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The situation is dire.

A reactionary and increasingly radicalized far right is on the advance, attacking reproductive, queer, immigrant, and democratic rights particularly targeting Black and Brown people and trans youth. These extremely reactionary policies disproportionately affect working and poor people.

The nationwide right to an abortion has been overturned by a despotic and anti-democratic Supreme Court. Clearly, under capitalism, the victories won by our movements can be taken away in the blink of an eye; this system will not provide our liberation.

The Supreme Court has advanced the right-wing agenda in massive leaps over the past month limiting climate regulations, further eroding the paltry separation of church and state, and allowing the indefinite detention of undocumented people. They show no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Meanwhile, it seems that nearly every day a new anti-trans bill is proposed or passed. Military and police budgets rise while our incomes fall further and further against inflation. As we hurtle towards a recession, the Fed blames workers meager raises, while the bosses and boards continue to make record-breaking profits. Amazon profits rose by 220 percent ($108 billion in sales during the first three months of 2021). At the same time, the company paid $4.3 million to union-busters to spread lies and prevent workers from forming unions.

Every week seems to bring news of a new once-in-a-lifetime climate disaster, from major flooding in Yellowstone, to heat waves and cold snaps. The UN reports that a record number of people are facing starvation, in large part due to climate disasters. Yet, big corporations with the help of Democrats and Republicans alike ravage the planet to make ever-increasing profits, creating the conditions for life-altering weather events. While the capitalists plan for space travel, the capitalist state builds walls and criminalizes immigration which will only increase as the climate crisis intensifies. Women, LGBTQ+ folks, and people of color are the first to suffer displacement and the other consequences of capitalist-driven climate change. They sacrifice our futures for their profits.

These attacks demand an organized and strategic resistance and defense. They demand that we take the streets, that we organize a mass movement like the one in Argentina, which won the right to an abortion in a predominantly Catholic country. We have the ability to Shut it down!: not only in the streets, but also in our workplaces, where our power as organized workers can hit the capitalists in their pocketbooks. We have the ability to shut down the whole economy for the rights of working-class and oppressed people, and thats the power we must harness.

But we aspire to more than just defending against these attacks.

We demand free and safe abortions and gender-affirming healthcare, parental leave, free childcare, and a free healthcare system controlled and organized by communities and healthcare workers, not by profit-seeking bosses. To win these demands, we must confront and fight to abolish the institutions that oppress us: the U.S. military, ICE, the police, the Supreme Court, and the whole capitalist system they protect and defend.

The Democratic Party is not our friend or ally in this struggle. They will give lip service to our movements in order to contain struggle, then open the door and shake hands with those who attack our basic rights. Defending against the attacks we face and fighting for our rights requires an independent movement that does not give one iota of political support to the Democratic Party. Even progressive Democrats who promise sweeping reforms to mitigate the worst of capitalisms inequities will always fall in line with the mainstream Democrats on the most important issues, whether its voting for funding to the Israeli military, supporting Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, or otherwise ceding ground to the increasingly-reactionary policies of the center and the Right. This is because ultimately these wings of the political apparatus share a common goal to uphold this capitalist system and to constrain struggle and crisis within its limits.

This moment demands a feminism that sees and fights the system as a whole, a system that denies working-class and oppressed people our basic rights. It demands a feminism that not only dreams of a better world, a world of freedom and equity, but actively organizes for that future, which will only be achieved by the overthrow of capitalism.

This moment needs socialist feminism.

Neoliberal, imperialist feminism has nothing to offer women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, people of color, or any oppressed group. The girl-boss lean-in feminism of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris is a dead-end strategy, used to justify the continued exploitation and oppression of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and across the globe. This feminism warped liberation to mean more room at the top for a select few, room to participate in and in some cases lead the everyday violence of this imperialist capitalist system. It fed us the lie that playing by the rules breaking the glass ceiling, diversifying the top, and passing the right laws could achieve equality; but capitalism systemically denies billions of people across the world the material conditions that would make such equality possible. And it was this logic that defanged, co-opted, and dismantled the militant movements that fought for, and in some cases won, our rights in the past.

Even as the first woman of color serves as the vice president of the United States, millions of women, queer people, and people of color are losing their rights. While queer CEOs and politicians position themselves as progressive, queer people are seeing the worst attacks in generations. As corporations pat themselves on the back for featuring LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people in their advertisements, the workers at these companies are ruthlessly exploited. The state and the capitalist system it protects hold nothing for us other than disaster and exploitation.

Our feminism stands on the side of the new unionization wave we are witnessing at Starbucks, Amazon, and also among reproductive rights workers, like at Planned Parenthood. Its young people of color, queer folks, and women who are on the front lines of these struggles and who highlight that the working class is multi-racial, multi-gender, and must be organized to fight back against the bosses who want to hyper-exploit our labor. Our feminist movement must fight so that every worker has a union and we support labor struggles in the U.S. and around the world. These unions must fight for a living wage, better benefits, longer breaks and all of the other necessities of workers in the workplace. But they must also fight for the issues of oppressed people like for abortion rights, climate change, housing and more. That will often mean putting up a fight within our unions to take up these struggles and ensure that they are led by the rank-and-file. Top-down business unions have done almost nothing as our rights are being stripped away; we must fight so that our unions are fighting bodies that put the power of the organized working class in the hands of the workers themselves. Thats why members of Bread and Roses have organized and are a part of CUNY for Abortion Rights and are calling for rank-and-file committees to fight for reproductive justice.

Our feminism not only includes trans people, but it fights against any political project that excludes trans people. Our feminism fights for trans rights, including access to free gender-affirming care for anyone of any age who wants it. We fight attacks on trans people, especially on trans youth. We demand LGBTQ+ inclusive curricula in schools and in sexual education classes.

Our feminism is on the side of Black liberation and the Black Lives Matter movement, against police and the prison industrial complex. We fight to kick cops out of our unions, to oppose progressive prisons, to integrate Black history into school curricula, and to abolish all of the repressive institutions that oppress and repress Black people.

We know that racism, as well as all forms of oppression are institutional. It will not be eradicated without eradicating the racist, sexist, and ableist institutions that maintain capitalist profits. But we also know that bigotry also expresses itself interpersonally even among working-class and oppressed people. It is essential that we fight those racist, sexist, homo- and transphobic attitudes among our co-workers and community. Throughout history, the bosses and the capitalists have used and fostered racism in white workers in order to ensure that workers do not unite against the bosses; xenophobia, sexism, abelism, homo- and transphobia have been used similarly. That is why it is essential to build a socialist feminist movement that actively says that Black Lives Matter and stands on the side of all oppressed people.

Our feminism stands not on the side of Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, but with the people in Palestine, in Mexico, in Venezuela, in Somalia, and in Iran, who are hurt and killed by their policies. We need a feminism that is international and anti-imperialist. We reject the reactionary war of Putin against Ukraine, but we also reject any idea that U.S. imperialism and NATO could be a progressive force in the world. We fight for a feminism that opposes every increase in the military budget, a feminism that fights to close U.S. bases around the world and abolish the imperialist U.S. military.

We need a feminism that is serious about winning every reform that improves the lives of workers and the oppressed, but also understands that reforms in capitalism are fleeting and can be reverted in moments of crisis. There is no liberation for oppressed people within the confines of capitalism capitalism takes a system of oppression and discrimination and uses it for profit: the unpaid labor of overwhelmingly women and other marginalized genders in the home, the semi-slave labor of disproportionately Black and Brown people in prisons, the low-waged labor of undocumented people or the lower wages paid to women, especially Black and Brown women. Oppression is immensely profitable to the capitalist system, and thus, capitalism will never end oppression.

Thats why we fight for socialism: for a society in which every material need is met, a society that guarantees the right to free time, to art, to self-realization, and to pleasure. A society in which work is distributed among those who are able to labor, in which technology is used to reduce work, and the rest of the time is free for us to use as we like. A society in which democracy isnt a game of choosing your next oppressor every few years, but an everyday practice of deciding how society will function. A truly democratic society where healthcare workers and patients run the healthcare system, where teachers, students and community members run the schools, and so on. We demand a society in which production is for human needs, not for the profits of a few.

We know that this is possible. We fight for reforms and use every struggle to build our strength the unity of the working class, the construction of a socialist organization, the fortification of our numbers in the streets, and our organization in our workplaces to overthrow capitalism. Fighting for socialism means a direct confrontation with the capitalist state our goal is to build the strength for mass protests, for strikes, and eventually, for revolution. In that sense, our strategy for societal change is different from that of mutual aid. While we support each other and our community, transformative change cant be achieved by working class folks passing amongst ourselves the crumbs we are given by capitalism. In a capitalist system in crisis, our networks of mutual aid will also be attacked if we do not build an organized and combative movement in the streets and in our workplaces. And our demands are much bigger than crumbs: we believe in building a movement that demands what we deserve. The society we want will be built on the ruins of this violent capitalist system, not alongside it. That means having this confrontation with the state directly in our sights and organizing for that purpose.

In the abortion rights movement, that means fighting for free, safe and legal abortion. Our goal is not to build a movement that adapts to a post-Roe world, one that accepts that abortions will be severely curtailed, and retreats to a strategy of donations and abortion pills. These arent enough, and the Rar Right will inevitably attack these as well. Our goal is to build a movement for free, safe and legal abortion on demand and without apology, accessible at every hospital and clinic for anyone who wants one. This kind of movement will defend our access to abortion pills, and fight for much more.

And we believe that if we organize, we can win. The power of mass protest and self-organization in struggle cannot be underestimated - its what has won the right to an abortion, stopped austerity measures, and even overthrown leaders around the world. But protest alone is not enough. We need a feminism that harnesses our power as workers, those who make society run, and who can shut it down from the factory floor to the classroom to fight for the liberation of all peoples, and for a society free from exploitation and oppression.

The working class makes everything run; we have the collective power to shut it down, but also to produce in ways that are beneficial to the entire community without destroying the environment. We live in a society of plenty, where a few people hoard everything; it is possible for everyone to get what they need and have the conditions to live fulfilling and beautiful lives. To echo the rallying cry of feminists who came before us: we want Bread for all, but we demand Roses, too.

Its up to us to build this kind of socialist feminism.

In Argentina, a group of workers went on strike in solidarity with a trans co-workers right to use the bathroom at their company. Workers at Kraft foods engaged in a work stoppage against a manager who sexually harassed a female worker. These are just a few of the accomplishments of Pan y Rosas (Bread and Roses), a socialist feminist group that exists in 14 countries around the world, including Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, France, Germany, the Spanish State, and more.

Pan y Rosas takes its name from the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, where 30,000 women workers shut down their workplaces for nine weeks. Lawrence was known as Immigrant City, with people from 51 different countries living together within 7 square miles, working shoulder-to-shoulder in the local textile mills. Union meetings were translated into 30 different languages. The Outlook, a local newspaper, said, There are almost as many nationalities here in Lawrence as there are in your Babel of New York. The workers are American, English, Scotch, Irish, German, French, Flemish, French-Canadian, Polish, Italian, Syrian, Russian, Armenian. You might not suspect that a common sentiment could animate these diverse groups and weld them into a fighting unit. Nevertheless they have struckstruck as a single homogenous body.

At pickets and parades, strikers carried banners that demanded Bread and Roses. The expression came from a poem written in 1911, which reads in part,

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women deadGo crying through our singing their ancient call for bread.Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.

After a difficult strike, which included massive protests, pickets, and police repression, they won a 15% pay increase, plus higher overtime pay, and a promise by the company not to retaliate against the strikers. The strike inspired many other workers in other parts of the country to go on strike as well.

Pan y Rosas was originally formed in Argentina in 2001, when women from the PTS (Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas; Party of Socialist Workers) were writing a book about socialist feminism and begun participating in the Argentinas National Womens Conference. In December of that year, there were huge mobilizations and riots, which also gave way to a wave of factory occupations. Brukman, a factory abandoned by the bosses in 2001, was then taken over by a predominantly female workforce. Police constantly attempted to evict the workers, but the PTS was always on the front lines with them, chanting Aqui estan, estas son, las obreras sin patrn! (Here they are, these are, the workers without a boss!) and Brukman es de las trabajadoras, y al que no le gusta, se joda, se joda! (Brukman belongs to the workers, and if you dont like it, go fuck yourself!).

Pan y Rosas was born as a way to organize the women workers in the factory around labor rights, as well as the fight for reproductive rights and socialist feminism.

In 2003, Pan y Rosas participated in the National Conference for Women for the first time. This conference, which has been running for 30+ years, brings together feminists from all over the country. The first Pan y Rosas delegation consisted of forty women demanding the right to free and safe abortions. By the 2017 Womens Conference, Pan y Rosas brought 4,000 feminists from all over the country to the meeting. It organizes groups at universities, helped organize the fight for abortion rights in Argentina, and organizes womens commissions in workplaces around the country.

The group has expanded all over the world, including Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Peru, Uruguay, Chile, the Spanish State, Germany, France and Italy. Pan y Rosas comrades have been involved in the struggle against the coup in Bolivia, in the fight for abortion rights in Mexico, in the Yellow Vest movement in France, in the uprising against austerity in Chile, and many more struggles around the world.And now, we are launching Bread and Roses in the United States a socialist feminist group affiliated with Left Voice. We hope this kind of organization can connect the struggles in our workplaces to the struggle in the streets and in our schools, to actually shut it down for abortion rights, against all attacks on our rights and lives, and for our liberation. This kind of organization can bring together all of our struggles, united in a struggle against oppression and capitalism, because we have a world to win.

Here is the original post:
We Need Socialist Feminism. Join Bread and Roses to Fight for It - Left Voice

Tomorrow sees the return of the Durham Miners Gala an annual celebration of the labour movement and its history. Today, with capitalism in crisis and workers on the move, it is vital we reclaim the militant traditions of the class struggle.

This month sees the return of both the Durham Miners Gala and the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival back after a two-year pandemic hiatus.

A great deal has happened in this time. From the cost-of-living crisis, to the neverending turmoil in the Tory Party: there is ever-increasing economic and political instability; and a growing sense of uncertainty and malaise in society. It is clear that something has to give.

Workers face huge burdens, with soaring prices of food, fuel, energy, and rent. And the squeeze on living standards is only set to get worse.

But workers are beginning to mobilise and move into action. In standing up to the attacks of the Tories and bosses, the RMT has given confidence to the whole trade union movement. Posties, barristers, and airport workers are all striking. And there is a militant mood brewing within public sector unions.

The Gala and Tolpuddle celebrate the best traditions of our movement: militant traditions that have been burned into the working class consciousness through past struggles in particular the Great Miners Strike of 1984-85.

Today, growing numbers of workers and youth are once again questioning the capitalist status quo. Many are drawing the conclusion that the whole system needs to go.

This radicalisation needs to be linked with the traditions and lessons of the past. The role of Marxism is to learn from history, and from the struggles of the generations that came before us; to act as the collective memory of the working class. Revolutionary theory and ideas, in this respect, are the vital foundations of our movement.

Cynical, pessimistic types try to tell us that the working class doesnt exist anymore. They claim that the ideas of socialism are outdated and irrelevant. But mass working-class events like the Big Meeting demonstrate what nonsense this is.

This is also shown by any strike, such as the action currently being undertaken by rail workers. As RMT leader Mick Lynch has correctly stated: not a wheel turns, not a lightbulb shines, without the permission of the working class.

The task is to harness this potential power, by mobilising our movement on the basis of bold socialist policies, in order to end the misery and barbarism of capitalism.

Events such as the Gala and Tolpuddle remind us that we stand on the shoulders of giants. But we also make our own history. There has never been a better time to join the struggle for socialism. Help us build the forces of Marxism, and fight for revolution.

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Durham Miners' Gala: The fighting traditions of our movement - Socialist Appeal

In a remarkable trilogy of ground-breaking, critical, well researched and readable books, historian Jacques Pauwels challenges the core self-declared virtues of Western civilisation rooted in and disseminated across the world by its power elites and ruling classes that it stands for civilisation, peace, freedom, and democracy.

Pauwels pierces through the smoke and mirrors of this widely accepted construction to reveal the darker forces that lie at the heart of modern Western elite history, mentalities, institutions and practices a complex network of corporate, feudal, reactionary clerical, political, bureaucratic, militaristic, and mass media forces that drive states to wage relentless class warfare as well as two World Wars, the subsequent killing fields of the Cold War, and devastating Wars of Terror after 9/11.

Anyone who wants to open their minds, be challenged and re-think the history of the past century and more could hardly do better than study Pauwelss work. Many readers (and reviewers) will regret that they missed out on these works as they were published one by one over the past 20 years and wonder why they have not heard of Jacques Pauwels before now. The mass media megaphone is somehow almost mute when it comes to studies that radically challenge the status quo.

In short, Pauwels work explodes the myths that shroud in darkness the class and colonial drivers and character of World War I, the active backing of Hitlers Nazis by German, American, British and other Western industrial and financial interests, and explodes the American mythology behind the idea that World War II was somehow a good war. In so doing, Pauwels provides readers with a detailed, complex and politically-useful guide to understanding our own time, and how the world came to be where it is today still suffering from the after-effects of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, hyper-globalisation and its neoliberal philosophy, imperial wars without end, inequality and deprivation amid increasing concentration of corporate wealth, and a politics gravely disconnected from the interests of ordinary people.

Jacques R. PauwelsThe Great Class War 1914-1918James Lorimer and Co (2016)

The mother lode of Pauwelss trilogy is The Great Class War 1914-1918 it describes and explains the deeper historical developments that shaped the class system, impacting intellectual developments such as Social and National Darwinism, managing and incorporating rising trade union and socialist political parties labour aristocracies, justifying colonialism and imperialism as liberal beneficent civilising missions, sharpening the tools of modern class and interstate warfare. It laid the foundations of a system of oligarchical power that would rather back fascism and Nazism than democracy and socialism, and would therefore need to construct mythologies of a good war while dropping atomic bombs, intervening militarily in defence of colonial powers in an era of decolonisation and a liberal rules-based international order, and wreaking havoc and misery amidst plenty in the era of neo-liberal hyper- and corporate-globalisation.

From the French Revolution of 1789, Pauwels identifies class and race-based elitist ideologies and modes of class war and traces their development and mentalities to explain how despite their strategies of destruction of life, especially working class and colonial subjects lives, elites ultimately generate the basis of mass resistance and subsequent cycles of elite reaction, workers revolution and mass rebellion.

Pauwels offers an alternative scenario to that of endless elite rule and power advanced by the proto-fascist Robert Michels, and to orthodox Marxism and Leninism, although it is clear that he favours the latter theories, despite wearing them ever so lightly. In his practical interpretation, he seems to agree more with American sociologist Alvin Gouldners assertion that while there may be an iron law of oligarchy (a la Michels), there is also another iron law an iron law of democracy and mass resistance. There is no end of history, however, that is apparent in Pauwelss work, a departure from Marx and Lenin. But that does not in any way detract from the force of this remarkable historians work which follows in the finest traditions of the works of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky

The mother lode

World War I, the Great War, was much more than a war between rival states and alliances, was not a war of democracy against autocracy, nor a war to end all wars, or for civilisation against barbarism. According to Pauwels, the essence of the War lies in its decisively class character, including its related imperial and racial-colonial drivers. Pauwels provides a richly detailed, indeed masterful and accessible synthetic account that challenges common Western mythologies of the War.

While many, maybe most, accounts rely on the superficialities of poor diplomacy, useless or out of touch military leadership, political incompetence, or just tales of heroic or homicidal military battles, Pauwels persuasively shows via a large secondary and primary literature, that the War was actively wanted by elites and ultimately rooted in the kinds of social and political forces released or rejected across Europe by the French Revolution of 1789, in the class wars from above and below that revolution made visible. The forces of democracy, equality and liberty, of the downtrodden, unleashed terror in the minds, lives, and vested interests of the church, nobility, feudal military leaders, and emerging industrial capitalists. The history of the period to 1914-18, Pauwels argues, is really a history of class war a Great Class War.

To be sure, Pauwels analysis is an adaptation and application of a loosely Marxist theory of class yet, he adapts and extends it so meticulously, creatively applies it to the roots and conduct of warfare in such persuasive detail, sustains the argument with relentless force, while writing with clinical effectiveness, that his labours yield a fascinating study that puts flesh on the bones of Marxist and Leninist analyses. That makes this study a must-read book for two main reasons: first, as a counter-history that challenges the deafening status quo about WWI, an important achievement and resource in its own right.

But secondly, it speaks loudly and clearly to the century or more that has passed since 1918. At a time when class inequality is rampant, despite the predominance of narrowly-construed identity politics, and elite authority is challenged from below and societies and politics appear increasingly polarised and the political-ideological centre is in crisis, a class analysis is sorely needed. Wars, Pauwels argues, are the ruling classes way of rolling back the victories of struggles for democracy, and social and political equality, by working people who overwhelmingly bear the brunt of military violence, economic and financial hardships, and the repressive and ideological forces of the modern capitalist state. War as a tonic, relief for elites from domestic crises, diversion from popular struggles for economic rights, for independence from colonial rule, votes for women, for socialism. An escape from the terrors of the collapse of elite legitimacy, and the rise of radical forces and leaders. Wars pass their costs onto the poor who are killed in droves while enriching ruling elites via war contracts and lower wages, higher living costs, and skyrocketing corporate profits.

Indeed, it was precisely that latter argument that makes the book so important for our own rather perilous time, perils of which Pauwels is only too aware. So much so, he devotes two chapters to the 1918-1945 period, when established elites unleashed fascism and Nazism against the forces of radical and revolutionary change, and to the so-called liberals Long Peace/Cold War from 1945 to the recent wars of terror. The elites dogs of war are alive and well, embedded in military-industrial complexes lubricated with trillion-dollar annual budgets, despite popular demands for peace and social investment, an end to forever wars.

Yet, ironically, despite successfully initiating wars on a regular and terrible basis, the wars themselves prove only temporary reprieves from what appears to be inevitable resistance and uprisings from below once the initial propaganda value of wars wears off, soldiers bodies pile up, military conscription kicks in, and civilian hardships multiply amid massive corporate profit-making. The very solution to a class war from below and the political and economic gains won through revolutions and radical rebellions, through trade union action and socialist electoral popularity, merely exacerbates the perilous position of the church, aristocrats, feudal military castes and their newly-emergent bourgeois allies.

But the ruling classes and their political and other leaders are tenacious, Pauwels shows, determined to cling on to their powers and privileges, waging counter-offensives when they see working class forces retreating back to ordinary life, their socialist and trade union leaders the labour aristocracy become complacent and comfortable in their integration into the lower tiers of the establishment. And so the cycle continues without end, it would seem.

Also Read: Book Review: The Foundations of White Anglo-American World Power

Wheels within wheels, conflicts within conflicts

At over 600 pages, Pauwelss study of World War I really does justice to the significance of the topic and his analysis. It is remarkable how he manages to show that though there was a national/imperial rivalry component of the War, he also complexifies matters by showing that it was also and more importantly a class war. In this class war, the ruling classes of the belligerents largely shared their anti-socialist and anti-worker ideology and politics, and their sense of social superiority over their own lower orders in the society, polity and in the trenches. So while there were vertical conflicts between the British and German workers and power elites etc, there were also class enmities between British rulers and middle and working-class people. And working-class soldiers of various nationalities frequently had greater sympathy with their enemy counterparts than with their own upper-class officers because the latter saw their men as dispensable, to be sacrificed in great numbers on the battlefields in a modern war fought with weapons of mass destruction.

This attitude extended to the European colonialists attitudes to the dispensability of colonial troops and coolies considered even less human than their white lower orders, and sacrificed on the altar of expansion for territory, colonies, raw materials, markets, and cheap labour. As the hardships of trench warfare flooded trenches, rats and other vermin, disease, and humiliation by upper-class officers intensified, and the home by Christmas 1914 rallying call faded into a long drawn out years long stalemate so soldiers and their families were radicalised. Their initial nationalist fervour, which was actually much exaggerated by the political and media barons, converted into class conflict against their officers, strikes in domestic industries, and questions about who the war benefitted became reflected in song, poetry, everyday conversation, refusals to obey orders, shooting of officers, and outright mutinies.

Of course, the position among Russian forces was dire by 1917 and soldiers set up councils soviets to discuss the war, to resist their officers and, ultimately the War itself. As Antonio Gramsci said, trench warfare radicalised soldiers and forged the alliance between industrial workers and peasants that was the heart of the Bolshevik revolution. Trench warfare turned out to be a proletarianising process for peasants. The vertical war between nations transformed everywhere, at varying levels, into a series of horizontal wars between the classes. The Great War, planned for and wanted by all the belligerent nations elites as an antidote to rising democracy and workers power, and for colonial and territorial gain, led to a bloodbath that actually increased the veracity and validity of radicalism and revolution, in the metropolitan countries as well as the colonies.

Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army in Mesopotamia during World War I, being led by Guru Granth Sahib.

The revolutionary and counter-revolutionary effects of the French Revolution

That the Church and nobility lost out in the French Revolution and henceforth became even more counter-revolutionary, is clear. But while the industrial bourgeoisie and workers were among the winners, the former soon came to fear the dangerous classes as a threat to their positions and powers. Step by step as the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871 bloodied 19th century France, the bourgeoisie increasingly clung to the church, aristocracy and military, seeking to turn back the clock and the rising tide of workers power, especially as socialist ideas and Marxism took hold across France, Germany, Britain and Russia. Elitism and social Darwinism became the watchwords of elites against the rising masses, the great unwashed, who would dare to claim their collective right to a decent life, a greater share of the fruits of their labour.

Reactionary nationalism, romanticism, elitism, imperialism backwards-looking, nostalgic, a mythical golden age before 1789 and all that flourished. Friedrich Nietzsche stood among the champions of elites against the mass, extolling the manly virtues of the Ubermensch, heroic figures of a more chivalrous age, before socialism. Imperialism was increasingly seen as a solution to working-class poverty and discontent to ship to faraway colonies the surplus populations of the teeming cities of Europe, to extend European global domination and white supremacy. As the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes argued in 1895 after attending a workers protest meeting:

In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets.

It was a safety valve for growing class discontent, racist divide and rule. In that calculus, war and empire were safety valves for elite power workers fighting, dying and killing other poor people on the frontlines of imperial wars for territory was considered by elites to be preferable to their waging class for social progress war at home.

It is one of the greatest strengths of Pauwelss research and analysis that he provides evidence from across the major belligerents societies, polities and class systems, their historical development, the ideologies of their ruling elites, working-class and other movements for change. Further, he connects the vertical histories of nations to the horizontal histories of class relations, showing how a class system operated across Europe, in varying ways and levels of intensity, alongside ethnic, racial and colonial conflicts within and between the Great Powers.

Class struggle on a global basis

And, class struggles and divisions are seen on a global plane too with colonial peoples seen as the oppressed workers and metropolitan elites their tormentors. This is reminiscent of Gramscis prescient analysis of colonial powers exploitations that were so inhuman that indigenous peoples of the colonies were not even left their eyes for weeping[causing them to rise up and defy]aeroplanes, machine-guns and tanks to win independenceThis is the class struggle of the coloured peoples against their white exploiters (Antonio Gramsci, The war in the colonies,LOrdine Nuovo, June 7, 1919).

White ruling class fears were heightened in 1920 when the Bolsheviks convened in Baku an unprecedented conference of socialists, communists, and anti-colonialists from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia sealing the link between the struggles of the oppressed everywhere. What the intellectually and morally bankrupt Second International had ignored the colonial question was now moving to the centre of the global interests of the Third International. The Great War which was supposed to extirpate the voices of the workers and oppressed ended up creating the very conditions that paved the way to revolutions and uprisings, including a workers state.

Western ruling elites reinterpreted and misrepresented anti-colonialism and class politics as a race war, an instrument for racist divide and rule, a numbers game in which the white minority might be overwhelmed. It was the 1905 moment in which Asian Japan defeated European great power Russia in extremis. Blocking, preventing and weakening the unity of colonial peoples and their working-class European allies became a key aim of metropolitan elites. Anti-colonialism and anti-racism, then, became represented as reverse racism with whites as victims. It was to continue to be one of the powerful tendencies of elite colonial and class politics for the rest of the 20th century, including the Cold War and post-9/11 wars of terror across the Global South.

Herein is forged, then, in the colonial masters minds the link between socialism, communism and anti-colonialism radical movements for change that, after the Bolshevik revolution, embraced anti-colonialism and anti-racism. Lenin and his companions openly proclaimed their determination to work for the emancipation of all oppressed people, not only the lower classes in Europe itself, but also the colonial peoples of Africa, India the millions of black, yellowfrom their white masters (p.467). Europes elites, such as Winston Churchill, racialised Bolshevism as a Jewish virus (Judeo-Bolshevism) against superior white Aryans in their Herrenvolk (master race) societies.

Jacques R. PauwelsBig Business and HitlerLorimer and Co (2018)

Millions stand behind me

We know what Hitler and the Nazis did with that racist philosophy but its roots lie in the entire colonial-imperial system led by European and American establishments, including, for some, the trenches of World War. Recall that the American industrialist and anti-Semite, Henry Ford, authored the racist The International Jew, and used his newspaper The Dearborn Independent to peddle the myth of Jewish world domination. That linkage, as well as the far more substantial evidence of German capitalists disgust at the democratic nature of the Weimar Republic, at anything approaching coalition government with the powerful Communist Party, is ably detailed in Pauwelss Big Business and Hitler.

Millions did indeed stand behind Hitler and Nazis millions of Deutsch Marks from big business and banks. The socialist myth of the Nazis is also exposed as such in devastating terms the destruction of socialists and communists, the enrichment of the big industrialists via military contracts, and the privatisation programmes that furthered the impoverishment of the majority at the hands of the German elites their 1%. The idea that Nazism stood for the mass of people is thoroughly exposed, although it is noted that fascisms ability to attract some mass support, but never a majority, gave it greater credibility among established elites. They and the Nazis could hide behind the myth of mass support the fact that their money, Nazi policies and their power base in the SS served established elite interests.

American myths

Finally, a world power, among other great imperial powers, like the US that admired and even invested in Nazi Germany, needed mass mobilisation of mythology to redefine the nature of the Second World War. Pauwels demonstrates this in great detail in The Myth of the Good War. He systematically debunks the good war myth by showing detailed evidence that US policies were driven by its power elites and that extirpating fascism was not the principal driver of US strategy.

Jacques R. PauwelsThe Myth of The Good War: America In the Second World WarJames Lorimer and Co. (2003)

Rather, it was to defeat a rival great imperial power that threatened US interests in Europe and, ultimately, had Nazism succeeded, would threaten the US itself and its ambitions for global domination. Indeed, early war years planning by elite think tanks like the New York Council on Foreign Relations had considered acceptable a possible accommodation with the Nazis. This helps explain why so many fascists and Nazis were reintegrated into mainstream post-1945 German life, why the industrialists and financiers of Nazism were never brought to book and why many of those corporations continue to operate in Germany today.

The class character of Americas Cold War, then, is explained the aim of labelling opponents un-American was to silence the voices of those who would fight for radical change or alternatives to the racial-capitalist order, who favoured socialism, equality, or even social democracy. This followed logically from Trumans unnecessary use of the atomic bombs in Japan, and to Churchill ordering the firebombing of Dresden to demonstrate to the Soviet workers state the awesome powers of the capitalist West, as pro-Soviet world opinion soared in response to their overwhelming sacrifices and struggles in defeating the Nazis.

What liberal international order?

In that context, what is to be made of the liberal international order (United Nations, IMF, World Bank, and the whole Bretton Woods system), that the Western imperial powers constructed in 1945 and which remains the ideological and institutional basis of their global influence? Not very liberal, hardly international beyond the West, and not very orderly. And claims that liberal rules-based order maintained the Long Peace from 1945? Indians and Pakistanis need only to recall the traumas of the bloodbath at partition in 1947. We just have to count the black, yellow and brown bodies in the Cold Wars killing fields of Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the death squads of Latin America, interventions and crimes against peace in Africa, Iraq and Libya, among others. Long peace for whom? What is to be concluded from Western elites responses to Russias illegal war on Ukraine, and to Ukrainian refugees, in contrast to the Wests illegal wars around the world, and black and brown refugees?

Triumphant trilogy

The sheer level, depth and breadth of Pauwelss knowledge and scholarship brought to bear on the history of class struggles, wars, colonialism and racism, is outstanding. Pauwels has provided a set of studies that debunk myth after myth about world history, and especially the class and racial forces, elitist ideologies and material interests that drive state power and are the locomotives of imperial wars and also massive popular and working class resistance, rebellions and revolutions.

The trilogy is historical but the books perspective, analysis and conclusions are applicable today, urgently necessary, and useful in practice. Jacques Pauwels has made a powerful contribution to bringing class back in to comprehending world history, and also taking into greater account than most Marxists the powerful and related role of race and racism in world politics.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is a columnist at The Wire. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire.

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Review: A Trilogy That Challenges the Core Self-Declared Virtues of Western Civilisation - The Wire

On Monday morning, a gunman opened fire on the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. Six people have died so far, and dozens are injured. It is the latest in a string of horrific mass shootings that continue to rip through American society.

More than two dozen have been hospitalized, including one child in critical condition. The age of those shot spanned between eight and 85 years old, including at least five children, with minor to severe injuries.

According to reports that have emerged, the gunman opened fire from a rooftop of a business along the route of the parade. Heavy gunfire can be heard on videos captured on social media as a marching band was performing. Hundreds of parade-goers fled in a mass stampede. Others who remained helped paramedics tie tourniquets on the victims. A number of bystanders described the scene as a war zone.

In an emotional statement to ABC 7 Chicago, local physician Dr. David Baum described the deadly scene he witnessed a couple hundred feet away. You saw massive amounts of bodies on the corners where the gunman just picked people off, he said. These bodies were decimated, these were eviscerations of body parts. The people who were gone, they had horrific injuries. The kind of injuries you only see in wartime

Police reported that the alleged shooter was 22-year-old Robert E. Crimo III, who fled the scene. A massive manhunt by the police and federal law enforcement agencies began in the Chicago suburbs, and the suspect was caught and taken into police custody by the early evening.

More information will come to light in the coming days about the specific motivations for this latest act of homicidal violence, though there are initial indications that Crimo holds far-right political views. Ten months ago, he posted disturbing music videos, including one that showed imagery of a man with a rifle in a video called Toy Soldier. Several reports have now emerged of Crimo attending a Trump rally in 2020 and appearing to cheer on a Trump motorcade in 2021.

Highland Park also has a large Jewish population. While it is not clear at present if Crimos motives were anti-Semitic, in April a number of anti-Semitic flyers were littered around the city and other northern suburbs.

This event must be placed and analyzed within its broader social and political context. The United States is a society plagued by unprecedented levels of social inequality, police violence, massive levels of exploitation of the working class, endless wars, the worship of the stock market and the indifference of the ruling class to the needs of the population.

Mass violence has become part of American life. When Charles Whitman, known as the Texas Tower sniper, shot indiscriminately at a gathering of people in 1966, it was a truly shocking event in American society. Such mass shootings are a near daily occurrence now.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been over 307 mass shootings in 2022 to date in the United States, on track to exceed the 611 mass shootings in 2020, a figure that is approaching two such incidents daily.

Mass shootings have more than doubled since these events began to be tracked. In 2014, there were 269 mass shootings; 335 in 2015; 382 in 2016; 346 in 2017; 336 in 2018 and 417 in 2019, before leaping to 611 in 2020. Most recently, the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in May, sparked widespread revulsion and anger. Chicago itself is a city plagued by violence.

President Biden barely referred to the horrifying events in Highland Park in his remarks at the White House yesterday, devoting all of 11 words that said nothing (You all heard what happened. You all heard what happened today.) Instead, he gave a number of paeans to the military in a pre-planned speech in which he declared that the United States is a great nation... Ive never been more optimistic about America than I am today. An optimism that digs deep, never gives up. Thats America.

Bidens delusional remarks about the state of American society along with his indifference to yet another mass shooting is in line with the interests of a ruling class that is wholly consumed with preparations for endless war and the maintenance of a policy of mass infection that has led to over a million dead in the United States in the COVID-19 pandemic. To the ruling class, life for the masses has become expendable and cheap one year after Biden declared independence from the virus.

To discuss the horrific mass shooting that had taken place just hours before would have struck a discordant note in Bidens declaration that We are a great nation... I have never been more optimistic about America than I am today. As with the pandemic, the American ruling classs solution to social problems is to just ignore them.

The police in the United States kill more than a thousand people with impunity every year, such as the latest horrific shootingthe murder of Jayland Walker, hit by over 60 bullets fired by police officers.

The richest 400 people in America control over $3 trillion in wealth, while half of Americans do not even have $400 in savings to cover an emergency. Such levels of inequality, across the country and in the Chicago area, are completely incompatible with democracy, as has been made clear with the shredding of the right to abortion by the Supreme Court, along with a slew of other decisions that pave the way for the eradication of the democratic rights of the population.

Biden and the Democratic Party have nothing to offer except the prospect of war against Russia and China, in large part due to the acute levels of social tensions at home. In response to the persistence of high gas prices that are wrecking working class families, Biden told the media he will fight the US-NATO war in Ukraine against Russia as long as it takes, threatening the danger of nuclear war and planetary suicide.

The promotion of political reaction, spearheaded by every institution of government, has been accompanied by the incitement of right-wing violence.Sections of the ruling class through the Republican Party are preparing for dictatorship by whipping up fascistic groups, right-wing terrorism and racially motivated and anti-Semitic attacks.

For their part, the Democrats have adopted a political strategy of accommodating their fascistic Republican counterparts, calling them colleagues even though Trump and a vast section of the state conspired to carry out a coup on January 6.

The Democrats have also begun to carry out an electoral strategy in which they boost far-right candidates within the Republican Party, part of the playbook used by Hillary Clinton and the media in 2016 that assisted Donald Trump.

The Democratic governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, recently spent millions on ads to boost the fascistic, Trump-backed multimillionaire Darren Bailey, helping him win the Republican primary election for governor. Bailey spoke in the nearby suburb of Skokie, Illinois (the site of a fascist march in the 1970s), where he said in response to the shootings in Highland Park, Lets move on and celebrate the independence of this nation.

The latest horrific mass shooting must be taken as a warning. Fascistic violence is dripping from every pore of capitalist society, and democratic forms of government are crumbling under the weight of Americas massive social inequality. The fight against fascist violence and the defense of basic democratic rights require the building of a socialist movement of the working class.

Join the Socialist Equality Party!

The Socialist Equality Party is organizing the working class in the fight for socialism: the reorganization of all of economic life to serve social needs, not private profit.

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An American massacre on the Fourth of July - WSWS

To be an unorganized socialist is a contradiction in terms, Zohran Mamdani told City & State, explaining his decision to join the Socialists in Office committee soon after winning a Democratic primary for an Assembly seat in 2020.

Mamdani, who represents the Astoria section of Queens, is a member of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and received the groups endorsement when he ran for office. He is one of six DSA members in the state Senate and Assembly, who are collectively known as the Socialists in Office.

The first socialist in office in the modern era was Julia Salazar, who was first elected to the state Senate in 2018. (Full disclosure: I am a member of NYC-DSA and donated to Salazars campaign.)

The rest of the group were elected in 2020: Mamdani, state Sen. Jabari Brisport, and Assembly Members Marcela Mitaynes, Phara Souffrant Forrest and Emily Gallagher.

These six legislators work closely with DSA, in ways that go far beyond the usual relationship that elected officials have with community and activist groups.

Following its victories in the 2020 elections, NYC-DSA created a dedicated group known as the Socialists in Office committee (SIO) to coordinate with its elected officials. The SIO includes representatives of NYC-DSAs Citywide Leadership Committee, geographic branches (such as the Central Brooklyn branch and Queens branch), and working groups focused on specific issues (such as the Healthcare Working Group and housing working groups).

The SIO meets regularly, typically through weekly virtual meetings and monthly in-person meetings. During the meetings, members will often discuss pending bills and strategize on how to win DSAs legislative priorities, which this year included the New York Health Act, the Build Public Renewables Act, and good cause eviction.

The committee is democratically run, with any member not just those in elected office able to suggest that the committee adopt a collective position on a certain issue or piece of legislation.

We have created a decision-making process by which we could air out a question whether it be legislation or whatever else, or endorsements and then have a structure to a debate and then a vote, internally, to figure out: Where do we lie on this as a committee, and how do we ensure that we move as a collective even amidst individual dissent? Mamdani said.

In cases where the committee does vote to adopt a collective position, the six legislators will be expected to vote as a bloc in the Assembly and Senate. In other cases, though, they may vote differently from one another.

There have been a lot of occasions where we didnt make any decision at all and then as a result we just ended up voting in different ways, Salazar said.

In addition to the regular SIO meetings, the six socialists in office often attend the DSAs monthly branch meetings and participate in mass calls open to all DSA members, where they report back on what is happening in Albany.

Part of the function of the committee is to have mass calls where we explain what exactly just happened in this extremely complicated, last-minute process that has huge ramifications for millions of people in our state, said Sumathy Kumar, the co-chair of NYC-DSA and a member of the SIO committee. That is an extremely important function of the socialists that are in Albany right now, of pulling back the veil on how undemocratic, how top-down the Legislature is, all the things that they think they can get away with, and exposing that to a mass audience and agitating people to get involved, to get organized, to join a movement so that we can actually structurally change that.

The particular relationship that DSA has with its elected officials is unique within state politics. Plenty of lawmakers belong to caucuses and informal blocs, participate in strategy calls led by outside advocacy groups and host town halls to hear from constituents. But only DSA and socialists in office have created this hybrid model.

Its not a one-off town hall where you hear from people and then you go back to your office and you do whatever you want, Kumar explained. Its an ongoing process, its an organizing conversation, its a permanent strategy really, to have an ongoing conversation between people who have been elected and people theyre representing.

In some limited but very real sense, the elected officials who belong to SIO have been willing to share the power they have as legislators with DSA, agreeing to support the collective goals of the SIO committee despite their own personal beliefs.

I think whats unique about it is it truly is collaborative between the legislators in the Socialists in Office committee and the non-legislators in the committee, Salazar said.

In theory, that could mean DSA elected officials would represent the interests of an outside group rather than the interests of their constituents. But in practice, the socialists in office say, there isnt much conflict between DSAs values and those of the districts that elected them not least because many people in those districts belong to DSA. NYC-DSA currently has about 6,400 members.

More of my constituents are dues-paying DSA members than of any other organized group in the district, Mamdani said.

The guy that I beat in FIFA five blocks down from my apartment is a DSA member, he added. The co-owner of the bar on Avenue North where we launch our canvasses is a DSA member. The taxi driver who lives two avenues south is a DSA member. The teacher I run into on the subway platform is a DSA member. In being accountable to a mass movement, I am being accountable to my constituency.

Both Salazar and Mamdani said that they have never felt pressured by DSA to take a stance that they disagreed with, since they all share the organizations values and politics.

This committee is, almost fundamentally, based on our socialist ideology, right? So were like-minded people and like-minded policymakers, Salazar said.

That is a credit to DSAs electoral strategy. Unlike many progressive advocacy organizations, DSA is extremely selective with its endorsements, only endorsing candidates who fully embrace the organizations values and plan to work closely with the organization once in office. Often, DSA-endorsed candidates have already been active in DSA organizing campaigns for years before deciding to run for office. So long as DSA only endorses true believers in socialism, they can be assured that any endorsed candidate who wins election will share their goals and be eager to work with them.

When it comes to DSAs main campaigns such as universal health care, good cause eviction, and publicly owned renewable energy utilities theres no question that all six of the socialists in office are on the same page.

When it comes to issues that are controversial within DSA, however, the unified front of the socialists in office can fray. That was the case with the bill creating the NYCHA Preservation Trust an enormously complex piece of legislation that enables the New York City Housing Authority to set up a public trust to accept federal housing vouchers and sell bonds to raise money from investors to repair NYCHA buildings. Many NYCHA tenants have expressed skepticism of the Preservation Trust, though others have spoken out in favor of it.

In late May, Salazar was approached by Democratic leadership and asked whether she would sponsor the Senate version of the bill creating the NYCHA Preservation Trust. The bill had originally been introduced by Senate Housing Committee chair Brian Kavanagh, but he withdrew his sponsorship in response to opposition from NYCHA tenants. Salazar, who supported the creation of the Preservation Trust, agreed to sponsor the bill without first consulting the SIO committee.

Salazar maintains that she did not do anything wrong, since neither the SIO nor NYC-DSA as a whole had taken a position on the NYCHA Preservation Trust. She said that the SIO did discuss an earlier version of the bill, known as the Blueprint for NYCHA, but ultimately decided not to take a position.

In 2021, we had a discussion about it. The members of the committee who were interested actually met with representatives from NYCHA to understand the bill better and make our own recommendations for how the bill could be improved, Salazar said. After that, the Socialists in Office committee determined that it was not a priority for the committee, and it clearly wasnt a priority for the organization, so the committee took no position on the Preservation Trust.

But others within the organization felt betrayed when Salazar sponsored the bill. Last summer, a group of DSA activists who opposed the creation of the Preservation Trust had introduced a resolution at NYC-DSAs annual convention calling for the organization to publicly oppose the bill. But the resolution did not pass a reflection of the fact that some within DSA actually support the Preservation Trust. After the convention, NYC-DSA leadership passed an amended resolution that pledged to remain neutral on the issue of the Preservation Trust and to create a dedicated group within DSA known as the NYCHA Solidarity Working Group that would focus on bringing NYCHA tenants into DSA.

We moved forward with a resolution at the convention, and there was a back and forth; some in leadership didnt want to take a hard anti stance on the Trust, said Dannelly Rodriguez, a member of the NYCHA Solidarity Working Group. We made compromises; DSA would not take any position on the Blueprint or the Trust until we had organized NYCHA tenants.

Rodriguez said Salazars unilateral decision to sponsor the bill was a slap in the face that violated NYC-DSA leaderships pledge to remain neutral on the issue.

After Salazar announced her sponsorship of the NYCHA Preservation Trust bill, the NYCHA Solidarity Working Group published an open letter demanding that she withdraw the bill. More than 140 DSA members signed their names to the letter.

Senator Salazar has ignored NYC-DSAs democratic decision-making process, the letter reads. By surprising her NYC-DSA colleagues in the State Legislature, some of whom have no firm opinion on and others of whom have major concerns with this NYCHA legislation, she has shown disregard for the SIO Committee as a concept. Albany wants to politically divide the SIO and this action accomplished that.

Salazar did not withdraw the bill, though she did hold a virtual forum with the NYCHA Solidarity Working Group and other DSA members to discuss her position on the bill. Rodriguez and other members of the NYCHA Solidarity WG said that their concerns were not addressed; they wanted Salazar to face some form of accountability from DSA or SIO for her decision to sponsor the bill, not just for her to explain her position.

In the aftermath, there has been zero to minimal engagement about what Julia had done, Rodriguez said. We had a meeting prior to the voting on the bill to try to rein her in, a critical and meaningful discussion that ultimately led to zero accountability on her position.

When Salazars bill and its Assembly equivalent came up for a vote, all of her fellow socialists in office voted against the bills. Phara Souffrant Forrest, one of the Assembly members elected in 2020, also released a public statement explaining her decision: For me, doing better means starting with NYCHA residents and engaging them deeply on the issues and what possible solutions might look like. Having spoken to my own constituents about this legislation, I have heard skepticism and a feeling that no one has invested the time to work deeply with them on shaping their future.

Rodriguez said that Salazars decision to sponsor the bill had led some NYCHA tenants to refuse to work with DSA and had led him to question DSAs commitment to holding its elected officials accountable.

Meanwhile, Fight for NYCHA, an activist group opposed to the Preservation Trust that Salazar has previously sparred with on Twitter, recently launched a new Twitter account called @NoDSANY with the tagline, The DSA sold-out NYCHA. Now, they are going to find out.

Despite the acrimonious split over the NYCHA Preservation Trust, both NYC-DSA and the Socialists in Office project seem poised to continue to grow.

Last year, two DSA candidates won election to the City Council Alexa Avils and Tiffany Cabn prompting the organization to create a nascent City Socialists in Office committee. In the August primary, two more candidates are running for state Senate with DSAs endorsement: Kristen Gonzalez and David Alexis.

And last month, climate organizer Sarahana Shrestha beat incumbent Assembly Member Kevin Cahill in a Democratic primary. Shrestha is a member of the Mid-Hudson Valley chapter of DSA, and before running for office, she participated in an SIO strategy workshop as an organizer on DSAs Public Power NY campaign. If she wins the general election in November, as she is heavily favored to, then she will continue participating in the SIO committee but this time as an elected official.

Shrestha told City & State that she did not originally want to run for office but was persuaded to run in order to expand DSAs legislative influence beyond New York City.

I would not have run as a candidate without DSA backing, she said. In this case, it was really the organization and the organizers coming together and being like, lets run this specific member of our organization for this specific reason in this specific place.

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Here's how the DSA keeps its lawmakers in line - City & State