CW: mentions of suicide

Nevada’s education is a disaster.

According to recent statistics, Nevada ranks among the “least educated” states. In 2015, the state scored 50th of 51 in total K-12 education assessment. To anyone who grew up in Las Vegas, this is not even remotely surprising. This is not a new phenomenon. In my high school, between 2011 and 2015, we celebrated whenever Nevada climbed from 50th to 49th in overall ranking in public education nationwide.

Politicians always bang the drum of education reform, but marginal fixes do nothing to address the root issue. The constant failure of education reform is a consequence of a lack of political backbone to take on the central political force of austerity in Nevada: the mining industry. Education has everything to do with taxing the mines. If we want to fix education in Nevada, we must understand how the mining industry exacerbates the systems of oppression that contribute to the problems in our public education system. The mining industry has so far escaped paying its taxes with devastating consequences for democracy, Indigenous sovereignty, the environment, and social services – including education.

Take mental health as an example.

Teachers are often forced to fill a state-created void of mental health services.  In the Clark County School District, the ratio of students to school psychologists is about 2200:1. The recommended ratio is 500:1. The complete dearth of mental health professionals in Las Vegas schools makes many students seek help from mentor figures they form connections with in the classroom. Teachers are compelled structurally to assume far more responsibilities than their job description dictates in the mental health needs of their students. They often perform and expect an overwhelming amount of extra labor to make up for the lack of psychological professionals. That is despite the fact that their labor is already undervalued and underpaid. That is an unfair burden on teachers that significantly decreases their capacity – both emotional and physical. Instead of enjoying time off after work, I witnessed my teachers in their classrooms several hours after school-bells rang huddled with classmates who may have harmed themselves if left alone that night. That burden on teachers is a direct result of underfunded social services.

Not only are teachers forced into extra labor by the chronic underfunding of our schools, but students are also impacted. The mental health needs of students can easily fall through the cracks of a broken system, a fact that is particularly the case for students from marginalized communities. Nevada’s public education is abysmal across the state, but it is no coincidence which schools are the worst hit by chronic underfunding’s impact on mental health: schools with majority-Black student populations and schools in Tribal communities. Nevada is a “majority minority” state, and racial discrimination is linked to worse mental health. Certain municipal institutions are hotbeds of racial discrimination, like the Las Vegas Metro, which harms the mental health of city residents all the more. Las Vegas has the highest proportion of undocumented immigrants nationwide, forced to live in fear of state-sponsored violence enacted upon them. Studies also show that the kids of undocumented parents receive healthcare at significantly lower rates than the national average. Poverty is linked to lower school achievement and more mental health disorders in both childhood and adulthood, and concentrated poverty is most extreme in Nevada’s communities of color. Las Vegas’s workforce is a precariat of service workers who work odd hours for the casinocracy that exploits them, and leaves many kids without parental support for large segments of the day.

Urban sprawl exacerbates the mental health issues endemic in Las Vegas public schools, as well. Social isolation, linked to worse mental health, is increased by long commute times. These longer commute times are invariably present in a school district without sufficient school buses and awful public transit – both of which are proven to be linked to the racist and classist system. “Black and Brown people comprise a disproportionate share of public transit’s ridership base,” which means that Black and Brown people are impacted at greater rates by underfunded transit and urban sprawl itself.

Even after students and teachers arrive in school, they may be forced to learn and work in facilities with harsh environmental conditions. I attended class in the Vegas heat – which can reach upwards of 100 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit – with no AC in portable classrooms holding up to fifty students for substantial parts of my school life in Clark County. This environment is clearly not conducive to an effective educational environment, and yet that was our daily reality. My high school’s student population was 90% children of color. Students arrive from long commutes at school, sleep-deprived, with all of the negative impacts of sprawl already enacted after leaving homes where they may face financial instability or abuse or live in fear of state-sponsored violence. They arrive at school to study in classrooms with facilities that are broken down and – quite plausibly – may not even qualify as sufficient by the standards of international human rights, sweating, trying to learn about U.S. history from a curriculum that largely erases the stories of their families and their communities in favor of the stories told by white settler elites, at small desks their might share with other students. They may go the entire year unnoticed by an overworked teacher just as they are unnoticed by the counselor, by the administrator, by the system. The COVID-19 pandemic has only worsened these circumstances.

No one I knew did not suffer from mental health issues. Many had undiagnosed mental illnesses that plagued them, or from which they had no escape. Many sought help from apps, but apps cannot replace sufficient mental health care. Some of my friends killed themselves. Every single death and untreated mental illness was aided and abetted by woefully insufficient school funding and the de facto abandonment of Nevada’s students by state budgets.

All of these factors lead to one conclusion: Underfunding schools is deadly. The mines have blood on their hands. Our economy isn’t boom-and-bust anymore; it’s stumble-and-bust, at best. Whether we are in central Las Vegas or in Northtown or on the Eastside or on a reservation, we survive in conditions created by defunded public services like education. Minerals have more rights than teachers or students. They have since Nevada became a state.

Since the beginning, the mining industry has taken advantage of Nevadan suffering for its own profits. Nevada is the fifth largest producer of gold in the world. As per the Nevada Constitution, the mining industry cannot be taxed beyond a cap of five percent on net proceeds. That constitution was largely written with the ink of Big Mining. When the constitution was first drafted, the arrogance of the California-owned mining companies that sought to exploit Nevada’s resources failed when settler Nevada voters decided against the first proposed constitution. Then, an infamous bust occurred and Nevadan voters “yearned to be rescued by the only thing that they thought could save them, investment from … California corporations and financiers.” The mining industry capitalized on the bust to secure their tax exemption in the Nevada Constitution and benefit from economic collapse.

The fact that Big Mining used a bust to write themselves the tax exemption makes the train of argument from mining industry lobbyists particularly ironic. At the recent IndyTalks session where progressive champion and PLAN executive director Laura Martin faced mining lobbyist Jim Wadhams, Wadhams defended the taxation cap on the grounds that the mining industry does experience recession. The mines do bust; thus, they should not be taxed at a higher rate. However, since the bust part of the mining industry’s economic cycle was the catalyst for mining to receive its much-desired tax cap to begin with, the industry has no moral ground to stand on in weaponizing that very fact to defend the unjustifiable exemption. Big Mining cannot pretend history does not exist if Nevadans remember.

Another argument that the mines use to defend their role in defunding Nevada is that mining does pay other taxes. As the executive director of the Nevada Mining Association argued to the Pahrump Valley News, “the industry, like other businesses, also pays property, sales and payroll taxes.” The same talking point was repeated by Wadhams in the recent IndyTalks session. However, as Laura Martin pointed out, that does not actually capture the full picture of the generous deductions that the mining industry feasts upon that small businesses are not qualified for. Mining is uniquely positioned as the only industry in the state that is constitutionally exempt from any real obligation to Nevadan communities. Instead of paying into our public services, Nevadans foot the bill for cleanup costs, costs of development, corporate services, royalties paid if on a lease, and healthcare benefits. “We are paying for their healthcare,” Martin said. “It’s just mining. No other business gets to enjoy so many deductions. [The mining industry] basically saves $5 billion in taxes owed to the state.”

Mining has an arsenal of arguments steeped in business language and buzzwords, but the simple fact is that mining is legally protected from adequately compensating the state for its heinous activities. We don’t need to get in the weeds. The mines exploit Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe land at the expense of Nevadans – particularly the poorest. We have the fifth most regressive tax structure in the nation, by virtue of Big Mining. As Ian Bigley wrote in the Nevada Current, “Nevadans making less than $20,500 a year pay over 10 percent of their daily income in taxes, while the mining industry pays less than 1 percent of their gross income into the state general fund.” In other words, the poorest Nevadans pay nearly ten times their proportionate worth compared to the entire mining industry. That is by the design of the mining industry that held Nevada legislators’ hands in writing the NV Constitution.

Mining does everything to keep it this way. Sweet, reasonable rhetoric voiced from lobbyists is only one of their weapons. Mining, as the “only game in town,” lobbies and fills the coffers that support key politicians. Nevada Gold Mines donated half a million dollars to the Home Means Nevada PAC, affiliated with Governor Sisolak, in advance of the current legislative session where NV Constitution amendments to tax the mines are on the table.

Meanwhile, mining lobbyists slander legislators that dare to ask the mines to pay their share with the label “eco-terrorists.” That keeps legislators who are early in their terms from criticizing the mines due to fear of retaliation. According to Laura Martin, first-time legislators will often say they “don’t want to cross mining.” The mines delight in maintaining that fear to protect their profits. I witnessed this culture of fright first-hand. When I walked through a government building in the early 2010s, a lawmaker told me about the influence of mining only in a whisper. The industry was untouchable. Mining is a quiet behemoth exerting tremendous influence through a tax exemption they bullied Nevadans to accept 160 years ago.

The fact that our elected officials fear the mining industry’s power demonstrates the extent of their political influence. By constitutional writ, the mines are immune to their democratic obligations to communities and act as a fundamentally undemocratic force on Nevada’s political culture by counteracting our votes with both money and a potential for retaliation that is hung over the heads of Nevadans. Mining not only retaliates against elected officials, but regular residents as well. “We get messages [from people that live near active mines] all the time, [asking how they] can contact their legislator without the mining industry finding out because [their] uncle works there,” Martin indicated in the IndyTalks session. That is doubly true for Native communities who have been compelled to coexist with the mines.

Even while encouraging fear, the mining industry pollutes and poisons the land with particular consequences for Indigenous people. “Every waterway — springs, streams, all these watersheds — these mines are operating and damaging our water resources; not only that, but our environment, the survival of all people,” said Shoshone Paiute Tribal Chairman Brian Thomas of Duck Valley. Shawn Collins, a Western Shoshone former employee of the mining industry, discussed in Tainted Thirst how, at the hands of mining, the areas where Shoshones used to camp –  a site where Native elders are buried – was the exact location that the corporation destroyed to build a mine: “they tore up my country, my family’s country.” Meanwhile, the Yerington Paiute Tribe continues to rely on store-bought water bottles because their land has been poisoned by uranium and arsenic shed by the Anaconda Copper Mine. Changes in clean-up were decided in 2019 by a company based on new science, but no notification was given to the tribe. While the mines have made improvements in decreasing contamination caused by their operations relative to decades ago, the fact that the industry continues to avoid paying adequate taxes shows that even the barest form of reparations for crimes against Indigenous people on their own land remain unpaid.

In fact, exploitation of the land at Indigenous people’s expense has been the resulting impact of mining interests since the inception of those interests in Nevada. The only treaty between the United States and an Indigenous Nation in Nevada, the Treaty of Ruby Valley (1863), was written to guarantee free rein for mining to exploit the land at all costs.

While Native people are disproportionately impacted by the mining industry’s operations, the environment itself suffers severe degradation. Where pit lakes form in vacated mining sites, “toxic stews” of melted metals generate acid into a “circular chain reaction of perpetual pollution.” There is a great deal of water in Nevada’s earth, but the mines disrupt natural water flows. The environmental consequences are long-lasting. The Anaconda Copper Mine in Yerington ceased operations decades ago, but clean-up of the plume generated by operations was initially announced to require up to 285 years to “remove the quantity of water necessary to clean up the aquifer.”

Yet, even though that impact directly results from mining, this centuries-long treatment is a responsibility that the profiteers of Big Mining avoid at all costs. ARCO, the company charged with cleaning up Anaconda, has since amended its technical review to only assume responsibility over a much smaller plume zone than it was originally prescribed. That alteration benefits the company, but not the actual process of cleaning up the land poisoned by industry. Meanwhile, mining continues to dewater the environment and impact vital ecosystems by over-appropriating the environment for profit, particularly in locations like the Robinson Mine in White Pine County and in the upper Humboldt River corridor.

Undeniably, the mines harm Nevadans. Ever since the founding of Nevada, the mines have capitalized, giving back little in reparations to the people of the state they exploit. They established a culture of fear among Nevada lawmakers in 1863, and that culture has followed them into 2021. They expect a quid pro quo from legislators who they fund to counteract the needs of the voters who elected those legislators into power. If legislators don’t play their game, they slander them with labels like “eco-terrorist.” They prey on the land with little regard to the impact on Indigenous communities and the environment.

Finally, they stuff their pockets with earnings while public services go underfunded. While many factors contribute to the disastrous Nevada public education system, a large number of them are deeply intertwined with a lack of sufficient funding. Teachers take on additional labor to make up for a dearth of mental health professionals; students resort to mental health apps in lieu of qualified counselors; most students rarely receive one-on-one attention because of oversized classes; students suffer from poverty in classrooms, as well as at home, because of underfunded classrooms; long commutes are made longer by debilitated public transit, which is an effect of underfunding. All of these can contribute to higher drop-out rates and the epidemic of mental illness throughout Nevada schools, culminating in suicides. The consequences of these underfunded public services impact Black and brown students at higher rates than white students, and the mining industry is complicit in every single one of them.

“We do not see our Legislature being as inventive as possible for our kids and for our healthcare in the same way they have been for big business … we shouldn’t have the biggest gold mines and the most underfunded schools in our country,” said Laura Martin in IndyTalks. She is completely correct, as were Nathaniel Phillipps and Courtney Jones when they wrote that “the political imagination of our state does not reflect the severity of oppression under which we live.” The mining industry is a major force striving to prevent the formation of a truly equitable and liberatory political imagination, but only through greater political willpower against the mines can legislators justify deserving our votes. Harry Reid was able to oust the Mob and destroy the forces of organized crime in the city of Las Vegas, but the mines loom untouched by even adequate taxation as democracy is impeded despite our own votes, as Indigenous people suffer without water on their own land, and as Nevadan kids kill themselves in their own schools. AJR1, which would change the tax code to distribute the taxed revenue earned on gross proceeds of minerals to public services like education, is the first step in changing the political imagination of our state and actually making a difference in Nevada education.

Nevadan lives depend on taxing the mines. Pass AJR1.

Use this form to tell your legislators to #TaxTheMines.

The ideology of the current neo-liberal power establishment dictates it will continue to display an ineffective front against and obscure the amount it abets fascist forces. In response, we must more carefully examine the causes of the threat and provide a countervailing force for the people.

Centering policies which actually benefit Black, Indigenous, and people of color has to be at the core of what we do in those efforts considering fascists exploit existing prejudicial structures and attitudes to advance their ideas. This is clear in the Trump administration’s active meddling in anything resembling a proper response to the COVID-19 outbreak, which has disproportionately affected Black and Indigenous Americans.

Right-wing demagogues alone aren’t responsible for the reemergence of fascism in this country, however. James P. Cannon, a political leader and socialist in the early 20th century, argued it emerges as a result of the capitalist society’s untenable nature. It is exploitative and aims only to expropriate value from people and Earth’s resources, naturally creating the discontent that causes fascism to arise.

“Fascism is a product of the crisis of capitalism and can be definitively disposed of only by a solution of this crisis,” Cannon said. “The fascist movement can make advances or be pushed back at one time or another in the course of this crisis; but it will always be there, in latent or active form, as long as the social causes which produce it have not been eradicated.”

The forces which uphold those social causes shift to suit the time and, inherently, capitalism sows inequality among the masses. Racial capitalism is ingrained in all aspects of society. As professor of Black studies and political science Cedric J Robinson wrote, “racialism inevitably permeates the social structures emergent from capitalism.”

This country is a settler-colonial state — an ongoing, over 400-year project focused on subjugating Black and Indigenous people as a means to extract profit. Due to this, the United States’ intimate tie to white supremacy cuts across all economic, social, political and environmental lines. America’s land theft policies and genocide of Indigenous people inspired fascist forces in the 1930s, as did Jim Crow laws.

It’s hard to rationalize the behavior of those who understand these realities and still advocate for the status quo. It’s particularly immoral to push for a shift to a more hyper-nationalistic culture revolving around the unique actors and symbols of American opression.

As we strive to overthrow the existing social and political order, protecting the history of Socialist liberation and fascist resistance fighters is vital in opposition. Historically, “antifa” is not a loose collection of white anarchists, as mainstream media and the political class implies. Black people are the vanguard of antifascism; generally, that holds true for any popular American resistance movement.

Writer Molly Crabapple chronicled a group of Black Americans who supported efforts to drive Italy out of Ethiopia in 1934. In another decisive display of international solidarity, approximately 90 Black Americans fought in the Spanish Civil War — a battle between a socialist/communist dominated coalition government and the revolting fascist belligerents. Communist organizers, such as Canute Frankson, emphasized the importance of the struggle, as a “fight for the preservation of democracy” and “the liberation of my people, and of the human race.” James Yates fought in the war, met supporter Langston Hughes on the front lines, and went on to organize with the Communist Party USA when he returned to the U.S. Thyra Edwards helped refugee resettlement efforts during the war before returning home to continue her writing and activist career.

The United Front Against Fascism conference, organized by Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton in 1969, represents a direct thread between Popular Front organizing efforts of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. With the release of the Judas and the Black Messiah movie, a retelling of Hampton’s assassination, it’s imperative we uphold him and the Black Panther Party as pillars of the Socialist movement within the United States — they were proudly Marxist-Leninist, even though that is obscured by the film.

“Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism,” Hampton said, “because fascism will stop us all.”

The opposing force to fascism and the underlying social causes in which created it has to be socialism. Contributing to mutual aid efforts and fighting to dismantle the carceral state also honors the legacy of the Black Panther Party — a legacy comrade Ahmad Adé helped build. Other members of the party are still unjustly imprisoned after nearly 50 years. Locally, our decarceral efforts include the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty. We can build on that infrastructure to support additional abolitionist policies.

Indigenous liberation groups, such as the American Indian Movement, joined the BPP in coalition work. Modern iterations of this, as a couple comrades wrote, means centering Indigenous futures as a key part of our movement. Supporting Nevada’s Indigenous peoples through organizations such as the Nevada Native Caucus is crucial as we continue to fight capitalist land-grabs of their territory.

Federally, the tepid neo-liberal resistance to and a bipartisan appeasement of the Capitol Insurrection has only served to strengthen the institutions fascists use to exert control. The only way forward is to dismantle the racist, imperialist police state.

With pro-Black and Indigenous liberation, as well as decolonial ideology, policies and forces at the core of our front, we can build a strong left to combat the active threat of fascism.

Based on the results of our recent vote, we are not continuing the tuition strike past April 5. Although you are free to continue withholding tuition if you choose, there is no longer any guarantee that you will be joined by 1,000 other students. We understand that many people have to pay tuition in order to maintain their visa status, register for Fall classes, and graduate. We will start disbursing money from the strike fund for anyone whose late fees are not waived by Columbia—you can request funds here if you need them or get in touch with Townes (townesend@gmail.com).

We want to emphasize that the end of the tuition strike for this semester does NOT mean the end of our campaign! We always knew that it would take a long struggle to win our demands and the tuition strike was only one (particularly powerful) tactic within that struggle. 

For that reason, we are currently strategizing about how we can best carry our campaign forward into future semesters—and we need your feedback!

As a first step, we are asking all our supporters (regardless of whether you could participate in the tuition strike or not) to participate in a non-binding  vote on whether to organize another tuition strike in the Fall semester in support of our demands. We are also asking everyone to share their ideas on additional or alternative tactics and any other feedback you have about how to make the campaign even stronger next semester. Please fill out this form to vote and share your feedback. 

We are also asking everyone to join us at our Tuition Strike Debrief / Strategy Session for Next Semester, next Thursday, 4/15, 7 pm ET, in order to discuss the strengths of our movement and what we need to improve going forward, as well as to discuss the question of whether we should organize another, larger tuition strike in the Fall, or whether we should try an alternative tactic.

There are many reasons why a campaign next semester could be successful in winning even more of our demands. We started out last semester with an almost unprecedented tactic and no pre-existing organization, and in the course of just a few months we organized a movement involving 4,700 students, including over a thousand students who withheld their tuition payments in support of our demands, many of them continuing on almost to the end of the semester. Through this struggle, we won fossil fuel divestment, increased financial aid for summer classes, and emergency grants for students.

This was despite the fact that students were spread out across the country and there was almost no possibility of in-person organizing or actions. In future semesters, we will be able to host more disruptive in-person actions like pickets and to organize a much larger number of students. We are also looking into the possibility of developing a longer-term organization with greater resources that we could draw on to organize future campaigns. Most importantly, we now have a more organized student body that is ready and able to take collective action on issues that affect us. And finally, we will be part of a nationwide movement—students at fifteen other universities have already confirmed that they are interested in or committed to organizing a tuition strike at their campus next semester.

That being said, if we are going to have any chance of success, we are going to need your help! This current vote on whether or not to organize a tuition strike for the Fall semester is non-binding partly because we want to involve a greater number of people in our strategic discussions before committing to any approach going forward, and also because we will need a lot more people who can commit to organizing a future campaign. That’s why we’re asking everyone to fill out on this form if you can commit to helping us organize!

We have accomplished something truly unprecedented this semester, but we have a lot of work left to do. We hope that you’ll join us in that continued struggle.

Solidarity,

Columbia YDSA

Territorial disputes between countries often can have severe, long-lasting and disastrous effects for the people living in or around the disputed territories. Tens of millions of people live in the territories of Jammu and Kashmir in the northern Himalayas which are disputed between India, Pakistan and China. The tense situation in Kashmir is often cited as a potential flashpoint for a third world war.^[1] The current territorial disputes between Sudan and South Sudan are born of decades of bloody civil war escalating into genocide.^[2] And the disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region last year escalated into all-out war in the Caucasus mountains.^[3]

Territorial disputes can often result in harsh conditions for people living in these areas. Many disputed territories are under military occupations, with civilians experiencing frequent interruptions in electrical and water services as well as state-sanctioned violence towards those who resist occupation. Because many of these disputes are born of conflict in the recent past many countries will also use them as pretexts to increase tensions against their neighbors, escalating conflict globally. Both the shadows and threats of war loom over these disputes, putting civilians across the entire world at risk.

But we’re not talking about those kinds of disputes today.

Today I’m writing about the ridiculous, and meaningless disputes between so-called “developed” countries with plenty of resources and diplomatic capabilities. I’m writing about the disputes over empty patches of land (or worse, coastal waters) with no inhabitants, no known resources and no strategic value. These disputes exist for their own sake, with many of them emerging from the remnants of dead and dying empires. These disputes are unlikely to start wars, but will continue to setbacks in the process for global peace, as their claimant nations will continue to fight over them for no other reason than to gain bargaining power later on.

And this time, to show I am expending no intellectual effort in this endeavor, I am presenting this article as an internet-friendly Buzzfeed-style list.

Dollart Bay

What is it? A bay in the mouth of the Ems river in Northern Europe.
Who disputes it? The Netherlands and Germany.
Why does it suck? The disputed territory has no land and has no resources and is between two nations that have existed long enough that they could have figured this out years ago. What’s there to like? The two nations decided decades ago to “agree to disagree” over a patch of coastal water neither of them actually needs in order to remain prosperous. Good ol’ European diplomacy at its most execrable.^[4]

Ilha Brasilera

What is it? A small island at the confluence of the Quarai and Uruguay rivers.
Who disputes it? Brazil and Uruguay.
Why does it suck? This island has had one resident in recent memory, a Brazilian man who moved away for health reasons in 2011. Bizarrely enough Uruguay and Brazil act as if there is no dispute on the island. Authorities from both countries coordinated to fight a fire that burned a portion of the island in 2009, and both countries participated in the ecological survey to study the damage the fire did to the island. The international cooperation around the island’s care makes this dispute almost not suck, but as long as on paper these two nations can’t decide how to share a tiny island in the middle of a river it will remain in the region of “suck.”^[5]

Gibraltar Isthmus

What is it? The isthmus of Gibraltar (not the entire peninsula) north of the Gibraltar airport.
Who disputes it? The UK and Spain.
Why does it suck? This would be a more dangerous dispute if Spain and the UK were clashing over the entire peninsula. However, Spain and the UK dispute the area around the airport, as this was not set by the Treaty of Utrecht which set the Gibraltar border in 1713. The implementation of Brexit is also complicating the border rules of Gibraltar and threatens to make crossing into and out of Gibraltar a bureaucratic nightmare for nearby residents. And all because the UK thinks the Burger King across the street should pay taxes to them and not Spain. England sucks as a rule and the Gibraltar dispute sucks as a result.^[6]

Juan de Nova Island & Others

What is it? A series of uninhabited islands in between Mozambique and Madagascar
Who disputes it? Madagascar and France
Why does it suck? No shade to Madagascar here, the suck in this dispute is entirely France’s fault. By no logical means can France call these islands its sovereign territory. Metropolitan France is a full continent and a half away, these islands have no value to France and France is doing nothing with them. Any sensible international organization (and we’re still trying to find one) would cut off these last vestiges of an unwanted and dying empire from France’s hands and maybe let the colonized nations have a chance at building something. No empires no longer, Paris.^[7]

Oyster Pond

What is it? A bay on the eastern shore of the Caribbean island of St. Maarten.
Who disputes it? France and the Netherlands.
Why does it suck? The existence of Belgium has not stopped the French and the Dutch from sharing a land border in the Caribbean. The land border is well defined, but what happens when it reaches Oyster Pond on the island’s eastern shore? Does it hug the northern coast like the Netherlands claims? Or does it go down the center of the bay like France claims? Better question: who cares? It stuns the imagination that two highly-developed European imperial powers need to argue over which of them gets the taxes from a single local pizza joint. Anyway, if you want something interesting on St. Maarten go check out its airport where, because the runway is so close to the beach, large aircraft make low landing passes over sunbathers. It’s pretty cool!^[8]

Rockall Island

What is it? A rock sticking out of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Who disputes it? England, Ireland, Iceland, Denmark (through the Faroe Islands).
Why does it suck? Four major forces in Western Europe are clamoring for a rock covered in bird feces that sticks out of the ocean. It’s a rock with probably not enough flat surface on it to hold more than three humans on it at a time. Claiming this island contravenes international law, but since when has that ever stopped anybody? I’d be fooling myself if I thought this was just about the rock. This border dispute exists because of the probable deposits of North Sea oil underneath it. Any border dispute with wealthy states arguing over who gets to boost petrochemical output some marginal percent by definition sucks.^[9]

Liancourt Rocks

What is it? A pair of windswept rocks in the middle of the Sea of Japan.
Who disputes it? South Korea and Japan.
Why does it suck? It’s the same situation as Rockall, they’re just windswept barely-habitable rocks in the middle of the ocean with potential petrochemical deposits underneath. This dispute is inflamed by the tensions between Japan and South Korea, as the latter has suffered a number of historical abuses at the hands of the Japanese Empire. But the push for further and further exploitation of petrochemical resources (while the planet is actively being killed by petrochemical exploitation mind you) between two countries whose economies are not dependent on it does, in a word, suck.^[10]

Hans Island

What is it? An uninhabited island in the channel between Ellsmere Island and Greenland.
Who disputes it? Canada and Denmark (on behalf of Greenland).
Why does it suck? There’s nothing more depressing to me than two colonial powers arguing over empty land that they, by no natural rights, can claim to possess. The island, far into the Arctic Circle, has historically been used as a fishing outpost for local Inuit peoples. But to Canada and Denmark it is just a frozen, uninhabited, lifeless rock near the far northern end of the Earth. In 2018 the two countries convened a task force to determine once and for all the fate of the island’s sovereignty but no task force conclusion can undo the fact that Hans Island, like all the Americas, is stolen land. It will take a hell of a lot more than this task force to undo that.^[11]

Baja Nuevo Bank

What is it? A group of reefs with portions barely above water in the Southwest Caribbean
Who disputes it? Colombia, Nicaragua, Jamaica, the United States.
Why does it suck? This bank is barely above water. It has just enough land space for Colombia to build a single lighthouse. There are no known resources here, just a little spit of land that is partially exposed at low tide. The claims on this bank exist solely so countries can have something to fight over, should the need to fight arise. There is nothing but the open ocean surrounding this band for hundreds of miles. I imagine the United States is currently deciding if it’s okay for them to start island dredging after yelling at China for doing exactly that.^[12]

Machias Seal Island

What is it? A small rocky island in the Gulf of Maine between Machias and Grand Manan Island.
Who disputes it? United States and Canada.
Why does it suck? I’ve saved the best for last. The United States and Canada, marketing themselves as having the warmest international relations of any two nations cannot agree who owns a small island at the back end of either country. Both countries acknowledge the island’s importance as a sanctuary for migratory seabirds, most notably the Atlantic puffin. In fact, the United States allows a charter boat company based out of Cutler, ME (with an amazingly basic HTML website) to send tourists to visit the island. To solidify its claim Canada has built a lighthouse and continues to send keeper staff to man it (the lighthouse is automated, by the way.) The United States, in return, doesn’t recognize the existence of the lighthouse. This claim has “suck” written all over it as long as the US and Canada are involved, and are continuing to be endlessly petty in enforcing their claims. My advice? Give the island to the puffins. They deserve a break.^[13]

What does it all mean?

I’m personally fascinated by petty border disputes because of the dissonance between how governments in the so-called “developed” world market themselves as public intellectuals of high conscience and exemplary efficiency, and the reality of them behaving like petty children robbed of their favorite toy. Except for that the claims they make are tiny and inconsequential to the majority of each nations’ populace. Your average American would never have even heard of Machias Seal Island, much less recite the geopolitics of it. But these countries hold onto control of each and every square millimeter of space because in their minds concessions in one area lead to concessions in others, creating a slippery slope which can only lead to the end of national sovereignty as we know it. And although a stateless borderless globe is highly desirable to those of us on the left, the logic that every minor concession leads to bigger, more consequential ones is false.

The disputes also arise because of the conception of land ownership in Western societies that extols the development and exploitation of land as a commodified resource. The Earth is a living thing like all of us in that the Earth has complex interlocking systems which, if one is thrown out of balance, can cause devastation to all the others. Hegemonic western powers have almost universally rejected this fact, believing instead that Earth can be partitioned consequence-free into zones of natural exploitation, in service of neoliberal economic growth. Additionally the growth neoliberal economists crave is increasingly disconnected from actual human need, hence why food manufacturing companies can take in billions of dollars in revenue while hundreds of millions of people across the globe suffer from hunger. If these same countries and cultures transformed such that they prioritized human need as well as a healthy symbiosis with Earth’s natural systems, then perhaps these governments might see it as beneficial, even virtuous to let these disputed areas and the people who depend on them simply be.

References

1. https://theconversation.com/kashmir-conflict-is-not-just-a-border-dispute-between-india-and-pakistan-112824 – Kashmir conflict and discussion
2. https://www.dw.com/en/can-sudan-and-south-sudan-find-friendship/a-51255829 – south Sudan conflict
3. https://www.nytimes.com/article/armenian-azerbaijan-conflict.html – The Nagorno-Karabakh War
4. https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/trb-2014-182.html – Dutch government announcement of a Dollart-related agreement, in Dutch
5. https://web.archive.org/web/20160304041854/http://www.centralsuldejornais.com.br/IndexNoticia.asp?idNoticia=113782 – Article on Ilha Brasileira, in Portuguese
6. http://www.exteriores.gob.es/portal/en/politicaexteriorcooperacion/gibraltar/paginas/historia.aspx – Gibraltar Isthmus dispute history
7. https://user.iiasa.ac.at/~marek/fbook/04/geos/ju.html – Juan de Nova Island information
8. http://www.soualigapost.com/en/news/6397/coop%C3%A9ration/border-oyster-pond-reason-behind-another-conflict – Oyster Pond description
9. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/who-owns-rockall-a-history-of-disputes-over-a-tiny-atlantic-island-1.3919668 – Rockall Island
10. https://www.cntraveler.com/story/why-the-liancourt-rocks-are-some-of-the-most-disputed-islands-in-the-world – Liancourt Rocks
11. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/world/what-in-the-world/canada-denmark-hans-island-whisky-schnapps.html – Hans Island and the Whiskey War (article is from 2016 so it’s slightly outdated)
12. https://buzz-caribbean.com/news/bajo-nuevo-what-you-should-know-about-the-island-dispute-jamaica-gave-up/ – Bajo Nuevo Bank
13. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/07/22/machias-seal-island-dispute – Machias Seal Island dispute

Some Other Things…

So… if you translate source #4 from Dutch to English the content of the announcement sounds like the border dispute has been resolved. I looked into it and found that it was only part of the dispute that was resolved in 2014, concerning an offshore wind farm that had been part of the dispute before then. I’m adding this note as a clarification note for anyone who either speaks or has put in the effort to translate Dutch.

With a surge in anti-AAPI violence making news and the Derek Chauvin murder trial ripping open wounds, it's time to keep up the pressure and defund NYPD. On tonight’s show, we’re joined live by Cheryl Rivera, an organizer with NYC-DSA’s Defund NYPD and Abolition Action campaigns. We’ll discuss common myths and misconceptions about defunding the police and organizing for community safety in a non-carceral framework. We also hear from Lizzy of Queens DSA and our Immigrant Justice Working Group and Yves from the grassroots collective Red Canary Song on violence against Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities and why increased policing is not the answer. To learn more about the Defund NYPD campaign, please visit www.defundnypd.com. To learn more about Red Canary Song and its work with Asian and migrant sex workers, visit https://www.redcanarysong.net/. To donate or request funds from the NYC-DSA Mutual Aid fund, visit bit.ly/covid19aid.

Starting April 1, we are conducting another round of voting to democratically decide whether the strike should continue after the first Fall registration date of April 5. If you’re currently striking, please fill out this form to cast your vote before midnight on April 2nd so we can announce the results on April 3.

We have been doing our best to understand what potential advantages and consequences may come with continuing to withhold past the Fall registration date, starting April 5 (for some Columbia schools). 

The administration has so far been utterly silent in response to our demands since their decision to divest from fossil fuels on January 22nd. This is similar to the administration’s intransigence on the grad workers’ strike and further proof of how unresponsive the administration is to student and worker demands. The advantage of continuing to strike is that, in doing so, we would convey our determination to continue in face of the university’s egregious refusal to address our demands. The administration has a history of “waiting out” student protests—we have the opportunity to show them that this is not a possibility in our case. 

On the other hand, we understand that the risks of striking past this point may be too great to incur for many of our strikers to continue. Understanding that many may need to end their strike to register for classes or to graduate, voting to end the strike collectively now would allow us to end this semester’s campaign as a unified movement, rather than people having to drop out individually. Ending the strike would not mean ending the campaign or giving up on our demands, as we will continue to strategize about ways to win our demands through direct pressure in following semesters.

Keeping those advantages and disadvantages in mind, these are the risks of continuing the strike past April 5:

If you are planning to register for Summer or Fall 2021 semesters (and if your unpaid balance is $1,000 or greater): your account will be placed on a financial hold, and you will not be able to register until the balance is paid. Summer registration began on March 8th, and the earliest date listed for Fall registration is April 5th. (except for TC, which began both Summer and Fall registration on March 29). 

If you are graduating Spring 2021: graduation holds are placed 30 days prior to the graduation date (i.e. sometime this week), and you will not be able to receive a diploma or transcript until the balance is paid. 

These holds are not irreversible, but rather are lifted automatically when tuition is paid. If your unpaid balance is less than $1,000, you will not face these holds. 

Please note that if you are an international student and your visa status depends on registering immediately for next semester, we are not asking you to stay on strike if it means risking your visa status! Regardless of the vote result, we understand if you have to drop out of the strike because the risks of not registering are greater than for the average student. 

Except in the case of TC, there will no late fees until April 16 at the earliest, but as stated above, Columbia has not been charging the usual monthly fees, likely a direct victory for the strike. At TC, fees have been inconsistent, varying by the amount you’re withholding after the initial $50 fee in January. If you’ve been charged any fees, try to get in touch with Columbia offices to waive these fees if you haven’t yet. If Columbia offices refuse to waive your fees, then request money from our strike fund here. These funds will be disbursed when the strike ends but you can contact columbia.ydsa@gmail.com if you need them earlier. 

Finally, we want to invite you to the following upcoming actions and events:

• Labor Struggles at Columbia: Thursday, April 1 at 6:30 PM ET 
  • A general meeting to discuss the history labor organizing on campus, including an overview of Barnard contingent faculty organizing by the co-chair of BCF-UAW, and to hear an update on the ongoing strike from a GWC-UAW bargaining committee member. Suggested readings are this history of graduate worker organizing at Columbia, and this piece on the broader implications of the current strike. 
  • Our meeting next Thursday, April 8 (on the same zoom link) will be a discussion of the Bessemer, Alabama Amazon workers’ struggle for unionization and the results of the vote. 
  • Register for the meeting!
• Schumer Owes New York: Student Debt Cancellation Rally: Saturday, April 3, 3:00 PM ET at 9 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, NY 11215
  • Our tuition strike campaign is part of a much larger struggle against austerity and inequality in education. Join us to demand that Senator Schumer supports full student debt cancellation and tuition-free college for all legislation!
  • RSVP! and visit the Facebook event page!

March 31, 2021

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America support and stand in solidarity with the plaintiffs in Chandra Cates, et al., v. The Trustees of Columbia University. The University has proven time and time again that it would rather line administrators’ pockets than serve the students, faculty, rank-and-file staff, and surrounding community members that comprise this institution. 

The plaintiffs’ struggle is tied to that of striking students—both are about holding the university accountable to the popular interest of its community. Currently, the administration, at best, neglects these interests, and, at worst, is actively antagonistic to them. Columbia workers have been deprived of their full retirement benefits because of the university’s negligence, just as the University neglects students’ demands. To create a truly democratic university, workers and students must stand together and fight against Columbia’s administrative glut, manifest neglect, and misplaced priorities. YDSA supports tens of thousands of Columbia employees and retirees in their fight to recover their retirement savings that they rightfully deserve and that Columbia University has taken away from them.

States in the US have often been lauded as the “laboratories of democracy”. Georgia, on the other hand, has once again made a name for itself as an experiment in authoritarianism.

On March 25th, while confronting Brian Kemp for once again restricting basic democratic processes in Georgia, State Representative Park Cannon was arrested. Since it is illegal to arrest Georgia legislators by misdemeanor during session, Capitol Police charged her with trumped-up felony charges. The bill that Kemp signed into law, SB202, is indefensible; it restricts voting methods, adds complicated and inaccessible hoops, allows the state to intervene in county elections processes, and bans voters taking care of each other while waiting for hours in lines. Instead of allowing criticism, police closed ranks around Kemp and the state Republicans, deflecting the heat by throwing accusations at a Black woman trying to represent her district’s residents.

Let us be clear: racist police and judicial violence has a long and horrible history in this state. For generations, state law enforcement, business interests, and officials have fabricated charges and defended or deflected violence against unionists, Jewish, Black, Asian, and Latino people, and political opponents of a regime of white supremacist capitalism. If Georgia were not a part of the United States empire, it would be painted as an authoritarian oligarchy; instead, our ruling class is given license to consolidate power by violence in the name of “civil political debate”.

As socialists, we of Atlanta DSA recognize that Georgia’s multi-front assault on the rights of its residents is part of a larger project of capitalist domination. ICE imprisons and demonizes immigrants, law enforcement arrests Black State Representatives while tacitly approving racist mass-murder, and unionization rates, worker protections, and wages all remain at rock bottom. The exploitation of the working class has always been racialized; the most exploited workers are those forced to the bottom of a racial caste system. We see this assault on voting rights as only the most recent in a long line of rollbacks of the rights of working people.

Georgia’s ruling class is trying and has always tried to make solidarity illegal. But, as CWA-AFA President Sara Nelson once said, “solidarity is a force stronger than gravity.”

In the past year, working people have expressed tremendous power and won real victories. Unions, especially the predominantly Black Unite Here local 23, delivered a historic defeat to Republicans last November. Latino organizations like Mijente worked tirelessly to defeat the 287(g) program in Cobb and Gwinnett county, ending local law enforcement’s formal collaboration with ICE. In the past few days, national unions like IUPAT and CWA have worked alongside DSA chapters across the country to deliver over half a million phone calls to working people, asking them to flood the voicemails and mailboxes of US Senators and flipping votes to end the filibuster, pass the PRO Act, and pass HB1, the “For the People Act”. Victory is possible, but we must organize and fight together to achieve it.

We, the Steering Committee of Atlanta DSA, call on all working people in the state of Georgia to get organized. This fight did not start with SB202, and it will not end with SB202. As a class, our strength is in our numbers and our coordination. We must overcome racial, gendered, sexual, and caste divisions by fighting alongside one another.

Solidarity is a verb, and we practice it by organizing together, committing together, and moving into struggle together. We ask you to join DSA, to join a local organization, and to join a union if you can.

CW: sexual assault, rape, abuse, state-sponsored violence, descriptions of incarceration

Ten years ago this month, the Syrian Revolution began.

The spark was graffiti. The wildfire of the Arab Spring spread across the region in 2011, embers igniting from Tunisia to Egypt. Meanwhile, the city of Daraa was gripped in the iron fist of the corrupt cousin of the Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad. He forbade people from selling land without a security clearance but granted clearance only to his chosen favorites (Wendy Pearlman, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, 64). Then, in a local schoolyard, graffiti appeared: “you’re next, Bashar.” That was the first sign that the wildfire had reached Syria.

Immediately, school children younger than sixteen years old – chosen with no proof as to their involvement in the graffiti – were detained and tortured until they told officials everything they wanted to hear (Pearlman, 64). Ahmed, an activist in Daraa, described what happened next. Families assembled to demand the government release their children. The assembly grew, and the demands grew louder in Daraa. A security official responded to the shouts with resounding defiance, “forget your children. Go home to your wives and make more children. And if you don’t know how, bring your wives and we’ll show you how” (Pearlman, 62).

Patriarchal rape culture is not the only strand of fascism deeply baked into the DNA of the Syrian regime. The regime is constructed from an exclusionary nationalism that manifests in militarism, paranoia, and surveillance: “the private property of a dynasty” (Yassin al-Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy, 152). The government’s ideology, a doctrine instilled in every student in Syrian schools since Hafez al-Assad’s consolidation of control in the 1960s, erases all diversity within Arab culture and sociopolitical beliefs to uphold the specific brand of Arabness that permits conflation of the Syrian nation with its government. Under this nationalism, any criticism of the government is naturally also a criticism of the nation, which is also the military, which is also the motherland. These are all the trademarks of fascism. It’s no wonder that slogans like “Syria First,” pre-empting Donald Trump’s use of the same phrase years later, and “Syria Is Above All,” which is explicitly inspired by the Nazi equivalent, were common in pro-government counterprotests (Saleh 118).

The enforcement of this ideology, and thus the reality of the Syria in which the movement began, was enabled by ethnic cleansings of Indigenous people – the Kurds – in the 1960s. The government adopted the “Arab Belt” policy to, in the words of activist Qamishli Mesud, “alter the demographics of Kurdish areas. [The policy] aimed to Arabize the population and change cities’ Kurdish names to Arabic names” (Pearlman 45). Shortly after the ethnic cleansings, dissent from Sunni Muslims also began to organize into a formidable movement. That movement was crushed in 1983. Tens of thousands of residents of the city of Hama, the nucleus of dissent, were massacred by the government’s military. The Hama massacre was mentioned in whispers ten years ago, described in code as just “the events,” since the language of Assad’s Syria is sealed and locked in euphemism.

Any dissent, however strong or faint, was incarcerated or killed in Syria. The legitimacy of the regime was carved above the corpses of dissenters and Indigenous people.

The regime relies on both security forces and brownshirts to enforce its existence. The fascist foot-soldiers of the regime, similar to Proud Boys and Border Patrol militias in the empire’s heartland, are the shabiha. They would routinely threaten to seize property, rape young women, arbitrarily humiliate cafe-goers, and kill people who objected to their insults throughout Syria (Saleh, 47). Much like Trump-supporting militants in the United States, the shabiha are weaponized by the regime to maintain its own power: “the poor and disadvantaged can be deployed as fanatical defenders of a wealthy political elite who disrespect them and care nothing for their well-being” (Saleh 53). These authoritarian militias expanded when the Revolution began.

Salah, a landscaper in rural Daraa, described Syria best: “we don’t have a government. We have a mafia. And if you speak out against this, it’s off with you to bayt khaltu [“your aunt’s house”]. That’s an expression that means to take someone to prison. It means, forget about this person, he’ll be tortured, disappeared. You’ll never hear from him again” (Pearlman 17).

One such dissenter who went to his aunt’s house was Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a leftist organizer who joined the Syrian Communist Party in the late 1970s, before the massacre in Hama. He was arrested for democracy advocacy and for protesting against the regime’s military intervention in Lebanon on the side of right-wing militants. Saleh was incarcerated for sixteen years in Syrian prisons for his organizing.

Saleh’s last year was spent in Tadmor Prison – the black hole of the Syrian regime. To understand the regime, one must understand Tadmor.

“Tadmor Prison is a name, or a crime scene, which resonates terribly in the Syrian imagination,” notes Robin Yassin-Kassab (Saleh xiii). “Faraj Barraqdar, a fellow prisoner, called Tadmor ‘the kingdom of death and madness.’” The prison, built by French colonizers, was reappropriated by the Assads when they came into power. This is revealing. A regime that has no problem in using colonizers’ weapons against its own people is no different than the colonizers that preceded the regime. Salameh Kaileh, a Palestinian writer who was detained in Tadmor from 1998 to 2000, has reported that “in Tadmur you have nothing. You’re only left with fear and horror.”

Faraj Barraqdar, a former prisoner of the regime, described Tadmor in his poem:

High walls of cold cement
Control towers
Mine fields
Check points
Barricades and special military forces
Finally… A space of pure patriotic fear
If the whole of Syria falls
This prison will never ever fall

Tadmor Prison was ground zero for the Hama massacre. Hundreds of political prisoners were shot to death in their cells as Assad’s brother, Rifaat, ordered his soldiers to kill one dissenter after another at gunpoint in 1983.

After sealing its legitimacy in blood, the Assad regime began to explore new methods of control over the people. The government transformed itself to don the coat of neoliberalism, becoming an outpost of the global financial empire of Washington, as Bashar inherited Syria from his father. The internet entered Syria. Reform was in the air. But much like Mao Zedong’s period of reform in 1957, reform was smoke and mirrors.  “A new class of crony capitalists, at their fore Assad’s extended family, became conspicuously rich,” Wendy Pearlman describes. “As power and wealth became concentrated in a narrower elte, the regime increasingly abandoned its traditional working-class base”.. Bashar al-Assad spearheaded the consolidation of power in this “neo-bourgeoisie that… owes everything to the regime and has a lot to lose were the revolution to emerge victorious” (Saleh, 18).

The creation of an elite, capitalist oligarchy that owed their existence to an exterminationist and paranoid regime also changed the societal fabric of Syria. “Development… favoured cities at the expense of rural areas, city centres at the expense of outlying neighborhoods, and wealthy suburbs at the expense of the crowded traditional suburbs” under the new neoliberal authoritarian model favored by the Assad regime (35) In other words, Bashar al-Assad utilized economic violence through forced displacement and gentrification to destroy traditional communities and defund Syrian homes.

This neoliberal turn had another consequence, one that also emerged in the West as a result of austerity: privatization of higher education. Adam, a media organizer in Latakia, said that “universities used to be free. But by the time I went to college, I had to pay for it… the regime had no willingness to reform the problems in public universities. Instead, their answer was to open new private universities, which charged people thousands of dollars” (Pearlman, 40). And when they graduated, similarly to countless students in the US today, they entered a workforce devoid of job offerings with degrees that felt worthless.

Then, schoolchildren painted the walls of a Daraa school with graffiti. Then, families were turned away and sexually harassed by security forces. Then, people started mobilizing – particularly in the traditional communities that a decade of neoliberal development had neglected and destroyed as gentrifying high-rises were built in the preferred neighborhoods of the oligarchy. Every Friday, people went to the squares and protested. Rural villages started assembling. A political movement was beginning in Syria – in the shadow of Kurds’ ethnic cleansing, in the shadow of Tadmor Prison, in the shadow of the Hama massacre, in the shadow of new skyscrapers, in the shadow of fascist gangsters arbitrarily attacking people in old cafes.

At its heart, the Syrian Revolution unfolded as a secular, feminist, and radically inclusive movement wherein a popular front of liberals, conservatives, and socialists of all sects and ethnicities within the heterogenous diversity of Syria all participated in confronting the regime. Many key organizers were millennials, the same generation that would reinvigorate and lead a new era of Democratic Socialists of America an ocean away. And many of the key leaders of the Revolution against the fascist, masculinist government were and continue to be women.

Students were some of the first protesters in the Syrian movement, with female students leading the charge. In demonstrations at the University of Aleppo, a former student named Ghaysh described how “women who wore headscarves would hide papers and signs in their long coats because they wouldn’t get searched” (Pearlman, 40). Male dorms were shut down quickly, but female dorms remained open, because security forces, in their sexism, conceived of maleness as the only potential source of resistance. Quickly, the center of organizing became the suites and dorm rooms of female students at the University of Aleppo. Sometimes, female students would even physically block police from attacking male demonstrators in the same way that anti-fascist organizers blocked police from attacking protesters during the George Floyd uprising.

Meanwhile, some organizers began to coordinate across the country in a massive digital organizing drive using Skype. Razan Zeitouneh, a human rights lawyer and organizer, created the Local Coordination Committees (LCC) to coordinate regionally and nationally. Organizers from one town could coordinate with organizers in another town entirely by using anonymous pseudonyms in Skype rooms. Many of the leaders of the LCCs would spend up to 12 hours together organizing online, according to feminist organizer Zaina Erhaim, who was a close comrade of Zeitouneh in maintaining the LCCs ten years ago. The LCCs were ”anti-sectarian, committed to nonviolence, and opposed to foreign intervention.”

That progressive ideological unity within the LCCs did not last the year. When the regime brought in tanks and released violent right-wing terrorists from its prisons to infiltrate and discredit the Revolution, as well as garner Western sympathy as the Assad regime posited itself as a key in the War on Terror, the secular and nonviolent Local Coordination Committees splintered. Zeitouneh was detained and disappeared within two years. Zeitouneh has not been seen since.

Meanwhile, Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Samira al-Khalil, his wife, both organized together as dissidents committed to democratic socialism, free from the Assad regime’s chains. Samira established women’s centers and small income-generating projects. As Yassin aimed to meet up with her, Samira was abducted and disappeared along with Zeitouneh. They are suspected of abduction by one of the patriarchal, terroristic militias in the opposition.

Many organizers began to lose faith as the regime violently suppressed one assembly after another, and their friends turned to more new authoritarian ideologies. Instead of envisioning an abolitionist approach to uprising, many adopted the regime’s authoritarian tactics – an eye for an eye. Countless joined and built violent, terroristic militias, which were either infiltrated with terrorists from Assad’s prisons, or filled with military officers disillusioned from the regime but still loyal to the toxic militaristic culture of sexual assault and targeted violence. Some dissident militias adopted prisons from the Assad regime, just like the regime had adopted them from the French colonizers: “at these sites the treatment of prisoners (who are not necessarily associated with the regime) does not come close to complying with basic human dignity” (Saleh, 182). The most infamous of these were the Daesh prisons in Raqqa, given that Daesh is a death cult of horror.

The violent suppression of the political movement carried on as “many initiators of the revolution and civil society activists [were] detained or assassinated, while armed resistance has been emphatically on the rise, with militants being recruited from the most disadvantaged ranks of society” (Saleh 166). One of the leaders of the Local Coordination Committees, Yahya Shurbaji, a pacifist whose commitment to nonviolent political tactics never wavered, was killed under torture in prison in September, 2011.

Invariably, the left-wing and non-sectarian organizers were targeted by the regime as the greatest threats. Lina Sergie Attar, who is the founder and CEO of the Karam Foundation serving Syrian needs in the diaspora, described a scene that unfolded as the Revolution slipped away into violent mayhem: “so many years ago, at the time when we felt the hope of the revolution slipping away into the ugliness of war, my friend, activist Rami Jarrah, told me, ‘The people who started the revolution will not be the ones who finish it.’”

In 2017, other refugee justice activists and I organized a symposium of Syrian revolutionaries at Middlebury College in central Vermont. The symposium contained two primary elements: speeches and workshops on activism. One activist-turned-journalist that I had the privilege of working with was Loubna Mrie. She became an activist between nineteen and twenty years old, smuggling medicine and food to families in Homs, as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) emerged as the armed element of the movement in its initial stages. Even though she was an organizer in the opposition, Loubna was targeted by her community in Latakia because her family was so deeply connected to the regime: “my father’s family is well known in Latakia—my uncle, my cousins and my dad founded the shabiha there.”

When Loubna was identified with a mask on in a Youtube video, her mother, who had always supported her daughter as she participated in the Revolution, was kidnapped. Her father cursed her and hung up the phone when she called him. But one day, Loubna said: “one of my friends, someone that I trust, told me that the dead body had been seen. I called [my father] and told him that he killed her. He said OK. He told me that he wished he could do the same to me.” Eventually, she fled to Turkey and has sought asylum in the United States.

Ever since those first few years, the country has been engulfed in immense violence and civil war. Syria is a theatre of death where the twisted features of Bashar al-Assad in his business suit continues to direct the show, presiding over a country filled with corpses and ruins, the wreckage of his war on his own people for daring to dream of a better world. In 2013, Saleh described Syria as “a playground for ghouls and terrifying, faceless beings” (210)

And yet, even as names like Eastern Ghouta and Idlib erupted in the flames of horror, some places of incredible lived resistance continue to survive. Most notably is the political project of western Kurdistan, on land that once the Assad regime ethnically cleansed, spearheaded by Indigenous people. The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, often called Rojava, persists as a political experiment as the “most feminist revolution.”

The Federation is a multi-ethnic, heterogeneous de facto nation based on a model of Kurdish democratic confederalism. Since Rojava explicitly rejects centralized statist models for social progress, calling the Federation a state would be inaccurate and disingenuous. Indeed, decisions are made democratically through local communal assemblies where women co-chair every meeting and assembly. As Carne Ross describes, “in terms of historical comparison, this project resembles most closely the short period of anarchism witnessed by George Orwell in Republican Spain during the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s.”

The anarchistic model of governance in the Federation has created one of the most progressive, democratic models worldwide. Not only are decisions made subject to the opinions of every resident, but residents who belong to ethnic minorities in the context of the Indigenous-led region, specifically Arabs, Assyrians, and Syriacs, are given priority on the speaking list for assemblies. In other words, Rojava uses a progressive stack structure for all conversations nationwide throughout the Federation. Interpreters are also mandated for anyone with linguistic differences from the common language of the assemblies.

The Democratic Federation exists in a region where every surrounding force is deeply hostile to the Federation’s existence. Beyond just the Assad regime, Turkey and Daesh are constant threats to the livelihood of this radical experiment in Kurdish-led, anarchistic self-governance. The Federation is heavily armed in the same style and philosophy as the Black Panthers were, but are elevated to the position of a national army. The People’s Self-Defence Units are composed of male and female soldiers defending the collective from the imperialist and fascist forces that surround its oasis.

In March, 2020, JM Lopez reported on a women’s commune called Jinwar that can be found inside the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. In many ways, Jinwar functions as a haven for Arab, Kurdish, and Yazidi survivors of sexual assault perpetrated by fascist forces of both the Assad regime and the patriarchal militias and death cults found in the opposition. Jinwar was created by feminist organizers as an eco-village that officially opened on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 2018. The town is arranged in a triangle of thirty houses, all of which function as “a shelter for those who suffer abuse, a home for widows with children who lost their husbands during the war, and a place for women who want to get away from a capitalist society.” Some women are survivors of child marriage – explicitly, a form of rape – and shelters that functioned more like prisons than shelters in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Jinwar is also based in Indigenous Kurdish culture. In Kurdish, “jin” is related to both the term “woman” and “life”; the term “war” signifies “space,” “land” or “home.” Essentially, Jinwar is a Kurdish name that can be loosely translated to “Women’s Home.” As one Jinwar organizer noted in the village’s construction, “the village will be an autonomous space, a space of women to live freely and to regain the confidence, strength and creativity that have been undermined in the long historical process of an ever deeper and broader systematization of state, capitalism and patriarchy.” The village is a safe space for women who have survived immense oppression and is one type of socialist feminist community.

The construction of Jinwar was done on explicitly eco-socialist lines. The houses were built only through materials that do not pollute the environment mostly by Indigenous women, powered primarily through solar power, free from market influence. Decisions for Jinwar are made by monthly assemblies of the residents of the village; tasks are distributed by them as well. There is a children’s park, a bakery, a library, a medical dispensary, and a communal kitchen – all administered by women who trade off jobs every month. Visits to Jinwar by men are allowed, but they are not allowed to stay overnight. Jinwar is a far more progressive community than any Western society has been able to create in our era, located in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria produced by the Revolution, even as terror seized the rest of the country.

The Revolution increasingly seems to survive only in Rojava, but the Revolution also lives in the consciousness of its participants worldwide. A social movement is an animating force, injecting life into the blood of every individual. “We had gotten used to oppression. It was part of our life, like air, sun, water. We didn’t even feel it. Like there is air, but you never ask, “where is the air?”… and then – in one second, in one shout, one voice – you blow it up. You defy it and stand in front of death,” said Cherin, a mother in Aleppo (Pearlman 88). Yassin al-Haj Saleh captured the energy of the Revolution and its organizers further: “for hundreds of thousands of Syrians, the Syrian popular uprising has been an extraordinary experience, ethically and politically: an experience of self-renewal and social change, an uprising to change ourselves and a revolution to change reality” (29).

The Revolution can never die when it lives on in participants’ memories. The movement may have been forced into the bloody hold-outs of deeply corrupt and patriarchal rebel militias, or into the feminist collectives of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. However, as the people who dared to dream are forcibly displaced into refugee camps and resettlement programs, the movement lives on as a human revolution in the soul and mind of each Syrian displaced far from Aleppo or Damascus.

Many revolutionaries continue to live as they are reduced to the political status of “asylee” or “refugee.” Twentysomething organizers who spent 12 hours a day online coordinating protests from their bedrooms are in Istanbul, Berlin, Chicago, Copenhagen, New York City, Beirut, and San Francisco. Activists are community members in places like Las Vegas, working service jobs, or apolitical classmates in community colleges like the College of Southern Nevada. “Just a few weeks ago, I watched two Syrian refugee girls, Hawla and Rua, present their project to redesign the popular online game, Among Us, to become a more interactive game in real life,” said Attar in her recent article. “They were coding live on Zoom in front of their mentors, guest critics, and peers. Another young teen in Istanbul, Rouba, has started an Instagram baking business during the pandemic. And yet another teen who had lived through the starvation sieges in East Ghouta as a child became a young technology leader in his Turkish school, where he taught dozens of Turkish students design programs he learned at Karam House. These young people and thousands more are proving every day that Syrian refugees are much more than their tragedies and trauma. They are brimming with potential and endless possibility.” Syrians are here, among us, with us and alongside us, and their struggle and experience is ours, as well.

I met one such child in Atlanta, Georgia, at a school with a large population of refugee children. Eleven other students, activists, and I were volunteering with New American Pathways and the International Rescue Committee there. The children in the after-school program were all refugees – from Iran, from Syria, from Iraq, from Pakistan. One child, a boy in second grade, had an eyepatch. We learned that he lost his eye in the regime’s assault on the city of Aleppo. He was a natural at art.

Ultimately, there are a number of lessons we should draw from the Syrian Revolution. The first is understanding that the movement, in itself, is an energizing force. Whether or not a specific mobilization succeeds or fails, it will continue and persist in the heart of its organizers. We should not let our efforts be poisoned by opportunism or replication of the systems of oppression we seek to abolish, whether in the form of patriarchy or racism. The forces of counterrevolution, the institutions with vested interests in maintaining the status quo, will not yield without force, but that force must always be driven by principles. Ends do not justify the means, because bad means are toxic to good ends.

The second is that, in the tumult of the Revolution, there have been models of progress in Syria worth emulating as goals of the global left. The highly accountable, progressive Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, perhaps more than any other society in the world, upholds values of social progress. Places like Jinwar present radical alternative ways of living – eco-socialist, Indigenous, multicultural – to the debilitating systems of oppression we breathe. Rojava proves that a better world is possible – a world that is full of interdependent care, where survivors can thrive in safe spaces. Rojava is the future we should strive for.

Further, we must remember that many regimes are wolves in the sheep’s clothing of left-wing rhetoric. Whether China or Syria, these “anti-American” authoritarian systems are toxic to marginalized people within their own borders and to social movements for greater progress worldwide. These regimes function as national bourgeoisies upholding the very imperialist system whose bedrock in the twenty-first century is the United States. As they participate in and propagate the finance system whose ultimate iron fist is Wall Street, they oppress their own people to maintain power. The Assads of the world are the cogs in the global empire. We must recognize the forces of oppression for what they are, regardless of what they say. No self-respecting abolitionist can support regimes that prop up their power through incarceration and displacement.

Finally, we must understand that relegating any conversation on Syria to the extent of Western intervention is a disservice to the organizers – young people, mothers, workers – who find purpose and life in the Syrian Revolution. The Syrian experience holds lessons in the nature of social movements today more than any French or Russian Revolution does, yet we place the latter two on a pedestal even as we only ever mention Syria when the President of the United States drops bombs on the country. Syria deserves to be thought of and treated on its own terms, as Syrians experience it. While presidents should be condemned for interventions that harm civilians, Syria is all too often treated by Western leftists as only a practice ground for recycled anti-war rhetoric and not a real place with real people. At best, positioning the West as the center of the galaxy of the Syrian experience is erasure; at worst, it infantilizes and silences Syrian people and gaslights survivors of war by informing them that the monstrous regime did not, in fact, murder their relatives or destroy their communities to maintain power.

Solidarity means addressing the lived experiences of workers and students, of revolutionaries and digital organizers, on their own terms – in all their flaws, in all their beauty. They are our comrades and fellow travelers. Now, as many have become refugees, they are our neighbors. The people of Syria are the people of the West are the people of Syria. Understanding that our future is the same and our struggles interdependent is the way to be truly internationalist.

Long live the Syrian Revolution. Organizers who have a world to win, unite.

Within its first hundred days, the Biden administration had already bombed Syria, deployed bombers to Norway, and arrayed countries against China through the ‘Quad’ Summit. Meanwhile, Texans went without electricity, Asian-Americans and African-Americans suffered from racial violence, and millions of working people across the country awaited financial relief while struggling to obtain vaccines that were often deployed inefficiently, creating logistical and material problems on top of existing hardships. 

The connection between these sets of events may not seem obvious at first. However, the reality is that the desperate race for COVID-19 vaccinations and the efforts to deal with the pandemic coincide with the increasingly tense nature of the geopolitical situation, especially the rivalries between the great power nations, such as the United States, China, and Russia. Furthermore, this geopolitical competition, spurred on by the pandemic, will have serious implications for the working class of this country. We have already seen some of its political implications, such as the rampant opportunism on the left, which claims to support the working class on the one hand, while promoting neo-liberal imperialism on the other. In order to prepare for these events, we must have a better understanding of the forces at work and above all, we must build up an authentic anti-imperialist movement, which will not only benefit the oppressed nations of the world, but will also aid our country’s own working class by preventing unnecessary conflict and eliminating foreign distractions which are designed to misinform and mislead the public. 

Recall last year when Russia launched its ‘Sputnik-V’ vaccine. Many Western media outlets attacked the effort as nothing but ‘propaganda’ and dismissed its efficacy on baseless grounds. Regardless of whether the Russian claims were true or not, it was very telling to see such a hostile reaction during a time in which international cooperation was the mantra of the UN and WHO. Of course, far from being a friend of the world, the Trump administration had engaged in the most shameless attempts to monopolize its control over vaccines from other countries, all while criticizing China and Russia for their ruthlessness. 

It must be said again and again that regardless of whether the claims of the Russian and Chinese governments about their vaccines are true, it is highly suspicious for the Western media outlets to be so vigorous in their attacks against them, especially when we consider how the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU countries have been struggling to deal with their own vaccines. Here, I claim that the suspicious motive behind these attacks has little to do with scientific concerns about vaccine efficacy and much more to do with an imperialist agenda. 

Backtracking a bit, let us not forget Biden’s iconic words, ‘America is back’ – this proclamation sounded the alarm as to what the intentions of this administration would be. It means renewed efforts to infringe on the affairs of other countries and the endless expansion of the already monstrously large military-industrial complex. 

Now, I return to the issue of media hostility towards Russia and China. The longstanding tensions between the U.S. and those two countries are well known, but have become particularly more tense in recent years due to events in the South China Sea and Black Sea. With regards to the former, Biden has sent a clear message about U.S. intentions to reject China’s claims in the strategically vital, energy rich area. And with regards to the former, Biden maintains the U.S. position on Crimea belonging to Ukraine, despite the fact that this is no longer the de facto situation, and is not likely to change. Given this geopolitical context, we can clearly deduce the fact that there is a clear motive at work for the so-called progressive liberals who support Biden and the U.S. establishment as a whole. Far from being the guardian angels they present themselves as, the liberal media is only interested in justifying aggressive U.S. policy, especially in the wake of the Biden victory, and they do this by focusing their attacks on China, Russia, and any other country which may prove to be an obstacle to their agenda. In the interests of the American working class, we must not allow ourselves to fall victim to this deception. 

Finally, I shall bring my entire point together. Recall the domestic problems I mentioned earlier, chief among them being the Texas power crisis, which left over 5 million Americans without electricity. This occurred amidst the desperate efforts to vaccinate millions of Americans in a race against time to prevent the new COVID-19 variants from taking a foothold. The situation in the EU countries was not much better, causing bitterness and resentment among citizens due to the lackluster rollout, despite the optimism of political leaders. What is striking about all of this is that in such a time of crisis, it would behoove Western political leaders (including our own in Washington D.C.) to at least make a good faith effort at cooperating with countries like China and Russia in helping to meet global vaccine demand, especially when time is of the essence and supplies are short. The response has been, as we know, anything but that. Our supposedly ‘peace-loving’ leaders have been working hard to undermine such efforts by pushing countries to reject Chinese and Russian vaccine shipments – and not because their own supply is so plentiful. But then the question arises – why would they do this? In order to understand the answer, we must turn to the works of theory.

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Imperialism is not merely a preferred policy choice of the current establishment – it is a distinct phase of development in the capitalist economy itself. Although the development of capitalism began within the confines of individual states, it inevitably expanded beyond them and encompassed the entire globe. And this was not by mere chance, but was (and still is) built into the very logic of capitalism itself. It would have been impossible for there to have been capitalism ‘in a single country’ because the aims of the capitalist are global. And these aims have no respect for ‘international treaties’ or ‘conventions’ of any kind. For example, the company Pfizer cut back its previously agreed shipment of vaccines to Europe, due to the fact that European health officials had figured out ways to extract more doses of the vaccine than what was previously agreed to in the contract, causing widespread indignation among European governments. And I have not yet mentioned the massive profits made by these vaccine corporations during this terrible time of hardship for the entire population of the globe, but especially those in the poorest nations. In short, the development of huge corporate monopolies, such as those of Google, Amazon, and the aforementioned vaccine corporations inevitably leads to imperialism as a means of suppressing the class struggle domestically and expanding profits internationally. 

Imperialism also has its own distinct class antagonisms, such as the intensified class struggle between the labor aristocracy and the working class, which is particularly divisive in our country. These antagonisms arise from the contradictions of imperialism. An obvious example of this is the aforementioned Texan power crisis. While corporations scramble to secure their grip on resources and maximize their profits, millions of people are quite literally left in the dark. The aim of the capitalists is to placate the more well off elements of the labor aristocracy while suppressing the general mass of workers. This produces the political opportunism we have seen on the left in recent years, such as the capitulation of the reformist Sanders camp to Joe Biden. The political divide between working class interests and the reformist aspirations is to be found in the contradictions of imperialism itself. Historically, this divide has caused betrayal and infighting on the left, such as the infamous divide during World War I between the socialists of the Second international and the supporters of the Bolsheviks, who denounced the opportunism of the former.

The events of these past few months have demonstrated the need for a socialist movement that is truly revolutionary in its aims and strategy. In contrast to reformism, revolutionary socialism grasps the fact that the contradictions of capitalism can never be resolved under the present system. It can only be achieved by the complete overthrow of capitalism by the working class. And in its place, the working class can build a political and economic system based on the collective ownership of the means of production and safeguarded by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will serve society as a whole, not just a few powerful individuals. This is the viewpoint of revolutionary socialism. 

To summarize, the American working class must have an anti-imperialist movement in order to protect its own vital interests and to steer clear of the dangers of opportunism. The purpose of this movement would be to work in conjunction with and give direction to the existing parties and organizations of the socialist movement. This can be achieved through protests and demonstrations against the government’s actions, such as the withholding of vaccines from other countries, but also through solidarity with other countries, such as the ‘Hands Off Syria’ movement. As long as capitalism exists, imperialism will exist. Conversely, the strength of the socialist movement depends upon the existence of an anti-imperialist movement which can rally the working class against war, aggression, and political opportunism, with the ultimate purpose of undermining imperialist interests and blocking the suppression of the class struggle, so that the socialist movement, which alone is capable of resolving the contradictions of capitalist society, can carry out its revolutionary tasks. 

The working class can not expect any lasting relief, so long as the vicious policy of the U.S. imperialists continues to make the world a more unsafe place. Even a global pandemic does not put the military-industrial complex to rest. On the contrary, it has spurred a ‘vaccine war’ which has only added to the misery of the working people. In the eyes of imperialism, vaccines are just a commodity and people’s lives are just the casualties.