Freedom Road Socialist Organization

As this is being written, there is no way to tell how bad the catastrophe that has hit Haiti will get. The government there is estimating the earthquake has caused an almost unbelievable 100,000 deaths!

There are important political lessons to be drawn, and already analyses and denunciations of US imperialism's culpability are flooding the left blogosphere. This is well and good--important work--but it is not the main task before us for the next few days.

Millions of folks in this country, and around the world, are filled with horror and sympathy and want to respond. When Katrina hit, people all over took up collections of food and supplies, threw everything in the biggest truck around, popped the clutch and headed towards NOLA. Communities opened their homes to the displaced. That stuff is not so easy to do in Haiti's case and the main thing that people are doing, besides praying, is giving money.

Several charities have set up phone numbers one merely has to dial or text to make an automatic $5 or $10 donation. Oxfam and the Red Cross and other big dogs in what we might call the NGO-industrial complex are spamming and phonebanking like crazy. So are religious charities.

The immediate task for progressives and revolutionaries for the next couple of days is to try and capture some of this flood of resources for the grassroots organizations of the Haitian people (and of course to do some education in the process).

One such group is the Haiti Emergency Relief Fundestablished by a group of folks in the US who have been doing Haiti solidarity work since 1991, working closely with Haitians to build and support mass-based civic groups on the ground there--unions, peasant cooperatives, schools, women's organizations and more.

Each December, a quiz makes the rounds on the facebook-twitter-blog circuit. Last year, we wrote a Year in Review as a response to that quiz. So here it is again: our second annual—20 questions for 2009!

This is based on a presentation given by the author on the political economy of his university as part of a workshop on student/worker activism and is printed here in contribution to the rapidly unfolding dialogue around student activism in the face of budget cuts.

1. Making Hegemony

The public university is like all the state’s organs integrated into the neoliberal and imperial order under which we live.  Within that order it performs, as I see it, two functions: supporting and expanding that system, and dutifully practicing that system’s logic.

I know what you're thinking: Capitalism's a hot mess.  Obama's selling the people out.  War on the Middle East wages on.  We're still a small Left, so how will things ever change?  It will not be an easy road but understanding the period that we are in, summing up lessons from previous socialist projects, and having a vehicle for change will lead us in the right direction.

If under your watch you were responsible for record levels of unemployment, massive numbers of people losing their homes, polluting the earth and depleting its resources, causing irreversible damage and possibly ending the world as we know it for humankind, people would probably start asking, “Dude, what the f*&%k  are you doin'?” 

It always happens around the same time in the evening. I'm at a Christmas dinner with my extended family. Sometime between the second round of drinks and the start of the meal, my uncle starts his famous rant about smoking bans. He hits all the libertarian talking points in between gulps of lager: they're bad for business, they expand the role of government, they're paternalist, they're an invasion of privacy. It's unlikely that anyone at the table actually brought up the subject, and my uncle doesn't smoke. But declaring his utter loathing for those laws over the roast turkey and asparagus has turned into a holiday tradition. Like a battery-operated-blinking-light Christmas sweater, it's impossible to ignore. One year I made the mistake of calmly suggesting that smoking bans protect low-income servers who work long hours in bars and would not like to die of lung cancer. I was told they should find another job or “get over it.”

BILL FLETCHER JR. was recently invited to speak at the United Nation’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Bill addressed the assembly as a civil society representative and as a member of the Steering Committee of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.  Below is the full text of his presentation:

UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY

COMMITTEE ON THE EXERCISE OF THE INALIENABLE RIGHTS OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

Trusteeship Council Chamber

United Nations

New York, New York

November 30, 2009

Remarks by Bill Fletcher, Jr.

BlackCommentator.com & U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary-General, Mr. President, Excellencies:

Let me begin by expressing my appreciation to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People for inviting me to participate in today’s meeting and offering a presentation in connection with the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Below are a couple of stories and reflections from Freedom Road comrades on political work—or the opportunities for it that were missed—during the most awkward years of our lives: high school.  While universities have been the site of some of the most visible and politically organized and conscious struggle, we know that they are not the only front of neoliberalism’s assault on people’s access to education.  We’ve got to start building younger than that to win.

No more tradition’s chains shall bind us: the young are often the most willing to break from the old ways of thinking, to embrace new common sense, counter hegemoMnic ideas, and to begin a life of struggle.  They’re also just as likely to take those hegemonic ideas and live them out.  Cruising my little sister’s Facebook shows that pretty clearly—even if there are teachable moments in her About Me and Interests.  Because schools aren’t just important as sites of organized campaigns, but also (and maybe primarily!) because they can and do shape what we know and the way we think, they could lead us to a really liberatory understanding of our world.  But we know that teachers can only teach so much.  This story from Bryan, a comrade in North Carolina, is instructive, and for the high schoolers out there reading this we hope you’re inspired to stand up.

On the week of November 16, simmering anger throughout California's higher education system reached the boiling point.  As the University of California Regents met in Los Angeles to approve a 32% tuition increase for UC undergraduates, thousands of students, campus workers, faculty and community members took action across the state to express their defiance of the fee hikes and the larger project of privatization afflicting California's public education system.

At UCLA students occupied a campus building and renamed it Carter-Huggins Hall, in memory of two Black Panther Party members killed at UCLA by FBI agents.  Rallies and marches were held at other campuses across the state.  Sit-ins, strikes and occupations took place at San Francisco State, San Francisco City College, CSU Fresno, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz, as well as the UC Office of the President (UCOP) in Oakland.  In many cases the protests were met with brutality by police, including the use of tasers on unarmed students and workers.  Scores were arrested and will face academic penalties or criminal charges for their part in peaceful protests defending public education.

These protests were distinguished by the leading role of women and students of color, who are disproportionately found among those who will be priced out of a UC education because of rising costs.  After the 32% increase, it now costs more than $10,000/year to attend the University of California – an increase of more than 300% in one decade.  This movement is also notable for its multi-sectoral makeup and demands.  Students, workers and faculty members found common cause and organized shoulder-to-shoulder in the General Assemblies called at many campuses before and during the protests.

It's no accident that the Regents and UC administrators had to resort to violence to deal with this wave of outrage.  The fundamental issue is that the UC Regents (along with Governor Schwarzenegger and the California legislature) have abandoned any commitment to a system of public education that is truly public.  By turning their backs on the people of California, who have repeatedly expressed their wish that the state should treat education as a public good and make it affordable and accessible for all, the Regents and the UC administration have forfeited their legitimacy as guardians of the public education system.  And when any unjust institution loses its legitimacy, violent suppression of dissent is not far behind.

"I was born into the universe, not just one country… So much to explore, experience, touching, feeling life.  Life does not only belong to me. We all belong to each other.  Just that one thought could take a lifetime to practice." – Susan West, January 20th, 1972

Susan West Friedman

Susan was an enthusiastic member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, believing that it was essential to have an internationalist, long-term, post-capitalist, vision to complement grassroots activism. Susan was relatively new to San Diego.  She made an indelible mark in just 4 years and developed a multitude of friends in short order. She joined the Board of Directors of Activist San Diego and served as one of its officers.  Susan reveled in the idea of building a network for social justice, that would engage new people and anticipated the pending launch of ASD’s FM Community Radio Project.  The Iraq/Afghan wars were so abhorrent to her that she seldom missed a San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice meeting, worked with Code Pink and was passionate about the Stop Blackwater campaign.  After attending the US Social Forum in Atlanta she contributed her organizing skills to create a similar project locally.  We could go on...