Long Time US Government Offical Racially Harrasses New York Vendor

Richard Mellor

Please my class brothers, sisters, comrades, if you haven't seen the racist tirade this long-term US government official Steward Seldowitz directs at a street vendor in New York City, go watch it in its entirety. Look at the smirk on his arrogant, privileged mug.

When you do that, reflect on what Martin Luther King said about racists when he spoke at an AFL-CIO convention in December 1961 9 years before his assassination while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, members of my former union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He said:

"Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires, and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor's needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth." my added emphasis.

The US ruling class is racist to the core; this society was built on racism and oppression of all those who own nothing but our ability to work. When the first settlers stepped foot on this continent seeking trade, profits and untold wealth, the first goal of the capitalists that financed the expeditions bringing Europe's poor with them, was to drive the Native people from the land and privatize it. It took a genocidal war against the original inhabitants to do that.

The US ruling class, like their British counterparts are rabid Anti-Semites and labor haters. Capitalism (the term "empire" is used too often as a substitute for calling the system what it actually is, a capitalist system of production) is a system of war. It is a system of exploitation as was feudalism and slavery. They are historical forms of producing the necessities of life.

The ruling class is a minority in society, any class society. Those on whose backs wealth is created are aware of this exploitation. Here in the US, the US ruling class brutality suppressed any efforts by workers to join together in order to fight or campaign four our own interests. But exploited people instinctively band together against those who get rich from our labor. The Civil Rights movement in the US, rising out of a  period of terror so great that there were fewer black politicians in the late 1950's and early 60's than there were during Reconstruction, shook the US ruling class to the core. This, and the rising of industrial unionism and creation of the CIO in the 1930's had repercussions around the world.

Martin Luther King was right. Malcolm X was right when he said, "You can't have capitalism without racism". 

Given the balance of class forces being in our (wage workers) favor in terms of numbers, whether we are in the US, India, Russia, Germany, indeed the world, the ruling class has to find some way to undermine this tendency to class unity that arises strongly during times when the class war becomes more intense. Racism is one approach. Using religion is another. In Ireland, the color of the population was pretty much the same for everyone, so religion was the main divide and rule tactic. Same with India with Muslims and Hindu's, and in Africa creating inter-tribal conflict. 

I think we all know this brothers and sisters.

This racist US government official, Stewart Seldowitz, is most likely Jewish.   But his religion, just like a Protestant's in Northern Ireland, is not the issue; that division is socially constructed. The problem with Seldowitz, and the root of his intolerance is not his religion; he is a powerful representative of the capitalist class and the capitalist state. He is a also Zionist. And there are Christian Zionists in the US, including in the US body politic, more of them than Jewish ones. These are also for the most part Anti-Semitic. When people like him, appeal to the white worker, hold out his hand to us in brotherhood, as "Americans"  be aware. His goal is to undermine our class solidarity, pick our pockets and separate us from our power. 

I was talking to an Arab friend today, a Muslim,who agreed that the prominence of Jews in the forefront of these protests is having an effect, historically it is Christians (the Crusades)  we fought not Jews despite what so many US Americans think he said. "They are our cousins" he told me. While supporting the Palestinian resistance, "Hamas doesn't speak for me" added. 

Despite the prominence of Jews in the movement for Palestinian rights, there will inevitably be an increase of Anti-Semitic incidents as well as Anti-Muslim ones like we see in the video. We must strongly confront and condemn Anti-Semtism when it raises its ugly head. The presence of so many young Jews in the movement for Palestinian rights is the best way to protect Jewish rights and the Jewish identity.

So far what we are seeing is a tremendous global movement against the this genocidal assault by the Zionist regime against the civilian population of Gaza. The savagery is hard to stomach, but it has changed the situation for good.