[Marxism] Reconstruction Party candidate Malcolm Suber interview

[David Walters <dave.walters@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[From 'Unity & Independence', a supplement on independent working class 
political action produced by 'The Organizer' newspaper. It is not yet on 
the web any place --David]

Malcolm Suber: ‘If We Want Real Justice & Equity, We'll Have to Do It 
Ourselves'

[Note: The following interview was conducted on Sept. 6, 2007, by U&I 
correspondent Donna Kesselman.]

Unity & Independence: Tell us a bit about yourself. ...

Malcolm Suber: I've been a textile worker, an autoworker, a college 
professor, a printer, and the executive director of UrbanHeart, an 
inner-city school program. I've also been a community organizer against 
police terror and U.S. imperialist war and for unionizing unorganized 
workers.

I've been an active fighter in the Black Liberation Movement and working 
class struggle for power dating from my youth in South Carolina. I was a 
student leader at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. I lecture on 
Black Liberation around the United States.

I am a founding member of the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund. I am 
running for the New Orleans City Council as the first candidate of the 
Reconstruction Party.

U&I: Why are you running for the New Orleans City Council? Suber: We 
want to win this seat so working class and poor Black folk have some 
representation at city hall and to move toward building the 
Reconstruction Party.

Our people's campaign is building a Reconstruction Movement for our 
people's right to return back home. We've witnessed the failure of 
federal, state and local officials to do anything to get people back home.

The local white ruling class program is to change the city's 
demographics, eliminating the Black people. We should decide how our 
community should look when it's rebuilt. We won't allow the 
land-grabbers of Black people's land, the gentrifiers, to chase out 
those who really built this city.

If we want real justice and equity, we'll have to do it ourselves. The 
Democratic politicians, the same old folks, won't do it. The two big 
capitalist parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, make empty 
promises to the people, while awarding the politically connected. What 
they've done for Katrina Survivors adds up to almost nothing.

It's going to take a fight on the streets to get people home. We have to 
seize this opportunity to elect one of our own. At the very least, we 
will raise the issues people have on their minds. I've been fighting for 
30 years in this city - and we will continue fighting, whether we win 
this election or not. Working people - not just uptown whites and 
book-licking college presidents - need to sit on the city boards and 
expose how the machine delivers the goods to those who presently run 
this city. Our slogan is "nothing about us, without us, is for us." Ours 
is a campaign for full participation of working class and poor Black 
people in decision-making about relief and reconstruction after the 
storm and great flood.

The right to return remains an empty phrase without governmental 
policies making it possible for our people to return. Policies must 
defend working people's interests against police terror and ensure the 
reopening of Charity Hospital, which served working and poor people in 
now devastated areas. We will defend our people's culture. They are 
keeping Black working class social and pleasure club organizers and 
Mardi Gras Indians out of the city. Most important, this is not a 
bourgeois campaign. No contributions from business or rich people are 
accepted. We will rely on contributions from poor and working class 
people to finance my/their campaign. We ask working people to campaign, 
go door-to-door, call their friends and raise funds. I am for public 
election funds so working people can run, whatever their economic 
situation - not $1,000 dollar breakfasts, because rich people want 
favors from politicians who accept their money.

U&I: How does this fit in with the national campaign?

Suber: We believe the Reconstruction Movement needs a Reconstruction 
Party. This party is being launched in New Orleans to refocus local and 
national priorities on human needs and a just society. Locally, the 
focus is a full and just reconstruction of our city after Hurricane 
Katrina and levee failures, with the full involvement of those affected 
by these disasters. Everything happening in New Orleans is so profound; 
it is a dress rehearsal for the ruling class around the country. They 
exploited Katrina to advance their program to smash public schools and 
introduce charter schools. The program of the ruling class is to 
privatize everything: schools, health care, prisons.

They want to go back to plantation days. People were taken out at gun 
point during Katrina, as they don't working class people in the city who 
are not working for them. Those not working – unemployed, ill, elderly – 
must go. They don't want the social safety net or any social programs at 
all.

The Gulf Coast Reconstruction Movement is raising the fundamental 
questions about what the kind of society we want to live in, whether we 
should be re-electing people who defend the rich and their unjust rule.

We only have the millionaire ruling class's twin parties to do the 
bidding of the rich. We have a government not of, by, and for the people 
- but of, by and for the rich. Working people deserve better than what 
they are given in this society. We need a party of our own, the 
Reconstruction Party, to advance our program and our interests.

A mass Reconstruction Party in this country would represent the 
interests of working and oppressed folks. We think our campaign here and 
the interests we engender around our city council race will engender 
support for the Reconstruction Party nationally. It also can engender 
the interest of working people around the world.

U&I: What initiatives have you taken to get your campaign off the ground?

Suber: We are building a "Malcolm Suber for City Council-at-Large 
Election/Reconstruction Party Committee" composed of community activists 
and working class people fighting for change in New Orleans. We are also 
reaching out to the Diaspora, especially our people in Houston, Atlanta 
and Jackson, Mississippi.

Challenges to our people's voting rights continue. In this election, 
like the 2006 mayor's elections, they refuse satellite voting - so our 
people will have to come home to vote or vote absentee with all its 
problems. We will do outreach for only our campaign actually champions 
their right to return by advocating support for their moving expenses 
and rental expenses, the fight for rent control, the reopening of public 
housing, an end to homelessness. We will join the NAACP suit against 
Louisiana authorities who purged 20,000 New Orleans voters from the rolls.

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