FIGHTBACK!
A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
Cuba: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave (1991)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-cuba-land-of-the-free.html
The United States v. Cuba (1992)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-us-v.-cuba.html
Malcolm and Fidel in Harlem (1993)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-malcolm-and-fidel-in-harlem.html
Hands Off Cuba! (1994)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-hands-off-cuba!.html
Adrienne Rich, Poet of Honor (1997)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-adrienne-rich.html
Dorothy Day: A Saint? (1997)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-dorothy-day.html
If We Are United, We Cannot Lose (2001) (speech)
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-if-we-are-united.html
PHOTO: Walter Lippmann
Introduction
by
Carole Seligman and Roland
Sheppard
First Edition. March 2005.
You have in your hands a wonderful book. It is a complete collection of the
monthly columns written by Sylvia Weinstein for Socialist Action newspaper from
1984 through February of 2001, and for the first four issues of Socialist
Viewpoint magazine, May through September, 2001. She engaged in revolutionary
socialist journalism until she died at age 75 on August 14, 2001. This
collection also includes the transcript of a presentation Sylvia gave to a
university women’s rights celebration in Baltimore, Maryland in 1993, in which
she reviewed her personal history as a fighter for women’s rights.
She was born Sylvia Mae Profitt in 1926, on the outskirts of Lexington,
Kentucky. Fifty-six of those years, her entire adult life since she was 19 years
old, was spent as an active participant in the revolutionary workers movement:
38 years in the Socialist Workers Party, and 18 years in Socialist Action, of
which she was a founding member and full-time worker. During the last few months
of her life, she was a founder and leader of Socialist Workers Organization and
Business Manager of Socialist Viewpoint magazine.
During her 38 years in the Socialist Workers Party, she took assignments as
secretary of the New York City branch of the party, as an activist in the Civil
Rights Movement in the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP, and as a full time worker
in The Militant newspaper office, among many others.
She was arrested for sitting in at Coney Island Hospital at an NAACP action
there to force the hiring of Black workers in the construction of more hospital
buildings. She picketed at Woolworths in solidarity with the southern sit-ins.
Like many socialists during the McCarthy era witch-hunt she was visited at home
and harassed many times by the FBI. Of course that never stopped her. She not
only increased her activism, she even ran in socialist election campaigns for
public office in New York City and later in San Francisco.
Sylvia was a staunch defender of the Cuban Revolution and an activist in the
Fair Play for Cuba Committee. When Fidel Castro came to New York City to address
the United Nations after the victory of the Cuban revolution, Sylvia was a key
organizer in the committee that arranged a big reception for Fidel and the Cuban
delegation to meet with their U.S. supporters and Black community leaders at the
Hotel Theresa in Harlem. Sylvia remained very proud of that experience.
But it was the feminist movement of the 1970s that inspired Sylvia to take a
leadership role, especially in the struggles for abortion rights and childcare.
These issues had a deep personal meaning for Sylvia. In those struggles, Sylvia
was an organizer and activist. She did countless mailings and handed out
hundreds of thousands of flyers. But the feminist movement also brought out
Sylvia’s tremendous leadership talents.
Sylvia made her own experiences as a young mother who was forced to obtain
illegal, terrifying, and unsafe abortions the property of the movement as a
whole. She testified at speak-outs to legalize abortion, and later, when it was
legal, she organized to defend the clinics from the attacks of the rightwing
anti-abortion terrorists. She became a spokeswoman and teacher. In the 1970s she
was the main leader of the movement for childcare in San Francisco. She became
known throughout San Francisco as the “childcare lady,” and as an advocate for
all human rights.
She set an example of unalterable opposition to the capitalist government which
stood in the path of women’s liberation. Her campaign for Board of Education in
San Francisco was run on a financial shoe string, but Sylvia got about 10,000
votes. She came up against powerful politicians—representatives of the rich— in
the course of her work for women’s rights. S.F. Mayor Willie Brown, who was then
speaker of the California State Assembly, tried to elbow her off the stage in
the middle of her speech at a Day in the Park for Women’s Rights. That was an
annual demonstration that Sylvia had helped initiate during the struggle for
childcare in San Francisco. Sylvia also found herself face to face in opposition
to Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was then president of the Board of Supervisors
of the City of San Francisco. Feinstein tried to use the childcare issue to gain
political power for herself but not to expand childcare services for families.
Sylvia fought her on this, and fought successfully against the S.F. chapter of
the National Organization for Women endorsing Feinstein for mayor.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, Sylvia was both the main spokeswoman for the
militant wing of the feminist movement and also the most respected feminist
speaker among the masses of working women who demonstrated for women’s rights.
Behind the scenes, powerful politicians moved in to try to isolate Weinstein and
her collaborators from the NOW members by initiating a public red-baiting
campaign in the San Francisco media. To Sylvia, this campaign only showed how
effective militant independence in the feminist movement was.
Her last important political work was in founding the Socialist Workers
Organization after the demise of democracy within Socialist Action. She
continued the regular monthly column, “Fightback!” that she had written for
Socialist Action newspaper for the first three issues of Socialist Viewpoint
magazine.
Sylvia Weinstein had the unique ability to make masses of people feel justified
in their anger at their oppression and in the justness of their cause. She also
imparted a strong sense that masses of oppressed, working together, could exert
their power and change things for the better. She believed that the working
class was fully capable of taking control over society and ruling in the
interests of themselves and all humankind. She was sure that eventually masses
of people would join with her to change things, to make a socialist revolution.
Perhaps it was because she exuded a deep belief in the goodness of her fellow
workers, that people gravitated to her and were so affected by her.
In the women’s movement, during its ascendancy, Sylvia was able to impart that
attitude of class consciousness to thousands of women. In the socialist movement
she was able to impart that confidence to her comrades. Her legacy is as a
partisan fighter for human rights and advocate of a socialist future for
humanity.
Sylvia’s columns are infused with revolutionary spirit, optimism, respect for
the potential of the working class, love for the working people of the world,
and hatred for the oppressor class. The columns exhibit the very essence of
Marxist political analysis— a deep understanding that society is divided into
social classes with diametrically opposed social, political, and economic
interests. But they are in no sense dry or academic. Sylvia spoke and wrote with
a colorful style full of invective for the brutality and arrogance of the
capitalist class and the stupidity of its stooges in government.
Many of the columns also reveal the strong personal motivation for Sylvia’s
tireless revolutionary work—her personal background of extreme rural poverty,
her childhood experience in labor organizing, her two dangerous illegal
abortions, her active participation in the working class, Civil Rights, antiwar,
and especially the women’s liberation movements. Because Sylvia played a
leadership role in the campaigns for child care, the Equal Rights Amendment, and
abortion rights, her columns on those topics are especially fierce.
This book will be useful for all who oppose the horrors the capitalist system is
perpetrating upon the peoples of the world today. It provides a revolutionary
socialist perspective on the last two decades of the 20th century U.S. empire.
It contains useful history on some of the most important developments of those
two decades, such as the several wars waged by the U.S. on developing countries,
on the status of women— particularly with respect to women’s reproductive
rights— on the growth of the prison-industrial complex and America's political
prisoners, on the first Palestinian intifada, and the major events of the end of
the 20th century.
Sylvia had the gift of finding and re-telling the stories of ordinary people
that reveal great truths about our society. She found stories in the daily
newspapers, such as the story of the Russian mother who went to Chechnya to
bring her soldier son home, and let the readers see how this strong act of love
and personal sacrifice applied to all mothers and all working people. Through
this story she showed how reactionary wars against national liberation were not
only against the interests of workers and soldiers of the oppressed nation, but
against those of the oppressor nation as well.
The book does much more than provide a useful history of this period. The basic
politics of these columns is very relevant today. These writings advocate
policies of complete working class independence from ruling class politics. They
advocate working class methods, strategies, and tactics, such as mass street
demonstrations to oppose war or to support important reforms such as
reproductive rights for women and the Equal Rights Amendment. The columns are
particularly useful in understanding capitalist electoral politics. Many are
scathing attacks on the reformist policy of supporting so-called lesser-evil,
pro-capitalist candidates in elections, and the de-railing of important social
justice movements in the process. These columns are particularly useful in
understanding the present predicament of the antiwar movement in the aftermath
of U.S. wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, current continuing occupations of
both of these countries, and a presidential election approaching with no genuine
working class political party in place to contest capitalist political power. In
this context, Sylvia Weinstein’s writings are not only interesting but
prophetic.
The series of articles in this book are indicative of her compassion for the
oppressed and her unswerving confidence in the power of the working class to
construct a socialist world humanitarian society in harmony with nature. Sylvia
was a rebel woman who knew how to fightback. “Fightback!” was the name of her
monthly column, and therefore, it is the title of this book.
—Carole Seligman and Roland Sheppard
FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint Publishing Association
ISBN: 0-9763570-0-3
360 pp.
To order your copy of FIGHTBACK!
Send a check for $25.00 plus $5.95 for shipping and handling to:
Socialist Viewpoint
333 Valencia Street, Suite 407
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-920-9323
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