Neighborhood Meetings are part of DSA-LA’s Neighborhood Solidarity Program—our chapter’s campaign to strengthen and grow socialist organization by uniting with our neighbors through tenant organizing, mutual aid work, and political study. This and all other Palms/Culver City Neighborhood Meetings are open to new and long-time comrades who live in Palms & Culver City.

Our fifth Palms & Culver City Neighborhood Meeting will build on discussions and projects outlined in last meeting — including our ongoing community tabling and canvassing efforts dedicated to the benefits available through (and the failings of) the American Recovery Act.

Continuing our study of Class Struggle and Socialist Strategy across different terrains, our study topic for this meeting will be Socialist Propaganda and Consciousness Raising. Short recommended readings to ground the discussion are included below.

• 5-page excerpt from “How can the left win?” (Seymour, 2011). Written in the wake of the 2008 global recession, Seymour’s discussion of the role of ‘common sense’ and ideological struggles that “prepare the preconditions for more militant forms of combat” can lend lessons for our work as socialists today, who strive to articulate, build, and fight for a new politics in response to the current health and economic crisis.

• 14-page excerpt from “Raising Consciousness at the Workplace; Anglos, Mexicans, and the Founding of the Los Angeles CIO, 1933 – 1938” Chapter 6 from John Laslett’s Sunshine was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010 (2012)