Our organizing efforts this year have activated existing members and brought new ones into the fold. Here’s to continuing this momentum through the second half of 2024!
Month: May 2024
Building Playgrounds for the Rich and Jails for the Poor
Who says that government can’t give us nice things? Just this week, Monroe County approved $4.3 million in tax exemptions for the latest sports fad, Topgolf, to come to CityGate. While its proponents tout jobs, tourism, and reinvestment in the local economy, without a doubt there exist more beneficial means of achieving these goals. This is just the latest insult by a political class demonstrating who they work for—not the working class, but the idle rich.
We Bend the Arc by our Collective Effort
Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but it requires our collective effort. So, I urge you: do what you can. Organize, advocate, educate, support those activists on the ground, and center Palestinians in their struggle for freedom.
Review: The Exhausted of the Earth
For socialist organizers, the book sets the task of finding ways to speak to these “Exhausted,” and to direct their spontaneous actions toward constructive ends. To quote Fanon, “things must be explained to them; the people must see where they are going, and how they are to get there.” Chaudhary’s The Exhausted of the Earth provides us a valuable explanation.
Transparency & The Reservoir
Our city has a transparency problem. While we have several amazing projects by movement journalists, broadly our news media avoids controversial topics, focusing on journalistic work which advertises this city as a good place to drive to. What that leads to is a shockingly petty and personalistic political space, where politics is often a matter of loyalty or disdain for particular political figures, rather than anything substantial. It also leads to the vast majority of the people in this city not understanding that the issues they face are political issues which they can change. The image we basically get is of a city where nothing happens, or at least nothing that any one person can affect.
Rochester Food Sovereignty: Grow Your Own Food and Buy from Local Farmers
To disentangle your diet from the tentacles of the global chemical-industrial food system, you can practice what world peasants of La Via Campesina call food sovereignty. You can grow at least some of your own food and buy the rest from area farms or from stores that buy from them. Buying from a farm may be less convenient than shopping at a grocery, but we will not shift from corporate capitalism to a solidarity economy until we all help make it happen.