First Published October 29, 2023

Ithaca DSA supports Professor Russell Rickford and is disgusted by the attacks being leveled at him. He has been accused by Cornell campus groups and media outlets of celebrating Hamas’s violence against Israeli civilians and promoting hate speech. These accusations are based on a short and decontextualized video clip of a much longer, 19-minute speech that was given at a rally in support of the Palestinian people, co-organized by Jewish Voices for Peace and the Ithaca Committee for Justice for Palestine and co-sponsored by the Ithaca DSA and other local organizations. Professor Rickford did NOT support or glorify violence against civilians. In fact, he stated "I hate violence. I hate violence. I can’t stand guns. I come from a deep tradition of peace. I come from a deep tradition of resistance to militarism, and to war. I would never presume, on principle, I would never presume, to tell an oppressed people how they should seek their liberation... I abhor the killing of civilians. It’s horrific," (full transcript of speech here). 

The deliberate misrepresentation and decontextualization of his speech is an affront to open dialogue and free speech, which Cornell purports is a key value of the university. We call on Cornell to take the side of Professor Rickford, instead of those making bad faith attacks, undermine free speech, and distort others’ viewpoints for political gain. 

Professor Rickford is a wonderful scholar, teacher, community member, and activist who does not deserve this incredible outpouring of hate and disinformation. 

Sign a petition to support him here.

The question is the same as it was a hundred years ago: Will we collectively choose Socialism or Barbarism?

Democratic socialists know that governments that protect the interests of the ruling class while refusing to guarantee our rights to housing, healthcare, and education are democracies only in name, and that both major parties in fact support a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (that is, the one percent). Even so, DSA engages with the electoral process as candidates, campaigners, canvassers, and voters. The electoral arena is often where we find allies, grow coalitions, and inspire the rest of the working class to build socialism together, brick by brick.

This election, we are faced with a stark reality that the duopoly power shared by the two major US parties is a ratchet effect, dragging the window of political discourse ever rightward, despite the broad popularity of progressive policy. As socialists, we understand the Purpose of a System is What It Does, and in an election in which progressive policies and down-ballot candidates consistently outperformed the top of the ticket, it is clear that the Democratic Party is more concerned with excising social democratic and “Berniecrat” elements from the party and providing unwavering material support for Israeli genocide than winning “the most important election of our lifetimes.” To be clear, the Democratic corporate consultant class will get paid either way, and the stock portfolios of Democratic and Republican politicians alike will continue to go up.

The bourgeois election process may have selected the American version of fascism embodied in Donald Trump, but we recognize two important facts. One, American fascism is neither recent nor novel, with a long, brutal history both domestically and internationally supported by both parties. Two, as proven in places like Indonesia and Chile, democratic socialist policies are broadly popular and effective at countering reactionary politics, at least until the forces of US capital intervene on the side of violent, anti-democratic repression. As Americans worry about the very real threat of violent, anti-democratic repression at home (an ongoing and longstanding reality for many Americans, and a new possibility for certain privileged groups), it is worth reminding ourselves that the tools of imperial control perfected abroad will inevitably come home and be used on us too.

What Is to Be Done?

The question is the same as it was a hundred years ago: Will we collectively choose Socialism or Barbarism? American support of Israel’s brutal genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, mirrored by the brutal militarization at our southern border, shows that the American ruling elite have made their choice: barbarism. Therefore, we must organize together to build a future worth passing on to the next generation. We must be sober, analytical, and adaptable. We must look to the analysis and lessons learned from those that came before us. We must help educate each other.

We are in the midst of a multi-generational class war, as well as a time of many morbid symptoms as the old world dies and the new world struggles to be born. What that new world will look like remains to be seen, but in the words of the late, great David Graeber, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Statement from the Madison Area DSA Executive Committee on the 2024 Election

Donald Trump’s victory is a setback for the working class and will surely threaten our communities in countless ways. But it would not be possible without the failures of the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris’s focus on upholding a sorry status quo was not enough when voters are dissatisfied and disgusted with climate change, genocide, inflation, and our corrupt political system.

Workers deserve more. Workers deserve housing, Medicare for All, unions. Workers deserve a Green New Deal, taxes on the rich, an end to the US war machine. Workers deserve a party that fights for us, not the rich who exploit and divide us. Workers deserve socialism, and we won’t stop organizing until we get it.

Democrats lost, but DSA can and does win in down-ballot races throughout the country. Progressive and pro-worker ballot measures passed in several “red” states. Here in Madison, voters overwhelmingly passed budget referendums to fund our schools and city services. With those funds, we demand free school meals, affordable housing, sanctuary for immigrants, safety for trans people, and better pay for workers.

Only socialism and building mass movements and political organizations can defeat barbarism. Don’t despair – join DSA and organize for a better world with us! Come join us this week at one of the following events!

• Saturday 11/9 at The People’s Organizing Fair
• Sunday 11/10 at the Shout Your Abortion rally
• Tuesday 11/12 at our next Madison DSA monthly meeting
• Saturday 11/16 at our next New Member Orientation

Register for all of the above at https://madison-dsa.org/events/.

In the wake of the 2024 general election, many of us are feeling despair, grief, and anger over the results, especially at the national level. We had terrible options—between a wannabe fascist dictator and a neoliberal genocidaire in the Oval Office, neither outcome would be desirable for the working class in the United States. Unfortunately, [...]

Read More... from Statement from the Leadership Council following the 2024 general election

The post Statement from the Leadership Council following the 2024 general election appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America | San Diego Chapter.

The results of the election are frightening and difficult to process.

DSA knows that Donald Trump and the Republican Party will be a terror on the working class while they remain in power. This terror will disproportionately impact already vulnerable communities, including people who are Black, indigenous, Hispanic, queer, immigrants, and more, as it did during the prior Trump term. The return of “Muslim bans”, gutting of carbon initiatives, an even more unabashedly reactionary Supreme Court, an unrepentantly hostile NLRB, an emboldened rightist paramilitary movement both in and out of the state  — all these and more are in the offing. The Israeli settler state is celebrating, brazenly announcing its intention to permanently depopulate Northern Gaza of its already starved and shell-shocked residents. Project 2025, or some other iteration of right-wing state consolidation, may yet find its day in the sun, having shed some of the aura of liability.

Meanwhile, the current leadership of the Democratic Party has failed to produce a convincing alternative to the rise of fascism and plays into the right-wing agenda in critical and unacceptable ways. While the various causes that led to Kamala Harris’ defeat will be teased out in the weeks to come, we already know that the policy that “nothing will fundamentally change” of Biden and Harris has alienated the multiracial US working class, who do not see the Democratic Party as sufficiently fighting for their needs.

We know the US political system, irrespective of its official labels, ultimately serves capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy. These imperatives lock it into a death spiral that threatens the whole of human existence. The rate of spiral may ebb and flow under the hand of different nominal masters, but the direction remains the same — as long as these forms of domination exist unchallenged.

Many of us are disheartened. We are making space to mourn collectively, while recognizing our individual forms of heartbreak. We own the failures of the US Left to credibly point a way out of our deepening polycrisis, outside of its usual circles. We also know that, per Black abolitionist organizer and academic Mariame Kaba, “hope is a discipline.” Even when the future is uncertain or dangerous, we have the responsibility to believe that we will win. We will win a world where democracy flourishes, people’s basic needs are met, and working class people have the power.

We will only win when we are organized. And we will be organized only when working people striving for a better world can genuinely find a voice in Left political life.

Regardless of the election results, our task is to organize — to become a bigger and more skilled socialist movement, to contest for power, and win big for the working class.

The DSA 2024 Workers Deserve More platform is part of the path in which we can do that. Find out more here: https://2024.dsausa.org/

If you have never organized before, or if you have had to step away, we invite you to join Silicon Valley DSA or peer organizations fighting to make Silicon Valley a place where all working people can thrive.

At our upcoming chapter meeting on November 16 at 1pm we will talk about this as a community. Please join us, and let’s cry, laugh, argue, strategize, despair, celebrate, and above all struggle together – for the better world that can and must be.

In unity,
SVDSA Officers

The post On the 2024 US national election appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

Media Advisory

For Immediate Release

November 6th, 2024

Politics Beyond the Ballot Box

Local Raleigh Organizations Hold Organizing Fair

Moore Square, Raleigh, NC

November 9th, 2024 1-4PM

NC Triangle Democratic Socialists of America, in collaboration with multiple local organizations dedicated to social justice, organized labor, and community support, will be hosting a public Organizing Fair in Moore Square in Raleigh on November 9th from 1-4pm. This will be an opportunity for community members to learn about the struggles in their area and the organizations involved in this vital work. With the end of the 2024 election, more Americans than before are paying attention to politics. But, we need to recognize that voting is only one of the essential ways we express our voices and advocate for our communities. Labor protections, civil rights, and peace cannot be advanced once every four years. They must be fought for every day, week, month, and year. 

This organizing fair will be a place for passionate Triangle residents to become connected to these fights in their own backyard. The event will have tabling to create opportunities connecting community members with organizers, speeches from veteran organizers about next steps, and tables for community members to discuss the 2024 election and its consequences. Organizations participating include but are not limited to: Raleigh Mutual Aid Hub, The Southern Workers Assembly, Jewish Voices for Peace, Triangle Tenants Union, Meals for the Masses, Palestinian Youth Movement, and the NC Triangle Democratic Socialists of America.

“The strategy of showing up every few years to cast a vote clearly is insufficient. Workers are kept out of power no matter who is in charge. It does not need to be that way though- workers are really what makes everything run. Nothing is made without labor. We have power, we just have to be organized and conscious. This event is important because it is a first step towards realizing the power we can only claim if we get organized.” - Jody, IBEW member

We encourage all Triangle residents who care about this election to turn out and learn about how they can become involved in their community’s work. We cannot trust elected officials themselves to fix the growing problems our nation is experiencing. We have to do it ourselves. And there is no other place to get started like your own community.

Statement on November Election Results

Today we wake up to a world more in dire need of our solidarity than ever before. As votes continue to be counted across the United States, it becomes more and more clear that the Democratic Party is not the opposition we need or deserve to beat back the far-right.

 

For months, we raised the flag on the need to address working peoples’ needs, their fears, and especially their calls for their families to stop being murdered. The Democratic Party chose its donors, pundits, and the ruling class’ project in imperialism.

 

Who will choose to stand up for workers here and abroad? Who will stand up for healthcare, housing, and education for all? Who will stand up for our bodily autonomy, our civil rights, our democracy, and our planet?

 

Under Joe Biden, the United States has prioritized maintaining a massive military budget, expanded oil drilling, racist immigration policies, and a genocide in Gaza. The Harris’ campaign chose to continue (and even expand upon) many of the same policies put forward by an unpopular Biden administration and is now answering for it. Under a second Trump administration the threat of repression and consolidation of power has never been greater.

 

Without a working class alternative to the Democratic Party, and one that organizes in our homes and in our workplaces, we will fall further behind.

 

The Democratic Socialists of America believe that we can, as a united working class, beat the ruling class and build a better world. Just last night we defended rent control in Hoboken, NJ in an overwhelming victory. DSA elected socialists to office in New York, Oregon, Georgia, and Kentucky. DSA-supported ballot measures won massive victories expanding abortion rights in Montana, Nevada and Arizona. Nebraska and Missouri expanded sick leave, raised the minimum wage and cemented labor rights. Michigan Representative and DSA member Rashida Tlaib won a landslide re-election in a district Harris lost. It is clear that policies and candidates that offer genuine opposition to the far-right continue to win, and Democrats choose not to be on the side of the working people’s demands.

 

These next four years the far-right will be emboldened, but just as they ascend the need for political alternative will grow increasingly clear.

 

Will you join us? Will you stand with us as we face incredible headwinds in 2025?

 

Will you join the fight for our lives, our neighbors and our planet?

 

Join DSA

###

 

The post Statement on Election of Donald Trump first appeared on North NJ DSA.

Following a grueling presidential campaign and a gut-wrenching election night, our worst fears have been realized.

Donald Trump will once again be the next president of the United States.

The scale of Kamala Harris’s loss has been stunning. Not only did she manage to lose all seven swing states in the Electoral College, she is also very likely the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the popular vote to a Republican in twenty years.

Harris deserves much of the blame for Democrats’ defeat. She replaced an unpopular incumbent at the last minute, and instead of running on a radically different platform than her predecessor, she stuck to Biden’s extremely unambitious strategy. She refused to break with Biden on Israel despite the dire moral imperative of ending a genocide and the severe unpopularity of his position. She campaigned with far-right Republican politicians instead of shoring up support among the Democratic base. Perhaps most importantly, she failed to promise that anything of substance would change if she were elected president at a time when most Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.

Despite the valiant and selfless efforts of millions of progressives and socialists to prevent Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Harris made it clear from the beginning that her campaign took the Left’s support for granted, and she repeatedly ignored its warnings that her centrist platform would alienate key constituencies.

The most radical utterance of the campaign, Tim Walz’s impromptu October 9 remark that the electoral college “needs to go”, was immediately shot down by the Harris campaign. The Democrats’ pathological aversion to risk has made their platform all but untenable, especially now that Republicans are on the verge of cementing long-term control over our broken electoral and political system.

Even though Harris’s tack to the center is clearly to blame for her defeat, the Left will suffer relentless attacks over the next four years. Democrats will use the party’s brief flirtation with mild social democracy in 2020 as a scapegoat, claiming the positions Harris was “forced” to take to compete in the primary that year poisoned her image with moderate voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, have plans to unleash a different type of attack altogether.

***

Over the coming months, there will be thousands of articles in the liberal press detailing the exact kinds of harm Trump is likely to inflict on our country and the world during his second term. All of it needs to be taken seriously. He has promised to pursue personal vendettas and to use the military to crush protests. He seeks to purge the federal bureaucracy and administrative state of competent leadership and radically transform the national economy to suit himself and his supporters among a certain subset of the capitalist class. He plans to target millions of immigrants and refugees using a vast militarized police apparatus. He is likely to renege on his promise not to sign a law banning abortion nationwide. He and his inner circle have enthusiastically supported and even proposed expanding Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. He has pledged to actively sabotage the fight against climate change, primarily out of spite. And on and on and on it goes.

This is a grave moment in the history of American democracy. Trump will use the power of the state in unprecedented ways to target his perceived enemies and to entrench right-wing dominance over the American political system. Many of the freedoms we currently enjoy under the Constitution are likely to be curtailed, and some will be abolished altogether.

Democrats have spent the past five years assuring us that there is no “other side” to a Trump victory. Either the anti-Trump coalition wins, or democracy dies. There is no contingency, no plan to rally against the onslaught of nightmares we’ve been warned endlessly against.

And yet, we are still here.

***

The American far right is gleefully preparing for what they see as their final victory, and much of their strategy depends on intimidating their enemies into silence. They want the Left to go into hiding, to flee the country, to stop speaking out for fear of retribution, and to abandon the political sphere to right-wing extremism.

In the frenzied time between this catastrophe of an election and Inauguration Day, we must guard against overestimating the power of the far right. It is easy to imagine that they are capable of anything, and the vague perception that they can get away with literally any crime and ignore all existing law will pre-emptively demobilize opposition to the incoming administration.

As soon as Trump takes the Oath of Office, the far-right will be hampered by its own unpopularity, infighting, and incompetence. Trump will surround himself with the same sycophantic and profoundly incompetent medley of toadies and conmen, and they will spend much of their time propping up a man who does not have the faculties to govern.

Trump’s return to the White House is likely to be a farce of Ronald Reagan’s second term, during which an ailing president increasingly unable to lead was puppeted by a ghoulish cast of right-wing charlatans. Unfortunately, Trump’s prospective cabinet makes Reagan’s rotating cast of misfits look like Boy Scouts. We don’t know exactly what horrible things they will try to do once the MAGA right grips the levers of power once again, but we must prepare however we can.

***

Liberalism has proven once and for all that it cannot save American democracy. Neither Biden nor Harris considered any serious reforms to our economic and political system, not even vastly popular ones. The multiracial working class will bear the brunt of their failure to act. The only alternative to the coming barbarism is to organize.

We must join together in opposition to Trump’s efforts to undermine American democracy. The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, and it is committed to opposing fascism and supporting the working people of all nations. There are hundreds of other progressive and left-wing groups across this country that will take up the fight to defend our communities and our people. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, we have no option but to protect one another.

The coming years will be difficult. Laws will be written to target the most vulnerable among us. Democratic structures will be damaged and will not easily bounce back. Regional and global conflicts will intensify in ways that cannot be reversed. Environmental damage will be wrought that cannot be undone. People will die who cannot be brought back to life.

But we are still here, and we still deserve a better world. We have no choice but to press on.

The post We are still here appeared first on Midwest Socialist.