For many years I taught labor history at night to working students at City College of San Francisco. Since Bay Area workers and their unions had carried out two consequential general strikes (San Francisco in 1934, and Oakland in 1946), each semester I assigned my pupils an essay question:  Is it possible—or even desirable—for our region’s workers, if faced with oppressive circumstances, to replicate those feats today?

My students’ essays appeared along a range of responses between two poles. On one end, no, not possible, even if desirable, due to changed conditions like suburban distances between home and workplace, along with the decline of union density. On the other, yes, both desirable and possible, because new communications technologies allow ideas and organizing to spread rapidly online, and labor’s steep decline means that workers are angry enough to make it happen. Few students in either camp thought it would be an easy lift, reflecting a general sense of limited horizons for labor-led progressive change in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

The 1946 Oakland General Strike was the very last one American workers had managed to put together, literally a lifetime ago. But metaphorically, post-January 23, 2026, we might now be onto a new calendar. In the wake of the powerful “No Work, No School, No Shopping” day that erupted in the Twin Cities, alongside a steady drumbeat of growing demonstrations and electoral successes against the Trump regime, there’s wind in the sails for mass action on May Day 2026.

Just in my neck of the woods many events have already taken place, and more are on the boards, combining planning, training and coalition building for that once-unpopular holiday, officially observed in one hundred or so nations across the globe but not in the country that birthed it. I hear from a friend in Minneapolis that he’s been going to meetings attended by hundreds of people dedicated in a serious way to making May 1 another day of action. 

We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of what happened January 23. In the midst of a brutal occupation by poorly trained, heavily armed troops operating with seeming impunity on behalf of their fascist mission of ethnic cleansing, the ordinary people of Minneapolis organized themselves to defend their streets, their democratic rights, their immigrant neighbors, and their idea of a decent society to demand “ICE out!”. Somewhere around 75,000 people showed up on a cold Minnesota winter day to freeze the gears of the local economy and the occupation. 

It was pretty close to a general strike, and unlike all the other dozen-plus city-wide general strikes in American history it was waged not around an economic struggle between workers and bosses, but on behalf of a political idea, more like what happens every so often in other countries. Which is very much in the spirit of May Day.

Tools are there to be found

Doing such things will not suddenly become easier. The Minnesota circumstances are unique, with an unprecedented level of assault running into a recent baseline increase in labor-community alliance and activism. The ICE invasion reignited the embers of powerful alliance-building and union contract victories that peaked in 2024. But every city has its own local history, culture and traditions of collective action, and despite the diminished capacities of the labor movement, the tools are there to be found—providing they are sought out seriously.

One hurdle is the legitimate fear of labor leadership over legal consequences for calling a general strike, forbidden by the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a federal legislative backlash by the Republican-controlled Congress against the 1946 strike wave. Unions can be fined and labor leaders jailed for overtly calling for sympathy strikes. Thus while mostly supportive behind the scenes, unions were muted in their participation in the May 1 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations and the November 2011 “Day of Action” in Oakland that shut down the docks and shuttered many businesses in support of Occupy Oakland’s call for a general strike. 

Making distinctions

In Minneapolis unions and labor federations advanced the ball down that field without quite uttering the words “general strike”, although everyone was pretty clear what “No Work, No School, No Shopping” meant. Which brings us to the distinction between what Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch termed ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopias. Both contain the hope for something better than what we’ve got, and both can propose action to get us from here to there. But an abstract utopia fails to marshal full consideration of the many-sided realities that need to be navigated in order to arrive at a successful endpoint. A concrete utopia pays attention to what Marx was getting at in his Introduction to the Grundrisse when he noted that “The truth is concrete; hence, unity of the diverse.”

What didn’t do that? The cry immediately after January 23 by various individuals and organizations to replicate “No work, no school, no shopping” nation-wide a week later on January 30, which predictably fizzled, absent the hard work of analysis and organizing that produced January 23.

What did do that? In the background, helping to set the stage for Minneapolis, was United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain’s call—issued in 2023—for unions across the country to line up their contracts for common expiration on May 1 2028. Here was a call not to have a general strike, but to organize one. A concrete utopia is one that bridges the gap between the current unsatisfactory situation and the desired outcome with appropriate tactics, strategies, and inspiration—and above all, with a cleareyed picture of and willingness to do the work needed in the timeframe needed to do it.

We may be learning that there is nothing like a dose of fascism to clarify the minds of labor and other progressive movement leaders. Besides all-but-calling a general strike, and getting onto the May Day train, unions around the country have been stepping up ‘tax the rich’ efforts at the state and local levels and signing onto coalitions supporting socialists running for office. Not everywhere, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and it seems to be starting. There are some 250 democratic socialists in office today in the United States, the most since the heyday of the Socialist Party in the early twentieth century, nearly all elected with union support. The imagination of the labor movement, perhaps not coincidentally mostly slumbering since the 1946 strike wave, is waking up.

The direct confrontation with fascism experienced in places like the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere is not everywhere. Where it’s happening it’s real and deadly serious, on the wrong end of weapons wielded by our government against its own citizens. Fascists are occupying the federal government apparatus, and as they are wont to do, they are stripping it of its helping functions and shifting resources to the repressive functions. But the occupation is being contested. Civil society is the playing field, and democracy is still in play.

Mayhaps

May Day has always been about collective imagination—to be precise, workers imagining a new world, one in which they will be in charge. This act of collective imagining involves another pairing, not the same as but rhyming with the concrete/abstract utopias distinction: individual imagination and fantasy. In psychoanalytic terms, fantasy is a regressive and often self-destructive escape from reality, a defensive flight toward would-be omnipotent control, but only in one’s head. The ultraleft posturing that goes into a call for a general strike without regard to material circumstances is a good example. Imagination, by contrast, actively and creatively engages the work necessary to move from internal conception to making something actually happen—like lining up our contracts to expire on the same day, May Day 2028, with a timeline matched to the magnitude of the task. 

Fain’s concrete utopia also rhymes with how May Day began. Following the execution of the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago, the Socialist International declared a day of commemoration, with demonstrations in every country for the eight-hour work-day, the cause for which the Chicago labor leaders were put to death. Wisely, the call did not impose a one-size-fits-all set of instructions, but instead suggested that each country assess its situation and determine what sort of demonstrations made sense in their own context. The results ranged from weekend marches to general strikes. In some places, over the years, the marches became general strikes, May First became a workers’ holiday, and the labor movement achieved the shorter workday.

For eight decades in this country we’ve done the weekend marches, not the general strikes, the door to which has been shut tight. The people of Minneapolis showed us something remarkable on January 23—that with the work that accompanies imagination, it just might be possible to crack the door open and let the light through. Minneapolis isn’t everywhere, nor should we expect it to be—like Mamdani’s victory could happen because it happened in New York, and New York also isn’t everywhere. But both events show us that something different is possible when collective imagination is fired by the vision of a better world, and the vision is matched with the work it takes to get there. 

On May 1 2026 we’ll be testing how far along we are on the path to the mass actions necessary to push back the fascist tide. We should expect the results to be uneven, but we can learn from them and thus be stronger as we head toward the next rounds of struggle.

In last month’s California Red progressive tax column, “The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality” we learned that our state’s billionaires are busy making unintentional arguments for raising taxes on themselves. As Exhibit A, we heard the statement by tech mogul Tim Conway who, in speaking of the Billionaires Tax, described it as “…the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt”. We’re fairly certain that, say, Native Californians who suffered a genocide in the nineteenth century, falling from a third of a million people pre-contact, to fifteen thousand by 1910, might disagree with Conway’s historical viewpoint.

It would be hard to top this perspective for revelation of the navel-gazing narcissism of the billionaire set at the prospect they might have to pay their fair share of taxes to support the society that had made them rich, but at least it had the virtue of honesty, albeit of the self-delusional variety. No such sideways move accompanied billionaire activities earlier this month, when a large envelope landed in the letterboxes of homes across the state. 

Designed to mimic official state electoral mailers—the printing even said “OFFICIAL 2026 VOTER PETITION ENCLOSED”—it contained three elements: a flyer headed “Yes to Protect Retirement and Life Savings”; a petition for an initiative measure for the November state ballot; and an already-paid return envelope to send the filled-in petition to something called “Californians To Protect Retirement and Life Savings” at a Burbank P.O. Box. 

Reading between the lines

The outside of the mailer said, “Sign now to stop Sacramento politicians from taxing your personal property”. On the inside, the unnamed politicians pushing their unnamed tax on everyone were further chastised.

You would have to read between the lines, but two of the flyer’s three bolded bullets give away its actual agenda. One tells us that the ballot measure petition we are being urged to sign “prohibits new state taxes on personal savings, and personal property…” . The other “prohibits retroactive taxes”.  

The only proposed tax on personal savings and property, which is indeed designed to apply retroactively to January 1, 2026 (that much is true), is the Billionaires Tax, which will fall on the shoulders of precisely 246 people in the Golden State. Nonetheless the flyer argues that “Politicians should not be allowed to change the rules and tax what you have worked a lifetime to earn” (emphasis added). 

Despite the second person form of address, no one will be taxed by the Billionaires Tax unless he or she is a billionaire. However, the Billionaires Tax is not mentioned anywhere in the flyer. To do so might undercut the multiple deceptions at the heart of this mailer.

Worn and tattered economic blackmail banner

The BT is not emanating from scary Sacramento politicians. It is an effort spearheaded by a health care workers union, United Health Workers-SEIU, to plug the $20 billion per year hole opened up in the California state budget for Medi-Cal recipients by Trump’s HR1, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”, beginning in 2027.  Should the Billionaires Tax fail to make it, with no other action taken, millions of the poorest Californians would lose their health care, and tens of thousands of decent union health care jobs would disappear as well. 

As for those unnamed but undoubtedly evil “Sacramento politicians” supposedly pushing the tax, Sacramento politician numero uno, Gavin Newsom, among many others, opposes the Billionaires Tax. His deeply unoriginal reasoning is the worn and tattered economic blackmail banner that always gets waved about by wealthy would-be tax dodgers—they’ll all leave the state! and take all the jobs with them!—which research has proven to be largely fallacious. 

The main argument—dishonest in form, as well as content—is the one that states that the proposed tax is on “you”—and since everyone hates taxes, or so it is assumed by the makers of the argument, “you” will become incensed and get to work opposing it. Here the authors of the mailer thoughtfully provide a petition for “you” to sign and return in a pre-paid envelope. (They must be hoping that the “you” is more than the 246 people who are actually the “you”.)

Certainly a handful of anti-social billionaires oppose the tax. It’s hard to imagine a more selfish perspective. According to the Billionaires Tax campaign website, “California billionaires have increased their wealth 158% over the last three years, making a 5% tax, spread over five years, truly negligible relative to their enormous gains.” In other words, this wealth tax doesn’t actually decrease billionaire wealth; it merely slows down its rampaging growth in order to save Medi-Cal. 

Tsunami of lies headed our way

The goal of this mailer and its petition is nullification of the Billionaires Tax, should it pass. Let’s be clear: the billionaires tax campaign hasn’t even finished gathering signatures, let alone qualified for the ballot, and, dare we mention the final hurdle, gained fifty percent plus one of the votes of the electorate. We are seven months from Election Day, and tens of millions of dollars in right wing billionaire money has already been dropped into our mailboxes and into credulous mainstream media stories breathlessly announcing the drain-circling our fourth largest economy in the world will undoubtedly suffer when all the billionaires leave. Imagine the tsunami of advertising, mailers and surrogates lying through their teeth all washing over us once the measure qualifies.

Lost in all the noise are two simple points. First, everyone, meaning the megarich too, needs to pay their fair share of taxes—Silicon Valley billionaires who have benefited hugely from Trump’s federal tax cuts included. Second, elections in a democracy should be decided on the basis of the merits of the argument—not dishonest scare tactics amplified by unlimited billionaire spending. Ironically, the dirty tricks already pulled by this campaign demonstrate that the billionaires behind it have more money than is good for truth, fair elections and their own better selves, should they actually have any. 

They might want to pay a bit more attention to the rising public perception that their political spending is bad for democracy. They might then decide it’s in their own interest too to pay their fair share to support the basic public services needed by the rest of us. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it over a century ago, taxes are “the price we pay for a civilized society”.

On Tuesday, November 3rd the voters in this country may deal a significant blow to the Trump and MAGA movement by taking away the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Every vote will be important in these very important elections.

What role will DSA play in this important battle? Tens of thousands of activists across the state will work to defeat the Republicans. Will DSA be there with them? Will DSA be known as an organization that stood up to do what was best for the people in this critical moment of history?

I hope so.

That's why I am proposing that we organize and direct our effort to support the Democrats in the five swing districts across our state.  One way we could do this is by developing a California DSA Congressional Elections Committee

I recorded this short video introducing myself and proposing we build this committee. Please take a moment to watch it. I will expand on it more here in this article, but it will introduce the idea.

Why should we focus on the swing districts? The swing districts are the battleground. Most districts are solidly Republican or solidly Democratic. They are stable territory for either side. The swing districts are where the two parties fight and gain or lose ground.

California has five of them: 

• CA-13 is held by Democrat Adam Gray, who won in 2024 by only 187 votes. The district also voted for Trump. CA-13 includes all of Merced County, most of Madera County and parts of Stanislaus, Fresno and San Joaquin Counties. Our closest chapters are North Central Valley, East Bay and San Francisco. 

• CA-21 is more likely to remain Democratic. Current representative Jim Costa won by 10,065 votes, but that is still close enough to have it make the swing districts list. It includes part of Fresno County and Tulare County. Our closest chapters are North Central Valley, East Bay and San Francisco. 

• CA-22 is held by Republican David Valadao. It includes most of Kings County and parts of Tulare and Kern Counties. The closest chapter to this district is North Central Valley DSA and we also have an Organizing Committee in Kern County.

• CA-45 is held by Democrat Derek Tran, who narrowly won in 2024 by just 653 votes. It is located mostly in Orange County and includes a small part of Los Angeles County. Our Long Beach, Orange County and Los Angeles chapters could collaborate on this race.

• CA-48 is also held by a Republican and it includes parts of San Diego and Riverside counties. We have chapters in the Inland Empire and San Diego.

You can check out maps of the districts and voting results of the 2024 general elections here in this site I put together.

The election committee will include people from chapters across the state.  We will help each other organize members in our chapters to participate in these elections, discuss how things are going and to help each other out and share ideas and resources.  We will discuss successes and challenges getting members involved in the campaigns.

I acknowledge that these Democratic candidates in the swing districts hold positions on some issues that many DSA members may be strongly opposed to. But priority number one right now must be stopping MAGA fascism in its tracks, and one crucial and necessary tool is a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. 

All we as DSA members need to do is show up and participate in the campaigns and we can figure out together how best to do that. 

Participants from a chapter could tell the congressperson’s campaign that they would like to focus on an area where many of the members live or an area that participants want to focus on for some other reason. We can publicize campaign events to our members and encourage them to help. We can look at voter statistics for the areas we choose and become more advanced in our understanding of the voting history of the area we focus on. Some of you will have other ideas about what to do as well and they will be welcomed. We will discuss them openly together!

Working together on this important political event will help us to function in an organized and collective way, like an organization bigger than our isolated chapters, and to learn to work together smoothly, efficiently and with unity.

We need to work that way if we are going to successfully march down the long and difficult road of building socialism. Right now MAGA stands ahead of us, right in the middle of that road. 

Please contact me (lealfaro@protonmail.com) to work together on getting our people to help with any campaign event.  Contact me if you have questions or views on this very important time.

[reprinted by permission from Jacobin]

On a late March afternoon, beneath the vaulted, medieval-revival ceiling of Immanuel Presbyterian Church, more than four hundred members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) gathered in the lingering heat of a citywide heat wave. The air inside the sanctuary was thick and stubborn as members fanned themselves with paper copies of the meeting agenda and shifted in their seats.

The proceedings moved briskly at first. Members discussed strike solidarity with the teachers’ union, upcoming labor actions, and campaign work. But as the temperature held and the room settled, the chapter turned to the main act, a more contentious question: whether to reopen its endorsement process for the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral race. What followed was a three-sided debate, carried out with intensity but also with (mostly) practiced comradely discipline.

More than one hundred members had signed petitions backing housing activist Rae Huang. Another one hundred supported City Councilmember Nithya Raman. Others argued that reopening the process would risk overextending the chapter’s resources and undermine a carefully built electoral strategy. In the end, 54 percent voted to reopen endorsements, but the measure failed to reach the required supermajority.

It was the kind of debate that would have once remained obscure and relevant only to a relatively small organization. As DSA’s LA chapter has grown to five thousand members, and the national organization has become an increasingly prominent force, DSA-LA’s decisions have begun to register as reportable events in the political life of the city. What was once “inside baseball” now carries implications for multimillion-dollar races and the direction of governance in the second-largest city in the United States — part of a broader maturation of socialist politics.

For years, DSA-LA has pursued a disciplined electoral strategy focused primarily on city council races, with massive districts that each encompass over 260,000 residents — but where, when the Left concentrates its forces, it can still meaningfully shift outcomes. This strategy flows from both ongoing campaign work and the chapter’s political program, and has delivered results on the council.

Shake Up City Hall Slate

Nithya Raman’s 2020 victory marked a breakthrough, and in the years since, DSA-backed candidates have steadily expanded their presence. Today multiple members or allies of the organization sit on the fifteen-member city council, and the chapter has built a reputation for running serious, field-heavy campaigns rooted in tenant organizing and alliances with labor unions.

In the current cycle, DSA-LA has endorsed the Shake Up City Hallslate of six candidates. DSA-LA’s 2026 slate includes both incumbents and challengers, with councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, a Highland Park organizer advancing tenant rights and advocating for improving public safety through better social service and mental health provision, and Hugo Soto-Martínez, a former hotel worker and union organizer who has delivered legislative wins for renters, immigrants, and labor.

The challengers include Estuardo Mazariegos, a South LA organizer running on social housing, tenant power, and a Green New Deal, and Faizah Malik, a tenants’ rights attorney focused on housing affordability and land use reform on the Westside.

Beyond council races, school board member Rocío Rivas is seeking reelection as a defender of public education against privatization. And Marissa Roy is mounting an insurgent bid for city attorney to reorient the office toward civil rights and corporate accountability.

The Other Citywide Race

That last race represents something new. The office of city attorney has historically been low-profile, technocratic, and largely insulated from ideological contestation. Roy’s campaign, by contrast, seeks to transform it into a site of democratic accountability, raising questions about prosecution priorities, tenant rights, and the legal architecture of inequality in Los Angeles.

“The city attorney is one of the most powerful and least understood offices in LA, and the current city attorney is using the office to obstruct the pro-tenant, pro-worker agenda our DSA electeds are trying to implement in city council,” said Sydney Ghazarian, cochair of DSA’s Marissa Roy Working Group and a former DSA National Political Committee leader. “We’ve learned the hard way that the policies we pass don’t matter if the city attorney refuses to enforce them. ”

Roy’s candidacy is not just another race. It is a test of whether democratic socialists can expand their project beyond legislative bodies into the legal machinery of the city itself. It’s one thing to pass legislation; it’s another thing to enforce it and have the city devote its legal might to supporting tenants and workers.

“Right now, we have a city attorney who wastes the office’s resources defending indefensible LAPD misconduct instead of prosecuting slumlords, bad bosses, and polluting corporations,” added Ghazarian. “Marissa will use the power of the office to defend tenants, workers, and millions of working-class Angelenos, not just the powerful few.”

The Mayor’s Race Enters the Room

The debate over the mayor’s race sits uneasily alongside this strategy. Before Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor last November, the question of intervening in the race wasn’t on the minds of many LA chapter members. But that upset election rippled out in energizing waves across the country.

On one side were those who saw a mayoral endorsement as a natural next step. With DSA-backed candidates now holding multiple council seats and with the deep polling weakness of LA’s current mayor, Karen Bass, the prospect of a democratic socialist mayor no longer feels entirely out of reach. A mayoral campaign, in their eyes, would bring visibility, attract new members, and potentially consolidate the gains of the past decade.

“I want our chapter to be able to seize this moment and demonstrate to thousands of working-class Angelenos that DSA-LA is an organization worth joining, and I want a movement that understands 2028 is not just about returning to corporate Democratic policies but rather reshaping the fabric of American society,” said chapter cochair Leslie Chang, who supported a Nithya endorsement. “Supporting Nithya for mayor is our chance to build a movement here in Los Angeles that is ready to support a democratic socialist for president in 2028.”

On the other side were those who view such a move as premature or even counterproductive. The chapter’s strength has been its disciplined allocation of resources, particularly volunteer labor for phonebanking and canvassing. A citywide race could absorb enormous capacity, potentially weakening the campaigns where DSA has its clearest path to victory.

There are also political considerations. Raman, despite her history with DSA and her strong record on tenant protections and advocacy for the homeless, has at times diverged from the organization on key issues, including Palestine, housing policy, policing budgets, and the implementation of the city’s “mansion tax.” Raman has drawn heavy fire at times from DSA members nationally for being accommodating to local pro-Israeli groups. For instance, she was censured by the chapter in 2024 for accepting the endorsement of Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles. At the recent chapter debate, some members active in housing fights raised concerns about her being an inconsistent ally to the housing left in the city and criticized her efforts to rewrite Measure ULA, the city tax on top-tier property sales that flows directly into the city’s affordable housing programs, to exempt apartments, condos, and mixed-use housing. Raman contends that it is a tactical move to keep lobbying groups opposed to the measure from gutting the law with a statewide ballot initiative..

Huang, by contrast, is seen by some members as more closely aligned with socialist principles but faces questions about electability and citywide recognition. “She’s not on the Shake Up City Hall slate, but she’s here to shake up city hall,” says Gabbie Metheny, a DSA-LA chapter member and volunteer community manager for the campaign.

Democracy Is Good, Actually

These are not superficial disagreements. They reflect a deeper tension within democratic socialist strategy: whether to prioritize ideological clarity or electoral viability, and how to balance the two in a political environment still largely hostile to socialists.

What stands out, however, is not the existence of disagreement but the form it takes. The debate inside DSA-LA is structured, participatory, and transparent. Petitions circulate. Members argue openly. Votes are taken, and decisions are respected even when the margins are narrow or the outcome frustrating. The result is messy, sometimes slow, and occasionally anticlimactic.

Members also sometimes vote with their feet in a mass organization where democratic socialism spills out into a broader movement not always contained by DSA. Formal endorsement or no, over 120 DSA-LA, Long Beach, and Orange County members (mostly new recruits) are volunteering for Huang’s campaign (out of 1,110 volunteers total), taking up organizing roles in canvassing, digital outreach, policy, and more. Many DSA members active in the United Auto Workers have been pillars of support for the Nithya campaign. But messy or not, DSA-LA’s internal debates provide a rare example of large-scale democratic practice in an era when most political organizations operate through top-down decision-making or informal influence networks.

The stakes extend beyond Los Angeles. As democratic socialism becomes an ever more powerful force in American politics, questions of strategy, scale, and internal democracy will only become more pressing. DSA-LA offers one possible model: a mass-membership organization capable of contesting elections, organizing in social movements, and still arguing, in full view of its own members, about how best to proceed.

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Eric Blanc and Chris Winston have both written articles recently investigating why there is currently no mass anti-war movement in the US and proposing actions for us to take to address that problem. I’m glad that they each put forward their analysis, because both are grappling seriously with this issue, and we do need to figure out what we can do to build a mass anti-war movement. Although I lean more towards Winston’s position, my primary objective in this piece is not to argue for why he is correct or why Blanc is wrong, but rather to dig into the underlying assumptions that lead some of us to Winston’s conclusions and others to Blanc’s.

Both authors propose various tactical interventions that they believe will help to build a mass anti-war movement. However, selection of tactics is downstream from strategy. In this case, the primary strategic question should be, “Who is our base?” Who do we seek to organize into this mass anti-war movement? Once we have the answer to that question, determining tactics is much more straightforward. With a war as unpopular as this one, it seems obvious that the potential base for the anti-war movement would be that majority of the American people who oppose the war, but when we look at the imperialist system more comprehensively, the base becomes smaller.

I propose that the potential base for the anti-imperialist movement within the US consists of the following:

1. The portion of the American ¹working class that is exploited by capitalism to a greater extent than it benefits from imperialism,
2. People in the United States, regardless of class status, who, due to ties of family or friendship, suffer net harm from imperialism when all impacts are taken into account, and
3. Individuals who, despite benefiting more from imperialism than they are exploited by capitalism, desire the end of the imperialist system because they believe it to be abhorrent and are willing to sacrifice the benefits they derive from the system in exchange for its end.

There is a potential fourth group: people who benefit more from imperialism than they are exploited by capitalism, but desire the end of the imperialist system in part because they don’t believe that they will have to endure any reduction in their standard of living when the imperialist system is dismantled. It is potentially possible that the productive forces could be developed more rapidly than the malapportionment of resources is redressed, such that the people in this group won’t actually face a reduction in their standard of living. Personally, I believe that doing so should be one of our objectives should we gain enough power to implement preferred policies, because it will be easier to carry out the changes we want to see if this group is not actively opposed to us. However, this group should not be considered part of the base. It might not be possible to develop the productive forces with sufficient speed to protect them from any decrease in their standard of living, and to pretend that we can definitely do so would be to act in bad faith. In order to presume good faith of our comrades, unless presented with evidence to the contrary I will assume that no one is including this group in their calculations of what constitutes our base.

The second and third groups of our base will be important, and are likely overrepresented among the organizers already involved in the anti-war movement, but the key factor determining the size of the base is the first group. This, I believe, is the primary point of dispute between those who agree with Blanc and those who agree with Winston. Before we get to that, though, I’d like to make explicit four points that I have been assuming so far, because I believe both sides of the debate agree with them:

1. The American working class is exploited by the capitalist system, given their position as workers.
2. The American working class benefits from imperialism, given their position as Americans.
3. At least some members of the American working class are exploited by capitalism to a greater extent than they benefit from imperialism.
4. At least some members of the American working class benefit from imperialism to a greater extent than they are exploited by capitalism.

The question is, of course, how big is the “some” in points 3 and 4? I will leave it to future articles (by me or others) to seek to quantify the degree of exploitation by capitalism and benefit from imperialism, but we now at least have the crux of the issue. If one believes that the group in point four is merely a small fraction of the American working class, then our base makes up a majority of the American public, and majoritarian ²tactics are the correct path to build a mass anti-imperialism movement. On the other hand, if one believes that the group in point four is a majority of the American working class, or even just a large minority, then our base does not make up a majority of the American public, and we should pursue minoritarian tactics instead.

What does it mean to pursue either majoritarian or minoritarian tactics? Well, here are some examples. In electoral work, majoritarian tactics would involve seeking to either win enough elections to pass our preferred policies, or to demonstrate the counter-majoritarian nature of the electoral system. Minoritarian tactics would mean seeking to win races in certain areas where the electorate is friendlier to us, running other races that we don’t expect to win, and having those elected officials and candidates use their higher profiles to encourage people to participate in the movement. In labor organizing, majoritarian tactics would involve strengthening our relationships with whatever unions we can and supporting any worker organizing. Minoritarian tactics would be specifically building relationships with unions that represent large portions of our base (and organizing unions in unorganized workplaces where members of our base are overrepresented), whether that is workers who are exploited more by capitalism, workers who have personal ties to the imperial periphery, or workers who are more likely to be willing to suffer reductions in their standard of living as the cost of ending imperialism. In direct action, majoritarian tactics means mobilizing as many people as possible to events such as the No Kings rallies, while minoritarian tactics requires researching specific pain points where a smaller number of people can put effective pressure on the imperial system.

Blanc’s preference for majoritarian tactics is most explicit in section 6, “Sectarianism Has Helped Marginalize Anti-War Activity.” He presents building “the broadest and deepest possible opposition to US military aid and interventions abroad” as the preferred option, and laments that the movement has tied “widely supported demands against war to unjustified and unhelpful romanticization of any and all anti-imperialist forces.” This is a long-running dispute within the left, where anyone who expresses support for the people who are putting their lives on the line to resist imperialism will be lambasted as romanticizing “any and all anti-imperialist forces”. Because such forces are universally condemned in American media, any support for them whatsoever (justified or not) tends to be incompatible with cohering majority support, at least in the short term. Blanc also explicitly criticizes the encampments on college campuses for lacking, “concerted efforts to win over and mobilize majorities on campuses,” but he does not explain why winning over majorities would have been preferable to other strategic objectives that could conflict with an effort to win over majorities. Blanc’s bias towards majoritarian tactics is so strong that he never bothers to argue for why such tactics should be preferred; it is self-evident to him that majoritarian tactics are necessary.

On the other hand, Winston’s preference for minoritarian tactics does not come out in any overt rejection of majoritarian tactics, but rather a belief that there are some things more important than staking out a majoritarian position, and those things are sometimes incompatible with such a position. In response to Blanc’s assertion that Americans are overwhelmed by all the terrible things Trump is doing, and thus don’t have time to build an anti-war movement, Winston asserts, “We have plenty of time to meddle in their [Palestinian and Iranian] affairs, and allow DSA politicians such as Zohran and AOC to manufacture consent for these wars, yet none, it seems, to build a competent, powerful movement to actually be of service.” In this section, Winston counterposes the need to build a movement that can materially impact the situation with public criticism of anti-imperialist forces, and crucially, presenting it from the perspective of our comrades in other countries: why would they have any respect for our critiques of their social systems if we aren’t actually inhibiting the mass slaughter our government is subjecting them to? Thus, building a powerful anti-imperialist movement must precede any critiques of their societies. This line of reasoning does not allow for any exceptions in the event that public criticism of anti-imperialist forces may be necessary to build a majoritarian movement in the US, so if such a necessity exists, then we have to rely on minoritarian tactics. However, the gaze of anti-imperialist forces is not the only reason to refrain from public criticism of them. For Winston, “What distinguishes us, however, is that we also hold AOC and Sanders and Zohran to account for their role in normalizing, from the left, the American narrative regarding Iran.” Public criticism of anti-imperialist forces, even when paired with rhetorical opposition to the war, strengthens the narrative that is employed to justify the war. As a result, any potential gain from a broader base being willing to support us if we concede the flaws of the enemy du jour is more than offset by the harm done by reifying imperialist narratives.

I do not expect us to all agree on whether or not our potential base makes up a majority of the American public. Even if someone effectively quantifies the relative degrees of exploitation and benefit I allude to above, there will be many who dispute the results of their calculation. However, I hope that this piece will help us to all understand the reasons for or against the various tactics that we propose.

by Eric Herde

1. While I am not fond of using the word “American” as a demonym for the United States, the English language does not have a workable analogue to Spanish’s “estadounidense”. “UnitedStatesian” just feels to clunky for formal writing. In the context of this piece, “American” is used as a demonym for the United States, not for the Americas as a whole. ︎
2. The term ‘majoritarian’ is not meant to imply that anyone thinks we can organize a majority of the population into DSA, or get a majority of the population to actively participate in any particular campaign. The majoritarian/minoritarian distinction refers specifically to the size of the base; the people whom we could reasonably expect to passively support or at least not oppose our actions ︎