Freedom Road Socialist Organization

Alice Lovelace performs her poem, "Unity" for the 30th anniversary celebration of the Organization of Black Struggle. Reproduced with permission.

Arizona’s elected officials have decided to officially scapegoat Latinos for the economic crisis facing that state and the entire country. On July 29th, Arizona’s SB 1070 will require police to ask any person who looks “reasonably suspicious” for their immigration papers. In effect, it will force the police to engage in racial profiling of Latinos and other people of color living in or visiting the state.

The state of Arizona is in such a desperate economic crisis that it has had to close down all of its kindergarten programs. Latino immigrants are being blamed for this situation, when the real culprits are the Wall Street banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies that stole trillions of dollars through the sale of sub-prime loan packages. When that bubble burst, the US economy went into a tailspin that has thrown millions out of work, cost millions of people their homes, tanked millions of small businesses, and created massive budget crises for every local and state budget. You can be sure of this: it wasn't Juan or Rosalinda who pocketed billions from the sub-prime scam; it was the folks at Goldman Sachs and AIG.

Over 100 days ago the BP offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, taking eleven lives and beginning to leak untold quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Estimates began at 3,000 barrels a day, but now range from between ten and thirty times that amount. President Obama has asked "whose ass [do] we need to kick?" Revolutionary socialists however know that no amount of finger-pointing can make this right. It's not BP; it's the system!

Toward that line of thinking, we offer the following notes on what is the end of life as we know it in the Gulf, and potentially the largest ecological disaster of all time.

When the tea party first came on the scene and Glenn Beck started putting people we know on his chalkboard, organizers on the Left began questioning our strategy and personal safety. How bad is this trend? Bad. Of course it’s dangerous to have well-resourced, gun-toting, racist, homophobic folks running around with tea bags on their hats. It’s not just bad fashion sense.

Some reactions people I have overheard for what the Tea Party (TP) means for the Left:

1. “Things are getting worse.”
2. “We have to learn from the tea party.”
3. “Should I change my name?”
4. “Should we stop calling ourselves socialists since people view it so negatively?”
5. “Should we avoid all ‘wedge issues’ like racism?”

Quick response to these reactions—

1. Worse than what?
2. Learn from them? Yes and no.
3. I like your name.
4. Actually, socialism is doing better in popularity according to the latest polls—but there are regional differences.
5. We have to talk about racism, it’s our job. Plus, the leadership of the TP would not like to be painted as a racist movement. They would like to paint Obama as one. They have a problem gaining younger membership and racism in the party is thought to keep the younger generation away.

Now that we are done reacting, let’s realize there’s a missing piece to this puzzle: Left and progressive organizers were and can continue to be a powerful threat to the right wing agenda and agents for systematic change in this country. The key to flexing this power lies in pushing an issue-based independent agenda, uniting our forces, developing broad united fronts and utilizing bigger and bolder tactics from electoral organizing to creative direct action.

Arizona...I've decided to
Stay away for as long as it takes
To avoid narrow minded pendejos
And ridiculous flakes

I will not spend my dinero
En lugares where I'm not wanted
Gente who look like me
Maltratado and taunted

If you are an organizer working in any way to make progressive change, this framework is probably familiar:

• Work to build power by recruiting members and developing their leadership abilities.

• Center the work on issues.

• Use collective, direct-action strategies as a means to win change.

• Focuses on building organizational power over the long term.

This framework for community organizations and organizers has both strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths are that it is simply, practically oriented, and focuses on the oppressed as agents of their own change.  Among its weaknesses are its inability to develop (at least so far) long lasting victory, its often short-sighted practicality, and its lack of an all-around story line about the future.

The many books written on this framework and the organizations using it have been mostly “practical,” “how-to” manuals on organizing.  Very few of these works apply a comprehensive view that helps us to hold a vision, an analysis and a strategy for change.

Thus, a major question before us is: can community organizers and their organizations achieve lasting structural change without explicitly articulating an ideology and long-term vision?

How do we come to know that change is even possible?  Some people might say that organizers are dreamers and visionaries.  They might be right.  How do we ground our dreams and visions with a real understanding of the conditions we encounter today?

Learning from Socialists

In 2006, my wife and I were fortunate to travel to Cuba with an international Agroecological delegation from Mexico, Venezuela, Mozambique, North Korea, Japan, Ireland and other countries, as well as the United States. In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U. S. economic blockade, the Cubans were forced to move quickly during the 1990s "special period" into agroecological (versus petrochemical)approaches to raise food to feed the people. At the time of our trip, urban agriculture-using bio-fertilizers and bio-controls-provided more than 384,000 good paying jobs and 4 million tons of vegetables each year using only 67,000 hectares of land.

It is difficult to sum up a life, none less so than that of a revolutionary leader that eluded capture for over three decades and helped build a revolutionary movement. Cherukuri Rajkumar, known as Comrade Azad, was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) who are usually referred to as Naxalites from the Naxalbari insurrection in West Bengal in 1967. While not much is known about this man (especially in the West), his impact on the revolutionary movements internationally are tangible and visible. He was one of the most important contributors to People's March and the Maoist Information Bulletin. His movement is written about in Arundhati Roy’s thoughtful piece Walking with the Comrades.

Background

 

1. On April 23, 2010 Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed into law Senate Bill 1070, a broad bill increasing state powers of enforcement of federal immigration policy and in essence sanctioning racial profiling. It allows police officers to detain anyone they “suspect” as being undocumented immigrants. In a state that was part of Mexico until 1848, and home of indigenous peoples for centuries, the racist implications could not be more stark. The possibilities for these “suspects” are dire— arrest, cross checking across a national database for past criminal activity, handing over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and deportation. It is one of the most deliberately racist laws that we have seen in decades, targeting indigenous peoples, Latin@s and immigrants. The sponsor of bill in the Arizona legislature, Russell Pierce, has clear white supremacist connections.

    

    

2. Arizona is a laboratory of experimentation in states’ rights – the strategy employed by the Right prior to and during the civil rights era, and re-imagined during the more recent health care debate in 2009. SB 1070 did not come out of thin air.

Arizona, the land
Of the bright yellow sun
The land of our ancestors
Since time has begun

The land of the original
People of this hemisphere
And its cousins the winged,
Two legged and dancing deer