Seeing an opportunity to involve the public, the International Students for Social Equality at Eastern Michigan University, led by 27-year-old Clement Daly, will hold a public meeting from 7-9 p.m. this Thursday at the Michigan League Room 4 on the University of Michigan’s campus. The topic will be “Haiti’s Tragedy: A crime of U.S. Imperialism.”
According to the ISSE’s EMU student organization Web site, a presentation will involve “the historic role of U.S. imperialism in compounding this tragedy in general and the current militarization of the relief effort in particular will be highlighted.” After the presentation, there will be an open discussion and a questions and answers portion.
More than 150,000 Haitians have died, and the body count is expected to top 200,000. In the days since the overwhelming Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, U.S. and international troops and humanitarian agencies have increased deliveries of food, water, medicine and heavy equipment to help the quake’s survivors. More than 20,000 U.S. troops are on the ground in Haiti and aboard 20 ships offshore delivering aid with the possibility of more being sent, according to ABCnews.com.
The blogosphere, pundits and other countries have condemned America’s apparent militaristic coup of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales having branded the U.S. response an imperialist occupation under an aid banner.
President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Haitian President René Préval have dismissed these allegations as ideological problems fabricated by critics. Clement Daly is not so sure.
The ISSE supports the genuine and sincere efforts from the working class to donate time, money and resources to the Haitian tragedy, but it believes the U.S. government’s priority is to “send in troops and occupy the country.
“They diverted aid for days while they landed their marines … I reject that response to this crisis,” Daly said in a recent interview.
The goal of the ISSE at EMU is to build an organization that advances the class interests of students and working people in the community on a principled basis.
“To this end, we endeavor to develop a socialist culture within the best layers of students and workers as the foundation for a mass socialist party to lead the working class in carrying out the task history has set for it – that of overthrowing capitalism, reorganizing society on a higher cultural level, and subordinating humankind’s economic capacity to the fulfillment of social need, not private profit,” related Daly in an e-mail.
Words like “socialism” and “communism” are often used interchangeably, though they are not the same. Daly does not mind either label, as long as people listen to his ideas with an open mind. These words have become buzzwords used to describe the current presidential administration in the media (something the ISSE rejects) without truly clarifying what they mean. The issue is those words mean different things to different people.
“Socialism refers to a system in which there is a substantial public role in ownership and allocation of resources in a society, with the aim of promoting greater equality,” explained professor Richard Stahler-Sholk from EMU’s political science department. “Communism is a term that has come to be associated with a highly centralized model of state ownership of most of the economy, as well as a centralized political model in which power is monopolized by one political party, as in the former Soviet Union.”
In truth, socialism has yet to be successful in large part due to corruption of the original ideals. Though myriad nations have called themselves socialist, none of them actually have been. Russia, China, North Korea and Sweden, all of these had, or currently have, systems in which the state controls resources and the economy, not the public. Daly claims socialism cannot be successful unless it is international, as one country singularly declaring itself socialist is bound to fail.
As of right now, the socialist group at EMU is on the brink of failure itself, though it just began in the fall semester. Its events are held off campus, mostly at the University of Michigan, because Campus Life does not recognize a student organization until it has five confirmed members; not only on the group’s paper application, but also on its Web portal.
“Without recognition, we have no access to the resources we need to recruit members; resources such as rooms for holding events,” urges Clement Daly. “To satisfy EMU’s bureaucratic formality, we urge all students who agree with our perspective to help build the ISSE by joining our group on the university’s Web portal.”
Students who are interested in joining the International Students for Social Equality group might find more information through www.emustudentorgs.com or by emailing the organization at isse.emu@gmail.com.