Maine Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Sophie G. welcomed more than one hundred members and friends from across the state who met in Portland over the weekend. Alongside nuts and bolts discussions and elections for the group’s organizing committees and working groups, Maine DSA welcomed solidarity greetings from allies and friends, including the Maine Coalition for Palestine and the Maine-based immigrants rights organization Presente! as well as reports from Maine Youth Power and the Maine Gun Safety Coalition. Members also hosted several workshops including a panel on the opportunities and pitfalls of electoral politics, renters organizing in the mid-coast, and the ABCs of being a good organizer. 

Maine DSA accomplished a lot over the last year. We elected Wes Pelletier to serve alongside Kate Sykes as Portland’s two socialist city councilors. Comrades in Brunswick launched the Brunswick Renters Organization and made their voices heard in city council hearings—even if the city councilors “value the class position of a landlord over the class position of a tenant” as DSAer Peach Cushing put it at the time. 

Members are also launching a new organizing committee in South Portland as well as building up working groups to defend bodily autonomy—for LGTBQ+ and reproductive rights—and to expand our solidarity work with the labor movement. In another sign of members’ increasing dedication, a full slate of candidates ran to fill more open leadership positions than last year. Yet, despite that good work, everyone recognized the depth of the danger facing working-class Mainers heading into Trump’s second term—not the least of which is the fact that local Republican county committees are openly celebrating Trump’s pardon for Maine’s very own January 6 insurrectionists. 

Last week Pine & Roses published a proposal to guide our organizing over the coming year and it was taken up at the conference. The resolution emphasizes the dangers Trump represents and frankly acknowledges that we are facing “a period of increased attacks on marginalized communities, the labor movement, public education, and the working class as a whole.” As such, “socialists must play a frontline role in defending the working class from attacks by the far right” even as “the political environment in Maine, as of 2025, presents opportunities to resist the Trump administration and make gains at the state and municipal levels.” 

In order to put this analysis to the test, Maine DSA aims to work side by side a wide array of allies to defend immigrants, the trans community, indigenous sovereignty, unions, public education, and democracy in general while simultaneously building up the socialist movement’s reach across the state. During the debate, several members suggested the resolution ought to have a more clearly defined international section. One member proposed an amendment (which passed with a clear majority voting in favor) to specify that Maine DSA aims to “challenge the hegemony of the Democratic Party.” Thus amended, the resolution passed (nearly) unanimously. Now comes the hard work of trying to put ideas into action. 

As we do, the more activists and organizers we can muster the better. So if you’re looking for a way to join the fight against Trump, please consider getting in touch with us and joining Maine DSA. 

The post Maine Socialists Say No to Trump appeared first on Pine & Roses.

By Maxine Bouvier & Vanessa Bartlett

MEDFORD– Full-time lecturers at Tufts University started their two-day strike Monday morning following a strike authorization vote of 94%. Lecturers, members of SEIU-509, have been bargaining for 10 months with the university for livable wages and fair workloads. 

Faculty’s current demands are a 3.5 percent annual increase after an initial adjustment for cost of living, along with a reduction in unmanageable workloads. As it stands, Tufts offers a 2.5 percent merit raise that has remained stagnant. The average full-time lecturer salary is at or below 80 percent of the area median income (depending on household size). 

According to biology lecturer Helen McCreary, Tufts salaries are also not on par with those of peer institutions. 

“If you adjust for cost of living, we’re the second lowest. And even if you look, rather than looking at peer institutions, adjusting for cost of living, if you look at other universities in this area that are research heavy institutions, we’re also the second lowest.” 

Low salaries have meant that many full time lecturers are unable to afford to live nearby the university. As housing costs in the Greater Boston area have continued to skyrocket, these faculty members typically commute an hour plus to teach at Tufts. This affords lecturers less time to spend with their families, and with their students. 

On top of financial struggles, lecturers say they are overburdened with large class sizes as Tufts continues to up enrollment targets. McCreary’s intro biology classes have ballooned to 480-550 students, class sizes she says Tufts simply does not have the space to accommodate.

“I’m excited about Tufts having more students, the students are phenomenal, but that increased enrollment needs to come with more support for teaching,” says McCreary. 

Lecturers, whose job duties include teaching, mentoring students, and carrying out other service work feel that they are not able to deliver on the high quality of education that Tufts promises to its students under these conditions. 

“Students pay tuition, some of the highest in the country, but we don’t see that tuition being reinvested back into providing a quality education. Because, you know, we certainly are not having more faculty to teach more students. They’re saying ‘do more with less,’ says striking lecturer Penn Loh. 

Faculty on strike say the Tufts community has been deeply supportive of their efforts. Students see that they are overworked, and families are frustrated to see the high tuition costs they pay are not put into their students’ education.

A Tufts sophomore, Ben, who came out to support the full time lecturers union on the picket line, shared his reasoning: 

“I want my faculty members to be able to support themselves easily, to not have to make long commutes, so that they can be, like, good teachers.” 

Lecturers have also received support from local elected officials, including Somerville City Councillor Willie Burnley Jr., State Representative Erika Uyterhoven, and Zach Bears of the Medford City Council, all of whom were present at the picket on Monday. 

“It is incredibly frustrating to see that there are multiple unions currently rallying, fighting for their rights at Tufts when we know that they have a surplus of 34 million this past year. They have the money to support their workers and are making the choice to not,” said Burnley.

As McCreary puts it, “Our working conditions are students learning conditions.” 

Regarding the decision to strike, Loh said it was a tough choice. “I really didn’t want to have to take an action like this,  but in a lot of ways we felt like this was the only way for us to send a clear message that we are not going to do an either or, either you get a better workload or better pay. We actually need both.”

Maxine Bouvier is a member of Boston DSA.

Vanessa Bartlett is the vice-chair of the Working Mass editorial board and a member of Boston DSA.

The ultra-rich are ruining the lives of the next generation. The solution is to organize for power, fight, and win.

The post Gen Z: No one is coming to save us. It’s time to unionize. appeared first on EWOC.

Growing up in Pasadena, the Santa Ana winds are as familiar as Craftsman bungalows. They happen annually, and every few years they pick up enough to do some damage. More than once I’ve seen gusts topple trees, power lines, and city infrastructure. Usually, they amount to nothing more than a story one shares with a friend; recalling the violently swaying branches  or the bright blue blast that rockets from a nearby transformer. This time was different.

We know that climate change has made weather more extreme. Between 2022 and 2024, Los Angeles experienced extraordinary amounts of rain, in some cases for weeks in a row without pause. For the last 8 months, however, we have received less than an inch of rainfall. When you combine excess rain and growing brush, followed by eight months of drought and a sudden 100mph weather event, you have the recipe for a climate catastrophe.

The Palisades Fire started at 10:30 AM on January 7th. By noon the next day, it had already reached over 11,000 acres. For context: that means it was expanding by about seven football fields per minute. The Eaton Fire, which started above Altadena on January 7th at 6:18 PM, had grown to 10,800 acres by 10AM  the next morning. These are also just two of ten notable fires we’ve had this month.

DSA-LA’s response

As evacuation warnings started, members of DSA-LA quickly set up an emergency response message group. We included members of our steering committee, regional branch organizers, leaders of our mutual aid committee, and any who wanted to help. Our members were balancing this as we were getting real time updates about our friends and family needing to evacuate, with some having to evacuate themselves.

Our first project was creating an evolving  list of resources and information. The situation across the county was developing very rapidly, so this list would be updated many times a day.

As this resource was being created, we started a rapid-response network with our elected democratic socialists, or our “Socialists in Office (SIOs)” and their staff members. Our chapter has already established a Socialists in Office Committee, which made this task much easier. These elected officials were providing constituents with real-time updates and coordinating evacuations, relief, and evacuation centers. They also established locations where residents could relocate to get clean air.

DSA’s staff and National Political Committee worked with our chapter to send mass communications out to members along with a volunteer sign-up form to identify those who were ready and able to help. Working with our regional branches, we divided the respondents up by location and  routed  them each day to volunteer sites  in their area. These included offices of our local electeds and sites like the Pasadena Community Job Center that were accepting and distributing food and donations, as well as facilitating community cleanups. Sites like this were popping up all over LA county.

The community

The response from Angelenos to this disaster has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. Thousands of people have shown up every day to do everything from house evacuees, sort donations, raise money, foster displaced pets, clean up debris, and care for their community in any way imaginable. Volunteers were compiling lists of Gofundmes for victims. Our shelters were taking in hundreds of animals, big and small.  It didn’t take long for these sites to become so overcrowded with people willing to help, that volunteers started to be turned away. One of our own members involved in the emergency response was volunteering nonstop, even as they learned of their family’s home being lost in Altadena. For every tear I’ve cried for a loved one who’s lost their house or apartment and belongings, I’ve cried thinking about how proud I am of this place and its people.

The state

Our system of disaster response was not designed for the scale of these events. The most effective form of firefighting at scale, air support, was impossible during high winds. Our reservoirs, with the exception of one, were full and functional, but the extreme demand caused water pressure to drastically diminish. Typically, 3-4 fire engines are used to put out one structure fire. We now know almost 18,000 structures have been destroyed. Even discounting the fires burning in our mountains, that would require at least 54,000 fire engines deployed at once. Firefighters were even pouring into California from other states and countries to assist in this effort.

That doesn’t mean, however, that our government should be completely excused from what happened before and after these tragedies started. Our current system is an unfortunate reflection of the power dynamic that exists in this country. For too long, private utilities, fossil-fuel companies, and the billionaire class have purchased legislators and laws that allow their profit-seeking to take precedence over our safety and health. Over the years, Los Angeles and California have made strides away from this type of governance, in no small part due to workers coming together to make that happen.

What our government has done in response to these fires has also been fraught. Fire chiefs didn’t prepare like they had in previous years. A significant portion of the labor used to fight fires is also, shamefully, forced from those who are incarcerated. The city of LA’s mayor was out of the country as this all began (though she flew back quickly). County evacuation notifications came far too late for residents, if at all. The county even mistakenly notified millions of people multiple times that they needed to evacuate or boil their water when they didn’t. There was also little information about best practices to protect our health outside after the smoke dissipated (if a fire just ripped through a bunch of houses and businesses near you, wear your mask outside for at least a couple weeks afterward).

We’re allowed to be, and should be, upset at everything our government has done and will do wrong. We should be careful, however, about using distrustful language against our state that flirts with the libertarian and destructive sentiments of the reactionary right. We must always see these lies for what they are. They are attempts to turn sectors of the working class on each other, while distracting us from the real causes of this disaster.

Republicans, right-wing personalities, and oligarchs, particularly Donald Trump and Elon Musk, wasted no time in blaming this disaster on Los Angeles and California. They used their usual, hateful rhetoric to denounce diversity and equity initiatives, Democrats, and an electorate that is too “woke.” Billionaire developer and closet-Republican Rick Caruso, who’s mayoral run in 2022 also went up in flames, used the opportunity to attack mayor Karen Bass in a thinly-veiled attempt to relaunch his political career. He also hired private firefighters, using our water to protect his shopping center in the Palisades. If you want a sense of how important capital is to these people, Caruso decided that saving his open air mall was more important than saving his own daughter’s home, which was destroyed in the Palisades fire.

The policies that DSA-LA’s electeds have begun to propose in response to the fires (an eviction moratorium and rent freeze in response to landlord price gouging) has been evidence for why the state, and gaining democratic control of it, is so important. The recovery effort in the aftermath of these fires is going to take years. What would we want as socialists in the recovery?

This question will be taken up in Part 2 of this article in the February California Red.

Upcoming Events

Thursday, January 30 (5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.): Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)

Thursday, January 30 (5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.): Palestine Solidarity and Anti-Imperialist Working Group (Zoom)

Thursday, January 30 (6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Ecosocialist Monthly Meeting (Zoom)

Saturday, February 1 (11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.): Boycott Chevron Picket (In person at 5500 Telegraph Ave., Oakland)

Monday, February 3 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister & on Zoom)

Monday, February 3 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Reading Group (SF Reds Chapters 4, 5, 6) (Zoom)

Tuesday, February 4 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Newsletter Training (Zoom)

Wednesday, February 5 (6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): New Member Happy Hour at Zeitgeist (In person at Zeitgeist, 199 Valencia)

Saturday, February 8 (1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Outreach Training and Outreach (In person at 1916 McAllister)

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

Events & Actions

#BoycottChevron Picket

Join the #BoycottChevron picket on Saturday, February 1st from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at 5500 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland! Chevron is one of the largest providers of power and fuel to Israel, which they extract off the coast of Palestine, and they are a primary target of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.

Let’s stop their profits while educating our community together!

Newsletter Training

Curious about how the newsletter gets put together each week? Interested in joining the newsletter team and learning how to do it yourself? Join us on Zoom on Tuesday, February 4th from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. for an online tutorial! Working on the newsletter is a great way to stay engaged with the chapter and help out with vital but often overlooked work. We are particularly seeking out disabled comrades and folks with busy schedules who might not be able to make it to in-person DSA events regularly.

Check out the #newsletter channel on Slack or message Serena M for the Zoom link!

Tenderloin Healing Circle Recap

At the January general meeting, DSA SF members voted unanimously in favor of a proposal to continue the Tenderloin Healing Circle project (TLHC) that started in August 2023 as a part of the Mutual Aid priority.

Initially formulated as a response to our Tenderloin neighbors’ expressed need for support with gun-related trauma, the twice-monthly healing circle (think: group therapy) became a place for the TL and DSA SF community to come together and connect, process emotions, and be in solidarity.

We spent December reflecting on the successes and challenges of our TLHC work, and brought a proposal to the chapter highlighting the positive reputation the TLHC gained through community members attending and benefiting from the work, as well as the need to continue the project to strengthen the existing relationships between DSASF and the TL community. As the project continues, we want to emphasize that everyone is welcome to attend – not just those of us who live or work in the TL.

The Tenderloin Healing Circle will run through 2025! Please join us every second and fourth Monday of the month from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Kelly Cullen Auditorium at 220 Golden Gate Ave, and check out the #tl-healing-circle channel on slack to get involved.

DSA SF Education Board: 2025 Planning Survey

What did you come to DSA to learn about? What types of educational events do you think would help our organizing work as a chapter? Help the ed board shape our 2025 educational offerings by taking this three-minute survey.

Behind the Scenes

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

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

Concerned about the incoming Trump administration?  Welcome to the club. Back in 2016 many asked, “Is this fascism under construction in America?”  Today by any reasonable measure it’s no longer open to question.  

Some academics and various branches of the left continue to split hairs over what type of governing power or social movement can legitimately be called by the term, or whether there are differences between “fascism” and other sorts of authoritarian rule like “military dictatorship” and “police state”, or if those differences matter at all. 

Nonetheless, there’s a solidifying consensus—from right to left—that we are now witnessing American fascism under construction. We heard from Trump’s former administration cronies describing him as a fascist during the campaign; Kamala Harris agreeing in an interview; the New York Times editorializing along those lines; and here’s what AOC said recently: “We are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.”

But as Karl Marx put it in the eleventh “Thesis on Feuerbach”, “The philosophers have interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In other words, it is up to democratic socialists and other progressives to understand fascism so that we can build the broadest possible principled coalition to resist and defeat it.

No predictions necessary

It’s a one hundred percent safe bet that this administration will not be good for the working class, particularly immigrants, whom Trump has made clear will function as his number one scapegoat and first test case for the destruction of society’s civil liberties. This has already begun. 

Trans people and queer culture are number two in line. The left, whom Trump has castigated as “vermin”, may not be as present in his day-to-day rhetoric, but fascism never leaves socialists and communists far down the list of enemies—indeed, defeating the left is fascism’s historic origin and ongoing role. Assaults on women’s right to control their bodies launched by Trump appointees on the Supreme Court will continue and likely expand. Expect the multiracial working class to be under assault in numerous ways—all without calling these aims and actions by their actual names.

Institutions that are meant to be bulwarks of democracy are targets. Any mass media that don’t toe the line are disparaged as “fake news”.  Libraries will endure shelf-clearing, school curricula that tell the truth about American history will be attacked, and the federal government will saw off and sell off as much of the public sector as it can. (Here’s where fascism and greed merge in the Trump administration.) There will be an attempt to split and weaken organized labor, peeling off the more conservative union leadership while isolating the more militant unions. If that gambit fails, we can expect more direct efforts to crush labor and working class militancy. 

Behind all these expected actions is the threat of violence to enforce them, whether from extra-legal right-wing militias, or now, the captured security apparatus of the federal government. And don’t discount a growing collaboration between the two with Trump’s encouragement, beginning with his pardon of the sixteen hundred January 6th far right conspirators.

Finally, as I noted a year ago in California Red, “Ultimately a fascist movement, usually perceived by the capitalist class initially as a threat, becomes the defense of that class, as the upstart party entrenches itself in state power, and a significant fraction of the holders of economic power, used to operating under the fig leaf of political democracy, figures out how to make their accommodation with this more direct form of violent domination of the other social classes.”

Accommodations by big capital to fascism

Recent capitulations to Trump by leading members of the ruling class notably feature representatives of Silicon Valley capital, including formerly anti-Trump capitalists like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, among others. Each of these oligarchs control major media platforms, as does the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who, like Bezos, in the waning days of the presidential campaign last year, instructed his managers to squash editorial opposition to Trump. Thirteen of Trump’s cabinet appointees are billionaires. In other words, we are witnessing the accommodation of formerly skeptical sectors of big capital to fascism as it climbs to power.

The good news: fascism usually only lasts for so long; society eventually grows sick of the lies, the destruction, the lack of liberty, the erosion of humanity. But it takes understanding as soon as possible the nature of the beast, communicating that to as many people as we can, building the biggest coalition we can, and the courage to engage in collective action together.

The more we know about how fascism works the better we can combat it.  In that spirit we share the annotated bibliography below.  

Fascism reading list

Books

Bray, Mark.  Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Melville House Publishing, 2017. An historical and global look at what resistance to fascism has looked like from the early twentieth century to (close to) the present day, including discussion of tactics, strategies and historical lessons, through the prism of anarcho-syndicalism. 

Guerin, Daniel.  Fascism and Big Business, Monad Press, 1973. Originally published in 1936 by a left-wing journalist and updated in the 1960s, this is the classic overview of developments in Germany and Italy, informed by well-honed Marxist analysis.

McLean, Nancy.  Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Viking, 2017. How did the Republican Party move from a conservative alternative to the Democratic Party to the carrier of fascism in America? McLean tells the story of James Buchanan, whose right-wing libertarian playbook was adopted and backed by the Koch brothers. 

Paxton, Robert.  The Anatomy of Fascism, Vintage, 2005. In fascism studies all roads lead to—or at least touch on—Paxton. A non-marxist but synthetic overview of the field. If you are going to go for the deep dive this is essential reading. 

Stanley, Jason.  How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Random House, 2018. Not as rigorous or concerned with definitions as Paxton or Guerin, this short, readable discussion, concentrating on cultural factors, describes the ways fascism becomes normalized in a democracy.  

Stanley, Jason.  Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, Simon and Schuster, 2024. A continuation of the arguments of his previous book, How Fascism Works, Stanley shifts the lens from fascism in culture to how fascists destroy a democratic commons of the mind by privatizing the public sector and controlling the content of schools, universities and libraries. 

Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism, Verso, 2023. A short (160 pages), brilliant, but densely argued effort to summarize theories of fascism as they shed (or don’t shed) light on the present moment. Not for the Marxist beginner. 

Articles, websites and podcasts

Burtin, Olivier. “Fascism Has an American History, Too”, American History, V. 49, No. 3, September 2021. Argues that the previous consensus for an American exceptionalism—no fascist movement of any consequence has ever occurred in the USA—is wrong. The Ku Klux Klan in the nineteenth century is analyzed as a proto-fascism.

Churchwell, Sarah. “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here”, New York Review of Books, June 22, 2020. A similar argument to Burtin’s, but focusing more on later Jim Crow society, and how fascism will appear in a culturally endogenous way here.

https://convergencemag.com/articles/block-and-build-2-0/

“Block and Build 2.0” is an updated (January 15, 2025) strategy document by the editors of Convergence.

Fletcher, Jr. Bill. “Labor Now Needs to Be an Anti-Fascist Movement”, In These Times, November 8, 2024.  A few suggestions on how to organize resistance to the new fascist regime.

https://convergencemag.com/podcast-shows/block-and-build/

Block and Build: A Weekly Roadmap for the Left. Examines political developments from a movement perspective.  Fascism-specific: “Checking the Barometric Pressure of Creeping Fascism”, December 13, 2024

https://www.fascismbarometer.org

The Fascism Barometer.  Podcasts, toolkits, Instagram posts on various approaches to stopping fascism.

https://democracytoolkit.press

Democracy Toolkit. Resources especially for journalists, but anyone interested in defending a free press dedicated to reporting fact-based news in a democratic society.

Organizers and workers from across Alameda County, California, scored a major victory for the BDS movement on December 10th, successfully pressuring the Board of Supervisors to vote to develop an ethical investment policy that, when implemented, could move tens of millions of dollars in investments out of companies profiting off of Israel’s genocide and system of apartheid.

The County Treasurer, Hank Levy, who is an independent elected official, also announced that he had already dropped all $32 million in bonds the County held in Caterpillar (CAT), which directly profits from Israeli apartheid and the ongoing genocide, after sustained organizing from county residents and organizations requesting him to do so. 

This vote comes after months of grassroots organizing and pressure, including from many organizers with Bay Area Divest! (BAD!) and the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America’s (EBDSA) “Divest from Apartheid” campaign.

Top priority

“Organizing local governments to divest from Israeli apartheid and genocide is our chapter’s top priority,” said Zach Weinstein, co-chair of EBDSA. “It’s been incredible to see the combined power of organized workers, faith communities, racial justice organizations, Palestinian and Arab-led groups, and Jewish anti-zionists to win this major victory for the Palestine solidarity movement in the US, even as state repression of that movement continues to escalate.”

Thousands of Alameda County residents signed petitions, made phone calls, and sent emails to their County supervisors calling on them to divest from companies like Caterpillar. In November, well over one hundred people came out in person to pack the Board of Supervisors’ hearing room in support of divestment. Even more attended the hearing this month, with supporters also filling an overflow room across the street.

Labor unions like SEIU 1021, as well as the Alameda County Labor Council, played a pivotal role; the Council passed a resolution supporting local divestment campaigns. 

“Since Israel began their most recent assault on Palestinians over a year ago, our members have been leaders in doing what we can to stand in solidarity with Palestine and in opposition the US government’s role in these genocidal attacks – from organizing actions at our workplaces, to divesting our own dues from companies that profit from war, apartheid and climate change,” said Felix Thomson, a shop steward with SEIU 1021. “From our over one hundred rank-and-file members of SEIU 1021 Members for Palestine to our Local President, we have made this a priority issue in our union. It’s clear that the Board of Supervisors felt they had to pay attention to this level of organization from the workers who keep this county running.”

Alameda County is the first U.S. county to divest in this manner, and, once this policy is fully developed and implemented, it will be the largest jurisdiction in the US to have divested from Israel, following the Bay Area cities of Richmond and Hayward, California and a handful of other cities across the country.

“Along with other Bay Area organizers, we will continue to organize to ensure that this policy is faithfully developed and implemented and to get other Bay Area governments to follow Alameda County’s lead,” said Weinstein. “Millions of people of conscience across the US will continue to resist this country’s complicity in the ongoing genocide, displacement, and oppression of Palestinians – until Palestine is free, from the river to the sea.”

Under the banner “Make Big Oil Pay,” about 50 climate activists marched to the gates of the Chevron refinery in Richmond for a boisterous rally on January 17. Organized by the Sunrise Movement and joined by other enviros, the rally was hastily put together in solidarity with an action by climate activists in fire-ravaged Los Angeles. 

The Richmond action was tightly-organized. The gathering point was a park where beautiful signs and banners were distributed, chants rehearsed, and spirits lifted by young energetic Sunrise organizers. 

The march was choreographed to safeguard us amidst speedy commute-hour traffic. A dozen or so cameras—wielded mostly by the marchers themselves, I suspect—recorded virtually every moment of the march and subsequent rally at a Chevron gate. Speakers lambasted Big Oil for profiting at the expense of fire-ravaged Los Angeles. At age 74—one of the oldest marchers—I felt deep affection and gratitude for the young organizers who clearly put heart and soul into the action.

What’s the plan?

At the same time, I was plagued by the nagging feeling I get at every climate rally: What’s the plan to grow this into a mass movement? 

Sure, some rallies have attracted hundreds, like the Wall Street West blockade that shut down some banks in downtown San Francisco for most of a day in 2019. Gorgeous protest art was everywhere —displayed on placards, unfurled on banners, chalked onto the closed streets. But inexplicably, organizers provided no leaflets for blockaders to give to the hundreds of passersby we encountered that day. Leaflets to explain the perfidy of oil giants and their enabling banks, to assure passersby of our nonviolent intent, to invite everyone to join the next action, whose date, time and location would be prominently displayed on the leaflet. Instead, the climate actions I’ve attended feel to me like one-offs, a giant splash of anger and art after which most participants go home and wait to be summoned to the next one. 

Is it possible for the plethora of environmental action groups in the Bay Area to collaborate on a single target to generate widespread excitement and attract larger numbers in the future? My experience in the direct action campaign to stop construction of a nuclear reactor in Seabrook, NH suggests the answer is “YES”. 

In 1976, 18 members of the Clamshell Alliance non-violently occupied the Seabrook construction site while several hundred rallied in support. After three weeks of non-stop proselytizing, 180 “Clams”—organized into affinity groups—occupied the site as a thousand or more rallied in support. After eight more months of non-stop proselytizing, some 2,000 Clams occupied the site for 24 hours, then began planning the next occupation while being detained together in National Guard armories for 13 days. (Curious how we did it? See my new documentary “Acres of Clams” at https://youtu.be/RPuE9oKh6-I or just search YouTube for “Acres of Clams Eric Wolfe”.)

The chance to be human

Clamshell had strong support from Seabrook residents, who appreciated the open communications we maintained with local cops, state police and National Guard. Our nonviolence trainer, the late Sukie Rice, encouraged us to always make eye contact, speak from the heart, and defuse tension during actions by being human. In doing so, she said, you give each person you encounter—police, politicians, the press, the public—the chance to be human as well.

By contrast, at the climate non-violence trainings I’ve attended we are told to never speak to the police lest we inadvertently increase our legal jeopardy, or give away strategy. Sure, participants should be cautioned to avoid self-incriminating statements. But bathing our actions in secrecy isn’t a formula for building a mass movement. The better approach, in my experience, is to be as open as practicable with the police, build public trust in our tactics and intent, and bring thousands as close to the targeted facility as we can, then sit down peacefully. Yes, police might react with violent dispersal tactics, but I believe that becomes less likely when you’ve made concerted overtures to the police in advance, and continually reinforce to the public and media that nonviolence is a core part of your identity. Forcing large-scale peaceful arrests makes news and can build numbers going into the next action.

Of course there are many complications with any given action, which participants themselves must game out as best they can during nonviolence training. But when we are able to repeatedly mobilize thousands the publicity will be immense and there is a better chance to inspire concerned citizens elsewhere to action.

On January 17, Sunrise organizers clearly demonstrated the importance of upbeat, even joyful, energy. I wonder who will find a way to marry that energy to a strategy for sustained, disciplined nonviolent direct action.

How should American labor respond to the coming assaults under the Trump administration? A few weeks ago, I highlighted American Federation of Teachers National President Randi Weingarten’s speech calling for an abandonment of neoliberalism. In addition to her remarks, there have been several other notable responses and strategic proposals by unionists and advocates of labor that speak to the need for unions to get out in front of the predictable attacks on the horizon.

Indeed, before the Trump administration has even started, some are signaling the need to preempt likely attempts to gut unions in higher education. As the Guardian recently reported:

Student workers are bracing for the incoming Trump administration to “constrict or eliminate” their labor rights, after a surge in union organizing on college campuses.

Nearly 45,000 student employees formed unions between 2022 to 2024 between 44 bargaining units. As of earlier this year, an estimated 38% of all graduate student employees in the US were unionized.

But organizers fear this trend will stutter as Trump prepares to return to office. During his first presidency, officials tried to exclude 1.5 million private college and university student employees from exercising collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act, arguing these workers were not “employees”.

While the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the country’s top labor watchdog, withdrew this proposal months after Joe Biden took office in March 2021, Trump’s re-election sets the stage for another battle.

Representation and contracts now

Thus, academic unionists at campuses across the country are organizing to secure representation and win contracts now so they are better positioned for battles in the near future.

This is what labor reporter Hamilton Nolan recommends in “Lean Into the Punch: Labor Under Trump” at his Substack, How Things Work—organize and fight rather than cower and wait:

There are precisely two things to be done, beginning now, and continuing for the next four years. One thing is to organize. Unions are weak because they represent only ten percent of American workers. To gain power, we need to grow. That means that unions need to resist their impulses now to say, “Organizing is about to get harder so we shouldn’t waste our resources on it,” cut their organizing budgets, and spend their money trying to build a moat to protect their existing members. No. That is the first step to death. We all need to organize our ass off. Spend every last cent trying to bring new people in to the labor movement. In hostile times, workers need the protection of unions more than ever. It’s our responsibility to give it to them. We all get stronger when we grow, and we are all an easier target when we are small.

The other thing to do is to strike. More bluntly: to do more legal as well as illegal strikes. (Teachers in Massachusetts are showing us the way right this minute.) The legal regime that corporations are salivating to dismantle is the same one that has, for decades, laid out the ground rules for who and how and where and when strikes could expect to be sanctioned by the law. Take away those rules and the only silver lining for workers is that the shackles are off. Strikes carry their own power apart from any laws—the inherent power that goes with the fact that when workers stop working, nothing gets done. This is the core power of the labor movement. Time to lean into this. When you are in a fight and the referee leaves, you can either stand there exclaiming “My word! I say! This is highly improper!” as your opponent gouges your eyes out, or you can start fighting dirtier.

Of course, the key to his suggestions, as Nolan observes, is for labor leaders to double down on funding organizing, even if that means moving some funds away from other areas to do so. “Organize, organize, organize” has long been the mantra of the union movement; the problem is that rarely has the requisite financial muscle been put behind that rhetoric.

Labor growth

In “Labor’s Resurgence Can Continue Despite Trump”, Chris Bohner and Eric Blanc counsel against despair and argue that:

Conditions overall remain favorable for labor growth, despite Trump’s re-election. Political contexts matter, but so do factors like the economy, high public support for unions, labor’s deep financial pockets, the growth of union reform efforts, labor’s continued disruptive capacity, and the spread of young worker activism. Rebuilding a powerful labor movement remains our best bet to defeat Trumpism, reverse rampant inequalities, and transform American politics. Now is not the time for retreat.

To bolster their claim, they point out that organizing was more robust during the Bush era than it was under Obama:

Unions organized significantly more workers under George W. Bush’s administration than under Barack Obama. Why? The main reason is that the labor movement in the early 2000s was still in the midst of a relatively well-resourced push to organize the unorganized, whereas by the time Obama took office labor had mostly thrown in the towel on external organizing, hoping instead to be saved from above by lobbying establishment Democrats to pass national labor law reform. Labor can grow over the coming years if it starts putting serious resources towards this goal.

Therefore, the authors insist, labor can not just survive but prosper if unions take advantage of their existing resources and commit to a more robust, reformed, future-leaning movement that attracts some of the same disaffected workers who may have voted for Trump.

“Block and Build”

The United Teachers of Los Angeles’s Alex Caputo-Pearl lays out a thorough formula for “How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Authoritarianism” in Portside Labor:

In the coming years, defeating MAGA authoritarianism must be US labor’s main objective, embedded within a long-term strategy to fight for multi-racial democracy and an economy in which working-class people thrive. I propose that labor adopt an intensified “Block and Build” approach.

“Blocking” means organizing broad labor, community, and political alliances against authoritarianism, fighting tooth-and-nail against attacks on democratic rights, and vigorously defending the most vulnerable. “Building” means massively expanding a social base and movement infrastructure that will fight authoritarianism long-term and build campaigns for multi-racial democracy and an economy that radically departs from the corporate-driven, unequal model that has dominated since the 1970s.

More specifically, as Caputo-Pearl outlines, “five elements are needed in the overall program to defeat authoritarianism and build the foundations for a just society”: plow resources into organizing; campaign and negotiate for the common good with universalist demands for healthcare, childcare, and minimum wage while also defending the rights of communities under assault; strike and walk out; build independent political power by combining political and electoral work with member organizing aiming to create a new vision for society; and coordinate on as many levels as possible and build toward a nationwide general strike on May 1st, 2028.

Hence, amidst the sea of defeatism, retreat, and withdrawal, it is encouraging to see that folks in labor circles are not just exercising some optimism of the will in the face of the pessimism of the intellect that is not unfounded given our present political circumstances. I am reminded of the many other times in our history when the death of the labor movement was predicted and yet unions somehow managed to persevere against all odds. Most recently, many saw doom in the wake of the Janus Supreme Court decision that greatly restricted public sector unions, and yet this was followed by a wave of activism and organizing that helped keep public sector unions afloat.

That said, the challenges labor faces in this moment with an emboldened corporate class and an ideologically hardened rightwing in power across the board at the Federal level are perhaps unprecedented in the modern era.

Danger ahead

Also, in addition to the institutional obstacles within unions to more aggressive organizing, the labor movement faces the danger of divide and conquer tactics on the right that will pit private sector unions that have many members who may have supported Trump against public sector unions to which he represents an existential threat. This kind of split would be devastating for unionism as a whole and weaken the movement to such an extent that even those who stood with Trump would eventually be attacked by the same forces in his ranks that are aiming first for the public sector.

It is also up for debate whether the labor movement as currently constituted has what it takes to muster something like the national general strike that leaders such as UAW’s Shawn Fain and Alex Caputo-Pearl are proposing. Nonetheless, it is certainly true that dire times tend to focus the mind and summon unexpected courage.

At its best, labor can serve as a model for an inclusionary, multiracial democracy with the everyday needs of ordinary folks at its heart. If we act upon the bedrock principle that an injury to one is the concern of all, perhaps unionists can provide an alternative model to the war of all against all that MAGA embodies more than anything else.