There is little new to say about Molly Crabapple’s wonderful history of the Jewish Bund, Here Where We Live is Our Country. Since its publication, the book has been widely celebrated by the Left, dismissed by the Right, and met with a mix of praise and accusations of naivety or idealism from liberal and centrist publications. 

The praise is well deserved. Crabapple writes so joyfully and tenderly about the Bund that a passive reading of the book feels almost heretical. The Bund was anti-Zionist, and Here Where We Live is Our Country is the kind of book that inspires people to continue the struggle against Zionism and genocide. 

As I read, I couldn’t help but reflect on what makes good historical writing. I have long held the view that an academic tone and a straightforward, seemingly unbiased telling of history are, frankly, a bad way to write, and an even worse way to engage with historical texts. First, the idea of telling an unbiased history is both naïve and impossible. If one subscribes to the notion that history is a set of facts and that a history book teaches or uncovers those facts, one is doomed to fall into the ruling-class narrative. That narrative promotes a record of great men, civilizations, and empires, in which everyday people are merely passive observers of the ever-turning wheel. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ordinary people are active participants in history, forging the path along which a “great man” or a “grand narrative” of civilization can later be divined. 

As a counter to the chronicle of great men and grand narratives, a different school of thought has emerged, first articulated by E.P. Thompson in the 1960s as “history from below.” But like most things, “history from below” existed long before Thompson popularized the term. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, and Peter Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution are all excellent examples of history from below before the term was popularized.

It was the work of Howard Zinn that breathed new life into the form with his bestseller A People’s History of the United States. These seminal works gave readers a sense of empowerment, showing that working-class people are shaping the world we live in and that, no matter how much the ruling class wishes it were otherwise, history doesn’t just happen to people without their participation. This is where Crabapple’s book really shines. 

Crabapple weaves the narrative of the Bund with moments from her life as an activist. For Crabapple, the Bund has a personal element. Her great-grandfather, the impressionist painter and sculptor Samuel Rothbort, was a Bundist. It’s through Crabapple’s family lens that we are introduced to the Bundist ideas.  This was a movement of Jewish socialists who sought to build autonomy, dignity, and socialism within Europe. Establishing a philosophy of doikayt, Yiddish for “hereness,” Bundists did not believe a Jewish state would bring safety. Bundists saw Zionism as a capitulation to racism and the idea that Jews were foreigners who didn’t belong in Europe.As Crabapple expands the narrative, the reader sees her life as a journalist. We cut between complex historical narratives of the Russian Revolution and the Bundists as well as her time at Occupy Wall Street or her writing on Gaza. The intertwining creates a grand socialist narrative. 

The Bundists were not naïve, wide-eyed socialists living in a utopian fantasy, as their detractors would describe them. Crabapple lays out the Bundist program with precision and details how Bundists would manage the affairs of cities and town councils. The Bundists did not shy away from power but wielded it within a democratic tradition seeking tangible, day-to-day improvements for the working class. Bundists would put in practice an eight-hour workday in Vilna, Minsk, Grodno, and Białystok long before it became law, secure wage increases for workers, improve safety conditions, and establish mutual aid funds to help injured workers, all while protecting themselves within the framework of “national cultural autonomy.” This was a practical method of Jewish preservation and self-defense that did not rely on “nationalism.” This strategy had practical effects. In the extreme violence of anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia, Bundists were able to defend themselves. The Bund successfully armed self-defense militias and created a Jewish culture of mass resistance. The fact that the Bund could build anything under such harsh conditions is a testament to its practicality.

There is much to learn from the Bund and from the Bolshevik response to it. It’s nothing short of a tragedy that the Bolsheviks would go on to reject the Bund and its “national cultural autonomy.” Ultimately, Lenin viewed the Bundists as a separatist threat to the working class. Lenin wanted an organized party of professional revolutionaries while the Bund wanted to remain an autonomous entity within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. 

The Bolshevik reaction to the Bund is a cautionary example. Marginalized groups within the working class can maintain autonomy and apply cultural lenses to address issues affecting those communities. This is not a contradiction to solidarity but an asset to it. The Bund offered a real alternative to Zionism for Jewish people being persecuted in Russia, and support of the Bund within the revolution could very well have solidified Bundism as a viable alternative.

That viable alternative feels like a thesis in and of itself. Crabapple continuously invites the reader to imagine a new world. Here Where We Live Is Our Home is a thorn in the side of the ruling order; it is the history of anti-Zionist Jewish thought and movements. For so long, this has been an underarticulated history, known only to those willing to search it out. Now it is available to all of us. Reading it, I felt as if I were reading a first edition of Black Jacobins or The Making of the English Working Class. Like those great works of resistance literature, Crabapple’s book is destined to inspire action.

The post History From Below: Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Public schools returning to democratic civic education can help save public education and working class politics

The post Workers Deserve Education appeared first on Democratic Left.

DSA chapters across the golden state from San Diego to Humboldt have endorsed candidates and ballot measures and are mobilizing to support them. Here our contributors lay out what we are up to in promoting a democratic socialist political agenda.

Santa Barbara

DSA Santa Barbara has decided to endorse candidates for local city council, including a mayoral candidate. As of 2024, Santa Barbara has enjoyed a slight 4-3 progressive majority on City Council, allowing for such policies as a local Rent Stabilization Ordinance and the non-renewal of a contract with Flock. However, this majority hangs in the balance in the upcoming election with four seats on council being up for grabs. The current mayor, a conservative man who has hurt progress in the city, has decided not to run for reelection, and three council members have termed out, two of whom are progressives. 

One of these progressive city council members, Kristen Sneddon, has decided to run for mayor and has received our endorsement due to her continued work on protecting renters and her overall alignment with DSA principles. We have also endorsed Gabe Escobedo, Ian Baucke, and Devon Wardlow, who are running for the other City Council seats in different districts. All of them have shown willingness, if not eagerness, to work with our local chapter. Furthermore, they all support strong tenant protections and are adamant on limiting ICE activity in Santa Barbara to whatever extent they are able. DSA-SB is incredibly focused on the local level and therefore has made no other endorsements.

—Beckett S 

Los Angeles

We’re excited to announce the results of our phase 3 electoral endorsement process! DSA-LA is proud to newly endorse:

• Nithya Raman for Los Angeles City Mayor

• Angela Gonzales-Torres for Congressional District 34

• Noland Sutherland for Burbank City Council

• Mike Van Gorder for Burbank City Council

• Stephan Post for West Hollywood City Council

• Estefany Castenada for Centinela Valley UHSD Trustee

• Yaritza Gonzalez for Inglewood Unified School District, Trustee

They join their fellow members Marissa Roy and Estuardo Mazariegos on our team of union leaders, renters, tenant organizers, parents, and activists who are running for office to fight for working class values and create real change across Los Angeles. You can learn more about our candidates on our website shakeup.la. 

DSA-LA is ready to unite tenants, union members, immigrant communities, and working Angelenos behind a slate that can break corporate interests’ grip on city government. Our vision is clear: win office, build a governing majority, and deliver a city working people can afford to call home. But we can’t win without your help: now’s the time to mobilize to knock doors, organize your neighbors, and get out the vote.

San Diego

This November, DSA San Diego has endorsed two mayoral candidates and two ballot measures. Kenneth Zuniga is a longtime DSA member running for Mayor of the city of Vista here in San Diego County! He served on the Homelessness Commission and has successfully organized to keep ICE out of city facilities. He has also organized against the installation of Flock cameras in Vista. As Mayor, he hopes to lower the cost of living in the city, and advocate for union-backed jobs and truly affordable housing. 

Alexander Kraft is a socialist labor organizer running for Mayor of El Cajon. Kraft is fighting back against the far-right mayor and city council, for police reform, housing, and protecting El Cajon’s large immigrant community from ICE. 

The chapter has also endorsed two ballot measures aimed at funding important services through taxing the rich. These measures are Proposition 40 and Proposition 3. Prop 40 is a one-time 5% emergency wealth tax on billionaires in the state, raising 100 billion dollars to fund healthcare and education. This measure was created after Medicaid funds were taken away from Californians by the federal government (called “Medi-Cal” in California). It is vital that this passes so that millions of working-class people don't lose their healthcare. Prop 3 is a proposal to make permanent an existing tax on high-income earners to help fund K-12 and community college education. The loss of this funding would be incredibly detrimental to the future of access to education. DSA San Diego is excited to support these campaigns and continue building socialism in the region!

Orange County

Over the past few months, OC DSA has seen an undeniable socialist surge to over 800 dues-paying members in good standing. 

We held an endorsement forum and with an overwhelming vote of over 90% of that day’s participating membership, OC DSA elected to provide endorsement and on the ground field support for three Santa Ana City Council candidates: Isuri Ramos (Ward 6), Sandra De Anda (Ward 4) and Ben Vasquez (Ward 2). 

Three class warriors

Sandra De Anda has been one of Orange County’s strongest warriors against OC’s ICE incursion, utilizing the OC Rapid Response Network and fighting for families through policy making across the county. 

Isuri Ramos is a community advocate and planning commission chair who has been fighting tirelessly against data centers, for tenant rights and for police accountability. 

Benjamin Vasquez is seeking re-election. He is a teacher and reform leader in his union who has been a champion of workers’ rights, rent control and affordability as well as expanding necessary social services for all of Santa Ana. 

Two wolves

Inside Orange County exists two wolves:  a billionaire-worshipping fascist supremacist movement that seeks to push down all workers in favor of jailing our neighbors, pushing unwanted data centers, and creating an ever-present Flock police state—and the Socialists relentlessly pushing back against their tide for equality, affordability and dignity for all.

It is our hope that we can start electing the type of leaders we want to see in office, gain electoral power and use the template that has been so successful in New York to build up Orange County’s ground game to bring about the type of county we all want. A victory in these races will show the power of socialist organizing in Orange County and be a strong sign of things to come in one of Southern California’s more traditionally conservative counties. 

We want to thank all three for sharing their time and effort in seeking OCDSA’s endorsement. OCDSA has appointed liaisons for each campaign as we work toward a shared vision of power for OC’s working class. 

Inland Empire

Inland Empire DSA is proud to endorse Joz Sida for Fontana Mayor, Joe Alvanez for Fontana City Clerk, and Proposition 40, the Billionaire Tax. These endorsements reflect our commitment to building working-class power, electing leaders accountable to their communities, and making the wealthy pay their fair share to fund the services working people rely on.

Long Beach

Our Billionaire Tax kickoff canvass for Prop. 40 launched today! ✊

Thank you to everyone who knocked doors with us. Learn about more @dsa_lb Tax the Rich events and get involved. Election Day 2026 is right around the corner!

dsalb.org/taxtherich

Humboldt 

G Mario Fernandez has served on the Eureka City Council for the past four years. He has been a consistent advocate for the working class, for the unhoused, for immigrant, LGBTQ+, and marginalized communities. He has supported important measures including Eureka’s Sanctuary Declaration for Transgender People, the boycotting of Avelo Airlines for working with ICE, and calling on CalPERS to divest from companies participating in the genocide of Gaza. Mario has championed programs like Uplift Eureka (helping the unhoused secure housing and jobs) and CARE (Crisis Alternative Response Eureka, using mental health clinicians and case managers to handle non-violent crises) for community response rather than law enforcement officers. 

Mario understands that true public safety comes from investment in people’s quality of life, not through surveillance. He advocates denser, mixed-use planning, expanding available housing, stronger renter protections, and strengthening our public transit system. Mario champions green jobs and workforce development through infrastructure improvement projects and upgrades to address climate change. Eureka is the heart of Humboldt County and needs someone who will advocate for living wages, peace, and human dignity. Mario has the proven, experienced leadership necessary to continue building a livable and safe community for all. Humboldt DSA proudly endorses G Mario Fernandez for Eureka City Council!

Sacramento

Sacramento DSA has endorsed Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang for Congress in CA-D7, Emily Smet for American River Flood Control District Division 2, and Prop 40, the California Billionaire Tax Act.

Mai Vang has an established history of advocating for the working class by delivering essential infrastructure and social services to her constituents.  She is running on a platform of universal child care, Medicare for All, ending the genocide in Gaza, and abolishing ICE.

Emily Smet is an environmental scientist and former chapter co-chair of Sacramento DSA running on a platform of responsible environmental stewardship, cooperation with rather than punishment of our unhoused neighbors living near the American River, and interrupting the interests of former developers and lobbyists who use local boards to enrich themselves rather than serve the people.

Editorial assistance:

Jack R - CA DSA Comms Committee

Contributors:

[reprinted by permission from The Press Democrat]

This Labor Day (weekend), it’s essential to highlight that reducing inequality is the main purpose of labor unions through collective bargaining for living wages, comprehensive benefits, and improved workplace health and safety conditions.

Moreover, unions provide a political voice for their members and lobby for legislation, such as restrictions on child labor, a minimum wage, the forty-hour week, and Social Security, that benefit all working people. 

Recently, the California Federation of Labor Unions, representing 1300 affiliated unions with 2.3 million members, endorsed Proposition 40, the California Billionaire Tax Act on the November ballot.

Prop 40 is a one-time 5% wealth tax spread over five years on California’s 250 billionaires who lived here on January 1, 2026. Prop 40 defines wealth as the value of stocks, bonds, trusts, and specified property holdings, minus outstanding debt.

According to the California Budget and Policy Project, if approved, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth would decline from $200 billion to $190 billion. 

Why is such a tax necessary?

First, wealth inequality has soared nationally and in California. A report by UC Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, and Jasper Boll of the Paris School of Economics, finds that from 1982 to 2026, California billionaires' wealth has skyrocketed by 38-fold to $2.3 trillion, while the real family income of the average California family has merely doubled.

Second, the measure would generate about $100 billion in revenue that the state desperately needs because of the massive Trump tax cuts for the wealthy last year and the slashing of health care funding (H.R. 1).

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that up to 1.6 million California Medi-Cal recipients could lose health insurance. Eighty-three California hospitals are at risk of closing, and up to 145,000 health care workers could be laid off, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Ninety percent of the Prop 40 revenue will backfill these health care cuts, with the balance dedicated to public education.

Third, Zucman, Saez, and Boll claim that billionaires pay less in taxes than the average taxpayer, relative to income. They calculate that between 2018 and 2020, across all local, state, and federal taxes, billionaires paid just 24 percent of their income in taxes, whereas the typical taxpayer paid 30 percent.

The main reason is that both the federal government and California tax investment income or capital gains (about 72 percent of billionaire wealth) only when stock is sold.

Most billionaires earn very little in salaries, such as Zuckerberg’s, which is $1 a year. They borrow tax-free against their colossal wealth to pay for ongoing expenses.

The billionaire tax provides a remedy by taxing all wealth regardless of whether it has been realized or not.

The argument opponents make is that if Prop 40 passes, billionaires will leave the state, resulting in the loss of capital and jobs. However, there is no historical evidence to support this assertion.

Sociologist Cristobal Young, author of The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight (2017), studied 13 years of millionaire tax records nationwide and found that only 2.4 percent of millionaires moved to another state annually, compared with 2.9 percent of the population at large. 

Young also researched California millionaires after the voters in 2012 approved the largest tax increase ever on top earners. Two years after the ballot initiative, the state experienced a loss of just .04 percent of millionaire residents.

Studies reached similar conclusions for other states boosting taxes on the wealthiest, including New Jersey in 2020, New York in 2021, and Massachusetts in 2022

Why?  

The research has found that 60 percent of California millionaires are older than 50 years; most have children and are socially and professionally tied to where they made their money. With children in school, property ownership, and extensive professional and social connections, they are unlikely to move for tax reasons.

Moreover, California tech billionaires depend on skilled professionals who are graduates of UC and CSU, and on innovation that is a byproduct of the exchange of ideas among tech workers across companies clustered in places like Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

California billionaires benefit immensely from the publicly financed infrastructure of universities, transportation, and healthcare. It’s time for them to pay their fair share to offset the pending catastrophic health care cuts.

Most of the attention on the California state ballot has been focused on the Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, thanks to heavy-handed spending by a dozen superrich reactionaries who are horrified at the idea that any part of their beyond-Gilded Age-level wealth might get redirected to health care for people who desperately need it.

But there are four related measures that require the attention of voters who care about economic inequality and want to address it fairly, since these measures also relate to appropriate taxes for rich people in the Golden State. One, the Education and Health Care Act of 2026 (Prop 3) is a currently existing but temporary income tax on the top two percent of income earners—individuals who make at least $370 thousand, or joint filers who make $740 thousand a year. This top-brackets income tax brought a tidy $14 billion to the state treasury last year. The bulk of its revenue goes to K-12 schools and community colleges. I’ve written previous articles dealing with Prop 3 and so will concentrate on the other three here.

41 and 42: Poison pills for the Billionaire Tax

Props 41 and 42 are designed to thwart the Billionaire Tax, and Prop 43, if it passes, will make it very difficult to raise revenue at the local level.

Props 41 and 42 were put on the ballot by billionaires hiding behind the anodyne title “Building a Better California” to trick voters into nullifying the billionaire tax. This positive-sounding organization is a PAC funded by right wing ultrarich like Sergey Brin.

Prop 41 would supposedly create audits of new state tax revenues and makes them subject to a state cap. The Billionaire Tax will easily earn more than the cap, over which any money is either returned to voters or goes to education. Prop 41 doesn’t mention the Billionaire Tax directly, but it contains a standard California ballot measure poison pill: if it receives more votes than other measures with an overlapping topic (i.e., the Billionaire Tax) it nullifies it. 

Prop 42 would prohibit new taxes on personal property including retirement accounts, financial assets or business interests. It deceptively proposes that unnamed “Sacramento politicians” are planning to do this to everyone. The only tax it would apply to—again without naming it—is the Billionaire Tax. As with Prop 41, more votes for Prop 42 than 40 nullifies the latter. 

Let us be very clear. These initiatives aren’t about helping California taxpayers, and they’re not about audits or retirement savings. They are about defeating Prop 40. Knowing who supports a ballot measure as well as who opposes it provides excellent context for understanding its purposes. One of Prop 41 and 42’s main funders is Google founder Sergey Brin, who has recently become the third richest person in the world. Brin has already spent a psychotic $100 million against a tax that would preserve healthcare access for millions of Californians. Other sociopathic billionaires have chipped in $50 million more. 

Prop 43: a higher barrier for funding local services

Proposition 43, also backed by billionaires and corporate entities like the Chamber of Commerce through their shill, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, would impose a supermajority requirement for all local special tax initiatives.  It would require at least two-thirds of local voters to approve any local initiative that would create, extend, or increase a special tax. It applies to initiatives placed on a local ballot on or after January 1, 2027.

This new supermajority vote requirement, replacing simple majority for local citizen-initiated measures, would apply to measures raising revenue for all forms of local government—cities, counties, school and community college districts, and any other local or regional government entity.

Majority rule is the basis of local democracy. Prop 43, if it passes, would represent a giant step backward, and make it easier for giant corporate interests like the Realtors’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, fossil fuel companies and other similar entities to wreck funding for the things we all need.  

Propositions 41, 42, and 43 represent profound threats to California’s future.  Putting a lockbox around our cities’ and state’s ability to raise revenue will result in devastating cuts to education, healthcare, public safety and transit and our ability to safely breathe air and drink water.  VOTE NO on Propositions 41, 42 and 43.

PART ONE OF TWO

On July 9, 1973, Dorothy Healey sat behind a microphone at KPFK in Los Angeles and ended a political commitment that had consumed nearly her entire adult life. She had joined the Young Communist League at 14, organized farmworkers and cannery workers, gone to jail, rose through the ranks of Communist Party leadership, and for two decades led its Southern California district. Now, at 58, she told her radio audience that she was resigning from the party.

The immediate cause was almost painfully characteristic of the organization she was leaving. The national party had denounced Al Richmond, the former editor of its West Coast newspaper, the People's World, for his memoir A Long View from the Left. Southern California Communists were instructed to uphold national leaders’ judgment whenever they discussed the book publicly. Healey refused.

Her resignation was anything but a renunciation of radical politics. "My hatred of capitalism," she told her listeners, remained as intense as when she had joined the YCL in 1928. She described herself instead as "a communist ... without a party."

That distinction would define the rest of her life.

Dorothy Healey's political history is often told as a journey from Communism to democratic socialism. The description is accurate but flattens a much, much more interesting story. Beginning with the crisis of world Communism in 1956, Healey spent decades trying to salvage the radicalism, working-class politics, and organizational seriousness of the Communist tradition while discarding authoritarianism, sectarianism, and toeing the party’s foreign policy line.

Much of that reinvention happened right here in Los Angeles. From the late 1950s through the early 1980s, Healey occupied an unusual position amongst successive generations of the city's left: the Communist Old Left, the civil rights and antiwar movements, Black and Chicano radicalism, socialist feminism, the New American Movement and finally Democratic Socialists of America. 

Her story is therefore less about leaving the Communist Party than about the harder question that flowed from it: What do you build after it?

The Earthquake of 1956

For American Communists, 1956 was an earthquake.

At the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev exposed a portion of the crimes committed under Joseph Stalin. Healey later remembered hearing the secret speech in New York and being devastated by its revelations. That autumn Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, generating debate through out Communist parties around the world.

Thousands of Communists in the US responded by voting with their feet and leaving the party. Healey did not. Instead, she became an advocate for democratizing the Communist Party USA from within.

That decision made Los Angeles unusually important. Under Healey and her longtime comrade Ben Dobbs, Southern California became a center of dissent, sufficiently independent that the national leadership repeatedly tried and failed to dislodge them. 

This was not an insignificant backwater club. Healey had been brought into LA’s leadership after World War II and eventually headed what the Los Angeles Times described as the party's second-largest district after New York. 

The old Popular Front had been broken by the Cold War. Communists had been driven from unions, prosecuted under the Smith Act, blacklisted, surveilled and pushed toward the margins of public life. Healey herself had been convicted under the Smith Act in 1952 before the Supreme Court reversed the California convictions in 1957.

Yet Southern California radicalism was already beginning to regenerate outside the party. Civil rights organizers, peace activists, students and young radicals were creating their own political networks. Healey's great post-1956 wager was that the surviving Old Left could enter into conversation with this new one.

LA became one of the laboratories.

A Communist on the FM dial

In 1959, the same year KPFK began broadcasting in Los Angeles, Dorothy Healey went on the air.

The new Pacifica station was itself an experiment. Commercial-free and listener-supported, KPFK gave airtime to an extraordinary range of political opinion, from conservatives such as William F. Buckley and Howard Jarvis to the Communist leader of Southern California. Healey's program, Communist Commentary, gave an avowed Communist a regular voice on the Los Angeles airwaves at the height of the Cold War.

Radio suited her. Healey could be ferociously political without sounding mechanical, and she possessed little patience for the wooden language that often passed for Communist public communication. Even critics of her politics encountered something difficult to fit into the stereotype of the obedient party hack: a funny, combative, recognizably local political personality.

The program also gave Healey something increasingly important: a political identity larger than the institution she led. As her disagreements with the national Communist Party widened, Angelenos could encounter Dorothy Healey directly, not merely as a representative of the CPUSA. By 1963 her presence at KPFK was prominent enough to become an issue in congressional attacks on Pacifica's broadcasting license.

More importantly, KPFK placed Healey inside a rapidly changing Los Angeles political culture. The station became one of the spaces where the Old Left, pacifism, the New Left, feminism, Black radicalism, antiwar activism and the counterculture could collide with one another. Healey no longer had to wait for those movements to enter the Communist Party; she was already talking to them over the radio.

That convergence was happening elsewhere in the city as well.

Despite the party's losses after 1956, Healey worked to restore relationships with liberals and peace activists and to open the Southern California organization toward younger radicals. Communist youth participated in southern Freedom Rides, and the party's Black membership later developed the Che-Lumumba Club, which became an important political base for Angela Davis. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener have argued that this continuing interaction between Los Angeles's Old and New Lefts distinguishes the city's 1960s history from the familiar national story in which the Communist movement simply disappears before the New Left arrives. Healey became one of the human bridges between those worlds.

Eighty-three thousand votes for a Communist

Her peculiar place in Los Angeles politics became visible in 1966, when Healey ran for Los Angeles County Assessor.

She made no attempt to disguise her politics. This was a Communist running openly for countywide office less than 15 years after the height of McCarthyism. She received 83,891 votes, 5.4 percent of the total.

The result was politically meaningless if measured by winning (and by current DSA LA standards). But it was remarkable as a measure of survival. After blacklists, prosecutions, loyalty investigations and years of official anticommunism, more than 80,000 LA County voters deliberately marked their ballots for Dorothy Healey.

The campaign also tells us something about the politics Healey was trying to construct. She was not retreating into a purified revolutionary subculture. She was attempting to make socialism visible within the ordinary political life of Southern California.

That strategy put her increasingly at odds with a national party whose instincts remained tied to Moscow and to an increasingly insular organizational culture. Los Angeles Communism had survived the catastrophe of 1956, but the contradiction at its center was becoming harder to contain. Healey wanted the party to open itself toward the new movements; the party leadership continued to demand political reliability.

In 1968, the contradiction broke open.

Socialism with a Human Face

In August 1968, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed Prague Spring and Socialismus s Lidskou Tváří (Socialism with a Human Face).

Healey had visited the country the previous year and had close connections with Czech communists like Edward and Marta Goldstucker. She condemned the invasion, while Communist Party general secretary Gus Hall and the national leadership defended it. Healey resigned as head of the Southern California district.

For Healey, Prague brought the argument that had begun in 1956 to its conclusion. Could socialism exist without democracy? Could a communist movement possess an independent political judgment, or was its loyalty to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union ultimately stronger than its commitment to democratic change initiated by other communists?

But she still didn’t quit.

Healey had spent 40 years in the Communist movement, and a political organization built over a lifetime is not simply a bundle of positions from which one unsubscribes. It was comrades, marriages, campaigns, jail cells, organizing drives, friendships and a way of understanding one's own place in history.

So Healey remained inside for another five years, stripped of her old leadership role and increasingly alienated from the national organization. KPFK gave her somewhere else to stand.

The microphone allowed Healey to remain a public Marxist while becoming steadily less identifiable with the party hierarchy. A 1972 KPFK recording preserved by the Pacifica archive, for instance, has Healey giving an extended discussion of Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Marxist who had famously battled the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies of her own movement and criticized the Bolsheviks even while joining the Spartacists in Germany.

Then came July 1973.

When the Southern California party instructed its members to repeat the national leadership's attack on Al Richmond, Healey refused one final demand for obedience. She announced her resignation not in a private letter or internal meeting but over KPFK, before the Los Angeles audience she had cultivated for 14 years.

The symbolism is almost too neat. Dorothy Healey left the Communist Party through the microphone.

[Stay tuned for Part Two in the October California Red.]

OCDSA’s Mutual Aid Committee, affectionately abbreviated to “MAC”, has been one of the chapter’s longest operating undertakings. Following the Marxist ideal of a society sharing goods and services according to ability and need, MAC’s work, directly within the chapter and with members of the community at large, has long been the focus of the group, even before our formal establishment as a committee in 2026. 

What does MAC do?

In the pandemic years, MAC provided taillight services for free to the community in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and helped provide groceries to low-income community members directly at their doors during lockdown. Following the easing of social distancing restrictions, MAC worked with community partners to provide meals and groceries to the county’s at-risk and unhoused populations, helped get medical supplies to besieged countries through our partners at Not Just Tourists, established close ties with other mutual aid organizations such as Costa Mesa Mutual Aid, Lucha, and 714 Mutual Aid, and responded to individual requests from members and non-members alike for support with material, emotional, and social needs. 

What does it take to join MAC?

MAC takes a friendly “as you are” approach to service, accepting members regardless of their experience with mutual aid endeavors, and works within their abilities to help empower them through direct work with the community. MAC meets twice a month virtually, provides onsite training at events to help members and volunteers find their footing, and co-hosts events regularly with our community partners. MAC works within the comfortability of our members, taking into consideration people’s interests, capacities, abilities and disabilities, diversity considerations, and opinions to operate horizontally, reciprocally, and in a participatory manner.

How has MAC been a vehicle for socialist change in OC?

Because it is the nature of MAC events to involve direct action and accessibility, they are often some of the first events new members attend. Lower-key MAC events like our “cookovers” or grocery packing nights serve as equal parts socials, networking events, and direct actions, while more involved events allow members to interact with orgs outside of DSA to cross-pollinate. MAC has been a powerful tool for OCDSA and its members to demonstrate that we actively stand by our ideals, are friendly with and supportive of the community at large, and that the nurturing, prosocial world that Marx envisioned is possible, even within the belly of the beast

What do our members have to say?

• NH: “Our goal is creating a community where a core value is lifting each other up. We want to build this into the fabric of our community, with systems that provide necessary aid to those in need, with the understanding that at some point, we will also need aid. During my time with OCDSA's Mutual Aid committee, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with other mutual aid groups in OC to foster community and help build and strengthen these systems. The organizing skills I have learned have been invaluable, but even more so, the connections we have made with these incredible people have made a major impact on me. It's been said before that without hope, no one would have the drive to do this work, and I wholeheartedly agree. My cup overflows with hope when I see the overwhelming number of kind-hearted, dedicated people who are activated. If everyone engaged in mutual aid, the world would be a better place, but I also think that every person would be happier, less lonely, and more fulfilled.”

• PB: “Being a member of MAC is a personal reminder for myself that there’s a need out there, there are like-minded people who want to help fill it, and that though the world can seem discouraging and that I alone can feel powerless to change it, I can at least shape a better place in my corner.”

• SB: “DSA-MAC is a true demonstration of community and people’s ability to rely on each other when capitalism tries to make everything so scarce and isolated.”

• ZR: “To me, mutual aid means helping people with what they need without expectations or administrative barriers and being able to be helped when I need it. Being a member of MAC makes me feel like I have a community of people who will support me, and also it gives me space to help others when I am able to and that what I have to give means something.”

• AL: "As a disabled person I often feel invisible and erased from society. Our needs are often forgotten about by the government and even our fellow man. For me that stopped when I joined the DSA and MAC. As both a member of MAC and someone who benefits from the help it provides, I felt a sense of community that I wasn’t sure was even possible. I felt seen and supported. My comrades put hard work and dedication into our services every week to provide mutual aid to our communities, where like me, people are seen, not discarded."

PART ONE OF TWO [Reprinted from Geese]

Too often, mutual aid, direct action, and electoralism are treated as exclusive contrasts. Reflecting on his work in the San Diego chapter of DSA, Aldo B. argues that each tactic is part of a necessary whole and that any of them, taken individually, are ineffective as a revolutionary strategy.

A colleague of mine once said that his revolutionary cocktail for the systemic change we needed as a movement entailed three key elements; direct action, mutual aid, and electoralism. This concoction has stuck with me and rolled around in my head since he said it over a year ago in his millennial-style car vlog that he posted on Instagram. I've since expanded these three components into conceptualized processes:

• Direct Action is the means by which existing conditions are confronted head on to the point of rupture in the mode of production.

• Mutual-Aid is the logistical metric for satisfying the consumption of a community by an organized grassroots network of distribution and production. 

• Electoralism is the competition between politically organized factions over the attention economy of the electorate, aka, the 30-60% of the population that is allowed to vote.

With the recent primaries across the country, my own personal hajj to NYC, and of course the lovely DSA discourse on X the Everything App, this revolutionary cocktail has only come to sit evermore in the front and center of my thinking about how to organize internally around a variety of issues my comrades feel passionately about—especially in light of those issues seemingly being at odds with one another. 

I’ll state explicitly now that I fundamentally disagree with the framing of these three tactics as being antagonistic towards each other. In fact I would go as far to state that the distilled critiques which a proponent of direct action or mutual aid might level against electoralism and a staunch electoralist against the proponents of mutual aid or direct action, are all the same. None of these tactics are an end in and of themselves. 

Standing alone, Mutual-Aid is mere charity at best, or bandaids for bullet holes at its worst; Direct Action is frankly adventurism at best, or in the worst case acts as a revolutionary release valve; and Electoralism may demonstrate a shift in the Overton Window, but at the expense of cooptation and complacency with a tepid reformism. It is only together, united by a coherent and democratically decided strategy, that its potency for revolutionary change can be actualized. 

That's enough theory for now, but I want this conceptual engine to be humming in the background as you read this piece. 

Personally, since I was a young man, I have always strived to be a well-rounded organizer, a Jack of All Trades if you will. My mother would call me a metiche (nosey?), but that's neither here nor there. The way that manifests in my organizing today is that I have a tendency to stick my fingers in every pie within arm’s reach. I run the political education committee as an elected leader in my chapter, founded and am an active participant of our migrant rights subcommittee, am the former mentor for the electoral working group and current campaign manager of a chapter cadre campaign, a proud member of the Springs of Revolution network championing our national priority Labor for an Arms Embargo locally in conjunction with our Palestine Solidarity and Labor working groups; and last, but certainly not least, my day job is as an organizer for a statewide non-profit that leans towards tenant organizing. All that to say is, six years into my organizing journey, I have yet to pigeonhole myself into just one avenue of organizing. I may not have done it consciously initially, but I try to embody the concoction of this revolutionary formula in my day-to-day organizing projects. 

Through my experience, I believe there is something to be abstracted from the overlaps in these tactically diverse projects and campaigns.Allow me to explain.

I will start with direct action as it is probably the most contentious and certainly the most volatile element of the cocktail. I want to clarify now that I am not necessarily talking about the high-risk civil disobedience operations of a Palestine Action or of a civil uprising nature; though assuredly those too have their place in the cocktail. The primary methods of direct action organized by DSA San Diego are pro-Palestine banner drops, anti-ICE community defense, and strike line support. 

In my opinion, banner drops are a sort of guerrilla political education and agitation. Of the near dozen banner drops we have organized or supported in the last year, they have proven to be opportunities for some of the most frank organizing conversations amongst the membership and with the general public. I recall one instance during a banner drop in the South Bay, a predominantly Latine working class community, where a woman began to lightly criticize us; not for being pro-Palestine, but genuinely interrogating us as to how hanging a piece of painted cloth over a bridge helps the Palestinian people. The working group cochair and I explained to her that our intentions were to keep Palestine in the public’s mind. Nearly three years into the genocide and almost a year into Trump’s regime, it almost feels as though, with the onslaught of tragedy after tragedy domestically, people might forget or deprioritize Palestinian liberation in order to deal with the struggles we have to overcome at home. What we were really trying to do was emphasize that the struggle in Palestine was the same struggle we faced here.

In the same vein, our anti-ICE community patrols are another form of direct action. Just as in Palestine the genocide was result of a century of development by the Zionist entity, experimenting with different methods of occupation and disenfranchisement, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security are fomenting the early stages of an ethnic cleansing of working class black and brown people from our communities. When I motivated to prioritize community self-defense in the chapter, I was met with some well-intentioned pushback. The main worry was the high-risk nature of the work and associating with organizations like Union del Barrio (which had just been the target of a congressional investigation for their role in the LA resistance to ICE occupation). Ultimately, enough members of the working group reasoned that, if DSA defending migrant communities was unlawful, then that long arm would eventually come for us anyway. 

We spent the first three months investigating how radical projects like this had been executed in the past. We examined the Black Panthers and engaged with the plethora of resources that organizations like CrimeThinc, SiempraNC, and Front Line Defenders had compiled on ICE tactics and strategy. We read historical and contemporary pieces of theory on how a ragtag group of socialists could even stand a chance at hampering in any way an imperial terror machine like the US government. As we grew and developed, we realized that patrolling the community was beginning to inspire discourse on the notion and structures of public safety. This consciousness was spreading not just among patrollers, but within the communities themselves. The patrols became prefigurative for how a community protects itself from an entity that wishes to do it harm, and our chapter was a driving force in that.

Direct action also takes the form of labor work. We are lucky enough locally to have a talented and knowledgeable labor working group chair that keeps tabs on every union in contract negotiations, prepping for a strike, or already on the strike line. By the time they have begun, we are already actively organizing in support of it. We are turning out members to the strike line, donating to strike funds, and even anchoring strike kitchens. My experience walking strike lines has displayed (and tested) the vast spectrum of revolutionary optimism that can emerge out of solidarity with militant workers fighting against unfair labor practices. It is almost a form of political education similar to what occurs during a banner drop, except no one is wondering what exactly the picketers are trying to accomplish—it’s right there on the signs! 

Most recently, on a 24-hour Teamsters picket line, I got to talk to workers about everything from the world cup to the Iran war. But the most consistent topic the workers brought up was that, in spite of the risk they were taking, they felt deeply convinced that they could win this fight. It was deeply inspirational and to my mind demonstrated the potency of direct action as not just a tactic for fighting the good fight, but as a method for motivating workers that a better world was in fact possible. All they needed was to take the risk to fight for it.

[Stay tuned for Part Two in the October California Red]

“…people believe, 'Well this is a really affordable premium experience.' Because they're saying like, 'Well it's less than $10 and I get a really premium experience'." 

—Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, Wall Street Journal interview, April 2026.

Being ordered by your boss to do the impossible is nothing new. Nearly everyone has multiple stories of a boss holding them to an unreasonable standard. But those managers may not just be one-off cranks whose demands of their employees don't ultimately affect the overall business model and instead are a symptom of a much deeper problem. My argument is that this phenomenon has not only become more common in lower management; these unrealistic and often contradictory expectations are increasingly common in the corporate upper management of the monopolies that dominate our daily lives.

I've been working at Starbucks for nearly a year. Under the tenure of Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, I have become well-versed in the corporate double talk Starbucks deploys. Starbucks corporate waxes poetic about creating a cozy, calm, local-feeling cafe atmosphere. The reality is we are a fast-food restaurant, and we are designed to operate like one. During peak hours we are expected to send a car in the drive-thru on its way, on average, every 45 seconds. This is an impossible standard to reliably maintain. Barring miraculous circumstances, with everyone working as efficiently as possible, we can expect to hit 55-65 seconds, and that’s still without writing on cups.

As you may know, we baristas are supposed to write a personalized message on the drinks we make. We’re not even supposed to write messages on cups ahead of time based on the logic that they couldn’t have been written with personalized intent. Baristas generally forgo the cup writing altogether, only pulling out their sharpies when the district manager drops by. Needless to say, this mass-produced personalized experience Starbucks ostensibly pursues is not possible, let alone while keeping drive times under 45 seconds. This is what Starbucks corporate thinks can be pawned off as a “really affordable premium experience”. They sincerely believe customers will read the words “pumpkin vibes” hastily scrawled on their pumpkin spice latte and forget Starbucks raised prices again. It betrays a frighteningly low opinion of their consumer base’s intelligence. Customers are smart enough to understand that the message on their cup wasn’t written for them personally—it was written to meet a quota.

The greatest example of Starbucks’ anti-reality obtuseness is its refusal to bargain in good faith with Starbucks Workers United. After years of fighting, Starbucks has racked up mountains of labor law violations. For now, they write the fines they have to pay off as the cost of doing business. This is not a sustainable strategy. The Starbucks unionization effort spreads further and faster each year, as does the DSA takeover of the Democratic party. Eventually, one of two things will happen: Starbucks union density will reach critical mass and force Starbucks to settle a contract, or an insurgent socialist administration will prosecute Starbucks’ labor violations so vigorously that continuing to incur fines becomes completely untenable. 

If Starbucks is serious about saving its flailing company, they will have to start with meeting the demands of their employees. The unionization movement will drag Starbucks and companies like it kicking and screaming into a world where “good business” means treating workers and customers fairly, not maximizing shareholder value at the expense of the entire planet.

Every so often we have an opportunity to do something transformative. I’m not talking about “changing the narrative”, although that’s important and part of the picture. I’m talking about changing the world. 

Easy to say, hard to do. But on October 10 we will have that opportunity by countering right wing billionaire lies with a simple truth: education and health care are rights, not privileges reserved for the wealthy few.

What’s at stake

On the November 3 state ballot there are two initiatives—Prop 3 and Prop 40—that together give us the chance to help the richest Californians part with a significant amount of money, unneeded by them, and absolutely necessary to bettering the lives of millions of the rest of us.

Prop 3 makes a temporary state income tax on the top two percent of income earners permanent. It supports public education. Prop 40 taxes California billionaires on their enormous wealth, five percent to backfill cuts Trump made to Medi-Cal. If it doesn’t pass three million Californians will lose access to health care.

Currently there are phone banks and door to door canvassing happening, and you can join these to help. Sign up here for Prop 3, and here for Prop 40. But there’s one other thing you can do that potentially can make the biggest difference: come out on October 10 for both measures.

On that day

On that day people across the state will hold signs on streets, banners on freeway overpasses, leaflet in public places, and demonstrate. Perhaps we might pay a visit to a billionaire or two and say hello. We often hear that while the rich have the money, we have the people. That equation only works when the people are organized enough to counter the money power.

What does the money power look like? A handful of sociopathic billionaires, claiming without justification to speak on behalf of all 250 members of that group in California, have spent more than $150 million so far against Prop 40. That spending has bought confusion and fear on the basis of lies (California will lose investments, taxes and jobs; first they tax billionaires, then they come for you; this is a tax on all of us, etc.). Even relatively well-informed people are perplexed, as I found in talking with voters in the first East Bay Tax the Rich canvass on September 19.

This is unsurprising. We know that if a lie is repeated enough times at least some people will be persuaded, or at least confused. And at this point the lying commercials and digital ads are everywhere. But the good news is that the lies are easy to address in one-on-one conversations. The deep anger in the electorate toward Trump-supporting billionaires is waiting there ready to tap. Through the phone banks, and at the doors.

So we organize. By coming out on October 10 with a high public profile we can provide the truthful alternative view. We may not have the money for the advertising, but we can earn a spot on the news, in social media, and turn around the confusion in neighborhood conversations. 

California DSA is working with the labor movement and other coalition organizations to make October 10 California Tax the Rich Day. This is how we organize the day of action: we do it ourselves. No one is coming to the rescue except us: Workers over Billionaires. 

To get involved, contact your local DSA chapter, your union, your local central labor council. Plan to come out. Put together an art build. Make signs. Make banners and set them up where the public can see them. Find a place to stand, and stand there together on October 10. It will make a difference in this campaign, and in this world.

Join the California DSA Tax the Rich Working Group.

For more info, contact Working Group co-chair Mark G.