Who Sits On the US Supreme Court Matters Little To Workers

Workers Owe Nothing to These People

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

 

"Brethren we conjure you...not to believe a word of what is being said about your interests and those of your employers being the same. Your interests and theirs are in a nature of things, hostile and irreconcilable.  Then do not look to them for relief...Our salvation must, through the blessing of God, come from ourselves.  It is useless to expect it from those whom our labors enrich." (1)

 

There is a bit of a panic brewing in the Democratic Party over the coming mid-terms that could lose this other Wall Street party the razor thin majority in the Senate and its influence in Congress in general. Biden is very unpopular. Democrats rely to a great degree on the Black vote, something many black voters are aware of and the party has at times been condemned for it, a form of abuse for black working-class Americans taking them for granted.  As the Black Agenda Report has pointed out many times, where can they go when it comes to electoral politics? The only alternative is the “white man’s party that has shifted so far to the right of late that supporting it is abhorrent to so many workers and black workers in particular.

 

So, the announcement by “worker Joe” Biden that he will appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court is an attempt to strengthen the party at the polls by appealing to the black voter for help, but importantly to the black middle classes, the professional politicians, businesses and other sections of the black petit-bourgeois that’s concerned with advancing its class interests in the capitalist pecking order.

 

“What about whether she’s qualified or not.” I overheard one white person say the other day. Well, this is true in general (and she will be------more on that in a minute) but you won’t get very far with that argument. I remember a rather conservative white guy on one of our crews saying that with regard to affirmative action, that qualifications alone should matter not race (color). A Latino co-worker who rarely expressed political views snapped right back with “You’ve had 200 years of affirmative action.”. While many of the minorities I worked with saw huge failures in Affirmative Action they vehemently defended it and rightly so. It has failed that’s for sure but we must defend it against attacks from the right and racists.

 

Whomever Biden picks to replace yet another aged lawyer that made the top spot for lawyers in US society and has decided to retire, she will be qualified. But qualified in what?  She will pledge to defend the so-called free market and the capitalist system as she has done so far, this is the primary qualification. She will uphold the laws of the land as written by billionaires or their political front men and women that uphold the rights of the owners of capital and the legitimacy of their rule. She will legitimize US foreign policy that has resulted in the deaths of millions of people throughout the world since the decline of the European colonial powers. These victims are overwhelmingly workers of color.

 

Present US Vice President, Kamala Harris put a lot of young working-class black men in jail to protect the system from these predators; it got her where she is today. Democrats Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden have apologized for supporting the 1994 crime bill that resulted in the massive increase in the prison population, disproportionally African Americans.

 

No matter who is on the US Supreme Court, it matters little to any worker. In a civilized society, a social system devoid of class exploitation, people in official positions would naturally reflect the make-up of the general population; but we are where we are. I would be foolish to not recognize that to have individuals in powerful positions in society who, because of their race or color, were excluded for centuries will be welcomed as progress and in a sense it is as it reflects a concession to the social power of the workers in that marginalized community.

 

But we must not see things backwards. The increase in black politicians, businesses, and growth of the black middle class is a product of the heroic struggle of the black workers and youth over a long period that periodically erupt in to the streets. The Civil Rights movement forced changes from above and, unbeknownst to many workers in the US and participants in that movement, it had a huge effect throughout the world as victims of colonialism from Kenya to Northern Ireland were influenced by it. It forced the white racist ruling class to remove some obstacles that would increase the black middle class that could act as a break on the revolutionary potential of the black workers, proof that the system works so work within it; don’t challenge its legitimacy.

 

Unions weren’t a product of the US Supreme Court either. They were also built through mass actions and violating the laws that the US Supreme Court upholds. Workers were shot and/or deported for even discussing them. Social legislation of the 1930’s and the social legislation of the 1960s were a result of what was already taken in the streets, politicians simply codified it, took it in to the courts where they have more control. That, in my view, was the purpose of Affirmative Action as far as I can gather. These are my personal opinions but I do have my GED and HEO certificate though I don’t like to boast.

 

The arrest and conviction of state security forces for killing unarmed blacks in particular (US cops kill a lot of people but as with most statistics, for people of color it’s the percentage or rate) would not have occurred but for the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was almost unheard of for a cop to be arrested never mind convicted of murder. For George Floyd to die under the knee of some jackbooted right-wing thug in uniform is disgusting, I don’t care how many cigarettes he sold whether he was a felon or not; you can be made a felon by the stroke of a cop’s pen, I know, it happened to me on a picket line. If white workers want to strengthen our own material position in society we can begin by openly condemning this and standing with our brothers and sisters of color, united we have a lot more power than relying on a bunch of old lawyers for our livelihoods. To support the racist court system or the police or defend the idea there is such a thing as a “White Race” and to identify with it is class collaboration with the enemy.

 

We must unconditionally condemn the likes of Rittenhouse and other right wing neo-fascist types, or misguided workers that identify the response to the cop murders as rioting. While the damage was mostly to corporate property (no individuals homes are were set alight to my knowledge) that was a small percentage of the activity of the BLM movement, (some of it the activity agent provocateurs). In the absence of a social movement to which workers of all backgrounds can turn, when boiling point is reached, when workers can take no more, the movement erupts out of pure anger and takes on many characteristics and many alien class forces jump to its head.  

No movement comes ready-made. If you want to get a glimpse of how the movements in early colonial America occurred and what methods they used, read The Urban Crucible by Gary Nash. I read that quite a while ago and you’ll see that workers’ history in this country and gains we made came about through mass action and taking to the streets. Some of the early battles were always described as riots, or mob action, many of them far more violent than the Black Lives Matter protests were which were overwhelmingly peaceful protests.

 

Arguing over Biden’s announcing a choice for the US Supreme Court a sort of Politburo for the US capitalist class, is pointless. So he’s limiting the choice to a woman and only a black woman. The US ruling class will get their person in. It's their court.

 

The US Supreme Court was instituted by George Washington in 1789. He was of course a slaveowner and also from a wealthy English landowning merchant family. His ancestors were those that drove the British peasants off the land denying them a livelihood and means of subsistence then imprisoning them or for repeated offenses, hanging them for vagrancy or poaching.

 

We owe nothing to the US Supreme Court. It’s not ours.

 

(1) 1840's appeal from New England laborers to their fellows to abandon the idea that the employers/capitalists would solve working people's problems.  Philip Foner History of the Labor Movement Vol. 1 p192