“He’d tell me he was gonna stay awake holding my hand all night, so that when morning came, I’d still be there for him … As if all the strength that [my son] had in that little hand could counter generations of corporate greed … ”

That is from a speech Troy Jackson gave in 2014 that I will never forget. 

It was at the Democratic Convention in Bangor. He was running for Congress, lagging far behind the eventual primary winner, Emily Cain. It seemed clear he was going to lose, but I was curious what he would say.

I had been friends with Troy for a decade at this point. We had served together on the Labor Committee in the Maine Legislature and while he was always a solid vote for the working class, and definitely knew BS when he heard it from the business community, he didn’t seem politically ambitious. He was a very nice guy, showing up every day and just doing his job for his constituents. 

We often teased each other about our backgrounds: Me, a rabble-rousing city-slicker representing the People’s Republic of Portland, him a hayseed from the socially conservative willy-wags next to the Canadian border. He taught me what a feller-buncher was and why a “town” in his district was named T8 R11, and I promised I’d protect him, if he was ever willing to venture to a place that actually had streetlights.

Running for higher office just wasn’t on my bingo card for Troy – he didn’t seem like a populist firebrand who could channel the emotional weight of the working class.

But then I heard that speech.

Troy introduced himself by speaking about how every Sunday night he would prepare to leave for the woods for the week. Living paycheck to paycheck meant traveling far from his hometown of Allagash because paper companies kept bringing temporary Canadian workers across the border illegally to do the work his neighbors had been doing for generations near his home (corporations were able to undercut Maine workers with Canadian because Canada provides national health care).

After packing his lunches, he would go in to see his four-year-old son to kiss him goodnight and say goodbye. His son, desperate to have his father stay, would hold Troy’s hand and ask him not to go. 

“He’d tell me he was gonna stay awake holding my hand all night, so that when morning came, I’d still be there for him. I used to watch him fight to stay awake, with his little hand wrapped around my thumb. As if by strength of his will alone, he could keep me at home. As if all the strength that he had in that little hand could counter generations of corporate greed that was keeping other young children in the St. John Valley from their parents. It was during those long Sunday nights, that would turn into early Monday mornings, that I stopped accepting things for the way that they were, and started thinking about the way that they should be.”

You could hear a pin drop in the massive convention hall as Troy told this story. After it, the place erupted.

The bulk of the rest of the speech was the standard populist fare Troy has been preaching ever since. Economic inequality. The shortcomings of capitalism. A fighter for those beaten down. A shield against the powerful and a voice for the voiceless. Heartfelt. Empathetic. 

However, that opening imagery is what I will never forget. It was not simply beautiful writing, it showed an intrinsic connection to what the working class feels under a capitalist system that could not care less about our families.

That kind of empathy is all too rare in politicians. But seeing it in him that night a dozen years ago, tells me that Troy is exactly the person we need in the United States Senate.

***

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Beacon, sign up for the free Beacon newsletter here.

The post Troy Jackson. The right person, at the right moment. appeared first on Pine & Roses.

On February 28th, 2026, rockets could be heard over Tehran. On that day the US military in cooperation with their Israeli allies launched a first strike missile attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran. People watched in horror as loved ones were buried under the rubble or shredded by bombs. Those hoping to escape the destruction hid in their homes, though no place was safe. Military bases and schools alike were hit. When the dust settled many searched the wreckage. Some found the lifeless bodies of those they cared for, others did not. 

This scene is not an uncommon occurrence. In January the US invaded Venezuela, kidnapping the nation’s president and murdering 80 people. It has since strengthened the embargo on Cuba, cutting the Island nation off from oil, which is critical for the functioning of essential services like hospitals, leading to many unnecessary deaths. US actions across the globe have led to the suffering of millions of people.  

Maine is a part of the United States though few people consider our state’s involvement in foreign policy. However, Maine is deeply connected to the lives of people abroad. Not in some abstract way, but materially and directly through what our state funds and supports. This article hopes to show how Maine is not simply a passive supporter by merely being a part of the US but is in fact an active participant in the horrors wrought abroad and how there is a direct connection between Maine and these conflicts. It does not have to be this way. While massive political upheaval would need to occur in the US as a whole, there are steps we can take within our state to mitigate its involvement in the US war machine.  

To start off, we should understand Maine’s involvement with the US military. As of fiscal year 2024, the US military spends about 4.6 billion dollars in Maine. This is around 4.7 percent of the state’s GDP. Out of the major nations being threatened by the US right now, Maine’s military expenses are around 60% of the total military expenses of Iran. The amount spent on the US military in Maine alone is over 9 times that of Venezuela and over 35 times that of Cuba. Maine dwarfs these nations regarding military spending. Maine itself only makes up around 0.8 percent of total US military spending. To reiterate, less than 1% of the US military is enough to outspend Cuba’s military 35 times over. Yet they are still somehow considered a national security threat where we must starve its people to death in order to protect America. 

With all this money being pumped into Maine, where is it actually going? General Dynamics is one of the major military contractors in the state. It is the fourth largest military contractor in the US. In 2024 the US government gave it 191 million for an army contract in Saco. The company owns Bath Iron Works (BIW), which is another major player in the Maine economy. In 2025 BIW was the fourth largest private employer in the state ranging from 6,000 to 6,500 employees. It has been producing ships for the US military since 1884 and was bought by General Dynamics in 1995. It produces around half of all Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyers. As of 2019 BIW supports 69 ships which is around 75% of the nation’s surface combatants. 

Texas Instruments, the other major corporation producing for the military, has been operating in Maine since 2011 when it purchased National Semiconductor. Texas Instruments does not work directly for the government, instead it produces much of the machinery that is placed inside weapons of war without making those weapons itself. Places like BIW have to purchase the components they need from somewhere, and Texas Instruments serves as one of those companies. 

It’s established that there are multiple corporations within the state that produce tools of warfare. However, how are those tools actually used in the US’s wars of aggression? The USS Thomas Hudner (DDG-116) and the USS Stockdale (DDG-106) are both Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, which finished being produced in 2009 and 2018, respectively. Both being produced at BIW and costing a combined total of around 2.5 billion. On January 3rd 2026, the US invaded Venezuela with the goal of violating the nation’s sovereignty to kidnap its leader in a ploy to push Venezuela back under US control. Both the USS Thomas Hudner and the USS Stockdale were active in the Caribbean during the attack. They had sent the USS Stockdale to the Caribbean all the way back in September when the US was blowing up Venezuelan fishing boats. Rosa González lived in the port city of Catia La Mar. During the night of the attack, she was sitting with her family watching the game show “La Ruleta de la Suerte.” After the show had ended Rosa headed up to bed. However, that night a US missile would hit the apartment, destroying parts of the building and setting other parts on fire. In the destruction, Rosa was crushed under a washing machine. Her family was able to bring her to a medical clinic, but by that point it was too late.

The USS Spruance was built by BIW and finished in 2009, costing around 1 billion dollars to produce. On February 28th it took part in Operation Epic Fury where it launched Tomahawk missiles into Iran. This attack led to the bombing of an Iranian girls’ school and the murder of over 150 students. A Guardian article recounting eyewitness testimony of the attack describes a father going to a morgue to look for his daughter, “The headscarf that she was always so careful to pin in place – just so – had slipped. ‘Her head was broken,’ he says. Her ribs, too, had caved in. But the rest of her body was still intact. She was covered with dust. That’s her, he told the morgue staff: her name is Zahra Behroozi. She was eight years old.”

The weapons produced in Maine are directly involved in the atrocities the US commits abroad. There is no separation between domestic and foreign policy. Our domestic military industries are built on the murder of others. It is because of the funding and support that we give to these industries that innocent civilians abroad, including thousands of children, are killed. We cannot separate these facts. There is no position of “good on domestic policy but bad on foreign policy.” While the government and businesses spend billions to kill innocents abroad, ten of millions at home cannot get access to proper healthcare, are unable to buy a house or afford rent, and are struggling to pay for basic necessities.

I stated at the beginning of this article that as of fiscal year 2024, the government spends around 4.6 billion dollars on the war industry in Maine. This amount could easily fund the national parks in Maine and could fully fund all the national parks in the US with over a billion to spare. It could also fully fund SNAP within the state which costs only around 348 million dollars yearly. On top of this, it could also pay for General Assistance (GA) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) which cost around 36 million and 142 million, respectively. We could fund all of these programs at the same time and we would still have around half a billion left over.

One of the main arguments against shutting down these war industries is that they are major employers. BIW is the fourth largest employer in the state of Maine with over 6,000 people. Which does not count all the people employed in industries which build the materials and technology that is bought by BIW and companies like it. However, this does not mean that these industries need to continue in their current form. Places like BIW could transition to civilian ship production. The government could utilize all the money it was spending on war assistance in this transition as well as help fund and develop other industries in the state to create jobs for people. Just because these major employers participate in the military war complex it does not mean they have to be or always will be. There are many things like the development of public transportation and renewable energy which could be massive employers within the state. The US has the money to create this transition as long as we do not spend it on war and death. 

 As an example, a proposed rail line between Portland and Westbrook would cost an estimated 100 million, taking up only 2% of the military spending in Maine while establishing much needed public transportation in the area. A plan proposed by Acadia Center back in 2018 to invest in Maine’s transportation said it could bring in over 8,700 new jobs, as well as 3.8 billion in economic benefits. On top of new jobs, robust public transportation would give tens of thousands of people more options to engage with the wider Maine community. Over 90 thousand people over the age of 18 in Maine do not own a driver’s license. Investing in public transportation would mean that people would not be at risk of missing a doctor’s appointment because they do not have access to a vehicle. We could also build offshore wind turbines, which would both help build renewable power and also supply jobs. It would cost around 760 million, or around 17% of military spending in the state. The Turbines are projected to create 6,000 jobs during construction and 1,000 jobs annually. They would also bring in 1.1 billion in economic activity just through construction. 

These examples show moderate changes that could be made which, while not eliminating the crisis suffered by working Mainers, would definitely help alleviate it. So if what the US spends on the war industry in Maine were redirected to actually help people and benefit society, why isn’t it? Because it is not in the interests of the people in power to do so. The US is built on imperialism, companies and government officials can get rich off of endless wars which fuel the defense industry and its profits. On top of this, businesses can make massive amounts of wealth by exploiting the labor and resources of other nations. Why employ people in the US when you can underpay workers abroad? There is no interest in genuinely helping people in the US, only winning them over through cheap products often made with foreign slave labor so they will continue to support the US’s imperialist project abroad. 

If there is a genuine desire to gain things like universal healthcare or stable living conditions for workers in the US, then anti-imperialism must be at the heart of the movement. If it is not, concessions will only serve to further the murder of the global south and any gains made will be lost when the next inevitable economic crisis emerges. The US government has more than enough money to feed people. However, people will continue to go hungry as long as there are incentives to pour that money into war. If we want to truly make Mainers’ lives more affordable then we have to dismantle the US war machine.

The post How Maine Funds War appeared first on Pine & Roses.

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book “The American Road to Socialism: The Unfinished Struggle for Democracy”

Ask an American whether workers should own the results of their labor, and you will get a yes. Ask whether the economy is rigged in favor of corporations and the wealthy, and you will get a yes – 70 percent of respondents in a national poll last year, including 58 percent of Republicans, said the system is rigged and needs to be replaced. Ask whether your boss, your landlord, and your insurance company have too much control over your life, and you will get a yes. Then say the word “socialism,” and watch the yes turn into a maybe.

That gap is the central strategic problem we in the American left face. This is a challenge we socialists have faced for decades, but the political foundations are changing. Sixty-two percent of Americans under thirty now hold a favorable view of socialism. Among Democrats, favorable views have climbed from 50 percent in 2010 to 66 percent in 2025. Meanwhile Gallup found the approval rate of capitalism slipping to 54 percent, its worst showing in over a decade of polling. Roughly 15 percent of 2024 Trump voters — younger, more racially diverse, and largely disengaged from politics — told pollsters they prefer democratic socialism to capitalism. These results have been matched with equal intensity in the waves of socialist primary victories across the country this cycle. DSA endorsed roughly 150 candidates in 2026. By the end of June, thirty-five had won their primaries or gone unopposed. 

These wins are only the beginning of building a durable socialist movement in this country. If we are to displace the political establishment rather than merely embarrass it, we have to build a movement that crosses the partisan spectrum. Closing the gap between what Americans already believe and what they think socialism is takes three things: understanding why the gap exists, learning to speak in a way that closes it, and building an organization disciplined enough to contest the communities where the gap will be closed.

Why Has America Not (Yet) Embraced Socialism?

We first have to address the elephant in the room: Why over the 250 years of this country’s existence has socialism failed to take root? There are four structural obstacles in this country that have historically prevented the United States of America from embracing socialism. First, the deliberate repression of the left by capital and the state cannot be ignored when answering this question. McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, the destruction of radical unions, elite-driven cultural backlash to eras of progressive political dominance, and the outright assassination of prominent leftist leaders in this country have all been tools used by the elite to prevent the destruction of capitalism. 

Second is elite-driven racial divisiveness. In a multiracial society like ours, racism has been the most reliable instrument the political and economic elite have for keeping the working class divided against itself, deployed by reactionary coalitions from the founding of this country, through the end of Reconstruction, the Dixiecrats and the Southern Strategy, and present day racial divides. When workers are pitted against each other, they cannot organize alongside one other against the capitalist minority.

Third, unlike almost every other industrialized democracy, the United States has for most of its history lacked a durable labor or socialist party, leaving the working class without an independent political vehicle to organize. The Socialist Party, as well as the Democratic Party at certain points in its history, offered a space for working class political organization. But this wasn’t permanent. The structural explanation for this absence lies in the American electoral system itself. Winner-take-all elections, single-member congressional districts, and the Electoral College create nearly insurmountable barriers to third parties that simply do not exist in the proportional representation systems of Europe and Latin America.

The fourth obstacle is closely related to the third—the cultural identification of socialism with foreign ideologies and anti-Americanism. For a century, the right has successfully branded socialism as something alien to the American tradition: a European import at best and Soviet totalitarianism at worst. This branding has been reinforced by a corporate-controlled media apparatus that has consistently marginalized socialist voices from mainstream political discourse while amplifying the association between socialism and authoritarianism. This is the obstacle that matters most, because all others can be overcome through organizing, institution-building, and political strategy. If Americans continue to believe socialism is fundamentally un-American, no amount of doorknocking will overcome that barrier. The cultural and rhetorical reframing of socialism that we present to the masses is the foundation everything else rests on.

Speaking American: How We Talk About Socialism 

The reason why socialism in this country has failed to take off isn’t because Americans reject its core premises, but because they reject its branding. When we describe the actual tenets  of democratic socialism: workers controlling their workplaces, affordable housing, universal healthcare, strong communities, freedom from corporate domination, etc., polls consistently show majority support among Americans. What Americans reject is the word socialism and the cultural associations it carries. The task is therefore to show them that what they already want is socialism. We can achieve this goal through five cultural and rhetorical strategies.

The most effective brand of political communication is narrative rather than argumentative. People are not persuaded by policy papers, ideological frameworks, or abstract appeals to justice. What persuades voters are stories that connect political ideas to lived human experiences. When a worker describes watching the company they spent twenty years building get sold out from under them so that a private equity firm could extract its assets, that story makes the case for cooperative ownership more powerfully than any theoretical argument ever could. When a single mother describes choosing between filling a prescription and paying rent, that story makes the case for universal healthcare in terms no policy brief can match. Socialists must learn to lead with stories because stories create the emotional connection that opens people to ideas they might otherwise reject on ideological grounds. This is the basis of agitation as a political strategy—the simple act of using leading questions and “whose side are you on” to bring voters to your desired outcome—which then opens voters to political organizing. 

The American Dream with Socialist Characteristics 

Socialism isn’t a rejection of the American Dream, but is instead its ultimate fulfillment. The dream as originally conceived—that through hard work, anyone can build a good life in this country—has been hollowed out by capitalism. When wages stagnate, housing is unaffordable, healthcare bankrupts families, and student debt crushes an entire generation, the promise of a better life becomes a cruel joke for the working American. Socialism restores the American Dream by giving Americans the material security to actually turn their hard work into a higher standard of living. This is how we should communicate our vision to the American public—not as a radical departure from what they’ve been promised, but as a radical fulfillment of the promise they have known their whole lives. It is through socialism that the life of a happy family, a happy home, a good job, and a Fourth of July barbecue can be realized for the working majority of this country.

You Do the Work, You Own the Results 

Producerism is the belief that those who produce wealth should get to control wealth. Producerism should be at the rhetorical and policy center of our movement. In a country where voters pride themselves on hard work, hard work should be rewarded. Socialism accomplishes this by giving workers control over their own labor. No longer is there surplus labor value for capitalists to extract. What you create is what you control. Producerism has deep roots in the American political tradition from Jefferson, Jackson, and the Populists all the way through the labor movement, the New Deal, and the Great Society. The twenty-first century version of this argument is simple: you produce the wealth, you should own it. Corporate executives, Wall Street traders, and trust fund inheritors produce nothing. Instead, they extract wealth from Americans who work for a living. Socialism—which is fundamentally the belief that workers should control the wealth they create—isn’t a foreign import. Cooperative ownership is the logical conclusion of the producerist principle that Americans have believed in for two centuries. When we talk to voters, we should frame our project as “we believe the people who do the work should own the results of their work.” That is a sentence that virtually every American will agree with, and it is the most basic definition of socialism.

Your Neighbor is Not Your Enemy 

Americans have a deep attachment to community, whether religious, familial, neighborhood, or civic. Barn raisings, mutual aid societies, the labor union, and the tradition of neighbors helping neighbors were all core institutions of American culture hollowed out by capitalism. Capitalism has left the American worker small, isolated, and unable to defend themselves against either an abusive employer or an indifferent state. Cooperatives, tenant unions, and popular assemblies are the tools ordinary people use to rebuild that. Socialism is what happens when neighbors decide to look out for each other instead of leaving everyone to fend for themselves.

Us Against the Oligarchs 

The defining feature of American politics right now is that voters across the spectrum are furious at elites. The right channels that fury at cultural figures, immigrants, and minorities. Our job is to channel it to the economic elites who actually control people’s lives. Democratic socialism is not “big government.” It is the opposite of oligarchy: a system where ordinary people hold power instead of billionaires. Every proposal we make should be framed as transferring power from elites to working people, not from the private sector to the state. Americans distrust both big business and big government, and our answer is therefore neither. Socialism is the democratic self-governance of working people, which is what the natural conclusion of the values most Americans ascribe to the founding of this country.

What Freedom Really Means 

This is the framing we underuse most. The right insists socialism means the government running your life. In reality it is the capitalist class running it. Your boss controls your time, your wages, your conditions. Your landlord controls your housing. Your insurance company controls whether you get treatment. There is no meaningful freedom when every condition of your survival depends on the decisions of unaccountable private actors. Democratic socialism offers two freedoms at once: the freedom that comes from a baseline of material security, and the freedom that comes from actual control over your workplace, your building, and your neighborhood. What could be more American than that?

“The Party Within the Party” 

That brings us to the question every American socialist has to answer: what do we do with the Democratic Party? Make a clean break and start a third party, or organize inside? The answer is both: the “party within the party.”

This strategy is not new or revolutionary for the DSA, but it could use some sharpening and clarity. Building a third party under current conditions is not possible given the design of our electoral system and the entrenchment of the duopoly. When those conditions change, likely through our own efforts, so should our approach. But working within the Democratic Party carries its own risks. Without an independent organizational base we will be absorbed and neutralized, which is exactly what happened to progressive movements throughout the twentieth century. I can’t say when the DSA will reach a state where it can truly break from the Democrats and its bourgeois politics, but our goal is not to become Democrats. Instead, we must use Democrats’ existing infrastructure to build our own power and base of support. What we therefore need is an independent socialist organization with its own membership, funding, discipline, and platform. We can and should use the Democratic ballot line as a vehicle to win elections, gain national publicity, and push for reforms to the political system. As we do so, we will win over the sympathy of left-leaning voters while retaining the independence to hold our own officials accountable, mobilize outside election cycles, and build working-class institutions that outlast any party. 

In order to accomplish this, we must do three things: streamline our endorsement process, run for and win smaller local and state offices, and expand our fight to contest elections in more rural and conservative parts of the country.

The Endorsement Process

Ours should be an endorsement that candidates actively seek out, not one selectively and arbitrarily given. Right now the process is often slow, contentious, and dominated by factional dynamics that prioritize ideological alignment over strategic opportunity. Candidates substantively aligned with democratic socialist principles get denied because they fail to check a few boxes in our process, and races go uncontested by socialists because nobody clears the purity threshold. A strategically oriented process would test candidates against a short list of non-negotiables — economic democracy, racial justice, anti-militarism, labor rights — allow flexibility on secondary questions, and prioritize races we can actually win.

The Local Governance Gap

There are thousands of offices in this country decided by a few hundred or even a few dozen votes: city councils, county boards, township trustees, school boards, water reclamation districts, planning commissions. They are not glamorous. They generate no national press. They are also where the governance that shapes working people’s daily lives actually happens. A single organized chapter can win them with minimal resources. Winning them turns municipal and state governments into laboratories of socialist policy — and, just as importantly, makes voters comfortable with the idea of socialists governing, because they can see it working down the street. It is also how we build a bench. You do not produce candidates capable of competing at the highest level without officeholders who have already governed something. DSA’s habit of pouring electoral energy into high-profile congressional races while neglecting the offices where socialism can be practiced most tangibly is a strategic failure that caps our growth.

Purple & Red Territory

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans think the economy is rigged for the rich. Of the respondents who had never heard of DSA, 43 percent were more amenable to democratic socialism against 38 percent for capitalism — meaning our brand problem is, in a real sense, an introduction problem. Bernie Sanders and AOC draw enormous crowds in places where we currently have limited resources and support. These are communities where a candidate running the producerist message alongside concrete local issues — housing costs, healthcare access, job quality — can win, particularly in local and state races where national partisan dynamics matter least.

The proof of concept of the socialist electoral model is no longer hypothetical, and it is no longer only applicable in progressive areas like New York. Zohran Mamdani started at 1 percent in the polls and beat the entire New York establishment twice, winning 30 percent of the districts Trump carried in 2024 — not because those voters had a conversion experience, but because Mamdani was the only candidate talking about their rent. Donavan McKinney just won a congressional primary in Detroit with a fraction of his opponent’s money, running on working-class representation in government, taxing the wealthy, and getting corporate cash out of politics. Neither man asked anyone to become a socialist. Our candidates have won by speaking to material conditions and letting the label take care of itself. They are using their success in office to bring people into socialism by example. That is a replicable model, and we have been rationing it. Imagine every chapter with a few hundred members identifying one winnable local race, recruiting a candidate committed to the platform, and running a real field operation.

Expanding the Project 

But how do we accomplish all of these goals? There are several ways in which we can go about expanding the reach of the DSA organization which mostly entail building upon already existing programs.

The Socialists in Office program (SIO) is a DSA-sponsored program that coordinates with and supports DSA officials in public office through a co-governance model. The organization works with SIOs on building coalitions with key communities, teaching our politicians the ropes of local governance, and on drafting and passing legislation. The SIO program has been incredibly effective at building a base of socialist politicians with strong constituent services and strong legislative skills, but the program could be significantly expanded. 

Imagine if the SIO program was involved in the electoral process before candidates won their races? The program should be the primary vehicle by which we elect socialists across the country. It should work with candidates during their campaigns, providing media training, fundraising support, and organizing training. It should work to build coalitions between DSA candidates and key groups like labor, students’ groups, and tenants’ organizations. And it should be involved in identifying candidates across the country to run for office under the DSA banner.

But engaging in electoralism alone will not be enough to move the masses towards socialism. In essence, the DSA must break from the two-party tradition of only showing up in communities when it comes time for Americans to vote. DSA cadres must be continually present in communities, doing the work of building strong relations with local residents. As we expand our organizing capacity, we should engage in mutual-aid work, providing communities with key services that corporations and governments refuse to offer. From the public housing complex to the barn-house, we must be in the communities that will decide the future of this country, becoming a key resource for local residents without ever asking for a vote or donation in return. This is how we, and by extension socialism, can become the most trusted political project in this country.

The road to socialism here will not be paved by one election, one candidate, or one project. It will be built by the sustained, unglamorous work of people who refuse to accept that the richest country in human history cannot provide a dignified life for everyone in it. The framings and arguments above are a toolkit to be adapted to the conditions of communities across the country. The question is no longer whether socialism can win in America. It is whether we are willing to do the work to achieve that victory.

The post The Road to Power: A Socialist Guide to Winning in America appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

by Alex K.

Many of the arguments I have heard against the Participatory Democracy proposal boil down to one simple phrase: “What if I can’t participate?”. Often a theoretical member who works the night shift, or is taking care of family members, or cannot attend these meetings for a myriad of reasons is given as to why Participatory Democracy is not only unfair, but akin to a poll tax or a literacy test. I would ask why the Cleveland DSA is required to replicate Liberal voting structures in an organization that looks to create a system outside of the current oligarchy built upon centuries of white supremacy, misogyny, and outdated Enlightenment ideals. 

Voting should be the end process of a long period of conversation, deliberation, and, most importantly, organizing. I dare those reading this to try and think outside of the individualist society that so many of us have grown up in to think of voting not as a question of “What happens if I cannot vote?”, but as a question of “Am I organizing effectively enough to trust my comrades who can?”. While the title of this article, “You Aren’t Special – And Neither Am I” is meant to be inflammatory, I challenge the reader to think of Cleveland DSA not as an organization made up of individuals, but as an organized mass that is anchored in the idea that the collective is always stronger than the sum of its parts–of which voting is only one minor part.

As a Marxist, and a part of the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), I am interested in theories of Democracy and the ways that we can make our structures more Democratic, and I reject the idea that the ultimate form of Democracy is casting a ballot. Patricia Springborg notes that Marx sees the “positive case for democracy as bearing a peculiar and intimate relation to politics and its emergence as a historically specific cultural complex–a uniquely intimate relationship that is not shared by other regimes such as monarchies and aristocracies.”(1) Though this may seem complex at first, the crux of Marx’s argument is simple: Democracy is more than existing under a political system, it is about being able to have a true, meaningful relationship to the way that a person interacts with and shapes their own political system. While this point may seem to express, at the very least, sympathy towards One Member One Vote, Springborg expands on this basis to show that there is more to Democracy than the simple act of voting.

There are two additional points that Springborg makes about Marx’s views on democracy: one is that “democracy does not require the participation of all members of society as individuals in the decision-making process and that, therefore, the debate over the relative merits of direct or representative democracy is misdirected.”(2) This goes hand-in-hand with the final argument Springborg describes–“political participation turns not on the function of deputies or representatives but rather on political suffrage,” and in quoting Marx, reiterates that “Voting, ‘considered philosophically … is the immediate, the direct, the existing and not simply imagined relation of civil society to the political state.’”(3) Together, these arguments paint a picture of Democracy based on a foundation of universalism, rather than individualism. Democracy does not come about through giving everyone a day off to cast a ballot. Rather, it is essential that everyone can cast a ballot, but that casting a ballot comes about through people having a deep connection to what they are voting on, understanding that part of democracy is that not everyone who is able to participate does participate, and that voting is a political act–not the political act.

Marx clearly states that if members of the state–or perhaps Cleveland DSA if you are so inclined–“are an integral part of the state, then it is obvious that their social existence is already their actual participation in it. They are not only integral parts of the state, but the state is their integral part.”(4) Those who choose to be in Cleveland DSA are an integral part of it, and it is notable that being part of Cleveland DSA is a unique choice that exists outside of, though not independent from, the larger American political sphere. Springborg expands on Marx’s rejection of the separation between the self and the state in how focusing on individual political actions as “all” or “not all” “falsely presumes the political to be constituted by single political acts performed by individuals, focusing exclusively on the legislature as the locus of popular participation.”(5) Voting is the ultimate realization of a single political act performed by an individual. I challenge all persons in Cleveland DSA to think beyond themselves to a politic based on all of us, together, regardless of a single person’s circumstances.

In writing this, I look to challenge ideas of what it means to vote as a member of Cleveland DSA, outside of the historical understanding of what Democracy can, and should, look like. What does it mean to be Democratic as the systems made to suppress and silence political engagement are potentially replicated in Cleveland DSA? In an organization whose program clearly states that “[The Democratic Socialists of America] are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic,”(6) it is essential to look beyond American individualism and the idea that the ultimate form of Democracy is exemplified through a ballot. I do not believe that replicating the same systems that have not only failed us, but were designed to oppress and suppress, will create the future we all look towards. It is only through meaningful, powerful organizing that the systems we look to transform can truly change: not through the vote of a single individual.

Footnotes

1 Patricia Springborg, “Karl Marx on Democracy, Participation, Voting, and Equality,” Political Theory 12, no.4 (1984): 538: http://www.jstor.com/stable/191498

2 Springborg, “Karl Marx on Democracy,” 538.

3 Springborg, “Karl Marx on Democracy,” 538.

4 Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” §§ 308 Civil Society and the Estates, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed August 19, 2026, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch06.htm

5 Springborg, “Karl Marx on Democracy,” 542.

6 Democratic Socialists of America, “Our Program,” section “Our Perspective” paragraph 5, accessed August 19, 2026, https://program.dsausa.org/

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Unions in New York City and across the country could learn from DSA’s membership-led endorsement process, guided by a political program

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There has been a momentary lull in the mass demonstrations against Trumpian fascism. We haven’t seen a “No Kings Day” since March 28 (although one is being scheduled for October), and it’s been almost four months since the most robust May Day participation in this country since the 1940s. Thus as we count down to the November 3 election it is all the more important to get out on the streets on Labor Day, Monday September 7, to rebuild the public profile for mass action, which in turn supports enthusiasm for progressive candidates and ballot measures.

Traditionally Labor Day is the official kick-off within the labor movement to canvassing in an election year. This time around in California the difference is that it features a rejuvenated left edge to the state’s unions in the wake of the important decision at the August 4 California AFL-CIO convention to support the Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, along with Prop 3, the Education and Health Care Act. Enactment of this dual hit on ruling class income and wealth will produce a fairer share of taxes paid by the state’s richest residents to support public education and health care. 

It will also send a signal to the most reactionary tech bro capitalists that their insane level of political spending can’t buy our democracy.

Historic Opportunity

The marquee political campaign for California DSA this year is our Tax the Rich effort. Our state council endorsed both measures before any other organization in the Golden State. As a result we have set up committees and working groups in our chapters, held (and continue to hold) educational forums and trainings, and crafted materials to use in educating our members, unionists, and the electorate. 

Due to our level of preparedness, our chapters are in good position to work with local central labor councils and their new mandate to support Props 3 and 40 across the state on Labor Day and onward toward the election. One example: East Bay DSA is partnering with the Alameda Labor Council to phonebank and canvass for the two tax the rich measures along with candidates for office endorsed by both groups. 

The increased cooperation between organized labor and DSA has been driven by the tremendous successes of DSA’s electoral program around the country. There is a new level of respect within unions for the hard work and principled cooperation of socialists in politics. 

The labor movement, for its part, is more prepared for Labor Day than I’ve seen in a long time. The California Federation of Labor Unions has posted the upcoming activities of its councils well in advance of the holiday and is organizing for marches, picnics, and other actions and celebrations. See the local events here.

This Labor Day let’s continue to build on the synergy. A strong socialist presence at Labor Day events will grow both movements. 

• Labor Day events

• Tax the Rich campaign materials

• Taxing the Rich in American History: A Forum with Vanessa Williamson September 16

Revealing Results of a Berkeley Community Health Study

I operate a physical therapy clinic in downtown Berkeley, Calif., which has been in service to the community for over 35 years.  I have worked here for fifteen years and witnessed the deterioration of our healthcare system firsthand as it relates to addressing the functional mobility needs of our community members. 

Through daily interactions with patients, I’ve seen consistent patterns of discrepancy between insurances and access to care.  However, these valuable insights remained largely anecdotal. So we sought to formally document them in a proposed community-based study, which would confirm that these factors result in perpetuating inequities in our community.

True experiences and obstaclesOur clinic teamed up with UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies and two community organizations, Healthy Black Families, Inc., and the Friends of Adeline, to highlight the true experiences and obstacles our patients face when attempting to access care. 

The study attempted to understand the level of recognition and attention that patients received from referral sources and insurance providers when trying to navigate these realities. 

Our aim was to transform these observations into actionable knowledge and present it to our city, county and state governments. 

We formulated a successful grant application on this subject for a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Grant, which awarded us the opportunity to formally study our community’s access to care. 

The study cohort consisted of patients from different insurance coverages who were placed into a listening study.  The study design included three workshops with 27 participants and a facilitator who administered the questions.  All of the workshops were video- and audio-recorded and later transcribed and interpreted by three different readers (no AI). 

As our recordings demonstrate, the majority of patients from the most vulnerable socio-economic bracket covered by Medi-Cal were people of color and senior citizens.  We juxtaposed their experiences to others in the listening study, who are cash-paying clients and higher-income private insurance members. 

This study revealed clear and substantial inequities present in the healthcare system.  It also revealed a disconnect between the city of Berkeley and its community healthcare clinics, which the city supports materially. 

As the community clinics that support Medicaid clients do not provide physical therapy (PT) services under their umbrella, they must refer PT to an outside clinic.  However, the reimbursement levels are so low for these services that the majority of the clinics refuse to accept these patients.  Facing this obstacle, affected patients typically discontinue pursuit of care and their physical mobility becomes significantly impacted or lost altogether, further damaging their overall health and generating a greater burden to their community. 

Study findings: themes and solutionsOur findings also illuminated the disconnect between those who seek care and those who are providing it.  After studying the transcripts, five key themes were identified, which will be brought to the attention of city, county and state policymakers to address potential solutions: 

1) The need for Medicare for All to address delayed treatment, and lack of insurance coverage.

2) The negative effects of virtual physical therapy (isolation, lack of physical touch, static vs. dynamic assessment).

 3) No health without care (positive effects of manual physical therapy, human touch, one-on-one care).

 4) The importance of preventative care (independence and mobility impact quality of life, reduction of negatively impacting social networks and, thus, the greater healthcare system).

 5) A disconnect between city of Berkeley support of the Lifelong Medical Care clinics that request PT, while not supporting PT clinics as part of their structure.

The overarching voice of the Medicaid group, in contrast to the private-pay groups, underscores the perils of accessing care, continuing care and the debilitating cost to members to the detriment of their communities and the healthcare system as a whole.

Our study focused intentionally on insurance levels that point to socio-economic sectors as opposed to race/ethnicity.  However, because we identified participants by their insurance coverage, we know that 50 percent of the participants are below the poverty line (very low or extremely low-income bracket).  

Our study clarified the fact that this portion of the population must wait for extended periods of time while their physical status deteriorates, as opposed to participants who have direct access to care with no waiting times.

The listening study also emphasized the importance of manual therapy care and one-on-one care, which many insurance carriers no longer reimburse for. The classic relationship between the physical therapist practitioner and the patient that used to be based on face-to-face, hands-on care has been replaced by “patient mills,” where patients are being given exercises and monitored by unlicensed aides and hardly ever physically touched. 

This approach is used to bridge the financial gap of poor reimbursement by the practitioners to make up for the loss in revenue.  The study overwhelmingly revealed the effectiveness of manual therapy and direct care in healing the patients who participated in the study or, to put more simply, people before profit.

The cost of “wealthcare”

The political and economic system in which Californians are presently ensnared orients state healthcare policy around private ownership and above all, profit. The actual cost of this “wealthcare” regime is orders of magnitude higher than the exorbitant profits investors extract. Indeed it is a price Californians pay with their bodies, their community, and their human agency. Quoting from the most recent DSA Program, Workers Deserve More: “The political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs. As capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism. Big business makes deals with the government to line their pockets.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the health care system, with big hospital systems being rewarded huge profits at the expense of our communities. As community clinics are driven under and funding is lost, our traditional safety nets disintegrate for the benefit of a small handful of privileged oligarchs.As community clinics (which have historically treated the working-class) are driven under and funding is directed upwards, our traditional safety nets are being disintegrated for the benefit of a small handful of privileged investors. We must go beyond merely countering this moral calamity by organizing local DSA chapters to demand that California’s top public institutions center the findings of this study and others like it to fund policy and programs that foster community-based health care accountable to elderly, disabled and underprivileged Californians. We must also demand our elected representatives center community-based healthcare hand-in-hand with adequate reimbursement through policies that strengthen and center patients and their healthcare providers above the interests of the medical insurance industry.

Cancel Thanksgiving? A Progressive Guide for Handling the Holidays

It’s a good thing that labor journalist and author Matt Witt was not running for governor of Wisconsin this year like DSA candidate Francesca Hong. Democratic primary rivals and Republican opposition researchers would have badly distorted the message of Witt’s new book Make Holidays Your Own (Common Ground Press). It encourages creative rethinking of family gatherings and community practices on major holidays.

In their effort to discredit Hong, her foes in both parties created what the New York Timescalled a “social media kerfuffle” over old social media posts dissing Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.

The outspoken state legislator and former restaurant owner from Madison lost her August 11 primary despite polling very strongly beforehand. Given the annual sense of foreboding that overtakes millions of Americans when tense family re-unions draw near in late November, Hong’s past call for Thanksgiving to be “cancelled”—because of its connection to “colonialism”—probably had its local fans.

Under fire on the campaign trail, Hong did concede that bringing people together around a table can be “a good thing.” But, according to the Times, she also courted controversy by “questioning the value of Valentine’s Day and Christmas trees.” So not only Wisconsin turkey farmers, but gift card sellers and Christmas tree growers—if sufficiently miffed—might have voted instead for the moderate Democrat from Milwaukee, David Crowley, who won the primary. 

And even if Hong had prevailed, according to the Times, she faced the challenge of winning over voters like John Wilson, a 61-year-old pharmacist from Platteville WI, who usually “leans Democratic.” However, when asked whether he favored Hong or U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, Wilson chose the latter because “you have to take people at their word” about serious matters like Thanksgiving.

Tiffany has strong views on holidays too; in 2021, he was one of 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth Day a federal holiday, which won’t be popular with African-American voters statewide.

Just A Few Days OffIn the future, left-leaning candidates can avoid even momentarily distracting flaps like this by reading Matt Witt’s book—hopefully, before pulling the trigger on Twitter in a moment of pique. The few paid days off that most Americans get to enjoy should not be cancel culture targets, when, as the author argues, they can be celebrated in ways “more historically accurate, meaningful, inclusive and fun.”

In Make Holidays Your Own, Witt offers much creative advice about dealing with that day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day and eight others; his focus is on countering their crass commercialization, historical baggage, stultifying traditionalism, or exploitation by the right. 

See, for example, the garish 250th birthday party staged on July Fourth of this year in Washington, D.C. by the White House and its corporate funders. While no doubt critical of that, Abdul El-Sayed, the successful Democratic Senate primary winner in Michigan is definitely tiptoeing around the issue of fireworks on the Fourth.

As the Times notes, “he has deleted a number of videos and posts where he floated the idea of abandoning fireworks on Independence Day.” El-Sayed’s press spokesperson is now reminding voters that he “is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander.”

In other words, he’s an All-American guy! As Witt explains, “In every culture, holidays matter. They come with a message and symbols— with a story that reinforces a certain way of looking at society and passes on certain values to the next generation.” According to the author, what’s good about remaking holidays, in ways that send a different message, “is that you don’t have to convince everyone in your community who doesn’t agree. They can celebrate however they want and so can you.”

A Labor Day History LessonAnd sometimes the development of alternative celebrations—such as the reclaiming of May Day by the modern day, more immigrant-influenced U.S. labor movement—can lead to two opportunities to picnic, protest, and march, rather than just one!

As a former communications director for the United Mine Workers and Service Employees International Union, the author delves most informatively into the political agenda behind the creation of Labor Day, as a counter to nascent working-class internationalism in the late nineteenth century.

Readers will learn that it was a corporate Democratic President—rather than any anti-union Republican—who first tried to erase the memory of May 1 as an international workers’ holiday born in the U.S.A., and replace it with an end of summer day off out of step with the rest of the world. 

To add insult to injury, May 1 then got officially rebranded, during the McCarthy era, as Law Day—although nobody, even corporate lawyers, get time off for that. Yet, thanks to multiple MAGA threats to the “rule of law” since Trump got re-elected, more than a thousand California bar members used their lunch hour to stage a first-time ever May Day-style protest in downtown San Francisco.

As Witt recounts, massive demonstrations seeking shorter working hours occurred in Chicago and other U.S. cities on May 1, 1886. When repeated on May Day four years later, workers in “dozens of countries in Europe and Latin America also held rallies and marches to support the eight-hour day demand.” 

Thereafter, much to the alarm of “robber barons” here and abroad, May 1 protests became “an annual event for workers all around the world” and an expression of cross-border solidarity between labor radicals of varying stripes.

Forget May Day?

By 1894, however, a business-backed resident of the White House named Grover Cleveland needed a “sop to unions.” He had, after all, just called out federal troops to crush the Pullman strike organized by the American Railway Union, a pioneering alternative to craft unionism led by future Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs (who was jailed for his role in the strike).

At Cleveland’s request, Congress declared that workers should be given a day off, every year, on the first Monday in September so that, as Witt notes, “actions taken by U.S. unions would not be coordinated with their counterparts in the rest of the world.”

Today, Labor Day is a paid holiday for about 3 in 4 workers in the U.S. Ironically, the lowest paid workers are the least likely to have the day off with pay. That includes non-union workers in food service, retail, hotels, agriculture, delivery and janitorial services, as well as part-time workers, or those whose companies claim are ‘independent contractors’ rather than employees.

On the holiday counter-programming front, the good news is that May Day (as noted above) has made a major come-back over the last two decades. There is also “the shining example of the transformation of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day as now observed in many cities and states.”

Thanks to the efforts of progressive veterans’ groups like Veterans for Peace and Common Defense, at least some commemorative events on Memorial Day and Veterans Day now focus on peace and justice issues, rather than uncritical celebration of past wars. 

In his chapter on Martin Luther King Day, the author suggests a range of activities that “can be about the movement and not just the man.” (This is advice that venerators of Cesar Chavez are taking, but only belatedly, after recent revelations about his history of sexual abuse while president of the United Farm Workers.)

Witt reports that all proceeds from his book are going to Rethinking Schools, a 

…national nonprofit organization that supports social, economic, and environmental justice teaching at a time when the very idea of public education is under attack. Rethinking Schools’ materials have been used by tens of thousands of educators and have reached millions of students.

Let’s hope that Make Holidays Your Own also gets into the hands of many educators who have to come up with fresh ideas for in-school celebrations of holidays, that cannot be cancelled even in blue states—but of course, don’t want their personal creativity in the classroom (or pet peeves) unleashing a conservative backlash of the sort that did not help Hong.

After six months of nonstop right-wing bloviating about the Terrible Horrible No Good Billionaire Tax (Proposition 40 on the upcoming November California ballot) and an accompanying “No” campaign supported by some leading liberal allies, there is new wind in the sails of progressive tax politics. 

"I don't know how to lead a labor organization that stands to the right of the Democratic Party on economic issues", said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, the state affiliate of the AFL-CIO, just before her convention voted on August 4 to support the Billionaire Tax. 

Representing some two million plus workers within fifty unions, the CFLU wasn’t the only major organization to come out for Prop 40, a temporary 5% wealth tax on 250 California individuals, earlier this month. Gonzalez was referring to the endorsement delivered just days before by the California Democratic Party (CDP), which raised a single digit-laden hand at Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the most prominent opponents of Prop 40 (along with probable next Governor Xavier Becerra). 

Newsom seemed to think he could play it both ways, opposing the actually existing billionaire tax proposal in his own state, while calling for imaginary/aspirational higher taxes on billionaires and corporations at the federal level in preparation for his all-but-announced run for president. This transparently opportunistic ploy didn’t cut it with either the CDP or the delegates to the labor fed convention. As icing on the cake, the 100,000-member California Nurses Association also came out for Prop 40 the day before the CFLU convention. 

But as promising as all this movement may be for progressive tax advocates in the Golden State, the greater lesson may be in what it portends for messaging strategies more broadly in the midterm elections.

Slow drip

For the past two months, directly after the California Democratic primary eliminated Tom Steyer— the only major gubernatorial candidate supporting the Billionaire Tax—a slow drip of labor and liberal organizations trashed the proposal with reasoning ranging from somewhat principled to proven lies curated by $100 million in billionaire PAC monies. A week after the primary the 300,000-member California Teachers Association (CTA) and the state Building and Construction Trades Council (BTC) went public with their opposition, followed by Planned Parenthood, the California Medical Association and others. 

Why did the CTA—a leading advocate of the other progressive tax on the ballot, Prop 3—oppose a temporary tax meant to backfill a $20 billion per year hole in the state’s Medicaid budget created by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill? Some 14 million Californians are supported by Medi-Cal, the state version of Medicaid. The coming massive reduction in federal Medicaid funding, which pays for tax cuts for the richest Americans, directly impacts the students and families served by CTA members. As most teacher unions ritually announce in defense of their students every time a state public health budget is slashed, “You can’t teach a child who comes to your classroom sick.”

The answer is complicated, and I have addressed it in detail elsewhere. The short version is that the union that sponsored the Billionaire Tax, SEIU-United Health Care Workers, designed the tax to send 90% of its revenues to address the Medicaid problem, and the remaining 10% to be split among other services. This violated the understanding in Sacramento that 40% of general fund revenues should go to public education. It also raised, possibly, a hurdle to passage of Proposition 3, the Education and Health Care Act, planned by the longstanding progressive tax coalition CTA is part of before UHW launched the Billionaire Tax. 

Prop 3, an income tax on the top two percent of taxpayers in the state, has no lack of supporters. The coalition did its homework and by last year everyone to the left of Attila the Hun was on board its project, which is to make a temporary tax that currently brings in upwards of ten billion dollars a year for schools and services permanent. 

DOA?

As the organizations, or at least their leaders, were piling onto the anti-Billionaire Tax train, pundits rushed to pronounce Prop 40 dead on arrival. Mainstream media reportage breathlessly announced the “split” in the labor movement. Op eds in major newspapers by right wing think tank wonks distorted the numbers to “prove” that the mechanism of the tax couldn’t work. Political newsletters pondered the arcane mysteries of Proposition 98, the ballot measure passed by voters in 1988 that mandates 40% of the California state budget to education. 

Undeterred, SEIU-United Health Care Workers (UHW) plugged away. Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna splashily supported the tax. It collected signatures and courted coalition partners like California Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which provided a dual endorsement of the Billionaire Tax and Proposition 3 early in the year. California Teamsters and California AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), along with two large hotel and restaurant union locals, came on board both taxes as well. UHW suffered and survived negotiations with Newsom’s office to relinquish the ballot measure if the Governor and Legislature would agree to a reduced 2% tax, an offer that Newsom rejected. It sent its organizers to talk with California Democratic Party delegates and unions in the labor federation. 

Molten Reservoir

The persistence paid off. Rumblings of discontent bubbled up within labor at top-down leadership maneuvering against what seemed to most rank and filers a righteous cause. One sign of what was to come emerged a week before the CFLU convention, when the local San Diego labor council and building trades council both voted to support the Billionaire Tax.

This points to a more significant issue than the infighting within labor and purportedly progressive organizations over a couple taxes. It should come as no surprise that a year and a half into the ruinous Trump 2.0, there is an enormous molten reservoir of electorate anger at billionaires— especially the insufferably arrogant tech bros leading the charge against the Billionaire Tax—ready to be tapped. 

Shifts in the electorate

Much of the attention around shifts in the electorate has been focused on the war inside the Democratic Party between youthful DSA and other left candidates for office versus old guard centrist Democrats. But equally significant to understanding what is and isn’t going to work in the mid-term elections is something that has always been the case: that the voters, when given the opportunity to vote to tax the rich, generally do so with enthusiasm. And when the theme is folded into the campaigns of left candidates—as in Mamdani’s in New York—it helps, both because of what it promises to fund on behalf of working people, and because it puts meat on the bones of populist economic appeals.

An opening now exists in the Golden State, three months before the election, to craft a united tax the rich campaign with national implications. California, launchpad to neoliberal tax politics with Prop 13 in 1978, can redeem this stain by passing the first state level wealth tax in the nation’s modern history at the same time as making a more traditional top bracket income tax permanent. Passage of both will not erase California’s vast economic inequalities overnight. It will not even mean that the rich are paying their fair share of taxes—just a fairer share. What it can do is firmly underscore the immense importance in elections of acknowledging economic inequality and doing something about it.

What will be needed to win both Props 3 and 40, against the tsunami of fascist billionaire anti-tax spending, is a common progressive tax message and grassroots campaign, an approach that will more likely bring victory to both measures than separate campaigns that ignore their commonalities. This common messaging should contain at its center the idea that education and health care are rights, not privileges, and that passage of both measures would represent the wealthy finally paying a fairer share for that common good.

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By: Steve Dubb

This article was originally published by Shelterforce on August 12, 2026.

In the world of movement organizing, few groups in the past decade have undergone a faster demographic transition or greater growth than the Democratic Socialists of America, better known as DSA. Between 2015 and 2017, boosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, the average age of DSA members dropped from 64 to about 30, and membership tripled from 8,000 to about 25,000, according to Washington Post reporting. Growth has continued since then. As of December 2025, DSA reportedly had 92,912 members—more than 10 times the number from a decade earlier.

DSA is best known for its electoral organizing. Famously, last year, in New York City, the local DSA chapter played a major role in supporting the successful mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani. But DSA’s organizing extends far beyond elections.

A significant number of local DSA chapters have adopted tenant organizing as a focus of their work. In some communities, the local tenant union and the DSA tenant organizing working group are one and the same. More often, DSA housing organizers and tenant unions are close allies, though they operate independently of each other.

A motivating factor for DSA members is the opportunity to use organizing to make a material difference in people’s lives. This effort to connect with people’s material conditions has deep roots in socialist organizing. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not uncommon for democratic socialist activists to join labor unions as a way to build stronger bonds with the working class.

As a Jacobin article notes, these efforts echo today in institutions such as the union democracy group Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the publication Labor Notes. DSA similarly supports union organizing through its support for such institutions as the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. 

Tenant organizing has now become an important vector of DSA activity alongside labor. There is a history here as well. As John Altas, one of Shelterforce’s founders, explains, Shelterforce itself was founded in 1975 in an environment in which “the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the National Lawyers Guild [were] engaged in tenant organizing in several cities across the country.”

Shanti Singh, a member of DSA San Francisco who has long worked for Tenants Together, a statewide tenant coalition in California, says the 2008 housing crisis drove a resurgence of both tenant unions and DSA.

“Everyone needs housing. … It’s a very easy way to connect people’s everyday lives to larger economic systems,” says Nicole Zimmerman, a member of DSA’s Montgomery County branch in Maryland, adding that this makes it an obvious entry point for power building and political education. “When you’re talking to tenants or talking about landlords, there’s a very clear class divide there. … There’s power in numbers and [in] bringing people together to take on the landlords.”

Singh makes a similar point. “Rent eats first, right?”

Sebastian Fernandez Giraldo, a member of DSA’s North Carolina Triangle chapter, argues that tenant organizing is an easier way for DSA chapters to reach working people than labor organizing because it doesn’t require organizers to first get employed at the worksite to be organized.

Tenant organizing is also powerful, Fernandez Giraldo adds, because it “creates the opportunity for people [who might] otherwise [not] be in touch with each other to talk about their issues and to see how they have a lot in common.”

A National Commitment

The convergence of DSA and tenant organizing dates to 2016, when some local DSA chapters—including Asheville, North Carolina; Flagstaff, Arizona; the San Francisco Bay Area; Chicago; Des Moines; and New York City—launched local tenant organizing efforts. Nationally, DSA established its Housing Justice Commission in 2019.

Allison Geroi, a member of DSA’s Metro DC chapter and an organizer with its tenant organizing affiliate Stomp Out Slumlords, wrote in a description of DSA’s 2019 convention that there was support for tenant organizing but also a concern that a national resolution might lead the national body to push a favored approach and discourage local experimentation. This concern was addressed by an agreement that the “national housing group would function primarily as a space to share resources and develop a strategy for national targets, rather than a campaign-in-a-box that would be exported to locals.”

By the time this language was developed, support was strong, but other delays made it “clear that we would not reach the housing section of the agenda.” Supporters felt strongly enough that housing should be a DSA priority that they “actually ran up to the stage right as the convention was about to end and pushed that resolution through,” recalls Singh, who was among the delegates who did so.

In 2021, buoyed by an uptick in tenant organizing across the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the national DSA passed a resolution that established “housing justice, with a focus on tenant organizing, as a national priority campaign”; dedicated the equivalent of one full-time position of national staff time to support local tenant organizing efforts; and “establish[ed] a permanent and ongoing train-the-trainers education curriculum and regular intake of new organizers seeking to establish or strengthen tenant organizing programs in their chapters.”

In 2022, DSA implemented that resolution by launching a national tenant organizer training program, the Emergency Tenants Organizing Committee (ETOC), which “connected with over a dozen DSA chapters to share experiences and learn about their on-the-ground local organizing.” By 2023, it had trained 18 DSA chapters and mentored 14 new local tenant unions “from as far west as Honolulu to as far east as East Tampa.” Between 2023 and 2025, nearly 300 tenant organizers participated in ETOC trainings, and DSA members contributed to the formation of eight new tenant unions.

DSA’s support of tenant organizing was reinforced in 2023 through additional training, funding, and a commitment to translating organizing materials (especially into Spanish). In 2025, the national convention committed to undertaking a national mapping assessment of tenant organizing capacity and sought to link workplace and tenant struggles under a nationwide campaign with the theme of: “Organize your workplace, organize your building.”

Building Power, Community by Community

Although tenant organizing has become a high priority at the national level, DSA is a highly decentralized organization in which local chapters have considerable autonomy; not all of them have made tenant organizing a core part of their work. Those that have embraced tenant organizing have adopted varied approaches, depending on their local conditions.

Mark Firla, who actively participated in DSA and tenant organizing in Connecticut between 2020 and 2023, relates that he and some of his fellow DSA members realized that there were unutilized state and local tenant protections on the books that they could use to generate interest among tenants and help them flex their political muscles. For example, a state statute allows the formation of local fair rent commissions to examine and eliminate excessive rental charges, and New Haven, where Firla lives, has had one since 1984.

More than 70 percent of New Haven’s population are renters. This means the city has considerable, if latent, tenant political power. Firla says DSA worked to activate that power by “literally cold knocking doors and saying, ‘Hey, who’s your landlord? Do you have issues? Are they responsive?’” and then pushing the city to implement or enforce preexisting rules. This had concrete effects in terms of increasing local political power; it enabled the chapter to position itself to help lead a lobbying effort to pass a statewide right-to-counsel law in 2021. “One of the outcomes that the state has seen over the last three, four, five years is much more significant involvement [among] organized tenants,” says Firla, which, he adds, is likely why a lot more cities in the state now have fair rent commissions.

But from a DSA perspective, Firla says, the power-building opportunity that tenant organizing provides has largely been squandered in the state. “If you’ve got a town of 20,000 people … and you have 200 organized community members or tenants, and those folks are willing to go work for a politician or work against a politician … they’re going to have a profoundly outsized impact,” he says. Instead, however, according to Firla, tenant organizers and DSA largely parted ways, and he argues that the state’s tenant organizing looks more like traditional lobbying.

In Albany, New York, the relationship between DSA and the local tenant union has been much more symbiotic, according to Bebhinn Francis, who is both a Capital District DSA (CDDSA) member and lead tenant organizer at United Tenants of Albany (UTA).

UTA, which was founded more than 50 years ago, is clearly independent of DSA. It receives its tenant union training from the Tenant Union Federation, not from DSA’s ETOC program, says Francis.

But in terms of the actual work of forming and supporting tenant unions, UTA and CDDSA are highly integrated. Without DSA volunteers, UTA’s tenant union organizing program would effectively consist of only Francis. Francis goes so far as to say that without the work of CDDSA members, the local tenant movement “would not even exist.” 

With DSA volunteers, however, the situation is quite different. Working with CDDSA, Francis has helped lead eight large tenant union building campaigns, with the largest building housing 250 families. The people power from DSA greatly speeds operations: At one 150-unit building, Francis says, the team of door knockers from the CDDSA housing committee enabled organizers to amass 62 percent support for a tenant union in just three days.

“CDDSA and I work hands-on throughout this process,” says Francis. “CDDSA helps with the outreach, the sign-ins. … When a tenant is afraid to give testimony for whatever reason …  it’s a Capital District DSA member who reads that testimony on behalf of the tenant.”

In North Carolina, the level of integration between DSA and tenant organizers is less pronounced than in Albany but more pronounced than in Connecticut. Another difference from Connecticut is that North Carolina lacked tenant-friendly policies or political environments at the state or local level. Therefore, the approach of making existing policies work for tenants was not available.

Tenant and housing organizing in North Carolina, in short, often had to start from the ground up. Fernandez Giraldo joined the Raleigh branch of DSA’s North Carolina Triangle chapter in 2018 and became very active in Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. After that campaign fell short, he saw the 2020 eviction moratorium as an extraordinary opportunity to reach people where they were and engage them politically.

Fernandez Giraldo and a friend looked up addresses where evictions had been filed. “We figured out which ones were apartments,” he says, “and we would knock on every door in the apartment complex, and be like, ‘Hey, you’ve got these rights. There [are] also these resources that you can access.’” Slowly, he says, others within the DSA chapter joined in, eventually connecting with people in Chapel Hill and Durham to create the Triangle Tenant Union. The union includes DSA members, but it is institutionally autonomous.

Fernandez Giraldo notes that the Raleigh City Council is “very right-wing, very controlled by real estate.” Other DSA chapters in North Carolina faced similar situations with their city councils, so they independently decided to focus on building tenant-union infrastructure and later linking up to create a statewide network of city- or regional-level groups. In 2024, with support from the Cypress Fund, a local philanthropic group, these groups formed the North Carolina Tenants Union. As with the Triangle Tenant Union, the tenant groups intentionally remain politically autonomous, even though many of their organizers are also DSA members.

Perhaps ironically, given that the initial focus on tenant unions stemmed in part from local policy not looking promising, the new statewide tenant infrastructure is beginning to enable tenant organizing groups to advance policy at the local level. A major breakthrough occurred last fall in Durham, where, after years of tenant advocacy being stymied, the city council passed a resolution strengthening habitability rules. Tenant organizers are already mobilizing at the building level to remedy unsafe conditions.

In Washington, D.C., the pandemic fueled a DSA chapter’s tenant organizing. Metro DC DSA already had a directly affiliated tenant organizing project, Stomp Out Slumlords, but it grew sharply from 2020 to 2021, increasing from 13 to more than 40 organizers and from 7 to 20 sites.

In fall 2025, tenants organized by Stomp Out Slumlords won a $41 million judgment in a case brought by the tenant association and the District of Columbia against the former owners of Marbury Plaza apartments in Anacostia. In her order, Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams noted that mold remediation had been “required in 645 of 672 individual units and all 98 common areas.” 

Zimmerman says Montgomery County, Maryland, has focused first on achieving policy wins, notably the passage of a rent stabilization ordinance in 2023, while D.C. proper has focused more on building tenant unions to stand up to landlords directly. Zimmerman serves on a coordinating committee that seeks to bridge the two strategies by advising the D.C. group on policy issues and connecting folks in Montgomery County with DSA Stomp Out Slumlords tenant organizers in D.C. when Maryland tenants are seeking to organize a building.

In California regions with preexisting tenant organizing, such as the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the DSA chapters can directly channel electoral energy into housing, through initiatives such as right to counsel and taxing vacant apartment units. DSA San Francisco has enough political energy around housing to maintain two working groups, one on tenant organizing and one on social housing, says Singh.

In other, more traditionally conservative regions of the state, such as the Central Valley, Inland Empire, and Orange County, Singh says, tenant unions are a newer phenomenon, and DSA chapters are helping many of them get off the ground. “Our dream,” she says, “is that every city in California above 100,000 people should have a tenant union.”

Negotiating Tensions

Firla notes that DSA chapters getting into tenant organizing face the familiar tension between pursuing the kinds of wins achievable by professional tenant association staff and the leadership development at the heart of successful long-term organizing. While the D.C. tenant union is an official DSA affiliate, this is not the norm.

Formally, as stated in DSA’s 2025 housing justice resolution, the organization’s goal is “to create and strengthen tenant unions led democratically by rank-and-file tenants and not NGOs.” But maintaining a “rank-and-file” orientation can be easier said than done when funding often depends on philanthropy, with rank-and-file dues collections often secondary.

A 2023 report from Stomp Out Slumlords captures this tension: “Organizational institutionalization in the current context virtually requires becoming a grant-seeking nonprofit and all of the restrictions on political advocacy and militancy that entails. At the outer limit of our hopes in 2021 was a collective entity with a thousand dues-paying members, but even if that were achieved and dues were set at $100 a year (well beyond most tenants’ actual willingness to pay), this would only support a single staff member and no office space.”

According to Firla, in Connecticut, a lack of political education weakens the power that could come from tenant organizing. It’s “a really exciting opportunity,” he says, “if you can get folks to understand that same set of facts and have a broader understanding of who … we are as a community, and how we can exercise power that, in many cases, working people don’t understand they have.”

Francis also emphasizes the importance of political education in maintaining alignment between DSA volunteers and tenants in tenant union organizing. “We’re really, really clear in our political education when we’re communicating with our tenants about lines of division and what class is,” she says. “There’s basically the ruling class and the working class. And even though our paychecks might vary in what they look like … we are all closer to the homeless side of this equation than the big CEO who’s owning these buildings, sitting in their mansion … in New Jersey.”

Tenant Power Drives Electoral Wins

DSA’s electoral ambitions have benefited from its focus on tenant issues. This may be particularly evident in New York, where DSA members have secured high-ranking political positions and advanced housing policy. For instance, State Sen. Julia Salazar, the first New York DSA member elected to the New York State Senate (in 2018), has consistently run on housing issues. In April 2026, Salazar introduced the Tenant Power Act to create legal protections for tenant unions. In New York City, a call to freeze the rent for rent-stabilized apartments—realized in late June—helped propel Mamdani to victory.

In Washington, D.C., Aparna Raj, a DSA-backed tenant organizer, won the Democratic Party primary for city council in Ward 1, typically tantamount to winning the general election. Her campaign, notes The 51^st, centered on housing and “addressing the District’s affordability problem.” Janeese Lewis George, D.C.’s Democratic mayoral nominee (and hence the city’s presumptive next mayor), is also a democratic socialist and won with the endorsement and active support of Metro DC DSA.

In San Francisco, Singh notes, tenant and electoral organizing are often intertwined. “A lot of our electoral stuff has to do with housing,” she notes, including a ballot measure in 2026 that would raise $100 million for affordable housing in the city.

As Singh says, “You can’t have economic [justice] and leave real estate capital untouched.”

Steve Dubb is strategic initiatives editor at Shelterforce. Prior to Shelterforce, Steve worked as senior editor of economic justice at Nonprofit Quarterly. Before that, he worked at The Democracy Collaborative … and was also previously the executive director of NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation), a U.S. and Canadian association of housing cooperatives, focused on campus communities. Steve has authored and edited multiple books. Most recently, he co-edited (with Raymond Foxworth) Invisible No More: Voices from Native America (Island Press, 2023). Steve is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and actively volunteers in the area with multiple groups on economic justice work.

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