Trans workers face discrimination and bigotry on the job, but unions can provide the protection, benefits, and solidarity missing in non-union jobs.

The post Trans workers belong in unions appeared first on EWOC.

By: Jake S

Resident Advisors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute live in the student dormitories and offer services and resources to the students that live in their buildings to keep them safe and offer them help when they need it. RAs voted to form a union and affiliate with the United Auto Workers – the same union that represents graduate student workers at WPI – roughly two years ago, and have been in first contract negotiations with the university for the last year as WPI-RAU-UAW.

On October 31, they launched a strike demanding that WPI respond to their workplace needs and agree to a decent contract. 

Working Mass met with Zoey and Christian, two WPI-RAU members on the union’s bargaining committee, to learn more about their roles, their union, and what they need from WPI to do their jobs that WPI is refusing to give them.

WM: What makes these jobs important?

Zoey: At its core, this job is about people. It’s about being there for our residents in a number of ways and showing up to support them however we can.

WM: What kind of things do your residents come to you with?

Zoey: There’s a lot of things. Sometimes, they’ll talk to us if they’re really struggling with academics and they’re worried that they’re gonna fail their classes because they haven’t had enough sleep. Sometimes, they’ll come to us with mental health challenges or, you know, trouble with socializing on campus if they haven’t been able to make many connections or friends. We can direct them towards opportunities and resources and help with those things. In some cases, they come to us because it’s the middle of the night, and there’s an emergency that needs to be urgently dealt with, and they know that we’ll know how to handle it – someone’s suffering from alcohol poisoning, for example. We provide a peer that our residents can go to when they’re unsafe, or if they need access to help. We’re there in the dorms with them and they know that we’re a safe person they can go to.

Christian: The important piece is being there in the halls with the residents living alongside them throughout the academic year, because you have a chance to get to know them and build up trust and that sense that if something goes wrong – if they need to come to you for something urgent – you will be there to them and they feel comfortable coming to you for something that might be more serious.

WM: Why did you and your coworkers decide to form a union?

Christian: We formed the union about two years ago because a large percentage of the staff was really upset with constant and repeated changes to job expectations and responsibilities. There were several meetings over several months where management drastically changed what we were supposed to be doing and we got very – I believe rightly – upset with management over those repeated changes. The contract that we had originally signed did not align with the duties that we were now expected to perform. So, we formed our union in response to these actions taken by management.

We’ve been undergoing contract negotiations for nearly two years since.

WM: How has the University responded to that decision to organize?

Christian: We were moving towards our union election, and they just kind of didn’t.

WM: Sounds like they tried to ignore you!

Christian: There wasn’t very much of a response right after we had our election and our union was certified, either. We began our bargaining in late summer 2024. Not long into that process, there was an introduction of a pretty drastic restructuring of our positions that would fracture it into multiple different positions with totally different responsibilities. This particular piece has been a major part of what we’ve been fighting against for the past year, and is a major piece of why we’re on strike.

WM: Tell us more about your core demands.

Zoey: Like Christian said, the biggest thing is that we do not want this restructuring. They proposed it about a year ago, and they have made almost no changes to it, or movement on it, since they initially proposed it. And we have been steadfastly opposed to it the whole time because the positions are not well thought-out, they are not fully developed and ready to be put into practice. It’s barely a prototype that’s not ready for real-world use.

WM: You just had a bargaining session this past Monday in which they have not moved on that position around restructuring of the unit. Do you want to talk more about how it went today? 

Christian: Absolutely. Our bargaining committee has worked tirelessly to put together a full written contract proposal that has had significant and meaningful movement on our positions. We believe that the contract that we put together and presented to them today would benefit our whole community. The most important piece to us, of course, is those three roles WPI wants to recategorize us into. The solution we proposed to resolve that was to put their half-baked roles on pause and, for the duration of this contract, keep the positions as they are. But we proposed to form a committee that would do it the right way, modifying their proposed positions or developing something new with feedback from res advisors, residents, and housing staff to put together something that makes sense for all WPI residents. This was totally rejected by management, and they maintain their commitment to the positions that they’ve proposed, and still have not been moving on them whatsoever.

They claim that our proposal with this committee doesn’t meet anywhere in the middle. We disagree.

We have been steadfastly opposed to it the whole time because the positions are not well thought-out, they are not fully developed and ready to be put into practice.

WM: What do you think is motivating the restructuring of this unit?

Zoey: We’ve heard a lot of things over the months. One thing they said is that they’re not doing it for monetary reasons. They believe that the RA role as it is isn’t good enough, and they want to “modernize” it. Maybe their idea is meant to be some sort of new flashy thing that they want to advertise. It seems like it might just be sort of the pet project of the Dean of Students.

During bargaining, the Dean of Students talked with us a bit about why she’s sticking to this vision, and it was something that we’ve heard from her a bit before. Basically, it’s that four years ago or so WPI had a pretty serious mental health crisis. There were seven suicides in a period of six months. This was during the COVID pandemic, a very tumultuous time in the world, and in that span of time somebody at WPI talked to some RAs and heard that RAs were struggling to do everything that they were doing. They were expected to do too much. And this is apparently what they think the solution to that looks like. Meanwhile, we have our RAs and our whole community speaking out to tell them that this is not the path forward. 

WM: It’s interesting that, under crisis, WPI is moving to eliminate the RA role rather than to address the needs of their RAs with more support – hiring more of you, for example. A friend of mine used to serve as an RA at WPI, and it seemed like he was on call basically all the time for his floor. It was a very stressful, demanding job that didn’t give a whole lot back to him. Do you believe them when they say at the bargaining table that this has nothing to do with money?

Christian: It’s hard to know for sure exactly what they’re thinking, but of course there’s a monetary aspect to this. I mean, WPI has a lot of money… the endowment alone is massive and always growing. WPI just bought two new hotels to turn into new student housing, and we have tons of grants that continue to flow in to support different programs. I really can’t imagine why they would want to do a restructuring of our roles that they know could harm residents unless it would be for financial gain.

WPI just bought two new hotels to turn into new student housing, and we have tons of grants that continue to flow in to support different programs. I really can’t imagine why they would want to do a restructuring of our roles that they know could harm residents unless it would be for financial gain.

They claim it’s not, they claim it’s for these other reasons, but they haven’t made any movement based on the feedback anyone has given them on the basis of their supposed reasoning. That’s what we saw at the bargaining table again today. So, it makes it really hard to believe that there isn’t a financial incentive, or at least some ulterior goal from the upper administration that they’re trying to accomplish.

WM: Do you think it also has something to do with employer control in the workplace?

Zoey: Absolutely, I would say it does. In their insistence on sticking to these roles, really what they’ve been saying is that they believe it is their right to unilaterally decide what the job descriptions are, and they universally have the right to create any additional roles or additional job descriptions without talking to us about it beforehand.

As WPI’s previous president left the position, she took home a compensation package of just over $2 million. Converted to an hourly wage for a 40-hour work week, that’s nearly $1,000 an hour. Res advisors are not currently paid a wage or stipend. Many of its next top earners are administrators being paid base salaries deep into the six figures. The school’s endowment sits at nearly $650 million; its total assets held, roughly $1.3 billion.

In February of this year, WPI was recognized as an R1 research university, distinguishing it as an institution that produces a high number of doctorates and has significant resources at its disposal for funding academic research. Room and board costs for first-year students (who are required by the school to live in the dorms) have ballooned to more than $16,000 for a single academic year. And over the last ten years, undergraduate tuition has climbed steadily from roughly $45,000 to just over $60,000, representing an increase of over 30% – more than double the average rate of undergraduate tuition increase across Massachusetts.

Jake S is a Worcester DSA member and a former member of United Auto Workers (UAW).

The post WPI Resident Advisors On Strike Against Destructive Restructuring and Unionbusting appeared first on Working Mass.

This opinion piece is part of an ongoing debate in Maine DSA about candidates in 2026. Pine and Roses welcomes contributions. 

“[O]ur notion, from the very beginning, was that ‘the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself[.]’” — Friedrich Engels, 1888 Preface to the Communist Manifesto

Troy Jackson is a man that needs very little introduction within the labor movement in Maine. Troy has spent nearly half of his life in public service, having been first elected to the Maine State House of Representatives in 2002, and the State Senate in 2008, where he eventually became Senate President in 2018. During his entire time in public office, Troy has earned a reputation as a stalwart ally to Maine’s working class. 

When I first heard about Troy, I was quite dismissive. I quietly entered the labor movement with a lengthy article on the need for an independent working class party, so when I heard some of my comrades gushing about Troy as the latest reform candidate running on the ticket of a bourgeois party, I assumed that they were describing a certain kind of political candidate and electoral strategy which I had already thoroughly criticized. My position changed, however, when I had the opportunity of hearing Troy speak at the Maine AFL-CIO’s summer institute, and I saw that Troy was actually something completely different from what his supporters had described to me.

What makes Troy Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign qualitatively different from those of other reform candidates is this: unlike other mainstream reform candidates like Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and Graham Platner, all of whom demand systemic reforms which would benefit the working class while leaving intact the system that dominates the working class, Troy’s campaign is actually demanding worker control over the levers of political power, albeit still within the bounds of the existing political system. In doing so, Troy has actually fused the economic side of the struggle for working class emancipation with its political counterpart, as opposed to “lending the economic struggle a political character” (Cosmonaut Magazine). In this regard, Troy stands leagues above every mainstream reform candidate in my opinion, even above Sanders, who Troy names as one of his personal influences. It is for this reason that I think Troy is worthy of endorsement by all self-described socialist and/or communist organizations.

Now Troy is very much not a Marxist, nor any other kind of socialist or communist, nor does Troy pretend to be any of these things. He therefore does not articulate his demand for working class political power in the same terms that my comrades and I would use. It is apparent in his speeches that Troy is driven by lived experience and intuition rather than a scientific critique of the status quo. Any excerpt I present from Troy’s speeches could therefore never make my entire argument for me, as they demand to be viewed in their full context. Nevertheless, I find the following excerpts from his speech at Bernie Sanders’ Labor Day rally in Portland to be highly illustrative, as they punctuate the end of a speech where Troy talks about the lessons he learned as a fifth-generation logger about the importance of the working class taking collective action to advance its own interests:

“I’m running because it’s time to put power back in the hands of people[…] We know that the only way to build our future, the future we want, is if we build it ourselves! That’s why this campaign isn’t just about sending me to the Blaine House, it’s about sending each and every one of you coming along with me, to restore our dignity, and fix what’s been broken for too damn long![…] It’s about time for real folks to take the wheel! Hell, we built the wheel!”

There are many socialists, however, who will acknowledge that while there is clearly a lot to like about Troy, the fact that he is not running on the ticket of an independent working class party disqualifies him from some, if not all, forms of support. While this is very close to my own general position towards socialist electoral participation, and I agree on the concrete need to establish an independent working class party which fields its own candidates in elections, the path to get there must be developed according to the time and place in which we find ourselves. Supporting a position with a strong argument is not enough to bring about change in the world—oh what a different place the world would be if that were the case!

Those who argue a priori for an independent working class party, while correct about the concrete necessity of such a party, forget that such a party has no social basis so long as the working class has not realized the impossibility of consistently advancing its interests in parties consisting of both bosses and workers, such as the Democratic Party (Cosmonaut Magazine). 

Here in Maine, the most advanced section of the working class, represented by Troy and the labor unions, are currently tied very closely to the Democratic Party. I know this quite well because I have conversed with numerous Democratic Party activists at the Maine AFL-CIO events which I have attended. The same phenomenon becomes apparent at the national level when looking at national political fundraising data available on OpenSecrets. It’s an arrangement which, owing to favorable conditions, has worked well for the Maine AFL-CIO, as it has successfully gotten numerous union members elected to seats in the state legislature on the Democratic Party ticket.

The organized and disorganized sections of the working class cannot be won over with argument alone, but must arrive at our conclusion themselves. Socialists need to aid this development by engaging in struggle and agitation alongside the workers and their representatives in the unions. To argue otherwise is to essentially insist that the working class must come to us socialists for our support. Those who commit this error forget these salient words from the Communist Manifesto:

“In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.” — Communist Manifesto section 2

This is where Troy and his campaign once again enter the picture, as his campaign has already become a scene for class struggle in the political arena.

Though it is not always the deciding factor in elections, the candidate whose campaign succeeds in raising the most money generally stands a very good chance at winning their election. And since the capitalist class has the most money, the fundraising data disclosed by political candidates serves as an indicator of which candidates are preferred by the capitalist class (Cosmonaut Magazine).

At the time of writing, the available fundraising data for the most prominent candidates in the gubernatorial race is as follows: 1) Hannah Pingree (Dem.): $542,000; 2) Shenna Bellows (Dem.): $529,000; 3) Angus King III (Dem.): $434,000; 4) Troy Jackson (Dem.): $400,000; 5) Robert Charles (Rep.): $257,000; 6) Richard Bennett (Ind.): $202,000 (Maine Ethics Commission).

Were it not for small donations raised through his connections to Maine’s working class institutions, Troy would not even be on this list. It is quite telling that despite having spent the most time in office and having the most endorsements of anyone currently running on the Democratic ticket, Troy is currently being out-fundraised by someone as formidably unimpressive as Angus King III—son of former Maine Governor and sitting US Senator Angus King. The fact that Troy ranks fourth in fundraising despite being the strongest candidate clearly indicates that the capitalist class will only tolerate working people in government so long as they remain subordinate to a non-working class executive, mirroring the condition of working people in the economy more generally. Troy’s considerable resumé is irrelevant to the capitalist class. They don’t care that Troy has been a faithful Democrat for over 20 years. They don’t care that Troy is probably the candidate who is most representative of the average Mainer. They would rather have a vegetable like Angus King III in the Blaine House—leave it to the guy with the surname King to campaign on nothing other than birthright!

What excites me about Troy’s campaign is precisely what Maine’s capitalist class disdains most about Troy’s campaign: Troy Represents the conscious self-activity of the working class advancing its own interests in the political arena. I do not expect miracles from Troy if he is elected. For me, Troy has already performed his most important miracle by making his campaign a demand for direct working class political power. I know Troy isn’t the socialist movement’s ideal candidate, but he doesn’t need to be in this case. If Troy becomes Governor, Maine’s working class gets the opportunity to witness the limitations of advancing its own interests within a bourgeois government; that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for [their] own purposes” (The Civil War in France). If Troy loses in the party primaries, then it will demonstrate to Maine’s working class the problems of trying to advance working class interests in a party consisting of workers and owners—something already hinted at by the fundraising data shown above. Hence my frequent refrain when comrades ask me what I think of Troy: Maine’s working class takes a step forward whether he wins or loses. And as Marx would say: “[e]very step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs” (Letter to Bracke).

The post The Case for Troy Jackson appeared first on Pine & Roses.

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Imagine that in the poorest neighborhoods of Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago, you could find a public park with glistening swimming pools, world-class sports and recreation facilities, and spectacular landscape architecture rather than vacant lots. If you are a single mother, rather than being forced  to lug your clothes blocks away to pay to wash your clothes, you can come to a public, well-maintained, space to do your laundry for free while you eat delicious food grown at the agroecological garden nearby. Meanwhile, your children can learn how to swim, attend workshops on how to grow food in the city, hit up the planetarium to learn how Mayan Cosmology relates to the Big Bang, hang out at the skate park, or take a guitar lesson.

As you eat your lunch and do your laundry, there is a staffer whose job it is to talk to you and be on the lookout for any whiff of domestic violence in your life. If you are dealing with domestic violence, right next door is a counselor who can help you. Imagine in this scenario, somewhere in the most gutted sections of U.S. cities, you can have access to an expert lawyer should you need one. Regardless of what you’re dealing with at home, you are welcome to see the massage therapist and acupuncturist in this same public building, a space for women known as Casa Siemprevivas. She doesn’t just provide you with bodywork, but will teach these practices to fifteen of your neighbors and friends so that you can use this space for peer-support bodywork circles. These are spaces where emotional release through laughter and crying are encouraged. All of this is free and funded by the government.

In the U.S., this kind of investment in such expansive public services remains imaginary, for now, but it is very much real and operating efficiently in Mexico City under the leadership of the MORENA party of President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the left-wing populist leader of the country. 

Such public institutions in Mexico are called “Units for Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony” or UTOPIAs for short. There are now sixteen of these, at present exclusively in Mexico City’s most populous and poorest borough of Iztapalapa. Virtually all UTOPIAs provide services for women dealing with domestic violence, harm-reduction forward centers for drug users, spaces to support queer and trans folks, community centers for the elderly, and workshops to support men in deconstructing toxic masculinity – which in practice involves teaching men whose relationships are in terminal decline or men who have become single fathers due to unforeseen tragedy, how to do things like wash dishes, fry eggs, or braid hair. No small thing.

Each UTOPIA  has a range of other specialized services. For example, UTOPIA La Libertad, sited directly behind a prison wall, has a petting zoo and a planetarium. UTOPIA Meyehualco, occupying what used to be an extensive park full of soccer fields for use by exclusive leagues only, now has a large animatronic dinosaur park (yes, you read that right) and a hockey rink. UTOPIA Olini hosts extensive manicured ponds, a tidepool, and gym that’s the home field for an outstanding breakdancing squad. UTOPIA Estrella Huizachtépetl sits atop a reclaimed drainage area from a water treatment facility that has been converted into an extensive wetland ecosystem. And UTOPIA Quetzacoatl, sited unusually across multiple discontinuous buildings and spaces in a dense urban area, has a strong focus on children’s mental health services, with an art therapist on staff. Some of the UTOPIAs have regular workshops supporting residents, especially women, in forming small businesses and cooperatives under the banner of the ‘solidarity economy.’

In the following section, I will share more stories of how people use and benefit from the services provided at the UTOPIAS based on several months of research on the ground in Mexico. My aim is to expand our collective imagination in the United States and elsewhere in the imperial core about what a robust urban commons of care can look like. In addition, I hope to share the deeper history of working class organizing and struggle that made these programs a reality. Despite the many differences between our organizing contexts, I suggest that US organizers have much to learn from organizers who have built mass power in Mexico.  

Stories from below: how the UTOPIAs improve the lives of working people

With all of these free social services on offer with a strongly anti-carceral, feminist, and ecological inflection to boot, it is no wonder that the UTOPIAs have garnered attention among international left-wing circles as a concrete example of what municipal ecosocialist politics can look like.  As part of my research in urban political ecology, I’m now spending a sabbatical semester here and I’m basing this article on visits to eight of the sixteen UTOPIAs and interviews with a range of staffers, users, and functionaries.

Across these visits and interviews, an unambiguously positive picture emerged. Mental health counselors told me about how they were able to spend far more time with clients working at the UTOPIAs than they had been working at understaffed clinics. 

An OB-GYN who rotated among the UTOPIAs believed that she was finally able to do what she went to school to do: “bring reproductive justice directly to the people.”

A farmer on staff at UTOPIA La Libertad shared that his agroecological vision for the future was that “cities can and must grow their own food.”

An elderly woman told me that the workshops on death and dying provided her with community and solace after her husband passed. 

A 24-year old butcher who used to be addicted to heroin got clean thanks to the harm reduction and counseling services at UTOPIA Teotongo, and he now goes to the site at least once a week to assist the on-site shaman in conducting temazcal sweat lodge ceremonies. He explained, “the UTOPIAs provided me with a life that I could have never imagined before.”

A group of teenage girls who started a punk rock band confirmed that there was no way they could have done so without the free instruments and practice spaces provided by the UTOPIA.

The UTOPIAs also demonstrate that expanding the urban commons of care-giving does not need to be expensive. The government of Iztapalapa has stated that each UTOPIA cost $100 million pesos (about $5 million USD) to build, with an operating budget of about $1 million USD. Even if these figures are underestimates, and even if they were ten times higher in the United States due to higher prices for materials and labor, the numbers would still not be very burdensome when you consider the billions that our big cities spend on cops and tax breaks for the rich.

As I spoke to workers and users of the UTOPIAs and asked about how these spaces were built, one name came up consistently: Clara Brugada, the former mayor of Iztapalapa and now Head of Government of all of Mexico City. I was told by mental health workers, retirees, hydroponic technicians, and site administrators that the UTOPIAs were the brainchild of Brugada, and that it was through her vision and through the sheer force of her political will, backed as it was by the people, that the UTOPIAs were built. 

The consensus that I heard was so widespread that it felt silly to simply deny it , even if it seemed implausible that a single individual could compile such a radical set of diverse services related to issues as varied as mental health, science education, and urban agriculture. But still, something seemed incomplete – so I dug deeper. Through my research into the recent history of Mexico City’s politics,  it became clear that there was in fact a mass movement that shaped the city’s urban political matrix, developed and piloted many of the initiatives commonly found at the UTOPIAs today, and in a significant way directly produced Clara Brugada. It’s called the Urban Popular Movement. 

The Urban Popular Movement and MORENA: political organization in the wake of neoliberalism

Decades before the MORENA party took shape, a far more scattered constellation of urban organizations were fighting for working people’s immediate demands for titles to their land, water services, and electricity. But in some instances, these organizations went beyond fighting for immediate political demands, and also experimented with and ultimately built direct services to improve people’s lives. They created centers for women dealing with domestic violence, grew food, regenerated urban forest ecosystems, and provided harm reduction services for drug users. In essence, they built many of the elements that we now find, at scale, across the UTOPIAS.

That urban organizers in Mexico City managed to create a forceful social movement with real political muscle under these conditions should give us further confidence that we can too.

The Urban Popular Movement itself built political power among the city’s disenfranchised squatters, the informally employed urban poor, and other working class people clinging to some semblance of normality and dignity.  This movement grew in the fertile soils of urban disaffection with the decades of pro-capital rule by the Institutional Party of the Revolution(the PRI) and subsequent conservative opposition. 

The ruling PRI party had historically maintained its power from the late 1940s all through the 1990s and even part of the 2000s through a corporatist structure built on three organizational pillars under its strict control: theConfederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM), representing labor, the Confederación Nacional de Campesinos (CNC) representing peasants, and the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP) representing urban middle classes, “civil society” organizations, and, in theory, the urban poor. 

By the 1980s, though, large numbers of Mexico City residents were neither in industrial unions nor were they meaningfully represented by the CNOP. For those of us living in the United States in the 21st century, this likely sounds very familiar: union density has plummeted in our own country since the 1980s, and ‘civil society’ organizations have gradually receded from popular life.  

Just like in the United States, by the 1980s the labor movement in Mexico was a shadow of its militant past.  The CTM formed in the crucible of the 1930s. The progressive president Lázaro Cárdenas established the organization with the aim of bringing together the more militant and communist-inflected industrial proletariat with more independent workers in the transit sector and those working for smaller businesses. But after the rightist Miguel Alemán Valdés came to power in 1946, he rechristened the official party as the Institutional Party of the Revolution(the PRI) and set out to purge militants from organized labor. He appointed Alfonso Ochoa Partida, nicknamed “el charro” for his love of the Mexican rodeo sport of charrería, as the head of the CTM to carry out these purges. To this day, flat-footed pro-capital unions are known as “sindicatos charros” in Mexico. These capital-friendly unions remained powerful political forces throughout the economic halcyon years of relatively prosperous Import Substitution Industrialization during the 1950s and 1960s. 

This era of relative class harmony held together by the PRI’s corporatist structure started to unravel in the late 1960s. The 1968 Tlaltelolco and subsequent Halconazo massacres of student activists, followed by the dirty war of the 1970s carried out by José López Portillo, created a crisis of political legitimacy for the PRI. Despite the relatively moderate demands of the student movement for political reform, the PRI was unwilling to tolerate any challenge to their corporatist hegemony. The PRI’s crisis of political legitimacy was supercharged by the global economic crisis of the late 1970s, which sounded the death-knell for Import Substitution Industrialization that had maintained rising standards of living in the postwar decades. These combined crises spelled the beginning of the end for the PRI, and created political openings for left-wing opposition to organize and build.

During the 1970s and 1980s, radical organizers and students who had fled to the countryside during the repressive days of the Dirty War had been hard at work carrying out rural political education programs, often inspired by the Maoist mass line theory.  Many peasants already had existing radical commitments anchored in the legacy of Emiliano Zapata, the militant champion of peasant land rights from Mexico’s revolutionary days. Such commitments were reinforced by their lived experiences of rural economic struggle over the years. 

As the 1970s economic crises began to make rural livelihoods less viable, tens of thousands of these newly dispossessed peasants began to move to the outskirts of Mexico City. While these new arrivals were poor, lacked formal political power, and were highly vulnerable to the predations of greedy landlords, they were far from passive actors. They brought their radical political analyses with them and quickly began to form politicized community organizations. As the legitimacy of formal avenues for popular urban political participation collapsed, these organizations grew into the Urban Popular Movement. 

The story of thirty-year-old Enrique Cruz, a militant with one of the organizations of the Urban Popular Movement known as the UPREZ (the Emiliano Zapata Popular Revolutionary Union), helps shed light on this history. He explained to me, 

I’m an Indigenous Soque-speaker and I was born in Oaxaca. My parents and grandparents were deeply involved in the struggle against gold and silver mining that was destroying our land and threatening the ecosystems we cared about. When I moved to the city, I found a school run by the UPREZ adorned with murals of Emiliano Zapata, and I knew that these were my people. Through the UPREZ, I gained a strong political education and became an organizer fighting for dignified housing, providing direct education and political education to others, and working on other issues.

Organizations like the UPREZ emerged in the 1980s, and became especially strong in the aftermath of the catastrophic 1985 earthquake that sparked a wave of urban mutual aid activity. One of the strongest of these organizations is known as the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo (the Union of Settlers of San Miguel Teotongo), located in the far northeast corner of Iztapalapa on the edge of Mexico City.  

When I visited their community center and office to examine their archives in August and explained that I was interested in the history and political consequences of the UTOPIAs, staffer Marco Antonio Flores informed me that “If you’re interested in the UTOPIAs, you’ve come to the right place. Much of what you see in the UTOPIAs – services for women facing domestic violence, support for drug users, agroecology – we piloted those things, experimented, and developed them starting in the 1980s. To see them widespread and supported by the government now is a wonderful thing.” 

On first encountering the UTOPIAs, there were some things that seemed familiar. In my political and academic work, I have seen an impressive range of projects with similar aims, from scrappy anarchist outfits doing land projects, to non-profit sexual health and harm-reduction centers, to community-based agriculture organizations. But to see these things, and so much more, packaged together and brought to scale with the full muscle of the state behind them felt like something quite different. 

What made these organizations successful in not only fighting for basic urban services and also finding a foothold in national and city politics? I asked Marco Antonio why his organization seemed to be so robust and so persistent, with such a strong presence in the community today, while other member organizations of the Urban Popular Movement seemed to have disbanded. He responded, “In the 1980s, many of the organizations focused narrowly on demanding land titles, water hookups, electricity, and even rent control. Once some of those demands were met, they didn’t have much of a reason to continue. Our focus was larger: we fought for basic rights but also built  a vibrant community center with a more expansive goal of providing for the well-being of community members in a comprehensive way.” 

Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada herself is of this movement. While she was a student, she began organizing with Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo. She worked to organize for basic services like electricity, water, and sewage. According to an elder woman organizer who has lived in the community since the 1970s, Brugada played a critical role as a young strategist in the early 1980s. She pushed their group to lobby the government to fulfill these demands, in addition to self-organizing to provide services that the state would not.

In the 1990s, Brugada was a leader in a campaign to repurpose a women’s prison that also held political prisoners during the dirty war into a preparatory school. This campaign, which we might today describe as ‘abolitionist,’ ultimately succeeded and the school was inaugurated in the year 2000. While they fought for land titles, Brugada continued to organize with the Unión de Colonos to establish a community center to support women dealing with domestic violence, to restore urban ecosystems, and to provide support for drug users.

Here, there is a larger lesson for the US left, for DSA, and perhaps even more specifically for an incoming Zohran Mamdani administration in New York City. We have movements in our cities that are building the capacity for mass, militant mobilizations. These include the tenant movement and the labor movement. But they also include innovative projects carried out by community-based groups focused on environmental justice, reproductive justice, agroecology, and more. 

In other words, the community organizations of Iztapalapa that endured the test of time and won durable political power didn’t just fight for things like rent control and basic urban sanitation, as vital as those things were. They also directly built the means of providing urban community care with scarcely any resources, and in doing so ensured that when a political opening came about, their ideas and practices would be right there on the table for sympathetic political forces to run with. 

These groups intentionally built partnerships with people who would eventually build the MORENA party and become part of the state apparatus. As the MORENA party consolidated power, these groups were therefore integrated into municipal governance rather than kept on the periphery. 

Existing community organizations and the battle for the urban commons

Each of the UTOPIAs is situated in a neighborhood with a particular political and economic history. While the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo was a powerful and visionary force for community organizing and development, other UTOPIAs had significant if less persistent community organizations in place. Many UTOPIAs are sited on formerly abandoned lots and parks. The Tecoloxtitlan and Papalotl UTOPIAs, for example, were both sited in empty urban fields that used to be black markets for stolen auto parts. 

The programming coordinator from UTOPIA Papalotl, Rodrigo Castellano Hernández, shared  that starting in the late 2000s, a group of community members came together to start running youth programming around the community. They offered martial arts classes and started to experiment with urban agriculture. By the time that Clara Brugada became the mayor of Iztapalapa, there were already robust community efforts in place to reclaim the site for positive and care-forward community activities. 

Likewise, in UTOPIA Tecoloxtitlan, a group of neighbors combined community resources to start a center for special education and an Alcoholics Anonymous center in the park, self-organizing community labor to clean up the dilapidated urban field. And in UTOPIA Meyehualco, which was built in a park that was previously available only for private soccer league members. The municipal government, alongside allied community organizations, organized to secure this land for free public use despite objections from the private club members who sought to maintain their complete ownership over the property.

In cities in the United States, the specific process of finding space for projects like this would likely look very different than it did in Iztapalapa. At the same time, US cities do have considerable leeway over municipal budgets, even if the ruling classes have been terribly successful at maintaining funding cops rather than care year in and year out. But radical movements in the US have demonstrated that things need not be this way. From teachers striking for better conditions over the past 15 years, to abolitionist campaigns in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, our own movements have revealed that municipal budgets can be meaningful sites of class struggle.

It is worth emphasizing that the UTOPIAs do not merely function as an organ of the MORENA party and Mayor Clara Brugada. Radical community organizations use the spaces to organize independent political power too. In September, I attended an event at UTOPIA Paplotl put on by one of the most important member organizations of the UPREZ, Enrique’s organizing home. In a packed auditorium of about five hundred people hailing from dozens of smaller community-based organizations and cooperatives focused mainly on housing issues, the leaders of the UPREZ formally inducted these groups and their many working class members into their organization. 

One of the founders and movement elders of the URPEZ, Jaime Rello, described how these mass movements relate to the UTOPIAs and the MORENA party succinctly:

Comrades, the UTOPIAS are the synthesis of all this experience and struggle of more than 57 years since the 1968 movement. Our comrade Clara, who emerged from the popular movements and the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo, learned well from all this experience of struggle and now puts it into practice. But that’s not enough, comrades, if there isn’t a strong movement to continue to fight for these issues, because the pressures that we face and that Clara faces from the right, the pressures we face from the interests of capital, are very strong. 

Our organizations are not built solely by leaders. Our organizations are built by everyone. We need everyone to contribute and put the collective interest before our individual interests. We have come as far as we have because of  thousands and thousands of social activists who have dedicated their lives to transforming this country and this city.

The UPREZ and the larger Urban Popular Movement are undeniably allied with the MORENA party. Clara Brugada herself came from these working class movements of Iztapalapa. Nonetheless, it is clear that these organizations are not demobilizing simply because one of their own is in power. The relationship between these mass organizations and the MORENA government could serve as a model for how DSA and other left organizations might relate to a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty or similar administrations: using the spaces, resources, and platforms provided by such an administration to fiercely organize for the rights of workers and tenants, to build independent centers of community power, and to develop a robust urban commons of care both within and outside of the state.

The historical roots of the UTOPIAs show us that community-driven initiatives to care for one another can be elevated and brought to scale by the state when conditions are right. It is not necessary to build good ideas for community care, urban agroecology, and physical and mental well-being from scratch. Many organizations have been doing this work. With relatively modest funding from the state, they can blossom into serious programs available to the masses. In the U.S. context, we can find similar types of local and regional organizations that have the vision and experience that could help  our versions of UTOPIAs flourish.

Armed with visions of community care similar to what has been realized in Mexico City along with the growing political muscle of DSA, we are in a position to fight for precisely these things in our cities. We should seize this opportunity, in New York City, and across the country.

Bibliography

In addition to interviews and field observations, this piece draws heavily on the following books on the urban history of Mexico City:

• Davis, Diane. 1994. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. Temple University Press.

• Gerlofs, Ben. 2023. Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City. Vanderbilt University Press.

• Vitz, Matthew. 2020. A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. Duke University Press.

Portland DSA Celebrates Zohran Mamdani’s Historic Victory in NYC, Signals Parallel Path for Portland on Affordability Issues

PORTLAND, OR — The Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) today celebrated the historic election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City, hailing it as a watershed moment for the socialist movement and evidence that a politics centered on working-class issues resonates with voters in major American cities, including Portland.

“The victory of Zohran Mamdani shows what is possible with grassroots energy and people power,” said Tiffany Koyama Lane, Portland City Council Vice President, District 3. “In Portland and across Oregon, we stand on the same side of the fight for: no-cost childcare, housing by and for the people, people over big banks and billionaires, dignity for everyone and protecting democracy. Zohran’s win proves that when we organize, regular working people can change the rules, and win a better world.”

“Mamdani’s victory is a clear sign that people want representatives who relentlessly and unapologetically fight for working class people, stand against genocide, and share a vision for a world where everyone lives a life of joy and dignity,” said Angelita Morillo, Portland City Councilor for District 3. 

Mamdani’s victory, powered by an army of volunteers and a platform of affordable housing, free transit, free childcare, and taxing the rich, demonstrates that voters demand concrete solutions to the affordability crisis. Here in Portland, DSA-endorsed city councilors are already advancing a similar agenda.

A Shared Vision for Governing

The policy priorities championed by Mamdani in New York mirror the work Portland’s socialist councilors are already advancing. In New York, Mamdani ran on a platform tailored to the needs of working people. Similarly, in Portland, DSA and our electeds are championing and defending universal Preschool for All, advocating for major expansions and improvements in public transit, recommitting the city to eliminating traffic deaths, advancing police accountability, funding our parks, exploring new models for social housing, taking on the fossil fuel industry, protecting sensitive habitat in Forest Park, affirming Portland’s Sanctuary City status, protecting Portlanders from ICE and Trump’s promised military invasion, and demolishing the false narratives of the Trump Administration on national television (1, 2).

Portland DSA has a long history of advocating for a progressive tax revenue program, famously encapsulated in its “Tax the Rich Portland” initiatives, which resulted in a successful universal preschool ballot measure This aligns directly with Mamdani’s pledge to fund social programs and public services by ensuring the wealthy pay their fair share.

“The same energy that elected Zohran Mamdani in New York is alive and well in Portland,” said Olivia Katbi, co-chair of Portland DSA. “For too long, our city has been told that corporate-friendly policies are the only way. Mamdani’s victory, and our own successes on the Portland City Council, prove that when you offer a clear, bold vision for a more affordable and just city, people will rally to it.”

Earlier this year, Portland DSA launched a new initiative called “The Family Agenda for Portland,” which aims to win policies that help families and children. Members have been canvassing for the Parks levy as the first official project under this campaign. The Family Agenda was inspired by one of Zohran’s campaign proposals earlier in the year, which promised “baby boxes” to all new parents in the city as part of a comprehensive Family Agenda for NYC.

Portland DSA’s Record of Action

With four members on the Portland City Council, Portland DSA has become a decisive force in city politics, setting the agenda and passing substantive policy changes. Key budget achievements include rerouting $1.8 million from the Golf Fund to parks maintenance and fully funding the city’s Small Donor Elections program. The socialist bloc also championed a move to divert $2 million earmarked for the Police Bureau to fund parks, reflecting a commitment to reallocating resources to community needs. 

Even where DSA priorities didn’t achieve council majorities during budget season, DSA electeds stood clearly for our values. Councilor Mitch Green led a charge to reallocate Prosper Portland’s “Strategic Investment Fund” to critical public services under threat, criticizing the development agency’s history of “directing public funds for unaccountable private profit-making.” Councilor Angelita Morillo proposed an amendment redirecting funding for 1 of Portland’s 20 encampment sweep teams to emergency rental assistance.

After budget season, Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane championed a unanimous council reaffirmation to Vision Zero, moving the head Vision Zero Staffer under the Deputy City Administrator and ensuring traffic deaths are responded to as seriously as any other public safety concern. Councilor Sameer Kanal led a resolution codifying our “Sanctuary City” reputation, prohibiting city employees from cooperating with ICE and directing city employees on how to engage with immigration enforcement. Council Morillo’s Detention Facility Impact Fee — which would disincentivize new detention facilities like the ICE facility on Macadam — will be considered by the city council this week. 

Portland DSA maintains its power through consistent street-level mobilization and a strong relationship between its members and its elected officials, ensuring accountability to the movement, not corporate donors. DSA‘s member base is expanding rapidly, because the organization produces results. 

Denouncing the Corporate Backlash: Portland Business Alliance Aims to Block “Socialist Majority”

This rising socialist influence has drawn the ire of Portland’s corporate establishment. The Portland Business Alliance has explicitly stated that its #1 goal is to “prevent a socialist majority” in the city council, a goal that is completely out of touch with the material needs of Portlanders who are struggling to keep up with housing and healthcare costs and protect their neighbors from ICE raids.

“This is not a surprise,” said Jesse Dreyer, a co-chair of Portland DSA’s electoral working group. “The Alliance represents the same corporate interests that Mamdani defeated in New York. They are threatened because we are proving that a city can be governed for the benefit of its working people, not for private profit. Their goal to block a socialist majority is an admission that our movement is growing and that their agenda is unpopular.”

Political staffer Doug Moore recently admitted that the PBA’s goal was to “stop DSA from taking over the council”, calling our commitment to bread-and-butter issues as an attempt “to take over the City Council and turn it into an ideological showcase for the rest of the country.” Similarly, District 2 Councilman Dan Ryan has repeatedly publicly questioned what the North star of the DSA aligned city councilors is. 

“The Portland Business Alliance and our local oligarchs are stuck in a self-serving echo chamber, advancing debunked arguments about tax flight and arguing that tax cuts for the rich will somehow help ordinary Portlanders who are suffering,” said Brian Denning, co-Chair of Portland DSA. “Both Zohran Mandani and Portland DSA are offering a new direction for city politics and the local economy, based on fair redistribution of wealth, functional public services, a healthy environment, and affordability for all.”

A Unified Movement for the Future

Mamdani’s victory in New York signals a national shift and provides a model for how socialists can win and govern major cities. The Portland DSA chapter, now recognized as a major power broker in the city, is committed to this same path.

“The future of Portland will be decided in the coming years,” said Mitch Green, Councilor for District 4.” We can choose a city managed for the wealthy and corporations, or we can follow the lead of New Yorkers and build a Portland for the many, not the few.”

The post An Historic Night for Socialism appeared first on Portland DSA.

By: Terence Cawley

On Wednesday, November 5, Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) announced the results of their strike authorization vote initiated on October 24.

A supermajority of 92% of SBWU voted to strike dozens of cities on one of the company’s most profitable days of the year, November 13, if Starbucks does not “finalize fair contracts and stop unionbusting.”

Baristas at unionized stores across the United States voted on whether to authorize a strike over the course of several days. The voting process coincided with a wave of seventy practice pickets occurring in sixty cities nationwide (including Worcester, MA; Epping, NH; and Providence, RI) from the 24^th through November 1, as the union ramped up efforts to secure a fair first contract for union stores. 

“Workers are done waiting around,” said Starbucks Workers United spokesperson Michelle Eisen. “We’re coming up on close to one year since the last official bargaining session with the company, so it seems like it’s the right time.”

Further strategy for the strike remains in the hands of membership, with committees that determine the timeline, duration, and scope of any future actions. “All of our escalation strategies are worker-developed,” said Eisen.

As the strike authorization ramped up, practice pickets offered an opportunity not just for workers to literally practice for a possible strike, as well as to show customers what such a strike would look like while demonstrating to Starbucks workers’ commitment to this fight.

We’re not bluffing. We’re showing how strong we are and making Starbucks ask: is this really something they want to deal with at their busiest time of the year?

A Brief History of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)

Since Starbucks workers in Buffalo, N.Y. started Starbucks Workers United in August 2021, over 650 stores representing over 12,000 workers have unionized. However, none of these stores have reached a collective bargaining agreement.  

Starbucks Workers United’s demands include changes that will enable more baristas to make a living wage, like higher pay, expanded healthcare benefits and paid leave, and more consistent scheduling. The union is also asking for stronger protections from racial and sexual harassment, as well as the enshrinement of current benefits in a contract so they cannot be revoked by the company later. 

Starbucks initially opposed unionization efforts aggressively, leading to over 700 charges of Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) filed against Starbucks with the National Labor Relations Board. The company reached an agreement with Starbucks Workers United in February 2024 to negotiate a “foundational framework” for contracts for union stores. Starbucks then failed to meet its own deadline to agree to this framework by the end of 2024, leading to workers at over 300 Starbucks location going on strike on Christmas Eve for the largest labor action in company history. 

Starbucks Workers United and the company entered mediation in February 2025. The union has made some progress in contract negotiations, reaching 33 tentative agreements with the company on important issues including just cause, dress codes, and worker health and safety. However, Starbucks continues to hold out on the workers’ three core demands: increasing worker hours to address understaffing and ensure workers qualify for benefits, increasing take-home pay, and resolving all outstanding ULP charges. 

Eisen, who originally organized in Buffalo as part of the initial wave of unionization prior to becoming SBWU’s spokesperson, said: 

More take-home pay means workers won’t have to choose between paying rent and buying groceries. Sufficient staffing of stores means one barista won’t have to be working the jobs of three baristas.”

The most recent offer from Starbucks, which the union rejected in April, offered no raises for union workers in their first year, 1.5 percent raises in subsequent years (“it is actually pennies when you do the math for most workers,” said Eisen), and no solutions for understaffing and the outstanding ULP charges. There was also no indication that the company was willing to move on these points. 

Worker Dignity Means Customer Dignity

Beyond improving worker quality of life and repairing the damage Starbucks has done to its brand by being “the largest violator of U.S. labor law in modern history,” Eisen argues that the reforms the union is fighting for would also improve the customer experience. When she first started working for Starbucks fifteen years ago, she recalls how adequate staffing allowed stores to maintain higher quality standards for food and drinks. 

Eisen noted:

You walk into a Starbucks now, and there are two people on the floor running back and forth trying to play the role of multiple positions because the stores aren’t staffed appropriately. If I haven’t been a long-time Starbucks customer and I walk into a Starbucks now, the likelihood of me coming back, seeing the state of the stores, is pretty slim. We have to invest in the people running these stores.

Starbucks Workers United claims on their website that Starbucks could finalize fair union contracts for less than the over $97 million Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol made for four months of work in 2024. Starbucks also covered the cost of Niccol commuting from his home in California to company headquarters in Seattle via private jet. The 2024 wage gap between Niccol and the median Starbucks worker was the largest of the 500 biggest public companies in the U.S., with Niccol making 6,666 times more than the average Starbucks employee.

On September 25, Starbucks announced that they would be closing hundreds of stores nationwide, along with firing 900 corporate workers. Of the 59 union stores included in this round of closures, eight of them were in Massachusetts. Several of those stores, like the Harvard Square and Davis Square locations, had just unionized within the last few months. 

In the weeks following the closures, Starbucks Workers United held practice pickets at stores in 35 cities, including one at the shuttered Harvard Square store and one in New York City which received a supportive visit from mayoral candidate and DSA member Zohran Mamdani. According to Eisen, the closures, rather than weakening the union, have led to a surge in organizing leads as workers are more motivated than ever to win a fair contract.

“It’s another example of the company making decisions with little to no notice and absolutely no input from workers,” said Eisen. “A lot of non-union workers are saying, ‘whoa, we need to get in on this. It’s clear the company doesn’t care about us.’” 

What Comes Next? 

The strike authorization vote and practice pickets come at a critical time for Starbucks Workers United. The holiday season, typically the busiest and most profitable time of year for Starbucks, is approaching fast. A strike during this season could add to the company’s already significant financial woes.

Starbucks stock is down 6 percent since the beginning of 2025. Same-store sales have declined for six consecutive quarters. 

Meanwhile, public pressure on Starbucks to bargain in good faith with its workers continues to intensify. In September, a coalition of 45 progressive organizations representing over 85 million people, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), sent an open letter to Niccol urging him to finalize fair union contracts with SBWU. Starbucks investors have also grown frustrated with the company’s unwillingness to resolve its labor issues, with several groups sending their own open letters to the Starbucks Board of Directors over the last few months.  

“Every day, more and more workers are willing to join the fight despite how they’re being treated, which is giving me hope, especially with the current political climate,” said Eisen. “If workers are willing to take on the risk to fight, how can I not fight?”

Supporters can join SBWU on the picket line and sign the No Contract, No Coffee pledge at https://sbworkersunited.org/take-action/. 

Terence Cawley is a member of Boston DSA.

The post Starbucks Workers United Supermajority Authorize ULP Strike for November 13 appeared first on Working Mass.

Christopher Columbus is widely considered one of the greatest villains ever to set foot in the Americas. His crimes have been extensively documented by modern historians, and even his contemporaries were so disgusted by his behavior that he was returned to Spain to stand trial for his crimes as a governor in the so-called “New World.”

The myth of Columbus as a heroic explorer has been shattered, in Chicago as everywhere else. In July 2020, massive protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd led to the removal of the city’s public monuments to Columbus in Grant Park and Arrigo Park. The city announced earlier this year that these monuments will not be returned to public display.

The defense of Columbus represents a reactionary effort by a small minority of Chicagoans to launder the reputation of a murderer. This group seeks to use public land and funds to push a regressive, sanitized version of a history of unrelenting violence and oppression. The people of Chicago expressed their will that statues honoring Columbus be removed from the city’s parks, and the city’s elected officials have ratified that decision through peaceful, deliberative, and democratic action.

Unfortunately, another monument that advances that exact same mission of intimidation and historical whitewashing is still on display in Chicago to this day. It was gifted to the city by Benito Mussolini himself, and it lionizes a key architect of the original fascist movement in Italy: Italo Balbo.

—

Italo Balbo started his political career after World War I as an organizer of the fascist Blackshirts in Ferrara, where he and his men spent years terrorizing and murdering agricultural workers for attempting to unionize. He trained fascist thugs as strikebreakers, and they used extreme violence to reassert control of the countryside on behalf of wealthy landowners. Balbo himself was accused of ordering the brutal murder of anti-fascist priest Giovanni Minzoni, though he was acquitted of the crime in an Italian court after Mussolini took power.

In 1922, Balbo helped orchestrate Mussolini’s March on Rome, in which the future Duce threatened to launch a civil war unless the king of Italy appointed him as Prime Minister. The king relented, and Mussolini proceeded to use the power of the police and military to terrorize his enemies and establish an authoritarian state. Balbo was rewarded for his loyalty with a position as a member of Mussolini’s inner circle (a quadrumvir on the so-called “Grand Council of Fascism”) and as the head of Italy’s Royal Air Force, where he developed the country’s military air power in preparation for the Second World War. In a leadership shakeup in 1933, Mussolini appointed Balbo as Governor-General of Libya. He served there until his death in 1940, when poorly trained Italian forces shot down his plane in the mistaken belief that it was a British bomber. Allegations that Mussolini orchestrated Balbo’s death are unsubstantiated and likely untrue.

—

In 1933, Balbo personally flew across the Atlantic Ocean from Italy to Chicago, arriving with a fleet of twenty-four amphibious aircraft to visit the Chicago World’s Fair. The spectacle was well-received by the public, especially the Italian-American community of the city, and Mussolini saw it as an opportunity to propagandize in favor of fascism.

The following year, Mussolini shipped a Roman column to Chicago to commemorate the flight. On the base of the column, he wrote the following words in English and Italian (emphasis added): 

THIS COLUMN 
TWENTY CENTURIES OLD
ERECTED ON THE BEACH OF OSTIA 
PORT OF IMPERIAL ROME 
TO SAFEGUARD THE FORTUNES AND VICTORIES 
OF THE ROMAN TRIREMES
FASCIST ITALY BY COMMAND OF BENITO MUSSOLINI
PRESENTS TO CHICAGO 
EXALTATION SYMBOL MEMORIAL 
OF THE ATLANTIC SQUADRON LED BY BALBO
THAT WITH ROMAN DARING FLEW ACROSS THE OCEAN 
IN THE 11TH YEAR 
OF THE FASCIST ERA.

The text has since worn away from the base, but the monument has remained in Burnham Park for over ninety years. During Balbo’s visit to Chicago, the city chose to further honor Balbo by renaming Seventh Street as “Balbo Drive,” a fact that made Mussolini extremely jealous. Balbo’s flight drew explicit comparisons to Christopher Columbus at the time, and the statue of Columbus that formerly stood in Grant Park was dedicated in Balbo’s presence during the World’s Fair in 1933.

Balbo died before the United States entered the war in December 1941, so he never featured in anti-Axis propaganda as one of Mussolini’s vile toadies. This is likely what allowed the monument to slip through the cracks in the country’s united opposition to and hatred of European fascism.

—

Some of the positive characteristics extolled by Balbo’s defenders are not complete fabrications. By all historical accounts, Balbo was personable, courageous, adventurous, and sincere. He criticized Mussolini’s turn toward anti-Semitism, and he believed Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany was a strategic mistake. He had a complicated relationship with Mussolini, and his political disagreements with the Duce became more pronounced in the final years of his life.

Fortunately for Balbo, his position in the regime afforded him the luxury of criticizing Mussolini in public. His victims in Ferrara and throughout Italy were not granted the same liberty. The crimes of the legions of jackboots he commanded are extensively documented, and Balbo is likely guilty of many acts of violence that don’t appear in the historical record. He also played a key role in amassing the fighters and bombers that later killed thousands of Allied servicemen as they liberated North Africa, Sicily, Naples, and Rome from fascist tyranny.

Balbo spent his term as a supposedly ‘moderate’ governor of Libya preoccupied with a project to ship tens of thousands of Italian settlers to the colony and eventually displace the colonized. He dreamt of an Italian empire stretching across the Mediterranean and East Africa, unconcerned with the ultimate fate of the non-citizen Arab, Berber, Black, and Jewish ‘subjects’ who were terrorized by the brutal colonial regime he helped oversee. Balbo was eager to criticize Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler only when he wasn’t rubbing elbows with the Führer himself on an official state visit to Nazi Germany.

Most importantly, Balbo orchestrated the destruction of democracy in Italy and was a senior minister in Mussolini’s fascist government. He never recanted his profoundly held belief in fascist ideology or his support for Mussolini. Nothing Balbo said or did during his lifetime can absolve him of the horrible crimes he committed.

—

There have been numerous attempts to remove the monument and rename Balbo Drive over the years, most recently in 2017 and 2020. A tiny minority of right-wing Chicagoans consistently turns out to defend the monument when it is threatened, and all City Council measures to remove the monument or rename the street have failed.

In 2018, a measure was introduced to the Chicago City Council to rename Balbo Drive as Ida B. Wells Drive. At the last minute, the Council caved to pressure from right-wing groups and chose to rename Congress Parkway instead.

In 2022, the Chicago Monument Project published a report that recommended the removal of seventeen monuments and works of public art in the city, including the Balbo Column. In their rationale for the removal of the column, the Monument Project stated:

The Brandon Johnson Administration pledged to follow the recommendations of the report upon his election in 2023, but there has been no movement on the Balbo question since.

Today, a tiny minority of Chicagoans defend the monument out of a strong but profoundly ahistorical sense of pride in Balbo’s accomplishment divorced from its context as an expression of fascist state power. Balbo’s apologists have aligned themselves with a nasty flavor of right-wing Italian-American civic pride that attempts to excuse his numerous crimes and his lifelong disdain of democracy and basic human rights.

In one guest essay written for the Monument Report, a defender of Columbus and Balbo writes “These monuments are not, nor were they intended to be, political statements. It is senseless to try and make them into a political agenda.” Indeed, most of the attempts to sanitize Balbo’s legacy seek to bring him out of the political sphere and turn him into a benign cultural figure, an Italian hero who was, at worst, ‘a product of his time.’

This is an extreme distortion of Balbo’s legacy. Mussolini saw Balbo’s flight as an explicit exercise in fascist propaganda. He followed the progress of Balbo’s ‘expedition’ with great interest, and Balbo’s men took careful note of the presence of a small number of anti-fascist protesters in Chicago and New York. The flight was an explicit attempt to legitimize Mussolini’s totalitarianism in the eyes of the American public, and the continued presence of the monument is evidence of how thoroughly this effort succeeded.

—

Balbo’s values and life’s work should be reprehensible to any person who believes in free expression, democracy, an independent civil society, and freedom from political coercion. Democratic rights are under dire threat in America, and our city’s official valorization of a proud fascist has never been more embarrassing.

Between the ongoing authoritarian takeover of the United States by the Trump Administration, the continuing death and destruction in Palestine, and a number of other emergencies at home and around the world, leftists in Chicago have had a lot of other things to focus on in recent years. But symbols matter a great deal, and our city’s continued veneration of an avowed enemy of everything we as socialists hold dear is an insult we must not abide.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to the present state of affairs. The city should give Balbo the same treatment it gave to Columbus in 2020: rename Balbo Drive and loan or donate the column to a private historical society.

Chicagoans have the right to honor whomever they like on their own property, no matter how vile their hero’s actions were in life. Earlier this year, the Columbus statue formerly standing in Arrigo Park was loaned by the city to the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans.

I, for one, think the Balbo column would look wonderful right next to it.

—

Markus van Drenthe is a democratic socialist and anti-fascist living in Chicago. Much of the information on Balbo in this essay was sourced from the biography Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life by Claudio G. Segrè (University of California Press, 1987).

The post In Chicago, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus Lives On in Italo Balbo appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

In 1847, the Choctaw Nation donated $170 (almost $7,000 in today’s money) to a small coastal town in Ireland called Midleton. Ireland had been facing a famine and a British economic blockade for two years. Despite facing their own recent genocide that killed over 2,000 Choctaw, the nation donated what money they could to the people of Ireland.

Over a century later, the people of Midleton realized the aid had come from the Choctaw and recognized their shared histories of forced famine and ethnic cleansing. In 1995, former Irish president Mary Robinson visited the Choctaw Nation (now in Oklahoma), reestablishing ties between the two nations. Two decades later, an Irish artist named Alex Pentek created the stainless steel structure “Kindred Spirits”, which is located in Midleton’s Bailick Park in commemoration of the Choctaw’s aid. Just last year, the Choctaw commissioned their own sculpture, titled “Eternal Heart,” by Sam Stitt, an enrolled Choctaw artist.

These two indigenous peoples and their shared history reminded me of the recent Global Sumud (meaning “resilience” in Arabic) flotilla and the nearly 500 participants from 44 countries who sailed across the Mediterranean to break the illegal Israeli blockade on Gaza. Twenty-two participants from the United States sailed with the flotilla. The flotilla was established in July of this year to denounce the genocide in Gaza and call on the international community to help Palestinians in desperate need of food, medicine, and other basic supplies.

The flotilla, however, did not reach Gaza. It was illegally intercepted by the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF). While one of the boats, the Mikeno, did make it past the Gaza blockade, it too was boarded nine miles off the coast of Gaza. The participants were arrested, taken to the port of Ashdod, paraded around by far-right settler and Jewish Power party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir for Israeli social media, and shipped off to the Ktzi’ot Prison, located in the occupied Negev desert. For almost a week, the families of the American participants did not know where they were, how long they would be held, or their condition. The U.S. consulate did little to provide aid, and participants were prevented from speaking to legal counsel. 

On October 7th, 2025, Nelson Mandela’s grandson and Sumud participant Mandla Mandela posted a video about his release from Ktzi’ot. American activist David R.K. Adler could be seen in the background of the video. A few days before, X, the mother of one of the participants, received word from the Japanese consulate in Jordan that the Americans were deported from Israel to Jordan and allowed to return home. 

On October 8, five of the American participants made it back to the U.S. and flew back to the O’Hare International Airport. Al Hub, a Palestinian-led youth forum based in Bridgeview, or “Little Palestine” in Chicago, formed a welcome committee for those returning. The action was originally organized for Illinoisan and former Marine Jessica Clotfelter. I was one of the people who turned out in support of the returning Sumud participants. Taking the CTA Red and Blue lines, I made my way to the international terminal (Terminal 5) to join the welcome committee for Jessica Clotfelter, Tommy Marcus (a.k.a. Quentin Quarantino on Instagram), Stephen Wahab, Logan Hollarsmith, and Paul Reid. Jessica’s family, her parents, brother, and cousin, and Stephen’s brother anxiously waited for their return.

The Sumud quintet came from across America. Stephen and Paul are from Oregon, Tommy from California, Logan from Arizona, and Jessica from Illinois. Not all of them were on the same ship during the flotilla. Stephen, a Palestinian-American, was aboard the Alma with activists Greta Thunberg, Thiago de Avila, and Mandla Mandela. Paul was sailing on the Inna with a mostly Spanish and French crew. The Ohwayla hosted Logan (who served as one of its captains), Jessica, and Tommy, as well as fellow American activists David R.K. Adler and Greg Stoker. 

It was around half an half-hour before we saw the five heroes emerge from Exit A in Terminal 5. The Sumud quintet was not expecting this small but mighty welcome home. Paul clutched his heart as he walked towards our group, clearly not expecting such hospitality after nearly a week in an Israeli internment camp.

Jessica and Stephen’s reunions with their families were some of the most heartfelt moments; you could feel the emotion between the families as they were finally reunited with their daughter, sister, brother, or cousin. Al Hub bought bouquets for Jessica’s mother to hand to her and individual flowers for the rest of the quintet. It was touching to witness families reuniting after the wrenching uncertainty of the past week. Tommy, Paul, and Logan did not expect a grand reception just for them.

Once greetings were done and calm settled over the group, some of the gathered community members, including myself and independent journalist Jackie B., asked the five activists questions about their journey to Gaza, their treatment under Israeli captivity, and their eventual release into Jordan.

Tommy Marcus took the lead in answering the first set of questions, as the rest of the group were jet-lagged and still processing the experience. “Yes, we are back in the United States, even after our own government and consulate failed us,” he said. Marcus described how the group was illegally captured by the Israeli Navy in international waters and taken to the Port of Ashdod. There, they and the rest of the Sumud participants were placed in front of Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli politician, leader of the Otzma Yehudit or “Jewish Power” party, and a known settler in the occupied West Bank. There, Israeli military media showed Ben-Gvir calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas.” This is ironic because Ben-Gvir is a Kahanist, who had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, where 27 Palestinian Muslims were murdered, in his house.

After the Israeli propaganda tour, or hasbara, they were then shipped off to the Negev to Ktzi’ot, the largest Israeli prison, or an internment camp, as David Adler called it in this “Democracy Now!” interview. According to Tommy Marcus, the camp holds thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children. Jessica and Logan chimed in, saying that men and women were separated into different isolation blocks and away from the Palestinian hostages. All five confirmed that some of the Sumud participants were held in 1 by 2 meter cells (3.3 feet by 6.6 feet) for up to 72 hours, a practice widely condemned by human rights groups. 

Marcus continued by describing how IOF guards would hold guns to their heads, try to break them by taking away medicine such as insulin or, in Tommy’s case, Lexapro, and zip-tying their hands behind their backs. Logan Hollarsmith, a captain of the Ohwayla, reported that they could hear the screams of Palestinians despite the isolation, and that there is a sub-level beneath the cellblock they were held in via other Sumud participants, who were familiar with the prison.

During this time, Jessica Clotfelter’s attorney, Farah Chalisa, attempted multiple times to locate Jessica by contacting the U.S. consulate, Jessica’s state representative, Mary E. Miller, and other Israeli and American officials. Representative Miller is a far-right Republican elected to serve Illinois’ Congressional District 15. She said in 2021 that “…Hitler was right on one thing: he said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” Ironically, when asked about Jessica’s captivity in occupied Bedu-Palestinian lands, Miller’s office responded to a request for comments by stating  that she “support[s] the right for Israel to exist.”

So how did the quintet make it out of Ktzi’ot and end up in Jordan? As mentioned before, participants’ families heard about it from the Japanese Consulate, one of them being Stephen’s brother, who found out through another Sumud participant’s mother that the Americans were being released into Jordan. 

There is only one open land route between the  West Bank and Jordan: the Allenby Bridge, named after Gen. Edmund Allenby, who led British colonial forces tasked with supporting the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in World War I. When the Sumud members were thrown into a blacked-out IOF van bound for Jordan, Tommy Marcus said he thought “…he and David Adler were going to be black bagged or disappeared and that nobody knew where they were headed”. It was Palestinian-American activist Stephen Wahab who caught a glimpse of a sign pointing to the Allenby Bridge in Arabic through a small sliver of exposed window.

In Jordan, the Sumud members were provided a 5-star hotel and traditional Jordanian/Palestinian food. The American participants stated their consulate did not provide for their comforts in Jordan and that these amenities came from the Jordanian government. After six days in prison, the quintet finally had a warm bed and food; they didn’t have to share the toilet bowl in the cellblock for water and sleep on a hard floor anymore. Before going to an official interview with Jackie B. and Fox News 32, Tommy Marcus said they, the Sumud Five, appreciated the global community for amplifying their captivity, but highlighted the importance of continuing to focus on the genocide in Gaza and the Palestinian hostages from Gaza and the West Bank, especially with the ongoing ceasefire Phase 1 talks going on at the time.

As I made my way back home with Jackie B. and Tommy, who was catching a connecting flight to L.A., I thought about the parallels between my Irish ancestors and the Palestinians. With similar experiences, they face or have faced ongoing famines and genocides. As Jackie and I sat on the Blue Line train, I wondered where future generations might place a sculpture commemorating the flotilla’s actions for the Palestinian people in Gaza. Will there be greater cultural exchanges between the Palestinians and the international community? When and how will the genocide and blockade end? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the resilience of the Palestinian people will live on as they struggle to finally be free.

Though the five Americans we greeted at O’Hare are now safely home, the danger for other activists continues. As of press time, there is one participant from Spain, Reyes Rigo Cervilla, still being held in Israeli captivity. He is imprisoned alongside participants in the recent flotilla “Thousands Madleens to Gaza” that sailed after the Sumud. We stand in solidarity with him and all who sacrifice in the name of a just peace for the Palestinian people.

I cannot begin to describe the bravery of the Sumud quintet had for joining a global flotilla sailing to Gaza to bring aid to the Palestinians. I see very clearly the parallels between the Global Sumud and its heroes and the Great Hunger, which my own family experienced in nineteenth-century Ireland. Even after hundreds of years, colonial tactics remain the same. While there is an ocean between our five heroes and Gaza or the Choctaw and Ireland, there is hope, solidarity, and resilience between all of us. Despite the current situation in Gaza and the horrible violence elsewhere around the world (in Sudan, the Congo, Kashmir, Myanmar, Ukraine, etc.), everyone can do their part, no matter how small. May we all live to see a free Palestine and where all international struggles and the oppressed are free from their shackles of Western imperialism.

The post Famines and Flotillas: From Ireland to Palestine  appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Zohran Mamdani and New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) won the biggest electoral victory of the socialist movement in my lifetime and may have started a new era for the socialist movement. What comes next is up to every organized socialist in DSA and every soon-to-be organized socialist inspired by victories like Zohran’s. 

The post Zohran Won and You Can Do It Too appeared first on Democratic Left.