Workers World May 4, 2000: Youth movement fights for most oppressed

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------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the May 4, 2000 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------

Youth movement fights for most oppressed

By Leslie Feinberg

From Antioch College to Kent State University, from Seattle to Washington, young people are taking direct action to demonstrate their solidarity with the most exploited and oppressed here in the United States and around the world.
Their bold acts of vision and courage have given rise to a movement that is determined to battle corporate-backed injustice and inequality, police brutality, racism and the death penalty.
Across the United States and around the world supporters of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal are applauding the guts and grit of Antioch College and Kent State students.
This year's Antioch graduating senior class invited Abu-Jamal as one of their commencement speakers on April 29. As a result, Antioch Commencement Committee member Teishan Latner told Workers World, "We've endured a most vicious and well-orchestrated assault of hate mail and phone calls from the Fraternal Order of Police, agents of racist terror, and many other organizations and individuals."
But the students have stood tall in the face of this Klan-style fear campaign.
"We believe Mumia Abu-Jamal must be heard," Latner said, "and we are honored by his tape-recorded presence at our graduation, an event that will mark for many of us the beginning of our engagement as activists in the years to come."
The Kent State students invited Abu-Jamal to address their May 4 event on the 30th anniversary of the massacres by National Guard troops of youths at Kent State and Jackson State University. The 1970 killings at Kent and Jackson, during protests against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, were an attempt to silence the anti-war movement that was at its peak.
"The obvious connection is that Mumia's execution is an attempt to silence dissent," explained Justin Hons of Kent Anti-Racist Action, "just as May 4 [1970] was an attempt to silence dissent."
In addition, he told WW, during the 1970s Abu-Jamal was a Black Panther Party member. That organization was in the crosshairs of a government counter-intelligence assault. So Abu-Jamal "was part of the same movement for liberation and revolution that the students were part of," Hons concluded.
In fact, wherever the emerging movement takes its place at the front lines of struggle, the demand for a new trial and freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal is heard loud and clear.
Even hazy clouds of tear gas and pepper spray couldn't obscure the sight of placards, banners, buttons and stickers supporting Abu-Jamal that activists carried or wore at virtually every skirmish in the Battle of Seattle last winter.
And the same was true in Washington during the recent weekend of struggles to shut down the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In fact, on April 15, more than 1,000 activists picketed the Department of "In-Justice" to protest the powerful prison-industrial complex and demand freedom for Abu-Jamal.
The action was organized by the International Action Center. IAC youth leader Sarah Sloan told WW: "When activists later took their protest to the sidewalks of Washington--for which no permit is required--police carried out a mass arrest of 678 of the marchers in an illegal act of 'preventive detention.'
"Those arrested endured purposely difficult conditions--even brutally painful treatment--during the night in jail. Yet most of us who were swept up were back in the streets the next morning on April 16," Sloan said.
Workers and oppressed of the world unite
The tumultuous street battles in Seattle and Washington were fought to shut down some of the most hated instruments of U.S. finance capital's world domination--the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
The tenacious, bodacious movement to shut 'em down is rooted in earlier militant campus occupations and student-bolstered street actions to boycott clothing and toys produced in the cruel conditions of sweatshops.
These students, joined by union activists, discovered who raked in the mega-profits off the blood and tears of sweatshop workers. And that path of profits led right back to the Gap, Disney and other giant U.S. corporations.
So it was no accident that a movement of students and workers against corporate globalization arose to challenge the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last winter.
That act of shutting down the WTO was objectively an act of solidarity with the most exploited and oppressed of the world's people.
The technologically underdeveloped countries--purposely kept underdeveloped by the imperialist powers--are hostages within the WTO. The wealthy and powerful rulers of the imperialist countries have the cops, courts, prisons and laws to enforce the right of their banks and transnational corporations to open up sweatshops, employ child labor, crush unions and destroy the environment.
The WTO's main goal is not just corporate globalization but imperialist globalization. That means bulldozing any barriers to the penetration and domination of finance capital--particularly U.S. capital.
And those countries that dare to resist this untrammeled drive for profits off their labor and resources face the high-tech might of the Pentagon war machine and other NATO armies.
The bankers and finance ministers who traveled to Washington for the April 16-17 meetings were also confronted by tens of thousands of demonstrators who contested their right to meet. "More world, less bank!" protesters demanded.
The creative and courageous acts of resistance exposed the predatory role of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Protests charged these two imperialist institutions with impoverishing people all over the planet through the weapon of usurious debt, destroying the environment, bankrolling the global sweatshop industry, super-exploiting Third World countries, creating massive unemployment around the world and feeding the rapacious appetite of capitalist globalization.
The movement here in the belly of the beast--from Seattle to Washington, Antioch College to Kent State--has given new hope to those in countries that have been fighting the onslaught of U.S. banks and corporations.
And now the movement is turning its attention and preparing its forces to target the Republican and Democratic conventions this summer. All these issues and more will be raised in a booming, collective voice that cannot be ignored.
As these activists make the fight against racism, national oppression and exploitation in the United States more and more part of their battle plan, they will build stronger bonds with communities in this country that have nothing to lose and everything to gain by leading a struggle that won't quit until every battle is won.

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