SEP Denies Racism in Trayvon Martin Killing - WV

[kong]

/english/wv/1005/sep-trayvon.html

From the latest Workers Vanguard:

Anti-Socialist Inequality Party
SEP Denies Racism in Trayvon Martin Killing
Outside of stone racists, Tea Party yahoos and those among the zoo of reactionaries contending for Republican presidential candidate, there were few who openly denied the bitter truth that 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed in cold blood by a racist vigilante simply because he was black. But cries from those like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum that to portray Martin’s killing as a “racial issue is fundamentally wrong,” “disgraceful” and divisive found an echo from an organization that calls itself the Socialist Equality Party (SEP). A March 31 statement by the SEP’s presidential candidate Jerry White opined: “The killing of Trayvon Martin is not fundamentally about race.” White concludes by urging a “fight for socialism.” The notion that the socialist liberation of the working class means denying the reality of black oppression in this country—a cornerstone for the edifice of capitalist rule in America—is a grotesque but accurate measure of the political sensibilities animating the SEP.
A subsequent SEP article on its World Socialist Web Site titled “The Killing of Trayvon Martin and Racial Politics in America” (wsws.org, 5 April) by its National Secretary Joseph Kishore allows that “racial prejudice may [!!] have played a role in the killing of Martin.” But he asserts that the eruption of massive protests had nothing to do with race, much less the daily reality of racist terror against black people in this society. That Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, saw a young black man in a hoodie as a dangerous predator also is of no consequence to Kishore. Instead, he presents this cop wannabe as one of many “disturbed individuals” whose “violent actions” are the product of the “tensions building up in American society” as a result of the current economic crisis. This is kind of like describing lynchings in the Jim Crow South as the product of the economic dislocations resulting from the destruction of slavery but…having nothing to do with race.
Kishore presents such arguments as a statement of supposed working-class opposition to the Democratic Party, which he proclaims is using “the killing of Martin to promote the reactionary politics of racial identity.” As evidence, Kishore points to an observation by Jesse Jackson that “racial profiling is all too common in the US, and has led to the killing of a young man.” Who other than an apologist for racism or perhaps an escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane could deny that this is an elementary statement of fact? The problem isn’t that Jackson, Al Sharpton and others of their ilk are fanning the flames of outrage against racist reaction in America. On the contrary, their purpose is precisely to contain such outrage and keep it safely in the channels of pro-Democratic Party electoralism.
The SEP and Victor Berger
In its articles on Martin, the SEP polemicizes against the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and other leftists who did their bit in promoting the “change we can believe in” credentials of Barack Obama as U.S. imperialist Commander-in-Chief. But, far from exposing such pro-Democratic Party belly crawling, Kishore’s article opened the door for the ISO to try to present its organization as genuine fighters for “socialist equality,” including for black people.
In a letter attributed to ISO honcho Sherry Wolf that is posted on wsws.org (19 April), she thanked Kishore for his article, saying that she had circulated it to ISO members as a “useful example of lunk-headed indifference to racism in the name of socialism.” In reply, Kishore argued: “Socialists have never denied or ignored the existence of racism. However, the historic position of the socialist movement has been that the struggle against racism and all forms of oppression must be based on the fight to unite all workers, on the basis of their common class interests, against the capitalist system.” In fact, to unite workers around their common class interests requires championing the rights of black people, immigrants and other minorities who are a vital part of the proletariat. As Karl Marx put it, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
Any organization claiming a revolutionary perspective must take up the fight against the special oppression of black people in the U.S. The forcible segregation of the black population at the bottom of this society has been integral to capitalist rule in America since the days of slavery. Poisonous anti-black racism fomented by the bourgeoisie has long been a barrier to the proletariat developing a consciousness of itself as a class, crippling its struggles against the capitalist class enemy.
The position that Kishore puts forward is indeed “historic,” the history being that of the American Socialist Party, which included the likes of outright white supremacist Victor Berger. Even the best elements of the early socialist movement, such as Eugene Debs, who opposed all racial prejudice, treated the question of black oppression as simply part of the workers struggle against capitalism and no more. As James P. Cannon, a founder of the American Communist movement and later of U.S. Trotskyism, wrote in “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement” (printed in The First Ten Years of American Communism [1962]): “The old theory of American radicalism turned out in practice to be a formula for inaction on the Negro front, and—incidentally—a convenient shield for the dormant racial prejudices of the white radicals themselves.”
This changed when the victory of the 1917 Russian Revolution, as Cannon put it, “began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races.” The Communist International under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party fought with the early American Communists to champion the fight for black rights. The Bolsheviks understood that, far from “dividing” the working class as the SEP would have it, the fight for black freedom was critical to uniting the American proletariat in struggle for its own emancipation from capitalist wage slavery.
Since our inception, the Spartacist League has fought for the program of revolutionary integrationism: fighting to mobilize the multiracial working class against every manifestation of racial oppression as part of arming the workers for the struggle for proletarian socialist revolution. This is the only road to achieving genuine and full equality for the black masses through their integration into an egalitarian socialist society.
In contrast, the SEP’s conscious opposition to even the mention of racial prejudice in the Trayvon Martin case is no aberration. Such contemptible indifference to special oppression has been a hallmark of this organization and its predecessor, the Workers League (WL), for decades. This was put most crudely by former WL leader Tim Wohlforth who, in the early 1970s, told a group of young New Left Maoists: “The working class hates faggots, women’s libbers and hippies, and so do we!” Such views were indeed those of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy at the time under George Meany, who had nothing but racist contempt for the fight for black rights or those of anyone else. Yet, at the height of Vietnam antiwar protests and the upheavals in the black ghettos, the WL urged that Meany’s AFL-CIO form a “labor party” on a program that omitted any mention of the war or the fight for black liberation.
After current SEP head David North took over as WL leader, its press, the Bulletin, denounced the Spartacist League as having “a grotesque fixation with the issue of race.” This was its response to the 5,000-strong labor/black mobilization on 27 November 1982—initiated and led by the SL—which successfully drove a gang of Klan terrorists off the streets of Washington, D.C. Integrated unions in the D.C./Virginia region, particularly from longshore with its heavily black membership, helped build the mobilization. They recognized that stopping the fascists was not just a defense of black people and minorities but also of the entire labor movement against its most deadly enemies. Not the Northites, who condemned the mobilization as “A Revisionist Frenzy Over Klan” that elevated “race” over “class.”
The Civil Rights Movement
It is absolutely true that the ISO’s calls for a “new civil rights movement” are aimed at refurbishing the credentials of Jesse Jackson and other black Democrats, whose purpose is to re-elect Obama. But the SEP itself peddles its own version of Obama’s “end of racism” myth. For the SEP, to raise the question of racism over the killing of Trayvon Martin is to “subordinate political thinking to an unchanging template of racial politics,” adding “as though nothing had been accomplished by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s” (“Behind the Right-Wing Racial Politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton,” wsws.org, 1 May). This position invests the civil rights movement with essentially eliminating discrimination against black people, a convenient alibi for the SEP’s retrograde views. Although it defeated Jim Crow segregation in the South, when the civil rights movement came North it ran up against the mass unemployment, poverty and rampant police brutality in the black inner cities that are part of the very fabric of American capitalism.
The leadership of the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King—who looked to the Democratic Party and capitalist state for redress—would not and could not wage the necessary struggle against these conditions. Today the SEP tries to present MLK as some kind of anti-capitalist fighter, crediting him with the understanding that “the oppression of blacks was fundamentally a question of class.” Despite its admonition that King was “not a revolutionary socialist” (no kidding), the SEP’s whitewash of him is the same myth peddled by the ISO. It simply comes from a different vantage point, one based on the revolting argument that “attempts to present racism as the ‘core’ of American society are false and reactionary.”
The lengths to which the SEP will go to present its own “false and reactionary” view of American history can be seen in Jerry White’s February 13 election platform. The words “black people” and “racism” are never mentioned. Instead, White rhapsodizes that: “This country was founded on the principle that ‘All men are created equal’.” That was the stated principle but what was embedded in the United States Constitution was slavery. It took a bloody Civil War to smash the Southern slavocracy, but you wouldn’t know it from reading White’s platform, which reduces the Civil War to the pledge that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The abolition of slavery merits no mention.
Political Bandits
In 1970 we recalled Lenin’s term “political bandits” to describe the SEP’s forebears, the Workers League and Gerry Healy’s International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to which it was affiliated. Such an organization will fly any flag as long as it is perceived as advancing its own episodic, and often grotesque, opportunist appetites. When called for, they had the ability to wield Marxist orthodoxy, which was but a mask for violations of any and all known Marxist principles.
For years, Healy’s ICFI was the bought-and-paid-for PR agency for various Near East despotic regimes. When these crimes against the working class were exposed, his loyal lieutenants, including David North, cried that it was all Healy’s doing. But none of them raised a peep when the money was still pouring in. Indeed, the Bulletin joined in publishing an article hailing the murder of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members in 1979. Healy’s ICFI provided many such services and was handsomely rewarded by the rulers of countries including Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi. After Healy was ousted, North proclaimed himself the new leader of the ICFI.
After years of pandering to the AFL-CIO tops, North used the occasion of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the former Soviet Union to declare that the unions are “direct instruments of imperialism” and must be destroyed. Doubtless, he was buoyed in this pronouncement by the role his organization had played in supporting the imperialist-backed forces of counterrevolution that destroyed the former Soviet workers state. At the same time, years of crawling before bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Near East were reversed with North proclaiming that any and all struggles for national self-determination must be vigorously opposed.
So should you run across an Internet tome taking up the world economic crisis on the SEP’s wsws.org that sounds vaguely like “orthodox” Marxism: beware! Devoid of any class basis or connection to reality, North and his gang can and will say or do anything. Today, they are slyly giving aid and comfort to the racist enemies of those outraged by the killing of Trayvon Martin. We can only speculate about whose or what interests are served by the Northites. One thing is for certain, it is not the interests of the multiracial working class here or internationally. 

[milkmiku]

I ask of you, What evidence is there that George Zimmerman pursued Travolta Marten because of the color of his skin?

[Conscript]

I ask of you, What evidence is there that George Zimmerman pursued Travolta Marten because of the color of his skin?

A better question is what use is this declaration? There obviously exists a stereotype of young black men and they're disproportionally targeted, yet there's nothing for socialists to gain in any court ruling to come out of this.

The SEP's actions stink of opportunism to me.

[cynicles]

Isn't there an audio clip out there of Zimmerman saying a bunch of racist shit while following the kid?

[milkmiku]

Isn't there an audio clip out there of Zimmerman saying a bunch of racist shit while following the kid?


There is an audio clip that was edited by cnn to make him sound racist, yes, Was a scandal.

People still trust major news networks in this day, it is appalling.
This likely won't mean much to those who are dead set on labeling Zimmersaten a racist, but the only friend that came to his defense was black.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-03-25/news/31237766_1_shooting-joe-oliver-racial-epithet

Zimmerdolf also rode along with cops on an occasion and accused them of being lazy and covering up the beating of a black homeless man by the police chiefs son.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/22/2813681/zimmerman-rode-with-cops-ripped.html

Truly Zimmerfer is the most evil and vile racist to ever spew his radical and unending hatred of all things not white to have ever existed in the history of man.

Or perhaps he was just a gung ho idiot that shot a kid, no no that makes zero sense.

[cynicles]

Atleast there is confirmation from an outside source on the comments thing, the SEP isn't exactly the most trustworthy organization since they regularly lie and have defended real racism in the past.

[Jimmie Higgins]

It would be nice to read other radical viewpoints without having to deal with thins kind of bullshit. The SEP regularly lie about the ISO's positions and the Sparts regularly cherry-pick and distort our positions... then both pass these myths off as established facts needing no real explanation.

The Sparts will have totally unconnected stories that have nothing to do with the ISO and there'll be a line like, "But groups like the ISO who support Barack Obama..."

The SEP claimed that the ISO "campaigned for Obama" and the Sparts claim that out goal is to rehabilitate Jessie Jackson (rather than as we say build a movement from below as we claim and organize by... and as if a Democrat with tons of mainstream support would even need or want a socialist party to "rehabilitate him" even if we actually wanted to).


It is absolutely true that the ISO’s calls for a “new civil rights movement” are aimed at refurbishing the credentials of Jesse Jackson and other black Democrats, whose purpose is to re-elect Obama.It's absolutely bullshit is what this unsubstantiated opinion, presented as established fact. Where's their evidence of this... the SEP's claim? And what was the basis of the SEP's claim... that the ISO supported a Trevon Martin rally where people like Jackson were speaking! Oh lord we are in the same area as a liberal!

I wish groups like these would get their heads out their asses and engage the real world. This is petty FOX News type reporting. "While it's absolutely true that Obama wants fascist Socialism and to take all of our guns away, but..."

[#FF0000]

I ask of you, What evidence is there that George Zimmerman pursued Travolta Marten because of the color of his skin?

Why did the police conduct only the most rudimentary of investigations before there was large public outcry? (this is where the racism really comes into play, imo)

Also for what it's worth, Zimmerman has a history of making an insane number of 911 calls whenever he sees black people. So. Yeah.

[Revolution starts with U]

There is an audio clip that was edited by cnn to make him sound racist, yes, Was a scandal.

People still trust major news networks in this day, it is appalling.
This likely won't mean much to those who are dead set on labeling Zimmersaten a racist, but the only friend that came to his defense was black.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-03-25/news/31237766_1_shooting-joe-oliver-racial-epithet

Zimmerdolf also rode along with cops on an occasion and accused them of being lazy and covering up the beating of a black homeless man by the police chiefs son.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/22/2813681/zimmerman-rode-with-cops-ripped.html

Truly Zimmerfer is the most evil and vile racist to ever spew his radical and unending hatred of all things not white to have ever existed in the history of man.

Or perhaps he was just a gung ho idiot that shot a kid, no no that makes zero sense.

Who ever said he was against all things black? That's the citation I'd like to see. Who ever said "racist" means "I hate everything black people do and every black person?" Who ever made this absolute claim?

Is it not racism when someone says "most black people are jungle monkies. Not all of them, one of my best friends is black."

And what does it matter that the only person to defend him was black?

Nice straw man tho. I'm sure it worked on at least a few racists.

[milkmiku]

Why did the police conduct only the most rudimentary of investigations before there was large public outcry? (this is where the racism really comes into play, imo)

Also for what it's worth, Zimmerman has a history of making an insane number of 911 calls whenever he sees black people. So. Yeah.

The same reason they don't do a time consuming investigation during every self defense shooting. Do you truly think every single self defense shooting has an in depth investigation? They don't.

In my experience it goes like this

He broke in and I shot him.
Okay can you come down to the station and fill this out

People ain't got nothing on Zimmerbub, so they trump up baseless charges of racism to at least get him on a hate crime.

All the while the media trumps it up more and the public is distracted from things that really matter.

But hey, continue to think this is a issue of racism, black Vs. Whit makes people big bucks.

Almost forgot, this incident did bring "stand your ground" under scrutiny, something that my boy Eric would love to get rid of.

[milkmiku]

Who ever said he was against all things black? That's the citation I'd like to see. Who ever said "racist" means "I hate everything black people do and every black person?" Who ever made this absolute claim?

Is it not racism when someone says "most black people are jungle monkies. Not all of them, one of my best friends is black."

And what does it matter that the only person to defend him was black?

Nice straw man tho. I'm sure it worked on at least a few racists.

the point is, there is no evidence that he shot followed travon because he was black.

Zimmerdolf is not a racist, he is a fool.

[Revolution starts with U]

Milk,

You do realize it still racist to think young white men shouldn't wear urban attire... right?

[milkmiku]

Milk,

You do realize it still racist to think young white men shouldn't wear urban attire... right?

What? did Zimmerdolf say something along those lines? Like I care what white people where anyway, besides.

Young white people should not where urban attire=/=I followed travon because he was black.

As I have said, zero poof that Zimmermus followed Travon and then shot him because he was black.

[Revolution starts with U]

"these assholes. They always get away."
~Zimmerman

What could he have meant by "these assholes" other than "young people in urban attire?" That's all he could see of the kid, that he was black and wearing a hoodie.

[Revolution starts with U]

I mean... you're right that there is no proof. But if it walks like a duck...

Most racists in this day and age are of the "I'm not racist but (insert racism)." Is that any more forgivable than just being an outright racist?

[milkmiku]

"these assholes. They always get away."
~Zimmerman

What could he have meant by "these assholes" other than "young people in urban attire?" That's all he could see of the kid, that he was black and wearing a hoodie.

That's quite a leap, Well I appreciate your being cordial, I can see neither of us will change our view. So I wish you the best.

[Revolution starts with U]

Good day to you as well then. I don't see where the big leap is. All he could see was a young guy in urban attire. Then he said "these assholes always get away." Where is the leap? What did he mean by "these assholes?" Just people in his neighborhood, or was he stereotyping based on what he saw?

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

I can't really comment on their distortions of the ISO's position, since I have never read any ISO publications, but I feel that this article is rather dishonest. The SEP's position on racism is certainly indefensible, but on the basis that it is heavily reductionist, not that they themselves are racist or promote racism. The articles that discuss racism on the WSWS (however briefly) condemn it categorically. The rub lies in the fact that the Northist leadership believes that any foray or investigation into identity politics automatically transform you into a petty-bourgeois radical. Thus, all questions of ethnic or social identity are either distantly secondary or anathema to the building of a worker's movement. Such blatant disregard for these social plights will only alienate the workers in this fashion. And given that they falsely call themselves Trotskyists, their actions are in of themselves petty-bourgeois. Trotsky was not afraid to approach the issue of race as North and his ilk are. Far from it, from what I've read. In essence, the SEP are not racist, but they are objectivist, as in vulgar economic determinists. That should be our principal opposition to them as a party.

[milkmiku]

Good day to you as well then. I don't see where the big leap is. All he could see was a young guy in urban attire. Then he said "these assholes always get away." Where is the leap? What did he mean by "these assholes?" Just people in his neighborhood, or was he stereotyping based on what he saw?


What he saw was a kid in the dark on a Florida night wearing a hoodie, who happened to be black.

Did he assume "blacks up to no good" or "kid in hoodie on a Florida night", it is indertinable if he was steryotyping because the kid he say wearing a hoodie was black, but people automatically assume the worst.

This entire debacle is just making media cash while arming mister Holder with more ammo against Gun rights.

Also "Travolta Marten", silly phone.

[#FF0000]

The same reason they don't do a time consuming investigation during every self defense shooting. Do you truly think every single self defense shooting has an in depth investigation? They don't.

Mmm nah son if it was a white kid who ended up dead I'll bet you a shiny new nickel that Zimmerbiff would have been in prison by the weekend.


People ain't got nothing on Zimmerbub, so they trump up baseless charges of racism to at least get him on a hate crime.

Nah as a dude who carried around a gun a lot for awhile I can assure you that Zimmerpuff is guilty of manslaughter at least. He created a situation while carrying a weapon, someone is dead because of it -- and that it his responsibility.


All the while the media trumps it up more and the public is distracted from things that really matter.


racism matters tho


But hey, continue to think this is a issue of racism, black Vs. Whit makes people big bucks.

oh like who

and what is wrong with pointing out "oh hey racism is still a thing and plagues our 'justice' system all day every day"?


Almost forgot, this incident did bring "stand your ground" under scrutiny, something that my boy Eric would love to get rid of.

idk who eric is but it's a p. good idea considering it's some dumb policy that is basically a license to go vigilante for no reason

[milkmiku]

idk who eric is but it's a p. good idea considering it's some dumb policy that is basically a license to go vigilante for no reason

I was going to reply to all your point until I read this.
For the love of god, allah, YHVH, or whomever you may worship, please please please educate yourself on "stand your ground"

http://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2011/Chapter0776/All

Okay I changed my mind. I know not how to multi quote withing a post but...

"Mmm nah son if it was a white kid who ended up dead I'll bet you a shiny new nickel that Zimmerbiff would have been in prison by the weekend."
Keep telling your self that slick
http://www.13wham.com/news/local/story/trayvon-martin-christopher-cervini-shot-self-defen/_UVsYj1H_kiPMmBGmqyJNQ.cspx
Scott was arrested because new yorks SD laws differ, but he got off Scott free, heh.
Ironic article on it as well
http://themartialist.net/?p=306


"Nah as a dude who carried around a gun a lot for awhile I can assure you that Zimmerpuff is guilty of manslaughter at least. He created a situation while carrying a weapon, someone is dead because of it -- and that it his responsibility."
Sure thing , Lets talk when you learn self defense laws.


"racism matters tho"
Indeed, It must be removed from the earth, but Zimmerdevill is not a racist.


"oh like who"
The news channels playing the case and spinning it in a way to keep people watching.

"and what is wrong with pointing out "oh hey racism is still a thing and plagues our 'justice' system all day every day"?"
nothing, Racism must be removed from this earth.

[l'Enfermé]

"these assholes. They always get away."
~Zimmerman

What could he have meant by "these assholes" other than "young people in urban attire?" That's all he could see of the kid, that he was black and wearing a hoodie.
By these assholes, quite obviously, he meant burglars(the neighborhood experienced a lot of break-ins and burglaries and all that shit lately. Now that whole hoodie shit, I don't remember what I read about it, but I recall something about Martin putting on a hoodie after Zimmerman began following him, i.e he put it on to hide his face, which is rather suspicious(no matter what color your skin is).

Anyways, Zimmerman shot Martin because Martin was sitting on Zimmerman and beating him savagely, already having broken the man's nose and given him lacerations on the back of his head and two black eyes(as confirmed by medical records and the paramedics that arrived at the scene) and also I remember something about minor back injuries and swollen upper and lower lips. The phone recording indicates that Zimmerman was yelling and screaming for help while Martin was beating him, and this is further backed up by the fact that Martin had no other injuries besides the gunshot wound and lacerations on his knuckles(from beating Zimmerman). Zimmerman also says that after he lost sight of Martin and was walking back to his car, Martin re-appeared and confronted him, asking him something like "you got a problem homie?", to which apparently Zimmerman said "no", and then Martin supposedly said that he does now and punched him in the nose. Zimmerman says that as Martin was beating him on the floor, he was yelling for help Martin kept on telling him to shut up and tried to cover his mouth to silence the screams. Supposedly Martin then saw Zimmerman's concealed gun and told him "you're gonna die now motherfucker" and reached for it, but Zimmerman got it first and shot him...though if he had the gun in his hands, he could have told Martin to get the fuck of him. But whatever, the evidence quite clearly backs up Zimmerman's story. This whole racism shit is just ridiculous, it was completely made up by the media to get some good ratings. I think FBI's civil rights division has concluded, after interviewing Zimmerman's family, friends, co-workers, neighbors and such that there is no evidence that suggests Zimmerman is a racist.

Most of the evidence suggests that Zimmerman was acting in self-defense(and racism really has nothing to do with this, although the cops from whatever county/town this incident happened probably were more eager to believe Zimmerman's story because the guy Zimmerman killed was black - but this has nothing to do with Zimmerman himself), but it's still really fucked up that a 17 year old was shot because of what was probably a misunderstanding.

[#FF0000]

I was going to reply to all your point until I read this.
For the love of god, allah, YHVH, or whomever you may worship, please please please educate yourself on "stand your ground"

I already know a little bit about them tho. Mainly that they allowed a dude to seek confrontation while carrying a weapon which is literally the first thing they tell you not to do when you start carrying a weapon, and then absolved him of responsibility when someone died in the situation he created.


Keep telling your self that slick

hmmmmm neither of those links really challenge the fact that the police and justice system in america are a lot harsher on black people than on white people.


Indeed, It must be removed from the earth, but Zimmerdevill is not a racist.

idk if he is or not and i don't think it actually matters.


The news channels playing the case and spinning it in a way to keep people watching.

the thing here is that the news doesn't talk about, you know, racism in america hardly ever. like it is a surprise to people that black people get harsher sentences for the same crimes as white people or that drug enforcement leads to more black people getting arrested than white people despite the rate of drug use are pretty much the same among white and black people. i mean if they make lods e mone off of talking about racism then they are missing some hella rich veins.

[#FF0000]

I do also wanna point out that Zimmerman had something like 50 911 calls over the course of two months where he was just calling the cops on every black person he saw.

no one can really sit here and say with any degree of certainty that zimmerman's a racist but i don't really blame someone for thinking he probably is.

[l'Enfermé]

the thing here is that the news doesn't talk about, you know, racism in america hardly ever. like it is a surprise to people that black people get harsher sentences for the same crimes as white people or that drug enforcement leads to more black people getting arrested than white people despite the rate of drug use are pretty much the same among white and black people. i mean if they make lods e mone off of talking about racism then they are missing some hella rich veins.
Yes. Your media(for the most part) seems to completely ignore racism and pretend it doesn't exist where it does, and invents it where it doesn't.

[milkmiku]

How do I do that multi quote thing?

"I already know a little bit about them tho. Mainly that they allowed a dude to seek confrontation while carrying a weapon which is literally the first thing they tell you not to do when you start carrying a weapon, and then absolved him of responsibility when someone died in the situation he created."
No, please read the law. It does not allow you to "seek confrontation" It absolutely does not. Please learn the law.

"hmmmmm neither of those links really challenge the fact that the police and justice system in america are a lot harsher on black people than on white people. "

But it disproves your "if a black had shot a white he'd be in prison"


"idk if he is or not and i don't think it actually matters."

It matters if he is going to be unjustly charged with a hate crime, Racism is a serious issue and no one should be unfairly labeled a racist.


"the thing here is that the news doesn't talk about, you know, racism in america hardly ever. like it is a surprise to people that black people get harsher sentences for the same crimes as white people or that drug enforcement leads to more black people getting arrested than white people despite the rate of drug use are pretty much the same among white and black people. i mean if they make lods e mone off of talking about racism then they are missing some hella rich veins."

The news loves to pit black against white and to show case black crime. You know this, Both are something dumb people eat up to confirm their racial presidencies.


Also, I apologize for my poor english, it is not my first language and I am never sure on the grammar rules.

[#FF0000]

No, please read the law. It does not allow you to "seek confrontation" It absolutely does not. Please learn the law.

Then how on earth did zimmerblip use it to claim defense when he created the situation?


But it disproves your "if a black had shot a white he'd be in prison"


Nah because it is still more likely to be the case and that goes for any crime, tbh. Police are gonna put more scrutiny on a black person than a white person in general.


It matters if he is going to be unjustly charged with a hate crime, Racism is a serious issue and no one should be unfairly labeled a racist.


I don't think he is going to be charged with a hate-crime, though.


The news loves to pit black against white and to show case black crime. You know this, Both are something dumb people eat up to confirm their racial presidencies.

Yeah, I can see what you mean here

(also to multi-quote, just put the text you want to quote in [ quote ] [ /quote ] brackets.

[milkmiku]

Then how on earth did zimmerblip use it to claim defense when he created the situation?

Because he claims that Travon assaulted him, remember that following someone is not a crime. A is a 911 dispatcher a holder of athurioty.

Suppsodely travon attacked zimmermang because he was being followed, started beating him, the was shot.

[l'Enfermé]

Then how on earth did zimmerblip use it to claim defense when he created the situation?

Because according to his version of the events, Martin confronted and assaulted him when he was returning back to his car(after he lost sight of Martin) and evidence doesn't contradict his version.



Nah because it is still more likely to be the case and that goes for any crime, tbh. Police are gonna put more scrutiny on a black person than a white person in general.

Of course they are, due to social conditions created by the US Government blacks are way more likely to be criminals than whites. It only makes sense.

[#FF0000]

Of course they are, due to social conditions created by the US Government blacks are way more likely to be criminals than whites. It only makes sense.

Except black people are not more likely to be criminals. Simply more likely to be treated as one!


Because he claims that Travon assaulted him, remember that following someone is not a crime. A is a 911 dispatcher a holder of athurioty.

Nope, following someone isn't a crime, but trying to confront someone who one think might be a criminal while carrying a weapon is insanely irresponsible, which is why the first thing I heard when I heard the first details of the case was "oh, hey, manslaughter, case closed".


Suppsodely travon attacked zimmermang because he was being followed, started beating him, the was shot.

Which goes against all sense imo because now suddenly Trayvon just attacked a dude for literally 0 reason because he was supposed to have been out of sight when this happened.

[milkmiku]

Nope, following someone isn't a crime, but trying to confront someone who one think might be a criminal while carrying a weapon is insanely irresponsible, which is why the first thing I heard when I heard the first details of the case was "oh, hey, manslaughter, case closed".

Which goes against all sense imo because now suddenly Trayvon just attacked a dude for literally 0 reason because he was supposed to have been out of sight when this happened.

CBS, the news group that played the infamous edit zimmeran call, did a quick and dirty rundown of the "facts"
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/04/11/fast-facts-the-zimmerman-case/

I've been jumped for "being chinky", people do stupid shit for no real reason at times, especially young scared people.

boy I cannot wait for this case to be over.

[#FF0000]

CBS, the news group that played the infamous edit zimmeran call, did a quick and dirty rundown of the "facts"
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/04/11/fast-facts-the-zimmerman-case/


Haha oh wow the second degree murder charge fits a lot better than I thought it did originally, as it turns out.


I've been jumped for "being chinky", people do stupid shit for no real reason at times, especially young scared people.

Yeah and that's part of the reason why it's a bad idea to stalk someone with a gun like zimmerdip did. Like I said, stepping out of his car to follow or confront Trayvon in the first place was such an outrageously irresponsible thing that I think he is fully responsible for what happened to Trayvon during the incident.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I can't really comment on their distortions of the ISO's position, since I have never read any ISO publications, but I feel that this article is rather dishonest. The SEP's position on racism is certainly indefensible, but on the basis that it is heavily reductionist, not that they themselves are racist or promote racism. The articles that discuss racism on the WSWS (however briefly) condemn it categorically. The rub lies in the fact that the Northist leadership believes that any foray or investigation into identity politics automatically transform you into a petty-bourgeois radical. Thus, all questions of ethnic or social identity are either distantly secondary or anathema to the building of a worker's movement. Such blatant disregard for these social plights will only alienate the workers in this fashion. And given that they falsely call themselves Trotskyists, their actions are in of themselves petty-bourgeois. Trotsky was not afraid to approach the issue of race as North and his ilk are. Far from it, from what I've read. In essence, the SEP are not racist, but they are objectivist, as in vulgar economic determinists. That should be our principal opposition to them as a party.
No, it is really worse than that. SEP forebears the WL tried to muck around in the trade unions -- their platform didn't mention race (or the Viet Nam War) because they believed that rank and file workers were racist and pro-war. They were pandering. So, okay, not racist, they were just willing to disappear the issue of race when convenient. In the case of this shooting, it would appear the Zimmerman is a racist -- but I don't have a direct line into his brain, so who knows? However, the frequent shooting of unarmed young black men for being "suspicious" is part of the terror war the US bourgeoisie has been waging against minorities in this country. Why defend this nasty vigilante shit?

As for the ISO, sorry Jimmy, I won't go as far as the SL to say that you support JJ or Obama, but in my opinion, Socialist Worker did pander to Obama when he was elected -- I know we disagree on this. What I would call the wishy-washy nature of the ISOs opposition to Obama, especially right when he was most popular, was not exactly an example of sterling communist propaganda, to put it mildly.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

No, it is really worse than that. SEP forebears the WL tried to muck around in the trade unions -- their platform didn't mention race (or the Viet Nam War) because they believed that rank and file workers were racist and pro-war. They were pandering. So, okay, not racist, they were just willing to disappear the issue of race when convenient.
To be honest, I don't see how this differs from what I had said. That the SEP routinely downplays race or uses it in a opportunist fashion is part and parcel of objectivism, which in my opinion can be traced directly to the leadership's descent into the late practices of the Second International. This means that they are alienating themselves from the working class by refusing to participate in their struggles. The issue of race is an aspect of this degeneration. As you say, they are willing to "disappear" the issue of race. But whatever the reason they chose not to include race in their platform, it amounts to the same thing--which is the refusal to engage workers on these important issues and instead repeat the necessity of making a working class movement in their articles ad nauseam, with nothing other than words to back it up. They are living room journalists, not revolutionists.

And while you choose to see it as "pandering" to working class prejudices--you're probably correct, I don't know--I see it first and foremost as a fundamental perversion of Marxist theory. As Trotsky once said, inconsistencies or "scratches" here can be infected and lead to "gangrene", and I believe the party's reductionism on race is a consequence of that. The party does not engage in any deep or searching theoretical debate (something that should be required of any Trotskyist organization) because of their utter cowing to the Northist leadership. They are, in my opinion, guilty of this first and foremost. This is not to downplay their behavior regarding race specifically, but I feel that before we jump to judgment we should take a look at their party practices as a whole, not just on one issue.

In the case of this shooting, it would appear the Zimmerman is a racist -- but I don't have a direct line into his brain, so who knows? However, the frequent shooting of unarmed young black men for being "suspicious" is part of the terror war the US bourgeoisie has been waging against minorities in this country. Why defend this nasty vigilante shit?
Naturally there's no reason to defend vigilantism. That having been said, I'm not personally inclined to give Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt, racist or no. His actions are not anything particularly extraordinary or unique when it comes to police behavior in general. In my opinion, what is needed is a look into the institutional corruption of the police, despite the fact that Zimmerman is not a cop, properly speaking. Racism may end up explaining this incident, it may not. Either way, it does not and cannot explain the police institution itself.

Edit: I must admit that I am very inexperienced on racial politics, particularly privilege theory. So if there are any reservations in what I have said, please tell me, albeit nicely. I am here primarily to learn.

[norwegianwood90]

I ask of you, What evidence is there that George Zimmerman pursued Travolta Marten because of the color of his skin?

There are three facts I think highly suggest that Zimmerman did pursue Martin on account of skin color.

1. As other comrades have stated, Zimmerman had a history of calling 911 when he saw African-Americans he felt looked "suspicious."

2. As comrades have also stated, Zimmerman stated during his call with the 911 dispatcher that, "They always get away."

3. Zimmerman can be heard muttering, "Fucking coons," under his breath on the audio recording of his 911 call.

These facts, when put together, lead to the conclusion that Zimmerman believed young African-Americans to have a criminal tendency, and that he likely pursued Martin because of Martin's skin color--Zimmerman seems to have believed that if he did not pursue Martin, Martin would "get away," due to Zimmerman's inability to persuade police to respond to "suspicious" African-Americans in previous calls.

[Paulappaul]

Anyways, Zimmerman shot Martin because Martin was sitting on Zimmerman and beating him savagely, already having broken the man's nose and given him lacerations on the back of his head and two black eyes(as confirmed by medical records and the paramedics that arrived at the scene) and also I remember something about minor back injuries and swollen upper and lower lips.


The phone recording indicates that Zimmerman was yelling and screaming for help while Martin was beating him, and this is further backed up by the fact that Martin had no other injuries besides the gunshot wound and lacerations on his knuckles(from beating Zimmerman).

Yeah major bullshit here dude, nice try though. There is no recorded phone call of Zimmerman confronting Martin, in actuality, Zimmerman put down the phone and then chased after Martin and confronted him. What we know of there altercation is from eye - witness reports of about a 38 second scuffle and from a recorded conversation between Zimmerman first confronting Martin that was heard by Martin's friend whom he had called earlier. The gist of the moment and proceeding events was that Martin was just walking around a neighborhood which he was visiting (yes, he wasn't living there) and was complaining about how some guy was watching him from his car and then started to follow him. Frankly I'm about Martin's build, size and age, if some guy obviously more bulky then me was following me around I'd be equally freaked out. Zimmerman confronted him, not the other way around and as for a fight, eye witness accounts vary. From someone watching from a distance, a woman and a 13 year old kid it appeared that Martin was fighting Zimmerman, however from the perspective of the owners of the house's backyard where the altercation occurred, it looked as though Zimmerman was on top of Martin. The rest of your story is frankly, a load of crap.

The transcript of Zimmerman's phone can be seen and heard here, as well as the eyewitness reports.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trayvon_Martin#Shooting_and_investigation

[Ocean Seal]

What makes him a racist, is the fact that he stalked and killed a black kid for being in a middle class neighborhood, also calling him a 'fucking coon' on the 911 tape. So yeah fuck Zimmerman, and his pig apologists.

[RRRevolution]

regardless of whether or not zimmerman the nutcase vigilante is a racist, the action of the police department in not investigating the murder were clearly racist and I'd say that is of even more significance.

[Martin Blank]

What makes him a racist, is the fact that he stalked and killed a black kid for being in a middle class neighborhood, also calling him a 'fucking coon' on the 911 tape. So yeah fuck Zimmerman, and his pig apologists.

This!

And before one of you apologists for racism tries to argue that Zimmerman didn't call Martin a "fucking coon", our organization had the 911 call analyzed by five separate people, all of them experienced with audio recording and enhancement. All five of them agreed independently about what Zimmerman said, and also pointed out that all you really had to do was boost the volume to hear it clearly.

The prosecution has chosen to lie about and cover up this fact because they knew it would expose not only the racist character of Trayvon Martin's murder, but also the attempted racist cover-up committed by the local government and state entities. In this sense, the prosecution is itself a party to the attempted whitewashing of Martin's murder.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

To be honest, I don't see how this differs from what I had said. That the SEP routinely downplays race or uses it in a opportunist fashion is part and parcel of objectivism, which in my opinion can be traced directly to the leadership's descent into the late practices of the Second International. This means that they are alienating themselves from the working class by refusing to participate in their struggles. The issue of race is an aspect of this degeneration. As you say, they are willing to "disappear" the issue of race. But whatever the reason they chose not to include race in their platform, it amounts to the same thing--which is the refusal to engage workers on these important issues and instead repeat the necessity of making a working class movement in their articles ad nauseam, with nothing other than words to back it up. They are living room journalists, not revolutionists.

And while you choose to see it as "pandering" to working class prejudices--you're probably correct, I don't know--I see it first and foremost as a fundamental perversion of Marxist theory. As Trotsky once said, inconsistencies or "scratches" here can be infected and lead to "gangrene", and I believe the party's reductionism on race is a consequence of that. The party does not engage in any deep or searching theoretical debate (something that should be required of any Trotskyist organization) because of their utter cowing to the Northist leadership. They are, in my opinion, guilty of this first and foremost. This is not to downplay their behavior regarding race specifically, but I feel that before we jump to judgment we should take a look at their party practices as a whole, not just on one issue.

Naturally there's no reason to defend vigilantism. That having been said, I'm not personally inclined to give Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt, racist or no. His actions are not anything particularly extraordinary or unique when it comes to police behavior in general. In my opinion, what is needed is a look into the institutional corruption of the police, despite the fact that Zimmerman is not a cop, properly speaking. Racism may end up explaining this incident, it may not. Either way, it does not and cannot explain the police institution itself.

Edit: I must admit that I am very inexperienced on racial politics, particularly privilege theory. So if there are any reservations in what I have said, please tell me, albeit nicely. I am here primarily to learn.
Re the SEP, you are quite right across the board. And their practices have been far worse than their paper program, which has been all over the place since the mid 60s. In the 70s the received large sums of money from bourgeois regimes in the Arab world in exchange for "positive press." They also acted as cops for the Hussein regime in Iraq, photographing and identifying Iraqi Communists demonstrating in London. Their bizarre and paranoid charges that Joseph Hanson was connected to the FBI and the murder of Trotsky were damaging to the world movement and patently absurd. The SL characterize them as political bandits -- I think that is fair enough. For all the heated arguments I might have with supporters of various currents, I feel differently about the SEP. They are not on the left and I think should be avoided at all costs.

All of this is to say that picking one point, like their defense of Zimmerman, and disregarding their entire, very sordid history, is a mistake.

[A Marxist Historian]

It would be nice to read other radical viewpoints without having to deal with thins kind of bullshit. The SEP regularly lie about the ISO's positions and the Sparts regularly cherry-pick and distort our positions... then both pass these myths off as established facts needing no real explanation.

The Sparts will have totally unconnected stories that have nothing to do with the ISO and there'll be a line like, "But groups like the ISO who support Barack Obama..."

The SEP claimed that the ISO "campaigned for Obama" and the Sparts claim that out goal is to rehabilitate Jessie Jackson (rather than as we say build a movement from below as we claim and organize by... and as if a Democrat with tons of mainstream support would even need or want a socialist party to "rehabilitate him" even if we actually wanted to).

It's absolutely bullshit is what this unsubstantiated opinion, presented as established fact. Where's their evidence of this... the SEP's claim? And what was the basis of the SEP's claim... that the ISO supported a Trevon Martin rally where people like Jackson were speaking! Oh lord we are in the same area as a liberal!

I wish groups like these would get their heads out their asses and engage the real world. This is petty FOX News type reporting. "While it's absolutely true that Obama wants fascist Socialism and to take all of our guns away, but..."

You claim the Workers Vanguard misreports and ... go ahead and do some crass misreporting of your own.

The WV has never claimed that the ISO "campaigned for Obama."

Instead it has, accurately, reported on things like the ISO holding victory parties after Obama was elected.

Formally, the ISO never endorsed Obama, and the WV, despite your misquotes from nowhere or at best grossly snipped to mislead, has never claimed otherwise. But in practice, the ISO was in Obama's camp during the election campaign and during the period of popular enthusiasm for a black president afterwards.

Now that so many people are disappointed with Obama, including a lot of Democrats, the ISO's tone to Obama is more critical.

As for Jesse Jackson, in whose eyes is the ISO rehabilitating him and/or his kind of politics? Leftists and people in the movement, being as the ISO is of course not a mass party in the mainstream.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I can't really comment on their distortions of the ISO's position, since I have never read any ISO publications, but I feel that this article is rather dishonest. The SEP's position on racism is certainly indefensible, but on the basis that it is heavily reductionist, not that they themselves are racist or promote racism. The articles that discuss racism on the WSWS (however briefly) condemn it categorically. The rub lies in the fact that the Northist leadership believes that any foray or investigation into identity politics automatically transform you into a petty-bourgeois radical. Thus, all questions of ethnic or social identity are either distantly secondary or anathema to the building of a worker's movement. Such blatant disregard for these social plights will only alienate the workers in this fashion. And given that they falsely call themselves Trotskyists, their actions are in of themselves petty-bourgeois. Trotsky was not afraid to approach the issue of race as North and his ilk are. Far from it, from what I've read. In essence, the SEP are not racist, but they are objectivist, as in vulgar economic determinists. That should be our principal opposition to them as a party.

So then, the SEP, like Zimmerman, "condemns" racism "categorically." Perhaps the defender of Zimmerman here, who thanked this posting, can go join the SEP, and then recruit Zimmerman, so they can all condemn racism categorically together...

-M.H.-

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

So then, the SEP, like Zimmerman, "condemns" racism "categorically." Perhaps the defender of Zimmerman here, who thanked this posting, can go join the SEP, and then recruit Zimmerman, so they can all condemn racism categorically together...

-M.H.-
Do you have a problem with what I said? Because I don't understand what you're trying to say here. It feels as if you are painting me with the same brush as Zimmerman's defenders because he thanked my post. If so, I disagree with your judgment.

Re the SEP, you are quite right across the board. And their practices have been far worse than their paper program, which has been all over the place since the mid 60s. In the 70s the received large sums of money from bourgeois regimes in the Arab world in exchange for "positive press." They also acted as cops for the Hussein regime in Iraq, photographing and identifying Iraqi Communists demonstrating in London. Their bizarre and paranoid charges that Joseph Hanson was connected to the FBI and the murder of Trotsky were damaging to the world movement and patently absurd. The SL characterize them as political bandits -- I think that is fair enough. For all the heated arguments I might have with supporters of various currents, I feel differently about the SEP. They are not on the left and I think should be avoided at all costs.

All of this is to say that picking one point, like their defense of Zimmerman, and disregarding their entire, very sordid history, is a mistake.
Naturally, I agree that discounting the party's history is a mistake. I thought that was implied by my insistence to review all of the party's concrete activities, but I could have been unclear. You have raised numerous issues that I can, and will, look into and research.

[milkmiku]

Perhaps the defender of Zimmerman here, who thanked this posting, can go join the SEP, and then recruit Zimmerman, so they can all condemn racism categorically together


and this is why the type of forum software is bad and I love the "you don't agree with the general consensuses of others! you must be just like those guys!" vibe your entire post radiates. Simply delicious.

I do not defend racist, I will how ever defend someone who is being wrongfully accused of racism, now that I have heard the "fucking coons" comment on youtube, I am thinking on whether he really said coons, punks, or goons. I've listened to it dozens of times and still am not sure.

[l'Enfermé]

Yeah major bullshit here dude, nice try though. There is no recorded phone call of Zimmerman confronting Martin, in actuality, Zimmerman put down the phone and then chased after Martin and confronted him. What we know of there altercation is from eye - witness reports of about a 38 second scuffle and from a recorded conversation between Zimmerman first confronting Martin that was heard by Martin's friend whom he had called earlier. The gist of the moment and proceeding events was that Martin was just walking around a neighborhood which he was visiting (yes, he wasn't living there) and was complaining about how some guy was watching him from his car and then started to follow him. Frankly I'm about Martin's build, size and age, if some guy obviously more bulky then me was following me around I'd be equally freaked out. Zimmerman confronted him, not the other way around and as for a fight, eye witness accounts vary. From someone watching from a distance, a woman and a 13 year old kid it appeared that Martin was fighting Zimmerman, however from the perspective of the owners of the house's backyard where the altercation occurred, it looked as though Zimmerman was on top of Martin. The rest of your story is frankly, a load of crap.
If you were an in-shape guy and some fat guy who's much shorter than you was following you, you'd be freaked out? Seriously? Anyways, no, Martin's only injury was the gunshot wound(apparently inflicted at very close range, which only backs up Zimmerman's version) and his knuckles were fucked up too from beating that dumbass Zimmerman. Unless Zimmerman hits so weakly that it doesn't have any effect on his opponent or leave marks on his hands, then it's pretty certain that Zimmerman wasn't even fighting back(let alone being the first to confront him!).


This!

And before one of you apologists for racism tries to argue that Zimmerman didn't call Martin a "fucking coon", our organization had the 911 call analyzed by five separate people, all of them experienced with audio recording and enhancement. All five of them agreed independently about what Zimmerman said, and also pointed out that all you really had to do was boost the volume to hear it clearly.

The prosecution has chosen to lie about and cover up this fact because they knew it would expose not only the racist character of Trayvon Martin's murder, but also the attempted racist cover-up committed by the local government and state entities. In this sense, the prosecution is itself a party to the attempted whitewashing of Martin's murder.
Yeah, I'm really an apologist for racism. I totally don't take that shit seriously, you know, it's not like my people have experienced racism that's a hundred times more brutal and savage than what blacks experience in the United States. This isn't StormFront or a GOP site, accusations of racism are pretty much ridiculous around here, a bunch of whites around here are actually into that white guilt crap.

I've seen equally trustable experts say that he probably didn't say "fucking coon", but "fucking cold"(owing to the unusually cold weather that night). According to this one, he said "fucking punks" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL84rHwIuKg&feature=relmfu). And given that none of Zimmerman's family members, friends, co-workers and neighbors, after being interviewed by the FBI, indicated that anyone ever suspected him of being a racist, I still think it's extremely unlikely that he was.


Except black people are not more likely to be criminals. Simply more likely to be treated as one!

Since when? In the US, Blacks are like 8 times more likely to commit robbery than whites(30 something if it's gang crime if I recall correctly), 4 times more likely to commit rape and so on.


Nope, following someone isn't a crime, but trying to confront someone who one think might be a criminal while carrying a weapon is insanely irresponsible, which is why the first thing I heard when I heard the first details of the case was "oh, hey, manslaughter, case closed".

Quite true, if Zimmerman was the one who confronted him.


Which goes against all sense imo because now suddenly Trayvon just attacked a dude for literally 0 reason because he was supposed to have been out of sight when this happened.
Trayvon tried to emulate a tough gangster persona(didn't he describe himself as "no limit nigga" or some stupid shit like that?) before his death, it wouldn't be out of character at all.

[Martin Blank]

Yeah, I'm really an apologist for racism.

Well, that was one of the reasons you were restricted -- that, and supporting imperialist intervention.


I totally don't take that shit seriously, you know, it's not like my people have experienced racism that's a hundred times more brutal and savage than what blacks experience in the United States.

You're right. They haven't. After all, I don't recall Chechens or Ingush peoples being sold into slavery, treated as property, etc. Stalin may indeed have been a brutal bastard when it came to his ethnic cleansing of many of the peoples of the Caucasus, but he couldn't hold a candle to the slave traders and slave owners.


This isn't StormFront or a GOP site, accusations of racism are pretty much ridiculous around here, a bunch of whites around here are actually into that white guilt crap.

That may be true, but it is wholly irrelevant to anything I wrote. I'm not some doe-eyed while liberal crusader, and I don't bandy use terms like "racist" lightly. You have to earn that appellation. And you did.


I've seen equally trustable experts say that he probably didn't say "fucking coon", but "fucking cold"(owing to the unusually cold weather that night). According to this one, he said "fucking punks" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL84rHwIuKg&feature=relmfu).

Go listen to the original 911 tape and decide for yourself. It's really hard to miss that long double-o sound.


And given that none of Zimmerman's family members, friends, co-workers and neighbors, after being interviewed by the FBI, indicated that anyone ever suspected him of being a racist, I still think it's extremely unlikely that he was.

Yes, because the family and friends of Zimmerman -- the same ones who lied about the amount of money he collected through his website and about the fact that he had a spare passport he did not turn in to the court -- are so impartial and unbiased.

As for his neighbors, they are the ones who told investigators about all of the calls he made to 911 every time he saw an African American walking around in that gated community.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Of course they are, due to social conditions created by the US Government blacks are way more likely to be criminals than whites. It only makes sense.Only a small percentage of prioners and trials in the US are violent. The vast majority are drug-related and blacks and whites are equal in percentages of drug use and dealing - which means most drug users and dealers are actually white. This is not reflected in the prison and court system because cops aren't pulling cars over outside private schools and universities as a pretext to search for drugs. They don't go to hipster areas with anti-drug Swat teams or stop and frisk white people in Times Square.

The cops individually may not think they are doing anything but treating people the same, but by virtue of where they are sent to patrol, what kinds of tactics they use, and the kind of leeway to profile they have all guarantee the poor people, poor black and brown and red people disproportionately, are locked up or on probation.

The "fear the young black sociopath" hysteria that was designed by people in the government to sell the drug war and increase in police and prison spending is what both emboldened someone like Zimmerman to imagine himself to be the "civilizer" in Regan's "urban jungles full of (black) predators" as well as led him to believe that any black male youth in a hoodie was a danger and he would be considered a "hero" for taking care of business.

[Jimmie Higgins]

You claim the Workers Vanguard misreports and ... go ahead and do some crass misreporting of your own.

The WV has never claimed that the ISO "campaigned for Obama."

The SEP claimed that the ISO "campaigned for Obama"Your claim that I misreported on your group's misreporting was... misreported.


Instead it has, accurately, reported on things like the ISO holding victory parties after Obama was elected.

Formally, the ISO never endorsed Obama, and the WV, despite your misquotes from nowhere or at best grossly snipped to mislead, has never claimed otherwise. But in practice, the ISO was in Obama's camp during the election campaign and during the period of popular enthusiasm for a black president afterwards.I've rebutted your and the SEP and WV claims NUMEROUS times with articles from before the election and in the election issue stating that people's hopes are a positive thing that should be encouraged, but they are misplaced in hoping that Obama will just deliver.

Someone who votes for Obama today because Romney is "so scary" or someone voting for Kerry cynically are people who've resigned and will probably not be drawn to the left anytime soon. People in 2008 who naively voted for Obama were still workers who we saw as being people who could potentially be won to the left because there was a real underlying desire for positive change - and the clash between that hope and reality especially as they learn themselves that their hopes are misplaced meant that we didn't think activists who were voting for Obama were "lost causes" but people we wanted to try and convince to fight for themselves.


Now that so many people are disappointed with Obama, including a lot of Democrats, the ISO's tone to Obama is more critical.Below is the cover-story from the election issue of Socialist Worker in 2008... it's the same article that the Sparts always quote from to show how the ISO was supporting Obama because in the introduction, the writers says that the election rally was moving to see so many young people out celebrating. And it was, I certainty didn't think I'd see a black president when I was a kid and so it would be totally disconnected for radicals to not realize why people were excited even though we think that hope was misplaced. But like I said, this is a cherry-picked quote that requires ignoring the ENTIRE POINT AND CONTENT of that Socialist Worker article:


NOW THE issue is how Obama and the Democrats will use their power in Washington, particularly on the issues most important to voters--the economy and also the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A closer look at Obama's stated policy positions--as opposed to his soaring rhetoric--points to a big gap between the hopes and expectations of Obama voters and the cautious, moderate program he has put forward.

Obama is, after all, a mainstream politician. For all his ability to galvanize working people and youth to get out the vote, his campaign relied on huge amounts of money from corporate donors, allowing him to spend an estimated $650 million, by far the most in U.S. history. To tap those funds, Obama, the former community organizer, abandoned the public financing system that was established to counteract the role of big money in politics.

With the business support came a steady moderation of Obama's positions, particularly after he took the lead in the primary contest with Hillary Clinton. While Obama occasionally tossed out progressive positions--such as calling for increases in the minimum wage to be automatically tied to a rise in inflation--he is far from the "socialist" conjured up by McCain's operatives.

Rather than implement a major redistribution of the wealth, he simply wants to let Bush's tax cuts expire and increase the top income tax rate from 35 to 39.6 percent. But as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies points out, Obama's proposal is far friendlier to the rich than those of the 1950s Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower.

An even more urgent issue than taxes is the bailout of the financial system, as Bush's Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson starts rushing to hand out $700 billion to banks and financial institutions before Obama takes office on January 20. This "rescue" is, in fact, the greatest single transfer of wealth from workers to the rich in U.S. history.

Will Obama call a halt to this colossal rip-off and fashion an economic program that puts the interests of working people at its center? Will an Obama administration use government ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and shares in big banks in order to halt mortgage foreclosures? Will there be an economic stimulus program that creates secure, long-term jobs?

Obama's economic team shows no inclination toward such changes. While some pro-labor liberal economists like Jared Bernstein are counted among Obama's economic advisers, Obama relies much more on establishment figures like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker--both with long track records of favoring big business at workers' expense.

The same "realism" dominates Obama's foreign policy team. Attacked by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain for his inexperience in foreign policy, Obama surrounded himself with former secretaries of state, ex-CIA officials, generals and academics committed to an imperialist U.S. foreign policy. The style will change--more cultivation of allies, more international agreements--but the substance will not.

Obama plans to leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq to ensure that a pro-American government survives. And as he stressed repeatedly on the campaign trail, Obama wants to escalate the savage war in Afghanistan, where the pursuit of Osama bin Laden masks what is really a U.S. determination to occupy a strategic crossroads in Asia. Also, Obama has staked out hawkish positions on Venezuela and was even to the right of the Bush administration in declaring his support for Israel.

None of this is to say that no change is possible. Tens of millions of people want a new direction. The question is whether they can be organized to fight for it.
So please explain how this story, while saying that people were excited for the right-reasons, while going through how these expectations will not be met, is giving Obama a pass?

Now take that "But in practice, the ISO was in Obama's camp during the election campaign" and roll it up really tight and stick it really far up your ass so I don't have to smell that slanderous and just plain incorrect shit ever ever again from you.


As for Jesse Jackson, in whose eyes is the ISO rehabilitating him and/or his kind of politics? Leftists and people in the movement, being as the ISO is of course not a mass party in the mainstream.
I don't know, that was what the Worker's Vanguard claimed. They were confirming their agreement with the SEP's claim that we only participated in a rally for Travon because we were trying to give support to Jessie Jackson:rolleyes:.

[passenger57]

You know lots of leftists in this whole world, have this idea that as soon a person is a member of a leftist party, he is a pure humble, loving, honest saint. And all leftist parties, all socialist leftist parties of this world are perfect, and all of its members are pure, honest and 100% good. And by the same token, all right-wingers are evil, all right-wing parties are monsters. And all people who vote for right-wing parties are criminals and evil.

And nothing could be further from the truth, I know that right-wing ideology is oligarchic, and most right-wing politicians are not compassionate and too humble toward the poor. However there are millions of people who vote for right-wing parties that are real nice, loving and good. They vote for right-wing parties because of extreme *mind manipulation* power of all the capitalist TV channels of USA and all capitalist newspapers. Compared with leftist TV channels and leftist news sources that are a lot weaker in the amount of people that they reach compared with the extreme powerful media of right-wing parties.

What I am trying to say by this is that are tons of leftist organizations in this whole world that are not good. And there are tons of leftist activists part of leftist parties that they themselves are full of egocentrism, narcissism, no compassion for the weak and poor. AND ZERO LOVE TOWARD OTHER LEFTIST PARTIES AND TOWARD OTHER LEFTIST LIBERATION MOVEMENTS OF THIS WORLD !!

I don't understand what the hell is going on with the whole left of the whole world that there are so many egocentric, elitist, and immoral, evil leftists in this world. Leftists are supposed to be nice, humble, compassionate with the poor, needy and weak.

You know that party, the socialist equality party do not support the Bolivarian revolution. I don't like the socialist equality party, they seem to me too elitist, too suck-up, too egocentric

Well, i just hope that some day in the near future, we in USA would have a great leftist political party with leaders that are humble, nice, friendly, well-intentioned, cooperative, altruists and real cool !!


.



/english/wv/1005/sep-trayvon.html

From the latest Workers Vanguard:

Anti-Socialist Inequality Party
SEP Denies Racism in Trayvon Martin Killing
Outside of stone racists, Tea Party yahoos and those among the zoo of reactionaries contending for Republican presidential candidate, there were few who openly denied the bitter truth that 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed in cold blood by a racist vigilante simply because he was black. But cries from those like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum that to portray Martin’s killing as a “racial issue is fundamentally wrong,” “disgraceful” and divisive found an echo from an organization that calls itself the Socialist Equality Party (SEP). A March 31 statement by the SEP’s presidential candidate Jerry White opined: “The killing of Trayvon Martin is not fundamentally about race.” White concludes by urging a “fight for socialism.” The notion that the socialist liberation of the working class means denying the reality of black oppression in this country—a cornerstone for the edifice of capitalist rule in America—is a grotesque but accurate measure of the political sensibilities animating the SEP.
A subsequent SEP article on its World Socialist Web Site titled “The Killing of Trayvon Martin and Racial Politics in America” (wsws.org, 5 April) by its National Secretary Joseph Kishore allows that “racial prejudice may [!!] have played a role in the killing of Martin.” But he asserts that the eruption of massive protests had nothing to do with race, much less the daily reality of racist terror against black people in this society. That Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, saw a young black man in a hoodie as a dangerous predator also is of no consequence to Kishore. Instead, he presents this cop wannabe as one of many “disturbed individuals” whose “violent actions” are the product of the “tensions building up in American society” as a result of the current economic crisis. This is kind of like describing lynchings in the Jim Crow South as the product of the economic dislocations resulting from the destruction of slavery but…having nothing to do with race.
Kishore presents such arguments as a statement of supposed working-class opposition to the Democratic Party, which he proclaims is using “the killing of Martin to promote the reactionary politics of racial identity.” As evidence, Kishore points to an observation by Jesse Jackson that “racial profiling is all too common in the US, and has led to the killing of a young man.” Who other than an apologist for racism or perhaps an escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane could deny that this is an elementary statement of fact? The problem isn’t that Jackson, Al Sharpton and others of their ilk are fanning the flames of outrage against racist reaction in America. On the contrary, their purpose is precisely to contain such outrage and keep it safely in the channels of pro-Democratic Party electoralism.
The SEP and Victor Berger
In its articles on Martin, the SEP polemicizes against the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and other leftists who did their bit in promoting the “change we can believe in” credentials of Barack Obama as U.S. imperialist Commander-in-Chief. But, far from exposing such pro-Democratic Party belly crawling, Kishore’s article opened the door for the ISO to try to present its organization as genuine fighters for “socialist equality,” including for black people.
In a letter attributed to ISO honcho Sherry Wolf that is posted on wsws.org (19 April), she thanked Kishore for his article, saying that she had circulated it to ISO members as a “useful example of lunk-headed indifference to racism in the name of socialism.” In reply, Kishore argued: “Socialists have never denied or ignored the existence of racism. However, the historic position of the socialist movement has been that the struggle against racism and all forms of oppression must be based on the fight to unite all workers, on the basis of their common class interests, against the capitalist system.” In fact, to unite workers around their common class interests requires championing the rights of black people, immigrants and other minorities who are a vital part of the proletariat. As Karl Marx put it, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
Any organization claiming a revolutionary perspective must take up the fight against the special oppression of black people in the U.S. The forcible segregation of the black population at the bottom of this society has been integral to capitalist rule in America since the days of slavery. Poisonous anti-black racism fomented by the bourgeoisie has long been a barrier to the proletariat developing a consciousness of itself as a class, crippling its struggles against the capitalist class enemy.
The position that Kishore puts forward is indeed “historic,” the history being that of the American Socialist Party, which included the likes of outright white supremacist Victor Berger. Even the best elements of the early socialist movement, such as Eugene Debs, who opposed all racial prejudice, treated the question of black oppression as simply part of the workers struggle against capitalism and no more. As James P. Cannon, a founder of the American Communist movement and later of U.S. Trotskyism, wrote in “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement” (printed in The First Ten Years of American Communism [1962]): “The old theory of American radicalism turned out in practice to be a formula for inaction on the Negro front, and—incidentally—a convenient shield for the dormant racial prejudices of the white radicals themselves.”
This changed when the victory of the 1917 Russian Revolution, as Cannon put it, “began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races.” The Communist International under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party fought with the early American Communists to champion the fight for black rights. The Bolsheviks understood that, far from “dividing” the working class as the SEP would have it, the fight for black freedom was critical to uniting the American proletariat in struggle for its own emancipation from capitalist wage slavery.
Since our inception, the Spartacist League has fought for the program of revolutionary integrationism: fighting to mobilize the multiracial working class against every manifestation of racial oppression as part of arming the workers for the struggle for proletarian socialist revolution. This is the only road to achieving genuine and full equality for the black masses through their integration into an egalitarian socialist society.
In contrast, the SEP’s conscious opposition to even the mention of racial prejudice in the Trayvon Martin case is no aberration. Such contemptible indifference to special oppression has been a hallmark of this organization and its predecessor, the Workers League (WL), for decades. This was put most crudely by former WL leader Tim Wohlforth who, in the early 1970s, told a group of young New Left Maoists: “The working class hates faggots, women’s libbers and hippies, and so do we!” Such views were indeed those of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy at the time under George Meany, who had nothing but racist contempt for the fight for black rights or those of anyone else. Yet, at the height of Vietnam antiwar protests and the upheavals in the black ghettos, the WL urged that Meany’s AFL-CIO form a “labor party” on a program that omitted any mention of the war or the fight for black liberation.
After current SEP head David North took over as WL leader, its press, the Bulletin, denounced the Spartacist League as having “a grotesque fixation with the issue of race.” This was its response to the 5,000-strong labor/black mobilization on 27 November 1982—initiated and led by the SL—which successfully drove a gang of Klan terrorists off the streets of Washington, D.C. Integrated unions in the D.C./Virginia region, particularly from longshore with its heavily black membership, helped build the mobilization. They recognized that stopping the fascists was not just a defense of black people and minorities but also of the entire labor movement against its most deadly enemies. Not the Northites, who condemned the mobilization as “A Revisionist Frenzy Over Klan” that elevated “race” over “class.”
The Civil Rights Movement
It is absolutely true that the ISO’s calls for a “new civil rights movement” are aimed at refurbishing the credentials of Jesse Jackson and other black Democrats, whose purpose is to re-elect Obama. But the SEP itself peddles its own version of Obama’s “end of racism” myth. For the SEP, to raise the question of racism over the killing of Trayvon Martin is to “subordinate political thinking to an unchanging template of racial politics,” adding “as though nothing had been accomplished by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s” (“Behind the Right-Wing Racial Politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton,” wsws.org, 1 May). This position invests the civil rights movement with essentially eliminating discrimination against black people, a convenient alibi for the SEP’s retrograde views. Although it defeated Jim Crow segregation in the South, when the civil rights movement came North it ran up against the mass unemployment, poverty and rampant police brutality in the black inner cities that are part of the very fabric of American capitalism.
The leadership of the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King—who looked to the Democratic Party and capitalist state for redress—would not and could not wage the necessary struggle against these conditions. Today the SEP tries to present MLK as some kind of anti-capitalist fighter, crediting him with the understanding that “the oppression of blacks was fundamentally a question of class.” Despite its admonition that King was “not a revolutionary socialist” (no kidding), the SEP’s whitewash of him is the same myth peddled by the ISO. It simply comes from a different vantage point, one based on the revolting argument that “attempts to present racism as the ‘core’ of American society are false and reactionary.”
The lengths to which the SEP will go to present its own “false and reactionary” view of American history can be seen in Jerry White’s February 13 election platform. The words “black people” and “racism” are never mentioned. Instead, White rhapsodizes that: “This country was founded on the principle that ‘All men are created equal’.” That was the stated principle but what was embedded in the United States Constitution was slavery. It took a bloody Civil War to smash the Southern slavocracy, but you wouldn’t know it from reading White’s platform, which reduces the Civil War to the pledge that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The abolition of slavery merits no mention.
Political Bandits
In 1970 we recalled Lenin’s term “political bandits” to describe the SEP’s forebears, the Workers League and Gerry Healy’s International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to which it was affiliated. Such an organization will fly any flag as long as it is perceived as advancing its own episodic, and often grotesque, opportunist appetites. When called for, they had the ability to wield Marxist orthodoxy, which was but a mask for violations of any and all known Marxist principles.
For years, Healy’s ICFI was the bought-and-paid-for PR agency for various Near East despotic regimes. When these crimes against the working class were exposed, his loyal lieutenants, including David North, cried that it was all Healy’s doing. But none of them raised a peep when the money was still pouring in. Indeed, the Bulletin joined in publishing an article hailing the murder of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members in 1979. Healy’s ICFI provided many such services and was handsomely rewarded by the rulers of countries including Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Abu Dhabi. After Healy was ousted, North proclaimed himself the new leader of the ICFI.
After years of pandering to the AFL-CIO tops, North used the occasion of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the former Soviet Union to declare that the unions are “direct instruments of imperialism” and must be destroyed. Doubtless, he was buoyed in this pronouncement by the role his organization had played in supporting the imperialist-backed forces of counterrevolution that destroyed the former Soviet workers state. At the same time, years of crawling before bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Near East were reversed with North proclaiming that any and all struggles for national self-determination must be vigorously opposed.
So should you run across an Internet tome taking up the world economic crisis on the SEP’s wsws.org that sounds vaguely like “orthodox” Marxism: beware! Devoid of any class basis or connection to reality, North and his gang can and will say or do anything. Today, they are slyly giving aid and comfort to the racist enemies of those outraged by the killing of Trayvon Martin. We can only speculate about whose or what interests are served by the Northites. One thing is for certain, it is not the interests of the multiracial working class here or internationally. 

[l'Enfermé]

Only a small percentage of prioners and trials in the US are violent. The vast majority are drug-related and blacks and whites are equal in percentages of drug use and dealing - which means most drug users and dealers are actually white. This is not reflected in the prison and court system because cops aren't pulling cars over outside private schools and universities as a pretext to search for drugs. They don't go to hipster areas with anti-drug Swat teams or stop and frisk white people in Times Square.

The cops individually may not think they are doing anything but treating people the same, but by virtue of where they are sent to patrol, what kinds of tactics they use, and the kind of leeway to profile they have all guarantee the poor people, poor black and brown and red people disproportionately, are locked up or on probation.

The "fear the young black sociopath" hysteria that was designed by people in the government to sell the drug war and increase in police and prison spending is what both emboldened someone like Zimmerman to imagine himself to be the "civilizer" in Regan's "urban jungles full of (black) predators" as well as led him to believe that any black male youth in a hoodie was a danger and he would be considered a "hero" for taking care of business.
Quite true but that doesn't contradict what I said at all comrade.

Also, in the US, when it comes to drugs, I think whites are actually more likely than blacks to deal and use drugs, except for heroine, the use of which is similar in black and white populations.

[l'Enfermé]

Well, that was one of the reasons you were restricted Acknowledging that the European Imperialist powers subjugated mostly technologically and culturally inferior nations is racist? You can't possible believe that.


that, and supporting imperialist intervention. That's just silly nonsense comrade. What I said is that I would support UN/NATO intervention on the side of the Syrian government, against the various death squads running around Syria, sniping random people and slitting children's throats and blaming it on some imaginary pro-Assad militias composed of crazed bodybuilders that cover their bodies with tattoos of Assad family members(that seem to kill a large amount of pro-Assad civilians, I guess that with all those steroids they have a trouble distinguishing friend from foe! - it would be be much more effective for them to kill oppositionists instead, like the American death squads in Latin America who went around killing trade unionists and leftists, but fantasies invented by Western media don't have to make sense). Such an intervention would quite clearly defeat imperial interests in Syria(and even the interests of Russia and Iran), so I don't understand how these accusations against me make any sense to any sensible person. And anyways, how can anyone take that comment I made seriously, when NATO provides shelter, training, equipment and funding for these death squads, as do the various American Gulf satellite states. It's like if I suggested in 2003 that the United States should send troops to Iraq to protect Saddam Hussein's regime against Shia malcontents.


You're right. They haven't. After all, I don't recall Chechens or Ingush peoples being sold into slavery, treated as property, etc. Stalin may indeed have been a brutal bastard when it came to his ethnic cleansing of many of the peoples of the Caucasus, but he couldn't hold a candle to the slave traders and slave owners
How can slavery even come close to genocide? Blacks are systematically locked up on fraudulent drug charges. Chechen children were bombed in schools and hospitals just over a decade ago. There's hardly a comparison, and I actually wasn't even talking of the Czar's genocides of Caucasians or Stalin's(Comrade Stalin's genocide, by the way, killed approximately a third of the Chechens or maybe 40 percent - in comparison the Holocaust murdered something like 35 of the world's Jews, or maybe less), I was talking about the last 2 wars (which probably aren't even the last, more like the latest, the Russians really like to start a new extermination campaign of my people every couple of decades and nothing suggests that the latest round was the last) during which maybe 250,000 Chechen civilians probably were killed by Russians.


That may be true, but it is wholly irrelevant to anything I wrote. I'm not some doe-eyed while liberal crusader, and I don't bandy use terms like "racist" lightly. You have to earn that appellation. And you did. First time anyone called me a racist around here, except for the guy that called antisemitic because of my anti-Zionism.


Go listen to the original 911 tape and decide for yourself. It's really hard to miss that long double-o sound. I did and it really doesn't sound like "coon" to me, I actually hear something like "goon".


Yes, because the family and friends of Zimmerman -- the same ones who lied about the amount of money he collected through his website and about the fact that he had a spare passport he did not turn in to the court -- are so impartial and unbiased. Also his neighbors and past and current co-workers, who have no reason to lie.


As for his neighbors, they are the ones who told investigators about all of the calls he made to 911 every time he saw an African American walking around in that gated community. I read something about that. I remember the media making a huge deal of how he even called 9-11 on a 10 year old black kid, the point of the story was to show he was so racist that he even hates little kids! Then I found out that he called 9-11 on that kid because he was afraid for his safety, the child was alone. I don't know but I'm betting the rest of his supposedly racist 911 are bullshit too.

[Revolution starts with U]

I can only speak for Ohio, but heroin use among whites, especially white females, is far higher than among blacks.

[milkmiku]

This just in Zimmerhitler now a child molester. Man oh man they want him in prison so very bad.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/07/16/witness-claims-george-zimmerman-molested-her-as-child/

Next will be stories about his Satan worship as a teen and his anti-Americanism and ties to Osama bin laden.

[Revolution starts with U]

So now you've just evolved into knee-jerk defense of this guy? Like, can't even fathom the possibility that this guy might be scum, knee-jerk defense?

[l'Enfermé]

I actually have gathered enough evidence to suggest that Zimmerman did 9/11.

[milkmiku]

So now you've just evolved into knee-jerk defense of this guy? Like, can't even fathom the possibility that this guy might be scum, knee-jerk defense?

Nope, but I know desperation when I see it. Recall some of the other big trials like this, zimmerdolf is in all legality innocent because of stand your ground, read the law, so what happens? Something must be done to get him. Must demonizie him to the point where no jury would find him innocent.

Remember OJ, Casey, Hurbert, and many other cases where evidence was shaky or not even there...

But go ahead and use your label, people here sure do love labeling people who disagree with them.

Zimmerman allegedly molested a girl, likely a family member, from the age of 8 to 18 while the girl was 6 to 16. If true this is despicable, but even so, it has no baring on this case whatsoever, The woman also claimed to have call the Sanford police, ""I was afraid that he may have done something because the kid was black," the woman says on the recordings. She said she had no direct knowledge of the shooting death, but wanted police to know Zimmerman had made negative comments about blacks when they were growing up."

[Jimmie Higgins]

If you were an in-shape guy and some fat guy who's much shorter than you was following you, you'd be freaked out? Seriously? Anyways, no, Martin's only injury was the gunshot wound(apparently inflicted at very close range, which only backs up Zimmerman's version) and his knuckles were fucked up too from beating that dumbass Zimmerman. Unless Zimmerman hits so weakly that it doesn't have any effect on his opponent or leave marks on his hands, then it's pretty certain that Zimmerman wasn't even fighting back(let alone being the first to confront him!).So why is following and then shooting someone after a scuffle "Standing your ground" but trying to fight someone who was following you for no reason is not - and is in fact a valid reason for the stalker to "stand his ground"?

If a white teenager was being followed by an armed black guy and then they got into a fight, who would be the one standing their ground legally in that case? Do you really honestly think the cops would let that black person go or treat him as a victim and in his legal rights to shoot a white teenager?


Since when? In the US, Blacks are like 8 times more likely to commit robbery than whites(30 something if it's gang crime if I recall correctly), 4 times more likely to commit rape and so on. First of all, in the US court system black friends or black relatives who commit a crime together are sometimes prosecuted as "gang-affiliated" when they are just crime associates because they have tougher penalties for these kinds of crimes so that 30% figure is suspect.

Second, non-hispanic whites commit 1/2 of the violent crimes in the US (and violent crimes are a tiny percentage of the prison population) but blacks are more often convicted for any kind of crime. The rate, may be higher, but the higher total number of crimes is done by white people.


In 2001, for example, for all violent crimes, including simple assault, blacks committed twenty-eight percent of the total, according to the Justice Department. Yet, African Americans comprised thirty-four percent of all persons arrested for those crimes that year, meaning that blacks were arrested at a rate that was twenty percent above their rate of offending. Indeed, if blacks and whites had been arrested for these violent crimes at a rate that was equal to their rate of committing them, tens of thousands fewer blacks, and tens of thousands more whites would have been arrested for violent crime in 2001.

Comparing racial arrest data with racial offending data for 2001 reveals that for every 100 violent crimes committed by blacks, roughly thirty were arrested, while for every 100 violent crimes committed by whites, about 26 were arrested, meaning that white offenders were about fifteen percent more likely to get away with their offenses than black offenders.
This is the context in which this case happened. Is Zimmerman himself an open racist - I think the evidence is there, but it's beside the point. Even if he himself wasn't racist, the social situation in the US, decades of a black-scapegoating drug war and decades of "tough on crime" repression coming down disproportionately on blacks sets up a situation where a cop doesn't have to be a racist to effectively enforce a racist system, and it's the same for vigilantes since the ruling class has pushed so hard on the myth of the black sociopathic criminal.


Trayvon tried to emulate a tough gangster persona(didn't he describe himself as "no limit nigga" or some stupid shit like that?) before his death, it wouldn't be out of character at all.So liking cheesy music is a good justification for being killed? This is why I pull out my gun whenever I hear someone listening to Johnny Cash's glorification of murder and outlaw-thug culture in his songs.:rolleyes:

[Lucretia]

I will say this on the ISO/Obama issue: when the ISO declared that Obama's election was "transformative," what did they think his election had transformed? And why was that headline, especially if the thing being "transformed" wasn't about a positive development in the class struggle (and not just people's "hopes" and "dreams" and other empty and over-used branding devices from the campaign -- which, at best, represent only potential transformation if channeled in a specific direction, not actual transformation), getting front-page press to the exclusion of a different perspective?

So yeah, I think I'm somewhat on board with Lev here, and will say that provisionally my view on this issue (pending further evidence and argumentation to convince me otherwise, of course) is as follows: while you can comb through the ISO's news stories and not find anything technically or factually false, or explicitly "pro-Obama" in the sense of saying positive things about his policies or his likelihood for standing up for workers, there are other issues at stake in determining how O and his election were represented, such as HOW certain facts are presented, how certain events are described -- the context, the connotations of the words that are chosen. Any expert in communications can tell you that the message conveyed by any text cannot be reduced to the straightforward literal reading of the words in the text, but is contingent on a whole panoply of variables, e.g., the use of images, even the use of silence/absence regarding words or ideas you would expect to find given the rhetorical situation, etc. The description of Obama's election as "transformative" seems to be a case in point. Is this a clear endorsement of Obama? Obviously not. Does this, at the very least, bestow an unduly positive spin to the events surrounding his election? Absolutely. (I still can't say more than "events surrounding" because I am still not sure what was supposedly transformative!)

At best the ISO's press on this issue was presenting a muddled message that combined factually correct content but presented those facts in hyperbolic and soaring rhetoric about the election in a way that aligned way too closely with O's political consultants and marketers, and was thus implicitly lending credence to a pro-Obama interpretation of the election.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I will say this on the ISO/Obama issue: when the ISO declared that Obama's election was "transformative," what did they think his election had transformed? And why was that headline, especially if the thing being "transformed" wasn't about a positive development in the class struggle (and not just people's "hopes" and "dreams" and other empty and over-used branding devices from the campaign -- which, at best, represent only potential transformation if channeled in a specific direction, not actual transformation), getting front-page press to the exclusion of a different perspective?

So yeah, I think I'm somewhat on board with Lev here, and will say that provisionally my view on this issue (pending further evidence and argumentation to convince me otherwise, of course) is as follows: while you can comb through the ISO's news stories and not find anything technically or factually false, or explicitly "pro-Obama" in the sense of saying positive things about his policies or his likelihood for standing up for workers, there are other issues at stake in determining how O and his election were represented, such as HOW certain facts are presented, how certain events are described -- the context, the connotations of the words that are chosen. Any expert in communications can tell you that the message conveyed by any text cannot be reduced to the straightforward literal reading of the words in the text, but is contingent on a whole panoply of variables, e.g., the use of images, even the use of silence/absence regarding words or ideas you would expect to find given the rhetorical situation, etc. The description of Obama's election as "transformative" seems to be a case in point. Is this a clear endorsement of Obama? Obviously not. Does this, at the very least, bestow an unduly positive spin to the events surrounding his election? Absolutely. (I still can't say more than "events surrounding" because I am still not sure what was supposedly transformative!)

At best the ISO's press on this issue was presenting a muddled message that combined factually correct content but presented those facts in hyperbolic and soaring rhetoric about the election in a way that aligned way too closely with O's political consultants and marketers, and was thus implicitly lending credence to a pro-Obama interpretation of the election.

You mean the article that starts with this:


THE SWEEPING victory of Barack Obama in the presidential elections is a transformative event in U.S. politics, as an African American takes the highest office in a country built on slavery.

and argues this:

NOW THE issue is how Obama and the Democrats will use their power in Washington, particularly on the issues most important to voters--the economy and also the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A closer look at Obama's stated policy positions--as opposed to his soaring rhetoric--points to a big gap between the hopes and expectations of Obama voters and the cautious, moderate program he has put forward.

Obama is, after all, a mainstream politician. For all his ability to galvanize working people and youth to get out the vote, his campaign relied on huge amounts of money from corporate donors, allowing him to spend an estimated $650 million, by far the most in U.S. history. To tap those funds, Obama, the former community organizer, abandoned the public financing system that was established to counteract the role of big money in politics.

With the business support came a steady moderation of Obama's positions, particularly after he took the lead in the primary contest with Hillary Clinton. While Obama occasionally tossed out progressive positions--such as calling for increases in the minimum wage to be automatically tied to a rise in inflation--he is far from the "socialist" conjured up by McCain's operatives.

Rather than implement a major redistribution of the wealth, he simply wants to let Bush's tax cuts expire and increase the top income tax rate from 35 to 39.6 percent. But as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies points out, Obama's proposal is far friendlier to the rich than those of the 1950s Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower.

An even more urgent issue than taxes is the bailout of the financial system, as Bush's Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson starts rushing to hand out $700 billion to banks and financial institutions before Obama takes office on January 20. This "rescue" is, in fact, the greatest single transfer of wealth from workers to the rich in U.S. history.

Will Obama call a halt to this colossal rip-off and fashion an economic program that puts the interests of working people at its center? Will an Obama administration use government ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and shares in big banks in order to halt mortgage foreclosures? Will there be an economic stimulus program that creates secure, long-term jobs?

Obama's economic team shows no inclination toward such changes. While some pro-labor liberal economists like Jared Bernstein are counted among Obama's economic advisers, Obama relies much more on establishment figures like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker--both with long track records of favoring big business at workers' expense.

The same "realism" dominates Obama's foreign policy team. Attacked by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain for his inexperience in foreign policy, Obama surrounded himself with former secretaries of state, ex-CIA officials, generals and academics committed to an imperialist U.S. foreign policy. The style will change--more cultivation of allies, more international agreements--but the substance will not.

Obama plans to leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq to ensure that a pro-American government survives. And as he stressed repeatedly on the campaign trail, Obama wants to escalate the savage war in Afghanistan, where the pursuit of Osama bin Laden masks what is really a U.S. determination to occupy a strategic crossroads in Asia. Also, Obama has staked out hawkish positions on Venezuela and was even to the right of the Bush administration in declaring his support for Israel.

None of this is to say that no change is possible. Tens of millions of people want a new direction. The question is whether they can be organized to fight for it.Please tell me how this article is downplaying or excluding criticism of Obama. Did you only read the first paragraph and stop, content in your understanding of the entire article - or, more likely, are you just parroting arguments and SW quotes you read in sectarian sources?

To steal a joke from Colbert, do you read Dickens like you read SW: "Hmm, 'A Tale of Two Cities'... ok, page one... 'It was the best of times.' Wow, what an uplifting story."

Anyway, this is the SAME EXACT argument, quotes, and claims you and Lev and MH lost last time once I went and quoted the arguments from the articles y'all took quotes from.

The fact that you argue that you have to find the HIDDEN support for Obama, decode the language and so on, in Socialist Worker should clue you in that you are trying to make reality fit your conclusions about our group.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Since when? In the US, Blacks are like 8 times more likely to commit robbery than whites(30 something if it's gang crime if I recall correctly), 4 times more likely to commit rape and so on.

Source?

[Lucretia]

You mean the article that starts with this:



and argues this:
Please tell me how this article is downplaying or excluding criticism of Obama. Did you only read the first paragraph and stop, content in your understanding of the entire article - or, more likely, are you just parroting arguments and SW quotes you read in sectarian sources?

To steal a joke from Colbert, do you read Dickens like you read SW: "Hmm, 'A Tale of Two Cities'... ok, page one... 'It was the best of times.' Wow, what an uplifting story."

Anyway, this is the SAME EXACT argument, quotes, and claims you and Lev and MH lost last time once I went and quoted the arguments from the articles y'all took quotes from.

The fact that you argue that you have to find the HIDDEN support for Obama, decode the language and so on, in Socialist Worker should clue you in that you are trying to make reality fit your conclusions about our group.

Jimmie, you might be able to copy and paste this criticism to a hundred different critics of the ISO. But I'm not really a "critic" of it in any traditional sort of way, as I hope you know. And so, predictably, your response doesn't really address the content of what I wrote.

You seem to think that my argument rests on citing specific passages of text where the ISO is praising Obama. But you'll notice that nowhere did I say that the ISO praised Obama. And in fact, as I'll repeat later in this post, I pointed out that the text of the ISO's articles on Obama explicitly condemned him for reasons that any revolutionary socialist should. But I also said that communication and the conveyance of ideas and messages cannot be reduced to a literal reading of the content of the articles in question -- that other issues are at play, like imagery, choice of words, the organizational structure of a work, the way certain topics or ideas are brought up or described. And it is those areas where the representation of Obama's election as a positive thing comes into play.

And this is where it is important to zero in on the one actual quote I do mention -- drawn from the HEADLINE of an ISR article -- of the characterization of Obama's election as "transformative." You don't really answer the question I did have, which was What exactly was transformed by Obama's election? You did manage to repeat the quote, and provide enough context to let us know that -- yes -- the "transformative" event was Obama assuming office. But you didn't really do anything beyond that.

Are you suggesting, by including "as an African American takes the highest office in a country built on slavery," that the transformation the article was trying to convey was one of a decline in racism, that Obama's election transformed how white people think about and treat black people? Because that is obviously hogwash. If anything, Obama's election represented and symbolized a transformation that had already been happening for decades and decades -- as a result of African-Americans' struggle for freedom outside the bourgeois ballot box. So we can acknowledge this kind of transformation and celebrate it and put it on the front page of our magazine in other contexts because in this particular context, it means celebrating the election of a bourgeois politician that every socialist should have known was going to be more effective at curtailing the left ("broad left" or otherwise) than the GOP would have been. The transformation in racial ideas, attitudes, and practices that most African-Americans fought for was not the freedom to be equal as exploiters and oppressors in society, which is why the black freedom movement in the US was never just about "equality" but also about transforming the state and various other institutions in many, many more ways besides tinkering with how they treated black people. In touting O's election this way, the ISO is actually reinforcing rather than countering the tired old argument by socialists opposed to so-called "identity politics" that standing up for racial justice means breaking with a truly class politics -- because it is actually taking a setback in class politics and touting it for perceived racial reasons. (And yes, it WAS a SETBACK! Obama and the Dems are NOT the "lesser evil," and the Dems are not the second-most pro-capitalist party. They are as objectively pro-capitalist as the Republicans are; they just have different ideas about what strengthens capitalism, and for the most part, whatever theoretical problems welfare-liberals have with capitalism, they tend to be the most effective at salvaging it.)

But even if we concede that Obama's election dramatically changed racial attitudes -- which as I said is highly questionable -- wouldn't it be a better move by revolutionary socialists to foreground what remained the same (bourgeois control over American politics) rather than what changed, considering that what remained the same was the class structure of American politics? Shouldn't the headline be about Obama being a lackey for the capitalists, and the questionable note about "transformation" relegated to page 3B? This, by the way, is what I mean when I say that information isn't just conveyed by words, but how those words are organized and structured within the whole of a piece, what is given top billing and what is thrown in at the last paragraph.

You have to do more in this argument with me than parrot the talking points you used against other criticisms that are patently wrong (like the SEP claim that the ISO "campaigned" for O). And you'll also have to do more than post criticisms the ISO made of O. Again, those criticisms are perfectly consistent with my argument, which was that the ISO's approach to election was muddled by combining criticisms (of the kind you cite) with overblown claims about its "transformative" nature in a way that made the election seem progressive in important ways.

[A Marxist Historian]

I'll skip over Borz's more than dubious account of what happened based on certain eyewitnesses whose testimony is not credible, others have dealt with that, and skip down to the key point.


...I think FBI's civil rights division has concluded, after interviewing Zimmerman's family, friends, co-workers, neighbors and such that there is no evidence that suggests Zimmerman is a racist...

Now, that's reassuring. Nice to know who Borz thinks is an authority on this.

Doesn't everybody know how racist the FBI is? Hell, J. Edgar was probably involved in the Martin Luther King assassination, or at least his underlings. A Congressional ivestigating committee long, long ago in the 1970s concluded that there was a conspiracy behind the MLK assassination... and let it drop at that, too many of the wrong skeletons to uncover.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

...
Yeah, I'm really an apologist for racism. I totally don't take that shit seriously, you know, it's not like my people have experienced racism that's a hundred times more brutal and savage than what blacks experience in the United States.

Huh?


...
Since when? In the US, Blacks are like 8 times more likely to commit robbery than whites(30 something if it's gang crime if I recall correctly), 4 times more likely to commit rape and so on...



OK, we have this guy Borz's number. He isn't an apologist for racism, nor is he a racist.

He just hates black people.:crying:

-M.H.-

[Raúl Duke]

This is how I view the issue.

Whether or not Zimmerman is an outright racist, which may in fact be the case regardless that he's Latino (that was the first "anti-racist Zimmerman" argument I've heard and it's BS plus racist in itself: Living in Miami/East Coast, many Cubans are racist particularly more so towards African-Americans than black Cubans/Hispanics, this racism is more like ethnic strife/xenophobia but fueled through the racism prevalent in American society. All because Americans think that Latino as some "universally brown 'race'" doesn't make it true, there are white Latinos and racist Latinos), I don't think one can deny the fact that racism is still perpetuated in some form in this society/culture.

The racist image, perpetuated by this society through means like the media, of "dangerous black young males" influenced to some degree Zimmerman's actions.

This is a society where the mere color of your skin may lead to erroneous assumptions about your character in a regular, embedded basis. Structural oppression, like racism, is still prevalent in US society.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Will Obama call a halt to this colossal rip-off and fashion an economic program that puts the interests of working people at its center? Will an Obama administration use government ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and shares in big banks in order to halt mortgage foreclosures? Will there be an economic stimulus program that creates secure, long-term jobs?

Obama's economic team shows no inclination toward such changes. While some pro-labor liberal economists like Jared Bernstein are counted among Obama's economic advisers, Obama relies much more on establishment figures like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker--both with long track records of favoring big business at workers' expense.

The same "realism" dominates Obama's foreign policy team. Attacked by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain for his inexperience in foreign policy, Obama surrounded himself with former secretaries of state, ex-CIA officials, generals and academics committed to an imperialist U.S. foreign policy. The style will change--more cultivation of allies, more international agreements--but the substance will not.

None of this is to say that no change is possible. Tens of millions of people want a new direction. The question is whether they can be organized to fight for it. Plea

Jimmie, it's the "Gee Whiz," and "stay tuned to see what happens," attitude that is objectionable. Will Obama turn out to be an alien from outer space who is really made out of mold slime? This is a truly idiotic thing for a Marxist Revolutionary to print in their paper about the US imperialist-in-chief. I know that you feel that if somewhere in the article you articulate a formally correct line that it doesn't matter what the tone of the article is.

One could surmise from the above quote that if only Obama had better advisors or a better policy, something good would happen. I don't think that YOU believe that, but it is implied. Even if Obama made a sharp turn to forestall foreclosures, it would be in the interests of the banks and finance capital. That is who he works for -- your article completely fails to underscore this. It is not a matter of Obama's specific policies, it is his program -- to strengthen US capitalism. This is what US presidents do.


A closer look at Obama's stated policy positions--as opposed to his soaring rhetoric--points to a big gap between the hopes and expectations of Obama voters and the cautious, moderate program he has put forward.

Obama is, after all, a mainstream politician. For all his ability to galvanize working people and youth to get out the vote, his campaign relied on huge amounts of money from corporate donors, allowing him to spend an estimated $650 million, by far the most in U.S. history. To tap those funds, Obama, the former community organizer, abandoned the public financing system that was established to counteract the role of big money in politics.

A closer look at Obama's stated policy positions? Come on. Who is he, who does he work for, what does the Democratic party really represent?

Right people believed him -- our job is to say that it is all a lie -- all of it, not by increments and that nothing short of revolution will fix it.

[l'Enfermé]

Huh?



OK, we have this guy Borz's number. He isn't an apologist for racism, nor is he a racist.

He just hates black people.:crying:

-M.H.-
I would really love to know how you came to that conclusion.


I'll skip over Borz's more than dubious account of what happened based on certain eyewitnesses whose testimony is not credible, others have dealt with that, and skip down to the key point.



Now, that's reassuring. Nice to know who Borz thinks is an authority on this.

Doesn't everybody know how racist the FBI is? Hell, J. Edgar was probably involved in the Martin Luther King assassination, or at least his underlings. A Congressional ivestigating committee long, long ago in the 1970s concluded that there was a conspiracy behind the MLK assassination... and let it drop at that, too many of the wrong skeletons to uncover.

-M.H.-
Yeah, man, we're not living in the 70s anymore.


Source?
I don't remember where I read that, from some left source that was criticizing how US government policies are forcing blacks and Hispanics to turn to crime. Googling "race and crime in the United States" gives results like:
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/orace.png
And this (http://iontheworld.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-color-of-crime-race-crime-and-justice-in-america/)and this (http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf), according to which "• Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery" and "


Blacks commit violent crimes at four to eight times the white rate."

And so on. I don't know where these numbers come from, but it's pretty clear that blacks are much more likely to be criminals than whites in the United States.


So why is following and then shooting someone after a scuffle "Standing your ground" but trying to fight someone who was following you for no reason is not - and is in fact a valid reason for the stalker to "stand his ground"?

If a white teenager was being followed by an armed black guy and then they got into a fight, who would be the one standing their ground legally in that case? Do you really honestly think the cops would let that black person go or treat him as a victim and in his legal rights to shoot a white teenager?

1. Martin wasn't shot after a "scuffle", he was shot while beating Zimmerman. "Standing your ground" or whatever(not being an American I'm not very familiar with the terminology) if someone is stalking you is perfectly reasonable, and even the most logical thing to do in many cases to ensure your safety, but is this applicable if Zimmerman's story is correct(i.e that he was following Martin, until he lost him, and when he was walking back to his car Martin re-appeared and confronted him, Zimmerman tried to avoid a confrontation but Martin punched him in the nose, pinned him to the ground and wouldn't stop beating him until Zimmerman shot him in close range)? In Zimmerman's account, Zimmerman was the one "standing his ground" or whatever. I don't deny that Zimmerman's account might be false, but to me, it seems like his account is probably the one that's true or at least, the one that is the closest to the truth. Either way, I'm not a judge or a juror or his lawyer so what I think doesn't matter.

Fi
rst of all, in the US court system black friends or black relatives who commit a crime together are sometimes prosecuted as "gang-affiliated" when they are just crime associates because they have tougher penalties for these kinds of crimes so that 30% figure is suspect.
30 times more likely, not 30 percent. And yes, I've read about that, it seems like a very discriminatory practice and from what I've read, it isn't extended to whites.


Second, non-hispanic whites commit 1/2 of the violent crimes in the US (and violent crimes are a tiny percentage of the prison population) but blacks are more often convicted for any kind of crime. The rate, may be higher, but the higher total number of crimes is done by white people.
Whites make up like 65 percent of the American population(72 percent including "Hispanic Whites", I think), so that makes a lot of sense.


So liking cheesy music is a good justification for being killed? This is why I pull out my gun whenever I hear someone listening to Johnny Cash's glorification of murder and outlaw-thug culture in his songs.:rolleyes:

I don't understand what you're trying to say. What does music have to do with it?

[milkmiku]

So why is following and then shooting someone after a scuffle "Standing your ground" but trying to fight someone who was following you for no reason is not - and is in fact a valid reason for the stalker to "stand his ground"?

Riddle me this, is being followed probable cause for self defense? Is following someone a crime? Learn the law.


If a white teenager was being followed by an armed black guy and then they got into a fight, who would be the one standing their ground legally in that case? Do you really honestly think the cops would let that black person go or treat him as a victim and in his legal rights to shoot a white teenager?This scenario happened, look at one of my eriler post about this "if the race was reversed he'd be in prison"


First of all, in the US court system black friends or black relatives who commit a crime together are sometimes prosecuted as "gang-affiliated" when they are just crime associates because they have tougher penalties for these kinds of crimes so that 30% figure is suspect.I can believe this, but would need source. I know for a fact that Asians pretty harsh penitintles for gang related shit, because I was mixed in my younger years.



Second, non-hispanic whites commit 1/2 of the violent crimes in the US (and violent crimes are a tiny percentage of the prison population) but blacks are more often convicted for any kind of crime. The rate, may be higher, but the higher total number of crimes is done by white people.Well that is a given, they are the majority after all. Per population though blacks commit more crime, the problem is people start to blame that on the fact that they are black and not the system. But still, source.



This is the context in which this case happened. Is Zimmerman himself an open racist - I think the evidence is there, but it's beside the point. Even if he himself wasn't racist, the social situation in the US, decades of a black-scapegoating drug war and decades of "tough on crime" repression coming down disproportionately on blacks sets up a situation where a cop doesn't have to be a racist to effectively enforce a racist system, and it's the same for vigilantes since the ruling class has pushed so hard on the myth of the black sociopathic criminal.I can agree with you there, not the whole "he is racist" shit though.


So liking cheesy music is a good justification for being killed? This is why I pull out my gun whenever I hear someone listening to Johnny Cash's glorification of murder and outlaw-thug culture in his songs.:rolleyes:I agree, the only good music is Hatsune Miku, she is goddess of all things good.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Naturally, I agree that discounting the party's history is a mistake. I thought that was implied by my insistence to review all of the party's concrete activities, but I could have been unclear. You have raised numerous issues that I can, and will, look into and research.

Right -- I thought I was elaborating on what you had said, not refuting it. There is a lot of hot air in this thread. But to all the defenders of Zimmerman, why would you defend this guy? For some kind of abstract notion of justice? At best he's a fucked up vigilante, at worst a racist murderer, so why give a fuck? Leave his defense to Fox News.

Why a group that claims to be on the left would take up his defense is even harder to grasp. But the SEP and their forebears have taken many positions that are ludicrous. That's what they do.

[milkmiku]

Right -- I thought I was elaborating on what you had said, not refuting it. There is a lot of hot air in this thread. But to all the defenders of Zimmerman, why would you defend this guy? For some kind of abstract notion of justice? At best he's a fucked up vigilante, at worst a racist murderer, so why give a fuck? Leave his defense to Fox News

Because you and people like you argue from emotion and would condemn a man to death at worst or life in prison at best based upon your feelings. Because this is bigger than some guy shooting some kid, this case is being used by the ones in power to further this hatred between blacks and whites, a hatred that benefits them because it separates us and will not allow us to focus on them, and people are eating this shit up and begging for more. To me, it is about a man who made a mistake and now a system wants to grind him away no matter what the cost because it is convenient.

Go ahead a believe he is a racist, child molester. If he is guilty or not, one thing matters, the media has successfully kept us all entranced with this circus.

I guess I'm done with it to, fuck Zimmerman and fuck everyone who hates him.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Because you and people like you argue from emotion and would condemn a man to death at worst or life in prison at best based upon your feelings. Because this is bigger than some guy shooting some kid, this case is being used by the ones in power to further this hatred between blacks and whites, a hatred that benefits them because it separates us and will not allow us to focus on them, and people are eating this shit up and begging for more. To me, it is about a man who made a mistake and now a system wants to grind him away no matter what the cost because it is convenient.
Go ahead a believe he is a racist, child molester. If he is guilty or not, one thing matters, the media has successfully kept us all entranced with this circus.

I guess I'm done with it to, fuck Zimmerman and fuck everyone who hates him.
It is hardly "emotional" to suspect Zimmerman's guilt if we take into account the general racist behavior of the police institution--the very institution which Zimmerman ardently wished to be a part of. On this basis alone Zimmerman is fighting an uphill battle in my eyes, and in others, no doubt. As I have said before, there is no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. Lev is no stranger to these issues, as our own exchange has shown.

You are probably correct that the bourgeois media is exploiting the racial element of the case to encourage fragmentation among the workers. Here I agree that we must point to their farcical tactics. But it would be a costly mistake to say that bourgeois tactics are all there are behind the racial question. You cannot take the issue of race and simply sweep it under the rug and hope that it will resolve itself of its own accord. The social eruption of race in America can only seen as a historical product of institutional racism itself and how it is reflected in the minds and hearts of men. The revolutionary left is obligated to analyze these questions, not chalk it up to mere deception. If we do not, our potential "bridge" (in the Trotskyist sense, see "The Transitional Program") to the working class will be burnt and may turn them against us, and justifiably so.

That you ignore this approach to race places you in the same camp as the SEP on this score; that is, you see racism as nothing more than a diversionary tactic. This is a reductive and determinist approach that will lead you nowhere. By refusing to look at these issues as a cohesive (and contradictory) whole, you are tacitly encouraging racism, regardless of whether you are subjectively anti-racist or not; racism is an integral part of police tactics. The vacuity of your position has made me realize that this kind of defense is reprehensible, and I denounce you and the SEP for your bull-headed, opportunistic approach. If you do not reexamine your positions, you may end up on the side of those you profess hatred for.

[Jimmie Higgins]

And so, predictably, your response doesn't really address the content of what I wrote.
You argued: "At best the ISO's press on this issue was presenting a muddled message that combined factually correct content but presented those facts in hyperbolic and soaring rhetoric about the election in a way that aligned way too closely with O's political consultants and marketers, and was thus implicitly lending credence to a pro-Obama interpretation of the election."

So I then took the article - which is from the newspaper, not the ISR and "transformative" was used in the text, not in the headline, which I would have assumed you would notice while combing through the text for the secret words chosen or left-out that actually praise Obama while the literal text criticizes him - I quoted the body of the article which goes through issue by issue how Obama is a continuation, not a departure and is not what his supporters believe.

Your argument is ridiculous, it is basically a critique of "tone" and for the purpose of the newspaper, I think the tone was correct: so you're excited about Obama's election, that's understandable in such a racist county as this... now let's look at where he actually stands and the people he is choosing for his appointments and see what that says about what he is actually likely to do. That's it, that's the point of the article, to reach out to some of the sincere people out there who had illusions in Obama - we want people to think that change is possible, that better things are possible, we just don't want them to have illusions in Obama. All this can be clearly seen in the last line I quoted from this article:


None of this is to say that no change is possible...In other words, the "this" all the things listed in the body of the text about Obama's positions and appointments, suggest that Obama's NOT bringing any change.


...Tens of millions of people want a new direction. The question is whether they can be organized to fight for it.

So, Obama won't bring change, but it's positive that so much of the population (this is still in the aftermath of the Bush years of pessimism and resignation among most people) wanted a new direction - but it's not going to come from Obama, it's going to come from below if at anything.


But I also said that communication and the conveyance of ideas and messages cannot be reduced to a literal reading of the content of the articles in question -- that other issues are at play, like imagery, choice of words, the organizational structure of a work, the way certain topics or ideas are brought up or described. And it is those areas where the representation of Obama's election as a positive thing comes into play.This is a silly argument. You see refomist subtext because you already expect to find it. SW articles are simple and direct by design - not modernist poetry. We don't don't tailor our propaganda work for Literature Grad Student Departments.


And this is where it is important to zero in on the one actual quote I do mention -- drawn from the HEADLINE of an ISR article -- of the characterization of Obama's election as "transformative." I don't remember any ISR story or headline like this... I checked the three issues from October 2008 to the Inaguration and couldn't find anything like that... do you remember what issue it was - what was on the cover? I think you may be thinking about the SW article from the election night that the Sparts always quote "transformative" from.


You don't really answer the question I did have, which was What exactly was transformed by Obama's election? You did manage to repeat the quote, and provide enough context to let us know that -- yes -- the "transformative" event was Obama assuming office. But you didn't really do anything beyond that.It was a watershed moment in US history that a black president was elected in a country where racism is the number one tool of the ruling class. People were excited. Do you really think that good propaganda on election night would be: "You're stupid, you should listen to us." or would it be better to say, "You're excitement is understandable in this racist country, but look at the real policies and issues and see that it's an illusion."


If anything, Obama's election represented and symbolized a transformation that had already been happening for decades and decades -- as a result of African-Americans' struggle for freedom outside the bourgeois ballot box.I'd argue that it wasn't even that much. Maybe if Jessie Jackson had been elected in the 1980s, but Obama was elected in the absence of struggle and after years of decline... he's a "colorblind" era President, not a Civil Rights era President. I think the Democrats put him up to create a sense of a break from Bush and rehabilitate the international image of US imperialism after Iraq and Hurricane Katrina - and many liberals explicitly supported him on this basis too. But some liberal-oriented people also supported him as a recognition after Katrina that racism is still a factor and out of a sincere desire for something different.


So we can acknowledge this kind of transformation and celebrate it and put it on the front page of our magazine in other contexts because in this particular context, it means celebrating the election of a bourgeois politician that every socialist should have known was going to be more effective at curtailing the left ("broad left" or otherwise) than the GOP would have been. No, the argument of the article was, "we know you were moved by Obama's election and there are sincere reasons for that, but when you compare these hopes to reality, Obama is not really about the change you think". So it's contrasting the spectacle everyone saw and the joy that many people sincerely felt with the actual issues.


Obama and the Dems are NOT the "lesser evil," and the Dems are not the second-most pro-capitalist party. They are as objectively pro-capitalist as the Republicans are; they just have different ideas about what strengthens capitalism, and for the most part, whatever theoretical problems welfare-liberals have with capitalism, they tend to be the most effective at salvaging it.)Agreed, as the January 2009 article in the ISR argued about labor and Obama and the book we published about the Democrats before the election.

It seems like if we were secretly putting in subtext to support Obama, we would have wanted to hold off on publishing a book about how the Democrats are not friends of the working class or social movements until after the election rather than in the run-up to it. If, however, like me you know that the ISO is against the Democrats and see it as one of the main obstacles to building working class movements in the US, then publishing a survey of the betrayals and function of the Democratic party in US society would be a good thing to do in order to make good arguments in a pro-Obama environment.


But even if we concede that Obama's election dramatically changed racial attitudes -- which as I said is highly questionable -- wouldn't it be a better move by revolutionary socialists to foreground what remained the same (bourgeois control over American politics) rather than what changed, considering that what remained the same was the class structure of American politics?You mean like the whole body of the text from the article you are criticizing where it goes through how Obama is going to continue Bush's policies?


Shouldn't the headline be about Obama being a lackey for the capitalists, Not if the goal is to try and convince people who have illusions in Obama that they are wrong. If you want to pose to other left groups as the "most radical" then maybe that would be a good headline - but not for trying to win non-radicals to revolutionary viewpoints.


You have to do more in this argument with me than parrot the talking points you used against other criticisms that are patently wrong (like the SEP claim that the ISO "campaigned" for O).
Does "patently wrong" mean correct if you read the subtext and position of the text correctly?

The ISO is merely continuing the pro-Obama line that it pursued in the last presidential election. In 2008, the ISO campaigned for Obama and cheered his election, as documented in detail by David Walsh in an essay (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/iso2-j19.shtml) published on the WSWS. ^In fact it was an article written by their National Secretary who made this claim.


And you'll also have to do more than post criticisms the ISO made of O. Again, those criticisms are perfectly consistent with my argument, which was that the ISO's approach to election was muddled by combining criticisms (of the kind you cite) with overblown claims about its "transformative" nature in a way that made the election seem progressive in important ways.So criticisms of Obama that he is not progressive are not enough to prove that we are critical of Obama and don't think he was progressive?:rolleyes:


I know that you feel that if somewhere in the article you articulate a formally correct line that it doesn't matter what the tone of the article is.

No, the tone is important because articles like this are geared toward making an argument to people who have illusions in Obama. You can have all your headlines say: "All power to the soviets" but it won't actually relate to anyone. This article from the election night clearly tries to appeal to the hopes people were expressing while then going straight through the issues and showing how Obama won't deliver and is a continuation and that people organizing themselves for change is they way to go. It's straight forward, it's not a critique of the role of the Democrats (although we did and continue to have articles like that) or about if elections matter - it also doesn't discuss the development of imperialism, the need for a revolutionary party, the Labor Theory of Value, or many other arguments because that's not the purpose of that piece. So these criticisms from y'all are just silly. If the article did give a survey of the history of the Democrats, you'd critique it for "letting Obama off the hook" by talking about the party and not going through how Obama was a continuation of the same shit.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I don't remember where I read that, from some left source that was criticizing how US government policies are forcing blacks and Hispanics to turn to crime.You were probably looking at a right-wing site arguing that the US welfare state creates "a culture of violence". I don't know of any left-wing arguments that the government is directly forcing people to turn to crime through policies. The government is criminalizing poor people through police repression and stop and frisk tactics, but the conditions of capitalism generally "create crime".


Googling "race and crime in the United States" gives results like:

And this (http://iontheworld.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-color-of-crime-race-crime-and-justice-in-america/)and this (http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf), according to which "• Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery" and "


Blacks commit violent crimes at four to eight times the white rate."

And so on. I don't know where these numbers come from, but it's pretty clear that blacks are much more likely to be criminals than whites in the United States.What are you arguing here then? That racial profiling is justified? The rate may be higher but the total number of violent crimes are done by white people so if you are looking for a criminal, it's most likely going to be a white person statistically. Second, crime is highly segregated and violent crimes are most often crimes of passion between people who know each-other already - so profiling and vigilantes keeping blacks out of their neighborhood is not rational unless seen as connected to the racist crime hysteria and propaganda over the last generation.

The class system in this country is held together largely through racism, the current form of racist control and creating a consensus around racist ideas is through the "war on crime". Following a black kid in a rich neighborhood is inherently racist in this social context. The guy may not be a Klansman walking around calling people names or whatnot, but everything he did was a reflection of modern racism.


I don't understand what you're trying to say. What does music have to do with it?Dressing "street" or listening to hip-hop are not justifications for shooting someone - at least not non-racist ones. Wearing a hood and being black isn't a (non-racist) reason to be suspected of something.

[l'Enfermé]

You were probably looking at a right-wing site arguing that the US welfare state creates "a culture of violence". I don't know of any left-wing arguments that the government is directly forcing people to turn to crime through policies. The government is criminalizing poor people through police repression and stop and frisk tactics, but the conditions of capitalism generally "create crime".
The US government is forcing blacks more than whites into crime through policies that promote poverty in black communities, through worse educational opportunities and other bullshit. How can the government criminalize poor people through police repression, if they already have to be criminals to be repressed by the police? I'm not sure I understand that.


What are you arguing here then? That racial profiling is justified? The rate may be higher but the total number of violent crimes are done by white people so if you are looking for a criminal, it's most likely going to be a white person statistically. Second, crime is highly segregated and violent crimes are most often crimes of passion between people who know each-other already - so profiling and vigilantes keeping blacks out of their neighborhood is not rational unless seen as connected to the racist crime hysteria and propaganda over the last generation.
I don't even remember the root of the argument anymore actually.


The class system in this country is held together largely through racism, the current form of racist control and creating a consensus around racist ideas is through the "war on crime". Following a black kid in a rich neighborhood is inherently racist in this social context. The guy may not be a Klansman walking around calling people names or whatnot, but everything he did was a reflection of modern racism.
The class system is held together largely through racism? Nonsense. Whites make up 72 percent of the American population, blacks only 12, in the context of class-struggle the black population is pretty much irrelevant especially due to how it's been lumpenized by government policies.


Dressing "street" or listening to hip-hop are not justifications for shooting someone - at least not non-racist ones. Wearing a hood and being black isn't a (non-racist) reason to be suspected of something.

I didn't say anything about music. #FF0000 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=14710) wrote that Martin confronting and attacking Zimmerman was completely out of character, I replied that it's not, Martin has been emulating this tough gangster motherfucking persona before he was killed, he's been trying to appear as exactly the type of person that would confront and attack Zimmerman. I still don't understand what music has to do with this, sorry if I'm missing something here. And yes, stalking someone because they're black IS racist, however, in this case, the person being stalked was a stranger in what I can only assume is a rather small gated community where everyone knows each other, and since a lot of break-ings and burglaries and all that shit happened in that community recently, trying to hide your face with a hoodie is pretty fucking suspicious no matter what color your skin is.

[Lucretia]

You argued: "At best the ISO's press on this issue was presenting a muddled message that combined factually correct content but presented those facts in hyperbolic and soaring rhetoric about the election in a way that aligned way too closely with O's political consultants and marketers, and was thus implicitly lending credence to a pro-Obama interpretation of the election."

So I then took the article - which is from the newspaper, not the ISR and "transformative" was used in the text, not in the headline, which I would have assumed you would notice while combing through the text for the secret words chosen or left-out that actually praise Obama while the literal text criticizes him - I quoted the body of the article which goes through issue by issue how Obama is a continuation, not a departure and is not what his supporters believe.

I stand corrected. I am conflating the article in which Obama's election was dubbed transformative with the cover-photo of the raised fits and the words "Yes! We can!: POLITICS AND STRUGGLE IN A NEW ERA" emblazened across the top of the January 2009 issue (the first line in that article calls the election of Obama a "watershed event" that marked a repudiation of Bush policies, then contradictorily explains that the Democratic party Obama represented contributed significantly to those policies). Explain to me again how this isn't soaring rhetoric that implies Obama's inauguration (which took place the month this "New Era" was being touted on the ISR cover) was a positive thing. So yes, I was not correct in saying "transformative election" was in the headline. It's difficult to keep track of all the positive spin that the ISR was putting on Obama assuming office.

Rather than fruitlessly engage in a tit-for-tat, block by block response to what you have written, I'll basically say that your primary counter-argument dismisses one of the foundations of modern-day communications -- both as a scholarly field and as a practice mastered by marketers, consultants, and the like. Which is that communication isn't just about a literal reading of the text, especially when the literal reading you're providing often consists of isolated quotes which obscure the overall presentation of the articles you're drawing from. So you can take snippets from the text that technically convey the correct Marxist line on Obama -- that he is a capitalist lackey who will cede nothing to workers because he represents a system that opposes their interests -- but to do so ignores the glaring front page "NEW ERA" pronouncements.

You still, by the way, haven't answered the very simple question I have asked three separate times now: What did Obama's election transform? To which can be added a similar but differently phrased question, If Obama's election was a watershed event, what was so dramatically different that we should have expected from his presidency compared to what came before it?

Please do not respond with isolated snippets from the ISR in which Obama is called a hopeless capitalist. Because if you do that, you're just missing the point I was making: the depiction of the election by the ISO was muddled and contradictory. It combined correct analysis of Obama's role in maintaining the system of capitalist exploitation, with overblown rhetoric and language about the "transformative" nature of his "watershed election" -- which actually implied that, if pressured by the grassroots, he could potentially effect significant changes of the kind we never could have gotten under the previous administration.

My guess is that the muddled nature comes from the ISO's attempt to bridge the consciousness of the typical liberal out there who shared the same assumptions about Obama's election being "transformative" with the Marxist analysis provided deeper, though inconsistently, in the articles under examination. Your response concedes this with your typical caricature of how we're calling for "All Power to the Soviets" signs unless we endorse peppering reformist analysis into your revolutionary theoretical organ at key places like on the front page. Keep this in mind, Jimmie: watering down your message to the point where it is contradictory is not how you reach out to workers. What we're seeing in this case is a totally flawed application of an otherwise good strategy.

If you can't understand what Lev and I are saying here, then I recommend you ask us to clarify certain issues. Because we're not just sniping from the sidelines on some issue we've made up to attack the ISO. This is a very important issue, and the ISO coverage of Obama's election was, at best, highly disappointing from an organization aspiring to contribute to revolution.

[A Marxist Historian]

Your claim that I misreported on your group's misreporting was... misreported.

Point granted, slightly slipshod and careless on my part, crossing your comments on the SEP with those on the SL. But evasive on yours, as you did in fact clearly misreport, inventing a nonexistent and false quote, namely:

"The Sparts will have totally unconnected stories that have nothing to do with the ISO and there'll be a line like, "But groups like the ISO who support Barack Obama...""

The Spartacists have never claimed that the ISO "supports Barack Obama" in the overt fashion of, say, the CPUSA or DSA.



I've rebutted your and the SEP and WV claims NUMEROUS times with articles from before the election and in the election issue stating that people's hopes are a positive thing that should be encouraged, but they are misplaced in hoping that Obama will just deliver.

Your "rebuttals" have been rather pathetic, already well dissected by others on this thread, I have little more to add.



Someone who votes for Obama today because Romney is "so scary" or someone voting for Kerry cynically are people who've resigned and will probably not be drawn to the left anytime soon. People in 2008 who naively voted for Obama were still workers who we saw as being people who could potentially be won to the left because there was a real underlying desire for positive change - and the clash between that hope and reality especially as they learn themselves that their hopes are misplaced meant that we didn't think activists who were voting for Obama were "lost causes" but people we wanted to try and convince to fight for themselves.

Well, sure, but what does that have to do with it? I recall that in one of the Workers Vanguard sub drive reports in 2008, the comment was made that most WV subscribers probably voted for Obama. Given the absence of any mass alternative, most workers who voted voted for Obama, either as a lesser evil or because they were caught up in the pro-Obama enthusiasm whipped up by union bureaucrats and sellout leaders of minority communities, etc.

The way to win people to revolutionary politics is to-win them to revolutionary politics, not hold victory parties for Obama and be a left cover for him.


Below is the cover-story from the election issue of Socialist Worker in 2008... it's the same article that the Sparts always quote from to show how the ISO was supporting Obama because in the introduction, the writers says that the election rally was moving to see so many young people out celebrating. And it was, I certainty didn't think I'd see a black president when I was a kid and so it would be totally disconnected for radicals to not realize why people were excited even though we think that hope was misplaced. But like I said, this is a cherry-picked quote that requires ignoring the ENTIRE POINT AND CONTENT of that Socialist Worker article:

I was moved all right, I was saddened. So many people under the influence of so many false illusions. Black faces in high places is an old story since the civil rights movement, now it's all the way up to the top. It's an extremely clever move of the ruling class, and working people have paid the price. Especially black people.

Since Obama was elected, the average net worth of black families in America has dropped by something like a factor of ten! In cold, hard, material terms, Obama has been the worst president for black people since Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction in 1877. If McCain had been elected, America would probably have looked like Oakland after the Oscar Grant murder when the shit went down. Instead, black people have by and large just stood there and took it, 'cuz there was a black man doing it to them.

So no, people were excited for all the wrong reasons.


So please explain how this story, while saying that people were excited for the right-reasons, while going through how these expectations will not be met, is giving Obama a pass?

Now take that "But in practice, the ISO was in Obama's camp during the election campaign" and roll it up really tight and stick it really far up your ass so I don't have to smell that slanderous and just plain incorrect shit ever ever again from you.

I don't know, that was what the Worker's Vanguard claimed. They were confirming their agreement with the SEP's claim that we only participated in a rally for Travon because we were trying to give support to Jessie Jackson:rolleyes:.

A subtle, sneaky distortion of what the article said--again.

In practice, yes the ISO, though not "supporting" Obama on election day, was definitely in Obama's camp. When he won, you guys didn't just participate in victory celebrations, you even organized Obama victory parties on campuses!

-M.H.-

[NGNM85]

You seem to think that my argument rests on citing specific passages of text where the ISO is praising Obama. But you'll notice that nowhere did I say that the ISO praised Obama. And in fact, as I'll repeat later in this post, I pointed out that the text of the ISO's articles on Obama explicitly condemned him for reasons that any revolutionary socialist should. But I also said that communication and the conveyance of ideas and messages cannot be reduced to a literal reading of the content of the articles in question -- that other issues are at play, like imagery, choice of words, the organizational structure of a work, the way certain topics or ideas are brought up or described. And it is those areas where the representation of Obama's election as a positive thing comes into play.


One could make a similar criticism of your employment of Right-wing catchphrases, like; 'Obamacare.'

[Lucretia]

One could make a similar criticism of your employment of Right-wing catchphrases, like; 'Obamacare.'

Obamacare is not a "right-wing catchphrase." It may have started out that way, but it is now a label that is used even by the groupies demonstrating in front of the Supreme Court in favor of that wretched law. It was, and will always be, the signature legislative issue of what will likely be his one-term presidency.

It's a matter of public record that, as much as Obama tried to do the politically savvy thing and pretend that it was the congress crafting the bill, he was working with insurance companies to craft the major components of the bill, which were then piped through various backchannels to the various subcommittees. Thus, even if it were still a "right-wing catchphrase," we would be justified in calling it Obamacare nevertheless. It's not some right-wing plot to try to peg the bill to a single personality in order to demonize it.

So no. You fail.

[NGNM85]

Obamacare is not a "right-wing catchphrase."

It absolutely is. It's just a revamp of 'Hillarycare', which is how they branded the Clinton administrations' attempt to enact similar legislation, in 1993.


It may have started out that way, but it is now a label that is used even by the groupies demonstrating in front of the Supreme Court in favor of that wretched law.

It's obviously pejorative, and, just as obviously, it's intended to be interpreted as being pejorative. Furthermore; I can't recall a single example of anyone who supported the bill characterizing it as such. It's a Right-wing talking point.

As for the merit of the Affordable Care Act; I don't even think you're qualified to make that determination, so I can't take it very seriously.


It was, and will always be, the signature legislative issue of what will likely be his one-term presidency.

It's probably the biggest thing his administration has done, most certainly domestically, but, probably, overall, regardless of how the election turns out. Although; it's fascinating, but, sadly, not surprising, that you're pulling for Mitt Romney. (Just as you, apparently, supported McCain/Palin, in '08.)


It's a matter of public record that, as much as Obama tried to do the politically savvy thing and pretend that it was the congress crafting the bill, he was working with insurance companies to craft the major components of the bill, which were then piped through various backchannels to the various subcommittees. Thus, even if it were still a "right-wing catchphrase," we would be justified in calling it Obamacare nevertheless.

Only if you have no idea what you are talking about. (Which is fairly obviously the case.) First of all; this is not a new idea. It was first proposed by Republican affiliated think tanks, like the Heritage foundation, in the late 80's. They even praised Governor Romney's implementation of a version of this idea in Massachusetts, which fairly closely resembles the Affordable Care Act, although; apparently, they have reversed this position somewhere between then, and now. So, to brand this as the Presidents' plan, to put all of it on him, is ahistorical, and wrong. If it should be associated with any one politician, it would make substantially more sense to associate it with your preference; Governor Romney, as he was the first to actually implement this idea.


It's not some right-wing plot to try to peg the bill to a single personality in order to demonize it.
So no. You fail.

No, that's exactly what it is. Since you decided to rail against what you see as the subliminal support for the President, in an articles that very clearly criticizes his policies, it's perfectly fair to point out that, much of the time, you sound as if you're channeling Rush Limbaugh.

[A Marxist Historian]

I would really love to know how you came to that conclusion...



From the posting it was commenting on, as well as others in this thread(and your attempts to cover your tracks in more recent postings have not impressed me).

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

It absolutely is. It's just a revamp of 'Hillarycare', which is how they branded the Clinton administrations' attempt to enact similar legislation, in 1993.



It's obviously pejorative, and, just as obviously, it's intended to be interpreted as being pejorative. Furthermore; I can't recall a single example of anyone who supported the bill characterizing it as such. It's a Right-wing talking point.

As for the merit of the Affordable Care Act; I don't even think you're qualified to make that determination, so I can't take it very seriously.



It's probably the biggest thing his administration has done, most certainly domestically, but, probably, overall, regardless of how the election turns out. Although; it's fascinating, but, sadly, not surprising, that you're pulling for Mitt Romney. (Just as you, apparently, supported McCain/Palin, in '08.)



Only if you have no idea what you are talking about. (Which is fairly obviously the case.) First of all; this is not a new idea. It was first proposed by Republican affiliated think tanks, like the Heritage foundation, in the late 80's. They even praised Governor Romney's implementation of a version of this idea in Massachusetts, which fairly closely resembles the Affordable Care Act, although; apparently, they have reversed this position somewhere between then, and now. So, to brand this as the Presidents' plan, to put all of it on him, is ahistorical, and wrong. If it should be associated with any one politician, it would make substantially more sense to associate it with your preference; Governor Romney, as he was the first to actually implement this idea.



No, that's exactly what it is. Since you decided to rail against what you see as the subliminal support for the President, in an articles that very clearly criticizes his policies, it's perfectly fair to point out that, much of the time, you sound as if you're channeling Rush Limbaugh.

NGNM, you have proven once again you're an idiot. You have somehow managed to convince yourself that my criticism of the ISO's articles on Obama was that the articles were using "liberal" language. It wasn't. It was that they are using liberal language in a way that created a message that contradicted, or at the very least confused, the Marxist analysis that the ISO introduced.

Do you see the distinction between the two? The first position, the one you have created and then wrongly projected on to me, is reminiscent of your tribalist lesser-of-two-evils approach to politics, where if a Republican says something it is by definition without value because, well, a Republican -- a person of the bad tribe -- said it. The second position can readily concede that Republicans might say things that are true, perhaps even somethings that bear repeating in a socialist theoretical journal. But it maintains that these things shouldn't be repeated just to appeal to Republicans when repeating them contradicts or substantively detracts from the analysis you're trying to draw the Republicans to.

With that out of the way, we can address your equally idiotic claim that supporters of Obama do not refer to Obamacare as Obamacare.

Just take a gander at this story: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/06/obamacare-supreme-court-regular-americans

Two things that you should observe about it: (1) Mother Jones -- apparently now a right-wing web site in your book -- uses "Obamacare" to describe the Affordable Care Act; (2) the image in the article shows pro-Obama supporters holding signs which say "WE LOVE OBAMACARE!"

This is just one single example. There are countless others I could catalog for you if I wanted to waste my raising you out of your profound ignorance. Perhaps now you can "recall a single example of anyone who supported the bill characterizing it as such." Maybe this will even inspire you to READ THE NEWS.

Now go lick your wounds, then hijack some other thread to whine about how not enough people support Obama or Obamacare.

[NGNM85]

NGNM, you have proven once again you're an idiot. You have somehow managed to convince yourself that my criticism of the ISO's articles on Obama was that the articles were using "liberal" language. It wasn't. It was that they are using liberal language in a way that created a message that contradicted, or at the very least confused, the Marxist analysis that the ISO introduced.

There’s no such thing as; ‘Liberal language.’


Do you see the distinction between the two? The first position, the one you have created and then wrongly projected on to me, is reminiscent of your tribalist…

First; you don’t know what my views are. Second; there’s nothing ‘tribalist’ about it. I don’t oppose the Republican party because they are Republicans, I oppose them because of their Reactionary social agenda, etc., etc. They used to be the (Small ‘p.’) progressive party. That’s why Marx supported them, and rightfully so. However; this isn’t 1861, and this isn’t the party of Lincoln.


lesser-of-two-evils approach to politics,

You say that is if there’s any other way to see it. It never makes sense to choose the greater evil, that’s what makes it; 'the greater evil.' Of course; I suspect you understand that, and that the problem lies elsewhere.


where if a Republican says something it is by definition without value because, well, a Republican -- a person of the bad tribe -- said it.

See above.


The second position can readily concede that Republicans might say things that are true, perhaps even somethings that bear repeating in a socialist theoretical journal.

Absolutely, but that's hardly exclusive to Republicans.


But it maintains that these things shouldn't be repeated just to appeal to Republicans when repeating them contradicts or substantively detracts from the analysis you're trying to draw the Republicans to.

I wouldn’t claim to know what motivates you. The Affordable Care Act was criticized, to varying degrees, by the Left, and the Right. (Admittedly; there’s plenty to criticize about it, I’m not in love with it, by any means.) However; beyond the difference in tone, frequency, and intensity, the opposition, on both sides, is substantively, and qualitatively distinct. The criticism on the Left was, primarily, that it was insufficient, that we should have something like the Public Option, (Which passed, in the House version, incidentally.) something closer to Universal Healthcare, like practially every other industrialized country. The Right is adamantly opposed to that. They absolutely hate that idea. They’ve made a lot of noise about the individual mandate, but that’s merely a smokescreen. That’s the part the insurance industry really likes. The part they hate is the end of lifetime care limits, the end of denying, or preventing coverage based on ‘pre-existing conditions’, free preventative care, etc. In short; all the provisions that the Left likes, generally speaking. (Incidentally; the American people, overwhelmingly, agree.) When you use that phrase, in the way that you use it, you implicitly endorse the latter view, the Right-wing view. (Although; admittedly, this is somewhat of a moot point, as you've gone way beyond implications.)That’s not counting the fact that it’s historically inaccurate, as I’ve already explained.


With that out of the way, we can address your equally idiotic claim that supporters of Obama do not refer to Obamacare as Obamacare.

That’s not what I said. What I said was that it is a Right-wing pejorative. That’s a fact. I also said that, as such, it was primarily employed by the Right, (Also a fact.) and that I couldn't recall an instance of anyone on the Left using it, as you did.


Just take a gander at this story: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/06/obamacare-supreme-court-regular-americans (http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/06/obamacare-supreme-court-regular-americans)


Two things that you should observe about it: (1) Mother Jones -- apparently now a right-wing web site in your book

That doesn’t follow. I never said that this pejorative was the sole determinant, or, in any sense, a sufficient condition of Right-wing ideation. However; it was created by the Right, and it is, primarily, overwhelmingly, employed by the Right.


-- uses "Obamacare" to describe the Affordable Care Act; (2) the image in the article shows pro-Obama supporters holding signs which say "WE LOVE OBAMACARE!"


This is just one single example. There are countless others I could catalog for you if I wanted to waste my raising you out of your profound ignorance. Perhaps now you can "recall a single example of anyone who supported the bill characterizing it as such."

Of course I can recall one, now. (Or two, depending on how you want to do the math.) Again; what I was was that this is a Right-wing pejorative, and it was meant tobe understood as such. That’s why one, primarily, hears it from people like; Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, etc. It’s a Right-wing talking point.

What I'd like to know is why you're opposed to the provisions listed in the article. (For example; the end of lifetime limits, the end of 'pre-existing conditions', etc.) How do you square that circle?


Maybe this will even inspire you to READ THE NEWS.

Please.


Now go lick your wounds, then hijack some other thread to whine about how not enough people support Obama or Obamacare.

I didn’t ‘hijack anything.’ First, and foresmost; the thread was, for all purposes, dead. Second; my criticism was substantive, prescient, and topical.

Right. ‘Real’ Radicals vote Republican. Gotcha.

[Lucretia]

There’s no such thing as; ‘Liberal language.’



First; you don’t know what my views are. Second; there’s nothing ‘tribalist’ about it. I don’t oppose the Republican party because they are Republicans, I oppose them because of their Reactionary social agenda, etc., etc. They used to be the (Small ‘p.’) progressive party. That’s why Marx supported them, and rightfully so. However; this isn’t 1861, and this isn’t the party of Lincoln.



You say that is if there’s any other way to see it. It never makes sense to choose the greater evil, that’s what makes it; 'the greater evil.' Of course; I suspect you understand that, and that the problem lies elsewhere.



See above.



Absolutely, but that's hardly exclusive to Republicans.



I wouldn’t claim to know what motivates you. The Affordable Care Act was criticized, to varying degrees, by the Left, and the Right. (Admittedly; there’s plenty to criticize about it, I’m not in love with it, by any means.) However; beyond the difference in tone, frequency, and intensity, the opposition, on both sides, is substantively, and qualitatively distinct. The criticism on the Left was, primarily, that it was insufficient, that we should have something like the Public Option, (Which passed, in the House version, incidentally.) something closer to Universal Healthcare, like practially every other industrialized country. The Right is adamantly opposed to that. They absolutely hate that idea. They’ve made a lot of noise about the individual mandate, but that’s merely a smokescreen. That’s the part the insurance industry really likes. The part they hate is the end of lifetime care limits, the end of denying, or preventing coverage based on ‘pre-existing conditions’, free preventative care, etc. In short; all the provisions that the Left likes, generally speaking. (Incidentally; the American people, overwhelmingly, agree.) When you use that phrase, in the way that you use it, you implicitly endorse the latter view, the Right-wing view. (Although; admittedly, this is somewhat of a moot point, as you've gone way beyond implications.)That’s not counting the fact that it’s historically inaccurate, as I’ve already explained.



That’s not what I said. What I said was that it is a Right-wing pejorative. That’s a fact. I also said that, as such, it was primarily employed by the Right, (Also a fact.) and that I couldn't recall an instance of anyone on the Left using it, as you did.



That doesn’t follow. I never said that this pejorative was the sole determinant, or, in any sense, a sufficient condition of Right-wing ideation. However; it was created by the Right, and it is, primarily, overwhelmingly, employed by the Right.



Of course I can recall one, now. (Or two, depending on how you want to do the math.) Again; what I was was that this is a Right-wing pejorative, and it was meant to be understood as such. That’s why one, primarily, hears it from people like; Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, etc. It’s a Right-wing talking point.

What I'd like to know is why you're opposed to the provisions listed in the article. (For example; the end of lifetime limits, the end of 'pre-existing conditions', etc.) How do you square that circle?



Please.



I didn’t ‘hijack anything.’ First, and foresmost; the thread was, for all purposes, dead. Second; my criticism was substantive, prescient, and topical.

Right. ‘Real’ Radicals vote Republican. Gotcha.

Good lord. You don't know when to quit, do you? Well, since you're a glutton for punishment...

Your argument is that, because "Obamacare" was originally coined by right-wingers with a certain argument in mind, using that word means that I am "implicitly endorsing the view of the right" even after it has been demonstrated to you that OBAMACARE IS A TERM THAT IS NOW USED BY ACTIVISTS AND NEWS OUTLETS WITH AN EXPRESSLY LIBERAL-LEFT PERSPECTIVE. Are they also "implicitly endorsing" the views of the right? (According to your express logic, they must be.) Or are you just making these shitty arguments up as you go a long just to have some means, any means, for trying to attack me as insufficiently pro-Obama? I think the answer to this question is obvious enough that I don't need to provide it myself. And this, by the way, is what I mean by tribal politics. You pick the enemy first, then you develop the argument after the fact to justify why the person is your enemy. And if that argument doesn't work, just invent another completely different argument, all while pretending to maintain intellectual rigor and consistency. It's a total joke.

In spite of the humor, there's a larger point here that you're too dense to grasp, and it's a serious point: language is flexible and, within certain limits, can be used in a variety of different ways (take the word "queer" which can still be used as a pejorative, but is also used as an identity label by various sexual groups). This means that use of a word like Obamacare does not necessarily entail a conservative criticism of the president. In fact, it might not be used critically at all -- as you have now observed by viewing its use by supporters of the law and of the president.

In the case of the ISO's article, what I was criticizing was NOT the use of a specific word because that word was coined by the wrong people, and therefore implied a wrong message. To repeat: the criticism was that the content of the ISR article contradictorily claimed that Obama's election was a positive transformation and watershed event (the liberal understanding of O's election), at the same time that it conceded Obama was a capitalist lackey who could not be depended upon to bring about any significant political changes in the country (the undeniably correct, Marxist analysis, and one which undermines the idea that O's election was a political watershed).

Do you see the difference yet, NGNM?

I must say, though, I am impressed by your ability to change arguments in the span of two posts, then pretend that you never made the first (disproved) argument. You earlier claimed adamantly and unequivocally regarding the word Obamacare: "I can't recall a single example of anyone who supported the bill characterizing it as such. It's a Right-wing talking point." Now suddenly the word is just "primarily, overwhelmingly employed by the right." We'll leave aside the fact that you have no evidence whatsoever for determining who "primarily" uses the word, which isn't surprising since you apparently had no idea that proponents of the law had even adopted it. Even if we concede that you are right about who "primarily" uses the word, where is your concession that you were wrong when you stated point blank that it was strictly a right-wing talking point, not used by the left at all? It's something we would expect from a fair interlocutor, but that's not what you are.

As a parting shot, I'd like to challenge you to provide a single shred of evidence indicating that I "supported McCain/Palin, in '08," that I'm "pulling for Mitt Romney" in this election, or that I have ever supported a bourgeois politician. It seems once again that you're too fucking stupid to distinguish between a prediction and a prescription: saying that Mitt Romney will likely defeat Obama in the present election is not the same as saying I hope he wins and that I support him.

But to expect you to make that distinction would be to expect you to demonstrate the slightest inkling of critical thought. Even lurkers on this forum know better than that.

People have been permanently banned from this forum--not just restricted to the "opposing idiots" subforum--for far, far less.

[RedskinUltra4]

I know I'm late to the party here but the point the WSWS was making should be a given for socialists.

The fundamental division in society is class (i.e. the massive social inequality that exists between the very wealthy and the vast majority of society). That is not to say that race/ethnicity is irrelevant or that racial disparities aren't historical injustices that need to be remedied. We need to uphold the primacy of the class struggle above identity politics and a narrow focus on race that divides the working-class and only benefits a small social layer of a particular minority group.

[A Marxist Historian]

I know I'm late to the party here but the point the WSWS was making should be a given for socialists.

The fundamental division in society is class (i.e. the massive social inequality that exists between the very wealthy and the vast majority of society). That is not to say that race/ethnicity is irrelevant or that racial disparities aren't historical injustices that need to be remedied. We need to uphold the primacy of the class struggle above identity politics and a narrow focus on race that divides the working-class and only benefits a small social layer of a particular minority group.

"Redskin"? A very suspicious monicker. You wouldn't happen to be a skinhead?

In the United States of America, and a lot of other places too, racial oppression is key to what capitalism is all about, and has been since the first American colonies were founded.

Fighting racial oppression in the USA is the farthest thing from "identity politics." There can never be a proletarian revolution without the interrupted work of the Second American Revolution, the so called "Civil War," being completed as part of that.

As Karl Marx put it, labor cannot be liberated in the white skins while in the black skin it is branded.

-M.H.-

[l'Enfermé]

No it's not, eliminating "racial oppression" actually makes capitalism much more smoother and stabler.

[Jimmie Higgins]

No it's not, eliminating "racial oppression" actually makes capitalism much more smoother and stabler.Yes that's why the ruling class just loves to look back at the urban rebellions and black power movement of the late 1960s or the Populist movement or the Radical Reconstruction period as "the good old days".

Racial oppression is the thing that helps keep the class system in order for our common oppressors. They created these structures, they maintain them, they have and will resort to terrorism to prevent any meaningful challenges. On the other hand the working class has always been strongest when we have been able to begin to bridge this and fight as a more united class. There are countless examples, but one close to home for me is how CP members in San Francisco convinced mostly white dockworkers to appeal to the local black community (blacks had been used as scabs and so many unionists actually expressed a lot of anti-black sentiment) to support the strike and I don't think the SF General Strike would have happened the same way without black-white class unity.

[l'Enfermé]

How does racial oppression keep the class system in order for our common oppressors in Japan, where the population is almost 99 percent Japanese? What about China? Racial minorities in China are more privileged than the main Han ethnic group, with the exception of the Uyghurs and Tibetans. The 4 biggest "ethnic minorities" in China, the Zhuang, Manchu, Hui and the Miao are probably better off than the Han. Japan and China, by the way, have some of the world's biggest proletarian populations.

So is the US such a magical place where it's necessary to maintain discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in order to maintain the bourgeois order, or is racial discrimination in reality an impediment towards a more stable bourgeois rule, because without it there's less for the working class to revolt against?

[milkmiku]

How does racial oppression keep the class system in order for our common oppressors in Japan, where the population is almost 99 percent Japanese? What about China? Racial minorities in China are more privileged than the main Han ethnic group, with the exception of the Uyghurs and Tibetans. The 4 biggest "ethnic minorities" in China, the Zhuang, Manchu, Hui and the Miao are probably better off than the Han. Japan and China, by the way, have some of the world's biggest proletarian populations.

So is the US such a magical place where it's necessary to maintain discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in order to maintain the bourgeois order, or is racial discrimination in reality an impediment towards a more stable bourgeois rule, because without it there's less for the working class to revolt against?


Let's not forget Korea, the Philippines, and Singapore. Western leftist see everything through Western eyes. I find my self thinking that if people would quit seeing racism in everything, they'd finally start combating real racism and shit would get done.

[A Marxist Historian]

How does racial oppression keep the class system in order for our common oppressors in Japan, where the population is almost 99 percent Japanese? What about China? Racial minorities in China are more privileged than the main Han ethnic group, with the exception of the Uyghurs and Tibetans. The 4 biggest "ethnic minorities" in China, the Zhuang, Manchu, Hui and the Miao are probably better off than the Han. Japan and China, by the way, have some of the world's biggest proletarian populations.

So is the US such a magical place where it's necessary to maintain discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in order to maintain the bourgeois order, or is racial discrimination in reality an impediment towards a more stable bourgeois rule, because without it there's less for the working class to revolt against?

Yeah, Japan and China have a very different social dynamic than the USA. Especially monoracial Japan.

But in Japan, racism was equally important but in a completely different way. Japanese racial superiority over everyone else was a large part of what the old imperial system was all about. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to that once and for all, and the Japanese ruling class have been licking American boots ever since, and would not dare to claim that Japanese are racially superior to white people. Black people perhaps, and other Asians perhaps too, but never white people, at least not white Americans.

By the way, the Ainu and the Korean immigrants do certainly get the crappy end of the stick, and that does help, in a small scale way, to keep Japanese workers less rebellious.

As for China, China had a revolution you may recall, and that's exactly why the minority peoples are treated relatively decently. If capitalism is ever really restored in China, I'll bet the minority peoples rapidly get shoved into a status like that of black people in America.

-M.H.-

[Jimmie Higgins]

How does racial oppression keep the class system in order for our common oppressors in Japan, where the population is almost 99 percent Japanese? What about China? Racial minorities in China are more privileged than the main Han ethnic group, with the exception of the Uyghurs and Tibetans. The 4 biggest "ethnic minorities" in China, the Zhuang, Manchu, Hui and the Miao are probably better off than the Han. Japan and China, by the way, have some of the world's biggest proletarian populations.

So is the US such a magical place where it's necessary to maintain discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in order to maintain the bourgeois order, or is racial discrimination in reality an impediment towards a more stable bourgeois rule, because without it there's less for the working class to revolt against?

Anyone with the ability to read a mainstream newspaper should be able to figure out that different countries often have different scapegoats and oppressed groups. In some places it's Roma, in others it's Coptic Christians, or North African immigrants or whatever. Ruling classes take whatever raw materials that exist (prejudices leftover from feudal societies or entirely new divisions) to divide and rule the society. That's the important thing, the divide and rule, not specifically who - it just happens that african americans are the go-to scapegoat historically for US rulers.

A united working class is not a "more stable" society for the ruling class - it's a major fucking problem for them. This is the WHOLE REASON racial codes were developed in the US. In early colonial times, life expectancy was short and so the rich actually favored white indentured servants over Indian or African slaves who cost more and were likely to die in a few years anyway. Two things changed this - one was the the plantations got bigger and colonial life easier so life expectancies became longer than a term of indentured servitude which made slaves more cost-effective and, more importantly for this discussion, white and black servants united and rose up together against the rich. The response from colonial governments was increased segregation and restrictions on the rights of black slaves. In the populist movement a similar thing happened where white and black sharecroppers organized together to fight against their common conditions: the Democrats destroyed this with a 2 part strategy of cooption of the white populists and some of their reform demands while increased racist attacks on blacks and more restrictions. Again after the civil rights and black power movement, the Democrats co-opted the middle class part of the black power movement (where black power meant black businesses and politicians) while increasing repression on the working class oriented side of the movement followed by a "war on crime" targeting black communities. So each time in US history that blacks and whites have begun to organize in concert on a class basis, we see a clear effort from the top of society to punish a scapegoated section as an effort to drive a wedge into the movement and reaffirm racial divides in the class.

So no, they don't see a united working class as a stable society, they see it as a nightmare and threat.

[l'Enfermé]

Let's not forget Korea, the Philippines, and Singapore. Western leftist see everything through Western eyes. I find my self thinking that if people would quit seeing racism in everything, they'd finally start combating real racism and shit would get done.
I'm not sure about the Philippines actually, and Singapore is a freaking city-state so who cares, but South Korea, absolutely. South Korea, with a population of 50 million, is like 99.5 percent Korean.


Anyone with the ability to read a mainstream newspaper should be able to figure out that different countries often have different scapegoats and oppressed groups. In some places it's Roma, in others it's Coptic Christians, or North African immigrants or whatever.
Who are the scapegoats in advanced capitalist societies like South Korea and Japan? I thought racial discrimination is necessary to maintain capitalism?


Ruling classes take whatever raw materials that exist (prejudices leftover from feudal societies or entirely new divisions) to divide and rule the society. That's the important thing, the divide and rule, not specifically who - it just happens that african americans are the go-to scapegoat historically for US rulers.
That's not really true. What about the Irish and the Italians?

What about before the "Great Migration" of blacks from the rural south to the industrial heartland in the Northern states, which happened during WWI? Before it, the Northeast and the Midwest, the most advanced, in the capitalist sense, regions of the United States, the black population was insignificant, less than 2 percent, nobody gave a shit about them at the time in the North.



So no, they don't see a united working class as a stable society, they see it as a nightmare and threat.


The most stable and harmonious capitalist societies, the capitalist societies where the hegemony of the bourgeoisie was the least threatened in history, the the old welfare states(the ones being dismantled right now)of Europe, were the freest and least discriminatory societies in modern history.

"Racism" and "discrimination" and "racial oppression" are in no way inherent to bourgeois society, and in modern times, impede the perpetuation of capitalist society. This is a fact. Again, look at Japan. The world's third biggest economy and home to one of the world's largest working class. Racial oppression is non-existent and the capitalist hegemony is not threatened by this fact. The Japanese working class is not divided by ethnic or racial lines, yet the Japanese bourgeoisie isn't afraid of this state of affairs, it doesn't consider it a "nightmare", it's not threatened by it.

If capitalism that isn't supported by racial oppression is possible in a capitalist society like Japan, which in many ways is more advanced than American society, it's possible any-fucking-where, including America. Capitalist society runs well without any "scapegoats". Egyptian capitalism isn't supported by the oppression of Coptic Christians like you implied, in fact, it's hindered by it; and the rational section of the Egyptian bourgeoisie recognize this and opposes the discrimination Copts face on these grounds.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Who are the scapegoats in advanced capitalist societies like South Korea and Japan? I thought racial discrimination is necessary to maintain capitalism?No as I said in my last post, different ruling groups have different strategies.


That's not really true. What about the Irish and the Italians?Yes the Irish WERE oppresses, as were southern blacks at the time under slavery then anti-reconstruction terror and then Jim-Crow. The ruling class can multi-task and so these oppressions were just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course while it's useless to rank oppressions, to back up my claim that anti-black racism is more of a historical keystone for the US class system all one has to do is realize that while anti-Irish oppression was intense, it has passed as new waves of immigrants have replaced them as the target of nativist xenophobia... but anti-black racism has gone through two transformations and is still around in a major way, locking up blacks similar to how Irish once took up 90% of urban prisons.


What about before the "Great Migration" of blacks from the rural south to the industrial heartland in the Northern states, which happened during WWI? Before it, the Northeast and the Midwest, the most advanced, in the capitalist sense, regions of the United States, the black population was insignificant, less than 2 percent, nobody gave a shit about them at the time in the North. Is that why they were segregated in the north? There were different conditions between life in the north and life in the south but northern "divide and rule" generally focused on divisions between irish or chineese - but blacks were also used as strike-breakers... again, these divisions as a way to increase INSTABILITY for the working class.


"Racism" and "discrimination" and "racial oppression" are in no way inherent to bourgeois society, and in modern times, No, again different ruling groups have favored different strategies of divide and rule - but in the US, the prominent one is race (not that gender or sexual or other divisions are less important).


impede the perpetuation of capitalist society.No, modern racism in the US developed along with the US ruling class - first by the landowners, then by the capitalists.


This is a fact. Again, look at Japan. The world's third biggest economy and home to one of the world's largest working class. Racial oppression is non-existent and the capitalist hegemony is not threatened by this fact. The Japanese working class is not divided by ethnic or racial lines, yet the Japanese bourgeoisie isn't afraid of this state of affairs, it doesn't consider it a "nightmare", it's not threatened by it. There is no forms of oppression or internal class divisions in Japan!?:blink: You are mixing and matching - if you want to talk about the centrality of racism to US ruling classes, then we have to discuss US history, not Japan. If you want to talk more broadly about how the ruling class divides the population in order to secure it's own dominance, then we have to speak more broadly than the kinds of racism found in the US.


If capitalism that isn't supported by racial oppression is possible in a capitalist society like Japan, which in many ways is more advanced than American society, it's possible any-fucking-where, including America. Capitalist society runs well without any "scapegoats". Egyptian capitalism isn't supported by the oppression of Coptic Christians like you implied, in fact, it's hindered by it; and the rational section of the Egyptian bourgeoisie recognize this and opposes the discrimination Copts face on these grounds.Yes some sections do - but not the ruling class which is tied to the military who ACTUALLY STAGED "SPONTANIOUS" ATTACKS ON COPTS LAST YEAR!

When the facts are against your argument in a specific historical example, you switch to abstract generalities, but then if I argue on that general basis, you duck back down into specific examples and minutia. I don't know if you're an national-anarchist or some kind of "tribal-socialist" or what, but there's some kind of ideological blockage keeping you from seeing a basic reality that Marxists and many other radicals and even non-radicals have observed for 200 years. Again, the US ruling class relies on racism, specifically anti-black racism, as their tool of rule of choice - but all capitalist ruling classes, even if they don't favor racial divisions, must divide the working class in order to keep ruling.

"They divide each to conquor both" as Fredric Douglas said or "White skin [in the US] can not free itself where black skin is branded" as Marx more or less said (I'm paraphrasing both). Or any of Marx's later writings on the Irish in England and so on.

Ruling classes in capitalism have to divde us and keep us fighting over crumbs for their system to work - this can be anything from dividing workers and creating different tiered benifit packages or cultivating professional snobbery for higher up workers against lower; to sexual oppression; to racial oppression.

[A Marxist Historian]

Anyone with the ability to read a mainstream newspaper should be able to figure out that different countries often have different scapegoats and oppressed groups. In some places it's Roma, in others it's Coptic Christians, or North African immigrants or whatever. Ruling classes take whatever raw materials that exist (prejudices leftover from feudal societies or entirely new divisions) to divide and rule the society. That's the important thing, the divide and rule, not specifically who - it just happens that african americans are the go-to scapegoat historically for US rulers.

A united working class is not a "more stable" society for the ruling class - it's a major fucking problem for them. This is the WHOLE REASON racial codes were developed in the US. In early colonial times, life expectancy was short and so the rich actually favored white indentured servants over Indian or African slaves who cost more and were likely to die in a few years anyway. Two things changed this - one was the the plantations got bigger and colonial life easier so life expectancies became longer than a term of indentured servitude which made slaves more cost-effective and, more importantly for this discussion, white and black servants united and rose up together against the rich. The response from colonial governments was increased segregation and restrictions on the rights of black slaves. In the populist movement a similar thing happened where white and black sharecroppers organized together to fight against their common conditions: the Democrats destroyed this with a 2 part strategy of cooption of the white populists and some of their reform demands while increased racist attacks on blacks and more restrictions. Again after the civil rights and black power movement, the Democrats co-opted the middle class part of the black power movement (where black power meant black businesses and politicians) while increasing repression on the working class oriented side of the movement followed by a "war on crime" targeting black communities. So each time in US history that blacks and whites have begun to organize in concert on a class basis, we see a clear effort from the top of society to punish a scapegoated section as an effort to drive a wedge into the movement and reaffirm racial divides in the class.

So no, they don't see a united working class as a stable society, they see it as a nightmare and threat.

Overall a good post, a couple clarifications.

Firstly, in America blacks aren't at the bottom just because of "divide and rule." It's the heritage of chattel slavery, a crucial formative experience for US capitalism, which could never have gotten off the ground without it. Slavery was abolished in the Civil War, but black people were not liberated, they remained an oppressed race-color caste whose oppression still is key to understanding America and how it works. The heritage of slavery is still with us to this day, and is the fundamental unsolved task in America still left over from the era of the bourgeois revolutions.

Secondly, on the Populists, there's a lot of mythology about them that was spread by New Left historians like Lawrence Goodwyn and Southern white liberals like C. Vann Woodward. Populism was fundamentally a white segregationist reform movement of business oriented, commercially minded white farmers, who hated the railroads and bankers for solid economic reasons that had nothing to do with socialism. They had a thoroughly capitalist vision of a more democratic variety of Americanism not terribly different from that of the later "progressives."

In which black populists had a "separate but equal" but thoroughly subordinate place, manipulated by racist leaders of the Populist movement because blacks hadn't yet lost the right to vote in the South. When Populism collapsed, Southern ex-populists became the very worst lynchers and racists, like Tom Watson.

There's a newish book, "the Populist Vision" by Charles Postel, that has changed the point of view of the American historical profession about Populism. Unfortunately the word hasn't quite gotten out yet to a lot of leftists (including the Spartacists BTW). And Postel himself is definitely a radical, I've heard him speak. Quite anti-capitalist.

-M.H.-

[Positivist]

Ugh the SEP just keeps on sinking.

[RedskinUltra4]

"Redskin"? A very suspicious monicker. You wouldn't happen to be a skinhead?

In the United States of America, and a lot of other places too, racial oppression is key to what capitalism is all about, and has been since the first American colonies were founded.

Fighting racial oppression in the USA is the farthest thing from "identity politics." There can never be a proletarian revolution without the interrupted work of the Second American Revolution, the so called "Civil War," being completed as part of that.

As Karl Marx put it, labor cannot be liberated in the white skins while in the black skin it is branded.

-M.H.-

I can't say I disagree with any of that. I was trying to make a more general point and objecting to thread author's characterization of the WSWS coverage.

What I consider identity politics is the promotion by liberals and "socialists" of race as the defining division in modern society. This has been on full display in the liberal media (e.g. MSNBC) with its sole focus on the racial aspects of the Zimmerman/Martin shooting and round-the-clock speculation on an allegedly racist motive. The flock of scoundrels like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who descended on Florida to contain people's rage into safe channels should speak volumes.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the individuals and organizations which obsess over race, gender, and sexual orientation are almost always those who orbit the Democratic Party and seek to push it to the Left through protest politics. These are middle-class progressives who want social reforms and cultural change but are entirely complacent and hostile to the independence of the working-class as a political force based on socialist principles.

And there's nothing "suspicious" about my user name. Communist skinheads are known as Redskins.

[A Marxist Historian]

I can't say I disagree with any of that. I was trying to make a more general point and objecting to thread author's characterization of the WSWS coverage.

What I consider identity politics is the promotion by liberals and "socialists" of race as the defining division in modern society. This has been on full display in the liberal media (e.g. MSNBC) with its sole focus on the racial aspects of the Zimmerman/Martin shooting and round-the-clock speculation on an allegedly racist motive. The flock of scoundrels like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who descended on Florida to contain people's rage into safe channels should speak volumes.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the individuals and organizations which obsess over race, gender, and sexual orientation are almost always those who orbit the Democratic Party and seek to push it to the Left through protest politics. These are middle-class progressives who want social reforms and cultural change but are entirely complacent and hostile to the independence of the working-class as a political force based on socialist principles.

And there's nothing "suspicious" about my user name. Communist skinheads are known as Redskins.

Ok, then you are a skinhead, one confused enough to think he is a "communist." Now, I suppose l'enferme deserves a minimal pass on his boneheaded denial of the significance of white racism, as he lives in a country with no black people. But any white American who doesn't understand that white racism is a large part of what America is all about is effectively a white racist, whether he realizes it or not. And your boneheaded, skinheaded denial that racism has everything to do with the Trayvon Martin case proves that.

So it's not surprising that you like the SEP.

Some 20-30 years ago, I was at a mobilization vs. the Ku Klux Klan organized by the Spartacists. A so called "redskin" wanted to join and be a marshal. He was told that he could, as long as he first tattooed "anti-racist" on his forehead.

Ultimately, class not race or gender is the decisive axis of all class societies. But America is a deeply, profoundly racist country, in which the oppression of the working class is intimately linked with racial oppression. More so than just about any other country, with the solitary exception of South Africa.

Why is that? Due to the peculiar course of American history.

Nowadays, due to the economic, social and cultural domination of America over the world, American racial patterns and categories are getting pretty universal. Which is to some degree a return to the past, as America is far from the only country with racial chattel slavery in its past. Though the American slavery system was by far the biggest, most profitable and most influential in modern history.

-M.H.-

[Thirsty Crow]

And your boneheaded, skinheaded denial that racism has everything to do with the Trayvon Martin case proves that.

You do realize that not all skinheads are boneheads, and that there exists a significant tradition of actual redskins? I assume that your prejudice keeps you from soberly assessing the point Redskin makes, that point being that the discourse of racism can also function as a diversion from issues of class in the hands of liberals. I don't understand what's so controversial about that.

[Jimmie Higgins]

that point being that the discourse of racism can also function as a diversion from issues of class in the hands of liberals. I don't understand what's so controversial about that.Well I don't think that point fits with class realities in the US. I think this "race is a distraction" argument misses the mark - liberals always tend to want to separate out the middle class demands and marginalize the working class ones and so "talking about race" isn't the issue, the issue is liberalism tries to take the class politics out of race when liberals are forced to talk about this issue. So liberals "distract" and "muddle" the issues, not talking about race.

The dominant liberal mode of thought is colorblindness - that is they would rather not talk about race at all if they can help it. Look at Obama's handling of race... he won't mention it (unless chastising poor black fathers) until the right-wing basically forces his hand - and then he almost always equivocates or backs down.

But of course what would we expect from a Presidential-level politician. But it's true of the vast majority of NGOs since at least the early 90s too.


What I consider identity politics is the promotion by liberals and "socialists" of race as the defining division in modern society. This has been on full display in the liberal media (e.g. MSNBC) with its sole focus on the racial aspects of the Zimmerman/Martin shooting and round-the-clock speculation on an allegedly racist motive. The flock of scoundrels like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who descended on Florida to contain people's rage into safe channels should speak volumes.I think the silence speaks more than the volumes when you stack the occasional Jena 6 protest or Zimmerman one-off protest to the actual level of racism in the US right now - particularly anti-black but anti-latino and anti-arab racism are also at high levels.

What do most of the liberal anti-racism groups do? Hire lawyers, file legal cases, gather money to support the Democrats. What do they have to say about people being pulled over in every city daily for "driving while black" what do they have to say about systemic poverty and about the prison system? No the criticize hip-hop more than they criticize Prosecutors.

The "containing" aspect of what some of the more accommodating anti-racist NGOs or politicians comes not from talking about "race" but from channeling class-anger about racism into supporting Democrats or whatnot. Liberals accept systemic racism - or at least think their hands are tied to do anything about it. They will generally only go after the more obvious forms of direct and personal racism because their strategy (at least since the end of the civil rights/black power era) is not to help people organize themselves for their own defense and to make their own demands, but to win in the courts and the polling booths. So they don't want to spend money and energy on things that will not easily aid these goals: obvious examples of racism rather than the systemic racism of pretext police stops or bad home loans or re-segregated and underfunded schools; middle class legal clients who don't "scare whites" because they are poor or maybe have some history with the police or courts; they argue for diversity rather than justice because "justice" scares the officials they want to appeal to.

Finally, I think your view that "race distracts" from class is a false view. It counter-poses race and class whereas in the US these things are linked and IMO we have to see systemic racism as an attack on our class. I think saying that people being upset at racism distracts from the class struggle is like arguing that people being upset by home forclosures are distracting from the class struggle. Of course there can be liberal or radical responses to racism or foreclosures, but they are fundamentally class issues in the US.

[A Marxist Historian]

You do realize that not all skinheads are boneheads, and that there exists a significant tradition of actual redskins? I assume that your prejudice keeps you from soberly assessing the point Redskin makes, that point being that the discourse of racism can also function as a diversion from issues of class in the hands of liberals. I don't understand what's so controversial about that.

Arev there "actual redskins"? I've never met one, but I concede the possibility. This Redskin is no red, as he denies that the murder of Trayvon Martin was racist.

Can "the discourse of racism" (gawd, I hate that academic gobbledegook, I see too much of it professionally, I'm sad to see it here) distract from class issues? Of course, but that has nothing to do with the Trayvon Martin case, which is all about white racism pure and simple.

That Trayvon Martin happens to have been lower on the socioeconomic totem pole than the racist who murdered him is interesting, but not really what this is all about.

Even upper class black people are victims of racism in this racist society. Hell, even a prof who was a personal friend of Obama got victimized in racist fashion by white cops in Boston a few years ago, and Obama himself did not dare to stand up for his friend, as he know that this is a white racist society, and if he wants to be Prez, he has to accept that.

-M.H.-