Hurricane Katrina & the war: A perspective for the movement

The struggle to rebuild New Orleans is an anti-war struggle. There’s no getting around it. It’s not a stretch of the imagination. That is a political reality.

And therefore there is hardly anything more important just now than for the anti-war movement and all progressive forces to find meaningful ways of solidarizing themselves with the struggle of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina—primarily Black and poor people from New Orleans and up and down the Gulf Coast.

The solidarity of the anti-war movement needs to go beyond slogans and symbolic gestures, both for political and strategic reasons.

The political reason is the necessity as a long-term prospective to not only make the anti-war movement more anti-racist and more class-conscious but to understand that the concrete merging of the struggle for Black people and all people of color in this country—along with the entire working class and the anti-war and progressive forces—is essential to resisting imperialist war.

We have got to unify the movements.

The strategic reason is that now more than ever, as a consequence of what the Katrina catastrophe exposed, people everywhere have made the connection between the war and the needs of poor and working people at home in the strongest way: Is the money produced by the working class and the oppressed going to be spent on building cities or funding war?

That understanding—which has existed, but which is sharper now—is what creates the natural link between the anti-war movement and the people of New Orleans.

The popular expression of that consciousness is the demand to end the war, bring the troops home now, take all that money that’s been wasted on this imperialist war and rebuild New Orleans and every other city decimated by hurricanes—either the kind that originate in nature or those produced by capitalist exploitation, oppression and racism.

Hurricane Katrina: The Black nation’s 9/11

In his article entitled, “Hurricane Katrina: The Black Nation’s 9/11!” Saladin Muhammad also puts forward a valuable list of demands. (www.workers.org/2005/us/hurricane-0922/)

Muhammad is chairperson of Black Workers for Justice and a co-convener of the Million Workers March Movement in the South.

In his article, Muhammad calls for building a Gulf Coast Survivors Justice and Reconstruction Movement.

He wrote, “The movement in the Gulf Coast region has major concerns that require the organization, politics and leadership of the African American liberation struggle as a central component to help unite a broad, multi-national, multi-racial and international campaign for social justice and reconstruction.”

Such a network could unite the relief and reconstruction efforts into a regional coalition, form councils among the evacuees in various cities that could elect representatives to an assembly, organize and reconnect the dispersed masses from the region into a representative body “that acts somewhat as their provisional government,” and create a network to connect supporters, technical resources, fund-raising and allies throughout the country and internationally.

Community-labor united

Activists from the Gulf states, as well as the most militant and politically conscious forces in the Black workers’ movement and the anti-war movement, have already put forth programs and demands to addressing the Katrina crisis.

Consistent with Saladin Muhammad's proposal, the Community-Labor United (CLU) coalition has announced the formation of a Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Reconstruction Project.

The CLU is a coalition which emerged in the wake of Katrina, is representative of activists in the Gulf States. It is demanding that all of the government funds earmarked for Katrina relief and reconstruction be placed in a Katrina Survivors' Fund, administered by survivors.

CLU is also demanding that funds be made available immediately for reuniting families, and that community representatives be involved in all decisions regarding the reconstruction and future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

The Million Worker March Movement has drafted proposed initiatives to meet this catastrophe.

These include a call to ensure the right of return to all who have been displaced, freeze reconstruction contracts until the community has control of this process, and cancel all outstanding debts of Katrina survivors.

The demands include a call for a People's referendum on all decisions affecting the political and residential issues of Gulf Coast survivors and the needs for prioritizing hospitals, schools and other public-service-oriented infrastructure for reconstruction.

The MWMM program also demands the establishment of a program to provide jobs and union wages for Katrina survivors, and that the U.S. accept Katrina aid offered by other countries.

Troops Out Now Coalition demands

The Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC) has formulated a number of demands based on direction from activists in the Gulf region, as well as close allies in the Million Worker March Movement.

TONC has issued a call for the formation of an International Network In Solidarity With Katrina Survivors and their communities.

The perspective of the Katrina Solidarity Network is to embrace the demands and priorities of the people in the Gulf Coast and organize the widest solidarity possible behind their struggle.

TONC supports the demand issued by the MWMM that the money needed for rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region must not come from more cuts in food stamps, Medicaid and Medicare, public housing and public education.

These vitally needed funds must come from the war budget—and the only way that can be done is to end the war immediately and bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan now.

A struggle for power

The TONC proposal on Katrina Solidarity also endorses the call for an immediate freeze on awarding Katrina contracts.

Who is going to control the money and who is the money really for?

The essence of this struggle in the Gulf Coast is a struggle for power between the Black working class on one hand and on the government, Pentagon and capitalist corporations on the other.

Who will get contracts? Who will get jobs? What wages and workers’ rights will they be entitled to? It is the people who must control all of the funds that will go towards the rebuilding, and who must make the decisions.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that will be coming in to the Gulf Coast must not be handed over to corporate looters like Halliburton and all the rest of Bush’s rich friends who are lining up at the trough to steal the money.

TONC supports the call for Congress and Bush to rescind the waiver of the Davis-Bacon Act and pay prevailing wages for workers who rebuild New Orleans. Extend unemployment benefits, back pay and a guaranteed job for all workers displaced by Katrina.

And TONC demands that the U.S. government immediately accept the 1,100 medical doctors offered by Cuba and the resources Venezuela has offered.

Other demands that TONC has put forward include:

* The thousands of people of New Orleans who are in living in shelters in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi have the right to make their demands heard. They have a right to communicate with residents in the other shelters and to coordinate the progressive forces. Activists, who are not in the shelters, who are in a position to help in this process, must have full access.

* Military occupation of the Gulf must end. The thousands of National Guard troops and soldiers are not in New Orleans or the area to help. They are there, fundamentally, to maintain the political control of the government and to deter the right of people to organize and to protest.

* TONC, along with the MWMM, calls for the establishment of an international commission of inquiry, which needs to reflect not only people from across the United States but from around the world because this struggle is international in dimension and scope.

The struggle in response to Katrina is really just beginning. It is bound to affect the Sept. 24 anti-war march in Washington, D.C., the Millions More March and every other struggle hence forth.

Mass anger over imperialist war, combined with fresh outrage over racism and national oppression as well as growing class consciousness amongst the workers, born out of a deepening worldwide capitalist crises—has set the stage for a rejuvenation of the class struggle.

The task at hand is for the most advanced, serious, experienced and principled forces in the political movement to forge a united front around Katrina and the war.

Accomplishing this task is absolutely essential to the preparation for mounting larger and larger struggles against capitalism, which are necessary, inevitable and on the horizon.

For more information about getting involved with the International Katrina Solidarity Network, contact TONC at www.troopsoutnow.org.

Holmes is a leader of Workers World Party and one of the national leaders of the Troops Out Now Coalition.