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In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” Almost two centuries later, the battle for democracy continues. Today, economic precarity and social upheavals have led many to question our present political system. In these times, DSA’s position that the United States is “no democracy at all” is a rousing and powerful assertion against mainstream narratives. At this event, DSA members Jerry Harris and Luke Pickrell will discuss their understanding of democracy, whether the Constitution supports or frustrates democracy, and to what extent socialists should "fight for" or "defend" democracy going into the 2024 Presidential elections.

Jerry Harris is the national secretary of the Global Studies Association and on the international board of the Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism. He is a retired union activist with over 120 published articles on political economy, globalization, democracy and other topics. His work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, German and Chinese. His last book was "Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy."

Luke Pickrell is a member of East Bay DSA and Marxist Unity Group. He's written in Cosmonaut and The Democratic Constitution Blog, and contributed to various discussions in the Why Marx? project. He's also interviewed or co-interviewed several people about democracy and the U.S. Constitution for Cosmopod, including Robert Ovetz, Douglas Egerton, Gil Shaeffer, and Bruno Leipold.

The video version of this episode can be found on YouTube here.

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Local DSA chapters have been conducting what is called Socialist Night School. Socialist  Night School is a democratic space for people to participate in the education process. 


In today’s episode we talk with Guy Brown, Molly Culhane and Evan Moravansky. They are members of the National Political Education Committee. Evan is the chair. They will explain more about what the National Political Education Committee is, and they’ll explain much more about Socialist Night School.

Guy Brown (he/him) is currently a member of DSA's National Political Education Committee and the father of a two-year-old. After leaving the Ozarks, he worked as an early childhood and elementary teacher before joining Charlotte Metro DSA in 2016 . He enjoys playing soccer with his toddler, cuddling with his two pitbulls, and watching Bravo with his wife.

Molly Culhane is a member of East Bay DSA and the National Political Education Committee. She is also a graduate student in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley, with research interests that center on the criminalization of informal economic activity. Hailing from Denver, Colorado, Molly is enthusiastic about running, public transportation, and building a more inclusive, more robust socialist movement through political education.

Evan Moravansky is a member of mid-Hudson Valley DSA and is the Chair of the National Political Education Committee. 

Resources

• NPEC Mentorship program sign-up form
• NPEC Socialist Night School Curriculum website
• NPEC-created old curriculum for basic SNS modules
• Socialist Night School modules shared from other chapters
• Socialist Night School "What is Capitalism?" and Backwards Planning Training 
• Socialist Night School "What is Socialism?" and Facilitation Training

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Today we are talking with members of the Chicago Teachers Union, Ayesha Qazi, David Stieber and Hadeil Abdelfattah. As you may remember from our episode on the victory Chicago’s mayor, a former CTU member, Chicago’s students and educators have lived through a neoliberal hell. From 2003 to 2013 Chicago closed 50 schools, only making conditions for students worse. These closures moved the members of the teachers union to become militant. Their militancy changed the direction of Chicago’s education politics and reignited a labor movement in America that starting to reverse decades of decline of US union membership. Chicago educators recently joined 146 other unions, locals and caucuses, including United Auto Workers, United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America and Association of Flight Attendants, signing a letter calling for basics rights to be restored in Gaza, hostages to be released, and for Biden to call for a ceasefire. 

Ayesha Qazi-Lampert is an AP Environmental Science Teacher at Chicago Public Schools. She is a member of the Chicago Teacher Union Climate Justice committee and is the Chair of the American Federation of Teachers Climate and Environmental Justice Caucus 

Dave Stieber is a 17 year Chicago Public Schools high school social studies and poetry teacher. He is National Board Certified and hold his Masters in Urban Education Policy. His partner is also a CPS teacher and together they have two children that both attend CPS.

Hadeil M. Abdelfattah, Ed.D. is a Palestinian-American born and raised on the northside of the city of Chicago. She is an educator of nearly 28 years and is currently a Lead Instructional Coach at Chicago Public Schools. She holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership and wrote an Autoethnographic study of her experiences as the child of immigrants in a large urban school district. 

Our Union Called for a Cease-Fire. It's About Our Students. (In These Times)

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DSA is becoming a true working class organization. Today we are continuing our conversation with three past and present members of DSA’s National Labor Commission, also known as the NLC. The National Labor Commission has several campaigns underway. We have talked about the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee or EWOC on this podcast a number of times.

Ayesha Mughal was an NLC Steering Committee member from 2022-2023 and is currently a staff organizer on the Starbucks Workers United campaign in Pennsylvania.

Sean Orr is a UPS package-car driver and elected shop steward in Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago.

Sarah Hurd is one of the co-chairs of DSA's National Labor Commission which works to build rank and file militancy and solidarity within the labor movement. The NLC launched a campaign called "Strike Ready" which served as a major force in organizing community support for the Teamster's contract fight against UPS.

The 2024 Labor Notes Conference will be held April 19-21 in Chicago. Register by March 1 for a big discount. Labor Notes is both a media project and a network of rank-and-file members, local union leaders, and labor activists who know the labor movement is worth fighting for. They encourage connections between workers in different unions, worker centers, communities, industries, and countries to strengthen the movement—from the bottom up.

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This has been an important year for the labor movement and for DSA. Workers are seeing the value in forming a union and using the credible threat of a strike to win better pay, working conditions and political power. Today we are speaking with three past and present members of DSA’s National Labor Commission, also known as the NLC. The National Labor Commission has several campaigns underway. We have talked about the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee or EWOC on this podcast a number of times.

Ayesha Mughal was an NLC Steering Committee member from 2022-2023 and is currently a staff organizer on the Starbucks Workers United campaign in Pennsylvania.

Sean Orr is a UPS package-car driver and elected shop steward in Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago.

Sarah Hurd is one of the co-chairs of DSA's National Labor Commission which works to build rank and file militancy and solidarity within the labor movement. The NLC launched a campaign called "Strike Ready" which served as a major force in organizing community support for the Teamster's contract fight against UPS.

The 2024 Labor Notes Conference will be held April 19-21 in Chicago. Register by March 1 for a big discount. Labor Notes is both a media project and a network of rank-and-file members, local union leaders, and labor activists who know the labor movement is worth fighting for. They encourage connections between workers in different unions, worker centers, communities, industries, and countries to strengthen the movement—from the bottom up.

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NPEC Presents: "Understanding the Israeli–Palestinian Colonial Conflict,” with featured speakers: Moshé Machover and Sumaya Awad.

How should we understand what is taking place in Gaza and across occupied Palestine? What history do we need to know to understand and interpret the present? What can we do in the present to shape the future? Moshé Machover and Sumaya Awad will help us answer these questions.

Moshé Machover, born in Tel Aviv in 1936, is a mathematician and socialist activist who has been active in and written extensively on Middle-Eastern politics. A collection of his essays on the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians – Conflict and Resolution (Haymarket Books).

Sumaya Awad is Adalah Justice Project's director of strategy and communications, and coeditor of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (Haymarket Books). She has written a series of essays with Daphna Thier in Jacobin, including In Israel, Zionism Prevents Working Class Solidarity .

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This episode is going to be different from prior episodes. Today we’re going to be talking about psychoanalysis. Marx esteemed scientific rationality. Many, including many socialists, reject psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. I have my own questions, honestly. Nonetheless, there is a significant branch of Marxism grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis, including controversial yet influential thinkers like Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek.


On Today’s episode I asked Michael Downs to talk about his essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance, Why the Left Needs Žižek to Understand Workers”. Michael Downs is most famous for his theory blog The Dangerous Maybe. The Dangerous Maybe makes philosophers such as Žizek, Lacan, Marx and Heidegger intelligible to people with little to no background in theory. Michael Downs himself does not have a college degree, but his blog posts have been so respected that professors are assigning his them in their classrooms. In his essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance” he talks about some insights he has gotten from reading Žižek, insights that he believes socialists organizers should be aware of: we must meet workers where they are at. We will fail to bring about socialism if we force our values on the rest of the working class. Our job as organizers is to present them with the tools to take their own liberation into their own hands. This aligns with the socialist organizers from EWOC and the DSA National Labor Committee and other places that you have heard on this podcast.

• Michael Downs' theory blog The Dangerous Maybe.
• Michael Downs' essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance, Why the Left Needs Žižek to Understand Workers” in Underground Theory (2023).
• Downs’ courses on Žižek’s “For They Know Not What They Do”, and an Intro to Nick Land. 

Note: Downs' class on Nick Land is interesting because Land offers a critique of socialism, and yet he influenced some of today’s most important socialist thinkers, including Mark Fisher and Nick Srnicek.

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October 7, 2023 Hamas executed a surprise attack on military and civilian Israeli targets, killing over 1200 people and taking around 200 hostages. Israel’s response to Hamas’s horrific actions has once again been disproportionate and genocidal. We demand a ceasefire and condemn any attacks on civilians. 


In recent years DSA has made solidarity with Palestine a priority. We already had plans to do an episode on Palestine soon, but due to recent events we wanted to provide historical context as soon as possible, context that is rarely provided by the mainstream media in America.


We will have more on this topic in the future. The DSA National Political Education Committee is working on additional educational materials, including training material on how to talk to non-socialistists on Palestine. This material will be available to everyone, but will be especially designed for local DSA chapters to facilitate their own trainings.

In this episode we interview Sumaya Awad and Daphna Thier. Sumaya Awad is the Adalah Justice Project's director of strategy and communications, and coeditor of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (Haymarket Books). You’ll recognize Daphna from a number of our previous episodes. She was previously the chair of the DSA National Political Education Committee, and is now the Labor Education Coordinator for Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). Sumaya and Daphna have published multiple articles together in Jacobin on Palestine (see below).

Articles by Sumaya Awad and Daphna Thier:

• The Tide Is Turning Against Israeli Apartheid (Jacobin)
• Why You Should Support Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Against Israel  (Jacobin)
• The One-State Solution  (Jacobin)
• In Israel, Zionism Prevents Working-Class Solidarity  (Jacobin)
• Sorry, Anti-Zionism Still Doesn’t Equal Antisemitism  (Jacobin)

Note that Sumaya and Daphna both make reference to the number of Palestinian children that have died in the current conflict. According to the Washington Post as of yesterday, October 22,  1,873 children have died. 

Volunteer with DSA’s No Money for Massacres Phone-banks.


DSA Members and U.S. Representatives Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib submitted a resolution to Congress titled “Ceasefire NOW”.  The NPC Steering Committee officially endorsed the resolution and is calling for all DSA members to send an email to their elected representatives demanding they sign on as co-sponsors of this resolution and end t

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Sara Nelson took office as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO on June 1, 2014, and she is currently serving her second four-year term.

Sara became a United Airlines Flight Attendant in 1996 and has been a union activist since nearly the beginning of her career, including serving as strike chair and leading communications for nearly 10 years at AFA’s United chapter. 

In the summer of 2019, she addressed DSA’s largest ever Convention, which occurred during a surprising wave of strikes by teachers, hotel workers, and others. Much of the convention revolved around the power of the working class when we organize -- which is what Nelson spoke about.

Nelson draws on diverse stories throughout the U.S.’s history to show how organizing at work not only improves people’s lives, individually and as a group but that rather than being just another form of activism, labor organizing is our most powerful weapon. 

NPEC Curriculum - Sara Nelson’s “Solidarity is a Force Stronger than Gravity" 

YouTube video of Sara Nelson’s “Solidarity is a Force Stronger than Gravity" 

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Vivek Chibber is the guest on today’s episode, discussing his essay “Why the Working Class?” which maybe not so coincidentally is the name of our series. In this episode Vivek not only answers the question he proposes to answer, but he talks some about what socialism could look like, and DSA’s role to getting there.

Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the editor of Catalyst: a Journal of Theory and Strategy.

NPEC Curriculum - Vivek Chibber’s “Why the Working Class?” 

NPEC Presents: Imperialism: the US and Mexico 

The relationship between the United States and Mexico, both today and historically, constitutes a significant feature of U.S. imperialism. Speakers at this panel event will discuss concepts of imperialism; the long drive by U.S. capital and the U.S. government to dominate Mexico and seize economic benefits at the expense of Mexico and the working class of both countries; and Mexican/Chicano labor in the U.S. including the ways in which the U.S. imperialist relation to Mexico has tended to divide the working class and responses to those divisions. This unequal relationship continues today, affecting workers on both sides of the border.

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