Preface
In the September 2023 issue of Revolution, the Internationalist Group’s youth publication, a reference is made to a series of polemic exchanges between the Internationalist Club at Hunter College and ourselves (p. 8). This correspondence was prompted by a leaflet produced by the IC for the Walkout for Abortion Rights at Hunter College, as part of the National Student Day of Action, in October 2022. Our article, including a response to the IC, can be read here.
Since the article in Revolution does not go into the content of the email exchange in detail, we are sharing the material in full on our bulletin.
We believe debating the questions raised in our correspondence furthers the development of an informed and politically active student movement. The variety of different student groups present at last year’s Abortion Walkout reflects the steadily growing maturity within student activism. Students are electing to join organizations with specific programs and bases of unity. They are willing to define themselves ideologically, and collaborate on worthwhile goals and issues while scrupulously drawing lines of disagreement and demarcation.
We look forward to any continuation of the discussions that follow, in the spirit of continuing to raise the level of militant student organizing.
IC Email 1: Oct 20, 2022
Comrades:
The Hunter Internationalist Club is holding a forum and discussion on “Socialism: What It Is and Why We Fight for It” on Tuesday, October 25th at 2:30PM in Thomas Hunter 105.
In our club’s recent meetings, we have discussed the leaflet you distributed at the October 6 protest and voted to invite your organization to the forum, where we would give you 10 minutes during the round of discussion to present your views, critiques, etc.
Looking forward to your response.
Signed,
Redacted
MDSO Reply 1: Oct 24, 2022
Thank you for the invitation and apologies for the delay in responding. Unfortunately, our Hunter chapter members have to be at their wage labor jobs during the time of your forum, and cannot attend. But we would like to be considered again in the future.
What are your thoughts on our leaflet?
We would like to establish a line of communication to discuss organizing future exchanges of ideas, as well as possible areas of agreement that might come up for joint front work at Hunter and in CUNY.
IC Email 2: Oct 27, 2022
Comrades:
It’s a shame that your organization was unable to find any members that it could send to our forum, where approximately 50 young people participated in an animated discussion about revolutionary politics.
Of course, in accordance with the principles of workers democracy, you are welcome to attend and participate in the discussion at any of our public events.
With regard to the last paragraph of your response to our invitation, we would be interested in arranging to meet with you in person to explore the topics you mention.
* * * * *
Your response asks what our thoughts are on your leaflet.
That is a large subject that could certainly be a topic for in-person conversation. Here we will give a frank but brief answer to your question, on just a few aspects:
The fact that the Internationalist Club had by far the largest single organized contingent at the October 6 “walkout” protest clearly doesn’t square with the caricature your leaflet presents of a group that supposedly cuts itself off from struggles, etc. At the October 6 protest, our contingent’s signs, speeches and literature put forward our revolutionary program on the fight for free abortion on demand.
Quite a different matter is becoming part, as your organization has, of something like the “CUNY for Abortion Rights” coalition. As we have shown in detail in our press, what “C4AR” is consciously based on is a whole tradition of class-collaborationist coalitions for “peace,” abortion rights, etc. particularly those formed in the early 1970s. (See for example internationalist.org/why-history-matters-in-fight-for-abortion-2209.html.)
Far from a principled united front for a common action by different groups, C4AR is an ongoing propaganda bloc built on a reformist basis. That was shown clearly and concretely by its leaflet for the October 6 Hunter protest, whose demand was: “pressure the CUNY admin to take a stand on abortion rights.” This slogan expressed not “imprecision,” as your leaflet characterizes it, but a call to mislead Hunter students into reliance on and collaboration with the class enemy. The nature of C4AR was then underlined by the fact that not a single component of the coalition had a single word to say publicly against that slogan – which was the demand of the “walkout” protest flier – from the time when the C4AR flier was posted up widely at Hunter, through the following two weeks when it remained widely posted, up until October 6, the day of the protest itself.
That includes the MDSO, which remained publicly silent on the topic until, under the pressure of the public criticism we had put out almost two weeks previously, sought to distance itself from the demand, on the day of. So your organization can scarcely disclaim responsibility for this class-collaborationist call. But rather than face up to this fact, in its leaflet the MDSO seeks to justify itself with the kind of argument routinely put forward against actual adherence to revolutionary principles. It voices an outlook standard for most of the left, according to which it can conveniently pay lip service to some such principles sometimes, but actually upholding them in practice is a different story, since that would mean to “cut ourselves off from the existing movement.”
When writing a self-justification in its leaflet for October 6, the MDSO sought to characterize our attitude towards joint actions with other groups. Evidently you did not “seek truth from facts.” ( Or chose to ignore those facts.) Again, the picture presented won’t wash for anyone remotely familiar with the history of CUNY struggles over the past 20+ years. As is very widely known at CUNY and on the Hunter campus, the Internationalist Clubs have initiated and/or participated in innumerable united front protests and other joint actions. To mention just a few, these range from the campaign that spiked CUNY’s attempted purge of undocumented students in 2001 to the one against CUNY’s hiring of war criminal David Petraeus (which we’d assume would be well known to you), to numerous speak-outs at Hunter against racist police terror and deportations; in support of campus workers; for abortion rights, to Ayotzinapa protests – to mobilizing students for the Cabricanecos workers campaign over the past six months.
Your leaflet uses the term “hubris.” Frankly, it strikes us that this term would more appropriately apply to the MDSO casually dismissing (or not bothering to inform itself) about these actions, and the many others that are part of the actual political record. If your group is unfamiliar with these struggles because it did not participate in them, even a small amount of online research would make the facts clear. Among many fruitful sources for this could be archives of student newspapers from CUNY campuses (Hunter, BCC, Hostos, BMCC, CCNY, the GC, Baruch, etc.) – and of course of our paper Revolution: www.internationalist.org/revolutiontoc.html
On your leaflet, two more things for now. Our Club members are very curious to know:
A footnote to the online version of your leaflet says that we incorrectly characterized the MDSO as Maoist. If it isn’t, then what is it, and what is its position on Maoism?
As your leaflet notes, we call for a revolutionary workers party. This is because as revolutionaries we agree with Lenin’s point that the workers and oppressed actually breaking from capitalist parties, politicians and institutions is not something that will just happen spontaneously. It requires formation of a party, one that can actually lead the struggle to break the power of the ruling class, smash the bourgeois state in a socialist revolution, and establish a workers state, extending this internationally. You reject the call for a revolutionary workers party. So what kind of party do you propose? None, i.e. leaving politics to the bourgeois parties? Or a party of some other kind? Or is it that the MDSO has no opinion on this question? It is not one that genuine revolutionaries could honestly evade.
Signed,
Redacted
MDSO Reply 2: December 12, 2022
To the Internationalist Club at Hunter,
Thank you for your patience. We will respond briefly to some of the points made in your email.
On the CUNY4AR coalition:
You continue to levy your criticism against the slogan, “to pressure CUNY admin to take a stand on abortion,” for lacking emphasis for independent class struggle, and accuse the involved organizations with CUNY4AR of reformism and class collaboration. This slogan is imprecise, as we have mentioned before. It may have been a call for collaboration with the administration, had C4AR emphasized working with CUNY in an amicable relationship. But that was not the case: the CUNY administration was never involved in the walk-out mobilization, and in fact both administrative staff and teachers came out to try and shut down the rally. You continue to state that the “pressure” slogan was the main demand of the coalition, which on the contrary, was only one of the many demands raised. If there was a central call raised by the coalition, it was to unite the student body and get organized.
Your organization on the other hand appears content with your sectarianism and isolation from the student body, boasting about your large contingent at the rally. We must ask — who was in that contingent? Existing Internationalist Club members? Your organization is more established and thus larger, so this numerical difference comes as no surprise.
At the September 13th interest meeting where a vote was held on the question of organizing a walkout on the Hunter campus, the Internationalist Club members abstained from the vote, refusing to participate and leaving the question up to others. The MDSO voted in favor of immediately preparing for a walk-out in order to mobilize the largest possible number of students.
Our programmatic goal of popularizing the politics of socialist revolution among the student masses means we will sometimes join broad coalitions with groups such as the Left Voice and YDSA, both of whom we have clear political differences with, which you can find outlined in several articles, like this one, on our website: 3 Reasons Why Revolutionary Students Should Not Join YDSA.
We see it as our duty to broaden and raise the consciousness of the democratic student movement, including those sections dominated by reformists and opportunists. The student body reflects the same class divisions present in society. We aim to struggle against the many manifestations of bourgeois ideas that dominate college campuses. We refuse to limit ourselves to only organizing those students who already adhere to proletarian politics and a materialist worldview. Our role in the CUNY4AR coalition is to agitate the student mass around the popular and democratic demand for abortion rights, which under capitalism necessarily includes winning reforms and imposing demands on capitalist and bourgeois institutions. We have a clear and consistent positions on this, dating back to our article in July 2020:
“We recognize that the struggle for reforms is important in the movement toward socialism. However, we struggle for reforms not only to obtain immediate improvements in the lives of working people, but more importantly to develop and broaden the class struggle. That is the difference between revolutionism and reformism. We know that bourgeois politicians grant reforms with one hand and snatch them back with the other, reduce them to nothing, and use them to preserve the separation of the workers from the means of production. Only by putting political power in the hands of the working class can we transform society in a fundamental way.” From: Abolition: A Third Way Between Reform and Revolution?
On the question of party construction:
You end your email response with a misunderstanding of our position on party construction (“You reject the call for a revolutionary workers party”). Our position on the need for a party is laid clear in numerous articles we have published:
“In order to win lasting reforms which can be used to further the class struggle, the working class must act from a position of political independence, organized in its own Party. This Party will gather the most advanced and combative elements of the working class to lead the fight of the whole people against the bourgeoisie, which is organized in its state and in its parties. As a student organization, the MDSO cannot directly play a role in the construction of such a Party, but we recognize its urgent necessity as a condition for the emergence of an independent working-class politics in the United States.” — From: Rebellion in the Blue Cities
“On their own, these struggles always end in some agreement with capitalists or the state, whether through a law, an institution, or some other pact. It is an organicist illusion to see these partial and fragmented struggles as somehow spontaneously converging in a unified project of socialist revolution. In the absence of a revolutionary class – by which we mean an organized subjective force bearing a revolutionary program and capable of leading a general popular uprising against the old society – resistance struggles are condemned to repeat themselves ad infinitum.
It is the duty of all revolutionaries today to work for the construction of a Party that bears a political program around which the revolutionary camp can rally. Only such a Party will be able to elaborate a tactics and carry out the painstaking work of tracing a revolutionary path to the future, organizing and channeling the force of the rebellious masses at every step.” — From: Is THIS the Revolution?
However, it is not enough to call generally for breaking with the Democrats and building a revolutionary Party. From time to time, you’ll also encounter Left Voice and even some caucuses in DSA calling for the same. What matters is whether one takes a position on each issue from an independent working-class perspective.
Here, on the issue of the Roe overturn, our impression is that the IC/IG’s analysis (“Supreme Court Cancels Right to Abortion: Trigger for Ultra-Rightist Mobilization“, “Free Abortion on Demand: How Revolutionaries Fight for It”, and “U.S. Capitalism and Its Supreme Court“) belongs broadly to the same political space as that of Left Voice, DSA, and ultimately the liberals of the Democratic Party.
Rather than the “reactionary features of the U.S. Constitution, designed to curb supposed ‘excesses of democracy'” — reflected in “unelected courts with the power to overrule legislative and executive action”, “a Senate designed to rein in the more representative House”, etc. — what is key on this particular issue is that bourgeois democracy itself — precisely its “more representative” institutions — have been central obstacles to abortion access. See, for example, the status of state-level abortion rights on the eve of Roe, as well as the Hyde Amendment, which was imposed by a supermajority in the “more representative” House in response to Roe.
Ironically, the narrative of “unelected courts” mirrors that of Ginsburg (who said that Roe was “heavy-handed judicial intervention”), as well as that of Alito in overturning Roe (because it had “short-circuited the democratic process”). However, all socialists know that the elected federal and state legislatures, no less than the Court, represent the interests of the capitalist class. What the history of abortion rights in the US demonstrates is how all the institutions of the State have worked in concert against the working class.
On Maoism:
We have already made clear we are a mass organization united around our programmatic demands. We adhere to no particular ideology and unite with anyone who agrees with our program and our constitution, and generally accept a dialectical and scientific world outlook.
We look forward to your response.
IC Email 3: January 29, 2023
To the May Day Student Organization:
Thank you for your response to our previous email. As revolutionaries we understand how crucial it is to seek clarity about the differences between organizations on the left. Historically, one of the ways that this has been done is through polemical exchanges.
It is therefore disappointing that your latest response seems to fall into a pattern of mischaracterizations of our program and actions. You continue to launch the accusation that we are “content with isolation and sectarianism,” while implying that we only organize students who “already adhere to proletarian politics and a materialist worldview.” The approximately 50 people who attended our forum on October 25 at Hunter (to choose one example among many) by no means all “already adhere to proletarian politics.” Events like this are key to our work of winning over students to proletarian revolutionary politics. Upholding revolutionary principles is the basis on which we seek to raise the consciousness of students at CUNY and beyond and win them to a fighting program for socialist revolution. This sets us apart from organizations that, lacking a genuinely revolutionary program, end up tailing after the existing consciousness of the student body.
CUNY4AR coalition/slogan issue: On CUNY for Abortion Rights (CUNY4AR), you are still making excuses for, and seeking to prettify, this reformist coalition that you helped build. As you know, CUNY4AR’s one flier publicizing the October 6 protest at Hunter stated, front and center, in its definition of the purpose of the event: “What? A walk-out and rally to pressure CUNY admin to take a stand on abortion.” This was the one and only “demand” for the event that the vast majority of Hunter students would have seen prior to the event. If Hunter students were being encouraged to “unite and get organized,” to use the phrase from your most recent letter, it was on this basis. There’s no real way to get around this fact.
In your letter, you write, “You continue to state that the ‘pressure’ slogan was the main demand of the coalition, which on the contrary, was only one of the many demands raised.” Surely you cannot seriously be referring to a QR code included on the flier, which did not even indicate that there were more demands to be found by scanning it? Nor does this hidden laundry list counteract the political implications promoted by the demand that was actually promoted to Hunter students in real life, in the sole physical medium used to publicize the protest. Your excuses on this matter are identical to those of the professional maneuverists of Left Voice.
You say your goal in CUNY4AR was “to broaden and raise the consciousness of the democratic student movement [as you put it], including those sections dominated by reformists and opportunists.” Instead, unfortunately, you seem intent on helping the latter justify ways in which they persistently work to hold back, or even lower, consciousness. We would suggest you begin by taking the subject of slogans more seriously, as they are a key factor in raising consciousness, or failing to do so.
“Sectarianism and isolation”: In our October 27 letter to the MDSO, we responded in detail to your mischaracterization of our record and attitude towards joint actions with other groups, giving a range of concrete examples. In your December 12 response, you chose to simply ignore all of this and repeat the claims of “sectarianism and isolation from the student body.” Meanwhile, since October we have continued to participate in and bring students to numerous struggles throughout the city. To mention just a few: abortion clinic defense and defense of Drag Story Hour against ultra-rightist threats; strikes by NYSNA nurses, Starbucks Roastery and HarperCollins workers; protests by taxi workers and UFT retirees; rally in solidarity with railway workers against Democratic Party/DSA strikebreaking, and others. We saw no sign of the MDSO being present, let alone putting forward its views, at any of those events.
But what about The New School? After all, “About MDSO” on your website states that your organization traces its roots to The New School. During the recent strike and occupation there, we brought CUNY students to the picket line on November 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 28, 29 and 5; stayed overnight during the occupation (which began on December 8), participated in the Town Hall on December 11, and gave speeches on various occasions. We did not see the MDSO there once, nor any posters, placards or written propaganda from it at all on the picket lines (although we did see a brief message on Instagram).
So once again, what’s with the claims of our supposed willful isolation from struggles?
Roe v. Wade overturn and the capitalist state: The section of your letter on the Roe v. Wade overturn represents more glaring mischaracterizations, regarding our program for the liberation of women. Nothing about our call for “women’s liberation through socialist revolution,” our intransigent opposition to any and all bourgeois parties, our refusal to put any illusions in said parties or the bourgeoisie’s institutions, and the manner in which we seek to carry out our program, puts us in the same “political space” as Left Voice, let alone the DSA – as you must certainly be aware. What we said in our speeches, signs and publications at the October 6 Hunter protest made that very clear as well.
A simple reading of any of our articles on the topic would also make this clear to anybody.
To cite one of the articles you reference in your letter:
“Marxists understand … that the courts are part of the capitalist state, which – as Lenin details in one of his most essential works, The State and Revolution (1917) – is a machine for enforcing the exploitation of the working class… Our strategy is based on class struggle, on the revolutionary program. But for liberals and reformists, the 1973 concession by the top court informed their whole approach of reliance on the capitalist courts and above all the Democrats to save the day. This has always been a dead-end strategy, and I think it’s pretty clear that this is the case today.”
– “U.S. Capitalism and Its Supreme Court,” Revolution No. 19, September 2022
The legislative institutions of bourgeois democracy certainly have, as your letter states, been “central obstacles to abortion access.” You then proceed to lecture us to “See for example,” the Hyde Amendment, etc. Did you read the front-page article in Revolution No. 19 (“Free Abortion on Demand – How Revolutionaries Fight for It”) that you refer to in your letter? Our discussion of the Hyde Amendment is impossible to miss. This section begins: “Passed in 1976 not long before Carter became president, the notorious Hyde Amendment had his backing,” (etc.). Further down it emphasizes:
“And it’s racist. A quarter of African American women and 17% of Latina women are on Medicaid, so the Hyde Amendment means having to pay hundreds of dollars for this simple medical procedure. Carter was far from the only Democrat who supported the Hyde Amendment. It has been included in every budget passed by every administration since it was first introduced to undermine Roe v. Wade. That includes Joe Biden’s administration as late as last year” (etc.).
In the same issue, the Hyde Amendment comes up as well in “Why History Matters in the Fight for Abortion Rights,” which is an article on the history of class-collaborationist coalitions around the abortion issue that are the explicit precedent for the reformist CUNY4AR coalition that you defend. And the third article you refer to, “Supreme Court Cancels Right to Abortion: Trigger for Ultra-Rightist Mobilization” (The Internationalist No. 67-68, May-October 2022)? It refers to the Hyde Amendment no less than five times.
But what about your silly attempt to portray our references to grossly anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution as somehow counterposed to the understanding that, like the Supreme Court, the elected legislatures represent capitalist class interests? It’s little more than a debater’s trick.
That the function of the bourgeois state is to enforce capitalist exploitation and oppression, under bourgeois democracy as under other forms of capitalist rule – as emphasized in “U.S. Capitalism and Its Supreme Court” – is a point integral to everything we do and say. How this relates to the specific set-up of bourgeois democracy in the U.S., is investigated in depth in our article “Slavery and the Constitution: Origins of U.S. Capitalist ‘Democracy’,” in Revolution No. 17 (August 2020), which we highly recommend.
If you think that this point about the function of the bourgeois state is somehow contradicted by showing how the “democracy” of the capitalist government’s institutions is “restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical,” as noted by Lenin (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky), then you have a problem not only with the Bolshevik leader but with Marx and Engels, who like Lenin, developed this point in innumerable works. But perhaps this cuts no ice with the MDSO, since your letter affirms: “We adhere to no particular ideology….”
On that point, we’d like to ask, frankly, what does that mean? Meanwhile, your materials continually echo the dominant bourgeois ideology, calling for politics based on “the people” – and this in a country where that same capitalist Constitution begins: “We the People.”
Party question: On parties, your last correspondence states that the MDSO does have a “position on the need for a party.” This contradicts your October 6 leaflet’s polemic against the Internationalists’ call to break with the Democrats and build a revolutionary workers party – which your leaflet distorted to the point of comparing to bourgeois parties. This misrepresentation strikes us as particularly astonishing given that the MDSO itself supposedly holds a similar position. But this position apparently does not mean anything in practice, as you write that “As a student organization, the MDSO cannot directly play a role in the construction of such a Party. In contrast with this expression of studentism by the MDSO, we state in “Join the CUNY Internationalist Clubs!” (Revolution No. 19, September 2023):
“The revolutionary party we need must be one that champions the cause of all those exploited and oppressed by capitalist society, bringing revolutionary class consciousness to the mass of workers in the course of the class struggle. Students and youth can play an important role in this struggle, if we understand what we’re fighting for and get organized, allied with the power of the working class. That’s what we in the Internationalist Clubs are about.”
Maoism: It is in response to a question from our prior correspondence – if the MDSO is not Maoist, then what is its position on Maoism? – that your December 12 letter makes the statement that “We adhere to no particular ideology….” This seems like a way of evading the political responsibility to take a position regarding how Mao’s “bloc of four classes” program led to catastrophe for the communists, workers and peasants of Indonesia; on his notorious alliance with U.S. imperialism sealed under Nixon and Kissinger and its horrific effects and implications from Indochina and Bangladesh to Angola to Chile, and so much more. How can youth who want to be revolutionaries be educated politically on the basis of evasions and misrepresentations? They can’t.
We look forward to your response, and as stated in our previous communications, are open to discussing these points and more in person.
Redacted,
For the Internationalist Club
P.S. Do all MDSO members see this correspondence?
MDSO Reply 3: April 4, 2023
Hello Internationalist Club,
Apologies for the delay in replying to your last message. You asked at the end of that message, “Do all MDSO members see this correspondence?” Yes, we’ve been circulating and discussing all of the comments, going back to your first leaflet that started the exchange (Oct. 4). This is an interesting exchange for us, one that is especially educational on the nature of the struggle for abortion rights historically and in the US today, an area where we’re still learning, including by looking at the literature of different organizations.
To jump straight into the issue: we agree that one can simultaneously and consistently point out 1. that the Constitution has anti-democratic features that empower unelected courts, and 2. that the elected legislatures represent capitalist class interests. However—and this is not a “debater’s trick,” but goes to the heart of the campaign at hand, of how we understand the struggle for abortion rights today—what exactly is the relevance of 1. to the Dobbs decision? Our suggestion is that, if one is a revolutionary who takes a moment to think and not a New York Times liberal who repeats talking points by rote, it is not quite relevant: the problem here, on this concrete issue, is not an alleged deficit of bourgeois democracy (“government by judiciary” as one early American Marxist called it), but rather bourgeois democracy’s “purer” operation, the fact that its most “majoritarian” and elected bodies are arrayed against workers.
We said in our Oct. 7 leaflet, “To paraphrase the favorite book of these reactionaries (see Job 1:21): What the Court ‘gave us’ in 1973, it has now taken away.” The question is why the withdrawal by the high court (composed of unelected judges)and the returning of the issue to national and state legislatures (composed of elected representatives) is equivalent to abortion’s criminalization in large parts of the country today. Unlike the intuitive (bourgeois) view of the democratic deficit, this question serves directly to develop revolutionary consciousness.
Your interpretation of Lenin on the “restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical” character of bourgeois democracy only confirms the impression we mentioned in our last message, that, on the issue of the Roe overturn, the IC/IG’s analysis “belongs broadly to the same political space as that of Left Voice, DSA, and ultimately the liberals of the Democratic Party.” The passage from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky—one only needs to glance at the chapter title!—is a comparison by Lenin of bourgeois democracy (the bourgeois-democratic parliamentary republic, as such) and proletarian democracy (the republic of the Paris Commune or Soviet type, as such), and not—as you read it—a critique of the “grossly anti-democratic features” (unelected courts, etc.) of bourgeois democracy by reference to itself.
An illustrative extract: “Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? … Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the ‘democracy’ of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution!”
See also, from elsewhere in the book: “Kautsky the historian has never heard that universal suffrage sometimes produces petty-bourgeois, sometimes reactionary and counter-revolutionary parliaments. Kautsky the Marxist historian has never heard that the form of elections, the form of democracy, is one thing, and the class content of the given institution is another.”
In light of this perspective, we agree the references in your articles to the Hyde Amendment are important. However, it is not enough to include these within a somewhat incoherent analysis.
What was the status of state-level abortion rights on the eve of Roe?
Why had only a minority of states enacted abortion law reforms between 1967 and 1970?
What state institutions enacted the trigger bans that went into effect after Dobbs?
The work remains to be done of exposing why the full decriminalization of abortion and its free access is unviable under the dominant US political framework, accounting for factors such as the political weight of the petty bourgeoisie, and the political alliance between evangelical Christians, Catholics (five of whom made up the six of the Dobbs majority), and Capital.
On CUNY4AR and other (in our view) secondary issues:
You are blowing our critique of your approach to CUNY4AR out of proportion. The critique had to do strictly with your abstention at a September meeting from the vote to hold the Hunter action, not with your entire record of work in CUNY and elsewhere. That is to say, there was a rally at Hunter in October where the IC was able to bring a contingent and speak only because we and others (but not the IC!) voted in favor of the action in the first place. At the rally, we, like yourselves, independently distributed literature and spoke from our own positions. Beyond this one event, sure, the IC has the numbers to show up to more events than us, has a long history of good work, etc.—we don’t dispute that—these are reasons for our interest in this exchange.
Maoism and the Party question—we don’t have a position on Maoism and we aren’t playing a direct role in the construction of a Party because we’re a mass organization of students. It is entirely legitimate and necessary for there to exist organizations of youth who “openly declare that they are still learning” (Lenin) on these and other no doubt important questions while at the same time carrying out work around different current issues, rather than apriori adopting a list of points of agreement that come from elsewhere, on Stalin, on Trotsky, on Mao, on Chinese foreign policy during the Mao era, and so on.
Thank you for taking the time to engage in this discussion, which has certainly been educational for our membership. We look forward to seeing you at future actions on campus and around the city.
May Day Student Organization 