Hi everyone! So Gathering Forces will be taking a break for the month of August. We will be back sometime in September. Folks can feel free to continue posting on the ongoing debates on the blog, but no new posts.
Peace yall!
No More Excuses, Time to Organize in the Ghetto
July 20th, 2010 · Posted by BaoYunCheng · Black Liberation, Education, Hip Hop, Poor Peoples Movements, Revolutionary Organization
In this following post, I argue for movement builders and revolutionaries to take seriously the task of organizing with low-income people of color in the ghetto—the unemployed, the homeless, the gang members. I hope to engage with two primary audiences: white anti-racist progressives and revolutionaries. In my first section, I criticize white anti-racists and how they use the idea of white privilege (aka privilege politics) to distance themselves from directly organizing with people of color. In the later sections, I lay out the urgent need for revolutionaries and movement builders to organize with street people of color (POCs) and thus avoid reproducing the problems of social distancing by white anti-racists and avoid the rigid conception of working-class-led revolution by contemporary revolutionaries.
I. SOCIAL DISTANCING BY WHITE ANTI-RACIST PROGRESSIVES and THEIR FEAR OF BLACK BOY!
It happens so much it’s become ritual now. Every time I hear the overstated progressive truism “the oppressed peoples must lead the movement” put forth by an organizer/activist who’s completely disconnected from the day-to-day interactions with oppressed communities—and believe me, when you’re around the organizing scenes in Seattle, you hear it as frequent as it rains—the song “Black Boy” by Tech N9ne plays in my head. I can just hear a more movement-oriented Tech N9ne singing, “I was told by your movement I was a fool…I think I know why organizers would look in my eye and say that, and why’s that?” with Krizz Kaliko (Kali) responding in his opera-esque voice, “Cuz I’m a BLACKBOY!…Scared to see me, frauds disappear like a genie.”
I think Kali’s line “frauds disappear like a genie” is particularly appropriate for white anti-racists who talk the big talk of people of color movements and the need for people of color (POC) leadership, but don’t walk the walk in building this movement together with street folks and low-income POCs. White anti-racists, this day and age, seem intent on organizing in comfortable spaces while using the aforementioned truism to validate their own distance from low-income workers, unemployed, and street people of color based in the inner cities and ghettos of Amerikkka.
The added irony is that many white anti-racists, if they are in majority white organizations, proudly use the language of ANTI-RACISM as an excuse to not organize with street people of color. They correctly point to past histories of militant people of color movements co-opted by white folks, at the same time blatantly forgetting groups like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African Peoples, the Young Lords, and the Black Panther Party, none of whom could be dismissed as folks who were intimidated and co-opted by white anti-racists. This is extremely important when thinking about the possibilities of multi-racial organizations for the contemporary period. However, there is a host of real history, theories, and organizations which have devolved a multi-racial way of organizing into separate movement building based on “privilege”: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Freedom Summer, Fanon’s “Black Skin White Masks,” Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement, the Black Panther Party’s call to organize in one’s respective community, and Noel Ignatiev’s “Race Traitor.” A lot has been lumped together, and what is of interest is how each of these examples has been interpreted to justify specific social relations in terms of race.
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→ 14 CommentsTags:
Advancing the Immigration Struggle in Texas
July 14th, 2010 · Posted by Krisna · Immigration, White Supremacy
On Saturday June 12th, a hundred anti-racist and democratic-minded folks descended on the south gate of the Texas State Capitol, protesting a rally held by supporters of Arizona’s SB 1070 and who want to enact a similar law in Texas. Supporters numbered around 200-250 and were made up of Republicans, Tea Party folks, Texas Nationalists, and a sprinkling of fascists. The counterprotest and others like it speak to a growing minority tendency of the immigrant rights movement who are ready for confrontation with supporters of white supremacy and which has added new dimension to the debate over the road the movement should take.
Counterprotest in Context
Before the State of Arizona passed SB 1070 and a following bill banning ethnic studies and teachers with accents, Texas made a major encroachment upon public school curriculum which removed historic figures such as Thurgood Marshall and Cesar Chavez and will place more emphasis on the non-violent tendencies of the Civil Rights movement and in opposition to organizational experiences such as the Black Panther Party.
Such attacks remind us that we’re not living merely through the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, but also the deepest political crisis in likely 100 years. All of the old concessions the rulers have formerly used to coopt mass struggle: better wages, pensions, free and public education, public hospitals, ethnic studies programs, etc. are being removed from the table. There are hardly vestiges of the organs of struggle that working people built in the early 20th century, the 1930s, and 1960s to put the rulers in check and build the independent power of workers, women, and people of color.
Political struggle has been narrowed to either liberal and progressive NGOs and non-profits or spontaneous bursts of mass activity to emerge every few years and that go far beyond the limits of the established organizations. It is this spontaneity that has yet to find permanent organizational form and that can carry it during the highs and lows mass rebellion and consign liberals and progressives to obscurity.
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The Landscape of Detroit
July 6th, 2010 · Posted by jubayr · Black Liberation, Cultural Criticism, White Supremacy
Over a year ago Eminem released the song “Beautiful” along with a video that roots the song in the de-industrialization of Detroit.
The history and political backdrop to the city been a source of cultural definition and hope for its people.
The Great Rebellion of 1967 was a turning point in the city of Detroit. After years of attacks by the police, and being relegated to the most grueling, lowest paying jobs with no chance of promotion, black and poor white folks revolted, shaking the foundations of the ruling establishment in Detroit. Both before and after the rebellion, there were a number of important organizations which were key in cultivating the means and spirit of revolt, such as the Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) along with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the Republic of New Afrika. But the organizational weaknesses of these groups coupled with the relentless onslaught by the city elite left the people of Detroit open to a new wave of attack that resulted from the collapse of the Black Power movement. The city, afterwards, would not be the same.
All the wealth that black and white workers had created was looted from the city by the capitalists and moved out to the suburbs or down to the southern United States. Along with that went the tax base of the city, and forty years later the city is falling apart due to an emaciated infrastructure. This story is shared by other cities where brown and black folks rose up to take their city back. Gary, Indiana and Newark, New Jersey are only two more examples. I’ve heard Detroit described by visitors as resembling a war zone — well that’s what it is; it’s the American Third World.
→ 2 CommentsTags: culture·deindustrialization·Detroit·Eminem
Muslim Students Take the Lead at UC Irvine
June 27th, 2010 · Posted by jubayr · Islam, Organization, Palestine, Religion, Strategy and Tactics, Student, University
written with Will
This past February students in the Muslim Student Union (MSU) at UC Irvine deliberately disrupted a talk by Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the US, as he attempted to justify the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008/2009.
The 11 students who disrupted Oren by shouting him down were arrested. Afterwards, Muslim students and other Palestine solidarity activists attending the event walked out and held a protest outside.
Recently, Lisa Cornish, the Senior Executive Director of Student Housing, and other university officials at UC Irvine have recommended the 1-year suspension of the MSU. In addition, MSU members must complete 50 hours of community, no MSU officers will be allowed to be an “authorized signer” for any other student groups, and if the MSU is allowed to re-register for official status in 2011, it will be placed under a one-year probation.
There is currently a debate over at Kabobfest where some in the Muslim community are arguing that the MSU should not have been involved in organizing the disruption. They argue that MSAs and MSUs have no business taking leadership in this struggle.
One argument goes that it invites retaliation on the whole Muslim community threatening their religious freedom. The problem with this argument is that it places the sins of white supremacy and empire squarely in the laps of Muslims and solidarity activists who choose to resist. There is a faulty assumption here that the occupations of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the racist attacks on Muslims in the US are a result of organized resistance on our part. This is completely backwards. Oppression doesn’t result from our resistance; we resist because we are oppressed.
→ 1 CommentTags: disruption·Islam·Muslim·Muslim Student Union·Palestine solidarity·Strategy and Tactics·UC Irvine
Questions of Form, Reform and National Liberation in State Capitalism & World Revolution
June 20th, 2010 · Posted by jubayr · Johnson-Forest Tendency, Revolutionary Organization
written with Will
Chapter IX of SC&WR addresses the issues of Tito and Yugoslavia. In many ways the question of Yugoslavia could be seen as the last straw for the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Yet again orthodox Trotskyists and the Fourth International fetishized nationalized property and described Tito’s Yugoslavia as breaking Left from Stalin’s Russia without asking that central question: was the working class self-governing?
Along with China, Yugoslavia posed other challenges to the common conception of Marxism for that time. Like other exercises in national liberation, Yugoslavia raised questions about the role of the peasantry, the material limitations of national liberation without world revolution, and the dynamic class tensions within national liberation movements.
Hopefully the following prompts can help us think through some of these issues.
- How do they describe the mode of labor in Yugoslavia? (86) How did this compare to Stalin’s Russia?
- What was Tito’s People’s Front, and what role does the Johnson-Forest Tendency argue it played in relation to class tensions?
- Tito and the Communist Party Yugoslavia (CPY) established a method of emboldening the bureaucracy that could be described as a process of upward mobility; “in its crisis it sought to strengthen the state authority by new recruitments from those who have shown readiness in the factory to exceed the norms in production.” (92) The notion of meritocracy is a common conception today of what an egalitarian society should look like. How have we encountered and challenged these sentiments in our own organizing?
- The Titoist bureaucracy, through a process of criticism and self-criticism, argues for “decentralization.” (93) The demand for decentralization is still common in progressive/Left circles today. Is this enough? Does decentralization have any role in defining the new society?
- The example of Yugoslavia is posed as similar to other experiences of national liberation. What was the relationship of the CPY bureaucracy to the Yugoslavian working class when it opposed the Kremlin? (96) How does the class nature of the Titoist bureaucracy explain its relationship to both the US and Russian empires? (94-95) How has the problem of socialism in one country been manifest in the historical failures of other national liberation movements – socialist, nationalist, or otherwise?
- JFT describes the CPY bureaucracy as “concretely nationalist and abstractly internationalist,” what does this mean? (97) How has the Trotskyist tradition understood the nature and process of national liberation? Is it necessarily a bourgeois revolution? Are there alternative conceptions of national liberation movements, and why are they necessary?
→ 4 CommentsTags: Johnson-Forest Tendency·national liberation·State Capitalism and World Revolution·Tito·Yugoslavia
Part II of State Capitalism and World Revolution
June 15th, 2010 · Posted by Will · CLR James, Economy, Johnson-Forest Tendency, Revolutionary Organization, Unions
written with Jubayr
What up everyone? Hope readers are having fun with State Capitalism and World Revolution ☺ I don’t think I got much to say as the questions kinda get at what SCWR is constantly trying to hammer from different angles. Here are some more questions which can guide us as we read SCWR.
Chapters 6-8
1-What is SCWR saying about the plan, the state, and the party? Why is it antithetical to the self-government of the working class?
2- What is the implications between the following two formulations: crisis of revolution is in the crisis of leadership versus the crisis of revolution is the crisis of the self-mobilization of the working class? Where does Trotskyism fall on this question and what does it say about Trotskyism according to SCWR?
3- What is the political economy of the post WWII era as JFT sees it? Has it changed in the neo-liberal era? If so, how?
4- How does SCWR describe the role of unions in the state-capitalist era?
5- What is the theory of permanent revolution? How does SCWR orient towards it in the post WWII era?
6- In “Leninism and the Transitional Regime” SCWR poses quiet an interesting history of Lenin’s relationship to the Russian working class after the October Revolution. Is SCWR being completely accurate in its historiography of Lenin?
→ 1 CommentTags:
Foxconn suicides and Honda strike in China: Call for Asian workers solidarity.
June 13th, 2010 · Posted by Wen · Uncategorized
While the Chinese government has invested as much as $58 billions to stage the Shanghai Expo, Chinese workers at Foxconn Technology, a Taiwanese-owned electronic manufacturer which assembles products for corporates such as Apple, Dell, HP, Motorola, and Nokia are jumping out of their sweatshop factories. Foxconn employees nearly 600,000 workers all over China, and its total network is worth 54 million dollars. The boss, Terry Guo, is the richest man in Taiwan, but the workers are only paid $132 a month, which is the legal minimum wage in China, and work over time to boost the salary. There have been 12 suicides in the Shenzhen factory this year alone and most of them were 18 -24 year old second generation farmers who migrated to the urban factories from the South because there were simply no work opportunities back at home. They sign off their rights to the labor laws and work as much as 36 hour over time to compensate for the high living cost in the city. The Foxconn workplace is extremely oppressive—military like security control (also because companies such as Apple demanded so), crowded dormitories and long work hours. To prevent workers from the same hometowns to mobilize, they are separated into different sectors of the factory as well different dormitories. While the Foxconn workers clearly face severe workplace alienation, the Shenzhen government expressed that they haven’t found any direct relationships between the suicides and the workplace issues, but purely personal “psychological stress.”
Palestine today, but what about tomorrow?
June 10th, 2010 · Posted by Will · Apartheid, Arab, Islam, Middle East, Palestine
written with jubayr
Last week, we all watched as the Obama administration asked to get “all the facts” before releasing a comprehensive statement about the murder of 9 Palestine solidarity activists by the Israeli Defense Force aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. If he just waits a little longer, he might be able to find a way to use international law to bury both the dead and the living.
Many of us have become depressed and catatonic, staring eyes wide and mouths dry; we’ve lost sleep and shed tears; there is a heavy weight in our chest as we’ve become both saddened and enraged at the continued barbarism of Israeli state violence, and the way the US ruling class justifies spilling the blood of Muslims, Arabs and Palestine solidarity organizers alike.
In response we’ve organized rallies, protests and candlelight vigils around the world. In Turkey, dozens of our sisters and brothers declared an end to sanctuary for Zionism and white supremacy, by storming the Israeli consulate.
Israel’s Attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla: New Escalation, New Desperation
June 6th, 2010 · Posted by mlove · Apartheid, Arab, Islam, Palestine, Racism
As with the general crisis, it seems everything is magnified at a higher level.
What follows are a few brief notes on last week’s assault of the aid convoy to Gaza. It certainly isn’t the only death squad operation going on against aid convoys as events in southern Mexico shows.
The attack on the Free Gaza flotilla, with the killing of 9 solidarity organizers and wounding of 30 or more, is not an isolated incident. It instead reveals a number of interlocking tensions that need to be pulled apart.
This premeditated assault and murder is part of a general shift in the Israeli government’s policy toward international anti-apartheid organizing, where the regime itself is taking on an increasingly direct role in attacking solidarity efforts. The regime understands that a more pro-Palestinian viewpoint has steadily gained ground in the Left and progressive circles. Further, it understands that the tactic of BDS has gained significant ground in the last ten years. While Palestinians, and more broadly Arabs and Muslims, have been constant targets of U.S, European and Israeli agents and police, the net is now being cast wider to include international solidarity as a whole.
In less than 24 hours after the attack on the Free Gaza flotilla, the Israeli government, along with the vast majority of newspapers and news channels in the U.S. and Europe began their typical intensive propaganda campaign. This certainly creates a kind of firewall, with the vast majority of people suffering from lack of knowledge about Israeli apartheid and the role of U.S. imperialism.
However, even this propaganda and the immense interest U.S. and other Western elites have invested in the apartheid project is coming up against reality. They have not been able to solve the political impasse represented by the Palestinian struggle. As a result, Zionism, as a form of white supremacy, is perhaps more in crisis today than it ever has been in its history.
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→ 2 CommentsTags: Apartheid·Arab·Imperialism·Muslim·Palestine·White Supremacy·Zionism
State Capitalism and the Break with Trotskyism
June 6th, 2010 · Posted by jubayr · Johnson-Forest Tendency, Revolutionary Organization
written with Will
The Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT) has been at the foundation of our project here at Gathering Forces. The theoretical contributions JFT made to the worldwide working class movement place them in the traditions of Left-libertarian socialism, libertarian Marxism, and a broader anti-authoritarianism.
With the Left and Marxist tradition in the US historically dominated by tendencies that formulated a socialism ‘from above’ – namely, Stalinism, Social Democracy, and variants of Trotskyism – JFT has played a pivotal role challenging these traditions by restoring the notion that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself to the center of Marxism.
The method and conclusions of the Johnson-Forest Tendency contextually emerged from their break with Trotskyism in regards to Trotsky’s failure to understand the state-capitalist nature of Russia. The document State Capitalism & World Revolution (SCWR) is a statement of this break, and attempts to clarify some of the fundamental questions facing revolutionaries at the time. Is Russian “Communism” what socialism/ the new society actually looks like? What is Stalinism: a revolutionary force or counter-revolution? What is the unique feature of the modern bureaucracy under capitalism?
These are just some of the key questions this work tries to get at. Looking around the world and the left, these questions are still with us today.
Lots of militants roll their eyes when discussions over Russia begin. After all, James is known for demanding the Americanization of Bolshevism and here we are talking about Russia! Considering everything going on in the world and the hundreds of other books a militant could read right now, why look at SCWR?
Although it is over fifty years old, it was a profound advance on Marxist theory and still relevant for militants today. In many ways many of the questions the book raises have yet to be surpassed in terms of the development of capitalism and the revolutionary Left’s response to the dilemma’s facing oppressed people.
The following are questions raised in the first 5 chapters of SCWR:
- What is Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism? Where does Trotsky think the Stalinists will end up? What does he think the Stalinist relationship to the bourgeoisie is?
- What is JFT’s analysis of Stalinism? According to JFT what is Stalinism’s relationship to private property and to the Russian “Communist” state? According to JFT what are the implications of Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism?
- What do they mean by “the fundamental antagonism of society was the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the social relations of production”? Why can only worker self-management of production solve this fundamental contradiction of capitalism?
- What is the difference in understanding crisis and Russian “Communism” when using falling rate of profit in contrast to the under consumption argument? (10) What are the implications of the under consumptionist argument? (13)
- If capitalism can plan, then does under consumption disappear, does crisis disappear, does the falling rate of profit disappear? Can capitalism plan completely? Can capitalism’s plan negate working class resistance or the falling rate of profit?
- What is JFT trying to say about bureaucracy? What is the bureaucracies’ relationship to capital and to workers? What is significant about the sentence, “The bureaucracy inevitably must substitute the struggle over consumption, higher wages, pensions, education ,etc., for a struggle in production” (41). What does it mean to say that bureaucracy is an organic outgrowth of capitalist development and working class resistance? What is JFT trying to do when comparing the mode of labor in Russia and the mode of labor in the United States?
- What is JFT’s critique of Trotskyism in relationship to the plan and the bureaucracy? Why is this important when one is attempting to destroy the bureaucracy and struggle for direct democracy?
→ 16 CommentsTags: falling rate of profit·Johnson-Forest Tendency·state capitalism·State Capitalism and World Revolution·Trotskyism
The Capitalist Offensive and Calls for Austerity
May 28th, 2010 · Posted by mlove · Budget Cuts, Economy, Labor
With the growing calls for austerity in mind here is a two part spot The RealNews Network did on the role of hedge fund king Pete Peterson in galvanizing the ruling class to push through more cuts in social infrastructure, including the biggest victory of all: the privatization of social security.
on the ground in Arizona
May 16th, 2010 · Posted by jubayr · Immigration, Strategy and Tactics
*** written with Will
SB 1070, and the white supremacist attacks on ethnic studies and “teachers with accents” is potentially sparking a new round of mass struggle for immigrant rights.
In Arizona, the fight for immigrant rights has been going on for some time. The Right has been mobilizing to capture state power in Arizona through the Tea Party mobilizations in the state legislature along with attacks against brown and undocumented peoples by Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
In response, organizers across the country – some new and some veterans of the movement – are contending with questions that were left unanswered after the spike in mass activity around the immigrant rights movement in 2006
The right wing of the movement is using the same tactics to demobilize protesters and organizers, and instead supporting bracero-styled legislation, and appealing to the nativist perception of the ‘brown hordes invading America.’
The challenge facing the rest of the movement will be whether we can build our own autonomous institutions that doesn’t compromise with the right, doesn’t sacrifice some undocumented peoples for a ‘well-behaved’ few, and build united working class power among the different sectors of the struggle.
Below are two articles by Joel Olson, an organizer with the Repeal Coalition, which is calling organizers to Arizona for a Freedom Summer in order to fight against this new round of attacks on immigrants and undocumented peoples.
Major questions still face the movement in terms of what next and how to do it:
- What relationship should organizers and the movement have to institutions like the City Council of Flagstaff?
- Can undocumented immigrants be organized at the workplace to fight SB 1070?
- How do workers stop ICE raids? Do Cop Watch style groups need to be built in light of what Sheriff Joe Arpaio has done in AZ?
- What support can be given to the folks on the ground in AZ from other parts of the country?
- How will undocumented immigrants be won over to revolutionary politics in the course of this fight?
- Is Sheriff Joe Arpaio representative of proto-fascism, fascism itself, or white populism? How do we look at the Minute Men and the Tea Party Movement under these ideological rubrics?
- We should also ask what is the relationship of the economic crisis and the attacks on immigrants.
———————–
New Arizona
by Joel Olson
In the midst of the Arizona state government passing the most outrageous anti-immigrant law since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, several happenings pass unnoticed by the national media. At a packed Flagstaff City Council meeting discussing the law, waves of people declare publicly that they are undocumented, practically daring law enforcement officers to arrest them. At the same meeting, a member of a radical immigrant rights group receives thunderous applause for demanding the repeal of all anti-immigrant laws and declaring the right of all people to “live, love, and work wherever they please.” Even the most conservative city councilman admits he liked the notion. Down in Phoenix, high school students spontaneously organize a school walkout through mass texting, without direction from the established immigration reform organizations. This infuriates the organizations because it pre-empts “their” planned protests. And then these same students chuck water bottles at cops when they arrest one of their own.
Welcome to the new Arizona.
→ 2 CommentsTags: Arizona·Bring the Ruckus·Immigration·Repeal Coalition·SB 1070
BP’s oil spill on the backs of the working class and planet earth
May 9th, 2010 · Posted by jubayr · Ecology
The collapse of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico continues to tear through both working class lives, and the ability of the Gulf’s ecosystem to create and sustain life.
Eleven workers lost their lives in the accident, and now the livelihood of more working class families are threatened.
A mechanism that should have sealed the well in the event of a blowout failed, and now hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil are spilling out, threatening to create another dead zone in the Gulf.
A device, known as an acoustic switch, could have prevented this massive spill. But despite earning almost $6 billion in profits, BP resisted regulation that would have required these devices to be installed on deep sea oil rigs.
While the entire coastal region is threatened, a state of emergency has been declared in Louisiana. Wetlands and marshes along the coast, already under stress due to capitalist land use planning, are now being threatened with collapse.
In addition, hundreds of families who make a living in the fishing industry are losing work due to the contamination. BP is recruiting them for “paid volunteer work” to assist in the cleanup, but are denying them basic safety equipment and compensation for either injury or damage to their equipment.
The extant of the devastation is being described as a Hurricane Katrina redux. There is a general sense of helplessness and malaise, as some held signs demanding help from Obama along the road as he drove through Louisiana.
Capital’s global crisis, thought to be slowing down, is not hovering; it’s dropping like a hammer on both the working class and planet earth. The profit demands of the current energy infrastructure based overwhelmingly on coal and oil have proved to be an obstacle to transition towards an ecologically sustainable energy production. Obama’s expansion of offshore drilling, the maintenance of a coal-centered energy production via Copenhagen, and the expansion of nuclear energy production in the US in over 30 years are just the most recent examples.
But as the spill in the Gulf demonstrates, this energy economy is inextricably bound up with the ability of capital to attack and exploit the working class and ecological systems. Complex life requires more complex ecosystems to survive, but capital has long demanded that we forfeit the very conditions of life for it to grow. The future of free life on this planet will depend on the working class’s ability organize itself against these attacks.
Below are two articles on the catastrophe.
→ 10 CommentsTags: BP·Deepwater Horizon·Ecology·energy·Gulf of Mexico·oil spill·working class
