Yesterday at around 8:30 in the morning I went to San Francisco State University to attended the opening session of Uniting Pilipino Students for Success (which is hosted by the Filipino student org PACE) and as I was walking by the Old Humanities (HSS) building I could hear in the distance some students chanting, “In memory of sixty-eight!  Occupy SF State!” (the 1968 reference is a tip of the hat toward the student and teacher strikes at SF State back in 1968 and 1969 which helped set up the College of Ethnic Studies)

As I got closer I could see that the Business Building (the smallest building at SF State which makes it easier to plan an occupation) was being barricaded by students protesting the huge increase in tuition fees that have effected the entire California State University system.  Not only were students blocking all entrances but all the entrances (from the inside) had stacks and stacks of chairs, desks, and tables buttressed right up against them.  They were piled so high you couldn’t even get a view inside the building at all.

According to this San Francisco Chronicle article:

Faced with state budget cuts of more than half a billion dollars, CSU trustees approved a 20 percent fee hike in July, bringing annual tuition to $4,827. At a time when applications to CSU are climbing, the university is limiting enrollment, cutting employee pay through furloughs and offering fewer courses.

When I first started out as a Freshman at SF State in Fall of 2003 it cost only around $1,900 a year (slightly over $900 a semester) to go to SF State.

From reading the newspaper articles and talking to friends the occupation has grown over the entire day with many students supporting it and many others venting their frustration at the occupiers for disrupting classes.  At one point the supporters of the occupation (and just general curious onlookers) were in the hundreds (I suggest following this link to see a multimedia presentation by the campus newspaper, which I used to photograph for, the Golden Gate [X]Press.  You can also see video of the occupation at this link here).

According to the occupiers website they are demanding quite a bit from the administration and the CSU Board of Trustees.  Some of them are obvious “throw-aways” such as:

• That the imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Gaza are ended, and that money is used to feed and clothe the poor.
• That the bailout money, all 5 trillion of it, be returned to the people who lost their homes.
• That prisons are closed and defunded.
• That the CSU board of Trustees be dissolved.

But other demands seem to be more reasonable even if they seem slightly unattainable (which doesn’t mean they can’t attain them but just that, as of now, it would take a lot of pressure and grass-roots organizing to attain them):

• That no disciplinary action be taken against us for our action.
• That the union painters on campus, who were all fired and replaced with independent contractors, be rehired.
• That all laid-off lecturers be rehired.
• That a student owned and run food cooperative be established on campus.
• And more

Now, the big question is what is going to happen over the next coming days and how are these demands going to be meet and what type of plans the occupiers have beyond simply occupying the Business Building.

I, for one, am extremely sympathetic toward this action and support my fellow students whole heartedly who are on the inside and those organizing on the outside.  However, I am wondering how effective this occupation will be.  I’m not saying I won’t do work to support it, I will, I’m just looking at the future.

There really needs to be a strong grass-roots based network of students in key CSU campuses to pull off something successful.  Not only that, but there needs to be strong involvement of student orgs and key grass-roots organizers from the outside of the campus community.  Plus, one of the reason why the 1968-69 strike was successful is because the Black Student Union had the support of the Black Panther Party and had spent the previous three years planning for student action toward building up a strike (three freakin’ years!).  Not only that but there was a centralized committee of student groups that planned almost every aspect of the student strike and actions, so all the student groups were on the same page and knew each others plans (it was called the Third World Liberation Front).  Also, the teachers union got involved which caused more pressure to be put upon the (then) San Francisco State College administrators.

While this occupation (I’m predicting) won’t be successful in the short-term it could (and this is completely up in the air) be successful in the long-term.  We could look at this occupation as either the opening salvo in a long fight or a high-stakes one-shot gamble to get our demands heard.

There needs to be some very frank and sharp discussions between the key student organizations on campus and their needs to be coordinated planning for future actions by the student orgs and the students themselves.  Not only that but there needs to be outreach to the community outside SF State and the other key CSU campuses.

To do this would be extremely hard.  It would mean many boring meetings and stamp-licking and flier-printing, etc.  Not very glorifying stuff, but hey, that’s what being a true organizer means.  Doing the boring stupid grunt work in order to plan future successful actions.

Hopefully something becomes of this occupation and that the students involved in it don’t become discouraged when it is finally broken but are instead galvanized to do more work and grass-roots organizing (ya know, the boring stuff) in order to create more successful and sustain actions.

• Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation by Kate Weigand
  "Drawing on substantial new research, Red Feminism traces the development of a distinctive Communist strain of American feminism from its troubled beginnings in the 1930s, through its rapid growth in the Congress of American Women during the early years of the Cold War, to its culmination in Communist Party circles of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The author argues persuasively that, despite the devastating effects of anti—Communism and Stalinism on the progressive Left of the 1950s, Communist feminists such as Susan B. Anthony II, Betty Millard, and Eleanor Flexner managed to sustain many important elements of their work into the 1960s, when a new generation took up their cause and built an effective movement for women's liberation."

  via: http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/

  (tags: literature northamerica communism feminism history)

Report on Congress of American Women (LexusNexus). (Click on pic)

Over at The Excerpt Mill I quote James R. Barrett on the Popular Front and feminism:

[M]any of the roots of modern feminist movement are located in the Popular Front organizations of the postwar period. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, as women poured into the Party, they organized national and state commissions on the status of women, raised the issue of women’s rights, and joined with liberal middle- and working-class women in consumer and feminist organizations. The creative thinking of Mary Inman, a theorist whom the feminists of the 1970s often invoked as a mother of the new movement, outlived her 1943 expulsion from the CPUSA. Communist women built on her ideas regarding the special exploitation of women, going beyond the Party’s usual language of class. By the late 1940s, such activity had pushed the CPUSA beyond its narrowly economic interpretation of women’s oppression and produced a campaign within the Party against what came to be called “male chauvinism.” The Party launched the Congress of American Women (CAW) in 1947, which was deeply influenced by Communists but also included many prominent and many anonymous early feminists.

• The Structure of Reactionary Violence and Human-Rights Violations in the Philippines – Jose Maria Sison
  "But it is not enough to see only the relationship of the Arroyo ruling clique and the Ampatuan ruling clan in Maguindanao or even the rotten and violent character of the entire oppressive ruling system in the Philippines. The official designation and government financing of the Ampatuan private army as CVO and Cafgu paramilitary auxiliaries of the PNP and PA are in line with the national internal security plan called Oplan Bantay Laya (OBL or Operation Freedom Watch). This has been designed and directed by the US under its global war of terror policy.

  The structure of reactionary violence and human rights violations in the Philippines has several levels, including those of the US, the puppet Manila-based government and the local tyrants like the Ampatuans. The US has been the most culpable for whipping up state terrorism and vigilantism by local tyrants and by army and police commanders unter the pretext of combating communists and Muslims who are unjustly labeled as terrorists."

  (tags: southeastasia elections humanrights imperialism)
• E. San Juan, Jr., "Electoral Gore: Warlord Violence, Oligarchic Decay, and US Neocolonial Domination in the Philippines"
  "In a public statement (27 Nov 2009) as chairperson of the International League of People's Struggle, Jose Maria Sison succinctly formulates the overriding influence of US hegemony as the framework within which the logic of the Ampatuan massacre can be grasped. He reviews the organic links of Ampatuan power with the CAFGU, CVO, the AFP, and the PNP, national bureaucracy, counterinsurgency agencies, etc. Except for its lack of elaboration on the imperial mechanisms of transmission (provided by other general studies of Moro society such as CENPEG'S The Moro Reader or Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria's Under the Crescent Moon), Sison offers the left's more comprehensive and substantial point of view on this specific event."
  (tags: southeastasia elections humanrights)

Artwork by Latuff (click on pic for his website)

Nir Rosen writes:

The Americans have failed to convince Afghans that they should want them to stay, and Afghans certainly have not been convinced of Karzai’s legitimacy. There are just too many blunders. In September 2009 a British plane dropped a box of leaflets that failed to open. The box landed on a girl and killed her. Given that most Afghans are illiterate, its contents would have made no difference anyway. Material goods will not outweigh anger over civilian casualties and eight years of humiliation. In Iraq it took the trauma of the civil war to make the Americans look better, yet Iraqis still overwhelmingly want them out. Obama is not Bush, but for Afghans it is the same occupying country—the America of Iraq, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib; the America seemingly at war with Islam.

Hat Tip: As’ad

• The Bankers: How the Banks Brought Ireland to Its Knees by Shane Ross
  "This is the story Shane Ross – journalist, independent Senator, and long-time champion of citizens against misbehaving corporations – tells in The Bankers, going behind the scenes and the headlines to explain what happened, how it happened, and who made it happen. They're all here: Sean Fitzpatrick and the other bank bosses; Patrick Neary and the other members of Ireland's failed regulatory apparatus; the property developers, who dominated the banks' lending to a ruinous degree; and the politicians, who inflated the property bubble and have allowed the banks to dictate the terms of their bailout to an astonishing degree."
  (tags: literature europe capitalism politics)
• When it was Bliss to be a Communist « a reader’s words
  "History, however, proved PC Joshi right. Freedom, blighted as it was, had indeed arrived. But this was not the only manner in which PCJ was redeemed. His advocacy of a Congress- Communist alliance to defeat Right reaction has been by and large accepted even by the CPM, evident in its support for the UPA between 2004-2008. PCJ’s other major contributions- of involving the party cadre in relief work, as in 1943 when the CPI cadres were at the forefront during the Bengal famine, and his ability to branch off a cultural renaissance (IPTA, PWA) have not been surpassed. The communist cadre is rarely involved in any kind of social action nowadays, leaving the field open to organizations like the RSS and religious outfits."
  (tags: blog southasia communism history)
• CPP joins nationwide outrage against Arroyo's congressional candidacy as part of her power perpetuation scheme :: Philippine Revolution Web Central
  ""Arroyo's long-standing scheme actually involves grabbing a congressional seat in her home district as an initial step, maximizing her presidential powers to the hilt up to the last day of her official term to ensure her factotums' continued majority hold on Congress, making the next president merely transitionary and using all this as leverage to continue her Cha-cha scheme. The objective of the entire plot is for her to resume at the soonest time possible the top position of the national government, this time as prime minister under a new parliamentary system," the CPP pointed out."
  (tags: southeastasia politics elections communism)
• LENIN'S TOMB: Alasdair Macintyre's contribution to marxism
  "this extraordinary collection, entitled Alasdair Macintyre's Engagement With Marxism, demonstrates the importance of his early marxism to his ongoing philosophical labours. The pleasurably terse and argumentative style that is so familiar in his philosophical writing is forcefully on display in a bewildering variety of contexts – arguments with left reformism, discussions of British capitalism, social democracy, nuclear weapons, Gaitskell and clause 4; thumbnail critiques of figures such as Sartre (whom he obviously admires, but regards as profoundly ignorant of the real situation of the working class – perhaps Ian Birchall can tell us how accurate this is), Marcuse, Lukacs, Mills, Williams and Deutscher; a dissection of the Sunningdale agreement (a 'colonial solution'); theological exposition, etc etc. It also contains 'Notes from the moral wilderness', and extracts from 'Marxism and Christianity' among other important texts."
  (tags: blog marxism philosophy)
• Barack Hoover Obama « Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
  "What if Obama was not a latter-day FDR but a repackaged Herbert Hoover, however? Would Hoover have pushed through Social Security legislation if he had been President? Maybe if the pressure was sufficient to do so, but clearly Hoover was more hostile to the poor and to the working class than the aristocratic FDR whose combination of noblesse oblige and long-term strategic thinking on behalf of the class he served made him more amenable to change."
  (tags: blog northamerica marxism politics)

• San Francisco's International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement by Estella Habal
  "The struggle to save the International Hotel, in the San Francisco neighborhood known as Manilatown, culminated in 1977 with the eviction of elderly tenant activists. Many of them were Filipino bachelors who had emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s for menial labor. Each evicted tenant was accompanied by at least one young activist who had come to find their roots in the lives of the "manongs" (respected elders).

  San Francisco's International Hotel is part history and part memoir. In telling this compelling story, Estella Habal features her own memories of the Anti-Eviction Movement, focusing on the roles of Filipino Americans and their participation in both the anti-eviction protests and the nascent Asian American movement. She rounds out the narrative with a variety of sources, including interviews with other participants, the notes of insiders, and official reports."

  (tags: literature northamerica race leftism marxism capitalism)
• Postcolonialism Meets Economics by S. Charusheela, Eiman Zein-Elabdin
  "In the last half century, economics has taken over from anthropology the role of drawing the powerful conceptual worldviews that organize knowledge and inform policy in both domestic and international contexts. Until now however, the colonial roots of economic theory have remained relatively unstudied. This book changes that. The wide array of contributions to this book draw on the rapidly growing body of postcolonial studies to critique both orthodox and heterodox economics. This book addresses a large gap in postcolonial studies, which lacks the type of sophisticated analysis of economic questions that it displays in its analysis of culture. The intellectual and disciplinary terrain covered within this book spans economics, history, anthropology, philosophy, literary theory, political science and women's studies."
  (tags: literature international capitalism marxism imperialism)

• Latin America and Global Capitalism A Critical Globalization Perspective by William I. Robinson
  "This ambitious volume chronicles and analyzes from a critical globalization perspective the social, economic, and political changes sweeping across Latin America from the 1970s through the present day. Sociologist William I. Robinson summarizes his theory of globalization and discusses how Latin America's political economy has changed as the states integrate into the new global production and financial system, focusing specifically on the rise of nontraditional agricultural exports, the explosion of maquiladoras, transnational tourism, and the export of labor and the import of remittances. He follows with an overview of the clash among global capitalist forces, neoliberalism, and the new left in Latin America, looking closely at the challenges and dilemmas resistance movements face and their prospects for success."
  (tags: literature latinamerica capitalism)

Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil (Photo by Sebastiao Salgado).

In chapter two, one of the most powerful and persuasive, Robinson charts the crisis of developmental capitalism, or import-substitution industrialization, in the 1960s and 1970s, and then shifts to neoliberalism, or export-led development, in the 1980s and 1990s across Latin America. Drawing on the historical materialist categories of proletarianization and primitive accumulation, he examines the contours of the new economic model through a focused exploration of nontraditional exports and services. He offers a penetrating look at the cut flowers industry in Ecuador and Colombia, the explosive growth of the fruits and wines sector in Chile, soy production in Argentina and the rest of the Southern Cone, and winter fruits and vegetable production in Central America. He demonstrates how there has been an “accelerated replacement of noncapitalist by capitalist forms of agricultural development” and a “concomitant displacement of the peasantry and its conversion into a rural proletariat. This has occurred along with an increase in rural to urban and transnational migration”; promotion of “flexible…work in the new agro-export platforms”; a move to “predominance of female workers in these platforms”; and “the articulation of local agricultural systems…to global agricultural and industrial food production and distribution chains.”

Today, BAYAN released a press statement:

Multisectoral group Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) today criticized Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Ronaldo Puno for obfuscating the issues why the Ampatuan massacre happened.

Puno, in a press briefing Thursday, said that he intends to ask Congress to amend the law giving local government officials the power to choose top police officers assigned in their area. He said that the Ampatuans apparently became “too close” with top local police officers in Maguindanao.

Four senior policemen in Maguindanao have been implicated in the mass murder which claimed at least 57 victims, including women, journalists, and human rights lawyers that is being widely blamed on the Ampatuan clan and its private army.

“Let us remind Puno that the reason why the Ampatuans became the monster that they are today is because the Arroyo administration coddled and nurtured it for its own political interests. That the local police force and the military-controlled “civilian volunteer organizations” became part of the Ampatuan private army is Malacañang’s own doing,” Bayan chairperson Dr. Carol Pagaduan-Araullo said.

Araullo said that as long as the system and culture of patronage politics exist, centralizing the power to appoint police officials assigned to local government units to the national government will not address the problem.

“In a case like the despised Arroyo administration, which has used patronage politics to consolidate its control of power and has deeply cultivated the pervading climate of impunity, the immediate consequence of Puno’s proposal is to further bolster Malacañang’s power over local governments and police. It can use this against unfavored or uncooperative local government officials and also to influence the outcome of the upcoming elections,” said Araullo…