Governor Jeff Landry halts an election already under way and the legislature redraws the state's electoral map

The post Black Voting Rights Under Attack in Louisiana appeared first on Democratic Left.

“…For anybody who destroys a single life it is counted as if he destroyed an entire world, and for anybody who preserves a single life it is counted as if he preserved an entire world.” – Sanhedrin 4:9:1

This article is not intended to shock the reader as a means of persuasion, but it does contain some references to war crimes and crimes against civilians. Proceed with caution.

There is nothing valorous about war. It is one of the greatest evils of humanity. In the 20th century alone, well over one hundred million people were murdered in the course of armed conflict, and millions more died of the deprivation and disease war brought to their communities. The vast majority of those casualties were civilians and conscripts who had no way to avoid their lives being destroyed by the tools of warfare.

In the West, fear of another global conflict that could directly touch the U.S. and Europe faded in the three decades following the end of the Cold War. Russia was no longer the leader of an explicitly anti-Western bloc of nations; China was a dependable trading partner of the U.S.; and both allowed the U.S. to enforce its will on the Global South and Middle Eastern countries including Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The U.S. exercised its imperial influence on these countries under the guise of “nation -building” or “safeguarding democracy,” with limited success. Media figures and politicians actively encouraged people in the West to ignore the conflicts they engineered elsewhere. They urged us to treat their wars as simultaneously righteous manifestations of democracy, necessary civil rights interventions, distant and ancient conflicts, and complicated statecraft irrelevant to the life of the average citizen.

War no longer feels so distant. In 2022, Russia’s war in Ukraine brought an active war zone to the borders of the European Union for the first time in two decades. The following year, Israel launched a campaign of genocide to permanently end the possibility of an independent Palestine. This campaign has repeatedly expanded into attacks on neighboring states to force them to submit to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East, and the Israeli far right dreams of conquering large swaths of the region.

These developments alone threatened global peace, but it was Donald Trump who took the idea of unlimited war to a new level. He has used his unilateral authority as “Commander-in-Chief” of the U.S. armed forces to illegally seize and destroy boats on the open sea, kidnap the President of Venezuela, repeatedly threaten an invasion of Greenland, illegally blockade the island of Cuba, and launch a war against Iran that began with the assassination of entire sections of the Iranian government, in flagrant violation of the laws of armed conflict. He has also repeatedly floated the idea of using the U.S. military as a domestic occupying force to illegally cement his dictatorial rule.

At a time when global conflict is becoming more common and more likely to escalate, we must remember that there is no such thing as a just war. There is no such thing as a necessary war. Waging war is a crime committed against working people and the most vulnerable in any society.

We must stand up as one and reject war unequivocally.

* * *

All U.S. presidents of the 21st century have unilaterally expanded their military power. After the political and military disaster of the Vietnam War, Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution into law. This law reasserted its authority to regulate the president’s ability to wage war by imposing time limits on the amount of time a military action can continue without congressional approval. In recent decades, Congress has consistently refused to hold the president to account for repeated violations of this law.

In the patriotic frenzy following the September 11th Attacks, Congress granted sweeping powers to President George W. Bush to intervene anywhere in the Middle East through the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It was extremely broad, granting the president the authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons”. Bush used this authorization to justify the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as military strikes across the greater Middle East. These wars wasted trillions of dollars, killed nearly one million people, destabilized the region, and reasserted a presidential prerogative to wage ill-conceived wars anywhere in the world.

Obama quietly expanded his military authority through his extensive use of drone warfare, asserting his right to order the killing of any person anywhere in the world. Biden made less intensive use of drones than Obama, but he did not take any steps to limit the powers of future presidents. He does deserve some credit for ending of the twenty-year war in Afghanistan, though his long history of support for war, militarism, and empire building, and the subsequent resurgence of reactionary rule in that country, must also be taken into account in any holistic evaluation of his record.

Trump has taken the power to wage war to the extreme, untethered as he is by any sense of morality or propriety. He imagines his powers as president to be nearly absolute, and there is no telling how far he may escalate his military recklessness as he becomes increasingly unpopular, embattled, and unhinged.

All presidents have known on some level that what they are doing is morally and legally indefensible. The U.S. does not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court (ICC), in large part because politicians fear it could prosecute U.S. military and civilian leaders for the numerous war crimes they have committed over the last five decades.

The Bush administration took this exceptionalism a step further. In 2002, Bush signed a law (nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act”) authorizing the President to “to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any person […] who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court,” which includes the use of military force to invade the headquarters of the ICC in the Hague, Netherlands. This law is still on the books today and could be invoked by Trump or any future president.

* * *

Liberals have justified war for centuries, treating it as another tool in the geopolitical arsenal. This is why Democratic establishment figures like Chuck Schumer have quietly cheered Trump on in Iran from the sidelines. They disagree with Trump’s procedural ineptitude, not his stance on the necessity of bombing Iranian cities. They see war as an extension of normal political levers of power.

Meanwhile, the far-right treats war as a rite of passage, the ultimate way to prove valor, courage, and loyalty to their ultranationalist project. To that end, they use the violence of war as a way to motivate their followers to interpersonal violence, turning the methods of imperial domination perfected thousands of miles away on their own people.

Trump has repeatedly shown that he engages with the seriousness and tragedy of war as if it were an exercise in childish imagination. He has repeatedly insisted that military personnel killed in action are “suckers” and “losers.” His administration spliced footage from the video game Call of Duty into a montage of missile strikes on Iran. He nonsensically claims that a new class of U.S. battleships (widely considered to be nearly a century out-of-date in an era of drones and high-altitude precision air strikes) will be “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” as if he were taunting a schoolmate on the playground.

If it is true that “war is all hell,” as the famous and earnestly serious appeal to peace by Civil War-era General William Tecumseh Sherman has it, then Trump, self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, and their brand of chickenhawks imagine themselves to be the Doom Slayer. In their minds, they are the macho heroes of a video game, gunning down endless waves of demonic enemies with no sense of danger, consequence, or moral weight.

As central as violence is to the far-right project in America, Trump has normalized engaging with it in a totally unserious way. The Bush administration spent nearly a year lying to sell the war in Iraq to the American people; Trump launched his strikes on Iran effectively without warning, and has faced no consequences for doing so.

* * *

The reality both factions deliberately obfuscate is that civilians always bear the overwhelming cost of war. The numbers are horrific in their own right, but they get worse when we consider that record numbers of civilians have been displaced by armed conflict – over 122 million as of 2025. War crimes against civilians are also rising at an alarming rate, in part due to a lack of regard for international agreements and the tendency of far-right governments to use dehumanizing rhetoric and escalating violence to achieve foreign policy goals.

These trends have only become more acute in the era of unrestricted drone warfare, where soldiers use modified Xbox controllers to pilot weapons of war from air-conditioned bases. The use of enormously powerful explosives to “mistakenly” destroy civilian targets no longer requires risking the lives of U.S. military personnel. These drones are the bane of the existence of millions across the Middle East, parts of Africa, and across the world, and they are the ultimate expression of the U.S. war machine’s demand that it be allowed to violate the sovereignty of any nation anywhere in the world to assassinate its enemies.

Most of the wars raging around the world today are not conflicts between two well-defined nation states. They are most often messy civil wars with multiple competing sides that drag on for decades with no end in sight. There is no valor to be had in such a war, only grinding death.

Embargos and sweeping economic sanctions are warfare by other means. They are more palatable in foreign policy circles because they are a relatively “easy” way to politically coerce smaller, less powerful economies that do not require commitment of soldiers or materiel. But the overwhelming costs of embargoes are felt by the poorest civilians, not leaders. As one academic report puts it: “Economic sanctions are the modern equivalent of a siege.” Sanctions impose immense hardship on civilian populations and often cause mass deprivation and even starvation.

Sanctions are also a way to “punish” left-wing governments for adopting pro-worker policies that harm foreign interests. For example, the U.N. estimates that the U.S. has drained $130 billion from the Cuban economy since the blockade was imposed in the early 1960s; without the blockade, it is easy to imagine that Cuba’s economy could be as strong as Vietnam’s, which has experienced immense growth in the past few decades. An example of socialism “working” in a country with so much cultural contact with the U.S. would be destabilizing to neoliberal and neo-fascist political narratives, however, which is why our government has repeatedly intervened to sabotage left-wing governments around the world innumerable times in the last hundred years.

* * *

Trump’s war in Iran deserves special consideration in all this, in part because it is arguably the most ill-conceived war in American history. Even David Frum, the morally detestable cheerleader for the Iraq War, openly states that Trump started this war on a “whim.”

In addition to serving as a billion-dollar market manipulation to enrich himself and his allies, Trump’s Iran war is a test to see if his political base will let him get away with genocide, as evidenced by his suggestion last month that he would destroy Iranian civilization. Every indication shows that they will.

Right now, the only thing preventing the president from launching an unprovoked nuclear strike against a non-nuclear state is the kind of unwritten consensus Trump loves to violate. Even the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization that created and maintains the “Doomsday Clock,” is expressing alarm at the possibility. Trump recently insisted that he has no intention to use a nuclear weapon against Iran, but there is no reason to think he wouldn’t change his mind at any time in the next two and a half years.

A nuclear strike on a civilian population is unquestionably a method of genocide carried out in a matter of hours rather than months or years. It also inflicts unimaginable and wholly unnecessary physical suffering on survivors. Contrary to popular consensus, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not militarily justifiable. Seventeen years ago, comedian Jon Stewart rightfully stated that Harry Truman should be considered a war criminal for his decision to use nuclear weapons on civilians. America being what it is, he was forced to apologize for his remarks.

The world is now one tweet away from Trump declaring that the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against his enemies anywhere in the world is permissible under U.S. and international law. Such a proclamation and the accompanying use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state would unleash an unimaginable new era of terror on the world.

* * *

We live in a dangerous time. As tempting as it might be for the left to cheer on the collapse of the American global military hegemony, what follows will almost certainly be worse. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Trump, and any number of tinpot authoritarians cannot be left to carve up the world into political and economic spheres of influence. This is exactly what the current international system was set up to prevent. We must remember that the laws of that system were written in the blood spilled by countless millions in the Second World War. If we allow those institutions to crumble, that horror will descend on a new generation.

There is not a single armed conflict the United States has waged since the Second World War that was morally or politically justified against its human cost. In most U.S. political discourse, this would be considered an eminently radical statement. But if we are to stand with oppressed people everywhere around the world, the victims of war are among the highest on the list of those who need and deserve our solidarity.

There is no such thing as a just war, or a justifiable war. We do not need to be “bleeding hearts” to recognize that war has never served our interests as working people, and that innocents bear the overwhelming cost of wars waged for territory, wealth, geopolitical influence, “regime change,” and genocide.

International law is unusually sweeping in allowing United Nations member states to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world. Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, and all manner of other butchers and warmongers can and must be held accountable for their horrible deeds. There is no statute of limitations to expire. Every war criminal is subject to prosecution for the rest of their natural life.

It is up to us to build a world where justice for the victims of war is not only possible, but inevitable – a world in which war itself is rendered obsolete as a tool of punishment, extraction, and oppression.

The post War is a Blight on Humanity appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

At the upcoming Chicago Democratic Socialists of America chapter convention on June 6, members will debate a proposed rewrite of our chapter’s bylaws. This proposal was the product of the Local Democracy Commission (LDC), an appointed body of seven members tasked with developing a comprehensive consensus package of structural reforms to improve the day-to-day operations of our chapter.  

Our commission was able to agree on the vast majority of changes to the bylaws, and made substantive improvements and clarifications that we all believe will greatly benefit the chapter. But the commissioners had some substantial disagreements on how to structure the Executive Committee (EC). A majority of the commissioners supported a near-identical version of the proposal which was brought forward at the March General Chapter Meeting (GCM) and failed to secure the two-thirds majority of votes needed to adopt a change to the bylaws. We’re happy that the LDC was able to agree on so much, but we think the membership should have the option to choose between the two visions for the chapter’s executive leadership. 

Our concerns aren’t solely structural: we see the makeup of the EC as a fundamental political and organizing question as well, and we feel a few key changes are still needed to maintain structural connections between the membership and leadership, help the leadership move the membership behind chapter priorities, and limit the potential for siloing. So, in keeping with the guidelines set during the establishment of the LDC, we’re proposing an amendment to address these concerns.

Our Proposal

Currently, the EC is composed of eight officers and proportional representation from the territorial branches, as well as a Labor Branch delegate and a YDSA delegate. As the chapter has grown, so has the EC; the body is set to have roughly 30 members in June. Our existing bylaws also include a provision that empowers the EC to appoint a Steering Committee (SC) to handle many of the day-to-day issues that require leadership attention but don’t call for substantive debate, such as small expenses or approvals of minor requests from chapter groups. Any decision made by the SC can be overturned or revised by a vote of the full EC.

The proposal that was submitted at the March GCM reduced the EC to 11 members by eliminating all branch representation, and removing the voting authority of the Political Education Coordinator, among others. The base proposal also did not formalize an SC to handle day-to-day administrative decisions within the executive body. The main substantive difference between the March GCM proposal and the one introduced by the commissioners who supported it was the inclusion of a seat for a “labor coordinator” elected by the entire membership, rather than a delegate elected by the Labor Branch, in the way all other branch delegate seats are currently elected. We felt this change did not substantively address the concerns that members had with the earlier versions of the proposal, and did not move far enough from the failed March proposal to seek consensus and compromise with the concerns then expressed. 

We agree with the other commissioners that, because the demands of executive-level leadership can lead to burnout, a much smaller executive body is needed to allow for sustainable middle-layer organizational development. But we need a political leadership that is present across the chapter, can move an all-volunteer membership through organic connections, can coordinate operational units, and, critically, has an incentive to build consensus. 

We believe that by removing branch delegates and not formalizing an SC, the base proposal actually risks working against these interests. On the contrary, that structure would likely create a greater burden for EC members, sever the point of connection between branch-level leadership and the central executive body, and set up potentially adversarial relationships between the executive leadership and the branches.

Our alternative proposal reduces the EC by about 50% from its projected June size, down to 16 seats. This EC would still include an SC composed of seven members — the two Co-Chairs, Secretary, and four “at-large” members without specific officer duties elected by the full membership — to free up valuable organizing capacity for EC members and open up more space at EC meetings for political discussion. Its minimum 4-vote threshold keeps it in line with the minimum vote threshold of the base proposal, which has a quorum of 6 for the 12-person EC.

Ten of the 16 EC members would be elected by the full membership of the chapter: two Co-Chairs, Secretary, Treasurer, Membership Engagement Coordinator, and Political Education Coordinator, and the four at-large members. Other officer-level positions, such as Communications and Campaigns, could be opened up to the membership or appointed from among the EC’s elected at-large members, as the EC or GCM decides. The four territorial branches and the institutional branches (e.g., the Labor Branch) would each have one delegate, as would YDSA. 

Ten generally-elected members and six branch delegates ensures a structural majority for generally elected members. The territorial branch delegates would be elected by the membership of the branch and would have a seat on the branch steering committee. The Labor Branch delegate would be elected by the Labor Branch members, and the YDSA delegate would be elected by local YDSA chapters.

Our Reasoning

This proposal addresses the major pain points members raised in our outreach as commissioners: that branch leadership should be able to focus primarily on branch work; that generally elected members should hold the majority of elected seats; that we need a nimble body to handle day-to-day administrative and political decisions; and that the executive body should have fewer seats to encourage more competitive elections. 

As part of our work, members of the LDC looked at the structures of similar-sized chapters with high recruitment and retention statistics. The 16-member EC in our proposal is in line with three high-performing chapters in our tier of membership size: Portland DSA (the most successful chapter at recruitment and retention outside of New York City) has 14 seats; Twin Cities DSA had between 14 and 17 seats until February 2026 (including branch and labor delegates); and Philadelphia DSA has approximately 15. There are other well-performing chapters with smaller bodies, but Portland, Twin Cities, and Philadelphia were the best-performing in recruitment and retention. (See Tables 1 and 2 for more context on these figures;  “LQR Rate” is the rate of “lapsers and quitters minus reactivators,” a metric that essentially reflects member attrition.) Portland in particular has had much recent electoral and labor organizing successes.

However, there is an important caveat: we do not believe that success follows from structure itself. As the tables below show, there is not a strong correlation between things like EC size, proportion of at-large members, or number of officers, and different metrics of success. What we found, however, was that of the most quantitatively successful chapters we identified, 14-17 was a common and reasonable range. 

Certain elements of our EC’s composition have significant impact on the organizational health and functioning of the entire chapter, and we want to state those stakes clearly. 

Branches Matter! 

This is a belief we share with the other commissioners, who have argued that branch delegates should be removed from the EC to free them up to focus on the work of expanding branch-level organizing. While we don’t disagree with the spirit of that argument, we’ve instead proposed that each branch be given one delegate seat on the EC to maintain a formal connection between each branch and the central leadership body. 

We believe that direct connection between branches and the EC is necessary to avoid siloing or pushing branch leadership to take on even more work to stay abreast of developments across the chapter and in leadership. Labor Branch already has this setup within the current EC: One dedicated delegate is tasked with liaising between the branch and the leadership as a voting EC member with substantive input, while the rest of their SC dedicates its organizing efforts towards branch and chapter work. This has been an effective model, and we believe it will serve the chapter’s operations well.

The EC is Not a Legislature—The GCMs Are

We see the function of chapter leaders elected to the EC not as representatives who advocate on behalf of a constituency, but as leaders who facilitate the work of the chapter by being embedded in it. The EC is not a legislature—that’s the GCM. Rather, it is a body delegated to efficiently execute the will of the membership between GCMs.  

What’s more, the high rate of member turnover means that, at any given time, a significant portion of the membership aren’t connected to its leaders and didn’t vote in the most recent leadership election. In a typical year, 18-25% of members lapse or quit, while 15-25% of the chapter consists of new members recruited that year — meaning roughly 35-50% of the membership composition turns over annually, presenting major operational challenges for even the strongest chapters.

Conclusion

Should this amendment fail, we are concerned that the EC will become disconnected from chapter formations, sitting above them and overly factionalized in the way similar structures in other chapters have been prone to factional domination. There is also a real risk of this structure creating an adversarial relationship between leadership and membership, with an EC that is factionally proportional but not set up to implement the inherent compromises that emerge from GCM decisions, in part because it will not be composed of operational units. Most importantly, we are concerned that without this amendment, the EC may drift from its practical leadership function and begin to act more as a policy-making body detached from the membership.

In developing this amendment, we’ve prioritized a scientific approach, drawing from recruitment and retention data from comparable chapters, our own chapter’s recruitment and retention data over time, an analysis of the purpose of an executive executory body versus a legislative body, and a practical study of how members become organically connected to the central leadership. We believe this proposal is a balanced compromise between the original proposal that failed at the March GCM and what we have seen work in Chicago and comparable chapters. Our proposed amendment addresses the consensus complaints with our current structure, while holding the chapter together at the highest level. We hope the membership will agree, and consider voting in support of our amendment. 

Additional Findings

For members’ convenience and reference, here are some additional data that we put together in the course of our research. There was more, but less relevant here.

Table: Metric 1. This shows the membership density of “Huge” and “Extra-Large” DSA chapters based on members per 1,000 residents in their territory. Most chapters are within range of each other; there are local factors that are important (such as geographic spread) and contextual politics is likely heavily determinative of this figure.

Table: Metric 2. This is a simple table showing the percentage of members in a chapter who either pay monthly dues or are enrolled in Solidarity/Income-Based Dues (SIBD), a measure of commitment intensity.

The post A Vision for a Lean, Political, and Effective Executive Committee appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

DSA candidates win state house seats in Kentucky, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, advance in Georgia mayoral race. Results updated as of 7:30 a.m. ET May 20.

The post LIVE BLOG: RABB WINS HOUSE RACE appeared first on Democratic Left.

Shasta County DSA faces the challenge of organizing in a rural, heavily Republican corner of far northern California — but years of persistent effort have paid off.

The post North California Home to New DSA Chapter appeared first on Democratic Left.

The candidate for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District is one of at least 14 DSA candidates on the ballot Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Oregon, and Kentucky.

The post Chris Rabb Makes the Establishment Nervous appeared first on Democratic Left.

A friendly boss and a healthy wage are increasingly rare, but do workers lucky enough to have both need a union?

The post I have a good boss. Do I still need a union? appeared first on EWOC.

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By: Chris Brady, James N, Dan Albright, Mitch Gayns

MASSACHUSETTS – Working people and unionists coalesced in May Day events throughout Massachusetts on May 1, 2026, which is likely to be seen as a moment of a historic cultural revival for the holiday in the United States.

Also known as International Workers Day, May Day honors the martyrs of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in the fight for the 8-hour workday. May Day is a seminal holiday across most of the world, where red banners are unfurled down major thoroughfares, but the holiday has largely been confined to the margins on its home turf of the United States. Instead, influenced by anti-labor sentiments, the United States moved to officialize and honor the much more patriotic Labor Day on an entirely different part of the calendar.

But as Working Mass uncovered in several events and actions in Massachusetts throughout the day, May Day is turning mainstream once again. The mainstream ‘No Kings’ pages share ads about May Day actions in their own networks that have emerged since Trump’s election, the unions use the holiday for actions, and pro-worker organizations hold their socials with genuine joy everywhere from Boston to Worcester to Holyoke. While May Day revives across the country in massive actions of tens of thousands from New York to Portland to Minneapolis, in Massachusetts, May Day shows a labor movement captured in time.

Boston Logan Workers Take Off

EAST BOSTON – The day’s packed itinerary kicked off with the Coalition of Boston Logan Airport Workers (CLAW) rallying at East Boston Memorial Park. CLAW, a consolidated coalitioon of ten unions that split bargaining representation of Boston Logan’s pilots, flight attendants, food service workers, and baggage handlers, had rallied between four and five hundred workers to march.

One of the key issues the unions marched against alongside their allies was a management policy that limited pickets on airport property to an arbitrary ten people, effectively demobilizing workers. Luke Williams, President of the Boston Association of Flight Attendants, told Working Mass:

We’ve been told if United Airlines is having a picket today, then American can’t have a picket, or you can have five and five people each and split it. We’ve been limited to ten people for any action at the airport – point blank.

Williams represents 900 flight attendants at Logan.

Addressing the limitation, Rep. Ayanna Pressley highlighted the importance of organizing against authoritarianism:

We need to be able to organize to apply pressure…no one should be intimidated from exercising their constitutional right to free speech.

Workers also rallied for better wages and healthcare, many wearing lobster iconography. Signs read “CLAWing back our rights.”

Four to five hundred unionists marched from Memorial Park to Logan Airport. At the edge of airport property, an airport management official flanked by state police officers forced the march to stop, which action planners anticipated. In a dramatic exchange with hundreds of workers looking on, management spoke to SEIU 32BJ Executive Vice President Kevin Brown.

According to Brown in an announcement to the crowd, management had “committed that they will review the policy so that airport workers can protest with more than ten people at a time.” The primary demand of CLAW, in its action, had been won.

Worcester Celebrates its Annual May Day, Alongside Rhode Islanders

WORCESTER — Workers across trades, academia, and professions gathered in University Park around 6 p.m. on Friday, May 1st, for the Worcester DSA’s annual May Day rally. Speakers from the Worcester and Rhode Island DSA spoke to working people across the crowd with a clear message: generations of workers across the world have fought, and continue to fight, for a better world.

Worcester DSA Steering Committee member Jake S read a speech from Peter Fay, a longtime labor organizer and Rhode Island DSA member. Fay’s speech traced the history of the labor movement in the city and its bond with immigrants, often victims of capitalism.

“We didn’t come here looking for freedom or entrepreneurship,” he said.  “We came because capital pushed our ancestors off of their land.”

Political violence against communists, socialists, and labor organizers in the early 20th century spread across the country. The textile mills and factories across New England were home to workers fighting for a better world, like labor leader “Seditious Annie” Anne Burlak Timpson, and the capital looking to stop them. 

Fay said:

She unflinchingly organized Black and white workers together, despite all of capital’s best attempts to set them against each other, to buy off and bribe some at the expense of others.

One common theme throughout the rally was the failure of both political parties in America, and their unified support of international violence. James L said:

A U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine, war in Iran, war in Lebanon, rampant looting of public funds by conspiring billionaires, attacks on the rights of trans people, abduction, extraordinary rendition, and murder of immigrants, political dissidents, now heads of state in Venezuela and Iran, by our completely unaccountable government. Most of the so-called opposition party happy to collaborate, sign off and roll over.

James noted Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) called for a general strike last year, but offered no vision, organizational structure, or demands for a general strike.

While speakers noted the failures of the two dominant political parties, the historic and ongoing repression of workers rights, and capital’s division of the working class, all offered a message of hope and solidarity that starts with labor organization. Cayla Dodd, a bus driver, union activist, and member of IBT Local 170, said:

The problem isn’t that workers are asking for too much, the problem is that capitalism requires workers to live on too little. It requires instability. It requires fear. It requires workers to be one emergency away from disaster, because a worker who is scared of losing everything is easier to control. That’s why they hate workers talking to each other, because the moments that workers stop seeing ourselves as isolated individuals and start seeing ourselves as a class, everything changes.

Boston Worker Organizations Touch Grass

NORTH END – Back in Boston, as the airport action concluded, socialists gathered in a harbor park in the North End at midday to socialize and hear speakers from the labor movement.

Evan McKay, Boston DSA-endorsed candidate for state representative in the 25th Middlesex District, spoke on how union work fighting harassment as President of Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU), currently on strike, led them to socialism:

We need to have the union in these circumstances. That was one of the things that brought me into socialism, the sense that we need to have fighting unions in order to take on these struggles.

Energy at Field Day was high. Organizers had set up a volleyball net in the corner of the field. Although the net was left largely unused, organizers assured Working Mass that DSA is actually a very athletic group. Socialist soccer jerseys were on display, and given the high level of active recruitment for the Boston chapter’s running league, they may have a point.

Tables prominently featured the chapter’s campaigns for rent control in Massachusetts, an upcoming socialist job fair, as well as pamphlets for different working groups and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

Dr. Anisah Hashmi, a Resident Physician at Boston Medical Center and a delegate for the Committee for Interns and Residents (CIR-SEIU) compared the conditions of resident physicians to academic workers.

Like grad workers, hospital corporations label us students and trainees. It’s a slap in the face to the 80-hour work weeks that we put in to deliver high quality patient care. It’s unsustainable to expect us to fully show up for our patients as we struggle to afford to live in the city of Boston.

DSA then marched through Downtown Crossing to join the rest of the labor movement for the premier rally at the Boston Common.

On May Day, Western Mass Shows Itself as Focal Point for a More Militant Labor Movement

This was originally published as video footage for Working Mass digital on Instagram. Reporting was supplemented for print.

HOLYOKE – Even further west from Worcester, in the River Valley, hundreds of unionists and workers marched through downtown Holyoke to rally for working peoples’ rights and pay and against war, as well as signal a new moment in the history of the Western Mass labor movement.

The rally was organized by the Western Mass Labor Federation and led by the Holyoke Teachers Association. Holyoke teachers are approaching a full year without a contract, and centered the day’s militancy around pressuring Mayor Garcia and statewide leaders.

Labor Federation President Jeff Jones spoke to Working Mass about the systemic defunding of education.

They never seem to have a problem allocating money for war, but the moment we talk about funding schools like these Holyoke teachers are here today, all of a sudden it’s a problem, and all of a sudden we can’t accommodate it.

Western Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley is a historic progressive stronghold with a strong labor history, dominated by industries in higher education and agriculture. Holyoke has the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans per capita outside of Puerto Rico.

The labor collective has been intentional about cultivating militancy and rank-and-file democracy. According to Ethel Everett, a social worker and union leader with SEIU, innovation in the labor movement is urgently needed.

We have these shared values about what’s happening in this country, what’s happening in this world. We have to think differently and not be so focused on this is the way labor has always been.

The connection to May Day was also intentional, organizers argue. “May Day is Workers’ Day, a communist holiday,” said Barbara Madeloni, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and Education Coordinator at Labor Notes. She continued:

The history of May Day is the history of working people accessing the fullness of their collective power to say, damn it, these are our demands and we’re going to do whatever we need to do to win those demands.

Western Mass unionists are pushing their politics upward.

The Western Mass Area Labor Federation has moved beyond traditional bread-and-butter unionism: launching political education programs, building deeper ties with rank-and-file workers, supporting new organizing in collaboration with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee and River Valley DSA, and taking public positions on international issues that many U.S. labor bodies have avoided.

In November 2023, the federation voted unanimously to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, breaking a gag order imposed by the national AFL-CIO on the issue. In 2024, it went further, backing a call for an arms embargo. And this year, the federation condemned the war with Iran and what it described as the kidnapping of Venezuela’s head of state.

Holyoke teachers are still fighting for a contract. But on May Day and after, they will be supported by the collective Western Mass. labor movement. The rest of the country would benefit from taking notes on how labor itself can support the networks of the rank-and-file across the region.

Boston Teachers Fight Cuts and Pour Hundreds Into the Common

BOSTON COMMON – In a finale of the day before workers wrapped up to hit bars and socials, workers marched on the Common. The Boston Teachers Union (BTU) was a key player in the rally at Boston’s traditional heart, aimed directly at Mayor Michelle Wu: stop the layoffs. 

BTU speakers noted that the Mayor’s proposed budget spared all departments from staffing cuts – with the exception of 400 teachers and paraprofessionals at Boston Public Schools.

While the Mayor and major news outlets cite enrollment declines of 3-4%, these cuts represent more than 5% of total staff, with the paraprofessionals (who are overwhelmingly Black and Latino) especially hard hit. These cuts are contradictory to BPS’s stated desire to move toward a ‘co-teaching’ model, the gold standard in K-12 education finally beginning implementation due to the unrelenting advocacy of students, parents, and educators.

Boston Public Schools (BPS), and the national education landscape at large, has been constrained by Medicaid cuts increasing the city’s healthcare cost burden and attack on immigrants undercutting student enrollment.

The Mayor chose to cut critical education staff at a time when they are needed more than ever. Her decision is all the more alarming in contrast to her laissez-faire attitude toward police overtime, which consistently lands 70-100% over budget, significantly higher than her predecessor Mayor Walsh.

Shortly afterward, at the Boston Common, BTU joined hundreds of workers who turned out for the keynote May Day event. A tapestry of eclectic unions, pro-worker organizations, and liberal groups joined together with shared interest in fighting for the labor movement.

“Today is International Workers Day,” said Greater Boston Labor Council President Darlene Lombos. Lombos explicitly acknowledging the legacy of the Haymarket Massacre as “the courage and the sacrifice of those majority immigrant workers sent a beacon seen around the world.”

Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL)-endorsed U.S. Senate candidate Joe Tache spoke about the suppression of May Day actions in the United States:

For the most part, May Day in our country has been pushed to the margins, because the billionaires and the politicians that represent them, don’t want us to know our history. But here in Boston we’re shaking things up…we’re putting May Day back on the table.

DSA wrapped up the rally marathon at Democracy Brewing, a worker-owned cooperative near the center of the city and host to many worker-organized meetings. Discussions turned to moving workers from mobilizing to organizing. The central challenge remains taking energy from the rally turnout and funneling it into sustained political action. But after reclaiming May Day, workers are one step closer to doing just that.

Chris Brady is a member of Boston DSA and an editor of Working Mass.

James N is a member of Worcester DSA and contributing writer to Working Mass.

Dan Albright is the chair and an editor of Working Mass.

Mitch Gayns is a digital creator and campaign organizer based north of Boston.

The post May Day is Turning Mainstream Again appeared first on Working Mass.

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Kansas City DSA has grown faster than similarly-sized DSA chapters during the post-election membership surge. A member of KC chapter leadership explains the strategy behind the surge.

The post Reflections on the “Missouri Miracle” appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Marckus T

So I didn’t vote in last Tuesday’s primary. For someone deeply invested in political change, staying home wasn’t just me being apathetic. It was a conscious choice because looking at the Ohio ballot, there was absolutely no revolutionary opposition to the status quo. The results across the state aren’t just disappointing. They basically show how the Democratic Party establishment keeps a stranglehold on politics by limiting who is even “viable” to run.

For us socialists, it really highlights the massive gap between having radical rhetoric and actually having the organized material power to challenge the system. We talk a lot about material dialectics, and this primary is a perfect social experiment playing out in real time. The establishment applied their pressure, the progressive wing failed to organize a material counter-pressure, and the resulting synthesis is just more of the exact same stagnant politics that have been failing working-class Ohioans for decades.

The Uncontested Gubernatorial Illusion

Take the race for Governor. Amy Acton ran completely unopposed. We basically had no choice on state leadership. This lack of competition is just classic managed democracy, where the establishment handpicks candidates so a left-wing insurgency can’t even get off the ground.

When the party only gives you one path, voting is just a formality and not actual working-class agency. The Ohio Democratic Party would rather run a completely safe, uncontested moderate and lose to a Republican than risk a primary where a socialist or true progressive might actually agitate the working class and shift the conversation. They make the barrier to entry so high with signature requirements and fundraising expectations that grassroots campaigns are starved out before they even file their paperwork. This isn’t an accident. It is a calculated structural bottleneck designed to keep working people choosing between two flavors of capitalism.

Forhan and the Failure of Individualist Insurgency

Then there’s the Attorney General race, which was the only real clash between a self-described radical and the party machine. Elliot Forhan getting crushed by over 20 points is a huge lesson for our movement. It proves that rhetoric is not organization. Forhan ran a really lackluster campaign that was totally isolated from work unions and socialist infrastructure.

There’s a huge difference between shallow individualist advocacy and deep structural organizing. Forhan’s campaign was flawed by design because he substituted radical aesthetics for actual base-building. In the age of social media, it is really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that going viral or having edgy talking points translates to actual votes. But political power doesn’t come from a Twitter following. It comes from knocking on doors, having hundreds of one-on-one conversations, and building trust in working-class neighborhoods.

Because he couldn’t unify the left in Ohio or build a dedicated mass base, his insurgency just got flattened by the party’s money and institutional weight. Doing true organizing for a candidacy means doing the rigorous and unglamorous work of building collective power before the election, not just making a bunch of noise during it. You cannot substitute ego for an organized mass base.

The Sherrod Paradox

Sherrod Brown’s dominance is still a thing because he remains the only prominent figure using a pro-worker “Dignity of Work” narrative. He is obviously not a socialist, but the vacuum to his left exists because we haven’t built a competing power base capable of offering a materialist alternative for the working class. Him winning by 90% isn’t a total endorsement of his politics, it’s just the complete absence of a radical challenge from within the Democratic Party.

While Greg Levy is providing an alternative by running as an independent, this primary proves the Democratic establishment faces zero internal threat from the left. And frankly, we have to be honest about the material reality of third-party runs right now. The current political atmosphere is so hostile and unstable that running outside the two-party system just isn’t a realistic tactic for us yet. It is a sad reality, but the structural barriers are simply too high. Until we build up our own massive and disciplined electoral infrastructure, those independent campaigns will continue to be starved of resources and media oxygen before they can even get off the ground.

“Dignity of Work” is a great slogan, but as socialists, we know that true dignity doesn’t come from just having a slightly nicer boss or a slightly better wage under capitalism. It comes from the working class actually owning the value of what they produce. But because we haven’t stepped up to provide that alternative on a massive scale, working-class Ohioans are left clinging to the best available option the Democrats will allow them to have.

Ceding the Battlefield: The Danger of Anti-Electoralism

I know there are comrades in our movement who think electoral politics is a complete waste of time, just a bourgeois trap that feeds the establishment instead of building revolution. And theoretically, yeah, that skepticism makes sense. The capitalist state isn’t built to dismantle itself.

But looking at our material conditions, this total lack of opposition is exactly why Ohio politics are so stagnant. Unopposed elections are why Republicans keep dragging the state further red without even trying. If we refuse to field candidates, we aren’t starving the establishment. We are literally handing them the keys to the state.

Look at the material victories we’ve already won though. With Cleveland DSA’s trans rights priority project, we fought for and passed protective legislation in Lakewood that is in effect right now. In Cleveland, we are deep in the fight pushing a ballot initiative to force that same legislation onto the city council’s agenda. We treated that project like socialist science. We formed a strategy, we tested it by organizing in the real world, and we secured a material victory. We are proving that organizing in good faith with the community forces tangible changes to protect the working class and marginalized folks.

We’re flexing our power in local issue-based campaigns, but we are completely ignoring electoralism, which is half the political battlefield. Why build up all that structural power just to surrender the ballot box? If we can run a complex, city-wide ballot initiative, we have the skills to run our own class-conscious candidates.

The Call to Action: Building Accountable Leaders and the Campaign Megaphone

The reality of these primaries shouldn’t just alienate us, it should be fuel for the fire. If there are no revolutionary candidates on the ballot, we have to put them there.

This means people taking the initiative themselves. Don’t wait for the establishment to tap you on the shoulder. We need politically motivated comrades stepping up right now, asking the hard questions, and figuring out what it takes to get a campaign off the ground.

But to be absolutely clear, this isn’t just a call to run candidates just to oppose the status quo without a real strategy. We can’t recreate the exact conditions we’re fighting against by launching unaccountable, candidate-centric campaigns that just copy the establishment’s playbook. We have to do things fundamentally differently.

What makes our electoral strategy structurally different is absolute democratic accountability and deep political alignment. We aren’t just looking for casual allies, we are building a core of deeply dedicated organizers. A socialist candidate isn’t a free agent. They are a delegate of the organization. Doing things in a new way means ensuring that a candidate is in such deep agreement with the democratic values of the chapter that going rogue wouldn’t even cross their mind. It has to be a core value of the candidate themselves that it is imperative to stand true, dedicated, and strictly disciplined to what the organization as a whole values. We don’t just endorse a candidate and hope for the best. We lift up a comrade who is already deeply embedded in our collective struggle.

When we have that level of structural discipline, the campaign turns into something way bigger than a single politician. It becomes a massive megaphone. Using that megaphone does two crucial things. First, it popularizes our politics on a massive scale, putting our platform in front of thousands of voters and making the organization a recognized, household name for working-class power.

Second, and most importantly, it intrinsically ties into the organizing work we are already doing. A disciplined electoral campaign doesn’t exist in a silo. When our candidates and volunteers are knocking doors or speaking on a debate stage, they are directly uplifting projects like the trans rights ballot initiative. The campaign acts as an amplifier. It builds the soft power of public narrative and popularity, which we then convert into the hard power needed to actually pass our initiatives and force the state’s hand.

By fusing our electoral campaigns with our pre-existing issue campaigns, we stop playing defense. We start building a comprehensive political machine. We can’t wait for the establishment to offer us a seat at the table, we have to build our own apparatus from the ground up. The DSA is the vehicle to do that. By committing to this organized project, building accountable leaders, and launching strategic campaigns, we can transform this alienation into the material power we need to break the status quo and finally secure tangible changes for the working class of Ohio.

The post The Ohio Primary: The Electoral Trap and the Call for a Revolutionary Alternative appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.