~X.623, •••• ,.-..!\:.~. A Spartacist Pam,phlet $1 --Farrakhan's Reactionary .Dead End-- Million Man March I a ~ SEE PAGE 35 --,____ - 1-...., ............ ~~ .... --... - .............. -_-,_______ ~-~'". ~.. ~_ ..... ~'........ t: ':.a __ ",""""" __ • ~•.. ___ - _______ .....,..,_ -"~-,-""", .. " .. ~-,- ... ,-,,... -,-.-,---- 2 Table of Contents Introduction What We Stand For This issue of our Black History and ace" a thing of the past, the bourgeoisie barely pays lip service to black equality, Labor Black League for the Class Struggle pamphlet series, while simultaneously dumping the race Social Defense ....................... 6 reprinting articles first published in Workers Vanguard during 1995, reveals and labor broKers (black politicians a capitalist America mired in deep polit­ and trade-union "leaders") it previously Racist Prison Hell: 1,5 Million Behind Bars ical reaction, a society marked by an cultivated to control the working class. Lockdown U.S.A . .................... 8 all-sided offensive by the rulers against The attempt of the ruling class to labor, immigrants and especially black dispense with its intermediaries and Attack on Blacks, Immigrants, Women people. A closely analogous period in front men occurs in a period of enormous U.S. history is the 1920s, a time of anti­ and growing social contradictions. Since Defeat Racist Assault on immigrant and anti-communist hysteria, 1980 there has been an accelerating Affirmative Action! .................12 anti-black race riots and rampant Ku shift in concentration of wealth into the Klux Klan terror, when the labor move­ hands of the bourgeoisie and a corre­ International Outcry Wins Stay of Execution ment was weak, timid and dominated sponding immiseration of the rest of Battle for Mumia's by right-wing business unionists. the population. America now leads all Freedom ................................ 17 The wave of racism and reaction that industrial nations in inequality of distri­ swept the country in the 1920s was a bution of wealth, with over 40 percent direct response by the capitalist class of the nation's income concentrated in Statement of July 12 to the worldwide revolutionary move­ the hands of I percent of the population. By Mumia Abu-Jamal ................... 22 ment inspired by the world's first vic­ To contain the explosive contradictions torious workers revolution, the Russian generated by this growing gap between Eyewitness Report October Revolution of 1917 led by the themselves and everyone else, the bosses South African Unions Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. have massively augmented the repres­ Take Up Jamal's Fight In contrast, today's wave of racism and sive apparatus of the capitalist state, as Their Own ........................ 23 rightism feeds off of the recent destruc­ which intrudes more and more into all tion of the Soviet degenerated workers aspects of social life. state, which was fatally undermined by Killer Cops and Sweatshop Slavery decades of bureaucratic rule and the Lockdown U.S.A. Brutal Anti-Immigrant nationalist, anti-revolutionary program Today the country's biggest growth Repression in L.A . ................ 27 of Stalin and finally served up to the industry (now at $30 billion per year) is imperialists outright by his heirs. The prisons. And for every manufacturing Fight Klan Terror! Unionize the South! former USSR quickly disintegrated into job lost in the 1980s there is a new place a myriad of mutually hostile capitalist in jail. "Lockdown U.S.A." (page 8) Cross-Burnings and states experiencing the "benefits" of explains why and how the courts and Anti-Union Terror .... .............. 28 counterrevolution: immiseration of the prisons have become the dumping working people, rampaging social reac­ ground for those on whom the ruling Race, Class and American "Justice" tion and racist violence against dark­ class of this country has turned its back. Racist Backlash Against ,skinned minorities and Jews, all-sided The U.S. currently has the highest rate O.J. Simpson Acquittal ......... 30 degradation of women, fratricidal chau­ of incarceration in the world: 344 per vinism and wars of conquest such as 100,000 people. Over 50 percent of those Russia's bloody adventure in Chechnya. behind bars are black, but black people Farrakhan's Reactionary Dead End The significance of this historic de­ make up just over 12 percent of the pop­ Million Man March Appeases feat is not lost on the toiling masses of ulation. Hispanics are also dispropor­ Racist ExplOiters .................. 35 the world, especially the workers and tionately imprisoned. poor peasants of Asia, Africa and Latin The main vehicle for the rapid increase Farrakhan: Broker for Racist Reaction America who know that world imperi­ in the black and Hispanic prison popu­ Why Did Rulers Applaud alism is a powerful enemy of their strug­ lation has been the so-called "war on Million Man March? .............. 39 gles to free themselves from poverty, drugs" (which is above all a poorly dis­ social backwardness and brutality at the guised war on minorities) with the Dem­ hands of their own venal and repressive ocratic Party and especially its black On Reactionary Mobilizations ruling classes. front men taking the lead. As the prisons of the Oppressed .................. 41 Today the American ruling class, become blacker (one in three young drunk with glee over this victorious black American males is in jail, on pro­ counterrevolution, has been seized with bation or on parole), the few rights pris­ Black Women and a deep ideological passion to return to oners had are rapidly being curtailed. Revolutionary Struggle ......... 42 the imagined halcyon days of unfettered The right of haheas corpus has been capitalist freebooting. As noted in the severely limited. Legal aid for indigent ATribute preamble to the program of the Labor defendants has been gutted. Sentences Conrad Lynn, 1908-1995 ........ 44 Black League for Social Defense (see have been extended and education and page 6): "The racist rulers of America rehabilitation programs have been abol­ -Democrat and Republican-believe ished or sharply cut back. To top it all Spartacist Publishing Co. they can get away with shredding any off, prison officials now want to ban the Box 1377 GPO and all social welfare for the working media from interviewing prisoners so the class, the poor, blacks, the young, the public will not know enough to protest. New York, NY 10116 old, without the slightest danger. of And to hammer the point home, they are I February 1996 social unrest." Imagining the "red men- resurrecting the hated prison chain gang, I I I ""---~ 3 , Pictures Black youth face permanent unemployment, Increasing Imprl.sonment. Over fifty percent of state and federal prison population today Is black. hallmark of the Jim Crow South. to a number of federal crimes, the rate Mumia's petition for a new trial. On page The deep racial polarization in Amer­ of executions will rise even more rap­ 22, readers will find Jamal's statement ican society was starkly illuminated by idly. The modern American death pen­ in response to Sabo's refusal to remove the vicious anti-black backlash over the alty is a barbaric legacy of a barbaric himself from hearing the petition for a acquittal of OJ. Simpson by a largely system of production: chattel slavery, a new trial. black jury ("Racist Backlash Against system which degraded black people The Partisan Defense Committee OJ. Simpson Acquittal," page 30). After to the status of property, to be used for called for an international campaign of a year-long show trial and media circus, profit and disposed of as the owner protest to stop the execution scheduled the jury made short shrift of a blatant saw fit. for 17 August 1995. Demonstrations prosecution frame-up in which police The death penalty is racist in its appli­ were held around the world. Here in and prosecutors lied, evidence was cation. A majority of the over 3,000 men, the U.S., the Labor Black Leagues par­ planted, and the key police detective was women and children on death row are ticipated in building a series of labor­ exposed not only as a liar but also as a minorities. Nearly 50 percent are black. centered demonstrations around the fascistic racist. A black person is 22 times more likely country on August 3 demanding, "Stop As the article notes', even Simpson, to be sentenced to death if he is convicted the Execution" and "Free Mumia Abu­ a multimillionaire black superstar and of killing a white person than if the victim Jamal!" In response to the international ReaganlBush conservative who "made were black. In the McCleskey case, the outcry, Sabo signed a stay of execution it" according to the rules of (white) U.S. Supreme Court ruled thatthis racist on August 7. Jamal wrote: American capitalism, after his arrest got bias does not matter, because to question "The state of Pennsylvania still has every the same frame-up treatment daily meted it "throws into serious question the prin­ intention of killing me-just not right out in the ghettos. But the Simpson case ciples that underlie our entire criminal now. "Thus the stay is a limited victory .. .let us also illustrated that the fundamental justice system." Yes, indeed. utilize this precious time to build a divide in this deeply racist country is The symbol of the struggle against the stronger and broader movement, to not not race but class. With his millions, racist death penalty in America today is 'stay' one execution, but to halt them Simpson was able to buy a topnotch team the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former all! Down with the racist U.S. death of attorneys who won his acquittal. As Black Panther, award-winning journalist penalty!" death row political prisoner Mumia Abu­ and supporter of the controversial MOVE On February 9, Jamal's attorneys filed Jamal noted: "If OJ. Simpson were a organization, who was framed up for the papers in Pennsylvania Supreme Court poor man of no influence, with the exact 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman.