Any membership organization that wants to build power will eventually, if it grows, require the paid time of some of its members. Unions, political parties, or membership organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) universally trend towards some level of “professionalization” as they grow in size, resources, and power. Whether it’s managing an office and finances or going out to organize new workplaces, chapters, or campaigns, at a certain point, grassroots leaders come up against challenges that can’t be handled on a fully volunteer basis, and the decision to pay some members to carry out organizational work needs to be made.

In an ideal world, there would be no tradeoffs (other than money itself) to paying people for organizational work, but the reality can be different. In a democratic organization, power over important decisions should stay in the hands of the membership, either directly or through elected leaders, and paid members should be using their compensated time to carry out the organization’s democratically decided program. The reality, though, is that paying members introduces a number of inevitable contradictions as well as serious pitfalls for democratic membership organizations. Compensating some people for their time introduces differentials in incentives, access to information, time, and access to the membership that can alter democratic dynamics considerably.

For DSA, these dynamics deserve particular attention because delegates at the 2023 national convention took steps to greatly expand our paid political leadership—meaning members who are being paid part-time or full-time ex officio (by virtue of the office they hold) to conduct the duties of their elected leadership position in DSA. This practice of paying elected leaders is common in the labor movement, and it is an exciting development with many potential benefits for DSA. But the proposals for paid political leadership passed at convention were approved with surprisingly little discussion of the potential risks. While salaries and stipends for some of these positions are on pause due to DSA’s present budget crunch, the NPC and conventions have authorized payment for a large layer of the national leadership, including full-time salaries for two NPC co-chairs and two labor commission co-chairs, part time stipends for the rest of the NPC steering committee, and stipends for a substantial number of YDSA leaders. As DSA moves towards adding a robust new layer of members being compensated for their organizational work (on top of our existing professional staff), it’s important to identify the ways these paid political leaders could change our organization and think through how we can ensure that safeguards are in place to preserve the dynamic, grassroots democracy that is essential to DSA’s organizing model.

There’s no guarantee that paid leaders will be aligned with the will of the convention, behave responsibly in office, or resist the temptation to use their position to cement their political and economic positions within the organization. To minimize the possibility of these more damaging outcomes, DSA should ensure that paid leaders are elected by the convention itself, apply a uniform set of rights, benefits, and responsibilities to all paid leadership, and implement clear regulations to maintain an even playing field in DSA’s internal elections.

What’s the Worst That Can Happen?

For DSA members, the most salient reference point for the challenges that arise with paid organizational work is usually the labor movement, which makes sense because unions bear many similarities to DSA in their structure. A typical union represents workers at some number of work sites, who pay dues and elect their leadership. A majority of the union’s dues frequently go to either paying staff (hired from outside as professional staff or from within the membership) or paid leadership (paid directly by the union or paid through “release time” from their unionized workplace.) In a strong union, staff and elected leaders are tightly integrated with the membership, doing what is necessary to build the unity and power of an informed membership base who fights to win and enforce contractual rights. In weaker unions, on the other hand, members may have little to no interaction with the union other than paying dues, while staff and/or paid leaders handle bargaining, contract enforcement, and the internal union business with little oversight.

What some leftists fear about paying leaders or hiring staff in unions is that there can be real incentives once in power to change the character of the organization to be more passive and bureaucratic. These dynamics have led to too many unions having weak or almost nonexistent internal democracy—despite having democratic bylaws and elections. The purpose of electing members to work for the union full-time is to get the benefits of having professional staff while still having an organization whose leadership come from the rank-and-file membership and share their experiences, concerns, and priorities. But in any union (especially those where members are engaged in low-paid, dangerous, or physically demanding work) holding a paid position can mean more money, better working conditions, reputational benefits, and power. In the worst case scenario, leaders who come off the shop floor may become out of touch with the needs of the membership and be able to rationalize transforming the union into a passive organization where their own more desirable position is secure. The biggest Marxist critics of union staff and leadership characterize this as being in a structurally similar position to capitalists – instead of a worker being exploited by a boss for their income, the paid union leaders are now living off the surplus produced by other people’s labor. While this analysis can sometimes be applied reductively – or worse, used to slander staff who are doing their best to carry out an organizational program (remember our movement needs staff and will need a lot more staff if we are able to grow) – what it gets right is that an engaged membership and democratic decision making are essential, and members who are getting paid should support member engagement, not be a substitute for it.

Even when personal financial incentives are removed from the equation, having some members in paid positions can change democratic norms and outcomes. Having a paid leadership position is a major advantage to retaining power (because of the ability to be in front of the membership full-time and during work hours), significantly increasing the already real advantages of incumbency. Additionally, the existence of paid leadership positions gives leaders the opportunity to use the resources of the union to build their political base. In many unions, membership in the governing caucus or fealty to the leadership is a first step in climbing the ladder of the union. Paid or stipended positions are often reserved for allies or handed out in a politicized way. Whether they are granted directly by the leadership or elected (with the support of the governing caucus), paid positions can easily become a form of political patronage that gives outsized power to the existing leadership. Promising promotion to a more remunerative position or threatening removal from a particular office or slate are potent ways for leaders to keep their allies from stepping out of line. This is a major way union leaders suppress internal democracy, despite often having very democratic bylaws.

DSA staff jobs are not cushy sinecures being held by corrupt union bureaucrats, and our paid leadership positions are not likely to be either, but we can and should learn from more than a century of democratic struggle and reform in the labor movement. As we take the significant step of adding a new layer of paid political leaders, we should put safeguards in place to protect our dynamic member democracy. Most importantly, we must put in place regulations to ensure that holding paid positions does not become a platform to undermine member democracy.

Paid Leaders Should Be Elected by the Convention

In any democratic organization, especially one as factionally divided as DSA, it is important that all paid time is being deployed in a way that is consistent with the democratically decided will of the membership. DSA’s highest decision making body is the biennial convention made up of hundreds of directly-elected chapter and at-large delegates. The convention elects the 16 at-large members of the National Political Committee (NPC), which is the highest decision making body between conventions. The NPC has the authority to hire and fire the National Director(s), who in turn oversee DSA’s staff. This is a clear chain of command and political authority that starts with DSA members electing their convention delegates and ends with staff members carrying out their duties. Elected leaders, on the other hand, won’t always neatly fit into this framework. They will not have supervisors, they will inevitably feel accountable to whatever subset of members elected them, and they will (rightly) have a level of political legitimacy and autonomy that staff do not by virtue of being elected. In order to maximize unity in DSA and minimize conflict over the role of paid leaders, we must ensure that the lines of authority flowing from the members through the convention and NPC stay consistent. Requiring any elected leaders who are paid by DSA to be elected by the delegates at convention, as the NPC co-chairs and steering committee members are currently, is the best way to do that. If there are instances where a convention election doesn’t make sense (for example, a paid leadership position whose responsibilities include a specialized skill set), the same chain of authority should still be followed, meaning the next best option is to have the NPC make appointments.

The 2023 convention almost took us in a different direction by authorizing paid National Labor Commission (NLC) co-chairs. At the time, the NLC co-chairs were not elected by the convention but by the National Labor Commission membership—a sub-body within DSA that has a restricted membership and its own internal bylaws and democratic procedures that are not guaranteed to meet the standards of the national organization. To ensure that they would better reflect the overall political priorities of DSA’s membership, the NPC made the right decision by overruling the NLC bylaws and having NLC co-chairs be elected by the convention delegates rather than by membership of the NLC. This approach should be our standard practice—paid leaders should be elected by the convention, not by self-selecting or restricted membership sub-groups.

DSA Needs a Consistent Policy on Responsibilities, Rights, and Benefits for Paid Political Leaders

For better or worse, any organization that is paying people for their labor must be able to answer some basic “human resources” questions. What happens if an employee isn’t doing their job? What happens if they engage in unacceptable behavior in the workplace? What happens if they get sick? What happens if they have a personal crisis? For most DSA staff, the answers to these questions are laid out in their negotiated collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Since paid political leaders are just as human as paid staff, all of the same questions are likely to arise as their use is expanded in the organization. It’s important, then, for DSA to establish personnel policies for paid political leaders proactively, before issues arise. In addition to codifying these basic terms and conditions of employment, we should account for the fact that paid political leaders don’t have supervisors and have far less accountability than the typical employee. At a minimum, all paid political leaders should document their hours and provide written reports to the NPC on at least a quarterly basis explaining how their compensated time is being spent. Clear guidelines for nonfeasance should be established for all paid positions, and the criteria for nonfeasance and elected leaders performance against those metrics should be transparent to the NPC and general membership.

DSA Needs Robust Rules on Campaigning for Internal Office to Ensure a Level Playing Field

Strange bedfellows have created a situation in the US where union elections are arguably more regulated and more democratic than many government elections. Corporate opponents of unions supporting (often onerous) transparency requirements, reformers fighting for a level playing field within their unions, and government actors concerned with rooting out organized crime influence in the labor movement have all contributed to a robust set of regulations for candidates for union office. Candidates for union office have a right to access membership lists before elections and a right to send mail to union members. Donations from any employer to candidates for union offices are forbidden. Ballots are counted independently and candidates have the right to view the counting. The notice period for elections, frequency of elections, and definition of the electorate are all subject to government regulations. DSA’s elections are already surprisingly unregulated (even student government elections, for example, often have campaign finance rules), but as we move towards paid political leadership the absence of rules becomes all the more urgent to address.

For our paid staff, the CBA forbids them from using their role as staff to organize for or against any political tendency or perspective in DSA, and they are not allowed to hold elected office in DSA locally or nationally. Compare these modest limitations to our paid political leaders: by their very nature, to get elected, they have to be among the most adept DSA members at organizing for their political tendency or perspective in DSA, and by definition, they are already holding political office. Once elected, they will have enormous advantages in terms of position, access to information, time, and visibility with the membership that could make it nearly impossible for rank-and-file members to seriously contest elections. Without careful regulations, factions that secure paid political positions will be very well positioned to use them as full-time factional organizers and begin the process of turning DSA into an internally demobilized one-party state like too many labor unions have become.

DSA should consider new rules to maintain a level playing field for leadership elections. Requiring the registration of slates and caucuses would be a first step at bringing some transparency to the highly organized but secretive groups that increasingly dominate DSA’s political decision making. Candidates and slates should be required to report their spending on campaigning, and there should be overall limits on how much can be spent to promote candidates. Government officials are not supposed to use their office resources for campaigning, and union leaders cannot use union resources for campaigning, but DSA is woefully behind in establishing similar bans. We should establish clear rules on how DSA assets like Zoom accounts, social media accounts, and official email accounts can or cannot be used for campaigning, and we should codify and enforce the ban on formal DSA committees and working groups making candidate endorsements. Establishing a “campaigning period” from the start of delegate elections to convention where candidates who are running for DSA office step back from chairing official events like pre-convention conferences could also help maintain a level playing field at the moments when incumbent leaders with paid positions will have the most to gain from pressing their natural advantage.

The Time to Act is Before There is a Problem

If DSA can climb out of its current budget situation, it’s clear that increasing use of paid political leadership will be part of our organizational makeup moving forward. It’s important to be thoughtful and proactive about putting policies in place to protect our member democracy before problems arise. If paid political leaders are elected by the convention in elections with a level playing field for non-incumbents, and have clear rights and responsibilities that are transparent to membership and the NPC, we may see tremendous benefits from adding a more politically active layer of paid members full-time alongside our existing organizing staff. If we fail to put these safeguards in place, we could empower and entrench leadership cliques even further in DSA, and erode the democratic norms that make our unique, high-engagement membership model possible.

Photo: Greek theatre in Baton Rouge, LA by Spatms. Shared under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The post DSA Needs Rules for Paid Political Leadership  appeared first on Socialist Forum.

Hot Labor Summer. Striketober. There’s been a lot of buzz around the labor movement, particularly among younger workers, since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The buzz is warranted. Since early 2021, there has been a notable uptick in both strike action and union organizing. Popular, high-profile strikes among autoworkers, higher education workers, public school educators, Hollywood actors and screenwriters, and others brought the number of major strikes in 2023 to the highest level in two decades. Starbucks workers have successfully pressured the company to accept a collective bargaining framework for unionized stores. The United Auto Workers (UAW), fresh off their strike win over the Big Three automakers, have announced a potentially historic campaign to organize non-union auto plants in the South. As of this writing, workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee and a Mercedes plant in Alabama have filed for union representation elections with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). If successful, these campaigns could begin to plant the flag of unionism in a region of the country that has historically been the movement’s Achilles heel.

These are very exciting developments that democratic socialists support in every way possible. At the same time, it is crucial to stay grounded and keep all of this in historical perspective. Last year’s strike action, while important, was an uptick from an extremely low baseline of strike activity. Both the frequency and the overall scale of strikes remain far below pre-1980s levels, and to date they have been confined largely to groups of already organized workers. Moreover, the uptick in workplace collective action has yet to translate into meaningful new gains in union organizing. The absolute number of union members grew by roughly 140,000 in 2023, but the rate of union membership (also known as “union density”) declined to an historic low of 10%. It is surely better for the overall number of union members to rise than to fall. But the rate of union membership growth is currently too slow to keep pace with the growth of the workforce, much less to overtake it and raise union density.

Faced with these realities, it makes sense for organizers to look at the moments in history when labor took great leaps forward for inspiration. The lodestar is the enormous upsurge in unionization that took place in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) led the charge to organize the mass production industries in the United States. From our vantage point in the present, it can be difficult to truly assimilate the scale of what the CIO – and, let us not forget, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) – accomplished in that epochal time. The numbers are mind-boggling. In his indispensable book The Turbulent Years, historian Irving Bernstein recounts how the number of union members in the US rose from about 2.8 million in 1933 to over 8.4 million in 1941. This tripled labor’s ranks in less than a decade, raising union density from roughly the level it stands at today to nearly 25% of all non-agricultural employment. There was union growth everywhere, but the biggest leaps happened in the mass production industries of the private sector. Union density in manufacturing exploded, from less than 9% in 1930 to over 34% in 1940. While the biggest gains happened in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and Pacific regions, the rate of union membership grew by over 10% in the South during the Depression decade. This was a major breakthrough that finally established the legal right of workers to organize and strike, raised working-class living standards, and realigned the basic patterns of US politics for decades.

It’s become axiomatic that unionization grows not gradually but in spurts of the kind that happened in the 1930s-1940s. In his study of the Depression decade, economist Richard Freeman defined a spurt as “a sharp concentrated episode in union growth,” in which “membership should grow more rapidly in a few contiguous years than would be expected” from random variation. On this basis, he concluded that “unionism generally grows in discontinuous spurts” that, as in the case of the Depression-era upsurge, appear suddenly and unexpectedly. Similarly, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm found that the history of working-class formation is marked by “explosions” resulting from “accumulations of inflammable material which only ignite periodically, as it were under compression.”

These insights have informed the strategic thinking of many left labor organizers. But we are now 90 years removed from the upsurge that organized much of the private sector, and overall union density has been in continuous decline since the 1950s. The near disappearance of private sector unionization was only partially mitigated by the growth of public employee unionization, and the judicial imposition of “right-to-work” on the whole public sector after the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision is sapping the foundations of labor’s last redoubt. Faced with these harsh realities, socialists and labor organizers need to ask ourselves an unsettling question: what if the next upsurge never comes?

In his unjustly forgotten book The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, John D. Stephens identifies the two main drivers of previous leaps in union organization – and concludes that they are not likely to occur again. The first is the political and social impact of the world wars. “During and immediately after the two world wars trade union membership increased rapidly, particularly in the defeated powers.The disastrous consequences of nuclear war,” Stephens concludes, “rules out this factor for the future.” The second is the “combination of severe economic crisis and the accession of leftist parties to power (crisis alone causes membership to deteriorate). This has occurred only once,” Stephens observes, “so it might have been an idiosyncratic unrepeatable event.”

There are two additional developments that, in my view, could forestall the development of a new upsurge on the order of the 1930s. The first is a product of the 1930s upsurge itself: the establishment of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and other institutions that recognize, in however constrained a fashion, labor’s right to organize and serve to mediate conflicts between workers and employers. The second is the dramatic growth of service sector employment at the expense of industrial and manufacturing employment.

To be clear, my argument is not that unions and other labor organizations are doomed to die a slow, painful death under the conditions of contemporary global capitalism. My argument is that the main drivers of the one big leap in working-class organization are absent, raising the possibility of a relatively modest best-case scenario for unions in the US: growth without a 1930s-style explosion in the level of union organization. If this is indeed the case, it raises challenging questions about the place of organized labor in democratic socialist strategy and progressive politics in general today.

Labor’s Wars

If you look at a line graph tracing the level of US union density over time, you might come to the perverse conclusion that World War III is the best thing that could happen to the labor movement. That’s because the two biggest spikes in union membership in this country happened just before and during the two world wars. Nineteenth-century unions tended to be unstable organizations that rose and fell along with the success or failure of strikes. Workers lacked a clear legal right to organize, the unions that did exist were quite precarious, and the courts were deeply hostile to strikes as well as legislation to improve working conditions. Workers waged many bitter struggles for rights, recognition, and power, but the labor movement struggled to raise the level of union density above a minimal level.

World War I’s impact on the subsequent development of the US labor movement was profound, and profoundly contradictory. The war decimated the Socialist Party, which never recovered from the twin blows of government repression and the Communist split in 1919. At the same time, wartime mobilization generated a relatively hospitable environment for union organizing under the aegis of “industrial democracy.” In Labor’s Great War, historian Joseph McCartin argues that wartime conditions “eroded managerial control and ignited explosive labor militancy. This in turn triggered an abrupt, vast extension of federal government power expressed by both the repression of radicals and an unprecedented commitment to the democratization of the workplace.”  No less a labor radical than Willam Z. Foster, who helped lead the drive to organize Chicago packinghouses, established the Trade Union Education League, and served as chairman of the Communist Party for many years, refrained from opposing the war to focus on organizing amid wartime labor shortages and National War Labor Board-sponsored shop committees. By 1919, union density had popped from its prewar level of roughly 10% to nearly 20%, easily the highest level in US history to that point.

After the armistice, federal labor policies that boosted unions were dismantled and employers waged a bitter counteroffensive amid a sharp postwar recession. Labor’s wartime organizing gains were reversed, and by the end of the 1920s union density slumped back to its prewar level of about 10%. The onset of the Great Depression in late 1929 triggered popular unrest, but it did not immediately translate into an upsurge in strike action or union organizing. It took until 1934 for the wave to come, and it was a big one. In The Turbulent Years, Bernstein reports that nearly 2000 strikes involving roughly 1.5 million workers swept the country, including four mass strikes – auto parts workers in Toledo, Ohio; truck drivers in Minneapolis; West Coast longshoremen; and textile workers in New England and the South – that resembled revolutions in miniature. The wave kept rolling through 1937, when the legendary UAW sit-down strike against General Motors opened the path to organizing the auto industry. In a few short years union density more than doubled, to nearly 25% of the entire workforce by the late 1930s.

Despite this great leap forward, labor’s gains were by no means assured. Many newly minted union locals evaporated as quickly as they appeared, and major citadels of employer recalcitrance still remained – namely the steel industry, which continued to resist unionization after the UAW’s breakthrough in auto. In Labor’s War at Home, historian Nelson Lichtenstein notes that the sharp recession that hit in late 1937 “put an abrupt halt to most organizing work between 1938 and 1940.” Republicans and Southern Democrats handed Roosevelt an important defeat in the 1938 midterm elections, which brought the New Deal’s reformist momentum to a screeching halt. “A year before Pearl Harbor,” Lichtenstein reminds us, “the CIO remained a tentative and incomplete structure” – a fragile juggernaut, in the words of labor historians and podcasters.

World War II offered the conditions under which labor organized the last major industrial holdouts and consolidated the gains it made in the 1930s. During the war years, Lichtenstein writes, “unions completed the organization of basic industry, more than doubled their dues-paying membership, and fortified themselves with such an array of contractual and administrative defenses” that the problem of organizational security was solved. Wartime labor policies that were piloted during World War I, like the National War Labor Board, were rebooted and expanded and joined by new federal agencies like the War Production Board and the Office of Price Administration, both of which had extensive union representation. The AFL and CIO agreed to a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war (many unofficial strikes nevertheless happened), and the 1943 Smith-Connally Act granted the federal government the power to seize industries where the threat of strikes could disrupt war production. At the same time, Washington’s dire need for uninterrupted production allowed unions to win concessions that resulted in further growth and organizational security. By the end of the 1940s, Lichtenstein writes, the labor movement “had organized at least 80 percent of all workers in basic industry. As a proportion of the nonfarm workforce, total union membership was more than 35 percent in 1954, and for the first time, American unions enrolled a section of the working class that approached northern European levels.”

War is hell – there is nothing “good” about it. The point here is that the dynamics of union growth were closely bound up with the relationship between foreign war and domestic politics. In the twentieth century, total wars between great powers required mass mobilization on an unprecedented scale, which in turn required governments to leverage both coercion and consent. In her landmark book Forces of Labor, sociologist Beverly Silver demonstrates how workers’ bargaining power vis–à–vis states and employers increased dramatically with the massive demand for labor in factories and on the front lines. In this context, workers were able to win economic and political concessions that were not possible in the absence of great power warfare. The great power wars of the early twentieth century depended on the active consent and participation of the masses, who demanded more rights, security, and democracy in return for being hurled into a blazing slaughterhouse. By contrast, the interventions and counterterrorism operations of recent decades have relied on a small and isolated segment of the population, forestalling the kinds of democratizing pressures that built up and exploded around the two world wars. As Silver concludes, “one of the most powerful processes underlying the expansion of workers’ and democratic rights is being reversed, raising the question of whether this reversal is facilitating a major contraction in workers’ and democratic rights.” Labor’s record of largely unmitigated organizational decline since the 1950s suggests that this may indeed be happening.

Depression Lessons

It is hard to imagine the level of human suffering the Great Depression brought to this country. When Franklin Roosevelt took office in early 1933, the economy was essentially stalled. One-quarter of the US workforce was unemployed, poverty and hunger stalked millions, and massive shantytowns popped up in cities and towns around the country. Private relief was completely unfit for the scale of need, and government intervention was piecemeal and threadbare. There have been numerous crises and recessions since the 1930s, some of them quite severe. But none of them have approached the scale of the Great Depression, which remains a singular event in the history of global capitalism.

Crisis alone does not necessarily spur working people to organize in self-defense. The already low level of union density in the US dropped further after the 1929 Wall Street crash, and did not begin to rise again until well into the 1930s. It was the combination of miserable conditions and the accession of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal to power in 1933, a development that raised workers’ expectations concerning the role of government in their lives, that encouraged workers to strike and organize on a truly massive scale. As noted above, John D. Stephens speculates that the conditions that drove the 1930s upsurge “might have been an idiosyncratic unrepeatable event.” Many economists thought the apparatus of economic regulation and welfare spending that was built during the New Deal and World War II effectively put an end to the business cycle. They were, of course, wrong. Capitalism continues to suffer recurrent crises and slumps that are an essential feature of the system. But politicians and economists seem to have learned an important lesson from the Great Depression – a worldwide crash of that terrible magnitude simply cannot be allowed to happen again.

The two biggest recessions after World War II were the early 1980s slump and the Great Recession of 2007-2008. Both downturns were severe and working people suffered, but these did not come anywhere close to matching the scale of the Great Depression. “Automatic stabilizers” like unemployment insurance, food stamps (SNAP), and Medicaid did not exist a century ago, and while they are inadequate they prevent the roof from completely caving in on millions of people during recessionary periods. Additionally, policymakers have shown themselves to be willing to intervene massively when crisis strikes. The 2007-2008 crash could have rivaled the Great Depression, but it did not because of a globally coordinated response that prevented the crisis from spiraling completely out of control. Domestic stimulus spending could and should have been higher, millions lost their jobs, and many homeowners saw their mortgages go up in smoke. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate peaked at 10% in 2009, far below the 25% unemployment rate that ravaged the country in the 1930s.

The economic impact of the Covid pandemic, as bad as it was, could have been far worse. Unemployment exploded from just 3.5% in February 2020 to 15% in April. The public health side of the pandemic response was disastrous, but the economic intervention was massive and highly successful. Unemployment insurance, according to one study, “was the most important single element of the fiscal response to the pandemic” by providing benefits to over 50 million workers and injecting nearly $1 trillion into the economy by August 2021. At the same time, policymakers sponsored a massive expansion of welfare spending that had a dramatically positive impact on the lives of working people. Families received three rounds of stimulus checks, average federal SNAP benefits were doubled, and an enormous expansion of the federal child tax credit cut childhood poverty in half in a single year. Unemployment fell back to its pre-pandemic level by early 2022, and it has remained at a low level ever since.

Crisis is still endemic to capitalism, but policymakers seem to have learned that mass unemployment is so politically destabilizing that it must be avoided at all costs. Future generations could well forget the lessons of the Depression, and rising tensions between great powers could hamper the international coordination that is crucial to preventing localized crises from going global. But if the policy response to recent economic crises is any guide, the net damage they cause today may be high enough to inspire some degree of workplace organizing and political turbulence, but not nearly enough to facilitate an upsurge on the order of the 1930s.

Solvents of Revolution

The National War Labor Board’s dissolution in 1919 ended the federal government’s brief experiment in regulating and institutionalizing class struggle. That year also saw a massive explosion in strike action, with mixed results for organized labor. The biggest losses were in steel, where employers smashed a major organizing drive, and in the public sector, where the state of Massachusetts so thoroughly suppressed the Boston police strike that it set the cause of public employee unionism back for nearly half a century.

Labor’s political fortunes began to change in 1926, when Congress passed the Railway Labor Act to facilitate collective bargaining and mediation in order to avoid strikes in the railroad (and later, airline) industry. The 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, passed before Roosevelt’s election and the 1930s strike wave, banned “yellow dog” contracts and restricted the use of federal court injunctions against unions during strikes. The law was an important advance for labor, as it committed the federal government to a policy in favor of protecting most workers’ right to organize and strike. It ensured that a more favorable legal and political environment would be in place when the big strike wave hit in 1934, and provided a foundation on which subsequent reforms were built.

The landmark reform, of course, was the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act. The Wagner Act had roots in the Norris-LaGuardia Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in 1935. The Wagner Act guaranteed private sector workers the right to organize, bargain, and engage in “concerted protected action” including strikes. It designated the NLRB to implement the law, including the administration of representation elections. Putting a federal government agency in charge of running the process of union representation meant that workers didn’t necessarily have to win their unions through bitter and risky recognition strikes – the main way that workers won their unions before the Wagner Act. In his study of spurts in union growth, Richard Freeman demonstrates the decline of recognition strikes and the rise of NLRB elections after the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the NLRA in 1937. According to Freeman’s statistics, there were 2200 recognition strikes in 1937 alone, a staggering number that entailed the unionization of nearly one million workers. 73 percent of all workers unionized that year were unionized through recognition strikes. That percentage dropped to 24 in 1938, and down further to 3 percent in 1944. Meanwhile, representation elections became the method by which most workers became union members. From 1941 through 1944 at least one million workers unionized through representation elections each year.

Recognition strikes have not entirely disappeared, but they have become extremely rare. According to the Cornell University Labor Action Tracker, there were just 13 recognition strikes in 2023 involving 476 workers. In his study, Freeman argues that “the key condition for growth spurts rather than the gradual growth of unionization is confrontation over the union institution.” So long as government policy did not accept the basic legitimacy of the union institution, Freeman’s key condition was present. There hasn’t been an organizing upsurge in the private sector since the achievement and consolidation of the NLRA. And there hasn’t been one in the public sector since the public employee organizing spurt of the 1960s and 1970s led to the establishment of union representation and collective bargaining systems in many states. Many employers have never accepted the fundamental legitimacy of unions and collective bargaining. They fight them tooth and nail, and the legal-institutional protections for union organizing through the NLRB process have become far too weak. But workers won the NLRB in the 1930s, and it’s still here. Whatever its weaknesses and limitations, workers will typically use it to organize instead of riskier efforts like recognition strikes. Mark Beissinger, a political scientist who studies revolutions, argues that “democracy is the great solvent of revolution” because it offers the possibility of achieving your demands without risking your life or liberty. In that sense, the recognition and institutionalization of unions is analogous to the ways in which capitalist democracy renders revolutionary politics unviable. So long as this modicum of workplace democracy exists, it will tend to channel conflict into a less disruptive government-sponsored process that forestalls the kind of upsurge that helped give birth to it in the first place.

Pervasive Fragmentation

The 1930s upsurge generated union growth across the entire workforce. That growth, however, was not evenly distributed by sector or occupation. The biggest leaps in union density were concentrated in industrial and manufacturing employment, which accounted for a much larger share of the workforce in the 1930s-1940s than they do today. According to Freeman’s estimates, union density in manufacturing nearly quadrupled from 1935 (10.6%) to 1947 (40.1%) bringing millions of workers in the mass production industries into the labor movement, primarily through the CIO. Notable leaps also occurred in transportation, communications, and utilities as well as building and construction trades, where the AFL maintained its predominant position. Union density in private services, which accounted for roughly half of total employment at the time (and over 70 percent today) tripled, but from an extremely low level. According to Freeman, union density in this sector grew from 2.8% in 1935 to 9.2% in 1947. That is a higher unionization rate than what exists in the entire private sector today (just 6%), but the fact that density in private services remained quite low amid the biggest unionizing upsurge in US history is sobering. Even government employees, who were excluded from the rights and protections afforded by the Wagner Act, had a higher unionization rate in this period according to Freeman’s estimates.

Today, roughly 85 percent of all US employees work in private service providing occupations (about 70%) or in the public sector (about 15%). The share of workers employed in manufacturing has dropped from roughly 40 percent during the 1940s to just about 8 percent; mining and logging, two industries at the vanguard of radical labor militancy in the twentieth century, dropped from around 3 percent to less than half a percentage point; construction stands at its rough historical average of about 5 percent. According to Census Bureau data, 43 percent of all employed civilians are now in management, professional, and related occupations, constituting the single largest occupational group by far. The next largest group, sales and office occupations, constitutes 19 percent. This means a significant majority of everyone working in the US today is employed in some sort of professional or white-collar occupation.

In The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, Stephens speculates “whether the economic structure of large countries” like the United States “does result in some strong structural restraint to labor organizing.” Neither Stephens nor I suggest that organizing white-collar and service workers on a large scale is impossible. As Stephens sensibly notes, “labor organization can be increased through voluntary human action.” The industrial working class, however, has historically been the vanguard of union organizing in the US and similar countries. Their power stemmed significantly from their strategic location in the heart of the production process, but not just there. Historical patterns of industrialization also tended to concentrate workers from the same or similar workplaces together in urban neighborhoods, thereby enhancing their capacity to form trade unions, political parties, and other forms of organization. They were able to combine disruptive potential with organizational capacity in ways that other sections of the working class have typically not been able to. That unique combination powered many of the victories that working people in the US were able to win in the twentieth century.

Stephens finds that “the level of white-collar organization is the single most important source of variation in labor organization” between the countries he observes in his study, which includes the US. But what accounts for differences in the level of white-collar organization? According to Stephens, the answer is to be found in the political realm. “The most important cause of variations in the growth of organization in the post-war period,” he concludes, is “incumbency of socialist parties” that use public policy to encourage unionization. The US, of course, has never had a socialist party capable of winning power on a scale that could fundamentally alter the balance of power between workers and employers. At times, however, the alliance between unions and liberal-labor factions of the Democratic Party has served as a partial equivalent of the labor and socialist parties found in many other countries. The task facing the labor movement and democratic socialists is to build, together with other democratic and progressive social movements, a social democratic faction in the Democratic Party dedicated to protecting and promoting labor organizing as strongly as possible. The Squad is serving this purpose in embryo, but it is still too small to help shape the agenda of the party as a whole.

The extensive privatization and fragmentation of social life under post-industrial capitalism, layered on top of the already existing differentiation of the US working class by race, gender, national origin, citizenship status, religion, and other conditions makes it very hard to construct collective actors capable of effectively challenging capitalist power. In his final book, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century, the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright observes how “the class structure has become more complex in ways that undercut the shared sense of fate and life conditions…there is a pervasive fragmentation of lived experience that makes a common class identity difficult to forge.” This is especially true in a time when most people work in the extremely heterogeneous service sector, which runs the gamut from fast food workers to nurses to software developers. The basic experience of waged and salaried labor may be widely shared, but the specific modalities of that experience are extremely varied. Wright names a few of them: the “level and security of earnings; precariousness of employment; autonomy within work; skill levels and education required within work; opportunities for creativity; and so on.” The upshot is that the working class is, as Wright concludes, “fragmented with divergent interests” from one segment of the class to another. “Many people still experience class as a salient identity, but it does not provide the universalizing basis for solidarity for which progressives once hoped.”

Politics to the Fore

If the main historical drivers of working-class upsurge are absent, and the class structure of contemporary capitalism makes it even more difficult to organize workers than it was before, what are the implications for our political strategy? In Forces of Labor, Silver concludes that “the twentieth-century trend toward increasing workplace bargaining power,” concentrated among manufacturing workers in industries like auto, “is at least partially being reversed in the twenty-first century….As such, we might expect the weight of associational power in the overall power strategies of labor movements to be on the increase.” Silver is probably right about the shift away from workplace bargaining power toward associational power, which includes various forms of collective organization both inside and outside the workplace. In that sense, twenty-first-century labor movements might resemble those of the nineteenth century more than those of the twentieth, with unions engaged in routinized collective bargaining constituting just one expression of organized working-class power among others.

Silver’s insights are reinforced by those of Göran Therborn, one of the leading theorists and scholars of the radical left since the 1970s. In the lead essay of his recent collection Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy, Therborn argues that the “dialectic of industrial capitalism, which Marx analyzed and predicted with impressive accuracy, is no longer operating in the Global North and has been stymied in the South. Post-industrial capitalism is no longer producing a growing, ever more concentrated working class.” Since contemporary capitalism does not possess a potentially progressive structural trend, making progress is now “more dependent on political mobilization and leadership” than it was before. Moreover, Therborn argues, in today’s world “the labor movement is only a necessary component of egalitarian politics, no longer sufficient as its natural center. Decisive to any successful egalitarian politics in the post-industrial era is a positive middle class policy of the left.”

Therborn uses “middle class” to describe professional and white-collar employees – many of whom are actually in the working class according to Marxian definitions, others of whom are not. Workers in sociocultural services, disproportionately women with high educational attainment but relatively modest salaries, have become the core left-wing constituency not just in the US but across the rich capitalist democracies. They are also among the most highly unionized workers in the country. Workers in education, training, and library occupations, for example, have the highest unionization rate among all occupational groups. The key challenge for the left is building beyond this core constituency to win over, as Therborn describes them, people “in the bottom half of the population, the losers of neoliberal globalization.” One important way to do this is to build organized labor’s power in the service and retail sectors, where employment has exploded but unions are rare. But this will take time, and we cannot bank on a general social explosion to do much of the organizing work for us. The growth of unions and other workers’ organizations in today’s environment will depend, to a very great extent, on our own dogged efforts to build power against the grain of today’s social and political conditions – not in preparing to take advantage of a “next upsurge” that shows few signs of arrival.

Image: Amazon warehouse workers outside picketing outside of the New York City office of the NLRB on October 25, 2021. Photo by Joe Piette and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

The post What if the “Next Upsurge” Never Comes? appeared first on Socialist Forum.

At the start of the COVID pandemic, AC Transit cut bus service dramatically. The District has been slow in spending budgeted funds toward restoring cuts because it lacks the workforce to operate additional service. The same hiring and retention crisis faces many other transit agencies, and impacts other sectors like education and healthcare, as well. 

At AC Transit, one of the major drivers of the retention crisis is bus schedules that don’t build in enough time to ensure workers get a break to stretch, use the bathroom, or eat a meal. Nathaniel Arnold, vice president of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 192, spoke at the April 24 board meeting about the dire situation, expressing the union’s frustration that the agency has “not been putting the time on the runs that they said that they were going to,” and adding, “We’ll be able to retain our workforce by also making better working conditions for them so that they don’t leave.”

AC Transit’s board has called a special meeting on Wednesday, June 5, as part of its service realignment initiative. The issue of schedules that don’t work for bus operators and are unreliable for riders will be a major topic of discussion. A petition for workers and riders is circulating this month, and the union is calling on its members, and riders who support them, to turn out on June 5.

Majority spoke with ATU 192 member, AC Transit bus operator and assistant shop steward Jack Watkins about the stakes in the struggle for better schedules. – The Editors

Majority: What’s the problem with the schedules? What impacts are they having on you and your co-workers as bus operators?

Jack Watkins: The schedules are designed to be unsustainable. They’re designed to place subliminal stress onto the driver to where we internalize the necessity to make it to the end of the line [on time], with the implicit understanding that we know that it’s not possible to do safely. And that gets coupled with the [AC Transit] District constantly putting out “drive safely, drive safely,” to cover themselves. They put up paperwork and memos around driving safely, but then they create schedules and cut time off of the schedules, and create a situation where they know that it’s impossible to do that, and they expect us to silently adhere to that, to walk that impossible tightrope. And that eats into our mental health, our physical health and the way that we’re able to show up for the community.

Majority: Talk more about the impacts on the drivers.

JW: Most simply, we are pressured to strategize when and how to step away from the bus and take a moment to breathe. When we get to the end of the line, we’re often feeling that pressure of calculating to the minute how much time we have to find a bathroom, use the bathroom, come back from the bathroom and get back to that bus. So that we can make that next trip on time. The same regarding our ability to take breaks to recover mentally, to have water, and to have food. I know drivers that say that they don’t get the opportunity to eat their lunch so often that they’ve stop packing lunches. And then when they get off work late they end up stopping to get some fast food on the way home which negatively affects their bodies. With us having a sedentary job, we do try to plan for our mental and physical health needs, and that gets undermined by trying to maintain the schedule because even if we pack a salad or something that is nutritionally beneficial to us, we are often unable to eat it and we find ourselves eating when we get off work late at night, which throws off any healthy routine.

And also our mental health is messed up because we do a good amount of mental math at all times in addition to driving: our brain power is used up doing math to figure out how long it’s gonna take to get from one time point to the next time point. “I have to make it from Seminary and MacArthur down to MacArthur and Fruitvale in five minutes. How can I do that?” Driving safely and doing that is impossible. On a busy day or even at nighttime, it’s impossible to make it that many miles in five minutes with the lights and all that stuff while trying to drive safely. Calculating the risk-reward with me running through this yellow light? Keeping our heads on the swivel looking out for other cars driving around us and making sure that we maintain a safe distance from other vehicles. How fast are we trying to pull off from red lights or stop signs? We’re compromising all of these safety aspects, trying to maintain the schedules which is unreasonable. And it’s this pressure that goes unaddressed.  Management functions in a space where they’re able to pretend it doesn’t exist. 

Majority: How do the unsustainable schedules affect your riders? 

JW: Bus drivers make decisions to pass up passengers, particularly disabled passengers, passengers in wheelchairs. Not a week goes by that I don’t have somebody in a wheelchair that says the last bus passed them up. I believe that is a calculation that the bus drivers are making based on trying to maintain time.  Every day, a passenger says “hey, this bus passed me up,” if not the bus directly in front of me a bus earlier today or a bus on a different line. 

In addition to the way that we treat the passengers when they get on the bus with a pocketful of change, the immediate reaction to every bus driver that I know when they think about a passenger with a bunch of pennies is,  “oh man, they’re so slow,” and that in itself is evidence that they’re thinking about the speed at which they can operate the bus. And the passengers feel that; we treat the passengers like they’re a nuisance or we treat them like we’re rushing them. When I talk to passengers about my personal actions they talk to me about how they wish bus drivers were nicer to them, or they wish that bus drivers would take more time with them. The passengers regularly will apologize preemptively about doing regular things because they have been mentally trained to feel like by default they are going to be an inconvenience to the bus driver. 

Majority: How do the schedules impact attendance by operators? 

JW: We get burned out. I said to myself the other day, “Man, I wish I could call off today. I’m tired. Oh man, this day was really really stressful for me.” And a sizable amount of that stress comes from the constant act of doing all this math, finding these shortcuts, risk-reward, safety measures, all in effort to maintain these schedules. In addition to driving the bus, traffic, passengers, mental health, all of these things. That pressure from the schedules is making a job that’s already difficult, far more difficult.  And so people decide, “hey, I might not even have any hours available to take off but I’m calling off because I CAN NOT do this tomorrow.” And that’s when people have to make a difficult decision between their mental health and their ability to feed their families. And that’s a position none of us should have to be forced in to. And sometimes they end up making the decision to just come in to work because we need the money, but ultimately in a largely unfit position to drive the bus that day. And then, they may get into an accident or burn out one way or another, cuss somebody out and end up getting some type of disciplinary response. Because of the way that they’ve responded to the stresses, they get a one day suspension or whatever, and those things can certainly be mitigated through designing these schedules with operators in mind. 

Majority: What are the impacts on riders when an operator calls off due to stress? And what about longer-term absences like when they are injured or have kidney disease?

When people are out on injury or health reasons, that’s difficult. Because there is a culture that I believe has been created that automatically assumes that the people who are out on injury are not being honest about their injuries. When I hear people talk about injury, they say “no, no, it’s legitimate. I wish I didn’t have to do this but I have to go out because my shoulder is in so much pain.”  If somebody’s out and they don’t have enough people to cover that shift, then that bus just won’t show up and then somebody’s waiting for an extra 20 minutes. And things like repetitive motion injury is a regular part of the job. But I think a lot of injuries are exacerbated by our schedules being so awful. And then that ends up affecting everybody.

East Bay DSA stands in solidarity with ATU 192’s contract fight in 2019. (Photo: Keith Brower Brown)

Majority: What needs to be done to fix this?

JW: We need better schedules. The District creates the schedules. And they’re creating them knowing that they’re not sustainable, but also knowing that drivers have been internalizing the stress and the pressure to adhere to the schedules.  The District uses these metrics around “is the bus physically making it to the location on time?” Without any care or consideration for the internalized pressure. They value the bus making it to the end of the line, but not the driver making it happen.  And the way that operators can push back is by rejecting that internalized pressure. “Hey, I know you want me to do this job in this way, according to the schedule, but it is impossible.” We must show management how impossible it is. I think operators need to be vocal about it, and they need to move to action by following not the schedule itself, but following the safety protocols primarily. And I think that would make it harder for the district to justify their schedule cuts. A lot of passengers do have consideration for bus drivers driving safely.  The way that bus drivers will be able to show the District, management, and the board of directors the severity of the unsustainable schedules is by taking that power back, rejecting the internalized stress that the management and district puts on our shoulders. That’s how we use our power as bus drivers to show them that “hey, I understand that you’re telling me to do these contradictory things. But you’re paying me to drive this bus safely – and not even paying well enough to do that – the labor that you’re asking me for contractually is in regards to driving this bus safely, not in regards to doing these mental gymnastics and mathematical calculations on how I can thread an impossible needle.”

Majority: How can your riders support ATU workers in this struggle?

JW: The riders can can show up with us to the AC Transit board meeting on June 5. They can sign the petition asking the board to meet drivers’ needs by fixing the schedules to address our harsh working conditions. But mainly by showing up to the board meetings and speaking out to let the board of directors know about the conditions of the bus drivers and how that affects their ability to get where they need to go reliably. Riders can tell the board the conditions that they see for the bus drivers and how that translates to them. 

Members of the community can speak out at the AC Transit Board Meeting on June 5, 2024, at 5pm. The meeting will be held at AC Transit’s Oakland headquarters, at 1600 Franklin Street, second floor.

“We have to pay for our sins of the past. Back in 1980 when Reagan at the time fired PATCO workers, everybody in this country should have stood up and walked the hell out. We missed the opportunity then, but we’re not going to miss it in 2028. That’s the plan. We want a general strike. We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.” United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain has thrown down the gauntlet. 

Fain’s challenge raises the stakes for working-class organizations in the United States. And we can point to the UAW’s own Stand Up strikes and Starbucks Workers United opening contract negotiations as positive signs. Yet there’s little doubt that our unions, social movements, and socialist organizations are not yet prepared to put Fain’s words into action. And four years will go by in the blink of an eye. The good news is that the fighting element in the U.S. labor movement has found its voice and socialists are in the thick of it. This article will examine 1/ the general conditions that have given rise to general strikes in the past, 2/ their demands and goals, and 3/ some of the associated gains and setbacks as we look forward to 2028.

Mass strikes in U.S. history: Civil War to 1900

Right up until the 1980s, mass strikes were common in the United States. In Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. DuBois argued that enslaved Black workers launched the first general strike in U.S. history during the Civil War. And even as racist violence buried Radical Reconstruction, workers across the country launched a wave of mass strikes: 1877 (railway workers), 1886 (Knights of Labor), and 1894 (railway workers again). The last came to be known as the Debs strike, as he was jailed for defying anti-strike court injunctions as the president of the union. These strikes frightened the ruling class, prompting a wave of executions, the creation of the National Guard and Pinkerton armies, and a war on trade unions. 

The conditions characterizing this first period of industrial struggle included transitory working-class organization, widespread state and employer violence, and an array of criminal syndicalism laws and court injunctions that all but outlawed legal trade unions. In the absence of any meaningful state welfare system, wild booms and busts in the rapidly developing capitalist economy drew millions of immigrant workers into industry only to cast them back out into abject poverty. Class consciousness surged as socialist and anarchist organizers built up local unions and cooperatives. 

The leading labor organization of the day, the 700,000-strong Knights of Labor, called for strikes and demonstrations on May Day 1886 involving more than 350,000 workers across the country. They aimed to win the Eight Hour Day and galvanize workplace organization. In the short term, the ruling class struck back savagely, executing four labor organizers in Chicago, the Haymarket Martyrs, and launching a particularly intense Red Scare in that same city. The Knights crumbled. Yet over the next thirty years, the Eight Hour Day slowly took root in working-class consciousness as well as in law and practice.

1900 to World War I

Conditions during the first two decades of the twentieth continued to be characterized by sharp booms and busts and overt state and employer violence. However, the growth of the Socialist Party to 100,000 members, the foothold carved out by the American Federation of Labor, the audacity of the Industrial Workers of the World, and founding of the NAACP in 1909 and the Great Migration of Black workers from the South to the North, all provided significantly stronger organizing structures and resources compared to the previous period. At the same time, staggering rates of food-borne illness, child labor, disease, and alcoholism prompted middle-class reform organizations to support the first instances of state regulation. 

Three broad trends emerged within the union movement during these years. First, the AFL, formed in 1886, reacted to the maelstrom after Haymarket by advocating a narrowly focused “pure and simple” trade unionism. Longtime president Samuel Gompers championed conservative and discriminatory views on immigration and race and carried out a long struggle against socialist influence with the federation. Despite Gompers’ politics, the AFL defended its presence among sections of skilled workers—thereby demonstrating the potential for stable union organization—while growing slowly among important sectors of “unskilled” sections of the working class. However, in the face of coordinated union-busting campaigns, the AFL avoided strikes whenever possible, instead seeking to build partnerships with politicians. 

Second, the IWW, launched in 1905, rejected craft unionism and raised the goal of organizing One Big Union in order to overturn capitalism. Elizabeth Gurley-Flynn and Big Bill Haywood turned the AFL’s policies on their heads. Whereas most of the AFL leadership saw strikes as dangerous and disruptive and contracts as sacrosanct, the IWW believed strikes—specifically general or mass strikes— were the means by which the working class could prepare for revolution; contracts were often, unfortunately, an afterthought. And unlike the AFL’s leadership, the IWW adopted openly antiracist policies. 

The IWW put their mass strike strategy to the test during the 1912 Bread and Roses textile strike of 30,000 workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, organizing people from dozens of nationalities. Mass picket lines and daily general assemblies kept the mills shut tight, but the IWW knew it would be difficult to win in Lawrence alone. So under threat of National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets, the IWW and the Socialist Party organized a huge solidarity campaign across the country, including sending strikers’ children to live in safe houses for the duration of the strike, garnering enormous sympathy and constant media attention. The union’s radical policies forced the companies to concede some of the strikers’ short-term goals, including a wage increase and improvements to working conditions. The IWW showed how to win. However, the IWW’s relative indifference to signing and enforcing long-term contracts—influenced by its sense of impending revolution—allowed the bosses to pick away at these gains after the strike.

A third trend of socialists and unionists intermingled the IWW and AFL, often moving between one and the other and, in practice, many SP members supported both the IWW and more radical AFL locals or leaders. For instance, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was affiliated to the AFL, but it organized on an industrial structure (not based on craft divisions within the trade), was led by socialists, and organized some of the most militant strikes in U.S. history, including mass strikes before and after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. In a nutshell, this trend of organizers sought to infuse the existing structure of the AFL with aspects of IWW radicalism, employing radical tactics to win contracts and strengthen the union’s staying power.

William Z. Foster epitomized this group of organizers, amalgamating dozens of AFL locals divided by craft and skill to unite for a national steel strike in 1919. The goal was to leverage the base of the existing craft unions to create a movement for all steel workers, thereby raising wages, improving conditions, and unionizing the bulk of the industry. This unity tactic inspired workers across the country and the unions launched a general strike in the steel industry rallying more than 350,000 workers. The bosses, again—this time in the wake of the Russian Revolution—initiated a Red Scare, jailed hundreds of workers, and even declared martial law in Gary, Indiana. Overwhelmed, the strikers were defeated and unionization in the steel industry all but collapsed for the better part of two decades. 

Surprisingly, for several years, Gompers’s AFL policy appeared to bear more fruit in the run up to World War I compared to the alternative left-wing strategies. When President Wilson offered the AFL the chance to join the National War Labor Board, consisting of representatives from business, labor, and the state, Gompers jumped at the chance, pledging the unions to increase war production and promising to prohibit strikes. Granted access to organize the ballooning war industries, the AFL tripled its membership, surpassing 4 million in 1919. Some workers used their raw power at the point of production to challenge the conservative AFL leadership, most famously during the 1919 Seattle General Strike. But to paraphrase Job from the Old Testament, “what partnership with government and industry giveth, it also taketh away.” Victorious in Europe, the American ruling class tore into the unions.

The Great Depression

Ten years later when the Great Depression broke out in 1929, conditions appeared to have lurched back to the nineteenth century; the truth was more complicated. Important quantitative shifts had prepared the ground for a qualitative breakthrough. First, radicals led thousands of workplace organizing drives during the early Thirties. 1934 marked a turning point with general or mass strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, and East Coast textile mills, drawing in more than 1.5 million workers. Many of them joined the Communist and Socialist Parties, creating the largest left parties in U.S. history. Second, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toledo all won contracts and significant wage gains, touching off a war within the AFL and the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Some union leaders understood that if they didn’t lead the rebellion, they might be left behind. Others genuinely supported it and threw their (relatively) well-resourced unions behind it. Third, although Roosevelt’s New Deal had only a small impact on macroeconomic activity, his administration created the foundation for the modern interventionist federal state, both in terms of economic investment—which really only took root as war production cranked up—and increasingly significant regulatory power. If Wilson’s National War Labor Board was a test balloon, Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act signaled the federal government’s willingness to corral labor and business when it served its own interests. 

It’s impossible to reduce what came next to the “right conditions.” Strategic, tactical, and political debates raged throughout these years, but it’s clear that mass strikes were central to winning. The United Auto Workers Sit Down strikes forced GM to the bargaining table and the dam broke. Between 1937 and 1938, around 2.5 million workers hit the picket lines—often occupying their workplaces—in more than 7,000 separate strikes. Unionization soared from just over 2.5 million workers in 1932 to over 8 million by 1939, or nearly 25%. The goal of organizing basic industry was finally achieved. 

1940 to the 2000s

Unionization spiked again during and after World War II, holding just under 35% until 1960. However, conditions, once again, had changed radically. A combination of Cold War politics and business unionism led the CIO to purge Communists and radicals—including whole unions—from its ranks, severing the organic link between the working class and the left. The united AFL-CIO discouraged rank-and-file action, but its leaders were sometimes willing to strike to deliver better wages for their members. For instance, the United Steelworkers launched a months-long strike in 1959 by more than 500,000 workers. Arguably the largest strike to shut down a single industry in U.S. history. President Eisenhower eventually invoked Taft-Hartley, ordering strikers back to work, but he did not call out the troops or jail strike leaders nor did the companies organize private militias to break picket lines. Instead, the battle ended in mediated settlement and a significant, if smaller than hoped for, raise. Rather than rank-and-file action and radical leadership, labor relations came to settle into a grove. Strikes became rehearsed, top-down affairs. Perhaps Gompers had been proven right afterall. The post-war global boom and enhanced state intervention tended to diminish slumps and the Great Society programs created under pressure from the Civil Rights Movement, provided a (pathetically underfunded) safety net. The era of Big Labor and Big Business seemed to promise a rising tide that would lift all boats. This picture was never uncontested, but there was a reality to the idea that an apolitical labor movement based on enormous, bureaucratically-run unions could bargain “in good faith” with deep-pocketed corporations. 

Two things upset this tenuous labor peace. First, from the left, the Civil Rights and Black Power rebellions along with the antiwar movement jumped from the streets to the workplaces. Black autoworkers in formations such as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement led Wildcat strikes in Detroit and beyond and postal workers—with a high concentration of veterans and Black workers—walked out in 1970 in an illegal wildcat strike. Socialists and radicals of all stripes did their best to strengthen this movement, yet McCarthyism had done huge damage and the left’s forces were small compared to the period before World War II. 

Second, from the right, the ruling class regrouped under the banner of neoliberalism and decided that labor peace was not compatible with profits. Taking advantage of sharp recessions in the 1970s, the employers’ union busting offensive drove unionization down from just under 30% at the end of the Sixties to below 20% by Reagan’s second term and just 10% today. Hand in hand with the war on labor, Democratic and Republican Administrations rolled back Civil Rights and the welfare state. Bill Clinton famously promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and did just that upon election, throwing millions into poverty. 

Back to the Future? 

If neoliberal bosses thought they’d won the final conflict, they were sadly mistaken, just as their brethren had been at the end of the nineteenth century and during the 1920s.. During the depths of the neoliberal offensive, important working-class rebellions kept the spark alive and trained radicals how to organize and pass along their experience to the next generation. Justice for Janitors challenged the hotel and landlords during the 1990s; the California Nurses Association raised RNs up and helped spread their union across the country; Teamsters held the line against UPS in 1997, just to name a few. And, although not exactly workplace strikes, the 2006 Day Without An Immigrant, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter have all found their ways into workplaces and union halls, narrowing the gap between social movements and labor. While the 2017-2018 Red State Rebellion teachers strikes—including their Chicago, Oakland, and Los Angeles precursors—introduced a new generation to social and political elements characteristic of citywide and statewide strikes.

So what conditions are we operating in today in the run up to 2028? Economically, workers’s livelihoods are being shredded by inflation and impossible prices in housing, healthcare, and education. The bulk of the working class is unlikely to face nineteenth century or Great Depression conditions, but we are still closer to the Great Recession than to the American Dream. The left, social movements, and unions have picked ourselves up off the floor, but we are still historically weak. This is not a moral judgment. It is simply an assessment. For instance, although DSA has 80,000 members, the same number the SP had in the teens or the Communist Party had during the Great Depression, my back of the envelope math says that we are about 10% as strong as those parties in terms of union experience, community implantation, and political impact. On the other hand, it seems to me that the liberals are rapidly losing the better part of a couple generations to climate catastrophe, student debt, racist police, and genocide in Gaza. If only an infinitesimal fraction of those people are organized socialists today, they are still bringing their own personal antiracist, anti imperialist, and anticapitalist consciousness into work each day. That’s a tough group of people for any manager to intimidate. 

In terms of the state, this is a very tricky question. Biden’s NLRB has removed some barriers to successful union drives. Likewise, Democratic governors have in general refrained from their Republican counterparts’ right-to-work mantra, even if they insist on maintaining strictures on workers rights, such as in my home state of Maine where Gov. Janet Mills has vetoed public workers’ right to strike and farm workers’ right to the state minimum wage. Nationally, the climb down from Build Back Better to the Inflation Reduction Act—nevermind a blank check for Netanyahu—only goes to show that the Democratic Party is neither trustworthy nor very farsighted. 

One potential good-case scenario might be that we are able to maintain labor’s momentum in the run up to 2028 and use Fain’s call for a general strike as a mobilizing and organizing lever, while we fight back against a string of broken promises from a second Biden Administration. In that case, many questions arise: How do we think about our goals for 2028? Organizing targeted industries? Uniting social movements and unions to fight for specific reforms? How do we combine political demands like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal and a ceasefire in Gaza with union drives? What role can a general strike—and the organizing lead up—play in winning the demands we set out? What is our own organizing power and how does that stack up against our opponents? 

On the other hand, Biden and the Democratic Party’s own failings have kept the door open to a second Trump victory. In that case, all bets are off. The left is in better shape today than it was in 2016 in broad terms and there’s a better chance to link social opposition to Trump in the streets to workplace organizing. But if there’s one thing we should have learned from Trump’s first term, it’s that he—and the very significant social base he represents—can do real damage and deepen demoralization on our side.  

In either case, old debates will resurface among labor organizers about the role of mass and general strikes. After all, their great power to inspire and wrest concessions from employers and the state also risks the kind of vengeance meted out to the Haymarket Martyrs. Raising the stakes remains our class’ only plausible path to changing the balance of power. When we do, whether it’s before or after 2028, we should be as prepared for the inevitable backlash as we are eager to join picket lines and consolidate our own victories.

Image: Shipyard workers going on strike as a part of the 1919 Seattle general strike. Photo by Asahel Curtis

The post Looking Back to Look Forward to 2028 appeared first on Socialist Forum.

Until the Russian Revolution, the Marxist strategy was to achieve democracy in non-democratic countries. This demand applied to all countries that lacked a system of universal and equal suffrage, whether that country was economically advanced, like France, Germany, and the United States, or economically backward, like Poland or Russia. This new state would be outlined in a democratic constitution—the “first” and “fundamental condition” for the “political liberation of the proletariat,” according to Friedrich Engels. 

Victor Berger, a leading member of the Socialist Party of America, described this principle to an American audience when he introduced a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the United States Senate. The Senate, he said, was an “obstructive and useless body, a menace to the people’s liberties, and an obstacle to social growth.” In a future democratic society, “All legislative powers [will] be vested in the House of Representatives. Its enactments, subject to a referendum…[will] be the supreme law, and the president shall have no power to veto them, nor [will] any court have the power to invalidate them.” 

This article reintroduces little-known history and attempts to normalize discussions about the Constitution on the left. We argue that the history of struggles for a democratic constitution remains relevant because the U.S. is not a democracy. It wasn’t in the past and it isn’t now.

The Roots 

The roots of  democratic republicanism can be found in different places, such as Thomas Paine’s writings, Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Dissertations on the First Principles of Government. In Dissertations, Paine explained, “The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights.” Universal and equal suffrage is the “primary right by which other rights are protected,” and to take away that right is to “reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.” Men had natural and inalienable rights, including the right to democratic representation. Paine argued for a unicameral legislative system (one house, as opposed to bicameralism), with the understanding that “the poor can escape their wretched condition only through politics.” He contributed to the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which temporarily created the Union’s “sole unicameral and near democratic state.” Following the American Revolution, a debate raged between democratic republicans like Paine and aristocratic republicans like James Madison over whether or not the sovereign will of the people was desirable. Paine advocated for a democratic republic, in which unimpeded legislative powers would lie in a unicameral legislature with representatives elected by universal and equal suffrage. Paine’s aristocratic-republican opponents feared universal and equal suffrage. They sought a mixed government that divided power between two legislative houses with a malapportioned Senate, a veto-wielding executive, and an unelected federal judiciary. The ideas of aristocratic republicans won out; the new federal constitution created a constitutional republic that was explicitly not a democracy.

The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens soon became the paramount statement of equal rights, especially of universal and equal suffrage. Mary Wollstonecraft attempted to expand the Declaration’s principles in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue and Louisiana were inspired by the French Revolution and “constructed it in their own image.” The Babeufists focused on the property question in the Manifesto of the Equals, writing, “The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, one that will be greater, more solemn, and which will be the last.” The French Constitution of 1793 laid out a system of democratic republicanism in which legislative and executive power were combined in a single body. 

Steeped in the history of previous revolutions, Marx and Engels took hold of these theoretical roots during the English Industrial Revolution. They concluded that the emerging working class would gain political power through a democratic republic. From that position of power, workers, who would soon make up a majority of society, could “wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie” and begin socializing the economy. Works like The Principles of Communism, The Communist Manifesto, and The Critique of the Draft [German] Social-Democratic Program of 1891 show the presence of democratic republicanism in Marx and Engels’ thought. “If one thing is certain,” said Engels to the German Social Democratic Party, whose 1891 program auspiciously lacked the demand for a democratic republic, “it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution [of 1793] has already shown.” 

Marx and Engels spent their entire lives struggling to create democratic states, and their work touched all of the significant democratic struggles of the 19th century. In 1893, Engels explained, perhaps exasperatedly, “Marx and I have repeated ad nauseam that…the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.” 

The Chartists 

Marx and Engels came to appreciate democracy’s radical potential by observing the political movement of the working class in England, the only industrial nation at the time. During the mid-19th century, no political struggle was more significant than Chartism, which united working-class communities behind a desire for self-government into a robust political organization. Paine’s natural rights theory immensely influenced the Chartists, and they, in turn, profoundly influenced Marx and Engels. Chartism’s place in the history of democratic republicanism deserves special attention. 

Chartism began in 1838 with mass meetings in Birmingham, Glasgow, and Northern England. It was primarily a reaction to the perceived inadequacies of recent parliamentary legislation, including the Reform Act of 1832, the Factory Act of 1833, and the notorious 1834 Poor Law—the last of which was denounced as “the annihilation of every domestic affection, and the violent and most brutal oppression ever yet practiced among the poor of any country of the world.” 

In 1839, a national convention was held in London to facilitate the creation of a petition, the People’s Charter, to be presented to Parliament. The charter made six demands: universal and equal suffrage for all men over the age of 21, equal representation in parliament, a secret and direct ballot, annual parliamentary elections, payment for members of parliament to allow men of all social classes to hold office, and the removal of property requirements for parliamentary candidates. With over one million signatures, the petition was sent to the House of Commons. Yet, as expected, the House refused to hear the petition. After heated debate, “physical force” Chartists decided to hold a Grand National Holiday, which became modern history’s first call for a general strike. 

In 1842, the People’s Charter was again presented to Parliament, where it was rejected despite gathering an astounding three million signatures, about half of the adult male population of Great Britain. Engels’ book, Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, described the Chartist movement and its demands in revolutionary terms, “In Chartism, it is the whole working-class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks, first of all, the political power, the legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie has surrounded itself…These six points, which are all limited to the reconstitution of the House of Commons, harmless as they seem, are sufficient to overthrow the whole English Constitution, Queen and Lords included.” 

But the British state was unified and robust, and the army was well-trained and professional. As time wore on, the Chartist movement began to fray. A series of challenges, such as concentrated state violence and well-placed reforms, sapped Chartist organization throughout 1848. These carrot-and-stick tactics ultimately spelled the end of England’s most militant and united labor movement and the most significant and best-organized political movements of the 19th century. The rise of the British working class was resisted.

The Heritage

After Marx and Engels’ deaths, it remained common knowledge among many Marxists that, as Engels explained, “democracy means the dominion of the working class, neither more nor less.” Democratic republicanism lived on through works such as Karl Kautsky’s The Republic and Social Democracy in France, Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory and Practice, and the Socialist Party of America’s platform of 1912. Yet no one, including Marx and Engels, championed democratic principles more clearly or consistently than Vladimir Lenin. The political demands in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party’s program of 1903, including “concentration of supreme state power wholly in the hands of a legislative assembly” and “universal, equal and direct suffrage,” provide a clear and still relevant definition of democracy. Following the 1905 revolution, RSDLP representatives in the Imperial Duma leveraged their position to demand an end to Tsarist tyranny. The primary obligation of socialist electeds in an undemocratic political system, explained Lenin, was to agitate for democracy. 

Likewise, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) deserves special attention. Eugene Debs, the SPA’s presidential candidate in multiple elections, denounced the Constitution as “autocratic and reactionary.” Americans, Debs explained, were not “a free and self-governing people.” A new founding document needed to be written by “The people in the complete sense of that magnificent and much-maligned term,” not by “ruling-class lawyers and politicians” using the Constitution’s Article V process for amendments. The SPA’s newspaper, Appeal to Reason, regularly ran constitutional polemics, such as “Tricked in the Constitution.” In 1914, prominent SPA member—and soon to be 1916 presidential candidate—Allan Benson wrote Our Dishonest Constitution, in which he referenced the work of Charles Beard, whose writing on the Constitution was nothing less than the “generally accepted…view of the founding” during the Progressive era. Beard also taught classes on the Constitution at the SPA’s Rand School of Social Science in New York. 

However, the Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war threw everything into the air. Circumstances forced the Bolsheviks to repudiate their democratic values and create a one-party state. Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the Bolshevik’s dilemma during the earliest months of the revolution was on the mark; it was one thing to disband the long-demanded constituent assembly for reasons that Luxemburg herself appreciated, and quite another to make a virtue out of a necessity and claim, as many Bolsheviks did, that representative parliamentary democracy had been superseded by Soviets and was no longer relevant. Luxemburg warned against “Freezing into a complete theoretical system all of the tactics forced upon [the Bolsheviks] by…fatal circumstances.” As the Third International solidified, the democratic republicanism of earlier times was swept away. The result was a steep decline in constitutional agitation among self-described Marxists. By 1928, the Socialist Party of America’s presidential platform had stopped critiquing the Constitution. That same year, the newly formed Communist Party (CPUSA) denounced the malapportioned Senate but concluded that “democracy” was one of the three tools used by the ruling class to subordinate workers. Henceforth, democracy was no longer considered a strategic demand. The socialist movement stopped talking about the Constitution, and a necessary tool to understanding political power in America was lost.

The Rediscovery

Thankfully, several important voices helped revive democratic republicanism. In the 1960s, Hal Draper wrote The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party,’ presenting Lenin as one of history’s foremost revolutionary democrats. Draper worked contemporaneously with Richard N. Hunt, whose 1974 book, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, traced Marx and Engels’ relationship with democratic republicanism across the decades. Draper and Hunt were contemporaries of Neil Harding, who, in his 1977 work, Lenin’s Political Thought, wrote that according to Lenin, workers didn’t have to have come to “socialist consciousness” to acquire “political consciousness.” In other words, Lenin didn’t think someone needed to be a socialist to appreciate the struggle for democracy. The struggle for democracy was paramount. Draper, Hunt, and Harding debunked many of the myths of a supposedly undemocratic Marxism peddled by the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Thanks to them, we know that “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant a state based on universal and equal suffrage and that only the circumstances of civil war led Lenin to support a one-party state. 

In 2006, Lars T Lih, who had read Draper and Harding, published Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context. Lih wrote, “The imperative necessity of political freedom is the central theme of Lenin’s political agitation.” He continued, “If you were willing to fight for political freedom, you were Lenin’s ally, even if you were hostile to socialism. If you downgraded the goal of political freedom in any way, you were Lenin’s foe, even if you were a committed socialist.” Lenin’s belief that establishing a democratic republic is the paramount task of the working-class movement is simply what was understood to be mainstream Marxism in his time. 

The theory and history presented above are essentially everything needed for a mass democratic socialist movement in the U.S. 

The Constitution

As Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind describes in fascinating detail, critiques of the Constitution are as old as the Union itself. In 1913, Charles Beard published his iconoclastic, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Beard’s work was followed by W.E.B Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, in which the eminent Marxist and sociologist lambasted the 39th Congress that met during the two years following the Union’s victory. Du Bois described the assembled congressmen as spinning “around and around…in dizzy, silly dialectics”  and alienating their intellect and creativity in appeals to “higher constitutional metaphysics.” Constitutional devotion in the face of changing circumstances was the height of absurdity to Du Bois, “Here were grown, sensible men arguing about a written form of government adopted ninety years before, when men did not believe that slavery could outlive their generation in this country, or that civil war could possibly be its result; when no man foresaw the Industrial Revolution or the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; and yet now, with incantation and abracadabra, the leaders of a nation tried to peer back into the magic crystal, and out of a bit of paper called the Constitution, find eternal and immutable law laid down for their guidance forever and ever, Amen!” Du Bois followed Black Reconstruction with Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. There, he described how the malapportioned Senate allowed the South to dominate national politics. 

In 1948, historian Richard Hofstadter published The American Political Tradition and pointed to the Framers’ “Calvinistic sense of human evil and damnation.” Like Thomas Hobbes, the Framers thought that “men are selfish and contentious” and needed “a good political constitution to control [them].” Above all, the new Constitution was necessary to confine the popular, democratic spirit present since the American Revolution. Martin Luther King made a similar point in 1967, explaining that the South’s stranglehold of the Senate kept the U.S. from achieving the enviable social-democratic policies of the Nordic countries. 

Having reached a high point in the early 20th century, constitutional critique waned following the Second World War. However, it reemerged in some circles in the 1990s. In the pages of The American Prospect, lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan decried the “Infernal Senate” and its “Rotten Boroughs, full of Senators who are horse doctors, or in rifle clubs, targeting our bills.” In 2011, in Jacobin Magazine’s second issue, Seth Ackerman published “Burn the Constitution,” explaining that the Constitution makes it “virtually impossible for the electorate to obtain a concerted change in national policy by a collective act of political will.” Most recently, The America Prospect published an article by its editor, David Dayen, titled America is Not a Democracy. There, Dayen highlights the gerrymandered legislature, the Electoral College, the malapportioned and veto-wielding Senate, the Supreme Court, and the influence of money in politics. He concludes with a provocation, “Where can we find this democracy we need to fight to preserve?”

Putting the Pieces Together

The Constitution is the elephant in the room; a person wearing a blindfold might feel its leg or trunk yet not understand what the animal is. Once in a while, someone may realize it’s an elephant but decide to keep the blindfold on to avoid confronting such an enormous obstacle. We should throw away the blindfold. In 2021, DSA took a step toward confronting the Constitution by including the demands for a second constitutional convention and a call to abolish the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College in its Political Platform. “The nation that holds itself out as the world’s premier democracy,” DSA concluded, “is no democracy at all,” and, “Democracy is necessary to win a socialist society.”

However, it’s YDSA that’s leading the way inside DSA. Last year, YDSA passed Resolution 21: Winning the Battle For Democracy, which demands “a new and radically democratic constitution, drafted by an assembly of the people elected by direct, universal and equal suffrage for all adult residents with proportional representation of political parties, and rooted not in the legitimacy of dead generations of slave-owners and capitalists, but that of a majority consensus of the working masses.” As the “youth of the democratic socialist movement,” YDSA urges all DSA members, including our elected officials to take “concrete actions to advance the struggle for a democratic republic such as agitating against undemocratic Judicial Review, fighting for proportional representation, delegitimizing the anti-democratic U.S. Senate, and advancing the long-term demand for a new democratic Constitution.” 

Now we can put all the pieces together: DSA’s Political Platform proclaims, “The nation that holds itself out as the world’s premier democracy is no democracy at all.” Engels insisted, “The democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.” YDSA’s resolution calls upon DSA to take, “concrete actions to advance the struggle for a democratic republic such as agitating against undemocratic Judicial Review, fighting for proportional representation, delegitimizing the anti-democratic U.S. Senate, and advancing the long-term demand for a new democratic Constitution.” 

At the end of the day, people must decide where their energy will be most effective in moving everything else forward. We contend that the battle to democratize the political system is the leading edge of the class struggle. Organizing for a Democratic Constitution will put us on the road to sustained growth.

Image: The Preamble and Article I of the U.S. Constitution from 1787

The post The Rediscovery of Democratic Republicanism appeared first on Socialist Forum.

Heading into this November, many on the left are feeling despondent at a choice between a neoliberal Democrat and a right wing extremist Republican. These were not compelling choices four years ago and are somehow even less compelling today. Biden continues to aid and abet a genocide now in its seventh month and has proven incapable of protecting the right to abortion despite its broad support. Trump, no better on those issues,  is also facing four separate criminal indictments, including one that is currently being tried and another that he is desperately hoping the reactionary Supreme Court will delay until after the election. 

It is in this climate that the National Political Committee of DSA instructed members to take part in political discussions surrounding the upcoming election. The National Labor Commission hosted such a discussion on April 10th during one of our quarterly membership meetings. The views expressed at the meeting reflect the big tent nature of DSA, but there were several themes that emerged repeatedly. The top line takeaway is that we must keep building our movement outside of the 4-year election cycle. We are lucky to be an organization that does not have all of its eggs in the basket of electoral politics and, thanks to the hard work of countless volunteers over the past 8 years, we have begun to build a bench of socialist cadre electeds.

Below are a selection of the points brought forward by our members:

Perspective 1- Hold the Line on Palestine

“My union played a big role in the Biden-Harris election. We knocked millions of doors and endorsed Biden day one. Our informal group pushing for a ceasefire have oriented toward a petition that highlights the role we played in the last election and says many of us won’t canvas for him this time. We want our union to call for a permanent ceasefire, an end to military aid, an end to the occupation. We are saying that Biden will lose if he doesn’t change course. We got over 300 signatures and delivered it to the international president.” – John

“All of these decisions need to be weighed against Biden loyalism amongst union leaders but that loyalism does not exist with younger voters. No votes for genocide is not ultraleftism but a strategy of patience. We want a strong and ever growing labor movement. Biden is going to go down in history as a war criminal and even a soft endorsement of Biden will create distrust down the line for us.” – Aliyah

Perspective 2- Keep Our Focus on Building the Labor Movement

“I am mostly really glad that unions are supporting Biden because I want Biden to win. Even though I don’t think DSA should do the same. I want to point to one unintended consequence though. UAW just spent a lot of resources to try to organize the non-union plants in the south. If they had taken out all the people that have been working on organizing and invested in a media heavy “get out the vote” campaign, what would that do to the organizing drive in the south? I think it would be a big mistake. Hopefully if unions don’t have something else great going on they will do this but they shouldn’t derail something exciting they are doing to do GOTV.” – Jane

“I want to mention a favorite quote from the last Labor Notes. The question was posed “don’t you think we need a labor party?” The response was, “When Labor is strong, it doesn’t matter who is in office, they come begging to us.” Whatever fight is important to you—climate change, social issues, reproductive justice, all of those fights—we won’t win them unless labor is our focus. Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. I know that nothing gets done without the people who mop the floors and build the buildings and deliver the boxes and run the software. To win in any of our other fights we need to build our unions and DSA is a great vehicle for doing that. Whoever wins our response should be to build democracy in our locals and our internationals. Elections are a great opportunity to tell our coworkers “they decided the endorsement without us, wouldn’t it be cool if we had a say in that?” – Ben

“The main way we as labor socialists can affect our unions and the election is to get more people in unions. If there is a massive organizing effort going on led by a vision of a May 2028 deadline of common contract expirations, that’s the most important thing since the Flint strike. We should fight any attempts to take any resources from that and put them in elections. I think focusing on lower level elections, congress and state legislatures and driving turn out makes sense. I hope the people against the explicit endorsement of Biden aren’t outright anti electoral. I used to be that way but I don’t believe that anymore. In places where it matters, which is unfortunately only 10 states, we need to participate in what our unions do to drive turnout against Trump. He’s got it together better than he did in 2016. We also need to address the undemocratic processes of endorsements in unions” – Joe

Perspective 3- Use the Election As a Political Education Moment

“I’m in an AFSCME local with 10,000 members. The majority of our members are supporting Biden. I agree that DSA shouldn’t be supporting Biden and that unions in their own interest ought to be. But I think DSA should offer a political analysis that expands our fellow union members’ consciousness. At the first rank and file meeting of a group I started we had 50-50 attendance of the traditional union membership of Black men and women over 40 and DSA milieu which are under 40. When Gaza came up some said we should defer to Biden but we later came to an understanding that the genocide was awful and should be stopped and our pension shouldn’t be invested in Israeli companies. We also came to the conclusion that a boycott could be comparable to past boycotts like the British textile mills boycott of American slave cotton. That historical comparison spoke to our members’ instinctive politics and brought them closer to what DSA’s vision is. We won’t get Shawn Fain nominated at the DNC but have a responsibility to put forward a distinct vision of politics with moral clarity that can engage and inspire the younger cohort and hopefully present a vision of what radical labor politics can achieve.” – Honda

“There are a group of folks who see Trump as the enemy but don’t see Biden as the solution. My shop won our election in January in a conservative state. My coworkers are disaffected. They don’t like Biden but aren’t riding for Trump. They’ve seen what organized labor can do for people. They are seeing what’s happening in Gaza, people who would usually ride or die for Israel are saying ‘this is f’d up.’ We don’t have the capacity to provide another option, but where is DSA at when it comes to meeting these workers. The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee is wonderful but do our local working groups have the ability to mobilize and supply support? We need to get to a point where we can reach this burgeoning middle layer that needs a solution.” – Zeth

Perspective 4- Focus on What Comes After

“I think the most interesting question is how we should be responding to the election. I think DSA taking a position on the election is a secondary question and the primary question is what will happen directly afterward. In 2016 DSA wasn’t as coherent as it is today. A primary part of our discussion should be what happens on election day. If Trump is elected we need to mobilize our membership. Same thing with Biden if there is an attempt to overturn the election. In Portland in 2016 a random grouping came up to lead the resistance—they don’t exist anymore.  DSA is primed to be in that position and raise our banner the highest and bring disaffected workers terrified of a Trump presidency into our ranks.” – Jesse

“We should be thinking about right after and how we as DSA are poised with an international perspective and ability to leverage and activate chapters who are embedded in the local politics of their regions. We can have an agile response if we prepare. There will be fearful people and they will be persuadable people. We need to be showing that DSA is a space for folks to come. Whether Trump wins or loses workers will be upset. Things aren’t going to be good with the radical right either way.” – Cynthia

“I want to talk about the importance of the period after the election. What happens between November and January will be chaotic. We have to be out in the streets with ten times the numbers as we have had in the past. We need to think about what our message will be. We should defend the Squad because if we can’t defend our comrades who have defended Palestinian rights that would be bad. We used to have the slogan “endorse your enemies, work for your friends. It’s not important who we endorse, it’s important what we do. Wherever we have allies we need to start working with them because we have to be ready. And we have to be resilient enough to survive another Trump presidency.” – Paul

Perspective 5- Stop Trump 

“I think we need to start as Marxists with an analysis of the situation. I came into DSA just after 2016 where we had high hopes the left could make a huge advance and that was frustrated. We don’t have the same opportunity this time. If Biden wins we have a stalemate and if Trump wins it’s worse. Trump is worse on the issues Biden is bad on, he’s a threat to the labor movement to LGBTQ people to the climate. I think that’s the analysis motivating the left wing of the labor movement in endorsing Biden and I don’t think DSA has anything to gain from endorsing Biden. But we should be clear, if we try to posture some independent analysis that departs from that it will put our members in the labor movement in a marginal position arguing against the position that Trump needs to be defeated. We can just say “we are socialists and only endorse socialists” but we can also recognize that Trump needs to be stopped. – Sam

“Now that we’re transitioning into the general election, not backing Biden is ultra leftism. We need to stop Fascism and Trump is fascism. The status quo is better than fascism. In terms of labor, what Trump is going to do is destroy the NLRB. From Amazon to Starbucks to the Teamsters it was facilitated a lot by the NLRB and Trump will destroy that. It’s not an ideal position but that’s the reality we’re faced with.” – Lewis

Perspective 6- Think Local

“There are two things we’re discussing. What should our unions be doing and what should DSA be doing? We know Biden and Trump don’t represent the exact same thing and Trump would be more hostile to labor organizing. Maybe if I were Shawn Fain I’d delay endorsement and hold out for more, I understand why labor is lining up behind Biden. I agree with focusing on the day after but I think the efficacy of anything we do after the election will rely on what we do in the lead up. We should point to Trump as the grave threat he is but be clear that even if Joe Biden lucks out and wins he does not represent a threat to the forces that power Trump. And even if he wins, there could be another Trump around the corner. We need to build socialist politics. If I’m knocking doors for Rashida I’ll say, if you really want to defeat fascism organize a union or reform your union. It’s not about what we say about Biden but how we bring people into the organization.” – Ian

“In recent months there have been a lot of anti-worker legislation pieces going through our state house. This legislation activated our local labor base with weekly protests and more activity than I had seen in years from union members. DSA was showing up weekly and talking to union members and it was really meaningful to them to see DSA standing up against right-wing legislation. We did that without aligning with the Democrats. We also ran a socialist for office and he showed up to those rallies. We have recruited to our chapter by positioning ourselves as against the far right and to the left of the Democrats. This is how we should position ourselves. Engage with union members who are afraid of a Trump administration and bring them into what we’re trying to do.” – Kelsea

Points of unity

While some of the specifics differ, there are many points that were reiterated again and again. One major point of agreement was that the election cannot distract us from our long-term project of building a fighting American labor movement and eventually a political party that represents its interests. This means working to keep our unions investing in organizing and educating our fellow union members about what democracy can mean in their workplaces and their unions. Another point of unity was taking a location specific approach to engaging in electoral politics. We must protect the socialists that we have gotten into office and who have used their positions to fight for an end to the genocide in Gaza. In some cases this turnout could have an effect of preventing another Trump administration, but we should be clear eyed about just how much of an effect we will have on the presidential election.

Our group did not come to a consensus on public messaging around Biden but seemed to be united in its belief that a second Trump administration would be devastating to our work. The NLRB under Jennifer Abruzzo has been a huge help in supporting the resurgence of the labor movement and a MAGA administration would be far more hostile. There was also consensus that DSA should feel no need to endorse Biden but should recognize the reasoning for why many of our unions would align behind him.

Finally, there was a lot of discussion about positioning ourselves to be able to mobilize for whatever occurs in November and use it to build our movement. There will be a lot of fear in the air as we approach the election and it is up to us to build up messaging that can speak to people’s fear and structures to bring them into sustained struggle. Whether that struggle is against a Biden administration unwilling to take bold action to improve our conditions or a Trump administration bent on the destruction of our movement, we must be organized to seize the moment. It is our hope that as DSA’s strategy for the coming months emerges, the tool of our presence in unions across the country will be a major part of it.

Image: UAW picket line at the GM Willow Run Distribution Center, Tuesday, September 26, 2023, in Belleville, Michigan. (Photo by Adam Schultz)

The post National Labor Commission Perspectives on 2024 and Beyond appeared first on Socialist Forum.

Tens of thousands of university students established encampments on more than 200 campuses across the country in the run up to graduation ceremonies. More than two thousand were arrested. Many encampments were broken up by police repression and an unknown number of students face academic discipline for their actions in solidarity with Gaza. While many campus administrations relied on the police, others have agreed to negotiate over the students demands for disclosure and divestment of university holdings dealing with Israel. Protests have continued through commencements as many high profile speakers have cancelled their engagements and students have walked out during ceremonies; some Columbia students even accepted their diplomas wearing zip ties. No doubt, campus administrations are betting the movements will fade over the summer break, but Socialist Forum‘s interview with YDSA organizer Erin Lawson from NYU points to the movement’s rapid expansion and the prospects for a revival in the fall semester.

Socialist Forum: Can you tell us about how the encampment at NYU began?

Erin Lawson: It started on April 22. We were inspired by [the encampment at] Columbia. We knew we had to do something fast after the first mass arrests at Columbia on April 18. When people saw police brutalizing students, that caused a reaction across the country and especially here in the city because we’re so close and know all about the brutality of the NYPD.

SF: Did the encampment begin spontaneously? How do you come together on such short notice?

Erin: The Friday before April 22 the NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition (PSC) met. The PSC had been organizing since October and it brings together about thirty organizations, with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) playing a leading role. People really felt we had to do something on Monday, and we spent all weekend planning logistics so that it wasn’t like a spontaneous thing where people just set up tents. It was a very coordinated action.

SF: Roughly, how many tents and how many people were out there that first day and what was the mood?

Erin: There were about thirty tents and I would say upwards of three hundred people. It was probably the most beautiful action I can recall, with so many students coming together for each other in solidarity with Gaza. There was chanting and singing. It was a moment of solidarity in this community. I have been organizing at NYU for four years and I’ve never seen so many students all together. I was so proud to be a part of it.

SF: This is a silly question we have to ask because of the insanity of the national media and with President Biden coming out and attacking all the encampments as antisemitic. Were there any actually problems with antisemitism or other forms of racism?

Erin: No, absolutely not. Jewish and Arab students were working together. The girl I got arrested with and who I shared a cell with is Jewish. I think people have to realize that young Jewish people came out to support Gaza because they’re struggling to reconcile how they grew up with  what’s happening now. This is so important to them, and when the media weaponizes their identity to defend what Israel is doing… it’s fucked up.

SF: How did the campus administration react?

Erin: Their immediate reaction that morning was to say that if you disperse now there won’t be any repercussions.

SF: You obviously refused to dissolve the encampment immediately. How did the administration escalate?

Erin: They blockaded the encampment so no one could get in or out. The faculty even had to negotiate so we could use the bathrooms. The cops arrived at 2 p.m., and, in hindsight, we should have known that NYU President Linda Mills always intended to call the cops that day. I think the Democratic establishment has a lot to answer for. If you look at Joe Biden’s administration and how he has painted these protests across the country as not peaceful and nonviolent, saying solidarity with Gaza because they’re facing genocide, which is actually what’s happening. Instead, Biden is saying that we’re antisemitic and violent and that we’re crazy students. Which is just factually not true.

SF: How has Mayor Eric Adams responded?

Erin: Mayor Adams has been egregiously evil, I would say. At every point, he’s justified the cops’ presence on our campuses and says that we are causing havoc in the city, which is just not true. The only disruptions to campus life have been caused by the administrations when they cancel events in order to turn the student body against the protesters.

SF: What sort of support have you received from students, faculty, and the community in general?

Erin: I think we’re very lucky in the sense that the unions on campus, the faculty union and the graduate student union, have supported us every moment. The faculty stood on the edge of the encampment and created a wall around us so they would be the first people who got arrested. They were the ones who really put themselves out there for us at every turn. They wanted it to be student led and they supported whatever escalation or de-escalation we voted on.

SF: Were you having general assemblies, discussing tactics and strategies, and making democratic decisions within the encampment?

Erin: Yes, the first day, there was certainly a sense of democracy. When we wanted to escalate something, we all got in a circle and voted if we wanted to do that or not.

SF: So on the night of April 22, around 130 people were arrested at NYU. What was the mood of people as they were arrested and what was your personal experience?

Erin: This was the first time I was ever arrested. I want to say that there’s very few things I think myself and other students want to get arrested for. Despite being very active organizers, we don’t take being arrested lightly. It’s a very traumatizing experience. It’s not fun. Jail is not fun. The NYPD are very brutal. They’re one of the most highly funded and militarized forces in the world, so I don’t want to glamorize or romanticize getting arrested. But it was also a very beautiful experience. I remember that in the back of the police bus and even in my cell, we were singing and chanting. So it was eight hours of being very anxious on the one hand, but it was also wonderful. And I will say, because it was my first arrest, I didn’t know what to expect. In fact, I was told earlier that day that being arrested was very peaceful because we were just doing civil disobedience so the police officer would just ask us to stand up and put our hands behind our backs. But I saw the NYPD throwing chairs at students. I saw the NYPD pinning students to the ground. I saw them use pepper spray. It was really, really scary. But every student who was arrested that day was standing very strong. We knew what we were doing was right.

SF: So the NYU encampment started days after the first mass arrests at Columbia, and then the movement spread to the City University of New York, the New School, and beyond New York the week of April 22. Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall on April 23 and held it for nearly a week until the final police raid at Columbia on April 30. How did NYU students react to the Columbia raid? And are there any connections between students on different campuses?

Erin: I remember I was with my comrades on Tuesday night and we were literally listening to Columbia’s student radio and hearing in real time what was happening at Columbia. Then about an hour later that night, we heard what happened at City College Campus because we have friends and comrades to go to CUNY. We all know that our struggle on our campus is not just isolated, our struggle is city wide because the NYPD is a terrifying, brutal military force that disproportionately brutalizes Black and brown students. This is particularly noted at CUNY because its the most diverse school system in the city. I just remember being terrified that night. There was a whole group of NYU students who went to jail support that night around midnight. We stayed there until like four or five in the morning waiting for our comrades from Columbia and City College of New York to get out of jail. So there’s definitely a community of student organizers who are there for each other because we know that we will win when we are all in solidarity with each other. We’ve been doing jail solidarity almost every day. Last night, we were supporting students arrested at the New School and in the second sweep at NYU.

SF: So multiple rounds of jail support in the last week.

Erin: Definitely. It’s like a full-time job!

SF: Why do you think the movement spread so quickly across the whole country and even internationally?

Erin: It’s so much more than I could ever have imagined. I keep saying this to people but if you told me two weeks ago, this is what the student movement would be like I would have been like, no way. I would have never fathomed. I think that’s perhaps my own ignorance in thinking about this fervor on campus compared to how hard it’s been to organize students over the past four years that I’ve been organizing. Maybe I’ve fallen into my ways of like “you’ll have to organize students and do XYZ before you turn them out like big militant actions,” but I think what this moment has proved is that students are already energized. They’re already politicized to do these actions. They just need a place to do it. So if you give students a forum, if you allow them to scream, they’ll all fucking scream because we all know that what’s happening in Gaza is wrong and that we need to stand up for the people of Gaza and the people of Palestine because our college administrations and our government won’t. We have to do what we can as privileged members of the United States.

SF: What do you think are the things that are at the top of students’ minds today? Gaza, obviously, is the match that lit the fuse, but there must be something else going on amongst people who are in their late teens and early twenties. What do they think about the world and their place in it?

Erin: The only times we’ve been able to vote in national elections our options have been terrible. It’s been Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and Joe Biden and so there’s been a lot of political apathy and withdrawal over the past few years.I think people are realizing now that we can’t afford to be apathetic in any aspect of our lives because when we’re apathetic things like Gaza can happen. We feel like we can’t do anything about it but then you realize you actually can. What is stopping you? Nothing. Nothing is stopping you and I think that’s what’s so beautiful about this moment. I think this moment will bleed over into a lot of other things, you know there’s so much insecurity across college campuses around working and our labor. I think previous generations, and even us maybe six months ago, were just like resigned to thinking that work sucks and that’s just maybe our life for fifty years. Now we’re realizing we can’t afford to be apathetic anymore because that’s what institutions want us to be. We have more power than them because we’re more than them.

SF: UAW President Shawn Fain came out defending the encampments and the right to protest and he condemned the police attacks. What impact do you feel this movement is going to have on young people as they enter the workforce?

Erin: Oh, I think it will be so impactful. We always say in YDSA that the most strategic thing about it is that you come out with all these organizing skills, and all these realizations that you can make a difference and that’s what I think these encampments are doing. You realize that the only way you’re going to see a better world is if you organize. Not only is that the only way, but you start to believe that you deserve dignity and respect. So do the people in Gaza deserve safety and dignity and respect. You have to fight for that and it’s going to be really hard and it might sometimes be really exhausting, you might be demoralized at certain periods. I certainly have been in the past two weeks, and at times during the past four years, but you realize that if you don’t fight, that’s what that’s what they want. That’s what institutions want, it’s what your boss wants. But you can’t let them win.

SF: You must have been a freshman in college during Covid and then the Black Lives Matter uprisings. Do you think those events have taught your generation of organizers any lessons?

Erin: When I look back at that time, on the one hand, I think it was a big moment of political consciousness raising for people. They realized that they could go out into the streets in protest. I also think it was a moment for people to realize what’s strategic about mass movement. I think Black Lives Matter did a great job getting people out into the streets and realizing their power. But I also think it didn’t have a fully cohered program. You go out and you protest the police brutalizing Black and Brown people because that should not be happening. At the same time, you have to ask whatreal material change you want to see come out of the movement. I think that’s what we realize with the Gaza solidarity encampments, we had real demands. Disclose and divest is basically universal across every single college campus. That’s what we learned from Black Lives Matter.

SF: There’s been a ton of people from many organizations in this movement and SJP has been especially important. As you’re working alongside all these comrades, what would you say to people who ask what socialists offer this movement?

Erin: I think socialists provide the class analysis lens and an idea of solidarity that is much more expansive. So much of socialism is about building solidarity across nations and building a movement across peoples and we know that the struggle of the people in Palestine is our struggle because if the people in power can do what they’re doing to the people in Gaza, they can do it here at home too. That’s why, to me, when we are building the socialist movement, we’re fighting for them and fighting for us at the same time. The US and the big institutions think that we’re just bodies for labor, or bodies to be used, and we are so much more than that. We deserve full, beautiful lives and that’s what we’re fighting for here at home and abroad.

SF: Anything you want to add?

Erin: We have to keep fighting.

Image: NYC Democratic Socialists of America and Jewish Voices for Peace Ceasefire Rally on October 20, 2023

The post Students Stand Up for Gaza appeared first on Socialist Forum.

1864. That’s the year Arizona’s abortion ban was passed. The archaic law has remained dormant since 1976, when Roe v. Wade made abortion legal nationwide, but a little over a month ago, on April 6, the Arizona Supreme Court resurrected the law, banning abortion in almost all cases.  

The Arizona State Legislature has since passed another law to repeal the 1864 ban, which would default the state to a still strict, 15-week ban on abortion because of a law that was passed and signed by former Republican Governor, Doug Ducey, in 2022.  

Meanwhile a coalition called, Arizona for Abortion Access has been gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures to get a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would create a “fundamental right” to receive abortion care up until fetal viability.

Tonight, we’ll bring you a dispatch from the frontlines of the fight for abortion rights here in Arizona and talk to socialist organizers about how they’re trying to change the dynamic so reproductive rights can no longer be tossed around like a football during election years. 

For more info on Arizona abortion ballot measure visit: https://www.arizonaforabortionaccess.org/

There has been a lot of exciting DSA Green New Deal Campaign action so far this Spring! Here is our March and April recap.

Chapter Organizing and Training

We held our monthly Building for Power (B4P) campaign huddles, a space for DSA members working on local B4P campaigns to strategize and collaborate.

In March, we discussed fundraising. We had a mix of comrades of all experiences— from chapter leaders to brand-new members—get creative and share best practices for fundraising for campaigns. Here are the slides. 

We followed up the March huddle with a Green New Dues solidarity dues phonebank on April 9th asking members to increase their dues to 1% of their yearly income. We dialed almost 2,000 comrades, and of the people we connected with and had conversations, 53% agreed to make the switch!  

Our April huddle was a group discussion about working with unions. Organizers from San Diego, Milwaukee, and New Orleans were able to compare notes on engaging with IBEW. Check out our full Strategist’s Guide here for further reading on navigating these relationships.

bUILDING FOR pOWER Campaign Highlights

Here are some highlights from B4P campaigns from the last two months:

Milwaukee DSA’s Power to the People campaign recently passed 7,000 signed petitions in support of public power and they held a rally at Milwaukee City Hall on March 1st.

Chicago DSA’s Fix the CTA public transit campaign built pressure to oust Dorval Carter, the Chicago Transit Authority board president currently overseeing a substantial decline in the transit system’s service, reliability, and working conditions.

Louisville DSA’s Get On The Bus campaign held a screening of Taken for a Ride, a 1996 documentary about how auto and fossil fuel companies sabotaged public transit in the US to devastating effect. They also circulated a petition to demand that their local government fund the Transit Authority of River City (TARC).

Metro DC DSA’s We Power DC sent in almost 150 comments to DC’s Public Service Commission, opposing a multi-year utility rate hike that would raise rates by 20% over three years, resulting in unaffordable energy rates for one fifth of district households—worsening DC’s crisis of energy injustice. While Pepco claims these costs are necessary for decarbonization goals, DC’s Office of the People’s Council found that 95% of the proposed investments cannot be tied to any reductions in greenhouse gasses. We Power DC also hosted a night school on the Environmental Justice Amendment Act, developed by We Power DC in partnership with local EJ organizations and a DSA-endorsed DC Councilmember. The legislation would transform the District’s zoning and permitting laws to protect overburdened communities.

Charlottesville DSA’s green social housing campaign hosted a panel in March about land trusts, land banks, and how to create deeply affordable housing that welcomed over 80 attendees. This was Cville DSA’s largest event to date, and it truly was a multiracial, socioeconomically diverse gathering of voices. They also authored a sign-on letter for their demands that has garnered signatures from several housing and environmental justice organizations in town to submit to Charlottesville City Council.

If your chapter is ready to Build for Power, fill out our interest form and come to our May huddle!