When the era of capitalism comes to an end, and it will, it will not be because we socialists engaged in utopian methods of organizing based on blind guesswork. Instead capitalism will be overthrown because we engaged with the theory of scientific socialism and converted our theory into practice. The struggle against capitalism has a long history. The benefit of this is our ability to learn from socialists of the past. It’s from these observations and analysis that I argue the path forward does not lie inside the Democratic Party. It lies in the creation of a workers’ party dedicated to the interests of the working class.

Third Party Viability

I don’t suspect many will disagree with the eventual necessity for a workers’ party, instead disagreeing with the current viability of one. There is currently no viable workers’ party, or third party of any sort, in the United States. However, it would be fallacious to then say third parties can never be viable in the US. Two examples of third parties breaking through the established two party system come to us from Latin American, Uruguay and Venezuela. Regardless of opinion on the actions taken by these third parties, their success serves as a positive indicator in support of future third party viability in our own country. 

The third party prospect is only further enhanced by the fact that more than half of all Americans are dissatisfied with both Democrats and Republicans. America’s own history shows us examples of third parties coming into power when a large enough gulf exists between goals of politicians and desires of voters. Some will argue American third parties are a thing of the past, that the period of possibility has ended. This line of thinking falls prey to the same fallacy committed by Francis Fukuyama when he said we are at the end of history. Today only seems like a finality because we have not seen what comes next. DSA’s slogan “a better world is possible” isn’t something we say because it feels good; it’s something we say because it is true, and it can only be achieved if we demand it.

Moving Democrats Left

The strategy of electing better Democrats, putting socialists in office, is often cited as the route by which socialists will be able to drag Democrats left. Recent victories of DSA-endorsed figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani have renewed enthusiasm for this approach, but how has the Democratic Party changed for the better following the election of such candidates? Regarding Mamdani, the entire Democratic establishment organized itself to shut Mamdani out, most notably House and Senate minority leaders Hakim Jefferies and Chuck Schumer. This is reminiscent of how the Democrats organized internally to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the 2016 presidential nomination, or how they held a closed-door secret ballot to elect then 74 year old Gerry Connoly to the House Oversight Committee instead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most popular Democrats in recent history. Maybe those candidates just weren’t socialist enough, maybe a strong socialist slate could make the changes we need. 

Luckily for us, this also happened recently. The Las Vegas DSA chapter won on a progressive slate in 2021. They received no communication from the Nevada State Democratic Party, no support, nothing except a vote from the state representatives to condemn the “horrors of socialism”.. We understand that individual action alone cannot overcome systemic injustices. Similarly, we should not expect individual personalities within the Democratic Party to be capable of completely changing the party’s direction.

The 2024 US presidential election is the most glaring example of the Democrats’ unwillingness to shift left. In the face of a second Trump term, which was correctly identified as a fascist movement and touted by the Democrats as the greatest threat American “democracy” has ever seen, how far did they move to the left to garner our support for this critical election? Not a single step. Instead of hosting a free and open primary, Democratic Party officials unilaterally selected Kamala Harris, the spineless, genocide-enabling, right wing establishment plant who threw trans people under the bus, only ever grew more unpopular the longer she remained in the public eye, and said the only way she would differ from Biden is by putting more Republicans in her cabinet. The Democrats have shown us time and time again that they would rather hand Republicans victory on a silver platter than move an inch to the left. It’s time we stop pretending we can build an effective socialist platform within the party.

Some point to the Tea Party’s success in moving the Republican Party further right as evidence of our potential ability to move the Democratic Party left through mass popular support, but a class analysis shows this is not as analogous as it may seem. The Republicans and Democrats are both bourgeois parties dedicated to the service of the ruling class. The Tea Party movement was also a bourgeois movement attempting to move the Republicans further right; the Republican Party was already racist, already chauvinist, already dedicated to increasing working class exploitation to benefit the capitalist class; the Tea Party simply wanted them to be more explicit and more extreme in these regards. The Democratic Party is also racist, also chauvinist, also dedicated to increasing working class exploitation to benefit the capitalist class. Any attempt to move them left is in direct opposition to their goals and to the class interests of those they serve. This is an exercise in opportunism, the false belief that working with capitalist interests will produce results favorable to the working class. History has demonstrated that any cooperation with the ruling class necessitates the working class must subjugate itself, as cooperation requires the continuation of class relations.

Minimizing harm, voting for the lesser evil

This is the primary argument for supporting the Democratic Party among leftists. However, evidence has shown this is not effective as a strategy. The general argument is that Democrats, however bad they may be, will be less harmful in office than Republicans. If people who would have voted Democrat instead vote third party, this takes votes from the Democrats and makes it more likely Republicans will win elections. Therefore, voting Democrat is the preferable option because it minimizes harm from politicians.

For my response, it’s important to reiterate that the Republicans and Democrats are both bourgeois parties, they both exist to serve the interests of the ruling class. The role elections play in our society can be analogized to instances of imperialism and US intervention. From the Revolutionary Communist Party’s publication, The Communist, we have this observation of imperialist action:

However, the horrors of imperialism are not due to bad people or bad policies. They flow from the class divisions endemic to capitalism, the market economy, and the nation-state. They cannot be understood in the abstract or done away with in isolation. Moreover, an analysis not rooted in class leads inevitably to class collaboration and illusions in the trap of lesser evilism.

As socialists who stand against imperialism, conversations regarding the recent indefensible aggression from the American capitalist class toward Venezuela and Iran has brought renewed discussions. We understand that no act of imperialism can be analyzed in isolation because they do not exist in isolation; they exist within a broader system of global exploitation wherein any success achieved by imperialist powers serves to bolster future interventions. Similarly, elections are not isolated events that happen every however-many years. Elections exist within the broader context of the political struggle. It is misguided to look only at the short term regarding harms stemming from elections.

The Democratic Party capitalizes on people’s tendency toward short term harm mitigation. We see this in the rhetoric they employ. Every new election is the most important election of our lifetime, the selling point for almost every Democrat is they’re not Republican. In some ways these arguments are true; every election we face is against a Republican Party farther right and more openly fascistic than the one before. What’s left out of Democratic messaging is that the Democrats are also farther right and more fascistic than before. Democrats who are called radicals today, people like Mamdani, AOC, Bernie, not too long ago would have been called mainstream progressives. Free buses, universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy:  these were mainstream Democratic positions a few short decades ago. In many cases these policies that existed in the past have been repealed to the detriment of the people. The reason these ideas are considered radical now is because the Republican Party has been dragging our country further and further right, year after year, and the Democrats have been complicit. The trend of Republicans and Democrats moving further right every year will only continue in the years to come. We know the Democrats won’t change; they’ve made that very clear. Continuing the trend of minimizing harm in the short term will change nothing. The goal of socialists should not be to elect Democrats, it should not be to elect better Democrats; that’s the job of the Democratic Party. Our goal must be to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, and that goal will not be achieved by voting for politicians in a bourgeois party.

Effect on Socialist Organizing

A foundational concept of socialism is that of dialectical materialism: no two forces can act on each other and come out unchanged. When analyzing the effects socialist organizing within the Democratic Party has on the party, we would be doing ourselves a disservice to not also analyze the effects the party has on socialist organizers and candidates.

Too often do I see self-identified leftists bending over backwards to defend candidates whose actions are very deserving of criticism. Two examples come to mind. Bernie Sanders has shown imperialist tendencies in his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia, Kosovo, and Libya under Clinton and Obama while condemning US withdrawal from Syria. AOC voted in favor of providing Iron Dome funding to Israel, freeing up their pocketbooks to continue the genocide in Palestine. These actions don’t undo the good they’ve done, but to say the good they’ve done ought to shield them from criticism would be ridiculous. We do not support socialist politicians for clout, we must not engage in politician worship as others do. Critical support for politicians must be just that, critical of the politician. To defend politicians or candidates when they act contrary to the socialist project is necessary to prevent ourselves from being co-opted and absorbed into the “kinder version” of the neoliberal movement. We learn through practice; if we practice defending concessions to capital then the only thing we learn will be how to concede to capital, leaving us unable to meet the revolutionary moment when it arises.

Conclusion

The Democratic Party is a dead end for the socialist project. We cannot expect to realign a bourgeois party to proletarian interests; we cannot allow the Democrat’s strategy of focusing on the short term to blind us to the long term results; and above all we cannot allow ourselves to believe this—the Democratic Party—is the best we can hope for. The process of building a working class party will be difficult; it will take time; but we can’t afford to continue in the status quo much longer. In working to build a workers’ party today we are making things easier for ourselves tomorrow. It’s regrettable that we have to start from almost nothing, but that’s no reason to avoid starting now. The best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago, but the second best time is today. 

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and the same is true for all future societies. Our future will not be written by any ruling class or their parties. Our future will be formed by the will of the masses—by the proletarian class who possesses revolutionary potential—and we are not powerless in this formation because we are them.

by Kevin N

Sometime in my early twenties — way, way back in the early 2010s — for reasons I’m still not entirely sure about, I suddenly stopped being a nihilist apolitical punk who couldn’t be bothered with activism because he had more important things to drink. I was first radicalized around the issue of campaign finance reform, and got involved with a national organization called Wolf-PAC. I spent a few years lobbying Ohio’s state representatives regarding campaign finance laws — they were invariably bemused each time I walked into their offices with long hair and a patchy leather jacket. In spite of my ratty appearance, I did manage to personally convince a Republican State Representative to change his stance on campaign finance laws after a series of meetings at the Mentor Public Library, although he still wouldn’t sponsor our Wolf-PAC resolution for fear of political backlash. I learned a lot about political advocacy through that experience, but that’s another story.

At some point, I got an email from a group dedicated to campaign finance reform that called itself Democracy Spring. They were organizing a protest in DC, with the intention of having as many people as possible perform an act of civil disobedience by willingly getting arrested for protesting without a permit on the steps of the Capitol Building.

I was absolutely thrilled at the idea. I had romanticized 1960s images of crowds of protestors in my head, and they had convinced me that this was the sort of direct action that would affect real change (that was, indeed, the depth of my analysis). So I threw everything I had into the organization. After months of working with the Democracy Spring organizers in DC, I was able to organize a small contingent of Clevelanders to travel to DC by train and participate in the protest. All in all, there were some 1,300 people who were arrested on the first day of the protests, the largest number of arrests at the Capitol since the Vietnam Protests. More would be arrested in the week that followed.

I spent a week in DC protesting, and it was one of the most exciting weeks of my life. I marched, chanted, and commiserated with like-minded activists. I have a picture somewhere of me getting my hands zip-tied behind my back, but I have no idea where. Rosario Dawson and Cenk Uygur got arrested with us. One of my favorite political commentators at the time, Lawrence Lessig, spoke at the rally. Bernie Sanders gave us a shout out on social media. Cory Booker and John Lewis came out to speak with us and encouraged us to continue. Elizabeth Warren admonished the rest of the Senators for ignoring us during a speech she made on the Senate floor. I even made my first semi-viral Twitter post. It truly felt like the beginning of something important — I left DC feeling downright euphoric.

But that was it. Nothing changed.

Aside from CNN showing a single 30 second clip of the protest, no mainstream news media covered us. Someone at Vice wrote a piece on us, but nobody ever really took them seriously anyway. After it ended, nobody in the government ever referenced the protest again. I’m quite certain most of you reading this have never heard of the protest in the first place. It was like we had plowed the ocean.

After I got home, I was undeniably elated by the experience, but in the back of my mind I was still somewhat conflicted. It seemed like we hadn’t actually accomplished anything, despite all that effort.

Luckily, I learned from the organizers that there would be a coordinated follow-up effort: the country would be divided into smaller regions, and local organizers would recruit supporters (there was no formal membership process) by staging smaller protests at local political events. Then after two years of building support, we would return to the Capitol and stage a repeat of the original protest, but larger.

This was promising! Again, I threw everything into the effort. I drove to Columbus once a month to meet with Ohio’s organizers, and got another small contingent of Clevelanders to go to protests in an effort to build support for our nonpartisan campaign finance reform movement. 

Then Trump got elected.

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The Spring Dries Up

Suddenly, all of the emails from Democracy Spring stopped talking about campaign finance reform and were just focused on “resisting” Trump. Okay, that’s fine. But how? Are we still meeting in Columbus to coordinate efforts? No, those regional meetings around the country stopped pretty abruptly. Are we trying to organize another big protest in DC? No, the communications were just filled with vague calls to “Resist!” and unoriginal, unremarkable statements about the gravity and urgency of the political threat posed by Trump. Lacking any formal structures, the organizational movement in Ohio and around the country dissipated faster than it came together.

But emails from Democracy Spring’s leadership (the only remaining form of communication they sent out) kept coming. I wasn’t clear on what they were doing now, but I continued to read them since they had been such a big part of my life for nearly half a decade. On Trump’s inauguration day, I went to DC to protest — although, admittedly, I ended up disgusted and depressed by the whole spectacle and spent the day in the Holocaust Museum instead.

I touched base with some of the Democracy Spring organizers who were in DC as well. They said they had something big planned for the inauguration, and I was confused as to why there hadn’t been a more concerted effort to recruit people. Regardless, I hadn’t planned to get arrested again, so I declined to participate.

Later that day, I got this email:

The email went on to detail the efforts of “six brave democracy defenders” — a far cry from the 1,700 who joined them just two years prior — and they claimed it as a massive victory. In the weeks and months that followed, similar emails with subject lines like “Trump Disrupted!” and “Two Democracy Spring Leaders Arrested at Sit-In!” followed, each containing photos of the same handful of participants engaged in various innocuous acts of “resistance” — and typically accompanied by a request for donations. The emails eventually stopped.

The Democracy Spring organization (if you can call it that), once able to mobilize thousands of people across the country, had dissolved into a vanity project for its leadership clique. All it took was a single political crisis (Trump’s election, in this case), and the structureless network of dedicated activists from across the country fell apart into a harmless, toothless display of performative “Resist!”-ance.

I was devastated. I felt like I had totally wasted those years of my efforts with Democracy Spring. I dropped out of activism altogether and probably (definitely) started drinking too much. I got into activist journalism instead, and made a few locally-focused documentaries about homelessness that won some awards at some film festivals around Ohio. But I stopped engaging in direct political activism, for the most part, aside from attending one-off protests or local community-building events.

I’d occasionally talk with the organizers of these events, and when I asked them what their long-term strategy was, they would invariably offer vague, starry-eyed platitudes about “building the movement” and “Resist!”-ing without offering anything concrete. It was always too reminiscent of the empty rhetoric I heard from Democracy Spring’s leadership for me to buy into their passion again.

Luckily, I had also been a convert of Bernie Sanders in 2014, and canvassed for him in 2015. Exclusively thanks to him, I spent the following years reading and unlearning all of the misconceptions that I didn’t know I had held about the word “socialism” (on my own, since I still mostly liked to hang out with nihilist apolitical punks who all thought I was annoying for being “political” and reading). It took a long time! Anti-socialist propaganda dies hard. I’m still unlearning stuff. At some point in 2023, I saw a post made by an old college friend (shout-out Julie) about a DSA event and decided that I’d better attend if I were going to be calling myself a socialist. It was my socialist “put up or shut up” moment, if you will.

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Democracy In Action

In Cleveland’s DSA chapter, I found tons of committed members working together in an organization that was structured in its composition, serious and thoughtful about its rhetoric, deliberate about its strategy and tactics, intentional about political education, and focused on efforts that did not just consist of protests and petty acts of civil disobedience. But most importantly, it was democratic, directly accountable to its membership, and committed to building its members into leaders — instead of having them orbit around an insular group of self-proclaimed leaders who lead through force of personality alone.

The chapter’s model of organizing, as opposed to just mobilizing and advocacy, was nothing short of inspiring. According to what a given situation demanded, the organization’s goals were both long-term and short-term, widescoped and narrow, national and local, and with a calculated strategy to achieve all of them — with the right kind of deliberate and thorough organizing, of course. Most importantly, the chapter had a priority structure that allowed its membership to pivot and focus their limited capacity on issues as needed, so the organization wouldn’t crumble if the national political situation demanded a change of course.

In short, DSA was everything that Democracy Spring wasn’t.

I want to clarify that I don’t expect or even want you to be disillusioned by protesting. It was a real bummer of a process to go through, and I’m happy for folks who don’t feel the same way I do. I’m also not trying to use my personal experience as a demand for deference — although if you’re someone who is shallow enough to grant political weight to this sort of activist credentialism, feel free to defer to me if you want to — nor am I trying to say “I know better than you, so you should think like I do.” My intentions are solely to give an example that illustrates the clear limitations of protest-based activism. The trend I laid out in my personal story about one protest movement is observable in varying degrees across all protest movements.

Protesting is an acceptable way to “fight back” precisely because the ruling class thinks protesting is ineffective. And without a deep commitment to organizing, it is. The word “demonstration” is suggestive of the performative nature of protests — which there is a time and place for! But protests are by no means the most important tool in our toolkit. Without clear follow-up, without a commitment to building ourselves and each other into leaders, without a plan to build working-class power — in other words, without organizing — protests achieve little beyond making the attendees feel good about themselves. And to amplify the social standing of the self-proclaimed “leaders” in liberal activist circles, of course.

(By the way, the French word for “protest” is “manifestation,” which is more befitting of their culture of resistance; the average French protest would be called a “riot” if it took place in this country. But that’s a separate discussion.)

Again and again, when I see a political crisis emerge in this country, I watch the liberal activist groups in this city circle their wagons and start mobilizing for protests. I see the same people attending every time. And when the crisis passes, the mobilizing stops. There’s good work being done by these liberal activists, for sure. But every time a new issue emerges as the crisis du jour, the same pattern plays out: new coalitions with catchy names (but composed of the same people), emergency protests, vague calls to “Get organized! Join an org!”, and then — once public perceptions of “crisis” and “urgency” have faded — nothing. That sort of Sisyphean ambulance chasing is not organizing for change — it’s just performative “Resist!”-ance.

I often hear that we have a bad reputation among liberal activists in this city. Quite frankly, I don’t care. I’m not really all that impressed with those groups. That’s why I’m in DSA instead. Our DSA chapter is one of the largest, most coordinated, and most capable independent political organizations in the city, so let’s act like it. Liberal activist groups should be more worried about what we think of them. There’s nothing to be gained from deferring to liberal activists and giving undeserved weight to their criticisms of our chapter. We should absolutely work with them where our interests align, but at the end of the day, they need us more than we need them. After all, they wouldn’t be so desperate for us to endorse, support, and attend their events if that weren’t the case. Let them work for our approval instead.

I’m in DSA because I think it’s the organization best poised to stage a serious, coordinated, and multifronted resistance against capitalism and fascist reaction — not because it just happens to be “one progressive org out of many” that I happened to join. But if we treat this organization like it’s just one of many generally progressive orgs, it definitely will be.

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Organizing, Not Just Mobilizing

I have nothing against attending protests. I attend and will continue to attend protests. People should attend protests; they’re cathartic, empowering, and publicly visible. But we have to recognize the strategic limits to endorsing and attending protests just for the sake of endorsing and attending protests. And if we do endorse a protest, we need to be deliberate about turnout.

The March 28th No Kings protest is coming up and there are questions over whether we should endorse it or not. Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. Unless we’re doing something tangible at it like collecting signatures for our Gender Freedom Policy Petition, simply showing up, as good as that might feel, will accomplish as little as any other protest.

If we endorse a protest and only about 10 people show up, that misrepresents the actual power in this chapter and perceptibly brings our nearly 700 member org to the level of the myriad small, disorganized activist groups in the city. So, there is a potential cost associated with the optics of being present at these protests as well as the potential benefits to which folks are appealing; but those benefits only manifest if our turnout is strong.

Protesting alone isn’t going to stop Trump, Zionism, or ICE — it won’t stop any form of fascist reaction, for that matter. What will stop these things is organizing people into DSA and building it into a formidable political force that can leverage its power from below. As long as we’re not making a concerted effort at doing the latter, the former holds.

On a positive note of what can be possible at protests: at the last anti-ICE protest I attended, I connected a group of student activists at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) with the state Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) coordinator, and they’re currently organizing a new YDSA chapter on Case’s campus. This, in my opinion, is the sort of thing we should be aiming to do at protests.

Without organizing — and I mean organizing — mobilizing attendees for protests has an inherently limited impact. I think many comrades think “organizing” simply consists of getting people to show up at events, direct actions, canvasses, and training sessions; but that’s only mobilizing, not organizing. Without a deep commitment to developing one another into leaders both inside and outside the organization, we are not organizing.

Internal organizing is just as crucial a part of “the work” as our outward-focused efforts in the community. Without either, we stagnate.

To be clear, nothing should stop us from attending, endorsing, or supporting protests when they’re aligned with our values, but we need to be deliberate and calculated about what we’re doing when we go. Otherwise we’re just chasing the tail of the liberal activist movement — and I don’t know about you, but I joined DSA because I found that movement lacking.

We can attend these protests, demonstrate resistance to ICE and fascism, participate in direct actions/responses, and be serious about organizing people into DSA at these events — all at the same time. As one of our comrades likes to say, “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.” Another likes to say “We just have to do it.”  Again, I fully agree — we just have to be deliberate and strategic about it. The urgency of the situation demands nothing less than a principled and coordinated organizational effort, not just blind faith that “Resist!”-ing at protests is enough to change anything on its own.

Solidarity, comrades.

The post Why Protesting Isn’t Enough: The Limits of Protest Activism appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

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By: Chris Brady

Teamsters’ International President and Medford native Sean O’Brien took the stage at the 2024 Republican National Convention, upending decades of precedent in organized labor’s reliable standing as a Democratic bloc. O’Brien’s appearance wasn’t shocking so much as symptomatic. Labor is in political freefall. Workers have correctly identified that Democratic politics have left them behind; a new populist right has fomented an ideological pitch to try and fill the absence. This new political movement, constituted by labor bureaucrats, pseudo-populist politicians, and disaffected working class voters is increasingly shaping the labor movement with a new right-wing force, animated and with collaboration of a wing of labor leaders and strategists. Although O’Brien frustrates principled organizers everywhere with politics and his love for podcasting more than doing work, the significance of his 2024 speech was the open display of the  forces which propelled the labor leader to try to court a new audience.

Meeting of the minds. (Credit: Mediaite.com)

Oren Cass’s Ideology 

The intellectual base behind labor’s rightward shift is being spearheaded by a different Massachusetts native: Oren Cass. Cass crystallized his maverick identity after working on Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign. 

According to Professor of Labor Studies at UCLA Kit Smemo, Cass lamented following the loss that:

“The Republican Party’s ‘blind faith in free markets’ left it unable to win elections, much less address the gnawing social (and moral) crises left by decades of austerity, deregulation, and privatization.”

This sentiment may seem ludicrous coming from a Republican, as even most Democrats will not verbalize anything close to the critique of neoliberal doctrine as Cass has. 

But the GOP is no longer Romney’s party. National politics has struggled to meet the collective shedding of the neoliberal paradigm, and in Washington, D.C., where Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, and an army of upper-middle class striving 26 year-old Hill staffers excrete propaganda that somehow evolves into law – establishment forces have left a vacuum for politics that is interested in workers, at least on the surface.

Matt Yglesias, the chopped man and hot-take centrist whose readership includes most Democratic establishment players. (Credit: Current Affairs)

This realization led Cass to found American Compass, a think-tank that defies conventional GOP orthodoxy and attempts to articulate a Republican worker agenda fit for the Trump moment. Its policies combine a family-centered conservatism with a seemingly genuine assessment of the economic crises workers face in the United States. Acolytes include Vice President J.D. Vance, Senators Hawley (R-MO) and Cotton (R-MO), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Cass has even appeared on Sean O’Brien’s podcast. Compass advocates for a focus on the nuclear family, deportations, regulation of Big Tech, and, incredulously, is critical of the financialization of the United States economy by Wall Street. Of particular emphasis, however, is Compass’s self-identified advocacy for labor and workers.

According to their policy page:

“Organized labor has traditionally been the mechanism that gives workers an institution of solidarity, power in the market, and representation in the workplace. Strong worker representation can make America stronger.” 

In 2021, Cass gave a lecture titled “Why National Conservatism Needs Worker Power.” This rhetoric is a far cry from the more familiar Republican establishment lines, drunk off of Koch funding, pushing right-to-work laws and demanding that greater shares of surplus value fall to Capital. While a Republican operative ostensibly supporting the labor movement may reflexively seem refreshing, if not confusing, the actual policies being proposed by the American Compass labor desk are different than either the mainstream of labor or the rank-and-file movement.  For example, Compass is emphatically critical of the National Labor Relations Act, which resulted in the creation of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), due to its institutionalization of bargaining power monopolies by labor unions instead of its suppression of worker power. Similarly, Compass has expressed skepticism of the DSA-endorsed PRO-Act, which would increase worker organizing through these channels.

Instead of the current system of labor,  Compass prefers non-union “works councils” in European Union style, where although workers may not earn collective bargaining power, they at least offer new, more bureaucratic channels to communicate with management. 

The Role of David Rolf

This concept, surprisingly, does not stem from some Jack Welsh union-busting fever dream, but in part from David Rolf, former President of SEIU 775 and member of the American Compass Board of Advisors. Rolf has spoken out extensively in support of ‘labor movement innovation,’ including while teaming up with libertarians. 

What does David Rolf believe in? We just don’t really know – which makes him a great token labor leader for Compass.

American Compass is staunchly opposed to labor unions acting politically.Citing a survey they conducted themselves, Compass claims that workers would prefer their unions to exist solely to improve their working conditions, siloed away from politics, and that the progressive projects pursued by leadership are actually unpopular with rank-and-file workers. Predictably, Compass is opposed to labor’s work stoppage tactic, calling strikes “unproductive,” in the sense that withholding labor is inefficient for the economy. This analysis counters prolific labor activist Jane McAlevey – and all historic labor scholarship and praxis – that indicates that strikes are the most effective tools the working class has.

Smemo articulates that Compass’s role is to coerce a conservative-friendly compromise between capital and labor. “[Cass] sees this as a way to harmonize business interests and profitability with workers’ demands for more pay. But of course, in a very conservative sense, the strategy has to be calibrated to what ultimately is going to keep workers in line. How do you increase worker power without empowering workers?”

The danger, here, with this sort of political project is that it threatens to take the teeth out of the labor movement. If Cass had it his way: unions are no longer political, no longer strike, and increasingly sympathetic to nativism and nationalism. Instead, Cass wants labor to work out better wages with management through legal maneuvering and arbitration. That’s certainly a nice thought, but in practice it’s how you de-fang one of the few institutions that actually fights for working people. Unions didn’t win the 8-hour workday from bureaucratic dexterity.

With a sizable coalition of Congress bought into the mission, the concepts American Compass espouses are no longer just words on a policy proposal. They’re real threats, and they’re infiltrating the labor movement.

The Rank-and-File Alternative

In Philadelphia, well outside of D.C.’s theoretical fetishization of working people and in the real world, a more traditional labor leader is utilizing tried and true class politics. Richard Hooker Jr. is running against Sean O’Brien for the Presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, currently serving as the Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 623.

Hooker’s assessment of O’Brien’s leadership was grim. He cited the federal gutting of collective bargaining rights, NLRB, and OSHA, blaming the Trump administration that O’Brien has courted. 

“That does not sound like a party who cares about workers. And unfortunately, our general president has aligned with that party.”

Hooker is running on a slate aimed at making the Teamsters more democratically structured. 

“Once you create that more democratic union, you’re going to get members to fight more against the company and that’s what we need. We need our members to fight more against the employer class, the ruling class.” 

Hooker uses class-war language, not mutually beneficial worker-employer MBA speak, because that’s what his membership responds to. This is in stark contrast to O’Brien’s argument for labor leaders to meet the most reactionary segments of their membership, and consequently to the concepts proposed by American Compass. Hooker maintains that unions are political organizations, that workers come to union leadership to solve political problems regarding ICE, safety, and affordability. 

As for ending the option to strike, Hooker was incredulous:

“Eliminating strikes? That’s crazy. Why be in a union if you can’t withhold your labor? If the company is going to continue to exploit you and not give you what you demand and deserve. Look what happened back in Haymarket in 1886.”

Richard Hooker Jr. (center) campaigning with Teamsters at UPS. (Credit: Richard Hooker Jr.)

American Compass As A Prevention, Not A Solution

Governor Mitt Romney signed the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Bill into law in 2006, creating the foundation for what would soon become the Affordable Care Act. The move may seem odd – why would Mitt Romney choose to pursue healthcare reform as a signature policy achievement? After its passing, Romney declared it as the end of the “single-payer canard.” Whatever the merits of the bill, it effectively closed-off any potential for more radical universal healthcare reforms.

The Romneycare bill was successful in making the healthcare system a little bit less depraved, but it failed to address even most of the problems associated with the quasi-privatized healthcare system. It did, however, take out all of the momentum behind a statewide push for universal healthcare. In essence, Romney’s calculus was in part to sacrifice some healthcare concessions in order to protect the market system from the potential of a future universal healthcare plan.

American Compass likely serves a similar purpose. Workers are converting to more radical politics – DSA has eclipsed 100,000 members – and the labor movement has made moderate gains in organizing and militancy in recent years. Compass is not a solution for the economic plight of workers, but a mechanism to contain and diffuse political pressure that workers are building.

Oren Cass has correctly identified where the winds are blowing, and that conservatives didn’t have an answer to meet a moment where workers are learning to wield their power. The solution, like for his former boss Romney, is to develop policies with the aesthetics of populism and worker advocacy, while in reality accomplishing anything but that. If successful, capital will be able to stave off a labor movement on the offensive, just like they beat us on healthcare two decades ago.

Smemo said:

“There’s been rising labor militancy and organizing. Workers are not simply accepting this intolerable inequality lying down. I think Cass has recognized that you can try to obfuscate, you can try to misdirect attention, but ultimately, it’s going to be something you have to reckon with. And it’s going to require some preemptive moves in the hopes that this can prevent far-reaching labor militancy and insurgency.”

Chris Brady is a member of Boston DSA and an editor of Working Mass.

The post Who Are The ‘Pro-Worker’ Republicans? appeared first on Working Mass.

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The story of a windfall invested in left-wing organizing in the 1920s provides provides insight into problems facing the Left yesterday and today.

The post Last Flight of the Radical WASPs appeared first on Democratic Left.

Recently, Central Indiana DSA (CINDSA) has received inquiries about our relationship with the Socialist Party of Indiana. Central Indiana DSA is a big-tent organization with members who hold a broad […]

By Rob Switzer

Last year my comrade and Detroit Socialist co-editor Taina Santiago wrote an article titled “Dance Against Fascism: A History of Rhythmic Resistance.” In it, she explores how dance has historically been used as a tool of community and resistance among marginalized and working-class peoples. She cites a few specific examples, such as the bomba, which enslaved peoples in Puerto Rico used as a tool to grow community amongst peoples who spoke different languages.

Since then, I’ve thought about how many other examples there are of this phenomenon. The most obvious example is capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that was disguised as a dance so slavers wouldn’t realize its practitioners were actually training to fight. As another example, the ever-popular salsa was created in the same environment as bomba: by enslaved Afro-Latino peoples in the Americas.

I began to realize that almost any dance style you can think of has some version of this story. For the past year or so, I’ve been learning and practicing tango, the world-famous Argentine dance. Most Wednesdays you’ll find me in class at Motor City Wine, followed by social dancing afterwards.

So I decided to explore the history of tango, and whether it has its own story of exploitation and resistance. And the answer is yes, of course it does.

TANGO IN THE OUTSKIRTS OF BUENOS AIRES

The exact origins of tango are a little hazy and complex. But there are some facts that are undeniable. It was born amidst an explosion of the population of Buenos Aires in the late 1800’s. Its roots can be found in the neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, particularly in the “arrabal,” which can be roughly translated as “slum,” but not necessarily with the same negative connotations.

These “arrabales” were home to a mix of different peoples, but most notably Spanish and Italian immigrants. For this reason, many classic tango songs feature the “lunfardo” dialect, which is a form of Spanish making heavy use of Italian-derived local vocabulary. Central to this story was the prominence of what were called “compadritos,” a class of mostly poor, native-born men in the arrabales who were known to mimic the behaviors of the upper classes.

But there is another part of the story, which some elements of Argentine society would rather ignore: Buenos Aires was a hub of the South American slave trade. Although the Black population of Buenos Aires is now a very small minority (around one percent), in the mid-1800’s they comprised about a fourth of the population.

Slavery was abolished in Argentina in 1853. The Black residents of the late nineteenth century were either freed enslaved peoples themselves or the descendants of the enslaved. They continued to face discrimination and were largely concentrated in their own “barrios” (neighborhoods) or arrabales.

And they created their own dances. The most prominent among the Black community in Argentina (and neighboring Uruguay) was the “candombe,” a local fusion of various African traditions, mostly rooted in Angola, the home country of many of the people who were forcibly brought to this region.

There were European-influenced dances at that time — most notably the “milonga” (a word which holds great significance in tango today) — that appear to have borrowed heavily from dances like the candombe.

Quoting from the 1995 book “¡Tango!” by Simon Collier et al., some of the best evidence of the birth of tango as we know it today comes from a 1913 newspaper article which asserted that “in the year 1877 the African-Argentines [of Buenos Aires] improvised a new dance, which they called a ‘tango’ … and which embodied something of the style and the movement of the candombe … Groups of compadritos, who apparently had the habit of visiting African-Argentine dance venues and then parodying the gestures and movements they saw there, took this ‘tango’ to Corrales Viejos — the slaughterhouse district — and introduced it to the various low-life establishments where dancing took place, incorporating its most conspicuous features into the milonga.”

It goes on to explain that “at the beginning, what was soon to become the tango was simply a new way of dancing the milonga … The distinctive features of the new dance-form came entirely from the compadritos’ parodistic borrowings from the African-Argentine tradition.”

After the tango became a fully-formed independent style of dance, it exploded onto the international stage after South American travelers introduced it to Paris. It became popular in France, then spread across Europe and the United States, and the rest is history. But what often gets left out of this story is the dance’s Black influence, and the contemporary reaction to those roots.

RACISM, OF COURSE

Tango is sometimes called “the forbidden dance,” and the usual explanation is its close contact between the partners and its sensual nature. Sometimes people might acknowledge the lower-class roots. But during the growth of tango, perhaps the biggest reason tango was shunned was racism.

A good example can be seen in a letter that was printed in The Times in England in 1913: “I am one of the many matrons upon whom devolves the task of guiding a girl through the mazes of the London season, and I am face to face with a state of affairs in most, but not all, of the ballrooms calling for the immediate attention of those in a like case … I need not describe the various horrors of American and South American negroid origin. I would only ask hostesses to let one know what houses to avoid by indicating in some way on their invitation-card whether the ‘Tango’ will be permitted.”

Simply put, people knew tango was essentially a “Black dance,” and a lot of people did not like that. But today, one may wonder how many people are even aware of that history: The majority of Argentina’s population today has primarily Italian ethnicity, and it is sometimes seen as the “White Hispanic” nation of the Americas. Certainly, some of its population is proud of that fact, including its politicians. According to the Argentine newspaper Clarín, in 2002, then-President Carlos Menem even said during a visit to the United States (translated from Spanish), “Blacks do not exist in Argentina; that’s a problem Brazil has.”

The real history of tango reveals that just like bomba, salsa, bachata, and the more obviously African-influenced dances like candombe and kizomba, we would not have tango today if it were not for the resilience of enslaved peoples. These enslaved peoples were not only trying to keep their traditions alive but participating in one of the oldest, time-tested forms of human connection that we have: dancing with each other.

If you ever have the joyous experience of going to a “milonga” to dance tango, or going out to dance any of the above-mentioned styles — or even swing or jazz/blues — don’t forget that it’s a near-certainty that what you’re doing was shaped by a community of people who were oppressed or even enslaved.

No matter the hardship these people faced, nobody was ever able to steal from them the joy that comes from music and movement and human connection. We should proudly carry on that tradition. No matter how bad things get, they will never stop us from dancing.

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Dance Against Fascism: Tango was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Labor activists are front and center in today’s fight against ICE and for the dignity and rights of immigrants and workers of color. 

The post Hate injustice? Join the labor movement.  appeared first on EWOC.

What the latest political science can teach us about effective organizing.

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The 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” offers urgent lessons for beating ICE today.

The post We’ve had a nationwide immigrant strike before. We can do it again. appeared first on EWOC.

by Alexandria R

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become infamous, particularly in the past year, for brutal tactics, intimidation, and even murder. In 2025, 32 people lost their lives in ICE-related incidents. Some of the agency’s more lethal crimes have drawn major headlines – particularly the most recent killing of two US citizens in Minnesota. While ICE as an agency has gathered a popular reputation as a secret police force, the agency and its activities date back to March 2003, when it was formally created and mobilized as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Its tactics, including infiltration and disruption activities akin to COINTELPRO, have not changed. ICE has acquired Israeli-manufactured spyware known as Graphite, developed by Paragon Solutions. The software is capable of hacking encrypted drives and phones, including live location data, photos, and encrypted messages. Additionally, the agency embeds itself within local law enforcement, often making use of Flock license plate readers and shot spotters to target migrant families and coordinate its operations. Officially, Flock denies that this cooperation exists. 

The agency’s effective infiltration and lethality is concerning, especially when their official mission is taken into account. DHS effectively functions as an organ of the state dedicated to mass internal surveillance and policing. ICE has a mandate to use children to draw out their parents, and detain people based on their outward characteristics. 2026 is a little over two months old, and in that time, ICE has murdered more than six people. Some of them are activists. Other American citizens have been threatened with detention or death for interfering with ICE business. Of particular concern are reports from activists in Minnesota, which echo strange occurrences reported by other activists since at least 2020. Judy and Noah Levy were stopped by ICE agents while observing agency operations in St. Paul. The couple noted that their license plates were photographed. Jarringly, the agents addressed Judy by her name when they came to speak with her. Recalling the incident, Judy said that she was shaken, but continued to follow the agents and their caravan. That’s when ICE vehicles turned onto Levy’s street. 

“Our street is off the beaten path,” said Noah, “You don’t go down our street to get to anywhere. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t intimidating.” 

In September, ICE spent millions on technology to surveil social media and the dark web. The software, called “Tangles,” creates a daily life profile of the people it surveils by mining social media for their posts, contacts, locations and events they attended, combining it with any information leaked about them online. While the agency has been using AI to “crawl” social media apps and sites, ICE is also putting together a surveillance force for 24/7 social media monitoring. DHS wants your data, but surveillance of public information is not where ICE stops looking.

The Guardian first broke the story of DHS/ICE’s acquisition of Graphite. Stephanie Kirchgaessner’s report details the capabilities of the software, noting that Graphite can “hack into any phone. By essentially taking control of the mobile phone, the user – in this case, ICE – can not only track an individual’s whereabouts, read their messages, and look at their photographs, but also open and read information held on encrypted applications, like WhatsApp or Signal. Spyware like Graphite can also be used as a listening device, through the manipulation of the phone’s recorder.” The agency’s contract with Paragon Solutions dates to late 2024 under the Biden administration. ICE’s mandate to spy on members of the public originates with the founding of its parent organ, DHS. 

Infiltration via spyware is not the only point of entry into personal and private data. It has always been important to be aware of your safety when disclosing personal information online, such as location “check-ins” and specific information about shops or restaurants you frequent. Securing information that can be used to track you and your activities can be difficult when you don’t know what people are looking for. The many different ways that federal agents gain access to sensitive details about ICE observers and their affiliates certainly don’t make it easier. Agencies often infiltrate group events and Signal chats by posing as a concerned member of the public or as an activist. This can be mitigated by ensuring that people are who they say they are via connections to the community, but informants and state collaborators could be anyone. I do not encourage readers to start viewing their comrades with suspicion – only to be wary of sharing specific, personal information, even among friends or comrades, as much as possible.

Internal policing and surveillance have always been the mandate of DHS. Though the agency’s tactics have shifted recently to become more ruthless, the existence of ICE has been maintained and expanded upon by every administration since George W. Bush. The contradiction is glaring. Internal policing and anti-migrant policies such as forced deportation of asylum seekers have no place in a society that calls itself a nation of immigrants, and we as citizens have an obligation not only to inform the public of the tactics and goals of these entities, but also to actively work against them.

The post Every Step You Take, ICE is Watching You appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.