Reflections on ISO Critique: Response to Readers

We received a critical message regarding our piece on the SFSU occupation from a commentator named “Alejandra.”

"Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it." - Paulo Freire

As self-reflection and self criticism is just as important as criticism of others, we take these types of comments seriously and hope to continue receiving them from leftists in response to what we post on here.

Just to be clear, folks who participate and post on this blog work in coalition with ISO members (and various other tendencies we have written about) in movements against budget cuts and justice for Oscar Grant.  Our criticisms and reflections never preclude working together with these groups in the real world.

Here is the message we received from “Alejandra” (our response follows it)

Alejandra:

i´m not a member of the ISO, but i think it should be noted that this AS response fails on many accounts.

if you argued that what made Nov. 20th at Berkeley a success was a synthesis of the General Assembly with direct action, then why wasn´t the SFSU occupation proposed to a general assembly? do you acknowledge the turnout at SFSU in support of the occupation was pretty damn small? why can´t direct actions be done via the process of mass democracy (one person, one vote)?

The occupiers undercut the actual general assembly process at SFSU by making a unilateral decision. but rather than acknowledge this, you simply evade the question.

moreover, you pose a total strawman concerning democracy. nobody has every claimed that democracy means “every person has to approve something before it happens.” ridiculous! in the real world, a democratic process means a majority rules vote. couldn´t there and shouldn´t there have been a discussion and debate and vote on the occupation? if you don´t agree there should have been, you have the obligation to explain why.

lastly, it is a terrible means of debate to respond to a mild criticism with the inflamattory comparison of Corrigan´s critique and the ISO´s. what a great way to cut off discussion! if it´s true you are trying to learn from experience and not be sectarian, why have such a derisory tone and approach to other groups that,whatever your differences may be, are working in the struggle against the budget cuts?

despite all the talk about moving beyond the problems of the left, it seems to me that AS is mired in some of the worst old traditions: sectarianism and ultraleftism.

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Reflections on ISO Critique:  Response to Readers

I.  Possibility of Repression

II.  Democracy:  Theoretical Confusion

III.  Politicization

IV.  “Sectarianism” vs. Criticism

V.  Conclusion

Comrade Alejandra, first of all your response is very much appreciated!  In the spirit of comradely criticism, I’d like to point out where it’s problematic.  Primarily this emerges in two ways: a total lack of consideration for the possibility of repression and underlying theoretical confusion over the nature of democracy.  These problems, and the conflict between our two approaches in general, are important questions for this struggle; it would be much appreciated if you would continue to engage.

I.  Possibility of repression

Your response fails to acknowledge the presence of the state (administrators, police, etc).  Proposing an occupation at an SF State general assembly would have exposed not only the plans of the occupation, but the occupiers themselves; this exposure can, depending on the circumstance, result in anything from the mere prevention of the action to brutal state repression.  Those who insist that every action be approved by an open democratic space are acting against the working class’s interests for, as we observe above, “it is anti-working class to judge an action by its democratic process. The rubric must be, instead, the degree to which an action tips the balance of class forces in favor of the oppressed.”  The Wheeler occupation on Nov. 20^th was indeed proposed to a general assembly, but it was done so the night before it was scheduled to happen.  In addition, the Wheeler occupation happened within the context of a 3-day strike. At SFSU there is only one union that is in struggle (it’s not even a school-affiliated union, it’s construction workers), and these construction workers have been enthusiastic supporters of the occupation and every other sign of protest they see from students. They aren’t complaining for not being invited to internal planning meetings. Why are you?

II.  Democracy: Theoretical Confusion

As we noted in the piece that you are responding to:

“Left out from both criticisms is any definition of what “democratic” actually means.  Formal democracy, whereby every person has to approve something before it happens, is a fiction. Democracy does not exist in the abstract.”

Upon reflection, you do point out a minor flaw in the wording of our critique that does in fact make a straw man.  It should say: “Formal democracy, whereby the majority of people involved have to approve something before it happens, is a fiction.”  With that correction though, the argument still stands that democracy (defined as direct control of happenings by the people involved and affected) is not created only, or even best, by general assemblies.  By your rubric, the CA state proposition process, where all registered voters have input into the legalistic decisions of the state, is much more democratic than any class struggle ever could be.  As noted above, you can only think that such processes are most democratic if you ignore, consciously or not, the constant intervention of the state into these formally democratic processes.  This is the way that you, the ISO and Corrigan share the same theoretically bankrupt understanding of democracy.  You replicate the ISO’s misunderstanding without responding to our critique of it!

III. Politicization

Needless to say, also absent from your analysis is any mention of the many hundreds of students who were politicized by the occupation and did defend it (YouTube clips of this are easy to find). Not everyone shares your impulse to lead everything. Most of us are happy to support whatever positive forms of resistance folks take on, and are especially supportive of more direct forms. Why are you bitter? Have some solidarity.

Perhaps you missed the mini general assemblies that happened at the entrances to the occupied building where people were discussing plans for building strikes on March 4^th as well as building inclusive spaces like general assemblies in the future. You missed the hundreds of students who came to look, and ended up staying and having political conversations about the nature of the budget crisis and the need for class struggle to fight it. Is this outreach unimportant to you? Doesn’t the education of hundreds of students as the crisis we face and the method to fight it matter? If it does matter, then you should recognize the importance even though you didn’t make it happen.

IV. “Sectarianism” vs. Criticism

The claim, with backing arguments, that the ISO, you, and Robert Corrigan of SFSU share a theoretical foundation is not sectarian; it’s either correct or incorrect, and only political arguments, not ad hominem attacks, will change minds about that.  We recognize that conservative elements such as yourself have your hearts in the right place . . . but letting that recognition silence principled criticism will retard the movement more than anything.

V. Conclusion

Occupation polarizes and clarifies the situation for people, as well as providing a platform from which to speak. The SFSU occupiers were talking about class war and the March 4th strike, and hundreds of people heard them and agreed. Organizers at Cal have acknowledged that the General Assemblies there have dwindled and are very stale. Some have criticized themselves for not approaching the general assemblies in a more political way. The proceduralist, apolitical nature of the actually existing general assemblies at Cal has lacked political proposals for the movement and led in practical terms to tailing liberal elements. Had we been more open to debate and to creative action from the beginning we would be much further along the way to radical resistance in the spring. We need a disciplined approach to reaching out to workers of all kinds to strike March 4th, but we also need creative ways to energize communities so that they see March 4th as an exciting POLITICAL event, not just another symbolic expression of disapproval as most protests are these days.

We look forward to considered responses from other tendencies in the movement.

Racial Unity in the Class Struggle

Most people don’t openly say this, but it’s generally assumed that an activist should only organize their own racial community and not any others. It is commonly accepted that whites should not organize communities of color due to them reproducing white supremacy. These

The photo shows representatives of the Asian, Black, and Chicano/Mexicano student organizations at Berkeley (that is Richard Aoki on the left, whose life is documented in the recently released film “Aoki”)

are questions and concerns we should take seriously but with the conscious goal of working through the racial contradictions rather than accepting them as they are. The process of building unity amongst the working class will find its most difficult hurdles in confronting race and racism.

The picture to the right is of three different militants, from three different racial groups, coming together in struggle.  Many have pointed out that the budget cut movement is largely White activists, but the reality is that the budget cuts impact communities of color far more. Therefore it’s important for communities of color to continue entering this struggle, and in large part this means bringing in issues that pertain specifically to one’s racial community. For example, many Black activists against the budget cuts bring up the racist murder of Oscar Grant. In their political mind these issues are not different but stem from the same system.

Let’s return to the positive aspects of the 1960s, and the quest for racial unity in order for the struggle to deepen by simultaneously challenging the particular issues in each racial community with the major issues that we are all subjected to through the budget cuts and the general breakdown of capitalism.

Everything Touched by Capital Turns Toxic

In the article below, written by Gifford Hartman, capital’s war against the ecological is couched within a rich history of class struggle in California.  California’s economy transformed from its early days as center of raw mineral extraction (primarily gold and, later oil), to one based on agriculture, and then became the site of the pioneering suburban sprawl model of housing development. The earth was abused and re-abused through every cycle of accumulation right along with the indio slaves, mexicano laborers, chinese contract workers, okie migrants,  black longshoremen, and the rest of us who were drawn by the dynamic economy at the Pacific rim of  US imperialism.

Crisis in California: Everything Touched by Capital Turns Toxic

I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California…. California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralisation taken place with such speed.

- Letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Sorge, 1880

Shantytown USA

In California toxic capitalist social relations demonstrated their full irrationality in May 2009 when banks bulldozed brand-new, but unsold, McMansions in the exurbs of Southern California.

Across the United States an eviction occurs every 13 seconds and there are at the moment at least five empty homes for every homeless person. The newly homeless are finding beds unavailable as shelters are stretched well beyond capacity. St. John’s Shelter for Women and Children in Sacramento regularly turns away 350 people a night. Many of these people end up in the burgeoning tent cities that are often located in the same places as the ‘Hoovervilles’ – similar structures, named after then President Herbert Hoover – of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The tent city in Sacramento, California’s state capital, was set up on land that had previously been a garbage dump. It became internationally known when news media from Germany, the UK, Switzerland and elsewhere covered it. It featured in the French magazine Paris Match and on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the US. Of course this publicity necessitated that Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s governor, and Kevin Johnson, mayor of Sacramento, shut it down. When we visited in March 2009 to investigate, we met Governor Schwarzenegger and Mayor Johnson there by chance. Johnson told us the tent city would be evacuated, saying, ‘They can’t stay here, this land is toxic.’

Almost half the people we spoke with had until recently been working in the building trades. When the housing boom collapsed they simply could not find work. Some homeless people choose to live outside for a variety of reasons, including not being allowed to take pets into homeless shelters or to freely drink and use substances. But most of the tent city dwellers desperately wanted to be working and wanted to be housed. In many places people creating tent encampments are met with hostility, and are blamed for their own condition. New York City, with a reputation for intolerance towards the homeless, recently shut down a tent city in East Harlem. Homeowners near a tent city of 200 in Tampa, Florida organised to close it down, saying it would ‘devalue’ their homes. In Seattle, police have removed several tent cities, each named ‘Nickelsville’ after the Mayor who ordered the evictions.

Yet in some places, like Nashville, Tennessee, tent cities are tolerated by local police and politicians. Church groups are even allowed to build showers and provide services. Other cities that have allowed these encampments are: Champaign, Illinois; St. Petersburg, Florida; Lacey, Washington; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Reno, Nevada; Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Oregon. Ventura, California recently changed its laws to allow the homeless to sleep in cars and nearby Santa Barbara has made similar allowances. In San Diego, California a tent city appears every night in front of the main public library downtown.

Wallerstein on the Current Cojuncture

We’re reposting these notes by world-systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein because of their concise presentation and contribution towards an understanding of our present situation.  Here in California we are in the midst of interesting and exciting developments of struggle against budget cuts, the outward expression of the crisis of capital.

Immanuel Wallerstein

In this context radical forces should be engaging in “serious internal struggles over the correct strategy to pursue.”  We’ve seen this develop in the student movement (see the posts below) and will continue to see it as resistance spreads.

The Current Conjuncture: Short-run and Middle-run Projections
by Immanuel Wallerstein

1. Where We Are:

a) The world has entered a depression, whose greatest impact is yet to come (in the next five years).

b) The United States has entered a serious decline in geopolitical power, whose greatest impact is yet to come (in the next five years).

c) The world environment is entering into serious crisis (and nothing much will be done about it) (in the next five years).

d) The rumblings of left-oriented social movements are everywhere, but they are poorly coordinated and lack clear tactical vision (because they lack clear middle-run strategic vision).

e) Far-right forces have clearer short-run tactical vision than the left (a combination of preparing for violence and a refusal of all centrist compromise), but they too lack clear middle-run strategic vision.

f) The future (both short-run and middle-run) is very, very uncertain.

SF State CEO Corrigan and “Socialists” Attack SFSU Occupation

SF State CEO Corrigan and “Socialists” Attack SFSU Occupation

I. CEO and Socialists Share Bourgeois Notion of Democracy

II. Building March 4^th Strikes: Synthesizing Diverse Approaches to Organizing

The wave of occupations at universities across California has raised the stakes of the anti-budget cut struggle while also raising questions about methods of struggle. On December 9^th, SFSU students spoke with action that rang louder than any “speak-out” could as they occupied the Business building for 24 hours; in the process they galvanized a whole new layer of disgruntled students around a hopeful and inspiring

No more bourgeois control!! This is a Class War

project: fighting the budget cuts which attack the whole working class, starting where they are right now, at their own campus. Many students remarked that the occupation was the single most important experience of their political lives. In many cases this was the first day of their political lives.

CEO and Socialists Share Bourgeois Notion of Democracy

Teachers, faculty, campus workers, and the whole campus community are affected by these cuts. Yet some have seen it necessary to publicly condemn the occupation. Chief among these are the President of SFSU, Robert Corrigan (not a surprise), and the International Socialist Organization (kind of a surprise).

Obama’s War: Foreign and Domestic

Obama’s recent decision to commit 30,000 more soldiers to the

Translation: he criticized him so much . . . yet he follows his footsteps!

occupation of Afghanistan has angered folks who thought the promised “change” would include change in the US government’s imperialist foreign policy.  Anti-war, semi-socialist ex-Democrat Cynthia McKinney puts the cumulative effect well in a recent editorial:

“…there is deep disquiet today within the ranks of the President’s own base in the Democratic Party, with independents, and with middle-of-the-roaders called “swing” voters.  In unprecedented numbers, voters in the United States of all previous political persuasions went to the polls and invested their dreams and, most importantly, their votes in the “hope” and “change” promised by the Obama campaign.  But in light of the President’s defense of Bush Administration war crimes and torture in U.S. courts, the transfer of trillions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars to the wealthy banking elite, continued spying on environmental and peace activists as well as support for the extension of the Patriot Act, and removal of Medicare-for-all (single payer) as a central feature of proposed health care reform, Obama voters are rethinking their support.”

The resulting uproar from the liberal/progressive wing of Democratic Party voters doesn’t result from simple naïveté about the nature of the US political system; many up-until-recently disillusioned US residents were bamboozled by Obama’s race and rhetoric.  The Black electoral base, which is generally the most progressive section of US society, has been especially victimized by the assumption that racist, imperialist politics radiate from a white, racist chief executive.  The Obama administration PR team, and the Democratic Party in general, have encouraged this image through Obama’s constant appropriation of Black political heroes like MLK and most recently Muhammad Ali.  As Dave Zirin observes in his recent article “Message to Obama: You Can’t Have Muhammad Ali”, this is a cynical bastardization of one of the most famous war resisters in the 20^th century.

Occupations Spread Across California

Occupations Spread Across California

Behind Every Fee Increase is a Line of Cops

Fully armed, a line of 10 swat team police marched up to the picket line. Half-stunned by their presence, the crowd of supporters hesitatingly jeered the cops. In unison and on command the pigs charged forward and shoved the picketers to the ground. Throughout the day there were various refusals to accept these attacks; they ranged from hurling verbal abuse at the cops with chants like “Fuck the Police,” to acts of physical resistance such as refusing to sit down at the urging of cops and fellow protesters, to minor incidents of exchanging blows with the pigs.

Some of these bold acts of resistance were deplorable to those protestors whose go-to chants were “Peaceful protest! Peaceful protest!” as the pigs violently attacked students.  One chant was even directed to the cops themselves: “We are fighting for your kids! We are fighting for your kids!” This brings into sharp relief the widespread confusion about the role of the state in the anti-budget cut movement.

9/24 – Opening Shot Against the Budget Cuts

What follows is an analysis of the actions which took place at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz on September 24th, the different political strategies advocated, and some perespective on how to move forward.  Post comments to discuss & debate, and Enjoy!

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September 24^th:  The Opening Shot

-Advance the Struggle

I. Introduction to 9/24

II. UC Santa Cruz Occupation

III. UC Berkeley Rally & General Assembly

IV. Twin Pitfalls of Tailism and Adventurism

V. Moving Forward

I. Introduction to 9/24

On September 24 2009, thousands across the state protested and picketed against the California budget cuts. CFA organized pickets at some CSU’s across the state, several UC unions had actions on the UC system, and students protested in mass. UC Santa Cruz launched a successful occupation of the graduate student center and UC Berkeley had a rally of 5,000 students, with 500 students taking over Wheeler hall for a mass assembly.

M1 (Dead Prez) on Internationalism – From the Ghetto to Gaza west coast speaking tour

M1 from Dead Prez got interviewed by Davey D about his experience in Gaza (which he wrote about for the SF BayView) and about the importance of international solidarity between the struggle here in the US and struggles abroad.  He’ll be on a speaking tour that’s making stops in Oakland and other Bay Area and Northern California cities. (Click here for the flyer)

For those of us in the belly of the beast, we have a very specific responsibility to be internationalist.  But, one question that comes to mind is: how do we exercise this responsibility?  No doubt symbolic protests and demonstrations against the war, or against the invasion of Gaza by Israel, are important.  But is this deep enough?  Have we struck a nerve in the imperial centre through these processes?

Anti-war organizations are planning a fall campaign, but the question remains: is this enough?  Symbolic protests play a role in shifting public opinion against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but is there something missing?

Hopefully M1 will get into some of these questions during the tour, and folks can take a stab at it in the comments.

Van Jones’ Resignation Helps Save Obama’s Credibility with Racists

Big L writes:

So, Van Jones resigned and took one for the team by backing down from his position as “green jobs czar” for the Obama

Van Jones & Obama: representing the failure of "leftist" strategy in 2009

administration.  This is happening after Glenn Beck, reactionary Fox News anchor, smashed on him and called him out on his show for being a “communist” and part of STORM.

Interestingly, Glenn Beck’s right-wing, reactionary red-baiting actually contains some useful, truthful facts about Van Jones’ strategy.  Specifically, Beck’s racist-ass (and let’s be clear, this dude is completely reactionary) brings up the way that Van Jones saw his work alongside Obama as the way to be a “more effective revolutionary.”  Van Jones, and many in the non-profitized left, see this “inside/outside” approach as the most effective way of organizing (and as we’ve seen this includes many post-STORM nonprofit organizations.)

What lessons will we draw from Van Jones’ effort to infiltrate the system and change it from within?  Is it possible to have an “inside/outside” combination approach to revolutionary organizing (where we work within bourgeois electoral circuits, and outside of them) like the one that Bill Fletcher Jr. advocates for?  This Van Jones example is yet another strong sign that it doesn’t work.

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Unfortunately, many self-proclaimed revolutionaries see this type of strategy – basically, working within the system – as the only way to engage in day to day struggles: fighting budget cuts means working mostly within the existing student government/organizations and teacher’s union; battling exploitation on the job means working within the official union which is  supposed to represent a particular group of workers interests.  Etc, Etc.

Perhaps revolutionaries should consider taking the road of building autonomous organizations as vehicles capable of challenging budget cuts, exploitation on the job, police brutality, and other forms of capitalist oppression and exploitation.  These autonomous organizations may relate to unions, student organizations, etc, but maintain ideological and organizational independence at the same time.  This independence would allow revolutionary minded folks to actually create a magnetic pole of radicalism; providing space for individuals who are ready to take the system on more militantly, and also serve to pull existing organizations like unions and student orgs leftward.

These are some of the most burning questions revolutionaries should be discussing.

Mike Davis on California’s Crisis and the Need for Cadre Groups

This is a transcription of Mike Davis’ speech and closing remarks at the ISO’s “Socialism” conference which took place in San Francisco this summer.  We’re posting it here cos we know some local activists that couldn’t get into the talk . . .

About the speech: Mike rightfully calls out the Democratic Party for enabling the gutting of social services despite their majority in Sacramento.  So many folks in progressive orgs, unions, etc are caught up in a paradigm that accepts the Democrats as the party of the people, and Mike smashes on this illusion.

Also, he brings up the fact that social movements alone cannot rise to the challenge of combatting the crisis.  The missing ingredient is fresh cadre organizations.  Here’s a snippet and then the whole speech:

“Even if you say that the whole legacy of Leninism was a historical disaster, you’re still faced with exactly the same questions posed in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. That is, the need to create some organization of organizers that provides a framework for young people willing to make extraordinary sacrifices and dedicate their lives solely to the fight of the poor and the working class. The need organize a cadre of people able to exchange and generalize and coordinate experiences across the struggle so that some kind of genuinely left agenda–which means a pro-working class agenda–becomes possible.

The Bolshevik Party may not be the only route to this. The anarchists in Barcelona did a pretty good job in a different way of bringing together and coordinating a relentless struggle for their principles and the principles of the working class.

But the question is inescapable. You have to talk about this question. You have to talk about the creation of organizations. I’m not arguing to revive the little red book or the thoughts of Leon Trotsky, but we need organizations that can allow such dedication to exist.”

What Marxists Should Learn from Black Feminists

I’ve been reading This Bridge Called My Back, and re-reading the Combahee

women of color against bourgeois pigs

River Collective’s statement, which is known for its important contribution towards an intersectional understanding of the Race/Gender/Class triad of oppression.  Their take on the racialized and gendered nature of class is right on:

We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.

They also self-identify as socialists:

We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses . . . We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.

These women had a nuanced view of what socialist revolution should be about.  Many in the marxist movement absolutely miss what these black feminists hit squarely on the head – that the revolution is about one class against another, but that this revolution is meaningless if oppressions & contradictions within the class (racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc) are not dealt with.

On the one hand, there are those who focus entirely on a seemingly race-less and sex-less “working class” being pitted against the bosses.  Included here are many trotskyist & anarchist formations.

On the binary opposite side of the spectrum are those who focus on the oppression of “people” and how these “people” (presumably class-less black people, women, queers, students, etc) will be those who make the revolution.  Included here are mostly maoist formations . . .

On yet another hand, those who do acknowledge and uphold the intersectional approach often lack a revolutionary strategy & program for making revolution, and focus mostly on the experiences and identities of oppressed groups (women of color, queer, etc).  Often times these intersections are like linear lines criss-crossing at fixed locations, with little said about the historical evolution of these simultaneous oppressions, and how they developed out of each other.  Many of this persuasion may be found in academia, or in non-profit organizations.

What are we left with?  A pretty empty vacuum of revolutionary politics.  A sad state to say the least.

So, what’s the challenge?

To develop a strategy, theory, program, and organization which speaks to the experiences of all oppressed people, and which sees the ending of oppression as a class struggle – with the all-important caveat that this class struggle be full of color, gender, and sexuality – but a class struggle nonetheless and not some struggle of abstract, utopian, class-less “revolutionary people.”

The piece “Sex, Race & Class” by Selma James speaks more to the organic intersections of the triad of oppression, and is a good complement to the Combahee River Collective’s classic statement.  Enjoy

-L.

Update: Global Class Resistance

Zimbabwe, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, Honduras, Mexico. Class struggle in all these countries, along the same worker-capitalist fault line. Each of course has its own particular contexts with its own contradictions, but nonetheless, how many working class people are seeing their situation as being bound up with that of the ethnicity in the next neighborhood over, let alone being conscious of their place in a global proletarian class, in a global division of labor?

The point at which solidarity can actually be expressed materially by workers in the US with workers elsewhere is still very far off. To see this manifest would require entire new layers of workers getting organized (largely immigrant, but retail, unwaged, and informal economic sectors too) with a radical perspective from the get-go by internationalist Marxists.

Those workers already organized by patriotic unions (afl-cia, change-to-win, etc) have a distorted perspective not only regarding the international proletariat, but also the scope of their own activity domestically. The link between internationalism and militancy is very strong. Militants would have to either revolutionize those unions from within or go through a process of building dual unionism to build an alternative with a revolutionary perspective.

Perhaps all workers should be seen as “new layers” and directly recruited by marxists to socialist organizations which can organize workplace, community, and political rebellion without a mediating front of some kind such as a union or community organization.

Marxists can go directly to the streets in working class communities and to workplaces (including campuses) and hand out flyers with news of workers fighting back, and fuse it with an analysis of the system in its particulars and generalities. Radicals can and should do this basic work to erode hegemonic apathy and narrow-mindedness. Influencing consciousness can prime the terrain for concrete organizing. That organizing can take different forms depending on the perspective of the Marxist, but it should be done.

Regardless of which approach any given Marxist chooses to take toward organizing the workers, news of international proletarian struggle can be used as an exposure for the US working class, showing them what is possible. By thinking about the conditions in other countries and analyzing the forces at play (class interests, contradictions within classes, the role of the state, the spectrum of political actors, etc) workers here “at home” can develop a richer picture of whats going on domestically. For the working class to become a class for itself it has to become conscious of itself and study itself.

Radicals of all persuasions should publicize these examples of global proletarian resistance as much as possible and agitate the working class in the US to consider how it might get organized to join the fight.

Two Prison Riots – Two Different Strategies

Last saturday, August 8th, a prison riot broke out between Latino and Black prisoners . . . Over 200 prisoners were seriously injured.  What follows is a piece from a statement written by the Chicano Mexicano Prison Project on the riot.  They state that:

What we, Raza and Africans, and all oppressed people (including poor whites) must understand, it is that the “divide and conquer” strategy is the foundation upon which colonialism-capitalism rests. And, if we are serious about ending the vicious violence among colonized and oppressed (poor and working class) people, colonialism-capitalism must be destroyed.

We’re also posting an article on a 10 day prison rebellion (presumably the longest in US history) that happened in the 1990’s that highlights a different approach taken by the prisoners.  In the Lucasville prison uprising, Black and White prisoners united against the prison system itself.  The article reads:

The single most remarkable thing about the Lucasville rebellion is that white and black prisoners formed a common front against the authorities. When the State Highway Patrol came into the occupied cell block after the surrender, they found slogans written on the walls of the corridor and in the gymnasium that read: “Convict unity,” “Convict race,” “Black and whites together,” “Blacks and whites, whites and blacks, unity,” “Whites and blacks together,” “Black and white unity.”

What can we learn from counterposing these two examples of prison upheaval?

The full story of the Lucasville uprising is posted here.

Tim Wise on Obama Red-baiting: Socialism as a New Black Bogeyman

This was originally posted on Tim Wise’ facebook page,and we’re reproducing it here for folks to discuss, critique, and comment on. Tim Wise is a white guy known for his writings on white privilege.

Red-Baiting and Racism: Socialism as the New Black Bogeyman

By Tim Wise
August 10, 2009

Throughout the first six months of his administration, President Obama–perhaps one of the most politically cautious leaders in contemporary history–has been routinely portrayed as a radical by his opponents on the far-right. In particular, persons who have apparently never actually studied Marxism (or if they did, managed to somehow find therein support for such things as bailing out banks and elite corporations) contend that Obama is indeed a socialist. Reducing all government action other than warmaking to part of a larger socialist conspiracy, the right contends that health care reform is socialist, capping greenhouse gas emissions is socialist, even providing incentives for driving fuel efficient cars is socialist. That the right insists upon Obama’s radical-left credentials, even as they push an Obama=Hitler meme (something they apparently think is fair, since, after all the Nazis were National Socialists, albeit the kind who routinely murdered the genuine article) only speaks to the special brand of crazy currently in vogue among the nation’s reactionary forces.

As real socialists laugh at these clumsily made broadsides, and as scholars of actual socialist theory try and explain the absurdity of the analogies being drawn by conservative commentators, a key point seems to have been missed, and it is this point that best explains what the red-baiting is actually about.