There’s no good reason to believe Donald Trump, a serial liar of the first magnitude, any time he opens his mouth. His propensity to evade the truth, fudge, misdirect and outright lie is well documented. Yet a recent moment in the bright light of national media exposure may be an exception to that rule. 

I’m referring to the fascinating press event shortly after Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York and he and Trump chatted in the Oval Office in front of reporters. As reported by the New York Times, a troublemaking Fox News reporter attempted a gotcha, asking if Mamdani still thought that Trump was a fascist. 

“That’s OK, you could just say, ‘Yes,’” Mr. Trump said, looking highly amused by the whole thing. He waved his hand, as if being called the worst term in the political dictionary was no big deal.

“OK, all right,” Mr. Mamdani said with a smile.

“It’s easier,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s easier than explaining it.” Chuckling good-naturedly, he reached up and gave Mr. Mamdani a pat on the arm. “I don’t mind,” he added.

Of course, just because Trump agreed with that description of his politics doesn’t necessarily mean anything. He says one thing one day and contradicts it the next all the time. But one interpretation of this oddball encounter—and many have been offered—is that Trump took the opportunity to reassure the hard core of his movement base that he was still exactly who they thought he was. He may have framed the event as one old time powerbroker New Yorker talking with the new one, but don’t you worry: beneath the smiles and arm-patting ‘I’m still the old blood and soil’. 

Why might Trump feel he needed to do this? Perhaps because after his pardon of the January 6 conspirators in his first day of his second presidency he has paid relatively little attention to the movement that voted him back into office. And why would he? He has been too busy—expanding executive and federal overreach, bombing boats and countries, lying about ICE murders and conspiring with fellow billionaire oligarchs to loot government—to bother with the rabble, some of whom however may finally be growing restive over their lack of tangible benefits, stonewalling on the Epstein files and now, horrors, a democratic socialist elected in New York. 

It’s monstrous

Last spring I wrote a response in Jacobin to an article that made a case against calling what’s happening in the United States “fascism”. The author and I did agree that whatever we call it—authoritarianism, oligarchy, despotism, plutocracy etc.—it’s monstrous, needs to be fought and defeated, and the conditions in the country that brought it into being must be transformed. 

But drawing on the thinking and definition developed by Robert Paxton in his Anatomy of Fascism, I was and remain convinced that we are at the very least well along the path of ‘fascisization’ (the somewhat ugly neologism coined by Richard Seymour in his thoughtful Disaster Nationalism) if not fully arrived at the end of that treacherous road. I’m advocating here that it’s important for all of us involved in the resistance to be talking about it in this precise way.

I’ve laid out the main arguments elsewhere. Here’s another consideration, relating to popular perception rather than categorical discussion. So far the majority of the population has not been suffering beneath some iron heel, which in the cultural imagination is what fascism is about: the universal knock on the door at midnight; neighbors spying on neighbors and reporting them to the authorities, etc. People do see armed thugs in masks taking people away in unmarked cars to undisclosed locations—and more recently executing them—but that’s on the news. It’s not them it’s happening to.

One way of viewing this: the fact that the majority of us is not in the manacles of ICE, or among the quarter million or so federal employees who no longer have jobs, or amid the millions of poorest Americans dependent on the social services that federal workers once provided, simply means there hasn’t yet been time enough in twelve months to extend these abuses to more people. They keep coming. An alternative perspective: in countries that have gone full on fascist the worst impacts weren’t felt directly by the majority of the population—at least not until the warmongering part led to disastrous defeat. And with an imperialist war machine boasting a budget dwarfing all other countries’, that may never happen in our particular fascism variant. 

The essential question

But let’s set aside quibbles over definition and go with a more practical approach. The essential question remains:  “Is labeling the assault on American democracy ‘fascism’ helpful or not in fighting it?” I believe that if I’m talking with someone scared of what’s happening and looking for action to prevent things from getting worse, using the “F” word provides a common — and accurate — understanding of what we’re up against and basis for next steps.

I admit I haven’t seen any studies or opinion research in the last year that can quantify my assertion that calling it ‘fascism’ is persuasive to people not yet ready to jump into the streets. It would be helpful if a pollster were to ask, “Is this fascism?” and see how the demographics broke down in the responses. I have been relying on my gut instinct, the many conversations I have had with people, and informal scans across the media landscape as the population has attempted to metabolize events since Trump was elected for the second time. But recently I have gathered some new data. 

As a result of writing several articles on the topic I was asked to make a public presentation for DSA-LA in September. Seventy members turned out. We had a good discussion after my remarks and several comrades told me they were going to get more active than they had been.

Since then I’ve delivered this slide/lecture five times, sponsored by DSA, Working Families Party and other political- and labor-adjacent organizations. The crowds have been averaging close to one hundred people, and they are still there wanting to talk more after the advertised closing time. I provide them with some modest amounts of usable analysis, history, and scary empirical detail, and leave them with some hope—drawn from movement history and present-day resistance activities—about how we might prevail. 

Takeaway: You can do this too

I’m not famous. I’m retired, my last book came out ten years ago, I’m distributing my most recent video myself, and I am not so delusional as to think that it’s my name that has been bringing in the crowds. Rather, it’s the title of the talk (along with some good publicity by the sponsoring groups): “American Fascism: What it is, what to do about it.” (The one last week in Sonoma was recorded. Here it is.)

The people coming out clearly have a direct interest in the topic, but that’s the point: if you build it, they will come. At each of the presentations we make sure that various co-sponsoring organizations have tables and are given space to make brief presentations about the work they are doing (ICE defense, electoral efforts, affinity group formation, anti-war organizing, etc.) and a way to sign folks up. 

The takeaway: you can do this too. Get a couple organizations together and have them sponsor a similar event. The lurid details and steady drip drip drip of information—this innocent person killed by ICE, that new war front being opened up by Trump for oil, this professor told they cannot teach Plato because he promotes “gender ideology” (to take just three items from today’s news)—can drown out the central reality that we should all be directly confronting every day. We need action, we need numbers, we need to stitch groups into coalitions, and we need these things now.

While differences around the definition of our problem might still trouble some of us, the proof is in the pudding: use of the term “fascism” gets attention and provides a platform for discussion, education and organizing. That’s useful. And besides—it is fascism.

[An earlier version of this article was published in The Jumping Off Place]

Richard Hofstader, drawing from sociologist Max Weber, distinguished in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964) between the “intellectual” and the “professional”: the former a free critic of our ideas and social fabric; the latter living off his skills, not for them. At the turn of the 21st century, however, academia—the primary site of the siloed away “intellectual”—resembled little of what it did only decades earlier. No longer was the University of California free to all residents of the state as it had been for over 100 years. With decreased state funding for university operating budgets, public (and nonprofit) universities had become less and less of a public good: transformed instead into an increasingly premiumized hazing ritual imposed on working people seeking mythologized class mobility: “degree mills.” Fittingly, university academics simultaneously featured more specialized contingency in an increased reliance on residual low-wage intellectual labor. The minting of ever more of these graduate and non-professorial workers has, naturally, led to the rise of unions through which they fight to represent their interests. 

Universities today are increasingly research-oriented and produce important advancements in fields such as climate science and disease prevention—as well as continuing their educational missions (in an albeit ever more ancillary, impoverished form). After years without raises, and a 16-year legislative fight to win collective bargaining rights, graduate workers won a union at the University of California in 2000 with the United Auto Workers. Today, UAW represents over 60,000 workers across the UC system (and over 125,000 in higher education across the country) with jobs in various research, teaching, and staffing capacities—30,000 of whom at UC are currently fighting for a new contract, and 10,000 of whom are fighting for their first. The expansion of academic worker unions in the UC system and beyond isn’t only about ensuring equitable working conditions in higher education, but about fighting to protect and expand the University as a public service which produces public goods.

Statize or politicize

After the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court ruling in 2018 stripped public sector unions’ ability to collect fair-share fees and forced them to cultivate active membership, they were left with two paths, per Chris Maisano: statize, and become junior partners to government employers; or politicize, and fight “to put the level and quality of public services on the bargaining table.” UAW 4811, as well as its UAW Region 6 siblings at USC (Local 872), Cal State (Local 4123), CalTech (Local 2478), and beyond are doing exactly this politicizing effort by undertaking one of the biggest efforts to increase funding for public goods in California history: fighting to authorize Senate Bill 895, and through it $23 billion in grant funding from the state for public research.

UAW is leading the way in large part due to the fascist Trump regime’s attacks on higher education, and research in particular. As long ago as in Ancient Greece, the pursuit of knowledge for the public has been politically fraught. In The Apology, Socrates, facing the death penalty, defends himself from his accusers against charges of “corrupting” Athenians by leading them to criticize orthodoxy and thereby expand the knowledge of the public. Today, research workers are under siege in a similar manner—attacked by the climate-denying, anti-vax, anti-education regime for improving public knowledge about our world and lives through examination and experimentation. In the absence of funding from the state government, climate science has grown reliant on funding from the National Science Foundation, lifesaving health research likewise on funds from the National Institutes of Health. Rather than relegating these discoveries to the proprietary knowledge of capitalists in the oil industry or big pharma, respectively, federally funded research has still served the broader public by making scientific discoveries available to all for decades.

Hollowing out

That research, and the now union jobs which produce it, however, have been imperiled by Trump’s attacks. “The Trump administration’s attacks on research funding—cutting the budgets of funding agencies, firing staff responsible for reviewing proposals, withholding money for funded projects—are hollowing out this workforce,” says Ahmed A., a postdoctoral scholar at UC Irvine, financial secretary for UAW 4811, and member of DSA-LA. “Postdoctoral Scholar and Academic Researcher hiring has slowed down, and we’re seeing a massive uptick in layoffs. In 2025, the size of both bargaining units has decreased, and this trend shows no sign of stopping.” This decline in jobs will take another year to play out in the admission numbers for graduate workers who make up the bulk of the rest of research staff at UC.

These cancellations have targeted health and science which runs contrary to reactionaries’ “MAHA” and climate denial narratives. At UC Irvine, the NSF grant which funded the Climate Justice Initiative (CJI)—a longstanding research project studying health effects of climate change and pollution on Southern California communities—was abruptly cut in 2025, resulting in the attempted layoff of eight UAW-represented researchers, which would have effectively ended the project. Because workers were able to fight through their union, these researchers were able to win their jobs back, and thus to continue this vital research. CJI demonstrates how the damage of these cuts extends even beyond research institutions, says Thi T., a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Irvine and member of Orange County DSA who works on the project: “Our community partner organizations in OC broadly rely on a patchwork of their own federal grants that have gotten disrupted.”

 Fighting for the future of public research and education

The decrease of funding (particularly policies like capping indirect cost rates for granting agencies, which pay for day-to-day operations and facilities maintenance) to institutions has also cut into the quality of instruction, while providing cover for administrators to keep raising tuition for students. Some departments have seen instructional budget cuts of 50% or more as management offsets operations (and ballooning executive compensation) costs onto instruction. “There aren’t enough courses offered for undergraduates to complete their degree requirements quickly, while graduate students still struggle to find work,” says Trevor S., a teaching assistant at UC Irvine, and officer for OC DSA. “There is a high demand for teaching and a high supply of qualified instructors, but everyone somehow still loses. Fewer and fewer courses are being offered and class sizes keep growing.”

While UAW and others have successfully killed many grant cancellations in court, and the proposed federal budget for 2026 ended up restoring most funding for research—the targeted cancellation of federal grants which go against the Trump-prescribed narrative will persist for at least three more years, if not longer. This is why UAW is the primary sponsor of the California Health and Science Research Bond Act. SB 895 would put the largest bond in state history on the November 2026 ballot, $23 billion dollars over 10 years to fully fund public health and climate research. This funding would also take the pressure off of educators, caught in the University's targeted austerity which is driving down the quality of public education and forcing students to pay more. While funding at the federal level may never be truly secure again, UAW workers offer a model for how to win funding for the public good by organizing—one which DSA members can learn from and join because, as Thi T. puts it: “California communities face multi-billion dollar climate and environmental catastrophes every few months. We need multi-billion dollar solutions today.”

It’s going to be imperative that DSA members across California organize to protect and grow public research and education through every possible avenue as we move deeper into Trump’s second term. The passage by popular mandate of UAW’s bond this November will set the stage for public workers across the country to follow suit, safeguarding public goods and services when under siege by reactionaries at a national level. In 2026 California has the opportunity to lead the way in protecting the health and climate of all people, in the U.S. and around the world—as well as to strengthen and politicize the union of science, labor, and socialism!

Yes, it is no longer the holiday season. But due to technical issues preventing some California Red readers from taking our Holiday News Quiz offered in December, we are offering a reprise opportunity to take the quiz and win Socialist Prizes! These include books, posters, pamphlets, t-shirts and more. Don’t hesitate—it’s working now. Winners will be announced in the next issue. Note: If you took the quiz and successfully made it to the end and submitted your answers, don’t worry; we still have your entry and you are still in the running.

Rules: Find the answer to the quiz questions in a 2025 California Red article or articles, give the answers, cite the articles, and send it along.  Helpful hint:  All the older news articles containing the answers are on the California DSA website and are archived here. 

At California DSA’s State Council meeting in December, around fifty members from across the state came together to reflect on our interventions into Prop 50. Chapters around California ran canvasses which we used to talk with our neighbors about the need to not only oppose the far right’s increasing encroachment on our democracy through redistricting, but to commit to organize, and to get involved in DSA in order to help build out a positive program that can respond to the existential threats we face. In the span of about a month that the campaign ran, DSA members talked to over 3000 people about the strategic merits of redistricting in this moment, and about how people can get involved in longer term efforts to protect our immigrant neighbors, and protect public workers, and transform conditions at the municipal level.

People over billionaires

We heard from Estuardo Mazariegos, DSA-LA endorsed candidate for LA City Council, on the developing People over Billionaires program that ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), DSA, and other community and labor organizations have been coordinating actions around, including recent marches through wealthy enclaves, including La Jolla, Beverly Hills, and San Francisco to call out the billionaires’ agenda, and to build support for a peoples’ first agenda to prioritize education, climate justice, solidarity across borders, and dignity for working people.

Álvaro López, a member of NYC DSA, talked about the Zohran campaign and NYC’s process for scaling up field operations from the campaign launch through election day, and the leadership and skill development the chapter was able to build over the campaign as its membership almost doubled.

A SEIU United Health Workers (UHW) Political Organizer and DSA member, Maky P, gave a presentation on HR1 (the so-called “big beautiful bill”) and its impacts on public education and social safety net programs like Medicaid. Delegates deliberated and voted in favor of endorsing the state Billionaire Tax ballot measure, currently circulating petitions for signatures [see “We Need to Tax the Rich” in this issue of California Red]. Over the coming months, chapters will take up local endorsement votes and a statewide working group will create resources to build out campaigns to make the case for taxing the rich in order to tackle wealth inequality and agitate around a broader socialist vision. Members interested in getting involved can fill out this interest form.

[[{“value”:”

By: Travis Wayne

DORCHESTER, MA – The brisk wind warned of an oncoming Arctic storm that afternoon of Friday, January 23, 2026. Rank after rank of one thousand banner-waving union and community members simmered at the mass rally at the South Bay Mall, a sprawling complex that includes outposts of ICE collaborators Target and Home Depot. 

Massachusetts unionists were there to honor their siblings across the country, in Minneapolis, where the people paralyzed the streets and the economy at the same moment – leading the nation’s first general strike in eighty years. One hundred thousand workers marched in frostbiting temperatures as they flirted with another uprising in a city home to uprisings. 

Back in Boston, SEIU purple flew next to UNITE HERE white-and-red beside the bright blue of the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), each marching in proud step with one another, behind and in front of the red flags and “Abolish ICE” signs of the socialist organizations. The building trades crowded around and amidst the ICE watch verifiers and immigrant community leaders.

A change had occurred. Labor had united. The Greater Boston Labor Council (GBLC), representing one hundred thousand workers alone, had led the charge. In honoring their siblings together, Boston labor issued a warning to the secret police: if we can organize this in a few days with solidarity alone, imagine what happens when you come to Massachusetts?

The General Strike in Minneapolis

The political capital for an uprising did not appear overnight in Minneapolis.

ICE invaded the Twin Cities in a rampage, going door to door abducting relative after relative, in flagrant violation of the helpless courts. The ferocity of ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis boiled to a head with ICE’s execution of verifier Renee Good on January 7, 2026, which spurred on mass mobilization by the people alongside the unions whose members were being disappeared one after another.

Minneapolis is a city with a memory of mass uprising, with many organizers holding lived experiences of the George Floyd uprising of Black Lives Matter less than six years ago. Those bonds were reactivated with their ties of solidarity, at organic and grassroots levels, since the Floyd uprising also included wildcat walkouts by Minneapolis workers and political closures by businesses – both of which also happened on January 23, as part of the general strike.

These non-traditional supports to the general strike were many. Another one was the consumer boycott. By designing the general strike not only around the shut down of work, but also of consumption through shopping and social reproduction through education, the unions aimed to shut down all of society at once. For one day, the city would stop.

The infrastructure for organizing was sustained differently this time compared to the more mass character and mosaic organizational matrix of the Floyd uprising, when autonomist actors set the AFL-CIO headquarters aflame: this time, labor took leadership, including the AFL-CIO.

The coordinated synchronization was a demonstration of effective rapid response. SEIU Local 26 – whose membership is largely made up of immigrant janitors currently targeted and disappearing under ICE terror – proposed a mass day of action to a table of progressive unions. This crystallized into a Day of Truth and Freedom: the Minneapolis general strike. Every single major union signed on. The masses went on a political strike under the auspices of a non-strike as they shut down the city’s economy. The nation’s first general strike in eighty years commenced.

To paraphrase Luxemburg, Mandela, and Mamdani: it was impossible till it was done – and the people were in the streets.

The Abducted and Mass Labor’s Consensus

Since ICE’s attacks on Boston began, anti-ICE resistance has tasted like the iron of labor.

A high-profile early ICE attack was SEIU 509 member Rümeysa Öztürk’s abduction from the streets of Somerville in March 2025. Thousands swarmed the Powder House Park in anger, before hundreds of workers led by the SEIU International demonstrated in April.

The largest private sector union emerged as an early leader in the labor movement against ICE in Boston. SEIU took the front line of labor resistance in public but also the private efforts to free their member, and by the time of the June solidarity rallies with abducted California SEIU leader David Huerta, all the SEIU locals in Massachusetts were unified and organized.

The Massachusetts AFL-CIO was also present, as were other unions, but ICE attacks became more ambient, targeted, constant. Meanwhile, strikes hit across the city as union after union organized for their own workers and interests. Each mobilization built a block for a wider movement.

In the home and in less organized economic sectors, Massachusetts workers often faced ICE without the benefit of the unions’ infrastructure. In Worcester, dozens of people interfered to stop an ICE seizure of a mother and child, an incident that preceded the higher levels of legal and now lethal punishment exerted by ICE on similar incidents of grassroots resistance. 

Other forms of resistance have been more response than direct. Ruth was freed through a mass coalition of community organizations and the efforts following the abduction of Allston Car Wash workers, including solidarity actions to train community members in ICE watch that followed, was organized by Boston University students and Allston-based organizers with Boston DSA. 

ICE watch trainings have grown in demand. As LA organizers patrol Home Depots, the networks of the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network continue to extend deeper and deeper into Boston neighborhoods. Different sections of the city each contains hundreds of volunteer ICE watch verifiers in their communities, embedded in workplaces and homes, connected by group chats that mobilize in moments with public announcements of ICE activities. LUCE holds trainings with organizations where every single seat is taken and the back room packed.

The abductions are close to everyone’s minds.

Standing Alongside ICE Watchers, Labor Faces ICE

The unions began rallying at the South Bay Mall around 3 PM on Friday, January 23 — with the Greater Boston Labor Council at the front. The Greater Boston Labor Council (GBLC), representing over one hundred thousand workers in Massachusetts as part of the largest federation of workers in the United States, held a symbolic and practical position: all of labor was united.

Unions that sponsored the rally included BTU, UNITE HERE 26, 32BJ, 1199 SEIU, IBEW 103, AFT Massachusetts, Greater Boston Building Trades Union, UFCW 1445, IATSE 11, New England Joint Board, AFSCME 93, IUPAT DC 93, Sheet Metal Workers 17, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, among others.

Many of these unions have faced abductions. No longer is the story of the disappeared member or client rare.

Catherine Anderson, one Chelsea schoolteacher, pointed out the endemic nature of abductions in public schools. She mentioned the abduction of multiple students before noting that “dozens of our students have had family members and loved ones detained… ICE was in our elementary school parking lot for hours this fall.” 

The SEIU simply amplified the anonymous voice of the wife of one of their members, Pablo, abducted by ICE, before translating from the original Spanish to English:

Being there locked up – he feels like he’s sick, depressed, while he’s been there. As the head of household, he covered all the expenses here and all the costs a family has. And it’s hard for me right now because I have to pay rent… we put our faith in God and hope he comes back to us soon. We know there are many people going through the same thing.

After the speeches concluded, and the final orator hopped off the pickup truck the unions had pulled up in front of Target, the mass of people began to picket the superstore. A far greater number of people holding banners and signs crossed back and forth, defying the mall’s property, than the customers that meekly trickled across the picket line into the store.

Evan, an electrician with Local 103 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), told Working Mass as the crowd marched:

ICE agents are lawless and ICE is a lawless, reckless agency with no oversight… there’s no reforming ICE. ICE is only 19 years old. Why keep it? Smoke that thing out.

Meanwhile, GBLC’s organizing director marched with Worcester and Holyoke LUCE coordinators, alongside others, into Target to speak with the bosses. They were there to deliver the letter from labor against ICE collaboration.

Community supporters stood within the audience and picket line alongside their unionized siblings. Ken Casey, the son of a union worker and local teamster and lead singer of Boston’s own world-famous Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, was on the scene. 

Casey stressed the importance of the general strike. He told Working Mass:

I like to see the thought of a general strike because I think in the long run it might be our only way out of this mess… if you’re talking about the workers in the unions, that’s the infrastructure to be the tip of the spear to make the change to put forth the effort to mobilize.

The anchoring community organizations of the anti-ICE movement moved in lockstep with labor. The vast ICE watch LUCE Immigrant Justice Network sent speakers and demand letter delegates alongside GBLC leaders, and Bonnie Jin, co-chair of the Boston DSA chapter that organized key anti-ICE demonstrations preceding the January 23 mass labor rally in Dorchester, emphasized the resolve held by Boston labor and its allies:

We are in solidarity with our union siblings. We also know we’re taking steps towards a general strike, not only with what we’re seeing in Minneapolis with so many different unions… but here in Boston. Right now, the federal administration has threatened Boston with funding cuts, and we know our union siblings are under attack.

Jin was right: even as one hundred thousand workers hit the streets of Minneapolis on general strike, Donald Trump announced the decision to cut funding to any municipality that does not cooperate with ICE – amidst his ongoing war on higher education institutions, whose dramatic cuts have impacted Boston’s labor movement, in particular.

Abolish ICE as ICE Kills Again

Meanwhile, Linkedin and Spotify both aired ads advertising $50,000 sign-on bonuses for ICE agents. Gradually, the fascist gangs that plagued previous eras began to disappear – maybe, as some rumor, the first in line to join ICE. There is minimal vetting based on the report of one major ICE critic’s ability to receive a job offer. The story was embarrassing enough to the Trump Administration for the regime to target the reporter. 

The tide of common sense had changed. A few hours’ drive further north into New England across the state line, one Southern New Hampshire DSA orator stood in the night – hand on mic. “Let’s be real, the moderate position is now to abolish ICE.”

Ken Casey, hands thrust in his winter coat pockets rather than on a microphone, laughed incredulously back in Boston. “Hell yeah, abolish ICE… how do you show up and snatch someone when they’re showing up for their hearing?”

The people dispersed as the sun set and the mass picket ended in Dorchester.

The next morning, back in Minneapolis, ICE slaughtered another. 

Alex Pretti – an ICU nurse, a member of Local 3669 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), an ICE Watch verifier – was beaten by six secret police agents in broad daylight. They smashed his head in before loading him with fifteen bullets of lead. 

The nurse was executed by ICE within a ten minute drive of the spots where George Floyd and Renee Good were murdered.

As the eastern seaboard descended into an Arctic spell that made Boston colder than Alaska, Rat City wasn’t the only one readying for an ICE invasion. There were rumors of Philadelphia preparing, too. The unions and community rallied again in hours in the cold night the evening of Pretti’s murder, the tone shifted from soaring resolve to fury among the assembled crowd. 

“No fascist USA,” chanted the people. “No fascist USA.”

Travis Wayne is the managing editor of Working Mass.

The post Boston Labor Unites to Face ICE As Minneapolis Leads First General Strike in 80 Years appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

“We have to turn thinkers into fighters and fighters into thinkers” — General Gordon Baker Jr.

By: A

In a digital discussion, a comrade brought up this article, entitled “The Teamsters have a MAGA problem. Here’s why,” on the current state of The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) militancy and nativism, written by Luis Feliz Leon, with the suggestion that we ought to spend some time reflecting on it. This prompted a number of replies whose topics ranged as follows: making sense of the endorsement of current IBT president Sean O’Brian (SOB) by the reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the general response to Trump by the U.S. labor movement, the role of labor staff in response to Trumpism/MAGA, the levels and positions of power within different unions, the role of workplace versus staff organizing, and strategic job placement.

Throughout all of these topics, there seemed to be agreement on a main point: We as DSA members need to engage in political reflection on the current status of the labor movement in light of the prominence of reactionary forces. This article is an attempt to set-up and illuminate this conversational space.

Where to start?

My initial response to this article was to ask about which part we needed to focus on. This was for two reasons. (1) The article covers a lot of territory, linking up current struggles to a multiplicity of past labor struggles with similar issues to descriptions of ICE activity to examples of current bottom up organizing under the Teamsters banner. There are lots of pieces to touch on, so what are the important ones? (2) Comrade Leon’s central thesis is clear but extremely broad, and composed of two points:

• Teamster Militancy paired with Political Nativism is a “strategy that destroys the very foundation of working-class power.”
• If we are to reject this strategy in order to build a class-wide labor movement, then we ought to build a culture of class solidarity within unions.

What socialist would disagree with the imposition to build political class solidarity against political nativism? Surely, then, we ought to take up the set of practical questions under this general imposition.

To take up Comrade Leon’s framework and generate more productive practical questions, I will here seek to explore the relationship of the Teamsters organizing efforts to our own here at Metro-Detroit DSA. I presuppose that, roughly and not absolutely, the Teamsters are Organizationally Militant without being Politically Militant and that our chapter of DSA is Politically Militant without being Organizationally Militant. Thus, there is a question of what each entity might learn from the other. What follows is an enumeration of sets of questions for (1) current and future Teamsters labor organizers in Detroit and (2) Metro-Detroit DSA members.

§ What should current and future labor organizers in Detroit do?

The section in Comrade Leon’s article entitled “Fit to Rule” picks out the aspects of TDU that are working, or not, and two strategic paths which are deemed unsatisfactory: romantic denunciation and narrow pragmatism. The former takes on ideological struggle without material struggle, and the latter material struggle without ideological struggle. The strategic path forward, he proposes, is rather to develop a “robust political education program geared towards developing the political consciousness of militant workers.” To which “TDU can play an important role in showing how it can be done.” The key strategy to a revival of the labor movement is to establish a base of labor militancy with a superstructural ideological militancy. The class war must be fought in the realm of ideas as well as material gains. We cannot have one without the other.

For current labor organizers, both rank-and-file and staff, there must be a widening of strategic scope to include this ideological struggle. We must do ideological mapping not only of favorability towards union efforts or contract issues but also towards broader political issues to gauge political orientation. Just as unions are not won through policing for purity, neither will a socialist orientation of rank-and-file workers be won through those same means. So, educative tactics and programs must be developed according to what moves the needle.

Following this line, what are the right questions to ask?

Ideological Mapping

We might stay with the same categories of sympathy to the cause, just with socialism as the object of sympathy rather than a union effort. But how will we distinguish levels? Additionally, it seems that we need to expand the types of antagonism since far more people will be antagonistic to socialist ideas and that we need to be effective with more types of people in the long-term. What types of antagonism to socialism are there?

Organizing Tactics

In order to have tactical organizing conversations, we ought to develop ladders of logical steps to connect the meaning of socialism with concrete, everyday struggles. This requires, also, that we have a more embodied, developed understanding of our own commitment to socialism. When a coworker expresses their exhaustion from but necessity of their job, how does your sympathy for their situation connect to a project for a better world? Most importantly, how can we express such a sentiment without ending up in a ‘heady’ conversation where socialism becomes an intangible concept? This will be another test of our own education. Do we know how to repeat the phrases we have been taught or do we understand the world at a deeper level such that we are able to pull others up with us?

Organizing Programs

What sorts of reading groups/lectures can be implemented into the organizing program? What free time does the rank-and-file have for this? Are there groups of people who already enjoy reading or are there better medium(s) that people are already attuned to? Are there experienced lecturers/teachers among the staff or rank-and-file?

Educative Interventions

Are educative interventions–like 1-on-1 dialogical investigations and popular education–part of the correct strategy for our current moment? How might the expansion of unions in the labor workforce itself operate as an educative mechanism? Are education programs currently feasible within specific unions?

§ What should Metro-Detroit DSA members do?

Although I am a fairly new member to the chapter, I have already noticed an in-effect lack of organizational militancy within MD-DSA. We are proud to have 1200 members on paper, about 100 members at monthly chapter meetings, and dispersed groups of 5–30 participating in any given committee. We need to learn from the Teamster’s Organizational Militancy, especially since we already have plenty of Ideological militancy in educative programming.

I say that this observation is in-effect as an organization because there are plenty of individual organizers within the chapter who are highly motivated, hardworking, and remarkably effective in their own right. The point here is not to begin directing blame but to find which questions help us bridge the gap.

When I was the chair of a Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, I ran into this same organizational problem. A handful of activists were doing everything, some supporters attending and helping, and most of the base was disengaged. In an autopsy of my time leading the chapter, I found a major problem to be that my leadership was tailing the members. With the expectation that members would constitute the directing force of the chapter, I took the role of the steering committee (SC) to be the busy workers that carry out the commands of the membership. I and my fellow SC members quickly became overwhelmed with the amount of work it takes to simply maintain the operation of the chapter. Thus, our main goal became to preserve the chapter rather than to lead it.

The diagnosis of the problem is with the lack of clear authority within the organization. Who was responsible for what? The membership was looking to the steering committee for what the chapter ought to do and we were looking right back, with no one going anywhere.

This question of authority has broken out within the chapter in response to Trump’s war on Venezuela. On January 3rd, 2026, many members of MD-DSA flocked to the Slack channel for direction and leadership. Many discussions broke out about other organizations’ events and some finger pointing about who ought to be directing a unified Democratic Socialist effort. There was a lack of clarity of responsibility and, consequently, of authority. This brings us to the set of questions I think we need to face.

First, how should authority figure between leaders and members in MD-DSA? Are we avoiding the tailing problem in our leadership? Is there a hierarchy of authority among committees? How do we prioritize the work of the chapter among our commitments (if we do so at all)? What are the relationships between new and experienced members? Is there a generational pass-down of organizing knowledge occurring in the chapter?

Next, there must be a learning process in organizational tactics. What types of learning materials are made available to new members to transition them from a regular person interested in politics to an active organizer? Which habits of organizing are the basics to be taught to all members? What is our progression ladder of on the ground organizing skills?

Lastly, there must be a program to instill organizational militancy within the chapter. How can we instill a sense of responsibility towards the chapter in our members? (1) How are we to learn to be dutiful and responsible towards one another? Are members supposed to see their participation in DSA as a part of their own personhood? These are questions I welcome members to contemplate as we continue to grow MD-DSA as a whole. (2)

_______________________________________________________________

1. If members only participate when they want, their membership is contingent on their desires rather than their moral obligations. But this is not an easy distinction to make.
2. I hope that the reader encounters every question as individual considerations in their own right and not as rhetorical remarks to be skipped over.

This article represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of The Detroit Socialist or Metro Detroit DSA as a whole.

“The Teamsters Have a MAGA Problem.” What should we do now? was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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By: James P. Cannon

This was originally published in May 1934, when the Teamsters organized the last general strike in Minneapolis.

Today the whole country looks to Minneapolis. Great things are happening there which reflect the influence of a strange new force in the labor movement, an influence widening and extending like a spiral wave. Out of the strike of the transport workers of Minneapolis a new voice speaks and a new method proclaims its challenge.

It was seen first in the strike of the coal-yard drivers, which electrified the labor movement of the city a few months ago and firmly established the union after a brief, stormy battle of unprecedented militancy and efficiency. Now we see the same union moving out of this narrow groove and embracing truck drivers in other lines.

Behind this, as was the case with the coal drivers, there are months of hard, patient, and systematic routine work of organization. Everything is prepared. Then an ultimatum to the bosses. A swift, sudden blow. A mass picket line that sweeps everything before it. The building trades come out in sympathy. The combined forces, riding with a mighty wave of moral support from the whole laboring population of the city, take the offensive and drive all the bosses’ thugs and hirelings to cover in a memorable battle at the City Market.

The whole country listens to the echoes of the struggle. The exploiters hear them with fear and trepidation. Weaving the net around the automobile workers, with the aid of treacherous labor leaders, they ask themselves in alarm: “If this spirit spreads what will our schemes avail us?”

And the workers in basic industry, vaguely sensing the power of their numbers and strategic position, can hardly help asking themselves: “If we should go the Minneapolis way could anything or anybody stop us?” The striking transport workers are a mighty power in Minneapolis today. But that is only a small fraction of the power of their example for the cheated and betrayed workers in the big industries of the country.
 

The Message of Minneapolis

The message of Minneapolis is of first-rate importance to the American working class. A careful examination of the method from all sides ought to be put as point one on the agenda of the labor movement, especially of its most advanced section. A study of this epic struggle, in its various aspects, can be an aid to their application in other fields, and, by that, a rapid change of the position of the American workers.

There is nothing new, of course, in a fight between strikers and police and gunmen. Every strike of any consequence tells the old, familiar story of the hounding, beating, and killing of strikers by the hired thugs of the exploiters, in and out of uniform. What is out of the ordinary in Minneapolis, what is more important in this respect, is that while the Minneapolis strike began with violent assaults on the strikers, it didn’t end there.

In pitched battles last Saturday and again on Monday, the strikers fought back and held their own. And on Tuesday they took the offensive, with devastating results. Businessmen, volunteering to put the workers in their place, and college boys out for a lark as special deputies – to say nothing of the uniformed cops – handed over their badges and fled in terror before the mass fury of the aroused workers. And many of them carried away unwelcome souvenirs of the engagement. Here was a demonstration that the American workers are willing and able to fight in their own interests. Nothing is more important than this, for, in the last analysis, everything depends on it.

Here was a stern warning to the bosses and their hirelings, and not only those of Minneapolis. Transfer the example and the spirit of the Minneapolis strikers to the steel and automobile workers, for example; with their mass numbers and power. Let the rulers of America tremble at the prospect. They will see it! That is what the message of Minneapolis means first of all.
 

Mass Action

A second feature of the fight at the City Market which deserves special attention is the fact that it was not the ordinary encounter between individual strikers and individual scabs or thugs. On the contrary – take note – the whole union went into action on the picket line in mass formation; thousands of other union men went with them; they took along the necessary means to protect themselves against the murderous thugs, as they had every right to do. This was an example of mass action which points the way for the future victorious struggles of the American workers.

It is not a strike of the men alone, but of the women also. The Minneapolis drivers’ union proceeds on the theory that the women have a vital interest in the struggle, no less than the men, and draws them into action through a special organization. The policy, employed so effectively by the Progressive Miners, is bringing rich results also in Minneapolis. To involve the women in the labor struggle is to double the strength of the workers and to infuse it with a spirit and solidarity it could not otherwise have. This applies not only to a single union and a single strike; it holds good for every phase of the struggle up to its revolutionary conclusion. The grand spectacle of labor solidarity in Minneapolis is what it is because it includes also the solidarity of the working-class women.
 

The Sympathetic Strike

The strike of the transport workers took an enormous leap forward and underwent a transformation when the building-trades unions declared a sympathy strike last Monday. In this action one of the most progressive and significant features of the entire movement is to be seen. When unions begin to call strikes not for immediate gains of their own but for the sake of solidarity with their struggling brothers in other trades, and when this spirit and attitude becomes general and taken for granted as the proper thing, then the paralyzing divisions in the trade union movement will be near an end and trade unionism will begin to mean unity.

The union of the truck drivers and the building-trades workers is an inspiring sight. It represents a dynamic idea of incalculable power. Let the example spread, let the idea take hold in other cities and other trades, let the idea of sympathy strike action be combined with militancy and the mass method of the Minneapolis fighters – and American labor will be a head taller and immeasurably stronger.

Those who characterize the AFL unions as “company unions” and want to build new unions at any price will derive very little consolation from the Minneapolis strike. We have always maintained that the form of a labor organization, while important, is not decisive. Minneapolis provides another confirmation, and a most convincing one, of this conception. Here is the most militant and, in many respects, the most progressively directed labor struggle that has been seen for a long time. Nevertheless it is all conducted within the framework of the AFL.

The drivers’ union is a local of one of the most conservative AFL Internationals, the Teamsters; the building trades, out in sympathy with the drivers, are all AFL unions; and the Central Labor Union, backing the drivers’ strike and the possible organizing medium of a general strike, is a subordinate unit of the AFL. The local unions of the AFL provide a wide field for the work of revolutionary militants if they know how to work intelligently. This is especially true when, as in the Minneapolis example, the militants actually initiate the organization and take a leading part in developing it at every stage.
 

The Bolshevik Militants

Further development of the union, and perhaps even of the present strike, on the path of militancy may bring the local leadership into conflict with the reactionary bureaucracy of the International and also with conservative forces in the Central Labor Union. This will be all the less apt to take the local leaders of the militant union by surprise, since most of them have already gone through the school of that experience. In spite of that, they did not turn their backs on the trade unions and seek to set up new ones artificially.

Even when it came to organizing a large group of workers hitherto outside the labor movement, they selected an AFL union as the medium. The results of the Minneapolis experience provide some highly important lessons on this tactical question. The miserable role of the Stalinists in the present situation, and their complete isolation from the great mass struggle, is the logical outcome of their policies in general and their trade union policy in particular.

The General Drivers Union, as must be the case with every genuine mass organization, has a broad and representative leadership, freely selected by democratic methods. Among the leaders of the union are a number of Bolshevik militants who never concealed or denied their opinions and never changed them at anybody’s order, whether the order came from Green or from Stalin.

The presence of this nucleus in the mass movement is a feature of the exceptional situation in Minneapolis which, in a sense, affects and colors all the other aspects of it. The most important of all prerequisites for the development of a militant labor movement is the leaven of principled communists. When they enter the labor movement and apply their ideas intelligently they are invincible. The labor movement grows as a result of this fusion and their influence grows with it. In this question, also, Minneapolis is showing the way.

James P. Cannon was the national secretary and chairman of the Socialist Workers Party in the mid-twentieth century. His organization’s local leaders were the driving force behind the Minneapolis general strike and the subsequent growth of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He began his career as an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World under the mentorship of Big Bill Haywood.

The post Learn from Minneapolis! appeared first on Working Mass.

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INTRODUCTION

Climate change is the issue that looms over all others. A livable planet is prerequisite to every policy goal. Without one, nothing else matters. Yet humanity has generally failed to meet the moment. Our addiction to growth, creature comforts, and heavy industry — most pronounced in the West — is driving us to the abyss. We live for the day, and forfeit tomorrow. As a result, our planet is hurtling toward irreversible tipping points — and may have already passed them. 

Our recklessness has eliminated entire species of animals and insects critical to our ecology, created countless climate refugees in parts of the world having already endured generations of colonized existence, and cost us billions (if not trillions) of dollars. Yet the political class has done little to mitigate this crisis. Many summits have passed. Task forces have convened. And what we have to show for it is the Paris Agreement— an unambitious, largely unbinding pledge that’s proven ineffective.

Climate change is a global problem. As such, it calls for international collaboration — especially between the world’s two biggest emitters, the United States and China. So far, that has been lacking. America has been all too happy to jettison cooperation for a policy of saber rattling and encirclement. Not only is the United States continually announcing the construction of new bases in the Asia-Pacific region, it pushes forward in a Cold War logic of seeking to humiliate China rather than honoring its basic needs and interests. Infamously, America sacrificed climate talks through Nancy Pelosi inflaming tensions over Taiwan and blatantly violating established precedent in US-China relations. Unfortunately, this has become the norm. The Americans would seemingly rather destroy the globe if it means winning a few political skirmishes with China and the Chinese people.

Such antagonism is incredibly distressing. As the world’s two largest emitters, the two powers should be working together to prevent and even reverse ecological breakdown. Quite literally everything depends on it. Instead, the U.S. has continued its ravaging of the environment for short-term economic gain when in fact, it should not only be working with China, but learning from the ways it has mitigated carbon emissions over the last few decades. It is clear Washington will not lead us into a more sustainable future. Beijing might.

UNCLEAN HANDS

In the 10 years since negotiators drafted the Paris Accords, the United States has been an unmitigated climate disaster. Less than a year after drafting, Americans elected a president who called climate change a Chinese hoax. Trump, once assuming power, began his regime by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. The United States stood alone as the only “major emitter… to repudiate the agreement.” Of course, Trump was not done. He then moved to the domestic front. Trump allowed oil and gas drilling in wildlife refuges, coastal waters, and other formerly protected areas. A particularly sweeping executive order directed all federal departments to eliminate any rules restricting energy production. Further orders sought to accelerate “approval and construction of fossil fuel projects by limiting state environmental reviews.” And this just scratches the surface. A Pulitzer-winning environmental reporter described the first Trump administration as a “relentless drive toward fossil energy development.”

During those dark years, the White House suppressed “climate and related science” to conceal the harm of its boneheaded policies. The administration infamously “edited a major Defense Department report to downplay its climate findings.” It altered the contents of government websites to reduce public access to scientific data. While hiding the truth, Trump also muddied the waters via his own “climate denial and denigration of renewable energy.”

After him came Joe Biden, who supporters heralded as the first climate president. It was not to be. He let the world know early on that environmentalism was categorically not “his thing.” In March 2021:

Biden approved the Willow Project — an Alaska oil drilling venture of appalling scope. The development includes 200 oil wells connected by multiple pipelines.

Under Biden, the Department of Interior “auctioned an Italy-sized chunk of the Gulf of Mexico for drilling.” Biden also reopened “massive tracts of the Gulf for extraction.” Amazingly, the rate at which his administration approved oil permits actually outpaced Trump. Not to be outdone, Trump’s second term has arguably been the greatest calamity of all.

In Trump’s first 100 days this year, he instigated more rollbacks of environmental rules than during his entire first term. After Biden reentered the Paris Agreement, Trump again withdrew. He has earmarked massive expanses, including in the Arctic, for new drilling. After erroneously declaring a national “energy emergency,” Trump exempted dozens of coal-fired power plants from clean air rules. He also blocked “the approval of new solar projects and wind turbines, which he has called ‘ugly’ and ‘disgusting.’” In September, Trump revoked the $7,500 federal tax credits for electric cars. Analysts fear this could spell “big trouble” for the industry and, by extension, the environment.

The pace of destruction has been frenetic. On March 12th alone, “Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency… announced 31 actions” revising pollution standards projected “to save 200,000 lives.” The agency’s head, whose job is to protect the environment, celebrated “driving a dagger into the heart of… climate change.” And the worst is likely yet to come. “[T]he pressure on our regulatory system and our democracy will… ramp up,” said Michael Burger, a climate law scholar.

STARK CONTRAST

In addition to their climate malfeasance, radicalized Republicans are rabidly sinophobic. Relative to the current administration, previous American diplomats were sometimes more neutral on China. Just two years ago, special envoy on climate John Kerry advocated “genuine cooperation” between America and China on environmental issues. “China and the United States are the two largest economies in the world,” he stressed. “It’s clear that we have a special responsibility to find common ground.”

Naturally, the backlash from what became the new guard was fierce. Republican representative Michael McCaul of Texas criticized Kerry’s willingness to negotiate, labeling China “not an honest broker.” McCaul’s colleague Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, representing the far-right Freedom Caucus, attacked Kerry for caring about climate change at all. Perry dubbed global warming “a problem that doesn’t exist.” He then accused the scientific community of “grifting” — lying for pecuniary gain. Of course, this is not just false but highly hypocritical. If anyone is grifting, it’s Perry himself. His denialism probably has something to do with the massive bribes he gleefully accepts from the fossil fuel industry. Unfortunately, inmates like him are now running the asylum.

But the rot has infected members of both parties. Yes, Kerry has had lucid moments. But, overall, he too has a deeply flawed climate record. Under Barack Obama, Kerry abetted an administration which took “disastrous steps that worsened the climate crisis.” This included lifting “the ban on exporting crude oil… thanks to… multiyear lobbying efforts… by… industry groups.” Kerry was hardly a bulwark against special interests trying to destroy the environment.

Kerry also actively supports fracking, which belches methane — one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases — into the atmosphere. Moreover, as recently as 2020, Kerry led the advisory council of a bank that dumped massive sums into fossil financing. That’s not all. Kerry is notoriously weak on climate mitigation funds, insisting the United States can’t afford to assist the developing world. While special envoy on climate under Joe Biden, he said “under no circumstances” would America pay any climate reparations. This contradicts the advice of experts, including economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, who see reparations as necessary for ecological justice.

Yet, in a country as environmentally disastrous as the United States, Kerry seems like a climate hawk. America is history’s worst carbon emitter by far. Today, it ranks among the top per capita emitters according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The United States also finds itself toward the very bottom of the Sustainable Development Index (SDI).

Compare that to China. UNEP data shows that China’s per capita emissions are 40% less than America’s. China also ranks 21 spots above the United States in the SDI. And the country is taking considerable steps to further green itself.

In the first four months of 2023, China added a whopping 62 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity. No other country has made comparable strides, with 80 percent of China’s new power capacity coming from renewable sources. China alone accounts for over 35 percent of all global investment in the transition to clean energy in 2021. These facts have led scholars, including the University of Michigan’s Tom Lyon, to remark that “green is everywhere in China.”

Rather than resting on its laurels, the Middle Kingdom is upping the ante. Even otherwise unsympathetic observers, including the capitalist press, cannot help but marvel. The Economist recently acknowledged that “[t]he scale of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp.” By the end of last year, “the country had installed 887 of solar-power capacity — close to double Europe’s and America’s combined capacity.” In 2024, it deployed over 24 million tons of steel to build new wind turbines and solar panels. This “would have been enough to build a Golden Gate Bridge on every work day of every week that year.”

Yet there is great room for improvement. Despite historic expansions in clean energy, China remains heavily dependent on dirty sources for its energy demands. Coal still comprises a majority of its energy production. Air pollution is consequently a major problem in Chinese cities. Sulfates fill the skies, typically tracing to coal and fuel oils. Their concentration peaked in the early 2010s, which commentators dubbed an “air-pocalypse.” But China got serious. As The Economist reports:

[C]hemical devices were installed to remove sulphur from the flue gases pumped out by power stations. These steps, along with others, greatly improved air quality in Chinese cities. Its citizens’ lungs are much the better for it, and their lives the longer.

But China’s “war against pollution” is far from over. When it comes to the most harmful particulate matter, China still vastly overshoots World Health Organization standards. This causes a slew of health problems including even premature deaths. Much of the blame for that, however, lies with the United States and its rich allies. As Roger Bybee, a Milwaukee-based freelance writer, explains in his article ‘Scapegoating China,’ “U.S.-based corporations, their contractors, and other Western multinationals… are responsible for a majority of China’s fossil-fuel effluents.” Economist Rob Larson makes a similar point in his book Bleakonomics. American multinationals, he writes, play a “crucial role in exporting polluting industries.” Consequently, residents of major Chinese cities often wear face masks to avoid inhaling harmful amounts of toxic smog.

But at least they wear them, rather than turning masks into a political maelstrom — as was, embarrassingly, the case here. The Trump administration demonized masking and vaccines, continuing its push against the latter to this day. China, meanwhile, treated the pandemic with requisite seriousness. It was easily the world’s largest producer of personal protective equipment, generously exporting excess supply to help other countries cope. While COVID ravaged America, and arguably still does, China conquered it — with a tiny fraction of the death rate. On public health, Beijing showcased its immense superiority.

Many have dubbed tensions between these two great powers, the United States and China, a “New Cold War.” This New Cold War mirrors the old one. In years past, for all its flaws, the Soviet Union led on guaranteeing basic social rights. Citizens enjoyed free college and healthcare alongside universal housing which basically abolished homelessness. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s Western counterparts — namely, the United States — spread death and destruction abroad as greed ran rampant domestically. The difference could not have been clearer. 

We see this contrast today too. As the United States descends into fascism, embracing old ways of thinking, China is revolutionizing itself for humanity’s betterment. The Middle Kingdom is greening industry, innovating technologically, and continues opening itself to the outside world. For all its flaws, chief among them cowardice (or indifference) amid Zionist criminality, China is leaping into the new age. In the New Cold War, it is plainly the preferable option. The choice is between civilization and barbarism. Socialists the world over should act accordingly.

LESSONS

There is much to learn from China’s successes. For one, they show the power of innovation. A common narrative in the West is that China is merely an appropriator, and not an originator. China, the story goes, ruthlessly poaches Western technology with little regard for intellectual property because it cannot solve problems itself. But “any doubts about China’s ability to produce… innovative solutions have been disproven with its rapid uptake of green technology.”

Look no further than its booming vehicle industry. Over the years, more than 500 electric car companies have sprouted in China. Although, for efficiency’s sake, that number is rapidly falling due to consolidation. China manufactures over 70% of the world’s electric cars and accounts for 40% of global exports. This is thanks partly to generous government subsidies and otherwise supportive policies to buttress that critical sector.

And that brings us to another common Western common narrative. It is the idea that capitalism promotes innovation better than any other economic system, with socialism paling in comparison. Yet China’s immense environmental progress was produced by a careful series of five-year state plans guiding a largely socialist economy. The ruling Communist Party does not allow the country to fall prey to the anarchy of the market. Its planning outlines $16 trillion of investment to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. A particularly noteworthy proposal is China’s Biodiversity Conservation Strategy and Action Plan. It “aims to vigorously develop green finance… and integrate biodiversity data into… environmental disclosures and sustainability reports.”

There is a lesson here for the United States. More state intervention in the economy can work wonders, and breathe new life into this decaying power. The tools to do so already exist. One is the Defense Production Act, a congressional response to Harry Truman’s 1950s call to supply the Korean War effort. Today, the Defense Production Act is a powerful tool in the presidential arsenal to mobilize private industry to fulfill social priorities. 

Namely, “the executive branch could use the Defense Production Act… to accelerate the clean energy build-out.” Importantly, it could do so while bypassing Congress and subfederal authorities and “without regard to the limitations of existing law.” The ability to override contrary “federal, state, and local laws that privilege corporate short-termism” is bursting with promise.

But none of that matters absent the requisite political will. The United States remains committed to the path of climate doom. A bold transition to renewables is not on the horizon. The Green New Deal, though blindingly necessary, is nothing more than a few bits of paper. America is refusing to face the growing environmental crisis that threatens organized human life as we know it.

Therefore, the global masses — especially in developing nations, which are most at risk — look to China for vision and leadership. And the reason is clear. In staking our collective future, Beijing — and its commitment to expanding green energy — is a safer bet and steadier hand. There is no debate. And there never was.

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Issue 7, the first of which we are publishing with a preview in this format, is the Ballot and the Rebellion. To receive a bimonthly full copy of the magazine issue delivered to your door knowing your funds directly support the independent media we represent, you can subscribe here.

Working Mass is a project of union members and members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Massachusetts and beyond. We cover strikes, new organizing, and contract campaigns, as well as labor strategy, the reform movement, and socialist politics.

Strikes in the Air, Welcome to Issue 7:

In this issue, organizers debate electoral strategy, from cadre candidates to victory infrastructures, in articles written in between and around clocked-in shifts and showing up day after day for fellow workers on the picket line of the Red Cup Rebellion.

Espresso machines are rusting from disuse, but the fire of solidarity is still running hot.

Note from the Managing Editor

I’m honored to serve as the new managing editor of this publication. I’m from a union family, raised by IATSE rank-and-file worker leaders and United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC) union craftsmen, but what led me into labor was my own conditions – when seventy-hour weeks caught like a prairie fire and fanned into a strike. My coworkers and I organized to contract ratification and strike authorization as rank-and-file members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and Campaign Workers Guild (CWG). These left me with a sense of the electric possibilities of collective action, which socialist struggle only showed an even farther horizon for. The Triangle chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) elected me twice to co-chair the chapter; most recently, I have been active in and served as co-chair of the Somerville branch of Boston DSA.

Experiences on the shopfloor and in organizational leadership leave me with a conviction: politics happens at the base, and radiates up. The places where people spend their time and experience exploitation and domination — including the workplace and home — are the places in which the politics that boil into the class forces shaping electoral landscapes are struggled for and over.

In solidarity,

Travis Wayne

Issue 7 Contributors: Terence Cawley, Maritza S, Matt Wolfinger, Jake S, Ric Blair, Jackie Wilson, Dalton Galloway, Carlos B

1. Starbucks Workers United Supermajority Authorize ULP Strike for November 13

2. WPI Resident Advisors On Strike Against Destructive Restructuring and Unionbusting

3. Winning Online: 5 Digital Tactics That Powered Connolly and Zohran To Victory

4. The Starbucks Strike and the Long Memory of the Kitchen

5. Cross the Finish Line, Not the Picket Line – Newton Runs 5k to Support Striking Starbucks Baristas

Opinion Pieces

1. Electoral Strategy With Every Canvass An Organizing Moment

2. A Revolution Requires Revolutionaries, Not Candidates

3. Oppositional, Independent, and Socialist Candidates

The post Announcing Issue 7: The Ballot and the Rebellion appeared first on Working Mass.

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By: Jake S

WORCESTER, MA – On Monday, January 10, North Atlantic States Carpenters Union Local 336 members gathered against a 10-year real estate tax exemption and state tax credit eligibility proposed by Worcester City Manager Eric Batista for Menkiti Group, a Washington DC developer.

They object on the grounds that Menkiti has broken the city’s Responsible Development Ordinance – a list of requirements to be eligible for such exemptions – through its hiring of Barber Drywall. The company has been cited five times over the past two years for ordinance violations relating to wages and hours. Tax exemptions and credits like these amount to a publicly-funded subsidy granted to developers by the city.

Menkiti is seeking the exemption for a project which would convert the upper floor of an office building on Main Street into market-rate apartments. Only five of the 48 planned units will be available to tenants making no more than 60% area median income, according to Chief Development Officer Peter Dunn in communication with Worcester City Council.

Ahna Wowk-Aposhian, a journey-level carpenter and 5-year member of the union, toldWorking Mass that union carpenters weren’t being “prioritized” by City Hall, despite their best efforts to support ostensibly pro-labor candidates.

[Local] 336 has spent countless hours, countless days interviewing candidates, holding political actions, going to rallies, holding signs, and being told over and over again that Worcester government and City Council values the Carpenters union and is on the side of union labor. And with this fourth proposed non-union high-rise [project] — it really is the last straw, it does feel a little insulting at this point.

Candidates that we endorse signed pledges to back union projects and union work, and we haven’t seen that. [The City hands out subsidies to] developers that hire contractors who violate multiple labor laws, who engage in wage theft against their lowest-paid workers, who do not hold themselves to any kind of OSHA standard. Union work across the board is safer, it pays better, it has more protections [for workers].

Union carpenters vocalized the need to improve wages, hours, and working conditions for all workers, and that their union exists to pursue just that. When asked more about the value of her union, Ahna said being a member:

offers a quality of life that’s absolutely unheard of for someone of my age bracket and background. As a 37-year-old, I have a pension, I have annuity, I have a guaranteed retirement. I don’t worry about breaking my leg and not being taken care of; my wife doesn’t have to worry about her healthcare. I know that if I experience workplace discrimination, the full force of the union will come down like a hammer – there are so many people to back you up.

Carpenters stood out in the leadup to a Zoning Board meeting regarding the project and subsequently entered the meeting to voice their concerns. Rather than reject the City Manager’s proposals, Worcester City Council on Tuesday delayed the agenda item until its next meeting scheduled for today: January 20. 

Carpenters Local 336 will return to City Hall in the leadup to the meeting.

Not the First Time

As Ahna alluded to, this wasn’t the first time Carpenters Local 336 demanded change in the city’s distribution of subsidies (and not even the first time in relation to Barber Drywall). Back in May, several building trades unions across Worcester and Fitchburg – including the Carpenters – stood outside of 446 Main Street, the glass high-rise that houses the Worcester office of Synergy Investments.

Synergy had made the decision to hire NEI General Contracting for a similarly subsidized project to the tune of nearly $6.5 million in tax exemptions.

NEI and contractors it planned to hire had previously been charged with 37 minimum wage violations; 39 pay violations; and $15,000 in penalties for retaliating against employees who filed suit over alleged wage and hour law violations (including threats relating to immigration status), according to a press release provided by the unions. 

Such infractions, the unions stated, were clear violations of municipal development ordinances, and should prohibit subsidy projects from being awarded to these contractors. Those violations occurred over the course of other projects receiving combined millions of dollars in tax exemptions and credits.

“They cheat, they don’t pay their people the right wages, they don’t pay the right overtime, they undermine the building trades, and then they get tax money,” said Michelle Arnold, a journey-level carpenter and 8-year member of Local 336. 

These contractors have a history of doing this. We’ve built all kinds of buildings in this town, and we’re very disappointed the town would let these contractors not play by the rules. It takes money off everybody’s checks – union and non-union. Non-union workers are the ones working for these contractors, and they’re getting cheated.

When asked more about the role of her union, Michelle said:

Because of the union, we have a 5-day workweek; because of the union, we have safety protocols and fair wages. We can bring charges to shady contractors and help the people that aren’t getting paid the right way. Unfortunately, that sort of thing happens a lot more than people want to think, and most of the time, it flies under the radar.

She noted events like this could bring more attention to these issues of the building trades, and recalled her fellow union members joining nurses every day on the picket line of Worcester’s historic strike against St. Vincent’s Hospital. “Working people supporting working people can have a big impact. Everybody wants to earn a paycheck; everybody wants a fair wage for their time.”

Dan Mulcahey, Vice President of the Worcester-Fitchburg Building Trades Council (WFBTC) and a member of Sheet Metal Workers Local 63, agreed.

For union workers, if you show up on time and do your job, you get the proper training you need to get licensed in your trade when you’re just starting out, you get job security throughout your career, and you get to retire with dignity when you’re done.

“There’s a lot of development going on right now in the city of Worcester,” remarked Jorge Rivera, President of the WFBTC. “We’re pro-development – but it’s gotta be the responsible type of development.”

Synergy Investments has continued to be the beneficiary of that nearly $6.5 million in tax subsidies for its project – despite the protestations of the building trades unions – which was to turn the eleven-story tower at 1 Chestnut Place into 198 market-rate apartments.

To city and state governmental bodies, both Synergy and Menkiti’s business practices appear to qualify as “responsible development.” The question that Worcester’s working-class residents might ask is: “responsible to whom?”

Jake S is a member of Worcester DSA and a contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Bad Blueprints: Worcester Building Trades Challenge Subsidies to Developers appeared first on Working Mass.

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