Rally Against the Cuts to Education – March 4th, 5pm San Francisco Civic Center

March 4th is a Strike and Day of Action. I am tired of all these fucking leftoid groups promoting the rally at civic center. We're going to shut down our campus... we need help to do it. By going to civic center when the building is closed we are doing nothing more than patting ourselves on the back for having successfully co-opted a bay area-wide shut down of public services.

STRIKE means STRIKE!!!

Everyone needs to BE AT THE CAMPUSES for support.... and MAYBE rally at Civic Center in the evening... but the CAMPUSES is where the REAL actions and rallies are going to be taking place.

Yes! Brilliant! Let's not gather with thousands of people with whom we might organize a bigger movement! Let's stay isolated in our fantasies and pretend we can have the general strike because all the workers have been waiting for is a few intrepid students to lead the way. And then when it doesn't happen we can blame the leftists for damming the inexorable tide of history with their sheer pessimism. Hurray for revolutionary optimism! Smash the shackles of common sense!

My friends, I'd like to suggest you reacquaint your feet with the ground.

If you are interested in building a mass social movement against the budget cuts, and all of the other attacks on people's lives, then attend the all education rally in SF Civic Center at 5pm.

If you are interested in making sure the Left in the US remains impotent, small, and completely disconnected from the lives of most people, then don't go.

There will be many spontaneous responses to March 4th. This complexity breaks the bounds. Your SFSU shutdown will gain power as the city rally unfolds.

In Solidarity,
wj

bREAK OUT YOUR CELL PHONES AND START FORWARDING MESSAGES. DON'T BE SILENT. BE LOUD. BE VOCAL BE OBNOXIOUS.

The "established" Left groups in question have made open moves to reign in rank and file and student activity. They've also attempted to define students as "separate" from workers, even though anyone on the ground knows that most students are workers, yes as in waged laborers, as in proles. Yet some of the conservative trot groups portray students who want to agitate for DEFINITE strikes across many sectors as wanting to be "vanguardist." It's the height of hypocrisy for these groups, whose entire modus operandi is fraction groups, front groups, and secrecy, to go out and red bait the community organizers/participants as being too radical. The irony is that there are literally school administrators to the left of some of the Trot groups, as was witnessed at an SF high school in which one trot group tried to protect its turf, limiting students to "teach ins" instead of the walkouts, which the school principle actually was in favor of!

Don't let them hold your militancy back! Your militancy in no way puts you at odds with the community, no matter how much these leftist groups want to control the situation.

At the 10/24 Berkely meeting it is not even in dispute that the Trot groups and union bureaucrats anti-democratically moved to remove the general strike from the discussion, in the same way they have manipulated countless other conferences.

Then they tell you that you can't simply "call" a general strike, this is not how history works, and that students can't expect to lead workers. But this is ahistorical, because historically student actions have often led to general strikes, Paris, South Korea, Tiananmen, etc. People are calling for DEFINITE strike actions as opposed to the watered down "action" --whatever you want, which is designed to break solidarity of action.
But if and when strike actions occur, should they be sustained, you know damn well Todd Chretien and the ISObots, Speak Out, Socialist Action, ANSWER, etc. will line up to take credit for having "organized" it.

Take the lead of the SF State students who have engaged in exemplary actions of the type that have historically increased militancy and helped formulate more effective theory. They are not waiting for the SF State self imagined peoples' vanguard of the ISO or union leaders to give the ok. They have been calling for real strike actions all along, as have many other campuses. The occupations are exemplary and push forward the demands being made.

Keep it up comrades!

I think it's a damn shame that the mobilization of thousands of people in Civic Center was given short shrift by the bourgeois press in favor of the actions of a handful of student leftists playing at being radical by getting themselves hog-tied by the cops on the Oakland freeway. And it's a shame twice over that some would-be revolutionaries think that the putschist actions of this minority are somehow more important than the thousands of excited, energized, and activated protesters who felt their power in civic center, and over the coming weeks will bring that spirit home to their workplaces and communities.