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.

Monday begins early, at 7:15 a.m., when the line curls out of Red Line Roasters, a worker-owned café in the old Pacific Electric train station across from the Metro. Workers grab coffees and snacks on their way to the morning shift at the new state-owned electric motor factory off Lankershim.

The espresso machine hisses and inside, Marisol checks the co-op dashboard between orders. The shop’s profits this quarter are up, but instead of disappearing upward into some distant corporate skyline, they’re already earmarked for wages, reserves, and the neighborhood fund.

A flyer near the register advertises a Thursday night community investment meeting where people actually decide how the surplus gets used. Across the street, the public childcare center opens, and parents drop off kids without doing the quiet math of whether the day’s work is even worth the cost. 

On Tuesday, the old bank on Magnolia now feels more like a library than a financial institution. Sammy sits with a planner, pitching a cooperative music studio, and the questions focus on jobs, partnerships, and sustainability rather than extraction. The loan terms from the public bank are clear and uneventful, almost boring, with no trapdoors or predatory edges.

Capital has stopped being a hunter and become something closer to irrigation. Money flows where it is needed and stays long enough to matter. The difference is decisive.

By Wednesday evening, 60 or so neighborhood council reps gather at the Maurice Sendak school auditorium for the monthly housing assembly. North Hollywood now mixes rent-controlled units, newer public housing, and cooperative buildings, and decisions about development happen in the open. Arguments unfold over timelines, design, density, and even the types of shade trees. The process is slow and imperfect. Input is collected and sent upstream to LA Housing Works, the massive countywide public builder. 

But no one is waiting on a distant landlord, a long Sacramento legislative hike, or a hedge fund’s quarterly calculation. The decisions are local, contested, and binding. The friction is real, but so is the reality of democracy.

Thursday night returns to the café, where $48,000 in surplus sits on the table. The options range from expansion to raises to community investment, and the discussion circles around balance rather than maximization. In the end, the vote splits the difference, modestly increasing compensation while contributing to neighborhood energy retrofits for solar batteries.

Outside, the streetlights hum on, powered by a cleaner, regionally coordinated grid. It isn’t perfect, but it holds, and you can feel the difference in the summer air.

On Friday, a fabrication co-op loses a contract, but no one is fired. The workers draw on reserves, adjust hours, and rely on a regional employment program if needed. Risk is still present, but it no longer translates instantly into catastrophe. Maybe somewhere this too changes but now it mostly works. 

At lunch, someone jokes that a bad quarter used to mean existential dread, and now it just means longer meetings. Everyone groans, because some things, apparently, are permanent.

Saturday brings a festival to North Hollywood Park, where people drift in on cheap or free transit. Food co-ops, local artists, and planning tables fill the space, and infrastructure proposals are explained in plain English. Nearby, a booth answers questions about the federal social dividend, which arrives monthly and softens the edges of everyday life.

It isn’t dramatic, but it’s reliable, and that reliability changes how people move through the week. The system feels less like a gamble and more just like the weather.

Sunday is quieter, a day of checking accounts and taking stock. Pay is decent and compressed, bills are manageable, and healthcare no longer sits like a threat in the background. Manny and Rose, the oldest of couples, sit on a balcony and try to name the feeling.

It isn’t prosperity exactly. It’s the sense that everything is no longer hanging by a thread, that the floor is solid even when you trip.

The neighborhood isn’t a utopia, and disagreements, inefficiencies, and ambitions persist. Markets still exist even if mixed in with planning, and some projects succeed while others lag. But the center of gravity has shifted, and the basics of life no longer depend on winning a constant series of small bets.

No one designed it all in advance. It grew piece by piece, assembled while people were already fighting for it and living inside the shell of the old order. If you walk down Lankershim at dusk, you don’t see a finished future, just a place still being made in real time by real people.

This is just one imagining of what a transitional period of a society, our society, that’s gone down the democratic road to socialism might look like. You may have your own. What would be different? If a new future could be won, what would it feel like? 

Further Reading:

• The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Alec Nove

• Nordic Socialism: the Path Toward a Democratic Economy, Pelle Dragsted

• Reclaiming Public Ownership, Andrew Cumbers

• A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, Kate Aronoff et al

On May Day, hundreds of protesters descended on Oakland International Airport (OAK). Their demands: to abolish ICE, end US wars (including stopping the shipment of military cargo to Israel), and tax the rich. As a protest of over 150 on foot at Terminal 1 reached a crescendo, another hundred protesters inched past the terminal in a four-lane car caravan, honking horns and displaying messages. News camera crews captured some of the excitement.

OAK is home to a FedEx terminal that ships military cargo to Israel, making the airport the subject of the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo Campaign, of which East Bay DSA is a member. Terminal 1 is also the ticketing location of Delta Airlines, which deported Liam Conejo Ramos. Finally, it is the site of labor struggle involving airport workers organized by SEIU-USWW. 

The OAK action coincided with another, at SFO, where SEIU-USWW members working without a contract led a demonstration that resulted in 25 arrests. (A third airport action took place later in the day in San Diego.) It was organized in less than a month, led by East Bay DSA, along with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) and Indivisible East Bay, with support from leaders of the Arms Embargo Campaign, such as the Palestinian Youth Movement and Arab Resource and Organizing Center. Many other community and labor organizations participated, including contingents from ILWU local 6, Oakland teachers, and Bay Area Labor for Palestine. 

ILWU Local 6 Hosts a Pre-Action Meeting

Nearly 350 people, a third of them DSA members, met up in the morning at the ILWU Local 6 union hall, a few blocks from the airport entrance. We heard from speakers about May Day, the struggle of OAK workers, and about our three demands. A statement of support was also read from Angela Davis, who apologized for not being able to make it. 

Grace Martinez, statewide deputy director with ACCE, a co-leader in planning the event, reflected that the numbers exceeded our turnout goal. “There were people who had been in the movement for a very long time,” she said, “but for many, including many of our members, this was their first May Day – and their first protest. That was very powerful.” 

The Action at Terminal 1

The action at Terminal 1 kicked off when the first busload of people arrived from the ILWU hall. We wanted to let airport workers and passengers know through our banners, chanting, and flyers why this action was happening at the airport. By the time the second busload arrived, over 150 people were participating on foot.

Our signs, flyers, and chants proclaimed our overall immediate demands - tax the rich, stop US wars, abolish ICE - and also educated people about the fact that there’s an ongoing campaign to stop the shipment of military cargo through OAK (via FedEx) to Israel. An August 2025 study from the Palestinian Youth Movement found that 16% of Lockheed Martin military cargo bound for Israel passes through OAK - with over 250 military shipments to Israel from January to August 2025 alone. 

This demonstration came a few weeks after a car caravan organized by the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo campaign, and the addition of an on-foot rally made our action an escalation and a reminder to the airport, which is governed by the Oakland Port Commission (appointed by famed anti-war politician and Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee), that business as usual will continue to be disrupted so long as military cargo flows through OAK. The action felt even more powerful when we saw our comrades in the car caravan shut down the only road into the airport, moving slowly enough that our banner holders were able to walk in front of them.   

One of our coalition partners, Nancy Latham, a member of Indivisible East Bay’s steering committee, recalled waiting for the caravan at Terminal 1. “The moment they turned the corner,” she said, “they looked like a bunch of huge animals ready to stampede. And then as they drove toward those of us standing outside the terminal, it was as if two tributaries were flowing together. We all felt a surge of power to have this other group meet us. It was a peak experience.”

The View from the Car Caravan

To prepare for the caravan, May Day organizers incorporated the lessons learned from the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo caravan two weeks before, including preparing for the possibility of arrest. While we did not plan to disobey authorities, confronting the possibility of arrest focused participants on the risks and heightened personal security necessary in these times of authoritarian surveillance. After all, airports are among the heavily surveilled environments in the country. We secured our phones and conducted our chats in Signal, good practices for all activists. We had caravan training sessions with East Bay DSA members a few days prior to May Day and during the pre-action training at the ILWU hall.

Before getting into our cars, we practiced on foot the formation we would deploy. We had over 60 cars ready and able to join the caravan, each with a driver and at least one “co-pilot” to monitor the Signal chat. The cars were decorated in car chalk proclaiming “Abolish ICE”, “Stop US Wars”, “Tax The Rich”, and “No Killer Cargo Thru OAK”. 

This intensive preparation led to the execution of a wildly successful caravan. The key tactic was having four lead cars, with the co-pilots in constant communication, along with a police liaison in the middle of the formation, and a rear car providing updates from there.

When we reached the point where four through-lanes emerged, we slowed to two miles an hour in four columns and proceeded to the terminal area. As we approached Terminal 1, we were greeted with raucous cheers and sign waving. We responded with car horns and fists in the air out of the car windows. Suddenly, people carrying three banners emerged from the crowd, took the street, and led us through the airport on foot. Horns and cheering continued. It was exhilarating and powerful. The sheriffs decided to intervene by segregating the last third of the caravan into the far left lane reserved for car shares. So now the caravan was slowing traffic in that area as well.

It took the caravan 40 minutes to snake through the airport. We were able to stay in formation across all the lanes and keep our speed at 2 mph until the entire caravan cleared the airport. By then, the sheriffs had blocked off the two closest exits leading back to the terminal.

No worries. With the Terminal 1 rally concluded, we cheered our victory and drove back to the union hall. 

The road to May Day 2026

Complementing the traditional afternoon rally and march by the Oakland Sin Fronteras coalition, the morning airport action marked a structure test and turning point in the coalescence of progressive and working class East Bay organizations around demands and tactics that we can build on over the coming two years. Getting to this point was the work of many months by East Bay DSA’s Fighting the Oligarchy campaign.  

The campaign, voted East Bay DSA’s top priority at our June 2025 convention, began by organizing in solidarity with the Federal Unionists Network. It was an important goal of the campaign to help the FUN’s Bay Area Hub grow their ranks and develop their organizing capacities and reach. By the early Fall, that goal was well advanced, through a variety of means that included regular canvasses of federal workers at workplaces in Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco. 

Another important campaign goal, however, was focused more broadly on the growing mass resistance to the Trump regime:

“Shape the politics of East Bay resistance: Cohere the growing mass movement in the East Bay to fight the oligarchy and incipient fascism by providing support and leadership, democratic organizational practices, and a political analysis that this is a fight in solidarity with the working class against capitalism, not with the Democratic against the Republican party.”

Since Labor Day, the Fight the Oligarchy campaign turned our focus to becoming a valued partner of Bay Area resistance organizations and coalitions.

We met with the Alameda Labor Council and SEIU 1021, proposing a series of “May Day in the Time of Trump” political education and organizing trainings, which both organizations endorsed, along with ACCE, Bay Resistance, the FUN and several more unions. The first event covered the history of May Day, and brought together a panel of partner organizational leaders who spoke to their vision for using this May Day to build power toward May Day 2028. The second featured Eric Blanc speaking to the Lessons of Minneapolis, followed by a table discussion and organizing training.

At the national level, one of our co-chairs was actively engaged in MayDayStrong, and in the NLC May Day committee. Locally, we focused on several key centers of resistance activity in the East Bay: Bay Resistance (a coalition led by numerous labor and community organizations), ACCE and Indivisible East Bay. Through building relationships and showing up to do work, we proved ourselves to be good leaders and organizers in the final months of 2025, at No Kings in October, and a People over Billionaires action at the homes of several SF billionaires, led by ACCE. This resulted in our being included in the planning committees for No Kings 3 and the Bay Area’s MayDayStrong solidarity school. 

With partners convened by Bay Resistance, we planned a February 27 “train the trainer” event geared to turning people out to the solidarity school, and a solidarity school in San Francisco attended by about 1,000 people. East Bay DSA contributed two trainers at the solidarity school, including co-leading a training for union members, which was focused on organizing No Kings participants to take action on May Day. The planning for the OAK action began at these regional convenings, with East Bay membership organizations, primarily DSA, ACCE and Indivisible, taking on the challenge of quickly planning the OAK action.

Internal Organizing

With more than 2,000 members and dozens of active chapter projects spread across four counties, it took work to coordinate and get everyone on the same page about shared priorities in our chapter, even for a big event like May Day. 

Over the last couple of years we’ve worked at improving our ability to turn out to protests en masse - first by establishing rapid response endorsements and turnout infrastructure for Palestine solidarity work after October 7, and more recently by calling and planning our own actions, like our solidarity march and rally with Minneapolis in Oakland on January 23. 

By late February, it was clear that East Bay DSA would be playing a major role in making May Day big in the Bay this year, and a core group sprang into action to get organized internally. We began meeting in late March, setting a goal of 200 East Bay DSA members committing to not work on May Day. Our initial group of ten members from different chapter projects eventually grew to include nearly twenty actively planning East Bay DSA’s roles in the OAK action as well as the Oakland Sin Fronteras rally and march. We coalesced on the demands we wanted to center, brought those back to our coalition partners, made a communications and turnout plan, held a chapter leaders’ meeting to incorporate our May Day asks into their organizing, and held a large community meeting on April 28 to get final preparations in place. All of this meant that  dozens of chapter members from several different committees and campaigns helped organize hundreds of people to take action on May Day. 

What comes next

We aspire to play an even bigger role in making sure that May Day actions disrupt the flow of capital next year. That means both continuing to build coalition relationships and getting even more organized as a chapter to be able to put forward clear demands and plan significant actions. 

Our proposed mechanism for doing so (subject to approval at our annual convention on June 7) is establishing a May Day Working Group that will work all year to identify potential opportunities for mass and escalating actions, especially workplace actions. This group will be structured explicitly to bring together leaders from different chapter projects, maximizing our reach and coordination. The hope is that this will put us on an even stronger footing as we look towards May Day 2028. 

This approach is consistent with the national labor priority established by the DSA NPC encouraging chapters to organize toward actions on May Day 2028. The resolution calls for a “2026-27 strategic plan that may add detail, scope, timelines, staff time allocation, budget guidance, and concrete goals to these priorities [including preparing for May Day 2028].”

Meanwhile, several of us will be in St. Louis at the end of May with our local partners, and many DSA members from around the country, to learn and plan together, anticipating major provocations and mass resistance to come.

We’ll go to St. Louis with a new sense of what’s possible. As a structure test, the OAK action exceeded our expectations. ACCE’s Martinez said, “The whole point was to have an assessment of where we were as a movement, a coalition and organizations. While the May Day action came together in just three weeks, it was the culmination of a series of escalating actions that we pulled off together going back to last Fall.” Now, she added, “May Day is becoming more real for a lot of people.”

As one of our members, Eileen T, explained after returning from an exhilarating May Day visit to Chicago, “May Day is a distress signal. It can come at any time.” When it does, we aim to be prepared to fight back and protect our working class communities.

California DSA will be hosting a zoom meeting on May 28 at 6:30 to provide an overview of the two progressive tax measures that will be placed before voters on the November state ballot. You will hear about recent tax the rich efforts in California, and speakers from the campaigns will provide updates. You will also have an opportunity to ask questions and get answers. Register here.

From the time of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto to the present day, taxing the rich has been a central project of the socialist movement. Why?

As long as the capitalist class extracts surplus value from the labor process it will continue to grow richer at the expense of the working class. (See Piketty, R > G). Economic inequality has surpassed Gilded Age proportions. Progressive taxation is an essential means of clawing back some of the wealth created by the working class so that we may fund vital public services and provide the basis for a more egalitarian and democratic society. Campaigning for progressive taxes provides a direct opportunity to raise class consciousness, as the discussion naturally revolves around how inequality benefits the rich, hurts everyone else, and can be at least partly fixed with this solution. 

As such, a tax the rich campaign opens the door to the next level of discussion: how capitalism works, and how democratic socialism can fix its problems. 

A common thread

The other benefit of a tax the rich campaign is that it represents a common thread through just about every other issue and concern to DSA members. If you are working on issues like public transit, public education, universal childcare, public health and safety or social housing, none of these issues can be properly addressed without adequate funding from the state. Taxing the rich is pivotal to success in any of these areas.

If you are interested in electing democratic socialists, once in office they need more funding than currently possessed by the public sector. We shouldn’t be electing socialists to administer austerity, but that’s what usually happens, given the bad choices they face without progressive taxation to fund their work. The ‘electing’ part of local electoral work is also supported by a tax the rich campaign, because taxing the rich remains consistently popular, and when presented in cooperation with local DSA-endorsed candidates who are on board, it broadens their appeal as well.

If you want to stop the imperialist war machine of the US government in its corrupt alliance with private sector capital—including the current AI investment bubble that supports data centers, environmental destruction, and surveillance technology alongside new forms of mass death in other countries—we must wrest as much of that capital as we can out of the hands of the ruling  class so that it doesn’t control these enormous sums to invest. Taxing the rich is a vehicle to do that.

If you wish the labor movement to become more militant, raising class consciousness can be transferable from the ballot box to the workplace. The working class has two methods to retrieve the capital it produces through the labor process: militant, democratic organizing unions that extract a greater share of the pie through collective bargaining, and political organizing to tax the rich. With socialist education as the nexus, each method can reinforce the other.

After November, more taxing the rich

We have created a Tax the Rich Working Group in East Bay DSA to work on the two state ballot measures that will appear in November before the voters. Similar groups have been chartered in other chapters. But our progressive tax work won’t be over with the election. Even if both measures pass, capital will continue to be bloated and the multiracial working class will continue to have needs that can only be met through other forms of progressive taxation, like increased corporate taxes and splitting commercial property off from residential property. After November we intend to turn to political education and legislative efforts along these lines. These will be key components of our ongoing May Day education and coalition-building project, reinforcing the idea of what May Day 2028 signifies in terms of a political economy for workers over billionaires. 

If your chapter has not yet started working on the campaign here’s a chance to get going. Check out the campaign page on the California DSA website. Joining this work will engage the diverse activities of California DSA chapters within a unifying theme and effort. It will help us to stand alongside and uplift our allies in the labor movement and community in common struggle. And it provides the opportunity for pushing beyond reform toward revolution. 

What:‍ ‍Online forum on taxing the rich in California

When: Thursday, May 28, 6:30 – 8 pm

Who:

• Matthew Hardy, Communications Director, California Federation of Teachers

• Doug Jones, Organizer, United Health Workers-SEIU

• Fred Glass, Co-Chair, East Bay DSA Tax the Rich Working Group

Register here.

Here’s how DSA members and other progressives can organize to compete in upcoming intra-party contests.

Oligarchs and the donor class still have a firm grip on the Democratic Party apparatus and politics. But the cracks are increasingly obvious:

Zohran Mamdani; Analilia Mejia; the crumbling of AIPAC/DMFI sway; burial of the DNC’s 2024 autopsy report for fear of what it might reveal; polling numbers that show a party less popular than even Donald Trump; widening gaps between the progressive and corporate wings. 

And now, still small but growing numbers of DSA cadre and allied candidates are competing and winning local, state and federal elections around the country, defeating some guardians of the status quo.

When will the ice break in California?

The day may be coming soon. We’ll know a lot more after June 2 primaries and November 2, when progressives who make “top two” test the thesis that the road to victory is the opposite of chasing Republicans to the right in pursuit of mythical centrist “swing” voters. 

Next, we’ll have an opportunity to contest for control of the state Democratic Party.

Compared to many other states, the composition of the California party’s Central Committee, which elects its officers and endorses candidates, approves the party platform and passes resolutions, enables significant small D democracy, if we organize. 

About a third of the approximately 3,500 members are elected in caucus-like processes—4 in each of the 80 state Assembly districts. Voting has gone more and more by mail and online since the pandemic, with plenty of opportunity for mischief but also real opportunities for progressives —again, if we organize. 

Path to success

The path to success in the 2026-27 ADEMs (Assembly District Election Meetings) is to create solid, diverse slates of candidates in each district, with strict solidarity—each member working hard to get out the vote for all—facilitated by an effective system to register voters in a special process. (It’s not enough to simply be a registered Democrat, though that is required.)

Another third of delegates to the state Central Committee will be selected by county central committees, which in most of the state will be elected on the 2028 primary ballots (exact methods vary some from county to county, confusingly). In most locations, a similar process of creating progressive slates and campaigning for them will be in order.

Recruiting candidates to construct ADEM slates needs to begin now. They must file by late this year, with voter registration following, and balloting in early 2027 (exact dates to be announced). Many DSA members have run in recent rounds, which come every two years, though participation has been passive to negligible in many chapters. Chapter electoral committees may want to change that, determining the best strategy—and it can vary a lot depending on the demographics, politics (e.g. union strength, local Democratic leadership) of the district.

Help for Organizing

Gearing up to help organize locally is a PAC in formation, the People’s Democracy Network (PDN), operating fully outside the Democratic Party but dedicated primarily to building power for the left inside the party. We hope to accelerate the ability to work with local progressives to build ADEM slates this year, but the main organizing needs to be done by people with local relationships and skills in each district. Careful navigation is often needed to forge coalitions where necessary and to counter fake “progressive” rivals. Last time, we saw an unusual infusion of money for competitors in some districts by PACs apparently fronting for Israel lobby groups.

PDN will soon be recruiting members to support its particular narrow mission – building progressive power in the California Democratic Party, from the outside. Exact criteria are in the process of being determined, but to be clear, it’s not exclusive: members of DSA or other groups are welcome. To read PDN’s mission statement and 2024 policy platform (needs updating, including the name), go here.

For a more detailed description of the ADEM process and advice on constructing local slates, please see here.

And to let us know of your interest in helping organize in your district, please submit this form.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Senate candidate Aber Kawas — the first of a series with members of New York City DSA’s 2026 slate.

The post Aber Kawas sees a Path to Principles in Public Office appeared first on Democratic Left.