Fight Back! is circulating the following editorial written by Josh Sykes for the Student Commission of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Thousands of union workers, faculty, undergrads and graduate students across the University of California system stood up and said “no more!” to the severe budget cuts, layoffs, furloughs and tuition hikes. On Sept. 24, they stood up and walked out. The UC faculty initiated the walkout. The United Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) union called a one-day unfair labor practices strike. All ten of the UC campuses saw protests. UCLA saw 1000 students walkout and sit-in at the administration offices, demanding, and winning, a meeting with the chancellor to discuss grievances. At UC-Berkeley over 5000 took the streets, shutting down busy intersections. Students at UC-Santa Cruz occupied a campus building to protest the cuts.
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Marxist- Leninists Must Uphold Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Liberation and the Fight Against All Forms of Homophobia and Heterosexism
The struggle for the rights of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transgender people is a struggle for basic human rights. It includes the struggle to extend all democratic rights to LGBT people including immigration, parenting, and the right to be free from violence in society and for the opportunity to participate equally in all aspects of society.
The Right wing has mounted a full-scale assault on the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people seeking to dehumanize in order to justify persecution and the denial of basic human rights. Rather than buying into narrow definitions of family, we must support full legal and social acceptance of all forms of family. We know that this benefits not only queers but also takes in social and economic reality of the working class as a whole. Furthermore, we recognize the majority of queers are working class. We must actively oppose homophobia and heterosexism in all of their forms, in society and within our organization. We must also stand with Bisexual and Transgender people against attempts to submerge their struggles within the Lesbian and Gay rights movement. We work for the construction of a socialist society that will continue to fight for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender liberation in all of its institutions.
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender movement has effectively challenged social oppression and, by winning the freedom to come out, expanded the possibilities of human sexuality in this society. This movement has led the way in fighting AIDS, one of the most devastating health crises of our time. Throughout history, queers have also been front line fighters in both the workers and national liberation movements. It has inspired the entire progressive movement with its courage and militancy; this movement has fought for and won real gains and freedoms for all people. It is a progressive movement, and revolutionaries should encourage and help lead it. As in all the mass movements where we organize, we strive for the leadership and empowerment of oppressed nationalities and working class people within the Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, and Transgender liberation movement. Just as Lenin was the first to strike down anti-queer laws, so too will we fight to land a crushing blow to anti-queer oppression.
Freedom Road Socialist Organization has a rich history of work among youth and students. Many of the veteran cadres of our organization were active with the youth of the Black Panther Party, Brown Berets and the Students for a Democratic Society of the 1960s, the Revolutionary Student Brigades in the 1970s, or the Progressive Student Network in the 1980s. Others worked on campuses to organize against South African Apartheid, in the historic Jesse Jackson campaign, or in solidarity with the Central American revolutionary movements. Many also organized Asian American and Pilipino (1) students, or worked in mostly oppressed nationality student formations like the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM) in New York. Today, students and youth in Freedom Road continue to do mass student organizing, mainly in the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) formed in 2006.
We are publishing the paper, Continuing the Revolution is Not a Dinner Party written 20 years ago during the 1989 turmoil in China. Authored by Mick Kelly, a leading member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, this paper was produced in the context of a major two-line debate in our organization on socialism and China.
We are publishing it now, because with the 20th anniversary of the events at Tiananmen Square upon us, there are already attempts underway to attack socialism, the Chinese revolution, and those that defend it. We do not see this paper as a definitive statement of our organization on the many political movements and great debates that occurred in China since 1949. Rather we think the paper stands as a rigorous effort to use Marxism to understand the near defeat of the Chinese revolution that took place some 20 years ago.
In Continuing the Revolution is Not a Dinner Party, Mick Kelly does a good job of explaining the origins, development, and reactionary reality of the Chinese student movement, as well as its relationship to Chinese society and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1980s. The paper supports Marxism-Leninism and the Chinese revolution while investigating and evaluating the problems faced and errors made by the CCP. The paper is provocative reading for Marxists because it challenges both social-democratic and ultra-left views regarding socialism and continuing the class struggle within socialist countries.
The author defends the leading party’s attempts to develop a modern socialist society, the need to combat revisionism within the party and society, and to beat back counter-revolution and the restoration of capitalism. On the down side the paper was overly hopeful about the outcome of the struggle against revisionism and capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe, and underestimated the growth of the capitalist sector of the Chinese economy in the years to come.
Many issues raised in Continuing the Revolution Is Not A Dinner Party were settled in the early 1990s. For example, some western leftists back then held that the overthrow of existing socialism would lead to a new improved socialism. Those who held this view were soon proved wrong by the counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe and the USSR, where restored capitalism led to mass unemployment, societal decay and wars that continue to this day. As the U.S. ruling class celebrated this, many of the counter-revolutionary Chinese students, hyped as heroes by U.S. corporate media, were able to escape justice, reappearing to make their fortunes in the west. These pro-imperialist reactionaries praised the armed attacks on the People’s Liberation Army and openly expressed their dreams of bringing capitalism to China.
We hope that those interested in revolutionary change today can learn something from this paper. We are now in a situation where Marxism-Leninism is gaining strength and popularity around the world and the socialist countries are modernizing. Proletarian revolutionaries in many countries can make advances while the U.S. economic crisis deepens. Our hope is this paper will help to further the understanding of why supporting socialism and China is important to everyone who is fighting imperialism and to everyone who wants a better way of life.
Speaking at a news conference on May 5, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “The main effort in our strategic focus from a military perspective must now shift to Afghanistan.”
With these words, Mullen has condemned the people of Afghanistan to suffer more misery, oppression, and poverty – as if eight long years of occupation were not enough.
A New Pamphlet on the Struggle for Immigrant Rights
By Carlos Montes, Los Angeles, California
After years of struggle and massive marches, justice for immigrants appears closer to reality, but we must continue to hit the streets to demand full legalization and an end to the repressive ICE detentions and deportations. It is also a time to sum up our lessons and history of struggle. This is why I encourage you to read the new pamphlet, The Immigrant Rights Movement and the Struggle for Full Equality just published by Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
The pamphlet points out that that at the center of the immigrant rights movement in the US is the fundamental struggle of Chicanos, Mexicanos and Central Americans for full equality. It gives a brief history of the theft of the Southwest by US imperialist war and how this set the basis of our exploitation in the fields, mines and factories. The pamphlet puts out the basic demands of the masses and presents a class view of the immigrant rights movement. It exposes the brutal national oppression of our people and is different from other revolutionary publications that only see the immigrant rights movement as a purely workers issue. Check out this new pamphlet by FRSO. You can get it at: www.frso.org
Carlos Montes is a long-time activist in the Chicano community and the struggle for immigrant rights.
On May 1, International Workers Day, millions upon millions will be marching against the capitalist economic crisis that has engulfed most of the world. Working people in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North America will hit the streets to protest the soaring unemployment, shorter hours and cuts in pay that are sweeping the world.
In 2006 there was a huge upsurge in the Immigrant Rights movement, peaking on May 1, when some two million people marched across the country. At the core of this movement is the struggle of Chicanos, Mexicanos, and Central Americans for self-determination and full equality. This paper presents the views of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) on the current immigrant rights movement and the struggle for Chicano, Mexicano, and Central American liberation.
1. Immigration, Imperialism, and National Oppression
In our “Statement on National Oppression, National Liberation and Socialist Revolution” (FRSO, 2004), we say that “It is imperialism that still dominates the countries of the Third World, forcing more immigrants to come to the United States to escape poverty and repression.” This is certainly true for immigrants from Mexico and Central America. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has opened up the Mexican economy to even greater penetration by U.S. multinational corporation and agribusiness, driving millions from their hometowns to seek work in the cities and the United States. U.S.-backed governments and counter-revolutionaries in Central American have violently attacked popular movements and governments, leaving economic devastation in their wake, driving hundreds of thousands more to the United States.
Once here in the United States, immigrants from Mexico and Central America face intense national oppression, rooted in the U.S. conquest and seizure of Northern Mexico. Mexicans in the this territory, which today make up the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, were dispossessed of their lands, their language suppressed in schools, and the culture denigrated, and forced to work in the mines, fields, and homes of the capitalists. Thus the Mexican people of the southwest were forged into an oppressed nation, the Chicano Nation, with a common territory, economy, and culture and the right to self-determination, up to and including secession from the United States.
Generations of immigrants from Mexico who have settled in the southwest have been assimilated into the Chicano Nation. Mexican immigrants and their children are changing the demographics of the southwest, as more and more majority Chicano counties emerge, strengthening the demand for self-determination. This so-called “Browning of America” is striking fear into the racist monopoly capitalist class that rules America, but is welcomed by revolutionaries and communists who seek to weaken and ultimately overthrow this class.
Asheville, NC - Around 25 student activists and organizers from seven cities throughout the southeast came to Asheville, North Carolina, April 4, for a conference called “The Crisis of Imperialism and Building a Revolutionary Movement.” This regional student conference was hosted by Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Joe Iosbaker of SEIU Local 73 at a rally outside worker-occupied Republic Windows & Doors back in December 2008
Recently the media has been abuzz with talk of the possible ‘nationalization’ of ailing big banks such as Citigroup. Both Democrat and Republican senators, as well as the former chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, have raised the possibility of a temporary ‘nationalization’ or government takeover of big banks.
Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) opposes ‘nationalization’ of banks by the present government. We stand with the majority of the American people who oppose more bank bailouts.
Fight Back! is circulating the following editorial written by Josh Sykes for the Student Commission of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Speaking at a news conference on May 5, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “The main effort in our strategic focus from a military perspective must now shift to Afghanistan.”
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