By: Reid Jackson

COPLEY SQUARE – The voices and shouts of labor were audible approaching the square on September 7. Starting in the morning, the Greater Boston Labor Council (GBLC) led workers gathering between Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library. At the parade were all the ranks: the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Boston Teachers Union (BTU), SAG-AFTRA, and the United Auto Workers (UAW).

At the heart of the march was DSA: red signs, each blazened with “Socialism Beats Fascism.”

Recent Electoral Results

Labor Day 2026 in Boston is colored by the results of the midterm primaries for Massachusetts, with winners and losers alike attending the march to share in the celebration of labor power in our community. Among the attendees was Sen. Ed Markey, who just beat his moderate challenger Seth Moulton by 30 points just to show the electorate that he still has that dog in him.

Ed Markey, standing above the crowd after victoriously sweeping the state, said:

This vast movement which has gathered here today in Copley Place… is proof that the powers that be can’t hold a candle to the power of the working people.

Markey’s race against a much younger candidate was that you do not have to throw away your constituents in the pursuit of the chasing the ever elusive goal of electability, something that Moulton ended up learning the hard way when he attempted to get ahead of a perceived wave of conservatism flooding through the country by claiming that the issue of trans rights needn’t be “absolute” within the Democratic Party.

Markey’s choice to stand with the queer community wasn’t a shock to anyone who knew him and followed his pattern of maintaining solidarity with every marginalized community he represents in our state. That philosophy that guided him to stand with the trans people of Massachusetts brought him to the same square in Boston as the rest of us.

Evan MacKay, endorsed by Boston DSA in their run for State House to represent Cambridge, was also right in the heart of the march with their DSA comrades who campaigned for them exhaustively for months. They led chants on the bullhorn with “ONE STRUGGLE! ONE FIGHT! WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!” Their spirits, despite just one week from their primary defeat, were carried on by enthusiasm.

MacKay’s presence, and the presence of the Boston DSA as a whole illustrates their resolve to continue to grow and develop their movement, and the foundation of maintaining that movement is to show up to events like the Labor Day march, and the picket lines of other struggles for union labor.

DSA’s contingent marched right behind a rolling truck with an inflatable shark on it for the Southeastern Mass Labor Council and ahead of the SAG-AFTRA contingent, whose members (largely actors and other performers) dressed like Spider-Man to excite children on the parade.

In other words, socialist labor organizers were right at home with their union siblings.

Labor Day, as an alternative to May Day, represents a holiday with few militant roots. But a holiday for workers is still a holiday. For workers in Boston, who suffer under excruciating rent and low wages amidst a cost of living crisis, Labor Day became a day that showed labor itself: strong, together, capable of both rest and power while winning bread and roses.

Reid Jackson is a union organizer and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post In Photos: On Labor Day 2026, Boston Labor Has Never Been Louder appeared first on Working Mass.

Impressions is where ROC DSA members can share what they’re reading, listening to, viewing, or otherwise experiencing. If you have two hundred words about the culture at large you’d like to share with your comrades, submit to Rich J on Slack or to the Red Star at steering@rocdsa.org.

History from Below
Isabella D read: A People’s History of the United States (1980), by Howard Zinn

A People’s History of the United States should be required reading not just for those on the left, but for all Americans. Zinn delivers a clear, incisive chronicle of US history from the conventionally neglected perspective of the marginalized working class – the indentured servants, immigrants, indigenous peoples, and laborers that generate a “quiet revolution.” Its accessible dialectics serve as a springboard for inchoate Marxists, or even the mere curious, to pursue alternative historical and theoretical analyses in greater depth. Zinn highlights the masses as agents of change, challenging patriotic narratives that attribute history primarily to great individuals (e.g., US presidents).

This sobering account of America’s birth and development brings readers to an uncomfortable conclusion: our western liberal democracy that we’ve held so dear is a farce. In the name of capital and corporate interests, the United States bludgeons its dissidents with “law and order” while simultaneously safeguarding its hegemony through military occupations, global destabilization, and strangling neoliberalism. A People’s History expertly unravels the lies so commonly found in our history textbooks, instilling a necessary and righteous outrage in readers as they glean the rapacity and hypocrisy of the American government since its inception.

Never Change, Socialist Parties … 

Greg B read: The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912 by Ira Kipins

I picked up this history of the Socialist Party of the United States for free and didn’t finish it, but it was still fascinating. This history was written in 1955, and Kipins’ main thesis is that the Socialist Party failed because the “right-wing” betrayed the party’s left and moved away from its socialist values. He cites writings from Victor Berger and others on the right who don’t believe socialism will come from the working class, or his belief that the Democratic and Republican Parties are inevitably headed towards socialism. I agree with these critiques of the party’s right, but Kipins’ bias reads on almost every page. Kipins also criticizes the party for its racism, sexism, and xenophobia, again, with most of the blame clearly falling on the party’s right. The book also made me more hopeful about DSA, since it’s filled with embarrassing stories of segments of the party in death fights over the name of the organization, or factions demanding all resources go into “colonizing” the western US to create socialist state governments. 

Learning from Our Mistakes

Greg L-H read: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (2023), by Vincent Bevins 

The 2010s saw massive street protests sweep the globe, from the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street in the U.S., Euromaidan in Ukraine, Movimento Passe Livre in Brazil, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, and more. These actions represented spontaneous uprisings, organized online with a smorgasboard of demands and rarely attached to a political party. Many purposely adopted a horizontalist structure, rejecting leadership and hierarchy in the name of radical participatory democracy. In If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (2023), journalist Vincent Bevins documents these massive eruptions. His story weaves one location with the next in much the same way online platforms allowed cultural signifiers to jump from the streets of one protest to take meaning elsewhere. Through Bevins’s coverage we come to understand power and leverage (who holds it, and how it is effectively wielded), and learn why these movements failed to achieve their ambitious goals. The book is essential reading for socialist organizers, shaping our theory of change and helping to understand one cannot merely “knock the players off the stage” without a plan for what comes after. 

Punks Against ICE

Abigail J went to: Pinkshift: Saccharine 5 Year Anniversary Tour

On Sunday August 23rd, myself and a couple other comrades took a trip out to Buffalo to see the punk band Pinkshift. We stopped in at the beloved Burning Books (where I scored a copy of the book Breaking Free, an official Adventures of Tintin book promoting the anti-capitalist movements and riots of 1980’s UK), and got ramen before heading to the show.

While we missed the first opener, we were just in time for the second, the NJ-based punk band Pollyanna. With just enough death-metal-style screaming to keep it unpredictable, the energy from this band was outstanding, especially the lead singer/guitarist who sported a neon pink mullet and an equally bright pink “faggot” baseball jersey. Suffice to say, I highly enjoyed them.

Before Pinkshift actually came on, a member of Our City Action Buffalo came on stage to decry the ICE staging center literally one block away and was met with cheers from the crowd. (Where’s ROC DSA’s outreach to the local punk scene?) Pinkshift themselves were excellent, opening with the anti-patriarchal Burn the Witch, and bringing high energy all evening. As someone who hasn’t been to many punk shows at all (and none since transitioning), it was a very cathartic evening, to be in a room full of queers and leftists dancing and shouting along with the music. If you want to be one of the coolest, come out to the next show with us! 

The post Impressions first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

by Jean Allen

On August 9th, Michael Larosa, Democratic strategist and former spokesperson to the Biden administration, answered a question about why he opposed Abdul El-Sayed. 

“The problem with ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’, the who still matters. At least it matters to me. I come from a time when I watched people jumping out of windows on 9/11, 70 miles from where the towers were falling and burning for 3 months, we could smell it where I was from in Pennsylvania where the wind blew.”

This is a part of a long-running denial of the humanity of Arab and Muslim peoples and has come up more and more as leftist Muslims run for and attain office. This language, which seemingly blames a man who would be 16 at the time for an oddly personal trauma narrative, is as sanctimonious as it is ridiculous and hateful, but it’s not the only narrative that Americans have about 9/11 anymore. 

A few weeks ago, I was commiserating about how difficult it’s been to buy a house with my local deli owner. The man, an Italian American roughly in his 30s, said “Well look, don’t worry. With this war going on, it’s a matter of time before some disaster like 9/11 happens that’ll lower the interest rates again.” I stared, slack jawed. At that moment, I remembered something a friend said months ago: even the most radical boomer would never joke about Pearl Harbor the way the average millennial or zoomer jokes about 9/11 

I also remembered my own experience of 9/11, as a 6th grader in the computer lab. I was sitting next to someone I had a crush on, trying to say something, when our principal interrupted to tell us what was happening. He always had a sad sort of voice, so every PSA after that, every time the principal informed us a blue Subaru had its lights on, my heart sipped like he was announcing another terrorist attack. My father worked in NYC at the time, and I was deeply worried about him as I heard my peers talking about who did it, what they were gonna do next, and who we were gonna invade. My brother-in-law, living in Grand Junction, CO, was surrounded by people swearing the next target would be the Grand Junction clock tower. 

The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event to everyone; this was the first time we felt the experiences previously saved for those who lived in the ‘third world’ countries our military lingers in. Our buildings – the symbol of New York, of international finance and capitalism–were destroyed as if they were nothing. That personal trauma was then transformed into a proudly ignorant patriotism. Censors decided to remove everything from Rage Against the Machine to Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”. Anyone who opposed the war we immediately got ourselves into, or the security measures strategically called the Patriot Act, was viewed as hateful UnAmericans, from the nation of France to the Dixie Chicks. My French name was used as a reason to suddenly other and bully me, and I had the least of it. Arab and Muslim American communities found themselves infiltrated. People would be disappeared into the Guantanamo Bay detention center or any number of other CIA sites, where they would be sexually assaulted and tortured. Anarchists found that their spouses were actually deep undercover police. Police militarization proceeded rapidly. Every dang time you got on an airplane you had to take off your shoes and belt so that the TSA agents could scan your genitals to make sure you weren’t a terrorist. At the top of it all was that idiot, George W. Bush, lord of the malapropism, who seemed intentionally foolish as he led our country into wars which cost millions of lives.

Seven years and change later, I sat with my parents watching Will Ferrell parody Bush. It was the day before Obama’s inauguration and it seemed that everything would get better, that the period of militarism Bush represented was over. Having marched in the 2003 protest against Iraq and volunteered for Kids for Kerry, I was tremendously excited to have cast my first vote for a man who seemed to be the repudiation of everything Bush stood for. 

And then Obama took office and Guantanamo didn’t close. And the Iraq War went on, some might argue to this day. The War in Afghanistan continued, for another 13 years after W Bush was repudiated. You get in an airport and you still have to take off your shoes (or DONT TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES) and take off your belt (OR DONT) and get ordered around by a TSA agent in the name of preventing another disaster like the one that happened 25 years ago and killed more than 3,000 people. At the same time you’ll be asked to remove your face mask, which prevents the spread of a disease which has killed between 15 and 35 million people in the last 6 years, so your face can be more accurately scanned 

I don’t remember when I started making 9/11 jokes. I was sensitive to it for quite a bit, and I do recall criticizing those jokes sometime in 2013. What changed? The security state Bush used sanctimonious patriotism to build outlived its ideological justification. More and more Americans do not see ourselves in the US imperial project or see it as meaningfully ours. Decades after the well choreographed and developed justification for the ‘dumb’ war in Iraq, Trump continued the ‘global war on terror’ with a venture into Iran which began with the double tapping of a girls school. A double tap attack is when you attack some form of infrastructure, wait for medical professionals to arrive, and attack again. All this, ‘against terrorism’, and then after our personal trauma has been used to ignite a whole region, we are still expected to treat the personal trauma of someone who was a mere 70 miles from Manhattan on that day with grave seriousness. 

So, why do we joke about 9/11? Part of it is our dark humor, sure. But more of it is lashing out against feeling utterly powerless. The US citizen has voted, again and again, for candidates who claimed to bring peace. We are reminded, again and again, that this political system can only continue war, can only continue dominating us with things done ‘for our safety’. And so, being infantilized, we act infantile. We make edgy jokes and feel some sense of empowerment or at least contentment with the way things are, in an empire that seems to be careening out of control. Hundreds of thousands of people have been needlessly killed in wars started by US presidents in the last twenty five years, and until we, the working class, take the reigns I see only more arms races, more wars, more needless death and destruction.

All this, as 9/11 turns old enough to get its own pilot’s license.

OH NO 9/11 IS CRASHING ITS PLANE INT-

The post What do we joke about when we joke about 9/11 first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

On October 16, 2023, just weeks after the beginning of Israel’s intensified genocidal assault on the Gaza strip, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions issued a historic call. The federation asked workers across the world to refuse to build and transport weapons for Israel, as well as to take action against complicit companies and pressure their governments to end military trade. On October 31, Belgian transport workers’ unions answered, announcing that they would not handle arms shipments to Israel. “The loading and unloading of these weapons,” they wrote, “helps to provide organisations to kill innocent people… As trade unions, we declare our solidarity with those who are campaigning for peace.”

The Belgian unions have since been joined by dockworkers in Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, Greece, Sweden, and more, who have refused complicity in the supply chain of genocide and refused to handle shipments of arms, ammunition, airplane parts, and other military equipment. In Italy, general strikes have swept the country in solidarity with Palestine, as not only transport workers but all working people withhold their labor from a national and global economy that enriches war-makers with the blood of Palestinians.

These workers did not wait for their governments to officially declare an arms embargo, but realized their power as laborers to enact one directly (not for nothing, many of these governments have since issued formal arms embargo legislation). Nor are these spontaneous uprisings. They are the result of long-term organizing, research, and international coordination towards collective action that is both material and symbolic, both practical and highly politicized. They are an expression of the working class’s political consciousness and autonomy, over and against capital. They are, in other words, acts of class struggle.

The labor movement in the United States has been slow to follow our comrades overseas, for a variety of reasons that are too numerous and complex to treat here—decades of anti-communist repression, bourgeois cooptation, class collaboration, Zionist propaganda, and legal restrictions on strikes and other labor organizing. Despite valiant efforts like those of dockworkers in Oakland, the vision of a worker-led arms embargo has remained marginal to pro-Palestine, socialist, and labor organizing in the US.¹ The idea that American workers could leverage their collective power to directly weaken the supply chain of genocide has been widely dismissed as far-fetched and idealistic. As a result, the bulk of arms embargo campaigns in the US have hinged on making appeals directly to members of Congress; an approach that has evidently borne limited fruit.

I argue here that an arms embargo campaign that centers workers as protagonists of the struggle and actively cultivates anti-imperialist consciousness in the US labor movement is an indispensable task for socialists in the present moment. It is our best chance to impede Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which continues despite the so-called “ceasefire,” as well as its campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and south Lebanon. An arms embargo is also a powerful vehicle of class struggle within the US, as it requires us first to cultivate class consciousness through mapping the relations of capital and imperialism, then to act on that consciousness to seize hold of and transform those relations. 

Launching Break the Chain

The principled actions of international workers in solidarity with Palestine inspired the formation of DSA’s national Labor for an Arms Embargo campaign (LFAE), which seeks to “organize and use [the] power [of the working class] to end the genocide of Palestinians.” I have spent the last year working on the Break the Chain campaign, a local iteration of LFAE. Break the Chain was established in NYC–DSA in June 2025 after research from the Palestinian Youth Movement revealed that New York’s airports and seaports are a major shipping hub for Israeli military cargo. 

In the face of these revelations, amidst a horrific livestreamed genocide that continued despite years of protest, organizers in NYC–DSA’s Anti-War Working Group felt compelled to halt the deadly shipments. They convened an organizing committee and drafted a campaign proposal, which passed a branch-level vote with overwhelming popular support to become an official chapter campaign.² 

The initial phase of the campaign was the most challenging (so far). On the surface, our demand was simple: end the transfer of arms to Israel. But who exactly could end it, and how? Should we focus on one facility, or multiple across the supply chain? Had anything like this been attempted before in New York City, or anywhere in the US? We knew from the beginning that Break the Chain would be labor-centered, but which specific workers were we trying to reach, and how? These questions opened up a period of intense research, strategizing, and debate. We gathered as much information as we could, including by talking to other organizers in our networks, and used it to create power maps. We explored many avenues that turned out to be dead ends. 

Eventually, after months of fact-finding and deliberation, we decided to focus our efforts on JFK airport, which is the biggest exporter of goods to Israel of any US airport or seaport, with over 20% market share, as well as an iconic and accessible location for NYC residents. Since then, we have been popularizing the demand for an arms embargo by speaking to workers and community members directly. We have volunteers go out every week to flyer, table, and canvass, to let people know about the arms shipments and invite them to join our campaign. We created a website and Instagram, and worked with our DSA-endorsed candidates and elected officials to create promotional videos for social media. And we are continuing worker outreach and training efforts, offering organizing trainings and workers’ circles for hundreds of union members who want to take action for Palestine in their local.

After a year of research, mapping, flyering, tabling, one-on-ones, and (so, so many) meetings, I am more convinced than ever that the struggle for an arms embargo is not a pipe dream but one of the most important sites for socialist class struggle in the United States today. I hope the Break the Chain campaign can serve as an inspiration for other socialists, anti-imperialists, and labor organizers across the country who are ready to take up the call for an arms embargo.

What Is An Arms Embargo?

I should clarify briefly what I mean when I say “arms embargo,” because the term has been used with imprecision. In short, I mean nothing more or less than the total end of all military trade, including exports, imports, and transport, of material goods like weapons, ammunition, aircraft and vehicle parts, fuses, etc., as well as intelligence, research, software, and technical knowledge.³ This definition of an arms embargo, as opposed to other important but ultimately insufficient goals like the end of US military aid to Israel, is necessary because Israel relies on the “qualitative military edge” provided by American technology to perpetrate genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. Israel could theoretically use its own money to purchase this equipment at full price and continue the genocide, but it could not develop the sheer productive capacity necessary to maintain military domination on its own (at least, not for a long time). 

The arms embargo operates within the circuit of capital—it disrupts, by definition, the existing systems of production, distribution, and consumption. Purely political demands like the end of military aid, however commendable, depend ultimately on the actions of powerful politicians. The arms embargo, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of direct, democratic intervention by the thousands of people materially implicated in the production and circulation of military goods. No collection of laypeople, however large, could simply push the figurative button to stop aid packages going from Washington to Tel Aviv. But dockworkers can refuse to load ships, cargo handlers can refuse to load airplanes, truck drivers can refuse to move containers, pilots can refuse to fly, and mechanics can refuse to repair. It is not only possible; it is happening across the world right now.  

This line of argumentation has earned myself and my comrades plenty of charges of naïveté. The US is too large. Union density is too low. The existing unions are too conservative. There is truth to these critiques (though I remain optimistic despite the odds). But an arms embargo campaign need not necessarily rise to the level of a general—or even a dockworkers’—strike to be a potent and necessary form of class struggle.

Cognitive Mapping & Class Consciousness

Class struggle requires class consciousness—an understanding of one’s position in the relations of production, of oneself as shaped by and acting within vast, powerful material systems that both place objective constraints on and create opportunities for subjective action. The economic conditions of global capitalism and its ideology of neoliberal individualism have made such an understanding exponentially more difficult. But an arms embargo campaign requires the intentional exposure of the relations that capital hides—the work of mapping power, which is simultaneously the work of mapping vulnerability.

In his brilliant Postmodernism, the late Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson diagnosed an objective situation: due to the immense complexity and increasing globalization of late 20th-century capitalist systems of production, it had become more difficult for individuals to apprehend their own role in these global systems. As labor was abstracted, outsourced, and atomized, old class relations seemed to fade and disappear. Against this obfuscation of the means and relations of production—the apparent disappearance of “class” as a category can only benefit the ruling class—Jameson proposed a strategy of “cognitive mapping.” Cognitive mapping is “a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.” For Jameson, “cognitive mapping” is a solution to an aesthetic problem, but I have never been satisfied to render such essential work entirely unto the poet. In my work on Break the Chain, I have experienced firsthand how the practical task of mapping the supply chain is also a political act of cognitive mapping.⁴ 

For most of us, the vast sprawl of global logistics remains abstract and only breaks through into reality at moments of crisis (who knew what the Strait of Hormuz was before it was blockaded?). But an arms embargo campaign requires us to intentionally and proactively combat that abstraction, for the simple reason that to stem the flow of military cargo, it is necessary first to know precisely where that military cargo comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there. 

Our investigation has uncovered, so far, 38 companies complicit in the movement of military cargo from the NYC metropolitan area to the Israeli military, with hundreds more suspected but unconfirmed. These companies are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Many are obscure, tiny contractors that produce only one specific part, but others are household names: FedEx, Delta, and United Airlines all transport weapons and military cargo out of civilian airports. Many airlines that Americans use in their daily lives are part of the US Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a program which allows private airlines to contract with the Department of War (DoW) to provide aircraft in case of wartime emergency in exchange for receiving DoW business during “peacetime.”

Our investigation is an act of cognitive mapping. It resituates the seemingly isolated and innocent activity of flying on a commercial airline in the global flow of people, goods, and capital and reattaches the subjective experience of daily life to the objective totality of capitalist production—in particular, to the historical situation of imperialist exploitation that has facilitated the genocide of the Palestinians. It is also an act of burgeoning class consciousness: to recognize oneself as belonging to the class that rides, loads, builds, fuels, directs, cleans, or flies the plane, rather than the one that profits from it and decides where it will go and what it will carry, or the one for whom the contents of its belly mean death.

Collective Action Across the Map

But to have a map is one thing. To use it is another. This is the real power of an arms embargo campaign: it requires the creation of a map that is not sterile and academic but living, dynamic, and burning with a call to action. The arms embargo invites us to take our complicity in the global military supply chain as the starting point of struggle, rather than as the endpoint of analysis. It not only points us towards the multiple nodes and vectors of commodity flow that capital wants so badly to hide but gives us a concrete goal that can only be achieved through collective action.

Again, this collective action need not necessarily be a strike. Workers may opt to pass a resolution in their local, form an investigative committee, hold a rally, write an open letter, speak to the media, or testify at a local port authority board meeting. As we have seen with Break the Chain, the demand for an arms embargo often functions as a catalyst for unionized workers to get seriously involved in their union when before they had been passive “paper members”—it may even act as an impetus for non-union workers to unionize or form other kinds of affinity groups. Once workers realize their unique positionality and power as workers, they can begin to imagine new ways to enact material, democratic control over the conditions and products of their labor.

The arms embargo campaign is also unique in the ways that it marries the practical and the political. This sets it apart from, on the one hand, “bread-and-butter” labor issues that improve workers’ lives but fail to adequately politicize those improvements and, on the other hand, abstract political claims that demand workers take this or that position without responding to the material needs of workers themselves. It is often bemoaned that socialist and anti-imperialist organizers fail to “meet workers where they’re at” and instead expect them to go from apathetic to quoting Lenin in a matter of weeks. 

A democratic, worker-led arms embargo campaign provides this missing link: these weapons shipments are dangerous and unfair to American workers as well as deadly to Palestinians. At JFK, for example, research from The Intercept revealed that one cargo flight bound for an Israeli weapons manufacturer contained 14 tons of nitrocellulose, a highly flammable and explosive compound used to produce ammunition. An accident could affect not only the workers handling this cargo directly, but anyone in the vicinity—nitrocellulose was responsible for a 2015 explosion in Tianjin, China, that killed 165 people, recent factory explosions in Bloomfield, CT, and Prescott, WI, and more.

The demand for an arms embargo cuts across issues of safety and democracy in the workplace for domestic workers and life and dignity for people under siege in Palestine. At one stroke, it provides us the framework to understand the deep connections between our everyday lives in the US and the lives of people overseas, and the means to seize hold of and transform those connections. It challenges us to create the kind of cognitive map Jameson envisioned, and then to put that map to concrete use—not merely to describe the world, as Marx would say, but to change it. 

Beyond even the project of the arms embargo itself, the Break the Chain campaign has brought people together in new ways, spawning new connections and ideas about how to organize for a better world. It has not only helped empower people to become active as union members, but brought people into DSA and introduced them to or helped them to deepen their understanding of the ideas of socialism and internationalism. It has built and strengthened ties between the labor movement, the Palestine movement, and socialist organizations. At the time of this writing, three union locals have passed resolutions calling for an arms embargo at JFK, fifteen labor and community organizations have officially endorsed the campaign, and many of them have been involved in the campaign itself. It has expanded the structures of collaboration between DSA’s rank-and-file and our elected officials, who have supported the campaign by hosting joint canvasses and appearing in campaign videos (more to come…). It has helped hundreds of ordinary people—including myself—develop concrete skills to lead the fight against capitalism and imperialism.

When we began this campaign, we had a handful of dedicated organizers with one ambitious but deeply-felt goal. An arms embargo in New York City felt distant—just shy of impossible—but vitally necessary. A year later, we have hundreds of people involved in the campaign across several areas of work: creating communications, conducting research, speaking to workers in the field, hosting events, and more. We have plenty of work left to do, but an arms embargo, led by working people in solidarity with Palestine, feels closer than it ever has before.

What is class struggle but this: the identification and exploitation of contradictions in the material system of capitalism; the politicization of working-class life as it already exists and the construction of new forms of collective power; the recognition of our shared destiny as peoples of this world and of our shared enemy in the class which destroys the conditions of life for its own enrichment? There are, of course, other forms of class struggle. Our task is the size of the world, the shape of the whole human project. To achieve it will require a diversity of tactics and struggle on many fronts. 

But to those for whom the arguments and ideas in this essay have rung true, to those who seek new avenues of action in solidarity with the people of Palestine, I invite you to join us in the fight for an arms embargo. If you are in New York City, you can fill out this form to get in contact with an onboarder for the Break the Chain campaign. Comrades in other chapters can reach out to DSA’s national Arms Embargo Organizing Committee to get connected to ongoing campaigns in your area or discuss how you might start one.

Until Palestine is free—until victory.

This article’s photograph was placed in the public domain by Wikimedia Commons user Ukrain4pal. It depicts the general strike for Gaza in Ancona, 2025.

1.  Oakland dockworkers with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union refused to unload cargo bound for Israel in 2021 and have participated in protests against Israeli shipments in Oakland.  ︎
2. I joined the campaign a few months after its creation. Shoutout to my incredible comrades who were there from Day 1! ︎
3. Refer to the BDS Movement’s definition of a “military embargo.” I am choosing to use “arms embargo” because it is more familiar to a general audience and to maintain terminology from LFAE. ︎
4. You can explore some of the mapping Break the Chain has done on our website: wecanbreakthechain.com. ︎

DSA's Workers Deserve More calls for women's, queer, and Indigenous liberation — but none of that is possible if the organization continues to treat the nuclear family as a given rather than a structure built to preserve capitalism.

The post Imagining the Next 250 Years: Abolish the Nuclear Family appeared first on Democratic Left.

This guide will help you navigate every step to help you and your co-workers win the pay, benefits, respect, and voice at work you deserve.

The post Organizing guide appeared first on EWOC.

Learn the laws that can support or challenge your organizing efforts. They can be effective tools, but your collective power is the ultimate weapon.

The post Labor law and rights appeared first on EWOC.

No matter what stage of your campaign you and your co-workers are in, these practical resources will help you stay structured and effective.

The post Union organizing tools and templates appeared first on EWOC.

Learn how you can organize your workplace even in unusual circumstances. These guides apply traditional organizing lessons to unique situations to help you and your co-workers win.

The post Scenarios appeared first on EWOC.

Learn how to run your union in a way that’s democratic and engages members in their own contract fights.

The post Union operations: How to run and maintain a democratic union appeared first on EWOC.