PSL Forms Study Group, Seeks to Fight Against Oppression
Cameron Haskins and Ermiya Fanaeian, PSL student leaders, at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, on Friday, Feb. 18, 2022. (Photo by David Chenoweth | The Daily Utah Chronicle)
March 29, 2022
The Party for Socialism and Liberation is forming a new student study group at the University of Utah in March 2022. Ermiya Fanaeian and Cameron Haskins, students at the U, are the founders of the study group.
According to Fanaeian, PSL has existed in Salt Lake City for five years. It is relatively new, but the history behind it goes all the way back to the communist revolutions in Asia in the early 1900s when the group used to be known as the People’s Party.
Socialism is not new to Utah — the Worker’s Party was prominent in the 20s and 40s.
“It is also a furthering of the past,” Haskins said.
Haskins and Fanaeian are inspired by the historical communist and socialist revolutionaries of the mid 1900s including Fidel Castro, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Castro was the leader of the communist revolution in Cuba. Davis is an author, professor and activist for socialism in America. Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party, but fled to Cuba after being convicted of murder in a New Jersey shootout.
According to the Freedom Archives, the Black Panther Party was founded on the principles of Marxism and Leninism by Seale and Huey P. Newton amid the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, King Jr. was a civil rights activist and fought for a socialist liberal revolution.
PSL is a revolution against capitalism and promotes the rights for marginalized groups. It fights for the liberation of immigrants, Black people, the Asian community, women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community and the oppressed.
PSL has hosted numerous protests in Salt Lake City, including fighting against anti-Asian hate and highlighting issues of racism on the U’s campus.
“We see all these different oppressed groups as a part of the broader class struggle towards working class revolution,” Fanaeian said.
The difference between PSL and other communist or socialist groups is the focus on liberating these oppressed groups. PSL is a political party.
“The Party for Socialism and Liberation is not a liberal movement — we are a leftist movement,” Fanaeian said. “We are an anti-capitalist movement. We are a working class revolutionary movement.”
Haskins said PSL is also “the voice of the people and the momentum of the people.”
Haskins and Fanaeian plan to teach common socialist ideologies, history, texts and lessons about philosophers such as Karl Marx and Vladmir Lenin. They also want to educate students on how to fight against oppression, specifically on campus.
“The overall goal of this group is to study together and learn about revolutionary measures of the past, but also [how to] prevent attacks on our communities at the school,” Haskins said.
The U has faced several racial and domestic violence incidents in recent years. According to the values of PSL, there are institutional problems that need to be addressed and that will be addressed within the study group. A bomb threat against the Black Cultural Center is the most recent known racial incident.
“It was really frustrating to see what happened with a bomb threat,” Haskins said. “These things have continuously happened on campus over and over.”
Fanaeian said the murder of Lauren McCluskey was the result of the police department failing to do anything about her numerous reports.
The founders of the study group are critical of the U’s leaders.
“My eyes were focused at the leadership of the university,” Haskins said.
It all falls back on what the leadership has failed to address.
“These assaults are a result of the institution, the presidency’s office — Taylor Randall’s office — our safety department, our police departments having absolutely no plan in place to really ensure the safety of these students from continuous attacks like this,” Fanaeian said.
It is important to Fanaeian and Haskins that they are able to introduce these socialist ideas to the campus community.
“There is this kind of activism happening where we are fighting against the ruling class and capitalist exploitation,” Fanaeian said.
Haskins is excited to see where this group goes.
“I’m most excited to see and meet new students who feel the same way and want to organize and put efforts into protecting ourselves and also advocating and fighting for what’s best for us collectively as students,” he said.
The PSL student study group will be officially formed in early March 2022 and all students are invited and welcome to join. More information about the study group and the party itself can be found on Instagram at @pslsaltlake.
John Hedberg • Apr 25, 2022 at 11:58 pm
A 2nd Re-Tweet:
Marxists historically revere censorship. It’s the only way they can retain power. If one party (say, the Stazi of old East Germany, during the Cold War period) has exclusive control of what is allowed into the “pool of facts”, they can control public decisions, because they effectively control public perception. If you don’t know about your choices, or are never told you have one, control becomes a simple matter for Big Brother. All he has to do is label any opponent an enemy of democracy, attach a few false attributes to that opponent to make them appear evil and socially “radioactive”, and no one will dare open their mouth to oppose the “champions of compassion” (i.e. if you oppose “us”, you really hate people. It’s not because our policies are stupid or harmful that you voice objections, it’s because YOU’RE stupid and harmful! Therefore, no one has to listen to you, and everyone can dehumanize you, in the name of “compassion”, because you’ve been falsely defamed by Marxists as having evil hatreds you never possessed. Clever way to disarm any opponent, right? What good person is against compassion?)
If any group expresses the need to censor or control public debate, it’s because they know their ideas will be unpopular, so the only way they can survive is to limit the “pool of facts” and demonize all their opponents as “threats to democracy” and “haters”, all of which hide how destructive their real agenda actually is, once it’s implemented in current places like Venezuela, where one of the world’s richest breadbaskets can no longer keep its people from starving, or places like China, Russia, and Cambodia, where “cultural revolutions” “cleansed” their cultures’ “pool of facts”, resulting in the arrest and murder of millions and millions of innocent people all through the 20th Century, just so the objection to prevailing truth could be silenced and power maintained in the name of figment “compassion”.
Human rights tend to be individual rights, since they’re most often questioned when individuals step outside archaic assumptions or stereotypes in pursuit and expression of their individual, human potential. Those assumptions aren’t universal, nor do diverse individuals or groups hold them to the same degree or meaning, but the Marxist approach strives to paint these often negative assumptions onto entire groups it arbitrarily chooses (there’s no such thing as “white” or “Asian” people, for instance), regardless of science, which in effect is just replacing old archaic harmful stereotypes with false novel assumptions just as harmful, or in the case of attributing ephemeral stereotypes as fixed power structures and attaching them to entire (non-homogenous) groups, it’s something which observation of the 20th Century shows leads again and again to genocide in the repeated deaths of innocent millions in every corner of the world. I don’t think we can overlook our part in the consequences, if we choose to teach the distorted perspectives and arbitrary false values which have preceded those atrocities again and again across the world in the last 100 years. Marxist ideology doesn’t teach equality of opportunity, of rights, or of humanity out of reasoned Love: it teaches group-hatreds based on arbitrary stereotypes which it chooses to paint as fixed “power structures” onto groups of completely heterogenous human beings, summarily judging diverse individuals as guilty of assumptions which they may or may not actually hold, and asking for execution based on its new false stereotypes, assumptions, and hatreds. A better name is retribution politics, or the ideology of Auschwitz, since this has been the pattern of consequence, even to the present moment for the Uyghur enslavement and genocide in Western Communist China. Their “power structure” must have been very threatening, indeed, to require “equity” which includes systematic enslavement, internment, rape, murder, involuntary organ harvesting, and appalling medical experimentation unlike anything heard about since the Nuremberg Trials. The Uyghurs are semi-‘Asian’ and semi-‘Caucasian’: do the Chin Communist majority dehumanize their slaves, test subjects, and organ hosts by casting them as racially inferior and reprehensible, in order to justify ideologically their crimes against their humanity?
Any program or dogma which teaches people that some are born oppressors and some oppressed, based on the skin color we are born with, our gender, or other inherent identifiers, are really teaching Jim Crow racism under a new name, whether you call it “CRT”, “Anti-Racism”, or “Equity-Diversity & Inclusion”. It’s not very equitable or inclusive of diversity if it teaches people that their worth is greater or less based on characteristics they cannot change, and that some are born evil, when in fact we’re all just as human in our weaknesses as well as our ability to tame them as individuals. Call it Socialism, Marxism, or Jim Crow, if it teaches people to place worth in something other than our common humanity, it teaches partiality (prejudice) and hate, rather than Love, appreciation, wonder, courage, and real compassion, which are all as human and individual as our weaknesses, and are all based on our choices in the face of a life where suffering is a guarantee, as is our ability to make beauty happen in the midst of it, and to appreciate wonder and truth to help us overcome inevitable suffering in all the places these reside, all around us, all the time, if we’re willing (if we choose) to open our eyes and, as individuals, tame the content of our characters so that what we express is the closest to Love that we can aspire to.
Teaching people racism (that people can be defined by shades of skin pigmentation) as a way to combat racism is like teaching a cheerleader (of any gender) that the only way they can preserve their virginity is to sleep with the entire football team. It could be a little self-defeating! And so it is with those who wish to censor the “pool of facts” while they teach us to fear and hate each other based on things we can never change, in the name of opposing fear and hate, while they divide and exclude us by how we identify, in the name of diversity and inclusion. What could possibly go wrong that didn’t go wrong in all the other countries which tried the same cultural revolution which compassionately buried millions of our innocent neighbors and family members? What’s in a name?
Best, With Love,
J Hedberg
John Hedberg • Apr 25, 2022 at 11:40 pm
Edited Re-Tweet:
Marxists historically stereotype entire colors and categories of people as racist & evil haters, accusing whole heterogeneous groups without evidence. That’s almost the definition of racism, what Marxists delight in doing. I’ve been harassed by people who didn’t look like me on campus, once for months on end, I was assaulted twice in Peterson, and I’m Euro-American, male, straight, and Christian. When I reported these incidents to University officials, I was the one accused of racism and discrimination, without any effort to investigate or corroborate what happened to me. If anything, I’d say this university is biased against Euro-Americans, since they threatened me with punishment for reporting harassment and assault that was aimed at me just for being there. Maybe that’s the reason Lauren is dead: she was the wrong color, so her reports were simply dismissed by the same campus official who said to me, “Now you know what it feels like”, as if nobody Euro- has ever grown up dirt poor in a bad neighborhood and had to withstand adversity and discrimination on a daily basis (I did: my mother was an addict).
Don’t you get tired of the constant pity party about race, as if suffering and discrimination don’t happen to everyone, regardless of identity? As if it doesn’t matter, or it means less, or people don’t feel it as much, when it happens to folks who identify a certain way? Because people who believed these things and dehumanized each other ran Jim Crow in the South, ran Kristallnacht and concentration camps in National Socialist Deutschland, are running such camps today in Western China, and they were also responsible for the savage “cultural revolutions” and genocides which happened throughout the 20th Century in places like Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia, Soviet Europe, Communist China, and the former Yugoslavia, to name a few situations where literally hundreds of thousands to tens of millions died when folks rationalized dehumanizing others, as if their hatreds were valid when other peoples’ were not, or as if the normal human strengths and imperfections of others were not the equal of our own.
You hate people you stereotype, and you think systemic racism is still active in a United States which has already codified equality through the efforts of Dr. King (a Christian minister) and many others of all identities over 400 years, finally succeeding with overwhelming support more than 50 years ago. All kinds of bigotries will always exist, mostly because people continue to tell each other that their own bigotry and hatred is justified while everyone else’s is not. When we replace all bigotry with a love of all God’s children as equally fallible yet equally beautiful, that won’t be the end of suffering in life, or of oppression that stretches in all directions when any people’s circumstances are poor, but it does counter-act and uplift our common humanity in the midst of life’s inevitable suffering, and it teaches us to shun hatred for compassion, for genuine caring about the well-being and thriving of all the children around us who were also created by an Infinite Love which is still there, if we’re willing to do the work, find that worth reflected in diverse ways in ourselves and each other, and build our lives in common around that enduring flame of light, life, and love.
In a democracy, people generally do what they’re taught, and it’s up to us to be cognizant enough to pass good laws and hold ourselves and each other accountable, since civilization is a universal responsibility which never sleeps: identifying and expressing the best standards of love, science, and society is always up to each one of us, and it should be obvious by the 21st Century that no group in history has ever been homogenous about anything, we’re all so diverse as individuals. So it’s as individuals that we find and see worth, and encourage it, develop it, and “deploy” it for the well-being, not just of everyone here, but of all the children who will be here, for their happiness and well-being, and hopefully the well-being of all God’s creatures, as well.
Let me know what you think. Gandhi indicated that the real devils are within all of us, and it’s this inner battle against hatred where the real war is won, by love and understanding, acceptance, appreciation, and even in the midst of inevitable suffering, by joy in being able to share the burdens and the victories together. Aim well!
With Love,
J Hedberg