Note: posts by individual CVDSA 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.

We lost our City Council race.

CVDSA and UVM YDSA members will continue to assess where we went wrong internally. But our defeat on the Progressive Party’s ballot line also happened to take place as part of a “wave election” for the Burlington Democrats, who, if we include the Democrat-endorsed independent Mark Barlow in the North District, won four out of the five of seats up for grabs on our municipal legislature. To make matters worse, both of the citizen-initiated charter change proposals – opposed by our Democratic mayor, supported by the Progs – flopped at the ballot box.

In Ward 8 – where Jake Schumann, the Progressive nominee for the overlapping East District, earned slightly more votes than his competitor Tim Doherty, though Doherty would ultimately prevail thanks to an advantage in Ward 1 – our failure appears to belong to us. We feel bad not only for failing to put Rhone Allison in office but also for opening the door to what looks, possibly, to become a long and extremely dispiriting journey of political advancement for the Democratic victor: Burlington’s blandest 22-year-old careerist, already an entrenched establishmentarian, who, while working for the local branch of the Chamber of Commerce, campaigned without an articulated policy platform of any sort, promising little beyond the assurance that, unlike her Progressive predecessor in Ward 8, who had resigned after seven months of chronic absenteeism, she would actually attend the City Council meetings. And who could doubt it?

Sometimes it’s a little unclear why people who have no political goals or interests (of their own, that is) seek to spend their lives as centrist placeholders in our city halls and statehouses. There are plenty of other ways to feel important and get your name in the paper. Rhone’s campaign, by contrast, took every opportunity to emphasize its ideological intensity: if nothing else, it brimmed with notions.

The biggest notion was socialism. According to Rhone’s literature, they were a Democratic Socialist, not a Progressive, irrespective of their ballot line. Chased by campus police for a month and half, our relentless YDSA volunteers knocked every door in Ward 8’s dormitories on multiple occasions to tell their classmates about the socialist candidate for City Council and their endorsements from the Vermont State Labor Council and Teamsters Local 597.

What did the campaign’s socialism consist of?

It aimed to center workers as much as possible, but pragmatically, given the role of the City Councilor, the bulk of the platform sought to address Burlington’s increasingly obvious housing shortage and its devastating effects on tenants.

We borrowed from models across the country for our proposals to rejuvenate the local public housing authority, to empower tenant unions, and to convert rental buildings into housing cooperatives. In a less clearly socialist fashion, we also wanted an aggressive liberalization of Burlington’s zoning laws, with reforms including, but not limited to, permitting fourplexes in all low-density residential districts and high-rises near UVM; expanding the South End Innovation District plan to reuse the old industrial parcels near Pine Street; and approving the Trinity Campus rezoning.

Of all the housing planks, this last component – or some version of it – seemed, thanks to a measure of preexisting pressure, to stand the best chance of becoming a reality in the near term. A slightly more dramatic addendum to our land-use agenda asked for a rezoning of the Burlington Country Club, a massive waste of valuable urban land that currently pays taxes according to the property’s value as protected “recreation/greenspace” – that is to say, very little. Redesignating its 150 acres as a high- or even medium-density district would generate an unsustainable tax burden for the sprawling, low-revenue business, forcing a sale and a change of use: housing, for instance. We imagined an engaging, left-populist crusade to take on the country club elites and repurpose their exclusionary oasis toward a useful social end.

Students, including an abundance of UVM freshmen and sophomores, constitute the vast majority of Ward 8’s electorate, and Rhone’s campaign operated according to the theory that contact mattered most. Presumably few of these newcomers, living on campus, had developed detailed views on local municipal problems or attachments to specific policy prescriptions to address them, but we believed that most of them had a generally left-wing outlook and would, with enough direct and persuasive encouragement to participate in the election, overwhelm the small minority of grownups in the ward, to our benefit. For one reason or another, it didn’t happen.

Elsewhere in Burlington, however, a specific issue did seem to occupy voters’ minds. Unfortunately, it wasn’t housing. In the year 2023, our election was still about the police.

We all know the story. Emboldened by a summer of vibrant demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, the Prog-led Burlington City Council passed a resolution in 2020 to reduce the size of the police department by 30 percent through attrition. They didn’t know how fast the activism would fade, or how soon the backlash would set in.

On the national level, it didn’t take all that much cleverness for reactionaries to turn the radical-liberal dictum that our politics should emerge from a process of “centering the voices of marginalized communities” to their own purposes: easily enough, journalists in the corporate media found impoverished Black and brown families who would speak eagerly of the police as a crucial source of protection from violence and danger that pervaded neighborhoods wholly unfamiliar to the coddled, quixotic, white academics and NGO leaders who favored abolition. Subsequent sensationalized upticks in certain categories of crime in certain cities (including Burlington) solidified the consensus that progressives (and, in Burlington, Progressives) had gone much too far.

When will the Progs stop paying for this decision, which they’ve already reversed? New York Times stories like “The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont” don’t help, but one possible answer is the Progs will continue to pay until the moment they make it clear that their politics are, in fact, about something other than policing.

In 2023, with a controversial ballot question on the subject of police accountability dominating most of the news coverage of Burlington’s city election, that wasn’t easy to do. Question 7, also known as Community Control of Police, aimed to create a civilian review board with binding powers to investigate, suspend, and fire officers. Even if it had passed locally, it would have faced slim odds in the statehouse, with a near-certain veto ahead from our Republican governor, but a well-funded “no” campaign drew rank-and-file conservatives to the polls, and 63.2% of voters rejected the item in Burlington. Presumably, they didn’t leave the rest of their ballots blank.

CVDSA has always rooted for the Progs. But if only as a thought experiment, we might ask ourselves why. For many of us, our allegiance owes, above all else, to a well-founded contempt for the Democrats and an appreciation that, in Vermont at least, a viable alternative structure exists to provide a route to elected office for left-wing candidates.

Of course, we hated to see the Progressive Party lose its plurality on the City Council. But have the Progs demonstrated what the import of that loss will be for constituents in the now Democratic East District and Ward 8? For instance, will it make their rent go up or down?

Talking about housing didn’t win Rhone the election on March 7, but moving forward, it remains the issue with the strongest chance of displacing “public safety” as a primary subject of concern and debate in our local elections. Everyone who cares about Burlington should aim to find new ways to center housing as a political topic, not only because it represents a potentially viable electoral strategy in the future but also because – unlike Burlington’s out-of-control crime wave – it is real. But Progs who want to play a productive role here will have to demonstrate how their positions on housing actually differ from the Democrats’.

With Burlington now taking tentative steps toward adding new housing in the South End, we should remember that it could have done so years ago. In 2015, the Progs unanimously signed on to a resolution by Councilor Joan Shannon, a Democrat, to prevent a residential rezoning along Pine Street. Local artists had protested out of fear that their studios would soon become apartments, since apartments command higher rents.

The brand of cultural leftism that ranks rich people’s desire for subsidized spaces in which to engage in personal self-expression by making quirky paintings and sculptures ahead of working-class people’s need for shelter isn’t rare in the United States. But future Progs on the City Council may want to ask themselves if this should be their brand of leftism.

More recently, the Progs have prioritized punishing UVM (which, owing to its size, functions as Burlington’s not-for-profit, state-subsidized stand-in for the careless, impersonal greed of Corporate America) for raising its admissions totals over hastening the construction of new, badly needed student housing on the Trinity Campus.

The Progs’ political fixations – trying to protect homeowners from property tax increases, for instance – point to the influence of one of the party’s bases in Burlington: aging hippies who bought houses back when they were cheap, with the aim of defending a small, friendly, oddball city from, among other things, overdevelopment. Permitting the construction of big apartment buildings would – in addition to increasing the housing supply – allow for the development of younger, non-student constituencies, whom we could work to organize around newer, less foggy approaches to ecosocialism and housing justice. But getting there would require the Progs to suffer through some uncomfortable moments during public comment periods at City Hall.

CVDSA members vote for the Progs, but we can’t by ourselves control where the party stands on housing. We can try to make a difference. We can control where CVDSA stands.

Coincidentally, a couple weeks after Rhone’s loss, Denver DSA stirred a tempest online when it announced that its membership had voted to oppose the construction of a mixed-use neighborhood – with market-rate and income-restricted housing, a grocery store, and a public park – on the site of the abandoned Park Hill Golf Course, just below an A Line commuter rail stop. Two of the chapter’s elected officials had already said they would vote against Referred Measure 2O, the local ballot question that would enable redevelopment if approved.

The parallels to our own proposal were unmistakable. Our comrades in Colorado had taken a different view.

The understanding that DSA’s housing organizing will focus principally on building tenant power, advocating for rent control and Section 9 repairs, and advancing various forms of social ownership is uncontroversial; the open question is whether or not DSA should actively oppose the private development that other organizations – YIMBY Denver, for instance – regard as the sole solution to our cities’ housing crises. DSA chapters across the country have defended their partnerships with local anti-gentrification groups against charges of “Left NIMBYism,” but critics can point to stranger bedfellows: specifically, the unproductive minor nobility of conservative homeowners and mom-and-pop landlords who, in a historical materialist analysis, would seem to represent a more regressive political force than the corporate developers whose intentions to expand their real estate holdings threaten the former groups’ ability to build personal wealth strictly by contriving conditions of scarcity.

In the case of the Park Hill Golf Course, Denver DSA could hardly make a convincing case that it is on the verge of realizing a socialist vision for its 155 open acres, if only voters next month reject the plan put forth by Westside Development Partners. Denver doesn’t have a public developer to turn to on the city or state level, let alone one with enough capital to take on a project this big. Last year, socialists in Rhode Island achieved a major victory when their legislature authorized a $10 million pilot program to build new mixed-income housing under state ownership, but even if housing organizers in Colorado managed to win similar legislation, it would not create anything close to enough public-sector capacity.

To many observers, the usual complaint that the development will displace Black and brown residents fell flat this time: it is, after all, a golf course – an enormous empty space – not an embattled gentrifying community. Westside’s plan could be better, surely, but it underwent what has become, by now, a more or less standard process by which developers seek to win public approval before a zoning change, with the signing of a community benefits agreement that promised 25% affordable housing; recreational, cultural, and commercial facilities; and token financial giveaways to adjacent low-income residents and nonprofits.

Activists might have pushed the Denver City Council harder to demand a little more before agreeing to rezone the golf course on Westside’s behalf, but that vote has already taken place. If the general public now refuses at the ballot box to remove the conservation easement that bars all construction on the site, there is no clear path to building housing of any kind in the near future, at any level of affordability.

As it is, Westside’s mixed-use, transit-oriented plan represents a clear upgrade in relation to the surrounding development pattern, with its long, uninterrupted rows of overpriced ranches. The proposal is, in a basic sense, urban.

Most socialists would like to be urbanists; they just can’t stomach becoming market urbanists. Virtually all of us ardently support public transit, pedestrian infrastructure, and bike lanes. Most of us identify suburban development as an ecological catastrophe that will contribute more and more carbon emissions until we create opportunities for people to live closer together instead. Many of us, moreover, share a conception of great cities as uniquely supportive and enriching social fabrics that, by providing an abundance of free, easy-to-access amenities, from parks to cultural programming, as well as constant opportunities for human interconnection, use the wealth of the public sphere to mitigate some of the inequalities of class society in deeply meaningful and empowering ways.

Few American metropolises have a built environment capable of embodying this ideal. Burlington has much to recommend it, but it falls a little short of the minimum density threshold for total walkability, which, especially given its inadequate bus service, is another way of saying that it cuts off people who don’t own cars from full, democratic participation in its civic life. Like most cities, it would be better if it had more people living in it.

But how do we get them there, except by giving capitalists permission to build expensive new homes? This is where DSA begins to balk. The left-wing caricature of private development, which pictures every new building as a stack of glossy condos that will, after their purchase by billionaire foreign investors, sit forever vacant, is an exaggeration; in fact, the shoddy, faux-luxury “gentrification buildings” in places like New York City’s Bushwick, for instance, house many of the debt-saddled, downwardly mobile college grads who turned North Brooklyn into one of DSA’s strongest bases. But it’s true, of course, that market-rate construction will not serve those who struggle most to find shelter. So why would we want more of it?
Socialists, understandably, view the question of upzoning through the lens of “What is the socialist thing to do here?” Naturally, the building trades unions – long derided on the Left, anyway, for their supposedly immovable conservativism – always want to build, but it doesn’t feel socialist to pave the way for private profit. That’s because, in the most straightforward sense, it isn’t socialist.

As we all know, our socialism does not yet exist, except as an embryonic force. But where can it begin to achieve its expression? Sometimes we look in the wrong places.

For example, we may imagine disputes between big developers and the “communities” that oppose them as secondhand iterations of the capital-labor conflict, playing out in a modified arena but with the same underlying dynamics. This can allow us to claim victories that, on the 21st-century shop floor, come all too rarely. America’s unions may be weak, but its NIMBYs are reasonably strong, and by positioning ourselves as ideologically distinct junior partners in anti-development coalitions dominated by the latter, we can take part in their wins. The recognition – open or suppressed – that the primary political forces behind these “victories” would mount even more combative campaigns against the development of housing for low-income renters, if the possibility of it ever arose, may only slightly dampen the celebratory mood when a market-rate project fails.

When anticapitalists seek power within the capitalist state, they face the awkward reality that, alongside pushing for alternative ways of organizing our society, they must also think seriously – if they want to protect their electoral futures as well as the here-and-now material interests of their constituents – about how to manage a profit-driven mode of production in order to yield the least bad possible outcomes. Nobody benefits when we collapse specific, correctable market failures into the broader inadequacy of capitalism as an economic system. Until we win socialism, we will never have a society where all of us can thrive, but the question of exactly how few of us will thrive in the meantime should still concern us, and not only in areas where potential gains for working people would derive from class struggle in a traditional sense.

The uninspiring nature of YIMBY “success stories” – where a flurry of new construction in one city or another proved to reduce the size of rent increases in subsequent years, relative to a comparable city, without eliminating them altogether, let alone solving homelessness – offers a temptation to dismiss their significance. Rezonings tend to increase the housing supply by less than their advocates promise, and the effects of increased supply play a smaller role than advocates purport in increasing affordability. But the effects remain real, both for existing tenants and those hoping to move into an area. Few renters would turn down a chance to knock a few bucks off the monthly check to their landlord, and we shouldn’t allow our distaste for YIMBYs themselves, in their stereotypical libertarian form, to convince us, through an inevitably convoluted logic, that superficially positive zoning reforms would contravene our deeper revolutionary aims.

In many political disputes – like Denver’s, for instance – there is no structurally socialist entity with which we, as socialists, can align ourselves. Instead, we must choose sides among various partially or fully malignant forces within capitalist society. But that doesn’t have to mean losing sight of our long-term vision. As we weigh in on conflicts that pit land-use patterns that, even under capitalism, have the capacity to promote a measure of social solidarity against the sprawling, car-dependent infrastructure that undergirds American individualism, we should do so, naturally, with the goal of socialism in mind.

All sorts of issues come before DSA’s elected officials, as they do any other. They may find themselves in a position to craft new industrial regulations to protect consumer safety or the planet, to the detriment of corporate profits; less comfortably, they may also – if the ideology of the organization doesn’t constrain them – notice the necessity of shrinking misguided regulatory apparatuses in order to stimulate the production of essential goods: unavoidably a boon for capitalist firms, which will dedicate a portion of their proceeds to political donations for right-wing candidates and causes, as the real estate lobby reliably demonstrates.

It’s not the only one. In New York, private solar and wind energy companies helped fend off NYC-DSA’s attempt to pass the Build Public Renewables Act last year. We should never mistake investors in commercial clean power for friends, but neither can we, in this parallel case, afford to lend a hand to NIMBY activists or municipal officials in their aim to develop new land-use hurdles that would make it more difficult for these firms to site solar and wind farms on scenic hillsides, even if doing so would serve to drain some of the companies’ political influence by depriving them of revenue. We can’t meet our goals for clean electricity without their contributions. As we fight for a better approach, we cannot pretend that will not, for the foreseeable future, continue to rely, at least in part, on on our enemies.

Housing can be more complicated. How, for instance, should we sort the competing claims for space between residential and industrial uses under our cities’ zoning regimes? When, if ever, does it make sense to raze functional middle-density neighborhoods in order to construct high-rises?

But in housing-starved cities, multifamily construction on obviously underutilized parcels – on parking lots, golf courses, and other sites of minoritarian dominance, including single-family neighborhoods – is as close to an unalloyed good as we’re going to get. In the lead-up, we can negotiate with developers, when possible, over rates of affordability and public amenities, but it is a mistake for frustrated socialists to prioritize the cathartic act of “standing up to big real estate” over the production of housing. Zoning offers a rare veto power over capital, which elsewhere does more or less whatever it wants whenever it wants, and the desire to wield this power punitively, understandably, is strong. But all zoning can do is say yes or say no to someone else’s proposal; it can’t create anything.

Such zoning-based showdowns with developers become less exciting when we realize how little we can actually win. At times, the socialist position on striking real estate deals can embody a strange paradox: we loudly insist that private development can never truly serve the needs of the people, yet simultaneously we seem to believe that, if only we hold fast to an impossibly ambitious list of demands during each rezoning, we can turn a proposed condo tower into something like public housing.

In reality, when a city councilor boasts that they forced a developer in their district to exceed, by a significant margin, the maximum level of affordability that it said it could meet on a project without compromising the project’s viability as a profit-making endeavor, what they usually mean – as in the case of Innovation QNS in Queens – is that the mayor quietly agreed to kick in an extra subsidy from the city’s coffers in order to boost the number of income-restricted units, allowing the councilor to save face among gentrification-sensitive voters without tanking the project. This additional concession doesn’t come from capital; it comes from the public, which props up the developer with cash that could, alternatively, have funded a democratically managed community land trust or a limited-equity co-op.

Under capitalism, capital rarely ever really loses. At worst, it walks away and finds a more agreeable home elsewhere.

This, of course, is one reason why it’s so vital to fight for the establishment of state- and city-owned real estate development corporations. But DSA’s orientation toward housing in general would improve immeasurably with the realization – possibly a tough pill to swallow for some of our tenant organizers – that we will not win socialism through an obstructive struggle against real estate capital specifically. To tell ourselves otherwise is to lose a piece of our Marxism: specifically, the piece through which we can regard capitalist development as a progressive force, delivering the hard infrastructure that our socialist revolution – which we will win as workers (for instance, in the “conservative” building trades), not as consumers of housing – will inherit.

This is not a call to reduce DSA’s emphasis on housing in municipal politics. It is the opposite: Burlington may not yet have caught up, but in most places, housing already sits at the center of the debates about our cities, and we must engage with it through a wider set of political lenses, including some that feel more wonky than radical. Electorally, DSA has no choice but to build itself up from the local level, and to do that, we need a municipal agenda that will measurably improve America’s cities in short order. We can’t afford to be right on the big questions and wrong on the small ones.

Our housing organizing will continue to focus on tenants, but our policy positions should reflect a common-sense climate-conscious view on land use and a normal recognition of the need to increase the housing supply, unclouded by a fetishistic hatred of “empty luxury condos.”

After all, it’s the capitalist’s role, not ours, to look at an apartment building and see only a spreadsheet of projected profits. We can notice the plumbing, the electrical work, the sturdy walls and roof, and know that, one day, it will be social housing – like all the other housing will be – because the private developer that built it, like every other capitalist, will no longer exist.

This will happen in Burlington. Until then, we want to make it as nice a town as it can be, with plenty of apartments to rent. Some of the new units, we hope, will be public housing, and we’ll continue to work on making that happen. But at first, most of them probably will be private.

A toxic train derailment turned the focus of the world to the tiny town of East Palestine, Ohio. Tonight we'll talk to Timothea Deeter, an East Palestine resident and Mahoning Valley DSA member about how mutual aid can transcend political boundaries and what her community needs moving forward. We'll also zoom out and look at the larger environmental degradation of Ohio and neighboring states. We're joined live tonight by Andrew Woomer, the advocacy Coordinator for the Southwestern Pennsylvania office of the Clean Air Council. Andrew is from Pittsburgh and was in East Palestine earlier today dropping off air purifiers. We'll talk to him about that and his work to monitor and organize around petrochemical and oil and gas issues across Pennsylvania. We'll also hear from documentary filmmaker David Ruck about his film The Erie Situation on toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie. 

Follow Mahoning Valley DSA on Twitter and Facebook 

Watch the trailer for "The Erie Situation" and follow filmmaker David Ruck on Twitter

Follow Clean Air Council on Twitter and you can donate to their mutual aid efforts in East Palestine here

 

 

 

In this panel discussion, DSA members from several religious traditions share their perspectives on the importance of religion for sustaining, inspiring, and organizing political movement on the Left. Speakers for this event include Asad Dandia (Muslim), Ty Kiatathikom (Buddhist), Clyde Grubbs (Unitarian Universalist), Marie Venner (Catholic). This event was moderated by Nicole-Ann Lobo.

Portland DSA’s Plan to elect socialists in the Rose City

Portland DSA members met Sunday March 12th for our General Meeting, and ratified a new Endorsement Policy for the chapter. A slideshow explaining the policy can be found here. The authors of the new policy, Wallace Milner and Spencer Mann, explain their perspective on the policy and its purpose.

Sunday March 12th, Portland DSA took an important step towards electing socialists to City Council with the passage of a new chapter endorsement policy. This comes at an essential time for electoral organizing in Portland. With the implementation of city charter reform, instituting ranked choice voting and multi-member districts for City Council elections, the 2024 election cycle presents an extraordinary opportunity for Portland DSA to disrupt the capitalist municipal order, and our new policy enables us to meet the moment.

Our new policy is designed to enable the chapter to run committed, cadre candidates for office. It aims to help us run campaigns in a way which builds the chapter, leverage the rank and file power we’ve built through our orientation to labor, maximize the coalition work and field organizing we’ve done through ERA (Eviction Representation for All) and UPNOW (Universal Preschool Now), and elect socialists who will put forward a socialist vision for society and fight for our politics in state and city government.

Socialist representatives should be expected to build DSA, advance socialist politics, and draw a clear distinction between themselves and capitalist politicians. At the same time, we must also prepare our candidates to run competitive campaigns if they are going to take power. This endorsement policy aims to balance these two commitments, providing tactical flexibility and political accountability.

How Will Endorsement Work?

1. To apply for an endorsement, a candidate will begin by filling out an application form on our website.
2. When this application is received, the SC will share the information to the membership, and will also share a nominating signature form.
3. If a candidate gets 25 nominating signatures from members in good standing, the candidate is sent a questionnaire, and the endorsement advances to a vote at a general meeting.
4. At the general meeting, the candidate will present themselves to the membership and there will be a Q and A and then a debate. According to our chapter bylaws, a candidate will need 2/3rds of the vote to receive an endorsement.

Two Types of Endorsement

This new policy creates two paths of endorsement — an external endorsement and a cadre endorsement. When applying, a candidate picks which type of endorsement to apply for.

A cadre candidate comes from a background of organizing in DSA. Their campaign is run as a chapter project, and they are held to a very high standard. An external candidate is one where DSA is one part of a wider coalition supporting a candidate.

Cadre candidates have additional expectations. They are required to meet with the chapter twice a month, to brand themselves as a democratic socialist in all their literature, and to form a socialist caucus in the legislative body they are elected to. External candidates will be encouraged to do all these things, but they won’t necessarily be required to. They will be asked about their stance and plans on these topics, and the chapter will decide if their answers are acceptable.

External and cadre candidates will also be presented differently in public campaigns. Cadre candidates are expected to be fully and uncompromisingly representatives of DSA’s politics, platform, and decisions made through internal chapter democracy. For external candidates, DSA will be part of a coalition of other political forces supporting them, and DSA campaigns will have an independent orientation, simultaneously being a part of the coalition and being the best fighters for the cause, while also clearly and distinctly articulating our own socialist principles and building our organization.

This setup is designed to strengthen democratic debate in the chapter. It empowers the members to decide whether candidates meet the standard for endorsement at the cadre or external level and emphasizes electoral accountability. It enables the chapter to exercise tactical flexibility based on the nature of the campaign and ensures membership control over cadre representatives.

Socialists in Office Committee (SIOC)

Our new policy creates a socialists in office committee. Their job is to coordinate with campaigns, candidates, and officeholders in order to apply our standards and politics to nuanced situations, recommend suitable actions to leadership and membership, and empower our elected officials, candidates, campaigns, and membership to build socialist power.

The socialist movement faces two, twin challenges — the danger of sectarianism, where one fails to build up our movements beyond small isolated groups, and the danger of opportunism, where one prioritizes the short term gains of a campaign over the long term principles of a movement.

The role of the SIOC is to address these dangers by supporting candidates and holding them accountable. The committee will meet regularly with any endorsed candidates or elected officials. In these meetings, they will strategize, enforce DSA policy, and figure out how our actions can be coordinated. When an officeholder has a big campaign, the SIOC can help them figure out how to mobilize members. When the chapter has a big campaign, the SIOC can make sure the officeholder supports it.

If a candidate violates DSA values or policy, the SIOC is empowered to make a recommendation to a general meeting or the steering committee. Of course, the ultimate decision rests with a general meeting, which, as our highest decision making body, can decide to alter our relationship to candidates.

The SIOC will ensure a strong connection between the chapter and candidates/officeholders, making sure our actions are coordinated, our ideas are shared, and our goals are pursued.

Building Socialist Power in Portland

The left in the United States has been dealing with difficult conditions since 2020. While the resurgence of labor energy is one of the most optimistic trends in the past two decades, there has been a broad decrease in energy and participation since the height of the BLM uprising and the Sanders campaigns.

In this new political moment, socialists need to adopt more deliberate, public facing campaigns with clear strategies to build our organizations. Candidate accountability, a united front approach to coalition work, and the clear expression of socialist politics are the cornerstones of a successful socialist and movement building electoral strategy.

Our new policy will facilitate a series of powerful, principled, and bold campaigns for 2024 and beyond, which we believe will enable us to win elections, grow the chapter, and advance socialism in Portland. As socialists, we have a world to win. The 2024 City Council elections will be a key test for our movement, and the passage of this policy has begun to prepare us for the challenge.

Portland DSA’s Plan to elect socialists in the Rose City

Portland DSA members met Sunday March 12th for our General Meeting, and ratified a new Endorsement Policy for the chapter. A slideshow explaining the policy can be found here. The authors of the new policy, Wallace Milner and Spencer Mann, explain their perspective on the policy and its purpose.

Sunday March 12th, Portland DSA took an important step towards electing socialists to City Council with the passage of a new chapter endorsement policy. This comes at an essential time for electoral organizing in Portland. With the implementation of city charter reform, instituting ranked choice voting and multi-member districts for City Council elections, the 2024 election cycle presents an extraordinary opportunity for Portland DSA to disrupt the capitalist municipal order, and our new policy enables us to meet the moment.

Our new policy is designed to enable the chapter to run committed, cadre candidates for office. It aims to help us run campaigns in a way which builds the chapter, leverage the rank and file power we’ve built through our orientation to labor, maximize the coalition work and field organizing we’ve done through ERA (Eviction Representation for All) and UPNOW (Universal Preschool Now), and elect socialists who will put forward a socialist vision for society and fight for our politics in state and city government.

Socialist representatives should be expected to build DSA, advance socialist politics, and draw a clear distinction between themselves and capitalist politicians. At the same time, we must also prepare our candidates to run competitive campaigns if they are going to take power. This endorsement policy aims to balance these two commitments, providing tactical flexibility and political accountability.

How Will Endorsement Work?

1. To apply for an endorsement, a candidate will begin by filling out an application form on our website.
2. When this application is received, the SC will share the information to the membership, and will also share a nominating signature form.
3. If a candidate gets 25 nominating signatures from members in good standing, the candidate is sent a questionnaire, and the endorsement advances to a vote at a general meeting.
4. At the general meeting, the candidate will present themselves to the membership and there will be a Q and A and then a debate. According to our chapter bylaws, a candidate will need 2/3rds of the vote to receive an endorsement.

Two Types of Endorsement

This new policy creates two paths of endorsement — an external endorsement and a cadre endorsement. When applying, a candidate picks which type of endorsement to apply for.

A cadre candidate comes from a background of organizing in DSA. Their campaign is run as a chapter project, and they are held to a very high standard. An external candidate is one where DSA is one part of a wider coalition supporting a candidate.

Cadre candidates have additional expectations. They are required to meet with the chapter twice a month, to brand themselves as a democratic socialist in all their literature, and to form a socialist caucus in the legislative body they are elected to. External candidates will be encouraged to do all these things, but they won’t necessarily be required to. They will be asked about their stance and plans on these topics, and the chapter will decide if their answers are acceptable.

External and cadre candidates will also be presented differently in public campaigns. Cadre candidates are expected to be fully and uncompromisingly representatives of DSA’s politics, platform, and decisions made through internal chapter democracy. For external candidates, DSA will be part of a coalition of other political forces supporting them, and DSA campaigns will have an independent orientation, simultaneously being a part of the coalition and being the best fighters for the cause, while also clearly and distinctly articulating our own socialist principles and building our organization.

This setup is designed to strengthen democratic debate in the chapter. It empowers the members to decide whether candidates meet the standard for endorsement at the cadre or external level and emphasizes electoral accountability. It enables the chapter to exercise tactical flexibility based on the nature of the campaign and ensures membership control over cadre representatives.

Socialists in Office Committee (SIOC)

Our new policy creates a socialists in office committee. Their job is to coordinate with campaigns, candidates, and officeholders in order to apply our standards and politics to nuanced situations, recommend suitable actions to leadership and membership, and empower our elected officials, candidates, campaigns, and membership to build socialist power.

The socialist movement faces two, twin challenges — the danger of sectarianism, where one fails to build up our movements beyond small isolated groups, and the danger of opportunism, where one prioritizes the short term gains of a campaign over the long term principles of a movement.

The role of the SIOC is to address these dangers by supporting candidates and holding them accountable. The committee will meet regularly with any endorsed candidates or elected officials. In these meetings, they will strategize, enforce DSA policy, and figure out how our actions can be coordinated. When an officeholder has a big campaign, the SIOC can help them figure out how to mobilize members. When the chapter has a big campaign, the SIOC can make sure the officeholder supports it.

If a candidate violates DSA values or policy, the SIOC is empowered to make a recommendation to a general meeting or the steering committee. Of course, the ultimate decision rests with a general meeting, which, as our highest decision making body, can decide to alter our relationship to candidates.

The SIOC will ensure a strong connection between the chapter and candidates/officeholders, making sure our actions are coordinated, our ideas are shared, and our goals are pursued.

Building Socialist Power in Portland

The left in the United States has been dealing with difficult conditions since 2020. While the resurgence of labor energy is one of the most optimistic trends in the past two decades, there has been a broad decrease in energy and participation since the height of the BLM uprising and the Sanders campaigns.

In this new political moment, socialists need to adopt more deliberate, public facing campaigns with clear strategies to build our organizations. Candidate accountability, a united front approach to coalition work, and the clear expression of socialist politics are the cornerstones of a successful socialist and movement building electoral strategy.

Our new policy will facilitate a series of powerful, principled, and bold campaigns for 2024 and beyond, which we believe will enable us to win elections, grow the chapter, and advance socialism in Portland. As socialists, we have a world to win. The 2024 City Council elections will be a key test for our movement, and the passage of this policy has begun to prepare us for the challenge.

March 13-27 marks Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) 2023, a period of global mobilization to raise awareness about Israeli apartheid and build support for the Palestinian struggle to end Israel’s brutal system of apartheid, settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing. The International Affairs Working Group of CT DSA invites you to a series of events to learn more about Palestine and how you can get involved in the global solidarity movement:

Tuesday March 21 @ 4pm, “The Time that Remains” movie screening & discussion at Southern Connecticut State University.

“The Time That Remains” is a film about the Israeli occupation of Palestine from 1948 to present. We will have a post-film discussion with speakers from the anti-Zionist Jewish congregation Mending Minyan; the International Affairs Working Group of CT DSA; and the student organization Yalies for Palestine. 

The screening will take place on the SCSU campus. RSVP here for the room number and directions to find the building:

RSVP: https://link.ctdsa.org/iaw23scsu

Wednesday March 22 @ 5 pm, “Boycott” movie screening & discussion at the New Haven Public Library.

Join us for a screening of “Boycott”, a film about the impact of state legislation designed to penalize individuals and companies that engage in BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction), a set of non-violent tactics to put pressure on the Israeli occupation modeled after the international movement against the South African apartheid. We will have a post-film discussion on the broader implications of these laws for legal repression of social movements. Some states have already used the anti-BDS laws as templates for laws to restrict advocacy for issues, including divestment from fossil fuels, abortion, and gender affirming care.

The screening will take place in the Main branch of the New Haven Public Library, 133 Elm Street.

RSVP: https://link.ctdsa.org/iaw23boycott

Sunday March 25 @ 6.30 pm, Palestine Solidarity Potluck

Join us for a social potluck bringing together organizers and community members who stand in solidarity with Palestine! This will be a chance to meet each other, break fast together for those observing Ramadan, chat in an informal space, and build relationships that strengthen our movement. Please bring food or a beverage to share, if you are able.

The potluck will take place at Black and Brown Power Center, 928 Chapel St, New Haven.

RSVP: https://link.ctdsa.org/iaw23potluck

DSA’s National Political Education Committee (NPEC) invites political educators and activists from DSA chapters, OCs and National Committees to participate in a collective research project on Political Education in Social, Labor & Political Movements.

To submit an entry:

Those interested in participating can reach out to NPEC at politicaleducation@dsacommittees.org for more information and to make sure the topic of interest is still available and makes sense for the project.

Entries should include your name, email address, and chapter/OC/national committee, and answer the below information in a presentation similar to example entries:

• What social movement or political theories of education are you reporting on?
• Briefly describe this movement or theory: Its objective, active dates, notable participants, and any notable efforts or achievements.
• Briefly describe this movement’s or theory’s program or ideas for internal political education.
• Briefly describe movement or theory’s program or ideas for external education program.
• Please share 1-5 relevant links to documents, websites, or information that would be useful for those looking more deeply into this practice and theory.
• Please share up to several graphics (photos, logos, promotional materials)
• Please share any additional information here. 
• Other – Please include any notes or queries to NPEC.
• Submit entry to: politicaleducation@dsacommittees.org.

To the NPC of Democratic Socialists of America, the publishers of Democratic Left, and the Rutgers University community,

Central NJ DSA and North NJ DSA were alarmed to see that Democratic Left, a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America, recently published a piece by Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway, a man notorious for fighting against union demands.¹While this article has since been taken down and replaced, we are calling on Democratic Left to publish pieces by Rutgers educators and workers who are involved in its union contract campaigns. It is imperative that the DSA uplift the voices of working people, especially those challenging men like Holloway and the values they uphold. Going forward, it is vital that the NPC and Democratic Left do not undercut the labor and housing work of local chapters.

Central NJ and North NJ DSA are deeply involved in solidarity work with the Rutgers University unions, like AAUP-AFT, PTLFC-AAUP-AFT, BHSNJ-AAUP, URA-AFT, and other unions that represent the thousands of workers at Rutgers University that are working without a contract. Some of those workers are our own members. As an employer, Rutgers University has failed to bargain in good faith or offer dignified terms for the workers.

The decision to feature Holloway’s introduction to the 2023 edition of The Souls of Black Folk is a severe misjudgment on behalf of the editorial team at Democratic Left, in light of Holloway’s obstinate resistance to recognize the validity of union organizing and workers’ demands. As president of Rutgers, Holloway has been breaking the power of campus unions, even recently releasing a statement pitting workers against students and their families. He has been running the University for the benefit of predatory developers and business interests, without regard for the needs of the workers, students, or surrounding communities. None of these despicable actions are new – Holloway has established himself as an anti-union zealot as a dean at Yale, before his time at Rutgers, dragging with him a history of brutal and unnecessary layoffs.

Throughout the union contract campaign at Rutgers, our chapters have been striving, alongside the unions, to bring together faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members into a broad coalition against Holloway’s vision of a corporate university. Furthermore, we have united unions’ struggle with local tenant struggles, and built strong connections that we will leverage in our chapter’s long term work. President Holloway is a representative of the system we stand against. In direct opposition to the coalition-building work of our local chapters, we were shocked to learn that Democratic Left chose to publish an article written by Holloway and centering his views on socialism on the same day as the Rutgers’ unions rallied in Newark. This decision undermined the important solidarity and coalition work of our chapters. It is evident there was little research done into Holloway’s work before Democratic Left published this piece and the negligence to properly evaluate the credentials of a writer and historian shows a profound lack of coordination between National DSA and local chapters.

On February 28th, the faculty union held a rally in Newark to denounce the university administration for their greed and intransigence, to show unity among workers and the broader community, and to begin the union’s historic strike vote. It was a powerful event, the culmination of many months of enduring work, and DSA showed up in force to connect with fellow workers and offer our vision of a just and dignified society, a society in which educators and workers at Rutgers are compensated for their labor that sustains the university as a place for education and learning. Holloway’s vision, alongside others in his administration, is to find ways to pay workers as little as possible, all the while speaking about fairness in the most superficial terms.

President Holloway, who receives a salary of $1.2 million dollars, is hypocritical for reflecting on the legacy of socialist luminary W.E.B. DuBois while the workers he is responsible for negotiating with struggle to pay their bills.² In his 1918 article, “The Black Man and the Unions,” DuBois lauds the power of unionizing. “Collective bargaining has, undoubtedly, raised modern labor from something like chattel slavery to the threshold of industrial freedom, and in this advance of labor white and black have shared.”³

It was a mistake to invite Holloway to provide the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk because of his long history of failing to live up to the standards set forth by DuBois’ work and writings and by the other authors involved, who themselves represent a radical and more just vision of society. It bears reiterating that Holloway’s trail of destruction for everyday working people at the institutions he’s been part of extends far. Examples once more include Holloway’s disastrous tenure as Dean of Yale College during the 2017 hunger strikes of Yale graduate workers demanding better wages and working conditions, as Provost of Northwestern University amidst the 2019 “discussions” surrounding racist visiting lecturer Satoshi Kanazawa, and currently President of Rutgers during the Covid-19 pandemic when he laid off more than a thousand union workers as part of a broader “austerity” while him and others retained their own exorbitant salaries.⁴Resisting calls for divestment at Rutgers, Holloway has also strengthened institutional ties to Israel and the American military-industrial complex through a tech partnership with Tel Aviv University, opening the door to taxpayer funded weapons research.⁵ Holloway fails to achieve the wisdom and fraternity championed by DuBois. If he wants to live up to the socialist and anti-imperialist vision of DuBois, Holloway must settle a fair contract with the workers, and end the displacement and exploitation of the local communities.

For these reasons and more, we are reiterating our demand for President Holloway to quit pitting worker power against a prosperous Rutgers University and working class New Jerseyans and for Democratic Left, part of our own organization, DSA, to publish the insights and analysis of Rutgers workers.

In Solidarity,

Central New Jersey DSA
North New Jersey DSA

1. https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/another-black-history-month-ends-what-will-we-do/ ↩
2. https://www.nj.com/education/2020/01/12m-a-house-and-a-car-what-are-the-other-perks-the-new-rutgers-president-will-receive.html ↩
3. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-black-man-and-the-unions/ ↩
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/opinion/why-yale-graduate-students-are-on-a-hunger-strike.html, https://dailynorthwestern.com/2019/01/24/campus/holloway-defends-academic-freedom-saying-kanazawas-removal-would-make-matters-worse/, https://www.nj.com/opinion/2023/01/rutgers-prioritizes-union-busting-and-gaslighting-public-health-care-workers-opinion.html ↩
5. https://bdsmovement.net/news/academia-weapons-and-occupation-how-tel-aviv-university-serves-interests-israeli-military-and ↩

Teachers and Community Defeat Stealth OUSD School Closure and Layoff Plan

By Michael Sebastian

On Tuesday February 28, with only 24 hours notice, OUSD board president Mike Hutchinson called a special meeting to consider resolutions relating to “Budget Adjustments” and a “Classified Employee Reduction in Work Force.” These resolutions, which Hutchinson negotiated in private with the district superintendent in the midst of teacher contract talks, would have cut 100 classified positions (translators, social workers, restorative justice counselors), enacted a district-wide hiring freeze, and merged ten schools in the district. Rapid-response organizing by Oakland teachers and the community helped defeat both resolutions, with candidates endorsed by the Oakland Education Association (OEA), Bachelor, Brouhard, and Williams, voting against. Board member Thompson joined Board President Hutchinson in the votes, while board member Davis abstained. 

Tuesday’s emergency meeting comes on the heels of the recent victory reversing planned school closures. Hutchinson had supported that earlier resolution, but angered many when he joined the superintendent in bringing forward the latest austerity proposal. At a time when OUSD has ample funding, the community loudly rejected the idea of cutting resources, schools, and jobs for the district instead of directing that funding to meet the needs of our students, as demanded by OEA.

OEA has presented the district with a list of common good demands to strengthen Oakland’s public schools and protect students as they bargain for a new contract. The resolutions presented on Tuesday are viewed as pitting teachers against other staff employees in order to unfairly strengthen the district’s hand at the bargaining table. “Tuesday’s proposal, cutting mainly from SEIU and AFSCME jobs within the district, was meant to create false antagonism between workers and weaken support for teachers and their demands,” said Lexi Ross, who co-chairs East Bay DSA’s OEA solidarity group. “OUSD has received $54 million in new state funding this year. Allocating that funding to fulfill teacher’s demands and cutting from the bloated administrative budget would eliminate any need for the cuts presented on Tuesday.” 

The magnitude of OUSD’s administrative expenditures has been a major point of contention. Comparing Oakland’s administrative budget to Santa Ana Unified, a district with 10,000 more students, Oakland spends $20 million more on administrative salaries. Instead of cutting needed jobs and resources from our schools, the district could “chop from the top”, cut the administrative bloat and be able to provide the common good demands that OEA is bargaining for.

At the meeting, community members voiced unanimous opposition to the cuts. Most public comments expressed dismay and exasperation that the district continues to fight to defund our schools when there are safety and resource issues district wide. Many mentioned the egregious amount that OUSD spends on administrative positions and its central office. Shane Ruiz, co-chair of East Bay DSA had this warning for board members voting in support of this budget at Tuesday’s meeting: “Networks are forming, people are watching, and come November people will be held accountable.”

The district’s efforts to pit educators against other essential school workers, and its claims that a long-deserved raise for teachers must come at the cost of layoffs, school closures or mergers may run afoul of state labor laws. Last year, OEA filed an unfair labor practice charge with the California Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) when Budget and Finance Director Lisa Grant Dawson sent an email stating that the district would have to close and merge 12 schools to give teachers a raise. 

In a recent Oaklandside article, followed by a Facebook live stream, Mike Hutchinson stated: “Unfortunately for our budget, it’s a zero-sum game. In order for us to create resources to prioritize new and different things, we have to create those resources by making budget adjustments.” On his Facebook live stream Hutchinson also claimed that he was going to deliver an “historic” raise for teachers, but unless the budget with layoffs was approved the district wouldn’t have the money for those raises. Statements like these could set up an impasse similar to the unfair labor practice charge that OEA filed last year. 

The current round of contract negotiations have apparently stalled, with the district not meeting with OEA, the teachers’ union, since February 15, due to a lack of new proposals to bargain over. With little to show for months of negotiations with the district, OEA and its sister union, United Teachers of Los Angeles, are planning to walk out of “PD” or professional development sessions to attend simultaneous community rallies.

The community is invited to join educators at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater on Wednesday, March 15 from 2pm-6pm to demand that OUSD bargain in good faith.

Introductory Note

While there are many notable events in the 1950s and early 1960s leading to the development and radicalization of the Ethiopian student movement (ESM),¹ the first public expression of the ESM as a leftist and Marxist-Leninist movement was in 1965, “when students came out on to the street with the revolutionary slogan of ‘Land to the Tiller’… a turning point in the history of the student movement.”² 

The 1965 protests for “Land to the Tiller” were followed by yearly uprisings in 1966, 1967, and 1968, each with its own demands, culminating in the major student uprising in 1969. In the second semester, students annually confronted “the powers that be on a variety of social and political issues.” The slogan for May 1966 was “Is poverty a crime?” and the demonstrations that year were the first confrontations with police. The students became the victors of the “Battle of Ras Makonnen Bridge,” giving as good as they got and immediately winning their demand for closure of what became known as the Shola Concentration Camp.³ The estimated 2,000 students that participated in the action carried signs that read “Rich Are Getting Richer, Poor Are Getting Poorer,” “Poverty is Crime in Ethiopia,” and “Close the Shola Concentration Camp,” in reaction to reports of inhumane conditions at the camp in Shola where panhandlers and other poor people rounded up from streets of Addis Ababa were detained.^4,5

In April 1967, the third successive year of protests mostly centered on the Arat Kilo campus rather than the main campus in Seddest Kilo. In an apparent reaction to the two previous years’ protests, the government promulgated “a law that students argued made public demonstrations virtually impossible by laying a number of preconditions, including the issuance of a permit by the Ministry of Interior.”⁶ The day before the law was to go into effect on April 11, students organized a demonstration that gathered between 1,500 and 1,700 people at the Arat Kilo campus but were prevented from leaving by police who had surrounded the campus. The police eventually stormed the campus using tear gas and clubs to attack “indiscriminately not only the students … but also faculty and foreign students who were not part of [the protest].”⁷

Ultimately, however, while it no doubt played a part, it was not student activism and agitation that directly triggered the 1974 revolution; it was the 1973 famine.⁸ According to Elleni Centime Zeleke:

The very spontaneity of the popular movements of 1974 also meant that the various [student] groups involved were not able to develop their own organisation and political leadership before the soldiers pushed forward to monopolise power.

The student movement, it would appear, was ill prepared for the sudden onset of the revolution and not ready to take advantage of the natural mass uprising. Bahru Zewde writes:

In short, the Ethiopian student movement produced many militant adherents of Marxism-Leninism but few theoreticians who were able to interpret the Ethiopian reality through the creative application of Marxist theory… What occurred was to all intents and purposes a transmutation of the religious orthodoxy of the classical tradition… into a Marxist orthodoxy, or continuation of dogma by other means. Agitprop, more than theory, was to be the hallmark of the Ethiopian student movement. The overriding preoccupation of the movement’s leaders was to mobilize students for the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle, and Marxist-Leninist writings provided a ready-made justification for such militant opposition.9

Nonetheless, the political parties that dominated the immediate post-1974 period were founded from the ESM. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) was started by Ethiopian students in exile in the US, Europe, and Algiers, while the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (MEISON) came out of the Ethiopian Student Union in Europe (ESUE).¹⁰ Unfortunately a split within the movement, along with the rise of the Derg as a military junta, set the stage for the liquidation of the leadership of both parties.

Before the bloody purge of 1976–1978 in which EPRP and MEISON were both essentially eliminated, an immediate legacy of the student movement was the fact that the military regime adopted a number of proposals from the movement’s demands,¹¹ including the land reform program and the creation of peasant associations.¹² The ESM’s most enduring legacy may be that it served as the initiation and proving ground for many of the debates and conflicts that would dominate the post-revolution era. Not only does almost every Ethiopian political party of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—including the TPLF and EPRDF, which came to power between 1991 and 2018—trace their roots to 1974 and their membership come from the ESM, the questions that dominate the modern era also trace their roots to before the revolution and to the writings and debates that were part of the discourse of the multi-locale ESM. To this day, these questions, especially the question of the multi-nation, multi-ethnic, and multilingual nature of Ethiopia, i.e., the “national question,” dictates much of the politics.

Internal Political Education Program

The Ethiopian student movement’s most prominent internal political education programs were its several publications. Each geographical wing of the movement—in North America, in Europe, and in Ethiopia—had several publications that produced varied essays, reports, and other writings on a wide range of topics. However, these publications did not function and are not read solely as an internal political education apparatus, and therefore are discussed in more detail in the next section on the movement’s external political education programs.

But perhaps a discrete example of an internal political education program within the movement was the Political Education Program (PEP). The Ethiopian Students Association in North America (ESANA), later the Ethiopian Students Union in North America (ESUNA), launched PEP at its 16th congress in 1968 with Dessalegn Rahmato as its coordinator. A resolution at the 16th congress in New Haven, Connecticut,¹³ called for the creation of a reading list on “revolutionary ideology.” Such lists created in subsequent years included writings not only by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, but also Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, C.L.R. James, Isaac Deutscher, Andre Gunder Frank, Régis Debray, Leo Huberman, and Paul Sweezy. A 1970 bibliography of writings on Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Vietnamese revolutions—in an intentional effort to focus on revolutions as opposed to theory—also included general declarations stating “anything by Giap is recommended” and “all books by Fanon are recommended.”¹⁴

On the internal political education of the movement in Europe, Bahru writes:

While I have not been able to come across an equivalent documentation on the European side, it is nonetheless a well-known fact that there were study groups in the various branches of ESUE. The ABCs of Marxism-Leninism as well as detailed discussions of such topical issues as the national question and the woman question were regularly discussed in such chapters. The general practice was for random selection of presenters to initiate discussions so that all members would come prepared.15

External Political Education Program

The ESM’s most ubiquitous and sustained form of external political education was its publications. Elleni writes:

In the years between 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America organized themselves into a number of student unions… [which] articulated a new radical social agenda for the burgeoning Ethiopian nation-state. Each of these student unions produced journals that attempted to explore the relationship between social theory and social change as it might apply to the case of building a socialist Ethiopia. The titles of these journals include Challenge, Struggle, and Combat. What is most remarkable about these journals is that, collectively, they became the venues where the policy outcomes of the 1974 Ethiopian revolution were first articulated and argued over. In these journals we witness the development of the ideas and thoughts of much of the leadership that participated in the Ethiopian revolution after 1974, and can begin to understand the divisions that influenced the different political parties in the post-1974 period.16

Below is a description of some of the most notable publications of the movement:

• News and Views (N&V) was “[t]he most famous and enduring student paper of the home-based student movement.” N&V was founded in part as a continuation and in part to replace the earlier Newsletter by the students at the University College of Addis Ababa (UCAA), the predecessor of Haile Selassie I University (later Addis Ababa University). The UCAA Newsletter had been criticized for the publication’s self-professed avoidance of coverage “in matters of politics, religion, and race.” In subsequent years, News and Views began to offer more professionalized coverage of issues managed by journalism students advised by their professor. However, authors maintained their anonymity by publishing under assumed pen names such as “Tamariw” (“the Student”), “Lelaw Tamari” (“the other Student”), or “Tayaqiw” (“the Enquirer”). The use of pseudonyms continued into the 1970s and became a commonplace practice in student activism in Ethiopia and the diaspora. A notable column in N&V was “That will Be the Day, When…,” a satirical lamentation from students that appeared regularly on the newsletter.¹⁷ However, N&V more often butted heads with UCAA and its Jesuit administration, or even the student union under whose auspices it was organized, than engage in the larger discourse as it originally set out to do in the editorial in its first issue in 1959. The first series of News and Views spanned until 1964 and the second series, after a hiatus, was published from December 1965 to June 1966.¹⁸

[More to come as research continues]

• Challenge…
• Struggle…
• Combat…
• Democracia and Voice of the Masses…
  

—Abel Amene
MDC DSA

Endnotes

¹ See Chapter 4 of Bahru 2014, “The Process of Radicalization”
² Bahru 2014, p. 128
³ Ibid, p. 139–140
⁴ Legesse 1979, p. 33
⁵ Ibid. This was done to present Addis Ababa as the ideal location for the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity, which was being formed at the time. The operation was intensified ahead of visits by foreign dignitaries.
⁶  Bahru 2014, p. 142, cites Balsvik 1985, p. 183
⁷ Ibid, p. 143
⁸ Ibid, p. 42
⁹ Ibid, p. 138
¹⁰  Elleni 2020, p. 87
¹¹ Ibid, p. 50
¹² Ibid, p. 2
¹³ Bahru 2010, p. 66
¹⁴ Bahru 2014, p. 135–137.
¹⁵ Ibid, p. 137
¹⁶ Elleni 2020, p. 87
¹⁷ Bahru 2014, p. 79
¹⁸ Ibid, p. 80–81, 291

Bibliography

• Legesse Lemma (1979), “The Ethiopian Student Movement 1960-1974: A Challenge to the Monarchy and Imperialism in Ethiopia”, Northeast African Studies, 1 (2): 31–46.
• Balsvik, Randi Ronning (1985), Haile Sellassie’s Students, African Studies Center, Michigan State University [out of print]
• Messay Kebede (2008), Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960–1974, University Rochester Press, [Note this book and author is heavily criticized by below books and other academics]
• Bahru Zewde (2010), Documenting the Ethiopian Student Movement, African Books Collective
• Bahru Zewde (2014), The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, c. 1960–1974, Boydell & Brewer
• Elleni Centime Zeleke (2020), Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016, Haymarket Books
  • See also Elleni’s presentation at the University of Washington: “Ethiopia in Theory, Theory as Memoir”