I. Voting Rights vs. Minority Rights, Human Rights and Self-Determination The ground rules of the U.S. electoral system construct the context for the pro-imperialist political parties to contain challenges to their power. The United
States is built on conquest, slavery, genocide and empire. This history shapes the political culture today, as elections are dominated by a chauvinist, punitive, and aggressively racist white majority, with
minority communities badly split on ideological and class lines, and with many of society's most oppressed members and groups unregistered, undocumented, and incarcerated. This is a fundamental
systemic contradiction embedded in the very structure of voting in the U.S. The U.S. electoral system is structured to give power to those who are entitled to vote and does not protect the
constitutional and human rights of racial and ethnic minorities from the abuses of racist voting majorities. U.S. constitutional theory acknowledges the rights of the minority at the level of concept, but
its history has shown it is not so in practice. The U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution evolved certain theories of "inalienable rights" and a "bill of rights" to protect members of society
from the invasive use of police and military force and "the tyranny of the majority"—initially in revolutionary war against the British monarchy. These lofty and in fact progressive theories of protecting
the individual and groups from state repression, such as freedom of speech and assembly, were restricted from the outset based on the assumption that "society" meant white male property owners, and "rights"
pertained to the white, male, bourgeois class that was in antagonism to the crown. Thus the term "bourgeois democracy" means the rights of the capitalists against the King, not a working class democracy
opposed to the capitalists. For centuries, in a nation built upon the genocidal conquest of indigenous lands and black African slavery, the concept of "majority vote" has 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; those with rights have debated whether those without rights can
have rights. Thus, 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 the post-civil war Reconstruction and imposed Jim
Crow laws to literally re-enslave the 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 in
representative bodies across the country that have prevented the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. In each of these situations, the vote-less have 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 at every opportunity. 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 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. 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 have passed the Effective Death Penalty act that violates habeas
corpus rights that 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 life-time bans on the
right to vote for felons who have been released from custody. The Sentencing Project in Washington D.C., as Earl Ofari Hutchinson reports in the Los Angeles Times, estimates that 40% of black men will be
permanently barred from voting in those states. The Clinton administration that talked about voting rights has been conspicuously silent as the states first arrest black and Latino men on unjust charges and
then deny them the vote when they get out of prison. These measures amount to the latest version of the poll tax and other legal maneuvers designed to deny black people the franchise. During the height of
the anti-racist 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 while Malcolm X proposed that
black people go to the United Nations to assert human rights independent of the U.S. system. During that period, anti-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 draft and anti-war resistance tactics to challenge an unjust and imperialist war. This extra-legal, extra-electoral perspective is the unique contribution of
the anti-imperialist Left to the electoral debate, and it retains compelling relevance, perhaps even greater, today. The worst error for the anti-imperialist Left would not be to vote for the
"wrong" candidate, but rather to raise illusions about the electoral system in the heart of the U.S. empire at a time when our unique responsibility is to challenge its fundamental precepts.
The anti-imperialist Left has the responsibility to raise the most fundamental but revolutionary challenge to the system itself: The human rights of all peoples, but especially minority groups and groups
without suffrage, are inviolable. 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. When we take this perspective on electoral politics, we can see that there is, in fact, a need for a strong movement—rooted in civil disobedience, the refusal to
abide by unjust laws, and militant direct action—to challenge the entire legitimacy of the electoral system, and to prevent the enforcement of racially-biased and class-biased "initiatives." |