http://themilitant.com/2017/8132/813203.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 32 August 28, 2017
(front page)
SWP talks with workers in Va. about racist actions
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
In response to recent developments in Charlottesville, Virginia, and
furor in the liberal media portraying workers who voted for President
Donald Trump as the social base of racist and right-wing activity in the
U.S., members of the Socialist Workers Party have been knocking on doors
in Charlottesville and around the country to discuss the issues with
working people.
SWP member Ned Measel met David Slezak at his home. He is a retired
teacher in Charlottesville who now serves meals at a homeless shelter
across the street from the park where the Aug. 12 confrontation took
place. “I had to listen all day to chants — ‘blood and soil,’ build the
wall, Jews will not replace us, and f--k the faggots,” he said,
referring to the ultra-rightists. “I saw some of them had machine guns.”
He showed Measel some photos of armed white supremacists he took with
his phone.
Slezak wanted to discuss broader politics in the U.S. today. “I’m a
socialist. What do you think of Bernie Sanders?” he asked. “Sanders
doesn’t present a course forward for the working class. He is seeking to
take over the Democratic Party and give it a more radical reform program
in hopes of shoring up the capitalist system,” said Measel. “Working
people need to build their own party, a party like the SWP, that can
lead workers and their allies in struggle against the ravages of the
capitalist crisis today and chart a course to take political power out
of the hands of the capitalist class. That’s what the Cuban people did
in their revolution, something working people here need to emulate.”
Variety of opinions about statue
People had a variety of opinions about the statue of Confederate General
Robert E. Lee in downtown Charlottesville that the City Council wants to
take down. “The statue is historical and it’s never bothered anyone, so
it doesn’t need to come down,” Rae Dawn, 15, told Measel on her
doorstep. This view was shared by a number of others, both Blacks and
Caucasians, talked to by SWP members.
Unlike in Charleston, South Carolina, where 50,000 people marched in
2000 demanding the Confederate battle flag be taken down — leading to
its removal from the state Capitol building — or where thousands
gathered in July 2015 to see that same flag entirely removed from the
Capitol grounds after white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine
African-American worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Charleston, there is no broad movement of workers in the
streets of Charlottesville demanding the statue of Lee be removed.
In Charleston, West Virginia, about 150 people protested at the state
Capitol Aug. 13 demanding the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen.
Stonewall Jackson. A handful of members of the Sons of Confederate
Veterans counterprotested, saying the statue was a historical site. The
next day Socialist Workers Party members and supporters from the
Washington, D.C., area knocked on doors in Huntington, West Virginia,
where President Donald Trump recently held a rally attended by thousands
of working people.
Most of the workers they met, both Caucasian and Black, said that they
had voted for Trump.
“People say that this is a part of history, but it’s about bad history,”
said Shawn Tackett, 42, an unemployed construction worker, who was
remodeling his home. “The Civil War was fought to abolish slavery. The
reasons they are for fighting for the monuments are wrong.”
Team members showed him Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to
Workers Power by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, which describes
Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, the Black-led
working-class movement that overthrew Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s
and the significance of the 2000 protests against the Confederate battle
flag in Charleston.
“That’s why struggles over state governments displaying the Confederate
battle flag, or over statues or holidays in tribute to political or
military leaders of the slaveholders’ rebellion, continue to have weight
in the class struggle many decades — indeed almost a century and a half
— after it was routed in a bloody civil war,” Barnes writes in the
Workers Power book.
SWP members and supporters are stepping up efforts to meet with workers
on their doorsteps and introduce them to Are They Rich Because They’re
Smart? and The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record, also by Barnes, and
Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? by SWP leader Mary-Alice
Waters, and to increase the circulation of the Militant.
“I’ve been to four funerals in the last week and a half,” said Tackett,
talking about the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, where the drug
overdose death rate is the highest in the country.
“We can solve it,” said SWP member Glova Scott. “Drug use and crime
decline when workers go into struggle against the economic, social and
moral disaster wrought by capitalism, that’s what happened during the
big battles that overthrew Jim Crow. It’s through these kinds of
struggles that working people will gain the strength and self-confidence
to take political power and finally get rid of this dog-eat-dog
capitalist system.”
In the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Mary Martin, SWP candidate
for Seattle mayor, and SWP member Edwin Fruit met Lahtavia Mitchell, 26,
who works as a housekeeper. “It’s sad that people can feel totally
comfortable expressing hatred and prejudice for others,” she said. “On
the other hand I see people feeling totally able to express their
anti-racist stance too.”
“The historic gains of the powerful movement that overthrew Jim Crow
cannot be turned back,” Martin said. “It still reverberates today. There
is more fraternization among workers who are Black and workers who are
Caucasian than ever before. The working class is less racist than ever
before in U.S. history.” Mitchell got a Militant subscription to follow
politics and the activities of the SWP.
SWP members in New York put all other activities aside Aug. 14 to join
in a number of actions in the area to protest the killing of Heather
Heyer by a white supremacist in Charlottesville and discuss the road
forward for the working class.
SWP leader Róger Calero said he met Fredy, a construction worker who
came to Trump Tower to “see what was happening with the demonstrations.”
After an hour of discussion on a wide variety of political questions,
Calero told the Militant, Fredy got a copy of the paper. He said he had
a friend he thought would also like to talk with the SWP. “We plan for
the three of us to get together and talk more,” Calero said.
SWP member Lea Sherman took part in a rally of some 125 people outside
the Church of the Mediator in the Bronx that evening. They had an open
speakers platform so she addressed the crowd. “There is much carnage on
the working class,” she said, “including unemployment, the opioid
crisis, no health care, cop violence, never ending wars. Neither the
Democrats nor Republicans have any solutions. The road forward is the
working class taking power. That is the road of the Cuban Revolution.”
Arlene Rubinstein and Ned Measel from Washington, D.C., and Edwin Fruit
from Seattle contributed to this article.
Related articles:
SWP protests rightist acts, killing in Virginia
Liberals, left smear working class as racist
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