DSA Leftist Music & Art Repository

07/09/2022

A proposed left-leaning constitution was voted down this weekend, but the artworks remain, calling for universal human rights, environmental justice, and social equality.

02/09/2022

In memoriam of Mikis Theodorakis on September 2, 2021, the IF DDR interviewed Hartmut König, a former secretary for international labour and culture in the Free German Youth organisation also known as FDJ, (German: Freie Deutsche Jugend). König, an acclaimed songwriter himself, shared his reminisc...

12/08/2022

Heeeeeeeey!

From the Whitney Museum to Tate Modern, workers at art and cultural institutions are discovering that unions aren’t just for hard-hats

04/08/2022

Everything you ever wanted to know about the intimate exploits of Mr. Block but were too afraid to ask:

Charles H. Kerr Publishing will host a book release event for Praise Boss! by Joseph Grim Feinberg. Based on the original 1930s coworker from hell, MR. BLOCK, Praise Boss! is a “mad mix of vaudeville, IWW history, cartoon, Agit Prop, erotic high jinks, and class struggle. . . . pure radical theatr...

29/07/2022

This is huge!

Soon! For the first time in almost 100 years, Hugo Gellert’s classic, Capital in Pictures—a beautifully illustrated edition of Marx’s Capital—will be back in print, with a new introduction by Talia Lux.

26/04/2022

Big and true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Kamzolkin

04/04/2022

Story also highlights Minneapolis archives and library workers doing an amazing job of recovering a forgotten piece of working class history.

"We didn’t have the right equipment to hear the film. A specialist helped us extract the audio. We then heard the boy speak after getting asked about the teachers striking. With a smile as his friends surrounded him, the boy who looked to be around 10 years old said: “. . . I think they should get some more money cause they work, they be working extra hours for us and all that stuff.” "

Deep in the WCCO film archives are hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities to travel back in time. And on one reel a treasure lay hidden, untouched, for 52 years.

02/04/2022

Less than one week left of what looks like a powerful exhibit in Buffalo, NY!

31/03/2022

Brings a whole new meaning to craft unionism!

Sellers are calling for a shopping boycott beginning April 11th.

18/03/2022

Happy Anti-Imperialist St. Patrick’s Day to those who celebrate!

St. Patrick’s Day is the perfect occasion to watch the best film ever made about the Irish fight for freedom against British occupation in the early 20th century.

08/03/2022

Happy International Working Womens' Day!

Violeta Parra was a Chilean composer, songwriter, political organizer and visual artist who is best known for her pioneering work in the Nueva Canción Chilena cultural movement.

Ricardo Levins Morales is a Minneapolis-based artist and organizer with deep roots in the anti-imperialist movement in Puerto Rico. His interest in fusing art with political activism dates back to the late-1960s.

Violeta Parra, known as the mother of Latin American folk.

“Yo no tomo la guitarra por conseguir un aplauso. Yo canto la diferencia que hay de lo cierto a lo falso. De lo contrario no canto.”

“I do not play the guitar for applause. I sing the difference that there is between what is true and what is false. Otherwise I do not sing.”

19/02/2022

15/02/2022

February 1931 cover of 'The New Masses' by Hugo Gellert, decrying the activities of the Fish Committee, set up in 1930 by New York Congressional Representative Hamilton Fish III to repress Communist activists across the United States.

13/02/2022

EVE 6 are a treasure

12/02/2022

10/02/2022

Eve6's bandcamp: https://eve6.bandcamp.com/

06/02/2022

Headline gold 💯

Article on the enduring influence of US Communist artist Rockwell Kent's illustrations to the famed, 1930 Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick in the comments.

Why socialists should read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

03/02/2022

Informative article that highlights the role that Black leftists, including legendary performer and Communist activist Paul Robeson, played in leading opposition to nuclear proliferation after World War II.

"In 1946, Paul Robeson gave a scathing, brilliant speech about the connections between nuclear weapons and racism against the Japanese and Black liberation: “it is all part of one problem, this matter of discrimination and it may be the foremost question facing us today in the atomic age.” Robeson puts the crux of the problem not on the weapon itself, but on the ideologies and prejudices that compel the use of the weapons at all. As a rising Black performer with much to lose, Robeson continued, drawing these dangerous connections between racism, capitalism, colonialism, war, and ultimately, extinction: “Our government is getting uranium from the Belgian Congo for atomic bombs. American companies are prospecting for oil in Ethiopia and for minerals in Liberia...these manifestations of a new and heightened interest in Africa on the part of American Big Business represent a challenge to the rest of us...We on the anti-imperialist side are handicapped by lack of money, lack of powerful organization, lack of influence in state and international affairs. But, although the enemy has all the advantage and has a head start in the race, it is yet possible for us to catch up and win. It is possible to win if the majority of the American people can be brought to see and understand in the fullest sense the fact that the struggle in which we are engaged is not a matter of mere humanitarian sentiment, but of life and death. The only alternative to world freedom is world annihilation.”

Content Warning: violence, racist language, mention of racist atrocities, mass death This story was also published in Waging Nonviolence and Nukewatch .

02/02/2022

Happy birthday to internationalist, Communist poet Langston Hughes, and happy day one of both Black History Month and the Lunar New Year!

“On the topic of woodcuts, Li Hua created this woodcut—a cry for the country's semi-colonial status. After his visit to China where he met in 1933, wrote the anti-colonial poem in the same name, 'Roar, China!'”

24/01/2022

[4 days away] Cultural production is a powerful instrument for those who hold and shape it. These artists’ work focuses on the future and boldly imagines new worlds. As artists and cultural producers, how can we use art to imagine and promote socialist futures?

You can RSVP to the virtual opening of Vital Lines / Líneas Vitales at https://peoplesforum.org/events/vital-lines-virtual-opening-celebration/

18/01/2022

Today in the United States, we observed a Federal holiday in honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To give you a sense of how threatening King's anti-imperialism and radical commitment to racial and economic justice were to a U.S. political establishment committed to compromising with segregationists and ensuring Capitalist economic hegemony by military means, consider the fact that these three images, of King being barred by police from attending the funeral of slain Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers, of the sanitation workers whose strike for safer working conditions brought King to Memphis, TN before his 1968 assassination, and of organized labor mourning King, were taken by Ernest C. Withers, a photographer who cooperated with the FBI's COINTELPRO surveillance of the civil rights movement for almost two decades.

Read the address by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., given at the
April 15 Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam in New York City
on Saturday, April 15, 1967 here: https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mlkviet2.htm

tl;dr: "I come to participate in this significant demonstration today because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this mobilization because I cannot be a silent onlooker while evil rages. I am here because I agree with Dante, that: "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." In these days of emotional tension, when the problems of the world are gigantic in extent and chaotic in detail, there is no greater need than for sober thinking, mature judgment, and creative dissent."

Watch the speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGFOiSTs3Q

12/01/2022

Meme Gerd Arntz strikes again!

11/01/2022

Radio Venceremos, the clandestine radio network of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front of El Salvador began broadcasting Jan. 10, 1981 and continued to do so throughout the Salvadoran Civil War.

06/01/2022

Big news!

Revolutionary photographer Tina Modotti’s article on the murder of her Cuban communist lover Julio Antonio Mella lay forgotten in the Moscow archives for decades. On the 80th anniversary of her death, we publish it in English for the first time.

01/01/2022

What's this about a logo contest?!

25/12/2021

Happy Xmas to all who celebrate!

on this snowy Terre Haute afternoon. From "Jesus, the Supreme Leader" originally published in Progressive Woman in 1914.

"It matters little whether Jesus was born at Nazareth or Bethlehem. The accounts conflict, but the point is of no consequence.

It is of consequence, however, that He was born in a stable and cradled in a manger. This fact of itself, about which there is no question, certifies conclusively the proletarian character of Jesus Christ. Had His parents been other than poor working people — money-changers, usurers, merchants, lawyers, scribes, priests, or other parasites — He would not have been delivered from His mother’s womb on a bed of straw in a stable among asses and other animals.

Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as every other babe ever born into the world. He was of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of mankind. The scriptural account of his “immaculate conception” is a beautiful myth, but scarcely more of a miracle than the conception of all other babes.

Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual being."

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1914/0300-debs-jesussupreme.pdf

23/12/2021

20/12/2021

Beloved U.S. singer-songwriter Phil Ochs was born on this day in 1940. This animated short by graphic designer David Miller uses Phil Och's own recordings to outline his career, offering a glimpse not only into the psychological anguish of Ochs' final year, but also the thoughtful wit behind his songs.

CW: Mental health, alcohol addiction, su***de

Phil Ochs, the humanist troubadour who had a special incisiveness and edge to his creations, was a vital creative voice of the protest era and one of my arti...

02/12/2021

Jake Ehrlich is an ambitious gem of a contemporary topical balladeer.

We celebrate the creation of liberatory new traditions and wish Jewish comrades a happy continuation of the anti-imperialist festival of lights!

I sang this original verse to Peter Yarrow's "Light One Candle" last night for an online Chanukah gathering of rad Jews across the country. I hope that you all will include it in your Chanukah festivities as a counterweight to the triumphalism and nationalism that so often accompany this holiday. Happy Chanukah & Free Palestine! 🇵🇸

🕯️ Light one candle for the Palestinian people, deprived of the right to their land
And light one candle for elders & children with keys to their homes in their hands
Light one candle to spotlight the struggle of an occupied nation in pain,
And light one candle to show our resistance to the violence done in our name!

01/11/2021

'Samlade Krafter' is a compilation of recorded live performances from a 1978 concert held in Malmö, Sweden celebrating the 75th anniversary of the 1903 founding of the Social Democratic Youth League (SDUF), the youth affiliate of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. After having broke with the Social Democrats in 1917, the SDUF went through a number of changes. By the time of this 1978 concert, the SDUF had been renamed the Communist Youth (KU) and had affiliated itself with the Swedish Left Party–the Communists (VPK).

The KU was the predecessor organization of the contemporary Swedish communist youth organization The Young Left, which has remained affiliated with the current iteration of the VPK, the Left Party (V).

This record is a collection of covers and original music performed by musicians who were affiliated with the KU in the late-1970s. The compilation's title translates to 'Gathered Forces' in English.
On the history of the Swedish Left Party (V): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Party_(Sweden)

On the history of the Swedish Young Left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Left_(Sweden)

Compilation of recorded live performances from a 1978 concert held in Malmö, Sweden celebrating the 75th anniversary of the 1903 founding of the Social Democ...