DECONSTRUCTED OF A BAD THEORY.

The latest work of art to be banned in Boston is the Emancipation Monument.

World Socialist Web Site contributor Jacob Crosse brings the scorn.

On December 29, city officials removed from downtown Boston a famous statue of Abraham Lincoln and an emancipated slave that has stood for 141 years. This politically reactionary act was the culmination of a campaign, including a petition drive, carried out by racialist elements linked to the Democratic Party.

So much for Ayanna Presley having no enemies to her left.

Contrary to the claims of its racialist detractors, the statue, paid for by subscriptions from former slaves, cannot by any objective standard be characterized as racist or demeaning. It depicts the abolition of slavery in the US, which Lincoln and over 360,000 Union soldiers paid for in blood.

It features Lincoln, his hand over the Emancipation Proclamation, and a freed slave, his shackles broken, crouched in a runner’s stance with the key to his chains in his hand. The granite base of the statue, all that remains after Tuesday’s removal, bears an inscription that reads: “A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.”

The True Socialists would like a true class politics, rather than a woke identity politics.

[Outgoing president Donald] Trump and the Republicans responded to the mass protests [against allegedly racist policing] with open hostility and calls for more widespread repression, including Trump’s June 1 unleashing of federal military police against peaceful protesters in Washington D.C. and his threat to impose martial law and deploy active-duty troops across the country to crush the demonstrations. They portrayed the demonstrations as part of a “socialist” and “terrorist” plot and encouraged far-right and fascist vigilantes to attack anti-police violence protesters.

For their part, the Democrats sought to defuse the movement by means of racialist politics, doubling down on their efforts to define all social ills as the result of ingrained and permanent white racism, promote divisions within the working class, and obscure the fundamental dividing line in capitalist society—socio-economic class.

That dividing line might exist, but it's more likely an alliance of Trumpian populists and entrepreneurial people in the ethnic communities that is going to emerge, not some Fifth International.