They maintain that only a dictatorship -- their dictatorship, of course -- can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.
-Mikhail Bakunin
Anyone seeking to participate in, or make a contribution of time or resources to Pittsburgh's efforts to oppose the machinations and the very presence of the upcoming G-20 summit, should take care to ensure that they are in contact with the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project, and not some opportunistic Stalinist front group. Like the G-20 itself, the unaccountable, authoritarian, New York City-based, Bail Out The People Movement (which is a front group for the International Action Center, which is a front group for the Worker's World Party) is making its own plans for late September, with little or no involvement or input from the people of Pittsburgh. Tellingly, the contacts listed on their website, neglect to include anyone in southwestern Pennsylvania.
These dinosaurs from our nightmarish past and their hand-puppet, Cindy Sheehan, have been further granted misplaced legitimacy by the self-described Reuters 'news' agency, who apparently could not be bothered to investigate whether local groups and individuals intended to oppose the upcoming invasion by the handful of elite figureheads and their camp-following amen corner and secret police.
The grassroots Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project has strong, longstanding community ties and support and lacks the kind of centralized, top-down structure of both the G-20 and the Stalinist front group. Rather than reliance on a discredited, archaic party line, the local Project is based around a set of principles and points of unity, that were agreed on by the participants in a directly democratic fashion:
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Work to end all relationships of domination and subjugation, including but
not limited to those rooted in patriarchy, racism, classism, homophobia,
capitalism, imperialism and the state; -
Resistance to the commodification of our shared and living Earth;
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Organizing on the principles of decentralization, autonomy, sustainability,
mutual aid and respect; -
Opposition the police and prison-industrial complex, and maintaining solidarity
with all targets of state repression; -
The use a diversity of tactics to directly confront systems of oppression by
advocating forms of resistance which maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, and to construct local alternatives to global capitalism.
Aside from cynically masquerading as a grassroots effort, like the astroturf, right-wing media and lobbyist owned and operated 'Tea Parties', the New York City-based Bailout the People organization is using the occasion of the G-20 summit to solicit donations (to supplement their trust funds established by socialites and the KGB) and engage in a form of a tactic that is common among, but not restricted to, the authoritarian left, known as "entryism", where an existing struggle or organization is willfully, and often deceptively hijacked by members of an outside organization. Another Stalinist front-group, that is better known, is International ANSWER, which discredited and demoralized the opponents of the escalation of the long-running US war in Iraq, through its ineffective, permitted, protest parades, its thinly veiled authoritarian politics, its insistence on taking credit for the mobilizations and protests of others, and its continued cooperation with law enforcement. This is no different than what the paper-selling, authoritarian-left alphabet soup has done to discredit and derail popular resistance and grassroots organizations for the past 100 years, with special malice reserved for anarchists, who they tend to shoot in the back the back, both figuratively and literally, whenever possible. This is why people like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, among others, were publishing condemnations of Lenin and Trotsky's violent excesses, 40-50 years before US liberals would accept that that the 'Worker's Paradise' of the USSR was merely another dictatorship. What began in Petrograd, continued to Kronstadt, the Ukraine, the Barcelona May Days, Hungary, and the collusion with the de Gaulle regime, which preserved his (and their) power.
Given their long-standing policy of uncritical support for any dictator or war criminal willing to stick a red star on a national flag and/or taunt the US government, including the dynastic North Korean regime, Slobodan Milosevic, and longtime US asset, Saddam Hussein, how sincere can the Workers' World Party (WWP) in its opposition to the G-20? The WWP split from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) due to the latter's condemnation of Stalin's 1956 invasion of Hungary and subsequently fell in behind any tyrant willing to use leftist rhetoric as a justification for their brand of repression and imperialism. No apologists for the 1989 actions of the Maoist state in Tienanmen Square are worthy of the level of trust and solidarity required for sincere opposition the G-20, who counts the WWP's beloved state capitalist China, among its member nations. Support the local alternatives to the G-20 and the WWP.
Comments
thanks for this sir
I'm most definitly not a Stalinist and yeah some of their policies are a little sketchy but allies against the G-20 are few and far between and the revolution is a long way off. Why not just work together on what you have in common and save the sectarian infighting for another day? It kind of comes off as jealousy because they got media attention and you didn't, no offense.
these WWP/PSL/IAC/ANSWER pro-Stalinists are like poison..
on the other hand, you may wish to couch your opposition to them in less "in-group" terms, which people who are not-so-deeply involved in the Left are not familiar with.. i doubt many people reading this know what country Kronstadt is in, much less what happened there almost a hundred years ago..
tell folks what's at stake: save the details for later if they ask.
Der, you're welcome.
Ann, None taken; I can't bring myself to think of them as allies, because they aren't. Other than whatever socialite/KGB trust funds they subsist on, they bring nothing to the table. The local G-20 efforts are getting media attention, but the Stalinists are trying to represent themselves as the only organized opposition, despite having no local ties. Sorry that's how you read it. I am personally not seeking corporate media attention about this.
different terms, I wrasseled with the same concerns and couldn't come up with much more than than emotional objections to their interference. Their sponsorship of a big, permitted parade, probably won't have any effect, either way, except for their diversion of resources. I'm open to suggestions, though, if you have more logical objections, than I do.
People aren't stupid, and I've include links to the more obscure stuff, if they are interested or curious.
thanks!! one thing tho - ANSWER and IAC split. ANSWER is no longer associated with the WWP. see the wikipedia entry for PSL - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_Socialism_and_Liberation
We can never hope to convince people of their errs in judgment if we refuse to engage them. I recently spent some time with the WWP people in Detroit, at their People's Summit. While I disagreed with them on many points, it was still a worthwhile experience to put disagreements about politics in the past. People from the WWP support diversity of tactics and doing things other than simply march, but, just like the RNC-WC, they realize that a Green-Orange-Red strategy is necessary. What of the immigrants that could be deported if caught? These are important questions.
Yes, they supported Milosevic, are Stalinists, state-socialists; but, we have no hope if we can't work to convince people that their strategies are the problem. We also have to have our ideas together, i.e. theoretical unity in order to do that, something that we, as anarchists, seem to despise. See: Luigi Fabbri's "Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism," among other texts (Organizational Platform of Lib. Communists).
socraticpunk,
I disagree with you, but if that's what you think is right for you, that's good enough for me.
We have a very tiny non-student, migrant population, due to the loss of our industrial base almost 30 years ago and as far as I know, the local organizers will take that into consideration.
The platform and Fabbri's plea to "act more like middle-class WASP's to avoid the influence of middle class WASPs" are not for me, but to each their own.
Mike Boda is probably a cop, and is certainly doing everything possible to discredit the upcoming protests.
I'm not very knowledgeable of this movement and I do not agree with all of it's stands, however as a Constitutionalist I favor most of what this Group is supporting and all I have to say is more power to them and please stay away from any Socialist hroups, because they are just as bad as and so-called democracy groups.
I've been to many socialist countries and I can tell you it's in the same as capitalism, except the instead of Capital being in private hands, its in the hand of the Political elite that live like Kings , while the poor stay poor.
You start off with a quote by Bakunin against dictatorship, and then you call Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son in Iraq, a Stalinist "handpuppet?" This article is about as uniting as a rant against "bomb-throwing anarchists."
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