DC is set to inherit full control over a prime parcel of real-estate. Should we build housing for all, or parking lots for a blood sport?

As Donald Trump's Summer of Reckoning nears an end, the rest of us enter uncharted territory.

Republicans in Congress, having solved the rest of America’s problems, have renewed their focus on how the District of Columbia runs its municipal affairs.

The fight for full democracy for DC will not reach conclusion until DC’s citizens and elected officials unite to bring it about, by any means necessary. 

The emblematic play by Nathan Alan Davis, currently in its world premiere at Arena Stage, connects America’s fraught racial past with its present.

Pundits took the Democrats' strength in the midterms as a referendum on Republican extremism and support for moderation. But the results really show that voters want more from Democrats, not less.

Brief coverage of an anti-Amazon rally held on Black Friday.

A new play at DC's Kreeger Theater explores the common threads that link unique immigrant experiences.

A new coalition is looking to disrupt police involvement in basic traffic enforcement.

The ink from President Biden’s signature on “The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” was hardly dry when his underlings began to undercut the most critical parts of the legislation.

The District's lack of autonomy leaves its 700,000 residents vulnerable to the political right's misogynistic machinations.

Whatever demons drive Americans to kill massive numbers of innocent citizens, they’d be stymied without easy access to lethal weaponry.

The battle for basic rights is about to get tougher. So must the Left.

On April 7, the DMV lost an important figure in the history of DC's left-wing currents.

In the battle between the “corporate Mouse” and the political rats in Tallahassee and elsewhere, the Left has no natural allies.

The world must demand of Russia: Stop the bombing and pull out the troops. Then we’ll talk.

What opponents of CRT are really afraid of is white students embracing solidarity with students of color in favor of social change.

Through voter suppression tactics and and locally focused organizing schemes, Republicans are setting up conditions to favorably contest the next presidential election.

However important railroads are, are they so critical as to undercut the rights of the workers to decent treatment?

Has the national defund movement slowed? Part of the problem may be the movement’s messaging.

The residual racism embedded in many place names around the country could well include the name Arlington

Taliban rule and the Texas far right’s legislative wish list of banning abortion and suppressing voting rights invite comparisons.

A brief update (and appeal to action) on the infrastructure bill making its way through Congress.

A two-decade recounting of local perspectives on the labor movement.

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.

In a post-carbon future, will urban expressways wither away and revert to urban space?

Heather McGhee's new book reminds us that racial division is a vital component of capitalist exploitation.

The estate of Dr. Seuss was justified in ceasing the publications of several of his books. His legacy should be viewed against the entirety of his life’s (rather progressive) work.

The political war between voting rights and voter suppression has reached a new intensity. For the Left, the battle is about the future of progressive politics; for the Right, it’s about survival.

Trump is gone, but the pandemic nightmare his administration failed to acknowledge remains.

In 2021, Virginia is a much-changed state absorbed by a blue wave that foretells an opening for progressive politics from Virginia to Florida.

Trump's regime ended with an insurrection at the Capitol. The attack failed, but revealed the wells of hatred that infect much of the White working-class.

This article from February 1992 set out the state of play for the single-payer movement at the time. As in 2020, a recession was making millions of Americans anxious about their own access to health care.

In mid-December the United States passed a grim milestone: 300,000 lives lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. How do we even begin to process how many have died?

It was a mixed-messages kind of election - Trump was defeated but not fully repudiated. How should we make sense of where we are now?

Trump’s two-pronged strategy—litigation and political pressure—to remain in the White House is sputtering on all cylinders, but unlikely to succeed.

How might the 2020 election be stolen, and how will the opposition fight back?

Introduction

Donald Trump intends to steal the 2020 election. We can't let that happen.

An amusing look at how a small right-wing college serves as academic cover for a classic push-poll about the dread menace socialism.

A guide for exploring the clash of ideologies in a compact enclave in Northwest Washington.

What has the new anti-racism revolution accomplished? And what has yet to be achieved?

The treatment of the District during both the COVID-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter protests provides yet another argument why the District needs self-government.

This article, published in the June 1992 issue of the Washington Socialist, looks at two uprisings from that time triggered by police violence: in DC’s Mount Pleasant Neighborhood in 1992 and in Los Angeles the previous year.

The DSA is not endorsing Joe Biden. But members should do what they can to assist in his victory.

This piece from Fall 1987 draws parallels between that year’s crash and much more significant one of 1929 and offers predictions of how it might affect U.S. politics going forward.

Does the Left’s eagerness to remake the country in the face of the crisis make it the mirror image of the nationalist right?

The history of DSA's electoral and political strategy.

Labor’s present-day struggles against capital – and sometimes, amongst itself – are reflected in this 1985 Socialist interview with Victor Reuther, brother of the late United Auto Workers’ President Walter Reuther and himself a longtime UAW leader.

But attempts to pin down what socialism is and what socialists would do if they gained the levers of power has been a historically popular exercise. A new book gives it another go.

If civil disobedience is needed to prick the consciences of a number of us sufficient to avert a new global tragedy, then we are obliged to practice it.

The proposed bill from a decade ago, which would have given DC a single vote in the House but no Senate representation, sold democracy short.  That would have given DC no voice in the impeachment trial, nor in the confirmation votes of the rogues’ gallery of Trump appointees.

There are numerous changes in our individual behaviors and practices that can help move the struggle forward, if only a little, by injecting a little socialism at the grass roots. After all, virtually every important social change started with an individual taking action.

The Caucus mission statement cited its purpose as the exploration of “the history of DSA both locally and nationally, as well as the history of left politics and culture locally, nationally and internationally, in order to provide a historic perspective that can contribute to the present-day thinking and practices of Metro-DC DSA.”

RWF will present to representatives of team owner Daniel Snyder a sort of holiday gift: the petitions collected during the year with signatures of members of the public demanding a name change.

While being a socialist isn’t required to support statehood for the District, the cause does demand the support and involvement of all true socialists.

Reflections on democratic socialism from 1984.

While proposals for DC statehood have been submitted in each Congress for decades, the current bill is the first to have been declared a priority by the Democratic leadership of both houses.

People moving to improve their lot in life has been a constant and sometimes this movement takes place across the arbitrary lines known as borders.

The administration's brain-dead war against science is a reason why “Deep Time,” the new permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is so refreshing.

The struggle for full democratic rights for the District of Columbia will take another step forward on July 24 when the House Committee on Oversight and Reform holds a hearing on H.R. 51, a bill to make the DC the 51st state.

The country can live without athletes hobnobbing in the Rose Garden. What will be harder, though, is repairing the damage that Trump’s toxic racism unleashed on the nation.

In 2015, the Arlington County Board also adopted a resolution condemning the Washington football team’s name as racist. But two jurisdictions that have shown interest in luring the team have remained mum on the issue.

Odds appear good that a bill for DC statehood will pass the House of Representatives, a new first in the fight for equality for the District. And unfortunately, that’s where it will stop.

Metro-DC DSA notes with sadness the passing of longtime local member Alice M. Leonard on February 24 at the age of 101.

Bill Mosley examines the right wing's longstanding rationale behind the late, great and once and future (?) Shutdown – further eroding public confidence and trust in government.

Review of a new book from John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Varveck which explores the intersection of race, identity, and the working class.

On December 8, activists pressing for a change to the Washington football team’s racist name take their campaign to the club’s headquarters in Ashburn, VA.

The pro-police message of NLEM demands a countervailing narrative, one that makes more than a brief pass at the abuses of law-enforcement officers.

The People’s Lobbying Group is lining up clients that work on tax issues, economic justice, labor, consumer rights and local Prince George’s County matters.

The progressive faction on the council has largely pursued policies to benefit the majority of DC residents, but Reeder’s rise shows they have not made necessary connections with the District’s lower-income minority communities.

Dick Gregory carried the weight of being a black man in a country still emerging from the mire of Jim Crow, and the racism he experienced in his everyday life first drove his comedy and then his commitment to fighting racial oppression.

The Council’s threat to overturn the expressed will of the voters rises to more than policy disagreement: it is nothing less than contempt for the voters who put them in office.

DC has been playing an increasingly assertive role in facing down the hostile occupier sitting in the White House. Now we need to ask for a favor from those outside the District.

Bill Mosley examines why confronting the malefactors in the Administration in their public and private lives is necessary in this Age of Trump.

Today’s galloping gentrification is only the latest chapter in a decades-long saga in which the powers that be have sought to remake Washington, DC at the expense of the people who have made it a living, breathing city.

Radical tourism is not merely about passing a day while visiting another city, but rather looking at the world from the viewpoint of those who challenged the status quo of profit, patriarchy, white privilege and homophobia.

The idea of establishing a dedicated source of funds for WMATA dates back at least three-and-a-half decades — and one of its early proponents was the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

The film effectively depicts the mob mentality that greases the wheels for attacks on the poor.

Trump's tariffs are a dodge to avoid the questions of global trade and multinational corporate hegemony that his crude ideology has no answers for. Yet he has perforce been joined by some unlikely allies.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, which recently opened an exhibition on how Native imagery and history have been used and abused for entertainment, profit-making, and painting a pretty face on the policy of Manifest Destiny.

Countering critics of kneeling protesters with a deeper look into the creation of the Star Spangled Banner.

Is it really possible for a museum dedicated to the scripture of a specific religion to be a pure purveyor of scholarship rather than a promoter of that religion’s point of view?

For the past three years, the grassroots group Rebrand Washington Football (RWF) has been circulating petitions calling on the team to adopt a new name.

Every significant development in the history of the district has had a racial component. This is a city whose very existence is steeped in racial geography.

The artists we now call modern increasingly adopted the world around them as their subject matter, a world being reshaped by industrialization and revolution.

If Puerto Rico is cursed by federal Washington's indifference and neglect, the District of Columbia has the opposite problem: suffocating micromanagement

Emboldened hate groups followed Trump's example in a march on Charlottesville. Thousands, including dozens of members of Democratic Socialists of America, marched in a counter-demonstration to show with their presence that hatred and intolerance cannot go unanswered.

While the removal of racist monuments is on the agenda, we need look no further than in our own backyard for examples of memorials that should never have been erected in the first place.

The 100th birthday celebration of a founding member of DSOC/DSA in our local and a Northern Virginia activist for over 70 years.

ATC privatization has been prevented for now, but privatization has powerful backers who aren't ready to quit after 30 years of trying, and it is likely to be resuscitated in the near future.

For the residents of DC, the Marshall monument is an affront to our city.

The fate of RFK Stadium and the land on which it sits were put in play earlier this year when DC and Maryland political leaders, wary of a giveaway, went on the offensive.

There is a wall of resistance to Trump and his agenda that will be difficult to break. Tim Snyder's review helps us build out a resistance strategy built for the long-term.

Even as cities across the country declare themselves as sanctuaries, DC has come under special scrutiny due to its colonial status.

DC residents can't appeal to a member of Congress to stop a Trump nominee. So stop asking us...

The Smithsonian's new addition reminds us how we got this far, and suggests how we might go further.