Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class – Apply by June 10!
Are you interested in becoming the best organizer you can be? Do you want to expand socialism here in Milwaukee, but are unsure of where and how to start? Have you been involved but feel like the project did not go anywhere? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class is for you!
This nine week program will focus on holistically teaching you to be an unstoppable organizer who builds socialism, changes hearts and minds, and impacts our city. You will learn direct action organizing, as defined by Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists, in which we organize actions, campaigns, and tactics to “1) win real, immediate, concrete improvement in people’s lives . . . 2) Give people a sense of their own power . . . 3) Alter the relations of power.”
Interested individuals will apply (Click here, which is due by 11:59 p.m. on June 10, 2025), be interviewed, and enter the program if selected. DSA membership is not required to participate, but is encouraged.
This education program will be a combination of in-person events with virtual events if necessary. Each unit will be roughly a week, with a week break in the middle of the program. Each unit will consist of classroom-style instruction in the unit topic (no more than 2 hours, which will be in-person), field work in organizing (which will be at least 3 hours and consist of having conversations, moving people to action, and building infrastructure for a strong socialist movement involving several types of campaigns), and time for personal reflection. Each participant must commit to the entire program and, unless excused, attend every unit instruction, and field work session. Missing more than two classes and field work sessions may result in removal from the program.
This is the sixth time this program has been offered, and it is back by popular demand! The two instructors have updated and revised the course to make you even more prepared to lead in socialism.
Time commitment per week:
Unit instruction: 2 hours
Organizing work: 3 hours
Miscellaneous tasks: 1 hour
Total time per week: 6 hours
Weekly Schedule
Class will be conducted on Thursday evenings from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. and held in-person at Zao MKE, located at 2319 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, 53211.
Field work will be held at regular intervals over the week, with options to organize at several points during the week:
(tentative schedule, subject to change . . .)
Saturdays, 9:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m.
Sundays 12:00 p.m. until 3:00 p.m.
Mondays 5:30 until 8:30 p.m.
Program Timeline:
June 10 at 11:59 p.m.:
Application deadline – apply here
June 12:
Start of nine week program ( class held, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.), held at Zao MKE, located at 2319 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI 53211
June 19:
Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
June 26:
Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
July 3:
Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
July 10:
Week Break
July 17:
Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
July 24:
Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
July 31:
Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
August 7:
Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Units
Each unit helps to answer the question: what is organizing?
Welcome: what is organizing?
- Get to know participants and instructor
- Define scope of class and intentions
- Determine goals and desired outcomes
Organizing is one-on-one Conversations
- Learn the 7 point organizing conversation
- Practice the conversation and its elements
Organizing is building the committee and the campaign
- The importance (or not) of the committee
- Power Mapping the campaign
- Strategy Chart
Organizing is holistic productivity
- Traction versus distraction
- Time management and its importance
- The Reverse Calendar
- Overcoming blocks to action
Organizing is a mindset
- Acknowledging hurdles and setbacks
- Failure is a great option
- Develop a practice to keep you going
Organizing is raising money and managing it
- Why money is OK
- How to bring energy and money to your campaign
- The basics of campaign budgeting and finance
Organizing is communications
- What does “messaging” mean?
- The power of media
- Writing workshop
Organizing is bringing it all together
- You’ve got momentum – now what?
- Recap of unit themes
Reviews
Here is what previous students have to say about the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class:
“[Before the class] I had no idea about the actual work of organizing. Now I feel confident that I would be able to become a leader in a campaign setting . . .”
“I loved the practical application of socialism . . . [and] I loved the far-reaching application of some of the class content.”
“This is a great way to move into the world of socialism. . . thank you so much for offering this course”
“This [class] is a great first step for anyone looking to start organizing . . .”
“I radically grew in my comfort around being upfront and simply being able to approach a complete stranger with a potentially controversial topic.”
“New organizers and experienced organizers can benefit from this class.”
“Generally speaking my confidence level just interacting with people about socialism has gone through the roof. I have been given a phenomenal overview of how to organize and I feel confident that I can find out what works best for me in the future.”
“It was great to grow as an organizer within the confines of a welcoming community/instructor.”
“I feel more confident organizing outside of an electoral context.”
Meet your instructors:
Alex Brower
Alex Brower is a labor leader, socialist organizer, and Milwaukee’s 3rd district alderperson as a DSA endorsed elected. Professionally, Alex has been the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, which organizes union retirees. In his organizing work, Alex has saved jobs from privatization, helped workers win a union voice on the job, defeated a temp agency, organized against a proposed iron-ore mine, helped bring comprehensive sex education to Beloit Public Schools, and won workplace healthcare for many uninsured MPS Substitute Teachers. As an MPS substitute teacher and former Milwaukee Rec. Department instructor, Alex brings a host of experience teaching others. Alex has also been a candidate for Milwaukee City Comptroller and School Board, running both times as a socialist.
Autumn Pickett
Autumn Pickett is a union organizer and Communications Director for American Federation of Teachers – Wisconsin. She helped win back voting rights for 20,000 students while attending college in Indiana, protect 100’s of custodial and grounds crew jobs from privatization across Wisconsin, sink Billionaire Howard Schultz’s 2016 presidential run, use organizing tactics that garnered national headlines, and mentor dozens of YDSA chapters across the country that continue to make real wins for working people. She has served on the National Coordinating Committee for YDSA, as Milwaukee DSA’s Education Officer, and currently represents Milwaukee DSA on the statewide Socialists in Office committee. Autumn is excited to bring her years of experience mentoring new socialist organizers over to the Milwaukee Organizer Class for the first time and help build a people powered movement in Cream City alongside each of you.
Any questions?
Contact Alex Brower at 414-949-8756 or milwaukeedsa@gmail.com
Apply now!
Apply here, or copy and paste this URL into your web browser: https://forms.gle/JLgc33sE3fpK8TSH7
Statement on the Political Retaliation Against Dr. Tammy Carpenter
From the Portland DSA Steering Committee:
At the Beaverton School Board meeting this Thursday, after an hour-long closed-door session, a motion was made to engage a “third-party investigator” to look into the actions and comments of Dr. Tammy Carpenter, an elected school board member and a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). What was her alleged offense? Being an unabashed supporter of Palestinian liberation in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. While discussions in executive session are legally withheld from public records laws, our understanding is that this retaliation was instigated by the Jewish Federation of Portland, an organization lobbying for Zionist interests and the State of Israel that has a history of waging smear campaigns against pro-Palestinian elected officials and community members.
We commend Dr. Carpenter for fighting for the rights of all children – in Beaverton, in Palestine, and around the world. We believe that children have the right to go to school in peace, unburdened by war and famine, and that those defending them are on the right side of history. As the United States’ funding of Israel grows increasingly unpopular, it is clear this “investigation” into Dr. Carpenter is a desperate maneuver to force local governments to crack down on free speech, and to go down with the sinking ship of the Zionist project. In the last 600 days of genocide in Gaza, every public school and university in the territory has been destroyed by the Israeli military. We cannot allow this to continue.
Dr. Carpenter is a beacon of community integrity and is the only elected official on the Beaverton school board to regularly hold town halls, respond to constituent inquiries, and share information with families. She is also a champion of unions and workers’ rights in our schools. It is no wonder that the political establishment is colluding with the Jewish Federation of Portland to slander her.
This is just the latest example of how the US’ war industry attempts to silence dissent around Palestine. Schools – and by extension, school boards – should be a place where people can speak freely and learn the truth about our military’s complicity in genocide. The people of Beaverton elected Dr. Carpenter, and she is our voice for justice.
We call on all supporters of free speech and a free Palestine to rally at the Beaverton School Board meeting to show our opposition to this undemocratic retaliation! Join DSA and allies this Monday, June 2nd, 6:30pm at the Beaverton School District offices at 1260 NW Waterhouse Ave to defend Dr. Carpenter, along with all those facing political retaliation for their support of Palestinian children and families. No to Genocide! Solidarity Forever!
The post Statement on the Political Retaliation Against Dr. Tammy Carpenter appeared first on Portland DSA .
The U.S. will explicitly target socialists
Review: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
Collective Grieving Under Late-Stage Capitalism
Solidarity with Austin’s Muslim Community
By Austin DSA
For over a year and a half, Austin DSA has argued that the state of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people is inseparable from struggles for justice in Texas and the United States. We see this everywhere: from the militarized police forces that stalk Black and Brown neighborhoods after being trained by the Israeli military, to the women in Gaza forced to navigate reproductive healthcare structures that have been obliterated by imperial US foreign policy as reactionary domestic policy destroys those same systems at home. The local is inseparable from the international, as the violence that the US oversees abroad returns to our own communities in the form of fascist violence.
We stand in solidarity with Nueces Mosque, Austin Diyanet Center, and the Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association (IABA), which on May 22 were spray painted with “symbols, including Stars of David, defacing the mosque’s main entrance and surrounding property.”
Conventional media in the United States often frames violence in Palestine as a religious conflict that has lasted for centuries. The spray painting of a Star of David on a mosque perpetuates this myth, when in fact, this conflict is defined by the aggression of a Zionist, racist, setter-colonial state against an indigenous people which refuses to let itself be destroyed. Framing this as a religious conflict hides a national liberation struggle and inflames both Islamophobia and antisemitism around the world. While Zionism claims that no Jewish person can be safe from antisemitism without a militarized ethnostate, Jewish people suffer when their religion is co-opted and equated to the violent, political ideology of Zionism.
The use of a Jewish religious symbol as a hate crime object against Austin’s Muslim community at large and the UT community at Nueces Mosque in particular is only one more example of how these dynamics have tangible consequences in our city. Recall the stabbing of Zacharia Doar following a Palestine solidarity protest in Austin in 2024, the attempted drowning of a child in Euless, TX later that year, and the emboldening of local neo-nazi groups to carry out actual antisemitic hate crimes in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election. None of us are safe unless all of us are safe.
Austin DSA and Austin Against Apartheid organize for a free Palestine by diverting US resources away from Israeli genocide and apartheid. In doing so, we are standing against all occupational forces that stand between working class people and freedom. We all deserve to live in a world free from money spent on state violence and war instead of life affirming services like housing, healthcare, and social safety nets. Israel’s aggression and religious framings of the conflict breed acts of hatred around the world. The struggle for Palestinian liberation affords us a vocabulary for envisioning a safer, freer world. A free Palestine means a safer society at home and abroad.
The post Solidarity with Austin’s Muslim Community first appeared on Red Fault.
We Have a Public Health Crisis
In his failed presidential bid, Human Health and Services Secretary RFK Jr. remarked that he would help people struggling with addiction become healthy again by having them work on unpaid “wellness farms.” If they refused, they would face incarceration. Throughout his career, RFK Jr. has railed against vaccination and modern medicine, taking particular aim at measles and HPV, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and even weight loss drugs. He now serves on Trump’s team of wreckers, an administration that’s dismantled public health infrastructure like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) during our sixth year of COVID-19 and as the threat of a bird flu pandemic grows.
It should be no surprise that fascism often comes first for the disabled and people deemed as a “societal expense.” In Nazi Germany, Krankenmorde, or the “euthanasia” of the disabled, marked the beginning phase of mass death, and in fascist Italy, mental asylums swelled and transferred their patients to Nazi death camps. Both of these initiatives were preceded by American psychologist Henry Goddard’s writings against the “feebleminded” and the United States’s forced sterilization of the disabled. Fascism’s contemporary resurgence, especially in the U.S., is not a surprise to disabled activists who have warned since the onset of Covid that the rapid normalization of eugenics in regards to the pandemic would be its modern precursor. Yet, both the socialist left and the labor movement remains unprepared for this moment and continues to ignore a public health crisis that fundamentally threatens the vision and hope for an organized, militant working class.
The Cost of Modern Eugenics
Disability has what is referred to by theorist Sara Ahmed as “stickiness,” or the idea that bodies are impressed upon by their relationships to other bodies, signs, and cultural associations. Race and disability have long been wedded through eugenics. As a recent example, racism and disability were enmeshed at the onset of COVID-19 when Asian people, specifically Chinese Americans and the broader diaspora, were condemned as being the cause of the pandemic, echoing the racist history of Asian people having been situated as “carriers of contagion.” A similar pattern unfolded during the AIDS epidemic, with AIDS having been deemed by major politicians as a disease contracted by “degenerate” queer and Black people.
Necropolitics and who is mournable have framed much of American history, but especially the last six years. At the start of the pandemic, hospital overcrowding led to infamous triage protocols worldwide where some lives were valued more than others. Nursing homes across the US piled up with deaths without so much as dignified preservation in a morgue. In that time, we began manufacturing consent for the death of the working class from a preventable airborne illness. The CDC claimed early on that Covid would only severely impact the disabled or people with comorbidities, not because they intended to inspire care for the disabled, but to justify their deaths so everyone else could carry on with life as normal. Since 2020, over 1 million Americans have died from Covid-19.
Infectious disease and a crumbling healthcare infrastructure incapable of providing accessible preventative care continue to leave lasting effects on our communities. Our government takes solace in the active spread of infectious disease and in the culling of the disabled because fascist states believe we must weed out the unfit. The “Make America Healthy Again” Executive Order, RFK Jr.’s announcement of a “disease registry” taking aim at autistic people, and the dismantling of the FDA’s regulatory power over our food supply are just the latest steps taken by this administration that will hurt all segments of the working class. For workers in America, the precarity of health is universal.
And yet, many of us remain largely in denial about our own proximity to disability. Apart from the fact that about 45% of Americans have a comorbidity, Covid has been proven to remain in the body post-infection and cause lingering damage to cardiovascular and organ systems, and having been infected with Covid even just once makes it more likely you’ll develop long-Covid. Studies on the prevalence of long-Covid show that nearly 7% of the population, or 1 in 13 Americans, currently has it and of those, 1 in 5 report having symptoms that disrupt their daily life. Some doctors estimate that within four years, most Americans will have long-Covid. As of the summer of 2024, 13.9% of those experiencing long-Covid had failed to return to work; we know what happens to people who can’t work under capitalism.
The material repercussions of Covid infection and reinfection have already begun to show themselves. The most apparent impact is the disruption to our immune systems. We saw reports of a “quademic” this past holiday season (Covid, RSV, flu, and norovirus), and this season our flu infections and death rates are higher than they were at the peak of swine flu. As disability rates climb, services and social safety nets for the disabled become harder to access. Our life expectancy is in decline. Our cancer rates are on the rise. Since the onset of modern medicine, Americans have seemingly never been sicker.
But the left’s reluctance, including DSA, to fight for disabled people is not just a mistake that costs us our health, it is also making us deeply vulnerable to attacks on workers. In a police state reliant on facial recognition technology to squash threats to power, mask bans are an obvious next step, and multiple counties and states are banning them entirely.
Most recently, Columbia University announced plans to implement a mask ban on campus because of protests in solidarity with Palestine. Kathy Hochul is following in lock-step to ban masks in public in the name of safety, and Maryland is contending with a Democrat introduced statewide ban in service of the Anti-Defamation League, another decision also directly connected to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Simultaneously, we’re seeing an end to Covid era worker benefits like telework, which was originally intended as a disability accommodation, and even threats to OSHA. A wider, bolder movement invested in disability solidarity that sees disabled struggle as class struggle would be better equipped to protect workers and their organizing rights.
The longer we continue to ignore our public health crisis, the more vulnerable the working class will become to sickness, disability, and state repression.
What is to Be Done?
The seemingly innocuous limit of socialist solidarity with the disabled is masking. Despite the claims we made in early pandemic days that a refusal to mask was a refusal to engage in community care, we have adopted the ultimately neoliberal principle that each person can and should make an individual choice about masking. It should be evident that public health matters significantly to the physical and mental wellbeing of the working class. Organizing for socialism will become increasingly difficult as our peers continue to get sick, become disabled, or are caught in a cycle of working to afford caring for sick loved ones who have no social safety nets.
We know that masks work at preventing the spread and contraction of airborne viruses. N95s and KN95s are the most effective at doing both. For the right-wing, that isn’t a fact. The Trump administration’s latest report about Covid being a lab leak says as much: “There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19.”
Socialists must counter these fascist, unscientific narratives not just in voice, but through collective action. There was once a time when we did. At the start of the pandemic, socialists prided themselves on understanding the science behind why masks work and why we should wear them. Unionists fought for worker access to PPE and air filtration systems. Some workers even went on strike over it. Now, it is exceedingly rare to find socialist organizations or unions routinely calling for and enabling spaces that require masking, and both have mostly stopped contending with the ongoing ramifications of a lack of public health infrastructure or the working class’s vulnerability to sickness.
The inaccessibility of healthcare in America is why most of us want universal healthcare, a collective solution to the problem, and although every broken piece of the for-profit healthcare system was exposed by the pandemic, the US left failed to win it. Unfortunately, there are segments of the left that still choose to shirk any responsibility to public health. Medicare-for-All is no longer the public rallying cry it once was for national DSA, or its surrogates. Similarly, the Party for Socialist Liberation’s presidential candidate Claudia De La Cruz, in a livestream for her campaign, directly addressed the question of mask mandates in PSL spaces saying, “People are asking about masking, well there’s no federal mandate on masking, right? But we do have masks at our different events. People choose whether to use them or not. We can’t implement something that the federal government, having the power to do it at a national scale, does not do.”
Why not? Is the role of socialist organizations claiming to counter capitalism and empire to mimic the United States government? We set rules about our spaces all the time. We have bylaws, codes of conduct, harassment and grievance policies– all things that aid in the mission to keep our spaces safe, and yet when disabled activists ask for masking requirements, no one hears us. We’re told that masking makes us “out of touch with the working class,” that we’re “freaks,” or that we’re simply asking too much. Many of these claims run counter to the science behind masking and public health that would benefit most working people, especially those of us already struggling with various forms of disability.
While we may list universal healthcare as a primary socialist demand, electoral campaigns associated with the DSA must actively advocate for it. Locally DSA endorsed candidates, like Zohran Mamdani, who I hope wins, should be elevating healthcare as an issue and loudly supporting initiatives like the New York Health Act to establish statewide single-payer healthcare. Universal healthcare must be a core part of our agitational electoral campaigns, regardless of district or region.
DSA and other socialist and labor organizations must take material steps to protect the health of the working class. It is possible and necessary for us to require masking and air filtration at DSA events, run electoral campaigns that agitate around universal healthcare, and encourage our union members to push their Locals to take up the issue of public health. We should also be engaging in political education on the history of eugenics and disability activism here and abroad.
The argument for solidarity with the disabled community doesn’t begin or end with Covid mitigation. It requires a sharper analysis of how capitalism preys on our health for profit and disposes of us when we’re sick, and of how it uses sickness and eugenics as a scapegoat to justify the policing and state-sanctioned execution of people of color, the disabled, and political dissidents. Disability touches all of our lives at any given stage, and it is latent in class, social, and ecological struggle. The opportunities for disability solidarity are all around us and as fascism rises worldwide and continues rendering more of us unmournable in the eyes of the state, it is the responsibility of socialists to intervene.
Unless we commit to practicing true solidarity with the disabled, eugenics will disable and kill the working class base we claim to want to organize, fight for, and protect.
Image Description: Official portrait of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States secretary of health and human services. Photo taken Feb. 21, 2025.
Unions and Community Unite for May Day
This article is a first attempt to review what happened leading up to and surrounding this year’s May Day rallies, who organized the rallies, how they accomplished it, and what comes next. It’s based on discussions with union leaders and DSA members in a half dozen cities and our experience here in Maine. The breadth of the protests means this assessment is necessarily anecdotal and incomplete. The author welcomes corrections and hopes DSA members will write up and share their experiences across the country. For background to the UAW’s call for a 2028 May Day general strike, see the fall 2024 issue of Socialist Forum featuring an interview with CTU, UAW, and DSA organizers.
What happened?
Hundreds of thousands of workers marched and rallied on May Day, making it the largest International Workers Day since 2006 when two million immigrant workers left work and marched to demand their rights. Protests were organized in 1300 locations, large and small; no doubt the first May Day protest in many places. Broadly speaking, there were three different levels of mobilization. First, as in 2006, Chicago stood out with some 30,000 marching, organized by a mass coalition of labor and immigrant rights organizations. Second, cities like Philly, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Oakland, Burlington, and Portland, Maine mobilized between two and fifteen thousand. Third, hundreds of cities and towns turned out crowds from a couple dozen to hundreds, including smaller cities like Davis, California. This ranking is not intended as a judgement on the organizers. In fact, some of the smaller rallies included higher percentages of the population than the largest. For instance, in the town of Wayne, Maine—population 1,000—seventy-five people turned out for both morning and evening rallies.
It’s worth noting that the crowds were not as large as the April 5 day of protest initiated by Indivisible; however, participants were noticeably more multiracial, younger, and radical with widespread support for transgender rights and opposition to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Though an important step in the process of building working-class unity against the billionaires and capitalist class, these efforts have a long way to go. For instance, although multiracial, at the national level, the marches did not entirely reflect working-class diversity. And if immigrant rights organizations were critical in many cities, Trump’s reign of terror against immigrant workers suppressed turnout from this community in many places.
Who organized it and how?
Memory and sacrifice play a role in sustaining oppositional working-class culture. No Haymarket Martyrs, no May Day. More recently, the 2006 May Day protests provided a living link to the past as well as the importance of International Workers Day globally. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for unions to align contracts and lead a 2028 general strike, have introduced May Day to a whole new generation of labor organizers.
Recently, precursor actions in the wake of Trump’s election laid the basis for pulling together a mass, class-based response. As the saying goes, the best organizing tool is a bad boss and Trump is one of the worst bosses possible. Repression and widespread layoffs do not always provoke resistance, but this time targeted workers put up a critical mass of opposition that gummed up the works and provided the time to organize a strategic response.
Thousands of teachers from across the country responded to a call by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers for walk-ins in March to protest Trump’s destruction of the Department of Education. Bay Area activists organized a “Day of Resistance” against ICE even before Trump was inaugurated. The Maine State Nurses Association led a rally to protest Medicaid cuts in March and organized a mass town hall to prevent the closure of the obstetrics department in the small town of Houlton. Kathryn Lybarger, president of AFSCME 3299 representing 22,000 workers at the University of California, summarizes her union’s approach, “My union went on its fourth strike in six months on May Day, and the energy felt great. For union members fighting a powerful employer for our families’ futures, it was amazing to be joined on the picket line by all kinds of community members who are fighting billionaires for their futures too. The day felt like an event and an important step in building the movement we need to stop Trump and win a better world.” In the single biggest display of working-class power on May Day, 55,000 LA County employees in SEIU 721 walked off the job and marched through downtown LA.
As federal workers reeled from Trump’s layoffs, the Federal Unionist Network was one of the most important elements blunting the blitzkrieg. FUN organizer Chris Dols explains, “Amidst all the necessary defense we’re playing against the billionaires’ offensive, May Day is the labor movement’s opportunity to articulate a positive vision for the world we deserve. Federal workers are uniquely positioned and proud to help advance such a vision because, above all else, we are public servants, and it is the entire public that is under assault. As is captured by the FUN’s ‘Save Our Services’ demand, our approach to May Day was to foreground the crucial services and protections federal workers provide in an effort to not only cohere fighting federal labor movement but also to develop and deepen alliances with all who stand to lose the most if Trump gets away with smashing up our agencies.”
Pair these factors with decades of bipartisan misery inflicted on the working class, and it’s not surprising workers are angry. Politicians have failed to deliver on demands like healthcare for all, affordable housing, and a stronger public education system. Add inflation, union-busting, white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia and homophobia, genocide in Gaza, and anti-immigrant bigotry, and the potential for uniting large parts of the working class across its many divisions comes into focus.
Chicago takes the lead
Yet objective conditions alone cannot make a plan. Organized forces with the credibility and capacity to think through a strategy and to put it into practice are needed.
According to Jesse Sharkey, past president of the Chicago Teachers Union and lead organizer with the newly-formed May Day Strong coalition, “Chicago became a center of May Day organizing this year for two reasons—first, there was a local coalition that got a lot of people involved. Activists from the immigrants rights community were extremely important in initiating it, and they held open meetings. They invited anyone who wanted to help organize. That drew in trade unionists, and many others. On a second front, Chicago was in the middle of initiating a national call for May Day protests… The call for that effort came from the Chicago Teachers Union and a handful of allied organizations such as Midwest Academy, Bargaining for the Common Good, and the Action Center on Race and the Economy. The NEA also played an extremely helpful role. In late March, we had about 220 people from over 100 organizations join us in Chicago to start planning for May 1 actions. The reason we were able to initiate such a widespread effort was because we have a past practice of closely linking trade union fights to wider working-class demands. In places where local unions have worked with community and activist groups, we had networks of communication and trust. Then, once that effort had reached a certain critical mass, some of the big national networks like Indivisible and 50501 got on board, and that really grew the reach of the day.”
It’s not that the CTU and immigrant community organizers in Chicago were the only ones thinking about May Day, but their action drew together and amplified similar efforts across the country, nationalizing the protest by providing a framework and resources for labor and community organizers in hundreds of towns and cities. Chicago didn’t create May Day 2025—thousands of activists across the country had to take up the call—but it did open a door.
Socialists and the united front
Assessing the impact of May Day for the working class as a whole should not be conflated with DSA’s role in the organizing. But as this is an article that will mostly reach DSA members, it’s worth reviewing what we contributed. First, thousands of DSA members across the country turned out for May Day. This fact alone shows our organization’s strength, and it points to opportunities and responsibilities. If all your chapter was able to do was to turn out members or help publicize the local protest among coworkers and the broader community, that’s an important contribution. Second, at the National Level, DSA’s National Political Committee and National Labor Commission joined May Day Strong and organized membership Zoom meetings to encourage branches to take action starting in March. Third, and this should come as no surprise, DSA played a bigger role in some places than others. I think it’s worth considering the impact of the strategic and tactical choices local chapters made on the influence they wielded and the organic ties they deepened. After speaking with comrades from across the country, I will offer a few positive examples. I hope comrades will add to this picture and offer alternative ideas or criticisms.
New York
In October, the NYC-DSA chapter adopted a resolution to support the UAW’s call for a 2028 May Day strike. The chapter subsequently held an internal May Day 2028 strategy retreat and identified May Day 2025 as a key link in the chain of developing power and political momentum to fight against Trump and the broader machine. As one DSA organizer puts it, “It’s not enough to circle May Day 2028 on a calendar, we need to build a coalition to organize it and politicize it.” Rooted in this perspective, NYC-DSA turned out to support a mass post-election labor-left anti-Trump rally, the FUN day of action in February, the subsequent Stop the Cuts rally on March 15, and Hands Off on April 5.
Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth, co-chair of NYC-DSA Labor Working Group and National Labor Commission SC member (as well as a twenty-year member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA) picks up the story, reflecting, “After Stop the Cuts, I went to Chicago on March 19 and 20 as an NLC representative to join the May Day Strong meeting. Stacy Davis Gates, Jackson Potter, and Jesse Sharkey welcomed us all into the house that CTU built. Shawn Fain was there along with Randi Weingarten, who was enraged because Trump signed his executive order gutting the Department of Education that same day. We broke out into regions and were charged with going back home to build May Day as big as possible. In New York City, broadly speaking, there were three important currents: the core of the union movement represented by the Central Labor Council, the left-liberals like Tesla Takedown, and the labor/left, of which DSA is a part. Through a lot of coalition work, we made a circle out of this Venn diagram. Trump helped along the way. Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation really angered the Building Trades, further galvanizing them into participation. DSA played an important role in mobilizing: we had a huge contingent, and even more members marching with their unions. But more than that, we helped politicize May Day to point to the billionaires who are benefiting from the Trump administration’s attacks on us.”
Part of this work included successfully advocating—alongside many others—for both AOC and Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyer to speak at the rally, which garnered significant national media attention, helping broadcast our message far beyond May Day participants. It’s important to point out that DSA did not initiate the coalition, but worked alongside long-time labor activists to support May Day, earning our stripes as a trusted and capable partner.
On the day, NYC-DSA turned out some 500 members, many of whom marched with their unions. They did so while keeping up with other work—DSA member Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor—with NYC-DSA labor organizers having advanced a month-long Build to May Day campaign. Organizers called on committees and working groups across the chapter to make May Day a priority, turning out members and volunteer marshalls. The chapter is now in a stronger position to discuss next steps with the broader coalition and consolidate a layer of new members and allies. There’s more pain ahead, but May Day helped gather working-class forces together for action and to take the temperature of the most active and militant layer of trade unionists and community activists. As NYC-DSA Labor Working Group member David Duhalde suggests, “The New York City May Day rally and march from Foley Square to the iconic Wall Street Bull statue was a microcosm of the shift in energy in labor during Trump’s second term.” How far that shift goes can only be tested in practice.
Philadelphia
As in New York, Philadelphia DSA did not initiate the call for the May Day rallies. The AFL-CIO led the charge in alliance with immigrants rights organizations such as Milpa, New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, and Juntos, mobilizing some 5,000 workers. But Philadelphia DSA did add its organizing muscle, assigning Luke M to act as liaison. The chapter followed many of the same tactics as their New York comrades. When the AFL-CIO opened up the coalition, DSA members proved themselves energetic organizers; for instance, running the marshal training and providing a large portion of marshals. DSA members constituted a large part of the seventy-two people arrested at the end of the march in a civil disobedience action, including Rick Krajewski, a DSA member elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Seven union presidents joined in this calculated escalation of tactics, demonstrating a broad understanding that workers will have to take matters into their own hands to back down the billionaires and capitalist elites.
And in a lesson passed down through generations, from the IWW to Sit-Down Strikes to the Civil Rights Movement to Occupy to Black Lives Matter to Gaza, no protest is finished until jail support is organized, a responsibility that was taken up by DSA members and coalition partners alike. That unity in action demonstrated the most important aspect of united front work, but the chapter also raised the socialist banner. Taking placards and membership interest card ideas from DSA members in California, Philadelphia DSA formed a visible presence on the march with some 200 members, and signed up sixty-two new recruits. It didn’t hurt that the unions invited Bernie to speak. After all the hard work, Luke praised his Philly comrades, “I have to say I’m genuinely proud of what we accomplished, and I’m looking forward to the debrief meeting to see what comes next.”
Portland, Maine
Maine DSA’s Labor Rising working group decided to focus on May Day in December, laying the basis to help initiate an organizing meeting open to all community groups and unions. Maine AFL-CIO leaders and UAW graduate students participated in a preliminary meeting to brainstorm ideas, and more than 70 people attended an April 12 meeting in the South Portland Teamsters’ Hall, where the group democratically planned Portland’s May Day. Working groups took up all aspects of the action, and we took all important decisions back to the coalition for votes. Running a long a related track, Maine Education Association and Maine AFL-CIO leaders called for actions across the state, amplifying the Chicago May Day Strong call and dramatically broadening what the Portland coalition could organize.
Nearly 2,000 people turned out in Portland, starting with a rally at the University of Southern Maine to back UAW graduate students’ demands for a first contract and then marching to the Post Office to hear from postal workers. Members of the Portland Education Association and a trans student poet headlined the stop at Portland High School and a librarian union rep spoke in Monument Square before the final rally that heard from the president of the Metal Trades Council at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, a rep from the Maine State Nurses Association, members of the Maine Coalition for Palestine, an organizer from LGTBQ+ community group Portland Outright, a local immigrant rights group called Presente! Maine, and others. It was a great demonstration and showed the thirst for a broader coalition. Twenty-five other towns held actions, bringing the total number of Maine participants to over 5,000, the largest Maine May Day anyone can remember.
It would be shortsighted to overstate the power and stability of this fledgling coalition. Large doses of patience and understanding will be necessary to foster bonds of trust. Sectarian pressures to draw “red lines” that exclude workers new to political activity and organizations who have various programs and interests represent one danger. A narrow focus on the midterm elections represents another. Fortunately, there’s a lot of room for creativity between those two extremes.
Long road ahead
May Day was the first test of strength for the left and working class against Trump, MAGA, and forty-plus years of neoliberal rot. We face a long, complex problem where political pressures to return to passivity will be strong, but May Day 2025 constitutes a small step towards healing deep wounds in the American working class, the divide between organized and unorganized, immigrant and US born, etc. If brother Fain’s call for 2028 is to grow strong, then 2026 and 2027 must be practice runs. If 2026 and 2027 are to be real demonstrations of strength, they must grow out of tighter bonds between labor, community, and the left, more active membership participation in all of those forces, and a combination of defensive struggles we are forced to fight and battles we pick on our own terms. As Sarah Hurd, co-chair of DSA’s National Labor Commission, spells out, “This year’s May Day actions showed the power of what we can accomplish just by setting a date and inviting people to take action together. It has also highlighted what work we need to do to scale up our level of organization in the next three years.”
What did May Day teach us? Fittingly, the last word goes to Kirsten Roberts, a rank-and-file Chicago teacher, “The most important element of May Day 2025 is the explicit entry of organized and unorganized labor into resistance to Trump. Trump’s attacks are aimed directly at dividing the working class and turning ordinary people against one another while the billionaires rob and plunder us all. An agenda for working class unity can be built when we stand up for those most victimized and vilified by the right-wing bigots AND when we stand together to fight for the things that the billionaire class has denied us—the fight for healthcare, education, housing, and good-paying jobs for starters. For decades, we’ve been told by both parties that funding war, incarceration, and border militarization are their priorities. May Day showed that working people have another agenda. Now let’s organize to win it.”
Syndicalism
On February 21, 2025, Elon Musk walked onto the stage of the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference and waved around a chainsaw before declaring “I am become meme!” The chainsaw was handed to him by President Javier Milei of Argentina, who used the chainsaw as a symbol of his campaign to “cut bureaucracy” and bring prosperity to Argentina–a campaign so successful that 57% of Argentinians now live in poverty. In typical Muskian fashion however, the chainsaw did not actually function, and instead Elon himself made chainsaw noises.
As Elon jumped around, his ex-girlfriend Grimes took to messaging him publicly on X (Twitter) begging him to please stop ignoring their child’s medical needs. “Plz respond about our child’s medical crisis. I am sorry to do this publicly but it is no longer acceptable to ignore this situation. This requires immediate attention,” She then explained to others on the site, “I’m not giving any details but he won’t respond to texts, calls or emails and has skipped every meeting and our child will suffer lifelong impairment if he doesn’t respond asap.”
This is the man who Trump has granted near-limitless power to cut budgets and fire employees at will through his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
As of writing, this administration has already ordered the firing of 220,000 federal workers. Tens of thousands have been fired so far. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its activities protecting people from debt collectors have been effectively ended. Plans are underway to eliminate the Department of Education. DOGE has already ended dozens of education programs, seemingly targeting in particular those meant to help disabled students, as part of DOGE’s campaign against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Thousands have been fired from the Department of Veteran Affairs, and the administration has ended many of its programs researching cancer and veterans’ healthcare. They have also cut hundreds of millions of dollars in research and education funding, particularly healthcare-related research conducted through the National Institutes of Health. Following in the footsteps of Argentina’s Millei, these government cuts are triggering a reduction in consumer spending, an increase in inflation, and risking negative economic growth in the United States–all potential signs of a nosedive towards economic recession.
Listen: these guys suck.
They just plain suck. It’s not even funny! These people are freaks, and not the good kind.
So let’s just get rid of them!
There is, in fact, a long tradition of working people defying governments and organizing for revolution in their workplace: this tradition is called syndicalism.
Syndicalism is a form of action that focuses on organizing unions as the primary revolutionary vehicles to overturn the power of the capitalist class, take control of the workplace, and run our workplaces and economic system together democratically.
The ideas can perhaps best be summarized by the 1906 Charter of Amiens, which became the program of many syndicalist unions: “In daily protest work the union pursues the coordination of working class efforts, and the growth of the well being of workers, through the carrying out of immediate improvements, such as the diminution in work hours, the increase in salaries, etc. But this task is only one side of the work of syndicalism: it prepares complete emancipation, which can only be fulfilled by expropriation of the capitalists; it advocates as a method of action the general strike; and it considers that the union, today a resistance group will be, in the future, a group for production and redistribution, the basis of social reorganization.”
Prior to World War I, syndicalism was an important form of revolutionary socialist struggle in industrial societies. Animated by the vision of a socialist and egalitarian future, syndicalists organized the first major national unions that many countries ever had, mobilizing millions of workers for revolutionary struggle. With this vision, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) was organized in France in 1895, and to this day it remains the largest labor union in France. The Freie Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften (FVdG) was organized in Germany in 1897, later reorganizing in 1919 as the even larger Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (FAUD). The Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA) was organized in Argentina in 1902. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was organized in the United States in 1905. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was organized in Spain in 1910 out of the merger of several earlier regional syndicalist unions. The Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) was organized in Italy in 1912. The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) was organized in South Africa in 1919, evolving out of the IWW chapter there. The Confederação Geral do Trabalho (CGT) was organized in Portugal also in 1919. Each of these unions would reach over a hundred thousand members, and many of them remained in their time the largest labor union in their country. In some cases they became international unions, such as the IWW with its branches in the tens of thousands in Chile, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.
There are many lessons we can draw from these movements. However, I would like to focus on one particular example of syndicalist organizing relevant to our current crisis. In 1918, the German Empire was overthrown, with a leading role played by a group of labor militants known as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards.
How did this happen?
In 1914, the empires of Europe went to war with each other over competing territorial claims. This was World War I. In a shock to the international socialist movement, the socialist party of Germany, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), did not oppose the German Empire’s war of conquest. Instead, they embraced it! The SPD leadership whipped its parliamentary politicians into funding the war, and opponents of the war within the party ranks were quickly expelled, with many then imprisoned by the Empire. The SPD and the Empire further entered into an agreement called the Burgfrieden, whereby the SPD-affiliated labor unions agreed to not go on strike for the duration of the war and to discipline workers to increase productivity for the war effort. The syndicalist FVdG was the only German union to release a statement opposing the war and Burgfrieden, and for this its leaders were imprisoned and driven underground.
Many rank-and-file workers recoiled at the actions of the SPD and began organizing their own opposition to the war. Labor militants and shop stewards created an independent underground network known as Revolutionäre Obleute, or in English–the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (RSS).
RSS members were organizers recruited from workplaces across unions and firms where the workers were opposed to the war and would be willing to go on strike irrespective of the position of the union leadership. The RSS member from that workplace was chosen by the workplace’s workers as a sort of delegate to the RSS, someone who had the leadership abilities to organize strikes while also being trusted enough to represent coworkers and maintain secrecy. The RSS also targeted the war material industries in particular to recruit members and organize anti-war sentiment as a way to position themselves to halt the entire war effort and the Empire’s military capabilities.
As the war dragged on, the Empire began rationing food and energy, and there were scarcities throughout the economy. Casualties mounted. Family members and loved ones were lost. Dissatisfaction began to grow. RSS militants flexed their muscles in their respective workplaces more and more by initiating illegal strikes for better wages and working conditions, violating the Burgfrieden. By 1916, the RSS felt confident enough to begin organizing their first general strike against the government when SPD parliamentary leader and anti-militarist agitator Karl Liebknecht was arrested, spurring the anti-war movement into public action.
With public anger forming against the war and Liebknecht’s arrest, the RSS decided now was their chance to launch a general strike. The RSS tried to hold an emergency meeting of members at a dancehall, but police had been tipped off and arrived before them. The thrity RSS organizers instead chose a local pub to meet, and there they decided that they had enough support in their respective workplaces to call a strike for the following day, June 28, 1916. They returned to their workplaces, and the following day, they left their workplace for the streets–with thousands alongside them. Initially this meant the large metal-working companies in Berlin went on strike, since this is where the RSS was most densely organized, but thousands of other workers soon went on strike in support. In Berlin and Braunschwig, 55,000 workers in total struck to demand Liebknecht’s freedom, despite mainstream union leadership and the SPD publicly opposing the strike.
This strike did not succeed in its goals–Liebknecht was conscripted to the army, then imprisoned again after he kept trying to organize soldiers against the war. He remained in prison until 1918. For many, this was demoralizing. But the RSS understood this was a long game, and the fact that they were able to muster tens of thousands of workers on an illegal strike for a political goal, rather than a purely workplace-related issue, was a promising sign of what could be achieved. So they organized another strike. After a harsh winter, the Empire reduced everyone’s food rations in March, and a new law was passed conscripting civilians to work in the war industries. The RSS felt there was enough popular anger against the Empire again to launch another strike.
Among syndicalists there is a recurring question of whether to work within the mainstream labor unions and convert them to syndicalism or build new independent radical syndicalist unions outside of them. The majority of the syndicalist movement at this time chose the latter. However, the RSS opted for something a little in between. The RSS agreed with their syndicalist comrades that unions should be the major revolutionary vehicle to overthrow the capitalist system and become the infrastructure of the new democratically-organized economy. And although individual members of the RSS were members of various socialist groups, they were committed to maintaining the independence of the RSS and revolutionary labor movement outside the influence of any political parties. However, the RSS did not attempt to build an independent union.
Instead, RSS members came together across different unions to organize. To that end, their network was both: 1) a parallel infrastructure meant to allow militants to directly organize with their fellow workers and coordinate with each other across workplaces, bypassing the authority of the mainstream union leadership; and 2) a network within each union to coordinate taking over the leadership and direction of that union. Everything is an organizing opportunity, everywhere is a battlefield for class war. To that end, Richard Muller, one of the key leaders of the RSS, successfully passed a resolution in the metalworkers union to demand an end to the new law conscripting civilians to work in the war industries. They then used the union’s upcoming general assembly to organize with RSS and non-RSS union members alike for a new general strike. Muller was imprisoned by the Empire for his actions, but that only served to inflame the more moderate members of the metalworkers union, who now felt that one of their own was being attacked.
The result was an April 1917 general strike that was even bigger than the 1916 one, with an estimate of over 100,000 strikers paralyzing the cities of Berlin, Braunschweig, Halle, Magdeburg, Leipzig, and others. Demands came to free Muller, increase the food ration, and establish democratic political representation. After a day, the pro-war leader of the metalworkers union called for an end to the strike, but tens of thousands continued striking for another week anyway. None of the demands were met. That didn’t stop anyone though. In fact, it just made them more angry.
Several months later, Muller was released, and the RSS began planning another strike. They attempted to forge coalitions with other anti-war elements, in particular the USPD and the Spartacus League. These groups were formed by people who were expelled or resigned from the SPD because they opposed the war, perhaps the most well known of them being Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, and even by this point, the famously moderate Eduard Bernstein. If you’ve lost even Bernstein, you’ve really done it! And done it they did – the German Empire was losing the war, and badly. The SPD’s continued support for the war lacked any credibility. After extensive surveying of their members and fellow workers, the RSS in consultation with the USPD and Spartacus League organized for another general strike on January 28. This time the strike demand was explicit: the people demand the downfall of the regime. RSS members went to general meetings of their unions to call on all workers to strike. Some of the mainstream union leadership denounced the strike but to no avail.
On January 28, 1918, the metalworkers announced the start of the strike by banging hammers on metal oxygen tanks in the factories. Eventually over 500,000 workers went on strike across Germany demanding the overthrow of the government. The police responded with brutality, assaulting assemblies and raiding union offices, targeting and arresting strike leaders. The military was called in to Berlin, and RSS leaders feared they would be willing to fire on the strikers. Out of caution, they called off the strike only a week after it began. This was the third general strike.
It was soon followed up by a fourth and final general strike. Knowing they would have to face off against the military, the RSS and allies began assembling weapons and prepared to initiate the next strike in November. They smuggled thousands of rifles into Berlin and hid them throughout the city. They made plans for armed marches through the city to occupy critical infrastructure and surround the military barracks before the army could be mobilized. Then something unexpected happened: sailors in the German Navy in the northern port of Kiel mutinied, refusing to fight anymore in a losing war, and Kiel itself came out in protest to support them. A revolutionary wind in the air, the RSS moved up their plans and launched the fourth general strike on November 9, 1918. This time, the SPD and pro-war union leadership didn’t dare to oppose it. They saw the writing on the wall.
When the day came, everyone did their duty. Contemporary observers noted with surprise how bloodless and automatic it all seemed. The barracks were surrounded. The soldiers either surrendered or joined the strikers. The railways, bridges, telegraphs, and other critical infrastructure were occupied by armed workers. An armed march on the parliament building, with Richard Muller at its head, led to the pro-war parliamentarians scattering and trying to escape as the armed strikers began seizing each room. New revolutionary committees to manage food, welfare, and trade were already being established in the old offices that once were occupied by war planning. Karl Liebknecht, now freed from prison, declared a new socialist republic from the balcony of the former royal palace to thunderous applause from thousands.
The rest of the story doesn’t have a happy ending. But the post-revolution politics that eventually led to the rise of the Nazis is a story for another time.
What can we learn from this part of the story?
As of writing, Trump is attempting to institute his own Burgfrieden, with an extra emphasis on Burger. He has granted permission to Israel to continue their genocide of the Palestinian people with US weapons, as he organizes murderous US airstrikes against Yemen. He has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport any immigrant, regardless of visa or residency status, who has expressed opposition to the genocide, including the high-profile arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and others. Now Trump is expanding his attempts to arrest and deport hundreds, targeting university activists, academic union organizers, and immigrant labor organizers. Trump additionally signed an executive order nullifying collective bargaining agreements with most federal labor unions, ending union protections for over 800,000 workers. Trump’s threats to withhold funding from universities that don’t crack down harder on anti-genocide protests has led Columbia University to expel Grant Miner, the pro-Palestine president of the university’s academic worker union UAW 2710 of which Mahmoud Khalil was also a member. This was only one day before union contract negotiations were to begin–the university has since cancelled the negotiations. Twenty-two students at Columbia have either been expelled, suspended, or had their degree revoked. Opponents to the war, including labor organizers, are being suppressed and arrested–does any of this sound familiar?
Noticeably absent from the opposition to Trump’s new Burger-frieden is the opposition party itself, the Democratic Party. Leading Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand have instead voted to pass the Trump-Elon austerity bill, which cuts billions in public spending and thousands of jobs. Only a handful of Democratic members of Congress have spoken out against the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and others, while the top party leadership remains silent. The result has been a collapse in public approval of the Democratic Party to literally record lows.
Although the people may not yet demand the downfall of the regime, they at least are demanding a real opposition to it. The layoffs among federal employees have led to nationwide protests by federal labor unions. Federal labor organizers have formed the Federal Unionist Network to coordinate collective action against the administration. They have organized mass rallies in major cities under the banner of Save Our Services. Many of these Save Our Services rallies occurred outside of Tesla vehicle dealerships, helping inspire the Tesla Takedown pickets of Tesla facilities and direct action against Tesla vehicles. In parallel, academic labor unions have mobilized thousands of workers in Stand Up for Science and Kill the Cuts rallies. During the April 5 nationwide day of action, which mobilized at least one million in protest, labor unions joined in marching on the capital to demand freedom for Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and other political prisoners.
We can take a few lessons from the history of syndicalism and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards. For one, the revolutionary syndicalist unions built their strength through organizing the unorganized. DSA is doing this through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and Workers Organizing Workers (WOW). These successes could be even further expanded upon through deep organizing in immigrant communities, which perhaps some chapters are already doing. This would include the translation and dissemination of organizing materials in local languages, developing organizers for EWOC and WOW who can field organizational efforts in local languages, as well as holding organizing meetings in immigrant neighborhoods in the languages of the neighborhood.
As the organizing base widens, more organizers are recruited, and the organizing network expands, there arises a need to coordinate collective action. This could be done in the manner of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards by establishing a formally-organized network of labor militants across workplaces where the workers are opposed to the Trump administration and willing to take politically-motivated labor action. Many labor militants already connect through DSA, and these connections can evolve into the kind of tightly-organized structure that labor confrontation demands: uniting upon a common platform, common strategy, common actions, whereby all members take responsibility for the mobilization and success of the action within the workplace they represent. Like the RSS, this socialist labor network could also fulfill the dual role of organizing militancy within unions while also coordinating action between militants across unions in a way that bypasses potential blocks from moderate leadership. A lot of this work can begin at the chapter level for local labor organizing and can expand nationally, facilitated by resources and connections from the DSA National Labor Commission.
Ultimately, like the RSS, this militancy could organize a succession of nationwide general strikes against the administration. It goes without saying it will take long and intense organizing work to reach this kind of critical mass, but it’s a critical mass we can reach. And these would be hard fights, but they’re hard fights that can be won. We can take heart from some recent successes of illegal strike actions: the Durham city sanitation workers strike in 2023, the public school teacher strikes in right-to-work states in 2018, the Indiana Graduate Worker Coalition strikes in 2022 and 2024, the UAW 4811 strike for Palestine in 2024, and more. Additionally, we have a long history of general strikes in the United States to draw inspiration from, such as the St. Louis General Strike in 1877, the Seattle General Strike in 1919, and the San Francisco General Strike in 1934.
Perhaps the prospect of taking such a direct and combative stance against the administration seems scary. But if left unchecked, Trump and Elon will engineer a reality far more frightening. People are being sent to prison camps. Hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs. The economy is crashing. The country is being thrown into a generalized crisis. As things stand, each and every one of us in this society is stamped with an invisible number that marks our place next in line for losing a job, losing housing, or getting imprisoned. Our only defense is to band together and fight. We have it in our power to change the world. And we must change it. If we stand still, we will lose everything. If we act, we will win everything. The choice is clear. The world is yours, if you simply reach out to seize it.
Smoke Break Socialism
“I can’t support myself and my kid with just this job,” she said. “I need to get a second gig.”
“Shouldn’t you be able to?”
“What do you mean?”
“Shouldn’t you be able to pay all your bills,” I said, “with one job?”
I asked this while a coworker and I were killing time before we both clocked in, and it was clear that she had never considered this idea before. She thought for a second and cited our hourly wage. It’s too low, of course, to cover her expenses. “We work for the biggest coffee company on the planet, whose CEO just got a multimillion-dollar quarterly bonus, but you don’t get paid enough to live. Why not?”
It was an open-ended question, and deliberately so, because I was genuinely curious to see what she thought. The question has been answered with entire books of political thought, but I wanted to see what this person whom I work with every day would make of it. She leans conservative and wouldn’t have responded to any blanket leftist statements or jargon-heavy theory. But none of that was necessary, because with one question, we were suddenly having a real and specific conversation about what it means to survive in a coercive economy. “I was going to say that maybe they can’t afford to pay us more,” she said, “but, I mean, is that actually true? I don’t know.”
Our conversation went from wages to worker exploitation, to rising prices and corporate greed, to the privatization of healthcare, education, and housing, without ever actually talking about capitalism or socialism. I came away from that conversation feeling a sense of solidarity with a coworker despite all the seeming lines of division between us. We work the same job, with the same physical and emotional stresses, the same unpredictable hours, and the same financial pressures. But we also live in the same community and face very similar struggles. And though we often view them from different lenses, we fear the same fears. But in that conversation, I felt like we took a small step forward, together, against the blaze of capitalist greed burning its way through the world.
The sense of doing this together is crucial. The only thing that can counter a minority of capitalist vultures is a fed up majority of united workers. The ‘reform versus revolution’ question is an old and endless debate in leftist circles, but the way out of that loop is coalition building. Without a critical mass of united citizens, neither reform nor revolution is even an option. But how do we build strong coalitions in our present fractured reality? We have to start in the places and with the people we share our time and our labor with, our coworkers. We have the opportunity to do this every day over lunch, during breaks, and in all those moments we put down our tools and step away from our tech to collectively catch our breath. The latest phase of the takeover of our world is happening at top-down, national levels, but our resistance can be waged in the offices, kitchens, and worksites we occupy every day. This isn’t yet a type of struggle where we need to take up arms against the government, but it is very much a struggle that demands we link arms with our community. The good news is that this particular style of unarmed socialism already has a rich tradition from which we can learn, even here in the States.
In the first half of the 20th century, Americans elected a handful of socialist mayors and other local officials who weren’t focused on overthrowing capitalism, they were focused on using the municipal government to guarantee a quality of life for its citizenry. As John Nichols wrote, “public parks, public libraries, public schools, and public utilities were their concern” and are their lasting legacy in this country. These “sewer socialists” left behind a living example of street level leftist engagement and a way to affect national change through local effort. We don’t have their access to the levers of power, but we have each other and the potential to organize into a concerted movement to change the nature of those levers forever. It’s through our conversations at work that we can bring about that movement. The sewer socialists of today need to be “smoke break socialists.”
Part of the power of this approach is that conversations at work are of a completely different nature compared to normal conversations between friends or family members. They’re removed from those spheres, disconnected from the rest of your life, and they involve people you might otherwise not talk to. But that’s also exactly what makes them so powerful and full of revolutionary potential. No matter where the other person comes from or what the circumstances of their life are, in that moment on break at work, you’re united by a shared viewpoint as a worker. Your workplace is a crossroads where disparate identities find common ground.
This same unique aspect of break time conversation also precludes the more traditional means of persuasion. In the fleeting space shared by coworkers as they catch their breath and recharge their batteries, political speeches and soapbox sermons fall flat and feel inauthentic. Theoretical jargon breaks the spell and kills the magic of the moment. Smoke break socialism’s most powerful tool is a question. A genuinely curious, open-ended question that compassionately, but insistently, challenges people to interrogate their beliefs and assumptions. A question that invites them to see themselves in a wider context as a worker amongst a world of workers, all of whom share a dream of more time spent living and less time spent surviving.
My conversation about wages with my coworker was only one of several, all revolving around the same fundamental question. As rents and food prices and college tuition and gas and every other cost of living continue to rise while our wages barely twitch upwards, everyone wonders: why can’t we ever seem to get ahead? I counter with a question of my own: how come in one of the richest countries in the world, we could end up on the street if we lose our jobs? These conversations never go the way I expect. We start out talking about wages and end up talking about guaranteed housing, free education, and what kind of financial and emotional burdens would be relieved by universal healthcare. When one coworker disparaged all this as going against the American trait of self-sufficiency, I asked him about Thomas Paine’s plan for universal basic income. He’d never read Agrarian Justice but immediately looked it up and downloaded a copy. If it was good enough for a Founding Father, I hoped it would be good enough for him.
I live and work in Southern California, so of course the recent and devastating wildfires have been a topic of conversation during breaks. Everyone agrees that the fires and floods are worse each year, and the summers seem to get hotter and hotter. And of course, since we’re living in a conservative county during an age of conspiracy, a few coworkers raised the idea that the fires were a result of the Governor undermining the President over water rights or DEI initiatives undermining the fire department’s ability to effectively fight fires. Gentle requests for reliable sources and verifiable data clear up the conspiracies fairly quickly in these conversations, and they open the way for deeper questions about who has control over our planet’s future and why it isn’t us. I asked once about our reliance on fossil fuels and got into a lengthy conversation about suburban sprawl and our forced dependency on cars. This led to a conversation during a shift the next day about corporate control of public land and the endless consumption of public resources for private profit.
I should note here that I work for a multinational chain of coffeehouses whose revenue reports continue to increase by the billions while its frontline employees huddle in break rooms to collectively groan about our 3-cent hourly raises. My fellow baristas are hardworking people trying their best to survive a corporate culture that mandates an unbreakably cheerful attitude in the face of ever more desperate policies and ploys to increase profits. A lot of smoke break socialism at my job is fueled by the situations we face every day. There’s a large unhoused population in our neighborhood, for example, who have always been able to get free water at our bars and open access to our restrooms. A recent policy update stated that water and bathrooms would only be available to paying customers. This struck most of my coworkers as a needlessly callous move that would also place us in the stressful position of having to deny already struggling people even the smallest gesture of help. During one conversation about this, a simple question about the profit motive behind the policy led to a wide-ranging discussion about the roots of the unhoused crisis, the privatization of mental health care, and defunding police budgets in favor of more social services. Eventually, the conversation became about the overall tendency towards extraction rather than reinvestment by the corporation we work for. In a surprising twist, my most conservative coworker raised the point that the new company policies seemed to be designed to not only extract as much profit as possible from the customer but also as much labor as possible from us.
These conversations have been transformative and liberating for me on several levels. Rather than feel paralyzed by the onslaught of news about the dismantling of my country’s constitution and the public embrace of white supremacy by my government, I feel empowered to seize this moment as an opportunity for mental revolution. Smoke break socialism has come to be a daily chance to take action and affect change, however small and however local. But more importantly, it’s come to be a way to organize and fight back. Before these conversations and collective explorations with my coworkers, our shop was a crew of friends helping each other get by. Now, we’re becoming a crew of fighters working to get control of our lives. We’re talking about unionization and what that would mean for each of us personally. As the organizers would say, we’re seeing our stake in this struggle. We’re seeing how we can take our collective concerns and transform them into collective solutions.
If this approach to socialism is to be of any use, it needs to transform us all from coworkers into coalitions. Which it can do by allowing people to come to a shared understanding of the change they want to see and tying that to community programs and mutual aid projects already in existence. That discussion I had with my coworkers about our unhoused neighbors and their treatment by the company led to several of them asking to accompany my DSA chapter’s next volunteer day at a local soup kitchen. How many more of them would be open to canvassing for immigration justice or rallying for striking workers if they could come to see how these concerns connect to their concerns through more powerful conversations?
Image: Woman taking a smoke break in New York City. Photo by Benjamin Gardere. Photo distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.