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VI.  U.S. Responsibility for Denial of Rights Internationally and Domestically

What can the organized Left and the social movements demand of the institutions of U.S. imperialism to counter the U.S. government's denial of fundamental rights?

Current conditions

Governments throughout the world commit massive violations of fundamental human rights. The United States, with its sheltered transnational corporations and aggressive military force, is among the greatest perpetrators. Obviously, the global system of imperialism does not operate by ensuring human rights. Protecting rights is the opposite of maximizing profit through exploitation and oppression of nations and peoples. Indeed, the very concept of an unfettered "free" market system is based on an entirely different principle: do not acknowledge rights in the first place; if rights are won through struggle, restrict their scope as much as possible; then steadfastly proceed to eliminate them.

But the struggle for rights is essential to thwarting imperialism's extreme disregard for human life, to protecting the right of nations to self-determination, to gaining the greatest expanse of rights possible under any set of given conditions, and to creating and protecting space for oppositional political activity. The struggle of social movements to win, defend, and expand actual rights—contrary to the interests of imperialism—is critical. The concept of rights—particularly civil liberties such as the right to vote, to dissent, to assemble and to protest—is essential to organizing the movements of oppressed peoples against growing repression, racism and xenophobia.

Meanwhile, the discourse surrounding the concept of human rights has become a key weapon of U.S. cultural imperialism. Promotion of  "American democracy" effectively builds consent for the "right" of the United States to invade any country deemed a threat to "democracy"—for U.S. hegemony at home and abroad. The U.S. needs political control over the terrain of rights discourse. This control is essential to assuring U.S. ability to maintain its faltering legitimacy in the current international order.

As the United States dramatically accelerates its already-aggressive assault on  civil rights and liberties, we give special focus to our struggle for clarity on this question. We enter into battle on this terrain with the objective of expanding the definition and scope of human rights, while exposing the limits of rights discourse in achieving the all-too-readily promised contradictory attributes of democracy—freedom and equality.

The whole idea behind democracy is freedom, but it is freedom as defined by a government. The bourgeois democratic revolutions of the 18 th and 19th centuries won freedom for individual bourgeois and the capitalist market to operate without restriction by a monarchy. For example, the American Revolution brought "freedom" for the settler colonialists from British rule.  Thus the term "bourgeois democracy" means the right of the bourgeoisie under capitalism to control markets, to stop giving taxes to a king or queen and to define their own political system of governance; it has nothing to do with working class democracy for all. The promise of "liberty and justice for all," as inalienable rights, is framed by the particular history of the United States; thus contradiction exists within the theory of bourgeois—or capitalist—democracy.  Freedoms or rights are only granted or won through a process of struggle over the power to govern—that is, the so-called "balance of power" between those who legislate the law, those who execute the law, and those who judge the law.

What are "inalienable" rights? We think of inalienable rights as birthrights that cannot be taken away. In the U.S., "inalienable rights" are defined by the law of governance; liberty belongs to those in power and they decide what justice will be.

When the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution evolved certain theories of so-called "inalienable rights" written into the Bill of Rights, they were intended to protect members of society from the invasive use of police and military force—initially in the revolutionary war against the British monarchy. One particular contribution of the Bill of Rights was to theorize the protection of political or philosophical minority voices against "the tyranny of the majority."  Yet, these lofty, and in fact progressive, theories of protecting the individual and groups from state repression—freedom of speech and assembly in particular—were from the outset based on the "rights" of a white, male, landowning bourgeois class that was in antagonism to the British crown. They excluded all "minority" slaves, Native American peoples and effective-minority women.

For centuries, in a country built on a minority conquest over an indigenous majority, the concept of "majority vote" enabled white male property owners to determine the rights of others. Those with votes have argued among themselves as to whether those without the vote can vote.  After the Civil War, it took a white male electoral majority to pass the 13th Amendment freeing the slaves, the 14th Amendment making them citizens with equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment giving them the "right" to vote.  It was also white male voters who, by 1877, overturned the progressive and revolutionary achievements of post-civil war Reconstruction and imposed Jim Crow laws to literally re-enslave recently freed blacks.  In 1919, a male electorate finally voted for women's suffrage.  Still, to this day, it is the unwillingness of the white male voters and politicians in representative bodies across the country that have prevented the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.  In each of these situations, the voteless have typically had to find ways to pressure, appeal to, and compromise with those with voting power in order to gain any rights.  The norm of majority voting behavior, on the other hand, has been to further institutionalize exclusion and the denial of rights at every opportunity, and even to reverse them and take them away.

Freedom and equality exist in contradiction under bourgeois democracy.  Capitalism can grant liberty if that means freedom for those individuals who are franchised; it cannot survive based on actual justice, that is, equal rights for all.  The "promise" of governance based on all persons being "created equal" is the lie upon which the United States was built.  Bourgeois democracy requires those with rights to decide if those without rights can have rights.

The structural disenfranchisement of voting minorities continues today and neither voting rights law nor civil rights law has successfully changed this condition.  At the national level, in the past eight years, a steady stream of Supreme Court decisions have given the police expanded rights to elicit coerced confessions, allowed tainted evidence to be admitted in court, overturned minority electoral districts, and restricted the authority and remedies of civil rights laws.  The U.S. Congress and the Clinton administration passed the Effective Death Penalty act that violates habeas corpus rights which have existed for centuries, in an effort to make sure they effectively execute the far over-represented black and brown prisoners on death row.  Today, nine states have lifetime bans on the right to vote for felons who have been released from custody.

In California over the past decade, racist, conservative majorities have voted in favor of cleverly crafted attacks on minorities using the general election initiative process. Proposition 187 "Save Our State" denies medical care, education, and even food to undocumented immigrants; Proposition 184 "Three Strikes and You're Out" imposes mandatory life sentences on many low-income black, Latino, Native American, and Asian/Pacific Islander men; Proposition 209 "The Civil Rights Initiative" outlaws state-supported affirmative action programs; Proposition 21 "The Juvenile Justice Initiative" imposes adult sentences on black and brown youth; Proposition 227 "English for the Children" eliminates language rights and bilingual education programs for Latino and Asian immigrants.

The thoroughly right-wing character of this administration is visible in the open political partisanship of the Supreme Court, the branch of government charged with the power to exercise justice. The Courts' unprecedented intervention in the 2000 election which gave Bush the presidency not only defied all legal precedent but, in substance, virtually repealed voting rights law. Just months later in Alexander v. Sandoval, the Court attacked Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by ruling that discriminatory effects cannot be challenged in courts by "private parties"—namely any civil rights or grassroots plaintiffs. Without proof of discriminatory "intent," the discriminating party is treated as the victim.

Reaching far beyond the attack on the hard won victories of the Civil Rights movement, the recent Sandoval ruling reversed progressive lower court decisions upholding language rights as civil rights. The lower court judged Alabama's English-only (anti-Spanish language) laws to be instruments of "national origin discrimination." Upholding charges brought by a working class immigrant woman, the lower court sought to overturn the racist laws and force public services to be provided in Spanish. Yet the Supreme Court moved with right-wing reaction to defend Alabama's racism. In a nation built on systematic destruction of indigenous languages, cultures and peoples, this aggressive legalization of racism and xenophobia characterizes the Bush administration's defiance of human rights within the U.S. and internationally.

The vociferous rejection of all peoples' right to live in this multinational country and speak their own language is widespread.  Throughout the U.S., an electoral  majority dominated by white supremacist ideology  is so xenophobic that it tends toward consent to the Great Nation patriotic belief that the U.S. is a superior "civilized" country in which civil rights are not needed.  Ready to support all repressive government measures against people of color and against the Left, this group does not recognize the danger in its own loss of rights.  This pro-imperialist racist electoral majority focuses on one international issue—human rights violations in other nations—and it begs for U.S. military intervention.  These people have focused on only one domestic issue—individual liberty.

"America the Beautiful" has garnered the reputation as a home that people from other nations will risk their lives to reach in order to protect their human rights.  Yet, if the recent rejection of UN leadership at the World Conference Against Racism is any measure, the U.S. government's discourse on human rights does not acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people from their own stolen lands, and it rejects responsibility for crimes against humanity in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

As the United States claims to defend human rights by declaring an international war on "terrorism," U.S. military assistance is directly responsible for consistent human rights violations in places like Colombia and Guatemala.  Today in Afghanistan, the U.S. is perpetrating serious human rights abuses and war crimes not only by direct bombings but also by the unconditional transfer of weapons of war into a country which has already suffered massive human misery as a result of previous U.S. military intervention, last time supporting the Taliban against the pro-Russian alliance! Not only does the U.S. export arms, it exports leg-irons, thumb-cuffs, and electro-shock torture devices.  And, as world expert on lethal injection killings, the U.S. has now trained the Philippines to execute the death penalty and, further has committed U.S. troops to "teach" the Philippine military to hunt down insurgents. 

The United States remains one of the worst and most consistent violators of human rights treaties that have been agreed to by many countries within the United Nations.  For example, the United States has not signed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, drafted in 1998—with already 98 signatories and 14 ratifications—to establish a permanent court of international law for trying individuals accused of committing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.  The United States wants to institutionalize the court but it claims the "right" to complete exemption from the court's jurisdiction.  It fears the ability of a Third World or future socialist bloc to hold the U.S. to the standards it tries to impose on others. 

Similarly, while it regularly receives Amnesty International evaluations documenting torture-related offenses in the U.S. criminal justice system, as well as police brutality linked to racial profiling, the U.S. has entered a variety of "reservations, declarations or understandings" that block it from ratifying the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.  The U.S. violates all international human rights conventions against the death penalty and specifically targets the oppressed nationality prison population in the U.S. for execution.  On death row, people of color face exceptionally cruel conditions and condemned foreign nationals are systematically denied consular notification and assistance.  Asylum-seekers are routinely incarcerated and maltreated while political prisoners, such as Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal, are persecuted for their opposition to the U.S. government.  The U.S. is the world leader in killing "child offenders," and women imprisoned in the U.S. number ten times those in all western European nations combined.  It is frightening but not surprising that the Bush administration has used the post-September 11 patriotic wave to accelerate the evisceration of individual rights, which are a foundation of U.S. bourgeois democracy.  The wave of repression before us abandons all the bourgeois democratic principles: freedom, equality, justice, and any form of representative government.

Our basic approach remains: we oppose U.S. domination; we oppose any notion of exception for the United States; we oppose all forms of ideological hegemony, state repression, and physical abuse; we reject bourgeois demagoguery about human rights; we support the actual struggle for inalienable human rights throughout the world; and we insist that the United States be held accountable for all its human rights violations.

Dilemmas for the Left

Confusion stands in our way again.  Progressives want to stop all U.S. human rights violations at home and abroad—all U.S. aggression, intervention, overt and covert strategies of hegemony.  Yet, we are gravely concerned about violations of international human rights conventions by other nations as well, and understandably seek approaches to stop them.  The growing atrocities in the world—among them saturation bombing of civilian populations, torture, land mines, rape and enslavement of women and children, wholesale massacres of ethnic populations—present a strategic dilemma.  The U.S., as the only military power that can impose its will on all other nations, uses human rights violations in Third World and other nations—real and imagined—as a pretense for U.S. intervention.  As we have recognized, many crimes in the Third World are instigated by U.S. foreign policy and are at least partially caused or exacerbated by U.S. presence.  Thus, any time a movement for human rights turns to the U.S. world police force for help, it must confront the fact that it is asking the greatest force of world domination to be the arbiter of human rights! We cannot let the U.S. police other nations in order to "protect" them.  We can, however, demand of the U.S. that it police itself.  We can place demands upon the U.S. government to outlaw the human rights violations of U.S. corporations.  We can call upon the U.S. government to abide by international law and sign international treaties.  We can demand that violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights by any U.S.-based entity be made a national as well as international crime.

Unclarity and disagreement also arises, as discussed before, when progressives approach the role of the State in U.S. domestic affairs. After all, it is the U.S. government that is supposed to serve people in the U.S.—provide healthcare, transportation, education.  We want these things—all the components of the social welfare state discussed in Section V.  We want more, not less: more services, more benefits, more rights.  Yet we know that a government dedicated to a corporate welfare policy is not our friend; we cannot put our lives in the hands of the State.  The State is not neutral; therefore, we have an obligation as Leftists to struggle to force policies upon it.  We believe that it is our right and duty to demand that the U.S. government live up to all its promises and be forced, through political struggle, to expose its lies and to expand the space for actual democratic action.  Therefore, we demand of the government—that has built the State by means of the subjugation of internal nations and oppressed nationalities—that it enact restrictive laws to curtail national oppression, white supremacy, and racism.  We demand reparations. 

Another area of confusion among progressives is how to approach different sectors of government.  This dilemma arises especially on the issue of "federalism"—the role of the federal government in policing the affairs of states and municipalities.  Some find reassurance in federal and state "separation of power": Appeal to the FBI to stop the Ku Klux Klan when local government refuses to act?  All branches of government are essentially divisions of labor of the same ruling class.  Nonetheless, these formal distinctions have been the site of significant progressive struggle within U.S. history and the issues of state and federal rights are critical arenas of potential tactical interventions by social movements. 

From the point of view of our strategy, we oppose the many pro-imperialist/racist policies of all levels of government in the United States.  However, in general, we place great emphasis on the interrelationship of federal powers and protection of the hard-won rights of oppressed peoples that should be inalienable.  For example, the revolutionary fight against national oppression and racism in the U.S. has at times forced the federal government to intervene in order to uphold civil rights.  A case in point: at the end of the Civil War, which was fought over the "rights of states" to have slavery,  the only way to guarantee the newly achieved and fragile rights of the freed slaves was to impose federal military control over the defeated states of the confederacy.  Unfortunately, those federal protections were soon nullified with the federal Hayes-Tilden deal in 1877, by which northern capitalism allowed the defeated Southern aristocracy to re-enslave the black population through Jim Crow laws, under the banner of "states' rights."

From that time to the present, states' rights has remained the cry of the Southern rebels—as well as enraged slave owners, Klansman, and segregationists throughout the country—and for another century they got their way.  Indeed, this states' rights doctrine has completely overlaid the racist perpetuation of exclusionary voting rights, economic impoverishment, as well as massive Klan and police terror.  In this context, the democratic advances of the antiracist movement in the United States have been critically aided by winning, where possible, federal protections against "the tyranny of the majority," federal laws against discrimination, and federal powers to enforce the protection of subjugated people—including the use of federal troops to integrate schools and the use of federal law to secure in limited cases the sovereignty of indigenous nations.

As we write, the Bus Riders Union is engaged in a test of civil rights law that was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. The MTA refuses to comply with  federal judges who have repeatedly upheld civil rights law as embodied in a 1996 Consent Decree between the Bus Riders Union and the Los Angeles MTA. In 1999 we won a federal court order that required the MTA to purchase 350 new buses and hire sufficient drivers to reduce overcrowding levels on the buses for 400,000 bus riders, overwhelmingly people of color.  The MTA appealed the decision on the grounds that "states' rights" theory allows them to disregard the Consent Decree, because it was an improper intervention by the federal courts in the running of a local government agency.  The Ninth Circuit Court upheld the lower court ruling against the MTA, and upheld it again upon a full district court appeal.  In a tremendous victory for the Bus Riders Union, the Supreme Court rejected the MTA's appeal.  In this context, the stakes for protection of federal power are high for the antiracist movement across the country and specifically for bus riders in Los Angeles.  This is a legal tactic driven by a Left strategy and a mass-based social movement with a variety of other forms of struggle.  Should we have used the federal court to sue a regional agency? Should we have used the bourgeois civil rights law at all?  Our approach to the role of the government is to always fight for the protection and expansion of rights, which usually means rights won at the federal level.

At the same time, we know that there are many instances in which "local," "regional," "statewide," or other progressive struggles are in direct contradiction to the power and "authority" of the federal government and must be supported—such as support for indigenous nations, state-specific expansion of legal rights such as legal marriage between same-gender partners, regional autonomy for concentrated populations of an oppressed nationality, special voting districts, local environmental regulations that provide greater protections, etc.  In past years, federal Supreme Court decisions have overturned specially-created minority nationality electoral districts in particular states to concentrate (and therefore benefit) black and Latino voters, overturned the right of a state to curtail corporate sales to a military junta, overturned the right of a state to prevent nuclear waste from being trucked through its borders and dramatically reduced the rights of women to file sexual harassment suits.  In such cases, we believe any effort by the federal government to overturn expanded rights at the local and state level is an abuse of federal power. 

It is clear that progressives involved in using the government to fight the government face constant dilemmas.  Over time, given experience with a variety of situations like this one, we have come to advocate relying on concrete analysis of specific times, places, and conditions.  And we have developed a principle to determine the best interests of oppressed peoples in concrete conditions:  the rights of oppressed, exploited, subjugated peoples, as well as the powers to enforce these rights, must be protected and expanded, whether at the local, state or federal level of government.  We are dedicated to restraining the U.S. government at all levels any time it acts to deny rights.  Our support for federal powers in relation to "states' rights," therefore, is historically specific to the expansion and protection of the rights of subjugated people, and the expansion of the social welfare state to satisfy the basic needs of oppressed people.  Therefore, it is not only possible but, actually, historically necessary for the Left to defend regional autonomy rights to oppose oppressive acts, while maintaining a commitment to federal powers to enforce protections from oppressive acts. 

We have no illusions—about bourgeois democracy or bourgeois law—but we know from many years of struggle that democratic rights can be won and must then be defended.  We are very aware of the character of bourgeois democracy and we believe in pushing it to its limits as part of a multi-faceted united front strategy against racism, national oppression, the subjugation of women, and the tolls of imperialism.  One of the worst errors for the antiimperialist Left would be to instill illusions about bourgeois democracy in the heart of the U.S. empire at a time when our unique responsibility is to challenge its fundamental precepts.  Therefore, we fight in the present based on a vision of the future when the human rights of all peoples, but especially minority nationalities and groups without suffrage, are inviolable; when the rights of oppressed nationality peoples, indigenous peoples, and immigrants cannot be voted away or abrogated by the dominant racial group or any other form of electoral or political majority. 

Even as we advocate using the instruments of bourgeois democracy to fight for space, we must expose the contradictions and steadfastly pursue other approaches, or we will objectively foster the illusion that the U.S. government and capitalism in its moribund stage can actually create both liberty and justice, freedom and equality.

As we struggle with these contradictions and the Left's dilemmas about how to engage them, we look to other models of democratic struggle as critical to our work. During the height of the antiracist movements of the 1960s in the U.S., the Black Panthers called for a referendum by all black people to determine their relationship to the United States, and Malcolm X proposed that black people go to the United Nations to assert their human rights and have them recognized and protected, independent of the U.S. system.  During that period, war resisters denied the legitimacy of the U.S. government to "legally" wage a genocidal war in Vietnam and engaged in a wide variety of  anti-war draft resistance tactics to challenge an unjust and imperialist war.  This extra-legal, extra-electoral perspective is the unique contribution of the antiimperialist Left to the human rights debate, and it retains compelling relevance, perhaps even greater, today.

When we take this perspective on the struggle for human rights, we can see that there is a need for a strong mass movement—rooted in organizing, civil disobedience, the refusal to abide by unjust laws, and militant direct action—to challenge the entire legitimacy of the bourgeois justice system.  As the Bush administration launches a wave of repression not seen since the McCarthy days and makes every effort to deny our rights, we challenge all progressives to struggle for clarity,  and fight for the principle that the rights of oppressed  nationalities can never be determined by vote of the oppressor nation's electoral majority.  We must begin preparation now to use every means necessary to assert our inalienable rights.  

Strategic demand around which the strategy center's program group is unified

We call on the U.S. government to cease its war and uphold the terms of international treaties protecting the rights of all peoples during war and peace.  We call upon the U.S. government to enforce the terms of these treaties in relation to all U.S. corporations.  We call upon the U.S. government to recognize the inalienable rights of indigenous peoples, oppressed nationality and racial groups, women and children.

Focal Campaigns

    n U.S. military, stop all human rights abuses and cease overt and covert military intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign nations—end Plan Columbia.

    n All U.S. governmental bodies and U.S. corporations, reverse and repeal any racially coded propositions or policies that lead to a denial of equal rights or to a disproportionately discriminatory impacts on oppressed nationalities, racial, ethnic, or gender groups, internationally and domestically (such as California propositions 187, 209, 227, 21, etc.).

    n U.S. government, extend civil and human rights protection with regard to sexual orientation and gender identity—that is, full protection of all rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender peoples.

    n U.S. government, support and facilitate the basic rights of self-determination for black, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander populations, and Native Americans, specifically the right to devise electoral proposals for political representation.  Uphold the inalienable cultural and language rights of oppressed nationalities. 

    n U.S. government, begin investigation of the U.S. role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, as proposed by the Conyers Bill and prepare to make reparations to all nations who suffered from this heinous crime against humanity.

    n U.S. government, abolish the death penalty!

 

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