The bare bones of PROVIDENCE WORKERS DEFENSE
Our organizing principles are the core needs of the working class. Those core needs should be expansive but always able to return to the roots of Peace Land & Bread. How we choose to define it must be done by new democratic forms created by workers alone. It must be implemented and enforced by workers alone. The class character is necessary in order to ensure accountability and scalability.
So let’s look at the slogan itself and explore how it will inform and guide a process of liberation. Going to the roots is central to making a workers movement honest and direct. Eliminating the unnecessary and language twisting of concepts of the posers and ambitious makes for a durable, accountable and open working class movement. To the root in all things, and that ends up being our needs Peace Land & Bread.
PEACE: We live in desperate austerity, where social harms are regularly committed locally, nationally, and internationally. To live in peace means an end to forcible destruction of unhoused communities, police sweeps in our neighborhoods, ICE raids, usurious rents, threats of unemployment, loss of dignity. We will achieve peaceful self managed communities, and workplaces for all of Providence. Through workplace and community councils this can be achieved with durability and a promise.
This is no utopian scheme, this is a practical matter of survival, the cruel nature of capitalism compels us to confront our bottom line, make based value judgements on what is good for us and what is bad for us to act on and enforce this. This means that working class peace must be protected not only from the ruling class but also from a tiny member of our community who prey on each other. There can be no tolerance for the landlord who orders evictions or from the mugger who seeks to assault you. We are our best peacekeepers.
LAND: The ruling class have acted to destroy the land through pollution and partition, and our workplaces through management dictatorships. We demand full meaningful land reform now. Good safe permanent housing for the unhoused, abolition of the landlord dictatorship, expropriation of the land, full access to the waters, full right to travel without police threat or intimidation. Restoration of the land and waters to the first peoples of Providence. With no drinkable surface water and a denuded bay the capitalists have had their chance and they have failed. An absentee landlord can have no pride of place, just extraction of workers wealth, they have failed to provide housing for all. Wages are artificially kept at the subsistence level by combine and compact between bosses, they have failed. Housing is a fundamental human right, access to open space is a fundamental human right. This isn’t a pollyannaish proposal, this is possible under the wise democratic control of workers who know best what is needed by their own community. The protection of personal property is sacred, the elimination of waste and destruction is absolutely necessary, our lives depend on liberated land.
BREAD: We the working class have a right to live full free good lives, all of us, this means total access to the things which sustain our bodies, our hearts and our minds. Simply free and democratic access to that which sustains us. Full bellies, full hearts, and full minds. That’s it.
PROVIDENCE WORKERS DEFENSE 