We've received numerous responses to the article on Gun Show organizing and the far right. The question which has repeatedly been posed in light of the article has been,"So-how should we be organizing potentially insurgent white workers in a way that takes the game back from the far right?"
We post this article, written in 1977, as the beginnings of a response, and as a peek at how little some things have changed in the context of factory and neighborhood immigration raids and working class responses.
Since When Has Working Been A Working Crime?
by Sojourner Truth Organization
1977
NEWS FROM THE PLANT
When Frank Stewart came to work early Tuesday morning, he punched in and went up to the locker room to change clothes.
"Where were you yesterday?" asked Joe Williams, who changed at the next locker. "Don’t you know we work on Mondays around here?"
"I had to go to court to fight a speeding ticket. First they kept me waiting half a day. Then 1 had to look at this stupid movie about how to drive."
"You missed some real excitement around here," said Joe. "The government pulled a raid."
"What do you mean, a raid?"
by Peter Little
We're now witness to the largest wave of human migration the planet has ever seen. Driven by a new, truly international form of capitalism, human populations are alternately violently displaced, economically pressured, invited, coerced into relocation across the globe by civil wars, low intensity wars, high intensity wars, famines, droughts, hurricanes, floods, trade policies, austerity, other countless other economic and environmental catastrophies. This is globalized capitalism. We live in a time of threatened ecological collapse and the beginnings of capitalism's greatest tragedy-the possibility of a human created mass die-off of mamallian and other forms of life.
More momentarily, we also bear witness to a possible global economic collapse and what will be the inevitable attempts at a massive restructuring and upheaval of the US working class that will result.
By Ken Lawrence
My conservative father, a veteran of World War II in the Pacific, was not
a hunter, but he owned a Colt Woodsman Match Target pistol and he taught me
to shoot. Occasional trips to a Chicago south side target range began when I
was about age 11 (the year would have been 1953), about the same time that I
signed up for weekly target rifle shooting after school, at the neighborhood
YMCA.
Dad regarded his gun as a prudent measure for self defense, and his Army
marksman and expert shooting medals as proud achievements, along with his
amateur wrestling and chess tournament trophies.
[For readers unfamiliar with guns and shooting sports: The Woodsman is a
large, heavy, long-barreled semiautomatic pistol with enormous walnut grips,
which shoots exclusively standard velocity .22-caliber long rifle ammunition.
It is not concealable, nor does it fit a holster, and it would be virtually
useless in combat even in the hands of an expert, though for certain
professional assassins it would be the weapon of choice to murder an
unsuspecting or helpless victim at close range with minimal noise and mess.]
My father's rationalization for arming himself did not match his choice
of pistol. Furthermore, he taught his two sons to shoot it, but not his two
by Dan Horowitz de Garcia
Race doesn’t exist. Race is a construct, a creation of theory and practice. Yet race is real. Money is also a construct, but instead of paying your rent send in a note explaining that money doesn’t exist and you refuse to pretend it does. Call me from the homeless shelter and tell me how that went.
Race doesn’t exist, but race is real. Welcome to the United States.
The race that doesn’t exist is the biological race. There is no scientific basis for Black, white, Latino, etc. The race that is real is the race of power relationships. The race of power relationships is the history of land-owning, European men deciding who will be oppressed (as in owned or exterminated). The race of power relationships is about the creation of whiteness and white supremacy.
True Lies: Al Gore, Environmental Movements and the Earth
By M. Treloar
“Earth is in very bad shape.”
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars
Just to keep Al Gore's award in perspective, it's useful to remember that he will share the Nobel Peace Prize with Henry Kissinger.
For those of you not yet born in 1975, when the liberation of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) occurred, Kissinger was the U.S. Secretary of State who won a Peace Prize for brokering the Paris peace accords and getting U.S. troops out of Vietnam. Kissinger is also a war criminal who dares not travel to many European cities for fear of being arrested and tried as an accomplice of the late Chilean dictator Pinochet.
by Selma James
There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.
In our pamphlet which Avis Brown so generously referred to, (1) we tackled ". . . the relation of women to capital and [the] kind of struggle we [can] effectively wage to destroy it" (p.5), and draw throughout on the experience of the struggle against capital by Black people. Beginning with the female (caste) experience, we redefined class to include women. That redefinition was based on the unwaged labour of the housewife. We put it this way:
This month several BtR locals are helping to coordinate a speaking tour by Selma James, a lifelong campaigner for women's rights and anti-racism and the founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign. She is joined by Andaiye, a feminist organizer and author from Guyana, South America.
Selma is known for her groundbreaking contributions to understandings of capitalist exploitation. In the 1970s she argued that the housework and caring work women do outside of the market is the basis for the reproduction of the entire working class. She is a former member of CLR James's Johnson-Forest Tendency.
Tour schedule
Pittsburgh PA Nov 8,9
Philadelphia PA Nov 11-13
New York City, NY Nov 14
Detroit, MI Nov 15-17
Benton Harbor Nov 18
Amherst MA Nov 19
Toronto ON Nov 23, 24
Atlanta Nov 25, 26
Miami FL Nov 26 (Andaiye only)
Phoenix, Flagstaff AZ Nov 27, 28
Portland OR Nov 29, 30
Los Angeles CA Dec 1, 2
Arcata CA Dec 3
San Francisco CA Dec 4-5
Bring the Ruckus has been closely following the tense situation in Jena, Louisiana. We would like to share this important piece by Xochitl Bervera, an organizer for Families & Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC). Several members of Bring the Ruckus have worked with FFLIC, both from a distance and on the ground in Louisiana, including two members who were with FFLIC in Jena on July 30th, the day Mychal Bell was originally scheduled to be sentenced.
The Justice that Jena Demands
by Xochitl Bervera / September 29th, 2007
I want to tell you about Emmanuelle Narcisse. He was a tall, slim, handsome young man who was killed by a guard at the Bridge City Correctional Center for Youth — a Louisiana juvenile prison — in 2003. Apparently, he was “fussing” in line, talking back to a guard. The guard punched him in the face, one blow, and Emmanuelle went down backwards, slamming his head on the concrete. He took his last breath there behind the barbed wire of that state run facility. The guard was suspended with pay during the investigation. No indictment was ever filed against him.
There is also Tobias Kingsley1, sentenced when he was 15 to two years in juvenile prison for sneaking into a hotel swimming pool (his first offense). Tobias endured physical and sexual abuse inside the prison. He said that guards traded sex with kids for drugs and cigarettes, and sometimes set kids up to fight one another, making cash bets on the winner. His mama said he was never the same after he came home. She said the nightmares, the violence, the paranoia persisted years after the private lawyers helped him come home early. His battles with addiction and depression are not yet over.
By Eugene Romania
Eugene Romania is an Oregonian who has been a member of Bring the Ruckus for three years with the Portland local, where he has been involved in police-abolition work. With the support of the organization, he was able to spend nearly a month living in Lake Charles, Louisiana volunteering with Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC). These notes are excerpted from his online travel diary, which he used to communicate with other Bring the Ruckus members during the month of June.
May 31, 2007, 8:31 PM
The city of Lake Charles is beautiful, and the first two white person's conversations I overheard involved one recounting how she told both her bosses to “go straight to hell” today and the other saying how he hated Arkansas because Bill Clinton is from there — in his opinion Clinton should have died at birth, is a child molester, and took all his hard earned money to give to black people who are too lazy to go to work, so they just wake up at 11 am everyday, and in his opinion, if every African died tomorrow, he wouldn't care. This will be an interesting time...
-- E. (from the shores of Lake Charles, LA: "Welcome to Lake Charles — Come See Our
Live Gators")
June 1, 2007, 8:30 AM
"God Answers Knee-Mail"
Today is the first day of the 2007 Atlantic Hurricane Season. No ceremonial first pitch or parade, but I received my hurricane-planning guide inside the daily paper, and I intend to become familiar with it.
Forecasters are expecting 17 named storms this year and 9 hurricanes, 5 of them “intense.” “We expect an above-average hurricane season,” says the paper. An average
year in the Gulf has only 9.6 named storms and 2.3 intense hurricanes, so this year is expected to be twice as hurricane-ridden as normal.
It is clear to the casual observer (me) that this city hasn’t come close to recovering from Rita, two years ago. It came up approximately 15 seconds into my first conversation with a local, who was telling me what casinos I should check out. “Harrah’s was the biggest, it was right over thurr....before the big storm,” the man said, as he pointed out over the lake. There are plenty of abandoned buildings scattered all over town, still two-thirds standing and advertising a $4 crawfish buffet or used cars, which are nowhere in sight.
What follows is the audio version of the panel "Building Revolutionary Strategy and Organization in the 21st Century", which was held at the recent U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2007.
The panel was originally proposed by Solidarity. Additional panel members came from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, the Labor/Community Strategy Center, the School of Unity and Liberation, a study group from New York City and Bring the Ruckus.
