The Vast Majority: "Chicago's Socialist Surge" with Carlos Ramirez-Rosa

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🗓️ 14 May 2019

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Chicago recently made international headlines for the victories of six — six!! — members of the Democratic Socialists of America running for city council. It’s an astonishing victory, the biggest socialist victory in any American city in probably a century.

These victories matter both for Chicago, which has seen growing working-class pushback to neoliberalism in recent years, but also for socialist organizers in cities around the country, who can learn from how Chicago won so many elections on a left platform.

One of the six victors in the April elections was Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who represents Chicago's 35th Ward, a gentrifying area on the city’s northwest side. Carlos was the only incumbent socialist city council member (or “alderman”); despite being attacked repeatedly by the area’s wealthy real-estate developers, he won re-election comfortably.

You can read my interview with Carlos from two years ago, when he was kicked off a gubernatorial ticket for his support of Palestine (which we mention in our discussion) here:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/09/carlos-rosa-chicago-bds-democratic-party

And you can read my piece in the Guardian on the Chicago electoral victories here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/03/americas-socialist-surge-chicago

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to episode 3 of the vast majority. I'm Micahutrich, managing editor of
0:11.0	of Jacobin and I'm recording this in Chicago and Chicago has been
0:15.1	in the headlines recently because we just elected a ton of socialists to our
0:21.0	city council six to be exact plus a handful of other strong progressive
0:26.1	city council members and those elections are a massive victory that is a
0:31.7	testament to both the rising socialist movement in Chicago
0:36.0	as well as the rest of the country and it's also a testament to the strength of the
0:39.7	city's broader working-class movement and one of the people who is Carlos Ramirez Rosa, who was the movement.
0:43.0	And one of the people who won in that string of
0:47.0	socialist victories on the city council
0:49.0	is Carlos Ramirez Rosa, who was the sitting
0:52.0	alderman of the 35th ward on the northwest side of
0:55.8	Chicago he's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America the only sitting
1:00.9	socialists on the city council so he's the kind of
1:03.9	elder statesman of this crop of socialist city council members in a way and you may have
1:09.2	heard of Carlos before because he drew some national headlines when just a couple years ago he was
1:14.9	running on a gubernatorial ticket as a lieutenant governor and was kicked off of that
1:19.4	ticket because he refused to back off of his support for boycott divestment and sanctions against Israel.
1:26.4	So he's somebody who has taken some very strong and uncompromising stances in favor of left-wing issues and has paid the price in terms of pushback
1:36.1	from the city and states political class and so I talked to him about his recent re-election, the role of socialists in his
1:46.4	campaign and what the left electoral prospects for the future in Chicago are going to look like.
1:54.0	Alderman Carlos Rosa, welcome to the vast majority.
	...

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