Worcester DSA

Join one of our chapter's September reading groups:

📰 "Union Fratricide" on the anticommunist push to kick UE out of GE in Massachusetts

📕 Chapter 4 of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩 by Frantz Fanon

Sign up for the location or Zoom:
https://worcdsa.org/rsvp

At Pride Worcester yesterday, we had almost 200 people sign up interested in the country's largest ✨and queerest✨ socialist organization!

Couldn't make it? You can still join us:
🌹 https://dsausa.org/join

Interested in DSA?

Come check out our chapter's table later today and tonight, from 3 to 8 pm, at the Pride Worcester Festival 🌈

We'll be on Franklin Street in downtown Worcester, near Chashu Ramen + Izakaya — and we've got more stickers!

Yesterday, we had a presence on the ground with DSA members from Chicago, the Midwest, and around the country to 𝗖𝗿𝗮𝘀𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘆💥 on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.

While Democrats had to wall themselves off behind lines of fencing and police batons, we hit the streets with a simple message:

A choice between genocide or genocide is not democracy, and we don't protect our rights by voting to genocide another people — Free Palestine! 🇵🇸

Democrats are the party of genocide and of rail-strikebreaking, record oil production, restarted student loan payments, dismantled COVID protections, the $7.25 minimum wage, Cuba strangulation, border crackdowns, and homeless sweeps and record police killings and budgets

We're in the country's largest socialist org to build an alternative to the parties of capitalism and imperialism

We thank Chicago DSA's contingent for hosting chapters from every part of the country

The DNC isn't done and neither are we

Join us in DSA:
https://dsausa.org/join

Join one of our chapter's August reading groups for a discussion of:

📕 Chapter 2 of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩 by Frantz Fanon

📰 "Why the US Working Class is Different" by Mike Davis

Sign up for the location or Zoom:
https://worcdsa.org/rsvp

Did you know Worcester DSA's Political Education Committee holds discussions of short and long readings every month?

📕⛓️🌍 Tomorrow we kick off our multi-week reading of Frantz Fanon's book The Wretched of the Earth with a first session that will discuss Chapter 1

📰⚙️⚒️ And on July 21, we're also holding a standalone discussion of the short reading "Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry" by William Z. Foster

Sign up for the location or link to join us in-person in Worcester or remotely on Zoom!
https://worcdsa.org/rsvp

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time to join the country's largest socialist organization✨

🌹 https://dsausa.org/join

🌹 We've spent the lead-up to May Day getting supplies to student encampments

✊🏽 Today we'll be with the Mass Nurses Association at Brigham and Women's

🍿 Friday night, May 3, we're screening a very relevant documentary on workers fighting U.S.-backed bloodshed

RSVP:
https://bit.ly/May3NaePasaran

Democrats let this bill pass unanimously in the Kansas Senate and boosted it to a ⅔ House supermajority

It requires ID for content "harmful to minors," including "homos*xuality"

Democrats don't protect us

Join DSA and fight back! 🌹🏳️‍⚧️
https://dsausa.org/join

We made the trek out to North Adams today to join Berkshires DSA (and Troy DSA!) in solidarity with the 120+ striking museum workers at MASS MoCA

We're proud to have UAW Region 9A members in DSA and to walk UAW Local 2110's picket line in the rain, hail, and cold 🪧🌹

Inside and outside, we helped disrupt today's bu****it propaganda session by an IOF special forces commander at Worcester State University

🇵🇸

Thank you to everyone at and in the Worcester St. Patrick's Day Parade who shared their support!

The Parade Committee doesn't allow socialists, but we still showed up for the cause of Ireland and Palestine — united and free from occupation and imposed starvation 🇮🇪🌹🇵🇸

Missed it? Watch Spectrum!

Following final ratification at our recent General Meeting, we're pleased to share our Reflection, Analysis, and Tasks for 2024, which cover:
📈 Development of the chapter,
🌹 Political conditions, and
📍 Goals and work for the year

https://worcesterdsa.org/rat

Congressman Jim McGovern (D) will talk hunger and human rights, then vote in support of the Zionist apartheid regime and cheer "Reelect Biden!" as he bombs Yemen to aid genocide

We see what Democrats say and what they do, and we need an alternative — that's why 60+ community, union, and DSA members rallied at McGovern's Worcester office on MLK Day to say "Hands off Yemen!" and "Free Palestine!" 🇵🇸

At today's Palestine Vigil in Worcester, we were honored to have a member of our chapter's elected leadership speak🕯️

We're the Democratic Socialists of America — with nearly 100,000 members nationwide — and here in Central Mass, we're proud to be in the fight for Palestinian liberation, joined today by comrades in the labor movement!

Here's an excerpt from our speech:

What about October 6, October 5, October 4? The violence did not start on October 7 — so what about every day of violent subjugation enforced on the Palestinian people before that day?

The oppressor normalizes their violence, makes it a fact of everyday life in their society so that violent resistance by the oppressed becomes disruptive, easy to recognize, and the target of criticism for all those who in fact do not want to change society.

But the subjugation, the domination, the oppression of one people by another is inherently violent. It is the oppressor who initiates violence, and it is only through the end of their oppression that violence can be brought to an end. In short, without justice, there can be no peace.
..

What we’re fighting for is a Free Palestine, from the river to the sea. That does not mean a rump second state in the West Bank, but rather it means a single democratic state, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, that recognizes Palestinians' right of return and equal humanity — which necessarily also means an end to the Zionist apartheid regime of Israel, which has been banishing and brutalizing Palestinians every day since the start of the Nakba in 1948.

Both political parties in this country — the Republicans and the Democrats — give cover and funding to Israel on our dime. Then they go on social media and the national news and call all of us anti-Semites for daring to question it. They call us that because they insist that the crimes of the Zionist apartheid regime somehow represent all Jews and because they insist that Jews could not possibly exist in Palestine without the existence of Israel.

These are lies, and we reject them. And so have thousands of anti-Zionist Jews, including in DSA, who have stood up against this cynical and dangerous rhetoric to say "No genocide in our name" and "Never again means never again for anyone."

In DSA we offer an alternative — we're the largest socialist organization in the country, and we're a political home for all people of conscience, for people of all races, and all faiths and none, who believe a better world is possible and who won't watch helplessly while this one burns.

So we mourn the dead, and we say ceasefire now, yes, of course, but we also say end apartheid, end the occupation, and ! 🌹🇵🇸

The Boston Globe contacted us on Friday to ask why we are "voicing defenses of or support for Hamas's attack on Israel."

We reject this framing and affirm our continued solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.

If you were to ask us on Juneteenth if we defend or support Nat Turner's rebellion and the Pottawatomie massacre, we would answer loudly and clearly that our support for the Black liberation struggle is unwavering.

And if on Indigenous Peoples' Day you insisted we perform condemnation of the siege of Springfield and "merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, s*xes and conditions," we'd simply condemn settler colonialism instead.

That dehumanizing and genocidal language taken from the Declaration of Independence might sound familiar to those in media and positions of power who have casually and callously made use of the dead since Oct 7 to whip up a lynch mob for the leveling and liquidation of Gaza.

There are people demanding a final example be made of the 2+ million forsaken human beings, half of them children, who for years have been blockaded, besieged, and bombarded and who the Israeli apartheid regime has cut off from electricity, food, water, and medical supplies.

We would never have asked Black South Africans to denounce or renounce uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and we are not going to lecture a people caged, brutalized, and left with no options.

Nelson Mandela, among those charged at the Rivonia trial for conspiring to commit violent revolution and acts of sabotage, said in 1964 as a founder of MK that "a government which uses force to maintain its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it."

Meanwhile, expressing their white supremacist worldview and identification with Israel, the South African government in 1978 stated the two regimes "have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Mandela was still serving a life sentence when an MK attack left over 200 casualties in Pretoria in 1983. He wrote of it that "our decision to take up arms had been so grave and reluctant," and "it was precisely because we knew that such incidents would occur."

Those who would somehow blame the oppressed for the oppressor's violence find common cause with Ronald Reagan, who declared in 1986 that "the calculated terror by elements of the African National Congress [is] designed to bring about further repression."

The United States still had Nelson Mandela on its terrorist watch list nearly 20 years after his eventual release from prison.

But in 2008, Congress passed by unanimous consent a bill, H.R. 5690, making an exception to the ban on entry to the U.S. for "[terrorist or criminal] activities [if] undertaken in association with the ANC in opposition to apartheid."

Nearly two decades after the end of the U.S.-backed apartheid regime, Mandela was now hailed in Washington as "a hero of the antiapartheid movement" and praised on the floor of the House of Representatives for waging "a war of liberation against the apartheid government."

Israel has no more right to exist than apartheid South Africa's fraternal twin Rhodesia — and one day, after Israel follows that regime into the dirt, maybe Congress can again pretend the U.S. always stood against apartheid and with the cause of Palestinian liberation.

Every day until that day, we stand with the Palestinians and with all people around the world who mourn the dead, who condemn the conditions of violence imposed by the oppressor that make violent resistance inevitable, and who call for a just peace.

So no blockade, bombing, banishment, or bloodbath in Gaza — but more than a ceasefire or return to the status quo, ending U.S. support for Israel, dismantling apartheid, decolonizing from the river to the sea, and recognizing Palestinians' right of return and equal humanity.

No justice, no peace! ✊🏼🇵🇸🌹

From the river to the sea, we unapologetically support Palestine's struggle for liberation from Zionist occupation and colonization.

We call for an end to U.S. support for the Israeli apartheid regime and a principled stand and accountability from our elected officials.

Israel has nuclear weapons. It's been armed to the teeth by the United States. And it seizes Palestinian land and property, restricts movement, and maintains its domination through detention, torture, and killings.

Palestinians are under threat, not the existence of Israel.

Palestinians cannot peacefully march as Israel responds with violence and massacres as in 2018.

They cannot boycott without Israel labeling it "economic terrorism."

And they cannot appeal to international institutions, which Israel and its U.S. patron ignore and impede.

Israel takes away all other options from the colonized and then denounces the Palestinians for turning to armed struggle.

Martin Luther King Jr. said "A riot is the language of the unheard."

Kwame Ture, another of this country's great socialists, put it even better:

"The most perturbing question for the liberal is the question of violence. The liberal's initial reaction to violence is to try to convince the oppressed that violence is an incorrect tactic, that violence will not work, that violence never accomplishes anything.

"The Europeans took America through violence and through violence they established the most powerful country in the world. Through violence they maintain the most powerful country in the world. It is absolutely absurd for one to say that violence never accomplishes anything."

"Most societies in the West are not opposed to violence. The oppressor is only opposed to violence when the oppressed talks about using violence against the oppressor. Then the question of violence is raised as the incorrect means to attain one's ends."

"Is it not violent for a child to go to bed hungry in the richest country in the world? I think that is violent. But that type of violence is so institutionalized that it becomes a part of our way of life… And that again is because the oppressor makes his violence a part of the functioning society. But the violence of the oppressed becomes disruptive. It is disruptive to the ruling circles of a given society. And because it is disruptive it is therefore very easy to recognize, and therefore it becomes the target of all those who in fact do not want to change the society."

Today we talked to customers about SBWorkersUnited's union-busting petition

Some responses:
☕ "I worked at Starbucks!"
🏗️ "I'm IUOE; I'm signing."
🤔 "If it's so bad why stay?"

We can make it better! We organize for us and those after us.

This person signed!