The Buffalo Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America congratulates Adam Bojak on his victory in the Democratic primary election for the 149 NY Assembly district, and extends immense gratitude to everyone responsible for making his victory possible. 

So, what next? Why join DSA? For a decade, Buffalo DSA has fielded these specific yet important questions. Last Tuesday, with chapter co-founder Adam Bojak’s primary night victory, we received the resounding affirmation that when we fight, we win! 25,000 doors knocked. Thousands of phone calls. Six figures of fundraising from the average person, the worker, those who share the belief, “a better world is possible.”

What does this win mean? We hold the firm belief that electoralism isn’t “the answer,” no matter how exciting or gratifying it is to win, but rather another step along the way. It’s a catalyzing step, a way to draw people in and organize them, but winning an election is never the end goal. We don’t believe in the mentality that you should “just vote.” To be a serious organizer and Buffalonian interested in a more just and equitable society, controlled democratically by the working class, we must do more. An election result is only as good as the power we can build and the priorities we can win.

In this moment, we step onto a much bigger stage for our chapter and broader movement for working people. Ask yourself: what can I do? Then, let’s do it. Nothing is stopping us but ourselves!

The work is an ongoing struggle, and we need you to achieve our vision. If you’ve ever felt ready to take on the establishment, the time to join the largest socialist project in American history is now.

Thank you to the people of the 149th Assembly District. We continue to fight for you, the people of Buffalo, Erie County, and workers of the world. 

Join DSA today!

This is an opinion piece written collaboratively by the Immigrant Solidarity Working Group and was not voted on at a general membership meeting. Opinion pieces from sub-bodies do not reflect the opinions of all members and are not chapter approved statements.

It is with no stutter and no hesitation that Salt Lake DSA stands with the 15 defendants facing charges for anti-ICE organizing in Minneapolis. Their stance is part of a proud, long-standing tradition of resistance against law enforcement overreach in this country. Faced with the indiscriminate violence of this winter’s ICE/DHS activity in the Twin Cities, these neighbors banded together in an inspiring and powerful model. After these feral agents murdered two and celebrated their own impunity, the regime attempts to contort law and morality to punish their real enemy: our unwillingness to submit.

There is risk in taking a principled stance. It is in that spirit that we also condemn the charges faced by two former court clerks in Logan that allegedly helped individuals evade ICE agents at the courthouse. When faced with an opportunity to perform the moral, righteous act, these clerks took it—at their own personal risk. They acted against a vindictive and thoughtless regime intent on tearing apart families, and for that we salute them.

It is not enough to point out the blatant hypocrisy of the Trump regime, as it is not only painfully obvious, it is expected and routine. They decry the “weaponization” of the law while also rewarding loyalist felons with pardons. The hypocrisy and double-dealing are markers of a system in a permanent tailspin. Trump and his cronies find themselves in the criminal trough of our economic system, resorting to merely demanding submission and collecting bribes. They are rapidly running out of distractions, and soon, the lid will tighten yet further.

As the administration criminalizes dissent in America, we implore all Utahns: do not consider yourself exempt from this assault on your civil liberties. Stand with us, or stand beside us, but at least stand up and be seen in opposition to this continued erosion of freedoms. In this capitalist system, law is merely a weapon in the hands of the powerful, completely divorced from morality and righteousness. As a weapon of the powerful, once you stand crosswise to their goals, the law will be used to hammer you back into place. It is time for us to seize the hammer.

We know we stand firmly on the right side of history, because between solidarity and hate, we will always choose the former.  In time, we will win; the only question is, for how long will we all need to suffer until we can put an end to this madness? How many of us will be caught up in the gears? When the working class has unified to fight this fight together, we will no longer have to wonder. We will have already won.

The post Solidarity is Not a Crime first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

The private jets, limousines, and tanned vacationers coursing through Atlantic Aviation’s exclusive lot mask a grim reality. Every Tuesday and Friday, the private company facilitates the transportation of residents detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in and out of Las Vegas. They sometimes come, and sometimes go, chained at the wrists, waist, and feet, shuffling single file between white caged-windowed buses and unmarked aircraft supplied by major commercial airlines.

Taylor Swift’s $54M Falcon 7X

Canadair Jet ICE plane by @buffysphotography

The members of Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America (LVDSA) demand that Atlantic Aviation terminate contracts with DHS and immediately end its participation in these flights. With support from the Habeas Flight Watch Network, LVDSA’s Abolish ICE Campaign is taking steps to ensure they do. LVDSA is conducting habeas flight watches and hosting a National Day of Protest against Atlantic Aviation on June 27th.

Located at Harry Reid International Airport, Atlantic Aviation reserves its runways and hangars for the luxury jet set. No doubt, the private company enjoyed a boost in positive press when Taylor Swift chose to park her private jet at Atlantic upon breezing into town to celebrate Travis Kelce’s Super Bowl LVII victory. Today, the company promises to whisk World Cup spectators to games in style, offering gourmet in-flight dining and wrap-around concierge services. Unsurprisingly, it does not flaunt its frequent flying of ICE victims among its first-class services.

While Atlantic Aviation caters to celebrities and sports pros to rake in profits, they are also fattening their bottom line on the injustices our neighbors suffer. People are rounded up based on their skin color, language, and clothing, exploited by the city’s shady 287(g) agreement, and targeted by Flock AI mass-surveillance technology. Denied due process, they are deliberately displaced in the expanding network of concentration camps and the routes that connect them. We are taking action for the victims, their families, and the attorneys who are unable to secure their clients’ habeas rights.

A team of flight watchers from LVDSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) meets outside Atlantic’s runways with cameras, documenting the arrival and departure of ICE victims. The goal is to capture footage of the individuals getting on and off buses and planes— their faces, clothing, and shoes—so that their families and lawyers might find them. A Habeas Flight Watch Network volunteer flight dispatcher keeps the team notified of the ETAs for Las Vegas-bound ICE flights, and, just like commercial flights, these schedules are subject to frustrating last-minute changes.

Friday, June 12th, is no exception. At 6:44 am, our Las Vegas flight watch team receives an ETA from the dispatch: today’s flight arrives from Fort Hood via Reno on a Canadair CRJ-200 operated by Air Wisconsin; it’s scheduled to land at 12:22 pm. We set up early in case the plane arrives ahead of schedule, which happens. Stationed outside the Atlantic Aviation fence with cameras and tripods, we learn the flight is delayed until 12:51, then 1:13. It is now over 100 degrees.

Buffy Taylor, a member of PSL, sighs and walks under a tiny tree in the lot’s perimeter for a sliver of shade.  She’d arrived on her bike, a duffel bag containing several ice-cold water bottles and her Canon T7 strapped over her shoulder. “I’ve been tracking and photographing planes for years as a hobby, and I figured I could help people find their family or friends and expose the illegal actions of the government,” she explains. “Put my skills to good use.” By the time the team receives their final status update – ETA 1:21 pm – their phones are overheating, and Taylor’s waters are hot to the touch.

As with other Las Vegas ICE-related activity, the arrival of the ICE plane is quiet and understated. Our team learns it has touched down on Atlantic Aviation’s Runway 19, the same one used to welcome visiting celebrities. Moments later, a dull gray aircraft, serial number N455AW, devoid of any colors or logos except a tiny US flag, rolls toward us before turning slightly to let a taxiing private jet by. We can’t believe our luck– we now have a clear view of the plane’s stairway, the white prison bus, and the stretch of pavement between them.

When its doors open, four men in neon vests spring to action, neatly setting about 20 bright orange bundles in a row on the ground.  “Prison jump suits?” I ask Taylor.

“Nope, their personal belongings.”

Uncertain whether people are held prisoner on the plane, on the bus, or both, and seeing no movement from either, we focus on the four yellow-vested staff bustling about, bounding up and down the airplane stairs. Are they Atlantic ground crew? ICE agents? They eventually form an assembly line between the bus door and the plane’s stairway. Finally, the victims step off the bus, stooped and resigned, shackled at the wrists and feet, a long chain linking them at the waist.

Taylor abandons her tripod and darts around on foot, zooming in on captives, as I dictate a physical description of each man boarding the plane after he is frisked from head to toe. Twenty-two in all, mostly young, 20s and 30s, though one man appears to be old, perhaps in his 70s. Once the last has boarded, a pilot inspects the plane’s exterior as the caged-windowed bus slowly drives off the tarmac. We wonder about the victims, whether they’ve eaten or used the bathroom, and what they must be thinking.

As we spot the white bus exiting Atlantic’s parking lot, Taylor sprints, zigzagging through parked cars, and snaps photos of the bus’s driver and license plate. “It’s astonishing how many people have to be complicit for this to happen,” observes Audrey Hines, a co-steward for LVDSA’s Abolish ICE Campaign.

Not all habeas flight watches are this successful. Some sessions have yielded pictures of the plane or bus—still helpful—but no people. Other times, planes and utility vehicles have arrived unexpectedly, suddenly blocking the view. Organizers leave hot and exhausted, but determined to catch useful images on the next one. “Each new flight watch has the potential to help even one person, help one family be reunited, so it is so worth it,” says Hines.

“Even if we don’t have the best shot, we keep trying— you kind of feel like a spy,” adds 19-year-old Mikey LaFrambois, a lead organizer in UNLV’s Young Democratic Socialists of America.

Hopefully, these ICE flight watches won’t last too long. On Saturday, June 27th, at 6 pm, LVDSA is joining the National Day of Protest against Atlantic Aviation and other airlines abetting ICE activity. We are hosting a protest outside Atlantic Aviation, in a united demand that they cancel their contracts with DHS and the federal government. We stand in solidarity with cities around the country that are speaking up. We salute Dallas, a World Cup host city whose organizers and faith leaders are taking Atlantic Aviation to task for courting wealthy ticket holders while preying on the powerless. As Rev. Neil Thomas, lead pastor of Cathedral of Hope, noted on June 10, 2026:

As people arrive for the World Cup and other major events, we will proudly showcase our city as a place of hospitality and opportunity. Yet, at the very same time, through these very same airports, on these very same streets, within sight of celebrations, immigrant members of our community are being removed from their homes and families. This contradiction forces us to ask difficult but necessary questions about who we are as a city.

Atlantic Aviation caters to the indulgences and excesses of billionaires while actively participating in and profiting from the crimes against our neighbors. All professional athletes, celebrities, and customers using Atlantic Aviation’s services are part of the problem. Pilots transporting victims of ICE arrests, ground staff loading cargo —all are agents in perpetuating this nightmare.

In solidarity with local immigrant rights efforts, we urge readers to demand that Atlantic Aviation terminate these inhumane flights. This company will be held accountable for its actions.

By Jill Glass, LVDSA Abolish ICE Campaign Co-Steward

Images by Buffy Taylor @buffysphotographs 

References

American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. (2026, April 8). ACLU of Nevada files notice of appeal to continue challenge of LVMPD 287(g) agreement with ICE. https://www.aclunv.org/press-releases/aclu-of-nevada-files-notice-of-appeal-to-continue-challenge-of-lvmpd-287g-agreement-with-ice/

American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. (2026, April 2). Racial profiling rampant after Supreme Court ruling. https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/racial-profiling-rampant-after-supreme-court-ruling/

Atlantic Aviation. (2026, June). World Cup. https://www.atlanticaviation.com/world-cup/

Balas, R. (2026, January 17). Inside Taylor Swift’s $54M Dassault Falcon 7X: 2026 Eras Tour & flight tracking controversy. The Flying Engineer. https://theflyingengineer.com/taylor-swifts-private-jet-inside-look/

Immigration Policy Tracking Project. (2025, April 8). Reported: ICE contracts with commercial airlines to facilitate deportation flights. https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-ice-contracts-with-commercial-airlines-to-facilitate-deportation-flights/

Instagram. (2025). Post by @habeasflightwatch [Instagram post]. https://www.instagram.com/p/DYXLGP7AI7E/

Lexington Alarm. (2026). Habeas Flight Watch. https://lexingtonalarm.org/habeas-flight-watch/

Schilken, C. (2024, February 9). Will Taylor Swift be able to park a private jet for Super Bowl? Vegas airports are full. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2024-02-09/super-bowl-private-jets-parking-las-vegas-airports-49ers-chiefs-taylor-swift

Velotta, R. N. (2016, May 18). Jet Suite to offer luxury travel between California and Las Vegas. Las Vegas Review-Journal. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/jet-suite-to-offer-luxury-travel-between-california-and-las-vegas/

ICE takes 240 from Clark County jail under new pact; ACLU fights deal. (2026, March 11). Las Vegas Review-Journal. https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/ice-takes-240-from-clark-county-jail-under-new-pact-aclu-fights-deal-372339

By Victor A. Jiménez

January 23, 2005

I woke up on my aunt’s couch to 12.2 inches of snow and Saturday morning cartoons. Two hours later my grandmother went to another couch in the living room where my mother was sleeping to wake her up, and found her not breathing.

The ambulance came and pronounced her deceased around 12:00–1:00 a.m. At 11 years old, they told me that she had passed away “from a heart attack caused by depression.” In hindsight, that was their way of explaining to a child that she had died due to a drug overdose. Later in life as I saw others around me abuse prescription medication, I came to understand the truth of what had happened. She was depressed and abusing medication prior to the incident that led to her death. That night we were sleeping at my aunt’s house because the lights in our own home were shut off. My mom had struggled financially since my grandmother left for Mexico to retire. My grandmother was back in town specifically to help us find our footing.

April 3rd, 2026

This was my second year going vegan for Lent. I’m not a devout Catholic (I think like many Catholics I’m not great at it). My way of making up for it is going really hard for Lent. Luckily, the 21st century is the best time ever to be sober or vegan. There are a ton of options for me at the UFO Bar, where the Groundworks Caucus of Metro Detroit DSA held a social event. It was really well attended, big Metro Detroit DSA brass, with members from all caucuses present.

This was a month or so into my membership, and my new job. I left a start-up paid field firm to run the field program for a DSA candidate, and it was the best decision I made in a long time. I was so eager to be working on a team again and even more excited to be working on a real campaign.

I’d sat down with a comrade, and we had one of our first conversations. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon– I had my non-alcoholic beverage in hand and my onion rings were crunchy just like I like. I opened wide to chomp down on my vegan smash burger.

My fellow comrade chose that moment to ask me, “So Victor, what does being a socialist mean to you?” I totally froze. Partly because I was caught off guard, partly because the vegan smash burger was falling apart in my hands, but mostly because I hadn’t asked myself that question yet, or put much thought into my answer. Why was I a socialist? And why the hell was I so sure?

I’ve never studied economics, foreign affairs, sociology, or even politics to be honest; I was a communications major. I took a bite to give myself time to think on the fly, I think they could tell I panicked. I’m not known for my poker face. I was surprised because the little thought I’d put into the question before that point did not have any bearing on the conviction of my answer.

There is no reason why any basic human need should not be completely bought and paid for: water, power, internet, housing, healthcare, food, and education. All of these should be public goods, not just for those who need it most, but for everyone. That’s what it means to be a socialist to me.

Any other outcome is a choice by the rich and powerful oligarchy running this country. Who never has trouble finding money for war, or data centers, or warehouses to lock up our immigrant neighbors. After I washed down that first bite I gave a less eloquent version of that answer and we moved onto other subjects, but that question hasn’t left me since.

If this series was called “Why Am I Socialist?” I could just end it right there, but that’s not the question. Why this organization? Well, I’ve worked in campaigns for a while now and I’ve learned to discern a winning strategy from a losing strategy very quickly. I like playing for winning teams, especially when that team also has members who believe in the same principles and values as I do sitting in seats at the highest levels of government.

Progressive politics have always been important to me. I’ve been as selective as I can with my employers and I prefer to work for issues over politicians as often as I can. The quality of candidates that this organization has produced in recent years is undeniable and how they govern and show up for their communities has matched how they campaign through and through. Besides the candidates, the party itself is growing exponentially. The influx of new members is bringing new life and creating the opportunity for new initiatives, ideologies, and theories of change to take hold of the party in unexpected ways. This is an environment rife with energy, hope, and purpose; the perfect time to join an organization.

The best thing about DSA isn’t our politics. It’s the outcomes our politics produce. I’m 100% done with case studies and surveys. We know the air is bad and we know it’s because of heavy industry, we know that none of us can afford anything, there is no other way to interpret the rising cost of living and stagnant, undignified wages. There has never been a single survey nor case study needed to decide whether or not to build weapons for the military industrial complex which our tax dollars are propping up at rates which we will never know because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. From what I’ve seen our brand of politics is producing real outcomes, quickly, and unapologetically governing with the radical idea that basic human needs should be met for everyone in our society.

My answer to the question posed by this running series is simple: if DSA electeds made up a significant portion of officials in this country, at every level of government, we might actually live in a world where water, power, internet, housing, healthcare, food, and education were all public goods.

We might live in a world where our power wasn’t shut off in 2005 during the 12th heaviest snow storm in Detroit’s history and in that world my mother and millions of others who are no longer here due to the pain and trauma that capitalism burdens us with might still be here. All of this nonsense is a choice — we need people in office willing to choose differently.

Why I Joined DSA: For the Vegan Smash Burgers was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Serge S

(Note: This is a corrected version of a previous post.)

Cleveland joined several communities nationwide who are changing their stance on Flock surveillance technology. 

During the Cleveland City Council Public Safety Committee’s June 17 meeting, members voted 3 to 1 against renewing their Flock “Safety” surveillance contract which expires on June 29. 

Voting against were Stephanie Howse-Jones, Niki Hudson, and Kevin Conwell, leaving Committee Chair Mike Polensek as the sole member to vote for the agreement. 

According to News 5 Cleveland, council members, police administrators, Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond, fifteen community members and more than two dozen people from Flock No were involved in the discussion, which lasted nearly two hours. 

Flock cameras were first installed in Cleveland during the summer of 2023 and have spread to nearby communities including Euclid, Richmond Heights, Willoughby Hills. 

The $250,000 contract would have extended the system for another year. 

The fight isn’t over. Although the safety committee declined to renew the contract this time, another council committee may take up the legislation, although no date has been set. 

Flock isn’t the only surveillance system in Cleveland. The city also operates 3,400 video surveillance cameras, most of which have AI tracking capabilities. 

This isn’t the first time that Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration has tried to sneak funding for surveillance technology through backroom channels. In the past he has bypassed the Safety Committee by extending contracts through the city’s Board of Control which effectively sidesteps council’s ability to review, approve, or deny them. 

In one such instance Bibb extended the city’s $850,000 contract with SoundThinking, the vendor of their gunshot-detection technology ShotSpotter in April of 2026. 

Several organizations have risen in response to Flock and other tracking systems which have flooded Cleveland in recent years as city’s including Dayton have cancelled or declined to renew contracts with Flock. 

One of them, “Flock No CLE” formed last year when the city tried to push an emergency proposal to expand Flock systems and replace their ShotSpotter system in 2025. The legislation would have authorized a $2 million three-year contract with Flock’s version of the “shot spotting” technology by using microphones in their already existing automated license plate readers, according to Signal Cleveland. 

According to Axios Cleveland the Cleveland Clergy Coalition spoke in favor of the contract on safety grounds while police argued the technology improves response times and claimed that there has been no misuse of data by Cleveland officers – although there is no way to verify these claims as officers can use a login system that does not always have two-factor authentication – meaning that logins could be shared to avoid tracking. 

Sources in order of use:

https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/cleveland-metro/cleveland-flock-license-plate-reader-contract-expiring-end-of-the-month

https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/06/18/cleveland-council-flock-contract-renewal-vote

https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/05/19/flock-cleveland-bibb-council

The post Cleveland Safety Committee Denies Renewal of Flock “Safety” Contract appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

The post Socialism Wins In DC appeared first on .

Author’s note: This paper, which was presented in April at Historical Materialism Istanbul 2026 at Bilgi University, was written in the context of both a series of seminars on liberatory psychoanalysis and ongoing study with the TDSA Trans Rights & Bodily Autonomy (TRBA) reading group. I am deeply grateful for the dedicated participation of the members of this reading group, and look forward to what our study continues to yield. 

In what ways are war and resistance, revolution even, gendered and raced? What work does an economy of war require of the bodies and psyches of those subject to it? (How) can logics of domination be interrupted via the labor of (transing) gender, or the lens of blackness? That is to say, how do we critically engage race with gender against logics of marginalization? How do we approach race and gender as axes and sites of hegemonic ideological production — as well as the sites for the possible liberation from supremacist hegemony? 

Paul Preciado, writing in his epilogue to Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire, and assessing the conditions of feminist and gender-revolutionary movements in the prior half century in Europe, highlights a warning in Hocquenghem’s text — “Hocquenghem alerts us,” he writes, that “’it is possible that revolutionary politics are in themselves repressive processes.’” The “provisional lesson” that Preciado derives from this is that revolutions may not be just what they seem, raising the possibility that “causes capable of becoming logics of power are not really the most revolutionary ones” and that “revolutions also construct their own margins” (AT 130-131). 

For Preciado, the “micropolitics of fags, dykes, queens, and trans people [travesti] are opposed to the traditional model of politics as war… and [these micropolitics] propose a new model of politics as relation, fiesta, communication, self-experimentation, and pleasure” (138). The re-publication of the text of the epilogue as a zine (Anal Terror) by the baedan journal of queer time travel includes an introduction by the baedan collective wondering if Preciado’s portrayal is an overly rosy one. They write that “there is a remarkable elision of violence, perhaps even of force, in Preciado’s text” representing “a kind of historical positivism or optimism that we are not inclined to share” (AT 120-121). This is the tension within which we are reading and working today — just as, for the baedan collective, it is important to “see what in [Preciado’s text] responds still too much to the production and reproduction into which every citizen-subject in a society like ours is interminably seduced and coerced” (AT 121), so too are we investigating the flows, seductions, coercions, into the production and reproduction of hegemonic normativity — even in what are cast and understood as revolutionary or liberatory struggles. 

The thesis here, and what is under investigation, is that there are ideological currents which are manifested and projected on, in, and through the body — its ornamentation, its movement, its sound, its relations… and that the apprehension of the functioning of these ideological currents — their utterly real effects on our lives, relations, deaths— is possible through the terms and sites of race and gender. Judith Butler, in a lecture at the University of Cambridge, enumerates that gender has as its topics life and the body, and thus implicates broad “zones of passion and fear, of hunger and illness, vulnerability, penetrability, relationality, sexuality, and violence” as well as “distinct or differentiated modalities of embodiment [including] modes of porosity and closure, dependency, relationality, relations to food, protections from unwanted intrusion, from assault, from exposure to the elements, hunger.” [30:00, LGBTQCam] 

Thus treatments of gender and of race illustrate and implicate in a material way treatments and interpretations of other social, political, and economic phenomena, and provide a quotidian lens and context for liberatory political projects— which we delineate here as commitments to life, care, autonomy, and their conditions. 

One of the tasks of the hegemon, as the baedan collective’s comment alerts us to, is the production of subjectivities that are conducive to its particular ideological reproduction and expansion. The means by which hegemonic normativity accomplishes this vary — from discipline to propaganda to coercion to medicalization to segregation to force to colonization of the very modes of being, relation, and language that we exhibit to one another. In W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, he details the confluence of conditions during the American Civil War that resulted in the extension of the legal classification of citizenship to the formerly enslaved black population. He writes: 

“It had been a commonplace thing in the North to declare that Negroes would not fight. Even the black man’s friends were skeptical about the possibility of using him as a soldier, and far from its being to the credit of black men, or any men, that they did not want to kill, the ability and willingness to take human life has always been, even in the minds of liberal men, a proof of manhood” (BR 129). This “proof of manhood required of the [black man]” was, in Du Bois’s words, “to seize a bayonet and rush mad with fury or inflamed with drink, and plunge it into the bowels of a stranger” (BR 129). Let us pause on this constellation: the challenge of manhood, as a conditional status to be proved; this proof taking the form of seizure, rush, inebriation, inflammation, plunging, and lack of other relation; the directionality of proof, to white men, already citizens (made such through genocide), who doubt and other the black subject, and thoroughly devalue his labor, autonomy, speech, and care. Du Bois makes clear that it was only through this proof that the black man in Civil War-era United States was able to accede to citizenship — ‘citizenship’ then, too, is manifestly constituted by this gendered and raced constellation. 

Du Bois notes that the black man “might plead his case with the tongue of Frederick Douglass” yet “the nation listened almost unmoved” (BR 129). Speech, Du Bois observes, resulted in (almost) no motion; it was madness, fury, the ability and willingness to take human life that had a legal effect. This is another relevant question to our inquiry into the conditions and traits valorized in revolutionary life. What are the conditions required for motion, or a change of motion? What do we do if e.g. speech yields (almost) no motion? What labors in this (almost),

prohibiting motion, or concealing micromotions? Du Bois shows us that the American nation, the status of citizenship, and the gender category ‘man’ are directly related to the failure of Reconstruction via the devaluation of care, the denigration of black life, and the hostility of privileged subjects toward groups which ‘threaten’ to dislodge the superiority and supremacy around which their subjectivity is organized. 

Let us turn to the text of Frantz Fanon’s under consideration, from the chapter on “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” in Wretched of the Earth. While Fanon lucidly formulates that “imperialism… sows seeds of decay here and there that must be mercilessly rooted out from our land and from our minds” (WoE 181), we also see in the text the difficulty of this task, for these ‘seeds of decay’ labor to invisibilize themselves, to contour the ‘normal’ – and recruit the body and the mind toward their propagation. One of the case studies Fanon writes about concerns a 26 year old Algerian man working with the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale). When a raid goes wrong, the patient goes “underground… without ever going home” (WoE 186). It takes several months for any news to arrive of the patient’s wife and toddler daughter. After the patient goes underground, French soldiers go to his residence and kidnap his wife for interrogation. She is beaten for days, and then raped, both alone and in front of other soldiers. In the case study Fanon reports, second-, third-, fourth-hand that the colonial soldiers tell her “If you ever see that bastard your husband again, don’t you forget to tell him what we did to you” (WoE 186). Despite the violence to which the patient’s wife is subjected, in this case study, Fanon is concerned with the patient’s “dignity as an injured husband” (WoE 187), and with his inability to have sexual intercourse (it is not detailed with whom, but we infer that it is not the patient’s wife). 

How is the act of rape — the epitome of gendered violence— figured here? It is an attack on the husband, who is ‘injured’; it is a medium of communication between the colonial soldiers and the resistance fighter— tell him what we did to you. This attack, then, takes place via the body of the wife as property of or as extension of the husband. Notably, the wife is not considered or referred to as a militant (as the husband is) and her work is excluded from the content of the liberation struggle. Yet the text makes clear that she is a significant material support to this struggle, cooking the meals to which he sits down every night in silence, raising a child, protecting her husband. Indeed, she displays a great commitment to the relations she is imbricated in, refusing to inform on her husband or other FLN associations; which is punished directly with rape. Her body, her marriage, her quotidian routines— as well as those of her young daughter— are the very field of war, and this fact is summarily repressed. The husband, who is legible as a member of the resistance, is protected underground; the wife, who is not legible as such for the extremely obvious reason of her gender, gets tortured. What margins appear here? Who is acceptable collateral damage in the contention of power? Fanon’s case study here illustrates precisely the seeds of decay he muses on earlier — the importation of hegemonic gendered violence into the schema and behaviors of the anti-colonial revolutionaries. 

The task before us, to follow another decolonial psychoanalytic theorist, Ignacio Martín-Baró, is one of de-ideologization; of the rigorous rooting out of ideologies that keep us located in the motion of colonial, imperial, supremacist logics of domination. These examples have shown us

how the site of the body is colonized, and violence doled out on the basis of a strict supremacist ordering of race and gender relations. I will now bring in the work of Marquis Bey, and their essay in their book Cistem Failure to look at the work of blackness and transness as radical invention — against the politics of war, which are the politics of gendered and racialized violence, the politics and logics of supremacy and extermination. Projects of liberation worthy of the name cannot include or utilize sexual violence, cannot utilize exclusion or extermination of the ‘other’, we opine. 

In their essay “Heart of Cisness”, Marquis Bey interrogates the qualities and behaviors of a cisgender system of bodily regulation, including the co-constitutive racialization of the gender ‘cistem’, and theorizes blackness and transness as “assert[ing] radical invention” (CF, 26). Blackness, for Bey, is “the written name given to an open ‘imagining of things’ that converges astoundingly with the abolitionist imaginatory jailbreak that must include all vectors of violence” (CF 28). Bey goes beyond the epidermalization that constitutes so much discussion of race, and the gender policing that appears even in discussions of transness. Bey synthesizes “whiteness as necessarily subtendant of cisgender” and asserts that “blackness as a critique of [cisgender] [questions] the very notion of cisgender itself” (CF 25). Reflecting on their experience in the American high school football locker room, and the exhortations of their coach toward masculinity as toughness, ability to withstand and dole out abuse, Bey distills that it was “conquest, via violent means, [that] was how we got our currency” as boys-becoming-men. What an echo of Du Bois, writing of events now 175 years past, where conquest and violence was also what made manhood possible and legible, and what permitted subjects to accede to the violent category of citizen (even as the fruits of this category continued to be systematically denied on the basis of race, via the dismantling of Reconstruction through new legal mechanisms)! 

Responding to this status, Bey conceptualizes “black and trans, then, as radically non-exclusionary” (CF 26), and invites non-racist, non-cisssexist reconceptualizations of blackness and transness. This “invitational pull of a capacious, ‘inexclusive’ blackness” represents for Bey “an expansion, not a dilution, of its radical abolition of the violent tethers of this world” (CF 27). I follow Bey here in insisting on a “hell-bent liberatory refusal of the violences that have been inscribed into us and that we’ve been told we must perpetuate” (CF 40). 

In contrast to what white supremacist organizations of power demand, we do not have to endorse or utilize schemas of domination and supremacy in our struggle toward liberation — in fact, liberation as such depends precisely on being able to interrupt these schemas and on discovering, rediscovering, inventing, reinventing modes of relation that radically include the ‘other’ and refuse power whose engine is marginalization. 

By Caitlin Murphy 

Works Cited: 

• baedan collective & Paul Preciado. Anal Terror: Notes on the First Days of the Sexual Revolution [zine]. Seattle, 2015.
• Bey, Marquis. Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender. Duke University Press, 2022. 
• Du Bois, W. E. B. Black reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. 
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004. 
• LGBTQ Cam (University of Cambridge). Who’s Afraid of Gender? | Judith Butler’s public lecture at University of Cambridge 2023 [Video]. YouTube. June 2, 2023. 

Expression of Disapproval – Burbank City Council Budget Flock Inclusion

On June 2nd, after receiving a multitude of constituent comments objecting to the renewal of the City of Burbank’s $250,000 contract with Flock Safety, the Burbank City Council voted unanimously to pass the city budget unamended, resulting in the renewal of the contract with Flock. This included DSA endorsed Socialist in Office Burbank City Council Member Konstantine Anthony.

DSA-LA and many other chapters of DSA have opposed Flock contracts in our cities, and the DSA-LA Immigration Justice Committee currently has an ongoing campaign to end Flock contracts in Los Angeles. Flock routinely shares data with DHS and ICE, breaking sanctuary ordinances and California State Law in the process, and has a proven track history of extreme data vulnerabilities and violations of their own privacy policies. Flock cameras have been used to track immigrants, women seeking abortions, and even in one instance to access cameras in a children’s gymnastics room. The bottom line: “Flock Safety” is not safe.

DSA Los Angeles strongly disagrees with the council member’s vote. As an avowed socialist, Council Member Anthony should have cast a vote of principled opposition to the use of public funds to surveil working class residents. At the same meeting, the council member was targeted for censure for organizing opposition to a Moms of Liberty, a hate group’s, anti-trans event in Burbank. We understand that this motion put him in a difficult position to take a position of courage – however, the expectation of our SiOs is to take positions of conviction, especially when the community demands it.

The struggle for socialism, multiracial democracy, and immigration justice continues. We are in communication with Council Member Anthony about actions to make amends going forward, and will work with him in the future to build a Burbank for all.

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