For an Internationalist May 1st

Friends,

THING 1: GET INTO THE STREETS FOR MAY 1ST!

INTERNATIONALISM: THE WHOLE WORLD COMES FIRST

I am getting ready to go out into the streets to join with thousands of others nation-wide in the May 1^st protests. It is very good that the Occupy movement is remounting the political stage. In the face of massive repression, including at least three police raids in the early morning hours today of NY Occupy activists and countless broken bones, bloodied skulls, tear-gas canisters, mass arrests and more of Occupiers last fall, people are coming back!

At the same time, while it is important but not enough to care about the 99% in this country – we really must fight for the “99%” throughout the world. The Pakistanis dying under – and terrorized by – US drones dropped in record numbers by President Obama. The immigrants who die crossing the US/Mexican border or who survive only to be separated from their families and forced to live and work in the shadows of this empire. The 2.4 million people locked into the hellholes of US prisons. The youth and the women and others who slave in sweatshops to produce the clothes we wear and the electronics we rely on. The peasants being thrown off their lands by US corporations and agribusiness. The climate refugees whose whole lives and lands are destroyed by the wanton destruction and pollution of the environment which is advancing everyday under the blind accumulation and competition process of global capitalism.

ALL THESE PEOPLE ARE PART OF THE REAL 99%.

ANY REAL AND MEANINGFUL PROTEST TODAY MUST INCLUDE THEM.

This is why I am marching into the May 1^st protests together with the Internationalist Contingent.

As Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has said:

“INTERNATIONALISM – THE WHOLE WORLD COMES FIRST!”

In NYC, we are hooking up at 3:45 on the SW corner of 14^th Street and 3^rd Avenue. Join us!

THING 2: PURSUE THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS – GET INTO BA, GET INTO THE REAL REVOLUTION!

I was just listening to Todd Gitlin who was a guest on WNYC radio as part of their May 1^st coverage. Among other things, he said that he thought there was work for Occupy to do to establish, “a sustained place in American political life.”

It is hard to think of a worse thing for Occupy to find for itself than a “sustained place in American political life”! Political resistance should NOT seek to become part of the “political ecology” of America – it should contribute to a world WITHOUT America and without everything that America stands for and does in the world.

We do not need, and we should not be seeking, to get a “place at the table” of empire. We need a world without empires.

One of the greatest things about Occupy is that it WASN'T part of the ongoing political terrain of the US. It ruptured out of those ruts. That is why it inspired so many and that is why it opened up such space for people to begin to think and dream differently. And that is why, at least as much as anything else, it was so viciously and brutally repressed and attacked by police who were commanded from the highest levels the state (including nation-wide conference calls among mayors who then did coordinated brutal police attacks in different cities).

Those who rule this country and this system are deathly afraid of the big questions that just began to be posed by the Occupy movement and among those who started to think more deeply about where all the problems confronting humanity come from. But, those of us who dream of a different world – we must welcome and embrace those big questions, we must look and think ever more deeply about the root of the problem and the necessary solution.

Precisely so that we do not have to be fighting the same battles generation after generation – against the Vietnam war back then and the Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan/soon-Iran wars today, against the lynching of Emmett Till back then and the murder of Trayvon Martin today, for the right of birth control and abortion back then and... for the right of birth control and abortion today – plus the wholesale enslavement of millions of women worldwide in sexual slavery, against pollution back then and nearing the brink of total climate disaster today, and on and on – we need REAL REVOLUTION. We need communist revolution as it has been re-envisioned by Bob Avakian.

If you don't know about this – there is nothing more important to be learning about, engaging deeply with, and helping others get access to even as you yourself are learning more.

A great place to start is this incredible new interview which was just released for May 1^st at Revolution Newspaper. Read up. Enjoy. Happy May 1^st. Lets bring into being a whole different world.

http://revcom.us/avakian/what-humanity-needs/interview.html

Sunsara Taylor

Report from DC on Roe v. Wade anniversary: Taking on the “March for Forced Motherhood!”

I arrived in DC yesterday midday with an impressive group of mostly young women. Some of them I have known for a while, both through the movement for revolution and through the more recent efforts initiating a new movement to End Pornography and Patriarchy: the Enslavement and Degradation of Women. One was a young woman who I had just met the day before up at a clinic in the South Bronx where there was a march commemorating Roe v. Wade that made its way to a fake clinic (a “Crisis Pregnancy Center”) where there was a speak-out against the lies and guilt and lack of medical help that is distributed at those centers.

Ten minutes into lunch we were neck deep in a discussion spanning the controversies which surrounded Slutwalk, the origins of the oppression of women, how to understand the sex industry (could it EVER be “empowering for women” or is the point to get to a world where no one is commodified and women are not oppressed), questions surrounding revolution and socialism/communism, and so much more. Probably some of what we wrangled with will surface in future posts... but this morning (just as yesterday during the discussion) I cannot go as far as I'd like because there are places to be!

This morning we are heading to the Supreme Court to Stand Up for Abortion and Birth Control! There should be some tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of anti-abortion protesters who will be streaming through the capital. Previously, I wrote about why they would be better called the “March for Forced Motherhood and Female Enslavement.”

Last evening at BusBoys and Poets, we had a very rich program and discussion. Students came out from the nearby universities, including a number of current or former Catholic students. One young woman from Catholic University, where a lot of the anti-abortion protesters stay while in from out of town, courageously stood up to them by herself. She wore her pro-choice t-shirt and held a pro-choice sign as they streamed through her school. This morning she is going to have a much bigger crew with her as many of the folks who came to the program volunteered to join her.

Also, a small core of the Occupy folks from DC apparently went into one of the anti-abortion youth events and pulled off a “mic-check” where they spoke for a while about why women need the right to decide for themselves about their reproductive lives.

During the presentation I gave over dinner, one of the things I tried to lay out is how we have gotten into this situation where we keep losing ground on abortion and birth control. I took on the way that the bourgeois feminist movement (including the mainstream of the pro-choice movement) has totally subordinated itself to the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party is a ruling class party which shares a lot of the same desires as the Republicans in terms of wanting to strengthen the patriarchal family at a time when “national unity” is both being challenged (due to the ongoing ideological effects of the 60's, the recent anti-war movement, the changes in the position of women, the influx of immigrants, the challenges to the patriarchal family posed by the LGBT struggles and traditional gender norms, and many other things) and is more needed than ever (at a time of an ongoing “War on Terror” and other global challenges to the empire). This overall unity in class interests is greater than their disagreements – real as those disagreements are – and it shapes the terms over which they struggle and over which they continually capitulate. As a ruling class party, the Democratics doesn't want the instability and upheaval that would be required to really take on the truly fascist and fanatical Christian fundamentalist anti-abortion movement.

As Richard Viguerie, an early architect of the anti-abortion movement, put it decades ago: “The abortion issue is the door through which many people come into conservative politics, but they don't stop there. Their convictions against abortion are like the first in a series of dominoes. Then we lead them to concern about sexual ethics and standards among young people. This leads to opposition to secular humanism. Then... we point out that secular humanism is identified as both the godfather and the royal road to socialism and communism which points the way to commitments to minimally regulated free enterprise at home and to aggressive foreign and military politics to counter the communist threat from Russia and its many surrogates.”

Obviously, the world has changed since that quote, but the strategic orientation laid by Viguerie explains a lot as to why the crazy Christian fascist lunatics didn't stay on the margins of society but were elevated and given major backing by ruling class forces starting with Reagan and continuing till today where they are now all throughout the halls of power, courts, high finance and military.

And, the Democrats, while differing over many of the details and approach, both don't want the kind of fight that comes from really taking that on and share the same basic outlook of strengthening and shoring up the homefront and national unity – including an increase on the patriarchal family and patriotism (and the two do go hand in hand!).

The mainstream pro-choice movement, by tying its sails to the Democratic Party, has taken their lead – and gone along with distancing itself from an unapologetic defense of abortion AND has stopped mobilizing people to really fight for abortion rights and instead mobilizes them to vote and give money to elections. They adopted Clinton's “safe, legal, rare” apologetics and defensiveness and then dropping the word “abortion” from almost anything they do. Go, for instance, and look at NARAL's homepage and you can't find the word abortion anywhere on the front page!

To really demonstrate just how terrible the direction of this “pro-choice movement” is – at a time of the greatest assault on abortion we've ever seen, building on all that has come before and escalating even further, the pro-choice movement called for a bullshit “Virtual March” on Washington (all the groups, NARAL, NOW, Planned Parenthood, Feminist Majority, etc. – together with the Supreme Sucker Up of Progressive Energies: MoveOn.org) where people do nothing but click a button “to prove to congress... that they will do nothing but click a button.” Ie: “Don't worry, keep compromising away women's lives!” A “Virtual March” would be fine, of course, if there were only a “virtual war on women” currently afoot.

I also spoke to the fact that resistance IS possible, but not by relying on the Democrats or the groups that have made themselves nothing more than an appendage to them. We must rely on ourselves – and the millions more who are sitting on the sidelines to act outside of the institutions and the political limits of the bourgeois political framework. To be in the streets declaring “Abortion On Demand and Without Apology!”

Many of the students were very eager to hear this and discuss, saying they felt there had been something wrong with the pro-choice movement and there was a need for something more radical. There is more to report on all this – but, as I said, I have to scoot out the door.

Before I do, I have to mention some of what else really inspired me. A woman I met some fifteen years ago who worked at one of the clinics in Brookline, Massachusettes where two women were killed by an anti-abortion gunman in the 90's came down. She looked incredible and it was wonderful to see her and hear her speak at the program. Heather Ault, of 4,000 years of Choice, is here with her beautiful banners. A man I met over the summer at the Summer of Trust, where we defended Dr. Carhart's clinic, is supporting all this. He is from one of the Unitarian churches and said he'd never been involved in or thought much about abortion until we came down over the summer. Now, he regularly escorts at the local clinics. The women of the Brevard, Florida NOW Chapter who were up here for the Summer of Trust have also come back again. So glad to be joined by this incredible crew. More to say later.

In the mean time – please give some money to this critical effort! It really will make an incredible impact both on this protest today AND on the ability to continue to do even more like it.

Donate: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1170/p/salsa/donation/common/public/?donate_page_KEY=5872