We began our meeting by discussing upcoming virtual teach-ins. There are several planned on topics such as Labor & Energy Democracy, A Worker’s Green New Deal, Art Design & Architecture. The chapter will be able to get involved and run certain sessions if we are interested. We will plan to continue keeping people up to date through the announcement email list. For more information, visit this website: bit.ly/sftpteachin. We may plan a watch party for some of these sessions.
We then heard from one of the members with experience promoting voter registration and electoral politics more generally. He described how left-wing activists are pushing democratic policies against the resistance of Republicans, who are focused on radicalizing their supporters. He has mixed feelings about the effectiveness of the focus on electoral politics and suggests it’s unclear what may happen in the event that Democrats win the presidential and congressional elections. He stressed that it’s important to talk to people to ensure they’re going to vote and that they’re involved. He also suggested that joining phone-banking efforts is important work.
Next we discussed the political education event with Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez. People found it interesting and pointed out that there were attendees that were not regular members of SftP. We will write a more detailed blog post about the event. The next Dialectical Biologist reading group will be Oct 21st, 6:00-7:00pm: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82473299736?pwd=eCtoaHVVc2pOL3VXMlJPb0NSdzhmdz09
We also discussed SftP’s work with Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville (MAMAS) on creating a tool for identifying landlords with multiple properties. The project is going to be receiving a data dump of deeds records of corporate entities in MA. This data will be useful for identifying corporate entities holding multiple properties and analyzing whether larger corporations tend to be involved in more evictions and incur more violations. Meetings about the project are Mondays at 6pm.
Some miscellaneous points were discussed:
- Indigenous Peoples Day March: http://www.indigenouspeoplesdayma.org/boston/
- Bi-Weekly Meetings now starting at 6 pm on Tuesday
- New admin committee is being organized
- There are still unsold copies of “The Science We Need” available for $15
- Social hour with new members: Thursday Oct. 29th, 6-7pm