Nexuses of electric eyes are the newest appendage of capitalism. There are now cities in the United States where, as a driver, your location is constantly tracked. This has happened quietly in the past few years, as technology costs decrease and private companies have secured the right to produce data from the public. The company that ruthlessly tracks drivers is called Flock. Campaigns to dismantle Flock contracts have brought tech critics and anti-capitalists together. But surveillance plays a strange, integral role in the current political economy, one that threatens to stabilize Flock when narrow criticisms against it are addressed. For example, in Eugene, OR, where a local Flock contract was dropped, the police department maintained that “while there were concerns about certain vulnerabilities and data security requirements with the particular vendor, the technology itself is not the problem.”

Flock primarily sells Automated License Plate Reader cameras, which they set up at intersections and roadsides to fulfill their municipal contracts. It has become a shared target because an open-source project scraped and published the location of Flock cameras across the country. It made them visible, and therefore targetable. Controversies over ICE’s use of Flock data and police stalking people using the same drew attention. Progressive nonprofits like Fight for the Future, the ACLU, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation waded in and started to mobilize people against the company. Socialists in Flagstaff, AZ, successfully campaigned to have their city council drop a contract with Flock. At the recent DSA Summit, de-Flock campaigns received enthusiastic attention as a way to constrain ICE’s prison archipelago.

Surveillance is an extremely difficult topic to organize around, for reasons I will discuss later, so we should be glad this pattern has produced successful campaigns. But the focus on Flock means we are missing the larger picture—the surveillance industry as a whole. A survey of surveillance professionals found that most believe Flock creates problems for their entire industry. Already, executives are distancing themselves from Flock’s practices and finding ways to return to the comfort and obscurity of corporate self-regulation. If nothing is done, Flock will be marked as a solitary bad apple as the broader industry continues to spread the same kinds of tools and practices. To fight capital’s surveillance state, socialists will have to dig deeper and understand the contradictions it poses for our liberatory project. 

To explain this, I will start with the political economic reasons why increasing surveillance technology is part of the current base of production, which makes moral arguments against surveillance of limited use. I will then go into the moral arguments—centered around privacy—to demonstrate. In the end, I do not know the exact way to expand the fight against Flock. But I know it will require a conceptual shift, where we turn away from the individualistic legal-rights frameworks that have historically been popular for contesting surveillance tools. Instead, we need to imagine surveillance as a collective harm that will only be healed by collective care, for our neighbors, for our class. As more chapters adopt de-Flock campaigns as priorities, it is worthwhile for us to develop a deeper analysis of the harms that surveillance poses to the working class, its connections to US militarism abroad, and the limitations of prior efforts to end corporate and government surveillance.

The Political Economy of Surveillance

In the current phase of capitalism, data is capital. Like cultural or social capital, it can be exchanged at certain rates for economic capital. Information collection has always played a role in the accumulation of capital, from logging of productivity measurements and profits to financial journalism on market behaviors and ship deliveries. Information helps capitalists to navigate risks and produce profits out of an irrational economic system. Over time, however, the production of information has increased to such a point that we now see it in its most discrete, atomized form—data. 

Through the 20^th century, as the United States economy became defined by its excesses of consumption (Cohen 2004), marketers created techniques to produce desire within mass-media audiences. They learned, however, that isolating and targeting specific populations increased the power of their message, through tailoring. In his study of 1990s mass-mail marketing, scholar Oscar Gandy identified a growing economic form that he called “the panoptic sort, the all-seeing eye of the difference machine that guides the global capitalist system” (Gandy 2021). Marketers started hoarding personal consumer data to identify and target cohorts of consumers for personalized ad campaigns, to instill specific desires in specific sections of the population. The resulting panoptic sort produces discrimination and atomization, as individuals are made visible to capital via smaller and smaller distinctions. Corporations and their marketing departments created, as Gandy describes, “a kind of high-tech, cybernetic triage through which individuals and groups of people are being sorted according to their presumed economic or political value. The poor, especially poor people of color, are increasingly being treated as broken material or damaged goods to be discarded or sold at bargain prices to scavengers in the marketplace.” This panoptic sort then became the core of the 2010s tech boom, through surveillance advertising. Its success is, I believe, part of the reason we are living through a moment of proletarian disorganization.

A scale of mass surveillance that would never have been permitted, if undertaken by the U.S. government, was applauded as the means through which tech companies could save a post-recession economy. This was the period where data finally became a driving element within capitalism, supported by state largesse. As Jathan Sadowski describes, “Fortunately for these companies, data capital, like financial capital, is treated as an engine of growth and epicenter of power and is thus governed by regimes of ‘light touch’ regulation, which are more interested in supporting than they are stymieing the smooth circulation of data capital” (Sadowski 2025, 84). Data has become a source of surplus value. Companies and capitalists are compelled to produce and accumulate as much data as possible.

At the same time, the extreme overproduction of data to serve the panoptic sort overwhelmed human comprehension. Computers helped to store and retrieve this data. Disciplines like statistics and mathematics made it comprehensible to experts, but even they strained to put the vast supply to optimal use. So, computer science—that faithful, now discarded, squire of capital—produced algorithms that could credibly compress that data into new and exotic forms. This is all that large-language models and so-called “artificial intelligence” software are: tools for synthesizing insane quantities of data into something quickly comprehensible. Encyclopedias have done the same for centuries. But specifically for this story, these tools made the computational processing of image data comparatively cheap. 

The limiting factor on video surveillance up until recently was the price of guard or security labor. A networked camera that feeds data into an empty server does not perform surveillance, unless there is someone to watch and then use that data. (Data, like all other kinds of capital, is dead labor that must be revivified [Marx 2024].) But video analytics, notification, and search all expedite that watching. I recently heard a police chief describe this change, at a talk. Time was, if you knew of a store where someone you wanted to track had been, you had to go and collect physical VHS tapes and then use a fancy 2x playback feature so that it would take you 4 hours to watch an 8 hour video. Now, he said, “We can search all 42 cameras [of our video surveillance system] at once.” This is the automation of labor. 

That means, in a service economy, there is an economic incentive to adopt surveillance technologies—they replace, one by one, the labor of sworn and civilian cops. That pressure for adoption comes not just from within policing agencies but from their constituencies as well, who demand more information, more transparency, more efficiency. This same police chief was asked, after his talk, about pushback on his agency’s video surveillance system. He said it was not really a problem, because “When a crime is committed, the first thing people ask is, where is the video?” By controlling the production of data about their activities, police also secure control of narratives about their crimes. Scholar Bryce Clayton Newell observed this effect in his study of the limited accountability created by body-worn camera programs: “Body-worn cameras are a state-supported, administrative response to bystander video and other forms of increasing police visibilities; as such, they support the police and legitimize official state narratives and the use of state police power” (Newell 2021). Copwatch programs put an effective check on police action, but one response by agencies has been to relocate video production within their own control and demanding the funding to do so. 

The US empire depends on a global chain of workers who have been pacified into productivity by dispossession, exploitation, and commodification: “To understand pacification is to understand how capitalism itself is produced and reproduced” (Rigakos 2022). And when data is capital, socialists need to understand how data subjects are pacified into playing a part in the production of data. Beyond its agencies themselves, the entire U.S. security state is a boon to the surveillance industry.

Secured supply chains gather steel, copper, plastic, and Taiwanese semiconductors to manufacture cameras, cables, and servers that can navigate the US’ Dual-Use Technology Controls on their import and export. Security labor designs and installs surveillance assemblages grafted onto public housing, traffic lights, and signs. Software providers like Axon and Genentec design platforms that can synthesize private and public data sources in local fusion centers, Real-Time Crime Centers. The Department of Homeland Security funds private corporate actors and public agencies to create an “information sharing environment,” where grants are contingent on data-sharing collaborations with ICE via 287(g) agreements. Just as many of the academic grant-giving agencies have been gutted, DHS research and development arms are recreating the Cold War academy, to find new ways to pacify domestic populations. Where before surveillance advertising was able to isolate single consumers, video surveillance isolates individuals so they can be put into profit-driven camps and detention facilities. This is the scale of the enterprise that municipal Flock agreements are a part of. 

The Limits of Privacy

Against this surveillant economic system, its opponents often march under the banners of privacy and Luddism. The current form these values take, however, is individual abstention from a system of social exploitation. Let me explain. For over a decade, “tech lash” activists have tried to curb the excesses of so-called surveillance capitalism. In so doing, they have often focused on privacy to explainas the harm it causes. While privacy is a changing social norm, it is usually parsed as a “right to be left alone.”

This right, however, is legally derived from property. In fact, capitalism depends on an apparently clear division between public and private. That division allows private accumulation from previously public resources. The state continuously polices that boundary for the working class, even as it allows capital to smuggle public goods into private profit—a kind of osmosis. “The border between public and private spheres, that is, the myth of the autonomy of state and market, is particularly vehemently defended, for it is the cornerstone of liberal capitalism,” Micol Seigel (2016) argues in her history of US international police advisors.

When Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren (1890) first attempted to craft a doctrine on privacy out of constitutional and common law, they did so to keep photojournalists away from high society weddings. While they formulate privacy as the right to an “inviolate personality,” US law has developed through a combination of Fourth Amendment protections combined with civil tort cases to understand this right as particularly protecting expectations of privacy for one’s possessions. These are all subject to revocation by the state under “reasonable suspicion” but they also remain completely silent on the subject of the private accumulation of personal data. The scale of harm caused by massive data breaches can scarcely be estimated. And the “third-party doctrine” allows the government to do an end-run around any listed protections, by subpoenaing private companies—it simply deputizes data collection work to private companies. 

 Against this, a range of technology nonprofits have offered their services. Borrowing countercultural aesthetics (Turner 2006), these nonprofits have made legal combat the primary venue through which surveillance issues are resolved. The law, however, is where the deck is stacked against the working class. Many of our movements have been quashed by the state via extralegal surveillance operations, like COINTELPRO. We do not own estates, gates, and guards to help us press a claim of violation. We do not have a court that will hear the mass collection of private data and issue a decree for jubilee. 

Further, privacy as individual enjoyment of property is a flimsy tool for building the subject of collective action—how can we imagine the place of privacy in class consciousness? In many cases, to build our consciousness as a class, we actually need to tear down the barriers that hide away inequality and injustice, like the feminist Wages for Housework movement. In others, we actually already understand publicity as the condition for supporting one another. Legal scholar Khiara Bridges has shown how US public welfare assumes the need for privacy violation, to provide social services to families (Bridges 2017).

Flock, and the security industry, recognizes the flimsiness of relying on moral appeals against surveillance. They want to take it head-on. In a recently leaked media guide, Flock consultant Jamie Hudson advises, “Don’t avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you are not going to convince opponents that it’s not.” Instead, surveillance advocates and police departments are encouraged to focus on “governance.” That is, to emphasize how mass surveillance tools actually help towns appear to deliver services to their constituencies. At the same talk I mentioned before, a police chief recommended emphasizing that “we’re not here for immigration.” If that doesn’t work, police can “overload ’em with statistics” about how cameras help them to solve crimes. If that doesn’t work, emotional language: “Are you going to tell some affected family that their case shouldn’t be solved because of some contrived reason?” 

Under Flock’s guidance, surveillance is a “force multiplier” that helps wise, frugal city councils efficiently fund their poor, cash-starved police departments. The reasoning is economic. It is meant to appear practical. And if Flock doesn’t succeed in this framing, there are plenty of other companies that will try. Stanford University, for example, has already replaced its Flock contract with a similar vendor of license-plate readers, Genetec.

Conclusion

The role of privacy in a socialist state is far from clear. Privacy grants space for the creation of the self. In US society, this is driven to an unnatural height, where people are both atomized and paranoid of surveillance. Profits from data extraction and analysis link the United States to Israel, which as a client-state service trades its war machines and surveillance technology tested on Palestinians (Al-Khatib et al. 2026). But collection of information, especially for industry, is just as part of socialist states as capitalist ones, as examples like the Chilean Project Cybersyn show. Our problem is not that data is collected at all; our question is not whether we should or should not. Our problem is that data is capital. Its accumulation is an economic imperative that shackles society to narrow, repressive strictures. Surveillance data production feeds the war machine and the private prison industry. That is what we need to change. Our question is how. 

Socialists have to build the alternative, especially when they are able to govern. Other countries, like the United Kingdom, have explored the creation of data trusts, where contributions are voluntary and benefits must be communal. Indigenous communities are exerting data sovereignty to block flows of data and extractive access to communal knowledge. Hackers and designers make technologies that evade or reconstruct the frictionless data environment we have come to see as natural, inevitable. Still, critiques of surveillance and aesthetics of resistance remain stuck in the age of Orwell’s 1984 and its surveillant television, itself a criticism of imperial British mass media society. But the beast has changed, and so must we. 

DeFlock, like Tesla Takedown before it, has shown that technology companies are just as vulnerable to pressure campaigns as any other. DeFlock goes a step further by targeting the source of funding for surveillance, where Tesla Takedown focused on changing public perception. But our horizon must be broader. Let us see surveillance for what it is—a part of capitalism. 

References

Al-Khatib, Islam, Arees Bishara, Sarah Fathallah, et al. 2026. Digital Domination: AI, Surveillance, and Digital Power in Palestine and Beyond. Birzeit University; 7amleh. https://7amleh.org/storage/posts/pdf/af9d8f67-334d-465e-bd9d-c5bd1800bbf4.pdf.

Bridges, Khiara M. 2017. The Poverty of Privacy Rights. Stanford University Press.

Cohen, Lizabeth. 2004. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. Vintage Books.

Gandy, Oscar H. 2021. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Oxford University Press.

Marx, Karl. 2024. Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Princeton University Press.

Newell, Bryce Clayton. 2021. Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras. University of California Press.

Rigakos, George S. 2022. Security/Capital: A General Theory of Pacification. Edinburgh University Press. 

Sadowski, Jathan. 2025. The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. University of California Press.

Seigel, Micol. 2018. Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Duke University Press. 

Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

Warren, Samuel D., and Louis D. Brandeis. 1890. “The Right to Privacy.” Harvard Law Review 4 (5): 193–220.

Article illustration is by Bernardino Rodriguez, c. 1600–1650

By Madeline W.

Metro Detroit DSA endorsed four candidates in local races and eked out wins in all four, flexing the political muscle the likes of which NYC-DSA and Denver DSA demonstrated a month ago in their barrage of wins across endorsed races.

Cadre candidate and environmental advocate Chris Gilmer-Hill ran against incumbent Democrat Helena Scott in Michigan’s 8th State House District — covering areas of Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge, and Northwest Detroit — and won by 6 percentage points. In an election season increasingly defined by the role of corporate money in politics, Scott was a vulnerable candidate due to her close relationship with DTE and corporate interests. Gilmer-Hill ran on a progressive platform, stumping for key DSA priorities like taking on DTE, enacting Medicare for All, and expanding socialized housing access and protection. Gilmer-Hill will face Republican Bruce Langran in the November general election.

By far the most ambitious campaign for Metro Detroit DSA this primary was Donavan McKinney’s campaign to unseat incumbent Democrat Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, encompassing all of Grosse Pointe, most of Detroit, and some of the Down River cities. Thanedar, a Metro Detroit DSA member until his expulsion a few years ago, had become embattled in recent years due to unpopular political positions in a district that was historically held by the late Democratic Socialist John Conyers. Last year, Thanedar voted with House Republicans to “thank” ICE for their mass deportation regime.

McKinney sought endorsement from DSA in late spring and was formally approved by the chapter body in June, giving MD-DSA just a few months to build campaign infrastructure capable of beating Thanedar — a monumental undertaking with so little time. The path to victory the chapter saw was not straightforward, but his race had one main factor going for it: significant parts of his district overlapped geographically with Chris Gilmer-Hill’s State House race, making it easy to quickly ramp up McKinney’s campaign work in the area.

Combined, DSA knocked 50K doors for Chris Gilmer-Hill and Donavan McKinney. That, along with critical support from fellow socialists in office, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and State Representative Dylan Wegela, propelled McKinney to victory. Early this morning, McKinney was declared the winner of his primary contest, winning by 4 percentage points. In the November general election, McKinney will face Republican challenger TP Nykoriak to become the next Congressman in what is a deep blue district.

Elsewhere in Metro Detroit, incumbent Democratic Socialists, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and State Representative Dylan Wegela, cruised to victory. They will face James Hooper and Chris Dobis, respectively, in the November general election.

Michigan is seen as a prime battleground in a proxy war playing out in the Democratic Party nationally between progressives and Democratic Socialists, and the establishment Democratic base. Today, we can now confidently say that Michigan has spoken: DSA is here to stay.

Madeline is the co-editor for The Detroit Socialist and a member of Groundwork.

DSA Has Arrived was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three DSA members discuss the intersection of socialism and sports fandom on this episode of "Class," the podcast of the National Political Education Committee.

The post Sportcialism appeared first on Democratic Left.

In June, ILWU Local 6 and Local 10 workers at C&H Sugar in Crockett, CA went on strike against contract takeaways and to demand the company negotiate in good faith. The company responded by rerouting a shipment of raw sugar to a nearby non-union facility, bypassing the striking ILWU workers, and dumping sugar from Negros Island in the Philippines onto its docks. Negros, where just months earlier, the Armed Forces of the Philippines massacred 19 human rights activists, community journalists, and land defenders, including Bay Area organizer and SFSU alumnus Lyle Prijoles.

On August 7 at 6:00 PM at the DSA office (1916 McAllister St), come to Bloody Sugar: The C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines, where we’ll connect the C&H strike to the struggle of Filipino sugar workers and land defenders, examine sugar’s bloody history and the imperialist global supply chains that bind us together in struggle, and discuss how we can organize in solidarity here in San Francisco. 

• RSVP for Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines
• Read DSA SF’s statement: Justice for Lyle Prijoles and the Negros 19!

Tuesday August 4 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday August 5 (6:00 PM – 9:00 PM) Social Housing Happy Hour (MOTHERSHIP, 3152 Mission St)

Wednesday August 5 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Tech Worker Reading Group (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

 Thursday August 6 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 6 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Friday August 7 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

 Saturday August 8 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) No Appetite for Apartheid: Consumer Pledge Canvass (Dolores Park, by the Miguel Higalgo Statue)

 Saturday August 8 (11:00 AM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Sunday August 9 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group Meeting (zoom only)

 Monday August 10 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

 Monday August 10 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM)Labor Working Group Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

 Tuesday August 11 (6:30 PM – 8:30 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting(zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

 Wednesday August 12 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM)DSA SF General Meeting (zoom and in person at Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, 1187 Franklin Street (at Geary) in the Starr King Room)

 Saturday August 15 (11:00 AM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

 Saturday August 15 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Food Service (Patricia’s Green Picnic Area, 499 1/2 Hayes St)

 Sunday August 16 (11:00 AM – 2:00 PM) Affordable Housing Guarantee Act Field Kickoff (Duboce Park)

 Monday August 17 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines

Join us on the evening of Friday, August 7 at 6:00 PM at the DSA SF office, 1916 McAllister St — we’re hosting a guest speaker from San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines to discuss the recent events that connect the strike against C&H Sugar in Crockett, California to the massacre of 19 land defenders and activists in Toboso, Negros Occidental in the Philippines. We’ll dive into sugar’s bloody history, learn about the links in the imperialist global supply chain that bind us together in struggle, and discuss what we can do here in San Francisco.

RSVP for Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines

Apartheid-Free Bay Area Consumer Pledge Canvassing

Come join us for our next No Appetite for Apartheid consumer canvass! We will be meeting in Dolores Park on August 8 at 11:00 AM at the Miguel Hidalgo Statue. Help build support for the 200 apartheid-free zones our campaign has established in SF.

RSVP for the NA4A Canvass 

Social Housing Ballot Measure Field Kickoff

Great news: according to recent polling, the DSA SF-endorsed Affordable Housing Guarantee Act has support the support of 67% of San Franciscans, but there are still so many who haven’t heard about the measure yet. We need your help to make sure every San Franciscan hears about this measure directly from us – join us to kickoff the field campaign for the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act, Sunday, August 16 at 11:00 AM at Duboce Park.

RSVP for the Social Housing Ballot Measure Field Kickoff

Picnic in the Park

Join your friendly neighborhood socialists at Dolores Park on August 22 from 2:30 PM to 5:00 PM for an afternoon hanging out in the park. Great for families and new members! Bring snacks to share and a blanket! Meet in picnic area by the playground.

Beach Day with Palestine Solidarity Working Group

Join the Palestine Solidarity Working Group at Ocean Beach on August 29 at 2:00 PM as we play some games and enjoy some time on the beach together! We’ll have snacks/drinks and a volleyball net, and of course we will be snagging a bonfire pit for the vibes.  Please bring whatever you’d like to roast over the fire and come learn more about our work with Palestine!

RSVP for Beach Day via Partiful

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

Know Your Rights Canvassing in the Fillmore

A small but mighty crew of four DSA members met at Raymond Kimbell Park on Saturday, August 1st to do some Know Your Rights Canvassing in the Fillmore District. The group went out into the community to chat with employees and business owners about what to do in the event of ICE agents showing up at their business. Informational handouts in both English and Spanish were distributed along with red cards that provide an easy script on what to say if you are in a situation confronting ICE.

Several blocks of Fillmore were covered and the businesses were receptive and often appreciative of the information being given to them. It also was a chance for DSA members to interact with the public in general, and some direct conversations were sparked with members of the community. DSA members enthusiastically encouraged curious people to seek out https://dsasf.org/events/ to get involved.

If you are interested in joining our next KYR Canvassing event or have suggestions on neighborhoods we should visit please join our Immigrant Justice Slack channel or check the events page for our upcoming meetings and planned community events.

EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing Week #3
Last Tuesday, we held our third session of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) course Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing, a four week course that goes into the basics of organizing: from organizing committees to inoculation against the boss. A group of about 10 met in person at 1916 McAllister to watch the course plenary before engaging in group discussion about the material.

This week’s topic was “Collective Action and Escalation” and was focused on the approach of building the cohesion and unity within a workplace necessary to make demands of the bosses. The plenary emphasized that Organizing Committees need to pick issues that promote worker cohesion in the campaign. Following that: the demands in a campaign need to be widely and deeply felt, definable, specific, measurable, and significant enough to actually change peoples’ lives. Also noted was the fact that often the choice of campaign target is as important as the issues chosen for the campaign–campaign targets should be people who are within reach of the workers and who are decision-makers. Finally, the plenary emphasized that escalating the campaign requires buy-in from coworkers at every stage. The campaign should only be escalated when your coworkers are ready for the next step. Discussion touched on stress tests, the mechanics of escalation, and the tact necessary to organize workers who are on visa or are undocumented.

The next session will take place on Tuesday, August 4 at 7:00 PM, hosted at 1916 McAllister St and will cover the Inoculation Against The Boss’s Campaign.

If you’d like to get involved with the SF local chapter of EWOC, reach out to the lead coordinator Caitlin S. or email labor@dsasf.org. EWOC is a standing topic at meetings of the Labor Working group, which are held every fourth Monday at 7:00 PM, both in-person at 1916 McAllister St and over Zoom. Anyone is welcome to attend, and we’re always looking for people interested in workplace lead canvassing, organizer trainings, and volunteer outreach. If you’re interested in organizing your workplace and would like to be connected with an EWOC organizer, fill out the request form here.

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 publishing the weekly newsletter. Members can view current CCC rotations. 

Interested in helping with the newsletter or other day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running? Fill out the CCC help form.

Publicity can significantly shape a union campaign. Learn how to pressure your boss, rally public support, and sow doubt and division among management.

The post How to talk to the press about your union campaign appeared first on EWOC.

A roundup of recent coverage

The post DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” Platform And Why the Press Can’t Stop Wringing Its Hands appeared first on Democratic Left.

On August 4th, 2026, at approximately 5am, officers from the Madison Police Department and the Wisconsin State Patrol surrounded the Corey Ruiz Memorial Vigil at the intersection of Willy St. and S. Baldwin. These police officers cowered behind the city workers tasked with descending upon the barricades in Bobcats, bulldozers, and garbage trucks. The police only engaged with the volunteers when they were comfortably armed to the teeth in riot gear. With overwhelming force, they brutalized the protesters at the Vigil. 

Verbal reports provided to Madison Area DSA included statements that police forces threw protesters onto broken glass, comrades were bound and carried like suitcases, and these brutes gloated about their mistreatment of the volunteers and houseless people at the memorial. These armed forces of the state profaned a community space that, through 13 days of sustained care, served a need for collective grief and remembrance of a man murdered at their hands.

Here is the so-called “peaceful” transition encouraged by Mayor Satya in her correspondence with the general public. Let us all remember just what Mayor Satya means whenever she dares to speak about “peace.” Peace for whom? Certainly this is not peace for the houseless of Madison. Not for Black and brown working class people. For Mayor Satya, peace is the restoration of convenience for the white and well-off.  Peace is the end of the community’s  disruption of a system that has murdered Corey Ruiz, Tony Robinson, and Richard Lee Johnson. That is Mayor Satya’s “peace.”

Prior to 5am on August 4th, the memorial site was calm. There were no altercations reported to the Madison Area DSA. Individuals de-escalated potential conflicts through their own efforts, demonstrating that  the MPD is incompetent in their role of maintaining order. For a short time, the houseless people of Madison had somewhere safe to sleep, demonstrating that the city government is incompetent in their role of providing for the people. The community stepped up where our government failed. That evening demonstrated what the organizers on the ground already knew– we keep us safe. Mayor Satya’s vision of public safety is hiding behind a line of riot police marching down Willy street, while never meeting face-to-face with the protesters demanding that she and the MPD take accountability for a state-sanctioned murderer.

The true threat to the public safety of Madison is Mayor Satya’s incompetent governance and the MPD. It’s the structural violence of homelessness that imminently threatens every wage-worker who is one missed rent payment, one traumatic injury, or one catastrophe away from a fate of complete dehumanization. It’s the racial violence of the carceral state where the police may kill Black and brown people with impunity–where a murderer can walk free as long as that murder is funded by tax-payer money. The biggest threat to our public safety is allowing this system to continue.

The Madison Area DSA condemns Mayor Satya in mishandling the Corey Ruiz Vigil and sanctioning the MPD’s brutal treatment of the protesters. We join other community organizations, such as Freedom Inc., the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and local individual Black organizers, in demanding the immediate arrest of the murderer cop Kiel Baitinger-Peterson. We demand the funding and empowerment of an independent Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Police Civilian Oversight Board, and to provide all information requested by them immediately. We demand justice for Corey Ruiz, and others murdered by racist state violence.

We stand with the rest of Madison. We demand community control of the police.

Executive Committee
Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America

Read more at Memphis-Midsouth

Update: DSA candidates win Michigan legislative races, Ann Arbor mayoral primary.

The post Election Live Blog: Scenes from McKinney Victory Party appeared first on Democratic Left.