fine casual clothing and cars, unexplained but obviously well-paid employment, and plenty of time to attend conferences; were they not so sophisticated and worldly, I might mistake them for AmWay reps. For their reading group here in Cleveland, Ohio they meet at upscale coffee shops full of ugly local sculpture and hand-made furniture fit for a torture chamber.
As to Sherry Wolf, well, I think she is no different from any of her fellow ISO leaders, except perhaps in the bad taste shown in selecting her nom de guerre. Perhaps more blatantly cynical, as though one can detect the opportunist gears working by her facial expressions; or read her desire to take a hatchet to some OWS kid by the way she rubs her hands together. But she is no Lady Macbeth of the social revolution, I hope. Perhaps for SEP she is a stalking horse for any double-dealing race- and gender-baiting anti-socialist socialist; I ran into a few of those when I tried to join Workers World Party in 2011.
1932 rally in defense of the Scottsboro boys
Kishore's SEP is clearly on-guard against ISO attempting to set the left debate in this country on racial lines. But after 40 years of working class retreat, and concomitant vanguard retreat both programmatically and organizationally, the number of Marxists in the United States able to employ a transitional approach instead of race-baiting in a situation like the Martin case is miniscule. For greater class clarity and greater social weight, see the pickets of locked-out American Crystal Sugar workers, not protesters over the Martin murder. Righteous demands for Zimmerman's arrest, and the recognition of the profoundly racist component to the murder, are not going to be read out of existence by any Trotskyist party.
Kishore goes on to make some useful points about the fertile ground for a rise in class consciousness around the current world depression. He points out the material basis for a greater international scope to this class consciousness thanks to the convergence of living standards for workers in the imperialist and non-imperialist countries.
He then concludes:
The politics of Jackson, Sharpton, the ISO and the entire coterie of "left" supporters of the Democratic Party represents the interests of a layer of the upper-middle class that is deeply worried that it is beginning to lose political control over the working class.
They are seeking to establish the political conditions for once again subordinating the working class to the election of Obama. More fundamentally, their aim is to undermine and preempt any development of independent class consciousness, which poses a threat to the capitalist system. They are exploiting the killing of Trayvon Martin for this deeply reactionary purpose.
The 'political conditions for once again subordinating the working class to the election of Obama' already exist, and the Martin murder and any 'movement' flowing from it will not change this fact in 2012. Against Obama, Sharpton, and Jackson there is, to coin a phrase, no alternative. Right now.
Right now Marxists will have to tail after these eventually meager and ultimately small-bore mass actions, meeting whom we can and making the best impression we can based upon our politics and the expression of our proletarian morality and solidarity. Our newspaper and book sales, the use we make of our election campaigns and the building of our youth groups, are the only proven propaganda methods of rebuilding a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States [or any other country]. Whether Zimmerman spends a minute in jail, and I am not optimistic about the possibility, our eyes must be on helping to expand and promote the class consciousness and combativity of our class. Decrying acknowledgment of racism in Martin's murder is a distraction from that course.
Jay
20120406
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