Vol. 80/No. 11 March 21, 2016
(Commentary)
Start with the class struggle, not capitalist laws, courts
The article began with the partisan debate over when and how to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of Antonin Scalia, as if that had any importance to working people.
President Barack Obama and the meritocratic layer of lawyers, professors and functionaries he is part of favor the appointment of a liberal justice who will use the court to make “progressive” medicine, regardless of the law. Many on the right of bourgeois politics favor stalling until after the election, hoping for a less liberal new president who will nominate a like-minded judge to do the same.
Class-conscious workers have no interest in how long the Supreme Court seat stays vacant, or in any way “oiling the machinery of exploitation in order to make it function more smoothly and effectively,” as Socialist Workers Party leader James Cannon wrote in 1937 when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to enlarge the Supreme Court to pack it with justices that agreed with him (see reprint on this page).
History shows that even small concessions can’t be won “without the most determined struggle,” Cannon wrote. “And a genuine rectification of the gross inequalities and injustices of capitalism is to be attained only by the development of these struggles to their logical and inevitable climax — the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. A ‘liberal’ Supreme Court can’t and won’t aid these struggles. And a ‘reactionary’ Supreme Court can’t stop them.”
Cannon wrote those words when the class struggle was on the rise. Workers were building powerful industrial unions through sit-down strikes and broad regional organizing drives supported by farmers and the unemployed. It made it easier for workers to see this was the road forward, not trying to put “friends” on the bench.
Similar editorials appeared in the Northwest Organizer, the newspaper of the Minneapolis Teamsters Joint Council, whose ranks included members of the Socialist Workers Party who helped lead labor battles throughout the region. The paper ran scores of articles reporting how capitalist courts ruled for the bosses and issued injunctions against the unions.
Class struggle key
Communists don’t start with the Constitution or the courts. We start with the class struggle, defending ourselves from the rulers’ attempts to divide us and undermine our confidence and class-consciousness on the road to taking political power.
The Constitution, including its amendments, is an instrument of capitalist rule. But it is marked by the impact of the revolutionary war that overthrew British colonialism and the second American Revolution that brought down slavery.
Farmers, laborers and artisans fought for and won the “Bill of Rights” amendments after the northern businessmen and southern plantation owners who wrote the Constitution declined to include protections against government attacks on freedom of speech, the right to worship and the right to bear arms, against denial of due process of law, against unreasonable search and seizure.
The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, by-products of victory of the North in the bloody four-year Civil War, prohibited slavery and guaranteed equal protection of the law and the right to vote. The enforcement of these protections, as Nimtz points out, has only been possible through persistent working-class struggle.
Further gains were registered in struggle in winning women’s suffrage and lowering the voting age to 18.
Having no solution to the capitalist crisis other than deepening attacks on working people — and fearing the inevitable response by workers and farmers — the propertied rulers have turned increasingly to growing centralization of power in the executive branch. No war since World War II has been declared by Congress; all have been launched by presidential action. Unelected federal regulatory agencies decide the outcome of union struggles to the detriment of working people, control land use to the detriment of farmers and ranchers and dictate other important questions for our class and its allies.
Workers get off track if we spend energy trying to divine which judges will act more or less in our interests, any more than if we follow the ill-advised exhortations from labor officials to vote for the “lesser evil” of the capitalist politicians.
We need to rely on ourselves, on our class. On transforming ourselves as we fight, chart a course to overthrow the dictatorship of capital and build a society based on human solidarity and organized by self-confident workers and farmers. As a by-product of that revolutionary struggle, we can extract some concessions.
Related articles:
‘Workers need revolution, not judicial reform’
Letter from a reader
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