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.

Have you been thinking about joining DSA, but haven’t gotten around to it?
Is it time to renew your dues?

DSA is a member-based organization committed to increasing power for the working class and fighting capitalism. All members decide how much and how often to give, and dues-paying members democratically decide the direction of our chapter locally and DSA nationally. To be a truly democratically controlled and explicitly anti-capitalist organization, we can’t rely on big donors or grants, which can often push non-profits into running certain projects or campaigns as conditions of receiving money. Dues – especially monthly – go to running local campaigns, training organizers, and sustaining a nation-wide infrastructure.

Join today!

While the climate crisis intensifies, prospects for transformative national legislation are grim. But at the state and city levels, DSA is fighting to take back our energy system from fossil fuel profiteers. After years of unprecedented organizing that pitted organized labor, climate activists, legislators at every level of government, and working-class people against the full forces of fossil capital, DSA chapters in New York scored the biggest Green New Deal win in US history—so far! The Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), which recently became state law, lays the foundation for a socialized electrical grid, powered by clean energy and built by union labor. On this panel, hear from organizers across DSA about how we can reclaim public ownership and take the “just transition” from slogan to reality.

Panelists: Sarah Arkebauer | Soleil Smith | Gustavo Gordillo | Sarah Louden
Facilitator: Lizzy Oh
Location: DSA Convention 2023, Chicago

By Monday, August 28: Tee Pre-Order!

Friday, September 1: Mildred Fish Harnack Memorial Concert

Come celebrate the life and achievements of a true antifascist hero, born right here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We will be celebrating her with an exciting lineup of regional musical talents including Ruth B8r Ginsburg, Glutton for Insurrection, Brandon Payton-Carrillo, Lil’ Guillotine, and DJ Dr!psweat! Stand with us in solidarity against the forces of fascism in our country and communities! All proceeds from this event go to the creation of this event as well as future antifascist organizing and education. 

Learn More & Purchase Tickets

Co-authors: Lauren Trendler, Jane Slaughter, Ian McClure

This Saturday, August 26, Metro Detroit DSA will host its first ever Endorsement Town Hall, 1–3pm at Swords into Plowshares. We will hear from four candidates, two running in municipal races this November and two running for the state House.

Come to the town hall to hear these members try to convince you why DSA should put its people power behind them. Detroit DSA does not do “paper endorsements”; our endorsement means we will work hard for the candidate, as we did in our Ferndale for All Ferndale for All and Detroit for All campaigns. So your vote on these endorsements matters!

Our chapter has a commitment to running class struggle campaigns, or those that make clear the conflicting interests between the working class and the owning class. We expect our candidates to openly call out these monied interests, and their politicians in both parties.

This follows our local convention, held in June, in which we voted on chapter priorities for the year. An amendment to our Electoral base resolution, which passed with two-thirds support, calls for the formation of a Socialists in Office (SIO) committee focused on helping our electeds to be organizing centers for their constituents. This includes actions like Rashida’s workplace organizing training in July and the town hall that Dylan Wegela wants to hold about auto worker issues. We look forward to working with our electeds for more events like these.

DSA’s national convention this month passed the resolution “Act Like an Independent Party.” It calls for building an independent DSA political identity, while still using the Democratic ballot line as necessary. The resolution says “we mean building and emphasizing the collective identity of our candidates and expecting our candidates to identify publicly and proudly as ‘democratic socialists.’” Therefore, we need to “strengthen our already existing organizational independence from the Democratic Party, including building our own lists of voters and volunteers, our independent fundraising capacity, our own candidate schools, and exploring building our own tech tools.”

These strategies were adopted to enable DSA to create an organized bloc of elected socialists who will take on the enemies of our class. We have the opportunity, by endorsing the right candidates, to help build an independent socialist pole in American politics who will wield the bully pulpit on behalf of workers. It’s one part of beating back the extreme right, fighting corporate power, and building the socialist world we know is possible.

The four candidates to be considered are:

Mike McDermott

• Westland City Council (incumbent)
• Questionnaire
• https://www.mcdermottformichigan.com
• Recommended for endorsement by the MDDSA Steering Committee

Alex Meyers

• Farmington Hills City Council
• Questionnaire
• https://www.electalexmeyers.com

Layla Taha

• State House District 25- Westland (pending special election)
• Questionnaire
• Website forthcoming
• Recommended for endorsement by the MDDSA Steering Committee

Dylan Wegela

• State House District 26-Garden City (incumbent)
• Questionnaire
• https://dylanwegela.wpcomstaging.com
• Recommended for endorsement by the MDDSA Steering Committee

Register here:

https://www.metrodetroitdsa.com/endorsement_town_hall

Saturday, August 26th 1–3pm
Swords Into Plowshares

33 E Adams, downtown Detroit

The Detroit Socialist is produced and run by members of Detroit DSA’s Newspaper Collective. Interested in becoming a member of Detroit DSA? Go to metrodetroitdsa.com/join to become a member. Send a copy of the dues receipt to: membership@metrodetroitdsa.com in order to get plugged in to our activities!

Metro Detroit DSA Hosts First Ever Endorsement Town Hall was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Earlier this month the national Democratic Socialist of America joined the Atlanta chapter of DSA in publicly endorsing a campaign to put a referendum on the November ballot that would stop “Cop City”, a massive police training facility that has been proposed to be built in the Weelaunee Forest - public forest land and one the largest remaining green spaces in Atlanta - surrounded by predominantly Black working class neighborhoods.

Tonight we’ll hear from Atlanta DSA member Gabriel Sanchez about the chapter's effort to stop Cop City through a ballot referendum, the terrifying tactics police, the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia have used to in order to crush opposition and what motivates them to keep fighting despite few clear victories for the Defund the Police and abolition movements in recent years.  

To learn more and to get involved you can visit copcityvote.com and atldsa.org/stopcopcity

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Today, on the anniversary of the execution of socialist anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, The DSA Fund and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are holding a panel discussion on the two, using the 2006 biopic above. Tune in and join the dialogue on Zoom. Through the tragic story of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the inspiring images of those who keep their memories alive, audiences will experience a universal – and very timely – tale of official injustice and human resilience. The text below is ALBA: log in here at Eventbrite. (Ed.)

 The ordeal of Sacco and Vanzetti came to symbolize the bigotry and intolerance directed at immigrants and dissenters in the United States, and millions of people in the U.S. around the world protested on their behalf. Nearly eighty years later, the story continues to have great resonance, as civil liberties and the rights of immigrants are again under attack.

The powerful prison writings of Sacco and Vanzetti are read by actors John Turturro and Tony Shalhoub. A chorus of passionate commentators propels the narrative, including Howard Zinn, Arlo Guthrie, Studs Terkel, and a number of older people with personal connections to the story. Artwork, music, poetry, and feature film clips about the case are interwoven within the narrative.

Through the tragic story of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the inspiring images of those who keep their memories alive, audiences will experience a universal – and very timely – tale of official injustice and human resilience.

Peter Miller is an Emmy and Peabody-award winning filmmaker whose documentaries have screened in cinemas and on television throughout the world. He directed the film we are discussing today, THE INTERNATIONALE, which was short-listed for an Academy Award nomination. Most recently, he co-wrote and produced BEDLAM, about the crisis in care for the severely mentally ill, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and aired on PBS Independent Lens.

Brandon West is a labor organizer with the Writers Guild of America, East, a former voting rights advocate, and a previously DSA endorsed candidate for City Council in Brooklyn. Brandon has worked to protect and increase access to the ballot and strengthen the political voice of historically disadvantaged communities. He has organized work places, and built coalitions at the State and National level since 2009. Brandon is currently a NYC-DSA Housing Working Group Organizing Committee member, a Citywide Leadership Committee member, and sits on the Socialists in Office Committee in New York City.

Ashik Siddique is an organizer with Democratic Socialists of America, elected to DSA’s National Political Committee of DSA in 2021, and currently serving on the NPC Steering Committee. He works as a research analyst at the National Priorities Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, analyzing militarized spending in the US federal budget — and all the nice things that would be possible if we simply defund the Pentagon.

Diana Moreno is an immigrant from Quito, Ecuador and the Co-Chair of Queens DSA . She has organized immigrant workers throughout her career, most recently as Deputy Director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, an immigrant rights non-profit focused on political education and job training for undocumented workers. She currently works as Communications Manager for the New York State Nurses Association, a labor union representing over 42,000 healthcare workers in New York state.

The post Watch the Sacco and Vanzetti Documentary With the The DSA Fund and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade! appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).