More than "nonviolence" to defeat of Jim Crow

How Blacks in South defended
themselves against Klan violence
 
BY ARRIN HAWKINS  
In her letter to the editor printed below, reader Wendy Banen asks for examples of armed self-defense by Blacks against the racist violence endemic to Jim Crow. Legal segregation in employment, housing, schools, and other aspects of life was smashed by the mass movement for Black rights in the 1950s and '60s.
Armed defense against racist attacks in the South is a lesser-known part of Blacks' resistance to the Klan, White Citizen councils, and other ultrarightist outfits. Racist violence, condoned by federal and state authorities, was aimed at defending segregation and punishing anyone who opposed it. When faced with Blacks prepared to defend themselves, their property, and the lives of civil rights workers, however, racist vigilantes retreated.

One example is the Union County NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, led by Robert F. Williams. Blacks there starting in 1957 organized armed "civil defense groups" to counter Klan attacks.

"Since the city officials wouldn't stop the Klan, we decided to stop the Klan ourselves," Williams recounts in his book Negroes with Guns. "We started this action out of the need for defense because law and order had completely vanished; because there was no such thing as a 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution in Monroe, N.C."

In 1965, young fighters in McComb, Mississippi, organized all-night armed patrols to deter Klan "joyrides" in Black neighborhoods. McComb was the scene of some of the heaviest Klan violence against the civil rights movement. While hundreds of civil rights workers were participating in Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964, some 16 bombings occurred in McComb.

Members of the Young Socialist Alliance visiting the town met with some of these militants in McComb. "Armed self-defense was actually initiated by two teen-aged girls," Joel Britton wrote in the March 22, 1965, Militant. "They were fed up with the bombings of Negro homes and churches and took to sitting up nights on the porch with guns. When their parents and other adults discovered how the girls were spending their nights, they decided it was a good idea, but shouldn't be left to the youngsters alone to carry on."

Another militant example is the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which was formed in Jonesboro, Louisiana, to protect Blacks from Klan raids. In July 1964, after Blacks tried to implement the Civil Rights Act in public accommodations, a 30-car motorcade of Klansmen rode through the Black neighborhood escorted by the Jonesboro police. "We decided that if the power structure would do that for Klan, then we had better do something for ourselves," said Earnest Thomas, a leader of the Deacons in Jonesboro.

The Deacons had chapters across Louisiana, including in Bogalusa, Baton Rouge, and New Iberia. The group declined by 1968, as desegregation advanced.

Speaking at a Militant Labor Forum in New York in December 1965, Deacons leader Charles Sims said, "We let him [the Klan] know that everywhere the civil rights workers went, he might not see them, he might not know who the Deacons might be, but somewhere close to him we were there."

Deacons for Defense, a 2003 film directed by Bill Duke that dramatizes the story of the group, shows the Deacons succeeding in desegregating a Louisiana saw mill.

Praising the combative example set by the Deacons, an editorial in the June 21, 1965, Militant said, "The Deacons will help the civil rights movement win further victories, by reducing the terror which helps prevent Negroes from winning new rights and exercising rights already won on paper…. Everyone who is for civil rights and Negro equality should give the Deacons every support and encouragement, and should defend their right to exist and grow, free from government harassment."
 
 
Related article:
Letters  

http://www.themilitant.com/2005/6930/693036.html

"Lenin's Final Fight" - Excerpt

....Between late September 1922 and early March 1923, the final months of his active life, Vladimir Lenin led a political battle within the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At stake was nothing less than whether the party would continue advancing along the political course that had brought the Bolshevik-led workers and peasants of the former tsarist empire to power some five years earlier. That victory had opened the door to the first socialist revolution and ushered in a new historical era with prospects for proletarian-led popular revolution not only in Europe but across Asia and beyond.

There was nothing hypothetical about this battle. Lenin fought to win the party's leadership to implement concrete proposals on matters affecting the lives of tens of millions: control over revenues from the Soviet republic's import and export trade; structural changes to facilitate improving the class composition of state and party bodies; a transformation of the organization of agricultural production and exchange; special steps to guarantee equality of rights and self-determination for nations and nationalities formerly oppressed by the tsarist empire; increased political priority and funding of literacy programs and schools as part of broader efforts to open education and culture to the toilers and to party cadres working in government bodies; civil treatment of party members and coworkers as an unqualified precondition for leadership.

The battle was not primarily over economic policy or methods of administration. It was a political fight over the class trajectory of the Soviet republic and Communist Party.

Would the proletariat continue to exercise and strengthen its leadership of state institutions, the party, and economic production and planning? Or would this proletarianization be engulfed and overwhelmed by the growth of petty-bourgeois and newly emerging bourgeois layers, especially in trade and farming, and by their representatives—whether unwitting or not—throughout the state and party apparatus?

How could the worker-peasant alliance on which both the proletarian dictatorship and Communist Party rested—and, in fact, the newly formed Communist International, as well—be reinforced?1 How could that alliance be defended in face of social and economic devastation brought on by civil war and imperialist military intervention? In face of unrelenting pressures resulting from the higher productivity of labor in the imperialist countries as reflected through the world capitalist market? How could working-class leadership of that alliance be fortified, and the peasantry's confidence in the proletariat and support for its course toward socialism be broadened and built on?

What steps had to be taken by the working-class vanguard of the revolution and their party to continue marching forward along the road of proletarian internationalism? Why were the attitudes and conduct of the majority Russian cadres and leaders of the Soviet republic toward oppressed nations and nationalities within the old tsarist empire the acid test of the Communist Party's course toward workers and peasants the world over? Could communists look for new worker and peasant revolutions not only in Europe but elsewhere, following the defeat of the 1918-20 revolutionary wave?....

Read the entire article here:

http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7415/741550.html

Malcolm X, King had clashing class outlooks

http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7408/740861.html

Excerpt:

....it is simply untrue to talk about a political convergence between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. King was a courageous individual who helped lead powerful mobilizations for Black rights, from the time of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 right up until his assassination in 1968… .

Martin Luther King's individual courage is not the question. We're talking about two clashing class outlooks, two irreconcilable political courses.

One of the pieces of "evidence" displayed time and again to support the "Malcolm-Martin" myth is a photograph of the two of them together, smiling, after running into each other by happenstance at the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C., in March 1964—just two weeks after Malcolm announced his break with the Nation of Islam. But there was no political content whatsoever to that chance meeting. As King himself later said in an interview with Alex Haley, "I met Malcolm X once in Washington, but circumstances didn't enable me to talk with him for more than a minute." And King went on in that same January 1965 interview to condemn what he called Malcolm's "fiery, demagogic oratory," charging that "in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice."

That was Martin Luther King's political assessment of the person who was arguably America's greatest single mass revolutionary leader of the middle of the twentieth century.

The actual political relations between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were demonstrated a few months after their unplanned encounter, when King traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, in June 1964. King went there to support activists who had been repeatedly beaten by the Ku Klux Klan and arrested by cops for organizing lunch counter sit-ins and other civil rights protests. The Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson had contemptuously spurned King's call for federal troops to protect the demonstrators and enforce their rights.

On behalf of the newly launched Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm sent a telegram to King at the time saying, "If the federal Government will not send troops to your aid, just say the word and we will immediately dispatch some of our brothers there to organize self-defense units among our people and the Ku Klux Klan will then receive a taste of its own medicine. The day of turning the other cheek to those brute beasts is over."

King flatly rejected Malcolm's offer, calling it a "grave error" and "an immoral approach."

Nor did that political chasm narrow over subsequent months. In early February 1965, Malcolm spoke to a group of three hundred young people at a local church in Selma, Alabama. Since the beginning of 1965, King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had been leading voting rights demonstrations in and around Selma, in the course of which protesters had been subjected to cop brutality and some 3,400 had been arrested. After Malcolm had addressed a meeting of several thousand on February 3 at nearby Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, students there insisted that he go with them to Selma the next day, and Malcolm agreed. King was being held in jail in Selma at the time.  
 
Youth invite Malcolm to Selma
When he spoke to the young people in Selma, Malcolm again condemned the Johnson administration for its refusal to deploy federal troops to protect Blacks fighting for their rights. Malcolm said he was "100 percent for the effort being put forth by the Black folks here" and believed "they have an absolute right to use whatever means are necessary to gain the vote." But he added that he didn't believe in practicing nonviolence in face of violence by organized racist forces. He concluded: "I pray that you will grow intellectually, so that you can understand the problems of the world and where you fit into, in that world picture"—once again the internationalist starting point, "broadening your scope," that Malcolm was always working to promote. And then he continued:

"And I pray that all the fear that has ever been in your heart will be taken out, and when you look at that man, if you know he's nothing but a coward, you won't fear him. If he wasn't a coward, he wouldn't gang up on you… . They put on a sheet so you won't know who they are—that's a coward. No! The time will come when that sheet will be ripped off. If the federal government doesn't take it off, we'll take it off." …

The young people in Selma met Malcolm's talk with uproarious applause. But that wasn't the response of SCLC leaders. Malcolm described their reaction in a speech to a February 15 meeting of the OAAU at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, less than a week before he was gunned down in that same hall.

"King's man didn't want me to talk to [the youth]," Malcolm said. Malcolm was referring in particular to the current Democratic Party mayor of this very city [Atlanta], Andrew Young—a former U.S. congressman from here, and also U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter administration. In Selma that day, Young had schemed unsuccessfully with Coretta Scott King to stop Malcolm from being given a microphone.

"They told me they didn't mind me coming in and all of that," Malcolm told the OAAU meeting—but they didn't want him to talk, because "they knew what I was going to say." The young people, both from Selma and from Tuskegee, however, "insisted that I be heard… . This is the only way I got a chance to talk to them."

You don't have to take Malcolm's word for it. King, who was in jail when Malcolm was in Selma, said, shortly after the assassination: "I couldn't block his coming, but my philosophy was so antithetical to the philosophy of Malcolm X—so diametrically opposed, that I would never have invited Malcolm X to come to Selma when we were in the midst of a nonviolent demonstration, and this says nothing about the personal respect I had for him. I disagreed with his philosophy and his methods." …

So, no, there was not a "Malcolm-Martin" convergence during that last year. To the contrary, the divergence widened, as there was a clarification of Martin Luther King's conviction that capitalism and its injustices could be reformed. Meanwhile, Malcolm never stopped advancing in his commitment to the need for the oppressed and working people of all skin colors, continents, and countries to join together in revolutionary struggle against the capitalist world order responsible for racism, rightist violence, the oppression of women, economic exploitation, and war.
....

Israel, Palestine, BDS, and the road to workers power

If you are in the NYC area, please attend a public forum on this topic:

NEW YORK
Manhattan
Class Struggle and Social Contradictions in Israel Today
Speaker: Lea Sherman, Socialist Workers Party
Fri., Jan. 24, 7:30 p.m.
545 Eighth Ave., between 37th and 38th St., Room 1410
Tel.: (212) 629-6649

And please read and share thoughts on this important article:

Israel boycott weakens fights of Palestinians, workers

False apartheid analogy distracts from real class struggle in Israel, Palestinian territories

(commentary)

BY SETH GALINSKY 

The Dec. 15 vote by the American Studies Association to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions has been hailed as a victory by those who see the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign as a way to force the Israeli government to end its occupation of Arab lands, obtain full equality for Palestinians in Israel, and win the right of return for Palestinians who lost their homes in Israel. However, the boycott campaign is an obstacle to these and other fights by working people in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The Association for Asian American Studies backed the boycott in April and the Modern Language Association debated the question at its Chicago convention this month.

Leaders of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel contend that Israel is the world’s unique pariah nation today, similar to the white-supremacist apartheid state of South Africa that was overthrown in the early 1990s. They say their effort is modeled on the campaign for international sanctions against apartheid but they say nothing about the mass struggle organized by the African National Congress, which was the key to the democratic revolution in South Africa.

While the expression “Israeli apartheid” has become accepted by some who support the Palestinian struggle, the analogy is false.

Both apartheid South Africa and Israel have roots as settler colonies and bulwarks of imperialism in underdeveloped regions of the world. But the two are otherwise quite different in key respects. South African apartheid set out to exploit the labor of the rightless Black majority to create superprofits for the capitalist class. The founders of Israel sought to expel as much of the Arab majority as they could and make their profits by creating an almost all-Jewish working class.

Israel today is the most economically and socially developed capitalist nation-state in the Middle East, with a large proletariat and substantial middle-class layers. Its power is backed by the most formidable military in the region. And despite its original goal of expelling the Palestinians, they make up more than 20 percent of its citizens. Israeli capitalism exploits Jewish, immigrant and Palestinian labor, including from the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

At the same time Israel is a bourgeois democracy, which affords working people a degree of political rights and space to organize and act in their class interests that for the most part does not exist elsewhere in the region. Like other developed capitalist nations, it is full of class antagonisms and social contradictions.

Apartheid: a state of ‘white race’
Apartheid South Africa was not a nation in any meaningful sense but a state of the “white race.” Less than 20 percent of the population living in the territories under its control — those defined by law as persons “of the white race” — had rights of citizenship. Blacks could not vote, change jobs at will or own land. They had to carry government-issued passes at all times and could not travel from one side of a town to the other without permission.

Anytime the government chose, it could send unruly African workers back to isolated Bantustans, so-called homelands in impoverished rural areas.

Apartheid prevented the formation of a modern nation. It institutionalized racial and tribal differentiations and blocked development of modern classes, including a hereditary working class among Blacks.

Following World War II, South Africa’s rulers were largely successful in implementing their vision of this unique system of capitalist wage slavery under feudal-like forms of subjugation. Its success was its downfall. Such blatant and socially explosive contradictions became impossible to hold together.

The Israeli rulers’ goal was very different: the removal of the Arab inhabitants and the setting up an all-Jewish nation from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. Today they have abandoned this failed vision and instead are looking for ways to adjust their borders and maintain an Israel with a Jewish majority.

In the West Bank, the Israeli government has built a wall between Jewish and Arab areas, and constantly encroaches on Palestinian territory with settlements. It keeps the Gaza Strip blockaded, preventing Palestinians there from working in Israel and from normal trade and travel relations with the rest of the world. This reinforces their dependence on handouts from the United Nations and other agencies, stunting development of the class struggle.

Palestinian citizens of Israel face systematic discrimination in jobs, education, government services, land ownership and housing.

At the same time Jews and Arabs inside Israel can ride the same buses, go to the same universities, work in many of the same factories, belong to the same unions and fight side by side for better wages and conditions. Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel were both part of social protests over housing and inflation that swept the country in the summer of 2011.

Opens door to anti-Semitism’
Israeli law professor Amir Paz-Fuchs told the Militant by phone from Oxford, England, Dec. 30 that he supported the boycott movement when he lived in Israel out of “frustration.”

“I felt like we had worked over the last 30 years to get the government to stop its most flagrant violations and have failed miserably,” he said. “We thought anything you can do to get the Israeli government to change, we thank you for it.”

But after taking a post at the University of Oxford he has begun to question the tactic. “A physics professor here refused to accept a doctoral student because he came from Israel,” he said. “I’m probably one of the last people to bring up anti-Semitism, but it reeks of that.”

Paz-Fuchs raises an important point. The Jewish question does not go away and capitalism remains a death trap for the Jewish people. Anti-Semitism, Jew-hatred and conspiracy theories, dredged up from the past, seek to get working people to scapegoat Jews for the crisis of capitalism and divert their attention from the real enemy: the bosses and their system of exploitation. Bending to anti-Semitism poses a danger to the working class and to the Palestinian struggle.

Joining debate ‘more powerful’
In 2011 British novelist Ian McEwan was invited to Israel to accept the Jerusalem prize for literature. He refused to heed calls to boycott the invitation. Instead, in a speech widely reported on in Israel, McEwan denounced the Israeli government for the “continued evictions and relentless purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, the process of the right of return granted to Jews but not to Arabs” as well as for turning Gaza into “a long-term prison camp.” He also criticized Hamas for embracing “the nihilism of the suicide bomber, of rockets fired blindly into towns, and the nihilism of the extinctionist policy towards Israel.”

“What he did was so much more powerful and took more courage than refusing to come,” Paz-Fuchs said.

The boycott campaign is based on “the logic of pressure, not diplomacy, persuasion, or dialogue,” Lisa Taraki, a leader of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, said in an August 2011 interview in al Jazeera. “No amount of ‘education’ of Israelis about the horrors of occupation and other forms of oppression seems to have turned the tide.”

But just as there are two Americas — the America of the wealthy capitalist property owners and the America of the working class — there are two Israels. Similar class divisions exist within the Palestinian territories.

Viewing all Israelis — and Taraki means Israeli Jews — as enemies and Israel as a special apartheid state that must be destroyed, blocks Palestinians from winning potential allies among working people of all nationalities and religious beliefs. It can also provide cover for Jew-hatred to hide and fester, whatever the intentions of boycott supporters.

This can be seen in the boycott campaign against the G4S private security firm for equipping Israeli prisons in the West Bank. But G4S also equips prisons in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and in the United States. Are U.S. prisons, or those in Saudi Arabia for that matter, a better model for their treatment of workers and oppressed people behind bars than Israel?

The Israel boycott campaign stands in contrast to the revolutionary course followed during the fight against apartheid. The African National Congress won leadership of the vast majority of Africans in struggle on the basis of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which called for a South Africa that “belongs to all who live in it, Black and white.” And they meant it. That course ensured victory by winning support among all nationalities, including a substantial number of Caucasians, to the side of the ANC.

But there is no revolutionary leadership in Israel or the Palestinian territories today. Hamas and Fatah, which claim to speak in the name of Palestinians, are bourgeois organizations that are obstacles to the struggle. They don’t have a program that offers a way forward for the Palestinians, much less one that can attract allies among Jewish, African immigrants and other workers in Israel.

This doesn’t mean the fights for Palestinian rights and against national oppression should wait for other developments in the class struggle. But it will not succeed in the long run unless it wins allies among working people inside Israel. And any advance in the Palestinian struggle must be championed by the labor movement in Israel if workers there are to break down divisions fostered by the bosses that keep them hamstrung.

Palestinian working people, not the Palestinian bourgeoisie, are the motor force for the liberation struggle and the fights for Palestinian rights that are going on today: from fights against job and housing discrimination inside Israel to the fight by Bedouins in the Negev to remain on the land they have lived on for decades, to fights against the West Bank wall and the economic embargo of Gaza, for water rights and to win freedom for Palestinian political prisoners in Israel’s jails.

Because Israel is the most developed capitalist country in the region, with a powerful multinational working class, there are more opportunities than ever for advancing these fights.

But the boycott campaign’s schema of Israeli apartheid leaves its supporters disoriented and unable to embrace real developments in the class struggle in Israel, like the ongoing fight of Sudanese and Eritrean immigrants for refugee status.

The road forward for working people is not the “destruction of Israel” — anymore than the “destruction” of the U.S. or Russia — but the forging of a revolutionary movement and a communist leadership of Jewish, Arab and immigrant workers and farmers that will advance the fight for Palestinian national rights and lead working people to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers in Israel and the region.

A revolutionary government will invite Palestinians scattered throughout the world to return to their homeland. And in the face of rising rightist movements as capitalism’s crisis of production and trade deepens, it will open its doors to Jews fleeing reaction anywhere in the world.

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7803/780356.html

Greasing the skids toward Bonapartism

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7802/780250.html

Excerpt:


Big government bad for workers

Contrary to popular misconception, the revolutionary communist movement is not for “big government,” whether it’s a government representing the state power of the capitalist exploiters or a revolutionary government of workers and farmers.

The false view has developed as a result of the massive, repressive state that was put in place in the Soviet Union following the counterrevolutionary usurpation of power by a privileged bureaucratic layer led by Josef Stalin in the 1920s.

Writing on the lessons of the 72-day Paris Commune where the working-class in 1871 held political power for the first time, communist leader Karl Marx said, “The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure — the standing army and the state functionarism.”

The goal of the revolutionary workers movement is to overthrow and dismantle the rulers’ repressive apparatus and administrative bureaucracy. The political power of the working class and its allies that will replace this state will have no need for some big central government to administer society.

Through the revolutionary struggle for power and without the fetters and stifling conditions of capitalist rule, working people will transform themselves into self-confident men and women capable of organizing to meet the material and cultural needs of humanity and solve what had been insurmountable social problems. And they will do this starting at the most basic local level, not through top-down administration.

In this sense the communist view is also the opposite of that put forward by the liberal meritocracy, which seeks to promote greater dependency among working people on a supposed benevolent government and its administrative agencies.

Sawant, elections, and the road to workers power

My hiatus from political blogging will probably continue for some time. 

But this excellent exposition by my old party, the SWP, cannot go unmarked.  It encapsulates an analysis of the current situation very well.

Does election of Seattle socialist, unionists in Ohio strengthen labor?
(front page, commentary)

BY JOHN STUDER 
A number of newspapers and online publications of various middle-class radicals and socialists on the U.S. left have extolled the recent electoral wins by Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative candidate for Seattle City Council, and two dozen City Councilors in Lorain County, Ohio, who ran on a ticket under the auspices of the local union federation. For some, the election of left Democrat Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York is included.

The question is, do any of these electoral victories represent an advance for the working class and its allies? Do they strengthen workers capacity to fight the bosses? Do they further the self-confidence, class consciousness and organization of labor? Do they move toward independent working-class political action?

In the absence of working-class struggles strong enough to transform our labor unions and lay the basis for a social movement that can challenge the bosses political power, the answer is no. Without this, and lacking a revolutionary program, these elections only nurture workers’ illusions in democratic forms of capitalist rule and provide them with left cover.

Kshama Sawant, an economics professor, ran for the nonpartisan Seattle City Council position No. 2, winning with 50.67 percent in a two-candidate race, with no Republican running. With a “practical” focus on getting elected, she campaigned around three central demands: “$15-an-hour minimum wage, a rent control ordinance to make housing affordable, and a tax on millionaires to fund transit, education and other public services.”

Sawant’s campaign flyers bore the headline “Make Seattle affordable for all” and featured an endorsement calling her a “rarity — a progressive candidate who is principled, articulate, competent, smart, and fearless.” She presented herself as an “activist,” highlighting her involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. She said she was speaking for the 99 percent against the 1 percent, running “so that working people finally have real representation.”

Constrained to the narrow boundaries that typify capitalist election contests for local offices, her literature avoided important political issues that affect all workers, such as high unemployment and a woman’s right to choose abortion. It made no mention of key international issues, Syria, the place of the Cuban Revolution, the common interests of working people worldwide against the bosses or the global crisis of capitalism that is driving their attacks against us.

“Sawant pushed the discussion in all races to the left — just as the Tea Party has pushed rightward elsewhere,” noted the Freedom Socialist Party.

The observation is accurate. In a similar fashion, de Blasio’s campaign helped carve out space for a growing socialist wing of the Democratic Party.

But a shift in bourgeois electoral politics to the left does nothing to advance political action on the part of the working class — which takes place in the streets, not at the ballot box. Electoral politics is not the arena for the working class — it’s the arena for the bosses and the labor officialdom. Getting workers to orient in that direction is the employing classes’ strongest weapon.

A major aspect of liberal and bourgeois-socialist politics is geared toward promoting the notion that the capitalist government can play a benevolent role with the right people in office pushing the right policies — a perspective that fosters attitudes of dependency.

Some middle-class socialist groups have in recent years pulled back from running for office themselves, burned out from previous exertions that didn’t produce the quick gains they were looking for. In 2013, the Freedom Socialist Party did not run in Seattle, their base. The Party for Socialism and Liberation did not run for mayor in New York.

Today, a number of the same socialist groups are united in pointing to elections as a key arena where workers and “activists” should focus attention. “On election night Sawant’s supporters, including this writer, gathered to watch returns,” the FSP’s Linda Averill wrote. There were “socialists of all stripes: independents, the FSP, SA, and International Socialist Organization (ISO). In the electoral arena, such collaboration is historic in recent times.”

This attempt to reap gains through a “practical” electoral focus is an attempt to look to something other than real politics — the actions of the working class and the hard road of struggle ahead. These groups, with their attraction to Occupy, no longer look to the working class as the engine of revolutionary change. They lack confidence that through experiences in class combat working people will forge a leadership of their own, gain political clarity and transform themselves into the kind of men and women capable of fighting to end the dictatorship of capital and replace it, from the ground up, with the political power of the toiling majority.

The electoral farce, in contrast, drags workers deeper into the trap of seeing their involvement in politics as a matter of choosing among a list of candidates who they hope will make things better for them.

Much of the left acts on the conviction that the heterogeneous and diffuse Occupy protests, which began and peaked in 2011, represented the growth of a new social movement for progressive change. The idea led to disillusionment in face of Occupy’s inevitable evaporation and cooption by the left of the Democratic Party. But today such hopes have been rekindled in growing excitement about new possibilities in electoral politics.

“It has been said that what happened in Seattle was that Occupy went to the polls,” Jason Netek wrote in the ISO’s Socialist Worker.

“Working people and the poor and all those fighting oppression need to start running pro-worker, anti-corporate independent candidates as part of forming a new, genuine party of the left, which will represent the interests of the 99%,” Socialist Alternative wrote.

In some cases this perspective has been marked by critical attraction to the de Blasio campaign. “He talked explicitly about the vast inequality between rich and poor in the city,” Socialist Alternative said. “In a distorted way, he has articulated the anger of the working class against Bloomberg and the rich elite.”

Ohio labor ticket
“Union-dense Lorain County, Ohio, is now home to an independent labor slate of two dozen newly elected city councilors recruited and run by the central labor council,” Bruce Bostick, a long-time leader of the Communist Party USA, wrote in the Dec. 4 Labor Notes.

The ticket was launched in response to an effort to break city unions by Democratic Mayor Chase Ritenauer and a number of incumbent Democrat city councilors. Its purpose was to mount left pressure on the Democratic Party. “Running independent wasn’t our first choice, but hopefully this can help bring the Democratic leaders to their senses,” Bostick quotes Machinist Art Thomas as saying. The meeting of the Lorain Central Labor Council after the election voted to buy a table at the upcoming Democratic Party dinner and to donate to the campaign of Matt Lundy, the party’s candidate for county commissioner.

What made possible the elections of Sawant and the Lorain labor ticket was a shift in workers’ thinking today under the impact of the bosses’ drive to foist the crisis of capitalism on our backs. What workers need is a clear class explanation of the roots of the crisis in the dictatorship of capital and a discussion on how to build a movement to overthrow it.

To advance this discussion, The Socialist Workers Party selectively runs candidates in U.S. elections today, with a focus on the highest offices to better engage in a discussion on the biggest political questions facing workers and their allies.

The party uses its election campaigns as a subordinate component of broader propaganda work, taking the Militant newspaper door to door in working-class neighborhoods in cities and rural areas. It uses them with a cold eye to the fact that the central political prop of the capitalist rulers is the idea that their ballot box gives us a choice in how we are ruled.

In a time of rising class struggle, one expression of independent labor action that could arise would be a labor party based in the street battles and combat organizations of the working class. Its purpose would be to mobilize the broadest involvement of workers and their allies in the struggles of the day, seeking to forge solidarity among combatants and advance the fight for workers’ power.

It would not be an electoral party whose goal was to hold posts in the capitalist government. History is full of such examples that in the end served to buttress capitalist rule.

The mighty revolutions of our epoch — in Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959 — weren’t won through elections, but by the actions of millions in the streets.

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7747/774704.html

Capitalist monsters under the bed

http://socialistworker.org/2013/10/31/capitalist-monsters-under-the-bed