New York meeting: ‘Join fight against US war drive’

BY MAGGIE TROWE

NEW YORK — The Socialist Workers Party is carrying out a communist campaign against imperialism and war, New York SWP organizer Norton Sandler told a special meeting at the party’s new hall here Nov. 21. The meeting came on the heels of escalating war moves in the Middle East by imperialist rulers in Washington, Paris and elsewhere, intertwined with assaults on workers and political rights at home.

“Communists Campaign Against U.S. War Drive: Protest Cop Spying on Muslims and Mosques,” read the banner behind the speakers, a course to combat the rulers’ efforts to take advantage of reactionary terror assaults by Islamic State in France to attack the working class. More than 90 people attended the meeting.

“As-Salaam-Alaikum,” Sandler said. “That’s what SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes said when he spoke at a big party-sponsored meeting shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda-organized attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”

In their assault on our class, the rulers’ biggest target then, and now, is the section of the working class who are Muslims and Arabs, Sandler said. “Communists know the rights of the working class are what is always at stake when the capitalist rulers go to war.”

And the drive to war is being ramped up, Sandler said, in Washington, Paris and other imperialist capitals.

You see more soldiers and cops in Penn Station and Grand Central Station, he said. And the Bill de Blasio administration in New York is adding 560 counterterrorism intelligence cops to what is already a larger force than most countries have.

“The New York Socialist Workers Party plans to visit mosques and Muslim communities, get to know people and lend our support,” he said to applause. “I invite anyone who would like to join in to see me and sign up.”

“After Sept. 11 we discussed how the rulers and their government would try to make it sound like a classless ‘we’ made up the U.S. populace,” he said. “The same thing is developing in the wake of the murderous attack in Paris.”

The French legislature voted overwhelmingly to impose and extend a far-reaching state of emergency that gives cops more sweeping powers and guts political rights, Sandler said. There have been hundreds of raids inside France, with no warrant required. The French capitalist government wants to reinforce anti-working-class statutes, passed during French imperialism’s bloody but failed fight against the Algerian liberation struggle in the 1950s and ’60s, that allow for far-reaching spying and stripping citizenship from those named as terrorists.

The meeting featured debate on several questions. One participant said it was her opinion that the reactionary, terrorist Islamic State was growing and asked what was its attraction for young people and workers.

Islamic State attracts few youth

“I don’t think they attract many at all,” said Barnes, speaking from the audience. “There are millions and millions of Muslims and Arabs in France. Only a miniscule number are attracted to Islamic State. Go and sell the Militant at mosques and neighborhoods around them. You won’t find many favorable to Islamic State.”

Barnes contrasted the Algerian war for independence from France to the development of the brutal anti-working-class Islamic State.

IS was built by former officers from Saddam Hussein’s army — broken up by the U.S. invasion of Iraq — who merged with a handful of al-Qaeda terror adherents, Barnes said.

Young people in Algeria were fighting for their independence against extreme French brutality. Islamic State and its terror attacks has nothing to do with that, he said. It’s more like the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s.

“We’re in a slow, slow depression,” Sandler said, “You don’t have bread lines like the 1930s, but it is depression conditions for working people and things are getting worse. That’s what motivates workers to go hear candidates like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, who say they’re something different, and why the Socialist Workers Party gets more of a hearing than in decades.”

Working-class struggles

Strengthening working-class struggles is part and parcel of the fight against imperialism and war, Sandler said. “The SWP tries to help lead and expand the struggles, win solidarity and increase confidence. We are part of strikes by airport workers, the fight for $15 an hour by fast-food and other workers. We are part of the United Auto Workers striking against two-tier wages at Kohler Co. in Wisconsin, the fight of Steelworkers against the 95-day lockout by Allegheny Technologies and against U.S. Steel and ArcelorMittal’s concession demands.”

Naomi Craine, a leader of the party in New York, chaired the meeting. She introduced several people active in labor and social struggles — Denise Barlage, a member of OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart), who is part of a delegation touring the U.S. to build support for Black Friday actions calling for $15 and full-time hours; Vonie Long, president of United Steelworkers Local 1165 in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, that is fighting concession demands from the bosses and organizing support for locked-out workers at Allegheny Technologies Inc.; and Ikea Coney, who has been active in the fight against police brutality and whose son Darrin Manning was beaten by Philadelphia cops last year.

The fight against anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred is a burning question in the U.S. and the world, Sandler said. “The Socialist Workers Party insists that Israel has the right to exist. We support the just demands of the Palestinian people against oppression by the Israeli government and their demand for a contiguous Palestinian state. We say that Jews from anywhere in the world who feel under attack must be able to return to Israel.”

Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Philadelphia in 2015, described how campaigners spoke for the working class in the election, joining in workers’ pickets and struggles, from defense of the Americans with Disabilities Act to the fight against police brutality. He thanked supporters in New York and elsewhere for their help campaigning there and in the several-week effort to collect nearly 3,000 signatures in workers districts to put Hart and John Staggs for City Council on the ballot.

Since the Nov. 3 election Hart, Staggs and SWP supporters have been part of the Nov. 10 Fight for $15 actions, the airport workers’ strike and the Communications Workers protest against Verizon’s concession demands,” he said.

“We advocate independent political action, the formation of a labor party based on the unions,” Hart said, “and we help build confidence and consciousness of who are our allies and who are not.”

A special display at the meeting featured highlights of the Philadelphia campaign, including considerable press coverage Hart and Staggs received.

Building an international movement

“Our perspective is to build a communist world movement of parties like the SWP,” said Steve Clark, a leader of SWP in New York and member of the speakers’ panel. Our sister party, the Socialist Workers Party of Iran, was forged there through the mass mobilizations in 1978 against the brutal anti-working-class regime of the U.S.-backed Shah.

“The SWP in Iran was an organization of communists recruited and trained in the U.S., in the SWP here,” Clark said. “It was, like its U.S. counterpart, a party imbued and inspired by the lessons and example of the Cuban Revolution.”

Clark described how the Iranian SWP took part in the massive uprising in February 1979 that toppled the Shah, set up workers councils in factories and neighborhoods and fought, arms in hand, against the invasion of Iran by Saddam’s Iraqi regime in 1980. The Iranian SWP was virtually the only voice in defense of the Kurdish liberation struggle in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and in defense of other oppressed nationalities. It took part in oil strikes in the Arab region around Isfahan and in demonstrations for women’s rights. The SWP ran for president of Iran in 1980, and was on the ballot.

“That party set an example of the kind of campaign, the kind of voice for the working class and oppressed that the SWP 2016 campaign can be,” Clark said.

The 1980s counterrevolution in Iran didn’t crush the working class or silence the voice of communism, he said. The Talaye Porsoo publishing house has produced more than 40 Pathfinder titles in Farsi and sold more than 50,000 copies of books with a communist perspective in Iran and the broader region, including in Afghanistan and Kurdish regions.

Volunteers prepared a delicious meal for the meeting. A collection raised nearly $9,000 to build the party.

The New York hall, Sandler announced, will be the headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party 2016 presidential campaign.

Related articles:
Washington, Paris ramp up war moves, attack rights
Campaign against imperialist war! Protest attacks on Muslims, mosques!

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