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Night School

Gif of a lightning bolt striking a rose on top of the Capitol Building
Socialist Night School

Learn and discuss the nature and tenets of socialist ideology, organizing, and action. These group discussions allow us to learn, coordinate, build on and discuss organizing a better future for all of us. Past presenters at the Socialist Night School have included Noura Erakat, Vijay Prashad, Grace Blakely, Bill Fletcher, Tim Shorrock, Daniel Denvir, Johanna Fernández and Sarah Jaffe. To contact us with questions or comments, to learn more about Socialist Night School, or to get support for your chapter’s political education, please email us at politicaleducation@mdcdsa.org.

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Upcoming Events

Big Tech & Capitalism Walking Tour
Saturday, October 7 @ 1:00pm
Meet at Farratgut Square, 912 17th Street NW
Sign up here

 

The Mount Pleasant Uprisings
Thursday, October 12 @ 6:00pm
Mount Pleasant Library (Meeting Room 13160)
3160 16th St NW, DC 20010
Sign up here

Learn about our reading group program here.

PAST SESSIONS

The Basics

What is capitalism? What is socialism? How do DSA activities help us get there? How can you get involved in the DSA?

A focus on the Marxist view of capitalism, how capitalist profit is rooted in the exploitation of labor, and the identification of class struggle.

The ascendance of neoliberalism into a hegemonic doctrine in global affairs is discussed in this globally minded session.

This session explores the history and the present of socialist interactions with labor unions in the US.

The question of social reproduction is the question of how workers are reproduced in order to keep capitalism surging.

DC, Maryland, and Virginia Issues

The path to racial and economic justice in DC must go through the city budget. This session provided an introduction to the DC budget process, budget advocacy tips, and discuss how to improve the budget process in the future.

This session provided a brief overview of the history of labor in Virginia, from slavery, to Right to Work’s Jim Crow origins.

Learn more about Uber, the gig economy and how cities manage their place in global capitalism.

Over the last several decades, public education has been under attack by corporate and private entities looking to profit from K-12 education. In this session of Socialist Night School, we will explore the tactics and history of the corporate-funded political group Democrats for Education Reform, and the funding, spending, and influence that has allowed them to advance the school privatization project here in DC.

A history of a planned community on the radical edge of New Deal era housing programs. Resources page to come.

Food lines, PPE lines, supply lines. The lines for mutual aid and other critical services can feel endless, especially during a global pandemic. We’re in them or serving on them because we need resources or want to help our community members access them. But the question of this session, “Why Are We on the Line?” asks something more. Our panelists will ask us to think about the larger political and capitalist forces that create the need for these support lines in the first place. Without critically assessing and actively working to dismantle those systems of oppression, we risk burning out our most precious community leaders. The line is necessary, but the line shouldn’t be forever. What role does mutual aid serve? What is the role for policy change? Why do they need to work together to really get things done?

Come hear the socialist argument for why we need to decriminalize sex work! Join us for Socialist Night School: Sex Work Decriminalization. You will learn first-hand from sex workers and HIPS, a
local harm reduction services, advocacy, and community engagement group, through a Sex Work 101 presentation, a conversation debunking myths about sex work, and a Q&A session.

Come learn more about the War on Drugs, and the socialist arguments for why we need to decriminalize drugs and invest in a harm reduction approach in supporting the health and wellness of people who use drugs! Join in person or online on Wednesday, March 22 from 6:30-8:00 for a Socialist Night School entitled Seize the Means of Consumption: A Harm Reductionist Fight for Drug Decriminalization. You will learn first-hand from advocates and people with lived experience from HIPS and decrimpovertydc through a harm reduction 101 presentation, a conversation debunking myths about drug use and prohibition, and a Q/A session.

Internationalism

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST or Landless Workers’ Movement) is a Marxist movement which provides access to land for poor workers while simultaneously attacking income inequality, racism, and sexism.

A resource on how to understand U.S.-Chinese relations, how they are rooted in growing dysfunctions of the neoliberal global order, and how socialists in the U.S. should oppose this new Cold War.

The impact of sanctions on civilian populations and how sanctions are not an alternative to war.

Mainstream depictions of the world’s first use of nuclear weapons paint it is a military necessity. In fact, it was a political decision on the part of US leaders. Peter Kuznick discusses the decision to use the atomic bomb, its impact, and the ramifications of this decision 75 years later.

This session explores how a socialist government has responded to COVID in India.

The war in Yemen is one of the world’s most pressing crises right now, having intensified in March 2015 when a U.S.-supported Saudi-led coalition intervened against Houthi rebels aligned with the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the inequalities of capitalism. Nowhere has this been more transparent than the inequalities to vaccine access between the Global North and the Global South. This session features Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla is a member of the Cabinet of Progressive International and leads its policy pillar, Blueprint.

Why is Palestine a socialist issue? This panel contextualized the recent uprisings of Palestinians in response to the escalation of violence and dispossession in Jerusalem, covering the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and what we as socialists can do to support Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality.

The struggle of the Puerto Rican people has its roots in the colonialist relationship it has been forced into by the United States. This is an essential part of the vision the US had when invading in 1898 and its evolution ever since. We will cover important events and of this colonial history and how these have affected Puerto Rico, the internal resistance against imperialism, and the ultimate goal of independence.

On October 30, Brazilians reelected Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to an unprecedented third term, defeating the far-right extremist incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Despite an entrenchment of deeply reactionary forces in Brazil’s recent congressional and gubernatorial races, Lula has mounted an epic political comeback, confronting a right-wing onslaught in the world’s fourth-largest democracy. The world looks much different today than it did twenty years ago when Lula was first elected. Brazil faces enormous challenges and opportunities—some old, some new—in the years ahead. With global attention on Brazil as Lula turns to the task of shaping his administration, it is not too soon to ask how he will govern, or what the Brazilian left’s task is moving forward. Sabrina Fernandes and Andre Pagliarini led a conversation about the campaign and its implications, Brazilian history, the left, and possible futures for Latin America’s largest nation.

Policing and Prisons

A brief history of U.S. immigration enforcement leading up the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. This session examines some contemporary policies and programs intersecting immigration enforcement and the criminal justice system, and discusses some of the relevant data sources.

In the wake of continuing protests in response to the police murder of George Floyd, we invite all MDC DSA comrades to join us for an emergency Social Night School on police abolitionism.

The history of repression of dissent and the US left, focusing largely on the role of the FBI in conducting political surveillance.

In the wake of protests against police violence and calls to defund the police, a major obstacle opposing any and all reform or even criticism, are police unions. How do police operate as political actors? What is the role of police unions in preventing reform? How can we address policing when police and their unions wield such power?

In this session, we explore the connections between the criminal punishment system and the immigration enforcement system. Why is this system not ‘broken’ but rather working as designed? How do some pro-immigrant positions end up reinforcing the notion that immigrants are dangerous and undeserving? We discuss the limits of some popular reforms, and how an abolitionist lens can help us identify what sorts of reforms are worth fighting for, what has changed, and what hasn’t, since Democrats took control of the White House. This session was led by Silky Shah, who is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the United States. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for nearly 20 years.

National Issues

We discuss the inadequacies of our health care system, how the pandemic exacerbates it, and how to organize to fight for a single-payer system.

What are tenants doing to fight for their homes in the middle of pandemic, and how does it fit with historical tenant struggles?

You’re told that if you “do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Whether it’s working for “exposure” and “experience,” or enduring poor treatment in the name of “being part of the family,” all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

The Reconstruction era represents America’s first attempt at multiracial democracy. Why did this valiant attempt end so abruptly? What was acheived, and what lessons can we draw from this experience for the 21st century? A session led by Robert Greene II, an Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University.

The impact of sanctions on civilian populations and how sanctions are not an alternative to war.

Ecosocialism is a framework for combining insights from the rich tradition of Marxist social analysis with scientific knowledge of our biosphere. How does ecosocialism help us understand how capitalism and overlapping systems of oppression fuel the kinds of extraction that now undermine basic systems of life on Earth?

Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? A new book by Dan Greene, The Promise of Access, shows why it is so hard to get rid of the idea—which he terms the access doctrine—that the problem of poverty can be solved with the right tools and the right skills. He argues that as libraries and schools pursue technological solutions, they win praise and funding but also marginalize and alienate the populations they serve. Learn more about how this plays out in Washington, DC, where Greene examined organizational change in technology startups, public libraries, and a charter school, and begin thinking about our path forward.

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to strike down Roe, and Republicans in many states legislating ever more restrictive abortion laws, join us for a teach in on abortion and reproductive justice. What were the limits of Roe and of the choice framework? How did widening inequality since that landmark decision make choice more myth than reality, and how did the decision to fight for abortion through a pro-choice framework limit reproductive justice? Both in the past and moving forward, how is the fight for abortion connected to incarceration, health care and poverty?
The Demystifying the Federal Reserve Socialist Night School, hosted at the Mt. Pleasant Library (3160 16th Street NW) at 6:30 pm on Thursday, June 15th, will help us understand one of the world’s most powerful institutions shaping our economy and our world – The Fed. Historian and Writer Tim Barker will detail how the Federal Reserve works, with an emphasis on its key functions and the class dynamics of how the Fed’s policies affect workers and the world economy. The Night School will specifically cover the effects of The Fed’s policies on Metro DC DSA priority campaigns around housing, climate, and labor and address current issues related to inflation, the debt limit, and bank failures. It will aim to help members and organizers react to monetary policy and other macroeconomic constraints that affect their organizing work and connect them to organizing around debt-related issues. The Night School will be held in-person with a live stream available to virtual attendees. Non-members and members are encouraged to attend and there will be a happy hour following the in-person event! Tim Barker is a writer and a Ph.D student with expertise in monetary policy and contemporary American history. Tim is the author of “Other Peoples Blood” in N+1, was interviewed for a recent two-part series on The Dig podcast on inflation and monetary policy, and has authored other related work. The Socialist Night School program is hosted by the Metro DC Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and its Political Education Working Group, with the purpose of helping organizers learn about the world and discuss the nature and tenets of socialist ideology, organizing, and action.

Socialist History

The Young Lords were an explicitly socialist organization led predominantly by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth. Their history is recounted in this session.

Beginning in the 1930s, organizers in Alabama were able to build a majority-Black Communist Party that fought to free the Scottsboro boys and organize sharecroppers despite police violence, mob violence, and deeply entrenched racism that posed a real barrier to workers’ solidarity. 

Journalist Vincent Bevins discusses his new book, The Jakarta Method. In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union.

As a five-time presidential candidate, and founding member of both the Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of World, Eugene Debs’s legacy has loomed large over the American socialist movement for over a decade. Jailed for his role in the 1894 Pullman Strike and again for his opposition to US entry into World War I, Debs’s fight for working-class power was not without risk. In a conversation with Jacobin’s Shawn Gude, this Socialist Night School session will explore the life of Debs, his vision of socialism, how it was tied to his commitments to democracy and internationalism, and why it still matters today. Shawn Gude is a senior editor at Jacobin. He is currently writing a book on Eugene Debs, and he also runs the Debs Dispatch, a Substack about all things Eugene Debs.

The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. Stayed On Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom.

Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.

Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed On Freedom is a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world.  Join us for our session on the book Stayed On Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey by Dan Berger.

Dan Berger is Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Scholarship in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the co-director of the UWB Labor Studies Colloquium.

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy—particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization. As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Hospitals and nursing homes went on hiring sprees. But many care jobs bear little resemblance to the manufacturing work the city lost. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color. Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-first century. Join Metro DC DSA’s Socialist Night School for a discussion of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, with author Gabrial Winant. Gabriel Winant is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His writing about work, inequality, and capitalism in modern America has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Dissent, and n+1.