by Jean Allen

This essay is written in support of my convention resolution, For A Collectively Printed & Distributed Red Star. In it, I am motioning that we budget $3,600 for a printer and future printing costs through the year, and I understand that seems to be a lot. It will be compared to other front-facing work we have, other important committees, and people will ask why we should devote so much energy, time, and money to our publication?

This resolution should be seen more as a partial solution to a problem brought up by our ambitions. In our first long term planning retreat, we agreed to aim for a membership of 1000 within the next five years. Some comrades have brought up fears that are, broadly, about the quality of that new mass membership. What if they are liberals, or reactionaries? What if these members do not aid in the capacity of the chapter, and instead stay as ‘paper members’? 

I want to cast the first problem wholly away. I do not have the politics I had when I joined DSA. In fact, the politics I have now did not exist when I joined DSA, but instead emerged from the interaction of hundreds of people with practical organizing. That is the experience of so many comrades in our organization, and I see no reason that it will cease being the case in the future. What we should worry about, more than what the new members call themselves the moment they join, is: what will we give them to do? 

When I joined ROC DSA, the organization was two years old and we were just figuring ourselves out. What kind of work would we do, what were the boundaries of our politics, why are we even doing anything we did? There was a degree of pressure then, in 2017-2020, for us to become similar to the other left wing organizations around us at the time. Groups like Metro Justice dwarfed us, and had a clear eyed focus on basebuilding, mobilizing, and lobbying towards the end of getting radical legislation passed. Other organizations were even more focused on lobbying. A criticism I had of this approach is that lobbying focuses us on very specific people – it requires getting enough members who have free time, specialized skills, and the drive to get in a bus at 5AM on a weekday to go to Albany and pressure our electeds to little effect. I believed that we needed, instead, something that could produce a mass politics.

But I have a self-criticism. Far too often, the answer I and our chapter had to a new member asking “what do I do about the growth of fascism in the US?” is to say “clear a weekday, you’re going to be in a meeting deciding what we’ll do!”. Our meetings have gotten better, and as a whole we are far better at meeting discipline than we were in 2023 (when, during the primary season, we had more meetings than days in the month). But those criticisms I had of lobbying – that it requires people with free time, specialized skills, and the drive to keep going without clear wins – all apply to meetings-as-praxis. They also require specialized skills, they all require drive, and in fact they require more of our free time.

Now, I am not saying that meetings are bad, and I am very much not saying that we should stop deliberating. But if meetings are for the purpose of making decisions about the work we are doing, far too often the leadership work of filtering day to day activities into something people can meaningfully make a decision on, and making decisions into tasks that are assigned and then followed up on, is left to the meeting, and so meetings become multiple people deciding on the logistics of something that one person should be figuring out, rather than thinking about the broader direction we are going in.

If we are going to be an organization of thousands of members, that has hundreds of active members, then we will need to give those members something they can meaningfully do. For the most active, that may look like meetings and making dozens upon dozens of decisions about the tactics and logistics of the chapter. Ideally, general meetings would be a place where all the decisions are filtered to a place where membership can meaningfully choose strategic directions. But for many, many members, their engagement will look like something smaller. 

Anyone who’s been to a labor training will have seen this graphic:

The ‘core’ for us is leadership, the hyper-engaged, people who know a bunch that’s going on and who have a high level of time commitment to the chapter. Outside of that is activists, people who are engaged but perhaps not consistent, who maybe don’t have a fully formed idea of what they want to do with the chapter. Further outside are supporters (who maybe show up to a meeting every so often) and the disengaged (who are, at best, paper members). 

Something that was brought up to me the first time I was shown this has stuck with me since: that the best way to get a member to move deeper into the bullseye is to get them to feel they are representing the organization in some way. They get the ‘big sibling’ educational effect, where older siblings who are forced to teach their younger siblings end up reinforcing their grasp of the material by expressing the lesson in their own words. So a disengaged member, who is expressing socialist ideas to their friends, is finding their own way to articulate them. A supporter who tables for us ends up having dozens of conversations where they’re speaking on behalf of all of us, and it gives them a better sense of what they want from this organization and how they can help us. 

This could be an argument for any clearly defined, front facing set of tasks, and I want to be clear I support us engaging in all of them more. City Vitality has done very well for its clear outward facing task. But this resolution centers Red Star, and gives whatever priority campaign we have reserved column space, for a reason. For the development of our chapter’s rich inner life, we are not yet, as a chapter, in the habit of explaining our political perspective externally. We are good at slogans, we are good at developing conversations internal to the chapter, we are getting better at developing campaigns towards the political ends we’ve decided on, but when it comes to arguing our beliefs in depth, that is a skill that many members have, but which we do not have as an organization. When our leaders in the Steering Committee attended a pretty hostile interview on WXXI the other month, there were several times they seemed stumped. I do not think this is a failing of these comrades, it is a failing of a chapter culture which hasn’t developed the habit of putting out clear socialist analysis. This is understandable as we’ve worked to build, from the ground up, a socialist organization in this city. But just like meeting centricity, it is not fitted to a truly mass politics.

We need to get better at creating smaller, outward-facing, manageable tasks if we want to become a truly mass organization. We can do that without giving up the rich internal life we have built for ourselves in ROC DSA. City Vitality’s outreach walks and External Organizings’ tablings are two examples, but we need more, easily manageable tasks, for the organization to thrive. And for us to win, in our long term goal of the working class governing society, we need to get far more comfortable with articulating ourselves to it. People are excited, desperate, to do something in this moment. We need something to say, and something to do.

The post On Clear Tasks and Meetings first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Throughout the history of the United States, Black Americans have been the most ardent defenders of the democratic ideal.

The post America 250: The Struggle for True Democracy appeared first on Democratic Left.

By Asanti M.

To recount the history of the human struggle against hunger is to see a true virtue birthed from necessity in its most basic form. From time immemorial cooperation precluded death; community cemented life; and collaboration rose as the principal weapon against hunger. To stave off the constant assault on our mortality, collective structures arose from collective needs. Both calculated and spontaneous efforts set in motion the systematic destruction of our innate enemy and laid the foundation for a solidarity rooted in a visceral understanding of the human condition. Rather than eliminate hunger, contemporary modes of societal organization produce social structures that justify material dispossession. Collaboration has been abandoned for competition, and hunger is given space to thrive beyond the immediate consequences of climate or natural disasters. The sympathy that surrounds the suffering fades into a background colored with the constant tragedies that make up the white noise of modern life. 

Here in the States, there are countless organizations that endeavor to feed the hungry, yet every day a child starves. The tireless efforts of the charitable grant little solace to a mother whose labor can’t support her child nor to a father whose determinations fall short of supplying even the bare necessities. This struggle isn’t unique to the innocent but oppresses the “blameworthy” all the same. People deemed guilty by our systems are forced to navigate a world entirely unsympathetic to their plight. Despite the commonality of their condition, we see the suffering separated into two distinct categories: on one hand we have the fetishization of the hungry that abstracts their social position to maintain the image of an idealized victim; while on the other, we witness their unabated condemnation as inept failures or criminals on the margins of society. Each rendition subtracts from their humanity and masks the innately human battle against hunger. The “innocent” are allotted systematically constrained charity while the others are left to face an unforgiving material and social degradation. 

It’s not difficult to understand the sympathy that stirs the charitable. Their imagination brings the extremity of the idealized victim to the forefront of their mind: the emaciated frames, the protruding ribs, the sunken cheeks. They aptly discern what an all-consuming force the fiend we call Hunger can be, and, with heart in hand, they motion to alleviate the suffering of its victims. Their sympathy materializes in both simple and elaborate structures of food distribution, supplementing the diets of millions and temporarily subduing the otherwise relentless pains of starvation. The admirable solution posited by the sympathetic addresses the immediate needs of the hungry but does so under the unabated pretense of a deeply entrenched meritocratic framework that constricts its application. As the hungry toil, the meritocratic ethic that asserts: an individual deserves neither reward nor punishment from factors beyond their control, casts a moral fog over our deeply disturbing distribution of wealth. Hunger, death, and destitution become accepted as viable individual outcomes, rather than deeply opposed as communal ails. The elimination of hunger ceases to be one of the fundamental cornerstones of organized society and gives way to the social inversion that elevates the accumulation of individual wealth above collective humanity. 

The meritocratic ideal operates as an ostensibly unbiased sorting mechanism leaving the supposed listless to languish while the prudent rise to pinnacle of their aspirations. In our case, the ideal that exists in the national consciousness never escapes the imagination; all manner of happenstance, prejudice, or generic biases that color the human psyche render our “meritocracy” nominally absurd and functionally inept. Nevertheless, the mockery goes to serve as a retroactive justification for the languid position of the hungry, consequently molding the contours of the discussions surrounding their humanity. Conversations and solutions alike are fixed on optimizing the performance of the poor, while utterly disregarding the simple fact that our nation decorates landfills with several billions of pounds of wasted food every month. Wealthy institutions harp on charity, the unidirectional and placid rendition of mutual aid, but rarely engage in the opposition required to dismantle the sorting system itself. Our make-believe meritocracy shrouds the public imagination and replaces any concept of common humanity with fictitious barriers used to justify the vast disparities inherent to our current system. Any talk of universal dignity by the charitable is reduced to platitudinal posturing when the systems that place profit over the abolition of hunger go unquestioned.

The moral logic that permeates our nominally meritocratic society seamlessly accomplishes the impossible task of nullifying history and rendering structural social context irrelevant. The mirage of potential upward social mobility acts as the comforting illusion that instills hope against the foreboding backdrop of uncertainty. Blind individual perseverance is brutely applied as the universal answer to all societal ails and erodes the need for any deeper use of contextual evaluation. Wealth becomes proof of productivity and productivity rises to the status of virtue. Conversely, any outward semblance of economic strife, if not refuted as transient, becomes evidence of personal failure. The excess of the wealthy in the face of poverty doesn’t spur moral condemnation because meritocratically the excess is evidence of the assumed judicious character of the well-off. The impoverished, on the other hand, can bear no such virtue, evidenced by their very condition. There’s no need to understand the complex sociopolitical realities that produce poverty and hunger, because hunger itself ceases to be a collective social issue framed by laws, polices, history and the like. But rather reduces to the sole burden of the individual, in which the failure to provide or produce equates to the moral failure ascribed to poverty.

The moral judgment befalling the impoverished is only allowed redemption through the accumulation of status and wealth in the free market. By extension, the public’s measure of our own dignity degrades into a measure of our market value disregarding any innate human essence or even our societal contributions. Arbitrations of the market, buffered by charity, define the dynamic in which hunger is justified while the rules created by the free market masquerade as the only path forward, cementing isolation and competition as a seemingly natural default. The imposition of this isolating ethos shreds the collective call to abolish hunger into millions of fragmented families struggling to toil their way through an inherently dehumanizing system. Any motion towards solidarity becomes a tortured struggle that opposes the fundamental assumptions that form the bedrock of a fractured society. In a nation where the market determines humanity and a feigned meritocracy casts a veil over its manufactured borders between our brothers and sisters, the claim that “not a soul should starve if there is enough food to be had” seems the crazed cry of a radical.

The post To Feed the Hungry: The Merit of Charity first appeared on Red Fault.

Jeffries Speaker fight drags on, Florida subpoenas DSA, Palestinian-American challenges Fetterman’s Senate seat, Fox can’t quit Hasan Piker, early 2028 AOC buzz, and more in this edition of “Red All Over,” Democratic Left’s weekly news roundup.

The post DSA Subpoenaed, Jeffries Speaker Fight Heats Up, AOC 2028 Buzz appeared first on Democratic Left.

Socialists come together in a very “red” area to challenge a lobbyist-dominated local government.

The post DSA Chapter Forms in San Joaquin Valley appeared first on Democratic Left.

In a period of hyperpolitics defined by intense civil strife that produces a thin layer of institution-building, Zohran Mamdani’s rise shows similar limits. The left must now meet immediate political demands of governance through organizations that have never held such power.

The post A Hyperpolitical Mayorality appeared first on Democratic Left.