The Activist interviewed the candidates for national co-chair at the 2024 YDSA national convention. Uma Clemenceau discusses their run for co-chair. YDSA’s National Convention is on the horizon. Though the event will be online this year, the key elements that make the convention important will remain. Hundreds of YDSAers will gather to discuss, debate, and…

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The Activist interviewed the candidates for national co-chair at the 2024 YDSA national convention. Sean Bridge discusses their run for co-chair. YDSA’s National Convention is on the horizon. Though the event will be online this year, the key elements that make convention important will remain. Hundreds of YDSAers will gather to discuss, debate, and vote…

The post Co-Chair Candidate Profile: Sean Bridge appeared first on YDSA.

The Activist interviewed the candidates for national co-chair at the 2024 YDSA national convention. Nat Leach discusses their run for co-chair. YDSA’s National Convention is on the horizon. Though the event will be online this year, the key elements that makes convention important will remain. Hundreds of YDSAers will gather to discuss, debate, and vote…

The post Co-Chair Candidate Profile: Nat Leach appeared first on YDSA.

The Activist interviewed the candidates for national co-chair at the 2024 YDSA national convention. Current NCC member at-large Carlos Callejo III discusses their run for co-chair. YDSA’s National Convention is on the horizon. Though the event will be online this year, the key elements that make convention important will remain. Hundreds of YDSAers will gather…

The post Co-Chair Candidate Profile: Carlos Callejo III appeared first on YDSA.

The Activist interviewed the candidates for national co-chair at the 2024 YDSA national convention. Current co-chair Aron Ali-McClory discusses their run for a second term. YDSAs National Convention is on the horizon. Though the event will be online this year, the key elements that make convention important will remain. Hundreds of YDSAers will gather to…

The post Co-Chair Candidate Profile: Aron Ali-McClory appeared first on YDSA.

The Activist Editorial Board summarizes the first day of the 2024 YDSA national convention. “Turbulence,” was the word keynote speaker Sumaya Awad used to describe the current political climate as she addressed an audience of 136 members of YDSA for the organization’s online convention.  Awad’s words reference the volatility and uncertainty that have been defining…

The post Activist Updates: 2024 YDSA Convention Day 1 appeared first on YDSA.

The authors outline the need for student unions in this current political moment and why YDSA should take on this long-term project. YDSA has the opportunity to bring this revolutionary model of organizing here first. From organizing the first undergrad student labor union at the University of Oregon, helping establishing the city of Columbia, Missouri as a…

The post For R21: The Potential of Militant and Democratic Student Unions appeared first on YDSA.

Democratic Party leadership claims that the threat to democracy posed by a second Trump presidency and Republican-dominated Congress is real, and they are correct. The Republican Party is clear in its intention to undermine essential market regulations and basic individual rights. With the backing of a loaded Supreme Court, Trump’s administration stands to finally break the promise held out by Democrats throughout the rising tide of fascism: that we can defend democracy through our legal system. When that tide breaks, it will most immediately impact trans and reproductive rights, the unhoused, immigrants, and asylum seekers—but it ultimately will affect us all.

Nevertheless, the Democratic Party’s actions contradict its own apparent concerns. For example, while touting the value of free speech and protest, the Biden administration has overseen the crackdown on student protest across campuses nationwide. This does nothing to distance Democrats from the charge of repression that it levies against Republicans. Furthermore, instead of allowing for a competitive primary process (ironically, something permitted by the Republican Party), the Democratic National Committee saw to it that Biden was effectively the only candidate on the ballot. Even before Biden’s disastrous debate and the question of his cognitive decline, unprecedented thousands of Americans expressed their will for another candidate by voting “uncommitted” or “no preference” across the country—not least because of his commitment to funding Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Democracy may be under threat, but it is already compromised today.

People want to stand up for democracy, yet with Biden at the helm, the Democratic Party reveals itself to be unable and unwilling. Following the recent attempt on Trump’s life, Democratic Party leadership has been more interested in the symbolic high ground, calling for national unity against “political violence.” The hypocrisy is blatant. On one level, this calls for unity with a candidate and party who incite the very violence at issue. On a deeper level, however, the Democratic Party fails to reconcile this call for unity with the state of violence it has perpetuated. Biden may be the first president to stand on a picket line, but he has done little to nothing material for the American and global working class. While Biden has focused our attention on “shrinkflation” and “hidden fees” (admittedly insidious practices), the prices of housing and healthcare continue to rise. Instead of moving to socialize these costs, the Biden administration funds war abroad, which benefits everyone from landlords and developers to insurance agencies and weapons manufacturers. Meanwhile, working people suffer degradation and death.

Given these conditions, the Democratic Party rightly appears bought by capitalist forces, which allows the Republican Party to (falsely) claim it will oppose “elites” in the name of those most desperate. Behind the culture war he stokes, Trump (like populists the world over) taps into real pain felt by the working class. In order for the Democratic Party to stake any claim to legitimacy, it must field a candidate who will rise to the moment and confront the threat of fascism without hesitation, all the while attacking its root economic causes. That candidate is not Joe Biden.

From the City of Charlotte to Mecklenburg County and beyond, join the call: it’s time to drop Joe!

Let the following know it’s time to drop Joe:

Alma Adams: (704) 344-9950

Chuck Schumer: (202) 224-6542

North Carolina Democratic Party: (919) 821-2777

The 2024 Republican National Convention marks the consolidation of the American Right around Donald Trump and his fascist agenda. Despite months of media fanfare over various alternative candidates, Trump easily secured the nomination with over 98% of the vote. By contrast, the Democratic Party is bitterly divided over whether Biden should withdraw.

For his Vice President, Trump anointed JD Vance. Vance seeks to make demagogic appeals to “working class interests” such as banning abortion nationwide, attacking gay marriage and trans rights, and eroding what little democratic rights workers have in the United States. This attack on the workers’ movement serves Trump’s plans for aggression against Mexico and other international states abroad, in addition to giving unwavering support to Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Vance presents himself as a working-class Heartland Everyman in an effort to cover up the corporate elitism that anchors every single one of their policies. In reality, Vance is a Yale-educated Silicon Valley venture capitalist and multimillionaire running to cut taxes for his tech billionaire friends.

Trump’s far-right politics come as no surprise – but many on the Left were caught off-guard by Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s speech at the RNC. In his speech, Sean O’Brien claimed that “elites have no party. Elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker.” After his appearance, he praised an article written by far-right Senator Josh Hawley as “100% on point” that promoted JD Vance’s framing of the class struggle as between a socially conservative working class and a socially progressive “elite.” 

O’Brien is wrong. Elites—the capitalist class, who live through exploiting working-class labor and extracting rent from us—have two parties. Both Republicans and Democrats serve the interests of capitalists, blocking policies that will serve working-class people, from universal healthcare to housing for all. O’Brien was elected to reform the Teamsters and fight for working people, not to cut deals with millionaire fascists like Donald Trump and JD Vance.

The solution is for working-class people to take political power for ourselves—to seize the schools and the warehouses, to disarm the police and close the prisons, and to build a real democracy that does not answer to the rich. This is socialism at its core—the fight for democratic control of every part of our lives, allowing us to build a world without starvation, war and corporate greed.

However, we can’t win this fight alone. Capitalism is an international system, dependent on the exploitation of workers across the world. To make and sell an iPhone, capitalists rely on coltan miners, many of them children, in the Congo; manufacturing workers to assemble them in China; and longshoremen, truck drivers and retail workers to ship and sell them in the United States. To keep the system running, capitalists depend on the division of nation-states and on military power to hold them in line. Just like how you can’t strike with only half of your shop, we can’t beat capitalism with only workers from one nation. Patriotism splits the labor movement and makes us easy prey for the bosses.

Trump and Vance are not the first reactionaries to make promises to union leaders: In the early 1920s, Benito Mussolini promised legal protection for the eight-hour day, creation of a minimum wage, and an “economic parliament” where both workers and corporations could have direct control over the economy. Instead of delivering on his promises, his regime engaged in mass layoffs and pushed wages down by up to 60%. He crushed the labor movement and set up fascist-controlled unions in its place. Workers rose up in response, taking the streets and occupying factories, and the fascists responded with brutal police repression.

To beat the parties of Trump and Biden and end the genocide in Gaza, we need a party of our own—one with a program that fights for workers of all races, genders and nationalities, queer and straight workers, trans and cis workers, able and disabled workers, rural and urban workers, the employed and unemployed, uniting all of us into one struggle against exploitation and oppression. DSA is committed to seeing this struggle through to the end, which is why our members are in the streets of Milwaukee protesting the RNC, and why we will be bringing the fight to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month. This is why DSA is putting forward the For Our Rights program: an economy for the working class, an end to war, and a new, democratic constitution. In 2024, workers deserve better. The only thing that can defeat the far-right for good is a mass movement of working people: Join DSA to help us build it.

We call on all chapter leaders to urgently mobilize your chapters and communities, building a movement for our program demands and against Biden and Trump. Call your membership, recruit from the community, and hit the streets—it’s time to shape history in the making. 

All Power to the International Working Class!

The post All Power to the International Working Class – Statement on the Republican National Convention appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).