Portside

Portside anticipated that the DSA convention would be a watershed event for the left. Just before it was called to order, membership surpassed 25,000. The group was making a leap from minor to major, and we welcomed that. We contacted some DSAers we know who were present, to bring you their views on what the meeting meant for DSA and the left.

Reader Comments: White Supremacy in the Age of Trump; Removing Confederate Monuments - They Lost - Get Over It; Free Speech Hypocrisy; Monopoly (the game) was Invented to Demonstrate the Evils of Capitalism; Right to Work - Racist Origins, Victory in Missouri; Radicals in Our History; Korea; Venezuela; Boycott the NFL; Jews Against Hate; and more....

Make no mistake about it: What we observed was an act of terror. This brutality was designed to intimidate people of color, such as myself, as well as to intimidate the many courageous people who were in Charlottesville opposing white supremacy in full force. The goal was to place a high cost on protesting white supremacy and to frighten people away from standing up for their rights.

Reader Comments: Time to Stop Honoring Traitors Who Fought for Slavery - Take Down ALL Symbols of Hate - Sign the petition; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Colin Kaepernick; Growing Up White in America - Unlearning the Myth of American Innocence; DSA's Convention - initial reader responses - what do you think?; Will Democrats Support Single-Payer in future elections; The Forgotten World of Communist Bookstores; lots of resources; and more....

DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, just held their largest convention - ever - with 700 delegates, representing 25,000 members. Nearly a thousand socialists - young and old, over-whelmingly young, came together to startegize building DSA, the largest socialist organization in the United States in decades. Here is a Portside exclusive report by Heidi Chua.

DSA has experienced a surge in membership. The question is whether it can translate that enthusiasm into actual change.

Reader Comments: GOP's Secret Health Bill - not popular in Red states; Across the Country, Verdicts Protect Cops Who Kill; Naomi Klein; Mueller's Trump Investigation - Follow the Money; Readers respond to various Portside posts - Progressive Electoral Politics, People's Summit, Socialists and Electoral Politics; On the United Front; Gig Work; and more...

We have to build our organization and not just show up for rallies. DSA will have to “walk on two legs,” sustaining mass opposition to the Trump administration and its red-state equivalents while building social movements for economic, gender, and racial justice that can spur electoral challenges to pro-corporate Democratic incumbents.

Our radical democratic socialist perspective is critical because it helps us connect the dots between what might seem to be separate issues in the organizing we do. For example, how does anti–charter-school activism relate to the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15?

Brexit has come to the United States. For thirty years now, in Europe and the United States, a bipartisan neoliberal consensus has embraced the benefits of globalization and the rise of the "knowledge economy." If only workers would go back to school, retrain, and send their children to college, the good jobs that disappeared would somehow return. But those good jobs did not arrive, and voters have opted for a faux populism that promises to reverse globalization.