By: Travis Wayne

BEACON HILL, MA – On the morning of September 9, 2025, organizers from an anti-Zionist coalition of Massachusetts residents arrived at the Massachusetts State House to rally with supporters for their cause: stop a partnership signed by Governor Maura Healey with Israel’s largest medical system to launch an Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup accelerator in the Bay State.

Sheba Medical, its primary site in operation since the Nakba, is funding its AI arm under the name ARC: Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate. ARC aims to shape healthcare by “connecting entrepreneurs and clinicians, advancing the development and implementation of new technologies.” The main goal of the ARC startup accelerator is to create pipelines, to make it easier for experimental products to be used in clinical settings, with a particular focus on three kinds of technology: diagnostic tools, digital health platforms, and “workforce support technologies.”

Sheba ARC is thus poised upon its 2026 launch to fundamentally alter the management of both patients (through diagnostic tools and digital health platforms) and workers (through workforce support), making both more heavily integrated and reliant on AI technology from the State of Israel.

Start-up Accelerator Against a Backdrop of Genocide

The Governor’s Office announced the partnership back in May 2025. While Governor Healey at the time mainly focused on Massachusetts’ status as a “global hub for healthcare” ready for the accelerator to contribute to the state’s so-called “innovation-based economy,” the Consul General of Israel to New England Benny Sharoni was more explicit about the contract’s actual impact:

Opportunities for deeper collaboration between Israel and Massachusetts are both real and exciting—especially in biotech and life sciences, where both are global leaders. Together, the innovation ecosystems of Israel and the Greater Boston Area can drive breakthroughs in science and medicine for the benefit of all.

The benefit of all pointedly does not include benefits to the Palestinian healthcare system. While Sheba floods money into an AI accelerator to make patient and worker management less human, accessing Massachusetts’ healthcare as a “soft landing pad” in U.S. markets, Gaza’s healthcare system is in total collapse, with Israel killing more than 55,000 Palestinians less than forty miles from Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv.

“The Israeli medical establishment in general identifies with Israel’s colonial project and puts the colonial project over the most basic ethical principles of their profession,” wrote Neve Gordon, the former inaugural director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and one of three authors who wrote “The Shame of Israeli Medicine” cited by the organizers of Sheba Out of MA, which describes the ways in which the apartheid system is endemic to Israeli medicine. The authors call for the total boycott of Israeli medical institutions like Sheba.

Or as one organizer read: “we must not partner with entities that serve as arms of the regime.”

Taxpayer Coalition Petitions the Governor

The ways in which Sheba ARC will make Massachusetts even more complicit in the U.S.-Israeli genocide, taxpayer dollars even more blood-soaked, is what drove the taxpayer coalition to the steps of the State House.

The Sheba Out of MA coalition is led by Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, assembling together signatories from 38 other local organizations including thirteen neighborhood-based pro-Palestine formations, Doctors Against Genocide, Physicians for Humanity, United American Indians of New England, and the Boston Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Jordana Laks, an organizer with the Healthcare Workers for Palestine, read from the letter to the gathered crowd while other organizers delivered the letter itself. They shared the words of one signatory after another from across Massachusetts. One Weston medical professional wrote that, “as a physician, I find it particularly appalling to welcome an Israeli healthcare company when Israel has made [destroying Gaza’s medical facilities] its priority.” Another taxpayer said it was a true shame for the Governor to forge such a partnership, “especially in the name of AI technology.”

Around noon, organizers returned from delivering the signed letter to the Governor’s Office.

Speaking to Working Mass as the crowd dispersed, Laks said:

We want safe homes, abundant food, excellent schools, healthcare as a human right–not financial and moral support for Israel. Call Governor Healey to stop Sheba ARC from pervading Massachusetts healthcare.

Sheba isn’t the first such partnership that anti-Zionist coalitions have forced to end in the Greater Boston area. In April 2025, BDS Boston successfully forced MIT-ILP to cancel its lucrative contract with Elbit Systems.

You can sign the Sheba Out of MA petition as an individual or organization or call the Governor’s Office to call for Sheba Out of MA.

Travis Wayne is the deputy managing editor of Working Mass and a member of Boston DSA.

The post Sheba Out of MA: Taxpayers Deliver Letter Demanding No Israeli AI in MA Healthcare appeared first on Working Mass.

By: Taina Santiago

When summer ended and the school year began again, parents were racing to check off their supply lists. For working class families, this task can be time-consuming and expensive. In response, Metro Detroit DSA’s Black and Brown Alliance (BBA) organized a back-to-school backpack drive.

The event took place Saturday, August 30, at the Eastside Community Network (ECN) building in Detroit, where other community services like free vaccines for children and free pizza for families were set up as well. ECN also runs a free store packed with clothes, shoes, and toiletries.

This space fostered the socialist principle of meeting the needs of the working class in real ways. With a “Solidarity Metro Detroit DSA” banner proudly displayed, a dozen DSA volunteers throughout the day distributed 140 backpacks filled with folders, markers, pencils, and other school supplies.

Why Mutual Aid?

Mutual aid is a form of community service that expects nothing in return from those you are lending a helping hand. It functions under the philosophy that we always show up for each other in our communities. BBA has been talking about doing a mutual aid project for a few months now, with members eager to get started on something actionable. BBA Secretary Rodney Coopwood had a personal connection to the idea: “Growing up in Detroit, there were times when I myself didn’t have what I needed for school. I had to wait for supplies well after classes started.”

BBA was also inspired by the Black Panthers and their ability to radicalize people through community services. BBA Co-chair Jon Mukes said, “[Mutual aid is] how a lot of Black people from various other socialist traditions organized. Free breakfast programs, free health clinics, etc., were incredibly revolutionary. Historically one of the reasons why socialism grew is because socialists and communists fed the people when the capitalist system failed.”

Because of the Black Panthers’ example, it was clear to the BBA that there had to be educational and community-building elements in the project to avoid doing one-and-done, detached charity work. So along with handing out supplies, we also gave literature about DSA to parents and had deliberate conversations with members of the community about socialism.

Recruitment Potential of Mutual Aid

One of the BBA’s goals is to diversify Metro Detroit DSA. Black and Brown socialists have always been the backbone of the larger movement and there should be many more people of color in our organization. Mukes said, “One of the many reasons that our chapter is incredibly white is that we aren’t visible/doing work in Black and Brown communities.” While a delegate to DSA’s national convention this year, Mukes says he “made a point to hang around and talk to other POC comrades and I asked about how they recruited Black and Brown members. A backpack drive for Black people in their communities came up a lot.”

BBA’s mission of diversity in the chapter also informed where we chose to hold the backpack drive: in Detroit. Volunteers spent the day informing Black parents about DSA’s September general meeting, giving interested people an actionable next step to get involved, and collecting contact information for further communications. An event that makes DSA visible and allows us to have one-on-one conversations with people of color has great recruitment potential for working class Black and Brown comrades.

Another goal of the BBA — and DSA as a whole — is to change the narrative around socialism. Decades of Red Scare propaganda have painted socialists as the enemy of the people when the opposite is true. Socialists want to bring working class people together and events like the backpack drive do just that.

“If we approach them with more actions and fewer words, they see us as people of purpose. We give their kids backpacks. We provide water when they’re thirsty, heat when they’re cold,” Coopwood said. “When we were there, I expected to be brushed off, but people were very open to talking about socialism. They may not sign up for DSA, but they’ll know that DSA and socialists are there to help. So when an open socialist is on the ballot, holding a rally, or pushing an agenda to publicize a private corporation or implement ranked-choice voting, they’ll be open to us.”

Lessons on Organizing

As important as the event itself was all the planning, budgeting, location scouting, and prepping that had to be done in a short window of time. When BBA voted to put the backpack drive into motion, there were only a couple of weeks before the school year began. Within a couple of days, Coopwood had drawn up a fully mapped out proposal to take to the steering committee. In another week, Mukes was ordering supplies and a week after that, those supplies were in the hands of working class families.

This speed of turning talk into action was a testament to BBA members’ organizing skills and served as a confidence booster to fuel more projects. Coopwood said, “I realized I’m much more capable as an organizer than I originally thought. This was my first time doing something like this. I applied what I do at work as a researcher, made an action plan, and it worked — I was very proud of that.” Mukes sang the praises of fellow organizers, saying, “My biggest takeaway was how quickly a handful of dedicated people can set something like this up.”

These kinds of mutual aid projects would give the chapter more opportunities to build up experienced organizers, giving members projects to try out, learn from, and succeed at. The DSA volunteers who have conversations with strangers about socialism will improve their skills there too. The members who put events like the backpack drive together will take valuable lessons into subsequent projects, bringing ideas from the abstract into reality with effectiveness and efficiency.

As Coopwood pointed out, these events “give action-oriented members an outlet to effectively aid communities, and those communities know exactly who assisted them, building unity and loyalty. This unity will be reflected when we need to run electoral candidates or launch campaigns like Michigan for the Many,” which is a campaign we actually gathered signatures for at the backpack drive. He continued, “This is how we get the public — who intrinsically value actions over promises — to know what Metro Detroit DSA is and bring them to our side.”

Just the Beginning

As socialists, getting the material needs of the working class met is an important element in our ideal political and economic system, so we should put our socialist money/action where our mouth is. The backpack drive is not a one-off event, it is a kick-off to a greater focus of the BBA on mutual aid in general. Our direct involvement in communities of color — getting to know people and cultivating camaraderie — will be invaluable to building our movement.

And it isn’t just about the big picture goals. It’s also about the small moments that keep us connected to the human-driven purpose of everything we are doing, which Coopwood highlighted: “I got to see kids pick out their favorite color backpacks, and in the grand scheme of trying to stop capitalism and imperialism from destroying the world, it’s nice to see a kid pick their favorite color backpack.”

BBA Rings in the School Year with Backpack Drive was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After reading that Burlington’s legendary music spot Nectar’s had permanently closed, GMDSA Secretary David Wilcox wrote to Seven Days to propose municipalizing the venue. His letter, printed on 8/20/2025, is republished below.

In response to the shutdown of Nectar’s, I’d like to suggest a solution: Why not have the city government take over and run Nectar’s? There’s nothing radical or unprecedented about the City of Burlington running a popular music venue, given that it owned and operated 242 Main for 30 years. And I would argue that a venue like Nectar’s, one that’s synonymous with the general idea of what Burlington is, contributes far more to the city’s bottom line than its own financial numbers would indicate.

Without venues like Nectar’s, Burlington loses its aura as a cool, desirable place to live. And if Nectar’s has seemed like a shadow of its former self in recent years, why not try to revitalize it under new (public) ownership? Especially since the final shutdown of Nectar’s was due to a dispute with a landlord. The city has already forced the sale of one Handy property (184 Church Street) for the greater good of the community. Surely, there’s a way to make all this happen with enough political will.

I, for one, am sick and tired of passively accepting the loss of important places and services due to “the market,” which is every bit as much a human-created institution as laws and governments. The Burlington renaissance began with then-mayor Bernie Sanders (whose administration founded 242 Main) refusing to accept the market dictating that we couldn’t have nice things. If we want Burlington’s glory days to return, we need to rediscover that energy.

David Wilcox
Winooski

The Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) denounce Milwaukee Police Association president Alex Ayala’s comments calling for a National Guard presence in Milwaukee, noting that such an escalation would harm communities across the city.

“If enacted, the deployment of military violence on the streets of Milwaukee will only cause harm to the citizens,” said Pamela Westphal, Milwaukee DSA co-chair. “Now, more than ever, the citizens of Milwaukee need to build solidarity with their neighbors as the increase of police and military violence grows every day.”

Ayala’s comments come after President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard against protestors in Los Angeles and against the people of Washington D.C., and he has suggested doing likewise in other U.S. cities, as near to Milwaukee as Chicago.

“We must remain strong together in every city facing militarization,” Milwaukee DSA co-chair Andy Barbour said. “We oppose this proposed violation of the safety of our community and are committed to the fight against fascism.”

DSA organizers intend to work with other organizations and community members across the city and beyond to keep our communities safe from increased militarization in Milwaukee. 

As part of that work, the organization is calling on city leaders to follow the likes of Alderman Alex Brower and Alderwoman Larresa Taylor, who released a statement Thursday breaking down both legally and logically why a Milwaukee National Guard deployment would spell disaster for people here.

“We need our local government to advocate on behalf of the communities fearing for their lives here in Milwaukee,” Barbour said. “Working people will notice which of their representatives leave them in danger by remaining silent.”

Milwaukee DSA is Milwaukee’s largest socialist organization fighting for a democratic economy, a just society, and a sustainable environment. Join today at dsausa.org/join.

The 2025 DSA Convention featured a panel on “Building DSA’s Cultural Organizations,” featuring panelists who started DSA sports leagues, choirs, and more. They made the case that these cultural organizations can become institutions of collective action. 

The post Culture is Collective Action appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Freddy Oswald

From Viral Attention to Volunteer Action

Perhaps the most distinct feature of Zohran Mamdani’s primary campaign was his ‘man on the street’ videos.

Talking directly to the camera, often while walking, Zohran captivates audiences on social media with his humor and energy. And every video seemed to end with just about the same appeal: “get signed up to join a canvass in your area.”

To win June’s Democratic primary, Mamdani’s campaign mobilized an army of volunteers. More than 50,000 people signed up to volunteer and upwards of 30,000 or more actually attended a canvass, led by over 400 field leads and augmented by around 40 paid canvassers with fluency in key languages: together they knocked 1.6 million doors, holding more than a quarter of a million conversations with voters.

Behind those numbers sat not just good vibes or a popular working class election platform, but a piece of infrastructure that translated viral attention into material turnout: Solidarity Tech, a CRM designed by organizers for organizers and rooted in the organizing methods of the labor movement.

Mamdani’s campaign excelled at social media, producing attention-grabbing content that cut through timelines and inspired action. But crucially, that attention didn’t dead-end on Instagram, X, or TikTok. Instead, it linked to a volunteer sign-up page where supporters could commit to canvass shifts in their neighborhoods, which fed into the campaign’s Solidarity Tech database.

Once signed up, the CRM handled the unglamorous but decisive follow-up: automatic confirmation emails, text reminders, and calendar invites. These nudges dramatically boosted attendance, reducing the rate of no-shows. Unburdened from manually sending texts or doing constant event-reminder phonebanks, campaign field leads could focus on leading in-person canvasses and driving the face-to-face interactions with new volunteers and voters alike which are so crucial to deepening engagement with any campaign.

The combined system turned Mamdani’s charisma into an attention-to-action pipeline: from virality, to sign-ups, to turnout, to door-knocks, to earning the trust of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. 

Technology Built By Organizers, For Organizers

In some sense, Solidarity Tech is like every other Contact Relationship Management (CRM) software. Just like Action Network or Salesforce, the system is a contact database, helping its users collect, store, and sort information about the people they engage.

But Solidarity Tech is different for two main reasons: it is independent from the Democrats, and it was designed with worker organizing in mind.

Unlike the dominant CRMs in U.S. electoral politics (NGP VAN, NationBuilder, or Action Network) Solidarity Tech was not born inside the Democratic Party ecosystem. This is crucial because the Democratic establishment has a history of weaponizing its control over this infrastructure to undermine progressive, anti-establishment campaigns. For example, in 2015 the DNC shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to NGP VAN. Others, like Justice Democrats challenging incumbents, have in the past been denied access to NGP VAN’s VoteBuilder software entirely in some states. 

And the Democratic establishment doesn’t even try to hide it. “We talk about growing the Democratic Party, so how do you grow the Democratic Party if you go after incumbents?” Steve Brown, a spokesperson for the Illinois Democrats, told Wired in 2017. In the same article, another then little-known Justice Democrat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to purchase VoteBuilder for $6,000 only to find a  stripped-down voter file. “It was all gone,” Ocasio-Cortez told Wired, referring to the information about vote preferences and past support which is collected by VoteBuilder and usually made available to candidates. It should be no surprise that the establishment Democrats have no interest in facilitating their own undoing. 

But Solidarity Tech didn’t come from inside the Democratic Party. Instead, it was designed by a worker-organizer and software engineer, Ivan Pardo.

After working briefly in big tech, Ivan left to build Buycott, a website to facilitate consumer boycotts, with a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) effort as its second largest campaign. Then Ivan got involved as a volunteer organizing in Rideshare Drivers United (RDU), the Uber/Lyft driver association based out of Los Angeles. To help his team organize, he started building a CRM that eventually turned into Solidarity Tech.

Ivan’s model took many lessons from the traditional worker-organizing framework developed by labor unions. But the problems of organizing Uber and Lyft drivers, with hundreds of thousands in California alone, many part time, were vastly different from running a campaign to unionize 100 grocery store workers or 1000 machinists at a manufacturing plant.

And there was another problem: no money. Unlike traditional organizing campaigns where well-resoured unions bet big on viable campaigns in the hopes of recouping costs later, RDU has never able to raise more than enough to fund one or two staffers. 

To meet these twin challenges, organizers adapted classic labor frameworks, including assessments, the organizer bullseye, and leadership ladders, into an organizing workflow that could operate at mass scale. Assessments became the first line of contact: short conversations or digital surveys that gauged support, identified leaders, and sorted drivers into tiers. The organizer bullseye framework was adapted for distributed conditions: core leaders in the center training volunteers, with volunteers engaging wider layers of supporters over the phone. Every RDU member was asked to become an organizer, with the core team distributing lists to get drivers phonebanking fellow drivers, onboarding peers, and reporting assessments back into the CRM. 

And this work often happened in drivers’ own native languages, allowing a diverse handful of driver organizers to reach hundreds and thousands of drivers in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Arabic, Korean, and more. Out of the necessity of organizing a multi-lingual, largely immigrant workforce, and enabled by a technology which easily tracked language preference and assigned calls by language, Solidarity Tech approximated the logic of workplace mapping and the union strategy of building representative leadership committees.

The journey began by answering the question of how to find drivers in the first place. The most direct way was the meet drivers at the airport, signing them up one by one, and following up with them later to recruit new volunteers. But other ways were possible too. At the time, protests against Uber and Lyft received outsized attention – so this ‘earned media’ could be used to capture drivers attention. All of this was coordinated by Rideshare Drivers United through Solidarity Tech, relying on just one paid organizer and a handful of lead volunteers. 

The software was built to solve problems of scale and independence: how to mobilize tens of thousands without substantial centralized resources, and how to retain ownership of organizing data rather than depend on institutions that might restrict access.

And with this work, by drivers organizing drivers, they were able to win Assembly Bill 5 in 2019, which kicked off a massive multi-year battle with Uber and Lyft. 

The Real Secret: NYC-DSA

In theory, Solidarity Tech excels at relational organizing and volunteer development: tracking who knows whom, mapping social and workplace ties, pairing volunteers with lists by language or region, and identifying and tapping organic leaders. In practice, Mamdani’s campaign didn’t make use of all of these features.

This wasn’t because these aspects weren’t necessary, but because NYC-DSA provided much of the relational infrastructure already. As Mamdani field director Tascha Van Auken, former campaign manager for Julia Salazar, outlined in her interview with City & State New York, the campaign began in December 2024 with many of the initial canvassers being DSA members with experience leading canvasses. Van Auken outlines how this effort expanded over time, as volunteers were trained into leads, scripts were sharpened, and the operation was scaled up. And core campaign staff, like Van Auken herself, had cut their teeth on earlier DSA campaigns.

It would be totally silly to argue that the Mamdani campaign was won because of Solidarity Tech, rather than the real secret sauce which was NYC-DSA’s political machine, built up over a decade. But Solidarity Tech played a role in super-charging the growth of this machine, constantly feeding it with new volunteer sign ups and driving increased turnout at a scale which likely would have been impossible to keep up with if done manually.

DSA as the backbone of the campaign also explains why the campaign didn’t need to rely on the relational tools within Solidarity Tech. With dozens or hundreds of experienced field leads integrated into a pre-existing semi-mass city party, the chapter could staff canvass launches, orient new volunteers, and maintain neighborhood continuity without depending on the CRM for leader development. 

Instead, the campaign treated ST primarily as a volunteer funnel and reminder system, serving as a bridge between grabbing a supporters attention and leading them on a canvass in person. And even though relational features weren’t maximized in the software, they still mattered in practice. Every volunteer who showed up was greeted by a local organizer—a neighborhood lead who had likely run the same canvass sites multiple times. That consistency created trust and continuity, allowing volunteers to feel rooted in their own community rather than in an abstract campaign machine.

Similarly, DSA had the internal capacity to tap the full capacity of new volunteers who wanted to do more than knock doors. That meant the campaign didn’t need to rely on ST’s follow-up and leadership-development workflows, because the campaign didn’t need to manage those tasks at all; instead, those functions were handled through the chapter’s own committees, working groups, and recruitment pipelines.

In this way, Mamdani’s field operation blurred the line between high-tech automation and low-tech relational organizing. Social media and the CRM got volunteers to the door; DSA organizers kept them coming back.

Moving Forward For DSA

Although the Mamdani campaign was able to forgo some of these features and workflows focused on ‘deep organizing’ in Solidarity Tech, they remain highly valuable for any DSA chapter which seeks to follow in NYC’s lead.

Campaigns outside of New York will have far less infrastructure than what the Mamdani campaign began with, and building up this infrastructure – i.e. recruiting and training volunteer organizers and campaign leads – will require months of work. Even a DSA chapter which has not yet launched a campaign can begin deploying this toolkit, in order to prime their existing list while they decide which campaigns to put forward. The work of organizing a core crew, recruiting volunteers to phonebank, and deploying these volunteers to call through the list remains the same. 

This work of priming the list is crucial to activate as many “paper members” as possible ahead of election time, funneling them into trainings or working groups, so that come election day there is a larger pool of potential volunteers, and a trained team ready to scale up outreach operations.

Organizing At Scale

Mamdani’s campaign demonstrated a truth often lost in the consultant-driven world of politics: organizing at scale is not just about quantity, but about structure.

The Mamdani campaign shows how insurgent campaigns can combine mass attention with deep organizing. Social media grabbed attention. Solidarity Tech captured and converted that attention. And DSA provided the relational glue that turned volunteers into repeat actors.

The lesson isn’t just about one candidate or one election. It’s about how the left can own its own infrastructure, adapt worker-organizing models for electoral scale, and prevent its capacity from evaporating once a campaign ends.

For a generation of activists, Solidarity Tech represents a bridge: from the deep organizing traditions of the labor movement, to the scale of modern internet-driven campaigns. The challenge now is to use that bridge not just for one race, but for the long road of building movements that last.

The tools of the labor movement—assessments, leadership ladders, the organizer bullseye—emerged from shop-floor campaigns which were 10x, 100x, or 1000x smaller than the Mamdani campaign. Today, they can be scaled for tens of thousands of volunteers, if the right infrastructure is in place.

With the right tools we can translate deep organizing into the digital age.

Freddy Oswald is a member of Boston DSA and a contributor to Working Mass.

The post Deep Organizing at Scale: How Solidarity Tech Helped Power Zohran Mamdani’s Volunteer Wave appeared first on Working Mass.

by Reese A

This piece was written 08/15/25

Last week, I had the honor of representing the Liberal Arts and Science Academy chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), at YDSA’s 2025 annual national convention. It was a true honor to be their co-chair, and to serve them once more as their delegate.

Ultimately, however, I came away from the convention concerned for our political future as a movement: We were decisively against organizing students. We failed to pass crucial resolutions that would strengthen the student movement, including R23: Building Campus Consciousness, Democracy, and Militancy through Student Unions and R10: Building an International Student Movement. R23 would have provided crucial support to mass student organizing in the form of student unions, a formation that can mobilize large numbers of students in solidarity in a way that YDSA cannot. The success of the student union formation is outlined below with Students United by LASA YDSA, and I think that failing to bet on mass student organizing via student unions will remain one of the biggest lost opportunities of the convention. Additionally, R10 centered our internationalism around building relationships with student organizations as YDSA, something that must be centered in order to build an international coalition to win student demands and ultimately socialism.

Instead, we focused on gatekeeping durable socialist organizing to only people with “real” ties to the class struggle (current laborers) and building value-pure socialist groups to recruit students into. We passed resolutions like R12: For a Campaigning Internationalism and R18: Recommitting to Running Strategic Campaigns as Unapologetic Socialists, which aren’t obviously bad, but show a clear focus away from larger mass movement organizing of students towards socialist groups. This tendency fundamentally doesn’t believe that students have a claim to power, but rather we must take a backseat to the “real” working class and focus on political education, supporting their cause, and running smaller campaigns as socialists to pressure the campus. It doesn’t believe in the mass student movement or their own claim to power and representation.

This is a mistake. If we want to win material change, at our schools and in the world, we have to be comfortable organizing the people around us, having conversations, and building power. As students, we represent some of the most diverse, progressive and willing bodies of people in America, and our organizations should strive to organize and mobilize as many students as possible to win. Some might argue that students don’t have the correct “class character,” and I must disagree. We are forgetting what the root of working class is – people who are not owners, people who do not control capital. Just as unemployed people are part of the working class, so are students. Additionally, others argue that students inherently aren’t worth organizing because they’re a transient group. The student movement has built some of the strongest organizations and movements in American history, from Vietnam and Students for a Democratic Society, to divestment from South Africa and winning the collapse of apartheid, to fighting for a free Palestine today. Turnover is not a valid reason to avoid organizing – if that were true, we wouldn’t be organizing Starbucks and Amazon. Yet regardless of the excuses people give for abandoning students, none of them give a valid reason to leave them unorganized and retreat to our comfort zone of like-minded socialists. They’re progressive, willing to fight, and have organized throughout history. It would be a shame for YDSA to give up on student mass organizing, let alone for the wider socialist movement to do so, yet increasingly that seems to be the trend.

It’s important that we organize the entirety of the working class by building durable organizations to fight for change, not because that we think only the working class can win socialism, but because we truly believe in each and every one of our neighbors as people. In this time of rising fascism, believing in people is more important now than ever if we want to defeat it. Yet the socialist movement seems to be retreating into hiding, requiring that people come to our doorstep instead of organizing our neighbors en masse for change, because we no longer find hope in them. We vote down student organizing, we vote down protest organizing, we stop committing to the rank-and-file strategy and make connections with the union leaders instead. This is what fascism wants of us: to feel hopeless and that your neighbor is untrustworthy, to build division in order to cement the ruling class. Instead, we must meet neighbors where they are, with organizations that can represent them both to their schools and to the wider world, and build committed comrades out of this bond.

At LASA YDSA, we organized a student union, Students United, to serve as a durable student bargaining representative to fight for fairer learning conditions and mental health support. We currently have over 8% of the student body supporting our bid to unionize by signing Union Authorization Cards. This union attracted a wide range of people because it was rooted in a collective movement, representation, and demands for change – a movement from which we were able to build committed socialist organizers out of. While YDSA could never legitimately claim to be a representative of students and demand bargaining rights, a union could, because a union’s legitimacy comes exclusively from its status as a representative of the students instead of ideology or self-interest. YDSA can lead the movement, YDSA can build organizers from the movement, but YDSA must commit to empowering the working class to seize power for themselves. This is an important distinction because it’s both an optical, political and communal one – it’s the difference between one-party rule and a worker’s state for the people. Democratic socialists should commit to people power and democracy first and foremost, not try to make a utopian socialist society concocted out of thin air and imposed on the people.

We will not win by building a cadre vanguard that people do not feel a connection to. We will not win by treating our neighbors as peasants to be strung along. We will win through class struggle and a mass movement of each and every one of us, that, through solidarity, can be built in any community and especially within students. We must not give up on student and wider working class solidarity. We must not give up on our own communities. We must commit more, organize for power, and organize to win socialism.

The post In Defense of the Student Movement first appeared on Red Fault.

On August 22nd, 2025 United Auto Worker (UAW) local 647, representing over 600 GE aerospace workers in Evendale Ohio and Erlanger Kentucky, voted by 84% to go on strike if they had not received a counter offer from GE by the time their contract expired at midnight on August 27th. That time came and true to their word the workers went on strike.

It’s important to remember that between 2022 to 2024, GE Aerospace has reaped record revenue surpassing $100 billion for over $16 billion in shareholder distributions. CEO Larry Culp earned $89 million in 2024 alone - over 1,200 times more than the median worker’s annual income. With this kind of profit GE could absolutely be reasonable with these moderate increases that the workers are asking for but are choosing not to.

Metro Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Democratic Socialists of America stand in solidarity with these workers not just with words but with direct action. DSA Cincy members have been out on the picket line since day one with these workers and are currently out there as of this writing! We proudly support GE workers and will continue to do so until their demands are met.

DSA is proud to endorse the following candidates running with Twin Cities DSA support:

Robin Wonsley is running for her third term on Minneapolis City Council, representing Ward 2. She’s running as an independent socialist, and has been a tireless advocate for rent control, public housing, and police accountability.

Robin has a thorough list of campaign priorities which also references the work she has already done on council, encompassing an impressive legislative record. These priorities cover a wide range of issues impacting workers and students including a traffic calming program, housing programs, and working to secure tuition-free college at the state level.

Learn more about Robin in her interview with the Minneapolis Interview Project!

Soren Stevenson is running for Minneapolis City Council, Ward 8. He’s championing working class issues, including housing for all, public safety reform, and environmental justice.

Soren is a proud union member, survivor of Minneapolis police violence, and has extensive experience in housing justice. He recently worked within his union to prevent the permanent closure of a much needed homeless shelter, which required council support.

When Soren ran for council in 2023, he received the most first-choice votes by lost by a mere 38 votes! With just a little bit more help this time around we can secure his seat on Minneapolis City Council!

Robin and Soren are no strangers to national DSA endorsement and we’re looking forward to welcoming both of them to the new Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash slate this year!

Adam Schneider is running on a third party ballot line for the Minneapolis Park Board. He has led environmental justice fights, including the Roof Depot campaign. His campaign is championing parks equity, youth programming, and labor protections.

​​I am running because I believe the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board can be a vehicle to advance climate and environmental justice. By working with the community, our park system can be an integral part of an equitable, resilient, and vibrant Minneapolis.

– Adam Schneider

Adam’s focus areas for the Parks Board include community-driven governance to prioritize resident needs and health over developer interests, expanding community gardens and the urban tree canopy, and environmental stewardship.

Michael Wilson is also running for Minneapolis Park Board! Michael is a stalwart labor advocate, backed by unions running to unseat anti-union incumbents. He’s a former Park Board worker, labor organizer, and environmental justice leader in the successful Roof Depot campaign.

Michael is running on a platform of fair wages for park workers, expanding public transit to reach all parks, utilizing Park and Recreation programs to support working families, and directly addressing environmental concerns impacting the working class such as the Emerald Ash Borer infestation.

Michael’s going up against major anti-labor opponents who’ll pour in as much corporate cash as they need to keep him out of office – pitch in with a donation to our slate today!

The Twin Cities DSA Slate is part of the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising campaign!

The National Guard is coming to Chicago. Never mind the fact that Governor J.B. Pritzker doesn’t want them here and hasn’t ordered them. Never mind the fact that a federal judge recently struck down Trump’s siccing of the Guard on Los Angeles, where they were tasked primarily with intimidating protesters and milling about aimlessly.  Never mind the fact that the presence of troops and federal agents in Washington, D.C was so enraging that a salmon-shirt-and-khaki-shorts-wearing Generic White Guy threw a sandwich at a federal agent – and dodged felony charges after a grand jury refused to indict him. 

Trump has chosen to illegally deploy  National Guard troops and more ICE agents to our city because Chicago is purportedly a violence ridden “killing field” requiring immediate federal intervention. The actual, obvious reason is that Trump is still mad that a group of protesters chased him out of the city in 2016, and that workers here have successfully organized against ICE terrorism. He also resents that Chicago is a thriving, multiracial, multi-ethnic city with local and state leadership uninterested in complying with his whims or bowing to threats of force.

At the same time, the allegations of violence and crime haven’t stopped well meaning people sharing photos of the best of Chicago – its street festivals, beaches, and museums – while mocking how “scary” this world-class city is. I understand the urge to troll and to tell people who have never visited our city to kick rocks. But we cannot neglect the real people behind every statistic, every talking point, and every headline about the number of shootings and assaults in Chicago. Those people deserve more than Trump’s false promises of “law and order,” a “gotcha” headline about crime, or erasure of what happened to them. 

Over the Labor Day weekend in Chicago, 58 people were shot. Eight of those people died. Eight people’s parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters are grieving the loss of loved ones while having to navigate the grim logistics of death: visits to the morgue and the funeral home, obtaining a tall stack of death certificates, contacting Social Security, phone and email providers, banks and credit card companies, health insurance companies, utility providers, and landlords in order to close accounts and attempt to eliminate any debts.

The 50 people who were “only” injured, not killed, are recovering in the hospital. They are fighting with insurance companies who want them discharged before they have gotten used to using a colostomy bag, or before their excruciating pain has dulled to become a manageable (but likely permanent) part of life. Their parents, partners or children are trying to figure out how they are supposed to accommodate a wheelchair or walker in their rickety walkup or two flat, or how they’re supposed to pick up their prescriptions when the only pharmacy in the neighborhood closed three months ago, or who they can talk to about their loved ones’ psychological trauma as the city grapples with a critical shortage of trained mental health professionals.

Meanwhile, nurses have to deliver bad news to parents, aid injured patients, fight with insurance companies, while somehow finding time for a bathroom break. Social workers and case managers have to call through a database of agencies that hasn’t been updated in five years to figure out which patchwork of nonprofit service providers are still open and can offer assistance. Many will try to find time to collectively grieve the clients they lost. Community Violence Intervention (CVI) workers will go to funerals and answer phone calls and text messages at all hours from angry friends and family, trying to persuade them that revenge isn’t worth it, all while making minimum wage and facing layoffs if the CVI grant isn’t renewed. To that last point: Chicago’s CVI landscape is even more fragmented and precariously funded in the aftermath of the collapse of Heartland Alliance, which ran the READI Chicago program.

If a survivor decides to take their chances with the criminal legal system, they’ll deal with an indifferent, unresponsive, or downright hostile police detective. If, rarer still, that detective actually clears a case (meaning a suspect is identified and arrested), the survivor then gets to deal with indifferent, unresponsive, or downright hostile assistant states attorneys, along with the stress of having to relive their trauma while testifying in court, being rigorously cross-examined, and having to see the alleged perpetrator and their family in court. 

If a survivor rationally decides that they want to focus on recovery and don’t want to subject themselves and their loved ones to violent retaliation, the police will openly blame them for the next shooting.

The cycle repeats, leaving more families and workers hurt, desperate for some kind of closure, and struggling with no support. The people screaming about crime in Chicago will continue to ignore the suffering of working-class Chicagoans and remain completely disinterested in offering any real solution to the complex problem of urban crime. The National Guard will either pack up or shift duties to mulching trees.

This is the current state of violence in Chicago. Our city is  this way because the ruling class wants it to be this way. The basic reason why violence is such an intractable issue, no matter how many millions we shovel into the police budget, is because the officers and leadership of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) believe that working-class Chicagoans deserve violence as punishment for having non-MAGA politics and for daring to exist in Chicago while not being white.

I am a police and prison abolitionist because I see “criminal justice reform” as being structurally impossible – not because there aren’t effective reforms, but because police have made it abundantly clear that they will not carry out any reforms that would make the police department better at its stated purpose of preventing crime, swiftly intervening when crime happens, supporting victims and witnesses, and detaining suspects without murdering them or violating their constitutional rights.

In recent years, police have successfully lobbied to make reforms ineffective. The “landmark” Empowering Communities for Public Safety Ordinance (ECPS) is a sprawling meetings-industrial complex that has not delivered on its promises of a police force accountable to civilian oversight. The Anjanette Young Ordinance removed the ban on no-knock raids so it could pass with the votes of alderpeople who think what happened to Anjanette Young and Breonna Taylor was good and should happen more often. They and the Chicago Police Department believe police officers should not be punished for terrorizing and murdering innocent people. 

This extends beyond shootings. This year, women in Logan Square were targeted by a serial rapist. Police detectives refused to act until the women got the attention of local news and publicly organized demands for justice to force the department’s hand. A group of detectives paid six figure salaries had to be bullied into doing their jobs and catching the perpetrator. At least one victim attempted to report what happened and received no response.

The ineptitude and indifference of CPD directly caused an increase in sexual assaults. The reason is pretty obvious if you spend any time trawling anonymous CPD Twitter accounts: the average cop considers women in Logan Square (or Avondale, or Edgewater, or Bridgeport, or Pilsen, or Lakeview, or Hyde Park, and so on) to be insufferably woke and feminist, and thus deserving of rape and sexual assault.

It is our role as socialists to name this specific state failure while uplifting the victims and the many workers left to pick up the pieces of these failures. We should not talk about “killing fields” or point to the richest parts of Chicago to claim that everything is fine. We should also avoid waving off violence as only an issue on the South and West Sides, because violence is both heavily concentrated and scattered across the city. I live on a charming block on the Far North Side that feels like it could have come straight from Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town. There is a block not too far from me where shootings are commonplace.

Right now, Chicago DSA and many other community groups are bracing for an invasion from National Guard troops and federal agents. It is unclear how long this will last. But once the troops leave, or they are relegated to trash pickup, we need to make a serious effort to uplift the human toll of police letting thousands of people die for no reason, and be a regular presence at community vigils and peace marches. The 58 people shot this past weekend deserved more than a false choice between violence and fascism. We all do.

The post Neither Paradise Nor Killing Field: A Socialist Perspective on “Crime in Chicago” appeared first on Midwest Socialist.