Call to Support the Iraqi ‘resistance’ Is Heard at Conference in New York

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The revolution may or may not be televised, but it is coming – and none too soon, according to panelists and participants at the “Life After Capitalism” conference held at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center over the weekend.


For $15 a day, 700 people registered to attend a series of symposiums on topics like “Radical Queer Politics: Resisting Capitalist Co-Optation” and “Ending All Domination: Intersecting Oppressions,” which despite their academic titles boiled down to planning for a more pleasant and tolerant tomorrow in postrevolutionary America.


An America that will be largely fashioned after, depending on to whom The New York Sun spoke, Green, non-Caucasian, Gay/Lesbian/Bi/TransGenderinclusive, Socialist, Vegan, Organic, Indigenous, Anti-Imperialist, Pacifist, Communist, Fair Trade-Not Free Trade, Maoist, Marxist Humanist, non-Judeo-Christian, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal/Free Lynne Stewart, or Free Palestine movement lines.


There were others, too, but many re jected bourgeois conventions like describing their views to the press.


Kicking off what could be called the festivities Friday night was a clip from an anti-corporate and anti-globalism documentary called “The Fourth World War,” featuring footage taken at several South Korean and Mexican demonstrations where protesters clashed with police. One piece of footage showed Palestinian Arab radicals running from Israeli troops, with the narrator pausing to refer to them as “the heroes of Palestine.”


Later that evening, students and older radicals listened to a Canadian anticorporate author, Naomi Klein, argue that it was in the crowd’s interest to “support the Iraqi resistance,” whom she described as “fearless and courageous.” The message was warmly received.


In an atmosphere of a painfully earnest commitment to a world where American capitalism is a historical footnote, among the most serious of all – the most hesitant to smile or hold a traditional two-way conversation – were members of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade.


Ubiquitous in their black T-shirts proclaiming “I was born into a sewer called Capitalism,” the RCYB members had the most detailed plan for making revolution occur: First, sell videos of a talk by the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Bob Avakian ($35, cash only), who is living in exile in France. The second is to prepare for an armed struggle in which the “controllers of capital,” as Maraya, an RCYB member from Cleveland, put it, are “systemically eliminated, paving the way for a worker-governed state in which the conventions of war, oppression, and racism are eliminated.”


When asked where such a state may be found, she replied without hesitation, “Mao’s China.” Pressed on matters like the millions of lives lost in China’s communist experiment, she dismissed the claims of fatalities as products of “a capitalist mindset” and challenged the Sun to name a society where there was not only “no drug addiction, but every peasant could read – thanks to the ‘Little Red Book'” by the former Chinese dictator, Mao Tse-Tung.


Maraya, who said she is a college graduate and part-time data-entry clerk – “Until the revolution gets under way, and then I’ll be busy in the vanguard” – said that current events such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been good for recruitment, but that she didn’t like the conference very much because “everyone seems so concerned with marketing, and isn’t really coming together to help overthrow the capitalist order.”


If failure to develop a plan to overthrow the capitalist order was a problem, it was because the most lively aspect of the conference was the intersession book fair. There were always at least 20 tables set up, so groups could hand out literature or sell books. It was sort of a club fair on a college campus, with the role of the Crew team, Hillel, or Inter-Varsity fellowship being taken by The League of Pissed Off Voters and the Communist Spartacist League.


One table, set-up by MayDay, a so-called Anarchist literary workers collective, according to the man running it, was selling both self-published manifestos and works by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. It also sold buttons, one of which stated, “Demand 9/11 Truth!”


When asked what was unclear about what happened on September 11,2001, the bookseller simply shrugged; a pass er-by informed the Sun that the twin towers could never have fallen without charges or munitions having been in place prior to the plane crashes. He declined to give his name or organizational affiliation.


Though there was no end of scorn for President Bush, his Cabinet, and his policies at the conference, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Senator Kerry, appeared to be held in equal scorn, largely for his vote to support war in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of the two-dozen on- and off-the-record interviews conducted by the Sun turned up anyone inclined to support Mr. Kerry or for that matter most any national Democratic politician, except a former Vermont governor, Howard Dean.


One of the more dynamic sessions attended by the Sun was “Law and Obedience After Capitalism,” presented by Brooklyn College criminologist Alex Vitale and veteran radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, currently under indictment by the federal government for allegedly helping convicted terrorist Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman communicate with a terrorist group.


The session explored how a post-capitalist American society might handle the matter of the rule of law. Mr. Vitale put forth several proposals that, given the backdrop of the proceedings, were stunning for their pragmatism: that there would likely have to remain in place a police force and that repealing drug laws would not end crime.


Mr. Vitale’s thunder was stolen by Ms. Stewart, who acknowledged, in a turn of phrase lifted from Ronald Reagan, that the secret to eliminating the poverty behind so much crime was not money, but, in essence, good parenting and good education.


These assertions did not sit well with two members of the Spartacist League, who, reading from extensively detailed notes, sharply chastised both the panel members and the audience for accepting change within the capitalist system as opposed to developing a framework for overthrowing capitalism. There were also calls for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal, an issue about which everyone was said to be inadequately worried.


Ms. Stewart, who spoke openly about her legal travails at the hands of Attorney General “Ashcroft and his henchmen,” concluded the session by quoting a Mexican revolutionary: “Change happens not when you go hat in hand, but rifle in fist.”


The New York Sun

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