Seattle DSA Condemns Anti-Trans Police Violence in Cal Anderson Park

APPROVED FOR RELEASE 25 MAY 2025

Seattle DSA strongly condemns the violent police riot that occurred yesterday, during which officers assaulted, peppered sprayed and arrested protestors and bystanders including DSA members as they peacefully exercised their 1st Amendment rights to demonstrate against a bigoted anti-trans hate rally in Cal Anderson Park hosted by an out-of-state astroturf group.

It is egregious that the city and state would use public resources to protect a hate rally. Sending in law enforcement to attempt to provoke, arrest and injure Seattleites advocating for a city free from discrimination and hatred is disgusting.

We condemn Mayor Bruce Harrell for using the police to target queer protestors in one of Seattle’s gayest neighborhoods, and call on every local elected official to condemn these actions by police and investigate how this hateful, bigoted event was ever allowed to take place.

Today is a shameful reminder that the state has chosen to side with hatred and discrimination, and the police will always come down on the side of those who seek to attack and erase us. Seattle DSA will always stand with the trans and queer community – an attack on one is an attack on all.

Seattle DSA Statement on Those Arrested at Cal Anderson Park

APPROVED FOR RELEASE 26 MAY 2025

This past Saturday, 24 May 2025, twenty-three Seattle community members were arrested after the Seattle Police Department and Washington State Troopers violently attacked protestors exercising their constitutionally protected free speech to tell the anti-queer, transphobic, anti-choice astroturf group MayDayUSA their hate is not welcome here. Seattle DSA condemns this recent exercise of state violence and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s equivocating statement on the events of last week as he attempts to absolve himself of responsibility.

While several of the arrested were soon released, many remained in jail over the weekend under false, trumped-up charges including felony assault. Among these political prisoners are close comrades of Seattle DSA, individuals with deep ties to our community who have been active in the wider movement for a just, collectively liberated world.

This uncalled-for attack at the hands of the police and courts will not go unchallenged by Seattleites as we face many mounting crises, an increasingly hostile Mayor and City Council, and a growing recognition that politics-as-usual is a dead-end. Seattle DSA stands with our queer and trans neighbors as they fight for their liberation from both the violence of cisheteropatriarchy and the many violences of capitalism, and we stand with political prisoners who fight for justice and freedom.

As we mark the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and the summer of uprisings it sparked, we have seen demands for police accountability and disarmament as well as prison abolition be met with further police impunity, more police funding, and an ever-growing prison-industrial complex. Time and time again marginalized communities have borne the brunt of state violence in defense of an untenable status quo, communities including our BIPOC, queer, unhoused, migrant, and low-wage neighbors. And time and time again these communities have risen up to declare this situation unbearable and fought back.

We demand charges be dropped for the Cal Anderson Defendents and for Bruce Harrell to immediately resign. Seattle DSA further continues to demand for the end of prisons and police militarization as tools of domination and capitalist exploitation along with the wider structural violence of racism, settler colonialism, and imperialism that underlie them.

Without justice, there can be no meaningful peace. And attack on one is an attack on all.

Upcoming Events

Tuesday, May 27 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tech Reading Group (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Tuesday, May 27 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.):  Da Vinci Code Reading Group – Day 2 (In person at 1916 McAllister and Zoom)

Wednesday, May 28 (7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.):  Maker Wednesday (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, May 29 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Ecosoc Vision and Strategy (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, May 29 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Immigrant Justice Working Group (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, May 31 (6:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.):  Chapter Movie Night: A Screening of Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) (In person at Carr Auditorium, SF General Hospital, 22nd St)

Sunday, June 1 (5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Capital Reading Group (In person at 1916 McAllister and Zoom)

Monday, June 2 (5:50 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Socialist in Office + Electoral Board Meeting (Zoom)

Monday, June 2  (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Ecosocialist Biweekly Meeting (Zoom)

Monday, June 2 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board Meeting (Zoom)

Wednesday, June 4 (6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): New Member Happy Hour (In person at Zeitgeist, 199 Valencia)

Thursday, June 5 (5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.):  Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)

Saturday, June 7 (1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Outreach and Training (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, June 7 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Know Your Rights Canvassing (Location TBD)

Monday, June 9 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.):  Tenderloin Healing Circle (In person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate)

Monday, June 9 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Events & Actions

Maker Wednesday

Join us for Maker Wednesday on May 28 from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.! Come make some art and connect with comrades. All are welcome, see you there!

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Visioning an Ecosocialist San Francisco

Join us for “Visioning an Ecosocialist San Francisco” this Thursday, May 29 6:00-8:00 p.m.! We’ll meet in-person at 1916 McAllister to imagine, brainstorm, strategize, and plan our ecosocialist future.

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Move Night: Soy Cuba

The Labor Board and Immigrant Justice Working Group are excited to announce our upcoming Spanish Language Movie Night! As part of our desire to improve our Spanish, learn more about Marxist movements in Latin America, and connect with the Spanish speaking community of San Francisco, we are going to be showing “Soy Cuba,” an 1964 international co-production of Cuba and the USSR. We are planning on having food, so please RSVP so we can know how much food to order. We will be watching at the Carr Auditorium at SF General, Saturday, May 31 from 6-8:30 p.m. Invite your friends, eat snacks, and sharpen your knowledge of Spanish and Marxism in Latin America. Hope to see you there!

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Socialist in Office Reportback

At the Socialist in Office meeting on May 19, the electoral board discussed several items

• Land use permitting reforms being pushed by the Mayor which threaten gentrification of districts in the City like Calle 24
• A debrief on on the Four Pillars hearing. Notably, SFPD admitted to not being able to solve the underlying issues surrounding drug overdoses.
• Proposed ordinance from Jackie Fielder preventing unhoused families from evictions from shelters for at least a year
  • The board is organizing a contingent for a rally in support of the hearing on the resolution on June 9 at City Hall. Keep an eye on the calendar for full details and a link to the RSVP which will be posted shortly.

If you would like to be involved in these conversations, join the electoral board on Mondays at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom and find us on Slack at #electoral-discussion.

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EWOC Fundamentals Training Reportback

The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) Fundamentals Training group continued with our third session. The lecture plenary was an interview with Phoebe from the Sesame Workers union, who won their union campaign this past week! Phoebe talked about how they navigated a company environment that outwardly championed community but was actually deeply anti-worker. The lecture also focused on how to escalate campaigns with actions successfully.  We began our discussion section with a reaction to the plenary interview. One comrade shared how they connected to how workers at quote-unquote ‘progressive companies’ can use the company’s mission against them. For example, a pharmaceutical company’s workers can use a slogan like “wellness for all” to argue that workers deserve to be part of that too. Another comrade shared the story they heard of Starbucks workers having a catchphrase to write on coffee cups to build support for their campaign.  Our assignment from last week was to have an organizing conversation with a coworker, so we also discussed our experiences with that. We helped one comrade troubleshoot their conversation, where they encountered people of the “things are okay” camp. We talked about how asking hypothetical questions has worked to open up people’s imaginations and be more receptive to joining the campaign. Things like… “what if you didn’t have to work two jobs – that this one would be enough?”  Next week, we’re going to wrap up the training with a focus on inoculation and the boss campaign!

Behind the Scenes

The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.

To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.

By Jean Allen

Standing at the 4/19 protest organized by 50501, I was happy to see so many people coming out to oppose Trump (even with my frustrations on the lecture series model of rallies), though I couldn’t help but think back to the protests of 2020, the last time I’d seen MLK park that packed. Because for all the people at the 50501 protest, the feeling was that going to this rally was an extracurricular. I saw a tremendous amount of clever signs, signs that declared that it must be serious because the person holding it was protesting, signs with a coy kind of revolutionary expression. People get annoyed at these signs and I get it, but what these rallies look like to me is thousands of people trying to sort out what their political beliefs look like under this assault by Trump. It’s for that reason that I still think these rallies should incorporate small group discussions and that ROC DSA should hold another forum, because if the main product of these rallies is political development, small discussions can support that.

I remember five years ago, when another protest started at that park, where the energy was very different. At the height of Andrew Cuomo’s popularity in the beginning of COVID, he passed a budget undoing in one week many of the justice reforms a generation of activists had fought. People were mad at that, mad at the economy and mad at the horrifying state we are living in. The day after the 3rd Precinct of Minneapolis PD was burned down, a crowd gathered at MLK Park and after a series of speeches, marched onto the street.

The protest of May 31st 2020 was probably the most militant protest I’d been involved in in the city of Rochester. People who had been studying up on the Hong Kong protests arrived in multiple blocs, chants were directly oppositional to the police and repeated by a crowd large enough to make downtown Rochester’s streets seem small.

This changed when we marched to the Public Security Building. The police line which had guarded the building the whole day was not present, and in its place was a single cop car. As the crowd got angrier and angrier, eventually some started destroying the cop car. After this the police came out and escalated with pepper pellets, forcing the crowd into the street. A standstill was held for an hour, with the crowd pressed up and with a consistent escalation from the police. This was he day that I realized there was a difference between pepper pellets and tear gas. During this, a comrade and I realized how many organizational resources would fall apart if we were arrested, and left. Shortly afterwards someone began burning the cars that were in the Public Safety parking lot, which led to the police moving impetuously and pushing the crowd across the river, leading to the riots of that night.

This spawned the Rochester iteration of the 2020 protest wave, which has defined politics since. Some-thing that is tremendously interesting about the 50501 protests is that it has activated the older ‘family protest’ crowd who had largely vacated rallies since 2020. People who have not been politicized think of a protest and they think of the intense police repression and escalated crowds that have characterized the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 or the Palestinian liberation movement since October 2023. I regularly see comrades being, in my view, very overly cautious about protests, because to them protests started with the 2020 Rochester riots instead of the Geezers for Peace protests of the Bush era.

These protests had a feeling where you had to go, not out of ideological reasons but for very personal ones, which exposed a, maybe thrill-seeking aspect to these protests. Had that march not ended at the Public Security Building and police violence not been inflicted on the crowd, it is very likely that nothing would have happened in the city of Rochester that year. We would have had rallies, marches which were perhaps larger and of a far more militant character than previous ones, but it was the police violence and riot of May 31st that turned Rochester into a hotspot of protests. We can characterize the whole protest wave of 2020 as being caused by a series of cop riots which forced the crowds that showed up to rapidly develop their tactics and organization. But it was also dependent on the threat of police violence to continue it’s pace, given the number of people who showed up to either experience police provocateur, some suburban thrill seeker, or an ‘authentically’ angered person from Upper Falls. Dyshika McFadden was arrested connected to burning police cars, but he was one of a few people. But what we do know is that the moment that the police’s personal property was threatened they lost their nerve and threw people onto the other side of the river, triggering a night of riots.

“Cop riots . . . forced the crowds that showed up to rapidly develop their tactics and organization.”

This created the conditions for a curfew which allowed the police to round up dozens of homeless people and escalate their use of force, but also beginning the process of a political rupture even before we knew that they’d killed Daniel Prude and were covering it up. This rupture brought Lovely Warren down, brought the People’s Slate into City Council, and brought us to the moment we are in now. It’s also meant that despite the politicization of policing and the consistent downward pressure on police staffing, the police department has consistently been allotted more money in budgets. The last 5 years have been a reaction to that moment in 2020, when people were infuriated that on top of everything—on top of the bad economy and our degrading environment, on top of the restrictions put on women and queer people and the nightmare that is COVID, on top of the wars and the suffering—the cops can KILL you and get away with it. Out of the fears sparked by the riots of 2020 and a car manufacturer releasing cars without locks, right wing media has created an all encompassing view of cities as sub-civilizational dens of murder and crime, which has for the moment allowed the occasional “officer involved shooting” to happen without rising to the scale of a city-wide crisis. Instead the loss of these fellow human beings is back to what it “should be” in our society: a personal crisis alienated families and communities. The cops CAN kill you again and no one will care, for now. The RPD, and its backers benefited a lot from the riots of 2020.

They did so at the cost of the immediate political order they were charged with defending. By the fall the police allowed the crowds to occupy the area around city hall for a week, and that is a general lesson we can learn from 2020: that when the chips are down, parts of the state which seemed to be monolithic start to fracture against each other. Sometimes that happens in obvious ways, sometime not so obvious. But it’s a key part of the politics of crisis, and we would do well to develop our sense of it.

We can see a similar dynamic in the Trump administration with their idiotic self imposed crises. When the chips are down, when the stakes are at their highest, fractions of the ruling order turn on each other. That, on its own, is not enough. The working class is not yet able to rule and needs to be brought there, purposefully united and organized. But understanding how to move in those moments is how politics works. We will be taught a lot soon.

The post Riots and Protest in the Home of Frederick Douglass first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

While the conclusion of the 2024 election season offered most DSA chapters an opportunity to pause, reflect on their campaigns, and regroup ahead of the following electoral cycle, special elections called in Oakland immediately launched East Bay DSA back into action. The recall of Oakland’s mayor and the election of the District 2 Councilmember to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors created two vacancies to be filled in an April special election.

Both elections were pivotal for political control of local government in Oakland, as progressive wins in both races were necessary to secure a progressive majority. The left quickly coalesced behind a single candidate in each race: former Representative Barbara Lee for Mayor and housing policy director Kara Murray-Badal for District 2. Lee, both a progressive icon and a longtime mainstay of East Bay politics, was easily able to assemble a broad coalition of support ranging from the left to the establishment and from labor unions to the business community, and faced only former Councilmember Loren Taylor, an arch-centrist figure in Oakland politics who narrowly lost the 2022 mayoral election and subsequently emerged as a leader in the recall movement.

But despite her progressive credentials, most notably being the only member of Congress to vote against the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Lee is not a socialist and East Bay DSA did not intervene in the mayoral race. Murray-Badal, on the other hand, is not only a socialist but a once-active member of East Bay DSA, having founded the chapter’s Racial Solidarity Committee and organized for Medicare for All as a canvass lead. Members of the chapter were enthusiastic about her run, and the chapter voted overwhelmingly to endorse her.

It was, however, clear that Murray-Badal faced a much greater challenge. Her main opponent, environmental policy advisor Charlene Wang, started with a financial and name recognition advantage, having run only a few months prior for the at-large position on City Council. Wang also benefited from being able to position herself between the progressive and moderate wings of local politics, aided by the presence of candidates to her right such as Harold Lowe and Kanitha Matoury. Murray-Badal would need to rely on a strong field operation through her core coalition of labor unions and progressive organizations to win.

Immediately following our chapter’s endorsement in February, we began to co-host and support canvasses on a weekly basis. In total, we held or supported eight weekend canvasses, three weeknight canvasses, and one phonebank, in addition to conducting turnout phonebanks and textbanks during the week, knocking nearly three thousand doors in the process. We developed a strong relationship with the Murray-Badal campaign, and multiple DSA members served as campaign staff.

Ultimately, though, our efforts were unsuccessful. Wang won the election, leading with 47% of the vote to Murray-Badal’s 34% in the first round and winning 59% to 41% after ranked-choice voting.

Electoral analysis

District 2 is in many ways a microcosm of Oakland as a whole, exemplified not least by its demographic makeup. A racial and socioeconomic gradient spans the district; the hills in the north are mostly white and wealthy, while the communities in the flatlands, closer to the shore, are overwhelmingly non-white and working-class. Wang won both extremes, while Murray-Badal won the diverse and mixed-income center of the district, in particular Cleveland Heights and most of the Eastlake neighborhood. In Crocker Highlands, the wealthiest part of the neighborhood, Wang won easily and Murray-Badal finished third behind centrist candidate Harold Lowe. Wang was strongest in Chinatown, the westernmost part of the district, and also performed well in San Antonio in the southeast, a neighborhood which notably awarded Trump his best performance in Oakland last November with over 20% of the vote.

A precinct-level estimate of the results after ranked-choice calculations produces a similar map, though with Wang flipping one precinct and improving significantly on her result in Crocker Highlands thanks to the distribution of Lowe’s second-choice votes.

Examining turnout at the precinct level most clearly demonstrates the gradient described earlier. While some San Antonio precincts saw turnout below 20%, a whopping 64% of Crocker Highlands voters cast ballots, a particularly high figure for an off-cycle special election. Turnout disparities between wealthier and poorer areas are obviously commonplace, but they are exacerbated in lower-turnout scenarios such as special elections.

Takeaways

The trichotomy between conservative wealthy areas, progressive middle-income areas, and conservative poor areas is not unique to this election; rather, it reflects voting patterns commonly encountered by progressive and socialist candidates across the country and indicates an issue we must tackle if we are to be more electorally successful. We must expand beyond our base of college-educated, downwardly-mobile young people and make inroads among working-class communities that have been ignored by campaigns and political organizations and often move toward reactionary politics as a result. Toward this end, East Bay DSA’s Electoral Committee plans to undertake deep canvassing campaigns in areas such as West Oakland and East Oakland, inspired by and hopefully in collaboration with left-wing community organizations such as the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment which are successfully building bases in these areas.

Internally, too, there is work to be done. While there was a core group of consistent volunteers throughout the campaign, most chapter members did not engage with the campaign, and some even expressed opposition to participating in the campaign or electoral politics in general. Getting more members on board with engagement in elections will be crucial to building our capacity and strength as an organization. Additionally, our decision to hold canvasses every weekend may have dampened attendance at each canvass, especially considering our limited capacity to turn out members on a weekly basis; for future campaigns, we are considering instead hosting a smaller number of canvasses but concentrating turnout efforts on those few canvasses to maximize impact.

But while we lost the election, our efforts were still fruitful for East Bay DSA and our electoral organizing, both internally and externally. Our canvasses and phonebanks provided valuable campaign experience and leadership development to members, growing the Electoral Committee’s core and preparing us for future campaigns. 

Antonio G, co-chair of East Bay DSA's Electoral Committee, put it this way: “The campaign was an outlet for local political agency. Kara’s campaign and values were for some new members the perfect starting point to connect with strangers and organize in community."

Our consistent involvement made us one of the strongest components of the Murray-Badal campaign’s coalition, strengthening our relationship with allied organizations and the broader left in the East Bay. While we have much room to grow, learn, and improve, this experience has helped us as we look toward 2026 and beyond.

The following is a response to Hazel Williams's March 7 article, "Reflections on California DSA”, in Democratic Left, the online publication of the national DSA. 

As former (Fred) and current (Michael) members of the California DSA steering committee we would like to express our appreciation for Hazel Williams’s examination of the first couple years of the existence of California DSA, the first official state DSA body in the country. As she notes, this is essential work in assessing the utility of such bodies going forward.

However, while we are in broad agreement with her description of the events, we have some significant differences with her interpretations of their meaning. These interpretations result from two problems: information she leaves out that would help explain the failures she enumerates; and political differences she glosses over.

One important background factor needs to be emphasized at the outset: there were few resources made available to California DSA from the national organization because national DSA is itself understaffed and without sufficient institutional resources to anticipate and prevent such problems. A simple statement of what happened doesn’t get to this underlying dynamic.

Hazel tells us that “the PAC [political action committee] had racked up thousands of dollars in fines from noncompliance prior to my term and it took me nearly a year and over 100 email exchanges with national compliance staff to bring it into compliance. And yet the PAC was not used once during my term.” This is true. We appreciate the heroic work she did in cleaning up that mess. But the PAC was not formed by California DSA. The brand-new state body in 2022 inherited it from the ad hoc, chapter-driven statewide Prop 15 campaign of 2020.  And it was not used during her one-year term because there were no priority statewide elections during that year. 

The first state committee, prior to Hazel’s term (we have one-year terms) set as a major goal developing an income stream and hiring staff, to address the obvious lack of necessary resources. But we did not know what we were up against. As the first state DSA structure, we had no precedents to look to, nor, as it turned out, any national rules to help us develop the financial independence we knew we needed. Indeed, just the opposite: for instance, national rules, we found, prevented us from creating a bank account. 

Also key: the idea of California DSA was born in the peak moment of activism in 2020 when Bernie Sanders ran for president the second time. That level of activism continued into the first months of the pandemic as the Black Lives Matter movement scaled up and, in California, in the Prop 15 “tax the rich” statewide ballot measure campaign that fall. California DSA was predicated on what turned out to be an overoptimistic hope that a major portion of that activist cohort would continue that level of involvement. As we all know, instead we saw a national falling off of involvement and membership across the board, including in California.

Hazel notes the failure of CA DSA to live up to its founding “vision document” and enumerates the various parts of that vision we did not put in place, or only barely. Behind this failure was our inability to create the administrative infrastructure necessary to support committees, meetings, and other initiatives adequately—see as above:  no money, no staff, an all-volunteer body, layered, as Hazel notes, on top of the considerable local work state committee members were already doing. As it turned out, the conditions were not favorable to generate greater resources, which could not be foreseen, absent a crystal ball.

Since Hazel’s departure, California DSA has simultaneously scaled back some of its ambitions until such time as we are able to figure out the financing and staffing, and begun, nonetheless, to achieve some of the more modest goals we laid out. Hazel mentions that when she attended the statewide zoom presentation of “California DSA 101” six members showed up. Since late 2024 we have run this introductory ninety-minute session three times, and each time we have had more than sixty participants. She laments our failure to put in place any training during her year in office. On our website we have begun to store training modules, and last month delivered a four-part, weekly “Labor 101 for Socialists” study group to fifteen participants.

Speaking of the website, we have a regular bi-monthly newsletter, California Red, that goes out to every member in the state, and we update the news articles on the site every month, providing the only means for thousands of DSA members to learn what the other chapters in California are up to. 

This is especially important for our farflung at-large members. In a state the size of California, we have comrades reading California Red and attending our CA DSA 101s who have no chapter within a hundred miles. One recently joined our communications committee. She told us how grateful she is to have found her way to plugging into DSA work:  “When I wasn't sure whether I was ready to make a serious commitment of my time and energy to DSA, especially since all existing chapters are many hours of travel away, meeting gracious, approachable, skillful humans on this side of the country virtually through the state org made taking that plunge far less daunting. In addition to receiving their invaluable wisdom and support, networking directly with other rural and at-large members in our huge, diverse state is, in my opinion, necessary to support courageous chapter formation across California's many forgotten, often politically conservative, rural places. The state org is the most obvious place for that.”

Hazel says, “In summary, we built much of the basic infrastructure of a state body, but struggled to achieve most of our organizational goals.” Well, no. The “basic infrastructure of a state body” would include the necessary resources of staff and finances. We “struggled to achieve most of our organizational goals” precisely because we did not have that basic infrastructure.

In this light, her conclusion that “The cost to DSA as a whole is too great, in terms of labor, money, and opportunity. It may be better to let other seeds take root” rings hollow. There are, in fact, few costs at this time to DSA as a whole, and the benefits are slowly beginning to accrue. 

With extremely limited resources (the volunteer labor of about a dozen people, including the state committee and its standing committees (electoral and comms, and every other month a few dozen delegates to our state council) we are pioneering a new DSA structure. If California DSA were a person, its stage of development would be, at three years old, a toddler. It is far too soon to issue any final—especially dismissive—judgements. 

We agree with Hazel that DSA members in other states should proceed with caution, with clear objectives, and a realistic plan for resources matched with its goals. Since it is likely that political struggles over social policy will increasingly occur at the state levels, we see great value in DSA organizing state formations. We are happy to share our experiences with comrades involved in any efforts along these lines. 

Solidarity,

Fred Glass and Michael Lighty

In 1867, San Francisco passed a law making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.” Such “Ugly Laws”—in place all over the country until an intolerably recent 1974—were simply one more knot in the rope that’s been strangling disabled folks since Capital first decreed that any body that can’t create wealth for the bosses is unworthy of existence.

One might be excused from believing that the Nazi concept of a “life unworthy of life” left our world splattered across Eva Braun’s armband along with the Fuhrer's gray matter, were not the insidious echoes of eugenical thought still screaming in our ears. It ricochets from the ableist algorithm that withheld care during COVID based on a psychotic assumption linking ability and human worth, to a Canadian suicide law that coerces non-terminally ill undesirables to self-deport out of existence rather than face an unassailable scarcity of care. As Derek Beres put it in a recent Guardian article,

“When (Health Secretary Robert F.) Kennedy claims that autism is worse than Covid-19 because the latter only kills 'old people' and 'metabolically healthy' people don’t die from it, or when a Maha associate claims that measles is 'an essential rite of passage, immunologically', you’re hearing the language of soft eugenics. Don’t let vaccines protect everyone, instead let the infirm and weak be culled so that the strong will survive and perpetuate.”

Because the sky will most definitely fall if an 80 year-old-man recently hired by 81 million people exercises the humility it takes to use a mobility device in public, "Aides reportedly conceded that it was politically untenable to have the U.S. president in a wheelchair," and so conspired to prevent President Joe Biden from using one. We couldn't have a sane, rational and responsible conversation about this oldest of presidents' eventual senescence in part because so many people couldn't stand to—or trust their neighbors to—contemplate, let alone contend with, the complexities of collective responsibility among and to the aging, and the fact that the privileged are mostly the ones who get to do it.

Only in a eugenical society, where even an essential service provider like Planned Parenthood must navigate the dark words of its beatified founder—the avowed eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who once wrote that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective”—can we truly appreciate the imperfect miracle known as Medicaid (MediCal in California). This chronically underfunded federal program that provides life-saving health care to impoverished Americans with all the panache of a bobbing log after a shipwreck—was suggested by a President famous for hiding his disability (FDR) and signed into law by another who worked from the toilet (LBJ -- perhaps the Crippest thing we’ve ever heard).

Like all true miracles, Capital's begrudging acquiesence to Medicaid has a secular explanation—a boring one about compromise and compassion and Federalism in a serendipitous moment where good was painstakingly chiseled from a bedrock of fear, bias and paternalism. And it is that exact secular miracle that keeps me (Brian) alive today, sucking air through one tube while I piss out another, living not for the bosses, but for the aspirational Jeffersonian promise at the heart of any argument for American greatness. This very promise of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is ignored by a current regime hellbent on stripping so many of so much so a few can have a little more.

Choosing Interdependence Over Eradication

The life-saving log of Medicaid/MediCal isn't enough for all the human flotsam floating in the wreckage created by Capital's abuse of our bodies. Disability justice is how we—Crips, freaks, sick & mad people, neurodivergents, institutional survivors, casualties of state violence and imperial wars, Deaf and hard of hearing people, the deformed and the despairing, and those who hate us (starting the day they too are confronted with the unsparing reality that their own bodyminds are fragile, ephemeral, golden and sacred but don't actually work mechanistically like industrial cogs in a profit-fetishest's wheel)—survive the crushing reality that Capital is entirely happy to kill anyone not harvestable for material gain. We do disability justice because we know we are broken, like the split husk from which every raw green seedling emerges, and we do disability justice because we know we are whole, as part of the intricate web of life in all its diversity and complexity and unexpected magic, which continues to confound and inspire and rally us all at our best. The way we do disability justice is together. It's the only way it can be done.

Interdependence is the crux of our movement. Interdependence—a solidarity borne out of recognition of our innate vulnerabilities—is how we keep us alive and die trying. As Patty Berne, one of creators of this queer & BIPOC movement, put it: 

“Disability Justice holds a vision born out of a collective struggle, drawing upon the legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance within a thousand underground paths, igniting small persistent fires of rebellion in everyday life. Disabled people of the global majority—black and brown people—share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice. There has always been resistance to all forms of oppression, as we know through our bones that there have simultaneously been disabled people visioning a world where we flourish, that values and celebrates us in all our myriad beauty.”

Solidarity among and with disabled people is not optional if the working class is to out-survive and defeat capitalism and its currently rabid fascism. Abled people are ill-equipped to survive this antifascist fight without us. They may have never been in a situation where all of the normative rules for human existence are inverted in their own flesh and blood lives, and political inversion on a massive scale is what we are all undergoing together now. Disabled people have already had to learn how to create community out of extreme isolation, have had to muster the courage to show up in public knowing that our very presence will inspire contempt, rancor and worse. People who haven't been marginalized don't have these skills. The survival craft. They haven't cultivated the pluck that it takes to pick yourself up, again and again, day after day, when all the alarms are sounding and the doors won't open and the lights make your brain melt and your limbs are in shattering pain and you are dealing with voices that tell you to just shrivel up and die. Not as an apex existential crisis with soaring soundtracks and fabulous makeup, not as a one-off you can tie up neatly with a bow, but every. Single. Day. They haven't faced that. 

But we, the quarter of the population who have nonconforming bodyminds, live this oppression constantly, and are undeterred by its current iteration. The surreality of our embodiment in an economic hegemony that hates us for being is the air that we have adapted to breathe. We have learned to stare into the slobbering maw of economic and state and corporate and institutional violence every day, everywhere we live, across the generations and say: fuck you. We exist. We remain alive out of defiance and the defiant and limitless expanse of our love for ourselves and each other. That is our politics. The rest is details.

Natural Comrades

Disabled people are uniquely primed for socialist organizing, and it is self-defeating not to prioritize us in every DSA chapter, in every action, and in every member recruitment drive. We are more than a quarter of the population, are overwhelmingly working class (typically, poor), we are intersectional, we are where most people end up at some point during, if not the end, of their lives, and we are already excluded in large numbers even from labor organizing, because we are often unable to conform to the productivity fetish of Capital. In an articulation of the Third Principle of Disability Justice offered by Berne in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice:

“3. ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC. We are anti-capitalist, as the very nature of our mind/bodies often resists conforming to a capitalist 'normative' level of production. We don’t believe human worth is dependent on what and how much a person can produce. We critique a concept of 'labor' as defined by able-bodied supremacy, white supremacy, and gender normativity. We understand capitalism to be a system that promotes private wealth accumulation for some at the expense of others.”

Disabled people know in our bones what abled people often fear and temporarily elude facing: 

Only once we acknowledge the challenges of our shared dependence, along with our irreducible differences, can we fully value the skills and resources necessary to promote the capabilities of everyone, whatever our distinct needs, whether as carers or cared for, noting the frequent reciprocity of these positions. Recognizing our needs both to give and to receive care not only provides us with a sense of our common humanity, but enables us to confront our shared fears of human frailty, rather than project them onto those we label as 'dependent.'“

In this we hold the keys to create the "caring economy" of our dreams, as articulated in The Care Manifesto.

DSA must have the backs of disabled people, because we are you, we are who you will be, and we are the bodies you will have to step over on your way to doing anything else if you don't. Should we persist as a nation that relegates its most vulnerable members to mass graves? No? Then fight for Medicaid, MediCal in California, which rich politicians want to defund so they can buy more mega-yachts. Fight for SSI. Fight for SNAP, CalFresh in California. Fight for ramps over stairs. Fight for Medicare For All. Fight for a worker's compensation system that refuses to humiliate injured workers. Fight for your neighbor who is too scared to tell you they are sick, to ask for help when they need it, to give you the wisdom they sit in, through long dark nights and blistering days. Fight for access: language access, structural access, online access, transit access. Fight for the person who isn't in the room because of the room. 

We can fight hate with rage, or sorrow, or a patient understanding extended to those moving at a different pace, or water bottles on a sweltering picket line, but we fight it best together, interdependently, with sharp tongues and soft hearts, searching for a greatness not lost, but found in every kind word and selfless act, in every tear shed and setback faced, in every impossible possibled and bitter pill swallowed. Only through solidarity can we hold this secular miracle of our mutual survival—including Medicaid—together. It's the way we will win.

Further reading:

Sins Invalid's 10 Principles of Disability Justice is an anchor for our own work and we are grateful for the brilliance of the queer BIPOC people who articulated and exemplify it.

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Kakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press. 2018)

The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, by The Care Collective (Verso, 2020)

Matin, B.K., Williamson, H.J., Karyani, A.K. et al. "Barriers in access to healthcare for women with disabilities: a systematic review in qualitative studies." BMC Women's Health 21, 44 (2021). 

Sharpe, Jason A et al. “Social Risk Factors Are Associated With Disability Prevalence - Results From 17 States in the 2017 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.” American Journal of Health Promotion: AJHP vol. 37,4 (2023), pp. 453-463. 

(An Electoral Campaign for Us) At the risk of being cheesy, this is what democracy looks like.

Before I got active in politics, there was Bob Filner. When he was mayor, I was still married, and my focus was on trying to balance my family responsibilities with feeding my creative side as the board member of a local literary nonprofit. I had the same kind of interest in electoral politics as most Americans: not much in between presidential elections, and then with a resigned sense that the fix was most likely in.

But Filner broke into my attention and indeed the attention of millions through revelations that he’d abused an extraordinary number of women. If you don’t know who he is, I’m sorry to tell you now that what was so shocking about this wasn’t simply the number of women stepping forward, it’s that Filner was the great progressive hope. He’d served in Congress before running for mayor of San Diego and had been a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The three people who publicly blew the whistle on his behavior put their careers on the altar of justice, and I’m forever grateful to them.

Why so personal? Well, hello, I’m a woman. My daughter is a woman. I know and love so many of them. But also, the one thing that hit me clear as lightning when the accusations brought forward one woman telling her story, then another, then just an awful procession, was that his behavior had been witnessed and known by many more people than the three whistleblowers. This was a man with a long political career. People behind the scenes experience disruption, even if they don’t see an assault firsthand. They know something’s up. They ask, they talk.

The fix was in

And I’m telling you this now, because I want you to know that this is a big part of why you need to get involved in electoral politics. Even if you’re experiencing the kind of disgust I felt viscerally in 2013, even if it’s going to take you a minute to process. Even if you could not fathom how a presidential incumbent you were fixed on to support was clearly faltering in his capacities and earnestly facilitating material support for genocide. The fix was in, in spite of all these unacceptable and outrageous priors and it’s going to take many of us – masses of us – to break it.

What does that look like? In DSA, a lot of our members sign up because they’re pissed off at the conventional options. Like me they can’t handle the dissonance of living in what’s pledged to be the world’s strongest democracy, yet one in which they don’t have the option of voting for someone they trust to advance their values. Some are ready to throw in on candidate campaigns from day one, some want to focus first on alternatives for building power. Both answers are right. But ultimately, we need the masses to engage in elections.

I came to electoral politics through my organizing for ecosocialist policy; specifically, Green New Deal initiatives that expressly affirmed the need to overcome capitalism in the fight for our planetary future. I saw how DSA member candidates and elected officials in New York were using the attention on them as candidates and elected officials to proselytize for our version of a Green New Deal, not because it polled well, but because it was the right thing to do. Because I want my daughter to exist on a livable planet, I signed right up.

Fun as hell

And then I found out that when you get connected to campaigns you care about, it’s fun as hell. If you’re a private person, you might assume that people will be indignant when you knock on their doors. You might assume they’ll all shoo you away, and that it’ll be humiliating. What actually happens is that the people who don’t want to talk to anyone unexpectedly just won’t come to the door. Maybe a few will shoo you away. But in between those experiences you’re going to have sincere conversations with neighbors who wouldn’t know anything about the choices to be made in local elections or primaries without hearing from someone like you, who has no more stake in the outcome than your one precious life.

At the risk of being cheesy, this is what democracy looks like. It’s not passively being a booster for insider candidates in the desperate interest of doing something. Hopefully once you find out how fun canvassing is, you’ll start getting to know the people organizing support for one candidate or another, and you’ll start learning more about who’s really putting in the work to stay unbeholden to the donors and interests hostile to the working class. All that learning does not come overnight, but it does come pretty easily when you step one foot after another into action. Don’t lose your anger. Let it settle and decompose, nourishing a righteous tomorrow. Have fun with it and the people joining you in the work – we’re in this together.

[This article was originally published in The Jumping Off Place on May 14.]

Although Elon Musk has either withdrawn or been removed from day-to-day oversight of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the world’s richest man’s engagement with right-wing extremism continues to raise valid concerns for pro-democracy advocates. This article seeks to analyze Musk's political rhetoric using the frameworks laid out in Umberto Eco's “Ur-Fascism,” highlighting key traits like xenophobia and cult of personality. By comparing Musk's statements and actions to Eco's model, the author aims to point out the fascistic character of Musk’s rhetoric, and the potential threat it poses to democratic governments. This is a condensed version of an essay originally presented orally at California State University Northridge. 

Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism” holds significant weight within scholarship on political extremism. His fourteen-point definition of “Eternal Fascism” was immediately utilized by scholars to help understand European fascist regimes. Scholars have continued to use “Ur-Fascism” to identify current regimes. While Eco holds no monopoly on the definition of fascism or its features, the respectability of “Ur-Fascism” amongst historians and scholars, as well as its utility and relevance, merit its use today. 

Primarily a reflection on his experience in fascist Italy, Eco’s background as a semiotician also led him to discuss how fascists articulated themselves. Behind every movement lies its ideologies. In front, however, lies its rhetoricians. As fascism began to take root in Italy, Eco asserts that Mussolini “did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric”. But how can a political ideology which led to several totalitarian governments survive and spread without consistency? Eco reflects on the confusing nature of fascism:

Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions… [This] contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation…Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations. 

Eco frames fascism as a fundamentally incoherent set of ideas that, when conveniently applied, help consolidate power in the hands of a few authoritarians. Eco said, however, “It is enough that one of [these ideas] be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”. Given this, the presence of multiple fascist characteristics in Musk’s rhetoric should give serious pause amongst democracy advocates. If we smell smoke, we must act like there’s a fire; if the alarms are going off, we cannot ignore them.

Eco first speaks of Ur-Fascism as an ideology that follows a cult of tradition which is necessarily syncretistic. While not a practicing Christian, Musk has claimed to be “culturally Christian” and a “big believer in the principles of Christianity”; he also went on to tie the decrease in religion with a decrease in population. 

While he may be cherry-picking from one set of religious beliefs, he doesn’t appear to combine them with any other mythologies or religions. However, his rightward shift into the MAGA movement does give some concern. Musk has historically been moderate. But after endorsing Trump in 2024, he became the largest political donor in the 2024 election cycle, donating more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump and other Republican candidates running for congress. He even set up a political action committee that largely ran Trump’s ground campaign up until election night. 

Eco notes the Fascist Party of Italy at its beginning was republican, and that it ultimately manifested itself as a far-right dictatorship after it was financed by rich landowners.  

The rejection of modernism and anti-intellectualism are two prominent features of Musk’s rhetoric. Eco explains how the Nazis held a surface-level praise of modernism via technology, while rejecting “the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course)”. Musk has a long relationship with technology, particularly with Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has worked for decades on a plan to colonize Mars, stating that humanity should have “life insurance for life as a whole”. It’s perhaps no small coincidence that Musk was named after the alien Mars leader in The Mars Project, a science fiction novel written by Nazi rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. 

A green carmaker’s climate denial

When von Braun’s book was published, the world faced an existential threat via a Cold War nuclear apocalypse; today climate change represents a similar threat to Earth. Despite his contributions to green energy technologies, he has increasingly engaged in anti-intellectual climate change denial. While scientists have agreed agriculture and other land use make up 13-21% of global emissions, Musk has claimed agriculture has “no meaningful impact on climate change”. Since his involvement in the second Trump administration, Musk has adopted his climate denialism, prompting leading experts to call Musk a “climate denier”. While previously calling for a “popular uprising” against fossil fuel industries, experts have noticed Musk’s rapid deprioritization of climate solutions since his involvement. 

Much like von Braun’s utopian visions for Mars exploration helped the American public forget about his contributions to Nazi war crimes, Musk’s interplanetary irrationality has worked to pave over important climate realities. Eco notes that “distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism”. Musk’s distrust of climate science contradicts his green endeavors. Given Musk’s current political and economic positions of power, his continued rejection of modern climate science and his irrationalist rhetoric present a fascistic danger to America, and the world.

Attacks on cultural and social progress

While dismissing climate expertise, Musk has also attacked cultural and social progress. Eco reminds us that fascist intellectuals, like Goering, “mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values”. Musk became obsessed with the “woke mind virus” after his daughter Vivian transitioned into a woman. He publicly vowed to “destroy the woke mind virus,” claiming his “son was killed” by it. This rhetoric exemplifies Eco’s seventh feature: obsession with a plot. Eco notes that such a plot can come from within or without the nation, but their “followers must feel besieged”. Musk has claimed that the “woke mind virus,” its reevaluation of traditional values and gender norms, is causing civilizational collapse; he also blamed universities for indoctrinating students with “wokeness”. Considering every single major medical association recognizes the efficacy and importance of gender-affirming care, Musk’s unfounded obsession with “wokeness” threatens both the LGBTQ+ community and academia. This feature remains particularly dangerous, as Musk continues to target other marginalized groups. 

Musk’s rhetoric also reflects Eco’s twelfth feature: thinking as “a form of emasculation”. Musk tends to compensate for his intelligence by playing heavily into machismo. Musk has resorted to threats of violence, such as inviting Zuckerberg to a cage match over the launch of Threads. He also flexed his unelected influence over government spending policy by waving a chainsaw at CPAC. These exaggerated masculine behaviors coincide with what Eco implies as a “disdain for women” and “condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits”. While leaning into transphobia, Musk is also misogynistic. Several SpaceX employees sued Musk for firing them based on sexual bias; they documented a “pervasive sexist culture at SpaceX” rife with routine sexual harassment and comments. SpaceX also issued a $250,000 severance, and a non-disclosure agreement, to a flight attendant after Musk allegedly propositioned her for sex. Researchers also found a dramatic increase in the pervasiveness of misogynistic content and accounts on Twitter following its acquisition by Musk. This evidence firmly ties Elon’s rhetoric to a machismo that threatens women.

Great Replacement theory

Most egregiously present in Musk’s rhetoric is the fear of difference. Eco’s fifth feature notes that “Ur-Fascism is racist by definition;” fear of difference is often the first appeal made by burgeoning fascists. Musk has claimed “illegals [are] being put in swing states” so they can “replace native-born American voters”. This unfounded claim is a nod to the Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy theory believed by white nationalists and white supremacists. Dr. Suleiman, president of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, accused Musk of using his platform on X to blow “every conceivable dog whistle of Islamophobia”. For example, Musk used a baseless memo to spread a rumor campaign accusing British PM Starmer of being “complicit in the rape” of British women and girls by Pakistani grooming gangs; recent studies have found little evidence of such gangs, noting most offenders were white. 

These examples demonstrate a deep-seated racism in Musk’s rhetoric. His rhetoric has also featured antisemitic tropes and symbols. Before his involvement with Trump, Musk agreed with a tweet claiming Jews deserved hatred for their anti-white racism by replying “you have said the actual truth”. Musk infamously performed a Sieg Heil salute at a Trump rally. While the Anti-Defamation League quickly defended his “awkward gesture,” their director emeritus disagreed, calling it a “Heil Hitler Nazi salute”. Several scholars of extremism, as well as the former head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, have condemned Musk’s fascist salute; regardless of his intentions, white nationalist organizations and commentators across the US celebrated the salute. Musk also spoke to supporters of the AfD, a German far-right party with a history of neo-Nazism and xenophobia. In his speech, he called the AfD “the best hope for Germany,” claimed multiculturalism “dilutes” German culture and values, and that Germany needed to “move beyond” the “past guilt” of the Nazi era. Musk’s racist and antisemitic rhetoric resembles Eco’s fifth and seventh characteristics, firmly tying his rhetoric to fascism. 

Free speech for me, not for thee

Musk’s aversion to analytical criticism also ties him to Eco’s fourth feature. Musk has repeatedly censored his critics, despite identifying as a “free speech advocate”. After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he suspended the Twitter accounts of journalists critical of him; in 2024 he censored at least fourteen more across the political spectrum. He also failed to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate for their coverage of X. Despite his first amendment advocacy, he hypocritically allowed the Turkish government to censor speech on X before their national elections. Musk’s tendency to critique and meddle in the democratic governments of Turkey, England, Germany, and the United States, can also be associated with Eco’s thirteenth feature. These features further define Musk’s fascist tendencies, serving as a growing list of red flags for democracy advocates globally. 

If one of Eco’s features applied to the world’s richest man would be troublesome, seven is no laughing matter. In addition to Musk’s increasing economic and political power, his rhetoric has increasingly become more fascistic over time. Democracy advocates, particularly in the United States, should treat Musk’s rhetoric and rise to power as a potentially nation-ending event. Historically, rhetoricians with less wealth and influence have given birth to fascist movements and totalitarian governments. Eco implored that the rise of fascism is not obvious, that it is our duty to “uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world”. In a world of rising extremism and instability, it must be the task of the modern leader, the modern citizen, to be resiliently anti-fascist. “Freedom and liberation are an unending task”.

[A slightly different version of this article was published on May 1 in Jacobin.]

“With our comrades we remember recent victories, and we mutter against, and curse, our rulers. We take a few minutes to freshen up our knowledge of what happened there in Chicago in 1886 and 1887 before striding out into the fight of the day.”

—Peter Linebaugh, “A May Day Meditation”

When my children were little in the late 1990s, we attended an annual May Day event in verdant Tilden Park, near our home in Berkeley.  Each year a flyer, resplendent with Walter Crane illustrations, would appear in our mailbox inviting us to come celebrate. I have no memory of how we got onto the mailing list, but I recall how much my kids loved arriving in the meadow, lining up with dozens of other families, and marching around the perimeter of our “commons” behind banners and signs, before participating in a kid-led theatrical presentation featuring authority-defying woodland peoples and a cruel but eventually vanquished evil overlord.

This mashup of “green” and “red” May Days—the celebration of spring renewal dating back to time immemorial, and the more modern promotion of workers and class struggle—is typical of the dialectic that has animated the holiday in various times and places. This year’s May Day is leaning more toward red.

On April 5 an estimated three million people around the country served notice that their “consent of the governed” was not available to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their fascist billionaire cabal. The turnout for the hastily thrown-together “Hands-Off” demonstrations—more than a thousand events in all fifty states—surpassed organizers’ predictions and ramped up expectations for the next big day of action, which happens to be May 1, International Workers Day. 

A confluence of tributary factors is building attention for this year’s May Day. Beyond its traditional significance in worker solidarity, and as a display of resistance to the current extreme right wing agenda, May Day 2025 offers the opportunity to lay down a marker toward a formidable goal: the challenge issued by United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain to the rest of the labor movement to line up union contracts for expiration on May 1, 2028 as a platform for mass strikes to follow. As Fain put it, “We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.”

The history 

Although celebrated in more than one hundred countries, May Day has never been an official holiday in the United States, the country of its origin. The explanation lies in a complex history encompassing the vast differences between what workers want and what capitalists are willing to part with. Jacobin has published many articles over the years on that history, so I’ll just briefly summarize here and point you for details toward my documentary video, We Mean to Make Things Over: A History of May Day.

In 1884 the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor, decrying the inhumanity of workers’ lives crushed by too many hours of work and too little time for rest and play, passed a resolution stating that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1 1886”. Another resolution encouraged all labor organizations to vote for a general strike on that date in support of the eight hour day. After determined organizing, a third of a million workers downed tools on the big day, with decidedly mixed results. 

Chicago saw the greatest manifestation of worker power. But following police violence that resulted in fatalities, a protest demonstration was held in Haymarket Square on May 4. Here an unknown perpetrator threw a bomb, precipitating a police riot in which several more people were killed. The city’s employers and government unleashed the nation’s first red scare, targeting the most effective immigrant worker organizers. It ended in the kangaroo court conviction and hanging of four leaders, the murder or suicide of one more in his cell, and continued imprisonment of three others. Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, after examining the matter, pardoned and freed the prisoners, declaring their trial a miscarriage of justice.

The cause of the Haymarket martyrs was embraced by the newly formed Socialist or Second International, which in 1889, meeting in Paris, designated May 1, 1890 as a day of remembrance and called for a worldwide demonstration for the eight hour day. Initially there was no mention of establishing a workers’ holiday. Yet, in country after country for decades, workers’ movements pushed employers and governments to recognize May Day as a paid holiday and to establish the eight-hour day as the workplace standard. At times, the May 1 movement was met with bloody repression. In some places, it took a general strike to win the holiday and the eight-hour workday.

The first May Day demonstrations in 1890 fell on a Thursday, stimulating a conversation that’s recurring now: should workers leave work (strike) to aggressively support the cause? The Socialist International left that decision up to its affiliated parties in each country, depending on their assessment of the conditions under which they operated. The results varied from Vienna, where on May 1 a general strike shuttered the city, and some sixty rallies combined to form a march of one hundred thousand; to London, where a non-striking “May Day” was moved to May 4, a Sunday, unleashing an unprecedented demonstration of three hundred thousand. 

In the United States the AFL decided against a repeat of 1886. Instead the most prepared union, the Carpenters and Joiners, led the way and struck for the eight hour day. Other unions and allies provided as much support as they could, while planning that each May Day following another union would go out and take its turn. Ten of thousands of carpenters earned an eight hour day through these actions in 1890 (although the victory was rolled back by the economic depression later in the decade).

Within a few years, following the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, and in the midst of the Pullman strike in summer 1894, in which workers were killed by police, the national guard and armed thugs employed by the railroads, President Grover Cleveland thought it might be prudent to let a little steam out of the class struggle pressure cooker. He signed a bill proclaiming the first Monday in September a holiday celebrating the contributions of workers to America. This bill made no mention of the eight-hour day or the repression of the workers’ movement. Under these circumstances Labor Day was, in effect, an employer-friendly substitute for May Day.

Although the Socialist Labor Party, left-led unions and later the Socialist Party and IWW continued on May Day to promote the eight hour day and workers’ holiday, by the turn of the century the AFL fully accepted the non-radical substitute. With the Russian Revolution, Labor Day became a foil in propaganda wars against Communism. After World War II, it devolved still further into a Cold War workers’ holiday. “Labor Day Sales!” advertisements bolstered consumer capitalism’s claim to better serve the working class than Communism did. A nadir of sorts was reached with the redesignation of May 1st as “Law Day” in 1957 by President Eisenhower (although internationally that dubious honor would go to Hitler’s cooptation of the holiday). But a funny thing happened on the way to the death of May Day. 

The Resuscitation of May Day

After Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign and the explosive growth of DSA, the decades-long freeze on public collaboration between organized labor and the left began to thaw. DSA chapters and unions found they could work together. A rekindled interest in May Day led to collaboration on a growing number of small but feisty demonstrations.  

There were other signs of a renaissance of the unofficial workers’ day. In early 2018 my former employer, the California Federation of Teachers, asked me to testify before the State Assembly Education Committee on behalf of a CFT-sponsored bill that proposed making May Day a state holiday. The CFT legislative director told me beforehand that he had asked 39 legislators to carry the bill before one agreed. The bill got through committee but died on the Assembly floor. 

The moment that stuck in my mind occurred when I finished my brief history presentation to the legislators. A silence ensued, and lingered on, for close to half a minute. Anyone who has spent time around elected officials knows that silence in front of a crowd is not their default. I surmised that the image in their heads during that silence originated with the evening news they had absorbed each May Day earlier in their lives, when goosestepping Soviet soldiers preceded tanks and missile carriers in their march across Red Square in Moscow. I guessed that the assemblymembers were busy connecting that image with the concept of “re-election”, thus sending them into a moment of quiet contemplation of their futures.

This experience taught me that the recovery from ‘May Day fear’ of union activists post-Cold War and post-Bernie did not extend to elected public officials. Soon my brief legislative committee testimony became a longer talk, which I presented to unions, labor councils, DSA chapters (and like May Day demonstrations, often cosponsored) in April for the next couple years. With COVID’s shutdown, I delivered these talks on zoom, but also worked with a group of talented friends to turn the presentation into a video. 

When we returned to public gatherings, the video continued to be screened in the days leading up to May first each year. There was clearly rising interest in the topic. May Day demonstrations were becoming an annual labor-supported event. San Francisco demonstrations and marches, for instance, were jointly called by all five Bay Area labor councils.

This year the UC Berkeley Labor Center showed the video on April 3. The event was cosponsored by East Bay DSA, UC Berkeley YDSA, the Alameda Labor Council and UAW Local 4811, the academic workers union that had waged and won an inspirational statewide UC strike in late 2022.  The event included a reception for the art created for the video by Jos Sances, blown up and framed on the Labor Center’s walls, and brief talks by me, Jos and Tanzil Chowdhury, a PhD candidate and a statewide leader of Local 4811. The Labor Center’s event organizers told me they would be very pleased with forty attendees. Ninety showed up. 

Tanzil described the work it had taken to make the 2022 strike a success. A new militant leadership of the union (actually three separate units at the time of the strike, merged afterward into one) carefully prepared the members for several years to get to the point where the strike could be successful. He noted that in the current political situation, many people were hoping that Shawn Fain’s date for a general strike on May 1 2028 could be moved up.  But his union’s example demonstrated the importance of proper preparation. If it took several years to set up a strike of 48,000, a three-year timeline to build a national general strike of millions did not seem excessive. 

The discussion that followed his presentation seesawed between fear that we don’t have three years given the speed at which the installation of American fascism is taking place, and the recognition of how much distance we have to cover before pulling off a successful general strike.

At other screenings since then the conversations have continued to revolve around the question, ‘How do we reasonably get from here to where we need to be as quickly as possible?’

Toward the general strike?

For much of organized labor, May Day 2025 is no longer May Day 1957. Unions like the UAW have learned to surmount divide and conquer tactics utilized against labor, which included the reflexive avoidance of May Day. Shawn Fain’s stated goal of a general strike, and the concrete task of aligning contract expirations to support it on May Day 2028, provides a tangible and highly symbolic process for overcoming working class division. It addresses the desire for action so many are feeling right now, and not incidentally establishes a credible path for the American working class to reclaim May Day. 

Going back to May Day’s origins, the state repression of immigrant worker leaders and whipping up of hysterical xenophobia has periodically returned as a “look over there” tactic in times of social crisis, and the current moment is no exception. Historically some unions have turned their gaze away or even cheered anti-immigrant fervor. But today Sheet Metal workers union president Michael Coleman and National Building Trades Council leader Sean McGarvey—not generally considered radical labor leaders—are nonetheless standing up against Trump for the return of union apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose illegal deportation and imprisonment is intended to divide workers and demoralize the immigrant community. 

May Day 2025 is also not yet May Day 2028, and it remains to be seen whether we will get there.  Labor and community organizing for this May Day contains the seeds for growing another outpouring of anger and determination similar to what we saw on April 5. That’s important. The key to success of the plan for a general strike in 2028 will be found in continuously building the muscles for mass action along the way, which necessitates a sharp focus by organized labor on internal and external organizing for that purpose. We shouldn’t expect this to happen overnight. Labor is not a monolith, and different unions are moving at different speeds toward understanding and acting on the existential peril we face. 

Of course, organized labor is not the only factor in resistance to the fascist tide. But the turnout for May Day 2025 will help to show us whether labor is on track to play the role it can and should in the fight.

The California DSA State Council met for our bi-monthly meeting on April 5th. State Committee member Michael L. grounded us in our political reality. He applauded the mass mobilizations at the “Hands Off” rallies across the United States that were happening at the same time as our meeting. “Sure ‘hands off,’ but what more?” He challenged us, “What are we fighting for?” He highlighted the importance of building a base, organizing, and leadership beyond these mobilizations. 

Bonnie L. from East Bay DSA reported that her chapter’s labor committee had passed a resolution to support the Federal Unionist Network (FUN) and was bringing it to the full chapter at its upcoming yearly convention to make this work a priority for the coming year, and urged other chapters to do the same. [The chapter subsequently voted to make it the top priority.]

California DSA can also publicly take a position on legislation. We had a lively discussion about our legislative endorsement framework and the process for supporting or opposing legislation going forward. We did not formally decide to change the framework language in the meeting. 

The statewide electoral committee shared the work that its members have been doing to research key, winnable districts to build an Assembly slate for the 2026 elections. 

We also discussed the California DSA delegate elections, which are currently happening across the different chapters. 

We ended the meeting with a presentation and discussion about our collective ideas about the Vision for California campaign.

Our next State Council meeting is on June 7th where we will have our first meeting with the newly-elected delegates.