Gender is a historical process. It is not the same thing from century to century, decade to decade, or even moment to moment. At one point, archers used high heels to get an advantage on the battlefield, leggings were worn by royalty, pink used to be seen as a ‘guys’ color because it was calm and collected, they used to think it was manly to put rainbows on trucks, and makeup used to be for everyone, before in the 20^th century the fashion industry made these things marketed to women.

Historical performances of gender are not the same throughout time and culture – in other words they are not essential to a person, they are something which can be undermined, and change throughout a person’s life. No person is essentially any gender, because gender is a performance. That does not mean that people do not express themselves as one gender or another, or cannot continue to do so, it means that gender is so variable that it cannot be boiled down to a binary. The reason that it’s so valuable for reactionaries to focus on issues such as binary gender, and create such an essentialist paradigm for gender, is because the ruling class want to use it as an scapegoat to advance the agenda of brainwashing people with transphobia, so that they can uphold an American exceptionalist facade. The goal is to cover over all the genocide, the patriarchy, and the white supremacy, which is the United Snakes of Amerika.

Every person is a multiplicity of gender expressions, and this is “micro transsexuality” that Deleuze and Guattari talk about in “Anti-Oedipus.” Gender expression and gender identity are also separated, and have no necessary relation to each other. That means that if you identify as a man, you could behave in mostly what your era deems feminine, and this has no relation to what a person could identify as. The identity and the expression are chosen, not innate, and they can be arbitrarily undermined by any variable expression, which occurs in thousands, if not millions, or more, at every second.

Gender as a historical process

What we think of as gender changes from moment to moment. As a historical process, gender is part of change, and flux, as opposed to a constant fixed thing in the past like Heidegger’s notion of being. Gender might be thought of as coterminous, happening with and at the same time as time itself. Gender and time can be thought of contrasted to queerness as a rupture with the continuum of time. Gender, through history, has been a process of capture into a submissive role in Europe, through the middle ages when women were vilified and seen as witches. Witches were actually women that had set up their own crafts and shops according to Butch Lee in “Military Strategy for Women and Children.’ Women, likewise, according to Abdullah Ocalan were subjugated by religious leaders and strong men in ancient Mesopotamia, which formed into a Christianity which made Eve the cause of the fall of man.

Gender, however, in the West was a less hierarchical process. There was a matriarchy at one point for the Pueblos in the Southwest in Mesa Verde according to “A Pueblo Social History” by John Ware, which shows that the Pueblo society was predominantly matrilocal, and matrilineal, meaning the women would own the fields and the house, and the men would take care of different tasks. In the Hopewell there was a decentralized society with weakly institutionalized roles according to Christopher Carr’s “Gathering Hopewell,” which had gender variation on the record in the Shaman at the late Woodland period. There were likewise, many accounts of gender variation which were called “berdaches,” from Spanish colonizers which Roscoe describes in his monograph “Changing Ones.” People are multiple genders as well in the Arctic, and the account “The Many Faces of Gender” show people sometimes even becoming another gender to escape a ghost. But all of these practices, threatened by culture and time; things such as television show traditional western roles, which enculturate people into specific genders. Such as the continual creation of films that involve a man and a woman in a relationship, without any alternatively gendered characters. If there is a queer character, they may be a punchline, or a stereotypically sassy character. Sometimes movies and TV, unless they are shows like “Hazbin Hotel,” or “Stephen Universe,” don’t feature any queer characters. Some would argue Spongebob is a queer character, due to his lack of attention to what is considered manly, but queerness is never really explored very deeply in the original seasons of Spongebob.

Even the notion of gender as tied up with biology is an outdated assumption. Biology is variable, and has people who have chromosomes that don’t match their gender assigned at birth, that may make someone have a body that does not match what typically is expected for certain bodies. This means people can be intersex, or they can have an assigned male or assigned female body that has parts that don’t match up to just xx or xy. This is aside from the fact that performances vary throughout the ages. In the 80s people like Prince, and Boy George were bending gender expression, and even in the 60s and 70s David Bowie was crossdressing and expressing himself in ways that were not usual for the assigned male at birth person at that time. There was also glam rock such as the New York Dolls, who work makeup and dresses as an expression of queer rebellion, when most of the genre was actually supposed to be coded as cisgendered and heterosexual. You could construct a whole wardrobe of basically what is considered a feminine outfit, constructed through clothing through history that is considered “for men.” So what does that mean?

It means that there is no reason to say that one item of clothing is “for” one group, and “not for” another. Gender expression is a fungible signifier, meaning it is an expression that can be changed through time.

Queerness as escape

If fixed, binary gender, is what Max Stirner would call a “fixed idea,” then queerness is a rupture with the temporal flow of gender, into a multiplicity of expressions. Queerness is not in time the same way that gender is, queerness is a temporal instant in which change occurs, and the word queer also has the implication of unusual. Something which is unusual strikes you as uncanny, something which is familiar, and yet unfamiliar. Why do homophobic, transphobic, conservative people, usually online, react so negatively when confronted with the notion of queerness, seeing it, thinking about it, thinking it may apply to them? It’s because gender requires upholding an image when it is a fixed idea that is obeyed dogmatically, a fixed idea that makes people behave in a negative manner when what Lacan calls “the imago,” (Ecrit) is threatened, meaning the image of yourself. The transphobic person actually needs the trans person to uphold their imago, in the sense that without the trans person the insecurity would have nothing to uphold itself by saying what it is not. Bigoted cisgender, meaning gender assigned at birth identity, is parasitic on trans people, in that it needs them as a scapegoat to uphold its own rigid gender roles, but it also is not a symbiosis, but a parasitic relationship, because the bigot seeks to eliminate the trans person, either in expression or in life.

Queerness is also a multiplicity of impulses beneath consciousness. It’s change itself, difference, multiplicity. Gender identity itself is part of an assemblage of social machines. Clothing companies, marketing techniques, family influence, friend circles, they all influence us, but we can choose to cut against the flow of time and make our own choices as to what we want our expression to be. There is no qualitative difference in abolishing essentialist notions of gender, while at the same time expressing yourself however you want. Abolishing gender essentialism is a matter of hierarchy, in a way, as even difference, and what Deleuze calls the rhizome can have hierarchy. There is hierarchy mixed in with everything we do, but there is also good and bad hierarchy. Gender essentialism is a micro fascism, meaning it is an intensity of restriction forcing people out of their own desiring machines. One’s own desiring machines are one’s own impulses, which are directed or repelled towards various social forces. Social machines interact with desiring machines as one and the same process of arrangement, otherwise known as assemblage. Micro fascism is an intensity of bad hierarchy, like queerphobia, Islamophobia, racism, etc. based on essentialist thinking. Desiring machines are the impulses, which themselves are infinitely multiple, and cut against against the flow of the fixed ideas of gender in time and consciousness. It is because of queerness that gender changes through time. Plato had what he calls the instant, which he calls a queer thing in the Parmenides.

Identity and expression disconnected

We’ve talked about how gender identity is a conscious phenomena, and queerness is a rupture with conscious identity, but further complicating the gender picture is the way that your identity can be one thing, but your expression could be an entirely different cultural expectation. David Hume had what is called the “is/ought” divide, but this is not because is and ought are separate. Facts and values can be looked at the same way as the identity and the expression. In the same way that facts and values are connected, gender and identity are connected. If you have a fact in one corner, it does not necessitate that there will be a corresponding value in another corner. For instance, if you’re a Catholic, that doesn’t mean that you won’t be a trans person. You could hold the facts of the Catholic Church, and still feel that you are trans, or even be trans and identify as a Republican. A great example of the disconnect between gender and identity is what is called a “femboy.” Femboys dress in feminine attire, deemed feminine by culture and the fashion industry. They can identify as a man, but their expression has nothing to do with their manliness sometimes. Everyone is a mixture of different expressions, so they may still have some expressions that are one expression or another.

But this is another thing that should be avoided even, the idea that we have “male or female enculturation.” This is an argument that Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF) use to try to say that if you were assigned male at birth you still act like a man because you have been taught to behave as a man. That assumes that all men are treated equal, or that all men identify with the label of man, and that this label of man would correspond with an identity and expression that is infinitely man, to the infinite exclusion of the woman. That is not true, just like facts and values, gender identity and gender expression are infinitely mixed. There’s an array of identities which we pass through through life, infinite of them which are related to all the past events that have happened before. All the different time periods and their genders have meaning that expresses itself in a warped, and reconfigured way in the assemblage of each generation’s machines.

The eternal return and gender abolition

Abolishing essentialist notions of gender is a societal wide task, and all the expressions that have ever happened recur through trends that take what happened in the past and make it new again. Time is cyclical, and while the heat death of the universe may still occur, in the representational, scientific sense of time, there is always an infinite recurrence of everything that has happened, happening again in the eternal return. Queerness is not inside or outside of our heads, it is in a singularity as Deleuze would say in Difference and Repetition. The singularity means that all things are happening in a virtual field of identities and arrays of past expression re-occurring through the instant, which is the moment of change in which everything happens.

Gender is part of a colonial capture into an expression where infinitely variable expressions are attempted to segmented lines into a conveyor belt. Queerness is not necessarily a good, or bad thing, it is outside of conscious expressions and responsible for them all. Throughout time, the ways that people have expressed their gender has seen different levels of acceptance. The goal is not to be detached from all time, and try to exist in a fortress of a-temporality. We all have consciousness, unless we are in a coma or dead, that is inescapable. We will always have hierarchical thoughts mixed in with our rhizomatic, and variable lines of flight which evade capture into dominant structures of gender hegemony. But there is always the threat that if we are not careful about avoiding restructuring a new gender, instead of micro transsexuality, the full array of the expressions of the impulses, then we risk reinstituting forms of control over people’s gender again.

Sources:

“Baedan: A Journal of Queer Heresy.” Contagion Press, 2014. 

Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, editors. *Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction*. Springer, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles. *Difference and Repetition*. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. *Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Frink, Lisa, Rita Shepard, and Gregory Reinhardt, editors. *Many Faces of Gender: Roles and Relationships through Time in Indigenous Northern Communities*. University Press of Colorado, 2002.

Heidegger, Martin. *Being and Time*. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt, SUNY Press, 2010.

Hume, David. *An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding*. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Lacan, Jacques. *Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English*. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton, 2006.

Lee, Butch. *Military Strategy for Women and Children*. Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2011.

Öcalan, Abdullah. *Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution*. International Initiative Edition, 2013.

Plato. Parmenides. Translated by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, Hackett Publishing Company, 1996.

Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Edited by David Leopold, translated by Steven T. Byington, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Ware, John. A Pueblo Social History: Kinship, Sodality, and Community in the Northern Southwest. University of Arizona Press, 2014.

The post Abolishing Gender Essentialism appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

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This Week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it is abandoning its intention to build a detention facility in a warehouse on Salt Lake City’s west side. This partial victory belongs not to politicians grandstanding in the courts but to the tireless mass organizing of Salt Lakers and working people nationwide. From the activists who showed up week after week to protest at the site of the planned concentration camp, to the citizens who put pressure on elected officials to get creative when opposing this facility, to the workers who refused to build DHS’s brutal machinery.

While we are under no illusions that the abandonment of one cog in the mass deportation machine will end ICE terror, we nevertheless celebrate this as a win and commit ourselves to continuing the fight. We must work to abolish ICE and DHS altogether. This starts by forcing cities like Riverton to cut their 287(g) contracts, the current campaign by our Immigrant Solidarity Working Group. If you, like us, believe that the only way to grind the gears of deportation to a halt is to build working class power, we invite you to join Salt Lake DSA and organize with us.

Contact: SLDSA Steering Committee | steering@saltlakedsa.org

The post SLDSA Statement on DHS Cancelling ICE Warehouse Plans first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

Bosses will argue that full-time employees are simply contractors to cut benefits and save money. Here's how to tell if you're misclassified.

The post How to know if you’re misclassified appeared first on EWOC.

The health coverage cliff, the budget gaps, the bureaucratic siege on families like mine all have the same fundamental answer: the New York Health Act.

The post There is No Affordability Without Healthcare appeared first on Democratic Left.

[[{“value”:”

Yard signs for hometown candidate Daniel Koh pepper the gardens of seven-figure homes in Andover, an affluent suburb north of Boston, as the six-way race for the Massachusetts 6th Congressional District enters its final weeks. 

Koh is dominating the race in campaign cash and endorsements, from labor unions and establishment politicians alike. A Working Mass review found that $180,000 donated to Koh came from donors who had also donated to the American Israel Political Action Committee, or AIPAC.

Constituents deserve to know: “Who is paying for all these signs?”

Koh’s campaign war chest holds over $4 million according to the most recent FEC filing deadline, more than the rest of the field combined. His campaign is quick to boast that expenditures are largely funded and backed by institutional labor.

The Massachusetts AFL-CIO and nearly half of local unions have endorsed Koh, including AFSCME council 93, the International Association of Machinists, NAGE SEIU Local 5000, SEIU Local 888, Teamsters Local 25, UNITE HERE NEJB, the Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Building Trades Union as well as many of its members including, IBEW Local 103, IBEW Local 104, IBEW Local 2222, IUPAT DC 35, Laborers Local 22, Laborers Local 175, Laborers Local 88, and more. 

I’m proud to stand with labor, and I’m proud to have labor standing with me.

Hear directly from labor leaders on why they’re backing our campaign pic.twitter.com/w3Bko5JdAf

— Dan Koh (@dank) August 11, 2026

It is likely that many unions see Koh’s frontrunner status as a deterrent to endorsing other challengers. If labor leaders think Koh’s win is inevitable, the incentive to support different, more progressive candidates diminishes. 

Only a handful of unions have declined to genuflect before him. UAW International and SEIU State Council have backed candidate and State Rep. Tram Nguyen (D-Andover), a member of UAW Local 2320 from past work as a legal aide. The National Education Association and the Massachusetts Teachers Association endorsed candidate Mariah Lancaster.

Boston DSA formally recommended against moderate candidates Koh, Nguyen, and financial technology executive John Beccia, but declined to recommend any progressive challenger. 

For better or worse, Koh is the labor candidate. Given Koh’s resume, this coalition is disappointing, but not surprising.

He’s a former protege of Boston’s ‘labor mayor’ Marty Walsh, and served as Mayor Walsh’s chief of staff before following him to the U.S. Department of Labor. Koh also served in the Biden White House, where he was deployed to Michigan to negotiate with the Uncommitted Movement during the presidential primary on the administration’s behalf. There, negotiations were described as “tense,” and Koh and the Biden administration left without conceding any ground in their facilitation of the Gaza genocide.

His loyalty earned him the ‘MSNBC trifecta’ endorsements: Former President Joe Biden, Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

Executives & AIPAC Dollars

Labor isn’t the only movement funding Koh.

Koh has received criticism for taking the maximum allowable donations from a Palantir executive and from sports gambling websites, among others. 

Koh has not received funding directly from AIPAC. But at least 68 donors donated to both AIPAC and Dan Koh’s campaign. Their combined donations to AIPAC total $206,395.

These donors include Josh Kraft, of the Kraft family, as well as executives at Apollo Asset Management, Bain Capital, and Goldman Sachs. At least 29 of these donors reside out of state, while only five live in the 6th District.

Because receipts are only available through the June 30 filing deadline, the total Koh has received is likely larger. 

The AIPAC-overlapping total is small relative to Koh’s overall haul, but sizable relative to the budgets of his progressive opponents. The $183,700 figure exceeds half of the total campaign funds raised by all of the race’s three progressive challengers, Beth Anders-Beck, Jamie Belsito, and Mariah Lancaster.

The donations are a blaring warning signal for the type of Representative Koh intends to be: business as usual, corporate, bland, and likely to continue the technocratic facilitation of extractive and genocidal American wars abroad. 

The unwitting alliance between labor unions and supporters of America’s most vilified lobbying arm is an indictment of the current state of labor’s electoral orientation: a movement on the defensive, with endorsements rarely democratically decided, and inclined to back establishment figures who prioritize incremental worker concessions over progressive candidates who might shift political leverage from capital to labor. 

If you’re driving by a yard sign and wondering who paid for it, the answer might be AIPAC-linked donors, a labor union, or both.

Tony A is a contributing writer to Working Mass and a resident of Massachusetts’ 6th Congressional District. 

The post Dan Koh, Labor’s Candidate in MA-06, took over $180,000 from AIPAC donors appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

There’s an old Marxist-Leninist tweet from a gadfly who went by the name of Phil Greaves: 

“Star Wars is fascist, Harry Potter is fascist neo-feudal dreck, selfie-obsession is fascist, British soap operas are fascist, sci-fi is generally fascist, ironic detachment is fascist, porn is fascist. Masscult under imperialism is inherently fascistic. Sorry to spoil your ‘fun’.” 

And the mad lad who has since protected his tweets replied to himself soon after:

“One day people will ask: ‘How did Anglo-Americans not see their own fascism?’ And part of the answer will be: ‘Because they were entertained by it.’” 

The point Greaves is getting at is how the current moment attempts to overwhelm you as an individual with spectacle at all times, and to hypnotize you in a way. It is easier for the state to alienate you and keep you locked into regular consumer behavior if you are watching ambivalently, without thinking, allowing yourself to be immersed in something whether it be the new Avatar film, alcohol or drug abuse, or porn addiction. Think about how the so-called algorithm induces schizophrenia in you as a subject. You first see a selfie from your friend back home for the holidays, and next, you see an ad for a political candidate paid by a subsidiary of AIPAC. Then you see from the news account of your choice Palestinian bodies mutilated by either our government’s or Israel’s. Then you see a meme that you have to Google in order to understand. In mere seconds, you have hopped around the world, and your attention has shifted again, again, and again. 

The problem here is one of immersion. These media objects, whether we talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe or virtually-augmented point-of-view porn, like cigarettes, come in regular enough doses to give you your fix, and yet something feels missing. Mark Fisher calls this condition “depressive hedonia.” 

Here’s Fisher in chapter 4 of Capitalist Realism: 

“Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services. In his crucial essay ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’, Deleuze distinguishes between the disciplinary societies described by Foucault, which were organized around the enclosed spaces of the factory, the school and the prison, and the new control societies, in which all institutions are embedded in a dispersed corporation.”

Regarding that last line, in the new MCU film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Zendaya’s character gets offered a good job, but she turns it down because it’s for an evil corporation. Her friend asks if all corporations are evil. She says “Yes.” In the context of the film, this is one of the things Peter Parker loves about her: her ethical moral compass. But in the reality the film exists in, this line is ironic by being a product of Disney, whose name is interestingly missing from both the front and end credits. Zendaya’s character’s refusing to work for a corporation is proven to be hypocritical, as the actress has chosen for the better part of a decade to work almost exclusively for them. And yet, when she kisses Tom Holland, her real-life boyfriend, the audience applauded nonetheless. 

The Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov wrote in his landmark piece of film theory “The Principles of Montage”: 

“The artist’s relationship to his surrounding reality, his view of the world, is not merely expressed in the entire process of shooting, but in the montage as well, in the capacity to see and to present the world around him. A variety of social encounters, a class struggle takes place in reality, and the artist’s existence within a particular social class influences his world-view. Artists with differing world-views each perceive the reality surrounding them differently; they see events differently, discuss them differently, show them, imagine them, and join them to another differently. Thus, film montage, as the entire work of filmmaking, is inextricably linked to the artist’s world-view and his ideological purpose.” 

If we take this as true and look at the dominant mode of filmmaking in America and the West in the past 50 years since the end of New Hollywood with the release of Jaws and Star Wars (pick your poison), it’s obvious that the dominant mode of filmmaking has been immersion. When James Cameron’s Avatar was released and pushed forward the trend of 3D and fully digital spaces, the main point of praise was how ‘immersive’ it was. With Avatar: The Way of the Water, this was taken forward with new, technically difficult footage never before possible, both with underwater 3D footage requiring technological advancement allowing each piece of the human face to be recorded in a liquid environment where facial features are distorted. 

Some left-wing filmmakers, like the undersung Paul W.S. Anderson, have attempted to work from within the system, creating movies with revolutionary politics like Resident Evil: Retribution, which features images like that of a private military group falling beneath the superstructure of an old Soviet base, being crushed by the very simulacra they used to poison the world. But Anderson, too, like Cameron, was victim to the desire to immerse the audience and give us our dopamine fixes. He even used technology from the state to lull audiences into a kind of stupor, turning shots meant to recall to the viewer the torture at the hands of the fascists in Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom into images meant to entertain the viewer. He used NASA cameras shooting upwards of 10,000 frames per second for very beautiful slow motion photography. There’s surely a joke to be made from the old Maoist Jean-Luc Godard’s line about cinema being the truth at 24 frames per second, updated to 10,000 lies per second through social-democrat Paul W.S. Anderson’s cinema. 

There’s a bizarre video that came out in 2012 featuring Marxist filmmaker Michael Haneke and CIA plant John Krasinski in the Hollywood Reporter where Haneke explains how Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is an incredibly manipulative film because of how it turns the Holocaust into entertainment. We, the audience, begin to fear whether the characters will be gassed or not. The gas of Auschwitz is turned from a real historical object into a literary device, another example of Chekov’s gun. Haneke’s films, by contrast, are cold and impersonal. His first theatrical feature, The Seventh Continent, spends ten minutes following a family getting out of bed. We don’t see their faces, instead their feet as they tie their shoes and their hands as they eat. This is a Brechtian approach to filmmaking, meaning Haneke is using the distancing effect. He wants the audience to be at a remove from what he is presenting, and instead the audience thinks about it instead of being immersed in whatever world is being shown. 

His films echo the words of the great Soviet filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, who wrote in “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form”: 

“Step by step, by a process of comparing each new image with the common denotation, power is accumulated behind a process that can be formally identified with that of logical deduction. The decision to release these ideas, as well as the method used, is already intellectually conceived. The conventional descriptive form for film leads to the formal possibility of a kind of filmic reasoning. While the conventional film directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole thought process as well.”

This is a mode of filmmaking that rejects emotional manipulation alone and instead wants the audience to deduce the logic of the material reality being presented. When you go to the movies, you interact with filmed reality. It’s ultimately a kind of materialistic art, when you look towards its essence. But in America, from the big studios down to micro-budget filmmakers here in Chicago, there is a push towards immersion. We filmmakers are entertained by the studios, and so we aspire to work for the studios, just as naïvely as the working man believes that one day he, too, will be a billionaire. Audience members broke box office records recently watching the new, fascist Spider-Man movie. What’s troubling is that there aren’t many alternatives. I Want Your Sex, from Queer New Wave icon Gregg Araki, demands an attention to the roles shown and the characters’ class relations, but its obvious ideology attacking hedonism appears to have been lost on the critical masses who praise it for its explicit sex scenes in a puritanical era. Yet the sex scenes and the context of the characters show that the puritanical approach is more ‘correct’ than the perspective espoused by Olivia Wilde, even though her words appear alluring. She roofies Cooper Hoffman’s character, explicitly grooms him, and abuses him. Somehow this is lost on many viewers. 

When talking about contemporary socialist films, not a whole lot of names pop up here in the Americas. Boots Riley comes to mind immediately, but the question quickly arises if his filmmaking is even particularly socialist. His individual opinions are, yes, but the form of it all? Even if his characters in I Love Boosters end up cheering a general strike, the form of his film still relies on immersion. The film form is still capitalistic to the core, from its production model to how the movie moves from shot to shot, even if its main plot device is a dialectical materialism device. This just appropriates left wing language for the sake of corporate profit. 

So then, what is to be desired? 

We must, as filmmakers, keep the audience at a remove from the world of the film, and we as viewers must leave the film world that we watch at a distance and reject any parasocial emotions that fill inside of us. We must desire to be challenged formally and accept that we might be bored from time to time. Sometimes, we might even desire to be bored. 

Later in chapter 4 of Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher says: 

“Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many – and these are A-level students mind you – will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a postliterate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the conning, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.”

We must deny immediate satisfaction to contemplate ideas, to depict ideas, and to challenge the viewer to try to understand them. In Angela Schalenec’s Passing Summer, a writer goes up to a publisher who is disappointed at her reliance upon elliptical sentences. He says something like, ‘at some point, I just wanted to read a normal novel. Do you not want to be understood?’ And she says, “I want to be understood.” And yet Schalenec, in each of the films she has made since that 2002 film, has not removed her own elliptical, naturalistic, and difficult narrative decisions. She wants to be understood, but she doesn’t want to do so by leaving her principles at the wayside. 

And so, neither must we, as socialists. 

The post Realism or Resisting Immersion? appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Updated with election night remarks from Larkin and Broward County DSA co-chair and Larkin campaign manager Zach B.

The post Election Night Live Blog: Larkin Concedes, “The Fight Continues” appeared first on Democratic Left.

A statement of the Democratic Socialists of America International Committee, July 2026. En español a continuación.

What is happening in Ecuador is a coup conducted without tanks. Its weapons are electoral councils, tribunals, and prosecutors, and its result is the one every coup seeks: a government that no longer has to face its opponents on equal terms. In a single week of July, the government of President Daniel Noboa closed three of the channels through which Ecuadorians contest power, each time by a lawful-looking decision of an ostensibly neutral body.

On July 15, the National Electoral Council refused to release the forms citizens need to gather signatures for a recall of the president, a right written into the constitution, ending the effort before anyone could sign.¹ Days earlier the Constitutional Court had refused even to hear the appeal of the Citizen Revolution, the largest opposition force, against its own suspension, citing a rule that blocks review during an election period, which is the only period when the suspension bites.² Then the electoral tribunal suspended AMIGO, the movement under which Citizen Revolution candidates had arranged to run, one day before the deadline to register alliances.³ Throughout, Noboa litigated against the recall aimed at him before the very council deciding whether it could proceed.⁴

This is not a seizure of power in the night. It is the steady conversion of the referees, the electoral council, the courts, the prosecutor, into instruments of the incumbent. Each step survives inspection on its own. Together they let a president choose his opponents.

It did not begin with paperwork. During last autumn’s national strike against austerity, security forces killed three protesters and charged demonstrators as terrorists.⁵ And it is not only Ecuador’s affair. Ecuadorians voted in November 2025 to reject foreign military bases; the United States deployed personnel to Manta anyway, and by July the chief of U.S. Southern Command was in Quito reviewing Noboa’s security plan in person.⁶ Our own government has set aside a vote of the Ecuadorian people, which places a particular duty on socialists in the U.S.

To the citizens’ platform Revoca EC and the attorney Washington Andrade; to Leonidas Iza, acting as president of Ecuarunari; to the peasant, labor, and teachers’ organizations, FENOCIN, the FUT, the Frente Popular, and the UNE, who filed the second recall petition against austerity and the agreement with the International Monetary Fund; and to every rank-and-file member of the Citizen Revolution whose party the electoral tribunal has barred from the ballot: we see you, and we stand with you.

We do not write to instruct anyone in Ecuador how to conduct their struggle. We write to affirm a principle that stands above any single party’s fortunes: the recall belongs to the people, not to a party, and the right to appear on a ballot cannot depend on the incumbent’s convenience. The government suspended its largest opposition without ever proving the charge, because it timed the suspension to the one period when the courts are barred from reviewing it. A case that cannot survive review is not a case. It is a tactic.

DSA members: raise Ecuador where you are. Bring this statement to your chapter, and demand that your own representatives end the U.S. military and police cooperation that underwrites this repression. The local elections of November 29 will test whether Ecuador’s doors are narrowed or shut. Doors closed by law can be reopened by law, but only while some remain open, and solidarity is one of the things that keeps them open.

The recall is not a party’s weapon. It is the people’s. From Quito to Chicago, our struggle is one.

1. El Universo, July 15, 2026.

2. Primicias, July 15, 2026.

3. La República, July 17, 2026.

4. Qué Noticias, July 8, 2026.

5. El Universo, October 23, 2025.

6. International IDEA, November 2025; La Jornada, July 18, 2026.

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Sobre el Ecuador: cuando los árbitros se suman a un equipo

Declaración del Comité Internacional de los Socialistas Democráticos de América (DSA), julio de 2026.

Lo que ocurre en el Ecuador es un golpe sin tanques. Sus armas son los consejos electorales, los tribunales y la Fiscalía, y su resultado es el que persigue todo golpe: un gobierno que ya no tiene que enfrentarse a sus adversarios en igualdad de condiciones. En una sola semana de julio, el gobierno del presidente Daniel Noboa cerró tres de los canales por los que los ecuatorianos disputan el poder, cada vez mediante la decisión, en apariencia lícita, de un organismo supuestamente neutral.

El 15 de julio, el Consejo Nacional Electoral se negó a entregar los formularios que la ciudadanía necesita para recolectar firmas por la revocatoria del mandato del presidente, un derecho inscrito en la Constitución, poniendo fin al proceso antes de que alguien pudiera firmar. Días antes, la Corte Constitucional se había negado incluso a conocer el recurso de la Revolución Ciudadana, la mayor fuerza de oposición, contra su propia suspensión, invocando una norma que impide la revisión durante el período electoral, el único período en que la suspensión le duele. Luego el Tribunal Contencioso Electoral suspendió a AMIGO, el movimiento bajo el cual habían acordado inscribirse las candidaturas de la Revolución Ciudadana, un día antes del plazo para inscribir alianzas. Durante todo el proceso, Noboa litigó contra la revocatoria dirigida a él ante el mismo consejo que decidía si podía avanzar.

No es la toma del poder en la noche. Es la conversión paulatina de los árbitros, el consejo electoral, las cortes, la Fiscalía, en instrumentos del oficialismo. Cada paso resiste el escrutinio por separado. Juntos, permiten que un presidente escoja a sus adversarios.

No empezó con el papeleo. Durante el paro nacional del año pasado contra el ajuste, las fuerzas de seguridad mataron a tres manifestantes y procesaron a manifestantes por terrorismo. Y no es solo un asunto del Ecuador. Los ecuatorianos votaron en noviembre de 2025 en contra de las bases militares extranjeras; Estados Unidos desplegó igual a su personal en Manta y, para julio, el jefe del Comando Sur estaba en Quito revisando en persona el plan de seguridad de Noboa. Nuestro propio gobierno ha desconocido una votación del pueblo ecuatoriano, lo que impone un deber particular a las y los socialistas de este país.

A la plataforma ciudadana Revoca EC y al abogado Washington Andrade; a Leonidas Iza, en su calidad de presidente de la Ecuarunari; a las organizaciones campesinas, sindicales y docentes, la FENOCIN, el FUT, el Frente Popular y la UNE, que presentaron la segunda solicitud de revocatoria contra el ajuste y el acuerdo con el Fondo Monetario Internacional; y a cada militante de base de la Revolución Ciudadana cuyo movimiento el Tribunal Contencioso Electoral ha excluido de la papeleta: les vemos y estamos con ustedes.

No escribimos para indicarle a nadie en el Ecuador cómo conducir su lucha. Escribimos para afirmar un principio que está por encima de la suerte de cualquier partido: la revocatoria pertenece al pueblo, no a un partido, y el derecho a aparecer en la papeleta no puede depender de la conveniencia del oficialismo. Un gobierno que suspende a su principal oposición en la única ventana en la que las cortes no mirarán no ha ganado una discusión. Se ha negado a tenerla.

A las y los afiliados de DSA: levanten el tema del Ecuador donde estén. Lleven esta declaración a su sección, inviten a estas organizaciones a hablar directamente con nosotros y exijan a sus propios representantes que pongan fin a la cooperación militar y policial estadounidense que sostiene esta represión. Las elecciones seccionales del 29 de noviembre pondrán a prueba si las puertas del Ecuador se quedan estrechadas o cerradas. Las puertas cerradas por la ley pueden reabrirse por la ley, pero solo mientras algunas sigan abiertas, y la solidaridad es una de las cosas que las mantiene abiertas.

La revocatoria no es el arma de un partido. Es la del pueblo. De Quito a Chicago, nuestra lucha es una sola.

The post On Ecuador: When the Referees Join a Team appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

It’s a big week for the Prop I!

Last week we build a lot of momentum with our kickoff in Dubose Park, and front page story in the Examiner.

This week has a couple opportunies to keep the energy going:

• Thursday August 20 from 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM there’s a Phonebank for Prop I – Affordable Housing Guarantee Act at 1916 McAllister St
• Friday August 21 from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM there’s a Yes on Prop I – Letter Writing & Pizza Night at 1916 McAllister St

See you there!

Events & Actions

Tuesday August 18 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday August 19 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) What is DSA? (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 20 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Phonebank for Prop I – Affordable Housing Guarantee Act (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 20 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 20 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Friday August 21 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Yes on Prop I – Letter Writing & Pizza Night (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 22 (11:00 AM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 22 (2:30 PM – 5:00 PM) Picnic in the Park (Mission Dolores Park, picnic area by the playground)

Sunday August 23 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (online)

Sunday August 23 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Socialists for an Affordable Bay Area: Fundraiser and Social (East Bay Community Space, 507 55th St, Oakland)

Monday August 24 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday August 24 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) SF EWOC Local Meeting (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday August 25 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday August 26 (6:45 PM – 8:30 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 27 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM) Emergency Planning Training (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 29 (11:00 AM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 29 (3:00 PM – 4:30 PM) Decolonization Studies (1916 McAllister St)

Sunday August 30 (1:00 PM – 2:30 PM) What is DSA? (Bayview Branch Library, 5075 3rd Street)

Monday August 31 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

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Letter Writing & Pizza

Join us Friday night 8/21 at 6pm at the DSA Office (1916 McAllister) for some good old fashion analog letter writing to thank our donors of the Yes on Prop I, the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act campaign, over dinner as we handwrite thank you cards and letters that we will send to donors with campaign buttons or bracelets! RSVP here! 

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Picnic in the Park!

Join your friendly neighborhood socialists at Dolores Park on August 22 from 2:30 PM to 5:00 PM for an afternoon hanging out in the park. Great for families and new members! Bring snacks to share and a blanket! Meet in picnic area by the playground.

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Bay Get Ready: People’s Assembly

As we approach the November election, the possibly of the Trump administration causing chaos to the electoral process and stealing the election is a real possibility. The attacks on our democracy have already started. 2026 is the most expensive election cycle yet for advertising from the worst people on earth. AI, AIPAC, and crypto Super PACs have spent more than $180 MILLION to influence voters this election cycle. We say hands off our election! In the event that the Trump administration tries to hijack the midterm election, it is important that organizations across the Bay Area be prepared for the possibility of ICE at the voting polls and the need for mass action to stop an election steal.

This coming Saturday, August 22nd, at Mission High School in SF, Bay Resistance along with East Bay DSA, SF Rising, SEIU, and AROC are sponsoring an event on how to organize around the plan to defeat MAGA in the midterms and defend democracy through mass noncooperation should an election steal take place. Even if you have attended one of the Bay Resistance mass trainings before, this training will be different and specific.

Doors open from 9-10. 
The main training is 10 – 12:30.
RSVP at: https://bit.ly/massassembly

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Apartheid-Free Bay Area

Join us on Sunday, August 23rd as we continue to canvass stores in support of Palestine! We will be canvassing the Excelsior and other nearby neighborhoods. We will meet outside the Wells Fargo on Ocean Ave and Mission St, where there will be a brief training before we split into canvassing groups.

Please RSVP here as we’ll need an accurate headcount! Those with cars and/or Spanish skills would be especially welcomed, and we’ll be grabbing lunch afterwards if interested!

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Decolonization Studies

Come join your friendly neighborhood socialists for study time! We’re reading from a collection of texts chosen to elevate our understanding of decolonization, reading is done beforehand and participants are invited to the office for a monthly in-person facilitated discussion. Please feel free to come to the session even if you’ve only partially completed the readings!

RSVP here (Decolonization Studies – DSA San Francisco Organization)

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Beach Day with Palestine Solidarity Working Group

Join the Palestine Solidarity Working Group at Ocean Beach on August 29 at 2:00 PM as we play some games and enjoy some time on the beach together! We’ll have snacks/drinks and a volleyball net, and of course we will be snagging a bonfire pit for the vibes. Please bring whatever you’d like to roast over the fire and come learn more about our work with Palestine!

RSVP for Beach Day via Partiful

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Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

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Reportbacks

DSA SF In Print

Our comrades Annie R and Hazel W were featured in Sunday’s issue of the SF examiner in an article about DSA SF and our work on Prop I.

Read the full article here

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Yes on I Field Kickoff

On Sunday, over 70 San Franciscans came out to Duboce Park for the Yes on Prop I Field Kickoff! We canvassed over 35 commercial corridors across the city to put up “Yes on I” signs to spread the word about the measure, and put up over a hundred window signs. This was an incredible first day and start to a long field season for the Yes on I campaign, thanks to everyone who joined! Let’s keep the momentum going all the way through the election.

If you didn’t make it out, that’s okay! We have plenty of events coming up, check out the calendar at yesonisf.com/events.

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July EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing: Final Reportback

On August 4th DSA SF had its final Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing course for the summer. A 4 part series, this final course taught a group of 10 people about how to inoculate your colleagues against the boss for the campaign. We learned of the many ways union busting will happen, and how we can protect our colleagues against these fear driven campaigns with solidarity. We also heard from our colleagues in the course on how they themselves have experienced some of these union busting tactics. Check out the EWOC Captive Audience bingo card to see how many union-busting tactics you’ve seen firsthand!

This series was my first time facilitating an EWOC course, and was both inspiring and fruitful to help with. EWOC starts you off with a “teach the teachers” course in how to facilitate, and comrades like Caitlin and Tim to help with the facilitation it made it less stressful. Having two of my own Organizing Committee members attend helped to spread some of my knowledge out and empower them to have their own one on one conversations. I believe anyone who is interested in organizing should attend these courses, as they show you tactics you will need and common pitfalls. Finally, nothing is more beneficial that real human experience which is shared through conversations in person.

If you’d like to get involved with the SF local chapter of EWOC, reach out to the lead coordinator Caitlin S. or email labor@dsasf.org. EWOC is a standing topic at meetings of the Labor Working group, which are held every fourth Monday at 7:00pm, both in-person at 1916 McAllister and over Zoom—the next one will be Monday August 24th! Anyone is welcome to attend, and we’re always looking for people interested in workplace lead canvassing, organizer trainings, and volunteer outreach. If you’re interested in organizing your workplace and would like to be connected with an EWOC organizer, fill out the request form here.

If you’d like to get involved with the SF local chapter of EWOC, reach out to the lead coordinator Caitlin S. or email labor@dsasf.org. EWOC is a standing topic at meetings of the Labor Working group, which are held every fourth Monday at 7:00 PM, both in-person at 1916 McAllister St and over Zoom. Anyone is welcome to attend, and we’re always looking for people interested in workplace lead canvassing, organizer trainings, and volunteer outreach. If you’re interested in organizing your workplace and would like to be connected with an EWOC organizer, fill out the request form here.

The result? A larger crowd and lots of press coverage.

The post Laura Loomer, State Rep. Attempt to Shut Down Florida DSA Rally  appeared first on Democratic Left.