We are posting the following because we believe it is deeply important to develop a summation of the Student Liberation Action Movement, an attempt to build a radical student movement in New York City. On April 8th, the Radical Study Group at the  University of Houston will be hosting two speakers from SLAM, Kazembe Balagun and Lenina Nadal, to present their summation of those experiences.

By SLAM Herstory Project
Interviews by Suzy Subways

In March 1995, 20,000 students from City University of New York (CUNY) were attacked by police after surrounding city hall to protest a draconian tuition increase. This protest, organized by the CUNY Coalition Against the Cuts, marked an upsurge in student movement activity that continued into 1996, when the group transformed into the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM), a multiracial radical organization. Before disbanding in 2004, SLAM established chapters at CUNY colleges in all five boroughs of the city. This roundtable focuses on the chapter at Hunter College in Manhattan and explores SLAM’s legacy of building a left culture in New York City and across the country.

Read more...

The following originally appeared on the Kasama site. It is being reposted here for study

by Mike Ely

I wrote:

“Revolutionary rumblings [in the 1960s] didn’t take the form of “class against class” in the U.S. — and never will.

Bryan writes:

“Revolutionary rumblings will take the form of “class against class,” in this country and around the world….You don’t claim to be Marxists still, do you?”

There is a great transition happening in human society — breaking out of the sharp contradiction between social production and private appropriation. But to think that takes the form of workers gathering over here, and capitalists gathering over there — and then a rumble…. well that is non-materialist and non-Marxist (if you will).

Read more...

The following is a response to Sharon Smith's (a steering committee member of the International Socialist Organization) critique of identity politics that originally appeared on Good Morning, Revolution. Posting here is not necessarily meant as an endorsement, but as an opening up of a discussion in the process of reconception and refoundation.

A Critique of ISO on Identity Politics

By Comrade Baba

In an article “The politics of identity” published in the journal of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a Trotskyist group in the US, Sharon Smith argues:

“At the most basic material level, no one group of workers ever benefits from particular forms of oppression.”(1)

Smith’s reasoning: “Whenever capitalists can force a higher paid group of workers to compete with a lower paid group, wages tend to drop. . . . The only beneficiaries are capitalists, who earn bigger profits, while ensuring the survival of the rule of the profit system.”

Smith’s argument, an attempt to undermine identity politics and “counterpos[e] to it a Marxist analysis,” greatly oversimplifies the problems of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Rather than a Marxist analysis, a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, the argument reduces social reality and its multiple contradictions into a single abstract contradiction between Labor and Capital.

While the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is the fundamental contradiction in capitalist society, the social relations in capitalist society are too complex and particular to be reduced to extensions of the fundamental contradiction. These social relations have their own histories and particularities. They have to be understood in their own right.

Read more...

The following is a pamphlet written by MLM Revolutionary Study Group about the Cultural Revolution in China, and what its legacy is for the future. The Cultural Revolution has been the center of much debate and is certainly an extremely radical and revolutionary episode in human history. Thanks to Ernesto Aguilar and China Study Group for pointing it out.

The following article originally appeared on Navigating the Storm, the blog of Kali Akuno. We are reposting it here for study and discussion. The piece is also available as a PDF.

Barack Obama and the New Afrikan¹ “National Question”. Are We Free Yet?
 
by Kali Akuno

Saturday, May 24th, 2008  
 
In Honor of the 83rd Birthday of Malcolm X and the clarity he brought to the New Afrikan revolutionary movement.
 
Since the stunning Iowa victory of Senator Barack Obama in January, a great deal has been said and written about the declining or ongoing significance of “race” and “racial prejudice” in US society and the prospect of a person of Afrikan descent being its President as proof of its substantive social transformation. While this discussion must be regarded as an advance over the conservative moralistic and race-coded discussions that have dominated political debate in the US since the 1980’s, we must acknowledge its critical limitations. 
 
In the main, these discussions individualize the issues and only engage the behavioral and subjective aspects of inequality and oppression. What is fundamentally missing is a critical discussion of the structural and systemic nature of oppression and exploitation within the US and how the Obama campaign “phenomenon” relates to these structures and dynamics. 
 
This paper seeks to investigate the strategic relationship of the Obama campaign to the structural dynamics of oppression and exploitation within the US.  In particular, it will focus on the question of New Afrikan or Black national oppression within the US and how the Obama campaign addresses this oppression. It also seeks to address certain strategic questions that progressive forces within the national liberation and multi-national working class movements must struggle with over the course of the next six months in order to ensure that our demands and interests are advanced – regardless of whether Obama wins or loses the Presidential election in November.   
 
Some of the strategic questions this paper seeks to address are: 
1.  What is Obama’s organic relationship to the New Afrikan or Black nation? 
2.  What class position, alignment and program does Obama represent? 
3.  How does Obama’s campaign strategy and program relate to the historic interests and demands of the Black nation? 

Read more...