Is Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria to be welcomed, or seen as a gift to the Turkish state and an abandonment of the Kurds? Sharp differences on this question continue even inside DSA’s International Committee.

Through the course of his campaign Okere has stood on the picket lines in solidarity with striking hotel workers in downtown Chicago and with ACERO charter school teachers in two separate instances.
But perhaps the biggest proof of his conviction is his involvement with Chicago DSA. Unlike most DSA-endorsed candidates, who approach the organization from the outside, Okere is one of few who came from within.

Through their work, DSA Los Angeles is demonstrating the ways in which strike support is one of the most crucial activities the socialist Left can undertake. Although some argue it has limited political utility—after all, we can’t control the course of a strike—strike support builds trust, demonstrates unconditional solidarity, and helps prolong and support difficult confrontations between workers and the boss.

UTLA’s mix of creative cheer and solidarity reflected a key understanding: This strike was not only about the Los Angeles teachers, but the fate of public education in the United States.

Acclaimed writer Nancy Kricorian brings her work with NYC DSA’s Immigrant Justice Working Group to the U.S.-Mexico border.

For those of us who think reform and revolution are concepts tied at the hip, Luxemburg is likely the most important Marxist to speak about politics as practiced in Western democratic societies, and that includes even Antonio Gramsci. I won’t bury Lenin, but I do think we as western radicals have more to learn from Red Rosa than from Vladimir, particularly in her invocation of workers councils (just as Lenin did) and in the value of mass strikes, themselves educational opportunities.

While the right’s use of Christian prayer to promote an agenda of hatred is perverse, the left’s prayers are oily, often nothing more than an attempt to score points. Prayer is not a rhetorical flourish or a tool of one-upmanship.

On the 40th anniversary of the classic labor film Norma Rae, this new review takes a look back at how well it presents the union organizing process. We’d love to see it paired with some of the labor films that followed it, such as 9 to 5 (1980), Silkwood (1983),  and Matewan (1987) — or with its most contempoorary peer, Boots…

American history does, however, offer a specimen of what is today called right-wing populism that includes virtually all the 12 characteristics: the multi-million-member northern Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, also known as the second Klan. It argued that the U.S. was intended as and should remain a nation of white Protestants, “Nordics” in Klanspeak. This national destiny was being subverted by immigrants, namely Catholics and Jews. It is possible that a majority of native-born Protestant Americans shared this attitude, so this second Klan did not need to be secret or violent; it operated by promoting its ideas and electing its members to office. It even claimed to be defending democracy, though of a particular type: majoritarian or “plebiscitary” democracy, in which a majority could override minority interests. Its electoral strategy put into office 16 senators, scores of congressmen (the Klan claimed 75), 11 governors, and thousands of state, county, and municipal officials. Journalist Dorothy Thompson, whose early warnings about Nazism—an extreme form of right-wing populism– were influenced by observing the 1920s KKK, pointed out that a dictator “never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship.”