A draft of this main political report was presented to the national congress of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization in November 2000. Based on the congress discussion, the report was revised in the summer of 2001. It is worth noting that even the initial drafts of this report were the products of a collective process in which many comrades contributed insights about their cities and their mass organizing work. The report is divided into two main sections, "The Conditions We Face" and "The State of the People's Movements and Socialist Forces in the U.S."

MAIN POLITICAL REPORT

(Revised August 2001)

Table of Contents

Part I: The Conditions We Face

Is There A Third Industrial Revolution?
Economic Prospects Overall
The World Scene
Effects of Economic Changes on US Working People
Immigrants and US-Born Oppressed Nationalities

Part II: The State of People's Movements and Socialist Forces in the U.S.

The Labor Movement
Community-Based Poorer Sector Organizing
The Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Movement
The New Movements
The Black Liberation Movement
The Chicano National Movement
Asian-American Movements
Student Movements
Prospects for Left Refoundation

PART I: THE CONDITIONS WE FACE

This is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the U.S. economy, nor to predict when a stock market crash will occur, (as if we could since Marxist theory is not about market timing), or to hail the coming depression which will supposedly unleash a workers' uprising against capitalism. Rather its goal is to point to a few developments that affect the lives of working people and the terrain of struggle. In doing this, we will try to explicitly demonstrate (when we can in specific examples) how Marxist and Leninist categories are useful in understanding economic developments and what they mean for working people.

The U.S. economy:
* is dynamic
* is increasingly polarized
* pushes its worst crises into the Third World (see Asian currency crisis, Mexico and other debt crises, etc.)
* pulls labor from around the world with great flexibility
* has eroded the safety net for most workers (both public entitlements and the expectations of job stability, rising wages and pensions) and increased the feminization of poverty
* offers simultaneous inducements for selected workers to buy into the system

IS THERE A THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?

Information/communications technology, in which the U.S. leads on a world scale, has created huge opportunities for capital accumulation and fueled much of the economy's dynamism over the past decade. Many analysts consider information/communications technology along with biotechnology to constitute a Third Industrial Revolution—steam and electrification marked the first two. (Biotechnology's effects are only beginning to be seen and it's the target of powerful resistance worldwide by small-scale farmers, middle-class consumers, radical youth. This resistance makes its potential as a spur to capital accumulation harder to assess and we're not equipped to examine it in depth right here.)

Information/communications technology shouldn't be seen as just a sector of production. Rather, as more and more machinery is computer-driven, this technology is crucial to the smoother integration and rationalization of most productive activity and therefore has the potential to raise profit rates throughout the economy.

First, it enables capitalists to monitor sales, adjust the product mix with less re-tooling (lowering the cost of fixed capital), facilitate "just-in-time production" and keep inventories low. For example, the average time that a GM car spends on the lot before purchase has been reduced from 77 to 64 days. In Marxist concepts, this raises the rate of profit by shortening the time of turnover. A capitalist puts out money to hire workers to make products to eventually sell for more money than he initially laid out. The less time the product lies on a shelf, the quicker money comes back to be re-invested and start the cycle over again, and the more money the capitalist ends up with.

Secondly, these technologies lower what Marx would call the unproductive costs of accounting, record-keeping, bill collecting, market research. These activities don't create surplus value but are required to realize surplus value (to sell products and collect money)—so when these costs are lowered, the surplus value that's left goes up. This is significant; Marxist economist Ernest Mandel estimated in the 1980s that as much as 50% of GNP in advanced capitalist countries was dedicated to the accounting and realization of value and that this was a severe drag on profit rates. This drag is now being lessened.

Other uses for information/communication technology include product design and greater control of labor in auxiliary aspects of production, like transportation, that were previously hard to monitor. For example, satellites now track trucks on the road and impose more speed-up on truck divers (nominally independent contractors) by regulating where they should be within how many hours, what routes they must follow, etc. In large clerical pools, computers automatically track and record for management the number of keystrokes workers make on a daily basis.

In looking briefly at information/communications technology, we've emphasized those aspects that are boons for capitalists and setbacks for workers. And there are more we could name. With "just in time" production, there's greater use of contingent or "just in time" workers who get no benefits. Personnel agencies now employ 3% of workers, versus 1-1/2 % ten years ago. The glamour and quick, high pay of new technology pulls college-educated people away from doing people-oriented work (such as teaching) that's needed for working class survival, but lower-paid. Then there's the destruction of human capacity through repetitive motion injuries (from using the computer keyboard) and the effects of computer screens on kids eyes and brains (which are only beginning to be studied).

We do not agree with those who say that technological change in itself is creating the conditions for revolution because human labor has become obsolete. The information-communications technology constantly creates new forms of low-paid, body-destroying manufacturing and service work. Who makes the computer chips? It's often women of color from the global South, who face enormous repression when they struggle to organize and need First World solidarity. There have also been other anti-capitalist trends such as the "information wants to be free" current that some computer professionals share with hackers, and socialists should try to relate to them.

Under socialism, once we can begin re-organizing the whole economy to stop destroying non-renewable resources and human capacity, we'll be able to find some humanly constructive uses for aspects of this technology.

ECONOMIC PROSPECTS OVERALL

Many economists think this technically driven surge in productivity is responsible for the high economic growth in the 1990s (4% vs. 2.5% in the '80s), and the low unemployment/low inflation, a rare combination which now shows signs of ending as inflation rises. Our guess is that the hyper-valuation of stocks and their very high price/earnings ratio will continue to be corrected by more-or-less dramatic stock market plunges, and some recession. However, there's still plenty of new opportunity for profit-making in this period.

Therefore, we shouldn't expect an overall collapse of the U.S. economy. The Third World will probably continue to bear the brunt of capitalist devastation. There will likely be more currency collapses and debt failures—wiping out people's livelihoods and buying power and smaller, local businesses—erupting in various countries and regions. Though these crises, like the Asian one a couple of years ago, often take a financial or currency form, their underlying cause is over-investment and over-production, as classical Marxist analysis argues.

THE WORLD SCENE

This section of the MPR is more modest than some of its predecessors. On the international situation, we will address fewer points and go into less depth than in other sections of this MPR. That's because the other stuff is based on ongoing work and we have done too little work on these issues. Rather than try and sketch all or most of the major developments in the global economy and world politics, we will try and sketch out six areas toward which we think developments will lead comrades, and revolutionary socialists in general, to turn their attention in the next few years.

In everything we do, we must keep in mind the suddenness with which struggles can erupt that we have a responsibility to respond to. The decades-old movement against the Pentagon's use of Vieques, Puerto Rico as a bombing range took off after a watchman there was killed. This led to the most significant revival of the Puerto Rican national movement—on the colonized island and on the mainland—since its long decline began in the late '70s.

The explosion of the Oslo peace process in the Mideast is another example. It was predictable that things could blow, but the time and the magnitude of the eruption stunned the world. It also put the central role oil plays in world politics back in the public eye. There are any number of flashpoints which could thrust themselves onto center stage at any time.

1. The rapid growth of the movement against imperialist globalization provides a new context which affects work around different aspect of the world situation.

This movement is very new and there are debates among leftists as to the movement's mass character and staying power. In the FRSO leaflet distributed at A16 in Washington, we said, "People around the world have been wondering if the Battle of Seattle was a fluke. This weekend makes it official. We are a movement, the most powerful, fastest growing movement the US has seen in years."

The movement is internationalist in orientation (and world-wide in scale), it's militant, it's full of young folks, and it scares the hell out of the ruling class. Also it's too white, it's "eventist," it's weak on organization, and it's moralistic. But the most important thing is that it is a real movement and that provides the basis for uniting with the positive aspects and overcoming the backward ones.

The movement has two great strengths. One, it is an actual united front, an alliance of class forces. On a global scale, it has pulled together in dialog and action a wide range of revolutionary and progressive forces. In North America, it includes elements from the student movement, especially the anti-sweatshop campaigns, from the environmental movement, from the trade union movement, from faith-based organizations, from indigenous nations and from sections of the liberal bourgeoisie, represented by foundation-bankrolled NGOs. At its present stage different forces are relatively free to promote their positions within the front, but this will not automatically continue to be the case. There will have to be struggle to maintain the united front, to keep various forces actively involved. At the same time there are bound to be conflicts over what line predominates, as the AFL-CIO effort to suck students into a narrow no-most-favored-nation-status-for-China focus shows.

Two, the movement's focus and its content tend to lead activists to a deep understanding of the nature of the enemy. Its initial concentration was on an ill-defined "globalization" and institutions like the IMF. Increasingly, the movement identifies the enemy as corporate globalization or imperialist globalization. Activists have begun to contrast that with the kind of global ties (facilitated by e-mail and faxes) that, for example, hooked students and activists around the world up with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.

Despite our limitations in size and concentration, there are ways in which we can make the theoretical as well as practical contributions to the growth of the movement. The glaring omission in the united front so far has been communities of color in the US, which are sharply affected by the issues the movement is tackling. The movement must be helped to see and to act on the links between the oppression and struggles of peoples and countries in the Third World and the oppression and struggles of communities of color here in the US. One way to do this might be to engage in a campaign about the genocidal approach of the giant drug companies and the government to the AIDS crisis in Africa.

If this movement continues to grow and involve new layers of activists, it will be important to carry out as much of our international work as possible in its context. This means working in and with the movement itself, and not merely using demos it calls to promote particular activities we might be involved in, as some solidarity groups did in Washington.

2. International labor solidarity is on the agenda in a big way.

This is one of those sort of obvious imperatives which are given lip service until changing conditions put them squarely on the table. The unprecedented mobility of capital, both as money and as production equipment, have awakened many workers and union officials to the need for international cooperation on a class basis.

There have been important symbolic struggles like the global support for the Liverpool dock workers in the late '90s, but the fact is that no one has much of an idea about how to build effective cooperation in struggle against giant transnational corporations yet. There is a struggle to be waged inside the AFL-CIO over how and how fully to take part in the anti-globalization struggle.

A positive and internationalist stand on these issues, a stand pitting us against the Pat Buchanan nativist approach which paints workers in other countries as the enemy, will be a key element in the effort to forge a stronger, more organized left pole within the labor movement. Finally, our work on international labor solidarity enables us to draw out the connections between the global South and the South of the US, which serve similar functions for capital, on different scales.

3. US intervention and aggression can reliably be expected someplace in the world.

One constant on a world scale since World War Two has been the readiness of the US ruling class to intervene militarily in other countries to defend its interests. Yet, though their defeat in Vietnam is a quarter of a century in the past, fear of angry mass reaction by the American people remains a serious constraint on their ability to commit troops to any intervention which threatens to bring significant numbers of US troops home in body bags. Thus the Pentagon favors interventions which use air superiority to bomb offending countries into smithereens, as was done to Serbia during the war over Kosovo.

In some ways the US ruling class has a harder time not only because of the domestic limits mentioned above but because of its current position as unchallenged king of the hill, the global hyperpower, as resentful European bourgeoisies have taken to calling it. With its Japanese and European imperialist rivals still in poor position to challenge US dominance, all global crises become the problem of the US ruling class. From the 1950s through the beginning of the '90s, many of these problems were solved by the collusion of the US ruling class and their opposite numbers in the Soviet Union.

These days US intervention is painted in terms of human rights or rescuing people from savage enemies. These crises themselves are not necessarily made up. The US, usually in alliance with other imperialists, moves to restore stability in areas racked by local wars or civil conflicts, in which it is often difficult to identify who should be supported. Still we need not and we should not be agnostic when such interventions take place. We should start from the stand that the US is up to no good and that the proven results of US intervention tend to leave the underlying contradictions worsened. Ask those it has "saved'"—from Grenada to Somalia. We must always look at the particularity of contradiction in developing our analysis and practice, but it's hard to go wrong opposing US intervention.

Particular attention should be paid to Colombia. Unable to defeat powerful revolutionary guerrillas, the corrupt government has bought into Plan Colombia, a massive military buildup funded and staged by the US. Presented to the people of this country as an anti-drug campaign, Plan Colombia makes escalating US involvement nearly inevitable.

4. Pro-peace sentiments remain a strong current among sections of the people in the US and on a world scale, and important battles are taking place under the umbrella of the peace movement.

There are today very serious struggles going on over the attempt by the Clinton and Bush administrations to tear up decades worth of nuclear arms treaties and agreements. Instead, sections of the ruling class are still dreaming of deploying a Star Wars defense like the one Reagan fantasized about so hard. Some push it to maintain unquestioned US military supremacy, while others are more interested in cashing in on the multi-billions of dollars such a program would cost.

In fact, such international agreements are a real Achilles' heel for the US and a sharp exposure of the government's pose as the bringer of peace and order to the world. In recent years the US government has desperately tried to block international agreements against the use of land mines and against having soldiers under 18. Now 140 countries have signed an agreement to set up an international war crimes tribunal. The US refuses to take part, for fear its past and future crimes will put US soldiers and officers—even government figures—in the dock.

Similarly, there is motion and concern about the many armed conflicts on a global scale, which the imperialists claim to be distressed by. A closer look shows them to be the product of previous imperialist meddling. Take the Rwanda situation, originally fueled by divide-and-rule tactics of the Belgian colonizers and stirred up by French support for the Hutu extremists who unleashed the genocide there.

A distressing war for all progressives has been the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, two countries led by veterans of allied national liberation movements which freed their countries only a decade ago. Satellites of the US and other imperialist powers closely tracked the military buildup in months before the war, yet did nothing to pressure other countries to cut off arms supplies or even to expose developments to the world so that African countries and people around the world could bring pressure to bear for negotiations.

And the US government has done little but squeak out little messages of "concern" as the rulers of Russia level most of Chechnya to crush the national aspirations of the Chechen people.

Anti-war forces are also among those who have been in the forefront of the struggle against "non-military" forms of war, like the savage sanctions the US ruling class has imposed on the people of Iraq, resulting in the deaths of more than half a million children.

5. Changing conditions have not eliminated the need for solidarity with the peoples and liberation struggles of the Third World.

Sometimes this means support for traditional liberation movements like those led by the Communist Party of the Philippines. In general though, such armed struggles led by communists are not the main form that fighting for national liberation and resisting US neo-colonialism takes. Frequently, we see movements of women, indigenous peoples or workers, targeting oppression that can sometimes be blamed directly on imperialism and sometimes only secondarily. The armed struggle in Mexico, the Third World country most closely tied to US imperialism, is only one relatively small aspect of the popular struggle there.

These will not always be simple movements to understand and support, especially when the struggle targets US culture and a Western view of human rights. It is easy to say that we support the rights of indigenous people to practice traditional agriculture and that we support the women of Afghanistan against the medieval strictures of the Taliban. There will be harder cases. The US press vilifies the Shiite Islamic leadership of Iran as primitive reactionaries. Those who oppose the mullahs are hailed for their desire to watch American TV shows. Do these "democratic" Iranian liberals also oppose the regime's oppression of Kurds in the North and Sunni Muslims in the South of Iran? Important questions like these are not easy to answer, based on media reports here.

One important point is that our solidarity cannot afford to be that of "condescending saviors." We have an obligation to support these movements, but we also have a great deal to learn from them. The success of the Zapatistas in leveraging small forces to reset the national agenda in Mexico is the example most frequently cited.

There is also much to be learned from other struggles, particularly those of the millions of women who have been subjected to civil wars, economic and social dislocation and particularly IMF/World Bank readjustment which destroy both older social orders and government-run social services. The alternatives pioneered by these women—from farming and handicraft collectives to battles for women's rights to struggles against agribusiness—can teach us a lot as we seek to refound our understanding of socialism. Those of us who attended the 1995 International Women's conference in Beijing found women of the South to be way beyond their Northern sisters in their analysis and in their experimentation with alternatives.

6. Work with immigrants has a major international component, which can easily be overlooked.

Immigrants are a key factor in the class struggle in the US, but they are also a living link which connects the class struggle here with the struggle in the home country. The relationship with the homeland varies from group to group. Some, like the Burmese, actively support strong opposition movements in the home country. Others tend to patriotic support of the rulers of the home nation when it clashes with other countries or stands up to the US. In the Ethiopia/Eritrea war, political and financial support from expatriate communities in Europe and the US was a material factor.

Especially with larger groups of immigrants and those with longer roots in the US, the political life of the home country is reproduced here. The major parties of the Dominican Republic, for instance, devote enormous efforts to campaigning and fundraising in the US during election campaigns and tens of thousands return to the island to vote.

A lot of solidarity with the home country, though, is very practical. Individuals and small social clubs raise money to send home for flood relief or to build a clinic or school in the home village. These local associations, some casual, some highly organized, have enormous influence on migration patterns and on the neighborhoods and jobs new immigrants wind up in. They are also potential storm centers for organizing. The successful organizing drive that unionized thousands of drywalleros in the LA area in the mid-'90s was headed by a core from one small town in central Mexico.

In the past we have talked about how working class immigrants from some countries bring with them fairly advanced class consciousness and traditions of struggle from which we can learn. We also have to learn to deal with the large numbers of immigrants whose roots lie in nominally socialist societies, including the former Soviet bloc. If we simply discount their experience as anti-communism, we lose the opportunity to learn from them and to unite with them in struggles that may bring forward new understanding and consciousness.

In closing this section on the international situation, there are two points to make. First, it is important that we not continue the fairly broad neglect of struggle around international issues that has recently characterized our organization. Living amid the relative privileges which come with life in the number one plunderer of the world's people leaves us certain obligations—international solidarity and proletarian internationalism—which can be neglected only at the expense of the future of our struggle.

Second, we are a small organization and must pick our shots carefully. We cannot possibly take on all the tasks implied by the six points in this section.

EFFECTS OF ECONOMIC CHANGES ON US WORKING PEOPLE

Coming along with the lean and mean economy described earlier, which produces so many more goods so efficiently (while of course destroying non-renewable resources) are several key trends: the commodification of more spheres of human life; the increased inequality and income/wealth polarization in the society; the individualistic ideology that if you don't make it, it's your own fault and safety nets and secure jobs are for losers. These three trends are inter-related, feed each other and also generate stirrings of resistance.

There are pushes to privatize and thereby commodify many institutions and economic activities that are both crucial in working class life and almost impossible to perform humanely while generating profits. These include schools, Medicaid/Medicare, Social Security. One drastic example is the health care proposal introduced by Bill Bradley during the 2000 presidential campaign. While praised by many as progressive, this proposal would have completely given over Medicaid to HMOs, eliminating any direct government responsibility and accountability. It's noteworthy that in recent months many HMO's have bailed out of Medicaid, recognizing the difficulty of making profits there. Similarly, the Edison Project, the for-profit schooling corporation, hasn't exactly set the world on fire since it's gone public on the stock exchange.

Besides causing failures of some firms and mergers of others and thereby increasing the centralization of capital, this contradiction between profit-making and human need continues to generate different forms of anger and actual fightback that deserve further examination. One example is the massive resentment and rage at HMOs which the Labor Party has tried to channel in its Just Health Care campaign, even though at this time it's mostly progressive health policy people, professionals and leftists who are in motion, not really the basic masses. Another example is the organizing against vouchers, corporate-run charter schools and the intrusion of advertising into curricular materials (like Channel One).

Economic Polarization and Inequality

Overall, today's economy is more polarized than it's been since the 1930s. For working class people, real wages (what you can actually buy with your money) today are 9% lower than they were in 1973. This is another factor that has allowed the lower unemployment rate without inflation that characterized the '90s. However, we also have to figure in that real unemployment is always undercounted by government statistics, especially in communities of color.

Lower real wages allow capitalists to raise the rate of profit the old-fashioned way—by increasing the rate of exploitation. While workers are producing more, workers have been getting a lesser proportion of their product back in the form of wages. Proportionally more of the newly created value goes to the capitalist class in the form of profit, dividends, interest and executive salaries. The average CEO of a major U.S. corporation made $12.4 million in 1998—475 times greater than the average worker made, compared to (only!) 42 times greater in 1980!

By "working class," we are referring to people who have to work or get public benefits to survive, who don't hire, fire or manage others, who have no special scientific or advanced education, and who have little control over the process and pace of their work. Working class people by this definition may be blue, white or pink collar, service or industrial, new or old economy. The statistics touted in the late '90s to show a "booming economy" with "most employees doing better" actually lumped together the working class with middle-strata employees, who have more control or independence in their work process, and may get greater recognition and compensation based on their "individual talents."

Even within the middle strata, public sector professionals such as teachers and clinic doctors—who provide services primarily for the working class people—have been doing worse. Those providing either personal services for the wealthy or business services were doing quite well but some now have been affected by the downturn, particularly in high tech sectors. For example, U. S. capital, sparing itself even the expense of a public school system adequate to educating enough technically adept employees, drew in technical and scientific professionals of many nationalities from South Asia, Russia and other regions but has begun to lay them off and push them out, or intensify their work while driving down salaries.

We must win over significant numbers of middle strata people such as scientists, engineers, programmers, teachers and health/human services professionals to a working class stand and to our movements and organizations, in order to build a revolutionary bloc that can really contend for power. But we want to be clear about the central role of the working class, and about the factual reality that , despite the bourgeoisie's claims, even when the economy was supposedly "booming," most working class people were not doing better—and they're even worse off now. A small minority of working class people, located in particular high-growth sectors, had been doing better. An example is a Chicana high school graduate working as a receptionist for a Silicon Valley dot-com and pulling $17 an hour with stock options. But her situation is not typical—and not stable.

Most Latinos and African Americans are at the bottom end of the polarization. A National Science Foundation study, cited by Salim Muwakkil in In These Times, found "a five-year decline in African Americans' net worth and a wealth gap between Black and White Americans that continues to expand.... The net worth of the median African American family in 1999 was $7,000. For the median white family, it was $84,400." (Note: median means that half of the grouping are above, and half are below a certain figure—it's different from average.)

Sociologist William Julius Wilson believes, based on analysis of labor force and census data, that between 1990 and 1995, the majority of adults in some urban African American communities were not employed. Since the 1970s, the Black working class has been undermined by de-industrialization, with factory closures in urban centers and the public sector shrinking in most cities in all regions. One of the worst hit cities is Pittsburgh, now with the country's oldest population as there is so little economic activity to draw young people.

The Prison-Industrial Complex

The impact of the prison-industrial complex on urban communities of color—the communities that are criminalized in order to feed the voracious appetite of the prison system—is devastating.

Two million human being, disproportionately African Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans and other oppressed nationalities are caught up in the prison-industrial complex. In state prisons, 60% are drug offenders with no history of violence. The U.S. holds a full 25% of the global prison population, and probably a higher proportion of its citizens in jail than any other country in history.

While domestic militarization and the prison-industrial complex have had acute effects across the United States, these effects are painfully visible in California. In the last ten years California has built 20 new prisons and two new universities. In that same ten years California has risen to first in prison spending and dropped to 41st in the nation in education. Since 1990, 26,000 jobs were added to various state corrections departments and 8,000 jobs were lost in higher education.

The prison-industrial complex ties into the overall economy in numerous ways. An average of $7 billion over the last ten years has gone to the construction industry to build prisons. Firms such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch write between $2-3 billion in prison construction bonds each year. Prisons employ 523,000 people, mostly whites from rural areas devastated by the corporatization of agriculture and animal-raising, and they often buy into the white supremacist capitalist system as overseers of people of color. In California, however, the rural communities where prisons are sited are predominantly Latino communities with drastically high unemployment rates. The California Department of Corrections employs more people of color than any other state agency. In 1985 there were 7570 prison guards; in 1990 there were 14,249; and today there are over 28,000 prison guards who can earn more than a tenured University of California professor.

Women are the fastest growing population of prisoners in the country. Since 1980, the number of women imprisoned in the US has tripled. Now, on any given day, over 90,000 women are incarcerated in US jails and prisons. In 1992, there were 50,493 women incarcerated in federal and state prisons. Amazingly, the rate of women's imprisonment grew from 6 per 100,000 in 1925 to 37 per 100,000 in 1992. The rate of women's imprisonment in California is approximately 45 per 100,000. California now has the dubious distinction of incarcerating more women than any other state and currently has the world's largest women's prison.

Tens of thousands of inmates work for private companies. There is some controversy about the extent to which the employment of inmates by private industry is a really viable trend. But what it's clear is that the prison-industrial complex contributes to the further marginalization and disenfranchisement (quite literally since in some Southern and other states up to 27% of African American men are permanently barred from voting due to felony convictions) of mostly U.S.-born oppressed nationality people.

Polarization and Working Class Quality of Life

The criminalization of men of color, the erosion of their opportunities due to harder high school graduation tests and cutbacks in affirmative action, and now the higher incarceration levels of women—leave an even greater burden on the women back in the communities. Women are more and more the mainstays of the family, trying to hold jobs, run the household, raise the kids, take care of frail elders. At the same time, the gutting of Aid to Families with Dependent Children has impacted both working class mothers and the whole working class severely. It has served to lower the wage floor, and increase work discipline, economic insecurity and job competition in the working class overall.

In New York City in August 2000, Laura Morales, a 33-year-old Puerto Rican mother of three, sat down for a break at her workfare assignment and keeled over, dead. For several months, she had neglected going to the doctor for her worsening headaches—because she was terrified that the city would cut off her kids' benefits if she took time from her workfare assignment.

This tragedy is especially horrifying; just on an everyday level welfare reform's impact on children and communities is destructive. Even single mothers with toddlers are forced to work, often in dead-end, minimum-wage jobs with no childcare, and to leave children with less adequate or more overwhelmed caretakers, who are paid minimum wage or less. Many single parents retrieve the children at the end of a long work day, do the necessary cooking, cleaning, feeding with little time and even less energy to engage in the central work of parenting: the social education and nurturing of children. The result is more neglect, children whose behavior may draw the attention of child welfare authorities, increased state intervention and the break up of working class—especially oppressed nationality—kin networks and communities, already strained by the huge numbers of fathers in prison. One of the most basic human activities and relationships—parenting—becomes more and more alienated. Even the grandmothers who are parenting the kids of their children with AIDS or substance problems are now being forced off welfare and into minimum wage work at McDonald's, K-Mart and other places.

Single, working-class women with children are suffering more in the current economy. The New York Times put it concisely: women with neither college degrees nor husbands are doing a lot worse. While the wage gap between men and women overall continues to narrow, there is evidence that women at the lowest income levels are worse off. It is also probable that the economic disparities between women of color and white women are growing, though hard figures on this have not been much publicized. A stark anecdotal example: Advertisements in elite college newspapers offer tall, blonde young white women with high IQs $80,000 for their eggs (talk about the commodification of everything!) while hundreds of thousands of actual children of color languish in foster care and even greater numbers are receiving inadequate public financial support (if any) and childcare, and inferior public schooling.

With declining public health facilities and social services, more punitive policy at all levels and in all spheres of government, plus broken family bonds and more young people running the streets on their own, we can expect to see more disease and early death in the oppressed nationality and poorer sectors of the working class. Asthma rates among inner city children are skyrocketing, while Medicaid cut-offs and hospital closings and cutbacks make treatment harder to get, and more parents are working and unable sit with their children in overcrowded clinics all day. Rates of HIV infection among teens and people in their early 20s are also zooming up. We are also seeing more of what the revolutionary Black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon called "auto-destructive behavior." This is like self-destructive, but on the level of a community or a people: increased violence by youth of color against each other through robbery of desired commodities such as sneakers and leather jackets, anti-woman violence and relationship violence overall, and drug dealing and substance abuse.

This reality may mean that revolutionaries should give greater attention to shoring up or building institutions that enhance the physical, emotional and spiritual survival and life conditions of urban poor and working class people—from clinics and hospitals to food coops to after-school programs to improved public schools to parenting and grandparenting support groups. A number of comrades do some of this work through their jobs with not-for-profit-agencies and we should sum up what we learn from this work and its implications for revolutionary organizing.

Even in the more stable sectors of the class and when there are two parents present, often both parents have to work. They face both a money crunch and a time crunch that exacerbate stress and tension, especially gender and generational contradictions—and leave little time for family life, much less for political life. Parents often work opposite shifts so they can take care of the kids and frail elders (with the aging population and high cost of elder care) but seldom see each other.

Individualistic Ideology

With more commodities and more pressure to buy them, yet greater income inequality, the capitalists have to convince working class people that anybody can make it, and that if you don't, it's your own fault. Otherwise, their system looks unjust. Children and young people are a big target for capitalist policy and ideology. On the "it's your own fault" side, more and more states are requiring students to pass more and harder statewide tests to get high school diplomas. If you can't pass that test, well, that just proves you deserve to work for minimum wage all your life.

One of the most insidious forms of commodification and individualistic ideology is the manipulative, direct marketing to children via TV and advertising—from Pokémon to Tommy Hilfiger. This has exacerbated parent/child tensions and created a consumer demand that has helped fuel the rapid growth of consumer debt as a percentage of consumer disposable (after-tax) income: from 68% in 1980 to 97% in 1999. This means that a family with an income of $30,000 per year is, on the average, $29,000 in debt. With declining real wages, workers are shoring up their living standards by borrowing to make ends meet, and overall stressed out about paying the bills. As bankruptcy laws become much harsher, there will be more misery for working class and lower-middle class people.

The marketing to youth also has the ideological effect of what cultural theorist Paul Smith calls "encouraging the fashioning of cultural identities by way of apparel choices," especially by using Black cultural icons like Michael Jordan to represent Blackness in the culture—while actual Black communities are systematically immiserated—and in this way undermining the formation of a radical Black identity. A comrade from St. Louis writes with an example of the generation gap/cultural cooptation issue:

A Black political-cultural organization that originated in the '60s upsurges is the main organizational form through which we attempt to organize Black workers. However, it presently has no programmatic focus on Black workers as workers. A few Black workers from our labor work have supported or participated in a few of the group's activities over the year, mainly the anniversary celebration and the 1998 BRC meeting in Chicago. One of our union members regularly attends the group's reggae nights. With that exception, however, others have copped an attitude—towards me as well as the group—that we're "still stuck in the '60s" when we talk about militant struggle and project revolutionary Black nationalist culture and themes. In my workplace, the younger generation of 20-40 year old Black (and Latino) workers tend to have a "what's in it for me" culture.

Oppressed nationality youth have been and still are the creators of groundbreaking, oppositional culture, but the capitalist entertainment industry is poised to co-opt it more and more quickly. An example is the poetry slams which adopt hip hop performance style and competition for poetry and spoken word. Much more than rap it was a bearer of radical critique of society. Now it's been rainbowed, sexed up and MTV'd; and media-driven world series poetry slams have undercut local shows.

The Dream of Making It

The dream of making it as an individual—being the rapper or basketball star who makes it out of the projects to become a multi-millionaire—ties people deeply into the capitalist system. Such success stories are common enough to hold out hope that "the system could work for me" and to blunt some anger and opposition to capitalism.

These stories and the beliefs to which they give rise reinforce bourgeois hegemony. That is, they allow the capitalist class to maintain power within a formally democratic system, without having to resort to direct coercion all the time. They keep significant numbers of people trying to make it, listening to motivational speakers, blaming themselves when they fail, or putting down others in their same position ("no scrubs" or calling anybody who criticizes the rich a "playa hata") rather than seeing collective struggle as an option. Furthermore, one strategy the capitalists have used since the rebellions of the '60s challenged the legitimacy of their rule, has been to cultivate a buffer stratum of professionals and managers in Black, Chicano, Asian American and other oppressed nationality communities, people who can act as a buffer from the masses.

After the '80s right-wing ideological assault, and the long-term decline in the percentage of the work force that is in unions—a decline that has only recently begun to reverse—the expectations of a lifelong job with rising wages and guaranteed pension has eroded even for more stable sectors of the working class. But other carrots like stock options serve to tie many middle strata and some working class people into the system. Stock ownership (including through company or union pension and retirement plans) in the U.S. has increased from 32% of households in 1989 to 48% of households in 1998, a 50% increase.

IMMIGRANTS AND U.S.-BORN OPPRESSED NATIONALITIES

At the same time that U.S.-born oppressed nationality, working-class people are increasingly tracked to prison, oppressed nationalities from the Third World are increasingly drawn here as a super-exploited proletariat. Immigrants now constitute 13% of the work force nationally, with much higher figures in some of the coastal cities. In New York, for example, immigrants are a higher proportion of the work force now than they were at the turn of the last century.

Immigrant presence is growing in traditionally African American job niches such as poultry processing and janitorial work. In Philadelphia, there's been an influx of Cantonese Chinese people working in sweatshops and small industry, along with Eastern European, West African and Ethiopian immigrants who do service work. There's increasing strife, including between African Americans and African immigrants. The Virginia suburbs of DC have a growing Latino population, mainly Salvadorans but also Nicaraguan, and some Ethiopians, who generally work in service and construction. In D.C. itself, since the 1991 Mt. Pleasant uprising by Salvadorans, there's tension between the Latino community and the mostly Black cops. Pittsburgh draws little immigration due to the death of industry and infrastructure, but some Europeans and Jamaicans are arriving. Oakland's Black population, the home base of the Black Panther Party in the '70s, has decreased from 50% to 40% of the city's total, while the Latino population grows and the white population declines.

As noted earlier, not all immigrants of color are working class. In some cases, capital has deliberately recruited immigrants with scientific and technical skills to meet its labor needs. Some immigrants come with wealth or at least education, seeking greater entrepreneurial and professional opportunities, while others are fleeing situations that have become economically unviable and will become the worst-paid workers in the most oppressive conditions.

Immigrant families also face culture and gender contradictions, as women are pushed into the work force, upsetting the traditional male/female dynamics. Men who used to bring home the bacon are sometimes earning less than their wives. Their feelings of powerlessness sometimes translates into anger that gets misdirected against their wives and children. Part of the reason for family breakdown is cultural. Immigrants may not understand the way things work here. For example, they might spank their children; children learn in school that parents shouldn't hit kids—and call the police against their parents. Parents are in confusion and despair about how to maintain control over their kids. Children know English where parents don't, and again, the balance is upset. Parents rely on the children to take them to the doctor, fill out all the forms, and interpret what they must do to survive in the U.S.

Why So Much Immigration Now?

Capital has always sought to purchase means of production—living labor power, machinery, raw materials—at the lowest possible cost. Labor, unless restricted, has always moved to where wages are higher. While these pulls are constants of capitalism, certain specific factors related to imperialist globalization are also at play. The penetration of the market (universal commodification, as Marx would say), qualitatively deepened by NAFTA and other trade agreements, allows corporate monoculture (single crops) for foreign markets to crowd out subsistence agriculture in the Third World. This drives people off the land and into cities and other countries in search of work.

Along with national differences in wages, differential currency values and the current high value of the U.S. dollar are also key. A sub-minimum wage in U.S. dollars can enable a super-exploited Mexican immigrant to send home a sum that's substantial in terms of what it can buy in Mexico. In fact, remittances from emigrant workers, at $6 billion annually, are the third biggest source of Mexico's revenue, after tourism and oil. For El Salvador, they're the biggest source of revenue. A wage that is unacceptable to U.S. workers, because it is below the standard of living that U.S. workers have historically struggled for and achieved (what Marx calls the "historical or moral element of the value of labor power," beyond the minimum needed for physical survival) may still pull displaced, desperate Nicaraguan or Haitian peasants or urban poor.

Undocumented immigrant workers, who are usually in the poorest strata, constitute what Marx calls the "floating" form of the industrial reserve army ( and what some current theorists call a hyper-proletariat). They have no stability and are pulled back and forth among the service, manufacturing, agriculture/food processing and informal sectors depending on labor market needs. Since the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which introduced employer sanctions and made it illegal for an undocumented worker to have a job, undocumented workers effectively have none of the labor standards protections available to other workers. When a labor complaint is made, it is automatically checked against immigration records and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is informed. Undocumented workers know that you can't file a complaint about not being paid, for example, without risking deportation, so it's harder for them to organize. There have been some successful unionization struggles by undocumented workers, for examples Minneapolis hotel workers, and the conditions and tactics which make such victories possible should be examined further.

Some Experience

Many comrades in commissions remarked on these trends and the key questions and tasks they pose for revolutionaries: the erosion of stable working class jobs, the further marginalization of African American and Chicano working class people, growing numbers of super-exploited immigrants, and more competition and potentially conflictual interactions between U.S. and foreign-born people of color.

A St. Louis comrade writes,

... oppressed nationalities and immigrants are concentrated in health care, janitorial and related semi-skilled or unskilled maintenance/service sectors, postal and government, food service and food processing, and small manufacturing. In my workplace (federal government), there is a significant influx of Latino workers due to a new job need for bilingual skills. Thanks to the work of a handful of Latino union activists, significant struggle against discriminatory practices impacting Latino workers has been engaged and some victories were won. It's taken some very diligent, patient, and sometimes difficult work to maintain some level of support for these Latino struggles among both white and Black workers. A couple of our leading Black union activists have almost a Nation of Islam nationalist orientation, and often attack Latino workers because of their privileges relative to Black workers. At the same time, these more militant Black workers have received full support of the union in trying to organize a similar movement against discriminatory practices among Black workers, with little to no success so far. The potential for unity lies in the struggle for justice and equality. The conflicts have to do with real and perceived relative privileges among the different oppressed nationalities.

Boston area comrades report:

The destruction of manufacturing here has had a ripple effect in other sectors—especially the public sector as the tax base has eroded. Industries with oppressed nationalities include health care (Haitian), light manufacturing (many different immigrant groups, some white Eastern European) hotel and janitorial (where non-English speaking immigrants with 10-12 language groups have displaced African Americans). A problem with concentrating in these workplaces is that janitorial work is very low paid and any comrade would need to be financially supported in order to work there; hotel is a possibility but the local has a very backward leadership even though the organizers are great.

Overall it seemed that all immigrant groups (even those who are also Black) look down on African Americans. They consistently seem to be held at the bottom....Even other Africans seem to look down on African Americans. In a clapped out mill town near Boston, where major industries have been downsizing, a multi-racial and multi-faith group of ministers started a community group to deal with jobs for young and other unemployed people. They started a machinist training course as a path into jobs at the remaining large plant in the area. Recognizing that the plant's requirement of 10th grade Math and English levels was keeping out immigrants, they started an ESL class which then enabled immigrants (most Latino) to come into the machinist training class. The program has become more staff-driven and less grassroots-based but has clearly been successful in making decently paid jobs accessible to in inner-city immigrants. But it has not managed to bring in enough African Americans. Reasons may include the ensnaring of Black youth in the prison-industrial complex—even some children of current plant workers have been iced by a rule barring those convicted of felonies in the last seven years—and some general demoralization among African-American youth, as well as outreach problems.

A comrade from Los Angeles writes:

In LA, oppressed nationalities and immigrants are concentrated in all of the low-income service and manufacturing jobs. Our labor work is focused on the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and a local of mostly childcare workers in private non-profits. They are mostly Latina immigrants, Chicana and Afro-American. Low income and dignity on the job are the main issues. In California, we have had plenty of opportunities to do alliance building due to the many anti-minority and anti-immigrant legislative initiatives that sees to grow in this state. We raise these issues within both labor and community forums and request support and resources for our campaigns. We are often able to draw people and money to our causes. A newspaper would really help in terms of agit/prop around these issues.

The major conflict throughout LA with regard to the national question is the clash between Latina/os and African Americans. The biggest conflict/potential is the cultural limitations (cold war warrior closed mentality) of the union movement and simultaneously the requirements of immigrant organizing, i.e., union/community/legal coalition or organization. We are attempting to build an alternative labor/community organization with former August 29th Movement (ATM), League of Revolutionary Struggle(LRS) and independent Marxists. This alternative could allow us to fully utilize community resources and traditional ties with traditional union movement. Workers are suffering the most adverse effects of globalization in medium to light manufacturing, specifically the garment industry and service, e.g., childcare workers, and some parts of the informal sector, e.g., domestic workers.

North Carolina comrades report:

North Carolina has a rapidly growing Latino community, both in major cities like Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro and Durham but also in rural communities in Eastern and Western parts of the state. The urban work is in construction, landscaping, service, restaurants, and the rural in agriculture and poultry processing. The immigrants are predominately Mexicans but include other Central Americans, with a small middle class from South America. There is heavy job competition with low-wage African American workers. The immigrant workers are frequently subject to robberies and other thefts. Although there is some conflict in the communities, the situation is not yet critical. Black Workers for Justice and United Electrical Workers Local 150 and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee are building an African American/Latino alliance. We are circulating, both here and internationally, a petition for amnesty and labor rights for immigrant workers.

Handling the Contradiction

In this discussion we have placed a heavy emphasis on the conflict among workers of color—in prison and street violence, and in competition for housing, employment, government programs and other resources (through school boards and local elected office)—rather than the deeper, underlying contradictions between workers of color and white workers. Without unified leadership from workers of color, there can be no strategic alliance of the working class and oppressed nationalities. If such divisions between workers of color become sharper, it will be easier for white workers to shirk their responsibility of standing in solidarity with their co-workers of color and, instead, rest unthinking in the comfort of white privilege.

Comrades have tried various tactics for building ties between immigrant workers, U.S.-born workers—both oppressed nationality and white depending on local conditions—and labor unions. These include activity in Jobs with Justice; working with immigrant workers centers which are often plagued by problems of domination by one person and difficulties in sustaining an organizing orientation as opposed to service and support group orientation; working in electoral coalitions; starting union-community coalitions around job creation for minorities (Boston area) or around organizing unorganized immigrant workers (Virginia). Community-based alliances against police brutality and other common issues also show promise in some cities. One lesson from work with the unions is that strong, autonomous community-based organizations of working class immigrants or African Americans are necessary to insure that unions serve these workers' real interests and, just on a pragmatic level, are sufficiently attuned to the cultures and needs of these workers to be effective at organizing them.

At another level, this really emphasizes the importance of the left pole projects in the movements of oppressed nationalities. These can unite forces who clearly see the need for unity among oppressed nationalities, and more, that a working class stance is the most solid foundation for building such unity. Conservative and middle forces in the national movements will invariably tend to a my-nationality-first approach, and the petty bourgeoisies are especially prone to fan the flames of discord in order to enhance their own class interests.

PART II: THE STATE OF PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS AND SOCIALIST FORCES IN THE US

Some basic, positive trends among the people's forces have continued to develop since the last Congress. Compared to three years ago, it's more apparent that the organized right offensive represented by the Reagan years has peaked, at least for now. Yet mainstream Democratic Party politics, as represented by Al Gore and allied centrists, tilts more to the right than at any time at least since Truman.

Beset by and more conscious of global conditions, broader mass resistance has begun to emerge. Signs of change also exist among oppressed nationality forces, such as the recent hints of openness by the Nation of Islam toward Orthodox Muslims and other forces, and greater involvement of Black, Latino and Asian American masses in struggles against police brutality and in Mumia support work.

THE LABOR MOVEMENT...

In the national AFL-CIO, President John Sweeney's New Voices coalition is fraught with tensions due to several factors and faces a possible right-wing challenge to its national dominance. Its promising beginnings, with the "America Needs a Raise" campaign and the victory of the Teamsters in the UPS strike, began to fade away as it showed no compelling sense of mission. Then Ron Carey, the Teamsters president and former insurgent who led the UPS strike (and a stalwart of New Voices), was subject to financial investigations. The rightist, old guard James Hoffa Jr. captured the Teamster presidency in the next elections.

While New Voices, after years of pathbreaking efforts by labor leftists around Central America and South Africa, did break the iron grip of Cold War, old-style business unionism, it has not broken with the Democratic Party around many issues, both domestic and international. Even when the New Voices leadership has opposed aspects of the Democrats' neo-liberal agenda, the break isn't clean and it sometimes goes to the right rather than left, as in the racist, imperialist stereotyping of China during the recent trade debate. While opposing Most Favored Nation trading status for China, Sweeney broadly endorsed the Clinton Administration's free trade/WTO agenda, and declared support for Al Gore's presidential campaign way early.

This has left an opening for right-wing populism, especially from the manufacturing unions and others such as the above-mentioned Teamsters that are hard hit by the transfer of jobs overseas and have tended historically toward protectionist and anti-immigrant approaches. The best example of this trend is Hoffa Jr.'s having right-wing xenophobe Pat Buchanan speak at the A16-week demo against most favored nation status for China. Now the Teamsters leadership and other rightists in the AFL-CIO are among the loudest voices calling for independent political action.

The Sweeney leadership has also reversed the AFL-CIO's historic stance toward undocumented immigrant workers and is supporting their right to organize rather than calling for stricter enforcement of laws against them. Mostly this is a pragmatic response to reality: 13% of the work force is foreign-born. In Los Angeles, 70% of manufacturing workers are Latino immigrants, 90% of them undocumented. Unions like the Service Employees International (SEIU) and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) have made breakthroughs in organizing immigrant janitors, waiters and other service workers in the immobile sector—businesses like fancy hotels and restaurants, convention centers and casinos that, by their very nature, can't just move overseas for cheaper labor. These unions pushed for the policy change. But New Voices has not yet brought along the rank and file through an effective educational campaign to challenge old prejudices, and this policy switch is very resented in unions such as the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers.

This highlights a more fundamental contradiction in the New Voices approach. On the one hand, it focuses on organizing (but what kind of organizing?) and opposes some clearly right-wing tendencies; it recognizes that the working class is browner and more female and supports both some changes in union leadership composition and some linkages with social movements. On the other hand, it fears real workers' power, or at least has no vision and strategy for achieving it and therefore is limited in its effectiveness, both in mobilizing current union members around progressive demands and initiatives, and in winning new members through organizing campaigns. Despite the resources poured into organizing, the historic decline in the proportion of the work force that is unionized has only begun to reverse. 1998 was the first year that union density didn't drop in manufacturing. In the first six months of 1999, the AFL-CIO lost 713 NLRB elections, a loss rate of 48.4%. Many factors certainly contribute to this. Downsizing, subcontracting and contingent jobs have made workers insecure. Neo-liberalism has eroded acceptable standards of employment. And the workers most open to organizing don't match the demographics of organizers and union leadership, and have needs and demands around national oppression.

But the danger we face is that right-wing forces in the AFL-CIO may coalesce, with ideological leadership from the red-baiting, anti-social movement American Federation of Teachers as well as the manufacturing union bureaucracies, and cut off the historic opening for leftists that New Voices has represented. This danger, and the opportunity presented by the mass resistance to imperialist globalization manifested in the Seattle and D.C. actions, make the conscious building of a labor left extremely urgent at this time.

The labor left should not expect New Voices officials to be leftists, because they're not, but would probably offer critical support to them the extent that they still chart a path beyond Cold War business unionism. At the same time, the labor left should work practically and theoretically to develop and promote its own vision for what many call social justice unionism.

...AND THE LABOR LEFT

We can define the labor left as active rank-and-file workers, union staff and elected union leadership who self-identify as progressive or anti-capitalist, who put forward anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal and pro-poorer sector approaches and issues in labor struggles, and who try to organize fellow workers to struggle militantly. For the past twenty years, the labor left has shown three general tendencies: (1) try to influence the bureaucracy from within; (2) work within organizations such as the Labor Party or Jobs with Justice that focus on particular issues for labor; or (3) oppose everything the union bureaucracy does. Smaller groups with which our comrades are associated, such as Black Workers for Justice and Labor Notes magazine, have a more coherent critique and vision but do not constitute a major trend at the same level. However, they do embody some of the approaches that an effective labor left would need to adopt.

Recently, some comrades, along with other labor activists, have been working to convene an initial meeting of labor leftists from diverse backgrounds to discuss their historic tasks in this period. The hope is that they can come to some agreement on a vision of a class-struggle, anti-white supremacist labor movement—one that can seriously contend with capital—and on some initial direction and projects for working together to reshape the labor movement in this direction. Some tasks for the labor left would include: building solidarity with the movements of other oppressed people (thereby also transforming the unions' role in communities and increasing union support of the demands of oppressed nationalities); sharing experiences among different sectors and trades within the labor movement itself (to overcome the atomization of workers); pushing unions to organize immigrants and the South and empower women; building member control of unions in all its gender, racial and ethnic dimensions and in the relationships of union members to the union, and of union leadership and staff to the members.

To build such social justice unionism, labor leftists must engage together in both theoretical work and practical struggle and projects that begin articulating the social mission and transformation of the labor movement. Examples of this might include developing a position on the trade debate and educating around it, and using vehicles like the solidarity schools initiated by the New Directions caucus in the United Auto Workers to develop the leadership capacity of rank-and-file activists.

Currently, FRSO has relatively few labor concentrations in the classic sense. More comrades are scattered around the country among rank-and-file, staff and elected leadership positions in locals, internationals and central offices. If we are able to recruit more students and young people who are willing to re-locate, strategic workplace or sector concentration might become a possibility and should be given serious consideration in terms of dynamic sectors, oppressed nationality composition, etc. For now, people who can move should still think South.

COMMUNITY-BASED POORER SECTOR ORGANIZING

There is a ton of community organizing going on around many issues—from neighborhood block associations trying to protect housing from business development, tenants struggling to maintain affordable housing, struggles to stop toxic dumping, fights for better transportation in inner city neighborhoods, living wage campaigns, parents fighting high stakes testing in public schools, women protesting attacks on reproductive rights, battles against racist profiling and police brutality, attempts to stop the right wing from criminalizing youth of color.

While so far these have been mostly defensive battles, people have not stood idly by as their neighborhoods and families have been systematically kicked to the curb. Many of the neighborhood struggles have been led by women. They have taken the lead in particular in struggles for environmental justice. Perhaps it is because women have always taken responsibility for the health of their children, and caring for children suffering and dying from lead poisoning, cancer, or asthma fuels their anger.

A comrade from Boston was a leader in Mothers Against the Asphalt Plant, which brought together black mothers from Roxbury and white mothers from South Boston—enemies in the busing struggles of 20 years ago—now united to protect their children from a company intent on profiting from spewing particulate matter in their direction. As the South Africans said, "When you've touched a woman you've touched a rock." The mothers wouldn't budge—and stopped the plant! With the asthma epidemic, women of color got tired of being told that their kids had asthma because they didn't know how to vacuum properly—shit, poor women are the vacuuming experts, having kept all those rich folks houses clean all these year! It is women, not public health experts, who figured out that waste incinerators and diesel buses idling in their neighborhoods were the problem, and that they too could demand, "not in our back yard either!"

So the traditional environmental movement has had to make way for the folks. It's not just the spotted owl out in the remains of the North American rain forest that's an endangered species. Urban folks living in environments of cement and asphalt cubicles are also endangered. There is a growing divide between the big formal environmental organizations like Sierra Club and the grassroots-based ones like SEAC (Student Environmental Action Coalition), Earth First, and smaller indigenous neighborhood groups of color. (The direct action white student environmental activists have been an important contributory factor to the new movement; their environmentalism has taken them to an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist analysis). But there is also still a divide between those white student activists and the people in the community next door—once again, we can play a role in directing them to notice the environmental degradation not just of the global South, but of the South of their own cities.

But the vast bulk of community organizing is not spontaneous, as it once was. It is done by non-profit organizations, with foundation backing. It is good that there are more foundations willing to fund organizing; there are many progressives who've penetrated the foundation world. However, the bad news is that tying your apron strings to a foundation can be deadly. A major Catholic funder issued a directive to all its grantees saying they could no longer talk about—much less work on—issues related to gay or reproductive rights.

And the organizing model that is the darling of funders is the Alinsky style of organizing, taught by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) and practiced by such groups as the Interfaith Organizations and ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), to name two national efforts. In this model, outside organizers are brought in and follow a recipe that can be applied by people of any political stripe: identify an issue, find a winnable objective, select a target, and use direct action techniques they teach you.

This model can produce results, but it's not the only way to organize, nor the best. It has been criticized particularly by organizers of color, and particularly women organizers of color. (CTWO, the Center for Third World Organizing, has a great pamphlet called "We are the Ones We've Been Waiting For" by and for women of color organizers.) Alinskyan organizing places little importance on the cultures and histories of resistance in particular communities. What we consider to be legitimate struggles for the liberation of oppressed nations, most Alinskyan organizing would label " divisive identity politics."

Further, there is a need not just for techniques, but for analysis, and for taking on issues where we might not win all of our demands in the short-term. And the Alinskyan emphasis on outside, professional organizers actually undermines the development of indigenous leadership, of advanced activists rather than just paper members of Alinskyan-led groups. Often a small, local group initiating an organizing campaign will find this kind of foundation-funded CBO coming into their community and sucking up all the publicity and funding.

THE LESBIAN/GAY/BISEXUAL/TRANSGENDER MOVEMENT

The rightward shift in U.S. politics has had its impact on the LGBT movement, though significant counter-trends are now surfacing. It has led not only more conservative elements, but also moderate and liberal forces to dismiss the left (both within and outside of the LGBT community) as irrelevant, even though just about everyone would admit that in the beginning gay liberation movement was a leftist movement. In addition, superficial success in a variety of areas of US life has led an increasingly white, middle class-dominated political movement into a dash towards the mainstream, and this has exacerbated class and race differences within the community.

While most (but not all) across the political spectrum in the LGBT movement give lip service to the politics of "inclusion" the reality is that the concerns of working class and LGBT people of color are left in the dust of the stampede toward the mainstream.

One notable and encouraging development that has successfully bucked the overall trend is the growing organization of LGBT labor activists. Pride At Work, AFL-CIO was founded in 1994, driven primarily by LGBT leftist labor activists, and has since seen steady growth. Organizing had gone on for several years, with support from the more progressive unions in the AFL-CIO. Three years ago, PAW officially affiliated with the AFL-CIO. This also speaks to positive changes within the labor movement. However, even formations such as PAW are not without their own internal contradictions. Tensions exist between leftists and more liberal minded elements within PAW were evident around the 2000 elections, in the struggle between Gore supporters and those who desire to push labor, the LGBT community and other social justice movements toward independent politics.

Socialists and all progressives should enthusiastically support PAW, as it poses a challenge to homophobia within the labor movement, and raises worker and class issues within the LGBT community. Those who seek to challenge white supremacy will find many allies here, and there is a recognition of the need to make serious inroads among LGBT workers of color. As with the "straight" organized labor movement, this fledgling organization is weakest in the South.

AIDS remains a challenge to the LGBT movement. The center of the epidemic has shifted from gay white men to gay men of color, and to straight intravenous drug users and their sexual partners, with people of color hugely over-represented. The predominantly gay, male, middle-class-led AIDS movement has declined as many people perceive the crisis is over because of the dramatic drop in death rates as a result of use of the triple anti-HIV drug therapies that have been won by the movement. While the AIDS death rate dropped by 80%, the crisis is still not over even though it has attenuated. Some ACT UP chapters have survived and are focusing much of their efforts on getting these life extending treatments to Africa where 24 million people are infected with HIV and most are without access to these expensive treatments.

ACT UP and the Health GAP Coalition forced the Clinton/Gore administration to stop their attacks on African countries like South Africa which passed legislation permitting generic production of patented AIDS drugs under the "compulsory licensing" clause of the TRIPPS treaty. Al Gore led the attack on the South African government until AIDS activists in the US launched a counter attack by disrupting his campaign appearances for five months at the beginning of his bid for the presidency.

The compulsory licensing provision allows an exemption from the intellectual property rules of the treaty during health crises. Clinton and Gore, however, demanded higher standards and acted as the watch dogs of the pharmaceutical industry until they themselves came under attack. Generic anti-AIDS triple drug therapies could be manufactured for as little as $200/person/year if manufactured in sufficient scale. In the US the same combination would cost about $9000. These low prices are a threat to the name brand drug industry because they reveal the enormous price gouging that is standard business practice today and generates super-profits for the huge and powerful pharmaceutical industry.

More remains to be done as the Clinton/Gore administration continues to attack Asian and South American countries attempting to save the lives of their people. At this time a campaign of international solidarity could make the difference between life and death not only for the 30 million people living with HIV/AIDS world wide, but also the difference between development and collapse in many countries in Africa. The infection rate of South African youth between the ages of 18-24 is approaching 50%! Additionally Third World debt remains an enormous obstacle to health care spending in poor nations. It is important that all progressives support the campaign for generic production of AIDS drugs, cancellation of Third World debt and international aid (not loans) to help build local African pharmaceutical plants to produce the drugs.

THE NEW MOVEMENTS

Significantly, the new phase of capitalist globalization has evoked a growing response among students and young people. (See more on student movement below.) The response is economic, political and cultural, as the historically wide gap in income and wealth in the US limits access to housing, job security, reasonable public services and benefits, respect for democratic rights on the job and in communities of color. Add in revulsion at the devastation of the environment and an unending succession of wars and crimes against humanity.

The new movements have two emerging features which were not present for most of the '80s and '90s: 1) a mass base with an interest in alternatives to capitalism and white supremacy; and 2) a convergence of various forces on the left around a common program, as seen in the issues above.

Key targets and issues for newer activists have included: police abuse especially of Black, Latino, Asian and other immigrant communities; the criminalization and daily brutalization of oppressed nationality youth, harsher penalties for youth and non-violent offenders, and the death penalty; environmental racism, for example incinerators and waste facilities in urban communities of color; sweatshops locally and globally; and the International Monetary Bank, World Bank, World Trade Organization and other international imperialist institutions. Other important focuses have been organizing immigrant workers either directly or indirectly, by building community support (Korean Immigrant Workers' Advocates in LA); and providing after-school, bilingual and leadership development programs for oppressed nationality youth. Though originating in the 70s, the movements of people with disabilities maintain their militant edge, targeting job discrimination, slave wages and lack of access to education and physical facilities.

This wave of resistance seems broad and sure enough to characterize as a new movement. Compared to the early SDS and SNCC generation, the current youthful generation seems more sophisticated in its understanding of capitalism and its democratic pretensions. Many broken heads and promises later, the new civil disobedience/direct action slogan, "This is what democracy looks like" compares well with the liberal-radical participatory democracy slogans of the early sixties. (Democracy in the direct action-oriented sectors still looks too white, but the efforts by post-Seattle forces to incorporate prison-industrial complex issues and build alliances with people of color groups for protests at the Republican and Democratic conventions are significant breakthroughs.) A new sort of idealism, anti-racism, anti-heterosexism, anti-capitalism, anarchism and radical environmentalism all mix together without, as yet, strong presence of Marxism or revolutionary socialism. In addition, among oppressed nationality activists, a new revolutionary nationalism has also begun to gain ground. For Chicanos and Latinos, for example, important counter-hegemonic trends are humanism and indigenous ideals about communalism.

The protests at the April 2000 World Bank meeting and the Republican and Democratic conventions have spurred two developments that hold potential. One is a coalescence of some of the revolutionary collectives of young people of color—SLAM (Student Liberation Action Movement) at New York's City University, CAAAV-Organizing Asian Communities in NYC, SOUL (Students Organizing for Unity and Liberation) in Boston, and STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) in the Bay Area—into a network with a list-serve and issue discussions, called The Next Movement. The second is a budding relationship between some of the these groups (along with the predominantly Black and Latino Philadelphia ACT-UP) and the white and ideologically anarchist-flavored anti-globalization forces in the Direct Action Network on the East Coast. They worked together to organize a day of protests against the Criminal Injustice System at the Republican Convention. While the action was mixed in its success, some good working relationships and trust developed and some young white activists deepened their understanding of racism/white supremacy and their commitment to fight it.

In part, the greater political sophistication of today's rising generation reflects the spread of some lessons learned from the examples of the sixties generation and its successors. In particular, the impact of the women's movement and the gay and lesbian movement (pre-cursor to the LGBT movement) are obvious. Many groups of younger activists incorporate a principle around LGBT inclusion in most things they say and write, and even though there usually are "out" LGBT young people in the mix, they don't have to bring it up themselves. Many of the younger men consciously ask for feedback around male power dynamics. Often, newer activists, both women and men, promote a culture that grew out of the women's liberation movement, and it shows up frequently in the content and process of their meetings: more openness and personal sharing, greater understanding that personal histories influence political behavior, more use of popular education methods, working to combat male chauvinist behavior by examining and changing those behaviors, not just sitting around and talking about the "woman question." Women are no longer the support staff; they are leaders too.

THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT

Trends described in the section on immigrants and oppressed nationalities have weakened the fighting capacity of the Black masses. These include the decline of stable industrial jobs available to African Americans, shrinkage of the public sector which has historically provided both an employment niche for African Americans and much-needed revenue for Black communities, deteriorated public schools and high levels of imprisonment. This has promoted some right-wing nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and scapegoating of immigrants. Yet there are also promising trends such as: proliferating fightbacks against police abuse, racial profiling and environmental racism; broader mass involvement in the struggle for Mumia's freedom and against the prison industrial complex; and possibly greater openness by the Nation of Islam to alliance with other forces in Black communities.

FRSO's common focus has been in uniting with those who set out to establish the Black Radical Congress as a vehicle for Black radicals to come together and project an internationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist perspective and practice that can help build and shape the broader mass struggles of Black peoples in the U.S. The state of the BRC varies from city to city. In general, local organizing committees have been difficult to sustain because many of the most experienced activists have long-standing commitments to local mass organizations, while other veterans may have been working as loners for a long time. In the East Bay of California, where the l.o.c. has a relatively strong steering committee of people from different organizations, it provides opinions from the left that the press has come to rely on, and is developing a press strategy. There is still a tension between the Steering Committee taking up issues and constituent groups wanting to do their own thing and someone is needed to anchor the work more firmly. Each city needs a few people whose work is just—or at least primarily—the BRC, but this is easier said than done.

The 2000 regional meeting of the BRC decided on a national focus of "Education, Not Incarceration/Fight the Police State." For the BRC to thrive on a national level, other conscious left groups need to make a commitment to supporting it. It needs a functioning national executive body that can act with appropriate speed, because without this, the broader coordinating body and membership become demoralized. In its current state, BRC is not well developed enough to help guide and focus the work of youth. It should support them in their work, particularly if it is under the rubric of the Freedom Agenda, and help them set up their own committees if necessary.

In spite of its many shortcomings, the Black Radical Congress really offers a united front of the Black left and a national and international perspective on critical issues facing Black people in the U.S. and across the globe. Without it and the establishment of a viable left pole, the continuing drift to the right brought on by globalization will lead to more attacks on the Black masses, more setbacks and the consolidation of a police state.

THE CHICAN@ NATIONAL MOVEMENT

The Chican@ liberation struggle currently lacks the coherence of a movement that has a shared vision and is directed towards a common goal. In place of a conscious movement, it takes the form instead of many different, mostly localized battles around a wide range of issues, including land issues, bilingual education, union rights, immigration, welfare rights, police brutality, affirmative action, and others. Most of these struggles are defensive, i.e., aimed at warding off efforts to further restrict Chican@/Mexican@ rights or other gains won in earlier days of the struggle. Most of these struggles are led largely by middle forces (from the middle and upper classes) such as lawyers, elected officials, heads of social service agencies, union officials, academics, etc. There continues to be a noticeable absence of working class, progressive, much less revolutionary leadership to most of these fights or campaigns.

Fortunately, there are exceptions out there. In several recent educational rights or anti-prison struggles, radicalized Chican@ youth are playing a major, and often, leading role. This includes groups like Olin in Northern California, and Youth Organizing Communities in Los Angeles. These groups both have a base among working class Chican@s and are explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist in their politics. Both groups have led walkouts and mass actions involving thousands of working class youth, and represent a positive ray of light towards reconstructing a Chican@ Movement.

The current strength of the Chican@ struggle is the number and variety of struggles: Justice for Janitors in a number of areas, United Farm Workers, youth groups in California, and a whole range of left and revolutionary cultural activists (Ozomatli, Quetzal, Quinto Sol, Culture Clash, Aztlán Underground, Taco Shop Poets, and many others). But it is also a reflection of weakness in that the struggles continue to be primarily fragmented, localized, and lacking a clear sense of long-term direction or vision. As we have noted in other documents, the powerful slogan of Chicano Power, rooted largely in the working class and connoting a real challenge to the capitalist system, has been largely replaced by the notion of Hispanic Empowerment, rooted largely in the middle and upper classes, with the narrow goal of carving out a piece of the corporate pie for those classes. With such a weak ideological and political orientation it is no wonder that the response of the Chican@ masses to the political and economic attacks against them has been relatively weak.

The Decline of the Left

Two important factors have contributed to the current situation in the Chicano@ struggle: the ascendancy of the middle forces and the decline of the Left.

The last decade has seen the emergence of the Chican@ bourgeoisie as a much more powerful class. This sector is now larger, richer, with many more connections to the "system" and with a much clearer sense of its own vision and goals, than other sectors of the movement, particularly the Left. While most sectors of the Chicano@ bourgeoisie are, to a degree, victims of national oppression and remain part of the united front, a small sector has become comprador (mejor, vendido) bourgeoisie, which has, in many ways become integrated into the ruling class (the clearest examples being folks like Henry Cisneros, Luis Caldera). They have thrown in their lot with our class enemy.

It is important for revolutionaries to analyze the Chican@ capitalist class carefully, so that we can, strategically and in terms of specific struggles, distinguish friends from enemies. While certain tactical alliances with the compradors may be possible, they are now with the enemy and this has important implications for the class struggle within the Chicano national liberation struggle. More so, since the role of the vendido class has not been widely and clearly exposed to the masses. Longer-term alliance is possible with the national bourgeoisie, although at this time, in the absence of a strong mass movement, this sector too has, by and large, thrown in its lot with free markets and Hispanic enterprise (capitalism). We must make a similar analysis of the Chican@ petit bourgeoisie.

The decline of the Left in general, and the Chican@ Left in particular, continues to have a major ideological and political impact on the struggle. As we noted in "Crisis in the Chican@ Movement": "[The Left] articulated the demand for Chicano Power as a cogent and popular way to express the long-standing demand of our people for land, some form of genuine self-government, and control over the basic institutions that affect our lives…." With leadership and impetus from the Left wing, the Movement began to open many of the social, political, educational and economic doors that had been locked against La Raza. Affirmative action, minority business programs, greater access to higher education, greater electoral access, government appointments, an expansion of social programs, a tremendous cultural renaissance—all of these are a product of those times [and Left leadership or influence]."

During the last several years we have seen the impact of the new alignment of social forces. In the various California state ballot initiative battles (Propositions 184, 187, 209, 227, 21) which attacked immigrant rights, as well as the rights of other oppressed nationalities—tremendous mass energy and initiative was displayed as hundreds of thousands of working class Chican@s/Latin@s marched and demonstrated and engaged in other forms of mass protest. But the political character of these efforts was largely determined by the middle forces, who endeavored to limit or even eliminate mass protest (in the case of Proposition 187), as well as to offer the narrowest of political challenges (no reference to racism in the fight to save affirmative action, no reference to language rights or the effectiveness of bilingual education in the fight to save that program). In the case of the so-called "crime initiatives"—propositions 184 and 21, the middle forces virtually sat out the struggle, providing no resources or support for the campaigns against these initiatives.

Other Trends in the Chican@ Movement

The nationalists continue as a small, but not insignificant force in the current Chican@ struggle. Their efforts are focused among youth, and, most recently, in the struggle against the prison-industrial complex. But these forces seem to have little impact in the struggles around the anti-immigrant propositions, or in key labor struggles such as Justice for Janitors or the farm workers. Nevertheless, without any other clear Left alternative offering a clear ideological line, a vision of self-determination and socialism, and able to provide leadership to key struggles, the nationalists will continue to attract and influence some youth and students who are sick and tired of the lame leadership of the middle forces.

Another important new trend is what we could call Los Indigenistas. This trend is mostly cultural nationalist and advocates a return to indigenous cultural values as the main form of resistance to Eurocentric domination. They are mostly cultural groups and attract a fair number of young people who are seeking a clear and strong form of national identity, especially in the face of the consistent attacks on Chican@ language and culture from the right wing. Unfortunately, many of these groups believe that organizing political struggle or building social movements is a waste of time, and that the focus of activists should be on reclaiming our Indian identity and languages. There are also some problems with sectarianism, sexism and homophobia within this trend.

The New Raza Left

Since our last Congress, FRSO spearheaded a California-based effort to create a Left alternative in the Chican@ struggle. This effort is called the New Raza Left, and was inspired by both the need for a challenge to the leadership of the middle forces, and by the success of the Black Radical Congress. This effort began in 1998 and eventually created a network with groupings in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Jose/Hollister. Initially, it attracted numbers of young activists, academics, and veteran@s from a diverse range of struggles and beliefs (communist, social democrat, nationalist, indigenista, radical feminist). Within a relatively short period of time it developed a strong political statement of principles, and a goal of organizing a Southwest-wide conference to create a real Left alternative. Unfortunately, because NRL never developed a consistent leadership core, it was unable to sustain its momentum and follow through on its decisions. It began to drift, its effort became almost totally localized, and soon many of its activists left. Today the NRL consists of one active chapter in Los Angeles, and individuals in Northern California who continue to identify with it, and have begun efforts to rebuild it in Northern California.

The California Chican@ student movement has been in a relatively prolonged slump since the demise of the LRS, which played a major role in creating strong MEChA chapters and an activist statewide network. But individual campuses continue to organize, especially in response to the cuts in affirmative action and ethnic studies programs, and MEChA continues to meet as a statewide group. The real action, though, seems to be a the high school level, with groups like Olin and Youth Organizing Communities, both of which are majority Chican@/Latin@ but multiracial in character.

ASIAN AMERICAN MOVEMENTS

The growing size of the Asian population in the U.S. means that they are seen as a growing force with great potential, both by the ruling class and by progressive activists. They have been here long enough and have been demanding equality long enough so that exoticisation and marginalization are not so easy. Certainly Clinton paid attention to Asians—to the funds that could be raised! The appointment of Asians at the national level such as Bill Lan Lee also has raised the Asian profile; even Bush has got a couple tokens in his cabinet. (Bananas—yellow on the outside, white on the inside.)

However, Asians are also seen as convenient targets of attack. Buddhist nuns, of all people, were singled out for illegal fundraising, as if Asians were the main problem in campaign financing. Progressives have also fallen into anti-Asian stereotyping—for example, when labor targeted China as the main problem at the DC rally against the WTO in spring, 2000. Their use of anti-Chinese AND anti-communist stereotypes set back relations between white and Asian labor.

Generational differences

There are intense inter-generational contradictions between parents and their children, and different possibilities for radical organizing. Parents do not define themselves as "Asian American," they remain Chinese, Vietnamese, Bangladeshi, whatever. Of those who have immigrated as adults from China and Southeast Asia, many tend to be anti-Communist, as we saw in the California Vietnamese community when a shopkeeper was attacked for putting up a poster of Ho Chi Minh. On the other hand, many come from histories of radical activism back home; Miriam Ching Louie has a new book on immigrant women workers, in which she shows that many were deeply involved in both workplace and political struggles. Immigrant Asians from China and Southeast Asia will fight for their rights, but they are unlikely to be won over to revolutionary socialism in the short term.

Smaller in numbers, Pilipinos and South Asians are more likely to come from anti-capitalist perspectives and struggles. Pacific Islanders do not all come willingly into the category "Asian/Pacific Islander" (API). Native Hawaiians, for example, feel more kinship to indigenous peoples, and Samoans in the US often feel more at home in the African American community. Because there are so many API nationalities within US borders with so many different histories both back home and here, it is important not to generalize, since those homeland experiences, length of time on the mainland, racial/ethnic demographics and relations of the particular part of the country in which you live, all make a difference to Asian identify.

Children of immigrants or those who came at an early age try to escape the tight parental rule of Asian culture, and to find their place in the US. Rejecting homophobia and male domination, there are numerous organizations of Asian sisters, Asian LGBTs, and groups organizing against domestic violence. But Asians cannot simply become "American." Experiencing racism, many become politicized and identify as Asian-American or API-American, and get active around issues like environmental justice, workers rights, and criminal injustice. They want to work and hang out with other Asians and to assert API identities. There is a growing radical strand, especially on campuses and even in high schools, with renewed interest in learning about API revolutionary history, as well as the history of the Black Liberation Movement, and with deepening their understanding through participation in struggles against the criminal injustice system and for immigrant rights, workplace rights, anti corporate globalization. The strong presence of young Asians at Critical Resistance East demonstrated their desire to join with other oppressed nationality people to oppose the prison industrial complex and to draw out its implications for API's. A new generation of API radicals is in rapid formation.

New organizations of the API working class have formed, such as the Korean Immigrant Workers' Association, the Pilipino Workers Center, the Thai Workers' Center, Asian Immigrant Women's Association, and others. These are critical components of developing an independent working class current within the multinational working class and the API national movements. More Asians are becoming organizers both in the community and in the labor movement.

In 1998, there was an effort to rebuild a unified left pole in the API movement by convening the Asian Left Forum (ALF). The "old" Asian left, is different from the African American left. It is newer, smaller, more diverse, and has few leaders that are recognized as such by large numbers of Asian activists or by others on the left, which made the task of calling people together for the ALF different from calling for a Black Radical Congress or New Raza Left. There are still many left activists from 20 and 30 years ago, but they work and act in pockets, some of that due to the remnants of old sectarian struggles. While the first gathering was a step forward and a second ALF in 2000 was also positive in that it was a gathering of, by, and for the next generation of leftists, the ALF has not yet been able to unify activists into a strong formation that can act and speak for the left wing of the API movement.

STUDENT MOVEMENTS

We use this term to refer principally to the college- and university-based movements which can include both undergraduates and graduate students. We use the term "post-student" to refer to people who have recently left college or university but are not yet clearly positioned in another social sector such as labor. Some of the newer activists we mentioned earlier are post-student. When we speak of "youth," we generally mean young people who have not (yet) been to college: workers under 25 years of age, young people in high school, etc. This section is about student activism.

Globalization has affected universities and student activism by forging ever deeper corporate ties to higher education. In public universities around the country, we are witnessing the steady abandonment of a "public mission" ideology, replaced by a business model that eliminates gains of the past—such as ethnic studies programs—while putting great tuition burdens on students. This money crunch, which hits oppressed nationality students the hardest, limits both who gets into school and who is able to squeeze in activism between classes and their after-school jobs. It seems to be mostly a period of individual activists, and occasionally small collectives, often with significant leadership by older/grad students and activists who have recently graduated. Another general observation is that many of the recent flare-ups—such as the anti-sweatshop sit-ins in support of the Workers Rights Consortium over the industry-backed Fair Labor Alliance—to some degree remind veteran activists of the fight over the Sullivan Principles during the anti-apartheid divestment movement.

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) was the biggest thing during the 1999-2000 academic year. From a small beginning, it spread rapidly to many, many campuses. (SLACs—Student-Labor Action Coalitions—which peaked in 1998, largely faded or were swamped by USAS.) The concrete goals of the movement are small demands for reform—essentially placing dinky chains on capital—but any changes are a big step forward. And capital has begun to fight back. For example, Nike saw fit to punish the University of Oregon (CEO Phil Knight's alma mater) for signing onto the Workers Rights Consortium by withdrawing a planned $30 million donation.

The question of "What next?" looms for this sector of the movement. Fighting domestic sweatshops? Making explicit ties to other fights, such as the living wage? While labor unions (especially in the manufacturing sector) have been active backers of USAS, a series of promising-sounding labor-student meetings initiated by the Steel Workers turned out to be only an attempt to enlist student activists in the fight against most-favored-nation status for China.

Anti-sweatshop work has been driven by at least some degree of class awareness (though for many activists it's not so much of their own class standing as of the class standing of the bottom rung of workers.) The movement has a classic narrow focus, a movement mostly unto itself, but through the struggle students have become aware of broader-reaching ideas. The movement leadership and advanced have a pretty good sense of the appropriate role for "first world" (mostly white) student activists. On the other hand, among the broader membership—especially on less militant campuses—there is a noticeable dose of paternalism. Some members, pulled in solely by the motion, lack even a left-liberal analysis. They utilize clumsy tactics and artificially separate domestic issues from international ones.

The international "hot spots" that have gotten student attention include some response to the Iraq sanctions and bombing, though this motion has been mostly citywide and not campus-based. In addition, we have seen some new motion around Colombia. The movement against Burma's dictatorship is not what it was a few years ago, but still exists. There were short-lived demonstrations around the UNAM strike in Mexico, and students continue to be involved in Zapatista-solidarity projects, but not through student formations. Much of any activism with an international, anti-imperialist flavor has recently expressed itself through the IMF/WTO actions in Seattle and Washington, D.C. These two events drew large numbers of mostly-white students. Although students made up the majority in D.C., the experienced direct action cores were primarily post-student.

Oppressed Nationality Student Groups

Among oppressed nationalities on campuses, there are signs of more separation and antagonistic relations, though various struggles to defend ethnic studies and affirmative action seem to buck this trend. Overall most oppressed nationality student groupings have retreated into themselves, with little drawing them to one another. It is common to see African students focus more on their individual nation states, as opposed to pan-Africanism.

A noteworthy exception has been California, where a steady drumbeat of racist statewide ballot initiatives—to ban affirmative action, to promote English only, to criminalize youth—has produced massive resistance. Alliances and people of color-led formations have characterized the movement, especially on campus. MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), mainly based in the Southwest, has been more lively in recent years, and Pilipino student activism focused on cultural issues and some support for the struggle at home is also a presence.

And in the fight against ethnic studies cutbacks at one campus in the South, there was an ability to project a broad call (demanding African American, Asian American, and Latino studies) if not build working organizational relations. It should be noted that such struggles tend to be defensive in nature and very particular to each school.

Among some African American students there seems to be openness to radical ideas and even socialism, although this coexists with many mushy ideas floating around without anchor. For example, a student might be heard to express weariness of the official idolization of MLK and a preference for Malcolm X, but at the same time say "I like Bill Clinton."

Many of the advanced oppressed nationality students exist in tighter and smaller groupings which tend to focus on very particularized fights, and on issues such as Mumia's case, which has galvanized more students of color over the past year. The form of struggle tends to be ad hoc coalitions.

PROSPECTS FOR LEFT REFOUNDATION

Current conditions in the US are favorable, and improving, for the development of a left refoundation or party building project. Left refoundation has something useful and practical to offer the organized socialist left. It defines a strategic objective for revolutionary socialists that realistically could apply to a new period of mass action and left initiative. Potentially left refoundation could also provide a rallying cry among wider sections of new activists as they gain experience, look for organizational answers, but wonder at the present weakness of revolutionary socialism.

FRSO can use these opportunities not only to put out our own politics, but to invite other left and independent forces into a dialogue around the need for an anti-capitalist party in the US. The strong participation of oppressed nationality youth in the above movements also means that a left refoundation project might be able to build itself from the ground up in a way that distinguishes itself from much of what remains of the existing organized left, which as we know tends to be dominated by older and white activists.

Since the left groups with whom we have closest relations, with the exception of our left pole projects, vary from city to city at this time, left refoundation dialogue with those groups as well as with independent leftists will probably be shaped at the local level in the upcoming period. On a national level, the left pole oppressed nationality and labor left projects seem to be the ones with the most steam and potential at the moment. Left refoundation work at the local level can involve discussion, joint strategizing and joint work with both other established left groups and independent activists. Discussion and joint work can connect left refoundation with movement building politics. As mentioned before, the high activity of young activists and activists of color can connect left refoundation with both the transformation of our own organization as well as the party-building project itself.

Organizing in the Emerging Movements

As in other early stages of movement-building, today's left forces seem largely divided along national lines. The anti-globalization movement seems largely white, though it has strong potential among foreign students and immigrant communities. The BRC, ALF and other motion among oppressed nationality forces has a serious excitement about bridging generational, ideological and nationality- and national origins-based differences. But much more work has to be done with them to unite around the need for socialism. The new forces in labor have more of a pre-existing multinational base, and their outreach among students and youth seems geared toward building multinational alliances (for example around campus workers and sweatshops).

All this makes our rooting ourselves more deeply among oppressed nationalities, among the masses and organized forces, both more important and less likely to occur spontaneously, without substantial effort, in the midst of our organizing in the new, emerging movements.