Turn on the news, and you’ll find pundits and politicians claiming migrants crossing into the United States have created a crisis at the border. The motivations and context for migration are omitted, and the proposed (bipartisan) solution is always the same: to “secure” the border. Despite its opposition to Donald Trump, the Democratic Party, in its perennial attempts at electoral triangulation, its loyalty to corporate power, and its infatuation with the national security state, has dropped any pretense of opposing fascistic border militarization. They not only refuse to roll back Trump’s border policies, but recently doubled down on those policies by backing the Senate’s “Border Act of 2024.” The bill, marketed as a compromise with the GOP, included:

• $7.6 billion of extra “emergency funding” for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
• Another $7 billion in “emergency funding” for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), hundreds of millions of which would go to hiring more Border Patrol agents
• Funding for 50,000 immigrant detention beds
• Requiring asylum seekers to show greater proof to seek refuge, and giving asylum officers more discretion to close cases before they reach court
• Granting the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the power to shut down the border if crossings average more than 4,000/day for a week
• Implementation of a “border emergency authority” which would automatically shut down the border if crossings reached 5,000/day on average or 8,500 in a single day 

Make no mistake; these measures are a complete capitulation to xenophobia and the Republican Party. Despite their claims of resistance to Trumpism, this bill (which ultimately failed to pass into law due to Trump’s personal opposition) publicly announced the Democratic Party’s explicit collaboration with the far-right’s fascistic border agenda. 

Both parties accept as fact that immigration is a national-security issue, but immigration and the border have nothing to do with security and everything to do with exploitation, dispossession, and imperialism. The expansion of the national-security state at the border threatens the rights and livelihoods of the working class in every country, including the United States. It’s important for every DSA member to understand that the social forces influencing migration and the methods of control migrants are subjected to are driven by the primary enemies of the workers’ movement: capitalism, imperialism, and state power. 

People do not uproot their lives and undergo a long, dangerous, journey to a foreign land simply because they feel like it. Migrants are displaced through state-violence, political instability, economic crisis, and climate change, all caused or exacerbated by the US government and corporations. The border regime is a reaction to a process set in motion by the same politicians and businessmen responsible for the dispossession, political chaos, and economic woes causing migration in the first place. 

“Shutting down,” “closing,” or “securing” the border is popular political rhetoric, but every effort toward this goal fails. Each new piece of the border regime increases the number of dead without decreasing border crossings. There is a simple explanation for this: decreasing crossings is ancillary to the border’s primary function of increasing the exploitability of migrants through surveilling, categorizing, imprisoning, deporting, injuring, and killing them. The southern border acts less like a wall and more like a zone of exception, wherein human rights are erased. Those passing through the border are sorted into different categories and emerge stamped as “guest worker,” “asylum seeker,” or “illegal.” This social division of hyper-exploitable workers is a danger to workers everywhere.

Karl Marx himself wrote about the effects of dividing the working class this way. Describing 19th century Irish workers in England, he wrote, “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation, and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.” 

Then, as now, competition between laborers weakens working class power. The solution to capitalists undercutting domestic wages by paying immigrant workers less (i.e. that old nativist rallying cry “they took our jobs!”) is to organize all workers, domestic and foreign, to end their competition with one another and instead fight the capitalist class together. Workers seduced by nativist sentiment only strengthen the power capital holds over the entire class. For Marx, this situation is so detrimental he called it “the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization.”  Modern US politicians continue this English tradition by weaponizing the border against labor, keeping profits high for the capitalist class while advancing their individual political careers through crass xenophobia. 

The border regime, in addition to dividing the working class, also manages the consequences of imperialist intervention and ongoing climate catastrophe, while lining the pockets of arms manufacturers, construction contractors, tech companies, prison operators, and more. The United States is constructing a “border-industrial-complex,”and like the military-industrial complex, this necessitates the expansion of state power, which, if the history of the Cold War and the War on Terror are any indication, will not remain within its initial parameters. Migrants are the latest profitable scapegoat for expanding state power over everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike. 

DHS and its constituent departments, like CBP and ICE, in partnership with local law enforcement and private companies, form a massive web of indiscriminate surveillance across the United States. Private companies are selling aggregations of personal data directly to law enforcement agencies, while predictive data analytics, facial recognition software, and other biometric systems are continually being developed for purposes of “border security.” This technology is used to funnel migrants into an archipelago of incarceration, often operated by private, for-profit companies paid by the government for each detainee they’ve imprisoned. The border is a lucrative business, and it’s being exported abroad. 

Every year since 2008 the United States has provided Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador with funding and a set of priorities which include remedying “border security deficiencies.” US agencies like ICE, CBP, and DEA, play an important role in supporting and training border patrol units in countries aligned with the United States. CBP has twenty-one attaché offices and ICE has forty-eight offices around the world. In this way, the US southern border is part of a larger border system radiating outward from the United States to make the hemisphere safe for capital-accumulation and to intercept people fleeing north from the consequences of that accumulation.

While the border cannot be fully abolished while capitalism remains, it is difficult to imagine the end of capitalism without a concerted and sustained attack on the border regime and the entirety of the state’s repressive apparatus. Border regimes are deeply intertwined with global capitalism, state power, and ecological catastrophe. Simply ending immigration controls while keeping everything else intact is not viable. There is no reason to believe the border regime will end while it remains a key piece in managing capitalism at home and abroad. 

We cannot dismantle the two separately. One follows the other. There is no future in which US Congress votes to, and then carries out, the breaking of lucrative contracts with construction, surveillance, prison, and weapons manufacturers, while abolishing DHS, freeing everyone from detention centers, ending deportations, granting amnesty for all, demolishing the border wall, and implements a drastic reduction of the visa bureaucracy. The state does not relinquish power that way, and capital will not abide an interruption to its accumulation. Neither will it dismantle a mechanism, such as the border, that is so useful in combating working-class unity. There is no single policy that will undo the border regime, just as there is no single policy that will end capitalism. 

So what should the relationship between DSA and migrant workers be? Solidarity. We should not arrive at this struggle offering the paternalistic humanitarianism of NGOs and nonprofits, which often ignore root causes. This humanitarianism distills people into saviors and victims while comfortably existing within the global structures and institutions of capitalism. Solidarity, on the other hand, does not conceptualize people as saviors and victims but as equals working together, through disagreements and contradictions, to actively fight against border regimes. Solidarity is participatory not technocratic, equitable not paternalistic, and universalist in that it brings people of various identities together to fight a common enemy. Solidarity is the headwater from which socialist politics flow. It is, essentially, a duty. A duty to organize ourselves alongside migrants locally, nationally, and internationally. A duty to fight together for an end to the oligarchic world system that forces people from their homes and condemns them for it. Without this solidarity, we can’t build socialism. 

The labor movement of a single country, no matter how well organized, is useless if it views foreign workers as competitors and enemies. The only way forward is through international solidarity and coordination. If socialists lose sight of this fundamental principle, then there is no hope for socialism, or in the words of Eugene Debs, “If the principles of socialism have not international application and if the socialist movement is not an international movement, then its whole philosophy is false and the movement has no reason for existence.”

The post Fighting the Security State at the Southern Border appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

On this day in 1970, four Kent State students were murdered while protesting Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnamese war into Cambodia. This massacre further inflamed the anti-war protests on campuses across the nation which saw 4 million students strike for peace.

Today, we see history repeat itself with students occupying their campuses with the demand to cut funding to Israel’s apartheid regime as it slaughters ten of thousands and dislocates millions.

Today, we see that the leadership of the state and country has learned nothing as it continues to violently crush student protests while increasing funding for weapons of war being turned on the people of Gaza.

Today, we see Joe Biden has learned nothing from this experience as he smears student protestors and inflames violence against them by calling for order and obedience on college campuses

We stand with the student movement and demand an end to this genocide. We must continue fighting until the Palestinian people are free, just as the students of the 70s pushed on until Nixon was left with no choice but to sue for peace.

The post From Vietnam to Palestine: The Power of Student Solidarity appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (Repeater Books, 2024) comes at a much needed time. The world is now in an era of unprecedented man-made climate change. Meanwhile, socialism is finding a renewed strength in international politics, and confronting critical questions of strategy in coalescing its power. Chaudhary presents both the gravity of the moment, and a path forward.

Evidenced by record-breaking temperatures and climate-driven natural disasters, the fact of climate change is becoming increasingly undeniable. Although belief in climate change has often been the barometer for environmental political progress, this mere “acknowledgement” is not enough, Chaudhary argues. Seeking to take advantage of the situation, “right-wing climate realists” are fully aware of the coming catastrophe, but stand to gain from the concentration, preservation, and enhancement of their existing political and economic power.

“We’re not in this together,” says Chaudhary. Both reinforcing and reforming existing class structures, climate change is ultimately “about power.” Its winners and losers shape the global bourgeoisie and proletariat. For the bourgeoisie, climate security presents an investment opportunity as technologies of migrant detention, surveillance, and expulsion develop to deal with the regime’s growing underclass. They are given privileged access to the increasingly privatized emergency responses, insurance, and funding necessary to survive climate change. A matrix of private islands and penthouses from which they can hop by private jet or helicopter further insulates these “right-wing climate realists” from the rising waters.

Chaudhary conceptualizes a new international proletariat connected through nodes along a global “extractive circuit.” These peoples are designated as expendable, disposable. “At every node in the circuit there are two simultaneous and related phenomena: value extraction and nodal exhaustion.” Life today is an ever expanding cycle of intensified work and increasing consumption. Drawing on Fanon, whose colonized man “perceives life . . . as a permanent struggle against omni present death,” colonization has returned to the mainland under climate change regimes and is replicating in an ever-present race to not be among the expendable. 

Against this intensification, there is a cultural celebration of “resilience.” Putting in the extra hours, doing the hard work, suppressing stress, and self-reproducing to return to work the next day, is sold as the way to get ahead. But resilience is a management strategy and apology for the status quo, says Chaudhary. “Attachment to the ideal of resilience only maintains a world which demands it.” Instead of getting ahead, workers are on a stationary treadmill to keep producing profit for capital. What the situation demands is “not resilience but rebellion.” 

These “Exhausted of the earth” allow us to think about the outlines of a new revolutionary class outside of the traditional, and out-of-date, vulgar-Marxist depiction of Victorian factory workers. The revolutionary potential of the Exhausted exists in “affective aspects of class antagonism” (Lauren Berlant), or “infrastructures of feeling” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore). Resentment at our exhaustion will prod us into action, at first individually, then as collective sentiment. À la Fanon, Chaudhary predicts spontaneous outbreaks from global exhaustion. Then, this contagious stress will ripple through the nodes of extraction, creating a global protest movement. It is the role of socialists to organize and shape this energy into a coherent program. 

This path for green revolution is suggested in favor of what Chaudhary identifies as the “climate Lysenkoism” of the left. This is “a broad range of self-ascribed ‘left’ and ‘Marxist’ perspectives that subordinate both natural and historical realities to a quasi-mystical technophilia and an ahistoric romance of the mid-twentieth century Northern nationalist welfare state.” Salvation, for these theorists, depends on climate technology “that is always just about to break through.” But as Chaudhary details, the limits of these technologies do not provide any realistic expectation they can be scaled to divert from the worst of climate catastrophe. In the meantime, it remains business as usual; a preservation of the status quo.

Part of the value of Chaudhary’s work comes from its openness to a degree of utopianism that shows what “might” be. This provides the image of a positive program to fight for, rather than a negative program of climate doomerism. The project of left-wing climate realism, says Chaudhary, is “to carve out a sustainable global human ecological niche.” To do this, we must present mass climate adaptation and mitigation as something better. This is in opposition to strains of degrowth that offer a diminished standard of life—perhaps not a unifying message.

A high standard of living does not have to rely on the same disposable consumption that is currently valued. Chaudhary’s utopia borrows from ancient climate technologies to demonstrate lower-energy options for comfort. Architectural cooling techniques that have been in existence for thousands of years serve as a preferential alternative to noisy and power-hungry air conditioners. Although Chaudhary presents an attractive glimpse of his utopia, he avoids an overly detailed description of the transformed world. In this way, Chaudhary steers clear of the “utopian socialism” whose blueprints are disconnected from the material conditions of society and wherein the “historically created conditions of emancipation” are to yield to their “fantastic ones,” as decried by Marx and Engles in The Communist Manifesto. 

But this lack of detail also makes it hard to grasp concrete steps to escape our current situation. This is one area where Chaudhary leaves the reader wanting more. Although Chaudhary’s “minor paradise of a sustainable niche,” (captured in projects like the “Farming Kindergarten” in Đồng Nai, Vietnam), is evocative, it is difficult to get the sense of how these projects will scale. This solution is also a technological one, although perhaps employed under differing conditions than those of the growth-oriented “climate Lysenkoists” with whom he disagrees. 

Readers are also devoid of a roadmap to turn feelings of exhaustion into a socialist project. Indeed, Chaudhary admits that “for many emerging and vital constituencies of the Exhausted . . . the project of full socialism . . . is not necessarily desirable and has considerably less mass purchase than exhaustion.” While the exhaustion of our epoch leads to spontaneous action, one can see problems with turning this into directed action. Such horizontal feelings of outrage, as described by Vincent Bevins in Why We Burn, do not necessarily formulate into a coherent political project. One also wonders if it is not too much to hope for our collective emergence from depoliticized exhaustion. Medicalized responses to exhaustion (amphetamines, antidepressants, and sedatives), noted by Chaudhary, suggest instead the possible coming of a “Brave New World” dystopia. But hope we must. 

A final area where I take exception to Chaudhary is his assertion that “the ‘more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society’ is already here; it has been for a while; we’re just behind the times.” Although this model “doesn’t mean pitched mass battles,” it suggests an eruption of violence beyond the always-latent “class war” that plays out through both the slow violence of exploitation and flashes of brutal repression. “Civil war” is not an appropriate description of our present moment, and may be permissive of a political violence that extends beyond the bounds of what is prudent. Spontaneity is not always to be celebrated, and an overplaying of hands could lead to ruthless disruption before the army is ready to go into the field. 

Although some of the book is theoretically dense, it offers enough explanation that casual readers will still find something to gain. The importance of Chaudhary’s project is underscored by the serious threat of climate change to all life on the planet; a point he clearly illustrates. World leaders consistently overshoot their professed climate goals, and even “committed warming”—the future effects of carbon already in the atmosphere—haunts us like Marx’s “dead labor.” For socialist organizers, the book sets the task of finding ways to speak to these “Exhausted,” and to direct their spontaneous actions toward constructive ends. To quote Fanon, “things must be explained to them; the people must see where they are going, and how they are to get there.” Chaudhary’s The Exhausted of the Earth provides us a valuable explanation. ★

The post Review: The Exhausted of the Earth first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

[[{“value”:”

By Vanessa Bartlett

On Wednesday, an estimated 2000 people participated in a May Day rally with the Boston University Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) to demand that the university provide serious responses to their contract proposals. But in a bargaining session the following day, the university continued to stall, despite some progress in the previous session.

Rally participants begin marching from Marsh Plaza towards Bay State Road

As the spring semester winds down, the university has been flailing to make up for the absence of grad students in classrooms. In an email sent to undergraduates on April 29, interim Provost Kenneth Lutchen assured students that the school remains “focused on supporting students affected by the strike.”

Joe Guidry, a third-year PhD student in the Astronomy department and member of BUGWU’s bargaining committee, took issue with the idea that keeping grad workers out of the classroom is in the best interest of undergraduate students. 

“It’s clear that this university is run by and for the admins and the donors. There is no sense of faculty governance, there’s certainly no sense of democratic agency for the grad workers, or even the undergrads for that matter,” Guidry said. 21,000 undergrads enrolled at BU have had their education disrupted by the strike this semester, and the university is unwilling to meet even basic demands of the graduate workers, leaving no room for the possibility of the union returning to work in their critical capacities as researchers and teachers. 

At the May Day rally, speakers from BUGWU made it clear that they believe their fight is an existential one, which goes beyond pay and benefits, and cuts to the heart of the type of institution BU could be.

“Our strike is working because it is revealing that BU is run by admins like a real estate company that owns a diploma mill, churning out expensive degrees by any means necessary,” Jaira Koh, a BUGWU member, said to the crowd at Marsh Plaza. 

Koh continued, “Every single experience that we’ve had at BU of an actual educational and research institution is the result of brave, caring people outright defying the vision of the administration, and instead carving out small pockets of what the university could be. I’m talking about us. Grads, undergrads, staff and faculty. We are the only reason that this place still feels like it might be worth fighting for.”

This graph from the union shows the stark difference in bargaining participation between BUGWU and the university. 

Guidry explained, “It’s about building a better BU. It’s about making this our university, run by us and for us, run for the people of this university in education, over profit and prestige.”

In his email to undergraduate students, interim provost Freeman boasted about a recent bargaining session where the University and BUGWU reached tentative agreements on six articles. However, Guidry said that in their most recent bargaining session, the university came to the table unprepared and unwilling to TA any more proposals. 

“I believe this is a calculated response,” Guidry confided. “The university does not want to show signs of panic. After the incredible show of force that grad workers, undergrads, faculty and staff demonstrated at our May Day Rally yesterday, I think the university is putting on a brave face and trying to pretend that they are not worried about the looming disruption that will happen over the final grading period.”

“I think it’s very clear our strike is working. And I think it’s manifest in how management is behaving. Both at the bargaining table and their correspondence,” said Guidry.

“On strike: until we WIN!” and “BU works: because WE DO” were some of the chants that rang out across campus on May Day.

In his email to undergraduates, Lutchen attempted to thread a narrative of division between undergraduates whose educational experience was interrupted by grad strikes, and BU faculty who were put under pressure to find alternative ways of teaching without aid of graduate students.

“We want to address head-on BUGWU’s allegations that we are not providing an appropriate and robust educational experience to our students during this time. In the early period of the strike, many faculty and staff went above and beyond to pivot in record time to provide a quality educational experience to the students who were affected by BUGWU’s job action,” Lutchen wrote. 

Apart from calling a five-week-long strike a “job action,” terminology so vague and sanitized as to be completely misleading, and referring to BUGWU’s pointed and justified criticisms of the university’s bargaining strategy as “misinformation” in other parts of the email, Lutchen’s implication of the unpopularity of BUGWU’s position was severely undercut by the massive outpouring of support received by graduate workers at Wednesday’s rally.

Dhruv Kapadia, BU’s undergraduate student body president, spoke at the rally about the importance of solidarity across the BU community. “Undergraduates, graduate students, staff, faculty and alumni are all connected by one shared BU identity,” said Kapadia. “Without solidarity, we are nothing.” 

A statue of BU’s mascot, Rhett the Boston Terrier, watched as the crowd marched past towards One Silber Way

BUGWU and Palestine

The BUGWU strike is happening concurrently with a wave of repression of student expression at universities across the country and in Boston, where over 200 students and community members have been arrested at university encampments. Students who speak up for the rights of Palestinians who have been subject to displacement and genocide at the hands of the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation, are in turn facing increasing police repression and violence, sanctioned by their own universities. 

These students peacefully demand that their universities disclose their financial ties to the Israeli apartheid government and divest from them, and are met with police in riot gear. In much the same way, unions within higher education institutions find themselves on the front lines of a class struggle, between the ruling elites who govern universities and the working-class people responsible for the day-to-day operations of those schools. 

Guidry added, “Our struggle for control over this university can be seen across the country… our struggles as grad workers are not equal to the Palestinians who await imminent invasion and Rafah and elsewhere in the occupied Gaza Strip, but they clearly are interconnected. And that is why we put out our statement of solidarity [with Palestine].”

Ruofei, an undergraduate in the Anthropology department at BU and longtime leader in BU’s Students for Justice in Palestine group, spoke at the rally as well. “Our struggle is rooted in Gaza, where the Zionist entity is still massacring families and starving a besieged population.”

“The experience of suppression of our voices and disregard of our rights to free speech is a struggle that we share with the graduate workers of BU. Graduate workers have been silenced and intimidated by the administration at BU,” said Ruofei.

BUGWU’s May Day rally was confirmation that the union is dedicated to the long-term struggle, and determined to win no matter how long it takes. According to the union, 93% of BUGWU members are rent-burdened. Many utilize food pantries and other services just to be able to eat. Parents are left to figure out for themselves how to pay for childcare. 

Confronted with the seriousness of these concerns, BU has tried to project an image of strength and disinterest for months. However, undergraduates and faculty continue to vocally support graduate workers through their contract fight. That unwavering community support was on display Wednesday, when five weeks into their strike, BUGWU held their biggest rally yet. 

“This is really a tug of war. It is a class struggle. And we’re seeing that with our strike, we are tugging harder than them. Our strike is working. We are strong. They are the ones who can make this tug of war end sooner. We are resolved around our demands, and we have the power to win them,” said Guidry.

Grads march past a banner on Bay State Road which reads, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” “}]] 

By Vanessa Bartlett

On Wednesday, an estimated 2000 people participated in a May Day rally with the Boston University Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) to demand that the university provide serious responses to their contract proposals. But in a bargaining session the following day, the university continued to stall, despite some progress in the previous session.

As the spring semester winds down, the university has been flailing to make up for the absence of grad students in classrooms. In an email sent to undergraduates on April 29, interim Provost Kenneth Lutchen assured students that the school remains “focused on supporting students affected by the strike.”

Joe Guidry, a third-year PhD student in the Astronomy department and member of BUGWU’s bargaining committee, took issue with the idea that keeping grad workers out of the classroom is in the best interest of undergraduate students. 

“It’s clear that this university is run by and for the admins and the donors. There is no sense of faculty governance, there’s certainly no sense of democratic agency for the grad workers, or even the undergrads for that matter,” Guidry said. 21,000 undergrads enrolled at BU have had their education disrupted by the strike this semester, and the university is unwilling to meet even basic demands of the graduate workers, leaving no room for the possibility of the union returning to work in their critical capacities as researchers and teachers. 

At the May Day rally, speakers from BUGWU made it clear that they believe their fight is an existential one, which goes beyond pay and benefits, and cuts to the heart of the type of institution BU could be.

“Our strike is working because it is revealing that BU is run by admins like a real estate company that owns a diploma mill, churning out expensive degrees by any means necessary,” Jaira Koh, a BUGWU member, said to the crowd at Marsh Plaza. 

Koh continued, “Every single experience that we’ve had at BU of an actual educational and research institution is the result of brave, caring people outright defying the vision of the administration, and instead carving out small pockets of what the university could be. I’m talking about us. Grads, undergrads, staff and faculty. We are the only reason that this place still feels like it might be worth fighting for.”

Guidry explained, “It’s about building a better BU. It’s about making this our university, run by us and for us, run for the people of this university in education, over profit and prestige.”

In his email to undergraduate students, interim provost Freeman boasted about a recent bargaining session where the University and BUGWU reached tentative agreements on six articles. However, Guidry said that in their most recent bargaining session, the university came to the table unprepared and unwilling to TA any more proposals. 

“I believe this is a calculated response,” Guidry confided. “The university does not want to show signs of panic. After the incredible show of force that grad workers, undergrads, faculty and staff demonstrated at our May Day Rally yesterday, I think the university is putting on a brave face and trying to pretend that they are not worried about the looming disruption that will happen over the final grading period.”

“I think it’s very clear our strike is working. And I think it’s manifest in how management is behaving. Both at the bargaining table and their correspondence,” said Guidry.

In his email to undergraduates, Lutchen attempted to thread a narrative of division between undergraduates whose educational experience was interrupted by grad strikes, and BU faculty who were put under pressure to find alternative ways of teaching without aid of graduate students.

“We want to address head-on BUGWU’s allegations that we are not providing an appropriate and robust educational experience to our students during this time. In the early period of the strike, many faculty and staff went above and beyond to pivot in record time to provide a quality educational experience to the students who were affected by BUGWU’s job action,” Lutchen wrote. 

Apart from calling a five-week-long strike a “job action,” terminology so vague and sanitized as to be completely misleading, and referring to BUGWU’s pointed and justified criticisms of the university’s bargaining strategy as “misinformation” in other parts of the email, Lutchen’s implication of the unpopularity of BUGWU’s position was severely undercut by the massive outpouring of support received by graduate workers at Wednesday’s rally.

Dhruv Kapadia, BU’s undergraduate student body president, spoke at the rally about the importance of solidarity across the BU community. “Undergraduates, graduate students, staff, faculty and alumni are all connected by one shared BU identity,” said Kapadia. “Without solidarity, we are nothing.” 

BUGWU and Palestine

The BUGWU strike is happening concurrently with a wave of repression of student expression at universities across the country and in Boston, where over 200 students and community members have been arrested at university encampments. Students who speak up for the rights of Palestinians who have been subject to displacement and genocide at the hands of the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation, are in turn facing increasing police repression and violence, sanctioned by their own universities. 

These students peacefully demand that their universities disclose their financial ties to the Israeli apartheid government and divest from them, and are met with police in riot gear. In much the same way, unions within higher education institutions find themselves on the front lines of a class struggle, between the ruling elites who govern universities and the working-class people responsible for the day-to-day operations of those schools. 

Guidry added, “Our struggle for control over this university can be seen across the country… our struggles as grad workers are not equal to the Palestinians who await imminent invasion and Rafah and elsewhere in the occupied Gaza Strip, but they clearly are interconnected. And that is why we put out our statement of solidarity [with Palestine].”

Ruofei, an undergraduate in the Anthropology department at BU and longtime leader in BU’s Students for Justice in Palestine group, spoke at the rally as well. “Our struggle is rooted in Gaza, where the Zionist entity is still massacring families and starving a besieged population.”

“The experience of suppression of our voices and disregard of our rights to free speech is a struggle that we share with the graduate workers of BU. Graduate workers have been silenced and intimidated by the administration at BU,” said Ruofei.

Ready for the long haul

BUGWU’s May Day rally was confirmation that the union is dedicated to the long-term struggle, and determined to win no matter how long it takes. According to the union, 93% of BUGWU members are rent-burdened. Many utilize food pantries and other services just to be able to eat. Parents are left to figure out for themselves how to pay for childcare. 

Confronted with the seriousness of these concerns, BU has tried to project an image of strength and disinterest for months. However, undergraduates and faculty continue to vocally support graduate workers through their contract fight. That unwavering community support was on display Wednesday, when five weeks into their strike, BUGWU held their biggest rally yet. 

“This is really a tug of war. It is a class struggle. And we’re seeing that with our strike, we are tugging harder than them. Our strike is working. We are strong. They are the ones who can make this tug of war end sooner. We are resolved around our demands, and we have the power to win them,” said Guidry.

Preservation of TOPA is more than just a foundational right for the DC's tenants, it is also a vital point of agitation between the rentier capitalist class and workers.

Cleveland DSA condemns the House’s passage of HR 6090, which deploys the IHRA definition of anti-semitism, conflating anti-zionism and anti-semitism, for enforcement of federal antidiscrimination laws on campus. Republicans introduced this legislation in a desperate assault on the youth protests that have erupted across America as a result of American universities’ bizarre, large scale investments in Israel. A hundred and thirty-three Democrats voted for this bill, with Cleveland’s Shontel Brown among the co-sponsors.

Cosponsor Richie Torres claims the bill doesn’t limit criticism of Israel’s policies except when people call for the destruction of Israel. In other words, one can legally favor one Zionist policy over another, but there will be only one lawful opinion on the apartheid regime itself. Legislators are well aware that those who support democratic rights for Palestinians across historic Palestine, regardless of the model proposed, are considered to be calling for Israel’s “destruction”. They know the IHRA holds that describing Zionist colonialism as racist is, by itself, antisemitism. They themselves join in widespread and willful misinterpretation of protest slogans as antisemitic. Why the First Amendment should have an exception carved out for Israel is not clear, but there is no question of how this law will be used on campuses across the United States.

There is a good reason Israel and its allies have, for decades, worked hard to cancel, vilify, and suppress Palestinian speakers and their allies, especially on campus. They know that there is no justification for settler colonialism, massacres, torture, police kidnapping, and general exploitation of Palestinians. Reflecting on the campus protests, Israeli Minister Nir Barkat recently stated that “American public opinion is an existential threat to Israel.” Mr. Barkat’s allies in Congress say it is necessary to ban certain opinions on Israel to prevent their gaining a foothold in the United States. This is a doomed effort, already a substantial minority of Americans, including large portions of America’s Jewish community, are openly expressing anti-zionist views, a situation that was unthinkable even 10 years ago.

Passing anti speech legislation to shield genocide supporters, a supposed anti-discrimination measure from the same party systematically attacking trans youth at school, is an insult to young voters. Under Trump, there is no question that the organizations criminalized today, with Democrat connivance, will be on the front lines against GOP repression. Laws like HR 6090, among countless other bipartisan measures of state-surveillance and repression, will be deployed against us by Trump. We will use our front line role in the battle for democracy to further educate the American public about Israel, whether or not the attorney general or the supreme court consider this lawful.

There is a widespread fear that Biden cannot secure enough young and Arab-American votes to defeat Trump, particularly here in the midwest. Democrats have been trying, hopelessly, to play both sides, to both criticize and supply Netanyahu’s genocide, and it is destroying their party. Should Biden decline to veto the bill, this would represent yet another step towards a second Trump term, a step taken not by students, nor outside agitators, neither by antizionist Jews, nor Arab America, but by the candidate who asks for our vote. It is in this desperate context that the GOP and the large majority of House Democrats are asking Joe Biden and their Senate colleagues to spit on the first and most fundamental right of Americans.

Our congresspeople were among the 91 to vote against the bill. Socialists must do likewise even when they are alone. Elected socialists must maintain a clear and accurate message regarding the occupation of Palestine. We urge our representatives and our sister chapters to comply with the spirit of the 2023 National Convention, which specifically resolved to expect electeds and prospective endorsees to reject the IHRA definition.

DSA chapters nationwide will continue to engage in protected speech on and off campus. We do not ask Congress’ permission for this. We applaud our fellow students, alumni, and community members on campuses across the country, risking their safety and liberty to fight the genocide, most especially right here at Case Western Reserve University. We know that you too do not ask the US government what you can or cannot say. Take heart: history will absolve us, even if the courts do not.

The post Anti-Zionists have a right to speak – Cle DSA Statement Against HR 6090 appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

The below is a response to President Kaler’s email threatening disciplinary and legal action against students for their Gaza solidarity assembly at CWRU

Hello President Kaler et al.,

As a member of the CWRU and the Cleveland Jewish community, I am deeply disturbed by the rhetoric of this email which implies that there is rampant anti-Semitism at the protests and on our campus. Members of my Jewish communities have been standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine long before October 7. It is my duty as a person of the Jewish faith to employ our values of tikun olam (repairing the world) and pikuach nefesh (saving and valuing all lives). This includes but is not limited to being in solidarity with my Palestinian siblings in our community. For the past 7 months, they’ve watched in horror as their family members and loved ones abroad in Gaza face forced displacement, forced starvation, and extreme violence that we are priveleged enough to never be able to fully comprehend.

Our brave students are risking everything to stand up for these Jewish values of repairing the world and saving all lives. As a Jewish person, I am not afraid, I don’t feel unsafe, and I am not intimidated by seeing community members of all faiths (again, including the members of the Jewish community) come together for interfaith prayer, dialogue, study, and wellness activities. In fact, I think what we are witnessing is a beautiful display of students living out our CWRU mission of the “promotion of an inclusive culture of global citizenship.”

To reiterate, I am not threatened by the students singing, practicing yoga, praying, and gathering for meals together. What I am afraid of, however, is the increased surveillance and policing measures we are seeing all across campus. Acts of surveillance only seek to antagonize our students who are peacefully exercising their right to protest our institution’s silence and complicity in the horrors we are witnessing from afar.

President Kaler’s email regarding the student protests, sent on 5/2/2024 to intimidate the camp and slander its participants.
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We urge you to write your own response to the administration’s attacks against student organizers and their supporters:

Provost’s Office: [email protected]
Presidents Office: [email protected]
Office of Student Affairs: [email protected]

The post Letter from a member of Case Western’s Jewish Community appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

by Jean Allen

I remember a conversation I had with Mary Lupien five years ago at a coffee shop. We’d run into each other and were talking about some local Rochester controversy at the time, when another person with us expressed amazement that we even knew anything about what was going on in the city. That week another friend complained about their kids’ experience with the schools, the decay of Rochester’s infrastructure, and the state of downtown, yet expressed astonishment that I had any contempt for the mayor, who they thought was doing a great job.

Our city has a transparency problem. While we have several amazing projects by movement journalists, broadly our news media avoids controversial topics, focusing on journalistic work which advertises this city as a good place to drive to. What that leads to is a shockingly petty and personalistic political space, where politics is often a matter of loyalty or disdain for particular political figures, rather than anything substantial. It also leads to the vast majority of the people in this city not understanding that the issues they face are political issues which they can change. The image we basically get is of a city where nothing happens, or at least nothing that any one person can affect.

Last month, we were all given notice that our water was potentially unsafe to drink after a body had been found in the reservoir. We were given a boil water notice for half a week before we were notified that the body of Abdullahi Muya (a resident who had been missing since February 18th) had actually been in the reservoir for over a month without the knowledge of the city. The boil water notice was retracted and we went back to going about our day.

Now, the whole reason we have a water treatment process is to make sure that an incident like this does not fully contaminate our water supply, and there’s no reason for conspiratorial levels of alarm. But this event should give people pause about the governance of this city.

Generally, I think people accept that they have no clue what happens in the halls of power because they assume those people have our best interests at heart and are doing a good job for it. But when someone has been found dead in the reservoir for a month, the fact that we can only discover key information about this city’s governance via hearsay and rumor is a further slap in the face. The people of Rochester deserve to know what is happening in our city. ★

Editor’s Note – Check out Red Star’s coverage of a previous transparency gap involving our water supply, ‘We Keep Us Safe When the City Fails,’ by Skye K, from February 2023, available at: rocdsa.org/blog/we-keep-us-safe-when-the-city-fails.

The post Transparency & The Reservoir first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Lifelong peace organizer and trade unionist Dennis Serrette has passed away at 83.