Toward A Revolutionary Proletarian Feminism

In the lead up to International Women’s Day, the next Revolutionary Student Movement (RSM) Communist Night School* will discuss issues of gender and class. Specifically, what does feminism mean to proletarian and working-class women? We will read about various strands of feminist thought—from radical feminism, socialist feminism, liberal feminism, to anarcho-feminism—and critique each strand. Finally, we will explore what proletarian feminism means in order to develop a revolutionary proletarian feminist politics.

TIME: 6:30PM, Wednesday, February 29th

LOCATION: Charlie’s Bike Shop, 242.5 Queen Street East, 1 block east of Sherbourne. 

READINGS: 1. http://pcr-rcp.ca/pdf/prog_en.pdf pp.18-20. (UPDATE: Link now fixed.)

2. Brave New World–Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement (pp.11-59) by Avanti

“But we are proletarian feminists because women are not all alike: there are the bourgeois, the petty bourgeois and proletarian women. Feminism is characterized by the class characters of women. We want a women’s movement expression of the majority of women who are proletarian workers, precarious of today and tomorrow, who are oppressed inside and outside the family. Women who have nothing to defend but have double chains to break. A proletarian feminism because this social capitalist system is classist, this State, Government, these parliamentary parties are classists, their policy is based on a daily class struggle, because sexism, clericalism, fascism are expression of a capitalist, barbarized and rotten class. The proletarian feminism asserts the incompatibility of women with every economical, political, social, cultural, ideological aspect of this bourgeois system. We affirm the proletarian feminism against the petty bourgeois feminism who struggle just to carve out spaces for themselves in this social system.” –Maoist Road

Question to keep in mind for the night of the school: Considering that proletarian feminist movements worldwide are geared toward women liberating themselves from the material oppressions of capitalist/imperialist systems, what is our role, as residents in an imperialist and oppressor country, in helping to create a proletarian women’s movement that will address the concrete struggles of proletarian women?

*The Communist Night School series are hosted by a bunch of students who don’t really have time to do all the readings they’re supposed to do for school or more interesting stuff. We have engaged topics such assexuality, people’s wars, youth movements, etc in past night school series. Read the entries in this website, or flag one of us down after the event, to learn more about some of our actions.

Light refreshments provided.

Hope to see you there!

Communist Night School on People’s War in India!

Wednesday, January 11 at 6:30pm

Location: Room 223 at Innis College 2 Sussex Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S1J5

Readings provided. Click here.

Snacks provided–bring your friends!

The third installment of the Revolutionary Students Movement’s Communist Night School will be held in solidarity with the International Week of Support for the People’s War in India from January 14-22. Join us on Wednesday, January 11th at 6:30 for a screening the documentary Blazing Trail: A Journey of the Indian Revolution, followed by discussion of the film and a short reading. Together we will learn more about the Indian people’s struggle against capitalist exploitation, poverty, caste oppression and imperialism.

Come learn. No previous knowledge of communism or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism required.

“May the wind of the people’s war reach the proletarian masses all around the world.”

Combating liberalism: Sexuality and class politics

The Revolutionary Students Movement in Toronto will be hosting a Communist Night School on Thursday, November 17th, from 7PM to 9PM, at Innis College, room 313. We invite you to the second session of an ongoing series of free educational discussions on various aspects of Communist politics and culture where we will debate questions of identity politics and liberalism. Let’s discuss how and why the so-called ‘death’ of communism and the rise of neo-liberalism has obscured our analysis of race, gender and sexuality as an economic phenomenon.

This session, we will be focusing on sexuality. Topics will include the gay movement, including its accomplishments and failures. We will be looking at where the movement has made tactical errors. We will also examine some of the communist backlash against homosexuality as an identity and as a practice, and deconstruct the pseudo-science that underly uncritical Marxism’s attacks on homosexuality. Finally, we will do a brief overview of the history of homosexuality from a Marxist perspective.

Attendees are invited to go through the reading as much as possible and take part in discussions. We will have three presenters, who will break down the reading into digestible components.

Did we mention there will be snacks?

Hope to see you there. 

Short speech made at the Oct 15th “Canada out of Afghanistan Now!” rally

A more detailed summary of the rally, as well as an analysis of Occupy Toronto, which happened on the same day, can be found on the PRAC website.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————-

We are the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee of Toronto. We denounce Canadian imperialism. We denounce the occupation of Afghanistan.

We stand in solidarity and support of the Communist-Maoist Party of Afghanistan. The goal of the Communist-Maoist Party is to resist occupation in all its forms. We support all those who are working tirelessly in resistance. We particularly those who are mobilizing the oppressed Afghans.

Background information:

In July 2011, a regiment of 650 US troops left Afghanistan, and 33,000 more are due to leave soon.

Why are they leaving? Because the occupation has changed its tactic from one of pure occupation to the gradual transfer of responsibility.

For example, the UK is withdrawing its forces completely. However, the UK will be establishing a military academy for Afghans. The purpose of the imperialists and their cronies is the training of forces that would be able to repress its own people.

This does not mean the US has withdrawn from the business of occupation; the US will be now be occupying in a smarter way—via a puppet regime. How will the US establish this puppet regime? Through 2 ways:

1. the imperialist US intends to maintain permanent army bases in Afghanistan

2. the imperialist US plans to buy out the local Islamist insurgency. It will do this through a variety of tactics, from repression and appeasement, to peace and conciliation.

The ultimate goal of the imperialists is the consolidation of its own rule via the puppet regime. The Islamist, chauvinist and autocratic character of the Afghan regime is of no consequence to the US and its imperialist cronies.

And why is the US so interested seeing the puppet regime consolidate? Because the installation of 400,000 local security personnel will save the US money. Saving money will mean the US can maintain longer dominance of both Afghanistan and the regions around Afghanistan.

It is not hard to see the that end goal, whether 2001 or 2011, is still global supremacy for the US and its imperialist cronies.

What must we do about this? Since the puppet regime will now carry out the wishes of the imperialist forces, the revolutionary struggle will be targeting the puppet regime. That is its top priority.

We, as opponents of imperialism in an imperialist country, must support the Afghan revolutionary forces in its struggle to topple the puppet regime the US and its imperialist cronies helped set up!

Mao at Occupy Toronto!

RSM/PRAC banner of Mao’s face

A quick historical and contextual overview of JRA/PFLP: Declaration of World War by Masao Adachi (1971)

The Proletarian Revolution Action Committee of Toronto and the Revolutionary Student Movement would like to thank everyone for coming out to the event tonight!!!

To put the film in context, we would like to provide a  brief historical overview of the political situation in which this film was made, the relationship between the Japanese Red Army and the infamous United Red Army, our own political position regarding some of these politics, especially the nature of armed struggle, and its implications of it on the larger communist movement.

This film was made 3 years after the second Ampo struggle by noted filmmakers Masao Adachi and Wakamatsu Koji, both sympathizers of the Japanese Left and the Communist League (Red Army Faction). The second Ampo struggle, like the first Amp struggle of 1960, was against the US-Japan Security Treaty which among others things included the right for American military bases to exist in Japan. The Communist League (Red Army Faction) itself was a split from the Communist League, or the Bund, in July 1969. The Bund itself was originally formed in 1958 by a group of Zengakuren members and leaders that split from the Japanese Communist Party in light of Khruschev’s Secret Speech and the JCP’s policies towards a number of political questions. Zengakuren stands for Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Sō Rengō or in English the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations, and is an umbrella group for numerous student groups in different universities. Although it must be noted that by the 1960′s several competing Zengakuren’s existed, each controlled by a different socialist/communist group. The Bund quickly came to adopt Trotskyism like much of the anti-JCP Left. The Bund was centrally involved in the first Ampo struggle in 1960 and collapsed shortly thereafter (1961) into numerous small sects due to the failure of that Ampo struggle. The different Bundists sects reorganized themselves into Communist League – Unity Faction in July 1965 in the midst of the ever deepening university struggles, the war in Vietnam and in preparation for the Ampo Struggles. The Bund again was a major force in the street battles, coordinated direct actions and university occupations across the country and was regularly pitted in violent street battles with the police.

Indeed, the unified Bund’s student organization soon emerged as one of the largest student groups on Japanese campuses. However, by 1969 tensions had arisen within the Bund’s central committee regarding the direction that the struggle should take thereafter. The Bund itself was largely concentrated in the Tokyo and the Kansai area around Osaka and Kyoto. The Kansai group argued, much like the Weather Underground, that the time had come to start a revolution in Japan using an urban political-military strategy. The Tokyo group opposed such a plan and deemed it adventurist and premature. In September 1969 at a public meeting organized by the Kansai faction called “The Great Red Army Political Meeting”, the Kansai faction announced the formal formation of the Communist League – Red Army Faction (RAF), and announced the following slogans, “Escalate the Present Struggle into Armed Revolution”, “Simultaneous Worldwide Revolution” and “Create a World Party, a World Red Army and a World Revolutionary Front”. Amongst the attendees were Shigenobu Fusako, future leader of the Japanese Red Army in the Middle East, and Tsuneo Mori, future leader of the Japanese Red Army in Japan. On September 22nd the RAF started attacks against police boxes in Osaka with molotov cocktails, and started a series of revolutionary expropriations and continued until 1971. Due to the success of these actions the RAF quickly came under pressure from police surveillance and saw the mass arrests of their underground and aboveground members. On November 5th the police in an early morning raid on a mountain lodge at the Daibosatsu Pass in Yamananashi Prefecture, surprised and arrested 53 members of the Red Army that were there on a program of ‘special training”. Chairman Shiomi was also arrested, thus resulting in the near collapse of the organization. These mass arrests resulted in two key developments: 1) the rise of Tsuneo Mori to the Chairmanship of the party; and 2) the remaining fragments of the organization came to theorize that it may be too difficult for an urban guerrilla army to get the necessary training in Japan itself, and results in a group of JRA members hijacking Japan Airlines Flight 351 on March 1970 which is re-directed to North Korea i.e. the JRA in North Korea, Shigenobu’s departure in 1971 to Beirut to receive training from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine i.e. the JRA in the Middle East at the behest of Chairman Mori, and the Mori group in Japan which would later merge with the Japanese Communist Party (Revolutionary Left Faction) to form the URA. Apparently Chairman Mori was less keen on establishing worldwide bases and continued to believe that domestic guerrilla training was possible.

Thoughts on the upcoming elections…

From South Park's "Vote or Die" episode! check it out!!

With provincial elections on its way, we the proletariat see the usual string of promises. These promises have no other purpose but to diffuse people’s rage at the bourgeois Canadian state.

All the candidates have adopted rhetoric that addresses the working class, but it is all a sham! All the candidates are simply slight variations of each other. All of them are only interested in protecting the interests of the rich from the disaster the rich has wrought for itself. None of them, or their party platforms, truly analyzes the heart of the proletarians’ problems.

We, whether youth, proletarian, or both, face mounting and unpayable debt. We must work non-stop just the make ends meet, and yet we come nowhere near it. When we try to search for jobs, we find ourselves amidst increasingly bigger seas of jobless people similarly looking for work. We cannot get adequate housing free from overcrowding. These, among other issues, define our generation.

Yet all the bourgeois parties can offer us are meaningless promises that don’t address the root cause of our misery.

The NDP party, a prime example of a party that is left in word and right in form, is dangerous because it works hard to deceive the masses by projecting a so-called working class agenda. It says it will raise people’s standard of living, but it shamefacedly represses people’s knowledge of the sources of the wealth that fills its coffers. Like the Conservatives and the Liberals, the NDP will just as gladly plunder third world countries. Its ultimate interest is the maintenance and growth of the capitalist system.

The Liberals, for its own part, is trying to funnel disaffected young people into NGOs, hoping that these young people will waste their youth working for reforms, as the representatives of endless myriads of identity groups. At the same time, the Liberals are trying to paint itself as the “immigrant-friendly” party by appeasing businesses and professional people of color. Meanwhile, poor migrants are kept outside of borders, and poor workers, working for minimum wages and less, languor inside of the borders, unable to benefit from a policy that only promotes the interests of the businesses and the bourgeois class of immigrants.

While the NDP and the Liberals are busy deceiving the proletarians, the Conservatives, similarly despicable, are working to fan an anti-immigration wildfire: by pitting the immigrants and non-immigrants against each other, the Conservatives hope to distract the masses from the dismal state of the economy. As the economic conditions get worse, the Conservatives will have nothing for the masses but increasingly bold hatespeak.

At wits end about who to exploit next, the capitalists cut down funding in order to maintain profits, and people are starting to mobilize against cuts. Our jobs, though, as students, proletarians, and revolutionaries, is to place the misery of our lives within the larger context of capitalism and crisis. We must have the courage to hold the glaring inequalities and contradictions in front of us to heart; we must address the problem at its root; we must take hold of our attachment to parliamentary democracy, at least as it exists now, and uproot it!

Under the present circumstances, voting simply works to legitimize a fundamentally unjust system. We must opt for the more drastic, the more truthful, solution. We must mobilize the masses to act in its own interest.

We must boldly shout: “revolution is the only solution!”

Communist Skool Launch!

Event poster:

Please read  Prakash’s  “Where Should Students and Youth Make a New Beginning?” We will also be taking a recent youth issue of the Partisan–a newspaper published  by the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party)–and discussing a segment of it. The newspaper article will be available at the meeting.

Our aim is to help students and youth gain a theoretical understanding of our political tasks, as well as brainstorm some practical ideas for realizing our revolutionary goals.

Directions: get off at St. George subway station at Bedford, then go West until you see a gray, ramped building. Enter via side entrance and take elevator to the 5th floor.

We look forward to seeing you at our launch!

Join an anti-capitalist, anti-reformist revolutionary youth movement!

Dear students and youth:

The Revolutionary Student Movement (RSM), based in Toronto, is having its first open meeting this coming Wed. Sept. 28th, at 6:30PM. Location is OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) room 5150.

If you are reading this, no doubt you’ve heard about us from our outreaching, from our comrades in Montreal and Toronto, or just by word-of-mouth. No doubt you are already apart of anti-capitalist movement, or want to be.

Come to the meeting to:

-find out what is communism, and what is Maoism

-engage in political discussion with us

-vent to us and let us vent to you about the increasing difficulty of being a young person in capitalist society

-meet us and allow us to meet you

-find about our programs

-write for our paper

-find out more about communist skool (launching Thur. Oct 6th!)

-find out more about student and youth revolutionary movements all over the world

—

Light snacks will be provided. Bring your friends. No registration necessary.

JRA/PFLP” Declaration of World War” by Masao Adachi (1971)

FILM-SCREENING FUNDRAISER
Suggested Donation is $10 -$20 (though people without funds will not be turned away).

***With introductory remarks by Toronto based Video Artist and Curator, Victoria Moufawad-Paul ***

Filmed in 1971 in the midst of joint anti-imperialist military actions carried out by the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Declaration of World War is an experimental revolutionary film essay that serves as a record of the communist and anti-imperialist global struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

———

The Revolutionary Student Movement (RSM) is the student division of the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee, whose main purpose is to offer an alternative educational/activism space on campus. Our beliefs are partisan–Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. We will be offering free Communist afternoon school during the school year. Syllabus and more info will be posted soon, on rsmtoronto.wordpress.com. And will be available at the Film Screening Fundraiser.