Date: Fri, 24 Jun 94 18:34 CDT
From: James Davis <
[email protected]>
To:
[email protected]
Subject: Rally Comrades! Online Edition 6/94
[This publication is being sent to you as a subscriber to the
PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition). The intent of RALLY is to
assess the current political and economic conditions, and map out
the tasks of revolutionaries at this stage of the struggle. It is
published monthly.]
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June, 1994 Electronic Edition Vol. 13, No. 4
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INDEX TO Volume 13, Number 4
1. WE CAN END HOMELESSNESS
2. DEFEND THE RIGHT TO VOTE
3. MOVE PEOPLE AHEAD WITH 'SPIRIT POWER'
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1. WE CAN END HOMELESSNESS
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By Beth Gonzalez
The Clinton administration recently released a draft report that
puts the number of homeless in this country at seven million --
more than 100 times the number the Bush administration admitted.
The growing reach of poverty and want in this country and the
protests of thousands have forced the administration to open an
important debate.
The National Organizing Committee (NOC) accepts the challenge of
this political moment. It's time to go on the offensive in the
struggle against homelessness. We enter the battlefield the
Clinton administration has opened up with answers about what the
problem is and a program for solving it.
WHAT'S THE REAL PROBLEM?
There is more than enough empty housing to provide good homes for
everyone who needs them. The reason people don't have homes is
because they can't afford them. In this system, you don't get
what you need unless you can pay for it; and people who have no
jobs or low-paying jobs can't pay for what they need. Robots and
computers don't need homes and health care and education for their
children; robots can produce goods more cheaply than people, and
so they are displacing people at the rate of about 3,000 layoffs
per day.
Today's poverty comes from a change in the way things are
produced. New electronic technology produces more goods with less
labor. Under a different system, this technology could mean
people give to society what they can, and take whatever they need
to live a happy and healthy life. But under the existing system,
this technology means more multimillion-dollar salaries for the
people who run the corporations and hold the power; it means more
hunger and homelessness for those who don't.
A PROGRAM TO END HOMELESSNESS
Homelessness could be eliminated overnight. There are six million
vacant luxury apartments. In some cities, half of public housing
is vacant. Much of the vacant housing that the government controls
or acquires gets turned over to real estate developers who sell or
rent it at a profit, and all with government tax breaks. Between
the vacant public housing and the other housing units the
government controls, more than enough empty housing is already
public. At this time, the government's largest housing subsidy is
the $54.1 billion that goes to homeowners in tax deductions; $21
billion of that goes to the five percent of the taxpayers with
incomes above $100,000. Instead of giving tax breaks to investors
and mansion owners, the government could open up this public
housing and turn it over to people who need it. The only thing
standing in the way is the interests of private property.
WHAT CAN WE DO NOW?
It's time to force President Clinton and HUD Secretary Henry
Cisneros to do something and to make them deliver on any promises
they make. Massive pressure can force the federal and local
governments to open up the vacant units and provide heated,
repaired housing to everyone who needs it.
The Clinton administration will try to put the responsibility for
the problems back on the victims of the system. We intend to
focus the anger and keep the responsibility where it belongs: on
the state -- the government, the police, the laws that protect the
private property of the millionaires and billionaires against the
needs of millions of hungry and homeless people.
Through takeovers, encampments and tent cities, thousands have
already forced their cities and the federal government to house
some families. Detroit's Tent City, Chicago's Tranquility City
and Philadelphia's housing takeovers have each forced city
officials to place 500 to 600 people in homes.
But the economy puts people out of their homes faster than the
protests can win new ones. The government has the power to end
homelessness. But only the united fight of millions of people can
force them to do anything. Today, the takeovers, tent cities and
other actions have to unite to go on the offensive. We have to use
each victory to expand our unity and prepare for the next stage of
the fight. People who never before had to confront this system in
order to survive are coming to the realization that this system
and this government aren't going to take care of them and that
they're going to have to fight to survive.
Eighty-nine percent of those responding to a recent poll view
homelessness as a major problem. Millions will do something about
the problem if only they know what to do. We can broaden the
struggle to include all sections of society. When the homeless
take over homes, then artists, writers, musicians, academics and
other cultural workers help shake up the rest of the population.
We need to put the problem of homelessness on center stage and
force all of society to see it and do something.
WHY IS NOW THE TIME?
In our millions, the new class of poor people that this system is
discarding is just like the family sleeping in the doorway of a
luxury building full of vacant apartments. Society has the
technology to guarantee an economic paradise. The only thing
standing in the way of decent housing for everyone is the state:
the laws and police that protect private property and make it one
sort of a crime or another to be poor.
This system leaves millions with no place to call home while as
many luxury apartments stand empty; it puts millions of children
to bed cold and hungry each night while a small elite lives in
filthy luxury; it closes schools to open jails. This system is
not only immoral; it is doomed to extinction. The millions who
have to fight this system to survive and the millions more who
want to see justice done don't have to accept the death and
destruction that is handed out by this system. These millions are
the force that can overturn it.
The rulers and profiteers of this country can neither hide nor
justify today's new poverty. They cannot relieve it by shifting
the burden overseas. The uprising of poor peasants in Chiapas,
Mexico, which shook up the rulers of this whole continent on
January 1, signalled that that escape route was closed. The ruling
class still has important tactical advantages -- the mass media,
the police, the social service bureaucracy and billions of dollars
at its disposal. But the administration's report on homelessness
is a sign that the ruling class is being forced to do something
about a problem that is out of control.
The NOC intends to take advantage of this moment to go on the
offensive in the struggle against homelessness, to grab the rulers
of this country by the political throat and to gather together the
practical revolutionaries around a strategy to get rid of this
whole system of poverty and injustice.
We have a revolutionary press that poses the real problems, the
real solutions and the steps to take. The People's Tribune and
Tribuno del Pueblo raise the banners of the struggle and put a
face on the enemy. They broadcast and broaden the fight on every
front. To gather the most massive pressure to force the ruling
class and its government to do something about homelessness, we
intend to get these newspapers out far and wide.
To the members of the NOC: Let's organize ourselves for this
battle. To those of you fighting on your own to end homelessness:
We invite you to join with us and bring this plan to life in your
city or town.
[Beth Gonzalez is the National Secretary of the National
Organizing Committee.]
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2. DEFEND THE RIGHT TO VOTE
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By John Slaughter
Almost 1.5 million African Americans live in North Carolina -- 22
percent of the population. Yet until 1992, no African American had
been elected to Congress from that state for over 100 years. In
1992, based upon the 1965 Voting Rights Act, redistricting created
two new African American majority congressional districts, and two
African Americans, Eva Clayton and Mel Watts, were elected from
their respective districts.
In Mel Watts' district, five white voters from Durham filed suit,
claiming that because of racial "gerrymandering" of the
congressional district boundaries, their constitutional rights to
representation had been denied. On June 26, 1993, the Supreme
Court agreed with them. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the
majority opinion in the Shaw v. Reno decision. She saw the
creation of the districts as "an effort to segregate voters on the
basis of race" and said it "threatens to carry us further from the
goal of a political system in which race no longer matters."
Voters have a right, she said, to participate in a "color blind"
electoral process. The Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower
federal court, essentially ordering the state of North Carolina to
defend the creation of the minority district.
In the wake of the Shaw decision, similar court challenges to
minority districts have been filed in Louisiana, Florida, Georgia,
South Carolina and Texas. In the Louisiana case, a district court
recently struck down the black-majority district represented by
first-term African American Rep. Cleo Fields.
It is a cruel irony that the highest court in the land could base
its argument in the Shaw case upon an abstract appeal for color
blindness, when white supremacy has dominated the politics of this
country almost since its inception. After the last census, 13 new
majority-black districts were created in the South and the border
states, and all elected African Americans to Congress. Prior to
the creation of minority districts, no Southern state had elected
a black member of Congress in this century. Even now, African
Americans make up less than 10 percent of the U.S. House and only
one percent of the Senate.
But the significance of this decision goes beyond an attack on the
voting rights of African Americans, as bad as that is.
Historically, this country's rulers have typically begun an attack
on the people as a whole by attacking African Americans,
especially in the South. The ruling class' appeals to white
nationalism have always had the purpose of controlling the white
worker. The ruling class' tactic has been divide and conquer --
control the majority by turning it against a minority.
Beyond this, the democratization of the South has always been the
key to democratizing America, and the key to democratizing the
South has been the African Americans' struggle for equality. The
vote is one weapon in the fight to gain material equality. It is
also a weapon in the struggle now under way between a tiny ruling
class of billionaires and the growing class of permanently
unemployed people. Thus any attack on the right to vote is an
attack on the millions of every color and nationality who are
struggling against poverty and injustice.
New technological developments which are making millions of people
permanently unemployed have thrown the economic system into a
stage of crisis from which there is no escape. The only recourse
for the ruling class is to institute measures to repress those
people -- black and white -- who are being forced to fight to
reorganize society in their own interests. The Shaw v. Reno
decision must be seen as part and parcel of the motion to withdraw
fundamental democratic rights and establish a virtual police
state.
Even though the South remains the region where manufacturing is
most heavily concentrated, it lost tens of thousands of
manufacturing jobs to automation in the 1980s, and the jobs that
remain are cheap-labor, low-end jobs that are the most vulnerable
to further automation. The most rapidly declining industries --
apparel, knitting mills and tobacco -- are concentrated in the
South.
The South has yet to overcome its history as a reserve of raw
material, obsolete technologies and cheap labor. Today, it has the
highest percentage of the working poor and the lowest per capita
income. Sixteen percent of all Southerners live in poverty, and
the proportion in the old plantation area known as the Black Belt
is dramatically higher. This is the system which the Shaw v. Reno
ruling is designed to help maintain. It takes the form of an
attack upon the Southern black worker, but its purpose is to
continue the control of all who are poor.
In fact, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed to remedy
historical patterns of racial "balkanization" like the 1900
amendment to the North Carolina Constitution that barred African
Americans from voting unless they were descended from Confederate
soldiers, paid a poll tax and could read and write any section of
the state constitution. Throughout the South, particularly in the
Black Belt -- the old plantation area which contains the greatest
concentration of African Americans -- gerrymandering, vote fraud
and brute force and terror have been used to deny access to the
ballot box.
In the process, millions of poor whites have also been denied the
franchise. For example, the poll tax adopted in Mississippi in
1890 kept 6,000 black voters from casting ballots in the election
of 1896, but it also eliminated more than 60,000 whites from the
voting rolls. Another example: In the late 1970s, in Choctaw
County, Alabama, all voters were required to re-register or be
purged from the rolls; this pre-election tactic knocked more than
2,200 African Americans and some 1,500 whites off the rolls.
It is significant that the black-majority districts under attack
in North Carolina are almost 50 percent white. Professor Allan J.
Lichtman, an expert witness for the defense in the North Carolina
and Louisiana cases, has noted that the challenged districts in
those two states "combine low-income blacks and whites who had
previously been scattered in more affluent districts."
The legacy of the Old South has not been surmounted. Government
remains by and large the consent of the few. Those who vote have
been primarily the elite, the most affluent and well-educated. The
have-nots on the bottom find that no one really represents their
basic interests, and yet the legal system continues to throw up
barriers to block access to the ballot.
Why? Even though no oppressed or exploited class has voted itself
into power, the vote can nevertheless be a powerful weapon for
change in the hands of the have-nots, black and white. Alabama
Black Belt leader Albert Turner, a principal architect of the
Voting Rights Act, understood that the movement for the vote was
not about access to the ballot as an end in itself. It was about
"making changes with the vote," he said. The members of the class
that finds itself on the bottom want jobs, health care and
education. They want the kind of society in which they and their
children can reach their full potential.
It is no accident that this latest assault on the vote is coming
in the South. Just as the poverty of the South drags down the rest
of the country economically, so the politics of the South sets the
pace for the nation as a whole. To lose the weapon of the vote
would be a great step backward; the vote must be defended at all
costs.
[John Slaughter is the author of _New Battles Over Dixie: The
Campaign for a New South_, and a member of the National Council of
the National Organizing Committee.]
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3. MOVE PEOPLE AHEAD WITH 'SPIRIT POWER'
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By Abdul Alkalimat
Revolutionaries around the country are reaching out to the
National Organizing Committee (NOC). They are using the People's
Tribune and Tribuno del Pueblo to tell their stories, to get out
the word, to organize others. They are searching for organization
and the means of unified action with others fighting for justice.
At present, the fighters are coming forward in struggle after
struggle by ones, fives, and tens. We are confident that people
struggling for justice and economic security will come forward in
waves of hundreds and thousands. The NOC must prepare for rapid
growth.
The NOC presents a clear and rational understanding of how the
emerging revolutionary motion is taking place. Our NOC Program is
an invaluable weapon, but we need more.
We have to bond with people and sustain them with emotional
attachment to the cause and to the NOC. We must sustain them with
the energy of our emerging revolutionary culture. This can be
summed up as "spirit power!"
Consciousness must be ignited and sustained by this, our spirit
power.
We are like the Biblical figure David, come to challenge the
giant. We are small as one, but we are made strong by the power of
history, made fearless by our belief in the justice and higher
morality of our cause.
Song, bearing witness and symbols of identity can unleash our
energy. They can heal us, bond us together and instill the
optimism and courage we need to face the struggles of today and
those that lie ahead.
Every important movement fighting on behalf of the exploited and
oppressed has harnessed the "spirit power" of their people to
build, grow strong, and march into battle. The abolitionist
sentiments in the song "John Brown's Body" were taken up as the
theme song of black soldiers marching into battle during the Civil
War. The theme song of the labor movement is "Solidarity Forever."
For the civil rights movement it was "We Shall Overcome." For the
international communist movement it is "The International."
In a forum, or even on a panel, only one person can speak at a
time. However, everyone can sing together, and when people sing
together they can grow strong and can be reborn in the heat of the
culturally based "spirit power" of a people bonded together by
their common suffering, regardless of nationality or color.
Most of the songs of the protest movements in the United States,
especially the civil rights and trade union movements, have been
taken from the church and rewritten to reflect the content of the
movement. The civil rights movement was able to harness the
"spirit power" of the black community and the entire population in
part because it did this. The old church song "I'll Overcome
Someday" had words like "I'll be all right ... I'll be like Him
.. I'll wear the crown." It was first rewritten by black Tobacco
Workers Union workers, and eventually became "We Shall Overcome"
with words like "We are not afraid ... We are not alone ... We'll
walk hand in hand."
Movements also borrow songs from each other. James Farmer took
"Which Side Are You On?" the labor song written by Florence Reece
for the mine workers, and rewrote it for the civil rights
movement. He put in words like, "Oh people can you stand it, tell
me/ how you can/ Will you be an Uncle Tom or will you/ be a man?/
Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?"
Another way that spirit power can be released is by people bearing
witness through testifying. As people come forward, they carry
with them the psychological burden of their misery and suffering.
The church has been very successful with using testimonial as
their way of allowing people to share their story, to unburden
themselves, and by doing so, to bond with others who have been
through similar experiences.
There is a vital place for this testimony in our meetings and at
our gatherings. Each story is everyone's story. We need to tell
each of these stories over and over until we are bonded in the
particularities of each other, and on that basis we respect each
and every member of the NOC. In this way, people learn they are
not alone, that they are not to blame for their suffering, that
they can organize to fight the true source of that suffering --
the capitalist system.
"Spirit power" can also be expressed through symbols which
identify who we are and what we stand for. There are many examples
from the revolutionary movement around the world: modern Algerian
women donning traditional dress as a symbol of resistance against
the French colonial government, the scarf of the Palestinian
struggle, and now, most recently, the ski-masked warriors of the
Zapatistas.
Our own country also has a rich heritage of such symbols of
resistance to injustice: the Christian sign of the fish, the
Muslim sign of the crescent and star, the Farmworkers and their
flag, the distinctive black dress of the Black Panther Party.
We are answering the call -- one which charges us to "wage war on
the capitalist system" (NOC Program). A more nobler cause has
never existed. Our "spirit power" is the emotional expression of
this higher calling. "Spirit power" can unleash our energy, can
heal us, bond us together. It expresses and instills a sense of
optimism, a certainty of victory regardless of any immediate
difficulties we may face. Spirit power reflects a love for our
class and all of humanity.
[Abdul Alkalimat is the International Secretary of the National
Organizing Committee and the interim chair of the Black Liberation
Committee of the NOC.]
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The NOC needs to show its "spirit power." We need songs that will
lift us to greater efforts, symbols of identity which proclaim our
allegiance to one another and our cause. We need a name that
expresses our goals, our aspirations and our revolutionary
strivings. The NOC needs you for this. Send in your suggestions
for a name. Design a NOC logo and send it in. Write songs. Send
any and all contributions to: NOC Steering Committee, P.O. Box
477113, Chicago, IL 60647.
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RALLY, COMRADES! (Electronic Edition) is the electronic version of
RALLY, COMRADES!, a newspaper published by the Political Committee
of the National Organizing Committee. The name of the paper is
taken from the original chorus of the poem and song, _The
International_, the rallying cry of the international proletariat:
Rally, Comrades
'Tis the last fight we face
The international
Shall be the human race.
Please address all correspondence to: RALLY, COMRADES!, P.O. Box
477113, Chicago, IL 60647, or e-mail
[email protected]. (c) 1994 by the
National Organizing Committee.
Hard copy subscriptions are available for $15/year, and donations
are important. We encourage reproduction and use of all articles.
Please credit RALLY COMRADES.
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