By Asanti M.

To recount the history of the human struggle against hunger is to see a true virtue birthed from necessity in its most basic form. From time immemorial cooperation precluded death; community cemented life; and collaboration rose as the principal weapon against hunger. To stave off the constant assault on our mortality, collective structures arose from collective needs. Both calculated and spontaneous efforts set in motion the systematic destruction of our innate enemy and laid the foundation for a solidarity rooted in a visceral understanding of the human condition. Rather than eliminate hunger, contemporary modes of societal organization produce social structures that justify material dispossession. Collaboration has been abandoned for competition, and hunger is given space to thrive beyond the immediate consequences of climate or natural disasters. The sympathy that surrounds the suffering fades into a background colored with the constant tragedies that make up the white noise of modern life. 

Here in the States, there are countless organizations that endeavor to feed the hungry, yet every day a child starves. The tireless efforts of the charitable grant little solace to a mother whose labor can’t support her child nor to a father whose determinations fall short of supplying even the bare necessities. This struggle isn’t unique to the innocent but oppresses the “blameworthy” all the same. People deemed guilty by our systems are forced to navigate a world entirely unsympathetic to their plight. Despite the commonality of their condition, we see the suffering separated into two distinct categories: on one hand we have the fetishization of the hungry that abstracts their social position to maintain the image of an idealized victim; while on the other, we witness their unabated condemnation as inept failures or criminals on the margins of society. Each rendition subtracts from their humanity and masks the innately human battle against hunger. The “innocent” are allotted systematically constrained charity while the others are left to face an unforgiving material and social degradation. 

It’s not difficult to understand the sympathy that stirs the charitable. Their imagination brings the extremity of the idealized victim to the forefront of their mind: the emaciated frames, the protruding ribs, the sunken cheeks. They aptly discern what an all-consuming force the fiend we call Hunger can be, and, with heart in hand, they motion to alleviate the suffering of its victims. Their sympathy materializes in both simple and elaborate structures of food distribution, supplementing the diets of millions and temporarily subduing the otherwise relentless pains of starvation. The admirable solution posited by the sympathetic addresses the immediate needs of the hungry but does so under the unabated pretense of a deeply entrenched meritocratic framework that constricts its application. As the hungry toil, the meritocratic ethic that asserts: an individual deserves neither reward nor punishment from factors beyond their control, casts a moral fog over our deeply disturbing distribution of wealth. Hunger, death, and destitution become accepted as viable individual outcomes, rather than deeply opposed as communal ails. The elimination of hunger ceases to be one of the fundamental cornerstones of organized society and gives way to the social inversion that elevates the accumulation of individual wealth above collective humanity. 

The meritocratic ideal operates as an ostensibly unbiased sorting mechanism leaving the supposed listless to languish while the prudent rise to pinnacle of their aspirations. In our case, the ideal that exists in the national consciousness never escapes the imagination; all manner of happenstance, prejudice, or generic biases that color the human psyche render our “meritocracy” nominally absurd and functionally inept. Nevertheless, the mockery goes to serve as a retroactive justification for the languid position of the hungry, consequently molding the contours of the discussions surrounding their humanity. Conversations and solutions alike are fixed on optimizing the performance of the poor, while utterly disregarding the simple fact that our nation decorates landfills with several billions of pounds of wasted food every month. Wealthy institutions harp on charity, the unidirectional and placid rendition of mutual aid, but rarely engage in the opposition required to dismantle the sorting system itself. Our make-believe meritocracy shrouds the public imagination and replaces any concept of common humanity with fictitious barriers used to justify the vast disparities inherent to our current system. Any talk of universal dignity by the charitable is reduced to platitudinal posturing when the systems that place profit over the abolition of hunger go unquestioned.

The moral logic that permeates our nominally meritocratic society seamlessly accomplishes the impossible task of nullifying history and rendering structural social context irrelevant. The mirage of potential upward social mobility acts as the comforting illusion that instills hope against the foreboding backdrop of uncertainty. Blind individual perseverance is brutely applied as the universal answer to all societal ails and erodes the need for any deeper use of contextual evaluation. Wealth becomes proof of productivity and productivity rises to the status of virtue. Conversely, any outward semblance of economic strife, if not refuted as transient, becomes evidence of personal failure. The excess of the wealthy in the face of poverty doesn’t spur moral condemnation because meritocratically the excess is evidence of the assumed judicious character of the well-off. The impoverished, on the other hand, can bear no such virtue, evidenced by their very condition. There’s no need to understand the complex sociopolitical realities that produce poverty and hunger, because hunger itself ceases to be a collective social issue framed by laws, polices, history and the like. But rather reduces to the sole burden of the individual, in which the failure to provide or produce equates to the moral failure ascribed to poverty.

The moral judgment befalling the impoverished is only allowed redemption through the accumulation of status and wealth in the free market. By extension, the public’s measure of our own dignity degrades into a measure of our market value disregarding any innate human essence or even our societal contributions. Arbitrations of the market, buffered by charity, define the dynamic in which hunger is justified while the rules created by the free market masquerade as the only path forward, cementing isolation and competition as a seemingly natural default. The imposition of this isolating ethos shreds the collective call to abolish hunger into millions of fragmented families struggling to toil their way through an inherently dehumanizing system. Any motion towards solidarity becomes a tortured struggle that opposes the fundamental assumptions that form the bedrock of a fractured society. In a nation where the market determines humanity and a feigned meritocracy casts a veil over its manufactured borders between our brothers and sisters, the claim that “not a soul should starve if there is enough food to be had” seems the crazed cry of a radical.

The post To Feed the Hungry: The Merit of Charity first appeared on Red Fault.

Jeffries Speaker fight drags on, Florida subpoenas DSA, Palestinian-American challenges Fetterman’s Senate seat, Fox can’t quit Hasan Piker, early 2028 AOC buzz, and more in this edition of “Red All Over,” Democratic Left’s weekly news roundup.

The post DSA Subpoenaed, Jeffries Speaker Fight Heats Up, AOC 2028 Buzz appeared first on Democratic Left.

Socialists come together in a very “red” area to challenge a lobbyist-dominated local government.

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Welcome back to The Local, a publication of NYC-DSA Labor Working Group reporting every two weeks. Send any tips, corrections, and other feedback to thenyclocal@substack.com. In this issue, Mayor Mamdani might be trying to get a progressive union leader to run in 2028, a Cornell study finds that private equity was able to enter and consolidate the home health care industry in New York state due to weak regulation, which also dialectically left it susceptible to one big unionization push by 1199SEIU, and the NYC Ferry unionization drive with TWU propels forward (please drop us a tip with more ferry puns in case this continues, as we are starting to run out).

Photo credit: Alexandra Chan at Marcela’s canvass 10/24.

Organizing

• Workers at shelter and supportive housing nonprofit Lantern Community Services are organizing with AFSCME DC37 and demanding voluntary recognition.

• Editorial employees at Scientific American voted 20-1 to join the Writers Guild of America East.

• Production assistants at CBS Studios working on the show “Elsbeth” voted 27-0 to join LIUNA Local 724.

• A unit of postdoc associates and senior postdoc associates at the technically private Research Foundation for the State University of New York located at Stony Brook University voted 92-1 to join the Communications Workers of America.

• Workers at Adapt Community Network are organizing with the UFT Local 2.

• The unit of workers at JFK contractors Unifi Aviation we reported on in the last issue filed another representation petition to organize with the TWU.

• The unionization drive at NYC Ferry continues as a unit of deckhands and senior deckhands organizes with the TWU.

• Two units of workers at City Squash in the Bronx are organizing as the City Squash Staff Union.

• Workers at the NYU Langone Sunset Terrace FHC are organizing with 1199SEIU.

• Workers at LaGuardia Airport contractor Oxford Airport Technical Services are organizing with the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 30.

Bargaining & Action

• The New York Live Arts Workers Union voted to authorize a strike.

• The Association of Legislative Employees held a lunchtime picket for Legislative division bargaining.

• Brooklyn nurse and union leader Sarah Dowd, who was suspended without pay by H+H management for holding organizing meetings with nurses on her day off, has been reinstated with full back pay.

City Hall

• A Public Employment Relations Board judge sided with the UFT and found that the city’s Department of Education illegally hired three non-union paraprofessionals at a Bronx elementary school in 2023. [The Chief Leader]

Albany

• The MTA unilaterally cancelled a benefit under which workers who had used more than 50 percent of their sick days could cash them out at retirement in a lump sum payment, leaving the benefit only for workers who had used less than half of their sick days. Workers argued that the unilateral move will, if anything, worsen absenteeism because, past a certain point, it no longer becomes worth it for workers to save their sick days. [The Chief Leader]

• Two studies released this year by the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations found that the state’s weak regulatory landscape for home health care allowed private equity to infiltrate the sector, especially when the private equity-backed Public Partnerships LLC was given the contract to administer over half the state’s home health care services. But ironically, the same consolidation has made it possible for 1199SEIU to unionize the 200,000-member workforce in one swoop. [The Chief Leader]

Miscellaneous

• Mayor Mamdani has been meeting with progressive union leaders like Jimmy Williams Jr. (IUPAT), Sara Nelson (AFA-CWA), and Shawn Fain (UAW) to potentially recruit a presidential candidate for 2028. [Axios]

• The Democratic wave of election victories last Tuesday may, in the near term, pave the way for state and local legislative reforms that benefit workers. [On Labor]

Jobs

• Fundraising Organizer – Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) (Salary: $73,000 – $86,000)

• Organizer – Local 32BJ SEIU (Salary: $67,517.34)

• State Policy Director – AFSCME DC37 (Salary: $90,000 – $110,000)

A complete list of local union jobs can be found at unionjobs.com, and here is the complete list of New York City’s civil service exams. Additionally, if you’re interested in taking a job in a strategic industry and want to be connected through the Labor Working Group, check out this form here.

The Thorn is published weekly by the Electoral Working Group of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America. Join the Electoral Working Group!

Local News

• Since last week’s midterms, there has been widespread public outcry against the feckless Democratic leadership of Hakeem Jefferies and Chuck Schumer, with calls for them to make way for a more progressive/offensive leader.

  • A Change.org petition has circulated, calling for Hakeem Jefferies to step down as prospective House Speaker for the incoming 120th Congress. It currently sits at over one million signatures.

  • A likewise petition exists for Chuck Schumer to step down as prospective Senate Majority Leader, though it only boasts approx. one hundred thousand signatures.

  • This outcry has also spread to Senate electeds and incumbents, including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Annie Andrews of South Carolina, Abdul El-Sayed and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Adam Hamilton of Kansas, Troy Jackson of Maine, Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota, and Julianna Stratton of Illinois. Despite the backlash, however, Schumer remains intent with maintaining his role as majority leader.

• According to New York City Criminal Summons, a recently published data analysis reveals that the NYPD names East New York and the South Bronx as neighborhoods most liable for low-level criminal summons, such as loitering, panhandling, and loitering.

• Attorney General Letitia James won a lawsuit against Nassau County Executive & Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman over his countywide ban on transgender people in sports. This lawsuit was filed in July 2024 after the ban was passed, and the verdict comes one day after Blakeman’s loss in the gubernatorial race.

• In the aftermath of Cornell University’s controversial revelation alleging a gang rape incident involving seven fraternity students, the school’s faculty senate votes “no-confidence” in its leadership.

• Governor Hochul signed S9051B, a law that calls on state regulation and protection against “companion bots” that are engaged with by minors.

Election News

• New York Governor Kathy Hochul secured her reelection bid by a twenty-point margin over Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman. This includes notable flips from Rockland, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties, who previously voted for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin in 2022.

• Mamdani-backed DSA candidates Claire Valdez and Daraliza Avila Chevalier won their House races in the 7th and 13th congressional districts, respectively.

• In New York’s 17th congressional district, Democratic candidate Cait Conley defeats Republican incumbent Mike Lawler.

• New York City voters approved all five ballot proposals to overhaul and streamline changes within the city government. The proposals were in regard to:

  • Question 1: Streamlining the approval process for private usage of public spaces.

  • Question 2: Reducing paperwork for businesses and nonprofits seeking city contracts.

  • Question 3: Changes to street sweeping projects combined with reforms to city-owned and government properties.

  • Question 4: Simplify construction processes by establishing a centralized system for applicants to navigate approvals across city agencies.

  • Question 5: Addressing how much money New York City should set aside for future emergencies.

In a period of hyperpolitics defined by intense civil strife that produces a thin layer of institution-building, Zohran Mamdani’s rise shows similar limits. The left must now meet immediate political demands of governance through organizations that have never held such power.

The post A Hyperpolitical Mayorality appeared first on Democratic Left.