It feels like deja vu all over again

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Malik Miah's column, "Which side are you on," couldn't be published this month. Miah, like most of our readership, works for a living and was obliged to attend a class series to upgrade his skills as an airline mechanic. His column will be back in next month's issue of Socialist Action.

With this month's issue, however, we are introducing a new column by Joni Jacobs, who was the Socialist Action candidate for mayor of San Francisco in 1991. Her column will be a regular feature of future issues of Socialist Action.

I've been angry since the U.S. Supreme Court announced on Jan. 21 that it would determine Dear editors, We car learn many things from the Establishment's movie critics who have written about Oliver Stone's "JFK." How much patience we have, for instance. I have read many reviews and articles about "JFK," and most remind me of the Chicago Times' verdict on Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg in 1863: "Silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances."

None of the bourgeois writers in the big commercial press (with the exception of Belinda Taylor's "Why the attacks on JFK film?," in the Jan. 22 Oakland Tribune, seem to be willing to deal with the movie itself-but spend all of their words in attacking the movie's director.

For example, George Will, for a number of years a pontiff in the Washington, D.C., hierarchy of film criticism, spent two big paragraphs of his Dec. 26 article, "Stone film libels America" on the June 28, 1914, attempt to kill the Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He then devotes the rest of his article to attacking "JFK's" producer Oliver Stone. He says absolutely nothing about the movie itself, except for calling it "cartoon history" and other negative things.

It's obvious that George Will believes the myths told in the Warren Report, unless he thinks a myth is a female moth. Both Will and former cabinet member Joseph Califano, a close adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, claim the movie shows Johnson By the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's anti-choice law. The ruling itself didn't upset me. I learned long ago that the Supreme Court is a ruling class institution incapable of safeguarding working people's rights.

It's the response of the pro-choice leadership that angers me. They have met the ruling with defeatism and camouflaged it as a "new strategy" that's as old as the capitalist system itself. They're sending mixed messages to the On one hand, NOW is calling for a million people to mobilize for choice in Washington, D.C., on April 5. This would be a powerful demonstration of the strength of the pro-choice movement.

On the other hand, they're lamenting the death of Roe v. Wade and calling for a "new strategy" to save abortion rights. The "new strategy" is to elect "pro-choice" politicians to Congress and state legislatures, and then lobby them for pro-choice legislation like the Freedom of Choice Act.

What's new about this strategy? It's the same strategy the pro-choice leadership has pushed for 19 years. And it's a strategy that's failed miserably.

Ironically, support for abortion rights has never been higher. Over 30 percent of Americans polled support unrestricted abortion, while over 80 percent support some form of legalized abortion. Have you ever before heard of a movement that had the support of 80 percent of the people, and yet the leadership is pessimistic about winning?

When the leadership puts out a defeatist message like this, it can devastate a movement. It's demoralizing to tell activists they have no control over their situation. It frustrates activists to follow a losing strategy many just throw and quit.

It also demobilizes the movement. Instead of bringing activists together where they can sense their united power, it restricts them to individual acts like letter writing and telephoning.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the pro-choice leadership's pessimism is that it breeds confusion. I've met young women who think abortion is already illegal because they've heard repeatedly that the Supreme Court is overturning Roe v. Wade. If confused young women get pregnant, they may seek out a back-alley abortion because they assume that a safe, legal one isn't available. The possible result is too tragic to contemplate.

I think the pro-choice leadership is mired in pessimism because they have no confidence that the movement itself can defend our rights. They haven't leamed that every right ever won by working people was the result of a struggle carried out indepenanything about politics. Likewise, leftist artists are not in a field without competition.

Don Simpson, Oakland, Calif. for 19 years; up their hands dent from-and in opposition to the government.

Instead, the leadership has put its faith in capitalist politicians, hoping that maybe this time it'll turn out differently.

It's funny-the pro-choice leaders think that Congress will protect our rights, yet they call us socialists utopian.

Many pro-choice activists I've talked to say they are depressed by the pro-choice leadership's "new strategy" because they know it said, depression is anger turned inward.

Pro-choice activists must not turn our anger inward, we must direct it outward—at the courts, at Congress, at every institution that denies women their fundamental rights.

We must mobilize and build April 5 into the largest pro-choice demonstration ever. We have to show the government that we won't go back to the back alleys and bloody hangers, and we have to show the pro-choice leadership that we won't go back to failed, defeatist strategies. no causality exists there. From that, we are told that many "material" worlds may exist, each with their own history and truth, and we must give up the materialist search for a more accurate and powerful knowledge of reality

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And in this ner...

won't work. However, we must remember that, as Gloria Steinem