Carlos Montes, a member of the Central Committee of Freedom Road Socialist Organization stated, Assata Shakur was a softspoken, warm friendly mujer! We met in Cuba, in 1996, while on a trip with Global Exchanges led by Medea Benjamin. We talked about the importance of unity of Chicano and Black liberation struggles, and how Cuba was really building a revolution and protecting her from U.S. state repression. She knew about the Chicano movement.”

#InJusticeSystem #AssataShakur #Opinion #Remembrances

Assata Shakur was a fighter for freedom and an icon of the Black liberation movement. She came of age during the struggles of the 1960s and 70s, and everything that was good and powerful about that time, Assata embodied. The deep understanding that a better world is possible, and most importantly, the conviction to never give up. Never surrender.

Assata began as someone searching and questioning why life was so hard for Black people in the U.S. Over time, through her experiences in the streets and her study of revolutionary movements in Africa and the Caribbean, she became a Marxist. She came to understand capitalism was at the bottom of the problem and committed herself to the fight to pull it up from the root.

This clarity made her dangerous in the eyes of the U.S. government. Assata was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. For that, she was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which spied on, framed and tried to destroy Black activists. She was harassed, hunted and finally captured after a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. Evidence against her was thin but she was convicted anyway and locked away. The government wanted to make an example out of her to show what happens when Black women dare to fight back.

But Assata refused to be broken. In 1979, she made a daring escape from prison. Socialist Cuba wrapped its arms around her and protected her. She lived out her years with dignity, surrounded by friendship and love.

Assata’s life was not easy. She paid a heavy price for her steadfastness: years in prison, exile and separation from her family. But she made the choice to stand on the side of liberation.

Assata is alive in the struggle for liberation for all oppressed people today. At the end of many demonstrations around the world, people still gather to raise their voices in her words: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” She is alive wherever people resist oppression and refuse to bow down to the existing order of things. She is alive in the fight for a better world.

She showed us what it means to be unbroken, and because of her, we know that the struggle for liberation cannot be stopped.

Assata Shakur teaches, inspires and lives always, in the fight for freedom.

#FRSO #Statement #Remembrances #RevolutionaryTheory #OppressedNationalities #AfricanAmerican #AssataShakur

New York, NY – On Oct. 20, the City College of New York (CCNY) administration shut down the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Student and Community Center in the North Academic Center (NAC) building. The Morales/Shakur Center is a hub of political and social activism at CCNY and the surrounding Harlem and Washington Heights communities.

As of early Sunday morning Oct. 20, the NAC building, which houses the Morales/Shakur Center and the library, were both closed during the day. Though the library has since reopened, the Morales/Shakur Center remains closed, despite a policy for all CCNY buildings to be open 24 hours during midterms week to allow students to study.

Police, CUNY security and administrators have been refusing to let students into the Morales/Shakur Center. Police arrested David Suker, a former CCNY student who sat in front of the door of the Center, as can be seen in this video.

Student and community activists are inviting everyone to come to an emergency press conference and protest in defense of the Morales/Shakur Center on Monday, Oct. 21 outside City College at 138th Street and Amsterdam.

The administration has placed a new sign in front of the Morales/Shakur Center that reads “Center for Professional Development.” A university representative informed students in a press release that the Morales/Shakur center has been closed and they intend to convert it into a Career Resource center. Books, documents and personal belongings of students were removed from the center and are being held and “examined.”

Students won use of the Morales/Shakur Center space in North Academic Center room 3/201 as a result of the 1989 CUNY student strike against a proposed tuition increase. The purpose of the space was for students to engage in activism and build links with the surrounding Harlem and Washington Heights communities. The administration tried to retake the space from student activists several times and also got caught engaging in video surveillance of the activist space in 1998. However, students and community members repeatedly fended off administrative attacks.

During one of those attempts to get rid of the Morales/Shakur Center in 2006, Ydanis Rodriguez, a leader in the 1989 student strike and a longtime leader of the Center’s community projects, stated, “In 1989 when we ended our organizing movement against the tuition increase proposed by Governor Mario Cuomo, we were able to persuade the governor not to increase tuition. At the end of that movement, as part of the negotiation, we got that space to use as a student and community center. The center has been a very important place at City College because this is a real link between the university and the surrounding community, especially Harlem, Washington Heights and El Barrio.”

A press release from Students for Education Rights (SER), one of the groups housed in the Morales-Shakur Center, says, “The Morales/Shakur Center is a space for community groups to meet on campus, for students to connect with their political elders and for movement histories to be retained and shared in Harlem. The Center has provided a space for students to organize around a number of issues recently, including the addition of gender identity into the school’s anti-discrimination policy and the combating of rape culture at City College. The closure of this space is a serious assault on our right as students to organize and cultivate community. This follows the Sept. 17 arrest of six CUNY students peacefully protesting David Petraeus’s teaching appointment. Furthermore, the CUNY Board of Trustees plans to impose a policy broadly curtailing our right to political assembly on CUNY campuses at its next Nov. 25 business meeting. Please join us Monday, Oct. 21 at 12:30 pm outside the North Academic Center to hold CUNY accountable for its stifling of student voices and disempowerment of community organizing.”

#NewYorkNY #OppressedNationalities #CityCollegeOfNewYorkCCNY #AssataShakur #MoralesShakurCenter

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement from People's Organization For Progress (POP) chair Lawrence Hamm, from a May 10 Newark, New Jersey press conference.

Newark, NJ – The People's Organization For Progress (POP) calls upon the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to remove Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) from its ‘Most Wanted Terrorists List.’ She does not belong on the list because Ms. Shakur was never charged nor convicted of an act of domestic or international terrorism.

To place her on such a list is fundamentally unjust. It is a perversion of justice and involves the ex post facto application of terrorist laws and definitions of terrorism that were not in existence or applied to her case at the time of her arrest and conviction.

Furthermore, she did not commit the crime she was accused of. She was placed on the list because her conviction connected her to the murder of a police officer. However, evidence in her case shows that she could not have shot and killed that officer. She became a fugitive because given the circumstances of her case, the atmosphere of repression, and the racism of the criminal justice system she could not get justice in this country and to remain here may have cost her life.

The move to place her on the list and the doubling of her bounty to $2 million has little to do with justice and everything to do with politics. It is an opportunistic attempt to use the criminal justice system to score political points in this highly charged post Boston bombing environment.

Placing Assata Shakur on the terrorists list when she was not convicted of a “terrorist act” is in essence falsely accusing her of a crime that she did not commit. It is the abandonment of the law in the name of enforcing the law.

Like the war in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, preemptive strikes, and the abandonment of international law, it is the establishment of a false premise as a rationale for violent action, which has no legal basis but for which political support may be imagined or conjured up. Placing Assata Shakur on the terrorists list sets a dangerous precedent.

With the false premise established what will be next? Will Cuba be given the ultimatum to give up Shakur like the Afghanistan government was told to give up Osama Bin Laden before the U.S. invasion of that country? Will there be a drone strike of Shakur's supposed residence in Cuba? Will Navy Seal Team “7” be sent on a covert mission to assassinate Assata Shakur who is an American citizen?

By identifying Shakur as a terrorist the FBI is taking the terrorists list and making it a “political enemies” list, which is an instrument of state terror. And why not? This fits in perfectly with unjust and illegal trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, extraordinary renditions, black site secret prisons in foreign lands, torture, assassination of U.S. citizens, military courts, secret trials, Guantanamo, elimination of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, government domestic spying, arbitrary arrests, police brutality, racial profiling, stop and frisk, mass incarceration, school to prison pipeline, suppression of dissent, COINTELPRO type operations, ignoring the Constitution, trashing the Bill of rights, and trampling upon our civil liberties.

And let's look at her accusers. Who is calling her a terrorist? The FBI who spied on Dr. Martin Luther King. The FBI whose Director J. Edgar Hoover made it his mission to destroy Dr. King. The FBI who engaged in acts of state terror that included assassination against people and organizations in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.

And the New Jersey State Police who shot up Newark and killed innocent people during the rebellion. The New Jersey State Police who for years engaged in the worst forms of racial profiling. The New Jersey State Police, a department so rife with racism that the federal government had to put it under a “master” to force it to reform its racist ways.

With this precedent the rights of all Americans are placed in greater jeopardy. Now, anyone can be deemed a terrorist, not because this was proven in a court of law but by fiat, proclamation or declaration by the President, U.S. Attorney General, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, or some other agency of the federal government.

And this can be done not just for transgressions of the present. It can be done retroactively for sins of the past, ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. If the government doesn't like someone just put them on the terrorist list.

Of course, this exercise of twenty-first century U.S. democracy would not be complete unless accompanied by the economic incentive that American capitalism can provide. In this age of robber billionaires a $1 million dollar bounty on the head of Assata Shakur was not enough. It has been doubled to $2 million.

Who are the $2 million pieces of silver for? Are they for enterprising U.S. citizens? No. Assata Shakur has been given political asylum in Cuba. This pot of gold is to entice elements within Cuban Society to violate the laws and policies of the Cuban government.

The FBI and company hope that in Cuba there are corrupt persons within the police, or criminal elements, or people opposed to the government who will take the bait and do this bit of subcontracting work and keep some of the heat off the bosses in the US.

They hope that there are Hamid Kharzais in Cuba who would like to have bags of money delivered to them on a monthly basis. “Bring Assata Shakur to us and you to can be a millionaire.” Dead or alive has not been specified.

The placing of Assata Shakur on the terrorist list while portrayed as a noble act in the attempt to get justice for a slain police officer is in fact a shameful act of revenge, opportunism, political manipulation, and authoritarianism. It is part and parcel of a corrosive trend eating away at the democratic processes and institutions in our country for half a century and which has accelerated since 9/11.

Assata Shakur should not be on the terrorist list. She should be removed from that list just as Nelson Mandela was removed from that list several years ago. When the threat of terrorism and the terrorist label is misused in this manner the victims of real acts of terror are dishonored.

#NewarkNJ #Newark #InJusticeSystem #Cuba #AfricanAmerican #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #PeoplesOrganizationForProgress #PoliticalRepression #AssataShakur

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following article by Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire.

On the 40th anniversary of the shooting and capture of Assata Shakur, the FBI and the State of New Jersey has now placed the African American revolutionary on the most wanted terrorist list. This latest provocation against Shakur, 65, is directed not only against the veteran Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA) member, but represents an overall attack on the struggle of African Americans against racism and national oppression in the United States.

Assata Shakur has now been placed under a $US2 million bounty offered by the racist government of the U.S. She had previously been subjected to a sum of $US1 million instituted a decade-and-a-half ago.

Since 1984, Shakur has been living as a political refugee in the revolutionary Caribbean-Island nation of Cuba. She sought asylum there after living underground in the U.S. where she escaped from maximum security prison in New Jersey on November 2, 1979.

Shakur was arrested on May 2, 1973 after being stopped by the state police while riding in a car traveling on the New Jersey Turnpike. She was seriously wounded in the routine traffic stop where Zayd Malik Shakur was killed and Sundiata Acoli (formerly known as Clark Squire) was also captured. Acoli remains in prison until this day some forty years later.

During the traffic stop New Jersey state trooper Werner Forester was killed. Shakur was charged with numerous crimes during a series of trials between 1973-77. However, she was acquitted of all these charges and was finally falsely accused and convicted in the death of the law-enforcement officer.

At the time of the arrest of Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli and the murder of Zayd Malik Shakur, the Black Liberation Army had been vilified for years in the corporate media. Many law-enforcement agencies throughout the country were on high-alert for the capturing or killing of members and associates of this organization.

Assata was held for six-and-a-half years in maximum security prisons in New Jersey. She wrote in her political biography entitled “Assata: An Autobiography,” released in 1987 by Zed books, that she was detained in all-male correctional facilities and subjected to torture by prison guards and other law-enforcement officials.

In late 1979, a group of BLA and Weather Underground activists liberated her from prison. She later immigrated to Cuba where the revolutionary socialist government of President Fidel Castro granted her political asylum.

Background of Repression Against the Black Liberation Movement in the U.S.

The Black Panther Party grew out of the southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the state of Alabama. In Lowndes County, Alabama in the aftermath of the Selma to Montgomery March that preceded the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) moved into the area to begin organizing for independent political action.

Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) was a leading organizer with SNCC at the time and played a significant role in the struggle in Lowndes County during 1965-66. SNCC partnered with the John Hulett of the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights which eventually led to the formation of the all-Black Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO).

The LCFO rejected attempts to integrate into the all-white Alabama Democratic Party which was segregationist and thoroughly racist in character. The LCFO took on the Black Panther logo and was consequently labeled the Black Panther Party. This idea spread throughout other regions of the state leading to the formation of the Alabama Black Panther Party by early 1966.

These efforts in Lowndes County gained national attention during 1966. Although the party registered thousands of African American voters, the November 1966 county elections were stolen by the racists.

Nonetheless, by this time the idea which time had come spread throughout other sections of the U.S. There was the establishment of other Black Panther organizations from New York State to California.

In October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense which eventually became the most dominant within the entire movement by mid-1968. By 1967, there were at least three different organizations working under the banner of the Black Panther in California in both the southern and northern regions of the state.

Carmichael, who became Chairman of SNCC in May 1966, pushed for a more nationalist orientation for the organization and the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. The Black Power slogan, which became popular in the summer of 1966, was advanced by Willie Ricks, a SNCC field secretary, (now known as Mukasa Dada) and Stokely Carmichael during the “March Against Fear” in Mississippi in June of 1966.

In 1967, Carmichael was drafted as “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Newton-Seale organization. Carmichael and other SNCC leaders entered into an alliance with the BPP for Self-Defense in February 1968.

Later this alliance broke down but Carmichael and other SNCC organizers continued to work with the Panthers based in Oakland through mid-1969. As a result of both the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist) as well as ideological and political differences, there was a split within the Black Panther Party during the summer of 1969.

COINTELPRO and the Splits Within the Black Liberation Movement

In 1967, the FBI stepped up its efforts to undermine and neutralize the Black Liberation Movement in the U.S. This took placed amid burgeoning urban rebellions which had struck over 200 cities by the end of 1967.

By October 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had labeled the Black Panther Party based in Oakland as the most serious threat to the internal security of the U.S. Hundreds of Party members and supporters were indicted on spurious charges and several organizers were killed by the police and their collaborators.

Leading members of the Party were imprisoned and driven into exile during 1968-69. Newton was wounded and convicted in the murder of an Oakland police officer in 1968. Eldridge Cleaver and Kathleen Cleaver went into exile in Cuba and later Algeria in 1968-69.

In 1969, Bobby Seale was arrested and charged with a conspiracy in the murder of fellow Panther Alex Rackley who was killed in New Haven, Connecticut. During that same year, Seale was bound and gagged on the orders of Judge Julius Hoffmann in Chicago during the conspiracy trial for allegedly attempting to disrupt the Democratic Convention of 1968.

With the Party being a relatively young organization, these actions by the federal government had a devastating impact. By late 1970 after the release of Newton on appeal, tensions grew between the factions within the organization headed by Cleaver, then still living in Algeria, and many of the Panthers on the east coast on the one hand and Newton and Chief-of-Staff David Hilliard along with their adherents based in northern California on the other.

In February 1971, an open split erupted with Cleaver calling for the expulsion of Newton and Hilliard and Newton condemning Cleaver for his public criticism of Party policy. Cleaver and his cohorts soon called for the intensification of the armed struggle inside the U.S.

With the ideological and political struggles coming to the fore inside the Party, various members were forced underground to avoid imprisonment and assassination. These cadres began to call themselves the International Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army.

The BLA was already a part of the Party prior to the split. Rule number six of the Black Panther Party 26 rules, said that no Party member could belong to any other armed force but the Black Liberation Army.

Political fracturing escalated in early 1971 with the acquittal of the New York 21, a group of leading Panthers in New York City who were falsely charged with attempts to carry out bombings in the city. A letter signed by some members of the New York 21 openly criticized the west coast leadership under Newton, prompting their expulsion.

Assata Shakur in her autobiography described this period in detail. Many Party members who had been purged were deliberately sent into the BLA, the underground.

Shakur wrote from the Middlesex County Workhouse on July 6, 1973 that “There is and always will be, until every Black man, woman and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples to struggle for Black freedom and to prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.” (Break the Chains pamphlet)

She continues in this essay noting that “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains!”

The prevailing governmental, corporate and reactionary forces were in mortal conflict with the Black Liberation Movement of the period. The heightened repression against the Movement came amid the major re-structuring of the U.S. and world economy.

Inside the African communities of the U.S. large-scale capital flight, police repression and the proliferation of drugs served to level whole areas which weakened the ability of the struggle to rejuvenate on a revolutionary basis. The split within the Black Panther Party between 1969-71 was replicated in other revolutionary organizations such as the Republic of New Africa, formed in Detroit in 1968 and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, also established in Detroit in 1969.

These political developments grew out of the material conditions in existence at the time. The African American struggle between 1975 and the second decade of the 21st century appeared to have shifted into the electoral arena.

However, the greater exposure of domestic neo-colonial constraints is causing a rethinking among the masses in regard to the overall strategic and tactical imperatives of the struggle. The ascendancy of President Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus has fully laid bare the futility of Democratic Party politics and its utility for African American liberation.

The Significance of the Continuing Persecution of Assata Shakur

With the abysmal failure of the electoral political strategy dominated by the Democratic Party, the ruling class in the U.S. knows that sooner or later the African American masses in alliance with other oppressed nations and exploited workers will move in the direction of revolutionary politics. The decline in the world capitalist system has illustrated to billions around the world that there is no future in the current economic dispensation.

Even inside the U.S. it has been estimated that nearly half of the people are now living either in poverty or close to it. The spokespersons and political agents of the ruling class through their own pronouncements make no pretense in regard to addressing the growing impoverishment of the workers and oppressed.

During the 1960s there was deceptive rhetoric related to the so-called “War on Poverty” and providing greater opportunities for the oppressed nations and marginalized workers to receive a larger share of the wealth owned by the top echelons of society. Today this rhetoric has totally disappeared from the lexicon of the corporate media and the political functionaries of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Consequently, revolutionary politics must be criminalized by the ruling class, the corporate media and the repressive apparatus of the state. Yet large segments of the African American, Latino/as, Arab-Middle Eastern and Muslim sections of the U.S. and world populations have already been criminalized.

Therefore, the recent attacks on Assata Shakur will ring hollow in the minds of the oppressed and conscious workers inside the imperialist-dominated system. This will be the case because there is no future in the current oppressive structures and revolution, or fundamental change and transformation, is the only solution to the problems of poverty, economic exploitation, state repression, environmental degradation and wars of aggression.

The most just response of the ruling class would be to grant a general amnesty to all political prisoners inside the U.S. and those held by the imperialists throughout the world. People living in exile like Assata Shakur should be granted a pardon and allowed to walk free among the masses of the U.S. who are yearning for such revolutionary leadership and consciousness.

Even if an amnesty is not granted to political prisoners by the Obama administration or successive White House occupiers, the struggle against capitalism and imperialism will continue to accelerate. The people have no other choice other than reject the system that is creating the conditions for their own destruction.

#UnitedStates #OppressedNationalities #Racism #BlackPantherParty #COINTELPRO #InjusticeSystem #Cuba #FBIRepression #AssataShakur

Fight Back News Service is reprinting the speech of Jess Sundin, a leader of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, delivered at the FRSO-organized May Day celebration, May 3.

Greetings! And happy May Day, to all the sisters and brothers, comrades and friends gathered here.

This day, International Workers Day, is celebrated by the working class in every corner of the world. This great holiday, a communist holiday, is marked with protests and marches, and also with meetings and celebrations. It’s been more than 125 years since May Day began, and struggles by U.S. workers and our unions have won the eight-hour work day, the 40-hour work week, health and safety rules at work, the right to unionization, unemployment insurance, welfare and social security, minimum wage, and much more. These things are threatened in workplaces and government halls every day. The people you will hear from tonight are, like you, at the forefront of defending our class against these attacks.

Before all of that, let us begin tonight by remembering that first May Day. It was 1886, a time of great protests and strikes by workers; and also a time of great violence and repression against our class and its leaders.

A general strike was being carried out in Chicago, and many other US cities, to demand an 8-hour work day. At that time, most people worked 12 to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. Half a million workers joined the strike, with Chicago being one of the most successful places. A public demonstration was called for at Haymarket Square, to stand up to police brutality against striking workers. At the end of the speeches, police moved in to disperse the crowd. A bomb exploded in their path, and police began firing on the demonstrators. Within a few minutes, dozens of people were killed or wounded, and the police had an excuse to unleash a campaign of repression against the good people of Chicago that lasted for months, and led to the legal lynching of four men who were killed by the state of Illinois for their role in organizing that first May Day protest in Chicago.

I think we grow up imagining that the ruling class gave us Labor Day, which they have in September, as an act of kindness or generosity. Just like maybe we think it was the bosses’ idea to make the work day last 8 hours. It was not until fifty years after the Haymarket massacre that the 8-hour day became the law of the land. We’re here today, because we know the truth, our day, International Workers Day, is May 1st. And it was the labor movement that brought us the 8-hour day. We know “that power concedes nothing without demand – it never has and it never will!”

The immigrant rights mega-marches of 2006 reignited May Day, with marches in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and beyond. Millions of Chicano, Mexicano and Central American protesters took to the streets to fight for legalization and full equality. Last year, tens of thousands joined together around the country for immigrant rights marches, and with unions as a part of the upsurge around Occupy Wall Street. And earlier this week, on May 1st, many of us joined MIRAC (the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee) and Mesa Latina in St. Paul for another great march to demand immigrant rights.

We are still marching now because the people’s movements are as needed as much today as they were in 1886. We aren’t looking to just make a few changes here and there. We are up against a real monster: A system called capitalism.We all know that capitalism is the system that we live under, but just like we don’t learn our history, most of us don’t learn what capitalism is or how it works. Capitalism is a political and economic system that is designed to be unfair. It’s set up so that a few people will own the factories, the trucks, the banks and all the rest. They get their money not by working, but by making other people work hard for them. Those few people are very rich, and I don’t mean like lottery winners. Some of them have more wealth than whole countries! And all of them have more to say about who will be the next president than all the voters in this country put together. They are the capitalist class – sometimes called the 1%, but really, they’re just a fraction of a percent of 1% of the people in this world.

While those guys live in the lap of luxury and call all the shots, the rest of us, the vast majority, we work hard just to get by. We cut coupons to feed our families. We live in apartments and pay rent to a landlord; or if we have a house, it’s the bank that owns most of it. I always say that I own the first floor half-bath at my house. Under capitalism, you can work every day of your adult life, and still go to your grave owing money to banks and hospitals, and even the undertaker.

Our role in the system of capitalism is not to own, but to work. Or to raise children who will grow up to be workers. Or if we’re unemployed, our role is to make those with a job feel so lucky to have a job, that they won’t demand self-respect, decent wages, safe working conditions, or anything else. All of us together, we are the working class.

At the same time, this country was founded on racism, slavery, theft and the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples. That is the key to the super-rich in this country: Native lands were stolen, African Americans built the Southern half of this country and still have no real political or economic power as a people; the Southwest was stolen from Mexico, but the Chicano people who have always lived on that land are treated as second class citizens. They stole whole countries, like Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

So when we talk about the working class, we mean a truly multinational working class, and one which makes real alliances with all oppressed peoples. That’s just here within the U.S. We also embrace the international working class. With all these people we have a shared interest in overthrowing capitalism, and imperialism (the global and highest stage of capitalism).

Of course, people don’t want to live like this, with the vast majority under the boot of a handful of greedy fat cats. And so we fight back. In fact, the history of our class is a history of struggle – of doing the work that makes society run, and then fighting the owning class for our livelihoods, and sometimes for our very lives.

Today, workers in the U.S. are resisting cutbacks to public services and attacks on our wages, pensions and rights. Even here in Minnesota, land of the Democratic Farmer Labor party, there was an attempt to take away the union rights of public employees. They call it “right to work,” but we know they mean the right to work for less wages, less job security, and less dignity.

Public school teachers have always been kicked around by the right-wing, but in Chicago, it was Democratic Mayor Rahm Emmanuel who pushed the Chicago Teachers Union to a strike – not just defending their jobs, but fighting against school closures and privatization. Their example inspired people across the country. Just like past strikes by University clerical workers, the Chicago teachers showed that workers can – and should – stand up in the face of attacks.

When we speak of working class struggles, no one stands above Minnesota’s own Welfare Rights Committee in the fight to defend the social safety net that we absolutely need to survive. I don’t know of any other state that has an organization of low income people fighting not only to poor-bashing, but also to win INCREASES in benefits that our families absolutely need. Let’s hear it for WRC!

Also this past year African Americans and their allies boldly confronted a spike in racist terrorism and police brutality. The murder of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African American youth, provoked outrage. It was only because of people’s protests that Florida moved to prosecute the racist vigilante George Zimmerman. Just this March in Brooklyn, 16-year-old African American student Kimani Gray was shot to death by the New York police department, and the community responded with militant protests – protests which police responded to by declaring martial law in Brooklyn. Racist terrorism by vigilantes like Zimmerman and by the police is an inherent part of the national oppression of Black, Chicano and other oppressed nationalities. The movement to end this oppression is rising. Freedom Road supports this as a key part of the right to self-determination for the Black Belt nation in the South and for the Chicano nation in the Southwest.

To speak again of the immigrant rights movements, it was undocumented youth, known as the Dreamers, who directly confronted Obama with sit-ins and militant protests at his campaign offices. Youth and students are vital to any movement for social change, known for pushing the limits. The Dreamers are responsible for some of the first real gains for immigrant rights in a long time. They taught us that we don’t win by negotiating with the rulers, but rather by demanding what we need.

The fight for democratic rights is part and parcel of the working class struggle. That is why this May Day, when I think of what we have accomplished this year, I cannot overlook the victories for gay marriage in several states, including Minnesota. We stand for full equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people. With Minnesota’s anti-gay marriage amendment, a basic principle of equality was at stake. As long as heterosexual marriage carries with it rights and concrete benefits recognized by the government (health insurance coverage, hospital visitation, inheritance, etc.), we must fight for gay marriage to be legally recognized too. Even as we celebrate the gains made by queer comrades, and work for further victories, we believe that no rights or entitlements should be contingent on any marriage, gay or straight.

While this issue certainly touches me personally, even as a lesbian mom, I have been far more personally impacted by repression. Many of you know, the FBI and a federal prosecutor have targeted myself, along with many others in this room – folks from the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements, and especially Freedom Road Socialist Organization. I know that you will hear more about this from Tracy, and I urge everyone of you to listen to what she has to say.

Our case is one of countless examples of government repression of people’s movements, examples that go back to May Day 1886, and before that, to the foundations of this country. I don’t have time to recount for you all the important cases from history, or even the most important ones from today. There is one in the forefront of my mind today – that of Assata Shakur, great hero of the Black Liberation Movement. Active in the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army in the early 1970s, she was framed up in several cases, with police under authority to shoot her on sight. She was captured alive after a shootout on the New Jersey turnpike. She was tried for six different charges – murder, bank robbery, kidnapping – and not convicted in one of those. She was convicted of murder in the shoot-out where she was captured, and given a life sentence.

Assata Shakur was gravely mistreated in prison – kept in solitary, sometimes in men’s prisons, and frequently tortured and abused. Somehow, a few of her comrades managed to help her escape from prison in 1979. She fled to socialist Cuba, where she still lives today as a political refugee.

Why is Assata on my mind today? Because this week, the FBI added her to the Most Wanted Terrorist list, and doubled the bounty on her head to $2 million. Assata has not been in this country since I was a small child. She is a writer, a political activist, and a historic African American leader. She is not a terrorist.

We don’t know why the FBI has done this now, almost 35 years after Assata escaped that prison. We do know that the US government has a long memory for ill will. That same long memory moved the FBI agents investigating us in 2010, to bring back a nearly 40-year old case against Carlos Montes! Carlos Montes and Assata Shakur were both targets of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program against people’s movements, and especially liberation movements (Carlos was a Brown Beret, a leader of the Chicano Liberation movement). I think the FBI remembers these cases best because they didn’t win. Assata Shakur is treated like a hero today in sunny Cuba, while Carlos Montes is still free and fighting in Los Angeles.

We need more victories like theirs, so we align ourselves with others fighting against political repression. This includes hundreds of Arabs, Somalis and other Muslims, imprisoned as so-called terrorists, while it is the US military that reigns down terror from the skies over countries across the globe, and it is the US that backs terrorist regimes in Israel, Colombia and elsewhere.

We know that war and repression are the last resort of a failing empire, which cannot rule without the use of force.

Many countries are resisting U.S. empire, its greedy demands. We welcome every force that stands against our rulers, including in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. First among these is Palestine, where even the children are heroes! They confront tanks and armed soldiers with rocks and slingshots. Even under threat of imprisonment, they protest openly against the US-backed Israeli occupation. In Syria, some people believe that those fighting against the government are like us, and that they are fighting for democracy. In fact, the Syrian government is at the frontline of resisting US imperialism in the Middle East. The US interest there is not in democracy for Syrians, but in a puppet government controlled by the US for the easy profit of US corporations.

Some of the biggest May Day protests this year were in Bangladesh, coming the week after a factory collapsed killed more than 400 workers. Before the collapse, the workers had seen the cracks in the factory walls. They didn’t want to go into the building, but were told by factory owners they would be fired if they refused to work. And so, to feed their families, they went into that building. And they were killed. On May Day, people demanded justice for the dead workers, including prosecution to hold the factory owner responsible for their deaths.

May Day reminds us of the need for a militant anti-war movement here that stands in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in oppressed nations. When they strike a blow against imperialism in their countries, they strike a blow against the same bankers, corporations and rich elites that rip us off and exploit and oppress us here in the U.S. This is as true with the Bangladeshi worker as much as with the Palestinian resistance fighter, or the Colombian guerrilla.

The work we all do from day to day is incredibly important, but on May Day, in the shadows of those who have fought and died for our cause, we must think about how the work we do can be a part of changing history. There is a way to put an end to this struggle against suffering, and that is socialism. Socialism is a system that puts power in the hands of working people and our class. It’s only logical that society should be run by the majority. Of course, if we were in power, we would make sure that the basic needs of the majority were met. The rich ruling class that is in power today doesn’t have a clue about what we need. Even the small-time Minnesota state politicians couldn’t get by on the amount of money that we live on with welfare. Most were afraid to try it, and the few that did try, they couldn’t do it. They don’t understand anything about how we live.

That is why May Day is also an important time to celebrate the accomplishments of the socialist countries – Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos and Democratic Korea – where the working class holds political and economic power. These are countries that have pulled people out of poverty; where housing, health care and education are guaranteed. And where the people who work to make the wealth of the country also benefit from that wealth.

It is no surprise that socialists were the first to call for people to celebrate May Day. Long live International Workers Day!

#MinneapolisMN #Socialism #JessSundin #immigrantRights #FreedomRoadSocialistOrganization #internationalWorkersDay #workersRights #May1 #Capitalism #USImperialism #FBIRepression #AssataShakur