By Ocean State Worker-Student Alliance
[Editorial Note: We at The Partisan are excited to share this summation sent to us by our comrades in Ocean State Worker-Student Alliance about a mass campaign they conducted in Summer 2024. This is the first of many summations and similar reports we and our various contributors nationally hope to share in order to created a centralized platform for revolutionary and class-conscious forces in the US to share and discuss the lessons they have learned through struggle. We encourage comrades nationally to reach out with similar summations and analysis of their past work, after we which we can go through a collaborative editorial and two-line struggle process culminating in the summation’s sharpening and publication. To reach out please email us at classpartisan@proton.me ]
Between winter and summer 2024, Ocean State Student-Worker Alliance (OSSWA) carried out a campaign in Providence, RI focused on resisting a series of proposed austerity measures from the state’s transportation authority (RIPTA). In particular we focused on combating proposals that would cut the total number of bus drivers and routes in the city, as well as convert the current transit hub (Kennedy Plaza) into a commercial development. Overall the campaign had mixed practical results, was a significant learning experience for our organization, and has lead into a process of re-structuring and “sector-alization” of OSSWA that has helped put our organization on a stronger political and organizational foundation.
At the beginning of the campaign, we adopted a strategy of escalation building towards greater and greater confrontation with the transit authority and its capitalist developer cronies like Joe Paolino. In order to implement this strategy, tactically we relied heavily on the repeating sequence of 1) SICA/collective assessment process, 2) mass meeting, and 3) action that tied into our application of the mass line method during the campaign. We also attempted to conduct united front work to compliment this process, establishing links with a local organization that had been spontaneously formed to resist these budget cuts.
There were two major successes of the campaign. The first was that the campaign helped put OSSWA on struggle footing, and solidify its mass character and focus. OSSWA had drifted around since its foundation in 2023, trying to establish a solid and unified basis of activity. The RIPTA campaign allowed the organization as a whole to cut its teeth and make a unified attempt at a community-based mass demands campaign, whereas before this work had been done in a subjectivist and individualistic way. It consolidated our presence as a class-conscious organization of the masses in a way that had not been before. Secondarily the coalition OSSWA participated in was successful in achieving its original goal in terms of concessions or demands, which was defeating the destruction of the Kennedy Plaza transit hub and most of the major cuts to bus routes and services. This narrow success was however clouded by the way the broad community resistance to the cuts was co-opted by opportunist and reformist forces locally. This lends this “success” a dual character, thus also serving as one of the main errors and opportunities for self-criticism and learning for our organization.
The campaign was obviously not without major failures as well, failures that also presented themselves as major lessons for our organization. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, opportunist and reformist forces ended up taking credit for the mass community resistance to the proposed cuts, and OSSWA was unable to consolidate a leading role in the coalition and defeat or overcome the ideological-political influence of reformist forces within this struggle. As it became increasingly clear how unpopular these proposed cuts were, reformist false “progressives” in elected positions globbed onto the fight like a cancer, seeking to ride the masses anger to further their own careers. Similarly, OSSWA was unable to win the spontaneous organization formed in resistance to the cuts to a class-conscious line, leading to a break down in coordination as that organization used the default opportunist and reformist methods of capitalist politicians to achieve its aims.
The other major failure of our intervention in this struggle was our own inability to overcome internal subjectivist, amateurish and liberal errors, leading to a messy campaign in need of professionalization and proletarian discipline. There were a variety of actions and plans carried out by OSSWA in the course of this campaign that could have been implemented better, most importantly our original assessment of the class forces at play in the struggle (which were more heavily lumpenized than we first expected), and our united front work, which fell into an unintentional tailism due to failures of leadership on our part. In each case our failures in these areas lead to a period of self-reflection and internal struggle within OSSWA, and ultimately helped produce the re-organization campaign launched this Fall which is helping remold our organization into a truly correctly constructed and class-struggle-based body.
In particular, this campaign lead into embarking on a process of sectoralization, which we are now a few months into and which has helped organizationally and practical implement the theoretical lessons of this campaign, as well as our concurrent political study. While before OSSWA did not have a strong focus as an organization, having an unclear or “umbrella”-like area of responsibility, through this campaign OSSWA has begun separating out its labor, neighborhood, and student sections, and in the process brought up new leaders and brought in new members, deepened the theoretical and practical unity of revolutionaries locally through rectifying our errors, and begun to professionalize its work as an actually functional set of sectorally-focused mass organizations. We hope this brief summation is useful for other organizations either in the process of carrying out similar anti-austerity campaigns, or planning on conducting such campaigns in the future. We have tried to keep this summation short and general for the purpose of creating this article, but if there are any specific questions, or if you would like us to elaborate on any points in this summation, please reach out to OSSWA_RI@proton.me!
An example of a protest held by OSSWA, in this case against a DNC fundraising event in June 2024.
