Who Are We?

Our “About Us” section here has not been updated for years.  We have taken it down and are working on a new one.  Will put it up on main page once it is done.  In the meantime, email us at bay.strikes [at] gmail.com with questions.  

31 responses to “Who Are We?”

  1. Danielle | May 3, 2009 at 6:47 pm | Reply

    Hello – I found this link through a friend, and it’s resonating in a very big way for me. I find myself, though, a little torn. The work that I do would, I guess, be categorized within the liberal non-profit domain, and I’d like to hear some thoughts on what can be done from within that environment to better serve the marginalized groups that you talked about. It just seems like the two have been divided, and I’d like to find a way to bring my politics to my work in full force.

  2. agk | May 4, 2009 at 9:13 am | Reply

    “The Left today is dominated by liberal non-profit corporatism on the one hand, and marginalized marxist grouplets on the other. The former has constituencies and bases, but politically tail behind the Democratic Party … ”

    question: i’m undereducated about the spectrum of the Left — the politics encompassed by it, who accurately identifies with it, where (job wise) one is more likely to encounter someone with leftist politics, etc — so i was confused by the quote above. i thought non-profiteers WERE mostly democrats (and i’m prettty sure they voted that way in the last election). so, my questions are: 1) what sorts of politics are predominantly represented in the non-profit sector (i’m not looking for a “well it really depends on the individual” type of thing here) — aren’t they democrats?; 2) wikipedia says “Left” in today’s parlance refers to liberals or socialists. where do democrats fit into this?; 3) what/who are the political constituencies/bases you are referring to, that the non-profits have/represent/endorse/etc if not democrat/green?

    • edm | May 4, 2009 at 11:28 pm | Reply

      1. and 3. are sort of the same, so i’ll try to adress them in a few lines. “what sorts of politics are predominantly represented in the non-profit sector (i’m not looking for a “well it really depends on the individual” type of thing here) — aren’t they democrats?”
      – yes, the “left” non-profit sector is predominantly a base of the Democratic Party, as recently seen in the election of Obama with the support of organizations such as ACORN. these groups, as well as unions, traditionally support the Dems and thus liberal legitimization of the capitalist state. they exist as another avenue of support for politics that don’t have the interest of the working-class in mind. the types of politics revolve around working towards reforming the government, not changing it as a whole.

      2. the term Left refers to liberals or socialists
      – the Democrats fit into the liberal aspect of the oft-confused term “left”. they do not advocate for the dismantling of the oppressive wage-system, but rather for the continuation of it, with reformist tendencies.

  3. Gerry | May 4, 2009 at 9:52 am | Reply

    This looks great. Good to know you active and thoughtful comrades around the Bay. I will be checking this out regularly.

  4. aufheben | May 4, 2009 at 12:28 pm | Reply

    I also found this link through a friend, and I would like to bring my politics to my work in full force too, but I can’t. That’s my problem it seems. Work is, well, work….
    But I don’t work at a non-profit. You do, and you want to better serve marginalized groups from that environment. Well, what does it mean to ‘serve marginalized groups’? In the past, when I have worked at non-profits, they were oriented around this kind of service approach. The idea was for the organization to provide what it could given the situation or at least given the current system of liberal democracy/capitalism. For me, that given is the critical limit.
    If politics and non-profit work are divided, then it is over these truly political questions: What is the current system? can it work for us? what would work better? how do we get it?
    If the focus of the discussion is the current dual system of liberal democracy and capitalism, then I think (and perhaps AS also thinks) that, NO, it cannot work for us. That a better system would be a different kind of economy, a different system of political relations, and that to throw off the yoke and build an egalitarian society, we must STRUGGLE.
    Struggle is political, and politics without struggle, politics that works WITH the current system (instead of against it), is the politics on non-conflict, a politics of social management–in short, the politics of service.
    So there is serving marginalized groups and serving the interests of the oppressed, and they’re two different goals. The politics of social management takes as its premise the current social regime and tries to better manage it in the hopes that the poor and oppressed can one day be absorbed. But capitalism necessarily produces oppression: poverty, immiseration, alienation, ecological destruction, war–the end to these scourges cannot be accommodated by a system constructed around generating more and more profit over time. If our goals are accommodated to this system, if we accept capitalism as a premise of our work, then the best we can do is provide services.
    The politics of social management insists that profit can accommodate an end to oppression, but the mainstream does not have a real political discussion about this question; instead, it is presumed that capitalism and liberal democracy can bring an end to oppression, that they are in fact necessary to that end. On the other hand, serving the interests of oppressed groups (and ultimately, everyone), means working from a different premise, from a perspective that directly questions and challenges the very existence of systems of oppression, and that takes as its explicit and overarching or unifying goal the end of capitalism and oppression. In the politics of struggle, these systems CANNOT be accommodated, and the provision of services is not an end in itself. The focus of this politics would be organization, building organization in and with, for instance, the working class. Organization that can coordinate activities amongst large groups of oppressed peoples and direct them towards the real possibility of altering social relations at the root–i.e., using peoples’ real power (their consciousness, their labor, their bodies, etc.) to change society in a revolutionary manner, to quit begging and take control of the systems that organize/are our political and economic lives (schools, factories, city councils, police headquarters, truck depots, train stations, music halls…).
    To the extent that a non-profit is directly focused on organizing neighborhoods, factory floors, youth, transportation workers (truckers, bus drivers etc.) towards the explicit goal of mobilizing a change of this nature, then it will be providing the best service possible. Otherwise, the politics of service are the politics of accommodation.

  5. Tell No Lies | July 9, 2009 at 3:49 am | Reply

    This is an exciting site. I like the mix of what you are doing and talking about here. Kudos.

  6. EARL GILMAN | July 15, 2009 at 2:21 am | Reply

    I think we have to expose “the non-profits”. There are many sincere people working in non-profits making miserable wages….while the directors who are usually lawyers earn big money. “There’s a lot of money in poverty”. Most non-profits are self-appointed and claim to speak in the name of the “community” or “civil society” when their real function is to permit the privitization of services and social control of the poor.

    The “Alinsky model” of community organizing (taught in colleges) advocates token protest to get reforms. It opposes revolutionary change.But we need genuine community organizations, not dependent on government or foundation funding. We need to educate and prepare a new generation of revolutionary leaders–thousands of them–that means teaching the poor and oppressed to think critically and not follow any “glorious leader”.

    • esteban | July 15, 2009 at 5:39 am | Reply

      100% true Earl! Check out the Advance the Struggle pamphlet on the justice for Oscar Grant movement, which devotes much attention to the role of non-profits in repressing resistance. please check in on this blog regularly and contribute to the debates here, as the question of how or how not to relate to non-profits undoubtedly will recur.

  7. Charles Rachlis | August 25, 2009 at 7:19 pm | Reply

    Dear comrades in Advance the Struggle,

    I am writing you on behalf of Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism (HRS). After our comrade DG was introduced to your group at an anti-4th of July picnic we familiarized ourselves with your web site and your work on behalf of Oscar Grant, which originally attracted our attention. Our comrades have worked on a similar case in 1992 when Jerrold Hall was murdered by the racist BART police. At that time we produced a pamphlet on police brutality explaining the class nature of the police and critiquing those with illusions in civilian oversight.

    The liberals, progressives and leftists that call for police oversight ultimately create illusions in the role of the state. As long as capitalism exists the police will be in its employ. Their role will be to keep working people and minorities from standing up against the rule of capital. To do this the police develop ranks with anti-working class, racist, homophobic and misogynist attitudes. The murder of Oscar Grant was a result of this system of race hatred that permeates the police forces and all the armed bodies of the state. Our orientation is to call on organized labor, workers, the unemployed, youth and the oppressed minority communities to mobilize worker’s self defense guards whom we will stand shoulder to shoulder with to protect our communities and the struggles of the workers and the oppressed.

    Our comrade, DG, reported that he had met a dedicated group of revolutionary activists, and his report on your pamphlet “Justice for Oscar Grant: A Lost Opportunity? ” created a buzz both within our national organization (HRS) and our international organization [The International Lenninist Trotskyist Fraction (ILFT)]. Our South African comrades, in the Workers International Vanguard League (WIVL), were so inspired as to make a slight modification to their statement in support of Mumia Abu Jamal in order to reference the Oscar Grant murder.

    When our comrade explained the case of Oscar Grant to the international gathering of the ILTF in Buenos Aires this past July the entire congress stood in his honor, vowed to make his case their own and listed him among the fallen and imprisoned comrades as an honorary chairperson of the congress. The following statement (see below) was adopted in its entirety by the July 2009 Congress of the ILTF. The ILTF consists of organizations from South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, New Zealand, and our group based here in the Bay Area. As some of our international comrades are prison for their activities in the workers movement, others have been assaulted and some murdered by the state and goons of the right wing so we know well the value of international working class solidarity when our brothers and sisters are victimized by the state.

    We submit for your consideration the statement “We Are All Mumia” We would be greatly honored if you would publish it or link to it on your website, mutual links may be considered. Despite our limited resources we look forward to joint work with your members, on the Oscar Grant case, police brutality issues or any future issue around which we might have sufficient agreement. At home and abroad our militants put themselves in the heat of the class struggle and recognize in your organization the same intention to fight for our classes interests. As that battle is both theoretical and practical we look forward to engaging with your organization on both levels.

    In Solidarity,

    Charles Rachlis for the HRS and the ILTF

    Resolution adopted at the July 2009 Congress of the

    International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (IFLT)

    We Are All Mumia

    It is with great concern that the working class militants of the world have watched the case of former Black Panther and MOVE activist Mumia Abu Jamal. We recognize his life long dedication to the struggle of the oppressed, the poor and the exploited. Across the world in the working class communities, barrios and ghettos his name is known. It is with great sadness that we see the movement for his freedom stagnating as it has depended for years on the non existent justice from the bosses’ court system. We recognize that the ruling class will never free our brother in chains. Only heroic actions such as the strike of the Oakland Dock workers who carried on a one day general strike can free our brother.

    Why do the capitalists’ courts keep Mumia in jail despite his innocence?

    The policy of depending on lawyers in the courts to free Mumia was defective from the start. In fact for many years it acted to keep the working class off the streets and placed our struggle in the hands of the bosses’ courts.

    The domination of the parasites on Wall Street is maintained through violence against the working class throughout the world; in the rest of the world it is maintained through the over 120 military bases, while in the United States it is maintained by the police. When one of the police is killed, Wall Street draws the line and unites around its agent. But when a young brother like Oscar Grant is shot in the back while restrained it is only the outcry and uprising in the streets by indignant youth that forces prosecution of the racist cops.

    Protection of the bosses’ system of super-exploitation is the centre of all their actions. Just as the great wealth of the United States was built on the labour of the enslaved African people today it is supplemented by the exploitation of immigrant labour.

    In this period of world domination of the banks on Wall Street, their democratic mask falls. Thus their greed for coltan (columbite – tantalite ore) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been behind the war there where over 4 million people have died; their control of over 80% of the arable land in the world is what is behind the high food prices that starve billions of people (the capitalists know that we can do without most things but we must eat); when they dismiss millions of immigrants and put over 4000 in jail, it is part of their social control, so that their profits can rise, and yes, these same capitalists dismiss millions of workers in the USA and around the world, steal the pension funds of the GM workers, with the active support of the Obama regime. They claim democracy but keep hundreds without trial in Guantanamo Bay; they claim democracy but have their bloody hands supporting the Micheletti regime in the coup in Honduras. The fight to free Mumia is the same fight of all the working class in the world against their capitalist system.

    We call on workers in the United States to down tools in coordinated strike action to Free Mumia Now! We call on the ILWU Local 10 and the immigrant workers who initiated the May Day million man marches in 2007 and 2008 to forge joint action to: Free the 4000 immigrants in the US jails! Free the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay! Free the political prisoners in the Zionist jails in occupied Palestine! Free the political prisoners in the sellout Palestine Authority’s jails! Free the political prisoners in all the secret prisons of the CIA around the globe! Down with the coup in Honduras! Forward to a government of workers and poor peasants in Honduras! Stop the mass dismissals across the United States! Occupy GM and other workplaces threatened with closures and demand their nationalisation without compensation under workers control!

    Down with the bureaucracies of the ALF-CIO and Change to Win who refuse to use proletarian methods of struggle to free our imprisoned brother and sisters and who channel workers’s energy into the bosses’s twin parties of exploitation, the Republicrats.

    Only mass workers’s strike action can save this son of Africa and hero of the world working class!

    We call for rolling mass working class action to free Mumia and all political prisoners of capitalism! Forward to an international day of mass action!

    Gathered in Buenos Aires in July 2009, revolutionary workers from Bolivia’s mines, Chile’s mills, Argentina’s factories, Peruvian working class, South Africa transportation sector, Brazil’s factories, from as far away as New Zealand and California, affirm our commitment to advocate for and build strike action to free our brother. We condemn the NAACP for hosting US Attorney General Eric Holder at their meeting in NYC and call on all militant workers around the world to demand: FREE MUMIA NOW! NO FAITH IN THE BOSSES’ COURTS!

    Forward to the reconstitution of the revolutionary party of Trotsky and the young Cannon in the United States as part of the fight for rebuilding the world party of the socialist revolution over the base of the program and legacy of the 1938 Foundation Congress of the Fourth International!

    The International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI) calls for a regrouping of revolutionaries along the lines of a new Kienthal/Zimmerwald to co-ordinate the defence against the imperialist attacks on the world working class and to prepare a counter-offensive. .

    This document can be found in its original at: http://www.humanist sforrevolutionar ysocialism. org/IFLT_ Documents/ Free_Mumia. htm

    Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism http://www.humanist sforrevolutionar ysocialism. org/index. html

    The International Lenninist Trotsyist Fraction consists of:

    •Liga Obrera Internacionalista (Cuarta Internacional)— Democracia Obrera [Internationalist Workers League (Fourth International)— Workers Democracy], Argentina

    •Fracao Trotskista [Trotskyist Fraction] (FT), Brazil

    •Liga Trotskista Internacionalista [Internationalist Trotskyist League] (LTI), Bolivia

    •Liga Trotskista Internacionalista [Internationalist Trotskyist League] (LTI), Peru

    •Partido Obrero Internacionalista— Cuarta Internacional [Internationalist Workers Party—Fourth International] (POI-CI), Chile

    •Communist Workers Group (CWG), New Zealand

    http://www.geocitie s.com/communistw orker/

    •Workers International Vanguard League (WIVL), South Africa

    http://www.workersi nternational. org.za/

    •Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism (HRS), United States

    http://www.humanistsforrevolutionarysocialism. org/index. html

  8. Cindy | December 21, 2009 at 11:34 pm | Reply

    The Left also includes anarchists, council communists, autonomous Marxists, and others on the libertarian Left.

  9. hammer and sickness | December 22, 2009 at 8:44 am | Reply

    regarding the Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism: when i hear “humanist” i think dunayevskaya. but the lengthy post above is clearly orthodox trotksyist. an explanation where the concept humanist fits in would be appreciated.

    regarding libertarian leftists… it would only benefit those leftists and the working class in general if council communists and autonomous marxists would be more outspoken, publish more propoganda, and engage the working class more publicly. we suffer from your timidity.

  10. Harley Filben | February 8, 2010 at 1:50 pm | Reply

    Fraternal greetings and all that from sunny England (snowy at the moment, which is getting a bit old in mid-february…)

    It’s good that there are groups of comrades in America and elsewhere, like yours, who are wiling to rethink Marxist politics from the ‘ground up’ rather than through one of the slightly dried-out 20th-century orthodoxies. I have to say that there are serious weaknesses here, particularly on the question of unity and its relationship to penetration in the working class.

    The first issue is the definition of the working class – this may seem hair-splitting, but it’s actually a politically important point. Your very brief definition is:

    “What does it mean to locate the struggle in the working class? It means that people who earn a wage face a common enemy in the capitalists who exploit their labor on the job and steal their money through rent and other expenditures.”

    But the working class does not consist wholly of people who earn a wage (and not everybody who earns a wage is a proletarian – Barack Obama has a salary as much as the guy in the Taco Bell). At the most abstract level, class is a relation of production, not – as you imply – a position in the productive process.

    To put it more concretely – if locating the struggle with the workers means locating it with people who earn a wage, what about the unemployed? What, furthermore, about the children of the employed workers? It is a long time since they’ve been sent up chimneys as a matter of course.

    The working class is defined by its separation from the means of production, which are owned and controlled by the bourgeoisie. The unemployed are working class as much as anyone – where they are supported by welfare and stuff, as opposed to selling drugs and so on. Welfare is in fact an extension of the wage fund, from which people are paid to be a reserve army of labour – in other words, not work.

    The problem for us here is that basic workers organisations, especially trade unions, do not arise out of a scientific conception of the class but out of the social division of labour there is now. They are overwhelmingly organised sectionally. Struggles arising from the workplace are specific, and almost invariably limited to sectional concerns. The reserve army of labour is maintained in order to corrode workers organisations, and shift power away from the workers. The classic historical example is Thatcher’s use of unemployment effectively as a class weapon in the 1980s.

    Of course, sectionalism is not an iron law. Before the 1980s in Britain, for example, there was a good chance that a major struggle in one sector would see workers go out in another – the dockers for the miners or whatever. The reason for this was Bert Ramelson – the Communist Party’s industrial organiser, who had thousands of trade union militants just waiting for the phone call.

    The CPGB was a disgusting organisation in many ways – class-collaborationist, nationalist, slavishly pro-Soviet, you name it. But because it combined a political project (even a dire political project) with the basic tasks of organisation, it was successful. Dockers in the CPGB were not just dockers – they were Communists.

    As a result, the disunity of Marxists is not founded on its isolation from the shop-floor – but rather the other way round; our disunity ensures that we will never have serious penetration in the working class!

    What is the cause of the disunity of Marxists, then? Principally how they organise, and what they organise around. Marxists tend to organise in a way that allows them to present a hard line to the working class, with no equivocation.

    Firstly, this means that there has to be unity around theoretical agreement with a substantial body of ideas; there was never going to be a fusion between the Cliff movement and the Healy movement, because neither could stand to co-exist organisationally with somebody with a different theory of the Soviet Union. Note that this isn’t a different line on, say, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which would have political significance; just a competition between two ways of saying that it ain’t socialism.

    Secondly, this means that party disputes – if they are not instantly diagnosed as a “petty-bourgeois deviation” (Trots), a “bourgeois headquarters” (Maoists), “Hitlero-Trotskyites” (1930s-40s Stalinism) – have to be kept secret from everyone else. So the first the w/c learn of the differences is, natch, the split. At that point, any w/c activist in that organisation’s orbit is likely to feel a bit had.

    Marxists, back to Kautsky and Engels at the latest, have always argued for effective unity, and that does mean that critics will sometimes have to shut up and carry out the agreed line. By generalising this ‘sometimes’ to ‘all the time’, you are denying the working class the chance to see different positions on burning issues, to contribute to the party debate (which you’d think would be important to people), to get a sense of an organisation that is intellectually alive rather than a zombified corpse of Trotskyism/Maoism/etc past.

    You are also denying all this to fellow leftists, making unity – even when it is pursued – far more fraught.

    All of which is historically silly – the Bolsheviks, certainly, had very public debates (quite impressive given conditions of Tsarist autocracy) on the most critical issues of the day, and as a result were able to neutralise and recruit elements on the left of the Mensheviks and SRs (most importantly Trotsky). Consequently – along with other strokes of good fortune of a more vulgarly financial nature – they went into 1917 an organisation of tens of thousands, no mean feat when there are only about 100,000 workers around.

    Conclusion – there is no way around the other comrades on the left. I appreciate that you are happy to work in a constructive manner with these others – but it is more important that leftists work together critically, since any serious upswing in our activity will have to follow, not lead to, our unity.

  11. rethinkinganarchism | March 27, 2010 at 3:14 am | Reply

    Great site! It’s exciting to see critical engagement with the question of how to build a base in the class. I’d be particularly interested in discussing ideas on how to avoid the emergence of a new class of bureaucrats and bosses in the movement as we struggle against the capitalists. It seems to me that many amongst the nonprofit left are happy to play the role of professional revolutionary/future bureaucrat (Van Jones, for example), while those on the academic left (and to an extent, the anarchist movement) are basically allergic to engaging with the class and languish in irrelevancy. I hope that projects like yours multiply and that we are able to build an autonomous, revolutionary, working class movement – between the mirror deviations on the nonprofits and academic left

  12. rethinkinganarchism | March 27, 2010 at 3:14 am | Reply

    Great site! It’s exciting to see critical engagement with the question of how to build a base in the class. I’d be particularly interested in discussing ideas on how to avoid the emergence of a new class of bureaucrats and bosses in the movement as we struggle against the capitalists. It seems to me that many amongst the nonprofit left are happy to play the role of professional revolutionary/future bureaucrat (Van Jones, for example), while those on the academic left (and to an extent, the anarchist movement) are basically allergic to engaging with the class and languish in irrelevancy. I hope that projects like yours multiply and that we are able to build an autonomous, revolutionary, working class movement – between the mirror deviations of the nonprofit and academic lefts.

  13. Kevin in SF | April 11, 2010 at 1:04 am | Reply

    How do you go about posting articles on your site? Actual articles, as opposed to comments?

    Thanks.

    • Advance The Struggle | April 11, 2010 at 10:41 pm | Reply

      Hi Kevin, the short answer is: you don’t. You can email us at bay.strikes@gmail.com and suggest something, but people have sent us all types of off the wall stuff which we havne’t posted, so feel free to send us anything but no guarantees.

  14. Lauren | April 12, 2010 at 7:31 pm | Reply

    You guys rule – thanks for all the good work.

  15. Green Red | April 14, 2010 at 10:46 am | Reply

    Great place it is. Good to see you here Tell No Lies too. Here you are meeting my Trotskist friend i had named before named comrade Earl Gilman.

  16. JLS | January 16, 2011 at 6:25 am | Reply

    Hi there. I’m also studying Das Capital, like Lenin, Luxemburg and the Johnson-Forest Tendency. The struggle continues. Comradely.

  17. harmsie | February 24, 2011 at 10:41 am | Reply

    “The radical left today is dominated by Trotskyist and Maoist parties who fetishize leadership and consequently inflate their leaders’ importance, anarchists/situationists who largely propose insurrectionist activity thinking that society is a stack of dry wood only lacking a spark,”

    hi. i just stumbled across your blog today and haven’t read much, but am liking it so far. just as an FYI, many anarchists are not insurrectionists but are pro-organizational and understand that building a revolution is long, slow, patient work. syndicalists and platformists (aka especifismoists) are the two main types i know of. i myself am an anarchist-platformist.

  18. lost | May 29, 2011 at 4:02 pm | Reply

    i will keep my comments brief.i was pleased to stumble on the a/s website/blog whilst searching for “course materials”on marxism/revolution,as im about to establish a small study/discussion group.

    im not in the usa but i am interested in contributing to and being part of a revolutionary current that seeks to take an open,nondogmatic and unsectarian view in organising against capitalism,the state,and power.

    its almost as if we have to start again.workers do not need telling by some professional elite what to do,we need to develop ways to maximise our ability together to change this rotten system.marxism and its traditions,and indeed other traditions of struggle are useful tools but they are not wholly writ.we,the exploited,oppressed and those in struggle have more in common than we have that divides us,most of the time,and i suspect in the current state of things we can mark our differences without dividing ourselves to be conquered.

    so please count me in to any circle of struggle focussed here.i have been a revolutionary socialist all my adult life.i hope i have some skills and experiences to contribute,but also the wisdom to know how little i know and that i am always willing to learn

    in struggle,
    lost

  19. lost | May 30, 2011 at 1:23 pm | Reply

    thanks,a/s, for your reply.i took a look again at your founding statement and wanted to confirm that i largely agree.i do not want to be sectarian and picky.that seems to be a bad tradition on the left that we demonstrate our machismo,and cleverness that way.

    theres a lot of that baggage i/we can leave out.that said we should not dump the genuine ways in which traditions have contributed real lessons,even if positions are materially not actually completed.indeed,i wonder whether whilst we can learn from some or most of the divergences,i wonder also whether we can also look “backwards”(i am not using precise langauge here)and see how some of those divergences,might actually at least sometimes contribute to the construction of a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle in which at least some of the pieces might make sense when seen together(i acknowledge that each such part need not be equal and that there may also be some hierarchy of knowledge .an inexact example might be that theories of state capitalism might well be superior to its predeccessor,but its not good enough.with the demise of what used to be referred to euphemistically/banally as “actually existing socialism”,whilst the debate about state capitalism may not be so urgent or central it remains of some importance in understanding the variety of capitalist forms,and keeping vigilant and sharp focussed about the society/ies we want to rebuild.that said,as i begin to come to terms with the contribution of john holloway in “changing the world…”and”crack capitalism”,he seems to throw an almighty amount back into play for serious reconsideration,without backing away one single step from “making revolution”.

  20. Gabriel | July 19, 2011 at 5:07 pm | Reply

    How do I join Advance The Struggle?

  21. Advance The Struggle | July 26, 2011 at 5:10 pm | Reply

    Great question Gabriel! The first step opens up the rest: meet up with one of us to see if we have enough political unity and talk through the kind of commitment you’ll be making. We’ll send you an email to set up a meeting, hope to talk to you soon comrade!

  22. Pingback: Anthropology News

  23. josh | January 21, 2012 at 8:23 pm | Reply

    Thankyou for the article on the occupy Oakland movement.Please keep up the fight.

  24. Julio Ramos | June 10, 2012 at 12:11 pm | Reply

    I am interested in contributing any of my time and ideas for human rights. Informed me of your next gathering I will attend. Happy Day

    “hardest thing for people to do NOW is what? Simple things in life ”
    Julio Ramos

  25. someguy66 | August 12, 2012 at 5:30 pm | Reply

    Just discovered this blog a few months ago. Excellent posts and analysis. Exactly the kind of clear-thinking we all need. Personally I guess I’m from the “anarchist-situationist” spectrum, so a few general questions/comments on that front. IMO one of the greatest contributions the SI brought to the table was a fresh perspective centered upon fusing theory and practice, taking the best of the struggles of both the past and the present to create something original and authentic. Above all this meant self-critique and truly taking ownership and responsibility for mistakes. It seems to me that you guys’ analyses are picking up where that tradition left off. So out of curiosity what do you all see as the legacy of the situationist tradition, good and bad? In solidarity from San Diego!

    • Advance The Struggle | August 13, 2012 at 1:16 pm | Reply

      Hi someguy66, thanks for the comment. To be honest, while some of us have read history of and writings from the Situationists, it’s not much of a direct influence on us at all. It’d be great if you wanted to recommend some films, texts, etc for us to get acquainted with. That said, a culture of self-critique and reflection is definitely central. We’ve had some great opportunities to engage in that process in the past two weeks with comrades from Oakland and Seattle, NYC, Atlanta etc. Very productive and helpful in moving forward and growing as part of this developing revolutionary tendency.
      Looking forward to hearing more from you – feel free to email us bay.strikes@gmail.com with thoughts/suggestions.

      • someguy66 | August 15, 2012 at 7:33 pm |

        Thanks for the quick reply! I just slogged my way through Ken Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology which is a great collection/summation of the SI’s texts/theory, if a bit dense. I highly recommend. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, of course, and Vienet’s Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement are both excellent. I look forward to reading more of your posts.

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