Labor organizers must prioritize developing new leaders in order to grow union density and winning new workplace fights.

The post Our goal is to develop leaders appeared first on EWOC.

The Revolutionary Potential of Metro Detroit and How the Membership Engagement Committee Can Ignite It

By Reese McCaskill Jr.

In 1966, during Ronald Reagan’s first term as Governor of California, he made it his mission to rein in public education. He did so because many college students were taking a stand against the war in Vietnam and he couldn’t have that on any UC college campus. In order to curb the anti-war protests, he thought of the idea of initiating tuition (for the first time, while UC schools never had a tuition system). Despite this new system, students courageously stood their ground.

As anti-war protests continued, he even resorted to a more aggressive move; sending national guard troops to suppress the protests at UC Berkeley. Reagan continued to show aggression towards the higher education of California colleges and was stalwart in his defense of his policies. Even his own advisor, Roger A. Freeman was an ardent defender of Reagan’s assault on higher learning. His advisor went on to say, “we are in danger of producing an educated proletariat” which he stated at a press conference, weeks before the California gubernatorial election of 1970. Reagan would go on to win his re-election for Governor and continue his assault on higher learning and the rest is history.

Now, how does Ronald Reagan and his advisor’s statement coincide with the work of the Membership Engagement Committee (MEC)? Because the revolutionary potential of the people is strong. Even in the 1960s, the capitalist class feared that an educated proletariat would recognize their potential and work to radically uplift their material conditions.

Currently, I see the revolutionary potential within Metro Detroit, which is why I am running for our chapter’s Membership Engagement Coordinator position. From the energy of the No Kings Protests to the passion at the May Day rally, Metro Detroit is itching to put the power in the hands of the people. If I am elected as coordinator, there are three strategies I believe would ignite this potential:

1. The creation of an active membership engagement strategy

2. Building stronger bonds between MEC, Committees, and Working Groups

3. Equipping new and current members with tools and knowledge to be effective socialist organizers

In the first 30 days after steering committee elections conclude, MEC would embark on the creation of a membership engagement strategy to accomplish our goal within the MEC resolution to hit 2,000 socialist organizers by the 2027 convention and get 15% of our membership actively engaged in the chapter. As your candidate, I believe our strategy should work not only to recruit new members, but also to orient new members into active organizers in our chapter.

Tangible efforts would focus on stronger social media outreach, recruiting at our campaign events, getting more involved with the community for a long-term approach to engagement, and cooperating with our Administration Secretary to look into our digital tools to consolidate our information so new members understand our chapter. The committee would also look into ways to activate 15% of our membership within this engagement strategy. With an effective engagement strategy, we would ensure every member has the opportunity to develop their political and organizing capabilities.

MEC also needs stronger ties with our committees and working groups. As one of the vital arms of Metro Detroit DSA, this committee is dedicated to engaging with all members. To strengthen our ties with the committees and working groups, MEC would establish MEC Liaisons. These liaisons would be MEC members who consistently attend committee or working group meetings and report back to MEC about the support needed from the committee. With stronger ties to our committees and working groups, this would allow for more rapid engagement of our newer members to their areas of interest and a better understanding of how to engage our entire membership.

Another important task for MEC is complementing the efforts of working groups and committees by preparing, informing, and developing members into stronger socialist organizers. But, how can we engage the membership when they don’t have the necessary tools to develop their political organizing skills? If elected, I would continue MEC’s work of ensuring every new and current member has every opportunity to develop as effective socialist organizers. We would do so by conducting socials, hosting organizer skills events, uplifting our current political education events, yearly convention planning to ensure our membership feels prepared and informed and developing ways the committee can make stronger connections with new members. Every member this committee engages with creates an opportunity to equip and teach. This movement that we are a part of is a great struggle and the only way for our members to understand such struggle is to give them every chance to learn and be ready for the task at hand.

This committee is and must be a reflection of our entire chapter. Independent comrades, Bread & Roses, Groundwork, Marxist Unity Group, Socialist Majority, etc., are crucial for the development and growth of this committee. With the rising tide of fascism, worsening material conditions, and people looking for a way out of this mess, our chapter and MEC must tell the people the good news; socialism is our path forward and Metro Detroit DSA will lead the way.

If I am able to serve as our Membership Engagement Coordinator, MEC wouldn’t be my committee, it would be an all-hands-on-deck-effort to ensure all members feel welcomed and have the chance to be effective socialist organizers. As Coordinator, I would steer the ship of this committee, but the real captains are every member in MEC. Democratic deliberation, discussion, and action would be what leads this committee and I’m proud to ask membership to rank me #1 for the Membership Engagement Coordinator position.

---

The Revolutionary Potential of Metro Detroit and How the Membership Engagement Committee Can Ignite… was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mona Fastvold’s 2025 film The Testament of Ann Lee, with Amanda Seyfried in the title role, shows a working-class woman passionately and relentlessly seeking the realization of her unique spiritual vision. It will bring Ann Lee’s story to scores of women who are relegated to the margins of their religious traditions despite their rich spiritual gifts. It will speak to people of any gender whose sincere faith inspires a deep hunger for spiritual and social liberation now, not just in “the sweet by and by.” And it will speak to all of us who feel out of step with a culture that passively accepts the world as it is and instead feel called to build a better one. 

The Testament of Ann Lee is an unconventional movie musical, using contemporary arrangements of Shaker hymns and stylized choreography to communicate the passion and immediacy of a  mystical eighteenth-century Christian movement that grew from the Quakers. An illiterate child factory worker in England at the dawn of the industrial revolution, Ann Lee grew to become the revolutionary spiritual mother of a religious community in the “New World” that followed a gospel of union with God, gender equality, and proto-communism. Although the film uses character amalgamations and time compressions to translate the historical events into slightly more than two hours, it is mainly true to the historical record. 

The deeper I dug, the more treasures I uncovered. By centering Shakerism’s spiritually ecstatic music and dance, The Testament of Ann Lee presents the audience with a religious experience, a sensual encounter with the Divine that is purer and truer than any of our inadequate attempts to translate it into language. And while this spirit-filled emotionalism won’t be for everyone, for those that it touches, it touches deeply.

The basic facts of Ann Lee’s story are simple, and at first glance not too different from the more oft-told tale of the Puritans: a religious leader is inspired to bring their followers to the New World, seeking freedom from persecution and new converts for their nascent protestant movement. Theologically, though,  the Shakers were the mirror opposite of the Puritans. Puritans feared and avoided pleasure but allowed sex under certain restrictive conditions (spawning psychological hang-ups that still keep thousands of therapists in business to this day). The Shakers lived in celibacy but whole-heartedly embraced and pursued pleasure as a divine gift of God. 

Through singing, dancing, and other charismatic gifts, Shakers experienced a higher ecstasy than mere sexual gratification can offer. While this may elicit a “thanks, but no thanks,” from most of us allosexuals living in the twenty-first century, the film tries to help contemporary audiences understand that celibacy was not another form of mortification of the flesh but a method to achieve something utopian: bodily autonomy and social equality for women.

The film viscerally depicts what was a common experience in Ann Lee’s time and place. Wives were compelled to be sexually available to their husbands at all times, with no thought given to their feelings or pleasure. They could expect to be constantly pregnant, at a time when giving birth was dangerous and sometimes fatal for mothers, their newborn babies, or both. 

A heartbreaking musical sequence shows a distraught Lee losing four children in quick succession, from stillbirth to other ailments. Her plight was not uncommon, but it  weighed especially heavily on Ann Lee, who never wanted marriage or sex and was forced into both by the pressures of her family and culture. 

The film also briefly touches on the sexuality of Ann’s brother William, who is shown leaving a male lover in order to commit to a celibate life. The historical record calls William Lee a “former dandy,” something that at the time probably meant “womanizer” rather than queer, though doesn’t preclude both (shout out to my fellow bisexuals). It is easy to imagine that the celibate Shaker life would have appealed to some queer people living in the eighteenth century, when “sodomy” was a hanging offense and their only option for family life might have been heterosexual marriage. Shakerism offered our queer ancestors a liberating path to spiritual fulfillment, social equality, and the love of a chosen family. Because of the large numbers of orphans at the time as well as widows with orphans, there were always children in the Shaker communities

Shakers rejected the racial order of the day as well. The film is historically accurate in depicting Black Shakers as equal members of the community, and while many famous Shaker hymns have no attribution, the song “Pretty Mother’s Home,” performed in the movie by Black actor Lark White, was written by a formerly enslaved woman named Patsy Roberts Williamson. Williamson’s enslavers initially joined the Shakers of the Pleasant Hill commune in Kentucky, but when they decided to leave, Patsy bought her freedom with help from the community and remained a member for the rest of her life. 

The Shakers and their indomitable woman leader were remarkable in successfully escaping the extremely limiting social expectations of their time and place and forging a completely new path for themselves. As the film shows, Shakerism began in England as a more outwardly expressive branch of the Quaker movement, but did not blossom into its full expression until Mother Ann, as she became known, was anointed by the Spirit through charismatic visions that began when she was in prison. 

Her visions inaugurated what Shakers consider to be the Second Coming, the presence of Christ’s spirit not just in Mother Ann, but in all true Believers. They cemented celibacy as a requirement for the true Christian life and America as the place that this new gospel seed should be planted. While the number of Shakers living today can be counted on one hand, the many Shaker communes still preserved as historic sites in the United States are the impressive material evidence of what a small band of spiritual radicals was able to achieve. 

The rule of Shaker community life was “from each according to his ability, to each according to his capacity,” a motto inspired by language from the Christian Bible that predates Marx. Leadership and labor were shared equitably  by men and women, children were raised collectively without the use of corporal punishment, and communities sustained themselves by selling their innovative yet simple goods, such as herbal remedies, straw hats, and their famously well-crafted furniture. They lived the ideals of Marxists and feminists before either of those words existed. In fact, when Marx faced doubts about achieving communism in his lifetime, Engels wrote to encourage him, “Remember the Shakers!” 

The Testament of Ann Lee not only remembers the Shakers, it brings them back to life. Through historically accurate costuming and set design, creative reimaginings of traditional Shaker music and dance, and stellar acting, especially from Seyfried as Ann Lee, the film brings us into the living dance of a people who dared to follow God beyond every limit they encountered. Unfortunately, it also shows us in graphic detail the too common fate of dissenters and resistors both in her time and our own. Ann Lee died before the age of 50 from injuries inflicted by hostile mobs. This is not a film for the faint-hearted.

Ann Lee broke through the boundaries of gender, race, conventional religion, and the economic order of the day to co-create the world of peace and liberation that God revealed to her. Despite any theological differences that the span of more than two centuries of religious and social change have created between people of faith today and the early Shakers, we can still find inspiration in their lives.

Our current times may call for new ways and forms, but today’s religious socialists can still look to this inspiring film and feel called to join with the revolutionary Ann Lee in boldly proclaiming, “We are the people who turn the world upside down.”

---

Works consulted for this essay include the following: The Shakers: Two Centuries of Spiritual Reflection, edited by Robley E. Whitson, and Mother Ann Lee, Morning Star of the Shakers by Nardi Reed Campion.

The post The Testament of Ann Lee: A Mystical, Musical Vision of Building a “New World” Utopia appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Florida’s gerrymander draws new battle-lines for a candidate already campaigning against an undemocratic constitutional order.

The post Oliver Larkin is Ready to Fight for Democracy appeared first on Democratic Left.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Christian Celeste Tate as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA's insurgent slate.

The post Christian Celeste Tate on Building Durable Power in Bushwick appeared first on Democratic Left.

How DSA's new rapid response protocol passed its first test in the Iran crisis.

The post More Than the Sum of Our Parts appeared first on Democratic Left.

California teachers have unknowingly invested billions of dollars in companies fueling the genocide in Gaza. Here’s how you can get involved in the historic divestment campaign targeting CalSTRS that is spreading across the state. 

Since October 2023, as Israel bombed and starved the people of Gaza and terrorized the entire region, the question of “how can we stop this?” has pumped unrelentingly through our hearts. We took to the streets and our electeds’ offices in protest and became increasingly frustrated each time we were ignored. 

Trying to appeal to some semblance of humanity in politicians using the democratic process has been enragingly ineffective at bringing about justice, or even a brief respite from violence, to our relatives in Palestine. To dismantle the death machine, we have to address what powers it. This monster that builds bombs and drops them requires vast amounts of resources. It is expensive to mine resources and build sophisticated killing devices. It’s expensive to hoist them in the air and position them exactly over a school. It requires a constant input of capital to keep this genocide going. The reason this death machine supply chain continues to murder families is because the violence generates profits for individual, corporate, and institutional investors. 

To stop the carnage, we must destroy those profits. And there’s a way we can do that together.

Divesting from Genocide

In 2005, Palestinian civil society launched the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS) – modeled after the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa – to cut the artery sustaining the parasitic companies that leech from the circulation of capital and funnel it into atrocities. BDS pressures institutions to withdraw investments from Israel and companies enabling Israeli apartheid in order to make support for Israel unprofitable. Since 2024, dozens of institutions divested from Israeli apartheid, with DSA members and chapters – including mine – often contributing to these victories. And now California’s educators are joining the movement.

CalSTRS Divest is a state-wide campaign by teachers and retirees who object to their retirement contributions enabling the murder of Palestinian children. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS, is the pension fund for public school teachers, and it is truly massive. At $390 billion with 1 million members, it is the largest educator-only pension fund in the world, and the second-largest pension fund in the US. At this scale, the fund has real power in the world economy, and the choice of investments makes a difference in where capital is pumped, and consequently, which industries flourish, and which wither. 

Many educators, myself included, were shocked to learn that CalSTRS invests the money we set aside for our retirement in Israeli bonds and companies like Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and Chevron that manufacture the bombs dropping on refugee camps in Rafah, the bulldozers flattening family homes in the West Bank, the planes and jet fuel used to bomb Palestinian hospitals, and the cameras and AI systems used to surveil families in the West Bank. In fact, CalSTRS currently has $2.7 billion invested in the Israeli genocide. While teachers struggle to find the resources to educate our students in overcrowded classrooms, our pension fund provides financing that allows a genocidal actor to murder classrooms full of students. 

As teachers, we often spend more time with the kids we teach than with our own families, and grow to love them. Taking teachers’ retirement money and using it to murder kids, then forcing retired teachers to live on blood money is sick and twisted. An unimaginably grotesque machination of empire, it turns the social welfare afforded to people “here” into a dependency on the depredation of people “there”. The CalSTRS Investment Board has tried to wheedle their way out of responsibility for its bureaucratic complicity by saying that without these investments, teachers would not have a safe way to retire. Looking beyond the disgusting nature of this argument that it is okay to kill babies if it makes money, research refutes the claim: Divesting completely from Israeli Apartheid would not significantly affect the returns of the portfolio. 

The CalSTRS Divest Campaign

Disgusted by the horrors that our pension system finances, current and retired teachers and educator unions across the state have joined the CalSTRS Divest campaign in droves. The potential victory here is huge: Not only is the divestment amount enough to make the complicit companies take notice themselves, but a divestment on this scale would set a powerful precedent for further divestment around the country.  If one of the country’s largest pension funds says no to blood money, it opens the door for organizers in states across the nation to demand that their retirement systems follow suit. 

Further, this divestment will be a huge labor win. Teaching is one of the few remaining professions in the United States with substantial union density and the guarantee of a pension. This divestment victory would show that workers will be heard when it comes to decisions regarding their retirement funds and continue the proud tradition of international labor solidarity.

This is not the first time teachers have won divestment.  In 2018, Bay Area teachers, horrified by increased incarceration of children as part of Trump’s immigration policy, convinced the CalSTRS Board to divest $12 million from private prisons with help from the California Federation of Teachers. Teachers have also won divestment from thermal coal and tobacco. Persistent organizing paid off in the past, and it is time to do it again!

Between the scale of a state-wide campaign and the conservatism of the CalSTRS Board, winning divestment will be a substantial challenge. While most teachers are not in favor of genocide, there are thousands of teachers across the state who are unaware of the contents of their retirement portfolio. We need to substantially increase our outreach in order to hold the CalSTRS board accountable to its own ethical investment policy. The re-election of many of these board members and those who appoint them is fast approaching, which gives us an opportunity to pressure them, but we need everyone’s help to act in time. 

Join the campaign!

DSA chapters from several areas including Sacramento and my chapter in the East Bay are organizing to strengthen this movement. But since the pension fund represents teachers across the state of California, we need all DSA chapters in California to engage to make divestment a reality. Here’s what we can do to help win this campaign:

1. Develop connections with public educators and teacher union locals in our respective areas and ensure that they pass resolutions supporting CalSTRS Divest. Sign up for the Teach-In on June 13 to learn more!

2. Get your chapter to adopt a resolution supporting CalSTRS Divest (template here) and be prepared to mobilize attendance at a quarterly CalSTRS Board meeting (stay tuned here)

This will be a significant undertaking with its share of challenges. But we are not starting from scratch. CalSTRS Divest has done tremendous groundwork to get to this point and is ready to teach your chapter how to get plugged into the campaign. This genocide runs on money. Together, we will starve the beast and feed the children. 

To find out more about how to get involved, please fill out our interest form at ebdsa.us/calstrsdivest.

Living under capitalism, we are all used to the enshittification of everything it touches. One of the worst contemporary examples is the increasing expansion of the surveillance state. Cautionary tales about the dangers of mass surveillance and building a panopticon like Orwell’s 1984 have instead been taken as instruction manuals. The most glaring case study is automated license plate readers (ALPRs) represented by Flock Safety, the largest purveyor of the technology. As socialists, we must organize to oppose those who would seek to turn a profit at the expense of human needs.

Contrary to what proponents of ALPRs claim, mass surveillance is a major threat to public safety rather than an effective tool to support it. These unblinking cameras create a massive 24/7 surveillance dragnet that provides time-stamped location data of every vehicle that drives by regardless of whether they are involved in a crime or not. Based on data from May 5 for the Flock transparency portal for the city of Palo Alto, less than 0.5% of captured vehicle data was related to previously designated ‘hot lists’ involved with a crime. The number of arrests or cases closed per ALPR recording of innocent passersby is guaranteed to be even lower. Since data is typically stored for 30 days or more, police have the ability to recreate your movements over the past month without a warrant, finding out where you live, where you work, where your children go to school, and where you organize even without any articulable suspicion that you have been involved in a crime.

The threats to our collective safety are not simply hypothetical. Police have used nationwide ALPRs to hunt down a woman seeking abortion. They’ve violated First Amendment rights by searching for people engaged in peaceful protest. The countless examples of ICE and CBP illegally accessing ALPR data show that the prohibition on sharing data out of state (illegal for a decade in California) is insufficient to protect our privacy. After ICE shot Marimar Martinez five times, they used historical ALPR data to trace her movements over the previous month to find support for their baseless claim she was a domestic terrorist. Repeated cases show police officers using Flock to stalk former partners. Flock employees have accessed video feeds pointed at a children’s gymnastics center, showing these cameras are not just about license plates but instead are part of a broader surveillance network. It was just earlier this year Amazon paid for a Super Bowl ad to announce their ultimately aborted partnership between Flock and Ring. Data from multiple streams including and beyond ALPRs get integrated into regional intelligence fusion centers where democratic oversight is limited and there is no guarantee local policies will be adhered to.

All of these violations of our rights and threats to public safety are enabled by a tool for which claims of efficacy are dubious at best. False positive hits from ALPRs are a consistent problem. A Black woman in San Francisco was pulled over and held at gunpoint due to a mistaken ALPR hit. Police handcuffed a 12-year-old in New Mexico when an ALPR misread a “2” as a “7”. A Black man in Toledo was mauled by a police dog after an erroneous notification (this time a “7” read as “2”). A man in Colorado can no longer use his vehicle because he keeps getting pulled over after police recorded both “O” and “0” in a data entry error mandated by policy. Even if the cameras were 100% accurate all the time, they would still be ineffective  -  swapping license plates is enough to fool the cameras despite claims of creating a “vehicle fingerprint”. Police pulled over a woman in Oakland in March after her license plates were swapped despite the fact that she had a silver Honda Fit and the crime-involved car was a black Honda Civic. After the mass shooting at Brown University, the killer swapped license plates on his vehicle and was able to murder a professor in Massachusetts. Police in San Diego had a specific car and license plate to search, but could not act in time to prevent murders at an Islamic center even with ALPRs. The claim ALPRs support public safety is not supported by the data; in fact the contrary is the case - they harm public safety.

Within California, SB 34 requires ALPR operators implement a usage and privacy policy in addition to forbidding sharing of data with out of state agencies. Even private entities are required to publish such a policy at risk of $2,500 per violation. Time and again, carefully crafted policies are violated by ALPR vendors. The city of Mountain View required written approval from the police chief and agreement to the city’s policies before sharing data, but unauthorized federal and statewide agencies gained access. Flock turned on an illegal nationwide lookup tool without telling local agencies, resulting in ALPR data sharing with out of state agencies in multiple cities. At an April 2026 council meeting in Sunnyvale, city staff revealed that Flock only just implemented two factor authentication to access ALPR data after the press reported on data breaches in Mountain View at the end of January. Although Flock Safety is the largest vendor of ALPRs and therefore has the most information available on data breaches, it is not a company-specific problem. Motorola Solutions provides cameras for UC Merced and allowed CBP to illegally access ALPR data. Many California cities grant access across jurisdictions, so if your city is currently sharing or has previously shared with El Cajon PD then your local data has also been accessible to out of state agencies due to their flagrant violation of California law and is at risk of multi-million dollar lawsuits.

Effective tools?

Proponents of ALPRs claim they are effective tools for preventing crime locally. The reality of data access undercuts that claim. From August 2024 to December 2025, the Mountain View Police Department performed approximately 25,000 searches of the city’s ALPR data while outside agencies performed more than 3,000,000 searches. In other words, only 0.8% of searches were done locally and the overwhelming majority were from external and mostly unauthorized entities. Proponents also claim that anyone concerned with privacy should turn their focus to the location tracking data provided by smart phones. This argument fails to take into account that there is a difference in kind with the type of data. One can opt out of smart phone location tracking but cannot opt out of ALPR data collection. Furthermore, a private company having data is also different from it being collected by the State and accessible to law enforcement. Police require a warrant before they can access your location data but no warrants are needed to search ALPR data. The persistent Fourth Amendment violations have led to numerous lawsuits against private entities, vendor Flock Safety, and local cities, including Los Angeles, Oakland, and several lawsuits against San Jose.

Mass movement required 

The Tech Bro Dystopia we already inhabit can only be effectively opposed if we organize together in a mass movement. You can start the fight in your local chapter by submitting FOIA requests regarding ALPRs for local cities in your area. Ask for all communications between city officials and any ALPR vendors, but don’t be surprised if it takes longer than allowed or if you get back files with redactions that would make the editors of the Epstein files blush. If you have Flock as a vendor like most cities in California, your city may have got a sales pitch from Flock employees and illegally eschewed a competitive bidding process in the same style as Trump. Make requests for data access logs that disclose agencies who searched your local data and reasons for the search. Just know that police are told to be “as vague as permissible” and Flock recently restricted responses to a pre-approved dropdown menu of reasons. Don’t be surprised if you find federal and out of state agencies on the access list in violation of state law, but do use that knowledge in your fight against surveillance capitalism. Also know that absence of ICE in data access logs does not mean the agency never accessed your data - a 2021 Biden era DHS policy mandates that ALPR operators leave no trace of ICE in audit logs except for the logs available only to ICE.

The standard Flock contract you can get from a FOIA request contains several objectionable provisions in the fine print your elected representatives may not have realized when approving it (assuming that Flock didn’t change the contract language from what the city proposed as they have been shown to do). Despite claims that only the city controls the data, Flock reserves the right to grant access without a warrant if they have a good faith belief it supports a legitimate law enforcement purpose. Even though Flock claims they just capture license plates and a vehicle fingerprint, their patent claims ability to identify people by personal or immutable characteristics like age, clothing, gait, gender, height, race, and weight. Although Flock claims cities own all data, the company reserves an exclusive, worldwide license to keep a fraction of everyone’s data to train their AI models. They need a worldwide license because they exploit workers in the Global South for model training. The real business model for Flock is to sell fear to our local police departments so taxpayer dollars are used to lease cameras to let Flock get the thing it actually cares about: our data. WE are the product; Flock cares about making a profit, not public safety. That became abundantly clear when the company installed two unauthorized cameras in Cambridge, MA before being kicked to the curb for the violation of trust.

To force the surveillance state out of your local city, get ready to mobilize to a city council meeting when the ALPR contract is up for renewal. Build a coalition with allied organizations and be prepared to pursue an inside/outside strategy. Set up a letter writing campaign to send messages to the relevant body (this is relatively easy with dues-funded tools each chapter gets from National). Some organizers should seek meetings to lobby council members. That approach can let you assess their position, defuse any pro-surveillance talking points, and find allies to raise questions during the meeting that you submitted in advance with your letters. If an ALPR contract is not up for renewal anytime soon, repeatedly mobilize for public comment on non-agendized items to demand a contract discussion until the topic can no longer be ignored.

At the same time, we must apply pressure to make supporting ALPRs politically intolerable. Write op-eds for your local publications. Create a document with talking points for public comment (our coalition can help you, see contact details at the end of this article). Hold a rally before the ALPR contract or surveillance use policy meeting and invite the media with a press release articulating your position. Balance speakers on the topic with chants from the crowd (my personal favorite: MOVE Flock, Get out the Bay!), then hold a public comment training session right before the meeting starts.

Track record: successes and setbacks

In Silicon Valley, we’ve seen success and setbacks. At the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, we used our one minute of public comment time to introduce ourselves and read as much of the coalition letter as we could, with the next person picking up where the previous one left off. In Mountain View, we had speakers pool time to give ten minutes each to two coalition members to read through our entire letter at the head of a marathon public comment session. We are fighting to remove Flock ALPRs from Stanford University, the largest landowner in Silicon Valley. The County Supervisors set a surveillance use policy to remove Flock as an ALPR vendor and had two votes that were in favor of forbidding the technology entirely. Mountain View unanimously canceled the Flock contract and said it would not pursue other ALPR vendors. Just before those decisions, Los Altos Hills chose not to renew their Flock contract. Our neighbors to the south in Santa Cruz were the first in California to terminate their Flock contract in January. On the other hand, in April the city of Sunnyvale unanimously voted to keep the Flock contract and East Palo Alto decided against changing the Flock contract after it was brought up for reconsideration. The City of Santa Clara received an informational report on ALPRs without any action and Palo Alto is trying to sweep massive data breaches under the rug.

If your city doesn’t seem ready to cancel its ALPR contract, fight for stronger guardrails in the surveillance use policy. You can push for a shorter data retention period - San Jose dropped from one year to one month of data retention, and ALPR data in New Hampshire is deleted within three minutes if the vehicle is not on a pre-approved hot list. The demands in our coalition letter pushed San Jose to prohibit cameras near sensitive areas like abortion clinics, places of worship, consulate offices, and health care facilities providing gender affirming care. Demand a surveillance use policy that requires any ALPR vendor to meet all your guardrails for public safety, including the requirement for a judicial warrant for any search of data.

A better world is possible, but only if we organize to build it together. A National Week of Action against ALPRs is planned for August 16-22. You can access an organizer’s toolkit our coalition has built if you want to start anti-ALPR organizing in your chapter by emailing ca@stopalpr.org.

Despite the use of dashes in the body of the text, every word was chosen by a human mind and no generative AI was used for this piece.

The setting is Silicon Valley DSA’s 2026 Annual Convention. And on April 18th in San Jose, California, something special can be heard emanating from the SEIU 521 event hall.

“Little T! Little T! Little T!” 

That something special is a chorus of voices chanting in approval of one of the chapter’s most beloved members, the affectionately monikered “Lil’ T.”

Today, this sort of chanting is common in our chapter. If you are a DSA member reading this, that might be a bit foreign to you. However, it should not be. For the good of your chapter and this movement, you should be chanting all the time. Now is the time to turn the volume up.

“Okay, but how?” Good question. In this article, I will outline how SVDSA transformed itself in about a year – from feeble and feckless to a chapter with booming growth, exciting wins, and a glorious member experience. It all culminated in our “Strategic Convention,” as our current pinnacle. I’ll focus on how we used tight infrastructural management and intentional tactics to create a joyful, supportive environment where members flourish, and where building Socialism is a damn good time.

Phase One

In 2024 (my first term on the Steering Committee), SVDSA faced the same challenges that plague many other chapters. We had steady attrition and minimal presence in the community. We were aimless and struggled to articulate chapter priorities, never mind execute them. In November, we lost a re-election bid for Redwood City Council by 13 votes. That loss was devastating and avoidable. Our approach had to change. 

The first serious change came that Summer, when we began holding most of our in-person meetings at the local SEIU union hall. This location has been reliable, easy to access (it’s where I work), and spacious for large gatherings. It has allowed many of our members their first opportunity to step foot in a house of labor, lending historicity and gravity to our organizing. It’s a major upgrade from scavenging for meeting space in libraries and Unitarian churches, all varying in levels of tech and wifi, cost, and comfort. The union hall has given us a stable and familiar home base. For your chapter meetings, I strongly recommend securing access to one of these routinely empty buildings.

Now, after decades of red scare tactics, many Socialists understandably feel shy publicly sharing their beliefs. The momentum behind our presence in the new union hall overcame this bashfulness. We began literally declaring our presence. Whether at chapter meetings, late night socials, or celebrating at an electoral watch party, we’d inevitably break into a raucous chant of, “DSA! DSA! DSA!” It's fun, it's loud, and projects our shameless joy in being Socialists.

Leveling Up

The early months of 2025 were spent mining our membership, seeking fresh faces to recruit for leadership candidacy at our April Convention. When the day came, we also introduced the chapter’s first-ever “Strategic Plan.” This new framework was critical. Finally, we had direction, but staying the course required focus. We created clear priorities and monitored them weekly. The payoff? During our campaign for Santa Clara County Ballot Measure A, we phonebanked and knocked on more doors than any organization besides the largest union on the Central Labor Council. These efforts surged our visibility. And of course, earning a victory made our members feel accomplished. 

If the Mamdani moment has taught us anything, it’s that the best political experiences reflect the best human experiences. It's part of what made me fly to New York City to canvas for him. No doubt, it would have been nice to watch his win at home from my living room. However, at a Brooklyn DSA election party surrounded by hundreds of comrades, it became one of the most memorable nights of my life. Nothing could erase what I felt in that building.

Despite what the purveyors of SeclusionChatBot2000 might have you believe, humans yearn for a shared purpose. We will go the distance for a worthy cause. Conversely, we give up quickly when we feel alone, especially when attempting something new. For most people, political organizing will be a very new ‘something’. To ease that anxiety, DSA members need to feel supported, and they need time to build confidence. Your DSA chapter should be your safe place to wade into uncharted waters. Yes, the ocean is deep, but together, we can all learn to swim.

In the wake of the Measure A triumph, a few strong chapter leaders set in motion the plan for a full-fledged “Strategic Convention.” Conventions are where most of the proposals for our chapter’s long-term vision, heretofore referred to as resolutions, are raised. They are then deliberated and voted upon by the membership. Resolutions tend to be drafted by a handful of highly active and politically conscious members. Our goal this time was to foster strategic planning as a tool for mass member development and engagement.

Leading up to our 2026 Convention, we set up working sessions for members to brainstorm “Strategic Resolutions.” This was a benefit in multiple ways: 1) it helped our leaders guide new members proactively, 2) it elevated the stakes of the convention, and 3) it created a shared sense of vision in the chapter. In the past, we struggled to make this democratic element of the chapter accessible. Most members had simply not engaged with DSA’s internal processes to this degree.

Chapter leaders created templates to help members develop their own resolutions. Regular leadership check-ins encouraged members who were working on their resolutions, even when it was not their primary focus. Effective organizing requires regular reminders; neglecting them threatens the goal. Resolutions deemed ‘Strategic’ were placed in a special compendium. Other resolutions were separated out. All were made accessible for members to review in advance of the Convention, publicized on our chapter Slack and Linktree.

The Big Day

When the highly anticipated moment of Convention finally arrived, our Strategic Compendium bore the marks of nearly all our most active members. This created investment in and focus on the essential business of our six-hour meeting. Long meetings can be quite challenging. If people don’t see themselves reflected in what is happening, interest will fade.

Walking into the convention space, it was obvious: this was special. Decorations abounded; the room was festooned in red and white tablecloths, balloons, streamers, flags, banners, and welcome signs. Music was jamming during the one-hour lunch session. One comrade created ice-breaker bingo cards. Another constructed a “Who’s that Socialist?” trivia game, offering winning contestants my favorite variety of prize — merch from other DSA chapters.

Our Steering Committee kicked off convention by giving out Recognition Awards. Members received them for specific contributions to our chapter throughout the year. Intentionally, more were given out at each break. This kept the excitement up throughout the long day. A veteran member who re-engaged after some dormancy received “Generational Talent”; another won “Friendliest Comrade,” and the member who booked our catering received “Chapter Chef.” Besides being a cute photo op, giving out actual awards, graduation-style, provided the chance for members to have their name chanted as approached the podium. 

As chapter co-chair, I was honored to give the “State of the Chapter” address. I devoted my ten minutes to naming and recognizing as many chapter leaders as I could muster. I closed out with a call-and-response style chant developed from picket lines:

Are you ready to fight for trans folks?
“Yes!”
To fight for immigrants?
“Yes!”

To fight for socialism?
“Yes!”

The collective “Yes,” binds members’ voices together. It is intended to both affirm the question itself and answer the deeper question, “Are we all in this together?”

That day, at every opportunity, we gave out big choral hugs to one another. When former San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston made his way to the podium for the keynote speech, he too was showered with chants of, “Dean! Dean! Dean!” which I think he appreciated.

If you’re excited by what’s been written so far, that’s awesome. But I wish stories like this weren’t so rare. Perhaps you’ve heard the refrain about DSA being an unwelcoming, or even hostile space. I know I’ve heard it. Though with so much variety from chapter to chapter, I have not experienced it myself. If the warm and inviting culture at our chapter is an outlier, it need not be.

The practices I am recommending may not come naturally. Maybe you feel silly chanting and getting all “ra-ra.” Or maybe voices raised to the sky evoke unpleasant memories of involuntary church attendance. No doubt, DSA is a big tent, so you might feel awkward cheering for people you often disagree with. But reader, I urge you: have a little faith and give it a try. What do you have to lose?

No one will do anything for long if it feels like shit. The same goes for if it’s exhausting, lonely, or boring. Those of us who love DSA cannot afford losing people for easily avoidable reasons. The creativity and color you give to your chapter will make the difference. If we want to grow, we need to make sure people have a good time being here. So go ahead and chant your comrade’s name. Maybe one day they’ll chant yours too.

Fascism is in power in America. But America is not yet a fascist country. This conundrum explains a war without justification, plan to win or exit strategy.

Ranking high on any checklist of items comprising the elements of fascism would be scapegoating a particular population, making it the target of frustrations, anger and envy whipped up by the ruling class. No matter whether the bullseye is affixed to Jew or Palestinian, immigrant, “antifa”, democratic socialist or trans, the acts of othering and dehumanizing an ‘out group’ in an attempt to purify the nation and bind it together through hatred of the common enemy are central tactics within the fascist project.

Similar effects may be achieved through demonization of another country, or at least its leaders, in the path to war. Trump and his administration are sloppier than their predecessors, who actually took some time beforehand to explain why “we” were going to war in Vietnam or Grenada or Iraq (fill in the blank), generally sticking to one or two more or less consistent—if untruthful—rationales. Our current administration can’t be bothered, jumping day to day among various whack-a-mole excuses—destroying Iran’s nuclear capacity; regime change; jumpstarting a revolt from below; guaranteeing Israel’s safety—for death and destruction on behalf of naked acquisitive imperialism, self-dealing and to distract from growing problems on the home front.

So now we have war (safely across the world, in our screens, not our streets) to draw our attention away from the Epstein files (high profile), the impact of massively shifting government resources from help to harm (slow motion disaster, less visible but becoming harder to ignore) and growing outrage at this administration’s assaults on immigrants, civil liberties in general, and the standard of living for the working class and middle classes. 

Pointing elsewhere

Of course, it doesn’t take fascism for capitalist rulers to push a politics of distraction; nor to redistribute state resources upward or “starve the beast”. These are well established conservative (and neoliberal) practices. From the time of The Wizard of Oz and its “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” scene, it’s commonly understood that despotic rulers, when cornered, point their finger elsewhere, anywhere away from themselves to get those pesky citizens off their backs. The politics of distraction by themselves don’t necessarily mark a regime as fascist. 

So then what does the war on Iran tell us about what we’re involved with here and now? Fascists have been in charge for the past year and counting of the most powerful force in our society, the federal government. Doesn’t that make the United States a fascist country? No. Because they have not been able to achieve the consent of the governed, a good chunk of whom didn’t think they were voting for this—or various thises—when they voted for Trump. Instead, since its electoral victory of November 2024 the MAGA regime has been steadily losing support in the electorate and in the streets. Despite its best (worst) efforts, civil society remains deeply contested. And the unpopular war in Iran could be the tipping point in the struggle for the hearts and minds of Americans.

The fifth stage

According to Robert Paxton in his Anatomy of Fascism, fascism usually passes through five phases: birth of a movement; rooting in the political system; taking power; exercising power; and then, over time, motion toward either entropy or radicalization. Entropy means a loss of forward motion, a gradual relinquishing of control during a hard-fought restoration of democratic governance. Radicalization means spiraling toward increasingly repressive actions aimed at its own internal population, and the initiation of war.

The military adventure launched by the Trump administration in Iran signals that we are moving from Paxton’s fourth to fifth stage. Faced with blowback over the Epstein files from segments of his own coalition along with opposing forces, a growing protest movement in the streets over the ethnic cleansing represented by brutal ICE invasions in Democratic-led cities, and consistent defeats in the political contests leading up to this November’s congressional elections, the flailing Trump regime has unleashed forces it cannot control. 

Externally there is the expansion of nihilistic Zionist violence from Gaza to the rest of the Middle East, directly supported by the US military, whose massive firepower is now revealed to be deployed in inverse proportion to its strategic capacities. The Maduro kidnapping in Venezuela accompanied by random murders in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean foreshadows a more sustained and deadly assault on Cuba. The deliberate alienation of once stable trade and geopolitical partnerships through erratic tariff impositions is being partially walked back, but not without having inflicted lasting worldwide economic shocks now exacerbated by the Middle East war. 

Internally, these macroeconomic factors are exerting a noticeable pocketbook impact on Americans. It’s the noticeable part, not the impact itself, that’s worrisome to Trump and MAGA leaders; hence the need for distraction. Does the war distract enough from the heavy handed assemblage of American fascism? Probably not, because each time the American car owner goes to the pump she is reminded of the costs of the war. Every American farmer facing foreclosure due to rising costs sees its impact. With every energy production and distribution center in the Middle East hit by Iranian drones on the evening news the viewer is reminded of the associations Trump wishes to avoid: war and oil and fossil fuel dependence and economic chaos.

A smaller but sizeable number of people, mostly members of the professional /managerial / technical class, have become politicized over related issues: the erosion of US technological and scientific prowess, sacrificed on the altar of fossil fuel profits as China leaps to global leadership of the green energy transition. A quarter million of these folks have been removed from the federal government payroll, with trickle down adverse effects in state governments and universities.

Birth to twins

A great accomplishment of MAGA at the outset of Trump 2.0 was the Faustian forging of a ruling class coalition between a bloated tech capital that knows better, but is too besotted with the AI bubble to care, and a fossil fuel industry that cares about nothing except extraction of as much profit from global environmental destruction for as long as possible. The two factions of capital tied the knot on the altar of a deregulated economy designed for internal surveillance and control, and external military expansion. But with its consummation in the Middle East, this ruling class marriage seems to have given birth to twins: entropy and radicalization of the current regime.

For Paxton, war is not incidental to but rather the engine of fascist radicalization; the initial battlefield victories of Germany, to take the classic example, sped the process, with expansion eastward running hand in hand with extermination of the mentally ill and physically unfit on the way to the Final Solution. 

The United States is of course a different country in a different historical situation. The internal radicalization of the fascist regime signified by state sanctioned carnage carried out by stormtroopers in the streets of the Twin Cities and elsewhere and the incarceration in detention centers of tens of thousands of immigrants, over two thirds of whom have no criminal records, does not yet compare in scale with mid-twentieth century European fascism, but marks a new departure in US history, at least outside the Jim Crow southern United States. 

It’s possible that the world capitalist system can weather all this for a while, even returning to a patched up Frankensteinian democratic skin over the metastasizing rot in the economy, as recently transpired in Hungary. But it clearly can’t stabilize for the long run this way. The continuous externalizing of climate effects from business as usual and the threats posed by 40% of American GDP growth predicated on AI investment without regulatory guardrails cannot be resolved on their own terms or without the transition to a sustainable planned economy.

The war in the Middle East pushes in the opposite direction, but its intended distractions (for the masses) and attractions (for the ruling class asses) are being undermined by its unintended effects: scrambling of the world economy, utter failure to bring the Islamic fundamentalist regime to terms, and the most sustained and determined organizing by progressive forces in the United States in decades. 

The long decay of American empire has now, thanks to fascism at the controls, hit fast forward. While it is imperative to remain watchful of the impact of the war on internal fascist radicalization (the potential to double down on ICE invasions, incarcerations and deportations, election rigging, threat of martial law), entropic unraveling and the opening for progressive coalitions may prove the stronger force. The outcome of that contest depends on whether we are able to build on the examples of Minneapolis on January 23, No Kings in March, and May Day Strong to generate a transmutable energy, alternating between the streets and the ballot box as needed.