The Buffalo Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America congratulates Adam Bojak on his victory in the Democratic primary election for the 149 NY Assembly district, and extends immense gratitude to everyone responsible for making his victory possible. 

So, what next? Why join DSA? For a decade, Buffalo DSA has fielded these specific yet important questions. Last Tuesday, with chapter co-founder Adam Bojak’s primary night victory, we received the resounding affirmation that when we fight, we win! 25,000 doors knocked. Thousands of phone calls. Six figures of fundraising from the average person, the worker, those who share the belief, “a better world is possible.”

What does this win mean? We hold the firm belief that electoralism isn’t “the answer,” no matter how exciting or gratifying it is to win, but rather another step along the way. It’s a catalyzing step, a way to draw people in and organize them, but winning an election is never the end goal. We don’t believe in the mentality that you should “just vote.” To be a serious organizer and Buffalonian interested in a more just and equitable society, controlled democratically by the working class, we must do more. An election result is only as good as the power we can build and the priorities we can win.

In this moment, we step onto a much bigger stage for our chapter and broader movement for working people. Ask yourself: what can I do? Then, let’s do it. Nothing is stopping us but ourselves!

The work is an ongoing struggle, and we need you to achieve our vision. If you’ve ever felt ready to take on the establishment, the time to join the largest socialist project in American history is now.

Thank you to the people of the 149th Assembly District. We continue to fight for you, the people of Buffalo, Erie County, and workers of the world. 

Join DSA today!

Monday, July 13 at 7 pm

Join DSA Ventura County’s Mutual Aid Working Group for a planning meeting focused on addressing unmet needs in Ventura County. Bring your big ideas, suggestions for coalition partners, and a desire to stand in solidarity with others. We are cookin’ up some ideas, and will post an agenda on our slack.

Sponsored by

To be blunt, bullshit is surprisingly important to the late capitalist economy. Many of the products and services now being sold are themselves bullshit, and can only be marketed using a massive dose of additional bullshit. Bullshit is needed to attract paying customers and, especially, to bring in investors and jack up share prices, which are themselves bullshit, often by orders of magnitude over any truly productive products  (see most of Nazi oligarch Elon Musk’s business ventures).

Bullshit is all around us, and no contemporary issue is soaked in it more than the “generative AI” debate. Even the framing (calling chatbots “artificial intelligence” because they are now marketed as replacements for human ingenuity) is bullshit. So as we wade into this bullshit debate, we must be vigilant in recognizing and guarding against that  bullshit.

At our June Convention, the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America passed a total ban on the use of large language models (LLMs) and similar technologies in our chapter work. Two days later, our Socialist Night School covered an aspect of the AI debate, in the context of eco-socialist theory and practice. One article we read, “Democratic Governance of AI Is the Real Solution” published this April in Jacobin by Holly Buck, made an argument that also came up in our chapter’s debate: We should fight to shape and harness these technologies, not stop them.

Chatbots Don’t Dream of Electric Sheep

This argument hinges on a claim familiar from tech industry marketing pitches: AI is incredibly useful, its maturation as a product is inevitable and world-changing, and everyone needs to get on the bandwagon. “How many of these people will block data centers but end up paying for a subscription to a frontier model once it is clear how useful it is to navigate daily work and life?”, asks Buck. 

That claim is, well, bullshit. But it’s not merely bullshit marketing. Bullshit is also inherent to the technology itself: LLMs cannot help but make shit up. Their output is inevitably bullshit, and, crucially, it always will be.

By now, everyone has heard about ‘AI hallucinations’, but this term is in itself another bullshit obfuscation. An LLM cannot ‘hallucinate’, because it does not think, it does not sense, and it does not imagine. It is designed to give people the impression that it is thinking, but that impression is pixel-deep. It truly is just glorified AutoCorrect: based on statistical analysis of massive amounts of (ill-gotten) text, it generates phrases, sentences, and paragraphs statistically likely to pass for what you asked for. 

At no point in this process does the model reflect on, consider, or imagine anything. Above all, it does not hear, see, or otherwise sense a world outside of the texts it is based on. It doesn’t get the world wrong — it has no world to get right. As one literacy specialist put it, LLMs have a “baked-in indifference to the truth.” They have no grasp on reality. The closest they get is testing outputs against documents they have already ingested. They are like a ghost trapped in a massive library with no real memory of the world – only what it has read about it. It makes things up without noticing.

The Margin of Bullshit

What an LLM does is statistically approximate outputs humans will accept. A margin of error is par for the course. The output is designed to give a good impression, but any piece of it could be subtly wrong or completely unhinged.

This is well-known in the AI industry, and accepted as an inevitability. Developers are trying to shrink the margin, but don’t expect to eliminate it. Google has released a set of benchmarks to test the factual output of different LLM models, and the best score any model has gotten on any of them is 85%. On the combined average score across the set, the best score is 71%. Most models score 40-60%.

In other words, you cannot trust anything these chatbots tell you. If you know the subject matter well, you will be able to spot the bullshit right away and correct it; but if it says anything you didn’t already know or cannot independently confirm, you have no idea if it is just bullshitting you again. It can misinform, but it cannot inform.

Good for Them

I have been trying to make the case that LLMs are not nearly as useful as they are made out to be. So why is the ruling class wagering the entire economy on them?

The basis of working-class power is that the bosses need us more than we need them. As the song goes, “without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.” The history of industrial capitalism is a history of the bosses trying to break worker power by replacing them with machines, which will not strike, talk back, or need rest. 

Now, the bosses see an opportunity to downsize and deskill in ways they previously could not, and they are excited. Some of them are so high on their own supply, they think they no longer need us at all; no wonder they now embrace end-times fascism. 

Even without going that far, any form of mechanization or automation represents a transfer of power. Steam-powered looms replaced skilled weavers with low-paid machine operators, and now Claude code replaces trained programmers with untrained vibe coders or ‘prompt engineers’. Each time, workers’ knowledge and skill gets built into machines which the boss controls completely, while a layer of specialized workers who once had real bargaining power are cast aside. The workers that replace them require less training and can easily be replaced, leaving them in no position to fight the boss. 

In most cases, replacing human skill with a machine’s statistical mimicry will lead to worse products and services (think chatbot therapists or AI slop books), and to worse working conditions for those providing them. But it also becomes much cheaper to produce those shitty products and services for the masses while the 1% still get their bespoke, artisanal, human-powered goods and services. 

Robocop’s Deadly Oopsies

This shittiness is par for the course. But sometimes, it’s a feature, not a bug, as when the customer is the ruling class and the product is the means of repression. Consider the use of AI in policing: When the cops use it to ‘identify’ a suspect, they not only have to work less, they also become less accountable. When they inevitably arrest, abuse, or murder the wrong person well, darn, that new computer program must have been ‘hallucinating’ again. Whoops! The commissioner will have a word with the vendor. The victims can try and sue the corporation that made the AI, but the poor cops, they were just doing their level best using the latest tools.

This logic of murderous impunity can be seen in action through Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which employs automated processes to choose targets – taking as a given that there will be a host of collateral casualties around them, and that some targets themselves are within the margin of bullshit. Thinking is streamlined out of the process, and everyone in the ‘kill chain’ can claim it was precision-targeted — they were just ‘neutralizing’ AI-identified targets, after all.

In this way, having a margin of bullshit is a bonus, not a failure. They may not admit it – they may not even understand it – but the inherent inaccuracy of the system serves to protect oppressors. While they rest easy, the rest of us live in terror of split-second algorithmic decisions with a deadly margin of error. Who will they hit next?

Bad for Us

This is not to say that using a chatbot fuels genocide. These are different applications of related technologies. The point is, in our work of agitating, educating, organizing, and mobilizing working people to build socialism, our purposes and priorities are totally different. 

The boss wants interchangeability and impunity; we want empowerment and self-conscious action. The boss cares about outputs and outcomes; we care about process. We take action not only because of the immediate result; we take action to build our capacity to take action, to develop skills, know-how, and confidence.

We have no use for the shortcut of having Grok write copy for our literature; why pass on an opportunity to hone our thinking and communications to a machine? If we ask ChatGPT to design and illustrate a poster, we additionally eliminate art — one of the most pleasurable, expressive activities people are still allowed to enjoy. Instead of developing our creative powers to remake the world, we develop a dependency on machines we have to rent from the boss while we’re trying to fight him. This is not even to mention that almost nobody will bother to look twice at yet another piece of samey-looking slop.

My own organizing work is focused on political education. I always wish I could read more, ingest more theory, and translate more history and insight into our present moment. A lot of people have started asking chatbots to do it for them, but this defeats the purpose. 

Reading ‘key takeaways’ is not the same as doing the reading yourself. It not only jettisons most of the substance, it’s also a completely different mental process. Even if you luck out and it’s bullshit-free, it won’t leave you with the depth of understanding you would get from personally grappling with the actual text. And besides, what use is a summary if any or all of it could be “hallucinated” nonsense?

As with so much of our work, the work itself is valuable and does not need eliminating. We cannot bullshit our way to socialism.

Notable Exceptions

All that said, I almost voted against the AI ban. It is hard to cut through the bullshit and draw a clear line around what kind of automation we should and shouldn’t use. The blanket ban rules out specific use cases we may want to reconsider. 

As a former translator who took just one transcription job and never accepted one again, I would suggest allowing machine transcription. Transcription is (usually) drudgery, and drudgery should be eliminated by automation.

By contrast, although translation is beautiful, creative, and often fulfilling work, in organizing I have found that it is often so expensive or time-consuming that it may not happen at all without machine assistance. This technology is closely related to chatbots, but matured years earlier and has a much smaller margin of bullshit. 

In both cases, the services used should be vetted carefully for privacy protection, and the outputs should still be checked carefully by skilled humans. In the case of translation, training up skilled socialist translators may still be worth the time and effort.

I am sure there are other ‘legitimate’ uses for AI out there, outside of my personal experience. I think safe ways to use them should be identified, and an argument made for them. In my opinion, though, starting with a blanket ban and figuring out the exceptions on a case-by-case basis is much better than letting the bullshit generators further rot our brains while we try to catch up.

My thoughts here are indebted to conversations with Hagen Blix, whose co-authored “Why We Fear AI” is an invaluable contribution to a left analysis of ‘generative AI’.

The post “AI”: Beware the Margin of Bullshit appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

At the June Chicago Democratic Socialists of America chapter convention, our membership passed the resolution to “Ban Chapter AI Use and Resist AI Proliferation.” I believe this is a good step towards combating the artificial intelligence oligarchy and its destructive, unpopular data centers, as well as ensuring our members develop their skills by doing. 

The most dangerous thing working-class people have is our brains. Knowing this, and that AI use has been documented to reduce brain function (“Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation

of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task”), I am concerned for the future of our class struggle if AI use proliferates further. We already have grave literacy issues in this country; in 2019, one in five adults in the United States did not have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That in itself is alarming, and we as socialists should fight to promote literacy at a time when misinformation and fascist propaganda is seeping into all of our media. Discouraging members from using AI is one way to do this, but we also need to begin to explore heavily regulating or outright banning AI use in news media, social media, education, the medical field, the legal industry, government, police surveillance, and benefits assessments, especially considering the problems of false information in these fields. 

Most people learn by doing in some capacity. The act of trying and failing is important for human development, and AI creates a ‘shortcut’ to learning that turns people into mere production machines. I see no reason why the chapter should use AI in any chapter activities. We have smart comrades with a wide variety of skills, and what we don’t have we can learn, recruit help with, or pay a worker to do, rather than contribute to a demand for AI that is degrading our environment at an alarming rate, much faster than other capitalist industries. I personally started participating in the chapter through helping the Lift the Ban on Rent Control campaign research donations from the real estate industry to various local elected officials and politicians, voting histories, and local housing decisions. That self-conducted research helped me develop my politics, notice new things, and recognize patterns. If I had used AI to do that research, I would have received a final ‘product’ much faster, but I would have also missed the political development and personal connections that came with asking other comrades I did not know for help, reading peripheral material I did not originally think was relevant, and seeing over and over the sheer scope of power the real estate industry has over politics in Illinois. 

It is true that AI is hard to escape using any existing technology, because AI companies are infesting every aspect of society to squeeze whatever profit they can out of their investment. We do not have to accept that. We can take a page out of Lina Khan’s book and pass regulations requiring companies to have clear opt in/opt out interfaces so consumers can choose whether or not to use it. We can pass moratoriums on new data centers and encourage research into new ways to run existing ones to reduce their harm to the environment and the lives of their neighbors. We can pass regulations around intellectual property use and data-scraping by AI to avoid dead internet and protect original thoughts and cultural production. We can tax AI companies at high rates, or push for public ownership so that the people make the decisions and reap the benefits around the technology. And most importantly, when we pass these laws and regulations, we must staff regulatory agencies and empower them to go after companies and their shareholders to enforce them. 

The post Against AI appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Sunday – July 12 at 3pm PDT

Location:  The Open Book – The Oaks Mall

556 W Hillcrest Dr, Thousand Oaks, CA 91360

Join the DSA Ventura County book club for discussions about selected readings. If you love history, the written word, or the world around you, then you belong here!

This will be a friendly, inclusive event open to all, regardless of prior experiences or familiarity with the topic.

Wednesday, July 8 at 6 pm

Monthly Working Session Meeting

Tuesday, June 30 at 6 PM PDT

The Political Education Working Group is the place to bring your ideas for workshops, educational material, agitprop, and more. Our goal is to bring socialist ideas, DSA messaging and campaigns, and class consciousness to the people of Ventura County. All levels of organizing experience welcome.

Many hands make light work.

Please reference our Slack’s events channel, or general, for the Agenda.

Zoom Meeting link will appear upon RSVP.

A political storm has been sweeping through the Golden State for the past half year. It’s called “The Billionaire Tax”. Its detractors, until now, have mostly been a handful of the ultrarich conservatives targeted by the proposed tax itself, and their ostentatious shoveling of tens of millions of dollars into a “No” campaign has helped buy them the public anger that these sociopathic tech bros so deeply deserve. 

On the other side, along with SEIU-United Healthcare Workers (sponsor of the measure), were to be found progressive stalwarts like California congressman Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, and several unions. To all intents and purposes—at least from the outside—it had the look of a class struggle in political form.

But with the elimination of the lone gubernatorial primary candidate who supported the measure, Tom Steyer, from contention in November, things have pivoted quickly, revealing complex dynamics largely unseen in public view until now. In the past couple weeks, unions and progressive organizations have joined the opposition; and under pressure, the SEIU-UHW is now offering to withdraw the ballot measure if the governor and Legislature agree to back a smaller but still substantial tax on the state’s billionaires.

Two tax the rich measures

There are in fact two ballot measures seeking to raise state revenues via progressive taxes in November: the Billionaire Tax (a wealth tax), meant to fill the massive budget hole created in the state’s Medi-Cal system due to federal funding reductions, and the Education and Health Care Act (an income tax), which already exists, but is a temporary tax, the revenues of which go to schools and services. Its principal backers, public education unions, are seeking to make it permanent. 

You might think that it would be a no-brainer for unions to stand united on these measures. The Billionaire Tax would affect a grand total of 250 people in the state who collectively hold two trillion dollars in wealth. They would pay out five percent of their hoard over five years, and then the tax would sunset. This would amount to one hundred billion dollars, or twenty billion dollars a year, so that millions of working class Californians, mostly children, would keep their access to health care. 

The initial proponent of the Billionaire Tax, SEIU-United Healthcare Workers, was joined along the way by AFSCME California, the California Council of Teamsters, and UNITE HERE Local 11 in Los Angeles, among others, because they recognized that the outrageous economic inequality symbolized by the growing wealth of a tiny fraction of the population, making Gilded Age inequities of yore seem quaintly egalitarian, contained the seed of a solution. More importantly than the symbolism, they also understood that many of their own members’ families are served by Medi-Cal, which covers close to 15 million state residents.

The Education and Health Care Act is likewise a progressive tax. Since its enactment as Prop 30 in 2012, and renewal as Prop 55 in 2016, it has raised over one hundred billion dollars for the state’s general fund through its creation of three high end marginal income tax brackets, affecting roughly the top two percent of income earners. Last year it brought in 14.5 billion dollars, or six percent of the state general fund. Here the charge is led by the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and the SEIU State Council, all of whom have been involved in a progressive tax advocacy coalition since the 2012 campaign. The Secretary of State’s office has recently announced that it has validated the signatures for ballot qualification of both measures. 

Strange bedfellows?

Last week CTA came out against the Billionaire Tax. So did the state Building and Construction Trade Council, the umbrella organization of construction unions. What was their reasoning? For CTA, the opposition was not entirely surprising. The Billionaire Tax represents a violation of their prime objective: defense of Proposition 98. Passed by voters in 1988, it sets aside 40% of the state budget for K-12 schools and community colleges. The 300,000 member association considers this a bright red line and marshals its considerable resources every time legislators or opponents seek to cross it. As written, the revenues of the Billionaire Tax are tightly aimed at saving Medi-Cal, with just ten percent allocated to education.

Fair enough. There is principle involved here for CTA. Not so much with the building trades, as far as I can tell, whose public justification echoes the transparently false propaganda of the right wing billionaires opposing the Billionaire Tax, i.e., that all the “job creators” will flee California and take all the jobs with them in their gold-lined suitcases. This was the argument offered by opponents of Prop 30 in 2012. It is, in fact, always the first line of defending ultra-privilege every time any progressive tax is ever offered anywhere. Copious research has shown this to be untrue. Here in California by 2015, three years after passage of Prop 30, 1.5 million new jobs had been created, and tax records demonstrated that ten thousand new millionaires had been minted. (Let’s set aside for now the question of what the current California “job creators” are actually creating: AI, which destroys more jobs than it generates.)

But as one of the big dogs in California politics, CTA’s position also merits a deeper look. The union claims it opposes the Billionaire Tax because “this policy will not provide the sustainable and long-lasting funding that our schools and communities deserve”, i.e., it is temporary. Ahem, so was Prop 30 and 55, which didn’t stop CTA from supporting the earlier temporary iterations of the measure it’s backing to make permanent now. 

Worse, and bizarrely, the only visible sign on CTA’s website about its position on the Billionaire Tax is to be found in its November election recommendations, where alongside the “Oppose” notation, a link is posted to the “Building a Better California” website, which nowhere says anything directly about the Billionaire Tax, but happens to be the web footprint of a front for the right wing billionaires dumping their couch cushions into the anti-Billionaire Tax campaign, a PAC whose contributors are headed up by tech bros Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel. Strange bedfellows—along with Governor Gavin Newsom, who has never met a progressive tax he likes.

So what’s really going on? Before SEIU-UHW launched the Billionaire Tax its leaders briefly consulted with the members of the progressive tax coalition. That coalition had a plan: get Prop 55 renewed and made permanent in 2026 before it expired in 2030, and then go after a wealth tax or take another swing at commercial property tax reform (narrowly lost due to COVID in 2020) in 2028. This plan was disrupted by the UHW, leading to the fear (plausible, but debatable) that another progressive tax on the ballot would muck up the works. Even SEIU State Council, the parent organization of UHW, isn’t on board the Billionaire Tax. When UHW went ahead on its own, nearly every member of the coalition that had been doing this work for fifteen years was pissed.

But alongside the fear of voter confusion over the two measures lurked another potential issue, one that has now been revealed as a valid concern. UHW leader Dave Regan has a well-known history of running state ballot measures as bargaining chips to gain traction in the state legislature. One example: a proposal to require higher minimum staffing levels in dialysis clinics, which lost on three separate occasions. Queried opponents and supporters alike, was the Billionaire Tax real or legislative leverage?

With the offer to withdraw the ballot measure if the legislature acts to find some significant funding for Medi-Cal, that question has regained life—although the governor’s office, which solicited the late-in-the-day negotiations with UHW, hasn’t made a substantial proposal, according to UWH sources. Thus at this point it appears likely the measure will go to the voters.

Where is an alternative solution?

California DSA, a small mammal scurrying around the ankles of the dinosaurs duking it out, and supporting both measures, is one of the few exceptions to the side-taking (AFSCME California and the California Teamsters Council are others), which has now become increasingly contentious. 

The Billionaire Tax was addressing a problem no one else was: a gutted Medi-Cal means people will get sick and die. The CTA in its opposition statement remained silent on this end of things. As communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, sometimes rival and sometimes partner with CTA, through a fair amount of the earlier history, I can attest that this is not new. The fierce defense of Prop 98 guarantees tended, for CTA, toward rigidity, while CFT, part of the AFL-CIO, and likewise a strong defender of school funding, nonetheless always bent one principle against another, acknowledging at moments like this, “We can’t teach children who come to school hungry or sick.”

In fall of 2011 and 2012, CFT was leading a labor-community coalition effort to get a Millionaire Tax on the ballot to address the giant state budget deficit left in the wake of the housing crash and Great Recession. Governor Jerry Brown, with a competing ballot measure, a mix of progressive and regressive taxes, refused CFT’s offer to come aboard the millionaire tax. Instead, he stripped away the other unions in the coalition (including CTA) by threatening to withhold his signature from their legislative programs. The pressure on CFT was enormous to cave, much like what UHW is undergoing right now. 

But CFT prevailed, due to its careful coalition building over several years. It had solid allies in the community who weren’t stepping away. Many union leaders told us in private that while they couldn’t publicly resist Brown’s blackmail, they were with us in spirit. After a half dozen straight opinion polls showed the Millionaire Tax likely to win, and following a massive rally in front of the state capitol, Brown capitulated, merging his measure with CFT’s, which became Prop 30, the largest bump in state income taxes on the rich since World War 2.

The same gubernatorial agreement is unlikely for UHW, both because of the transparent desire of Gavin Newsom to keep billionaire pocketbooks within reach for his presidential run, and because in place of the spadework of coalition-building over time that builds trust and loyalty, UHW leadership accomplished precisely the opposite, alienating its most likely progressive tax partners. Let’s sum up: good cause, bad process. And now we approach midnight.

Possible outcomes

All might not be lost for the Billionaire Tax. If its proponents and the governor and legislature are unable to reach a deal, it’s still possible to win at the ballot box. Yes, there will be a hellstorm of billionaire opposition funding. We won’t be able to watch TV or surf the web or go on social media without popup ads telling us that sad billionaires are taking all of California’s jobs with them when they move to Texas.

But billionaires are not exactly popular at this historical moment. Even with a hundred million dollars already spent by the opposition before the measure qualified, the most recent polls show the Billionaire Tax with a 20-point lead, with 23% undecided. There might just be enough voter animus for the richest Californians—especially the ones that have publicly embraced Trump, who happen to be the ones making all the noise about the Billionaire Tax—that pitchfork fever could carry the measure across the finish line. 

The California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO hasn’t weighed in yet. This is an important factor in how things will play out. The CTA’s opposition, while significant, is not the final word. As an independent union outside of the labor federation, it has no direct say on Labor Fed policies. The Building Trades’ votes are more to the point here. But if the UHW can rally an endorsement from the fed there will be new life in the measure. The CFLU convenes in early August. 

One of the arguments that makes the Billionaire Tax a problem for the usually progressive groups like CTA is also why they should let it go: it’s temporary. True, if pieces of the budget are carved away for more health care, that will not help education’s forty percent. But the tax as written does not compete for state budget dollars—it augments them with a five-year tax on billionaires that will expire after Democrats are in control of Congress and the White House, and the federal government will be able to resume paying its way in California. 

That’s a pretty big assumption, you might say. My answer is that if it’s not the case, and the fascists are still running the federal government in 2030, we will all have bigger problems than preserving Prop 98.

BOOK REVIEW

Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (Second Edition)

Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller

Seven Stories Press, 2026

Beyond the Theme Park: Struggle and Solidarity Under the San Diego Sun

Interviews by Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller

Center for Policy Initiatives and American Federation of Teachers Guild, Local 1931

This year’s republication of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See has been anxiously awaited by San Diego progressives and leftists. A master work by the late Mike Davis and his co-authors Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew, Under the Perfect Sun went out of print only a few short years after its original publication in 2005, and has since then been passed around, checked out via interlibrary loan, and transmitted via PDF among organizers and activists hungry to learn about a city that hardly seems to know itself. Yet the new edition means more than an opportunity for San Diego leftists to finally have and hold their own copy—it’s an opportunity for our comrades across California and beyond to understand how one city’s development shaped the contemporary forces we must map, move and overcome in our quest for working-class rule.

Under the Perfect Sun stands alone as a record of San Diego’s left and labor history, but it’s also distinguished by the structure of the collaboration. The book is made up of three main sections, separately authored or, in the case of Mayhew’s contribution, curated. Following an introduction by journalist David Reid is a political and economic history by Mike Davis, then a chronicle of insurgent fights by Jim Miller, and the book concludes with a compendium of oral histories gathered by Kelly Mayhew. The new edition includes a sampling of contemporary testimonials gathered by Mayhew and Miller to accompany this year’s republication; available in full free and online as the companion publication Beyond the Theme Park (download available from the Center for Policy Initiatives website). (Full disclosure: I am one of the activists interviewed for that book.) 

Structuring opportunity

Flipping the order, let’s start with the oral histories. And what a start. In both Under the Perfect Sun and Beyond the Theme Park, Mayhew opens with leaders in San Diego’s civil rights fights – Harold Brown in the former, Shirley Weber in the latter. I want to be very clear: DSA members and other leftists who only know Shirley Weber as California’s current secretary of state nonetheless need to read her story. It reveals what is possible once a structure is changed to unblock opportunity, and consequently how crucial it is to examine and understand structures at all levels. From Harold Brown, you’ll learn the lonely experience of fighting for economic parity and how that focus determined agendas of the early 2000s. Also in Beyond the Theme Park is Center for Policy Initiatives’ executive director Kyra Greene, who at the launch event for the new edition noted that the comparatively small civil rights movement in San Diego factors into the persistent struggles of the left today.

Also featured in both books are many of the area’s most significant labor leaders, movement organizers, nonprofit directors and politicians. As Mayhew put it at the launch, what you get from oral histories rather than third-person narratives based on newspaper articles and other archives is an understanding of experience. It matters to know what moved Lorena Gonzalez and Sean Elo-Rivera into their current positions and commitments (Beyond the Theme Park), just as much as it matters to see how binational activist Enrique Davalos ended up choosing San Diego, and what working for the Environmental Health Coalition looked like for Sonia Rodriguez, who lived the toxicity of Barrio Logan firsthand (Under the Perfect Sun).

Repression and amnesia

Jim Miller’s episodic journey through San Diego’s left struggles changed my perspective utterly when I first read it 7-8 years ago, newly activated and unsure why everything in San Diego’s mainstream political life seemed so remote. Though I am myself a transplant, San Diego was always a fixture in my life as the birthplace of my military-family parents, who continued in that tradition. They graduated from UC San Diego’s first bachelor’s degree cohort. They grew up with the city as it boomed through the Cold War years. Yet I never learned anything from them about San Diego’s political life, and in the truest sense possible, San Diego hid itself from many of its own children. As Miller writes, struggles beginning with the Free Speech Fight in the early 20th century onward were dealt with by both repression and amnesia, summarily dismissed or distorted beyond recognition by credulous historians drawing exclusively from tilted accounts.

What’s so significant about memory? After all, capital manipulates government and its aligned institutions everywhere; newly developing leftists might understandably believe that since the factors of capital control are continuous, the dynamics of contesting them are transferable from one place to the next. What is so critical about Miller’s history, though, is learning about the victories alongside the setbacks. While the Magonista revolt was a rout and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizing was effectively suppressed by vigilantes in the early twentieth century Free Speech Fight, the establishment of Third College at UC San Diego and the creation of Chicano Park are examples of community interests consolidating as exercised power. What’s so significant about erasure? Last year I walked my elderly parents around Chicano Park – the largest collection of public murals in the nation, and extraordinary in their virtuosity – and told them the story of its founding. They had no idea. Not even that it exists.

Completing the flipped order, Mike Davis’ history of political and economic power in San Diego visits many of the themes in his Los Angeles histories, such as City of Quartz (1990) and his last-published book, Set the Night on Fire (2020). While Davis is recognized as one of the last century’s most influential Marxist authors, many DSA members may be new to his work. Under the Perfect Sun is a fantastic start. The section asks who rules San Diego, answered by the overriding contest of “smokestacks” versus “geraniums.” With smokestacks understood to be the faction driving for infrastructure that could enable large industry, the geraniums of San Diego’s past and present generally prevailed, focused on slow urban growth and economic sectors that alienated mass organizing and working class consciousness by their very nature – tourism and the military. 

Davis’ thesis is that through these competing capital factions, San Diego’s power has oscillated between what can be thought of as private governments, with the government of publicly elected officials acting primarily for those interests. As this history progressed beyond the publication of Under the Perfect Sun his thesis and indeed the center have held: first Republican, now Democratic, San Diego’s officials stand on a continuum of stewardship for private elites. Without working class institutions effectively contesting for power, that center has reconstituted in the last 20 years to include the racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation minorities rebuffed by a myopic GOP. At a time when parties are first and foremost brands, the center-right now makes its approach through campaigns formally unaffiliated with the GOP like Larry Turner for mayor in 2024 and now Richard Bailey for city council, who adopted Zohran Mamdani’s design palette for his primary campaign.

Look beyond slogans, follow the money

Tracing how these fights have articulated is critical for leftists across the U.S. as urban politics are gripped by the polarity of “YIMBY” versus “NIMBY.” As climate change advances – a key concern of Davis in his later years – leftists, unions and working class communities of interest draw factional lines around what is to be done about unaffordable housing, the unequal and unjust distribution of pollution, rapid transportation and the U.S.’ overreliance on home ownership to build social security. Reading about the stratagems of San Diego’s smokestacks and geraniums illustrates just how handily working class anxieties can be manipulated to serve masters we did not choose – even to the extreme of surrendering public resources to a power as remote and impervious as the U.S. military. Look beyond the slogans and follow the money.

In the 2026 coda, Jim Miller reflects on the changes in San Diego in the last 20 years and narrates some of the most significant events since Under the Perfect Sun was first published. While the cost of living is now driving workers out, the representation of historically marginalized groups in office is marked as a welcome change. A recent win is the reversal of bans on project labor agreements (PLAs) by municipalities across the county and the commitment by the City of San Diego to adopt PLAs going forward. Often, labor in San Diego now leads where our politicians falter, and the closer cooperation between unions and community organizations like DSA gives hope that someday we’ll escape the recurrent corruption dogging San Diego as Enron-by-the-Sea.

Under the Perfect Sun gives a view of collaboration as process and praxis, with each author bringing to the book a life of service in its different forms. Mayhew and Miller have both served as leaders in their local AFT chapter, bringing their San Diego City College students into organized activity through the AFT internship program they launched as a pedagogy of experience. Together they founded City Works Press and with it the San Diego Writers Collective, and with journalist Doug Porter publish The Jumping Off Place, an online platform for independent writing. Their legacy is still evolving, and humbling in its scope. The presence of Mike Davis the organizer and working class son in his writing gave us one of the clearest voices in a quintessentially American Marxism, and a view to how the natural riches of Southern California can be ours when we fight. Elbows up and solidarity bound, let’s carry his spirit on.