A remarkable campaign. Take notes!
"Unlike Democratic political clubs or nonprofit organizations, NYC-DSA endorsed in races early, kicking off field operations in November for the late-June primary. This gave organizers the time to build a base of support within the districts, and to connect the state races to a national platform: Bernie Sanders was still in the race for president, advocating for the same issues the DSA for the Many slate was fighting for.
As DSA members campaigned nationally for Bernie through an independent expenditure, NYC-DSA connected local issues to the Sanders platform. When knocking on doors in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for example, volunteers talked about both Mitaynes’s and Sanders’s fight for universal rent control. Not only did linking our slate to Bernie grow in-district support and volunteer energy, but the national scope of the Democratic Primary and the scale of Sanders’s second presidential campaign lent credibility to our local socialist movement."
"Throughout the election cycle, the “DSA for the Many” slate made it clear that volunteers and supporters were growing a movement, not just supporting a few candidates. Even when deployed through electoral campaigns, our organizing was not just about winning elections; we are focused on broader goals."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/nyc-dsa-slate-democratic-socialists-america/
"Unlike Democratic political clubs or nonprofit organizations, NYC-DSA endorsed in races early, kicking off field operations in November for the late-June primary. This gave organizers the time to build a base of support within the districts, and to connect the state races to a national platform: Bernie Sanders was still in the race for president, advocating for the same issues the DSA for the Many slate was fighting for.
As DSA members campaigned nationally for Bernie through an independent expenditure, NYC-DSA connected local issues to the Sanders platform. When knocking on doors in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for example, volunteers talked about both Mitaynes’s and Sanders’s fight for universal rent control. Not only did linking our slate to Bernie grow in-district support and volunteer energy, but the national scope of the Democratic Primary and the scale of Sanders’s second presidential campaign lent credibility to our local socialist movement."
"Throughout the election cycle, the “DSA for the Many” slate made it clear that volunteers and supporters were growing a movement, not just supporting a few candidates. Even when deployed through electoral campaigns, our organizing was not just about winning elections; we are focused on broader goals."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/nyc-dsa-slate-democratic-socialists-america/
Jacobinmag
New York’s Successful Socialist Slate Shows the Left Should Think Big
In New York City, the Democratic Socialists of America ran a five-candidate slate for state office — and won across the board. The campaign’s overwhelming success points to a model of radical electoral organizing in the wake of Bernie Sanders.
"In one experiment, researcher Paul Piff rigged a game of Monopoly so that some randomly determined players started the game with more money. When the privileged players inevitably won, Piff asked them why they believed they had been successful. The winners answered with descriptions of their clever property purchases, completely forgetting the initial random coin toss that determined who began the game with an advantage. This phenomenon—believing that those on top deserve to be there, and those on the bottom likewise deserve their place—is called Just-World Fallacy. The conclusions we draw about the world around us are intrinsically flawed by our silent biases, always ready to shield us from the truth that we, too, might be subject to forces outside our control. "
currentaffairs.org/2020/08/work-hard-and-get-rich-or-more-likely-die-trying/
currentaffairs.org/2020/08/work-hard-and-get-rich-or-more-likely-die-trying/
Current Affairs
Work Hard and Get Rich (Or More Likely, Die Trying) ❧ Current Affairs
<p>What do we, rewired by capitalist urgency, have in common with the beaver? </p>
"It’s not just human services that are worse off through privatization. When basic needs and infrastructure like water, roads, and public transport are handed to private firms, services decline while prices rise and administration becomes more complex.
By enriching business, privatization creates a feedback loop: attracted by the guaranteed profit of natural monopolies, the investment and superannuation funds that own these assets are then empowered to lobby for more “investible products,” in order to secure further low-risk, reliable income.
The result is extravagant waste.
[...] Privatization and austerity are “zombie economics” — dead ideas that still walk among us. Far from being disruptive, innovative, and efficient, neoliberalism handed commonly owned social services over to a private bureaucracy of managers, duly protected by commercial-in-confidence laws, national security laws, and intellectual property."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/australia-victoria-coronavirus-privatization/
By enriching business, privatization creates a feedback loop: attracted by the guaranteed profit of natural monopolies, the investment and superannuation funds that own these assets are then empowered to lobby for more “investible products,” in order to secure further low-risk, reliable income.
The result is extravagant waste.
[...] Privatization and austerity are “zombie economics” — dead ideas that still walk among us. Far from being disruptive, innovative, and efficient, neoliberalism handed commonly owned social services over to a private bureaucracy of managers, duly protected by commercial-in-confidence laws, national security laws, and intellectual property."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/australia-victoria-coronavirus-privatization/
Jacobinmag
In Australia, COVID-19 Has Exposed a Litany of Privatization Disasters
The coronavirus pandemic has preyed on weaknesses created by decades of austerity, confirming what socialists have consistently argued: privatization was a disaster.
Forwarded from SolarPunk
1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)
Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)
Appropriate technology
Art Nouveau
Hayao Miyazaki
Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world
High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs
Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.
Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.
In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.
Solarpunk:
is diverse
has room for spirituality and science to coexist
is beautiful
can happen. Now
The Solarpunk Community
Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)
Appropriate technology
Art Nouveau
Hayao Miyazaki
Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world
High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs
Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.
Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.
In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.
Solarpunk:
is diverse
has room for spirituality and science to coexist
is beautiful
can happen. Now
The Solarpunk Community
Forwarded from SolarPunk
"The demand for universal health care, its crucial importance all the more revealed through the pandemic, seems an obvious focal point."
"To that goal three demands, each strategically related to the new openings posed above, might be added.
One is the demand for a onetime emergency wealth tax. This is an unashamedly populist demand, intended to appeal to a broad swath of the population without addressing the underlying issues of democratic economic control.
A second is economic conversion, an unashamedly radical demand that moves beyond the generalities of the Green New Deal and the vagueness of a “just transition” to engage workers in struggles that link the maintenance of a livable planet to the democratically planned restructuring of jobs and the economy.
Third, we need a push for greater unionization. The promise here lies not only in shifting the balance of power between groups of workers and their employers, but in unleashing a long-awaited union upsurge with the potential to transform a working class currently fragmented and demoralized into a coherent social agent capable of winning and sustaining social change."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/politics-class-consciousness/
"To that goal three demands, each strategically related to the new openings posed above, might be added.
One is the demand for a onetime emergency wealth tax. This is an unashamedly populist demand, intended to appeal to a broad swath of the population without addressing the underlying issues of democratic economic control.
A second is economic conversion, an unashamedly radical demand that moves beyond the generalities of the Green New Deal and the vagueness of a “just transition” to engage workers in struggles that link the maintenance of a livable planet to the democratically planned restructuring of jobs and the economy.
Third, we need a push for greater unionization. The promise here lies not only in shifting the balance of power between groups of workers and their employers, but in unleashing a long-awaited union upsurge with the potential to transform a working class currently fragmented and demoralized into a coherent social agent capable of winning and sustaining social change."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/politics-class-consciousness/
Jacobinmag
We Need a Politics That Is Not Only Class-Focused, but Class-Rooted
It’s not enough to make class the subject of our politics. We need to develop our political demands from a ferment that is rooted in class organizing and union density.