From Rich G.:
Dear Friends,
March on Mayday! Walkout and Shut Down the Schools and Workplaces!
The massive “Immigration Rights Are Workers’ Rights” school and workplace walkouts scheduled for Mayday are under attack, from within and without. Labor bosses like SEIU’s Andy Stern, and Catholic Church prelates like the Bishop of L.A., are attacking the Mayday actions because they fear the power of what they see as “their” rank and file taking action. Radio DJ’s, really the filler between commercials, who helped organize the original actions, are now attacking us, promoting the Bishop’s line, “work is a gift from God,” when work as we know it is nothing but a curse of capitalism.
From the outside, school bosses are using the old carrot and stick maneuvers that typify their rule—threats of school expulsions or lockdowns, and claims that what happens inside school is far more important that what happens out of school on Mayday: fear and prizes. Nonsense. The more people who walkout of schools and workplaces (better than just not showing up, as it requires organization and solidarity), the less discipline will be handed out. Nobody’s “permanent record” will be hurt. Indeed, in ten years, we will all forget whatever silly punishment is delivered, and we will remember we walked out and marched.
The Immigration-worker rights marches are full of weaknesses, contradictions: it’s a movement that waves flags, yet rightly declares that workers’ interests know no borders. But it may be that the most significant thing that comes from this Mayday shutdown is to demonstrate, once again, that workers create everything of value, and that if we act together, we can control what we create. The idea of direct-action walkouts, wildcats, strikes, sit-downs, could spread.
Nothing is going on in schools or at work on Mayday that will match the learning experience that will occur from walkouts and the marches. If possible, set up a study session on Mayday, just to backup the direct action, to reflect on the historic experience of the revolutionary and radical moment. Here’s a link: May Day
Rouge Forum Mayday Report
As we approach what we hope will be the massive Mayday marches on Monday, the school walkouts and work site shutdowns, we want to update you on the Rouge Forum and ask for your ideas.
The Rouge Forum email list has 4,461 members, about the same number for the last four years. The Rouge Forum web pages attract about 22,500 people a month, so many that the page is routinely shut down at the end of each month as we exceed our allotted web traffic—a good problem to have. The list includes university profs, adjuncts, k12 teachers, parents, university, college, and community college students, high school students, industrial workers, retired people, community activists, NEA and AFT staff, UAW staff, and one middle school student (with parental permission). Interestingly, more than half of the RF web page visitors are from outside of the US, mostly from the old United Kingdom.
The list has been active for eight years. As we have taken positions on key issues (like the immigration workers’ rights marches, calls for direct action vs the oil wars, or efforts to shut down the high-stakes tests in schools) people have left the list, and about the same number sign on. To make a leap in logic with only anecdotal evidence, we think the list represents more and more sophisticated people, what marketeers call opinion makers—what we think of as leaders.
What makes the Rouge Forum distinctive is our insistence (without dogmatically adopting a single line) that class struggle is key to social change, and our vision of change toward a democratic, egalitarian world that offers everyone a chance to be reasonably free, creative, caring, and cooperative. In schools, we have consistently linked curricula regimentation, high-stakes testing, racism, and imperialist war, as folds in the same cloth of capitalism, which must be superceded.
The conditions for a just world exist today—in our levels of production, transportation, technology, and communications. What is necessary to social justice is a massive change of mind—a pedagogical issue—and direct action. We also need a shared ethic in order to hold ourselves and our leaders to the values we adopted at the outset. We need organization. No other organized group working directly in schools in the US holds these views–and there is nothing especially remarkable about our outlook, except that we have had the courage to make the sacrifices to say it.
The Rouge Forum has held six conferences since 1998. The largest was in Detroit, the smallest in Syracuse, New York. The style of the conferences varied, from the free flowing three days in Detroit, with few presentations and what amounted to a long chat, to the more structured sessions of later meetings. Perhaps above all, people at the conferences made lifelong friendships with others of similar views.
We are, predictably, broke—no money. But we never had any. We have made three fund-raising appeals over the years, raising less than $2000, but individual donations have made it possible to run the www page. We have had to curtail the hard-copy editions of the Rouge Forum News, but have kept the online editions going–a problem since the online editions get blocked in schools.
With this as background, it is well past time to call for your views at this critical juncture, when a rising social movement is about to meet a ruthless opposition dedicated to perpetual war.
Below are several questions we have posed to ourselves, and now to you:
What do you think will be the most critical issues the Rouge Forum should address in the next five years? Why? What should we do?
How do you think we can improve our communications? Would you be willing to urge others to join the weekly email list?
Would you attend an upcoming Rouge Forum Conference? Where should it be? Why? When? What should be the focal issues of the conference? What form should the conference take (semi-formal presentations, just a long conversation, etc.)?
Do you think some assertive fund-raising would defeat the spirit of the Rouge Forum? Do you have ideas on how we might raise money (say, for the RF News hard-copy editions) without becoming dedicated to raising money?
Would you be willing to help establish a Rouge Forum publishing venture (not for profit) to publish books and pocket sized pamphlets?
Please respond to Rich Gibson at rgibson@pipeline.com
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