#taryn fivek

Eyewitness report: Venezuela solidarity conference and the struggle of women

Washington wages economic war on Venezuela’s people

By Taryn Fivek

The author was in Caracas, Venezuela, from March 4 through March 8, to represent the U.S.-based International Action Center as part of an international delegation. 

Caracas is on a war footing. There’s no other way to put it. There are shortages. The streets are quiet at night, except for the rare gunshot that turns heads. Make no mistake. Though U.S. tanks are not in Venezuela, there is still a U.S.-led economic war going on here. And it’s every decent person’s duty to stand alert and fight on the side of the Bolivarian Revolution.

100 Years of Socialist Revolution: Hope in the Belly of the Beast

Charlottesville eyewitness: ‘Sticking together to battle white supremacy’

By Taryn Fivek

Sent to scout ahead where people were forming up to march, my comrade Nate and I were consulting with a journalist we knew in the street. Suddenly there was a very loud noise, which I first thought was a bomb, followed by a lot of screaming. The noise turned out to be the sound of a car hitting bodies not more than 15 feet from us.

After the car hit the bodies, the Klansman put the car in reverse and you could see the car was totaled from hitting the bodies at high speed. He also slammed into two cars parked along the street, waiting to go. It seemed as though the people in those cars were also in shock. I saw someone comforting an elder, a Black woman, in one of the cars, like she might be having a heart attack.

I looked at the scene and tried to determine who might need help the most and ran to a woman, who later we found out was Heather Heyer, to try to keep people from moving her. I could see by the way her eyes were moving that she had suffered severe injury to her spine and head, and shouldn’t be moved.

Your judgment of time in moments like these is never accurate, but it seemed to me it took a long time for the paramedics to arrive.  I don’t think there were people there who were qualified to deal with that level of trauma. Heather, who was a 32-year-old paralegal worker and a staunch anti-racist from Charlottesville, died. Others were gravely injured.

The slow-moving emergency crews were just another example of what we in the anti-racist counterdemonstration were aware of: The state was out in force to protect the Klan and Nazis, not to save the anti-racist demonstrators.

Cops and Klan work together

The left outnumbered the Klan scum and Nazis in the streets. But we were also facing 1,500 cops and National Guard who were mobilized against us, not there for our protection. And there were heavily armed militia forces, looking like they were just back from Iraq, with automatic weapons, sidearms and hunting knives. They were on the same side as the police and the state.

Smash white supremacy: Eyewitness report from #DefendCharlottesville

This week, Roqayah and Kumars were honored to be joined by two organizers with the Workers World Party who have been in the middle of recent antifa actions in the South. 

Taryn Fivek, originally from the South, is based in New York and was in Charlottesville to confront the Unite the Right rally. Loan Tran is based in Durham, North Carolina, and was instrumental in the direct action that pulled down Durham’s Confederate monument in solidarity with the antifascist protesters in Charlottesville. Taryn and Loan share their accounts of those respective events, as well as the wave of arrests and other state repression following the action in Durham.

The guests give their takes on the state of right-wing reaction and left-wing resistance today, explaining how the Workers World Party’s political practice is both informed by the long Marxist-Leninist tradition and committed to centering the struggles of the most oppressed, including the incarcerated.

Follow Taryn on Twitter at @fivek and Loan at @ntranloan. Visit Workers World Party’s website to learn more about getting involved, and contribute whatever you can to support Workers World Party’s continued efforts on Patreon.

New York City: Why women need socialism

Thursday, March 9 - 7:00 pm

Solidarity Center, 147 W. 24 St., 2nd floor, Manhattan

New York City: ‘What’s next? Building the resistance to Trump,’ January 28, 2017.

Standing-room only public forum in New York City sponsored by Workers World Party.

Excerpts from talk by Larry Holmes, First Secretary of Workers World Party:

Our politics must be ambitious and offensive, we must advance new ideas, because if we don’t do it, who will? The capitalist crisis is responsible for Trump. The neo-liberal bourgeoisie has collapsed politically, because here and internationally they have been the manager of this huge assault on the workers and oppressed.

Many of the people who are waking up can be radicalized – if we reach out to them, if we try, if we talk about it among ourselves and say this doesn’t work, but this does. We don’t want to be isolated. We want to be with the militants, but we also want to be where the struggle is, whether that’s coming from the unions or one of these other mass movements.

What we are considering is a call for a revolutionary united front against Trump, against fascism. The reason it might be good to say a revolutionary united front against fascism is because first and foremost, the people and groups necessary are the communists, the socialists, the anti-capitalists and anarchists. Particularly those forces in marginalized and oppressed communities – BLM, immigrant rights activists, LGBTQ, women, etc.

The objective of that movement is not to separate itself from the masses, but to influence the masses, to go into the mass movements and influence those movements, though we will reserve the right to take action ourselves to push protest into resistance.

One of the tenets of such a front must be stopping the Democratic Party and the bourgeoisie from killing the movement. The Democratic Party is the graveyard of movements.

Our first priority must be to understand, embrace, support and defend the most oppressed: Muslims, immigrants, women, LGBTQ, Black Lives Matter, not only here but around the world. We must reject dismissing oppressed people under the category, “well, that’s identity politics.” Just the opposite – the oppressed people are the heart and soul of the working class. They are central to it. More than anyone else they will bear the burden of making the revolution.

This is not about being politically correct. It’s not about moralism. It’s being smart: blocking with those who are already in an advanced position. The fact is, the other sectors of the working class need the oppressed. If they don’t have they oppressed they will probably be paralyzed, and in some cases go backwards, as you can see. It’s a very dangerous problem.

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