On July 17th, a vigil was called by local organizers to call attention to the detention of Imam Ayman, a local clergy member detained by President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Following the vigil, citizens peacefully protested at Roebling Bridge. The protest remained peaceful throughout.

Around 8:30 PM, the Covington Police Department (CPD) arrived in force, with a video captured from the scene showing a response of at least 15 squad cars for a small, peaceful protest. Police ordered protesters to disperse, and as protesters were in the middle of complying, CPD violently broke up the protest, dramatically escalating what had been a peaceful protest into a police attack on protesters. CPD officers were caught on camera firing rubber bullets at point-blank range against peaceful protesters, and arresting those who had complied with the order to disperse. Some of those arrested were brutally beaten, with multiple protesters requiring medical treatment at a nearby hospital. At least one journalist was also arrested by police despite continually signaling their status as a member of the press.

DSA Metro Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky strongly condemns the plain and obvious brutality deployed against this peaceful protest. Through their actions last night the Covington Police Department showed contempt for a peaceful vigil and demonstrated an active desire to cause harm under the cover of “keeping the peace”. These shocking acts are an echo of Donald Trump’s authoritarian streak with the very violence protesters came out peacefully to oppose; one big tyrant emboldens many little ones. This moment along with the police-assisted terror campaign of ICE demonstrates that Americans’ civil rights are limited more and more every day. Given this violent crackdown against peaceful protesters, we call on the Covington authorities to dismiss any and all charges against those arrested at the protest.

The following is the prepared text of a speech delivered at a July 17 rally organized by the Democratic Socialists of America in response to Rush Hospital’s decision to halt gender-affirming care for trans youth. The move, following similar actions by Lurie Children’s Hospital, signals a disturbing trend of Illinois institutions preemptively complying with the Trump administration’s attacks on trans healthcare. Published here with the speaker’s permission.

Hi everyone, my name is Lyra Spencer she/her, and I am the co-chair of the Chicago Chapter of the Democratic Socialist of America. 

I want to first start out by thanking everyone for being here today, including the various organizations that endorsed this event such as the Chicago Teachers Union, the Illinois Nursing Association, Howard Brown Healthcare Workers United, the Gay Liberation Network, the Party of Socialism and Liberation, Socialist Alternative, Illinois Nurses Association, Howard Brown Health Workers United and several IPOs.

Comrades, I wish we were all gathered here under better circumstances. I stand before you today because Rush Medical systems have caved to the pressures of the Trump administration, and have halted accepting new minor patients for gender affirming care. This comes off the heels of Lurie’s Children’s hospital, headed by CEO Tom Shanley, ceasing all gender affirming care for minors. The consequences of these two hospital systems’ actions means that children who need access to life saving treatment will have less options and likely longer waits to receive this life saving treatment. There are now fewer places available in Chicago that provide this life saving care, burdening the rest of the system in Chicago, and ultimately making it more difficult for all trans people to receive the care we so desperately need.

Now how did this happen? We are in Chicago, Illinois of all places. A trans sanctuary city. Is there a law in place that prevents these hospital systems from providing care to all trans youth? In short, no. Earlier this year the Trump administration signed an executive order attempting to ban gender affirming care for those under 19. Almost immediately after that order was signed it was challenged and halted in the courts. Even though this executive order is not law, just this order being proposed was enough for Lurie Children’s to immediately suspend all gender affirming care. Rush followed caving in fear of their medicaid funding being taken away. The reason why these are both so dangerous outside of directly harming some of the most vulnerable children in our society, is because fascism relies on compliance. The more we preemptively comply with fascists, the more we try to conceal ourselves, the more we hide and stray away from confrontation the more power we give them. With that power they become stronger and have an even greater ability to hurt us, our communities, and to bring harm amongst those we care the most about. 

Well comrades it is beyond time that we say enough. It’s time to mobilize, organize, and to unionize. It is time to join organizations like DSA, or the many orgs that are here today. The capitalist Democrats aren’t going to do this for us. The attorney general and Pritzker are letting this all unfold under their watch. No one is coming to save us, so it’s time that we take our liberation into our own hands and fight back against this fascist regime. That means using allies in the state and passing Alderwoman Fuentes’ resolution, which we helped draft to condemn these hospital systems. That also means taking to the streets, like what we are doing right now, to apply direct pressure to these systems. I have to add that this is not a fight we can take on our own, but must be waged through collective struggle. We need to be in organization with our communities and our coworkers in order to resist fascism. Our power lies in working class people standing together and organizing for change. Our power does not come from lawyers nor the good graces of private hospital administrators.

Comrades, the issues we are experiencing today are a direct result of the failures of capitalism. Fascism tries to redirect those failures towards an out group, rather than where it should be which is at the ruling class. It is no surprise that life saving gender affirming care was first limited by two hospital systems that are privately owned and that are non-unionized. This shows the absurdity of healthcare being treated as a commodity and a vessel for private owners to profit from. We must go beyond being on the defense and demand not only that access to life saving gender affirming care be legal and protected for anyone of all ages, but we must also demand that both gender affirming care and all healthcare must be made free at the point of service. It is beyond time that the Illinois government treats healthcare broadly as a human right and makes sure that all of its residents have quality, free healthcare.

Another point I want to touch on is that us trans people are not the only scapegoat of this fascist regime. As we speak, our neighbors are being ripped away from their families and shuttled off to modern day concentration camps. They have gotten so inhumane that they wait till church services, birthday parties, graduations, to tear apart these families and to leave children scared and confused. Whether it’s denying children access to life saving gender affirming care, ripping apart migrant families and leaving children traumatized and orphaned, or slaughtering children indiscriminately in Gaza, this administration has launched an assault on our most vulnerable youth. We need to stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with every group this administration tries to other. These isolation tactics will not succeed because we all deeply understand the sentiment MLK shared which was “an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.”

Lastly, I will leave everyone with this. My family is from rural Mississippi and my father, if he were alive, would be 79 years old this year. He had to drink from “colored” only drinking fountains. My aunts could not use the bathrooms of their choosing and had to use “colored” women’s facilities. Sound familiar? This struggle for civil rights has not gone away and those here who are standing up for trans rights are the successors to that movement, and our cause today is as just as the cause of my father’s generation. Never let anyone who would disparage working class organizing and mobilizing tell you that they would’ve marched with Doctor King, because if that were true they’d be right here today.

In closing we have a lot of work today folks, but we will emerge victorious. We will beat back fascism, guarantee healthcare for all, and Chicago will become the beacon for joint trans and working class power in the United States. That starts today by joining DSA or one of the many amazing orgs that cosponsored this event. 

The post Defend Trans Kids! appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

The following excerpt is from a conversation held in April, shortly after the vigil for Sam Nordquist

JA: I’m Jean Allen, I’ve been a member of ROC DSA for seven years, and I’ve been out as queer for nine years. 

TC: I am Travis Covitz, I am the Political Education chair for ROC DSA 2025. I have been out as transgender for a little over a decade. Where it starts is, did you see the news about the missing posters, or was the first thing you saw about Sam Nordquist the fact that his body was found?

JA: The first things that I saw were calls for vigils before I knew anything about Sam Nordquist or even his death. I feel like it’s such a statement about the state of this country that the decade I’ve been in the left has felt like a long procession of vigils. A speaker at Sam’s vigil said that “every time this happens, we get stronger as a community”. I understand that it’s agitational framing, and it’s important for people to hear when they are scared, but it’s just not true. We are the people who make our communities stronger or weaker, more or less united, and I am not seeing that [community-building] happen mechanically even while I’ve seen an uninterrupted decade of vigils. It doesn’t happen automatically because someone died, and furthermore Sam Nordquist’s death didn’t happen to make our community better, it happened [because he was murdered]. I was happy with the speeches that at least acknowledged that we failed Sam.

TC: Yeah. This is my first time experiencing a local tragedy that became national news—even if just within the queer community. That for me has been a very weird part of this experience. Trying to figure out how I feel and what to do with how I feel. I reached out to some casual acquaintances, and they just …didn’t seem to understand why I was so messed up about it. It’s not that I’m scared that [the events of Sam’s murder] will happen to me, it’s that I feel guilty. And these folks tried to tell me “it’s not your fault,” and I know his murder is not my fault, but I think of myself as a community leader/organizer, and this moment is revealing how many gaps we have [in the Rochester trans community]. How many gaps there are that are not being filled.

JA: And it isn’t your fault, right? But it’s all of our responsibility, in a way. This harm did occur, and ended someone’s life, and is going to reverberate around their family, their close friends, their whole community. I don’t know. I agree with you that people are not taking this seriously. Sam Nordquist was—like you—a political refugee, effectively. You wouldn’t necessarily have left your home state if it weren’t for the increasingly dangerous politics around transness, and-

TC: Well, Sam Nordquist was from Minnesota, which—I think—is similar to New York in terms of legislation protecting trans people passing. For me, being from Arizona, I came to New York because I got into Cornell. And then I came to Rochester because it’s where I was offered a job. Even when I was interviewed for that Guardian article a couple years ago, they asked if I moved here to be safe as a trans person. Well, no. There were these other things that happened and being trans is another layer of how I navigate things. But I still feel a sense of responsibility for the trans community in Arizona for how much easier I have it, being in New York. There are people from my community, people I grew up with, who are still suffering. So I guess that does add a layer of my understanding of Sam Nordquist. Even if he didn’t see himself coming here as him coming here to be safe as a trans person, the bigger narrative that we tell ourselves and the way we make decisions-

JA: You’re absolutely right, and I don’t want to flatten these differences. But I feel that this crisis, that the state is imposing on queer and trans people, is leading to destabilization in a lot of peoples’ lives. While Sam came here effectively looking for love, I feel like that destabilization means a lot of people, for reasons that are going to be far more specific than “I am a political refugee,” will end up coming to NYS or Rochester. Because we’re a Sanctuary City, because NY is considered safe for trans people. And I do not feel that our community is capable of meaningfully supporting those people in this moment. And I do not trust our institutions to do so either. The failure of both of those led to this moment. But there are things we can do to get to a fighting queer community.

TC: Yeah. I guess, going back, part of the reason that I wanted to go to Cornell is because I was told there was a queer Jewish community there. For me that was a big draw. And then I went there and it basically didn’t exist, the trans community had all of its fractures and stuff, I ended up being kind of jaded about that. But the idea of having queer community is really powerful and definitely for me, coming to Rochester, I feel like the only reason that I have the community connections that I do is because I knew it was something I was going to have to fight for and I decided to fight for it. 

JA: And for many people they don’t have the time to do that. Or they don’t know, as Sam didn’t know, that the people they’re trusting are not trustworthy. That the community they’re coming into is going to abuse them or hurt them or, in this instance, kill them. And it’s more than the queer community being fragmented, I think we prize our fragmentation and powerlessness. That’s true when we prioritize our disagreements over the unity we need, and it’s true when we prioritize our friendships over the things that actually divide us. I’m thinking about the number of times I’ve seen in queer communities that we allow abuse, misogyny, or racism to continue. Because the bigot is nice and does all sorts of things. 

TC: Or that person has a cool house and lets people come over to hang out. They have resources that they ostensibly share with the community. 

JA: The thing that we are trying to build, a political community that is able to meaningfully support people. I guess what we’re talking about is a political organization, right? What queer people in Rochester need is a democratic political organization that is more important than anybody’s personal clique.

TC: I agree but / and for a lot of people, hearing “political organization,” they don’t necessarily hear what you mean. Or what I mean.

JA: This then becomes “join DSA,” which you should join DSA, but yeah they’d think perhaps of a bunch of other things. What do you mean when you say political organization?

TC: What I think of is programmatic unity.

The post Queer Political Community: A Conversation first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

With the passage of the so-called “big beautiful bill,” the poorest of the poor are being told their shelters are no longer funded, their food pantries won’t take them anymore, and their chronic illnesses will lock them into six-digit debts. All the while, one of the same bill’s provisions allows businesses to deduct the full costs of private jets. This type of prioritization is social murder, and we need to think beyond the corporate media and NGOs to build structures that can fight for the future we can – and need – to win.

As union workers in SEIU protested on the Senate lawn to declare, “these cuts kill.” While NOAA’s proposed 2026 budget closes all federally funded weather and climate research labs, the government’s Earth-destroying military budget is set to exceed $1 trillion. Over 130 people in Texas are dead after experienced National Weather Service staffers were offered severance, and the local government rejected flood warning systems due to cost. Social murder is a term coined by Friedrich Engels to describe the deliberate societal forces that bring about a “murder against which none can defend themselves.” Did these Texans die, or were they socially murdered? When a politician signs a paper forbidding a woman from receiving life-saving medical treatment, is it a passive act of someone dying, or is it violent act of someone killing? This bill is not an outlier. It is a crescendo of the austerity politics that have been cutting off community life supports for decades. We cannot allow any spectrum of debate to include costing out that which kills by omission; we can not cost out the lives of our neighbors, coworkers, or families.

Just a handful of private, multi-billion-dollar conglomerates own 90% of all US federal, state, and local media networks. Due to this, all widely broadcast discussions are framed with an unquestioning loyalty to the root narratives behind these highly-profitable social murder policies. Lively debates are held on just what degree people should have to prove their societal worth to allow them access to a doctor. The imposed scarcity framing this conversation is never questioned. Neither Fox News nor CNN, however, speak of scarcity when this same bill pushes nearly eight times the “saved costs” from food access into militarization. Over a trillion of our dollars will be spent every year imposing mass starvation and death upon all the world’s people this US government declares our enemies. Yet, when this same bill makes our incarceration and deportation machine the third-best funded army on the planet, it is seen as “unprecedented.” In the name of “non-partisanship” and “neutrality,” the corporate media’s coverage builds the public consent for our congresspeople to socially murder tens of thousands of Americans. We cannot let the ruling class define the field in which we fight. We have to meet people where they’re at, but we must do so with organizational media that is unafraid to educate, raise expectations, and make demands.

How did you resist the bill likely to be Trump’s longest lasting impact? More of us than ever before called our senators and marched through our cities. However, with the primary cost imposition being withheld votes and bad press, we can’t leave our struggles behind on the streets. Union density and participation is low, and there are no large scale political parties accountable to the working class and marginalized peoples. The only big institutions our angry public has for our defense are NGOs and nonprofits. These institutions are kept separate along the lines of their single issues, and are not accountable to their members. They’re accountable to donors and philanthropists – themselves unaccountable to a strategy. A nonprofit only has the power to ask you or me to call up a politician and tell their office worker what we think. This is not empowering. Much like a demonstration in the public square, it functions as an appeal to power. The capitalist state, purposed on reproducing itself, defines a democracy such that corporations are people and money is speech. The upper echelons of the political class are loyal to the “speech” that makes each of them more wealthy than you or I will ever be. A withheld vote or day of bad press will never speak as loudly as withheld labor and economic leverage. Actions like a strike or a widespread, disciplined, and targeted boycott take vast, connected structures of accountability. For a long term, winning movement, these are the structures we need.

Communities are weaker than ever. We are torn apart every day by the social murder committed by neoliberal policies – incarcerations, evictions, and social service destruction. These crises are amplified exposures of the everyday, not ruptures from the norm. Without an organized and structured community, all we have is the hope that someone else will do something. It will not save us to have awareness, prayers, and praise for the “resilience” of those who endure once the hurt hits close to home. We need to unite and strengthen the few remaining representational organizations like labor unions. Where there are missing structures that could unite people across currently isolated struggles, we need to create them. Tenants unions, students unions, and debtors unions alike can be built and scaled up across decades. These are the institutions we must join into, struggle with, and lead to form a shared horizon for those whom there is not yet a place to be represented. You can’t create a government truly accountable to the people unless the people have unifying structures that exist to empower them. Only when line cooks, tenants, retirees, students, and all those in between are comfortable leveraging their power and solidarity can we create a new society truly beholden to the people.

The post Trump’s Social Murder Bill Passes – Now What? appeared first on Pine & Roses.

On July 11th, LVDSA Co-Chair Shaun Navarro asked Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley a simple question: will you pledge not to collaborate with ICE?

Her answer: “No.”

This answer is unacceptable when our community is living in fear.

We call on Mayor Berkley and the Las Vegas City Council to publicly commit that the city of Las Vegas:

• will not collaborate or enter into an agreement with ICE
• will refuse the use of city resources for ICE transfer or holds
• will take a definitive stand to ensure Las Vegas remains safe for all residents, irrespective of their immigration status

Mayor Berkley also asserted “there is no ICE in Las Vegas”. While this is technically true, it is wildly misleading about the fact that ICE presence is growing in the valley: ICE has a detention center in Henderson, ICE activity has caused Broadacres Market in North Las Vegas to shut down, and ICE detained TikTok star Khaby Lame at Harry Reid International Airport in Clark County’s jurisdiction.

Mayor Berkley called ICE’s activity an “unfortunate situation”. But on July 1st, she also said that she supported Sheriff McMahill’s decision for LVMPD to coordinate with ICE under the federal 287(g) program. This program deputizes local law enforcement to fulfill federal immigration duties, allows LVMPD to detain undocumented people for up to two days to transfer them to ICE custody, and requires LVMPD to report conversations regarding citizenship to ICE within one hour.

While the city doesn’t control LVMPD, they work closely together and the city will be giving them over $185 million over the next year – funding a force that is working directly with ICE.

We believe that families being ripped apart is more than an “unfortunate situation”. Our community is afraid and wants to know that they will be safe and that their elected officials will not collaborate with ICE, which is why Shaun Navarro was met with applause as he asked the Mayor “When they are separating our families, what will you do?”

We invite members of the community to visit lvdsa.org/no-ice to send a letter to the Mayor and City Council with these demands and to join us in the fight to Cancel the ICE Contracts.

Are you fed up with rising rents, low wages, climate inaction, and billionaires hoarding more while we struggle with less? You’re not alone — and you’re not powerless.

We would like to invite you in learning about Democratic Socialism to our Mass Intro event that we are holding on July 27th at the DAAC! Our chapter has existed since 2017 and among other things, we have focused on issues including Labor, Housing, Trans rights, the Environment, Medicare for All, and fighting for the working class in general. 

We will have tacos, speakers, and music that we can all sing along to. Come celebrate Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Mayor’s Democratic Primary and help build our own Socialist movement in West Michigan.

This event is perfect for:
✅ Newcomers curious about what democratic socialism really means
✅ Anyone ready to get involved in building a better, more just world
✅ Existing members looking to reconnect or bring a friend

Together we can create a better world for all of us if we all work towards building our chapter and collaborating on future projects and events.

Solidarity!

The post Fight Fascism/Build Socialism: Intro to the GRDSA appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

Asked in the abstract, much of the American electorate supports social welfare policies like universal healthcare, reining in corporate and private wealth, and democratic control that extends from the workplace to the government. But when such programs are framed as “socialist,” many still turn up their noses in disgust. 

Socialism remains the big, scary “S” word—an idea good on paper but bad in practice (as I was taught by high school teachers and college professors). Socialism retains an association with authoritarianism and scarcity buttressed by Cold War propaganda. On the other side of the coin, the negative externalities of capitalism are rarely attributed to their mode of production. 

Deaths of Capitalism

Countless workers died while building America’s capital foundation. They died extracting raw materials like coal and timber. They died manufacturing commodities in factories. They died building bridges and railroads upon which commodities and raw materials travel. And they died while shipping these goods to market.

Others were condemned to miserable lives, suffering from horrible working conditions and at risk of debilitating injury. In the mines, workers were exposed to coal dust and acquired black lung. In textile mills, machines claimed fingers and arms. In meatpacking plants, workers’ flesh even became part of the product, according to muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair. 

Many of these risks still exist in the workplace today, or have been exported to workers in the imperial periphery. When trying to fight for better conditions, workers are confronted by the violent repression of the employer and the state. 

If they are injured, workers lack reliable access to healthcare. They are either underinsured, or experience service delayed by understaffing and unnecessary bureaucratic complexity. (Insert:limitations seen in response to COVID crisis)

Capitalism transforms workers into the mere appendage of a machine built to accumulate profit, precipitating alienation throughout the populace. Bodies inquiring for meaningful stimulation are forced to do dull work. How many “people of equal talent [to Einstein] have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” pondered evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Deaths from alcohol and suicide attest to our crisis of loneliness. Yet mental illness is frequently stigmatized and criminalized, and access to mental health resources is limited.

Under capitalism, products are created for exchange value, often with their use as an afterthought. Many products simply don’t work, as consumers are injured by defective and malfunctioning products. Others expel significant externalities not accounted for by the market, but measured in opioid overdoses, traffic fatalities, and tons of carbon dioxide.

When the rate of profit cannot be maintained at home, capital goes in search of new markets, and the very nature of capital requires endless expansion. Imperial wars for resources occur among developed nations, while the working class of impoverished nations suffers from the theft of resources, competition from foreign goods, and exploitation and repression by colonizing businessmen and their armies.

The invisible hand is stained red with these atrocities, yet too few see capitalism as the root of the problem. These deaths are metabolized by the system, waved away by the ruling class or calculated as the mere balance of costs and benefits. Capitalism exposes everyone to a warlike competition for superiority where all is justified.

Deaths of Socialism

In The Black Book of Communism, all of the deaths occurring in 20th century socialist regimes are laid at the feet of Marx. Filled with hyperbole and distortion, such accounts fail to situate these states in their historical context, and ignore the role of Western capitalism itself in achieving such results.

Many socialist countries were created in the wake of devastating wars and colonial regimes. The Bolsheviks revolted during a world war that left nearly 3 million Russians dead. Less than a quarter-century later, countries forming the Soviet Union suffered another 26 million deaths. Vietnam suffered under French colonial rule and Japanese occupation prior to the uprising of the Việt Minh. Cuba, China, and others fit similar patterns. 

As a result of this destruction, and their underdevelopment by extractive imperial regimes, socialist states were formed with inadequate means of production. Contrary to popular belief, Marx appreciated capital’s capacity for developing the means of production. The problem, however, is the direction of such development for profit rather than human need. These developing countries lacked the material basis for socialism. 

Where they did succeed, socialist states were obstructed by coordinated Western repression, seeking to deny any challenges to the hegemony of capitalism. These states were targeted with blockades, sanctions, and monetary entanglements that devastated their economies. Propaganda blaming socialism fanned the flames of coups, backed by intelligence agencies and corporate moral support. To ward off land reform, the United Fruit Company lobbied U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to manufacture the 1954 coup in Guatemala. The CIA helped overthrow Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile in 1973. Countless examples abound.

Despite these challenges, socialist states made impressive achievements in areas of education, housing, healthcare, and production capacity. Cuba achieved near-total literacy within years of the revolution, and now exports doctors worldwide. The Soviet Union rapidly industrialized, increasing steel production by as much as 400% during the first and second five-year plans. China’s economy is currently performing similar feats.

These achievements, and the violence of capitalism, do not excuse all the actions of these regimes. We can and should criticize Stalin’s senseless purges, the repression of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and genocide by the Khmer Rouge, all performed in the name of nominal “socialism.” These are not events to be ignored or defended, but a warning against the sacrifice of our ideals.

Real Socialism

We are not confined to the socialism of the past. The socialism of DSA is being constructed in a new historical context. As an organization that centers democratic practice, we have the opportunity to construct socialism as we see fit. It is up to us to make democracy accessible to all, and to prioritize freedom from want and oppression.

The arrival of socialism signals an end to imperialist wars and deaths of necessity. It means a rise in workplace safety and quality of life. It is an opportunity to address social issues that are ignored by private capital. 

History is not static—capitalism is not sustainable, and its horrors demand a response. The important thing is that WE define the response, rather than a ruling class that will only relinquish power upon the final destruction of the world. 

Reactionaries use fear of change to discourage challenges to existing hierarchy. They warn of perverse consequences from the fight for justice. Such fearmongering is counterrevolutionary. The socialist movement thrives from hope informed by action. The working class must reclaim the world we have built.

The post The Deaths of Capitalism first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Americans are taught to venerate July 4th as a turning point not only in the history of the Americas, but in human history itself. It supposedly represents the founding of the first modern republic, a nation destined to lead the world into an unparalleled golden age of freedom.

At one time, celebrations of the Fourth of July also included some celebration of universal rights. These include the idea that the United States is defined by its constitution, that there are some things that the government shouldn’t be allowed to do, and that every person is entitled to basic rights under the law. It also included the idea that democratic governance is a good in itself, applicable not only to those living within the borders of the United States, but of everyone in the world yearning to breathe free.

Next year, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The celebrations will be overseen by Donald Trump, the single most selfish, myopic, and authoritarian man ever to hold the office of President of the United States. They will take place in the context of his active attempts to destroy American democracy and remake it in his own image.

To the degree that the United States was ever a ‘revolutionary’ republic, that promise is now a distant memory. Any pretext of universalism that one existed (in spite of the many serious flaws of the American experiment) is gone. Republicans have replaced it with a ‘blood and soil’ conception of what it means to be an American, and Democrats are so preoccupied with civility politics that they abandoned the question of what it means to be an American decades ago.

The Independence Day holiday is still inexorably tied to the existence of the United States of America as a nation-state, and to the current policies of its leadership. Furthermore, it can never be extricated from the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and indigenous genocide, which loom large over any founding myth of the United States. The national founding holiday of the United States of America will never be a day celebrating universal human freedom. That is why, as socialists, we must look to other inspirations for our struggle.

***

Three centuries ago, the European concept of a ‘state’ was inextricable from the concept of its sovereign. In the traditional understanding, the Christian god granted the absolute right to rule a territory to a hereditary monarch. A few exceptions to this rule existed, but they were mostly carved out to protect the traditional rights of institutions such as the Catholic Church and powerful merchant guilds. The concept of a state that derived its legitimacy from a universal idea like self-governance was laughable, and apologists for absolutism openly scoffed at the idea that a state could exist independent from a monarch as anything more than a short-lived and chaotic experiment.

The social force that broke the back of this idea was not the American Revolution. The idea of a merchant republic was familiar to those in Europe during that time, and the notion that the British colonial government of America would be replaced by an oligarchy of wealthy merchants and slave owners was considered radical but not inconceivable by the powers of the Old World.

The more revolutionary project was the one that started in France in 1789. It grew from a demand for equal formal representation for the Third Estate (largely comprising the French middle class) into a radically new conception of what a ‘state’ should be. The storming of the notorious Bastille prison on July 14, 1789 marked a watershed moment in human history. For the first time, the destruction of the old, absolutist European order became not only possible, but inevitable.

The French Revolution was not only a political revolution, but a social one. It sought not to make peace with the old European order, but to abolish it entirely. Its experiments in radical democracy, secular government, and an unyielding demand that the powerful answer for their crimes served as the inspiration for two centuries of popular resistance to colonial, monarchical, and oppressive forms of government.

Over the next two centuries, popular uprisings and mass movements around the world dismantled the power of monarchy to dominate human affairs. This was most notable in the periods following the two world wars, when revolutionary and anti-colonial movements toppled monarchs and freed peoples from foreign dominion. Today, over 80% of the world’s governments have abandoned hereditary monarchy, and a significant portion of the remaining countries maintain a monarch only as a constitutional symbol with little or no political power.

***

The French Revolution informed and influenced nearly every leftist movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karl Marx called it “the most colossal revolution that history has ever known.” During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks were intimately familiar with the details of each stage of the French Revolution. They openly considered themselves the successors to the radical left-wing Jacobin faction, for whom the American socialist magazine of record is named.

The modern French Fifth Republic also traces its roots back to 1789, but the ideals of the period represent something far greater, and we can celebrate the history of republicanism without having to defer to nationalist propaganda or a founding myth. Nor do we as socialists have to apologize for the revolutionary violence of the early French republicans. As noted American humorist Mark Twain wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

As free people, it is our right and responsibility to choose what to celebrate in this world. The principles of self governance, universal human rights, freedom from arbitrary rule, and anti-monarchism are the basis for modern socialism. Even as we confront the new horrors of a global system in crisis, we must also remember and celebrate the victories that have brought us to this point. There is no better time to start than right now.

Vive le monde républicain.

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