We would like to introduce you to the Advance the Struggle Free Education newsletter, an agitational tool we use at various campuses across the Bay to connect with school workers and students interested in engaging around the conditions and struggles of the education sector.
We welcome any feedback and encourage our friends and supporters to spread these widely!
Here is our first edition:
All of us have been paying close attention to development of black insurgency over the past few years. The power of street protests, new black activist groups, and recent anti-racist demands at universities highlight the direction that the movement’s energy is going. Further, the recent spread of pro black, anti-racist demands at numerous universities following the Mizzou protests demonstrate one possible way in which the movement is cohering: through the development of common demands on college campuses.
Protesters block Interstate 580 in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, after the announcement of the grand jury decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Oakland was an exciting place to be, again, during the hot winter weeks of late November and early December 2014. Protests raged nightly, and so many of us found ourselves marching together through the streets, evading cops, and blocking freeways and BART stations wherever was possible. Walking down Broadway, turning right on 7th street and heading toward the West Oakland BART station. Stopping midway and having debates about which direction to go – toward 980? Back toward the 880? Piedmont? The chaotic discussions we had brought that familiar feeling of ungovernability back to our lives. Our militant and disorderly activities were creative and generative to the extent that we got practice in challenging the infrastructure of Bay Area capitalism, attempting to block flows of traffic in ways that at least felt like we were disrupting flows of capital. Celebrating militancy is important, but perhaps more important is pointing out some of the limitations of our courageous actions.
There are three key limits that we want to highlight here.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged austerity, blacklivesmatter, budget cuts, california, education, Oakland, Police Brutality, student movement, Student Struggle, Students
The following piece is a contribution from a high school student in San Francisco. This is the first in a series of student and youth political writings on our blog. Big ups to all the young people engaged in the fight for justice and liberation!
by The Act of Kindness
Women’s rights have changed over the years. Back then women were suppose to just take care of the children and clean the house. They were not given a right education. In the millennial generation we have progressed to all women having voting rights at the age of eighteen, right to education in the U.S, and abortion rights. Currently, in the U.S having the right to abortion hasn’t really been the case. In a case in Indiana March of this year, Purvi Patel was charged twenty years for having a miscarriage; she is supposedly guilty of “feticide.” This charge not only caused a petition and protests, but made women wonder if it is really safe to tell doctors, clinics, etc. about their abortion due to the very real fear of getting locked up.
This is because of the gender roles that society “naturally” gave to us. We as women are considered the ones that must take care of the child and if not we are considered “bad” women because we don’t follow through with society’s ideology. In many cases, women cannot provide for their child because of lack of affordable if not free health care, substandard education, and affordable housing because the government lacks support for families.Yet the government still demands women create strong families.
In order for women’s rights to be passed working class women need to be aware that the government is not doing anything to help them. Then once they are aware women would sign a petition for women to have the same rights and present it to a government official and if that doesn’t work, strike until they get reproductive rights. Women need to fight for their kids so their kids don’t have to live in the same condition and once and for all have equal rights for women as men.
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To the theoretician of capital and it’s destruction, the founder of the First Communist International, and father of modern communism, we wish you a happy birthday!
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
– Karl Marx, The German Ideology
Image from the http://thecharnelhouse.org/
How to get involved flyer
Here is a flyer that we have been using in the Bay Area that seeks to continue and center the conversation of these protest around: How do movements become revolutionary? It seeks to provide some tips and ideas of how the community can get involved and how to ‘generalize the activities from the movement into other spheres of society’.
Hit us up so we can come up with more ideas together, share resources, and collaborate!
Since 2011, countries around the world have had historic upsurges and have gained serious insight into the dynamics of anti-capitalist struggle in this period. Advance the Struggle along with La Peña Second Generation proudly presents a monthly Skype series with revolutionaries from across the globe to discuss these massive social movements.
The sixth session will involve militants from the Gezi Park protests and the ongoing movements in Turkey. The event will take place on Saturday August 23rd, 12pm noon at La Peña Cultural Center (3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA). Below is a description of the event and the leaflets for the series. Hope to see you there!
Come Saturday August 23rd at 12:00 to hear Turkish revolutionaries who will skype about their experiences in the wave of struggles at Taksim square in Instanbul. As protesters were evicted from the square, sizable protests emerged, confronting the government. Soon after, a wave of different movements, fighting for workers rights, freedom of the press, all ascended with force. A presentation will begin followed up by direct discussion with the Turkish revolutionaries.
Below is a video by Brandon Jourdan of Global Uprisings entitled, “The Taksim Commune: Gezi Park and the Uprising in Turkey,” which gives a fantastic first hand look at the escalating social movements for urban space and against political repression. Enjoy!
Taksim Commune: Gezi Park And The Uprising In Turkey from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.
The following article by Suzi Weissman and Robert Brenner was published earlier this week in the Jacobin online magazine. It’s a great overview of the past few years of ILWU’s struggles, the Longview uprising, the relationship between militant workers and various Occupies (Portland and Oakland in particular) and the treacherous role of the ILWU international.
One of the big questions that we’re left with after reading this piece is: what are pro-revolutionary activists and militants supposed to do in a situation where union leaderships are generally playing conservative roles, and when even those leaders who play more positive, militant, roles end up getting smashed? What does it mean, concretely, that an “aroused rank-and-file” is the only means for the working class, and trade unions in particular, to get our of this slump?
Our comrades have written about similar issues and begun to tackle these questions in the past years and generated debate, discussion and even controversy – so we welcome continued interventions into the important strategic discussion and debate.
Longview, Washington
Unions That Used To Strike
by Robert Brenner and Suzi Weissman
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, once known for its militancy and political radicalism, faces a choice between nurturing rank-and-file power and a slow, painful death.
In early July, 120 mostly poor and immigrant port truckers set up picket lines at three trucking companies in LA-Long Beach Harbor, extending their longstanding campaign to unionize. The next day, workers from the powerful and historically militant International Longshore and Warehouse Union honored the truckers’ picket by walking off their jobs, immediately shutting down three waterfront terminals.
The dockworkers had found themselves contractually free to refuse to cross the port truckers’ line, when their union’s agreement with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) had expired a short time before.
But almost immediately, a waterfront arbitrator ordered the longshoremen back to work. The ILWU had suddenly and without warning extended their agreement with the PMA for three days. Following the rules of their own contract, the union told its members to cross the truckers’ pickets and return to their jobs.
This action was in line with the ILWU’s informal pact with the PMA to maintain the flow of work after their contract had run out, and it snuffed out any potential the embryonic solidarity of the longshore workers and port truckers might have had to shift the balance of power between themselves and their employers.
In a small way, it encapsulated the two previous years of the union’s evolution. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
By Aram Mendoza and N. Finch in collaboration with Dewey teachers
Displacement of long-time, low-income residents due to gentrification has been an all too common story in the Bay Area recently. Now the same insidious process is targeting some of the most “at-risk” students in Oakland. Over the past two weeks, in the end of school rush, the Oakland Unified School District’s administration revealed they have been in close discussions with gentrifying developers that puts Dewey Academy, one of the public continuation high schools in the OUSD, in the cross-hairs of real estate agents and developers. The developers are already planning a 24 story luxury condo building overshadowing Dewey and now want to add Dewey and the old OUSD headquarters to the project. What follows is an overview of the situation, why it’s problematic, how it’s situated…
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Posted in Uncategorized
United Rank & File Construction Workers Take A Stand on May Day
Join us as we return to a proud history of direct action to fight to protect our own livelihoods, to raise up and organize all workers and against laws that restrict us.
On May 1, International Workers Day, we will be gathering at 16th and Mission at 5am to protest the 2 Gate System. This is a system that contractors and developers have created in order to impose the restrictive, discriminatory and repressive anti-worker laws of the Taft-Hartley act on construction unions.
San Francisco appears, on the surface, to be recovering from the economic disasters of recent years. There are cranes all over town and buildings are popping up everywhere. The people building these buildings are unable to afford the luxuries that many supposedly offer. We are also growing further and further from the chance of ever living a reasonable distance from the city in which we work. Most of us have long been unable to afford to live within the limits of the city we built. We see new wealth coming into SF all the time and yet we have gotten modest or no raises.
Many of us are lucky to have collective bargaining. We look forward to contracts coming up during this building boom. It seems the time has finally come for us to get the raises that we have lacked in the last few years while the cost of living has skyrocketed. We are looking forward to the opportunity to dig out of the financial holes we are in after years of unemployment, losing insurance for our families, losing houses and having to raid our retirement accounts to make ends meet. Now, contractors and developers need us badly and will have to give us a decent raise next contract, right? Maybe not…
Historically in San Francisco a vast majority of building has been done by workers who together, through their unions, bargain with all of their employers for a fair and equal wage rate for all of the labor done by their craft. This is still the case but we see other employers winning work contracts in SF at an alarming rate. Building has increased suddenly in San Francisco but it has disproportionately increased for the non-signatory contractors. There is an unprecedented amount of building being done by contractors who do not agree to the standards of pay and conditions that workers have fought for.
This gives signatory employers (those who employ workers under collective agreements) a powerful bargaining chip as we go into negotiations during this boom. They will argue that they need to stay competitive or the “union contractors” (and therefore workers) will all lose jobs. “Staying competitive” they argue, means that they cannot give raises, may even need some back, in order to compete. Suddenly, the snowball that has killed all the reasonably livable jobs across the country is being rolled around in San Francisco, the last bastion of hope for a decent living for those of us with blue collars.
Ideally, to stop this snowball, we would organize all workers who are not yet in our organizations. We would use the power of withholding all labor on a jobsite until all employers were forced to enter the same collectively bargained agreement. We would like to make it perfectly clear that we see non-union workers as our sisters and brothers in the trade. We want them to have the same wages and conditions that we have. We do not want to compete with them but rather join them into our ranks so that we might work together to raise the living standards of all working people. We want all workers to rise together, as opposed to the arguments made by employers about being “competitive”.
Historically, organized labor has caused economic hardships for entities that take advantage of an unorganized labor force. They did this by standing in solidarity with any group of workers in dispute with their employer and withholding all of our labor until the problem is resolved. The 2 Gate System is one of a host of anti-worker laws that make the tactics that the unions were built on illegal. As yet, the Unions have been mostly unwilling to challenge or disobey these laws. However, through well-organized disobedience and subversion of these laws using the power of united labor action, these laws can be eradicated. We are working toward a day when our unions will do this. Do not be surprised that the leadership of the unions is officially unsupportive, they are not sure the working members want or are ready for the struggle that it will entail, we must show them by taking up the charge as workers.
Until then, the laws do not and cannot forbid you and me, rank and file workers, from going to these jobs and protesting them.
At this time in history, the future of the working class hangs in the balance and we in the stronghold of San Francisco must hold the line for ourselves and fight to turn the tide against the attacks against all working people.
Together, we will build solidarity and power, bring an end to unjust laws, and have a society that meets our needs.
WE ARE NOT AGAINST THE NON UNION WORKER
WE ARE AGAINST THE EMPLOYERS, DEVELOPERS AND CONTRACTORS THAT EXPLOIT THEM
WE ARE AGAINST THE DOWNWARD PUSH THAT EXPLOITATION HAS ON ALL OF US
WE ARE AGAINST LAWS THAT RESTRICT OUR ABILITY TO FIGHT
WE FIGHT TO ERADICATE ALL ANTI-WORKER LAWS AND SYSTEMS
SMASH THE 2 GATE SYSTEM – SMASH TAFT-HARTLEY
1 GATE, 2 GATES, or 10 GATES- PICKET LINES MEAN DO NOT CROSS
What follows is a critique of the West Oakland Specific Plan – WOSP – which the city of Oakland hopes will help in “developing” West Oakland and is attempting to pass in the coming weeks. We offer this critique and brief thoughts on strategy in order to support the ongoing work of combatting displacement and gentrification that has been hitting the Bay Area for a long time. Please add comments, questions, and critiques in the comment section in the spirit of deepening our collective discussion of anti-displacement analysis and strategy.
Advertisement for Public Release of WOSP in Feb. 2014
Snapshot of the State and Capital in the Bay Area
If the Bay Area’s economy was compared to every other national economy in the world, it would be the 19th largest. The Bay has the highest GDP per capita in the entire United States, and even outpaces London and Singapore. It captures 40% of the entire flow of venture capital in the US (p11), which constitutes a higher amount of capital than that captured during the dot.com boom. While the Bay accounts for only 2.4% of the total jobs in the US, it has 12% of the computer & electronics manufacturing, 10.3% of software development, and 8.3% of internet related jobs (p13.) Seven of the top 10 social media companies are here – Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Linkedin, Zynga, and Yelp. In short, the Bay is home to one of the highest concentrations of capital in the world and mapping out the composition of capital is key for us to situate ourselves as we continue to engage in class combat. (Footnote #1)
The regional state is well aware of its place within the world economy. Over the past years, city politicians from the greater Bay Area have come together to generate a 30 year strategy about how to restructure the region’s housing, employment, and transportation structures. Plan Bay Area (PBA) was developed by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) to carry out the tasks of determining how the state can support and facilitate the accumulation of capital throughout the region. In order to grease the wheels of the local capitalist economy, the PBA aims to redevelop housing and transit throughout the Bay; New units are set to be built, new transportation “hubs” developed, and both of these projects are to be coordinated across single cities and the bay area as a whole.
PBA aims to align the various metropolitan areas of the Bay in their development of housing to match projected increases in employment. Internet, computer and electronics manufacturing, along with professional, scientific and technical services are accounting for some of the largest contributors to job creation here. PBA states that between early 2011 and late 2013 the Bay Area added more than 200,000 jobs, an increase of 7.5 percent that is well above the state’s average of 4.5%. PBA is projecting that this area will continue to outpace the rest of California and the US in its share of job growth due to the heavy concentration of tech related industries which forms part of the economic base of Bay Area political economy. (Footnote#2)
West Oakland Specific Plan – One Part of Capital/State’s Total Plan
We find ourselves in a city that’s clearly at the crosshairs of the system’s plans for intentional development and displacement: highly concentrated capital in the Bay Area and projections of millions of jobs being created in the next 10 years; a strategic plan by city politicians across the Bay to house these new high wage workers within its multiple cities; and the ongoing displacement of low wage workers and unemployed people. This is the situation Oakland Mayor Jean Quan references when she states that she’s seeking to bring in 10,000 new residents to Oakland while saying nothing about keeping long term residents and working class people in Oakland. Continue reading
As our organization expands to include workers from different sectors of industry, we are forced to understand and clarify the terrain in which we are organizing in. Below we are posting a new series that will focus on the health care industry and prospects for communist intervention in the Bay Area. Through an analysis of our local region, we wish to draw out the broader implications for organizing the rapidly expanding health care industry. We encourage our readers to comment on the questions raised so as to deepen our understanding of the complexities of workplace organizing in health care!
Non-profit health care is a huge industry. It meets at the junction of the “non-profit industrial complex” and the “health care industrial complex,” but forms a unique hybrid.
To give some scope to this industry, in California, non-profit hospitals account for 61% of total patient days excluding state psychiatric hospitals. Profits are just as large. In 2010 alone, the top two California chains, Kaiser and Sutter Health, together made net income of $2.18 billion.[1]
This led us to two questions: How do nonprofits make profit, and where do the profits go once they’re made?
A huge amount of non-profit hospitals’ profits come from state subsidies and benefits. These benefits include being exempt from state and federal income taxes on profits, property taxes, and almost all sales taxes. In return, these hospitals are supposed to offer charity care to those can’t afford it. It’d be reasonable to think that the tax credits given and the charity care returned should balance out so that these institutions are actually non-profiting. The joke of an exchange that exists in reality is shown in the following chart, courtesy of the National Nurses United research group the Institute for Health & Socio-Economic Policy.
We received this message of support for the BART workers struggle from a worker militant from the occupied factory of Zanon in Argentina. We offer it here for you to read and respond to.
—–
All support to BART workers,
BART has unleashed a string of attacks against the workers and their unions, wanting to eliminate the union to carry out the privatization of public transport.
Although the company states that it is in crisis, it has an annual profit of 125 million dollars. We face a crusade by employers, engineered by the government against the workers and passengers fighting for their rights.
In the context of our economic crisis, in which the plan of the employer and government is to get the workers to pay for the crisis, the struggle for a democratic organization of the labor movement is essential to challenge layoffs, suspensions and pay cuts.
Fellow workers, we extend our support to you and stand in solidarity with your ongoing fight in defense of your jobs at BART.
Raul Godoy – PTS (Socialist Workers Party) – worker at Zanon ceramics factory under workers’ control and MP (Minister Of Parliament) for the FIT (Left Front) in the province of Neuquen, Argentina.
Claudio Dellecarbonara – Train system Delegate of Buenos Aires. Candidate for the Senate through PTS and FIT (Left Front)
——
Todo el apoyo a los trabajadores de BART
La empresa de trenes BART ha desencadenado una seguidilla de ataques contra las y los trabajadores y su sindicato, quieren eliminar el sindicato para llevar adelante la privatización del transporte publico.
Aunque la empresa plantea que esta en crisis, cuenta con una ganancia anual de 125 millones de dólares . Estamos ante una cruzada por parte de los empresarios, amparados por el gobierno, contra las y los trabajadores que luchan por sus derechos y los de la población usuaria del transporte.
En un contexto de crisis económica como el actual, en el que el plan de las patronales y los gobiernos es que sean los y las trabajadoras los que paguen la crisis, la lucha y la organización democrática del movimiento obrero es fundamental para enfrentar los despidos, suspensiones y rebajas salariales.
Compañeros trabajadores de BART, queremos hacer llegar nuestro apoyo y nuestra solidaridad con la pelea que vienen llevando adelante en defensa de sus puestos de trabajo.
Raul Godoy – PTS (Partido de trabajadores socialistas) – obrero ceramista de Zanón bajo control obrero y diputado por el FIT (Frente de Izquierda) en la provincia de Neuquen, Argentinacia.
Claudio Dellecarbonara – Delegado del Subterráneo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Candidato a Senador por el PTS (Partido de trabajadores socialistas) – FIT (Frente de Izquierda).
Posted in Uncategorized
Another Black youth murdered in cold blood, and the murderer, according to the courts, is not guilty! The case of Trayvon Martin is an example of what America is composed of, the racism that deeply penetrates its veins, and the state that overseas its process. Trayvon Martin was vilified by the courts as a thug, and its murderer was defended as a noble citizen. How many Black and Latino youth have to be victims of such violence? When will we build a movement so powerful that can challenge such violence? When will the working class be organized to shutdown the system when such racist violence occurs? These are the critical questions of the day. We have experienced the Rodney King movement, the movement around the murder of Sean Bell, Kimani Gray, Kenneth Harding, and Oscar Grant. Yet these murders continue unchallenged.
Our strategy against such murders shall be, in the short term, organizing militant protests when such verdicts are executed and organize the working class in the long term as preparation for such moments. Only until the working class, located in strategic industries, that shutdowns components of the system, will we see a viable movement challenging the system. In the Oscar Grant movement we experienced a wave of rebellions on January 7th, and January 14th, 2009, as well as ILWU local 10 shutting down the port on October 23rd, 2010. The combination of street rebellions and shutting down industry are effective tactics against the state. The state, a concentration of power, will not take anything seriously, until there is a force that challenges such power ascends in the field of political battle. Our history of struggles against police brutality has been paralyzed between disorganized bursts of anger coupled with nonprofit lead forces that channel anger back into the system.
We need a militant organized movement of the working class who utilizes its position in society against state supported racist violence. The racist nature of American society will never be challenged until the working class begins to shutdown the system as a political response. A political organization with such explicit aims is needed to accomplish such tasks. Now is the time to organize for justice.
Come support the rally occurring Monday, July 15, 2013 at 14th and Broadway in Downtown Oakland.
The purpose of this essay is to summarize a key text on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism, written by a socialist feminist organization Advance the Struggle is politically close to, Pan y Rosas. In their book, Pan y Rosas: Gender and Class Antagonism under Capitalism, the author Andrea D’Atri wages political war against the various strains of liberal and postmodernist feminism, boldly upholding the mantle of revolutionary feminism from the beginnings of the capitalist era in Europe to the modern struggle against the brutal conditions women face in Latin America and worldwide.
Pan y Rosas, a women’s socialist organization under a larger Marxist-Trotskyist formation in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, and other Latin American nations, takes its namesake from the 1912 Bread and Roses strike by women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. They synthesized the strike for higher wages and for better living conditions, thus the title “bread and roses”, signifying their desire for a higher standard of living that would afford them the ability to enjoy the knowledge, culture, and freedom every human beings deserves but is largely denied, particularly for most women, who are forced to work for a paid wage and perform unpaid domestic and caring labor.
Sex against sex or class against class?
All women are oppressed by patriarchy, but the majority are also under the tutelage of waged work and dispossession. For example: are Ivanna Trump (billionaire clown Donald Trump’s wife) and Hillary Clinton closer to the majority of working and poor women, or to the bourgeois class they belong to? Although patriarchy precedes capitalism by thousands of years, the former takes a specific form under the latter. Under this system, the reproductive labor, such as cooking, cleaning, washing, having babies, raising children, etc., necessary to maintain our species and reproduce new generations is primarily performed by working-class women. Patriarchal ideology socially constructs women’s domestic labor as a natural function extending from their biology. Even though this labor is crucial in reproducing workers’ needs to eat, sleep, procreate, etc., in order to work day in and day out for the boss, this ideology allows for capitalists to maintain it as unpaid and therefore keep wages down and profits high. Working women’s role as waged and domestic workers has been dubbed the “double-shift,” since the end of the 9-5 simply means the end of the first shift for women, after which they return home to perform their other, albeit unpaid, shift. Because under capitalism women are primarily viewed as baby-making machines, struggles around bodily autonomy and reproduction rights can challenge capital’s narrow framing of sexuality in a heteronormative manner. Part of the reason the typical nuclear family is upheld as the ideal under bourgeois society is because it assures a constant replenishing of the labor force with young workers who can work faster, longer, and will feel less entitled to the benefits older workers demand. Homosexuality is therefore seen as a break in this relationship because it removes procreation as the main goal or desire of romantic/sexual relationships.
The 20th century was the century of the miniskirt, jeans, the right to vote, contraceptives, legal abortion, etc., all achievements through a century of struggle, but what does it mean to talk about progress when so many women around the world die from hunger, preventive disease, abortions, pregnancy, unemployment, etc? Capitalism’s growth has been contradictory; for while it lays the basis for ending thousands of years of patriarchy by reducing the grip of the family and the male patriarch through forcing women into the public workforce, it has also deepened the misery poor and working-class women encounter through the ideological and violent enforcement of women’s gender role in society. According to our comrades in Pan y Rosas, and the defining element of our feminist framework, the central subject of women’s liberation is the class relation, the axis that can unite proletarian, poor, and all oppressed women in the war against capitalist-patriarchy.
Posted in Analysis/Theory, History, Uncategorized
ADVANCE THE STRUGGLE 
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