Welcome:
Welcome to The Nutmeg Socialist. This is a forum for Connecticut socialists to share thoughts, document our organizing work, and build a collective understanding of how capitalism shapes our lives – and how we might move toward liberation together.
Who We Are:
We chose to name this project after Connecticut’s nickname of “the Nutmeg State.” But the nutmeg has a surprisingly radical history in socialist movements, as both a symbol of capitalist exploitation and possibilities of liberation. Stay tuned for a new logo and a detailed history of the nutmeg coming out soon!
This space is an extension of CT-DSA’s political education work. We are dedicated to developing our members’ interest in and capacity to do rigorous political analysis, cultivate a shared political consciousness, and advance our commitment to liberatory socialist politics in our communities and beyond.
This project grows out of DSA’s conviction that working people understand and take seriously the urgency of our historical moment and the intellectual labor required to meet it.
Abolish ICE Issue, Introductory Editorial
You are invited to read each of the pieces published here as standalone expressions, or to read them together as a collective statement. This issue argues that anti-migration enforcement is a racist class project. It proceeds from a shared premise that ICE, CBP, DHS, etc., produce racialized terror meant to facilitate exploitation and discipline dissent. The kinds of violence that we are confronted by and are resisting on our streets and in our communities are not examples of police excess. Rather, what we are experiencing is a state committed to racial capitalism acting according to its intended design.
The contributions to this forum approach this fact in complementary ways:
CJ Sheen’s “Widening the Circle” considers the long history of the American colonial project and the kinds of violences that it has historically rendered permissible. With the spectacle killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, Sheen asks us to consider the extent to which these historically constructed “permission structures” are widening. ICE abolition, he argues, should be understood as part of a broader anti-colonial politics that refuses all such dehumanizing distinctions.
In “Abolish DHS, an Urgent Winnable Demand,” Brian Z examines the Department of Homeland Security and its subsidiary agencies. He argues that ICE should be understood as part of a larger political project, one which is historically contingent and designed to drive vulnerable people into greater precarity. The effect, he argues, is that anti-migration enforcement creates value for capital by driving down wages and by making organizing more difficult and more dangerous. Brian critiques Democratic leadership’s reform proposals as efforts that legitimize rather than challenge this apparatus, arguing that abolition represents both a necessary and winnable political demand and that CT organizers have a role to play in winning that demand.
In “So You Chose to Have Kids At the End of the World,” Julia connects immigration enforcement to capitalism’s broader assault on social reproduction, examining how the post-industrial destruction of communal care systems and the commodification of caregiving force working people—particularly women—into impossible choices. Julia argues that the struggle for compassionate child-rearing and the demand for supportive social institutions constitute forms of resistance against capitalist atomization.
Pearson’s “What do we mean when we say ‘abolish’ ICE?” provides essential political education on abolitionist theory and praxis, carefully distinguishing abolition from reform or defunding. Drawing on the work of Angela Davis and Harsha Walia, Pearson articulates abolition as the project of making oppressive systems obsolete through the construction of alternative institutions rooted in care, mutual aid, and genuine collective safety. (something?)
Robert Choflet’s “Resisting the Seduction of Racial Liberalism” argues than Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right is a crucial resource for understanding contemporary immigration enforcement as an elaboration of postwar liberal racial politics. He shows how mid-century Democrats conditioned contemporary state violence by framing civil rights interventions in “law and order” terms, laying groundwork for mass incarceration and militarized borders while claiming race-neutrality.
Walrider’s satirical piece “Alex Pretti” deconstructs the state’s propaganda surrounding Pretti’s execution, employing bitter irony to expose how fascist narratives frame lawful defiance itself as threatening. Walrider’s analysis reveals that Alex was killed not despite his adherence to legal protocols but precisely because his principled resistance exposed the fundamentally authoritarian character of ICE’s mission.
Finally, in “‘From Intention to Impact: Takeaways from CT DSA’s Abolish ICE Emergency Meeting a Week Out” Seth Garben reflects on the content covered during CT DSA’s emergency abolish ICE rally on February 7, offering positives, opportunities for improvement, and suggestions for the future.
Coming soon, we’ll have a podcast discussing the book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.
Read together, these essays reveal that anti-migration enforcement is structurally inseparable from capitalist accumulation. The articles here work to demonstrate that ICE, CBP, and DHS, etc. function to intensify working class vulnerability, to demobilize political resistance, and to discipline the broader population through direct violence and terror campaigns. The histories outlined here – from conquest to mid-twentieth century liberal “law and order” politics to contemporary deportation regimes – help to clarify that our resistance needs to focus on systemic forces, rather than partisan excess. Whether the dismantling of communal care structures or the ongoing expansion dehumanized populations, the articles published in this issue converge on a shared analysis: these agencies cannot be reformed because the terrorization and exploitation of working people is their actual purpose. The political demand, therefore, must be an abolition that involves the sustained organizational work of constructing the caring and democratic institutions that render police, prisons, and borders obsolete.
We invite you to engage with these contributions, to bring them into conversation with your own organizing work, and to join the collective struggle for a world beyond borders, cages, and capitalism.
Further, we invite you to consider contributing your own writing to future issues. Reach out to us at politicaleducation@ctdsa.org
— The Editors