Re: The lunatic left

[Xxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxx>]

 The SWP seems aware of the seeming contradiction in their postion re the INS 
and
their position in the 1960s regarding federal troops as evidenced in the 
article in
the Militant below. Perhaps the SWP would have preferred a raid by UMWA and 
UNITE
militias or perhaps a lightening raid by the Cuban military :


Call for federal troops to enforce civil rights is a
world apart from INS assault in Miami

By Steve Clark
"We should not get caught up in the debate of whether too much force was used,"
writes Les Slater in one of the letters on page 15 of this week's issue of the
Militant. Slater is referring to the April 22 SWAT-style raid
in Miami during which eight members of a 130-strong Border Patrol special 
forces task
force of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)?wearing riot gear and 
armed
with MP-5 submachine guns?broke down the front door with a battering ram and 
smashed
their way into a private home.

In another letter printed in this issue, Joe Callahan also welcomes this 
assault by
la migra, comparing it "to the use of U.S. troops to enforce desegregation in 
the
South in the 1950s and 60s, something that socialists staunchly supported."

The Militant editorial, "In Defense of the Cuban Revolution, In Defense of the
Working Class," featured on the front page, presents the communist viewpoint on 
the
brutal and unconstitutional INS asault in Miami. In addition, however, an 
explicit
answer is called for to the misrepresentation in the letter by Joe Callahan of 
the
Socialist Workers Party's political course as part of the fight against Jim Crow
segregation and for Black civil rights.

That mass proletarian movement swept not only the U.S. South but the United 
States as
a whole for well more than a decade. It had deep roots in the battles that 
forged the
industrial unions in the 1930s and in struggles by sharecroppers and tenant 
farmers
during those same years. Many of its most self-sacrificing cadres gained initial
experience in the mobilizations by Black workers, rural toilers, and youth 
during
World War II against the color bar in wartime industries and lynch-mob terror 
and cop
violence?as well as statutory segregation of
units inside the U.S. armed forces itself, segregation that included the 
assignment
of the all-Black units both to the filthiest and to the most dangerous tasks.

Struggles against colonialism

The struggle paused for a number of years following the war. But the embers were
fanned by victorious struggles for colonial independence and national liberation
across much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. By 1954 that shifting postwar 
balance
of international class forces brought about the conditions in which the U.S. 
Supreme
Court, in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education, decided there was little
choice but to declare school segregation to be contrary to the U.S. 
Constitution.

Over the following decade, a veritable social war was fought across the U.S. 
South.
Segregationist forces used both official police power and stepped-up lynch mob 
terror
in an effort to deny voting rights to Blacks and bar
them from equal access to schools, transportation, restaurants, hotels, and 
public
facilities of all varieties. (It was during this period that the Confederate 
battle
flag was once again raised as a banner of racism, reaction, and secession over 
state
capitols in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and elsewhere.) Blacks 
combated the

racist violence, including by organized armed self-defense in many cases, and 
reached
out to supporters of all
skin colors across the United States to mobilize for freedom rides, sit-ins, 
marches,
and mass demonstrations
and rallies.

Federal troops, armed self-defense

White-supremacist governors such as Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Ross Barnett of
Mississippi, George Wallace of Alabama, and others initially called out the 
National
Guard in those states to block the desegregation of elementary schools, high 
schools,
and universities by Black students, and to maintain institutionalized 
inequality in
all aspects of life and work. In response, working people and youth who were 
Black,
not only in the South but across the United States, began to demand that 
Washington
enforce the equal rights it now claimed before
world opinion to guarantee?including, if necessary, by federalizing the National
Guard or sending in the U.S. armed forces.

The communist movement in the United States began raising this demand as early 
as
1955. "How many more lynchings, beatings, floggings, and kidnappings must we 
have
before the federal government acts to protect the Negro people of Mississippi?"
opened a Militant editorial in October of that year. Just a few days earlier, 
the
lynchers of a young Black man named Emmett Till had been acquitted in a 
Mississippi
Delta town through the connivance of the all-white judge, jury, and prosecution.

During a Socialist Workers Party leadership discussion the following year, 
national
secretary Farrell Dobbs reported that during a recent trip to Chicago he had 
found "a
big response to the demand for federal troops" among Black workers he had met 
there
in the packing and farm equipment industries. Dobbs added that "this is a big 
demand
which must be fought for through mass action. To demonstrate their seriousness, 
the
Negro leaders should organize a March on Washington. This course...would help 
give
weight to the whole struggle of
the Negro people."

Dobbs also pointed "to the accumulated evidence that the Negro people 
themselves have
been showing initiative in moving toward self-defense," and that defense against
reactionary forces is "a problem which confronts unionists, Negro and white 
alike, as
well as the Negroes as a people.

"I think the troop slogan," Dobbs said, "will help to push the defense guard 
slogan
as a propaganda point. Failure of the government to protect the Negro people 
against
terror leads to the conclusion that they must find
a way to defend themselves as best they can, in other words, defense guards 
organized
in association with their white allies."

Desegregating 'Ole Miss'

Over this period, both the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower and 
the
Democratic administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson resisted at every 
step
along the way dispatching federal troops to enforce Black rights. But the 
growing
mass movement demanding that Washington take action against the weakening but 
still
violent segregationist bunker in the South forced the White House to send in 
federal
marshals and military units at several turning points.

As schools opened in the fall of 1962, for example, Mississippi governor Barnett
deployed state troopers and local sheriffs to rebuff three straight efforts to
enforce a federal order to admit a young Black man named James Meredith to the
University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss") in the town of Oxford. Finally, on 
October 2,
the Kennedy administration agreed to dispatch the forces necessary to ensure 
Meredith
was registered and allowed onto campus. Accompanied by federal marshals, the 
Black
student was met by a racist mob, some shouting
"Go to Cuba, nigger lovers, go to Cuba!" and lobbing stones. By the end of that 
day,
the segregationist thugs had injured 160 federal marshals?28 of them with bullet
wounds?and killed a local worker and British reporter. Over the weeks to come, 
some
23,000 U.S. Army, Marine, and Air Force troops were stationed on the campus.

A year and a half later, in March 1965, when mass civil rights demonstrations in
Selma, Alabama, were putting a spotlight on the refusal of state authorities to
guarantee voting rights to Blacks, the Militant called on the federal 
government to
send troops to Alabama to arrest Wallace "and all other state and local 
officials
guilty of denying Negroes their rights. Moreover, the federal government should 
arm
and deputize Alabama Negroes so that they can protect their own communities from
racist violence."

When several thousand civil rights fighters refused to be turned back by a 
bloody
assault by state troopers on their first attempt to march from Selma to 
Montgomery,
the Johnson administration was forced two weeks later not only to call Alabama
National Guardsmen into federal service to ensure the safety of the marchers, 
but to
introduce legislation that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Gains in democratic and social rights

By the latter half of the 1960s, the mass civil rights movement had sounded the 
death
knell for the system of state-sanctioned segregation and discrimination across 
the
U.S. South known as Jim Crow.

Not only was equality codified in federal civil rights legislation, but a major
extension of Social Security protection for all working people had been won as
well?Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and cost-of-living protections. These 
were the
first significant new conquests in working people's social wage since the 
massive
labor battles of the 1930s.

These victories provided a vital impulse to struggles against national 
oppression by
Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other oppressed layers of the population; set a 
powerful
example for the movement for women's rights that exploded at the end of the 
1960s;
and gave momentum to the emerging movement to stop U.S. imperialism's war 
against the
people of Vietnam.

The working class and labor unions in the United States had been immeasurably
strengthened.

The use of federal troops to enforce Black rights, moreover, had not helped the
capitalist rulers morally justify or politically reinforce their various 
apparatuses
of repression against working people, as the Clinton administration is seeking 
to use
this week's lightning predawn INS assault in Miami.

To the contrary, as the Black rights movement gained power, expanding from the 
South
throughout all parts of the country, among the consequences was a parallel 
expansion
of political rights and constitutional protections for all working people. 
Fourth
Amendment rights against "unreasonable search and seizure" were strengthened by 
the
Supreme Court in 1961, including the exclusion of evidence illegally obtained 
by the
cops. Sixth Amendment rights of all to an attorney were extended in 1964. Fifth
Amendment protections against
self-incrimination and forced confessions were codified in 1966, the so-called
"Miranda" ruling. And the death penalty?a barbaric class weapon of the 
bosses?was
struck down in 1972.

As U.S. and world capitalism entered a long-term crisis by the mid-1970s, each 
of
these conquests has come under increasing pressure, as the courts and 
politicians in
both capitalist parties have sought to chip away at or reverse them. The biggest
attacks on these gains have been pushed through by the Clinton administration, 
with
bipartisan backing in Congress.

So, it's true that "the use of troops to enforce desegregation in the South in 
the
1950s and 1960s [is] something that socialists strongly supported." Contrary to 
the
assertion of Joe Callahan, however, this bloody and proud chapter in the 
struggle of
U.S. working people provides convincing evidence of why labor and the oppressed 
must
intransigently condemn the anti-working-class and unconstitutional commando 
operation
by the executive branch of the federal government in Miami. That Easter weekend 
raid
is part of the frontal assault on the constitutional rights conquered by a mass
working-class vanguard in these battles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Every class-conscious worker should not only "get caught up" in this debate but 
help
lead it?and act on its conclusions.