Last month, Amazon Teamsters and Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) launched a Holidays strike and were joined by dozens of CT DSA members across the state, with thousands of workers across the country walking off their jobs ahead of the busiest season in their respective industries.

Amazon Teamsters, a project which unites the Teamsters effort to organize drivers at distribution hubs nationwide with the 2023 victory of Amazon Labor Union (now ALU-IBT Local 1), began this strike wave with a deadline for contract negotiations, which Amazon brazenly ignored, leading to their thousands of union members picketing organized workplaces. 

Pickets also extended to hubs across the country – including here in Connecticut, with Teamsters flyering CT Amazon workers in solidarity with the strike. CT DSA members joined these pickets in Windsor, CT, a location that has been the site of “flying pickets” organized by California Teamsters who, like ALU, have voted in favor of unionizing and are seeking a contract with Amazon.

At BDL2 in Windsor, the picket was the first mass public action at that location. For many Amazon employees, seeing workers and comrades standing in solidarity and handing out thousands of flyers made the union real. For workers, Amazon is a real thing: a building they work in, managers they know, and a paycheck that many rely on. Before this action, the union was intangible, and by standing together at streetlights and talking through car windows the union became real for the first time. 

“It was heartwarming to see the broad community support for the nation-wide Amazon strikes,” said Ruby C, CT DSA’s Labor Working Group co-chair. “We had strangers come up to us and donate donuts, coffee, hand warmers, and join us on the picket line. Through day and night, sun and snow, we stood together and supported the thousands of workers who went out on strike.”

Meanwhile, SBWU launched their own nationwide strike in the leadup to Christmas, culminating in 300 organized stores shuttering due to walkouts, including three here in Connecticut at the West Hartford, Danbury, and Woodbridge locations.

Similarly striking over unfair labor practices (ULPs), Starbucks baristas have been fighting for a first contract from their employer since a store in Buffalo, NY voted for a union in 2021, itself building on international efforts to organize the coffee multinational. Over one third of Starbucks’ nearly 7,000 employees in Chile are unionized, and have supported their American siblings in the drive to organize a majority of the company’s 9,000 US locations.

CT DSA members supported SBWU’s strikes at all three locations in the state, and spoke with workers about what the strike means to them. One barista, Magnolia G, worked for Starbucks six years before the union drive and re-applied to work at Starbucks in Woodbridge after the election victory. Asked what she thought the difference was between the two experiences, she said, “that we have a union now.”

“I think it’s beneficial for everyone, it projects and helps you as an employee.” Magnolia added that she “likes the company, but wants to see improvements.” This was a common sentiment among both workers on the picket and regular customers, who turned around at the drive-through when they saw the union on strike. Many knew the baristas by their first names, and likewise were recognized by the workers who thanked them for their solidarity (and Dunkin Donuts deliveries) with cheers.

At both Amazon Teamsters and SBWU pickets, CT DSA was joined by internet celebrity Anthony Fantano – also known as TheNeedleDrop – the most popular music critic in the world, with nearly 3 million subscribers on Youtube. Fantano filmed short videos with CT DSA explaining his support for the strikes, and interviewed West Hartford SBWU barista and CT DSA Travis G., who explained that among other issues, “people have been fired for what they’re wearing, what their hair looks like. We don’t think that’s okay.”

“The strike was a huge success! The largest in our campaign’s history with over 300 stores striking. And the largest turnout in CT we’ve ever had too! Starbucks stocks crashed hard… Between that and the media attention, we hit them where it hurts, and now Starbucks knows that if they want labor peace, they’re going to have to give us a serious economic proposal,” said Theresa B, SBWU barista, staff organizer, and CT DSA member. “CT DSA turned out for us all across CT! In Danbury, DSAers kept us fed with donuts, coffee and pizza throughout the day and were all really excited to be part of such a militant action.”

With CT DSA’s support, CT Starbucks Workers United successfully got all three shops to close early, demonstrating the might of workers’ most powerful weapon against their bosses: the strike.

CT DSA successfully manned multiple strike lines on short notice, continuing to demonstrate our commitment to labor militancy in Connecticut. Stepping into the New Year, we’re excited to advance labor work that builds on cross-sector, inter-union solidarity!

A brisk recap of the 2024 Metro DC Democratic Socialists' local convention.

The end of World War II marked the beginning of an unspoken era in our history: the baby scoop era. Conservatives, obsessed with an idyllic 1950s America that never really existed, are trying to force us back into a baby scoop era. Overturning Roe v. Wade was just the beginning.

THE Baby Scoop ERA

By Saige S

The nuclear family — the idea of a working dad, a stay-at-home mom, and their children — is one of many family structures that has existed in American and world history. Compared to other family structures, particularly multigenerational households, a nuclear family is relatively easy to uproot and move around according to the changing needs of capitalist production, making it the favored family structure of capitalist countries and the bourgeoisie that rule them. In the post-war era, an ideology of hyper-atomized, pure-strain nuclear families came to predominate in the United States. This concept of family, which is still with us today, roots itself in white supremacist patriarchy by centering white, heterosexual nuclear families and othering alternative family structures.

The social attitudes brought on by this rising ideology especially stigmatized  “unwed” motherhood, “illegitimate” children, fertility issues, choosing not to have children, and divorce. Single white women were pressured to give up their infants, often by sending them away to maternity homes. These women were looked down on for failing to meet the expectations of white supremacy and patriarchy, and social workers viewed them as “abnormal” and “breeders”. The phrase “Baby Scoop era” was coined to describe the resulting increase in non-relative infant adoptions from the end of World War II until the 1970s.

Maternity homes, many of which were religious, were known for strict rules, exploitation, and an isolating environment of shame and grief, and oppressing vulnerable single mothers. Women sought out maternity homes for support or were pressured into entering against their will, but more than 80% of them had surrendered their babies for adoption by the mid-1960s. While many of these homes shut down during the 1970s, Jerry Falwell opened his own “Homes for Unwed Mothers” during the Moral Majority movement.

Rickie Sollinger, author of Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade, describes,

“For white girls and women illegitimately pregnant in the pre-Roe era, the main chance for attaining home and marriage… rested on the aspect of their rehabilitation that required relinquishment… More than 80 percent of white unwed mothers in maternity homes came to this decision… acting in effect as breeders for white, adoptive parents, for whom they supplied up to nearly 90 percent of all nonrelative infants by the mid-1960s… Unwed mothers were defined by psychological theory as not-mothers… As long as these females had no control over their reproductive lives, they were subject to the will and the ideology of those who watched over them. And the will, veiled though it often was, called for unwed mothers to acknowledge their shame and guilt, repent, and rededicate themselves.” Sollinger differentiates this era from those before, where “Black single mothers were expected to keep their babies as most unwed mothers, Black and white, had done throughout American history. Unmarried white mothers, for the first time in American history, were expected to put their babies up for adoption.”

Records from the era show that demand for white infants, an appetite for trimming welfare, and a desire to punish unwed mothers inspired adoption agencies to develop an array of devious or coercive methods for separating mothers from their children. One social worker, Georgia Tann, became infamous for kidnapping newborns by telling mothers that the child died shortly after birth and would be (“buried” free of charge). By paying off lawyers, judges, social workers, and nurses she was able to remain undetected for two decades, profiting the whole time from the sale of infants to rich couples. Despite her horrible legacy of child trafficking, she created the closed-adoption model largely still used today. 

The Baby Scoop era’s maternity homes inspired the creation of “crisis pregnancy centers” when an anti-abortion activist in Hawaii fought unsuccessfully against the passage of the country’s first law legalizing abortion. The following year, he and his wife opened their home as a maternity home and counseling center for people with “crisis” pregnancies. He later created a string of over 200 anti-abortion centers in more than 60 cities.

The decline of the adoption industry is often attributed to a falling fertility rate. This is linked to various factors, including the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, the legalization of artificial birth control and abortion, and increased federal funding to family planning services for young and low-income folks. These factors worked together with other social and political reforms of the era like no-fault divorce, the legalization of interracial marriage, and women winning the right to open their own bank accounts. Along with Roe v. Wade, these reforms brought the Baby Scoop era to an end, but the social and political forces that created it were never really dealt with. Although single mothers and “illegitimate” children face less overt stigma, conservatives have been very successful at connecting social problems like poverty and crime to more abortions and more divorces, to fewer adoptions and fewer (white) babies, and, ultimately, to women’s health and women’s independence. If the rollback of a half century of reforms continues on this track, we may well see a second Baby Scoop era.

To fight back, it isn’t enough to highlight the cruelty of Republican policy — we must investigate the social attitudes and power structures around race, gender, and capital that brought us to this point. When conservatives shake their fists over a declining birth rate while the population grows, we must ask whose fertility rate is declining? Which industry is benefiting and which is losing money? Which narratives are being upheld and which are being challenged? Who is benefiting from this system and who is being exploited?

Ushering in the Second Wave Baby Scoop

Conservatives began chipping away at Roe as soon as they got the chance. Slowly but surely, policy by policy, they decimated abortion access by throwing up compounding barriers over a 50 year span. They went after everything from Medicaid to Title X funding, and they implemented mandatory counseling, waiting periods, parental/spousal consent, and TRAP laws designed to force clinics to close. The anti-abortion movement is rooted in the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which has driven rising anti-immigrant sentiment and a record number of attacks on abortion in the last decade. The escalating rhetoric surrounding the nuclear family and “traditional” gender roles, as well as the rollback of bodily autonomy, is the patriarchy working overtime to undo decades of progress. 

This assault culminated in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court decision that completed Roe’s death by a thousand cuts. Though nominally their decision was a critique of Roe’s legal basis, the conservative court betrayed their real motives when they argued that safe haven laws are an adequate alternative to abortion and that there was no need to worry about children given up for adoption, because “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent” (emphasis mine).

Besides the bone-chilling implication that infants are commodities to be bought and sold, the “domestic supply” language suggests that the religious right’s plan to “fix” this problem is a return to the Baby Scoop era, with natural mothers serving as “breeders” for a revitalized adoption industry. This rhetoric also goes back to chattel slavery (using women’s bodies as vessels and their children as commodities to both materially benefit and and idealistically benefit the capitalist class) which is precisely why the 14th amendment was constructed the way it was, as an effort to put an end to that practice. The machinery needed to exploit this infant windfall is already in place in the form of Christian adoption agencies, crisis pregnancy centers, and maternity homes. Jessica Valenti, who has been closely following the anti-abortion movement post-Dobbs, details the “move in anti-choice states to ‘streamline’ the adoption process and terminate parental rights—and the link that has to the anti-abortion movement and their relationship to evangelical Christian adoption agencies. (In short, it’s a racist clusterfuck.) … Republicans there have advanced legislation to implement baby boxes in the state, which most people don’t know allow the state to terminate parental rights. That means people in their most desperate moment, would be unaware that by using the boxes they may never be able to get their babies back—there have been cases of women spending months to years in court battles trying to reclaim their parental rights.”

Crisis Pregnancy Centers

The anti-abortion movement is well aware that abortion today is much safer than it was before Roe v. Wade1, and have renewed their disinformation crusade post-Dobbs. Anti-abortion centers (also known as “crisis pregnancy centers” or “pregnancy resource centers”) spread misinformation about abortion, pregnancy, and target people who might be seeking an abortion. These centers target pregnant people who might be considering abortion by strategically choosing locations near abortion clinics and utilizing SEO in their online advertising by strategically choosing locations near abortion clinics and specifically targeting searches as simple as ‘pregnancy symptoms’ on Google. While search engine optimization (SEO) is a foundational part of online marketing, this allows AAC websites to be towards the top of search results for queries that call for licensed medical advice.

These centers are often affiliated with a religious organization (primarily Heartbeat International, Care Net, and Birthright). People are lured into the center with promises of free or affordable healthcare, but once inside  they are subjected to an anti-abortion sermon, fed misinformation about pregnancy, abortion, and birth control, and directed to religious services like “earn while you learn” programs, private adoption agencies, and maternity homes. Despite being a billion dollar industry, these centers receive generous funding from state and federal programs by posing as healthcare providers.

Maternity Homes

The anti-abortion movement saw the Dobbs decision as the perfect time to open more maternity homes, with the total number of maternity homes increasing nearly 40% during the last two years. There are now over 450 maternity homes across the country. In some states, these homes operate with little regulation from the state. This makes the women who enter them especially vulnerable to financial and emotional abuse through the weaponization of law enforcement and homelessness Unsurprisingly, many maternity homes have affiliations with crisis pregnancy centers and private adoption agencies. 

Anti-abortion proponents respond that modern maternity homes provide housing and financial support. But just like during the Baby Scoop era, these homes are “treating women like criminals“. Residents of maternity homes can be forced to attend morning prayer, may have their phones confiscated at night, and may require a pastor’s approval to enter a romantic relationship. They may also be asked to hand over food stamps to pay for communal groceries, or required to install a tracking app on their phone, and homes have called the police on residents who disobeyed the rules. And while they supposedly exist to support mothers, some homes still prioritize adoptions — ultimately, these homes exist to supply infants to a growing market, and provide yet another node where capitalists can mine profit from vulnerability.

Private Adoption Agencies

Both “crisis pregnancy centers” and maternity homes have ties to private, Christian adoption agencies. These agencies are oftentimes religious. There is no federal regulation of the industry, despite federal tax credits for subsidizing private adoptions (as much as $14,300 per child for the adopting parents). These regulations are made at the state level and vary greatly, and govern everything from caps on financial support to how birth parents give consent to an adoption. Many are a part of the broader religious right and will only work with Christians. A Jewish couple in Tennessee were denied adoption by a Christian state-funded foster care placement agency because of their religion in 2021. While LGBTQ couples can’t be denied the opportunity to adopt a child jointly from a public adoption service, private adoption agencies have reputations for refusing to adopt to same-sex couples. It’s been common for adoption agencies to price babies based on their race, although some states and agencies may use other formulas to determine adoption prices (like sliding-scale or uniform prices). 

Moving Forward Post-Dobbs

This new Baby Scoop likely won’t look quite the same. Unwed mothers aren’t likely to be sent away for breaking social rules. Instead it will be fueled by the housing crisis, barriers to abortion and birth control, privatized and defunded social services, the weaponization of CPS and termination of parental rights. But much like the first Baby Scoop, it will target those living in poverty, in rural communities, young people, and black, indigenous and communities of color. Anti-abortion centers, adoption agencies, and maternity homes are the forefront of the anti-abortion movement, diverting people toward religious services intent on restricting bodily autonomy. Language is one of the first steps in the escalation of a human rights crisis. The combination of anti-immigrant, pro-nuclear family/anti-LGBTQ, and anti-abortion rhetoric used by the religious right show their need to maintain these systems of oppression to hold onto power. The misinformation campaigns and consequent shifting social attitudes will inevitably be used to justify more restrictive laws, all the way up to full criminalization. Many people will suffer, but a few Christian entrepreneurs will grow rich as white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism are further entrenched.

If we want to see a different future, we have to fight the anti-choice movement on every front. We have to organize and educate our communities, sustain each other through mutual aid, and build collective power at work and where we live, through labor unions, tenant unions, and strategic campaigns like DSA’s own effort to shut down Gateway Women’s Care, an AAC in Raleigh. Above all we have to build solidarity between movements and across the lines of gender, race, and class. It feels vulnerable, hopeless, even naive to call for a solidarity that generations before us failed to build, but the fact remains that the power of regular people can only be realized when they’re together — solidarity is our only weapon, and we need it now as much as we ever have.

1.  There have been a number of medical advancements like safe and effective abortion medication, better ultrasound technology, and more accessible and reliable pregnancy tests. Abortion medication has been shown to be as safe as in-clinic procedures (less than a 2% complication rate) and data shows that 63% of abortions in the United States were performed using abortion pills in 2023. There have been technological advancements in the internet and social media, connecting people to resources and information they may not have otherwise known about. Telehealth makes healthcare more accessible and allows people to get services who may not be able to travel for healthcare due to barriers like cost, navigating insurance, ability to travel long distances, finding childcare, etc. ↩︎

A look back at some of the popular ideas and theories developed on the (digital) pages of the Metro DC DSA's home publication.

Socialists should feel grounded, if not consoled, by the framework of dialectical materialism to identify and ultimately disrupt the power imbalance between the haves and have-nots. 

Upcoming Events

Wednesday, January 8 (6:45 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): January General Meeting (In person at 2948 16th St & on Zoom)

Thursday, January 9 (5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.): Palestine Solidarity and Anti Imperialist Working Group (Zoom)

Saturday, January 11 (1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Outreach Training and Outreach (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Monday, January 13 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Wednesday, January 15 (6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): What is DSA? (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Wednesday, January 15 (6:45 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, January 16 (5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.): Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)

Thursday, January 16 (6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Ecosocialist Monthly Meeting (Zoom)

Friday, January 17 (7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.): Labor Happy Hour (In person at Molotov’s, 582 Haight)

Monday, January 20 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister & on Zoom)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Events & Actions

DSA SF January General Meeting

Join us for our monthly DSA SF General Meeting tomorrow, January 8 at 6:45 p.m.! You’ll hear the latest updates from our chapter priority campaigns, socialize with socialists, and take care of our chapter business.

Business starts promptly at 7:00 p.m. so please arrive by 6:45 p.m. to check-in, have a bite to eat, chat with comrades, and grab a seat. We’ll be meeting in person at 2948 16th St, or join us online by registering here: https://dsasf.org/chapter-meeting-zoom

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Labor Board Happy Hour

Join your fellow labor comrades for the Labor Board’s first social event of the year on Friday, January 17 at 7:00 p.m. at Molotov’s (582 Haight Street). This is the time to plug into our upcoming labor events and solidarity actions, as well as socialize with socialists! It’s open to all who support the labor movement, from engaged DSA SF and/or union members to those who are labor-curious.

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DSA SF Education Board: 2025 Planning Survey

What did you come to DSA to learn about? What types of educational events do you think would help our organizing work as a chapter? Help the ed board shape our 2025 educational offerings by taking this three minute survey.

Behind the Scenes

The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.

To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.

By Ivy Elliot

The Department of Justice Report

WORCESTER – On December 9, 2024, the Department of Justice released a report describing horrific, systemic civil rights violations committed by the Worcester Police Department. The investigation, during which the DOJ reviewed evidence and conducted interviews from prosecutors and victims of police abuse, had been opened in November of 2022. Many in the Worcester area were outraged – but not surprised – to learn that the WPD routinely uses their state-granted power to assault Black and Hispanic communities, resort to excessive force on a regular basis, and sexually abuse sex workers in the city.

On December 17, members of the community attended a meeting at Worcester City Hall to demand reforms and assistance that would alleviate the hardships experienced by unhoused and sexually exploited women in Worcester. These demands include public apologies for the crimes committed by WPD officers, allocation of funds towards a women’s shelter and harm reduction programs, and, from some, calls for the criminalization of sex buyers and pimps “while decriminalizing and rehabilitating abused women.”

Sex work is fully criminalized in Massachusetts and many other states across the U.S. Police all over the country will often perform undercover operations in an attempt to find and arrest those participating in the buying or selling of sex. It’s no secret that the officers frequently and systematically abuse their positions of power to engage in sexual contact with sex workers, and often assault them in the process. Many officers routinely offer not to arrest them in exchange for sexual favors.¹ The DOJ report found the same problems exist in the WPD, which has led to this new push for the criminalization of sex buyers.

While the DOJ report condemns the sex abuse, it also specifically notes that police officers are allowed to enforce the law in regards to the buying and selling of sex. The report does not admit that it is the act of officers “enforcing the law” on sex work which leads to the systemic abuse of sex workers. Many women involved in sex work are the most vulnerable people in the community: people who are unhoused, disabled, racialized, queer, undocumented, and who use drugs; those who may have no other option for work than to sell sex. Even if the officers involved in these undercover operations were not violating the law themselves, their job is, in itself, the targeting and arresting of anyone found to be engaged in sex work, which only serves to put sex workers under further hardship. It’s worth noting that the report includes the fact that “the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office has not prosecuted those arrested for selling sex since 2018, instead referring arrestees to a diversion program for survivors of sexual exploitation.” This treatment falls short of decriminalizing the sale of sex – which would mean the police are not technically allowed to arrest sex workers themselves – but these are the conditions under which the DOJ’s reported abuses have occurred. The County DA already operates under something akin to a model of partial decriminalization, and the results of this DOJ report suggest that it hasn’t curtailed the abuses of the WPD.
The suggested remediations at the end of the DOJ report offer little in regards to the safety of the Worcester community from the police. Their suggestions of increased supervision, training, and use of body cameras are little more than a band-aid which can easily be torn off when convenient, and do nothing to prevent the continued abuse of marginalized people at the hands of the WPD. As the community focuses on the abuse of sex workers in light of the DOJ report, we should examine what can be done to improve their conditions.

The Nordic Model

The Nordic model, which decriminalizes the seller but criminalizes the buyer of sex, has been proposed by some who see this as a way to eventually end sex work without further harming those who sell sex. In their view, this would only harm men who exploit women’s bodies, causing the market to eventually dry up. However, there is ample evidence from countries which follow this model that it is not an effective method to remove women from the sex industry or make the conditions of their work safer. Maine became the first U.S. state to adopt the model just last year, and we will likely see similar failures arise there. In reality, sex workers need to sell sex more than clients need to buy it, which puts workers at a disadvantage when their clients are criminalized. The dynamics of partial decriminalization does not increase the leverage sellers have over the exchange, especially when such “leverage” is inherently created by a systemically violent, sexually abusive, discriminatory police force continuing to track and harass the sellers themselves.

Many sex workers are in a position in which they cannot find another means of income. By criminalizing the buyer, the demand for sex work is lower, meaning sex workers are less likely to find clients, and are paid less by clients for their labor. Any law which makes workers poorer reduces their power as workers. When they make less money, they become more desperate, less likely to set boundaries with their clients, and more likely to take on riskier clients that they otherwise wouldn’t take.

Criminalization of the buyer forces sex workers to cater to their clients’ needs for safety. Clients will refuse to provide identifying information which workers could use to confirm if others have had violent experiences with them in the past. This opens more opportunities for clients to rob or assault sex workers without being traced. 

Sex workers can also still be followed by police who are looking to arrest their clients. When police are present, sex workers – especially those of marginalized backgrounds – are still at risk of discrimination, and subject to arrest for things unrelated to their work, such as immigration status or drug use. It was also found in the DOJ report that the WPD systemically targets Black and Hispanic people more frequently, and even performs arrests without probable cause. Since partial decriminalization does not reduce sex workers’ chances of police interaction, it continues to place sex workers – and especially racialized ones – in a position to be abused by the police.

The Nordic model also fails to address other ways that the police can use the law to unfairly punish sex workers. When buyers and managers are criminalized, sex workers themselves can be lumped into these categories. In Ireland, which implemented the Nordic model in 2017, sex workers sharing an apartment together can be penalized for brothel-keeping. In another damning report published by Amnesty International, Swedish police developed a strategy called “Operation Homeless”, in which they called the landlords of properties that housed known sex workers, informing them that they can either evict those tenants or face the legal consequences of “promoting prostitution.” The landlords, of course, overwhelmingly chose eviction.

Full Decriminalization

Another solution, full decriminalization, offers the ability for sex workers to continue to sell sex without the same level of fear from police nor from their clients and managers. While it does not completely erase the potential for police violence – or violence as a part of working conditions generally – it does prevent the police from involving themselves in sex workers’ lives as part of sting operations to arrest them (or their clients) for their work. When sex work is decriminalized, sex workers are given the same labor rights as other workers. The nature of work under capitalism remains exploitative, but increasing the rights of workers is better than decreasing them. They have a better ability to screen clients, set explicit boundaries, and openly organize. 

Other models generally fail to regard sex workers as workers. The discrimination and abuse faced by the most marginalized of sex workers under these systems reduces their power to defend their rights. When clients are scarce and demand is low, as perpetuated by the Nordic model, sex workers have less power to make demands of their clients. When the sex industry is regulated by laws which determine who is allowed to sell sex, business owners have greater power with which to control the industry and exploit hired sex workers. And when sex work is fully criminalized, sex workers are pushed into an underclass in which society barely sees them as human and paths out of poverty become more difficult.

The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) began organizing in the late 1980s to address the discrimination faced by sex workers and advocate for their rights in the country. Over the next decade, the NZPC lobbied for a reform act to decriminalize prostitution. The Prostitution Reform Act eventually passed in 2003 because of the organization and hard work of these sex workers. The collective now works to defend this law from being overturned, and provides resources to sex workers to keep them safe from abusive clients and managers, negotiate for fair wages, provide sexual health services, and defend migrant sex workers who are still criminalized in New Zealand.

Socialists and labor activists need to stand in solidarity with sex workers, fight for  decriminalization, and support them in organizing for their needs in a system which continuously disregards their humanity.

Full decriminalization does not intrinsically solve the issues of capitalism which force people into sex work. This is true of any work under capitalism, in which workers are forced into jobs which exploit their labor. Decriminalization, however, raises sex workers up to the same level as other workers in society and allows them to participate in class struggle on better terms. We should also not neglect the fact that many sex workers are in the industry because they cannot find other work. Sex workers, collectively, are the ones who are most impacted by their conditions, and have a strong understanding of their own needs; they can better advocate and fight for themselves when sex work is fully decriminalized. Many advocates of carceral solutions will say that criminalization is only effective when paired with reforms and services which help people out of the sex industry, but this leaves out an analysis of exploitation inherent to all types of work – reforms cannot address the myriad of underlying, structural issues which may lead people into sex work. 

The existence of programs that offer free shelter, universal basic income, drug rehabilitation, and helping migrants gain legal citizenship are all helpful in leading people away from selling sex if that is the outcome they want or need, but many of these programs come with their own flaws which cannot address every person harmed by the system. We cannot reform our way out of capitalism, and therefore we cannot rely on these programs to entirely eliminate sex workers’ need to sell sex. When these programs are coupled with any form of criminalization, there will always be people inevitably excluded from benefiting from them. Therefore, full decriminalization is the only way to give power to the workers.

Socialists and labor activists need to stand in solidarity with sex workers, fight for  decriminalization, and support them in organizing for their needs in a system which continuously disregards their humanity. Only through the end of capitalism can we fully end the exploitation of all workers and enter into a world in which no one is forced to perform labor which degrades and abuses them. Economic freedom and the freedom to choose our work is the only true solution to all symptoms of capitalist exploitation.

Ivy Elliot is a member of the Worcester DSA Steering Committee.
Photo Credit: Rory Cronin, member of Worcester DSA.

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Works Cited:

Smith, Molly, and Mac, Juno. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights. Verso, 2020.

1. Smith and Mac, 125 ︎

By the Editorial Board

Trump’s Threat To Labor

Donald Trump’s comeback election is an unprecedented threat to the labor and socialist movements. 

In his first term and on January 6, Trump flirted with right wing authoritarian tendencies. But now he is preparing a far more thorough and systematic break with the liberal democratic order. We must be clear that the threat from Trump this term is quite different than from previous Republican administrations.

His attacks on working people will certainly include the typical Republican approach of making it harder for workers to unionize, and passing legislation which economically helps the billionaires and hurts working people. Project 2025 lays out an ambitious plan in this regard, which would cut across protections for marginalized workers, defund pro-worker aspects of the regulatory state, expand misclassification, legalize company unionism, and allow states to exempt themselves from federal minimum standards. A new Republican-majority NLRB is also likely to curtail the rights of graduate workers to secure access to the National Labor Relations Act.

However, this time the typical weakening of workers rights will be paired with a more comprehensive assault on the most radical sections of our movement, as well as a co-optation of the more establishment-adjacent sectors of labor. Repression will be focused on those sections of labor willing to stand up to imperialism, mainly the pro-Palestinian movement within labor, and will be paired with wider assault by way of defunding and mass layoffs of those who seek to use their union power to support pro-social public services, especially teachers unions as well as unions in the civil service. At the same time, Trump will likely seek to bring a section of the labor movement close to him by way of handouts, especially those in the military-industrial complex and those unions with a disproportionately reactionary base, as we have already seen with the Teamsters union.

Divide and Conquer

Trump seeks to divide and conquer the labor movement. If Trump is successful, the result will be a labor movement too divided to launch a serious fightback. But to do so, he needs to win the reactionary wing of US labor, in order to keep the movement as a whole divided.

Trump’s choice of Congresswoman Lori Chavez-Deremer for Secretary of Labor is indicative of this strategy. Chavez-Deremer was one of only three Republicans to back the PRO Act, the main legislative push for labor under Biden which failed to pass. Now she has received this key appointment in the Trump administration with the endorsement of Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters.

In reality, Chavez-Deremer is no champion of workers. She has received just a 10 percent voting approval rating from the AFL-CIO, which by our accounting is an F. Indeed, one of Chavez-Deremer’s biggest supporters is Nike, the shoe company long accused of relying on sweatshops in East Asia, and she has also received over $100,000 from AIPAC. Nonetheless, her appointment gives the labor-right a justification for making nice with the Trump administration.

Chavez-Deremer’s appointment follows O’Brien’s speech at the Republican National Convention which, while short of a direct endorsement for Trump, nonetheless enhanced Trump’s pro-worker credentials.

The speech was also useful for O’Brien, helping him resonate with his right leaning members after some 59 percent of respondents in an internal union poll backed Trump. These numbers are not unique, but represent the march of MAGA from the police and border-patrol unions, through the building trades, and into the mainstream of the labor movement.

Trump’s economic-nationalist agenda which favors a revitalization of domestic manufacturing helps to facilitate his courting of labor. Trump’s critique of neoliberal globalist free trade has been a through-line in his politics since 2016, while his push to increase defense spending is a boon for certain unionized industries. Union leaders in these industries face the classic pressure of labor imperialism — more missiles, more airframes, more tanks means more jobs, and more jobs means more dues. Keeping the labor movement divided is an important task for Trump. If Trump can neutralize just a few major national unions, he can use them to disrupt the potential for unified action by the entire AFL-CIO.

Labor and Mass Resistance

Trump can court some sections of labor, but his program is anathema to the majority of the American labor movement and especially to unions in the public sector. Although the routing of the Harris/Walz campaign has left the liberal, labor, and left oppositions to Trump disoriented, it is all but inevitable that mass fightbacks will emerge during Trump’s second term, even if they do not emerge immediately.

Labor must not confine its energies to the fields of new organizing and contract fights, or even to basic defensive fights to hold onto organizing rights and conditions. Rather, the responsibility of the unions is to support popular mass resistance to Trump’s policies, providing symbolic and organizational support to attempts to block Trump’s policy roll outs, and using labor’s direct power to disrupt economic normalcy to materially reinforce the symbolic power of mass resistance. Only this level of resistance can be a threat to the Trump regime itself.

Although the way in which mass resistance develops cannot be pre-figured in advance, it is most likely that mass resistance will develop as a result of either sweeping layoffs in the civil service, attempts by Trump to roll out mass deportations, or an escalation of the US’s involvement in the current war.

During Trump’s first term, we saw the power of taxi drivers and flight attendants to disrupt Trump’s agenda through industrial action and the threat of a general strike. We also saw the largest protest movement in US history with the George Floyd Uprising, and the hope of a positive alternative in Bernie’s 2020 campaign. If such energies can be revived, threaded together, and directed strategically, with labor as a backbone, mass resistance can block Trump’s policies and even bring down his entire administration.

The Role Of Socialists In Labor

Just because mass resistance to Trump’s second regime is in the interests of the labor movement and the wider working class does not mean that it is in the interests of labor leaders. The majority of labor leaders are overwhelmingly bureaucratic in methods, uninspired in political outlook, and risk-averse and self-serving in orientation.

Some labor leaders may take a leading role in resistance on their own initiative, either because such resistance is in the interests of their members, their personal career, or their beliefs. But the majority of labor leaders will only act if pushed in one direction or another, preferring symbolic statements and risk-avoidance to bold material action. We will also quickly find out how large a proportion of the labor movement will be bought off into silence or active support by Trump.

While the spectrum in labor between those more sympathetic towards mass resistance, those caught in the middle, and those more open to accommodation with Trumpism is an objective fact determined by the structural position of the various industries within the capitalist-imperialist system and the balance of power within the unions, that does not mean that the role which the various sections of labor play is determined in advance.

Rather, the extent to which the radical sectors take effective and militant action, the middle layer are more or less brought along, and the reactionary layers remain latent (or vice-versa), is determined by the quality and quantity of our active intervention in the labor movement. If we intervene in the labor movement with a strategy for resistance which seizes on issues with majority support, puts forward effective tactics for their pursuit, and avoids minoritarian isolation, we can alter the degree to which the various sections of labor enter the field of class struggle. This requires socialists to lead and provide examples in the most militant unions, organize within the middling unions to push them towards supporting mass resistance, and block the worst expressions from within the reactionary unions.

Moreover, while DSA lacks unity on exactly how, when, and to what degree we should pursue politics independent from the Democratic Party, it is essential that within labor DSA members push in this direction, championing the idea of the need for a party for working people, and uniting the anti-Trump resistance with the fight for an alternative politics for working people.

Join us for a four-part discussion of the R. Palme Dutt text, “Fascism and Social Revolution.” This book was written in 1934 and through the text we intend to learn how capitalism creates crisis, how the crisis creates fascism, how we can analyze fascism, and why socialism is the only peaceful solution to the crisis. This is an extremely relevant text to our present moment and will help us in our own understanding and when talking to others about the current situation.

For the first session, we are reading selections from Chapter 1 and 2. We’ve selected the most essential parts of this book and reduced the page count by half. This is intended to make the reading more accessible for attendees but it is encouraged to read the entire two chapters if you can!

Reading selections:

Chapter 1, Technique and Revolution Section 1 – 4 (pg. 21-45)
Chapter 2, The End of Stabilization Sections 1 – 2 (pg. 46-57)

Refer to the study guide for relevant reading resources and guiding questions and discussion: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17OTih76i93hYdj4qiqDV-qAsuRTqeb0UMcwpBOWpXfs/edit?usp=sharing

Register for the virtual reading group: CLICK HERE

A member of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists responds to two articles recently published in the chapter's political journal.