Commemorate Black History Month With United Class Struggle

Call to action by the Bay Area Labor Black League for Social Defense and the Partisan Defense Committee

We call on the powerful multiracial unions in the Bay Area to mobilize against the government's war on America's integrated working class, on black people and on immigrants. Every bombing raid and missile attack on Afghanistan came together with new deadly assaults on the democratic rights of all of us. Bush and Attorney-General Ashcroft--that apologist for the Confederate slavocracy--have taken first aim at people of Near Eastern descent who were rounded up and thrown in jail where hundreds still remain. They've created the spectre of an "enemy within" in order to strengthen the powers of their own consummately violent state. But what America's racist rulers can get away with will be determined by class struggle. We must fight now to defend our rights and jobs, and the rights and jobs of our immigrant brothers and sisters. A united demonstration of the power of our class, together with youth, black and immigrant organizations, can spike the bosses' racist "national unity" campaign.
Under the USA-Patriot Act, rammed through with bipartisan support in the wake of the criminal attack on the World Trade Center, non-citizens can be deported without a hearing while operations like the FBI's COINTELPRO, which murdered 38 Black Panthers and framed hundreds more, are once more officially sanctioned. "National security" is also the pretext for a frontal assault on the longshore unions, a historic bastion of labor power, under the Port, Maritime and Rail Security Act. Down with the anti-immigrant witchhunt! No to the USA-Patriot Act and Maritime Security Act!
The "war on terrorism" is aimed straight at the heart of the working class. Hundreds of New Jersey teachers striking for a decent contract were handcuffed and jailed, while their union spokesman was denounced as "the representative of the Taliban." The State Attorney of South Carolina compared International Longshoremen's Association members in Charleston, who had fought to defend their union against cops and scabs, to the World Trade Center terrorists. Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, murdered by Chicago cops in 1969, got a full blast of what being labeled a "terrorist" in capitalist America means. Coordinating these repressive measures is Tom Ridge, the man who signed two death warrants against former Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocent man framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia cop, who was sentenced to death for his political views. Free Mumia now! Abolish the racist death penalty!
On the docks, largely immigrant port truckers are already being harassed by armed cops and federal agents. The Maritime Security Act--authored by a Democratic Party senator from "open shop" South Carolina--calls for "background checks" under which waterfront workers can be fired for any conviction in the past 10 years on any of 20 felony offenses, including minor drug charges. This directly threatens the jobs of black and Latino longshoremen who have been on the receiving end of the racist cop harassment in the ghettos and barrios under the so-called "war on drugs."
Just as the fight for black freedom is central to the liberation of all working people, the labor movement can only defend itself if it defends the rights of immigrants. In this country, the raw exploitation of labor has always come wrapped in the envelope of racial and ethnic-religious hostilities fomented by the capitalist rulers. Black oppression is the cornerstone of American capitalism. But black and immigrant workers are not helpless victims; they're a vital component of the multiracial working class. Armed with the militant traditions of their homelands, immigrant workers have been a key part of labor battles in this country, from the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike in the Massachusetts textile mills to the Justice for Janitors organizing drive in L.A. Together with black workers, they can help spark a working-class offensive against racial oppression and capitalist exploitation.
From the Chinese exclusion acts over a century ago to Mexican workers deported during the Great Depression and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, assaults on the immigrant workforce have always gone hand in hand with stepped-up oppression of blacks and the persecution of the most militant workers. Don't forget--here in California the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 led directly to the racist, anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 two years later. We demand: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! We must fight against deportations, for unionizing the unorganized and for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay in order to spread the available work. Let our motto be class struggle--joining forces against our common enemy, the capitalist ruling class!
The labor bureaucracy's commitment to the capitalist system leads them to denounce Mexican truckers and our downtrodden working-class brothers and sisters throughout Latin America and Asia for "stealing American jobs." This is a convenient fraud which promotes anti-immigrant bigotry at home and is directly opposed to our fighting unity as a class against the bosses' "divide and rule" schemes. Peddling the lie that the interests of the workers and their exploiters are compatible, AFL-CIO head John Sweeney says that "no sacrifice is too great" for workers to make for the reactionary "war on terror." Opposition to the war on labor, blacks and immigrants at home means opposition to the wars of American capitalism abroad. All U.S./UN/NATO troops out of Afghanistan, the Near East and Central Asia!
Instead of mobilizing union power to defend their members and all the oppressed, the labor tops sell the Democratic Party as the "friend of labor." But the Democrats, like the Republicans, represent the interests of the class enemy. The only difference is that the Republicans openly revel in attacking the working people and oppressed; the Democrats lie and do the same thing. Black Democrats like Barbara Lee, with her show of opposition--however superficial--to Bush's war powers are positioning themselves to contain and head off increasing discontent as the recession and racist repression bite. Democrat Bill Clinton declared "I feel your pain" while he axed welfare and spearheaded an anti-immigrant crackdown. Here in the Bay Area, "liberal" Democratic mayor Jerry Brown's gentrification plan for Oakland encouraged rampages through black West Oakland by the police gang who took the name "Riders" from the nightriders of the KKK. On the other side of the Bay Bridge, mayor Willie Brown has launched a new war on the homeless of San Francisco while 16,000 laid-off workers in low-wage industries face homelessness, and those still employed are only a paycheck away from the same fate.
To fight for its interests the working class must stand independent of all agencies and parties of the class enemy. The trade-union misleaders who have shackled labor's power to support for the Democrats now offer to help implement "security" on the docks and elsewhere. It is not the job of the workers to enforce the laws, "security" or otherwise, that will be used against them: cops and security guards have no place in the union movement!
There must be a political struggle within the trade unions, the only significant racially integrated institutions in segregation America, to break from the Democrats and build a class-struggle leadership which will champion the cause of black freedom and the defense of immigrant rights. The working class needs its own party--one that fights for a workers government. Those who labor must rule!
Mobilize Multiracial Union Power in a Mass Labor-Centered Protest! Defend Immigrants, Blacks, Labor Targeted by Anti-Terrorist Laws!

All Out! Saturday, February 9, 2 pm, Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakland

20 January 2002