March Fourth 2010 SF

Well March 4 was what a lot of us thought it would be, but I feel better about it than I thought I would. The main reason is that in spite of the fact that the unions and the Trotskyist sects controlled the thing, a lot of school kids came out, mostly after school was over, and had an experience they probably won't forget. Many of the teenagers were very outspoken. I didn't have a clue about politics when I was that age. The 1:30 pm Civic Center rally that we insisted on as a way to encourage a strike did happen, though only about 40-50 people came. This is probably largely due to a lack of publicity. Our bad. (I could write a lot about how activists these days rely too much on the internet to spread news of events but I won't .) But the small numbers made the thing more interesting in a way, since more people could take the bullhorn and speak to the crowd. There was some of the rah rah rally feel, but for the most part people spoke without too much play-acting, directly and honestly. At the 5 pm rally there were probably 8,000 people.

That said, I've been realizing more and more that the union leaderships and the Trotskyists (who actually behave almost exactly like liberals, in spite of their rhetoric, so maybe I'll just call them liberals) are not just a thorn in the side of the movement, they are actually a counter-movement whose main effect is to maintain the status quo. We should start identifying and naming these people and calling them out more publicly for their lack of imagination, cowardice, and downright collaboration with the ruling class. Today I had the pleasure of confronting the president of the SF teachers union and telling him that he was selling his members short. Last week I saw him address a "Town Hall meeting" in the Marina, where panelists included 4 state assembly people, 4 SF supervisors , and the mayor. All this waddling bureaucrat could suggest as a way to prevent layoffs and budget cuts was converting an unused building into a school and school offices and - get ready...centralize the photocopying at all SF schools so that the district spent 1 cent instead of 3 cents per photocopy. I told him he may as well have proposed a bake sale. He laughed at this and said that he was trying to put forward something people could relate to. I told him I thought people could relate to a lot more than that.

Reading the news about the days actions, I'm glad that folks in Oakland and Davis and Santa Cruz did some brave things like block freeway traffic and maintain real picket lines at the entrances of campus. And the fact that there is this network of people statewide who coordinated today's activity means that a lot more can be coordinated if we stay involved and try to push the momentum toward direct actions --such as a statewide general strike --that might really advance the struggle. There is already talk of another statewide meeting, which came out of conversations in the regional organizing committees in San Fran and Oakland. But the people who convened the October 24th conference, mainly Trot groups of one kind or another, called a meeting in LA without consulting any of the regional committees. This looks very suspicious to me, and at the least it is totally undemocratic. What we should do now is to push for a democratic meeting at a location between SF and LA--Fresno some have suggested--and make sure that voices that support some real, not-just-symbolic actions are heard.