You’ve probably received enough communications regarding this Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations, which will be held all across the country. At last count more than three thousand demonstrations are being organized, and there will no doubt be at least one near you.

In case you have been procrastinating, here is a link to find the demonstrations closest to you.

The first of these demos last June had a million or two people attend. The next one, in October, had at least five million. We’re aiming to double that this time, which would put us in striking distance of the 3.5% of the US population that research says is necessary to topple authoritarian regimes in the making. 

Against the backdrop of brutal anti-immigrant violence and preparation for election suppression at home, and clueless trade policy matched with deadly wars abroad, a growing number of Americans are coming out to the streets. These include people who have never been politically involved outside of voting every few years, and progressives who sat out the 2024 presidential elections because they didn’t think there was any difference between the two parties and the two candidates. Within DSA and the rest of the left this often took the form of denouncing the “twin parties of capital”. Which they are. But that picture, drawn without nuance, underestimated what fascism is and does.

Now we know. 

A reasonable question at this point is, ‘What sort of message should socialists be sending to the other demonstrators, and the world, a year into America’s fascist descent?’ You have the opportunity to weigh in on that as you make your protest sign. “No Kings” is a start, not a program. “Workers Over Billionaires” moves us closer to the ideas we need.

This mass demonstration of opposition is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to stop MAGA from dragging us along on its road to hell. For that we need to be broadening the struggle with other tactics and strategies (mutual aid, mass strikes, non-violent direct action, and electoral politics) that build a powerful anti-fascist movement and lay the basis for moving past the failed politics of the past. What happened in Minneapolis/St. Paul on January 23—‘No Work, No School, No Shopping’—is the best example so far. DSA has joined with labor and community partners in the May Day Strong coalition, which understands “No Kings” as a step toward a sharper critique of capitalism on May 1. On that day we will see how prepared we are to advance beyond a nationwide demonstration to a national movement.

We’ll see you out in the streets this weekend. And then we’ll continue to train and educate and prepare ourselves for the struggle ahead.

In the February issue of California Red we ran a background article on the California DSA campaign we call “The Fair and Responsible Tax Plan for California’s Wealthy”, which embraces both measures currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November state ballot. That was the first in a series we are running between now and the election. Here is the next installment.—Editor

The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality

Our East Bay DSA crew of five had planted ourselves in the parking lot of a supermarket in North Berkeley on a warm mid-March afternoon. We were collecting signatures for the Billionaires Tax and the Protecting Education and Health Care Act. During our three-hour shift we did not do badly, gathering several dozen for each measure. Even better were the conversations, which ranged from informing voters about the nuts and bolts of the proposals to broader questions about economic inequality: how much money do billionaires have, anyway? What share of the total income of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, goes to the one percent? What would be the right amount of taxes for them to pay? And how do we get them to pay their fair share? 

We explore a few of these ideas and numbers below.

A cool million

It used to be hard for the typical working class stiff to imagine what a million dollars looks like. A million dollars? That’s what millionaires have, and I’m not even close to being one of those, we would say. But that was before a million dollars or thereabouts became the average price of a house in Los Angeles. It’s slightly below that statewide, and slightly above that in San Francisco. But you get the idea. Generally speaking, if you can afford a home, you know what a million dollars looks like—it looks like your house. (If you’re a renter, it looks like that house.)

A billion dollars was even more unfathomable. We didn’t have many in the United States until relatively recently; as late as 1990 there were just 66 of them. Now there are close to a thousand, and we’ve got 213 right here in the Golden State. Since we know that a million dollars looks like a house these days, we can imagine that since a billion is a thousand millions, it would look like a thousand houses. 

No one needs a thousand houses to live in, so most billionaires scrape by with just ten or twelve. Of course, being billionaires, they need somewhat larger houses than most people, so they might spend five or ten million dollars or even more—fifty million! A hundred million!—on their humble abodes. If they owned ten of those, that could put a pretty big dent in their billion dollar fortune. But guess what? The average wealth of a billionaire is not a billion dollars. It’s currently around 8.6 billion dollars, according to inequality.org. So that would be 8,600 houses. 

Minus the dozen they “live” in, that would leave them with enough money to purchase 8,588 more houses. I don’t know about you, but as the numbers climb my ability to translate the million dollar house into a clear image of the wealth of billionaires is beginning to get somewhat unequal to the task. And that’s before we try to imagine what the total wealth of 213 billionaires looks like. 

Trillions

It is reliably estimated that thanks to the ginormous growth of their fortunes during the past ten years (Trump I’s tax cuts, pandemic economy when there was nothing to invest in except stock buybacks, Trump II’s continuing tax cuts, massive AI bubble, and outright looting of public resources) our couple hundred California billionaires collectively own (hold onto your “tax the rich” baseball cap) two trillion dollars’ worth of assets. In California they’re doing a little better than the average 8.6 billionaire; they’ve each got around 9.4 billion. 

Although I just said I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the houses when they added up to the average 8,600 houses each (adjusted now to 9,400), let’s try it out with trillions. That’s a thousand billions. So collectively our 213 ultra-rich people with their two trillion dollars would have, let’s see, carry the one, a bit over 1.8 million houses, at a million dollars each. 

You might think that that’s enough for anyone, and these individuals must be looking around for philanthropies to unload to. But no, according to a recent New York Times article, billionaire giving has fallen precipitously in the last few years as their ‘uneasy accommodation with fascism’ (fascism scholar Robert Paxton’s formulation describing the initial response of economic elites to the uncouth new political rulers) has grown considerably less uneasy—more like downright comfortable. The 213 billionaires in California have seen their total wealth grow by nearly a third in this period as the rest of us have been essentially running in place—and that’s not enough for some of them. 

If you listen to one of their loudest mouthpieces, tech mogul Ron Conway, the proposed billionaire tax is not only bad for his 212 other peeps; it’s way worse than that. He was recently quoted in a New York Times article with a sentiment that inadvertently revealed how that kind of bank account can warp one’s perspective: According to Mr. Conway, referring to the billionaire tax, “This is the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt.” Hmmm. I wonder whether the families of dozens of people who lost their lives and thousands who lost homes in the Eaton and Palisades fires in 2025 agree? Or if Japanese-Californians, 93,000 of whom were incarcerated during World War II, share that view? Or if Native Californians, whose population fell from a third a million people in 1800 to about 15,000 by 1910 during the genocide that did them in, would agree with Conway’s historical research? 

On the other hand

At the other end of the economic spectrum, California’s borders contain about 7 million people below the official poverty line, or 18% of its roughly 40 million people. But the official federal poverty line ($33,000/year for a family of four) is laughably (that’s probably the wrong word) below an actual ability to live. One measure of how many people are barely getting by in California is the number of MediCal recipients, dependent on the federal Medicaid funding stream for most of their care costs. Although California is a net donor to the federal treasury, it does rely on $20 billion per year from the feds to support MediCal. Some 15 million Californians are enrolled in MediCal.

Let’s move on from the tiny extremely rich and the very large poor slices of the state and look at the condition of the merely rich, the top 1% income earners, which includes the billionaires but extends downward to the merely well-to-do. Although calculations vary, the bottom rung of the ladder for a one percenter is just about a million dollars a year in income; the median merely rich, right in the middle of the one percent, is $3.6 million a year. Here’s chart to help us visualize how their share of total California income has grown over the past half century. 

That’s right, believe your eyes. The top 1%’s share of income in the Golden State has grown over the past half century from about one twelfth of total income to almost one third. Richest state in the richest country in the world? Yes, but a vast chunk of the riches seems to have ended up in the pockets of people who didn’t need the transfer. 

On the third hand, if all of the state’s total income had been divided up equally, every person in California in 2024 would have received around $80,000—which means that for a family of four, combining their incomes, the household would have had $320,000—just a little under ten times the official poverty line.  

“But that would be socialism!” cry the billionaires, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and probably quite a few temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Well, sort of. We’ll get into that some other time. One thing is clear: it would certainly be different from what we’ve got.

When HR-1, Trump’s Big Bad Budget Bill, first passed last summer, the California Medical Association warned of “catastrophic” consequences. They were right.

Residents of Glenn County now travel 40 minutes to the nearest emergency room, thanks to a 40% funding cut that forced the county’s only hospital to shut down. St. Johns Community Health in Los Angeles struggles to stay open, after seeing one-third of its operating revenue disappear. $50 million in cuts have forced the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to close more than half its community clinics; besides vaccinations, the clinics provided screening and treatment of tuberculosis and HIV. In Alameda County, Wilma Chan Hospital narrowly averted a layoff of 400 workers while the County searches  for new funding sources to keep them on the job.

MediCal, California’s version of the federal Medicaid program, currently covers one in five working Californians and half the state’s children. A 25% cut in state and federal spending is expected to strip close to 3 million people of their coverage by 2028. People on Medicaid will lose access to reproductive health services.  

Nor has Medicare been spared. Refugees and asylum-seeking immigrants who were on  Medicare no longer qualify. Other non-citizens were already barred from the program. 

HR-1’s proponents claimed the only people harmed by Medicaid cuts will be those who should not have been getting benefits in the first place—what were once referred to as the “undeserving poor. ” The new law requires that any adult under 65 who is not caring for young children must provide proof of working at least 80 hours a month to qualify for Medicaid, so long as their employers met the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.  

“Too onerous”

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, most people on Medicaid already work, but may find it “too onerous to demonstrate compliance” with the work requirement. The UC Berkeley Labor Center estimates that this could account for more than half the Californians expected to lose their MediCal coverage.  Their hours may fluctuate; they may be laid off temporarily or change jobs; they may be self-employed, or work for an employer who is unable or unwilling to provide the necessary documentation. The same illness that required access to Medicaid could also disqualify you from getting it, if it keeps you off work for any length of time. 

Work requirements don’t come cheap; one of the ironies of HR-1 is that the cost of implementing them could offset any savings from  throwing people off the rolls. Georgia is a case in point. Medicaid is jointly funded by state and federal governments, and one of the best features of the Affordable Care Act to make federal Medicaid dollars available for states  that cover people who make  up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Georgia took the money, but added a work requirement. As a result,  Pro Publica reports that “most of the tax dollars used to launch and implement the program have gone toward paying administrative costs rather than covering health care.”  Worse, many Georgians who complied with the work requirement still found their coverage terminated. 

The targets of HR-1

HR-1 targets those who benefited from expanded access to Medicaid—including 5 million Californians—in other ways. They are now required to reestablish their eligibility every six months. Every doctor’s visit requires  a $35 co-payment. In California, providers who will take them on as patients will likely become harder to find, since the state will no longer augment notoriously stingy Medicaid payments. And no one on Medicaid can count on being reimbursed if they get medical treatment more than a  month before their eligibility is confirmed.

More than any other group, Californias’s immigrants will feel the impact of the cuts;  here, the state must assume its share of the responsibility. California was the first state in the nation to grant MediCal eligibility without regard to immigration status. This did not come easy or happen overnight; it was the product of a protracted, step-by-step struggle to extend state funds to cover those denied access by the feds—first immigrant children, then Dreamers, finally all state residents, whether “legal” or not. 

This victory for immigrant rights is now in peril.  California has responded to lost federal health care dollars by barring any new enrollment in MediCal for undocumented adults. Those already enrolled must pay a $30 monthly premium. Even one missed payment gets you dropped from the program, with no opportunity to reenroll. In fact, leaving the program for any reason, even temporary, means you can’t get back in. Those who remain enrolled must now pay out of pocket for dental care.

A weapon in the war on immigrants

How is it that that a state that boasts the world’s fourth largest economy could allow access to health care to be used as a weapon in Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, all in the name of “austerity budgeting”? Much of the blame lies with the health care system itself. A plethora of profit-driven private insurance plans, coupled with various public programs that try to patch up the system’s holes, make rampant administrative waste and glaring inequities inevitable, while driving health care costs through the roof. 

The state legislature is already on record in favor of a “unified financing” system that provides comprehensive benefits and equal access for all Californians, at a projected savings of $158 billion a year. AB 1900, the latest attempt to adopt a single payer health plan in California, fleshes out what the system should look like.  But it is strictly a policy bill; effective financing for a truly comprehensive, universal health care system in the state would require federal waivers that aren’t likely to happen as long as Trump is in the White House. 

That doesn’t mean the money isn’t already there. It’s just that so much it is in the hands of people who are exempt from equitable taxation. That’s the rationale for the Billionaire’s Tax, a one-time 5 percent state tax on assets over $1 billion. It would affect only about 200 people, but would bring in enough money to offset all the federal revenue cuts from  HR-1. 

A second measure, to extend Proposition 55, the Education and Health Care Act of 2026, would make permanent an existing state tax on incomes in the top 2 percent’s brackets, due to expire in 2030. It wouldn’t bring in any new revenue, but it should prevent further cuts to cash-strapped public schools and colleges, and sets aside money as well for children’s health.

Both measures are currently collecting signatures for the November ballot and are endorsed by California DSA. On March 15, East Bay DSA created a Tax the Rich Working Group to get them on the ballot and work for their passage.

Neither measure represents a long-term solution to the health care crisis. They’re more like applying a tourniquet to a cut artery—a stopgap measure, to buy time until you can get the patient to a doctor. But without it, the patient could die. We can’t let that happen.

[Reprinted from Democratic Left]

Our ancestors in the labor movement fought for bread, but they fought for roses, too. This saying means that while we want subsistence, we also desire beauty.

As a union organizer and Silicon Valley DSA co-chair, I worked non-stop in 2025. Daily local fights just to earn my bread. Like many socialists, it was a joy to get to cheer on Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign. Then I had a realization: Why do so from afar? Why not give myself a rose? So I decided I would pack my bags and canvas for Mamdani. After trouncing Andrew Cuomo in the primary election, he was almost sure to win. It would be beautiful, and I needed a chance to celebrate.

I felt so compelled because frankly, we don’t often win on the Left: Bernie’s losses, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the destruction of Gaza had many feeling depleted. But every now and again? We get a long shot knockout.

A historic campaign
So here was the tale of the tape: On one side, a young, relatively green New York Assemblyman. A Muslim. An immigrant. A friggin’ Democratic Socialist. Just reeking of unelectability. On the other side, the most establishment Democrat who ever established: former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Zohran shouldn’t have stood a chance. But, despite smears of antisemitism, and the fact that Andrew Cuomo, a disgraced sex pest, was willing to ally with any Republican or billionaire with a checkbook, Zohran was able to organize a historic campaign. This campaign was built on real hope for working people and the mobilization of tens of thousands of volunteers.

On the ballot back home in Santa Clara County, there was Measure A, a ballot measure to raise $330 million for our public hospitals. I pushed for Silicon Valley DSA to endorse it. Campaigning for Measure A would be a strategic opportunity to build our chapter’s local notoriety and, of course, winning would be hugely meaningful in our community. Since I am a co-chair and I introduced the resolution for our endorsement, I was feeling a bit selfish leaving town so close to election day. Luckily, trusted comrades encouraged me to take the trip anyway. Those talks were roses for me.

In 2010, I had actually lived in Brooklyn. Returning on Saturday, November 1, 2025 was surreal. I roomed with a fascinating but cranky Russian woman named Merina, a 70-year-old immigrant who told me stories of isolation and despair, landlords who fixed nothing, and her past as an economist and poet. When I tried to talk to her about Zohran, she insisted that nothing could change and that Zohran and I were both naive. It reminded me of why his campaign, and his focus on the unvarnished details of working class life, was so empowering: because so many had lost hope. But in Zohran’s New York we all matter. Meeting Merina was a rose, even if she hated giving it to me.

How Zohran connected
The first canvas was Sunday in Park Slope. I got paired up with a first-time volunteer, a nurse practitioner. In my union, I represent similar workers and we bonded. Zohran connected with her because she sees how affordability impacts her patients. She was non-union and we talked about how she could change that. Our time together was a little rose.

That evening I got dinner with a DSA buddy from Portland who also made the pilgrimage. We hung with his friend, a popular drag king. While bar hopping we chatted everyone up about the election. When we hit a bar called Boobie Trap, we talked to a young couple who were making out all night. When they took a short break I interrupted to ask if they supported Zohran.The woman replied, “Do I look like I would vote for Cuomo?”

The last stop before bed was to hit the bodega. I chatted up three native Brooklynites about the election. One of them asked me, “So what exactly does it mean to freeze the rent?” Luckily, Zohran had been so detailed in explaining his platform, I felt I had the tools to explain. The guys said they would look into it. I don’t know if they did. But when I checked out, the shopkeeper confirmed he was voting for Zohran. Nice, bodega rose.

On Monday I had hopped over to New Jersey to canvas for Jake Ephros in his Jersey City city council race (he won). I hit the doors with a 22-year-old comrade named Mei. She wore a bluetooth boombox slung around her shoulder. For someone so young, she was quite insightful and dedicated. I did have to tell her not to play her boombox at the door though. 

A generous person, Mei drove me back into the city where we met up with my Portland comrade again and an old NYC friend. The four of us had a classic NYC Italian dining experience at Monte’s Trattoria and camaraderie was at an all-time high. Roses and “Fuggedaboutits” abounded.”

Tuesday, I had the surreal experience of canvassing in my old neighborhood, Bushwick. Last time I lived there Occupy Wall Street was happening. I did not participate at all. Times change. 

While waiting in line to get my precinct list, one of the volunteers wearing a red “DSA for Zohran” shirt pointed at me and insisted he knew me from somewhere. But how? As we shuffled through the line getting materials it dawned on both of us – we had attended some parties thrown by a mutual friend in San Francisco in 2023. Small world, big roses.

Beware shop talk
Once again, I was paired with a first-time volunteer. After we canvassed our last door, we ate lunch at a Palestinian restaurant called Ayat Bushwick. While sitting down, we ran into a handful of volunteers (including the one I had met in SF) and decided to all eat together. It didn’t take long before internal DSA politics took over the conversation. Finally, after a couple minutes of what was probably unintelligible shop talk, one of the volunteers bravely asked “So, what’s DSA?” Socialist record scratch.

This brave volunteer was a 28-year-old Dominican native New Yorker who had just been laid off. This ought to be our target demographic –— but she’s out here literally canvassing for Zohran and has no idea what DSA is. We’ve got so much work to do. A harsh reminder to not get lost in the red sauce. After lunch, those DSA members let me take a work call at their apartment. Rose and rose.

Finally, polls closed. There were big DSA election night parties scattered across the city. I couldn’t miss out. I went to 9 Bob Note, a wicked warehouse bar and club. Zohran felt larger than life at this point. When I finally got inside the energy was incredible. Will Menaker from Chapo Trap House was there and I got to say hello. Also there were Yung Chomsky and Brace Belden from the TrueAnon podcast: the DSA equivalent of a Hollywood after-party! Plus I kept running into people I had met on the trip. The drag king! My Portland comrade I didn’t even expect to be there! Ara, one of the NYC-DSA staff! It was like the end of Wizard of Oz: “And you were there, and you were there.”

The moment we were all waiting for was fast approaching. By then, many of us had crowded tightly into the dance floor area of the event space. There were a few hosts there to get us hyped up. And then it happens: Zohran is announced the winner. The mayor-elect sign flashes on the big screen. The building erupts. Incredible. 

This felt like a peak in my socialist career. Crammed in with hundreds of other comrades, most of whom I am sure worked a lot more on this campaign than I did, cheering, crying, hugging strangers. No kidding, I did a 360° and the makeout couple from Boobie Trap was standing behind me! We high fived. Roses could have fallen from the ceiling.

Eventually a group of us moseyed over to another Zohran party at Starr Bar where more comrades abounded. It really felt like you couldn’t go anywhere to escape the specter of “Mammunism”. We laughed, we drank, we danced and a 25-year-old told me I was “Old as fuck.” That rose was a little wilted but I still liked it.

Different world
During my final day I made an emotional visit to my old apartment from fifteen years prior. The street itself wasn’t that different, but my understanding of the world was. I sat down in a pizza shop and reflected on my experience and how far I have come.

I am fortunate I have the means for a trip like this. Most do not. Traveling introduced me to so many wonderful people all struggling for their bread and their roses. So many were generous and kind. Their faces lit up when I told them I had come all the way from California to help. And I have so many lessons to bring back to apply in Silicon Valley. 

And now I think about how far we have all come. DSA, the Left and the working-people living in this era of capitalism. More and more are waking up. More and more are hungry for change, hungry for the bread we deserve. The socialist future is ahead of us. Maybe you can’t see it yet. But close your eyes. Breathe it in. Do you smell that? That’s the rose.

(Fallujah, 2004; Minsk, 1942)

Barbara Epstein tells this story in her book about the Minsk ghetto

There is smoke on the horizon
but the fire is far away.
From here, we can’t hear the explosions.
We see the ruined houses only on TV 
but the fat man who works at the Post Office can’t quit smoking this year
because his son is in Fallujah.

Who can explain what is going on?
Is this worse than what has happened before?

In Minsk, in 1942, the Nazis occupied the city.
The Communist leadership had fled east to Moscow, abandoning the city, disbanding the Party.
There were therefore officially no Communists in Minsk.
Citizens, by which we mean Jews and non-Jews, Byelorussians, could not believe that no leadership had been left behind and authorized to organize a resistance.

At first they waited, expecting to be contacted.
Eventually, they formed their own underground, naming it, out of respect, 
the Second City Committee, in case a First Committee came forward.

Nothing came forward. 
The Second Committee saved thousands, Jews and non-Jews, 
transporting them to the partisan units in the forests to the east.

But this is the lesson: No one came forward. Nothing came forward.
They waited, and eventually formed their own committee.

The forever war by socialists and other progressives continues against the ruling corporate wing of the Democratic Party. 

The latest battles were fought at the more-or-less annual state party convention in San Francisco in February, which focused on 1) endorsements in legislative and statewide races; and 2) the party platform for the next two years. 

The endorsements rarely involve close contests in more than one or two races, but this year, as an elected delegate from Sacramento County I received a huge number of mailers and calls over the preceding weeks from candidates for open statewide offices – governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, insurance commissioner and superintendent of public education.  (Incumbents sailed through for attorney general, controller, secretary of state.)

62 candidates for governor

The race for governor comprises 62 candidates, mostly unknowns, from many parties or no party. Ten are generally considered serious by mainstream media – and recent polls indicate that most likely to advance to November’s general election are the two Republicans among them, with about 15 percent each, not much but well ahead of several Democrats at around 10 percent. With June 2 fast approaching, none of the eight top Democrats is blinking, despite pressure from party leadership on those polling poorly to drop out. Ironically, even if a few did it might not make much difference unless voters consolidate in backing one of the Dems. There’s no sign of it yet. 

A lot of folks are also taking a curious look at Tom Steyer, the self-funded billionaire who is ostensibly renouncing his past and repurposing his riches for a couple of decades, while embracing progressive positions on multiple issues. Another enticing aspect of his candidacy is that unlike all the other Democrats, he seems notably unbeholden to the party heavies. His answers to my questions about Palestine at the convention and at a recent Sacramento town hall were sympathetic but not well-informed. (When I offered to meet with him together with a Palestinian comrade he publicly accepted and staff rushed to take my contact information. We’ll see.)

The irony of a Republican governor with a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature could make for pundit heaven. It might highlight a stark contrast between relative progressives who manage to pass some decent bills and centrists who use the “impropriety” of refusing to override gubernatorial vetoes to maintain the status quo.

Meanwhile, the most well-known non-duopoly candidate, Green Party’s Butch Ware, is going to court to fight for his ballot spot after being disqualified over a technicality.

The possibility cast a pall over the convention; panic had not yet set in, and maybe it will still somehow be avoided. 

Several candidates did better among delegates than in voter polls, but no one came close to the 60 percent needed for official party endorsement. The same held for all the other contested statewide posts, all with multiple candidates. It’s unusual to behold such division in the party, perhaps in part reflecting increasingly large ideological differences, but also the smell of opportunity with Republican prospects seemingly tanking – though surveys show the Democratic Party less popular than almost ever.

Amid the chaos, progressive entities at the convention were not in a position (or not allowed) to make endorsements in these contests, but several candidates made positive impressions: California DSA-endorsed Oliver Ma for lieutenant governor (not on the party ballot due to late entry but very present), Jane Kim for insurance commissioner (came in a close second), and Nichelle Hengerson for superintendent of public instruction (topped a field crowded with several more well-known, termed-out legislators).

Most state legislative and congressional race endorsements were settled or ruled out before the convention at “pre-endorsement” conferences where local delegates and some others could vote for candidates in their districts. But in several cases, the results enabled further voting in San Francisco. And one – the seventh district (disclosure: where I mounted a last-minute campaign in 2024 against incumbent Doris Matsui due to her refusal to meet opponents of the Gaza genocide or call for a ceasefire back when that meant something) – had some real drama. 

DSA-backed congressional candidate denied endorsement

DSA-endorsed Mai Vang, a Sacramento city councilor, won enough support in the local process to force a further caucus at the convention – itself an extremely rare occurrence. Countering were 1) re-appointment of a number of loyalists as “delegates” in the district by party chiefs and Matsui’s fellow Congress members, a legal but despised maneuver; and 2) the sudden appearance of Nancy Pelosi and two other congressional colleagues at the caucus, meant to comprise delegates from the district. Votes are recorded and made public. It’s widely assumed that some were made under presumed fear of consequences had they voted for Vang.

The result: Vang fell one vote short of what would have enabled her to collect delegate signatures to force a full vote of the entire convention on the last day. In my 12 years as a delegate, I’ve seen that happen exactly once – and it was successful.

It was not to be, but as the Sacramento DSA chapter and many others mobilize, we know the vote that will count is still to come – on June 2. A top-two finish will take it to November. The race includes no other progressives. Beating an incumbent is tough under the best of circumstances, but two relatively unknown Republicans could conceivably split the MAGA vote and enable Mai to advance.

Contention on Palestine 

More drama occurred over the party platform. In a comparatively open process, the committee responsible heard testimony and received written proposals from many delegates on a plethora of issues. But it also declared its intent to shorten the 40+ page prior document and make it more of a statement of principles with fewer specific policy planks. 

A December draft did that, but to a minor degree, and progressives were not surprised that many of the deleted sections were among those they had successfully achieved in the recent past. A backlash ensued on a number of environmental issues, Native American matters and anti-corruption principles. There was a short-lived campaign of unknown origin, rife with speculation, to vote the whole platform down. But it petered out, and advocates succeeded in having much of what they wanted restored.

Most contentious, unsurprisingly, were sections on Palestine and Israel, in which I was actively involved. Hundreds of delegates and other Democrats signed a set of amendments we proposed accurately describing and calling for party opposition to genocide in Gaza, escalating settler/military violence on the West Bank – and for a freezing of arms transfers to Israel. Some improved language – see the final platform – came out of negotiation between leaders of Democrats for Justice in Palestine (see the previous California Red report on its founding) and the head of Democrats for Israel (recently renamed “Jewish Democrats,” offensive to those of us whom it describes but absolutely doesn’t represent). 

In an underhanded move, an outside Israel lobby official was allowed to plead with the committee to abandon the initial compromise, and a somewhat worse one eventually emerged – but still better than the previous platform and the committee’s original proposal, which would have deleted a nod, in generic terms, to various elements of international law, including people’s right to leave and return to their country, and condemned genocide – again generically, without mentioning Gaza. But it does describe the horrors that have occurred there. 

Especially grating to supporters of Palestine is the retention of language supporting a “secure, democratic Jewish state” and upholding the “two-state solution” mantra. The next chance to seek change will come in 2028. Meanwhile, it’s both exasperating and reassuring that elected Democrats are not even required to read the platform, let alone follow it in their legislative or executive pursuits.

When the era of capitalism comes to an end, and it will, it will not be because we socialists engaged in utopian methods of organizing based on blind guesswork. Instead capitalism will be overthrown because we engaged with the theory of scientific socialism and converted our theory into practice. The struggle against capitalism has a long history. The benefit of this is our ability to learn from socialists of the past. It’s from these observations and analysis that I argue the path forward does not lie inside the Democratic Party. It lies in the creation of a workers’ party dedicated to the interests of the working class.

Third Party Viability

I don’t suspect many will disagree with the eventual necessity for a workers’ party, instead disagreeing with the current viability of one. There is currently no viable workers’ party, or third party of any sort, in the United States. However, it would be fallacious to then say third parties can never be viable in the US. Two examples of third parties breaking through the established two party system come to us from Latin American, Uruguay and Venezuela. Regardless of opinion on the actions taken by these third parties, their success serves as a positive indicator in support of future third party viability in our own country. 

The third party prospect is only further enhanced by the fact that more than half of all Americans are dissatisfied with both Democrats and Republicans. America’s own history shows us examples of third parties coming into power when a large enough gulf exists between goals of politicians and desires of voters. Some will argue American third parties are a thing of the past, that the period of possibility has ended. This line of thinking falls prey to the same fallacy committed by Francis Fukuyama when he said we are at the end of history. Today only seems like a finality because we have not seen what comes next. DSA’s slogan “a better world is possible” isn’t something we say because it feels good; it’s something we say because it is true, and it can only be achieved if we demand it.

Moving Democrats Left

The strategy of electing better Democrats, putting socialists in office, is often cited as the route by which socialists will be able to drag Democrats left. Recent victories of DSA-endorsed figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani have renewed enthusiasm for this approach, but how has the Democratic Party changed for the better following the election of such candidates? Regarding Mamdani, the entire Democratic establishment organized itself to shut Mamdani out, most notably House and Senate minority leaders Hakim Jefferies and Chuck Schumer. This is reminiscent of how the Democrats organized internally to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the 2016 presidential nomination, or how they held a closed-door secret ballot to elect then 74 year old Gerry Connoly to the House Oversight Committee instead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most popular Democrats in recent history. Maybe those candidates just weren’t socialist enough, maybe a strong socialist slate could make the changes we need. 

Luckily for us, this also happened recently. The Las Vegas DSA chapter won on a progressive slate in 2021. They received no communication from the Nevada State Democratic Party, no support, nothing except a vote from the state representatives to condemn the “horrors of socialism”.. We understand that individual action alone cannot overcome systemic injustices. Similarly, we should not expect individual personalities within the Democratic Party to be capable of completely changing the party’s direction.

The 2024 US presidential election is the most glaring example of the Democrats’ unwillingness to shift left. In the face of a second Trump term, which was correctly identified as a fascist movement and touted by the Democrats as the greatest threat American “democracy” has ever seen, how far did they move to the left to garner our support for this critical election? Not a single step. Instead of hosting a free and open primary, Democratic Party officials unilaterally selected Kamala Harris, the spineless, genocide-enabling, right wing establishment plant who threw trans people under the bus, only ever grew more unpopular the longer she remained in the public eye, and said the only way she would differ from Biden is by putting more Republicans in her cabinet. The Democrats have shown us time and time again that they would rather hand Republicans victory on a silver platter than move an inch to the left. It’s time we stop pretending we can build an effective socialist platform within the party.

Some point to the Tea Party’s success in moving the Republican Party further right as evidence of our potential ability to move the Democratic Party left through mass popular support, but a class analysis shows this is not as analogous as it may seem. The Republicans and Democrats are both bourgeois parties dedicated to the service of the ruling class. The Tea Party movement was also a bourgeois movement attempting to move the Republicans further right; the Republican Party was already racist, already chauvinist, already dedicated to increasing working class exploitation to benefit the capitalist class; the Tea Party simply wanted them to be more explicit and more extreme in these regards. The Democratic Party is also racist, also chauvinist, also dedicated to increasing working class exploitation to benefit the capitalist class. Any attempt to move them left is in direct opposition to their goals and to the class interests of those they serve. This is an exercise in opportunism, the false belief that working with capitalist interests will produce results favorable to the working class. History has demonstrated that any cooperation with the ruling class necessitates the working class must subjugate itself, as cooperation requires the continuation of class relations.

Minimizing harm, voting for the lesser evil

This is the primary argument for supporting the Democratic Party among leftists. However, evidence has shown this is not effective as a strategy. The general argument is that Democrats, however bad they may be, will be less harmful in office than Republicans. If people who would have voted Democrat instead vote third party, this takes votes from the Democrats and makes it more likely Republicans will win elections. Therefore, voting Democrat is the preferable option because it minimizes harm from politicians.

For my response, it’s important to reiterate that the Republicans and Democrats are both bourgeois parties, they both exist to serve the interests of the ruling class. The role elections play in our society can be analogized to instances of imperialism and US intervention. From the Revolutionary Communist Party’s publication, The Communist, we have this observation of imperialist action:

However, the horrors of imperialism are not due to bad people or bad policies. They flow from the class divisions endemic to capitalism, the market economy, and the nation-state. They cannot be understood in the abstract or done away with in isolation. Moreover, an analysis not rooted in class leads inevitably to class collaboration and illusions in the trap of lesser evilism.

As socialists who stand against imperialism, conversations regarding the recent indefensible aggression from the American capitalist class toward Venezuela and Iran has brought renewed discussions. We understand that no act of imperialism can be analyzed in isolation because they do not exist in isolation; they exist within a broader system of global exploitation wherein any success achieved by imperialist powers serves to bolster future interventions. Similarly, elections are not isolated events that happen every however-many years. Elections exist within the broader context of the political struggle. It is misguided to look only at the short term regarding harms stemming from elections.

The Democratic Party capitalizes on people’s tendency toward short term harm mitigation. We see this in the rhetoric they employ. Every new election is the most important election of our lifetime, the selling point for almost every Democrat is they’re not Republican. In some ways these arguments are true; every election we face is against a Republican Party farther right and more openly fascistic than the one before. What’s left out of Democratic messaging is that the Democrats are also farther right and more fascistic than before. Democrats who are called radicals today, people like Mamdani, AOC, Bernie, not too long ago would have been called mainstream progressives. Free buses, universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy:  these were mainstream Democratic positions a few short decades ago. In many cases these policies that existed in the past have been repealed to the detriment of the people. The reason these ideas are considered radical now is because the Republican Party has been dragging our country further and further right, year after year, and the Democrats have been complicit. The trend of Republicans and Democrats moving further right every year will only continue in the years to come. We know the Democrats won’t change; they’ve made that very clear. Continuing the trend of minimizing harm in the short term will change nothing. The goal of socialists should not be to elect Democrats, it should not be to elect better Democrats; that’s the job of the Democratic Party. Our goal must be to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, and that goal will not be achieved by voting for politicians in a bourgeois party.

Effect on Socialist Organizing

A foundational concept of socialism is that of dialectical materialism: no two forces can act on each other and come out unchanged. When analyzing the effects socialist organizing within the Democratic Party has on the party, we would be doing ourselves a disservice to not also analyze the effects the party has on socialist organizers and candidates.

Too often do I see self-identified leftists bending over backwards to defend candidates whose actions are very deserving of criticism. Two examples come to mind. Bernie Sanders has shown imperialist tendencies in his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia, Kosovo, and Libya under Clinton and Obama while condemning US withdrawal from Syria. AOC voted in favor of providing Iron Dome funding to Israel, freeing up their pocketbooks to continue the genocide in Palestine. These actions don’t undo the good they’ve done, but to say the good they’ve done ought to shield them from criticism would be ridiculous. We do not support socialist politicians for clout, we must not engage in politician worship as others do. Critical support for politicians must be just that, critical of the politician. To defend politicians or candidates when they act contrary to the socialist project is necessary to prevent ourselves from being co-opted and absorbed into the “kinder version” of the neoliberal movement. We learn through practice; if we practice defending concessions to capital then the only thing we learn will be how to concede to capital, leaving us unable to meet the revolutionary moment when it arises.

Conclusion

The Democratic Party is a dead end for the socialist project. We cannot expect to realign a bourgeois party to proletarian interests; we cannot allow the Democrat’s strategy of focusing on the short term to blind us to the long term results; and above all we cannot allow ourselves to believe this—the Democratic Party—is the best we can hope for. The process of building a working class party will be difficult; it will take time; but we can’t afford to continue in the status quo much longer. In working to build a workers’ party today we are making things easier for ourselves tomorrow. It’s regrettable that we have to start from almost nothing, but that’s no reason to avoid starting now. The best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago, but the second best time is today. 

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and the same is true for all future societies. Our future will not be written by any ruling class or their parties. Our future will be formed by the will of the masses—by the proletarian class who possesses revolutionary potential—and we are not powerless in this formation because we are them.

by Kevin N

Sometime in my early twenties — way, way back in the early 2010s — for reasons I’m still not entirely sure about, I suddenly stopped being a nihilist apolitical punk who couldn’t be bothered with activism because he had more important things to drink. I was first radicalized around the issue of campaign finance reform, and got involved with a national organization called Wolf-PAC. I spent a few years lobbying Ohio’s state representatives regarding campaign finance laws — they were invariably bemused each time I walked into their offices with long hair and a patchy leather jacket. In spite of my ratty appearance, I did manage to personally convince a Republican State Representative to change his stance on campaign finance laws after a series of meetings at the Mentor Public Library, although he still wouldn’t sponsor our Wolf-PAC resolution for fear of political backlash. I learned a lot about political advocacy through that experience, but that’s another story.

At some point, I got an email from a group dedicated to campaign finance reform that called itself Democracy Spring. They were organizing a protest in DC, with the intention of having as many people as possible perform an act of civil disobedience by willingly getting arrested for protesting without a permit on the steps of the Capitol Building.

I was absolutely thrilled at the idea. I had romanticized 1960s images of crowds of protestors in my head, and they had convinced me that this was the sort of direct action that would affect real change (that was, indeed, the depth of my analysis). So I threw everything I had into the organization. After months of working with the Democracy Spring organizers in DC, I was able to organize a small contingent of Clevelanders to travel to DC by train and participate in the protest. All in all, there were some 1,300 people who were arrested on the first day of the protests, the largest number of arrests at the Capitol since the Vietnam Protests. More would be arrested in the week that followed.

I spent a week in DC protesting, and it was one of the most exciting weeks of my life. I marched, chanted, and commiserated with like-minded activists. I have a picture somewhere of me getting my hands zip-tied behind my back, but I have no idea where. Rosario Dawson and Cenk Uygur got arrested with us. One of my favorite political commentators at the time, Lawrence Lessig, spoke at the rally. Bernie Sanders gave us a shout out on social media. Cory Booker and John Lewis came out to speak with us and encouraged us to continue. Elizabeth Warren admonished the rest of the Senators for ignoring us during a speech she made on the Senate floor. I even made my first semi-viral Twitter post. It truly felt like the beginning of something important — I left DC feeling downright euphoric.

But that was it. Nothing changed.

Aside from CNN showing a single 30 second clip of the protest, no mainstream news media covered us. Someone at Vice wrote a piece on us, but nobody ever really took them seriously anyway. After it ended, nobody in the government ever referenced the protest again. I’m quite certain most of you reading this have never heard of the protest in the first place. It was like we had plowed the ocean.

After I got home, I was undeniably elated by the experience, but in the back of my mind I was still somewhat conflicted. It seemed like we hadn’t actually accomplished anything, despite all that effort.

Luckily, I learned from the organizers that there would be a coordinated follow-up effort: the country would be divided into smaller regions, and local organizers would recruit supporters (there was no formal membership process) by staging smaller protests at local political events. Then after two years of building support, we would return to the Capitol and stage a repeat of the original protest, but larger.

This was promising! Again, I threw everything into the effort. I drove to Columbus once a month to meet with Ohio’s organizers, and got another small contingent of Clevelanders to go to protests in an effort to build support for our nonpartisan campaign finance reform movement. 

Then Trump got elected.

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The Spring Dries Up

Suddenly, all of the emails from Democracy Spring stopped talking about campaign finance reform and were just focused on “resisting” Trump. Okay, that’s fine. But how? Are we still meeting in Columbus to coordinate efforts? No, those regional meetings around the country stopped pretty abruptly. Are we trying to organize another big protest in DC? No, the communications were just filled with vague calls to “Resist!” and unoriginal, unremarkable statements about the gravity and urgency of the political threat posed by Trump. Lacking any formal structures, the organizational movement in Ohio and around the country dissipated faster than it came together.

But emails from Democracy Spring’s leadership (the only remaining form of communication they sent out) kept coming. I wasn’t clear on what they were doing now, but I continued to read them since they had been such a big part of my life for nearly half a decade. On Trump’s inauguration day, I went to DC to protest — although, admittedly, I ended up disgusted and depressed by the whole spectacle and spent the day in the Holocaust Museum instead.

I touched base with some of the Democracy Spring organizers who were in DC as well. They said they had something big planned for the inauguration, and I was confused as to why there hadn’t been a more concerted effort to recruit people. Regardless, I hadn’t planned to get arrested again, so I declined to participate.

Later that day, I got this email:

The email went on to detail the efforts of “six brave democracy defenders” — a far cry from the 1,700 who joined them just two years prior — and they claimed it as a massive victory. In the weeks and months that followed, similar emails with subject lines like “Trump Disrupted!” and “Two Democracy Spring Leaders Arrested at Sit-In!” followed, each containing photos of the same handful of participants engaged in various innocuous acts of “resistance” — and typically accompanied by a request for donations. The emails eventually stopped.

The Democracy Spring organization (if you can call it that), once able to mobilize thousands of people across the country, had dissolved into a vanity project for its leadership clique. All it took was a single political crisis (Trump’s election, in this case), and the structureless network of dedicated activists from across the country fell apart into a harmless, toothless display of performative “Resist!”-ance.

I was devastated. I felt like I had totally wasted those years of my efforts with Democracy Spring. I dropped out of activism altogether and probably (definitely) started drinking too much. I got into activist journalism instead, and made a few locally-focused documentaries about homelessness that won some awards at some film festivals around Ohio. But I stopped engaging in direct political activism, for the most part, aside from attending one-off protests or local community-building events.

I’d occasionally talk with the organizers of these events, and when I asked them what their long-term strategy was, they would invariably offer vague, starry-eyed platitudes about “building the movement” and “Resist!”-ing without offering anything concrete. It was always too reminiscent of the empty rhetoric I heard from Democracy Spring’s leadership for me to buy into their passion again.

Luckily, I had also been a convert of Bernie Sanders in 2014, and canvassed for him in 2015. Exclusively thanks to him, I spent the following years reading and unlearning all of the misconceptions that I didn’t know I had held about the word “socialism” (on my own, since I still mostly liked to hang out with nihilist apolitical punks who all thought I was annoying for being “political” and reading). It took a long time! Anti-socialist propaganda dies hard. I’m still unlearning stuff. At some point in 2023, I saw a post made by an old college friend (shout-out Julie) about a DSA event and decided that I’d better attend if I were going to be calling myself a socialist. It was my socialist “put up or shut up” moment, if you will.

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Democracy In Action

In Cleveland’s DSA chapter, I found tons of committed members working together in an organization that was structured in its composition, serious and thoughtful about its rhetoric, deliberate about its strategy and tactics, intentional about political education, and focused on efforts that did not just consist of protests and petty acts of civil disobedience. But most importantly, it was democratic, directly accountable to its membership, and committed to building its members into leaders — instead of having them orbit around an insular group of self-proclaimed leaders who lead through force of personality alone.

The chapter’s model of organizing, as opposed to just mobilizing and advocacy, was nothing short of inspiring. According to what a given situation demanded, the organization’s goals were both long-term and short-term, widescoped and narrow, national and local, and with a calculated strategy to achieve all of them — with the right kind of deliberate and thorough organizing, of course. Most importantly, the chapter had a priority structure that allowed its membership to pivot and focus their limited capacity on issues as needed, so the organization wouldn’t crumble if the national political situation demanded a change of course.

In short, DSA was everything that Democracy Spring wasn’t.

I want to clarify that I don’t expect or even want you to be disillusioned by protesting. It was a real bummer of a process to go through, and I’m happy for folks who don’t feel the same way I do. I’m also not trying to use my personal experience as a demand for deference — although if you’re someone who is shallow enough to grant political weight to this sort of activist credentialism, feel free to defer to me if you want to — nor am I trying to say “I know better than you, so you should think like I do.” My intentions are solely to give an example that illustrates the clear limitations of protest-based activism. The trend I laid out in my personal story about one protest movement is observable in varying degrees across all protest movements.

Protesting is an acceptable way to “fight back” precisely because the ruling class thinks protesting is ineffective. And without a deep commitment to organizing, it is. The word “demonstration” is suggestive of the performative nature of protests — which there is a time and place for! But protests are by no means the most important tool in our toolkit. Without clear follow-up, without a commitment to building ourselves and each other into leaders, without a plan to build working-class power — in other words, without organizing — protests achieve little beyond making the attendees feel good about themselves. And to amplify the social standing of the self-proclaimed “leaders” in liberal activist circles, of course.

(By the way, the French word for “protest” is “manifestation,” which is more befitting of their culture of resistance; the average French protest would be called a “riot” if it took place in this country. But that’s a separate discussion.)

Again and again, when I see a political crisis emerge in this country, I watch the liberal activist groups in this city circle their wagons and start mobilizing for protests. I see the same people attending every time. And when the crisis passes, the mobilizing stops. There’s good work being done by these liberal activists, for sure. But every time a new issue emerges as the crisis du jour, the same pattern plays out: new coalitions with catchy names (but composed of the same people), emergency protests, vague calls to “Get organized! Join an org!”, and then — once public perceptions of “crisis” and “urgency” have faded — nothing. That sort of Sisyphean ambulance chasing is not organizing for change — it’s just performative “Resist!”-ance.

I often hear that we have a bad reputation among liberal activists in this city. Quite frankly, I don’t care. I’m not really all that impressed with those groups. That’s why I’m in DSA instead. Our DSA chapter is one of the largest, most coordinated, and most capable independent political organizations in the city, so let’s act like it. Liberal activist groups should be more worried about what we think of them. There’s nothing to be gained from deferring to liberal activists and giving undeserved weight to their criticisms of our chapter. We should absolutely work with them where our interests align, but at the end of the day, they need us more than we need them. After all, they wouldn’t be so desperate for us to endorse, support, and attend their events if that weren’t the case. Let them work for our approval instead.

I’m in DSA because I think it’s the organization best poised to stage a serious, coordinated, and multifronted resistance against capitalism and fascist reaction — not because it just happens to be “one progressive org out of many” that I happened to join. But if we treat this organization like it’s just one of many generally progressive orgs, it definitely will be.

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Organizing, Not Just Mobilizing

I have nothing against attending protests. I attend and will continue to attend protests. People should attend protests; they’re cathartic, empowering, and publicly visible. But we have to recognize the strategic limits to endorsing and attending protests just for the sake of endorsing and attending protests. And if we do endorse a protest, we need to be deliberate about turnout.

The March 28th No Kings protest is coming up and there are questions over whether we should endorse it or not. Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. Unless we’re doing something tangible at it like collecting signatures for our Gender Freedom Policy Petition, simply showing up, as good as that might feel, will accomplish as little as any other protest.

If we endorse a protest and only about 10 people show up, that misrepresents the actual power in this chapter and perceptibly brings our nearly 700 member org to the level of the myriad small, disorganized activist groups in the city. So, there is a potential cost associated with the optics of being present at these protests as well as the potential benefits to which folks are appealing; but those benefits only manifest if our turnout is strong.

Protesting alone isn’t going to stop Trump, Zionism, or ICE — it won’t stop any form of fascist reaction, for that matter. What will stop these things is organizing people into DSA and building it into a formidable political force that can leverage its power from below. As long as we’re not making a concerted effort at doing the latter, the former holds.

On a positive note of what can be possible at protests: at the last anti-ICE protest I attended, I connected a group of student activists at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) with the state Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) coordinator, and they’re currently organizing a new YDSA chapter on Case’s campus. This, in my opinion, is the sort of thing we should be aiming to do at protests.

Without organizing — and I mean organizing — mobilizing attendees for protests has an inherently limited impact. I think many comrades think “organizing” simply consists of getting people to show up at events, direct actions, canvasses, and training sessions; but that’s only mobilizing, not organizing. Without a deep commitment to developing one another into leaders both inside and outside the organization, we are not organizing.

Internal organizing is just as crucial a part of “the work” as our outward-focused efforts in the community. Without either, we stagnate.

To be clear, nothing should stop us from attending, endorsing, or supporting protests when they’re aligned with our values, but we need to be deliberate and calculated about what we’re doing when we go. Otherwise we’re just chasing the tail of the liberal activist movement — and I don’t know about you, but I joined DSA because I found that movement lacking.

We can attend these protests, demonstrate resistance to ICE and fascism, participate in direct actions/responses, and be serious about organizing people into DSA at these events — all at the same time. As one of our comrades likes to say, “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.” Another likes to say “We just have to do it.”  Again, I fully agree — we just have to be deliberate and strategic about it. The urgency of the situation demands nothing less than a principled and coordinated organizational effort, not just blind faith that “Resist!”-ing at protests is enough to change anything on its own.

Solidarity, comrades.

The post Why Protesting Isn’t Enough: The Limits of Protest Activism appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

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By: Chris Brady

Teamsters’ International President and Medford native Sean O’Brien took the stage at the 2024 Republican National Convention, upending decades of precedent in organized labor’s reliable standing as a Democratic bloc. O’Brien’s appearance wasn’t shocking so much as symptomatic. Labor is in political freefall. Workers have correctly identified that Democratic politics have left them behind; a new populist right has fomented an ideological pitch to try and fill the absence. This new political movement, constituted by labor bureaucrats, pseudo-populist politicians, and disaffected working class voters is increasingly shaping the labor movement with a new right-wing force, animated and with collaboration of a wing of labor leaders and strategists. Although O’Brien frustrates principled organizers everywhere with politics and his love for podcasting more than doing work, the significance of his 2024 speech was the open display of the  forces which propelled the labor leader to try to court a new audience.

Meeting of the minds. (Credit: Mediaite.com)

Oren Cass’s Ideology 

The intellectual base behind labor’s rightward shift is being spearheaded by a different Massachusetts native: Oren Cass. Cass crystallized his maverick identity after working on Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign. 

According to Professor of Labor Studies at UCLA Kit Smemo, Cass lamented following the loss that:

“The Republican Party’s ‘blind faith in free markets’ left it unable to win elections, much less address the gnawing social (and moral) crises left by decades of austerity, deregulation, and privatization.”

This sentiment may seem ludicrous coming from a Republican, as even most Democrats will not verbalize anything close to the critique of neoliberal doctrine as Cass has. 

But the GOP is no longer Romney’s party. National politics has struggled to meet the collective shedding of the neoliberal paradigm, and in Washington, D.C., where Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, and an army of upper-middle class striving 26 year-old Hill staffers excrete propaganda that somehow evolves into law – establishment forces have left a vacuum for politics that is interested in workers, at least on the surface.

Matt Yglesias, the chopped man and hot-take centrist whose readership includes most Democratic establishment players. (Credit: Current Affairs)

This realization led Cass to found American Compass, a think-tank that defies conventional GOP orthodoxy and attempts to articulate a Republican worker agenda fit for the Trump moment. Its policies combine a family-centered conservatism with a seemingly genuine assessment of the economic crises workers face in the United States. Acolytes include Vice President J.D. Vance, Senators Hawley (R-MO) and Cotton (R-MO), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Cass has even appeared on Sean O’Brien’s podcast. Compass advocates for a focus on the nuclear family, deportations, regulation of Big Tech, and, incredulously, is critical of the financialization of the United States economy by Wall Street. Of particular emphasis, however, is Compass’s self-identified advocacy for labor and workers.

According to their policy page:

“Organized labor has traditionally been the mechanism that gives workers an institution of solidarity, power in the market, and representation in the workplace. Strong worker representation can make America stronger.” 

In 2021, Cass gave a lecture titled “Why National Conservatism Needs Worker Power.” This rhetoric is a far cry from the more familiar Republican establishment lines, drunk off of Koch funding, pushing right-to-work laws and demanding that greater shares of surplus value fall to Capital. While a Republican operative ostensibly supporting the labor movement may reflexively seem refreshing, if not confusing, the actual policies being proposed by the American Compass labor desk are different than either the mainstream of labor or the rank-and-file movement.  For example, Compass is emphatically critical of the National Labor Relations Act, which resulted in the creation of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), due to its institutionalization of bargaining power monopolies by labor unions instead of its suppression of worker power. Similarly, Compass has expressed skepticism of the DSA-endorsed PRO-Act, which would increase worker organizing through these channels.

Instead of the current system of labor,  Compass prefers non-union “works councils” in European Union style, where although workers may not earn collective bargaining power, they at least offer new, more bureaucratic channels to communicate with management. 

The Role of David Rolf

This concept, surprisingly, does not stem from some Jack Welsh union-busting fever dream, but in part from David Rolf, former President of SEIU 775 and member of the American Compass Board of Advisors. Rolf has spoken out extensively in support of ‘labor movement innovation,’ including while teaming up with libertarians. 

What does David Rolf believe in? We just don’t really know – which makes him a great token labor leader for Compass.

American Compass is staunchly opposed to labor unions acting politically.Citing a survey they conducted themselves, Compass claims that workers would prefer their unions to exist solely to improve their working conditions, siloed away from politics, and that the progressive projects pursued by leadership are actually unpopular with rank-and-file workers. Predictably, Compass is opposed to labor’s work stoppage tactic, calling strikes “unproductive,” in the sense that withholding labor is inefficient for the economy. This analysis counters prolific labor activist Jane McAlevey – and all historic labor scholarship and praxis – that indicates that strikes are the most effective tools the working class has.

Smemo articulates that Compass’s role is to coerce a conservative-friendly compromise between capital and labor. “[Cass] sees this as a way to harmonize business interests and profitability with workers’ demands for more pay. But of course, in a very conservative sense, the strategy has to be calibrated to what ultimately is going to keep workers in line. How do you increase worker power without empowering workers?”

The danger, here, with this sort of political project is that it threatens to take the teeth out of the labor movement. If Cass had it his way: unions are no longer political, no longer strike, and increasingly sympathetic to nativism and nationalism. Instead, Cass wants labor to work out better wages with management through legal maneuvering and arbitration. That’s certainly a nice thought, but in practice it’s how you de-fang one of the few institutions that actually fights for working people. Unions didn’t win the 8-hour workday from bureaucratic dexterity.

With a sizable coalition of Congress bought into the mission, the concepts American Compass espouses are no longer just words on a policy proposal. They’re real threats, and they’re infiltrating the labor movement.

The Rank-and-File Alternative

In Philadelphia, well outside of D.C.’s theoretical fetishization of working people and in the real world, a more traditional labor leader is utilizing tried and true class politics. Richard Hooker Jr. is running against Sean O’Brien for the Presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, currently serving as the Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 623.

Hooker’s assessment of O’Brien’s leadership was grim. He cited the federal gutting of collective bargaining rights, NLRB, and OSHA, blaming the Trump administration that O’Brien has courted. 

“That does not sound like a party who cares about workers. And unfortunately, our general president has aligned with that party.”

Hooker is running on a slate aimed at making the Teamsters more democratically structured. 

“Once you create that more democratic union, you’re going to get members to fight more against the company and that’s what we need. We need our members to fight more against the employer class, the ruling class.” 

Hooker uses class-war language, not mutually beneficial worker-employer MBA speak, because that’s what his membership responds to. This is in stark contrast to O’Brien’s argument for labor leaders to meet the most reactionary segments of their membership, and consequently to the concepts proposed by American Compass. Hooker maintains that unions are political organizations, that workers come to union leadership to solve political problems regarding ICE, safety, and affordability. 

As for ending the option to strike, Hooker was incredulous:

“Eliminating strikes? That’s crazy. Why be in a union if you can’t withhold your labor? If the company is going to continue to exploit you and not give you what you demand and deserve. Look what happened back in Haymarket in 1886.”

Richard Hooker Jr. (center) campaigning with Teamsters at UPS. (Credit: Richard Hooker Jr.)

American Compass As A Prevention, Not A Solution

Governor Mitt Romney signed the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Bill into law in 2006, creating the foundation for what would soon become the Affordable Care Act. The move may seem odd – why would Mitt Romney choose to pursue healthcare reform as a signature policy achievement? After its passing, Romney declared it as the end of the “single-payer canard.” Whatever the merits of the bill, it effectively closed-off any potential for more radical universal healthcare reforms.

The Romneycare bill was successful in making the healthcare system a little bit less depraved, but it failed to address even most of the problems associated with the quasi-privatized healthcare system. It did, however, take out all of the momentum behind a statewide push for universal healthcare. In essence, Romney’s calculus was in part to sacrifice some healthcare concessions in order to protect the market system from the potential of a future universal healthcare plan.

American Compass likely serves a similar purpose. Workers are converting to more radical politics – DSA has eclipsed 100,000 members – and the labor movement has made moderate gains in organizing and militancy in recent years. Compass is not a solution for the economic plight of workers, but a mechanism to contain and diffuse political pressure that workers are building.

Oren Cass has correctly identified where the winds are blowing, and that conservatives didn’t have an answer to meet a moment where workers are learning to wield their power. The solution, like for his former boss Romney, is to develop policies with the aesthetics of populism and worker advocacy, while in reality accomplishing anything but that. If successful, capital will be able to stave off a labor movement on the offensive, just like they beat us on healthcare two decades ago.

Smemo said:

“There’s been rising labor militancy and organizing. Workers are not simply accepting this intolerable inequality lying down. I think Cass has recognized that you can try to obfuscate, you can try to misdirect attention, but ultimately, it’s going to be something you have to reckon with. And it’s going to require some preemptive moves in the hopes that this can prevent far-reaching labor militancy and insurgency.”

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

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The story of a windfall invested in left-wing organizing in the 1920s provides provides insight into problems facing the Left yesterday and today.

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