The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is a communist political party in the United States. FRSO formed in 1985 as a merger of several Maoist-oriented New Communist movement organizations.
In 1985, the Proletarian Unity League and the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters merged to create FRSO. In 1986, FRSO fused with the Organization for Revolutionary Unity. In 1988, FRSO absorbed the Amílcar Cabral-Paul Robeson Collective.
FRSO's component groups believed that ultraleftism was the US New Communist movement's main error. Merging under the FRSO banner, these groups hoped to consolidate the movement's remnants in a single organization and move beyond the sectarianism that marked the previous decades.
1999 split
In response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, FRSO began to develop two distinct positions on socialist countries. The "Left Refoundation" group, aligned with democratic socialism, argued that these events resulted from a deep crisis of Marxism. The "Fight Back!" group, aligned with Marxism-Leninism, argued that these events resulted from revisionism rather than failures within Marxism. These divisions grew during the 1990s. In 1998, the Left Refoundation group wrote an internal document, "Theses on Left Refoundation", and requested an organization-wide discussion.
Both factions claimed the name "Freedom Road Socialist Organization". In 2006, the Left Refoundation group renamed itself to "FRSO/OSCL", combining the English and Spanish acronym. In 2019, the Left Refoundation group renamed itself to Liberation Road.
Publications
FRSO's main publication is the website and monthly paper Fight Back! News (FB!N) and its Spanish section Lucha y Resiste.
The 9th Congress of FRSO, held in spring 2022, came at a critical juncture in the development of the people’s struggle and the accelerating decline of monopoly capitalism in the U.S. As the call to the congress states, in the recent period “we have seen a level of struggle that is unprecedented since the 1960s. The great rebellion following the murder of George Floyd, which was both broad and militant, signals the shape of things to come. It can be said the burning police stations helped illuminate the road to freedom. The fight against police crimes led to a resurgence of the African American national movement.”
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You could likely still use the capital book club even if you are behind (assuming the questions are on, or adjacent-ish to, Capital).
I fell behind and debated on posting there or not, and comrade @Cowbee@hexbear.net suggested posting anyway. Cowbee and @oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net could chime in too for suggested practices.
There are other book clubs too, but I can't speak to their rules
Tbh, the engagement in last year's Capital thread started to wane after the first couple of chapters. I fell behind, and I'm sure many others did. I'm a slow reader lol. And there was probably a sense amongst us that once one is behind we shouldn't post in the older threads, or maybe we felt that our posts in the older threads weren't going to be noticed anyway - so some people (like me) just stopped posting. Life happened :(
There's also feelings of embarrassment or shame in feeling behind that we may just need to power through, or remind ourselves that people on Hexbear won't actually care if we fall behind in reading. Post anyway.
Even if it's hard to have an ongoing book club in those threads, they may still be a good central place to post questions on whatever topic or chapter is on your mind.
A comment thread discussing some of this: https://hexbear.net/comment/6802005
I'd still like to hear a mod give the final piece of advice, but I was getting a sense that it's okay to post in older threads if that's where you are in the book.
Yep, I still maintain discussion based on previous chapters is better than none at all! And yea, I ended up only finishing volumes 1 and 2. 3 got completely skipped for now, I'll return to it later.
Thank you, and oscardejarjayes, for responding! Hopefully I can get started on vol 2 one day... year... decade... . I get too bogged down in supplemental material that I neglect the source
I know that struggle, haha!
I think I will commit to posting in them now