Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor launched their book tour for “End Time Fascism: and the Fight for the Living World” on a DSA mass call on Thursday.

The post Out of the Bunker appeared first on Democratic Left.

In December of last year, I started watching the television show M*A*S*H, which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1983. As a history nerd with a penchant for old TV shows I quickly became obsessed, watching every single episode in under six months.

For those unfamiliar, the show is a comedy-drama following the exploits of the personnel serving at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M*A*S*H) during the Korean War (1950-1953). Intended as an allegory for the Vietnam War, the show tapped into the intense anti-war and anti-institutional sentiment of broad swaths of the American public of the time.

The show is unapologetically anti-war and progressive, unrelenting in its insistence that basic human dignity be upheld in the most horrific circumstances. It is extremely well-written and enjoyable to watch, a true classic of twentieth-century television. M*A*S*H may have premiered over fifty years ago, but it still has much to teach us today.

Best Care Anywhere

Alan Alda stars as Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, a gifted young surgeon drafted into the war. He has a penchant for pranks and a consistent distaste for military discipline. Alda’s performance is unmatched, and he is truly a once-in-a-generation comedic talent. His sardonic wit, impeccable comedic timing, and old-school slapstick gags combine to create a masterful performance. At the time of writing, the 90-year-old Alda is still acting and speaking out for progressive causes. He deserves to be recognized as one of the greatest American comedians of the twentieth century, standing alongside the likes of Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and Steve Martin.

There was a significant amount of cast turnover spanning the course of the show’s run. Every time someone left, I was very nervous to find out who their replacement would be, and I wondered whether the new actor could live up to the standards of those departing. I was never disappointed.

Hawkeye’s original sidekick, Captain John “Trapper” McIntyre (Wayne Rogers) was a zany, sarcastic prankster. His replacement, Captain B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell) is a grounded family man who often serves as a calming presence and voice of reason. Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson) was the good-natured, borderline incompetent commanding officer of the outfit in the early run of the show; he was replaced in season four by the firm-but-fair, no-nonsense cavalryman Colonel Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan). The whiny, arrogant, and right-wing Major Frank Burns (Larry Linville) was replaced in season six by the blue-blooded and snobbish but cultured and honorable Major Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers).

Rounding out the main cast are the two other characters who stayed for the entire series: the meek and kind-hearted Catholic chaplain Lieutenant Francis Mulcahey (William Christopher), and the career-driven and tough head nurse Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Loretta Swit).

The only character swap that is more ambiguous is the replacement of the boyish and innocent but preternaturally competent company clerk Corporal Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff), who left the show in season eight. He was replaced by Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger (Jamie Farr), the Toledo-born, Lebanese-American cross-dressing soldier who spends much of the war attempting to convince the Army he has gone insane in pursuit of a Section Eight psychiatric discharge. Both characters are quite beloved by fans, and Radar’s departure marked a major turning point for the series.

The focus of the show is highly varied. Plots typically involve pranks and hijinx, Army bureaucracy, dealing with North Korean and Chinese POWs and Korean civilians, confronting racism, the psychological and emotional struggles of the staff, attacks by the enemy, interpersonal conflict that blurs the line between comedy and drama, and much more. The show also experiments with its own format, for example by filming an entire episode from the perspective of a wounded G.I. (S7E11), following a casualty in near-real time (S8E11), and depicting a soldier who is lingering as a ghost after succumbing to his injuries (S10E10).

M*A*S*H is based on a 1970 film of the same name and the 1968 novel that inspired it. Both works fall outside the scope of this article. The franchise received three spinoff series: Trapper John, M.D., which is not related to the show at all; W*A*L*T*E*R, the once-aired pilot for a show following Radar; and AfterMASH, which ran for two seasons. I would only recommend the latter to the most die-hard fans.

“There’s No Such Thing as an Anti-War Film”

In a real sense, this quote from the late French filmmaker François Truffaut is true. Accurately capturing the abject horror of war renders a movie effectively unwatchable as entertainment and impossible to distribute beyond an extremely limited audience. No such project could ever appear on network television.

At the same time, M*A*S*H avoids the typical pitfalls of other “anti-war” media that actually serve to glorify armed conflict or advance pro-war messages, such as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. There are several reasons for this.

First, the surgeons in the show are not soldiers in the conventional sense. They are doctors first and foremost. Hawkeye, Trapper, and later Hunnicut only reluctantly submit to military discipline. The show does not depict frontline combat or give the sense that a victory on the battlefield is a victory for the cast. Direct engagement with the enemy is sporadic and never glorified. The show makes it explicitly clear that every advance of blue squares on the map in a general’s office sends countless teenage boys to the hospital in critical condition. The surgeons at the 4077th must perform “meatball surgery” on their shattered bodies in the hope of keeping them alive long enough to get them to a hospital in Seoul or Tokyo. This constant drumbeat of “incoming wounded” keeps the show grounded in its values, and many episodes focus explicitly on the unique stresses endured by wartime medical staff.

Second, overt displays of patriotism, love of country, and sympathy with American foreign policy goals for Korea are almost completely absent. The show’s thesis does not seriously entertain counter-arguments as to why war should be seen as a moral good or a regrettable necessity. Characters do express belief in traditional American virtues including justice, fairness, democracy, and equality, but it is rarely tied explicitly to patriotism. It is only foils like Frank Burns who demand loyalty, obedience, and paranoia as they salute the flag.

Finally, the more “gung-ho” officers, soldiers, and civilians who visit the 4077th are consistently depicted in a negative light. The doctors are often pitted against officers willing to trade young lives for their own glory, bigots of all stripes, war profiteers, adventure-seeking journalists, anti-communist witch hunters, the officious bureaucracy of the U.S. Army, and more. These figures are often drivers of conflict in the series. They nearly always either learn a lesson, receive some kind of comeuppance, or set up a serious and contemplative moment for the main cast.

The show is not intended as an attempt to shock the viewer with the horrific, gory reality of war. Its elements are packaged in a way that is palatable for 1970s TV. Episodes are by no means excessively violent, and they aren’t at all unpleasant to watch. But they do send an unambiguous and consistent message: There is no value in this kind of killing.

If any piece of popular media can be considered truly anti-war, M*A*S*H is it.

Questions of Taste

Most of the humor in the show holds up to modern standards. It is intelligent and well-written, and there are relatively few cases in which a joke is made that I consider to be in poor taste. In one early episode (S2E9), the doctors paint a soldier in partial blackface to teach him a lesson about racism after he requests that he not receive “the wrong kind of blood” (referring to the recent integration of the U.S. Army’s blood supply). The message is intended to be anti-racist, but this plot point couldn’t air today for obvious reasons.

Some of the accents of the actors playing Koreans are uncomfortably broad by today’s standards. Many Korean characters’ inability to speak English seems to render them unable to speak at all, though this is likely due to the difficulty of sourcing actors who speak the language fluently at a time when the number of Korean-Americans in the U.S. was much smaller than it is today. There are also a few cases in which a person being kissed against their will is played for laughs, most often Major Houlihan. For these reasons, and likely a few more that I missed, some viewer discretion is advised. By the standards of a fifty-year-old show, however, there isn’t much to cringe at.

The portrayal of the cross-dressing Corporal Klinger is particularly noteworthy as an early example of what I would consider positive trans representation in media. Klinger is not transgender in the modern sense. He openly admits that he dresses in women’s clothing only to convince the Army he has gone insane, though his wardrobes are quite involved and he obviously revels in the freedom of expression it affords him. Klinger never changes his name or pronouns, he refuses a Section Eight that would require him to admit to being a “homosexual,” and he returns to a regulation uniform and ceases to angle for a discharge after he replaces Radar as company clerk.

The most notable part of the performance is how the majority of the cast treats him with matter-of-fact tolerance, and the characters who scorn him (particularly Major Burns) are portrayed as bigoted and petty. Even from those characters, anti-trans rhetoric doesn’t go to extremes.

Other trans people have different opinions on this topic. They believe Klinger plays into a harmful stereotype of the “man in a dress” that has been weaponized by the cisgender majority to delegitimize trans experiences. Given how the show approaches LGBTQ+ issues more broadly, including Hawkeye and Trapper’s acceptance of a closeted gay soldier (S2E22), I am personally inclined to believe the showrunners approached the question of Klinger’s identity as carefully and sensitively as could be expected for the time. That said, readers are encouraged to form their own conclusions.

Goodbye, Farewell and Amen

The series finale is a two-hour tour de force. Its live broadcast was watched by over 100 million people nationwide, and to this day it remains one of the most-watched scripted television events in history. Directed by Alan Alda, the finale does an excellent job of capturing the heart of the show. The episode is perfectly calibrated in its bittersweetness, and it serves as a powerful, emotionally satisfying, and fitting sendoff.

There is one rather disturbing plot point in the episode relating to the ultimate reason for Hawkeye’s hospitalization. It isn’t graphically depicted and is handled with care, but sensitive viewers can choose to skip that section, which takes place from timestamps 38:51 to 41:25.

As the ceasefire is announced during the finale, the total number of U.N., communist, and civilian casualties is read out over the base’s loudspeaker system, serving as a memorial for all those killed and permanently scarred by the Korean War. Klinger’s question: “Vietnam? Where’s that?” is particularly poignant as a nod to the show’s origin as a critique of the Vietnam War.

* * *

M*A*S*H is solidly progressive in a way that socialist viewers will immediately recognize. None of the characters are socialists, nor could they be in a show set during the early Cold War. But we can still admire and praise the virtues the show promotes: Radical tolerance of those different from us. Scorn for the horror of war and cruelty in every form. Sacrifice for those who have nothing. M*A*S*H reminds us that we should not apologize for our values, that our most basic humanity must be upheld against the forces of imperialism, militarism, and hatred.

The doctors of the 4077th are unable to stop the unbelievable carnage around them. They can only do their best to help those who come through the door. In our own time of global crisis, we should strive to do the same.

M*A*S*H is currently available to stream in its entirety on Hulu.

The post M*A*S*H is an Antiwar Masterpiece appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

A universal right to bargain would turn Simone Weil's philosophy into a concrete tool for building economic democracy in the American workplace.

The post A Right to Bargain appeared first on Democratic Left.

As CDSA forges ahead into a busy and demanding aldermanic cycle, membership is set to consider a new slate of potential endorsees at September’s General Chapter Meeting: four candidates for Chicago’s first fully-elected school board.

Before those votes take place, I’d like to make the case for why lending our chapter’s endorsement of all four candidates is critical to amplifying our “Workers Deserve More” program and furthering the class-struggle messaging that will help build out our movement and propel us to victory in February’s municipal elections. All four school board candidates under consideration (Hilario Dominguez, Jason Dones, Karen Zaccor, and Debby Pope) are self-identified socialists who have a clear-eyed vision for what it means to bring socialism to the Board of Education. 

But perhaps it would be illustrative to first share what the stakes are in these elections; in other words – what we stand to lose should charter and billionaire-backed candidates take these seats instead. 

Should a right-leaning school board take the helm after November’s elections, there can be no doubt that school closures would be on the table. This would be sold to us under the tired slogans of “fiscal responsibility” and “chronic under-enrollment.” It’s quite the masterful gambit, really. These schools are chronically under-enrolled because of decisions at all levels of government that have left Black and Brown neighborhoods starved of resources for decades. Now, those same actors are returning to demand the closure of schools that they intentionally underfunded.

A right-wing school board would likely forsake any attempt at progressive revenue streams from the state. Instead, it would likely close schools exclusively on the South and West sides of the city, just as it did in 2013. School closures aren’t just about underinvestment. They are a form of violence inflicted on the most vulnerable neighborhoods in this city. They leave communities divested, depopulated, and scarred. Today, the vast majority of CPS schools closed in 2013 remain in disrepair, a constant reminder for neighbors that Chicago has long valued the lives of certain residents over others. Additionally, school closures themselves are often antecedents to violence. Research has consistently demonstrated that areas immediately surrounding closed schools have seen higher rates of gun violence since 2013. 

Schools are community anchors and hubs where neighbors and their families convene to dream of a better tomorrow – one made possible only by the right to a free, accessible, and comprehensive public education. In many cases, they serve as centers for community programming, provide free summer enrichment programs, and welcome families that have recently arrived to the United States. When families are stripped of that right and forced to send their children to schools miles away at the behest of a school board that’s been bought and paid for by the charter school lobby, it’s an example of how the boot of racial capitalism continues to crush communities of color while enriching their oppressors. 

How can we seek to grow our presence on the South and West sides under the message of “Workers Deserve More” if we stand by while they’re given less and less? If “Workers Deserve More” is to be an actual vision for the implementation of democratic socialism, rather than a mere rallying cry, it must account for the workers (and their families) most likely to be affected by school closures: in Austin, Garfield Park, Englewood, and Auburn Gresham, among so many other neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. 

Furthermore, the election of a right-wing school board would likely mean cuts to services for students across the board. The first programs to go would likely be those that support Diverse Learners, students who require special education services. At a time when schools are already understaffed for the personnel that would accommodate these students’ needs (SECAs, paraprofessionals, etc.), it would be unconscionable to consider further cuts. Many students who receive accommodations and curriculum modifications have disabilities. As socialists, we must view this fight through the lens of disability justice. To ensure that every child, in every part of this city, has access to education as a tool of liberation, we must fight to expand funding for our Diverse Learners, not sit idly by while it’s rolled back.

While the prospects are quite somber should the school board swing right, there’s also much to be excited about should the board remain aligned with workers and their children. Just as with the City Council, we are fighting to build a bloc of school board members who have proven records as organizers for the working class. These candidates will mobilize the working class to demand the progressive funding for our schools that Governor Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly have been refusing to answer for. 

With stable, progressive revenue, we can start to dream bigger. We can work with our bloc of board members to develop a coherent set of policy planks around education that transforms and integrates our schools even deeper into the fabric of the communities they serve. We can begin to imagine a district of Sustainable Community Schools, with wraparound programs like free healthcare, legal aid clinics, and nutrition education. Our district could also fund Universal Pre-K at age 3. Both of these are policies that school board president candidate Hilario Dominguez is running on.  It is a program we as a chapter can and should rally around.

So in the words of educators across this country: “Raise your hand if you’re here, CDSA.” We need to be here to fully fund our schools. Here to push back against the tide of corporate and billionaire money. Here to ensure that the schools in our black and brown communities are as well-resourced as any school in Lincoln Park or Lakeview, not shut down. And here to dream and organize around a better future for Chicago’s children.

The post Raise Your Hand if You’re Here: Why CDSA Must Intervene in the Board of Education Races appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Portland’s capitalist class animates an opaque network of political action committees & non-profits tasked with pushing Portland politics to the Right.

In a post-Citizens United world, this incestuous network of wealthy donors and corporations relies on weak campaign finance rules, splashy websites, and endless permutations of the words progressive, Portland, and action!

The Portland Metro Chamber of Secrets

The OG lobby of the capitalist class. The Portland Metro Chamber executive committee is helmed by giant multinationals like Bank of America, Amazon, Google, Nike, and Wells Fargo, but it also features local investor-owned utilities, contractors, and health insurers.

The Chamber is the main clearinghouse for right-wing candidates who want to hide campaign contributions from the country’s least popular companies, including data center operators, union-busting law firms, and weapons manufacturers.

The Chamber distributes money to corporate political candidates through 4 ‘separate’ PACs, which are all headed by the Chamber’s hardest working employee, lobbyist Jon Isaacs. According to campaign finance records, Isaacs is the Treasurer/Director of all four groups.

Dishonorable Mention: Working Waterfront is not (yet) a PAC, but the Chamber operates the organization on behalf of major corporate polluters, by fighting against accountability for the dangerous CEI hub and the Portland Harbor Superfund site (e.g. Zenith, Chevron, Exxon, etc).

Some current and recent endorsements:

• State Senate District 15: Janeen Sollman (lost to data center opponent and DSA member Myrna Munoz)
• Portland City Council: Eric Zimmerman (incumbent), Olivia Clark (incumbent), Steve Novick (incumbent), Eli Arnold (current candidate).
• Safer Portland, the failed effort to raid the Portland Clean Energy Fund and hire more cops.

People For ‘Portland Sucks’

This group is like your co-worker who says, “it’s not political” before launching into a pro-cop tirade about how homeless people are at fault for their circumstances. Rising rents and falling wages don’t come up.

These PACs are mostly jobs programs for failed candidates and fired chiefs of staff (e.g. Vadim Mozyrsky, Bob Weinstein, and Eli Arnold, and Julia Brim-Edward’s former staffer, Vikki Payne):

• Go, Portland, Go
• Future Portland
• Partnership for Progress

However, their big money originates with some of the largest check-writers funding right-wing politics across Oregon, including Columbia Sportswear head Timothy Boyle. 

Their steering committees all feature each other’s principal members, according to reporting by the Portland Mercury:

“Partnership for Progress donated $32,000 to the new effort, Go Portland Go, in June, according to state records. The organizations also share some leadership; Partnership for Progress co-leader Vadim Mozyrsky also sits on the steering committee for Go Portland Go. The group is also listed as a coalition member on Go Portland Go’s website.”

‘Go, Portland, Go’ attached several famous restaurant-owners to its list of supporters, but this grassroots is already bailing:

“Earl Ninsom’s constellation of Thai restaurants—Eem, Langbaan, Hat Yai, Paadee, Phuket Cafe, and OK Chicken & Khao Soi (the latter was erroneously listed as two separate restaurants on the Go Portland Go website)—all appeared on the coalition’s list as of Friday, August 28. But after the Mercury asked about the restaurant’s group decision to join, Ninsom said the company would be withdrawing its support.”

Among the restaurateurs still aboard the PAC is the owner of dessert-forward restaurant Papa Haydn’s, which is currently subjecting employees to a nasty union-busting campaign.

Landed Gentry

Portland’s rent-seekers. Rent-seekers are individuals or organizations that try to increase their own wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions rather than by creating new wealth or providing productive goods.

These PACs represent the inheritor class; Portland’s ‘old money’ leveraging vast birthrights to buy property and extract rent from tenants, residential and commercial.

• Revitalize Portland Coalition
• Multifamily NW PAC
  • Equitable Housing PAC (statehouse PAC)
• Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors PAC

The Revitalize Coalition is typical. A pet-project PAC of Portland property-inheritor Jordan Schnitzer, Revitalize bills itself as a “real estate collective” of commercial real estate owners, lawyers, builders, and property managers who want more public money to flow into their pockets. 

They insist this personal windfall will ‘trickle-down’ to you, despite their twin-objective of cutting public services. This PAC has an extremely high density of Preschool-for-All haters, and they are licking their lips at Julia Brim-Edwards’ persistent effort to degrade the program.

Also, unrepentant racist and sockpuppet account operator Brian Owendoff is a Revitalize member:

Revitalize’s candidates for the City elections, prior and current, include right-wingers Rene Gonzalez, Loretta Smith, Dan Ryan, Eli Arnold, Olivia Clark, and Eric Zimmerman.

On the residential side of wealth extraction, landlord lobby Multifamily NW (aka “Equitable Housing PAC”) collected and distributed over $1,000,000 since 2020 to local and state politicians, across various efforts to oppose rent control, relocation assistance, and free tenant representation. 

Recent large campaign donations include all of the statewide Democratic Party Leadership (Tina Kotek, Kayse Jama, Rob Wagner, Julie Fahey, and Ben Bowman) as well as Brim-Edwards. 

Police-Industrial Complex

Not much to say here that hasn’t already been said by police reformers and abolitionists for 50+ years. These PACs are funded by cops or by the capitalists who love the cops. 

“More police” is their hammer, and every social problem is a nail. Increased homelessness? Hire more cops. Grandpa watching too many Fox News ‘Antifa’ segments? Hire more cops? Neighbor’s dog pooping on your lawn? Hire more cops.

The PACs:

• Keep Portland Safe PAC
  • Portland Police Association PAC
• Community Safety Coalition PAC
  • Portland Police Association
  • Multnomah County Deputy Sheriff’s Association
  • Heavy crossover with the Landed Gentry and the Portland Metro Chamber of Secrets

Yet, for a bunch of “law enforcement” officers, they can’t seem to avoid breaking the law. Complainants allege canvassers were instructed to lie to potential voters during the unrealized bid to raid PCEF for cop salaries. The Portland Police Association wasted almost $1,000,000 backing the effort and were humiliated in federal court before finally giving up their campaign.

Canvassing Calendar

With election season in full swing from now until November, it’s time for the DSA Difference. This calendar is your one-stop shop where you can find all our canvassing dates.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet profiles a not-so-secret secret society that presided over a troubled and troubling metropolis.

The post Meet Me in St. Louis appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Elizabeth Henderson

First a couple of farm food-related events:

“Feeding Tomorrow” – film screening September 23 at 6 pm at The Little, sponsored by the Rochester Food Policy Council. After the one-hour documentary, there will be a panel of local people whose work parallels the inspiring examples in the film. Here is the eventbrite link to purchase tickets – $5, but no one turned away for lack of funds: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/film-screening-feeding-tomorrow-tickets-1994986387990

Tour Mud Creek Farm, a small-scale organically managed vegetable farm in Victor, NY on Tuesday, September 29 at 10:45 am. The Abundance Food Coop, along with NOFA-NY and the Food Policy Council, will be holding a field day to tour Mud Creek Farm to learn about community supported agriculture, and highly diverse vegetable production using organic systems that build soil health and mitigate climate change. Free. Mud Creek’s address is 6880 Cherry St, Victor, NY 14564. The entrance to the farm’s semi-circular one-way driveway is on the north side of the road. You enter on the east end and exit on the west end.

The Rochester Community Food System Plan

If anyone had doubts, there is now irrefutable evidence that the food insecurity in Rochester’s “Crescent” neighborhoods results from decades of disinvestment, systemic racism and poverty. After three years of work by Consultants KK+P, with guidance from the Rochester Food Policy Council, a 25-member Community Advisory Council, public surveys and focus groups, the City released the Rochester Community Food System Plan (CFSP) on August 14, 2026. The CFSP is “designed to serve as a roadmap to creating a more vibrant, equitable, and resilient food system for the City of Rochester.” The first half of the plan is a solid and realistic report on the history and present state of food and agriculture in and around Rochester with excellent maps as illustrations and cameos of important institutions and individuals. The plan itself consists of five goals, ten strategies and 44 individual actions that can be taken by city government and many partners. Without a movement of working class people that builds the power to take on the underlying injustices of poverty and systemic racism, this plan will not eliminate hunger, malnutrition and food apartheid in Rochester. But it builds on the positive programs that we already have and has many good ideas for more that can be done on our local level. Please take the time to look it over and see where you can plug in.

As explained on page 4, “The Plan outlines a coordinated set of strategies and actions that the City of Rochester and its many community partners could pursue to create a more equitable, resilient, and connected food system. Each recommended action includes detailed information with a description and rationale for the recommendation; a potential timeline, partners, and some initial steps to inform implementation; references to related recommendations from relevant, previously completed plans; and any relevant models (with links) from other communities across the country from which to draw inspiration.”

The plan presents recommendations in a helpful way dividing them into short, medium and long term, early, keystone and high impact. It also links goals to Plan 2034, a reminder that Rochester has already made a commitment to this work. 

The plan’s first Goal is to focus the City’s attention on food issues and get the administration to appoint someone whose job it will be to coordinate actions around food and then pull together all the relevant players. At present, like many other cities, Rochester does not have a food department, so anything related to food falls through the cracks or gets shuttled around to several departments leading to confusion and very slow responses.

Goal 2 calls for increasing access to healthy affordable food and education about food and gardening.  This set of strategies and actions builds on existing programs such as the FoodLink Curbside markets, and also subsidized CSA shares and healthy food boxes with a focus on the neighborhoods suffering the worst food apartheid. An immediate urgent need brought on by the cuts to SNAP funding in the Big Horrible Bill is to make sure everyone who qualifies for SNAP/EBT receives it. Better coordination among the active and caring hunger action and mutual aid groups would help. Equally urgent is making sure that the summer meals program reaches all children, including those who do not participate in congregate programs. As during Covid, mobile delivery vans should be free to give out lunches to youngsters wherever they are. A related effort is to make sure our federal electeds refuse to pass a Farm Bill that fails to restore SNAP funding. 

The CFSP calls attention to the most critical food apartheid neighborhoods where full-scale grocery stores are few and far between. The City’s “Healthy Grocery” program that identifies smaller stores that carry some fresh produce has not had much effect. Supportive infrastructure is missing such as a reliable service that would deliver fresh food from area farms.  

There is some fine language in the CFSP that cries out for implementation: “Rochester is surrounded by one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions, yet not enough of this bounty consistently reaches small retailers, corner stores, and community markets in the city. Building stronger supply chain connections can help ensure that fresh, locally grown food is more widely available and affordable, particularly in neighborhoods facing limited healthy food access. Regional assets such as the Rochester Public Market, Genesee Valley Regional Market Authority, Foodlink, and Headwater Food Hub already play important roles in aggregating, distributing, and retailing regional products. Intentionally creating pathways for urban growers to connect with these distribution and retail networks would help ensure that locally grown food produced within the city itself is part of this supply chain. Strengthening coordination among these actors, while supporting infrastructure such as cold storage, last-mile delivery, and purchasing cooperatives, can help level the playing field for small retailers and alternative outlets. This will expand access to fresh produce, support local farmers, and build community food sovereignty.”

A few Rochester schools have gardens and nutrition programs, but most do not.  There are enough open spaces on school grounds or near most schools to make it possible for every school to have a garden.  What is missing is solid support to encourage and train teachers. The CFSP calls for increased education, but it will take a concerted effort on the part of parents, teachers, and civic gardeners backed up by some funding to move from only a few school gardens to a coordinated program that trains all youth in nutrition and how to grow food, funnels those who get excited into training programs with stipends like the current Taproot programs, and then enables the most committed to access further training crowned by public support to help them access the land and other resources necessary to start a farm.

Goal 3 is dear to my heart. It calls for increasing community gardening by building on the network that already exists.  Although it took two years of meetings after a crisis when the city bull dozed the Flower City Noire garden, the Urban Agriculture Working Group has made some headway in persuading the city to improve their system for free garden permits that allow for the use of city-owned plots. However, the city still insists that all permits are temporary and can be cancelled if a development opportunity arises. Missing is an agreement by the city to continue reserving some of its plots for development while designating others for permanent use as gardens or greenspace. There is still hope that the final Zoning language will make clear that development is best pursued along transit lines. With over 2000 plots owned by the city, you might think that a few hundred, with a few in each quadrant, could be reserved for gardens.

While sceptics are quick to point out that community gardens cannot feed the city, during World War II, “Victory Gardens” grew enough produce to replace the commercial food production that went to feed the troops.  We can do this! With climate disaster and a just-in-time corporate-dominated food system that crumbles when a crisis hits, it behooves us here in Rochester to take our gardens and local farms more seriously. The City’s Recreation and Human Services department already has a good program staffed by people who actually know how to grow things with gardens and training at rec centers and annual deliveries of plants and other supplies to community gardens. There is a solid base to start from.

Goal 4 aims at strengthening the connections between the city and the highly fertile and productive farms in the Finger Lakes counties starting with more investments in the Public Market as the food development center for the city. Although it scores as one of the outstanding markets in the whole country, the Rochester Public Market suffers from persistent understaffing and improvements move slowly. Hopefully the CFSP will bring it the attention it deserves. More support for Headwater Foods so that it can move into the city and expand is another promising set of actions.

The plan also points to institutional purchasing of NY grown foods as a way improve local diets. The Good Food Bill, an important piece of legislation that would allow public institutions like schools to pay up to 10% more to “values-based” NY farm suppliers, sits on Governor Hochul’s desk awaiting signature. It is taking a major statewide campaign to get her to sign (another story for another time).  Sadly, the Rochester School District has not taken advantage of the existing state and federal programs that increase funding for schools that buy from farms. RCSD is leaving a lot of money on the table that could improve school lunches. Since I did not grow up in Rochester nor did my son, I have left it to others on the Food Policy Council committee who had this experience to try to address this extremely frustrating and intransigent situation.

In the plan’s reporting on the existing Rochester food system, there is solid data on the 10% of city jobs that are food-related. One small portion of those jobs are the small food enterprises that attract people with the chance to run their own businesses and produce something creative. Action 4B-1 rightly rates support for these entrepreneurs as a possible “early win,” and adding incentives to the rfps for city-provided grants to developers to include space for gardens and food businesses should be a measure the city development department could take on immediately. 4B 2, 3 and 4 have good proposals for a series of ways the city can support food enterprises. 

The CFSP also documents the low wages and poor working conditions of the hundreds of food-related jobs in retail, fast foods, and groceries and even includes data about the small percentage that are unionized and pay better, but fails to include actions, such as union drives and contracts, that might transform them into living wage jobs. Sweet as it is, enabling a home jam artist to parlay her skills into a small business will not reduce poverty and hunger. 4C 4 links training programs to food enterprises, but does not include training as a union organizer among the skills most needed.

No one can argue with Goal 5: “Celebrate the diverse human, cultural, and natural assets of Rochester and the Finger Lakes region by leveraging the power of food to build connection and strengthen community.” The authors of the plan have combed the country for lots of good suggestions for how to do this. There is one action that I hope the Food Policy Council will take up soon – to hold an annual or biannual food summit to gather everyone involved in implementing the plan to assess progress and make further plans together.

…

As someone who spends so much of my time and energy on food – growing it, harvesting it, cooking and eating it, teaching others how to grow it, organizing around it, writing about it – my hope is that the CFSP will attract more attention to  the shockingly unjust state of food in our city and inspire some action for change.

The post Getting Grounded: The Rochester Community Food System Plan first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

By: Vanessa Bartlett

EVERETT – Workers at the Encore Boston Harbor, organized in bargaining units affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 25 and UNITE HERE Local 26, went on strike September 4 in advance of Labor Day following the expiration of their contract on August 31.

These 1350 hospitality workers have made the hotel-casino located at the juncture between Everett and Boston run since 2019, when Wynn Resorts opened the hotel on one of the three territories designated by the 2011 Expanded Gaming Act as legal gaming sites. Workers report that neither wages nor healthcare has kept up with company profits.

On the Picket Line

The picket line stretches along Broadway Street in Everett. A wide array of casino workers are hitting the streets every single day: housekeepers, cooks, servers, bartenders, slot attendants, warehouse workers, and drivers held signs, banged drums, and cheered at cars as they passed by honking in support.

Chant leaders yelled into megaphones: “All day, all night – Encore workers on strike!”

According to UNITE HERE Local 26, 1,350 workers at the casino are on strike after 95% of union membership voted yes to the action on August 20. They are demanding pay that reflects the “five star” experience workers are expected to provide for casino guests, as well as maintaining healthcare benefits and job security. The unions are asking the public to “stay out!” of the resort while the strike is ongoing.

Marina Guzman, a cage cashier at Encore, said that she found Encore’s response to workers’ demands “disheartening.”

No word from them, no word at all to acknowledge the work that we do and all of the work that we put into the company every single day. Because I know that right now they’re having a hard time running the show without us.

“Coming in, I didn’t know of all the responsibilities that we would [have] as a cage cashier. I honestly thought I was just changing chips for people, but there’s so much we do in the back of house that nobody sees, that literally moves the whole casino,” said Guzman. 

Guzman and other cage cashiers were on the picket line because, according to her report, pay and benefits are not in line with the compensation other workers at the casino receive. “We have a lot of catching up to do. And the fact that I see all of my cage coworkers here just lets me know that they’re fighting for the same things that I am, just as hard,” Guzman said.

While she has only worked at Encore for three months, Guzman said she hopes to work at the casino for years to come. 

The Fall of Tipping

Restaurant servers and bartenders are also demanding higher pay. Two cocktail servers explained that “tipping culture” has changed significantly, leading to lower than expected hourly wages for many servers at the casino. 

Iris Beltran, who has worked at Encore for four years, reported to Working Mass:

The casino expects us to make, give or take, $400. We usually make about $200, maybe $300 [per shift]. Because of the thing with tipping culture, how people are like, ‘oh, you make enough because you’re getting tips,’… it’s heavily affecting us for sure.

Maria Zubieta, another cocktail server, said she’s hopeful the contract will include a stipend for shoes.

I got in trouble the other day because my shoes were too run-down. They’re like, ‘it’s not five stars’, you need new shoes. They’re not paying for those shoes.

Servers are asking for a $2 raise. While it won’t close the gap between expected and actual wages for servers, Zubieta said that, “it’ll at least help a little, you know. A little more security, and with our health insurance, it will help with that kind of stuff, and that will take a big load off.”

Currently, servers make $15 per hour: the Massachusetts state minimum wage. 

Beltran said:

Guests expect top notch service,  but we don’t get anything in return. So that’s what we’re trying to say… the money needs to come from somewhere, so if we’re trying to not expect tips from the guests, the casino should be the one [giving us] a raise.

Teamsters 25 and UNITE HERE 26 press releases have pointed out the vast gap between Encore profits and worker compensation. Wynn Resorts reported a total operations revenue of $1.86 billion for just the second quarter of 2026 alone. According to Wynn Resorts, Encore Boston Harbor alone made $209.3 million in revenue for that quarter. 

Luke Williams, a flight attendant for American Airlines and union president of Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA)’s base in Boston (APFA BOS), was at the picket line on day one of the strike. 

“Local 26 is one of the biggest unions in the city, and flight attendants spend a lot of time in hotels, so we like to show our support for them whenever they go on strike,” Williams said.

Williams – who joined DSA in December 2025 – has worked tirelessly on the picket line with other members providing Encore workers with strike support, including logistical support and helping workers file for unemployment. Williams explained further:

DSA has gotten at least 38 people to sign up for shifts at the strike support office, which has mostly been helping workers file unemployment claims. Most people who volunteer will go to the picket lines as well, before and after their shifts.

“The vibe on the picket line has been very upbeat, lots of people out there, it’s the first week of being out, so now things are starting to get more intense,” said Williams. “It seems to mean a lot when people show up for them when they haven’t seen people do that for them before.”

One of the most important shows of solidarity that workers need is commitment to not cross the picket line and strike benefit fund contributions.

Vanessa Bartlett is a member of Boston DSA and contributor to Working Mass.

CORRECTION: Claims without concrete citation have been trimmed from a previous version of this article.

The post UNITE HERE 26 and Teamsters 25 Hotel Workers On Simultaneous Strike At Encore Boston Harbor appeared first on Working Mass.

[[{“value”:”

By: Vanessa Bartlett

EVERETT – Workers at the Encore Boston Harbor, organized in bargaining units affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 25 and UNITE HERE Local 26, went on strike September 4 in advance of Labor Day following the expiration of their contract on August 31.

These 1350 hospitality workers have made the hotel-casino located at the juncture between Everett and Boston run since 2019, when Wynn Resorts opened the hotel on one of the three territories designated by the 2011 Expanded Gaming Act as legal gaming sites.

Encore Boston Harbor occupies one of those parcels with a replica facade of the corporation’s flagship casino building in Las Vegas, Nevada. Yet as the state and the many involved municipalities continue to critically greenlight the massive corporation’s ambitions on the Mystic River, workers report that neither wages nor healthcare has kept up with company profits. The fall of tips, encouraged by the company and economic crisis across the United States, has also dramatically decreased net income for hotel workers.

On the Line and the Picket Line

The picket line stretches along Broadway Street in Everett. A wide array of casino workers are hitting the streets every single day: housekeepers, cooks, servers, bartenders, slot attendants, warehouse workers, and drivers held signs, banged drums, and cheered at cars as they passed by honking in support.

Chant leaders yelled into megaphones: “All day, all night – Encore workers on strike!”

According to UNITE HERE Local 26, 1,350 workers at the casino are on strike after 95% of union membership voted yes to the action on August 20. They are demanding pay that reflects the “five star” experience workers are expected to provide for casino guests, as well as maintaining healthcare benefits and job security. The unions are asking the public to “stay out!” of the resort while the strike is ongoing.

Marina Guzman, a cage cashier at Encore, said that she found Encore’s response to workers’ demands “disheartening.”

No word from them, no word at all to acknowledge the work that we do and all of the work that we put into the company every single day. Because I know that right now they’re having a hard time running the show without us.

“Coming in, I didn’t know of all the responsibilities that we would [have] as a cage cashier. I honestly thought I was just changing chips for people, but there’s so much we do in the back of house that nobody sees, that literally moves the whole casino,” said Guzman. 

Guzman and other cage cashiers were on the picket line because, according to Guzman, their pay and benefits are not in line with the compensation other workers at the casino receive. “We have a lot of catching up to do. And the fact that I see all of my cage coworkers here just lets me know that they’re fighting for the same things that I am, just as hard,” said Guzman. 

While she has only worked at Encore for three months, Guzman said she hopes to work at the casino for years to come. 

The Fall of Tipping

Restaurant servers and bartenders are also demanding higher pay. Two cocktail servers explained that “tipping culture” has changed significantly, leading to lower than expected hourly wages for many servers at the casino. 

Iris Beltran, who has worked at Encore for four years, reported to Working Mass:

The casino expects us to make, give or take, $400. We usually make about $200, maybe $300 [per shift]. Because of the thing with tipping culture, how people are like, ‘oh, you make enough because you’re getting tips,’… it’s heavily affecting us for sure.

Maria Zubieta, another cocktail server, said she’s hopeful the contract will include a stipend for shoes. Workers at hotel-resorts often work physically demanding shifts, the labor of which destroys shoeware, especially the cheap kind affordable to many hotel workers.

I got in trouble the other day because my shoes were too run-down. They’re like, ‘it’s not five stars’, you need new shoes. They’re not paying for those shoes.

Servers are asking for a $2 raise. While it won’t close the gap between expected and actual wages for servers, Zubieta said that, “it’ll at least help a little, you know. A little more security, and with our health insurance, it will help with that kind of stuff, and that will take a big load off.”

Currently, servers make $15 per hour: the Massachusetts state minimum wage. 

Beltran said:

Guests expect top notch service,  but we don’t get anything in return. So that’s what we’re trying to say… the money needs to come from somewhere, so if we’re trying to not expect tips from the guests, the casino should be the one [giving us] a raise.

Teamsters 25 and UNITE HERE 26 press releases have pointed out the vast gap between Encore profits and worker compensation. Wynn Resorts reported a total operations revenue of $1.86 billion for just the second quarter of 2026 alone. According to Wynn Resorts, Encore Boston Harbor alone made $209.3 million in revenue for that quarter. 

Luke Williams, a flight attendant for American Airlines and union president of Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA)’s base in Boston, was at the picket line on day one of the strike. 

“Local 26 is one of the biggest unions in the city, and flight attendants spend a lot of time in hotels, so we like to show our support for them whenever they go on strike,” Williams said.

Williams has worked tirelessly on the picket line with other members providing Encore workers with strike support, including logistical support and helping workers file for unemployment. Williams explained further:

DSA has gotten at least 38 people to sign up for shifts at the strike support office, which has mostly been helping workers file unemployment claims. Most people who volunteer will go to the picket lines as well, before and after their shifts.

The APFA president joined DSA in December 2025.

“The vibe on the picket line has been very upbeat, lots of people out there, it’s the first week of being out, so now things are starting to get more intense,” said Williams. “It seems to mean a lot when people show up for them when they haven’t seen people do that for them before.”

One of the most important shows of solidarity that workers need is commitment to not cross the picket line and strike benefit fund contributions.

Vanessa Bartlett is a member of Boston DSA and contributor to Working Mass.

The post UNITE HERE 26 and Teamsters 25 Hotel Workers On Simultaneous Strike Against Wynn Resorts appeared first on Working Mass.

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At the July DSA National Political Committee (NPC) meeting, I proposed adding abolition to the Workers Deserve More program because I believe that abolishing capitalist policing and prisons is a fundamental demand of the socialist movement. I crafted the language carefully to clarify that we mean abolishing policing and prisons as institutions of capitalist rule, not conflating the abolition of capitalist policing and prisons with the abolition of every future social capacity for accountability and safety.

The specific language we added is in italics: “Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect police and prison funding to public services, as steps towards abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state.” This phrasing was eventually simplified to “towards abolishing the police and prison system.”

This amendment was opposed by the Socialist Majority and Groundwork caucuses. Soon after the program’s launch, the abolition plank came under criticism from some DSA members, and several endorsed electeds explicitly disavowed the demand. Here, I argue that these reactions are rooted in a misunderstanding of the socialist tradition of abolition, a misreading of the lessons of 2020, and ultimately serve a reformist, anti-revolutionary conclusion.    

Abolition and Marxism

Underlying the current debate over abolition are two recurring misunderstandings. The first, common among liberals and reformists, conflates the abolition of capitalist policing and prisons with the abolition of any future capacity for collective safety, accountability, or restraint. The second, more common in anarchist traditions, rejects the Marxist understanding of the state itself. Marxists reject both errors by analyzing policing and prisons as institutions historically produced by particular class relations, rather than timeless expressions of coercion. Resolving both misunderstandings requires a historical materialist theory of the state and its carceral institutions. A Marxist analysis asks the questions: What social relations produced this institution? What class function does it perform? What material conditions make it necessary?

The Liberal Reformist Error 

Marxism differs from liberalism on the question of the state. Liberalism views the state as an essentially neutral instrument that can be put to different purposes. Marxism instead asks what class relations produced particular state institutions, what functions they serve within those relations, and how they can be transformed and how society’s material conditions can be changed.

If, after the revolution, we have socialized the means of production, broken the profoundly corrupting ideological and cultural grip of capitalism, reimagined healthcare, housing, education, social services, and our communities around human need, what will we do with the rare person who remains hellbent on committing violence? How can we provide them with as much care and as many resources as we can while ensuring they are separated from the people they intend to hurt? 

It is absurd for a Marxist to equate revolutionary institutions of safety, accountability, and care with the institution of policing and prisons under capitalism or to abandon abolition as a rallying call. The possibilities of harm under any social arrangement do not establish the necessity of the institutions through which capitalist society currently manages that arrangement. Our task is to abolish those institutions and transform the social conditions that reproduce violence, not promise that socialism will make every violent act impossible.

A related argument for “carceral minimalism” by Loïc Wacquant and, more recently, Paul Heideman in Jacobin, posits that abolition is not a viable path to social justice. Wacquant explicitly understands abolition to entail eliminating the “triad” of police, courts, and prisons rather than merely shrinking or reforming them. He correctly argues that we must take victims’ safety seriously and fight to materially reduce incarceration and state violence under existing conditions, but his framework never escapes a liberal capitalist horizon. He asks how policing, courts, and prisons can be made more limited and humane under capitalism, not whether the social relations that produce and sustain these institutions can be overcome. Indeed, his piece doesn’t mention socialism or communism a single time. The persistence of violence therefore becomes a reason to preserve some version of the institutions through which capitalist society currently manages it. 

A Marxist abolition rejects this inference and seeks to transform the material conditions that reproduce violence while developing new, democratically controlled capacities for collective safety, accountability, and repair. A socialist society might, where absolutely necessary, separate people who are a danger to others while providing them with care. But Wacquant’s insistence that a penal state, as a specialized apparatus of class domination, is a permanent requirement of complex society mistakes a historically specific institution of class rule for a universal social necessity. His “carceral minimalism” ultimately offers a program for managing coercion from within liberal capitalism, not a socialist alternative to it. 

The Anarchist Error

The liberal error conflates abolition of policing with the abolition of all social accountability; the anarchist error mistakes the Marxist theory of the state for a defense of the capitalist state itself and locates the root of oppression primarily in hierarchy, bureaucracy, and coercion rather than the class relations that give the state and its instruments their political character.

Lenin outlines his conception of the state in The State and Revolution. He writes that “the state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” It arises when society becomes divided into antagonistic classes. Here, Lenin quotes Engels, who writes that the state “becomes a power seemingly standing above society,” a “special, public power” that “does not directly coincide” with the people, consisting of “special bodies of armed men,” and “a standing army and police” as “the chief instruments of state power.” Lenin does not define the state or policing merely as a form of coercion but as the product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The capitalist state is an organ of capitalist rule produced by class society and used by the capitalist class to maintain its domination. The police serve as one of its chief instruments. 

The proletarian state exists to defend the revolution against capitalist counterrevolution while creating the material conditions for its own obsolescence. As class antagonisms are overcome, coercive institutions produced by class antagonisms lose their social basis. Some critics of abolition correctly identify this need to defend the revolution, but both fail to understand the difference in political character of coercion under socialism and fail to envision a world beyond class antagonism. This is ultimately an anti-communist perspective.

Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France makes this distinction concrete. He argues “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” specifically identifying the standing army, police, and bureaucracy. Marx praises the commune because it “got rid” of these institutions and transferred their functions to serve the working class, rather than simply inheriting them:

“Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune … having once got rid of the standing army and the police —the physical force elements of the old government.”

He continues:

“Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind.”

This is the materialist basis for a socialist abolitionism. We seek the abolition of prisons and policing as institutions of capitalist domination, while recognizing that socialism will have to solve real problems that capitalism currently purports to address through those institutions. The Marxist question is not whether those problems exist nor whether society may ever require coercive measures, but what social relations make particular forms of coercion necessary, who controls them, what class interests they serve, and how the institutions reproduce the conditions that make them necessary.

In this way, abolition is not a demand to abolish social protection or accountability but a demand to abolish the capitalist form through which these problems are organized, and to transform the underlying social conditions so that institutions of class domination are unnecessary.

The Rise of Abolition 

Tracing the roots of abolition reveals its significance to the socialist movement. During the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, abolition was a central concern in socialist politics. At its strongest, the movement came to understand abolition as not only a moral appeal against punishment in the abstract but a fight against police and prisons as institutions rooted in the history of slavery, racial capitalism, and class rule, whose abolition required transforming the social conditions that reproduce them. 

This framing is rooted in the Black radical socialist tradition. From W.E.B. Du Bois to Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolition has long meant abolition of the social order that makes systems of policing and prisons necessary while constructing new capacities for collective life.

Du Bois located the origins of modern policing and imprisonment in the unfinished project of abolishing slavery. As he wrote in Black Reconstruction, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” The overthrow of chattel slavery was followed by new forms of racial domination, including convict leasing, Jim Crow, debt peonage, and modern policing, extending slavery’s social function under capitalism by ensuring a disciplined and racially stratified labor force produced by Black oppression.

Gilmore extends this analysis to the political economy of prisons in the neoliberal era. The disruption and disorganization of the working class is essential to the functioning of the system. As she writes in Abolition Geography, “Put simply, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it. Thus criminalization and mass incarceration are class war.” In Golden Gulag, Gilmore analyzes how the carceral system became a means of managing the crises produced by neoliberal capitalism. The economic crises arising from the neoliberal transformation of the capitalist economy produced a massive increase in surplus labor — a growing population of people whose labor was considered superfluous to capital’s needs. Because of the racialized hierarchy of social relations in the United States, one key response was a massively intensified campaign to criminalize Black and Latino populations, and a concomitant enormous growth of the carceral state. This transformed a surplus population into one to be managed and contained, which weakened the possibility of the solidarity required to meaningfully challenge capitalism. 

As Gilmore explains, “Capital must be able to get rid of workers whose labor power is no longer desirable — whether permanently, by mechanical or human replacement, or temporarily by layoffs — and have access to new or previously idled labor as the need arises. These necessities, as Marx’s science of capital accumulation demonstrates, are not due to the personalities or preferences of heads of firms: CEOs who resist such “adjustments” to the labor force jeopardize profits.”

Today we see the hyper-criminalization of immigrants as serving a similarly useful role for capitalism. U.S. imperialism creates the conditions for mass migration through practices of unequal exchange that impoverish the Global South, where the resulting sub-subsistence level wages force workers to migrate for survival. The creation of a maximally exploitable immigrant labor produces an underclass of laborers whose vulnerability is targeted to drive down the power of the working class as a whole. (See Migration As Economic Imperialism by Immanuel Ness.) 

Declining opportunities for profitable investment for capital dictate that workers in the United States must be disciplined to accept less, and a terrified, hyper-exploitable working class continues to lower the floor for the working class as a whole. As Mark Neocleous summarizes in A Critical Theory of Police Power, “Capital is nothing less than a social war and the conflict between classes the most significant civil war in history. Yet this class war is carried out as a generalized police war.” Given the centrality of policing and prisons to capitalist accumulation within the imperial core, abandoning abolition would mean abandoning class war.

Abolition’s Retreat

Today there is a growing retreat from the Marxist and Black radical frameworks.

Much of the current debate frames abolition as an abstract hypothetical about whether any society will ever require coercion or restraint. This framing detaches itself from the concrete institutions and social relations through which policing is organized under capitalism. Instead of asking what police and prisons are as institutions that manage the contradictions of racial capitalism, it asks whether a generalized form of public safety might exist in an imagined future society.

In contrast, a Marxist approach asks us to begin not with abstractions but with the concrete institutions and social relations that produce institutions. Police and prisons are not neutral responses to human conflict but historically specific institutions expanded alongside capitalism, colonialism, and racial domination. 

The consequences of this mistake are significant. Once abolition is framed as an abstract proposition that all coercion must vanish forever, it becomes easy to dismiss as unrealistic. Instead of being seen as a strategy for dismantling institutions that reproduce capitalism and racial domination, it’s framed as either the fantastical idealism of anarchism or the limited purview of policy reform.

It’s important to acknowledge that this retreat from abolition emerges from a real contradiction facing the socialist movement. The George Floyd uprising was the largest mass rebellion against policing in a generation,  yet it produced few lasting structural victories. It’s reasonable to ask whether the movement’s politics, including the rallying cry to abolish the police, contributed to that outcome. But this mistakes the primary lessons of 2020. The principal failure was not that abolition proved to be bad politics or messaging, but that the socialist movement lacked the durable organization, institutions, mass base, and independent politics necessary to adequately absorb the energy of the uprising and carry it forward once the streets emptied. 

This retreat also cannot be understood apart from the intensity of the capitalist and political backlash against the politics of 2020. As Alex Karakatsanis has shown, the liberal establishment and corporate media worked overtime to co-opt the outrage into reforms that left the core institutions intact and quickly began a massive propaganda campaign aimed at selling the lie that crime was spiraling out of control. Progressive politicians and liberal media were eager to return to business as usual, abandoning the rhetoric of 2020 as quickly as they could and once again supporting ballooning police budgets, happy to paper over their inability to meet people’s needs by throwing money at the criminalization of poverty in service of capital. At the same time, much of the left increasingly reduced policing to a question of municipal budgets rather than understanding it as a central institution of capitalist political power.

The basis of this liberal retreat from abolition is clear. The question remaining is: What are the core contradictions driving the left’s retreat?

Electoralism and Reformism

DSA’s electoral successes have been expanding at a rapid rate. As a result, anything that appears to threaten this success naturally faces special scrutiny. This reformist logic was recently articulated by Mayor Mamdani, who, when asked about his breaks with DSA, stated: “Especially when it comes to public safety, I’ve been very clear that we have our police force, we have prisons, we have jails. The purpose of these is also to ensure we are delivering safety & justice.” Indeed, members of the Socialist Majority Caucus and Groundwork caucuses, the Jacobin editorial board, and a number of DSA electeds and aligned candidates have argued that abolition should be de-emphasized or abandoned because it is electorally unpopular or idealistic. Often, this takes the form of stressing the urgency of passing a candidate’s affordability agenda at all costs. This risks pushing DSA towards the pitfalls of tailism and economism, subverting our political program in favor of what is immediately achievable rather than using our political organization to expand what workers see as possible.

It is of course necessary to adapt the way we communicate depending on the context. Every mass movement must distinguish between propaganda, agitation, and the demands most appropriate to a particular audience. The error lies in retreating from a political plank altogether to avoid the strategic challenge in the first place. 

Whether a particular candidate campaigns on abolition, and to what extent, is a tactical question. But allowing that question to redefine the political program of a socialist movement reverses the proper relationship between the movement and its elected officials. Independent socialist organizations must expand the political horizon of the working class, not narrow it according to what elected officials can comfortably defend. DSA’s success is because of our steadfast adherence to our core principles, not in spite of it. Our organization has grown significantly since our program was released. When another moment like 2020 occurs (and it is inevitable), the working class will remember where we stood.

Part of this challenge reflects the need for DSA to develop further towards a party of the working class: an organization with all the structure, resources, political coherence, and discipline to support our candidates in standing firm rather than leaving them isolated in their respective political arenas to fend off attacks and feel compelled to distance themselves from or abandon demands in order to win reelection or fulfill campaign promises. That requires a commitment to fulfilling our Convention mandate to build DSA’s capacity to act as an independent political organization: strengthening the National Electoral Commission’s ability to coordinate our electoral work nationally while building robust Socialists in Office programs at the local level, so our electeds remain closely connected to DSA and are not left to navigate the pressures of office alone. It also requires building connective tissue and infrastructure across chapters and between national and local levels so that DSA can act as a unified political organization rather than a collection of isolated electoral campaigns.

Of course, embracing an abolitionist horizon does not mean DSA and our electeds should abstain from reform. Socialists in office should pursue every reform that weakens the carceral state, defunds police, reduces incarceration, and expands healthcare, but they should do so as part of a strategy aimed at the eventual abolition of policing and prisons rather than as an end in itself.

For Marxists, abolition is not an abstract moral principle or a distant utopia. It’s the unfinished struggle to complete the destruction of slavery’s institutional legacy and embrace Marx’s call to seize the machinery of the state, smash it altogether, and usher in a new social order. We should recall Eugene Debs’s exhortation: While there is a soul in prison, we are not free. 

Further Discussion

If you’re interested in discussing this article with other DSA members, head over to the DSA Discussion Board.

The forums are open to all DSA members in good standing. If you’re not a DSA member in good standing, sign up or renew your dues here.