Impressions is where ROC DSA members can share what they’re reading, listening to, viewing, or otherwise experiencing. If you have two hundred words about the culture at large you’d like to share with your comrades, submit to Rich J on Slack or to the Red Star at steering@rocdsa.org.
History from Below
Isabella D read: A People’s History of the United States (1980), by Howard Zinn
A People’s History of the United States should be required reading not just for those on the left, but for all Americans. Zinn delivers a clear, incisive chronicle of US history from the conventionally neglected perspective of the marginalized working class – the indentured servants, immigrants, indigenous peoples, and laborers that generate a “quiet revolution.” Its accessible dialectics serve as a springboard for inchoate Marxists, or even the mere curious, to pursue alternative historical and theoretical analyses in greater depth. Zinn highlights the masses as agents of change, challenging patriotic narratives that attribute history primarily to great individuals (e.g., US presidents).
This sobering account of America’s birth and development brings readers to an uncomfortable conclusion: our western liberal democracy that we’ve held so dear is a farce. In the name of capital and corporate interests, the United States bludgeons its dissidents with “law and order” while simultaneously safeguarding its hegemony through military occupations, global destabilization, and strangling neoliberalism. A People’s History expertly unravels the lies so commonly found in our history textbooks, instilling a necessary and righteous outrage in readers as they glean the rapacity and hypocrisy of the American government since its inception.
Never Change, Socialist Parties …
Greg B read: The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912 by Ira Kipins
I picked up this history of the Socialist Party of the United States for free and didn’t finish it, but it was still fascinating. This history was written in 1955, and Kipins’ main thesis is that the Socialist Party failed because the “right-wing” betrayed the party’s left and moved away from its socialist values. He cites writings from Victor Berger and others on the right who don’t believe socialism will come from the working class, or his belief that the Democratic and Republican Parties are inevitably headed towards socialism. I agree with these critiques of the party’s right, but Kipins’ bias reads on almost every page. Kipins also criticizes the party for its racism, sexism, and xenophobia, again, with most of the blame clearly falling on the party’s right. The book also made me more hopeful about DSA, since it’s filled with embarrassing stories of segments of the party in death fights over the name of the organization, or factions demanding all resources go into “colonizing” the western US to create socialist state governments.
Learning from Our Mistakes
Greg L-H read: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (2023), by Vincent Bevins
The 2010s saw massive street protests sweep the globe, from the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street in the U.S., Euromaidan in Ukraine, Movimento Passe Livre in Brazil, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, and more. These actions represented spontaneous uprisings, organized online with a smorgasboard of demands and rarely attached to a political party. Many purposely adopted a horizontalist structure, rejecting leadership and hierarchy in the name of radical participatory democracy. In If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (2023), journalist Vincent Bevins documents these massive eruptions. His story weaves one location with the next in much the same way online platforms allowed cultural signifiers to jump from the streets of one protest to take meaning elsewhere. Through Bevins’s coverage we come to understand power and leverage (who holds it, and how it is effectively wielded), and learn why these movements failed to achieve their ambitious goals. The book is essential reading for socialist organizers, shaping our theory of change and helping to understand one cannot merely “knock the players off the stage” without a plan for what comes after.
Punks Against ICE
Abigail J went to: Pinkshift: Saccharine 5 Year Anniversary Tour
On Sunday August 23rd, myself and a couple other comrades took a trip out to Buffalo to see the punk band Pinkshift. We stopped in at the beloved Burning Books (where I scored a copy of the book Breaking Free, an official Adventures of Tintin book promoting the anti-capitalist movements and riots of 1980’s UK), and got ramen before heading to the show.
While we missed the first opener, we were just in time for the second, the NJ-based punk band Pollyanna. With just enough death-metal-style screaming to keep it unpredictable, the energy from this band was outstanding, especially the lead singer/guitarist who sported a neon pink mullet and an equally bright pink “faggot” baseball jersey. Suffice to say, I highly enjoyed them.
Before Pinkshift actually came on, a member of Our City Action Buffalo came on stage to decry the ICE staging center literally one block away and was met with cheers from the crowd. (Where’s ROC DSA’s outreach to the local punk scene?) Pinkshift themselves were excellent, opening with the anti-patriarchal Burn the Witch, and bringing high energy all evening. As someone who hasn’t been to many punk shows at all (and none since transitioning), it was a very cathartic evening, to be in a room full of queers and leftists dancing and shouting along with the music. If you want to be one of the coolest, come out to the next show with us!