Every protection you have at work, every hour shaved off a seventy-hour week, every child who is not working in a factory right now, exists because workers organized and forced it.

The bosses know this. Which is why they never stopped organizing against you.

While you were working your shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was spending more money lobbying Congress than any other organization in the country. While you were figuring out how to pay your rent, the American Legislative Exchange Council was writing model legislation in hotel conference rooms, handing it to state legislators, and watching it become law, here in Tennessee and in thirty other states. While you were deciding whether the union was worth the trouble, your employer was paying a union avoidance consultant massive sums of money to make sure you decided no.

This is their business model: spending untold amounts of money to not have to pay you more or work you less.

The union-busting industry generates an estimated $340 million a year. Consultants train managers to hold captive audience meetings, to identify and isolate organizers, to make workers feel that a union would only bring conflict into an otherwise peaceful workplace.

The conflict, of course, was already there. They just don’t want you to think you can do anything about it.
“Right to work” did not spring up spontaneously in twenty-seven states. It was coordinated, funded, and executed by a network of foundations and advocacy organizations that have been at this for decades. Tennessee passed its right-to-work law in 1947. The infrastructure that built that law is still running — in fact, it spent buckets of money in 2022 to get that law enshrined in the state constitution, and that law wasn’t even facing a threat at the time.

So, if the people who own your workplace are organized into associations, coordinated through lobbying groups, advised by consultants, and protected by laws that they helped write — what does it mean that most workers are not organized at all?

It means the fight is not even. Every individual grievance, every whispered complaint in the break room, every person who got fired for speaking up — all of it runs into an apparatus designed to absorb from the start to absorb exactly that — one person, one complaint, one firing at a time.

There is only one thing that changes that math: We organize. We build relationships with the person next to us on the line, the one across the aisle, the one who has been there twenty years and knows where the bodies are buried. We stop thinking about work as something that happens to us and start thinking about it as somewhere we have power — if we build it.

The bosses figured this out a long time ago. That is why they work so hard to make sure you don’t.

I’ll be honest, I was a little skeptical when I first heard about the effort to achieve universal health care in Maine through a statewide citizen initiative.

Not because we shouldn’t try this by referendum (I’m a “by any means necessary” kind of guy on good policy), but because this initiative is a “Resolve.” Resolves are mostly non-binding short term expressions of opinion, not actual enforceable law. A directive to send a strongly-worded letter of disdain, offer praise for an achievement, or maybe to create a temporary task force to do a study that will end up on a shelf.

In short, they are mostly just to make a point.

Not that I am opposed to making a point. Indeed, in 2003, as a state senator, one of my proudest moments was sponsoring a resolve opposing the pending war in Iraq. The Maine Senate became the first state senate in the nation to go on record opposing that senseless attack, which certainly made a statement in the form of national headlines. But that was all it did. Pres. George W. Bush went through with his attack (in case you missed it).

So, when I saw this initiative I thought, why spend all the time and money collecting signatures – and then additional time and money to win a campaign – just to make a statement? In truth, we already know Mainers want universal health care, as poll after poll has shown.

But then I read the initiative.

While it is indeed a resolve, it is crafted in such a way that might just actually work. Instead of crafting the details of a complex universal single-payer health care law that the industry can tear apart in a well-funded misinformation campaign, the resolve simply, but very specifically, directs the legislature to come up with and pass said legislation. 

While a resolve directing the legislature to come up with legislation certainly leaves some concern for what that legislation might ultimately look like, the initiative is pretty precise at making clear what it must include and achieve.

Here’s how the resolve appears to work. It directs the legislature to come up with legislation to create a universal health care plan that will reduce costs, preserve choice, and pay providers expeditiously. It’s very specific in terms of these values.

But what it also says is that said legislation must, “Ensure that all residents of the State possess comprehensive, publicly funded health care coverage.” [emphasis added]

Whoa. 

That is not simply directing the legislature to nibble around the edges with ineffective market-based solutions. That gets right at the heart of the best solution possible – a single payer health care system like Medicare for All that the people have been clamoring for.

This kind of reminds me how Barack Obama gave the reins of creating ObamaCare to Nancy Pelosi and the Congress. Instead of drafting his own plan, he asked them to do it, as long as it met certain criteria to earn his signature.

Now, to be clear, as we learned under former Gov. Paul LePage – who refused to implement the voter approved elimination of the tipped wage, or the expansion of Medicaid that voters approved – the legislature/governor can always try to ignore the will of this vote. And, as mentioned earlier, since the legislature has the leeway to craft the bill, that does give corporate health care lobbyists a shot at trying to influence what the final legislation looks like.

But that is a battle we will have to fight either way, resolve or law.

In the meantime, getting this initiative on the ballot for 2027 is an important step toward getting a publicly funded single-payer health care system in Maine enacted. I’m looking forward to signing the petition on Election Day. You should too.

***

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Beacon, sign up for the free Beacon newsletter here.

The post Why I am excited to sign the petition to pass Health Care for All Mainers appeared first on Pine & Roses.

Welcome to the new website of the DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group. Many thanks to Devon Bussell, Ian Hyzy, Matthew Carroll, Ron Hogan, and content editors Maxine Phillips and Russell Fox, who have worked many volunteer hours to bring all of our activities and resources together. This site is a work in progress, and we hope you’ll give us feedback and ideas for what you want to see and potential writers and topics. Look at our categories and let us know if you want to write something for us. Query us at religioussocialism@dsacommittees.org first. —Ed.

Today, as the Religious Right threatens the rights and lives of so many in this country and uses religion as an excuse to wage endless war, we’re heartened by the renewed spirit of progressive religious folk.  They may not all be socialists, but they know in which direction their moral compass points. This article from the Guardian describes some of what’s going on.

The post Righting the Wrongs of the Christian Right appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

As DSA gets stronger, and as we get better at winning elections, more candidates will seek our endorsement. In some chapters, this has reached the point that multiple DSA members are interested in running for the same seat, and they all seek the chapter’s endorsement. This has not happened yet in our chapter, but it is only a matter of time, and we should be prepared for that to happen. In this piece, I will explain why we should view the DSA endorsement process as the determination of who the sole DSA candidate is in a given race, and expect all members to abide by the result.

Liberalism in Electoral Work

Many people in DSA, especially those of us with prior electoral experience, come from liberal organizing backgrounds. As a result, we have learned various assumptions about how politics works, and elections in particular. One of these assumptions is based on the fact that everyone has the legal right to run for any office (as long as they meet the legal qualifications). Comrades who still have a liberal view of electoral work view the decision to run for office as an individual decision. A candidate may confer with their family, friends, and political allies before deciding to run, but the decision is still made by the individual. Just as the liberal ideological framework in general privileges the capitalist class, this individual decision-making privileges the wealthy¹. A well-off candidate, with well-off family and friends, can easily start a campaign as an individual and raise enough money to be taken seriously by institutional actors. However, if the candidate is not well-off, and most of their friends and family are not, then they will have a much harder time raising enough money as an individual to be taken seriously. While there are individual socialists who are well-off, in order to build a strong socialist project, we need a scalable model that can work for working class candidates regardless of personal wealth.

Part of the socialist model of organizing, whether electoral or otherwise, is that major campaigns do not start as a result of individual decisions; they start from collective decisions made by a party². In order for electoral work to be a viable terrain of struggle for the socialist movement, we need to view the decision to launch an electoral campaign through this lens. Running a socialist candidate for office is a decision made by the organization, not by the individual candidate. As we work together to convert ourselves from atomized liberal individuals to members of a socialist organization, we need to identify these elements of liberal ideology and replace them with socialist frameworks. Granted, any decision made by the organization will start with an idea proposed by an individual member, but we need to draw a distinction between the origin of the idea and the point of decision: while any member can (and should) suggest that they or someone else would be a good candidate to run for any particular office, only the organization makes the decision about who will run for which office.

Socialist Framework in Practice

Applying the socialist framework to electoral work, the decision of whether or not to run a campaign is made by the organization, and then it is a campaign by the organization, not by an individual. In a cadre organization (an organization that only has active members and no paper members), this would mean that all the members would actively support the campaign (to the extent possible given their commitments to other campaigns). However, DSA is not a cadre organization, so there is no requirement that everyone support the campaign. Regardless, just like with any other campaign, we would expect all members to at least refrain from acting in opposition to the campaign, and running against a DSA-endorsed candidate would certainly count as acting in opposition to the campaign.

Because we cannot instantly replace the liberal framework with the socialist framework, we should expect that there will still be some electoral campaigns that start from individual decisions rather than organizational decisions. Thus, we will have some members who continue their campaigns even if they do not get the chapter’s endorsement. Over time, this should become less common, but in the short term, we should at least make sure that we don’t have members actively opposing the chapter’s campaigns by running against endorsed candidates.

Why do we run candidates?

There are multiple different perspectives on why we run candidates for elected office. The Bernstein model is to elect socialist majorities in legislative bodies and pass laws that will transition to socialism. The Miliband model assumes that the capitalist class will resist such laws, leading to a revolutionary rupture. Other models assume that the capitalist class will initiate a crackdown before we can elect a socialist majority, so the non-electoral wings of the party need to be as strong as possible before the crackdown comes. In these models, socialists in elected office need to serve as tribunes of the people and/or organizers, using their office to strengthen the other wings of the party.

While these perspectives have significant disagreements, they share one common feature: socialist elected officials will have to take actions that are risky to their political career but serve the interests of the party. In order to make this decision, the SIO will have to prioritize the interests of the organization above their individual political career. While we can never be absolutely confident that any SIO will put the interests of the party above their political career in all situations, we can at least implement a filter to identify some of the potential candidates who will prioritize their own political career: requiring a commitment to abide by the result of the endorsement process. Continuing to run even if the chapter endorses a different candidate would be an act of prioritizing one’s individual political career over the interests of the organization. Thus, someone who refuses to commit to end their campaign if the chapter endorses a different candidate for that race is a candidate who would be more likely to prioritize their individual political career over the interests of the organization in other contexts as well.

Instrumental case for democracy

However, prioritizing one’s individual political career is not the only reason why a candidate might be inclined to continue running even if someone else gets the endorsement. The candidate may simply believe that they are the best possible candidate for the organization to run for that office. Presumably, all of our candidates believe this, because they would not have agreed to run otherwise. However, believing oneself to be the best choice for the organization to run for an office does not mean that one should continue to run after the organization decides to run someone else, for the simple reason that everyone can be wrong sometimes.

Although we believe that democratic decision-making is inherently good, it also has instrumental value: Because we can all be wrong, a single person making a decision always has a risk of making the wrong decision. However, if the decision is made by a vote among multiple people who all have sufficient knowledge of the situation that they are more likely to be correct than not, then the group decision is much more likely to be correct than any one individual. The advantage provided by democracy is even greater when we engage in deliberation prior to the vote, sharing the relevant knowledge that each of us have, and then test our positions through carrying out the democratical decision, expanding our pool of available knowledge. 

In any major decisions that we make as an organization, we all need the humility to accept that the group decision is more likely to be correct than any one of us is as an individual. This principle applies just as much to choosing which candidate to run as it does to any other decision about a campaign. Thus, even though a candidate believes themself to be the best choice for the organization to run for a particular office, humility with respect to democratic decision-making and prioritizing the interests of the organization over the candidate’s individual political career still require that the candidate abide by the results of the endorsement process and not run if a different candidate is endorsed.

by Eric Herde

1. “Capitalist class” is not a synonym for “people with more money”, and in this case it’s technically the level of wealth of the candidate and their family and friends that matters, not their actual relationship to the means of production. ︎
2. Or party-like organization, such as DSA ︎

Newspapers publish letters from Portland DSA members all the time. Occasionally, the takes are too hot for corporate news media. We are publishing those letters here.

Portland City Councilors: Pass Police/ICE Mask Ban

At a time when our community’s trust in federal law enforcement has reached its nadir, it is crucial that the City take steps to restore our faith and confidence in those sworn to protect Portlanders and uphold the laws. The “Right to Know Who is Policing You” ordinance would do just that. When we authorize uniformed and armed law enforcement to patrol our city, and at times to restrict our freedoms, the ability to immediately recognize those officers and distinguish them from masked and anonymous vigilantes or impersonators can be a matter of life and death.

Last month the legislature passed and the governor signed HB 4138, directing state and local police agencies to implement policies like those found in the proposed ordinance. Policeofficers, whether local, state or federal, are public servants whom we entrust with solemn responsibility. This ordinance would codify the City’s policy as one of “trust, but verify,” grounded in transparency and backstopped by accountability in cases where that trust is misplaced or abused.

Requiring clear, visible identification, including recognizable uniforms identifying the specific agency and individual officer,protects all members of our community including sworn officers themselves. This ordinance is an important step toward repairing the damage that has been done to community–police relations in recent years, and underlines our commitment to the bedrock principle of the rule of law, no matter how tattered and torn that principle may be in Washington, DC.

I urge every member of city council to support this ordinance.

-Michael W.

And beginning the feminist conversation with myself

This is an opinion piece written by an individual member and was not voted on by membership. Opinion pieces from members do not reflect the opinions of other members and are not chapter approved statements.

2/10. Would not recommend. This book plays up some of the worst stereotypes and effects of white American culture, and it does so through horrific themes. Suicide and incest are pervasively spoonfed to you throughout the novel in ways that make me sick. Hate that. Hated the book.

Unfortunately, Irving’s emotional jiu-jitsu and exploration of dark and morbid topics is supposedly part of the fun. He’s been praised for his matter-of-fact presentations of heavy themes. Failure to find stability in a family, the loss of loved ones to a plane crash, and suicide are all explored to magnify the absurdity of loss’s effects on us. There is a tremendous depth to his works at times. This is, in theory, the work of someone who truly understands the human condition.

But come on. He doesn’t need to romanticize everything morbid. I don’t know what incest looks like with two consenting adults (as is so tastefully portrayed in the novel), but it doesn’t look like that. I mean, I would know. I haven’t spent the last year grappling with the internalized misogyny my family instilled in itself to keep victims quiet just to think the book was accurate. Irving barely explores the difficulty of finding, documenting, and addressing households affected by incestual abuse—no matter how often that abuse happens. Sure, I wasn’t directly impacted, but I had my close encounters. I knew enough to know how it worked. If nothing happened, it wasn’t going to be talked about. An odd interaction with an uncle; a strange drawing with familiar faces- that’s nothing. And if something did happen? If an abuser was amongst the family again? If you told someone what was happening? Don’t worry. It’s taken care of. Don’t. Talk. About. It.

It won’t be reported.

And if it is, what happens in the courtroom stays in the courtroom. There will be no family dinner-table discussion. 

Look, all I’m saying is if John Irving is gonna discuss the perverted nature of our society, he should do it right. I’m aware most of his writings begin about a decade or two before the Epstein class really started to dig into our cultural framework, but I just think that’s no excuse. For me, once what was going on really started to click, I began to ask questions. Like a half-decent writer, I tried to make sense of what was happening. I tried to understand it so that I could talk about it correctly. Obviously, that’s been difficult and so far unsuccessful. I still feel the effects of asking those questions in myself, in the ways I shut down. There’s no correct way to talk about it when there’s no one willing to talk.

So I guess I’m just upset that I don’t think Irving accounted for that in this novel—in any of his novels. I mean, he has like 20 of them and the majority portray incest, so I think this might just be his thing and not something he’s “unafraid to talk about”. And he still hasn’t taken the time to get it right. He talks about it the way most people misinterpret Lolita. As if it’s almost a beautiful thing in his misunderstood eyes. But whatever. He’s gonna get the praise he’s gonna get.

It feels like Irving has this self-righteous air around the subject, like he understands it differently and can therefore talk about it differently. And it’s frustrating because, well, I can’t talk about it at all. I don’t mean within my family. I mean because I can’t. I can’t get myself to talk about it. I can’t talk about it because my family’s conditioning to keep us quiet worked. Every conversation about gender-based violence; every conversation about defining feminism; every conversation where I feel like it could come up, I avoid. And if I don’t avoid it, I walk away shaking. Having been through what I’ve been through, within and without my family, it’s almost easier to be victimized and to dissociate than to go through the process of analyzing what happened. I was trained to be more afraid of how I’ll be perceived if I talk about it than of actually being abused.

But

I can’t keep watching my mom turn into a scared little girl whenever her brother’s name is mentioned. I can’t avoid my cousin anymore because I don’t know how to ask if he meant to send me what he did. I can’t keep watching my aunt relive finding those notebooks at 15 and reading her own name in them. I can’t keep asking myself if the decades-long family friends know how their daughter was talked about; that when I hit puberty, my body was compared to hers; that her sister was written about in those notebooks too. I can’t hear more stories from other women in my family about the patriarchs within it. And now that it’s “over,” I can’t watch while the older generations fight to keep these things undiscovered, as if there was never a judge or jury involved—to pretend they haven’t paid extra for people to have personal security during their prison sentence. I can’t learn about them lying to protect the abusers. I can’t do this anymore. So, so much has been buried under the rug that any discussion was suffocated before those most hurt could get peace.

So I’ll learn to speak up. At home, and out in the world.

I haven’t been much of a feminist yet; I’m just now truly addressing my internalized misogyny. In recent years I’ve become much more aware of what it means to me to be a woman: This comes at the same time that I’ve begun to face the world as a mother. This new understanding of the world has been difficult to accept, and something I spent the last year trying to avoid in the chapter. 

No matter how much I didn’t feel ready, being asked repeatedly to figure out childcare, and to attend male-dominated events to make other non-cis men comfortable, and experiencing unintentional-yet-outright sexism eventually led me to “accept my fate.” I let the project I was slowly, privately, and personally working through become a bandaid for others’ bruised egos, all while knowing I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t know what lines were where, or how they were being crossed. I didn’t say anything. As I helped push part of this conversation within SLDSA, I found that I’m still unwilling to actually talk about it. I’m unable to vocalize my thoughts without feeling deeply uncomfortable; presenting the Centering Children Resolution—itself born from my first time really confronting what feminism means to me—is the most emotional and distressing experience I’ve had during my time in the chapter. 

That distress was needed. I’ve spent years terrified of how every word I said and wrote would sound. Addressing these things within the chapter carried the same emotional weight that I would be buried under addressing them at home. After passing the resolution, the discomfort grew, and I couldn’t sit in silence anymore. Now was the time to address those ghosts which lingered in the hallways of my childhood home. I’m beginning to open the conversation at home, and I’m finally ready to talk out loud. To identify myself as another angry feminist, and actually sit and think through what that means to me: politically, spiritually, personally. Beginning with a book first recommended to me by a family member at 14, I’m on my way to developing a clear feminist framework to bring forward to the world.

In the meantime, I hope Irving comes to actually understand how this plays out in a home; what it means to be a child raised in a family with strange rumors. The Hotel New Hampshire does not capture it right, and what a shame that is. He really could’ve given life to an often hidden conversation. What a waste. The rest of the novel is fine though, if you were wondering. 

The post An Overdue Review of The Hotel New Hampshire first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

A union can democratize your workplace, protecting you against at-will employment, ensuring just cause, and raising standards for all workers.

The post Your boss is lying when he says unions are no longer necessary appeared first on EWOC.

DSA has become an important vehicle for climate politics. A new book uses the campaign for a New York state climate law as a lens for understanding the organization and its approach to the crisis.

The post Feel the Burn appeared first on Democratic Left.

State Rep. Rabb has fought for working-class Philadelphians in the legislature for years. Now, he’s taking his fight to DC to continue the struggle for housing for all, universal healthcare, and for real democracy in America! DSA is incredibly proud to endorse Rep. Rabb and make sure our voices are heard in the halls of power!

Rep. Rabb is our second Congressional endorsement this cycle. He has some tough opponents, and AIPAC and other dark money groups are already boosting his opponents. Philadelphia DSA has built up a powerful canvassing operation, but we can all help!

Rep. Rabb is joining Oliver Larkin on our Congressional slate. It’s going to take a lot of us standing together to bring more voices and votes into the halls of power.

Rep. Rabb is part of a slate of candidates in the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising project!

The author of "Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993" discusses how her theory of an “Inside/Outside” strategy applies to the Mamdani era.

The post Let the Record Show: Democratic Left Interviews Sarah Schulman appeared first on Democratic Left.