By Bridget T

First published on Substack here.

9-11-2025 was the 52^nd anniversary of the Chilean coup. Twelve years before that, on the 40th anniversary, 9-11-2013, I walked into a room at the top of Anabel Taylor Hall on the Cornell University campus to take part in an interview that would alter my view of the world forever.

In the summer of 2013, I was a Politics student at Ithaca College ready to start an internship with CUSLAR (Committee on U.S. – Latin American Relations) in the fall. I volunteered first for the summer to help organize the CUSLAR Spanish Camp for Activists where we improved our Spanish and empowered each other with good food, music, and political speakers. It was there that I heard live Chilean music for the first time around the campfire. I would later find out it was played by a man named Carlos. This is the same Carlos that I would interview about his experience in leaving Chile after the coup and coming to the U.S. in exile some months later. Political refugees from Chile had come to Ithaca, New York since 1974. My work with CUSLAR that summer also involved researching the connections and ties between Ithaca based organizations, such as CUSLAR and the Friends of Chile, and the larger refugee community that had formed a network to get exiled and imprisoned people out of Chile. From this research, we decided to put together an oral history project in preparation for the 40^th anniversary of the coup. I had the opportunity to hear the stories of those who were in Chile on the day of the coup and the years of President Allende and Unidad Popular’s administration.

Each story, or “testimonio,” gives a new perspective on the day itself, and on the years leading up to such a monumental event. Each person’s story represents a new layer of the coup and what it means in world history and in the history of the U.S. empire. Everyone I have ever talked to from Chile had an entirely different experience when their world came to a screeching halt on 9-11-73. I think this speaks to the human condition of course, but also, the truly diverse coalition that had been built around Allende and the thousands of workers who supported him.

One story unlike that of anyone else is the testimony from Ana Villa. Ana’s late father was an American diplomat working with the United Nations in Santiago at the time of the coup. Ana’s family was completely uprooted by the events of the 1973 coup. Ana had a unique viewpoint as a young person in Santiago, mingling with the international elite, but also coming of age with the people of Chile before and during the Allende government. I met Ana on 9-11-2013 when she walked into the CUSLAR office accompanied by her mother Fran Barraclough.

This is what she said:

Experiencing 9-11-73, Santiago, Chile

“I’m Annie. Ana Maria. I was born in Tennessee, but grew up mostly in Santiago, Chile. My dad, Solon Barraclough, worked with the United Nations with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), but he also had connections at *ICIRA (The Institute for Land Reform in Chile). So we went to Chile in 1959 and he went down to work for the FAO. I went to Nido de Aguilas and Santiago College which are both international bilingual schools.

I was very political, and I disliked all of the rich kids I went to school with. The kids were pretty snobbish. I started becoming very political in 1970 after Allende won the presidential election, and I was a senior at Nido de Aguilas. If the coup hadn’t happened, I never would have graduated because I was never at school! I would go to school and then run away to go to the big marches, in the middle of tear gas and everything. From 1970 onward, every time there was a Unidad Popular march I was there. . . A lot of interesting things happened at the time because of my school being children of ambassadors and international people.

“They knew that the coup was supposed to be that Monday”

The week of the coup, I went to school on Monday, September 10th and none of the other Americans were there. I asked why there were all gone, and the teacher said they all took a vacation. They all went out on vacation at the same time! That was ridiculous. They knew that the coup was supposed to be that Monday. And they took off. So I thought something was funny that Monday and then on Tuesday, I did not go to school.

On September 11th, I was supposed to go to some offices downtown to turn in papers right by La Moneda and I overslept. I overslept that morning. Now I have to explain where our house was. It was up this long street on a hill. A larger house with more land. Right across from us was the military country club.

On the day of the coup d’etat, the military ran all of their messages up to the county club all day. Through the months before the coup there was a lot of abnormal activity and many more cars. On the day of the coup, my father happened to be in Israel and my mother was at a friend’s house. I remember waking up in a panic because I’d overslept. I called my neighbor to say “we’ve got to go” and she said “we’re not going anywhere.”

“My friend said, ‘No, this is real”’

In June there had been a similar thing. The military had sent tanks up to La Moneda, attempting to do a coup or to scare people. This was called the Tanquetazo, so I said “ah it’s just another Tanquetazo. These sons of bitches don’t know what they’re doing.” But my friend said, “No, this is real.”

I got to hear Allende’s speech on the radio. I could look out and there must have been 20 soldiers with machine guns pointing at our house. They knew we were Gringanistas. I remember thinking “this is not good.” Behind our house were blackberry bushes, so I took my brother and went to the neighbor’s house and I called mother to tell her not to come home. Any car coming up the hill had to either be going to the country club or to our house so I said don’t even bother.

“We took off and left our house that day”

You could see the planes coming by- they were fighter jets. We took off and left our house that day. You could hear the shooting, the bombings, at one point you could see the smoke of La Moneda. I slept in the living room in our friends’ house, and you could hear the guns at night outside. That really stays with you.”

At the club, there were *cuidadores. I was friends with one of their daughters, and it was she who told me that they were looking for us. She told me that all the Barracloughs had to go to the police station and turn their names in. It wasn’t just us, of course. Pinochet and his command of people were going over lists of people who also needed to report in. But my friend knew where we were. So I thought, ‘wow, we’re really not very safe.’”

“I had names and books in my room that could get people in trouble”

Fran added, “She was the daughter of the sergeant” and Ana continued,

“Right. After that we weren’t allowed to leave the house for three days. We had a Volvo, and in Chile at the time, there weren’t that many Volvos. Also, we had diplomatic plates. So our car was very conspicuous and we didn’t dare go out in it. We wanted to put mud on the license plate and things, but after the third day I decided to just walk to our house because I had names and books in my room that could get people in trouble if the military got ahold of them.

This interview was a casual conversation between Ana, her mother Fran, the director of CUSLAR, Tim, and several students and interns, including myself. There were undergraduate CUSLAR interns from both Ithaca College and Cornell, and there were also graduate students, notably international students. It was common for some of the brightest Latin American scholars at Cornell to get involved in the events and campaigns of CUSLAR. Two of these students had grown up in Argentina, another country where U.S. imperialism reared its ugly head and sought to undermine the power of popular movements. During the 40^th anniversary event, the Argentinian students asked many questions that brought our conversation to an even deeper level.

One crucial piece that makes Ana’s story unique is obviously her father’s job and the specific nature of his role within the United Nations. Solon Barraclough was an American from New Hampshire who later worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization in the United Nations. After studying economics at Harvard and gaining practical knowledge on his family’s farm, Barraclough became a forester and adviser. He began working with the FAO on Latin American agriculture projects through the end of the 1950s, and, as President Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress program in 1961. Simultaneously, a global agrarian reform movement was growing. 

A 2002 obituary for Solon in the Guardian stated, “Barraclough was never happier than when out in the countryside talking to peasants.” One of the Argentinian students asked Ana, if her family or her father had any diplomatic protection. She responded:

“No! Even the U.N. was not protected. There were two pars to ICIRA, the national side and the U.N. side. And they found the national officials floating in Mapocho River two days after the coup. So no, there was no diplomatic protection. . .

“They can’t have a coup Monday because it’s foggy”

Fran: Some kid told her there was going to be a coup on Monday. And I said, “Oh the Chilean military won’t be able to do anything because it’s foggy. They can’t have a coup Monday because it’s foggy.” But it was the next day.

Ana: There was no protection really for Americans. For those who were right wing, or those in the CIA, or working with the embassy, there was protection, but my father was considered a persona non grata because he was doing land reform in Chile. Chile was made up of the very wealthy and the very poor, and those who were very wealthy were the landowners who had all these *latifundios. They weren’t using the land or were planting very little, exploiting their workers. So my father was taking that land and giving it to poor farmers, dividing it up for the workers and giving them something to live on. 

I mean we were threatened all the time to the point where my mother said, “Move your bed away from the window.” They shot at my father’s car when he was out. When I finally left the house after the coup, I couldn’t drive our car because it was recognizable, so I walked. 

I remember I walked through tenement housing that was built by the Christian Democrats, built in *Educardo Frei’s time. Frei built all these bricks houses for people. 

“What the heck are they shooting at? This is a Christian Democrat neighborhood!”

I was walking and there were helicopters flying on both sides of the road, and they were just shooting. I was thinking, “what the heck are they shooting at? This is a Christian Democrat neighborhood!” It got so that they got so close to me that I had to hide under a tree. It was spring, like that would protect me from a bullet, but that’s how naive I was, that I’m running around hiding from guns under a tree. Luckily they went away. 

The military broke into our house that night, on September 11. They said they were looking for weapons, but we had no weapons. They took our kitchen knives and said we had weapons. 

Fran: We had shish kabob sticks- real weapons!

Ana: They stole all of our radios, our washing machine, anything that we had imported without paying taxes. I had books in my room with lots of names of my friends who were against the coup. I stupidly thought, “Well, I can’t put them in the fireplace because that smoke coming up the chimney will look suspicious.” So what did I do? I threw them all out the window and had a huge bonfire in the back of my house. 

This was about the 13th or 14th, one of the first day we could go out. So what happens? I’m standing at my house, alone, with this huge bonfire and here comes a helicopter. The helicopter shows up, maybe 50 meters above me, circling me. I’m thinking “If I run, they’ll shoot. If I go in the house, and they follow me in there, then no one is going to know.” And I’m thinking “Ahhh,” so I just stood there. I’m not really looking at them, I’m thinking “How am I going to get out of this one?” And you know, I really was saved because all they did was circle maybe 30 times, and they just yelled obscenities, because there was a blonde girl, 18 years old with hair down to her waist. I thought they might not shoot but I might get killed or raped. I have to say, I just stood there, mostly because I was kind of frozen there scared. And they left me. 

“It changed those people”

The other thing that I did after the coup was that I went to a very good friend’s house who lived across the street from the Military Hospital. And he took me to his sister’s house near the *National Stadium. They were right-wing, some CDs, but they were horrified. They lived on Avenida Iglesia, so they were just seeing truckloads of dead bodies that were piled in the back and covered only with a tarp. 

My friends didn’t know what to make of it, I mean they were all for the coup, but then they started seeing these trucks at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning. They were removing bodies from the National Stadium. It changed those people. And I kept hearing about different friends who’d been shot and detained. 

Fran: One called and said the soldiers came and pushed the Cardinal, who was his neighbor, into a car and took him off. 

Student: Some of the people who committed those crimes are now in government. They just want the people to forget. 

Ana: Well, you can’t forget! We have two parts of Chile, those who favored the coup and think Pinochet was a hero, and those who had family members who were disappeared or tortured or killed. They’re still finding bones...

The Trip Out

We left on the first plane that left on the 19th of September. The only reason we got out was because we had friends give us their tickets. . . (To Be Continued in Part 2)

Lessons from Part 1: 

I haven’t talked a lot about the History is Ours project or the Chilean coup very much in recent years. I attribute that in part to my own frustration over never having brought the stories to a wider audience. I also had the time to observe over the years, that many Americans, simply did not care to know more about it. They certainly didn’t care to reflect on the U.S.’s role in this horrendous event and what it could possibly mean about U.S. foreign policy and the many, still entrenched, neoliberal institutions that hold such unbalanced power today. It’s possible that I had been so shocked and overwhelmed by the information, shocked about the coup and the things that were done to uplift fascism, shocked of course about the US’s involvement, but also shocked by the entire Western colonial project, that I went into a rather prolonged state of freeze after absorbing these stories that didn’t serve anyone, least of all the people whose stories I still held. I tried to share the stories of course in 2014 when the booklet was published. At CUSLAR, we always thought we would return to the project, revisit the interviewees, and keep telling the many unheard stories of those in Chile during this critical time period. From 2015-2018 I would bring it up at new jobs as I tried to describe who I was to co-workers; I felt like I could not relate to people my age very well without first telling them about these interviews, the book, and what had been my primary focus for that last year and my biggest accomplishment so far. The research never felt over. 

The layers behind this event would keep unfolding before me. I had to keep talking about it, always gauging what regular people knew about it, gauging their reactions when I told them about the coup, and gauging their reactions when they learned about the levels the U.S. was willing to go to in order to enforce its economic agenda on Chile, and anyone else that went against it. I eventually met other people interested in Chile through socialist activism in the U.S. I learned the story of my friend Alice Embree who had gone to Chile on the same trip as future Congressman Lloyd Doggett while they were both students at the University of Texas in 1967. She became a fierce antiwar activist with groups like the UT SDS chapter and the Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile; she worked with *NACLA and, from then to today, has always spoken about Chile. Meeting Alice and her family made me feel like Chile always finds a way back into my life (more on that in Part Two). 

Chile has long been described as a testing ground for the *Chicago Boys Economic project. The military junta regime was a Western colonial project, similar to Israel, similar to the United States itself. The project had to succeed because socialism needed to fail; whatever would uplift the people, whatever methods that would give them their land back or give them real economic power, had to fail. 

Chile was to be the example. 

Ana’s story shows that not even the UN had protection from this kind of fascist takeover. As Allende said in his final speech over the airwaves on the morning of the 11th: “At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by commander Araya, victims of the same social sector which will today be in their homes hoping with foreign assistance, to retake power to continue to defend their profits and their privileges”

“I am certain that the seed which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have strength and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.”

Allende understood that he had been betrayed by multiple figures and elements of the military, including “Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government.” 

Allende also understood that the military had the greater show of strength in this case. There is much debate on whether he should have done more, if he should have armed the workers, but my view, with Hindsight 20-20, after seeing the same pattern repeated successfully by the global elite in country after country; the people of Chile did not stand much of a chance against this fascist wave at that time. The people could not overpower a military leaders, many trained at the *School of the Americas, who were more brutal than any average person would have expected. The forces of foreign capital and imperialism were waging economic warfare against Chile from the moment Allende began his presidency and before. They sowed division between the classes with great intention and strategy. Ana’s experience even as part of an American elite family shows that human rights and international order would be discarded fully by the military regime and those who supported it. Does it show the weakness of the United Nations in protecting civilians? It’s unavoidable; yes. Whether it be a U.S.-backed coup in Chile, or a U.S.-sponsored genocide in Palestine, the UN seems unprepared to adequately respond and uphold international law when the violator is the United States or one of its close allies and proxies. 

The biggest lesson to me that needs to be remembered today is simply understanding who the United States is. These are the questions I hope someone hearing this for the first time wants to ask: Why would the United States back a coup that killed agriculture officials? Why would they back a coup that threw people doing land reform in the river? Why would they back a coup where civilians were rounded up and taken to a soccer stadium to be tortured and killed, their bodies piled onto trucks with a loose tarp and then driven to a dumping ground? If you think this started with Donald J. Trump, you have a lot to catch up on. Fascism in the United States is not new. It is not modern. 

Heed the last words of President Salvador Allende:“I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which Armed Forces broke their tradition.”  Fascism will, and will not, creep up on you. There are signs, there are subtle ways the leaders may try to hide their fullest intentions temporarily, but a fascist’s true desire will always become apparent at a certain point, undeniably. Like the Nazi that showed up to a warehouse in Los Angeles to debate Mehdi Hasan for Jubilee, fascists will loudly proclaim their beliefs, they will laugh them off with no hesitation or second thought. Fascists, by definition, believe in power; they believe that corporate power, military power, should be the deciding factor to all government decisions. They are happy to be the axe that is wielded for that agenda. If they want to break their oaths to the Constitution, they will. 

You will know when fascism is at your door. And it will be far too late then. What will you do when you know when they are down the street? What will you do when you know they are a few neighborhoods over? What will you do if they go first to a neighborhood that you don’t particularly like? Will you still know that it is fascism?

What will you do when you hear the stories of this coup, of what the U.S. was willing to do, of what the U.S. did, to cement its economic power over Chile, what the U.S. did to protect the international elites in the copper industry who were losing profits? Will you believe that capitalists are confident in their economic model? If in a democratic system, capitalism is always the logical choice of the people . . . why did they need the military to enforce that system? Why did they need to torture those who committed the ultimate “crime” to fascists: having their own thoughts? Believing in an alternative economic model? Joining a workers’ union, organizing as a student for a better world, supporting your neighbors, supporting land reform, speaking out against the military regime… all crimes. There comes a day when fascism is at your door, but before then, you must always organize for the power of the people, no matter who is elected, because the imperialists, the real criminals, are still at large. 

Allende said “People make history.” He knew that it was the belief of the working people of Chile for a better future that put him into office in the first place. He knew that it was the power of the people (and his administration’s policies that were enacting real change for the people) that became such a threat to the global elite, they conspired to orchestrate such a violent, dissent-crushing coup. It was the threat of the people realizing their own power, through these policies, and through the broader socialist movement, that terrified them most of all. 

Democratic Socialism and the nationalization of the copper industry, was the threat they needed to stop before the rest of the capitalist world could truly learn the lessons of the Allende government. The U.S. would support any government who promised to squash a movement led by the coalition of leftist organizations that backed Allende’s election, and the multi-pronged workers’ movement that gave those organizations their heart and soul. The U.S. could not allow Chile’s significant improvements regarding agrarian reform, healthcare reform, worker ownership, and nationalization of industries, to become worldwide success stories. They needed the world to believe privatization and capitalism were synomynous with democracy. 

It was always a lie. It is still a lie. It was not socialism nor a democratic socialist government enacting land reform reforms that lead to a daughter of an American diplomat burning books to hide their friends’ names, to keep them from being targets of brutal torture and “interogation”… it was when a fascist coup occured, backed by her own government, the American government itself, that such actions were necessary. That occurs when democracy has been betrayed and U.S.-backed fascism has won. Even so, history IS ours. We, the people, make history. Democratic Socialism isn’t about a powerful leader coming to save you; it’s about the people -and only ever the people- saving themselves, no matter the time, no matter the obstacle. Foreign capital and the forces of imperialism will no longer divide us, and they will no longer defeat us. 

For sources and footnotes, go to the Substack article here.

The post Stories from the Chilean Coup: Part 1 first appeared on Red Fault.

"Red All Over" — an occasional round-up of media coverage of DSA

The post There’s Always A Red Scare Somewhere appeared first on Democratic Left.

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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.

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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. ︎

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