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Some progress in the University of California strike, but nowhere near enough. And by the way, where’s Gavin?
By Harold Meyerson In her 2019 book Squeezed, Alissa Quart gave a name to the middle class that was just getting by in today’s middle-class-unfriendly economy: the middle precariat. One group that may just manage to ascend, wobbily, to the ranks of the precarious middle are the 12,000 striking postdoctoral scholars who reached a tentative agreement with the University of California earlier today to boost their wages and benefits. Under the agreement, which will shortly be presented to the postdocs for an up-or-down vote, the scholars will receive raises of between 20 percent and 23 percent to take effect next year, as well as a couple thousand dollars in child care assistance. By my very rough calculations, that should put them in the lower ranks of the mid-precar, with annual incomes in the mid- or upper 40 thousands—not enough to get a decent rental in coastal California, but able to buy a good-sized car to sleep in. But the 36,000 teaching and research assistants, most of whose annual incomes come in at around the mid-20 thousands, remain on strike, and the postdocs made very clear that they’re not reporting back to work until the TAs and RAs get a contract they can live with (if not live on, exactly), too. In a sense, the postdocs’ solidarity is in the grand historic tradition of UAW strikes against the Big Three auto companies, in which the skilled craft workers for those companies—the ones who could fix the assembly lines if they sputtered to a halt—won comparatively higher pay than their union brothers and sisters who actually worked on those assembly lines. Those craft workers often settled their contracts first, but stayed off the job until the far more numerous assembly line workers could settle theirs. As the union credo goes, an injury to one was, and still is, an injury to all. The importance of this UC strike cannot be overstated. Like their fellow Gen Zers and millennials who work at Starbucks, the TAs and RAs are well educated and lowly paid. Read more. https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=25e2a30f44898b9f3e978b1786dcd85c.1790&s=f3196cb603d6d11dedcd326ed6daf0e3 Democrats Can’t Be Counted On to Stop the MAGA Right, So Socialists Are Stepping Up
After the midterms, Congress will have more socialists than ever—while progressive policies won across the country. The Left will have to use its power to take on the anti-democratic GOP. KRISTIAN HERNANDEZ NOVEMBER 17, 2022 https://inthesetimes.com/article/democrats-maga-midterms-election-dsa-democratic-socialism-aoc-trump
If You Don't Hit It, It Won't Fall: On the Socialist Majority Caucus statement, 'Against the Right and the Center: A Democratic Socialist Strategy for Working Class Power' By Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher Nov. 2022. On the eve of the 2022 election, DSA's Socialist Majority Caucus has declared itself as a force actively engaged in building a broad united front against the far Right, with the particular aim of defeating GOP candidates across the board. It matters even more so because that task is not over with this electoral round, but will continue to 2024 and beyond. …This formulation merges an anti-far Right/antifascist fight with a fight against centrist Democrats, leading to a moment where the working class wins state power. We would agree that there are conflicts and struggles on all these fronts, but formulating it this way causes more problems and confusion than it solves or clarifies. There are three sets of struggles that need to be conducted, but the question is, at this moment, what is the principal struggle and who is the principal enemy. … Assessing the Terrain Here is where the issue of assessing the terrain becomes critical. We don't put the fight against the right on a par with the fight with the center. In fact, we advocate a more nuanced approach: First, unite and develop the progressive forces (Everyone from the Congressional Progressive caucus, Progressive Democrats of America, and the Working Families Party, on one hand, and the socialists, including Bernie, AOC, and those to their left on the other hand). Second, the progressive and Left forces must win over as many of the middle forces as we can (The Biden Dems, their close allies, Blue dogs, independent voters and even a few never-Trump Republicans). Third, isolate and divide the right (Overt fascists, Trump's rightwing populists and the Christian nationalists) and crush them batch by batch. Basically, we want to and need to avoid fighting all our adversaries at once. Read more. Views among DSA members and leaders differ. There are multiple caucuses, each consisting of more or less like-minded people. One is called Socialist Majority. The paper linked below is their contribution to the debate on DSA's future. (Feel free to weigh in.)
https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/smcperspective2022 Our economic crisis isn’t inflation, it’s corporate greed and the GOP will only make that worse
By Senator Bernie Sanders Corporate greed is at a 70-year high and oil companies are buying back stock, not lowering prices As we enter the final week of the midterm election, voters are expressing deep concern about the state of the economy and inflation. They should. Today, we live in an economy in which the billionaires are getting much richer while working families fall further behind. Unbelievably, while 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, we now have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had in the history of our country – with three multi-billionaires owning more wealth than the bottom half of Americans. While employers squeeze workers and their unions for cuts to health care and other benefits, the CEOs of major corporations now make nearly 400 times more than their average employees – the largest employer-worker gap in our history. During this campaign, my Republican colleagues talk a lot about inflation, and they are right to do so. Over the last year, Americans have become sick and tired of paying outrageously high prices for food, gas, health care, prescription drugs, housing and other necessities. Max Elbaum. Convergence.
Towards 2024… To varying degrees all of these challenges are being taken up by key segments of today’s progressive movement. But coordination among different groups—unified messaging, effective allocation of resources, division of labor, more rapid spread of best organizing practices—is undeveloped. MAGA operates as a unified force, while progressives remain fragmented. That must change if we are to become a contender for political power. The most recent push for our movement to move decisively on this front --Time to Re-Align: We Can’t Win from Our Safety Zones—deserves serious attention. read more. https://convergencemag.com/articles/two-weeks-to-high-stakes-midterms-two-years-to-2024/ By Bill Barclay Bill Barclay is a long-time DSA member, a participant in the North Star Caucus, a member of the National Political Education Committee, and a principal in the Chicago Political Economy Group. This is excerpted from an article in the Democratic Left Blog of DSA.  Fifty-five years ago this week, on October 21, 1967, almost a hundred thousand people attended a protest against the war in Vietnam, and some 50,000 marched on the Pentagon. Anger about the war that was wreaking such destruction on that country and a draft that was sending so many conscripts to kill and die fueled this and many more protests. As the United States has fought its “forever wars” in the past decades, the anger toward universal conscription has faded, because the conscripts of a “volunteer” army enroll primarily for economic reasons. Today, soldiers in Russia face conscription over a war none of them sought and few want to fight in. Bill Barclay reflects on the race and class issues of universal conscription. . . .
By Anand Giridharadas
Mr. Giridharadas is the author, most recently, of “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.” ( long) Polls swing this way and that way, but the larger story they tell is unmistakable. With the midterm elections, Americans are being offered a clear choice between continued and expanded liberal democracy, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other. And it’s more or less a dead heat. It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds. The pro-democracy side can still very much prevail. But it needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments. It needs to build a new and improved movement — feisty, galvanizing, magnanimous, rooted and expansionary — that can outcompete the fascists and seize the age. I believe pro-democracy forces can do this because I spent the past few years reporting on people full of hope who show a way forward, organizers who refuse to give in to fatalism about their country or its citizens. These organizers are doing yeoman’s work changing minds and expanding support for true multiracial democracy, and they recognize what more of their allies on the left must: The fascists are doing as well as they are because they understand people as they are and cater to deep unmet needs, and any pro-democracy movement worth its salt needs to match them at that — but for good Continue reading the main story In their own circles and sometimes in public, these organizers warn that the right is outcompeting small-d democrats in its psychological insight into voters and their anxieties, its messaging, its knack for narrative, its instinct to make its cause not just a policy program but also a home offering meaning, comfort and belonging. They worry, meanwhile, that their own allies can be hamstrung by a naïve and high-minded view of human nature, a bias for the wonky over the guttural, a self-sabotaging coolness toward those who don’t perfectly understand, a quaint belief in going high against opponents who keep stooping to new lows and a lack of fight and a lack of talent at seizing the mic and telling the kinds of galvanizing stories that bend nations’ arcs. The organizers I’ve been following believe they have a playbook for a pro-democracy movement that can go beyond merely resisting to winning. It involves more than just serving up sound public policy and warning that the other side is dangerous; it also means creating an approachable, edifying, transcendent movement to dazzle and pull people in. For many on the left, embracing the organizers’ playbook will require leaving behind old habits and learning new ones. What is at stake, of course, is everything. Command Attention The right presently runs laps around the left in its ability to manage and use attention. It understands the power of provocation to make people have the conversation that most benefits its side. “Tucker Carlson said what about the war on ‘legacy Americans’?” “Donald Trump said what about those countries in Africa?” It understands that sometimes it’s worth looking ridiculous to achieve saturation of the discourse. It knows that the more one’s ideas are repeated — positively, negatively, however — the more they seem to millions of people like common sense. It knows that when the opposition is endlessly consumed by responding to its ideas, that opposition isn’t hawking its own wares. Democrats and their allies lag on this score, bringing four-point plans to gunfights. Mr. Trump’s wall was a bad policy with a shrewd theory of attention. President Biden’s Build Back Better was a good policy with a nonexistent theory of attention. The political left tends to be both bad at grabbing attention for the things it proposes and bad at proposing the kinds of things that would command the most attention. An attentional lens, for example, would focus a light on the pressure applied on Mr. Biden, successfully, to wipe out some student debt. In a traditional analysis, the plan is a mixed bag, because it creates many winners but also engenders resentments among nonbeneficiaries. What that analysis underplays is that giving even a minority of Americans something that absolutely knocks their socks off, changes their lives forever and gets them talking about nothing else to every undecided person in earshot may be worth five Inflation Reduction Acts in political, if not policy, terms. Read more. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/opinion/midterm-democracy-crisis.html By Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect
So the January 6th Committee subpoenas Donald Trump... The committee concluded today’s hearing by voting to subpoena the former president, thereby upsetting both Trump (who surely will refuse to appear) and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who now must decide whether to prosecute Trump for blowing off the subpoena. Worse yet, Garland must decide before the next Congress, which has a 69 percent chance of being Republican according to FiveThirtyEight, convenes in January and abolishes the committee, rendering the subpoena moot. To descend into the crassly political (that’s in my job description), should Garland decide to prosecute before the midterms, he might drive more Trump fanatics to the polls. Then again, he might drive more Trump critics to the polls, too. Poor Merrick. If only the state of American democracy didn’t depend on his executing the law. Read Harold's full run-down of the Jan 6 committee here: https://prospect.org/politics/fish-stinks-from-the-head-january-6th-committee-subpoena-trump The Socialist International strongly condemns grave violations of human rights, repression and violence by the Islamic regime in Iran, as citizens have taken to the streets across the nation to protest against brutal treatment and abuses of power by the authorities.
 About Immigration
Regardless of where we come from, what our color is, or how we worship, every family wants the best for their children. But today, certain politicians and their greedy lobbyists are putting all of our families at risk. They rig the rules to enrich themselves and avoid paying their fair share of taxes, while they defund our schools and threaten seniors with cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Then they turn around and point the finger for our hard times at new immigrants—even tearing families apart and losing children. When we reject their scapegoating and come together across racial differences, we can make this a nation we’re proud to leave all of our kids—whether we’re white, Black, or brown, from down the street or across the globe. From Ian Haney Lopez; Merge Left. Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America A response to Ron DeSantis and the MAGA Movement.  Edited by Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, and Maria Poblet (OR Books) by Peter Olney https://washingtonspectator.org/power-concedes-nothing-review/ For me, from the moment that Trump launched his campaign announcing his white supremacist, anti-immigrant agenda, it was clear that he presented a danger to democracy and was an avatar for all the evils that have plagued our republic since its founding. 2016 was not a moment for equivocation or support for quixotic candidates like Dr. Jill Stein. History has absolved this viewpoint. The reversal of Roe v. Wade is only the most stunning result of a failure to pivot to support for Clinton in the general election (as candidate Sanders did that year). Power Concedes Nothing is a consolidated anthem from the unions and immigrant rights, civil rights, and community groups that learned the lessons of 2016 and went all out in 2020 to defeat Trump and his minions up and down the ballot. There are 22 individual chapters written by over 40 organizer-authors. They have grasped that as a serious left, we do not stand on the sidelines and make excuses for our inaction by critiquing the obvious and enduring campaign and policy defects of corporate Democrats. We enter the fray eyes wide open, understanding that we are bound together in common purpose, which requires clarity about our enemy and sobriety about the weaknesses and duplicity of our temporary allies. The Trump years have schooled a lot of folks about the necessity of this united front. An important review by our ally and labor organizer Peter Onley.  Peter Dreier
https://jacobin.com/2022/09/barbara-ehrenreich-activism-writing-socialism Katha Pollitt's obit in The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/barbara-ehrenreich/ Steve Tarzynsky https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/barbara-ehrenreichgroundbreaking-critic-of-u-s-health-care%ef%bf%bc/ https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/remembering-barbara-ehrenreich-1941-2022/ Chris Riddiough
Barbara was dynamic and thoughtful at the same time. She brought a feminist perspective to all her work. A few years after that encounter I heard her speak at the 1975 Socialist Feminist Conference. The conference was initiated by the New American Movement (one of DSA’s predecessor organizations) and planned by representatives of the socialist feminist women’s unions around the country.Pacifica Radio has a recording of her talk. https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/remembering-barbara-ehrenreich-1941-2022/  This Labor Day, we’re reflecting on the progress made and the work still to be done in the fight for what Black workers deserve. Then, we’re kickin’ it with the National Black Workers Center for their “Don’t Get Angry, Get Organized” Black Labor Day Event, from 12–7:30 PM ET today! (View the schedule, then register here.)
Less than 20 years after enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, were notified of the Emancipation Proclamation, the first Labor Day was observed on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. Though there was irony in honoring the labor of the 12-hour shifts that white Americans of the time were working while Black people were laboring under even harsher conditions despite the end of slavery, the holiday has come to represent the intersectionality of working-class people across all races. In 1882, the average work day was 12 hours and the week had no weekends; children were obligated to work to support their families instead of focusing on their education or their childhood, and many, especially Black and brown people, faced incredibly unsafe working conditions. By Chris Riddiough
(Aug 31, 2022) In his response to Gong and French and Abbott and Duhalde, Max Sawicky writes, “The unpleasant truth is that DSA is snow-white, and the U.S. working class is not.” I would add another element to that. Not only is the working class not ‘snow-white,’ the group of DSA elected officials is not snow-white either. Why is this? Why is an organization that is so predominantly white represented in elected office by people who are very diverse? I don’t think it’s because of a conscious effort by the National Electoral Committee or by the chapters. Max goes on to say, “I happen to think there are many black socialists…” and I would agree with him. And I would agree with another statement he makes – that calling on someone else to do something, as Gong and French do, is a non-starter. So, the question is what do we do?  Commemorate the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice. |
Principles North Star caucus members
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