On May Day, hundreds of protesters descended on Oakland International Airport (OAK). Their demands: to abolish ICE, end US wars (including stopping the shipment of military cargo to Israel), and tax the rich. As a protest of over 150 on foot at Terminal 1 reached a crescendo, another hundred protesters inched past the terminal in a four-lane car caravan, honking horns and displaying messages. News camera crews captured some of the excitement.

OAK is home to a FedEx terminal that ships military cargo to Israel, making the airport the subject of the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo Campaign, of which East Bay DSA is a member. Terminal 1 is also the ticketing location of Delta Airlines, which deported Liam Conejo Ramos. Finally, it is the site of labor struggle involving airport workers organized by SEIU-USWW. 

The OAK action coincided with another, at SFO, where SEIU-USWW members working without a contract led a demonstration that resulted in 25 arrests. (A third airport action took place later in the day in San Diego.) It was organized in less than a month, led by East Bay DSA, along with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) and Indivisible East Bay, with support from leaders of the Arms Embargo Campaign, such as the Palestinian Youth Movement and Arab Resource and Organizing Center. Many other community and labor organizations participated, including contingents from ILWU local 6, Oakland teachers, and Bay Area Labor for Palestine. 

ILWU Local 6 Hosts a Pre-Action Meeting

Nearly 350 people, a third of them DSA members, met up in the morning at the ILWU Local 6 union hall, a few blocks from the airport entrance. We heard from speakers about May Day, the struggle of OAK workers, and about our three demands. A statement of support was also read from Angela Davis, who apologized for not being able to make it. 

Grace Martinez, statewide deputy director with ACCE, a co-leader in planning the event, reflected that the numbers exceeded our turnout goal. “There were people who had been in the movement for a very long time,” she said, “but for many, including many of our members, this was their first May Day – and their first protest. That was very powerful.” 

The Action at Terminal 1

The action at Terminal 1 kicked off when the first busload of people arrived from the ILWU hall. We wanted to let airport workers and passengers know through our banners, chanting, and flyers why this action was happening at the airport. By the time the second busload arrived, over 150 people were participating on foot.

Our signs, flyers, and chants proclaimed our overall immediate demands - tax the rich, stop US wars, abolish ICE - and also educated people about the fact that there’s an ongoing campaign to stop the shipment of military cargo through OAK (via FedEx) to Israel. An August 2025 study from the Palestinian Youth Movement found that 16% of Lockheed Martin military cargo bound for Israel passes through OAK - with over 250 military shipments to Israel from January to August 2025 alone. 

This demonstration came a few weeks after a car caravan organized by the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo campaign, and the addition of an on-foot rally made our action an escalation and a reminder to the airport, which is governed by the Oakland Port Commission (appointed by famed anti-war politician and Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee), that business as usual will continue to be disrupted so long as military cargo flows through OAK. The action felt even more powerful when we saw our comrades in the car caravan shut down the only road into the airport, moving slowly enough that our banner holders were able to walk in front of them.   

One of our coalition partners, Nancy Latham, a member of Indivisible East Bay’s steering committee, recalled waiting for the caravan at Terminal 1. “The moment they turned the corner,” she said, “they looked like a bunch of huge animals ready to stampede. And then as they drove toward those of us standing outside the terminal, it was as if two tributaries were flowing together. We all felt a surge of power to have this other group meet us. It was a peak experience.”

The View from the Car Caravan

To prepare for the caravan, May Day organizers incorporated the lessons learned from the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo caravan two weeks before, including preparing for the possibility of arrest. While we did not plan to disobey authorities, confronting the possibility of arrest focused participants on the risks and heightened personal security necessary in these times of authoritarian surveillance. After all, airports are among the heavily surveilled environments in the country. We secured our phones and conducted our chats in Signal, good practices for all activists. We had caravan training sessions with East Bay DSA members a few days prior to May Day and during the pre-action training at the ILWU hall.

Before getting into our cars, we practiced on foot the formation we would deploy. We had over 60 cars ready and able to join the caravan, each with a driver and at least one “co-pilot” to monitor the Signal chat. The cars were decorated in car chalk proclaiming “Abolish ICE”, “Stop US Wars”, “Tax The Rich”, and “No Killer Cargo Thru OAK”. 

This intensive preparation led to the execution of a wildly successful caravan. The key tactic was having four lead cars, with the co-pilots in constant communication, along with a police liaison in the middle of the formation, and a rear car providing updates from there.

When we reached the point where four through-lanes emerged, we slowed to two miles an hour in four columns and proceeded to the terminal area. As we approached Terminal 1, we were greeted with raucous cheers and sign waving. We responded with car horns and fists in the air out of the car windows. Suddenly, people carrying three banners emerged from the crowd, took the street, and led us through the airport on foot. Horns and cheering continued. It was exhilarating and powerful. The sheriffs decided to intervene by segregating the last third of the caravan into the far left lane reserved for car shares. So now the caravan was slowing traffic in that area as well.

It took the caravan 40 minutes to snake through the airport. We were able to stay in formation across all the lanes and keep our speed at 2 mph until the entire caravan cleared the airport. By then, the sheriffs had blocked off the two closest exits leading back to the terminal.

No worries. With the Terminal 1 rally concluded, we cheered our victory and drove back to the union hall. 

The road to May Day 2026

Complementing the traditional afternoon rally and march by the Oakland Sin Fronteras coalition, the morning airport action marked a structure test and turning point in the coalescence of progressive and working class East Bay organizations around demands and tactics that we can build on over the coming two years. Getting to this point was the work of many months by East Bay DSA’s Fighting the Oligarchy campaign.  

The campaign, voted East Bay DSA’s top priority at our June 2025 convention, began by organizing in solidarity with the Federal Unionists Network. It was an important goal of the campaign to help the FUN’s Bay Area Hub grow their ranks and develop their organizing capacities and reach. By the early Fall, that goal was well advanced, through a variety of means that included regular canvasses of federal workers at workplaces in Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco. 

Another important campaign goal, however, was focused more broadly on the growing mass resistance to the Trump regime:

“Shape the politics of East Bay resistance: Cohere the growing mass movement in the East Bay to fight the oligarchy and incipient fascism by providing support and leadership, democratic organizational practices, and a political analysis that this is a fight in solidarity with the working class against capitalism, not with the Democratic against the Republican party.”

Since Labor Day, the Fight the Oligarchy campaign turned our focus to becoming a valued partner of Bay Area resistance organizations and coalitions.

We met with the Alameda Labor Council and SEIU 1021, proposing a series of “May Day in the Time of Trump” political education and organizing trainings, which both organizations endorsed, along with ACCE, Bay Resistance, the FUN and several more unions. The first event covered the history of May Day, and brought together a panel of partner organizational leaders who spoke to their vision for using this May Day to build power toward May Day 2028. The second featured Eric Blanc speaking to the Lessons of Minneapolis, followed by a table discussion and organizing training.

At the national level, one of our co-chairs was actively engaged in MayDayStrong, and in the NLC May Day committee. Locally, we focused on several key centers of resistance activity in the East Bay: Bay Resistance (a coalition led by numerous labor and community organizations), ACCE and Indivisible East Bay. Through building relationships and showing up to do work, we proved ourselves to be good leaders and organizers in the final months of 2025, at No Kings in October, and a People over Billionaires action at the homes of several SF billionaires, led by ACCE. This resulted in our being included in the planning committees for No Kings 3 and the Bay Area’s MayDayStrong solidarity school. 

With partners convened by Bay Resistance, we planned a February 27 “train the trainer” event geared to turning people out to the solidarity school, and a solidarity school in San Francisco attended by about 1,000 people. East Bay DSA contributed two trainers at the solidarity school, including co-leading a training for union members, which was focused on organizing No Kings participants to take action on May Day. The planning for the OAK action began at these regional convenings, with East Bay membership organizations, primarily DSA, ACCE and Indivisible, taking on the challenge of quickly planning the OAK action.

Internal Organizing

With more than 2,000 members and dozens of active chapter projects spread across four counties, it took work to coordinate and get everyone on the same page about shared priorities in our chapter, even for a big event like May Day. 

Over the last couple of years we’ve worked at improving our ability to turn out to protests en masse - first by establishing rapid response endorsements and turnout infrastructure for Palestine solidarity work after October 7, and more recently by calling and planning our own actions, like our solidarity march and rally with Minneapolis in Oakland on January 23. 

By late February, it was clear that East Bay DSA would be playing a major role in making May Day big in the Bay this year, and a core group sprang into action to get organized internally. We began meeting in late March, setting a goal of 200 East Bay DSA members committing to not work on May Day. Our initial group of ten members from different chapter projects eventually grew to include nearly twenty actively planning East Bay DSA’s roles in the OAK action as well as the Oakland Sin Fronteras rally and march. We coalesced on the demands we wanted to center, brought those back to our coalition partners, made a communications and turnout plan, held a chapter leaders’ meeting to incorporate our May Day asks into their organizing, and held a large community meeting on April 28 to get final preparations in place. All of this meant that  dozens of chapter members from several different committees and campaigns helped organize hundreds of people to take action on May Day. 

What comes next

We aspire to play an even bigger role in making sure that May Day actions disrupt the flow of capital next year. That means both continuing to build coalition relationships and getting even more organized as a chapter to be able to put forward clear demands and plan significant actions. 

Our proposed mechanism for doing so (subject to approval at our annual convention on June 7) is establishing a May Day Working Group that will work all year to identify potential opportunities for mass and escalating actions, especially workplace actions. This group will be structured explicitly to bring together leaders from different chapter projects, maximizing our reach and coordination. The hope is that this will put us on an even stronger footing as we look towards May Day 2028. 

This approach is consistent with the national labor priority established by the DSA NPC encouraging chapters to organize toward actions on May Day 2028. The resolution calls for a “2026-27 strategic plan that may add detail, scope, timelines, staff time allocation, budget guidance, and concrete goals to these priorities [including preparing for May Day 2028].”

Meanwhile, several of us will be in St. Louis at the end of May with our local partners, and many DSA members from around the country, to learn and plan together, anticipating major provocations and mass resistance to come.

We’ll go to St. Louis with a new sense of what’s possible. As a structure test, the OAK action exceeded our expectations. ACCE’s Martinez said, “The whole point was to have an assessment of where we were as a movement, a coalition and organizations. While the May Day action came together in just three weeks, it was the culmination of a series of escalating actions that we pulled off together going back to last Fall.” Now, she added, “May Day is becoming more real for a lot of people.”

As one of our members, Eileen T, explained after returning from an exhilarating May Day visit to Chicago, “May Day is a distress signal. It can come at any time.” When it does, we aim to be prepared to fight back and protect our working class communities.

California DSA will be hosting a zoom meeting on May 28 at 6:30 to provide an overview of the two progressive tax measures that will be placed before voters on the November state ballot. You will hear about recent tax the rich efforts in California, and speakers from the campaigns will provide updates. You will also have an opportunity to ask questions and get answers. Register here.

From the time of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto to the present day, taxing the rich has been a central project of the socialist movement. Why?

As long as the capitalist class extracts surplus value from the labor process it will continue to grow richer at the expense of the working class. (See Piketty, R > G). Economic inequality has surpassed Gilded Age proportions. Progressive taxation is an essential means of clawing back some of the wealth created by the working class so that we may fund vital public services and provide the basis for a more egalitarian and democratic society. Campaigning for progressive taxes provides a direct opportunity to raise class consciousness, as the discussion naturally revolves around how inequality benefits the rich, hurts everyone else, and can be at least partly fixed with this solution. 

As such, a tax the rich campaign opens the door to the next level of discussion: how capitalism works, and how democratic socialism can fix its problems. 

A common thread

The other benefit of a tax the rich campaign is that it represents a common thread through just about every other issue and concern to DSA members. If you are working on issues like public transit, public education, universal childcare, public health and safety or social housing, none of these issues can be properly addressed without adequate funding from the state. Taxing the rich is pivotal to success in any of these areas.

If you are interested in electing democratic socialists, once in office they need more funding than currently possessed by the public sector. We shouldn’t be electing socialists to administer austerity, but that’s what usually happens, given the bad choices they face without progressive taxation to fund their work. The ‘electing’ part of local electoral work is also supported by a tax the rich campaign, because taxing the rich remains consistently popular, and when presented in cooperation with local DSA-endorsed candidates who are on board, it broadens their appeal as well.

If you want to stop the imperialist war machine of the US government in its corrupt alliance with private sector capital—including the current AI investment bubble that supports data centers, environmental destruction, and surveillance technology alongside new forms of mass death in other countries—we must wrest as much of that capital as we can out of the hands of the ruling  class so that it doesn’t control these enormous sums to invest. Taxing the rich is a vehicle to do that.

If you wish the labor movement to become more militant, raising class consciousness can be transferable from the ballot box to the workplace. The working class has two methods to retrieve the capital it produces through the labor process: militant, democratic organizing unions that extract a greater share of the pie through collective bargaining, and political organizing to tax the rich. With socialist education as the nexus, each method can reinforce the other.

After November, more taxing the rich

We have created a Tax the Rich Working Group in East Bay DSA to work on the two state ballot measures that will appear in November before the voters. Similar groups have been chartered in other chapters. But our progressive tax work won’t be over with the election. Even if both measures pass, capital will continue to be bloated and the multiracial working class will continue to have needs that can only be met through other forms of progressive taxation, like increased corporate taxes and splitting commercial property off from residential property. After November we intend to turn to political education and legislative efforts along these lines. These will be key components of our ongoing May Day education and coalition-building project, reinforcing the idea of what May Day 2028 signifies in terms of a political economy for workers over billionaires. 

If your chapter has not yet started working on the campaign here’s a chance to get going. Check out the campaign page on the California DSA website. Joining this work will engage the diverse activities of California DSA chapters within a unifying theme and effort. It will help us to stand alongside and uplift our allies in the labor movement and community in common struggle. And it provides the opportunity for pushing beyond reform toward revolution. 

What:‍ ‍Online forum on taxing the rich in California

When: Thursday, May 28, 6:30 – 8 pm

Who:

• Matthew Hardy, Communications Director, California Federation of Teachers

• Doug Jones, Organizer, United Health Workers-SEIU

• Fred Glass, Co-Chair, East Bay DSA Tax the Rich Working Group

Register here.

Here’s how DSA members and other progressives can organize to compete in upcoming intra-party contests.

Oligarchs and the donor class still have a firm grip on the Democratic Party apparatus and politics. But the cracks are increasingly obvious:

Zohran Mamdani; Analilia Mejia; the crumbling of AIPAC/DMFI sway; burial of the DNC’s 2024 autopsy report for fear of what it might reveal; polling numbers that show a party less popular than even Donald Trump; widening gaps between the progressive and corporate wings. 

And now, still small but growing numbers of DSA cadre and allied candidates are competing and winning local, state and federal elections around the country, defeating some guardians of the status quo.

When will the ice break in California?

The day may be coming soon. We’ll know a lot more after June 2 primaries and November 2, when progressives who make “top two” test the thesis that the road to victory is the opposite of chasing Republicans to the right in pursuit of mythical centrist “swing” voters. 

Next, we’ll have an opportunity to contest for control of the state Democratic Party.

Compared to many other states, the composition of the California party’s Central Committee, which elects its officers and endorses candidates, approves the party platform and passes resolutions, enables significant small D democracy, if we organize. 

About a third of the approximately 3,500 members are elected in caucus-like processes—4 in each of the 80 state Assembly districts. Voting has gone more and more by mail and online since the pandemic, with plenty of opportunity for mischief but also real opportunities for progressives —again, if we organize. 

Path to success

The path to success in the 2026-27 ADEMs (Assembly District Election Meetings) is to create solid, diverse slates of candidates in each district, with strict solidarity—each member working hard to get out the vote for all—facilitated by an effective system to register voters in a special process. (It’s not enough to simply be a registered Democrat, though that is required.)

Another third of delegates to the state Central Committee will be selected by county central committees, which in most of the state will be elected on the 2028 primary ballots (exact methods vary some from county to county, confusingly). In most locations, a similar process of creating progressive slates and campaigning for them will be in order.

Recruiting candidates to construct ADEM slates needs to begin now. They must file by late this year, with voter registration following, and balloting in early 2027 (exact dates to be announced). Many DSA members have run in recent rounds, which come every two years, though participation has been passive to negligible in many chapters. Chapter electoral committees may want to change that, determining the best strategy—and it can vary a lot depending on the demographics, politics (e.g. union strength, local Democratic leadership) of the district.

Help for Organizing

Gearing up to help organize locally is a PAC in formation, the People’s Democracy Network (PDN), operating fully outside the Democratic Party but dedicated primarily to building power for the left inside the party. We hope to accelerate the ability to work with local progressives to build ADEM slates this year, but the main organizing needs to be done by people with local relationships and skills in each district. Careful navigation is often needed to forge coalitions where necessary and to counter fake “progressive” rivals. Last time, we saw an unusual infusion of money for competitors in some districts by PACs apparently fronting for Israel lobby groups.

PDN will soon be recruiting members to support its particular narrow mission – building progressive power in the California Democratic Party, from the outside. Exact criteria are in the process of being determined, but to be clear, it’s not exclusive: members of DSA or other groups are welcome. To read PDN’s mission statement and 2024 policy platform (needs updating, including the name), go here.

For a more detailed description of the ADEM process and advice on constructing local slates, please see here.

And to let us know of your interest in helping organize in your district, please submit this form.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Senate candidate Aber Kawas — the first of a series with members of New York City DSA’s 2026 slate.

The post Aber Kawas sees a Path to Principles in Public Office appeared first on Democratic Left.

How DSA Labor engaged chapters nationwide to support Starbucks Workers United’s 2025–26 strike

The post Flexing Our Solidarity Muscles appeared first on Democratic Left.

By Ian Mark

Like many of my comrades, I have a vision of a DSA with millions of working class members that can meaningfully influence politics on the scale of the next presidential election, a potential general strike and more. Only through growing DSA to this scale can we hope to build an organization capable of dismantling capitalism and winning socialism. Our goal is nothing short of building DSA into a genuine mass political party and a historic political force that can transform this country and the world…all in our lifetime.

At present, our chapter has nearly 1,400 members. That’s almost double the number of members we had in 2024. Recent DSA wins like Zohran Mamdani’s election underline that we are living in a time of historic opportunity for socialist politics, but our work is just beginning.

I’m running for Membership Engagement Chair to lead recruitment building the chapter to 2,000 members by the end of 2027 and position us for 3,000 by the end of 2028. I’m also running to support key efforts in driving engagement in our chapter’s projects and democracy, including developing practical organizing skills like how to hold effective one on one conversations and analyze power structures.

I’ve been in DSA for nearly 10 years. I joined Huron Valley DSA in 2017 because I felt compelled to do something other than doomscroll through the mind-numbing cruelty of the first Trump administration. I was angry and scared and I wanted to fight for a better future.

In 2020, I stepped up as the Member Engagement chair for Huron Valley DSA, serving on the steering committee and leading the committee through the surreal first year of the pandemic. In that time, I’ve talked to hundreds of new members and learned a lot about what truly drives engagement.

In this article, I’m outlining my plan for my three priorities of recruitment, engagement and development for the Membership Engagement Committee (MEC). These are the same priorities included in the MEC resolution that the general chapter membership unanimously and democratically voted to approve at our annual convention this April.

Building Metro Detroit DSA to 2,000 Members in Good Standing by 2027, and 3,000 or More by 2028

As exciting as our recent growth is, we can’t take this momentum for granted. Just three years ago, our membership had rapidly shrunk to less than 700 members. Furthermore, most people across Metro Detroit still have never heard of DSA or don’t understand what socialism is. Even many self-described socialists don’t understand why it’s important to join a socialist organization.

If we’re serious about building real power in Metro Detroit, we must ensure sympathetic people across the region are aware that a large chapter exists in their community and invite them to join the movement at scale.

Like most chapters across the country, our recruitment to nearly 1.4k members has been mostly passive, meaning there’s a lot of untapped potential for new members across southeast Michigan. If our chapter had the same proportion of DSA members to population as Twin Cities DSA, we would have over 2.3k members.

If we’re already growing at this rate, imagine how fast we can grow if we apply a concerted effort in recruiting.

I recently launched a new project with several comrades called “database building” (this is often called list building, but I prefer to call it database building to avoid confusion with list work, a totally different organizing tactic).

The database building approach is based on the model provided by New York City DSA, which is by far one of the fastest growing chapters in the country (even before Zohran launched his campaign).

In short, here’s how the plan for database building works:

1. We start by collecting names and contact information for individuals across Metro Detroit sympathetic to DSA and our politics at scale. This is a high-volume play.
2. There are many ways to build a large database of sympathetic non-members, but NYC-DSA cited letter-writing tools and mass calls like the call their chapter hosted with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as highly-efficient tactics for collecting thousands of names.
3. With a growing list of thousands of sympathetic “prospective” members in Metro Detroit, we phone or text-bank this list periodically asking them to join DSA, strategically timing outreach to occur following galvanizing political moments like the ICE surge in Minneapolis for maximum effect.

With this strategy, I am confident we can reach 2,000 members by our annual convention as outlined in our consent resolution for MEC. However, I’d like to go even further so that we can exceed 3,000 in 2028.

To Increase Engagement, We Must Build a More Consistent New Member Onboarding Experience

If we are going to deliver real wins for the working class in Metro Detroit, we don’t just need more members in the chapter. We need more members who are truly engaged, and that starts with new members.

If we use general meeting and convention attendance as a crude yardstick for engagement, only 150–200 members are actively engaged in any given month out of the nearly 1,400 members in good standing.

Our chapter currently excels at engaging new members in two crucial ways: our robust five-part new member political education program and a range of popular socials including game nights, Dances Against Fascism, regional meetups, cookouts, parties at local bars and bowling alleys, and more.

Continuing these programs is vital, and I commend my comrades in MEC for their exceptional efforts here in fostering a true sense of community in the chapter and grounding new members in sound socialist thought.

Where there’s the most room for improvement is ensuring all new members receive an accessible introduction on how the organization is structured, how our democracy works, what campaigns, projects and initiatives we have running and how they can contribute.

The biggest issue I see for engagement is the same issue I saw in Huron Valley DSA: with so many working groups, committees, projects and scattered communication channels, it can be very difficult for new members to understand what’s happening in the chapter and where they fit in. It’s hard to overstate how overwhelming and confusing the new member experience can be without a veteran member to guide you, but in MEC we simply don’t have time to do that for every comrade.

We do an admirable job calling new members weekly in MEC, but due to time constraints we only ever connect with a fraction of incoming members. Besides, in a 10–15 minute call, it’s not possible to share everything a new member needs to know. Lastly, even if we could, it wouldn’t be scalable for the amount of growth we need to build real power.

At the same time, we have to carefully assess what a brand new member truly needs to know, as it’s easy to overwhelm folks by throwing too much information or too many options at them all at once.

I believe MEC must streamline and standardize the new member experience by ensuring new members are consistently and quickly familiarized with the following:

1. The general structure of our chapter, including basic information on:

- General meetings and event schedule on our website

- What committee/working groups exist and what they’re working on

- How to access primary chapter communications (Slack, Signal)

- How our democratic process works, like Robert’s Rules 101 and how to bring resolutions to convention

2. Basic political education

- Basic orientation of what DSA is and does, what socialism is, and why we are socialists

- Schedule for upcoming new member political education events, OR other political education events if above is not in near future

3. Clear tasks to making a meaningful impact in the near future

- Accessible, tangible and specific opportunities to make an impact within the organization and get more involved

One way to achieve this would be consolidating our new member events with a session combining all of the above information in a DSA 101-style event hosted monthly. This would also provide a general entry point for prospective members.

New members would receive a primer on everything they need to understand the basics of our organization and how we operate. They’d get a chance to connect with other members and walk away with information on upcoming political education sessions as well as details on accessible, clear ways to make a meaningful impact, like the No Appetite for Apartheid boycott campaign or canvassing for the Chris Gilmer-Hill campaign.

This would supplement, not replace, our existing new member political education program. It would serve as the go-to first event to direct all new members within Metro Detroit DSA.

Other options include making this information more broadly available in a concise format on our website and in new member email and text outreach. Regardless, the point stands that we must ensure everyone receives the key details on how to navigate DSA in an accessible manner.

Developing Practical Organizing and Leadership Skills to Build Chapter Capacity

Since the majority of new members enter the organization with minimal or zero prior organizing experience, it is vital that we help everyday people grow into effective socialist organizers, thinkers and leaders. This development takes time and doesn’t happen by accident, so we must start this work now with an actionable, structured plan, building on the strong political education program and campaign structure that already exists within the chapter.

I recently launched a list work pilot program for developing leaders with the Chris Gilmer-Hill campaign. In less than two months, this initiative has already identified three members ready to step up as new canvass captains, who are the members that train new canvassers at the event and launch the canvass.

This is a big leap forward from the structure we built to elect Denzel McCampbell to Detroit City Council just last year. Each of these canvass captains gain valuable experience that they can later transfer to other leadership roles in the chapter.

Beyond leadership, MEC must also expand the general organizing skills trainings offered by our chapter. I believe that holding effective organizing conversations should be the number one skill every organizer learns, which is why I co-faciliated a training on the topic this spring. I’d like to run this training again every quarter to ensure every member is familiar and comfortable applying techniques like agitation and making a hard ask. Every single member should feel confident in their ability to galvanize their friends, family members, neighbors and comrades to action with this approach.

Furthermore, I believe we should run trainings on practical skills like facilitating effective meetings and creating agendas, how to use Robert’s Rules, analyzing power structures and more to complement the annual Organizing 101 series from the political education committee. These are skills that you often don’t learn before joining DSA, but are critical to being an effective organizer.

Together, We Can Build Thousands of Skilled Socialist Organizers in Metro Detroit

I have big dreams for MEC and our chapter, but I can’t do any of this work alone. Regardless of the results of the steering committee election, I will be working hard to implement the above agenda, and I’ll need the help of my comrades.

If you’re excited about the possibility of growing our chapter into the thousands and helping ordinary people grow into effective, powerful organizers, please join us. If you have your own ideas for how MEC should operate or what we should prioritize, let me know. Though I’m a proud member of the Groundwork caucus, I’d love for MEC to be a truly multi-tendency committee that serves as a model for how we can support diverse political perspectives and organizing tactics across the chapter.

Solidarity!

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To 3,000 Members and Beyond: How MEC Can Build a Stronger, More Effective Metro Detroit DSA was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Governor Jeff Landry halts an election already under way and the legislature redraws the state's electoral map

The post Black Voting Rights Under Attack in Louisiana appeared first on Democratic Left.

“…For anybody who destroys a single life it is counted as if he destroyed an entire world, and for anybody who preserves a single life it is counted as if he preserved an entire world.” – Sanhedrin 4:9:1

This article is not intended to shock the reader as a means of persuasion, but it does contain some references to war crimes and crimes against civilians. Proceed with caution.

There is nothing valorous about war. It is one of the greatest evils of humanity. In the 20th century alone, well over one hundred million people were murdered in the course of armed conflict, and millions more died of the deprivation and disease war brought to their communities. The vast majority of those casualties were civilians and conscripts who had no way to avoid their lives being destroyed by the tools of warfare.

In the West, fear of another global conflict that could directly touch the U.S. and Europe faded in the three decades following the end of the Cold War. Russia was no longer the leader of an explicitly anti-Western bloc of nations; China was a dependable trading partner of the U.S.; and both allowed the U.S. to enforce its will on the Global South and Middle Eastern countries including Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The U.S. exercised its imperial influence on these countries under the guise of “nation -building” or “safeguarding democracy,” with limited success. Media figures and politicians actively encouraged people in the West to ignore the conflicts they engineered elsewhere. They urged us to treat their wars as simultaneously righteous manifestations of democracy, necessary civil rights interventions, distant and ancient conflicts, and complicated statecraft irrelevant to the life of the average citizen.

War no longer feels so distant. In 2022, Russia’s war in Ukraine brought an active war zone to the borders of the European Union for the first time in two decades. The following year, Israel launched a campaign of genocide to permanently end the possibility of an independent Palestine. This campaign has repeatedly expanded into attacks on neighboring states to force them to submit to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East, and the Israeli far right dreams of conquering large swaths of the region.

These developments alone threatened global peace, but it was Donald Trump who took the idea of unlimited war to a new level. He has used his unilateral authority as “Commander-in-Chief” of the U.S. armed forces to illegally seize and destroy boats on the open sea, kidnap the President of Venezuela, repeatedly threaten an invasion of Greenland, illegally blockade the island of Cuba, and launch a war against Iran that began with the assassination of entire sections of the Iranian government, in flagrant violation of the laws of armed conflict. He has also repeatedly floated the idea of using the U.S. military as a domestic occupying force to illegally cement his dictatorial rule.

At a time when global conflict is becoming more common and more likely to escalate, we must remember that there is no such thing as a just war. There is no such thing as a necessary war. Waging war is a crime committed against working people and the most vulnerable in any society.

We must stand up as one and reject war unequivocally.

* * *

All U.S. presidents of the 21st century have unilaterally expanded their military power. After the political and military disaster of the Vietnam War, Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution into law. This law reasserted its authority to regulate the president’s ability to wage war by imposing time limits on the amount of time a military action can continue without congressional approval. In recent decades, Congress has consistently refused to hold the president to account for repeated violations of this law.

In the patriotic frenzy following the September 11th Attacks, Congress granted sweeping powers to President George W. Bush to intervene anywhere in the Middle East through the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It was extremely broad, granting the president the authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons”. Bush used this authorization to justify the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as military strikes across the greater Middle East. These wars wasted trillions of dollars, killed nearly one million people, destabilized the region, and reasserted a presidential prerogative to wage ill-conceived wars anywhere in the world.

Obama quietly expanded his military authority through his extensive use of drone warfare, asserting his right to order the killing of any person anywhere in the world. Biden made less intensive use of drones than Obama, but he did not take any steps to limit the powers of future presidents. He does deserve some credit for ending of the twenty-year war in Afghanistan, though his long history of support for war, militarism, and empire building, and the subsequent resurgence of reactionary rule in that country, must also be taken into account in any holistic evaluation of his record.

Trump has taken the power to wage war to the extreme, untethered as he is by any sense of morality or propriety. He imagines his powers as president to be nearly absolute, and there is no telling how far he may escalate his military recklessness as he becomes increasingly unpopular, embattled, and unhinged.

All presidents have known on some level that what they are doing is morally and legally indefensible. The U.S. does not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court (ICC), in large part because politicians fear it could prosecute U.S. military and civilian leaders for the numerous war crimes they have committed over the last five decades.

The Bush administration took this exceptionalism a step further. In 2002, Bush signed a law (nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act”) authorizing the President to “to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any person […] who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court,” which includes the use of military force to invade the headquarters of the ICC in the Hague, Netherlands. This law is still on the books today and could be invoked by Trump or any future president.

* * *

Liberals have justified war for centuries, treating it as another tool in the geopolitical arsenal. This is why Democratic establishment figures like Chuck Schumer have quietly cheered Trump on in Iran from the sidelines. They disagree with Trump’s procedural ineptitude, not his stance on the necessity of bombing Iranian cities. They see war as an extension of normal political levers of power.

Meanwhile, the far-right treats war as a rite of passage, the ultimate way to prove valor, courage, and loyalty to their ultranationalist project. To that end, they use the violence of war as a way to motivate their followers to interpersonal violence, turning the methods of imperial domination perfected thousands of miles away on their own people.

Trump has repeatedly shown that he engages with the seriousness and tragedy of war as if it were an exercise in childish imagination. He has repeatedly insisted that military personnel killed in action are “suckers” and “losers.” His administration spliced footage from the video game Call of Duty into a montage of missile strikes on Iran. He nonsensically claims that a new class of U.S. battleships (widely considered to be nearly a century out-of-date in an era of drones and high-altitude precision air strikes) will be “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” as if he were taunting a schoolmate on the playground.

If it is true that “war is all hell,” as the famous and earnestly serious appeal to peace by Civil War-era General William Tecumseh Sherman has it, then Trump, self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, and their brand of chickenhawks imagine themselves to be the Doom Slayer. In their minds, they are the macho heroes of a video game, gunning down endless waves of demonic enemies with no sense of danger, consequence, or moral weight.

As central as violence is to the far-right project in America, Trump has normalized engaging with it in a totally unserious way. The Bush administration spent nearly a year lying to sell the war in Iraq to the American people; Trump launched his strikes on Iran effectively without warning, and has faced no consequences for doing so.

* * *

The reality both factions deliberately obfuscate is that civilians always bear the overwhelming cost of war. The numbers are horrific in their own right, but they get worse when we consider that record numbers of civilians have been displaced by armed conflict – over 122 million as of 2025. War crimes against civilians are also rising at an alarming rate, in part due to a lack of regard for international agreements and the tendency of far-right governments to use dehumanizing rhetoric and escalating violence to achieve foreign policy goals.

These trends have only become more acute in the era of unrestricted drone warfare, where soldiers use modified Xbox controllers to pilot weapons of war from air-conditioned bases. The use of enormously powerful explosives to “mistakenly” destroy civilian targets no longer requires risking the lives of U.S. military personnel. These drones are the bane of the existence of millions across the Middle East, parts of Africa, and across the world, and they are the ultimate expression of the U.S. war machine’s demand that it be allowed to violate the sovereignty of any nation anywhere in the world to assassinate its enemies.

Most of the wars raging around the world today are not conflicts between two well-defined nation states. They are most often messy civil wars with multiple competing sides that drag on for decades with no end in sight. There is no valor to be had in such a war, only grinding death.

Embargos and sweeping economic sanctions are warfare by other means. They are more palatable in foreign policy circles because they are a relatively “easy” way to politically coerce smaller, less powerful economies that do not require commitment of soldiers or materiel. But the overwhelming costs of embargoes are felt by the poorest civilians, not leaders. As one academic report puts it: “Economic sanctions are the modern equivalent of a siege.” Sanctions impose immense hardship on civilian populations and often cause mass deprivation and even starvation.

Sanctions are also a way to “punish” left-wing governments for adopting pro-worker policies that harm foreign interests. For example, the U.N. estimates that the U.S. has drained $130 billion from the Cuban economy since the blockade was imposed in the early 1960s; without the blockade, it is easy to imagine that Cuba’s economy could be as strong as Vietnam’s, which has experienced immense growth in the past few decades. An example of socialism “working” in a country with so much cultural contact with the U.S. would be destabilizing to neoliberal and neo-fascist political narratives, however, which is why our government has repeatedly intervened to sabotage left-wing governments around the world innumerable times in the last hundred years.

* * *

Trump’s war in Iran deserves special consideration in all this, in part because it is arguably the most ill-conceived war in American history. Even David Frum, the morally detestable cheerleader for the Iraq War, openly states that Trump started this war on a “whim.”

In addition to serving as a billion-dollar market manipulation to enrich himself and his allies, Trump’s Iran war is a test to see if his political base will let him get away with genocide, as evidenced by his suggestion last month that he would destroy Iranian civilization. Every indication shows that they will.

Right now, the only thing preventing the president from launching an unprovoked nuclear strike against a non-nuclear state is the kind of unwritten consensus Trump loves to violate. Even the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization that created and maintains the “Doomsday Clock,” is expressing alarm at the possibility. Trump recently insisted that he has no intention to use a nuclear weapon against Iran, but there is no reason to think he wouldn’t change his mind at any time in the next two and a half years.

A nuclear strike on a civilian population is unquestionably a method of genocide carried out in a matter of hours rather than months or years. It also inflicts unimaginable and wholly unnecessary physical suffering on survivors. Contrary to popular consensus, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not militarily justifiable. Seventeen years ago, comedian Jon Stewart rightfully stated that Harry Truman should be considered a war criminal for his decision to use nuclear weapons on civilians. America being what it is, he was forced to apologize for his remarks.

The world is now one tweet away from Trump declaring that the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against his enemies anywhere in the world is permissible under U.S. and international law. Such a proclamation and the accompanying use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state would unleash an unimaginable new era of terror on the world.

* * *

We live in a dangerous time. As tempting as it might be for the left to cheer on the collapse of the American global military hegemony, what follows will almost certainly be worse. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Trump, and any number of tinpot authoritarians cannot be left to carve up the world into political and economic spheres of influence. This is exactly what the current international system was set up to prevent. We must remember that the laws of that system were written in the blood spilled by countless millions in the Second World War. If we allow those institutions to crumble, that horror will descend on a new generation.

There is not a single armed conflict the United States has waged since the Second World War that was morally or politically justified against its human cost. In most U.S. political discourse, this would be considered an eminently radical statement. But if we are to stand with oppressed people everywhere around the world, the victims of war are among the highest on the list of those who need and deserve our solidarity.

There is no such thing as a just war, or a justifiable war. We do not need to be “bleeding hearts” to recognize that war has never served our interests as working people, and that innocents bear the overwhelming cost of wars waged for territory, wealth, geopolitical influence, “regime change,” and genocide.

International law is unusually sweeping in allowing United Nations member states to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world. Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, and all manner of other butchers and warmongers can and must be held accountable for their horrible deeds. There is no statute of limitations to expire. Every war criminal is subject to prosecution for the rest of their natural life.

It is up to us to build a world where justice for the victims of war is not only possible, but inevitable – a world in which war itself is rendered obsolete as a tool of punishment, extraction, and oppression.

The post War is a Blight on Humanity appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

At the upcoming Chicago Democratic Socialists of America chapter convention on June 6, members will debate a proposed rewrite of our chapter’s bylaws. This proposal was the product of the Local Democracy Commission (LDC), an appointed body of seven members tasked with developing a comprehensive consensus package of structural reforms to improve the day-to-day operations of our chapter.  

Our commission was able to agree on the vast majority of changes to the bylaws, and made substantive improvements and clarifications that we all believe will greatly benefit the chapter. But the commissioners had some substantial disagreements on how to structure the Executive Committee (EC). A majority of the commissioners supported a near-identical version of the proposal which was brought forward at the March General Chapter Meeting (GCM) and failed to secure the two-thirds majority of votes needed to adopt a change to the bylaws. We’re happy that the LDC was able to agree on so much, but we think the membership should have the option to choose between the two visions for the chapter’s executive leadership. 

Our concerns aren’t solely structural: we see the makeup of the EC as a fundamental political and organizing question as well, and we feel a few key changes are still needed to maintain structural connections between the membership and leadership, help the leadership move the membership behind chapter priorities, and limit the potential for siloing. So, in keeping with the guidelines set during the establishment of the LDC, we’re proposing an amendment to address these concerns.

Our Proposal

Currently, the EC is composed of eight officers and proportional representation from the territorial branches, as well as a Labor Branch delegate and a YDSA delegate. As the chapter has grown, so has the EC; the body is set to have roughly 30 members in June. Our existing bylaws also include a provision that empowers the EC to appoint a Steering Committee (SC) to handle many of the day-to-day issues that require leadership attention but don’t call for substantive debate, such as small expenses or approvals of minor requests from chapter groups. Any decision made by the SC can be overturned or revised by a vote of the full EC.

The proposal that was submitted at the March GCM reduced the EC to 11 members by eliminating all branch representation, and removing the voting authority of the Political Education Coordinator, among others. The base proposal also did not formalize an SC to handle day-to-day administrative decisions within the executive body. The main substantive difference between the March GCM proposal and the one introduced by the commissioners who supported it was the inclusion of a seat for a “labor coordinator” elected by the entire membership, rather than a delegate elected by the Labor Branch, in the way all other branch delegate seats are currently elected. We felt this change did not substantively address the concerns that members had with the earlier versions of the proposal, and did not move far enough from the failed March proposal to seek consensus and compromise with the concerns then expressed. 

We agree with the other commissioners that, because the demands of executive-level leadership can lead to burnout, a much smaller executive body is needed to allow for sustainable middle-layer organizational development. But we need a political leadership that is present across the chapter, can move an all-volunteer membership through organic connections, can coordinate operational units, and, critically, has an incentive to build consensus. 

We believe that by removing branch delegates and not formalizing an SC, the base proposal actually risks working against these interests. On the contrary, that structure would likely create a greater burden for EC members, sever the point of connection between branch-level leadership and the central executive body, and set up potentially adversarial relationships between the executive leadership and the branches.

Our alternative proposal reduces the EC by about 50% from its projected June size, down to 16 seats. This EC would still include an SC composed of seven members — the two Co-Chairs, Secretary, and four “at-large” members without specific officer duties elected by the full membership — to free up valuable organizing capacity for EC members and open up more space at EC meetings for political discussion. Its minimum 4-vote threshold keeps it in line with the minimum vote threshold of the base proposal, which has a quorum of 6 for the 12-person EC.

Ten of the 16 EC members would be elected by the full membership of the chapter: two Co-Chairs, Secretary, Treasurer, Membership Engagement Coordinator, and Political Education Coordinator, and the four at-large members. Other officer-level positions, such as Communications and Campaigns, could be opened up to the membership or appointed from among the EC’s elected at-large members, as the EC or GCM decides. The four territorial branches and the institutional branches (e.g., the Labor Branch) would each have one delegate, as would YDSA. 

Ten generally-elected members and six branch delegates ensures a structural majority for generally elected members. The territorial branch delegates would be elected by the membership of the branch and would have a seat on the branch steering committee. The Labor Branch delegate would be elected by the Labor Branch members, and the YDSA delegate would be elected by local YDSA chapters.

Our Reasoning

This proposal addresses the major pain points members raised in our outreach as commissioners: that branch leadership should be able to focus primarily on branch work; that generally elected members should hold the majority of elected seats; that we need a nimble body to handle day-to-day administrative and political decisions; and that the executive body should have fewer seats to encourage more competitive elections. 

As part of our work, members of the LDC looked at the structures of similar-sized chapters with high recruitment and retention statistics. The 16-member EC in our proposal is in line with three high-performing chapters in our tier of membership size: Portland DSA (the most successful chapter at recruitment and retention outside of New York City) has 14 seats; Twin Cities DSA had between 14 and 17 seats until February 2026 (including branch and labor delegates); and Philadelphia DSA has approximately 15. There are other well-performing chapters with smaller bodies, but Portland, Twin Cities, and Philadelphia were the best-performing in recruitment and retention. (See Tables 1 and 2 for more context on these figures;  “LQR Rate” is the rate of “lapsers and quitters minus reactivators,” a metric that essentially reflects member attrition.) Portland in particular has had much recent electoral and labor organizing successes.

However, there is an important caveat: we do not believe that success follows from structure itself. As the tables below show, there is not a strong correlation between things like EC size, proportion of at-large members, or number of officers, and different metrics of success. What we found, however, was that of the most quantitatively successful chapters we identified, 14-17 was a common and reasonable range. 

Certain elements of our EC’s composition have significant impact on the organizational health and functioning of the entire chapter, and we want to state those stakes clearly. 

Branches Matter! 

This is a belief we share with the other commissioners, who have argued that branch delegates should be removed from the EC to free them up to focus on the work of expanding branch-level organizing. While we don’t disagree with the spirit of that argument, we’ve instead proposed that each branch be given one delegate seat on the EC to maintain a formal connection between each branch and the central leadership body. 

We believe that direct connection between branches and the EC is necessary to avoid siloing or pushing branch leadership to take on even more work to stay abreast of developments across the chapter and in leadership. Labor Branch already has this setup within the current EC: One dedicated delegate is tasked with liaising between the branch and the leadership as a voting EC member with substantive input, while the rest of their SC dedicates its organizing efforts towards branch and chapter work. This has been an effective model, and we believe it will serve the chapter’s operations well.

The EC is Not a Legislature—The GCMs Are

We see the function of chapter leaders elected to the EC not as representatives who advocate on behalf of a constituency, but as leaders who facilitate the work of the chapter by being embedded in it. The EC is not a legislature—that’s the GCM. Rather, it is a body delegated to efficiently execute the will of the membership between GCMs.  

What’s more, the high rate of member turnover means that, at any given time, a significant portion of the membership aren’t connected to its leaders and didn’t vote in the most recent leadership election. In a typical year, 18-25% of members lapse or quit, while 15-25% of the chapter consists of new members recruited that year — meaning roughly 35-50% of the membership composition turns over annually, presenting major operational challenges for even the strongest chapters.

Conclusion

Should this amendment fail, we are concerned that the EC will become disconnected from chapter formations, sitting above them and overly factionalized in the way similar structures in other chapters have been prone to factional domination. There is also a real risk of this structure creating an adversarial relationship between leadership and membership, with an EC that is factionally proportional but not set up to implement the inherent compromises that emerge from GCM decisions, in part because it will not be composed of operational units. Most importantly, we are concerned that without this amendment, the EC may drift from its practical leadership function and begin to act more as a policy-making body detached from the membership.

In developing this amendment, we’ve prioritized a scientific approach, drawing from recruitment and retention data from comparable chapters, our own chapter’s recruitment and retention data over time, an analysis of the purpose of an executive executory body versus a legislative body, and a practical study of how members become organically connected to the central leadership. We believe this proposal is a balanced compromise between the original proposal that failed at the March GCM and what we have seen work in Chicago and comparable chapters. Our proposed amendment addresses the consensus complaints with our current structure, while holding the chapter together at the highest level. We hope the membership will agree, and consider voting in support of our amendment. 

Additional Findings

For members’ convenience and reference, here are some additional data that we put together in the course of our research. There was more, but less relevant here.

Table: Metric 1. This shows the membership density of “Huge” and “Extra-Large” DSA chapters based on members per 1,000 residents in their territory. Most chapters are within range of each other; there are local factors that are important (such as geographic spread) and contextual politics is likely heavily determinative of this figure.

Table: Metric 2. This is a simple table showing the percentage of members in a chapter who either pay monthly dues or are enrolled in Solidarity/Income-Based Dues (SIBD), a measure of commitment intensity.

The post A Vision for a Lean, Political, and Effective Executive Committee appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

DSA candidates win state house seats in Kentucky, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, advance in Georgia mayoral race. Results updated as of 7:30 a.m. ET May 20.

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