There is a peculiar American humiliation in having to explain why you would like to buy groceries without helping populate a police database.

You needed eggs. Apparently, you also owed somebody a record of the trip.

Flock Safety’s roadside cameras collect license plates, vehicle characteristics, locations, and timestamps. Pass one and your car can become a searchable observation, available to an investigator with access. The company describes these as snapshots of public vehicle information. Such a modest word, snapshot. A birthday. A beach. Your car passing an intersection while you are trying to get through a Tuesday.

A collection of those observations has a different character. It lets an institution ask questions about where you have been. The public road supplies the material. You supply the life.

I resent the assumption that either is theirs for the taking. I resent being expected to prove that a trip deserves privacy, as though the default condition of citizenship were a standing invitation to inspect me. And I am tired of the little ceremony in which an industry takes something intimate, calls it data, and waits for the objection to become polite enough to ignore.

A road is not a confession.

On May 9, 2025, a Texas sheriff’s office searched a month of available records across 83,345 Flock cameras. The reason entered in the log was “had an abortion, search for female.” A woman’s partner had reported her. Investigators collected evidence and asked prosecutors whether they could charge her for taking the medication. They were told they could not.

The sheriff and Flock later presented the search as an effort to protect her welfare. But when the woman came to the sheriff’s office a week later, officers questioned her about the abortion and examined her messages. She had come to report a violent assault by the partner who had reported her. He was subsequently charged. The records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation document that sequence.

Her need for protection had to get past the state’s interest in her pregnancy.

Nobody has to invent a dystopia around this. The investigator typed the reason into a box. The archive was there to be searched. That is what should stick in the throat: how little had to happen before so much became available.

The usual reassurances arrive with the weary regularity of an automated email. Your plate is already visible. The records are only kept for a while. The system has rules.

Yes, a plate is visible. So is a person sitting in a café. Being seen by another human being does not make your afternoon the rightful property of an investigative system. We used to understand the difference between passing someone on the street and following them home. The distinction does not evaporate because the follower has learned to invoice the city.

Flock defaults to thirty days of retention, adjustable by its customers. That is a rolling month of observations, refreshed as people keep driving. Deletion at one end does not stop collection at the other. The archive gets younger. The appetite does not.

And rules governing access begin after the first trespass: the decision to make ordinary movement available for inspection. A lock on the filing cabinet cannot supply permission to fill it. An audit can help expose a search that should never have happened; it cannot make the person unsearched.

We have been through enough tracking scandals, data-broker revelations, and solemn announcements of revised privacy policies to recognize this transaction. First the intrusion becomes possible. Then it becomes profitable. Eventually, we are invited to a discussion about transparency. By the time the public gets a seat, somebody else is collecting rent on the furniture.

Flock has given that familiar entitlement a place beside the road. It is a physical reminder, on the route to work or the way out of town, that somebody has decided your passing should leave a record. You can object at the meeting. Your car can be recorded on the way home.

The intimacy of a life often resides in its errands. The pharmacy visited twice. The address you have stopped going to. The place across town where you are trying, quietly, to become someone else. A location does not explain any of these things. It can nevertheless furnish an official with a question you never owed him an answer to.

Now consider the protest. In September 2026, 404 Media reported on a Flock webinar that used Denver’s No Kings demonstrations to illustrate event-monitoring tools, including live video. People gathering to contest power became an example of how to equip power to watch them.

Even the objection gets a product demo.

A demonstration is public because people want to be heard. That does not mean they have volunteered for an institution’s future questions about their associations. A crowd contains the newly persuaded, the unsure, the person attending for the first time, the person whose employer would disapprove. Democracy needs room for people to arrive before they have worked out what arrival might cost. Surveillance sends the bill ahead of time.

The prison populist has a solution to this discomfort: imagine that the machinery will always be aimed at somebody worse than you. Give the state more power over them, and it will give you peace. The bargain offers a little borrowed sovereignty, the pleasure of picturing yourself beside the officer rather than inside the search results.

Donald Trump put that bargain in the title of his January 2025 order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The order directed expanded state and local participation in immigration enforcement. The language does its work before any search begins. A population is cast as a threat; restraint becomes something to apologize for. All that remains is to equip the people promising to remove it.

The target changes. The equipment stays.

This is the prison’s political inheritance: divide people into those entitled to feel safe and those whose submission is supposed to supply the feeling. Then keep expanding the means of submission. A frightened public gets a spectacle of control. The people selling control get a recurring customer. The person who needs housing, treatment, or somewhere to escape a violent partner gets told the budget is complicated.

There is an actual corporate bridge between the cage and the cloud. GEO Group operates correctional and detention facilities; its subsidiary BI Incorporated provides electronic monitoring, supervision, and case management under ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. GEO reported a renewed award for that work in September 2025. Confinement and monitoring are two lines of business under one roof.

An ankle monitor can be preferable to a cell. That comparison cannot tell us why a person should be monitored at all. When surveillance is imposed on someone who could otherwise remain free, the prison has expanded its reach while congratulating itself on opening the door.

Flock offers a more diffuse version of the presumption that people should be made continuously available to authority. No ankle bracelet required. The roadside does the collecting, and a reason to look backward can arrive later. Everyone captured in the archive helps stock the shelf, whether or not an investigator ever takes an interest.

There is serious money in stocking it. Flock’s March 2025 funding announcement named Founders Fund among the participants in a $275 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Peter Thiel, associated with Founders Fund and a co-founder of Palantir, wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Whose freedom? The freedom to build the apparatus, certainly. The freedom to refuse it appears to be causing considerably more trouble. Small-government enthusiasm becomes exquisitely selective when the government has a purchase order. The state must keep its filthy hands off the entrepreneur and its eyes on everybody else.

Palantir makes software for turning institutional knowledge into action. ICE’s April 2025 award of $30 million for ImmigrationOS specified work on identifying and prioritizing people for apprehension, tracking departures, and managing removals. In January 2026, 404 Media published a user guide for ELITE, another Palantir tool used by ICE, describing maps, dossiers, and confidence scores estimating the reliability of people’s addresses.

Confidence scores on where you sleep.

An address can be correct and the purpose of finding it abhorrent. AI’s most useful contribution to an authoritarian project may be immaculate obedience: find the person, sort the records, save the official some time. The machine need never develop a taste for cruelty. There is a customer for that.

Palantyranny is the rule of the unaccountable over the searchable. It joins the corporation’s power to classify with the state’s power to compel, making a person’s life increasingly visible to authorities whose decisions remain difficult to examine or resist. Your movements become their evidence. Their assumptions become your problem. The machinery may know where you sleep without knowing why you are afraid—and still help decide who comes to your door. Its defining achievement is this unequal exchange: power acquires a detailed account of your life while owing you scarcely an account of itself.

Flock and Palantir occupy different parts of this business. What joins the camera to the dossier politically is the claim on your availability: your movements held ready, your circumstances made useful, your life kept within reach. More capable software makes that reach cheaper to exercise. It does nothing to make it deserved.

You do not owe Flock a useful Tuesday. You do not owe a sheriff an interesting past.

“I have nothing to hide” accepts the wrong obligation. It offers to earn privacy through good behavior. But freedom is not a prize awarded after an inspection, and innocence is no promise that the inspector will leave you alone. The ability to go about your life must survive an official’s curiosity, a contractor’s sales target, and the next election.

Nor does the injury wait for an arrest. Sociologist Sarah Brayne’s 2014 research found an association between criminal-justice contact and reduced attachment to record-keeping institutions such as medical care, banks, formal employment, and education. The same pattern did not appear for civic and religious participation. Her account of “system avoidance” identifies a frightening possibility: people can retreat from the institutions they need because those institutions make them visible.

Her study concerned criminal-justice contact. The question it leaves beside a roadside camera is what people will give up to avoid the attention they fear. The appointment postponed. The meeting missed. The journey reconsidered until staying home feels like a decision freely made.

That last trick is especially foul. Power sets the conditions; you do the shrinking. There may never be an order to disobey or a charge to contest. Just a smaller radius in which to be yourself.

So no, the answer is not to design a more considerate dragnet. The answer is to stop collecting ordinary lives against the possibility that somebody powerful will want them later. End the contracts for indiscriminate movement surveillance. Require deletion of the accumulated records and verification that it happened. Close the routes through which another agency or a commercial broker can supply what a community has refused to collect. A particular investigation needs a particular justification. The rest of us are not its raw material.

Locally, that means finding the renewal date, demanding the contract, and making the council defend the decision in public. It means asking for removal without allowing the conversation to collapse into a tutorial on settings. A surveillance company is a business. It can lose a customer. We do not have to preserve its revenue stream as a constitutional courtesy.

And when the presentation returns to how much the system could know, bring the argument back to what it has no right to know. The errands, the friendships, the private repair work of a human life. The destination that matters desperately to you. The destination that does not matter at all.

You went somewhere.

None of their business.

***

This essay was first published on the author’s Substack, The Armory, on September 10, 2026. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

The post What The Flock: Prison Populists and Palantyranny appeared first on Pine & Roses.

En español/In Spanish:

Declaración de DSA de Texas sobre el tiroteo de ICE contra Wilber Rafael Garces Perez

El domingo 20 de septiembre de 2026, agentes de ICE embistieron dos veces el auto de Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, residente de Austin, y luego le dispararon por la espalda mientras aún se encontraba dentro del vehículo. Los agentes de ICE, junto con oficiales del Departamento de Seguridad Pública de Texas (DPS) y de la Policía de Austin (APD), lo esposaron y trasladaron al Centro Médico Dell Seton, donde ni recibió atención médica integral ni se le extrajo la bala alojada cerca de su columna vertebral, antes de ser devuelto a la custodia de ICE apenas unas horas después de haber sido disparado. El personal de seguridad del hospital se negó a permitir que la esposa o el abogado del Sr. Garces Perez lo visitara y tampoco confirmó su estado. Durante varias horas, su familia creyó que ICE lo había matado.

Los agentes de ICE llevaron al Sr. Garces Perez al Centro de Detención de Pearsall, donde lo obligaron a dormir en el piso, en condiciones de frío extremo, mientras sufría un dolor inmenso por la bala que aún no le habían extraído. Se le impidió hablar con su familia o su abogado durante casi 24 horas. Repentinamente las protestas estallaron en el lugar del tiroteo y se prolongaron hasta altas horas de la noche. Agentes de APD y de DPS brindaron cobertura a los agentes de ICE y de Investigaciones de Seguridad Nacional (HSI) para asegurar la escena. Dispararon balas de pimienta contra los manifestantes, hiriendo a varios, incluido un niño de 14 años a quien alcanzaron en la cara, lo que le provocó vómitos.

Esto nos recuerda un incidente similar ocurrido hace dos meses, cuando agentes de ICE dispararon y mataron a Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, residente de Houston, mientras se dirigía al trabajo. Tampoco olvidemos que en marzo del año pasado, ICE mató a Ruben Ray Martinez en South Padre Island, y el gobierno federal ocultó la verdad sobre la participación de ICE durante más de un año. Texas se ve sacudido por estas pérdidas y muchas más, desde los secuestros de miembros de la comunidad en sus propios hogares hasta la intimidación de los trabajadores y sus familias.

Para los texanos, la violencia de la aplicación de las leyes de inmigración forma parte del tejido de la vida cotidiana. Leyes estatales como la Ley del Senado 4 (SB 4, 2017), la Ley del Senado 4 (SB 4, 2023) y la Ley del Senado 8 (SB 8) despojan a las comunidades locales del poder para promulgar políticas de ciudades santuario y obligan a los sheriffs de los condados a colaborar abiertamente con ICE a través de los acuerdos 287(g). Otras leyes, como la Ley de la Cámara de Representantes 1900 (HB 1900) y la Ley de la Cámara de Representantes 2127 (“Death Star Bill” HB 2127), eliminan incluso la posibilidad de autonomía municipal para las ciudades de Texas al quitarles la facultad de reducir los presupuestos policiales o establecer regulaciones sobre políticas locales de seguridad laboral, protección ambiental y decisiones económicas. Además, el gobernador Greg Abbott lanzó la “Operación Lone Star” en 2021, creando de hecho una versión paralela de la Patrulla Fronteriza de EE. UU. dirigida por el estado de Texas. Todas estas leyes han sido aprobadas rápidamente a través de la legislatura estatal fascista, dominada por los republicanos, en los últimos 10 años. De esa forma prepararon el terreno para la violencia que seguimos viendo hoy en día.

En primer lugar, queremos hacernos eco de las demandas de la familia y los abogados de Garces Perez:

1. La liberación INMEDIATA de Wilber Rafael Garces Perez;
2. Una investigación independiente y local del incidente, en la que las autoridades locales, incluido el fiscal de distrito, Jose Garza, tengan acceso total a las pruebas y a los testigos, así como la capacidad de investigar y procesar cualquier delito penal cometido por agentes federales;
3. La divulgación de todas las grabaciones relacionadas con el tiroteo, así como la identificación pública del autor de los disparos y la exigencia de que permanezca en el estado y se someta a la investigación;
4. El fin de las tácticas violentas e ilegales utilizadas por los agentes de ICE, incluyendo el uso de sus vehículos como armas, disparar contra o desde vehículos en movimiento, y las cuotas de arrestos que impulsan esta violencia;
5. El fin de los acuerdos 287(g) en todos los niveles del gobierno local y estatal, incluyendo el DPS, y el fin de la colaboración del DPS con los agentes de ICE en controles de tráfico basados en perfiles raciales;
6. La expulsión de ICE fuera de Austin. Abolir ICE. 

Como socialistas en Texas, sabemos desde hace tiempo que nuestro estado es la primera línea de defensa contra las políticas fascistas y supremacistas del gobierno. Las secciones de DSA en todo Texas ya han planteado estas demandas. Hemos publicado declaraciones similares en todo el estado durante el último año, destacando cada vez más el sufrimiento de nuestros vecinos, el caos de la violencia estatal y la desesperación de nuestras comunidades por deshacerse de ICE. Este tiroteo debe ser el último.

Ahora es el momento de intensificar nuestras demandas, no de mostrar cobardía ni inacción. Podemos y debemos contraatacar en todos los niveles de poder que tenemos. Por lo tanto, además exigimos lo siguiente:

1. El Concejo Municipal de Austin y el de TODAS las ciudades y condados de Texas deben oponerse a las leyes estatales inconstitucionales, reintroducir las políticas de “ciudades santuario” y CESAR y NEGARSE a cualquier tipo de colaboración en la aplicación de las leyes de inmigración;
2. La legislatura estatal de Texas debe DEROGAR las leyes estatales que impiden que las ciudades se gobiernen a sí mismas (como la SB 4 (2017), la SB 4 (2023), la SB 8, la HB 1900 y la HB 2127) y devolver el control local a los gobiernos locales;
3. El gobernador debe PONER FIN a la Operación Lone Star y utilizar los miles de millones de dólares de los contribuyentes que se desperdician para financiar a las comunidades;
4. Las ciudades y condados de Texas deben PROHIBIR en todo el estado toda la tecnología de vigilancia basada en inteligencia artificial, como los lectores automáticos de placas (ALPR), que se utilizan DIARIAMENTE para rastrear y arrestar a miembros de nuestra comunidad, y que se proporcionan a través de contratos con Flock, Axon y otras empresas;
5. El gobierno federal debe DETENER todas las deportaciones de inmediato y reunir a todas las familias que han sido separadas por la fuerza;
6. Debemos ABOLIR el sistema violento de control migratorio y establecer una vía significativa hacia la ciudadanía para todos aquellos que consideran a Estados Unidos su hogar; 
7. Tenemos que ABOLIR ICE, el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional (DHS) y el Servicio de Protección Fronteriza (CBP).

Hacemos un llamado a nuestros miembros, compañeros de trabajo y vecinos para que sigan sumándose a las protestas y vigilias espontáneas en apoyo a Wilber Rafael Garces Perez. ¡Debemos seguir en las calles y continuar organizándonos en nuestros lugares de trabajo y en nuestros vecindarios para mantener a ICE fuera!

CHINGA LA MIGRA

SOLIDARIDAD POR SIEMPRE

Firmado por:

1. Austin DSA
2. San Antonio DSA
3. Houston DSA
4. Rio Grande Valley DSA
5. DSA North Texas
6. UT San Antonio YDSA
7. Paso del Norte DSA
8. Corpus Christi DSA
9. Fort Worth DSA

En Inglés/In English:

On Sunday, September 20, 2026, ICE agents rammed Austin resident Wilber Rafael Garces Perez’s car twice and then shot him in the back while he was still in his vehicle. ICE agents, alongside Texas DPS and Austin Police officers handcuffed him and took him to Dell Seton Medical Center, where he was barely given medical aid and the bullet lodged near his spine was not removed, before being released back into ICE custody mere hours after being shot. Hospital security refused to allow Mr. Garces Perez’s wife or lawyer to see him, and refused to confirm his condition. For several hours, his family believed that ICE had killed him. 

ICE agents took Mr. Garces Perez to South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas where he was forced to sleep on the floor, in extreme cold, while suffering immense pain due to the still-unremoved bullet. He was kept from speaking to his family or attorney for almost 24 hours. Almost immediately, protests erupted at the scene of the shooting and lasted long into the night. APD and DPS officers provided cover for ICE agents and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to secure the scene. They fired pepper balls at protestors, injuring several, including a 14-year-old boy who they struck in the face making him vomit.

We are reminded of a similar incident two months ago, when ICE agents shot and killed Houston resident Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on his way to work. Or in March of last year, when ICE killed Ruben Ray Martinez in South Padre Island, and the federal government covered up the truth of ICE’s involvement for over a year. Texas is reeling from these losses and more, from the abductions of community members from their homes to the terrorization of working people and their families.

For Texans, the violence of immigration enforcement is woven into the fabric of daily life. State laws like SB 4 (2017), SB 4 (2023), and SB 8 strip local communities of their power to enact sanctuary city policies and mandate county sheriffs’ open collaboration with ICE through 287(g) agreements. Others, like HB 1900 and the so-called “Death Star Bill” (HB 2127), remove even the possibility of home rule for Texas cities by taking away their power to lower police budgets or set regulations on local labor safety policies, environmental protections, and economic decisions. Further, Governor Greg Abbott launched “Operation Lone Star” in 2021, effectively creating a parallel version of U.S. border patrol run by the State of Texas. All of these laws have been swiftly passed through the fascistic, Republican-dominated state legislature in the last 10 years. They set the stage for the violence we continue to see today.

We first wish to echo the demands by Garces Perez’s family and attorneys:

1. The IMMEDIATE release of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez;
2. An independent and local investigation of the incident, with local law enforcement, including D.A. José Garza, given full access to evidence and witnesses and the capacity to investigate and prosecute any criminal offenses by federal agents;
3. The release of all footage related to the shooting, as well as publicly identifying the shooter and requiring that he stay in the state and face investigation;
4. An end to violent and unlawful tactics used by ICE agents, including using their vehicles as weapons, shooting at or in moving vehicles, and the arrest quotas that drive this violence;
5. An end to 287(g) agreements at all levels of local and state government, including Texas DPS, and an end to DPS assisting ICE agents with racially-profiled traffic stops;
6. ICE out of Austin. Abolish ICE.

As socialists in Texas, we have long known that our state is the front line in the struggle against fascist, white nationalist policies in government. DSA chapters across Texas have made these demands before. We have put out similar statements across the state over the last year, each time highlighting the pain of our neighbors, the chaos of state violence, and the desperation of our communities to get ICE out, full stop. This latest shooting must be the last.

Now is the time for an escalation of demands, not cowardice or inaction. We can and must fight back, at every level of power we hold. Therefore, we further demand:

1. Austin City Council and ALL Texas cities and counties must push back against unconstitutional state laws, reintroduce Sanctuary City policies, and CEASE and REFUSE any and all collaboration on immigration enforcement;
2. The Texas state legislature must REPEAL state laws that prevent cities from governing themselves (like SB 4 (2017), SB 4 (2023), SB 8, HB 1900, and HB 2127) and return local control to local governments;
3. The governor must END Operation Lone Star and use the billions of wasted taxpayer dollars to fund communities instead;
4. Texas cities and counties must BAN all AI surveillance tech like automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the state that are used DAILY to track and arrest our community members, provided through contracts with Flock, Axon, and other companies;
5. The federal government must HALT all deportations now and reunite all the families who have been forcibly separated;
6. We must ABOLISH the current violent immigration enforcement system and instead establish a new system that includes a meaningful pathway to citizenship for all those who call the United States home. Abolish ICE. Abolish CBP. Abolish DHS. 

We call on our members, our coworkers, and our neighbors to continue joining the organic protests and vigils held in support of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez. We must remain in the streets and continue organizing our workplaces and our neighborhoods to keep ICE out!

FUCK ICE

CHINGA LA MIGRA

SOLIDARITY FOREVER

Signed:

1. Austin DSA
2. San Antonio DSA
3. Houston DSA
4. Rio Grande Valley DSA
5. DSA North Texas
6. UT San Antonio YDSA
7. Paso del Norte DSA
8. Corpus Christi DSA
9. Fort Worth DSA

The post Texas DSA Statement on ICE Shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez first appeared on Red Fault.

Democratic Left interviews Police Reform Organizing Project Director Robert Gangi about Zohran Mamdani and the NYPD.

The post “You Can’t Have an Inclusive and Diverse City When the Police Engage in Racist Practices” appeared first on Democratic Left.

There is little new to say about Molly Crabapple’s wonderful history of the Jewish Bund, Here Where We Live is Our Country. Since its publication, the book has been widely celebrated by the Left, dismissed by the Right, and met with a mix of praise and accusations of naivety or idealism from liberal and centrist publications. 

The praise is well deserved. Crabapple writes so joyfully and tenderly about the Bund that a passive reading of the book feels almost heretical. The Bund was anti-Zionist, and Here Where We Live is Our Country is the kind of book that inspires people to continue the struggle against Zionism and genocide. 

As I read, I couldn’t help but reflect on what makes good historical writing. I have long held the view that an academic tone and a straightforward, seemingly unbiased telling of history are, frankly, a bad way to write, and an even worse way to engage with historical texts. First, the idea of telling an unbiased history is both naïve and impossible. If one subscribes to the notion that history is a set of facts and that a history book teaches or uncovers those facts, one is doomed to fall into the ruling-class narrative. That narrative promotes a record of great men, civilizations, and empires, in which everyday people are merely passive observers of the ever-turning wheel. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ordinary people are active participants in history, forging the path along which a “great man” or a “grand narrative” of civilization can later be divined. 

As a counter to the chronicle of great men and grand narratives, a different school of thought has emerged, first articulated by E.P. Thompson in the 1960s as “history from below.” But like most things, “history from below” existed long before Thompson popularized the term. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, and Peter Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution are all excellent examples of history from below before the term was popularized.

It was the work of Howard Zinn that breathed new life into the form with his bestseller A People’s History of the United States. These seminal works gave readers a sense of empowerment, showing that working-class people are shaping the world we live in and that, no matter how much the ruling class wishes it were otherwise, history doesn’t just happen to people without their participation. This is where Crabapple’s book really shines. 

Crabapple weaves the narrative of the Bund with moments from her life as an activist. For Crabapple, the Bund has a personal element. Her great-grandfather, the impressionist painter and sculptor Samuel Rothbort, was a Bundist. It’s through Crabapple’s family lens that we are introduced to the Bundist ideas.  This was a movement of Jewish socialists who sought to build autonomy, dignity, and socialism within Europe. Establishing a philosophy of doikayt, Yiddish for “hereness,” Bundists did not believe a Jewish state would bring safety. Bundists saw Zionism as a capitulation to racism and the idea that Jews were foreigners who didn’t belong in Europe.As Crabapple expands the narrative, the reader sees her life as a journalist. We cut between complex historical narratives of the Russian Revolution and the Bundists as well as her time at Occupy Wall Street or her writing on Gaza. The intertwining creates a grand socialist narrative. 

The Bundists were not naïve, wide-eyed socialists living in a utopian fantasy, as their detractors would describe them. Crabapple lays out the Bundist program with precision and details how Bundists would manage the affairs of cities and town councils. The Bundists did not shy away from power but wielded it within a democratic tradition seeking tangible, day-to-day improvements for the working class. Bundists would put in practice an eight-hour workday in Vilna, Minsk, Grodno, and Białystok long before it became law, secure wage increases for workers, improve safety conditions, and establish mutual aid funds to help injured workers, all while protecting themselves within the framework of “national cultural autonomy.” This was a practical method of Jewish preservation and self-defense that did not rely on “nationalism.” This strategy had practical effects. In the extreme violence of anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia, Bundists were able to defend themselves. The Bund successfully armed self-defense militias and created a Jewish culture of mass resistance. The fact that the Bund could build anything under such harsh conditions is a testament to its practicality.

There is much to learn from the Bund and from the Bolshevik response to it. It’s nothing short of a tragedy that the Bolsheviks would go on to reject the Bund and its “national cultural autonomy.” Ultimately, Lenin viewed the Bundists as a separatist threat to the working class. Lenin wanted an organized party of professional revolutionaries while the Bund wanted to remain an autonomous entity within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. 

The Bolshevik reaction to the Bund is a cautionary example. Marginalized groups within the working class can maintain autonomy and apply cultural lenses to address issues affecting those communities. This is not a contradiction to solidarity but an asset to it. The Bund offered a real alternative to Zionism for Jewish people being persecuted in Russia, and support of the Bund within the revolution could very well have solidified Bundism as a viable alternative.

That viable alternative feels like a thesis in and of itself. Crabapple continuously invites the reader to imagine a new world. Here Where We Live Is Our Home is a thorn in the side of the ruling order; it is the history of anti-Zionist Jewish thought and movements. For so long, this has been an underarticulated history, known only to those willing to search it out. Now it is available to all of us. Reading it, I felt as if I were reading a first edition of Black Jacobins or The Making of the English Working Class. Like those great works of resistance literature, Crabapple’s book is destined to inspire action.

The post History From Below: Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Public schools returning to democratic civic education can help save public education and working class politics

The post Workers Deserve Education appeared first on Democratic Left.

DSA chapters across the golden state from San Diego to Humboldt have endorsed candidates and ballot measures and are mobilizing to support them. Here our contributors lay out what we are up to in promoting a democratic socialist political agenda.

Santa Barbara

DSA Santa Barbara has decided to endorse candidates for local city council, including a mayoral candidate. As of 2024, Santa Barbara has enjoyed a slight 4-3 progressive majority on City Council, allowing for such policies as a local Rent Stabilization Ordinance and the non-renewal of a contract with Flock. However, this majority hangs in the balance in the upcoming election with four seats on council being up for grabs. The current mayor, a conservative man who has hurt progress in the city, has decided not to run for reelection, and three council members have termed out, two of whom are progressives. 

One of these progressive city council members, Kristen Sneddon, has decided to run for mayor and has received our endorsement due to her continued work on protecting renters and her overall alignment with DSA principles. We have also endorsed Gabe Escobedo, Ian Baucke, and Devon Wardlow, who are running for the other City Council seats in different districts. All of them have shown willingness, if not eagerness, to work with our local chapter. Furthermore, they all support strong tenant protections and are adamant on limiting ICE activity in Santa Barbara to whatever extent they are able. DSA-SB is incredibly focused on the local level and therefore has made no other endorsements.

—Beckett S 

Los Angeles

We’re excited to announce the results of our phase 3 electoral endorsement process! DSA-LA is proud to newly endorse:

• Nithya Raman for Los Angeles City Mayor

• Angela Gonzales-Torres for Congressional District 34

• Noland Sutherland for Burbank City Council

• Mike Van Gorder for Burbank City Council

• Stephan Post for West Hollywood City Council

• Estefany Castenada for Centinela Valley UHSD Trustee

• Yaritza Gonzalez for Inglewood Unified School District, Trustee

They join their fellow members Marissa Roy and Estuardo Mazariegos on our team of union leaders, renters, tenant organizers, parents, and activists who are running for office to fight for working class values and create real change across Los Angeles. You can learn more about our candidates on our website shakeup.la. 

DSA-LA is ready to unite tenants, union members, immigrant communities, and working Angelenos behind a slate that can break corporate interests’ grip on city government. Our vision is clear: win office, build a governing majority, and deliver a city working people can afford to call home. But we can’t win without your help: now’s the time to mobilize to knock doors, organize your neighbors, and get out the vote.

San Diego

This November, DSA San Diego has endorsed two mayoral candidates and two ballot measures. Kenneth Zuniga is a longtime DSA member running for Mayor of the city of Vista here in San Diego County! He served on the Homelessness Commission and has successfully organized to keep ICE out of city facilities. He has also organized against the installation of Flock cameras in Vista. As Mayor, he hopes to lower the cost of living in the city, and advocate for union-backed jobs and truly affordable housing. 

Alexander Kraft is a socialist labor organizer running for Mayor of El Cajon. Kraft is fighting back against the far-right mayor and city council, for police reform, housing, and protecting El Cajon’s large immigrant community from ICE. 

The chapter has also endorsed two ballot measures aimed at funding important services through taxing the rich. These measures are Proposition 40 and Proposition 3. Prop 40 is a one-time 5% emergency wealth tax on billionaires in the state, raising 100 billion dollars to fund healthcare and education. This measure was created after Medicaid funds were taken away from Californians by the federal government (called “Medi-Cal” in California). It is vital that this passes so that millions of working-class people don't lose their healthcare. Prop 3 is a proposal to make permanent an existing tax on high-income earners to help fund K-12 and community college education. The loss of this funding would be incredibly detrimental to the future of access to education. DSA San Diego is excited to support these campaigns and continue building socialism in the region!

Orange County

Over the past few months, OC DSA has seen an undeniable socialist surge to over 800 dues-paying members in good standing. 

We held an endorsement forum and with an overwhelming vote of over 90% of that day’s participating membership, OC DSA elected to provide endorsement and on the ground field support for three Santa Ana City Council candidates: Isuri Ramos (Ward 6), Sandra De Anda (Ward 4) and Ben Vasquez (Ward 2). 

Three class warriors

Sandra De Anda has been one of Orange County’s strongest warriors against OC’s ICE incursion, utilizing the OC Rapid Response Network and fighting for families through policy making across the county. 

Isuri Ramos is a community advocate and planning commission chair who has been fighting tirelessly against data centers, for tenant rights and for police accountability. 

Benjamin Vasquez is seeking re-election. He is a teacher and reform leader in his union who has been a champion of workers’ rights, rent control and affordability as well as expanding necessary social services for all of Santa Ana. 

Two wolves

Inside Orange County exists two wolves:  a billionaire-worshipping fascist supremacist movement that seeks to push down all workers in favor of jailing our neighbors, pushing unwanted data centers, and creating an ever-present Flock police state—and the Socialists relentlessly pushing back against their tide for equality, affordability and dignity for all.

It is our hope that we can start electing the type of leaders we want to see in office, gain electoral power and use the template that has been so successful in New York to build up Orange County’s ground game to bring about the type of county we all want. A victory in these races will show the power of socialist organizing in Orange County and be a strong sign of things to come in one of Southern California’s more traditionally conservative counties. 

We want to thank all three for sharing their time and effort in seeking OCDSA’s endorsement. OCDSA has appointed liaisons for each campaign as we work toward a shared vision of power for OC’s working class. 

Inland Empire

Inland Empire DSA is proud to endorse Joz Sida for Fontana Mayor, Joe Alvanez for Fontana City Clerk, and Proposition 40, the Billionaire Tax. These endorsements reflect our commitment to building working-class power, electing leaders accountable to their communities, and making the wealthy pay their fair share to fund the services working people rely on.

Long Beach

Our Billionaire Tax kickoff canvass for Prop. 40 launched today! ✊

Thank you to everyone who knocked doors with us. Learn about more @dsa_lb Tax the Rich events and get involved. Election Day 2026 is right around the corner!

dsalb.org/taxtherich

Humboldt 

G Mario Fernandez has served on the Eureka City Council for the past four years. He has been a consistent advocate for the working class, for the unhoused, for immigrant, LGBTQ+, and marginalized communities. He has supported important measures including Eureka’s Sanctuary Declaration for Transgender People, the boycotting of Avelo Airlines for working with ICE, and calling on CalPERS to divest from companies participating in the genocide of Gaza. Mario has championed programs like Uplift Eureka (helping the unhoused secure housing and jobs) and CARE (Crisis Alternative Response Eureka, using mental health clinicians and case managers to handle non-violent crises) for community response rather than law enforcement officers. 

Mario understands that true public safety comes from investment in people’s quality of life, not through surveillance. He advocates denser, mixed-use planning, expanding available housing, stronger renter protections, and strengthening our public transit system. Mario champions green jobs and workforce development through infrastructure improvement projects and upgrades to address climate change. Eureka is the heart of Humboldt County and needs someone who will advocate for living wages, peace, and human dignity. Mario has the proven, experienced leadership necessary to continue building a livable and safe community for all. Humboldt DSA proudly endorses G Mario Fernandez for Eureka City Council!

Sacramento

Sacramento DSA has endorsed Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang for Congress in CA-D7, Emily Smet for American River Flood Control District Division 2, and Prop 40, the California Billionaire Tax Act.

Mai Vang has an established history of advocating for the working class by delivering essential infrastructure and social services to her constituents.  She is running on a platform of universal child care, Medicare for All, ending the genocide in Gaza, and abolishing ICE.

Emily Smet is an environmental scientist and former chapter co-chair of Sacramento DSA running on a platform of responsible environmental stewardship, cooperation with rather than punishment of our unhoused neighbors living near the American River, and interrupting the interests of former developers and lobbyists who use local boards to enrich themselves rather than serve the people.

Editorial assistance:

Jack R - CA DSA Comms Committee

Contributors:

[reprinted by permission from The Press Democrat]

This Labor Day (weekend), it’s essential to highlight that reducing inequality is the main purpose of labor unions through collective bargaining for living wages, comprehensive benefits, and improved workplace health and safety conditions.

Moreover, unions provide a political voice for their members and lobby for legislation, such as restrictions on child labor, a minimum wage, the forty-hour week, and Social Security, that benefit all working people. 

Recently, the California Federation of Labor Unions, representing 1300 affiliated unions with 2.3 million members, endorsed Proposition 40, the California Billionaire Tax Act on the November ballot.

Prop 40 is a one-time 5% wealth tax spread over five years on California’s 250 billionaires who lived here on January 1, 2026. Prop 40 defines wealth as the value of stocks, bonds, trusts, and specified property holdings, minus outstanding debt.

According to the California Budget and Policy Project, if approved, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth would decline from $200 billion to $190 billion. 

Why is such a tax necessary?

First, wealth inequality has soared nationally and in California. A report by UC Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, and Jasper Boll of the Paris School of Economics, finds that from 1982 to 2026, California billionaires' wealth has skyrocketed by 38-fold to $2.3 trillion, while the real family income of the average California family has merely doubled.

Second, the measure would generate about $100 billion in revenue that the state desperately needs because of the massive Trump tax cuts for the wealthy last year and the slashing of health care funding (H.R. 1).

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that up to 1.6 million California Medi-Cal recipients could lose health insurance. Eighty-three California hospitals are at risk of closing, and up to 145,000 health care workers could be laid off, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Ninety percent of the Prop 40 revenue will backfill these health care cuts, with the balance dedicated to public education.

Third, Zucman, Saez, and Boll claim that billionaires pay less in taxes than the average taxpayer, relative to income. They calculate that between 2018 and 2020, across all local, state, and federal taxes, billionaires paid just 24 percent of their income in taxes, whereas the typical taxpayer paid 30 percent.

The main reason is that both the federal government and California tax investment income or capital gains (about 72 percent of billionaire wealth) only when stock is sold.

Most billionaires earn very little in salaries, such as Zuckerberg’s, which is $1 a year. They borrow tax-free against their colossal wealth to pay for ongoing expenses.

The billionaire tax provides a remedy by taxing all wealth regardless of whether it has been realized or not.

The argument opponents make is that if Prop 40 passes, billionaires will leave the state, resulting in the loss of capital and jobs. However, there is no historical evidence to support this assertion.

Sociologist Cristobal Young, author of The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight (2017), studied 13 years of millionaire tax records nationwide and found that only 2.4 percent of millionaires moved to another state annually, compared with 2.9 percent of the population at large. 

Young also researched California millionaires after the voters in 2012 approved the largest tax increase ever on top earners. Two years after the ballot initiative, the state experienced a loss of just .04 percent of millionaire residents.

Studies reached similar conclusions for other states boosting taxes on the wealthiest, including New Jersey in 2020, New York in 2021, and Massachusetts in 2022

Why?  

The research has found that 60 percent of California millionaires are older than 50 years; most have children and are socially and professionally tied to where they made their money. With children in school, property ownership, and extensive professional and social connections, they are unlikely to move for tax reasons.

Moreover, California tech billionaires depend on skilled professionals who are graduates of UC and CSU, and on innovation that is a byproduct of the exchange of ideas among tech workers across companies clustered in places like Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

California billionaires benefit immensely from the publicly financed infrastructure of universities, transportation, and healthcare. It’s time for them to pay their fair share to offset the pending catastrophic health care cuts.

Most of the attention on the California state ballot has been focused on the Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, thanks to heavy-handed spending by a dozen superrich reactionaries who are horrified at the idea that any part of their beyond-Gilded Age-level wealth might get redirected to health care for people who desperately need it.

But there are four related measures that require the attention of voters who care about economic inequality and want to address it fairly, since these measures also relate to appropriate taxes for rich people in the Golden State. One, the Education and Health Care Act of 2026 (Prop 3) is a currently existing but temporary income tax on the top two percent of income earners—individuals who make at least $370 thousand, or joint filers who make $740 thousand a year. This top-brackets income tax brought a tidy $14 billion to the state treasury last year. The bulk of its revenue goes to K-12 schools and community colleges. I’ve written previous articles dealing with Prop 3 and so will concentrate on the other three here.

41 and 42: Poison pills for the Billionaire Tax

Props 41 and 42 are designed to thwart the Billionaire Tax, and Prop 43, if it passes, will make it very difficult to raise revenue at the local level.

Props 41 and 42 were put on the ballot by billionaires hiding behind the anodyne title “Building a Better California” to trick voters into nullifying the billionaire tax. This positive-sounding organization is a PAC funded by right wing ultrarich like Sergey Brin.

Prop 41 would supposedly create audits of new state tax revenues and makes them subject to a state cap. The Billionaire Tax will easily earn more than the cap, over which any money is either returned to voters or goes to education. Prop 41 doesn’t mention the Billionaire Tax directly, but it contains a standard California ballot measure poison pill: if it receives more votes than other measures with an overlapping topic (i.e., the Billionaire Tax) it nullifies it. 

Prop 42 would prohibit new taxes on personal property including retirement accounts, financial assets or business interests. It deceptively proposes that unnamed “Sacramento politicians” are planning to do this to everyone. The only tax it would apply to—again without naming it—is the Billionaire Tax. As with Prop 41, more votes for Prop 42 than 40 nullifies the latter. 

Let us be very clear. These initiatives aren’t about helping California taxpayers, and they’re not about audits or retirement savings. They are about defeating Prop 40. Knowing who supports a ballot measure as well as who opposes it provides excellent context for understanding its purposes. One of Prop 41 and 42’s main funders is Google founder Sergey Brin, who has recently become the third richest person in the world. Brin has already spent a psychotic $100 million against a tax that would preserve healthcare access for millions of Californians. Other sociopathic billionaires have chipped in $50 million more. 

Prop 43: a higher barrier for funding local services

Proposition 43, also backed by billionaires and corporate entities like the Chamber of Commerce through their shill, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, would impose a supermajority requirement for all local special tax initiatives.  It would require at least two-thirds of local voters to approve any local initiative that would create, extend, or increase a special tax. It applies to initiatives placed on a local ballot on or after January 1, 2027.

This new supermajority vote requirement, replacing simple majority for local citizen-initiated measures, would apply to measures raising revenue for all forms of local government—cities, counties, school and community college districts, and any other local or regional government entity.

Majority rule is the basis of local democracy. Prop 43, if it passes, would represent a giant step backward, and make it easier for giant corporate interests like the Realtors’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, fossil fuel companies and other similar entities to wreck funding for the things we all need.  

Propositions 41, 42, and 43 represent profound threats to California’s future.  Putting a lockbox around our cities’ and state’s ability to raise revenue will result in devastating cuts to education, healthcare, public safety and transit and our ability to safely breathe air and drink water.  VOTE NO on Propositions 41, 42 and 43.

PART ONE OF TWO

On July 9, 1973, Dorothy Healey sat behind a microphone at KPFK in Los Angeles and ended a political commitment that had consumed nearly her entire adult life. She had joined the Young Communist League at 14, organized farmworkers and cannery workers, gone to jail, rose through the ranks of Communist Party leadership, and for two decades led its Southern California district. Now, at 58, she told her radio audience that she was resigning from the party.

The immediate cause was almost painfully characteristic of the organization she was leaving. The national party had denounced Al Richmond, the former editor of its West Coast newspaper, the People's World, for his memoir A Long View from the Left. Southern California Communists were instructed to uphold national leaders’ judgment whenever they discussed the book publicly. Healey refused.

Her resignation was anything but a renunciation of radical politics. "My hatred of capitalism," she told her listeners, remained as intense as when she had joined the YCL in 1928. She described herself instead as "a communist ... without a party."

That distinction would define the rest of her life.

Dorothy Healey's political history is often told as a journey from Communism to democratic socialism. The description is accurate but flattens a much, much more interesting story. Beginning with the crisis of world Communism in 1956, Healey spent decades trying to salvage the radicalism, working-class politics, and organizational seriousness of the Communist tradition while discarding authoritarianism, sectarianism, and toeing the party’s foreign policy line.

Much of that reinvention happened right here in Los Angeles. From the late 1950s through the early 1980s, Healey occupied an unusual position amongst successive generations of the city's left: the Communist Old Left, the civil rights and antiwar movements, Black and Chicano radicalism, socialist feminism, the New American Movement and finally Democratic Socialists of America. 

Her story is therefore less about leaving the Communist Party than about the harder question that flowed from it: What do you build after it?

The Earthquake of 1956

For American Communists, 1956 was an earthquake.

At the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev exposed a portion of the crimes committed under Joseph Stalin. Healey later remembered hearing the secret speech in New York and being devastated by its revelations. That autumn Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, generating debate through out Communist parties around the world.

Thousands of Communists in the US responded by voting with their feet and leaving the party. Healey did not. Instead, she became an advocate for democratizing the Communist Party USA from within.

That decision made Los Angeles unusually important. Under Healey and her longtime comrade Ben Dobbs, Southern California became a center of dissent, sufficiently independent that the national leadership repeatedly tried and failed to dislodge them. 

This was not an insignificant backwater club. Healey had been brought into LA’s leadership after World War II and eventually headed what the Los Angeles Times described as the party's second-largest district after New York. 

The old Popular Front had been broken by the Cold War. Communists had been driven from unions, prosecuted under the Smith Act, blacklisted, surveilled and pushed toward the margins of public life. Healey herself had been convicted under the Smith Act in 1952 before the Supreme Court reversed the California convictions in 1957.

Yet Southern California radicalism was already beginning to regenerate outside the party. Civil rights organizers, peace activists, students and young radicals were creating their own political networks. Healey's great post-1956 wager was that the surviving Old Left could enter into conversation with this new one.

LA became one of the laboratories.

A Communist on the FM dial

In 1959, the same year KPFK began broadcasting in Los Angeles, Dorothy Healey went on the air.

The new Pacifica station was itself an experiment. Commercial-free and listener-supported, KPFK gave airtime to an extraordinary range of political opinion, from conservatives such as William F. Buckley and Howard Jarvis to the Communist leader of Southern California. Healey's program, Communist Commentary, gave an avowed Communist a regular voice on the Los Angeles airwaves at the height of the Cold War.

Radio suited her. Healey could be ferociously political without sounding mechanical, and she possessed little patience for the wooden language that often passed for Communist public communication. Even critics of her politics encountered something difficult to fit into the stereotype of the obedient party hack: a funny, combative, recognizably local political personality.

The program also gave Healey something increasingly important: a political identity larger than the institution she led. As her disagreements with the national Communist Party widened, Angelenos could encounter Dorothy Healey directly, not merely as a representative of the CPUSA. By 1963 her presence at KPFK was prominent enough to become an issue in congressional attacks on Pacifica's broadcasting license.

More importantly, KPFK placed Healey inside a rapidly changing Los Angeles political culture. The station became one of the spaces where the Old Left, pacifism, the New Left, feminism, Black radicalism, antiwar activism and the counterculture could collide with one another. Healey no longer had to wait for those movements to enter the Communist Party; she was already talking to them over the radio.

That convergence was happening elsewhere in the city as well.

Despite the party's losses after 1956, Healey worked to restore relationships with liberals and peace activists and to open the Southern California organization toward younger radicals. Communist youth participated in southern Freedom Rides, and the party's Black membership later developed the Che-Lumumba Club, which became an important political base for Angela Davis. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener have argued that this continuing interaction between Los Angeles's Old and New Lefts distinguishes the city's 1960s history from the familiar national story in which the Communist movement simply disappears before the New Left arrives. Healey became one of the human bridges between those worlds.

Eighty-three thousand votes for a Communist

Her peculiar place in Los Angeles politics became visible in 1966, when Healey ran for Los Angeles County Assessor.

She made no attempt to disguise her politics. This was a Communist running openly for countywide office less than 15 years after the height of McCarthyism. She received 83,891 votes, 5.4 percent of the total.

The result was politically meaningless if measured by winning (and by current DSA LA standards). But it was remarkable as a measure of survival. After blacklists, prosecutions, loyalty investigations and years of official anticommunism, more than 80,000 LA County voters deliberately marked their ballots for Dorothy Healey.

The campaign also tells us something about the politics Healey was trying to construct. She was not retreating into a purified revolutionary subculture. She was attempting to make socialism visible within the ordinary political life of Southern California.

That strategy put her increasingly at odds with a national party whose instincts remained tied to Moscow and to an increasingly insular organizational culture. Los Angeles Communism had survived the catastrophe of 1956, but the contradiction at its center was becoming harder to contain. Healey wanted the party to open itself toward the new movements; the party leadership continued to demand political reliability.

In 1968, the contradiction broke open.

Socialism with a Human Face

In August 1968, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed Prague Spring and Socialismus s Lidskou Tváří (Socialism with a Human Face).

Healey had visited the country the previous year and had close connections with Czech communists like Edward and Marta Goldstucker. She condemned the invasion, while Communist Party general secretary Gus Hall and the national leadership defended it. Healey resigned as head of the Southern California district.

For Healey, Prague brought the argument that had begun in 1956 to its conclusion. Could socialism exist without democracy? Could a communist movement possess an independent political judgment, or was its loyalty to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union ultimately stronger than its commitment to democratic change initiated by other communists?

But she still didn’t quit.

Healey had spent 40 years in the Communist movement, and a political organization built over a lifetime is not simply a bundle of positions from which one unsubscribes. It was comrades, marriages, campaigns, jail cells, organizing drives, friendships and a way of understanding one's own place in history.

So Healey remained inside for another five years, stripped of her old leadership role and increasingly alienated from the national organization. KPFK gave her somewhere else to stand.

The microphone allowed Healey to remain a public Marxist while becoming steadily less identifiable with the party hierarchy. A 1972 KPFK recording preserved by the Pacifica archive, for instance, has Healey giving an extended discussion of Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Marxist who had famously battled the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies of her own movement and criticized the Bolsheviks even while joining the Spartacists in Germany.

Then came July 1973.

When the Southern California party instructed its members to repeat the national leadership's attack on Al Richmond, Healey refused one final demand for obedience. She announced her resignation not in a private letter or internal meeting but over KPFK, before the Los Angeles audience she had cultivated for 14 years.

The symbolism is almost too neat. Dorothy Healey left the Communist Party through the microphone.

[Stay tuned for Part Two in the October California Red.]

OCDSA’s Mutual Aid Committee, affectionately abbreviated to “MAC”, has been one of the chapter’s longest operating undertakings. Following the Marxist ideal of a society sharing goods and services according to ability and need, MAC’s work, directly within the chapter and with members of the community at large, has long been the focus of the group, even before our formal establishment as a committee in 2026. 

What does MAC do?

In the pandemic years, MAC provided taillight services for free to the community in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and helped provide groceries to low-income community members directly at their doors during lockdown. Following the easing of social distancing restrictions, MAC worked with community partners to provide meals and groceries to the county’s at-risk and unhoused populations, helped get medical supplies to besieged countries through our partners at Not Just Tourists, established close ties with other mutual aid organizations such as Costa Mesa Mutual Aid, Lucha, and 714 Mutual Aid, and responded to individual requests from members and non-members alike for support with material, emotional, and social needs. 

What does it take to join MAC?

MAC takes a friendly “as you are” approach to service, accepting members regardless of their experience with mutual aid endeavors, and works within their abilities to help empower them through direct work with the community. MAC meets twice a month virtually, provides onsite training at events to help members and volunteers find their footing, and co-hosts events regularly with our community partners. MAC works within the comfortability of our members, taking into consideration people’s interests, capacities, abilities and disabilities, diversity considerations, and opinions to operate horizontally, reciprocally, and in a participatory manner.

How has MAC been a vehicle for socialist change in OC?

Because it is the nature of MAC events to involve direct action and accessibility, they are often some of the first events new members attend. Lower-key MAC events like our “cookovers” or grocery packing nights serve as equal parts socials, networking events, and direct actions, while more involved events allow members to interact with orgs outside of DSA to cross-pollinate. MAC has been a powerful tool for OCDSA and its members to demonstrate that we actively stand by our ideals, are friendly with and supportive of the community at large, and that the nurturing, prosocial world that Marx envisioned is possible, even within the belly of the beast

What do our members have to say?

• NH: “Our goal is creating a community where a core value is lifting each other up. We want to build this into the fabric of our community, with systems that provide necessary aid to those in need, with the understanding that at some point, we will also need aid. During my time with OCDSA's Mutual Aid committee, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with other mutual aid groups in OC to foster community and help build and strengthen these systems. The organizing skills I have learned have been invaluable, but even more so, the connections we have made with these incredible people have made a major impact on me. It's been said before that without hope, no one would have the drive to do this work, and I wholeheartedly agree. My cup overflows with hope when I see the overwhelming number of kind-hearted, dedicated people who are activated. If everyone engaged in mutual aid, the world would be a better place, but I also think that every person would be happier, less lonely, and more fulfilled.”

• PB: “Being a member of MAC is a personal reminder for myself that there’s a need out there, there are like-minded people who want to help fill it, and that though the world can seem discouraging and that I alone can feel powerless to change it, I can at least shape a better place in my corner.”

• SB: “DSA-MAC is a true demonstration of community and people’s ability to rely on each other when capitalism tries to make everything so scarce and isolated.”

• ZR: “To me, mutual aid means helping people with what they need without expectations or administrative barriers and being able to be helped when I need it. Being a member of MAC makes me feel like I have a community of people who will support me, and also it gives me space to help others when I am able to and that what I have to give means something.”

• AL: "As a disabled person I often feel invisible and erased from society. Our needs are often forgotten about by the government and even our fellow man. For me that stopped when I joined the DSA and MAC. As both a member of MAC and someone who benefits from the help it provides, I felt a sense of community that I wasn’t sure was even possible. I felt seen and supported. My comrades put hard work and dedication into our services every week to provide mutual aid to our communities, where like me, people are seen, not discarded."