“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.

by Jo Blocton

Unions are the only space in American society where socialist values of solidarity and “us vs. them” are openly spoken and encouraged, outside of DSA. It is about time for us to take back this space to fight for workers’ rights. Detroit DSA’s Jobs Fair on September 19th was as much about education as it was about encouraging folks to consider new job options.

During the fair, about 60 participants heard from five different union members about why going to work within their fields can create legitimate change for the whole working class, while also improving their individual lives. The purpose was to bring socialists to the front line of the workforce, where we can build political power on all fronts for the working class.

These union trades didn’t come to play; The salaries of union workers represented at the fair start at $58,000 a year. The representative from the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) reported hourly wages as high as $57. The UAW has members on the line at more than $40 an hour. Teachers in one Metro Detroit school district are seeing salary increases of $20,000 within the first five years of teaching, with some districts offering programs to allow paraprofessionals and substitutes to earn their teaching certificate completely for free. Workers representing an organizing effort at a major logistics company are fighting to bring their wages on par with UPS’s top hourly rate of $49/hour.

OBTAINABLE JOBS

Joining a union is not all about the money. These careers present a unique opportunity to make real change, while being obtainable for the average joe. This is where joining the union efforts at workplaces with active unionization campaigns comes into play. We are talking about millions of Americans finally having a say in their working conditions, compensation, and benefits. One targeted company employs over 1.5 million people, as of 2025; if they could achieve a union contract, it would improve the lives of millions of families.

Speaking of families, careers in teaching would also improve the lives of millions, not just teachers but parents and students as well. The teachers union speaker reported a fantastic example in sunny Los Angeles. During the most recent LA teacher strike, the teachers union decided not to include only standard strike demands. The union met with parents and students to find out what they really needed as a larger community. The district had no choice but to capitulate because they were facing pressure from both sides: families and educators.

The teachers were able to reform the law enforcement presence in schools, while simultaneously getting a contract that included wage increases and other benefits. Making this effort with the parents not only allowed the teachers to strike for longer; they were able to organize to make sure the kids were still being fed during the strike.

Teachers unions have the power to fight artificial intelligence in the classroom and prevent the cognitive decline of Generation Alpha. Teaching is an opportunity to grow a more equitable and socialist future for all children — what’s not to love?

WEEKS WHEN DECADES HAPPEN

Joining a union provides a space to radicalize your co-workers and “prepare for the weeks when decades happen,” as explained by our IBEW representative. He spoke on how electricians hold the power of the state’s technology. Electricians can work against Flock cameras and data centers because they are the literal gatekeepers of power.

At the end of the day, the most important part of the Jobs Fair was actually getting socialist bodies into these positions. Participants were able to ask their top two union choices about career opportunities and the Labor Working Group is following up with attendees to help get them these jobs.

At the tables, participants spoke on their personal reasons to make the leap into an organized workplace. Some folks spoke about making a switch to diversify the workplace and others cited wanting to finally work somewhere that they could actually have a say. Once you have a union job, it’s difficult to go back to being treated as a grunt.

One of the best parts of the event? Most participants weren’t DSA members. This event served so many purposes and hit each nail square on the head. May all of these folks get positions in unions, and hopefully join DSA. As best said by our UAW representative, “the way change happens is talking with rank-and-file workers on the shop floor — that’s where we test out our politics.”

[Jo Blocton is a member of Metro Detroit DSA and UAW Local 6000.]

[If you’re interested in getting a job with the intent to organize, contact Metro Detroit DSA’s Labor Working Group.]

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Jobs Fair: It’s Time to Get These Socialists to Work was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Matt Wolfinger

BOSTON – There’s a loophole in our labor laws spreading across the economy. From delivery drivers to nurses, corporations are classifying workers as independent contractors and using the promise of flexible work to cudgel labor rights. 

Nearly 12 million people in the United States, or seven percent of the workforce, describe independent contractor work as their primary source of income, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Independent contractors aren’t protected under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), so they can’t unionize, aren’t entitled to benefits, a minimum wage, or overtime and can be fired at will. Companies like Uber, Lyft and Amazon have spent hundreds of millions to keep their workers classified as self-employed independent contractors, allowing them to cut costs and indirectly union-bust.

By blurring the line between employee and contractor, employers save money they’d otherwise be required to spend on unemployment insurance, benefits and employer-paid payroll taxes. Meanwhile, workers lcassified as contractors then pay exorbitantly higher taxation to account for both employee and employer contributions. If corporations can successfully “gigify” their industries, they can circumvent responsibilities and laws that would otherwise prevent them from mistreating their workers. 

Uber, Lyft and the Legacy of Gigification

Delivery and rideshare apps like Doordash, Lyft and Uber are poster children for operating in this gray area. Emerging in the shadow of the Great Recession when jobs were hard to come by, companies like Uber, Lyft and the now-defunct Sidecar pioneered the modern understanding of gig work by taking advantage of the dire economic landscape.

In Massachusetts, most workers are considered employees unless a company can prove their work meets three different criteria. According to Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell’s office, the work must be:

1. Done without the direction and control of the employer
2. Performed outside the usual course of the employer’s business
3. Done by someone who has their own, independent business or trade doing that kind of work

Companies constantly find workarounds. In one landmark case, Massachusetts residents voted in late 2024 to pass a ballot measure affording rideshare drivers the right to unionize. Notably, neither Uber or Lyft spent a cent to oppose it. In contrast, they paid more than $200 million in California to help pass Proposition 22, a bill cementing California gig workers’ misclassification as independent contractors. 

The reason why these companies did not perceive Question 3 as a threat became clear in May, when over 70,000 Lyft and Uber in Massachusetts drivers successfully voted to certify their App Drivers Union (ADU).  

As the first union of its kind in the country, it’s a big deal—but there’s a catch:  The union ceded on classification. Their official stance is that they’ve chosen to remain independent contractors. This limits the union’s ability to advocate for its members, since benefits like healthcare or a minimum wage are off the bargaining table.

As Working Mass’s Editorial Board reported at the time, Question 3 “allowed drivers to vote for a collective bargaining representative, with which Uber and Lyft would then have to negotiate over wages and working conditions… [but only covers] app workers transporting passengers, leaving out take-out and grocery delivery workers.” As a result, “the system as written allows drivers to vote for or against collective bargaining but does not mandate any driver rights within the “union” once it is recognized.”

This has led to credible accusations against the ADU of company unionism. The ADU’s FAQ page on their website states that remaining independent contractors allows members to “keep our flexibility and independence,” since bosses cannot legally dictate when independent contractors work and do not work. The ADU did not respond to requests for comment on how they reached this decision.

The flexibility messaging is reminiscent of a June 2026 report from the Flex Association, a national association for app-based work, that found that nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of the 10,000+ app-based workers they surveyed are doing gig work to supplement W-2 jobs. Flex’s 2024 Economic Impact Report found that “exactly half of driver and delivery partners would rather be able to choose their own hours, than receive a 50% increase in earnings with a fixed schedule.” 

While these studies seem to indicate gig workers would largely rather stay as independent contractors and prefer lower pay, there’s two fundamental flaws underpinning their results. First, drivers could advocate for having flexibility to choose their own hours and an increase in pay. There could also be an industry association for app-based work whose members include Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Doordash and Grubhub, Flex is incentivized to only share positive viewpoints on gig work.

In reality, drivers aren’t a monolith—some have become disillusioned with the promises made to them by rideshare companies once the curtain is pulled back and their exploitation becomes indisputable.

In July, a Massachusetts Uber driver filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging misclassification of its drivers as independent contractors. Uber uses this misclassification to avoid covering expenses like gas, insurance, and vehicle maintenance, since they were the responsibility of their “self-employed” contractor. It’s argued that the three qualifications in Massachusetts for independent contractor status aren’t met because:

1. Uber controls the routes and pay of their drivers while requiring them to meet a set of standards dictated by the company, so the work is not done “without direction or control of the employer.”
2. The services provided are not “performed outside the usual course of the employer’s business” (Uber is a company providing transportation to riders, which is fulfilled through the labor of their drivers).
3. Drivers do not have “their own, independent business or trade doing that kind of work” as Uber sets pay rates, can change them at their sole discretion and requires a set of standards its drivers and vehicles must meet (and can change those at will).

Food delivery and rideshare companies want to straddle the fence on employment, controlling every aspect of how drivers work through algorithms like employees, while stifling their ability to fully advocate for the same rights and benefits afforded to employees in Massachusetts. 

In 2024, More Perfect Union and Rideshare Guy put seven rideshare drivers in a room to see what fares they would be offered for identical trips and found that both Uber and Lyft’s algorithms routinely offered different prices to each driver.

Uber’s average wage gap difference was roughly 12 cents. “You know, to the naked eye, it may not be as much,” driver and Senior Contributor to Rideshare Guy Sergio Avedian told More Perfect Union. However, “A penny’s difference on 2.7 billion trips that Uber does every quarter is the idea.”

The Gig Economy Taking Healthcare

Executives in other industries have observed the chokehold platforms like Uber and Lyft have on their workers once they cannot do their job without it. Taking those lessons to heart, industries like healthcare have spent millions building their own.

When nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) with Brigham Nurses United (BNU) went on a one-day strike in July, the hospital locked them out for 4 additional days as retaliation, hiring 1,300 scab nurses to fill in for the 4,700 nurses on strike. Many of the scabs came from out-of-state, sourced from Colorado-based US Nursing (USN) who specialize in hiring nurses to scab during ongoing strikes. Similar to Amazon, they’ve begun outsourcing the labor to third-parties.

Their website hosts a portal where nurses can apply to fill shifts at hospitals where “Potential Strikes” loom. The nurses taking over these positions are paid comparable wages than the nurses they’re replacing, but their lack of hands-on knowledge that comes from working full time at a hospital can place patients at an increased risk of harm.

The job listings on “gig nursing” apps like Ingenovis Health’s often don’t list the facility in question, but anyone can make an account—no proof of credentials needed. Select “Strike Jobs” and set the location to Boston, MA to find nearly 300 USN listings, many of them starting October 11, for 2-week strike coverage at a hospital with a bed count of 846 and 59,715 emergency room visits.

According to the American Hospital Directory, BWH has a bed count of 846, and their ED’s About page says they “care for nearly 60,000 patients each year.” The listing has since changed from an “Active Strike” to “Potential Strike” with a date of “TBA” after the MNA announced the strike’s postponement.

93 percent of the 4,000 workers with BNU recently voted in favor of an open-ended, indefinite strike, originally slated to start October 14. The decision came after their historic strike in July had yet to yield results at the bargaining table, with negotiations between the MNA and MGB leadership at a standstill. 

The strike has since been postponed pending a vote on what MGB calls its “last, best and final offer,” though the MNA has emphasized that MGB refuses to budge on many key issues or engage in more bargaining sessions.

“Nurses continue seeking improvements on several key issues,” said an MNA spokesperson in a statement, including:

… Limits on MGB’s reliance on temporary nurses to support continuity and quality of care; affordable health insurance with meaningful plan choice; a differential for nurses required to float among units; and a meaningful cost-of-living wage increase.

Another strike is still on table if a contract fails to be ratified, even as MGB planned to once again work with USN to hire scabs for the strike. Since USN pays for each scab’s hotel and travel costs, they’re not classified as independent contractors. However, other gig nursing apps like CareRev have come under fire for allegedly misclassifying users as independent contractors.

These platforms allegedly use a form of dynamic pricing to pay each nurse that looks at a listing an algorithmically generated pay rate, a difference of cents or even dollars apart. It’s unclear how these gig nursing algorithms function, but it’s eerily similar to the ones used by Uber and Lyft. The “gigification” of healthcare has earned gig nursing platforms the name “Uber for Nurses.”

Central to the argument for gig nursing is in response to a so-called “nursing shortage.” But as recent data analysis from Time Magazine revealed, “there are substantively more actively licensed nurses than there are nursing jobs.” Framing the issue as a shortage obscures the real culprit—nurses are refusing to tolerate worsening working conditions.

Dr. Katie Wells, a Senior Fellow at the AI Now Institute researching tech in healthcare, spoke to Working Mass:

When I dug into the history of that, and I looked at all the scholars who had been studying labor markets for nurses, it became very clear that the rise of corporate medicine and the for-profit nature of a lot of hospital systems coincided with the degradation of working conditions for healthcare workers.

Dr. Wells is the co-author of a two-part “Uber for Nursing” study detailing the rise of gig work in the healthcare industry.

Although these platforms can be used to supply facilities with scabs, many are hired to account for lower levels of staffing. These platforms pit nurses against each other in a race to the bottom, where the nurse that wins a shift is the one willing to accept the lowest pay rate. Data the platform collects on nurses, such as credit card debt, helps it identify which nurses are more likely to accept lower pay.

A portion of the travel nurses using these apps are classified as independent contractors. They don’t receive health benefits, despite providing others with healthcare themselves.

These gig nursing platforms have been pushing for legislation that would classify the nurses who use their platforms as independent contractors. They’d be defined as different entities than existing healthcare staffing agencies, as AI Now’s study explains:

“These platforms are trying to convince policymakers that their business model is not that of a healthcare staffing agency, and that they instead should be recognized as a ‘healthcare worker platform’ or a ‘healthcare technology platform.’”

The language is similar to arguments made by Uber to Massachusetts legislators in 2024—that they’re closer to a “travel agency” than a transportation company—giving them the right to keep their drivers misclassified (a European court  saw through this argument). That defense was part of a case brought against Uber and Lyft by then-Attorney General Maura Healey, who alleged they were misclassifying their drivers.

The Classification Fight for Worker’s Rights

In exchange for a $175 million settlement with Uber and Lyft, current AG Andrea Joy Campbell dropped the case before the court could rule whether rideshare drivers count as independent contractors.

Campbell’s deal forced Uber and Lyft to abandon a similar ballot initiative to Prop. 22 in Massachusetts and afford drivers a few benefits. One of those benefits, which seemingly required the companies to pay drivers $32.50/hour, falls apart after reading the fine print.

That pay rate only applies to “active hours,” meaning it counts the time when drivers are either on their way to pick up a rider or taking them to their destination, but not the time in-between, referred to as “online working hours.”

“Time spent between trips, waiting for another ride request, or deadheading back from low-demand drop-off areas is neither compensated, nor counts towards the work time thresholds to qualify for sick time, health insurance stipends, and other benefits,” reporting from Forbes explains.

Drivers have attested online that “staying busy the entire hour is impossible due to the oversaturation of drivers.” By comparing active time to online working hours, Forbes calculated the utilization rate (the percentage of time drivers actually get paid for):

For example, if Uber pays $8 for a 12-minute trip, the driver’s pay rate per active hour would be $40 – above the mandated minimum. But if this is the only offer a driver receives and accepts over the next 48 minutes, the driver’s utilization rate would be 12/60= 20% (low!) and the gross pay per working hour would only be $8 (awful!). So, utilization rate is a critical determinant of driver earnings.

This doesn’t include the burden on drivers of paying for gas and insurance, taking another chunk out of their pay. With employee status, drivers could bargain for a contract to cement a firm minimum wage.

To their credit, Campbell’s office has kept their finger on the pulse of independent contractor misclassification. The AGO’s 2026 Labor day report released by its Fair Labor Division shows that in the last year, 1,500 workers across 60 companies were misclassified, leading to more than $2.1 million in penalties and restitution.

“When workers are misclassified as independent contractors instead of employees, they are denied basic workplace rights, including guaranteed minimum wage, overtime pay, timely compensation, accrued sick leave, and more,” Campbell’s office stated in an emailed statement to Working Mass. “Addressing this harmful practice and ensuring that every worker receives the protections they deserve is one of my top priorities.”

But until a firm decision is reached on how to classify rideshare and delivery drivers, a comprehensive answer on gig workers’ rights and the next steps organized labor will need to take will remain in limbo.

There aren’t signs that federal reclassification is on the docket anytime soon, making the state level (for now) the best way forward. Although Campbell’s settlement took a similar bill to Prop. 22 off the ballot, gig work platforms have proven they’ll spend millions to tip the scales in their favor. Gig nursing platforms aren’t introducing legislation in Massachusetts that would reclassify their business like they have in other states, but that could always change.

The conversation surrounding independent contracting finds itself in a sticky spot: many gig-workers prefer the flexibility provided by the work, and use it to supplement their income when their W-2 pay doesn’t cut it. Flexibility is attractive to workers, Dr. Wells explained, due to a lack of stable, guaranteed hours and a set schedule across the labor market. Knowing their schedules ahead of time gives workers more autonomy—scheduling a doctor’s visit or picking a child up from school becomes much easier.

“I think the reality is that there is a problem with existing labor markets in so many of these sectors and, at large, that has real purchase,” said Dr. Wells. “It has so many things at play that it means people are willing to trade all kinds of protections for the allure or the possibility of flexible schedules.”

The national minimum wage has sat at $7.25 since 2009, and the lack of universal healthcare is smothering everyday Americans in medical debt. The leading reported cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is medical debt, and we’re the only major country without a form of universal healthcare.

A long-term pathway to ending the exploitative nature of gig work and doing away with the independent contractor classification needs to come alongside ensuring workers don’t need to take on extra work to afford basic necessities, and without the threat of medical or student debt held over their heads.

In a world where everyone is guaranteed a living wage and health benefits aren’t up to the whims of your employer, gig workers could stick with their 9 to 5 or even keep driving if that’s what they’d prefer. It may sound like a pipe dream, but the system as it stands puts the working class at a severe disadvantage. Drivers can choose to pick their main job that now pays them a living wage or stay a driver, earning a living wage and receiving the same health benefits that their other job afforded them.

As companies celebrate record profits, the workers who generate that value see none of it reflected in their own paychecks. It’s undeniable that working as an independent contractor provides unmatched levels of autonomy, but that should not come at the cost of the benefits and workplace protections afforded as the bare minimum to every other worker in the country.

“The rise of [gig nursing] is a symptom of really broken labor conditions,” Dr. Wells said.

That’s how I try to think about it. And so when people say, ‘Well, let’s fix gig nursing,’ I think, ‘No, let’s fix the conditions that gave rise to gig nursing.’

Matt Wolfinger is a data journalist and a contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post When Workers, Driving Customers or Saving Lives in the ER, Become Independent Contractors appeared first on Working Mass.

By Dominick C. On Sunday, September 13th, a crowd of a few dozen organizers and tenants living at 150 and 154 Belmont Ave. swelled outside their buildings. Their voices rang […]

By Andrew W. Socialism is for everyone, and education provides power to the people. That’s why every issue of Garden State Socialist features this column, Socialist Stories: a short, educational […]

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.

We, the undersigned DSA chapters of the State of Minnesota, denounce and strongly condemn the escalation of xenophobic rhetoric that the Trump administration is intentionally directing at our communities. The President’s recent othering and dehumanizing of Minnesota's Somali communities encourages violence, both from his supporters and the violent and unaccountable national security state.

Minnesota is stronger because of our Somali and other immigrant communities. Immigrants are our friends, co-workers, teachers, community leaders, and more. As Minnesotans, we know who we are and we won’t fall for dishonest actors spreading disinformation and hateful, divisive rhetoric about our immigrant neighbors. No Minnesotan should feel unsafe or unwelcome because of their faith, heritage, or background. We stand in solidarity with our Somali and immigrant neighbors, and the Minnesota 15 who are facing retaliatory punishment for standing alongside our community. 

This past winter, armed agents of the fascist federal government attempted to tear down our communities by force. But Minnesotans’ depth of organized resistance cannot be dismantled. We have organized by the thousands across race, class, and faith to effectively defend our neighbors and communities. We built a decentralized network based on the collective awareness and shared vision that we all deserve to live, thrive, and be protected in our places of work, worship, and homes. We have shown the world that the vast majority of Americans will not tolerate our communities being turned into high tech laboratories of surveillance and occupation. We have shown the world that we will not accept having our hardworking neighbors terrorized and disappeared out of their homes. 

In response to our show of street power, fascist politicians are once again using lies about immigrants in an attempt to incite fear, violence, and division. They think this tactic will help them win the upcoming midterm elections, but we are united in our vision for justice, liberation, and a better world. They fear our movements because we are powerful, principled, and we are angry. 

As the Minnesota chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, we encourage our members and our neighbors to keep showing up for one another. Join your neighborhood group, host a community dinner, check in with a friend, get plugged into rapid response, and of course, join DSA and organize your community!

Stay strong. Solidarity and sincerity forever.

SIGNED: Twin Ports DSA, Twin Cities DSA, Brainerd Lakes Area DSA, St. Cloud DSA, Red River Valley DSA, Southeast Minnesota DSA