Dear Friends,
The Rouge Forum web page is updated at www.rougeforum.org. We call your attention to the No Blood For Oil section of the page for updates on the expanding wars as well as those good-for-the-rest-of-your-life antiwar posters for sale at lifesaving prices. And, for those under 35, remember: If They Attack Iran—You’re Drafted.
This week, however, we focus on the rising of workers and students in France, taking direct action against the Sarkozy regimes attacks on education, rights to strike, health care, and pensions. The corporate press in the US has largely ignored this struggle which has spread to more than twenty universities.
The French student resistance demonstrated, in 1968, several key things that remain true today:
*Students can initiate mass struggle for social change, but cannot complete them. For that, a worker-student alliance is necessary, and possible.
*When hope in schools is eradicated, uprisings typically follow.
*Mass struggles that turn to direct action, as in strikes or general strikes, can confront massive, organized, ruthless force with reason to believe that winning is possible.
*Those struggles are routinely betrayed from within. In 1968, the Quisling force was the official Communist Party of France which did all it could to divert and finally destroy the uprisings. One would expect the same from the CP-USA, and all its affiliates, today–as we witness the muddle that the CPUSA front, the United For Peace and Justice Coalition, has made of what there is of the anti-war movement. The core of that is the CP’s ironic rejection of the term, “class struggle.”
The Rouge Forum will be very active at the upcoming National Conference for the Social Studies conference in San Diego at the end of November. Come visit our booth and our presentations about high-stakes testing. Plus, please RSVP if you would like to come to our Rouge Forum party on Saturday evening. You are welcome to invite friends, but we need some guess for the number of people.
Thanks to Bill T and B, Greg, Katie, MrJ, Sean, Bill S, Candy, Elise, Irene T, Sue Horning, Charley in Vista in Africa, Seepho, Mary, Doug and Connie, Beau, Erin, Colin, Wayne, and Sharon A.
All the best,
r
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