This Is Left Notes

Thinking through a feasible, desirable, and achievable democratic socialism.

The ancient Greeks had a simple story about the dangers of focusing on the horizon. The philosopher Thales of Miletus left his house one night and couldn’t take his eyes off the stars. That was the philosopher’s undoing — into a ditch he fell. An old woman walked by and scolded him: “You, O Thales, cannot see what is at your feet and you expect to see what is in the heavens?”

King Solomon gives different advice in Proverbs 29. “Where there is no vision,” Solomon warned, “the people perish.”

Democratic socialists who want to avoid both tripping into ditches and perishing should heed both warnings. Part of the work of building a feasible, desirable, and achievable democratic socialism for the twenty-first century involves rebuilding a vision for our movement. A sketch of the world we want to build (what the Swedish social democrat Ernst Wigforss called “provisional utopias”) and a big picture roadmap for how to get there. But we have to ground that thinking in an analysis of what’s at our feet and plans for the near term. That means articulating well-defined goals and a clear strategy, rooted in an understanding of history and a philosophical foundation.

Those are the questions that shape what we think, read, and write about. Our work has been published in Jacobin, The Call, and other political outlets (you can see what we’ve been writing elsewhere here). This site — which we're calling Left Notes — is a place for us to collect and boost our articles and to share shorter thoughts, notes, and original research. We also hope that the comments section can be a productive place to get feedback on this work from friends and comrades.

A Little About Us…

Neal started organizing and doing left politics in 2007 in college in the Student Labor Action Movement (“SLAM”). He joined the Democratic Socialists of America in 2012 and worked for a year as DSA’s student organizer. He was then responsible for building Jacobin’s reading groups program. Between 2016 and 2018, Neal served a two year rotation as NYC-DSA’s treasurer and helped rebuild the chapter.

Since 2018 Neal has been a lead organizer for DSA’s Bread & Roses caucus and an editor for its publication, The Call. He’s also working on a dissertation at New York University’s sociology program on the policy and political strategy of the Democratic Party since the 1990s.

Nick began his organizing life as a rank-and-file union member in UAW Local 2865 at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. In 2018, he joined East Bay DSA, where he helped lead the chapter’s political education and communications programs. He completed his doctorate in philosophy in 2020 and went on to serve as communications director for democratic socialist Jovanka Beckles’s successful campaign for public transit board.

Nick moved to New York City in 2021 and has worked as an editor at Jacobin magazine since then. He has also written about politics, philosophy, and the labor movement for In These Times, Catalyst Review, Dollars & Sense, and elsewhere.