Statement Of The Central Committee

STATEMENT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE

RAINBOW PEOPLE'S PARTY

Image one caption: John Sinclair

Image two caption: The Central Committee of the Rainbow People's Party

Photo: David Fenton

February 15, 1972

To Our Sisters and Brothers in the Ann Arbor Rainbow Community:

For the past two months since John was returned to us our party has been going through the process of systematically reorganizing itself. For the first time in our history as the Rainbow People's Party we have sat down with our Chairman and carried on prolonged intensive discussions of our history and development, our historic role as rainbow people and as a revolutionary party which purports to represent our people as a whole, our organizational tasks as a party and as members of the immediate community, our structural strengths and weaknesses and how we might correct them, our internal contradictions and the contradictions that still exist between our party and different people and groups in the community. This is all new to us - in the past more than seven years of our organizational existence we have never undertaken such a systematic investigation of our situation, and we're just now learning how to organize ourselves so as to make the best possible use of the resources available to us. We're excited about the results we've achieved using this method of work, and we want to share some of the things we've worked out with our brothers and sisters in the community in the hope that it'll help us all get ourselves together better.

First of all we want to express our appreciation and gratitude once again for all the support everyone gave us during the struggle to Free John Now - we can never thank you enough, and all of us know that it was only through the unified efforts of the entire community, led by its conscious rock and roll musicians, that we were able to win the victory we achieved on December 13th. Rainbow Power! We also know that the only effective way we can express our appreciation is through through our practice in the community now that the people have brought John back home, and we've been spending so much time in meetings over the past two months precisely because that's the way we feel we can best organize ourselves and and make ourselves capable of dealing with the problems all of us face as a people.

We also want to thank all of our brothers and sisters who have helped us with our meetings, taking over the duties of party members so that all of us can meet at once, making their homes available to us when we needed more privacy than we could get at our headquarters, having patience with us and the untogether quality of our work while we were concentrating on our meetings so we can do better work in the future, and just generally offering us their encouragement and support during what has been a very difficult period for us. Again, we have never done this before, it's been a hard struggle for us to get down together like we've been doing for the past two months, and we hope it'll all be worth it to people when we start putting our plans into practice. We're sorry it's taken us so long to get to where we had planned and hoped to get in a much shorter period of time, but we had to take as much time as the situation called for and we're doing the best we can under the circumstances.

We constitute ourselves as a people's party, and it is extremely important to us that the people we work with in the community understand what we are about. We call ourselves servants of the people, and our goal is to make ourselves capable of serving the people's needs the best way possible, which means that primarily we are concerned with developing organizational forms through which our people can express their energy and genius in such a way that they will be able to solve their collective problems for themselves, following the principle of self-reliance and self-determination. By organizing ourselves to serve the people 24 hours a day, year in and year out, through the course of a protracted struggle against the dinosaur imperialist order, we are taking the first major step toward organizing our whole people into a powerful political force which will be capable of eliminating capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and the other evils of western civilization and of building up in its place a New World based on revolutionary humanism - the Rainbow Nation which will grow to include all the people on the planet.

We are engaged in a serious struggle, and there is no way we could be more serious about what we are doing. We have committed ourselves individually and organizationally to the struggle of our people - of all people - for liberation and self-determination, by any means necessary, and we are prepared to accept whatever consequences this commitment brings us, whether it's giving up our "free time" and our individual pursuits in order to deal with the needs of the people, giving up our freedom on the streets for long periods of time while we serve prison sentences arising our of our work in the community, or facing the armed might of the imperialist state. All of us are totally committed to the revolution, and we express our commitment through our daily work in the party and in the community as well as through the more sensational activity which is the only aspect of our work most people want to know about.

One of our primary concerns is that the people in our community know as much as possible about what we're doing and what we are trying to do here in Ann Arbor - we take this space n the community newspaper to talk about our activities and our plans because they affect everybody in the community finally, and if we're going to be a people's party then the people have to understand and approve our work. We aren't doing any of this just because it's what we want to do - we want to serve the people, and everything we come up with is designed to deal with what we see as the people's needs in the most efficient and the most effective way possible. We know that we make a lot of mistakes in the course of our work, and we know our analyses aren't always right, but the best way to check up on the the correctness of what we're doing is to submit it to the people like this and ask for your criticisms and suggestions so we'll know when we're doing something wrong.

The main thing we want to say now or any time is that essentially we're just freaks off the street like anybody else in our community, without any experience in political work except what we've gained by plunging ahead the best way we could, and we don't want to create any mystique around what we're trying to do as a revolutionary political party. Because we are just freaks off the street like the rest of our people, we feel it's important to make every attempt to de-mystify our activity so everybody in the community can share in the knowledge and experience we've gained through our practice, and so there won't be any weird separation between our party and the people we want to serve. Our point is that if we can do what were doing, if we can organize ourselves to deal with our own problems and the problems of our people in a systematic fashion, if we can commit ourselves to the struggle and work in the struggle day after day taking our pleasure from the well-being of the people and the progress of the people's programs rather than from little individualist trips, if we as the Rainbow People's Party can do this then all of us can organize ourselves and commit ourselves to the struggle that will free all of us finally from the condition which causes all our problems. There ain't nothin' weird about us at all - we're just like everybody else in the rainbow community, only maybe more so, and if we can do this then anybody can!

The other thing, before we go into specific detail, is that there isn't anything weird about meetings either - meetings are a necessity in taking care of business, and sisters and brothers who are serious about dealing with the needs of our people are beginning to understand, as we are, that meetings are an absolutely essential part of our communal life if we want to

continued on next page

continued

take care of business. Meetings are where people share their information and figure things out together, like sitting around toking down and rapping only in an organized, more or less systematic fashion, so that everything that needs to be discussed and taken care of will get done before the meeting's over. The harder the problem - and when you're talking about eliminating imperialism and all its manifestations you're talking about a hard problem - the longer and more intense the meetings are, especailly when you're starting out from scratch and doing it all for the first time like we've been doing, but in the end there's nothing mystical or strange about any kind of meetings at all. They're just instances of people getting together to work out their collective problems collectively, and all of us are going to have to start relating to meeting and talking a lot more about our common problems if we even want to survive as a people.

THE PRESENT SITUATION

In our party meetings we started out discussing the present situation on the international, national, regional and local levels. Our primary conclusion was that the revolutionary forces throughout the world are definitely on the rise while the reactionary forces, led by the United States government and the imperialist financial interests fronts for, are definitely on the decline. This is true on every front, starting with the international front where the people of Vietnam have forced greater and greater concessions from the U.S. government even while they've been subjected to the most vicious exterminated campaign ever faced by by a people in all of history thus far, where the 800 million people of the People's Republic of China have won a great victory in the twenty-two-year struggle to force the reactionary governments of Euro-Amerika to recognize their revolutionary government on its own terms, and where the national liberation struggles of oppressed Third World peoples have grown in intensity and scope again this past year as they have year by year since the end of the second world war. The revolutionary forces are growing stronger while the reactionary forces are growing weaker and weaker all the time, and we are quickly entering the decisive period of the struggle against the international octopus of imperialism.

On the national level we see that the revolutionary forces are growing and maturing more each day despite the tremendous toll taken by the vanguard workers in struggle - the assassination of George Jackson at San Quentin and the massacre of 32 prisoners and ten guards at Attica are only the most sensational instances of the genocidal campaign that is being carried out against oppressed peoples all over the planet - and that the reactionary forces have suffered serious setbacks even as they try desparately to reassure themselves that everything is going according to plan. The Nixon-Mitchell-Kleindeinst-Rhenquist-Kissinger conspiracy to smear the revolutionary movement with the brush of nihilism while systematically eliminating its most public activists has been consistently combatted and exposed by the people and can be said decisively to have failed. Bobby Seale and Erika Huggins are free to continue their work in the black community, Huey P. Newton has finally acquitted himself of the manslaughter charges which were meant to keep him off the streets for 15 years, political trial after political trial has ended in acquittal or a hung jury, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayres and their comrades in Weather Underground are still on the loose, and every move the government makes against revolutionaries now is immediately exposed, opposed, and defeated.

This doesn't mean that the picture is a absolutely rosy by any means, but t does mean that we are definitely making progress in our struggle, and that the government, despite all its seeming strength, is powerless to carry out its plans against the people without the most resolute resistance by increasingly larger masses of people in this country. There are still thousands and thousands of our brothers and sisters locked up in prison, there are still millions of people starving every day, the U.S. government is still dropping tons and tons of bombs on Vietnam and Cambo boda and Loas every hour, the people still have no effective control over the men means of production or the institutions which affect their lives, the conditions which have driven us to struggle against the monstrous beast of imperialism have really only worsened instead of improved, but in the final analysis it is an incontestable fact that the size and scope of the people's movement for change have continued to grow more this past year than ever before. and if we measure our progress against where we started from instead of against where we're trying to get to we can see that we're making tremendous strides in the correct direction.

As far as the rainbow colony is concerned, we can see that our numbers are growing by the day, that there are million lions of us now instead of hundreds or thousands as was the case five years ago, that we represent an increasingly greater threat to the reactionary forces by virtue of our very existence, and that the cultural suppression movement which has been carried out by the government over the past few years (including the psychedelic genocide/operation jones campaign) has almost totally failed in its task of stopping or at least defusing the mass cultural movement in this country. We can see that the strategic importance of the rainbow colony as the closet child of the mother-country and the mother-country's anticipated heir is looming larger all the time, and that a victory in our struggle for self-determination and freedom will mean victory for oppressed peoples all over the planet.

We can see that we really do have the numbers, that our revolutionary potential as a people is growing all the time, and that our strength is limited now only by our general state of disorganization and untogetherness. Objectively we are tremendously powerful, we have almost unlimited energies and resources, we have the ability to start taking over our lives and directing them the way we see fit, but we will remain relatively weak as long as we persist in remaining disorganized and isolated from each other. We think we're weak and powerless, but in actuality ity we have an incredible amount of potential which will start to actualize itself as soon as we begin to organize ourselves and to move together to get what we need. We are no longer in a position of weakness, we're in a position of strength, a and that strength has only to be organized to make itself felt immediately in the centers of power.

In this regard, there are two major areas of work to which we are ready to commit ourselves; the first is the creation of a Rainbow National Economic Development program which would enable us to reclaim some of our national wealth and to start developing a stable economic base for our people as a whole: and the second is the creation of a mass-based national political movement which would work through the electoral process as well as every other effective way first to evict Richard Nixon, and them to develop itself into a stable, multi-national, thorough thoroughly unified political force with the the ability to elect its own candidates to major public offices and to force the Property Party (Democrats/Republicans) to speak to the needs of the people and to expose their inability to deal with those needs under capitalism.

We are basically a local organization now, and these are national issues, but they affect all of us on a daily basis here in in Ann Arbor and they can only be dealt with on the level of national work. We all suffer from the economic exploitation and the cultural adulteration of our national wealth - our culture, and particularly our music - and we all suffer under the super-reactionary regime of Nixon and his rap partners, On the world-historical level there is no difference between the Republicans and the crats, but on the practical level - where all of us live out our lives - there can be great differences between liberal Democrats and right-wing Republicans, and as a revolutionary organization we are particularly concerned with removing Mitchell and Kleindeinst and their gang from their positions of power if only to lessen the possibility of trumped-up political trials and the prison sentences that go with them. We still have three of our comrades - Pun Plamondon, Skip Taube, and Jack Forrest - locked up in the federal penitentiary system as a result of the Mitchell-Kleindeinst conspiracy against the revolutionary movement, and we want not only to get them back on the streets with the rest of us but also to keep the rest of our people out of those situations in the future.

As of now there is no clear cut plan for the 1972 electoral campaign on the part of the movement, so we still are aren't equipped to detail our plans in this area, but we will lay them out for you as soon as they're finalized and ready to put into action. Talk now is centering on a People's Campaign which would include a protracted series of major rock and roll bashes on the John Sinclair Freedom rally model, a People's Platform which would be presented to the people through the people's press and at the rock and roll rallies for their endorsement, a massive national voter registration effort, and a five-or-six day MUSIC & POLITICS festival near San Diego just prior to the Republican National Convention. The details of this Campaign and the extent to which the RPP will be involved in it will be announced in the SUN as soon as they're available.

We are also working on a Rainbow National Economic Development plan which is still in the preliminary stages and which will be announced in its entirety as soon as it's ready to be implemented. Generally ally, as peopie know, we are interested in creating an alternative economic system, based on the communal, non-profit model model, which would be under the control of rainbow people and which would provide us as a people with the economic base and the major means of production we need in order to carry on our struggle against capitalism and imperialism on all levels. Our primary commitment is to wrestling our people's bands back out of the clutches of the greed creeps and returning the music and the economic power of the music to the people's communities where they belong, and our plan will be dedicated to this end.

THE LOCAL SITUATION

Turning to the local situation - Michigan in general and Ann Arbor in particular - we could only conclude that the outlook is even brighter for our people here than almost anywhere else, and that our original decision seven years ago to commit ourselves to this geographical area - Ann Albor/Detroit - has been proved correct beyond a doubt. Here in our base area conditions are ripe for the even more rapid development of our mass movement, only among rainbow people but also among the broad masses of Euro-Amerikan people, and the potential strength of the people in the rainbow community is far greater than the ability oí our party to organize than strength. Where in the there were not enough rainbow people the set to support the programs were proposing, now the situation is just the opposite: there are far more people to ready to move into active participation in the people's programs than there are people to help them organize themselves, and our basic task in the immediate future is to try to catch up to the people and help them create the organizational forms they need to develop in order to deal with their own needs.

In the local situation also, the government's plan to smear the active revolutionary forces in the community while dragging our leaders off the set and into the penitentiaries forever has been vigorously combatted and virtually defeated, even though our party itself still suffers the continued imprisonment of our three comrades, and even though we are still forced actively to combat the negative images of our organization and our movement which the sensation-mongers in the capitalist information media have projected over the past few years. Our success in this area is due largely to the correction of our own ultra-leftist, super-radical mistakes, our concerted efforts to redefine the revolution for people in this area as a positive process from which they can only benefit, the change in our methods of work which followed our transformation from the White Panthers to the Rainbow People's Party, and especially to the overwhelming support of the broad masses of rainbow people who came forward as soon as we gave them the chance and demanded the release of Chairman John Sinclair from the Michigan penitentiaries. We concluded that we were able to win the support of the people for the Free John Now campaign, and for our programs in general, because we were able to recognize our most blatant mistakes, to correct them and our methods of work as well, to go to the people with our corrected analysis and explain it, along with our mistakes, to them, and to give the people concrete channels through which they could actually express their support and their outrage over John's situation.

We discussed the Free John Now campaign at great length, since that campaign constituted by far the largest part of our activity during the first eight months of our party's existence, and we concluded that the campaign had been immensely successful not only in its first term - freeing John now!- but also in the way it involved many thousands of people in a political effort, in the way it brought new energy and life to our community and raised the spirit of our people to a whole new level, in the way it brought so many of our people's bands back together with the people in support of a common goal, and in the way it mobilized a great many mother-country elements behind an issue which directly concerns so many rainbow people and which provides a basis of unity between our people and the increasing number of mother-country people who are beginning to smoke the sacrament on the one hand, and to wake up to the incredible political repression that's going down in this place on the other. On top of all that, the Free John/Free Marijuana campaign, we feel, brought about the change in the Michigan marijuana statutes which is going to affect all of us starting April 1st, and which is a major political victory for our people in this state. As such, the victory in the initial state of the battle puts us in a significantly different position on the statewide level - riding on a forward surge of energy, we're now dealing from a position of relative strength rather than relative weakness and our future activity in this area has to be undertaken within that context.

On the local level, that is in Ann Arbor, we're in a greater position of strength than ever before - by defining the situation in our own terms and moving along the lines of our analysis of the local situation we've been able to keep our community growing, and its institutions along with it, while enjoying a relative degree of security within the community itself due to the nature of the relations we've established with the city government and its various political/military agencies. Our rainbow community has begun very clearly to define itself and to consolídate itself in order to increase our collective strength, and our most immediate goal is to complete the process of consolidation, through the Tribal council and its People's Committees, while expanding our services and the scope of our communal institutions at the same time. The consolidation of our initial base will provide a stable foundation for our community's growth in the future, and the more we increase people's participation in the people's programs and the people's committees, the more rapidly our community will be able to grow, and the stronger we'll all become as a result.

During the first stage of our development as the Rainbow People's Party we explained to our sisters and brothers in the community that we couldn't particípate in the Tribal Council and the People's Committees as much as we needed to because we had to concentrate almost all our energies and resources on the struggle to Free John Now; our position now that John is back with us is that we will participate in the development of the Tribal Council, the People's Committees, and the People's Community Center as fully as we possibly can. The development of the people's political and economic institutions is the first priority in all our mass work, and we are particularly committed to building up the Tribal Council, transforming it from a loose coalition of activist groups (RPP, Drug Help, Ozone House, Free People's Clinic, the People's Food Co-op, Youth Loberation Front, and other groups) into a solidly representative communal political institution which is capable of coordinating all the people's energies and resources, administering the public affairs of the community, seeing to it that adequate services are provided the people through the various people's committees, and serving as a model of the people's government of the future.

We see the Tribal Council eventually encompassing every brother and sister in the community, with the people representing themselves directly at regular mass meetings (like at the free concerts in the part in the summertime) and being represented in the community's formal dealings with the established communities by the Steering Committee, the group which has created and nurtured the Tribal Council from its first tentative days as a coalition of community service organizations. The mass meetings and the weekly Steering Committee meetings would serve as coordinating sessions and information exchange opportunities, while the actual work of the Tribal Council, and of the community as a set of institutions, would be carried on through the agency of the People's Committees and the various service organizations which would function under the banner of the People's Committees. The People's Committees would then serve as the backbone of the entire community, and each committee would be responsible for consolidation of all the existing institutions in its particular field, coordinating their activities so as to make the most economical use possible of the community's energies and resources, initiating new service programs and community instutions to deal with more and more of the people's needs, and providing a means through which sisters and brothers from the community who want to get involved in serving the people can plug into the organized life of the community. 

The People's Committees are where the work gets done and it is through working on the People's Committees that all of us can build up the kind of alternative social order we all dream about. Our party will be committing at least two of its members to each of the People's Committees, not only to contribute its proper share to the organized life of the community but also to demonstrate our commitment to the development of the Tribal Council as the kind of alternative communalist political institution we need in order to survive and grow as a people. We need these institutions, all of us need these institutions, all of us need them to provide for our collective needs as a community. and if we are serious about developing our community then we have to be serious about joining the People's Committees and working with our brothers and sisters on the People's Committees to deal with our collective problems.

On the individual level we seen the People's Food Committee developing strong ties between all the people's food cooperative projects in the community, consolidationg the buying power of the community, and increasingly serving the food needs of our people. WE envision a time when all of our food is grown on people's farms in the countryside and trucked into the city in the people's truck trucks to be distributed through the people's food warehouse, a time when we can provide for all our food needs without going outside our own community, and we see the People's Food Committee working actively toward this end.

We see the People's Housing Committee, which has barely begun to organize itself up to now, developing into an agency which can provide for the people's housing needs, whether through renting community -owned houses and apartments to tribes and individuals, constructing people's communes on a mass scale with the residents sharing in the ownership of their housing units, providing emergency housing for sisters and brothers passing through town with no place to stay, dealing with the housing problems of escapees from suburbia and the other dungeons of Amerika, operation a people's housing information exchange service, or whatever other means may be available to us at any given time.

We see the People's Health Committee developing further the Free People's Clinic, adding a Free Dental Clinic as is already planned, and moving into the area of People's Hospitals and People's Dispensaries as soon as conditions permit. We see the People's Drug Committee developing strong programs for dealing with heroin use and addiction in our community, the adulteration of the psychedelics by unscrupulous greedheads and/or the government itself, the problem of the presence of other destructive chemical agents such as speed and barbiturates in our community, and other problems relating to drug use and abuse, with the eventual goal of merging itself with the People's Health Committee after the social aspect of the drug problem is eliminated.

We see the People's Defense Committee developing in essentially three directions: (1) the establishment of a permanent Legal Self-Defense program in the community, including a legal information service, a bail-bond fund for brothers and

continued on next page

continued

sisters on the street who run into the slimy tentacles of the law, and a legal education program which would systematically inform people of their rights and of the legal services available to them through the People's Defense Committee; (2) the establishment of a stable force of Psychedelic Rangers (People's Peace Officers) which would be capable of dealing with all the security problems of the community, including street patrols, park rangers, security guards, and the like, and the creation of a training program in armed self-defense, including karate, firearms, and other forms of self-defense, which could result in the establishment of a well-trained, well-equiped People's Militia which would insure the safety and security of our community from outside attacks.

We see the People's Education Committee developing a multi-faceted Children's Community School as the first step toward the creation of a whole alternative educational system which would serve the educational needs of the entire community, from the cradle to the grave. We envision the the near future a functioning Children's Community School which would include a nursery school, a revolutionary day-care center and school for people between the ages roughly of 2 and 5, and a grade school program for people who would otherwise have to attend the cesspools of the capitalist-industrial school system.

We see the People's Communications Committee developing a through-going community information exchange program, including a newspaper, a central switchboard with information on everything that's happening in town, community bulletin boards situated around town so that people on the street can know what's happening, people's radio and television stations and whatever else we need to keep ourselves tuned into the life of the community on all levels. We see the Network operation developing rapidly into a full-fledged community switchboard, and we in the RPP are looking of forward to the day, hopefully in the near future, when we can turn the Ann Arbor SUN over to the People's Communications Committee to serve as the official news organ of the Ann Arbor Tribal Council. We see the paper going back to a weekly schedule as soon as possible, increasing both its circulation and its physical size, and drawing more and more people from the community into the day-to-day operations of a people's newspaper. We see the bulletin boards functioning by the summertime, and more and more communication among all of us who live together in this community.

We see the People's Music and Ballroom Committee developing the People's Ballroom in the Community Center, the 1972 Free Concert Series in the parks, and a regular series of fund-raising events involving the people's bands which would raise money for the Community Center, the Ballroom Project, the LSD Bail Fund, and other community service programs. We also see the People's Music Committee establishing a dynamic Musicians' change/People's Booking Agency which would hook bands up with the people who need their services, and vice versa. We see particularly the People's Ballroom developing into a true community cultural center, a place where our people can gather to get down in the music together, where our bands can make a decent living playing for their friends and neighbors at reasonable prices, where musicians without places to rehearse can possibly get together to work out their music, where theatre events, poetry readings, film screenings, workshops, meetings, and other community functions can be held regularly without the threat of interference from outside authorities.

We see the Artists' Workshop Committee developing in two ways: (1) toward the creation of a permanent Creative Workshop in the Community Center, a project which is already planned and which waits only upon the completion of the People's Ballroom for its implementation - a people's workshop where artisans and crafts people can practice their skills and market their products through a people's store, where people from the community can learn and practice skills such as carpentry, mimeographing, silkscreening, pottery, leather-working, macrame, and photography; and (2) toward the establishment of an Ann Arbor Artists' Workshop which would provide a forum for poets and other art workers from the community - musicians, filmmakers, painters, writers, photographers, dancers, and other artists - through which to present their work to the people. The Artists' Workshop would be centered in the People's Ballroom and would be engaged in a whole range of artistic activity, limited only by the human resources available in the community at any given time.

Finally, we see the People's Finance Committee developing into a massive fund-raising agency and economic development council which would serve the interests of the rainbow community by producing fund-raising events for the Tribal Council, the Community Center, and the various people's service organizations, by generating capital to be used for the purchase of productive equipment on a large scale, by establishing and collecting Community Taxes which would go to Towards the financial needs of the people's institutions, and by providing financial advice and direction to progressive entrepeneurs in the community who want to develop independent cooperative businesses which would help serve the needs of the people.

Those are the existing People's Committees right now; we see further the need for a People's Labor Committee sometime in the near future, which would procure jobs for brothers and sisters in the community, organize people's task forces to raise money individually and collectively by painting houses, doing landscaping and gardening work, and engaging in other forms of productive activity in an organized basis. We see the need for rides around town and around the country, which would work out plans for eliminating automobile traffic within the community, and which would develop means for dealing with all the people's transportation needs. We see the need for People's Committees to deal with every problem people have in our community, and we cannot be satisfied until all those needs are being dealt with on a regular, systematic basis.

In summary, we see the Tribal Council and the People's Committees developing into strong communal institutions which will enable us to solve our collective problems in this community and to move together to build the kind of society where we can all be free to develop our humanity to its highest possible level. Our party is irrevocably committed to the establishment and development of these institutions, not because they're something we dreamed up over a few joints but because they are necessary to deal with the needs of the people, and the needs of the people must be served. We have demonstrated through our practice in the past, even while we were primarily committed to freeing our Chairman, that we are determined to have what we need and to create it ourselves, and we will be working from this point, with the active participation of Chairman John Sinclair, to demonstrate further our absolute dedication to this task.

We have space here only to report briefly on one last area of our local work which will be discussed in more detail in the next issue of the Sun - the question of electoral politics and our participation in the electoral system. The Rainbow People's Party, after taking fully into consideration the changes in the local political situation brought about by the granting of the 18-year-old vote, the enfranchisement of students of voting age in the communities in which they live and work, and the internal development of the Radical Independent Party as it established its base and affiliated itself with the Human Rights Party, has decided to support the efforts, the platform and the candidates of the Human Rights Party of Ann Arbor not only in the April 3rd City Council elections but in the local elections to follow. Since we believe that social practice is the criterion of truth, we offered for nomination and had accepted as an HRP candidate for City Council in the Third Ward our sister and comrade Genie Plamondon, who will be running on the platform of the Human Rights Party.

We are not an electoral party; the Rainbow People's Party is a democratic-centralist revolutionary political part dedicated wholly to revolutionary social change and the creation of an intercommunalist social order on this planet, and we will work with any progressive forces in our community which have demonstrated their stability and commitment beyond a doubt. The Human Rights Party is such a force in the Ann Arbor community, and we are happy to have the opportunity to work with them in this election campaign. We will be involved in a serious campaing to win for the people, through the HRP, at least two seats on the Ann Arbor City Council, and to move from there for more effective control over the institutions and agencies which affect people's lives in this community. We do not propose the securing of two or more City Council seats as any kind of ultímate victory for the people. because we all know that our problems are incapable of being solved by any agency operating within the framework of imperialist society; but we do propose that a victory for the Human Rights Party in the April 3rd elections will be a tremendous victory for the people of the Ann Arbor rainbow community, and we urge all of our sisters and brothers in the community to register now and to vote April 3rd for sister Genie Plamondon and her running mates- Jerry DeGrieck, Nancy Wechsler, David Balck and Nancy Romer Burghardt - on the Human Rights Party ticket. VOTE HUMAN - Genie P. April 3!

This report just barely scrapes the surface of our two months of meetings and discussions, and it by no means covers the full range of our projected activities for the next period of our organization's development, but hopefully it can serve as a start toward a really comprehensive report by our party to all of you in the community who we profess to serve through our work. We welcome your comments, criticisms, and suggestions - which isn't to say thay we'll always agree with you, because we try to have a pretty clear idea at any given time of what we're doing, what we're trying to do, and why we're doing it that way - and we hope you will help us to develop into the kind of people's organization our community needs during this particular stage of its development. This is just the beginning, but we're certainly ready to start, and you'll be able to keep a close check on us as we work to caryy out out programs.

All Power to the People!

Rainbow Power to the People of the Future!

Support the People's Programs!

-Central Committee, Rainbow People's Party

February 15, 1972-Year of Unity