By Nick Lavin

10:1 – the recommended ratio of union members to Contract Action Team (CAT) members – was the watchword of everyone on the picket line this weekend in Beverly and Gloucester as they turned out virtually every member to the picket line on regular intervals. After months without a contract, educators in both towns voted overwhelmingly to strike beginning Friday, with Marblehead set to join them on Tuesday. Here’s what the teachers, counselors, and paraprofessionals on the line had to say about their efforts to Working Mass.

“The North Shore Is Taking Its Schools Back”

The Beverly and Gloucester teachers unions, each representing over 400 educators and other school staff, have been fighting for a fair contract for months – and in the case of Gloucester’s paraprofessionals, since June of last year. Inspired by the strike actions in several other towns and cities across the state, union members took the problem of underfunded public education into their own hands and started organizing.

Years of methodical shop-floor organizing and months of contract campaign escalations culminated this fall as North Shore educators set the date for a strike – November 8th. After turning broadly and deeply felt issues over pay equity, staffing, and general working conditions into a contract proposal for teacher- and student-well-being, the unions were ready to bring the proposals back to their workplaces. Union member-organizers started “Contract Action Teams” in their buildings to develop the strength needed to take on their districts, holding 1:1 conversations, turning out as ‘silent reps’ to negotiations with the city, and rallying.

Turning Up the Heat

When federal pandemic-era relief money ran out during the last school year, Gloucester laid off twenty-two educators, a loss felt deeply in the classroom. To the paraprofessionals expected to pick up the slack as sub-separate classes became ‘inclusion’ with less resources, the district suggested they apply for second jobs (which many already have) rather than increasing their pay. This blatant disregard for the work of paras is part of what motivated the merger of Gloucester paraprofessional and teacher units, says Margaret Rudolf, an eighteen-year special-ed paraprofessional: “when we started sharing [our story] with the GTA [Gloucester Teachers Association], they were appalled at how little we made.”

Paraprofessional pay equity is a sticking point in negotiations for all union members. The housing crisis emanating from Boston hits paras especially hard in the commuter towns of Beverly and Gloucester, who make as little as $20,000 a year.

Educational staff were exasperated by the systemic underfunding of public schooling, and the union was ready to organize the frustration into positive action. “Our program in negotiations were the solutions to the problems that we see in our schools and in our district. The district says ‘oh we hear you’ but then they reject all our proposals” said Rachel Rex, president of the Union of Gloucester Educators. 

Consistent stonewalling from city administration over basic school needs forced teachers to organize to take more militant action to ensure both they and their students get the resources they need. Rather than listening to parents and educators, city administrators have turned to the typical teachers-union-busting textbook, calling on the courts to issue injunctions against the strikes.

Community Support

Educators on the North Shore are taking on local politicians over public education – and bringing the community with them. Educators in both Beverly and Gloucester reported that, despite the stories coming out of the school committees about the union, community support for the strike has been overwhelming. Across the North Shore, pro-union signs are ubiquitous, and the supportive honking as cars streamed by the pickets was incessant. 

Because the union teachers are so beloved in Gloucester, the city’s administration centers a different villain in their union-busting narrative. Officials have taken to blaming the Massachusetts Teachers Association [MTA]. “The narrative is that MTA has caused these strikes, but let me be clear: my members made this decision,” said Rex. This line of attack, called ‘third-partying’, seeks to drive a wedge not only between workers and their union, but also between the union and the greater community. As politicians try to steer austerity against the tide of renewed teacher militancy and community frustration over school budgets, third-partying has become a common, if ineffective, rhetorical crutch across Massachusetts.

Both the Beverly and Gloucester teachers unions have launched strike support fundraisers, and don’t intend to back down: “we’ve finally found our voice and enough is enough… you can’t break us anymore, you can’t burn us out. We need a living wage, we need a parental leave policy, we need safe schools, we need the tools so that we can properly educate our students.”

Anger over the cities’ treatment of educators in both the union and the community has reached a boiling point and members are ready to transform their union power into political power. Once they win their contract, says Rex, GTA’s next campaign is “to change the political landscape here in Gloucester.“ Community members, business owners, and the union are fed up with the status quo and ready to elect people who care about safe schools and fully-funded public education.

Nick Lavin is a Boston Public Schools paraprofessional and a member of the Boston Teachers Union.

I remember being the only kid in my 5th grade class at Pennell Elementary in Gray, Maine to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1980. Ronald Reagan promised to Make America Great Again and he beat Carter 489 to 49 in the electoral college that year. It got worse in 1984. Reagan nearly ran the table against Walter Mondale, who managed just 13 electoral votes from his home state of Minnesota. The popular vote was 54 million to 37 million. You read that right. 

For those who had fought all their lives for civil rights, feminism, and peace, his election was a demoralizing and terrifying time. I was just a kid, but I could feel it too. Reagan made his bones in California as governor gassing anti-war protesters and staked his presidential campaign on White Supremacy, hailing States Rights in Mississippi where the Klan massacred civil rights organizers. In office, he smashed unions, mocked AIDS victims, bloodied whole nations in Central America, and pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war. It was bad. 

Reaganomics

If Reagan mobilized a racist backlash against civil rights to win office, he cemented his grip on power by taming inflation, running at almost 15% by the time of the 1980 election. He teamed up with Fed Chief Paul Volcker to drive the U.S. into a steep recession in 1981 and 1982 by slashing budgets and hiking up interest rates. Unemployment spiked to over 10% with millions of jobs lost in manufacturing. Reagan portrayed the recession as tough medicine that would—coupled with a war on the unions—restore American business to world supremacy. Wall Street and Big Business loved it. Private sector unionization declined by 40% over the course of the 1980s. In capitalist terms, it worked like a charm. GDP growth stormed back to 4.5% in 1983 and 7.25% in 1984, then chugged along around 4% for the remainder of the decade.

When all was said and done, Reagan had won the Cold War, rearmed the Pentagon, rolled back abortion rights, affirmative action, and environmental protection, and imposed the neoliberal model on friend and foe alike across the world. George H.W. Bush rode to an easy victory in 1988, spreading Reaganism into the 1990s and looked set to extend its run even further in the wake of the 1991 Iraq War. 

What finally undid the Reagan/Bush hold on the White House? As Clinton advisor James Carville put it, “It’s the economy stupid.” Post-war joblessness climbed to nearly 8% and that was just enough to put Clinton over the top in 1992. However, it’s worth remembering that billionaire Ross Perot won almost 20 million votes in his independent (rightward leaning) bid that year, so Clinton only won 43 million votes to Bush’s 39 million. The ghost of Ronald Reagan still haunted the country. Especially so considering that Clinton adopted much of Reagan’s anti-welfare and tough on crime rhetoric and policy. 

The left in the 1980s

There were important social movements and leftwing campaigns in the 1980s and early 1990s. Millions marched for Earth Day, disarmament, abortion rights, and Central American solidarity. Campus occupations protested South African Apartheid and Los Angeles and other cities erupted in rebellion after Rodney King’s attackers were acquitted in 1992. And while labor took it on the chin, strikes like the paper workers’ battle in Jay, Maine demonstrated that unions could still put up a fight. Many of these impulses found political expression in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 Democratic Party primary challenges, growing his left-wing vote from 3 million to almost 8 million in the darkest period of Reagan’s rule. However, the trend was clear. Feminism, civil rights, environmentalism, socialism, Indigenous sovereignty, disarmament were all on the decline and capitalism reigned supreme. Margerat Thatcher’s dictum “There is no alternative” rang true. 

Fast forward. Is Trump just a return to Reagan? Yes and no. 

Leftwing ideas are all more popular now—especially among young people—than in the 1980s. If Jackson’s campaigns brought together the remaining forces from the previous round of social movements, then Bernie’s campaigns gave a common language of socialism and solidarity to contemporary struggles whose trajectory has not yet been determined. Certainly, the NLRB will turn hostile under Trump, but there is more energy in the labor movement than we’ve seen since the 1960s. And if hundreds or thousands protested Reagan’s genocidal wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua and demanded divestment from South Africa in the 1980s, tens of thousands and more are standing in solidarity with Gaza now. Today to be young and to fight for socialism seems pretty normal, just ask all the people you know in DSA. That’s a big change. 

On the other hand, although Reagan’s margins were bigger than Trump’s, and Reaganism did help revive the far right—David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the KKK won a seat in the Louisiana legislature and Timothy McVeigh sprung from a widespread militia movement—Trump has brought together a kind of mass, participatory proto-fascist movement unlike anything Reagan ever managed (or cared about). That “movement” side of Trump—both its expression in the streets and its permeation of the state—is of a different order of magnitude and it might mean that Trumpism is more durable than Reaganism. 

What about global capitalism? Reagan wanted to win the Cold War, but I don’t think he and his team really imagined the Soviet Union would collapse. That is, they wanted to rebalance the existing global structures in favor of U.S. business, which they did. But today’s fractured worldscape—led by mutually antagonistic strongmen on the one hand and imperial democracies on the other—the escalating ecological catastrophe, and the creeping substitution of “normal” political channels for demagogic freelancing all add up to a more precarious world order. It was unnerving to hear Reagan “joke” about nuking the Soviet Union in 1984 (“We begin bombing in 5 minutes”) but it is positively terrifying to consider the damage Trump can do with, as Kamala Harris liked to put it, the “world’s most lethal military.” 

What now? 

At the risk of oversimplification, three roads suggest themselves based on this reading of Reaganism v. Trumpism. 

First, Trumpism could succeed in consolidating itself for a generation in terms of beefed up street (thug) power and control over the existing state. This is a very dangerous scenario and anyone who expects the CIA, the FBI, or the DNC to stand in its way ought to think twice. Deepening control over already Red state apparatuses and despotic inroads into Blue state defenses by means of Federal regulations, court rulings, and laws will radically restrict rights for whole groups of people and throw fuel on fire warming the planet. We might look to India today, or the U.S. before the end of Jim Crow, to see what this looks like. Not a totalizing Third Reich police state, but enough of a police state (with popular support) to change the terms. Just think about what things would be like under a second Vance Administration 2032-2036.

Second, Reagan’s Trickle Down economics initially juiced the economy making him a hero, but he couldn’t outrun the tendency of capitalism towards crisis and unemployment. Huge tax breaks for the rich, deregulation, and tariffs might lead to an economic boom for a time, Trump’s fabled “greatest economy in the history of the world.” But it will inevitably run out of steam, if it ever materializes at all. This expectation will determine the DNC’s strategy. The Democratic leadership will move to the (imaginary) center, “look for common ground,” and wait. They will denounce “extremists” in the Democratic Party and look for a new Bill Clinton. Despite all the damage 4, 8, or 12 more years of Trumpism might do, the Democrats will wait it out. And, in terms of the DNC elite coming back to power, it might work. Heck, it might even work in terms of winning the House or the Senate back in 2026 or even the presidency in 2028. And it’s always possible that Trump will follow Reagan into rapid mental and physical decline during his administration but before Vance is able to consolidate his own position as cult leader, touching off a bruising fist fight inside the Republican Party.

Third, there is the potential to replace Trump from the left. This could come in two shapes that I can think of. Either a left-wing populist is able to tap into a series of Trump missteps and disasters and run a short road to electoral victory. The U.S. electoral system cheats against this possibility and the DNC will be patrolling to head it off. But the bigger problem is that Bernie has no heir apparent with either his stature or political skills. 

Or the left charts a longer-term strategy for creating a genuine working-class movement rooted in workplaces and neighborhoods, oppressed communities and Indigenous Nations, and schools and universities. This strategy will face repression, cooptation, and internal debate and it will require many years if it is to grow powerful enough to accomplish its goals. And, truth be told, it is probably the least likely scenario presented here to succeed. But I can’t see another way out. Can you? 

The post Is Trump Just a Return to Reagan? Yes and No. appeared first on Pine & Roses.

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

At the end of August 2024, the Democratic Socialists of America released the 2024 Program: Workers Deserve More! This document is the result of a resolution passed by the 2023 DSA National Convention, titled “Defend Democracy through Political Independence.” The resolution called on the National Political Committee to “prepare for the 2024 national election by putting forward a positive program modeled after our 2020 DSA-For-Bernie campaign platform.” 

“Neither major party is capable of advancing a positive program for the 2024 elections that meets the needs of the majority of Americans,” reads the preamble. “That’s why [DSA] is presenting a bold alternative course of action. In our 2024 program, ‘Workers Deserve More,’ we hope to bring together millions of people throughout the U.S. to fight for a true democracy where working people have control over their own lives, their government, and the economy.”

The program presents a series of essentially legislative proposals, including Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, reduced military spending, and elimination of the Electoral College. As a presentation accompanying the program elaborates, Workers Deserve More “represents our vision for a new workers’ party and what socialists could do if we are elected into office at every level of government.”

The realization of these policies would not on their own “achieve socialism.” Indeed, they do not radically exceed the policy proposals of Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs, and the program itself has been criticized from within DSA as “advanc[ing] a reformist vision of socialism.” So, if Workers Deserve More presents only moderate goals for the socialist movement, does it hold any value?

The “Minimum” Program

As Jean Allen recently asserted in Red Star, “With a clear platform, our conversations can start to be about programmatic issues facing the left, rather than interpersonal squabble. With a clear platform, we will no longer have to filter our political differences through interpersonal loyalties. With a clear platform, we could unite the left in a substantive way.”

Various tendencies within the socialist movement have competing visions for “actually existing socialism.” But arguments about the higher stage of socialism—a prospect that appears discouragingly far in the future—are evocative of utopian thinking that provides no clear path toward its realization. To orient the movement to its task and explain its cause to the masses, a program must define clear and achievable goals.

These immediate goals comprise the “minimum” program. While the minimum program does not contend an immediate break with capitalism, it heightens the contradictions of capitalism and represents a step toward its dissolution. The achievement of each minimum demand fundamentally transforms the field for the next stage of the battle. 

While reforms are criticized for their potential to be co-opted by capital, these “non-reformist reforms” present a direct challenge to the dominance of capital. “The struggle will advance,” said proponent of this theory, André Gorz, as “each battle reinforces the positions of strength, the weapons, and also the reasons that workers have for repelling the attacks of the conservative forces.” Revealing new possibilities, each campaign is an opportunity to organize an increasingly conscious working class toward further objectives. 

The labor struggle unquestionably remains the core of the socialist movement. It is workers, as producers of value, who have the ability to cut off the capitalist class from its source of power: profit. It is workers who hold the revolutionary potential to overcome the conditions of their exploitation by seizing the means of production. But as Marx recognized, the “organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.” 

While workers are equalized toward the same relative position under the domination of capital, they are alienated from one another by the compulsion to market their labor. In the words of business guru Tom Peters, “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.” Success under neoliberalism requires the personal branding of curated LinkedIn profiles alongside callous ambition. Simultaneously, capitalist propaganda cultivates conflicting interests, fears, and identities among the working class. Despite this fracturing, the organization of the proletarians “ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier,” predicts Marx.

The working class is variously oppressed along these differing lines of identity. Unfortunately, reactionary elements within the socialist movement would sacrifice marginalized groups in favor of a purely economic struggle. Lenin recognized the importance of organizing across these lines, declaring in What is to Be Done, “Agitation must be conducted with regard to every concrete example of . . . oppression,” which “affects the most diverse classes of society [and] manifests itself in the most varied spheres of life and activity—vocational, civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc.”

“Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle,” says Lenin, “is not one whit less ‘widely applicable’ as a means of ‘drawing in’ the masses” (emphasis in original). The minimum program identifies which levers can be pulled to relieve pressure from our collective oppression.

The “Maximum” Program

It is no secret that the transition to socialism must go beyond these minimum demands, fundamentally changing the incentives by which the necessities of society are produced and distributed. The aim of the socialist movement is no less than the universal emancipation of humanity without distinction of sex or race, as Marx announces in the preamble to the Programme of the Workers Party (1880).

A maximum program “represents the final goal of the party that will be attained after a period of economic reconstruction and social transformation,” explains Donald Parkinson in his defense of the minimum-maximum program for Cosmonaut. 

“It describes the general aim of human emancipation and that this must be achieved through the proletariat and its party coming to power and collectivizing the means of production. In other words, it proclaims the long-term goal of moving beyond capitalism into a communist society.”

The realization of the maximum program signifies collective ownership of the means of production, production directed toward meeting need rather than accumulating profit, and halting imperial expansion and unrestricted resource extraction. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” per Marx. In short, the achievement of actually existing socialism.

The “Minimum-Maximum” Program

The socialist movement must be able to articulate both its immediate demands, and a call for the final overthrow of capitalism. A “minimum-maximum” program provides a roadmap for the achievement of this vision. Such a program “Allow[s] us to build a majority that is aware of what it is fighting for,” says Pakinson, while “exclud[ing] revolutionary phrasemongering and empty calls to action.” 

While we are working toward the establishment of socialism, we must work within the material conditions of our current moment. Minimum demands present clear tasks for the socialist movement, while providing for flexibility as conditions change. The selection of campaigns through debate centers democratic participation, and facilitates an analysis of which minimum demands will help to achieve maximum goals. Legislative proposals also create clear red lines to hold DSA electeds accountable.

The socialist movement is not currently positioned to win a presidential election, establish a proletarian dictatorship, and immediately “seize the biggest 100 corporations.” A socialist society will not be birthed, wholly formed, following the proletarian revolution, but must be built. ”Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other,” as Marx describes in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875).

While Workers Deserve More is based primarily around minimum demands, its preamble contains a nod to our maximum vision, namely, “To fight for a true democracy where working people have control over their own lives, their government, and the economy.” We must be sure that all our minimum demands function toward achieving these ends. 

In our political moment, “Neither major party is capable of advancing a positive program for the 2024 elections that meets the needs of the majority of Americans.” While Republicans tap into the resentments of the precariat, they are incapable of mitigating the material conditions of exploitation, and instead scapegoat minorities. Democrats gesture to working class credentials, but consistently capitulate to their donor class. Workers Deserve More serves to heighten these contradictions, articulating what the socialist movement can achieve. Let us demonstrate this potential, so we can raise hopes and expectations to as yet unimaginable heights.

The post Workers Deserve More and the Minimum/Maximum Program first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

The question is the same as it was a hundred years ago: Will we collectively choose Socialism or Barbarism?

Democratic socialists know that governments that protect the interests of the ruling class while refusing to guarantee our rights to housing, healthcare, and education are democracies only in name, and that both major parties in fact support a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (that is, the one percent). Even so, DSA engages with the electoral process as candidates, campaigners, canvassers, and voters. The electoral arena is often where we find allies, grow coalitions, and inspire the rest of the working class to build socialism together, brick by brick.

This election, we are faced with a stark reality that the duopoly power shared by the two major US parties is a ratchet effect, dragging the window of political discourse ever rightward, despite the broad popularity of progressive policy. As socialists, we understand the Purpose of a System is What It Does, and in an election in which progressive policies and down-ballot candidates consistently outperformed the top of the ticket, it is clear that the Democratic Party is more concerned with excising social democratic and “Berniecrat” elements from the party and providing unwavering material support for Israeli genocide than winning “the most important election of our lifetimes.” To be clear, the Democratic corporate consultant class will get paid either way, and the stock portfolios of Democratic and Republican politicians alike will continue to go up.

The bourgeois election process may have selected the American version of fascism embodied in Donald Trump, but we recognize two important facts. One, American fascism is neither recent nor novel, with a long, brutal history both domestically and internationally supported by both parties. Two, as proven in places like Indonesia and Chile, democratic socialist policies are broadly popular and effective at countering reactionary politics, at least until the forces of US capital intervene on the side of violent, anti-democratic repression. As Americans worry about the very real threat of violent, anti-democratic repression at home (an ongoing and longstanding reality for many Americans, and a new possibility for certain privileged groups), it is worth reminding ourselves that the tools of imperial control perfected abroad will inevitably come home and be used on us too.

What Is to Be Done?

The question is the same as it was a hundred years ago: Will we collectively choose Socialism or Barbarism? American support of Israel’s brutal genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, mirrored by the brutal militarization at our southern border, shows that the American ruling elite have made their choice: barbarism. Therefore, we must organize together to build a future worth passing on to the next generation. We must be sober, analytical, and adaptable. We must look to the analysis and lessons learned from those that came before us. We must help educate each other.

We are in the midst of a multi-generational class war, as well as a time of many morbid symptoms as the old world dies and the new world struggles to be born. What that new world will look like remains to be seen, but in the words of the late, great David Graeber, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Statement from the Madison Area DSA Executive Committee on the 2024 Election

Donald Trump’s victory is a setback for the working class and will surely threaten our communities in countless ways. But it would not be possible without the failures of the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris’s focus on upholding a sorry status quo was not enough when voters are dissatisfied and disgusted with climate change, genocide, inflation, and our corrupt political system.

Workers deserve more. Workers deserve housing, Medicare for All, unions. Workers deserve a Green New Deal, taxes on the rich, an end to the US war machine. Workers deserve a party that fights for us, not the rich who exploit and divide us. Workers deserve socialism, and we won’t stop organizing until we get it.

Democrats lost, but DSA can and does win in down-ballot races throughout the country. Progressive and pro-worker ballot measures passed in several “red” states. Here in Madison, voters overwhelmingly passed budget referendums to fund our schools and city services. With those funds, we demand free school meals, affordable housing, sanctuary for immigrants, safety for trans people, and better pay for workers.

Only socialism and building mass movements and political organizations can defeat barbarism. Don’t despair – join DSA and organize for a better world with us! Come join us this week at one of the following events!

• Saturday 11/9 at The People’s Organizing Fair
• Sunday 11/10 at the Shout Your Abortion rally
• Tuesday 11/12 at our next Madison DSA monthly meeting
• Saturday 11/16 at our next New Member Orientation

Register for all of the above at https://madison-dsa.org/events/.

In the wake of the 2024 general election, many of us are feeling despair, grief, and anger over the results, especially at the national level. We had terrible options—between a wannabe fascist dictator and a neoliberal genocidaire in the Oval Office, neither outcome would be desirable for the working class in the United States. Unfortunately, the worst of all choices came to fruition. With the Senate, House, and SCOTUS also being captured by far-right forces, it is understandable to feel fear and hopelessness. But we will NOT let those feelings get the best of us. That’s how the oligarchy wins. Fear paralyzes, and apathy kills. The reality is, we’ve got work to do.

Change to the status quo doesn’t happen […]

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The results of the election are frightening and difficult to process.

DSA knows that Donald Trump and the Republican Party will be a terror on the working class while they remain in power. This terror will disproportionately impact already vulnerable communities, including people who are Black, indigenous, Hispanic, queer, immigrants, and more, as it did during the prior Trump term. The return of “Muslim bans”, gutting of carbon initiatives, an even more unabashedly reactionary Supreme Court, an unrepentantly hostile NLRB, an emboldened rightist paramilitary movement both in and out of the state  — all these and more are in the offing. The Israeli settler state is celebrating, brazenly announcing its intention to permanently depopulate Northern Gaza of its already starved and shell-shocked residents. Project 2025, or some other iteration of right-wing state consolidation, may yet find its day in the sun, having shed some of the aura of liability.

Meanwhile, the current leadership of the Democratic Party has failed to produce a convincing alternative to the rise of fascism and plays into the right-wing agenda in critical and unacceptable ways. While the various causes that led to Kamala Harris’ defeat will be teased out in the weeks to come, we already know that the policy that “nothing will fundamentally change” of Biden and Harris has alienated the multiracial US working class, who do not see the Democratic Party as sufficiently fighting for their needs.

We know the US political system, irrespective of its official labels, ultimately serves capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy. These imperatives lock it into a death spiral that threatens the whole of human existence. The rate of spiral may ebb and flow under the hand of different nominal masters, but the direction remains the same — as long as these forms of domination exist unchallenged.

Many of us are disheartened. We are making space to mourn collectively, while recognizing our individual forms of heartbreak. We own the failures of the US Left to credibly point a way out of our deepening polycrisis, outside of its usual circles. We also know that, per Black abolitionist organizer and academic Mariame Kaba, “hope is a discipline.” Even when the future is uncertain or dangerous, we have the responsibility to believe that we will win. We will win a world where democracy flourishes, people’s basic needs are met, and working class people have the power.

We will only win when we are organized. And we will be organized only when working people striving for a better world can genuinely find a voice in Left political life.

Regardless of the election results, our task is to organize — to become a bigger and more skilled socialist movement, to contest for power, and win big for the working class.

The DSA 2024 Workers Deserve More platform is part of the path in which we can do that. Find out more here: https://2024.dsausa.org/

If you have never organized before, or if you have had to step away, we invite you to join Silicon Valley DSA or peer organizations fighting to make Silicon Valley a place where all working people can thrive.

At our upcoming chapter meeting on November 16 at 1pm we will talk about this as a community. Please join us, and let’s cry, laugh, argue, strategize, despair, celebrate, and above all struggle together – for the better world that can and must be.

In unity,
SVDSA Officers

The post On the 2024 US national election appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

Many people are rightly horrified by the election of Donald Trump, which will mean renewed attacks on immigrant, Transgender, Indigenous, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities and other oppressed groups. But the outcome of this presidential election was far from inevitable. The Democratic Party ran an unpopular candidate who abandoned working class voters, which led to the crueler face of capital coming into leadership for the next four years.

The Democratic Party and Biden’s administration failed to address the people’s needs in an election that largely became about the economy, and dismissed key constituents while increasing funding to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Their complacency caused the second Trump presidential term just as it caused the first – the right fills the vacuum left by their failures. The Democratic Party is unsuited for progress and we must build the alternative.

As socialists, it’s up to us to stop the descent into barbarism by building an organization by and for the working class. The rightward trajectory of both capitalist parties shows that we need an alternative to the future of war, militarism, and oppression on offer to us– a socialist alternative rooted in the struggle for liberation. The time is now. Join us in the fight for the new world.

dsasf.org/join

by Jean Allen

The night Trump was elected, I sat on a bridge by the Genesee. Having forgotten my phone and keys, I sat in the rain horrified that this would mark the total end of the movement for Black Lives and the growing left at the time. I drank a half bottle of whiskey and ill advisedly asked a friend out and barely slept. That morning, my roommates and I shambled wordlessly to a local diner, where my roommate spoke the first words I heard during the ‘Trump Era’:

“I just read that we need Jazz now more than ever”. 

I spent the next few months feeling directionless. All my political instincts said that Trump wouldn’t win in 2016 and he did. Was I correct about anything? 

That feeling came to a close a few months later, when I called my little sister as she came home from the Airport Protests of the early Trump administration. Right after, she told me that she was so excited for the ways that graphic design could fit into activism. The conversation steadied me. Initially I felt a kind of snobby satisfaction—Oh, my sister thinks the Airport Protests are about her here, how typical of the young. I had a similar feeling we had laughing at the Jazz article, that people have taken this huge event and made it about them, unlike ourselves of course. 

Reflecting on it, I was being taught a useful lesson. This essay will come out the weekend before the 2024 Election and I imagine you’re reading it after. I imagine that whatever the result, we will see a great many statements and a great many sentiments like this: That whatever crisis is happening is about them and their pre-existing interests and viewpoints. And it’s easy to take a kind of dismissive attitude towards that, viewing yourself as intelligently and critically responding to these same moments.

All of this is a lesson, and even the smartest snob can miss it. While crises do change people’s opinions, they only do so in ways guided by those people’s pre-existing beliefs and experiences. To quote scripture, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Easy to say that, but creatively and empathetically applying it is our task as Marxists. No event comes into the world with its own explanation, it is on us to divine and explain it. Think about the narrative that once climate change starts affecting the U.S. indisputably, then we will gain support for green energy policy, because the crisis will give people a visceral understanding of the damage of climate change. 

Except that is not the only thing happening in the wake of Hurricane Helene, or for that matter any hurricane since Katrina. For many people the hurricanes are not scientific events but moments of divine retribution or conspiracy. They think this because it sorts in with their pre-existing beliefs, and because they are told that by people they respect and love. 

I think we still kind of cling to a hope that some event will happen that will change people’s ideas, that we will all spontaneously arrive in a park with the absolute correct plan already in mind, because that is easier than thinking about doing politics and slowly changing peoples’ minds. Alas, nothing does politics for us. We need to patiently explain our politics forever if we want people to share our grounded materialist interpretation of events. And that means organizing around each individual moment but it also means understanding the continuity between moments. 

I do not know what will happen on November 5th.  I have felt quite a bit of uncertainty around it. We can guess how either party will slot the lessons of its defeat into pre-existing beliefs. But either way, we can be confident that on the day after the election, people will still be getting evicted, they’ll be losing jobs, they’ll be deported, they’ll be getting killed by homophobes or the police. It’ll be another day in a dying and deadly empire. We must clearly focus on our collective task, now more than ever. 

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