The Democratic Socialists of America are planning “Reading Groups” in the Washington, D.C., area that include a study of recent “Riots and Uprisings.”
Members and nonmembers can join the Metro DC DSA chapter this fall for readings and discussions on mass protests worldwide, including California and Minnesota‘s anti-deportation riots, according to the group’s materials and announcements about the clubs. The chapter’s other reading groups will explore topics such as abolishing “work, prison, and family,” “how the United States’s Cold War foreign policy led to genocide and dashed the dreams of radicals,” the “violence” of national borders, and “DSA’s electoral strategy” in light of recent Washington and New York City candidate wins.
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The DSA’s Metro DC chapter covers its Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia branches. The Democratic Party currently faces a reckoning with the more radical DSA wing’s efforts to overthrow establishment leadership in races across the country. Democratic Washington, D.C., mayoral nominee Janeese Lewis George, a Metro DC DSA member, is slated to win office in November in the overwhelmingly blue district.
A syllabus-style document describing the “riots and uprisings” reading club opens with a Karl Marx quote about “proletarian revolutions.”
Such movements “constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew,” the quote says. “They deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals — until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible.”
The DSA club will analyze “how people struggled” against elites during crises such as the 2008 stock market crash and COVID-19, according to the guide. The study will also include the mass uproar against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Los Angeles in the summer of 2025 and in Minneapolis starting in January. Both uprisings led to protester arrests and charges, as well as property damage.
“We want to understand and develop our knowledge of the mass protests movements increasingly shaking different parts of the planet, as they went from pure defeats in 2011 to overthrowing governments in the 2020s,” the DSA guide says. “We also want to develop a ‘Democratic Socialist’ analysis of these events, new concepts and ideas about them, through critically reading those who previously studied these events.”
For the Los Angeles portion, DSA selected readings from leftist publications cheering on the rioters or recounting authors’ experiences at the demonstrations.
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“The rebels, mostly Black and Latino youth, battled for hours, persevering despite the hails of rubber bullets, flash bang grenades lighting up the sky, billowing clouds of tear gas, armored personnel carriers filled with riot police, militarized Feds, the National Guard, and now the Marines,” one selected article says — just below pictures of protesters forming barricades and cars set on fire.
The DSA announced in July that it had surpassed 120,000 members nationwide and had become the largest socialist organization in U.S. history.
