Into the Bright Sunshine, by Samuel Freedman (Oxford University Press) is subtitled ” Young Hubert Humphrey and the Struggle for Civil Rights.” You might think the book was something for a history class, a chronicle of events long ago; even for that, you might turn away, if like many DL readers you mostly think of Humphrey as the man who didn’t stand up to Lyndon Johnson on the U.S. war against Vietnam. But as Freedman, who’s also an award-winning journalist and professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, explores in this book, there’s a lot more to Humphrey’s story, much of it useful for today’s struggles against racism and inequality. Freedman’s previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005); Letters To A Young Journalist (2006); and Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013). (Ed.)

Interview conducted by email on August 22, by DL Online Editor Chris Lombardi CL). (Full disclosure: Lombardi studied with Freedman decades ago, in the book seminar he runs at Columbia Journalism School).

CL: At some points, Humphrey’s journey feels kinda Joseph Campbell-ish, with young Hubert painted as a naif hero, going forth to conquer the forces of prejudice: “It was in Louisiana that Hubert first met Jews…” It can’t have been that simple.

SF: I wouldn’t necessarily invoke Campbell, but Humphrey’s childhood was incredibly isolated. He came from a town of 500 people, almost all of them white Protestants with roots in northern Europe or Scandinavia. One Jewish family in town. A small community of Black railroad workers 40 miles away. A Catholic town ten miles away that had crosses burned on its outskirts. It was a tribute to Humphrey’s father H.H. — a freethinker, a liberal Democrat — that Hubert as a boy was infused with a broader political and social perspective. 

CL: Can you speak to his religious evolution, and where does his Quaker grandma fit in?

SF:As far as I can tell, his Quaker grandmother wasn’t such a big influence. But the Social Gospel strain of Protestant theology was. Growing up as a member of the local Methodist church, and being best friends with the minister’s son, Hubert was exposed to a theology that put much less emphasis on personal purity and making it into heaven than it did on building the Kingdom of God (the term that was used) on Earth. Doing so meant supporting organized labor, reaching out across denominational and racial lines. That sensibility informed much of Humphrey’s public life.

CL: What distinctions did he see between the Social Gospel and all-out socialism, leading him to steer the Democratic Party away from the Henry Wallace crowd?

SF: It’s pretty clear that Humphrey was in the New Deal camp of using activist government to save capitalism from itself rather than seeking state ownership of major industries, etc. But it’s also true that in the Dakotas, where he grew up, there’d been a strong tradition of farmers forming their own cooperatives in order to have leverage against the power of the railroads and the commercial grain, dairy, and livestock markets. Humphrey was a major supporter of Wallace in the mid-1940s. He even gave one of the seconding speeches to Wallace’s (failed) nomination as vice president in the 1944 convention. But the emerging Cold War totally shattered their friendship and alliance. Wallace fervently opposed the Marshall Plan, while Humphrey strongly supported it. And I think that Humphrey interpreted Wallace in light of the bitter factional fighting in Minnesota’s Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party between Popular Front and anti-Communist forces. 

CL: How, in showing us a hero, did you avoid the “white-savior” narrative?

SF: From the outset of work on this book, I vowed not to fall into the white-savior trope. So I was always looking for the Black (and Jewish) allies and influences on Humphrey. Key among them was Cecil Newman, who founded, published, and edited the Black newspaper in Minneapolis, the Spokesman, and was really Humphrey’s tutor on racism in Minneapolis. And when the book moves forward to the 1948 Democratic convention, I was very attuned to A. Philip Randolph’s campaign for mass Black draft resistance if Harry Truman didn’t desegregate the military. After Humphrey’s speech at the convention led the Democratic Party to fully embrace civil rights for the first time, Humphrey and one of Randolph’s top aides exchanged letters that expressed their understanding that you needed both inside and outside forms of pressure to achieve political change. Humphrey never perceived himself as doing things for Black people (or Jews), but rather doing things with them. 

CL: You say early on that you wanted a full portrait of Minneapolis’s struggles with racism, pinging off the 2020 George Floyd flashpoint. When did you realize how huge the scope would be? You note, “The first Black person recorded in what became Minnesota was a fur trader…” and soon locate Dred Scott at Fort Snelling! That scope covers geographic space as well as time. Did you always know it would be like that?

SF: When I started this book in 2015–with Barack Obama in his second term and marriage equality being declared a Constitutional right–I thought I was filling some important historical and biographical gaps, about both Humphrey and the proto-Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s. I was intent on researching the context of racism and anti-Semitism in Minneapolis during Humphrey’s years there. But when [Donald Trump was elected in 2016] and George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, I realized that I was writing current events. The parallels between the struggles that Humphrey was involved in—whether to reform a bigoted, abusive police force or more generally to advocate for inclusive democracy against right-wing extremists like Gerald L.K. Smith–were almost eerie to comprehend. But, as an author, I also appreciated that my book might have a lot more present-day relevance than I’d initially assumed. 

CL: You show Humphrey learning how to use political means to try to address racism/anti-Semitism. He acted as what we would today call an ally/accomplice. And you name points on the journey from South Dakota to Minneapolis to Jim Crow Louisiana and back again. What’s your story, of learning you had to be an ally/accomplice? Or did you think of yourself as neither, just a super-accurate observer?

SF: I grew up in Central Jersey in a very politically minded, leftie household. My father and his entire family had lived in an anarchist community in Stelton, NJ, and though he went on to become a successful capitalist–as a machinist, inventor of microbiology machinery, and ultimately founder of a biotech company – e was firmly a man of the Left. My mother was less overtly political but was very formed by having rejected her parents’ Orthodox Judaism. The harshest insult in my father’s lexicon would be to say to me, “You’re so bourgeois.” In any case, the dinner conversations of my youth were often about the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. My parents were both Gene McCarthy supporters in 1968, though they were sane and practical enough to vote for Humphrey against [Richard] Nixon that November. So my entire career as a non-fiction author has been very much inspired by the political milieu of my family and by the belief that one’s work should contribute something positive to society.

CL: Speaking of which, can a writer be an ally, or even an accomplice (joining struggles outright, against our own privilege)? I’m guessing your answer is about reporting, and about listening– the latter word also used in today’s ally/accomplice discussions. What do you tell writers who ask you how to best explore these questions?

SF:I definitely believe a writer can be an ally. But the writing can only be credible if it also looks with intellectual honesty even at social and political movements a writer supports or endorses. You can’t be an author and also be writing de facto p.r. 

CL: Do you mean for Bright Sunshine to be an antidote for the helplessness we can easily feel when Silver-Shirts types resurface? What can Humphrey teach us all now?

SF: The battles that Humphrey fought against American fascists/bigots like Gerald L.K. Smith and Strom Thurmond are so instructive for our battles today against Trumpism. Humphrey’s enemies were Christian Nationalists, white supremacists, American Firsters. Sound familiar? The fact that we need to fight these battles anew every generation or two doesn’t mean that Humphrey, Randolph, et al,, failed; it means that victory doesn’t last forever and that progress always provokes backlash. But it’s vital for progressives today to be reminded that we can win, and have won, these battles in the past.

CL: In a book with 2020’s “reckoning” at its center, let’s talk Humphrey and policing.I was especially struck by that 1946 moment when goes against his own police commissioner after Dreamland Cafe. What’s the role of policing in this story? What would Humphrey think of today’s “defund the police” narrative? 

SF: Humphrey saw extremely clearly the bigotry, the abusiveness, and the inbred culture of the Minneapolis police force in the 1940s. Not only did he personally intercede in such cases, but he had the entire police force sent for training in “human relations,” as the term was back then, at the University of Minnesota. The tragedy of his rapid ascent from Minneapolis into the U.S, Senate is that he never fully implemented his police-reform plans, and over the succeeding decades, the powerful police union defied every other attempt at reform. The historian Michael Lansing at Augsburg University has written very compellingly on that point. But Humphrey, in my view, would not have had any truck with defunding the police.

CL: I’m also thinking of his role in prodding Truman to finally desegregate the military, after working with A. Philip Randolph during the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Did he think of the military families he met then, later, when anti-war activists targeted him?.

SF: Humphrey’s support for the Vietnam War was the gravest mistake of his political life, as he ultimately acknowledged. But he was like a lot of other Cold War liberals, including Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Walter Reuther, if I remember correctly, who bought into the “domino theory,” at least initially.

CL: Why are socialists Michael Harrington and Bayard Rustin missing from the book? Harrington, the first editor of this magazine, served on the board of Americans for Democratic Action as a student in 1948 , just as Humphrey was using the anti-communist lefty group to reshape the Democratic National Committee, and he later worked with Humphrey on the War on Poverty. Humphrey thanks him in The Education of a Public Man, along with Bayard Rustin. 

SF: Purely a matter of already being about 30,000 words over my promised length for the manuscript and not being able to squeeze in everything I would have wanted to. 

The post “Into the Bright Sunshine”- Why Hubert Humphrey Speaks to Our Times appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

During our August 27th, 2023, General Meeting, the membership of CT DSA voted unanimously to endorse Abdul Osmanu and Laurie Sweet in the upcoming Democratic primary for the Legislative Council of Hamden. Both incumbents in their offices and DSA members, councilpersons Osmanu and Sweet, have spent the last two years fighting for racial, social, and economic justice for tenants and working people in Hamden and across Connecticut, and we look forward to sending them back for another term in office.

CT DSA endorsed Abdul Osmanu in 2021 as a part of our first Hamden slate of Justin Farmer and himself for Council alongside Mariam Khan for Board of Education (JAM Slate). Since winning the election as the youngest councilman in town history, Abdul has worked to make the Hamden Police accountable to the people and stood alongside tenants and labor unions fighting for fair contracts. 

Laurie Sweet supported our JAM Slate in 2021 while running for the Legislative Council herself. Although not a DSA member nor endorsed for her election, she has worked closely with us and Hamden Tenant Union, an affiliate of Connecticut Tenants Union (CTTU), in the fight to protect and expand tenants’ rights and has since become a DSA member. Laurie traveled to Hartford on several occasions to speak on behalf of her tenant constituents in public comments before legislative committees and has worked closely with Abdul and Justin to push for a town government that is accountable to and empowers the working and renting class.

We are sad to see our long-running elected comrade Justin Farmer retire from the Council this year after four years in office, but we have immense trust in his fellow DSA members in Hamden to carry his mission forward. We congratulate Justin on his long and successful tenure in office and for all his efforts to build the socialist movement in Connecticut. Board of Education member Mariam Khan will not be up for reelection until the next cycle.

We encourage our members, supporters, and allies to get involved in Abdul and Laurie’s campaigns and to vote for them in the September 12th, 2023, Democratic primary. 

Solidarity forever,

Jacey L, co-chair

Jason R, co-chair

CT DSA Steering Committee

LVDSA Office Hours

August 31st @ 7pm

Drop in during our office hours to ask any questions about DSA, our chapter, any of the work we’re doing, or just enjoy some company while you do DSA work. Register here.

Tenant Canvassing

September 2nd @ 9am

We will be going door-to-door informing tenants of their rights to a habitable dwelling unit and how to defend themselves against eviction. Join us and help build tenant power in our city! Register here.

Labor 101

September 3rd @ 3:30pm

Join us this Labor Day weekend for an event to examine the history of the labor movement in the United States and discover ways to show solidarity with unions as numerous labor struggles break out across the country and in our own city. Register here.

Socialist Vibes

September 4th @ 7pm

Join us for a virtual discussion group covering socialists concepts & theories. Stay tuned for more information on the discussion topic. We’d love to hear from you about what topics would interest in you in the future. Drop by and share what you’d like to see from our political education program! Register here.

September General Body Meeting

September 7th @ 7pm

Join us for our September General Body Meeting to hear updates on the chapter, discuss issues relevant to our work, and vote on any chapter business. Register here.

Communities United: A Multicultural Festival

September 9th @ 4pm – 9pm

We will be joining SEIU 1107 and community partners for the Communities United, Raising the Stakes 2023 Multicultural Festival. We will be celebrating all of the different communities throughout Las Vegas and Nevada with performances and food trucks. Communities United is free to attend to and open to everyone! View details.

We have a big weekend coming up. On Saturday, September 2nd we will be tabling all day at Twin Ports Pride Fest. Join us a Bayfront Park. Then Sunday we head to Superior for the Pride Parade, always a favorite. Finally, on Monday we participate in the Cloquet Labor Day Parade. We need more parade marchers! We have a pile of new t-shirts if you want to try one, and we will be distributing stickers on The Minnesota Health Plan. Contact us a dsa.duluth@gmail.com if you want to participate in anything.

Our table at Pride Fest from a few years ago. Chapter member and congressional candidate Skip Sandman has sadly passed away since then.

Strike Ready DSA: An Instrument of Solidarity

By Sean Orr

On August 22, Teamsters ratified their tentative agreement with UPS overwhelmingly– 86.3% yes with over 58% turnout. As their contract struggle recedes (but does not disappear), it is an ideal time to reflect on DSA’s solidarity campaign with these workers and what it has meant for our organization.

UPS Teamsters did not strike, but DSA’s Strike Ready campaign was a success. It strengthened our chapters and their relationships with the labor movement in preparation for upcoming labor struggles. Building support for UPS Teamsters was DSA’s largest national project since Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2020. It involved chapters across the breadth of DSA in a new kind of political work, and, I would argue, changed much of DSA for the better.

What Strike Ready Looked Like

Launched by the National Labor Commission (NLC), Strike Ready had a single goal: to get DSA, on all levels, ready to provide solidarity to UPS Teamsters as their contract expired on August 1. As the campaign gained momentum, building solidarity with the Big Three auto workers was folded in. Combined, these two struggles raised the potential of over half a million workers on strike. 

To join Strike Ready, chapters had to deliberate and approve a campaign resolution, which included benchmarks and a basic timeline. There was ownership from the beginning, and a level of intention involved that encourages active participation. At the heart of this democratic process was the designation of at least two Solidarity Captains. These comrades were charged with advancing the campaign on a daily basis and getting their chapter strike ready. At a time when the organization was gearing up for a national convention starting August 4, this was no small task. At the time of writing, there are 256 Solidarity Captains carrying out Strike Ready in their local areas. When we talk about cadre, we are talking about our Solidarity Captains. Their dedication, creativity, and energy made this campaign happen. 

Our chapters first focused on internal organizing. A member pledge, signed by over 5,000 comrades, gave Solidarity Captains a tool for having a conversation with paper and lapsed members. Chapters are built through these types of organizing discussions, and Strike Ready enabled this to happen. Chapters also held fundraisers for the Labor Solidarity Fund, a NLC fund to support labor solidarity work by DSA chapters. If DSA was going to be ready to hit the picket lines, we would need financial resources to pull it off. Over $25,000 were raised by our chapters via a variety of creative public activities: picnics, film screenings and benefit concerts to name a few. 

While chapters got Strike Ready, the NLC prepared the rest of DSA to support UPS Teamsters. The National Political Committee (NPC) unanimously endorsed Strike Ready as DSA’s national priority campaign. Comrades in multiple chapters helped the NLC get DSA members in elected office to sign on to a solidarity statement that included clear asks that yield measurable results: demonstrations of public support, holding constituent meetings, and so on. More than 90 DSA members in elected office signed on, including three members of Congress (Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).

Once DSA was internally organized, we turned outward. Solidarity Captains got in touch with rank-and-file Teamsters and their locals. They attended meetings and rallies organized by the locals. They joined rank-and-file militants at the gates of UPS hubs for  parking lot meetings. Many of those same militants came to speak at DSA meetings about the contract. Quite a few joined DSA. Some chapters organized community canvasses alongside rank-and-file Teamsters to build public support for the UPS fight. We let the nature of our work surprise us. Around the country, rank-and-file Teamsters learned  that socialists are on their side.

On July 5, talks between the Teamsters and UPS broke down. Over the next two weeks, union locals organized practice picket lines across the country. It was the largest demonstration of strike readiness by a workforce in recent memory. And in dozens of locations, DSA was there. In many cases we were not strangers to the militants leading the action on the ground; they were the ones who invited us. Solidarity Captains brought comrades, picket signs, and bull horns. 

When a tentative agreement was announced on July 25, the same day that negotiations resumed, we–along with UPS rank-and-filers–were caught off guard. We were prepared for a strike. Socialists know that when workers are ready, strike action is always favored. Workers who are ready will win more through a strike, not just in terms of wages or benefits, but in terms of nerves of steel and self-awareness of our strength as workers. 

Teamster negotiators made a decision to accept a deal. DSA’s role in that moment was not to pass judgment on that tentative agreement or to harp on the missed possibilities. We announced our solidarity with the rank-and-file as they determined whether this deal was acceptable or not. Solidarity Captains reached out to their friends at UPS and asked, “What do you and your coworkers think of the TA?” DSA comrades at UPS took to the task of building the rank-and-file movement through the TA and into the coming period. 

What Strike Ready means for DSA

For decades, different formations on the Left have tried to solve the same problem: how do we bridge the divide between the socialist movement and the labor movement? 

Most of us know the history. For nearly a century, the socialist movement in the United States was indistinguishable from the labor movement. The Left and the unions belonged to the same mass movement of workers. They expressed a self-aware class that was conscious of its exploitation and wanted to do something about it. 

Due to a number of factors, the workers’ movement was broken apart after the Second World War, although that was a time of relatively high union density compared to today. The Left collapsed as a mass political force and was mainly confined to academia. 

When there was a mass resurgence of the Left as a result of the Vietnam War, groups like the International Socialists (IS) and the Revolutionary Union (RU) had their comrades “industrialize” by taking jobs in unionized workplaces across the country. Their biggest legacy is the movement for union democracy, embodied still in organizations like Labor Notes and Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). If there is a pulse in the labor movement today, it is because of the work done by these comrades.

Today’s DSA comes out of another resurgence of the Left: a conjuncture beginning with Occupy, carrying through Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, Donald Trump’s election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election, and reaching its peak in 2020 with the Bernie Sanders campaign, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the George Floyd uprising.  DSA is now the largest socialist organization in the United States in a century.

At our 2019 convention, we adopted the rank-and-file strategy as our guide to the labor movement. Comrades were encouraged to get unionized jobs, learn from our coworkers, and build DSA among the working class. Quite a few got jobs at UPS and joined the ranks of a militant movement. 

The following year, DSA launched a joint project with the United Electrical Workers (UE) to organize the unorganized, wherever they worked: the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). We were beginning to do the work that the Left had dreamed about for decades. But we still had a long way to go.

Strike Ready is qualitatively different from past campaigns on the Left. We did not come to workers with a program. We did not come to tell them how to win their fight,  although we never shied away from our enthusiasm for a strike. Our Solidarity Captains learned from the rank-and-file and provided support for their struggle. DSA was directed to expand the UPS workers’ struggle by amplifying their demands and building as large  a movement around the Teamsters as possible. The Left has long tried to get workers to learn from it; this time, the Left wanted to learn from workers.

To put it bluntly: We did not try to have DSA direct the working-class struggle. We let the working class struggle direct DSA. 

Strike Ready put our entire organization at the disposal of workers in struggle. Our chapters, national leadership structures, staff, and elected officials became an instrument for workers to expand their fight against the boss beyond their workplace. For Teamsters and auto workers, we are making solidarity real. We can canvass neighborhoods for them. We can organize solidarity events for them. We can bring community supporters to their actions. We can raise their demands by all means available to us. We can rally our elected officials to back them. 

The Strike Ready campaign is led by the workers directly affected: UPS Teamsters in the first case, auto workers in the second. DSA counts among its ranks dozens of UPS Teamsters and UAW auto workers, and these comrades gave direction to Strike Ready. It is tricky, and it is messy, but there can be no other way if we are to do this right.

The Left in this country has long had a representation fetish. One group after another claimed the mantle of “vanguard” because, they figured, their ideas mattered more than their authority among working people. They see workers in a fight, and they go to them as the self-declared experts ready to lead the way to total victory. 

We should not adopt approaches that have not and cannot work. Leadership is never proclaimed. It is always earned. And among our coworkers, nothing matters more than trust. Trust is earned by putting solidarity into practice, and that is what DSA has done with Strike Ready.

The Strike Ready campaign was a qualitative advance in bringing socialism and labor together,  uniting the greatest number of comrades with the greatest number of workers possible, amid the largest labor fight of the year. Relationships have been formed that can be the foundation for even more solidarity.

Strike Ready opens the possibility for a two-pronged approach to joining the socialist movement  and the working class. On one flank there is the rank-and-file strategy. Comrades with union jobs bring us into the ranks and build a left pole in the unions from the bottom up. It will make our unions stronger, more militant and more democratic. At another flank is the “DSA as an instrument” strategy. Our chapters are ready to support and expand any labor struggle that they can. We have the tools, the skill, and the dedication. Let each chapter of DSA serve as a House of Solidarity. There is no ambivalence when it comes to where we stand with workers in struggle. We will not tell them which direction to vote on the agreement they will have to work under, and we will not promise them a predetermined path to the promised land. But we will jump into the trench next to them and let them know, “You are not alone in this fight, and we will be here by your side until victory is won.”

The post Strike Ready DSA: An Instrument of Solidarity appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Welcome to the Reading Roundup, a forum for ATX DSA members to share what they’ve been reading and how it’s informing their political education.

The New Gender Paradox 

by Judith Lorber

A lot has changed in the last 30 years. In many ways queering gender has become a more common practice with non-gendered bathrooms, non-gendered pronouns, non-binary and intersex identities, and intersectional research. However, the gender binary persists strongly with gender still being a legal institution, a gendered division of labor, and gendered violence. How do these two conflicting forces interplay? Lorber provides a general overview of ways the gender binary has been fragmented and upheld in the last 30 years since their writing of The Gender Paradox.

This book can be a touch disjointed at times. Each chapter is broken into subsections which most of the time do not directly interrelate. Instead, they act as overviews into their particular subject matter such as birthing men or standpoint theory. The sections are small enough such that the quick switch in context is very manageable. They also allow for short and easy rereading which can be helpful considering how quickly the book moves.

Overall, Lorber provides an informative and concise overview of the current state of research as well as a thoughtful analysis on how to move forward. If you are interested in gender research and want a good entry point, or you just want a quick refresher with some analysis, this could be a good book for you.

–Garrigan S. 

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism 

by Harsha Walia

Gazing south toward the Rio Grande, it hardly requires a political viewpoint to see the border as violence. A tangle of razor wire on the shore, circular saw blades strapped to buoys, state troopers standing ready to further sharpen the aggression. It’s a shockingly primal manifestation of the highly sophisticated systems of exclusion, criminalization, containment, and displacement that Harsha Walia analyzes in Border and Rule.

Indeed, the militarization of an apparently static line between the US and Mexico conceals one of Walia’s key insights: the regimes of border imperialism do not hold steady boundaries. Forces of removal and immobilization are dynamic, constantly reshaping themselves to serve ruling class needs and desires, controlling human movement both between states and within them. While Walia does note the Anglo-slaver conquest of Texas as exemplary of this layered, racialized usurpation of freedom to stay and freedom to leave, her lens is worldwide, tracing multilateral influences between maquiladoras in Juarez and Export Processing Zones in Chittagong, the kafala system in Dubai and seasonal agricultural work in British Columbia, white supremacy and Hindutva, forced labor in US prisons and on Manus Island.

Border and Rule is heavy with the realities of mass displacement, incarceration, precarity, and poverty, but its gravity ultimately pulls away from despair. Walia’s fury and clarity burn through the bordering logics of global capital, right-wing ethnonationalism, and liberal complicity to illuminate what is essential: borders are weapons wielded to control the international working class, a sight that cannot be seen on a socialist horizon.

–Mike C. 

He, She and It

by Marge Piercy 

As someone who started reading science fiction in the late 1970s and spent much of my college days in the 80s and early 90s around militant feminists, it is unfortunate that it took this long to read He, She and It. Marge Piercy is a towering literary figure of the second wave feminist movement in the U.S. She is also a major figure in the development of cyberpunk and dystopian writing, influencing many of her more famous colleagues including William Gibson. 

The novel tells the story of Yod, a cybernetic being who develops a sense of self, but largely through the eyes of two women in the field, Shira and Malkah. Shira begins the story working at Y-S, one of the major corporate conglomerates which together largely rule an earth devastated by environmental catastrophies. Malkah, the grandmother who raised her, lives in a largely Jewish and egalitarian community. 

He, She and It explores themes of artificial intelligence in terms that feel modern in spite of being written over 30 years ago. It draws a wonderful parallel in telling the story of the Jews in Prague in the 1600s and the creation of a golem, a powerful creature of clay brought to life through the mystical practice of kabbalah. 

Piercy smoothly blends the ancient and the future while also drawing a backdrop of class conflict interwoven with race and gender, but unlike many political writers of fiction, she does so in a way that never jars the reader out of the story. The politics always feel a natural part of the lives she follows. 

–Joshua F. 

The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

In 1893 Fredrick Jackson Turner argued that the American frontier served as a safety valve, releasing the social pressures that built and became pent up in the eastern United States. In his 2019 book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Greg Grandin follows Turner’s frontier thesis through U.S. history. He documents the genocidal westward expansion and the mythical national identity based on rugged individualism, militarism, and white supremacy that were unleashed by the opening of the frontier. Grandin then turns to a question for our current era: what happens when we run out of frontier?

The existence of the western frontier allowed the United States to develop differently than other continents. In other nations, workers organizing and engaging in militant class conflict led to socialist parties and social democracies with expanded universal rights, robust welfare states, and large public stakes in industries like housing, healthcare, transit, and energy. In the U.S. on the other hand, while slaves, indigenous people, and wage laborers struggled against exploitation by the ruling class, the frontier hindered the class struggle’s ability to reckon with racial and gendered exploitation by providing an outlet for the disaffected working class along with capitalist speculators. As Grandin put it, “Instead of waging class war upward—on aristocrats and owners—they waged race war outward, on the frontier.” 

Grandin follows the myth forward in time. U.S. imperial expansion into Mexico, the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the globalization of western capital during the Cold War extended the frontier beyond the confines of the continent. Trump’s call to build a wall on the already militarized border provided a cruelly prescient symbol for the closing of the frontier. With capital grasping and clawing to find new markets, endless wars in the Middle East continuing to reproduce white nationalist militarism, and the ongoing project of capitalists and the state to undermine working class solidarity, unresolved social pressures blow back in the form of increased racist violence within, and especially at our borders.

Grandin tells the story of U.S. expansion into the frontier and its role in the rise of America’s right wing pathology with novel insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Because the underlying pressure can only be resolved by an organized working class, Grandin concludes that we face “the choice between barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.” It’s fair for those of us who believe that social democracy ignores the contradictions at the heart of capitalist production to decry the dampening of his closing statement, but his call for socialism rings true.

–Greg B. 

Interested in making a contribution to next month’s Reading Roundup? Send a 250-word blurb to redfault@austindsa.org!

The post Austin DSA’s August Reading Roundup first appeared on Red Fault.

The National Tech Committee is excited to announce DSA Feed, a new resource for comrades to find any updates from DSA chapters, national working groups, and our various publications in a single place.

The site is an implementation of Planet, an open source RSS feed aggregator which will pull down updates once a day from over one hundred DSA publications today, including podcasts like NPEC’s Class podcast and Seattle DSA’s Socialist Sound, and publishes them in a single website that anyone can access from their desktop, phone, or even your RSS reader.

We’re eager to add more to this site! We have a form on the project’s GitHub page which you or someone from your chapter can submit new sites to. If you’re wondering if your chapter is already included in this, you can check what the current list of sites we’re pulling is in the site’s feed list.

The NTC hopes this becomes a step forward to preserving our independence and our reach as an organization, especially for our dedicated and brilliant comrades who have worked to bring forward written works from all across the organization and to make sure they’re read. Whether they be short updates, statements, or editorials, they will end up on DSA Feed for anyone interested to see.

This is also a small step in reducing our collective dependence on capitalist social media. We’re seeing the downfall of many of these social media sites in real time, which has a deep implication for DSA as our reach for our message and our work will be impacted. But we can mitigate this by all of us as an organization, whether it be local chapters all the way up to national bodies, continuing to flex our publishing muscles and creating more work to update to our websites.

Want to contribute to this? Our project is open source and hosted on Github here and discussions about this tool can be found on the DSA Discussion Board.

If you’re inspired by this and want to work on interesting project with tech workers from across the country, please join the NTC!

On August 22nd, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12-3 to double down on a failed model of public safety, approving a four-year package of raises and bonuses for police officers as part of an agreement with the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL) that is expected to cost the city nearly $1 billion by 2027. As a result, vital resources needed for the rest of the city will be instead siphoned off to an ineffective, corrupt police department. 

DSA-LA is proud to stand with City Councilmembers and fellow socialists Eunisses Hernandez, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martínez in their opposition to this egregious misuse of city resources, which prioritizes giving enormous raises to armed police officers on patrol instead of funding city services and unarmed responses that actually keep Angelenos safe.

The city of Los Angeles has 22 departments with a higher vacancy rate than the LAPD. This contract, according to the city’s Chief Administrative Officer, will require “significant” resource diversion from other services in order to give the LAPD large raises and bonuses. This means fewer janitors to keep schools clean, fewer sanitation employees to maintain our streets and sidewalks, fewer housing inspectors to protect tenants and shut down illegal Airbnbs, and fewer outreach workers to help effectively keep people off the streets. 

The evidence is clear that greater investment in policing does not lead to a safer Los Angeles. In fact, the reduction of police officers in Los Angeles corresponded with a 10% drop in violent crime in 2023. While Mayor Karen Bass says that her “number-one job is to keep Angelenos safe,” her willingness to spend so recklessly on ineffective policing tells a different story.

When calls to build permanent supportive housing and expand mental health services are met with the question “how are we going to pay for that,” remember that 12 councilmembers chose to allocate $1 billion to police instead. Our three endorsed council members—the only three who voted “no”—have been able to house people in Echo Park, in Los Feliz, in MacArthur Park because they chose to emphasize services, aid, and outreach instead of violent police sweeps. 

We need to pressure the politicians who supported this egregious decision. We need to continue working directly with our endorsed socialist council members, and start planning for next year’s budget fight. But in order to achieve these goals, the working class of Los Angeles needs to be organized. 

Become a member of DSA today and join your neighbors in fighting for the Los Angeles we deserve, from improving public transportation to fighting for tenants to supporting workers on strike and beyond. Only together can we build the mass movement needed to reclaim state power for the working class.

Thorn West: Issue No. 171

City Politics

• Los Angeles Public Press covers last week’s surprising unanimous vote to reject City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s nomination to the City Ethics Commission, which occurred without debate. The nominee — the president of the Reseda Neighborhood Council — rose to prominence last year as a proponent of lobbying reform. Statement from Mejia here.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• The Los Angeles City Council voted 12–3 to approve a new LAPD contract that could add nearly $1 billion to the budget in increased salaries for officers over the next four years. The LAPD has been operating well below its targeted staffing numbers; this has not led to an increase in crime. Public comment was relentlessly opposed to the new contract. Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Hugo Soto-Martinez, and Nithya Raman were the dissenting votes and spoke against the contract at a press conference before the vote, along with activists from Black Lives Matter – Los Angeles, La Defensa and DSA-LA. Chapter statement here.

• Federal prosecutors and the FBI’s civil rights division will investigate an LAPD gang unit in the Mission Division. Many details are still unknown, but among the subjects of the investigation are the unit’s systematic failure to record stops on body cams.

• During an interview, Mayor Karen Bass repeated a long-debunked myth, widely believed and circulated by law enforcement officers, that merely touching fentanyl “could kill you.”

Housing Rights

• A package of tenant protections passed in Los Angeles this January requires landlords to send notice to the Housing Department every time they file an eviction. Six months and 40,000 eviction notices later, the controller’s office has taken this newly public data and released a database showing that the vast amount of evictions are for unpaid rent — and that the median amount owed is only $2,678.

Labor

• The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) leaked the terms of its most recent offer to the Writers Guild of America (WGA). In a letter to its membership, WGA leadership called the terms “neither nothing, nor nearly enough” and said that the offer contains ”too many loopholes.”

• The text of SB 799, proposed state legislation that would allow striking workers to collect unemployment insurance, has now been released to the public, and can be read here.

Transportation

• In 2022, a coalition of transit activists collected enough signatures to put Healthy Streets LA — which will require the city to implement its mobility plan whenever it repaves a street — on Los Angeles ballots in 2024. In response, the City Council asked for a similar but competing measure to be drafted by the City Attorney within 15 days. Fourteen months later, the city’s legislation has finally been drafted. Streets for All analyzes its shortcomings.

Environmental Justice

• Though Los Angeles was fortunate that the impact of Tropical Storm Hilary was relatively mild, there is still a lot to criticize about the city’s response, particularly the failure to proactively inform and provide necessary resources to the unhoused community.

• Meanwhile, with the storm approaching, Texas Governor Greg Abbott continued the practice of transporting asylum seekers from Texas to Los Angeles. “It displays a complete and total lack of common humanity,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

The post City Council Approves LAPD Contract, Adding Another Billion Dollars to Police Budget + New Data on LA Evictions appeared first on The Thorn West.

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