2016 was a radically transformative year for Saint Louis, the
State of Missouri, the United States, and the world. Locally, we saw
deepening of contradictions across the board. We saw the continued
police war on the masses of working class people of this city,
particularly Black people. In the depths of winter, the police and the
city government continue to attack our houseless comrades, ordering the
closing of the last remaining shelter in the Downtown area to satisfy
gentrifiers, individuals who make vast sums of money and desire to
whiten the area, opening and patronizing businesses that black people
are harassed at, using apps like NextDoor to slander and harass the
masses of working people, and summoning the police to kill, arrest,
fine, and torment. Several times this year, the city Streets Department,
under the watchful eye of the police who arrested everybody that
attempted to intervene, seized and destroyed property belonging to
houseless comrades in the area around the New Life Evangelistic Center
which is struggling to remain open in the face of the order to close.
The city doesn’t care where these comrades go, they can go to the
Mississippi River and jump in for all Slay and the philistines running
to take his place care. All that matters to these filthy pigs is that
they disappear from the streets, to the white elites with money that
control this city. Ferguson and North County remains as it was before
2014, plagued by an almost all white government that lives at the
people’s expense, with an occupying police force, fining and taxing and
killing like mad. East Saint Louis is still a city in ruins, left to rot
by neoliberalism which snatched jobs away to exploit people in foreign
countries. Monsanto and other companies that make dangerous chemicals
still are located in extremely close vicinity to this area, belching
toxic poison into the air that black children breathe. The fire at West
Lake still burns, threatening to poison entire communities. The election
of the fascist Trump, and the capture of the state government by Eric
Greitens and his clique (replacing the Democrat Nixon’s group which
filled our streets up with soldiers, ready to kill, in 2014) makes all
of these contradictions much more deep, although a Clinton regime
wouldn’t have been any better. Fascists roam our streets and our
schools, leaving their disgusting propaganda and threatening the lives
of our comrades. This makes the work of Progressive Youth Organization,
STL, much more important, and means that we must sharpen, deepen, and
expand our efforts to further build and protect a revolutionary mass
base in Saint Louis and the surrounding area, to serve the people, and
to build organized people’s dual power to wage protracted combat and
capture terrain against and from organized pig power and reaction.
They can do all the propaganda and smile all
they want, it still doesn’t change their function or their enemy
relation to the masses of people. Whoever works with the police or
encourages them to come to our communities is an enemy.
The overarching, major issue for the masses of working people in
Saint Louis and Missouri, especially Black and Brown people, is the fact
that the ruling system and the class it serves is, by design,
oppressing and exploiting them. Democrats run this city, what have they
done? Contrary to the pathetic and disgusting tailist screeds of our
local Socialist Alternative revisionists and reformists, which, during
the election season, first supported Bernie Sanders, even going so far
as to lead a “March for Bernie”, then the Jill Stein campaign,
pathetically and opportunistically tacking themselves on to every
pseudo-left social democrat that came around while refusing to actually
participate in mass work, because they can’t, or the worthless work of
the local Communist Party, USA chapter, which wasted time registering
people in working poor neighborhoods to vote, PYOSTL boycotted the
elections, because we know that shit won’t change by electing one or
another “new” candidate, “Superman” or no Superman. Change comes through
our own hands, our own organization, and our own struggle. To engage
with this system and its elections in any way, shape or form is to lead
the masses down dead ends and channel their hankering for struggle and
power into worthless and meaningless acts, a protest every month.
Protests are fine, but we see them as shows of force and threats, things
that upset the apple cart and make reactionaries feel uncomfortable in
their gut, not things that you invite politicians and other
representatives of the ruling class to. Whether they be students,
workers, or unemployed, people suffer at the hands of the police that
shoot and arrest them, the rest of the city and state governing
apparatus that peel and pare us for every last dime, exploiting
petit-bourgeois business owners that own the only stores in our hoods
and charge outrageous prices for expired and inferior food, and
slave-driving, parasitic bosses that suck their blood and bones.
Particularly, in majority Black, working class areas of North County and
North City, there are several areas that have been determined to be
food deserts, where the masses of working people have to pay exorbitant
prices to get basic foods and other items from small convenience stores.
One of our members saw a two day expired loaf of white bread for sale
in a Spanish Lake store for $4.
Stores like the one Mike Brown visited before his murder exploit and cheat the people.
This is shameless, brazen, and unacceptable exploitation. To make
things worse, the Trump era will herald a wave of cuts to already
pathetically funded social services programs such as SNAP, SSI, and
other things that many people rely on to survive. Furthermore,
gentrification is beginning to sink its claws into several areas,
particularly with the development of the imperialist NGA spy site in
North Saint Louis (at the expense of several poor Black families). To
this end, our primary and most pressing task for the New Year is to
launch a weekly “Serve the People” program under the auspices of PYO,
which, of course, will gather and distribute food, clothes, and other
necessities, but we are not launching a mere charity program, to do so
would make us no different than the Baptist churches that see our people
suffering and continue to preach pie in the sky, or Food Not Bombs. The
ultimate purpose of a Serve the People program is to help in the
process of building a revolutionary dual power in a working class area,
and put ourselves among the people, where we can easily listen to and
gather their correct ideas and hear their stories of bitterness, accept
criticism of our work from them, and develop and sharpen struggle in the
area in an all around way, while also raising the political level of
the people and having our own raised as well. This program will
initially be launched in a working class neighborhood, because the
working class is the revolutionary class, and we are working class
partisans and revolutionaries. Furthermore, the students who are members
in PYO must constantly be removed from their stuffy atmosphere of books
and petit-bourgeois ideas/theories, and be amongst the people
constantly to shake these ideas, tendencies, and traits. A day of social
practice and work with the masses is worth more than 20 books. While
the program will be carried out in one working class neighborhood
initially, as we grow and develop our capabilities and abilities, we
will expand and hopefully have a presence in several working class
districts by this time next year. It is imperative that we begin
collecting resources for this immediately, particularly durable food
items, toiletries, and clothing. Please contact us if you are interested
in offering space, have items to donate, or would like to volunteer for
this weekly program. Our city calls for this important instrument of
struggle and people’s power, showing that we do not need to rely on the
pig system to feed and clothe our own people, and we intend to deliver.
We also plan to launch a “Voice of the People – Saint Louis” YouTube
program, a mass propaganda and journalism organ that will enable us to
cover news of mass interest, highlight important issues and struggles
that are taking place in our city, name and shame reactionary
politicians, police, fascists, business owners, and bosses that abuse
the people, collect mass perspectives, highlight our work, and present
the revolutionary situation in Saint Louis and, especially, the work of
PYO-STL for the review and criticism of comrades across the country and
world. We encourage other mass organizations to consider beginning a
similar program.
The reactionary pig Missouri legislature recently passed legislation
which has an extremely ominous impact for Black and Brown youth in the
Saint Louis area. Under this legislation, “fights” at school can now
bear criminal charges, specifically, Class E felony charges. To quote a
Saint Louis Post Dispatch article:
“Starting Jan. 1, third-degree assault and some cases of
harassment will become class E felonies. Harassment will be a felony,
rather than a misdemeanor, if the victim suffers “emotional distress”
from an act committed with that purpose. The state considers harassment to be a form of school bullying, and harassment is among the offenses school districts are technically required to report to local law enforcement.
Also under the new law, a person who “knowingly causes physical injury to another person” will have committed the felony of third-degree assault.
At least two area school districts, Hazelwood
and Ferguson-Florissant, have already interpreted that definition to
mean that any student, no matter their age, who gets in a fight can be
charged with a felony.”
As we all know, the goal of this system is to introduce as many black
and brown youth to the criminal justice system as possible, ruining
chances for college and employment, and forcing them to become criminals
or work exploitative and dangerous jobs to maintain themselves,
effectively throwing them into a revolving door. These efforts stepped
up after the revolt in Ferguson. Essentially, the government is trying
to punish us for daring to rebel. We refuse to go to prison and jail,
and we will fight like hell to ensure that this reactionary legislation
is fought lock, stock and barrel. To this end, we will begin efforts to
expand our organization into high schools and middle schools, building
up an apparatus and conducting educational sessions and studies with
high school students to teach them about great revolutionaries and
revolutionary movements, build solidarity among working class students
from different national origins and backgrounds, and, most importantly,
build power in the secondary schools, especially in North Saint Louis
City and North Saint Louis County, to develop all around and deep
struggle among the city’s youth. The schools must be liberated, snatched
from under the noses of the reactionaries, and become trenches of
combat. With the VICC (voluntary interdistrict busing program, begun in
the early 1980s) ending, effectively, in 2024, this is extremely
important work, because students that formerly would have been bused
will begin to be concentrated in their own, working class neighborhoods
and beginning this organizing in the secondary schools now will solidify
and ensure a solid apparatus for struggle in these communities by that
time. Any student, teacher, or parent that would like to help facilitate
a PYO study group and possibly help develop a branch at a local school,
please email us or leave us a Facebook message.
Our city’s response to Trump in March. It
will take more than rallies and protests to struggle against the forces
that have coalesced around his moment.
Fascists have been emboldened by the victory of Donald Trump, who has
courted them, and welcomed them into his White House. Alt-right is an
insufficient cover for what they really are, Hitlerites and pogromists
who would arrest and kill every single one of us who do not conform to
their wicked way of thought, share their ethnic background, or fit into
their mold. Already, we have seen a spike in hate crimes since his
election. Trump continues to slander and attack our Latinx and Muslim
comrades, on top of state level attempts to deny them access to
universities (HB2003, see the Partnership for the Advancement of
Immigrant Students Facebook Page to gain knowledge on the efforts of
comrades in KC on this issue and the threat that immigrant students
face). We seek to develop a similar apparatus to help protect immigrant
students here in STL, and welcome any organization interested in forming
a coalition with us on this to contact us. We ourselves have a fascist
problem in our city, several have slithered out of their holes to paper
the city with “Identity Evropa” flyers and antagonize a black student at
Webster University with hundreds of racist flyers dumped outside of his
dorm room. Obviously, there simply is not enough room for both the
people and the pigs without badges in this city, and our third major
task for 2017 is to expand the struggle against fascism. The fascists
feel comfortable around university campuses, most of the flyers we have
seen and removed have appeared around these areas. To this end, we will
begin an anonymous reporting system for hate crimes and anti-people
incidents, businesses, and institutions, and develop a network to ensure
rapid response to these incidents, mass mobilization, and material,
physical and emotional support for targeted individuals or families.
Also, we would like to point out, the state of Missouri has some of the
laxest firearms laws in the United States. Lawful owners of firearms can
conceal and carry them anywhere in the state, although local
jurisdictions can still institute restrictions (no carry without
permit), and stand your ground restrictions now do not require people to
back away from a threat in public if there is a fear of bodily harm. To
quote an article in the
Columbia Missourian:
“Missouri became the latest state to allow residents to carry a
concealed weapon without a permit when lawmakers supported the change
Wednesday.
Starting Jan. 1, gun owners will be able to carry a concealed
weapon without a permit. The remaining provisions in the bill, including
the expansion of “stand your ground,” will take effect in 30 days.”
Instead of being afraid like liberals, we welcome this change, are
taking advantage of it, and encourage other people of non-white origin,
from minority religions, queer people, or who otherwise are threatened
with death in this Empire to exercise their right to own and train with a
firearm, and take steps to secure their meetings, demonstrations, and
events from fascist attack. Guns are not primary, and we are not a “gun
club”, but there is no making revolution while dead, and anybody with
the capability to do so should arm themselves without hesitation or
delay. Anyone who is interested in joining or assisting in our
antifascist work and joining a Saint Louis Coalition Against Fascism,
please contact us.
2017 is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, when the
workers and peasants of what was soon to become the Russian Revolution
dared to storm the gates and overthrow the degenerate and bankrupt
government, delivering us the first socialist state. In their memory,
and in the memory of all who have advanced our course towards a better
and more just world, we will build for revolution in a real way in our
city in 2017.
DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN!
DEEPEN AND EXPAND PEOPLE’S POWER IN SAINT LOUIS!
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