The candidate for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District is one of at least 14 DSA candidates on the ballot Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Oregon, and Kentucky.

The post Chris Rabb Makes the Establishment Nervous appeared first on Democratic Left.

A friendly boss and a healthy wage are increasingly rare, but do workers lucky enough to have both need a union?

The post I have a good boss. Do I still need a union? appeared first on EWOC.

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By: Chris Brady, James N, Dan Albright, Mitch Gayns

MASSACHUSETTS – Working people and unionists coalesced in May Day events throughout Massachusetts on May 1, 2026, which is likely to be seen as a moment of a historic cultural revival for the holiday in the United States.

Also known as International Workers Day, May Day honors the martyrs of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in the fight for the 8-hour workday. May Day is a seminal holiday across most of the world, where red banners are unfurled down major thoroughfares, but the holiday has largely been confined to the margins on its home turf of the United States. Instead, influenced by anti-labor sentiments, the United States moved to officialize and honor the much more patriotic Labor Day on an entirely different part of the calendar.

But as Working Mass uncovered in several events and actions in Massachusetts throughout the day, May Day is turning mainstream once again. The mainstream ‘No Kings’ pages share ads about May Day actions in their own networks that have emerged since Trump’s election, the unions use the holiday for actions, and pro-worker organizations hold their socials with genuine joy everywhere from Boston to Worcester to Holyoke. While May Day revives across the country in massive actions of tens of thousands from New York to Portland to Minneapolis, in Massachusetts, May Day shows a labor movement captured in time.

Boston Logan Workers Take Off

EAST BOSTON – The day’s packed itinerary kicked off with the Coalition of Boston Logan Airport Workers (CLAW) rallying at East Boston Memorial Park. CLAW, a consolidated coalitioon of ten unions that split bargaining representation of Boston Logan’s pilots, flight attendants, food service workers, and baggage handlers, had rallied between four and five hundred workers to march.

One of the key issues the unions marched against alongside their allies was a management policy that limited pickets on airport property to an arbitrary ten people, effectively demobilizing workers. Luke Williams, President of the Boston Association of Flight Attendants, told Working Mass:

We’ve been told if United Airlines is having a picket today, then American can’t have a picket, or you can have five and five people each and split it. We’ve been limited to ten people for any action at the airport – point blank.

Williams represents 900 flight attendants at Logan.

Addressing the limitation, Rep. Ayanna Pressley highlighted the importance of organizing against authoritarianism:

We need to be able to organize to apply pressure…no one should be intimidated from exercising their constitutional right to free speech.

Workers also rallied for better wages and healthcare, many wearing lobster iconography. Signs read “CLAWing back our rights.”

Four to five hundred unionists marched from Memorial Park to Logan Airport. At the edge of airport property, an airport management official flanked by state police officers forced the march to stop, which action planners anticipated. In a dramatic exchange with hundreds of workers looking on, management spoke to SEIU 32BJ Executive Vice President Kevin Brown.

According to Brown in an announcement to the crowd, management had “committed that they will review the policy so that airport workers can protest with more than ten people at a time.” The primary demand of CLAW, in its action, had been won.

Worcester Celebrates its Annual May Day, Alongside Rhode Islanders

WORCESTER — Workers across trades, academia, and professions gathered in University Park around 6 p.m. on Friday, May 1st, for the Worcester DSA’s annual May Day rally. Speakers from the Worcester and Rhode Island DSA spoke to working people across the crowd with a clear message: generations of workers across the world have fought, and continue to fight, for a better world.

Worcester DSA Steering Committee member Jake S read a speech from Peter Fay, a longtime labor organizer and Rhode Island DSA member. Fay’s speech traced the history of the labor movement in the city and its bond with immigrants, often victims of capitalism.

“We didn’t come here looking for freedom or entrepreneurship,” he said.  “We came because capital pushed our ancestors off of their land.”

Political violence against communists, socialists, and labor organizers in the early 20th century spread across the country. The textile mills and factories across New England were home to workers fighting for a better world, like labor leader “Seditious Annie” Anne Burlak Timpson, and the capital looking to stop them. 

Fay said:

She unflinchingly organized Black and white workers together, despite all of capital’s best attempts to set them against each other, to buy off and bribe some at the expense of others.

One common theme throughout the rally was the failure of both political parties in America, and their unified support of international violence. James L said:

A U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine, war in Iran, war in Lebanon, rampant looting of public funds by conspiring billionaires, attacks on the rights of trans people, abduction, extraordinary rendition, and murder of immigrants, political dissidents, now heads of state in Venezuela and Iran, by our completely unaccountable government. Most of the so-called opposition party happy to collaborate, sign off and roll over.

James noted Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) called for a general strike last year, but offered no vision, organizational structure, or demands for a general strike.

While speakers noted the failures of the two dominant political parties, the historic and ongoing repression of workers rights, and capital’s division of the working class, all offered a message of hope and solidarity that starts with labor organization. Cayla Dodd, a bus driver, union activist, and member of IBT Local 170, said:

The problem isn’t that workers are asking for too much, the problem is that capitalism requires workers to live on too little. It requires instability. It requires fear. It requires workers to be one emergency away from disaster, because a worker who is scared of losing everything is easier to control. That’s why they hate workers talking to each other, because the moments that workers stop seeing ourselves as isolated individuals and start seeing ourselves as a class, everything changes.

Boston Worker Organizations Touch Grass

NORTH END – Back in Boston, as the airport action concluded, socialists gathered in a harbor park in the North End at midday to socialize and hear speakers from the labor movement.

Evan McKay, Boston DSA-endorsed candidate for state representative in the 25th Middlesex District, spoke on how union work fighting harassment as President of Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU), currently on strike, led them to socialism:

We need to have the union in these circumstances. That was one of the things that brought me into socialism, the sense that we need to have fighting unions in order to take on these struggles.

Energy at Field Day was high. Organizers had set up a volleyball net in the corner of the field. Although the net was left largely unused, organizers assured Working Mass that DSA is actually a very athletic group. Socialist soccer jerseys were on display, and given the high level of active recruitment for the Boston chapter’s running league, they may have a point.

Tables prominently featured the chapter’s campaigns for rent control in Massachusetts, an upcoming socialist job fair, as well as pamphlets for different working groups and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

Dr. Anisah Hashmi, a Resident Physician at Boston Medical Center and a delegate for the Committee for Interns and Residents (CIR-SEIU) compared the conditions of resident physicians to academic workers.

Like grad workers, hospital corporations label us students and trainees. It’s a slap in the face to the 80-hour work weeks that we put in to deliver high quality patient care. It’s unsustainable to expect us to fully show up for our patients as we struggle to afford to live in the city of Boston.

DSA then marched through Downtown Crossing to join the rest of the labor movement for the premier rally at the Boston Common.

On May Day, Western Mass Shows Itself as Focal Point for a More Militant Labor Movement

This was originally published as video footage for Working Mass digital on Instagram. Reporting was supplemented for print.

HOLYOKE – Even further west from Worcester, in the River Valley, hundreds of unionists and workers marched through downtown Holyoke to rally for working peoples’ rights and pay and against war, as well as signal a new moment in the history of the Western Mass labor movement.

The rally was organized by the Western Mass Labor Federation and led by the Holyoke Teachers Association. Holyoke teachers are approaching a full year without a contract, and centered the day’s militancy around pressuring Mayor Garcia and statewide leaders.

Labor Federation President Jeff Jones spoke to Working Mass about the systemic defunding of education.

They never seem to have a problem allocating money for war, but the moment we talk about funding schools like these Holyoke teachers are here today, all of a sudden it’s a problem, and all of a sudden we can’t accommodate it.

Western Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley is a historic progressive stronghold with a strong labor history, dominated by industries in higher education and agriculture. Holyoke has the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans per capita outside of Puerto Rico.

The labor collective has been intentional about cultivating militancy and rank-and-file democracy. According to Ethel Everett, a social worker and union leader with SEIU, innovation in the labor movement is urgently needed.

We have these shared values about what’s happening in this country, what’s happening in this world. We have to think differently and not be so focused on this is the way labor has always been.

The connection to May Day was also intentional, organizers argue. “May Day is Workers’ Day, a communist holiday,” said Barbara Madeloni, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and Education Coordinator at Labor Notes. She continued:

The history of May Day is the history of working people accessing the fullness of their collective power to say, damn it, these are our demands and we’re going to do whatever we need to do to win those demands.

Western Mass unionists are pushing their politics upward.

The Western Mass Area Labor Federation has moved beyond traditional bread-and-butter unionism: launching political education programs, building deeper ties with rank-and-file workers, supporting new organizing in collaboration with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee and River Valley DSA, and taking public positions on international issues that many U.S. labor bodies have avoided.

In November 2023, the federation voted unanimously to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, breaking a gag order imposed by the national AFL-CIO on the issue. In 2024, it went further, backing a call for an arms embargo. And this year, the federation condemned the war with Iran and what it described as the kidnapping of Venezuela’s head of state.

Holyoke teachers are still fighting for a contract. But on May Day and after, they will be supported by the collective Western Mass. labor movement. The rest of the country would benefit from taking notes on how labor itself can support the networks of the rank-and-file across the region.

Boston Teachers Fight Cuts and Pour Hundreds Into the Common

BOSTON COMMON – In a finale of the day before workers wrapped up to hit bars and socials, workers marched on the Common. The Boston Teachers Union (BTU) was a key player in the rally at Boston’s traditional heart, aimed directly at Mayor Michelle Wu: stop the layoffs. 

BTU speakers noted that the Mayor’s proposed budget spared all departments from staffing cuts – with the exception of 400 teachers and paraprofessionals at Boston Public Schools.

While the Mayor and major news outlets cite enrollment declines of 3-4%, these cuts represent more than 5% of total staff, with the paraprofessionals (who are overwhelmingly Black and Latino) especially hard hit. These cuts are contradictory to BPS’s stated desire to move toward a ‘co-teaching’ model, the gold standard in K-12 education finally beginning implementation due to the unrelenting advocacy of students, parents, and educators.

Boston Public Schools (BPS), and the national education landscape at large, has been constrained by Medicaid cuts increasing the city’s healthcare cost burden and attack on immigrants undercutting student enrollment.

The Mayor chose to cut critical education staff at a time when they are needed more than ever. Her decision is all the more alarming in contrast to her laissez-faire attitude toward police overtime, which consistently lands 70-100% over budget, significantly higher than her predecessor Mayor Walsh.

Shortly afterward, at the Boston Common, BTU joined hundreds of workers who turned out for the keynote May Day event. A tapestry of eclectic unions, pro-worker organizations, and liberal groups joined together with shared interest in fighting for the labor movement.

“Today is International Workers Day,” said Greater Boston Labor Council President Darlene Lombos. Lombos explicitly acknowledging the legacy of the Haymarket Massacre as “the courage and the sacrifice of those majority immigrant workers sent a beacon seen around the world.”

Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL)-endorsed U.S. Senate candidate Joe Tache spoke about the suppression of May Day actions in the United States:

For the most part, May Day in our country has been pushed to the margins, because the billionaires and the politicians that represent them, don’t want us to know our history. But here in Boston we’re shaking things up…we’re putting May Day back on the table.

DSA wrapped up the rally marathon at Democracy Brewing, a worker-owned cooperative near the center of the city and host to many worker-organized meetings. Discussions turned to moving workers from mobilizing to organizing. The central challenge remains taking energy from the rally turnout and funneling it into sustained political action. But after reclaiming May Day, workers are one step closer to doing just that.

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

James N is a member of Worcester DSA and contributing writer to Working Mass.

Dan Albright is the chair and an editor of Working Mass.

Mitch Gayns is a digital creator and campaign organizer based north of Boston.

The post May Day is Turning Mainstream Again appeared first on Working Mass.

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Kansas City DSA has grown faster than similarly-sized DSA chapters during the post-election membership surge. A member of KC chapter leadership explains the strategy behind the surge.

The post Reflections on the “Missouri Miracle” appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Marckus T

So I didn’t vote in last Tuesday’s primary. For someone deeply invested in political change, staying home wasn’t just me being apathetic. It was a conscious choice because looking at the Ohio ballot, there was absolutely no revolutionary opposition to the status quo. The results across the state aren’t just disappointing. They basically show how the Democratic Party establishment keeps a stranglehold on politics by limiting who is even “viable” to run.

For us socialists, it really highlights the massive gap between having radical rhetoric and actually having the organized material power to challenge the system. We talk a lot about material dialectics, and this primary is a perfect social experiment playing out in real time. The establishment applied their pressure, the progressive wing failed to organize a material counter-pressure, and the resulting synthesis is just more of the exact same stagnant politics that have been failing working-class Ohioans for decades.

The Uncontested Gubernatorial Illusion

Take the race for Governor. Amy Acton ran completely unopposed. We basically had no choice on state leadership. This lack of competition is just classic managed democracy, where the establishment handpicks candidates so a left-wing insurgency can’t even get off the ground.

When the party only gives you one path, voting is just a formality and not actual working-class agency. The Ohio Democratic Party would rather run a completely safe, uncontested moderate and lose to a Republican than risk a primary where a socialist or true progressive might actually agitate the working class and shift the conversation. They make the barrier to entry so high with signature requirements and fundraising expectations that grassroots campaigns are starved out before they even file their paperwork. This isn’t an accident. It is a calculated structural bottleneck designed to keep working people choosing between two flavors of capitalism.

Forhan and the Failure of Individualist Insurgency

Then there’s the Attorney General race, which was the only real clash between a self-described radical and the party machine. Elliot Forhan getting crushed by over 20 points is a huge lesson for our movement. It proves that rhetoric is not organization. Forhan ran a really lackluster campaign that was totally isolated from work unions and socialist infrastructure.

There’s a huge difference between shallow individualist advocacy and deep structural organizing. Forhan’s campaign was flawed by design because he substituted radical aesthetics for actual base-building. In the age of social media, it is really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that going viral or having edgy talking points translates to actual votes. But political power doesn’t come from a Twitter following. It comes from knocking on doors, having hundreds of one-on-one conversations, and building trust in working-class neighborhoods.

Because he couldn’t unify the left in Ohio or build a dedicated mass base, his insurgency just got flattened by the party’s money and institutional weight. Doing true organizing for a candidacy means doing the rigorous and unglamorous work of building collective power before the election, not just making a bunch of noise during it. You cannot substitute ego for an organized mass base.

The Sherrod Paradox

Sherrod Brown’s dominance is still a thing because he remains the only prominent figure using a pro-worker “Dignity of Work” narrative. He is obviously not a socialist, but the vacuum to his left exists because we haven’t built a competing power base capable of offering a materialist alternative for the working class. Him winning by 90% isn’t a total endorsement of his politics, it’s just the complete absence of a radical challenge from within the Democratic Party.

While Greg Levy is providing an alternative by running as an independent, this primary proves the Democratic establishment faces zero internal threat from the left. And frankly, we have to be honest about the material reality of third-party runs right now. The current political atmosphere is so hostile and unstable that running outside the two-party system just isn’t a realistic tactic for us yet. It is a sad reality, but the structural barriers are simply too high. Until we build up our own massive and disciplined electoral infrastructure, those independent campaigns will continue to be starved of resources and media oxygen before they can even get off the ground.

“Dignity of Work” is a great slogan, but as socialists, we know that true dignity doesn’t come from just having a slightly nicer boss or a slightly better wage under capitalism. It comes from the working class actually owning the value of what they produce. But because we haven’t stepped up to provide that alternative on a massive scale, working-class Ohioans are left clinging to the best available option the Democrats will allow them to have.

Ceding the Battlefield: The Danger of Anti-Electoralism

I know there are comrades in our movement who think electoral politics is a complete waste of time, just a bourgeois trap that feeds the establishment instead of building revolution. And theoretically, yeah, that skepticism makes sense. The capitalist state isn’t built to dismantle itself.

But looking at our material conditions, this total lack of opposition is exactly why Ohio politics are so stagnant. Unopposed elections are why Republicans keep dragging the state further red without even trying. If we refuse to field candidates, we aren’t starving the establishment. We are literally handing them the keys to the state.

Look at the material victories we’ve already won though. With Cleveland DSA’s trans rights priority project, we fought for and passed protective legislation in Lakewood that is in effect right now. In Cleveland, we are deep in the fight pushing a ballot initiative to force that same legislation onto the city council’s agenda. We treated that project like socialist science. We formed a strategy, we tested it by organizing in the real world, and we secured a material victory. We are proving that organizing in good faith with the community forces tangible changes to protect the working class and marginalized folks.

We’re flexing our power in local issue-based campaigns, but we are completely ignoring electoralism, which is half the political battlefield. Why build up all that structural power just to surrender the ballot box? If we can run a complex, city-wide ballot initiative, we have the skills to run our own class-conscious candidates.

The Call to Action: Building Accountable Leaders and the Campaign Megaphone

The reality of these primaries shouldn’t just alienate us, it should be fuel for the fire. If there are no revolutionary candidates on the ballot, we have to put them there.

This means people taking the initiative themselves. Don’t wait for the establishment to tap you on the shoulder. We need politically motivated comrades stepping up right now, asking the hard questions, and figuring out what it takes to get a campaign off the ground.

But to be absolutely clear, this isn’t just a call to run candidates just to oppose the status quo without a real strategy. We can’t recreate the exact conditions we’re fighting against by launching unaccountable, candidate-centric campaigns that just copy the establishment’s playbook. We have to do things fundamentally differently.

What makes our electoral strategy structurally different is absolute democratic accountability and deep political alignment. We aren’t just looking for casual allies, we are building a core of deeply dedicated organizers. A socialist candidate isn’t a free agent. They are a delegate of the organization. Doing things in a new way means ensuring that a candidate is in such deep agreement with the democratic values of the chapter that going rogue wouldn’t even cross their mind. It has to be a core value of the candidate themselves that it is imperative to stand true, dedicated, and strictly disciplined to what the organization as a whole values. We don’t just endorse a candidate and hope for the best. We lift up a comrade who is already deeply embedded in our collective struggle.

When we have that level of structural discipline, the campaign turns into something way bigger than a single politician. It becomes a massive megaphone. Using that megaphone does two crucial things. First, it popularizes our politics on a massive scale, putting our platform in front of thousands of voters and making the organization a recognized, household name for working-class power.

Second, and most importantly, it intrinsically ties into the organizing work we are already doing. A disciplined electoral campaign doesn’t exist in a silo. When our candidates and volunteers are knocking doors or speaking on a debate stage, they are directly uplifting projects like the trans rights ballot initiative. The campaign acts as an amplifier. It builds the soft power of public narrative and popularity, which we then convert into the hard power needed to actually pass our initiatives and force the state’s hand.

By fusing our electoral campaigns with our pre-existing issue campaigns, we stop playing defense. We start building a comprehensive political machine. We can’t wait for the establishment to offer us a seat at the table, we have to build our own apparatus from the ground up. The DSA is the vehicle to do that. By committing to this organized project, building accountable leaders, and launching strategic campaigns, we can transform this alienation into the material power we need to break the status quo and finally secure tangible changes for the working class of Ohio.

The post The Ohio Primary: The Electoral Trap and the Call for a Revolutionary Alternative appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

by Martin Davis

Metro Detroit DSA’s May Day fundraiser to send unionizing workers to the Labor Notes Conference was re-energizing and humbling.

Tables full of comrades at Batch Brewing were bustling with energy after the May Day rally in Roosevelt Park, eager to order pints and sandwiches. I sat down with two of my co-workers and we shared our thoughts on our first May Day celebration. Both of them had no idea that an International Workers Holiday existed, and we were all a bit surprised by how many people turned out.

We heard from two speakers. The first was a co-worker of mine who has been pushed out of work due to injury. She highlighted the predatory practices of our employer that followed her injury. After filing for workers comp, she was followed around by a hired private investigator: a literal instance of adding insult to injury. My co-worker was then pushed to return back to work more quickly than her doctor advised, leading to a worse re-injury months later. I doubt she will be able to stay in our industry.

Each blow she took filled her with motivation to stand up for herself and fight back. She emphasized how normal her experience has been for many more of our co-workers, the need for organization at our workplace as a remedy, and the hope she experiences in striving for a union. Truly, a fighter to the end.

The second speaker was State Representative Dylan Wegela, who spoke on the importance of Labor Notes for actively organizing workers. He and his co-workers from Arizona, where he was a teacher at the time, had attended the Labor Notes Conference in 2018, meeting other teachers who were going on strike in different states. Dylan highlighted that while there was valuable information at Labor Notes, the key force of gathering with other organizing workers was the motivation that he and his coworkers gained.

They decided, on their first night of Labor Notes, to call home and challenge their union leadership to call a wildcat strike. This challenge pushed union leadership to call an official strike vote, passing easily and leading to a one-week strike that won raises and $400 million in extra funding for schools.

Throughout both speeches, the audience was full of energetic response and support. Shouts of “shame!” to the private investigator, applause breaks for the strike wins of Arizona teachers, hoots and hollers for the switch from agitated to organizing. But the support was not just in words but in deeds: the fundraiser took in just under $2000 from the attendees and the many who just bought a ticket to support.

The evening concluded with a performance by Andrea Doria. Waves of good vibes hit the audience of 60+ people, where a long day of showing support turned to a warm atmosphere of joy. I took the opportunity to walk around and greet comrades I had not had the chance to see, sharing cheers and catching up.

I am humbled by all the support shown to me and my coworkers. In saying our goodbyes, we expressed our surprise to be supported by so many people and our hope in what will come of our work. I cannot wait to go to Chicago for my first Labor Notes and, most importantly, to put the movement back in the labor movement.

[Martin Davis lives and works in Metro Detroit.]

May Day Money for the Movement was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Southeast Kansas DSA faces the challenge of organizing a large, thinly-populated territory — which may contain the smallest city in the country with a DSA elected.

The post DSA Chapter Forms in Southeast Kansas appeared first on Democratic Left.

We find ourselves in trying times. Fascism continues to rear its ugly head here in the heart of empire, reaching both inward toward our most vulnerable people and outward [to where?] on behalf of the interests of capital. Yet, we also find ourselves in an important position. DSA membership has reached historic levels, socialists are in office at higher and higher levels across more and more of the country, and collectivist sentiment rises in the face of the American [ICE] gestapo. We the workers are organizing! The successes of the socialist movement here in The United States may have inspired you to finally take the first step and say, “I am ready to get involved!” Maybe you have been hands-on involved in the struggle for years and the moment is feeling right again to make another push. Regardless of your tenure: I urge you to take action!

Though we as socialists share a common cause, countless efforts lie before us that must be tackled one-by-one to reach our end goal. As you plug in to DSA nationally, or here within the Denver chapter, the sheer number of causes to be involved with, [-] the committees, the working groups, the meetings, the protests, [-] all begin to flood your mind (and calendar). The call to participate in electoral processes at all levels will come down the line [soon]. Other organizations will make calls to comrades to join them in fighting for the rights of their fellow worker. If you find yourself overwhelmed, I promise you are not alone! You do not need your foot in every corner on day one, and you will likely never fully participate in every effort that comes your way. However, do not become paralyzed by an abundance of choice! I urge you to avoid doing nothing!

Find the causes that speak to you most and commit to them. Attend meetings for one committee or working group. Join the Starbucks workers on the picket line. Protest American military action in Latin America [and the Middle East]. Canvass to help elect a socialist into office [like Melat Kiros]. We have power in our numbers, meaning when we all step up to a cause we do not need to stretch ourselves thin and risk burnout. All I ask is you pick one and make an impact today. You are not locked in forever to one, and you do not have to limit yourself to one! But take this as your call to action, any action. This is what will make us the momentum {awkward} of the socialist movement! We must be persistent, we must maintain [our] revolutionary optimism, and we must remain grounded in the material conditions of workers around us. I hope to see you out there doing the hard but liberating work.

Solidarity forever comrades

As the name implies, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels attempts to build an understanding of how the family, divisions of class, gender, and the modern nation-state evolved over time.  At first glance, it’s simply an anthropological and sociological text about ancient and indigenous cultures. But on a deeper level it shows how economic modes of production have a huge influence on how society is organized.

Some people will tell you that things like the nuclear family, “traditional” gender roles, and capitalism are natural and have always existed, but if we look back only a few hundred years, we see many societies around the world that were organized very differently.  Engels started his study with the book Ancient Society by Lewis H. Morgan, an American lawyer who represented the Seneca nation of New York, who are part of a larger confederacy called the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois.  He found that the Haudenosaunee shared striking similarities with other indigenous cultures around the world, and with the early histories of cultures in Europe such as the Greeks, Romans, and Germans.

Using the Marxist philosophy of historical materialism, Engels built on Morgan’s work to show that most societies passed through the similar stages of development between hunter-gatherer tribes, settled agriculture, and ultimately modern capitalism.  Most importantly, he showed that the dominant economic mode of production and distribution is enormously impactful on society as a whole, especially on property relations, government and laws, and even family structures.  These societal structures tend to reinforce and strengthen the underlying economic systems, until some change forces a rupture, and a new system takes its place.Going all the way back to the beginning, the earliest bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers owned nothing beyond what they could carry on their backs, and had to rely on scarce and sporadic sources of food.  In these conditions, cooperation and sharing were necessary for survival.  This spirit of sharing extended to childcare, which was often communal; and even romantic relationships, where polyamory and plural marriage tended to be more common than they are today.  Because strict monogamy was almost unheard of, families tended to be matrilineal, since you can be sure of who a child’s mother is.  Morgan observed how extended families formed into matrilineal clans among the Haudenosaunee, and called them gentes, after a similar Roman family structure. 

Over time, technologies like fishing, fire, the bow and arrow, and horticulture (farming) allowed people to settle in villages, and this stage of development is where Morgan found the Haudenosaunee.  It was through the gens that land was owned in common, labor was organized, food and other goods were distributed, inheritance was passed on, and laws were administered. There was very little division of labor into separate job roles, and hardly ever would a leader inherit their office from a parent.  The Haudenosaunee had organized themselves into a representative democracy based on clans or gentes that ultimately came to include six related nations, but they didn’t have anything that we would call a state in the modern sense.  At this stage they had no use for taxes, standing armies, or private property, which is why Engels called this type of society “primitive communism.”  Despite what the anarcho-primitivists might say, we can’t actually go back to this type of society by destroying modern technology.Engels next shifts his focus onto Ancient Greece, specifically Athens, which developed along a similar path during its prehistory.  By the time that written language was introduced to Greece, the old structures of the gens was starting to unravel due to changing economic conditions.  As technologies like metal axes and plows were invented, more land could be cleared and cultivated than before.  The domestication of animals allowed for a more calorie-dense diet with less manpower.  This surplus of food demanded more organization, and technologies like written language and mathematics were invented to keep track of who owed what to whom.  At this stage, some men, probably the elected leaders of their gentes, decided that it was important to pass down this valuable farmland and herds of animals to their sons, and suddenly strict monogamy for women became important, so that men could be sure that their heirs were legitimate.  Of course men were still free to have multiple wives, or even take female slaves as concubines.  At this point the gentes still existed, but we see them change from matrilineal to patrilineal ways of reckoning relations. Where before a prisoner of war was just another mouth to feed, at this point it made economic sense to conquer and enslave neighboring tribes.  Suddenly, land was worth fighting for, and the collective property of the gens started to be divided up by households.  Free citizens found it increasingly difficult to compete with slave labor, and found that after a bad harvest they might have to mortgage or sell their land to a wealthier landowner.  At best they would end up as a sharecropper or landless peasant; at worst they might be sold into slavery to cover their debts.  So we see how the emergence of private property leads to class stratification.  At this time we also see the beginning of the division of labor, with specialized farmers and artisans making commodities specifically as commercial trade goods to sell rather than use themselves.  Thus people came to be divided into classes based on their relations to the means of production, with an emergent class of aristocrats controlling the bulk of the government and land.

At its peak, Athens had about 90,000 citizens, 365,000 slaves, and 45,000 free non-citizens.  There still was a form of democracy, but only for a shrinking number of male citizens.  As Athens transformed fully into a slave society, the old rules based on the gens became less and less relevant.  Trade and commerce incentivized many people to move away from their home villages, disconnecting them from their mother gens.

These changes lead to the emergence of a centralized government that ruled based on divisions of geography rather than family.  The gentes lost all political relevance, and stayed around merely as social and religious organizations.  A state apparatus emerged to collect taxes, maintain a police force, and raise a standing army for the conquest of their neighbors.  But the contradictions inherent in such a top-heavy and expansionist empire ultimately lead to the downfall of Athens.In a similar way, the Roman Republic grew by conquering and enslaving their neighbors, and well before it became an Empire, the old matrilineal gens had faded away in favor of a highly patriarchal system.  Our modern English word “family” comes from the Latin familia, meaning a man’s household, including his wife, children, and slaves, over whom he legally held complete control, even in matters of life and death.  Whole books have been written on why the Roman Empire ultimately collapsed, but one important cause was that small independent farms run by Roman citizens weren’t able to compete with the large latifundia or plantations in which slaves worked the land for wealthy landowners. Once the Roman Empire began to falter, Germanic and Celtic tribes swept in to take its place in much of Europe.  These tribes were living or had recently lived in clan structures similar to the gens of the Haudenosaunee, Greeks, and Romans, but as military conquest became more important, their war chiefs gained power in their societies, and often took on aspects of Roman culture.  These chiefs became the aristocracy of the new feudal order as Europe moved into the Medieval Era. Engels has now set the stage for the emergence of capitalism, nation-states, colonialism, and the situation in which we find ourselves today.

So how does this apply to us today?  My take-away is that human nature is a multi-faceted thing, that throughout history humans have organized themselves into various types of societies, and we can consciously work towards creating a society that is more equal, democratic, and free.

I want to leave you with a hopeful vision of how socialism has transformed and will transform society for the better, and how economic liberation leads to more freedom for everyone.  Socialized medicine means that you don’t have to stay in a shitty job just for the health insurance.  Socialized housing means that you don’t have to stay in a shitty relationship just to keep a roof over your head.  Socialized childcare means that no one has to put their career on pause in order to start a family.  And the abolition of private property means an end to divisions of class, and the coercive power of the bourgeoisie.

I also hope that I’ve inspired you to read and study Origin of the Family or any of the other foundational Marxist texts, to gain a better understanding of how the capitalist mode of production impacts our daily lives.  Most of those texts are free and in the public domain, and many can be found in e-book formats at marxists.org, or as audiobooks at librivox.org.

High up in the ranks of social media companies, there exists a job title that probably wont surprise you. Behavioral engineers at Meta, Tik Tok, Reddit, or any other algorithmically generated place you might scroll, are getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to figure out ways to keep us online. The good feelings we get from [scrolling] social media keep us entertained, but it’s the feelings of fear and especially anger that keep us addicted. Rage is the currency of the modern age, and I think this is hurting our movement more than it's helping it. Organized socialists need to develop defensive strategies to handle these attacks on our psyches from the bourgeois, and fast.

Capitalists will be the first to (proudly) admit that social media algorithms are designed to work like a slot machine. You put your attention in, pull the lever, and see what happens next. The addictive part about a slot machine is that when you pull the lever, you don't know what you're going to get. You might line up three cherries in a row and get a decent payout, or more often than not, you'll lose and pull the lever again. We pull the lever again because we're seeking out the dopamine from a payout. The machine trains our brains using conditioning tactics to seek out the reward of a big payout, in spite of the negative consequences.

The thing about social media is the illusory reward isn't even money, it's just exploitation. When we see a sad video when scrolling, the response planned by the bourgeois is for us to keep scrolling until that feeling can be reconciled. They’ve researched the emotions of the working class, they’ve researched the mechanisms of learning and behavior, and they’ve landed on an equation that keeps us online. And while the interplay between positive and negative emotions alone is enough to pull us in, some emotions do a better job than others. Anger, for example, does both. The endorphins released when we get embroiled in some heated argument on Reddit are addictive on their own, even though most people would not exactly classify rage as positive.

Anger isn't bad. It's a reasonable response to the state of things, and, in the right circumstances, it's one of the cornerstones of emotion that movements are built on. You should be angry! The thing is, behavioral engineers at social media companies know what they're doing. They're not manufacturing the kind of rage that gets most people off their asses and into the streets. The kind of rage they want on their platforms is designed to keep people glued to comment sections– brooding, and scared, but complacent. They want us to be good little soldiers of a culture war that none of us ever consented to fighting. In most circumstances, online discourse is a shell of what debate should be by design. These jerks deal in the business of exploitation, like all great capitalists do. Every second of doomscrolling means another dollar in their offshore banks to them.

Propaganda isn’t always explicit, and the content of a medium isn’t always the only thing impacting us. How we engage with the internet can and does impact our behavior off of it, even if the effects are subtle. The way that social media is designed means that we are constantly battling propaganda that urges us to stay online, to disregard complexity, and to stay angry, even when avoiding the more obvious pro-fascist content. A working class that is distracted by their anger is a lot easier to beat than one motivated to organize by it. To me, the scariest part is that these companies aren't only keeping us scrolling, commenting, and fighting. They're actively making it harder to organize a united front against their BS, using tactics ranging in complexity from simple algorithm planning and shadow banning to literally hiring trolls to agitate activists online.

For every DSA member there is a platoon of people who are just as activated by the media they consume on these platforms as they are paralyzed. And just because you and I, comrade, broke through the fog to join DSA, doesn't mean we're free from their psychological warfare. Now, I’m not saying we should give up on social media entirely. Many of us woke up to the tyranny of the modern age through social media, and it is necessary that we be engaging with primary sources as our country descends even further into fascism. It’s also necessary that we use these platforms to urge our future comrades to join the fight. Instead, I’m saying this as a reminder that none of us are immune to propaganda, and that propaganda isn’t always what it seems. Stay angry, but be mindful of who is benefiting from it- us or them?

Oxford report on industrial social media manipulation by political actors:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulation-political-actors-industrial-scale-problem-oxford-report
Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal, Israeli born (surprise, surprise) behavioral engineer
https://denver.overdrive.com/media/1817200