Portside

How to Help - Harvey Relief, Texas AFL-CIO, Not Red Cross, Organizations on the Ground that Need Help; Problems with Outlook; Reader Comments: Racism, Hatred, Slavery, Those Monuments; Populist Victory in Birmingham, AL; Building Today's Socialist Movement, DSA; California Hate Crime Tracker; 4,000 Rabbis Berate Trump; Announcements - Voting and Partisan Gerrymandering; Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression; MEDICC 20th Anniversary Conference in Cuba

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....

Communist bookstores provided a critical public space for radicals, operating in virtually every major American city. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York had several apiece. Smaller and ostensibly less radical locales such as Birmingham, Houston, and Omaha, had communist bookstores, too. Some radical bookstores operate today. Venture into one of these shops in which left bookstores helped customers envision radical worlds that were often otherwise unimaginable in America

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.

This fall the Chinese Communist Party holds its Nineteenth Party Congress. The US-China relationship is one of considerable global importance on several levels: political, economic and the situation of socialism and the international working class. Trump in his presidential campaign adopted a very hostile anti-China tone. However, after Trump assumed power, he changed; his actions towards China proved largely a continuation of established policy. Why did this happen?

Reader Comments: Trumpcare: What happens when - Play-by-Play from Planned Parenthood; Attempt to Outlaw BDS; Trump's Voter Fraud "Bait & Switch"; Clancy Sigal; Spicer bails; Globalization; If Capitalism Failed (we wish) - Greek workers find solution; Rosa Luxemburg; Yugoslavia's Socialism; Venezuela; Net Neutrality and Herbert Marcuse; High Noon remembered; New Website - What has the CFPB done in your state?

Yugoslavia’s “self-managed” socialism appeared to be a real alternative to the Soviet model. Why did it collapse so suddenly?