The Vast Majority

The Democratic Socialists of America's biennial convention is in Atlanta this weekend. The rise of the DSA is one of the most promising developments in American politics in at least half a century. I talked to Andrew Sernatinger, a member of Madison DSA, an elected delegate to the convention, and a rank-and-file member of Teamsters 695, about what's at stake at the convention.

You can read Andrew's pieces about the convention and the state of DSA in New Politics: https://newpol.org/dsa-2019-convention-breakdown/ https://newpol.org/dsas-growing-pains/

Also, if you're going to be in Atlanta, come to the Jacobin "Our Socialism Is International" event, featuring leftist guests from Peru, Sudan, Brazil, Japan, Germany, the Philippines, and Yemen. https://www.facebook.com/events/489420788296872/

It's gotten heated this last week between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the squad, on the one hand, and Nancy Pelosi, centrist Democrats, and the House Democratic Party leadership on the other. But this conflict isn't empty intra-party bickering. It's an actual political and moral battle, with one side, AOC's, on the right side of history and one, Pelosi's, not.

Miles Kampf-Lassin wrote about the battle and what it means, in an article called "They're Not Just Mad at AOC — They're Scared of Her." https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-aoc-nancy-pelosi-democratic-party

We also mentioned a recent Washington Post profile of AOC's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, that's worth a read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/07/10/feature/how-saikat-chakrabarti-became-aocs-chief-of-change/

The New York Times recently attacked Bernie Sanders’s record on solidarity with Nicaragua in the 1980s. It probably won’t be the last time we see redbaiting attacks against Sanders in the election season, so it’s important to establish what exactly happened in Central America in the 1980s, how brutal US intervention in the region was, what the Central American solidarity movement of that era looked like, and what side of history was the right one to be on.

Hilary Goodfriend discusses all of this in her recent article ”Why Bernie Sanders Was Right to Oppose US Intervention in Central America.”

Hilary is a doctoral student in Latin American Studies at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. You can read her article here:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/07/bernie-sanders-central-america-sandinista

Elizabeth Warren is, by American political standards, a very strong  presidential candidate. She has taken up a robust domestic social-democratic agenda — one that, while not as strong as Bernie Sanders’s, is pretty damn good.

Foreign policy, however, is a different story. Here, Elizabeth Warren is far from the most hawkish in her party. But she still leaves much to be desired, as Sarah Lazare recently wrote in a piece titled “Elizabeth Warren Can and Should Do Better on Foreign Policy.”

Sarah Lazare is a web editor at In These Times. You can read her piece on Elizabeth Warren’s foreign policy here (https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/elizabeth-warren-foreign-policy).

Bernie Sanders has been talking a lot about the New Deal lately, mentioning it in his recent speech on democratic socialism. Ironically, the response from many liberals has been to argue that the New Deal wasn’t really socialism. Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman has a few quibbles.

Plus, we talk about why the idea that the New Deal was racist doesn’t fully capture its relationship to white supremacy.

Read Seth’s article on Bernie’s New Deal rhetoric here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/06/new-deal-socialism-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary

Read an interview with New Deal historian Richard Walker, who discusses the charge that the New Deal was racist, plus many other aspects of the New Deal’s wide-ranging policies, here:

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/green-new-deal-roosevelt-public-works

Part two of our discussion with Eric Blanc on his new book Red State Revolt: The Teachers Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. We discuss the role of a "militant minority" of rank-and-file radicals in Arizona and West Virginia's teachers strikes — as well as what it means when that militant minority wasn't present, as in Oklahoma.

This episode is of particular interest to rank-and-file union members who are interested in making their unions more democratic and militant, as well as members of socialist groups who support unions but want to figure out how to get personally involved in the labor movement.

Read Micah's article (coauthored with Barry Eidlin) in Labor Studies Journal, "US Union Revitalization and the Missing 'Militant Minority,'" here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0160449X19828470 (Sorry, you'll need academic access.)

Buy Eric's book here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2955-red-state-revolt

The teachers strike wave of the last year and a half is the most important development in US working-class politics in decades. And nobody has covered that strike wave closer than Eric Blanc.

Eric has been Jacobin's man on the ground for most of these strikes, and he was there when they kicked off in West Virginia, then spread to Arizona and Oklahoma. (Since then, he's written many articles about strikes in Denver, Oakland, Los Angeles, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere.)

He wrote the "red-state" strike wave in a new book, Red State Revolt: The Teachers Strikes and Working-Class Politics, published by Verso as part of the Jacobin series. I can't recommend this book enough — it's one of the best labor books published in recent years in the United States, of interest both to rank-and-file workers looking to organize their workplaces but also anyone seeking to understand how and why these strikes came about.

This is the first of two Vast Majority episodes with Eric. This one talks about the role of the Bernie Sanders campaign in bringing together the strikers, the myth of the "red-state" voters and their willingness to go on strike, the role of social media in the strikes, why low wages aren't enough to kick off strikes, and more. The second episode, which will be out later this week, covers the role of a "militant minority" in organizing the strikes and consolidating the strikes' gains.

You can buy Eric's book here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2955-red-state-revolt

You can read his many Jacobin articles on the strikes and other issues here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/eric-blanc

What should the Left say about borders? Free flow of people across borders has always been a key topic for leftists, perhaps never more so than right now — especially given the realities of climate change. Some on the Left advance a maximalist demand of completely open borders; others (including, recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders) argue that social-democratic policies like Medicare for All require some restriction on the flow of people who can enter a country and access those goods.

Suzy Lee is no fan of the latter argument. In "The Case for Open Borders" in the Winter 2019 issue of our journal Catalyst, she argues that the Left can't give any credence to restrictionist arguments by accepting the need to restrict people from entering the US or any other country.

You can read Suzy Lee's essay "The Case for Open Borders" here: https://catalyst-journal.com/vol2/no4/the-case-for-open-borders

You can also read Daniel Denvir's piece in Jacobin, "How Bernie Should Talk About Borders": https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/bernie-sanders-immigrant-rights-border-policy

And you can subscribe to Jacobin at https://www.jacobinmag.com/subscribe

Socialism: The Movie with Yael Bridge

Yael Bridge is one of the filmmakers behind the forthcoming documentary Socialism: An American Story. She talks with Micah about what she's trying to do with the film as well as her own transformation from a liberal into a socialist through the Bernie Sanders campaign.

You can read more about Socialism: An American Story and chip in a donation for it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/socialismmovie/socialism-an-american-story-post-production

Chicago recently made international headlines for the victories of six — six!! — members of the Democratic Socialists of America running for city council. It’s an astonishing victory, the biggest socialist victory in any American city in probably a century.

These victories matter both for Chicago, which has seen growing working-class pushback to neoliberalism in recent years, but also for socialist organizers in cities around the country, who can learn from how Chicago won so many elections on a left platform.

One of the six victors in the April elections was Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who represents Chicago's 35th Ward, a gentrifying area on the city’s northwest side. Carlos was the only incumbent socialist city council member (or “alderman”); despite being attacked repeatedly by the area’s wealthy real-estate developers, he won re-election comfortably.

You can read my interview with Carlos from two years ago, when he was kicked off a gubernatorial ticket for his support of Palestine (which we mention in our discussion) here:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/09/carlos-rosa-chicago-bds-democratic-party

And you can read my piece in the Guardian on the Chicago electoral victories here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/03/americas-socialist-surge-chicago