Popular education is a method of teaching that centers the voices of students starting from their unique perspectives and situations.

The post How to use popular education to build worker power appeared first on EWOC.

By: Lauren Trendler

My name is Lauren Trendler. I use she/her pronouns and live in Oak Park. I am the Wine Director for Corner Shop. Why am I providing this information? Because this is how I would introduce myself if I was motivating a campaign resolution. Socialists believe in organizing workers. Sharing one’s occupation and city of residence connects comrades to organizing opportunities in their industry and community. It is also important in assessing one’s motivations when proposing that Metro Detroit DSA endorse a campaign or join a coalition.

Our chapter has long been recognized for having a strong ground game. We show up in force to picket lines, anti-war and anti-ICE protests. We have prominent, outspoken elected officials as members like Rashida Tlaib, Dylan Wegela, and most recently Denzel McCampbell, whose recent win was a big victory for the chapter.

Over the years as a DSA member and former chair of the Electoral Committee, I have seen candidates come to us seeking endorsement, eager for our labor but hesitant to publicly identify as socialists or organize with us. Many organizations want us to pound the pavement but will not offer us a seat at the table. The disclosure of personal and professional connections to a campaign will provide membership with objective information in order to make informed decisions.

I wrote R10–26 to promote transparency in our democratic decision making process. This resolution aligns with DSA’s Code of Conduct Section 3: Recognize and avoid possible conflicts of interest, which states “I will disclose any financial, personal, family, or close intimate relationship interest in matters of official DSA business which may impact on the work of DSA.”

R10–26 would amend Article III of the chapter bylaws to include: Authors and signers of resolutions and amendments proposed in working groups, at chapter general meetings, and at local conventions will be required to state personal and professional affiliations related to the subject matter of the resolution. It makes sense that if a chapter member is promoting a particular organization to work with, the chapter should know the promoter’s relationship to that organization. If a candidate has staff on their payroll organizing within the chapter for their endorsement, R10–26 would require them to disclose that to members during the endorsement process.

The 30 comrades who signed the amendment listed their occupation and location, including Amazon workers, union staff, and rank and file. The chapter Logistics & Planning Committee removed this information. According to the Groundwork caucus’ voting guide, such disclosures will make comrades vulnerable to doxxing. However, the very people they seek to protect willingly volunteered this information.

I encourage anyone who values transparency, democracy, and aligning our standards with the requirements of the national organization to vote “yes” on R10–26.

Lauren Trendler is a member of the DSA National Electoral Commission’s Steering Committee. She is also a member of the national Bread & Roses caucus and the local Democracy Coalition, a new self-organized, cross-tendency formation.

For Full Disclosure in Campaigns was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Fatima H.

I experienced what R16 proposes recently at a Socialists Organizing Western Wayne meeting where we discussed what our relationship should be with the Democratic Party, and how we should distinguish ourselves from them.

I sat in on the conversation, listening intently as my peers debated answers to these and other questions. This was my third SOWW meeting, and we were discussing the assigned chapter reading “A Great Time When We Get Rid of Class” from A User’s Guide to DSA: 5 Debates That Define the Democratic Socialists. At first, I was surprised to see so many differing ideas regarding the Democratic Party, candidate expectations, and building independent power.

Opinions were split on the issue of DSA’s relation with the Democratic Party . “I say we use the Democratic ticket and take over the party,” a member exclaimed, describing the long-term realignment strategy. Others advocated for a more immediate strategy, the clean break, where DSA moves towards independence without a guaranteed takeover. Proponents argued this would allow us to build separate power immediately.

Another group suggested the dirty break strategy was more pragmatic because it allows DSA to use Democratic Party resources (such as the VAN voter database) for advocacy and fundraising. In this view, we temporarily use the Democratic ballot line while establishing our own infrastructure, eventually becoming an independent socialist party before the Democrats can sweep those resources away. Finally, some proposed the party surrogate strategy, which involves operating as a distinct faction within the party until we can stand alone. This would allow us to differentiate ourselves from Democrats who have been complicit in the genocide in Palestine.

While our 30-minute reading and political discussion did not end in a consensus, we walked away with a broader understanding of our varying perspectives on this and other core DSA issues and ideas discussed. As Megan Romer says in the interview in the assigned reading, “Being engaged in struggle is the best way to develop one’s politics.” While that is not something all will willingly experience, the next best thing is to converse with others who have. Through these conversations, we can evolve our ideas and challenge our preconceptions.

What I initially perceived as a group with singular tactical goals was actually a landscape of diverse thought. This is a sentiment I am sure others can relate to, and one that new members will discover through such discussions. This experience caused me to consider different strategies and understand new perspectives; these were reasons my comrades held based on their unique upbringings, personal experiences, and educational backgrounds. Debates such as these are essential for sharing knowledge and exchanging ideas, allowing us to walk away from these conversations with more clarity and a broader perspective.

As a new member, this type of dialogue helped me better understand my fellow members and the group dynamic, helping to build a collective direction as I continue to engage in DSA events and local community politics. I support R16’s vision of discussing our differences openly. Using A User’s Guide to DSA helped to steer the conversation to a productive discussion of our differences. I believe it would be beneficial for both new and existing members to engage in similar discourse regularly, and I would like to see it brought to the rest of the chapter.

Vote YES on R16.

Experiencing R16 as a New Member was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What would you call the organization that coordinated over 100,000 volunteers in New York City to elect Zohran Mamdani mayor? Doorknocking, phonebanking, and merchandise ― all campaigning work that is normally funded and run by officials in political parties. Here it was run by DSA, an organization that historically shies away from the label. The […]

The post It’s a Party in the USA appeared first on Democratic Left.

“The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity.” – Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Writing is one of the most important inventions in human history. It allowed us to build civilizations, to coordinate social structures across vast distances, and to fuel humanity’s social, political, and scientific development into the modern age. Thanks to the written word, we can read the exact thoughts of scholars who lived many thousands of years ago, communicate complex ideas to millions of people, and build the democratic political movements capable of remaking society for the benefit of working people.

It has never been more important to preserve and expand our ability to write and communicate clearly. Original writing is now being severely devalued by a current of anti-intellectualism, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, and an unprecedented public disinvestment in education. This is why Midwest Socialist wants to encourage Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members in the greater Midwest to develop their own skills at writing and communication.

Learn, Learn, and Learn Again

During the heyday of the democratic socialist movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, deep engagement with Marxist theory was considered a prerequisite to leading workers in their struggle against oppression. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs, Antonio Gramsci, and countless others spent years developing tomes of political theory while they organized tirelessly to overthrow capitalism. They did not see organizing and theorizing as two separate activities, but as two integral parts of the same effort.

In the twentieth century, socialist governments considered mass political education an essential step in building a post-capitalist society. In 1961, Cuba sent 250,000 educated people into the countryside to teach millions of poor workers and campesinos to read, virtually eliminating illiteracy on the island within a few short years. The methods developed during this campaign served as an example for the entire Global South, and the model was successfully implemented in other countries around the world.

Socialist states with highly literate populations took this idea a step further. In East Germany, government-sponsored programs established spaces to encourage workers to express themselves creatively, including through prose and poetry. These programs would have been considered wasteful and useless in a capitalist society, but the socialist government of that country saw value in the political development of the working class through creative pursuits.

Closer to home, universal public education is one of the greatest surviving accomplishments of the working class movement in the United States. The collective knowledge of humanity is our birthright as working people, and it is our responsibility to engage with these ideas and educate ourselves.

A Hollow Education

The relevance of political broadsheets and hand-printed pamphlets has declined precipitously in the last hundred years, but the necessity to write clearly and convincingly has not. We live in a time when a significant percentage of young Americans are falling behind in school, when college students at our nation’s most prestigious universities are incapable of reading a whole book, and when AI is taking away the livelihoods of creative and intellectual laborers on an unprecedented scale. In this context, reading, writing, and learning have taken on new significance.

Public schools are under attack in the U.S. Compounding the damage of decades of chronic disinvestment, Republicans and Democrats alike have established charter school systems across the country that take state money to fund academies – often with reactionary pedagogical mandates –  and predatory, unstable for-profit schools through “school voucher” programs. These efforts take away resources from public schools and leave students behind. This is in addition to the current administration’s broad anti-intellectual right-wing attacks on science, history, tolerance in the classroom, and the basic principle that education should serve students rather than the state’s extremist political agenda.

Furthermore, all modern forms of mass media are deliberately constructed to turn working people into passive consumers of carefully curated political messages that shut out the possibility of radical change. They shamelessly promote unjust and insane wars, give billionaires and their servants unlimited airtime and space to advance their own agendas while marginalizing progressive voices, attempt to smear left-wing candidates for public office, and turn people away from transformative social and political structures.

AI is just the most recent extension of the centuries-long effort to control what working people know, think, and feel. A recent meta-study by the Brookings Institute highlights the dangers of using this untested technology in classrooms. Evidence is mounting that students and adults alike suffer a “cognitive debt” when they over-rely on chatbots to perform intellectual tasks, rendering them incapable of the basic skills needed to function in society and sharply limiting their ability to develop any kind of meaningful political consciousness.

This is why Midwest Socialist does not accept AI-generated writing and strongly discourages the use of AI writing programs. For too many, an ‘AI-assisted’ piece of writing is the end of a conversation rather than the beginning of one. It is an excuse not to engage with ideas, a way to treat essays and creative writing projects as problems to be solved, published, and put away as quickly as possible rather than an exercise in critical thinking and creativity. In this context, the adage “if you couldn’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it” takes on new meaning.

At a time when it appears possible to offload every intellectual exertion to an unthinking machine, engaging with ideas seriously and honestly is quickly becoming a revolutionary act in itself. Despite all the hype from tech companies, working people are still quite skeptical that AI will benefit society in the long run. We can consciously reject the implementation of technologies that don’t serve the needs of the working class.

Why We Write

“Our task is to make thinkers out of fighters and fighters out of thinkers.” – General Gordon Baker, revolutionary educator

All progressive transformation finds its energy from the creative labor of working people. To give an example from American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the face of the New Deal and arguably its most important champion, but he did not implement it. It required legions of skilled, educated, and competent artisans, craftspeople, engineers, laborers, administrators, artists, writers, and countless others working toward the unified goal of transforming society. We are going to need millions of engaged, curious people eager to work to better society. We will build the future we deserve through a combination of organizing, community building, and unshakable solidarity.

Right now, none of those efforts are where they need to be. In the context of economic stagnation and repression at home and abroad, the fight for a better world can at times feel hopeless. Individual action is not enough to reverse the long-term trends of illiteracy and intellectual shortcutting that have plagued our society for decades. We need robustly funded schools, mass political education, a media not beholden to private interests, and an economy that fosters creative pursuits as more than products to be packaged for consumption. But that effort starts by building our own capabilities, collaborating with others, and working tirelessly to create and sustain the kinds of unapologetically socialist institutions that will build a better society.

There’s a reason every child is taught to write essays in school. Writing teaches us to organize our thoughts, to engage with primary sources, and to express ourselves clearly and succinctly to a wide audience. These skills are essential to any political movement. We cannot rely on capitalist-controlled media and obsequious AI to do our thinking for us.

If it is indeed true that every cook can govern, as the old saying goes, then any DSA member can write. Not every single person must become a journalist, theorist, or polemicist. There are a million ways to contribute to our struggle. But if you wrote stories on lined notebook paper in the fifth grade, composed multi-paragraph social media posts in response to articles you see online, or simply have had ideas and perspectives on our work and movement, we want to hear from you. 

If you would like to write for Midwest Socialist, contact us through our Google form. Be sure to read our Editorial Policy before submitting. We publish op-eds, articles about leftist history, interviews, left-wing reviews of recently released media and leftist classics, and other forms of writing, and we are particularly interested in original journalism about events happening in the Midwest.

If you have an idea that you need help turning into an outline, an outline you need help turning into a draft, or an article you’re wrestling with, our Editorial Board offers Zoom appointments to discuss your ideas and help you build them into a publishable article. The editorial board doesn’t guarantee that every individual article will be published, but we will work with you to build your project into a piece we can all be proud of. Once you’ve submitted a draft, we will make edits and send a final draft ready to be published.

Writing is a skill that takes time and practice, just like learning a language, mastering a trade, or playing an instrument. The only way to improve is to jump right in, and Midwest Socialist is a great place to get started. We look forward to reading your work.

The post Why You Should Write for Midwest Socialist appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

By: Joseph Green

The Membership Engagement Committee is putting forth this resolution, Continuing Towards Mass Membership Activation, for the 2026 MDDSA convention. We have spent the last 4 months developing our goals and visions for the chapter with the swell in membership and the growth we expect.

Last year we surpassed our goal of 1,200 members with months to spare. This year, we want to 1) push our chapter to over 2k and 2) have 20% of our membership actively engaged in the campaigns, projects, and events. This is the crux of our vision for the chapter over the next year.

To achieve that goal we have developed 3 core priorities for our committee. Our main focus will be on recruitment, engagement, and leadership and organizing skills development.

To reach our goal of 2,000 MDDSA members and build a future socialist party in Metro Detroit we must meaningfully connect with new and potential members.With this resolution we will grow our relationships to fellow committees and working groups with the specific goal of connecting new members and non members to our chapter writ large. This will look like targeted outreach to organizers and canvassers involved in our electoral campaigns, online engagement, and public tabling opportunities to develop MDDSA’s recognition in the community.

DSA has been developing ongoing coalitions and relationships throughout the country and specifically in the Metro Detroit area. It is time that we begin to invite those we organize alongside to join our ranks and fight for socialism in our lifetime. Not only will this increase our membership base but it will also mean we are recruiting from highly motivated and politically engaged comrades.

MEC plans to work in conjunction with our Electoral committee to expand DSA’s presence and reach in our endorsed campaigns, and to work alongside our Labor committee to expand our outreach and recruitment to organizing work places and our partnering organizations. MEC plans to support each of our committees and working groups in their organizing efforts with the expressed interest of growing our chapter’s membership and inviting those we organize alongside to join our ranks.

Historically, our chapter has had less than 10% engagement from our membership in terms of campaigns support and meeting attendance. We want more. We want all of our members to feel empowered to jump directly into the work that most inspires them. MEC will support this effort by promoting our endorsed campaigns at all social events to encourage members to take the next step in engaging with our work. We will also be partnering with the other committees and working groups to effectively connect interested comrades with the appropriate organizers.

As our membership has grown we have seen groups of all demographics crop up and get to work in their fields, such as our Ferndale comrades, or the cadre of DSA teachers organizing in their districts. With this resolution MEC has developed a robust collection of resources to support these groups and help guide membership to them. These resources include an ongoing FAQ page, event planning guides, and membership development lists.

Our chapter and the national organization has seen a large swell in our membership in the recent past and with that immense growth comes the need for strong on boarding, guidance, and transparency. Our goal in engaging our members is to provide support, opportunity, and connections throughout MDDSA. With this resolution MEC is preparing for an even greater swell of membership in the future and planning for how we can manage and connect our comrades to the work at hand.

This vision of the future includes a greater reliance on group organizing and personal empowerment. MEC, with our growing log of resources and information, wants to empower our comrades to develop their ideas into actionable plans. Have you been looking for a sports social in the chapter (or a movie group, regional organizing group, etc.)? MEC will provide you with the resources you need to make it happen and the organizing leadership to support it in development. Our goal in changing our organizing structure is that it cuts through the administrative hurdles, and gives all of our members the tools for organizing success.

Finally, we want to give our membership a pathway to become organizing leaders. By developing strong processes and information logs we support the future strength of our socialist movement. Rather than resigning our membership to find their own way through our organization, MEC wants to develop clear and concise ways to develop our promising new comrades into strong socialist leaders. Our first way of doing this is by providing a clear ladder of engagement for each of our committees and working groups. This allows us to offer opportunities to up and coming comrades to take ownership of their role in our chapter.

How can a new comrade quickly and easily jump into the work of our Eco-soc working group? What would their next steps to leadership look like? MEC has developed an outline of how we can honestly assess the work and engagement of our comrades to more effectively identify leaders, opportunities for growth, or gaps in support. We will work with committee leaders to adjust this outline to better suit the work and expectations of each committee and group as needed.

As our chapter grows it is critically important that we systematize how we engage our membership and how we plan for our future and develop our future leaders.

Our goal with this resolution and for MEC over the next year is to grow our membership, get that membership plugged into our campaigns, and develop future leaders. To do this we want to expand our presence and influence in our partnerships and coalition campaigns, offer freedom to organize within our chapter, and provide intentional opportunity for growth, education, and leadership. Without growth, knowledge and opportunity our chapter risks stagnation in a period of political turmoil and we cannot let that happen. Please vote yes on our resolution Continuing Towards Mass Membership Activation, so we can make this a reality.

Why We Need “Continuing Towards Mass Membership Activation” was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An Amendment for a Radically Democratic General Meeting

By Chris W

What should a DSA member be? Ideally, if you were to meet individual members of a chapter, one by one, you would find very little in common in terms of basic demographics. You would meet people of various races, ages, and gender identities, different levels of education, different jobs, and — because this is a “big tent” socialist organization — different ideas for what a socialist future will look like and the way we as DSA get to that future. But there are certain characteristics that all DSA members must have.

An experienced DSA member should be a socialist organizer in the fullest sense of the term. They should be able to organize a workplace for a union drive, or organize a campaign to elect a socialist to office, an international solidarity campaign, a social meetup, a reading group. Ideally, they’d feel confident organizing any of these. Their skill and confidence in organizing would come from a firm agreement on strategy and aims along with a high degree of flexibility on tactics and fields of struggle within DSA.

Our ideal DSA cadre would have helped craft this program, drawing on a knowledge of socialist theory and history, deliberating and debating with comrades in democratic forums, confident in their ability to articulate their position in front of their comrades while willing to listen to other members when a better position is offered, or when their position fails to carry the vote. This DSA member, when asked by a friend, coworker or family member, “what is socialism?” can share the dream of a future free from exploitation, domination and war, and how DSA is the party to win that future.

One place where new and experienced DSA members are refined into socialist organizers is the General Meeting (GM). The Agitation, Deliberation, Education Amendment (A1R8) structures the general meeting to prioritize all DSA work equally. We do not believe that political education and organizing skills are in any way secondary tasks of the organization (2026 General Body Resolution [R8, the resolution being amended] Whereas: The goal of MD-DSA general body meetings shall be to get members involved in ongoing organizing work, with a secondary emphasis on political education and organizing skills trainings) because those are all part of the tasks that build up our membership to be true socialist organizers.

The amendment makes the GM a place where members learn about and discuss both the short and long term struggles and aspirations of DSA. It gives working groups and committees the opportunity for face-to-face conversations with new members to get them involved in committee work and updating experienced members on the same. It allocates ample time for democratic deliberation, ensuring a robust chapter democracy and a forum to discuss and deliberate ideas, tactics and campaigns born from the generative discussions carried out earlier in the meeting.

Political Education grounds the thinking and discussion for the GM. The Political Education Committee, made up of comrades passionate about socialist ideals and open to all members, selects topics that help to develop the political understanding of general membership. Thirty to forty-five minutes of the GM are dedicated to a presentation and a discussion of a broad topic relevant to socialist organizing: topics like “Why the Working Class”, “Racial Capitalism”, and “Socialist Feminism.” These are topics that any socialist must have a deep understanding of in order to effectively organize. New members are introduced to broader issues in socialist thought and organizing, and experienced members hone their thoughts and opinions through further discussion of the topics.

In addition to the normal political education segment, “in the case where the NPC has directly contacted steering committee and issued talking points about a current event” (A1R8 resolved clause 1), there will be 30 minutes for a short presentation and discussion of the issue. Many new members are brought to DSA in response to one of the endemic crises caused by capitalism, such as the genocide in Gaza, the ICE murders in Minneapolis, and the imperialist war on Iran. If we have a GM that is just updates on campaign work and questions of logistics, new members will walk, thinking that DSA is not serious about taking the fight to the capitalist class. As a chapter, we have failed to meet these moments on numerous occasions already. What is most alarming: we have not had a chapter wide discussion on ICE, the fascist paramilitary that invaded another midwestern city a few months ago. We are woefully unprepared as a chapter to respond should Trump turn his ire to Detroit. The first step to action is thought and discussion.

At our March GM, we had a short preview of what this segment could look like. I brought forward a motion to take fifteen minutes from Political Education to have a discussion on the US-Israeli war on Iran. Comrade Rodney C gave an excellent introduction, the conversation among members was spirited, and the members who came to the mic to share their perspectives were met with cheers from the crowd. Had the motion not been made, we would have had another GM where we did not address an absolutely monumental moment in global politics. With the passage of the Agitation, Deliberation, Education Amendment, the Current Event section of the GM would generate proposals for actions for the chapter to take that would be debated on in the section dedicated to deliberation.

The portion of the GM dedicated to deliberation and decision-making, “30–35 minutes for deliberation on adopting resolutions, endorsing campaigns, establishing new working groups etc., or agitation for new campaigns;” (A1R8 be it resolved clause 1) must be the democratic heart of the chapter, with the same deliberative spirit as the convention. The convention is the highest decision-making body of the chapter for a reason. It is an entire day when members gather to deliberate, face-to-face, the most important issues of our chapter and set its course for the coming year. We do not wait a few days for an email link to click on, to have our voices contend with members who did not hear the debate and are not educated on the issues.

We hear the speeches, feel the momentum in the room, raise our red cards proudly in the air. We are creating our democratic socialist future in the present. But we need practice in order to create this future. We can have this same exhilarating burst of democracy every time we gather for a GM. When a political decision arises in the course of their work, the Steering Committee should bring it to the GM to let the membership decide. When a working group or committee wants to start a new campaign, they should bring it to the GM to agitate for it and allow the membership to debate it. When members feel that they have a plan of action to respond to a new crisis after discussion in the GM, they should make their case to the rest of the membership.

Finally, each committee or working group gets to make its pitch to new members and others curious about their work in the 20–30 minutes dedicated to report-backs and breakout groups. At recent general meetings, there has been a haphazard effort, if any at all, to direct new members to the working groups. This is the best place to integrate new members into the chapter; by allowing them to follow their own interests to a part of chapter work that will get them engaged the quickest and keep them engaged the longest. It also allows for more face-to-face conversations, letting new and experienced members form personal connections that will help the new member feel comfortable in the chapter and integrate them into the chapter socially as well as politically.

DSA is its membership, and the organization’s abilities and qualities will be reflected in those of its members. Members who spend years attending the type of GM created by the passage of the Agitation, Deliberation Education Amendment (A1-R8) will be true democratic-socialist organizers. This member, and this organization, would not be easily discouraged by a defeat, nor carried away by a victory. They would be steadfast in pursuit of our higher cause; that dangerous radical dream of a society governed by and for working people. The dream of humanity united in peace and prosperity for all, free from domination and discrimination, living on a planet preserved for posterity.

Vote Yes on A1R8, linked here

Chris W is a law student and uncaucused member of the Democracy Coalition.

Agitation, Deliberation, Education was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 1988 and 2016, DSA backed insurgent primary campaigns by gifted outsiders — but the aftermath of the Jesse Jackson and the Bernie Sanders campaigns were very different.

The post Why Wasn’t There a Long Jackson Moment? appeared first on Democratic Left.

You’ve probably received enough communications regarding this Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations, which will be held all across the country. At last count more than three thousand demonstrations are being organized, and there will no doubt be at least one near you.

In case you have been procrastinating, here is a link to find the demonstrations closest to you.

The first of these demos last June had a million or two people attend. The next one, in October, had at least five million. We’re aiming to double that this time, which would put us in striking distance of the 3.5% of the US population that research says is necessary to topple authoritarian regimes in the making. 

Against the backdrop of brutal anti-immigrant violence and preparation for election suppression at home, and clueless trade policy matched with deadly wars abroad, a growing number of Americans are coming out to the streets. These include people who have never been politically involved outside of voting every few years, and progressives who sat out the 2024 presidential elections because they didn’t think there was any difference between the two parties and the two candidates. Within DSA and the rest of the left this often took the form of denouncing the “twin parties of capital”. Which they are. But that picture, drawn without nuance, underestimated what fascism is and does.

Now we know. 

A reasonable question at this point is, ‘What sort of message should socialists be sending to the other demonstrators, and the world, a year into America’s fascist descent?’ You have the opportunity to weigh in on that as you make your protest sign. “No Kings” is a start, not a program. “Workers Over Billionaires” moves us closer to the ideas we need.

This mass demonstration of opposition is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to stop MAGA from dragging us along on its road to hell. For that we need to be broadening the struggle with other tactics and strategies (mutual aid, mass strikes, non-violent direct action, and electoral politics) that build a powerful anti-fascist movement and lay the basis for moving past the failed politics of the past. What happened in Minneapolis/St. Paul on January 23—‘No Work, No School, No Shopping’—is the best example so far. DSA has joined with labor and community partners in the May Day Strong coalition, which understands “No Kings” as a step toward a sharper critique of capitalism on May 1. On that day we will see how prepared we are to advance beyond a nationwide demonstration to a national movement.

We’ll see you out in the streets this weekend. And then we’ll continue to train and educate and prepare ourselves for the struggle ahead.

In the February issue of California Red we ran a background article on the California DSA campaign we call “The Fair and Responsible Tax Plan for California’s Wealthy”, which embraces both measures currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November state ballot. That was the first in a series we are running between now and the election. Here is the next installment.—Editor

The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality

Our East Bay DSA crew of five had planted ourselves in the parking lot of a supermarket in North Berkeley on a warm mid-March afternoon. We were collecting signatures for the Billionaires Tax and the Protecting Education and Health Care Act. During our three-hour shift we did not do badly, gathering several dozen for each measure. Even better were the conversations, which ranged from informing voters about the nuts and bolts of the proposals to broader questions about economic inequality: how much money do billionaires have, anyway? What share of the total income of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, goes to the one percent? What would be the right amount of taxes for them to pay? And how do we get them to pay their fair share? 

We explore a few of these ideas and numbers below.

A cool million

It used to be hard for the typical working class stiff to imagine what a million dollars looks like. A million dollars? That’s what millionaires have, and I’m not even close to being one of those, we would say. But that was before a million dollars or thereabouts became the average price of a house in Los Angeles. It’s slightly below that statewide, and slightly above that in San Francisco. But you get the idea. Generally speaking, if you can afford a home, you know what a million dollars looks like—it looks like your house. (If you’re a renter, it looks like that house.)

A billion dollars was even more unfathomable. We didn’t have many in the United States until relatively recently; as late as 1990 there were just 66 of them. Now there are close to a thousand, and we’ve got 213 right here in the Golden State. Since we know that a million dollars looks like a house these days, we can imagine that since a billion is a thousand millions, it would look like a thousand houses. 

No one needs a thousand houses to live in, so most billionaires scrape by with just ten or twelve. Of course, being billionaires, they need somewhat larger houses than most people, so they might spend five or ten million dollars or even more—fifty million! A hundred million!—on their humble abodes. If they owned ten of those, that could put a pretty big dent in their billion dollar fortune. But guess what? The average wealth of a billionaire is not a billion dollars. It’s currently around 8.6 billion dollars, according to inequality.org. So that would be 8,600 houses. 

Minus the dozen they “live” in, that would leave them with enough money to purchase 8,588 more houses. I don’t know about you, but as the numbers climb my ability to translate the million dollar house into a clear image of the wealth of billionaires is beginning to get somewhat unequal to the task. And that’s before we try to imagine what the total wealth of 213 billionaires looks like. 

Trillions

It is reliably estimated that thanks to the ginormous growth of their fortunes during the past ten years (Trump I’s tax cuts, pandemic economy when there was nothing to invest in except stock buybacks, Trump II’s continuing tax cuts, massive AI bubble, and outright looting of public resources) our couple hundred California billionaires collectively own (hold onto your “tax the rich” baseball cap) two trillion dollars’ worth of assets. In California they’re doing a little better than the average 8.6 billionaire; they’ve each got around 9.4 billion. 

Although I just said I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the houses when they added up to the average 8,600 houses each (adjusted now to 9,400), let’s try it out with trillions. That’s a thousand billions. So collectively our 213 ultra-rich people with their two trillion dollars would have, let’s see, carry the one, a bit over 1.8 million houses, at a million dollars each. 

You might think that that’s enough for anyone, and these individuals must be looking around for philanthropies to unload to. But no, according to a recent New York Times article, billionaire giving has fallen precipitously in the last few years as their ‘uneasy accommodation with fascism’ (fascism scholar Robert Paxton’s formulation describing the initial response of economic elites to the uncouth new political rulers) has grown considerably less uneasy—more like downright comfortable. The 213 billionaires in California have seen their total wealth grow by nearly a third in this period as the rest of us have been essentially running in place—and that’s not enough for some of them. 

If you listen to one of their loudest mouthpieces, tech mogul Ron Conway, the proposed billionaire tax is not only bad for his 212 other peeps; it’s way worse than that. He was recently quoted in a New York Times article with a sentiment that inadvertently revealed how that kind of bank account can warp one’s perspective: According to Mr. Conway, referring to the billionaire tax, “This is the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt.” Hmmm. I wonder whether the families of dozens of people who lost their lives and thousands who lost homes in the Eaton and Palisades fires in 2025 agree? Or if Japanese-Californians, 93,000 of whom were incarcerated during World War II, share that view? Or if Native Californians, whose population fell from a third a million people in 1800 to about 15,000 by 1910 during the genocide that did them in, would agree with Conway’s historical research? 

On the other hand

At the other end of the economic spectrum, California’s borders contain about 7 million people below the official poverty line, or 18% of its roughly 40 million people. But the official federal poverty line ($33,000/year for a family of four) is laughably (that’s probably the wrong word) below an actual ability to live. One measure of how many people are barely getting by in California is the number of MediCal recipients, dependent on the federal Medicaid funding stream for most of their care costs. Although California is a net donor to the federal treasury, it does rely on $20 billion per year from the feds to support MediCal. Some 15 million Californians are enrolled in MediCal.

Let’s move on from the tiny extremely rich and the very large poor slices of the state and look at the condition of the merely rich, the top 1% income earners, which includes the billionaires but extends downward to the merely well-to-do. Although calculations vary, the bottom rung of the ladder for a one percenter is just about a million dollars a year in income; the median merely rich, right in the middle of the one percent, is $3.6 million a year. Here’s chart to help us visualize how their share of total California income has grown over the past half century. 

That’s right, believe your eyes. The top 1%’s share of income in the Golden State has grown over the past half century from about one twelfth of total income to almost one third. Richest state in the richest country in the world? Yes, but a vast chunk of the riches seems to have ended up in the pockets of people who didn’t need the transfer. 

On the third hand, if all of the state’s total income had been divided up equally, every person in California in 2024 would have received around $80,000—which means that for a family of four, combining their incomes, the household would have had $320,000—just a little under ten times the official poverty line.  

“But that would be socialism!” cry the billionaires, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and probably quite a few temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Well, sort of. We’ll get into that some other time. One thing is clear: it would certainly be different from what we’ve got.