The fight for voting rights is essential

Communist Party USA

  The following was presented to the National Board on Jan. 19, 2022, on behalf of the African American Equality Commission. Today’s urgent struggle to protect and expand the anti-racist, anti-sexist, democratic voice of working people through the ballot, the struggle for voting rights, occurs within the context of the 2020 Ferguson Rebellion, and an ongoing upsurge in strikes like that at the UMW Warrior Met Coal, ExxonMobil, Special Metals, and Starbucks. Walkouts such as occurred at various unorganized McDonalds are also very significant. This pro-democracy struggle continues that of chattel, and today penal, slaves and wage workers in the USA for recognition of their human dignity, for the power to allocate the social profits generated by their labor through democratic mass action, and for freedom. The “Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers Assembly and Moral March on Washington” on June 18, 2022, is an opportunity for all-out mobilization in support of democratically transforming the balance of power on behalf of the poor, and to “make real policies to fully address poverty and low wealth from the bottom up.” Every epoch of US history since the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, and later the US Constitution, has seen struggles against chattel and penal enslavement and wage exploitation, and for the dignity and well-being of workers. The Declaration reflects the tensions of the time of its drafting in its much misrepresented statement of freedom from the monarch, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” while crafting a nation where only white male landowners of specific age had a voice in the halls of power, and a vote, and where chattel slavery was legal and protected. While much has changed, anti-democratic tendencies continue in different forms today, regardless of fake assertions that the US is the land of “freedom.” Today white nationalist militias and . . . police conspire to terrorize and keep Black and working people from voting. Recognizing this tension, and changing demographic realities, capitalist leaders took long-term steps to protect their control and profits, starting at least as early as the Goldwater period. They developed an effective anti-democratic group of actions and have applied them consistently. These actions include (but are not limited to) gerrymandering, voter ID requirements, poll taxes and financial impediments to participation in the democracy, not counting people in the census, incarceration, denying felons access to the voting box, purging voter rolls, and outright terror. Just as the KKK was used in the period following the upsurge of Black representation in the post–Civil War Reconstruction, so today white nationalist militias and direct state power in the form of the police conspire to terrorize and keep Black and working people from voting. To protect their profits and control, the super-rich, capitalists, and their minions utilize every tool available for social control including the media, such as Fox News and Breitbart; capitalist culture (films, music, art); anti-union, sexist, and racist rhetoric; anti-immigrant attacks including forced family separations and deportations; and manipulating bourgeois democratic forms through national and state political parties. Politically, the Republican Party has been the main organized electoral representation of this trend. The Democratic Party, also under the leadership of capitalists but with significant involvement of Black people, women, and organized labor, has since the early 1960s talked about voting rights but has been ineffective in challenging the Republican onslaught, which is coming to a decisive inflection point today. In fact, the U.S. is in a decisive struggle against proto-fascist initiatives such as that seen on January 6, 2021. Struggles for community control of the police or democratic control…

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The fight for voting rights is essential