Resolution adopted at the July 2009 Congress of the
International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (IFLT)
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We Are All Mumia
It is with great concern that the working class militants of the world have watched the case of former Black Panther and MOVE activist Mumia Abu Jamal. We recognize his life long dedication to the struggle of the oppressed, the poor and the exploited. Across the world in the working class communities, barrios and ghettos his name is known. It is with great sadness that we see the movement for his freedom stagnating as it has depended for years on the non existent justice from the bosses’ court system. We recognize that the ruling class will never free our brother in chains. Only heroic actions such as the strike of the Oakland Dock workers who carried on a one day general strike can free our brother.
Why do the capitalists’ courts keep Mumia in jail despite his innocence?
The policy of depending on lawyers in the courts to free Mumia was defective from the start. In fact for many years it acted to keep the working class off the streets and placed our struggle in the hands of the bosses’ courts.
The domination of the parasites on Wall Street is maintained through violence against the working class throughout the world; in the rest of the world it is maintained through the over 120 military bases, while in the United States it is maintained by the police. When one of the police is killed, Wall Street draws the line and unites around its agent. But when a young brother like Oscar Grant is shot in the back while restrained it is only the outcry and uprising in the streets by indignant youth that forces prosecution of the racist cops.
Protection of the bosses’ system of super-exploitation is the centre of all their actions. Just as the great wealth of the United States was built on the labour of the enslaved African people today it is supplemented by the exploitation of immigrant labour.
In this period of world domination of the banks on Wall Street, their democratic mask falls. Thus their greed for coltan (columbite - tantalite ore) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been behind the war there where over 4 million people have died; their control of over 80% of the arable land in the world is what is behind the high food prices that starve billions of people (the capitalists know that we can do without most things but we must eat); when they dismiss millions of immigrants and put over 4000 in jail, it is part of their social control, so that their profits can rise, and yes, these same capitalists dismiss millions of workers in the USA and around the world, steal the pension funds of the GM workers, with the active support of the Obama regime. They claim democracy but keep hundreds without trial in Guantanamo Bay; they claim democracy but have their bloody hands supporting the Micheletti regime in the coup in Honduras. The fight to free Mumia is the same fight of all the working class in the world against their capitalist system.
We call on workers in the United States to down tools in coordinated strike action to Free Mumia Now! We call on the ILWU Local 10 and the immigrant workers who initiated the May Day million man marches in 2007 and 2008 to forge joint action to: Free the 4000 immigrants in the US jails! Free the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay! Free the political prisoners in the Zionist jails in occupied Palestine! Free the political prisoners in the sellout Palestine Authority’s jails! Free the political prisoners in all the secret prisons of the CIA around the globe! Down with the coup in Honduras! Forward to a government of workers and poor peasants in Honduras! Stop the mass dismissals across the United States! Occupy GM and other workplaces threatened with closures and demand their nationalisation without compensation under workers control!
Down with the bureaucracies of the ALF-CIO and Change to Win who refuse to use proletarian methods of struggle to free our imprisoned brother and sisters and who channel workers’s energy into the bosses’s twin parties of exploitation, the Republicrats.
Only mass workers’s strike action can save this son of Africa and hero of the world working class!
We call for rolling mass working class action to free Mumia and all political prisoners of capitalism! Forward to an international day of mass action!
Gathered in Buenos Aires in July 2009, revolutionary workers from Bolivia’s mines, Chile’s mills, Argentina’s factories, Peruvian working class, South Africa transportation sector, Brazil’s factories, from as far away as New Zealand and California, affirm our commitment to advocate for and build strike action to free our brother. We condemn the NAACP for hosting US Attorney General Eric Holder at their meeting in NYC and call on all militant workers around the world to demand: FREE MUMIA NOW! NO FAITH IN THE BOSSES’ COURTS!
Forward to the reconstitution of the revolutionary party of Trotsky and the young Cannon in the United States as part of the fight for rebuilding the world party of the socialist revolution over the base of the program and legacy of the 1938 Foundation Congress of the Fourth International!
The International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI) calls for a regrouping of revolutionaries along the lines of a new Kienthal/Zimmerwald to co-ordinate the defence against the imperialist attacks on the world working class and to prepare a counter-offensive.