Vol. 77/No. 31      August 26, 2013

Working people should welcome Attorney General Eric Holder’s July 25 pledge to restore voting rights following a Supreme Court ruling striking them down. We should closely watch how competently and thoroughly the Justice Department pursues reimposing this historic victory for the working class, so easily dismissed by the majority of the black-robed administrators of class justice.

The working class and its allies must organize a counteroffensive against the Supreme Court’s move to deal a blow to one of the central codified gains of the massive, proletarian Black rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. We must recognize and act on the understanding that we can’t simply leave protecting this — or any other working-class gain — in the hands of the federal government.

Our first such opportunity will be the Aug. 24 March on Washington, called by Black rights organizations, dozens of unions, women’s rights groups and many others. Organizers have put defense of the Voting Rights Act at the center of the action.

The Supreme Court unconstitutionally threw out the list of state and local governments required to get approval from the federal government for any changes in their voting laws with the argument that the list was based on outdated criteria. The real question is: have conditions in the South and elsewhere changed such that there is no longer a need for federal intervention to prevent denial of the most basic democratic voting rights? The answer is clearly no. Voter disenfranchisement persists and has taken on new insidious forms. If conditions have changed enough to make this requirement unnecessary in some areas, the onus should be on each jurisdiction to prove so and request its removal on that basis.

Many of the rules used to disenfranchise working people are presented as efforts to prevent “voting fraud” and include restrictive ID requirements and other red tape. Such policing of the electorate will impede many who are legally entitled to vote from doing so. Other methods include restricting voting hours and other administrative changes that create inconveniences that fall with great disproportion on working people.

We should also join march organizers in drawing attention to the millions of working people, in vastly disproportionate numbers African-American, who are legally branded as “felons” and thereby denied their voting rights — a question not even touched by the Voting Rights Act. The fact is the numbers in this category and the restrictions imposed on them has only grown in recent decades.

History is not simply the past. We need to understand the present arising out of a history of class struggle, look at all political questions from the point of view of the interests of the working class and act on that basis. The working class in the U.S. was dealt its greatest historic defeat with the bloody overthrow of Radical Reconstruction in the years that followed the Civil War — the second American Revolution — and the imposition of Jim Crow, policed by vigilante thugs and cops, who were often one and the same.

The Black rights struggle nearly a century later was able to push back, but not overturn, that counterrevolution. That battle permanently strengthened the fighting capacity and foundation for unity of the working class. It put the toilers in a far stronger position to advance our common interests along the road to wresting political power from the capitalists exploiters — the third and final American Revolution, which will open the final battle to end for all time every form of exploitation and oppression perpetuated by class society.

See you in Washington!
 
 
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Under pressure, Justice Dept. vows to restore voting rights
 
 
 
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