Monthly Newsletter of the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America

ROC DSA’s 2025 Steering Committee is excited about this year’s priority campaigns: electing a socialist majority to city council, fighting against the criminalization of homelessness, and helping workers to organize their work-places. While we witness the dismantling of our remaining social safety net with concern, we are determined to meet the moment. There is a growing demand for change, and an increasingly organized working class. Together, we will develop a world where the means for a dignified life are available to all.

The post Rochester Red Star | February 2025 (Issue 10) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

By Liz Henderson

Eating locally can continue through the winter! 

If you stock up now, you can save supplies of onions, garlic and root vegetables in a cool closet or section of a basement. If you get tired of potatoes, seek out celeriac, sunchokes, leeks, beets, parsnips, rutabagas or giant daikon radishes. A simple way to prepare these root crops is to bake them coated with a little oil and sprinkled with chopped garlic and herbs. Parsnips are good roasted with a little cinnamon.

There are area farms that sell their own produce at the Rochester Public Market, open Tuesdays, Thursday and Saturdays year-round. It is the #1 market in NYS for distributing SNAP benefits. Look for the Moss Family Farm (Albion) that sells its own and some resale produce; the Small World smallworldfood.com stand that carries veggies and mushrooms from several farms as well as value-added products like kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt and cheese; Rick Austin who sells eggs and frozen chicken from his farm in Newark, NY; and several farms that sell their own apples and other fruit. Small World products are also available at Abundance and Lori’s.

The Brighton Farmers Market moves to its winter HQ in November and remains open all winter, Saturdays from 10:00 – 1:00. Several farms have invested in hoop houses and greenhouses so that they can grow greens (lettuce, kale, collards, spinach) all winter. Prices at this market are high, but so is the quality. In addition to produce, there is fresh bread and other baked goods, a tempting variety of mushrooms, honey, maple syrup and useful kitchen supplies that help you avoid plastic.

Please keep in mind that when you buy directly from farmers, they get the full price that you pay (and, of course, have lots of expenses that they must cover). In a grocery, the farmer gets only a percentage (from 20 – 50%) of the price you pay for produce and much less for ingredients in processed foods.

Shop at Stores that Carry Local Products

The Abundance Coop is Rochester’s only cooperatively owned store. You can shop there whether you are a shareholder or not, but if you join ($100) you get a 10% discount once a month and get to help decide on store policy.  Since much of the food Abundance sells is certified organic, prices tend to be high.  But as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Abundance also carries many non-organic items. If you keep an eye out for the “Coop Basics” signs, you can purchase basic organic  staples at affordable prices. In addition, Abundance has a special program for people with limited incomes – FLOWER (Fresh, Local, Organic and Within Everyone’s Reach) – an everyday discount program that is designed to lower the cost of most of the food and eco-friendly products in the store. 

An independent grocery is Lori’s Natural Foods which carries a lot of local products too.

Some of the corporate groceries carry local produce, mainly when a particular crop is in season. Keep in mind that when selling to you, groceries double the price that they pay to the farmer. The UFCW has unionized workers at Tops, Safeway and Stop and Shop. Wegmans, Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Whole Foods compete as to who is more effectively anti-union. 

The post Getting Grounded – Eating from Local Farms through the Winter first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

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.

DSA in California is disproportionally education workers, especially higher ed workers. These people are also likely to be union members. HELU is an organization that ties together labor and higher ed in a way that socialists will recognize in its motto, “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast”—which echoes “Medicare for All,” “An injury to one is an injury to all,” “Solidarity forever,” and “Everybody in, nobody out.” HELU attempts to organize local unions and labor organizations to implement this motto as a national response to the crisis in higher ed. This creates an opening for California DSA members to engage in a national conversation with local impacts.

Where HELU came from

When Bernie Sanders, despite winning California, did not become the Democratic Party candidate in 2020, many people active in that campaign took a time-out. Among these were people who came from higher ed organizing: grad students, union staff and leaders, activists from the various parts of the contingent faculty movement, scholars of all sorts concerned about the crisis in higher ed, and, not surprisingly, quite a few DSA members. A piece of Bernie’s platform had been a focus on labor in higher ed but once Biden faced a GOP-dominated Congress, it was obvious that the path forward was not going to go through party politics. It was going to have to go through organizing. But what kind of organizing? 

Why wall-to-wall?

By focusing on labor rather than, for example, academic freedom, HELU acknowledged that higher ed workers who probably have the most power to bring runaway managers (and the whole industry, ultimately) into line are clerical, custodial, maintenance, library, tech and the numerous other “non-faculty” job positions without which the whole ship doesn’t sail. So organizing in higher ed would have to mean something way beyond organizing faculty. That’s how “wall-to-wall” became the banner, soon to be expanded to “coast-to-coast,” under which HELU came into being in 2021. 

First the organizers held a series of zoom summits, supported by Scholars for a New Deal in Higher Education, Jobs with Justice and the Rutgers University unions. Hundreds of people participated. They produced a vision statement, sufficiently equal to the crisis to quickly gather endorsements from over 100 local unions and labor organizations. Setting a goal of 50 formal members – local unions and labor organizations paying “Solidarity Pledges” like a form of per-caps – they convened their founding Convention in May 2024, elected officers and hired staff. Now began the hard part (see higheredlaborunited.org for what has been done since). 

The higher ed crisis changes in character

That was before Biden stepped back for Kamala Harris and of course, before Trump was elected. The crises that HELU thought we faced –student debt, administrative bloat, privatization, casualization of faculty and staff, legislative attempts to wipe out tenure, abolition of DEI programs, the attacks on student and faculty protests, mass layoffs of whole departments and especially adjuncts – were now consolidated into an ideologically empowered top-level GOP agenda intended to drop a veil of ignorance (see Ruth, Shrecker and Johnson’s book The Right To Learn, from Beacon) over the whole country.

What can a newly established – but growing -- organization do in the face of this agenda? And what should be the role of California DSA members?

Three challenges facing HELU

The challenges HELU faces in implementing “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” are formidable, but none are insurmountable. HELU already has enough strength and structure to serve as an inside-outside hub where these very challenges and difficulties get aired and debated and solidarity commitments made. Here are the three challenges that come up most often for California.

First is that California higher ed labor unions may not see the value of a national organizing project. California is a mature labor regime that can pretty much stand alone (and hence ignore the rest of the country). It may not seem to matter that, in the absence of an industrially based higher ed labor movement, there has been no way for the many unions that represent higher ed workers to speak with one voice and provide a vehicle for horizontal solidarity between higher ed locals. It was important, with Project 2025 looming, that in October 2024 HELU managed to get the top national leaders of nine unions including AFT, NEA, UE, AAUP, CWA, OPEIU, UAW, AFSCME and UNITE HERE to sign a Statement of Unity.  

A Unity Statement may seem like distant thunder given the urgent needs of higher ed workers at the bottom rank and file level. This is especially true in the California Community Colleges, where the wrong-headed 67% law, dating back to the 1970s, placed a cap on teaching load and helped create a vast statewide faculty that is majority part-time, low-wage and insecure. Lack of job security makes union participation risky, which leaves union leadership in the hands of secure tenured faculty who have given contingent faculty issues low priority. Now, after years of pushing, the One/Tier/United Faculty program at last promises some motion on this issue and this is where the energy has gone. Therefore California community college part-timers may not see HELU’s national organizing agenda as relevant.

The second challenge is the difficulty of organizing across job positions, the wall-to-wall challenge. Higher Ed is an old-fashioned hierarchical industry with serious prestige attached to some workers and none to others. This hierarchy is structured on race and gender, with an extremely disproportionate distribution of workers in top jobs being white men, and the low-wage, low-prestige jobs are largely people of color (especially women). Can custodians and tenured faculty strategize together and act in solidarity? The good news is that the workers in the low-prestige jobs are often unionized and highly competent in the skills and power of representation and bargaining. And what workers can most effectively hold the operation of a college or university hostage? Who can really learn from whom? Knowledge of a little higher ed labor history might come in handy here too.

Then there’s the coast-to-coast challenge. While HELU presents a national vision of a different higher ed system (see the Vision statement at higheredlaborunited.org), it is mind-boggling to figure out how to bring together workers in public and private non-profit institutions, not to mention the for-profits, workers in union-hostile or union-friendly states, workers in states without public sector collective bargaining (and where, as in some states, it is actually prohibited). Some states are way ahead of others; California is one of these. Then there are places like Florida and Texas, where the raids on higher ed make headlines. Beyond that are places like North Dakota where, in addition to having no collective bargaining agreements in public higher ed, there are also attacks on tenure.  (CWA is organizing there, incidentally.) But these don’t make headlines. HELU has hosted numerous zoom conferences to bring together activists from different states and contexts but we are still at the level of self-educating and learning from people who are like and unlike ourselves. This is not a challenge that will be resolved top-down but it is happening in real time through the nuts-and-bolts magic of bottom-up solidarity. 

The rising movement is the good news

The good news is the rising movement out of which HELU was born. While HELU is a re-set to industrial organizing of the 1930s, the multiple re-sets that re-shaped higher ed in the last hundred years all were responses to the demands of the time, facing the forces in play at the time. HELU spun off out of what felt like a state of ultimate exasperation: “The solution can’t be just a fix here and a fix there – we have to get in front of the whole problem.” The current demand could be described as a right-to-learn, anti-ignorance, what-does-the-planet-need demand.  

An Inside-Outside hub for higher ed activists

DSA is a big-tent socialist organization of thinkers and activists. HELU is not an opposition site; on the contrary. But it does have the power to host the critical, open-ended debates that can be brought back to local unions and labor organizations and energize them. As part of an inside-outside hub, it’s an opportunity for us to break out of local bubbles. DSA members are already among the numerous students, grad student employees, union organizers, lecturers and members of professions like tech and healthcare that are often employed by higher ed institutions, and campuses are where some of the most energetic union activity is already taking place.  DSA members bring a point of view that is likely to be historically grounded and capable of imagining strategy for an alternative vision for a whole society, not only the need for reforms, large and small. 

What DSA members can do (individually and together)

The three dire challenges listed above will not be overcome without a lot of processing of ideas, a job that DSA is set up to do. You can start by looking at higheredlaborunited.org to see the structure and recent work done by HELU. See if you belong to a local California union that has already endorsed or formally joined HELU. If you don’t, and are curious, you can sign up to get communications and partake in some discussions. If you find that you’re already in a member union, sign up and ask your local leadership for contact information for the delegates that represent your union vis a vis HELU. If your local is not yet a member of HELU, start the process of organizational decision-making. If you are in higher ed, but not yet unionized, contact EWOC to get some help starting a union. If you are not in higher ed at all, you likely know friends, comrades, neighbors and relatives who are. Pass this information to them. Then, in either case, proceed according to the principles of equality and solidarity that brought you to DSA to begin with. With higher ed being a major employment sector in all metropolitan areas and facing the prospects of fully neo-fascist attacks, we can’t do any less to defend one of the important parts of the common good for the entire working class.