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By: Frederick Reiber

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s students, workers, and union comrades gathered outside of the university’s Lobby 7 on Friday, October 10th to protest and celebrate MIT rejecting the Trump administration’s compact. 

Earlier this month, the White House sent offers to nine universities in what the administration titled “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Contained within these agreements were a number of stipulations—including commitments to accept the government’s priorities on admissions, women’s sports, free speech, student discipline and college affordability—exchanged for better access to federal research funding.

Following calls from the graduate worker union, professors, and numerous other student-led groups, MIT president Sally Kornbluth rejected the compact. She cited the numerous messages she had received asking for the compact’s rejection. In doing so the university becomes the first to reject the president’s proposal and the only such university at the time of writing.

Trump’s Continued Attacks on Higher Education

Trump’s proposal follows numerous attacks and challenges to higher education. The administration has paused federal funding of many top research universities, signed several executive orders targeting colleges, and attacked international students’ rights. These have emptied out entire neighborhoods in areas like Allston-Brighton as international student enrollment dropped precipitously this semester, and while the compact may be seen as an attempt to change course, academic leaders were quick to point out its true intent. Ariel White, vice president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at MIT, said:

This wasn’t an invitation letter, it was a ransom note… the goal is to leave universities powerless and at the whim of the federal government.

Other academic leaders agreed. MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU) – UE 256 president Lauren Chua called the proposal  “a thinly veiled attempt to divide us, to make us turn against each other, and to weaken the very communities that make our university thrive.” 

Chua couldn’t be more right, as the compact seeks to enforce harmful gender definitions, denying transgender students recognition and rolling back university protections, all masked under the language of “equality.” Other stipulations include forcing universities to be more accepting of conservative lines of thought, potentially overruling scientific consensus in academic research. The compact also bans colleges from using sex, ethnicity, gender, or political orientations, continuing the overturning of decades of academic work that finds strong connections between affirmative-action like policies and increasing opportunity for those with less money, or those who continue to face systemic racism. As Jade Personna, the speaker for the MIT Black Student Union, argued: “the battle is decades old and the Black Student Union has been fighting it since our inception.”

U.S. conservatives will continue their attacks on academic and intellectual freedom. That is part of a larger ideological project only furthered by the practical program of Project 2025. Long seen as bastions of “deceit and lies,” higher education has long been seen by conservatives as a threat. Some claim that colleges “teach that America is an evil, racist nation” purely for harboring left-wing scholars,. Now-Vice President JD Vance summarized their perception back in 2021: “the universities are the enemy.” 

In reality, American colleges reflect and reproduce America’s troubled history. Universities are learning institutions that are also landlords, schools that are also workplaces. 

Recognizing People Power

One important takeaway from the academic and student rally was the need for people power. Despite what other headlines may imply, the university’s rejection of the Trump Compact was not simply a matter of a good executive. The university’s rejection was a coordinated and community-led effort, won by the numerous student, worker, and professor-lead groups that organized against the compact by applying pressure on an executive amenable to that pressure.

The unfortunate reality is that American universities are businesses. Run by boards of trustees, colleges will do little to protect their students’ rights to academic or intellectual freedom in the face of financial turmoil. We have seen this time after time with pro-Palestine protests, and will likely continue to see similar protests dispelled. 

Kornbluth was forced to reject the compact by the very people who make MIT the institution of MIT. It is the professors, workers, and students who stood up for their communities, risking their bodies against an administration unafraid to kidnap or coerce. As Chua stated in her speech:

This is a victory for every single one of us, because we acted with unity and urgency, [because] we mounted a pressure that could not be ignored.

Fighting against fascism is not easy, it is not pretty, and it certainly is not done by CEOs, academic presidents, or a board of trustees. It is done through the blood, sweat, and organizing of workers, who—much like the community leaders at MIT—make themselves heard.

Frederick Reiber is a PhD student at Boston University researching collective action and technology. He is a member of SEIU 509, Boston DSA, and covers tech, labor, and education for Working Mass.

The post MIT Refuses to Sign Trump Compact Following Pressure from Grad Workers’ Union and Other Groups appeared first on Working Mass.

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From the beginning, the Trans Liberation Priority Project has put on its agenda passing trans sanctuary city legislation in the cities of Lakewood and Cleveland.
Lakewood is our first success.

The Cleveland DSA Chapter first submitted draft legislation to the City of Lakewood in April 2025 and showed up in support of this at a city council meeting, with numerous DSA members who resided in Lakewood giving testimony. Afterwards, representatives from DSA kept in touch with Council President Sarah Kepple about this for several months. In addition, we attended several events in Lakewood and canvassed, gathering resident signatures in support of the legislation.

The City, after consulting with leading local and state LGBTQ rights organizations, transformed our original draft into a Gender Freedom Policy which enshrines and upholds transgender rights in Lakewood. Sarah joined a DSA call in September and discussed the policy further. The legislation was formally brought to the floor of council in September and passed on October 6th, 2025—and we gained an earned media opportunity by being featured in an article in Ohio queer news publication The Buckeye Flame!

What does this show? Our efforts work. There is strength in numbers. Public support can sway minds. There is an appetite to protect our most vulnerable populations in Ohio, despite what legislation our state and federal governments pass. Persistent, polite communication and pressure works with local politicians. Blue cities can be beacons of hope, even in red states.

Our goal is to emulate this in the City of Cleveland. Through concentrated, democratic efforts with local partners and politicians, we aim to encourage Cleveland to pass similar legislation. The fight for another victory is only just beginning, and we are ready for it!

The post DSA’s Success: Lakewood Passes First-of-its-Kind “Gender Freedom Policy” appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

By: Taina Santiago

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has deported more than 400,000 people since Donald Trump took office again in January of this year. The administration recently allocated 75 billion dollars of funding to bolster the agency, which was originally formed in 2002 under George W. Bush and has been utilized by every administration since to target immigrant communities.

With ICE’s accelerated kidnapping and deportation operations, the Supreme Court legalizing racial profiling of Latine people, and the building of the shuttered-then-reopened concentration camp that the right disgustingly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”, many have compared this current era of attacks — specifically against Mexican immigrants — to the rise of fascism in Germany and the Nazis’ early antisemitic targeting of Jewish people in the 1930s. And while these comparisons are valid, we can also look in our own front lawn to see history repeating itself. The Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s — a period of time where as many as 2 million people of Mexican ancestry were forcibly or coercively sent to Mexico — took place on U.S. soil in the exact same period of rising fascism in Germany, but has gone largely unacknowledged since.

In the 1930s, The Great Depression brought on unprecedented levels of poverty and unemployment in the U.S. and around the world, a catastrophic downturn that was used by the government to scapegoat people of Mexican ancestry as the cause of these economic issues. President Hoover and his administration pushed an anti-immigration campaign at the time that revolved around keeping “American jobs for real Americans,” a dog whistle that quietly communicated that American meant — and still means — white.

In a white supremacist nation like the U.S., instead of the state of the economy being used as a mobilizing force for the working class, it is used — very effectively — to turn white working class people against Black and Brown people. Any time there is a recession or depression, minorities are to blame rather than the rich people who gamble with our livelihoods and abuse workers. Today, that economic rhetoric has been replaced by another set of lies that fearmonger about undocumented people committing more crimes — a claim that has been proven false. But it is all the same message of dehumanizing minorities in order to maintain white supremacy.

Back in the early 20th century, instead of ICE, it was the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) doing the deportations of 82,000 Mexican people between 1929 and 1935. But there were also many state and local “repatriation programs”–supported by the federal government–that encouraged people of Mexican ancestry to leave their homes, businesses, and communities for jobs, food stipends and financial assistance that did not materialize as promised, with cities like Detroit and Los Angeles carting off train cars full of people who were just living their lives. According to Professor Ana Raquel Minian in their contribution to this TIME article, “60% are believed to have been American citizens — most of them children.” This is a shocking statistic until you begin to understand that the very purpose of these “anti-immigration” efforts are nothing more than a tool to rid the U.S. of Black and Brown people, undocumented and documented alike.

Just as it is today, terror was used in the 1930s as a tool of coercion, with racial profiling and raids making life difficult for all people of Mexican ancestry. The USCIS website itself admits that, “though the effort was not aimed expressly at Mexican [people] it affected them more than other nationalities. For example, in 1930 Mexican [people] accounted for over half of all deportations.” It affected them more because they were people of color, othered by the U.S. government.

That othering continues today, where you can see on ICE and other immigration websites that every instance of the word “non-citizen” has been changed back to “alien” since Trump took office again. As it pertains to raids, the website also states that, “[a] more important result of [INS] raids, however, was that the threat of increased federal deportations likely hastened the departure of thousands of Mexican [people].” ICE’s sweeping raids of immigrant communities is creating this same fear in people around the country, and that is by design.

Detroit had its own Mexican Repatriation program that was advertised by the local government and Diego Rivera himself–the artist who painted the famed Detroit Industry murals at the DIA. He was recruited by the governor at the time, Wilber Brucker, and the Detroit Mexican Consulate, to help convince people of Mexican descent to leave Michigan. He falsely believed they would be greeted by new worker cooperatives, so he saw it as a liberating opportunity for his people and country. However, as he later came to find out, he was sold a bill of goods.

Detroit’s Mexican Repatriation program reduced the city’s population of Mexican people by 90% by 1936. And because of this pervasive, years-long ethnic cleansing, generations of Mexican-Americans were traumatized into silence, often opting for assimilation to survive. Only recently have we been able to hear the oral histories of Mexican-American Detroiters through projects like Maria Cotera and Elena Herrada’s documentary, Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land (2001), which asked elders who experienced the repatriation to recount their experiences of loss and suffering.

I was inspired to write this article because of a PBS documentary (you can watch it here) that happened to be playing on TV one night, which featured John Leguizamo documenting the history and activism of Latine people in America. In it, he talked about this repatriation operation, something I had never heard of in my life. I sat on the couch, confused. Confused about how I was unaware of this decade-long event that has shaped immigration policy and rhetoric ever since, and confused about why more parallels were not being drawn between it and the current times. The answer was that we simply hadn’t been taught about it en masse.

An essential feature of the propagation of U.S. imperialism is to erase history and frame ourselves as “the good guys”. We are taught in school and the media that most egregious human rights violations happen elsewhere, not here. Black and Brown people have always known this to be a blatant perversion of the truth — even if some of the specific examples like the Mexican Repatriation are also hidden from us. But it is a lie that white America falls for time and time again, even while they witness historically marginalized people suffer around them.

This present moment — the fascism, the racial targeting, and the white supremacy leading it all — was happening in the U.S. in the 1930s. So it is not solely Germany’s history we are repeating, but also our own. In fact, people of color have been living under fascism in the U.S. since the inception of this country, but it is only now that white America is waking up to this reality. It is time for the U.S. to look its ugly history in the face and finally–for the sake of the lives of Black and Brown people–learn from both the world’s and this country’s atrocities.

If you are looking for more ways to help in the struggle against ICE in our neighborhoods, join Detroit’s People’s Assembly contingent this Saturday, October 18th, 3PM at Roosevelt Park for the No Kings Rally taking place to connect with community members with the same resistance goals as you. Stay strong. Stay safe. We can only do this together. Solidarity forever!

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The U.S. Playbook: How The Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s Mirrors Our Current Moment was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

No — but just-cause rules protect unionized workers from unfair firing and discipline.

The post Do unions protect bad employees? appeared first on EWOC.

DSA is proud to endorse Frankie Santos Fritz for Greenbelt Mayor & City Council!

Frankie is a longtime local organizer and branch leader with Metro DC DSA. He is a proud member of a union family and plans to introduce a collective bargaining ordinance to cover the city workforce. Frankie is also a member of the Greenbelt Home Inc housing co-op and is championing laws to empower tenants who wish to convert their communities to cooperative or social housing.

Frankie plans to expand rent stabilization protections to cap annual rent increases with the rate of inflation. He is dedicated to supporting federal workers who are under attack from DOGE and the federal administration. His top transportation priority for the next term would be getting the long-promised Capital Bikeshare station built at the Greenbelt Metro Station and getting it stocked with numerous E-Bikes.

Check out the rest of Frankie’s campaign priorities!

In an ideal world, our ballot wouldn’t contain a measure like Proposition 50. We would have a political system built on true proportional representation, where the maps are drawn by and for the people, not by a political class to serve its own ends. But this is not that world. For decades, corporations and billionaires have spent enormous sums of money to rig our elections and consolidate their power, leaving us with a broken system that offers us two unpalatable options in a political game designed to keep the working class out of power.

Now, we are confronted with a clear and present danger: a coordinated, authoritarian project at the national level that seeks to rig elections and cement minority rule. In Texas, a partisan gerrymander is designed to steal congressional seats and consolidate power, with direct and devastating impacts on our communities—from attacks on labor rights to the ongoing assaults on immigrants.

This is a tactical moment that demands a tactical response. A "No" vote on Prop 50, while a symbolic stand against gerrymandering in all its forms, would be a unilateral disarmament in the face of an active assault on our democracy. This would be a “sideways” move. Sometimes we must fight fire with fire. 

This is where we must move onward, not sideways. Our movement is about moving forward toward a just and equitable society, rather than getting distracted by lateral battles that don't advance our cause. A "sideways" move would be to lose focus on the primary threats to our communities, or to get caught up in a political game that doesn't serve our long-term interests. That is why our endorsement of a "Yes" vote is a pragmatic one, born out of a clear-eyed assessment of the stakes.

Passing Prop 50 is an essential step in stopping the advance of fascism in the United States. It will counter Republican-led rigging of elections in states like Texas and Florida and give us a tangible chance to fight back against the Trump and billionaire agenda. 

Crucially, voting yes on Prop 50 does not disband or replace California's independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. The commission will remain in place and is set to resume its work after the 2030 census. This is a temporary, tactical measure that buys us time to continue organizing for a better world.

Beyond the immediate tactical gains, our endorsement of Prop 50 aligns us with the broader labor movement in California. Unions across the state recognize the critical importance of fair representation in protecting workers' rights and advancing a pro-labor agenda. When the working class stands united, we are a formidable force. Our vote for Prop 50 is a vote of solidarity with our labor comrades, strengthening our collective power against the forces of reaction and fascism. By standing with labor, we reinforce the understanding that the fight for fair elections is inseparable from the fight for economic justice and a socialist future.

We cannot cede this part of the fight against fascism and leave the center to lead it alone—they will fail. Only socialism can beat fascism. We are not just voting on maps; we are voting to protect our fellow workers, our immigrant neighbors, and our climate from a right-wing agenda that seeks to dismantle our unions, gut our social safety net, and accelerate climate collapse.

Vote yes on Prop 50, not as an act of faith in the establishment, but as an act of tactical resistance. And then, let's get back to the real work of building power from the ground up, for a political system that truly serves the many, not just the few.

Fight back California! Onward and not sideways!

Federal workers’ union rights have been terminated in the largest union-busting scheme ever.  The President of the United Auto workers is calling on unions to prepare to strike together on May 1, 2028.  The Trader Joe’s Union released an official statement calling out Israel and the United States for starving Gaza. Coffee shops, retail stores and a salvage business in the East Bay are organizing unions. There is a lot going on in the labor movement.

Would you like more background for understanding all this? Why have socialist ideas and unions always been intertwined? Why does socialist strategy require strong unions? What do socialists advocate for in unions? How can I get involved in the labor movement?  If these questions sound interesting to you, East Bay DSA is hosting another Zoom series of our “Labor 101: Socialists and the Labor Movement”. It’s a four-session discussion/reading group designed for DSA members and friends interested in discussing these questions. The readings are short; the emphasis is on discussing key questions. The series was created for those who don’t know a lot about the labor movement, but others are welcome.

We have offered the series many times in person: last spring we had our first Zoom series. DSAers attended from around the state, from Humboldt County to Kern County to Los Angeles County, as well as from the East Bay— it’s great to feel bigger than each of our chapter/city worlds. Participants included people involved in community organizing, people interested in organizing their workplace or industry, people who are in union jobs and wanted to talk about socialist strategy, and people who just wanted to know more. If you’re doing something like this in your chapter, or would like to, you would be especially welcome.

We will be meeting on Thursdays from 6:00 to 8:00 pm on October 30 and November 6, 13 and 20. Sign up here and we will send a Zoom link and a list of readings. Questions may be directed to David de Leeuw. 

By now, San Francisco is famous not just for unaffordable rent, but also for its acrimonious debates about how to solve the problem. One well-funded contingent asserts it’s all about making it easier and cheaper to build privately owned homes, but as even the corporate media is now noting, we’ve done a lot of that, and housing isn’t forthcoming. In an unusually frank comment, an advocate for this market-oriented approach admitted at a public hearing, “One of the challenges we face in San Francisco is we need the rent to go back up to get housing to work” Clearly, private development is, at best, limited in what good it can do. We need something more.

Social housing can be that something more. Referring to housing that’s permanently affordable, permanently off the speculative market, tenant governed, and home to people at a range of income levels but always including those who need it the most, social housing has been inspiring socialist organizers in cities across North America, including New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago. But efforts in San Francisco have been stymied by opposition from our previous and current mayors, and the new Big Tech-backed majority on our board of supervisors only makes the headwind greater.

That’s why we we in DSA SF’s Ecosocialism Working Group were so interested to learn from Seattle, a west coast city of similar size to San Francisco, which also had a business-backed mayor and city council opposed to social housing but managed to sidestep them and create and fund a social housing developer through a ballot measure. How did they do it, and what can we learn? To answer that, we hosted a conversation with Eric Lee from Seattle DSA and House Our Neighbors, and to speak to the work already happening towards social housing in San Francisco and in California, we also included Shanti Singh from DSA SF and Tenants Together. What follows is an edited transcript from that conversation, on October 3rd, 2025.

Can you both introduce yourselves?

Shanti Singh: Hi, comrades. I’m Shanti Singh, I have been a DSA SF member for over eight years and used to be co-chair way back in the before times. And my day job is working at Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant unions and other organizations like legal aid and housing justice coalitions. I’m the legislative director, but most of what we do beyond advocacy is organizing and base building and trying to make sure every California city has a tenant union. And that’s drawn us into social housing in a big way.

Eric Lee: Hello, everyone. My name is Eric. I am on the steering committee for House Our Neighbors. I’m also a member of Seattle DSA and was co-chair of our housing justice working group for two years during our fight for social housing. House Our Neighbors built a coalition that went toe-to-toe with some of our city’s most powerful actors, like the landlord lobby, tech companies, financial firms, etcetera. And we won. We won the creation of a Seattle social housing developer, which is a public development authority designed to provide publicly owned, permanently affordable, tenant-run housing. And we also won a tax on some of the city’s wealthiest and some of the world’s wealthiest corporations to fund that development. I’m interested to learn also about your all’s struggle for a more just housing system and share the details of what we’ve done up here.

How do you define social housing?

Shanti: There’s not a settled definition: it’s contested in good ways and bad. But there are some basic principles I think are useful. It’s permanently decommodified, so it’s not a speculative tool. A lot of our “affordable housing” in the United States can revert to purely private housing after 15 to 55 years, depending on where you live.

So that takes me to social ownership, defined broadly to include public housing and public ownership, community land trusts, and limited equity cooperatives that are run by the tenants themselves.

Universality. Who is social housing for? It should be for the people who need it most. But we also want to have targeted universalism, where it’s available to everybody who needs it, regardless of their status or their ability or their employment.

And then of course, there’s community control. Tenant-led development and tenant autonomy, so that social housing is actually run by the people that live in it. That doesn’t just mean tenants are picking the paint color on their walls, but maybe even being able to determine their rents. The tenants really have control over the housing that they live in.

Eric: Those are our key pillars that we’ve organized around, as you’ve said: publicly owned, permanently affordable. Tenants don’t pay more than 30% of their income in rent, ideally much less than that. It’s tenant-run, so 50% of the development authority’s board has to be elected by the tenants the developer serves. Also the buildings have councils and committees that manage operations of the buildings themselves.

Union built, green housing as well. New housing in Seattle will be built to the Passive House standard. The built environment has a relation to climate justice.

How did Seattle’s campaign get started?

Eric: House Our Neighbors emerged out of a response to a business-backed initiative to enshrine sweeps in our city charter, and make incredibly vague, unfunded commitments to shelter. It fortunately never made it to the ballot. House Our Neighbors filed a lawsuit, and it was thrown out by a judge.

Coming out of that victory, House Our Neighbors wanted to take on a more positive vision instead of fighting against something. That became I-135 [in 2023], which was a ballot initiative that established a social housing developer. Unfortunately, due to Washington state’s wonky laws, a ballot initiative can only focus on a single thing, so we couldn’t fund the developer within that initiative.

The initiative provided minimal startup funds so the developer could hire staff and lease office space, and we were hoping our local or state governments would provide funds for property acquisitions or actual development. However, they didn’t.

So we were forced to run another initiative [Prop. 1A in February 2025] that implemented a payroll tax on businesses that pay an individual employee over a million dollars. This tax is estimated to raise $50 million annually for the developer. We faced steep opposition from tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and the real estate lobby. And we won, and the developer should be receiving those funds early next year.

How did you structure this program to ensure it was implemented in spite of opposition from your mayor and all but one of your city council members? Based on our experience in San Francisco, I’m thinking to myself, “The mayor is going to say, ‘I’m just not going to do that.’” Or he won’t allocate the funds.

Eric: The initiatives are binding. I-135 actually created the public development authority (PDA) and required the city to allocate a certain amount of money for their startup funds. The mayor did drag his feet on providing those initial startup funds and the city actually never provided the full amount, and required a partnership with the state to provide those funds. But the text of the initiative is actually binding and they have to follow it.

Similarly with the tax itself. Those funds are allocated for the social housing developer and must be directed to the social housing developer. Again, they’re dragging their feet on providing those funds. The initiative passed in February of this past year and the funds were supposed to be retroactive to January, and they still haven’t received the initial funds. They’re expected to receive them in the first quarter of 2026. But because of the legal power of the initiative, they have to comply with it. I’d be interested to learn more about how your elected officials cannot follow the voters’ mandate.

Shanti: Our former socialist in office, Supervisor Dean Preston, with DSA and other organizations, spearheaded in 2020 a real estate transfer tax, Prop I. There were carve-outs for affordable housing, but if you sell an office building or a residential building over $10 million, the seller pays this transfer tax. That passed with 58% despite being outspent 20 to 1.

That funding was meant to go to rent relief and social housing. Unfortunately due to a legal technicality, that funding was not able to be automatically dedicated, so it went into the general fund. We’ve been fighting over that money ever since. [Prop 13 requires a two-thirds supermajority for taxes devoted to a specific purpose, unless the measure is placed on the ballot by gathering signatures, which wasn’t safe in 2020 due to Covid.]

In 2022, we won a $64 million budget allocation. A lot of it got spent on taking 200 to 250 units of housing off the private market and delivering them to community land trusts. We won an allocation to start researching what we would need to do to have a development authority like Seattle has.
And that funding is under attack. A couple years after Prop I, the city of LA passed Measure ULA, a similar transfer tax where 25% goes to social housing models. Now there is an attempt by real estate interests, both in the legislature and possibly at the 2026 ballot, to roll back ULA and potentially transfer taxes across the state. So it’s two steps forward and one step back.

How did Seattle build the coalition it needed to overcome elected officials’ opposition and win?

Eric: One key group was traditional affordable housing providers, who are severely underfunded. We didn’t want them to see the social housing developer as a competing entity for scarce funding. So we baked into I-135 a clause that the social housing developer would not be eligible for existing funds, but would require a new source of revenue. So the Housing Development Consortium came out as neutral and we saw individual affordable housing providers like the Low Income Housing Institute actually endorse our initiative.

Another endorsement we were proud to receive was the Seattle Building and Construction Trade Council. This is a group of unions who typically endorse more conservative candidates, but we baked into our initiative that the housing should built by union firms.

Regarding how we structured the campaign, a lot of campaigns use working people for photo ops or grunt work, but don’t really bring them into the decision-making. We empowered everyday volunteers, working people, to take action. We had a series of working groups—field, communications, endorsements—where anyone who expressed interest could join and help in the development of our tactics and strategies.

Part of our field strategy was to contact people who were materially affected by the social housing developer, namely renters. We looked at voter records and property ownership records, put them together, and identified if someone likely owned the unit of housing they lived in. Then we tried to get into apartment buildings to specifically talk to renters. That was just some volunteer who came up with that idea and put those two data sets together.

Seattle’s vote was held at a weirdly timed special election in February, and there was a competing measure that was a watered-down version of social housing your mayor was supporting. How did that end up happening?

Eric: Basically every step along the way, we faced some sort of opposition and that was one of the instances.

There’s a couple of phases of a ballot initiative [in Washington state]. First you file it, then you collect signatures. Then it goes to the city council and they can take one of three actions. They can pass it outright and make it a law. They can put it onto the next election. Or they can put it on the next ballot with an alternative they concoct.

We used public data requests to uncover the conversations that were going behind the scenes. The Chamber of Commerce contacted our council president with a sample alternative, and they took that sample alternative and passed it on to the ballot. 

They also delayed the vote. We turned in signatures to qualify for the November election, which had huge, 70 to 80% turnout here in Seattle. And we really wanted to be on that ballot because we felt like a higher turnout election would benefit us. Instead, they delayed the vote past the deadline to put us on the November ballot. Instead they cloistered us to a February ballot where it has like 30% turnout, and the turnout is typically mostly homeowners.

I have the flyer here that they sent out. This is our mayor, Bruce Harrell. They sort of phrased it as, “the people for responsible social housing.” It was a watered-down initiative to kneecap the social housing developer. It essentially provided two options to vote No on our initiative. But luckily people saw through this.

How do zoning changes in Seattle and San Francisco tie into the fight for social housing?

Eric: Seattle right now is going through what they call their comprehensive planning. It happens every couple of decades and outlines how Seattle will handle housing growth and zoning changes over the next two decades. The mayor and city council are largely responsible for drafting that. Most of Seattle is single family zoning, or it’s been changed to something called neighborhood residential zoning, which allows up to four townhomes on every lot.

House Our Neighbors particularly is interested in density bonuses for social housing. Traditional affordable housing providers receive density bonuses, which allows them to build larger buildings than they would be allowed to if it was market rate housing. However, the social housing developer under current Seattle and Washington state laws doesn’t qualify for those bonuses. We hope to change those laws to afford the Seattle social housing developer those bonuses and incentives.

Shanti: In San Francisco, we have to submit something called a housing element. It has to be compliant with state requirements, where there have been changes to state law lately to facilitate mostly market-rate housing construction with a little sprinkling of affordable on the side.

But that’s coming from interests that are primarily hostile to public investment. Hostile to social housing, hostile to taxing and reigning in speculation. And I think it’s especially acute in SF. In LA, because there is that funding source [ULA], there is more energy from the left to tackle single family zoning in our own way and be like, “We want to build social housing in these communities.”

But here, the problem is that everybody who’s behind this rezoning has no interest or commitment to even meeting our state goal of 46,000 low and middle income units. When you ask the folks in charge of the zoning plan, our previous mayor or current mayor, “What’s your plan to get those 46,000 units?”, it’s a question our DSA SF electeds like Dean Preston before and Jackie Fielder now are asking—they don’t have one. It’s just like, “The market will fix everything.” And that poisons the well a bit. As much as we do have exclusionary communities, the [rezoning] is very much in lockstep with real estate, who are also the ones who tried to kill our transfer tax, who don’t want social housing to happen. It makes people question what it can be used for.

Some version of this is going to pass in my opinion. It’s up to us to figure out, what is our vision and how do we weaponize the situation as DSA and as the left in SF? How do we use this to fight hard for social housing and turn lemons into lemonade?

As Shanti alluded to, we have another “pro-housing” faction in San Francisco, the YIMBY movement, and historically there’s been bad blood between YIMBYs and socialists. Does this dynamic also exist in Seattle?

Eric: I wouldn’t say we have that particular tension. A lot of urbanists in Seattle support social housing.

At House Our Neighbors, we understand that there is a supply issue. The amount of housing being built [compared to] projected housing needs for the future is insufficient. However, where most urbanists would end there, we think that’s only a key aspect of the problem. The other component is who owns and controls that housing. But I haven’t really seen that sort of tension here in Seattle. I was kind of surprised to hear that.

Shanti: I think it boils down to the progressives versus moderates divide that long predates DSA. Since Mayor Dianne Feinstein in the seventies, it’s been the tenant movement in San Francisco versus the downtown real estate interests. A lot of this was before we were born. But also, as DSA, we’re not the Democrats, right? We’re not progressives. We’re not moderates. We’re socialists. I think we should be conscious of history, do our own thing and stick to our principles, but not be bound by whatever the beef between progressives and moderates is.

What efforts are happening at the state level towards social housing in California?

Shanti: In LA, a quarter of measure ULA’s funding is dedicated to social housing. And that includes a lot of the community land trusts in Los Angeles, but could be towards building the kind of housing that’s being hopefully going to be built very soon in Seattle. So that is dedicated, though the rest of the money is going towards a lot of other programs, like legal aid for tenants, homelessness services.

I want to take this back to the movement. I consider tenant organizing in California to be at a nascent growing stage. There’s new tenant unions popping up all over, which is awesome to see. But we’ve got a long way to go.

I see social housing as an organic demand of organized tenants. You had the Moms for Housing in Oakland, homeless black mothers occupying vacant housing owned by a big nationwide speculative investor. You had a similar occupation in El Sereno in East Los Angeles, which is actually on publicly owned Caltrans-owned homes. You see the Veritas [a real estate investment firm] tenants in San Francisco, who are demanding Veritas housing be bought by the city. And you have the Hillside Villa tenants who are part of the Los Angeles Tenants Union in Chinatown, LA, demanding the city eminent domain their property and take it away from a slumlord. Fresno mobile home tenants who are winning co-ops, buying back their mobile home parks.

All of these are different social housing fights. Even with the tenant movement being in this nascent stage, organized tenants are thinking, “Why does my landlord own this housing anyway? They don’t have to. I can own it. The state can own it. A land trust can own it.” We feel that we have the power collectively to take this housing away, and off the market for good. That demand has exceeded the resources available, even as we have 60+ community land trusts growing. So the state needs to step up and do something.

We passed a study bill called SB 555 in 2023. It inspired the framework in AOC’s Homes Act. We basically said, here’s what social housing is. It’s permanently affordable. It’s permanently decommodified. It’s for people who are cost burdened by the private market. That’s a broad range from no income to middle income people. It can be owned by a community land trust. It can be owned publicly, can be owned as a limited equity cooperative.

We put some of those big-tent guidelines forward. And we demanded that the California Department of Housing and Community Development, HCD, put out recommendations. How do we get 1.2 million units of social housing, either through acquisition or construction, in California? That study is due at the end of 2026.

The purpose of this is to make sure our definition of social housing is in state law, because there are attempts to co-opt social housing. But also to get recommendations we can start turning into campaigns, locally and at the state level.

I got to go to Vienna three years ago, which was really cool. The main lesson is that there’s a social movement and a political party, the Social Democratic Party of Austria, that’s managed to maintain [their social housing system]. When we think about it as DSA, the social movements and political infrastructure are really more important even than thinking about the technicalities of public versus cooperative housing or how they have a ton of public control of land. They have tight rent controls on the private market, they keep a stranglehold on the private market to make social housing sustainable and keep growing it in Vienna, but all of that comes down to the strength of the movement.

Every day we receive more information about America’s slide into whatever you want to call it: authoritarianism covers it; oligarchy is part of it; dictatorship is Trump’s goal; and most likely we should be calling it fascism. This is deadly serious. 

Just about everyone I know has deep concerns for what’s left of American democracy. Many of us are feeling overwhelmed at the ongoing tsunami of bad news and seeming inexorable advance of the MAGA agenda. Others are close to burning out over the level of activism the moment calls for. But whether you are hunkering down in your basement, hoping for it to blow over, or out on the barricades, there are two concrete tasks you can shoulder in the next few weeks, each of which places a brick in the anti-fascist wall. Neither is difficult, and both will help to turn the tide. 

One of these is covered in another article in this issue of California Red on Proposition 50. Vote YES on Prop 50, and better, go out and do some work to pass it by canvassing or phone banking. 

“No Kings”

The other just requires your body, although it wouldn’t hurt to do some organizing as well. Saturday October 18 will see the second “No Kings” demo this year. The one on June 5 drew millions of people into the streets, including thousands of DSA comrades across the country. Other protests have been called and have been big, but this one was the biggest, and the one scheduled for October 18 is promising to be—must be—even bigger. You can find one near you here.

Authoritarian rule depends on the widespread belief by the population it rules over that it is invincible. Big demonstrations prove otherwise. Building larger and larger protests creates a compelling public picture of a countervailing majority and encourages the formation of a growing pro-democracy, anti-fascist movement that can operate on many fronts—in the courts, in elections, in workplaces and institutions of civil society, all of which ultimately depend on power in the streets. 

Numbers are important. According to studies, when 3.5% of the population in a country is regularly protesting an authoritarian regime some kind of threshold is crossed in which quantity translates into qualitative change in the possibilities for stopping the anti-democratic forces. Here that would translate into something like 12 million people. Best guestimates of the June No Kings day came to about half of that. We need to build that number up. Judging by the number of co-sponsoring organizations, the anti-fascist coalition has been growing.

But beyond magic number theory, we know that mass movements have power; in some respects, it’s the only power that ultimately matters. Come on out and be part of it. See you on October 18 —in the streets.

The democratic road to socialism needs state power, so democratic socialists need to engage in and win elections. Why? Once the office is won, it can be used to win strategic reforms, move more people into working-class ‘for itself’ activity, and accelerate the break away from capitalism. For that to happen, elected officials need to be guided by a socialist theory of change and make choices based on information and experiences coming out of working-class activity. 

Over the last decade or so, socialists have been bedeviled by electoral strategy. This is in part because we have been getting the order of operations wrong. If ‘accountability’ has to happen after the fact, your electoral strategy has already failed. It means the officeholder feels comfortably disconnected from the organization and the political program it has developed, and empowered to act in a way that directly conflicts with that program. Any accountability process is more likely to drive an even bigger division between the office and the organization.

In response to this reality, many democratic socialists have theorized how to develop ‘cadre’ candidates who will be disciplined by virtue of the fact of being ‘cadre’, and therefore less likely to act in a way that requires ‘accountability’. If the candidate owes their political development to the organization, goes this theory, they simply won’t break from the organization. 

The problem is that this ignores institutional pressure. Starting as ‘cadre’ does not address the immense pressure on elected officials from formal party apparatuses, organized constituencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profits, and other state and non-state organs. Setting aside the very real phenomenon of opportunists, even the most earnest and sincere cadre candidate will only be able to resist that institutional pressure for so long until compromise builds on compromise and one day they find they are no longer cadre at all.

So what is the answer? What is our theory for engaging in elections and holding elected office? That is still unclear. Like one of those optical illusion drawings of a vase or two faces, the statement “democratic socialists need to engage in and win elections” can be interpreted one of two ways: that individual democratic socialists (the candidates) need to be elected to office, or that “democratic socialists” as a collective political body via campaigns need to engage in and win elections. 

Unlike those optical illusions, though, there is actually one answer: the latter. The democratic road to socialism requires that the democratic socialist movement, consciously and as a body, determines the strategic way to engage in win, and collectively hold state power through elections.

If we can agree on this theory, we can agree that running cadre candidates may be the wrong way to think about accomplishing our goals. What we actually need to do is run cadre campaigns. Everything we need to achieve through our electoral work can be gained only by this approach: big-picture strategy, mutually reinforcing work, non-reformist reforms, victories for the working class, and wielding state power to bring about a rupture with capitalism. 

A cadre campaign is one where the relationships needed to win and hold office are developed, managed and held by the organization, not the individual candidate; the candidate will always be in a weaker position than the organization. Chapters should pick offices where running the campaign and winning it will be based on the strength of the chapter’s relationships, not the candidate’s. Discipline and accountability will result from that, because conflict with the chapter will automatically jeopardize those relationships. It is not a question of what the chapter can ‘offer’ a candidate in terms of support or the candidate’s stated or apparent ‘loyalty’ to the organization. It is a matter of the practical power the chapter holds in a given campaign. It is our responsibility to build our power to the point where we can exercise it as the decisive factor in winning. The campaign, not the candidate, is the path towards accountable cadre. 

The Relationships Needed to Win Power

A successful electoral campaign requires a web of political relationships: to funders, voting blocs, and institutions and organizations that provide these. The first are direct relationships and the second indirect. 

Who  can you call to raise money for an aldermanic election in Chicago? Those are direct relationships. Through your work on a local school council or other organizations, do you know 200 people who would vote for you? Those are direct relationships. A good candidate has both of those. A cadre candidate holds the same relationships the chapter primarily holds; a cadre campaign connects the relationships held by the organization to a specific electoral campaign. The organization’s endorsement (and the process by which it gets to that endorsement) is enough that it can lend its direct relationships to that candidate. 

DSA’s challenge is to build relationships where a democratic decision of the membership results in activating them for a specific electoral campaign – and can also sever those relationships. Will the chapter’s union members build committees at their workplaces in support of a campaign? Will the branches reach out to community organizations and leaders to proselytize for the candidacy? Will the chapter convincingly pitch the campaign to regular PAC donors who are likely chapter members? 

Traditional politics means that leaders of organizations confer and decide on good candidates and good races. That is not a viable long-term strategy for the democratic road to socialism. If a DSA chapter’s relationship is with leaders of a union, for example, that is helpful and healthy; but the real relationship needs to be ‘body-to-body’ – between organizational memberships. DSA members need to make the case to their union siblings and their leadership to make an endorsement; that is how individuals are minimized in the relationship, and discipline and accountability become built into the electoral strategy.

Within a chapter, the candidate is not cadre merely by being chosen, or really liking socialism. The candidate is cadre by virtue of their standing in the chapter and the relationships they’ve developed through their work. The chapter can send out fundraising e-mails, but if there is no membership buy-in or relationship with the candidate, they won’t bear much fruit.

The Relationships Needed to Hold Power

Once an election is won, a democratic socialist holds power; but do democratic socialists hold it? This is why there actually is a right way to see the puzzle. If the candidate’s relationships are held in common by the organization, the SIO (socialist in office)  holds formal power, but practical power is collectively held by the organization. 

The ends will look like the means, always. The way we win power will shape the way power is held and used; the last decade of DSA electoral work bears this out. Fighting over discipline and accountability are just different forms of frustration over failure to develop and execute cohesive long-term electoral strategy. 

No DSA chapter has the resources or relationships to win major elected offices on its own; for the foreseeable future, we will need to bring in other organizations and high-visibility figures to be part of a winning coalition. The question is not whether that has to happen, or whether it will require some degree of compromise on our message. That is inevitable, and denying it only marginalizes us by choice. The question is whether the political relationships that bring those coalitions together are held by the organization collectively, and therefore whether the membership has made the democratic decision to accept compromise or change. 

It should never be the case that the leaders of a chapter are worried about damaging their relationship with an elected official. It should always run in the other direction. That will happen when the SIO knows that if they piss off the teachers’ union too much, it will reverberate into the DSA chapter and vice versa. That reverberation can only happen when members are kept informed and have the opportunity to deliberate and discuss. When that happens, that is when accountability becomes real. The accountability happens before the fact, not after. 

“I am Awake”

In neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia, he writes about Clive Wearing, who suffered from anterograde amnesia and was unable to form new memories, and describes how Wearing would write in his journal, “I am awake” each time he came back into consciousness realizing he could not remember anything he had been doing. Wearing lived in a “continuous present.”  DSA chapters all over the country seem to get stuck in these continuous presents, with little institutional memory of campaigns past, of their relationship with various SIOs, and with other organizations. With each new membership bump or leadership turnover, we, too, are awake.

This lack of institutional memory is partly because of our all-volunteer, high-leadership turnover structure, but it is also because there is a culture of quiet around SIOs and other organizations. We’re often afraid to talk about the dysfunctional or non-existent relationship with this or that “DSA elected” because we do not want to alienate them or harm an already poor relationship. In other cases, the relationship is good but precarious, because the chapter knows that other than create mild embarrassment for a couple of news cycles, there isn’t much it can do to pressure an SIO. 

Being more open about the nature and history of these relationships is easier said than done, but it is important for experienced chapter leaders to discuss these things with newer members, and for those members to seek out this history in order to understand the challenges ahead of them. Otherwise, we are constantly waking up, living in an eternal present, doomed to make the same mistakes over and over. 

This phenomenon is particularly damaging to any meaningful electoral strategy, because the SIOs have stability and continuity our organization lacks. As a result, not only can this phenomenon reverse the flow of accountability, but it can harm the SIO project itself, as electeds feel they cannot rely on the organization to provide resources they need – volunteers, policy experts, donors, and organizers – to move their constituencies around a program. 

There’s no shame in admitting that while CDSA’s support may have tipped the scale in aldermanic elections of the past, it was neither necessary nor sufficient to be the only factor. 25th Ward alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez is the SIO who has maintained a meaningful and productive relationship with CDSA, but his relationships in Pilsen were already deep before his winning 2019 campaign. He had strong relationships with an influential local union of which he had been a member, and he had been director of a highly visible and well-respected community organizing group. Byron’s ideological and personal commitment to growing socialism, and his understanding of what only socialist organizing can do, has kept him close to the chapter and its membership, but – quite reasonably – he also knows that to stay in office and potentially grow beyond it, he needs a broad political base, and, as any elected official would be, he is very aware of how he won his two terms.

In New York City, the story of Zohran Mamdani’s capture of the mayoralty is instructive to a degree. Mamdani was an active member of the Queens branch of the chapter; his first electoral work in leadership was for a NYC-DSA-endorsed candidate, Father Khader El-Yateem, in a campaign where El-Yateem lost with a respectable 31% of the vote. Mamdani surely developed relationships in the course of that campaign, but having operated on the campaign through NYC-DSA, they were not his relationships alone. His experience in electoral campaigns revolved around NYC-DSA’s electoral program, including working on Tiffany Caban’s Queens district attorney race. As NYC-DSA grew stronger in these constituencies, it became more possible to win a statehouse race—which is exactly what Mamdani did in 2020, in a district that overlaps with Caban’s current seat. Even after winning, Mamdani attended NYC-DSA meetings and relied on its members for organizing activity and the ability to connect him to labor struggles they were involved with. Interestingly, as NYC-DSA developed its electoral strategy, Mamdani advocated for the “1234” proposal which would have welded SIOs closer together through common messaging and data sharing. A narrower CDSA version of 1234 was defeated in part due to opposition from supporters of Chicago SIOs who were against the idea of sharing of campaign data. 

Mamdani communicated to NYC-DSA that he would not run for mayor if he could not win its support for that campaign, and set about winning over the various factions in the chapter. This was an acknowledgment that he would need major organizational mobilization to make his campaign viable in the early stages, but it also recognized that his personal relationships to donors, volunteers, and labor and community organizations were insufficient to get him the early momentum he would need to compete. Only an organizational expression of his viability could do that, and NYC-DSA was the organization that could accomplish that. The activity of DSA members in United Auto Workers Region 9A won him a crucial early endorsement, and NYC-DSA activity in other unions coalesced groups of members into informal “[X] for Zohran” committees inside those unions that could fundraise, identify volunteers, and agitate for endorsements, as with the United Federation of Teachers and the AFSCME Council of public sector workers. These relationships not only help a candidate, but also undermine other candidates who try to force union or community leaders to make “pragmatic” endorsements against the will of their membership. A chapter needs to be able to deploy these kinds of activities and relationships for a campaign in order to have the result be cadre-in-office SIOs. 

The challenge for NYC-DSA, should Mamdani win, will be related directly to whether they as an organization have the resources and relationships necessary to maintain their place in a governing coalition, or whether they will be rapidly displaced by more powerful institutions.

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