Long Island Red Rose

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The Democratic Party must die. As long as it exists, it will always stand in the way of social and economic progress. It is not something that can be reformed, nor should we waste our energy trying.

If it wasn’t obvious after the first two months of Donald Trump’s second term, let me spell it out:

The Democrats do not care about you.

The Democrats will not become a party of the left.

The Democrats will never save us.

The battle we face—dismantling capitalism—cannot be won through passive, half-hearted electoralism. It will never be won by pleading with a party designed to suppress us.

The 2024 election made it clear: we have no real political power in our current state. Faced with energizing working-class voters or preserving their grip on the status quo, the Democrats chose the latter.

The DNC absorbs progressives, social democrats, and even self-described democratic socialists—either breaking them into obedient party loyalists or sidelining them into irrelevance. Yet liberals still tell us to be grateful, to fall in line, and to vote for whatever warmongering corporate ghoul they put forward next.

Enough. Liberals don’t want us—so why are we still here?

Take Bernie Sanders: A decade ago, he opened the door to anti-capitalist politics for millions, including me. But instead of building something new, he remains tethered to the Democratic Party, clinging to a dream that will never come true. If there’s one lesson to take from his experience, it’s that we need to have pride in ourselves.

Maybe we won’t ever win elections with a united, independent left. But we’re not winning anything now. As cliché as it is to reference Marx here, we have nothing to lose but our chains.

Eugene V. Debs, one of America’s greatest socialists, got over three percent of the popular vote four times between 1904 and 1920—once while in jail. He wasn’t running as a Democrat or Republican but with the now-defunct Socialist Party of America.

And before you say, “But Debs didn’t win,”—yes, he didn’t. But imagine if a socialist candidate today pulled three percent of the vote. That would be a bigger victory for our movement than anything we’ve had in years.

If electoral politics is the path forward, we need to stop expecting change from a party that has repeatedly shown it doesn’t value us and build power on our own.

The Democratic Party is, and always will be, a capitalist party. It exists to preserve and grow capital no matter the price. This alone makes the idea of a “leftist Tea Party” movement impossible. We’re not fighting for a balanced budget—we’re fighting for our survival through economic revolution. These people would rather let the world burn than fail to accumulate maximum profit rates—why are we still trying to work with them?

When push comes to shove—on workers’ rights, gender, race, immigration, or any other issue—the Democratic Party will always side with capital. We’ve seen it countless times. In 2020, they abandoned the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2024, they let Trump return without a fight and then blamed us. They have failed us at every turn.

It has never been about us, the working class. We know this. Yet we stay in this miserable relationship, begging them to listen.

It’s time to walk away.

We have two choices: continue begging liberals to let us in, or forge our path. Maybe it leads nowhere. But we’ve lost nothing by leaving. We are at rock bottom—why are we still trying to appease those actively making our lives worse?

Stop donating. Stop supporting them.

It’s time to let go.

As fascism grows ever bolder throughout the country, and white supremacy is being blatantly endorsed by the state, Columbia University is the latest institution to do evil work on their behalf.

On Mar. 8, the Ivy League college allowed its student Mahmoud Khalil to be apprehended by ICE unopposed for his role in campus protests for Palestine, stealing the legal residence from his eight-month-pregnant wife. After letting America’s Gestapo nab a member of its community on university grounds, Columbia followed up by punishing students who participated in last spring’s protests, handing out suspensions, and revoking degrees. While people across the country decried Khalil’s arrest, Columbia allowed ICE to kidnap another student this past Friday.

Make no mistake: This is not cowardice; this is collaboration. Another example of the powerful choosing profit over even the most basic concerns of humanity. Real Vichy shit. 

American institutions have long been marked by a disingenuous doublespeak. On one hand, policies that perpetuate the oppression of capitalism, with all its attendant cruelties towards racial and gender minorities; on the other, a million feckless statements about how Gushers stands with Black Lives Matter, or Walmart might as well have marched at Selma. 

But now even the most milquetoast and ineffectual language against racism and homophobia is being written out of corporate statements everywhere. Without lawsuits or raids, the American ruling class has willingly shed its mask of compassion, revealing the cold calculations of capital that have always lain beneath. 

It was never going to be any different. In the final estimate, the Trumps and Musks of the world are just figureheads of the capitalist class that helms all of America’s most prominent businesses and institutions. Columbia, a perennial recruiting ground for all the worst this country has to offer, and a storied defender of Nazis in the face of brave student protestors was bound to use this more outwardly authoritarian administration to squash the parts of itself that were less beneficial to its market cap. 

We will not worm our way out of fascism by voting with our wallets, because our power as consumers comes from the crumbs our corporate overlords have seen fit to scrape over to our side of the table. The scale will always tip in their favor. We’re doomed if we keep appealing to capitalist power instead of building our own. It’s only our labor power, our numbers, and our very bodies that can make effective weapons in the fight.

And if not, well, maybe Katrina Armstrong will get a free Mercedes out of it. 

We have all learned to oppose genocide, stand up to oppression and condemn it as wrong. To be there for the people being smashed by the wrecking ball.

As a gesture of humanity, Bellissimo Pizzeria & Restaurant, a Port Washington eatery, hosted a Palestine Action Long Island (PALI) Coalition fundraiser to raise money for a Gaza soup kitchen on Feb. 2. Now, because the restaurant’s owners displayed basic decency, they’re facing nearly constant harassment and staring down the barrel at eviction.

So many of our neighbors have forgotten the meaning of compassion. In service to the Israeli colonial project, which requires at its most basic level the complete displacement and dehumanization of the Palestinian people, protesters berated the fundraiser attendees outside the restaurant. 

This was a fundraiser for a soup kitchen—not for guns, rockets or anything that harms others—just food. A soup kitchen in a place where Israel has weaponized starvation to further the genocide of Palestinians. These protestors stood firm against a pittance of relief for the victims of an artificially imposed famine. 

Unwilling to just make their case and leave it at that, like the bullies they are, the protestors spent the following weeks pressing their advantage. Sands Point Village Mayor Peter Forman piled on to the beleaguered business a few days after the fundraiser to score points with the people in his base whose concept of humanity does not extend to the indigenous people of Palestine.  

Emboldened by the display, Bellissimo Pizza’s landlords have issued an eviction notice that will take effect before the end of the month. The restaurant’s owners, who are themselves Muslim, now face losing everything they’ve built for standing against white supremacy and Zionism. 

As members of PALI, the Long Island Democratic Socialists of America feel it is imperative to set the record straight regarding the conflation of Judaism and Zionism. 

The notion that supporting Palestinians is antisemitic is a deliberate lie. From its inception over a century ago, colonialists explicitly designed this project to displace Palestinians and create a European state in the Middle East. In reality, tying the actions of a genocidal state like Israel to all Jewish people, so many of whom stand with Palestinians on the right side of history, is as vitriolic an act of antisemitism as any perpetrated since the Holocaust. 

Long Island has seen no shortage of Holocaust survivors speaking at schools and community events who repeated that evil triumphs when the good people do nothing, and that “never again” means never again for anyone. While daily Israeli bombs and bullets riddle Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, this willful neglect in the face of genocide gives our politicians and their counterparts in the colonial state the green light to keep on killing. 

This is not a remote issue. Long Island is the point of origin for many of the people who displace Palestinians from their homes under the so-called “law of return” granted to American Jews seeking to emigrate to occupied Palestinian territory. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which tells people it’s antisemitic when students protest genocide but not when Elon Musk does a Nazi salute, lives in Great Neck. 

Long Island is on the front lines in the battle against Zionist propaganda, and we are countering scores of organizations, including outright white supremacists, who seek to convince the public that criticizing Israel is equivalent to criticizing all Jewish people. 

It is the mission of PALI, LI DSA, and all of humanity, to stand against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians at every opportunity. In that unceasing commitment, in a place where almost no one else will say it, we commend Bellissimo Pizza for sacrificing everything to do what is right.

In February, we hosted Howard University Afro-American Studies Chair Michael Ralph and University of Chicago postgraduate anthropology researcher Maya Singhal to discuss their paper “Racial Capitalism.” They outlined a critique of the concept of racial capitalism that Cedric Robinson presented in his influential book Black Marxism, in its place offering Ralph’s framework of the Forensics of Capital that seeks to analyze the various bodily and identity factors that alter a worker’s perceived value to the capitalist class. 

In the process, the two discussed how factors like race impact the class struggle and the oft-misquoted axiom from CLR James that “the race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental [is] an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”

We followed up on that discussion the following week with a screening of the satirical classic Starship Troopers. The misunderstood masterpiece directed by Paul Verhoeven, who grew up with Nazis launching V2 rockets from the backyard of his home in occupied Amsterdam, serves as a potent warning of the power of propaganda and the glorification of violence and struggle against the “other” in fascist societies…. Nothing to see there…

The reading group continued its examination of foundational Marxist theory with a discussion on Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital, which outlines how capitalists generate profit by keeping the working class on the knife’s edge of slavery and survival, stealing every bit of the products of their labor that they can in the meantime. 

After that discussion, guest speaker Avery Dyer of the Revolutionary Communists of America led a presentation on the Revolutions of 1848. They explained what we can learn from the moment in history when liberalism went from a revolutionary ideology to a reactionary one. 

Later this month, on Mar. 19 and 26, we will review Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

Let’s learn together!

Since January, we have been collecting coats and donating them to Community Solidarity. Long Island DSA comrades and supporters have already collected and distributed over 65 coats at the Hempstead and Farmingville Community Solidarity mutual aid food shares.

On Feb. 8, we sponsored a willow weaving community event at The People’s Food Forest! Mamoun Nukumanu, an expert willow weaver and artist, showed us how to weave young, living willow trees into the bamboo dome structure on the site. As the young willows grow, they will assume the dome’s spherical shape. The dome will be a living centerpiece in the middle of the Food Forest. 

The People’s Food Forest is a permaculture farming project and community garden that donates all the food grown there to local community fridges. At the March GM, Long Island DSA reaffirmed our commitment to supporting The Food Forest in our shared social welfare missions by providing free food to a historically disadvantaged community. Please look out in our Mutual Aid spaces if you would like to get involved in our upcoming volunteer planting days at The Food Forest!

On Mar. 1 we held our second Mending Cafe! The goal of these events is for chapter comrades with no mending experience to learn from more experienced comrades. At these cafes we train on mending our clothing items, with the intention that once enough of us are skilled enough, we can then offer these services as a free mending clinic in our communities to help people save money by holding onto useful items longer and to also save these items from winding up in a landfill. Our third Mending Cafe will be in early April; additional details on the date and location will be announced in the Discord.

Every week, large numbers of Mutual Aid Working Group comrades volunteer at Community Solidarity’s food shares and coordinate our DSA-led bread collections, regularly donating massive bags of bread. 

Being a socialist means serving the people. We are called to engage with our communities as proud socialists, working to rebuild a sense of connection while addressing the immediate harms and alienation caused by capitalism. And when we build parallel systems of support, it highlights the failures of capitalism to address the basic needs of the people. 

Please let us know if you would like to get involved!

Democrats convened to complain once again that identity politics had barred them from political success. In a February strategy meeting, center-left group “Third Way” members raced to discover how Democrats could help even fewer Americans. Republicans meanwhile continue fighting the culture war with the bloodthirsty appetite of manic crusaders. 

What Democrats see as a problem with identity politics remains an issue with lacking any identity at all. Like a quiet kid bullied by the cool kids' table, Democrats are constantly maligned by a glut of sing-song rumors. Every time a furry goes to class in a fur-suit or a transgender person breathes in this country, Fox will run a seven day news cycle on how Democrats caused it. Democratic defense has been to chirp “did not!” from the corner of the class.

Meanwhile, Republicans make use of their power by engaging in identity politics. Nassau County Executive, Bruce Blakeman, signed an anti-trans executive order last month. This harmed the right for sports groups to decide their membership based on their standards. It’s an action sure to hurt a single-digit number of trans athletes in the county, dozens of their teammates, and waste the time of hundreds of women who will need to validate their gender with paperwork.

Taxpayer dollars support Victoria Lagreca in defending this order in court. Over the past several years, she claims that at least four North American athletes suffered harm in incidents involving transgender women in women's sports. Injuries? During sports games? Inconceivable.

But this is just one issue in a barrage of wasteful cultural expeditions, ranging from anti-DEI, anti-Critical Race Theory, immigrants eating cats, and marijuana making one violent! These fabricated concerns are the same.

This moment will be remembered as one event in a lineage of politicians inventing hysteria to seize power and combat imaginary threats. Democrats’ narcissistic obsession with their branding misses the point; Republicans’ goal is to sensationalize unwinnable ideological battles so they can present themselves as the protectors of common sense.

If Democrats accept Republican framing like they did with immigration, they won’t just lose a group of bleeding-heart activists. With fingers in every major social media outlet, Republicans are primed to instigate fear and demand control in ways Orwell could not have dreamt of. Dems need a counter-narrative and an engagement plan now, but they’re too busy cutting off their limbs to fit into a box already snuggly filled by Republicans.

The Democratic strategy needs to stop “virtue signaling” and start genuinely reflecting its values. It should prioritize discussions about housing, health care, and income. However, it needs to show strength. The Republican Party will interpret every concession as an admission of guilt and will leverage its influence to construct a narrative against the left. They will claim that they need power to protect Americans from left-wing physical, emotional, and spiritual attacks. If Democrats yield rather than dismantle that narrative, Americans will once again vote out of anger and fear, resulting in a loss for them.

Remember this: People are brainwashed every day, but they only need to be disillusioned once. Figure out what works and use it.

This toolkit seeks to provide information about unions, organizing and collective bargaining. Be sure to bookmark this great resource from the Worker Organizing Resource and Knowledge Center. 

• From the National Lawyers Guild - Assessing Risks in Supporting Immigrants

• From the Immigrant Defense Project - Know Your Rights (in multiple languages)  

  • KYR for patients and healthcare workers here

KYR for students here and specific guidance from NYC Public Schools here

Steering Green Transit