Announcing Issue 8: DSA at 100K
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Our 2026 spring edition, Issue 8, is DSA at 100k. To receive a bimonthly full copy of the magazine issue delivered to your door knowing your funds directly support the independent media we represent, you can subscribe here.
Working Mass is a project of union members and members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Massachusetts and beyond. We cover strikes, new organizing, and contract campaigns, as well as labor strategy, the reform movement, and socialist politics.
History has changed. Welcome to Issue 8.
In 1912, the Socialist Party of America had grown to surpass 100,000 members. They held two congressional districts, mayoral seats, and countless council seats nationwide. That eve of the Great War was their peak.
For the first time since the SPA’s decline, DSA has reached the coveted milestone of 100,000 members. This is uncharted territory for U.S. organizers today. A mass organization of this magnitude has not been seen in generations of the socialist movement. In Massachusetts alone, thousands organize in five chapters: Boston, Worcester, Cape Cod, River Valley, and the Berkshires, membership rising across all of them, with party offices for members in Holyoke while organizers secure one in Boston to serve over thirteen neighborhood groups, many with memberships exceeding small chapters. There are socialists in workplaces and apartment complexes agitating tenants. There are socialists fighting in the streets and organizing rapid-response efforts against ICE. And there’s a pantheon of socialist officials, once again: hundreds of councilors, legislators, some mayors, while other comrades challenge our opposition for seats in the U.S. Congress to directly confront fascism and the imperialist war machine from the halls of power.
In this issue, we interview workers organizing for their first contract at breweries and dining halls; we follow carpenters fighting against bad developers; we witness marches against each successive war and invasion, from Venezuela to Iran to Cuba; we see labor’s continued work, alongside ICE watch, to muster the capabilities and unity needed to defend us. We review a deeply personal memoir about how one comrade became an organizer through revolution. She’s not the only one. Throughout the issue, DSA leaders share their personal stories of how they came into organization: as unionists, radicals, nurses, field directors, red diaper babies, and single moms involved in the first 100K Drive.
Together, we are a fighting organization.
It’s ours to choose what to do with it.
In Solidarity,
Travis Wayne
Issue 8 Contributors: Maritza S, Robin, Ben A, Tefa G, Jake S, Ezra S, Francesca M, Hayley B-B, Cerena E, Frederick Reiber, Megan Romer
How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 1)
Tefa G, Chapter Co-Chair, Boston DSA:
I went to Labor Notes in 2018 [a national conference for union activists] and met people from DSA there. And then when AOC got elected in 2018, I decided that I wanted to continue to do this work, but I needed to do it somewhere where it is going to work. So I moved to New York City in 2019 and became a fully active member of NYC-DSA.
I believe in this organization because in organized strategic efforts. As a Marxist, I need a platform to organize people who are disorganized, so that we can actually do something. I believe in civil disobedience protests, but it is important to have a plan – knowing your long-term goals, being strategic about your messaging, knowing what the next step is going to be. What you are gonna get people to do next? Who are gonna be involved? What are the repercussions?
Ezra S, Political Education Chair, Worcester DSA:
I knew what socialism was, but never called myself a socialist. I joined DSA in the summer of 2020, in the midst of COVID and the George Floyd protests. After seeing how the Democrats sabotaged Bernie’s campaign, the failure of the privatized healthcare system, and deepening my understanding about the police force’s relationship with the capitalist state, I began to ascribe the socialist label to my own politics. After nearly eleven months in NYC-DSA, I left to join a Marxist-Leninist microsect called the People’s Revolutionary Party, since disbanded.
In 2024, I found myself returning to DSA: to Worcester DSA, specifically, after I had moved to Worcester for school. The genocide in Palestine had motivated me to want to do more and be more active, and I was especially deflated by Clark SJP’s refusal to hold an encampment. I found Worcester DSA through its statements on October 7th, which I thought were incredibly strong and principled, so I joined the chapter to give it another shot. Two years later, DSA has become my sole political home. I cannot believe there was a time in my life when I debated that fact.
Francesca M, National Political Committee
I’m a red diaper baby: I was born into a socialist family. My childhood memories are dotted with candle-lit marches against the Iraq War; my brother leading a rally against education cuts; falling asleep on a plastic chair at the back of the union hall during my dad’s Party meetings; the ’70s feminist chants I sang with my mum in the car. Yet as I entered adolescence, the contradictions between my home life, the goodness and intuitive correct-ness of my family’s beliefs, and the pervasive social consensus around me — the photographs of Che Guevara on our walls, and my best friend describing Cuba as a ‘dictatorship’ with a knowing look — caused me to live with a sort of split consciousness. If asked about my political identity, I choked.
I had to first experience politics before I could articulate my politics. High school catapulted me into the student movement: every government, it seemed, took a turn at slicing off a piece of the public education system, so there was always something to fight for. And so we did: student strikes, occupations of school buildings, assemblies, bus rides to national marches, picket lines, fundraisers, panel discussions. I participated in everything, and brought my friends along too, but I didn’t have the confidence, or the certainty yet, to lead anything. I was organized, but not organizing. I did, however, begin to claim ideas: I read Marx, and anarchist anthologies, and learnt to distinguish between radical and assimilatory kinds of feminism.
After a stint in Students for Justice in Palestine during grad school, the moment that turned me into an organizer in my own right was the May 2021 Unity Intifada triggered by the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and the 11 days war on Gaza. For two weeks, I had thought of nothing but the war and how to stop it. I took time off work, turned my house into a headquarters, learned to give speeches, rehearsed talking points, travelled to every rally, allowed my friends to bring me groceries and make me coffee and offer their couch, talked to a thousand people, painted banners in my backyard, cold-emailed journalists, yelled at other journalists, yelled at politicians, yelled at the sky and God and Joe Biden, and by the time a friend in Gaza sent me videos from the street celebrations of the ceasefire, I knew I was an irreversibly changed person.
Four months later, I joined DSA.
Articles Featured in Issue 8:
1. Lamplighter Brewers Win Union Vote, Becoming the First Union Brewery Statewide
2. Is the Labor Movement Growing or Shrinking? The Incredible Views of the AFL-CIO
3. Bad Blueprints: Worcester Building Trades Challenge Subsidies to Developers
How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 2)
Hayley B.B., National Political Committee:
Growing up, my grandmother would reminisce about her organizing efforts in Southern California: walking side by side with the United Farm Workers, protecting women outside of Planned Parenthood, and mobilizing for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. I did not realize what this would mean to me years later as a 31 year-old socialist union organizer. She passed when I was a freshman in high school, long before I had the chance to ask her all the questions I now wish I could ask. Throughout high school during Obama’s presidency, I found myself angrier about ongoing political issues than my peers, but I never moved my anger to action beyond posting on social media. In 2016, while attending the University of Colorado Boulder, I yearned to get involved with the inspiring movement that was building around the Bernie Sanders campaign, but I never found a place on my campus to do this. I stumbled around working various low-wage jobs while attempting to “soul search” for a career path. When relatives suggested I do politics when I was consumed by the Kavanaugh trials, their suggestion was eye-opening to me. Within a few months, I was working for a Berniecrat legislator at the State Capitol, where I met Lorena Garcia, a current Colorado State Legislator, who in 2019, was running for the US Senate with a grassroots, socialist campaign endorsed by all four Colorado DSA chapters that took a major gamble and hired me as her full-time field director. I developed relationships with socialists all around the state. After the 2020 COVID shutdown ground her campaign to a halt, I plunged in and joined Denver DSA and was elected as electoral chair within months. In that same period, I led a successful organizing campaign with a fellow Denver DSA comrade to unionize the nonprofit we were working at under a Communication Workers of America (CWA) local. I’ve been a union member ever since and currently work as a union organizer for AFT-Oregon.
In 2022, I visited my grandmother’s home country of Slovakia for the first time to learn about my family history and visit her cousin, Martin Bútora, who still lives there. This cousin is a sociologist, writer, and professor. At the time, he was also an active advisor for Zuzana Čaputová, the first woman and youngest person ever elected to be Slovakia’s president as a member of the Progressive Slovakian Political Party. In 1948, as a teenager, he worked as a reporter when the Communist Party took over Slovakia and transitioned it into a Soviet satellite state. By November 1989, he co-founded Public Against Violence, the leading movement of the democratic revolution (The Velvet Revolution) in Slovakia, then served as the human rights advisor for a former president of Slovakia, was appointed the Slovak Ambassador to the United States from 1999 to 2003, and even ran for president of Slovakia in 2004. I spent each night during this trip gathering as much information as I possibly could from him about his own years of organizing experiences and his relationship to my grandmother, which he self-described as someone he wrote back and forth with frequently to discuss the politics of the world, and learn from each other’s organizing in their respective countries. Through our conversations I learned that throughout his lifetime, he had lived under almost every form of government, so I asked a simple question: “What form of government is the best?” He answered immediately, “Democratic socialism is the only form of government that will save our world.” This moment solidified everything for me and made me realize I didn’t come into socialism and organizing on my own; my grandmother has been leading me here the entire time. After my trip to Slovakia, I chanced upon my grandmother’s CWA union pamphlet. I never knew she was also a unionist herself, let alone the same union I first belonged to. This further crystallized what I already knew: my life path has roots much deeper than myself.
Cerena E, National Political Committee:
My parents were newly-immigrated Filipinos to NYC when my mom gave birth to me at the hospital where she worked. Their first jobs as US citizens were as nurses, with my mother being the first union nurse in my family. For most of my childhood, my parents never seemed to be in the same room at the same time unless we were on vacation with extended family. After my brother was born, I was raised nearly full-time by my godparents, both of whom were also nurses. The stories my elders would repeat to my brother and me sought to color my understanding of the world: according to them, by overcoming poverty through sheer grit and hard work, they raised me to embody their aspiration for a better life in the US. We moved to Houston in the summer before I began second grade, when my parents were able to afford a decent standard of living for my family on the combined salaries of two nurses.
To my parents’ chagrin, much of my adolescence was spent questioning whether hard work actually pays off in the real world. I dove into the nonprofit world, part with the naivete of an ambitious high school student authoring a college resume, and part out of the simmering rage I’ve come to associate with unabashed expressions of wealth in the US. I volunteered hundreds of hours at a local food bank, and fundraised, before quickly learning that nonprofits could never address the root of poverty. As long as there existed a class of wealthy donors who would sooner lift a finger to write a grant than confront the ugly economic system through which they enriched themselves, what good was my volunteer labor?
The absence of any competent opposition from the Democratic Party during Trump’s first term left me hopeless until I joined YDSA in my sophomore year of college at the University of Texas, Austin, nearly eight years ago to this day. Armed with clipboards, a YDSA banner, and a Bernie Sanders cardboard cutout, the students who took me on as a future socialist organizer raised my expectations of what we must demand of the world to change it. I joined my first union, the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU), as an undergraduate student worker. Unsurprisingly, my mentors in TSEU were also my mentors in DSA. From campaigns to protect students and university workers in the face of austerity during the COVID-19 pandemic, to electoral campaigns like Heidi Sloan’s run for Congress as an open democratic socialist in Central Texas, I saw myself and the people I organized with in Y/DSA transformed into working class champions of socialism. Now with over a year of experience working as a union nurse, just as my mother once was, and standing toe-to-toe against capitalism on a regular basis — the courage I feel to organize and fight for a just world would not be possible without the thousands of socialists I’m proud to call comrades in DSA.
4. Losing Your Whole World To Win a World – A Review of Defiance by Loubna Mrie
5. Emmanuel College Dining Hall Workers Win First Contract with UNITE HERE Local 26
6. Boston Labor Unites to Face ICE As Minneapolis Leads First General Strike in 80 Years
How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 3)
Megan Romer, National Co-Chair:
My first official title in DSA was 100K Captain, during the original 2021 100K Drive. I’d started organizing with my local chapter, Southwest Louisiana DSA, a little over a year before, but knew quickly that I had a lot of catching up to do — though I had been in activist spaces before, becoming an organizer (and becoming a socialist in any meaningful way) was new to me. My job for the first several months: snacks. (Self-imposed.) In that year, because of my comrades, I’d gone from a wobbly “Elizabeth Warren is probably the compromise choice we need” voter to a full-time Bernie 2020 super-volunteer, helped my chapter pivot to digital organizing during the pandemic, and worked on the leadership team of our chapter’s massive mutual aid response to Hurricanes Laura and Delta.
When the 100K Drive rolled around, my chapter’s leadership team, exhausted from our ongoing hurricane response, asked if I’d be willing to be the 100K Captain, our chapter’s lead for recruiting efforts, and I nervously accepted — I wasn’t sure I was ready for a formal position, but I stepped in. Our little bayou-side chapter grew by nearly double during that drive, solidifying a Top 3 spot on the chapter leaderboard and the legendary pink prize hat for several of our members. We had a distinct advantage, in that we were actively working on a campaign that was extremely easy to tap people into in the short term. Where we struggled was, of course, retention.
No chapter in the country figured out the magic potion that retained members through the Biden presidency. With Trump out of office and the daily news “back to normal” (such as it was), combined with the long tail of pandemic lockdowns, our numbers dwindled — we didn’t get all the way to 100K during that drive. It took years of rebuilding, combined with obvious external political conditions (some of which were of DSA’s own making, like the Mamdani campaign) to finally hit that big number, but we did. And now we’re here, we made it! But the work isn’t done. A DSA that is able to stop massive wars, shut down the supply chain to demand working class rights, protect our most vulnerable, and build a real democracy? That’s a DSA in the millions, and those millions need to be activated, trained, and ready to take on that fight.
We still haven’t solved the equation of retention, but when I look back at my own arc – just a regular slightly weird and artsy working-class mom who went from left-lib to communist through the social practice of collective organizing and collective learning. The question of how to pull people into that social practice — to make folks feel empowered about organizing and enthusiastic about learning both skills and theory — is one I’m still working on but which I try to bring back to my own experience. You are probably also working on this question – how to make DSA stick – and I’m so glad to be in this organization to work on it together. To the next 100K!
The post Announcing Issue 8: DSA at 100K appeared first on Working Mass.
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May Day: The Past and Future of Our Workers’ Holiday
May Day is a holiday for the common working people that goes back to ancient times. Today, it is known as International Workers’ Day, recognized in countries all over the world — but not in the United States. The irony runs deep: the modern identity of International Workers’ Day was born in the U.S., yet the country that birthed it refuses to claim it. That erasure is not accidental. It reflects a capitalist war on workers — and on May Day — that goes back to the origin of capitalism itself.
The history of May Day is coming back to life in the U.S., to shake and break the power of the billionaire class, carried by a working class that has had enough. United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain has called on all unions to align their contracts to expire on April 30, 2028 — setting the stage for a May Day strike that can shift the balance of power toward the many, not the few.
A Celebration of Our Common Life
May Day began as a celebration of spring, of fresh green, of flowers, and of the growth and abundance nature freely gives. Historian Peter Linebaugh calls this the “Woodland Epoch of History,” a time before mass deforestation, before the mass enclosure of the land into someone’s private property. People “went a-Maying” into the woods, performed outdoor theater, enjoyed each other’s company and “all that is free and life-giving in the world. … Whatever else it was, it was not a time to work. … Therefore, it was attacked by the authorities.” (Linebaugh, “The incomplete, true, authentic and wonderful history of May Day”).
These attacks were part of the early development of capitalism in the 16th and 17th century — the same era as the mass burning of women as witches across Europe, the brutal dispossession of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the growth of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the enclosure of the commons, which turned shared wealth into private property owned by the few.
In England, early capitalists had to put a lot of effort into forcing people into factories. As Linebaugh writes, “attacks on May Day were a necessary part of the wearisome, unending attempt to establish industrial work discipline.” The English Puritans treated May Day revelry as unholy, abolishing the holiday outright in 1644 to extend the hours of labor. Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts a similar story playing out in the American colonies in his historical fiction “The May-Pole of Merry Mount.” Capitalism enclosed not only land but time, turning it into endless toil for the profit of the few.
Despite attempts at repression, our ancestors kept May Day alive into the Industrial Revolution, when it became International Workers’ Day.
The Rise of International Workers’ Day
By the late 1800s in the industrialized United States, ten- to sixteen-hour workdays and six-day workweeks were the norm. In 1866, the National Labor Union — the first nationwide labor federation in the country — adopted the demand for an eight-hour day, as did the International Workingmen’s Association, known today as the First International. The slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will.”
1886 became “the year of the great uprising of labor.” In the United States, 400,000-500,000 marched for the eight-hour day. The Knights of Labor in Louisville, Kentucky, marched 6,000 strong — Black and white — into parks that were officially closed to Black people. The Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada — the immediate predecessor of the American Federation of Labor (A. F. of L.)–proclaimed May 1 the day “that eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor.”
Some who fought for more time in our lives lost all the time they had. On May 3, 1886, Midwestern members of Molders Union Local 23 — who made the industrial reaping machines that fed the nation — stood on strike for the eight-hour day. Several were shot and murdered by police.
The next day, a crowd of several thousand people gathered in solidarity in Haymarket Square, Chicago, to listen to speeches about socialism, anarchism, the emancipation of labor. Police — about 200 of them — waited until 10:30 p.m., when only a couple hundred people remained, then violently attacked the workers. No one knows who threw the stick of dynamite, but in the chaos, multiple police were killed, as well as a few workers.
The “justice system” decided it needed someone to blame. A harsh crackdown on union workers ensued. Eight anarchists were arrested and convicted of “conspiracy, with no evidence. Three languished behind bars, one committed suicide in prison, and for the crime of believing the working class should live, four were hanged. The conviction was widely regarded as a frame-up. In fact, in 1893, Illinois Governor Altgeld pardoned the three living Haymarket Martyrs, saying they “were not proven to be guilty of the crime.”
Lucy Parsons, the widow of one of the Martyrs, worked to spread their cause far and wide. Her efforts helped establish International Workers’ Day, a day that was adopted by the Knights of Labor, the A. F. of L., and the Second International. Thanks to the sacrifices of our ancestors, the eight-hour day became a legal standard in the U.S., and workers had more of their own time.
Workers of the World, Unite!
This International Workers’ Day, the Trump regime, backed by “Christian” nationalists, crosses borders in the most predatory ways possible — attacking the people of Venezuela and Iran, blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean. Tech lords rake in riches for enshittifying the internet, while ICE and police make martyrs of Latine workers who cross borders to productively contribute to society.
All wealth is either given by nature or produced by work. Wealth does not come from landlords and rent-seekers collecting money simply because they already own things. May Day — International Workers’ Day — is a day for the workers of the world to help each other claim the good things of life that the billionaire parasites hoard for themselves.
Karl Marx wrote, “For a thing to be sold, it simply has to be capable of being monopolized and alienated” (Capital, Volume Three). Since the capitalists of the sixteenth century tried to take May Day, they have never stopped taking. Parasitic billionaires still do everything they can to enclose us, to own us, to separate us from ourselves and each other and to reap the benefits at our expense. Elon Musk dreams of owning colonies on Mars only because he dreams of owning the very air we breathe.
During the European colonization of Southern Appalachia, a few rich and favored individuals monopolized the best land, setting the pattern of poverty and elitism we all know. Today, Northeast Tennessee elites want us to subsidize the electricity costs of their data centers, they force us to pay to be spied on by Flock cameras, they criminalize homelessness while housing prices skyrocket, they steal our time with low-wage labor that forces us to get second jobs or starve.
We live under a dictatorship of the billionaires, and we demand freedom.
This is why the UAW’s momentum from their phenomenal 2023 contract victory matters: convincing other unions to align their contracts to expire on April 30, 2028, is a powerful move: economic, political, and a show of solidarity all at once. A coordinated May Day action in a presidential election year could change everything.
Unions, DSA, Indivisible, and many more organizations are building toward that moment. We need all of you to help make that happen — starting today.
References & Further Reading:
Threads of Resistance: The 1929 Rayon Strikes in Elizabethton
Visiting Elizabethton, you’re greeted by a tall figure rising into the sky: a smokestack. Faded white lettering — “BEMBERG” — runs down the red brick column and seems to mirror the faded memory of organized labor in the region. Many in East Tennessee and Southern Appalachia are at least somewhat acquainted with the hard-fought victories won by coal miners in their efforts to unionize in Harlan County and other places, but most residents of the Tri-Cities are unaware that an inspirational strike happened in their backyard.
Rayon and the Opportunistic Nature of Capitalism
During the 1920s, agriculture in East Tennessee was in decline, but textile manufacturing was on the rise. In 1926, the Bemberg rayon plant opened in Elizabethton, followed two years later by the neighboring Glanzstoff plant owned by the same German company, Vereinigte Glanzstoff Fabriken. Recent improvements in the manufacturing of viscose rayon made Elizabethton a particularly suitable location given its abundant waterways and large number of poor families seeking to supplement farming incomes with part-time wage labor. The fact that the Carter County Chancery Court voted to grant the company tax exemptions didn’t hurt either. Similar cooperations between the state and industry are abundant today as well.
Textile mills played a crucial part in this capitalist dispossession of self-determination. Many small-scale farmers were forced to move to mill towns for parts of the year to supplement their income. Men were not the only ones from rural households trying to improve their family’s living conditions: women and children also participated in part-time work.
Women in the Workforce
Most women working at the Glazstoff and Bemberg plants made between $8 and $12 a week for 56 hours’ work. Rent in that area was around $30 per month, not taking into account necessities such as groceries. Even the bus and taxi services, which ferried workers from small communities outside Elizabethton, were pricey. The men’s wages in those same plants? Around $30 per week.
Working in the “finishing” side of the plants, women breathed in the rayon particulates that would be flung in the air during reeling, which could lead to a condition known as “Brown Lung”. Machines in the finishing areas of the plants were also known to sever fingertips. In addition to the physical ramifications, the women were ordered to dress “modestly” for work, were not permitted breaks longer than 10 minutes, and were often escorted to and from the restroom, lest they linger too long from their work.
While advancements in rayon production made the fiber less flammable, the harsh conditions set by management turned these mills into tinderboxes nonetheless.
Strike!
At 12:30pm on March 12, 1929, after months of demanding better wages and working conditions, 550 women walked out of the Glanzstoff plant, organized by figures such as Margaret Brown and Christine Galliher. The next day they returned and led out the rest of the workers from that plant. Within the next few weeks, workers from the Bemberg plant walked out in solidarity. Within a month, both plants in Elizabethton were effectively shut down.
The demands were simple: better working conditions and an increase in pay to match the other textile mills in the region. When plant management refused to even sit down with the strikers, Bemberg workers reached out to the United Textile Workers of America (UTW). This was not the first contact with organized labor, as Local 1630 of the UTW had been organized years before. This event, however, breathed new life into the union. A staggering 93% of workers in both mills unionized. This, coupled with the large community support for the union, gave many hope that change was finally on the rise for the workers.
Mill management got an injunction against the workers’ right to assemble and picket near the mills. Workers retaliated by blocking the roads to the plants, stopping the transportation of paperwork that would finalize the injunction. The company lawyer, George Dugger, was allegedly struck by a rock thrown by a striker as his car drove through the picket line. When he returned with law enforcement, the strikers were dispersed violently by cars driving in excess of 50 miles per hour towards them.Additionally, factory management and community members branded women strikers as “hussies” and “loose women” as punishment for defying traditional gender roles. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the yards of female strikers. These tactics demonstrate how bosses and elites have long mobilized patriarchy to undermine labor movements — a strategy we see today in the attacks on queer people.
A Tentative Agreement, Corporate Backstabbing, and Violent Clashes
Arthur Mothwurf, manager of the mills, reached an initial settlement with the unions on March 22nd. The agreement promised to raise wages, establish worker committees in order to deal with further grievances, and allow strikers to return to their jobs. This decision angered the Chamber of Commerce, who viewed the unionized strikers as a threat to the promised industrialization of Elizabethton, which would almost assuredly have lined their own pockets. They kidnapped two of the prominent union organizers, drove them to the North Carolina line, and told them to not come back, lest something drastic happen to them. The organizers, Alfred Hoffman and Edward McGrady, refused to be intimidated, and were returned to Elizabethton within a week, this time under armed union guard.
Not only were the promised wage increases not paid, almost 100 of the striking workers were fired within a few weeks. Worker’s committees lodged complaints. In turn, they were also met with firings. When, on April 15th, 90 more workers were fired, the strike recommenced, with thousands of plant workers rejoining the picket line.
This time, management had the governor call in the National Guard. Machine guns became a common sight on the roofs of the plants. Detachments marched into the surrounding hollers to escort scabs — replacement workers brought in to break the strike — to the mills. Both pro- and anti-union people began to carry firearms openly. Union member and mechanical foreman, Mack Elliot, had his house in Stoney Creek blown up with dynamite. The strikers destroyed a water line to the plants in order to halt production.
In the aftermath, over 1,200 strikers were arrested, a second (nearly identical) agreement was reached, and workers returned to better pay and a new manager who set about trying to divert workers away from the question of power and rights by conceding a company union and recreation leagues.
Weaving the Threads of the Past into a Mighty May Day Tapestry
While the agreement seemed to placate the demands of the strikers, new management carried on the traditions of its predecessors: shirk on raises, punish union members, and obfuscate any complaints brought to them.
In this seemingly dim light, we must remember the legacy left behind by the Elizabethton strikes. Similar, and even more violent, strikes were occurring across the US, especially in the southern textile mills in cities like Gastonia, NC and Greenville, SC. This wave of people power eventually resulted in the biggest organized strike in the US at that point in history: the 1934 US Textile Workers Strike. 400,000+ participants chose the labor movement instead of the looms.
This May Day, when the oppressive forces of capitalism threaten to rip our lives to shreds, remember that the most effective way to hold the tapestry of humanity together is by the strong stitching of solidarity.
To Win Our May Day Demands, We Must Escape the Constitutional Bind
May Day was born from a struggle that ran headlong into the United States Constitution. The workers who built the eight-hour movement, who struck in 1886 and rallied at Haymarket, wanted what many of us want today: an economy that works for those who do the work, freedom from state violence, and a basic guarantee that labor would not consume every waking hour of a person’s life. Time and again, the Constitution — not as an abstraction, but as a functioning legal order with its anti-majoritarian design, its unelected judiciary, and its deep protections for property over people — was the weapon their enemies used against them.
Today, “Defend the Constitution” has become a rallying cry for many who rightly oppose the Trump regime’s lawlessness and contempt for democratic norms. That impulse comes from a real and legitimate place. But the history of May Day asks us a hard question: can a document that has so often been turned against working people truly be the foundation of a movement for workers’ justice? Or do we need a different framework — one equal to the demands we’re making this May Day?
The Constitution in the Time of Haymarket
A call to move beyond the Constitution would have surprised few American workers or poor farmers a century and a half ago. By the late 1800s, the subordinate classes in America had decades of experience on the receiving end of the US Constitution’s antidemocratic and reactionary provisions. The Constitution was built around intentionally indirect systems of elections, a legislature that represented states rather than people, a judiciary whose judges were confirmed by an unrepresentative Senate, and a set of negative freedoms that favored the propertied over the propertyless — and over those once claimed as property. Most workers saw the Constitution not as a foundation for justice, but as an obstacle to it.
The events that gave birth to May Day — the long struggle for the eight-hour workday, the great strikes of 1886, and the Haymarket rally that ended in catastrophe — can be understood as a rebellion against the Constitution and the economic and legal order it reinforced. The eight-hour demand at the heart of those struggles ran up against the Constitution in two distinct ways.
The first was the Constitution’s privileging of negative liberties — the protection of private property, for instance — over positive liberties that would affirm and expand people’s rights to certain opportunities and wellbeing, such as the right to a living wage. In a world of capitalist exploitation, a constitutional order built exclusively around negative liberties handed capital a structural advantage: employers could invoke constitutional freedoms to resist any regulation of the terms they imposed on workers.
The second obstacle was a constitutional order designed to neutralize popular victories won through political struggle. Then, as now, the federal judiciary operated without regard for public opinion, appointed through a constitutional system that flowed through an indirectly elected president and a Senate that represented states rather than people. Time and again, those courts ruled in favor of monied interests over the people, most notoriously in Lochner v. New York (1905), which struck down a state law limiting bakers’ working hours as an unconstitutional infringement on employers’ freedom to contract. When workers turned to state legislatures to win their basic demand for “Eight Hours Work, Eight Hours Rest, Eight for What You Will,” the Constitution handed capitalists useful tools to reimpose the choke-hold.
For decades after Haymarket, the constitutional order continued to deal blows to the workers’ movement. When the Pullman Strike of 1894 threatened railroad capital, President Cleveland dispatched federal troops and obtained from the courts a federal injunction ordering the strike called off. Eugene Debs, the union leader who refused to comply, was imprisoned. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the use of such injunctions against unions in its In Re Debs ruling, handing employers a powerful new weapon against organized labor. In the same term, Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust struck down the federal income tax as unconstitutional, while U.S. v. E.C. Knight gutted antitrust enforcement against manufacturing monopolies. In a single year, the Court mobilized the Constitution to crush labor, protect monopoly, and nullify tax reform.
Even before those rulings, people had come to see the Constitution for what it was. As legal scholar Aziz Rana documents in The Constitutional Bind, reformers and radicals of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era widely regarded the Constitution as an antidemocratic instrument to be overcome. The Populists’ Omaha Platform of 1892 defined the Constitution’s fruits as a society where “Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.” They named the Constitution’s design as the problem, and many of their demands — a progressive income tax and direct election of Senators most notably — were won only through altering the Constitution, not by accepting or defending it.
Our Constitutional Bind
More than a century later, the Constitution presents most of the same barriers. For all the talk of it being a “living document,” the U.S. Constitution has remained remarkably rigid over time — widely regarded as the world’s most difficult constitution to change. Even the moderate assertions of positive liberties contained in the Equal Rights Amendment ran aground when confronted with the framers’ anti-majoritarian order.
Yet today we face an additional obstacle: a political culture that treats the Constitution as sacred. This reverence — this “creedal Constitutionalism” — narrows our political imagination, provides cover for imperialist adventures abroad, and funnels popular outrage into channels that leave existing power structures intact. It presents what Rana calls the Constitutional Bind.
Our descent into Trump 2.0 is Exhibit A in the case against creedal Constitutionalism. The Constitutionally valid Electoral College installed Trump in 2016 without even a popular plurality. The unrepresentative Senate’s Constitutionally valid confirmation process packed the Supreme Court. That Constitutionally packed Court, in Trump v. U.S. (2024), granted Trump sweeping immunity for “official” acts, emboldening the authoritarian turn of the last sixteen months. The monster was born not against the Constitution, but by it.
The Constitution and Our May Day Demands
And what of our May Day demands? No war. No ICE. Workers over billionaires.
In the weeks before Trump launched the US war of aggression against Iran, an SSRS poll found that only 21% of Americans favored an attack on Iran — yet a Congress unrepresentative of American opinion by constitutional design allowed the administration to forge ahead. That same Congress confirmed the pro-ICE fanatic Markwayne Mullin as DHS secretary at a time when a majority of Americans want ICE abolished. These are not failures of the administration to live up to the Constitution, but rather consequences of the Constitution’s aversion to basic democratic accountability1.
And the stakes are often life and death. While we demand that workers’s needs come before billionaires’ profits, Trump is gutting Medicare and Medicaid to bomb Iran and enrich war profiteers. Meanwhile, it is the US Constitution that grants district-drawing powers to plutocratic state legislatures, allowing them to draw district lines so that they, not the people, have the greatest say in who represents the states in Congress.
We should not avert our eyes from the reality that is before us. We cannot call for workers over billionaires, for abolishing ICE, for taxing the rich to fund healthcare and housing — and simultaneously ask people to put their faith in a document whose mechanisms created and recreate a society in which we must call for these things.
From “Defend” to “Overcome”
None of this means abandoning the legal and political terrain entirely. We should oppose Trump’s defiance of court orders — but not out of faith in the courts as such. We should oppose Trump’s imperialist aggressions in Iran and elsewhere — but not on procedural grounds. We should name specific rights worth defending — but we should root these demands in a universalism that exists independent of any particular text.
“Defend the Constitution” as a first reflex is understandable. We have been raised in a political culture of Constitution veneration. But we must now have the wisdom to choose our words carefully and the courage to state clearly that our allegiance is to a better, future world, not to a document that was designed to fail us.
“Defend the Constitution” cannot be the slogan for a movement that demands workers over billionaires, no ICE, no war, healthcare and housing for all. Our slogan must instead be “A New Constitution for a New and Better Future.”
And to get there, we must build power outside and against the political system — labor and tenant unions, neighborhood assemblies, student groups, and solidarity networks like those being forged today. These are the building blocks of a movement capable of winning a constitutional order based on direct elections, proportional representation, a strong legislature, and the expansion of those positive liberties we have too long been denied. In short: democracy.
That is a constitutional future worth fighting for. It will be won not by defending the Constitution but by building sufficient people power to overcome it.
References:
Organizing Tips for Everyday Workers
1. Don’t Quit. Organize!
Everyone’s situation is different, but if you can do so, stay on the job and organize to change the things at your workplace that aren’t working for you. Organizing is the best way to make your bad boss regret their crappy practices. Chances are that your co-workers have some of the same problems.
2. Talk to Your Co-Workers
Don’t go it alone. As workers, our power comes from collective action alongside our co-workers. Find out about others’ concerns. Ask them questions and listen to their answers. Share your own concerns with trustworthy people, but follow the rule of one mouth, two ears. We organize people by listening and showing them we hear them. Identify the issues that are widely and deeply felt in your workplace and take those issues seriously. Common issues include unmanageable workloads, substandard equipment, and unpredictable scheduling — and more. Help people overcome their fear by finding their righteous anger.
3. Find Places Where You Can Talk and Build Solidarity
What the boss doesn’t know can’t hurt you. Where are the places you and your co-workers can speak freely? This could be the proverbial water cooler, a smokers’ corner, a break room, or anyplace away from prying ears. Find solid people and establish a means of communicating outside of work: a text thread, an after-work hangout, or the like. Bosses try to divide us in many ways — backstabbing gossip, pitting us against each other for small rewards, racism, anti-woman or anti-queer sexism. Organizers build solidarity between co-workers.
4. Map Who Has Influence
The most powerful co-worker on your shift may not have a title. Identify the co-worker everyone respects and listens to. When they speak up, others follow. Talk to them about your issue. Their buy-in is worth more than a dozen casual supporters.
5. Every Collective Action Matters
Solidarity is a muscle that gets stronger with exercise. Strikes are the most powerful weapon we have as workers, but they are like the Solidarity Olympics, and you have to build up to them. Any action that you and your co-workers take together to improve your conditions builds the collective power to achieve what none of you could alone.
6. Document Everything
Keep a shared record of incidents, promises made, and responses received. When workers compare notes, patterns emerge, and patterns are evidence. A single complaint is easy to brush off. A pattern documented by ten people is much harder to ignore.
7. Learn from Experience
Make connections and get support from labor movement organizations. There’s no need to go it alone and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can start by contacting the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee at workerorganizing.org.
The Bosses Are Organized. Why Aren’t We?
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.
Righting the Wrongs of the Christian Right
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.
Why We Should Require Candidates to Commit to Abide by the Results of the Endorsement Process
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
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Portland City Councilors: Pass Police/ICE Mask Ban
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.
An Overdue Review of The Hotel New Hampshire
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.