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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/highest-US-court-upholds-fascist-anti-immigrant-law-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Highest U.S. Court Upholds
Fascist Anti-Immigrant Law

On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Arizona’s fascist anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, unanimously upholding the reactionary centerpiece of the law that critics have called its “show me your papers provision.” The Court also ruled by a 5-3 vote that three other parts of the law were unconstitutional. The ruling is a huge attack on immigrants in Arizona, as well as the rest of the people in this country, and it is a continuation of the oppressive and fearful conditions immigrants are forced to live under in the U.S.

Russell Pearce, the former Arizona State senator who wrote SB 1070, applauded the ruling in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying “the parts of the law that they didn’t uphold were not the meat of the law” and were not important to its implementation. (Wall Street Journal online, June 25, 2012)

SB 1070—The Horror of “show me your papers”

As the effective date of SB 1070 drew near in 2010, there were widespread reports of immigrants pulling their children out of school, staying away from work, fearing to catch the bus or go to the grocery store. Now the Supreme Court has given the green light for the program to go full-steam ahead, and as National Public Radio has reported, this is now having a “chilling effect” on people in Arizona.

What we said in 2010, in Revolution #208 (July 25, 2010), about this law remains true after this ruling:

“This law is an ugly, radically reactionary leap beyond the already intolerable conditions immigrants without papers face in this country. This law demonizes and outlaws people who are from Mexico or Latin America, or look like they may be from Mexico or Latin America, or indeed from any other country from which immigrants come. The law requires that police demand proof of legal residency from anyone they ‘stop, detain or arrest’ if police suspect that person is an undocumented immigrant. Many legal residents as well as citizens are going to be subjected to interrogation by the police because they ‘fit the description’—that is, if you are dark-skinned; have an accent; wear a certain style of clothes; or live in the ‘immigrant’ part of town.”

Since SB 1070 was signed into law in Arizona, 30 states have introduced overtly racist and cruel anti-immigrant legislation using SB 1070 as a model. And now with “show me your papers” being legalized by the Supreme Court, we can expect that the Arizona nightmare for immigrants will become a reality in many other states.

SB 1070—The law and the ruling

SB 1070 became Arizona law in the summer of 2010. The stated purpose of its backers was to drive undocumented immigrants—those who came to Arizona to work in back-breaking, low-paying jobs—out of the state by “attrition through enforcement.” This was a radical, reactionary leap beyond the already intolerable conditions faced by immigrants without papers in this country. The centerpiece of the law was a provision that you could be stopped by the authorities and, if they suspected you were not a legal resident, they required that you show proof, and then could arrest you in order to determine your immigration status.

Revolution newspaper was in Arizona during Arizona Freedom Summer 2010 where we learned about the terror-like conditions people live under:

“An immigrant told us what it’s like getting ready to go to work on Monday morning, the hesitation before you leave, knowing that a stop by the police, at any moment and for whatever reason—like your car being parked wrong—could mean you won’t make it back home, and then what will happen to your children? We heard a story from one person about a carload of five youth being stopped by the police for a broken headlight and when they protested that there was nothing wrong with the headlight, the cops smashed it in. None of the young men had papers and all were taken in....” (Revolution #206, July 4, 2010)

Right after being signed into law, four parts of SB 1070 were disputed by the federal government and were enjoined (put on hold) by a federal judge. The other draconian measures of the law were not disputed and went into effect.

The four provisions that were enjoined and fought out all the way to the Supreme Court had nothing to do with ending any of the inhumane conditions that undocumented people face daily or ending the obvious racial profiling that takes place while enforcing the “show me your papers” part of the law. Those provisions were challenged on the grounds of whether the federal government or the State of Arizona had the jurisdiction to make and enforce these laws or, as the New York Times put it, “on the asserted conflicts between state law and federal immigration laws and policies...” (“Blocking Parts of Arizona Law, Justices Allow Its Centerpiece,” June 25, 2012)

In the same decision in which the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the “show me your papers” provision, it split 5-3 to strike down three other provisions of the law. One section would have criminalized the failure to carry immigration papers; a second made it a crime to apply for work; and the third would make it a crime to be in the U.S. without legal papers.

The argument that state law is preempted by federal law was upheld because, in these three areas, the federal government already has in place laws that deal with “alien registration,” “combating the employment of illegal aliens,” and when it is and is not a crime “for a removable alien to remain in the United States.” Therefore, the majority of the Court ruled that Arizona does not need these sections, not because they infringe on the rights of immigrants, but because they “are preempted” (already exist) in federal law.

Unity and Disagreement in the Ruling Class

The ruling class as a whole recognizes that they face an unsolvable problem in that their system requires a cheap, flexible labor force that undocumented workers provide; but on the other hand, this means having millions of people living in the shadows who could become a political force of resistance to the system unless they are tightly controlled. The divisions in the ruling class here are over how to handle what both sides of the debate see as an “immigration problem.” (See “Vicious Attack on Immigrants Continue,” Revolution #209, August 15, 2010.)

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion gives an insight into how one section of the ruling class views undocumented immigrants when he laid out that Arizona’s “citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy,” and that “Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory,” and by denying Arizona this power, “we should cease referring to it as a sovereign state.” Further, in a despicable and racist attempt to uphold all of SB 1070, Scalia pointed out that “in the first 100 years of the Republic, the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, including convicted criminals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks.” Yes, you heard him right. He said that “freed blacks” were “aliens,” and he upheld the laws that restricted them from migrating to slave states.

The Obama administration represents another section of the ruling class whose policy has led to deporting more undocumented immigrants in four years than George W. Bush did in eight years, while corralling those who will submit to being “good, patriotic Americans” into the two-party electoral system. Let’s be clear: the Obama administration is not setting out for some “softer, gentler immigration program” than the Republicans, as the Democrats would have people believe. Obama’s own words make that clear when he said “...they’ve broken the rules. They’ve cut in the front of the line. And what is also true is that the presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally.” (“President Obama on Fixing Our Broken Immigration System: ‘E Pluribus, Unum,’” The White House Blog, May 10, 2011)

On the other side are the forces who backed SB 1070, and the whole fascist network of Tea Partiers, Minutemen, and neo-Nazis... and their sponsors in high places (e.g., Scalia), who see this situation as a way to further whip up and inflame a fascist base united around this being a “white man’s country.” While a few Republicans still hope to win Latino votes, the bulk of the Republican Party has shifted to this view.

SB 1070 and Stop-and-Frisk—
A Racial Profiling Comparison

Under the “show me your papers” section of SB 1070, the cops are supposed to have some “just cause” (lawful) reason to stop someone before they must ask for his or her papers. But ask the cop who stopped the five youth we spoke about above, for a broken headlamp that was not broken, if that was a lawful stop. Or there’s Joe Arpaio, the fascist sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, who sets up checkpoints in what he identifies as “immigrant neighborhoods” where his deputies can go over the cars of everyone stopped to look for technical or registration violations; or operations where his officers sweep through an apartment complex questioning everyone they find about some incident that happened at the complex; or when they surround the parking lot of a local supermarket and check everyone who comes out; or raids on workplaces; or setting up outside a school as immigrant parents come to pick up their kids.

The cops in New York City have legalized racial profiling when enforcing the stop-and-frisk policy where 700,000 people were stopped in 2011 and 85 percent of those stopped were Black or Latino. People are being stopped by the New York cops just for the way they look, or by the clothes they wear, or if they show any attitude of defiance as they are walking down the street. As we reported in Revolution #273 (June 24, 2012), “The most common reason cops list for stopping people is ‘furtive movement’”—a catch-all term used to basically cover up the fact that the person was stopped for doing nothing.

The point is that these cops, in NYC, in Arizona, and countless other places have become experts at coming up with so-called legal reasons as their loophole to circumvent the government from proving that they are racially profiling. It is crucial for people to understand how illegitimate these reasons are for people to be detained and questioned by the cops.

Mass Resistance Needed

People who see the tremendous injustice in this illegitimate fascist law and the whole attack being launched against immigrants in this country need to stand up and fight back against this attack, rally others to do so, and give heart to those who want to see resistance grow against these laws. None of this is going to go away without the people taking a stand and saying we will not allow this to happen to our brothers and sisters in Arizona—and anywhere else.

Revolutionaries need to unite with this struggle, expose the source of the real problem, the capitalist-imperialist system and the solution to that problem, revolution, and bring forward people into the movement for revolution—which can sweep this all away forever when the conditions exist for that. This is what it means to “Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution.”

One of our slogans during Arizona Freedom Summer 2010 rings more true today than ever—We are all illegals! We don’t gotta show no stinkin’ papers!

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/BAsics-bus-tour-rolling-in-nyc-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

The BAsics Bus Tour—

Rolling in New York City...
Reverberating Across the Country

The BAsics Bus Tour is rolling again! This time, the crew of volunteers—women and men of different nationalities and life experiences from all over the country—are going right into the global financial heart of the capitalist-imperialist beast, New York City, and surrounding areas.

Already, before the kick-off of the tour, people have been out in the neighborhoods to find housing and food for the volunteers, and build expectation, support and participation from the people in those areas. One person wrote, “We have already begun to see in these neighborhoods ... what it means that they have some of the highest concentrations of housing projects in New York City, block after block after block after block, until you feel the reality of people being warehoused. Kids play in the midst of garbage that covers the sidewalk like this system’s alternative to flowers... Youth tell us they are stopped multiple times a day by the police, ‘every five hours’ one teenager says, precisely like it’s part of a nightmarish routine. One older resident described seeing a young guy hunted down like an animal, chased through an empty lot with four-foot tall grass, then stomped on by police when they caught him. Empty lots, empty buildings, people living on top of each other and under constant threat of violence from police, and from how people are compelled by the dynamics of this system to do fucked up things to each other.”

There’s a glaring contrast in this city between the gleaming towers of the multi-billion dollar banks and corporations—and neighborhoods not far away like Brownsville in Brooklyn, where 90 percent of the people are Black or Latino, only 30 percent are high school graduates, and only 8 percent have completed college. The official unemployment rate in Brownsville (and nearby East New York) is 19 percent, more than twice the current national rate, and the median family income is less than half the national figure. Brownsville is ground zero for NYPD’s apartheid-like stop-and-frisk policy that harasses and terrorizes youth—cops make 93 stops for every 100 residents. This is also where, last November, 100 people rallied and marched to STOP “Stop & Frisk,” and 28 were arrested in a civil disobedience action outside the police precinct.

These are the city streets that the BAsics Bus Tour is rolling through. It’s a hot summer in New York City, and the tour is setting out to raise the political temperature higher. To those who are cast off, demeaned, and brutalized under this system, the tour is bringing the vision and works of Bob Avakian, the leader who has developed a way out of all the madness and horror that people face, here and around the world. Think about the people in places like Brownsville getting connected with the leadership of BA, as many copies of BAsics get out and clips from his talk Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About are shown on screens set up in the streets or in people’s homes. Think about people learning about this leader who has brought forward the scientific theory and strategic orientation for how to actually make the kind of revolution that is needed to get rid of this system and bring about a radically different—and much better—world and who is leading the Revolutionary Communist Party as an advanced force of this revolution.

People’s sights will be raised about what kind of change is needed and possible—and what role they can play in bringing about that revolutionary change. Think about organized cores of people beginning to act together in these areas—getting deeper into BA, increasingly taking up the slogan “Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution,” looking to Revolution newspaper as the “collective organizer,” and bringing others into the movement for revolution on many different levels.

And all this will be a catalyst for the nationwide mass campaign the bus tour is part of—BA Everywhere... Imagine the Difference It Could Make!—the mass fundraising campaign to raise big money to get BA’s vision and works into every corner of society. People in different cities around the country will follow the bus tour in near real-time, reading the stories and watching the videos of the interactions between the volunteers and the people, and joining in this effort by donating funds, sending in support statements, as well as in many other ways... and getting organized themselves into the movement for revolution. Think of the effect on the people in the ghettos, barrios, and poor suburbs nationally as they see people like themselves raise their heads from the day-to-day grind and dare to imagine and begin to fight for a whole new world... the effect on artists, teachers, professionals, and other progressive people in the middle class as they see revolutionary stirrings among those at the bottom of society... and the effect of these things back on the people the tour is meeting, as they see the role they’re playing in this movement that is coming together across the country.

The monstrous system of capitalism-imperialism continuing to exist—causing vast death and suffering among the people and damaging the planet’s ecology, possibly in irreversible ways—is intolerable. A radically different world is possible, through revolution. But the big problem is that way too few people know about the leadership of Bob Avakian, the revolutionary vision and strategy that he’s brought forward, and the movement for revolution that is being built toward the goal of a whole new world. The BAsics Bus Tour is a key part of changing this on a grand scale—right now.

There are many people who will immediately connect with and love what BA has to say... AND people who will disagree with a lot of it, or feel they don’t know enough yet to decide one way or the other, but who find themselves drawn in by different elements of what BA is about. There is a place and role for all these people to be part of this tour in all kinds of ways. That means everyone who can and should be part of the movement for revolution as described in the RCP’s statement “On the Strategy for Revolution”: “...those who have hungered for, who have dreamed of, a whole different world, without the madness and torment of what this system brings every day... those who have dared to hope that such a world could be possible...and even those who, up to now, would like to see this, but have accepted that this could never happen...”

When the doors are opened, many more people can take part in all kinds of meaningful ways—in ways that each person feels they are able to do, but which also provide pathways for them to stay connected, learn more, and become part of the growing movement for revolution.

When you contribute funds to or take part in the BAsics Bus Tour in different ways, you are acting together with many others around the country like yourself who just can’t accept that great social injustices go on daily and are even swept under the rug; who are outraged at the lies and justifications of the rulers about their crimes; and who are inspired and intrigued by Bob Avakian and think that he and what he’s brought forward should be “part of the discourse” broadly in society. And for those who are getting more into this, you are joining the thousands today who can be brought forward, oriented, and organized in a revolutionary way while beginning to influence millions even before there is a revolutionary situation—the thousands who, in a future revolutionary situation, can be (in the words of the RCP statement on strategy) “a backbone and pivotal force in winning millions to revolution and organizing them in the struggle to carry the revolution through.”

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/donate-to-the-basics-bus-tour-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Donate to the Bus Tour...
Make a Big Difference in the World

When you think of New York, what do you think of?

Do you think of the tall gleaming buildings where finance capitalists determine the fates of thousands and even millions with a single click of a mouse?

Or Times Square, where thousands from around the world rub shoulders with people in from the neighborhoods on a Friday night, surrounded by huge flashing screens of commercials, walking past the Broadway shows—right near the porn shops and strip bars?

Do you think of Harlem “after hours,” the birthplace of bebop... or the burnt-out, stomped-down South Bronx, the cradle of hip-hop? The East Village where punk was king... the Beats before them... or tomorrow’s next big thing? The peoples from every corner of the world looking for a change, bringing the pulse of languages, rhythms, foods, and styles in a glorious stew... and sometimes mixing it up and making something new?

Or does the face of Amadou Diallo come to mind—an immigrant in a strange land, reaching for his wallet in his doorway, and then falling in a hail of 41 bullets coming from four hair-trigger cops on a spring night in the Bronx?

Did you hear about the Father’s Day march last month where thousands marched against stop-and-frisk... the sit-ins and arrests last fall against the same racist police tactic... and the seething anger against the endless humiliation and abuse beginning right now to find voice and expression?

Do you remember Occupy, taking root last fall in the steel canyons of Wall Street? The defiance from Stonewall to ACT-UP that shook things loose? The student uprising at Columbia in 1968, the rebellions in Harlem before that? Malcolm X on the corner at 125th? What goes down here reverberates.

Whatever comes to mind, know this: the BAsics Bus Tour is right now smack in the middle of all of this, bringing to people the liberating vision and works and leadership of Bob Avakian, letting people know about the revolution that needs to and can be made, and giving them real ways to get into this and be part of it. It’s gonna be in the neighborhoods on the deep bottom of society... it’s gonna mix it up in the schools and the artistic scenes... and it’s gonna break through the clamor and hustle and attitude. There’s two busloads this time... from the South, from the West, from New York itself... “old hands” and “youngbloods” and in between—all primed to bring a fresh REVOLUTIONARY energy into the hot summer mix of the Big Apple.

If you saw the video of the bus tour in the South—and if you didn’t, then go right now to basicsbustour.tumblr.com!—you’ll get a sense of the difference this can make.

Give your money... and let THIS be the next thing that reverberates out of New York...

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/imagine-on-july-26-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Imagine, on July 26...
Creative Expression Across the Country Around the July BAsics Quotes

We received the following call from BAsics Bus Tour organizers:

Start thinking about and organizing right now for creative expressions on Thursday, July 26, around these two BAsics quotes: “American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People’s Lives” and “Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First.” This would go up against all the national chauvinist, “U.S. #1” bullshit being promoted, on a daily basis and at a time when there’s the Summer Olympics and the government is declaring the country’s “right” to bomb and assassinate people around the world. And it would be in unity with the BAsics Bus Tour.

Imagine...a big brass band and a crew with beautiful signs in the city center or town square...a flash mob with people shouting out the quotes one by one...a big globe balloon...poetry and spoken word performances inspired by the quotes...dramatic and colorful giant banners... These are just a few ideas. Talk to artists, musicians, poets, and other creative and imaginative people who would be excited to see these quotes out in society in a big way, and get their ideas and participation. And remember: send in reports, photos, and videos to baeverywhere@gmail.com and revolution.reports@yahoo.com.

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/an-important-form-of-participation-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

An Important Form of Participation in the Bus Tour

All throughout July, go out to people with signs that have the two BAsics quotes for the month at the top (“American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People’s Lives”—BAsics 5:7 and “Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First”—BAsics 5:8) followed by “BECAUSE...” and a blank space at the bottom.

(See PDF templates of these signs with the BAsics 5:7 quote here: English | Spanish | French)

Talk to people about what they think of these quotes and have them write in their responses. Send in photos (like the ones here) or videos of people with these signs to baeverywhere@gmail.com and revolution.reports@yahoo.com. A lot of the photographs and videos can, and should, be done where people’s identities aren’t all clear... where people can freely put out what they’re thinking and not all of who they are. The photos and videos will be part of the tour video coming out on July 25 (deadline for this is July 22). There should also be some signs that say, “I support the BAsics Bus Tour because...”—again with a blank space for people to write their statement. This is a way to kick off a national discussion about these quotes, the bus tour, and BA, and a concrete form that people can begin to be part of the BA Everywhere campaign and the movement for revolution.

Taking out revolution and internationalism at the International African Arts Festival, Brooklyn, NY on anti-July 4th

 

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/send-off-for-volunteers-for-BAsics-bus-tour-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Send-off for Volunteers for the BAsics Bus Tour

A group of us got together for a festive send-off for volunteers to the BAsics Bus Tour.  We enjoyed wine and some kick-ass spicy chocolate cookies made by a teenager to help raise money for the bus tour.    People from Occupy, activists, and revolutionaries came together to express their support for the volunteers and shared their thoughts about the bus tour and Bob Avakian's quotes that are the theme of this third leg of the tour.  

As we were talking about the bus tour, several people wrote down their comments about the quotes.  We pinned them, along with other statements we had collected earlier, to a poster board with the centerfold poster from Revolution.  One of the statements, comparing the U.S. to a spoiled child, was written by a middle school educator who is deeply disturbed about how kids are conditioned to think in this society.  She was moved by the bus tour video and said she is happy to donate to an effort that poses a visionary alternative to the current situation that can broaden people's outlook. 

The view that people all over the world are all important was spoken to in many ways in the statements, and it drew out people to talk more about their sentiments and personal experiences.  One person recounted how, while working a day labor job, he put his life in danger by challenging the chauvinistic rants of his redneck employer/driver, who threw him out of the truck when he refused to back down.

Woven into the evening with this spirit of internationalism and resistance was also a sense of the joy that comes with taking on the powers-that-be as people shared lessons from their experiences.

We had a good time, raised some money, and our volunteers left for New York City with a warm bon voyage.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/brief-filed-objecting-to-dangerous-mischaracterization-of-RCPUSA-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Brief Filed Objecting to Dangerous Mischaracterization of RCP, USA

The July 8, 2012 issue of Revolution addressed highly important legal and political issues focused up in a recent lawsuit initiated by several progressive activists, journalists, and scholars. As the article explained, “The lawsuit is contesting the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012, in particular one of its key provisions, section 1021. The NDAA gives any president the power to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely in military prisons, without charge or trial. It is a very ominous and threatening development. On May 16, a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs that section 1021 of the law is unconstitutional—and issued a temporary injunction blocking its enforcement. At this time, there is a further legal process underway which will determine whether this injunction will become permanent, preventing this section of the law to be enforced. But dragged into this mainly positive ruling is an erroneous and potentially harmful characterization of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and its Chairman, Bob Avakian.” (“Threatening Situation for the RCP and Bob Avakian: Letter Points to Dangerous Mischaracterization in National Defense Authorization Act Ruling,” Revolution #274, July 8, 2012).

In response to the ruling, a legal brief objecting to the mischaracterization was filed with the court by a lawyer. The brief included the following points:

1. On May 16, 2012, this Court issued an Opinion and Order in this cause enjoining the enforcement of Sec. 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012.
2. Mr. Avakian wishes to express agreement with the assessment that Section 1021 of said National Defense Authorization Act—and in his view this applies to the Act more generally—illegitimately gives sweeping powers to the government that constitute a serious threat to fundamental rights and liberties, and could result in people being arbitrarily subjected to indefinite detention, at the hands of the government, without just cause or due process.
3. However, in the Opinion, the Court incorporated the following language, “Hedges also testified that he has previously associated with a group called Bob Avakiam Revolutionary Party, a Maoist group, which he stated he understands endorses the use of violence towards revolutionary ends—a philosophy to which Hedges stated he did not ascribe.... Despite that fact, Hedges understands Sec. 1021 as potentially encompassing his association with the Avakiam Revolutionary Party and thus, the statute already has had a chilling effect on his associational activities.” (Order p. 18).
4. This Opinion contains an erroneous and potentially harmful mischaracterization of the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A. (hereinafter referred to as the RCP) and its Chairman, Bob Avakian.
5. First, neither the name of the political party nor the name of its chairman is referenced correctly in the Court’s Order.
6. Mr. Avakian’s name is Bob Avakian, not Avakiam.
7. The name of the party is the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A., not the Bob Avakiam Revolutionary Party.
8. Of even greater concern is the way in which Mr. Avakian and the party are characterized in the Opinion and the context in which they are being discussed.
9. Mr. Avakian’s concern is that such mischaracterizations in the Court’s Order—and in particular the use in this Order of the phrase “endorses the use of violence towards revolutionary ends”— could lend itself to the false interpretation that the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A. might seek to achieve a revolution through acts of terrorism.
10. This is an egregious distortion of Mr. Avakian’s political philosophy and the RCP’s political agenda.
11. In fact, the RCP and Mr. Avakian have, publicly and repeatedly, made clear their political and philosophical opposition to terrorism.
12. Mr. Avakian and the RCP have consistently taken the position that revolution is only possible when there is a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary people numbering in the millions. Mr. Avakian teaches that the initiation of, or advocacy of, isolated acts of violence, by individuals or small groups, divorced from masses of people, and attempting to substitute for a revolutionary movement of millions, is both wrong and harmful.
13. It is the position of the RCP and its Chairman, Bob Avakian, that fundamental social change can only be achieved once millions of people are themselves desirous of such change and determined to bring it about. Prior to, and in the absence of, such a revolutionary situation, the real work of revolutionaries should consist in raising political and ideological consciousness of masses of people and building massive political resistance to the injustices of the prevailing system.
14. In short, the RCP is a political revolutionary party and movement. Mr. Avakian and the RCP have been working for over thirty years to bring about fundamental social change in line with their actual philosophical and political views and principles. Neither Bob Avakian nor the RCP are terrorists.
15. It goes without saying that to advocate philosophically for social change through revolution falls under protected speech and the First Amendment. It is part of the political discourse, and such speech must not be chilled.
16. The mischaracterization of the views of Bob Avakian and the RCP, taken together with the specific placement of this paragraph in the Court’s ruling, creates a damaging false impression of the principles and practices of the organization. Given Bob Avakian’s position as the organization’s chairman, mischaracterization of the organization also reflects negatively on him personally. 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/scenes-from-ba-everywhere-july16-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Scenes from BA Everywhere

Week of July 16

“Scenes from BA Everywhere” is a regular feature that gives our readers an ongoing picture of this multifaceted campaign, and the variety of ways that funds are being raised and the whole BA vision and framework is being brought into all corners of society. Revolution newspaper is at the hub of the BA Everywhere effort—publishing reports from those taking up the campaign. Revolution plays a pivotal role in building an organized network of people across the country coming together to make BA a household word. We urge our readers to send in timely correspondence on what you are doing as part of this campaign—send your reports and photos to revolution.reports@yahoo.com.

Revolutionary Anti-July 4th Event in the 'Hood

A group of revolutionaries met in June with some residents, musicians and friends to plan for a revolutionary anti-July 4th picnic to be held in the area. Discussing deeply with people the theme of the two BAsics quotes for July ("American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives"; "Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First") as well as BAsics 1:13 was crucial in setting the stage for a successful anti-July 4th event (including in postering, leafletting and bringing friends); and it paid off in spades with a very rich mix of culture and revolutionary anti-American politics on the day itself.

Although some were slow to arrive, others from the 'hood who had to work on the 4th came early to "pay their respects." There was clearly a buzz about the event, despite the short time in building for it! People began to arrive in groups of friends and family laying on blankets, sitting in chairs, and eating the food that some people brought and BBQ cooked by a couple people participating in the event. It was a very mixed crowd of all nationalities and ages, including people speaking Spanish, Farsi and Hindi!

The welcome began with a reading of the New York anti-July 4th ad on the BAsics Bus Tour website. This reading emphasized that the anti-July 4th event was NOT a celebration of U.S. imperialism and its horrors here and around the world. Yet in setting out on this BAsics Bus Tour... this IS something to celebrate!

This reading was followed by a game of "spin the globe," in which people took turns reaching into a jar full of slips of paper, each one with a country that the U.S. had invaded... a marker was placed on the map and then the invasion was read aloud. The game was a big hit with all, from a 6th grader who learned about Vietnam to a Latino man who learned about U.S. forces used within the United States (from Wounded Knee to the LA rebellion). The game of course had to be cut short, as the list of U.S. invasions would easily eat up all the time of the anti-July 4th event.

This led to a reading of statements of responses to the BAsics 1:13 quote from one of the residents, cheered on by her friends. And then... the audience was introduced to the Revolution Talk with BA reading from Frederick Douglass' speech "what to the American slave is your 4th of July?"—all displayed on two remote TVs. This video reading also set a tone about who BA is and WHY this bus tour is so important. So many NEED to know about BA, who he is, and this book BAsics with these three quotes we are engaging people with.

Next up was the cultural part of the program, starting with a set of poems from a local youth (wearing a "fuck capitalism" T-shirt) whose poetry jumped on the lies the system constantly bombards the youth with. Another poem that ended with giving the middle finger to the U.S. met with lots of applause. There were other powerful spoken word pieces also featured, including some by upcoming bus tour volunteers! A highlight of the cultural segment was a performance especially for the 4th by a local rap group about Trayvon Martin with the refrain of "the whole damn system is guilty," and a moving verse about "we're all Trayvon Martin... shoot me shoot me...." And another rap group from out of town performed a couple of numbers including a call and response about "revolu....TION" and another piece nailing capitalism on the head about "I got to sell myself, I got to sell myself..." ending with the suggestion that it doesn't have to end this way! The music was so good that both groups performed again for those who arrived late!!!

At the peak of the event, two BAsics Bus Tour volunteers got up to speak and to also make a fund pitch. There were highlights of the bus tour in Sanford, as well as a lively picture of what was to come in New York... and especially a picture of what impact the BAsics book itself could have when seen overall as getting BA everywhere. A special appeal was made concerning the immigrant populations (there were readings of quotes in Spanish as well as English). $211 was raised from this pitch.

More poetry followed and special presentations were made by the People's Neighborhood Patrol and Stop Mass Incarceration. Then the emcee pointed to both the bookstore table where people could buy BAsics and also to a "materials table" where people could be part of one of the 12 ways to join the movement for revolution. There were bundles of past issues of Revolution newspaper, and stacks of palm cards featuring both BAsics 1:13 as well as the two new quotes (bundled up the night before by a young mother and her kids) for people to get out on buses, in libraries, beauty shops, laundries, concerts, etc. 3,500 palm cards, and 100 past issues of Revolution got out during the day as well as 2 BAsics and 1 Rev Talk DVD were sold. Over 60 people came throughout the day, the majority from the surrounding neighborhoods, but a good number of people from other cities as well.

In closing, announcements were made about other bus tour fundraising events and a plan was made to return to the park two Saturdays later to discuss how to be part of supporting the BAsics Bus Tour, especially featuring the talk given at New York Revolution Books on June 27, featured online at revcom.us.

* * * * *

Letter from a Reader
BAsics at the Annual American Library Association Conference

BA Everywhere was in the house at the annual American Library Association (ALA) Conference in Anaheim, California as we introduced thousands of librarians to BA and BAsics, spread the news of the exciting experiences of the BAsics Bus Tour in the South, raised funds for the next leg kicking off from New York City, and talked with as many of them as we could about how they could be a part of this growing movement for revolution, including how to get BAsics into libraries, enabling many more people to have access to BAsics and other works by BA.

18,000 librarians and others connected to public libraries, school and university libraries, prison libraries across the U.S., and libraries in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa attended this conference.

Just to give you a flavor of this conference, there were hundreds of workshops, meetings and programs addressing everything from career development to getting books into different sections of the population like prisoners, to setting up bookmobiles in neighborhoods with no physical libraries, on Indian reservations, to intellectual freedom and privacy rights—and there were librarians who were in Cairo, Egypt at the time of the overthrow of Mubarak.

Our crew included two people who played important roles in the launching of the first leg of the BAsics Bus Tour in Orange County (where this ALA conference was being held) as well as someone we met on the first day of the conference—a student from a community college in Los Angeles who works as a clerk for a public library. Off of getting the BAsics 1:13 palm card, this student bought BAsics and a copy of Revolution newspaper right away and off of discussing the 12 Ways to Join Us, he took a stack of BAsics 1:13 cards to distribute at events he attended. He started reading BAsics that night and he found us again at the end of the next day to join us in getting out more BAsics 1:13 palm cards as attendees were pouring out of the convention center.

Given the breadth and size of the conference, we decided to try to focus on some key groupings there. We went into the Exhibition Hall which had hundreds of booths and a few booths took some of the BAsics 1:13 cards and put them out for people to take. This included the booth of the Black Caucus of the ALA (BCALA) who invited us to attend their membership meeting and reception held during the conference to make an announcement about BAsics and the BAsics Bus Tour that went through the South. Clyde Young went to that meeting, which was attended by 200 librarians from all across the country, and made a brief announcement about BAsics and the bus tour. Afterwards, during the reception, people came up to talk, argue and to find out more. One woman told Clyde, "I may not look like it, but I am a revolutionary"; another man argued that revolution, socialism and communism has not worked and the underlying cause is human nature, but he was interested in the book and said he would check out the revcom.us website. Two women made clear that they were Obama supporters, that what they loved about the U.S. is that we have the freedom to say whatever we think and granted me that right even though they disagreed with what we were saying. Others commented they were glad we were there.

Off of a discussion with someone from the BCALA, we learned about the upcoming Joint Conference of Librarians of Color (JCLC) in September in Kansas City, Missouri and they thought that would be a good opportunity for us to speak more fully to librarians. The BCALA will be holding its own conference next year, August 2013, at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center and that is another opportunity as well.

We were surprised to find that there was a large contingent of librarians from other countries at this conference and given developments internationally and the important contributions of BA and his new synthesis, this was another important grouping to reach out to. We were able to print out there some copies of BA's statement, Egypt 2011: Millions Have Heroically Stood Up...The Future Remains To Be Written and shared that with librarians we met. One librarian from Egypt bought BAsics and based on discussion of BAsics 1:28, he commented that he felt trapped between the two reactionary poles BA writes about and was interested in what BA said about bringing forward another way. An African professor was excited to find it was an eBook and also about our website, revcom.us, as he wanted to share this with his students who are all into the digital age. On the 3,000 BAsics 1:13 palm cards we distributed, each had a sticker announcing "Gold Winner 2011 e-LIT Award in Current Events 1 (Political/Economic/Legal/Media)" which had an impact on this crowd too. We also sold seven copies of BAsics and raised some money for the next leg of the bus tour.

We got comments from librarians from many different places (big cities and small towns) who were very excited to meet revolutionaries, including many who commented "that's right" after hearing "you can't change the world if you don't know the BAsics." We wore BAsics T-shirts and by the end of the conference one librarian commented that "I've seen that t-shirt all over the conference and wondered what it was about."

* * * * *

July 4th Skit

For the Fourth of July, we decided to create a skit using a part of Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave is Your Fourth of July" speech and the Revolution newspaper with the BAsics quotes, "American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives" and "Internationalism ‑ The Whole World Comes First."

We had a person dressed up as a slave and he performed the Frederick Douglass quote. Other characters were someone dressed as Uncle Sam and a voice of opposition, and it ended with a reading of the BAsics quotes. Simply being dressed up as a slave caught people's attention and we were stopped before we could get to the place where we decided to perform, and made to perform on the spot. On the train ride to the park, a guy asked, "What, are they putting us back in chains again?"

The audience response was mostly positive. We received applause whenever we finished the skit. While most people agreed with what was being said, there was a back and forth that went on with some of the spectators which showed that this particular form of street theater not only challenges people, but gets a conversation started which might not start with different forms of engaging with the public.

A second team followed the skit, distributing palm cards, collecting donations for the BAsics Bus Tour and getting out the paper. One young guy who took a stack of palm cards said, "This is really good. This is not what they teach us in school." There was a lot of debate on whether America is a democracy, the land of the free, or is what we were saying true. Another question was can you ever get rid of capitalism. One guy said that it was appropriate bringing the skit out, everything you're saying is true, but what can we do about it? Several people took palm cards to distribute and said they want to check out BA and the bus tour. As we walked away from each performance, we could hear people continuing to debate these questions.

Later that evening, we went out to the official July 4th celebration. The palm cards with the two quotes were very controversial. Thousands of people, including families and groupings of young people from many different countries, gathered downtown to watch the fireworks, and there were a range of responses. Alongside the USA number 1 bullshit, there were people who were glad to see the quote "American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives." Several people spoke to their concerns about what the U.S. is doing around the world. A 13-year-old responded several times, "it's not right!" and when we asked him to explain, he said that people come here from all over the world for the American dream, and what they get is something else. One young man thought humanity would never get over this problem of inequality, but the rest of his family saw hope in what we were bringing to the people. An older Black woman took a stack of palm cards and excitedly told her friends how the BAsics Bus Tour is starting a national conversation about revolution and communism.

* * * * *

Cleveland Anti-July 4th BBQ and Picnic

In the sweltering heat, 20 people came out to an anti-July 4th picnic in a Cleveland city park. As people were eating, the sounds of "All Played Out" were heard as well as Outernational's "Todos Somos Ilegales" breaking through the suffocating heat. Art Blakey, a jazz musician, played his guitar as people were conversing, checking out the enlarged center fold of Revolution #274 and signing it. A call was made to support the next leg of the bus tour in NYC because the bus tour connects the people most downpressed by this system with the leadership they need to become emancipators of humanity.

There was back and forth on how the bus tour can contribute to forging a revolutionary people. A Black man was passionate that "the tour will help people with critical thinking, to think more critically about this system of oppression. There is common ground among the people, but most important is that BA is the leader. Some agree, some disagree, but the common ground is the system needs to be changed. Take action on it. Obama not going to do it, only the people can do it, to promote change and critical thought. The people have to change the world." Another person said how the gap between all the horrors people face with this system, stop and frisk, unending wars, racist killing of Trayvon Martin, sex slavery, and more and the solution laid out and developed by BA is still too wide. But the BAsics Bus Tour is working on closing that gap and he called on people to dig deep which for some is $10 and others $500 or more. People talked among themselves about ways to raise money, selling plates of food, having some cultural events, making rubber bracelets to sell with the colors of the BAsics palm cards, and making a music CD. People took stacks of palm cards with BAsics 5:7 and 5:8 to distribute. $907 was raised in cash and pledges for the NYC leg of the BAsics Bus Tour. People left feeling that although more people were expected to be there, the fundraising picnic was a success in terms of coming together to oppose America's July 4th by saying a loud "yes" to BAsics 5:7 and 5:8, and leaving with a deeper grasp that the bus tour connects potential emancipators of humanity with the leadership they need, and they acted on this understanding by generously contributing to the NYC leg of the tour.

Some of what was written on the board with 5:7 and 5:8 at the anti-July 4th picnic:

"God will not get the masses of this country and the rest of the world out of this horrible mess. Only a communist revolution will deliver a truly liberating future. A teacher in Cleveland, Ohio"

"Down 4 the Revolution."

"God is our bless'n 2 the 'solution' so people stay bless."

"I would be a stupid American if people around the world hadn't helped to open my eyes."

"The powers that be are not all powerful, the power is with the people, and the people say 'No More!' That is true power."

"People here and all over the world need revolution and communism. Bob Avakian gives the kind of leadership that could possibly take us there."

* * * * *

Houston Open Mic/Fundraiser for Bus Tour

From a reader:

On Saturday, we had an open mike/fundraiser for the BAsics bus tour in 3rd Ward, a historic Black community in Houston. Inspired by quote 1:13 by BA, five people performed spoken word or sang songs they had written. Some of it was written specifically off the quote, and others were more inspired by the theme of the quote. One young woman said that she was so moved by what she was hearing that she wrote a poem on the spot and shared it with us. I can't quite capture the emotions that were being expressed by the artists about the life this system has for youth. Some of them also spoke to the mental shackles that are keeping people from rising up, and others spoke to their hopes of how the world should be.

Several people made and donated things to sell to raise money at the event. An out-of-town artist donated prints of her work. A young woman made earrings with her son. And another person laminated centerfolds from Revolution to sell.

Several of the people came to the event off of posters or flyers they saw in the neighborhood. Some people came out from Occupy Houston. There was a lot of interaction between people, many of them learning about BA and revolution for the first time. One guy was intently reading BAsics. I overheard a conversation between a couple of people who were talking about all the bad things they've heard about communism. And someone asked, how she changed your mind. She said I'm changing it right now. Several people commented that they were uplifted by the event and there was a sense of community being built, a community for changing the world.

Later that evening, a crew of people went out to the Gay Pride parade and got out hundreds of palm cards with quote 1:13 and raised money. We walked through the crowds with a banner that said "The system has no future for the youth, but the Revolution does." Several of the youth who took stacks of palm cards asked what kind of revolution, and is it for everybody.

On Sunday, we took out a banner-draped car, blasting audio from BA and drove up and down streets in a far Houston neighborhood. Several youth took up stacks of cards and distributed them to their friends and neighbors. Many people were surprised and glad to hear about BA and that there is a movement for revolution. The quote struck a chord with many, many people. The question for them was how do we make good on this? There was also a lot of intense debate among people about the possibility of revolution and how are we making sure that the leadership is protected so that the revolution can go all the way.

These are a couple of the poems performed at the cultural event based on BAsics 1:13:

Raisin' Kain:

Seemed like we were burning babies/
Could have sworn—generations in cages/
But mom and dad looked so pleased/
They said, "Drink up!"
And I did

 

Untitled

Holding her baby in her arms,
She imagined that he would grow up to be strong
That he would run around with the other boys in her village
Hunting and exploring and experiencing the pleasures of life.

She could not imagine the wars and the destruction.
The militias that would turn her child into a solider
Barely bigger than the rifle assigned to him.

Holding her baby in her arms,
She imagined that she would grow up to be beautiful.
That she would make lots of friends to play with
And be full of happiness and love.

She could not imagine the desire and evil
That would steal her daughter and place her in brothels, hotel rooms
Alone, Abused and Ashamed.

Holding her baby in her arms,
She imagined that he would grow up to be a hard worker.
That he would work the fields his father, and his father before him
And his father before him had worked.

She could not imagine their land would be stolen by
Treaties and contracts established thousands of miles away
And her son crossing borders never to be seen again.

These realities can be reconfigured
So that our imaginings
Can be rendered whole
And children are not bound by circumstances,
Rather, they transcend.

* * * * *

Humanist Picnic

On June 30 several of us went to the annual "Free Thinkers" picnic put on by local humanists. We brought signboards that had the BAsics quotes "American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives" and "Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First" with space below for people to write their own thoughts and reactions. Many in this crowd were curious, and engaged in some pretty deep discussions about what things such as internationalism and revolution really meant, and what commonality communists and humanists shared in looking at reality. Also discussed was how we were using the BAsics Bus Tour to get Bob Avakian's work out to large numbers of people who would not otherwise be exposed. A number of people we talked to were angry about the damage done by religion in people's lives, and the way it is imposed on people. Some were interested in BA's book Away with all Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World and its presentation of how religion is a chain on the mind, and there was some support for the tour because we said that this is one thing the tour will be taking out to people. At the same time some people felt the question of belief in God was more of a personal thing. People looked at copies of BAsics and some put money in our bucket to support the bus tour.

* * * * *

Detroit Mini-Bus Tour

From several Revolution readers and volunteers for the next leg of the BAsics Bus Tour:

We decided to do a mini-bus tour in Detroit from June 23-25. This is a city in which the people cry out sometimes quietly, sometimes not, against a system whose police killed 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones on May 16, 2010 as she lay sleeping with her grandmother on the living room couch. So much of the city is literally destroyed that it is a struggle for most people to go anywhere or do anything. 2,000 people rallied for Trayvon Martin last month. This is a city whose people need to know that there is a way out and a way forward with Bob Avakian's re-envisioned communism.

We went through Aiyana's neighborhood with the decorated van and blaring out BA's spoken word piece "All Played Out" and the BAsics 1:13 quote. People took notice. A Black woman said, "The ways things are now, everything being the way they are going, their generation will not have a chance. The system needs to be brought down, this is ridiculous." Down the street, a few young Black guys who were sitting on the porch took lots of BAsics quote cards and pulled $2 out of their pockets to donate, and one went inside the house and got 37 cents more.

One afternoon we went to Dearborn, a mostly Arab community, and got a good reception. One Arab youth who said, "I am a revolutionary anarchist" took a stack of cards to get out. He said he was proud that in his high school there was a walkout supporting the Arab spring and recently there was a march supporting Trayvon Martin. Three teenage girls dressed in long black dresses and hijabs read the 1:13 quote, and one told us, "It's good you brought this to our generation. We need to have a say in the world. Not right that someone decided for us before we were born." We saw them distributing cards in the park.

On Sunday, we went to Belle Isle, a popular park in the city. There was lots of support for the 1:13 quote, and some controversy. One woman we met said she had been raped 9 times, and that the 1:13 relates to her—the point about being "destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born." She said how being born female is to be called "bitches" and be abused and raped. She gave $2 and said, "I am the donating type. We need a revolution but none going on."

In those few days, something important happened in Detroit in bringing BA and his vision to thousands. There was feeling among many youth and others that they are now part of the movement for revolution by getting the cards out and being part of spreading BA everywhere.

* * * * *

International African Arts Festival, Brooklyn, NY July 4th

Hundreds of people strolled leisurely around this festival, in the sweltering summer heat, listening to African music, tasting African and Caribbean delicacies, and browsing jewelry, clothing, music CDs, and African drums, in the multi-aisled outdoor marketplace. Vendors from West Africa, Barbados, Guyana, Senegal, the U.S. and many other countries brought their wares to sell. Some people traveled from their home countries to this five-day festival. It was a colorful crowd with Muslim African women in traditional dress, Rastafarians, African Americans, and people of all nationalities.

In the midst of this, revolutionaries talked to people about BAsics, Revolution newspaper and the cards featuring quotes: "American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives." BAsics 5:7 and "Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First." BAsics 5:8.

These quotes tapped into what a lot of people know first-hand about the U.S. and its role as the top imperialist country. There was much agreement with, "The world is a horror, but it doesn't have to be this way." Several immigrants talked of people in their countries not having food or drinkable water. There was an understanding that these problems are connected in some way to the role of the U.S. as the number one imperialist country. One person asked, "Why is it so hard?" when he talked about some people from the U.S. stealing from other countries. He said people come here for a better life, but if you have one altercation with the law, like for a small drug offense, you get deported. He said he knew many people that have been deported. He talked about the unjust disparity between people who get caught with crack cocaine compared to people caught with powdered cocaine. He was angry that it's the same basic drug, but Blacks and other poor people get punished a lot more severely. He said air is free, but water and electricity aren't, but they should be available to everyone. I told him what Avakian said, that food is not a right in the U.S. and we all know what would happen if you go into a supermarket and just start eating because you're hungry. This raised questions about what it will take to end this. He thought it was in god's hands and that the U.S. should just help people, so I got into with him why only revolution could solve these problems. He was interested in this and got the paper, but said he'd have to get BAsics another time.

One person gave a statement on "Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First," BAsics 5:7, by saying, "The U.S. is like the queen bee in terms of people looking up to them. The U.S. should help people worldwide with roads, electricity, agriculture, basic needs, but they don't—because they don't have something the U.S. needs."

Comments put on poster boards on "American Lives Are Not More Important than Other People's Lives":

"People are people. We all bleed red. Everyone has a right to live in PEACE!!!"

"Mankind should be equal," a vendor from West Africa.

"All Humans are just Human! No more No less!"

"That view [that American lives are more important] leads to chauvinism and disrespect."

A poet liked that quote a lot and talked about African-Americans being forced to come here through slavery. He agreed with the quote on American lives not being more important than other people's lives, but he thought it had the potential to offend people who wouldn't agree. I had some back and forth with him because I said it was true and even if some are offended, it is important to discuss and debate this with people.

A couple of African-Americans talked about the U.S. Constitution (it was the 4th of July) and how this country was set up from the beginning only for white propertied landowners. Black people were considered only 3/5 of a person and women were not considered people. There was an overall openness to revolution and to finding out more about Bob Avakian.

Several people gave comments and some were photographed or filmed with the quotes after I explained that we are building a movement for revolution with the BAsics Bus Tour as a key part of it and we want to show through photos/film how this movement is growing around the country.

Talking to people about these quotes drew out much speaking bitterness to what the reality of life is for millions of people who are being oppressed and exploited by the U.S. and it tapped into their desires for a new and better world. Several people wanted to be part of the BAsics Bus Tour in some way: spreading the word through Facebook, possibly joining up with the tour once it starts, and telling other people and finding ways they can contribute.

* * * * *

At Memorial for Two Young Lesbians Who Were Killed

June 28 there was a memorial in a park for two young lesbian women brutally shot in Texas (one is dead, the other severely injured). It was a sad and solemn event, with various speakers from the LGBT community. Revolutionaries participated and laid a sign on the grass saying, "No more Tyler Clementes, no more Trayvon Martins." People took and read the "No more Generations..." palm cards, and many said the words were very relevant to this tragic crime. Afterwards, there was a separate event, a march in memory of Stonewall and protesting violence and police violence against LGBT people. A banner with the full BA quote, "No more generations..." in small letters and "WE SAY NO MORE" in big letters was unfurled, and diverse people read it and signed it. During a march, it was hard to get into all the different levels of this powerful quote and to explain fully about the bus tour and do fundraising, but still some dollars found their way into our BAsics Bus Tour bucket.

Responses to the July BAsics Quotes

Sent by readers in Atlanta:

From a Black musician and jewelry artist:
"Every time I hear Obama say 'America is the greatest country in the world' I feel like running to the bathroom, sticking my finger down my throat and trying to throw up—hoping the bile comes out. How do you think people around the world feel when they hear that. I've seen pictures of kids with their arms blown off by American bombs. And we're fighting for their 'democracy and liberation.' American democracy and liberation really worked out for the American Indians, didn't it?"

From a Black veteran of the war on Afghanistan:
"The American Dream is the world's nightmare. It's everyone's nightmare. How egotistical can you get? Why should someone from the Congo be less important than an American, just because they happened to be born there instead of here? When I got back from Afghanistan, I had had it with America. All I wanted to do was bring it down."

From a participant at a discussion about the quotes at Revolution Books Atlanta:
"What should be 'important' is every person earning a living wage regardless of what section of the world they inhabit. What should also be 'important' would be for the United States of America to finally admit to the exploitation and inhuman treatment done to African and other peoples inhabiting the soils of 'America' and how America become 'important' primarily by persons' sweat and tears."

"Everybody lives are important. Everybody lives count. You don't need to know a person to care for somebody. I care for all people's lives. I am an organ donor and anyone who needs it should get it."

From a neighborhood where the BAsics Bus Tour visited in Atlanta:
"Not just America. If one person eats everybody has to eat. When I am on the bus I give a homeless person something to eat. No one should be left hungry. Everybody should care for everyone."

An atheist who bought Bob Avakian's Away With All Gods
"That's why they say God Bless America. Why don't they say God Bless the whole world. That's if you believe in God."

Someone who gave a donation to the upcoming BAsics Bus Tour
"Nobody's lives are more valuable than other human life. I love it! Start thinking about everybody not ourselves or our families. Everybody is connected."

Someone in Sanford, Florida:
"Get everyone included. Bringing everyone together even though we are in America. We have a system that keeps us in poverty and bondage to the system. Even though it sounds like we got it better, we don't."

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/273/getting-down-to-basics-with-the-people-of-sanford2-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Getting Down to BAsics With the People of Sanford

"Strange Fruit"

by Michael Slate

In late May I joined the BAsics Bus Tour as it rolled into Sanford, Florida, the town where Trayvon Martin was killed. The tour brought the work and vision of Bob Avakian and his book BAsics into Sanford and I spent my time in the Black neighborhood of Goldsboro talking with the people about their lives and digging into the deep questions of how to change things. This series is dedicated to the people of Sanford and to the crew of volunteers on the tour, whose enthusiasm for spreading the work and leadership of Bob Avakian and for fighting to build the movement for revolution inspired everyone they encountered. See Revolution #272 for "I Couldn't Put It Down."

For more on the BAsics Bus Tour, go to basicsbustour.tumblr.com.

Trees! That's what struck me the most about the look and the feel of Central Florida. After living in L.A. for a long time I'm like a kid in a candy store when I come up on a whole lot of big, full on oak and cypress trees, their branches and leaves throwing up a natural canopy to help you get through the humid and way too damn hot days. And then there's the Spanish moss hanging down off of the branches of these trees like silver grey beards. And when tiny flowers start to bloom on the moss, little red specks in all that grey—kind of like...blood... that's when it hits me. Trees carry with them a whole different meaning for Black people in Sanford and other parts of Central Florida. When a soft wind passes through these trees it's not the soothing whooooshhhh sound of the surface of leaves gently passing over one another they hear. Instead, it's more like a brittle clacking, the sound of dried bones that have been hanging there for centuries banging into one another. After all, as Bob Avakian has so sharply pointed out, "The 'Bible Belt' in the U.S. is also the Lynching Belt." And all these great beautiful trees, draped in Spanish moss, are also lynching trees.

In the Goldsboro neighborhood of Sanford, one of the historic Black neighborhoods, it's striking how many people have a lynching story. Samuel is a middle-aged, middle class Black man living with his family in a well-kept little house, with a well-kept lawn in Goldsboro. Samuel teaches in a local school. He's a striver in a terribly downpressed town. He has a rock-bottom belief that the system works—or at least it works for those who know how to work the system. Samuel believes that things will get better once Black people get into the system and learn how to work it.

He stands at his door wearing a green and black striped polo shirt, neatly pressed pants and slip-on shoes. Samuel moved to Sanford from another part of Central Florida a little less than 10 years ago. When I approached him to talk with me, Samuel looked out at the BAsics bus and wanted to know what it was and what all the commotion was about. We talked for a few minutes and as we stood there I noticed a Black man about Samuel's age riding past the bus on an old 1960s-style cruiser bike, not once but a few times, carefully checking everything out. On his last pass-by he looked over, nodded and rode off in the opposite direction.

Samuel commented that we were attracting attention and soon the conversation turned to the murder of Trayvon Martin. I read Samuel BAsics 1:13, the "No More Generations" quote that's a big part of the message this tour is carrying with it. Samuel started talking about his thoughts on what was behind the murder of Trayvon and how it has been handled by the authorities. "It was just a litmus test to see if they could get away with a modern-day lynching. Because in Central Florida, lynching been taking place for a long time. And a lot of the lynchings that have taken place in history have been done by law enforcement. It's been done from as long as I can remember. And one of the most notorious lynchers was Sheriff [Willis] McCall over in Lake County."

Samuel got quiet and tense, took a deep breath before he went on with his story. "I was six years old. I didn't go to school that day because I was sick. I was dropped off at my grandmother's house. My grandmother had to go to work, so I was with my grandfather. He was picking fruit at that time, so we drove out to the area where he worked and he pulled up into the orange grove and he stopped. And when he stopped it was more like a pensive stop. He saw police cars there. He basically knew something was wrong. He got out the car. He told me, he said, 'Whatever you do, do not look out of the car. Get in the back and stay down regardless of what you see or hear.'

"So I knew that something was wrong, and then he started yelling, 'Strange fruit! Strange fruit!' to the other workers that were around. When I peeked over the back of the station wagon window, I saw that Sheriff McCall and his deputies had hung a Black man. And I know he told me not to peek, or not to look and to stay down, but I looked and I saw what was going on. And I also saw Sheriff McCall brutalize my grandfather and the workers that were out there and told them that 'you better not say nothing, nigger, or else. That was the warning that we all heard, and we all grew up with."

Samuel's face was tense, he took a minute to pull himself together again and then brought things back to the murder of Trayvon. "Yes. I told everybody. This was the litmus test to see what they can get away with. And what I mean by they, I'm not talking about just the police force. But I'm talking about white men in general. Because everybody that was in charge of that investigation was white: the state attorney, the chief of police, the detective that was on duty at that time. Even though he wasn't a homicide detective, he was a narcotics detective. A homicide detective didn't respond to the shooting. It was a narcotics detective, which was wrong in the first place. Because if you have a shooting and there's a death, it should be a homicide detective that responds.

"Any time that there is a shooting involving somebody Black, it's always assumed that drugs are involved. Exactly. So normally they just roll out a narcotics detective because they assume that it's criminal mischief involved in the first place."

I asked Samuel when he saw that lynching. He said it was in 1968 and lynchings were still going on in Central Florida. To drive home his point, he told me that the "Coloreds Only" signs weren't removed from the water fountains in the Greyhound bus station until the late 1970s.

I looked over toward the BAsics bus and one of the volunteers was on the sound system reading BAsics 1:13, breaking down and talking about revolution and communism and why people have to be checking out Bob Avakian and becoming part of this movement for revolution. Samuel stared at the bus for a bit and listened to some of the agitation. Then he turned to me and said, "I think you're asking for trouble here in Seminole County. Because this is the area where it's the good ole boy system, and if you buck against the system you're going to be hurt."

I pointed out to Samuel that people in Sanford had stood up when the system justified and tried to sweep under the carpet the murder of Trayvon. I commented that it's not just the color of your skin or the "good ole boy" system but the bigger system of capitalism and imperialism that is built on the foundation of white supremacy that's the problem and what we have to deal with. Samuel responded quick: "Because we're tired of it. We're tired of it and we're not going to stand for it any longer. You're right. Like you said, it's more than just the color of your skin. Because not all white men are evil and not all Black men are good. So you have to think about where do we go from here? We have to get people who are going to let their words mean something, where their yea is yea, and their nay is nay. You have to have people that are going to let their words mean exactly what they say."

I talked with Samuel about the tour and why it's called the BAsics Bus Tour. I talked about how we're spreading the word about the vision, work and revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian and why that's so critically important today. I asked Samuel if he ever thought of revolution. He hesitated for a minute and then replied: "No, I haven't thought about revolution. I've thought about change. But as far as revolution is concerned and about changing the system, I think the system works, but it works for people who know how to work the system. I think we can change things. But the change has to come not only with our vote, but with our way of thinking. Knowledge is powerful." It was coming up on dinner time and Samuel's kids were kind of insisting that he come in so they could eat. As he stepped back into his house, he turned and said that he doesn't "buy into" communism because as far as he could tell it hasn't worked. And with that he was gone.

I saw Samuel the next day as we started to march through his neighborhood down to the speak-out at the Sanford Police Department. Samuel was watching and listening and as he was heading back into his house, he came over and asked me if I had any more of those cards with BAsics 1:13 on them. He smiled and said he wanted to think about that [BAsics 1:13] for awhile.

LaLa

Bicycles are a popular way of getting around in Goldsboro. It's flat and a relatively small area so people take advantage of it—lots of old cruisers with big fat tires and fenders. As I walked towards the bus after my conversation with Samuel, the man on the bicycle passed by again. This time he stopped to read the banners on the bus before heading off deeper into the hood. I was watching him and almost walked into another bicycle rider on the street. I jumped when I heard a young woman yell "Excuuuuuusse meeeeeeeeee!" in total frustration with my not watching where I was going. She stomped back on the pedal brakes and stopped an inch away from my leg. Her name was LaLa and she quickly let me know that I was gonna get run over if I didn't pay attention. I apologized and she asked if I was with the big old RV on the corner with all the banners and the sound system. I said I was and explained who we were and what we were doing there. I asked her about her thoughts on what happened to Trayvon Martin.

LaLa twisted her lips before she spoke. "I think it's cruel. I think that it's selfish. I feel like they not really doing nothing. I think they're just letting it go just because of his [Zimmerman's] mother and his father and what they're known for. He's a judge, and she's work at the courthouse. I feel like if you have money you can do whatever you want to do basically. That's what I feel about the whole situation."

I read BAsics 1:13 to LaLa and she took the card to read for herself. "I feel the same way that he feel and not only for Trayvon, but I feel it for the other people that's in the community that got killed by the police." LaLa thought hard for a minute, it was like she wanted to be certain she would use the words she needed to use to make her point. "I'm glad that—not that somebody would lose their life, but I'm glad that they're picking up on it. People starting to understand, and people are getting more understanding, and there had to be a 17-year-old boy that get killed for something to happen. But my boy was 16 years old. He got shot from behind. He was driving a stolen car or whatever. He was leaving and the security guard shot him from behind, and he died. He died and there's nothing we can do to bring him back. There's nothing that we can do. But we can try to speak for him, but not to say just because we speak I'm feeling that justice will be served."

I showed LaLa the photo collage of the "We Say No More" banner with BAsics 1:13 on it and told her how many people all over the country were stepping up to stand with the people of Sanford. I told her that hundreds had signed this banner and, before I could finish, LaLa proudly said, "And I'm one!

"It feel good to have somebody behind you and to have somebody, you know, that feel the same way that you do. If you by yourself, then you by yourself. No one'll hear you. But with a thousand more people, a lot of people gonna hear you. So it feels good to have somebody by your side that'll help you through it. It does. See, I'm glad that all this is going on, I really am, because I'm just 23 years old, and I'm sick of all this that's going on in Sanford, that I done seen in the 23 years of my life. I'm tired of it."

It was getting close to the time we had set to leave the neighborhood and LaLa said she had things to do. I wanted to ask LaLa if she ever thought about revolution and being part of the movement for revolution. She said she hadn't but she thought that it was kind of like everything happening today is in the Bible. We kicked religion around for a bit and LaLa was really intrigued by the idea that religion promoted a slave mentality that would keep people in chains. I asked LaLa again what she would say if she was asked how she could be part of this movement for revolution. LaLa got a huge—but suddenly very shy—smile, and said, "I'll be trying to get ready. I'm just happy that the movement is going. I'm real happy that the movement is going." Her friends called out from down the street and LaLa reached out for a handful of the "Join Us! Twelve Ways That You Can Be Part of Building the Movement for Revolution- Right Now" cards. She took off down the street on her bike, yelling out the longest "Thannnnnnnnnk youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu" imaginable and then letting loose with a loud, long laugh.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/call-to-end-pornography-and-patriarchy-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

End Pornography and Patriarchy:
The Enslavement and Degradation of Women!

Abortion On Demand and Without Apology!
Fight for the Emancipation of Women All Over the World!

We are told that “equality for women has been won” and that “there are no limits to what girls can achieve.” BULLSHIT!

Every 15 seconds a woman is beaten. Every day three to four women are killed by their partners. One out of four female college students will be raped or sexually assaulted while in college.

In recent years, pornography has become increasingly violent, cruel, degrading towards women; women are referred to as “cumdumpsters” and “fuckbuckets”; the “money shot” (ejaculation in a woman’s face) is standard; humiliating cruelty—like violent “ass-to-mouth” penetration—is normalized, and racist bigotry is sexualized. Meanwhile, the broader culture has been pornified: pole dancing is taught at gyms, “sexting” is a national phenomenon among teens and the strip club is the accepted backdrop to “male bonding.” All this is tied in with, and reinforces, the trafficking of millions of women and girls as literal chattel in the international sex industry.

This is NOT society becoming more comfortable with sex. This is society becoming saturated with the sexualized degradation of women. If you can’t imagine sex without porn, you’re fucked.

At the same time, a Christian fundamentalist-driven assault is imperiling abortion, birth control, real sex education and women’s lives. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people who do not conform to traditional patriarchal gender and sexual norms are demonized and threatened. Abortion doctors are killed. Women who seek abortions—or even birth control—are stigmatized. 2011 saw the largest spate of legal restrictions on abortion since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

ALL THIS MUST BE STOPPED!

Fetuses are not babies. Women are not incubators. Abortion is not murder.

Women are not objects. Women are not things to be used for the sexual pleasure of men NOR are they breeders of children. WOMEN ARE HUMAN BEINGS CAPABLE OF FULL EQUALITY IN EVERY REALM!

It is long past time that this new generation stand up, reject, and RESIST this culture of rape and pornography; this culture that labels women “selfish” if they choose not to become mothers; this culture that reduces women and girls to sexualized objects while denying their full multi-dimensional humanity (including their right—as one essential part of this—to explore their sexuality without shame or stigma); this culture that demonizes and bullies LGBT people.

Our purpose is NOT to lobby for new legislation to ban pornography (“decency laws” have always served to further repress homosexuality, boundary-challenging art and scientific sex education). We oppose the criminalization of women in the sex industry. Our mission is to challenge the new generation in particular to wage fierce cultural and political resistance to wake others up and to bring forward a new culture that celebrates the full equality and liberation of women.

Contact us: stoppatriarchy@gmail.com

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/cheers-to-the-150-doctors-at-abington-health-system-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Cheers to the 150 Doctors at Abington
Health System for Standing Up for Abortion!

More than 150 doctors at the Abington Health System have mounted public opposition to a plan for their hospital to merge with a Catholic institution and cease performing abortions. A letter signed by the 20 residents in Abington’s ob-gyn program read in part, “There is strong opposition to having our medical practice dictated by Catholic doctrine rather than our patients’ best interests and standard of care.” Robert Michaelson, an obstetrician-gynecologist who has worked at Abington for 33 years and who was the past president of the medical staff, said: “I would not be happy practicing at a hospital where accepted medical procedures are restricted. I love what I do.”

At a time when abortion and even birth control are coming under increasingly severe attack nationwide, it is all the more important that doctors and others stand up in defense of women’s fundamental right to abortion. Forced motherhood IS female enslavement. Doctors who provide abortions are heroes. Those who fight to protect women’s access to safe and unstigmatized abortion must be supported and joined with.

Forcing women to have children against their will is female enslavement.

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/273/this_cannot_go_on-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

"This has to stop, this cannot go on"

Justice for Ramarley Graham

by Li Onesto

On June 11, NYPD cop Richard Haste was indicted on manslaughter charges for the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham.

The night of February 2, 2012, like so many Black youth before him, Ramarley Graham was cut down by a cop who had a story to justify the murder before Ramarley's family even knew he was dead.

Narcotics detectives barge into a home in the Bronx. They gotta come up with something to explain shooting a young kid, close range, dead, in the bathroom. First they say Graham ran into the building fleeing from the officers. But there's a problem. Surveillance cameras show Graham walking to his apartment, taking out his keys, opening up the door, and casually walking in. New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at first says Graham "appeared to be armed." But this presents another problem for the police—because no weapon was ever recovered. They didn't have a warrant. But they kick down the door. Enter, guns drawn. In a matter of seconds, a death sentence is carried out—for no reason other than being young and Black and therefore, in the eyes of the police, suspicious.

The completely outrageous nature of this murder: chasing someone into their own home, busting through their front door, going into their bathroom and shooting them point blank... and then making up a whole story about how Ramarley was runnning into the building and was armed, all of which was clearly shown to be a complete lie. All this has hit people hard – and bitter anger has expressed itself in ongoing protest. Hundreds came to the funeral. Up to 200 people have come to demonstrations outside the the 47th NYPD precinct. People show up with t-shirts that say, “U C MY HANDS – NO GUN – Please don’t shoot” and signs declaring, “I am Ramarley Graham.”

Outside the home where Ramarley Graham was killed, a vigil is being held every Thursday (the day he was killed) for 18 weeks—to represent the 18 short years Graham lived. Leona Virgo, Ramarley's older sister, said on Democracy Now! (June 19), "At the end of the day, even though he's gone, it could happen to someone else. And all we're trying to do is prevent that from happening and to shed light on this situation here, because it does occur every day, and sometimes the stories do get unheard. But we're not going to let that happen in our situation, because they want us to forget, but we're not going to forget."

When Royce Russell, the lawyer for the Graham family, was asked if Ramarley had had problems being stopped by the police he said, "From those that you ask, 'Have you ever been stopped and frisked before?' it's probably highly unusual that you can grow up in New York City, African American or Latino, and walk the face of this earth, to and from school, in Bronx County, Kings County, Queens, Manhattan, and not be a subject of a stop-and-frisk, which we all know that doesn't mean you were doing something wrong, but be subject to a stop-and-frisk. I wish Ramarley was here to maybe tell us the stories of when he was stopped and frisked, if he was stopped and frisked, because we know oftentimes that many kids don't even reveal that to their parents. It's become such the norm that they don't even come home and say, 'Hey, Ma, you know what? Today a police officer pulled me over and went through my bag.' It is a norm." (Democracy Now!, June 19)

*****

Richard Haste, the cop who stole Ramarley Graham's life, pleaded not guilty and was released after posting $50,000 bail. This is the first time an NYPD cop has been indicted on a charge stemming from an on-duty shooting since 2007 when three detectives were charged with the murder of Sean Bell. Those officers were later acquitted.

In December 2007, another officer, Rafael Lora, was indicted for an off-duty shooting in the Bronx that killed the driver of a minivan. He was tried and found guilty of manslaughter—a conviction then overturned by an appeals court. And in 2000, the four police officers who shot and killed Amadou Diallo in the Bronx—in a hail of 41 bullets—were acquitted.

This is all part of a slow genocide by this system—that can become a fast genocide: Mass incarceration where nearly 2.4 million people live behind bars; with 80,000 subjected to the most inhumane, conditions of torture in solitary confinement. Official illegitimate policies like stop-and-frisk, that institutionalize racial profiling—and serve as a major pipeline to the prisons. And the endless brutality and chain of lives stolen by cops, like the lives of Ramarley Graham... Sean Bell.... Amadou Diallo... Oscar Grant... and so many others in the past... and to come in the future—as long as this system is in effect.

Ramarley Graham's grandmother, Gwendolyn Henry, was there the opening day of the trial of 20 defendants arrested in Harlem for civil disobedience to STOP "Stop & Frisk." She told Revolution newspaper: "The reason I'm here is because of the injustice that is going on with our young Black and Latino children. This stop-and-frisk is nothing but something that has been planned to destroy our young children. And I am here to speak up about it because we are too silent. It has been going on for too long, too long. So we have to start and make a movement, this has to stop, this cannot go on."

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/nypd-targets-STOP-stop-and-frisk-activists-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

NYPD Targets STOP Stop-and-Frisk Activists

Right after tens of thousands marched in Harlem to end the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy (see Revolution #273), it was discovered that the police are targeting those protesting this illegitimate practice that targets Black and Latino youth.

Christina Gonzalez and Matt Swaye were attending a community meeting inside the 30th Precinct in Harlem when they saw a crude “wanted” style poster in a public area of the station. The poster had mug shots of Gonzalez and Swaye, with their names and arrest numbers from previous protest arrests and the street address given where they were arrested. It was signed by a police officer and headed with official logos of the NYPD and the precinct.

The text reads:

“30 Pct PROFESSIONAL AGITATORS

BE AWARE THAT ABOVE SUBJECTS ARE KNOWN PROFESSIONAL AGITATORS THAT LIVE AT [street address]. ABOVE SUBJECTS MO IS THAT THEY VIDEOTAPE POLICE OFFICERS PERFORMING ROUTINE STOPS AND POST ON YOUTUBE. SUBJECTS PURPOSE IS TO PORTRAY OFFICERS IN A NEGATIVE WAY AND TOO DETER OFFICERS FROM PERFORMING THERE RESPONSIBILITIES. ABOVE SUBJECTS ALSO DETER OFFICERS FROM BEING SAFE AND TACTICAL BY CAUSING UNNECESSARY DISTRACTION. DO NOT FEED INTO ABOVE SUBJECTS PROPAGANDA.” (sic)

Gonzalez and Swaye participated in mass civil disobedience actions last fall to end stop-and-frisk and face charges in Brooklyn and Queens along with 17 others in upcoming trials (see article in #272). They regularly videotape NYPD harassment and protest police brutality and murder. All of this is legal activity, protected by the First Amendment, for which no one should be arrested or threatened.

Within days of a photo of the poster circulating online, the New York Daily News ran a story about the poster, quoting the police, who did not deny the poster’s existence or claim it was unauthorized. An NYPD spokeswoman said it was only designed to alert officers at the stationhouse. In other words, “alerting” cops to the names of protesters, providing photos and addresses is official police activity, designed to intimidate and shut people up.

The evening after the Daily News article, Gonzalez, Swaye, and others active against stop-and-frisk were leaving the apartment at the address cited in the poster, and found three NYPD squad cars double-parked in front of the building. Two officers were in each car, several were videotaping the activists. When asked why they were there, the officers said they were responding to a 911 call, but made no moves to leave their cars. (Video at www.thenation.com/blog/168729/nypd-brands-occupy-wall-street-couple-professional-agitators.) Since then, unmarked cars with officers who people recognize from the precinct have been following the activists around the neighborhood.

NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman told DNAinfo.com, “To put up something that looks like a wanted poster with the individual’s home address and brand them as agitators is an invitation for police to target them. At best, it’s a horrific example of unethical behavior and bad judgment. At worst, it’s an invitation to target these individuals as if they were on the 10 most wanted list.”

Targeting people for arrest, following them or surrounding their homes because of their political protest speech or actions is illegal police activity. With every stop-and-frisk, the NYPD is attempting to criminalize the people. But it’s the NYPD who are the criminals, fronting for a criminal system.

 

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness. Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA BAsics 1:24

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/this-is-the-imperialist-system-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

This is the Imperialist System
This is What They Want You to Vote For

Every Tuesday two dozen national security officials meet in the White House Situation Room to add new names to the “kill list.” They study, discuss, and decide who among the fresh crop of candidates from various parts of the world will be chosen for assassination. They look over the “baseball cards,” as one official calls them—faces on one side and biographies on the other. And yes, U.S. citizens are on the list as well.¹

President Obama personally oversees the process. He insists that he alone is to make the decision of who will be the next target of a drone attack or some other lethal kill. Apparently his decision to kill the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen was “an easy one.”

There is no trial, no jury, no challenge to the evidence presented. But Attorney General Holder explained in a speech at Northwestern University in March that it’s not a violation of constitutional “due process” because what takes place in that room embodies due process.

The so-called “precision” drone strikes used to kill the targets are also killing many others who happen to be in the area. So the numbers are intentionally lied about by the CIA, which claims any military-age male in a strike zone is a combatant unless there is specific intelligence posthumously—after they’re dead—proving them innocent.

What takes place every Tuesday is macabre and an extremely dangerous development. It is also a fundamental violation of U.S. and international law that goes beyond anything that Bush did. These are military strikes on the territory of other countries without any prior act of war by that country against the U.S., without any declaration of war issued by Congress, far from any war zone.

Judges, lawyers, and radical critics have expressed horror at the “kill list.” Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and constitutional law attorney, said:

The president of the United States believes that he has the power to order people killed, assassinated, in total secrecy, without any due process, without transparency or oversight of any kind...It’s literally the most radical power that a government and a president can seize, and yet the Obama administration has seized this power and exercised it aggressively with very little controversy.

There is a deafening silence from both the Democratic and the Republican Party; and assumed Republican presidential challenger Romney himself has expressed no opposition to it. That’s because both parties and both candidates have no opposition to it.

Why? They’ve come to agreement that this is a necessary part of the president’s job at the helm of a capitalist-imperialist empire facing serious, new international challenges.

In an article in Foreign Policy magazine in May 2012 titled “Barack O’Romney,” Aaron David Miller—who worked in the U.S. Department of State for 24 years and was an advisor to six secretaries of state—writes, “Ignore what the candidates say they’ll do differently on foreign policy. They’re basically the same man.” And after Obama’s order to kill Awlaki was carried out, Dick Cheney, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, praised Obama for “a very good strike,” calling it “justified.”

The ruling class that sits atop this imperialist system has no solution for the horrendous consequences of the workings of their system that is in any way in the interests of the people of the world. Rather, the urgency they confront is the “smart” use of military aggression and political intrigue to maintain, or reassert, their domination of the Middle East and Central Asia, fundamentally against the people of those regions. Obama’s “kill list” from that perspective is, as he put it, “an easy one.”

This is the Imperialist System

This is What They Want You to Vote For

 

1. "Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will," New York Times, May 29, 2012. [back]

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/272/illuminati-is-a-myth-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Enough With the (Poisonous) Bullshit

The "Illuminati" Is a Myth! Wake Up and Deal With the REAL Problem!

Why do we live in such a fucked-up world? Why are decisions so clearly out of the hands of the masses of people? And why do these decisions always run so sharply against the interests of these masses? Why do a few people control enormous amounts of wealth... while many more swim frantically to keep their heads above water... and the vast majority are ground down and chained to a life of misery, no matter what they do? And why are we lied to about all this?

People seek answers to these questions. Urgently. One of the biggest, most widespread answers out there pins all this on a shadowy group called the "Illuminati." This small but virtually all-powerful group, we are told, is bent on world domination. They have supposedly manipulated and rigged every war, every revolution, every economic or political crisis in accord with a master plan for world domination. There are 57 varieties of this explanation to be found on the Internet, differing in this or that detail and degree, but this is the basic framework you get from them all. (See sidebar for the actual history of the Illuminati.)

A Few Basic Facts The Illuminati was a secret society in Bavaria, Germany, that arose in late 1776. Bavaria at that time was ruled by a monarch and Roman Catholicism was the official state religion. The Illuminati, by contrast, promoted values associated with the bourgeoisie during this period. The bourgeoisie was rising up against the feudal order—advocating republicanism rather than monarchy; rational thought and secularism rather than religion and a state church; and the beginnings, at least, of gender equality. The Illuminati were suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785, and despite some efforts to re-form, never regained their footing. This was happening toward the peak of a period of transition and upheaval in Western Europe. The old order of feudalism—a social order in which the accumulation of wealth and power was based on land ownership and the exploitation of peasants (who are usually bound to the land, unable to move away, either by law or custom)—was being challenged. The rulers of this order were typically kings and other nobles—people who inherited their position, as a landlord inherited his land and even "his peasants"— and who defended the interests of the landlords. But for centuries, things had been changing underneath the surface. New ways of accumulating wealth, based on the further development of manufacture in the cities and on the exploitation of a new class (the proletariat) that had been driven off the land, had gained predominance. These new ways drew on international trade, and a world market came into being. All this, in turn, got a tremendous boost from the colonization of the Americas and the establishment of slavery within those colonies. Of course, this "boost" meant the genocide of the people living in North and South America and the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of people from Africa! For a while, these new capitalist ways could gain ground within the old social order. But the needs of this rising capitalist class increasingly ran up against the interests of the feudal lords and the laws and institutions that enforced those interests. The old structure of kings, backed by a state-sponsored church, had become an obstacle to the full growth and consolidation of the power of this new capitalist class. This rising new class—with its new ways of exploiting people's labor and accumulating wealth—had new ideas on how things should be organized to foster this, and they came together in groups to discuss these and to plan how to get rid of the old feudal order. Revolutions were waged against the kings who defended feudal power—first in England in 1642 to 1651, and then over a century later in France. The French Revolution spread its influence to many different countries in Europe, and the authorities in those countries began labeling those who were revolutionary-minded as Illuminati—trying to sow fear of revolution by implying that they were part of a secret, "foreign-inspired" group. Over time, this became increasingly bound up with anti-Jewish thinking. In 1918, at a time when the communist revolution had begun to win victories, a British woman named Nesta Webster wrapped together the nativism (prejudice against people not from one's country of birth), anti-Semitism, and anticommunism into one big, ugly package. Today, in some cases, some of the rougher edges of anti-Semitism have been sanded down, but the message is conveyed through code words.

These "Illuminati theorists" focus a great deal on manipulation of the banking system. They do not really talk about any problems with the capitalist system apart from that. Almost all of them are either openly or just-below-the-surface anti-Semitic—that is, they focus people's hatred against what they portray as a cabal of Jewish financial families. They do not talk about the capitalist class as a whole. They string together a lot of facts, pseudo-facts, and lies that they claim to be grounded in deep research—while in reality, these are marshaled to serve a thoroughly unscientific and, indeed, anti-scientific theory. Many connect this to the biblical Book of Revelation, with its lurid visions of apocalypse and mumbo-jumbo talk of Antichrists, to say that this is Satan's plan; and there are other equally mystical and anti-rational theories advanced in other variants of the theory.

There is only one word to describe these theories: wrong. Actually, there's another word, too: poisonous. Totally poisonous. These Illuminati theorists point to the wrong problem and the wrong solution. To them, the problem is not capitalism; it is a small group of people who are supposedly controlling and perverting capitalism. To them, the solution is not revolution; it is returning to the "purity" of capitalism (a "purity" which never existed and never can exist and wouldn't be any good even if it could!). In actual fact, these theories have served as the foundations for reactionary, fascist, and racist movements for over a century.

These theories are not "a little bit right." Yes, they take advantage of people's correct sense that the answers to the questions we started this article with are hidden. But that's just the point—they "take advantage." They exploit the sense that people have of being lied to and use that to train people in reactionary, backward thinking and mislead them into acting against their own interests. They are no more neutral or harmless than a quack doctor who gives you arsenic for a highly contagious, fatal disease.

Why Do Things Happen?

According to the Illuminati theorists, there is no real logic to history other than these quasi-Satanic forces trying to get domination. Everything you can name—the U.S. Civil War, the Russian Revolution—happened because the Illuminati manipulated it.

Do powerful forces attempt to control events? Yes, they do. But these forces, in this day and age, are political representatives of a class—the capitalist-imperialist class. And they do not have total control. First off, the power of these capitalist-imperialists does not come from Satan—who doesn't exist in the first place! Nor does it come from "secret knowledge," numerology, aliens, etc. No, these capitalist-imperialists derive their power from something much more everyday. They own the vast material forces that create wealth in this society—the factories and mines, the agriculture, the means of transportation and communication, the banks and other instruments of finance, and so on. This ownership enables the capitalists to amass wealth through exploiting the labor of those who possess no means of creating wealth—the proletariat—which today numbers billions of people around the world. Exploitation means that the capitalists take what these billions create each day through their labor and pay them in return enough to survive (and sometimes barely that). This exploitation is where they get their profit.

And this capitalist class is the embodiment of the capitalist SYSTEM. As Bob Avakian breaks down in the Revolution Talk,¹ a system is like a game with certain rules. So think of capitalism as a game with three rules:

1. profit comes from exploiting people's labor—therefore you must exploit to the maximum;
2. if you are a capitalist and you don't grow bigger, then your competitor will and drive you under—therefore, you must expand or die; and
3. profit over everything—therefore you must plunder the earth and all its inhabitants and subordinate everything to the pursuit of profit.

On the basis of the wealth that they have amassed from exploitation, the capitalist class shapes and controls the official use of force in society (armies, police, prisons, courts) and decision-making (mainly through the executive branch of government, like the presidency). They wield this machinery—the state—to defend and enforce their interests. But because different capitalists have conflicting interests (see rule 2, above), they fight each other for control and advantage—even as they collaborate to keep down the masses.

In today's world, where capitalism has developed into a global system of imperialism, this takes place on an international scale. They are like gangsters in a turf war, though the scale of their viciousness and destruction far exceeds what any gangster even dreams of. All this—this system—leads to horrific, widespread, and totally unnecessary suffering for billions of people. But all this is driven forward by the rules at the heart of the system that demand that the capitalists, in order to survive, exploit the vast majority of people ever more extremely as part of their cutthroat competition with other capitalists.

So what is the root of the problem? Not a tiny band of superhumanly evil beings. Not a small group of Jewish financiers. But a system in which a class of capitalists 1) controls the means of production and exploits the labor of many, 2) on that basis wields tremendous military force to dominate people, and 3) also uses that power to control and shape the media, education systems, etc. to influence and dominate the ways that people think. So long as this is the system, we will face the problems—exploitation of the billions, plunder of the environment, oppressive institutions, and ways that keep that exploitation going—that we face today.

Superhuman Masterminds—Or an Enemy That Is Powerful, but Riddled with Contradiction?

In the Illuminati version of the world, you have masterminds in near-total control of events. In the real world, the one in which we actually live, no one group of capitalists has total control; they fight with each other, and they also fight with the masses, trying to keep them suppressed and, when those masses rebel, trying to put them back into chains. Horrific, destructive wars go on as the concentration of all this. And sometimes, against tremendous odds, the masses break through the madness and make revolution.

No single capitalist or group of capitalists can predict the course of events; they cannot even predict whether this or that business will succeed. They try to, but they face a world of antagonistic forces and unintended consequences. The capitalist-imperialists fight for one reason: to defend, extend and expand their ability to accumulate capital in a world full of uncertainty and chaos. And they MUST fight—they are driven to do so by the "rules of the game."

This gives rise to huge crises in society, where things seem to unravel. These crises can mean great and even deeper horrors... but they can also contain the openings, if there is leadership and a revolutionary people, to make huge, positive changes—to make revolution.

What Is Really Behind the Lies and Hidden Agendas?

Do these powerful forces—these capitalists—try to hide their real motives and their real interests? Yes... because their interests are against those of the masses of people. Let's take war. The imperialists will never say that their wars are in the interests of defending and extending an empire which they control. Remember the U.S. war against Iraq? Hundreds of thousands died as a result of that war, and millions of people were violently uprooted. That war was labeled "Operation Iraqi Freedom," not "Operation Extend and Deepen U.S. Imperial Domination of the Middle East in Order to Edge Out Rivals and Keep the Masses Suppressed." The capitalist-imperialists will always invent pretexts or excuses for going to war, sometimes with absolutely no basis in reality—and this is true of Iraq, Vietnam, and almost every war you can name—because if they came out with the real reasons, it would incur much more opposition from the masses of people.

The Ugly Tradition of Anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism has a long and ugly history, one very well-documented in the article "Revolution Responds to Question on the Nature of the Holocaust." In brief, Jews were very oppressed within Europe for centuries. Laws barred them from owning land and from living in certain countries, they were subjected to torture, imprisonment and death in cruel "Inquisitions," and they were generally made one of the main scapegoats for society's ills by the ruling Catholic Church. As "Revolution Responds" explains, this began to come into question during the conflict between the established feudal order (dominated by landlords and kings) and the rising class of capitalists. The rise of capitalism was accompanied by the Enlightenment—an intellectual and social movement that used reason and science to examine and challenge many of the traditions and prejudices of the feudal society that stood in the way of the rising capitalist class. The rise of capitalism also meant that in some cases professions and occupations to which Jews had been confined in the old order now came into more prominence and importance, and this opened up room for some Jewish people to advance their situation. The article points out: The earth-shaking changes ushered in by the emergence of capitalism in Europe loosened and challenged, but did not come close to uprooting traditional theocratic-based fear and hatred of Jews. And even as great changes took place in the political and social landscape of Europe in the 1800s, and early 1900s, powerful forces in European society—including elements of the Christian establishment, along with feudal and other reactionary forces—lashed back at these changes, and, as part of that, targeted the Jews. Sections of people were periodically enlisted in spasms of anti-Semitic violence. Peasants locked out of any scientific understanding of the forces that were upending their lives had their desperation channeled away from the ruling classes and towards the Jews. Even in the most cosmopolitan countries—like Germany— anti-Semitic demagoguery had an appeal among sections of small business owners and shopkeepers who tended to be blinded by their social and economic positions to the actual mainsprings of capitalist society. This was also true in the U.S.—where Henry Ford published the phony "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a forgery that claimed to report on a meeting of Jewish rabbis to plot world domination. While spasms of anti-Semitic violence would occur in Europe, and while there was pervasive discrimination against Jews in all capitalist societies (including the U.S.), all this went to another level with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, which eventually led to the genocidal extermination of six million Jews. At the same time, there was and is a Zionist movement that arose among some Jewish people in reaction to this oppression. This movement attached itself to the interests of imperialism and, at the end of World War 2, different imperialist powers saw it in their interests to create the state of Israel in the Arab country of Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were violently driven from their land, and the Zionist state of Israel became an instrument of imperialism—especially U.S. imperialism—in the Middle East. While Israel pursues what is sees as its interests in the larger imperialist framework, to claim that Israel controls imperialism is to say that the tail wags the dog. The state of Israel should be opposed by anyone with a sense of justice—both for what it does to the Palestinians and more broadly in the Middle East and for its overall role in the imperialist system.9 But for oppressed people today to fall into the trap of anti-Semitism—of hating Jews or in any way going along with or giving ground to "Jews are the problem" instead of focusing on the real problem—is not just foolish, but profoundly poisonous to the cause of human emancipation, and immoral.

People sense this—but here come the Illuminati theorists and their ilk to say that the real motives of these wars were to further enrich "Jewish financial interests," or to cement control of the so-called "Bilderberg group," or to bring in one-world government under the United Nations.² No! The real reasons for the wars mentioned above were 1) to impose U.S. domination over rival imperialists (or to risk being edged out or even subordinated by those imperialists)... or 2) to crush liberation struggles of the people in the nations which they have been oppressing, as was the case in Vietnam, or 3) some combination of the first two. But if the imperialists just came out and said that, people would be far less likely to go along with these wars. And if the Illuminati theorists just said that, it would imply that there is something wrong with the system of capitalism and not just the behavior of this or that capitalist or group of capitalists. So think about it—why do the Illuminati theorists invent all kinds of explanations which lead you away from looking at the forces within the system's functioning? And remember—the "normal" functioning of the capitalist system must mean the untold suffering of billions, and this has been true since its earliest days.

Are we taught the real motive forces of history? No, we are not. We are taught in school that "Abraham Lincoln fought the U.S. Civil War to free the slaves and to realize the true promise of America." We sense there is more to it than that. So here come the Illuminati theorists once more to say that the Civil War happened as a result of the Rothschilds—again, a family of Jewish bankers in Europe—egging both sides on against each other so that they could take over the U.S. financial system. Oooh, sounds heavy... sounds deep.

Just one problem: this is totally wrong... and dangerously misleading. The Civil War, in fact, arose out of deep contradictions at the very heart and foundation of the capitalist system as it developed in the U.S., namely the enslavement of millions of Africans. The northern capitalists and southern slaveholders waged an extremely bitter and bloody struggle. Why? Because as the northern capitalists grew in strength over the first decades of this country, they increasingly ran up against constraints imposed on their expansion by the southern slave system. They needed to control the whole economy and nation in order to fully consolidate capitalism. The southern slaveholders needed to dig in and not just consolidate slavery but expand its reach and power. All this is shown in some depth in our current series on the U.S. Constitution,³ as well as in Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy⁴ by Bob Avakian and "The Oppression of Black People, the Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need."⁵ Those two antagonistic claims could finally only be settled by war.

Now, did a lot of capitalists—including banker-capitalists—make huge fortunes, and extend their individual power and influence off the Civil War? Of course! But to claim that was the cause of the Civil War is like saying that umbrella salesmen are the cause of the rain because they make extra money during downpours.

But there's actually more that this Illuminati theory hides. The northern capitalists, who eventually triumphed, quickly decided NOT to grant the newly free slaves the rights that they had fought for. Instead, they decided that it was more in their class interests to bring back the former slaveholders as "junior partners" and to put the African-American people into a new set of chains as sharecroppers tied to plantations (and convict-laborers—slavery in a new name—to build roads and industry in the South). This fit in with their interests—to politically "stabilize the home base" and extract super-profits from sharecropping agriculture, while they conquered the remaining Native American peoples in the West and prepared to contend as a world power.

This oppression of African-Americans, though going through many changes, has been the red thread running through the whole history of the U.S. and the colonies before it. It continues to be at the heart of U.S. society today. And the further development of this contradiction at the heart of America could still lead to, or certainly be a big part of, a major crisis in U.S. society, on the order of the Civil War, or the 1960s... or even beyond those earth-shaking days of change.

That fact has tremendous implications. It shows the depth of the oppression of the African-American people in this society. It shows the critical importance of the struggle against this oppression in a revolution to actually get free of this capitalist-imperialist madness. It shows how the capitalist-imperialist class in the U.S. has continually been driven to restore and rebuild institutions of white supremacy, even as these institutions go through changes. Understanding the true causes of the Civil War lets people see how there are times when these contradictions can come to a head in such a way so as to plunge all of society into crisis... and open up opportunities for huge and even truly revolutionary change.

But Illuminati theory covers up that understanding. It opposes that understanding. It leads people away from that understanding. According to it, the problem is not the deep-seated white supremacy built into the very heart of this system, which periodically leads to crisis and conflict and, yes, opportunity for radical and even revolutionary change; it is some comic book demon who "just happens" to have a Jewish name. Why do you suppose the Illuminati theorists want people to believe that the whole thing could have been settled were it not for the Jews (or in more "polite versions" some nameless financial capitalists)—instead of showing people the real reasons that go to the roots of the matter, with all the implications for the present and future that we just laid out?

Imperialism and Illuminati Theory... and Why Illuminati Theory HATES Revolution

Some people get taken in because these theorists talk about "big financial groups" and "hidden agendas." But where do those big financial groups come from and what drives their agendas? Their agendas are nothing but the expansion and extension of their particular bloc of capital or, on the international plane, their home nation. And why did these blocs of finance capital arise? This was actually explained by Lenin, in his analysis of imperialism.

Now this leads to another question: who is Lenin? V.I. Lenin was the person who carried on and carried further Marx's great insights into the workings of capitalism and the need for revolution. On the basis of these further advances in theory, Lenin led the first great revolution against capitalism in 1917. Lenin led this revolution against tremendous opposition and tremendous odds.

You wanna talk about conspiracies? Okay, how about this one: 14 capitalist powers all banded together to send their armies to crush this revolution. But the masses of people, in a terrible war that cost millions of lives, defeated this counter-revolution and went on to build socialism for four decades. This was a tremendous victory, unparalleled in human history up to that point. There was nothing pre-determined or neat about it.

But not if you listen to the Illuminati-types. According to them, Lenin—who led this incredible and heroic achievement of the masses—was nothing but a tool of... you guessed it... the Jewish financiers, once again... who were supposedly using him to implant total domination by the Illuminati.

Sorry, Illuminati theorists, you're wrong again—Lenin was a great revolutionary, a great champion for humanity, someone who gave us insight into how the modern world works and what it takes to fundamentally change it, for real. Lenin should be cherished and learned from by everyone who really wants to understand the world and change the world for the better. (And to those of you taken in by this other, lying shit, including those of you in the world of hip-hop who don't want to go along with the system: maybe you should ask yourselves what class interests are served by getting people who are searching for change to hate or at least have a totally false understanding of Lenin... and wake up to the fact that you are being played for something really vile and that your influence is being used to mislead others.⁶ )

To return to the point we started with—what is imperialism—before Lenin led the revolution, he developed a theory that explained several big changes in how capitalism functioned. First, the small, individual capitalists of prior times, through the process of relentless competition that is built into capitalism and "makes it run," so to speak, had been mainly wiped out. Big monopolies—one or a few capitalists, or blocs of capital, controlling huge industries—arose in their place. Second, banking and industrial capital had merged into "finance capital." The capitals of what had been different and smaller capitalists were now pooled into huge blocs which shifted capital in and out of different industries, different regions, etc. Third, capital itself began to be exported to the oppressed regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The capitalist states of Europe, North America and Japan began to militarily occupy these countries and fight with each other over "spheres of influence," to defend the interests of the capitalist-imperialists of their respective countries. This in turn led to wars on a scale never before seen: wars between the imperialists as well as wars of liberation and revolution waged by the oppressed masses. All this meant that capitalism had emerged into a new stage: imperialism.

In addition to the effects briefly outlined above, imperialism also means that the huge blocs of finance capital exert power over the smaller capitalists. Imperialist capital controls credit, they make large decisions about economic priorities and practices that affect these smaller capitalists, etc. These smaller capitalists feed off the imperialist system for their very existence but are also extremely vulnerable to getting wiped out, and resent all this. At the same time, their class interests and position can set them in opposition to the people on the bottom of society—the proletariat, who in many cases they exploit. They can feel "caught in the middle."⁷

Illuminati theory reflects the position of this class of small capitalists. And this theory can also take root among others "in the middle"—including small business people who employ a few people, professionals and managers, self-employed, etc. This is NOT to say that every person in this class position thinks this way—many do not and many can be and have been won to be allies and partisans of the revolution. But this theory crystallizes and represents the fantasies and aspirations that spontaneously arise out of the social conditions of this class. As a class it can not envision and lead the way to a world without exploitation; it can only dream of a "more level playing field" in which to carry out that exploitation.

There Are No "Good Old Days"—Either We Make a Whole New World or Humanity Remains Stuck in a World of Horrors

The Illuminati theorists want to bring back the "good old days" of early capitalism. Now, you remember the "good old days," don't you? The days of slavery... the days of the extermination of the Indians...the days when women had no rights whatsoever... the days of... well, you get the picture. The "good old days of America" were no fucking good in the first place! Yet these are what these people want to bring back! This is why so many of these theoreticians are fixated on the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, which was put into place in order to facilitate the abilities of finance capital. These Illuminati theorists are not against capitalism. They're against the ways that other capitalists—in this case, certain financial interests—hamper them and hold them back, or at least seem to hamper them.

But even if these theories ultimately reflect the position and aspirations of the petty-capitalist class, their influence goes broader into society. And in recent years these kinds of explanations have gained a hearing among the oppressed. Why is this so? For a long time now, a lot of people have been discouraged about the prospects of revolution in the U.S. The defeat of the first socialist revolutions—with counter-revolutions taking place in the Soviet Union in the mid-'50s, and then in China in 1976—has enabled the ruling class to wildly distort and suppress history, to slander revolution, and to proclaim themselves to be all-powerful. The defeat of the heroic struggles of the 1960s within the U.S. has also had a huge effect. In particular, there is the fact that African-Americans were lied to, and lied about. They, along with Latinos, have been targeted by a "war on drugs" that has served as a pretext to institute a new form of Jim Crow, mass incarceration—while all around the official line was that "racism is over, if you can't make it now it's because of your own bad choices." People often feel hopeless—and helpless—in the face of all this.

A parable: Two people go to a casino, play blackjack, and lose all their money. One spends all his time trying to figure out if the dealer was cheating; he then decides to see if there is a way that he can become so good at the game that maybe he can win. He may get real lucky... he may come out a little bit ahead, in the short run... or (most likely scenario) he may, if he keeps playing, lose everything. It doesn't matter. The casino continues. The other notices that no matter how people play the game, many people lose everything... a few people win a little... and the house takes the lion's share. She studies the rules of blackjack and understands that this result is built into the very rules themselves. It doesn't matter whether the casino cheats and the house always wins so long as the game is blackjack. She decides we need a different game altogether, and a world without casinos. Which one are you?

Illuminati theory reflects part of this reality—the part about people being lied to, about hidden forces with hidden agendas determining the real shape of people's lives. At the same time, Illuminati theory also represents going along with and reinforcing this ideological offensive against the people. It is NOT in any way, shape or form a way out of it. It slanders and lies about revolution. It spreads contempt for the masses and their ability to change history, especially through revolution. It directs people's anger against other ethnic groups that have supposedly "made it," while at the same time accepting that "making it" under capitalism should be people's highest goal. It spreads lies about and antagonism against communism and science, while it promotes mysticism and religion. How is ANY of that any good? It is NOT—it is poison.

Illuminati theory can seem to reflect a part of reality, but it does so like the fun-house mirrors in a carnival, giving you a distorted view. It does so in the service of a very unreal, very false and extremely reactionary explanation. The ruling class is powerful, but it is not all-powerful; as Bob Avakian (BA) recently has pointed out, "they are powerful, but their system is riddled with contradictions."⁸ History is not the plaything of a handful of men with secret knowledge; most of all, it is the struggle between contending classes, representing different ways to organize the production of what humans need to live, and different social and political and cultural lives that correspond to those different ways. There never was a golden age to go back to. Humanity will either remain locked in the endless horrors of capitalism-imperialism or go forward to something far better... communism, a society in which people carry out their lives without exploitation or oppression or antagonistic social conflict, a society in which people can rise to their full heights.

So how about instead of trying to go back to "good old days" that never existed and that we should certainly never go back to... how about we go forward? How about we quit getting taken in, or letting others get taken in, by people who worship capitalism and whose ultimate agenda is fascist and white supremacist? How about we call out the bullshit fantasy theories and worse that get people to focus on something other than the REAL source of the problem: capitalism? How about we eliminate the REAL source of the problem, capitalism, and bring in the REAL solution: socialism, as a transition to communism? And how about we promote and build a movement for revolution to bring in that new society, whenever the conditions emerge?

And how about, as a big step toward doing all that, we get with and deeply check out someone who actually has gone deeply into the problem, with REAL science... someone who has put forward a visionary and viable solution... who's developed a strategy to get there... and who leads a party that is bound and determined to lead millions on that road?

How about we get with BA?

 

NOTES

1. Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, a film of a talk by Bob Avakian, revolutiontalk.net. [back]

2. Many also say that the war was waged at the behest of Israel. While Israel certainly supported the war and in some ways benefited from it, they were not the motive force in it. For more on the relation between Israel and the world imperialist system, see the box on anti-Semitism. [back]

3. "The U.S. Constitution and the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal): Two Constitutions, Two Different Systems, Two Different Futures for African-American People." "Part 1: A Slaveholders' Union," Revolution #270, May 27, 2012; Part 2: "Reconstruction, and the First Great Betrayal, 1867-1896," Revolution #271, June 10, 2012; and Part 3: "Battleground Over Segregated Education in the 1950s and 1960s," Revolution #272, June 17, 2012. [back]

4. Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, Bob Avakian, RCP Publications, 2008. Also available at revcom.us. [back]

5. The Oppression of Black People, the Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need," Revolution #144, October 5, 2008. [back]

6. To learn the true history of the 20th century's socialist revolutions, see thisiscommunism.org. [back]

7. This used to get expressed when such theorists would say that "there is an international conspiracy of finance capital and communists working together to rule the world." Despite the fact that imperialism and the communist movement are actually deadly antagonists, from the narrow view of the representative of the small capitalist (who has contradictions with both of these classes, but for diametrically opposed reasons) they seem to be in alliance—against him. [back]

8. "What Humanity Needs: Revolution, and the New Synthesis of Communism," an interview with Bob Avakian, revcom.us. [back]

9. Special Issue on Israel: "Bastion of Enlightenment... or Enforcer for Imperialism: The Case of ISRAEL," Revolution #213, October 10, 2010. [back]

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/265/two_constitutions_two_different_systems-pt1-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

The U.S. Constitution and the Constitution for the
New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)

Two Constitutions, Two Different Systems,
Two Different Futures for African-American People

In January 2011, for the first time, the opening session of the U.S. Congress included a reading of the U.S. Constitution. Tea Party activists had just helped win a significant number of new Republican congressional seats. And this reading was widely acknowledged as a symbolic gesture to emphasize a new Republican rule requiring that all proposed bills must cite text from the U.S. Constitution permitting them to become law.

For 90 minutes, members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, took turns reading the Constitution. But in consultation with the Congressional Research Service and others, they read an edited version of the country’s founding document.

The version they read covered over the fact that the U.S. Constitution was not only written at the time of slavery, but in order to uphold and defend the practice of owning human beings as private property. This version did not include the sections referring to slaves as “three-fifths of all other Persons,” indentured servants “bound to Service for a Term of Years,” and the fugitive-slave clause that required that slaves that escaped to another state be returned to the owner in the state from which they escaped.

* * * * *

It is an ugly exposure of America’s foundations that slavery is openly sanctioned in the U.S. Constitution. But part of the “genius” of the U.S. Constitution is that it is a charter that appears to treat everyone the same—while concealing and reinforcing the profound inequalities, disparities, and class divisions at the heart of the capitalist economic, social, and political system. Indeed, since the abolition of slavery, the U.S. Constitution has provided the legal framework for the continuing oppression of Black people.

The National Civil Right Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, provides people with some powerful history of the struggle against this oppression.

Before the Civil War, Memphis, Tennessee, was a major slave market. Auction Square on North Main Street still displays the original plaque which commemorates the two kinds of trade that shaped much of the economy of Memphis at the time—slaves and cotton.

At the National Civil Rights Museum, you can go on a searing and unforgettable journey that deeply and artistically depicts the lives, struggles, resistance, and aspirations for the liberation of Black people in the United States. The museum’s corridors and galleries pull you through hundreds of years of horrific oppression and courageous resistance.

Beginning with the European-controlled slave dungeons on Africa’s western coast in the 17th century, through the savagery of the “middle passage” across the Atlantic, in which millions of African people died, and into the centuries of slavery. Exhibits display the heroic efforts of the Black soldiers who fought for the Union in the U.S. Civil War and the bitter results of emancipation’s betrayal that came not long after that war ended. Then the long nightmare of Jim Crow and legal segregation, the lynch mobs, the rise of the KKK and other racist vigilantes. The museum sweeps a visitor into the upheavals and transformations of the 20th century: the great migrations out of the rural South into the cities of the North and Midwest, the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement in the ’50s with battles around public education and against the savage lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.

The heart of the museum focuses on the upheavals of the ’50s and ’60s, struggle that began as the Civil Rights Movement and then erupted into the radical and revolutionary movements for Black Liberation.

Many people who walk through this tour leave it emotionally drained, filled with turbulent and intense emotions, with indelible images of centuries of oppression—and heroic resistance—etched in their memory.

A theme of this museum is that the U.S. Constitution, from its origins and at key junctures, provided a basis for greater and expanding numbers of people to be included in its aims of equal civil rights for everyone—won at the cost of great struggle, sacrifice and bloodshed.

But the question must be asked. What lessons should actually be drawn from this legacy of horrific oppression and courageous resistance? Can the liberation of Black and other oppressed people be won through the provisions and in the framework of the U.S. Constitution? Or is a radical—a revolutionary—leap beyond and away from that framework required for the emancipation of all of humanity, including Black people?

* * * * *

The U.S. Constitution was drafted, debated, and approved by slave owners and exploiters. This is a profound truth about the historical birth of the United States and the character of its founding legal document.

Still many people argue that the U.S. Constitution, despite its origins in a society that practiced slavery, has protected and expanded the political and civil rights of ever broader numbers of people. The Constitution is seen as something that continues to provide the legal foundation and political vision for overcoming existing inequalities and injustices. In particular, the argument goes, Black people in the U.S. have gone from being enslaved to the point where a Black man is president, a development that could only have happened because of the provisions and foundation established by the U.S. Constitution.

This message—that the U.S. Constitution establishes a vision and basis for achieving a society where “everyone is equal”—is profoundly UNTRUE and actually does great harm.

From its writing and adoption in 1787 to today, this Constitution has provided the legal framework and justifications for a society torn by deep inequalities, and the preservation of a whole economic and social setup in which a relatively small number of people rule over an exploitative society, and maintain that dominance. As Bob Avakian has pointed out:

“Over the 200 years that this Constitution has been in force, down to today, despite the formal rights of persons it proclaims, and even though the Constitution has been amended to outlaw slavery where one person actually owns another as property, the U.S. Constitution has always remained a document that upholds and gives legal authority to a system in which the masses of people, or their ability to work, have been used as wealth-creating property for the profit of the few.”

In particular, the subordinate, oppressed—and, for almost a century, enslaved—position of Black people has been sanctioned by this Constitution. And this oppression has been reinforced by laws and court rulings flowing from this Constitution and the social-economic system based on exploitation that it serves.

* * * * *

In 2010 the Revolutionary Communist Party published the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) (CNSRNA). This visionary document is based on the new synthesis of communism developed over decades by Bob Avakian.

Take a Radical Step into the Future... This Constitution (Draft Proposal) is written with the future in mind. It is intended to set forth a basic model, and fundamental principles and guidelines, for the nature and functioning of a vastly different society and government than now exists: the New Socialist Republic in North America, a socialist state which would embody, institutionalize and promote radically different relations and values among people; a socialist state whose final and fundamental aim would be to achieve, together with the revolutionary struggle throughout the world, the emancipation of humanity as a whole and the opening of a whole new epoch in human history–communism–with the final abolition of all exploitative and oppressive relations among human beings and the destructive antagonistic conflicts to which these relations give rise. Buy online at: revcom.us/socialistconstitution or at amazon (search for: Constitution-Socialist-Republic-America) OR Send money orders or checks of $8 plus $2.78 shipping/handling/tax to: RCP Publications, PO Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654

This Constitution is nothing less than the framework for a whole new society: a new political system in which the will of the people will be expressed... and a new economic system that will actually be geared to meeting people’s material needs, as well as taking care of the environment and contributing to the revolutionary international process of eliminating all exploitation. Even more fundamentally, this is a framework to advance to a communist world—a world in which exploitation and oppression will be things to read about in history books and people will no longer be divided into antagonistic social groups but will instead live and work together as a freely associating community of human beings all over the planet.

The CNSRNA is a draft proposal for an actual Constitution: the framework, the guiding principles and the processes of a radically new government, a radically new form of state power. We ARE building a movement for revolution—a revolution that WILL put this document into practice. These are the rules of a whole new game... a guide for those who will lead the new power for what to do on Day One, and after.

On the question of doing away with national oppression the Preamble to the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) states:

“The New Socialist Republic in North America is a multi-national and multi-lingual state, which is based on the principle of equality between different nationalities and cultures and has as one of its essential objectives fully overcoming national oppression and inequality, which was such a fundamental part of the imperialist USA throughout its history. Only on the basis of these principles and objectives can divisions among humanity by country and nation be finally overcome and surpassed and a world community of freely associating human beings be brought into being. This orientation is also embodied in the various institutions of the state and in the functioning of the government in the New Socialist Republic in North America.”

* * * * *

This article begins a series that will compare and contrast the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)—in relation to the enslavement, oppression and emancipation of African-American people. We encourage readers to discuss and study this series; spread and share it among your friends; get it into the classrooms, communities and prisons; and send us your comments.

Part 1: A Slaveholders' Union

The U.S. Constitution was drafted, debated, and approved by slave owners and exploiters. Despite this profound truth about the historical birth of the United States, many people argue that the Constitution has protected and expanded the political and civil rights of the people; and that it continues to provide the legal foundation and political vision for overcoming existing inequalities and injustices. But this message—that the U.S. Constitution establishes a vision and basis for achieving a society where “everyone is equal”—is profoundly UNTRUE and actually does great harm. From the very beginning this Constitution has provided the legal framework and justifications for a society torn by deep inequalities, and the preservation of a whole economic and social setup in which a relatively small number of people rule over an exploitative society and maintain that dominance.

In 2010 the Revolutionary Communist Party published the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) (CNSRNA). This visionary document, based on the new synthesis of communism developed over decades by Bob Avakian, provides the framework for a whole new society, a framework to advance to a communist world—a world no longer divided into antagonistic social groups, where people will instead live and work together as a freely associating community of human beings, all over the planet.

This series compares and contrasts the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)—in relation to the enslavement, oppression and emancipation of African-American people. We encourage readers to discuss and study this series, spread and share it among your friends; get it into the classrooms, communities and prisons; and send us your comments.

* * * * *

American enslavement of African people and their descendents was a never-ending hell of work, abuse, torture, rape, and degradation. It was enforced by whips, chains, shotguns, and vicious bloodhounds. The culture and outlook of white supremacy penetrated every aspect of life in the U.S., South and North alike. And all this was enshrined in the “law of the land,” starting with the U.S. Constitution—the binding legal document of the new country.

The U.S. Constitution was, and is, dedicated to the defense of “private property rights” based on exploitation, and for eight decades that included the enslavement of Black people. James Madison, the main author of the U.S. Constitution, wrote that the law in the U.S. regarded slaves as “inhabitants, but debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants.... The true state of the case is that they partake of both these qualities: being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property.... This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied that these are the proper criterion.”¹

Here Madison was arguing for and defending a legal principle that established Black people as a form of property in U.S. law.

“Inhabitants, but debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants”—which meant slaves had no rights whatsoever under the law.

“Being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property”—which meant they could be put on an auction block to be bought and sold, and witness their loved ones taken from them as someone else’s purchase.

“It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live”—which meant they could be forced to work like animals under the whip, chained up and hounded by dogs if they dared to escape; subjected to subhuman conditions of life, and the constant knowledge that the slave master could end their lives on even the slightest whim.

During more than the first 70 years of the United States, constitutionally sanctioned and court approved cruelty towards enslaved Black people knew no limits. The system of “justice” developed under the U.S. Constitution was dedicated to providing the legal basis for complete control of the slave master over their human property. For example: “In one case, a Missouri court considered the ‘crime’ of Celia, a slave who had killed her master while resisting a sexual assault. State law deemed ‘any woman’ in such circumstances to be acting in self-defense. But Celia, the court ruled, was not, legally speaking, ‘a woman’. She was a slave, whose master had complete power over her person. The court sentenced her to death. However, since Celia was pregnant, her execution was postponed until the child was born, so as not to deprive Celia’s owner’s heirs of their property rights.”²

A Slaveholders’ Union

The enslavement of African people and their descendents was integral to the development of what Europeans called the “new world” beginning in 1502. By the time the U.S. declared its independence from England in 1776, slavery existed in all 13 colonies, but it was most concentrated in the southern colonies—Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, especially in the cotton and tobacco plantation regions.

In May 1787, 55 delegates gathered in Philadelphia to write a constitution for a nation formed from the 13 newly independent British colonies. Since winning their war of independence, the former colonies had until this time been held together tenuously, by a weak and largely ineffective central power.

Whether these delegates could compose and agree upon a document capable of uniting the colonies into a coherent national state was not a settled question. Sharp, contentious debate expressing the conflicting interests of representatives from different states, in particular the slave owners of the South and the merchant capitalists of the North, continued for over four months before a complete document was drafted and approved by the delegates.

Much of their contention was shaped and driven by the question of slavery. George William Van Cleve writes in A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, that by 1770 slavery in the American colonies “had become a central economic institution ... slaves had become a major economic asset, with a conservatively estimated collective market value of about 14 million pounds sterling (about $2.4 billion today). Slaves constituted nearly 20% of total private wealth in the 13 colonies in 1774.”³

Two convention delegates delivered speeches denouncing slavery. But the debate here was not about the morality of slavery at the Constitutional Convention. There were no passionate speeches condemning this barbaric atrocity inherited from a colonial empire. There were no demands for its immediate abolition. The arguments concerning slavery centered on several inter-related issues: whether property or population would be the main factor determining representation in the new government’s congress, and the power of the new central government to control trade, commerce, and treaties—and most specifically, the international slave trade.

One Constitution, Two Mutually Dependent Economic Systems

Defenders of the U.S. Constitution often note that it doesn’t contain the word “slavery.” There are several possible reasons for this, including that at least some of its writers and signers recognized the contradiction in overtly recognizing slavery in a document that proclaims to be based on and represent “the people.”

But the fact is that this Constitution—the highest, binding political/legal document of the United States—acknowledged and defended the outright ownership as “property” of an entire category of human beings: Africans and their descendents. Building upon this constitutional foundation, the U.S., through both its political apparatus and its system of courts and laws, continued in its first 70 years to uphold this status of human “property” as a legal category.

The newly formed U.S. included two co-existing economic systems—capitalism and slavery, two ways of organizing society on a foundation of exploitation. These two systems were mutually dependent on each other. The merchants, lawyers, slave traders and slave owners, bankers, ship owners and other prosperous men who debated and wrote the U.S. Constitution needed to create a framework in which both capitalism and slavery could continue to develop. They needed a central state structure capable of protecting their sometimes clashing interests, while at the same time holding them within a unified federal state. They needed a constitution—a document that established the legal and political “rules” of the new country.

From the beginning, the U.S. was formed with the understanding that such a unified state was needed to forge a powerful new country in the Western hemisphere, one capable of resisting domination or interference by European powers, and with a central government strong enough to work out differences between northern capitalists and southern slave owners, especially as it expanded into its western territories. The Constitution’s “pro-slavery character” was the result of efforts to deal with this contradiction. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution declared the slaves to be three-fifths human beings. In this way, the property of the slave owners, i.e. human slaves, were counted in the system of political representation—giving the South an advantage in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College—while denying slaves legal rights as persons.

Slavery was concentrated in the southern states. But it existed in a mutually reliant economic structure with the mercantile capitalism then dominant in the northern states and within a common political framework. Slavery was decisive to the growth, expansion, and prosperity of the entire country. The economic well-being of both southern slave owners and northern capitalists depended on each other’s activities. Cotton and other agricultural products from the slave plantations were processed in northern factories and shipped from northern ports, which also dominated most of the trade coming into the new country.

The Constitution that emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia protected both the capitalist and slave forms of exploitation and enrichment for a small number of people and established a means for their often intense differences to be worked through. The framework that the U.S. Constitution provided for the coherence and development of the new country enabled the U.S., as a whole, and in both its slave and non-slave components, to expand dramatically in the decades after independence was won.

The Missouri Compromise

The years after the U.S. Constitution was written and adopted were years of rapid westward expansion, into areas that are now states like Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana in the North, and Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee in the South. Genocidal campaigns against the Native Americans who lived in areas coveted by white Americans made this expansion possible. And agreements made in Congress, under the provisions of this Constitution, established the legal basis for areas south of the Ohio River to be developed as slave territories, soon to be slave states.

Missouri, which lies mostly north of the Ohio River, became a battleground—as both pro- and anti-slavery forces were moving into Missouri in large numbers by 1815. The question of what the character of that state would be was up for grabs. As Van Cleve notes, “the Missouri controversy of 1819-1821 was a titanic economic and political struggle between America’s sections over their westward expansion. The dispute placed slavery in a clash with an emerging free-labor ideology.”⁴

The resolution of these “disputes” firmly upheld the legal, constitutional basis for slavery as a long-term social institution in the United States. Missouri was admitted to the union as a slave state. In exchange the non-slave state of Maine entered the union so that Congressional “equilibrium” between the two sections of the country would be maintained.

The equilibrium proved to be fragile. For the next 40 years disputes between northern and southern states erupted repeatedly as the country continued to push westward. The key point of ongoing, unsettled contention—whether the territories being opened up to American expansion would be slave or non-slave—was argued and fought over repeatedly. But the outcome of the Missouri Compromise further strengthened and emboldened pro-slavery forces, and led them to push for further expansion of slave territories. It also further solidified the constitutionality of slavery in newly formed states or territories, not just the states that had originally been part of the union.

From the time the Constitution was approved in 1788 to 1821, when the Missouri Compromise had been finalized, the number of slave states and the total number of enslaved people had both more than doubled. A huge proportion of the national wealth—in the North as well as the South—had been amassed from the backbreaking, never-ending labor of slaves—people who had no rights and no legal ability to resist their oppression; who were routinely worked to the point of death, sold away from families and loved ones, cruelly maimed and tortured, and systematically denied any education. The growth and expansion of slavery, as well as the enshrined right of slave masters and overseers to mete out any punishment they desired to their “property,” were built into the U.S. Constitution and were constitutionally protected.

As bargains and compromises were made in the halls of Congress, and as rulings came down in the U.S. Supreme Court, millions of human beings continued to have the legal, constitutional status of “property” without the rights of citizens. The blood of countless slaves was a mortar that bound together the increasingly clashing northern and southern sections of the country.

The Bloodhound Law (Fugitive Slave Act)

“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” Constitution of the United States, Article 4, Section 2

Put in plain English, this section of the U.S. Constitution said that a slave would remain the property of his or her “owner” wherever the slave may go, even into areas where slavery was not recognized. It further stipulated that officials in non-slave states who came upon escaped slaves were obliged to deliver the “property” to the “rightful owner.” To make things perfectly clear, Congress in 1793 passed the “Fugitive Slave Law” to require the return of “runaway” slaves.

But by the late 1840s, runaway slaves were becoming a major problem for slave owners, especially in areas on the perimeter of the slave states. A network of safe houses and secret trails called the Underground Railroad was operated by Black people and white abolitionists to help escaped slaves get to non-slave territory in the North and in Canada, and by the 1840s and 1850s thousands of Black people were escaping from slavery through the railroad.

Further, several northern states had enacted measures called “personal liberty laws” which were aimed at nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act and preventing bounty hunters from snatching Black people off the streets in northern cities and sending them to slavery. In several instances crowds of white abolitionists forced the release of slaves who had been arrested. Well-known intellectuals and writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Ralph Waldo Emerson condemned the law and called for people to defy it.

Around the same time, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—called the “Bloodhound Law” by abolitionists because of the bloodhounds used to track slaves—was passed as yet another “compromise.” But it in fact went even further than the original Fugitive Slave Act—it required that citizens of non-slave states capture and return slaves to their “rightful owners,” under severe penalty of law.

Dred Scott, and a Crisis of Legitimacy

A ruling concerning a slave named Dred Scott was a stark and concentrated example of the logic of the constitutionality of slavery. Dred Scott was a Black man who had been born into slavery, and served as a slave to a U.S. Army officer who had been stationed throughout the U.S. After the officer was transferred from Minnesota to the slave state of Missouri, Scott and his wife filed a suit in federal court seeking their freedom, which he said had been established because they had lived in non-slave states.

In 1857, the United States Supreme Court ruled that neither Dred Scott nor any person of “African descent” could file a lawsuit in a U.S. court, since they could not be citizens of the U.S. The Supreme Court further ruled that simply living outside an area where slavery was established did not establish Scott’s freedom, since this would “deprive his owner of his property.”

Roger B. Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, summarized his ruling with these infamous words: saying that the authors of the Constitution—the “founders”—regarded and legally institutionalized Black people as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The Supreme Court’s decision emboldened the southern slave owners, and infuriated many anti-slavery forces throughout the North. The slave owners argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in effect negated the Missouri Compromise, and would restore to them their constitutional right to bring their slaves anywhere in the United States. Many northerners regarded the Dred Scott decision as a culmination of a decades-long drive to expand slavery, and vowed to defy and oppose it. The differences between the two sides could no longer be reconciled.

Four years after the Dred Scott ruling, the U.S. Civil War began.

Part 2: Reconstruction, and the First Great Betrayal, 1867-1896

 “We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land.... And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise de crops ob corn, ob cotton, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything. And den didn’t dem large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugar and de rice we made? ... I say dey has grown rich, and my people is poor.”⁵

Freedman Bayley Wyat, 1867,
after he and other former slaves were
evicted by the U.S. Army from land
they were farming in Virginia

After northern victory in the Civil War, a key demand and need of Black people was land and the basic means to work on the land. As Bob Avakian wrote, “Land ownership was at that time crucial for Black people to have as some kind of economic ‘anchor’ and basis for them to resist being forced back into conditions of virtual if not literal slavery, of serf-like oppression, on the southern plantations.” In 1865, as the war was reaching its end, U.S. Army General William Sherman issued an order providing 40 acres of land and surplus army mules to newly freed Black people in coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina. But this order was overturned by President Andrew Johnson soon after he took office that year, and ownership of the land was returned to the white former slave owners who had possessed it before the war. The phrase “40 acres and a mule” became a bitter reminder of the betrayal of Black people by the federal government.

But in the brief period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction, there were major transformations in the lives of Black people. As Avakian wrote, these years witnessed “significant changes and improvements in the lives of Black people in the South. The right to vote and hold office, and some of the other Constitutional rights that are supposed to apply to the citizens of the U.S. were partly, if not fully, realized by former slaves during Reconstruction. ...During these ten years of Reconstruction, with all the sharp contradictions involved, there was a real upsurge and sort of flowering of bourgeois-democratic reforms. This was not the proletarian revolution, but at that time it was very significant.”⁶

Three constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—were passed during the years of Reconstruction, as were some federal laws (the Enforcement Acts and two Civil Rights bills), which were supposed to give substance to these amendments.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery—“except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”; i.e., prisoners. The heart of the Fourteenth Amendment granted U.S. citizenship to “all persons” born in the U.S., and extended the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution to states, saying that “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment said that no citizen of the U.S. could be denied the right to vote by the federal or state government because of their “race, color, or condition of previous servitude.”

From the onset, these developments were met with convulsions of mass violence across the entire area of the former Confederacy. The Ku Klux Klan was founded and grew dramatically in these years, carrying out lynchings, night raids, and terroristic assaults upon newly freed Black people across the South. Historian Eric Foner wrote that the KKK and similar racist organizations were “in effect ... a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy.”⁷

This violence pervaded every aspect of society, and was intended to enforce a culture of white supremacy, and of degradation and fear among Black people. Foner wrote, “More commonly, violence was directed at ... ‘impudent negroes’—those who no longer adhered to patterns of behavior demanded under slavery. A North Carolina freedman related how, after he was whipped, the Klan assailants ‘told me the law, that whenever I met a white person, no matter who he was, whether he was poor or rich, I was to take off my hat.’”⁸

An Inferno of Racist Violence Sanctioned by Court Rulings

Louisiana was a particularly violent inferno of racist mob violence against newly enfranchised Black people. In a book appropriately titled The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, Charles Lane wrote that, “Over three days in September [1868], [white terrorists] killed some two hundred freedmen in St. Landry Parish. Later that month, in Bossier Parish, just across the Red River from Shreveport ... hundreds of armed whites poured into Bossier Parish, scouring the countryside ... this soon turned into an all-out ‘nigger hunt,’ complete with bloodhounds. The killing lasted through October and the death toll reached 168.”⁹

On April 13, 1873, a mass slaughter of Black people occurred in Colfax, Louisiana, a town in the center of the state on the banks of the Red River. Of the almost 200 people involved in carrying out the mass murder in Colfax, only nine were eventually charged with any crime. Only three were convicted,¹⁰ not of murder, but of the federal crime of conspiring to prevent two of the murdered Black men from their constitutionally mandated “free exercise and enjoyment of the right to peaceably assemble.”

Such outright murderous, racist terror, when legally challenged, was backed up by the courts which ruled such acts constitutionally legal. Three years after the Colfax Massacre, the case appealing the conviction of these three was heard in an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court unanimously reversed the guilty verdicts on the three racist killers. The essence of the ruling was that “federal law ... could not protect Blacks in exercising their right to vote.” And that “Federal law could not protect the ‘lives and liberty’ of Black people from murderous conspiracies. They [the Supreme Court] found this charge in the indictment ‘even more objectionable’ than those based on rights to assemble and vote ... because the power to bring prosecution for murder ‘rests alone with the States’ ... and the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that prevents ‘any State’ from depriving ‘any person’ of life or liberty of any person adds nothing to the rights of one citizen against another.’”¹¹

In other words, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution prevented state governments from organizing lynch mobs or preventing Black people from participating in political life. But if a mob of “ordinary citizens” did so, and the local and state officials allowed it to happen—that was no violation of the U.S. Constitution.

This ruling gave a green light to an onslaught of unprecedented racist terror against Black people in every southern state. As Bob Avakian wrote in the article “How this System has Betrayed Black People: Crucial Turning Points”: “...in 1877 something very dramatic happened. The federal army was withdrawn from the South and the masses of Black people were stripped of even the partial economic and political gains they had made and were subjugated in the most brutal ways and once again chained to the plantations, only now essentially in peonage instead of outright slavery.”

In what has become known as its “Cruikshank ruling” (after one of the murder defendants) the Supreme Court put what amounted to the U.S. Constitution’s seal of approval on the Colfax Massacre, and helped put a legal seal on the end to Reconstruction, when it seemed that equality for Black people could possibly be attained within the United States.

In ruling that the federal government would do nothing to prevent the mass murder of Black people by organized racist mobs, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to decades of night riding KKK terror. In Louisiana an explicitly and overtly white supremacist state constitution was adopted, and became a model for other Southern state constitutions.

Other cases involving lynching came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883, 1906 and 1945, but the court’s decision in Cruikshank enshrined in U.S. constitutional law that the federal government would not intervene to end lynching in the South.” Lane wrote that in the Harris ruling—which came to be known as the Ku Klux Klan case—“The Supreme Court had meanwhile interpreted Black people’s other constitutional rights almost out of existence ... In 1883, the Court decided United States vs. Harris. The case stemmed from a federal indictment of twenty members of a Tennessee lynch mob for violating section 2 of the Enforcement Act, which outlawed conspiracies to deprive anyone of the ‘equal protection of the laws.’ Invoking Cruikshank, ... the Court unanimously struck down section 2. The lynching was not a federal matter, the Court said, because the mob consisted only of private individuals.”¹²

This ruling is worth repeating: Lynching was found not to be a federal matter, because the mob consisted only of private individuals.

Thus, the Supreme Court, the highest legal authority in the country, gave a legal green light to the lynching of Black people.

Indeed, during the years 1882-1951, the Tuskegee Institute (in figures many historians regard as an underestimation) —determined that 4,730 people were lynched in the United States; the vast majority of them Black, and almost all of them in Southern states.

Also in 1883, the same year as the Harris case, the U.S. Supreme Court heard what became known as “the Civil Rights Cases of 1883.” The Court ruled by an 8-1 vote to, in the words of historian Don E. Fehrenbacher, “void the Civil Rights Act of 1875.” Specifically the court ruled that “invasion of individual rights” by private individuals was not a matter in which the federal government could intervene. The “whites only” signs that had begun to appear throughout the South and in many parts of the North multiplied many times over, and took on the sanction of approval by U.S. law and Supreme Court ruling.  Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave who became a great leader in the fight to abolish slavery, said that in this ruling “the spirit or power of slavery lived on”. Legally sanctioned segregation of Black people began to exert its grip across the South.

Homer Plessy and the Constitutional Consolidation of Jim Crow in 1896

In the last three decades of the 19th century, the United States rapidly developed into a world capitalist power, and transitioned into a monopoly capitalist, or imperialist, country. Large-scale factory and mining industries mushroomed in the cities of the North and West. Slavery was no longer legal in the Southern states which had formed the Confederacy, but the former slave economies transformed into semi-feudal territories integrated into the capitalist-imperialist framework, and were dominated by sharecropping and other extreme forms of exploitation of Black people.

Agriculture—still based on extreme exploitation of Black people—remained the most profitable component of these states, and their most essential contribution to the entire capitalist economy of the U.S. Sharecropping—a harsh form of rural exploitation which differed slightly from place to place but always was founded upon ownership of the land and means to work it by white people, and.intense, year-round work by impoverished and overwhelmingly Black laborers—took root across the South. Millions of Black people were tied to land they worked endlessly but did not own. Under this system the crop harvested by former slaves would be taken by the white landowner to be sold. Out of the proceeds the landowner would deduct the costs of seeds and other supplies—and out of what was left, the Black farmers would get some share. But if the harvest was bad or the price of cotton fell, the Black farmer would end up in debt. And the white landowners typically defrauded the sharecroppers. So the situation was one where Black farmers were locked into debt and brutal poverty.

Also, as mentioned above, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” After being arrested and imprisoned, sometimes for something as minor as vagrancy, hundreds of thousands of Black people continued to be forced into slave conditions and what amounted to slave labor. Across the South, and several places, such as Sugarland in Texas and Angola in Louisiana, large slave plantations were transformed into prisons housing huge numbers of Black people who performed the same back-breaking labor for no wages as their ancestors had.

Across the entire South a system of degradation and oppression that became known as Jim Crow was being institutionalized in the laws of every state and municipality. Black people were systematically, legally, and violently purged from voting rolls, prevented from riding in public transportation, living where they wanted, entering public buildings or using public facilities, and a thousand other humiliations that were woven deep into the fabric of everyday life. The so-called “color line” became a barrier Black people could not cross.

On June 7, 1892, a man in New Orleans named Homer Plessy decided to challenge this line. Plessy bought a ticket for a train ride from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana—on a “whites only” car. Homer Plessy, as the Supreme Court wrote in its final decision, “‘entered a passenger train, and took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race (sic) were accommodated.’ The conductor then ordered him to ‘vacate said coach, and move to one of persons not of the white race.’ When Plessy refused to move, ‘he was, with the aid of a police officer, forcibly ejected from said coach and hurried off to and imprisoned in the parish jail of New Orleans.’”¹³

Four years later, in the case known as Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Plessy’s eviction and arrest, taking the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine of Louisiana’s white supremacist state constitution and making it federal case law. The ruling issued by Supreme Court Justice Henry B. Brown’s final words were “If one race be inferior to another socially, the Constitution of the United States can not put them upon the same plane.”

In response to this ruling, the New Orleans Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), which brought the suit to challenge the segregation law in Louisiana, replied, “We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred.”¹⁴

A Constitution to Maintain Oppression

The Cruikshank and Plessy rulings put in place the legal, constitutional basis of the savage oppression, discrimination, and outright murder perpetrated on Black people for decades. In these instances, the Supreme Court did not “misinterpret” the U.S. Constitution. It did not, in an argument echoed by many defenders of this constitution, “turn the clear intent of Congress into legislative impotence.”¹⁵

These rulings were not “aberrations”; they were consistent with the U.S. Constitution, and concentrated in important ways the changing needs of the capitalist ruling class, at a time when the U.S. had developed from a largely agrarian society to an industrializing imperialist power contending on a world stage. They were intended to provide a legal basis for maintaining, and actually intensifying, the subordinate, deeply oppressed condition of Black people, and in particular their status as sharecroppers providing cheap labor and enormous profits to the plantation economy of the South, and to the capitalist system as a whole

Lynch mob terror was a continual presence in the rural and urban areas of the U.S. South in the seven decades following Reconstruction, always threatening to inflame spasms of horrific violence against Black people. State and county officials often participated in or even organized and publicized such violence. The constant, inescapable degradation of Jim Crow was woven into every aspect of life in the South, and many parts of the North.

Federal policy remained (officially) “hands off,” while in fact, legally aiding and abetting these lynchings and allowing them to continue, and letting their perpetrators remain unpunished. Ida B. Wells, a Black woman from Mississippi who was active in the Civil Rights and women’s movements until her death in 1931, wrote in January 1900, “The silence and seeming condoning [of lynching by the government] grow more marked as the years go by.”

Anti-lynching bills were put forward in the U.S. Congress several times in the early 1900s, but never came close to being passed. Not until 2005—yes, 2005—did the U.S. Senate pass a resolution expressing its “remorse” for never having passed an anti-lynching bill.

Part 3: Battleground Over Segregated Education in the 1950s and 1960s

The betrayal of Reconstruction in 1877 began an era of lynching, segregation, and constant humiliation of Black people in the U.S., upheld and reinforced by constitutional law. But the economic and social conditions that had characterized the U.S. in the years prior to the Civil War were undergoing rapid and dramatic transformations.

By the beginning of the 1900s, the U.S. developed into a major imperialist power on the world stage, and then on the basis of the outcome of World War 2, had become the dominant imperialist power in the world. Domestically, by 1950, the U.S. transformed from a country whose population and economy were dominated by agriculture to an industrialized, urban society. Agriculture became increasingly mechanized, and the sharecropping that had characterized southern farming became less and less profitable. These changes had profound effects on the masses of Black people in the United States.

Jim Crow: From the End of Reconstruction to the End of World War 2

Lynch mob terror was a brutal fact of life in the rural and urban areas of the U.S. South following the federal government's abandoment of Reconstruction in 1877, always threatening horrific violence against Black people. In 1898, Ida B. Wells, a courageous African-American journalist and civil rights advocate, wrote an appeal to President McKinley to act against lynching, saying that "nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 to 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hang or burn to death an individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless." But McKinley didn't respond to Ida Wells, and widespread lynching continued well into the middle of the 1900s.

State and county officials often participated in and sometimes organized and publicized the lynchings. They routinely allowed them to happen. Federal policy, in every body of government and under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, in effect gave a green light to the lynchings by doing nothing to prevent them. U.S. constitutional law and Supreme Court decisions reinforced and gave these organized murders a stamp of legitimacy (see Part 2 above).

In these years a set of restrictions, rules, and deeply embedded cultural, social, and economic norms called Jim Crow reinforced the outlook and practice of white supremacy at every turn. This was America under the "rule of constitutional law"—a nightmare of blatant and ever present white supremacy, and the continual, unchecked use of the most savage mob violence against Black people.

William S. McFeeley, a professor of history whose book discussed slavery, lynching and the death penalty as a tool of social control, wrote that "by the close of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, lynching, disenfranchisement, and the formal categorization of Negroes as separate of the Jim Crow laws caused African Americans to be as powerless in America as they had ever been. Such humiliations as separate drinking fountains were part of the wall deliberately erected between Americans. Not even under slavery had African Americans been so excluded from any recourse to those in authority."¹⁶

Most Black people in the U.S. still lived in the South during the first half of the 20th century. The sharecropping economy of the South, integrated into the overall capitalist-imperialist system, provided great profits to both plantation owners and capitalists generally. But as the 1900s went on, changes in the international and domestic economy, including the increasing use of more advanced machinery to plant and harvest crops, began to transform the nature of southern plantation agriculture—requiring less labor than before. These changes in the economic foundation of southern society, and the continuing racist violence and degradation across the South, forced growing numbers of Black people in the South off the land their ancestors had worked for centuries.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, more than a million Black people left the rural areas of the South, moving into cities both northern and southern. This was the first wave of what became known as the Great Migration, and it transformed the face of the U.S. forever.

Migration of Black people out of rural southern areas subsided in the years of economic depression in the 1930s. But beginning with the onset of World War 2 in 1939 and continuing for three decades, millions more Black people moved out of the South, seeking jobs in the industrial areas of northern and western cities, and seeking to get away from the lynching and Jim Crow of the South.

Large numbers of Black people became a major and growing part of the population and workforce of cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York. The blatant Jim Crow of the South didn't exist in the same way in most northern cities. But Black people in these northern cities faced discrimination and humiliation at every turn. They were crowded into overpriced ghettos and overwhelmingly forced to work in the lowest paying, most dangerous industrial jobs.

In these changing conditions, new expectations and demands arose from among Black people. A Black soldier returning from World War 2 expressed the anger many people felt at that time: "The Army Jim-Crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler do than that?"¹⁷

Beginning in the late 1940s, in cities and towns across the country—not just in the South—Black people fought to overcome the deeply engrained and legally enforced oppression that confronted them at every turn. Some of the initial, and most intense, battles focused on public education.

Brown vs. Board of Education

In 1951, Oliver L. Brown, a Black man living in Topeka, Kansas, attempted to enroll his daughter Linda in an all-white elementary school seven blocks from their home. He was denied by the Topeka Board of Education, and Linda was forced to attend an all-Black school a mile from home. Oliver Brown and others in Topeka filed a lawsuit to end the Board of Education's policy of maintaining segregated public schools, using the pretext of the "separate but equal" standard established in the Supreme Court's Plessy ruling. (See Part 2 for discussion of Plessy v. Ferguson case.)

Three years later, this lawsuit was combined with four others and argued before the Supreme Court in a case that became known as Brown vs. Board of Education. The Court held two hearings over a five-month span. Earl Warren, who had recently been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, spent the months between court sessions working to assure that the vote on Brown was unanimous to overturn Plessy. Warren and fellow Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter were concerned about what kind of message the Supreme Court would send to the world and the people in the U.S. if it didn't unanimously reject legal segregation. Warren thought it would take "all the wisdom of this Court to dispose of the matter with a minimum of emotion and strife. How we do it is important."¹⁸ As we shall see, this "wisdom" was driven by larger political and international concerns.

Warren pressured, cajoled, and argued with wavering judges until all agreed to mandate an end to legal segregation in public schools. In the spring of 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling that overturned the segregationist precedent established in the Plessy ruling. The Court stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

The Supreme Court's Brown ruling is regarded by many lawyers and scholars as "in many ways, the watershed constitutional case of the 20th century," and is often held up as an example of how the U.S. Constitution provides the framework and foundation to put all citizens on an equal footing. Judge Stanley Reed, who was on the Supreme Court when Brown was decided, said "if it was not the most important case in the history of the Court, it was very close."¹⁹

But in reality the decision in this case was not an example of the highest court in the land standing up for and enforcing equality. Rather, the Brown ruling came about mainly in response to great necessity faced by the U.S. ruling class—to dramatic economic and social changes in the U.S. and to international and domestic challenges, and the need to deal with this in a way that would result in the least amount of social disruption, upheaval, and confrontation.

Within the U.S., Black people—especially youth—and some whites had begun to challenge the deeply engrained practices of Jim Crow and lynch law. And the migration of millions of Black people out of the South into cities in the North resulted in profound social changes and expectations.

Internationally, the U.S. faced mounting difficulties as it tried to secure its position as the leading imperialist power in the world. In particular, national liberation struggles in oppressed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin Ameria were beginning to challenge U.S. domination, foreshadowing much more profound upsurges that would come in the late 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, and very much related, the communist movement worldwide, which stood for the abolition of exploitation and inequality, had enormous influence across the planet. In the face of all this, for the U.S. to continue to maintain a legal system of flagrant discrimination, oppression, and brutality against Black people within its own borders tarnished the image it was projecting of itself.

But still, even with these larger concerns influencing the Supreme Court's ruling, significant limitations were built into the Brown decision. The ruling applied only to public education. Other areas of society could legally maintain their "whites only" status. The Court left open the question of who was responsible for enforcing the decision, and put off to the indefinite future when it had to be applied and enforced. The way Judge Reed put it was that enforcement should not be "a rush job. The time they give, the opportunities to adjust, these are the greatest palliative [soothing influence] to an awful thing."²⁰ To be clear, the "awful thing" Reed referred to was the end of constitutionally enforced segregation of Black school children in dramatically inferior schools.

The Brown decision was immediately met with vehement opposition from leading political figures in the U.S., especially in the South. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who was a leading white supremacist and a leading figure in the Democratic Party, said the South "will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court."²¹

Little Rock

The first major test of the Brown decision came three years later. On September 4, 1957, in Little Rock, Arkansas, nine Black students tried to enter Central High, regarded as the premier public high school in the state. A white mob carrying Confederate flags had started gathering at the school the day before, when a federal court in St. Louis legally cleared the way for Black students to enter the long segregated school.

In response, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus—who in mainstream politics was widely regarded as a "racial moderate" by the standards of the time—announced on statewide television that "blood will flow in the streets" if the Black students entered Central High."²² Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school and prevent Black students from entering.

Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Black students who tried to enter Central High, was turned away by soldiers with bayonets and confronted by an angry crowd that surrounded her and began yelling, "Get her! Lynch her!" Someone said, "Get a rope and drag her over to this tree!" Eckford was protected by a white NAACP member and was able to escape the mob and get on a city bus.²³

For the next several weeks, both the racist mobs and the National Guard prevented the nine students from entering Central High. The country, and the entire world, read and saw televised stories daily about the nine youths prevented from getting an education, and besieged by hate filled racist mobs while the federal government stood aside.

This was a big problem for the rulers of the U.S. They were trying to solidify and expand their global empire, and everywhere claimed that the U.S. was "the greatest country in the world," the land of "freedom and democracy," the place where the rights of the individual were cherished. Yet here were scenes broadcast worldwide of young Black students being viciously assaulted, having their lives threatened not just by racist lynch mobs but by the forces of the government itself.

Dwight Eisenhower, then president of the U.S., was on a golf vacation at the time the confrontations in Little Rock began, and didn't want to be interrupted. Then, on September 20, an Arkansas judge ordered Governor Faubus to remove the National Guardsmen from Little Rock. But the racist mob remained at the school, and the terrifying specter of a public, possibly televised lynching of the nine youths loomed into focus.

Eisenhower, and the ruling class of capitalist-imperialists he represented, felt compelled to act. He called in U.S. Army Airborne troops, federalized the Arkansas National Guard (taking them out of the control of Governor Faubus), and ordered the Army to escort the youths into the school. They remained there until the end of August.

To be clear, Eisenhower was not particularly concerned with protecting Black students under assault by a mob of howling racists. In fact, in private conversations Eisenhower said to companions that he had sympathies for white parents who didn't want their children to be educated in the same school as Black children. Publicly, he said he acted to "prevent mob rule and anarchy," and most of all because the white mobs in Little Rock had harmed "the prestige and influence of our nation...,"²⁴ not because of the injustice and cruelty that was segregation.

The nine students finally entered Central High in late September 1954, under military escort. They endured a year of constant assault, insult, and abuse.

Little Rock was the first major test of the Brown decision. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and into the 1970s, ugly, racist opposition to different forms of integrating public school education arose in different parts of the country, and battles that reverberated across the planet were fought to integrate major state universities in Alabama, Mississippi, and elsewhere.

But again, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka only applied to public education, not to the open, legal segregation that permeated every aspect of life in the southern U.S. And it took massive and courageous boycotts, sit-ins, voter registration drives, freedom rides, rebellions, and other forms of protest to begin to batter down other barriers to legal segregation across the South, until finally in 1964 the U.S. Congress passed a civil rights law that outlawed many open forms of discrimination against Black people and women.

The Supreme Court rulings on Little Rock and Plessy illustrate the link between legal rulings and ruling class interests. And they also show how laws not only reflect prevailing property and fundamentally production relations but how the interpretation of these laws does as well, at various stages. Here, Bob Avakian has pointed out:

 "A prime example is the contrast between Plessy vs. Ferguson at the end of the 19th century (1896), which upheld segregation as Constitutional, and the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in the middle of the 20th century (1954) which overturned it. Nothing fundamental affecting this had changed in the Constitution: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which codified the end of slavery and important related changes, had been passed well before Plessy vs. Ferguson—and between Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education there were no changes in the Constitution which clearly prohibited segregation—but the ruling class, and its prevailing representatives, in the Supreme Court specifically, saw its interests one way in one historical period and another way in another historical period."²⁵

Education in the "Color Blind Society"

The historic and ongoing oppression of Black people is built deeply into the foundation of U.S. society, and is manifested economically, politically, socially, and culturally. Establishing one formal expression of "equality" was not intended to, nor could it change this basic reality, even in the one realm of public education. And more recent Supreme Court rulings in the years after the Brown ruling have in fact served to undercut the actual impact in any ongoing way of Brown's end to the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Today, schools in the U.S. are more racially segregated than they were 40 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, while the average Black child attends a school that is only 29 percent white. Overall, a third of all Black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent Black and Latino.²⁶

A phenomenon of the last half of the 20th century, continuing to today, has been the growth of suburban and "exurban" areas. This development has been promoted and encouraged by various government policies, including conscious decisions to allow subsidized growth in the suburbs through tax policies, development of freeways and other mass transit, etc. In most metropolitan areas of the U.S., a great divide has arisen between what are usually relatively better off, and largely white, suburban areas, and inner cities populated by Black and Latino people.

Public schools are primarily funded through property and other forms of local taxation, and one outcome of suburban growth has been the vastly different resources allotted to schools in the inner cities and schools in more affluent suburbs. Two lawsuits in the 1970s, one in Texas and one in Michigan, sought to overcome the effects of the impoverishment of many urban school districts, the conscious neglect towards the education of Black and Latino youth, and the enormous inequalities of public education that remain a glaring, conspicuous feature of life in the U.S. after the Brown ruling.

The suit in Texas, Rodriguez v. San Antonio, argued that tremendous differences in tax-based funding for urban and suburban school districts had reinforced long-standing practices of seriously underfunding education for Black and Latino children, keeping them in dilapidated buildings, overcrowded classrooms, and with limited or no extracurricular activities available.

The Supreme Court emphatically rejected any attempt to overcome this enormous inequality that masquerades as equality. "The [Supreme] Court recognized that disparities in state funding of schools based on property taxes lead to Black schools and white schools, good schools and bad schools; nevertheless, they said, the Court should not intervene, for poor students were not a protected class, education was not a federally protected constitutional right, and thus, the Court should do nothing."²⁷

In the Michigan case, Milliken v Bradley, the Supreme Court ruled that integration of schooling in the Detroit metropolitan area could not take place across school district lines, despite the undisputed fact that any "leveling of the playing field" in the Detroit area would have to involve both the overwhelmingly Black Detroit schools and the overwhelmingly white suburban schools.

With these rulings, the era of even pretending to allow meaningful attempts to provide a quality education to all Black children, under the constitutional sanction of the Brown decision, had ended. As researchers at UCLA concluded in a 2009 report: "Millions of non-white students are locked into 'dropout factory' high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate, and few are well prepared for college or a future in the US economy."²⁸

The U.S. Constitution, and the way it has been interpreted and upheld for almost two-and-a-half centuries, has consistently sustained, deepened, and enforced the oppression of Black people. It is, as Bob Avakian has written, an "exploiters' vision of freedom," and it has been adapted not only to continue old forms of oppression, but to enforce new ones under changed economic and social conditions. This continuity of oppression is expressed vividly in the realm of public education.

 

To be continued

Notes

1. Cited in The U.S. Constitution: An Exploiters' Vision of Freedom, by Bob Avakian [back]

2. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, by Eric Foner and Joshua Brown [back]

3. A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, by George William Van Cleve, p 6 [back]

4. Van Cleve, p. 225 [back]

5. Reconstruction 1863-1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution, by Eric Foner, p. 105. [back]

6. “How This System Has Betrayed Black People: Crucial Turning Points,” by Bob Avakian, Revolutionary Worker (now Revolution) #894, February 16, 1997. [back]

7. Foner, p. 425. [back]

8. Foner, p. 430. [back]

9. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, by Charles Lane,pp. 18-19. [back]

10. A People’s History of the Supreme Court, by Peter Irons, p. 205. [back]

11. Ibid., p. 294. [back]

12. Lane, p. 253. [back]

13. Irons,p. 222. [back]

14. We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson: The Fight Against Legal Segregation, by Keith Weldon Medley. [back]

15. Irons,p. 197. [back]

16. A Legacy of Slavery and Lynching: The Death Penalty as a Tool of Social Control, by William S. McFeeley, Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia. [back]

17. A People's History of the Supreme Court, by Peter Irons, p. 368. [back]

18. A History of the Supreme Court, by Bernard Schwarz, p. 293. [back]

19. Ibid., p. 286. [back]

20. Ibid., p. 296. [back]

21. Irons, p. 399. [back]

22. Ibid., p. 405. [back]

23. Ibid. [back]

24. New York Times, September 25, 1957. [back]

25. Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon, by Bob Avakian, available online at revcom.us [back]

26. Gary Orfield, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge (Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, 2009), p. 13. [back]

27. Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law, by Martin Garbus,p. 212. [back]

28. Orfield, p. 3. [back]

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/265/two_constitutions_two_different_systems-pt1-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

The U.S. Constitution and the Constitution for the
New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)

Two Constitutions, Two Different Systems,
Two Different Futures for African-American People

In January 2011, for the first time, the opening session of the U.S. Congress included a reading of the U.S. Constitution. Tea Party activists had just helped win a significant number of new Republican congressional seats. And this reading was widely acknowledged as a symbolic gesture to emphasize a new Republican rule requiring that all proposed bills must cite text from the U.S. Constitution permitting them to become law.

For 90 minutes, members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, took turns reading the Constitution. But in consultation with the Congressional Research Service and others, they read an edited version of the country’s founding document.

The version they read covered over the fact that the U.S. Constitution was not only written at the time of slavery, but in order to uphold and defend the practice of owning human beings as private property. This version did not include the sections referring to slaves as “three-fifths of all other Persons,” indentured servants “bound to Service for a Term of Years,” and the fugitive-slave clause that required that slaves that escaped to another state be returned to the owner in the state from which they escaped.

* * * * *

It is an ugly exposure of America’s foundations that slavery is openly sanctioned in the U.S. Constitution. But part of the “genius” of the U.S. Constitution is that it is a charter that appears to treat everyone the same—while concealing and reinforcing the profound inequalities, disparities, and class divisions at the heart of the capitalist economic, social, and political system. Indeed, since the abolition of slavery, the U.S. Constitution has provided the legal framework for the continuing oppression of Black people.

The National Civil Right Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, provides people with some powerful history of the struggle against this oppression.

Before the Civil War, Memphis, Tennessee, was a major slave market. Auction Square on North Main Street still displays the original plaque which commemorates the two kinds of trade that shaped much of the economy of Memphis at the time—slaves and cotton.

At the National Civil Rights Museum, you can go on a searing and unforgettable journey that deeply and artistically depicts the lives, struggles, resistance, and aspirations for the liberation of Black people in the United States. The museum’s corridors and galleries pull you through hundreds of years of horrific oppression and courageous resistance.

Beginning with the European-controlled slave dungeons on Africa’s western coast in the 17th century, through the savagery of the “middle passage” across the Atlantic, in which millions of African people died, and into the centuries of slavery. Exhibits display the heroic efforts of the Black soldiers who fought for the Union in the U.S. Civil War and the bitter results of emancipation’s betrayal that came not long after that war ended. Then the long nightmare of Jim Crow and legal segregation, the lynch mobs, the rise of the KKK and other racist vigilantes. The museum sweeps a visitor into the upheavals and transformations of the 20th century: the great migrations out of the rural South into the cities of the North and Midwest, the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement in the ’50s with battles around public education and against the savage lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.

The heart of the museum focuses on the upheavals of the ’50s and ’60s, struggle that began as the Civil Rights Movement and then erupted into the radical and revolutionary movements for Black Liberation.

Many people who walk through this tour leave it emotionally drained, filled with turbulent and intense emotions, with indelible images of centuries of oppression—and heroic resistance—etched in their memory.

A theme of this museum is that the U.S. Constitution, from its origins and at key junctures, provided a basis for greater and expanding numbers of people to be included in its aims of equal civil rights for everyone—won at the cost of great struggle, sacrifice and bloodshed.

But the question must be asked. What lessons should actually be drawn from this legacy of horrific oppression and courageous resistance? Can the liberation of Black and other oppressed people be won through the provisions and in the framework of the U.S. Constitution? Or is a radical—a revolutionary—leap beyond and away from that framework required for the emancipation of all of humanity, including Black people?

* * * * *

The U.S. Constitution was drafted, debated, and approved by slave owners and exploiters. This is a profound truth about the historical birth of the United States and the character of its founding legal document.

Still many people argue that the U.S. Constitution, despite its origins in a society that practiced slavery, has protected and expanded the political and civil rights of ever broader numbers of people. The Constitution is seen as something that continues to provide the legal foundation and political vision for overcoming existing inequalities and injustices. In particular, the argument goes, Black people in the U.S. have gone from being enslaved to the point where a Black man is president, a development that could only have happened because of the provisions and foundation established by the U.S. Constitution.

This message—that the U.S. Constitution establishes a vision and basis for achieving a society where “everyone is equal”—is profoundly UNTRUE and actually does great harm.

From its writing and adoption in 1787 to today, this Constitution has provided the legal framework and justifications for a society torn by deep inequalities, and the preservation of a whole economic and social setup in which a relatively small number of people rule over an exploitative society, and maintain that dominance. As Bob Avakian has pointed out:

“Over the 200 years that this Constitution has been in force, down to today, despite the formal rights of persons it proclaims, and even though the Constitution has been amended to outlaw slavery where one person actually owns another as property, the U.S. Constitution has always remained a document that upholds and gives legal authority to a system in which the masses of people, or their ability to work, have been used as wealth-creating property for the profit of the few.”

In particular, the subordinate, oppressed—and, for almost a century, enslaved—position of Black people has been sanctioned by this Constitution. And this oppression has been reinforced by laws and court rulings flowing from this Constitution and the social-economic system based on exploitation that it serves.

* * * * *

In 2010 the Revolutionary Communist Party published the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) (CNSRNA). This visionary document is based on the new synthesis of communism developed over decades by Bob Avakian.

Take a Radical Step into the Future... This Constitution (Draft Proposal) is written with the future in mind. It is intended to set forth a basic model, and fundamental principles and guidelines, for the nature and functioning of a vastly different society and government than now exists: the New Socialist Republic in North America, a socialist state which would embody, institutionalize and promote radically different relations and values among people; a socialist state whose final and fundamental aim would be to achieve, together with the revolutionary struggle throughout the world, the emancipation of humanity as a whole and the opening of a whole new epoch in human history–communism–with the final abolition of all exploitative and oppressive relations among human beings and the destructive antagonistic conflicts to which these relations give rise. Buy online at: revcom.us/socialistconstitution or at amazon (search for: Constitution-Socialist-Republic-America) OR Send money orders or checks of $8 plus $2.78 shipping/handling/tax to: RCP Publications, PO Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654

This Constitution is nothing less than the framework for a whole new society: a new political system in which the will of the people will be expressed... and a new economic system that will actually be geared to meeting people’s material needs, as well as taking care of the environment and contributing to the revolutionary international process of eliminating all exploitation. Even more fundamentally, this is a framework to advance to a communist world—a world in which exploitation and oppression will be things to read about in history books and people will no longer be divided into antagonistic social groups but will instead live and work together as a freely associating community of human beings all over the planet.

The CNSRNA is a draft proposal for an actual Constitution: the framework, the guiding principles and the processes of a radically new government, a radically new form of state power. We ARE building a movement for revolution—a revolution that WILL put this document into practice. These are the rules of a whole new game... a guide for those who will lead the new power for what to do on Day One, and after.

On the question of doing away with national oppression the Preamble to the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) states:

“The New Socialist Republic in North America is a multi-national and multi-lingual state, which is based on the principle of equality between different nationalities and cultures and has as one of its essential objectives fully overcoming national oppression and inequality, which was such a fundamental part of the imperialist USA throughout its history. Only on the basis of these principles and objectives can divisions among humanity by country and nation be finally overcome and surpassed and a world community of freely associating human beings be brought into being. This orientation is also embodied in the various institutions of the state and in the functioning of the government in the New Socialist Republic in North America.”

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This article begins a series that will compare and contrast the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)—in relation to the enslavement, oppression and emancipation of African-American people. We encourage readers to discuss and study this series; spread and share it among your friends; get it into the classrooms, communities and prisons; and send us your comments.

Part 1: A Slaveholders' Union

The U.S. Constitution was drafted, debated, and approved by slave owners and exploiters. Despite this profound truth about the historical birth of the United States, many people argue that the Constitution has protected and expanded the political and civil rights of the people; and that it continues to provide the legal foundation and political vision for overcoming existing inequalities and injustices. But this message—that the U.S. Constitution establishes a vision and basis for achieving a society where “everyone is equal”—is profoundly UNTRUE and actually does great harm. From the very beginning this Constitution has provided the legal framework and justifications for a society torn by deep inequalities, and the preservation of a whole economic and social setup in which a relatively small number of people rule over an exploitative society and maintain that dominance.

In 2010 the Revolutionary Communist Party published the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) (CNSRNA). This visionary document, based on the new synthesis of communism developed over decades by Bob Avakian, provides the framework for a whole new society, a framework to advance to a communist world—a world no longer divided into antagonistic social groups, where people will instead live and work together as a freely associating community of human beings, all over the planet.

This series compares and contrasts the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)—in relation to the enslavement, oppression and emancipation of African-American people. We encourage readers to discuss and study this series, spread and share it among your friends; get it into the classrooms, communities and prisons; and send us your comments.

* * * * *

American enslavement of African people and their descendents was a never-ending hell of work, abuse, torture, rape, and degradation. It was enforced by whips, chains, shotguns, and vicious bloodhounds. The culture and outlook of white supremacy penetrated every aspect of life in the U.S., South and North alike. And all this was enshrined in the “law of the land,” starting with the U.S. Constitution—the binding legal document of the new country.

The U.S. Constitution was, and is, dedicated to the defense of “private property rights” based on exploitation, and for eight decades that included the enslavement of Black people. James Madison, the main author of the U.S. Constitution, wrote that the law in the U.S. regarded slaves as “inhabitants, but debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants.... The true state of the case is that they partake of both these qualities: being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property.... This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied that these are the proper criterion.”¹

Here Madison was arguing for and defending a legal principle that established Black people as a form of property in U.S. law.

“Inhabitants, but debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants”—which meant slaves had no rights whatsoever under the law.

“Being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property”—which meant they could be put on an auction block to be bought and sold, and witness their loved ones taken from them as someone else’s purchase.

“It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live”—which meant they could be forced to work like animals under the whip, chained up and hounded by dogs if they dared to escape; subjected to subhuman conditions of life, and the constant knowledge that the slave master could end their lives on even the slightest whim.

During more than the first 70 years of the United States, constitutionally sanctioned and court approved cruelty towards enslaved Black people knew no limits. The system of “justice” developed under the U.S. Constitution was dedicated to providing the legal basis for complete control of the slave master over their human property. For example: “In one case, a Missouri court considered the ‘crime’ of Celia, a slave who had killed her master while resisting a sexual assault. State law deemed ‘any woman’ in such circumstances to be acting in self-defense. But Celia, the court ruled, was not, legally speaking, ‘a woman’. She was a slave, whose master had complete power over her person. The court sentenced her to death. However, since Celia was pregnant, her execution was postponed until the child was born, so as not to deprive Celia’s owner’s heirs of their property rights.”²

A Slaveholders’ Union

The enslavement of African people and their descendents was integral to the development of what Europeans called the “new world” beginning in 1502. By the time the U.S. declared its independence from England in 1776, slavery existed in all 13 colonies, but it was most concentrated in the southern colonies—Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, especially in the cotton and tobacco plantation regions.

In May 1787, 55 delegates gathered in Philadelphia to write a constitution for a nation formed from the 13 newly independent British colonies. Since winning their war of independence, the former colonies had until this time been held together tenuously, by a weak and largely ineffective central power.

Whether these delegates could compose and agree upon a document capable of uniting the colonies into a coherent national state was not a settled question. Sharp, contentious debate expressing the conflicting interests of representatives from different states, in particular the slave owners of the South and the merchant capitalists of the North, continued for over four months before a complete document was drafted and approved by the delegates.

Much of their contention was shaped and driven by the question of slavery. George William Van Cleve writes in A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, that by 1770 slavery in the American colonies “had become a central economic institution ... slaves had become a major economic asset, with a conservatively estimated collective market value of about 14 million pounds sterling (about $2.4 billion today). Slaves constituted nearly 20% of total private wealth in the 13 colonies in 1774.”³

Two convention delegates delivered speeches denouncing slavery. But the debate here was not about the morality of slavery at the Constitutional Convention. There were no passionate speeches condemning this barbaric atrocity inherited from a colonial empire. There were no demands for its immediate abolition. The arguments concerning slavery centered on several inter-related issues: whether property or population would be the main factor determining representation in the new government’s congress, and the power of the new central government to control trade, commerce, and treaties—and most specifically, the international slave trade.

One Constitution, Two Mutually Dependent Economic Systems

Defenders of the U.S. Constitution often note that it doesn’t contain the word “slavery.” There are several possible reasons for this, including that at least some of its writers and signers recognized the contradiction in overtly recognizing slavery in a document that proclaims to be based on and represent “the people.”

But the fact is that this Constitution—the highest, binding political/legal document of the United States—acknowledged and defended the outright ownership as “property” of an entire category of human beings: Africans and their descendents. Building upon this constitutional foundation, the U.S., through both its political apparatus and its system of courts and laws, continued in its first 70 years to uphold this status of human “property” as a legal category.

The newly formed U.S. included two co-existing economic systems—capitalism and slavery, two ways of organizing society on a foundation of exploitation. These two systems were mutually dependent on each other. The merchants, lawyers, slave traders and slave owners, bankers, ship owners and other prosperous men who debated and wrote the U.S. Constitution needed to create a framework in which both capitalism and slavery could continue to develop. They needed a central state structure capable of protecting their sometimes clashing interests, while at the same time holding them within a unified federal state. They needed a constitution—a document that established the legal and political “rules” of the new country.

From the beginning, the U.S. was formed with the understanding that such a unified state was needed to forge a powerful new country in the Western hemisphere, one capable of resisting domination or interference by European powers, and with a central government strong enough to work out differences between northern capitalists and southern slave owners, especially as it expanded into its western territories. The Constitution’s “pro-slavery character” was the result of efforts to deal with this contradiction. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution declared the slaves to be three-fifths human beings. In this way, the property of the slave owners, i.e. human slaves, were counted in the system of political representation—giving the South an advantage in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College—while denying slaves legal rights as persons.

Slavery was concentrated in the southern states. But it existed in a mutually reliant economic structure with the mercantile capitalism then dominant in the northern states and within a common political framework. Slavery was decisive to the growth, expansion, and prosperity of the entire country. The economic well-being of both southern slave owners and northern capitalists depended on each other’s activities. Cotton and other agricultural products from the slave plantations were processed in northern factories and shipped from northern ports, which also dominated most of the trade coming into the new country.

The Constitution that emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia protected both the capitalist and slave forms of exploitation and enrichment for a small number of people and established a means for their often intense differences to be worked through. The framework that the U.S. Constitution provided for the coherence and development of the new country enabled the U.S., as a whole, and in both its slave and non-slave components, to expand dramatically in the decades after independence was won.

The Missouri Compromise

The years after the U.S. Constitution was written and adopted were years of rapid westward expansion, into areas that are now states like Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana in the North, and Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee in the South. Genocidal campaigns against the Native Americans who lived in areas coveted by white Americans made this expansion possible. And agreements made in Congress, under the provisions of this Constitution, established the legal basis for areas south of the Ohio River to be developed as slave territories, soon to be slave states.

Missouri, which lies mostly north of the Ohio River, became a battleground—as both pro- and anti-slavery forces were moving into Missouri in large numbers by 1815. The question of what the character of that state would be was up for grabs. As Van Cleve notes, “the Missouri controversy of 1819-1821 was a titanic economic and political struggle between America’s sections over their westward expansion. The dispute placed slavery in a clash with an emerging free-labor ideology.”⁴

The resolution of these “disputes” firmly upheld the legal, constitutional basis for slavery as a long-term social institution in the United States. Missouri was admitted to the union as a slave state. In exchange the non-slave state of Maine entered the union so that Congressional “equilibrium” between the two sections of the country would be maintained.

The equilibrium proved to be fragile. For the next 40 years disputes between northern and southern states erupted repeatedly as the country continued to push westward. The key point of ongoing, unsettled contention—whether the territories being opened up to American expansion would be slave or non-slave—was argued and fought over repeatedly. But the outcome of the Missouri Compromise further strengthened and emboldened pro-slavery forces, and led them to push for further expansion of slave territories. It also further solidified the constitutionality of slavery in newly formed states or territories, not just the states that had originally been part of the union.

From the time the Constitution was approved in 1788 to 1821, when the Missouri Compromise had been finalized, the number of slave states and the total number of enslaved people had both more than doubled. A huge proportion of the national wealth—in the North as well as the South—had been amassed from the backbreaking, never-ending labor of slaves—people who had no rights and no legal ability to resist their oppression; who were routinely worked to the point of death, sold away from families and loved ones, cruelly maimed and tortured, and systematically denied any education. The growth and expansion of slavery, as well as the enshrined right of slave masters and overseers to mete out any punishment they desired to their “property,” were built into the U.S. Constitution and were constitutionally protected.

As bargains and compromises were made in the halls of Congress, and as rulings came down in the U.S. Supreme Court, millions of human beings continued to have the legal, constitutional status of “property” without the rights of citizens. The blood of countless slaves was a mortar that bound together the increasingly clashing northern and southern sections of the country.

The Bloodhound Law (Fugitive Slave Act)

“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” Constitution of the United States, Article 4, Section 2

Put in plain English, this section of the U.S. Constitution said that a slave would remain the property of his or her “owner” wherever the slave may go, even into areas where slavery was not recognized. It further stipulated that officials in non-slave states who came upon escaped slaves were obliged to deliver the “property” to the “rightful owner.” To make things perfectly clear, Congress in 1793 passed the “Fugitive Slave Law” to require the return of “runaway” slaves.

But by the late 1840s, runaway slaves were becoming a major problem for slave owners, especially in areas on the perimeter of the slave states. A network of safe houses and secret trails called the Underground Railroad was operated by Black people and white abolitionists to help escaped slaves get to non-slave territory in the North and in Canada, and by the 1840s and 1850s thousands of Black people were escaping from slavery through the railroad.

Further, several northern states had enacted measures called “personal liberty laws” which were aimed at nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act and preventing bounty hunters from snatching Black people off the streets in northern cities and sending them to slavery. In several instances crowds of white abolitionists forced the release of slaves who had been arrested. Well-known intellectuals and writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Ralph Waldo Emerson condemned the law and called for people to defy it.

Around the same time, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—called the “Bloodhound Law” by abolitionists because of the bloodhounds used to track slaves—was passed as yet another “compromise.” But it in fact went even further than the original Fugitive Slave Act—it required that citizens of non-slave states capture and return slaves to their “rightful owners,” under severe penalty of law.

Dred Scott, and a Crisis of Legitimacy

A ruling concerning a slave named Dred Scott was a stark and concentrated example of the logic of the constitutionality of slavery. Dred Scott was a Black man who had been born into slavery, and served as a slave to a U.S. Army officer who had been stationed throughout the U.S. After the officer was transferred from Minnesota to the slave state of Missouri, Scott and his wife filed a suit in federal court seeking their freedom, which he said had been established because they had lived in non-slave states.

In 1857, the United States Supreme Court ruled that neither Dred Scott nor any person of “African descent” could file a lawsuit in a U.S. court, since they could not be citizens of the U.S. The Supreme Court further ruled that simply living outside an area where slavery was established did not establish Scott’s freedom, since this would “deprive his owner of his property.”

Roger B. Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, summarized his ruling with these infamous words: saying that the authors of the Constitution—the “founders”—regarded and legally institutionalized Black people as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The Supreme Court’s decision emboldened the southern slave owners, and infuriated many anti-slavery forces throughout the North. The slave owners argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in effect negated the Missouri Compromise, and would restore to them their constitutional right to bring their slaves anywhere in the United States. Many northerners regarded the Dred Scott decision as a culmination of a decades-long drive to expand slavery, and vowed to defy and oppose it. The differences between the two sides could no longer be reconciled.

Four years after the Dred Scott ruling, the U.S. Civil War began.

Part 2: Reconstruction, and the First Great Betrayal, 1867-1896

 “We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land.... And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise de crops ob corn, ob cotton, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything. And den didn’t dem large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugar and de rice we made? ... I say dey has grown rich, and my people is poor.”⁵

Freedman Bayley Wyat, 1867,
after he and other former slaves were
evicted by the U.S. Army from land
they were farming in Virginia

After northern victory in the Civil War, a key demand and need of Black people was land and the basic means to work on the land. As Bob Avakian wrote, “Land ownership was at that time crucial for Black people to have as some kind of economic ‘anchor’ and basis for them to resist being forced back into conditions of virtual if not literal slavery, of serf-like oppression, on the southern plantations.” In 1865, as the war was reaching its end, U.S. Army General William Sherman issued an order providing 40 acres of land and surplus army mules to newly freed Black people in coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina. But this order was overturned by President Andrew Johnson soon after he took office that year, and ownership of the land was returned to the white former slave owners who had possessed it before the war. The phrase “40 acres and a mule” became a bitter reminder of the betrayal of Black people by the federal government.

But in the brief period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction, there were major transformations in the lives of Black people. As Avakian wrote, these years witnessed “significant changes and improvements in the lives of Black people in the South. The right to vote and hold office, and some of the other Constitutional rights that are supposed to apply to the citizens of the U.S. were partly, if not fully, realized by former slaves during Reconstruction. ...During these ten years of Reconstruction, with all the sharp contradictions involved, there was a real upsurge and sort of flowering of bourgeois-democratic reforms. This was not the proletarian revolution, but at that time it was very significant.”⁶

Three constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—were passed during the years of Reconstruction, as were some federal laws (the Enforcement Acts and two Civil Rights bills), which were supposed to give substance to these amendments.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery—“except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”; i.e., prisoners. The heart of the Fourteenth Amendment granted U.S. citizenship to “all persons” born in the U.S., and extended the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution to states, saying that “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment said that no citizen of the U.S. could be denied the right to vote by the federal or state government because of their “race, color, or condition of previous servitude.”

From the onset, these developments were met with convulsions of mass violence across the entire area of the former Confederacy. The Ku Klux Klan was founded and grew dramatically in these years, carrying out lynchings, night raids, and terroristic assaults upon newly freed Black people across the South. Historian Eric Foner wrote that the KKK and similar racist organizations were “in effect ... a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy.”⁷

This violence pervaded every aspect of society, and was intended to enforce a culture of white supremacy, and of degradation and fear among Black people. Foner wrote, “More commonly, violence was directed at ... ‘impudent negroes’—those who no longer adhered to patterns of behavior demanded under slavery. A North Carolina freedman related how, after he was whipped, the Klan assailants ‘told me the law, that whenever I met a white person, no matter who he was, whether he was poor or rich, I was to take off my hat.’”⁸

An Inferno of Racist Violence Sanctioned by Court Rulings

Louisiana was a particularly violent inferno of racist mob violence against newly enfranchised Black people. In a book appropriately titled The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, Charles Lane wrote that, “Over three days in September [1868], [white terrorists] killed some two hundred freedmen in St. Landry Parish. Later that month, in Bossier Parish, just across the Red River from Shreveport ... hundreds of armed whites poured into Bossier Parish, scouring the countryside ... this soon turned into an all-out ‘nigger hunt,’ complete with bloodhounds. The killing lasted through October and the death toll reached 168.”⁹

On April 13, 1873, a mass slaughter of Black people occurred in Colfax, Louisiana, a town in the center of the state on the banks of the Red River. Of the almost 200 people involved in carrying out the mass murder in Colfax, only nine were eventually charged with any crime. Only three were convicted,¹⁰ not of murder, but of the federal crime of conspiring to prevent two of the murdered Black men from their constitutionally mandated “free exercise and enjoyment of the right to peaceably assemble.”

Such outright murderous, racist terror, when legally challenged, was backed up by the courts which ruled such acts constitutionally legal. Three years after the Colfax Massacre, the case appealing the conviction of these three was heard in an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court unanimously reversed the guilty verdicts on the three racist killers. The essence of the ruling was that “federal law ... could not protect Blacks in exercising their right to vote.” And that “Federal law could not protect the ‘lives and liberty’ of Black people from murderous conspiracies. They [the Supreme Court] found this charge in the indictment ‘even more objectionable’ than those based on rights to assemble and vote ... because the power to bring prosecution for murder ‘rests alone with the States’ ... and the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that prevents ‘any State’ from depriving ‘any person’ of life or liberty of any person adds nothing to the rights of one citizen against another.’”¹¹

In other words, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution prevented state governments from organizing lynch mobs or preventing Black people from participating in political life. But if a mob of “ordinary citizens” did so, and the local and state officials allowed it to happen—that was no violation of the U.S. Constitution.

This ruling gave a green light to an onslaught of unprecedented racist terror against Black people in every southern state. As Bob Avakian wrote in the article “How this System has Betrayed Black People: Crucial Turning Points”: “...in 1877 something very dramatic happened. The federal army was withdrawn from the South and the masses of Black people were stripped of even the partial economic and political gains they had made and were subjugated in the most brutal ways and once again chained to the plantations, only now essentially in peonage instead of outright slavery.”

In what has become known as its “Cruikshank ruling” (after one of the murder defendants) the Supreme Court put what amounted to the U.S. Constitution’s seal of approval on the Colfax Massacre, and helped put a legal seal on the end to Reconstruction, when it seemed that equality for Black people could possibly be attained within the United States.

In ruling that the federal government would do nothing to prevent the mass murder of Black people by organized racist mobs, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to decades of night riding KKK terror. In Louisiana an explicitly and overtly white supremacist state constitution was adopted, and became a model for other Southern state constitutions.

Other cases involving lynching came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883, 1906 and 1945, but the court’s decision in Cruikshank enshrined in U.S. constitutional law that the federal government would not intervene to end lynching in the South.” Lane wrote that in the Harris ruling—which came to be known as the Ku Klux Klan case—“The Supreme Court had meanwhile interpreted Black people’s other constitutional rights almost out of existence ... In 1883, the Court decided United States vs. Harris. The case stemmed from a federal indictment of twenty members of a Tennessee lynch mob for violating section 2 of the Enforcement Act, which outlawed conspiracies to deprive anyone of the ‘equal protection of the laws.’ Invoking Cruikshank, ... the Court unanimously struck down section 2. The lynching was not a federal matter, the Court said, because the mob consisted only of private individuals.”¹²

This ruling is worth repeating: Lynching was found not to be a federal matter, because the mob consisted only of private individuals.

Thus, the Supreme Court, the highest legal authority in the country, gave a legal green light to the lynching of Black people.

Indeed, during the years 1882-1951, the Tuskegee Institute (in figures many historians regard as an underestimation) —determined that 4,730 people were lynched in the United States; the vast majority of them Black, and almost all of them in Southern states.

Also in 1883, the same year as the Harris case, the U.S. Supreme Court heard what became known as “the Civil Rights Cases of 1883.” The Court ruled by an 8-1 vote to, in the words of historian Don E. Fehrenbacher, “void the Civil Rights Act of 1875.” Specifically the court ruled that “invasion of individual rights” by private individuals was not a matter in which the federal government could intervene. The “whites only” signs that had begun to appear throughout the South and in many parts of the North multiplied many times over, and took on the sanction of approval by U.S. law and Supreme Court ruling.  Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave who became a great leader in the fight to abolish slavery, said that in this ruling “the spirit or power of slavery lived on”. Legally sanctioned segregation of Black people began to exert its grip across the South.

Homer Plessy and the Constitutional Consolidation of Jim Crow in 1896

In the last three decades of the 19th century, the United States rapidly developed into a world capitalist power, and transitioned into a monopoly capitalist, or imperialist, country. Large-scale factory and mining industries mushroomed in the cities of the North and West. Slavery was no longer legal in the Southern states which had formed the Confederacy, but the former slave economies transformed into semi-feudal territories integrated into the capitalist-imperialist framework, and were dominated by sharecropping and other extreme forms of exploitation of Black people.

Agriculture—still based on extreme exploitation of Black people—remained the most profitable component of these states, and their most essential contribution to the entire capitalist economy of the U.S. Sharecropping—a harsh form of rural exploitation which differed slightly from place to place but always was founded upon ownership of the land and means to work it by white people, and.intense, year-round work by impoverished and overwhelmingly Black laborers—took root across the South. Millions of Black people were tied to land they worked endlessly but did not own. Under this system the crop harvested by former slaves would be taken by the white landowner to be sold. Out of the proceeds the landowner would deduct the costs of seeds and other supplies—and out of what was left, the Black farmers would get some share. But if the harvest was bad or the price of cotton fell, the Black farmer would end up in debt. And the white landowners typically defrauded the sharecroppers. So the situation was one where Black farmers were locked into debt and brutal poverty.

Also, as mentioned above, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” After being arrested and imprisoned, sometimes for something as minor as vagrancy, hundreds of thousands of Black people continued to be forced into slave conditions and what amounted to slave labor. Across the South, and several places, such as Sugarland in Texas and Angola in Louisiana, large slave plantations were transformed into prisons housing huge numbers of Black people who performed the same back-breaking labor for no wages as their ancestors had.

Across the entire South a system of degradation and oppression that became known as Jim Crow was being institutionalized in the laws of every state and municipality. Black people were systematically, legally, and violently purged from voting rolls, prevented from riding in public transportation, living where they wanted, entering public buildings or using public facilities, and a thousand other humiliations that were woven deep into the fabric of everyday life. The so-called “color line” became a barrier Black people could not cross.

On June 7, 1892, a man in New Orleans named Homer Plessy decided to challenge this line. Plessy bought a ticket for a train ride from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana—on a “whites only” car. Homer Plessy, as the Supreme Court wrote in its final decision, “‘entered a passenger train, and took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race (sic) were accommodated.’ The conductor then ordered him to ‘vacate said coach, and move to one of persons not of the white race.’ When Plessy refused to move, ‘he was, with the aid of a police officer, forcibly ejected from said coach and hurried off to and imprisoned in the parish jail of New Orleans.’”¹³

Four years later, in the case known as Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Plessy’s eviction and arrest, taking the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine of Louisiana’s white supremacist state constitution and making it federal case law. The ruling issued by Supreme Court Justice Henry B. Brown’s final words were “If one race be inferior to another socially, the Constitution of the United States can not put them upon the same plane.”

In response to this ruling, the New Orleans Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), which brought the suit to challenge the segregation law in Louisiana, replied, “We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred.”¹⁴

A Constitution to Maintain Oppression

The Cruikshank and Plessy rulings put in place the legal, constitutional basis of the savage oppression, discrimination, and outright murder perpetrated on Black people for decades. In these instances, the Supreme Court did not “misinterpret” the U.S. Constitution. It did not, in an argument echoed by many defenders of this constitution, “turn the clear intent of Congress into legislative impotence.”¹⁵

These rulings were not “aberrations”; they were consistent with the U.S. Constitution, and concentrated in important ways the changing needs of the capitalist ruling class, at a time when the U.S. had developed from a largely agrarian society to an industrializing imperialist power contending on a world stage. They were intended to provide a legal basis for maintaining, and actually intensifying, the subordinate, deeply oppressed condition of Black people, and in particular their status as sharecroppers providing cheap labor and enormous profits to the plantation economy of the South, and to the capitalist system as a whole

Lynch mob terror was a continual presence in the rural and urban areas of the U.S. South in the seven decades following Reconstruction, always threatening to inflame spasms of horrific violence against Black people. State and county officials often participated in or even organized and publicized such violence. The constant, inescapable degradation of Jim Crow was woven into every aspect of life in the South, and many parts of the North.

Federal policy remained (officially) “hands off,” while in fact, legally aiding and abetting these lynchings and allowing them to continue, and letting their perpetrators remain unpunished. Ida B. Wells, a Black woman from Mississippi who was active in the Civil Rights and women’s movements until her death in 1931, wrote in January 1900, “The silence and seeming condoning [of lynching by the government] grow more marked as the years go by.”

Anti-lynching bills were put forward in the U.S. Congress several times in the early 1900s, but never came close to being passed. Not until 2005—yes, 2005—did the U.S. Senate pass a resolution expressing its “remorse” for never having passed an anti-lynching bill.

Part 3: Battleground Over Segregated Education in the 1950s and 1960s

The betrayal of Reconstruction in 1877 began an era of lynching, segregation, and constant humiliation of Black people in the U.S., upheld and reinforced by constitutional law. But the economic and social conditions that had characterized the U.S. in the years prior to the Civil War were undergoing rapid and dramatic transformations.

By the beginning of the 1900s, the U.S. developed into a major imperialist power on the world stage, and then on the basis of the outcome of World War 2, had become the dominant imperialist power in the world. Domestically, by 1950, the U.S. transformed from a country whose population and economy were dominated by agriculture to an industrialized, urban society. Agriculture became increasingly mechanized, and the sharecropping that had characterized southern farming became less and less profitable. These changes had profound effects on the masses of Black people in the United States.

Jim Crow: From the End of Reconstruction to the End of World War 2

Lynch mob terror was a brutal fact of life in the rural and urban areas of the U.S. South following the federal government's abandoment of Reconstruction in 1877, always threatening horrific violence against Black people. In 1898, Ida B. Wells, a courageous African-American journalist and civil rights advocate, wrote an appeal to President McKinley to act against lynching, saying that "nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 to 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hang or burn to death an individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless." But McKinley didn't respond to Ida Wells, and widespread lynching continued well into the middle of the 1900s.

State and county officials often participated in and sometimes organized and publicized the lynchings. They routinely allowed them to happen. Federal policy, in every body of government and under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, in effect gave a green light to the lynchings by doing nothing to prevent them. U.S. constitutional law and Supreme Court decisions reinforced and gave these organized murders a stamp of legitimacy (see Part 2 above).

In these years a set of restrictions, rules, and deeply embedded cultural, social, and economic norms called Jim Crow reinforced the outlook and practice of white supremacy at every turn. This was America under the "rule of constitutional law"—a nightmare of blatant and ever present white supremacy, and the continual, unchecked use of the most savage mob violence against Black people.

William S. McFeeley, a professor of history whose book discussed slavery, lynching and the death penalty as a tool of social control, wrote that "by the close of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, lynching, disenfranchisement, and the formal categorization of Negroes as separate of the Jim Crow laws caused African Americans to be as powerless in America as they had ever been. Such humiliations as separate drinking fountains were part of the wall deliberately erected between Americans. Not even under slavery had African Americans been so excluded from any recourse to those in authority."¹⁶

Most Black people in the U.S. still lived in the South during the first half of the 20th century. The sharecropping economy of the South, integrated into the overall capitalist-imperialist system, provided great profits to both plantation owners and capitalists generally. But as the 1900s went on, changes in the international and domestic economy, including the increasing use of more advanced machinery to plant and harvest crops, began to transform the nature of southern plantation agriculture—requiring less labor than before. These changes in the economic foundation of southern society, and the continuing racist violence and degradation across the South, forced growing numbers of Black people in the South off the land their ancestors had worked for centuries.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, more than a million Black people left the rural areas of the South, moving into cities both northern and southern. This was the first wave of what became known as the Great Migration, and it transformed the face of the U.S. forever.

Migration of Black people out of rural southern areas subsided in the years of economic depression in the 1930s. But beginning with the onset of World War 2 in 1939 and continuing for three decades, millions more Black people moved out of the South, seeking jobs in the industrial areas of northern and western cities, and seeking to get away from the lynching and Jim Crow of the South.

Large numbers of Black people became a major and growing part of the population and workforce of cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York. The blatant Jim Crow of the South didn't exist in the same way in most northern cities. But Black people in these northern cities faced discrimination and humiliation at every turn. They were crowded into overpriced ghettos and overwhelmingly forced to work in the lowest paying, most dangerous industrial jobs.

In these changing conditions, new expectations and demands arose from among Black people. A Black soldier returning from World War 2 expressed the anger many people felt at that time: "The Army Jim-Crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler do than that?"¹⁷

Beginning in the late 1940s, in cities and towns across the country—not just in the South—Black people fought to overcome the deeply engrained and legally enforced oppression that confronted them at every turn. Some of the initial, and most intense, battles focused on public education.

Brown vs. Board of Education

In 1951, Oliver L. Brown, a Black man living in Topeka, Kansas, attempted to enroll his daughter Linda in an all-white elementary school seven blocks from their home. He was denied by the Topeka Board of Education, and Linda was forced to attend an all-Black school a mile from home. Oliver Brown and others in Topeka filed a lawsuit to end the Board of Education's policy of maintaining segregated public schools, using the pretext of the "separate but equal" standard established in the Supreme Court's Plessy ruling. (See Part 2 for discussion of Plessy v. Ferguson case.)

Three years later, this lawsuit was combined with four others and argued before the Supreme Court in a case that became known as Brown vs. Board of Education. The Court held two hearings over a five-month span. Earl Warren, who had recently been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, spent the months between court sessions working to assure that the vote on Brown was unanimous to overturn Plessy. Warren and fellow Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter were concerned about what kind of message the Supreme Court would send to the world and the people in the U.S. if it didn't unanimously reject legal segregation. Warren thought it would take "all the wisdom of this Court to dispose of the matter with a minimum of emotion and strife. How we do it is important."¹⁸ As we shall see, this "wisdom" was driven by larger political and international concerns.

Warren pressured, cajoled, and argued with wavering judges until all agreed to mandate an end to legal segregation in public schools. In the spring of 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling that overturned the segregationist precedent established in the Plessy ruling. The Court stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

The Supreme Court's Brown ruling is regarded by many lawyers and scholars as "in many ways, the watershed constitutional case of the 20th century," and is often held up as an example of how the U.S. Constitution provides the framework and foundation to put all citizens on an equal footing. Judge Stanley Reed, who was on the Supreme Court when Brown was decided, said "if it was not the most important case in the history of the Court, it was very close."¹⁹

But in reality the decision in this case was not an example of the highest court in the land standing up for and enforcing equality. Rather, the Brown ruling came about mainly in response to great necessity faced by the U.S. ruling class—to dramatic economic and social changes in the U.S. and to international and domestic challenges, and the need to deal with this in a way that would result in the least amount of social disruption, upheaval, and confrontation.

Within the U.S., Black people—especially youth—and some whites had begun to challenge the deeply engrained practices of Jim Crow and lynch law. And the migration of millions of Black people out of the South into cities in the North resulted in profound social changes and expectations.

Internationally, the U.S. faced mounting difficulties as it tried to secure its position as the leading imperialist power in the world. In particular, national liberation struggles in oppressed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin Ameria were beginning to challenge U.S. domination, foreshadowing much more profound upsurges that would come in the late 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, and very much related, the communist movement worldwide, which stood for the abolition of exploitation and inequality, had enormous influence across the planet. In the face of all this, for the U.S. to continue to maintain a legal system of flagrant discrimination, oppression, and brutality against Black people within its own borders tarnished the image it was projecting of itself.

But still, even with these larger concerns influencing the Supreme Court's ruling, significant limitations were built into the Brown decision. The ruling applied only to public education. Other areas of society could legally maintain their "whites only" status. The Court left open the question of who was responsible for enforcing the decision, and put off to the indefinite future when it had to be applied and enforced. The way Judge Reed put it was that enforcement should not be "a rush job. The time they give, the opportunities to adjust, these are the greatest palliative [soothing influence] to an awful thing."²⁰ To be clear, the "awful thing" Reed referred to was the end of constitutionally enforced segregation of Black school children in dramatically inferior schools.

The Brown decision was immediately met with vehement opposition from leading political figures in the U.S., especially in the South. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who was a leading white supremacist and a leading figure in the Democratic Party, said the South "will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court."²¹

Little Rock

The first major test of the Brown decision came three years later. On September 4, 1957, in Little Rock, Arkansas, nine Black students tried to enter Central High, regarded as the premier public high school in the state. A white mob carrying Confederate flags had started gathering at the school the day before, when a federal court in St. Louis legally cleared the way for Black students to enter the long segregated school.

In response, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus—who in mainstream politics was widely regarded as a "racial moderate" by the standards of the time—announced on statewide television that "blood will flow in the streets" if the Black students entered Central High."²² Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school and prevent Black students from entering.

Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Black students who tried to enter Central High, was turned away by soldiers with bayonets and confronted by an angry crowd that surrounded her and began yelling, "Get her! Lynch her!" Someone said, "Get a rope and drag her over to this tree!" Eckford was protected by a white NAACP member and was able to escape the mob and get on a city bus.²³

For the next several weeks, both the racist mobs and the National Guard prevented the nine students from entering Central High. The country, and the entire world, read and saw televised stories daily about the nine youths prevented from getting an education, and besieged by hate filled racist mobs while the federal government stood aside.

This was a big problem for the rulers of the U.S. They were trying to solidify and expand their global empire, and everywhere claimed that the U.S. was "the greatest country in the world," the land of "freedom and democracy," the place where the rights of the individual were cherished. Yet here were scenes broadcast worldwide of young Black students being viciously assaulted, having their lives threatened not just by racist lynch mobs but by the forces of the government itself.

Dwight Eisenhower, then president of the U.S., was on a golf vacation at the time the confrontations in Little Rock began, and didn't want to be interrupted. Then, on September 20, an Arkansas judge ordered Governor Faubus to remove the National Guardsmen from Little Rock. But the racist mob remained at the school, and the terrifying specter of a public, possibly televised lynching of the nine youths loomed into focus.

Eisenhower, and the ruling class of capitalist-imperialists he represented, felt compelled to act. He called in U.S. Army Airborne troops, federalized the Arkansas National Guard (taking them out of the control of Governor Faubus), and ordered the Army to escort the youths into the school. They remained there until the end of August.

To be clear, Eisenhower was not particularly concerned with protecting Black students under assault by a mob of howling racists. In fact, in private conversations Eisenhower said to companions that he had sympathies for white parents who didn't want their children to be educated in the same school as Black children. Publicly, he said he acted to "prevent mob rule and anarchy," and most of all because the white mobs in Little Rock had harmed "the prestige and influence of our nation...,"²⁴ not because of the injustice and cruelty that was segregation.

The nine students finally entered Central High in late September 1954, under military escort. They endured a year of constant assault, insult, and abuse.

Little Rock was the first major test of the Brown decision. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and into the 1970s, ugly, racist opposition to different forms of integrating public school education arose in different parts of the country, and battles that reverberated across the planet were fought to integrate major state universities in Alabama, Mississippi, and elsewhere.

But again, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka only applied to public education, not to the open, legal segregation that permeated every aspect of life in the southern U.S. And it took massive and courageous boycotts, sit-ins, voter registration drives, freedom rides, rebellions, and other forms of protest to begin to batter down other barriers to legal segregation across the South, until finally in 1964 the U.S. Congress passed a civil rights law that outlawed many open forms of discrimination against Black people and women.

The Supreme Court rulings on Little Rock and Plessy illustrate the link between legal rulings and ruling class interests. And they also show how laws not only reflect prevailing property and fundamentally production relations but how the interpretation of these laws does as well, at various stages. Here, Bob Avakian has pointed out:

 "A prime example is the contrast between Plessy vs. Ferguson at the end of the 19th century (1896), which upheld segregation as Constitutional, and the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in the middle of the 20th century (1954) which overturned it. Nothing fundamental affecting this had changed in the Constitution: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which codified the end of slavery and important related changes, had been passed well before Plessy vs. Ferguson—and between Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education there were no changes in the Constitution which clearly prohibited segregation—but the ruling class, and its prevailing representatives, in the Supreme Court specifically, saw its interests one way in one historical period and another way in another historical period."²⁵

Education in the "Color Blind Society"

The historic and ongoing oppression of Black people is built deeply into the foundation of U.S. society, and is manifested economically, politically, socially, and culturally. Establishing one formal expression of "equality" was not intended to, nor could it change this basic reality, even in the one realm of public education. And more recent Supreme Court rulings in the years after the Brown ruling have in fact served to undercut the actual impact in any ongoing way of Brown's end to the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Today, schools in the U.S. are more racially segregated than they were 40 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, while the average Black child attends a school that is only 29 percent white. Overall, a third of all Black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent Black and Latino.²⁶

A phenomenon of the last half of the 20th century, continuing to today, has been the growth of suburban and "exurban" areas. This development has been promoted and encouraged by various government policies, including conscious decisions to allow subsidized growth in the suburbs through tax policies, development of freeways and other mass transit, etc. In most metropolitan areas of the U.S., a great divide has arisen between what are usually relatively better off, and largely white, suburban areas, and inner cities populated by Black and Latino people.

Public schools are primarily funded through property and other forms of local taxation, and one outcome of suburban growth has been the vastly different resources allotted to schools in the inner cities and schools in more affluent suburbs. Two lawsuits in the 1970s, one in Texas and one in Michigan, sought to overcome the effects of the impoverishment of many urban school districts, the conscious neglect towards the education of Black and Latino youth, and the enormous inequalities of public education that remain a glaring, conspicuous feature of life in the U.S. after the Brown ruling.

The suit in Texas, Rodriguez v. San Antonio, argued that tremendous differences in tax-based funding for urban and suburban school districts had reinforced long-standing practices of seriously underfunding education for Black and Latino children, keeping them in dilapidated buildings, overcrowded classrooms, and with limited or no extracurricular activities available.

The Supreme Court emphatically rejected any attempt to overcome this enormous inequality that masquerades as equality. "The [Supreme] Court recognized that disparities in state funding of schools based on property taxes lead to Black schools and white schools, good schools and bad schools; nevertheless, they said, the Court should not intervene, for poor students were not a protected class, education was not a federally protected constitutional right, and thus, the Court should do nothing."²⁷

In the Michigan case, Milliken v Bradley, the Supreme Court ruled that integration of schooling in the Detroit metropolitan area could not take place across school district lines, despite the undisputed fact that any "leveling of the playing field" in the Detroit area would have to involve both the overwhelmingly Black Detroit schools and the overwhelmingly white suburban schools.

With these rulings, the era of even pretending to allow meaningful attempts to provide a quality education to all Black children, under the constitutional sanction of the Brown decision, had ended. As researchers at UCLA concluded in a 2009 report: "Millions of non-white students are locked into 'dropout factory' high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate, and few are well prepared for college or a future in the US economy."²⁸

The U.S. Constitution, and the way it has been interpreted and upheld for almost two-and-a-half centuries, has consistently sustained, deepened, and enforced the oppression of Black people. It is, as Bob Avakian has written, an "exploiters' vision of freedom," and it has been adapted not only to continue old forms of oppression, but to enforce new ones under changed economic and social conditions. This continuity of oppression is expressed vividly in the realm of public education.

 

To be continued

Notes

1. Cited in The U.S. Constitution: An Exploiters' Vision of Freedom, by Bob Avakian [back]

2. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, by Eric Foner and Joshua Brown [back]

3. A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, by George William Van Cleve, p 6 [back]

4. Van Cleve, p. 225 [back]

5. Reconstruction 1863-1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution, by Eric Foner, p. 105. [back]

6. “How This System Has Betrayed Black People: Crucial Turning Points,” by Bob Avakian, Revolutionary Worker (now Revolution) #894, February 16, 1997. [back]

7. Foner, p. 425. [back]

8. Foner, p. 430. [back]

9. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, by Charles Lane,pp. 18-19. [back]

10. A People’s History of the Supreme Court, by Peter Irons, p. 205. [back]

11. Ibid., p. 294. [back]

12. Lane, p. 253. [back]

13. Irons,p. 222. [back]

14. We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson: The Fight Against Legal Segregation, by Keith Weldon Medley. [back]

15. Irons,p. 197. [back]

16. A Legacy of Slavery and Lynching: The Death Penalty as a Tool of Social Control, by William S. McFeeley, Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia. [back]

17. A People's History of the Supreme Court, by Peter Irons, p. 368. [back]

18. A History of the Supreme Court, by Bernard Schwarz, p. 293. [back]

19. Ibid., p. 286. [back]

20. Ibid., p. 296. [back]

21. Irons, p. 399. [back]

22. Ibid., p. 405. [back]

23. Ibid. [back]

24. New York Times, September 25, 1957. [back]

25. Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon, by Bob Avakian, available online at revcom.us [back]

26. Gary Orfield, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge (Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, 2009), p. 13. [back]

27. Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law, by Martin Garbus,p. 212. [back]

28. Orfield, p. 3. [back]

 

 

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Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

From A World to Win News Service:

Iranian regime launches pogrom against immigrants from Afghanistan

July 16, 2012. A World to Win News Service. A new round of attacks against people from Afghanistan living in Iran reached a particularly horrendous moment on June 30, 2012, when groups of thugs assaulted the homes of Afghan residents in a poor neighborhood in Yazd, a city in central Iran. The regime had arrested two Afghans after the body of a young woman who had been raped was found in a well near the city. Whether or not the two were genuine suspects, the regime's decision to announce their ethnic identity can hardly be unrelated to the campaign of harassment and threats against Afghan residents launched by the Islamic Republic authorities, especially in recent months.

Iranian security forces have been harassing, beating and sometimes shooting Afghans crossing the border. They rob exiting Afghans of their cash, often representing the savings from months or years of work. Within Iran, Afghans are continuously stopped and searched by the security forces, then arrested and expelled from the country without informing their family. Afghan laborers are employed in particularly difficult jobs by employers who take advantage of their status to drastically underpay them. The employers bully them and sometimes refuse to give them their wages.

Afghan workers and refugees in Iran and their families are denied access to education and health services. This has been true even for people who have been registered and supposedly categorized as legal residents, and children of Afghan parents born in Iran.

This denial of basic human rights has taken on a qualitatively higher dimension in recent months, outraging many people in general.

According to pro-regime media, the authorities in Fars, one of Iran's biggest provinces, in south-central Iran, have made it illegal to sell many items and services to so-called illegal foreign citizens. This means that people cannot buy bread or milk for their children and other basic necessities, not to mention medicine, even for patients under a doctor's care, as well as services such as transport.

Earlier, the northern Caspian province of Mazandaran outlawed the presence of any Afghan, whether registered or unregistered, legal or illegal, starting June 21. The authorities gave two reasons for declaring Afghans unacceptable. One is that they supposedly represent a threat to the people of Mazandaran. The other is that the presence of Afghans is supposedly incompatible with the province's attraction as a tourist destination.

This kind of measure is not limited to Mazandaran. Twenty-eight out of 31 Iranian provinces have disallowed the presence of Afghan citizens in the whole or part of the province.

These measures are a blatant expression of Persian chauvinism (the Fars, or Persians, are the dominant and oppressor nationality in Iran). The regime's all-around reactionary nature also comes out in the way this is combined with its anti-woman policies. Under Islamic law children are usually considered to have the nationality of the father and not their mother, and according to the Iranian regime's legislation children from the marriage of an Afghan man and an Iranian woman are not considered Iranian citizens. Consequently they are denied access to all social services and many are considered "illegal" because the status of their father is "illegal."

But the Islamic Republic went even further a decade ago by completely banning marriage between Afghan men and Iranian women. If they do wed, the government will not officially register the marriage. This has given rise to tens of thousands of unrecognized or so-called illegal marriages—32,000, according to governmental statistics, a figure often considered an underestimation. The regime has refused to provide birth certificates to at least hundreds of thousands of children from such marriages. As a result they remain vulnerable and marginalized throughout their whole lives.

This kind of behavior by the Islamic regime puts the thoroughly rotten character of its ideology on full display. Such acts give the lie to the proclaimed "kindness of Islamic morality." The regime has bared the ugliness of its real face with its treatment of millions of Afghans, just as it has with Kurds and other oppressed nationalities and religious minorities, and of course in a myriad of other ways.

The Islamic Republic of Iran tries to justify its reactionary policies by calling the Afghan refugees a burden on the country's economy. This is a double lie.

First of all, in order to be able to feed themselves and their families Afghan immigrants have withstood hardship and had to tolerate the most difficult jobs at the lowest possible wages and without any basic rights. Their wages are often not paid, or if they are paid, are then stolen. In other words, Afghan workers and other toilers in Iran are producing wealth many times greater than what they could consume from social services or other resources, even if they had access to them, which they do not.

Secondly, contrary to the claims of the Iranian regime, most of these Afghans did not leave their home and work and sometimes their family of their own free will. In this regard, the Islamic Republic is trying to hide its own role in worsening the situation of Afghanistan and thus its own responsibility in producing the plight of the Afghan people.

Millions of people in Afghanistan lost their livelihoods and homes because of imperialist occupation, the brutal civil wars between the various Islamic fundamentalist groups and the intervention and meddling of regional powers. Their lives were destroyed and many had to flee to other countries, including neighboring Iran and Pakistan.

In addition to the two main invasions of Afghanistan, in 1980 by the Soviet social-imperialists (socialist in words but really capitalists and imperialists) and the U.S.-led NATO imperialists in 2001, other reactionary powers in the region including the Islamic Republic of Iran have also intervened to serve their own interests. In a bid to expand its influence, the Iranian regime, like the Western imperialists and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, has had a big share in encouraging and feeding Islamic fundamentalism in that country that has caused so much misery for the people and especially women.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has given financial and military support to Shia fundamentalistgroups and parties such as the Unity Party, the Islamic Movement party and many more. They supported one Islamic fundamentalist faction, the Northern Alliance, against another, the Gulbuddin Hekmatyar faction, in the civil war after the Soviet withdrawal that resulted in the destruction of Kabul, and later on against the Taliban. The Iranian Islamic regime even cooperated with the occupation of Afghanistan by the Western imperialists.

In sum, the Islamic Republic has played a role in all the crimes against the people of Afghanistan and has been part of the problem. But shamelessly they now pretend that they have to deal with several million uninvited guests and assume they have a right to commit any crime against them.

The Iranian revolutionaries and communists along with broad sections of masses have expressed their extreme anger and outrage towards this reactionary and racist policy. Many Web bloggers have reacted to these policies and published pictures of young Iranians carrying placards that read, "We all are Afghanis." Iranian political organizations and parties and many intellectuals and activists have issued statements against the harassment of Afghans in Iran. There have already been protests in front of Iranian embassies and similar venues in Toronto, Brussels, Frankfurt, Cologne, Stockholm and elsewhere in Europe, and more are planned.

In a statement, "Smash the organized and fascistic attack of the forces of the Iranian government against toilers and other immigrants from Afghanistan" on July 3, 2012, the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) said, in part:

"Only a few months ago Afghani toilers and immigrants in Iran were banned from entering a park in Isfahan. The shock of the killing of dozens of Afghani refugees near the border with Turkey by the Iranian security forces is still felt. Now we are hearing that under the pretext of the murder of an 18-year-old woman in the city of Yazd, the security forces and their thugs have attacked the poor neighborhood of Afghan immigrants in that city and burned down their homes, under the pretext of taking revenge for the murder of this young woman who herself was a victim of this chauvinist, patriarchal system...

"(In the province of Fars) the government has warned shops, bakeries, supermarkets and other businesses that provide daily necessities not to sell their goods to 'illegal aliens', and they will be fined and their business will be shut down if they don't comply... 

"With these criminal acts the Iranian regime intends to build a bridge between itself and the people, and escape from the people's anger by presenting Afghani toilers as the main cause of the (economic) crisis that has threatened its very existence...

"Immigrants from Afghanistan are part of Iran's proletariat, a class that has a fundamental interest in overthrowing this religious and chauvinist regime, and we should pave the way for them to be in the forefront of the struggle of burying this regime. The future revolution would be a thoroughly internationalist social revolution. The future revolutionary state of Iran, under the leadership of revolutionary and communist forces, will put an end to any oppressive laws against all those who live in Iran. As is stated in our party's programme, 'Their basic political and social rights, including their right to citizenship, work, education, a birth certificate, marriage with Iranians and to enjoy all the rights of citizens will be recognised.'

"All leftist and communist forces, all freedom-loving people and forces inside and outside the country, should stand against these organised and criminal acts and give the proper response to the mercenaries of the Iranian regime and all its thugs in every way possible."

 

A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine, a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.

 

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Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

A Prisoner Writes on July 4th: “What BAsics 1:13 ultimately means to me”

The following letter was written by a prisoner in the Midwest, July 4, 2012

To Whom It May Concern,

Even though this is more coincidental than conscious on my part, the fact that today is the 4th of July brings out a certain irony to all my below comments as they relate to the true realities of America and her bourgeois illusions. So, hey...I’m going to let the fireworks begin as I celebrate what this day actually means to me. Cool?

Over the past several months, I’ve been following the BAsics Bus Tour in earnest and watching how the tour has connected with the various communities it has come across as it has traversed the country. One way it’s done so has been by making themes out of certain quotes, such as BAsics 1:13, which says:

“No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to and early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that.”

The above quote reminds me of something that George Jackson once said in his book Soledad Brother which has stayed with me since the first time I read and is STILL the ground upon which my own convictions are also rooted in. He said: “When I revolt, slavery dies with me. I refuse to pass it down again. The terms of my existence are founded on that.” (p. 250)

I recently had a conversation with this younger brotha, who’s recently fresh to the joint with over a 100 year prison sentence. When I came down over a decade ago, it was “normal” to see a young 18, 19, or 20 year old brotha to be handed down a 50, 60 or 65 year sentence. I still remember the first time I witnessed a dude come back from court after being sentenced to 50 years in prison. It was surreal to say the least. It was even more surreal when I was handed down a lengthy term myself. Yet even then, only a few guys I knew had ever been given more than 65 years—not like that was a drop in the bucket or anything. You just knew one day you would possible see the streets again. You didn’t have LIFE. Today, though, when I look around at the guys newly arriving to the joint now-a-days, it’s really nothing to learn that your neighbor has 100 years, or even LIFE. Today, that’s really become the “new norm.” And if that wasn’t bad enough, instead of new arrivals having the chance of staying in the general prison population, acquiring a college degree, and a few trades, today warehousing an increasing number of us on supermax units 23 hours a day is also the “new norm,” since there’s no more college in our state and very few programs.

That’s why when me and this particular brotha was talking about my own conversion to becoming a communist and how he was glad that I had eventually found “my passion” in life—although I had to come to prison in order to find it—it really struck a chord with me. In one sense, I saw myself in him because I, too, remember that time in my own life when I really didn’t have any real tangible sense of purpose. Like him, I was also searching for answers to why shit was like it was in books and how life seemed more like a “curse” than some “preordained miracle.” On the other hand, I saw in this brotha and his comments a generation of Black and Latino males whose only real crime was being born into a marginalized group whose chance of socio-economic mobility was already limitedly determined by the fact of where they were born within the overall economic relations of the capitalist system. For this unfortunate sector of the population, prison and death was more than a possibility; it was a necessity of the very working of the system itself.

As I mentioned to this brotha, it wasn’t really so much about me finding “my purpose” in life per se, as if it was just “my thing” and I could’ve easily taken up another purpose; it had more to do with realizing the fact of NECESSITY. In other words, once I realized that the economic and social circumstances which brought me and him to prison, or caused others to seek escape though drugs, or caused some to find the “American Dream” through other means (prostitution, the drug economy, or even through sub-prime “legal” scams), and still others who committed suicide because of their frustration with life itself, ALL socially derived from the dynamics of the capitalist-imperialist system—Once I was able to put a circle around that, I one and the same time realized none of this shit had to be! None of these particular social realities! And it was at that point, that I started to feel like George: “When I revolt, slavery dies with me, I refuse to pass it down again. The terms of my existence are founded on that.”

By the end of our dialogue, I think bro realized, too, that his own circumstances could only be understood by the wider dynamics at work, and to a large extent, his lengthy term in prison was not so much due to his “personal choices” in life per se, as much as it was FIRST determined by the limitedly determined choices we were born into within the framework of the all-encompassing economic relations of capitalist system.

The fact of the matter, is that while neither me or him were “destined” to come to prison in some teleological sense, taken as a whole, numerous sections of the population were “destined” to find themselves in prison, in poverty, or facing all kinds of hardships due to the dictates of the capitalist system. That’s a given! Now...who will actual find themselves in that predicament and statistical category in their lifetime is variable; however, the fact that such a predicament and categories are necessary and integral to functioning of the overall system, is testament to the fact that we all must eventually become passionate about saying “NO MORE OF THAT” as we come to concretely understand the problem and it’s only solution.

BA summed all this up best when he mentioned in What Humanity Needs: Revolution and the New Synthesis of Communism that:

Marx made this point in another work of his, the Grundrisse: Once a system is firmly in place and entrenched, then individuals may be able to change their social position—they may acquire education and become part of the middle class, for example, or in some other way escape from being impoverished, into a more middle class position— but Marx emphasized in a very important point, while individuals may be able to do that, the masses of people cannot escape the conditions of their existence en masse, as the masses of people, except though abolishing those conditions—except, in other words, through revolution...

The misfortune of the masses of people is that, once this system is entrenched and its dynamics are what’s determining the character of things—and the confines and limits of what’s possible, within that system—then the masses of people are chained within conditions. And, to refer once again to Marx’s statement in the Grundrisse, they cannot escape from those conditions, en masse—in this country or that, and ultimately in the world as a whole—without overthrowing, uprooting and completely abolishing that system and replacing it with an emancipating system. (p.78, 79)

For me, that’s what BAsics 1:13 ultimately means to me.

In Solidarity, XXXXXXXXX

 

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/LA-police-continue-brutal-suppression-of-occupy-LA-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

Letter from a Reader:

Los Angeles Police Continue Their Brutal Suppression of Occupy Los Angeles

In a vicious and brutal show of force against Occupy LA, the Los Angeles police shot rubber bullets and arrested over a dozen people last Thursday night (7/12), as the occupiers were writing and drawing on the ground with chalk at the monthly downtown Art Walk. In the month leading up to Thursday night, the LAPD had been arresting OLA people for writing with chalk on the sidewalk, calling it “vandalism.” In response to those arrests, the occupiers called for people to go to the Art Walk where they would “non-confrontationally distribute vast amounts of ‘free chalk for free speech’ on the sidewalks of Art Walk to raise awareness about political repression, raise funds, and do outreach.”

This small and peaceful project was physically and politically attacked and criminalized by the Los Angeles Police Department and the mayor. There was a heavy police presence at the Art Walk from early in the evening. Occupiers among the thousands crowding the area handed out chalk, and people took it up. Sidewalks and walls of vacant buildings blossomed with colorful slogans, names, sayings, doodles, pictures and more. The confrontation began when police vamped on a young woman who was chalking and beat her down in front of hundreds of people, some of whom stepped up to help her. Then it was on.

The LAPD called a citywide tactical alert and sent hundreds of baton-wielding cops in riot gear into the area to push people back and clear the streets. Rubber bullets were fired; people were injured;15 people were arrested. People were outraged that this force and violence was arrayed against chalking. Occupy LA argues that chalking is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. The LA Times quoted a police captain who said chalking is “vandalism.” LA Mayor Antonio Villagrosa said, “That’s not free speech, that’s criminal behavior.”

One commentator asked, “Do they arrest people for hopscotch?” referring to the fact that children chalk the sidewalks so they can play hopscotch.

The reality is that the LAPD and the mayor are criminalizing dissent. These arrests are illegitimate and people need to stand up and oppose the repression against Occupy Los Angeles by the LAPD and LA City Hall.

Over the weekend chalking spread among other occupiers as one response to the outrageous police attack at the LA Art Walk.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/275/set_the_record_straight-en.html

Revolution #275 July 22, 2012

You've Been Lied to About Communism... And We're Setting the Record Straight!

Check out the new design and new content at the Set the Record Straight Website

www.thisiscommunism.org has:

• the truth about the Russian Revolution of 1917-56 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949-76
• resources on the most basic questions about communism
• video of talks by people who participated in the Cultural Revolution... and much more

New content includes discussion of the famine in the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward in China.