Workers World candidates’ solidarity with anti-fascists in Sacramento

The following statement was issued on June 29 by Monica Moorehead and Lamont Lilly, the 2016 Workers World Party presidential and vice presidential candidates.

The Workers World Party national election campaign sends its warm greetings to Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento and salutes its members for freezing out the fascist, misnamed “Traditionalist Workers Party” and preventing their rally from taking place on June 26. Our hearts are with Antifa in the aftermath of this violent TWP attack, which specifically targeted people of color and transpeople. We wish all the anti-fascists wounded in this attack a full and speedy recovery. We need these courageous warriors back on the streets.

We denounce fascist groups like the TWP. We despise their name, which employs the classic Hitlerite tactic (the official name of the Nazis was National Socialist Workers Party) of attempting to dupe white workers into thinking that fascists represent their interests. The fascists do not. The billionaire fascistic Trump does not. Michael Heinbeck, founder of the TWP, has personally assaulted anti-Trump protesters. He then had the nerve to paint Trump supporters as victims and build a rally around this fraudulent claim. Heinbeck does not speak for white workers. TWP is not a workers’ party in any sense of the word. The TWP is an extra-legal terrorist organization that works hand-in-hand with police violence like the KKK.

These fascists are making another fraudulent claim — that white workers are the “traditional” workers — as if wage slaves who are African-American, Latino/a, Asian, Indigenous, Arab, Muslim, migrant, LGBTQ, differently abled or women are somehow newcomers or outsiders. Long before this country was even founded, the 1% of the day profited from the genocidal theft of Native lands and the unpaid labor of enslaved Black people. The Industrial Revolution was financed by the slave trade. Even before a third of Mexico was stolen by the U.S., its original inhabitants slaved in the mines. All members of the multinational working class on July 4, 1776, were “traditional workers.”

A history of workers resistance

The multinational working class has a militant, fighting tradition which includes every oppressed nationality and group inside the U.S. There has never been a whites-only or English-only or U.S.-born-only labor movement. You can see that in the names of great labor leaders like Lucy Parsons, Mother Jones, A. Philip Randolph, Ferdinand Smith, Humberto Silex, Emma Tenayuca, John Handcox, Odis L. Sweeden, George Addes, Stanley Nowak, Larry Itilong and Cesar Chavez.

Also names of U.S. labor’s martyrs put shame to the fascist, stereotyped formulation of the “traditional” worker: August Spies, Louis Lingg, George Engel, Adolph Fischer (Haymarket Martyrs), Joe Hill (IWW), the Ludlow Massacre victims (Western Federation of Miners), Ella Mae Wiggins (National Textile Workers Union), Ralph Gray (Sharecroppers Union), Curtis Williams (Ford Hunger March), Virgil Duyungan and Aurelio Simon (UCAPAWA), Nagi Daifullah and Juan De La Cruz (UFW), Danny Lee Overstreet (CWA), the five Greensboro Communist Workers Party martyrs massacred in North Carolina by the white supremacist KKK in 1979, among many others.

All fascistic movements, from Trump to the forces behind the Brexit vote in Britain, are tools of the capitalist class whose prime motive is to keep those within our class — the workers and oppressed of the world — pitted against one another. The ruling class is the only class that fascists serve, despite their demagogic rhetoric. We do not believe in “free speech” for violent and divisive hate rhetoric. We also differ with those now criticizing the cops for not intervening and arresting people in Sacramento. We know what that would have looked like — more of our comrades injured, since the police are the enemies of the workers and oppressed peoples.

We are concerned to hear the police are combing through videos and pictures, looking for opportunities to arrest people. We stand in solidarity with any anti-fascists who may face arrests as a result. We support the right of anti-racist and anti-fascist forces to defend themselves from right-wing terrorism by any means necessary.

Although WWP was only able to be present with Antifa in a limited way on June 26, we are with you 1000 percent: SHUT THEM DOWN! Shut down the whole racist, capitalist system of wage-slavery! Workers of the world and oppressed peoples of the world unite and fight for socialism!