r/socialism

Bowdoin College is subjecting me (a founding leader of Bowdoin Socialists, an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and anti-Zionist student coalition) to a growing set of charges — including some tied to conduct while I was on medical leave — after I replied "RIP to bro 😿" to a campus email advertising a vigil for Charlie Kirk in September 2025. A fellow student reported the comment as a "direct threat to [their] life."

On February 12, 2026, Bowdoin Socialists published a compilation: "Bowdoin College's Jeffrey Epstein Connections," drawing on the January 2026 DOJ file release, the FCA's 2023 Decision Notice, and the Upper Tribunal's 2025 ruling in Staley v. FCA. One day later, Bowdoin's Director of Student Activities sent a written directive ordering Bowdoin Socialists to cease all online and offline activity on the grounds that we hadn't formally registered. However, student media are "editorially independent of the College and its administration" and the College "has no control over or input on the content of such publications and programming." When I questioned this on February 17, the Director simply replied that he was "passing this along to the Office of the Dean of Students for follow up."

On March 12, 2026, FIRE sent its first public letter to Bowdoin, calling the social media ban on Bowdoin Socialists a violation of our speech rights (at a private college).

On May 15, 2026, FIRE sent a second public letter condemning the ongoing investigations against me personally and demanding all charges be dropped. FIRE assigned a deadline of May 26 to respond.

Despite the ongoing pressure, Bowdoin Socialists is continuing to build out its speaker series for the coming academic year. We have announced two inaugural speakers and are currently in talks with a third:

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and one of the world's foremost scholars on colonialism and political violence. His books include Citizen and Subject, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Neither Settler nor Native, and, most recently, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State. Professor Mamdani is also the father of Zohran Mamdani '14, the Mayor of New York City, who founded Bowdoin's SJP chapter.

Anthony Fantano is widely recognized as the most influential music critic of his generation. In 2007, he joined WNPR and launched The Needle Drop as a music review blog before moving to YouTube in 2009. The channel has since accumulated approximately 1.2 billion views. The New York Times has called him "the only music critic who matters (if you're under 25)."

Hasan Piker is a leftist political commentator and one of the most-watched livestreamers in the United States. Bowdoin Socialists is currently in talks with Piker about an in-person event at the college.

I’ve seen a lot of confusion lately around why parts of the socialist/communist left are criticizing Zohran Mamdani, and I think both sides of the discussion are kind of talking past each other.

I think it’s fair to say that social democracy has historically functioned as a response within capitalism to moments of capitalist crisis.
Social democratic projects have rarely transformed the underlying power structure; more often they’ve helped stabilize it by conceding the historical minimum reforms necessary, given the balance of forces at the time, to keep working-class unrest at bay.

That critique is valid. And we must continue doing so.

A social democrat is not a revolutionary socialist. Mamdani is not going to overthrow capitalism or usher in socialism through electoral office. And I understand why some on the left are frustrated when people start treating modest reforms as the endpoint of politics.

But I also think some people are missing the dialectical side of this.

If reforms materially improve the lives of working-class New Yorkers; housing, transportation, wages, healthcare, labor protections; that matters. Socialists shouldn’t become so detached from material reality that we dismiss gains simply because they fall short of revolution.
Marx himself supported struggles for immediate reforms when they strengthened working-class organization and consciousness.

The point is not to mistake reforms for liberation, but to understand them as terrain of struggle.

And honestly, one of the most important things here is that Mamdani has helped renew interest in socialism among people who otherwise would never engage with these ideas at all. (Got this line of thought from another redditor, if you read this, thank you)

That creates opportunities to build class consciousness, organize, educate, and push politics further left.

Critical support does not mean abandoning critique. It means understanding political developments historically instead of morally.

Or as Marx put it: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” Not a bourgeois politician.

Edit: I see a some people upset because I used AI, I speak and think in Spanish better than I can in English, if using AI to translate my thoughts is going to make it less relevant then that just exposes some of the problems the left has to have a dialog when they don't like what they are reading and recurring to whatever fallacy to undermine others' opinions, leave that to right wingers.

I know FDR is a far from perfect president (looking at you
Japanese internment), but I’m interested in learning about him. I feel like he was as close to a socialist as we’ve ever had in the White House. I want to read about FDR through the lens of a leftist. Please recommend something for me!

We salute the heroic struggle of the Bolivian workers and peasants! They are once again earning their rightful place as the vanguard of the anti-imperialist movement on the continent. A successful struggle to bring down the hated Paz government and defeat its murderous repression campaign would give a black eye to the Yankee imperialists. It could halt the right-wing tide across the continent and ignite a broader struggle against the U.S.’s tightening grip on Latin America. Indeed, the recently elected U.S. puppets—in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru—have all declared their support to Paz. Thus, what is being fought over in Bolivia is not only the fate of workers and peasants there, but that of all oppressed masses in Latin America.

Or written differently: where do you think will be the next socialist Revolution?

And would there be anything that could be done to help it happen?

Would it be a country where the left is already powerful? Would it, on the contrary be a brutal dictatorship like pre-revolution Cuba or Russia?

As Marxists, and able bodied people, it is our duty to become weapons for the revolution, be it acquiring literal guns or becoming a weapon.

As an able bodied person who has fought martial arts for several years before (Capoeira, Judo and Taekwondo), I seek advice from older marxists who have needed to use physical force in their activism.

What is the most efficient martial art for us? Should we learn wrestling for one on one combat for self defense or should we learn Capoeira, Kickbox or Muay Thai to maintain our distance? What is most effective against the state and against individual fascists?

I hope that this serves as a wake up call to all Marxists of this subreddit: BECOME THE WEAPON THAT WILL LIBERATE THE WORKING CLASS. GET MORE DANGEROUS. MAKE THEM AFRAID.

Anthony Teso argues in Platypus Review that DSA is not doing enough to break from the Democrats and reformist politics. Is the critique valid? Will the momentum behind DSA be captured by the Democratic Party?

"BY ANY SURFACE MEASURE, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has become a serious political force. As of February 2026, DSA said it had surpassed 100,000 members, and Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election gave the organization its most visible municipal triumph to date.[1] Yet from a rigorous Marxist standpoint, the organization’s present political and organizational trajectory raises deep strategic concerns. The problem is not that its immediate demands are necessarily wrong. The problem is that the methods and structures it has adopted may systematically prevent those demands from ever being realized. This essay argues that DSA’s commitment to electoralism within the Democratic Party, its reformism without a developed theory of the state, its class composition, and its ideologically diffuse “big tent” model together forms a set of contradictions that Marxist analysis reveals as structural rather than accidental."

"The issue is not whether DSA can win elections, pass reforms, or radicalize a layer of activists. It plainly can. The issue is whether its dominant strategy builds the forms of working-class power capable of surviving collision with capital and the state. On that question, the doubts remain serious. A Marxist critique of DSA is therefore not a complaint that it wants too much; it is the harsher claim that, by tying socialist politics to institutions designed to absorb and domesticate them, it may be constructing the very machinery of its own containment."

He seems to be doing everything right and more