Socialist Student Alliance

08/27/2023

08/25/2023

Your home for Pitt students against Fascism.
A safe place on campus from society's intersectional racism, transphobia, homophobia, sexism and classism.

08/24/2023

Pitt students sign up for club emails at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeImjMCgoVeSQUR5dxR_cy1ZX3PaPmdyUFFQrSdm-YsKp4wuw/viewform

04/20/2023

Comrade Roquiel, Student Marxists of Pittsburgh alumnus and Red Strike Project Pittsburgh member, delivered these remarks at the 4/18 rally against pseudointellectual and arch-transphobe Michael Knowles:

In 1845 Friedrich Engels described his concept of social murder as such:

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, . . .places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”

Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)

Engels accused the British ruling class of forcing its poor into conditions which they knew full well would kill them slowly and painfully, through police, through starvation, through lack of ventilation and shoddy infrastructure. As a class, the bourgeoisie killed, and still kill, across the world, and leave no individual to convict of murder.

So let me ask: What is anti-transgender legislation but a form of social murder?

What is an invitation extended to Knowles and company to speak publicly on campus, but complicity in social murder?

It’s common knowledge that access to gender-affirming care is lifesaving for transgender people. That isolation and shame and self-hatred worsen our mental health and make us susceptible to targeted harassment and violence. And if we can’t rely on a university, or a government, or the police to defend us from attacks, then the only option is to defend ourselves and each other.

https://smp.serv.al/index.php/speech-delivered-to-a-demonstration-for-transgender-rights/

08/23/2022

No coarser insult, no baser aspersion, can be thrown against the workers than the remarks: “Theocratic controversies are only for academicians.” Some time ago Lassalle said: “Only when science and the workers, these opposite poles of society, become one, will they crush in their arms of steel all obstacles to culture.” The entire strength of the modern labour movement rests on theoretic knowledge.

Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution (Introduction)

08/22/2022

TO THE CITIZENS OF RUSSIA!

The Provisional Government is deposed. The State Power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.

The cause for which the people were fighting: immediate proposal of a democratic peace, abolition of landlord property-rights over the land, labor control over production, creation of a Soviet Government – that cause is securely achieved.

LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION OF WORKMEN, SOLDIERS AND PEASANTS!

Military Revolutionary Committee

Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

Ten Days That Shook the World

08/21/2022

Now, what is the party? In what does the cohesion consist? This cohesion is a common understanding of the events, of the tasks, and this common understanding - that is the program of the party. Just as modern workers more than the barbarian cannot work without tools so in the party the program is the instrument. Without the program every worker must improvise his tool, find improvised tools, and one contradicts another.

Only when we have the vanguard organized upon the basis of common conceptions then we can act.

Discussions with Trotsky on the Transitional Program (1938)

08/20/2022

It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to overthrow the government would be the folly of despair. But when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the workers and they accepted it, when the uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of unfavorable auguries. Marx did not persist in the pedantic attitude of condemning an “untimely” movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade from marxism, Plekhanov, who in November 1905 wrote encouragingly about the workers' and peasants' struggle, but after December 1905 cried, liberal fashion: "They should not have taken up arms."

Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of the Communards, who, as he expressed it, "stormed heaven". Although the mass revolutionary movement did not achieve its aim, he regarded it as a historic experience of enormous importance, as a certain advance of the world proletarian revolution, as a practical step that was more important than hundreds of programmes and arguments. Marx endeavored to analyze this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and re-examine his theory in the light of it.

The State and Revolution: Chapter 3: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx's Analysis

08/19/2022

Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labour serves living labour as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that living labour serves accumulated labour as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value.

Wage Labour and Capital: Chapter 5

08/19/2022

We have a world to win. Let's get to work.

https://www.facebook.com/events/417530670473745