[Friedrich Engels’] three classical laws of dialectics [are]…the law of “interpenetrating opposites,” the interdependence of components; the “transformation of quantity to quality,” a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state; and the “negation of negation,” the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states.
Stephen Jay Gould (1976)

Dialectic training of the mind, as necessary to a revolutionary fighter as finger exercises to a pianist, demands approaching all problems as processes and not as motionless categories.
Leon Trotsky (1939)

More important than the specific histories and theory we read is learning how to think and how to study a problem. Analysis that hones how we understand what we read improves our strategic and tactical decision-making.

For Marxists, this is the dialectical method, rooted in Marx’s theory of historical materialism. 

Historical materialism is the simple idea that human history develops based on the ‘objective’ way that human societies reproduce themselves: how they produce the ‘stuff of life’, meaning commodities (food, clothing, medicine, housing, etc.) and the services that modify and distribute those commodities. This does not mean that our economic systems determine everything. That was rejected as an interpretation almost as soon as Marx’s method came into being: 

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, [for example]: constitutions…[legal] forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants…philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. 
(Engels, 1890)

The outlook that Engels is criticizing here is sometimes called “mechanical materialism” and sometimes “economic determinism,” and is related to concepts like “vulgar Marxism” or “class reductionism,” which ignore the dynamic way that historical materialism considers systems as a whole.

The historical materialist outlook does not deny the influence of peoples’ conscious choices. It just tries to situate those choices within what can logically develop from existing social relations. It assumes that, in the big picture, systems that come into being and survive for any meaningful amount of time must rest on a material base. In other words, human choice and ideas matter, but will be formed in part by, and be constrained by, the material basis of society.

The Method of Motion

The dialectical method takes the world as it is and tries to understand the existing (‘concrete’) structures and relations as processes in constant motion, with  ’inherent contradictions’ which will influence their behavior. 

Any given factual observation we have of the world is like a photograph: ‘34% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree.’ But a photograph is not only not the full story; to some degree, it is a lie, because the world is always in motion. Its motion defines it. Observing human beings, ecosystems, social groupings, and societies at a given moment does not tell us everything about them, and in fact leaves out the most important things, because they are in a constant state of motion or change. 

Nothing in the physical world stays in a steady state, nothing in the world is completely independent, and nothing in the world can ever completely revert to an earlier form. Everything is constantly changing – is always interdependent – and therefore will always look both similar to and different from its own earlier states, along with the world around it. Our experience that things are in a steady state is just the limit of our powers of observation. 

We treat a tree as a single object, but in fact a ‘tree’ is incoherent without soil, oxygen, and sunlight; we have labeled a particular observable phenomenon as a “tree” but in fact a tree is just a momentary expression of a physical process we happen to observe in a certain way. If we ‘saw’ in millennia rather than days, we would barely even notice a tree, or a flower, or a person, all of which would briefly flicker into and out of existence; but we could lovingly watch forests, hills, or reefs grow and take shape before they erode and disappear.

Thinking of things as existing in a steady state, as having an ‘absolute’ nature, is sometimes called ‘idealism.’ or ‘metaphysics”; it is a still photograph. Nothing in the physical world, that results from or acts in the physical world is in a steady or static state. Everything has to be understood by how it changes over time, and how it relates to the ongoing processes to which it is connected. 

Who are you? You are the culmination of millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of reproduction, your personal experiences, the things you’re observing and learning each day. You’re not exactly the same tomorrow as today. Defining ‘you’ by how you are on any given day actually misinforms. 

The dialectical method tries to understand the component parts of social phenomena, while also understanding how those component parts all relate to one another and to other systems. It assumes interdependence, motion, and change. It therefore never assumes anything comes into being on its own, or simply as a result of conscious decisions, but instead that it must have emerged as a result of webs of social relations, historical processes, and even dumb luck. 

Evolution and History

The historical materialist and dialectical method have a close relationship with Darwinian understanding of systems. 

For example, among the observations of ecological systems that Darwin developed was that at any given moment, any ‘new’ biological species will look, to a significant degree, like its preceding form. This is because every species, while it is ‘evolving’ over thousands of generations, still has to continue to survive in its given habitat. Every change between one generation and the next – between parent and child – will have to be small. Big leaps are unlikely to survive, because every species has been honed over millennia to fit into its ecosystem. 

Even after drastic ‘speciation’ (divergence into different species), the similarities to a common ancestor are obvious; bodies retain many of the same structures, because the body has to survive. Consider:

As different as these species are, their forelimbs share all the same parts, but developed slowly over time into different proportions and, eventually, different functions – not by accident, but because they share a common ancestor. Even if the changes happened through accelerated periods, at no point was there some ‘big leap’ where completely new internal structures were introduced. 

The dialectic method, too, studies how developments in human societies contain some elements of the systems that came before it, but honed, altered, or developed to accommodate new conditions and the ideologies that accompany those changes. One example is in legal systems. The U.S. legal system is based on the English common law system in place at the time of the American Revolution; although the U.S. Constitution and principles of bourgeois democracy changed much about the existing system, it was still built up from that system. In turn, the English legal system derived from feudal Anglo-Saxon legal concepts, blended with French traditions after the Norman conquest – which themselves came from Roman law and Celtic and Gaulish traditions. This is why legal jargon has so many French terms: mortgage, jury, larceny, parole, estoppel, plaintiff, tort, chattel, and bail are all Norman words. 

The history of revolutionary governments is, in one sense, a history of revolutionary parties struggling with how to deal with the fact that a system that currently exists cannot just be rebuilt from scratch, but needs to work with the ‘bones’ already in place. They therefore try to figure out how to apply the correct pressures to change the system rapidly. Again, this is because societies are not steady-state organisms, but systems in constant motion from one moment to the next, needing to produce and consume. They need to change while also continuing to function. Even if you want to radically redesign a creature, it must continue to eat and sleep and reproduce from one day to the next or else it will die out. 

None of this means that radical change is impossible. It just means that systems we intend to change rather than destroy will always need to be built up based on what is already there, and that we need to understand their modes of motion, their interdependence with other systems, and their internal contradictions – the adversarial pressures within themselves – so that as we apply force to change them, we are doing so in a way that will develop them in a particular direction (or, in some cases, hasten their destruction). 

In short, the dialectical method teaches us how to study the processes of change. It takes nothing for granted; it is infinitely curious about why something came into being, where it came from, what it’s made of, and where it can conceivably go based on how it is composed. It is a science of thinking that rejects the idea that a photograph can tell a whole story, and instead pushes us to study the laws of motion that explain why and how something goes from A to B – and, eventually, to C.

The post Improving Our Analysis: The Dialectical Method and Historical Materialism appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

by Vincent Lima

The effort to defeat Trump and the fascist GOP has something in common with our chapter’s Stop the ROC BID campaign.

We adopted that campaign, unanimously, knowing full well that stopping the Business Improvement District would not defund the RPD, which would continue to be an occupying force in the community. Nor would it improve schools, eliminate food deserts, improve public transportation, or bring any other benefits to the working class.

We campaigned to preserve the bad status quo.

Why? So we could canvass our neighbors and share with them our vision for a better world while preventing something worse.

We won that campaign, perhaps sooner than we had hoped or expected.

The analogy may be trivial, since Trump and his white supremacist circle promise much worse than a business-improvement district. But it reminds us that in building socialism we have to play defense as well as offense.

Things are indeed bad today. The Republicans have a clear vision for the future, however, and it is much worse than the status quo.

I attended a lecture by Arundhati Roy in 2019 that is branded in my mind:

While many of us dreamt that ‘Another world is possible,’ these folks were dreaming that too. And it is their dream—our nightmare—that is perilously close to being realized.

Who are they?

White supremacists in the White House, new imperialists in China, neo-Nazis once again massing on the streets of Europe, Hindu nationalists in India, and a host of butcher-princes and lesser dictators in other countries to guide us into the Unknown.

The Landscape

That a second Trump presidency would be catastrophic and abhorrent is obvious.

But it’s also clear that the Democratic establishment, beholden to capital and empire, is more prone to acquiesce to far-right demands and even embrace them, than to fight back. A Harris presidency would be a continuation of the bad status quo in which we organize. It is not a prospect to embrace with enthusiasm. It is, however, the only available alternative to a Trump victory.

Before the presidential primaries, it may have seemed like a second Biden term was the only alternative to a Trump victory. We did not accept that proposition and unanimously embraced the New York version of the Uncommitted movement, Vote Blank, Not Biden. By organizing people to cast blank ballots, we tried to force Biden off the ticket and open the door to an alternative. Yes, Biden’s diminished capacity was the straw that broke his back, but our collective response to his enabling of genocide in Palestine was among the major weights contributing to the fracture.

At this stage, with the identity of the candidates settled, how do we proceed?

Our Choices

On a national level, DSA has sadly shown a lack of leadership at a critical time.

The National Political Committee (correctly, in my view) rejected a proposal titled, “No Votes for Genocide,” which would have had DSA urging voters not to vote for Harris. But it has not embraced a different strategy either.

The proposal was in line with the idea that to vote for Harris, a “genocidaire,” is to support Zionism. Some proponents of “No Votes” acknowledge that not voting for Harris puts a definite genocidaire in power and neither stops the genocide nor saves any Palestinian lives. They suggest the “No Votes” approach is a bargaining tactic instead.

Indeed, the conversational implicature of the “No Votes for Genocide” approach is that if Harris were to publicly urge Biden to impose an arms embargo on Israel, or if the genocidal campaign against Gaza had not happened at all, we would endorse her. We would not. The problem with the Democratic establishment goes well beyond Gaza. We’re not really bargaining here!

The “No Votes” approach is what Bill Fletcher, Jr., calls “a politics of frustration.”

In such a moment of frustration, what then is the solution?

Elections are an organizing opportunity par excellence, and the solution (of course) is to organize!

Organize, but how?

At this moment, we organize by defeating fascism, as embodied by Trump, while articulating a socialist vision for the future.

Our approach to 2024 was a question that we, as DSA, considered at our 2023 national convention. In the resolution, “Defend Democracy through Political Independence,” the convention charged the National Political Committee with forming “a multi-tendency national committee to prepare for the 2024 national election by putting forward a positive program modeled after our 2020 DSA-For-Bernie campaign platform.”

The resolution instructed the NPC to submit the program to a “membership-wide vote no later than December 31, 2023.”

The program was to guide the political communications of DSA nationally and locally during the 2024 elections. In its first recital, the resolution acknowledges that

The Republican Party and the extreme Right pose a significant danger to the multiracial working class in the United States. The ongoing threat to democracy and civil rights and the offensive against the material conditions, liberty, and lives of women, Black people and people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community should not be underestimated.

Naturally, the resolution minces no words about the Democratic Party, which “remains the primary political opponent of the working class in the ‘blue’ states, cities, and districts where DSA is often strongest.” It notes that “to combat the Right, we must resist being subsumed into the Democratic Party and its NGO apparatus.”

The resolution continues (emphasis added):

Our commitment to confronting the Right at the ballot in 2024 should selectively focus on preventing Republican subversion of democracy and civil rights. DSA should articulate a robust vision of democracy different from that of both capitalist parties.

The resolution calls on DSA nationally and locally to engage tactics like,

Hosting or participating in rallies and protests against the Republican nominee and the radical Right focusing on their attempts to undermine and attack democracy, workers’, and civil rights.

Incidentally, the convention explicitly rejected a provision that NPC should “publicly communicate disapproval to endorsed candidates and elected DSA members who . . . endors[e] centrist Democrats.”

The “Workers Deserve More!” program released on August 27, 2024, albeit without an all-member vote, is the outcome of the convention resolution. “In the face of the increasingly right-wing Republican Party,” the program recognizes “that a second Trump victory would be catastrophic for the international working class.” It does not, however, explain what we might do to forestall that catastrophe.

Our Movement Partners

Some of the most prominent voices of democratic socialism have outright endorsed Kamala Harris, arguing that the most urgent imperative of the moment is to defeat Trump.

Bernie Sanders endorsed Harris and went on to articulate a vision of what we can achieve, through our concerted organizing efforts, in a Harris administration.

Comrade Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Harris and gave a bad speech at the Democratic National Convention. She is now focused on Harris’s promise to invest heavily in new home construction and, as a democratic socialist, outlined a bill “to create the next generation of decommodified, dignified homes, including public housing and co-ops.” Campaigns in support of this bill will be a great organizing opportunity for DSA if Trump is defeated in November.

Among other prominent voices on the left, the endorsement by Angela Davis is notable. The nominee of either major party will “be the face of capitalism, militarism, and neo-colonialism,” she said to a French Communist Party festival. But voting is a collective and strategic act. A vote for Harris, she argued, is “about opening space for those of us who are more radical than Kamala Harris to put the pressure for change, especially in the first place when it comes to the genocide in Palestine.”

Also endorsing Harris outright is the militant leadership of the United Auto Workers. (For more on labor and the election, come to “Socialist Labor against Fascism” on Sept. 24.)

Other movement partners have taken a more subtle approach, which I find to be more in line with the approach decided upon by the DSA convention.

The United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) is DSA’s partner in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. In “The Path Forward for Working People in the 2024 Elections and Beyond,” UE excoriates the Democratic Party leadership, calls for a labor party, notes that the base for such a party exists, but acknowledges that “it cannot simply be wished into existence.” As we do the work to prepare the ground, UE urges that “workers strategically vote against Trump by voting for the only viable candidate running against him — which is now Kamala Harris. We encourage our locals and members to have conversations about the real dangers that a second Trump presidency poses to labor, and to ensure that UE members are educated about the issues and registered to vote.” (Emphasis added.)

The national leadership of the Uncommitted Movement likewise refuses to endorse Harris outright but in effect urges everyone to vote for her because they don’t want to cede the Democratic Party as a site of struggle: “Movements have long worked to rid the Democratic Party of hateful forces—segregationists, anti-union, anti-choice, and anti-LGBTQ proponents, the NRA, and Big Oil, and we will work in that legacy to rid our party of AIPAC’s pro-war extremism.”

I find the last part about not ceding the site of struggle compelling. That’s what Bernie was doing in 2016 and 2020. DSA grew enormously in the Bernie candidacies because we moved working people who associate with the Democratic Party from liberalism to socialism.

It’s Not about Voting

All that said, here in New York we can sit back and vote our conscience. If we are not content with sitting back, however, and seeing whether Trump will win, there is much we can do in line with our national convention resolution.

The “Socialism Beats Fascism” initiative (which I am helping organize) has identified ten DSA campaigns in swing states that we can support. Supporting these campaigns allows us to advocate for democratic socialism and build our organization’s power base, all the while helping defeat Trump. These campaigns range from Comrade Rashida Tlaib’s reelection effort in Michigan to state-level campaigns in Georgia and North Carolina, to reproductive freedom initiatives in Florida, Arizona, and Nevada.

We can support our DSA comrades in these campaigns by phone banking or fund raising from home. Or we can travel to one of those states to canvass door to door.

Whether we choose this vehicle, work through our unions, or organize in some other way, the best path forward in this frustrating time, as always, is to block the worst and organize for the best.

The post Organize in the Face of Rising Fascism first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

In the Preface to Marx’s Capital, he writes that making the book accessible to the working class is “a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.” Readers who have struggled through its first chapters or been intimidated by the page count, however, probably think he could have made a better attempt. As Marx admits, “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” 

But workers exhausted by long hours of labor may not find the energy for this fatiguing climb. They may not see an appeal in the intellectual labor of reading and interpreting theory. 

Fortunately, class consciousness does not depend on conquering a certain number of texts. Workers experience capitalism firsthand, and its exploitation is clear and personal. Bill Haywood, leader and founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, declared “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I have the marks of capital all over me.”

The socialist movement cannot dispense with theory, however. It requires a framework by which the mechanisms of our exploitation are understood, alongside an analysis of the history of class struggle. Theory provides a common language to describe our circumstances. By these means, we develop a coherent and functioning strategy to overcome capitalism.

We must also struggle against the cooptation of terms. The smearing of liberal Democrats with “communism” for the slightest nod toward progressive policies, demonstrates how terms are abused. The ruling class has a vested interest in associating socialism with authoritarianism and inefficiency, rather than a society dedicated to meeting the needs of the working people. 

This confusion leads directly to the betrayal of class interests. According to Civil rights leader Kwame Ture, few Americans could intelligibly answer the question, “What is communism?” Yet the cry: “The communists are coming! The communists are coming!” accompanied guns to Panama, Santo Domingo, Vietnam, and elsewhere; stifling challenges to the maintenance of American empire. “The man or woman who hates communism the most,” says Ture, “is the man or woman that knows the least about communism.” 

Socialist organizers have a duty to dispel this confusion, and to communicate clearly for the working class. In this capacity, the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America hosts regular political education sessions to analyze socialist literature. Made accessible by reading summaries and facilitated discussion, participants develop political consciousness through the process of articulating their thoughts and engaging with others.

It remains helpful to have an understanding of foundational concepts for these conversations, which often seek to apply them in new contexts. Here, I provide an overview of these “basics of socialism,” in Marxist terms, to help readers see the world through a socialist lens; understanding the forces at work in their oppression and uncovering the possibility for change.

Foundational to socialism is an understanding of the exploitation of labor under capitalism. The capitalist employs workers, using their labor to create value—by turning raw materials into finished goods, or commodities, that are sold on the market for profit. Workers are compensated, in wages, by a minimal amount of the surplus value they create. To maximize profit (surplus value remaining after expenses), the capitalist cuts wages as low as possible and extracts as much labor as possible from the worker; both by intensifying their work and lengthening the workday.

In fact, the capitalist cannot pay the worker more, since he is in competition with other capitalists. “Competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws,” says Marx. “It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital.” Competition requires the capitalist to reinvest surplus value into the business, to produce commodities at an ever-cheaper margin, lest he be overtaken by his rivals. Workers are also placed in competition with one another, as labor is bought and sold and must be offered at the lowest rate.

The system of production shapes workers and their relations. In a world dominated by machines and Taylorist efficiency, workers are reduced to mechanical appendages; becoming alienated from themselves and one another. Laboring for the enrichment of others, workers do not create goods for themselves. Instead, they are dominated by the commodities and capital which they create. “Labor itself progressively extends and gives an ever wider and fuller existence to the objective world of wealth as a power alien to labor,” describes Marx. The rhythm of life is determined by innovations workers did not necessarily ask for nor desire, while the surplus value of their labor is employed by capitalists to solidify power. 

Capitalism constantly uproots and overturns traditional relations, holding nothing sacred. An epidemic of social alienation and loneliness can be seen as a result. We live in increasingly commodified environments that limit the free public space available for association. Individualism is encouraged by competition; while collectivism is discouraged by censorship and repression from the ruling class. 

Even in their off-time, workers are dominated by the demands of capital. Workers are given minimal time to recover before returning to continue producing value for their employer. The leisure time of weekends and an eight-hour workday, is only enjoyed today thanks to the success of previous labor struggles. Still, many workers are exempt from these guarantees, and overwork takes a physical toll on workers. The workforce requires constant social reproduction to ensure its supply; and is dependent on the uncompensated labor of women to raise new recruits. 

Capitalists are enriched while they sit idly collecting the benefit of workers’ labor. Workers become impoverished as competition drives wages downward or displaces them by labor-saving machines. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,” says Marx. It is this class division under capitalism that pits the worker (proletariat) against the capitalist (bourgeoisie).

Workers are forced to sell their labor because they do not have access to the means of production. Workers do not own the farms, factories, or mines where the necessities for life are extracted and produced. The worker is forced to become a consumer, laboring to make money for the purchase of commodities. 

In fact, capitalism makes a constant effort to separate workers from the means of production and into employment. Primitive accumulation describes “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” During the English enclosure movement, peasants were removed from common lands and forced into the employ of others. Such instances of dispossession illustrate the violent compulsion at the core of capitalism. “Those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labor-market,” says Marx, are “the basis of the whole process” of capitalist class formation.

The ideology of capitalism reinforces its material base, developing a false consciousness among workers. They are led to identify with the concerns of the capitalist; believing in the inevitable reward of hard work and the omnipotent presence of the market. A disconnect is created between the understanding of things and their processes of production. One purchasing a smartphone, for example, does not confront the suffering of the mines nor the despair of the factory. This fetischism of the commodity mystifies the framework of relations under capitalism, “conceal[ing], instead of disclosing,”  according to Marx, “the social character of private labor, and the social relations between the individual producers.”

The process of resource extraction under capitalism affects not just the worker, but their environment. The ever-increasing production of goods compelled by competition, forces capital to continually expand in search of raw materials and markets. The harmful byproducts of habitat destruction, pollution, and carbon emissions, are externalities—negative costs that are shared by all, rather than the companies responsible. Under capitalism, goods are produced for their exchange value—i.e., for their dollar amount—rather than for use value. Capitalists are focused not on the real-world effects of their product, but its rate of return. 

The global search for resources and competition for new markets also leads, according to Lenin’s description of imperialism, “to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world.” The capitalists of world powers compete for their share of surplus value using national armies and financial warfare. These bloodthirsty conquests are justified by notions of racial supremacy described as racial capitalism.

Thankfully, socialist theory also shows a way out. Given capital’s reliance on labor, workers can collectively strike; denying their labor and cutting off the capitalists’ source of profit (and thereby power). Thus, the working class holds the revolutionary potential to overcome the conditions of its exploitation. Then, it can work to inaugurate a dictatorship of the proletariat to oversee the transition to socialism—not in an authoritarian sense; but rather governance by and for the democratic control of the working class.

Under historical materialist interpretations popular within socialism, events are propelled by the material conditions of society—rather than, for example, “great men.” With its innumerable crises, capitalism constantly creates the seeds of its own destruction. While revolutionary optimism in the final triumph of the working class may be criticized as deterministic, “In so far as the course of history and more particularly, the future socialist revolution are, for Marx, inevitable, they are inevitable not despite what men may do, but because of what men, being rational, are bound, predictably, to do,” explains G.A. Cohen in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence.

Protests, direct action, and organizational self-governance are moments of praxis: opportunities to put theory into action. These moments function to actualize our beliefs, and toward the instruction of theory for an observing public. “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it,” asserts Marx. May workers grasp this understanding of their historical placement, and create the conditions for their liberation.

The post Back to the “Basics of Socialism”: Concepts to Understand Our World and Envision Conditions for Change first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Thorn West: Issue No. 215

State Politics

• Governor Newson called a special session to pass regulations on the oil industry, with the intention of lowering gas prices. The measure has been further discussed in the State Assembly. While the State Senate has resisted returning for the extra session, Newsom has functionally ignored any legislation on his desk that originated in the Senate.

City Politics

• Today was Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s first day as Council President. Former president Paul Krekorian stepped down, as he will be termed out in November.

• A council motion to create protest “bubble zones” around religious institutions and other buildings (meant to curtail Palestinian solidarity protests) was agendized by the Public Safety Committee, and received unanimous opposition from over 100 public commenters. Hearing for the motion was continued to a later date.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• A University of California regents committee has approved the purchase of “less-lethal” munitions for its campus police forces, following a summer in which they were used against Palestine solidarity protesters. The vote took place in an empty chamber after activists were removed by police.

• The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department unveiled a new policy banning deputy gangs. The policy brings the department into compliance with a 2021 state law and follows sustained activist and media pressure.

Labor

• Across Oregon and Washington, 33,000 machinists represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers have gone on strike against Boeing after contract negotiations stalled. Strike demands include higher wages.

Housing Rights

• Earlier this year, city council requested a report on the current formula used to calculate maximum allowable rent increases on the city’s rent-controlled apartments. LAist obtained the unreleased report via a public records request. The report finds that rental increases have favored landlords, and that across Los Angeles an average of only 35% of rental income is needed to cover landlord operating costs. Report here. DSA-LA Twitter has more.

• LA Public Press debuted a podcast series telling the story of the Hillside Villa Tenants Association, who for years have organized to resist attempts by their landlord to price them out of their homes, becoming leaders of the tenant movement in Los Angeles.

Environmental Justice

• In 2022, the city council passed a ban on oil drilling in the city limits. Last week that ban was overturned by a judge, on the ground that it conflicts with state law. However, a bill currently on the Governor’s desk might resolve that conflict.

• Firefighters have begun to gain the upper hand over several large wildfires that have burned across Southern California in the past weeks.

The post Blockbuster Report on LA Landlords and Tenants + New LA City Council President appeared first on The Thorn West.