Revolutions Per Minute - Radio from the New York City Democratic Socialists of America

International Workers’ Day is right around the corner on May 1, and this year it comes among a huge upswell of worker-run unionism and labor militancy. From Delta Airlines to Amazon and Starbucks to local shops like Film Forum here in NYC, workers are coming together and fighting for their rights on the job.   Here at Revolutions per Minute, we are organizers, and organizers know that all labor st...

Tonight we are joined live from New Jersey by Chigozie Onyema, a North New Jersey DSA endorsed candidate for City Council in Newark. We will also be speaking to Rebecca Martinez and Julian Mesri from the Radical Theatre collective about their production of Songs About Trains.   We also caught up with State Senator Julia Salazar to talk to her about the New York State budget, why she voted against...

Tonight we’ll continue our series of interviews with the DSA For The Many Slate with David Alexis, a rideshare driver, working class father and climate organizer who is running to represent Senate District 21 in Flatbush, Brooklyn Many began 2022 with some hope that with Andrew Cuomo out of office, New York might finally be able to pass a state budget that meets the needs of working class people....

We spoke with a Starbucks worker-organizer from Buffalo, NY back in January here on RPM, and since that time the fight has only gotten hotter. As of today, over 170 Starbucks locations in 27 states have filed for elections with the National Labor Relations Board – including several right here in New York City! With union victories in Buffalo, Arizona, Tennessee, at the heart of the Starbucks mytho...

Tonight we’re joined live in the studio by Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard  and Jacob Clary, organizers from NYC-DSA’s Socialist Drug Politics Organizing Committee. We discuss the class politics of drug use, overdose prevention centers AKA safe injection sites, and much more. Learn how the transformative perspective of socialist drug politics offers different ways of understanding drug use and the social...

After three long weeks, Putin’s war with Ukraine has devastated the region with mass shellings of Ukrainian towns and villages, and bombings that have included hospitals and kindergartens. All of this has been under the banal guise of a [quote] “special military operation”, words which ring hollow to any Leftist familiar with the lies of Imperial Powers. This assault has taken thousands of Ukraini...

Tonight on RPM we continue our series of conversations with DSA’s 2022 For The Many candidate slate with Illapa Sairitupac. Illapa is social worker and climate organizer who has been endorsed by NYC-DSA for Assembly District 65, a Lower East Side district once held by the notorious Sheldon Silver.  We’ll talk to Illapa about running a campaign for working class New Yorkers in a district that also...

The specter and reality of war haunts humanity. The imperialist expansion of NATO and right-wing Russian nationalism continue to escalate tensions in the Ukraine, where CIA backed fascist paramilitaries roam the streets. While Russian invasion would prove devastating for the workers of the world, further US intervention would only make things worse. War is only rational for the profiteers in the m...

Considered on its own, the New York Police Department is in the top ten largest armies in the world. Why? As working-class New Yorkers struggle to stay fed and safely housed, the NYPD enjoys nearly unlimited resources and sees no issue with using those resources to oppress and surveil the city’s population. On tonight's show, we speak to Khalil from NYC-DSA’s Defund NYPD campaign on why socialists...

Yesterday two very different visions for the future of New York’s energy system were presented at a marathon 12+ hour long budget hearing on environmental conservation. On one hand, New York’s regulators argued to stay the course and continue to let the market and capital be the primary drivers of building renewable energy, despite the state having missed it’s renewable energy goals year after yea...

Starting late last year in Buffalo, NY, a union wave has spread all over the country as workers at an ever-increasing number of Starbucks coffee shops are getting organized and making demands on their boss and on the multi-national corporation that employs them. This movement is gaining speed every day - and to help us understand what’s going on from a worker perspective, we’re joined live in the...

Tonight on our show we will be talking about our host Desiree Joy Frias' home of the South Bronx where capitalist interests and government failures are continuing to cost lives.   In the middle of brutal winter weather and yet another Covid spike, tenants are once again mobilizing to defend against evictions and build working-class power with all of New York City’s residents, including the 1 in 12...

In an effort to exert its power over the Americas, the United States has enforced an embargo on Cuba ever since its revolutionary struggle for independence from American imperialism. The blockade is an effort to force regime change against the will of Cuban people who want to improve their society without foreign interference. Despite the immense suffering caused by the embargo to this very day, s...

The formation of the United Auto Workers in the 1930s represented the upsurge in organized working class militancy that pushed forward a New Deal. Since that time the UAW has been a base of support for its members that collectively provides workers with a better life. Yet the UAW has weakened as its corrupt leadership has chosen compromise with the bosses over a robust internal democracy. That’s a...

It’s never been easy to be a front-line retail or customer service worker at the holidays, and with a dramatic surge in COVID cases affecting New York City, this year is even harder. For our Revolutions per Minute holiday special, we’re joined live by Eric Dirnbach of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, DSA’s national project in partnership with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine...

2021 has been another incredibly tough year, with the pandemic and climate crisis exacerbating income inequality and dire living situations for working class people across the globe.   Tonight we’ll catch up with a few DSA working groups to talk about the organizing they’ve done to build working class power and solidarity this year and what’s coming up for 2022. Our guests tonight are Joel from th...

*and Cypress Hills, and Ocean Hill! Believe it or not, 2022 is right around the corner and will bring with it a new electoral cycle and a new slate of DSA-endorsed socialist candidates for office. On tonight’s show, we kick off our series of interviews with NYC-DSA’s 2022 slate as we speak LIVE with Samy Nemir Olivares, candidate for Assembly District 54 in Bushwick, Cypress Hills, and Ocean Hill....

Working class struggle continues to spread across New York City and the rest of the country. Wirecutter workers at the New York Times have launched their strike, joining the 3,000 Columbia academic workers on the picket line. 14,000 Kroger workers in Houston have authorized a strike while 24,000 academic workers at the University of California have done the same. Rank-n-file reform slate Teamsters...

Today we’re talking with Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest and her district manager Justin Freeman about how they are bringing their socialist office directly to the community they represent and are building power not just to win elections, but pass legislation that meaningful changes the lives of the working class in Brooklyn like the Less is More bill, which was signed into law this year, a...

Election day was Tuesday and DSA’s 30+ nationally-endorsed campaigns were put to voters. With a nearly 70% win rate for DSA's campaigns nationally, there's much to discuss about organizing for socialism at the ballot box and the rising tensions between the left and the existing Democratic establishment. On tonight’s show,  we'll share provisional election results and an interview with a DSA-endors...

You’re listening to Revolutions Per Minute live from the new WBAI studios, a socialist radio show and podcast from members of New York City Democratic Socialists of America. The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with 95,000 members nationwide and NYC-DSA is its biggest chapter. We are run by our 9,000+ members and organizers who are workin...

As regular listeners of Revolutions per Minute know, we are living in a time of many overlapping campaigns for justice for the working-class. Sometimes, organizing campaigns result in victory and opportunities for celebration while looking toward the next goal. Other times, campaigns require strategic escalation. On tonight’s show, we’ll speak to New York for Abortion Rights about a key victory in...

If you're a listener member, in order to maximize the power of our small collective, we're asking you to vote in this order: 1. Nicodemus Nicoludis 2. Dylan Saba For the rest of your ballot, we recommend looking into these candidates who are not members of Red Wave but are aligned with our goals: Eleanor Elizabeth Forman Bruce Greif (DSA Member) Philip DePaolo (DSA Member) If you're a staff member...

A strike wave is spreading across the United States. Thousands of nurses, carpenters, miners, factory workers, teachers and other workers are taking a stand against the big shots who steal the fruits of our labor. Unionization drives of academic, healthcare, and media workers have brought tens of thousands of new brothers and sisters into the organized labor movement. 60,000 IATSE film workers hav...

On Friday rent will be due for millions of New Yorkers. For tenants struggling to pay rent, this summer has been a roller coaster of ups and downs as hard fought for eviction moratoriums at the state and federal level have been won, overturned and finally reinstated here in New York, providing crucial protections until Jan 15, 2022. Today we will talk with NYC-DSA endorsed candidate and democratic...