The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Socialists meet, prepare for fall ‘resistance’
NEW HAVEN » Whether Americans have the vocabulary to discuss how capitalism and oligarchy negatively affect their lives, there is an instinctual understanding across the working class that Congress is not representative of this nation’s people, according to local socialist organizer Norm Clements.
Approximately 15 volunteers, some affiliated with the state’s Party for Socialism and Liberation, a revolutionary Marxist movement, according to its website, met Thursday for the first of three organizational meetings for the People’s Congress of Resistance, a planned action at Howard University in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 17 and 18.
Organizer IV Staklo said they felt excited to officially include Connecticut in a national collective of people and grass roots activism.
“This is going to be a really fabulous opportunity to meet people from across the country,” they said.
Clements said the People’s Congress will unite a national group of people across various struggles — activists from LGBTQ organizations, Black Lives Matter, immigrants rights groups, unions, women’s rights and climate justice advocates and more — to devise a manifesto.
Organizer and journalist Chardonnay Merlot said the “two parties of capital” have a vested interest in keeping those groups separate, or pitting them against one another. Staklo said one example is when elected officials and agents of the state try to put a wedge between LGBTQ groups and others, such as Black Lives Matter.
“They don’t want us to learn about each other,” Merlot said. “They don’t want coal workers to learn they have a lot more in common with a young black family in the south side of Chicago than the person who runs their coal company.”
Clements said the struggle also extends across borders: no one in the room at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of New Haven on Whitney Avenue would have a vote on whether the administration of President Donald Trump initiates war with the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.
“We go to war against countries with working class people just like us,” he said. “How would that benefit anybody in this room?”
Clements said there is “a lot of anger in the streets” at racism, bigotry, transphobia, misogyny and more, and the People’s Congress of Resistance is meant to galvanize workers to advocate for themselves.
“The Democrats aren’t offering us anything. The Democrats say they are ‘the Resistance,’ but what have they done?” he said. “Congress is millionaires and billionaires. They only care about other billionaires and corporations.”
Although Merlot said she sees the Trump administration is the “most toxic” in American history, she said the Democrats are not a suitable opposition party.
It’s not a coincidence, Clements said, that when members of Congress retire, they become lobbyists and consultants for corporations “they were working for all along.”
For two years after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, he “could’ve done anything,” he said, yet people today are fighting to get, afford and maintain their health care, in part because Obama didn’t implement a single-payer health care plan then.
Merlot said the plan for after the September convening is for activists from municipalities across the nation to take the resultant manifesto back to their communities and demand its implementation at a local level, gradually escalating its demands to become county, state and national policy.
“It’s got to come from the bottom up,” she said. If anybody doesn’t like it, she said, “then get out of the way.”
The Connecticut PSL will hold two more meetings before the event, at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 3 and Sept. 7 at 608 Whitney Ave.