Denver DSA is appalled by the shooting of two East High School staff members, the latest incident in a string of gun violence that has occurred in our city and our schools. We grieve together with our community and we stand in solidarity with the students and staff who continue to suffer trauma in a place where they deserve to feel safe. We empathize with the parents who must see their children go to school every day, not sure if they’ll come back alive. And we send our love and hopes for a quick recovery to the East staff members hospitalized in the shooting. This is unacceptable. 

Our community is in pain. Parents and students are afraid, and they have reason to be. People are demanding that those in power do anything to prevent continued gun violence in our schools. It’s not surprising to hear members of our East High School community calling for the only resource that has ever truly been offered to them in moments of trauma – more police. And we’re watching real time how quickly and enthusiastically DPS and the City of Denver is offering up that resource, while similar calls for improved mental health care, violence interruption programs and community and family supports – root cause interventions that are proven to be effective in preventing violence and strengthening our communities – go unheeded and unheard.

Denver DSA joins the resounding calls of the community leaders, student activists and elected officials who wholeheartedly reject the reactionary decision by Superintendent Alex Marrero and the DPS board of education to place armed Denver Police officers in all comprehensive high schools. We stand with the DPS students, teachers and parents who have tirelessly fought for – and previously won – the right to attend school free from armed police. Especially during times of intense fear and tragedy, it is incumbent upon us to call out the dangerous and carceral reality of the police, and reject the idea that guns of any kind – including those carried by police – belong ANYWHERE in our schools.

Putting cops back in schools will do nothing to protect DPS students and staff. Exhaustive research  — as well as our collective lived experience with the tragedies at Uvalde, Parkland and countless other schools — has shown that armed police officers do almost nothing to prevent or interrupt school violence. Rather, they perpetuate it, particularly on Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, queer, and trans young people, as well as students who experience poverty, abuse, and neglect. Police presence in schools increases rates of violence, arrest, suspension, expulsion and the harassment of students of color, and drastically lowering educational and mental health outcomes. And it makes students feel less safe, funneling thousands into the racist school-to-prison pipeline that locks countless students into brutal systems of incarceration.

Cops, metal detectors, lockdown drills, and schools that look like prisons are not the way forward. DPS and the Colorado Department of Education should be stocking schools with an army of counselors, psychologists and de-escalation experts to address the root causes of violence: poverty, poor mental health, and the systematic abandonment of youth in our underfunded public school system. The City of Denver should be offering robust violence intervention programs and more resources for parents and families. And the Democratic supermajority in the Colorado legislature should be acting to support all community members and enact statewide policies to make this violence impossible. We must work to prevent violence in the first place –  not invest in failed “solutions” that will harm students and staff.

No guns in schools, no violence in schools and no cops in schools.

In solidarity,

Denver DSA

Note: posts by individual CVDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

We lost our City Council race.

CVDSA and UVM YDSA members will continue to assess where we went wrong internally. But our defeat on the Progressive Party’s ballot line also happened to take place as part of a “wave election” for the Burlington Democrats, who, if we include the Democrat-endorsed independent Mark Barlow in the North District, won four out of the five of seats up for grabs on our municipal legislature. To make matters worse, both of the citizen-initiated charter change proposals – opposed by our Democratic mayor, supported by the Progs – flopped at the ballot box.

In Ward 8 – where Jake Schumann, the Progressive nominee for the overlapping East District, earned slightly more votes than his competitor Tim Doherty, though Doherty would ultimately prevail thanks to an advantage in Ward 1 – our failure appears to belong to us. We feel bad not only for failing to put Rhone Allison in office but also for opening the door to what looks, possibly, to become a long and extremely dispiriting journey of political advancement for the Democratic victor: Burlington’s blandest 22-year-old careerist, already an entrenched establishmentarian, who, while working for the local branch of the Chamber of Commerce, campaigned without an articulated policy platform of any sort, promising little beyond the assurance that, unlike her Progressive predecessor in Ward 8, who had resigned after seven months of chronic absenteeism, she would actually attend the City Council meetings. And who could doubt it?

Sometimes it’s a little unclear why people who have no political goals or interests (of their own, that is) seek to spend their lives as centrist placeholders in our city halls and statehouses. There are plenty of other ways to feel important and get your name in the paper. Rhone’s campaign, by contrast, took every opportunity to emphasize its ideological intensity: if nothing else, it brimmed with notions.

The biggest notion was socialism. According to Rhone’s literature, they were a Democratic Socialist, not a Progressive, irrespective of their ballot line. Chased by campus police for a month and half, our relentless YDSA volunteers knocked every door in Ward 8’s dormitories on multiple occasions to tell their classmates about the socialist candidate for City Council and their endorsements from the Vermont State Labor Council and Teamsters Local 597.

What did the campaign’s socialism consist of?

It aimed to center workers as much as possible, but pragmatically, given the role of the City Councilor, the bulk of the platform sought to address Burlington’s increasingly obvious housing shortage and its devastating effects on tenants.

We borrowed from models across the country for our proposals to rejuvenate the local public housing authority, to empower tenant unions, and to convert rental buildings into housing cooperatives. In a less clearly socialist fashion, we also wanted an aggressive liberalization of Burlington’s zoning laws, with reforms including, but not limited to, permitting fourplexes in all low-density residential districts and high-rises near UVM; expanding the South End Innovation District plan to reuse the old industrial parcels near Pine Street; and approving the Trinity Campus rezoning.

Of all the housing planks, this last component – or some version of it – seemed, thanks to a measure of preexisting pressure, to stand the best chance of becoming a reality in the near term. A slightly more dramatic addendum to our land-use agenda asked for a rezoning of the Burlington Country Club, a massive waste of valuable urban land that currently pays taxes according to the property’s value as protected “recreation/greenspace” – that is to say, very little. Redesignating its 150 acres as a high- or even medium-density district would generate an unsustainable tax burden for the sprawling, low-revenue business, forcing a sale and a change of use: housing, for instance. We imagined an engaging, left-populist crusade to take on the country club elites and repurpose their exclusionary oasis toward a useful social end.

Students, including an abundance of UVM freshmen and sophomores, constitute the vast majority of Ward 8’s electorate, and Rhone’s campaign operated according to the theory that contact mattered most. Presumably few of these newcomers, living on campus, had developed detailed views on local municipal problems or attachments to specific policy prescriptions to address them, but we believed that most of them had a generally left-wing outlook and would, with enough direct and persuasive encouragement to participate in the election, overwhelm the small minority of grownups in the ward, to our benefit. For one reason or another, it didn’t happen.

Elsewhere in Burlington, however, a specific issue did seem to occupy voters’ minds. Unfortunately, it wasn’t housing. In the year 2023, our election was still about the police.

We all know the story. Emboldened by a summer of vibrant demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, the Prog-led Burlington City Council passed a resolution in 2020 to reduce the size of the police department by 30 percent through attrition. They didn’t know how fast the activism would fade, or how soon the backlash would set in.

On the national level, it didn’t take all that much cleverness for reactionaries to turn the radical-liberal dictum that our politics should emerge from a process of “centering the voices of marginalized communities” to their own purposes: easily enough, journalists in the corporate media found impoverished Black and brown families who would speak eagerly of the police as a crucial source of protection from violence and danger that pervaded neighborhoods wholly unfamiliar to the coddled, quixotic, white academics and NGO leaders who favored abolition. Subsequent sensationalized upticks in certain categories of crime in certain cities (including Burlington) solidified the consensus that progressives (and, in Burlington, Progressives) had gone much too far.

When will the Progs stop paying for this decision, which they’ve already reversed? New York Times stories like “The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont” don’t help, but one possible answer is the Progs will continue to pay until the moment they make it clear that their politics are, in fact, about something other than policing.

In 2023, with a controversial ballot question on the subject of police accountability dominating most of the news coverage of Burlington’s city election, that wasn’t easy to do. Question 7, also known as Community Control of Police, aimed to create a civilian review board with binding powers to investigate, suspend, and fire officers. Even if it had passed locally, it would have faced slim odds in the statehouse, with a near-certain veto ahead from our Republican governor, but a well-funded “no” campaign drew rank-and-file conservatives to the polls, and 63.2% of voters rejected the item in Burlington. Presumably, they didn’t leave the rest of their ballots blank.

CVDSA has always rooted for the Progs. But if only as a thought experiment, we might ask ourselves why. For many of us, our allegiance owes, above all else, to a well-founded contempt for the Democrats and an appreciation that, in Vermont at least, a viable alternative structure exists to provide a route to elected office for left-wing candidates.

Of course, we hated to see the Progressive Party lose its plurality on the City Council. But have the Progs demonstrated what the import of that loss will be for constituents in the now Democratic East District and Ward 8? For instance, will it make their rent go up or down?

Talking about housing didn’t win Rhone the election on March 7, but moving forward, it remains the issue with the strongest chance of displacing “public safety” as a primary subject of concern and debate in our local elections. Everyone who cares about Burlington should aim to find new ways to center housing as a political topic, not only because it represents a potentially viable electoral strategy in the future but also because – unlike Burlington’s out-of-control crime wave – it is real. But Progs who want to play a productive role here will have to demonstrate how their positions on housing actually differ from the Democrats’.

With Burlington now taking tentative steps toward adding new housing in the South End, we should remember that it could have done so years ago. In 2015, the Progs unanimously signed on to a resolution by Councilor Joan Shannon, a Democrat, to prevent a residential rezoning along Pine Street. Local artists had protested out of fear that their studios would soon become apartments, since apartments command higher rents.

The brand of cultural leftism that ranks rich people’s desire for subsidized spaces in which to engage in personal self-expression by making quirky paintings and sculptures ahead of working-class people’s need for shelter isn’t rare in the United States. But future Progs on the City Council may want to ask themselves if this should be their brand of leftism.

More recently, the Progs have prioritized punishing UVM (which, owing to its size, functions as Burlington’s not-for-profit, state-subsidized stand-in for the careless, impersonal greed of Corporate America) for raising its admissions totals over hastening the construction of new, badly needed student housing on the Trinity Campus.

The Progs’ political fixations – trying to protect homeowners from property tax increases, for instance – point to the influence of one of the party’s bases in Burlington: aging hippies who bought houses back when they were cheap, with the aim of defending a small, friendly, oddball city from, among other things, overdevelopment. Permitting the construction of big apartment buildings would – in addition to increasing the housing supply – allow for the development of younger, non-student constituencies, whom we could work to organize around newer, less foggy approaches to ecosocialism and housing justice. But getting there would require the Progs to suffer through some uncomfortable moments during public comment periods at City Hall.

CVDSA members vote for the Progs, but we can’t by ourselves control where the party stands on housing. We can try to make a difference. We can control where CVDSA stands.

Coincidentally, a couple weeks after Rhone’s loss, Denver DSA stirred a tempest online when it announced that its membership had voted to oppose the construction of a mixed-use neighborhood – with market-rate and income-restricted housing, a grocery store, and a public park – on the site of the abandoned Park Hill Golf Course, just below an A Line commuter rail stop. Two of the chapter’s elected officials had already said they would vote against Referred Measure 2O, the local ballot question that would enable redevelopment if approved.

The parallels to our own proposal were unmistakable. Our comrades in Colorado had taken a different view.

The understanding that DSA’s housing organizing will focus principally on building tenant power, advocating for rent control and Section 9 repairs, and advancing various forms of social ownership is uncontroversial; the open question is whether or not DSA should actively oppose the private development that other organizations – YIMBY Denver, for instance – regard as the sole solution to our cities’ housing crises. DSA chapters across the country have defended their partnerships with local anti-gentrification groups against charges of “Left NIMBYism,” but critics can point to stranger bedfellows: specifically, the unproductive minor nobility of conservative homeowners and mom-and-pop landlords who, in a historical materialist analysis, would seem to represent a more regressive political force than the corporate developers whose intentions to expand their real estate holdings threaten the former groups’ ability to build personal wealth strictly by contriving conditions of scarcity.

In the case of the Park Hill Golf Course, Denver DSA could hardly make a convincing case that it is on the verge of realizing a socialist vision for its 155 open acres, if only voters next month reject the plan put forth by Westside Development Partners. Denver doesn’t have a public developer to turn to on the city or state level, let alone one with enough capital to take on a project this big. Last year, socialists in Rhode Island achieved a major victory when their legislature authorized a $10 million pilot program to build new mixed-income housing under state ownership, but even if housing organizers in Colorado managed to win similar legislation, it would not create anything close to enough public-sector capacity.

To many observers, the usual complaint that the development will displace Black and brown residents fell flat this time: it is, after all, a golf course – an enormous empty space – not an embattled gentrifying community. Westside’s plan could be better, surely, but it underwent what has become, by now, a more or less standard process by which developers seek to win public approval before a zoning change, with the signing of a community benefits agreement that promised 25% affordable housing; recreational, cultural, and commercial facilities; and token financial giveaways to adjacent low-income residents and nonprofits.

Activists might have pushed the Denver City Council harder to demand a little more before agreeing to rezone the golf course on Westside’s behalf, but that vote has already taken place. If the general public now refuses at the ballot box to remove the conservation easement that bars all construction on the site, there is no clear path to building housing of any kind in the near future, at any level of affordability.

As it is, Westside’s mixed-use, transit-oriented plan represents a clear upgrade in relation to the surrounding development pattern, with its long, uninterrupted rows of overpriced ranches. The proposal is, in a basic sense, urban.

Most socialists would like to be urbanists; they just can’t stomach becoming market urbanists. Virtually all of us ardently support public transit, pedestrian infrastructure, and bike lanes. Most of us identify suburban development as an ecological catastrophe that will contribute more and more carbon emissions until we create opportunities for people to live closer together instead. Many of us, moreover, share a conception of great cities as uniquely supportive and enriching social fabrics that, by providing an abundance of free, easy-to-access amenities, from parks to cultural programming, as well as constant opportunities for human interconnection, use the wealth of the public sphere to mitigate some of the inequalities of class society in deeply meaningful and empowering ways.

Few American metropolises have a built environment capable of embodying this ideal. Burlington has much to recommend it, but it falls a little short of the minimum density threshold for total walkability, which, especially given its inadequate bus service, is another way of saying that it cuts off people who don’t own cars from full, democratic participation in its civic life. Like most cities, it would be better if it had more people living in it.

But how do we get them there, except by giving capitalists permission to build expensive new homes? This is where DSA begins to balk. The left-wing caricature of private development, which pictures every new building as a stack of glossy condos that will, after their purchase by billionaire foreign investors, sit forever vacant, is an exaggeration; in fact, the shoddy, faux-luxury “gentrification buildings” in places like New York City’s Bushwick, for instance, house many of the debt-saddled, downwardly mobile college grads who turned North Brooklyn into one of DSA’s strongest bases. But it’s true, of course, that market-rate construction will not serve those who struggle most to find shelter. So why would we want more of it?
Socialists, understandably, view the question of upzoning through the lens of “What is the socialist thing to do here?” Naturally, the building trades unions – long derided on the Left, anyway, for their supposedly immovable conservativism – always want to build, but it doesn’t feel socialist to pave the way for private profit. That’s because, in the most straightforward sense, it isn’t socialist.

As we all know, our socialism does not yet exist, except as an embryonic force. But where can it begin to achieve its expression? Sometimes we look in the wrong places.

For example, we may imagine disputes between big developers and the “communities” that oppose them as secondhand iterations of the capital-labor conflict, playing out in a modified arena but with the same underlying dynamics. This can allow us to claim victories that, on the 21st-century shop floor, come all too rarely. America’s unions may be weak, but its NIMBYs are reasonably strong, and by positioning ourselves as ideologically distinct junior partners in anti-development coalitions dominated by the latter, we can take part in their wins. The recognition – open or suppressed – that the primary political forces behind these “victories” would mount even more combative campaigns against the development of housing for low-income renters, if the possibility of it ever arose, may only slightly dampen the celebratory mood when a market-rate project fails.

When anticapitalists seek power within the capitalist state, they face the awkward reality that, alongside pushing for alternative ways of organizing our society, they must also think seriously – if they want to protect their electoral futures as well as the here-and-now material interests of their constituents – about how to manage a profit-driven mode of production in order to yield the least bad possible outcomes. Nobody benefits when we collapse specific, correctable market failures into the broader inadequacy of capitalism as an economic system. Until we win socialism, we will never have a society where all of us can thrive, but the question of exactly how few of us will thrive in the meantime should still concern us, and not only in areas where potential gains for working people would derive from class struggle in a traditional sense.

The uninspiring nature of YIMBY “success stories” – where a flurry of new construction in one city or another proved to reduce the size of rent increases in subsequent years, relative to a comparable city, without eliminating them altogether, let alone solving homelessness – offers a temptation to dismiss their significance. Rezonings tend to increase the housing supply by less than their advocates promise, and the effects of increased supply play a smaller role than advocates purport in increasing affordability. But the effects remain real, both for existing tenants and those hoping to move into an area. Few renters would turn down a chance to knock a few bucks off the monthly check to their landlord, and we shouldn’t allow our distaste for YIMBYs themselves, in their stereotypical libertarian form, to convince us, through an inevitably convoluted logic, that superficially positive zoning reforms would contravene our deeper revolutionary aims.

In many political disputes – like Denver’s, for instance – there is no structurally socialist entity with which we, as socialists, can align ourselves. Instead, we must choose sides among various partially or fully malignant forces within capitalist society. But that doesn’t have to mean losing sight of our long-term vision. As we weigh in on conflicts that pit land-use patterns that, even under capitalism, have the capacity to promote a measure of social solidarity against the sprawling, car-dependent infrastructure that undergirds American individualism, we should do so, naturally, with the goal of socialism in mind.

All sorts of issues come before DSA’s elected officials, as they do any other. They may find themselves in a position to craft new industrial regulations to protect consumer safety or the planet, to the detriment of corporate profits; less comfortably, they may also – if the ideology of the organization doesn’t constrain them – notice the necessity of shrinking misguided regulatory apparatuses in order to stimulate the production of essential goods: unavoidably a boon for capitalist firms, which will dedicate a portion of their proceeds to political donations for right-wing candidates and causes, as the real estate lobby reliably demonstrates.

It’s not the only one. In New York, private solar and wind energy companies helped fend off NYC-DSA’s attempt to pass the Build Public Renewables Act last year. We should never mistake investors in commercial clean power for friends, but neither can we, in this parallel case, afford to lend a hand to NIMBY activists or municipal officials in their aim to develop new land-use hurdles that would make it more difficult for these firms to site solar and wind farms on scenic hillsides, even if doing so would serve to drain some of the companies’ political influence by depriving them of revenue. We can’t meet our goals for clean electricity without their contributions. As we fight for a better approach, we cannot pretend that will not, for the foreseeable future, continue to rely, at least in part, on on our enemies.

Housing can be more complicated. How, for instance, should we sort the competing claims for space between residential and industrial uses under our cities’ zoning regimes? When, if ever, does it make sense to raze functional middle-density neighborhoods in order to construct high-rises?

But in housing-starved cities, multifamily construction on obviously underutilized parcels – on parking lots, golf courses, and other sites of minoritarian dominance, including single-family neighborhoods – is as close to an unalloyed good as we’re going to get. In the lead-up, we can negotiate with developers, when possible, over rates of affordability and public amenities, but it is a mistake for frustrated socialists to prioritize the cathartic act of “standing up to big real estate” over the production of housing. Zoning offers a rare veto power over capital, which elsewhere does more or less whatever it wants whenever it wants, and the desire to wield this power punitively, understandably, is strong. But all zoning can do is say yes or say no to someone else’s proposal; it can’t create anything.

Such zoning-based showdowns with developers become less exciting when we realize how little we can actually win. At times, the socialist position on striking real estate deals can embody a strange paradox: we loudly insist that private development can never truly serve the needs of the people, yet simultaneously we seem to believe that, if only we hold fast to an impossibly ambitious list of demands during each rezoning, we can turn a proposed condo tower into something like public housing.

In reality, when a city councilor boasts that they forced a developer in their district to exceed, by a significant margin, the maximum level of affordability that it said it could meet on a project without compromising the project’s viability as a profit-making endeavor, what they usually mean – as in the case of Innovation QNS in Queens – is that the mayor quietly agreed to kick in an extra subsidy from the city’s coffers in order to boost the number of income-restricted units, allowing the councilor to save face among gentrification-sensitive voters without tanking the project. This additional concession doesn’t come from capital; it comes from the public, which props up the developer with cash that could, alternatively, have funded a democratically managed community land trust or a limited-equity co-op.

Under capitalism, capital rarely ever really loses. At worst, it walks away and finds a more agreeable home elsewhere.

This, of course, is one reason why it’s so vital to fight for the establishment of state- and city-owned real estate development corporations. But DSA’s orientation toward housing in general would improve immeasurably with the realization – possibly a tough pill to swallow for some of our tenant organizers – that we will not win socialism through an obstructive struggle against real estate capital specifically. To tell ourselves otherwise is to lose a piece of our Marxism: specifically, the piece through which we can regard capitalist development as a progressive force, delivering the hard infrastructure that our socialist revolution – which we will win as workers (for instance, in the “conservative” building trades), not as consumers of housing – will inherit.

This is not a call to reduce DSA’s emphasis on housing in municipal politics. It is the opposite: Burlington may not yet have caught up, but in most places, housing already sits at the center of the debates about our cities, and we must engage with it through a wider set of political lenses, including some that feel more wonky than radical. Electorally, DSA has no choice but to build itself up from the local level, and to do that, we need a municipal agenda that will measurably improve America’s cities in short order. We can’t afford to be right on the big questions and wrong on the small ones.

Our housing organizing will continue to focus on tenants, but our policy positions should reflect a common-sense climate-conscious view on land use and a normal recognition of the need to increase the housing supply, unclouded by a fetishistic hatred of “empty luxury condos.”

After all, it’s the capitalist’s role, not ours, to look at an apartment building and see only a spreadsheet of projected profits. We can notice the plumbing, the electrical work, the sturdy walls and roof, and know that, one day, it will be social housing – like all the other housing will be – because the private developer that built it, like every other capitalist, will no longer exist.

This will happen in Burlington. Until then, we want to make it as nice a town as it can be, with plenty of apartments to rent. Some of the new units, we hope, will be public housing, and we’ll continue to work on making that happen. But at first, most of them probably will be private.

In this panel discussion, DSA members from several religious traditions share their perspectives on the importance of religion for sustaining, inspiring, and organizing political movement on the Left. Speakers for this event include Asad Dandia (Muslim), Ty Kiatathikom (Buddhist), Clyde Grubbs (Unitarian Universalist), Marie Venner (Catholic). This event was moderated by Nicole-Ann Lobo.

To the NPC of Democratic Socialists of America, the publishers of Democratic Left, and the Rutgers University community,

Central NJ DSA and North NJ DSA were alarmed to see that Democratic Left, a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America, recently published a piece by Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway, a man notorious for fighting against union demands.¹While this article has since been taken down and replaced, we are calling on Democratic Left to publish pieces by Rutgers educators and workers who are involved in its union contract campaigns. It is imperative that the DSA uplift the voices of working people, especially those challenging men like Holloway and the values they uphold. Going forward, it is vital that the NPC and Democratic Left do not undercut the labor and housing work of local chapters.

Central NJ and North NJ DSA are deeply involved in solidarity work with the Rutgers University unions, like AAUP-AFT, PTLFC-AAUP-AFT, BHSNJ-AAUP, URA-AFT, and other unions that represent the thousands of workers at Rutgers University that are working without a contract. Some of those workers are our own members. As an employer, Rutgers University has failed to bargain in good faith or offer dignified terms for the workers.

The decision to feature Holloway’s introduction to the 2023 edition of The Souls of Black Folk is a severe misjudgment on behalf of the editorial team at Democratic Left, in light of Holloway’s obstinate resistance to recognize the validity of union organizing and workers’ demands. As president of Rutgers, Holloway has been breaking the power of campus unions, even recently releasing a statement pitting workers against students and their families. He has been running the University for the benefit of predatory developers and business interests, without regard for the needs of the workers, students, or surrounding communities. None of these despicable actions are new – Holloway has established himself as an anti-union zealot as a dean at Yale, before his time at Rutgers, dragging with him a history of brutal and unnecessary layoffs.

Throughout the union contract campaign at Rutgers, our chapters have been striving, alongside the unions, to bring together faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members into a broad coalition against Holloway’s vision of a corporate university. Furthermore, we have united unions’ struggle with local tenant struggles, and built strong connections that we will leverage in our chapter’s long term work. President Holloway is a representative of the system we stand against. In direct opposition to the coalition-building work of our local chapters, we were shocked to learn that Democratic Left chose to publish an article written by Holloway and centering his views on socialism on the same day as the Rutgers’ unions rallied in Newark. This decision undermined the important solidarity and coalition work of our chapters. It is evident there was little research done into Holloway’s work before Democratic Left published this piece and the negligence to properly evaluate the credentials of a writer and historian shows a profound lack of coordination between National DSA and local chapters.

On February 28th, the faculty union held a rally in Newark to denounce the university administration for their greed and intransigence, to show unity among workers and the broader community, and to begin the union’s historic strike vote. It was a powerful event, the culmination of many months of enduring work, and DSA showed up in force to connect with fellow workers and offer our vision of a just and dignified society, a society in which educators and workers at Rutgers are compensated for their labor that sustains the university as a place for education and learning. Holloway’s vision, alongside others in his administration, is to find ways to pay workers as little as possible, all the while speaking about fairness in the most superficial terms.

President Holloway, who receives a salary of $1.2 million dollars, is hypocritical for reflecting on the legacy of socialist luminary W.E.B. DuBois while the workers he is responsible for negotiating with struggle to pay their bills.² In his 1918 article, “The Black Man and the Unions,” DuBois lauds the power of unionizing. “Collective bargaining has, undoubtedly, raised modern labor from something like chattel slavery to the threshold of industrial freedom, and in this advance of labor white and black have shared.”³

It was a mistake to invite Holloway to provide the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk because of his long history of failing to live up to the standards set forth by DuBois’ work and writings and by the other authors involved, who themselves represent a radical and more just vision of society. It bears reiterating that Holloway’s trail of destruction for everyday working people at the institutions he’s been part of extends far. Examples once more include Holloway’s disastrous tenure as Dean of Yale College during the 2017 hunger strikes of Yale graduate workers demanding better wages and working conditions, as Provost of Northwestern University amidst the 2019 “discussions” surrounding racist visiting lecturer Satoshi Kanazawa, and currently President of Rutgers during the Covid-19 pandemic when he laid off more than a thousand union workers as part of a broader “austerity” while him and others retained their own exorbitant salaries.⁴Resisting calls for divestment at Rutgers, Holloway has also strengthened institutional ties to Israel and the American military-industrial complex through a tech partnership with Tel Aviv University, opening the door to taxpayer funded weapons research.⁵ Holloway fails to achieve the wisdom and fraternity championed by DuBois. If he wants to live up to the socialist and anti-imperialist vision of DuBois, Holloway must settle a fair contract with the workers, and end the displacement and exploitation of the local communities.

For these reasons and more, we are reiterating our demand for President Holloway to quit pitting worker power against a prosperous Rutgers University and working class New Jerseyans and for Democratic Left, part of our own organization, DSA, to publish the insights and analysis of Rutgers workers.

In Solidarity,

Central New Jersey DSA
North New Jersey DSA

1. https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/another-black-history-month-ends-what-will-we-do/ 
2. https://www.nj.com/education/2020/01/12m-a-house-and-a-car-what-are-the-other-perks-the-new-rutgers-president-will-receive.html 
3. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-black-man-and-the-unions/ 
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/opinion/why-yale-graduate-students-are-on-a-hunger-strike.html, https://dailynorthwestern.com/2019/01/24/campus/holloway-defends-academic-freedom-saying-kanazawas-removal-would-make-matters-worse/, https://www.nj.com/opinion/2023/01/rutgers-prioritizes-union-busting-and-gaslighting-public-health-care-workers-opinion.html 
5. https://bdsmovement.net/news/academia-weapons-and-occupation-how-tel-aviv-university-serves-interests-israeli-military-and 

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Teachers and Community Defeat Stealth OUSD School Closure and Layoff Plan

By Michael Sebastian

On Tuesday February 28, with only 24 hours notice, OUSD board president Mike Hutchinson called a special meeting to consider resolutions relating to “Budget Adjustments” and a “Classified Employee Reduction in Work Force.” These resolutions, which Hutchinson negotiated in private with the district superintendent in the midst of teacher contract talks, would have cut 100 classified positions (translators, social workers, restorative justice counselors), enacted a district-wide hiring freeze, and merged ten schools in the district. Rapid-response organizing by Oakland teachers and the community helped defeat both resolutions, with candidates endorsed by the Oakland Education Association (OEA), Bachelor, Brouhard, and Williams, voting against. Board member Thompson joined Board President Hutchinson in the votes, while board member Davis abstained. 

Tuesday’s emergency meeting comes on the heels of the recent victory reversing planned school closures. Hutchinson had supported that earlier resolution, but angered many when he joined the superintendent in bringing forward the latest austerity proposal. At a time when OUSD has ample funding, the community loudly rejected the idea of cutting resources, schools, and jobs for the district instead of directing that funding to meet the needs of our students, as demanded by OEA.

OEA has presented the district with a list of common good demands to strengthen Oakland’s public schools and protect students as they bargain for a new contract. The resolutions presented on Tuesday are viewed as pitting teachers against other staff employees in order to unfairly strengthen the district’s hand at the bargaining table. “Tuesday’s proposal, cutting mainly from SEIU and AFSCME jobs within the district, was meant to create false antagonism between workers and weaken support for teachers and their demands,” said Lexi Ross, who co-chairs East Bay DSA’s OEA solidarity group. “OUSD has received $54 million in new state funding this year. Allocating that funding to fulfill teacher’s demands and cutting from the bloated administrative budget would eliminate any need for the cuts presented on Tuesday.” 

The magnitude of OUSD’s administrative expenditures has been a major point of contention. Comparing Oakland’s administrative budget to Santa Ana Unified, a district with 10,000 more students, Oakland spends $20 million more on administrative salaries. Instead of cutting needed jobs and resources from our schools, the district could “chop from the top”, cut the administrative bloat and be able to provide the common good demands that OEA is bargaining for.

At the meeting, community members voiced unanimous opposition to the cuts. Most public comments expressed dismay and exasperation that the district continues to fight to defund our schools when there are safety and resource issues district wide. Many mentioned the egregious amount that OUSD spends on administrative positions and its central office. Shane Ruiz, co-chair of East Bay DSA had this warning for board members voting in support of this budget at Tuesday’s meeting: “Networks are forming, people are watching, and come November people will be held accountable.”

The district’s efforts to pit educators against other essential school workers, and its claims that a long-deserved raise for teachers must come at the cost of layoffs, school closures or mergers may run afoul of state labor laws. Last year, OEA filed an unfair labor practice charge with the California Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) when Budget and Finance Director Lisa Grant Dawson sent an email stating that the district would have to close and merge 12 schools to give teachers a raise. 

In a recent Oaklandside article, followed by a Facebook live stream, Mike Hutchinson stated: “Unfortunately for our budget, it’s a zero-sum game. In order for us to create resources to prioritize new and different things, we have to create those resources by making budget adjustments.” On his Facebook live stream Hutchinson also claimed that he was going to deliver an “historic” raise for teachers, but unless the budget with layoffs was approved the district wouldn’t have the money for those raises. Statements like these could set up an impasse similar to the unfair labor practice charge that OEA filed last year. 

The current round of contract negotiations have apparently stalled, with the district not meeting with OEA, the teachers’ union, since February 15, due to a lack of new proposals to bargain over. With little to show for months of negotiations with the district, OEA and its sister union, United Teachers of Los Angeles, are planning to walk out of “PD” or professional development sessions to attend simultaneous community rallies.

The community is invited to join educators at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater on Wednesday, March 15 from 2pm-6pm to demand that OUSD bargain in good faith.

Atlanta DSA and YDSA GT Call on Norfolk Southern to Fully Fund East Palestine Cleanup, Compensate Residents and Meet Railroad Workers’ Demands!

For centuries, railroad companies like Norfolk Southern have prioritized profits for the capitalist class over the health and safety of their workers and the general public. Railroad workers endure notoriously brutal workplace conditions, are often expected to work on-call around the clock, and frequently suffer fatal accidents due to overwork and exhaustion. Meanwhile, as profits for billionaire shareholders rise, companies like Norfolk Southern continue to lobby in favor of industry deregulation and cutting corners – resulting in the slashing of maintenance, staffing, and equipment inspections as average train sizes increase – proving they see railroad workers as expendable.

In response to this exploitation, a majority of railroad workers nationwide rose up this past fall to reject an inadequate union contract which excluded crucial demands like sick leave and an end to Precision Scheduled Railroading. While workers prepared to strike, U.S. government officials invoked the antiquated Railroad Labor Act (RLA) to deny over 100,000 railroad workers the right to strike and tyrannically impose the unacceptable contract. Atlanta DSA and YDSA GT stand in full solidarity with the railroad workers, who continue to fight for better working conditions and reject Congress’s blatant labor rights violations.

Decades of deregulation have culminated in the derailment of multiple trains over the last month – including the horrendous incident on February 3rd during which a Northfolk Southern 32N train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, leading to a fire and subsequent evacuation of thousands of residents. This derailment was neither an “accident” nor “unavoidable”, as the Northfolk Southern executives would have you believe. On the contrary, this violent wreck – which endangered working people, contaminated drinking water, and even led to mass death of local wildlife – was the direct result of capitalist deregulation, attacks on workers’ rights, and the valuation of profits over the environment and human life. 

Atlanta DSA and YDSA GT join Railroad Workers United in calling for the immediate action of regulatory agencies and Congress to rein in Class One railroad corporations and pass legislation to place railroads under public ownership.

Additionally, we demand the following of Norfolk Southern, which is headquartered in Atlanta: 

1. Fund a massive clean up effort in the area around East Palestine to ensure no further damage is done to human health and the surrounding environment and watershed. 
2. Fully compensate every resident of the East Palestine area harmed by the derailment.
3. End the harmful business model known as Precision Scheduled Railroading, and ensure sufficient staffing in all crafts, with all trains operating crews of two people minimum.
4. Implement adequate maintenance and inspections of locomotives and rail cars, tracks and signals, wayside detectors, and cap train length and weight at a reasonable level.
5. Concede to the demands of railroad workers – guaranteeing them training, sick leave, adequate time off work, and an end to draconian attendance policies.
6. Terminate all lobbying practices aimed at abolishing or blocking safety rules and regulations that will help make the railroad safer.
7. Divest from the Atlanta Police Foundation and withdraw all support from the Atlanta police facility known as Cop City.

Further, we call on the Georgia Institute of Technology to cut ties with Norfolk Southern and its Board of Directors until it meets the above demands and ceases its attack on workers’ rights, destruction of the environment, and violence towards working people.

Welcome back comrades! In this segment, Ralph & Nicole-Ann kick off a new season for Heart of a Heartless World, catching up after a long hiatus and giving a preview of what is to come this year. It's a good dose of solidarity, spirituality, and of course, socialism – all the things that give us a little hope for the world.

References

Statistics on Racial Disparities: Sentencing Project, The Vera Institute, MacArthur Foundation

U.S. Ranking in Incarceration Rates vs. The World: Prison Policy Initiative

Incarceration Rates in Colorado by Geography (heatmaps), including breakdowns by ZIP codes

The private contractor families blame for deaths in El Paso County CJC

Suicide and mental health disparities in El Paso County CJC

The complete list of CJC deaths in 2022

The growth of jails in the U.S. - and how they are harming our communities

A Reuter’s investigative report on deaths in jails nationwide

66% of the people who died in jails from 2009-2019 were awaiting trial - meaning they were never convicted of a crime

How for-profit “community corrections” facilities set parolees up for failure and contribute to high recidivism

Report on recidivism rates state-by-state

Out of Reach Colorado Housing Prices (report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition)

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in jails & prisons*

Mental illness in jails and prisons nationwide

The mental health impacts of incarceration

The Prison-Industrial Complex

#StopCopCity

*The original ACE study was racist. Check out this resource instead.

Police Brutality in Colorado Springs

De’Von Bailey murdered by CSPD after being stopped for a false report

Justice for Dalvin

CSPD murders a 63-year-old man having a mental health crisis

CSPD Excessive force against a 17-year-old girl

CSPD Excessive force and violent language against Colorado Springs Black Lives Matter protestors in summer 2020

Club Q

The Club Q shooter’s 2021 terrorism

How the D.A. and Judge failed to prevent the shooting at Club Q

Low enforcement of red flag laws in Colorado

Preliminary Hearings that presented evidence against Aldrich, including evidence that the shooting was bias-motivated

The Receipts

Reporting on CSPD’s infiltration and surveillance of leftist organizations in Southeast Colorado Springs

Reporting on attempts by CSPD and the FBI to entrap leftists

CSPD Body camera footage of cops discussing beating Colorado Springs Housing for All protestors

The Alphabet Boys podcast series on how the FBI planted a sex offender in the Denver BLM movement to surveil, incite violence, & entrap leftists (with an episode on surveillance and attempts at entrapment in Colorado Springs)

Community Alternatives to Public Safety

CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) is a Eugene, Oregon-based street clinic that intervenes in mental health crises without the presence of law enforcement. They receive funding as an alternative to policing and have saved the city millions of dollars.

STAR (Support Team Assisted Response) Program is a response program in Denver that sends trauma-informed behavioral health professionals to respond to community crises related to mental health, homelessness, substance use, and more without the assistance of police. They have reduced the number of arrests and improved community well-being since their beginnings in 2020.

Colorado HB17-1326 was a two-part bill that created parole reform by reducing the amount of time a person could be reincarcerated for a technical parole violation. The second part of the bill redirected $4 million in savings from the parole reform into a program called Transforming Safety , which provides grants to community organizations in North Aurora and Southeast Colorado Springs — two communities that are overpoliced and disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration — for creating crime prevention programs.

Work and Gain Education and Employment Skills (WAGEES) is a program to support people reentering society from incarceration by using Colorado Department of Corrections funds to allow community organizations to provide job skills training and assist with employment placement. This program has been so successful at reducing recidivism and helping people transition back into community that it has received increased funding and been set for renewal in legislative sunset reviews.

The Gathering Place in Denver provides free supportive, wrap-around services to women, children, and transgender people struggling with poverty in the Denver area. They provide housing assistance, food assistance, education and job training, healthcare, and mental health services.

Liberatory Harm Reduction is a philosophy that centers freedom of choice and treatment for those who use substances if they want it. Colorado has several harm reduction programs that offer clean syringes, overdose prevention education, and Narcan distribution to help people stay safer as opposed to using incarceration to punish substance use. However, many of these programs operate under a public health model rather than a liberatory model. Check out the link to learn more about the difference and why we need more programming that works under a liberatory harm reduction model.

One Million Experiments is a project that shares stories of community projects that redefine safety and explore alternatives to community-based public safety.

Interrupting Criminalization is a resource organization that provides a platform for programs and ideas around alternatives to policing and incarceration. They also coordinate between organizations to help build bigger campaigns for abolition work.

Do No Harm is a philosophy and guide for healthcare professionals to commit to serving clients while refusing to cooperate with the process of criminalizing and incarcerating them.

What is Transformative Justice?

Abolition Reading List

We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba

Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, and Erica Meiners

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

The End of Policing by Alex Vitale

Saving Our Own Lives: Liberatory Harm Reduction by Shira Hassan

Ready to join the fight against mass incarceration and police brutality? Join DSA!

You can also help support our work by donating to help us print more copies of our abolition zine! You can also share a downloadable version here.

On Feb. 21st Boston DSA emailed out the following call to action to Boston residents encouraging them to give public testimony on how the Mayor’s rent control proposal is in need of serious changes

Tomorrow, Wednesday, Feb. 22nd, at 10 am the Boston City Council will be hearing public comment on the Mayor’s proposed rent control legislation. Unfortunately, the proposal as is does not adequately protect tenants from increasing rents. It excludes many renters’ landlords and still allows for annual rent increases of 6 percentage points more than inflation (and rent increases of up to 10%). Most gravely, since the proposal lacks vacancy controls it may even incentivize evictions.

We are asking people to either submit written testimony or show up to give public comment tomorrow to point out to the Council that Boston deserves better. Boston is one of the most expensive cities to live in within the US; we need more affordable housing options.

To testify virtually on Zoom, email this address and ask for a link to give public comment: Christine.oDonnell@Boston.Gov. To submit written testimony, simply email your comments to this email: Ccc.Go@Boston.Gov. There is no deadline to submit written testimony.

If while drafting your testimony you’re looking for specific points to make on how Boston City Government could be ensuring people have affordable housing, here are some suggestions:

• First and foremost, the rent control proposal absolutely needs vacancy controls added in. Meaning, rent-increase caps must extend to both current and new tenants. Absent vacancy control, landlords will just have an extra incentive to evict renters and find higher-income tenants.

• The rent control proposal’s ‘just cause’ eviction protections have too many exemptions / potential loopholes to make up for the lack of vacancy controls. Most importantly, the vast majority of evictions in Boston are for non-payment of rent, which are not protected at all.

• The rent control proposal should limit increases to no higher than inflation in the given year.

• The rent control proposal excludes too many tenants. For example, it excludes buildings where the property owner lives there and there are also six or fewer dwelling units.

• The rent control proposal does not give due consideration to students who also suffer from their universities’ exorbitant housing costs.

• The rent control proposal should also include an overall rent cap, in an actual dollar amount.

Furthermore, we encourage folks to point out to the Council how rent control alone is not sufficient to end the exploitation of tenants by real-estate interests. More needs to be done to address the core problems the housing market generates.

• More municipal dollars should be committed to community-land trusts.

• We need more social housing and greater public funding for maintenance so as to have the upkeep residents deserve. Accordingly, the State Legislature must approve Boston’s request for a real estate transfer fee.

• The State Legislature must also pass legislation guaranteeing a universal right to free legal counsel in housing court for tenants.

Again, the public hearing is tomorrow at 10 am. And to testify virtually on Zoom, email this address and ask for a link to give public comment: Christine.oDonnell@Boston.Gov. To submit written testimony, send your comments to this email: Ccc.Go@Boston.Gov. 

P.S. We want to further acknowledge that housing justice isn’t simply attained with governmental policy changes, but through tenants collectively organizing and compelling real-estate interests to act. So, we encourage you to get in touch with the chapter’s Housing Working Group if you wish to plug in to that sort of organizing — simply email Housing@BostonDsa.Org and ask to join.

By Michael Sebastian

As the Oakland Education Association bargains a new contract, it has raised a comprehensive set of common good demands to help strengthen Oakland’s public schools and support students. OEA rallied hundreds of teachers and community members in support of these demands at the February 8 school board meeting. 

At the rally outside La Escuelita elementary school ahead of the board meeting, participants heard speeches from OEA teachers and parent leader Pecolia Manigo, who fired up the crowd with chants of “Who’s schools? Our schools!” Manigo, a leader of the Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network (PLAN) and recent candidate for school board, said “we can get this confused, that this is just about a contract. The contract is a representation of what we want in our schools.”

As the school board meeting opened to the public, hundreds flowed into the gymnasium where the meeting was held. Ismael Armendariz’s suggestion to “cut pork at the top” sparked chants of “chop from the top,” referencing the top-heavy finances of the district’s budget, where the superintendent makes $294,000 and other administrators pull in large salaries which divert money away from schools, teachers, and children. As OEA observed in a pamphlet in 2019: “OUSD is ‘broke’ on purpose so billionaire influencers can make financial arguments for closing neighborhood schools, refusing living wages for teachers, and denying students the support they need in order to learn and grow.” The chronic lack of resources has less to do with funding and more to do with who will foot the bill. The budget will either be balanced on the backs of black and brown students, as Armendariz said in the gymnasium, or the district will need to “chop from the top”.

As the meeting continued and the floor opened for public comment, attendees spoke about the dangerous consequences of chronically underfunded schools. One teacher spoke via Zoom about finding guns in school lockers, and a student report back showed that roughly half of high school students in OUSD don’t feel safe at the school that they attend. These problems arise because schools are understaffed, which is why OEA is calling for smaller class sizes, more nurses, counselors, psychologists and school librarians. Reinvesting in our schools and fully staffing them is the only way to create safe and productive learning environments for children.

Part of the reason that Oakland schools are so understaffed is that teachers in Oakland are substantially underpaid. Oakland is one of the most expensive cities to live in the state, and one of the lowest paid for teachers in Alameda county. “Living wages continue to be an issue in Oakland,” said OEA president Keith Brown in Edsource. “An experienced teacher can move to Hayward Unified and make $28,000 more overnight.” This results in high turnover, with one in four teachers leaving the district each year. In order to increase teacher retention rates, provide quality teachers for students, and maintain a stable learning environment in public schools, Oakland Unified will need to increase salaries so that teachers don’t leave the district or change careers to meet cost of living in the Bay Area.

Finally, OEA wants to reinvest in the Community School model, which has received over $4 billion in new state funding over the past two years. Engaging parents and communities so that schools become places where neighborhoods can flourish, community schools will provide needed resources for families, organizing in and out of school to make sure that students can thrive. This will help the district fulfill another one of OEA’s common good demands, a Reparations 4 Black Students resolution which aims to eliminate the black student opportunity gap in literacy and educational outcomes, and provide resources for black families who predominantly live in the city’s most disadvantaged communities.  

Combining the teachers’ requests for living wages and better working conditions with resources that will help Oakland children thrive, OEA is mindful that without the support of the community most of their demands will go unmet. The fight for better teacher wages, better working conditions, and better schools for children are completely intertwined. This is why the union fought so hard to save Oakland schools from closure, culminating in the 4-3 vote in January to overturn last year’s decision to close five elementary schools. This is also why it continues to fight to hold on to these victories and set the stage for more gains for our schools, children, and communities in the future.

Join teachers at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater on Wed, March 15 at 2pm to demand that OUSD bargain in good faith.

Michael Sebastian is a member of the steering committee of East Bay DSA.