Peace yall!

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.

To get to the point, the interpretations of this historical line up determine how white anti-racists are supposed to behave in a room full of people of color. One line of interpretation that exists is that anytime a white anti-racist walks in a room with other POCs, this strips agency and independent decision-making ability from oppressed people. How can this but assume that oppressed folks are stupid and silent when next to white anti-racists? As long as there’s distance between low-income street POCs and more organizers who consciously avoid organizing on the streets because of their “privilege”, there’s a problem.

To be clear, I most definitely disagree with Kali’s term, “fraud,” to indict white anti-racists. The sentiment that oppressed peoples must lead the movement is, in fact, real talk. However, what these progressives wholly miscalculate and fail to recognize is that in the inner city today, we don’t have the Black Liberation Army, the Panthers, the Young Lords, or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. We have the Crips, the Bloods, the Surenos, the MS-13. As B.o.B. puts it, “I ain’t have neighbors, that’s why they call it hood.” Among progressives, there’s often a romanticization of the black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s that is projected onto today’s black community. With this romantic projection comes another misguided expectation that today’s inner city POCs will organize and move independently because their objective conditions (white supremacist and capitalist Amerikkka systematically and completely fucking over inner cities) are far beyond intolerable. And when they move, there’s an expectation that they’ll move towards anti-patriarchy, anti-homophobia, anti-ableism because in the analytical minds of progressives, it makes sense that liberation is connected. In reality, when POCs have moved since the fall of the South African apartheid regime, it has taken on a middle-class leadership and orientation that fails to challenge capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, and ableism (i.e. the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, the Million Man March, Jesse Jackson, Obamanation). Because white anti-racists who may have sound stances on patriarchy et al. don’t organize in the hood though, it’s no surprise that many overlook, postpone, or even change their own analysis on patriarchy when giving unconditional support to or becoming allies with existing middle-class POC organizations rooted in low-income POC communities. This results in reproducing the failures of having separate movements for black liberation and women’s liberation in the 1960s, should a patriarchal black middle-class organization become the vanguard for a contemporary black liberation movement. Perhaps two street prophets and activists, Tupac Shakur and Cle “Bone” Sloan (former Blood who made the excellent documentary “Bastards of the Party”), give more insight into the reality of depoliticization in the hood. They both criticize past (black male) movement leaders of the 1960s and 1970s for failing to spread political ideas and lessons and militant traditions to the current generation of POC youth. This failure of past leaders has allowed for a middle-class POC elite to emerge and reign in the militancy of our current generation, instead turning us into believers of “Change!” and reforming the system through electoral politics at best, or turning us into “suicidal thugs” (to invoke both Huey Newton and Tupac) at worst.

Hand-in-hand with white anti-racists distancing from the hood is a more nuanced, subconscious racist fear of the “other” (the unknown) that gets to the spirit of Tupac and Bone’s grim reflection: fear of thugs or, as Kali sings it, “BLACKBOY!” More often than not, because white anti-racist progressives never set foot near the ghetto and get to know its population on a genuine basis, their own fear is shaped by the media’s dehumanization of street POCs into cold-blooded predators. Progressives then conflate mainstream hip hop or gangsta rap to thug culture and distance themselves from that as well. When they ostracize hip hop, progressives who do come in contact with street POCs quickly become irrelevant like the mainstream school system because they have no common basis to jump from. Though many progressives are quick to recognize the social context behind gang participation, their own act of social distancing exposes the contradiction between their sympathy for the unfortunate predicament of street POCs, and their lack of true solidarity in active movement building with street POCs. In the following section, I will lay out why it’s urgent and necessary to organize with street POCs.

II. THE TASK OF REVOLUTIONARIES and WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO ORGANIZE STREET POCs

I’m going to shift focus away from the white anti-racist progressives and re-orient the rest of this post to revolutionaries who recognize the need for total change of structure, of system from oppression to liberation, and to build an interconnected movement to do so. I wanted to start with a critique on white anti-racist progressives in hopes of cautioning revolutionaries from assuming similar positions of deliberate social distancing from the streets, both in theory and in practice. As much as this post has criticized white anti-racists, I also want to challenge revolutionaries today (i.e. many Trotskyists) who rigidly view the working class (i.e. those employed in a workplace) as the agents of revolutionary change, and thus associate unemployed street POCs as either secondary or altogether insignificant in the initial process for social change.

Today, more and more youth are getting initiated into gangs because the 1960s and 1970s are drifting farther and farther away. More and more youth will be stuck in gangs because capitalist Amerikkka has decided to cut jobs, cut public services, defund education, lower wages, bust unions, destroy homes, gentrify communities, and bail out shadow bankers who caused the global economic crisis in the first place. Most importantly, more and more youth will be driven to individual suicide because there’s no revolutionary suicide (Huey Newton) tradition present. More and more will be driven to deathstyle (versus lifestyle, to invoke a phrase from “Bastards of the Party”) in gangbanging because there’s no alternative revolutionary organization in the hood to channel the widespread anger to a productive and necessary fight against the racist system. Street youth today lack a positive political vision of a genuine democratic, people-run society provided to them. If we are rhetorically serious about the necessity of the most oppressed to participate in and lead a movement, then we need to be actively serious in seeing through street POCs getting politicized (with perspectives of third world feminism, queer liberation, from-below democracy, etc). The task of organizing with street POCs is urgent. In the coming days of economic depression in the hood, will street youth be faced with a choice between Bloods or Crips, or gangs or revolutionary organization?

Revolutionaries need to seriously study efforts from past organizations that have organized the lumpen to avoid repeating mistakes and build off their strengths. Instead of demobilizing based on the paper-thin excuse that the BPP failed because of gang members themselves (that gang members inherently brought their violent tendencies and gang mentality and lowered the political consciousness of the organization, as Chris Booker argues in “The Black Panthers: Reconsidered”), we need to ask ourselves why gang members were not getting politicized and how the gang mentality trumped revolutionary discipline in the BPP. I have heard this paper-thin argument invoked many times to forewarn the impossibility and impracticality of organizing with gang youth. One of the more common arguments I hear is that gang members’ loyalties are volatile, that they can turn back to deathstyle at any moment. My counter to that is absence of a positive political vision and alternative, this is true, but in my own conversations with local gang youth, none have expressed a long-term desire of banging. In fact, most tell me they desire a college degree, or to go to culinary school, in recognition that banging is, indeed, a sentence to death or incarceration. Their desire points to the urgency and practicality of street organizing. Imagine a thousands-deep movement of street youth demanding access to higher education on the front steps of the University of Washington. When we talk about higher education, we don’t think affordability for middle-class students currently enrolled at UW. We talk about education is a right to all who want it, regardless of income level, and one that, like the student struggles of the late 1960s demanded, should be community-oriented and community-serving. Curriculums should not reflect the class interests of the rulers, but should be empowering and disseminating of the ideas and instruments needed to further fight racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and ableism in society. Without the element of street POCs in the fight for higher education who bring the numbers, urgency, and community vision, any higher education movement will devolve into a reformist affordability campaign that may successfully increase enrollment for a few more students from the inner city, but will co-opt them into the individualistic and disempowering way of middle-class life and “official society.” We see this today in the middle-class and cultural orientation of student of color groups today on campus, which have devolved from their political-militant and broader community roots of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, when we say the oppressed must lead the movement, we need to ensure that those from the hood who are currently priced out of the university—their interests, as opposed to the interests of middle-class POCs already enrolled—must be foregrounded and they must lead the movement.

Volatility and lack of commitment aren’t problems endemic to the hood either. In my own campus and labor organizing, college students and workers have exhibited a spotty turnout. Because UW has already undergone much privatization in the last decade, many students are not low-income and don’t feel the urgency of the tuition hikes/budget cuts and consequently, the urgency to organize. Among the low-income students who are not channeled into the individualistic mindset of college or middle-class oriented ethnic cultural groups, many commute from longer distances and can’t attend meetings, or else work a few jobs just to stay enrolled. It has been extremely difficult to find low-income students who remain committed to building a long-term movement, given these factors, and given the lack of others from their own situation with whom they can organize. With workers like custodians who initially turned out in hundreds to protest the cuts when it first came down, many have now backed out from organizing because they’ve experienced intense management retaliation, police harassment, and union bureaucracy backlash. Their jobs are on the line, so over time, without solidarity actions from other workplaces or among the community (i.e. unemployed street POCs who want jobs that pay well and are unionized, so they should fight with UW workers to ensure that wages are high and unions are strong because UW is one of the largest employers in state and their labor practices affect other workplaces), we have seen a decrease of worker optimism and involvement in labor organizing. Because few, if any, opportunities and jobs are available in the hood, street POCs don’t face the question of college complacency or getting fired. Absent of movement organizing, the choices are few and grim. The situation is urgent. Just as we say that black worker demands need to be met in the workplace to elevate the conditions of both black and white workers, a mobilized hood fighting for jobs and opportunities will not only save the hood, but bolster the collective power and confidence of worker movements.

III. MAKING THE MOVEMENT DEMOCRATIC and “HIP-HOP”-IFYING EDUCATION

So, why did the BPP fail? In her autobiography, ex-Panther Assata Shakur points to the male chauvinism and the vanguard authoritarianism of the Panther leadership. Loosely based on Maoist vanguard organization instead of democratic organization culture, the Panthers centralized political leadership among the top echelon of the Party and failed to build leadership and develop political consciousness among their rank and file. When the FBI’s COINTELPRO brought down Huey, the BPP was all but dead. Therefore, political education of street POCs must be prioritized. Revolutionaries cannot assume the role of vanguard and lead the liberation of the hood. This will fail either in the course of the movement, as it becomes attacked by the state and leaders are picked off one by one, or after the overthrow of the state, as the vanguard revolutionary leadership becomes the new oppressive ruling class exploiting those they purported to have fought for. As I have stated repeatedly already, oppressed peoples are NOT stupid, they do NOT need to be led by a vanguard and they need to lead the movement. As I have also stated in my critique of white anti-racists, this does NOT mean that revolutionaries do NOT share information and sound analyses like anti-patriarchy with oppressed folks. We need to re-conceptualize education from the undemocratic, authoritarian standard banking-model where more enlightened teachers deposit information to learning students. The task of education is a task of leadership development. But, the educational process cannot be truly liberating if it’s a one-way street. It must be a mutual, dialectical process in which both revolutionary and street POCs teach and learn from each other, strategize together in order to advance the struggle. This is a concept that Paulo Friere outlines in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”

A dialectical education means that revolutionaries are NEITHER dismissive nor judgmental towards the interests of street POCs. Far too many revolutionary individuals and groups are quick to attack mainstream and gangsta rap for its misogyny and violence, thereby stripping away one big feature in which they could be relevant to street POCs. Conversely, being versed in hip hop allows a revolutionary not only to open seemingly nonpolitical, unintimidating conversations with street POCs, but also opens the door to more political conversations of patriarchy and homophobia using the language of hip hop. We’ve got to remember that the misogyny and violence in hip hop is merely a reflection of the patriarchal and violent system, and any condemnation towards individual songs and artists incorrectly shift blame from the system. The key task is to contextualize patriarchal lyrics of songs familiar to street POCs into this broader systemic analysis. It’s a false expectation to jump straight into women’s liberation and recreates the worst of vanguard authoritarianism in that revolutionaries who go into the hood don’t care about the individuals—their unique personalities, their interests, their needs, but just the cookie cutter program of disseminating revolution to the masses.

Early in the fall, I worked in a high school in the Central District with students diagnosed with Emotional Behavioral Disorder (EBD). (I’ve subsequently worked in many of these classrooms and have noticed a severely disproportionate number of black and Latino street youth diagnosed with this. It is a socially constructed disability. Many are diagnosed at an early age because they have not performed academically on par with the rest of their grade, and do not choose to engage with classroom material. Once you get to know these youth, you’ll find that they are extremely smart, can list out many real-life experiences of racism in ways I cannot articulate, and can read if presented with relevant material. They are a testament to the irrelevance of the standardized school curriculum to street POCs). The lead teacher, a middle-aged white woman, unsuccessfully tried to run a by-the-textbook world history lesson on Buddhism. The students were blasting their ipods, myspacing on the computers, and mad disrespecting the teacher and running the classroom, calling her a “fat b****” and “pop that p****” to her face. She ineptly and nervously laughed at these situations, while trying to play friend to the students. When a student made a comment of how he heard another female student in the room fucking someone else in the school, the teacher obnoxiously jumped in saying to the male student, “oh Jamal, you know so much about everyone else. You should be a matchmaker.” It was painful for me to watch her attempt to teach. I jumped in and broadly related the classroom lesson to spirituality and religion in hip hop (many of the concepts I had thought out already from my previous blog entry “Hip Hop Has Saved My Spirituality”), which paved the way for a more focused lesson on Buddhism, which I also related to hip hop. I related Buddha’s contemplative journey towards self-realization and meditation to Tupac’s spiritual journey of challenging contemporary religious authorities like the Pope and his ultimate self-realization that gangstas had their own heaven or thugz mansion free of police harassment; I related Buddha’s divine laws to the laws of hip hop godfather Afrika Bambaataa’s Universal Zulu Nation. The classroom dynamic immediately changed and the students were focused. The hip hop references gave me an edge of credibility and respect because I respect and I myself identified with the hip hop generation. More importantly, by introducing gangsta rappers like DMX into the spirituality and religion discussion, I was able to draw from DMX the following day and have a rich discussion on his quote, “Look thru my eyes, see what I see, do as I do, be as I be, walk in my shoes, hurt your feet, then know why I do dirt in the street,” which gave students an opportunity to reflect, journal on and then share about their experiences with racism, law and authority, and growing up in black and poor in the ghetto. Without even explicitly bringing up politics, hip hop had turned the classroom political and allowed students to bond on their common experiences with racism, and allowed me to situate their personal experiences into a broader system of racist oppression. Just like that, hip hop saved the day. By drawing from my own experience, I hope this illustrates the need to be relevant and NOT be a broken record screaming “REVOLUTION!”

Education is a dialectical, mutually reinforcing process. I’ve worked with a lot of young street POCs this past year and have learned immensely about gangs, racism, gentrification—in short, the “real” Seattle, from the run-down motels along Aurora Ave of the otherwise white bourgie North End, to the increasingly gentrified neighborhoods of High Point and White Center in West Seattle, to the bastion of the white homeless juggalo family hovering around downtown Westlake. I’ve come to respect the positive values that gang membership brings, while develop a more thorough critique of gangs and, consequently, believe in the urgency of developing revolutionary organization in the hood. The best values of gangs reflect the unflinching loyalty and commitment to the cause, and militancy and confrontational attitude from the revolutionary organizations of the 1960s and 1970s that is sorely needed in many more organizations today. Of course, the worst—the preying on other community members, the self-destruction, minority-on-minority violence, the patriarchal and homophobic culture—reflect on the failures of yesterday’s movement to transmit lessons of the past. Many more rank-and-file gang members realize the fatality of gangbanging and are searching for an alternative vision. They scoff at the school system for patronizing them and treating them like youth when, as one Blood validly pointed out to me as he was unrolling a stack of benjamins, he’s had so much more real life experiences than myself or any other counselor or teacher. At the same time, they cling onto the one alternative that they hear from teachers day in and day out, that one day they can be restaurant owners, lawyers, businessmen, heads of painting companies, if they stopped banging, get their act together, and concentrate in school. With the economic crisis deepening, and governments turning to austerity measures resulting in social service cutbacks and even fewer opportunities, can movement-building revolutionaries help chart a new and real positive alternative that street POCs devote their lives to? Can movements once again become an ordinary social activity today among ordinary folks as they were just a few decades ago? Will revolutionaries step up to the task to organize with street POCs in a non-patronizing, non-authoritarian way? If we can’t, then any broad movement will leave out some of the most oppressed folks and violate the sentiment that oppressed folks must lead the movement. I hope this post will be the start of more serious studying and discussions around past and contemporary efforts of organizing with street POCs, and more serious engagement with street POCs.

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.

To Fight or Not to Fight

With the defeat of HR 4437 aka the Sensenbrenner Bill in 2006, no doubt due to popular insurgency through mobilizations, strikes, and walkouts, the struggle over immigration, like gay marriage, is being fought out on a state level. Many are hearkening back to the Freedom Summer of 1964 where civil rights organizers from the North spent a summer in the Deep South, with some staying even longer, organizing voter registration drives and desegregation campaigns, and the need to recreate a similar initiative in Arizona. While such a project is important, what SB 1070 demonstrates is that the fight is where we already are. As lawmakers propose and launch comparable attacks on people of color elsewhere in the South, we need to build fighting organizations in our state, our own cities, and our own communities.

The debate over the way forward for the immigrant rights struggle has been radically changing ever since the sit-in at Senator McCain’s back in May of this year. Defying the terms of struggle and the logic informing it, three students have risked their livelihoods and residency by sitting in and demanding support for the DREAM Act which if passed would offer conditional, permanent residency to undocumented students.

The established immigrant rights organizations are asking those who want to engage in this type of direct confrontation with their oppressors to take a back seat to their leadership. Some of them claim they are in support of amnesty but that it isn’t the right time to introduce such a demand and that it runs the risk of alienating politicians who would then not support the DREAM Act or Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Furthermore, they fear that radical approaches that break the law would confirm the perspective of the racists that immigrants are criminals.

Others, many of them radicals in the academy, suggest that undocumented peoples should abstain from some or all direct action because they face greater economic and political uncertainty. Many can go into great theoretical detail about the institutions of white supremacy and the inequality of capitalist society but find themselves beholden to the narrow parameters such a society offers us to participate in politics. In short, they talk left and walk right.

Yet another tendency, though small, rejects such condescending liberalism. They feel an urgent desperation after years of organizing, beginning with the 2003 immigrant freedom rides, that our liberation is not the burden of citizens or white folks or liberal organizations whose leadership is merely biding its time until they win political office. They aren’t afraid of calling attacks on undocumented workers what it is: white supremacy. They see the struggle of immigrants as bound up with that of all people of color, queer folks, and women and their methods of struggle correspond to their perspectives.

Counterprotest

It is in this spirit that a counterprotest was organized to confront the white supremacists who want to extend and centralize the powers of the state despite their claims to be desiring of “small government.” The organizers of the rally encouraged folks to not bring racial signs or make racial statements, yet many yelled at counterprotestors that it has “nothing to do with race” alongside others armed with automatic weapons yelling “Go home, wetbacks!” As much as they tried to police their own racism, it was for not.

The counterprotest kicked off at noon. After a few minutes of introductory speeches and chants to get the crowd hyped, we marched onto the Capitol grounds directly toward the protest. We were instantly cut off by the Capitol police. We employed a variety of tactical formations, from marching to different sides of the protest, to conducting a picket line, to opening a space for anyone who wanted to say something to do so. We had the effect of being louder than their music performances and their speakers to the point where one speaker lost his cool and began screaming at us to “shut up” as the above link indicates. Eventually, the police threatened us with confiscation of our bullhorns and arrest if we continued to use them but it didn’t stop us.

Many had never spoken in front of others before and learned the strength of their own voice. Some high schoolers had remarked that this was the first political action or had never participated in anything like it. Others got the chance to debate individually and as a group with supporters of SB 1070 which went a long way towards developing their debating and polemical skills.

How It was Organized

It is understandable why some advocate the Left working together. They are tired of the sectarianism that isolates the Left from mass struggle, creates a culture of divisiveness, and throws up barriers to fighting alongside each other. The stick can be bent too far in this direction however, where the Left champions working together at the expense of their own principles or where there is no objective basis for unity; meaning no organizing is taking place that creates terms of struggle and unity.

With no large and bureaucratic coalition structure, several groups came together, including ¡ella pelea!, MEChA, Anti-Racist Action and others, to organize the counterprotest in a temporary organizing committee. The committee was majority women and people of color and largely queer. While the groups were disparate in politics and in focus, we agreed to the terms of a united front which ensured a democratic respect for folks to bring their own signs and flyers and employ a variety of tactics. This prevented “movement cops” from policing the actions of others as we see all too often in popular front-type coalitions. Instead we used the committee space to share and coordinate different tactical approaches. It was a real high note of Left solidarity that was grounded in organizing.

Critiques by the Left

There have been criticisms coming from elements both here in Austin and nationally about what the merits and points are of such counterprotests. While there are numerous points above that speak to the strength of the counterprotest, let’s take them up one by one.

The liberals say we become equated with the Right when we confront them directly, chant and yell at them or debate them individually. Others limited their critiques to more trivial issues, such as numbers; you need this many or that many to do this or that. Still others on the Left contrast organizing counterprotests to building the from-below power of undocumented workers and their organizations.

For the liberals, their conflation of principles and tactics doesn’t allow them to see the most obvious differences between white supremacy and anti-racism. An undocumented worker who yells in the face of a racist is not the same as a racist calling them a wetback. The number crunchers assume the reasoning of petitioning, that the more who sign on to a “cause” give it more legitimacy. I think for those of us who chose to show on June 12th, the struggle against white supremacy is a valid struggle in and of itself. We didn’t feel the need to wait for everyone else to give us their okay. Numbers are important in so far as strategy and tactics are concerned. The organizers of the event didn’t plan for a physical confrontation with the Right or the cops, not out of principle, but because of the odds stacked against the counterprotestors.

For those that contrast counterprotests and building organization, how are such counterprotests antithetical to developing the political power of undocumented workers and students? It is precisely in such confrontation where folks can overcome the perceived omnipotence of the racists, build their confidence and capacity to fight, discuss organizational and protest strategy and tactics, etc. This is giving them the experience to lead in all areas of the struggle. Counterprotests are not the full extent of the immigrant rights movement, but it is an arena of struggle that can’t be ignored or dissed.

We need to begin setting up the chess pieces for larger and more direct forms of confrontation as the struggle begins to advance. We need folks organizing for civil defense against ICE raids and minute men attacks, defending and expanding ethnic studies and immigrant access to universities, as well as on-the-job action against racist bosses. In ALL of these areas, confrontation is an indispensable component and they will go hand-in-hand with creating the kind of strong, dynamic organizations that are needed to win.

Conclusion

But the counterprotest has a greater import beyond what it did for the folks who organized and participated in it. Most of us acknowledge the dynamism of the Right today; their perspectives, strategies, and organizing are cutting edge and far advanced of stale liberal and social democratic talking points. But what was clear on this day is that they were out-organized. What was a Saturday afternoon picnic of a protest for them was a spirited, organized, and dynamic counterprotest for us. What was stale and pale for them was youthful, militant, and diverse with people of color clearly taking the lead.

Links to articles, photos/video

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/local/showdown-of-sides-at-the-capitol

http://www.kvue.com/video/featured-videos/Immigration-Face-off-at-the-Capitol-96230089.html

http://www.myfoxaustin.com/dpp/top_stories/Clash-over-Immigration-Law-at-Capitol-2010-06-12-ktbcw

http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/rally-supporting-arizona-immigration-law-met-by-protesters-744219.html

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.

Growing up in Detroit you learn to appreciate the hidden beauty of a city gutted by white supremacy and capitalism.  The resilience of the people there, despite all we’ve endured, is one testament to black civilization and oppressed peoples everywhere.  I have friends from the east coast who say that Detroit and much of the Midwest has its own unique form of scathing charm that is normally attributed to the tough personality types of New York.  To survive in a war zone you gotta be tough.  The working classes of New York live in a city which some of the most brutal capitalists in the world call their home, and everyday they go head-to-head with these capitalists.  In Detroit it’s a little different.  We were left for dead, and despite that, and all the odds stacked against us, we remind the bosses, the crackers and the cops that we’re still here.

One of the things i’ve always loved about the city is how green it can get during the spring and summer.  Again, because the city can’t afford to keep the trees up, and because families living in a city with a 33% unemployment rate have more important things to worry about than how high the lawn or the bushes get, wild vegetation has started to take back some of the city.

The photography of James D. Griffioen captures this in a very profound way.  His work evokes a sense of sadness, serenity, and rage all at the same time.  The scope of his work explores the many details of life in Detroit giving us a wider view of the devastation.  He shows us entire neighborhood blocks that don’t have a single house on it, book depositories with brand new text books that are going to waste, and miles of unused factories and store fronts that have been eviscerated and left to rot.

Griffioen’s work is not without hope, though.  There are several photographs that focus on colorful murals and graffiti tags that have chronicled a city, a culture and a people that have refused to die.  And because the only thing that has been rebuilt in the city has been Tiger Stadium, there are buildings from at least four different eras of architecture that clash and chronicle the patchwork/DIY life that many of us have lived while straddling the line between death and rebellion.

The Heidelberg Project, the work of Tyree Guyton, is another shining beacon of our resilience.  What Guyton has done is a perfect example of an insurgent art movement.  Known best for the dots that are scattered around the city and the crucified stuffed animals and baby dolls, the 1+ sqaure blocks that make up Guyton’s artwork, the Heidelberg Project, brings to the Surface all the contradictions that developers, the city elites, and white-supremacists try to gloss over.

In 1986, Tyree Guyton, along with family and friends, began cleaning up vacant lots and then used the refuse they collected to create pieces of art that sometimes encompasses the entire outside of a house along his block, including his home.  When Guyton speaks about his art with you, he conveys a sense of urgency and desperation that sums up the historical experience of Detroit.  He is one of those insurgent personalities, that has had his fare share of battles.  Twice, in 1991 and 1999, city officials have bulldozed pieces of Guyton’s art.  They claimed that art, focusing on the city’s trash problem, diminishes neighborhood property value and makes the city look bad.  that hasn’t stopped the Heidelberg Project, though.  In fact, he returned with his own political jabs at the Detroit elite arguing that it was strange the city had money to bulldoze his art, but they did nothing of the abandoned factory not far from Heidelberg where kids get hurt on a regular basis.

Guyton has been one of the few groundbreaking artists that I’ve had the chance to meet in my life.  The first time I spoke with Guyton he told me about one of his artworks that displayed the US flag.  He said one night he heard gunshots, and when he came out in the morning someone had emptied a few rounds into the flag.  He loved it, and considers this interaction with the rest of the city a key part of his project.

The Heidelberg Project from Laura Kuster on Vimeo.

Guyton has expanded the Heidelberg Project to include fashion shows, and a youth program in which kids regularly expand the project creating their own art.  As the documentary explains, freedom is being daring and having the courage to do what we think we can’t, and the Heidelberg Project challenges the people of Detroit to just go ahead and try it.

…philosophy by other means.

A colossal sanitation problem is just one ecological issue outlining the challenges facing the people of Detroit.  These issues are a result of the short-comings of past movements, the assault by white supremacy, and the de-industrialization that is common throughout much of the Midwest.  What will happen to the future of cities like Detroit throughout the rest of the American Rust Belt, and the crises of urbanization can only be speculated.

These artists, however, help me think about how a recycling program, an urban gardening or a clean-the-streets project can be transformed from a seemingly reformist, and sometimes moralistic mode of organizing to one that pulls hard on the chains of our oppression and the social forms that continue to destroy the environment.

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.

When the university bureaucracy engages in “collective punishment” it’s tipping it’s hand, and revealing which side of the struggle it falls on.  All pretensions of ‘objectivity’ fade away, as we’ve seen in the persecution of activists and academics who express solidarity with Palestine on university campuses.  Colleges and universities are institutions that are used to propagate the ruling ideas of official society, which includes the demonization of Muslims, as well as political and economic support for Israeli apartheid.

They do not distinguish between their attacks on Palestine and Iraq, on the one hand, and Muslims and Islam on the other; we should not distinguish in our defense.  While the MSU is currently denying any official involvement in organizing the disruption, Muslim students and the MSU should stand behind these actions and the 11 who were arrested.  It would be foolish to think we can escape these attacks by keeping our heads down.

Another assumption to this argument is that Islam and Muslim identity have absolutely no relationship to the occupation of Palestine, Iraq and other hot spots of US Empire and resistance.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The oppression of Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan is intricately tied to the development of Islamic thought and practice.  It is a singular process, and we cannot separate the two.

One the one hand, the notion of the ‘clash of civilizations’ — popularized by Samuel Huntington’s book of the same title — has been used as the main social ideology by both the Right and liberals to justify US Empire’s ‘war on terror,’ and the occupations and carpet bombing of majority-Muslim countries.  Academia and the press have used a forest worth of paper to expound how Islam is primitive and inherently antagonistic to bourgeois notions of democracy and modernity, why the US must embark on the contemporary journey of the ‘white man’s burden’ to civilize us and teach us democracy.

On the other hand, we have, no doubt, been living through what some have called an Islamic revival .  With the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Islamic politics gained major traction on the world stage as a viable alternative for anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements.  In tandem with this, the failure of Communism and nationalist projects to fulfill their promises of national liberation have prompted many to emphasize and explore the Muslim aspects of their identity over others.

As Islam and Muslim identity has become a voice of anti-imperial and anti-colonial resistance, it contains within it kernels of class struggle.  Just like Black Power, Islamic politics have tensions  of gender, race, and class which must be contested.  But just as Black Power was needed as the re-assertion of Black people, so to the defense and articulation of a revolutionary Islamic politics is needed now.  What it looks like is being fought over in Lebanon, Egypt, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.  This same struggle must occur in the US, as well.  This is an urgent task.

Our Muslim identity and politics cannot be separated from this reality.  Many of us have turned to Islam and Islamic politics in order to understand reasons behind the whole sale murder of our people, the daily humiliation we face as Muslims, and what we can do to fight back and resist.  While this, of course, has occurred to varying degrees, it explains the success of national liberation groups such as Hamas and Hizbullah.

Some, however, argue that all nationalism is sectarian.  While we’re certainly familiar with these forms in Lebanon, and now Iraq, nationalism — just like every other revolutionary tradition –  has a range of authoritarian and libertarian tendencies within it.  Ali Shari’ati is just one example of a revolutionary who advanced Islamic thought and practice with a blend of existentialism and Marxism.

In the United States, however, Islam has been successfully assimilated into American Empire.  The only reason for its existence is to coopt the independent resistance of American Muslims, and provide a tool of cover for imperial management.  The other specter in the US is the threat of al-Qaeda, which benefits liberal Islamic politics and American Empire.  It reduces the choice between either being a loyal opposition to US imperialism, or embracing the reactionary politics and strategies of the right wing of Islamism (of which Hamas and Hizbullah are NOT a part) — strategies that offer no possibility of emancipation.

The revolutionary tradition of the Prophet (PBUH), and other figures like Shari’ati are completely ignored.  The richer development of Islam has crashed on the rocks of liberalism and reactionary Islamism.  A higher development based on class struggle, anti-patriarchy, etc. has stagnated because of this tension.  There needs to be the development of a history and praxis based on such an analysis.

And where have the best of our generation gone out of these frustrations?  They have enrolled in law school or med-school and fight on the terrain of liberal democracy.  This strategy is unwinnable.  The braver have fled to Pakistan or Afghanistan to fight US occupations, but reach a dead end in philosophy and practice.

It’s a question of how should Muslims go about to change our circumstances; the politics of Arab and Muslim social movements need to be based on our self-conception and practical activity in the terms of strategy and organizational forms.  Marx brilliantly wrote that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”  The Theses on Feuerbach is a good place to begin thinking about this question.

It’s also important to note that the nationalism of the 60s and 70s provided the basis for international linkages between the Black struggle in the US, China, Cuba, Tanzania, Ghana, and elsewhere.  However, the task is not to mimic them.  The forms and content of one struggle cannot simply be repeated.

At the same time, US Empire’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan have guaranteed that such historical dilemmas will not go away.  The victories of the national liberation era are have provided that the overwhelming majority of nations in the world would no longer face the question of kicking a classic colonizer out of their country who are from Europe or the United States.  And yet the lives of billions of de-colonized peoples are hardly better.  What is the next course of struggle then?

What appears as fragmentary problems have to be reconciled in a globalized capitalist world which would have been hardly recognizable in the national liberation era.  Islam, as a social ideology Muslims use to navigate these forces, is intricately tied to this story.  How else can we explain millions of Muslims scattered across the advanced capitalist world as “legal immigrants,” undocumented workers, or parts of the diaspora due to continued apartheid or colonialism?  How else can we begin to explain what the Muslim people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, etc are going through?

As MSUs and MSAs are often the only Muslim student organizations on campus, not only do they have a right to be leading the Palestine solidarity movement, but they have a responsibility.  Religious education and building community are important work that MSU/As should be involved in, but they must also address these other aspects of the Muslim experience.  If the membership of these organizations chooses not to get involved, then Arab and Muslim students should start alternative organizations in order to take up the task of Palestine.

Another argument is that the tactic of disruption is un-Islamic or unbecoming of a Muslim.  I’m sure we’ve heard many times the story of the Prophet (PBUH) and the woman who would throw garbage on him as he used to walk home.  She did this for a few days, but one day she wasn’t there to do this.  The Prophet (PBUH) visited her because he thought something must have been wrong.  In turns out she was sick, so the Prophet (PBUH) stayed with her and prayed for her.

This story is used to champion an advanced moral spirit and character that Muslims should hold themselves to.  But it is also used — along with other false claims that Islam means peaceful tolerance of oppression and that jihad can be totally reduced to a personal struggle — to argue that Muslims should not organize for Palestine, or resist war and occupation.  It’s a conservative argument that relegates Islam to the realm of ideas, instead of recognizing that Islam is a material force that engages with the material forces of apartheid and empire.  If Islam is going to be more than an idea, then it needs to engage with these things in a concrete way.

To reduce Islam or Muslim identity to this one story is equivalent to throwing the rest of our tradition into the dustbin.  Jihad is another aspect of Islam, and has many meanings.  It may mean waging a meaning of personal struggle, but it also at times means going to war against our oppressors.  Muslims cannot ignore the tradition of struggle within Islam.  We must engage with it.  The liberation of our communities is a task Islam demanded of its adherents.

There are other political arguments made against the tactic of disruption.  The UC official, for instance, charged the disruptors with violating free speech rights.  Many Palestine solidarity organizers have accept these terms of engagement and fallen into this trap.

The problem with this conception is that it pretends that the rights of the speaker — in this case an Israeli state official — and the disruptors — Muslims — are the same.  They are not.  The MSU does not have billions of dollars, bombs, tanks, and a university administration at their disposal to fight for the liberation of Palestine.

Would the UC Irvine administration allow a speaker from Hamas, Hizbullah or any other Muslim/Arab national liberation organization to speak?  Probably not.  It’s free speech for white supremacy, and carpet bombs for the rest of us.

Was the MSU or other Palestine solidarity organizers allowed a mic and equal time to address the audience?  A formalized debate would have been equal terms, but the university administration, because they support Zionism and white supremacy, would never allow this.

Our first foot forward should be, as the first disruptor put it, “Propagating murder is not an expression of free speech!”  It’s an attempt to rally support for the continued murder of people of color in general and Muslims & Palestinians in particular.  This is exactly what Zionists are doing on their speaking tours.  They need to be opposed and shut down.

And yet another argument is that disruption and similar tactics make Zionists like Oren look like the victim.

Yeah right… to who?

Certainly not to other Muslims.  Racists are constantly painting themselves as the oppressed.  We need to be consistently putting our own perspectives out there that debunk this. We can’t fall into this trap.

The line of thought behind this argument is that if we act peaceful and civil enough, we will convince the US and Israeli ruling classes of our humanity, as if they simply forgot what apartheid and occupation does to a people.  The logic behind this also assumes that our liberation is going to come from some ‘white savior’ as if we don’t have the capabilities to free ourselves.

We should keep in mind that while Obama was twiddling his thumbs for over a year, Israel didn’t begin to ease the blockade on Gaza until after solidarity activists in the Gaza Flotilla attempted to break the siege.

We need consistent organizers, organizations and campaigns.  This becomes more dire in light of the fact that the university administration used the all to common tactic of waiting until the summer, when most of the students are gone from campus, before releasing this information about the suspension.  They tend to do that when it comes to actions that invite student protest and resistance.

This disruption at UC Irvine was a good first step, but it was only a first step.  Only sit-ins, occupations and strikes by students and workers will forge a successful solidarity movement in this country.  As Arabs and Muslims find ourselves at the center of these attacks by white supremacy and empire, resistance becomes a task that no one can do for us.

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?

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?

However tragic and agonizing, the sweatshop condition in the Chinese workplace does not silent the working-class but has the potential to mobilize them. The workers at Foxconn have gotten a 33% pay raise after the suicide incidents. Many workers in Southern China have been inspired by the event and started to mobilize on their own workplaces. On May 17, nearly 2000 Honda Motor Co. factory workers walked out on the job to demand for higher wages. The strike lasted for more than two weeks and was resolved by getting a 24% pay raise. Though some minimal pay raises are far away from enough to compensate for the workers’ living expenses and harsh work conditions in the neoliberal Chinese cities (the legal minimum wage in Shenzhen after the raise is 900 RNB, about 83 cents an hour), the Foxconn agitation and Honda strike demonstrated the energy of the Chinese workers and the potential power they have if they were organized nationally. Meanwhile, more than 10 Taiwanese labor rights organizations as well as the Hong Kong Students & Scholars Against Cooperate Misbehavior were protesting against Foxconn’s sweatshop operation as well as their Apple bosses in the US in solidarity with the Chinese workers. The Foxconn incident has awaken the long class conflicts between the ruling-class and working-class in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong beyond their ethnic and political boundaries.

The sweatshop conditions are not a unique Chinese problem but are spreading all over Southeast Asia and other developing countries. The Western bosses of Apple or HP will continually work with the Chinese bureaucracy and Taiwanese bosses to ensure they are still profiting as much and preventing any worker mobilization, even if that means killing their workers and stealing their labor and resources from their home countries. We have heard the workers in the US and in Taiwan complain that the Chinese workers have stolen our jobs. But they are not stealing our jobs–our jobs are destroyed by the US corporates and the Taiwanese government who is signing on neoliberal contracts with the Chinese bureaucracy so they can help the big corporates profit more with even less work. Specifically, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) that the leadership of Kuomintang is currently signing with the Chinese despite its controversy and Taiwanese workers’ anger, is more or less a preparation to sign on the Free Trade Agreement (but without the same protections) internationally afterwards. The ECFA will not only allow big capitals to flow across the Taiwanese strait but reduce manufacture jobs and average wages locally. When the Taiwanese and Chinese bureaucracies say they support “peace between the strait”or “better economic relations between the strait,”they don’t mean that they are really for peace, or anti-war, or jobs for the poor. They mean, forget about our rights to self-determination, forget about the Taiwanese colonial struggle, forget about workers’ struggle in Taiwan or China or Southeast Asia, the ruling-class will unite and ensure their status by exploiting us all together. Our countries have been sold out by the imperialists and the bourgeoisies for too long, and nothing has changed except that the ruling-class has learned more and more ways to cheat us that “the better life is coming,” just like the extravagant and wasteful Shanghai Expo that has destroyed many local Chinese folks’ homes. It’s time for us, Asians in the US, in Taiwan, in China, or in other parts of the world, to get more organized than our bosses, and call for international workers solidarity beyond the border and ethnic lines from below.

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.

In the US, there is this same sense of urgency as many are organizing for Palestine after a year of relative silence.  The same debates over strategy and tactics that have plagued the Palestine solidarity movement since its beginnings, however, have also resurfaced, with many looking to the UN, international law, or maybe some ‘progressive’ wing of the US ruling class to address both the massacre and the issues of apartheid and occupation in Palestine as a whole.

In response to these questions, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has put forward its own vision for what is needed today.  Instead of making appeals to the Israeli, US and Palestinian ruling classes, the GFF has demonstrated the possibilities of a people-to-people foreign policy.  If, not just Gaza, but all of Palestine is going to be free then organizers and everyday people must themselves break the siege and challenge the day-to-day reality of apartheid.  In the US this means we must confront the institutions of the ruling class the continue to support to Israeli apartheid and occupation.  This demands that we engage in civil disobedience on a mass scale, and take back control over the institutions that give financial and material support to Israel.

Israeli apartheid and occupation will defend itself at all costs.  We must do the same for Palestine.  On the flotilla, those organizers stopped waiting for an official policy, and attempted to break the siege themselves.  And in the middle of the assault by the IDF, they also responded by taking up the task of self-defense.    In the middle of this tragedy, these were moments of justice.

For those of us in the US, the question before us is: How long will we stay in the streets?  The massive protests at the beginning of 2009 in response to the siege on Gaza quickly died down after only two months. Our movement suffers from a lack of much needed sustained campaigns and organizations.  We cannot wait until the next tragedy before we organize the next protest, and it is often the decision to abide by the official channels of protest that spur many organizers to tell the movement to get out of the streets and into lobbying.

The following tasks remain for serious organizers interested in ending Israeli Apartheid:

1) development of theory which analyzes the situation of Palestinians in a global context
2) analysis of U.S. Empire
3) analysis of Israeli apartheid
4) analysis of white supremacy, gender and the question of Islam
5) the relationship the Palestine solidarity movement must make with other social struggles in the United States
6) finally, the development of organizations which can develop militants and sustain campaigns against the weakest points of Zionists, white supremacists, and anyone else who seeks to defend the State of Israel

Israel will not be brought down just by angry protests whenever the media reminds us that Palestinians are killed. While such protests play a vital role, we need militant organizations who can strike at the weakest spots of the enemy. Otherwise, no matter how much we protest, we are disingenuous to ourselves and to Palestinians. Apartheid and injustice has only ended when people have organized and fought back.

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.

The inability of Israel and the U.S. to solve the political problem of Palestinian rights has radicalized Israeli Jewish society. This could be viewed more broadly as a part of the resurgent white populism and fascism in places like Europe, Australia and the U.S. The deliberate attack on the flotilla is a result of this shift. The Second Intifada profoundly challenged the nature of the Jewish State, laying bare its systematic discrimination against the Palestinian population. It revealed, in Fanonian terms, that this state can be nothing but the negation of the “native”.

The entry of the far-right into the governing coalition, led by Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman and Danny Ayalon, has brought its solution into the mainstream of Israeli bourgeois politics: they call it “population transfer”, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. While arrests of political leadership and the killing of demonstrators goes on unabated in the West Bank bantustans, a similar campaign is occurring against an increasingly defiant Palestinian-Israeli community. This has led to the arrest or exile of prominent political leaders, including Azmi Bishara, Ameer Makhoul, and Raed Salah among others.

Equally important here is the spat between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government. It was only several months ago Netanyahu rejected Obama’s call to freeze the construction of Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank and Lieberman stood-up Biden at an official state dinner in Israel. While Obama has attempted to restart the “peace process”, Netanyahu and Lieberman have done everything to short-circuit it. The attack on the flotilla is another tactic to disrupt Obama’s foreign policy goals.

Since there is no longer an effective centrist bourgeois politics in Israel, there is little support for investing legitimacy in a comprador bantustan government that the “peace process” is intended to achieve. Even so, the U.S. position is unlikely to get any traction even without this kind of resistance given the fact that the construction of the Palestinian Authority depended on the particular position and status of Arafat. The Palestinian Authority can no longer have any political legitimacy. It can only be a source of patronage for the distribution of aid money and the center of an auxiliary police force for the apartheid regime.

The Israeli military also attacked the flotilla because of the large presence of Turks onboard. The intention was to send a message to the Turkish government in an escalating diplomatic stand-off for the last year with the fall-out from the Gaza massacre. The timing of this attack is no accident, then, given that recently the AKP-led government in Turkey with the help of Brazil brokered a recent deal to allow the transportation of enriched uranium out of Iran. In regional terms it is also likely that the Israeli government, with support from the Right in the U.S., is looking to set the political terms for any future war it is currently contemplating.

Yet, like the Arab regimes, internal factors in Turkey also are playing a major role in this incident. The Erdogan and the AKP-led government has loudly responded to the flotilla massacre, despite jeopardizing its relationship with Israel, because it is in its own struggle with both the military and depression-like economic conditions. The Islamic faction in the Turkish bourgeoisie has been instrumental in completing the transition from Kemalist state-led capitalist modernization to neo-liberalism and potential entry into the European Union. Populist rhetoric is needed to shore up the Islamic bourgeoisie’s stewardship of this process.

The Israeli government believed that since a large contingent in this particular aid convoy was organized by the Islamic IHH, it could de-legitimize anti-blockade efforts and anti-apartheid efforts more broadly in the eyes of progressives and Leftists by painting it as “Turkish” and “Islamic”. Instead, the IHH is an Islamic NGO associated with the small Saadet Party. The Saadet represents a more conservative split from the ruling AKP. But Erdogan has minimized differences with Saadet in order to bolster his populist credentials in the face of the economic crisis and the always hidden hand of the military junta.

Unfortunately, this de-legitimization of Islamic politics has a track record of working, though its effectiveness is waning. This has certainly shown itself on some parts of the “progressive” as well as the radical Left. While many old Cold War progressives have become the new Left face of a resurgent white populism in regards to imperialism and Israeli apartheid, some on the radical Left have been disarmed by the elites in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere (under different national conditions) as Muslims have been placed at the center of white supremacy today. Thinking about this phenomenon in terms of secularism or religion has only too often found various Leftists supporting one faction of the ruling class against another. Instead, it has to be understood how the question of Islam must be addressed within the racial, class and gendered terms of the concrete struggles and self-activity of people in Muslim communities.

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:

1. 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?
2. 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?
3. 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?
4. 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)
5. 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?
6. 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?
7. 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?

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.

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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.

Arizona has been dragged through the mud by the media and national opinion over the passage of SB 1070, a heinous anti-immigration law that massively expands police power in the state, basically mandating racial profiling and making it a crime to associate with undocumented people. Much of this derision is deserved. The law was crafted by one of the most nativist politicians in the country, State Senator Russell Pearce of Mesa, and signed by Governor Jan Brewer, who is running as far to the right as she can in order to win the coming Republican primary. The anti-immigrant sentiment is so strong in this state that even our “maverick” U.S. Senator, John McCain, endorsed the bill. McCain, who supported immigration reform when he ran for president in 2008, is also up for reelection this November.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is so widespread it could change the political landscape here—for the worse. The rumor is that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—who began the nativist sensation in Arizona in 2006 with his roadblocks and sweeps for “illegals”—is going to run for governor against Brewer. Andrew Thomas, the Maricopa County Attorney who is otherwise known as Arpaio’s mini-me, recently quit his job in order to run for state attorney general. Pearce salivates at the thought of replacing Arpaio as County Sheriff. So if you think things are bad now, wait until November, when we could have Arpaio, Thomas, Hayworth, and Pearce running the state. It’s enough to make David Duke exhale a low whistle.
But the courageous actions of undocumented workers and high school students suggest that nativism will not rule the Grand Canyon State without a fight. And those from below just might win.

You can see the kernel of the new Arizona in the shell of the old in the Repeal Coalition, a grassroots, all-volunteer organization with chapters in Flagstaff and Phoenix. As one of its main organizers, Taryn Jordan, explains, the group was formed in 2008 to fight anti-immigrant legislation. “We knew something like this [SB 1070] was coming, and we’ve known it for a long time,” says Jordan. “Our goal in Repeal was to provide a new face of resistance to it.”

And it is new. Most immigrant rights groups here call for “comprehensive immigration reform,” a law that would create a long, arduous path to citizenship for only some undocumented people, while leaving many in legal limbo. The Repeal Coalition, however, argues for the repeal of all anti-immigrant laws. “We demand the repeal of all laws—federal, state, and local—that degrade and discriminate against undocumented individuals and that deny U.S. citizens their lawful rights,” their literature states. “We demand that all human beings—with papers or without—be guaranteed access to work, housing, health care, education, legal protection, and other public benefits, as well as the right to organize.”

Flagstaff Repeal Coalition organizer Ashley Cooper says that in the current anti-immigrant climate, repeal is the only relevant demand. “You can’t reform these laws; you can only repeal them,” she says. “And this gets to the heart of the issue. In a global economy, where goods and services move effortlessly across borders, humans deserve the same freedom. The only way to achieve that is to repeal existing laws, not create complicated and difficult paths to citizenship that only some people will be able to access.”

The group is finding an increasingly receptive audience for its message, especially among undocumented people and college and high school students.

Repeal’s approach to political organizing is also different from most immigration reform organizations. “Our goal is not to work for the people but to work with them,” explains Phoenix organizer Ceci Saenz. “We believe that the people should be leading this struggle—and that they already are leading it.” Repeal’s task, she explains, is to facilitate this leadership by bringing people together, encouraging them to “develop their militancy,” and to provide a political framework for their struggle, which is expressed by their slogan, “No more hate, harass, and blame: Freedom for all people to live, love, and work where you please!”

Flagstaff Repeal helped mobilize the undocumented workers who courageously spoke out at the City Council meeting, for example, and they are currently organizing pickets at a local hotel that has harassed and abused (and now fired) undocumented workers there. The weekend before, they organized three protests in a row, which drew 500 people in a town of 60,000. “It wasn’t even our idea,” explains Flagstaff Repeal Coalition organizer Katie Fahrenbruch. “We held a meeting just before 1070 was passed. When one of our volunteers asked folks what they wanted to do about [the law], the entire audience said ‘Protest!’” (In Spanish, of course.) “They couldn’t collectively agree on a day, so they said let’s do it for three days. So, we helped organize it in less than twenty-four hours’ notice.”

In Phoenix, the Coalition is organizing undocumented people, trailer park by trailer park, apartment complex by apartment complex. While thousands massed at the state Capitol the day after Governor Brewer signed SB 1070 into law, the Repeal Coalition was with a group of several hundred, led by undocumented women, who led a protest through the Latino neighborhoods they are organizing. Later that evening they called an emergency meeting, and within thirty minutes there were forty undocumented people meeting inside a garage in a trailer park, discussing strategy.

Many people have been talking about leaving the state since 1070 was passed, but this group did not. They talked about fighting. Something is new here.

All of this is being done by a group of just a handful of volunteers without non-profit status and with virtually no budget. Three Phoenix organizers live in a “Repeal” house, paid for by a small grant they obtained. They agree to work at least thirty hours a week for Repeal in exchange for free rent and utilities. “We don’t live large and it’s been stressful since 1070 was passed, but it’s worth it,” says Chris Griffin. He lives in the house and spends his days visiting jails, courthouses, and the homes of undocumented workers struggling against these laws.

This is the new Arizona. As conservative whites try to drive every “illegal” out of the state, and as immigration reform groups wait for Obama and Pelosi and Reid to put immigration reform on the agenda, folks in the Repeal Coalition are holding mass meetings of undocumented workers and are going to the hangouts of high school students, encouraging them to take their struggle to the next level. And as snipers line the roof of the State Capitol, they are smiling every time a water bottle whizzes past a cop who is now empowered to check their papers.

Welcome to the new Arizona.

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SB 1070: Battle at the Grassroots
by Joel Olson

In the struggle over the notorious anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-working class law SB 1070, a person might be tempted to see this as a conflict that plays out among the elites of Arizona politics: legislators, governors, sheriffs, newspaper editors, judges, lawyers, and nonprofits. This view would be understandable, but wrong. The real battle is at the grassroots.

On the one hand, there is a strong nativist movement afoot in Arizona that is overwhelmingly white, mostly over the age of fifty, and largely male. They fear that “illegals are invading” and causing all manner of mayhem, from home invasions to overcrowded emergency rooms to automated voices forcing them to “press 1 for English.” They are represented by the Tea Party and local politicians such as State Senator Russell Pearce. Their goal is to hound and harass all “illegal aliens” out of Arizona—and if they have to check the papers of every brown-skinned person in the state to do it, fine. “Attrition through enforcement,” Pearce calls it. That phrase is now written into Arizona law. At their demand, SB 1070 turns every cop in the state into an immigration officer, practically requires racial profiling, and denies the freedom of Arizonans to associate with whoever they please, documented or not. With the passage of 1070, nativists are confident that they control the territory.

But what happens when you hold a Tea Party and a bunch of “illegals” show up?

Facing down the nativist faction is a ragtag, underfinanced, increasingly fearless, and thoroughly working class movement that seeks to destroy SB 1070 and replace the Tea Party’s bogus call for “small government”—by the way, how is a government where every cop is empowered to check your papers “small”?—with a real call for freedom of movement and association. The hope for Arizona rests with this group that is fighting at the grassroots for the freedom to live, love, and work wherever you please.

One of the first battles between these two forces took place last Tuesday in the small mountain town of Flagstaff, Arizona (population 60,000). The Flagstaff City Council voted 7-0 to sue the state government to prevent SB 1070 from going into effect. (Earlier that day, Tucson’s city council voted 5-1 to do the same thing. Now other towns, such as Yuma and Naco, are also threatening to file an injunction.)

This decision from within the most nativist state in the nation came as a shock to many. True, Flagstaff has a reputation for being a liberal bubble, but the city council hardly has a stellar record of standing with people of color, as anyone from the Save the Peaks Coalition could tell you. The city council has been hostile to this indigenous-led effort to prevent the local ski resort from using Flagstaff sewage water to make artificial snow on a mountain that is sacred to thirteen tribes. (That’s right, they want you to ski on pee.)

Further, a poll taken just after SB 1070’s passage showed that seventy percent of Arizonans supported it. And when Rush Limbaugh heard that over 150 people came to the previous Flagstaff City Council meeting urging them to file an injunction, he told his listeners to besiege the Council with calls in support of 1070. Over the next few days, Flagstaff’s little city hall received a slew of racist voice mails and several death threats. Then the local Tea Party put out a call to pack the next meeting.

But they didn’t count on getting beat at their own game.
The Tea Party nationwide prides itself on being a grassroots organization feared by politicians. They probably thought that a good word from Limbaugh would help them bumrush city hall and put this whole injunction business to rest. But that was before they met the Repeal Coalition, a grassroots organization that seeks the repeal of all anti-immigrant laws in the state of Arizona and believes in the freedom of all people to live, love, and work wherever they please. (For more on the work of the Repeal Coalition, see my previous article, “New Arizona.”)

While Limbaugh blathered on, the Repeal Coalition held a mass meeting in the local Catholic church to put pressure on city hall. Sixty adults and twenty kids, most of them Latino, most of them undocumented or related to someone who is, came after work in their McCafe uniforms, bounced babies on their laps, and in a sweltering room for two and half hours, patiently developed a strategy—hashed out in Spanish and English—to keep the pressure on the city council. They planned a protest before the council meeting, and then to pack the meeting chamber itself. The Tea Party boasted it would do the same.

At 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday, people began trickling in to the chambers, while a crowd opposed to SB 1070 gathered on the street in front of city hall. Repeal members handed out scraps of paper to people as they filed in, suggesting that if they spoke before the council during the meeting they should demand that the council condemn SB 1070 and vote to file an injunction against it. By 5:30, over two hundred people were jammed into the council chambers. The room was stuffed so full the fire marshal had to shut the doors.

But only about thirty people were from the Tea Party. Opponents of 1070 had them outnumbered six to one. Plus there were a hundred people watching a live feed of the event in the lobby. Plus there were dozens of people who would not go into city hall because they were undocumented and feared police harassment, but fed messages to Repeal Coalition members, who conveyed them to the city council. Plus there were two hundred people outside still protesting—oh, and a lone Tea Partier holding a sign. (Yes, one person. Remind me, why are liberals so afraid of this group?)

With drums from the protest audible in the chamber, waves of people spoke out against 1070 and in favor of filing an injunction against it, while just five Tea Partiers spoke against the injunction. Each of the five went to great lengths to emphasize that they only opposed illegal immigration—but in the next breath they warned of “invasions” and a “virtual border that’s moving northward.” They weren’t racist for supporting SB 1070, they insisted—but then they talked about how “these people” commit crimes. Their logic was simple and crude: Undocumented = criminal = Mexican = all Latinos.

They knew they were out-organized, and they were furious. One elderly gentleman, who earlier had tried to get me kicked out of the council chamber for handing out our speaking suggestions, waved the scrap of paper in front of the council and accused the Repeal Coalition of telling people what to say. “Am I right about this?” he turned and asked the crowd. “No!” it roared back. He sat down and left the meeting shortly.

Many of those who spoke against 1070 deeply impressed the council and the crowd. One man openly admitted he was undocumented. A Latina whose family has lived in Flagstaff since the 1890s told the Tea Partiers, “You think this law won’t affect you? You’re right; it won’t—because you’re white. You bet it’s going to affect me and my family, and we’ve lived here for four generations!” A white guy in a tie mocked the racial profiling within the law by saying “I’m not a bigot, but I look like one, don’t I?” Roars of laughter.

In the most powerful testimony of the night, a woman from the Navajo Nation told the council how this law would inevitably harass and profile indigenous people. Angrily she said, “I never had to carry my C.D.I.B. [Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood] and now I do. You all [white people] are our guests in this land. And this is how we are repaid. I’m going to be stopped because of this law, and I’m from a First Nation.” She left the podium in tears, and to thunderous applause.

The Tea Partiers began filing out in defeat midway through the meeting. As they did, Latinos who were waiting outside filled their seats. By the time the council actually voted on the injunction, there wasn’t a tea bag in sight. The symbolism of a grassroots movement devoted to oppression being replaced, one by one, by another grassroots movement devoted to freedom, smelled as sweet as creosote after a desert rain.

Four and a half hours into the meeting, three things struck me. First, the legal struggle against 1070 is driven by the grassroots struggle. I realized this as one councilperson, Scott Overton, admitted that he wanted to wait to see what other cities were going to do first before approving an injunction, but “the community pushed hard.” He then proceeded to vote for it. Then, the most conservative member of the council (and a candidate for mayor in an election that’s just three weeks away) voted for the injunction, too—even though minutes earlier he had said he would abstain! From his rambling comments it was clear that he did not like the injunction and probably liked the spirit of SB 1070, but he didn’t have the guts to go against 200 people pressuring him to do the right thing.

Politicians and lawyers may be in front of the television cameras, but they are not in the lead in the battle against SB 1070. Rather, they are being pushed into action by a teeming movement of undocumented people, their loved ones, and their allies. To be sure, the city council’s decision required some courageous initiative by Councilwoman Coral Evans. But this issue is hot because people at the grassroots are hot, and politicians feel they have to do something. In figuring out what happens next in the struggle, then, the question is not, “Will the legal battle win?” but “Will the grassroots be able to push the legal struggle even further?”

Second, the Tea Party and their ilk can only be defeated by out-organizing them. Tea Partiers are wrong, but they’re not stupid. Their minds won’t be changed by showing them “the facts” about immigration, for ideology always trumps truth. Rather than dismissing them as ignorant, you have to beat them at the grassroots. In Flagstaff, a grassroots group led by working-class Latinos out-organized the mighty Tea Party. They left early, and at 10:00 p.m. we celebrated a unanimous decision. Even Rush Limbaugh couldn’t save them.

Third, this evil law can be defeated. Flagstaff is a sign. New polls show that support among Arizonans for the law has declined to just over fifty percent, with those numbers going down to forty-five percent of those under thirty-five. Enthusiasm for 1070 is dampening because the grassroots is firing up.

We can win this.

In 1963, Malcolm X wrote about a Black revolution coming from the grassroots, one in which Black people were determined to control their destiny rather than be controlled by whites. Similarly, a new movement is emerging from the grassroots in Arizona, one that rejects the weak tea of “liberty” proposed by nativist Tea Parties. This new Arizona demands a new kind of liberty called for by a global economy: the freedom to live, love, and work wherever one pleases, and the freedom of ordinary people to have a say in those affairs that affect their daily lives.

The day after our victory, a hundred high school and middle school (!) students walked out of school in protest against 1070 and marched to city hall. Repeal Coalition members met them there and exchanged phone numbers. That evening, another mass meeting organized by the Repeal Coalition voted to keep the pressure on with more protests and more resolutions for city hall to pass.

So what happens when you hold a tea party and a bunch of “illegals” show up? You can see the new Arizona in sight, and it’s as beautiful as a Sonoran sunset.

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.

from Race Wire:

BP Oil Spill Hurts Already Besieged Communities of Color

Julianne Hing

It’s only been two weeks since the April 20 explosion on the BP drilling rig killed 11 workers fifty miles off the coast of Louisiana and triggered an oil spill, but already local environmental justice advocates are saying the impact on communities of color could do more to wipe out the local economy than Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the recession combined.

The oil spill, which BP has taken responsibility for but been unable to bring under control, threatens to cut off local communities from their primary source of food and livelihood “indefinitely,” said Monique Harden, the co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a New Orleans-based environmental justice group.

And now, many fishermen, already out of work since the federal government issued a ten-day ban on commercial and recreational fishing starting last Friday, are signing up for paid volunteer work to help BP with its cleanup efforts. Fishermen with boats are being paid nominal fees to ferry materials to and from shore and load the gigantic plastic containment booms that are supposed to keep oil from spreading further inland.

“We understand that the fishermen who are working with this cleanup are not being provided with any respiratory masks or anything to protect their lungs, just Tyvek suits and nitrile gloves,” said Paul Orr, with Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper. Orr said that the crude oil that is spilling from 5,000 feet under the water contains “volatiles” like benzene and toluene, chemicals that can lead to respiratory irritation, permanent brain damage, memory loss, leukemia.

But fishermen are desperate for work, and BP knows it. This weekend, after being pressured in court, BP was forced to retract large portions of an agreement it forced cleanup volunteers to sign that would indemnify it against legal action if workers were injured.

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from the World Socialist Web Site:

BP spill threatens vulnerable ecosystems with destruction
Dan Brennan

Thousands of barrels of crude oil continue to stream into the Gulf of Mexico two-and-a-half weeks after the April 20 explosion of oil giant BP’s drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, which left 11 workers dead.

On Thursday, a specially designed “containment dome” was shipped close to the spill site. BP hopes to lower the 200-ton device over the collapsed piping on the ocean floor, and pump oil upward to a ship on the surface. Engineers caution that the effort is experimental at such depths, and that it may take days to learn whether or not it will work.

In the meantime, oil continues to gush out into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of at least 200,000 gallons per day. In closed-door congressional hearings held Tuesday, BP executives admitted that the well could begin to emit as many as 60,000 barrels, or 2.5 million gallons, per day.

The spill already poses an ecological disaster to large areas of coastline along the Gulf Coast, wherever the oil eventually makes landfall.

On Thursday, BP and the US Coast Guard confirmed that the slick had reached Louisiana’s Chandeleur Islands. Additional reports cited dying jellyfish in the Chandeleur Sound and oil covered seaweed washing ashore. MSNBC reported Monday that long threads of oil sheen have already entered South Pass, a major Louisiana channel with salt marshes that provide a breeding ground for crab, oysters, shrimp, redfish and other seafood.

Nonetheless, the most serious impact may still be days off, favorable weather conditions having so far kept the oil slick miles from the shoreline. However, experts caution that it is not a matter of if, but rather when, weather conditions change and the oil makes landfall.

The most immediate threat is to the vulnerable ecosystems of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. The wetlands in these areas are already under severe strain from recent hurricanes and decades of inadequate land use planning and poor water management. As a result the Mississippi Delta loses an average 50 acres of wetlands to the sea each day, as erosion outpaces the natural replenishment of sediments.

Denise Reed, interim director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans, told the New York Times, “The trouble with our marshes is they’re already stressed, they’re already hanging by a fingernail.” The additional impact of oil could mean destruction.

The wetlands along the Gulf Coast provide a number of vital ecological services, not least of which is habitat for seafood. Commercial fishing, together with the oil industry, dominates the local economy. Louisiana is responsible for nearly a third of the country’s fish catch. The state is the largest producer of oysters in the world, responsible for about 250 million pounds each year. Oysters, the larvae of shrimp and fish, and crabs are among the most vulnerable marine animals due to their relative immobility.

Charter boat captain Dan Dix spoke of the disaster facing the fishing industry in an interview with Reuters. “Our biggest concern is that the oil comes in in any kind of volume and settles in the cane,” he said. “Once it settles it destroys the cane and kills the shrimp. If you kill the shrimp, you kill the fish that feed off the shrimp, and if you kill the fish then there is nothing left in the Gulf of Mexico. That would absolutely be a disaster for years and years.”

The government has closed waters for fishing from the mouth of the Mississippi River to waters off Florida’s Pensacola Bay.

The potential devastation extends well beyond fish stocks. The wetlands along the coast provide protection from storms and rising sea levels. Healthy wetland ecosystems are able to store water, filter pollution and stabilize shorelines from the forces of erosion. If large amounts of oil wash up, it could kill the grasses that provide the foundation of the ecosystem.

“The vegetation is what holds these islands together,” Garret Graves, director of the Governor’s Office of Coastal Activities, explained to the New York Times. “When you kill that, you just have mud, and that just gets washed away.”

The loss of more wetlands would mean greater vulnerability to hurricanes like Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005. To make matters worse, scientists expect rising sea levels in the Gulf and intense storms to result from climate change.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, up to 20 national wildlife refuges face major oil contamination. Breton Island National Wildlife Refuge, which includes Breton Island and all of the Chandeleur Islands in Louisiana, is an essential habitat for dozens of birds, including brown pelicans, laughing gulls, and royal, Caspian and Sandwich terns.

Reidar Hindrum, a scientist and oil cleanup expert who works for Norway’s Directorate for Nature Management, told the World Socialist Web Site that removing the oil from the mud and grasslands of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast will likely prove far more difficult than the cleanup for the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989.

“It will be very difficult,” Hindrum said. “The oil is likely to settle down into the mud. Ultimately to really remove the oil would require removing the vegetation.”

The oil spill could not have happened at a worse time for many bird species. David Viker, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s assistant regional director for migratory birds in the Southeast Region, noted that we are currently near the peak of the trans-Gulf migration season.

Hindrum, who worked on a Norwegian delegation during cleanup after the Exxon disaster, said that the effects of oil spills on birds and other forms of wildlife continue for years. “We tend to focus on the oil on birds and their feathers,” Hindrum said. “But in the long-term, their survival will also depend on how much the prey of the birds is affected.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service described a few other nature areas that may see devastation as a result of the oil slick reaching the shore.

• Bon Secour Refuge in Alabama contains 7,000 acres of wildlife habitat for migratory birds, nesting sea turtles and the endangered Alabama beach mouse. Refuge beaches serve as nesting sites for loggerhead and Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles. More than 370 species of birds have been identified on the refuge during migratory seasons, including ospreys and herons.

• Grand Bay Refuge spans 10,200 acres in Mississippi and Alabama. Species found at the refuge include the gopher tortoise, red-cockaded woodpecker and brown pelican.

• Mississippi River Delta Refuge covers 48,800 acres of marshlands and open water. It provides sanctuary and habitat for wintering waterfowl, American alligator, Brown Pelican, Arctic peregrine falcon, deer, swamp rabbits and piping plover. The marshes and waterways support a diversity of fish species, including speckled trout, redfish, flounder, catfish and largemouth bass.

A particularly striking symbol of the danger to wildlife in the refuge is the brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana. It was only recently removed from the endangered species list. The brown pelican nests on wetlands of the Gulf Coast in areas nearest the oil spill.

While thousands of feet of boom have been placed at points around the refuges that the brown pelican inhabits, huge portions of the wildlife refuges remain unprotected. The booms themselves provide only limited protection in the event of rough seas.

“Our experience is that when the wave exceeds three to four meters of height you cannot use the oil booms,” Hindrum of Norway’s Directorate for Nature Management said. “It can protect only small areas such as bays.”

“You can’t boom the entire 60-mile-long [Breton Island] refuge,” Tom MacKenzie, spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, told Greenwire. “We can’t protect all the birds. We are focused on the nesting brown pelicans because they are a stationary resource.” This piecemeal approach has been criticized by bird advocates, who fear the spill could decimate the bird species in the area.

In addition to booms, a variety of other measures, such as controlled burns and chemical dispersants, have been deployed in an attempt to avoid some of the worst consequences. However these measures are not without dangers of their own.

In particular, the impact from the hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants is highly uncertain. Dispersants do not remove oil; rather they dilute the oil slick by breaking it down into small droplets. The precise chemical composition of the dispersants is unknown, as they are protected as company trade secrets. And while there is certainly some benefit to reducing the concentration at the surface, the trade-offs, particularly for marine organisms, are ultimately not well known.

At this stage of the disaster there is inevitably a high degree of uncertainty as to the extent and location of the coming damage, both to the environment and the well being of multitudes of people who depend upon it. However, as the thousands of barrels each day continue to gush forth, it becomes more and more likely that this will be one of the worst environmental disasters in US history.