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Comrade,

December

“Socialism is the people. If you're afraid of socialism, you're afraid of yourself.”

― Fred Hampton

Holiday Toy Drive

Our chapter comrades and supporters stepped up for children in need this holiday season! Together, we collected over 200 toys and donated them to Community Solidarity.

Being a socialist means serving the people. It calls us to engage with our communities as proud socialists, working to rebuild a sense of connection while addressing the immediate harms and alienation caused by capitalism.

Long Island DSA members distributed these toys at the Farmingville, Hempstead, and Huntington Community Solidarity mutual aid food shares during the week leading up to Christmas. A huge thank you to everyone who donated and participated—this success was possible because of you!

Interested in joining our Mutual Aid Working Group? Let us know!

Upcoming Meetings

Abolish Rent Reading Group
Mon 12/02 @ 6:00 PM
RSVP HERE

General Meeting - LI DSA
Sat 12/07 @ 12:00 PM
RSVP HERE

Anti-War WG
Mon 12/09 @ 7:30 PM
RSVP HERE

Electoral Collective
Tue 12/10 @ 8:00 PM
RSVP HERE

U.S.-Israeli War on Lebanon
Thu 12/12 @ 7:00 PM
RSVP HERE

Mutual Aid Working Group
Fri 12/20 @ 7:00 PM
RSVP HERE

Political Education Working Group Creation!

We’re excited to announce the formation of the LI DSA's Political Education Working Group! In the coming months, as American fascism becomes increasingly overt, it is crucial for us as socialists to be equipped with a working knowledge of the efforts workers worldwide have undertaken to confront the same capitalist oppressions we face today.

To that end, we will be holding an online discussion on The Communist Manifesto on Wednesday, Jan 8th at 8pm. Two days later on the 10th, we’ll be hosting our first Socialist Movie Night over Discord with a screening of The Battle of Algiers, starting at 7pm.

Without robust political education, we risk continually reinventing the wheel—repeating the same mistakes and experiments as our predecessors instead of building on the wisdom and sacrifices of countless generations of proletarians.

Our working group will host readings, movie nights, informative discussions, and guest interviews with revolutionaries and academics to deepen our collective understanding of the rigorous thought and practice integral to socialism.

Too often, modern left-wing intellectual spaces are plagued by competitiveness and one-upmanship. Are you too intimidated to ask what dialectical materialism is? Unsure about the difference between Marxism-Leninism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism? We all have gaps in our knowledge—a collaborative, critical examination of the legacies of our comrades and forebears worldwide will benefit us all.

When we apply this knowledge to improve the lives of the working class daily, we move from being "giant dorks" to principled and disciplined leftists. So let’s hit the books together and build a stronger movement!

Solidarity Forever - New York Labor Strikes

New York workers held Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strikes throughout December to challenge the exploitative practices of Amazon and Starbucks and push for better terms at the bargaining table.

Striking is one of many activities that workers are legally entitled to under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). What makes a ULP strike different from an “economic strike” is further protection under the NLRA. Workers are entitled to return to their jobs after ULP strikes, whereas in an economic strike—for higher wages or other direct economic concessions—workers are not as explicitly protected.

Although workers across the state demand higher wages, better working conditions, and stronger protections, they can hold ULP strikes over these concerns due to misconduct from management over concerted activities, like refusing to bargain in good faith. For corporate albatrosses like Amazon and Starbucks, that list of ULPs is nearly limitless.

Amazon Teamsters authorized a strike at seven locations across the United States after the company missed their proposed Dec. 15 deadline for contract negotiations. Workers at the DBK14 distribution center in Maspeth began picketing Dec. 19, followed by a walkout at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island at midnight Dec. 20. Both groups maintained continuous picket lines through midnight Dec. 24.

Despite freezing temperatures, snow and wind, workers and their allies stood firm. They faced criticism from some passersby, the frustrations of last-minute holiday shoppers, and, in Maspeth, intervention from the NYPD—a stark example of the challenges workers face in their fight for fair treatment.

On the first day of the Maspeth picket, a Teamsters organizer and an Amazon driver who joined the picket line were unjustly arrested. Both returned to the picket within hours. The Teamsters secured a temporary restraining order against the NYPD for the duration of the strike.

Several days into picketing, a drainage pipe outside the warehouse began releasing freezing water, flooding the sidewalks where picketers were walking and spilling into the streets. Striking workers accused Amazon of deliberately opening the pipe to drive them away.

On December 22nd, Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) went on strike at locations across New York City and Long Island, joining Starbucks workers nationwide with pickets for three days at select stores. The pickets lasted through Christmas Eve, with other unionized stores, including some on Long Island, also closing on Christmas Eve. Workers urged customers to boycott all Starbucks locations during the strike.

Starbucks workers authorized this ULP strike in response to the company—whose CEO Brian Niccol makes over $50,000 per hour—returning to bargaining this past month without making meaningful movement on proposed wage increases for baristas. This was backtracking on their commitment to reach agreements for a contract by the end of this year and follow many unresolved ULP cases at stores across the country.

Starbucks Workers United members have spent this past year hard at work nailing down the specifics of the contract and escalating the pressure to win after the company stalled the process for years. SBWU’s efforts are especially inspiring given how tough it is to organize food service, where high turnover and low representation rates have stifled efforts for decades. Long Island DSA members joined workers for SBWU’s “Red for Bread” canvassing campaign, giving fliers to customers, asking them to support union baristas, and reaching out to unorganized stores.

Ultimately, there's still a long fight ahead for these workers, and anxiety around the uncertain future of the NLRA under the Trump administration means a long fight for us all. The past few weeks have shown us what building worker power looks like. When companies only care about their bottom line, workers need disruptions to demonstrate that their labor generates all that value. Along the way, it’s our duty as socialists to stand in solidarity with workers and push collective organization until worker power is absolute across the globe.

Biden's Deportation Record

From the same party that decried children in cages and held photoshoots in front of tent city shelters, deportations reached a 10-year high in the fiscal year 2024 under the Biden administration, surpassing the Trump-era peak in 2019, according to a government report.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported more than 271,000 immigrants in the 2024 fiscal year. It is the highest number since 2014 when the Obama administration deported 316,000 people.

Border agents arrested roughly 82% of those deported. ICE deportations rose from 72,000 in fiscal year 2022 to 143,000 in fiscal year 2023. The figures come despite Biden’s 2021 pledge to pause deportations.

Under Trump, the US carried out 1.5 million deportations during his four years in office. In the fiscal year 2019, ICE deported 267,000 people, the highest number during his administration.

Trump has promised to conduct the largest deportation operation in American history once back in office, which includes using the military.

About 11 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States as of 2022, per the American Immigration Council.

Oligarchs Gone Wild

Elon Musk used his considerable influence and wealth to undermine a bipartisan government funding proposal aimed at averting a shutdown, playing a key role in its collapse while being as annoying as possible.

While Congress eventually reached a last-minute deal on Dec. 21 to keep the government open until March 14, Musk garnered attention for leveraging his platform to sway lawmakers. His involvement hinted at the political clout he plans to wield over the next four years.

Musk, true to his obnoxious style, spread false claims on X, including misinformation about congressional salaries, stadium funding, and bioweapon labs. Fact-checkers swiftly debunked these misleading statements, sparking chaos.

The original funding proposal, which had support from both parties, faltered after Musk and former President Donald Trump expressed opposition. Musk, a major financial supporter of Trump, spent $250 million to back the president-elect’s campaign.

In response, House Republicans introduced a 116-page plan to fund the government, backed by Trump and Musk, who has emerged as a key GOP ally heading into the 2024 election. However, despite immense pressure and primary threats from Trump’s camp, the plan failed to pass on the House floor because of resistance within the Republican Party.

Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy are set to co-lead Trump’s planned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory board, a new initiative aimed at slashing regulations and government spending.

LI DSA Merch Store

We have a merch store! All proceeds go to UNRWA and local organizations supporting Palestine and Palestinians through the end of the year!.

Current apparel includes t-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, and multiple fun mugs. Most items available in multiple colors and sizes.

Check out our Bonfire store here: www.bonfire.com/store/long-island-dsa/

Note: As a social welfare org. 501(c)4, All purchases or donations to LI DSA are NOT tax deductible.

Attention: Comrades in need.

Is greedflation causing you food insecurity? Community Solidarity operates five mutual aid foodshares on Long Island every single week; free vegetarian groceries for all in need, no questions asked, and volunteers welcome.

Under Capitalism, the owning class continues to maximize profits over people, through price gouging, shrinkflation, and obscene amounts of intentional waste that keep prices high. The working class in turn must spend a greater and greater portion of their wages just to survive.

Food is a right. No one should go to bed hungry or have to choose between buying groceries, paying for prescriptions, or affording rent.

Contact them at communitysolidarity.org for locations/times.

Shinnecock Tribal Nation

The Town of Southampton is suing the Shinnecock Tribal Nation’s trustees over the construction of a travel plaza in Hampton Bays.

The lawsuit, filed in December, claims the plaza, which includes a gas station, violates zoning laws and creates a public nuisance. The lawsuit alleges the tribe didn’t get permission to clear the land or install underground gas tanks.

Due to federal rules on tribal sovereignty, the town cannot sue the tribe directly. Lance Gumbs, vice chairman of the Shinnecock Council of Trustees, told Newsday they will continue construction and that the town has no authority over tribal lands.

The plaza is being built on Newtown Road and has faced opposition from residents. The town is seeking legal advice and trying to halt the project while also asking for legal fees.

The plaza is near electronic billboards owned by the tribe. A recent court ruling required the tribe to shut them down after a legal challenge from the state, but the tribe says both the billboards and plaza will help generate additional income.

Nearly 60% of the Shinnecock people live below the poverty line, whereas the average household income in Southampton town is $194,861, with a poverty rate of 8.2%

Kathy Hochul Wants You to Think of the Poor CEOs

Whatever you think of Luigi Mangione, Brian Thompson, or the American healthcare system, even the most milquetoast reading of the events of Dec. 4 sees it plainly that Thompson’s assassination was a hot flash of decades of systemic discontent with how American medical resources are qualified and doled out.

Concede all possible sympathy to Thompson, all possible condemnation to Mangione, and eschew all personal responsibility for individual roles in a system that causes thousands upon thousands of preventable deaths among the poor and even the pretty-not-poor of this nation, and you are still left with the inescapable notion that our healthcare system is deeply, deeply sick.

Unless you’re Kathy Hochul. If you’re Hochul, you think of the poor CEOs.

To the bemusement of millions, the New York State Governor’s most visible response to Thompson’s assassination was to hold a “therapy session” for the Empire State’s healthcare company executives. The branding itself is beyond laughable. Maybe they just had health speak on their minds, but the last thing the fabulously wealthy apex dwellers of corporate America need is a publicly funded vent sesh.

If this were just stupid, it would be one thing. But it’s far worse.

The content of the therapy session, far from being stupid, is actively revolting. The governor, with nearly 200 members of the state’s business gentry on the phone, discussed sharing law enforcement resources with corporate security teams. Publicly-funded data collection on blameless New Yorkers across the state funneled directly into the arms of the private sector. A merging of corporate and state power so complete that to call it fascism feels redundant.

Instead of exerting any political pressure to fix or even band-aid the root causes of Thompson’s death and the deaths of enough New Yorkers to fill a small town every year, Hochul, unprompted, will start running oppsec for some of the wealthiest institutions on the planet. The thought of this much data changing hands in the healthcare field at all should already raise a million red flags with “HIPAA” on them.

What would make someone interesting to health insurance security? Mangione was radicalized by his own experience with a botched back surgery. Are we now to expect that government spooks tracking us like wild game could be just as much a consequence of a procedure as chronic pain?

But there’s no reason to think these practices would stop at a mere expansion of the surveillance state—another wing added to the panopticon Hochul has forced New Yorkers into at every possible moment. It’s absurd to think that capitalists armed with additional data relevant to public health matters wouldn’t mine it for maximum profit.

All that aside, the greatest offense of Hochul’s latest moment of evil is that against the sanctity of human life itself. Again, we have it pushed down our throats that our so-called representatives equate net worth to human worth.

A whole state apparatus can bend to cover the blind spot that leads to one death at the Heart of Capital, while at the same time shrugging coldly while health insurers and landlords and bosses and corporate polluters and planetary arsonists condemn us in our multitudes to slow and painful ends. This cold capitalist reality is apparent to anyone living in it, but we can’t even be spared the boundless indignity of having it rubbed in our faces.

Hochul, who was supposed to be less of a scumbag than Cuomo, who was supposed to be less of a scumbag than Patterson, who was supposed to be less of a scumbag than Spitzer and so on, is a scumbag. Beholden to nobody, regardless of the individual, the government of the polity that contains the bleeding core of global finance will always maintain as its one immovable object the primacy of scumbaggery.

Nobody is coming to save us from inside the halls of power. We have to do it ourselves.

The Mangione Effect

A familiar existential dilemma has loomed over me in the months following Donald Trump’s second presidential victory. Beyond the obvious political concerns, one question has continuously cut deeper:

What does working-class political power in America look like anymore?

We live in a country where the rich hoard wealth, union membership remains historically low and police brutally crack down on peaceful protests. Worse still, corporations, politicians and the very systems that exploit the American people have convinced many of them that the solution to their struggles lies in giving away more power rather than reclaiming it.

Voting, increasingly, feels like the only tool left. But even then, it rarely changes the trajectory when the voters speak. Democratic leaders, for example, remain committed to their murder-suicide pact with Israel and their ongoing genocide in Palestine. The DNC knows it’s unpopular but would rather lose than change course.

So what’s left for us? Are we doomed to live out our days picking an elephant or donkey every four years while enduring the never-ending cycle of bullshit culture wars that serve as distractions from genuine issues? It’s very possible.

For the first time in a long time, I’m seeing a glimmer of an answer against this. Strangely, it’s come through Luigi Mangione, the man recently charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

This piece isn’t about Mangione’s alleged crimes. Plenty of other commentators will dissect the legal minutiae. What interests me is the response.

The working-class reaction to Thompson’s death has been remarkable. I can’t recall another instance where the class divide in public sentiment has been so stark in my lifetime. Across social media and casual conversations, many workers have expressed sympathy for Mangione—not because they condone murder, but because they see his actions as a reflection of their frustrations.

The universal experience of being screwed over by someone more powerful than you resonates across all boundaries. The collective feeling is that the system is rigged, that powerful people usually get away with it, and that this time, one did not.

The sheer amount of solidarity he’s received tells us something important. This isn’t just a race or a political issue, though Mangione’s background and appearance are likely playing roles in the public perception of his case.

It’s a class issue.

And this brings me back to that existential question about working-class power. Thompson’s death and the reactions to it aren’t a call to arms or a sign of revolution. Mangione isn’t John Brown; the revolution isn’t coming. His actions appear to reflect a desperate, troubled individual beaten down by a broken system, lashing out at someone he deemed responsible, rather than aiming to spark societal change.

They are, however, a reminder that class solidarity still exists—and that it can cut deeper than the partisan divides that so often distract us. Mangione, the grandson of a wealthy real estate developer and a graduate of top private universities, sacrificed everything.

People like him aren’t expected to care about Ted Kaczynski or the U.S. life expectancy ranking. This makes his actions more surprising and highlights how deeply unwell our nation is, with even the most privileged being pushed to their limits.

This moment presents an opportunity to use this collective anger as an entry point for conversations about class, exploitation and what it means to take control of our political destiny. Maybe it’s as easy as saying, “I’ve been beaten down, too,” and finding common ground. From there, we can build something real—something based on shared experiences rather than divisive rhetoric. When a major poll shows that 69% blame healthcare coverage denials and 67% blame insurance industry profits for Brian Thompson's death, it's clear how powerful this could be in shaping discussions with non-leftists.

None of what I’m proposing is innovative, but perhaps it doesn’t need to be. What matters is that we don’t let this moment slip away without learning from it. As we brace ourselves for another Trump term and the continued erosion of working-class power, it’s easy to feel hopeless.

If this strange and tragic story has taught us anything, it’s that even now, unity is possible. If right-wing figures like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh are getting backlash from their fans over how they’ve framed Mangione, and we can’t see a winning strategy, then we’re in for a brutal four years.

Jimmy Carter dead at 100

The editorial position of Long Island DSA is that Hell exists and Jimmy Carter is in it.

This probably comes as a surprise to the legions of the powerful, who have fallen over themselves in the days following his death to lionize the former president with varying degrees of overwroughtness. Most of the obituaries surrounding the centenarian concede that his presidency was, at best, deeply flawed and, at worst, a disaster. But they nearly universally rank him as a man of high character, one of the most personally noble ever to have sat in the Oval Office.

There are a lot of reasons to admire Jimmy Carter. He’s just about the only person near a lever of power in the United States to call Israel an apartheid state, acknowledge that Palestinians have a right to national sovereignty, and treat North Korea as a rational actor rather than a horde of barbarous fanatics.

He was still ultimately a Zionist and a racist on each front, but he also holds the distinction of being just about the only head of the American empire to ever voluntarily relinquish colonial land without losing a war first when he returned the Panama Canal Zone to the Panamanians. His policies in Haiti saved lives during Baby Doc Duvalier’s dictatorship and his withdrawal of military support from Somoza’s dictatorship in Nicaragua indirectly helped the Sandinista Revolution succeed.

Most famously, though, Carter spent his long post-presidency as Habitat for Humanity’s most visible volunteer, building homes for people in need across over three decades. There too, income checks and other neoliberal cruelty mean few of Habitat’s homes over the years have gone to the poorest Americans. Still, Carter’s public works beat the genocidal finger-wagging, shitty painting and digital bloviating of his still-living colleagues, and his whole oeuvre seemed to even his most stringent critics to show a man dedicated to doing penance for his time at the tip of the spear.

Surely, if there can be redemption for anyone this powerful, Jimmy Carter must have redeemed himself, right?

Nope.

Getting the stupid one out of the way first: Ronald Reagan’s team sabotaged negotiations in the Iranian hostage crisis, delaying a resolution so Carter couldn’t claim a last-minute political victory before the 1980 Presidential Election. He bungled plenty of the preceding year-plus efforts, including his support for the Shah helped cause the Iranian Revolution, and the sanctions his regime imposed cripple the Iranian people to this day, but the neoliberal loser line that his tactics were weak rests on the false notion that they were ultimately unsuccessful. Love the spirit, totally stupid reasoning.

Let’s get to why he’s in The Bad Place if The Bad Place truly exists.

On the domestic front, Jimmy Carter should get at least as much credit for crushing the American working class as Reagan. He deregulated several industries and levied state power to break the United Mine Workers' yearlong coal strike in 1978. In his rhetoric, he constantly emphasized how futile it was to hope public policy could solve problems, breaking completely with even the limited social democracy of FDR and LBJ to steer us headlong into today, when American statecraft has been reduced comically and entirely to siphoning off public funds for robber barons.

Reagan and George W. Bush are fixed in the public conscience as the men who first opened the door to and then latched the state to the religious right, but it was Carter whose Baptist bent first brought Evangelical Christianity to the forefront of American politics, and every conservative social and legal pushback that came after owes its viability to his affable demeanor in laying the groundwork for the integration of church and state.

All of this is to say that maybe we’re all being a bit reductive when we graph the Reagan Effect without accounting for his predecessor.

But it’s on the foreign front where Carter’s biggest evils lie. Let’s look at just one man that Jimmy Carter empowered.

Zbigniew Brzezinski might seem like a poor man’s Henry Kissinger, but on the long list of U.S. diplomats who deserved to rot in the Hague, Carter’s National Security Advisor might be second on the list behind the Big Dog himself. Brzesinski’s sins are many, but his proudest achievement, the one he drunkenly bragged about to colleagues in private whenever he got the chance, was enticing the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in 1979.

His famed “Afghan trap” and its genocidal consequences have been responsible for every violent death in the country for the past 50 years: two wars, decades of ethnic conflicts, crushing poverty and about 90% of the global heroin trade. The massive debt the USSR incurred in the Soviet-Afghan War led ultimately to its collapse—the fall of the world’s greatest bulwark against global capitalism and the largest drop in life expectancy for a region ever observed.

Brzezinski is a demon’s demon, and Jimmy Carter sanctioned his every move. It is safe to say that Carter caused far more houses to be bombed out of existence than he ever caused to be built.

For these reasons and many, many more, it’s safe to say that if Carter ever looks on from the beyond at a better world that emerged after he was gone, he will be looking up, not down.

A Graphic History of DSA

The nonprofit DSA Fund, which focuses on political (i.e. socialist) education, has just produced a graphic history of DSA and the socialist movement. It is narrated by Eugene V. Debs (“most people just call me Gene”) and in 22 remarkably rich and detailed pages touches on the issues that fuel our activism: social inequities, union suppression and class warfare, police violence, foreign wars, US imperialist adventures and alliances, the seismic effect of the Sanders campaigns and the growth of socialist-identifying electeds in Congress and down-ballot around the country. Check it out and share it widely; it has reach beyond the faithful.

Democratic Socialists of America: A Graphic History

NPEC is excited to announce that Democratic Socialists of America: A Graphic History is here and ready for chapters to be used in their political education. This comic, completed with financial support from the DSA Fund plus research and input from many generations of DSA members, was written and penned by Paul Buhle and Raymond Tyler with illustrations by Noah Van Sciver. This is a 24-page online graphic history of DSA that can be used to give members a quick overview of our origins and campaigns. This is a fantastic and fun tool for new and experienced people to learn about DSA’s history and development and the dynamic force it is today.

Book recommendations:

The Dawn Of Everything

History as a discipline has almost always looked down from the top. Read a history book on, say, the Napoleonic Wars, and you’ll learn ‌about Napoleon, Tsar Alexander and Wellington. If you’re lucky, a few paragraphs here and there will be spent on the common people, the villagers of some poor doomed Russian village, or the workers in the streets of Paris, written with all the obligatory vim of a bureaucrat meeting a quota.

The Dawn of Everything is not that kind of book. The extent to which it is so completely not that kind of book is incredible. It dumps a millennia-old tradition of historiography squarely on its ass.

David Graeber and David Wengrow devote an astonishing amount of research and prosaic fortitude to examining the countless ways in which human beings have cooperated and thrived in the absence of political domination and exploitation. Its scope spans thousands of years and even more miles, from the Andean Mountains to the floodplains of Mesopotamia and the stepped pyramids of Teotihuacan.

Its ambition is matched only by the rigor of its evidence. It’s almost dumbfounding to think about what this book accomplishes: it refutes the European narrative of the Enlightenment, it provides a contextually sound counterargument to the theory of modes of production; it draws a straight line from the city-states of the Classical Maya to five hundred years of indigenous resistance in Southern Mexico right until the Zapatista uprisings, it redeems demonized indigenous peoples and introduces and glorifies a score more of them to its readers.

And through it all, one powerful, life-affirming resolution rings out: we have never been doomed to live, work and die for the benefit of a ruling class. If we act decisively, no one will ever doom us.

The Broken Spears

The Broken Spears is a simple book. It sets out to accomplish a simple task: to give to the world the indigenous account of the fall of the Aztec Triple Alliance at the hands of Hernan Cortes and his band of conquistadors. It accomplishes that task by simply drawing together and recounting for a modern audience a handful of testimonies relayed from Nahuatl eyewitnesses to a handful of monks in the 16th century.

In this simple book, in the simple act of documenting the staggering resistance of the Nahuatl people and proclaiming their dignity before the world, Miguel Leon-Portilla established himself as one of the greatest-ever contributors to decolonization in the Americas. This book should be smacked across the face of anyone who has ever recommended Guns, Germs and Steel and offered as medicine to anyone who has ever sat through an American history class where they were given the impression that the societies of the Global South were apocalypse'd by Europeans because they just weren’t about the grind.

Its few pages reveal the truth of countless people across many years; no indigenous Mexican alive today descends from those who passively accepted their historical victimization. There are no passive victims of history. Every underdog has gone down fighting to the last.

NPEC’s mentorship program

We’ll match you with an experienced mentor who can help you set up or revamp your chapter’s political education program. Mentors offer support and advice tailored to your chapter’s particular needs, whether you’re interested in a one-off troubleshooting meeting or long-term support as you build a political education program. If you are interested in being paired with a political education mentor, please fill out this form.

NPEC’s Podcast

Class, the NPEC Podcast - Organizing the Workplace: EWOC, Pt. 2

Tune in to Class, the podcast hosted by DSA's NPEC. Class is a podcast where we ask socialists about why they are socialists, what socialism looks like, and how we, as the working class, can become the ruling class. Part 1 was released in October - please listen, share, and enjoy!

Daphna is an organizer and educator at EWOC. In the last couple of years, she's trained a few hundred workers on the basics of workplace organizing. She is also a contributing writer and the editor of Unite and Win: the Workplace Organizer's Handbook. She's a DSA member based in Brooklyn, New York. In part two, Daphna discusses exciting labor campaigns, the intersection of labor organizing and politics, and EWOC’s future project.

Unite and Win: the Workplace Organizer's Handbook:
workerorganizing.org/unite-and-win

Learn more about EWOC and get involved:
workerorganizing.org/training
workerorganizing.org/support
workerorganizing.org/volunteer

Capital Reading Group

Whether you were able to attend our kickoff event, our first discussion, or not, you're still very much welcome to join us for our remaining Reading Group discussions of Karl Marx's Capital. Whether you're attending as an individual or tackling it as a chapter activity, we encourage all DSA members to get tuned in and learn more about this pivotal work in the Marxist canon. Here are our next discussion dates:

Dec. 17th: Discussion II: Parts III & IV

Jan 21st: Discussion III: Parts V, VI, VII

Feb 25th: Discussion IV: THE END.

If you would like to join us as we discuss Capital.

Crossword for Comrades

Solution to last month's puzzle in the bottom right.

Across

2. Long Island entered a severe __ in November after weeks without rain.

5. Received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from organizations like the Pro-Israel America PAC.

6. Long Island saw about 75℉ this __ .

7. Passed with a 62% majority, amending the NY state constitution to protect abortion rights.

11. Closest thing we’ve ever gotten to a legitimate American revolutionary vanguard.

13. Loathed by environmental advocacy groups, his consistent anti-environment voting records earned him the Environmental Advocates’ Oil Sick Award in 2011.

14. The __ Group, the world’s largest private equity firm that has spearheaded the deforestation of the Amazon and innumerable other controversies.

15. Within days of his nomination as administrator of the __ , an old campaign contributor to [5-ACROSS], [14-ACROSS], invested $500 million into new AI data centers.

16. On 1 November 1963, a rent strike by mostly Black tenants living in slum conditions in __ began. By mid-December, the protest had grown to include Puerto Rican residents and had spread to 58 buildings housing 850 families in the area. The rent strike resulted in rents lowered from $100 to $1 for some and other improvements to living conditions.

Down

1. About 200 were reported at the peak of [2-ACROSS]. Many along the side of the L.I.E.

3. Under [12-DOWN], __ has pledged humane treatment and reception for the immigrants a resurgent Trump is poised to pogrom from the U.S.

4. Has met with Oath Keepers, voted against investigating the Jan. 6 coup, and spent the last year as part of Linda McMahon’s America First Policy Institute.

8. Flooding from an August storm caused Harbor Road, which supported the __ , to collapse. The breach resulted in catastrophic consequences for the ecosystem and surrounding infrastructure.

9. Just released NLRB data show a large increase in US union elections and wins, as a three-year __ movement surge continues.

10. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” - __

11. CEOs of major corporations make almost __ times more than their average employees, while weekly wages have remained stagnant over the last 50 years and 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

12. The closest thing NAFTA has to a leader on the side of the people. Her administration has recognized Palestine and supported calls for Palestinian sovereignty and prosecution of Israel’s genocidal leadership.

- About -

Red Petals is Nassau County DSA's monthly newsletter. We share organizing update from Long Island with a socialist perspective on local news and politics.