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Former members of the U.S. Communist Party recount their Red Lives

The post Looking Back to Look Forward appeared first on Democratic Left.

Events and Actions

Tuesday July 28 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 28 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 29 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) DSA SF Electoral Board x WFP Happy Hour (Teeth Bar SF, 2323 Mission St)

Wednesday July 29 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM) Phonebank for the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 29 (6:45 PM – 8:30 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday July 30 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM) ICE Out Orientation (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 1 (1:00 PM – 3:00 PM) Immigrant Justice KYR Canvassing – Pacific Heights (Raymond Kimbell Playground Park, 1901 Geary Blvd)

Monday August 3 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday August 4 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday August 5 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (zoom only)

Wednesday August 5 (6:00 PM – 9:00 PM) Social Housing Happy Hour (MOTHERSHIP, 3152 Mission St)

Thursday August 6 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 6 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Immigrant Justice regular meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Friday August 7 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 8 (11:00 PM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Sunday August 9 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group Meeting (zoom only)

Monday August 10 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday August 10 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM)Labor Working Group Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

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Happy Hour with the Working Families Party

New to organizing? Looking to get more involved? Come to our joint happy hour with the Working Families Party TOMORROW Wednesday July 29th at Teeth Bar, 2323 Mission, from 6:00 – 8:00 PM and meet cool people organizing cool campaigns. The event is all ages AND it’s Teeth’s “Wings Wednesday” so you gotta come out — RSVP here!

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Immigrant Justice Know Your Rights Canvassing Event & Social

The Immigrant Justice Working Group will be hosting an ICE Out Orientation session this Thursday, July 30 from 7:00 – 9:00 PM at the office (1916 Mcallister) and virtually over Zoom! This is perfect for if you are interested in learning where to plug in with your local community initiatives and learn how to best utilize your skills, or even just to connect with others if you’re already active!

If you plan to attend either in person or on Zoom, please RSVP here!

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Immigrant Justice Know Your Rights Canvassing Event & Social

Join the Immigrant Justice Working Group for Know Your Rights (KYR) canvassing Saturday August 1 at 1:00PM at Raymond Kimbell Playground Park!

We will be distributing red cards and KYR materials to businesses and community members in the Pacific Heights neighborhood.

We will meet at Raymond Kimbell Playground Park on the corner of Geary Blvd. & Steiner St. to receive training and materials before canvassing.

Join us after for a social/debrief session at a local spot and grab food/drinks!

New to canvassing? No worries! There will be a brief how-to training before we go out in pairs or small groups.

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Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines

DSA SF is hosting a guest speaker from San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (SFCHRP) to discuss the recent events that connect the strike against C&H Sugar in Crockett, California to the massacre of 19 land defenders and activists in Toboso, Negros Occidental in the Philippines. We’ll dive into sugar’s bloody history, learn about the links in the imperialist global supply chain that bind us together in struggle, and discuss what we can do here in San Francisco. 

Join us on the evening of Friday, August 7th in the office at 1916 McAllister St. (RSVP link coming soon!).

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Reportback: Tenant Organizing Working Group Provide Support for Socialist in Office Jackie Fielder’s Town Hall

On Thursday, our Socialist In Office Supervisor Jackie Fielder hosted a Town Hall at La Fénix on Mission as part of a D9 listening series. Last Tuesday, DSA members posted flyers throughout the Mission inviting residents to the Town Hall and the Citywide Tenant Assembly in August, and providing information to help tenants know their rights when facing eviction. DSA’s Tenant Organizing Working Group was joined in tabling the event by the Eviction Defense Collaborative, and DSA SF members were in attendance to support and listen to ideas and concerns from working class residents in the Mission.

The room was packed with constituents who shared questions and comments to a panel including Jackie and representatives from the Mayor’s Office, the Department of Emergency Management, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, SFPD, and SFMTA. Mission residents took the floor and advocated for many important community needs such as funding for peer counselors, mental health and substance use treatment, housing-first policies and funding for affordable housing, and against recent shelter closures and surveillance by Flock cameras. The departments took notes and responded to questions directed at them, including requests for greater transparency and regular reporting. Jackie’s team followed up with residents who still had comments after the event to make sure their concerns were noted.

If you’re interested in showing up to support our Socialist in Office, Jackie’s next Town Hall will be in Portola on Thursday, July 30 from 6:30 – 7:30 PM at the Family Connections Center, located at 2565 San Bruno Ave!

by Elizabeth Henderson

This month’s column will be short – lots to say, but too busy gardening and digging in the dirt to write it down!

New booth at the Public Market! Fresh Farmers Together launched their shared booth in early June. Please visit Shed D on Saturdays from 7:00am to 1:00pm to purchase their freshly picked organically grown produce. The 8 or so farms use the label “Sustainable” because they are not certified organic, although they use organic systems on their tiny farms that range in size from 2 backyards to 6 acres.

Final Hearing on Zoning Alignment. July 13 @ 6:00 pm, Rochester City Hall – final-final hearing on final comments on city Zoning. Us community garden folks will be waiting to hear if the ZAP writers will finally understand the difference between a high tunnel and a row cover!

The Rochester Food Policy Council hopes to hear that the zoners are heeding the call “to read its urban agriculture provisions not only as technical land use code, but as environmental justice policy.” The Food Policy Council comments summarize the Taproot Collective 2024-25 report on their survey of 109 community gardens:

“Rochester’s community gardens are concentrated in neighborhoods that face the greatest combined burdens of poverty, food insecurity, environmental contamination, and disinvestment. The Gardening Together Study found that the majority of Rochester’s 109 documented food-producing gardens serve neighborhoods where, as one grower described it, residents overwhelmingly live below the poverty line, where children may never have seen a fruit tree, and where healthy food – free of chemicals, grown with care – is a form of public health infrastructure, not a hobby.”

“90% of the people in my community live below the poverty level. 90% of the people in my community’s children don’t know how it is to see an apple tree, a pear tree, a plum tree. I want to teach the people in the community how to live off the land.”
Inez Burns-Nixon, Garden of Hope, North Marketview Heights.

The Gardening Together Study’s analysis questions explicitly tested whether gardens cluster in neighborhoods with lower tree canopy cover, fewer parks, and greater food access barriers – the same neighborhoods that bear the most concentrated environmental burdens from Rochester’s legacy of redlining, industrial disinvestment, and infrastructure disinvestment. This pattern is consistent with national research on urban agriculture in rust belt cities, where community gardens function as environmental justice interventions: they green vacant land that would otherwise accumulate pollution and illegal dumping, provide fresh produce in areas that retail markets have abandoned, and build community resilience in neighborhoods where social cohesion has been systematically undermined.”

Pest management field day! July 23 @ 3:30pm – 6:30pm, Foodlink Community Farm [585 Lexington Ave, Rochester, NY 14613]. Join us for a hands-on field day exploring integrated pest management tools for small-scale growing spaces and the opportunity to build community with local growers! This event will focus on best practices for using row covers, biocontrols, trapping, and more. We will highlight a Cornell Cooperative Extension demonstration trial using insect exclusion netting and entomopathogenic nematodes to manage swede midge, an invasive fly that causes damage to brassica crops. We will hear from local growers on how they manage pests on their farms and gardens with a focus on organic management.

You can learn how to set up low tunnels, and there will be tabling by the Food Policy Council, Northeast Organic Farming Association, Taproot, and more.

Please check out the Taproot Collective Facebook and Instagram pages for announcements of workshops and volunteer opportunities through the season.

If you want to participate in a garden, please contact the author of this piece, and maybe she can point you in the right direction!

The post Getting Grounded, July 2026-Out in the Garden! first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

On Wednesday, July 22, four Madison Police Department officers surrounded and executed Corey Ruiz on the corner of Williamson and South Baldwin streets, mere blocks away from where Tony Robinson was murdered by Matt Kenny in 2015. We condemn in no uncertain terms the murder of Corey Ruiz by the Madison Police Department. Regardless of the events leading up to the murder, there is no situation where this is justified. For days our members have participated in demonstrations, protests, and vigils in solidarity with our community.

This is not the first time Madison Police officers have taken a neighbor’s life;  the police continue to use excessive force and perpetuate racism and classism with absolute impunity. In March 2015, Madison Police officer Matt Kenny shot and killed 19-year-old Tony Robinson. Despite widespread protests and calls for accountability, Matt Kenny has faced no charges and is still employed by the Madison Police Department more than ten years later. He even trains new officers. Even Tony Robinson was not the first victim of police murder in this neighborhood—in 2012, Paul Heenan was murdered by police on South Baldwin Street, and in 2006, Victor Montero-Diaz was murdered by police at the gas station on Williamson Street. 

We stand behind the community’s demands for:

1. The immediate arrest of Kiel Baitinger-Peterson and all those accessory to the murder we witnessed on Wednesday afternoon
2. That all information found in the investigation conducted by the Department of Criminal Investigation be turned over to the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Civilian Oversight Board
3. Community control over the police.
   

We demand accountability for Corey’s murder, and for the systems that have led to this point— systems that value property over human life. We demand full transparency, including the immediate release of the names of every officer involved and all available squad car camera and surveillance footage.

These common-sense demands only address this most recent harm done to the community and ensure accountability follows. If we truly want to stop further violence, we must not treat this as an isolated instance but rather a part of a larger structure that perpetuates violence. Instead, we must focus on the kinds of reforms that will prevent future police violence against our communities. 

We must demilitarize police departments, redirect funding to public services, and strengthen the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Civilian Oversight Board to have real community authority over the police. These changes, among others, are steps that will bring us closer to changing the violent carceral system that destroys communities and takes lives. We need to recognize that any reform that does not decrease the power of the modern punishment bureaucracy is no reform at all.

Time and again we’ve seen politicians break promises, make compromises that lead to half measures, and roll back reforms. We’ve seen momentum toward progress stall as soon as the news cycle moves on. Non-profits are limited by their mandate, structure, and fundraising, and advocate but do not deliver. To win our demands, members of the community must get organized and work together.

Support and attend the vigil, connect with your community, and be ready to take concrete action in the coming days and weeks to ensure true accountability and justice for Corey Ruiz. 

By: Cayla Dodd

MARLBOROUGH- A union contract campaign among school bus drivers and monitors has developed into something much larger than a dispute over wages and benefits. What is unfolding reveals in stark clarity the architecture of privatization – how private equity reshapes essential services, how union-busting operates under contemporary labor relations, and why even basic fights for dignity at work eventually run up against the larger structure of capitalism itself.

This is a story about a group of workers trying to win a decent contract. They want better wages, more stable hours, stronger benefits, safer buses, fairer route assignments, and protection from arbitrary discipline and on-the-job surveillance. They want, in other words, the same things workers have always wanted: security, respect, and some measure of control over the conditions under which they labor.

The question is why those demands are treated as unreasonable in the first place.

Workers who transport children every day can be left without meaningful retirement security, with subpar healthcare, and with schedules so fragmented and unstable that some cannot reliably afford housing, a car, or even their basic monthly bills. A sector plagued by chronic driver shortages continues to produce working conditions that drive experienced workers out. When workers begin organizing seriously enough to challenge those conditions, management responds with escalation.

Work Unseen by the Public

School bus driving is routinely misunderstood by people who don’t do its work. From the outside, school bus drivingt is often imagined as part-time work with limited responsibilities: a few hours in the morning, a few in the afternoon, summers off, and not much more to it. That caricature has done enormous ideological work on behalf of employers and municipalities alike, helping justify low standards, weak benefits, and public indifference. But it has very little to do with the actual labor involved.

In reality, school transportation is skilled, stressful, high-responsibility work. Drivers are responsible for safely transporting children through traffic, weather, construction, behavioral incidents, shifting route conditions, vehicle issues, and the endless unpredictability of day-to-day life. They are expected to exercise judgment constantly. They are responsible for operating large vehicles safely, managing student conduct, navigating difficult roads, responding to emergencies, and ensuring that students are released appropriately and arrive where they are supposed to be. A mistake can have enormous consequences. The job requires discipline, focus, and local knowledge. This is not a casual side gig. This is essential infrastructure.

Yet the structure of the work is built around instability. Drivers are commonly scheduled on split shifts, with a block of work in the morning and another in the afternoon. On paper, that can look manageable. In practice, it means the workday stretches across most of the day while providing only a fraction of full-time pay. A driver may start very early, finish a morning run, sit unpaid for hours in the middle of the day, and then return for afternoon routes. Those unpaid gaps are too large to ignore and too awkward to make a second job realistic. The result is a schedule that dominates your day without paying for your day.

That contradiction sits at the center of the economic misery so many school bus workers experience. They are not fully employed in a way that provides a stable living, but they are also not free enough to easily build a second source of income around the job. Workers can find themselves trapped between part-time pay and full-day obligation. From the standpoint of capital, that structure is useful. From the standpoint of labor, it is punishing.

Benefits do not compensate for that instability. Healthcare is often inadequate. Workers may technically have coverage while still facing costs substantial enough to make actually using that coverage a source of stress. Retirement security is rare. A worker can spend years performing essential public labor and still face old age with little to show for it beyond worn-out knees, accumulated stress, and a deep familiarity with financial precarity. That is one of the clearest expressions of what the system thinks workers are worth.

These conditions have real human consequences. Workers fall behind on rent. They fear eviction. They delay car repairs because they cannot afford them, even though a reliable car may be necessary just to get to work. They struggle to secure stable housing. Some take on humiliating and physically draining side measures just to survive, including selling plasma to cover everyday expenses. This is the lived reality produced when socially necessary labor is organized around cost minimization rather than human need.

Shortages as Tactic in the Class Strategy

Massachusetts has dealt for years with school bus driver shortages. Public discussion of this crisis is often shallow, described as though a natural disaster or demographic inevitability: a regrettable staffing problem that somehow descended on the industry from outside. Employers and public officials talk about recruitment, as if the main challenge is persuading enough people to enter the field.

Workers know better. The real crisis is retention. People leave because the job has been made unsustainable.

There is no mystery about why workers leave a job with unstable hours, weak benefits, inadequate retirement, rising surveillance, stagnant wages, and constant stress. There is no mystery about why new hires do not stay when they quickly realize the public image of the job bears little resemblance to its reality. There is no mystery about why experienced drivers burn out, seek better-paying work elsewhere, or leave the profession entirely. The shortage is the predictable result of labor conditions designed to suppress costs.

Once you see that clearly, much else comes into focus. The constant shortages intensify pressure on the workers who remain. Routes are stretched, doubled up, or constantly rearranged. Expectations increase. Management leans harder on flexibility. Workers are told to absorb more instability in the name of keeping the operation functioning. The strain accumulates. More people consider leaving. The shortage deepens. The system devours the very workforce it depends on. This is one of the ways capitalism presents its own contradictions as technical problems: treating the workforce as an input to be purchased as cheaply as possible, then acts confused when that workforce becomes difficult to sustain.

The conditions in school transportation did not emerge in a vacuum. They are the product of a political project. Municipalities were steered toward privatization over decades through austerity politics, anti-union ideology, and the broader neoliberal assault on public goods. Public services were increasingly reimagined as budget lines to be minimized rather than social obligations to be met. Outsourcing became attractive because private firms promised savings, but those savings had to come from somewhere.

They came, overwhelmingly, from labor.

Privatization is often defended in the language of efficiency. This is one of the ruling class’s great rhetorical tricks. Efficiency sounds neutral, modern, and practical. But in the context of public services, “efficiency” usually means shifting risk downward, stripping labor standards, weakening democratic accountability, and enabling more aggressive management over workers than would be politically tolerable in direct public employment. A private contractor can more easily suppress wages and benefits, fragment the workforce, impose unstable schedules, and retaliate against worker organization while local officials keep their hands clean and point to lower budget numbers.

That is the real social meaning of privatization: a class strategy. School bus workers are facing hardship through privatization. The whole model depends on labor being cheaper, more replaceable, and easier to discipline than it would be under more robust public-sector standards. Municipalities outsource because private companies are willing to do what public employers often cannot or will not: grind labor harder.

The worker experiences this as a thousand small humiliations and pressures. The politician experiences it as budget relief. The company experiences it as a business opportunity.

Sharpening the Blade of Capital

In this case, that logic runs through NRT Bus, Inc., its parent company Beacon Mobility, and, as workers understand it, the private equity firm Audax. Whatever the precise current corporate structure may be at the moment this article is read, the broader pattern is clear enough: school transportation has been folded into a larger world of corporate consolidation and financial ownership in which essential public services are treated as sites of extraction.

Privatization supplies the basic structure. Private equity intensifies its logic. When financial firms enter sectors like school transportation, the pressure to extract returns becomes even more relentless. The service itself becomes secondary to the imperatives of financial management. Essential public goods are treated as revenue streams. The workforce becomes a site of value extraction. Every wage increase, every improved benefit, every additional guarantee, and every reduction in management discretion is viewed through the lens of profitability.

This is what financialization does to work: it disciplines the entire enterprise around investor return. That means pressure for labor flexibility, tighter cost controls, consolidation, standardized management practices, and hostility toward anything that reduces managerial command over the workforce.

In a sector like school transportation, private equity’s influence is especially corrosive because the service is socially indispensable but politically neglected. Children still have to get to school. Families still depend on buses running. Municipalities still need contracts fulfilled. That creates a relatively stable flow of public money into the industry. For finance, that looks appealing. For workers, it means they are trapped inside a system where public necessity is being mined for private return.

This helps explain why even modest worker demands are so fiercely resisted. Better healthcare is a cost increase. Retirement security creates obligations that constrain extraction. Guaranteed hours reduce managerial flexibility and increase labor expense. Under a private-equity-influenced model, these become threats because they interfere with the deeper function of the enterprise.

Private equity brings a more concentrated and shameless form of capitalist discipline. It strips away even the remnants of paternalism or long-term stewardship some employers once used to legitimize themselves. What remains is naked extraction.

To Act in Concert

Against these conditions, workers built a contract campaign that aimed at more than symbolic change. The demands at its core were practical, concrete, and rooted in lived experience. Workers sought stronger hour guarantees because they knew unstable scheduling was wrecking their finances and their ability to remain in the job. They sought better wages because the existing structure was not keeping pace with the real cost of living. They sought improved healthcare because nominal coverage without actual affordability is not security. They sought retirement because a lifetime of work should not end in poverty. They sought safer buses, better route practices, and enforceable maintenance expectations because the labor itself is dangerous enough without being compounded by management neglect. They sought limits on surveillance and arbitrary discipline because “safety” rhetoric is too often weaponized as a tool of control rather than used to genuinely support workers and students.

None of these are fringe demands. They are exactly the kinds of demands any rational society would consider baseline. But because they conflict with the cost discipline built into privatized school transportation, they immediately become political.

What also distinguished this campaign was the way it was built. This was not simply a staff-driven process of bargaining behind closed doors, with workers receiving occasional updates. Rank-and-file workers themselves played a central role in the organizing. They held conversations with coworkers. They built visible solidarity actions. They created shared expectations that participation mattered. They used meetings, chats, and direct outreach to transform the campaign from something happening above workers into something workers were doing together.

Employers can tolerate a certain amount of passive dissatisfaction. They can tolerate symbolic complaints. They can even tolerate low-level grievances as long as the workforce remains fragmented and dependent. What they fear is organization: workers understanding themselves as a collective force with shared interests and the capacity to act in concert.

Visible Solidarity

To outsiders, a solidarity action like a red-shirt day can look small. But that misunderstands the function such actions serve. In a workplace structured by isolation, where drivers are split across routes, schedules, and classifications, visible collective participation is not cosmetic. It is one of the first ways workers learn to see each other politically.

When a worker looks around and sees that many of their coworkers are willing to participate in a common action, however modest, something changes. Fear begins to loosen. A private frustration starts becoming a public alignment. What had previously existed as scattered grievances begins to cohere into an organized workforce. Small collective acts create the conditions for larger ones. They build confidence, social trust, and a sense that the employer’s authority is not total.

This is one reason bosses often react disproportionately even to low-risk collective actions. They understand what many observers do not: participation itself is dangerous. Once workers get used to acting together, more becomes possible.

By the time a campaign reaches the point of a strike authorization vote, much of the real work has already been done. Such votes are measurements of trust, political development, and collective will. A workforce does not produce an overwhelming yes vote by accident. It does so because countless conversations, tests of solidarity, and small decisions have accumulated into something stronger.

That is why a 98 percent yes vote matters so much. It is evidence that workers were crossing from grievance into power.

Retaliation

Management’s response must be understood in that light. When a key rank-and-file leader is terminated at a critical point in a campaign, the question is not only whether the stated justification is plausible on its own terms. The question is what function the action serves in the broader struggle.

People often expect union-busting to look dramatic and explicit. Sometimes it does. But under modern labor relations, employers often operate through deniability, selective discipline, legal complexity, and timing. A worker is targeted in a way that does not openly announce anti-union intent, but can be narrated as an individualized matter detached from the collective context. This does not prove anti-union motive is absent. It shows that employers have become more sophisticated.

The purpose of such discipline is larger than the individual case. The point is to introduce uncertainty into the workforce, to make workers wonder whether participation is worth the risk, to force organizers to divert time, energy, and emotional bandwidth into defense, to destabilize the social infrastructure of the campaign, and to remind everyone that management still claims the power to punish.

Retaliation belongs inside the contract fight. In fact, it often emerges precisely when workers are becoming effective enough that management sees no other way to regain initiative.

The same is true of broader escalation through legal threats or lawsuits. Whatever their technical merits, such moves function politically. They muddy the waters. They force workers and unions to defend themselves on terrain chosen by the employer. They attempt to recast the conflict from one about wages, benefits, and worker power into one about impropriety, scandal, or misconduct. They raise the stakes of participation and create a climate in which caution can start masquerading as prudence.

This too is union-busting, just adapted to a labor regime in which employers know how to use formal legality as a weapon.

Labor-Management Relations and Their Contradiction

Mainstream discourse often treats labor-management conflict as though it were a misunderstanding between stakeholders who ultimately want the same thing. That fiction is useful to employers and to the political class that mediates between labor and capital without ever wanting to resolve their antagonism. But it does not survive contact with reality.

Workers and employers do not stand in a neutral relationship. The employer purchases labor power and seeks to get as much from it as possible for as little as possible. The worker sells labor power because they must survive, but has every interest in increasing their compensation, securing their conditions, limiting arbitrary control, and preserving their body and time. There can be temporary accommodations. There can be negotiated settlements. There can even be periods of relative peace. But the underlying interests remain opposed.

In school transportation, that contradiction appears in condensed form. Workers need stable hours, strong benefits, safe equipment, and real voice on the job in order to make the work livable. The employer, especially under privatization and private equity pressure, needs labor costs contained, managerial flexibility maintained, and worker militancy suppressed in order to preserve margins and secure contracts. These are conflicting goals.

That is why so many workers eventually reach a political realization through workplace struggle: management is not simply failing to understand their needs. Management understands perfectly well and resists because meeting those needs would alter the balance of power and the distribution of resources.

That is class analysis born from experience.

None of this means contract fights do not matter. They matter deeply. Workers need better contracts. Workers need to defend themselves using every tool available, including grievances, bargaining, arbitration, public pressure, and strike readiness. But campaigns like this also reveal the limits of what can be won if the fight remains confined to the level of a single workplace and a single employer.

Even strong workplace organization is forced to operate within a broader structure that reproduces the same pressures. Competitive bidding pits contractors against one another on labor cost. Municipal austerity rewards cheapness over human need. Private equity demands returns. Labor law constrains worker power while legitimizing endless employer aggression. A union can win gains, but those gains are always under pressure so long as the structure remains in place.

This is one of the central political lessons of the campaign. Workers can and should fight for every immediate improvement. But they also run up against the reality that exploitation is not just a matter of bad bosses or bad decisions. It is institutional. It is reproduced through markets, contracts, finance, and the state.

That realization is often the bridge between trade union consciousness and socialist consciousness. It is the moment when workers begin to see that they are not only fighting an employer but confronting a mode of social organization.

The answer cannot be better management of privatized services. The answer cannot be pleading for more enlightened contractors or slightly less predatory financial owners. The answer has to be political and structural. Essential public services should not be organized around private profit. School transportation should be brought back into public ownership and operated as a public good. The financial actors extracting wealth from essential services should be removed. Labor standards should be raised across the sector in ways that prevent public entities from using outsourcing to undercut workers. Drivers and monitors should have stable, sufficient hours, real healthcare, and meaningful retirement security. Workers should have enforceable rights on the job, including protection from surveillance abuse and retaliation. And the people who do the work should have a meaningful voice in how the work is organized.

This is far more practical than the existing system, which produces chronic shortages, burnout, turnover, declining conditions, and endless labor conflict while pretending to be efficient.

Capitalism does not merely generate inequality in the abstract. It organizes everyday life in ways that subordinate human need to accumulation. It takes indispensable work and turns it into a site of austerity. It transforms public necessity into private opportunity. It relies on worker insecurity as a lever of discipline. And when workers resist, it deploys law, management authority, and financial pressure to preserve that arrangement.

The campaign in Central Massachusetts therefore matters beyond one contract or one yard. Instead, it’s a window into the broader social order.

They Tried to Cut Off The Head

For socialists, labor organizers, union members, and community supporters, the appropriate response is not passive sympathy. It is organized solidarity linked to a political program.

That means materially supporting workers in active struggle. It means treating retaliation against worker leaders as an attack on the whole class, not an isolated personnel matter, demanding that municipalities stop hiding behind the language of contracting and take responsibility for the labor standards of the services on which the public depends. It means fighting privatization not only where it is proposed, but where it is already entrenched. It means building connections between workplace fights and wider campaigns for decommodified public goods.

It also means rejecting the idea that labor struggles should remain narrow, apolitical, or purely economistic. Workers do not benefit when socialism is kept out of labor politics; employers do. The more clearly workers can connect their immediate experience to the structures of capital, the more durable and transformative their organizing can become.

A contract campaign can win raises. A strong shop-floor organization can beat back some retaliation. But a movement capable of ending the rule of private equity over public services would do much more than that. It would begin to shift who society is actually organized for. When management moved against a key organizer, the intention was clear. It was a classic move in a contemporary form: isolate leadership, destabilize the campaign, remind workers who claims power in the workplace. But that move also had another effect: clarifying the struggle, making visible what is so often hidden, showing the conflict was never just about a few contract proposals. The move showed that workers had built enough power to provoke a serious response. And once workers begin to see all of this together, it becomes much harder to return to the comforting fictions of before.

The fiction that management and labor fundamentally want the same things. The fiction that shortages happen for mysterious reasons. The fiction that privatization is about efficiency rather than class power. The fiction that private equity is just another ownership model rather than a machine for intensified extraction. The fiction that the problems facing workers are isolated, accidental, or unfortunate rather than systemic.

When those fictions start to fall apart, something politically dangerous begins to happen. Workers stop interpreting their conditions as personal failure or bad luck. They start recognizing them as products of a social order. And once that recognition is collective, once it is organized, once it is tied to solidarity and action, the balance of power can begin to shift.

That is why this fight matters.

The fight matters because it is about wages and healthcare and retirement and schedules and safe buses and retaliation and respect. It matters because it is about whether workers can remain in the profession at all. It matters because it reveals the real causes of driver shortages. It matters because it exposes the class content of privatization. And it matters because it points beyond itself, toward a socialist politics capable of saying plainly what liberal management discourse never will: that essential public services should not be run for profit, that workers are entitled to dignity and control, and that the capitalist organization of social life is incompatible with either.

The workers in this campaign are fighting for a contract. They are also, whether everyone around them fully recognizes it yet or not, fighting over a much larger question.

Who should society serve: the people who do the work and rely on it, or the people who profit from keeping them insecure?

That question is not limited to one bus yard in Massachusetts. But it is being asked there with unusual clarity. And how workers answer it together — on the job, in the union, and in politics — will matter far beyond this one campaign.

Cayla Dodd is a school bus worker and member of Worcester DSA.

The post They Tried to Cut Off the Head: School Bus Workers in Central Mass Confront Private Equity appeared first on Working Mass.

The aim of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is unique among major American political organizations: to democratically bring about socialism in the United States. For most DSA members, engagement with that goal is limited. They help fund the organization through membership dues and donations and vote for our endorsed candidates. Some may even engage through additional small acts like sharing our social media content, attending one of our events, or refusing to cross a picket line that we are supporting. While we should always find ways to lead these members to additional engagement, it is fine (and healthy for one’s psyche) to accept that most of them will not consistently increase their engagement.

This piece is not written for these casual members, but instead for the footsoldiers and captains that are our vocal minority and the organization’s shepherds: socialist organizers. This cadre is not content to merely count themselves as  members of a socialist organization and as supporters of socialism – they want to pour the concrete of its foundation. They are compelled to take action because, after all, if we don’t take action, who will? We understand that the question is not only what economic system should we have, but what is to be done to bring it about.

Unfortunately for us, there is little to guide our way in terms of modern applicable instruction. The socialist organizers I have known have picked up their skills and tactics from a variety of sources that are rarely directly socialist organizing. Some learn politicking from working for the Democratic Party. Some learn list building and planning an escalation strategy from the world of organized labor. From ACORN to Occupy Wall Street, our organizational pasts may be socialist-adjacent, but rarely are they outright socialist. Instead, we were the ones at LGBTQ rights rallies trying to convince our community that corporate recognition would not liberate us. We may have even gotten on the megaphone at the Black Lives Matter rally and tried to name the link between racist policing and class war. We were the ones bemoaning the fall from influence of socialism in the Palestinian liberation movement, criticizing Hamas for reasons that had nothing to do with them lobbing rockets at the fascists occupying their homeland.

Paolo Freire once said “we make the road by walking,” and indeed many of us become socialist organizers not by taking a socialist organizing class or even being trained by a mentor within an organization. We begin by trying and failing, and trying a little differently and failing again, and trying a little differently again and maybe pulling off a win. And while experience is the best teacher, any self-taught musician can tell you that experience without pedagogical foundation can lead to bad habits. These may seem small on their own, but they can stop us from reaching our full potential and set artificial ceilings to what we can achieve.

A pitfall we must constantly be vigilant against as socialist organizers is the conflation of being a socialist with organizing for socialism. Being a socialist, no matter how loudly and proudly, is not organizing for socialism. While this tendency has always been an issue (Marx and Engels derisively called it “the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine”), it is particularly reinforced today by social media. Social media mines the entire world, humans and bots alike, for interactions, and so one’s “hot take” feels demonstrably powerful because some invisible hand has determined it merits thousands or even millions of “internet points.” This charade should fall away with even a minute of critical interrogation – it requires no effort to “like” a post, barely any effort to comment on one, and engaging with socialist thought in this way reinforces the thoroughly disorganizing behavior of spending our time “doom scrolling” rather than talking to one another and actually organizing. But while supercharged by social media, the problem is not caused by social media itself.

To return to the previously cited Communist Manifesto, the core deficiency with what I will call the “aesthetic socialists” was the same then as it is now – a lack of class consciousness.  They are happy to endlessly discuss the ideas of socialist thinkers, and they may even invoke terms including “communism” and even “revolution.” But as Marx wrote in his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

The aesthetic socialists will post memes and share videos, but rather than to drive organizing they are always focused on the promotion of aesthetic supremacy by lashing out venomously at any actual organizing project. Socialist elected officials? Traitors for any action they take that does not align with some mythic pure socialist set of values. Labor unions? First-world labor aristocrats. And for general use, they can always throw out general denunciations unaccompanied by evidence, including “liberal,” “racist,” “Zionist,” etc. If you are involved with socialist organizing, you’ve been exposed to someone like this at some point, or even worse, had them dragging down your organizing project. If they engage in any organizing, it will inevitably face inward, obsess over constructing a faberge egg of socialist organization for its aesthetics rather than its utility in building socialism among the working masses.

Too often though I see well-meaning comrades propose inept and misinformed solutions to the problem of aesthetic socialists. Some suggest it is the problem of not having the right kind of socialism. But from social democrats to hardline Maoists, from DNC Underground to the Austin Red Guard, the aesthetic socialist spans the spectrum of socialist thought. Some see how social media has reinforced the delusions of the aesthetic socialists and think prohibiting or restricting social media is the answer. And while social media restrictions are warranted for other reasons (especially to prevent delusions or depression), aesthetic socialism long predates social media, and the reinforcement from likes and retweets can also be obtained from reading groups, niche conferences, or the triumph of one’s caucus or faction. Having been to Left Forum and seen a dozen Noam Chomsky lookalikes pontificate on Lacan, I can assure you that social media merely magnifies rather than causes the problem.

There is only one solution: prioritizing class consciousness in socialist organizing. Regardless of any other variable, when a socialist has their eye on their class position and how it relates to the working class, it becomes practically impossible to justify aesthetic socialism. When the socialist has the people’s need for bread and rent and childcare on their mind and in their heart, the unimportance of their own socialist aesthetic becomes clear. Internal organizing becomes a means to ensure the prioritization of external organizing rather than an end to itself. To put it simply, your internecine fight with another DSA member seems stupid when you’re reminded most people are just worried about putting food on the table and not getting evicted.

Some comrades understand this centrality of class consciousness but mistake it as being baptismal. That, once one has attained class consciousness, they are born again and saved, their actions forever anointed in holy enlightenment. Not so – class consciousness must be maintained, adjusted, sharpened, and constantly re-examined. The working class and its movement through history is not static. While fundamental relationships may persist as long as we are in a capitalist economy (between workers and the means of production, between capitalists and the state, etc.), the precise dynamics and most importantly the lived experiences of working people constantly shift. Teaching ‘M-C-M’ is not organizing – it’s economics. Even teaching the writings of Lenin is not organizing – it’s political science. Understanding someone’s lived experience and connecting that to class struggle is fundamental socialist organizing. Marxist theory can give us a foundation to build on, but having class consciousness requires more than being well-read.

For purposes of maintaining class consciousness of our membership, I have always insisted that our members should be engaged in at least one of two DSA organizing fundamentals – electoral or labor. Good electoral organizing means exposure to dozens or even hundreds of persuasive conversations every month with working class people on why they should vote for a socialist. Good labor organizing means exposure to such conversations with working class people on why they should form a union or otherwise demand more from their employer.

There is no other advocacy or organizing that will foster class consciousness in the way that DSA’s electoral or labor organizing does for our membership. And this is not to discount the importance of other advocacy. But the nature of that advocacy under capitalism divorces it from class consciousness, even for those groups (Black people, immigrants, trans people) that are majority working class. At worst this leads to the liberal nonprofit world, and even at best it leads to disorganizing separatism and standpoint supremacy. It isolates on a pedestal the people (Black people, immigrants, trans people) most in need of working class solidarity and connection to the collective, ennobling their marginalization and suffering rather than seeking its end. Only a select few organizations have been able to navigate these treacherous waters, and they are notably akin to DSA in being membership organizations rooted in some form of class analysis (e.g., New York Communities for Change, Southerners on New Ground, GoodKidsMadCity Englewood, etc.). 

Sometimes when I have given this argument I’ll receive pushback that the organizing targets of electoral and labor are also subsets of the working class rather than perfectly representative. And there is no perfect representative of the working class, of course. But it is the nature of the subjects that creates the class consciousness, the people as “voters” and as “workers.” Organizing people as voters confronts them and ourselves with the contradictions of bourgeois democracy – how capitalists use democracy to grant their domination of the working class legitimacy, even though this democracy creates risk for them of losing control of the government. Organizing people as workers confronts them and ourselves with alienation and division of the working class and shows the power of withholding labor by proximity to the means of production. Or, put more simply, electoral organizing shows people the government is captured by capitalists but that we can end that capture through democratic organizing, and worker organizing shows people capitalism exploits workers but that we can end that exploitation through strikes and other collective worker actions.

We all have different roles to play in the struggle for socialism, and even among organizers are roles that may look very different but be equally valuable. We need the introvert pouring over spreadsheets and the homebody making beautiful graphics for our literature. I’m not asking these comrades to overhaul their personalities and become the weekly canvasser or shopfloor socialite. Nor am I asking our elected officials or new parents or caretakers or any number of comrades who literally do not have the time to do that frontline work to somehow do it anyway. But what I am asking of them is to stay connected to the frontline work. Do it when you can, and when you cannot, openly ask your comrades who are on the frontlines of electoral and labor, knocking the doors and talking on the shop floors, what their experiences are like and to internalize it and trust it. Class consciousness after all is about the humility of the individual as much as the power of the collective, the feeble strength of one compared to the awesome power of a united working class. 

The post Socialist Organizing Must Be Rooted in Class Consciousness appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

The following remarks were delivered by Aidan S. at the Anti-Rate Hike Block Party on May 31, held in opposition to RG&E’s proposed 34% increase in utility bills.

We’re all out here for the same reason: RG&E’s uncaring, corporate greed is putting an ever increasing financial burden on the people of Monroe County. As soon as the final installment of RG&E’s last 34% rate hike came into effect last May, RG&E immediately began petitioning the state for another 34% rate hike, as well as an increase in their corporate profit margin to 10%, well above the 6% recommended for private utilities by industry experts. The costs of living are skyrocketing. Trump’s war in Iran is pushing gas prices above $5 a gallon, even as he cuts funding to critical funding programs like HEAP. The City of Rochester already has the third highest utility costs relative to income in the entire United States, but apparently that’s not good enough for RG&E.

On top of this, RG&E continues to rake in record profits. Over the last 10 years, the profits of Avangrid (RG&E’s parent company) have increased by 185%, with $387.2 million in profits in 2024 alone! A full quarter of low-income households in Rochester pay 21% or more of their income to RG&E. This is how they make their money: by forcing us to choose between paying the rent, paying for food, and paying for heat!

All of this is happening while RG&E continues to cut services, close offices, and ignore the needs of the people they claim to serve. There were a record 15,325 utility shutoffs across RG&E’s territory in 2025, and RG&E has already shut off power to over 3,600 residents as of April, 2026. That is almost twice as many as this time last year! This behavior is cruel, heartless, and morally corrupt!

Power & Heat are basic needs. You can’t opt out of having power and heat. We use them to do our jobs, preserve and cook our food, to keep our families warm. Should anyone ever turn a profit by withholding another person’s basic needs? How is this much different from being actively extorted?

While the NY Public Service Commission has temporarily postponed RG&E’s desired 34% rate hike, thanks primarily to the massive amount of public comments calling out this blatant greed, RG&E continues to plague our community and stack the deck in their favor. Bob Duffy, the Chair of the Rochester Chamber of Commerce, is paid almost $240,000 annually just to sit on the Avangrid board and “advocate for the utility” in Monroe County’s business community. RG&E’s profits are taken out of the country and sent back to Spain – think of what we could do if those hundreds of millions of dollars were actually invested back into this community, our community.

RG&E owns the infrastructure, the lines, and state law says that we need a feasibility study to tell us if we can even think about purchasing that system from them. I have news for you: workers put up these lines, and in a just society, they would own them, and their communities would benefit from their work.

What we need is a local utility that is actually local, not one that is owned by corporate millionaires in Spain. We need a utility that is owned and operated by the people of Rochester and Monroe County, our friends, families, and neighbors. We need a utility that cares more about keeping our neighbors’ houses warm and the lights on. We need Public Power now!

I encourage everyone to learn more about ROC DSA, Metro Justice, and the Rochester for Energy Democracy campaign. See how you can get involved in getting our heat and power back into our own hands! They only own the power until we decide to take it, and we can only take it if we organize!

Lower Rates! Local Control! Public Power Now!

The post A Fight Over Power and Heat first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

The Democratic Socialists of America hold that Puerto Rico’s current territorial status is, unequivocally, a colonial one. We hold firm in Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination and independence. The United States must cede control through an orderly transition—one that cultivates an economically resilient and sovereign nation.

Puerto Rico was occupied by U.S. military forces on July 25, 1898, and has remained a colonial holding ever since. The Puerto Rican people continue to bear the brutal costs. Residents often endure weeks without running water, persistent blackouts and soaring electric bills, rising youth poverty, and population displacement. Meanwhile, the tourism industry, LUMA, and the unelected Junta, continue to profit from this unequal relationship and are responsible for failing to address this ongoing humanitarian emergency . 

The colonial system has failed Puerto Rico.  The U.S. government carries a profound moral duty to confront this irrefutable truth by allowing Puerto Ricans to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.

We, the Democratic Socialists of America, stand with the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and urge the following demands:

First, the U.S. Congress must initiate a process of decolonization for Puerto Rico and cede all sovereign powers to a popularly elected government.

Second, the U.S. must assist in a process of transition to full independence. This transition process must support the economic development of Puerto Rico, cancellation of debts, and foster diplomatic relations between Puerto Rico and the U.S. 

We reject colonialism outright and recognize that independence is the solution. Colonialism runs counter to every American principle of liberty. That is why we pledge our membership, our time, and our organizational resources to winning this fight in and out of Congress.

DSA stands in absolute solidarity with Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño, Democracia Socialista, Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana, Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, Movimiento Independitista Nacional Hostiano, and all organizations in Puerto Rico committed to decolonization. We condemn all organizations that promote and benefit from the colonization of Puerto Rico such as Partido Popular Democratico and Partido Nuevo Progresista. 

Demand action. Demand justice. Demand Independence for Puerto Rico.

Congress bears a moral obligation to act on Puerto Rico—and that moment is unmistakably now.

The post Statement of solidarity with Puerto Rican independence appeared first on DSA International Committee.

Democratic Left invites DSA members to reflect on the birth of the U.S. by imagining a fully democratized America.

The post Imagining the Next 250 Years appeared first on Democratic Left.