By Austin DSA

For over a year and a half, Austin DSA has argued that the state of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people is inseparable from struggles for justice in Texas and the United States. We see this everywhere: from the militarized police forces that stalk Black and Brown neighborhoods after being trained by the Israeli military, to the women in Gaza forced to navigate reproductive healthcare structures that have been obliterated by imperial US foreign policy as reactionary domestic policy destroys those same systems at home. The local is inseparable from the international, as the violence that the US oversees abroad returns to our own communities in the form of fascist violence. 

We stand in solidarity with Nueces Mosque, Austin Diyanet Center, and the Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association (IABA), which on May 22 were spray painted with “symbols, including Stars of David, defacing the mosque’s main entrance and surrounding property.” 

Conventional media in the United States often frames violence in Palestine as a religious conflict that has lasted for centuries. The spray painting of a Star of David on a mosque perpetuates this myth, when in fact, this conflict is defined by the aggression of a Zionist, racist, setter-colonial state against an indigenous people which refuses to let itself be destroyed. Framing this as a religious conflict hides a national liberation struggle and inflames both Islamophobia and antisemitism around the world. While Zionism claims that no Jewish person can be safe from antisemitism without a militarized ethnostate, Jewish people suffer when their religion is co-opted and equated to the violent, political ideology of Zionism.

The use of a Jewish religious symbol as a hate crime object against Austin’s Muslim community at large and the UT community at Nueces Mosque in particular is only one more example of how these dynamics have tangible consequences in our city. Recall the stabbing of Zacharia Doar following a Palestine solidarity protest in Austin in 2024, the attempted drowning of a child in Euless, TX later that year, and the emboldening of local neo-nazi groups to carry out actual antisemitic hate crimes in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election. None of us are safe unless all of us are safe.

Austin DSA and Austin Against Apartheid organize for a free Palestine by diverting US resources away from Israeli genocide and apartheid. In doing so, we are standing against all occupational forces that stand between working class people and freedom. We all deserve to live in a world free from money spent on state violence and war instead of life affirming services like housing, healthcare, and social safety nets. Israel’s aggression and religious framings of the conflict breed acts of hatred around the world. The struggle for Palestinian liberation affords us a vocabulary for envisioning a safer, freer world. A free Palestine means a safer society at home and abroad.

The post Solidarity with Austin’s Muslim Community first appeared on Red Fault.

On May 26th, Marcos Henrique and Lucas Segobia, both skilled workers here in Maine, were abducted by ICE on their way to work at 6am. They are being held at Twin Bridges Facility in Wiscasset on no charges, and they fear removal from the state and deportation. As of this report, a representative stated that the men were informed they would be moved shortly. If and when they are, it will be hard for their legal representatives to locate them. This is how the government disappears people.

In response, there was a press conference today, May 30th, at 10 AM in front of Portland City Hall. Roughly 100 people showed up on short notice to show support, along with local news outlets. Those who spoke included friends, family, and coworkers of the two who were abducted.

When neither of Lucas or Marcos showed up for work on Monday morning, loved ones tried to locate the pair for over 36 hours. In that process of calling Border Patrol, ICE detention Centers, Local prison facilities, and using the ICE locator page, family members were misled and lied to multiple times before they were located. Worse, Marcos and Lucas were lied to about where they were, believing they were in Portland when they were in Wiscasset. Every person in this country has a right to due process and habeas corpus. To waive the rights of people based on their immigration status is not just an attack on the immigrant community, it is an attack on everyone. We must bring Lucas and Marcos home to their friends and family. 

People’s Inclusive Welding, Southern Maine Worker’s Center, Maine DSA, and more are desperately urging the Maine community to contact their representatives, both locally, statewide, and nationally, to express outrage at this miscarriage of justice. 

The post Two Men Abducted by ICE in Maine appeared first on Pine & Roses.

By Ecosocialist WG member Jordan Lewis

Transit isn’t just a nice-to-have; someone in your community relies on it, and they deserve better service.

In anticipation of Oregon’s once-a-decade Transportation Package, which decides transportation spending priorities for the years ahead, Portland DSA boarded TriMet’s busiest bus and train routes to survey actual daily riders. Our goal was to learn the needs of those who depend on transit so we could best advocate for them in state deliberations over the transportation package. We felt riders were not advocated for in these negotiations, as proceedings tended to center lane expansion projects and a “back to basics” framing over any kind of transit service improvements. This was confirmed when the Oregon Transit Association warned of coming service cuts if the existing STIF Payroll tax were not raised from 0.1% to 0.5% (early drafts of the package proposed a mere 0.18% STIF rate).

“My commute time to work used to be 15 min to the Portland VA when the 64 still existed. Now my commute time is 1 hour with transfers even though I live 15 min driving distance from work. This has been an abysmal change that has made my workdays so much harder […] It doesn’t help that I am also disabled with constant chronic pain, to add to how difficult my life has become since this bus schedule was unnecessarily changed.”

The Ecosocialist Working Group, itself composed of many regular transit riders, recognized Elite Projection in how media, local and state governments told stories about public transit. While they describe our buses and trains as “Portland’s largest homeless shelter”, with otherwise fine service interrupted by homelessness on the streets and on trains, our membership did not think that was the whole story. Our suspicions were supported by Trimet’s own Attitude & Awareness Survey (A&A) which did report safety concerns twice as common as cleanliness or service concerns, but whose demographic data showed a non-representative sample. 66% (!) of A&A respondents had Bachelors Degrees or higher; 24% had the option to work fully-remote.

It is our belief that the A&A survey, which was distributed via advertisement, mail and e-mail to those already on TriMet’s internal contact lists, oversampled professional office workers who may not ride as much post-pandemic. Our survey was designed to be distributed in-person, either digitally or with pen and paper, to those riding the bus, MAX or streetcar during rush hour or on weekends. We thought this approach would better represent the average TriMet users who rely on it as a public service. We surveyed every “Frequent Service” transit route in the city of Portland in order to maximize response rate, and we selected sessions geographically in order to distribute surveys evenly across the city. We did not collect any identifying data other than ZIP Code, regularity of riding and Transit route (due to data privacy concerns), but the geographic distribution seemed very even across the city. In total, we canvassed 340 riders from 65 zip codes, across 33 transit routes. While 11% of our respondents rode less than once per week, 40% of “Attitude & Awareness” respondents rode less than once per month.

The survey findings did not totally contradict the A&A survey; most riders still listed passenger behavior as their most common negative experience, but poor stop shelter conditions trailed it by a few percentage points. When increased service frequencies were offered alongside increased outreach workers, the same riders who reported feeling unsafe preferred increased frequencies.

“Specific to the 77, more frequency. Overall unpleasant conditions at stops makes the experience waiting at the bus uncomfortable. I ride with my toddler and there is often human feces and drug paraphernalia. Lack of marked well lit crosswalks at stops also means I get off further than I would like to so that I can feel safer crossing at night.”

Our theory as Ecosocialists is that ridership follows service quality just as much as it follows homelessness rates. A strategy to improve transit service, both for current riders and for potential new ones, must prioritize increased service frequency, cleaning/maintenance of shelter facilities, and an increased presence of unarmed rider ambassadors to de-escalate difficult situations onboard.

“Most buses downtown have incredibly difficult disabled access. trimet security and police intimidate and harass people and delay trips and make riders feel unsafe. NARCAN. security should be public safety such as narcan, not policing fare.”

All of these improvements require an increase in funding to agencies like TriMet through raising the STIF Payroll Tax to at least 0.5% by 2030, and ideally to a full 1% by 2035.

The next steps are to lobby for these changes, both through discussion with state representatives and senators, and during the public testimony opportunities which are as-of-yet unannounced. The Package (now known as TRIP) is still under discussion, and so the specifics of the Bill have not yet been revealed, though a draft was released in early April and a controversial May memo has not inspired much confidence. Move Oregon Forward has an email form through which you can contact state officials with influence over the bill. Ecosocialist WG member Jordan Lewis has reserved a public communications slot at Portland City Hall at 9:30 AM on June 11, which he will use to present the findings of this report to city council.

You can view or download the full report here (PDF, 854KB):

“We need more seating and shelters at more stops, it sucks to have to stand at a stop while waiting for a ride.”

The post Ecosocialist Working Group Releases Transit Rider Survey Report appeared first on Portland DSA.

Seattle DSA Condemns Anti-Trans Police Violence in Cal Anderson Park

APPROVED FOR RELEASE 25 MAY 2025

Seattle DSA strongly condemns the violent police riot that occurred yesterday, during which officers assaulted, peppered sprayed and arrested protestors and bystanders including DSA members as they peacefully exercised their 1st Amendment rights to demonstrate against a bigoted anti-trans hate rally in Cal Anderson Park hosted by an out-of-state astroturf group.

It is egregious that the city and state would use public resources to protect a hate rally. Sending in law enforcement to attempt to provoke, arrest and injure Seattleites advocating for a city free from discrimination and hatred is disgusting.

We condemn Mayor Bruce Harrell for using the police to target queer protestors in one of Seattle’s gayest neighborhoods, and call on every local elected official to condemn these actions by police and investigate how this hateful, bigoted event was ever allowed to take place.

Today is a shameful reminder that the state has chosen to side with hatred and discrimination, and the police will always come down on the side of those who seek to attack and erase us. Seattle DSA will always stand with the trans and queer community – an attack on one is an attack on all.

Seattle DSA Statement on Those Arrested at Cal Anderson Park

APPROVED FOR RELEASE 26 MAY 2025

This past Saturday, 24 May 2025, twenty-three Seattle community members were arrested after the Seattle Police Department and Washington State Troopers violently attacked protestors exercising their constitutionally protected free speech to tell the anti-queer, transphobic, anti-choice astroturf group MayDayUSA their hate is not welcome here. Seattle DSA condemns this recent exercise of state violence and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s equivocating statement on the events of last week as he attempts to absolve himself of responsibility.

While several of the arrested were soon released, many remained in jail over the weekend under false, trumped-up charges including felony assault. Among these political prisoners are close comrades of Seattle DSA, individuals with deep ties to our community who have been active in the wider movement for a just, collectively liberated world.

This uncalled-for attack at the hands of the police and courts will not go unchallenged by Seattleites as we face many mounting crises, an increasingly hostile Mayor and City Council, and a growing recognition that politics-as-usual is a dead-end. Seattle DSA stands with our queer and trans neighbors as they fight for their liberation from both the violence of cisheteropatriarchy and the many violences of capitalism, and we stand with political prisoners who fight for justice and freedom.

As we mark the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and the summer of uprisings it sparked, we have seen demands for police accountability and disarmament as well as prison abolition be met with further police impunity, more police funding, and an ever-growing prison-industrial complex. Time and time again marginalized communities have borne the brunt of state violence in defense of an untenable status quo, communities including our BIPOC, queer, unhoused, migrant, and low-wage neighbors. And time and time again these communities have risen up to declare this situation unbearable and fought back.

We demand charges be dropped for the Cal Anderson Defendents and for Bruce Harrell to immediately resign. Seattle DSA further continues to demand for the end of prisons and police militarization as tools of domination and capitalist exploitation along with the wider structural violence of racism, settler colonialism, and imperialism that underlie them.

Without justice, there can be no meaningful peace. And attack on one is an attack on all.

Upcoming Events

Tuesday, May 27 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tech Reading Group (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Tuesday, May 27 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.):  Da Vinci Code Reading Group – Day 2 (In person at 1916 McAllister and Zoom)

Wednesday, May 28 (7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.):  Maker Wednesday (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, May 29 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Ecosoc Vision and Strategy (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, May 29 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Immigrant Justice Working Group (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, May 31 (6:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.):  Chapter Movie Night: A Screening of Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) (In person at Carr Auditorium, SF General Hospital, 22nd St)

Sunday, June 1 (5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Capital Reading Group (In person at 1916 McAllister and Zoom)

Monday, June 2 (5:50 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Socialist in Office + Electoral Board Meeting (Zoom)

Monday, June 2  (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Ecosocialist Biweekly Meeting (Zoom)

Monday, June 2 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board Meeting (Zoom)

Wednesday, June 4 (6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): New Member Happy Hour (In person at Zeitgeist, 199 Valencia)

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

Saturday, June 7 (1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Outreach and Training (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, June 7 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Know Your Rights Canvassing (Location TBD)

Monday, June 9 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.):  Tenderloin Healing Circle (In person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate)

Monday, June 9 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Events & Actions

Maker Wednesday

Join us for Maker Wednesday on May 28 from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.! Come make some art and connect with comrades. All are welcome, see you there!

Visioning an Ecosocialist San Francisco

Join us for “Visioning an Ecosocialist San Francisco” this Thursday, May 29 6:00-8:00 p.m.! We’ll meet in-person at 1916 McAllister to imagine, brainstorm, strategize, and plan our ecosocialist future.

Move Night: Soy Cuba

The Labor Board and Immigrant Justice Working Group are excited to announce our upcoming Spanish Language Movie Night! As part of our desire to improve our Spanish, learn more about Marxist movements in Latin America, and connect with the Spanish speaking community of San Francisco, we are going to be showing “Soy Cuba,” an 1964 international co-production of Cuba and the USSR. We are planning on having food, so please RSVP so we can know how much food to order. We will be watching at the Carr Auditorium at SF General, Saturday, May 31 from 6-8:30 p.m. Invite your friends, eat snacks, and sharpen your knowledge of Spanish and Marxism in Latin America. Hope to see you there!

Socialist in Office Reportback

At the Socialist in Office meeting on May 19, the electoral board discussed several items

• Land use permitting reforms being pushed by the Mayor which threaten gentrification of districts in the City like Calle 24
• A debrief on on the Four Pillars hearing. Notably, SFPD admitted to not being able to solve the underlying issues surrounding drug overdoses.
• Proposed ordinance from Jackie Fielder preventing unhoused families from evictions from shelters for at least a year
  • The board is organizing a contingent for a rally in support of the hearing on the resolution on June 9 at City Hall. Keep an eye on the calendar for full details and a link to the RSVP which will be posted shortly.

If you would like to be involved in these conversations, join the electoral board on Mondays at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom and find us on Slack at #electoral-discussion.

EWOC Fundamentals Training Reportback

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.

By Jean Allen

Standing at the 4/19 protest organized by 50501, I was happy to see so many people coming out to oppose Trump (even with my frustrations on the lecture series model of rallies), though I couldn’t help but think back to the protests of 2020, the last time I’d seen MLK park that packed. Because for all the people at the 50501 protest, the feeling was that going to this rally was an extracurricular. I saw a tremendous amount of clever signs, signs that declared that it must be serious because the person holding it was protesting, signs with a coy kind of revolutionary expression. People get annoyed at these signs and I get it, but what these rallies look like to me is thousands of people trying to sort out what their political beliefs look like under this assault by Trump. It’s for that reason that I still think these rallies should incorporate small group discussions and that ROC DSA should hold another forum, because if the main product of these rallies is political development, small discussions can support that.

I remember five years ago, when another protest started at that park, where the energy was very different. At the height of Andrew Cuomo’s popularity in the beginning of COVID, he passed a budget undoing in one week many of the justice reforms a generation of activists had fought. People were mad at that, mad at the economy and mad at the horrifying state we are living in. The day after the 3rd Precinct of Minneapolis PD was burned down, a crowd gathered at MLK Park and after a series of speeches, marched onto the street.

The protest of May 31st 2020 was probably the most militant protest I’d been involved in in the city of Rochester. People who had been studying up on the Hong Kong protests arrived in multiple blocs, chants were directly oppositional to the police and repeated by a crowd large enough to make downtown Rochester’s streets seem small.

This changed when we marched to the Public Security Building. The police line which had guarded the building the whole day was not present, and in its place was a single cop car. As the crowd got angrier and angrier, eventually some started destroying the cop car. After this the police came out and escalated with pepper pellets, forcing the crowd into the street. A standstill was held for an hour, with the crowd pressed up and with a consistent escalation from the police. This was he day that I realized there was a difference between pepper pellets and tear gas. During this, a comrade and I realized how many organizational resources would fall apart if we were arrested, and left. Shortly afterwards someone began burning the cars that were in the Public Safety parking lot, which led to the police moving impetuously and pushing the crowd across the river, leading to the riots of that night.

This spawned the Rochester iteration of the 2020 protest wave, which has defined politics since. Some-thing that is tremendously interesting about the 50501 protests is that it has activated the older ‘family protest’ crowd who had largely vacated rallies since 2020. People who have not been politicized think of a protest and they think of the intense police repression and escalated crowds that have characterized the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 or the Palestinian liberation movement since October 2023. I regularly see comrades being, in my view, very overly cautious about protests, because to them protests started with the 2020 Rochester riots instead of the Geezers for Peace protests of the Bush era.

These protests had a feeling where you had to go, not out of ideological reasons but for very personal ones, which exposed a, maybe thrill-seeking aspect to these protests. Had that march not ended at the Public Security Building and police violence not been inflicted on the crowd, it is very likely that nothing would have happened in the city of Rochester that year. We would have had rallies, marches which were perhaps larger and of a far more militant character than previous ones, but it was the police violence and riot of May 31st that turned Rochester into a hotspot of protests. We can characterize the whole protest wave of 2020 as being caused by a series of cop riots which forced the crowds that showed up to rapidly develop their tactics and organization. But it was also dependent on the threat of police violence to continue it’s pace, given the number of people who showed up to either experience police provocateur, some suburban thrill seeker, or an ‘authentically’ angered person from Upper Falls. Dyshika McFadden was arrested connected to burning police cars, but he was one of a few people. But what we do know is that the moment that the police’s personal property was threatened they lost their nerve and threw people onto the other side of the river, triggering a night of riots.

“Cop riots . . . forced the crowds that showed up to rapidly develop their tactics and organization.”

This created the conditions for a curfew which allowed the police to round up dozens of homeless people and escalate their use of force, but also beginning the process of a political rupture even before we knew that they’d killed Daniel Prude and were covering it up. This rupture brought Lovely Warren down, brought the People’s Slate into City Council, and brought us to the moment we are in now. It’s also meant that despite the politicization of policing and the consistent downward pressure on police staffing, the police department has consistently been allotted more money in budgets. The last 5 years have been a reaction to that moment in 2020, when people were infuriated that on top of everything—on top of the bad economy and our degrading environment, on top of the restrictions put on women and queer people and the nightmare that is COVID, on top of the wars and the suffering—the cops can KILL you and get away with it. Out of the fears sparked by the riots of 2020 and a car manufacturer releasing cars without locks, right wing media has created an all encompassing view of cities as sub-civilizational dens of murder and crime, which has for the moment allowed the occasional “officer involved shooting” to happen without rising to the scale of a city-wide crisis. Instead the loss of these fellow human beings is back to what it “should be” in our society: a personal crisis alienated families and communities. The cops CAN kill you again and no one will care, for now. The RPD, and its backers benefited a lot from the riots of 2020.

They did so at the cost of the immediate political order they were charged with defending. By the fall the police allowed the crowds to occupy the area around city hall for a week, and that is a general lesson we can learn from 2020: that when the chips are down, parts of the state which seemed to be monolithic start to fracture against each other. Sometimes that happens in obvious ways, sometime not so obvious. But it’s a key part of the politics of crisis, and we would do well to develop our sense of it.

We can see a similar dynamic in the Trump administration with their idiotic self imposed crises. When the chips are down, when the stakes are at their highest, fractions of the ruling order turn on each other. That, on its own, is not enough. The working class is not yet able to rule and needs to be brought there, purposefully united and organized. But understanding how to move in those moments is how politics works. We will be taught a lot soon.

The post Riots and Protest in the Home of Frederick Douglass first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

While the conclusion of the 2024 election season offered most DSA chapters an opportunity to pause, reflect on their campaigns, and regroup ahead of the following electoral cycle, special elections called in Oakland immediately launched East Bay DSA back into action. The recall of Oakland’s mayor and the election of the District 2 Councilmember to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors created two vacancies to be filled in an April special election.

Both elections were pivotal for political control of local government in Oakland, as progressive wins in both races were necessary to secure a progressive majority. The left quickly coalesced behind a single candidate in each race: former Representative Barbara Lee for Mayor and housing policy director Kara Murray-Badal for District 2. Lee, both a progressive icon and a longtime mainstay of East Bay politics, was easily able to assemble a broad coalition of support ranging from the left to the establishment and from labor unions to the business community, and faced only former Councilmember Loren Taylor, an arch-centrist figure in Oakland politics who narrowly lost the 2022 mayoral election and subsequently emerged as a leader in the recall movement.

But despite her progressive credentials, most notably being the only member of Congress to vote against the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Lee is not a socialist and East Bay DSA did not intervene in the mayoral race. Murray-Badal, on the other hand, is not only a socialist but a once-active member of East Bay DSA, having founded the chapter’s Racial Solidarity Committee and organized for Medicare for All as a canvass lead. Members of the chapter were enthusiastic about her run, and the chapter voted overwhelmingly to endorse her.

It was, however, clear that Murray-Badal faced a much greater challenge. Her main opponent, environmental policy advisor Charlene Wang, started with a financial and name recognition advantage, having run only a few months prior for the at-large position on City Council. Wang also benefited from being able to position herself between the progressive and moderate wings of local politics, aided by the presence of candidates to her right such as Harold Lowe and Kanitha Matoury. Murray-Badal would need to rely on a strong field operation through her core coalition of labor unions and progressive organizations to win.

Immediately following our chapter’s endorsement in February, we began to co-host and support canvasses on a weekly basis. In total, we held or supported eight weekend canvasses, three weeknight canvasses, and one phonebank, in addition to conducting turnout phonebanks and textbanks during the week, knocking nearly three thousand doors in the process. We developed a strong relationship with the Murray-Badal campaign, and multiple DSA members served as campaign staff.

Ultimately, though, our efforts were unsuccessful. Wang won the election, leading with 47% of the vote to Murray-Badal’s 34% in the first round and winning 59% to 41% after ranked-choice voting.

Electoral analysis

District 2 is in many ways a microcosm of Oakland as a whole, exemplified not least by its demographic makeup. A racial and socioeconomic gradient spans the district; the hills in the north are mostly white and wealthy, while the communities in the flatlands, closer to the shore, are overwhelmingly non-white and working-class. Wang won both extremes, while Murray-Badal won the diverse and mixed-income center of the district, in particular Cleveland Heights and most of the Eastlake neighborhood. In Crocker Highlands, the wealthiest part of the neighborhood, Wang won easily and Murray-Badal finished third behind centrist candidate Harold Lowe. Wang was strongest in Chinatown, the westernmost part of the district, and also performed well in San Antonio in the southeast, a neighborhood which notably awarded Trump his best performance in Oakland last November with over 20% of the vote.

A precinct-level estimate of the results after ranked-choice calculations produces a similar map, though with Wang flipping one precinct and improving significantly on her result in Crocker Highlands thanks to the distribution of Lowe’s second-choice votes.

Examining turnout at the precinct level most clearly demonstrates the gradient described earlier. While some San Antonio precincts saw turnout below 20%, a whopping 64% of Crocker Highlands voters cast ballots, a particularly high figure for an off-cycle special election. Turnout disparities between wealthier and poorer areas are obviously commonplace, but they are exacerbated in lower-turnout scenarios such as special elections.

Takeaways

The trichotomy between conservative wealthy areas, progressive middle-income areas, and conservative poor areas is not unique to this election; rather, it reflects voting patterns commonly encountered by progressive and socialist candidates across the country and indicates an issue we must tackle if we are to be more electorally successful. We must expand beyond our base of college-educated, downwardly-mobile young people and make inroads among working-class communities that have been ignored by campaigns and political organizations and often move toward reactionary politics as a result. Toward this end, East Bay DSA’s Electoral Committee plans to undertake deep canvassing campaigns in areas such as West Oakland and East Oakland, inspired by and hopefully in collaboration with left-wing community organizations such as the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment which are successfully building bases in these areas.

Internally, too, there is work to be done. While there was a core group of consistent volunteers throughout the campaign, most chapter members did not engage with the campaign, and some even expressed opposition to participating in the campaign or electoral politics in general. Getting more members on board with engagement in elections will be crucial to building our capacity and strength as an organization. Additionally, our decision to hold canvasses every weekend may have dampened attendance at each canvass, especially considering our limited capacity to turn out members on a weekly basis; for future campaigns, we are considering instead hosting a smaller number of canvasses but concentrating turnout efforts on those few canvasses to maximize impact.

But while we lost the election, our efforts were still fruitful for East Bay DSA and our electoral organizing, both internally and externally. Our canvasses and phonebanks provided valuable campaign experience and leadership development to members, growing the Electoral Committee’s core and preparing us for future campaigns. 

Antonio G, co-chair of East Bay DSA's Electoral Committee, put it this way: “The campaign was an outlet for local political agency. Kara’s campaign and values were for some new members the perfect starting point to connect with strangers and organize in community."

Our consistent involvement made us one of the strongest components of the Murray-Badal campaign’s coalition, strengthening our relationship with allied organizations and the broader left in the East Bay. While we have much room to grow, learn, and improve, this experience has helped us as we look toward 2026 and beyond.

The following is a response to Hazel Williams's March 7 article, "Reflections on California DSA”, in Democratic Left, the online publication of the national DSA. 

As former (Fred) and current (Michael) members of the California DSA steering committee we would like to express our appreciation for Hazel Williams’s examination of the first couple years of the existence of California DSA, the first official state DSA body in the country. As she notes, this is essential work in assessing the utility of such bodies going forward.

However, while we are in broad agreement with her description of the events, we have some significant differences with her interpretations of their meaning. These interpretations result from two problems: information she leaves out that would help explain the failures she enumerates; and political differences she glosses over.

One important background factor needs to be emphasized at the outset: there were few resources made available to California DSA from the national organization because national DSA is itself understaffed and without sufficient institutional resources to anticipate and prevent such problems. A simple statement of what happened doesn’t get to this underlying dynamic.

Hazel tells us that “the PAC [political action committee] had racked up thousands of dollars in fines from noncompliance prior to my term and it took me nearly a year and over 100 email exchanges with national compliance staff to bring it into compliance. And yet the PAC was not used once during my term.” This is true. We appreciate the heroic work she did in cleaning up that mess. But the PAC was not formed by California DSA. The brand-new state body in 2022 inherited it from the ad hoc, chapter-driven statewide Prop 15 campaign of 2020.  And it was not used during her one-year term because there were no priority statewide elections during that year. 

The first state committee, prior to Hazel’s term (we have one-year terms) set as a major goal developing an income stream and hiring staff, to address the obvious lack of necessary resources. But we did not know what we were up against. As the first state DSA structure, we had no precedents to look to, nor, as it turned out, any national rules to help us develop the financial independence we knew we needed. Indeed, just the opposite: for instance, national rules, we found, prevented us from creating a bank account. 

Also key: the idea of California DSA was born in the peak moment of activism in 2020 when Bernie Sanders ran for president the second time. That level of activism continued into the first months of the pandemic as the Black Lives Matter movement scaled up and, in California, in the Prop 15 “tax the rich” statewide ballot measure campaign that fall. California DSA was predicated on what turned out to be an overoptimistic hope that a major portion of that activist cohort would continue that level of involvement. As we all know, instead we saw a national falling off of involvement and membership across the board, including in California.

Hazel notes the failure of CA DSA to live up to its founding “vision document” and enumerates the various parts of that vision we did not put in place, or only barely. Behind this failure was our inability to create the administrative infrastructure necessary to support committees, meetings, and other initiatives adequately—see as above:  no money, no staff, an all-volunteer body, layered, as Hazel notes, on top of the considerable local work state committee members were already doing. As it turned out, the conditions were not favorable to generate greater resources, which could not be foreseen, absent a crystal ball.

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. Hazel mentions that when she attended the statewide zoom presentation of “California DSA 101” six members showed up. Since late 2024 we have run this introductory ninety-minute session three times, and each time we have had more than sixty participants. She laments our failure to put in place any training during her year in office. On our website we have begun to store training modules, and last month delivered a four-part, weekly “Labor 101 for Socialists” study group to fifteen participants.

Speaking of the website, we have a regular bi-monthly newsletter, California Red, that goes out to every member in the state, and we update the news articles on the site every month, providing the only means for thousands of DSA members to learn what the other chapters in California are up to. 

This is especially important for our farflung at-large members. In a state the size of California, we have comrades reading California Red and attending our CA DSA 101s who have no chapter within a hundred miles. One recently joined our communications committee. She told us how grateful she is to have found her way to plugging into DSA work:  “When I wasn't sure whether I was ready to make a serious commitment of my time and energy to DSA, especially since all existing chapters are many hours of travel away, meeting gracious, approachable, skillful humans on this side of the country virtually through the state org made taking that plunge far less daunting. In addition to receiving their invaluable wisdom and support, networking directly with other rural and at-large members in our huge, diverse state is, in my opinion, necessary to support courageous chapter formation across California's many forgotten, often politically conservative, rural places. The state org is the most obvious place for that.”

Hazel says, “In summary, we built much of the basic infrastructure of a state body, but struggled to achieve most of our organizational goals.” Well, no. The “basic infrastructure of a state body” would include the necessary resources of staff and finances. We “struggled to achieve most of our organizational goals” precisely because we did not have that basic infrastructure.

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. There are, in fact, few costs at this time to DSA as a whole, and the benefits are slowly beginning to accrue. 

With extremely limited resources (the volunteer labor of about a dozen people, including the state committee and its standing committees (electoral and comms, and every other month a few dozen delegates to our state council) we are pioneering a new DSA structure. If California DSA were a person, its stage of development would be, at three years old, a toddler. It is far too soon to issue any final—especially dismissive—judgements. 

We agree with Hazel that DSA members in other states should proceed with caution, with clear objectives, and a realistic plan for resources matched with its goals. Since it is likely that political struggles over social policy will increasingly occur at the state levels, we see great value in DSA organizing state formations. We are happy to share our experiences with comrades involved in any efforts along these lines. 

Solidarity,

Fred Glass and Michael Lighty

In 1867, San Francisco passed a law making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.” Such “Ugly Laws”—in place all over the country until an intolerably recent 1974—were simply one more knot in the rope that’s been strangling disabled folks since Capital first decreed that any body that can’t create wealth for the bosses is unworthy of existence.

One might be excused from believing that the Nazi concept of a “life unworthy of life” left our world splattered across Eva Braun’s armband along with the Fuhrer's gray matter, were not the insidious echoes of eugenical thought still screaming in our ears. It ricochets from the ableist algorithm that withheld care during COVID based on a psychotic assumption linking ability and human worth, to a Canadian suicide law that coerces non-terminally ill undesirables to self-deport out of existence rather than face an unassailable scarcity of care. As Derek Beres put it in a recent Guardian article,

“When (Health Secretary Robert F.) Kennedy claims that autism is worse than Covid-19 because the latter only kills 'old people' and 'metabolically healthy' people don’t die from it, or when a Maha associate claims that measles is 'an essential rite of passage, immunologically', you’re hearing the language of soft eugenics. Don’t let vaccines protect everyone, instead let the infirm and weak be culled so that the strong will survive and perpetuate.”

Because the sky will most definitely fall if an 80 year-old-man recently hired by 81 million people exercises the humility it takes to use a mobility device in public, "Aides reportedly conceded that it was politically untenable to have the U.S. president in a wheelchair," and so conspired to prevent President Joe Biden from using one. We couldn't have a sane, rational and responsible conversation about this oldest of presidents' eventual senescence in part because so many people couldn't stand to—or trust their neighbors to—contemplate, let alone contend with, the complexities of collective responsibility among and to the aging, and the fact that the privileged are mostly the ones who get to do it.

Only in a eugenical society, where even an essential service provider like Planned Parenthood must navigate the dark words of its beatified founder—the avowed eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who once wrote that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective”—can we truly appreciate the imperfect miracle known as Medicaid (MediCal in California). This chronically underfunded federal program that provides life-saving health care to impoverished Americans with all the panache of a bobbing log after a shipwreck—was suggested by a President famous for hiding his disability (FDR) and signed into law by another who worked from the toilet (LBJ -- perhaps the Crippest thing we’ve ever heard).

Like all true miracles, Capital's begrudging acquiesence to Medicaid has a secular explanation—a boring one about compromise and compassion and Federalism in a serendipitous moment where good was painstakingly chiseled from a bedrock of fear, bias and paternalism. And it is that exact secular miracle that keeps me (Brian) alive today, sucking air through one tube while I piss out another, living not for the bosses, but for the aspirational Jeffersonian promise at the heart of any argument for American greatness. This very promise of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is ignored by a current regime hellbent on stripping so many of so much so a few can have a little more.

Choosing Interdependence Over Eradication

The life-saving log of Medicaid/MediCal isn't enough for all the human flotsam floating in the wreckage created by Capital's abuse of our bodies. Disability justice is how we—Crips, freaks, sick & mad people, neurodivergents, institutional survivors, casualties of state violence and imperial wars, Deaf and hard of hearing people, the deformed and the despairing, and those who hate us (starting the day they too are confronted with the unsparing reality that their own bodyminds are fragile, ephemeral, golden and sacred but don't actually work mechanistically like industrial cogs in a profit-fetishest's wheel)—survive the crushing reality that Capital is entirely happy to kill anyone not harvestable for material gain. We do disability justice because we know we are broken, like the split husk from which every raw green seedling emerges, and we do disability justice because we know we are whole, as part of the intricate web of life in all its diversity and complexity and unexpected magic, which continues to confound and inspire and rally us all at our best. The way we do disability justice is together. It's the only way it can be done.

Interdependence is the crux of our movement. Interdependence—a solidarity borne out of recognition of our innate vulnerabilities—is how we keep us alive and die trying. As Patty Berne, one of creators of this queer & BIPOC movement, put it: 

“Disability Justice holds a vision born out of a collective struggle, drawing upon the legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance within a thousand underground paths, igniting small persistent fires of rebellion in everyday life. Disabled people of the global majority—black and brown people—share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice. There has always been resistance to all forms of oppression, as we know through our bones that there have simultaneously been disabled people visioning a world where we flourish, that values and celebrates us in all our myriad beauty.”

Solidarity among and with disabled people is not optional if the working class is to out-survive and defeat capitalism and its currently rabid fascism. Abled people are ill-equipped to survive this antifascist fight without us. They may have never been in a situation where all of the normative rules for human existence are inverted in their own flesh and blood lives, and political inversion on a massive scale is what we are all undergoing together now. Disabled people have already had to learn how to create community out of extreme isolation, have had to muster the courage to show up in public knowing that our very presence will inspire contempt, rancor and worse. People who haven't been marginalized don't have these skills. The survival craft. They haven't cultivated the pluck that it takes to pick yourself up, again and again, day after day, when all the alarms are sounding and the doors won't open and the lights make your brain melt and your limbs are in shattering pain and you are dealing with voices that tell you to just shrivel up and die. Not as an apex existential crisis with soaring soundtracks and fabulous makeup, not as a one-off you can tie up neatly with a bow, but every. Single. Day. They haven't faced that. 

But we, the quarter of the population who have nonconforming bodyminds, live this oppression constantly, and are undeterred by its current iteration. The surreality of our embodiment in an economic hegemony that hates us for being is the air that we have adapted to breathe. We have learned to stare into the slobbering maw of economic and state and corporate and institutional violence every day, everywhere we live, across the generations and say: fuck you. We exist. We remain alive out of defiance and the defiant and limitless expanse of our love for ourselves and each other. That is our politics. The rest is details.

Natural Comrades

Disabled people are uniquely primed for socialist organizing, and it is self-defeating not to prioritize us in every DSA chapter, in every action, and in every member recruitment drive. We are more than a quarter of the population, are overwhelmingly working class (typically, poor), we are intersectional, we are where most people end up at some point during, if not the end, of their lives, and we are already excluded in large numbers even from labor organizing, because we are often unable to conform to the productivity fetish of Capital. In an articulation of the Third Principle of Disability Justice offered by Berne in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice:

“3. ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC. We are anti-capitalist, as the very nature of our mind/bodies often resists conforming to a capitalist 'normative' level of production. We don’t believe human worth is dependent on what and how much a person can produce. We critique a concept of 'labor' as defined by able-bodied supremacy, white supremacy, and gender normativity. We understand capitalism to be a system that promotes private wealth accumulation for some at the expense of others.”

Disabled people know in our bones what abled people often fear and temporarily elude facing: 

Only once we acknowledge the challenges of our shared dependence, along with our irreducible differences, can we fully value the skills and resources necessary to promote the capabilities of everyone, whatever our distinct needs, whether as carers or cared for, noting the frequent reciprocity of these positions. Recognizing our needs both to give and to receive care not only provides us with a sense of our common humanity, but enables us to confront our shared fears of human frailty, rather than project them onto those we label as 'dependent.'“

In this we hold the keys to create the "caring economy" of our dreams, as articulated in The Care Manifesto.

DSA must have the backs of disabled people, because we are you, we are who you will be, and we are the bodies you will have to step over on your way to doing anything else if you don't. Should we persist as a nation that relegates its most vulnerable members to mass graves? No? Then fight for Medicaid, MediCal in California, which rich politicians want to defund so they can buy more mega-yachts. Fight for SSI. Fight for SNAP, CalFresh in California. Fight for ramps over stairs. Fight for Medicare For All. Fight for a worker's compensation system that refuses to humiliate injured workers. Fight for your neighbor who is too scared to tell you they are sick, to ask for help when they need it, to give you the wisdom they sit in, through long dark nights and blistering days. Fight for access: language access, structural access, online access, transit access. Fight for the person who isn't in the room because of the room. 

We can fight hate with rage, or sorrow, or a patient understanding extended to those moving at a different pace, or water bottles on a sweltering picket line, but we fight it best together, interdependently, with sharp tongues and soft hearts, searching for a greatness not lost, but found in every kind word and selfless act, in every tear shed and setback faced, in every impossible possibled and bitter pill swallowed. Only through solidarity can we hold this secular miracle of our mutual survival—including Medicaid—together. It's the way we will win.

Further reading:

Sins Invalid's 10 Principles of Disability Justice is an anchor for our own work and we are grateful for the brilliance of the queer BIPOC people who articulated and exemplify it.

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Kakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press. 2018)

The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, by The Care Collective (Verso, 2020)

Matin, B.K., Williamson, H.J., Karyani, A.K. et al. "Barriers in access to healthcare for women with disabilities: a systematic review in qualitative studies." BMC Women's Health 21, 44 (2021). 

Sharpe, Jason A et al. “Social Risk Factors Are Associated With Disability Prevalence - Results From 17 States in the 2017 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.” American Journal of Health Promotion: AJHP vol. 37,4 (2023), pp. 453-463.