A youth in the struggle

Summer is an activist with the Revolutionary Students Union in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she lives with her partner Wilden and their daughter. Along with student organizing, Summer and Wilden have worked in support of workers’ rights and in the anti-war movement.

I grew up Mormon in the very conservative state of Utah. It was taboo to even talk about politics around my family because it would somehow “ruin our family relationships.” Despite this, towards the end of high school I was exposed to radical left-wing politics through some friends of mine and started my journey to activism.

I came to political activism in college by becoming involved in an anti-Walmart campaign that was going on in Salt Lake City. Our goal was to provide the public with information about the exploitation of workers and union busting by this giant capitalist corporation. During this campaign, for the first time in my life, I began to recognize that life under capitalism is a constant struggle between people who work for a living and those that get rich off exploiting them.

The Marxist term for this is the “class struggle” — the working class struggling against the capitalist class. One point that really resonated with me at this time was the conclusion that the capitalist system always puts profit before people. My partner Wilden and I soon became involved in the growing anti-war movement that was forming around the time of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. We traveled to a huge anti-war rally in San Francisco in January 2003, where 100,000 people came out to oppose the U.S. threats of war!

With our political consciousness growing, we were less and less satisfied with the analysis of mainstream media. Wilden and I began attending a revolutionary book club and discussion group in Salt Lake City. We also started working with a local peace coalition, helping to organize anti-war events in our area.

We took a little time off from political work to have a little girl named Violet, and after a couple of years we became politically active doing immigrant rights work and fighting against repressive Arizona-style legislation in Utah.

Wilden and I contacted many left-wing groups, but the one that impressed us the most was Workers World Party.

WWP has a long history of working with working-class and oppressed people to build community power and fight for our collective interests against the capitalist class. We believe that the only way to have real liberation and equality is to overthrow capitalism, and that the only way to overthrow capitalism is through solidarity and organizing in the working-class and oppressed communities.

This outlook is directly tied to our understanding of Marxism and the application of Marxist analysis to the world today. We hope you join us in the streets and in our communities to see what we mean by putting Marxism into action! n