Free Assange and Manning! Expose the Imperialist Courts!
The jailing of Manning and Assange for exposing the crimes against humanity committed by the U.S. imperialist war machine belies the professed pursuit of justice by the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Hague, and the U.S. grand juries seeking Assange’s extradition. The U.S. government’s own documentation showed that the U.S. military assaults in Afghanistan and Iraq resulted in regular murder of civilians, justified as collateral damage daily on Fox, CNN and MSNBC. Manning and Assange revealed documentation of what we already knew. Theirs was a service to humanity, yet the whistleblowers are in lock up or exile and the criminal heads of state Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump continue to support or project U.S. imperial might as National Security Advisor Bolton tells the credulous on PBS that the U.S. has never been imperialist!
To exploit the contradictions of imperialisms’ pretense that they are the arbiter of international justice we show how their selective prosecutions ignore imperialism’s own crimes yet prosecute lackeys who are no longer useful. Therefore revolutionary workers and socialists do not raise demands in the workers movement that create illusions in imperialist courts or capitalist state institutions. The same principle applies when we fight the capitalist state in every urban center. For example, to fight police brutality, murder and terror the reformists call for “Police Civilian Review Boards” which creates the illusion that with proper “civilian oversight” the institutions of the capitalist state can be made impartial. All our work as Marxists is to expose the class nature of the state (every state). So that we do not create such illusions by calling on the police to jail killer cops, we explain that in order to “JAIL KILLER COPS”, the workers and oppressed need to use their own mighty self-organization. To activate the contradiction we call for popular assemblies, worker/black/brown self-defense (militia) and workers tribunals and explain how only working class democracy can end police terror and the causes of state repression. If under the pressure of workers organizing and struggle the bourgeoisie decides to jail one of their own, so be it, but our work is to expose the contradictions, turning them into opportunities for the workers movement to develop our own organizational power independent from and opposed to the bourgeois state. Likewise with rape in the armed forces. We call for the unionization and rank and file control of the military, election of officers and refusal of illegal orders, not courts martial.
We are all for exposing the contradictions of the capitalists’ state institutions, and especially the ones purporting to render “justice.” Indeed it was U.S. pressure on the ICC which resulted in the shut down of able prosecutors preparing a case against the U.S. for war crimes committed in Afghanistan. Navy Seal whistleblowers are trying to get the word out that their command structure is neck deep in the war crime business, the ruling class is fumble-fucking its attempt to cover up the crimes of U.S. foreign policy.Already the clever Members of Parliament and Peers are suggesting to the May government that Assange be handed over to Sweden to face resurrected rape allegations. This is because they realize the U.S. extradition case is so far based only on the 2010 Manning revelations and is not a very strong case at that. In many places this arrest looks like lap-dogging for the U.S. empire and their pals in the Trump gang. Assange’s arrest took place in the immediate aftermath of U.S. Attorney General Barr’s declaration that he will not be releasing the Mueller report on Russian 2016 election meddling without sanitizing it to suit Trump. So it is clear that Assange must be out of the way and silenced before the 2020 election cycle begins in earnest. We demand freedom for Assange and Manning!
Our united front conception of the defense of political prisoners is derived from the original united front resolution adopted by the Comintern almost 100 years ago. Workers, and oppressed, trade unionists and socialists, we must support freedom for Assange and Manning; striking together with others but marching separately and not mixing our banners with those who raise the Free Assange demands for the WRONG reasons stemming from dangerously wrong analyses! We will march separately from and challenge politically the red/brown alliance salesmen for a unipolar world view in which the Russian and Chinese imperialist states are as “anti-imperialist” as they ever were when they were degenerated and deformed workers’ states. We will not share any platform with Tulsi Gabbard, who is offering her services to Russia as the Democrat Trump replacement, nor with any other bourgeois politicians.
1) How we fight for international justice in crimes against humanity; what we counterpose to the ICC.
To expose the imperialist “justice system” including puppet regime courts, U.S. courts and the ICC, we only need a few examples (such as Noriega in U.S. courts, Saddam in the puppet state trial, Milosevich by the Hague, Omar Al-Bashir in absentia by the ICC). For us in the age of revolution and counter revolution the capitalist national and international courts are no more than a venue for the working class to put the system on trial—a long and honorable tradition practiced by class struggle militants. The bourgeois courts work to foster the illusion that individual criminals are responsible and can be prosecuted to correct the worst and most bloody structural acts of capitalist administration (while of course turning blind eye to the officially sanctioned crimes.) To the bourgeoisie we say we accuse you of a monstrous hypocrisy. Your daily drone killings of civilians are acceptable to your bourgeois morality, yet every act of resistance to imperialism is labeled terrorism: Environmentalists are labeled eco-terrorists, Black Lives Matter activists are labeled Black Extremists, feminists are labeled feminazis and immigrants are labeled rapists, gangsters and terrorists. To these ends journalism is under attack by the state as well as by champions of white nationalism, a Bonapartist presidency-for-life crowd and kluxer-fascists. all for the purpose of imposing the “justice” of the capitalist state, which is all about keeping the capitalist class in power.
We favor and call for international workers tribunals to hear all evidence, clear the innocent and charge the real culprits without exception. This is the legacy of the Dewey Commission on the Moscow Show Trials of the old Bolsheviks.
2) What arguments and demands we make in the meetings for the Defense of Assange, Manning, Snowden and other whistleblowers and class struggle political prisoners?
a) We demand the U.S. military out of the Middle East and Afghanistan! We say cut Israel off: Not a dime for the colonial settler state. We say Down with the monarchies! We see the yearning of the Arab masses for democratic freedoms and say you can’t get them without socialist revolution! No bourgeois forces will ever break completely with their international social class, the imperialists in the first place, and this means your sacrifices will never be rewarded until the Workers and oppressed peoples take all political power and control of all production away from the capitalists.
b) The effect of re-jailing Manning and extradition of Assange is to tell the worker masses that you may not object to war crimes, never mind stopping them. We denounce the courts that jail whistleblowers! We say these courts are toadies of the parasite bourgeoisie! Were the racist murderers of the apartheid state brought to justice? No! The world was treated to ‘truth and reconciliation’ instead, to the cheers of county parish priests, pacifists worldwide and every stock exchange. This is not an example to repeat. We call for political strikes to Free Assange, Manning, Snowden and all political prisoners. We take as our point of historical and strategic reference the method of the International Labor Defense organized by the CP-USA in the 1920s, which relied on the mobilization of the united front independent political action of the workers movement. The most recent examples were the ILWU Local 10 actions to Free Mumia, which while indicative of the way to win, and exemplary, were limited to an almost symbolic extent.
3) We advocate the building of United Front work based on the method contained in “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Transitional Program.” This is not just a touchtone of beliefs for us but the greatest post-1917 summation of the Marxist method and authentic experience of revolutionary working class struggle. When we arrive at the meetings of the mass movement the reformists and liberals will try to limit the demands to things like “Fair trial for Assange”; others more militant may call for “Free Assange” or “Hands Off”; we reject the first because it has no class context and as such builds illusions that the courts are class neutral. The second type of demand we integrate as our starting place but not as a stand-alone. We reject the single-issue fetishism of those who say more than one demand indicates insincerity. Our task is to show how this individual case is the crisis of capitalism in microcosm and so our demands must expose the bourgeois courts as class rule political instruments. This can only be done by actively filling the streets with assemblies and actions led by the ranks of labor and the oppressed which build politically independent organs of class struggle.
4) Our transitional program raises the demands that start with Free Assange but extend to: Release all Capitalist State secrets, business secrets and international secret diplomacy. This is timely in the U.S. considering the assorted perfidious withholdings of the Mueller report and of the Trump tax filings. Our program to end secret diplomacy can only be activated by the worker’s governments in power resting on the politicized and self-conscious working class’s own organizations. So such demands show the workers that basic democratic rights like freedom of speech, freedom of the press and assembly can only be made secure by the building of the organizations of proletarian class power. The emergence of such organs (transitional organizations–factory committees, action committees, price and wage and neighborhood committees and workers councils), even in embryo, can lead to dual power and revolutionary situations required to smash the capitalist state. Until then we are involved in a daily battle to assert these rights, just as we fight for the freedom to organize against all state encroachments. Down with Taft-Hartley and all slave labor enabling laws! We seek to build class struggle organs, the expressions of independent class-political consciousness, as Lenin instructed us to do.
5) We fight for socialism in everything we do. The entire project of bourgeois liberalism is to suppress class struggle and to divide the masses into controllable and defraudable identity ‘communities.’ We illuminate the hidden injuries of race, gender and class and show who does the injury to whom and why they do it, which is the falling rate of profit and the continuous social crisis this tendency of capitalism causes. Liberalism tells you to endure decades of crises and wars that never end. We aim to put them out of business before imperialism puts an end to humanity. We have a world to win, the old saying goes, and now also one to rescue. This requires facing truth squarely, methodically and scientifically. This means we don’t fear revelations of any kind.
