The following article advances some possible answers to questions raised in the thoughtful letter, “Can Class Struggle Use the Bosses’ Court?” (CHALLENGE, 4/26/13), especially about the history posed by the law professor whose lecture on the racist history of the U.S. Supreme Court inspired the letter.
There is historical evidence that the U.S. War of Independence was fought mostly to preserve slavery. By the late 1700s, the British rulers were gradually moving away from chattel slavery toward wage slavery due to the rise of industrial capitalism in Great Britain. The leaders of the War of Independence, including southern plantation slave owners and northern shipping and banking interests, all profited from the continuation of chattel slavery. 
The new U.S. government wasted no time in using its power to support slave owners. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) was a logical manifestation of the intent of the “Founding Fathers.” It stated categorically “that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not” were included within the term “citizen” in the U.S. Constitution nor within the term “people” in the Declaration of Independence.
It’s important to understand the dialectics of the capitalist legal system, in its appearance and essence. The bosses wish to promote the appearance that the courts are the final resort for those seeking relief from the more oppressive aspects of capitalist rule. Dred Scott, for example, was a runaway slave represented by Abolitionists in a lawsuit arguing that since he lived in a free state he should be a free man. They turned to the Supreme Court for relief. But the latter returned him to slavery.
One of the most famous cases used to support this appearance of “relief” from oppression is the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ended legal segregation in public schools. The case was mounted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as part of a 60-year campaign of legal challenges to segregation.
A closer look at the essence of the courts, however, reveals that they are a tool of the capitalist bosses to maintain power. Thus, the Brown decision was primarily a response to the Cold War gains of the communist movement in Asia and Africa, in the wake of the Chinese Revolution and the massive anti-imperialist struggles of the 1940s and 1950s. The U.S. bosses were attacked, correctly, worldwide for the hypocrisy of their system of racial segregation.
In a “friend of the Court” brief filed in the Brown case, the U.S. Justice Department argued that legal segregation had “an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.” Interestingly, though, through various legal maneuvers as well as the result of capitalism’s overall racism in broader spheres (segregated housing, rent and income disparities), school segregation exists in the vast majority of U.S. cities.
As communists we need to separate our possible tactical use of the courts — as part of a larger mass campaign — from our understanding of how the court system itself serves strategic ruling-class interests. The Court’s function is to legally interpret the Constitution. However, this Constitution is enshrined chattel bondage, whose main purpose is the protection of capitalist property rights. Its most “progressive” part, the Thirteenth Amendment, while abolishing slavery, permits a modern form of slavery — the mass incarceration of mainly black and Latino youth and workers.
In practice, this means that “legal interpretation” of the Constitution is solely a function of the needs of the ruling class in any historical period. At times the Court is used to mediate issues among competing factions of the ruling class, such as President Roosevelt’s efforts in the 1930s to add additional justices when the Court refused to endorse his New Deal programs, or the Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore in 2000 which settled a disputed election.
The appearance of liberal v. conservative justices is largely a smokescreen. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the Court to the Brown decision, was a conservative Republican appointed by Eisenhower. Yet he went on to become the liberal bosses’ darling in a string of cases after the Brown decision was used to expand the “rights of the accused” even as more and more workers were incarcerated.
Similarly the arch-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices in upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare because today’s capitalist class needs to control healthcare costs to fund mounting imperialist wars. The gay marriage cases, though still undecided, are getting extensive coverage because the bosses’ agenda for the military includes limiting overt discrimination in order to win more recruits willing to die for their interests.
Thus, we oppose organizing appeals to the “legal reasoning” or “humanity” of a court system established to crush the working class and maintain ruling-class power. However, just as communists involve themselves in the daily battles of reform struggles, we also involve ourselves in the bosses’ court system. It is one more arena of struggle, although by far not the most important. There are reasons for communists to take tactical advantage of the legal system and to recruit and train legal workers.
(Part II will discuss the political use of the courts as one tool within a mass communist-led campaign, as well as maintaining the necessity to recruit lawyers and legal workers into the Party.)
Three recent White House scandals — its handling of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya; its use of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) against Tea Party political groups; and its spying on Associated Press reporters — reflect serious disagreements within the ruling capitalist class.
On one side is the finance capital wing, which is preparing for long-term global conflict to maintain U.S. rulers’ top-dog status. These liberal imperialists are represented by Barack Obama’s new “Defense” Secretary, Chuck Hagel, who is seeking a U.S.-led alliance to confront rivals.
In opposition is a less powerful group of capitalists, led by the billionaire Koch brothers, with a shorter-range outlook. They are seeking immediate profits from domestic investments and are less interested in paying the bills for U.S. hegemony around the world.
In addition to this fundamental split, the liberal wing has its own internal conflict. It centers on how quickly the Obama administration can move toward fascism at home as it prepares for more imperialist wars. Even as they try to round up international allies, the bosses remain a long way from the domestic unity they need for their war plans.
U.S. workers are under brutal attack from wage cuts — Obama helped General Motors slash wages in half — and from persistent mass unemployment. The bosses have accelerated their drive for maximum profits by exploiting a temporary, part-time workforce and denying them benefits. Health care costs are sky-high for workers fortunate enough to get care at all. Police terror is on the rise, with racist cops killing black and Latino youth with impunity. Expanded oil and gas pipelines destroy the environment; oil drilling contaminates water on Native American reservations. With his storm troopers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Obama continues to set new records in his massive detention and deportation of immigrant workers.
In accord with the Democratic Party’s standard procedure, these fascist measures are being imposed behind a liberal façade. But “lesser-evil” Obama is not simply a repeat of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. He has moved even further to the right.
Splitting over Benghazi
Many Republicans are professing outrage that Obama failed to prevent the al Qaeda attack last September 11 that killed the U.S. ambassador and his mercenary guards in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. In reality, this furor stems from a long-simmering dispute over strategy. On one side stand the domestically oriented capitalist wing that ascended with former President George W. Bush and his top lieutenants, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. This camp tilted toward on-the-cheap, quick-hitting attacks on smaller foes like Libya and Iraq. Livid at the Benghazi fiasco, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is urging Obama’s impeachment (Business Insider, 5/12/13). He’s also proposing U.S. air strikes on Iran and North Korea and opposed Hagel’s appointment because Hagel was considered soft on Iran.
But the finance capital wing, led by Obama, wants to exercise more patience. They need more time to build a coalition for a far wider clash with a potential axis of enemies led by China and Russia. Hagel moved to the Pentagon from his chairmanship of the Atlantic Council, which is funded by the Rockefeller-JP Morgan-ExxonMobil-Pentagon forces. Shortly before Hagel left, this think tank issued a report calling for a ramping up of a U.S.-led alliance including Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and India to be in position to challenge U.S. enemies.
The IRS Frenzy
A different antagonism underlies Obama’s scandal within the IRS, which targeted Tea Party political groups by denying them nonprofit tax status during the 2012 elections. Here it’s the smaller bosses’ reluctance to fund the U.S. war machine, even though some of them profit mightily from its actions. Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch own an energy company that buys some Iraqi oil safeguarded by the U.S. Navy. But unlike ExxonMobil, Koch Industries does not pump from contested Iraqi soil. Moreover, Koch’s energy profits are concentrated in North America, far from U.S. imperialist war zones in Asia and Africa. As a result, the Koch camp requires less protection from the Pentagon.
Consider this statement from the Koch-controlled Cato Institute (5/15/13): “Economic interests are real but rarely warrant war. Stability may be a geopolitical virtue, but does not justify a neo-imperial American global presence.” In other words, the Koch-led bosses don’t want to pay for imperialist adventures to preserve the U.S. bosses’ international control.
Obama’s forces have attacked the Tea Party-Koch faction for their anti-Exxon heresy of opposing tax increases for war. On April 21, the New York Times, the leading mouthpiece for the arch-imperialist U.S. faction, warned of Koch efforts to buy the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and other papers, “to shift the country toward a smaller government with less regulation and taxes.” On May 18, the Times sought to stir anti-Koch feeling among environmentalists with the story of how Koch Industries has built a toxic petroleum coke mountain in Detroit.
Spying on the ‘Free Press’
Obama’s third disgrace, his administration’s spying on Associated Press reporters covering a terrorist plot in Yemen, exposes the maneuvering within U.S. imperialism’s main liberal wing. At the heart of the scrap is just how openly fascist U.S. rulers should appear to the U.S. working class. Wiretapping Attorney General Eric Holder is allowing Obama to seize higher ground. The same farce played out in Holder’s earlier threat to summarily execute U.S. citizen “terrorists” with drones. In both cases, the object for U.S. warmakers has nothing to do with justice. Their goal is to gauge how much brutal state power they can win the working class to support.
Meanwhile, U.S. rulers are finding an international alliance to be elusive. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law professor who advised the U.S. military in its Iraq invasion and occupation, writes: “The United States will...have to broaden its base of allies using the tools of ideology....India is the leading candidate for membership....” (Foreign Policy, 5/16/13). Feldman counts on the irresistible pull of the “American Way”: “The strongest argument that can be made...is that Chinese hegemony would threaten their democratic freedoms.”
But the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the top policy journal bankrolled by the finance capitalists, is lamenting India’s lack of readiness to mobilize its billion-plus population in a U.S.-led war. And Feldman pointed to a more probable union: “Russia may emerge as China’s most important geostrategic ally.”
Workers Have No Stake in the Bosses’ Institutions
What the bosses aren’t talking about publicly is the ultimately crucial allegiance of our working class. The international working class, including U.S. workers, has no stake in protecting U.S. diplomats around the world. U.S. embassies and consulates are essentially CIA outposts intent on protecting U.S. corporate profits and the dictators who serve them. They also organize attacks and assassinations against pro-working-class forces that fight their exploiters.
For U.S. workers, the IRS is a bosses’ institution that bankrolls the rich, allowing them to move their profits to tax-free havens while forcing our class to pay for the rulers’ wars.
Finally, the crocodile tears being shed by the Associated Press and the New York Times over “protecting” reporters’ pursuit of the facts are laughable. The main role of the boss-controlled media is to steer the working class into supporting the profit system as the “best” system devised by humankind. Any progressive ideas that emerge are those endorsing reforms to a system that can’t be reformed.
While the capitalists maneuver and factionalize, our class must take only one side: the one that organizes for revolution to overthrow a profit system that spreads misery among the international working class. No bosses serve the interests of garment workers in Bangladesh or miners in South Africa. None of them are allied with immigrants toiling in the fields or workers suffering from boss-imposed austerity throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. None of them are the friends of tens of millions of jobless youth.
Workers Are Fighting Back
Workers are not taking their oppression lying down. Not the Bangladesh garment workers who have taken their protests to the streets. Not the platinum miners in South Africa who are wildcatting against the new apartheid’s repression. Not the Peugeot auto strikers in France, or the immigrant workers from South Asia striking in Dubai. Not the teachers in Mexico opposing the rulers’ anti-worker reforms. Not the multiracial workers and youth in New York City organizing against racist, murdering cops.
Billions of workers are now suffering capitalism’s exploitation, racism and wars. But once armed with the communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party, they have the power to destroy the tiny class that rules us. They will erect a society without bosses and profits, run by the international working class in our class interests.
BRONX, NY, May 20 — “Do you want to march to the precinct?” “Yes!” came the resounding reply from 200 people who rallied at the home of Ramarley Graham, a black teen brutally gunned down in his apartment bathroom by NYPD officer Richard Haste on February 2, 2012. The Graham family was joined by relatives of Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, two Brooklyn youths shot and killed by the NYPD in the months following the Graham tragedy.
The rally became an open forum when Ramarley’s family asked the community to speak out about their experiences with police in the area. One said the cops broke down her door, arrested her and left her grandchildren unsupervised. The point was made that the cops are doing their job — to terrorize working-class people. The families of Kimani, Ramarley and Shantel called for multi-racial unity, explaining how this struggle has become bigger than the fight for justice for just these particular victims of police terror, advocating the need for mass action.
The last speaker, a PLP member, boldly called on the demonstrators to “break the law” and challenge the bounds of the legal system. While previous speakers mentioned capitalism and the “system,” he reviewed the historic role of communists in fighting racism and the need for a truly equal society — communism.
After the rally ended, hundreds took to the streets in the Wakefield community chanting, “Killer Cops, You Can’t Hide, We Charge You with Genocide!” The march was enthusiastically received along White Plains Road. Hundreds of CHALLENGES were distributed along the route of the march. Just as in Brooklyn’s Flatbush communities, workers are sick and tired of the police.
At the precinct, we were greeted by cops on the rooftop of their steel fortress-looking station. While some speakers said not all cops are bad, many in the crowd declared that they are ALL guilty. People started pointed to the cops and chanting, “If you see something, say something!”
We greatly admire the strength and courage of the family members of these youth murdered by the police. We invite them and all of you to join with Progressive Labor Party in building this movement to smash the system that has stolen the lives of their children and family members. We will continue to advance those ideas at these rallies and counter the politicians and preachers who seek to mislead the struggle.
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Profit Drive Kills Garment Workers, from L.A. to Bangladesh
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- 23 May 2013 60 hits
Los Angeles, May 11 — Like Bangladesh, downtown Los Angeles is filled with garment factories that the bosses have callously neglected. As one of our comrades put it during a CHALLENGE sale here, to nods from workers passing by, “In an earthquake, this old building (see photo) could collapse just like the one in Dhaka that killed over 1,100 people.”
Why did factory owners in Bangladesh threaten to withhold workers’ pay to force them to enter a building with visible cracks in its concrete walls? Why was the fertilizer plant that blew up in West, Texas built next to a nursing home, several schools, and an apartment complex? Why are garment workers in LA working in buildings that have yet to be retrofitted to meet current earthquake-safety standards? 
The answer, in a word, is “capitalism.” It’s not enough for capitalists to make a lot of money — they must extract the maximum profit. Otherwise, competitors will grab market share by investing more in equipment, research and development, and marketing, and hiring more workers. Since capitalism is a system of dog-eat-dog competition, companies that fail to maximize profits eventually go out of business.
How do companies maximize their profits? One primary method is to drive down wages, as in Bangladesh, where many garment workers make as little as $37 a month. Another is to invest as little as possible in healthy, safe working conditions.
The day before the Dhaka building’s collapse, inspectors found dangerous cracks in the building’s wall. Police issued an evacuation order, but garment workers were threatened with a loss of wages if they failed to come to work. The building’s owner, Mohammed Sohel Rana, a politician with the country’s ruling Awami League, has been arrested. By all accounts, he is guilty of murder. But the biggest criminals are the retailers in Europe and the U.S., like Benetton and Walmart, that pursued maximum profits by buying their goods from the substandard factories in Rana Plaza and countless others like them. The biggest murderers are the capitalists from imperialist powers who exploit the four million garment workers of Bangladesh, the great majority of them women. Rana was a small-time thug simply playing by their rules.
Why do local and national governments around the world permit such practices? In two words: class dictatorship. Some governments take the form of democracies, as in the U.S. and Bangladesh. Others are formally kingdoms, as in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, or capitalist states, as in China. But the content of all existing governments is the same — to maintain capitalist exploitation. That’s why the Progressive Labor Party fights not for democracy, but for communism, a system without exploitation where the working class will rule.
New York City, May 21 – NYC Transit bosses are guilty of murder, and the transit workers’ union leader is guilty of helping them cover up the crime.
Transit worker Louis Moore was dragged to his death in the tunnel in Astoria last month. He was walking to get to the platform when his tool bag caught on a gate he was trying to open. As he struggled with his bag, the E-train roared in, snagged the bag, and pulled him under the wheels.
Louis was born in Jamaica and was a single dad who lived with his teenage daughter. He had been on the job for eight years. Six years ago to the day, track worker Daniel Boggs was killed by a train at Columbus Circle and a few days later, maintenance supervisor James Knell was electrocuted after falling onto an exposed third rail.
Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 President John Samuelson, a former track worker, called Louis’ death an “accident” — but nothing could be further from the truth. These deaths are caused by a Transit Authority that years ago did away with the flagman whose job was to protect workers on the tracks by stopping trains until the workers were clear. One former track worker said that deaths like these could be prevented that way. In fact, when outside trades workers are contracted by the
Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) for track work they get that protection — but TWU members do not. The MTA is more concerned with paying the big banks billions in interest profits than providing safe conditions for transit workers and riders.
This is the murderous culture of the transit bosses. Former Track Director Steve Fiel left the MTA to take the same job at Washington, DC Metro from 2006 to 2008. About six workers died on the tracks during his time there. And his refusal to recognize the failures of the Automatic Train Control System led to a major collision that killed nine people in 2009.
The TWU leadership has been passive since the defeat of their last strike and the loss of automatic dues check-off. We are working under a contract that expired two years ago. While the body count climbs, PLP is building a revolutionary movement to destroy the racist profit system. In these dangerous tunnels, PLP is at work.
