We stand in full solidarity with the nearly 300 detained immigrant community members who began a hunger and labor strike in protest of profoundly inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey on Friday, May 22, and echo their demands:

1. An immediate in-person meeting with Governor Mikie Sherrill at Delaney Hall to directly observe conditions and hear testimony from detained individuals.
2. Immediate medical attention for detainees in units 2/2b beaten and attacked by ICE.
3. The immediate release of vulnerable detainees including elderly individuals, pregnant women, young people, and those with serious medical conditions.
4. Meaningful review of immigration cases and habeas filings.
5. An end to what detainees describe as coercive pressure to sign deportation or voluntary departure documents.

Please read about the strikers’ plight and their demands in their own words in their just published letter entitled “We Demand Freedom.”

Delaney Hall is located on a designated superfund site known as “Chemical Corridor.” It opened illegally in 2025 with no public notice, never passed minimal safety inspections and is not even structurally sound; a massive wall collapsed shortly after its opening. Inside, detainees are served inedible food in filthy facilities, and our neighbors are subject to constant verbal and physical abuse by both guards employed by the for-profit prison company GEO Group, as well as ICE agents. Delaney Hall is only the most recent setting within the unspeakably cruel and fascist landscape of ICE detention.

Immigration is driven by the impoverishment of billions in the Global South due to the systematic global theft of US imperialism. Those who live in these nations are forced to migrate to survive, or to seek better prospects for themselves and their loved ones. ICE exists to make migrants’ existence as desperate as possible, creating a maximally exploitable workforce unable or afraid to seek recourse for exploitation by their employers. In turn this serves to disempower the working class as a whole. ICE exists to spread fear, because that fear equals profit.

At Delaney Hall, DSA has worked in partnership with other organizations to simultaneously support families impacted by ICE detention at Delaney Hall, and work to shut it down. Members from throughout New Jersey and neighboring states are on the ground right now working to amplify the voices of the strikers and keep people safe as protests continue. 

Thousands of DSA members in chapters across the US have been active in the fight against ICE. DSA recognizes that ICE serves to divide and repress the working class. In contrast, we stand with the multiracial working class and understand that only together can we defeat capitalism.

Shamefully, Republican and Democratic politicians have supported this fascistic tool of nakedly racist class exploitation. Donald Trump has accelerated funding for ICE while Governor Mikie Sherrill has deployed State Troopers  to crack down on anti-ICE civil disobedience.

We are proud of our nationally endorsed leaders Joel Brooks and Jake Ephros for joining us in solidarity at Delaney Hall. Please take action by sending a letter to Congress and the New Jersey state government. Together, we demand that the Delaney Hall strikers’ demands are met immediately! We demand the immediate shutdown of Delaney Hall, and all immigrant detention centers! We demand the abolition of ICE, and free movement of all people everywhere!

The post Delaney Hall Statement of the DSA Abolish ICE Commission appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

By Rodney Coopwood

On May 1, 2026, Metro Detroit DSA rallied at Roosevelt Park as part of the city’s labor coalition for May Day. From the first planning meetings at the IBEW Hall through the day-of march and the debrief that followed, MDDSA (led by members of the Mobilization and Labor Working Groups) sat at the table with Teamsters Local 337, SEIU Michigan, IBEW Local 58, UAW Local 600, UAW Region 1, Moratorium NOW!, Michigan United, and other unions and organizations of the Detroit left. Being in those rooms was the most instructive part of the work.

We were invited in because of the history our members carry in this city’s labor and left movements, and because our chapter has spent the last year building the capacity to show up. A seat at the planning table is not given for free; it is the product of contingent discipline at previous actions and the steady labor of people who have made themselves useful to the broader left. The Mobilization Working Group, formalized at convention, was the structure that let us convert that capacity into coordinated participation and it did so as a genuinely cross-tendency effort, with members from across the chapter’s committees, caucuses, and coalitions working under the MWG’s coordination.

What the Room Looked Like

The most striking thing about the planning process was watching unions sit across from each other under the AFL-CIO umbrella and actually deliberate. These are organizations with different memberships, different cultures, and different relationships to militancy. The fact of them being in the same room, working through speaker order, route logistics, and messaging — that, on its own, was not nothing, and reminiscent of our own practices in DSA.

Still, sitting through those meetings as someone from the organizing side rather than the unionist side, I was struck by how much of the work became institutional rather than political. Speaker order became a question of which body’s position carried what weight, not which voice the day most needed. Logistics bent toward what city authorities would permit and protect rather than toward who the event was for. Parts of the program felt divorced from the meaning of the day itself. May Day belongs to the rank-and-file and in many respects to workers outside unions entirely, and that fact deserved more weight in the room than it fully received.

The People Who Made the Day

What made this May Day special for me was not what happened in the planning room. It was what happened on May 1st itself. We had volunteers from MDDSA across every role the day asked for: tabling, banner bearing, flag bearing, marshaling, medic, day-of flyering, and back-end logistics. New members standing alongside members who have been doing this work for years. People taking on new roles for the first time. People who had never carried a banner or been to a planning meeting walking up on the morning of May 1 ready to be useful.

That is what a chapter looks like when it is functioning. It is also what May Day is supposed to look like. The holiday is not just its program; it is its people. The shape of any given year’s coalition matters less than whether the bodies on the street are organized, prepared, and politically conscious. By that measure, what MDDSA put in the street this year was something we should take seriously, and every member who showed up — for the first time or the fifteenth — should know the chapter saw them.

What Worked

The march itself was phenomenal. Speakers connected the labor question to immigration, to racialized policing, to U.S. imperialism, to the specific intersectional realities of the working class in this city — the working class as it actually exists, not the working class as it appears in a 1950s photograph. That part of the day did the work May Day is supposed to do. It said out loud that the labor movement and the broader struggle against capitalism are not separate fights with separate constituencies.

The fact that the unions came together at all is the bigger story. The goal of this year’s May Day, as I understood it from inside the planning room, was modest and correct: get the relevant Detroit unions into the same physical space, working on the same calendar, talking to each other about something concrete. That goal was met. Relationships do not form in the abstract. They form when people have to figure out together how a rally works.

This rally took place under AFL-CIO sponsorship, something that, by accounts inside the planning room, had not happened in Detroit in a very long time. For most of the twentieth century, mainstream American labor kept its distance from May Day’s radical origins, favoring the September Labor Day that Congress established in 1894 in the wake of the Pullman strike. The AFL-CIO returning to May Day is a real shift, and one that creates room for a fuller program in the years ahead.

What The Numbers Said

Turnout at the rally was an estimated 500 attendees. By my count, roughly half were rank-and-file union members. The rest were politically conscious community members and active organizers, with SEIU showing the most prominent and organized presence. The unions did not turn out their memberships in significant numbers. Michigan’s union membership rate is 13 percent, well above the national rate of 10, and Detroit sits inside one of the more heavily unionized regions in the country. The “No Kings” mobilization earlier this year and last, with broadly anti-authoritarian messaging not specifically tied to labor, pulled thousands into the streets of this same city. May Day, with the city’s organized labor leadership formally behind it, did not. The gap is the question.

Part of the answer is practical. A 4pm Friday start excluded most day shift workers and most service workers whose schedules are not their own, and is worth noting for next year. But timing does not explain the whole gap. If union structures had more time to actively mobilize members for May Day in the weeks leading up to it, a Friday afternoon would have moved more people than it did.

The honest version is the one that came out of the debrief: this was a year of using unused muscles. The apparatus of political mobilization through union locals has been dormant for a generation, and that capacity does not return in a single planning cycle. That is partly an explanation. It is also a question. What would unions themselves have to change for next year’s May Day to actually move their members? Further, where is the current state of class consciousness in the U.S. if unions struggle to connect labor to May Day?

What’s Worth Building On

First, the Detroit left should carry more weight at the table. There is history between labor leadership and the broader left that predates my lifetime, and I will not pretend to fully understand it all yet. But even with that history, the moment demands engagement. Capitalism’s contradictions are visibly tearing at the lives of people in this city, this country, and every country the American empire reaches. A leftist — labor coalition strong enough to meet that crisis needs the organizers, writers, and educators who have spent their lives developing the political analysis the movement needs.

Second, and as has already been agreed to, the planning has to start earlier. Much earlier. The skeleton of next year’s May Day, who is in the coalition, what the political program is, who the speakers are, what the demands are, should be sketched in the fall, not in March. Earlier planning creates space for harder conversations and the programmatic clarity a workers’ rally deserves.

The Debrief

The most important conversation of the entire cycle was the debrief. That sounds counterintuitive, the rally is the visible thing, the debrief is internal, but it is the meeting where the organizers decided what kind of coalition it wanted to become.

The clarity that came out of that conversation was this: the goal of 2026 was first contact, and first contact was achieved. The goal of 2027 is to deepen — to pull in rank-and-file participation at a scale this year’s event did not reach.

Some of that conversation pointed toward the possibility of a general strike in 2028. However, a general strike is not a thing you can just announce; it is a thing that becomes possible after years and years of organizational work most people never see, in sectors of society that have been exploited by capital for decades. Treating 2028 as a horizon can be reasonable, if work of a strategically adaptable and principled nature is achieved prior.

What this May Day did was build one vertebra of a skeleton that does not yet have most of its bones. There is a great deal of work between here and any plausible strike horizon, and the honest version of the optimism coming out of the debrief is that the work is finally beginning to look like work, rather than like a wish.

Beyond the Union Hall

If the labor movement is going to grow into the force this moment demands, DSA, the broader left, and the unions themselves have to take seriously the work that exists beyond the union hall. Detroit no longer looks like the city that defined American industrial labor. Manufacturing accounts for under one in ten jobs across the metro area. Health care, education, retail, food service, logistics, these are where most actually work, and the great majority of those workers carry no union card. The Starbucks Workers United campaign has shown that a young, low-wage, dispersed workforce can build real power against an employer the labor establishment had largely written off as unorganizable. The labor movement that meets this decade is going to be built in workplaces like those, or it is not going to be built at all.

May Day’s politics speak to exactly this work. The holiday does not require a union card. It belongs to anyone who works for a wage, and the power it celebrates is the power of labor itself — the capacity to withhold work, to act in concert, to recognize that the people who do the actual work of running this society can stop running it. May Day started as a revolutionary leftist holiday, built by communists, socialists, and anarchists who understood the workplace was one front of a much larger fight. Keeping that history visible in the present and operative in the future is the work that has to follow. This year, we got into the room. Next year, we have to help change what the room can do — and start building the rooms that do not yet exist.

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Forming the Skeleton: May Day 2026 and the Work Ahead was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Rita Briar i will give you pause, weed-puller wear your gloves if you come at me or you’ll get pain, annoyance, it’s not your day So you wait a day, wait a week slow down just enough and I will bloom

by Oscar Langford This poem appeared in Miner’s Magazine on May 15, 1913. They’ve put an injunction on old Mother Jones The language so stung From the brave woman’s tongue, And her truth-telling words were so noisy in tones They’ve tried the suppression of old Mother Jones The Court has imprisoned old Mother Jones. She […]

by Rich H

The City is moving rapidly towards finalizing an economic development deal that raises financial and political warning signs—it potentially gives away millions of our tax dollars to an Abbott and Cruz crony, who is also a major Texas donor to AIPAC and one of the authors of the scurrilous Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission’s 2024 Study on Antisemitism in Texas, which perpetuates Abbott’s lies about the Anti-Gaza-War protests at UT.

The Deal

The deal (described in Item 6 on the April 23 Council agenda) is with RIDA Development, a Houston-based company that builds resort-style hotels, mainly in Florida. The proposed tourist-oriented project here in Austin is for a mid-sized convention center and hotel adjacent to the COTA facility that will be a “self-contained” “destination hotel and conference resort” (see news stories here and here for more details). The agreement with the City of Austin will rebate millions of dollars in Hotel Occupancy Taxes (HOT) back to RIDA for 30 years, in exchange for certain public benefits, the most significant of which is that the developer claims the project will result in 900 permanent hospitality jobs, at an average annual wage of $61,000. However, details about the specific performance benchmarks RIDA needs to hit to receive the tax rebate are sketchy. 

The deal also includes public parkland, $1.5 million into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and a labor peace deal with Unite Here Local 23. The City also touts projected property tax revenue from the project as a benefit.

The deal, which was unanimously advanced by the City Council at its April 23^rd meeting, has been celebrated by several city council members especially because of the labor agreement. This aspect is obviously great for the labor movement, but there are other serious concerns that may outweigh it.

In general, economic development deals do not benefit the public in ways politicians claim; instead, they tend to have negative impacts on local communities, especially for the working class. Research on economic development deals that use tax breaks allegedly to attract businesses and investment to cities has shown two important points: First, in the vast majority of cases, companies make decisions about where to locate operations independently of tax breaks—in other words, these tax breaks are just corporate tribute and make no difference to whether a project happens or not. Second, cities usually do not benefit financially from these kinds of deals—these deals end up costing the public more than they bring in.

An example of this research is the book, Incentives to Pander, co-authored by UT-Austin Government Professor Nathan Jensen, summarized as follows on the publisher’s website (see also this excellent two-minute video summary):

“Politicians … use these policies to claim credit for attracting investment… This book … shows how such pandering appears to be associated with growing economic inequality. As national and subnational governments surrender valuable tax revenue to attract businesses in the vain hope of long-term economic growth, they are left with fiscal shortfalls that have been filled through regressive sales taxes, police fines and penalties, and cuts to public education.”

Beyond these general problems with economic development deals, this particular one is especially suspect because of who the developer is and because of the financial implications of the deal.

Issues with RIDA’s Ira Mitzner

RIDA was founded by David Mitzner, the father of current CEO Ira Mitzner. It is a privately owned and family-run multibillion dollar company based in Houston. Billionaire Ira Mitzner is a big-money donor to Republicans in Texas and Florida, including to DeSantis’ super PAC and to Ted Cruz. He was the chair of the committee that brought the 2024 RNC to Houston, which resulted in Trump’s second term. Mitzner is also an important pro-Zionist voice in Texas, a big donor to AIPAC, and 2019 AIPAC Gala Chair. 

Additionally, he was appointed to the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission (THGAAC) by Abbott. The THGAAC’s 2024 Study on Antisemitism in Texas was partly responsible for the atrocious (and likely unconstitutional) slew of bills passed last year by the Texas Legislature that enshrined in Texas law and education code the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism (see page 9 of the report). (Incidentally, those bills passed with the support of most Democrats in the Legislature, including locals Hinajosa, Talarico, Cole, Flores, and Bucy.) Another recommendation of the THGAAC is an anti-masking law.

The Study on Antisemitism in Texas repeats false claims that the Anti-Gaza-War protests were anti-Semitic, and it justifies the police crackdown on protesters: “Tensions at UT Austin reached a crescendo at anti-Israel protests in April 2024 that required intervention by state troopers and campus police” (page 7, my emphasis). The report also calls out activists who went to city councils to demand a ceasefire resolution, falsely calling them anti-Semitic: “At public hearings in many cities, anti-Israel activists have regularly gone beyond their free speech rights to bully and intimidate elected officials and Jewish community members, using antisemitic language and sometimes being forcibly removed by police” (page 7). Additionally, the report praises Texas’s “lead” on anti-BDS legislation and Abbott’s pro-Israel statements and actions (pages 10-11). Mitzner is, in part, responsible for this report.

Do Austinites want our city to be entering into deals with people like Ira Mitzner, especially given the irregular, fast-track process the Council has used, and the unanswered financial questions about the deal that remain?

Irregular Process & Unanswered Financial Questions 

In addition to the unsavory connections of Mitzner, this development deal also raises serious financial and process questions.

At the April 23^rd meeting, Council passed an ordinance that “waives the staff presentation, public announcement and portal setup, and public hearing requirements” normally required for economic development deals. This prevents public scrutiny of the deal, which is especially problematic because “the structure of the agreement and its long-term cost to the city remain unclear, however, with key financial projections and final terms still under negotiation and not yet publicly released” (see this news article). We do not know what is actually in this deal, yet Council is fast-tracking it. Among the things that we do not know is the projected amount of the tax rebates—we don’t know how much this will cost us.

Typically, convention center and hotel development deals are sold to the public because they have “economic spillovers”: convention-goers typically spend money locally in restaurants and bars, retail stores, other local attractions, etc.—the argument goes—thus, supporting local businesses and jobs¹. Some of that rhetoric is in the staff presentation, but this project is specifically described as a “self-contained” (page 3) “destination hotel and conference resort” (page 2), located far from other local businesses at the COTA facility. This means that attendees of future events at the RIDA development are unlikely to spend much money outside the “resort” itself or in local businesses, severely limiting any “economic spillover.” The City’s claims about the “economic impact” of this project are disingenuous.

The deal does include public parkland, $1.5 million into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, in addition to the peace agreement with Unite Here. These are all great benefits, but the city cannot tell us at what cost to the public. How much are we spending from HOT funds to get parkland and $1.5 million in the Trust Fund? We are not told.

However, we can make some calculations based on assumptions that we do know: 

• The deal will rebate 8.5% of gross room revenue from the hotel for 30 years. 
• The hotel is planned to have 1,000 rooms. 
• Standard rooms at one of RIDA’s comparable developments, the Omni Orlando Resort, are around $250 per night. 
• The average annual hotel occupancy rate in Austin is somewhere around 65%. 

These are conservative numbers, so we can conservatively approximate the amount of HOT tax to be rebated to RIDA as:

8.5% x 1,000 rooms X 65% occupancy X $250/night X 365 nights X 30 years

=

~$150,000,000

That is $5 million per year for 30 years, with the main public benefit being 900 jobs. That’s about $5,500 of public money per job per year, which means that the public is effectively covering approximately 10% of RIDA’s payroll for 30 years, guaranteeing Ira Mitzner larger profits, subsidized by Austinites. 

This is what economic development looks like in Austin.

The item should be coming back to the council in next few month, so keep your eyes out for it to appear on an upcoming agenda—and be ready to write, call, and testify against this bad deal.

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¹It’s important to remember that most jobs in hospitality and food service are low-paying jobs. For example, of the job categories that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics uses, in Austin food service pays the lowest, at $31,200 on average, which is under 60% of the median wage for our area. Tourism-related economic activity tends to rely on a low-paid workforce; economic development deals do nothing to improve pay or working conditions in “spillover” jobs, yet those jobs are counted as part of the “public benefits” that we are paying for.

The post Troubling Economic Development Deal in the Works at City Council first appeared on Red Fault.

The post Metro DC DSA Urges DC Council to Put Working People Before Autonomous Vehicle Companies appeared first on Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America.

by Justin W

I Love Boosters is a story about a trio of “boosters,” women who steal from department stores and resell the items to the community, and their fight against a local billionaire. The billionaire’s name is Christie Smith, whom one of them admires so much she has her platitudes memorized, which makes for a complicated relationship that evolves as the movie goes along. The CEO is very clearly a genius, having graduated college at 17 and spent years working in physics departments, but her platitudes still sound just as vapid and amorphous as any other CEO or motivational speaker. During their heists the trio find a Chinese worker who steals the designer wear so quickly they legitimately believes she has a magic bag, and given that this is a Boots Riley film, you believe it too until it’s revealed to be a teleporter. 

The Chinese factory worker, Jianhu, is stealing the clothes as a way to attack Christie Smith for the horrible conditions in the factory she and her family work in. This brings the trio and Jianhu together as they start stealing more from Christie Smith. As they’re in the process of stealing clothes a discovery is made: The teleporter does more than teleport, it deconstructs and accelerates the contradictions as well. It becomes clear this is a machine based on Dialectical Materialism as the machine brings two things together (teleports), it deconstructs (as shown when they deconstruct clothes into their base components AND when they aim it at a person and turn that person into their parents having sex), and it accelerates the contradictions of a given entity (a cop car is turned into a parody of overmilitarization and reconstructs a person from their parents from before). 

This leads to the personal conflicts in the movie and what I believe to be the thesis. We have the main character Corvette and her best friend Sade, one who is trying to overcome the ills brought about by capitalism (Sade) and the other who is so lonely a loneliness demon tries to pick her up on multiple occasions (Corvette). Sade sees MLM marketing as the way through the ills of capitalism and Corvette sees vengeance as her way out of her loneliness. This is resolved when they link their struggle against Christie Smith to the workers both in China who are making the clothes as well as the workers building a union to stand up against the billionaire. The resolution is built through the combining of the efforts of all workers against Christie Smith and the fashion industry, starting in China and the United States but then the rest of the world, and the community organizing that needs to happen to build those strikes and protests. 

We see this through Corvette rejecting the loneliness demon and her confronting the rolling ball of bills, tickets, and failures of Corvette’s past (seen the entire movie following her just out of sight of everyone else), which shrinks once she has a community to help her deal with those problems. The problems are still there, just reduced to a more manageable size. 

Given this is a Boots Riley film, there are some incredible design and artistic choices that combine to create wonderful metaphors. The CEOs office is tilted, showing her skewed view of the world. The loneliness demon who has been around for millenia can only remember two years back when they were lost in a Target, or, one might say, lost in a capitalist hellscape (please listen to the song “Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash). At one point some characters who have been seen interviewed on TV take off their skins, revealing that they play characters on TV (like workers arguing for less pay and benefits as well as Candace Owens, among others) or lead MLMs to generate in people the need for more brutal cop tactics, anti-worker propaganda, and false solutions (like MLMs) as part of a campaign created by the billionaire to reduce in workers the desire for real solutions like collective action. 

The skin suits also demonstrate how those with anti-worker sentiments but still working class themselves literally sell their identities to be used and interchanged by anyone who needs them for whatever purpose. They give away their ability to identify themselves for the purpose of fulfilling the whims and desires of a billionaire. In true Boots Riley fashion, he tries to make the metaphors as overt as possible, with a little bit of surrealism thrown in the mix. The comedic elements of the movie shine through these metaphors and are so littered throughout I am very surprised the movie isn’t considered a comedy. Boots Riley’s love of storytelling and visual metaphor make him one of my favorite directors and this was terrific and just the right amount of silliness to push through the slightly radical position he’s leading towards through the film.

But this wouldn’t be a Marxist take on a very overtly Marxist movie (the main catalyst for the movie is a Dialectic Materialism machine) without some discussion on the theory presented. The Dialectical Materialism machine is initially seen only as a teleporter, but later in the movie a union organizer explains the full functionality, urging the trio to use it to help them accelerate people into the union they’re building. Initially, the Velvet Gang (the name of the boosters’ group) turns her down in favor of their plan to simply steal from the billionaire thinking that would be enough. As the movie progresses and we reach the climax of the film, the machine is used to link the struggles of the union in the United States to the factory workers in China, creating the solidarity needed to fight against their collective boss. 

Through the explanation of the functions of the machine we get a decent description of dialectical materialism, in a way that is simple enough that we can progress with the movie, while still being faithful to the concept itself. I think Boots’ decision to purposefully inject actual theory into the movie gives a stepping stone for those who like the movie something to grasp onto when deciding to work on their own politics, but does mean the resolution of the movie cannot be as explicit in the direction I think we should go. The CEO is not removed nor a communist revolution waged by the end of this film, instead a worldwide strike against the fashion industry is started, and characters from the movie are seen leading the union in their fight for a better wage, though the main characters are not participants. The most recent film to have such overt Marxist themes, also made by a black director, is Sinners. 

Sinners, for those who haven’t seen it (Why haven’t you? Go watch it!) has a black community fighting against a vampire who uses racism to escape from justice and controls the actions of those whom he has bitten. It is a story about a blood sucking parasite who had oppression forced on him years ago and wants to forcibly create the community he lost due to colonialism and imperialism by stealing the music and soul of a community that hasn’t yet lost themselves to that same oppressive force. The black community fights and kills the vampire, in a bloody struggle that lasts all night, ending with one character killing the racists who came to kill him. In interviews following the release of the film, director Ryan Coogler was asked multiple times about the Marxist implications of the movie and what was being said through the metaphors, every time keeping silent about what he wrote. He could not, at any point, be explicit in the aims and messaging of his movie, lest he lose what position he has to make films like Sinners again. He was able to show the action of the theory, but wasn’t allowed to be explicit in the ideology that created it. 

I see Boots Riley’s choice to name the theory but not show the action as the flip side of the coin. Even on a good day Hollywood would not allow both sides of the coin to be shown on screen at the same time, as Capital knows what it can allow anti-capitalist art to show, as well as what it can’t. Were I Love Boosters to show the fall of capitalism and say the words “Dialectical Materialism,” a producer would have simply shut down the movie and not let it see the light of day. There must be a balance struck between what can be said and what can be shown while still being funded by those who would otherwise be the target of said action or the villain of theory. The theory of the film is presented in a relatively clear way, but the film needed to reel in the actions shown to compensate. When we say “The Revolution will not be televised” this is an example. You can see that revolutions happen or you can hear theory be spoken, but never the twain shall meet, at least not on the big screen. So we need to read between the lines, and see the direction Boots Riley or Ryan Coogler are pointing us in. (On a related note, come join us at Book Club sometime.) 

Overall, this movie is terrific and I recommend everyone go see it. The bright colors, wonderful fashion, comedic style, and the only just so slightly over the top surrealism blend together into a wonderful movie that I would definitely watch again, and recommend others watch too. Combined with the theory hilariously intertwined into the movie, it is one of the best movies I have ever seen and I want to hear your thoughts on it too.

The post I Love “I Love Boosters” appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

[Federal] US CONGRESS CA-26: Chris Espinosa

We have been represented by a terrible establishment AIPAC shill for far too long, and we have a candidate who is anti-establishment and not beholden to the donor class.

The Ventura County DSA is proud to endorse Chris Espinosa.

Sources:

• CA DSA
• The Acorn
• ACLU
• CAIR California
• VC Star

[Federal] US CONGRESS CA-24: Helena Pasquarella

Incumbent Salud Carbajal (D) is running for his 6th term. He is an establishment democrat and has a disappointing track record for the working class. He is beholden to the donor class, with campaign contributions from organizations like AIPAC, SpaceX and Raytheon. He also accepted funds from Samuel Bankman-Fried, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for defrauding billions of dollars from thousands of people.

Carbajal continuously supported Israel during the genocide in Gaza, despite multiple town halls where his constituents directly expressed their outrage to him for his inhumane positions and refusal to acknowledge the genocide. His voting record reflects that he supports the following measures:

    – Supplying billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel (HR 2670 in 2023 and HR 6090 in 2024)
    – Opposing the BDS movement (HR 246 in 2019)
    – Codifying the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel (HR 894 in 2023 and HR 6090 in 2024)
    – Censuring House Representative and DSA member Rashida Tlaib for her support of Palestinian humanity (HR 845 in 2023)

Carbajal has crossed the aisle to vote alongside MAGA republicans on several harmful bills. In 2022, while acknowledging that “a good part of the Republican Party” has transformed into an anti-democratic cult loyal to Trump, he also stated his belief in “collaborating and creating a collaborative environment” with the MAGA republicans. Here are a few examples of measures he supported in his collaboration with MAGA politicians:

    – Enabling Trump to legally receive bribes in the form of cryptocurrency (GENIUS Act in 2025)
    – Legalizing the detention/deportation of immigrants who haven’t committed any crimes (HR 3697 in 2017)
    – Expanding the power of ICE and the DHS to collect American citizens’ personal information under the guise of fighting retail theft (HR 2853, aka CORCA, in May 2026)
    – Denying gender-affirming healthcare to children (National Defense Authorization Act in 2024)
    – Denouncing socialism (House Concurrent Resolution 58 in 2025)

Carbajal has shown time and again that he prioritizes corporate interests and the donor class over the working class, has no regard for the lives of Palestinians, and is willing to help advance Trump’s agenda.

Salud Carbajal’s challenger in the Democratic Party is Sarah Bacon, a former tech executive who is currently the vice president of external affairs for UC Santa Barbara’s Graduate Student Association. This will be her first time running for office. Overall, her platform aligns reasonably well with ours and she seems sincere and competent, but in this race she’s a Democrat running on a reform ticket. We feel the Democratic party needs to be transformed or supplanted, not just reformed.

Our preferred candidate is Helena Pasquarella, a DSA member and the Director at the Department of Peace in Ojai. She previously ran in the primary for CA-24 in 2024 as a Democrat, securing 9.1% of the votes and finishing 3rd. She is the only candidate – other than incumbent -Carbajal who has previously run for office.

Pasquarella is running as a member of the Peace and Freedom Party this election cycle and has been endorsed by the Green Party of Santa Barbara. Her platform includes Medicare for all, cutting funding to Israel, immigration reform, universal rent control, defunding the police, and supporting the Green New Deal. Pasquarella has recognized that Israel is committing a genocoide in Gaza and has pledged to refuse campaign contributions from corporations and their PACs. If elected, she has said she will proudly promote the DSA ideals into her decision making in Congress.

DSA Ventura-County is proud to endorse our fellow DSA member Helena Pasquarella.

Sources:

• Santa Barbara Independent
• Vote View
• The Sacramento Bee
• Federal Office of Public Affairs – Press Release
• Reverse Canary Missions
• Daily KOS
• Brad Lander (X.com)
• ED Hat Santa Barbara

[CA State] Lieutenant Governor: Oliver Ma

(Via CA DSA)

Very much like the governor’s race, the race for lieutenant governor contains a lot of candidates that leave much to be desired. Fiona Ma, California’s State Treasurer, and Josh Fryday, one of Gruesome Gavin’s high-ranking appointees, are the main establishment candidates. Fiona Ma has the bulk of endorsements from the Californian political establishment, with politicians like incumbent Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis and the majority of organized labor behind her. Along with Fiona Ma’s uninspiring establishment political line, she has been accused of sexual harassment and racial discrimination by a former staffer.

Occupying the “progressive” lane is the former mayor of Stockton, Michael Tubbs. Since Tubbs’s single term as mayor, where he is most known for his attempts to implement a universal basic income (UBI) program, he has led efforts in the non-profit sphere to combat wealth inequality with his End Poverty in California (EPIC) organization. While Tubbs is certainly running as a progressive and is endorsed by members of the progressive Californian establishment like former Senator Laphonza Butler, Representatives Lateefah Simon and Robert Garcia, and Mayor of Oakland Barabara Lee, his commitment to advancing left politics is not entirely certain.

To start off with, Tubbs endorsed billionaire centrist and former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg for president in 2020, even while democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s campaign swept California, receiving almost 36% of the primary vote to Bloomberg’s 12%. Bernie even won Tubbs’s home of San Joaquin county. On the campaign trail, Tubbs has certainly evoked economic populism, but revealed sparingly little policy- especially policy that results in real redistribution and the elevation of workers over owners. He has also been conspicuously silent on the ever-escalating violence, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine.

Luckily, there is another choice: Oliver Ma. Oliver is CA DSA’s first-ever endorsed statewide candidate and is running on an explicitly democratic socialist platform that articulates a vision of a California that works for working people—not oligarchs and billionaires.

Oliver immigrated to California at age seven and has dedicated his career as a lawyer to protecting the rights of tenants, immigrants, and workers. As an immigrant rights attorney with the ACLU, Oliver has been on the front lines of defending Californians against ICE and the federal government’s terror campaign. When elected, he will shut down the for-profit detention centers that have proliferated across our state, ending the profits made from our exploitation.

One of the primary areas of influence of the Lieutenant Governor is over California’s higher education system. Currently, University of California schools alone have over $32 billion invested in assets tied to genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Not only is Oliver the only candidate to describe the atrocities in Gaza as genocide, he is the only candidate who has promised to divest these funds from Israel and ensure that our higher education institutions are not funding atrocities overseas.

Oliver is committed to building something that lasts beyond his campaign and, in this, building DSA statewide. Oliver understands, like all democratic socialists must, that an organized movement of working people is more than one candidate or one campaign. If you are not in DSA yet, join today and get involved with our statewide organization or in your local chapter’s work.

For more information on Oliver Ma, go to: https://oliverma2026.com/ and vote for Oliver Ma before June 2.

Candidate Recommendations

Recommendations are personal statements from members of DSA and are not elected endorsements from the chapter

[State] CA Governor – Ramsey Robinson

By T.

Opportunism and class collaboration have historically not brought about a strong socialist movement, independent organizing has. If the current situation is unique enough that we should diverge from the lessons learned by past socialist projects and change strategy, that argument has not been made. It is not the job of socialists to further empower a billionaire, to funnel people’s support into the bourgeois Democratic party, the ruling class has enough help doing this as it stands. There is a tendency among some to say that if socialists are not winning directly we should strategically align ourselves with the winning side, but in this case the winner is still capitalist exploitation. This is not just our opinion, this is a long standing socialist strategy that has seen great effect in the past.

“Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.”
-Karl Marx, 1850

Running as and voting for socialists provides valuable benefits in building visibility for socialist organizations, growing class consciousness, emphasizing organizational independence from bourgeois parties, and measuring support among the population. To frame socialists voting for a socialist candidate who represents their values as simply a “protest vote” while advocating for socialists to vote for a capitalist candidate is belittling and disrespectful to our comrades who dedicated their resources to the socialist campaigns. As Eugene Debs once said, “I would rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don’t want and get it.” If voting for a socialist, such as Ramsey Robinson of the Peace and Freedom Party, is purely a symbolic protest, then what is it called when a billionaire promises to raise taxes or arrest ICE officers? Less than symbolic, this is an empty promise. Voting socialist is only symbolic support if voting is where your organizing ends.

We understand the disagreement is not over which candidate is preferable in and of themselves, the disagreement is over which campaign is worth supporting in a race. This being said, we must understand that our endeavors do not last for one election cycle, one act of praxis does not exist independently from the others. The question we must ask ourselves is: what course of action will result in a stronger socialist movement? Voting for Steyer to further empower one of the richest, most powerful individuals in our state, or voting for Ramsey Robinson and adding momentum to California’s growing socialist movement? For many of us, the answer is solidly Ramsey Robinson. A better world is possible and that world starts with standing by what we believe in, and standing in solidarity with workers.

Vote socialist! Vote Peace and Freedom in 2026! Vote Ramsey Robinson for governor!

[State] CA Governor – Tom Steyer

By G.

The California Gubernatorial field is huge. And with the open primary system, the two candidates who receive the most votes will advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. As it stands, the only non-Republican candidates in position to advance are billionaire Tom Steyer and attorney Xavier Becerra. 

After Eric Slalwell resigned when accusations of sexual misconduct and alleged rape emerged, Xavier Becerra became the preferred candidate of establishment democrats. As Attorney General of California during the first Trump administration, Becerra strongly advocated for lowering the cost of medicines that were developed with taxpayer dollars. But in 2023, as Joe Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he completely reversed his position at the behest of pharmaceutical lobbyists and rejected a petition by prostate cancer patients to lower the cost of the medicine they needed and couldn’t afford. Becerra has refused to recognize that Israel is committing a genocide. As a member of the House of Representatives, Becerra voted to authorize the use of armed forces against Iraq (HJRES 114 in 2002). Under his watch as HHS, 85,000 migrant children went missing. Becerra pushed to move children out of shelters quickly, resulting in the loosening of protections that were in place, including the screening of sponsors. Several of these kids were subjected to child labor in places like slaughterhouses, which resulted in cases of severe injuries and death. Becerra refused to take accountability for his failures. Becerra’s endorsements include Julia Brownley and Salud Carbajal, two Zionist supporting politicians. He has also received the maximum campaign endorsement from Chevron and has doubled down on receiving their support. 

Tom Steyer has a far more progressive platform than Becerra. Despite being a billionaire, he has stated his commitment to be a class traitor and advocate against his financial interests, including supporting the California Billionaire Tax that will be on the ballot. He supports the abolishment of ICE, calling them a violent extremist group. Steyer’s anti-ICE position goes beyond rhetoric. He has a 5-step plan to prosecute ICE agents if elected governor. Steyer supports Medicare for All and has been endorsed by CAIR and the Bernie Sanders organization Our Revolution.

But there are some red flags that immediately stand out. He is a billionaire who made his wealth in horrible ways. He founded an investment firm called Farallon that invested almost $90 million in a private prison company that runs the largest ICE detention centers in California. It is something he has acknowledged and says he regrets. Steyer also used his hedge fund to finance fossil fuel projects. Today he claims to be a climate change activist and has tried to distance himself from Farallon but he never fully cut ties with the firm he founded. Steyer has stopped short of acknowledging that Israel is committing a genocide and has stated that the focus should be on Iran rather than holding Israel accountable for their crimes against humanity. But he has condemned AIPAC, saying there’s no place for dark money in politics.

In an ideal world, socialist Ramsey Robinson would be the leading candidate. But unfortunately, he has no chance of winning. The reality is that the only viable candidates to oppose Steve Hilton, the pro-ICE Republican candidate, are Steyer and Becerra, neither of whom deserve the endorsement of DSA. That being said, I will be voting for Tom Steyer because his platform is far more progressive. He has not been endorsed by oil lobbyists and Zionists like Becerra has. It’s a matter of public record that Becerra has capitulated to the capital class over the working class when given power in government. And while Steyer has many flaws, he has pledged to run on a progressive platform that includes taxing billionaires, abolishing ICE, housing first initiatives, advocating for trans rights, and Medicare for all. It remains to be seen if Tom Steyer will follow through on his commitment to be a class traitor, but his platform is far superior to Becerra’s, and I would much rather Steyer be the candidate to oppose Hilton.

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