This episode of Heart of a Heartless World features Travis Donoho and Jeremy McMahan. Travis is a professional labor union organizer and member of Thich Nhat Hahn's Order of Interbeing Sangha. Jeremy is the producer of this podcast and a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner and scholar. They discuss the relationship between socialism and Buddhism, how self care is essential for labor organizing, and why a lot of American Buddhists don't identify as socialists.

In case you haven’t heard, the tuition strike just won a massive victory last week: Columbia announced that they will take action on our demand for increased financial aid, to the amount of $1.4 billion. No matter what Bollinger says, we know this wouldn’t have happened without thousands of students’ collective action.

This additional $1.4 billion represents nearly three times the amount of financial aid allocated at Columbia this past year, exceeding our demand to increase financial aid by at least 10%. However, Columbia’s response to the demands of our tuition strike still remains utterly inadequate.

Considering the university’s refusal to lower tuition costs, even this increased aid will by no means ensure that tuition for all programs across Columbia institutions will become affordable for low-income students. Instead of cutting their own multi-million dollar salaries or pulling funds from their $7 billion in unrestricted assets, the administration resorts to alumni donations in order to address our demand for better financial aid.

Columbia does not need charitable donations in order to make its education affordable; it simply needs to put its financial resources toward its own students rather than gentrifying real estate projects and executives’ wealth. Columbia’s announcement shows us the power that we have when we stand together, but it’s also a reminder of how much work we have left to do.

That’s why we’re asking all supporters of our movement to contribute their thoughts on how we can strengthen the movement into the future by joining us Thursday night at 7 pm ET at our Tuition Strike Debrief / Strategy Session to assess the strengths and weaknesses of our campaign this semester and to strategize about how we can build a stronger campaign next semester. (RSVP here for Zoom info)

Even if you can’t make it tomorrow, please vote in this non-binding poll on the question of whether we should try to organize an even larger tuition strike next semester and to share your feedback on what alternative or additional tactics we should use, as well as to indicate if you can help organize a campaign next semester. (Vote here!)

Hope to see you tomorrow!

Solidarity,

Columbia-Barnard YDSA

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The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) is Federal legislation that would remove the many barriers that have driven down union membership.  This bill has already passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and President Biden says he supports it.  Now we must pressure the Senate to pass it.

With the power of the working class organized we can demand a Green New Deal and a just transition to a clean economy that works for all.

https://www.dsausa.org/proact/

The year was 1970, and the Black Panthers had sent the FBI, and now the State Department into a whirlwind of panic. Rumor had spread across the embassies that the Black Panther Party was in Jordan agitating the country against Jewish people in Israel. Huey Newton called a press conference to clarify: the rumor was not quite true, Kwame Ture was in Jordan, but not as a representative of the Black Panther Party, and they had no grievance against the Jewish people. But what was happening was something far more formidable: one of the most fearsome socialist organizations in the US had been operating with an international consciousness.

Whether or not a grassroots movement is able to assent to international anti-imperialism has become an infamous bellwether on the left ever since the imperialist turn of the Social Democratic Parties in Europe. As World War I broke out across the continent, Lenin and Luxemburg warned that this was a war among imperial powers for control over resources that would be wrong to support, but the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and other European socialist parties most directly influenced by Marx and Engels, decided to betray them and each other by choosing nationalism and voting for war credits to finance the war, demonstrating how a socialism organization even with the best intentions can be bended into a tool of capitalism and the state if their politics are not fully anti-imperialist. How much will Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez be willing to reduce the defense budget and withdraw US troops at the expense of their electability in the largest empire in the world? How much would the protestors who turned out against police brutality in the US be willing to turn out against Duterte’s lethal Anti-Terror Law in the Philippines? Every solidarity movement as it grows faces challenges to the limits of its solidarity that it must meet if it is to continue to unite the oppressed against their oppressor.

“We support the Palestinians’ just struggle for liberation one hundred percent,” announced Huey Newton at the conference, “we will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.” The Black Panthers had been in daily correspondence with the Palestine Liberation Organization, via Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, who had traveled there fleeing US Law Enforcement. In about a year’s time, the Black Panthers had written and distributed 33 different articles on this topic in their newspaper, the Black Panther. 

But undoubtedly the most meaningful result of Black Panther’s relationship with Palestinian solidarity came with a militant Anti-Zionist organization which formed amongst Mizrahi youth in Israel in 1971. The Mizrahi are Jews who originated from Middle East and North Africa who were therefore both are Arab and Jewish, and as such have been treated as second-class citizens in Israel, above Muslim Palestinians citizens of Israel but below the European descended Ashkenazi Jews. Second-generation Mizrahim living in the slums of Musrara would learn of socialist movements from the revolutionary Matzpen movement organizing in Israel, and from these conditions the Mizrahi Black Panthers were born.

What’s beautiful about the Mizrahi Black Panthers is that rather than merely fighting for their own rights as Israeli Jews, they found common cause with their fellow Palestinian Arabs in Israel, who often lived in the same neighborhoods as them and faced similar problems of harassment and brutality by the police. They organized public demonstrations, often facing arrests from the police, including disrupting the World Zionist Congress of 1972 and organizing a hunger strike at the Western Wall which forced a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister. In what they had termed “Operation Milk,” milk bottles were stolen from rich Ashkenazi neighborhoods and given to poor Mizrahi families in need, along with incendiary literature explaining why this had been done. While they didn’t always necessarily identify as an Anti-Zionist or an Anti-Imperialist movement, their actions and their outlook situated themselves and the Palestinians against the Zionist state which to them was indistinguishable from the “white tribe” Ashkenazi supremacy of their condition.

At the press conference, Huey Newton had said, in what would later get published as “On the Middle East” that the Black Panther Party would “[n]ot just stand in international solidarity with all peoples oppressed by white supremacy but international resistance against all whom we understand to be the bodyguards of capital.” But how was it that it came to be that a movement that began in 1966 as two activists in Oakland arming and organizing black residents to defend themselves against police violence would be publicly declaring international opposition against all of capitalist imperialism in just four short years? What is it that they did or saw that we can learn from by their example? 

The first thing to note about the Black Panther Party’s solidarity with the Palestinians is that it was only a part of a rich relationship between Palestine and the broader Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm X was a significant champion of the Palestinian cause, on a personal level having been connected to the Arab world as a member of the Nation of Islam as well as ideologically as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, visiting Gaza in 1964. Malcolm X’s fight for black liberation extended to all non-whites oppressed by Western imperial power, not just African-Americans living in the US. Like Malcom, Kwame Ture’s concept of Black Power was also internationalist, explaining that “[w]hen you talk of black power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.” As chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Ture wrote a 1967 article drawing parallels between the black civil rights struggle in the US with the Palestinians rights struggle in Israel and staged a demonstration at a leftist conference to demand adoption of a resolution condemning Zionism.

While Ture and Newton both supported what they recognized as Palestinian Nationalism against the state of Israel, Newton felt it necessary to draw a distinction between a sort of alliance amongst oppressed peoples towards seperatism characteristic of Ture’s Pan-Africanism and his own conditional nationalism aligned not strictly by race but by the struggle against capitalist imperialism, stating “This transformation can only take place by wiping out United States imperialism and establishing a new earth, a new society, a new world. So politically and strategically the correct action to take is not separation but world revolution in order to wipe out imperialism. Then people will be free to decide their destiny. Self-determination and national liberation can not really exist while United States imperialism is alive. That is why we don’t support nationalism as our goal.”

And it must have seemed (more than usual) that these were particularly international times. It was the midst of the cold war and countries and conflicts were literally being categorized by their relation to Western Imperialism and Communism. More importantly, it was the midst of the Vietnam War. The most unpopular war in US history had been opposed by the Black Panthers  from the very start, including an anti-war plank in its original Ten-Point Platform, stating “We want all Black men to be exempt from military service. We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America.” The next year, the draft began and the number of deployed troops reached half a million.

At the same time this was a pivotal moment for the Israel-Palestine conflict in particular: in June of 1967 came the Six-Day War. It took less than a week for Israel to pre-emptive strike Egypt and much of Syria’s air force and drive out Egyptian and Jordanian forces on the ground until the UN came in to broker a cease-fire. The result was the entirety of historic Palestine became occupied by Israel, with a million Palestinians now living under Israeli rule and hundreds of thousands more fleeing as refugees. Unlike the relatively static occupation of this decade, the burgeoning party would have seen the nation of Palestine effectively wiped from the map in real-time.

Another essential aspect of the anti-imperialist politics of the Panthers, of course, was the anti-imperialist teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao whom as revolutionaries their leadership ascribed to. While Marx set the economic basis for describing the exploitation of Capitalism, it was Lenin who saw in particular its relation to Imperialism, describing it as the highest stage of the Capitalism system. Mao took this philosophy of Marxist-Leninism and recontextualised it outside of the West – first, as a “semi-colonial” country facing imperial aggression from Japan, later, as a Communist power facing aggression from the US. The result was militant political organizing conducted with a awe-inspiring combination of revolutionary zeal and analytical clarity, as illustrated here by Fred Hampton “We’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state attorneys with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reaction when all working people get together and have an international proletarian revolution.”

The sources of the Black Panther Party’s revolutionary ideas appear to have come from a variety of places. From the first, the Black Panthers saw themselves picking up after the work of another revolutionary, Malcom X, who was assassinated a year before their founding. But for the Panther’s Maoism also wasn’t a historical matter, they could see these principals in motion in China and Vietnam. They also drew inspiration from the Cuban revolution as well as the Marxist and decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon. By Assata Skakur’s account, “I wasn’t against communism, but i can’t say i was for it either. At first, i viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man’s concoction, until i read works by African revolutionaries and studied the African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of white colonists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the capitalist economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists.” On the other hand, George Jackson simply stated “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.”

Among these factors which help explain the international character of the Black Panthers, the one I find most compelling is the simplest one: the Black Panthers and Palestinians both faced struggles which they could recognize in each other. The Black Panthers were founded as a community solution to police violences and began their first published article demanding justice for the police killing of Denzil Dowell. In Palestine, there were 48 people killed by Israeli officers enforcing curfew in Kafr Qassem and the Wadi Salin riots protesting the police killing of a Mizrahi Jewish man. At a time when black people in America relocated to escape the legacy of slavery a racial enmity in the rural South and faced the impacts of redlining in ghettos, Palestinians and Mizrahim faced displacement from Israeli troops and slums. While Huey Newton compared the black experience in America to a colonial occupation of Palestine, a Palestinian liberation leader reflecting on Huey Newton would compare the oppression of the Palestinians to the the US incarceration system. While the location, context, and degree of these struggles may vary between the two peoples, it is undeniable they struggled against much of the same problems, in truth both struggling against different facets of the same problem of racist and imperialist capitalist systems. The Black Panthers direct experience with this oppression and with this struggle, fundamentally, is not something that would require a textbook to explain.

Perhaps the political and organizational legacy of the Black Panther Party in the United States can best be seen today in the Black Lives Matter movement, arguably the most influential racial civil rights and police abolition movement since the Civil Rights Era, and Democratic Socialists of America, arguably the most influential socialist organization of this generation. What guidance can we offer these movements on how they can stay the course of international solidarity? In the case of Palestine at least there is some reason for optimism; in 2016 the Movement for Black Lives released a statement in support of the Palestinian struggle as part of their platform and in 2019 the DSA passed a resolution in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement. But the lesson I believe we can take from the Black Panther Party on internationalism is to study the movements that came before you, pay attention to the world events happening around you, study the revolutionary theorists of the past and present, but above all engage meaningfully in the struggle for liberation. To catch a panther cub you must enter the panther’s lair — there is no greater teacher on the contours of our shared political struggles than the material reality of the struggle itself.

References

• “The Black Panther Party and Palestine Solidarity,” Matthew Quest
• “Ninetieth anniversary of the German SPD voting for War,” World Socialist Web Site
• “The long history of Black and Palestinian solidarity,” Liberation School
• “The New Left and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the United States,” Michael R Fischbach
• “When Israel’s Black Panthers found common cause with Palestinians,” The Electronic Intifada
• “’Our ideology is our pain’: Notes of an Israeli Black Panther”, +972 Mag
• “Rediscovering Huey P. Newton’s ‘On the Middle East’”, Workers Youth United
• “A historical framework for continued Black-Palestinian solidarity,” Mondoweiss
• “Stokely Carmichael,” History.com
• “A Huey Newton Story,” PBS
• “Vietnam War Protests,” History.com
• “Six-Day War,” Britannica
• “Vanishing Palestine,” Palestine Remix 
• “The communism of the Black Panther Party,” Redflag
• “50 years later – What can the Black Panther Party teach a new generation of revolutionaries?”
• “‘How do you organize that rage’: A podcast on policing and protest from The Oaklandside and East Bay Yesterday,” The Oaklandside
• “We’ll never forget October 1956 massacre, say Palestinians in Israel,” The electronic Intifada
• “Redlining,” Black Past
• “Great Migration: The African American Exodus North,” NPR’s Fresh Air
• “Why The Black Panther Party & Palestine Solidarity Is Still Relevant Today,” Black Lives Matter Alliance of Broward
• “Democratic Socialists of America BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group,” DSA

Voting for our officer election has concluded. Results are in, and we’re pleased to announce nine new officers for the Silicon Valley chapter of DSA! Join our first chapter meeting with them this Sunday, April 18th at 2pm. All are welcome to come meet the officers and ask questions!

Now is a great time to get more involved with DSA. Our committees could use a hand! Do you have interest in any of these areas?

• Communications: From social media to newsletters (hi!), our Comms Committee helps make sure our membership is aware of upcoming events, actions, and internal decisions. From writing to design, we’d love your help spreading the word.
• Outreach: Help bring DSA to local communities with the Outreach Committee. Seek out other organizations to partner with, share flyers in your area, and more.
• Agendas & Meeting Planning: Our AMP Committee is responsible for keeping things running smoothly — making sure all of the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed for upcoming meetings. Help keep our meetings as accessible as possible.
• Tech and Data: Want to build software to facilitate activism? Develop the chapter website? Ensure safe use of membership data? Join our Tech and Data Committee to help with the chapter’s technical structure.
• : Our goal is to make sure all comrades feel welcome in DSA spaces, whether they’re new to the movement, recently moved to the area, have been busy with other obligations, or are fully involved members. MDC helps to make sure you’re oriented, you get your questions answered, and you know where you can dive in.
• Finance and Inventory: This committee is responsible for confirming that our books are kept up-to-date and making sure we know what funds and resources are available — both critical aspects to enabling our work (from mutual aid to swag and beyond!).
• : Our newly-formed Social Committee is responsible for planning (virtual) events to bring our community together. If you have a fun idea, join the first meeting on Wednesday!

No experience required. Come to an upcoming meeting or to learn more!

In solidarity,
Your SV DSA Newsletter Team

The post Newsletter – 2021-04-12 appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

On Sunday, April 11th, the members of Charlotte Metro DSA voted to endorse the National DSA Pass the PRO Act Campaign. The full text of the resolution is available below.

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As a top national priority, DSA is embarking on a national campaign to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act). This transformative legislation gives power to unions to organize workers and overturns many anti-labor rulings handed down by the Supreme Court. Most importantly, it roots out racist and unjust labor practices, like right-to-work laws, and guarantees that immigrant workers have the same rights afforded to their fellow workers. DSA is joining a national coalition led by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), a union that is majority people of color, who has been leading the push. DSA’s National Political Committee is preparing to support DSA chapters in every state as we fight side by side with workers everywhere from now until May Day (Biden's 100th day in office) to force the president and federal elected officials to make this legislation a reality.

President Biden has made climate one of his key priorities in office. In his first week in office, he’s already re-entered the Paris Agreement and cancelled the Keystone pipeline. These steps re-establish the status quo of Obama’s presidency. But more importantly, the new administration's emphasis on climate, along with more socialists in Congress, creates openings for DSA to push for key legislative priorities. There is also a common desire among both labor and the left to not repeat 2008, when Obama was allowed to back down on his promises, leading to the Republican wave in 2010. 

We can only win transformative reforms like the Green New Deal with a much stronger, radicalized, and organized working class. To that end, DSA’s national Green New Deal (GND) campaign and Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC) are convening a central push for the First 100 Days of the new administration to pass the PRO Act (Protect the Right to Organize), which would strengthen unions and the power of the working class to organize on the job, helping to build labor power as strong as it needs to be in the months and years ahead to win a just transition to a green economy for all workers, especially in building power toward GND demands like a federal jobs guarantee that can function as socialist “non-reformist reforms.” The original New Deal was won through militant labor organizing — rebuilding this capacity is crucial to the theory of power DSA’s national GND campaign has developed for a radical Green New Deal.

Towards that end, Charlotte Metro DSA proposes to work within our chapter to mobilize members around the PRO Act, which would begin with emphasizing that passing this legislation is a first key demand within a larger campaign strategy to win a Green New Deal. We will coordinate our chapter with the broader DSA national initiative, laying the groundwork for future efforts strengthening connections between labor and climate justice. 

Goals:

• Align DSA members around a labor-oriented strategy for climate organizing;

• Advance a pro-labor narrative for DSA’s climate organizing, internally and externally;

• Connect with and activate DSA union members to participate in a strategic and federally-targeted DSA campaign;

• Activate non-union worker members within DSA around the demand of the PRO Act;

• Increase DSA members’ capacity/skills to carry out strategic organizing work with  federal targets in a strategic nationwide campaigns;

• Work with Labor WG to ID union members and non-union members in key sectors that would be affected by PRO for mobilization, laying the groundwork for possible future GND-related organizing with local labor unions;

• Support chapter targeting of local unions who could be brought into coalition around the PRO Act and facilitate longer-term relationship building with labor. 

To this end, we are proposing these chapter efforts for the first 100 days of the Biden administration:

• Plan public-facing political education events around the role of organized labor and the PRO Act in winning a Green New Deal;

• Mobilize members for national webinars around PRO Act and the role of organized labor in a just transition;

• Participate in DSA national phone banks with auto-dialer campaign to pressure key Reps in Congress, especially in strategic states and districts with Reps and Senators to be moved in key states like Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Colorado, and Arizona;

• The National GND campaign is developing a congressional tracking sheet with IUPAT to identify priority targets. We will work across our chapter to determine interest and capacity to organize against any priority targets in our jurisdiction;

• Adapt national social media campaign materials for targets in our region;

• Plan public action(s) locally around PRO Act, along with the national campaign and local labor allies (including a possible May Day action). These can include rallies, sit-ins, escalating nonviolent direct action, etc. based on capacity and risk factors for participating members and allies.

Interested members can sign up for the national campaign in this form! 

http://bit.ly/dsaproact 

The Madison Area chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauds the students at Altoona High School who organized a walkout in response to a return to in-person learning in the middle of a global pandemic. We stand with them in their fight for a safe learning environment.

Students at Altoona describe close confines that prevent adequate social distancing and a lack of trust in an administration that failed to consult with students about the plan to return. Many high school students are under sixteen and are therefore still ineligible for COVID-19 vaccination, putting them at a heightened risk of contracting the virus. That risk is greater than ever as new, more contagious variants become dominant in the United States and as new COVID-19 cases are climbing again throughout Wisconsin. 

Altoona High School administrators should listen to their students whose concerns about school reopenings are shared by leading epidemiologists, including those who once supported school reopening but have changed their minds due to the severity of the new COVID-19 variants. Our country and our state is on the cusp of a new wave of COVID-19 cases and unvaccinated students in crowded classrooms are directly in the line of fire. 

Throughout the pandemic, Madison Area DSA has stood with people fighting to reject unsafe conditions, mainly workers in our region. We recognize the Altoona Student walkout as a part of this same struggle. No one should be forced to risk their health and safety or the health and safety of vulnerable family members for a paycheck – or for a grade. As socialists, we believe that people should have the right to collectively determine the conditions in which they work and learn.

We are pleased to announce our third issue of our quarterly magazine, What’s Left!

In This Issue

• Peorty Selection for National Poetry Month: Spring in New Hampshire, by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
• Domestic Labor and the Capitalist State
• Socialist Feminism of the 21st Century
• The Struggle Continues: Reflections on GR Organizers Past Present and Future
• Michigan Stagehands Rally for Unemployment Benefits and Jobs – FightBackNews.org
• Say Yes To Michigan! An Imagined Future if We Pursue Alternative Energy

The post What’s Left – Issue #3 – April 2021 appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

To get involved with the campaign for Public Power: http://ecosocialists.nyc/  and https://www.nypublicpower.com/

To get involved with the Internet for All campaign: internetforall.nyc/join