Freedom Road Socialist Organization

LIBERATE ARIZONA

Arizona, the land
Of the bright yellow sun
The land of our ancestors
Since time has begun

The land of the original
People of this hemisphere
And its cousins the winged,
Two legged and dancing deer

Coming to the US Social Forum? Then let us show you where it's at! Check us out at the following spots.

Freedom Road/OSCL table at the USSF: Drop by and chat it up with our fab people, check out our latest schwag, and get tips on what's live!

Workshops:

Presente! Left Movement Veterans Discuss the Path to Power and the Role of the Left in the US
Date: Thursday June 24th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Event Location: Cobo Hall W1-51
Description: Long-time activists Bill Gallegos, Lian Hurst Mann, Chokwe Lumumba, Jane Slaughter, Linda Burnham, and Pam Tau-Lee join other Leftists that have plied their trade for over 30 years in an urgent discussion on the role of the left in today's social movements. These Movement Veterans have seen the Left transform significantly from a period of widespread, frantic left activity to the period of decline the left has found itself in recently. Today, both the Left and social movements in this country are faced with immense opportunity to play a role in changing the oppressive conditions in this country and striking a blow against US-led Imperialism. What role will or should it play? What must the organized Left do to help create real and profound change in the US and the World? How will it transform itself to be ready to take on these challenges? Our panelists will tackle these and other critical questions. Join these veterans as they put their decades of experience to use in discussing these critical questions with you!

Time to Step it Up! Uniting Leftists to develop a transformational alliance, get to scale, & win
Date: Friday June 25th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: Cobo Hall W2-61
Description: If you’re ready to bring it, join us to discuss what is required of effective Leftists & socialists in this moment. Look at the size of our movements and compare that to the scale required to win real victories. We all know it: we need to change shit up. This is a moment of 3 intersecting crises produced by capitalism: the neo-liberal economic crisis that has entrapped millions in violent poverty; an ecological crisis which threatens the existence of the planet; and a political crisis in which the state is exposed as a tool of corporate power. This is both a dangerous conjuncture and a terrain favorable to raising Left alternatives. A historical analysis reminds us that scattered movements got to scale by building strategic alliances. To be effective in this moment, we need to consolidate Left forces and increase our coordination. This workshop is an opportunity to discuss a proposal to step-up our organizing by building a new front that will allow us to get to scale. We will consider how a new formation should include political education to deepen and advance strategy, coordinate mass-movement work, and lead an innovative communications plan to put out courageous alternatives and solutions to the current crises. It’s time to step-it up and work together to build a new form of organization that will be a base for building our movements to scale. It’s time to achieve victory.

And last but definitely not least: we'll be in force at the Leftist Lounge, the biggest party of the Left this year! Swing by our table while gettin' your groove on.

See you in Detroit!

Feel overwhelmed by the huge number of events and workshops happening at the US Social Forum? So were we! So we put our heads together and came up with a list of recommendations. If you're at the Forum and want a printed palm card of this list, drop by our table and we'll be happy to hand you one in person! We also have a longer list of Eco Justice-specific workshops you can check out as well. Workshops in bold are the ones we're putting on as an organization.

If you're not sure you're making it to the tables but want it anyway, here's a print-ready version you can download.

Following our collective commitment to ecological justice, eco-socialism and liberation our Ecology Work Team wanted to highlight some of the many awesome activities and discussions around Eco Justice happening at the USSF!

We all know that Detroit has been ravaged by neo-liberal capitalism and disinvestment. The flip side to the devastation is a vibrant and inspiring movement, based in working class, oppressed nationality neighborhoods in Detroit, for ecological justice and community resiliency. We hope the activities we highlight provide examples of models, opportunities to engage with organizers around local to global fights for climate justice, eco-socialism, bring a frame of ecological justice into our mass work, and link the fight for food sovereignty to community power and self-determination.

Knowing how overwhelming the choices at the USSF can be we have pulled out a few key workshops that we think are particularly important; look further down for our full list of our recommendations.

Climate Connections: Thursday, 10:00 am at Woodward Academy 1436

Eco-Justice 101: Thursday, 10:00 am at WSU Cohn 224 There will also be a section on Wednesday @ 1:00 pm in Spanish

The Eco-Justice People’s Movement Assembly: Friday, 1:00 pm-5:30 pm at Cobo Hall D3-28

The growing movement for ecological justice recognizes capitalism as the root cause of the wars, unemployment, the BP Deepwater Disaster, immigration, and the Tea Party, and has a vision for putting our movements in a forward stance. Let’s join this movement with both feet in Detroit!

This spring, I had the amazing opportunity to hear Arundhati Roy read from her new book, Field Notes on Democracy, at Mission High School in San Francisco. She followed her reading with an interview with David Barsamian, in which she talked at length about her sojourn with the Naxalites of India. Her groundbreaking article, “Walking with the Comrades,” is Roy's political writing at its finest. She gives us real investigative journalism, asking question after question with clarity and occasional playfulness. She articulates the contradictions of the revolution she witnesses beautifully and simply. Her sense of solidarity is evident. This work is a must read.

- Saoirse Bell

The World People's Conference on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth convened in Cochabamba, Bolivia from April 19th-22nd, 2010. Evo Morales and others called for this conference after the failure of the UN-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen this past December where only 27 of the 192 countries represented in the United Nations, signed on to a "Copenhagen Accord." This "Accord" has been highly criticized. It was drafted in secret by the US and their imperialist allies, is not legally binding, sets emissions reduction targets too low to halt catastrophic climate change, and attempts to roll back measures in the Kyoto Protocol that call for industrialized countries to pay climate reparations to the Global South. In contrast, in Cochabamba, 140 countries signed on to a People's Agreement. which reflects the perspectives of the worldwide social movements and progressive governments present. The conference focused on educating people on the topics related to climate change, networking and organizing across sectors and geography, and completing the People's Agreement that will be presented to the United Nations in Cancun, Mexico this December.

Two of us flew in on a red eye from Miami with a hundred others coming for the conference, barely sleeping from so much anticipation. Arriving in Cochabamba at daybreak, there was a buzz in the air. Welcome signs hung in the airport and the media greeted us. Networking started immediately at the airport where we discussed which working group to attend, and what kind of work we do at home. Participants were taking this gathering seriously.

Originally published in The Rag Blog on April 16, 2010; reprinted with the author's permission.

[See also Mine War on Blackberry Creek, the 30-minute 1986 documentary by Anne Lewis about the 1984 United Mine Workers of America strike against A.T. Massey -- including her interview with now CEO Don Blankenship -- here.]

Who is this porcine man (all apologies to the noble pig) wrapped in our country’s flag saying that federal regulation of mine safety is as “silly as global warming?” Why it’s Don Blankenship, CEO of A.T. Massey, the fourth largest coal extractor in the United States and now the source of the worst killings in a U.S. mine in 40 years.

"The inclusion of public sector workers must also be central to our analysis and work. These workers, many of whom are women of color, deliver the social wage that we seek to protect and expand and, as the economic crisis deepens, are on the frontlines of mass layoffs and budget cuts. Just as more and more folks turn to social-safety-net services to survive, the workers delivering these services are cut back below the already bare-bones, pre-crisis levels.”

From FRSO/OSCL’s Strategy for the Coming Period: 2010 – 2013

While this task is true for revolutionaries throughout the country, we in Freedom Road have always placed a special emphasis on the importance of the South and Southwest. In the spirit of grounding the tasks our strategy points to as well as sharing the deep experience our members have in building mass movements, we would like to share the following document with the hope of sparking on-going conversations.

To a certain extent this article is about how we view reform.  I am of the school that we must fight for reforms and involve ourselves in the fight to improve conditions for workers.  However, we have to remind ourselves that reforms are always mixed bags...

While organizing people on the bus, I met a Black janitor who was very supportive of our work to fight for better buses and lowered fares, but thought that “immigrants” caused the bus fares to cost more. Instead of agreeing with him, I pointed out the salaries of the administration of the transit agency, and how they had given themselves raises all while cutting bus routes and upping fares and that disproportionately affected immigrant people.

We organize mass movements to create more favorable conditions for socialist revolution. But how revolutionaries organize people is very important. There are many methods for organizing people, such as Alinskyism, which push people to fight for small reforms but ultimately never challenge the logic of capitalism-imperialism.  Many of the world’s revolutionaries use a method called the mass line, which was developed by Mao Zedong but has been a principle of the communist movement since Karl Marx.

The Mass Line is a methodology that encompasses philosophy, strategy, tactics, leadership and organization.  It can be utilized as a tactic, both in military matters and in organizing the masses.  That sounds really complicated, but in reality the Mass Line is remarkably simple theoretically and very complex in action.