Long Island Red Rose

January was a busy month for the newly minted Political Education Working Group. We’ve launched both a lecture series and a discussion series on important socialist literature and films. 

We hosted a viewing and discussion for the classic film The Battle of Algiers, which chronicles the titular struggle in the Algerian Revolution against French colonialism. The film’s commitment to realism and its almost documentary-like approach to chronicling the battle (going so far as to fill its cast with people who lived through it) has made it a crucial document for revolutionary groups across the planet for the last seven decades.  

The following week, we hosted our first reading group to discuss The Communist Manifesto, touching on its key concepts to better understand the fundamentals of socialism. Please find our slides on the pamphlet and its key findings here. 

We followed up on The Communist Manifesto at the end of the month with a discussion on Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Fredrich Engles. In our presentation and discourse, we examined how Engels’ often underappreciated work laid many of the foundations for later theory and provided us with some early working models of dialectical materialism in action. 

In addition to our reading program, we also hosted our first lecture to reinforce some of these same topics. Guest speaker and author Christian Alfonso volunteered his time with our chapter to lay out the historical and philosophical roots of dialectics and dialectical materialism. As anyone who’s ever tried to read Hegel knows, it’s really helpful to have someone there to explain things. 

We plan on continuing our exploration of theory this coming month with some of Vladimir Lenin’s most influential work. While these foundational attempts at establishing socialism are essential for informing everything that comes later, one of the resounding lessons of these same theorists is that socialists must plot their movements under the unique social and political conditions of their environment. Before too long, we hope to shine a light on American socialism in all its varied expressions, particularly writers like W.E.B. DuBois and revolutionaries like Huey Newton and Angela Davis.

We study these works of the past to provide ourselves with a framework for how to change the future. As Fred Hampton once noted, without political education, the working class can never aspire to true self-determination to shape its fate and the course of humanity. While boots on the ground doing the work are indispensable, that work needs to be informed with the wisdom of generations of socialists who have struggled and, in many cases, solved some of the same problems we face today. 

Former President Joe Biden briefly removed Cuba from the U.S. State Sponsor of Terrorism list on Jan. 14, but newly inaugurated President Donald Trump reinstated the designation just days later, marking the second time he has reversed efforts to ease sanctions on the country.  

Biden sought to lift financial restrictions and suspend parts of the Helms-Burton Act, but Trump quickly restored the previous policies. Cuba was first designated as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1982. Former President Barack Obama removed it from the list in 2015, only for Trump to reinstate the designation in 2021.  

Biden’s short-lived reversal had little economic impact due to existing sanctions, but reinstating the designation maintains financial restrictions, limits exports and allows lawsuits against Cuba. Biden had also revoked a 2017 Trump policy restricting financial dealings with Cuban military-linked entities, but Trump’s reversal restored those restrictions.  

With Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a vocal critic of Cuba, now in office, the future of U.S.-Cuba relations remains uncertain.

After more than 47,000 Palestinian deaths and 15 months of continuous, American-paid war crimes, a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine is underway.

The ceasefire was announced on Jan. 15 and took effect four days later after months of negotiations led by the United States, Qatar, and Egypt. It is based on a proposal introduced by former U.S. President Joe Biden in May 2024.

The agreement aims to end the fighting and secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The deal comprises three stages:

• Stage one: A 42-day ceasefire will begin. Hamas will release 33 hostages, including women, children, elderly men, and the sick. In exchange, Israel will free about 1,900 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli forces will withdraw from populated areas, allowing displaced Palestinians to return. Hundreds of aid trucks will enter Gaza daily. Israeli troops will remain in border areas but leave the Netzarim Corridor.

• Stage two: After 16 days, negotiations for a permanent ceasefire will begin. All remaining living hostages will be exchanged for additional Palestinian prisoners. Israel will fully withdraw from Gaza.

• Stage three: The bodies of deceased hostages will be returned, and long-term reconstruction efforts in Gaza will begin.

Yet, similar to Lebanon, Israel has circumvented this ceasefire agreement, too.

Despite all of this, Trump has suggested urging Jordan and Egypt to take in Gaza’s displaced population. He said the relocation of Gaza’s 2.3 million people could be temporary or permanent.  

In response, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority, and the Arab League issued a joint statement rejecting the idea. They warned it could destabilize the region, escalate the conflict, and harm peace efforts.

We’ve long heard the axiom from the right that government is run best when it’s run like a business. The long arms of capital have enveloped more and more public resources for decades. Now, with the ascendancy of Trump in his second term, and the prominence of the tech and business figures he has loosed on the executive branch’s departments, that merger of corporate power and state power in America is more complete than ever.

We have a word for that: it’s Fascism. Mussolini said so himself.

While socialists have long understood that the interests of capitalism are incompatible with the interests of humanity, the speed at which the mask of civil discourse has come off the entire American ruling class is astonishing. Hollow platitudes about diversity from the FBI and Facebook have always meant little in the face of their track records of harming oppressed peoples around the world, but the fact that so many public and private institutions are proudly discarding even the hollow platitudes is signalling the rise of a more brazen evil in the halls of power.

The idea that fascism is capitalism in decay goes back almost a hundred years. In Discourse on Colonialism Aime Césaire laid out the case that the imperialist states of Europe birthed fascism in the mines and fields of Africa and Asia. Colonialism acclimated the citizens of the imperial core to brutality, and fascism merely brought that brutality home: 

“Each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated," all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind-it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices.”

It is then no coincidence that the United States should experience this moment of barbarism when the markets are threatened. After decades of meting out oppression in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Haiti and Libya, the tactics employed to maintain the American empire overseas are more and more finding themselves in use at home. The twin savageries of violent repression and hyper privatization are old and practiced. 

The nature of American society means the odium of this moment will be visited first and most brutally on the most vulnerable people in the country. We’re seeing it already with mass deportations and the dehumanization of trans people. It’s no shock that the leaders of the same Tesla that stoked the Congo Civil War and Facebook that aided the Rohingya Genocide would lead the charge in America. And in tandem with the oligarchs bending Trump’s ear, hospitals, newspapers, schools, and every other institutional pillar of our supposedly enlightened liberal society are falling over themselves to give their neighbors up to the dogs. They’ll run the gamut until the jackboots are at your door, too. 

And never forget that all of this started under the Democrats. The 2020 election, hell, 2020 in general, was a moment in time where mass unrest and solidarity could have pushed back the tide of right populism and capitalist abuse until the thought of days like these became fantasy. Joe Biden and his ilk spent four years chipping away at that solidarity, through pushing and normalizing COVID, eugenics, transphobia, genocide, and brutal retaliation from government and private forces against anyone who dared stand up for the Palestinian people. The tools of this new presidency were forged by Democrats. They could have stopped all of it; hell, they could have done nothing and let us stop it. They did not, because they do not want to. Because their pockets will grow just as fat as anybody’s.

No human being deserves to live life with a boot on their neck, and we must not accept it pressing down on anybody. We have numbers and righteous anger, and we must fight like hell to leverage them for the liberation of all humankind. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to do it ourselves. 

After years of fear mongering over Donald Trump’s existential threat to American democracy, Joe Biden’s final act as president was to warmly welcome the man into the White House on Inauguration Day. 

Perhaps he was only in it for the decorum. It’s well known that Biden obsesses over his legacy, striving to fit his public image as close to something out of The West Wing as possible. But he’s already locked in his image to his progeny. 

Joe Biden will go down in history as the president who damned us all.

There’s two ways to view Biden’s four years in office: one unflattering, the other worse. The kindest read that resembles reality is that Biden has been a shell of his old self for a long time. After years of press restriction and underreporting, stories citing evidence of Biden’s mental decline as far back as the 2020 campaign season have been coming out routinely. With an emperor that had no clothes, and a court that could not admit the emperor had no clothes, the executive branch and the Democratic Party as a whole were left to flounder as their leader dragged on everything from political appointments to the basic conventions of spoken English.

This perspective is pitiable, but ultimately more flattering than the truth. Biden’s horrendous record and his role in the nation’s decline cannot be explained without accounting for the role of malice. Biden as a hateful, spiteful egomaniac is far more consistent with the record of his decades-long career in power. His presidency was no aberration. This is the Biden who wrote the Crime Bill that supercharged the prison industrial complex. The Biden who praises segregationists. The Biden who took millions more from AIPAC over his career than any other politician.

However dim the lights have been, he is still best understood as this century’s James Buchannan: a man with the ability to stop unprecedented crises from coming to pass who simply did not want to. 

Biden’s impact is clear. At a time when a decisive leader was needed more than ever to back wildly popular measures to fight climate change, end genocide, protect trans people, and push back against the capitalist capture and debasement of everything that makes life worth living, Biden gave us none of that. His victories on the labor front will be made useless in mere months when the NLRB is reduced to a rubber stamp for business interests or obliterated entirely. 

Biden’s presidency was an unmitigated disaster for the American people. There are a number of ways that his four years seem even worse than Trump’s first term. More deportations than Trump, more COVID deaths than Trump, more police killings. He made us all complicit in genocide by using taxpayer money to fund the bombing of Palestine. He shrugged off the rising threat of fascist institutional capture and trans genocide like a man who couldn’t give any less of a shit.

Biden’s presidency may have been worse than Trump’s first term. It will certainly not be worse than the full-throated fascist resurgence his hubris and malice have wrought for us all. 

Maybe calling him the 21st century’s James Buchanan was letting him off too easily. He’s really the 21st century’s Paul von Hindenburg. The only thing that can stop an American reich from coming is a concerted revolutionary effort from the very people Biden despised more than the wolves he just let into the hen house.

In quite possibly the funniest sequence of events in recent memory, the Democrats and Republicans briefly banned TikTok in the United States.

Out of a combination of anger that the app was being used by an entire generation to share pro-Palestinian content coupled with jingoistic saber-rattling towards the People’s Republic of China and the boogeyman of the Communist Party of China… only for the number one app in the app store the week of the ban to become Red Note, aka Xiaohongshu, literally “Little Red Book” in Mandarin.  

For the uninitiated, in the West, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung is referred to as the “Little Red Book."From a practical standpoint, Xiaohongshu functions like a combination of TikTok and Instagram, the text translate button was only added in the first days of the app's surging popularity, and this marks the first time that Western and Chinese internet users are interacting en masse on the same social media platform. 

Inadvertently made possible by the blundering bipartisanship of the two fascist American political parties, this unprecedented digital exchange happening on Xiaohongshu is a watershed moment, eroding long-internalized Western chauvinism and Sinophobia in Americans, and opening the eyes of Chinese internet users to the capitalistic exploitation and immiseration of average Americans. 

For decades, Western media and propaganda have presented China through a lens of suspicion, otherness, and red scare fear-mongering. However, Xioahongshu's rise enables Western users to directly engage with Chinese people for the first time, thereby dispelling chauvinistic myths and humanizing a people Americans are propagandized to fear. 

Viral videos on the app showcase everyday life in China, including cities and infrastructure decades more advanced than ours (the largest and most advanced high-speed rail in the world), affordable housing/apartment tours (with over 90% home ownership in China), cheap groceries, and healthcare that is affordable (Luigi is very popular among Chinese netizens on Xiaohongshu). 

The American “TikTok Refugees” on the app, who work long hours at multiple jobs only to be unable to afford essential medical care, are having their eyes opened to the exploitative nature of capitalism. The more they interact with Chinese users, the more they are struck by the fact it doesn’t need to be like this. 

It never needed to be like this. In stark and vivid reality, people are seeing social safety nets, worker’s rights, and economic policies that though imperfect come far closer to the fabled “American Dream” we are all marketed from birth than the actual American material reality of today. For the first time, many Americans are confronting the uncomfortable truth that their economic system prioritizes profit over people, and that alternatives already exist in the world. 

It is unclear if Westerners will remain on Xiaohongshu, but more important than just one social media app the past few weeks have exposed a crack in the walls of Western propaganda that keeps Americans isolated from China. For some, this has been a moment of global solidarity and introspection, bridging cultural divides and exposing flaws in capitalism. 

This has empowered some Americans for the first time to imagine a world where cooperation and the good of the many take precedence over competition, exploitation, and the hoarding of enormous wealth in the hands of the few. This is a moment that may do more than just change how Americans post online; it may fundamentally change how Americans think. It is very simply much harder to hate someone when you realize that they have the same basic needs and wants as you; at the end of the day we all just want the necessities of life, some hours of work, more hours of leisure, and a better life for our families. 

So our enemy isn’t the Chinese Xiaohongshu poster showing us their favorite breakfast spot, that isn’t our oppressor; our oppressor is the billionaire oligarchs right here in our own damn country standing on the neck of the working class here.

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 Transitions (Labor Notes)

Monday, February 3, 2025, 8–9:30 p.m. ET / 5–6:30 p.m. PT

There is no worker that isn't touched by the climate we live in; and so, there is no workplace campaign that isn't climate related. In this new online workshop from Labor Notes, you’ll hear from rank-and-file workers who organized collective action for better jobs and a livable climate. Register here.

Rutgers LEARN New Media and Union Organizing 

Wednesdays, February 5–March 12, 2025, 6–9 p.m. ET / 3–6 p.m. PT

Rutgers LEARN is offering a new class on New Media and Union Organizing, as part of their Union Leadership Academy. All classes are online, and the cost is $100 for a six-week course. Anyone actively trying to organize their union or supporting others is welcome! Rutgers offers two classes per semester. The next class is on strategic research. Register here.

Labor Research & Action Network 2025 Conference Call for Proposals! 

Proposal submissions are due by Friday, February 21, 2025

LRAN 2025 Conference, “Rebellious Hope: Worker Power, Political Education, & Global Solidarity,” June 9–10, 2025, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. LRAN invites participants from universities, unions, worker centers, policy organizations, and others involved in the work of labor justice to submit proposals for this year’s conference. Click here 

We Are the Union Reading Group Launch with Eric Blanc, Kim Kelly, and Moe Mills

Monday, March 3, 2025, 8:30 p.m. ET / 5:30 p.m. PT

Launch event for a national and international reading group on the book We Are the Union, featuring a discussion with its author Eric Blanc, Labor writer Kim Kelly, and Moe Mills of Starbucks Workers United. All participants in the study group will receive a 50% discount on the book. Further details on the format, discussion dates, and receiving discounted copies will be provided to all those who sign up for the study group launch. Note: Participants are not expected to have started reading the book by March 3. Register here!

March!

Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing: an EWOC Training on How to Unite and Win 

Sundays, March 9–30, 2024, 1–2:30 p.m. ET / 10–11:30 a.m. PT

In four 90-minute weekly sessions, you will learn how to approach your co-workers, build a team of organizers among them, and develop a campaign. You will meet other workers who are organizing and learn helpful tools, practices, and principles for winning workplace improvements and getting a democratic voice over your working conditions. We also welcome those who are interested in joining EWOC as a volunteer and supporting other organizing workers! Space is limited to 120 participants, so register here today!