Our third regular issue of the year is finally here!
Featuring Jimin Kang, Cynthia Chukwuma, Kirsten Timco, Orji Victor Ebubechukwu, Patrick Childress, Johnson Appiah, and more.
Cover art by the Senegalese painter, Michel Delgado.
Read:
beautiful of the cuban people to recognize that two lesbian exes who are roommates and also best friends and their cat can be a family. viva la revolución
Cuba is holding a rare referendum on an unusually contentious law — a government-backed “family law” code that would allow same-sex couples to marry and adopt, as well as outlining the rights of children and grandparents.
Arrests have now started as we continue to call for Sen. Sanders to advocate for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip as Israel continues its genocidal bombing campaign and ground invasion.
one time a prominent communist and labor movement elder took me to a famous masonic temple and explained how the spread of revolutionary politics through the freemasons was essential to the american revolution, and i went “so we should be organizing the masons?” and he said “no.”
its actually very easy not to join a folk punk tattoo polycule collective living in a decaying mansion in rural massachusetts. most of us dont do that all the time so i dont really understand why youre fucking it up
this is reminding me of the time in 2020 when a white woman was accused of arson during a blm protest and a ton of ppl snitched and used it as evidence of outside agitators or provocateurs…only for it to turn out her boyfriend was the one whose murder sparked the entire protest
when that time comes i will personally stand with those who have the political vision to break the court and the entire system behind it under their heel, not the liberals handwringing and simpering about how real workers/women/queers/poc/whoever would never hold a red flag
Marx never had blue hair
Engels was not an obese furry
Lenin was never in a polycule
Stalin was never a vegan
Mao never watched anime
Stop using Communism to justify your fetishes
what people dont understand is that amanda palmer was just the surface level..until the early 2010s there was a whole subculture of like accordionists whos lyrics were like “im an evil clown haha what if we had clown sex together”
something that really humbles me from talking with older communists is that they spent decades in isolation with dwindling numbers of people who even cared slightly about their politics, holding their breath for something like the current milieu to emerge
what if…and i’m just throwing this out there…..we can oppose all forms of united states intervention in iran without smearing justified resistance to the ir as a color revolution just based off vibes
A color revolution being fomented in Iran just days after becoming an official member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
US imperialism punishes nations forging an independent path with chaos.
find this recurring discourse fascinating because it always either means "being nice" or "being a heterosexual person who talks about their politics in the most conditional and self-effacing terms possible" and there's no way to know which until you check the thread
I saw J Sakai at a grocery store in Chicago yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but
im not looking forward to posting "hey does anyone have an invite to a discord dedicated to fixing garden hoses" and "hey does anyone know where to find that discord where you can ask if japanese cosmetics are counterfeit or not" every week to zero replies
being a communist is like yes i know them ofc i can vouch for them we’ve been through so much together i would trust them with my life i’d take a bullet for them no i don’t know their last name
it’s weird that there hasn’t been an intellectual history of the iww. an entire milieu of marxist thinkers defining the work of a labor movement with over a hundred thousand members and everyone is just like “yeah they didnt read cuz they were too busy doing Praxis”
lol that ppl will assume someone is a “cishet man” because of the politics they hold. why should someone have to disclose their birth assignment to you to justify their position? why can’t you struggle against their politics rather than their [perceived] identity?
when that time comes i will personally stand with those who have the political vision to break the court and the entire system behind it under their heel, not the liberals handwringing and simpering about how real workers/women/queers/poc/whoever would never hold a red flag
ofc if that’s what justifies it, the only way reason we know all of that is because ppl snitched and she got arrested, so in a world where she wasn’t imprisoned…. her actions might still seem unjustified. moral of the story: mind your fucking business
During her tenure as a city councilor, Nithya Raman voted to pass a resolution implementing the IHRA definition of anti-semitism, which classifies criticism of Israel as anti-semitic. In her endorsement questionnaire, she defended that decision.
BREAKING NEWS!
DSA-LA is excited to announce our first round of candidate endorsements for 2024! We're proud to re-endorse Nithya Raman (
@nithyavraman
) for Los Angeles City Council District 4, and endorse Ysabel Jurado (
@YsabelJuradoLA
) for Los Angeles City Council District 14!
im still discovering bands id never heard of whos thing was pretending to be a weimar-era vampire theatre troupe called like Mauve and the Dark Thespians who havent made an album since 2008. there are thousands of them
i know cis & straight men whose lives or the lives of ppl they love will be devastated by the roe v wade decision. i know trans & gay men who are exhausted by having to wear their identities on their sleeves. what do you think these ppl owe you if you’re mad abt them speaking up?
i was a little too young to go to shows when most of them were around it felt like coming of age during the collapse of a civilization. a civilization where everyone wears corsets and sings stuff like “ooo im trapped in this asylum / because im a Victorian maiden / and im evil”
candidates who would call me a tranny: buttigieg, harris, biden, delaney, williamson
candidates who would make a huge deal out of asking my pronouns: warren, beto, williamson
candidates who under no circumstances could clock me: bernie sanders
speaking with the most possible respect to their sacrifices and legacy i have some bad news about the history of decentralized cell-based networks on the us left
it must be so weird being a teen rn and instead of your friends fucking around w synthesizers and experimenting with research chemicals theyre all getting a million views on tiktoks for saying shit like “read BLACKSHIRTS & REDS by MICHAEL PARENTI to OWN THE ANARKIDDIES”
i had a reactive urge to address this to “cis women” or “cis feminists” but that would have fundamentally missed the point. when the court turns on trans women, i’m sure the liberals who consider themselves our leaders will use the same rhetoric to shut down dissent and critique
we need to bring back the communist party-style grievance system where you have a huge trial and your party-lawyer has to expound about the history of capitalism and the internal colony question
capitalist realism couldve been like a 10 page essay you would lose nothing if you cut all the stuff about the matrix or whatever and the poorly aged rant about teachers strikes
it’s always career academics who have this kind of activist cult of the organizer mentality. i’ve put the last three years my life into the labor movement heart and soul and i would never insult a comrade by telling them they spend too much time on “internal issues”
@bloomfilters
kind of true but i do think both stereotypes hold a level of truth as different coping mechanisms to deal with cis perception in line with like. historic virgin vs whore conceptions of womanhood
its always fascinating seeing people frame deliberation as the org being “torn apart” or having a “circular firing squad.” americans literally do not recognize democracy when we’re looking at it
National DSA is currently debating whether to re-endorse AOC. DemLeft presents two opinion pieces, one arguing for and one against.
Read both pieces here:
it’s taught me to be a little less acerbic and to stop feigning surprise when my viewpoint is unpopular. having tens of thousands of comrades to hash political questions out with is a very rare and precious thing we may not always have
explaining the difference between the communist party of britain the communist party of great britain (marxist-leninist) and the communist party of great britain (provisional central committee) to my girlfriend who is real
He has never believed in mass organization the way we do, and this moment has been coming for a long time. I think a few years ago the membership wouldn’t have been ready for it. Now, we stand on our own, with or without his cult of personality.
if you dont want roe v wade to be overturned you need to wait 2 years and vote for the guy who was president when roe v wade was overturned and then wait for 2-3 of the oligarchs who voted to overturn roe v wade to die so he can appoint good oligarchs to replace them
People ask me a lot why
@MarxistUnityDSA
uses the slogan "fight the Constitution" rather than just falling back on more common ones like "rupturing with capitalism," "building dual power," or "transformative demands" (all of which are fine, for their own part).
Focusing only on local or state politics or abstaining from elections completely to do mass work are all political retreats when DSA needs to advance into more ambitious national and international struggle.
smithies: this is rose day its our school tradition where we pick roses in our schools private garden and drink virgin cocktails with the dean
hampshire kids: this is jerking off in the woods day we used to drop research chemicals and jerk off in the woods but now it sucks :/
President Biden announces over 12,000 U.S. troops have been mobilized along the Russian border to defend NATO countries:
“Granted, if we respond, it is World War III, but we have a sacred obligation on NATO territory.”
im maybe going to get cancelled for this but i find being a terf in 1975 pretty understandable, at least if you hadn’t really met trans lesbians or engaged with arguments to the contrary yet. by the 90s not so much 🤷♀️
i don’t necessarily support a special convention for anything more expansive than vacant NPC seat elections but i think it’s really cynical and uncomradely for our leadership to accuse their factional rivals of somehow sabotaging the climate movement
i dont really get when people accuse the rose of being a social fascist liberal shill thing when it goes back to the 1880s as a nod to the red flag of the paris commune. also roses are very beautiful and smell nice and we should appropriate everything of beauty for communism
you know i am not sure we talk enough about what a principled and thoughtful leader
@irockgnomes
has been for dsa. i genuinely sleep better knowing she’s representing the will of our membership 👑
The debate in DSA around “building DSA” vs “mass organization” misses the point that autonomous organization is happening all the time around us, whether we take part or not—union drives, rent strikes, neighborhood groups fighting police brutality, queer potlucks, etc.
it’s cool how marsha p johnson disappeared immediately after the stonewall riots and left a sticky note saying “thinkpiece authors are the sole interpreters of my legacy” as her last will and testament
i don’t share sakai’s affinity for the militant minority or his confidence that a majority of americans can’t be won to revolution but he really is incredible at thinking through political strategy practically
i would vote for elizabeth warren but she won’t stop DMing me and asking for feet pics. i’ve expressed my boundaries multiple times and she has continued to message me. i’m not trying to kinkshame anyone but i don’t think it’s appropriate to ask a trans woman for “trap feet.”
Ultimately for the org to survive all of us need to learn how to practice discipline as both a majority and minority. There is not another path, unless you think a split is viable (at which point—have fun going bankrupt and becoming an irrelevant sect).
having groundwork members resurrect the three-year old DSA cardinal twitter account to score perceived dunks over a bowman endorsement (?) while the worst horrors of a genocide wage in rafah reminds me of how unserious of an org we are and always will be
people seem to be struggling with this so i will clarify: the debate around “who threw the first brick,” which is a proxy for different forms of identity politics centering lesbians/trans woc/gay men/etc, doesnt make sense because that wasn’t how the riot was initiated
anyone else feel weird about the part in the lion king (2019) where the kid lion is watching hbo’s euphoria in the lion cave and he asks the dad lion if it’s normal that he wants to be a girl and the dad lion grounds him and signs him up for wrestling
Mohammed called for the end to “capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world.” She had previously tweeted: “may every Zionist burn in the hottest pit of hell.”
in the case of this particular person for instance yes i think you should have hobbies (lenin liked classical music and luxemburg was a sort of verbal humiliation domme)
The existing resolution sets a ceiling that the NPC has flexibility to lower if possible, with the aim of ensuring solvency through 2025. It does not set anything in stone. It also already requires the NPC to meet with the union and discuss alternatives, per the CBA.
SMC and
@GroundworkDSA
have submitted a new resolution to:
1. Rescind the majority’s layoff resolutions
2. Schedule a meeting with unit staff to discuss budget cuts
3. Commit to reconsidering non-staff cuts, setting our deficit goal at no more than $250k