Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 19:27:00 -0500 From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu> Subject: Re: M-FEM: Socialist Shelters? (was Queer Kids....) Carrol wrote: > Notice that we have "Marxists" in the United States, and >"Socialists," but we do not have a *socialist movement* at this >time, and it is a movement, not individuals or even collections of >individuals who build *institutions* of any kind, including homes >for homeless kids. And if fact, under the conditions of the last >30 years or so, those individual activists who have tried to >build one or another kind of "service" institution have usually >used that activity as a road away from politics, not as an >embodiment of their politics. > > So in addition to saying that there are no "socialist >shelters" now in the U.S., I would go further and say there >ought not to be under present conditions. I agree that without a movement, individuals who aim to serve a given need by building an institution are likely to become simple service providers and to become depoliticized. But this still leaves questions of *how to build (or rebuild) a socialist movement* and of what is the relationship between *movement-building* and workers' mutual aid activities (among which we may count a shelter for homeless kids). I am finally reading Mark Naison's _Communists in Harlem during the Depression_, and the book contains passages that relate to what we are discussing here. (BTW, I highly recommend the book to those who haven't read it yet.) I would like to quote one of them from the chapter entitled "They Shall Not Die: The Impact of the Scottsboro Case on the Harlem Party": "With Scottsboro setting the tone, other aspects of Party organizing in Harlem, most notably its work among the unemployed, displayed greater dynamism and flexibility. During the summer and fall of 1931, the Harlem Unemployment Council began to develop new strategies which tried to incorporate the cooperative traditions of Harlem's population into its program of militant protest. This represented a substantial change for the Harlem Council. During the first year of its existence, Harlem Council leaders, in an effort to distinguish their organization from Harlem's soup kitchens and private charities, had bluntly told the unemployed that the council could not take responsibility for providing them with meals. When rank-and-file council members had tried to collect food, money, or clothing for starving neighbors, or cook communal meals for the unemployed, council leaders had criticized them for 'avoiding militant struggle' and failing to shift the responsibility for care of the unemployed to the government. But by the summer of 1931, Harlem Party organizers had come to recognize that such doctrinaire opposition to self-help measures had limited their movement's appearl. 'Fear of the self-activity of the masses,' they concluded, had isolated the Harlem Council from many 'sincere workers' who saw no contradiction between taking a collection for their neighbors and resisting an eviction or marching to City Hall. The council's new strategy involved three major components: taking up collections on particular blocks to help families who were close to starvation, taking delegation of unemployed people to charitable agencies and sitting in until they received relief, and participating in protest actions at City Hall and the state legislature to demand cash relief for the jobless. The Party's call for a National Hunger March to Washington in December, 1931, gave added focus to these activities. Organizing for the march took the form of public hearings on conditions in Harlem and marches on public and private relief agencies. In several of these actions, the Harlem Council succeeded in getting immediate cash relief for unemployed individuals." (66-67) The above passage from _Communists in Harlem..._ says, to me, the following: 1) Workers' mutual aid activities can be used for a movement-building purpose, when they are organically linked to other class-based direct actions, class-consciousness-raising, and so on. 2) Related to (1), workers' mutual aid activities shouldn't be made a substitute for class-based organizing for reforms and social revolution. 3) The people that marxists would like to appeal to and recluit to the socialist movement are likely to have their own cooperative traditions and institutions. Ignoring them totally would be a poor idea. Since this is a marxist-feminist list, I think that (3) should be especially of concern to us. Feminists (and even non-feminist women) have placed much emphasis on mutual-aid activities. Creating and sustaining women's health clinics, providing underground abortion-provider networks when abortion was still illegal, establishing women's presses and bookstores when books by, for, and about women were scarce, setting up rape-crisis hotlines and counceling services, organizing self-defense classes, taking care of one another's children (formally or informally), and other activities have been the means that not only allowed women to work to meet other's women's urgent and immediate needs; They can be also the media through which women learn organizing skills and gain the ability to exercize leadership and initiative. I think marxists should think about ways to relate to these women's self-activities, in order to build a socialist movement. Yoshie
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