Gimme a Brake: Brake Light Clinic
Saturday, May 4, 2019
10 am – 3 pm
SEIU/1199 Main St. Office
2421 Main St, Buffalo, New York 14214
Come on out and have volunteers from Buffalo DSA change your brake light for FREE! Free coffee, doughnuts and legal advice while you wait.
This is our 4th Brake Light Clinic and each light replaced reduces the likelihood of interaction with the police.
Lutheran climate organizer Shay O'Reilly on demonic forces, white supremacy and climate change
Charlotte Metro DSA statement: Bernie Sanders Endorsement
At our March 3rd meeting the members of Charlotte Metro DSA engaged in the debate facing all of our fellow 60,000 comrades: whether to affirm the demands of the National Political Committee (NPC) and provide financial and labor support for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and more broadly, what Bernie Sanders and his bid for president means to the burgeoning and resurgent Socialist movement in the United States. Naturally, as good Socialists, we held a structured and comradery debate about what our role nationally is in relation to electoral politics and what our capabilities as a chapter are to affect change locally through elections and campaigning. Our conversation about local needs and capabilities transitioned to why the national debate was happening so early in the 2020 election cycle, and was seemingly predetermined by the NPC, when an opportunity to decide this more democratically and transparently is only months away.
Regarding the endorsement for Bernie Sanders for President set forth by DSA NPC, Charlotte Metro DSA decided to delay our decision whether to endorse in order to better focus on issues that affect our local communities and allow us to build a broader working class movement in the Charlotte Metro area. We also call on the NPC not to endorse at this time, especially under the current conditions of the endorsement presented. This endorsement is too important and impactful to be decided by so few individuals and without the transparency necessary for a democratic organization. Additionally, we are concerned that in its current form the endorsement will pull too much money away from other more necessary DSA-led endeavors to continue to build our movement, particularly by chapters outside of major metropolitan areas. Due to the lack of horizontal participation and likely cost to Charlotte Metro DSA, we cannot at this time and in good conscience endorse Bernie Sanders for President, and we ask for the NPC to call off its vote for an endorsement and to instead let it be determined at the General Convention this August in Atlanta.
In Solidarity, CLTMDSA
Emma Goldman Reading Group Syllabus
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Introduction: April 13, 12pm, Grindhaus
a. Emma Goldman on Wikipedia
b. What I Believe (1908)
c. A New Declaration of Independence (1909)
d. Anarchism: What It Really Stands For (1910) -
Feminism: May 18, 12pm, Grindhaus
a. Anarchy and the Sex Question (1896)
b. The Tragedy Of Women’s Emancipation(1906)
c. The Traffic in Women (1910)
d. Woman Suffrage (1911)
e. Marriage and Love (1911) -
Religion: June 15, 12pm, Grindhaus
a. The Failure Of Christianity (1913)
b. The Philosophy Of Atheism (1916)
c. The Hypocrisy Of Puritanism (1917)
d. Emma Goldman and the Soul of Anarchism , by Kim Domenico (2017) -
State Repression: July 20, 12pm, Grindhaus
a. Patriotism, a Menace to Liberty (1911)
b. Prisons, a Social Crime and Failure (1917)
c. Meeting of No Conscription League transcript (1917)
d. The Individual, Society and the State (1940) -
My Disillusionment in Russia: August 17, 12pm, Grindhaus
a. My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)
2018 Year in Review
Hello Charlotte Metro DSA Members,
2018 was our second year in existence, and one that saw a lot of change and action. Firstly, our charter and bylaws were accepted from DSA National and we transitioned from an organizing committee to an official chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. With official chapter status, we were able to hold our first officer elections in November, and now we can start the process to become a non-profit, open a bank account and receive a percentage of our dues back from national’s coffers.
Last year, we hosted several political education events to increase consciousness around issues important to building working class solidarity and power in our community. In January we hosted Medicare for All expert, writer and fellow DSA member, Tim Faust, for a rousing speech and Q and A session about Health Care justice. In May we put on a labor week with help from local unions and hosted two events at the IBEW hall. The first of the events was a panel discussion with local union officers and labor organizers, where the speakers dissected local peculiarities of organizing labor in the South and problems facing unions in Charlotte. To cap off the week we hosted the creators of the documentary “Union Time” about unionization of a Smithfield plant in eastern North Carolina.
Mutual aid is also an important part of building working class power. Our chapter hosted 6 brake light clinics last year, because broken or burnt out taillights are one of the most common reasons for traffic stops. By offering free light changes, we can help folks in marginalized and exploited communities avoid police interaction that can lead to arrest or violence. We also assisted Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy in their upkeep and maintenance of their office space so they can continue advocating for their clients. Helping CCLA allows Charlotte Metro DSA to increase local ties and help out a wonderful organization that offers legal assistance to the most vulnerable in our community.
To continue building an effective chapter, many of our members have gone to regional trainings in Atlanta, Asheville and Knoxville. We have learned skills to help us organize our membership, develop leadership in the chapter and assess obstacles to change locally. These trainings also led to the creation of the Outreach and Retention Committee to continue these lessons and build a sustainable and effective chapter.
There are already many plans in motion for 2019, and more to come. Housing will be our chapter’s focus issue in 2019, and in February we had our first Housing Committee meeting. In less than 18 months, the RNC will be in our city and we have begun strategizing how to be most effective during the convention. This year we will also have our first May Day picnic to celebrate International Worker’s Day. There will certainly be more to come!
Storyteller Kelli Dunham on her journey from nun to nurse and queer comedian
Women’s March 2019
Friday, March 8th @ 4:15PM
Niagara Square, Buffalo NY. Come join in solidarity as we revel in the #womenswave and we #UnitetheStruggles.
Organized by WNY Peace Center, with Riverside Salem Environmental Cottage.
The Labor Theory of Value
In order to explain exactly what socialism is, and how it works, it is important to first understand what the wealth in our society is, and where it comes from. It is a question of whether or not the people who actually create products of material value get to keep the fruits of their own labor, or even a fair portion of the profits, and the answer is that the lion’s share goes to someone else.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem if the system self-regulated and produced livable conditions for the worker – if the “invisible hand” as Adam Smith put it, always succesfully provided social benefits through the actions of an individual driven by profit. The truth is that market interactions and price signals are very effective for regulating exchange itself, but the benefits seldom actually reach the people who created the value behind them in the first place.
What is Capitalism?
Capitalism has many possible definitions, but when socialists use the word “capitalism” we are referring to a system of private ownership in which one person, or a small group of individuals, owns and controls a company’s means of production, and is able to exclude access to them.
These means of production are called “private property” or “capital” and include tools, machinery, raw materials, buildings, real estate, etc. A “capitalist,” therefore, is a person who owns capital.
Think of capitalism as an economic monarchy: The shareholders or owners hand orders down, and they are passed through the chain of command until they get all the way to the bottom to you, the worker.
Value and Where it Comes From
In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained the Labor Theory of Value like this:
“The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What everything is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people. What is bought with money or with goods is purchased by labour as much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. That money or those goods indeed save us this toil. They contain the value of a certain quantity of labour which we exchange for what is supposed at the time to contain the value of an equal quantity. Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command.“
Socialists like to use the example of a chair. A chair has use-value: Someone can sit on it. It is much preferable to standing, and it’s safe to say that at least one chair can be found in nearly every American home. Use-value is a difficult thing to measure, though. Exactly how urgently is a chair needed? We can sit on the floor if we want. We might lie down instead. Some cultures don’t even use chairs.
Well, we can roughly approximate the use-value of a chair, instead, by seeing how much of something else a person is willing to trade for it. This is called “exchange-value.” A chair’s exchange-value might be worth $20, or 5 yards of raw lumber, or 6 hammers, or 1 peacoat. Simply put, a chair’s exchange-value increases or decreases by the laws of supply and demand.
But why does the chair have an exchange-value at all? For this, we refer to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. It is the “toil and trouble of acquiring it.” If you could walk out of your house, and pluck a chair from a tree, it wouldn’t be worth much. It is precisely because a carpenter has taken raw materials and converted them into a chair through labor input, that it has acquired its value.
In order to build a chair, the carpenter needs wood, a hammer, a saw, and glue. He needs to get these items from someone else who made them, so he buys them for whatever their exchange values are. He then puts all of those items together to build a chair by spending a few hours sawing, hammering, and glueing. By the time he is done, the exchange-value of the chair has increased, and he can now sell it.
If he did nothing to the wood, hammer, saw, or glue and then tried to sell it, its value would have never increased. It would remain the same. So, we know that the value of the labor that he put into building the chair is the difference between the cost of his materials and the amount that he sold it for.
Labor Relations Under Capitalism
To continue with our chair analogy, the capitalist is a person who owns the wood, the hammer, the glue, and the saw that are needed to make the chair. The capitalist hires the carpenter to build a chair, and then he sells the chair for its exchange-value.
With the money he received, he keeps enough to replace the tools and raw materials that went into the chair in order to build another, and is left over with the amount of money equal to the labor that went into producing it.
The capitalist now decides what to do with the remainder of the money, which we call the surplus. First, he must pay the laborer’s wages, then he must keep a remainder of the surplus as profit. Adam Smith, here, considers profit a wage paid to the capitalist for the risk and labor of purchasing and managing the tools, raw material, and labor. But, the fact remains that the laborer did the majority of the actual input that turned the raw material into a chair.
As an experiment to see what the capitalist’s actual labor input is to the end product, let’s supose we left him alone with the wood, glue, hammer, and saw; and see what happens now that he took the risk of purchasing the stock. . . nothing. He needs a carpenter, or nothing will happen.
Even if you consider the capitalist more skilled, better compensated, or more essential to production than the worker, the chair still won’t get built without actual labor input. The capitalist can have a brilliant idea for a chair, and purchase mounds of wood, and take every ounce of “risk” that can be taken, but without employees to build chairs, he will have never increased the exchange-value of whatever he already has in order to be sold for a profit. The mere idea to undertake a venture is not sufficient justification to assume an employer had a greater amount of labor input in a process that simply couldn’t happen without his employees – especially to the extent we see in modern society where some employers receive hundreds of times the compensation that their employees do.
Henry George uses the example of gathering eggs in Progress and Poverty:
“A company hires workers to stay on an island gathering eggs, which are sent to San Francisco every few days to be sold. At the end of the season, the workers are paid a set wage in cash. Now, the owners could pay them a portion of the eggs, as is done in other hatcheries. They probably would, if there were uncertainty about the outcome. But since they know so many eggs will be gathered by so much labor, it is more convenient to pay fixed wages. This cash merely represents the eggs — for the sale of eggs produces the cash to pay the wages. These wages are the product of the labor for which they are paid — just as the eggs would be to workers who gathered them for themselves without the intervention of an employer.
In these cases, we see that wages in money are the same as wages in kind. Is this not true of all cases in which wages are paid for productive labor? Isn’t the fund created by labor really the fund from which wages are paid?”
So the leftover money that the capitalist is taking from the value of the chair that he sold for profit, largely comes from the labor of the worker – who didn’t get it.
Now we look back to the hammer: Someone had to cut down wood, and someone had to mine iron to get the raw materials for the hammer. Someone had to build a road that the raw materials are shipped on. Someone had to build the truck that carried the raw materials to the factory. Finally, a worker at the factory took the raw materials, and converted them into a hammer. None of these items simply popped into existence in the hands of the capitalist: they were purchased with the existing labor of the working class.
This is what Adam Smith means by “labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.”
In capitalism, people who are already wealthy start off by having the money to purchase and control capital. The barrier to entry in production, and their exposure to risk is reduced compared to a person who owns nothing and has no choice but to sell their labor in order to live. When a capitalist is allowed to take surplus value from the labor that his employees as a whole produce, and make decisions with it, he is compelled to make choices that benefit himself. This doesn’t mean that capitalists are bad people. It is their job to increase profits however they can.
Adam Smith hoped that an employer would realize that having well-paid, happy employees would be to his or her own benefit. The opposite is true. Employers have an incentive to suppress wages, cheapen production, deprive workers of benefits wherever possible, and automate their own workforce out of the job. This was verified strikingly in the deplorable working conditions of the industrial revolution.
From a classical liberal perspective, this is the beauty of the free market. It’s flexible, efficient, and if you can’t earn enough money to survive, it’s your own fault. But, this looks a lot different when you start to see capitalism as system of an unaccountable minority on top, driven by greed, stealing from the very people who made them wealthy, and using the money to change legislation, and undermine democracy in order to further concentrate their own wealth.
Is this theory true? Well, if the labor theory of value is true, we would be able to see a divergence between productivity and compensation, because the people producing the value would not be getting it. Let’s check:
Socialism
Karl Marx first articulated the Labor Theory of Value as a system in which surplus value is actually taken from the person producing it. Socialists take a look at the material input and the labor input, and recognize that it is a buildup of human labor that no one person has a right to control.
Since the workers and the capitalist both brought value to the product that is being sold: one put in the material half, and the other added the labor, socialists believe that it is only fair (and in the best interest of society, anyway) that everyone who had a share in producing the final product should have a say in how it is used.
The “abolition of private property” and “collective ownership over the means of production” essentially just means that we believe the workplace should be run democratically. The company as a whole should hire and fire their managers, set wages, arrange benefits and goals, and determine how to increase profits. One person or a small group of people should not be allowed to suck wealth out of people who have no choice but to continue producing it in exchange for a bare existence.
W. E. B. DuBois said of democracy, “the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected.” Workers will not vote to give power back to a tiny minority. They will not vote for pitiful wages or non-existent benefits. They will not vote to outsource their own jobs or work grueling hours.
Socialism is the belief that we should build a society based on worker self-management or “collective ownership,” mutual aid, and the basic principle that everyone is equal and has an equal right to exist.
What’s more: we see socialism as an urgent necessity. Capitalism is not equipped to deal with so-called “externalities,” that is, social consequences of an exchange that are not reflected in the cost of goods or services that are being produced and traded. Climate change is one such externality.
The global climate crisis is a threat to human existence, and we only have about a decade before we begin dealing with the repercussions in a very tangible way. As long as we live in a society driven by personal gain, the looming threat of human extinction will remain a mere footnote in our priorities.
Seize the means of production.
Rabbi Michael Feinberg on multi-faith labor organizing and what he learned from the Catholic left
Charlotte Metro DSA Opposes all 6 North Carolina Constitutional Amendments
The Charlotte Metro Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (CLTMDSA) strongly opposes the six NC constitutional amendments slated for the November 2018 ballot. These amendments are unintelligible jargon, unreadable, and ultimately part of a concentrated GOP power grab to gerrymander and take powers away from other elected officials. We urge others in the Charlotte-Metro region to also vote against all six amendments. Read more about them below.
Amendment 1: Photo ID voting requirement
This will require voters to show photo ID before casting a ballot. Defenders of these laws claim that IDs reduce voter fraud; however considering in-person voter fraud is extremely rare, requiring voters to show identification is more of “a solution in search of a problem.” The reality is that these ID laws prevent many from exercising their right to vote and are discriminatory against the poor, racial minorities, and other vulnerable groups.1
Amendment 2: Create an eight-member bipartisan election board
Under current North Carolina law, the election board consists of nine members – four from the governor’s party, four from the other major party, and one independent – with the governor overseeing the board. This amendment will reduce the nine-member election board down to eight, all of which would be appointed by the general assembly thus taking power away from the governor.2 As the current governor is a Democrat, this amendment is simply a blatant power grab by the Republican- controlled legislature.
Amendment 3: Reduce the state income tax cap from 10% to 7%
As Democratic Socialists, we believe that people should pay their fair share and that if you have more, you should pay more in order to create a society that meets the needs of all. This amendment would cap the income tax at 7%, thus concentrating more wealth for the wealthy while putting more financial burden on lower-income earners and potentially cutting funds from needed services.
From the News & Observer: “A state’s revenue needs can vary unpredictably over time and income tax caps eliminate flexibility. If income taxes can’t be raised to meet needs, a state’s primary alternative is to raise sales taxes (and various usage fees). Sales taxes (and usage fees) impact poor people much more than they impact wealthy people: Poor people must spend most of their income, subjecting most of their income to sales tax, while wealthier people spend a much lower percentage of their income. Moreover, [this specific cap] locks in rates that are lower than recent historical rates and the new flat-rate tax structure shifts more of the income tax burden to lower earners. Other states such as Kansas that have lowered tax rates dramatically have had poor results. We are already seeing hints of the impact in N.C. with a precipitous drop in inflation-adjusted per student spending in public schools.”3
Amendment 4: Establish a merit system for filing judicial vacancies
This amendment is another attempted power grab by the NC GOP and shifts the power of who appoints judges between elections from the governor to the state legislature. Instead of the governor making appointments, anyone in the state may submit recommendations to the general assembly who will then provide the names of two NCGA-selected nominees to the governor. The governor will then have to select from between those two nominees who are not subject to gubernatorial veto. If a vacancy occurs right before an election, the chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court is then tasked with the appointment instead of the governor.4
Amendment 5: Protect the right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife
There is no current threat to these activities in the state, and having this on the ballot is more so an attempt to get the GOP base to show up to the polls. Since the amendment refers to making these “preferred means of managing and controlling wildlife,”5 this also causes ecological concerns in that it could result in reduced protections for wildlife areas and habitats. It also defers hunting and fishing laws to the general assembly, which takes power away from local groups to establish regulations and create or maintain protected wildlife areas. Again, this is nothing more than another attempted power grab by the state legislature.
Amendment 6: Add rights for victims of felony crimes
As Democratic Socialists, we stand for the abolishment of prisons and the carceral state. This particular amendment is dangerous as it could result in even more people in prisons and with harsher sentencing. There are also risks that this could create even more bias against defendants facing trial.
Mark Rabil, law professor at Wake Forest University says, “Obviously everybody agrees victims should have rights, but the way I see the goal of Marsy’s Law is so much more than that................. The bottom line is
they’re giving victims and victims’ families constitutional party status that can override the constitutional rights of a defendant to a fair trial and the right of districts attorneys to pursue cases in ways they perceive to be fair.”6
On top of the fact that the criminal justice system already largely discriminates against vulnerable communities and racial minorities, this amendment is an open door to further exacerbate that discrimination and create even more disparity within our justice system.
CLTMDSA sees these amendments as disingenuous and not in the best interest of the people of North Carolina. Rather these efforts are to increase GOP control, consolidate power for the wealthy, and create more inequality for the most vulnerable in the state. Please join us in voting NO on all six in November.
1https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet 2 https://longleafpolitics.com/nc-constitutional-amendments-2018/
3https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article214823780.html 4https://longleafpolitics.com/nc-constitutional-amendments-2018/ 5https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article216437935.html 6https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article218118890.html