Perspectives on base, superstructure, and nonhuman exploitation.

The post Animal Liberation and Capitalism appeared first on Democratic Left.

Note: posts by individual GMDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

Photo Credit: Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Eighty of our neighbors, including fifty-five hard-working members of Teamsters 597, are losing their jobs.

On June 17th, the Dairy Farmers of America announced plans to “idle” their Saint Albans City facility. The effects of this idling will be catastrophic and will ripple out across Vermont and the Northeast: dairy farms will be forced to shoulder the financial cost of transporting their raw milk to facilities in faraway New York or Massachusetts where it will be mixed with milk from other farms during processing; markets will see distribution and supply of their dairy products change; local companies that produce dairy products, including Ben and Jerry’s, will grapple with supply chain alterations and changes in milk quality; the plant itself on Federal Street will sit empty save a skeleton maintenance crew; and most importantly, eighty employees will become jobless. The decision follows years of DFA slowly undermining farmer co-operatives throughout the Northeast with anticompetitive, antitrust monopolization that’s left local farmers struggling to break even while DFA reaps the spoils. Now we’re all hung out to dry. 

Franklin County deserves better. Vermont deserves better. Our friends and neighbors, the hard-working members of Teamsters 597, deserve better.

This isn’t the first time that DFA has engaged in antitrust action: a 2020 lawsuit filed against DFA by Food Lion LLC and the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers Cooperation Association claims that “DFA’s conduct threatens to and will result in antitrust injury as it tends to and will substantially lessen competition.” A lawsuit filed closer to home in Vermont two years later, S.R.J.F Inc vs. DFA, argues that “over time, DFA has taken predatory and exclusionary actions to position itself as the sole conduit for Northeastern dairy farmers to get their raw milk to market, and to control Northeast raw milk processing capacity, the only market into which Northeast dairy farmers can sell their perishable product.” Other examples of DFA seizing regional dairy industries abound, and a dairy processing plant in Connecticut currently faces similar unexpected closure.

This also isn’t the first time that DFA has proven itself a bad neighbor. Poor working conditions and unfair treatment from management led Teamsters 597 members to strike in October 2025, picketing on Federal Street late into the night. And ongoing discussions with Saint Albans City Council regarding rotten smells coming from the facility hit their most contentious note days before announcement of the plant's idling. DFA has proven itself more concerned with controlling our industry for their own gain than in supporting us, the dairy farmers, employees, and community members that call Vermont home. 

We all deserve better than an idling plant and hard-working union members without work, and we can’t allow monopolistic corporations with no regard for Vermont to strangle our dairy industry. We need legislators that use statute to create an economy where we can all succeed. We need laws that protect employees, to build strong participatory unions with greater investment from employees, and a pivot to co-operative worker-owned businesses over monolithic corporations without accountability. Our farmers and dairy workers deserve fair pay for the dairy products they produce instead of scraping by. Franklin County deserves better than a vacant DFA plant and the disruption of our dairy industry. And DFA needs to amend for the harm they’ve caused to our community and to the members of Teamsters 597.

On Wednesday, July 8, on day 54 of the National Peace Walk, two of us headed down Bradford Quarry Road in Alamance County, NC, toward Saxapahaw. The heat was oppressive. We had made a morning stop already at a church to refill our water reservoirs, taking a minute to tell a passerby about this nationwide pilgrimage that began in Brooklyn almost two months earlier. He remarked, as most tend to, that it seemed like a lot of walking. I tried, as I usually do, to downplay the physical challenge, as it is always made worthwhile by the spiritual nourishment of meeting with community at our destinations. Still, I had just bought a new set of insoles to replace the ones that I had walked to tatters, and I wasn’t sure how far this new two liters of hose water would get us. 

An hour later, Luther Livermon, a friend-to-be, slowed his car next to us and welcomed us to rest and refill at his house, a few yards down the road. When we arrived, we were officially introduced to Luther; his wife, Karen; and the two nurses who are her caretakers. Karen lives with dementia.

 Luther told us about his plan to eventually offer his 75-acre farm to Teepa Snow, a world-renowned specialist in care for those living with brain-change. Luther hoped that this offering would create a sanctuary for specialized care, as well as stewardship of the natural world, which could weather the impending changes of our society. He spoke on all of this unprompted, not aware yet that a core mission of our pilgrimage was to meet with communities working actively to create resilience through mutual aid in the United States. 

Luther also had posted signs along his farm’s frontage for the Preserve Alamance Coalition, an effort by Alamance County residents to halt the clearcutting of mature forest for construction of 1000 units of low-density housing by developers. A local friend and walk organizer, Krysten Voelkner, had coincidentally planned to meet us at the exact time we visited Luther’s farm, giving the two of them an opportunity to be introduced as neighbors and allies in the struggle to protect local forests and water. 

The simple, grounding activity of walking has led to many encounters like these. Our visit with those on Luther’s farm that morning was an affirmation that this project is one of making a path toward continual serendipity, walked by those who are ready to encounter it. 

Last fall, I was part of the organizing committee for the Quaker Walk to Washington, and the work that has continued from this act of public witness now has me on a pilgrimage bound for Minneapolis. Throughout my life, my tendency to be drawn toward egalitarian communities has kept me in overlapping circles of Quaker and socialist groups. 

Since beginning pilgrimage work with Brooklyn Quakers in early 2025, I have literally and figuratively followed a tradition that is older than what is known now as the United States. Quakers have been walking pilgrimages on this continent for nearly four hundred years as an act of peace. This simple act continues to be an effective way to step outside of many oppressive, interconnected systems to meet with friends in true intention. 

Quakerism has always had much to offer fellow socialists. Our historic mode of governance prioritizes long, thoughtful discernment which necessarily resolves in consensus. Quaker governance serves as the basis for the theory of sociocracy. In what was then known as New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant famously banned Quakers from practicing their religion. A 1657 petition called the Flushing Remonstrance was a call by residents of the borough for ratified religious liberty. Over a hundred years later, the petition inspired the Founders to include freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights, connecting Quaker society to this essential feature of spiritual freedom in the United States. 

The National Peace Walk 2026 follows this tradition of publicly expressing faith as an immovable societal foundation, one that weathers all periods of change. Walking to bring this good news to friends extends from a literal and metaphorical lineage that exists both on this continent, and throughout the world. Dozens of folks we have met along the way speak of the Camino de Santiago, currently experiencing the highest number of pilgrims since the 16th century. 

More recently, in our own country, a group of Buddhist monks walked 3,500 kilometers and gained international attention for the cause of peace and understanding. Their walk extended to Sri Lanka after the U.S. phase was finished. The tradition of pilgrimage in the United States in modern times has been upheld by a few notable figures, including Peace Pilgrim, who walked for nearly 30 years, crossing the United States seven times, speaking before crowds and on radio. According to her story, she rested when offered lodging, ate when offered food, and carried nothing except the clothes she wore. 

In the days before the United States. celebrated “America250,” the National Peace Walk finally crossed the North Carolina border, leaving only two days of walking to the next Quaker meeting in Raleigh. Those days in Virginia proved to be a challenge unlike the prior 300 miles between New York City and Washington. The heat and fatigue were factors, but the size and remoteness of Route 1 outside of Richmond were staggering at points. On this section, we could no longer count on a nightly station with Quakers, other faith groups, or communities of people activated toward building peace. We saw instead a kind of cultural blight: towns that had emptied after the dissolution of an unsustainable industry or the construction of I-95/85. In earlier days, when we might have stopped at some center of community for rest and water, there was now just a Wawa store, and then at a certain latitude, a Sheetz. We took our overnight rest on an abandoned porch or in the prohibitively expensive, soulless interior of a hotel room.

The act of intentionally meeting with friends at times can feel utterly inaccessible without acquiescing to a number of oppressive systems, installed by the force of convenience. “America at 250” on its face would like to be a celebration of a unity among states, but the lived reality for most in the Covid-era is an encroaching stasis of isolation, even “post” lockdown. 

The recent work of pilgrimage by NYC Quakers has been a modern effort to transcend these divides and to meet with friends as companions and partners in the realization of a peaceful world. Our intention as walkers is to reach Minneapolis by November, in order to celebrate the work of residents of the Twin Cities to build resilience under the pressure of full-bore state violence. From where we stand now, in Boone, North Carolina, a walk to Minneapolis could seem like an untraversable distance. What is certain, as it has been revealed to us many times over at this point, is that applied faith shared by community will open a way. The serendipity of the journey will be found by those who set out to meet it. 

The post 400 Years of U.S. Pilgrimage: Why This Quaker is Walking Across the Country   appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

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Former members of the U.S. Communist Party recount their "Red Lives."

The post Looking Back to Look Forward appeared first on Democratic Left.

Events and Actions

Tuesday July 28 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 28 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 29 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) DSA SF Electoral Board x WFP Happy Hour (Teeth Bar SF, 2323 Mission St)

Wednesday July 29 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM) Phonebank for the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 29 (6:45 PM – 8:30 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday July 30 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM) ICE Out Orientation (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 1 (1:00 PM – 3:00 PM) Immigrant Justice KYR Canvassing – Pacific Heights (Raymond Kimbell Playground Park, 1901 Geary Blvd)

Monday August 3 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday August 4 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday August 5 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (zoom only)

Wednesday August 5 (6:00 PM – 9:00 PM) Social Housing Happy Hour (MOTHERSHIP, 3152 Mission St)

Thursday August 6 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 6 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Immigrant Justice regular meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Friday August 7 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 8 (11:00 PM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Sunday August 9 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group Meeting (zoom only)

Monday August 10 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday August 10 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM)Labor Working Group Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Happy Hour with the Working Families Party

New to organizing? Looking to get more involved? Come to our joint happy hour with the Working Families Party TOMORROW Wednesday July 29th at Teeth Bar, 2323 Mission, from 6:00 – 8:00 PM and meet cool people organizing cool campaigns. The event is all ages AND it’s Teeth’s “Wings Wednesday” so you gotta come out — RSVP here!

Immigrant Justice Know Your Rights Canvassing Event & Social

The Immigrant Justice Working Group will be hosting an ICE Out Orientation session this Thursday, July 30 from 7:00 – 9:00 PM at the office (1916 Mcallister) and virtually over Zoom! This is perfect for if you are interested in learning where to plug in with your local community initiatives and learn how to best utilize your skills, or even just to connect with others if you’re already active!

If you plan to attend either in person or on Zoom, please RSVP here!

Immigrant Justice Know Your Rights Canvassing Event & Social

Join the Immigrant Justice Working Group for Know Your Rights (KYR) canvassing Saturday August 1 at 1:00PM at Raymond Kimbell Playground Park!

We will be distributing red cards and KYR materials to businesses and community members in the Pacific Heights neighborhood.

We will meet at Raymond Kimbell Playground Park on the corner of Geary Blvd. & Steiner St. to receive training and materials before canvassing.

Join us after for a social/debrief session at a local spot and grab food/drinks!

New to canvassing? No worries! There will be a brief how-to training before we go out in pairs or small groups.

Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines

DSA SF is hosting a guest speaker from San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (SFCHRP) to discuss the recent events that connect the strike against C&H Sugar in Crockett, California to the massacre of 19 land defenders and activists in Toboso, Negros Occidental in the Philippines. We’ll dive into sugar’s bloody history, learn about the links in the imperialist global supply chain that bind us together in struggle, and discuss what we can do here in San Francisco. 

Join us on the evening of Friday, August 7th in the office at 1916 McAllister St. (RSVP link coming soon!).

Reportback: Tenant Organizing Working Group Provide Support for Socialist in Office Jackie Fielder’s Town Hall

On Thursday, our Socialist In Office Supervisor Jackie Fielder hosted a Town Hall at La Fénix on Mission as part of a D9 listening series. Last Tuesday, DSA members posted flyers throughout the Mission inviting residents to the Town Hall and the Citywide Tenant Assembly in August, and providing information to help tenants know their rights when facing eviction. DSA’s Tenant Organizing Working Group was joined in tabling the event by the Eviction Defense Collaborative, and DSA SF members were in attendance to support and listen to ideas and concerns from working class residents in the Mission.

The room was packed with constituents who shared questions and comments to a panel including Jackie and representatives from the Mayor’s Office, the Department of Emergency Management, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, SFPD, and SFMTA. Mission residents took the floor and advocated for many important community needs such as funding for peer counselors, mental health and substance use treatment, housing-first policies and funding for affordable housing, and against recent shelter closures and surveillance by Flock cameras. The departments took notes and responded to questions directed at them, including requests for greater transparency and regular reporting. Jackie’s team followed up with residents who still had comments after the event to make sure their concerns were noted.

If you’re interested in showing up to support our Socialist in Office, Jackie’s next Town Hall will be in Portola on Thursday, July 30 from 6:30 – 7:30 PM at the Family Connections Center, located at 2565 San Bruno Ave!

by Elizabeth Henderson

This month’s column will be short – lots to say, but too busy gardening and digging in the dirt to write it down!

New booth at the Public Market! Fresh Farmers Together launched their shared booth in early June. Please visit Shed D on Saturdays from 7:00am to 1:00pm to purchase their freshly picked organically grown produce. The 8 or so farms use the label “Sustainable” because they are not certified organic, although they use organic systems on their tiny farms that range in size from 2 backyards to 6 acres.

Final Hearing on Zoning Alignment. July 13 @ 6:00 pm, Rochester City Hall – final-final hearing on final comments on city Zoning. Us community garden folks will be waiting to hear if the ZAP writers will finally understand the difference between a high tunnel and a row cover!

The Rochester Food Policy Council hopes to hear that the zoners are heeding the call “to read its urban agriculture provisions not only as technical land use code, but as environmental justice policy.” The Food Policy Council comments summarize the Taproot Collective 2024-25 report on their survey of 109 community gardens:

“Rochester’s community gardens are concentrated in neighborhoods that face the greatest combined burdens of poverty, food insecurity, environmental contamination, and disinvestment. The Gardening Together Study found that the majority of Rochester’s 109 documented food-producing gardens serve neighborhoods where, as one grower described it, residents overwhelmingly live below the poverty line, where children may never have seen a fruit tree, and where healthy food – free of chemicals, grown with care – is a form of public health infrastructure, not a hobby.”

“90% of the people in my community live below the poverty level. 90% of the people in my community’s children don’t know how it is to see an apple tree, a pear tree, a plum tree. I want to teach the people in the community how to live off the land.”
Inez Burns-Nixon, Garden of Hope, North Marketview Heights.

The Gardening Together Study’s analysis questions explicitly tested whether gardens cluster in neighborhoods with lower tree canopy cover, fewer parks, and greater food access barriers – the same neighborhoods that bear the most concentrated environmental burdens from Rochester’s legacy of redlining, industrial disinvestment, and infrastructure disinvestment. This pattern is consistent with national research on urban agriculture in rust belt cities, where community gardens function as environmental justice interventions: they green vacant land that would otherwise accumulate pollution and illegal dumping, provide fresh produce in areas that retail markets have abandoned, and build community resilience in neighborhoods where social cohesion has been systematically undermined.”

Pest management field day! July 23 @ 3:30pm – 6:30pm, Foodlink Community Farm [585 Lexington Ave, Rochester, NY 14613]. Join us for a hands-on field day exploring integrated pest management tools for small-scale growing spaces and the opportunity to build community with local growers! This event will focus on best practices for using row covers, biocontrols, trapping, and more. We will highlight a Cornell Cooperative Extension demonstration trial using insect exclusion netting and entomopathogenic nematodes to manage swede midge, an invasive fly that causes damage to brassica crops. We will hear from local growers on how they manage pests on their farms and gardens with a focus on organic management.

You can learn how to set up low tunnels, and there will be tabling by the Food Policy Council, Northeast Organic Farming Association, Taproot, and more.

Please check out the Taproot Collective Facebook and Instagram pages for announcements of workshops and volunteer opportunities through the season.

If you want to participate in a garden, please contact the author of this piece, and maybe she can point you in the right direction!

The post Getting Grounded, July 2026-Out in the Garden! first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

On Wednesday, July 22, four Madison Police Department officers surrounded and executed Corey Ruiz on the corner of Williamson and South Baldwin streets, mere blocks away from where Tony Robinson was murdered by Matt Kenny in 2015. We condemn in no uncertain terms the murder of Corey Ruiz by the Madison Police Department. Regardless of the events leading up to the murder, there is no situation where this is justified. For days our members have participated in demonstrations, protests, and vigils in solidarity with our community.

This is not the first time Madison Police officers have taken a neighbor’s life;  the police continue to use excessive force and perpetuate racism and classism with absolute impunity. In March 2015, Madison Police officer Matt Kenny shot and killed 19-year-old Tony Robinson. Despite widespread protests and calls for accountability, Matt Kenny has faced no charges and is still employed by the Madison Police Department more than ten years later. He even trains new officers. Even Tony Robinson was not the first victim of police murder in this neighborhood—in 2012, Paul Heenan was murdered by police on South Baldwin Street, and in 2006, Victor Montero-Diaz was murdered by police at the gas station on Williamson Street. 

We stand behind the community’s demands for:

1. The immediate arrest of Kiel Baitinger-Peterson and all those accessory to the murder we witnessed on Wednesday afternoon
2. That all information found in the investigation conducted by the Department of Criminal Investigation be turned over to the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Civilian Oversight Board
3. Community control over the police.
   

We demand accountability for Corey’s murder, and for the systems that have led to this point— systems that value property over human life. We demand full transparency, including the immediate release of the names of every officer involved and all available squad car camera and surveillance footage.

These common-sense demands only address this most recent harm done to the community and ensure accountability follows. If we truly want to stop further violence, we must not treat this as an isolated instance but rather a part of a larger structure that perpetuates violence. Instead, we must focus on the kinds of reforms that will prevent future police violence against our communities. 

We must demilitarize police departments, redirect funding to public services, and strengthen the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Civilian Oversight Board to have real community authority over the police. These changes, among others, are steps that will bring us closer to changing the violent carceral system that destroys communities and takes lives. We need to recognize that any reform that does not decrease the power of the modern punishment bureaucracy is no reform at all.

Time and again we’ve seen politicians break promises, make compromises that lead to half measures, and roll back reforms. We’ve seen momentum toward progress stall as soon as the news cycle moves on. Non-profits are limited by their mandate, structure, and fundraising, and advocate but do not deliver. To win our demands, members of the community must get organized and work together.

Support and attend the vigil, connect with your community, and be ready to take concrete action in the coming days and weeks to ensure true accountability and justice for Corey Ruiz.