There is a feeling among the American working class that has not been felt in decades. The feeling is so electric that it cuts through despair over the move toward outright fascism by the far right. The feeling is so electric that when Mayor Brandon Johnson called for a general strike in this country at Chicago’s October 2025 No Kings rally, it was imbued with possibility rather than just dismissed as a leftist pipedream. But what is a general strike? What does it take to organize a general strike? And what can we expect to see on May 1, 2028, the date called for by the Chicago Teachers Union, United Auto Workers, and now Mayor Brandon Johnson for attempting a general strike by aligning the expiration of as many union contracts as possible?

The General Strike – Origins and Socialist Adoption

Workers have been withholding their labor collectively to exert political power for as long as there has been civilization. However, with the advent of capitalism and the system of wage labor, withholding labor became both more dangerous for workers and more powerful. It was more dangerous because workers no longer did subsistence farming and often did not have the kind of networks of mutual aid which were once common because they were necessary to survival. Now workers could buy their food and other necessities with wages, liberating them from the work and risk of subsistence farming and social reproduction like making their own clothes, but also putting them at the mercy of the capitalists who paid their wages.

But strikes also became more powerful because capitalists depended on workers even more than workers depended on their wages. Labor is not cheap, even at the poverty wages that many capitalists have paid, but capitalists will always spend some of their capital on it because without labor no value is created, and without the creation of value no profits can be made. Capitalists can only earn a profit by paying wages that are less than the value created by the labor provided to them by workers.

Capitalists act as a class as well as individually. Not necessarily in some kind of smoke-filled backroom conspiracy way, but rather because their class position predisposes them to actions that become more than the sum of the individual actions. 

One example of this concerted action by capitalists as a class was in 1842 in Britain. In the midst of one of the worst depressions the country would ever experience, British capitalists slashed wages, laid people off, and cut corners on making workplaces safe. In response to these abuses, a group called the Chartists, formed by utopian socialists, liberal reformers, and workers, submitted a petition to the House of Commons in Parliament demanding  six significant reforms to introduce universal male suffrage, reduce corruption, and strengthen democratic representation and accountability in Britain. The petition had over three million signatures. The vote was not even close; it failed 287 to 49.

Two months later, a coal miner strike began in Staffordshire. For the most part it was like many strikes before and since. But there was one thing that stood out – the miners stated that they wanted the Chartist petition passed, and they connected their strike to it. Less than a month after that strike began, cotton workers who had their wages cut proposed “A Grand National Turnout” in support of the Chartist petition. Within less than a week, all work had stopped in Stalybridge and Ashton, then in Manchester, and soon throughout the country. Though the strike was eventually violently crushed, the capitalists got the message. They reversed  the previous wage cuts. Parliament got the message as well, passing the Factory Act in 1844. Worker organizers learned an important lesson – when the capitalist class uses their collective power to oppress, it takes the collective action of a whole nation of workers to fight back.

However, when early Marxists analyzed the general strike in Britain, they dismissed it due to its connections with utopian socialists and anarchists. Writing in 1873, Friedrich Engels argued that to use a general strike for revolutionary socialism (rather than the liberal reforms accomplished by the Chartist general strike) would require a level of organization and resources that would essentially beg the question “Why not simply use that organization and resources to take over the state rather than carry out a general strike?” But that changed in 1905, when the first of many revolutions swept the Russian Empire. While Russia was still largely feudal, especially compared to a nation like Britain, revolutionary socialists were nonetheless able to organize hundreds of thousands of workers to go on strike, shutting down electricity and newspaper distribution in St. Petersburg completely. The tsar eventually capitulated, abdicating a totalitarian feudal monarchy and creating a constitutional monarchy with a legislature and civil rights. Though these would later be rolled back, prompting the more famous Russian revolutions that created the Soviet Union, in 1906 the socialists of the world stood in awe of the historical victory of their Russian comrades.

One of the most inspired was a German economist and union organizer who had always believed in the potential of strike actions to bring about revolutionary change – Rosa Luxemburg. Not only did Luxemburg join the struggle in Warsaw, where she was arrested, but she eventually met up with Lenin, Trotsky, and others for an intensive weeks-long discussion in Finland about how the Russian revolutionaries were able to pull it off. She turned her take-aways from this discussion into her most influential political writing, The Mass Strike. In it, Luxemburg pointed out that the political mass strike in St. Petersburg was preceded by several strikes all over Russia in the years proceeding – and we now know in 2025 that there were even more of these smaller economic strikes leading up to it than Luxemburg even knew about.

Luxemburg argued that it was the participation of revolutionary socialists in these seemingly just-economic strikes over the years that was crucial to building toward the eventual general strike in 1905. These strikes were almost always unanticipated and unconnected to the socialists – the socialists did not start the strikes, but rather took the opportunity created by them to agitate for revolution and build working class organization. And they were cumulative – like the adage of Paulo Freire, workers make the road to a general strike by walking it, by carrying out strike actions repeatedly.

While Rosa Luxemburg dismissed the idea of “equal authority,” that trade unions should have as much political authority as a socialist party, she argued “everywhere trade-union work prepares the way for party work.” But Luxemburg was not concerned with winning over the trade union leaders, trying to convince them that their political “neutrality” was misguided – the value of trade union work was in the connection to rank and file members. Worker organizing raised class consciousness just as much, and perhaps more, than socialist party organizing. 

To summarize, the general strike is the mass withholding of labor by organized workers across an entire nation and multiple industries which has a political aim that confronts the capitalist class as a whole rather than a single capitalist employer. The experience of the Russian Revolution of 1905, as distilled by Rosa Luxemburg, presented a socialist political theory: revolutionary change could be accomplished through a general strike, built by organizers participating in smaller strike actions and engaging with the rank-and-file workers carrying them out.

The 21st-Century Push for a General Strike in the U.S.A.

There are considerable differences between the 21st century United States and those of 19th century Britain and early 20th century Russia. Most notably, labor unions and strikes were illegal in both of those historical cases, whereas in the U.S. both are, at least for now, legally protected if carried out in the way prescribed by the law. This has made it safer for workers to go on strike, but has also successfully pushed labor unions into less militant action.

While it appears the U.S. labor movement is rebounding from its historic lows of strike actions, we are still below the number of strike actions happening in the 1990s, let alone at the high points of labor militancy in U.S. history like in the 1970s. So is the general strike still a relevant concept for modern U.S. socialists?

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) decided it was still relevant, and did so before the recent resurgence in interest. On March 26, 2019, Barry Eidlin published an article in Jacobin titled “What is the Rank-and-File Strategy, and Why Does It Matter?” This article was not the origin of the rank-and-file strategy – that traces back to a working paper authored by Kim Moody in 2000 for the organization Solidarity. But with this article, Eidlin applied Moody’s most famous theory to the organizing DSA was doing in some places and seeking to do elsewhere. “Unions give workers a platform to wage class struggle in a coordinated and sustained way,” writes Eidlin, “in the process developing the capacities necessary for future fights.” For this reason, Eidlin argues that DSA projects like YDSA’s campaign to encourage members to become teachers and join or form unions was the crucial way for DSA to engage in labor politics. Eidlin cited the wave of teacher strikes in 2018 as an example of how the rank-and-file strategy had already produced success. 

Like Luxemburg and Moody, Eidlin casts doubt on the revolutionary potential of union staff and leaders, at least as the primary focus of socialist agitation, given their predisposition to conservatism from their material interest in minimizing risk to the financial well-being of the union as their employer. But Eidlin does not argue that these figures cannot play a part in the rank-and-file strategy – the question is whether those union staff and leaders will use their power and roles to empower a militant minority in the union.

Eidlin does not expressly cite the concept of the general strike, but it is easy to see how it fits into his argument when he writes that the rank and file strategy is “a theory of how to build power to change society in the interests of the vast majority…linking workplace struggles to broader community struggles.” But as Rosa Luxemburg notes, the general strike is not simply a campaign that socialists decide to do one day, but rather a culmination of a series of militant labor actions engaged in by socialists.

That is why the DSA Rank-and-File Strategy does not tell our members to “organize for a general strike” but instead to:

1. Educate DSA members about unions and the local labor movement.
2. Launch a jobs program for those interested in taking strategic jobs.
3. Create support structures for our members in these jobs.
4. Support members organizing new unions in their workplaces or choose strategic targets to organize.
5. Join and build union reform caucuses.
6. Support strike and contract campaigns through connections with workplace leaders.
7. Build and use the Labor Notes network.
8. Connect local unions and worker leaders with broader DSA campaigns such as Medicare For All and Green New Deal.
9. Work with unions on electoral campaigns for DSA-endorsed candidates.

We can see this strategy in the work of the Labor Branch of Chicago’s DSA chapter.. Every Labor Branch meeting has a political education section to educate our members about unions and the local labor movement. Our pipeline program connects our members to jobs in unionized workplaces. Our members who get into these jobs form formal or informal networks for discussing our organizing as socialists as well as labor militants. Our CHIWOC (Chicago Workplace Organizing Committee) organizing helps members start new unions in their workplaces. Our members are involved in reform caucuses of unions like Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) in CTU and Teamsters for a Democratic Union in the Teamsters. And our strike support program has brought our members out to talk to UAW workers, Teamsters workers, and Illinois Nurses Association workers on the picket line.

There is always more that we can do, especially as we expand our membership, but this work we are doing is laying the groundwork for a general strike. A lot of it may not fit our romantic ideas of what carrying out a general strike is – the epic rallying cry speeches, the grand stands against authoritarian politicians and bosses. But as Rosa Luxemburg taught us, it is this work that may only be remembered deep in the pages of history books that builds the road to the general strike. And her own tragic death, in which she was murdered by right-wing forces after a failed attempt at revolution that she reluctantly joined, shows the consequences of trying to force a general strike to happen without laying enough of that foundation.

But we may be getting closer to that crescendo. President of the UAW Shawn Fain, whose election was the result in no small part of socialists organizing as members of the UAW in a reform caucus, has called for unions to line up their contracts to expire on May 1, 2028, providing a legal impetus for a coordinated cross-industry and nation-spanning strike. It is an exciting development in labor militancy and collective working class action across unions rather than siloed in individual unions and individual workplaces. But what can we expect?

The future is always unwritten, and those who make unequivocal predictions should be treated with as much skepticism as a strip mall clairvoyant. But we can use our understanding of history and our analysis of the current conditions of the political economy to outline the most likely possibility. As aforementioned, strike actions in the U.S. are still at a relative low in our history, and there has been no indication within any of the major unions that this will be changing in the near future. Nearly every union has contracts with a “no strike” clause that prohibits going on strike until the contract expires. Even under Trump with the courts and National Labor Relations Board being disarmed as weapons of the labor movement, unions are still stuck in these legal-based strategies and unwilling to engage in strikes. Union density continues to decrease (11.1% in 2024) despite being at newfound highs of popular support according to polling. Lastly, the COVID pandemic unfortunately threw a wrench in the momentum that labor had following the strike waves in 2018 and 2019, with 2020 having the least amount of strikes of any period in U.S. history since the information first started being tracked.

All of these factors weigh against May 1, 2028 becoming a real general strike. Despite whatever their public statements may sound like, the labor leaders involved with organizing the effort are well aware of this. The point of the proposed May 1, 2028 action is to show the working class the power of their collective action and union collaboration, so that in the future if those workers face the decision of whether to go on strike, they will understand the potential benefits as well as the risks.  May 1, 2028 may not be the general strike its organizers hope it to be, but it is part of the process of building toward one, and that is why socialists should absolutely engage with the effort and take hope from it. But even this campaign, with the lofty aim of a general strike, still boils down to the basic work Chicago DSA and the organization nationwide is doing through the rank and file strategy – in the simple words of the UAW, “organize, organize, organize.”

If and when a general strike one day brings revolutionary socialist change to this country, it is impossible to say who will be the faces of that moment or the leaders whose names will be captured in the history books. No one can show you the path to capture that glory. But what DSA can do, through our understanding of the history of the general strike and of the current conditions of the U.S. political economy, is give you a strategic framework through which you can organize your workplace and get it ready for the beautiful day when we will cast off our chains and step bravely forward into a socialist future.

The post Building the General Strike appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Organizing large workplaces can seem daunting. It's crucial to find co-workers to connect with and analyze the power in your workplace together.

The post Sources of power in your workplace appeared first on EWOC.

by Dan F

There have been some differences of opinion in MADSA about decision making, meetings, and in general how we organize over the past few years. And contention has often arisen around bylaw changes. Here are some of my migraine-addled opinions on why this is happening.

Two examples of contention

First, in the 2025 convention there was a bylaw change proposed to make working groups accountable to a SMART goal-based structure. In the introduction, the intent was written as about “democracy, accountability, and transparency”, and about improving communication between working groups and the general membership. However, as written, the amendment would have invalidated the proposed charters of both of the active working groups, thus dissolving them until rewritten to include SMART goals.

That was a substantive change that, in practice, was about more than communication and transparency. Is “abolition of police and prisons” a “particular goal or goals”? How do we measure it? This change applied a certain way of thinking to working groups, implying they could only be limited-term engagements… and the implication ended up feeling like an attack or attempted critique to some folks active in those working groups, by shutting down their charters. It was unclear to AWG members how exactly SMART-based goals would fit into abolitionist organizing, which works on short and long horizons. [It doesn’t help that bringing bylaw changes to a convention that also passes charters based on the bylaws we just changed is confusing at best.]

Even though it likely wasn’t written with this intent (going by the introductory paragraphs), this amendment felt like an attempt to try to force some organizers to organize in a different fashion. This bylaw amendment did not pass. I think something quite similar could easily pass next year, and it’s definitely an open question of how to better link working groups with the wider body and each other, to avoid siloing. [Aside: I like the idea of sociocracy’s circles approach, where in large enough groups, for a connection between groups A and B there are two liasons: one that represents A to B and one that goes B to A.]

A second recent example of disagreement was the proposal to remove an asynchronous voting requirement on decisions about endorsements, and also when dissolving our Community Accountability Committee. That change was intended to make it possible (but not required) for those decisions to happen synchronously, in meetings.

This opened a divide, with a few heated and wide-ranging threads in Slack in advance. I’m arguing that the reason this went that way is that it felt like a coercive change to some people in the chapter, especially those who want to include all members in decisions, or those who can’t attend meetings all the time. I wonder what the chapter discussion around this would have looked like had the initial frame been more focused on “we don’t need to require these votes, we can still vote to take things asynchronously if we find that important”, but it became clear that the real discussion was about what the default mode should be. There was clearly a wide divide between people who wanted asynchronous votes and those who did not.

So from these examples, it seems that our orientation to coercion and our personal take on meetings (as effective organizing and decision arenas) may be at the root of some of our disagreements. And writing this is my attempt to dive down into why that is, and why we should care about these differences if we want to build and maintain a “big tent” organization working toward liberation.

I also want to make it clear that everything here is my personal take after talking with folks from various persuasions. I encourage people to write a different perspective. And I especially encourage that if any of this raises your hackles.

Coercion

Let me back up a step. What do I mean when I talk about coercion?

Generally, when Marxists or anarchists analyze the modern state, we say that the state hierarchy has a monopoly on violence. That’s the purest form of coercion. But coercion can pop up anywhere there’s an asymmetry of power. Anarchists worry about this a lot.

We should aim for the absence of coercion, where nobody feels they are doing something because of pressure from a “higher power” of any kind. But the dynamics of coercion do get strange in large groups. As the author of the voting change above noted, if the “paper members” of our chapter vote strongly yes on something that the hardcore meeting-attenders vote strongly no on, is that a kind of group coercion?

I think we’re actually in a place where people on all sides of that decision were thinking a bit through the frame of coercion, but thinking about it differently because of their (obviously) different experiences trying to organize.

You’re organizing wrong

Now here’s where this gets tricky. I’m going to advocate for more pluralistic methods of organizing, and against a Single Path To Perfect Organizing. In a way, this is kind of parallel to the “paradox of tolerance” argument.

I say that anyone who thinks they know the One True Way To Organize is wrong, and anyone who tries stuff and makes good things happen in the world, no matter how they do it, is correct. But it’s going to sound like I am saying “You’re organizing wrong!” and “Never tell someone they’re organizing wrong!” at the same time.

How do we solve the paradox of tolerance? In social spaces, we’re tolerant of any way anyone wants to be, except anyone who tries to draw a hard line around what can and cannot be tolerated. [Intolerance.]

How do we solve the paradox of how to organize? In organizing spaces, we organize any way that gets things done, except any way that tries to draw a hard line around how we do and do not organize. [Disorganization?]

The end goal of both of these solutions is to have the most people left in the plural, and only leave bad actors on the outside. Bad actors who we can hopefully convince that our pluralism is actually great, and they should come in! The water’s fine! Stop trying to draw artificial lines on parts of the ocean, right?

There are certainly harmful patterns we need to learn to avoid. But we also need to remember that this is always going to be volunteers opting in to making the world better, and not everybody is going to want to squeeze into the same box.

What is the goal?

So let’s get down in it. What are we trying to build as we organize?

My take? We’re trying to build test labs of liberation and democracy that solve societal issues. Some of those issues are thanks to capitalism, but others are likely inherent to human societies of any persuasion. [See this Wesley Morgan piece on building dual power if you want to delve into the anarchist thought here.] We need to show people that cooperative organizations full of self-managed individuals can, and do, build a better world.

“Democracy” is one of those words that gets tossed around, assuming we all agree at what we’re pointing at when we organize. But this concept is tricky. It implies that everyone has an equal say. But it can get used to refer to actually functioning cooperative or direct democracy, all the way over the spectrum to the supposedly “representative democracy” that we currently live inside in our Ye Olde Racist Crumbling Empire, which quite clearly does not give the dēmos any actual krátos.

So for now, let’s define democracy in a kind of Erik Olin Wright-ish way, as the maximally effective sharing of power so that everyone has the highest likelihood of being involved in decisions that impact them.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

The trope about socialists is that they love meetings. Many of us assume that meetings are a way to maximize democracy. But that assumption can fail, based on group size, style, goals, or composition. We can all watch this happen, as groups grow and shrink and change. Requiring that decisions happen in synchronous meetings can certainly have advantages, but for questions that impact the whole body of the chapter, what is the best path?

I believe we need to try many methods to make decisions. And try some new ways. Not everybody can take the time to sit in every meeting. And this insight needs to be woven through all organizing that pushes for liberation: DSA’s cultural focus on meetings may have something to do with why we aren’t reaching the working class with our socialist methods. It doesn’t make sense to have everyone in every meeting all the time. And also, it’s getting to the point where getting everyone in a single room is expensive and difficult.

So how can we still effectively share power? Personally, as someone who looks through an anarchist lens, I believe that the fundamental problem we need to solve in the world is minimizing coercion. And if you think about it, minimal coercion looks a lot like maximal power sharing, right?

The problems ensue when we get stuck in certain ways of thinking about power sharing. And I think synchronous meetings are often effective at sharing power, but they are certainly not the only way.

Coercion and hierarchy

I’m pretty allergic to hierarchy. Ironic that I say this while sitting on MADSA’s executive committee this year, right? Maybe I should rephrase. I’m allergic to coercive hierarchies. I get concerned about power, because most of the capitalist systems, and even some of the liberatory systems humans have tried to build to counter existing power (cough, unions) have crystallized into power hierarchies which do the exact fucking opposite of reducing coercion. And where we don’t have formal hierarchies, informal power hierarchies form, which are worse in some ways. (Less visible, and so on. That’s a whole separate thing.)

So what I’m driving at (as I steer the car of this screed off the cliff of a bad metaphor) is that not everybody has the same opinions about how decisions should be made. Even if we limit ourselves to thinking about voting, as a possible solution for Maximum Power Sharing? Even then, no voting system can be perfect. It’s been mathematically proven.

And there are people in the world who are allergic to meetings, allergic to Robert’s Rules, and fundamentally allergic to coercion. I actually believe most humans are allergic to coercion, but some of us have immune systems that really kick off, and some of us interpret the symptoms as just the way the world is.

We’re never going to organize the better world we want, if we do it exclusively in ways that drive some of the plural away. Or if we organize in ways that turn us all [the working classes, the non-billionaires] into “us” and “them”. We need to organize in ways where we can actually imagine billions of people maximizing power sharing and minimizing coercion.

We should allow for different styles of stumbling towards better democracy. Different mistakes.

Meetings are a good way to get people on the same page. But they are not the only way.

Voting is a good way to distribute power. But it is not the only way.

On voting

So let’s revisit the arguments bubbling underneath the recent bylaw amendment which aimed to remove the requirement for asynchronous online voting. Proponents of this change were acting in good faith to trim what they saw as extraneous, and bring more people to meetings, which they see as the highest decision-making body. But this caused quite a bit of friction.

Hopefully, you might be able to see the shadowy shape behind why people pulled strongly against this change. I believe it felt exclusionary to them. It triggered some kind of immune responses, you might say.

In the discussion on Slack before that vote, people talked about “paper members”, saying “I think disenfranchising 3-5 engaged second shift workers is a reasonable sacrifice to prevent 10-50 paper members who got told to vote a certain way by their friend from distorting our democratic process.” Is this an actual problem we think we have? If so, then I think our existing meetings are not solving it! The root of the issue is, in the fight toward true liberation, there are always going to be “paper members” of groups. Overlapping circles of people with different goals. Do we want to further exclude them? Tough calls all around, and neither option is perfect.

There are always going to be times when we can’t make meetings, even if we do want to. (I say this with a full throat: fuck migraines. But sometimes, missing a socialist meeting because my head is exploding feels like a boon.) We need to figure out how to maximally include everyone in decision making, not force them to attend meetings because we assume that’s best.

I don’t believe that a cadre-based system where a vanguard of “true believers” makes all the calls will ever end with actual socialism or real democracy. And I don’t think we’re ever going to build functioning socialism if our method of decision making is always meetings.

I also think that some of the time, we make a big deal out of voting for things that really come down in the end to volunteer capacity and what our members have the drive to actually organize. Chapter endorsements or any other organizing target are never going to get members, paper or otherwise, out of the house to Do Stuff unless they’re excited about it.

So voting ain’t perfect. We need to try out many methods. They all have benefits and failings. Proxy voting is likely going to be discussed at our December meeting; I’m excited to discuss that! But we need to consider using our groups (working groups, committees, whatever you call them) as intentional labs for more methods.

We should be trying different types of voting, not just winner-take-all. Votes could tell us where membership is on a spectrum, and that spread could fuel different group choices, rather than a simple up-down binary.

We could try out different consensus and consent models. I’m a fan of consent decision making, which gets people to actively think about their range of tolerance. I’m not sure it would work for large general membership meetings, but I think some of that mode of thinking might reduce some of the unneeded contention in our decision making; it might be a way to get us closer, faster, to the real objections we need to resolve. Because I do think there is something important and worth talking about in both of the amendments I used as examples here.

Using the wacky digital tools we have, could we build some kind of decision making method that integrates with our asynchronous communication [currently mostly happening on Slack] and allows for a more fluid democracy?

Conclusion

No system is perfect. But what can we imagine?

How can we brace the big tent large enough that we can all fight for liberation, together? Without dark patterns sneaking in from capitalism, patriarchy, and other bigotries that hoard power?

How can we build decision-making systems that don’t alienate people who dislike long meetings? What does the world look like, once we’ve made some real progress on improving our methods?

I’m not sure, but I’m hoping we can have some conversations about the various ways we can communicate effectively and spread power around all the people. Proxy voting is just one step in the experiment. What else can YOU think of? What can we try?

Date: Thursday, January 15, 2026 at 6pm PST

Online Only. RSVP for Zoom Link.

Monthly Steering Committee Meetings are open to members to observe but, generally, only Steering Committee members may vote and participate.

By: Jo Coutts

It is hard to imagine the future. When I was a young hip hop head in Washington DC in the early 1990s it was inconceivable that icons Ice Cube, LL Cool J, and Ice T would join the police propaganda machine playing cops in mainstream movies and TV shows. What would Biggie think?

S. Trotter seems to ask this question in their piece Rappers Die Every Day B in Swords into Plowshares’ current exhibit Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires. Like Trotter, most of the artists in the show focus on the present and the past rather than that oh so hard to imagine future.

In the present, Mike Williams looks at billionaires’ appropriation of our neighborhoods, children, and very lives from the perspective of Greek and Roman sacrifice. His painting, One Hundred White Bulls, depicts “a symbolic herd of sacrifice” to remind us that we are the resources sacrificed to capitalist greed.

Next to Williams’ piece, Andrea Cardinal’s 26 Billion Dollars visualizes that greed by screen-printing Dan Gilbert’s estimated $26 billion net worth. The billion-dollar notes are a stark reminder that our sacrifices lead to unimaginable amounts of money for the rich.

Looking back to the past, Melanie Bruton’s When Memories Fade depicts a rain-swept fresh produce stand and asks us to consider what it feels like to lose your community. How does it feel when places that brought life feel ghostly? The piece brings to my mind the iconic drawing of “the shooter” by an unknown to me artist on Dequindre Cut. Created when the Cut was a hub of community creativity, today, The Shooter lives in a ghostly emptiness of iron railings, shipping container pop-ups, and surveillance cameras. If you close your eyes on the Cut, you can just about imagine the community of artists with spray cans, people hanging out drinking beer out of brown paper bags, music, relationships growing and failing, and conversations that never end. But the memories are fading as the denizens of the Cut have been moved out to make way for developers building condos funded by our tax dollars through tax increment financing (TIF).

Tax Increment Financing is a way that government “economic development” departments like the Downtown Development Authority and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation “capture” our taxes and redirect them to private businesses without our knowledge or oversight. TIF is not the same as tax abatements. Tax abatements, which developers also receive, are a direct reduction in taxes for a certain period. Tax captures actually take our property taxes and give them to developers to use to pay for their projects.

Dan Gilbert has received more than $618 million through TIF. Ian Matchett’s portrait of Gilbert as an empty suit ready to dump all we hold dear into a trash can counters the prevailing official narrative of Gilbert as a philanthropic billionaire who has brought Detroit back from the trash heap.

And it is so hard to counter this narrative. In the face of the overwhelming propaganda by the City, the media, and even in some cases Detroiters like ourselves, we have to remember that none of the so-called Detroit revival is for our benefit. Gilbert’s theft of the taxes we pay to the City has gone to develop Library Street — when we approved the millage to fund libraries. It has gone to build a glass skyscraper where the Hudson’s building used to be — when we continually ask the City Council to increase the funds for home repairs. It has been used to develop $1,755 a month studio apartments in the Book Tower while we plead for water affordability.

A Future Beyond Billionaires is more than libraries, home repairs, and water affordability. Arthur Rushin III asks us to look for What Lies Yonder? to contemplate whether freedom is in the stars. Not just the stars in the heavens but also the stars in our hearts, our minds, and our souls.

Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires is at Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center and Art Gallery, 33 E. Adams Street until December 20, 2025.

Gallery hours Fridays and Saturdays 1 to 6 p.m.

Political Discussion Thursday, December 11 at 6 p.m.

Artist Talk Friday, December 19 at 6 p.m.

Free Parking in the lot behind the gallery. Let the parking attendant know you are visiting the Gallery.

Jo Coutts is a member of Metro Detroit DSA.

Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Date: Saturday, December 20, 2025 from 9:30 am til 11:30 am

Location: Ragamuffin Coffee Roasters• 111 N Reino Rd, Newbury Park, CA 91320 US

Come join like-minded comrades for a cup of your favorite morning beverage. These gatherings offer a relaxed space to meet members and find out how to get involved, decompress, talk about the issues we face, and stay connected as we close out the year.

No RSVP needed! But if you want to, head over here.

Friday, December 19 – 8:00 PM PST (Online)

Thursday, December 18 – 6:00 PM PST (Online)

Join DSA Ventura County’s Labor Working Group on zoom to discuss the ongoing labor struggles in our communities, from Starbucks Workers United’s indefinite strike, to the tentative agreement our County employees will be voting on in the coming weeks, to the movement for an arms embargo by Labor for Palestine, and the calls for a general strike by May Day 2028.

Please, bring other ideas, campaigns, and your own workplace experiences. An agenda will be posted on slack soon. You will receive the zoom link after you RSVP.

Wednesday, December 17 · 6:00 – 7:00pm (Online)

Wednesday, December 10 at 5pm PST (Online)