On Saturday April 12, over 36,000 people braved the heat to Feel the Bern at the Los Angeles leg of Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy tour. DSA-LA members showed up in full force to table, canvass the crowd, and build our movement. The total attendance for these nationwide rallies is now over 200,000, indicating a major political moment like the one that built the modern iteration of DSA in 2016—one that DSA needs to support and build upon.

Lines at the entrances formed before 8 am. The crowd sprawled out in front of LA City Hall, ranging from elderly folks with dogs to teens filming TikToks. There was even a group of middle-aged goths sporting their black parasols. One family from Fontana left their house at 4 am to make sure they were able to make it inside the event. The dust kicked up in the overflow area while Joan Baez and Neil Young chanted “power to the people.” It all felt fitting for “Berniechella.”

At the DSA-LA table, we sold Dodger-blue t-shirts with our own custom Bernie logo as we introduced our vision to curious folks and asked them to become members. We sold over 100 shirts in the first few hours. Throughout the park, DSA canvassers had hundreds of conversations with potential members as we invited them to upcoming DSA 101s and socials.

Making “Oligarchy” a household term

What was Bernie Sanders doing in Los Angeles? It’s not an election year, almost the entirety of our city council are nominally Democrats, we’re already a sanctuary city, and the county went for Kamala Harris by 1.3 million votes. Why would Bernie spend time seemingly preaching to the choir?

The goal of the tour seems to be to make “oligarchy” a household term. By deliberately calling out the capitalists as the source of our systemic problems, Sanders and AOC are raising class consciousness without anyone ever having to crack open Marx. By leading with the issues that resonate with working people—the rent being too damn high, getting money out of politics—Sanders is able to draw massive crowds from both liberal strongholds like LA to deep red regions like Bakersfield. This project of uniting workers of all backgrounds is critical for DSA to build upon.

“People in all different geographic areas are dealing with increasingly similar conditions, just being ground down by the cost of living, it’s harder and harder to make ends meet,” says Ashik Siddique, DSA National co-chair who canvassed at the LA and Bakersfield rallies. “To fight right-wing authoritarianism, we need mass politics and organizing at a scale to match. We should lean into this political moment by supporting it every place we can.”

The labor unions that attended the rally represented a wide range of workers, from longshoremen, to nurses, to graduate students, to teachers, and more. It was an example of the diversity of workers necessary in order for our movement to be successful.

What’s next?

But what’s next, after a rally? Where does the energy and anger go? Our answer, of course, is DSA.

“The political imagination of the liberal status quo coalition in our city has plateaued,” says DSA LA co-chair Marc K. “Liberals in our city don’t have the political courage to pass more robust renter protection, for example. But the labor movement is willing to go past what the liberals are able to do. DSA has shown that we’re willing to lead the way and labor is coming along with us in that fight. That’s how we got four people on city council and two people on the school board for the nation’s second-largest school district.”

The LA rally was announced with less than two weeks’ lead time; DSA LA’s local convention was scheduled for the same day. Chapter leadership discussed and voted to move convention by a day, a massive logistical lift that nevertheless paid off with the chapter’s growth. At least eighty DSA volunteers canvassed the rally crowd, collecting 235 commitment cards and signing up 53 new members.

One person named Drew had identified as a democratic socialist for years and became a member at our table on Saturday. I asked him what convinced him to finally join. “I believe in universal healthcare, universal childcare, basic human rights. When I lived in Texas, I saw leftists get a lot of harassment from right-wingers with assault rifles, and it is really important for the movement that we stick together.”

Over and over, I heard that what resonated with people was conversations about the issues that affect them: the rent is too high, healthcare is too expensive, schools are being defunded, and so on. And I also saw what didn’t work: one canvasser opened a conversation by explaining that DSA is “building a mass working class political organization.” These sorts of terms may seem totally normal for active DSA members, but in this case, the canvasser was met with a blank stare and an “um, okay.”

It was a great reminder that leading with the issues and their socialist solutions is the most effective way to grow our organization, not fighting about the nuances of caucus discourse on Twitter or explaining our internal committee structures. AOC would seem to agree—in her speech, she emphasized, “This movement is not about purity tests, it’s about class solidarity.”

Fired up

After Bernie was finished speaking, I expected we would break down our table and start packing up. But the table was busier than ever with people fired up and wanting to become members. One person walked up to me and said, “I want to join DSA. How do I get involved?” A canvasser’s dream!

I asked another new member, Jaiden, why they had decided to join DSA today. “Actions speak louder than words,” they said. “I can preach about it all day, but I need to get my feet on the ground and make it happen.”

These rallies are a critical recruitment opportunity for chapters nationwide, whether they’re in liberal cities like LA or deep red towns in the Midwest. The overwhelming enthusiasm for two democratic socialist politicians demonstrates that there is energy for our movement, and we just need to harness it.

Benina S, DSA LA’s co-chair along with Marc K, says, “We’ve been a Democratic supermajority state for a long time, but there’s no political will to undo things like Prop 13 [a limit on property taxes] or the statewide ban on rent control and actually help working class people. Socialism provides an imagination for the future, and 36,000 people are here because they were moved by class struggle messaging.”

On Saturday, April 5, millions hit the streets in 1,200 cities and towns across the country demanding “Hands Off” our federal programs, rights and workers. Unlike mass actions of the first Trump resistance, this one was backed by many unions and by the Federal Unionists Network, or the FUN. The FUN, a self-organized network of rank-and-file federal workers, is a significant focal point in the struggle against the billionaire takeover of the federal government. 

The FUN’s strategic role in the fight against the oligarchy

Federal workers are a highly strategic group in this struggle. They are a massive workforce, of some 2.3 million civilian employees, with large concentrations in every city in the U.S. – think federal office buildings, postal facilities, social security offices, VA hospitals and research facilities, among many other federal worksites. Nearly 150,000 federal workers live in California, with tens of thousands in the larger cities where DSA chapters are strong.

Beyond their size and broad geographic distribution, federal workers have drawn a compelling connection between their  immediate interest in saving their jobs and their union contracts and the interests of working people in saving public services and protections we all depend on. They did so very effectively in a March 13 livestream, which got 200,000 views. 

In other words, as noted in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, “By going after the federal work force, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are radicalizing the very people who can best explain how the government does so much good for so many.”

The Federal Unionists Network has been organizing since 2023, but since Inauguration Day its ranks and leadership have swelled to a level that has allowed it to set the resistance agenda for its union hierarchy. While the dozen or so unions representing federal workers litigate and lobby, top union leaders recognize that the real organizing to build the mass power it will take to win is happening at the rank-and-file level. As AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said on a webinar the FUN held on March 30 to train its members to organize their co-workers, “Yes, we’re filing the lawsuits, yes, we’re fighting back in Congress, but most importantly,” she said, referring to the FUN, “we’re mobilizing in the streets.”

“All this,” as the Times op-ed concluded, makes federal workers “uniquely well positioned to lead a new kind of resistance — more mainstream and grounded than the last one, and powerful enough to mobilize millions of Americans under its banner.” 

DSA, May Day and Beyond

DSA’s National Political Committee has adopted a May Day resolution that proposes that chapters ally with the FUN; and a number of DSA and YDSA chapters in California are already involved in planning May Day rallies and marches. We are well-situated to bring along our labor and community allies and connect their struggles with that of the federal workers. Getting our local unions and labor councils mobilized shouldn’t be too heavy a lift. After all, they recognize that the threat to federal workers and their union contracts is just the beginning of a wider war against workers and unions in every sector. As one labor scholar put it, “the Trump order [to cancel collective bargaining agreements] threatens to produce a veritable nuclear winter in U.S. labor relations” well beyond the federal sector. 

Looking beyond May Day, East Bay DSA’s Labor Committee adopted a resolution creating a working group to plan a longer-term campaign to fight the Trump/Musk oligarchy in solidarity with federal workers and the FUN. Our aim is to bring a priority campaign resolution to our chapter convention in May. The first meeting of the campaign planning group drew over fifteen comrades, who brainstormed goals for the campaign. 

One of the proposed goals was getting the word about the FUN out to federal workers in the East Bay, for instance, by heading to the federal office building in Oakland at lunchtime to talk with them. (One of our members works at a federal research facility and is already spreading the word there.)

Another goal we discussed is linking the struggles of local unions and community groups to the larger fight against the oligarchy that the FUN is quarterbacking. The federal unionists are in every agency, connected with funding and policy implementation on every imaginable issue – from education to housing to transit, from environmental protections to national parks to veterans’ healthcare, from Social Security to Medicaid to public health, and so much more. That means there is virtually no issue DSA is involved in that cannot be connected back to the oligarchy’s threats. In particular, cuts at the Department of Education, if not its complete elimination, are hitting our K-12 public schools, and our colleges and public universities are threatened with cuts both there and in other agencies (along with an attack on basic rights of free speech and association). Similarly, cuts to Medicaid would decimate our public health system. Connecting our local teachers’ unions, academic workers and university staff, and healthcare workers to the national struggle of the FUN, and vice versa, will not be hard.

Engagement by socialists is critical to building the movement

Socialists played critical roles from the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement, and we may be in an analogous early stage of a new mass movement today. We are also discussing the importance of our chapter joining local organizing committees that will plan future mass actions, like the ones on May Day. Our role is crucial, not only because we can reach so many workers who did not learn about the April 5 rallies, but also because our experience of direct member democracy in DSA suits us well to building a democratic culture that ensures that working class people are driving the campaign. In the longer term, building broad, democratic local alliances across the country will be critical to a potential 2028 general strike, and to the eventual creation of a workers’ party in the U.S.

There is a real possibility that the actions the FUN is organizing with its partners, like the mass “Hands Off” actions across the U.S. on April 5, and the more left-leaning actions planned for May Day, signal the birth of a true, sustainable mass movement such as the U.S. has not seen since the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. Socialists can’t bring such movements into being by an act of will; but when the conditions are right for them to emerge, our strategic organizing and tactical intervention can play an outsized role in their success. Allying with the Federal Unionists Network to connect their struggle within the federal apparatus with regional and local struggles in our states, cities and towns should be a priority in all our chapters. We are hopeful that East Bay DSA’s membership will agree when we bring our priority campaign resolution for a vote on May 14.

On April 5, 2025, tens of thousands of traumatized human beings took to a thousand different streets to tell the temporary inhabitants of the White House and their nazi-saluting cronies to keep their hands off the imperfect aspirations of American benevolence. 

I was not one of them. 

Instead, I was at home, high on tramadol, waging mortal combat with a recalcitrant body and a wheelchair that refused to turn left (my preferred direction). Which got me thinking: how does one promote universal social justice in the face of the banal cruelties of a sociopathic billionaire elite when one can barely get out the front door? 

On April 5, 1977, forty-eight years to the day before the Hands Off protest, over a hundred disabled activists and their allies occupied the San Francisco offices of what was then called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) for its failure to enforce Section 504 of 1973’s Rehabilitation Act, which plainly stated that: “No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States shall solely on the basis of his handicap, be excluded from the participation, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."  

While the word “handicapped” has vanished from the justice lexicon over the years, thankfully the ideas detailed in the above paragraph have not, and the credit for that rests solely on the arthritic, scoliotic, slippery-jointed shoulders of those brave disabled freedom fighters who for 25 DAYS found ways to not only avoid arrest on their way to government capitulation, but, perhaps more amazing to me, did so despite an algorithm of existence that included catheter use and an inability to sleep on the floor. 

On March 12, 1990, a thousand disabled activists and their allies marched from the White House to the US Capitol in support of the stalled Americans with Disabilities Act. When they got there, nearly four score (plus or minus seven) shed their assistive equipment and dragged their reluctant bodies up the hundred steps that barred their path to power in an all-too-human feat of endurance known as the Capitol Crawl, which helped push the bill into law four months later. 

On June 22, 2017, ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today) staged a die-in outside Mitch McConnell’s office to protest Republican-led efforts to kneecap Medicaid and eliminate the Affordable Care Act, resulting in indelible images of police tearing people from their wheelchairs and otherwise abusing fragile bodies—a surprise to no one who has ever sat between a cop and their even-more-fragile ego. Weeks later, John McCain shot his famous thumbs-down on the Senate floor in a last gasp of right-wing spinefulness, vindicating yet another self-sacrificial battering of disabled bodies.  

Last weekend, whispers of those three seminal events swayed through my fug of synthetic opioid bliss, suffocating my usual trip of warm love and solidarity with clouds of guilt and FOMO and self-recrimination at missing yet another vital protest. But then I started thinking about the ancillary characters in the high drama of those pivotal days in 1977, 1990, and 2017: the girl with quadriplegia who spent two hours at the San Francisco HEW offices before going home to peg-tube a blended burrito, the autistic man who stimmed out on the way to the Capitol and went to the library instead, the new DSA member named me who opted for Dennison’s chili instead of Domino’s pizza so he could parlay that saved ten bucks into a donation to ADAPT in 2017. 

In short, I realized that every single one of us matters to this mass movement just the way we are, regardless of spoons or arrests or protests logged. Whether I make the next one or not, what matters is that I face cruelty with kindness, injustice with defiance, and bilateral neuropathy with 25mg of that sweet peace-and-love potion currently warming my red-blooded veins. 

So if you’re feeling bummed out you couldn’t find childcare, or a ride, or a negative COVID test, and had to save your clever sign ideas for another day, know that no excuse is necessary. Your continued existence is protest enough, indeed the most primordial resistance of all. 

Or maybe that’s just the drugs talking.

By Gordon Brown

If the government no longer provides services we rely on, why should we pay for them? If the wealthy have avoided paying trillions in taxes for decades, why should the rest of us foot the bill? If our tax dollars fund endless wars and corporate profiteering, is it even moral to pay?

These questions are no longer hypothetical. The current administration has cut government agencies with a chainsaw, leaving gaping holes in the systems designed to keep us safe, healthy, and informed. As a result, we’ll need our tax dollars to pay private contractors to fill those holes.  Meanwhile, the wealthy continue to exploit loopholes.  It’s time to ask: Why pay federal taxes to support a military-industrial complex that provides tools for genocide, enriches the few, and is not concerned with the public good?

The Dismantling of Government Services

The Trump administration, with the help of allies like Elon Musk, has aggressively defunded and dismantled critical agencies and programs. The consequences are already dire:

Public Health at Risk: Thousands of scientists, researchers, and public health experts have been laid off from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This has crippled our ability to respond to health crises and conduct life-saving research.

Environmental Protections Gutted: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have seen massive cuts. This leaves us vulnerable to natural disasters, toxic air and water, and the looming threat of climate change.

Transportation Safety Compromised: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been understaffed and underfunded, potentially contributing to an increase in airplane crashes. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has also been weakened, putting drivers at risk.

Education and Consumer Protections Under Threat: The Department of Education faces cuts that could jeopardize student loans, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been effectively shut down, leaving consumers more vulnerable to predatory practices.

These cuts are not just bureaucratic shuffling—they are a direct attack on the services that keep us safe, healthy, and informed. As the federal government retreats, the burden falls on state governments and private contractors to fill the void. Why should we pay federal taxes when we’ll need that money to pay for privatized versions of the same services?

The Rich Don’t Have to Pay—Why Should We?

As sociologist Matthew Desmond has documented, the wealthy have avoided paying trillions in taxes through loopholes and favorable policies. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has doubled down on tax cuts for the rich, further exacerbating inequality. If the system is rigged in their favor, why should the rest of us play by the rules?

Moreover, the IRS has been gutted, leaving it unable to effectively audit the wealthy. This means the burden of funding government services—what’s left of them—falls disproportionately on the middle and working classes. If the rich won’t pay their fair share, why should we?

A Moral Imperative 

A significant portion of our tax dollars fund military spending and munitions manufacturing, contributing to death and destruction around the world. If your conscience rebels against funding endless wars and imperialistic policies, withholding taxes in a capitalist system, is one way to protest.  At least, it won’t be your hard-earned money contributing to killing and maiming to keep despots in power.

What Now?

The dismantling of government services, the perennial exploitation of tax loopholes by the wealthy, and the gutting of the IRS have created a system that no longer serves the public good. Instead, it enriches the powerful at the expense of the rest of us. If we’re going to pay for privatized services anyway, we need to save our money.

However, this isn’t just about saving money—it’s about demanding accountability. If the government won’t provide the services we need, if it won’t ensure the wealthy pay their fair share, and if it continues to use our tax dollars for immoral purposes, then it is our right, responsibility and duty to withhold our support.

The post Why Pay Federal Taxes? first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Union-busting is primarily aimed at undecided workers, but you must prepare everyone for the boss campaign.

The post Who do you inoculate and when? appeared first on EWOC.

It’s hard to repress a devilish grin from stretching across my face when I see the most evil parasites of the world, from asset managers to European neoliberal politicians, in full-blown panic at the economic free fall triggered by President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. However, I can manage to stifle my joy by reminding myself of the 900 workers laid off by Stellantis allegedly due to the tariffs, or more generally that it will be the American working class that suffers the most from the approaching economic recession.

I am sure the lay off of those 900 workers is also being waved about by champions of unrestricted international trade as evidence that support for tariffs by unions like the United Auto Workers is misguided. And it’s this reaction that concerns me almost as much as the harms that will come from President Trump’s nonsensical tariffs. Because tariffs are not the problem – it is the reliance by President Trump, and practically every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, on private investment to create domestic manufacturing that makes their tariffs so ineffective at protecting workers in this country. It was not always this way – the U.S. escape from the Great Depression and successful mobilization for World War II were predicated on one of the largest state plannings of the economy in human history, and when Americans saw the benefits, they became politically invested in it, from public housing to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 are being used as a convenient historical example by critics of President Trump’s protectionism. The persuasive appeal is obvious – the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were a last-ditch effort to reverse the ever-deepening Great Depression.. And, depending on which historian you asked, these tariffs either failed to stop massive unemployment or made the situation far worse by the trade war it triggered. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, otherwise a notorious boogeyman of “free market” proponents, ran on decreasing tariffs, ending the trade war, and reforming the political process for instituting tariffs.

However, while the increases of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were undone by FDR, the huge decrease in tariffs did not occur until after 1947. A global economy devastated by World War II had largely made the question of imports undermining U.S. jobs a moot question, and to the contrary American capitalists wanted trade liberalization because the U.S. had become the unquestionable center of global manufacturing, not to be dethroned until 2010 by China. The state of Pennsylvania alone produced more steel in 1945 than Germany and Japan combined.

But that was not created by the “free market.” It was created by unprecedented (at least within the United States) centralization of manufacturing by the U.S. federal government. Perhaps the most obvious example was the War Production Board formed in 1942. The WPB directed $185 billion (equivalent to $2.48 trillion today) of production in its three years of existence. The Board converted companies’ production lines (whether they liked it or not), prohibited nonessential production, rationed several commodities, and otherwise behaved in a way that earned the admiration of more controversial state planning proponents. 

Unsurprisingly given its broad mandate, the WPB also worked closely with the United States Tariff Commission. As this report from the Tariff Commission in 1942 reflects, changes in tariffs and other trade restrictions were not done out of some neoliberal ideology that the free-er the trade the better, but rather were calibrated to balance protecting domestic production while maximizing trade needed for the war effort. To just name one example, the report notes that the reliance on importing “canned fishery products” created a massive shortage once the war disrupted global trade. Even so, the report notes that any restrictions to ameliorate the situation had to be “consistent with the prosecution of the war.”

There is no such calibration between President Trump’s tariffs and state planning for production. To the contrary, planning of the economy in the U.S. was long ago turned over by the state to the finance industry (as epitomized by former War Production Board staffer and former Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler becoming the chairman of Goldman Sachs International in 1969). Even worse, President Trump’s strategy for incentivizing private investment is not even the typical flawed strategies of neoliberal orthodoxy (special economic zones, tax incentives, regulatory sandboxes, etc.), but rather to bully the world in the hope that foreign private capitalists will invest in American manufacturing out of fear of becoming a target. Whether this strategy will be effective in attracting foreign private investment is dubious at best – private investment generally is averse to the uncertainty and volatility that President Trump inculcates, and that is all the more the case when the purse strings are held by those with less influence over U.S. politics.

Even if President Trump’s strategy were to succeed though, it will not create the kind of manufacturing jobs that World War II era state investment paired with tariffs did. There will be no governmental support for unions and their ability to collectively bargain with employers, let alone the WPB’s threat of nationalization to those factories that did not promote industrial peace with the unions. And there is a certain irony to President Trump’s racist hatred of foreigners not extending to foreign capitalists, who are particularly well-positioned to exploit American workers. A CEO in Barcelona does not have to worry about his workers in Danville, Illinois showing up at his house or neighborhood charity fundraiser. And the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) empowers these foreign corporations to attack what few protections exist for American workers. This is not conjecture – the Canadian mining company Glamis Gold took the U.S. to ICSID in 2003 over environmental and labor protections related to open pit mining in California.

In the words of Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh, “In real international competition, there are always winners and losers.” The neoliberal ideology behind global free trade ignores this reality by claiming that unrestricted global trade lifts all boats, when that is clearly not true. The Trumpian protectionist ideology meanwhile acknowledges this reality but attempts to make America the “winner” by bullying other countries with the hope that this leads to foreign private investment in U.S. manufacturing. That strategy will likely fail, or even worse create abominable manufacturing jobs with little protections for workers. In this time, socialists must thread the needle by arguing that tariffs are an important tool but must be paired with state investment and planning to replicate the process by which the U.S. became the manufacturing powerhouse with good union jobs in the post-World War II era. We must clearly say that tariffs cannot bring back good union jobs, and even state investment is not guaranteed to, but instead we should follow historic examples like the Tennessee Valley Authority where public investment was paired with democratic engagement and labor unions (which continues to this day).

The post Tariffs Are Not the Problem – Private Investment Is appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Nevada’s 83rd legislative session started on February 3rd, 2025. Las Vegas DSA’s Electoral Working Group has been tracking bills on economic justice, worker power, immigrant justice, environmental justice, criminal justice reform and more.

By Jean Allen

At the end of the vigil for Sam Norquist, a queer man who I was sitting by said “see you at the next one” as I left. I came back, insisting that no, let there never be a next one. The man shrugged, took a hit of his vape, and we nodded and left. I was really struck by that, the bleakness that prompted in me. 

A week later, at another vigil for those lives destroyed by ICE, a comrade of mine—an unbelievably kind Chinese socialist on a student visa in Rochester—asked me if they were going to allow all of us to speak. I don’t think it’s that kind of rally, I said, and he left to argue his case. As I saw him be gently talked down, I heard the speaker talk about how many voices were being silenced by ICE and by our capitalist system.

Comrades, I don’t have any problem with any of the speakers at either of these vigils. Even where I disagree with these speakers we are all together trying to stop this terrible administration. And I think that the Sam Norquist vigil’s use of an open speakers list was helpful. But even with that, what is desperately needed is some degree of open conversation among the participants of our rallies.

My ideal would be small group conversations, but even a response period, as RCEA’s vigil had, is preferable. In November of last year, ROC DSA held a forum where people were allowed to speak in small groups about their feelings on the election, and where we could move forward. While I understand that the weather has been brutal the last two months, why have other groups not repeated this format? 

There’s a term I’d love us to start thinking about—protagonism. Developed by Marta Harnecker talking about Latin American movements, the term refers to the ability of the working class to “be the subjects, not objects, of their own individual (private) and collective (historical) stories—to be protagonists.” This seems obvious—who wouldn’t want to empower the masses?—and yet we so consistently disempower the people who come to our events in order to avoid annoyance or frustration.

And I get that. The two vigils I went to in the last few weeks were events that popped out of the blue, and they were managed as well as they could have been. No disruption occurred, no unpleasant moment transpired. I had my political start with the anti-war movement of the 00s and I remember how for a decade any open mic would eventually attract a 9/11 truther or someone with some similarly embarrassing conspiracy theory. It’s easy to dismiss open replies as encouraging cranks and conspiracy theorists. But cranks and theorists emerge because people aren’t used to thinking about society, because people don’t know how politics works because they’ve never played a part in it. Awkward moments are the growing pains that come from people processing thoughts themselves, which we can never force. Our events are drama free, yes. But people are coming to our people disappointed by our political system, which just seems to offer passive observance, and they passively observe a lecture series, and then they go home unchanged. That is a failure.

We are not going to get free, we are not going to stop the US’ slide to fascism, with the handful of organizations and notable figures we already have. To build towards a real democracy, we must first empower people and transform people’s consciousness. The best way is to allow people to talk through these ideas among their equals. That’s a lot more complicated than a lecture series. It’s a lot harder to pull off, and will feature frustrating moments. But, frankly, we don’t get infinite vigils on the road to fascism. We need to get this right, and empower the thousands of workers in this city, and we have a limited time frame to do so.

The post Let People Speak first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Join us in Portland on May 1st to speakout, march, and sing. Bring union banners, homemade signs, friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, and fellow students. All unions, community groups, and political organizations are welcome to form contingents and bring their own bullhorns and chants. We start at USM at 3:30. March to the Post Office, Portland High, and then Public Library in Monument Square starting around 5pm. Then up Congress Street for a final rally in front of the Portland Public Museum. Details here.

The slogan “Strength in Solidarity” won the vote to lead Portland’s International Workers Day protest on May 1st. About seventy people took part in the April 12 organizing meeting, including teachers, electrical workers, nurses, graduate student workers, LGTBQ+ activists, Gaza solidarity organizers, and political organizations like Maine DSA, Indivisible, and many more. The Maine May Day coalition meeting aims to build immediate mobilizations while contributing to a long-term united front to defend working peoples’ rights against the Trump blitzkrieg. 

The Portland effort is part of a larger picture. On April 17, over 1300 people participated in a national conference call spearheaded by the Chicago Teachers Union to organize May Day Strong protests in hundreds of cities across the country. [Note: Maine May Day sites will be listed starting later today.] Meanwhile, the Maine Education Association and Maine AFL-CIO affiliated unions are calling for rallies in multiple towns and cities across the state. 

[Read next: We need an anti-Trump united front in Maine]

Unfortunately, our social movements and unions are not yet strong enough to stop Trump in his tracks. This means we’re going to suffer losses and casualties, even as we increase our ability to fight back. Scores of immigrant workers are being detained and threatened with deportation in towns across our state. Bowdoin College faces threats from Trump for solidarity actions carried out by Students for Justice in Palestine. Free school lunch is at risk for more than 100,000 public school students. Transgender people face an orchestrated backlash, striking at the core of their basic human rights. Federal unionized workers have been illegally terminated and Trump wants to outlaw their collective bargaining rights. Cuts to Medicaid will lead to more hospital closures. Not to mention the impact of massive tax breaks for the rich, the slashing of environmental protections, and the very existence of our—already weak—democracy and civil liberties. The message is clear: if you stand up for basic civil liberties, you risk financial catastrophe and police repression.

Meanwhile, the Maine Republican Party, with Laurel “Doxxing kids” Libby at its head, is raking in millions from far-right groups across the country to ram through a referendum in November to limit voting rights for women, the elderly, the disabled, and—it must be said out loud—anyone that doesn’t look white enough for Libby and her entourage. Their strategy is to break our resolve and gerrymander power for themselves for decades to come in the name of profits for the rich and pain for the working class. They have the wind in their sales and we have to prepare for a drawn out struggle.

In that vein, one inspiration for the May 1st action comes from United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain’s call to begin coordinating contract expiration dates and ongoing actions now in advance of an effort to launch a general strike on May 1st, 2028 to flex workers power. One graduate student union organizer put it this way, “If we want to win, we all need to get strike ready. We need to practice. Not just in our unions, but in our communities, too.” 

Collectively, we took an important step in the right direction when 15,000 people in towns across Maine turned out on April 5 to protest Trump’s wrecking ball. These mobilizations began to change the mood from isolation and disbelief to determination to put up a fight and they are set to continue on April 19. 

There’s no telling in advance how large the protests will be in the coming weeks and months. The ebb and flow of mass social movements cannot be scheduled in advance. However, the history of labor during the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s both demonstrate that the better organized we are in advance, the better we are able to cultivate and sustain opposition. The more we leave our internal organization up to a date posted on Facebook and Instagram—or to small professional staffs managing large databases of passive followers and donors—the weaker we will be. This doesn’t mean we can’t use social media or raise money, but there is no substitute for face-to-face planning between organizations who can democratically represent activists in every workplace, neighborhood, community and school. We’re not there yet. That’s where we have to get in the years to come if we want to beat Trumpism and replace it with something better than what came before. 

Fortunately, we’re not starting from scratch. Maine has hundreds of community and labor and advocacy organizations who have been doing the hard work of organizing for a long time. That work has expanded the rights and social programs we all rely on. Now, much of that is under threat. It’s no surprise that the first groups to stand up were those with the strongest organizations, for instance, unions representing postal workers, federal workers, nurses, and teachers. We have to build on those efforts. To defend ourselves, we all need to expand our circles and build bridges between communities.

[Read next: Sitting down with the Portland Tenants Union]

Final details will be hashed out this weekend, but the outline of Portland’s May Day action is coming into view. We’ll begin at 3:30 on the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine to speak out against Trump’s threat to our public universities. And, we’ll march on the boss to demand the UMaine system bargain in good faith and sign a union contract with graduate student workers represented by the United Auto Workers. The two go hand in hand. 

Next, we’ll march to the Post Office on Forest Ave to oppose Trump’s threats to privatize it and hear from workers threatened with mass layoffs. Then up past Portland High School and the Portland Public Library in solidarity with educators and students opposed to Trump’s destruction of the Department of Education and his attacks on LGTBQ+ and immigrant students. Finally we’ll march up Congress Street during rush hour to the Portland Museum of Art to support funding for the arts and hold a final community rally starting around 5:00 pm. We’ll have a program of speaking out against Trump’s attack and offering ideas about how to deepen solidarity between all the different parts of our movement for democracy and justice. 

We need your help. Please attend the march if you are able. It’s a big state, so if you can’t get to Portland, please support or organize another action in your town or region hosted by the Maine Education Association and the Maine AFL-CIO or any other community group that steps up to stand up. Strength in solidarity. 

[Listen to the Maine Mural Podcast latest episode: Camp Hope in Bangor, Maine]

The post Strength in Solidarity: May Day protests against Trump take shape in Maine appeared first on Pine & Roses.

By Richard S

Cambridge, MA – Massachusetts labor activists were some of the first movers to confront South African apartheid and push for US divestment and sanctions. These efforts bore fruit in 1982 legislation divesting Massachusetts pension funds, Boston municipal divestment in 1984, and federal sanctions in 1986. Throughout the late 20th century, labor activists in Boston kept the issue of apartheid firmly on the agenda until the African National Congress (ANC) leadership supplanted apartheid and established a progressive constitutional democracy.

Today, American workers confront another criminal regime. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found Israel to be practicing “racial segregation and apartheid” in occupied Palestine. In Gaza, Israeli forces have resumed what Human Rights Watch and international institutions around the world call genocide, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” According to a recent YouGov poll, only 15% of Americans support increasing military aid to Israel. Public favorability toward Israel has cratered across all partisan and age demographics over the past three years. Given this bedrock of anti-apartheid sentiment, we can look to the New England struggle against South African apartheid as inspiration to end its Israeli form.

Workplace Roots of Anti-Apartheid Struggle

In 1970, at the Polaroid Corporation in Cambridge, MA, two Black employees – chemist Caroline Hunter and photographer Ken Williams – discovered the South African government was using Polaroid’s cameras to produce passbook photos – the internal passports enforcing racial segregation​. Outraged that their labor aided oppression abroad, Hunter and Williams formed the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM) and launched the first anti-apartheid boycott of a U.S. corporation​. They demanded Polaroid withdraw from South Africa through a pressure campaign that included rallies at Polaroid’s Cambridge headquarters. Pressure worked. By 1977, Polaroid ended all business in South Africa after a failed attempt at “responsible engagement” collapsed under public scrutiny​.

In the wake of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, Boston activists formed the Boston Coalition for the Liberation of Southern Africa (BCLSA) alliance fighting white minority rule. Labor organizers coordinated boycotts and educational events. Black American trade unionists in particular took the lead: in 1975, the national Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) broke with the conservative AFL-CIO and passed a resolution supporting the exiled South African trade union federation aligned with Nelson Mandela’s ANC. CBTU became the first U.S. labor body to call to boycott apartheid.

New England Labor at the Leading Edge

As South Africa’s repression intensified, New England labor activists championed divestment – pulling financial investments out of companies tied to South Africa. In 1979, State Representative Mel King of Boston and State Senator Jack Backman introduced legislation to divest the state’s public-employee pension fund from banks and corporations doing business in South Africa​. At first, their bill lacked enough support​. Understanding that broader grassroots backing was needed to overcome political inertia and corporate lobbying, they helped convene a meeting of unions, church groups, and anti-apartheid activists across Massachusetts​. 

Unionists testified that worker pension dollars should not fund apartheid. They linked factory shutdowns in Massachusetts to companies seeking cheap, non-union labor in South Africa. 

These forces merged to form the Massachusetts Coalition for Divestment from South Africa, or Mass Divest​. Crucially, labor unions were at the coalition’s heart, including locals of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and Massachusetts Teachers Association​. By uniting labor with religious and student groups, Mass Divest built a broad constituency in favor of cutting Massachusetts’ economic ties to apartheid. As Mass Divest rallied public support through petitions, pamphlets, and public hearings, the campaign gained momentum. Unionists testified that worker pension dollars should not fund apartheid. They linked factory shutdowns in Massachusetts to companies seeking cheap, non-union labor in South Africa. 

In 1982, their efforts paid off, as the Massachusetts legislature passed a sweeping pension divestment bill requiring the state to sell off all investments (around $100 million) in companies doing business in South Africa​. Conservative governor Edward King vetoed the bill. In a dramatic show of unity, lawmakers overrode his veto – the only override of King’s tenure​. The new law, enacted in 1982, made Massachusetts the first U.S. state (alongside Connecticut that same month) to divest its public pension funds from South Africa​. Massachusetts’ divestment law – described at the time as the toughest in the nation – passed through a concentrated campaign led by a bedrock of labor unions and activists in Massachusetts. Union activists provided much of the grassroots muscle behind Mass Divest, lobbying legislators and educating rank-and-file workers on why apartheid investments were immoral. The state AFL-CIO and major unions formally endorsed the campaigns in resolutions and lobbying officials. 

Inspired by the state’s stance, Boston City Councilor Charles Yancey successfully introduced a Boston city ordinance in 1984 requiring Boston to withdraw its funds from companies tied to apartheid​ – a measure similar to a proposal by Somerville for Palestine to Somerville City Council in March 2025. “Today’s divestment legislation is one more hammer blow against the chains of apartheid,” declared Yancey in 1984​. This made Boston the first major American city to divest municipally, selling $12 million in stocks and leading to policy transfer across the country as cities and states took Boston’s law and codified it into their own books. By 1986, the U.S. Congress, prodded by a broad coalition prominently featuring labor, overrode President Reagan’s veto to enact the federal Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, imposing economic sanctions on Pretoria​.

Labor Building Base, Boycotts, and Networks of Solidarity

New England labor did not just lobby for legislation; their memberships took more direct action to isolate the apartheid regime. Trade unions passed strong anti-apartheid resolutions throughout the 1980s, committing union resources and moral authority to the cause. For example, Massachusetts AFL-CIO under President Arthur Osborn vocally supported sanctions. So did local labor councils; the Greater Boston Labor Council regularly urged its affiliates to boycott firms complicit in apartheid. National unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) denounced apartheid’s exploitation of workers. West Coast longshoremen in 1984 boycotted South African cargo ships, inspiring unionized dockworkers and truckers in the Northeast.

Unionized city workers even removed Shell products from municipal garages.

Unions also joined campaigns targeting specific corporations. A notable one was Shell Oil, part of an international boycott to pressure Royal Dutch/Shell to withdraw from South Africa. Boston became a key front in this campaign. In December 1988, Boston’s mayor Raymond Flynn (former labor organizer) issued an order flanked by labor leaders declaring the city government “Shell Free” – no city agency would buy Shell gasoline until the company cut ties with apartheid​. Boston’s unions enthusiastically backed Flynn’s order; unionized city workers even removed Shell products from municipal garages.

Finally, Massachusetts activists built relational networks of solidarity with South African liberation movement organizers. Union locals hosted South African trade unionists and anti-apartheid leaders on speaking tours. Labor-affiliated groups raised funds for Black union organizers in South Africa who were jailed or fired by apartheid authorities. For instance, Boston-area unionists sponsored the defense of imprisoned labor leaders such as Oscar Mpetha and funneled material aid to newly independent Black unions in South Africa like the National Union of Mineworkers​. In June 1983, Northeast activists formed a Labor Committee Against Apartheid to coordinate letter-writing drives.

When Nelson Mandela was liberated from prison in 1990, he made a point to visit Boston​. Speaking to a jubilant crowd of 300,000 on the Charles River Esplanade, Mandela praised “the pioneering and leading role of Massachusetts.” The long-incarcerated leader of the South African freedom struggle cited the early Polaroid protests of 1969–70 as proof that Bostonians “rallied around our cause when we soldiered on by ourselves…You became the conscience of American society.”​

Mandela’s praise was not just empty rhetoric. As recounted by scholars like Kathleen Schwartzman, Kristie A. Taylor, and Stephen Zunes, international sanctions and other restrictions on South African capital played a decisive role in apartheid’s collapse.

Today: Labor and the Struggle for Palestine

Labor’s fight against apartheid in South Africa shows us divestment and sanctions can be effective tools to isolate racist regimes. It continues today in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel. Just as our unions once opposed apartheid South Africa, unions today, such as the UAW, UE, tenant and teachers’ unions are taking up the baton of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Crucial to the earlier generation’s success was building a broad, popular coalition across religious, labor, and student groups in coordination with allied lawmakers.

For our predecessors, “an injury to one is an injury to all” was not just a moralizing cliché. It was an analytic necessity that grounded the struggle for universal justice in shared class interest, the same class interest that leads workers to oppose Trump’s mass firings, the plunder of the commons, attacks on free speech, science, public health, and social insurance. As the war on Gaza deepens in its cruelty, and as the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza nears its fifty-eighth year, the fight for an arms embargo and broader sanctions will be fought by labor.

Richard S is a member of UE Local 256 and Boston DSA. He is also a doctoral student in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.