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Revolutionary Workers League/RWL

Formed in 1976 as a split from the Spartacist League, the RWL is a
dogmatic and intensely militant Trotskyist group based in Detroit. Little is seen of them outside of
Michigan and California state, and (like the Spartacist League) they demand the devotion of all their
members.

They have set up a network of puppet organizations: the National Women's Rights
Organizing Committee (NWROC, founded 1980's), the Committee to Defend Affirmative Action By
Any Means Necessary (BAMN, founded 1995), and others. These front groups are where the RWL's
primary activism takes place. They often practice entryism -- entering larger organizations and
trying to bend them toward their own ideology. The most recent case of this occurred in Oakland,
California (far from their home base), where BAMN supporters tried to take over the local teachers'
union, the OEA.

A group that split with the RWL during the Gulf War, the Trotskyist League, would
break from the RWL’s traditional entryism and work with Solidarity and other groups, though
maintaining their ultra-left stance. No matter what group they enter, RWL will never win many
converts to their extreme tactics.

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BAMN was formed in 1995 and has been embroiled in controversy over its militant stances ever since. For example, in a 2015 action, BAMN won a victory of sorts as its members mobilized in support of a UC Berkeley student who was allegedly raped. As part of the campaign, BAMN printed more than 100 posters bearing a photo of the young man accused by another student and the word “Rapist” in large bold type. BAMN also held rallies and ultimately the young man was suspended from the university until 2019.

Prosecutors declined to file charges after determining there was insufficient evidence to prove rape beyond a reasonable doubt.

[www.sfgate.com]

In Dec. 2014, BAMN was involved with the five-day-long series of Black Lives Matter street protests in the East Bay. Felarca told Berkeleyside at the time that we “can’t have business as usual.”

[www.berkeleyside.org]

She told the New York Times that ‘militant’ actions were justified and “riots are the voice of the unheard.”

[www.nytimes.com]

The group’s involvement in the university sexual assault allegations, the protests in Berkeley, and the Sacramento rally are typical of how BAMN operates: using headline-grabbing tactics to drive its point home, often bordering on seeking vigilante justice.

In 2001 the East Bay Express called BAMN “wild-eyed sectarian extremists” that was (or is) “allegedly a front group for the obscure Detroit-based Trotskyist political party called the Revolutionary Workers League.”

Class Struggle

Did the 3,700 Oakland schoolteachers who are members of the Oakland Education Association know that their union was targeted for takeover by a cadre of sectarian extremists? Or are they just too exhausted to care?
By
Chris Thompson
Apr 20, 2001

[eastbayexpress.com]

In 1998, BAMN allegedly stole 7,000 issues of the Daily Californian because it didn’t like the paper’s critical coverage of the group or articles exploring affirmative action and Proposition 209, which was to appear on the November ballot, according to a New York Times story.

[www.nytimes.com]

A column by reporter Joe Eskenazi slammed the organization and was titled, “BAMN Be Gone.”

To hear BAMN’s critics tell it, the group uses questionable tactics and indoctrinates its members. Jacobsen pointed to an open letter from a former BAMN member posted to Facebook as evidence that the group was a cult. “They recruit impressionable young people, isolate them from their family and friends, and indoctrinate them with their violent ideology,” he wrote in an email. “That’s practically ‘Cult 101.’”

“It looks like the very same people doing the very same things,” said Eskenazi, the former Daily Cal reporter who wrote the 1998 op-ed critical of BAMN.