Dirty Break or Destruction: The Peculiar Politics of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

By Youhanna Haddad

Perhaps the critics were right.

The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States. Founded in 1982 by a cadre of social democrats, the group has since swelled to roughly 100,000 official members. Virtually all of that growth occurred after Senator Bernie Sanders launched his first presidential run, which mainstreamed socialism in America. What was once a marginal bunch now regularly makes headlines and even has members in Congress.

Yet the Democratic Socialists of America is hardly uncontroversial on the American Left. A longstanding critique is that it’s too reformist and cozy with a Democratic Party it should be trying to destroy. Rather than mobilizing to build independent institutions, leftist critics believe the organization siphons socialist energy into the duopoly’s lesser evil. That is arguably counterrevolutionary as it may further lock us into a capitalist political system which only serves the elite.

Naturally, members forcefully resist this characterization of their organization. But recent events seem to have vindicated the critics in many ways. On August 6th, the Democratic Socialists of America’s official Twitter account posted the following:

“[Vice President Kamala] Harris choosing [Minnesota governor Tim] Walz as a running mate has shown the world that DSA and our allies on the left are a force that cannot be ignored. Through collective action… DSA members… organized… to support Palestinian liberation… and… pressured the Democratic establishment into… backing down from a potential VP with direct ties to the IDF and who would have ferociously supported the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

The DSA seemingly believes Walz is a solid choice and that Democrats caved to leftist activists in choosing him. A closer look at Walz, however, reveals that he is no progressive. He is, at best, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Although much of his worse escapades have been so brazen that Walz is really a wolf in wolf’s clothing.

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For example, he regularly speaks before the Minnesota Israel lobby. The Jewish Community Relations Council has applauded the governor’s “pro-Israel record.” Days after October 7th, Walz addressed the Council “in solidarity with Israel against the terrorism of Hamas.” In the speech, Walz made it clear that he stands “firmly with the state of Israel and the righteousness of the cause.” That cause, recall, is apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians.

But that’s not all. When Palestinian constituents who lost family members in the Gaza genocide wanted to meet with Walz, he refused. The Minnesota governor originally agreed to the meeting under the belief that these Palestinians would merely share their stories. When they informed Walz of their intention to discuss divestment and other material policy, he ordered his staff to cancel.

At a conference of the extremist Zionist American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Walz called Israel “our truest and closest ally.” He touted the apartheid state’s supposed “commitment to values of personal freedoms and liberties.” As a federal congressman, Walz voted to condemn a United Nations resolution declaring Israel’s West Bank settlements illegal. This placed Walz to the right of longstanding State Department policy, overturned by Donald Trump, that considered the incursions illegitimate.

It’s clear where Walz’s sympathies lie — with the Zionists and against the innocent men, women, and children they’re slaughtering. So it appears the Democratic Socialists of America were wrong. The Democrats didn’t respond to their calls for a free Palestine. Instead, they installed another stooge who will gleefully abet the ongoing holocaust in Gaza.

Democrats aren’t listening to socialist organizers. Pretending they are sells false hope, and enables liberal politicians to take leftist votes and run. Throughout their careers, Harris and Walz have made it abundantly clear where they stand.

Neither has any real commitment to working people at home or abroad. Their lack of such commitment is precisely what allows them to thrive in the fundamentally irredeemable Democratic Party. Despite the DSA’s official line, many members understand this. Within the organization exists a robust movement for a “dirty break” from the Democrats. One member described the strategy as follows

In the short term, the DSA should keep “run[ning] candidates on the Democratic… ballot line.” But the crux of the dirty break is that, concurrently, the DSA should begin building an independent working-class party. Upon assembling a sufficient infrastructure and voter base, the DSA should abandon the Democrats and run candidates under its banner.

One thing the DSA could do to facilitate a dirty break is further broaden its big tent. Currently, the DSA’s constitution essentially bans members of “democratic-centralist organizations” from joining. This excludes many Leninists, who are some of the biggest advocates for an independent working-class party. And while there are numerous Marxist-Leninist organizations that already exist as an alternative to groups like the DSA — with the most recent iteration coming from academic Carlos Garrido, who is involved in building such a party — it would make sense for the DSA to welcome the inclusion of this radical energy, rather than continuing to buffer it. As DSA members have yet to make much progress toward a dirty break, they could use such vigor. 

While not all DSA members support a dirty break, the vision is there. That alone may help many DSAers avoid the Democratic ruse of courting progressives for their votes before summarily abandoning them. Historically, stumbling into this trap seems to be the DSA’s modus operandi. But it won’t lead anywhere good.

The organization should instead empower its dirty breakers and channel the energy the DSA undeniably possesses into independent institutions which challenge — not serve — imperialist hegemony. And if the DSA doesn’t do that, other groups should emerge to supplant it.

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism. You can contact him at youhannahaddad@gmail.com.

How Israel Copied the USA

By Youhanna Haddad

Though Zionism has found a home in Palestine, the movement didn’t originate there. It was an exported ideology and only gained a foothold in the Middle East thanks to British patronage. Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, was a secular Austrian Jew who didn’t use theology to argue for his colonial ambitions. Rather, he argued that Jews couldn’t live freely in Gentile nations and needed their own state to escape antisemitism. 

Herzl’s magnum opus, Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), repeats frequently that the establishment of this state is a colonial endeavor. His colonial strategy revolved around the idea of a “Jewish chartered company,” similar to the infamous East India Company that plundered trillions of dollars from South Asia for the benefit of English capitalists. 

Herzl did not mince words. He used “colony” and “colonist” to describe his ambitions over 10 times in Der Judenstaat. He said the poorest Jewish settlers would become the “most vigorous conquerors, because a little despair is indispensable to the formation of a great undertaking,”. Herzl even believed European Jews would not come to Palestine without the guarantee that they would be legally superior to the indigenous Arab population:

“Immigration is consequently futile unless based on assured supremacy.”

Herzl also directly compared Zionist settlements to the “occupation of newly opened territory” in the United States. There are also uncanny rhetorical analogies. Both Zionists and Euro-American settlers claim supremacy to justify the conquering, displacement, and elimination of natives. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, for example, justified Israel’s violent West Bank settlement campaign in supremacist terms:

“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock”

Shapiro’s rhetoric mirrors that of Enlightenment thinker John Locke, who believed God created land only for “the industrious and rational.” Euro-American settlers cited Locke to justify their own violent displacement of natives. This violence is inseparable from colonialism.

Zionists could not build their state without subjugating the Palestinians. And Palestinians could not maintain their sovereignty and cultural identity under the boot of a Zionist state. So began Palestine’s struggle for national liberation, and the steady loss of Palestinian land has continued to this day.

Every nation has a right to self-determination and freedom from imperialist aggression. The Zionist entity is one of the last standing apartheid states in the world, fully backed by Western Imperialist liberal democracies. Israel and its allies are more than willing to use violence to enforce their will in the region. We therefore cannot be blinded by the fantasy of a pure, perfectly nonviolent path to self-determination for the Palestinian people. 

As Malcolm X explained, “concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.” Who could he be speaking to if not the Palestinians? There is no moral equivalence between the colonial violence of the Zionist state and the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves. The oppressed have an undeniable right to resist those who openly seek to destroy them. Just as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto valiantly resisted the Nazis hellbent on eliminating them, the Palestinians are resisting the Zionist forces that seek their elimination.

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Like the Zionists of today, American leaders have a long tradition of slandering indigenous resistance. The supposedly progressive president Theodore Roosevelt proudly spewed such lies to justify his conquest of the American West, saying:

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.” 

Clearly, Roosevelt had little regard for the original inhabitants of the United States. When he spoke on the United States military’s unprovoked slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children at Sandy Creek, he proclaimed it was “as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.” In his book The Winning of the West, Roosevelt ridiculed any sort of sympathy for victims of indigenous genocide:

‘‘All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes…The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages … American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori — in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.” 

It is no surprise that Roosevelt was a staunch Zionist. His belief in white people’s inherent right to violently expropriate colored lands fits perfectly with the Zionist mission. Israel’s founders held no illusions over what was necessary to create their ethnostate: total elimination of the Arab population. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, did not accuse Arab states of acting irrationally against the Zionist project. He knew the Zionist mission was directly at odds with Palestinian and Arab survival in the region: 

“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.”

While modern Zionists blame “far too many Palestinians… intent on massacring Jews” for resistance against Zionism, Ben-Gurion didn’t entertain this delusion: 

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but… [o]ur God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

Ben-Gurion’s own words shatter the lie that Israel-Palestine is “complicated.” It’s theft and genocide — plain and simple. And Zionists justify these crimes by dehumanizing the victims — much like Euro-American colonists dehumanized Native Americans. Zionism is thus undoubtedly a settler-colonial and racially supremacist ideology. We must reject it.

While corporate media continues to pump out tropes of the “Arab barbarian,” we cannot forget that all indigenous liberation movements throughout history have been smeared in the same fashion. For the moment, the establishment will smear those who stand with Palestine as antisemites and terrorist sympathizers. But history will remember us fondly, once the Zionist chapter is far behind us. 

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism.

Inventing Reality: Past and Present

By Youhanna Haddad

Capitalist countries like to claim that they have the freest media. President Joe Biden frequently reiterates America’s supposed commitment to a free press. In a similar vein, the British Broadcasting Corporation has repeatedly lauded the United Kingdom’s ostensible “freedom to publish.”

These statements often feature alongside denunciations of the alleged unfreedom in other countries — particularly those adversarial to Western hegemony. Such criticism tends to take on a certain form. Westerners claim that these adversarial powers tightly curate their media, only allowing information that reinforces state agendas. A recent (retracted) article in The Wall Street Journal, for example, accused China of “parroting lies” via their “solidified grip on information.”

But China is far from the only target. Whether it’s nations in Latin America and the Middle East, or Russia, the Global North’s prominent media institutions frequently remind viewers that information coming out of these places should be heavily scrutinized, with particular caution advised toward state-sponsored media. 

Since the Cold War, the imperial core has honed this rhetoric, which not only espouses the superior integrity of its media institutions but also attributes that integrity to a supposed respect for free speech rights. This narrative sounds good. But it rings utterly hollow upon closer scrutiny. In reality, free speech does little to keep the interests of capital from dictating the “news” Western media reports. As Lenin described over a century ago, “[In] capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.”

In the United States, just six corporations own a whopping 90% of the news media. This centralization demonstrates that, despite what seems like an abundance of options, the media is controlled by a tiny capitalist minority. And this minority is united by an overriding monolithic interest: profit. That means the media is only really free to report what doesn’t threaten the bottom lines of its owners.

But that is far from the only source of bias. Oftentimes, Western media institutions act at the direct behest of their governments. While the full extent of such collusion is often hidden in classified documents, what little has trickled into the public view vindicates the belief that “free” Western media is a fantasy.

The history of collusion between Western governments and media megacorporations is both storied and unsettling. Consider the 1975 Church Committee, which was organized by the United States Senate to investigate potential abuses by the CIA, NSA, and FBI. The Church Committee formed after several major news stories broke implicating the Department of Defense and CIA in the surveillance of civilians and covert assassinations of foreign leaders. 

One of the most disturbing findings was the explicit confirmation of CIA involvement in domestic and foreign media. The Committee confirmed at least “50 CIA relationships with U.S. journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations.” Additionally, it demonstrated that the CIA had control of two European press services — one of which was subscribed to by “over 30 U.S. newspapers.” With a notable lack of remorse, a senior CIA official told the Committee that, “Whether or not this type of overseas activity should be allowed to continue is subject to differing views and judgments… [in my opinion] we would be fools to relinquish it because it serves a very useful purpose.”

CIA defector Colonel John Stockwell corroborated this practice of media corruption. On his assignment to the Angolan Civil War, he allegedly headed a CIA campaign to disseminate news stories that slandered the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and their Cuban reinforcements. According to Stockwell, a full third of his CIA personnel in Angola were career propagandists. One startling falsehood they reported was a totally fabricated execution of 17 Cuban soldiers for the rapes of Angolan women. Framed as an act of feminist liberation, the imaginary victims supposedly executed the perpetrators by firing squad. This tale made its way to the front page of the Toronto Star — Canada’s largest daily newspaper — the Globe and Mail, and local papers in Winnipeg, Halifax, and Montreal. 

More recently, a 2019 bombshell in The Washington Post revealed that — even in this century — United States’ military campaigns are shrouded in lies to make them more palatable to the American public. Generals, senior federal officials, an Afghan War czar, and a Bush-era secretary of defense all confirm that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable while claiming that there was “no way” the United States could lose the war when interviewed. Federal officials faithfully chanted “steady progress” throughout the duration of the war despite knowing that their objectives were bound to fail via the means they were employing.

Today, the world's eyes are on Ukraine. Russian troops have been in the country for over nine months after Ukraine, against Russia’s repeated warnings, moved to join NATO. Since the invasion began, the United States has spent $68 billion to aid the Ukrainian government and military.  

While modern Russia is thoroughly capitalist, it's easy to see why NATO — the world’s preeminent imperialist alliance — views it as a threat. The country has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and its security interests are directly opposed to NATO’s objective of expanding eastward toward Russia’s borders. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not unexpected by any stretch of the imagination, Russian leaders have expressed for decades that their ability to defend their nation from invasion or global conflict would be severely compromised if NATO was permitted to expand toward its borders. 

Most infamously, declassified State Department documents confirm former Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” in 1990. To the contrary, NATO has admitted 14 former Soviet or Soviet-aligned states since then.

From the billions in aid to Ukraine, it’s clear the United States is investing heavily in the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Much of that aid is designated for weapons that are not yet manufactured, suggesting the United States is ready to support the neoliberal Ukrainian government for years to come. This means that — just like in Vietnam and Afghanistan — the federal government is dedicated to a long-term conflict with little regard for any public resistance they may encounter. Ask yourself: When in its history has the United States heavily funded a fighting force that was trying to improve living standards for any group of working people?

Today, we face a nonstop barrage of pro-Ukrainian media. Major news outlets have been reporting optimistically on Ukraine’s war efforts, while Russian troops remain planted on Ukrainian soil since February. Western bourgeois media is clearly trying to make NATO’s investment in Ukraine seem worthwhile, as they have done to support the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

You don’t have to be a Putin apologist to understand that Western powers see Russia as a threat to their hegemony. Those with a deep respect for human life should hope to see an expedient and diplomatic end to the conflict, with no further expansion of NATO. Unlike the United States and her allies, we should not support the effort to include Ukraine in NATO at any cost. This position is nonsensical, and only remains publicly acceptable due to the tireless media campaigns of a supposedly “free press” in the Global North.

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism.

Too Little, Too Late: Biden's Self-Congratulatory Marijuana Reform Falls Short

By Youhanna Haddad

On October 6th, 2021, President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon of those federally convicted of marijuana possession, noting that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.” This pardon, while seeming huge, releases exactly zero prisoners as no American is in federal prison for simple marijuana possession. Biden further stated that the federal government’s classification of marijuana as more serious than fentanyl “makes no sense,” with the attorney general and Department of Health and Human Services reportedly initiating a process to review marijuana’s scheduling. “Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana,” Biden said. “It’s time that we right these wrongs.”

Biden’s pardon disrupted the more than a century-long history of anti-marijuana policy at the federal level. While the pardon affects but a small minority of total possession convictions, the potential rescheduling or even descheduling of marijuana has not been seriously considered in the United States since the late 1980s. This is thanks in large part to the Controlled Substances Act, which schedules drugs without any regard to their scientifically understood qualities.

To examine the eclectic legal quagmire that is marijuana prohibition, one must explore the history of the plant: its use over time and geography. While the first culture to use marijuana frequently changes as anthropologists continue uncovering older instances of use, it is widely acknowledged that the psychoactive variety of the plant has been consumed for over two millennia. Little to no scholarship has uncovered any historical use of marijauna leading to the decline of living standards anywhere near the level of drugs such as opium.

In the United States, the first marijuana regulations appeared in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. Motivated by the white-supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny, the United States government pushed westward, running into the then much larger nation of Mexico. After the Mexican-American War, thousands of Mexicans found themselves in newly “American” territory.

To avoid sharing resources, white-American settlers employed a mixture of vigilante and state-sponsored violence to subjugate the Mexican population. They fixated on Mexican use of “locoweed” — a slang term for marijuana — and used prohibition as a means of subjugation. Criminalization thus turned Mexicans into an outlaw class. This served to both reign in the Mexican population and reinforce settler propaganda regarding the “Mexican Menace.”

But it wasn’t just Mexicans who became associated with marijuana around this time. The global phenomenon of jazz music was well underway by the early 20th century. An art form with unmistakably black roots, the popularity of jazz in urban centers led to black male performers gaining fame across the United States.

Concerns over white women in jazz clubs potentially having sexual relations with these men incited panic, particularly in white, bourgeois families. Worrying their daughters might be mesmerized by the siren song of the performers, they sought to restrict the influence of the jazz wave. This manifested in a reinvigorated opposition to marijuana — a known favorite of many jazz performers such as Cab Calloway, whose song ‘Reefer Man’ lauds the drug’s benefits. 

White imagination thus associated Latino and black peoples with marijuana. This set the stage for white outrage at the drug in order to suppress both populations. Rhetoric focused on the potential of marijuana to be used by men of color to dull the inhibitions of white women, facilitating their seduction. While the reality may have been that white women were simply interested in relations with these men, or wanted to explore jazz nightlife, the settler masses adopted this hyper-sexualized rhetoric. The newly established Federal Bureau of Narcotics capitalized on these racist lies in the early 1930s, with leader Harry J. Anslinger proclaiming that marijuana use promoted interracial sex:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

This rhetoric, which ignored widespread white use in order to racialize the issue, was successful in convincing Congress to pass the first truly restrictive federal regulation of marijuana: The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively made the drug illegal to possess or distribute. It took until 1969 for an infamous Supreme Court case to invalidate the law for its violation of 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination. One year later, President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, which classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning the federal government did not recognize any medicinal value and recognized a high potential for abuse.

While obviously nonsensical, this scheduling seemed to make sense to John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief under Nixon. In a 1994 interview, Ehrlichman stated that there was significant political motivation from the Nixon administration to target certain communities through the Controlled Substances Act. He explained that:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate [them with drugs] we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Nixon’s presidency is widely recognized as a particularly embarrassing chapter in American history, largely due to the Watergate scandal. Only escaping the scandal through a presidential pardon, Nixon was caught red-handed by the nation and world. In light of his crimes, it is unsurprising that the administration sought to quell political opposition through the legal route provided by the Controlled Substances Act.

Today, arrests for marijuana possession follow the same racist logic that birthed prohibition. In 2018, black Americans were 3.64 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. In Montana and Kentucky, they were over 9 times more likely to be arrested. This is despite the fact that black and white Americans use marijuana at similar rates.

There is no state, including all states where marijuana is legal, that arrests white and black citizens at equal rates. Even in Colorado — the first state to legalize recreational use — black people are 1.54 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession (even “legal” states have possession limits).

Incredibly, there are 19 counties in the United States where black people are more than 20 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana. In Georgia’s Pickens County, black people are over 97 times more likely to be arrested! These statistics demonstrate the racist nature of marijuana enforcement — an enforcement that has never separated itself from its roots as a tool of subjugation of nonwhite populations.

In the best-case scenario, Biden’s directive to reschedule marijuana would result in complete descheduling. That means marijuana would no longer be prohibited by the Controlled Substances Act. While this would undeniably be an overdue victory, it wouldn’t expunge or pardon any past convictions from draconian laws that unjustly decimated generations of black communities. Descheduling alone, therefore, does little to right the wrongs Biden claims to be so concerned about. In order to properly address this state-sponsored terror campaign, all prisoners whose charges derive from marijuana possession must be freed and their records expunged. Anything less is a frivolous distraction masquerading as a step toward justice while keeping the victims of prohibition in bondage.