New and long-time comrades who live in Palms & Culver City are invited to our second Neighborhood Meeting. These meetings are part of DSA-LA’s 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.

In following up on our first meeting, we’ll hear updates about the organizing activities we’ve been up to this month, including projects that could connect to our organizing on the neighborhood level. We will also welcome new comrades and continue planning the projects we discussed last time, including but not limited to:

• organizing our buildings for rent reductions targeting specific landlords shared by comrades in our area;

• holding a community workshop open to the public for accessing state benefits;

• planning know-your-rights canvasses;

• stocking and maintaining a community fridge;

• supporting Street Watch power-up tables.

We will also engage in political study together. Building on our conversation last time about Socialist Strategy & Electoralism, our study topic for this meeting will be Socialist Struggle at the Workplace.

Suggested readings are below:

• 6- page excerpt from The Marxist View of the Labor Unions: Complex & Critical (La Botz, 2013): A brief overview of Marxist socialists’ “relationship to the unions of which they are members, in that they are loyal to the union only insofar as it fights for workers, critical of the unions when they fail to do so.”

• The Necessity of Organization: The League of Revolutionary Struggle and the Watsonville Canning Strike (Shapiro in Viewpoint, 2018 – 17 pages). The story of Mexicana workers (many undocumented and majority women) who — “in the face of the most difficult odds imaginable” — pulled off a successful wildcat strike when their affiliated Teamster union ceased to function in the mid 1980s. Through their struggle they not only won a new contract, but also forced the business owner to sell the company. The piece commends the worker’s self activity, the unity of forces as key to the strike’s success, and the importance of insurgent institutions and long-lasting formations.

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.