Like many of you, our primary feelings right now are those of anger and urgency. We are isolated in our homes, or continuing to work in essential jobs made dangerous, as we watch COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to rise. Amidst this deadly pandemic we are witnessing a new stage in the emergence of the far right. White supremacists, encouraged by the President and our congressional representative, Elise Stefanik, are beginning to violently challenge our already precarious and frail democracy.

Both of the bourgeois parties have rallied together to protect big business and the political establishment. This could potentially cause a fallout between the Republican party, Trump and his white supremacist supporters, and boost the growth of the radical far-right movement. We will see increased calls for militarization and policing. Calls will be made for “unity,” signalling a rightward turn for the Democratic party as they reach across the aisle to work with conservative colleagues to restore the legitimacy of political institutions. We must be prepared to present an alternative.

High Peaks DSA is vehemently anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist. We believe that building a better society depends on true democracy, representation, economic justice, collaboration and care. Fascism, racism, and capitalism are the antithesis of justice and community care. Cornel West offers inspiration here. He reminds us to “never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” Fighting for justice is uncomfortable, confrontational and messy, and it is loving. This is the instinct that we organize from.

These past couple weeks have been hard. We are tired, but we can feel energy starting to creep back in. It is tempting to wait it out, and wish against our better instincts that Joe Biden’s inauguration will bring more normalcy, but we know that no such thing will happen. As we wrote in June, after the world erupted in anger at the unjust murder of George Floyd, “the system is not broken, it is working as it was always intended to. Our system was born when colonists brought the first African slaves to work this land for their own financial gain over 300 years ago.”

The same is true of the Capitol Police’s response to the white supremacist spectacle on January 6, 2021. The system that colluded to allow them to ransack the Capitol has been 300+ years in the making and will not disappear overnight. It is imperative that we continue organizing locally, to counter white supremacy and fascism in our community, to organize ourselves as the working class in order to challenge the power structures enabling white supremacy, which cannot exist without our labor, and to build support structures that can care for each other through sustained hardship.

In the spirit of solidarity and organizing during these tumultuous times, we hope you will join us in the following:

1. Our members’ meeting tomorrow, January 20th at 7 PM. We will discuss events of the last few weeks & the local priorities moving forward.
2. Our next Public Meeting will be on Wednesday, February 3rd, and will be focused on how you can get involved in local campaigns for justice as we move into a new political era.
3. The Tempest Collective’s: “Fighting the Far Right in the Biden Era”, featuring speakers from Santa Cruz and Chicago DSA chapters, labor organizers, and more.
4. Advocating for the health and safety of the most vulnerable.  Check out this really big news from our friends at RAPP (Releasing Aging People in Prison)!

The post What’s Next? appeared first on High Peaks DSA.

The spirit of black radical traditions, at their best, can turn the world upside down and help usher in a political economy of dignity, voice, and decision-making power for working-class communities. Liberationist streams of black radical spirituality are as contemporary as Alice Walker’s call for democratic socialist womanism, as old as Reverend George Washington Woodbey’s Black Baptist socialism and beyond. This discussion between Rev. Andrew Wilkes and Rev. Sekou, artist, author, and public theologian, is part of an ongoing series on faith and socialism. In this conversation, Rev. Wilkes and Rev. Sekou talk about the ethical and religious streams within black radical traditions and the implications for our times

In this age of relentless corporate media propaganda, working class media institutions that are actually rooted in the socialist movement are crucial for the struggles ahead. Tonight Marian Jones and Sarah Leonard join us to discuss their new socialist feminist publication: Lux Magazine. We’ll hear about how Lux came about through organizing and why its socialist feminist analysis not only helps us understand the crises we’re living through, but provides an intellectual framework to build a better world.

http://lux-magazine.com/

https://ezsubscription.com/lux/subscribe

Twitter - @readlux 

Metro Atlanta DSA forcefully condemns the coup attempt by supporters of Donald Trump that occurred in the United States Capitol building on January 6th. We echo the calls for Trump to resign or be removed from office as soon as possible. We call for the expulsion from Congress of all GOP politicians who encouraged this attack and we urge all our members and supporters to pressure their legislators to support Representative Cori Bush’s resolution to do so.

Since announcing his candidacy for president in 2015, Trump has organized a campaign of hatred, violence, and terror against working people. We saw this throughout his campaign, at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, and in the repression of the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020. We saw further escalation in this week’s attack on the Capitol building by a mob of white supremacists and far-right terrorists.

This attack was a convening of far-right activists and militants from across the country, called to D.C. by Trump himself. The crowd was made up of professional internet personalities, small business owners, neo-nazi militias, and even a Republican legislator from West Virginia. Despite aesthetic appeals to “liberty,” this movement is fundamentally opposed to the constitutionalism and rule of law of modern liberal democracy. 

Trump’s presidency is an extension of a wider neofascist movement fueled by the decay of capitalism in a dwindling empire. Squeezed between the pandemic, the climate crisis, and the declining rate of profit, the small capitalists and fascist militias are on track to grow increasingly hostile to both the liberal democratic state and the working class at large. Appeasement is not an option – the only effective counter is a mass movement of the working class fighting for truly democratic control of our society. Metro Atlanta DSA is committed to building this movement to defeat the fascists and the wealthy elites.

David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler have been defeated in Georgia. Working people showed up and voted in record numbers to reject the GOP and their cruel agenda. With Democrats on the cusp of taking power in the White House and both houses of Congress, our immediate task as socialists is to demand that the new Democratic Party government take bold action to empower working people and isolate the forces of reaction. If President-Elect Biden and Democratic Leaders Schumer and Pelosi truly intend to oppose fascism, they must tear it out at the root. We demand they pass a People’s Bailout for working people and that they move to swiftly expel the far-right coup instigators from Congress. Anything less will effectively enable the fascists to regroup and begin planning to take the House in 2022 and elect a Trump 2.0 in 2024.

This election was a referendum on COVID Relief. Congress must send all USA residents $2000 survival checks, in addition to retroactive compensation of $2000 per month for the entire span of this pandemic. To both address the immediate unemployment crisis and avert the worst of the climate catastrophe, we demand a Green New Deal to put Americans back to work and achieve 100% renewable energy by 2030. We can create good paying union jobs for all building green infrastructure for a clean and habitable planet for future generations. Finally, we must pass the Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act and establish a single-payer Medicare for All system, so that people are never forced to choose between their healthcare and their rent.

The dramatic upset in the Georgia Senate election can in large part be credited to an unprecedented electoral mobilization by organized labor. The hospitality workers’ union UNITE HERE, with support from other unions across the country, knocked 1,500,000 doors in the Senate election. Without their intervention, the Republican Party would still control the US Senate. Joe Biden owes it to the trade union movement to pass bold pro-labor reforms. Congress must establish a $15 minimum wage tied to inflation, pass the PRO Act, repeal Taft-Hartley, ban right-to-work laws at the federal level, and permit unions to organize through card-check.

We are under no illusions about the Democratic Party. Their neoliberal elite leadership has betrayed working people to serve wealthy corporate interests over and over again, and they will do it again as soon as the opportunity arises. Neoliberal rule from 2008-2016 is what gave us Trump in the first place. Our only recourse is to organize ourselves as working class people in a mass movement for justice and equality. We now have an opportunity for bold federal action, and we must seize this moment to build a vibrant movement for socialism that can overwhelm the forces of reaction. Join us in this fight – a better world is possible.

Join Metro Atlanta DSA today.

History is on the move. Reactionary Trump supporters seized the Capitol building earlier today in a fascist show of force. What does this all mean? RPM host and antifascist special correspondent Amy Wilson join us to discuss. 

We lost so many people this year, including socialist intellectual Leo Panitch. We’ll share clips from his presentation to the North Brooklyn DSA on the importance of building a culture of socialist political education. 

Later in the show DSA National Political Committee member Justin Charles will also join us to talk about the importance of working class organization for the struggles ahead.

The post SANTA AND METRO DC SOCIALIST ELVES DELIVER COAL TO CONGRESS appeared first on Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America.

Tonight we are talking about how care providers have been treated during the COVID-19 pandenic, focusing on vaccines to explain the role they will play liberating us from the COVID-19 epidemic (especially in our communities of color).

 

This is a deeply personal subject and in this episode we hope to honor everyone’s values and beliefs while grounding this segment in the science and public health knowledge of our guest.

 

Guest Jamese Lamb is an NYC-DSA Bronx/Upper Manhattan branch member and has a doctorate in Nursing from Duke University. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice and you should consult a primary care physician for your own personal care needs or eligibility for the vaccine.

 

This past Monday, New York City shut down indoor dining at restaurants and bars as COVID cases continue to rise in the city and across the country. Many restaurants were barely surviving before New York City became the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year. With little to no government support to make up for the loss of business needed to maintain necessary restrictions to stop the spread of COVID-19, restaurants and bars across the city are shutting their doors for good. And of course those most impacted in all of this are restaurant workers.

Today we’ll be talking with Natalia, Paul and Crystal, comrades from here in New York City and across the country in Minneapolis and Austin who are organizing with the Restaurant Organizing Project, and effort to organize restaurant workers for relief and power on the job during COVID-19 and beyond. We’ll talk about the many labor issues that existed for restaurant workers before COVID, how the pandemic has exacerbated those struggles while creating new ones, and how workers are fighting back.

Follow the Restaurant Organizing Project at twitter.com/@restaurantproj or visit labor.dsausa.org/restaurants to learn more about how you can get involved!

Space Coast DSA (SCDSA) Organizing Committee (OC) was originally formed in 2017 on the growing wave of interest in socialism nationwide. After two years we formally adopted a set of Bylaws and in 2019 were formally recognized as an official chapter. We engage in a number of projects as a chapter from protests and tabling events  to mutual aid programs and political campaigns. If you’re interested in these endeavours or just furthering your ideological education, all are welcome in our spaces member or not.

December 14

HACKENSACK, NJ — This weekend in Hackensack, protesters gathered in support of the hunger strikers detained by ICE inside the Bergen County Jail, as they have throughout the month the strike has lasted. These peaceful protesters were met with violence by a militarized police force. The excessive militarization of local police to suppress peaceful dissent, the racialized terror and violence they inflict, and the role they play in facilitating the ICE detention and deportation apparatus, all show why we need to defund the police. 

Hunger strikers protesting their detention by ICE are routinely retaliated against and lied about by officials, and such retaliation has been extended to the solidarity demonstrators. While the Bergen County sheriff spins false stories about the protestors, as has Hudson County executive Tom DeGise about protests outside his home for the renewed ICE contract, North Jersey DSA rejects these fraudulent narratives. Our members have been on the ground in Hackensack, Jersey City, and everywhere ICE is protested in North Jersey, and we can attest: these actions have been peaceful and led by our own communities.

 “This is the kind of movement building that is sending a powerful message to our communities on how we can stop the atrocities of ICE. As an Ecuadorian immigrant who has had family members detained because of their immigration status, I was inspired to see an area I have driven by numerous times growing up — to visit my mom at work a few blocks away, take the bus at the nearby station to go to work, buy groceries and eat with family– become a space of solidarity and strength in a way that I have never seen before, it’s moving.” reflected NNJ DSA co-chair Jorge Maldonado. 

Yet when people came out in peaceful solidarity with the hunger strikers at the Bergen county jail, they were met with an outsized number of police in riot gear ready to use violence without hesitation. The violence enacted by the Bergen County police was in stark contrast to the peaceful protest and makes it very clear who and what the police serve to protect. 

Bergen County has revealed that protecting profits made from incarcerating undocumented people in terrible conditions supersedes basic human rights. Bergen County and its police force have demonstrated that the rights of citizens and attempts at dissent will be forcibly quashed. It is a textbook study in police existing to serve corporate interests over human rights, in this case prioritizing ICE contracts whose primary purposes are to perpetuate the bloated correctional infrastructure in Bergen, Hudson, and Essex counties. That’s why we need to reallocate their funds to public needs as in schools, housing, jobs and ensuring that not a single human being goes hungry.

North Jersey DSA demands that we use the budgets of the police to enrich the people, not the interests of capital. New Jersey needs to end its ICE contracts and all ICE collaboration, and also defund the police. 

Comrades like Ridgewood for Black Liberation, who have done amazing work organizing in Bergen County, have met this violence with peace, and we applaud their work. We stand with all people opposing ICE inside and outside ICE detention. 

In solidarity, 

NNJ DSA

The post North New Jersey Democratic Socialists of America Denounces Police Repression in Bergen County, Calls to Defund the Police first appeared on North NJ DSA.