New and long-time comrades who live in Echo Park, Elysian Park, and Silver Lake are invited to our third Neighborhood Meeting as part of the DSA-LA Neighborhood Solidarity Program — our chapter’s campaign to strengthen and grow socialist organization by uniting with our neighbors through tenant organizing, mutual aid work, and political study.
At our last meeting, we decided to start preparing a tenants’ know your rights flyer to distribute around the neighborhood to start engaging with tenants and build a base for anti-gentrification socialist politics in Echo Park & Silver Lake. We will spend a chunk of time at the meeting starting to brainstorm the content of this flyer and how we will distribute it and assign roles for getting it done!
At this month’s meeting we will also begin a syllabus on socialist strategy, with the first discussion focusing on electoral politics. Totaling ~20 pages, the following set of recommended excerpts and articles provide a good foundation for the discussion.
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5-page excerpt from The Crises of Labor and the Left in the United States, by Mark Dudzic & Adolf Reed (Socialist Register, 2015); After providing a brief overview of the neoliberal elimination of working class opposition, this excerpt details the 1990s effort to establish a labour-based political movement independent of the Democratic Party.
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6-page excerpt from The Democratic Party Cul-de-sac (Chapter Nine from On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War), by Kim Moody (Haymarket Books, 2017); A brief overview of the institutional barriers to change within the Democratic Party and the author’s argument that “it is precisely its ability to attract and absorb the leaders and activists of social movements and organized labor that makes it, as some of us still insist, “the graveyard of social movements.””
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It’s Party Time: DSA and Post-Realignment Electoral Strategy (~10 pages, in full) by David Duhalde (DSA Socialist Forum, 2019); Published on a DSA forum, this author argues that DSA electoral activists should begin to build an organized democratic socialist faction within party structures across the country.”
If you have questions about whether or not this is your Neighborhood – email us at [email protected] and we’ll get back to you right away.