Selma opens with Martin Luther King, Jr. accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The film, and the portrayal of MLK, is consistent in depicting his pacifism. The march from Selma to Montgomery concludes peacefully. Lyndon Johnson said, “This is why I have chosen you, and not Malcolm X, who advocates violence, to lead the movement.” The film footage from the beginning to the end, however, proves that peaceful movements unprepared-for-violence beget violence.
The film advocates nonviolence and using the legal system. King and other mainstream civil rights leaders argued that working inside the system — by allying with “lesser-evil” bosses and going through the courts and laws — would win the fight against racism. King and others take on collaborationist positions, in which they exploit workers’ anti-racist fights to spread reformist illusions about elections, pacifism, and a seat at the bosses’ table.
Nonviolence is the belief that workers should accept all violence committed against them by the capitalist state and not fight back. The belief is that the rulers’ conscience will prevail and they will stop the violence against workers. This is what the bosses love about nonviolence: it disarms the working class from fighting back. History has proven many times the rulers have no conscience, i.e., slavery, racist police murder, and imperialist wars.
Pacifism vs. Mass Class Violence
“Negotiation, demonstration, and passive resistance” is King’s mantra in pressing for the right to vote. The barriers to vote are clearly part of a much bigger legal system. The film bears out the truth of the statement, “The cops, the courts the ku klux klan, all a part of the bosses’ plan.” Five hours after King’s speech, Viola Liuzzo drives a few marchers back to Selma, the subtitle states that she is murdered by the KKK.
Following the brutal beating by the cops of restaurant patrons (some were marching as King was away at a meeting) and the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, King visits Jimmie’s grandfather. He says, “God was the first to cry.” This statement contrasts sharply with a Black worker’s reaction to the beating of hundreds on the first crossing, known as of the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a Southern KKK leader and U.S. senator) out of Selma and the subsequent murder of Malcolm X: “We need guns” (see page 7).
King responded that they couldn’t win if he kills two racists and the racist government kills ten. King’s limited vision couldn’t see the power of an armed, organized working class, let alone a strategy to defeat the whole capitalist system, and so he silenced other militant voices.
Failure to Defy the Bosses
The second march on the bridge showed clearly King’s inability to confront U.S. ruling class and state. The troops were ordered to pull back. But King’s “instinct,” as James Reed, a Unitarian minister put it, told him there might be an ambush leading to more bloodshed of this multiracial march. King turned about after a brief prayer and led the march — this time with one-third white protesters from across the country — to retreat. That night, James Reed was beaten to death by Selma racists.
Only when the 50-mile march was approved — after a hearing with those victims of previous assaults as witnesses — did King make serious plans to march all the way. There is an imagined conversation between outright racist Alabama governor George Wallace and liberal racist U.S. president Lyndon Johnson before the march. The two politicians deny to each other who has the greater watch over voting rights, the President, the Governor, or, indeed, the racist registrars. Johnson declares that he doesn’t want to go down in history with the same identity as Wallace and was forced to sign the Voting Rights Act, which removed the most overt barriers to Black workers voting.
The film’s climax conveys that Johnson’s signature on the Voting Rights Act, not militant struggle, will improve the lot of Black workers. Fifty years later, Black workers still suffer from the vicious racism by the kkkops, courts, and bosses. King’s statements “we don’t fight” and Johnson’s backing (“he’s non-violent”) remain the theme of Selma. Two men close to King, Andrew Young and John Lewis, both believers in nonviolence, were highlighted after the film’s conclusion as achieving prominent government positions. They went on to fool many workers into revamping the very system that oppresses them.
Yet, actions speak louder than words. King was killed five months later when he acted to support the demands of the Memphis sanitation strikers. Two of the men had been crushed to death by faulty trucks. Mayor Loeb refused to make repairs or to raise the poverty-level wages that kept many of the workers on welfare. For King’s leadership of striking workers, criticism of the Vietnam War, and demanding the rights of white and Black workers, he shall be remembered throughout history.
After King’s assassination the front page of Challenge said, “Nonviolence is Dead, Organize!” What is never reported now in the media is that mass rebellions in scores of cities against tanks and troops deployed in the streets forced the U.S. ruling class to enact reforms such as voting access and antipoverty programs.
Ultimately, the bosses evoke King as a hero because he represents tactics that do not pose a vital threat to the root of racism: capitalism. The rulers would rather have nonviolent marches and negotiation with politicians than rebellions like Ferguson. Workers need revolutionary violence organized by a mass communist Party. Workers need not one but millions of heroes who lead by serving our class for a communist world.
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Malcolm X Speaks: On the Sellout of the 1963 March on Washington
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- 29 January 2015 699 hits
Just ten weeks after the historic civil rights march in August of 1963, Malcolm X gave an important speech — “Message to the Grassroots” — in which he attacked the civil rights misleaders who had collaborated with the ruling class and sold out the antiracist struggle of the day.
When reading Malcolm’s insightful analysis, quoted below, it’s helpful to keep in mind that back then Malcolm still viewed nearly all white folks as enemies and advocated black capitalism. But within a year, after two trips to Africa, he would make profound changes in his thinking. He came to recognize that all oppressed people, including white workers, are part of a common, international struggle against a common oppressor. When Malcolm uses the word “white” in this speech, we can substitute “capitalist” to better reflect where he was heading.
He concluded that the real enemy is capitalism. As Malcolm X put it, “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist. You show me a capitalist, I’ll show you a bloodsucker.”
Leading up to the summer of 1963, there was growing anger against racism, with lots of working-class struggle. As Malcolm explains, the March on Washington was spurred by militant grass-roots leaders:
It was the grass roots out there in the street. . . [It] scared the white power structure in Washington, DC to death; I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital….they called in these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, “Call it off.”
Kennedy said, “Look, you all letting this thing go too far.” And Old Tom said, “Boss, I can’t stop it, ‘cause I didn’t start it.” I’m telling you what they said. They said, “I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it.” They said, “These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of us.” And that old shrewd fox [Kennedy], he said, “Well If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll welcome it. I’ll help it. I’ll join it.”
Malcolm went on to describe how liberal capitalists bought off the “Big Six” civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer, and Whitney Young, with $1.5 million for their new coalition, the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership:
Soon as they got the set-up organized, the white man made available to them top public relations experts; opened the news media across the country at their disposal; and then they begin to project these Big Six as the leaders of the march….They became the march. They took it over...
And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all...I know you don’t like what I’m saying, but I’m going to tell you anyway ‘cause I can prove what I’m saying….[I]t was a sellout. It was a takeover
Guardian Weekly (from the Washington Post) 23 January, Gennevilliers, France:
Rather than fall quiet as requested during a national minute of silence after the Charlie Hebdo killings, three boys in Hamid Abdelaali’s high school class in this heavily Muslim suburb of Paris staged an informal protest, speaking loudly through all 60 seconds.
Across France they were not alone. In one school in Normandy, some Muslim students yelled…during that same moment. In a Paris middle school another group of young Muslims politely asked not to respect the minute, arguing to their teacher: “You reap what you sow.”
Abdelaali, a 17-year-old high school senior…said he feels disgusted by a magazine whose provocative cartoons had used the image of Muhammad for satire….Within France’s Muslim community of some 5 million — the largest in Europe — many are viewing the tragedy in starkly different terms from their non-Muslim compatriots. They…[are] arguing that, no, they are not Charlie at all.
Many of France’s Muslims…abhor the violence that struck…earlier this month. But they are also revolted by the notion that they should defend the magazine. By putting the publication on a pedestal, they insist, the French are once again sidelining the Muslim community, feeding into a general sense of discrimination that, they argue, helped create the conditions for radicalization in the first place.
Unemployment and poverty remain far higher among France’s Muslims than in the nation overall. Joblessness and poverty are particularly high in the heavily Muslim Paris suburbs such as Gennevilliers, an area of sprawling, dense apartment blocks….
On the streets here, Charlie Hebdol remains something different, a symbol of what some, such as Mohamed Binakdan, 32, describe as everyday humiliation of Muslims in France.
“You go to a nightclub, and they don’t let you in,” said Binakdan, a transit worker in Paris. “You go to a party, they look at your beard and say, ‘Oh, when are you going to Syria to join the jihad?’ Charlie Hebdo is part of that, too. Those who are stronger than us are mocking us. We have high unemployment, high poverty. Religion is all we have left….And, yes, we have a hard time laughing about it.”
Some insisted there is a double standard in freedom of speech and expression that is biased against Islam. They cite the 2010 so-called burqa ban in France that forbade “concealment of the face” in public, and that Muslim critics say was clearly aimed at devout Muslim women.
As the world’s capitalist powers rally around the racist French cartoonists (dead and alive) of Charlie Hebdo, they are seizing upon the killings to celebrate the myth of “free speech” [see box] and to intensify racism against Muslims and Arabs. French bosses are using the incidents to push through their version of the USA Patriot Act “to authorize more intrusive surveillance” (New York Times, 1/13/15) — code for a fascist crackdown against protesters and dissenters. As they target small-time Islamic terrorists, the biggest terrorists — the U.S., the European Union, China, and Russia — are maneuvering to gain an edge in their escalating inter-imperialist rivalry. They will exploit the victims in Paris in the cause of nationalism and fascism — and for the bigger wars to come.
The U.S. and European bosses need to win millions of working-class youth to think they are fighting racism by joining the military to fight the Islamic State (ISIS). Their greatest fear is that youth and workers will follow the lead of the rebels in Ferguson, Missouri. That’s the real fight against racism: to confront the bosses’ brutal use of state power and the apparatus (cops, courts, jails) that props them up. 
Individual terrorists can never defeat the rulers’ racism. It was the working-class masses in the Soviet Union and China and the Resistance movements that smashed the Nazis and their Japanese fascist allies in World War II. Racism can only be obliterated by mass working-class revolutionary violence. We need to organize tens of millions of workers, under the banner of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, to smash capitalism and build a worker-run society: communism.
In the aftermath of al Qaeda’s latest atrocities, U.S. rulers worked overtime to obscure the main source of violence: capitalist competition over oil and gas. In reality, the assaults in France stemmed from two related factors. Al Qaeda (along with rival ISIS) aims to seize Middle East energy riches from U.S. and allied control by force, including terror attacks in the West. Meanwhile, the long, vicious history of French imperialism’s anti-Arab/Muslim racism spurs on the terrorists, helping al Qaeda and ISIS recruitment efforts. But you wouldn’t know any of this by reading Foreign Affairs (1/7/15), the journal of U.S. imperialism’s top think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR):
The death toll makes this week’s attack the most significant on French soil since the Nazi occupation — a huge milestone in al Qaeda’s campaign against the West. It is part of a long line of plots to kill media figures for their symbolic value in the West as paragons of free speech and to some Muslims as examples of the evil of secularism.
French Rulers Murder 600 Muslims
The CFR, like virtually all the rulers’ media outlets, are ignoring the far deadlier government-led massacre of Arab workers in Paris on October 17, 1961. Only Robert Fisk of the (London) Independent (1/9/15) made the obvious connection:
Algerians had long provided the majority of France’s Muslim population and in October 1961 up to 30,000 of them staged a banned independence rally in Paris — in fact, scarcely a mile from the scene of last week’s slaughter — which was attacked by French police units who murdered, it is now acknowledged, up to 600 of the protesters.
Terrorists, as bloody as they are, can never match the lethal power of a threatened capitalist state. In 1961, cutthroat French rulers were trying desperately to hang on to an African empire that generated super-profits from super-exploitation of Black, Arab and Muslim workers. The French imperialists engaged in mass savagery in Algeria, their former colony, killing tens of thousands who were fighting exploitation.
Today’s embattled U.S. imperialists kill millions — 3 million in Iraq alone — in their Middle East energy wars as they ramp up for broader conflicts with China and Russia. U.S.-led forces more than doubled the Charlie Hebdo body count one week earlier, when their rockets wiped out 25 Afghan civilians (New York Times, 1/1/15). The victims were celebrating a wedding in Helmand province, along the route of a proposed but much-delayed, U.S.-dominated TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline.
The media’s big lie is their focus on Islam as a source of terrorist violence. While oppressed rank-and-filers may in fact be won to jihad as a form of rebellion against the West, profits matter more than the Prophet (Mohammed) to the chiefs of al Qaeda and ISIS. Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden came from a billionaire, non-royal Saudi family shut out of the state-owned Aramco’s multi-trillion-dollar oil holdings. His 1996 declaration of holy war on the U.S. was keyed to a demand to dethrone the reigning Saud family and expel “American occupiers” from the country with the world’s largest oil reserves. A 2004 bin Laden message to believers targeted ExxonMobil and Anglo-Dutch Shell, Aramco’s biggest partners:
One of the main causes for our enemies’ gaining hegemony over our country is their stealing our oil; therefore, you should make every effort in your power to stop the greatest theft in history, which is being carried out through collaboration between foreigners and [native] agents… Focus your operations on it [oil production] (Quoted by Middle East Media Research Institute, 12/30/04).
As for ISIS, which has ties to the Paris kosher market attack, its oil profit motive couldn’t be more blatant. Like al Qaeda, the top tier of ISIS unites Islamic energy barons in search of state power. ISIS operates on oil revenues from fields and refineries grabbed in Iraq, resources that the U.S. war machine was supposed to secure for Exxon.
Anti-Immigrant Racism Riding High in France
France is fast becoming an ever more virulent bastion of racism. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Muslim scarves and other religious garments are banned in public schools. Marine Le Pen’s National Front led the voting in recent elections, with an ultra-racist platform directed against Black and Arab/Muslim immigrants from North Africa.
The French fascists tie immigration to rising unemployment, the highest in decades. They hide the true source of joblessness, which is built into the cyclical boom and bust of capitalism. Many immigrant workers are segregated into ghettoes surrounding Paris and other big cities, victims of joblessness and slum housing. Their living conditions are similar to those facing Black and Latin workers in the U.S.
Anti-immigrant attacks are spreading throughout the European Union. In Dresden, Germany, pro-Nazis organized an anti-immigrant demonstration of 18,000. The 40 capitalist state leaders, the ruling-class servants who turned out for a photo-op at the mass demonstration in Paris, all represent countries that routinely torture innocents. Charlie Hebdo serves the liberal rulers’ purposes by dehumanizing Arabs and Muslims. The magazine’s disgusting cartoons evoke Nazi caricatures of Jews in the 1930s, a classic tool for a ruling class bent on war. Charlie and Charlie-inspired cartoons now appear in “respectable” U.S. publications. As mosques are attacked in France, major U.S. corporations are donating funds to this rampantly racist magazine.
Only Communist Revolution Can Eliminate Racism
Racism can be fought and crushed only by smashing capitalism, which depends on racism for super-profits and uses it to divide the working class. The goal of PLP is to destroy the profit system and its bosses, and to rid the world of unemployment, poverty, racism, sexism and imperialist war.
Building such a movement means spreading communist ideas in every organization: shops, unions, community groups, churches and especially the military. Rank-and-file soldiers, Marines, and sailors must be won to turn their guns around and direct their fire at their generals, who lead the rulers’ wars for profit. These workers must be won to unite with their sisters and brothers throughout the world.
Join and build a mass PLP!
Brooklyn, January 14 — Car wash workers here have been on strike for the past month shutting down the Vegas Auto Spa. The bosses re-opened with scabs recently. But the strikers are undeterred, especially since most motorists are respecting the picket line. This group of young Latin men took a decisive stand after they had enough of the conditions imposed by their racist boss, Marat Leshinsky. For years, they have labored under hazardous working conditions, receiving sub-minimum wages and expected to work long and often unpaid hours (sometimes 90 hours/week!).
These workers have organized themselves and joined a union, which this boss refuses to bargain with or recognize. The perseverance of these workers has inspired many in the surrounding community. Recently, with much support from residents and a community organization, the Washeros staged a march through the neighborhood all the way to Bay Ridge, to deliver their demands at the doorstep of the home of their greedy boss.
The strikers are well aware that this kind of exploitation of Latin immigrant workers reaps super-profits for the capitalist system. It is clearly racist, and all workers need to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters who are taking the lead in fighting back.
In addition to joining their picket line, bringing hot coffee and making donations, some workers have asked that we help write and tell their story in CHALLENGE, which has been well received by the strikers. Those of us in PLP are hopeful that all workers will join the fight to ‘Smash ALL Borders’ along with this capitalist system, which utilizes racism to exploit us all.
This has been a long strike, made even more difficult for these workers and their families by the cold weather and the arrival of the holidays. They receive very modest financial support from the union. The strikers have asked us to reach out to our friends, as well as the unions and other organizations that we work in, to help build solidarity in support of the bold spirit demonstrated by these strikers.
CHALLENGE readers are encouraged to show solidarity with the striking workers. The car wash is located at 557 Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn.
