In March 2025 I published a piece in DemLeft reflecting on my tenure as Co-Chair and Treasurer of California DSA. In it, I explore CA DSA’s successes and challenges, reflect on core lessons, and offer questions to help organizers across the country reckon with what it means to build a middle layer in DSA.

In May, comrades Fred G. and Michael L. responded to my piece in the California DSA Newsletter. Rather than building on or critically engaging with the analysis, however, they deeply distort its contents.

In my piece, I propose that the new CA DSA State Committee conduct a reflection on its work in order to assess what its path forward should be.

To their credit, the comrades spend a portion of their piece doing that, stating “Since Hazel’s departure, California DSA has simultaneously scaled back some of its ambitions until such time as we are able to figure out the financing and staffing, and begun, nonetheless, to achieve some of the more modest goals we laid out.”

This is not news to me. After all, I authored the resolution that scaled back CA DSA’s ambitions and successfully agitated for it to pass because I expected it to help in exactly the ways it did.

I refer to some of these successes in my piece, stating:

“In early 2024, when I felt like our experiment had largely stalled out, I put forward plans to drastically scale back, focus on a central priority, and even consider dissolving…As a result, involvement in CA DSA has largely increased, with some larger chapters like SF and LA folding ARCH campaign work into their existing electoral efforts, and smaller and medium chapters like San Diego, Long Beach, & North Central Valley with no existing campaigns stepping up to do campaign work.”

Importantly, however, I go on to urge the new State Committee to conduct the kind of rigorous and sober analysis I did of my own term by asking itself whether it achieved the goals of its own vision document such as “did we achieve material wins and have a significant impact on external political organizations and terrains of struggle?” and “did we grow and strengthen chapters?”

While the authors fail to explore these questions rigorously, they do offer an alternate diagnosis for California DSA’s challenges by citing a lack of staff and funding. I am glad for this opportunity to contrast meaningful political differences. I personally don't believe we should create and maintain new bodies in DSA that require staffing and funding without securing these things beforehand. And while I believe staffing has its place, I support the much more member-focused approach outlined in this piece by the Red Star caucus.

Unfortunately, instead of conducting a deeper investigation or engaging in more substantive internal-facing critique, the authors quickly pivot to a defensive misrepresentation my piece, ultimately muddying the waters:

“In this light, her conclusion that ‘The cost to DSA as a whole is too great, in terms of labor, money, and opportunity. It may be better to let other seeds take root’ rings hollow.”

But this was not my conclusion at all. The authors simply plucked a sentence out of context and called it my conclusion. What I actually wrote was:

“Now that the campaign is over, we should assess CA DSA once again and consider whether this pivot has addressed the contradictions and challenges above…If the answer to these questions is largely yes, our task should be to build on this priority structure while we move forward, doubling down on what worked and letting go of what didn’t...If the answer is largely no, we should not repeat our mistakes or muddle along. The cost to DSA as a whole is too great, in terms of labor, money, and opportunity. It may be better to let other seeds take root.”

In other words, I don’t come to any conclusion about what California DSA should do - I call on its organizers to carry forward the torch of self-reflection and make a diagnosis themselves based on what they find. It’s disingenuous to quote the last sentence on its own and claim that it’s my conclusion instead of acknowledging that it is part of a hypothetical.

This misrepresentation is not minor. It shapes the framing of their entire piece, from the title - “Too Soon for a Summary Dismissal” - to the final line, which reads: “It is far too soon to issue any final—especially dismissive—judgements”. An ironic ending to a piece that dismisses the entire framing of my reflection.

I’ll end by plugging Vicki Legion’s great work Constructive Criticism which serves as a critical guide for DSA members interested in the healthy giving and receiving of constructive criticism - one that honestly engages with the positions we disagree with in order to build towards a better organization. In my capacity as Steering Committee member of the national Growth and Development Committee I plan to help run Constructive Criticism sessions for chapters across the country in order to foster a culture that welcomes critique earnestly and sees its value in the collective project for liberation.

Let us be clear at the outset that we feel the time spent on responding, once more, to Hazel’s polemic on the shortcomings of California DSA would be better spent on doing some actual work against the actual problems that beset the working class and the socialist movement in California. Nitpicking infighting of this nature has not often served to advance socialist goals and this case is no exception. The world is burning, fascism is rising, and a contrived controversy doesn’t help with addressing either.

Hazel, without talking to anyone in CA DSA leadership, published a critical piece about our experiment in state structure in Democratic Left. When we responded in California Red to address what we saw as incorrect information in that piece, it meant that as far as we were concerned, she got her say, we got ours, and that should have ended matters. But apparently not. We are now publishing her response to our response. Unfortunately, she did not in her new critique actually address our main points, choosing instead to launch a debate over what she considered her conclusion versus what we understood it to be.

She claims that thanks to her intervention while serving as co-chair for a year the organization has improved: “I authored the resolution that scaled back CA DSA’s ambitions and successfully agitated for it to pass because I expected it to help in exactly the ways it did.”

One of us (Fred) was on the state committee at the time Hazel proposed her resolution, which in its first iteration simply attempted to shut down the state org entirely. Why did she try to do this? It may have had something to do with the fact that she found herself on the short end of eight-to-one and seven-to-two decisions time after time.

When that failed she amended it to reduce the number of positions on the state committee from nine to five, which would have had the effect of crippling what little volunteer capacity the leadership body possessed. The majority voted to replace that amendment with another that reduced the body from nine to seven—not because we felt it would have improved our ability to work, but in recognition of the reality that not enough people wanted to do this pretty thankless, under-resourced work, and we needed to have a quorum at our state committee meetings.

Her resolution had exactly nothing to do with the improvement of California DSA’s work. The ARCH campaign in 2024, which she claims as an example of her leadership, was already clearly viewed by our chapters as an important priority, and the state council’s vote to make that official for the state body occurred on the basis of that understanding, not due to her resolution.

Similarly, her claim that “as a result, involvement in CA DSA has largely increased” has no basis in reality. Renewed involvement came not from her effort to reduce the footprint of CA DSA but from a quite different source, months after she had left CA DSA leadership—Trump’s election, which lit a fire beneath members looking for a place to stand and fight. California DSA 101 statewide zoom presentations went from a dozen or two people in attendance before November 2024 to 60-75 attendees in each of the next several meetings after the election.

She refers us to the Red Star caucus document claiming the national DSA more closely resembles an NGO than a fighting socialist organization, and states her belief that staffing is less important than a member-driven organization. This is a sleight of hand argument, since California DSA is not the national, has no staff, doesn’t function like an NGO, and is (unfortunately) probably in no danger of finding the resources to staff up any time soon. Further, we agree with her that if we could muster sufficient activism from our membership to do without staff we’d go that way. Who wouldn’t? The more important questions to consider here are, “what are the factors that impede such enthusiasm for socialism in the masses”, and “how do we turn that around?”

She wants us to reflect on how we failed to measure up to the “vision document” she cites that supposedly was guiding CA DSA. That document, a two-page provisional sketch of the organization’s goals, was drafted by the exploratory committee for a California DSA in January 2021, more than a year before the organization officially existed. It was superseded by subsequent documents developed by the first state committee, much more ambitious in scope, which as we stated in our critique of Hazel’s DL article, were produced before fully understanding the obstacles in our path. This is reminiscent of Hazel’s omission in her DL piece, when in criticizing the lack of use of our political action committee (PAC) account, she left out the context that it wasn’t created by CA DSA but a prior ad hoc chapter-led campaign in 2018, which we inherited as CA DSA without institutional memory of what needed to be done to maintain it properly. And true, it wasn’t used while she was on the state committee. Why? Because 2023 wasn’t an election year. She didn’t respond to these corrections in her new piece.

California DSA is not some bureaucratic monolith needing to be deeply critiqued. It is an experiment in socialist democracy, the first state level DSA structure, put together in a moment of peak activism (post Bernie campaigns, during the pandemic and support for the BLM movement, and a very active tax the rich ballot measure, Prop 15, in 2020, which led to ad hoc coordination of our chapters statewide) with the high hopes that such enthusiasm for action from its membership might serve as the basis for a permanently active statewide presence.

That hopeful moment passed, and peak activism receded—not just in DSA, but in all organizations of the left and the broader progressive sphere. This is always a danger for the left when the Democrats are in office: Too many people think, “Oh, we elected these people; now they will take care of things.” This was the mistake activists made in demobilizing after Obama’s election, and the same thing, compounded by the pandemic, that happened in Biden’s term of office.

California DSA was created to say the opposite: no matter who’s in office we need to continually push them from below to do the right thing, which takes a mass socialist movement beyond the electoral moment. We had hoped the state organization might make a contribution to that perspective and that effort. If that hope has not yet been fulfilled, let’s recall that this is the first attempt in the country at a state DSA structure; it is just three years old; and we are not just trying to push California politics to the left; now we’re fighting fascism. Let’s get on with that task.

Thousands of DSA members across the state of California came out to local events on June 14, dubbed “No Kings Day”, swelling the ranks of protests from San Diego to Eureka. Here are a few snapshots drawn from the organizing of our local chapters.

East Bay

East Bay DSA brought out members to several events. Chapter co-chair Juan Canham told California Red, “I think it's a moment when our chapter’s commitment to using a diversity of strategies to combat fascism really came together, allowing us to be active on many fronts. As a chapter that encompasses a multitude of political tendencies it's not often that everyone is active at once but everyone I know in the chapter was active in some way on Saturday, some attending multiple events.”

EBDSA sent a sizeable contingent to the “No Kings” march in Oakland. The Oakland action went far beyond what the official organizers expected in terms of turnout. The sun was out, the vibes were good, and “the members spoke to a lot of people fed up with Trump, about how we have to defeat Trump but also the entire rotten system that brought him to power.”

On Friday night EBDSA got word from organizations it is working with that ICE had sent mass text messages to migrants in immigration court proceedings to report the next day Saturday at the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) office in SF or face an “infraction. Canham said, “ISAP is a private company that runs ICE’s alternatives to detention program. It is not located in a government building. Weekend reporting is unheard of. This could only mean one thing: mass arrests.”

He added, “With little notice, and despite already being committed to three other actions on Saturday, we decided that this was critical work and sent out the call to our entire list, with the caution that we did not know how this was going to go down (earlier in the week a peaceful protest outside of the ICE office in San Francisco resulted in arrests). At 7 am on Saturday many in the chapter answered the call prepared for the worst, but between us, community and faith groups there was sufficient turnout to deter ICE and SFPD from escalating. This ended as a successful 2-day community picket where ISAP didn't even try to open the office and ICE weren't visibly present. Instead 50 plus migrants were welcomed by lawyers who gave them help with their cases.”

All of this was occurring on the same day as a previously scheduled EBDSA event, a Labor Notes Troublemakers school that the chapter had been organizing for months with a coalition of unions in the East Bay. It brought together several hundred union members, labor activists, and local officers, to build solidarity, and share successes, strategy, and inspiration.

Marin

Marin DSA worked with a local immigrant rights group to organize a “No Kings, No Oligarchs” rally in downtown San Rafael attended by over 1,500 people. The rally featured many speakers, including chapter members who talked about defending social programs for seniors and working people, protesting the genocide in Gaza, and defending democracy by fighting oligarchy. The chapter partnered with other local organizers to speak about workers rights, protecting immigrants in our community from ICE, and US imperialism. Marin DSA co-chair Curt said, “It was the largest protest our chapter has ever organized and the second largest protest in Marin County since Trump took office.”

Anaheim

Orange County DSA sent a team to Anaheim No Kings Day, where one of the chapter co-chairs give a speech about how direct action is necessary and the Democratic Party gives no hope for liberation, and distributed chapter literature.

San Jose

Silicon Valley DSA comrades joined the San Jose “No Kings” rally. An estimated 12,000 people attended. One of the featured speakers was the chapter’s Rheanna, who reminded the crowd of recent events like Trump’s firing of scientists, the militarization of the local police department, and the incursions of ICE. She said, “We are going to build a movement so big so deep and powerful that no president, no King, no fascists will stand against us.” She invited the crowd to come to the next SVDSA meeting and get trained up in rapid response to be able to protect themselves and their neighbors. “Remember, we keep each other safe!” she said to cheers. [see video of her speech]

Peninsula DSA

Peninsula DSA, situated south of San Francisco, sent members to events in Pacifica, Colma, and San Mateo as well as to the big demonstration in San Francisco, to show up in solidarity and talk up DSA. Allison C reported, “We got 25 people to sign up for our newsletter, plus more folks scanned the QR code off our palm card. We definitely plan to bring more flyers (we passed out 100 plus) and signage next time.”

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Melville House, 2023, by Yanis Varoufakis

“What’s in a word?” is the title of Chapter 2 of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, where Yanis Varoufakis notes, “It is tempting to think that it does not really matter what we call the system we live in. Technofeudalism or hyper-capitalism, the system is what it is, whatever the word we use to describe it. Tempting perhaps, but quite wrong. Reserving the word ‘fascist’ for regimes that genuinely fall into that category and refraining from using it to describe regimes that, however nasty are not fascist, matters hugely.”

Varoufakis is fully aware of the odd angle—at least from a more traditional Marxist perspective—from which he is approaching the topic of his latest book. He argues that capitalism, the dominant mode of production on earth for the past two hundred years, has been replaced—not, as hoped for through generations of the left, by socialism, but by a new type of economic structure he has dubbed “technofeudalism”, and which, he says, is turning out to be even more ruthless, destructive and difficult to dislodge than capitalism.

Varoufakis, a former finance minister in Greece during the radical phase of the Syriza government, frames his analysis with the story of how his father introduced him, as a child, to understanding capitalism through the development of the forces of production throughout history, beginning with the Iron Age. By the time Varoufakis is an adult, his father poses the question to him that becomes the starting point for the book: “Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?”

This engaging approach of a dialog with his father, a touchstone throughout, serves the book well, keeping things relatively simple and straightforward as Varoufakis lays out his picture of the new mode of production. At the center is his understanding of the transformation that tech capital (which he renames “cloud capital”) has inflicted on humanity: the conversion of billions of us into “cloud serfs” willingly albeit unconsciously volunteering to labor for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners. 

How does this happen? As we switch on our computers, access the web, and lend our eyeballs to cloud capital we hand them a free gift. By clocking our clicks and following our eyeballs, the tech corporations are able to refine their targeting of our wants and desires continuously; the individual cloud serf decisions add up to mass analytics that guide ever more focused algorithms for pitches and sales individualized just for us. Cloud capital, in the form of corporations like Amazon and Apple, does continue to employ workers (“cloud proles”) in their brick-and-mortar facilities and extracts surplus value from them the old-fashioned way: through the labor process and capital accumulation. But the bulk of wealth collection now occurs, Varoufakis asserts, on platforms that have replaced markets on the web. He calls this form of wealth accumulation “cloud rent”.

Yes, he says, these platforms look like markets. But markets—as in exchanges of goods and services, and a key part of the definition of how capitalism functions—are the lesser part of what happens here, on sites he calls “cloud fiefdoms”. The bulk of the income for cloud capital comes from extraction of rent from the mostly modest-sized capitalist app developers who have to use the platforms to sell stuff to us—at an average cost to the developers of thirty percent of the transactions. The people who sell things on the platforms Varoufakis terms “vassal capitalists”.

All of this represents for Varoufakis a process that looks a lot more like how wealth was accumulated during feudalism—through ground rent, with serfs handing over a portion of what they produce on the land lent to them by its owners, feudal lords—than in capitalism, where surplus value is extracted through the difference between wages paid to the worker and the larger amount the worker generates for the capitalist.

Varoufakis’s explanation of how we got here relies on a reworking of the marxist understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. During the centuries-long emergence of capitalism out of feudalism the two modes of production were intertwined and coexisted. But eventually one part (surplus value production, creating profit) became dominant and the other (rent) operated in the shadows cast by its giant rival. Yet, rent survived, and ultimately and opportunistically today has taken on a new and monstrous form. In this way technofeudalism represents the revenge of the undead rent over profit. As Varoufakis puts it, “cloud capital is overpowering terrestrial capital, sucking cloud rent increasingly out of the global value chain” (169).

Interspersed within the more abstract discussion of the comparative dynamics of feudalism and capitalism are useful explanations of various recent real world developments. Like David Harvey, Varoufakis has a knack for making Marxist political economy understandable and clear. (The book helpfully includes an appendix where he defines all his terms.) Where did this cloud capital power come from in such a startlingly short period? Two sources: the enclosure of the internet commons, or privatization of what started out a public resource; and the massive transfers of public funds to private hands following the 2007-8 crash and Great Recession. The combination of the two created the primitive accumulation of cloud capital, which “differs from other kinds of capital in its ability to reproduce itself at no expense to its owner, turning all of us into cloud serfs.” But that’s not the only way it reproduces itself.

With the banking implosion of 2007-8 two things happened. The national central banks determined these businesses were too big to fail, so they shoveled huge amounts of cash to them. But to balance all this money-printing, their governments imposed austerity on the working class. Since the masses were in no position to buy new product lines, capital invested in non-productive enterprises like real estate and the stock market—and tech. Since there was no risk to the investment, having come from free central bank money, profit was optional. Hence the proliferation of startups and tech companies with soaring valuations while returning no profits for years.

Varoufakis spins a number of provocative implications out of this picture. In his final chapter he proposes what a new economy and society would look like if we could construct one free of profits and rents. But he also informs us that getting from here to there is a daunting challenge, larger than the one we faced under the rule of capital, which at least for a time gave us the opportunity to construct social democracy from class consciousness and union power. With technofeudalism, the proliferation of precarious employment, shrunken unions and the dispersal of community, social democracy is currently impossible, says the author. Organizing the working class is still necessary, but not sufficient. Now we need to build a bigger, broader alliance with all willing partners.

Like any analytic or political tradition, Marxism needs to renew its categories and rethink its presuppositions as the world changes in order to remain relevant and accurate. Technofeudalism represents a serious effort to accomplish this necessary task. I am not fully competent to assess the diagnostic picture Varoufakis presents in this book. For one thing, I don’t have the statistical chops to determine if the amount of value being removed from the global capitalist system by cloud rent has actually surpassed the volume of worldwide profit generated by labor for capital.

Solving this single equation should decisively answer the question as to whether Varoufakis is correct in his central argument. If you’ve made it through Volume One of Capital, that—along with not having slept through late neoliberalism—is really all the reader needs to follow the discussion in Technofeudalism. But following the discussion and being able to assess its correctness are two different things.

Whether his answer is correct or not, Varoufakis has asked the right questions in a book that plumbs some of the murkier depths of how our world works today.

By: Chris Brady

HADLEY, M.A. – The sleepy town of 5,000 near Amherst is usually known for its annual asparagus festival and university move-in day traffic. But in mid-2022, Hadley shocked the nation when workers at the town Trader Joe’s voted to certify a union election, the first in the country. A Minneapolis location soon followed and stores in Oakland and Louisville after that, rounding out the independent Trader Joe’s United (TJU). Several worked with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), co-organized by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE), to organize their workplaces.

However, three years after the favorable unionization vote, the Hadley store still doesn’t have a contract. Trader Joe’s has proven a vicious negotiator and union-busting innovator. TJU’s founding president Jaimie Edwards was fired on May Day, 2025, after ten years at the store.

From High Turnover to Interstate Independent Unionism

Retail workers face egregious working conditions sector-wide. Inconsistent scheduling, inconvenient hours, and minimal workplace protections or benefits are common. The precarity of workers’ employment and high staff turnover has made these sectors historically more difficult to organize.

According to crew member Ellie Arsenault, management targeting employees with bogus write-ups for trading shifts is common.

Management plays this game of setting people up to kind of get them in trouble and get them fired, essentially. There were a lot of things like that, and I think people are just kind of tired of it. We need protection and we don’t want management to just arbitrarily decide these things. 

Arsenault added to Working Mass that identity can play a role in harassment from management. Some crew members made transphobic comments that management left unaddressed especially during the TJU organizing drive, often targeting queer workers, an authoritarian company culture recently exposed in a January 2025 report from Fast Company showing how Trader Joe’s has allowed rampant sexual assault and physical safety issues to go completely unaddressed in the workplace.

When Trader Joe’s workers began organizing in 2022, the union wasn’t popular with all workers. Unionists faced major obstacles in persuading older coworkers with better interpersonal relationships with management. Earning their support required hard, one-on-one conversations from organizers to make sure the vote made it over the line. Some workers even pursued a “de-unionization” effort through the NLRB, which ultimately failed, but was backed by the influential National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and culminated in a written testimony for the House of Representatives.

These challenges to solidarity were unsuccessful. While one Trader Joe’s shop that organized under the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) in New York City was shut down on the eve of going public as a unionbust from the boss, working together, the Minneapolis and Hadley stores both voted to unionize and have been embroiled ever since in contract negotiations.

Three Years Without Contract 

Trader Joe’s has no interest in bargaining in good faith, or for that matter, bargaining at all. The company is going for blood by targeting the jugular of American labor law itself: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). While the NLRB has always been limited, the attack by Trader Joe’s illustrates the ferocity and finality with which the company intends to fight the union. Trader Joe’s won’t stop at busting one union; they want to bust the entire system of American unions’ legal apparatus, too.

Union negotiators know the bosses’ inventory well, and though Trader Joe’s is attacking on multiple fronts, they also use tried-and-true tactics. The boss will obfuscate, delay, and deny any attempt at negotiation rather than follow the law – common union-busting tactics to break rank-and-file morale. Trader Joe’s would rather talk in circles about meeting logistics instead of pay and benefits and find any way to manufacture delays.

Robert Hönisch, a worker-organizer at the Minneapolis location, noted to Working Mass: 

Trader Joe’s has engaged in numerous delay tactics to try and delay bargaining and try and make us argue about stuff that’s just not true. This is kind of the nature of their legal council, the law firm that represents them, and how anti-union in this company can be. Examples include them bringing up stuff that’s just not pertinent to bargaining, not wanting to engage in good faith on very small issues, and management demanding that we have in-person representatives at bargaining, while showing up to bargain without bringing their own in-person company representatives. 

Trader Joe’s has reprimanded employees for wearing union pins, fabricated stories about pro-union employees assaulting management or overcharging customers, and created a culture of surveillance and disparagement of any union activity. Trader Joe’s even offered lower retirement benefits to unionized stores. 

Targeting Organizers

Former TJU national president Jamie Edwards was not the only anti-union target. Emerson Azevedo was also fired.

Azevedo suffers from a history of seizures. In May 2025, he had a seizure at work. Emerson’s union colleagues called an ambulance. A week later, Emerson returned to the store to receive paperwork to be medically cleared by doctors, a condition necessary for him to return to work. Although he was still experiencing residual nausea, Emerson informed Hadley management he wanted to return to work but couldn’t pursue medical leave because he didn’t have a primary care doctor yet. Management seemed amenable to Emerson’s wish to come back to work.

The doctors, however, would not clear Emerson because management filed for involuntary medical leave despite Emerson’s explicit non-consent. The doctors insisted that they could only clear him when the medical leave claim finished filing. Trader Joe’s was holding up his medical leave paperwork, forcing Emerson to scramble to find a primary care doctor within a limited timeframe, leaving him completely vulnerable in a time of need. In other words, the boss weaponized healthcare to create a series of hoops for the unionist to jump through to keep his job.

When asked if Emerson’s paperwork limbo was in retaliation to his union organizing, Ellie responded, “most definitely.”

Due to public outcry and TJU organizing, Emerson was finally reinstated at work with backpay in June 2025. Emerson’s story resonates with workers with chronic conditions everywhere. Corporations will use any leverage they have to crush worker power. 

Trader Joe’s treated former TJU union president Jamie Edwards with a death by a thousand cuts method of unionbusting. They reprimanded Jamie twice for overcharging customers. When Jamie asked if management had looked at the alleged transactions to verify the overcharge, they said they had not. They failed Jamie’s performance reviews, pretended Jamie punched their manager, and screamed at customers. Jamie’s coworkers testified to management that these instances never occurred, but that wasn’t the point. Trader Joe’s was not interested in truth, and was merely looking to take out its most prominent opponent and shop floor worker leader.

Two weeks after stepping down as TJU president, Jamie was illegally fired. Unfair Labor Practices (ULPs) have been filed with the NLRB for both Jamie and Emerson’s cases. This tactic has been replicated across the country as different Trader Joe’s locations struggle for union rights, most notably in the Essex Crossing, New York location – where a union vote ended in a contested tie after Trader Joe’s cracked down on organizing activity hard. It’s clear that the boss continues to develop new and more underhanded methods to target workers for organizing, as workers continue to weather the storm in their fight for a contract that paves the way for genuine dignity in the workplace.

To support the union, readers can contribute to Trader Joe’s United and to Jamie’s solidarity fund. 

Chris Brady is a member of Boston DSA and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Trader Joe’s United Fights a Third Year Against Unionbusting Tactics appeared first on Working Mass.

Events & Actions

Tuesday, July 22 (8:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.): ICE Out of SF Courts! (San Francisco Immigration Court, 100 Montgomery St.)

Tuesday, July 22 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Social Housing Reading Group: SF Analyst’s Report (Zoom)

Wednesday, July 23 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tech Worker Reading Group: You Deserve a Tech Union (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Wednesday, July 23 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Independent Outreach (Meet at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, July 24 (6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Electoral Board Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, July 24 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Immigrant Justice Working Group Meeting (Zoom)

Friday, July 25 (5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Electoral Education: Zohran x DSA’s Victory (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday, July 25 (7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): Maker Friday: Zine Edition (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, July 26 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Excelsior Know Your Rights Canvassing (Meet in person at Silver Ave & Mission St)

Saturday, July 26 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Cuba Reportback (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Sunday, July 27 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Oakland Ballers vs Northern Colorado Owlz baseball game + “Halloween in July Night” (In person at Raimondi Park, 1800 Wood St, Oakland)

Monday, July 28 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Socialist in Office (SIO) Subcommittee Regular Meeting (Zoom)

Monday, July 28 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tenderloin Healing Circle (In person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate)

Monday, July 28 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board x Divestment Priority Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Tuesday, July 29 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Wednesday, July 30 (6:45 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.): Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (Zoom and in person at Radical Reading Room, 438 Haight)

Thursday, July 31 (5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.): Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)

Thursday, July 31 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Immigrant Justice Office Hour (Zoom)

Saturday, August 2 (12:45 – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Outreach and Outreach Training (Meet in person at 1916 McAllister)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates. Events with a are especially new-member-friendly!

ICE Out of SF Courts!

Join neighbors, activists, grassroots organizations in resisting ICE abductions happening at immigration court hearings! ICE is taking anyone indiscriminately in order to meet their daily quotas. Many of those taken include people with no removal proceedings.

We’ll be meeting every Tuesday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30  p.m. at Immigration Court at 100 Montgomery. We need all hands on deck, even if you can only participate for 1 or 2 hours.

Social Housing Reading Group

What could social housing look like in San Francisco, and how do we get there? Join DSA SF for a reading of the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s report on how the city can build its own publicly owned, deeply affordable housing. We will also read the SF Berniecrats report, Housing for the 99%, which lays out a vision for social housing for all in San Francisco. Join us at 1916 McAllister today (Tuesday, July 22) from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

DSA SF Tech Reading Group

On July 23rd from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., come join DSA SF and Rideshare Drivers United tech workers for our next monthly tech reading group.

We’ll be reading an excerpt from You Deserve a Tech Union by Ethan Marcotte. This event is hybrid with food provided at the DSA SF office at 1916 McAllister St.

RSVP here to access the link to the reading! See you there!

Electoral Education: Zohran x DSA’s Victory

Join us Friday, July 25 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at 1916 McAllister for an open discussion about the very exciting Zohran campaign, how they did it, and how it’s shaping the national discussion about electoral politics in the United States and in our national organization! .

Audience: EVERYONE! Whether you’re new to movement or been following the Zohran campaign for a while, we hope this will be interesting for us all!

Maker Friday: Zine Edition

Join us for Maker Friday: Zine Edition on July 25 at 1916 McAllister from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.! We will learn how to make zines, brainstorm ideas for them, and make them. All are welcome, no experience necessary, come connect with your fellow comrades while making fun content to pass out.

Know Your Rights (KYR) Canvassing with Immigrant Justice

Join the Immigrant Justice Working Group this Saturday (July 26) for Know Your Rights (KYR) canvassing! We will be distributing red cards and KYR posters to businesses and community members in the Excelsior. Our meeting point will be at the intersection of Silver Ave & Mission St at 1:00 pm. New to canvassing? No worries! There will be a brief how-to training before we go out in pairs or small groups.

Cuba May Day Brigade Reportback at the Office

Join us this Saturday (July 26th) from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the DSA SF office at 1916 McAllister for a reportback from the 2025 May Day Brigade in Cuba! You’ll hear a comrade’s firsthand experience of the socialist program in Cuba, its medical and educational systems, the May Day events that occurred in Havana, the challenges the Cuban people are currently facing, and their revolutionary optimism that we should adopt in the face of our organizing in the belly of the beast.

We’ll be blasting some classic Cuban tunes to get us in the revolutionary spirit, and there will be snacks and refreshments. Hope you can come!

Summer Social(ist) Events!

On Sunday, July 27th at 3:30 p.m. we’ll be going to the Oakland Ballers vs Northern Colorado Owlz baseball game + “Halloween in July Night” (at Raimondi Park) – We will be sitting in the 3rd Base GA2 section. Tickets are $15 each, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds (just reach out to us if you need help buying a ticket!). RSVP here and purchase tickets here.

Support the Blue Bottle Independent Union

Nestlé is one of the biggest corporations in the world charged with decades of human rights violations in the global south. They’re now in our backyard intimidating baristas with surveillance, firing, and bad-faith bargaining. Last week, baristas in four Bay Area locations of Nestlé-owned Blue Bottle presented management with a super majority of union cards and demanded voluntary recognition. Instead, Blue Bottle fired one of the organizers, B.B. Young. This comes at an especially bad time for B.B. since their husband was also recently laid off.

Blue Bottle workers are asking for our support

• Donate at this GoFundMe page 
• Sign the petition to demand that the company voluntarily recognize the Blue Bottle Independent Union
• Join the Blue Bottle Independent Union email list  or follow on Instagram to stay in touch
• If you are an employee of Blue Bottle, fill out this intake form to get involved with organizing the union at your own store

Reports

What You Missed at Last Week’s Electoral Board Meeting

At the Electoral Board meeting on July 17, the Electoral Board discussed several items:

• Legislative updates from the Socialist in Office Subcommittee
  • Please join the new #socialist-in-office Slack channel to receive more frequent updates from the subcommittee!
• An upcoming meeting on  with Jackie Fielder’s office to advance our Divestment priority
• A letter campaign to support Jackie in her sole dissenting vote on the City’s budget which forces austerity and potential future actions such as an op-ed
• A Zohran Mamdani themed discussion event happening this Friday at 5:30 in the office!

If you would like to be involved in these conversations, join the Electoral Board on Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom or the office at 1916 McAllister and find us on Slack at #electoral-discussion.

Behind the Scenes

The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.

To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.

Steve Thornton has been an activist in Hartford since moving there in the 1970’s after graduating from the University of […]

By: Chris Viola

Last month, from June 27 to 29, The Emergency Workers Organizing Committee (EWOC) held its first ever in-person conference: The “United & Win” Conference, co-hosted by Labor@Wayne. The location: right here in Detroit, on the campus of Wayne State University. Hundreds of labor activists from around the United States and Canada attended, and members of our own DSA chapter made up a large contingent of organizers, volunteers, and attendees for the event.

EWOC was born in the early days of COVID-19. DSA members–many of them volunteers and workers on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign–teamed up in its creation with the militant United Electrical Workers (UE) union. The idea was to help workers confronting COVID in their workplaces to organize for the protections they needed.

One of EWOC’s early victories was helping workers at a Michigan Taco Bell win hazard pay, paid sick leave, and personal protective equipment necessary to work during the early days of the pandemic. EWOC has stayed busy and has grown in the five years since, turning attention to the growing number of union drives in the time of Starbucks and Amazon organizing. Currently, EWOC has more than 400 volunteer organizers, 200 additional volunteers, and is supporting over 350 active campaigns.

How does it all work? A worker dealing with problems in their workplace fills out a form and a trained volunteer reaches out within 48 hours. The initial conversation may be with a newly-trained volunteer, and depending on the situation, the worker could end up talking to more specialized and experienced organizers. It could be a campaign to win a single demand, or it could lead to the process of unionization.

This is the distributed model of organizing used in the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign, UAW’s fight for “one member one vote” and direct leadership elections in their own union, and Starbucks Workers United winning over 600 unionized stores. It works by proactively giving as many workers and organizers the tools and support they need to win in their workplace. Workers who reach out and the volunteers who work with them both gain valuable skills and experience to take on increasingly bigger fights.

The conference was yet another tool for worker-organizers made available by EWOC, and perhaps the most versatile. The convention featured more than 25 workshops to hone organizers’ skills and panels to celebrate victories and inspire future campaigns.

Workshops ranged from training, such as NewsGuild’s Learn It, Do It, Teach It, to Remote Organizing by Collective Action in Tech. Panels ranged from Organizing in the Federal Sector with the Federal Unionists Network to Solidarity Across Movements, a panel featuring workers fighting for common good causes: Starbucks Workers United fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, a worker with No Tech for Apartheid, and a university unionist fighting against their research being used in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. A few sessions were recorded and will likely end up viewable on EWOC’s YouTube channel.

Panels and workshops were only half the fun, though. Social events were a short jaunt from Wayne State’s campus. Before the kickoff Friday evening, a member of our DSA chapter and fellow UAW activist, Dianne Feeley, led a tour of the Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

After the opening plenary, we were treated to words from an EWOC staffer, Megan Svoboda, and one of Wayne State’s Labor School Staff, Sean O’Brien (not that Sean O’Brien, he was quick to point out). Detroit DSA hosted a party at Northern Lights Lounge where we saw the commingling of dozens of conference attendees and Detroit DSA members.

The next evening there was a social gathering at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Exhibits such as “Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art” and “Fuck Your Green Light” were introduced by the artists. A few attendees came early or stayed after the conference just to go to a Tigers game or tour local attractions such as the Motown Museum or Greenfield Village.

The camaraderie was off the charts all weekend. I felt like I was constantly meeting someone new or someone I sort of knew on social media. lt felt like we were all sharing a part of ourselves by having this conference in our backyard, with events that were tied to the city itself. Big thanks to everyone at EWOC for choosing Detroit — a city rich with labor history — for their inaugural conference!

During the closing ceremony, participants were asked to give a short takeaway from the weekend. One comrade — through tears — said that he was so inspired by everyone’s stories that he was starting to feel that even he could make a difference.

This is the central lesson I’ve taken from a lot of union and DSA events. People become drawn to organizations like DSA or EWOC perhaps due to what the organization has accomplished or what it’s working on, not knowing how they will fit. But it starts with that original belief that we can actually influence the workplace, community, and the world around us.

So, that first conversation you have on the shop floor, that first door you knock in a campaign, that first phone call you make in a phone bank, that first signature you get for a petition: You have people standing with you. You have DSA. You have UE. You have EWOC. You have comrades.

Metro Detroit DSA has recently formed its own EWOC group as a subcommittee of the Labor Working Group. If you’re interested in being a part of it, the next meeting is coming up on Wednesday, July 30th at 6pm at The Old Miami in Detroit.

Chris Viola is a MDDSA Member and a UAW worker.

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First-of-its-Kind Labor Conference Strikes Detroit was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Workers in architecture are fighting back against capitalists chasing the bottom line at the expense of climate and affordable housing.

The post Architecture Workers Are Building Power on the Job appeared first on EWOC.

by Liz Henderson

As spring turns to summer, the biodiversity of life bursts forth in all its glory. We stand witness to rebirth in the cycle of life. Add moisture and heat, and seeds, those tiny bits of seemingly dead organic material, sprout shoots and first small leaves. 

In a cold wet spring such as we have had, the baby plants have the capacity to wait for weeks for the right conditions. Then they go for it, growing inches in a day. You can almost see them grow. On a warm, sunny day, an asparagus shoot can add 12 inches in a few hours. A pea or bean plant can send out long tendrils, grabbing whatever string, fence or other plant is within reach, to climb towards the sun sending out the flowers that will become pods of peas or beans. The stalks of last year’s raspberries suddenly send out leaves and clusters of flowers that swifty transform into tiny green-white berries that just as suddenly turn red, then dark purple and swell with sweet juice attracting birds and humans to help spread their seeds. Warm spring breezes pulse with purpose—reproduce, this is your chance.

We live in an exciting moment in the history of the relationship between humans and plants. For millennia, indigenous peoples and peasants have observed plant life cycles closely. To feed themselves and their families year round they had to.  When crops failed, there was no supermarket to turn to. When you focus on growing things, you sense that we are part of the natural order. Agroecology emerged from that awareness. As Robin Wall Kimmerer has written so beautifully about Haudenosaunee gratefulness that Nature provides everything we need as long as we are responsible participants.

A peasant farmer in Mali or a French market gardener did not have a scientific explanation but they knew that plants depend on the soil for nutrients and that you have to replenish what you have taken out. The law of return. Sir Albert Howard, one of the founders of modern organic agriculture, learned about how to make compost and the power of mycorrhizae, soil fungi, from the Indian peasants the British Empire had sent him to teach how to farm. He had the humility to listen to those illiterate  experts in soil health. In this decade, academia is finally giving soil scientists the resources they need to catch up with peasant farmers.

The age of soil science is finally turning attention to the unexplored frontier beneath our feet. I attend regular meetings of the NY Soil Health Association (www.newyorksoilhealth.org) which is open to everyone. Their website is a treasure trove of resources and listings of soil health field days. We will be holding one in Rochester, Sept 16, 4pm – 7pm, at the Lexington Ave, urban farm with a focus on cover crops. If you attend, you will take home cover crop seed for your community garden.

If you have not yet done so, I recommend joining one of the many community gardens in Rochester, most of which are included on this slightly out of date list: monroe.cce.cornell.edu/horticulture/community-gardens-in-monroe-county. If you do not have time to commit to full membership, 490 Farmers has volunteer evenings every week at 5:30 and TapRoot welcomes volunteers for a variety of jobs: sites.google.com/taprootcollective.org/taprootcollective/volunteer. The Urban Agriculture Working Group will be hosting work sessions through the summer at gardens that ask for help. Everyone is welcome to show up! These are the sessions so far:

• Kailee Little Free Library Garden (133 Kenwood Ave. 14611) Thurs, July 24: 1:30pm – 3pm
• Phillis Wheatley Library Community Garden (33 Dr Samuel McCree Way 14608) Tues, Aug 5: 11am – 12:30pm
• Beechwood Beauty (672 Bay St. 14609) Fri, Aug 8: 10:30am – 12pm

Regular participation in a community garden is a way to reduce your food budget a little—but even more, a way to get to know people you wouldn’t meet otherwise. I have volunteered as a sort of organic adviser to the Magnolia St. Children’s Garden for four years. We have work sessions most Saturday mornings from 10 till noon. I grow some of the starts, find materials, and help people who fall behind catch up with care for their bed. My special job is teaching the neighborhood children to orient garlic bulbs and potato seed for harvests we share. No one is in charge of this garden—yet everyone chips in what they can—making a new sign, mowing the paths, or building a new compost system. 

Iletha Clifton, who lives across the street with her 97 year old mother, started it.  Dr. Bill Bayer joined his former patients in growing healthy veggies, found funding for garden infrastructure and brought his church group to mentor children in reading and academic skills. Three of the members collectively share close to 200 years of experience while others are totally new to gardening. A recent Afghani refugee maintains two beds where her focus is tomatoes, peppers and cilantro. This year, Monroe County funded a Food System Outreach Program that paid for garden improvements. Gardens had to make a very specific list of the equipment they needed and then the Cornell Cooperative Extension purchased those items and had them delivered.  Magnolia St. received materials for a new fence to keep the woodchucks out. So far, so good!

Another source of gardening information and inspiration is Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY (www.soulfirefarm.org). On top of their series of how-to videos, they have made a film of lead farmer Leah Penniman’s book Farming While Black. The Rochester Black Nurses Association and the Food Policy Council (FPC) are hosting a special showing of the film Farming While Black  on Thursday, July 10 at 6:30pm at The Little Theater in Rochester. Here is a link to the trailer. After the film, there will be a panel on the theme Cultivating Wellness: Mental Health Support Through Farming and Gardening. Panelists include Koi Mendez (local land steward and food justice organizer), Melanie Funchess (Director of Mental Health and Wellness at Common Ground Health), and Katie Nuber (Therapeutic Horticulturist). FPC member Dr. Celia McIntosh will be the moderator.

The post Getting Grounded: The Wonders of Biodiversity first appeared on Rochester Red Star.