Alejandro González Iñárritu’s controversial new film "Digger" implicates us all in the climate crisis.

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By: Jonathan Cohn

The most dangerous words in the English language are: “we’re from private equity, and we’re here to help.” 

When private equity swoops in to “help” a struggling business, that typically means worsening labor conditions and worsening product quality—but increasing the money of those private equity executives. That’s exactly what private equity executives are trying to do with democracy in Massachusetts with this year’s Question 3, making it a place where they can more easily buy candidates and forestall progressive victories at the state and federal level. These donors are seeking to curb the rise of more populist messaging and policy that centers working people rather than the rich and large corporations. The fact that jungle primaries are detrimental to workers’ interests is why labor unions and progressive groups across Massachusetts are united in urging you to vote NO on Question 3. 

Question 3 would change MA’s electoral system to a jungle primary system like California and Washington. Proponents have been saying that this is about democracy, accountability, choice, competition, but a quick look at where the money comes from says otherwise. 

According to campaign finance disclosures, 70% of the money raised for Question 3 comes from private equity, with most of that from Bain Capital or Berkshire Partners. Indeed, just six private equity executives account for half of all the money raised by the campaign. These are overwhelmingly donors to conservative Democrats (like MA’s Jake Auchincloss and Seth Moulton) and Republicans (like Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy) who are friendly to the corporate centrism that the financial industry loves.

These donors have a long history of funding education privatization ballot questions, and not a lot of history caring about democracy. 

What is Q3?

Question 3 makes several noteworthy changes to Massachusetts elections. It’s important to understand the risks of all of them. 

The marquis part of Question 3 is the all-party primary system, often called a jungle primary, in which all candidates run on the same ballot and the top two candidates of any party advance to the general election. More on that in a moment. 

Question 3 also changes how MA elects Lieutenant Governors. Currently, MA has a system with the perhaps inartful moniker of “shotgun marriage”: Governor and Lt. Governor candidates run separately in the primary, and then are paired together in the general election. Under Question 3, gubernatorial candidates would pick their running mates upon formally filing as a candidate with the Secretary of State. Vetting possible running mates is a major hurdle for grassroots and less institutionally connected candidates, and if people don’t think you can win (grassroots candidates often peak late), why would anyone want to bet a year of their time on your campaign? It’s a very clear way to limit the possibility of who can consider running. 

Question 3 also changes ballot design in Massachusetts. In a bastardized version of fusion voting, it allows multiple minor parties to endorse the same candidate on the ballot. Fusion voting in states like New York strengthens democracy by enabling voters to choose minor parties’ ballot lines and help them to build a base. They earn that ballot line by having actual voters. By contrast, in Massachusetts, you can get minor party status with only 50 people petitioning the secretary of state. With such a low threshold, any slumlord can create a minor party (say, “Massachusetts Housing for All”), and start endorsing candidates on the ballot with deceptive names. The SuperPACs that flood your mailboxes in election season have to disclose their donors, but imagine if they can just get their endorsements printed directly on your ballot.

A Warning From California

California’s recent gubernatorial primary should be a warning to anyone thinking about voting YES on Question 3 this November. 

This year, given the diverse Democratic field and narrow Republican field in the gubernatorial race, polling consistently showed that two conservative Republicans would advance to the general election, denying voters real choice. 

Out of fear of such a lockout, the CA Democratic Party started pressuring candidates to drop out of the race, and the two dominant candidates became a self-funding billionaire and the candidate backed by every corporate PAC in the state. Actual policy debate was sidelined, and party elites and big money donors were empowered.

Whenever there is a push for consolidation, those with power, money, and privilege will always claim a right to stay in a race, regardless of whether they have the best ideas (often, they don’t). 

One of the biggest advocates for California’s jungle primary system has been the California Chamber of Commerce. They have touted its ability to help them get more corporate-aligned Democrats elected on the basis of lots of outside special interest money, conservative crossover votes in Democrat vs. Democrat general elections, and the loss of cues through which people typically understand the differences between candidates. And they are right, with the emergence of a new bloc of corporate-backed Democrats more loyal to Uber, Chevron, Meta, and crypto than to any constituencies or values.

That’s not a solution to any problem we have in Massachusetts; it will make the ability to pass policies to help working people even harder.

Getting Diverse, Working-Class Candidates to Run

I have worked for many years to try to recruit more candidates to run for office and support them when they do. When I talk with prospective candidates, the two biggest barriers for them when considering running for office are time and money. Running for office takes up a lot of time. It might require you to take an extended leave from work, or balance a full-time campaign and a full-time job. 

It also costs a lot of money to run for office, and most people don’t start out with a readymade list of high-net-worth donor prospects. 

If we want to see more working people run for office, then we need to find ways to rein in the time and financial burdens of running for office. 

Question 3 makes both of them worse, increasing both the time and money involved in running for office–benefiting incumbents and wealthy candidates for whom neither poses a true obstacle. 

Ranked Choice Voting vs. Jungle Primaries 

Although Massachusetts voters unfortunately rejected Ranked Choice Voting in 2020, there has been a robust and inspiring push on the local level to adopt Ranked Choice Voting on the local level. The push for a top-two primary system takes the wind out of those sails. 

New York City’s mayoral race last year showed us the wide-ranging benefits of ranked choice voting. Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic primary was due to an amazing field operation and a compelling message, for sure, but NYC’s Ranked Choice Voting system was essential to how the campaign played out. 

When voters can pick multiple candidates and register their preferences accordingly, progressive candidates aren’t in a fight to the death: they want each other’s voters to also rank them. We saw that dynamic in 2025’s greatest bromance: the cross-endorsement between Zohran Mamdani and former Comptroller and current Congressman-elect Brad Lander and the positivity and goodwill surrounding it. When progressive candidates lift each other up, the ideas and the movement benefit. 

In a ranked choice system, voters also don’t need to be afraid that voting for their top choice could lead to their least favorite choice getting elected. If you were a voter who did not want to see Andrew Cuomo become governor, you didn’t need to spend hours agonizing about how others might vote: you just vote for multiple progressive candidates and leave Cuomo off your ballot. 

A jungle primary, by contrast, is what Andrew Cuomo wanted to jerry-rig New York’s election system into. After losing the primary, he insisted on staying in the election, and he wanted to force out other candidates in order to form a cross-party conservative coalition, backed by a lot of money and a lot of racism. Cuomo was able to strong-arm Mayor Eric Adams out of the general election, but failed to convince Republican candidate Curtis Silwa out. Nonetheless, Cuomo still got 73% of Republican voters to vote for him, according to exit polls. With Mamdani pulling 50.78% of the vote in the general election, one can easily see how Cuomo’s theory of the election could have worked if he bullied his way into a two-party race. Democracy and the City of New York would have been worse for it. 

Just Say No

Question 3 is shaping up to be a “Whose side are you on?” question. On the yes side: private equity, venture capitalists, and investment bankers. On the no side: every major labor union and progressive group in the state. 

The yes side, bankrolled by those who have been fighting for years to make working people’s lives worse, and the no side, backed by those who have been fighting to make working people’s lives better. The choice is clear: NO on Question 3. 

Jonathan Cohn is a member of Boston DSA and Policy Director for Progressive Massachusetts, a multi-issue grassroots organization that advocates for state level policy. He has been active in campaigns to expand voting rights, strengthen immigrants’ rights, increase education funding, and make a fairer tax code, among many more. He has also been a volunteer, neighborhood team leader, regional coordinator, or campaign manager for various candidate campaigns and ballot initiatives at the city, state, county, and national level.

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California is the fourth largest economy in the world, with a growing number of billionaires, and an expanding crisis of poverty due to concentration of wealth and divestment from public goods like education and healthcare. This has been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s HR1 (“the big beautiful bill”), which cut $1 trillion from Medicaid nationally, resulting in a $100 billion cut to Medi-Cal, and a $20 billion cut to Calfresh, public programs that support our most vulnerable neighbors.

After the California Federation of Labor Unions, led by Lorena Gonzalez, voted at its August 4 convention to endorse two ballot measures to tax the rich – Propositions 3 and 40 – California DSA took the opportunity to reach out with a proposal: a California “Tax the Rich Day” on October 10. Gonzalez liked the idea, and the Labor Fed entered into a partnership with California DSA and SEIU-UHW (the proponent of Prop 40). 

In 2012, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and a progressive tax coalition organized across the state in an effort that culminated in the passage of a measure that put a tax on the top 2% of income earners in California in order to fund public education and healthcare. This year, voters will decide on whether to make that tax permanent via Prop 3. It currently generates between $5 to $15 billion annually. If it does not pass, the tax will sunset in 2030, and 1 in 6 public school teachers will be facing layoffs.

In response to HR1’s cuts to Medi-Cal, Service Employees International Union - United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), a labor union of over 120,000 healthcare workers across California, advanced a ballot measure, Prop 40, to create a one time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, payable either all at once, or via 1% increments over 5 years. This is anticipated to raise about $100 billion and to provide adequate funding to cover the gap in Medi-Cal’s budget wrought by HR1. This tax applies to any billionaires who were residents of the state at the start of 2026, or who will pay state income taxes for the year (at the start of 2026, around 216 billionaires lived in the state; presently, there are around 240).

California DSA endorsed both measures earlier this year, and has been coordinating canvasses, phonebanks, and communications in the run up to election day as we work to build a stronger left-labor pole capable of taking on the billionaires. 

Coming just a week after Bernie Sanders held rallies in San Francisco and Los Angeles to promote Prop 40, the day of action featured multiple local rallies and canvasses in which DSA members joined their local labor councils and union members to spread the class-struggle message that it was high time for the working class to take on the ultra-rich. In the lead up to Tax the Rich Day, Gonzalez blasted out an email, titled “It's time to Tax The Rich!,” in which she promoted events on California DSA’s landing page, and wrote: 

“I think we can all agree: billionaires have too much damn money. … No matter where you are in California, there is a protest or a canvass event near you this Saturday, October 10, where you can join our fight to tax the rich and pass Prop 3 and Prop 40, and to defeat Prop 41 and Prop 42!”

Actions took place that day across 8 cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, the Inland Empire, and the East Bay. The Labor Federation promoted and celebrated them on social media

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxkcazz6422v

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxkco3ub422v

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxkd5m24vk2v

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxmvzfrkbs2v

In Hayward, an East Bay city south of Oakland, East Bay DSA joined forces with the Alameda Labor Council for a tax the rich rally and canvass. The Labor Fed posted that “the East Bay did not come to play!” East Bay DSA, since August, has been partnering with the Labor Council to provide volunteers for phone banks and canvasses of the labor council’s 130,000 union members in Alameda County, focused on passing Props 3 and 40 and re-electing DSA-endorsed school board candidates in Oakland.

East Bay DSA’s posters, signs and banners, designed by David Solnit and fashioned at an EBDSA art build, have been featured at canvasses, like this one on September 19.

Inland Empire DSA heard the call from CA DSA for a Tax the Rich Day on October 10th, and put together a rally in collaboration with SEIU-UHW and PSL at City Hall in downtown Riverside. Over fifty volunteers from Inland Empire DSA, SEIU-UHW, PFP, PSL and Teamsters 1932 as well as Riverside City Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes showed up in support of taxing the state’s billionaires. Volunteer organizers led a march around City Hall and the surrounding area and held a tabling event in front of City Hall to speak to passers-by about how vital passing Proposition 40 (and defeating Propositions 41 and 42!) is to save our healthcare system and provide necessary funding to education and food assistance in the state. Immediately afterward, volunteers headed down to the SEIU-UHW headquarters in downtown Riverside to phone bank for Proposition 40, and IE DSA will be hosting joint phonebanks with SEIU-UHW weekly from now until the election. 

Angelenos turned out to canvasses in South Central and the Eastside to talk about LA City Council District 9 candidate Estuardo Mazariegos and Congressional District 34 candidate Angela Gonzales Torres alongside the need to pass Prop 40 to redistribute power from billionaires to working people. Later that day, a comedy and karaoke fundraiser capped the night off in support of efforts to tax the rich.

California DSA’s statewide working group will be meeting Tuesday, October 20th, at 6pm in order to continue planning and coordinating efforts in support of Props 3 and 40. You can RSVP here: https://www.californiadsa.org/calendar/tax-the-rich-wg-2026oct20 

The California Federation of Labor Unions Prop 40 will be hosting a phonebank in support of Prop 40 on October 21st and 5:30pm: https://www.mobilize.us/caaflcio/event/1056391/

“You can sleep when you’re dead.”

—Benjamin Franklin

There are just two weeks to go before one of the most consequential elections in the history of California. Driving the existential nature of this election is the onset and growth of the fascist cancer within American capitalism, pushed into metastatic overdrive by the election of Donald Trump to his second term in 2024. 

In the two years since, he has checked every box in any rational person’s understanding of what the word “fascism” means. As a result we are facing End Times Fascism— the term (and the title of their new book) coined by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor—meaning that this time around, fascists are sucking us down the chutes of climate destruction, democratic devolution, and rapidly eroding institutional means to reverse the tide. 

While all of DSA’s endorsed election campaigns throughout the state are important and contribute in various ways to the anti-fascist cause, I will go out on a limb to suggest that the campaign that can best serve the anti-fascist struggle is the dual effort to tax the rich via Props 3 and 40.  Why? 

Here we find an unprecedented opportunity—not one, but two tax the rich ballot measures up for a vote in one election. Each is essential to the wellbeing of the working class—one for education, the other for health care. Loss of either would be a disaster and a boon to billionaires.

Conversely, passage of both would send an urgently needed message:  that the wealth of the rich is not invincible, because an organized working class can be the greater force. 

Money shores up the power and power shores up the money 

You recall those two photos of Elon Musk early in 2025: wielding with sick glee a chain saw to demonstrate what his DOGE project was doing to the helping services of the federal government, and his Nazi salute at a MAGA rally? These were accurate signals of an emboldened and newly unified far right sector of capital, melding the formerly antagonistic interests of fossil fuel and big tech, brought together by Trump to supercharge the development of AI and its evil twin, data centers, under the control of corporations. 

The combined resources of these two capital sectors united in support of the fascist program is the reason why political spending hit record levels in the 2024 elections, and why it is on track to break the record again this year.

As Klein and Taylor make clear, mix hitherto undreamed of quantities of capital with Christian nationalism, perpetual war in the Middle East fanning the flames of religious fantasy along with the climate crisis, reckless investment in AI, the Trump administration’s removal of all federal regulatory controls, and you have the perfect cocktail for apocalypse. The richest people in the world think they can escape the dystopia they are consciously unleashing—to island bunkers, to the Rapture, to outer space—as they run the rest of us over the cliff and the earth to the end of its tether.

Here in California the billionaires’ push to defeat Prop 40 will set new spending records for ballot initiatives. That’s pocket change from their bloated portfolios. The campaign to pass Props 3 and 40 directly challenges the fascist program, valuing human need over uncontrolled profitmaking, saying yes to life and to the earth, and reducing the purses of the superrich and thus their power. If we win, we demonstrate that the power of people can outweigh the power of money.  

Time to Overdo it

I’m asking everyone who reads these words to add just a bit of work—something, anything— to election work you are already doing in the next two weeks to help get Props 3 and 40 passed. 

I’m not arguing that anyone should stop their campaigning for a local city council candidate or US congressional seat and replace that work with the Prop 3 and 40 tax the rich campaign between now and November 3. I’m saying something else, and I admit it runs against the grain of the advice that a lifetime of activist labor and socialist politics has led me to consistently offer comrades and other activists, which is, “Don’t overdo it.” Passion for political causes can easily tip over into burnout, which is not helpful for the long run. But we are up against an enemy that is literally attempting to destroy the long run. And so I make an exception this time so that it’s not the last time. 

In other words, for the next two weeks, let’s overdo it. 

Our final California DSA Tax the Rich Working Group meeting of the campaign is this Tuesday night at 6 pm; join us to hear what we’re planning. You could also join the Prop 40 phone bank on 10/21 at 5:30. Here is tonight’s Prop 3 phone bank link. 

It can also be simpler. You can grab a posterboard from an art supply store and make your own sign for Yes on 3, Yes on 40, Tax the Rich and stand on a street corner with a friend or two. You can put a sign up in your window. You can call your friends and tell them to vote yes on 3 and 40 and no on 41, 42, and 43. You can download flyers and pass them out in your workplace. 

With your help taxing the rich is possible. Once we’ve done that we can rest (contra Franklin, we don’t have to wait til we’re dead) recover from burnout, and breathe the air of a world slightly less imperiled by fascism.

In the early 1970s, when many student activists were migrating from campus to industrial jobs to promote working class radicalization, no labor film was more influential than Salt of the Earth.

This pioneering docudrama was made two decades earlier by a producer, writer, director, and several actors who were unemployable in Hollywood, due to McCarthy era-blacklisting.

This left-wing creative team recruited a cast of workers and their families from the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) to play themselves in a fictional account of a long strike at the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. 

Local 890 members knew something about red-baiting too. Shortly before their 1951 fight for better conditions and an end to wage disparities between Anglo and Chicano workers, Mine, Mill was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), along with the left-led United Electrical Workers (UE) and west coast longshore union, the ILWU. In 

In real life, and later on screen, the key to the success of this mining community struggle was the militant participation of strikers’ wives, mothers, daughters and sisters after their own mass picketing is enjoined by a local judge.

In Salt of the Earth, this picket-line replacement strategy, which challenged and changed traditional gender roles in a socially conservative company town, is heatedly debated by film’s two lead characters. 

Blacklisted and Deported

Playing the role of Ramon Quintera, Juan Chacon, an actual IUMMSW local president, initially objects to the strike activism of his fictional wife Esperanza, played by Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas (who was deported for making the film). Other members of an entirely male and largely Latino workforce are similarly conflicted about the emergence of a vocal and empowered women’s auxiliary.

When Esperanza and her fellow female pickets are arrested, she takes her small baby behind bars with her. The resulting boisterous jail house protest—which prefigures southern civil rights and peace movement tactics in the 1960s--forces the sheriff to release them all. The miners’ subsequent defense of the Quintera family--when the company tries to evict them--becomes a turning point in the long strike which ends in a contract settlement.

Berkeley journalist and now first-time novelist Barry Bergman was among the many young radicals much inspired by this now iconic depiction of Mexican-American labor struggle.  Before Bergman relocated to California and began a long career as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer/editor, and communications specialist for UC Berkeley and numerous non-profits, he worked for several years in a copper smelter near Tucson.

That experience as a rank-and-file member of the United Steel Workers (USW)--which gobbled up the IUMMSW, after years of raiding it--led to his writing Proles. (Serving House Books). Bergman’s novel is a funny, moving, and historically accurate account of workplace “colonizing”—or “salting” as it’s called today-- told from the point of view of the author’s fictional alter-ego. 

Via a college course entitled “Celluloid and Social Change,” Simon Bussbaum learns about a film called City of Emeralds. He is captivated by its depiction of “dirt-poor Chicano miners in the Southwest” and their humble but charismatic leader, Naldo Galvin.

Art Imitates Life

Simon does further research and discovers that Galvin—like the real-life Juan Chacon in the 1970s—has become a dissident in the Steel Workers. The former strike organizer—and Salt of the Earth co-star-- is now rallying his co-workers against “a class collaborationist union which muscled its way into zinc and copper mines in the Sun Belt” by marketing itself as a labor-management partner, rather than a class struggle foe.

The bookish film buff from Queens (the author’s hometown as well) leaves anti-war politics behind for a very different blue-collar life in open shop Arizona. Arriving for his first shift at Cobra Copper Company (aka “ThreeCo”) near Turcson, Simon walks into a scene lifted from the film that inspired his turn toward the working class.

“Outside the giant garage doors that opened out from the smelter’s shell, hundreds of men clustered in small groups, coveralls gone or dangling at their waist. Some were standing, others lying on bare ground or using their hardhats for seats. A handful were shirtless, glistening in the sun. It might have been a disorderly line at the Fillmore East, save for the work clothes and industrial boots.” 

A new co-worker, a “hard-looking Chicano with a missing tooth, a Fu Manchu mustache and a cobra tattoo on his right forearm” tells Simon what’s going on.  “It’s a ‘wildcat,’”  explains Snake, who seems happy to follow the crazy "white dudes” who started it all by “waving their arms, walking out, and shouting, ‘Join us!”. 

Other hard hats in the now idle crowd are pissed off about losing a few hours pay. “Anarchists,” one grumbles. “Commies and agitators. They don’t like it here, can’t blame them for that. But you can’t strike till the contract’s up. That’s the law.”

A manager addresses the crowd with a bull-horn and repeats the same message. “This is an unlawful work stoppage. Your local union has not authorized this action, and joins us in ordering you to immediately cease and desist. This is your final warning.”

A Tactical Error?

The “cadre” organization members--who have inducted Simon into their small circle at a local radical bookstore--are among “the twelve people pegged as troublemakers and fired.” After this “tactical error,” Simon attends his first Steelworkers local union meeting. There, he encounters bureaucratic lethargy and business union routine familiar to many rank-and-file activists, then and now.

Only a smattering of members show-up—at a VFW hall with an “American flag on the pole outside the building and another hung on a wall behind the podium.” Much time is spent on the financial report and a reading of minutes from the last meeting. The biggest agenda item is the e-board’s unanimous decision “not to pursue grievance arbitration cases for employees who were terminated.”

As the union treasurer explains, this will result in “a big savings for the local because we could not have prevailed in defending an action that went against the ‘no strike’ clause in our own contract.” (“Good riddance,” blurts out the local’s business manager, “a pudgy man in a short sleeved white shirt,” who gavels the meeting to a close soon thereafter.)

Bergman’s workplace descriptions are equally on target. Some resemble the best passages in The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s fictional account of job hazards in mid-western meat-packing plants a century ago or in Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Voung’s new novel about low wage work in 21st century New England.

“The smelter, known as ‘Freako,’ was a cavernous, ramshackle Big Top featuring spark-spewing furnaces, splashing cauldrons dangled from the cranes like murderous marionettes, rapids of liquid fire tumbling down in harrowing dayglow ribbons. Danger was everywhere, lurking beneath the dull roar and the rotten eggs stench. Everything black and orange, darkness and firelight, a waking nightmare Halloween that left him in terror of any possible misstep.”

Unfortunately, the hottest shop floor issue is not the threat of being scalded to death or maimed and killed in many other ways.  It’s ThreeCo’s controversial decision to hire its first female laborer, a feisty former high school athlete, who is a half-Latino and a single mother. It’s 1973, after all, and the era of equal opportunity is dawning. 

As the fictional reincarnation of Esperanza, Samantha Tanager is not just showing that she can, in a pinch, take a man’s place on the picket-line; she’s going to join them on the shop floor, in a fire-resistant orange jump suit, aluminum hard-hat, and steel-toed boots. But the sudden arrival of a “fetching copper miner’s daughter,” as a local newspaper describes her, proves to be very triggering for Bullock. 

He’s the big, tobacco-chewing redneck with “a natural talent for cruelty” that Bussbuam is assigned to work with. Already suspicious of Simon’s rather obvious East Coast Jewishness and college boy ways, Bullock views “Tanager’s admission to the sacred sanctum of the smelter as sacrilege, a grievous affront to the Code of the Working Stiff, Nonferrous Division.” 

Besides, he believes that Samantha is a lesbian. (Spoiler alert: much to Simon’s love-struck chagrin, Bullock’s gaydar is right.)

Casual Racism

Simon’s New Left idealism is now further tested amid Freako’s “dark, depraved beauty, which reeked of musty maleness that gave rise to a loose-knit, shambling ‘esprit de corps, wrapped in a kind of casual racism and sexism so expansive, so deeply rooted, it had started to feel—Simon not being of this world, and without standing perhaps to judge his co-workers’ cultural values—like just another flavor of assholism.”

When that “assholism” takes the form of a nasty campaign by Bullock to make Tanager’s life miserable on the job, Simon’s own personal class struggle ends in a parking lot brawl between two “union brothers.” It doesn’t end well for the new hire and little resembles more heroic scuffles, between labor and management, in Salt of The Earth. 

But it does lead Bussbaum to bid blue-collar life adieu and head for the greener pastures of California. (Tanager and her female partner leave for the more tolerant Texas oasis of Austin.)

Proles was definitely not written as a how-too manual for members of the Rank-and-File Project, a present-day effort to “recruit, educate, and support a new generation of activists who will join the fight for working-class power by taking union jobs on the shop floor.” 

But the book should be required reading, in such circles anyway, due to its deft exploration of the nexus between the personal and the political. Any left-wing “salt” trying to befriend un-class conscious (and sometimes weird) co-workers, while dealing with draining night shifts, imperious managers and not much nicer union bosses, will find humorous respite in Barry Bergman’s fictional rendering of his real-life experience with the “salt of the earth” in Arizona fifty years ago.

“The new lords of the global village are not just Wall Street insiders or run-of-the-mill plutocrats; they are a disparate, distinctly more anarchic group of powerful forces.”

Just in time for the midterms, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have delivered an incredibly relevant new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, that quite plainly lays out what is at stake in the coming election. We are living under a new form of authoritarianism that has already deeply weakened our democracy and threatens to push us over the cliff toward a dystopian future where only our new oligarchs will be able to survive the harsh social, economic, and environmental realities we face.  

Klein and Taylor survey the landscape of contemporary analyses of authoritarianism and name the present system “End Times Fascism,” a unique strain of political disease that has flourished due to several factors that have emerged out of the circumstances of our current Gilded Age.  What characterizes the malady that afflicts us? In sum, we are ruled by a nearly totally unaccountable elite.  As they note:

At its core, end times fascism is a crisis of rampant impunity born of concentrated power and wealth.  Far too much money, information technology, and weaponry have been allowed to concentrate into the hands of the few, and that unchecked power has deranged our elites, goading them to take risks that put our societies and countless species at risk.

And if the risks taken by contemporary elites seem to be crossing lines that other members of the traditional oligarchy were loath to trespass, that’s because they are.  The new lords of the global village are not just Wall Street insiders or run-of-the-mill plutocrats; they are a disparate, distinctly more anarchic group of powerful forces.  End times fascism is not the product of a coherent movement: “rather than a monolith, it is an alliance of very different groups, each one racing toward a different but related apocalyptic dream, sutured together in common cause . . . religious end timers, the tech end timers, and the ethno-nationalist end timers.”  

Hence the ongoing barrage of assaults on everything from education, civil rights, and freedom of speech to environmental sustainability and democratic institutions of all kinds seems like an unfocused shotgun blast because it is coming from several different angles all at once. Rushing towards climate catastrophe, unchecked oligarchy, and patriarchal, white supremacist retrenchment as the AI onslaught undermines our sense of reality and ability to think critically is only possible because the chaos creates polycrises and a blitzkrieg of disruptions makes it hard for the average person to get a clear cognitive map of power.  

And the resulting radical uncertainty unmoors people from their traditional bearings and allows the end times fascists to portray themselves as our saviors from the very threats that they have unleashed on the world.  We might not survive them, but they don’t care.  Their end game is not to save anything but themselves.  

As Klein and Taylor argue:

[F]ascist movements claim to be defending powerful institutions—the nation, the market, the military, the family—from internal and external pollutants.  In the logic of fascism, the task of defeating those threats and reimposing order, requires emergency measures, often destroying many of the very institutions fascists claim to be defending.

Enter Trump and company as they prepare to contest what is looking like a tsunami of Democratic voters this November.  The huge margins they will likely lose by in most places have made their task harder, but this has not deterred them. After discovering that their initial attempts to interfere with the midterms would not bear fruit, the MAGA right has simply found new roads to the ruin of American democracy. 

Seymour Hersch outlines their most likely next move on his Substack: 

So here comes the GOP’s Plan B, which still depends on election deniers who have been voted into office in states with contested Senate seats that could decide the fate of Trump’s last two years in office.

I was told that the targets, in terms of putting election deniers to work, are now limited to five states where a few thousand votes could make the difference in the political makeup of the Senate: Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas. The election counting machinery in each state is now in the control of elected Republican voting officials who are Trump supporters. In two other states, Georgia and North Carolina, Republican candidates are in trouble and Democratic candidates are comfortably ahead in polling.

“If the election is close,” one insider explained to me, “you would only have to disqualify as few as seven thousand voters” in primarily Democratic precincts “to change the outcome.” One thought now, I was told, is to call on election deniers in the toss-up states to find ways to use existing federal data, verified or not, to challenge thousands of votes in key Democratic precincts. (Trump said yesterday that he would not rule out invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, if he deems it necessary. Let us call that Plan C.)

Hence, it would not be wise to let the ugly polls for the GOP make us complacent or allow Trump’s increasingly pathetic public persona to lead us to underestimate the danger we face.  

In sum, the crazier Trump seems, the more likely it is that he may just try to do the previously unthinkable and bring more troops back onto American streets.  His Triumph of the Will style taxpayer funded TV ads are signaling how he will portray himself as a defender of American institutions as he blithely destroys them.  

Trump is the very embodiment of an end times fascist.  As Klein and Taylor argue, “We should believe our eyes.  The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”  

Vote and be vigilant, dear reader. The end times fascists will not go gently into their good night.  

Indeed, even if we are successful in pushing back against the tide of authoritarianism in the midterms, so much more remains to be done.  Klein and Taylor note that the task at hand will require us commit to the continuous work of occupying and defending the “paradise” of the “here” and “now.”   Following Walter Benjamin, they call for a “messianism of the here and now” that is best embodied at present by the movement, with DSA at its center, that brought Zohran Mamdani to power in New York.  

Mamdani’s campaign does not give us the perfect answer, but it does show us some of the rules of the road:

There is no cut-and-paste formula for fighting end times fascism; every front will take on the character and texture of its place.  There are, however, some guiding principles that are beginning to emerge across locations, and the Mamdani campaign embodied many of them.  Start from love of place; conjure a radically inclusive future where everyone can afford dignified lives: embrace common goals across difference; get outside and gather offline and in person; take on the powerful joyously, draw on history and don’t be afraid to stir the soul.

We need to build a world where we start to see “the word neighbor growing to expand to include thousands of people we have never met and who have yet to arrive.”  More than anything else, Klein and Taylor suggest, we need to never lose sight of either what we are fighting against nor what the future we want should look like.  

This article first appeared in The Jumping Off Place

“The smarter our life, the less control we have over it.”

—Jathan Sadowski^[1]

In a world where Big Tech too often sets the terms and conditions of basic human interaction within and beyond the workplace, more and more people are wondering how many of the supposedly “necessary” or “inevitable” algorithmic technologies we really need. Is it even possible for this digital machinery to serve the long-term interests of the many instead of the short-term interests of the few?

For French Marxist philosopher and first-wave eco-socialist André Gorz, the answer, in many cases, was no. “It is only because capital needs consumers for its products that production also serves human needs,” he wrote. But “they are needs and desires which have been produced to satisfy capital’s need for profitability.”^[2]

With a nod to Gorz, one way to think about eco-socialism in the twenty-first century is as a three-pronged, transnational revolutionary project to do the following:

1. democratically redefine basic human and nonhuman needs — including subsistence needs, occupational needs, and communicative needs — in opposition to the narrowly defined, market-driven needs of the owner-investor class;^[3]
   
2. radically reconfigure society so that it’s possible to universally satisfy everyone’s (overlapping but variable) needs within the biophysical constraints of the planet, thus repairing what second-wave eco-socialists call the “metabolic rift” between sociotechnical systems and socioecological systems; and
   
3. liberate the free, creative, self-directed development of human and nonhuman potential from the constraints of capital.^[4]
   

In what follows, I argue that an “ecological operaismo” — envisioned here as a fusion between autonomist Marxism (Italian workerism) and degrowth economics — can be one way for socialists to understand and ultimately transform the webs of social, ecological, and technological relations so as to decrease alienation (from self, society, labor, and nature) and increase workers’ collective ability to assert more direct, democratic control over our time and our space, our working conditions and our living conditions.^[5]

To make this argument, I first analyze some of the specific, present-tense effects of chatbots, a.k.a. large language models (LLMs) or generative AI, on the living and working conditions of one particular unionized workforce — me and my fellow contingent writing teachers at a mid-size public research university in Montana. I then reflect on what this analysis reveals about the potential (or lack thereof) for chatbots to be reappropriated by education workers in a way that serves eco-socialist ends instead of capitalist ones. As Christian Fuchs explains, “to appropriate technology means attempting to turn it from a means of domination and exploitation into a means of struggle and commoning.”^[6]

In the process, I raise a set of questions that workers in any sector might use to guide their assessment of the degree to which a given technology’s alienating, anti-democratic effects are (or aren’t) immanent or intrinsic — that is, hard-wired into the technology itself. And I consider how to persuade historically productivist groups like the building trades^[7] to be more receptive to an anti-Promethean, ecological operaismo (without resorting to what some have called “green moralizing”).

Growth for the 99 percent

Degrowth has some good ideas but bad PR. It’s easy to see why some on the left have derided it as a politically radioactive form of eco-austerity “rooted in the carbon guilt of the professional class.”^[8] As solar communism advocate Jason Schwartzman cautions, degrowth can easily sound like “an undifferentiated attack on the standard of living and livelihood of many groups of people, especially [the] broad low-income sectors of society” who already lack access to basic necessities.^[9]

Branding problems aside, the useful part of degrowth is closer to what I would call “growth for the 99 percent” or “de-alienation.”^[10] It starts from the premise that capitalism is a profoundly wasteful, inefficient (not to mention ecocidal) system, one characterized not only by a ravenously unsustainable appetite for space, energy, and materials, but also by wasted human potential and stunted social development. The artificial scarcity of basic survival needs, moreover, is a structural feature of compulsory commodity production (and the care work that sustains it).^[11] As media studies scholar Gavin Mueller explains in Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right about Why You Hate Your Job, degrowth — also called “decelerationism” — is not a Romantic, primitivist, or ascetic “withdrawal to a slower pace of life, but the manifestation of an antagonism toward the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us.”^[12]

Unlike the neoliberal “abundance” rebrand,^[13] then, the basic idea of an eco-socialist degrowth of the rich is that producing more of the goods and services that workers (paid or unpaid) actually want and need invariably requires producing less of the goods and services that capital wants and needs^[14] (hence the climate justice movement’s distinction between elite “luxury emissions” and agrarian, indigenous, or working-class “subsistence emissions”). Not only do we live in a world of finite resources — supplies of energy and raw materials (positive externalities) are limited,^[15] as is the planet’s ability to act as a sink or a sponge for waste and pollution (negative externalities) like carbon emissions. It’s also not possible, unfortunately — as the ecomodernists would like us to believe — for technological improvements alone to “decouple” the perpetual accumulation of GDP from ecological constraints.^[16]

Even if the most urgent environmental problem, atmospheric CO₂, must be addressed within capitalist frameworks, it’s also true, as Socialist Forum readers well know, that workers won’t truly be free until we decouple ourselves from capital. Labor, after all, “does not need capital,” as the autonomist technology theorist Nick Dyer-Witheford writes. “Labor can dispense with the wage, and with capitalism, and find different ways to organize its own creative energy: it is potentially autonomous.”^[17] This working-class need for autonomy from capital is, moreover, existential, given capital’s tendency to prioritize technologies that turbocharge its ability to exploit, control, subdue, and dispossess an always potentially rebellious labor force.^[18] 

Such a perspective suggests that some technologies are intrinsically anti-worker — that some forms of fixed capital simply can’t be fixed. Gorz, too, made a similar argument when he suggested that much modern machinery is deliberately (and “inflexibly”)^[19] designed to require alienating tasks and rhythms, whether on a Fordist assembly line, in an Amazon warehouse,^[20] or in the spheres of social and ecological reproduction that are increasingly ruled by an algorithmic factory logic.^[21]

class struggle technologism

In a 2016 article in New Technology, Work and Employment called “When Should Workers Embrace or Resist New Technology?,” Paul Edwards and Paulina Ramirez present a six-dimensional heuristic for analyzing a technology’s effects on workers.^[22] Without endorsing a “strong” technological determinism or an accelerationist, Soviet-style socialism — which would put them at odds with autonomist Marxists’ emphasis on subjective working-class antagonism as the driving historical force^[23] — these scholars nonetheless endorse a “weak” or “soft” determinism that, reasonably enough, sees capitalist forces of production as a source of significant social and environmental effects, however contestable those effects might be.

Edwards and Ramirez are primarily interested — as am I, in this essay — in analyzing the material effects of specific technologies rather than the ideological effects of specific technological discourses. A distinction between technical artifacts and techno-ideologies is analytically useful even if, in practice, the line is always blurred.^[24] For the purposes of this essay, the most relevant techno-ideologies are these:

techno-optimism: techno-oligarchs and techno-feudalists will solve everyone’s problems, so just get out of their way (agency lies with bosses, owners, investors, and entrepreneurs)

techno-ambivalence: most tech is intrinsically neutral — you can use it for good or for ill (responsibility offloaded onto individual users/consumers)

techno-pessimism: most tech is intrinsically bad, a weapon of class war from above — the only options are refusal, sabotage, or abolition (by oppressed groups and subordinated classes)

techno-autonomism: most tech is intrinsically political — a lot of it only serves the needs and interests of capital and managers, so refusal should always be on the table, but the degree to which any tech is intrinsically bad is always a contingent outcome of competing class forces (agency lies with organized workers at the points of production and social reproduction) — or, as Langdon Winner wrote in an influential essay, “to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity . . . have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning”^[25] (why have certain technologies come to be perceived as “useful” or “necessary” in the first place? whose interests, which forms of social organization, and which configurations of power are served by such perceptions?)

Edwards and Ramirez use their checklist to analyze the Davy miner’s lamp, California’s NUMMI lean production plant, and “the internet of things” — not from capital’s perspective, as is typically done, but from workers.’ Widely applicable to a range of technical artifacts and sociotechnical systems, their heuristic is a valuable analytical tool for organized labor.

In what follows, I use their fourth criterion, “immanence of the effects,” to evaluate so-called chatbots from the point of view of public-sector education workers. I examine what seem to be some of the defining, present-tense, intrinsic technical attributes and effects of chatbots, focusing on the implications for higher ed contract faculty (non-tenure-track adjuncts, lecturers, and so on) and our students. To talk about the “immanence” of chatbots’ effects means that some effects are more or less “inscribed in the technology” in a way that “either require[s] or strongly impl[ies] certain forms of social organization.”^[26] For certain effects to be “immanent” means that “the nature of the physical [or algorithmic] world enables or limits what the technology can do.”^[27]

Granted, blaming technology for our problems — as if it’s an autonomous force with a mind of its own — can be a dangerous form of commodity fetishism that lets capitalists off the hook.^[28] Sheep didn’t forcibly enclose the English countryside starting in the sixteenth century. People did. It would, therefore, be a serious mistake to treat chatbots as “discrete tools, rather than an ensemble of interconnected systems.”^[29] All artifacts presuppose “an infrastructural network of technical, social, and psychological conditions, without which the machines and products do not work.”^[30] Meanwhile, the growth of these networks will continue to appear uncontrollable and unstoppable only as long as workers and the public lack the organized power to significantly influence corporate decision-making around technoscientific investment.^[31]

But it’s also true that blaming capitalism, and only capitalism, sometimes lets technology off the hook. “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist,” as Marx put it (simplifying for effect, no doubt).^[32] Even if people, not sheep, were responsible for violently proletarianizing the yeomen, it was the growing market for commodified wool, specifically, that drove early capitalists’ particular need for private sheep pastures and mechanical stocking frames, each of which had undeniable effects that were both technically and socially over-determined.^[33]

Ultimately, what’s at stake in an analysis of a chatbot’s immanent, intrinsic, technically determined effects — especially those effects most likely to be judged by education workers to be intrinsically alienating, anti-democratic effects — is that “the more that an effect is inscribed in the technology, the more the social choice is one of ‘take it or leave it.’”^[34] For workers to decide how to respond to chatbots — abolition or transformation, refusal or reclamation — we must determine if transformation or reclamation are even possible in the first place.

Is there anything salvageable or redeemable about chatbots? Can they be hijacked by workers and socialists? Or are they (and their enabling social and material infrastructures) just the latest example of wasteful, socially unnecessary crap that — along with F-16s, Cybertrucks, high-tech border surveillance, etc. — most people neither want nor need and would (for ecological reasons, especially) be better off without?

These are empirical questions as much as theoretical ones. To effectively identify real, context-specific openings for worker resistance (and possible reclamation), we have to get specific. Capitalism might indeed produce its own gravediggers, but not every technology is a shovel.

political deskilling

College writing instructors teach students a lot more than how to write. We teach students that what they say is just as important as how they say it. We insist that their own voices, experiences, and perspectives matter a great deal, and that writing can help them develop those perspectives, analyze and contextualize those experiences, and refine those voices (or tweak them to fit the situation). Writing is an inherently social activity, we say — a way of acting in the world — and our relatively intimate class sizes allow students to witness firsthand how their work affects real flesh-and-blood readers. We give them space to argue, experiment, take risks, make mistakes, and challenge authority (including our own teacherly authority), which often results in a sense of community, even solidarity. And we help them find the right questions (not the right “AI prompts”) to ask during any writing project. Questions like: Who is my audience? What do I need or expect from them? What do they need or expect from me?

In short, college writing teachers guide students through the basics of collaborative inquiry, situational awareness, mediated interaction, and the ideologically charged negotiation (sometimes cooperative, sometimes conflictual) of meaning.

Information literacy is obviously a big part of that. One thing this means is that I tend to be less interested in the specific answers students come up with than in the kinds of questions they ask and the process they use to explore them. “Show your work” isn’t something only math teachers say. Writing teachers say it, too. Unfortunately, as one Human Rights Watch article about the Israeli military’s use of automated target-generation tools points out, “machine learning, AI, and other proprietary algorithms, by design, do not allow for scrutiny, or show their work or decision-making processes around how outputs are generated.”^[35]

Similarly, chatbots and “personal AI agents” like Copilot, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Gemini, Muse, and ChatGPT have (at least) seven serious flaws that seem to be baked-in design features:

• the training data they depend on to produce their responses — forcibly acquired via mass data plunder — is a mystery to users and designers

• the statistical, pattern-recognizing methods they use to analyze this data is a mystery to users and designers

• these statistical methods depend on outsourced ghostwork (often gig-ified and traumatizing) to fine-tune the otherwise unreliable output of factual, intelligible, non-toxic responses — as Antonio Negri emphasizes: “It seems that the algorithmic machine is itself intelligent — but this is not true. It is instead open to continuous modifications by human intelligence.”^[36]

• these methods require “massive amounts of brute force, in computing power and therefore in energy consumption”^[37] (MSU-Bozeman’s Tempest Research Cluster, a “high performance computing (HPC)” facility, is apparently the state’s largest supercomputer)^[38]

• their “inherent directive to assist makes AI chatbots susceptible to manipulation through ambiguous or manipulative language” (per IBM)^[39]

• their “tendency to make up facts [as well as sources and quotations], to double-down on incorrect information, and to perform tasks incorrectly” — called hallucinating, which some researchers consider to be an “innate” feature of LLMs^[40] — “can lead to the degradation of overall information quality and further reduce veracity of and trust in freely available information” (per OpenAI),^[41] a problem that platforms like Facebook have, of course, already been contributing to for many years^[42]
  
  
• “dependency on [LLMs]” — whether voluntary or coerced — “may hinder the development of new skills or even lead to the loss of important skills” (also per OpenAI, a company that’s adept at criticizing the same problems it created)^[43] — note the contrast between this statement and my university’s “Information about Generative AI” webpage, which claims that “prohibiting student use of generative AI in courses may deprive them of valuable opportunities to develop skills and expertise in an emerging technology, which can benefit students in professions and industries that are leveraging generative AI to complete work and improve efficiency”^[44] (meanwhile, our computer science department’s^[45] “Social & Ethical Issues in Computer Science” course recently received an ominous rebrand: it’s now called “AI for Everyone”; it does still cover social, ethical, and legal implications, but it also now involves “learn[ing] to collaborate more effectively with AI”)^[46]

In a nutshell, then: chatbots seem to be, by definition, unaccountable, people-pleasing black boxes premised on the monopolization of data and on instrumentalist, Promethean relations to nonhuman nature — black boxes that, instead of reducing overall drudgery, merely outsource it to earlier and/or more distant stages in the supply chain (such as the Congo’s lithium miners or Kenya’s data labelers),^[47] which makes them inherently labor-eating or labor-displacing, not “labor-saving.”^[48] It certainly doesn’t help that chatbots often give inaccurate accounts of their own inaccuracies.

That labor-eating technical attribute is key. The technology simply can’t work without a constant supply of alienated human labor to satiate its infinite data appetite and prevent it from developing a kind of digital mad cow disease. As Josh Dzieza explains in a damning exposé of the new white-collar gig economy, “when AI trains on AI-generated data, it gradually degrades, a phenomenon researchers call ‘model collapse.’”^[49] This fact alone poses a serious problem not only for left-wing accelerationist dreams of “fully automated luxury communism,” but also for those techno-capitalists for whom “current forms of algorithmically-managed gig work are conceived as a prelude to an automated distribution network in which today’s gig workers are rendered redundant through the firm’s development and deployment of in-house technology.”^[50]

The subject line of an email I recently received from OpenAI was: “Use ChatGPT to make life easier.” Easier for whom and at whose expense was not specified. Even with public, democratic ownership and control, could human-powered chatbots ever not be a form of “fauxtomation” or “Potemkin AI” — that is, “services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans acting like robots”?^[51] It’s hard to see how. The phenomenon of “model collapse” suggests that a chabot could never be self-sufficient. (The best visual metaphor for AI ghostwork that I can think of is a detail from Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 movie Parasite. A series of overhead lights in a high-end house seemingly turn on automatically whenever the owner walks down the hallway. Later, we learn there’s an elderly working-class guy living in the basement who slams his forehead against a row of lightswitches whenever he hears the owner’s footsteps.)

Many college students, of course, are aspiring middle-class professionals of one kind or another. And yet white-collar jobs in the so-called knowledge sectors are (like blue-collar manufacturing jobs before them) the ones that are most vulnerable to deskilling, outsourcing, and gig-ification via the ruling-class imposition of automated text and content generators.

This development could inflect professional-class politics in several ways.^[52] One possibility is that aspiring professionals turn inward in a desperate attempt to defend their diminishing professional-class perks and status (and, by extension, the class hierarchy that underwrites those perks and status). Another possibility is that they turn outward, organizing with low-wage workers across sectors in a more radical effort to contest the whole idea that a hierarchical, professionalized division of labor is just or necessary at all, and to insist that everyone, not just credentialed white-collar workers, is entitled to respect, security,^[53] autonomy, humane treatment, a living wage, leisure time, a clean and healthy environment, and meaningful control over the shape and texture of their work and everyday lives — including access to the basic means of survival (food, housing, health care, transportation, education, communication, etc.).^[54]

The second option is, from a socialist perspective, clearly preferable. My concern is that, because a chatbot’s ostensibly factual, descriptive statements are structurally detached from the reality it’s pretending to describe or know about, algorithmic text generators don’t just alienate workers from the means of survival. By further monopolizing control over knowledge and information and imposing artificial, commodified scarcity on what should be public, collective resources, they also alienate workers from the means of learning about the means of survival.

Chatbots prey on my students’ desire to learn about how the world works, and about what role they can or should play in social, civic, and economic life. This amounts to a kind of political deskilling: the systematic deprivation of the dialectical, human-generated forms of knowledge and information that are needed to understand how capitalism works, and how to change it. The knowledge produced by the natural and social sciences is always an interpretation of the world, of course. But, at least from a materialist perspective, the usefulness and accuracy of this knowledge — however partial and provisional it might be — is always constrained by material contexts and concrete human activities. “All social life is essentially practical,” as Karl Marx wrote. “All the mysteries which lead theory towards mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”^[55]

A chatbot is a mystical tool — one designed according to idealist (rather than materialist) specifications. Its outputs are epistemically detached from the concrete worlds its users are trying to understand and intervene in. If you ask a chatbot to summarize, say, The Communist Manifesto, what you’ll get is not the SparkNotes version of The Communist Manifesto. You’ll get the statistical average of how millions of other people (across the political spectrum) have summarized The Communist Manifesto. You’ll get, not the SparkNotes version, but the SparkNotes version of a million other SparkNotes versions. In other words: bullshit.^[56]

To reduce the concrete, qualitative labor of human writers to abstract, quantitative statistical patterns is a textbook example of alienation, whereby “workers not only experience their product as alien but also the various machines, tools, and spaces used to create those products.”^[57]

Indeed, as computational linguists Emily Bender and Alexander Koller emphasize, “meaning” is not a property of textual form alone. Meaning emerges from the socially, materially situated interplay between embodied writers/speakers and readers/listeners. Meaning presupposes a reader/listener who can use “their own knowledge of the communicative situation and their hypotheses about the speaker’s state of mind and intention.” Because a chatbot “only uses form as training data,” it “cannot in principle lead to learning of meaning,” which derives from (always situated and evolving) human needs, goals, and intentions. Indeed, “the slogan ‘meaning is use’ (often attributed to Wittgenstein) . . . refers not to ‘use’ as ‘distribution in a text corpus’ but rather [to the idea] that language is used in the real world to convey communicative intents to real people.”^[58] To say that a chatbot is capable of understanding what you typed (or the context around it) is like saying that a piece of paper is capable of understanding what you scribbled.

Chatbots can thus be viewed as capital’s attempt to steal back from workers — to reappropriate, to disembody — the embodied forms of fixed cognitive capital that, according to Negri, workers themselves had previously appropriated and internalized. Indeed, workers’ accumulated mental and creative capacities are what make them a potentially insurgent, autonomous agent.^[59] “Smart” devices, by contrast, are containers for dead labor, and the ecologically unsustainable growth of dead labor poses an existential threat to living labor.

In algorithmic capitalism, the class struggle is truly life-and-death: living labor struggles to reanimate (by re-embodying) dead labor; capital, meanwhile, does the opposite, as it struggles to control, exploit, and disrupt this process whenever it can — hence Big Tech’s mass injection of chatbots into schools, one of the primary social sites where people are given the chance to have their minds and bodies imprinted with the collective intelligence of past labor (including, if they’re lucky, some of the ideas produced by left-wing scholars, activists, organizers, and unionists). Of course, education should never be treated as “a simple matter of rote knowledge transmission,” with “experts passing information to non-experts by whatever medium is available.”^[60] This is why the struggle against chatbots is a struggle over not only the content of education, but its form.

There was, to be sure, nothing utopian about US colleges and universities before chatbots were unleashed.^[61] At the nominally “public” research university where I work, market and administrative logics dominate. Despite what the mission statement would like you to believe, managers seem to care more about serving military-industrial interests than the public good.^[62] Nationwide, higher ed is “a profoundly conservative place where its senior managers toe the line of whatever political flavor governments, businesses, and wealthy donors desire.”^[63]

Sixty percent of my university’s total revenue comes from tuition dollars. Meanwhile, Blackstone’s “campus entrepreneurship program” has a glassy office on the main floor of the student union building. A recent email from the university president announced the hiring of a new, so-called “CEO” to run one of our state’s two-year colleges, which boasts “workforce partnerships” with the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and the Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHE) Foundation. In their 2026 Corporate Overview, BHE confirmed plans to “support the expansion of new large-load industries, such as data centers,”^[64] even as parts of Montana experienced record-high temperatures and record-low snowpack levels this year, with knock-on effects for wildlife, agriculture, and wildfire risk, as well as for people who work outdoors or in buildings without air conditioning.^[65] (Hence Ben Tarnoff’s claim that “to decarbonize, we must decomputerize.”)^[66]

A foam board display in the campus library — part of MSU-Bozeman’s efforts to solicit feedback on its new “Strategic Plan.” Photo by the author.

Nor is it a secret that the majority of college teachers have, for decades, been overworked, underpaid, short-term contract workers. College students, in many cases, are no better off: those lucky enough to even get admitted are often burdened by debt, struggling to balance school with work and family obligations, and increasingly disabled by the debilitating stress associated with high-pressure competitive capitalism, “a social order that appears to be waiting for them to make mistakes, to fall, and to be replaced by someone worthier.”^[67] Chatbots only add insult to injury, exploiting students’ and teachers’ precarity and their understandable desire for (seemingly) cheap, quick shortcuts that short-circuit the slower, messier, embodied process of human-centric reflection, judgment, and analysis. (According to a 2025 AAUP report, “preexisting work intensification and devaluation” of things like responding to emails, writing rec letters, making slideshows, and designing new course syllabi “are the main reasons respondents give for using AI to assist with academic tasks.”)^[68]

Thus, the problem is not just the lack of public, democratic ownership and control; the problem is also that chatbots (and the social relations they presuppose) estrange people from themselves, others, and nature by depriving us of (1) the capacity to make informed judgments based on good reasons and reliable evidence, and (2) the capacity to forge empathetic connections with one another by imagining how and why another person (not a machine) holds a particular set of beliefs, values, and perspectives. The work of making and using chatbots should therefore be viewed as “inhuman labor, since it denies the realization of distinctively human capacities.”^[69]

This doesn’t mean that there’s some essential, authentic human nature that we need to protect or recover, which would be out of step with autonomist Marxism’s concerns with collective self-invention rather than individual self-restoration.^[70] It means that chatbots seem to be one of the things that severely stifle our distinctive capacity for collective self-invention. Unlike AI text, human-generated text is a uniquely formidable “technology for constructing options” and imagining alternatives.^[71] This is one reason why Big Tech is so intent on making language as “vague, mechanical, unthinking, [and] endlessly univocal” as possible.^[72] To deny the inherently class-conflictual aspects of language and meaning only makes it that much easier for schools to play their assigned role as places “where the contradic­tions between what capitalism promises and what it actually delivers are normalized.”^[73]

The AI industry is selling us an alienated, anti-democratic vision of language and education (and social relations generally). It’s not a vision in which knowledge, information, and education are universally accessible, but a vision in which knowledge, information, and education are considered obsolete and unnecessary.

If Gorz and Marx are right about how capitalist production “not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object”^[74] — in this case, a subject who’s been rendered so helpless that a chatbot feels helpful — then we need new, eco-socialist ways of thinking (and chatting) about human needs.

eco-socialist reskilling

To effectively, collectively heal the injuries described above (not just the insults) and develop our stifled communicative and imaginative capacities, there’s clearly an urgent need for cross-sector solidarity among workers of all kinds: productive and reproductive, paid and unpaid.^[75] The question, as always, is what kind of political glue can hold them all together.

For green syndicalist Jeff Shantz, the answer is health and safety — a transnational version of OSHA, more or less, that applies to both work environments and living environments:

Assuming that workers do not prefer to poison themselves and their families, the ecological health of workers’ communities provides for an immediate barometer of democracy in the productive sphere, where effects become personalized in the community or even in the body . . . Against processes of deskilling, indeed as a specific reskilling outside of mere job performance, health and safety efforts suggest a possible transcending of the ‘expert elitism’ [identified by some] as a serious inhibition to efforts of democratization . . . [as] workers learn about what goes into their bodies, their homes, and their neighborhood.”^[76]

How to accomplish this? In many places, it’s already happening. Around the world, “the class struggle of production is converging with class-based environmental justice struggles over food, air, water, and the conditions of social and ecological reproduction,” as eco-Marxist sociologist John Bellamy Foster observes.^[77] One way for socialists to make strategic, political use of this convergence is to acknowledge that resisting Promethean, productivist machine logics in the present can be a necessary (if also insufficient) part of what Foster calls “the long ecological revolution,” led by an “environmental proletariat” who refuses to be a passive victim of technological change.^[78]

The list below is inspired by some of these efforts, which could be described not only as efforts to “struggle for human autonomy from capital” but also “to struggle for a recognition of the ecological and cosmic human enmeshments and imbrications that capital obscures and obliterates.”^[79] Some promising ways to make time and space for new, cooperative, autonomous forms of political, economic, and ecological literacy include the following:

• join and strengthen networks like the Tech Workers Coalition,^[80] the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy coalition,^[81] and the Blue-Green Alliance,^[82] and campaigns like the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH)’s Fired Up! Workers for Heat Justice campaign^[83]

• conduct and circulate collaborative, experiential “workers’ inquiries” of the kind described in Notes from Below Issue 27, Workers’ Inquiry: The Politics of a Method and on Long-Haul’s About page

• support democratic economic planning efforts,^[84] such as by developing sector-specific, digital-era Lucas Plans (the original Combine Committee’s Lucas Plan was nominated for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and demanded, among other things, “human skills-based production rather than automation,”^[85] re-orienting arms production toward more socially useful products, and “re-organizing work into less hierarchical teams that bridged divisions between tacit knowledge on the shop floor and theoretical engineering knowledge in design shops”)^[86]

• organize informal, in-person study groups and teach-ins using documentaries like The Story of the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Alternative Corporate Plan,^[87]podcasts like Tech Won’t Save Us, and texts like the 2010 Cochabamba People’s Agreement,^[88] the Labor Network for Sustainability’s 2021 “Just Transition Listening Project” report;^[89] the 2023 Common Ecologies booklet, Towards Agroecological Futures: How to Facilitate Local Agroecological Transitions;^[90] the AAUP’s collection of AI resources (including How to Use FOIA to Uncover Higher Ed Partnerships and Contracts with Tech Companies);^[91] the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s collection of tech-related CBA language, “Negotiating Tech: An Inventory of U.S. Union Contract Provisions for the Digital Age”;^[92] Richard Lewontin’s 1998 book, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment; Victor Wallis’s 2018 book, Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism; or Ellen David Friedman’s 2026 book Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It’s Hard

• organize for not only the elimination of no-strike contract clauses^[93] but also for the repeal (and/or mass violation) of your state’s version of Montana’s absurdly expansive “Management Rights of Public Employers” law, which among other things protects an employer’s right to “establish the methods and processes by which work is performed” (often broadly interpreted to apply to the unilateral imposition of new technology)^[94]

• lobby for a federal jobs guarantee, a federal heat standard,^[95] a robot tax,^[96] a global Green New Deal, a 32-hour work week, an international phase-out of fossil fuels,^[97] and a “renewed, permanent” Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)^[98]

• initiate and/or support a building trades version of the Tech Won’t Build It movement^[99] that’s directed at large-scale data centers (the Montana AFL-CIO’s recently passed “Resolution on Data Centers, AI, and a Worker-Centered Economy” — jointly submitted by the Montana State Building & Construction Trades Council and the Montana Nurses Association — is unfortunately marred by a commitment to meritocracy and productivism: the resolution opposes a moratorium on data center construction, treating a growing “digital economy” as basically inevitable and claiming that “more demand” for supposedly job-creating data centers to become “part of critical infrastructure” will help labor unions “deliver on the promise of the American Dream” and “grow the middle class” — the resolution fails to mention that capitalists, not workers, are the ones driving this demand)^[100]

• use, create, or participate in user- and worker-controlled “platform coops,” decentralized forms of “peer-to-peer production,”^[101] community makerspaces, and AI-free search tools like NoAI.duckduckgo.com

• sign and share the Open Letter from Educators Who Refuse the Call to Adopt GenAI in Education; make and share your own, institution-specific version of the SUNY Oswego AI Opt Out petition; and join informal networks like the Alliance for Refusing Generative Artificial Intelligence Discord server, which as of this writing has more than 400 users (many of them are college writing teachers, but not all)

• initiate and/or support large-scale, coordinated data poisoning, server overloads, and other “strategic disruptions” of the digital economy’s logistical chokepoints^[102] (to the extent that chatbots can be used to sabotage chatbots, they could in fact be considered a means of struggle)^[103]

The upshot of all this is that a genuinely sustainable, participatory economy requires forms of communication and cooperation that are incompatible with the alienating, labor-intensive, neo-Taylorist chatbot technologies marketed as “generative AI.” “Real collective decision-making about fourth industrial revolution technologies must include the possibility of roads not taken, and humans rejecting the liquidation of their activities by machinic intelligence,” as the authors of Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism rightly insist.^[104]

Here’s my AI policy for this semester’s course syllabi, if any readers are curious. Instead of taking a punitive, disciplinary approach, my goal is to raise awareness about these tools’ flaws, limitations, and enabling conditions, inviting students to share their own questions and experiences. My goal, in other words, is to teach them the things about chatbots that they could never learn from chatbots themselves. Such as the fact that people don’t use chatbots; rather, chatbots use people.

To be honest, it did occur to me that I could finish this essay a lot earlier if I used a chatbot, potentially “saving” me hundreds of hours (read: outsourcing hundreds of hours) of reading, writing, and revising (not to mention hundreds of ounces of Folger’s and Hamm’s). Even after all that time and effort, I’m still not entirely happy with the result. But there’s no quicker, easier way. Nor should there be. The revolution will not be outsourced!

Indeed, if socialism means, among other things, the end of class (i.e., not just working-class self-emancipation but self-abolition), then we must refuse to act, whenever possible, as if human labor-power is an abstract, interchangeable entity — that is, a commodity. Universal fungibility, after all, is one of the foundational lies of capitalism, and one that chatbots perpetuate: a denial of qualitative differences among concrete objects and activities, and the related insistence that mechanization can increase economic quantities without transforming (or sacrificing) social and environmental qualities. Whether mechanization-induced tradeoffs are worth it must always be decided by those who’ll be affected the most.

That temptation to turn to a chatbot was a revealing one, though. However structurally alienating, inadequate, and unreliable they might be, chatbots do respond to legitimate wants and needs — especially the desire for free, universal, instantaneous access to meaningful assistance of various kinds, from counseling and tutoring to programming, graphic design, Wikipedia-style informational overviews, or even just basic companionship. Unfortunately, in lieu of real socialism — which would require, among other things, free, universal access to high-quality, person-centered education — capital has given us simulated socialism: global access to a virtual, text-centered army of over-eager Stepford professionals, as the contrasting images below demonstrate:

An email ad from OpenAI, and a flyer in the campus library. Photo by the author.

Maybe this is the real reason so many of us have been conditioned to think of chatbots as useful, even comforting. They try so hard to tell us the things capitalism doesn’t allow us to hear from actual people. They give us a taste — always only a taste — of another world. A world where the means of survival — including the means of acquiring political, economic, and ecological literacy — are no longer privatized, monopolized, and depersonalized. A world where social decision-making is no longer opaque, unaccountable, concentrated in the hands (and data centers) of a powerful few. A world where chatbots are no longer wanted or needed.

Chatbots undermine these survival literacies, so we must undermine chatbots. And, as labor environmentalist Tony Mazzocchi once observed: “When you start to interfere with the forces of production, you’re going to the heart of the beast.”^[105]

references

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^[1] Jathan Sadowski, The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism (University of California Press, 2025), 143.

^[2] André Gorz, “Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-limitation,” New Left Review 1, no. 202 (1993), https://newleftreview.org/issues/i202/articles/andre-gorz-political-ecology-expertocracy-versus-self-limitation. See also Gorz, “The Myth of Collective Appropriation,” in Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (South End Press, 1982) and Michael A. Lebowitz, “Capital and the Production of Needs,” Science & Society 41, no. 4 (1977/1978), https://www.surplusvalue.org.au/Marxism/marx%20lebowitz%20needs.pdf.

^[3] See Victor Wallis, “Ecological Socialism and Human Needs,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 8, no. 4 (1997), https://doi.org/10.1080/10455759709358761 and Nancy Fraser, “Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Theory of Late Capitalist Political Culture,” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

^[4] Jia Keqing and John Bellamy Foster, “Ecological Marxism,” Monthly Review 75, no. 4 (2023), https://monthlyreview.org/articles/ecological-marxism/.

^[5] I’m far from the first one to suggest the value of such a synthesis. Stefania Barca, Alyssa Battistoni, Tithi Bhattacharya, John Bellamy Foster, Kohei Saito, Jeff Shantz, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjosen, and James Steinhoff are among those who’ve endorsed similar ideas.

^[6] Christian Fuchs, “Appropriation of Digital Machines and Appropriation of Fixed Capital as the Real Appropriation of Social Being: A Comment on Toni Negri’s Article ‘The Appropriation of Fixed Capital: A Metaphor?,’” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 22, no. 1 (2024), https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1512.

^[7] Sam Sutton, “Voters Fear AI. Unions Want the Jobs,” Politico, June 2, 2026, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2026/06/02/voters-fear-ai-unions-want-the-jobs-00946226.

^[8] Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022), 29. For another left critique of degrowth, see “Does Climate Change Mean the End of Economic Growth?,” PEP Talk: The Participatory Economy Podcast, November 22, 2023, https://www.buzzsprout.com/2014537/episodes/13985275-does-climate-change-mean-the-end-of-economic-growth.

^[9] David Schwartzman, “Nuclear Power, Degrowth and the Working Class,” Historical Materialism, August 15, 2023, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/nuclear-power-degrowth-and-the-working-class/#_edn13.

^[10] On the concept of de-alienation as revolutionary activity, see Dan Swain, “Alienation, or Why Capitalism Is Bad for Us,” in The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, ed. Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew (Oxford University Press, 2018), 374.

^[11] John Bellamy Foster, “The Long Ecological Revolution,” Monthly Review 69, no. 6 (2017): 13, https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-long-ecological-revolution/.

^[12] Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021); John Bellamy Foster, “Planned Degrowth and Sustainable Human Development: An Introduction,” Monthly Review 75, no. 3 (2023), https://monthlyreview.org/articles/planned-degrowth/.

^[13] Dylan Gyach-Lewis, “The Abundance Agenda: Neoliberalism’s Rebrand,” The American Prospect, November 26, 2024, https://prospect.org/2024/11/26/2024-11-26-abundance-agenda-neoliberalisms-rebrand/.

^[14] Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, “How Much Growth Is Required to Achieve Good Lives for All? Insights from Needs-Based Analysis,” World Development Perspectives 35 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612.

^[15] Solar energy would be the exception.

^[16] “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” The Breakthrough Institute, April 2015, https://thebreakthrough.org/manifesto/manifesto-english.

^[17] Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois Press, 1999), 68.

^[18] Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 69-70.

^[19] Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, 33.

^[20] Sam Adler-Bell, “Surviving Amazon,” Logic(s), August 3, 2019, https://logicmag.io/bodies/surviving-amazon/.

^[21] Veena Dubal and Katie J. Wells, “Life Under the Algorithm,” Dissent, Fall 2026, https://dissentmagazine.org/article/algorithmic-pricing-surveillance-wage-discrimination/.

^[22] Paul Edwards and Paulina Ramirez, “When Should Workers Embrace or Resist New Technology?,” New Technology, Work and Employment 31, no. 2 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12067.

^[23] Sandro Mezzadra, “Italy, Operaism and Post-Operaism,” in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, Volume I, ed. Immanuel Ness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

^[24] “Artificial intelligence,” in particular, is more of a techno-ideology than anything else — “not a specific technology” but rather “a story about technology, one that [often] serves to disempower working people.” Jason Resnikoff, “Contesting the Idea of Progress: Labor’s AI Challenge,” New Labor Forum 33, no. 3 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/10957960241276515.

^[25] Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 133, https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf.

^[26] Edwards and Ramirez, “Embrace or Resist,” 103.

^[27] Ibid., 104.

^[28] Sam Heft-Luthy, “On the Commodity Fetish of Computation,” Socialist Forum, November 30, 2024, https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/fall-2024/on-the-commodity-fetish-of-computation/.

^[29] Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjosen, and James Steinhoff, Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2019).

^[30] Otto Ullrich, “Technology,” in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (Bloomsbury, 2024), 319.

^[31] See Robert L. Heilbroner, “Do Machines Make History?,” Technology and Culture 8, no. 3 (1967), 345.

^[32] Karl Marx, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/pov-phil/ch02.htm.

^[33] Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (Touchstone, 1999), 31-32.

^[34] Edwards and Ramirez, “Embrace or Resist,” 103.

^[35] “Questions and Answers: Israeli Military’s Use of Digital Tools in Gaza,” Human Rights Watch, September 10, 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/10/questions-and-answers-israeli-militarys-use-of-digital-tools-in-gaza.

^[36] Antonio Negri, “The Appropriation of Fixed Capital: A Metaphor?,” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 22, no. 1 (2024): 463, https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1511.

^[37] Richard Eskow, “The Only Ethical Model for AI Is Socialism,” Current Affairs, July 12, 2024, https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-only-ethical-model-for-ai-is-socialism.

^[38] “Tempest Research Cluster,” Montana State University, https://www.montana.edu/uit/rci/tempest/.

^[39] “AI Jailbreak: Rooting Out an Evolving Threat,” IBM.

^[40] Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, and Mohan Kankanhalli, “Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models” (preprint), February 13, 2025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.11817.

^[41] “GPT-4 System Card,” OpenAI, https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4-system-card.pdf.

^[42] See Zachary Loeb, “Who Moderates the Moderators? On the Facebook Files,” boundary 2, June 2017, https://www.boundary2.org/2017/06/zachary-loeb-who-moderates-the-moderators-on-the-facebook-files/ and Kari Paul, “Facebook Sued for ‘Deceptive Practices’ over Disinformation on Platform,” The Guardian, March 23, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/23/facebook-lawsuit-deceptive-practices-disinformation.

^[43] “GPT-4 System Card.”

^[44] “Information about Generative AI,” MSU Center for Faculty Excellence, https://www.montana.edu/facultyexcellence/teaching-advising/courseclassdesign/genai/.

^[45] This section of the essay was typed on the third floor of my university’s new $53M Gianforte School of Computing building.

^[46] “CSCI – Computer Science/Programming,” Montana State University, https://catalog.montana.edu/coursedescriptions/csci/.

^[47] Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (St. Martin’s, 2023); Lauren Irwin, “Kenyan Tech Workers Urge Biden to End ‘Modern Day Slavery’ Ahead of State Visit,” The Hill, May 22, 2024, https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4680453-kenyan-tech-workers-biden-modern-day-slavery/.

^[48] Janet Vertesi, “Don’t Be Fooled: Much ‘AI’ Is Just Outsourcing, Redux,” Tech Policy Press, April 4, 2024, https://www.techpolicy.press/dont-be-fooled-much-ai-is-just-outsourcing-redux/.

^[49] Josh Dzieza, “The Lawyers and Scientists Training AI to Steal Their Careers: Experienced White-Collar Workers Are Now Part of a Miserable Gig Economy,” New York Magazine, March 10, 2026, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/white-collar-workers-training-ai.html.

^[50] Janet Vertesi, Adam Goldstein, Diana Enriquez, Larry Liu, and Katherine Miller, “Pre-Automation: Insourcing and Automating the Gig Economy,” Sociologica 14, no. 3 (2020): 173, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11657.

^[51] Jathan Sadowski, “Potemkin AI,” Real Life, August 6, 2018, https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/.

^[52] See Andrew Ross, “The New Geography of Work: Power to the Precarious?,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 7-8 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408097795.

^[53] Of course, job security doesn’t mean much if all it “entails [is] a guaranteed slot in a sclerotic organizational hierarchy, where employee participation is clearly tokenistic, and where the division of labor functions as a fixed and formal regime of discipline.” Ross, “The New Geography,” 38.

^[54] See Abdullah Shihipar, “How Unions Can Save Higher Education — and Democracy,” The New Republic, July 6, 2026, https://newrepublic.com/article/211259/unions-higher-education-labor-organizing.

^[55] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marxists.org, 1888, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

^[56] Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater, “ChatGPT Is Bullshit,” Ethics and Information Technology 26, no. 38 (2024), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5.

^[57] Swain, “Alienation,” 362.

^[58] Emily M. Bender and Alexander Koller, “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data,” Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 2020, https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463/.

^[59] Negri, “Appropriation,” 464-465.

^[60] R. H. Lossin and Andy Battle, “Resisting Distance Learning,” Boston Review, April 30, 2020, https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/higher-education-in-the-age-of-coronavirus/resisting-distance-learning/.

^[61] See Sarah Jaffe’s chapter on academia, “Proletarian Professionals,” in Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (Bold Type Books, 2021).

^[62] Indigo Olivier, “Inside Lockheed Martin’s Sweeping Recruitment on College Campuses,” In These Times, August 2022, https://inthesetimes.com/article/lockheed-martin-recruiting-military-industrial-complex-student-debt.

^[63] Rinaldo Walcott, “The University Is the Crisis,” Canadian Dimension, September 2, 2026, https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-university-is-the-crisis. See also Dennis M. Hogan, “US Colleges and Universities Are Becoming Giant Exploitation Machines,” Jacobin, August 19, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/08/us-university-neoliberalism-exploitation-financialization-debt-jobs.

^[64] “2026 Corporate Overview,” Berkshire Hathaway Energy, https://www.brkenergy.com/assets/pdf/2026-BHE-Corporate-Overview.pdf.

^[65] Amanda Eggert, “Snowpack Hits Record-low Levels Across Montana,” Montana Free Press, April 10, 2026, https://montanafreepress.org/2026/04/10/snowpack-hits-record-low-levels-across-montana/.

^[66] Ben Tarnoff, “To Decarbonize We Must Decomputerize: Why We Need a Luddite Revolution,” The Guardian, September 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/tech-climate-change-luddites-data.

^[67] John Trimbur, “Composition’s Left and the Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness,” in Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era, ed. Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek (Routledge, 2021), 31. See also Nicholas Liu, “Universities Are Teaching the Virtue of Overwork,” Jacobin, September 10, 2026, https://jacobin.com/2026/09/higher-education-overwork-credentialing-exploitation.

^[68] “Artificial Intelligence,” AAUP, https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/teaching-and-research/artificial-intelligence.

^[69] Swain, “Alienation,” 364.

^[70] Weeks, The Problem with Work, 90.

^[71] D. B. Smith, “Axioms for English in a Technical Age,” College English 48, no. 6 (1986): 575, https://www.jstor.org/stable/376713.

^[72] David N. Dobrin, “What’s Technical About Technical Writing?,” in New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, Practice, ed. Paul V. Anderson et al. (Taylor & Francis Group, 1983), 241.

^[73] Ulises A. Mejias, “Artificial Intelligence as a Threat to Academic Labor,” Academe Magazine, 2026, https://www.aaup.org/issue/winter-2026/artificial-intelligence-threat-academic-labor. See also Camy Matthay, “Unschooling as a Political Activity,” Social Anarchism: A Journal of Theory and Practice, no. 31 (2001).

^[74] Karl Marx, qtd. in Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism (Palgrave Macmillan Chan, 2022), 37.

^[75] Dan Boscov-Ellen, “Workers of the Earth, Unite!,” Spectre, October 1, 2024, https://spectrejournal.com/workers-of-the-earth-unite/.

^[76] Jeff Shantz, Green Syndicalism: An Alternative Red/Green Vision (Syracuse University Press, 2012), 114-115.

^[77] John Bellamy Foster, “The Defense of Nature: Resisting the Financialization of the Earth,” Monthly Review 73, no. 11 (2022), https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-defense-of-nature-resisting-the-financializaton-of-the-earth/.

^[78] Foster, “The Long Ecological Revolution.”

^[79] Dyer-Witheford, Kjosen, and Steinhoff, Inhuman Power.

^[80] “Worker Power in the Tech Industry,” https://techworkerscoalition.org/.

^[81] “About TUED,” ​​https://www.tuedglobal.org/.

^[82] “About Us,” https://www.bluegreenalliance.org/about/.

^[83] “Fired Up! Workers for Heat Justice,” https://nationalcosh.org/fired-up.

^[84] Unlike central planning, the decentralized, participatory economic models proposed by Robin Hahnel and others would require only a limited role for large-scale computing infrastructure. Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright, Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy (Verso, 2016), 12.

^[85] David King and Breaking the Frame, “The Lucas Plan: How Greens and Trade Unionists Can Unite in Common Cause,” The Ecologist, November 2, 2016, https://theecologist.org/2016/nov/02/lucas-plan-how-greens-and-trade-unionists-can-unite-common-cause.

^[86] Adrian Smith, “The Lucas Plan: What Can It Tell Us about Democratizing Technology Today?,” The Guardian, January 22, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/jan/22/remembering-the-lucas-plan-what-can-it-tell-us-about-democratising-technology-today.

^[87] “Lucas Plan documentary: ‘The Story of the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Alternative Corporate Plan,’” posted January 16, 2014, YouTube, 24:31, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pgQqfpub-c.

^[88] Aissa Dearing, “Cochabamba People’s Agreement: Annotated,” JSTOR Daily, September 1, 2023, https://daily.jstor.org/cochabamba-peoples-agreement-annotated/.

^[89] J. Mijin Cha et al., “Workers and Communities in Transition: Report of the Just Transition Listening Project,” Labor Network for Sustainability, 2021, https://www.labor4sustainability.org/files/JTLP_report2021.pdf.

^[90] Daniel López García and Guillem Tendero Acín, Towards Agroecological Futures: How to Facilitate Local Agroecological Transitions, 2023, https://commonecologies.net/essays/towards-agroecological-futures/.

^[91] “Artificial Intelligence,” AAUP, https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/teaching-and-research/artificial-intelligence.

^[92] “Negotiating Tech: An Inventory of U.S. Union Contract Provisions for the Digital Age,” UC Berkeley Labor Center, https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/negotiating-tech/.

^[93] Hamilton Nolan, “Get Rid of No-Strike Clauses and Stop Begging,” In These Times, May 4, 2021, https://inthesetimes.com/article/no-strike-clause-labor-peace-union-contracts.

^[94] “Management Rights of Public Employers,” Montana Annotated Code 2025, https://mca.legmt.gov/bills/mca/title_0390/chapter_0310/part_0030/section_0030/0390-0310-0030-0030.html.

^[95] Jenny Brown, “Will Republicans in Congress Torch OSHA’s Heat Standard?,” Labor Notes, August 31, 2026, https://www.labornotes.org/2026/08/will-republicans-congress-torch-oshas-heat-standard; Kim Kelly, “All for One,” Orion, April 1, 2026, https://orionmagazine.org/article/all-for-one/.

^[96] “Robot Tax,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_tax.

^[97] Andrew Ross, “The Failure of COP28,” Dissent, December 22, 2023, https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-failure-of-cop28/.

^[98] Alyssa Battistoni, “Living, Not Just Surviving,” Jacobin, August 15, 2017, https://jacobin.com/2017/08/living-not-just-surviving/.

^[99] “Issue 52: The Tech Won’t Build It Movement Has Spread to Palantir,” Tech Workers Coalition, August 23, 2019, https://techworkerscoalition.org/blog/2019/08/23/issue-52/.

^[100] “Resolution #8,” Montana AFL-CIO, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ktUgVPtEhhprVgIvRjYcnfniShoNChib/view?usp=sharing.

^[101] Fuchs, “Appropriation.”

^[102] Benjamin Y. Fong, “Strategic Disruption,” Damage, November 29, 2023, https://www.damagemag.com/p/strategic-disruption.

^[103] For a discussion of “data strikes” and “data poisoning” as politically motivated forms of “data leverage” tactics that can be used against tech companies, see Nicholas Vincent et al., “Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in Its Relationship with Technology Companies,” Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445885.

^[104] Dyer-Witheford, Kjosen, and Steinhoff, Inhuman Power.

^[105] Les Leopold, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (Chelsea Green, 2007), 229.

This post is a shared statement by Salt Lake DSA’s Electoral Working Group explaining how we’re thinking about the upcoming election in Utah.

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Introduction

The 2026 general election is fast approaching, and once again the working class faces a crucial question: how should we participate in an electoral system structured to disempower us? As always, voting is neither the beginning nor the end of politics. Building a better future requires building collective power to take action and affect the conditions of our lives year-round. Nevertheless, voting plays a distinct and important role in expanding our capacity to organize and advance the socialist movement.

Our enemies understand this. The far-right Trump regime has continually sought to undermine elections, threaten voters, and attack left-wing elected officials, while tech oligarchs increasingly openly oppose democracy itself. Salt Lake DSA (SLDSA) is committed to protecting the right to vote, and as part of that commitment, we will participate in the No Kings: Vote Early! rallies in Salt Lake City and Ogden on Saturday, Oct.17. We encourage all SLDSA members and fellow comrades to show up and demonstrate that we will not be intimidated by the Trump regime’s attack on our voting rights!

That said, SLDSA’s Electoral Working Group is not endorsing or recommending any specific candidates in Utah elections this year. We are, however, recommending how to vote on this year’s proposed constitutional amendments and offering guidance on what socialists should consider when evaluating candidates.

Constitutional Amendments

Two proposed constitutional amendments are up for consideration: Amendment A and Amendment B. The Utah State Legislature, dominated by landlords and developers, has put forth both amendments amid the ongoing fight over the Proposition 4 Redistricting Initiative. Together, they give the legislature more power while making it harder to pass citizen-proposed initiatives, which Utah workers have historically used to create better organizing conditions. For this reason, SLDSA’s Electoral Working Group recommends voting AGAINST both constitutional amendments.

Amendment A

“Shall the Utah Constitution be amended to change how proposed constitutional amendments are published, requiring publication for 60 days immediately before the general election in a manner established by state law instead of in newspapers?”

SLDSA’s Electoral Working Group recommends voting AGAINST Amendment A.

Amendment A strips essential checks and balances on the legislature’s power to amend Utah’s constitution. If passed, this amendment would remove a long-standing provision requiring the legislature to publish all proposed constitutional amendments publicly, specifically in newspapers, at least two months before Election Day, and would let the legislature set its own rules for proposing constitutional amendments and notify the public only as it sees fit.

This is only the latest entry in the Utah legislature’s long history of trying to deny working-class participation in the democratic process. Year after year, the legislature has proven that it will always take the opportunity to set rules that increase its own power at our expense. 

The History of Amendment A is a Lesson in Organizing

In 2024, the Utah State Legislature attempted to place two misleadingly worded constitutional amendments on the ballot at the last minute:

• 2024’s Amendment D would have allowed the legislature to rescind Proposition 4’s redistricting requirements despite it being approved by voters and later upheld by the Utah Supreme Court.
• 2024’s Amendment A would have allowed the legislature to redirect income taxes away from education and services for people with disabilities and towards other legislative priorities.

The directionality here is instructive: both of these measures were designed to shift power away from voters and workers and toward the reactionary legislature.

Because the legislature proposed both initiatives at the 11th hour, overriding statutory safeguards to ensure they appeared on the 2024 general election ballot, it neglected to publish the initiatives to newspapers statewide, violating the mandatory notice requirement. In response, the Utah Education Association and the League of Women Voters successfully sued to remove both amendments from the ballot.

In retaliation for a teachers union successfully standing up to its attempt to seize power, the legislature passed HB 267 attempting to eradicate the ability of all public unions in Utah to bargain collectively. The sponsor of the bill, Jordan Teuscher, who is also an executive in the LDS Church’s business arm, posted an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal airing his grievances with public unions in general (a broadside which earned him a $15,000 check from “school choice” real-estate investor Howard Rich).

The story doesn’t end there. Throughout the spring of 2025, Utah Unions and community organizers formed the Protect Utah Workers Coalition, which gathered more than 250,000 signatures to put forward a ballot measure to overturn HB 267. Rather than face an embarrassing defeat at the ballot box, the Utah legislature repealed its own bill in December 2025.

This saga offers an important lesson for socialist organizers: the Utah legislature is a power center that is structurally and personally opposed to workers’ interests. Any power given to it will be used to attack our ability to organize collectively. Allowing it to set the terms for publishing constitutional amendments can only undermine our position.

Amendment B

“Shall the Utah Constitution be amended to require that citizen-proposed laws that increase taxes compared to existing law be approved by at least 60% of voters, instead of a simple majority?”

SLDSA’s Electoral Working Group recommends voting AGAINST Amendment B.

Amendment B directly attacks our ability to organize for better policies through the ballot initiative process. If passed, this amendment would raise the bar for passing initiatives that increase taxes from 50% (a simple majority) to 60%. The legislature defines initiatives that “increase taxes” as creating new taxes, expanding existing taxes, or raising existing tax rates. This definition, combined with the increased pass threshold, effectively eliminates our ability to organize for policies that redistribute wealth and fund public goods and services.

Citizen-led ballot initiatives in Utah are a crucial tool for workers to create better organizing conditions. Escalating attempts to undermine the referendum process only reaffirm its importance in challenging the power of the oligarch-aligned Utah Legislature.

Like workers everywhere, we understand how frustrating it is to see our taxes go toward unjust causes and wasteful advertising campaigns. However, we still believe it needs to be made easier, not harder, to organize for policies that actually meet the needs of the working class, especially policies that increase taxes to fund material change.

Candidates

SLDSA remains focused on empowering workers and running candidates that our members democratically choose to represent our chapter’s socialist values. We don’t believe that change is held in the hands of politicians, or that voting alone can fix the everyday challenges we face. Instead, we believe an organized working class and collective action are the only means to enact real, systemic change. As such, we offer no endorsements or recommendations of specific candidates for any 2026 Utah general election race.

Nevertheless, we recognize voting as an important tool for creating conditions that make it easier for us to organize. We encourage everyone to vote in their local races and consider issues raised in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program when deciding who to vote for. SLDSA, in particular, is focused on our campaigns to protect our communities from ICE and to protect our ability to organize by forming the Coalition to Defend Freedom of Speech and Democratic Rights. As you fill out your ballot, we invite you to consider whether the candidates you vote for have demonstrated the moral and structural fortitude to take on ICE and whether they have taken actions that expand and protect our ability to organize or actions that undermine it.

The post Considerations for the Utah 2026 General Election first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

by Elizabeth Henderson

Revisions of zoning codes happen at long intervals, so this is a chance for Rochester to make changes that will govern the city for at least the next decade. The process has been underway for over four years and seems to overwhelm the staff which has not met any of their deadlines. In their revisions, the zoning writers  have responded to some of the requests from the Food Policy Council and Urban Agriculture Working Group, but we have more work to do. The April 2026 Draft turns out to be their final language.  Now it is up to City Council which has the power to make amendments or to accept the draft as is.  If you want to support community gardening, please attend one of these sessions and speak up or send in written comments!

The zoning revisions process bears the title Zoning Alignment Project because the zoning is supposed to align with the City’s Rochester 2034 Comprehensive Plan. The vision for the plan is lovely: ”Rochester is a beautiful, progressive, lively, healthy, and welcoming city. We build from strength – leveraging our assets to grow our population, local business community, and tax base. We celebrate our 200th birthday in 2034 as a resilient and confident community where diverse neighborhoods are engaged and thriving; downtown is the vibrant heart of our region; our unique network of active waterfronts is accessible to all; and innovation, adaptation, and inclusion drive us forward.” – The People of Rochester

In the spirit of this vision, the Food Policy Council prefaced our comments with this reflection: “Community gardens in Rochester are not evenly distributed resources, and they are not evenly burdened by regulation. Taproot Collective’s 2024 – 25 Gardening Together Study – a site survey of 109 Rochester community gardens and qualitative interviews with eight urban growers – documents what planning maps confirm: the gardens that serve Rochester’s most disinvested neighborhoods, often operating on city-permitted vacant lots with no permanent infrastructure, are run predominantly by Black and brown residents with the least margin to absorb bureaucratic cost or legal uncertainty. These are the gardens that a $100 beehive permit fee prices out. These are the gardens that a 144 sq ft greenhouse cap renders non-compliant. And these are the gardeners who have historically been taught to use toxic practices – including tire planters – because those were the cheap materials available to them.

“This is the equity dimension of the ZAP that these comments address. The Rochester Food Policy Council – itself supported by Rochester 2034 Action UAG-1i – urges the City Planning Commission to read its urban agriculture provisions not only as technical land use code, but as environmental justice policy. Rochester 2034 (p. 311) identifies local food and urban agriculture as both climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. The Community Food Systems Plan grounds Goal 3 explicitly in equity and calls for making it “easier for residents to grow food where they live,” with particular attention to neighborhoods facing structural barriers including historical disinvestment. In order to be an equitable and efficient policy, the ZAP must align with both documents.

Here is a guide to commenting based on the FPC comments:

Garden Investment Security:
Rochester 2034 calls for long-term land security in multiple action items: VNT-3a, VNT-4d, and UAG-2a collectively direct the City to create 5 – 10-year permit/lease arrangements and to include long-term garden use provisions in the ZAP rewrite. The ZAP does not implement these actions.

The equity dimension is acute. Annual revocability is not a neutral administrative feature – it is a structural barrier that falls hardest on lower-income gardeners who cannot risk multi-year investment in infrastructure on land that can be taken back at any time.

The newly released Rochester Community Food System Plan (CFSP) reinforces this finding, noting that land tenure insecurity “discourages long-term investment and planning from gardeners” and that gardeners in disinvested neighborhoods have explicitly called for relief from “complicated communication and processes, uncertain land tenure, and perceived lack of support” (CFSP p. 109).

The ZAP should classify gardens as permitted in all residential neighborhoods.

Recommendation:
To align with Rochester 2034, the city should adopt zoning that clusters development more densely along transit corridors. The city can then designate vacant lots that are not on these corridors for use as greenspace and gardens. Each quadrant should get some. Half the city’s 5000 vacant lots are city property which it spends $260 a piece each year to keep “clean and green.” The city saves money when residents take over. When the city permits residents to use its lots for gardens, those lots can be divided into two distinct categories and clearly labeled as reserved for future development or reserved for use as gardens, farms or green space. The ZGEIS recognizes the distinction, stating: “This use is intended to support nearby residents, so allowing them in residential districts makes sense. Lots reserved for community gardens, as the principal use, would not meet the vision for development along the mixed-use corridors.” But does not take the further step to confirm the value of gardens as a principal use in residential districts.

Limitations on Season Extension:
Rochester 2034 (p. 311) identifies local food and urban agriculture as both climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. The Community Food Systems Plan grounds Goal 3 explicitly in equity and calls for making it “easier for residents to grow food where they live,” with particular attention to neighborhoods facing structural barriers including historical disinvestment. In order to be an equitable and efficient policy, the ZAP must align with both documents.

Rochester 2034 Action UAG-3c explicitly directs the City to “explore support for installation of high tunnels, hoop houses, and other season-extending production aids on City-owned and private land.” The ZAP – which Article 1.2.B requires to implement Rochester 2034 – instead caps community garden greenhouses at 144 square feet and applies a 50% lot-area ceiling to all tunnel structures, treating temporary row covers identically to semi-permanent high tunnels.

With climate change, in the Northeast rains are more frequent and come down much harder. Using high tunnels is a way to protect crops from pounding rain, so gardeners or urban farmers might justifiably want to cover as much as 75% of their land in order to have a crop. The April 2026 draft changed the previous limit of 25% to 50%.  That is better, but we can ask for more, especially since gardeners might also want to cover 100% of the garden with row covers for a few nights to protect from frost.

Recommendation:

• Replace the 144 sq ft cap with a lot-coverage percentage, consistent with every peer city reviewed and with UAG-3c.

• Clarify Section 14.1.G application to garden lots without principal structures.

• Establish grandfathering for existing non-compliant structures.

• Create separate standards for high tunnels (permanent/semi-permanent) and low tunnels/row covers (temporary).

• Exempt low tunnels and row covers from area calculations entirely.

Excessive Fee for Keeping Bees – Recommendation:

• Reduce or waive the $100 fee for community garden and urban farm apiaries, particularly those operated by nonprofits or serving low-income populations.

• Retain the Section 14.2.B siting standards as written.

• Affirm NYS requirement for beekeepers to register their hives with the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets (https://agriculture.ny.gov/plant-industry/honey-bee-health).

• Collaborate with community partners to deliver beekeeping education as part of the permitting process for community gardens and urban farms.

Remove Confusion about Garden Beds, Paths and Weeds:

Section 16.2.F – General Landscape Requirement requires all non-structure, non-paved lot area to be landscaped with trees, shrubs, live groundcover, and other plantings. Community garden growing beds, mulched paths, and production areas are functional green infrastructure under Rochester 2034’s own framework (UAG p. 321, Vacant Lands p. 171). The FPC requests explicit clarification that these satisfy Section 16.2.F.

The equity dimension: any ambiguity in this provision creates enforcement exposure for gardens that are least likely to have legal counsel to navigate it. Clear, affirmative language is needed.

Recommendation:

• Add explicit language that growing beds, production areas, mulched paths, and other functional garden features satisfy Section 16.2.F for lots used as community gardens or urban farms.

Definition of Weeds Needed, Section 16.2.E.2 – Maintenance: Definition of “Weeds” – Recommendation:

• Define “weed” in Article 24 to exclude intentionally cultivated native plants, food crops, cover crops, and ecologically functional vegetation.

• Add language to Section 16.2.E.2 clarifying that the standard does not apply to intentional plantings in community gardens serving food production, cultural preservation, pollinator support, or ecological function.

Reduce Toxics in Landscaping:

The ZAP section on landscaping (Section 16 Landscape) offers the opportunity to limit the use of toxic herbicides and pesticides in the city. There is extensive research on the environmental injustice that low-income people are exposed to significantly more toxics in their living environment than wealthier people. Lead paint, dust, contamination from incinerators and factories are located deliberately in neighborhoods where residents have fewer resources to defend themselves.

Section E, on maintenance states: “All landscaping must be maintained free from disease, pests, weeds, and litter.” This is the place to insert – “without the use of carcinogenic or endocrine-disrupting herbicides or pesticides.” The Monroe County Parks including city parks, and the Monroe County Forestry Plan, already have strict limits on the use of toxics only for invasive species or serious diseases. Zoning could hold all landowners to these good practices.

City Council Public Hearings:

Each of the Rochester City Council District representatives – Vice President LaShay D. Harris (South), Michael A. Patterson (Northeast), Mary Lupien (East) and Bridget A. Monroe (Northwest) – will host an initial public, district meeting in the coming weeks regarding the ZAP legislation currently before City Council. 

These meetings will be held in each respective Councilmember’s district, and will offer residents an opportunity to voice their opinion on ZAP. Additional meetings will be scheduled as well. No registration is required to attend any of these hearings regardless of where you live. Specific dates and times for the initial District Meetings are as follows:

Council Member Michael Patterson (Northeast District):

• Sept. 29: Rochester Public Market at 5:30pm
• Sept. 30: Ibero Community Room

Council Member Mary Lupien (East District):

• Oct. 13: Ryan R-Center at 6:00pm

Council Member Bridget Monroe (Northwest District):

• Sept. 28: Edgerton R-Center at 6:00pm
• Oct. 7: Roback Community Center at 6:00pm

Council Member LaShay Harris (South District):

• Oct. 5: New Life Fellowship at 6:00pm
• Oct. 14: Olmstead Lodge in Highland Park at 6:00pm

Following these initial District Meetings, City Council will host official public hearings with the Evans Administration on Oct. 21 and 22 from 5:00pm – 8:00pm in City Council Chambers. These hearings will be open to attendance by the public and available on the City Council YouTube Channel for those who cannot attend in person. 

City residents who are unable to make any of the many public meetings can email Council@CityofRochester.Gov, fax (585) 428-6347 or attend City Council’s regular Speak to Council and Public Hearing session on Nov. 12 at 6:00pm. The work session will be held on Oct. 8 in City Hall Room 208A. 

For more information on the City Council ZAP process, City residents can call the City Council office at (585) 428-7538 or email Council@CityofRochester.Gov.

Save this date: the 2027 Rochester Urban Farming Conference will take place Saturday, March 13 from 9:30am – 4:00pm at East High!

The post Getting Grounded October – Zoning Final Draft Fails Community Gardens and Urban Farms first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Ilhan Omar raid illustrates “fascist police state,” Mamdani under pressure over NYPD boss Tisch, and more in this edition of “Red All Over,” Democratic Left’s occasional news roundup.

The post Musk, Koch Spend Millions Against Socialism appeared first on Democratic Left.