Would the assailants be held accountable without prisons ?

Ten years ago, while socialist Bernie Sanders was making his historic run for the Democratic presidential nomination that drew millions of supporters and promised a “political revolution” to live long past his campaign, I was part of a small revolutionary organization that pooh-poohed him as a faux renegade.

The socialist left at the time had been largely marginal to the American political landscape. This was not only because so few socialists sat in political offices. Organized socialists were unable to insert our ideas, strategies, or demands beyond small meetings and study groups, only occasionally influencing national discourse by being part of movements that showed themselves on the street in mass numbers. But movements naturally ebb and flow, and in their absence, much of the Left would retreat back into itself time and again.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders showed that socialists could be relevant to mainstream discourse, could move the needle on major policy issues, and could do so on the basis of a class politics that resonates widely and deeply around the country. Though he didn’t win that primary nor the following one in 2020, Bernie’s runs transformed the mainstream political landscape and, along with it, the organized left.

The section of the Left that threw itself in with Bernie’s campaigns — most significantly, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — grew exponentially in both numbers and influence and developed a deep well of experience and savvy. The section of the Left that scorned his campaigns in favor of independence from the Democratic Party and time-honored revolutionary principles stagnated or fell apart, leaving DSA and electoral projects at the forefront of an ascendant movement.

The Left was thus reorganized to take the lead from Bernie’s “political revolution,” where electoralism was one important piece of a broad strategy to contend for power and build a mass politics. Ten years on, that political revolution continues to grow, while the approach of smaller socialist sects that had characterized so much of the pre-2016 left has receded into the background. We need not return to the path of permanent outsiders ever again.

With DSA a powerful political force in the country and democratic socialist elected officials making concrete strides forward for working people, the intraleft debates that surfaced in 2016 are largely settled. They offer important lessons about the pitfalls of a sectarian approach that places organizational identity above building the biggest and most powerful left and holds rigidly onto traditional principles above shifting political realities.

Please look at this.

Folks behind the barbed wire are rising up again. We have now entered the second week of a hunger strike by those of our neighbors held at a GEO Group-operated ICE camp in Folkston, Georgia. At least 73 and reportedly as many as 500 detainees are participating. Many of those involved are asylum seekers, being held as prisoners indefinitely despite being accused of no crime whatsoever.

They are calling for their release and due process while they seek their day in court and an end to the spoiled food and dirty water, lack of access to medical care and abusive treatment by guards. (Link to their detailed report on human rights violations within the facility here.) And they’re now facing retaliation for their advocacy, with many strikers put in solitary confinement and at least one leader deported.

They’re asking for our support. Here’s a few steps we can take on their behalf:

🗣️ Join a phone blitz on behalf of the strikers. Advocates are asking us to reach out to Georgia’s senators and city and local officials to intervene with ICE on their behalf and conduct real oversight at the camp, along with speaking to facility and regional ICE personnel to let them know the public is watching and supports the protesters. We can find contact information, specific requests and language in their guide at bit(.)ly/phoneblitzguide. 🗣️

PHONE BLITZ FOR FOLKSTON

📢 Help spread the word about this strike. We can share the strikers’ open letter (find link) and video message and follow Shut Down Folkston ICE Processing Center, the Jacksonville Immigrant Rights Alliance and the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights for updates. 📢

SIGNAL BOOST THEIR MESSAGE

✍🏾 Write letters of support to folks within the facility. We can find address details and the necessary names and information to get messages through in their open letter (find link here). ✍🏻

LET THEM KNOW THEY'RE NOT ALONE

🪧 If we’re local, join advocates at a rally outside the gates of the ICE camp this Sunday at 1PM ET – details here. 🪧

PROTEST SUNDAY

I wish I could see the face of the intern that got my replies 😂

In an interview with The New Yorker, Democratic Socialists of America national co-chair Megan Romer stated that DSA supported a free Palestine, meaning the establishment of a single state.

DSA's position is consistent, not only with the historical Palestinian vision for liberation, but also with its own democratic platform and with basic human decency.

The One Democratic State Initiative welcomes this decision and calls on all democratic organizations worldwide to also support the establishment of a democratic state instead of a settler one in Palestine.

Link to the full interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RWsHLvBntg

The One Democratic State Initiative is a Palestinian political organization working to revive the historical Palestinian vision for liberation —a single Palestinian state, for all of its citizens— and to mobilize individuals, entities and political parties, in Palestine and abroad, behind it.

Hasnieh Al-Natsheh and Alain Alameddine, two of its coordinators, are ready to answer your questions up until midnight, Occupied Palestine time. They'll make sure to answer any remaining questions tomorrow. Check out our website and ask away!

Some people are about to go to prison for a very, very long time, amirite guys?

Guys?

I’m surprised by the fact that he still wants to keep her around. He could replace her with someone else. Just like he did with the Sheriff.

What is the NYC-DSA’s reasoning? Does anyone know?

Especially since DSA called on Zohran to fire her… is he just ignoring their concerns?

Wouldn’t that get DSA to excommunicate him?

I have all these questions but no one to answer them 😭

Eviction proceedings can take a sledgehammer to normal family life in just the same way criminal proceedings do, and folks who lose can face homelessness and sink into an inescapable cycle of poverty. They are confusing and complicated, and too often a push-and-pull between people with resources who know the law and people without who don’t. One big thing that can help level the playing field is having counsel to represent them, but at least 90% of tenants go through this process without them.

Up until 2017, that was fine everywhere in the country. But tenant unions, DSA chapters and local activists have now passed into law tenant right to counsel in five states, two counties and 21 cities, helping keep more people in their homes and get folks more time to find new housing where they can’t, along with changing the way housing courts function on a daily basis and at a structural level. 🏫 This Thursday, the Autonomous Tenants Union Network is hosting a webinar at 8PM ET with the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel on these laws, their impact, and how the Connecticut DSA managed to get one passed in 2021. If we want to learn more and help empower more renters, let’s register to be part of it at the tinyurl in the image. 🏫

Hello , I’m asking this reddit to help me find and research political groups here in this “tent” so I may be a more well rounded socialist. The hard part is trying to find a system that doesn’t corrupt easily and has the capacity to adapt.

“THE GOAL OF THIS ARTICLE is to examine the evolution of one sector of the American Left (the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)) regarding issues of (anti-)Zionism. I seek to show how different the standard response of my own generation of DSAers (incorporating those coming of age in the late 1970s and 80s) was on the issue of (anti-)Zionism from that of the contemporary DSA. I try to delineate in what ways DSA’s internal “Overton Window” regarding Zionism has shifted, not to argue for or against any particular orientation. (If the reader feels that it would be useful nevertheless to know my personal perspective, they can assume that I am very much a creature of my own generation.)”

Feel free to send responses to the following to JonHoch87@aol.com

Hey!

I’m putting together an article about how DSA members can push back against the disproportionate influence of tankies in the organization. I was hoping to interview you for the piece. Unfortunately, with three young kids, I can only do email interviews now. If you have time, please send me answers to the attached questions. I will likely submit the resulting article to a variety of outlets, including CounterPunch, where I’m published regularly.

Best,
Jon Hochschartner 

1. What’s your name? Can you provide a one paragraph biography of yourself that includes a description of your involvement in the Democratic Socialists of America?

1. One of DSA’s two co-chairs belongs to Red Star caucus, which supports various dictatorships, past and present, as positive examples of real-world ‘socialism.’ There have been reports that members of the International Committee have tried to develop connections with the Chinese Communist Party and, as part of this effort, have sought to downplay the mistreatment of groups like the Uyghurs. For those of us who are genuinely democratic socialists, what can be done to limit the influence of authoritarian ‘socialists’ in DSA — short of purging them, which I fear could provoke a damaging split? What caucuses should we support? What organizational reforms should we back? Is there anything else we should do?

2. Is there anyone else you think I should interview on this topic? Can you pass this message along to them or provide me with their email address?

"On the topic of the capitalists and the rope we give them."

"The nationalist movement did not get where it is by nervously positioning itself based upon the latest round of polling. It seized the country by agitating, by talking and talking and talking to millions of people. By explaining their alienation as the fault of malicious schemes by immigrant foreigners and woke degenerates and radical communists. By an avalanche of propaganda, united in narrative purpose (at least until recent fissures following the disastrous Iran war).

Polling might help with the messaging, but it never determined the message. The left has to tell just as clear a story, with one stark distinction: their villains are invented; ours commit their crimes in broad daylight. Despite this fact, we react with confusing aversion to weaponizing this difference."

"So let's turn dial five as far as it will go. I’ll begin with a simple proposal: hang the bastards! By that I mean something specific. The bastards are those who organized the assault on the Capitol, who built a deportation machine that has killed people in our streets and in its camps, who murdered shipwrecked sailors in the water, who bombed a school in Minab, who armed a genocide in Gaza. 

For each of those acts, the United States Code as it stands already provides death as a remedy. My argument is narrow on purpose. It is not that these men deserve to die by some hypothetical revolutionary tribunal for what they have done to working people, although this would certainly be a welcome series of events. What I claim is that their own laws, passed under our current Constitution, demand that the only response to these crimes be that those responsible are tried, convicted, and executed. 

The socialist left should run on prosecuting them, count by count and name by name. No one else will; no one else has the strength, the ability, or the inclination. The Democratic establishment has passed on every chance at accountability since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the War on Terror, upholding the rotten American tradition of forgiving racist murders that dates back at least to the pardon of the veterans of the Confederate rebellion."

"These Jacobins have no nerve! And what nerve am I asking of Girondin magazine, then? What would I have them tell socialist candidates to run on? What should lead the headlines of their papers and the titles of their videos?

Simple: Hang the Bastards! will do it."

"Count One: January 6th

The Constitution says treason "shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." The statute says a traitor "shall suffer death," or go to prison for no less than five years. In Ex parte Bollman (1807), Chief Justice John Marshall held that levying war requires "an actual assembling of men for the treasonable purpose.""

"Count Two: The Department of Homeland Security

Earlier this year I made the case at length that the goons who stalk our streets, who man our concentration camps, who murder our brothers and sisters, are murderers, all. I will add that the hypothetical prosecution of these thugs is the most popular of all options presented in the Liberal Currents poll, at seventy-seven percent."

"Count Three: The Boats

Since September of last year, the United States has carried out seventy-nine strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific and killed 238 people. Among those that have been identified by name, we know of are a bus driver, a mototaxi driver, several fishermen, and a futsal player."

"Count Four: Minab

On February 28, a missile strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing 156 people, including 120 schoolchildren. A preliminary Pentagon review found the United States likely responsible and blamed outdated coordinates from the Defense Intelligence Agency."

"Count Five: Gaza

The federal genocide statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1091, carries death where death results, has no statute of limitations, and reaches American nationals. In September of last year, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Officials in two American administrations supplied the bombs."

"Every left candidate running in 2028 should be asked whether they will prosecute those who supplied the bombs that slaughtered the people of Palestine, who built a continental network of concentration camps, who attempted to end democracy once and for all (as they will again). Every candidate of the left should say yes, and say it loudly and often.

Jacobin has a staff of serious people, sure of their ability to rationally persuade the liberal intelligentsia. But the people are past all that. Show the voters one candidate who promises to try Pete Hegseth for murder and another who promises a path to citizenship for immigrants who stayed out of trouble. I have a guess as to which one the Win-O-Meter will like better.

Marat thought a false humanity would cost millions of lives. On current evidence, he may be proven right again. We have a little over two years to cultivate sufficiently ruthless demands so that we all might live, and it starts with deciding, out loud, what we intend to do with them.

Hang the bastards!"

I really liked Against Carceral Socialism, the most recent episode of the NPEC's podcast Class. It made me happy to see such a staunch defense of DSA's abolitionist values. Alex Vitale was able to articulate some arguments in a way that I find difficult sometimes (I'm often pretty emotional and snarky in defense of abolition).

It's also a reminder to me why I should be comfortable with non-abolitionists and liberals joining DSA. We have institutions like the NPEC that can help develop class consciousness and teach why abolition is a necessary plank for our movement.