USA/Canada

The 2021 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Convention was held online from 30 July to 8 August. With 94,000 members — it has grown fast since 2015 — the DSA is the largest socialist organisation in the USA since the Socialist Party led by Eugene Debs at the beginning of the 20th century. We covered the 2019 Convention at bit.ly/dsa-2019. Since the organisation was effectively refounded in 2016, DSA members are now typically in their twenties or thirties rather than fifties and sixties. Around 10,000 DSA members belong to a union, with a concentration in education and public sector unions...

Workers' Liberty published this on 14 September 2001. Against the barbarism of the New York massacre, we fight for socialism To use civilian planes, full of people, to attack buildings full of civilians, mostly ordinary workers, is a crime against humanity, whatever the supposed aims. What cause could the hijackers have been serving when they massacre thousands of workers in New York? Not "anti-imperialism" in any rational sense - whatever anyone may pretend or imagine - but only rage against the modern world. Only on the basis of a dehumanised, backward-looking world-view could they have...

The strictest anti-abortion law in the US went into effect on 1 September after the US Supreme Court let the 31 August deadline to block it pass, after an emergency appeal. The new law in Texas allows any private citizen to sue anyone deemed to have helped a woman get an abortion against the law, although not the patient themselves. Campaigners are worried this will empower anti-choice reactionaries to make harassing lawsuits, paralysing the few abortion clinics still open, in the state. The US Justice Department said that it will not tolerate violence against anyone seeking abortion services...

Much of what Eric Lee writes for Solidarity is very good, such as last month’s article on the LGBTI movement’s struggle in Georgia, but his contributions on US politics sit very strangely on the pages of a revolutionary socialist publication. Lots of good articles for the price of a bit of rubbish every so often isn’t an awful deal, but it shouldn’t go unchallenged. In his obituary (Solidarity 603) for American union bureaucrat Richard Trumka, he laments that this death received less coverage in the British press than that of “Barry the barred owl”. Thankfully the Morning Star has answered Lee...

You will no doubt be familiar with the expression “between a rock and a hard place”. That phrase, apparently, has its origins in labour history. According to one online source, “the phrase originated in America in the early 1900s to describe a dispute between copper miners and the mining companies in Bisbee, Arizona”. Maybe. It’s a modern take on the myth of Scylla and Charybdis, described by Homer as two immortal and irresistible monsters who controlled the narrow waters through which Odysseus needed to pass. I thought about Scylla and Charybdis the other day while I listened to a relative in...

Dan La Botz is a US socialist active in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Solidarity. He is a co-editor of the independent socialist journal New Politics, and a supporter of the Internationalism from Below initiative. He spoke to Daniel Randall of Workers' Liberty about debates in and around the DSA, especially about what approach the organisation should take to international issues. What follows is an edited transcript. This interview was conducted prior to voting on resolutions at the DSA's recent convention. At that convention, a resolution broadly representing the “campist”...

Last Friday (8 August), the BBC News website ran a story with this headline: “A beloved owl who became a well-known resident in New York’s Central Park has died.” The story went on to say that “Barry the barred owl was flying low in search of a meal when it collided with one of the park’s maintenance trucks on Friday morning.” On the previous evening, it was announced by the majority leader in the US Senate, Democrat Charles Schumer of New York, that Richard Trumka had suddenly passed away at the age of 72. Trumka was the president of the AFL-CIO, the main national trade union centre in the...

Millions of Americans who loathe Donald Trump are giving up on the chances that he’ll be prosecuted for anything, despite the numerous crimes he committed before, during and after his term in office. The charges of tax fraud against the Trump Organisation for example have so far only ensnared the hired help, with none stuck on Trump himself. Although around 600 of his followers have been charged with participating in what has become known as the 6 January insurrection, its chief instigator remains untouched. If Joe Biden and others were correct in saying that the invasion of the US Congress...

In 1909, as now, right-wing politicians in the USA were pushing new voter-suppression laws; and at that time vast voter suppression was already routine, against African-Americans in the Southern states. The Socialist Party was still weak (2.8% of the poll in the 1908 presidential election), as was the US union movement, but the SP discussed the threatened block to political advance by electoral means as did the much stronger German Social Democratic Party at the same time. This was the contribution (International Socialist Review, October 1909) by James Connolly, active in the USA between 1903...

On Friday 31 July the US Congress had failed to extend its about-to-expire evictions ban, and Joe Biden said there was nothing he could do. Then left-wing Missouri congresswoman Cori Bush galvanised protests by camping out on the Capitol steps. She was widely attacked, and not just on the right. A liberal newspaper in her city, St Louis, sneered that Bush “clearly misunderstands the complicated process” involved. The protests won. On 3 August the Biden administration introduced a new ban, until at least 3 October. Bush, who is from a poor background and worked as a nurse until her election...