Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ four-decade artistic project aims to teach us that we must cherish the work of taking care. A new film showcases the work of Ukeles, the artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation.

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In addition to high-stakes elections in New York, DSA candidates are on the ballot tonight in Maryland and Utah. 

The post LIVE BLOG: Historic Bloc of Socialists Going to Albany appeared first on Democratic Left.

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By: Travis Wayne 

DRACUT – In Beaver Brook Village, organizing began with mold. 

Beaver Brook Village is a restored textile mill named for the waterway that bisects the town, over which the complex’s tower looms, upstream and across the Merrimack River from Lowell. Now an apartment complex, the renovated mill was originally celebrated for its 47 units of affordable housing, first renting at $1000 to $1500 when opened in 2000. 

The landlords – TMI Property Management – have doubled that rent in the time since. 

As of August 2025, a majority (55%) of Lowell tenants were “rent-burdened,” or spending over 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Yet when tenants began to organize together in early 2026, rent only existed as the backdrop of the campaign that organically emerged. Tenants were motivated by how changes in living conditions impacted themselves and their neighbors’ lives when they decided to fight for a better home together – starting with mold.

Spores of Discontent

Something was wrong with the roof. 

No one could tell at first. Moisture that led to total dilapidation was endemic but its only visible evidence was seen in one unit. The reason, over time, became clear:  management had replaced many units’ flooring with vinyl. Vinyl flooring, a landlord special, can be used to hide mold effectively. 

Mold infestations can be dangerous. To the healthy, mold in the home can lead to low-level chronic inflammatory illness, nasal and sinus issues, and brain fog. Conditions can worsen with continued exposure. Concerningly, mold exposure can most negatively affect people with asthma, the pregnant, children, and the immunocompromised – including elders, of which many lived at Beaver Brook Village. 

For those most vulnerable, mold spores producing new organismic colonies can become real threats to memories, to familial connections, to lives and lifetimes due to quality of life and health impacts. Landlords can neglect tenants with little legal consequence, utilizing loopholes with name changes or LLC trades, to save costs as tenants with few resources lose even more.

As renters at Beaver Brook Village began to speak to one another, it became clear the problem was not isolated to one unit. 

Some neighbors admitted water damage; others were standoffish to any neighbors who knocked on their door. One tenant, whose partner was allegedly denied accommodation by the landlord, indicated he’d install every piece of equipment and charge TMI Property Management back. 

Even though “that’s spending money on the landlord’s property,” the renter shut the door on the tenant organizer that neighbored them. They kept coming to talk. Through that patient work, tenants came to understand their  neighbor’s dissatisfaction with the landlord’s response. Simultaneously, the dissatisfied resident came to trust tenant organizers’ sincerity enough to attend Tenant Association meetings and research ADA requirements for the building together with their neighbors.

What Can Grow With Mold?

As mold grew in countless units, one neighbor’s interest in the potential of collective action also did.

Mike R attended a training in the Merrimack Valley by the local Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) in December 2025, run by the Housing Working Group of Boston DSA. Local ETOC organizers adapted materials from the Housing Justice Commission (HJC), who are credited with catalyzing the creation of ten new citywide tenant unions and over 500 trained tenant organizers. He credited the training with giving him the tools to build the Organizing Committee of the Beaver Brook Village Tenant Association (BBVTA). According to residents, while many HJC projects nationally link tenants to citywide autonomous tenant unions (ATUs) affiliated with the Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN), BBVTA is supported by Boston DSA directly.

Flyers went up and were taken down by management over and over again, which provided the four initial Organizing Committee members with talking points against management.

Between the first and second meeting, BBVTA started to track the pattern of mold and moisture reports. They canvassed and held one-on-one conversations with their neighbors at their doors together. Multiple tenants in line reported similar conditions, so tenants were able to figure out a specific section of the roof was a potential source of mold. They had to take the issue of mold more systematically. 

According to Mike R in conversation with Working Mass, “we would all call the Board of Health to get an inspector on the landlord, as individuals, coordinated together.” This made the inspection process collective, too.

Within and Beyond Property Limits

The Organizing Committee agendized other discussion issues as the Beaver Brook Village Tenant Association meetings became larger spaces for tenants to talk about struggles they experienced in their homes. One of the first occasions for response to collective issues beyond mold was during a Nor’easter, which strangled the coast while stranding and endangering residents, particularly elders who relied on the sidewalk. For the first winter ever, residents could respond collectively:

During the first snowstorm, it shut down all the sidewalks, right? And they wouldn’t clear the sidewalks. After the landlord ignored the ticket I submitted, another tenant submitted another. Only once we coordinated did the landlord do something just an hour later.

Tenants that spoke with Working Mass emphasized that another major factor that infuriated them was the landlord charging fees for using communal space. The landlords charge $500 to use half the room for special events, for example, otherwise locking the common room space with authorization granted through the app of TMI Property Management itself. 

Both the whole community room and full kitchen were once free for the community. 

There was also a broader sense of instability among many tenants. Elders shared experiences from when the renovated mill was owned by its first landlords, who essentially foreclosed in 2012. Long-term tenants’ reports stood in stark contrast to the current ownership. The former owners emphasized then that “the tenants are not going to be affected whatsoever;” by the transition, but now, tenants’ ability to breathe and be stably housed is jeopardized by chronic mold infestation.

Tenants have plugged into broader struggles for housing justice in the region through BBVTA, as well. Beaver Brook Village tenants have begun discussing how to organize an eviction defense of the most vulnerable tenants in their region and have organized canvasses of their neighborhoods to win statewide rent control in 2026 – a campaign led by the Homes for All coalition.

BBVTA is not the first organized tenantry to take action on rent control. In other parts of the state, other Tenant Associations and unions have responded and acted for rent control in accordance with their memberships. For example, the citywide Easthampton Tenants Union (ETU) in Western Massachusetts organized through Spring 2026 for rent control only for its membership to vote to not support the legislative compromise that would add just cause protections in exchange for allowing landlords to raise rents in between individual tenancies, increasing the cap from 5% to 10%, and relegating it to opt-in from municipal bodies instead of the state itself.

The state’s Supreme Judicial Court swept in to end discussion on June 23. Even though 70% of Massachusetts residents favor rent control (or perhaps, because of that), the small number of unelected individuals that make up the court ruled that the ballot question was invalid. The Legislature, not the people who supported rent control and included the rising tenants’ movement, would decide. 

But even as forces from above intervene, tenants’ own consciousness and practice of their political agency grows with each day. At Beaver Brook Village, whether on questions of disaster relief or winning back community space or winning rent control, thinking collectively about politics was only possible once the Association itself was born. Tenants have to know each other to talk about the world to intervene in the world. In the words of Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, founders of the country’s largest tenants’ union of dues-paying households: “under political agency, there is communal life.”

Pre-Majority Action to Save Lives 

In the labor movement, a pre-majority action (where less than 50% of the unit takes action) is rare compared to the slow process of building towards the milestone of 70% support in a union election. This is necessary to survive a fight with the boss with only 50%, and thus win an election free and clear. Labor unions solidify their victories through a bureaucratic process which eventually leads to a certified contract through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). 

That is not the case in the U.S. tenants’ movement. For tenants in struggle, victories are far less likely to be certified or go through any kind of officially-mediated process. Terms are determined in every arena instead of by a process decided from on high. 

Tenants are more likely than workers to take pre-majority action. Even though the movement has given birth to multiple strategies stressing different levels of majority support, each of which is predicated on points of leverage and unlocks different tactics, the most pronounced strategic differences within the national tenants’ movement’s institutions. The Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN) and the Tenant Union Federation (TUF) exist on questions of block-by-block and building-by-building organizing versus pressure campaigns on strategic landlords. Those differences loom larger than questions of majority support in the absence of any NLRB-like body adjudicating the union form.

Landlords’ strategic toolbox remains as unevenly consolidated as tenants. Some landlords under corporate ownership and slumlord vultures may have every dirty trick up their sleeve, but many landlords are wholly unfamiliar with the concept of the “tenants’ union” itself. They may adapt tactics used by other landlords; they may just as well not.

For example, in the LA Tenants Union, when facing an issue where landlords could attempt to localize to individual units, landlords offered the tenants of Los Mariachis individual deals out of their exploitive leases. L.A. tenant Irma Aguilar, then, said:

The owner wants to peel us off in small groups over time, rather than all at once.

TMI Property Management, meanwhile, did not utilize the strategy of individual unit divide-and-conquer. Instead, they absolved themselves of responsibility completely. When the inspector came in response to tenant pressure, TMI Property Management also attended the inspection – and attempted to to avoid responsibility of roof ownership. 

TMI Property Management punted responsibility to American Tower, which owned the roof ostensibly to provide wireless coverage. Since the case was “too complex to navigate sooner” as a result of the various managerial companies above tenants’ heads, TMI Property Management delayed three months, from February to May, citing American Tower as the reason for not complying with the inspection. Only under renewed pressure did the landlord agree to replace the roof.

The inspector wrote a letter to American Tower to pressure the company on behalf of tenants for the roof replacement, but provided an “unsatisfying answer” to requests to include mold testing in the inspection, according to tenant reports. One tenant expressed “cautious optimism,” while Mike R indicated in remarks to Working Mass that “as long as they’re operating in good faith, the Association is satisfied with keeping them accountable.”

Renting the “Dark Satanic Mills”

In some ways, Beaver Brook Village tenants share much in common with other tenants of textile mills scattered across rural and suburban New England. In neighboring Connecticut, in Putnam town where another one of the ruins of William Blake’s “dark satanic mills” has been renovated to house 82 units, the main force that eventually drove those Cargill Falls Mill tenants to rent strike was also environmental conditions. There, tests showed toxic lead and dust in 68 of 71 units tested that poisoned a toddler and led the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate the site. 

As the Beaver Brook Village Tenant Association seeks to build from a pre-majority TA to a majority TA by engaging more and more neighbors in the collective process of organizing, they identified collectively the need to build a mutual aid strategy to slowly increase engagement across the apartment complex: “slow, respectful” spadework. According to Mike R:

We don’t want to become a service for people… but mutual aid, you know, gets trust. We are an organization that can deliver – and we need to prove that.

One Beaver Brook Village tenant, for example, faced unit damage she couldn’t afford to replace. The landlord agreed to repair her dishwasher, eventually following through, after other tenants encouraged her to report. The Organizing Committee also prioritized the development of reliable tech support for neighbors – desperately needed by elder tenants – offered in ‘office hours’ by volunteer residents. Tenants described how these office hours could cohere the beginning of a BBVTA grievance system.

BBVTA’s Organizing Committee has doubled in size since its first meeting half a year ago.

Even though tenant organizers at Beaver Brook Village have yet to cultivate the building-wide trust needed to sustain the kind of wildcat rent strike undertaken by the Cargill Tenants Union, BBVTA’s rise shows that many of industrial New England’s broken textile mills may be in a long evolution from sites of workplace struggle into sites of tenant struggle. 

How residents organize differently or similarly to the workers who once toiled in the rooms where residents now break bread, or between associations of residents of renovated mills separated by vast distances, remains in the hands of the tenants themselves to determine.

Travis Wayne is the managing editor of Working Mass, a member of the Greater Boston Tenants Union (GBTU), and a former organizer of the Triangle Tenant Union (TTU).

The post From Mold to Force: How Tenants of a Dracut Textile Mill Organized An Association appeared first on Working Mass.

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A national program is helping chapters open headquarters using a participatory selection process. Twenty chapters in every region benefited, and the program will expand to a new round of grants.

The post Building the Party, One Office at a Time appeared first on Democratic Left.

The Queens assemblymember built a career on AIPAC support and silence on Gaza. Now, facing a Palestinian American DSA challenger, he’s perfected the political choreography of looking left while leaning right.

The post The Art of the Dodge: Steven Raga Perfects the Politics of “Progressive Except for Palestine” appeared first on Democratic Left.

This is an opinion piece written collaboratively by the Immigrant Solidarity Working Group and was not voted on at a general membership meeting. Opinion pieces from sub-bodies do not reflect the opinions of all members and are not chapter approved statements.

It is with no stutter and no hesitation that Salt Lake DSA stands with the 15 defendants facing charges for anti-ICE organizing in Minneapolis. Their stance is part of a proud, long-standing tradition of resistance against law enforcement overreach in this country. Faced with the indiscriminate violence of this winter’s ICE/DHS activity in the Twin Cities, these neighbors banded together in an inspiring and powerful model. After these feral agents murdered two and celebrated their own impunity, the regime attempts to contort law and morality to punish their real enemy: our unwillingness to submit.

There is risk in taking a principled stance. It is in that spirit that we also condemn the charges faced by two former court clerks in Logan that allegedly helped individuals evade ICE agents at the courthouse. When faced with an opportunity to perform the moral, righteous act, these clerks took it—at their own personal risk. They acted against a vindictive and thoughtless regime intent on tearing apart families, and for that we salute them.

It is not enough to point out the blatant hypocrisy of the Trump regime, as it is not only painfully obvious, it is expected and routine. They decry the “weaponization” of the law while also rewarding loyalist felons with pardons. The hypocrisy and double-dealing are markers of a system in a permanent tailspin. Trump and his cronies find themselves in the criminal trough of our economic system, resorting to merely demanding submission and collecting bribes. They are rapidly running out of distractions, and soon, the lid will tighten yet further.

As the administration criminalizes dissent in America, we implore all Utahns: do not consider yourself exempt from this assault on your civil liberties. Stand with us, or stand beside us, but at least stand up and be seen in opposition to this continued erosion of freedoms. In this capitalist system, law is merely a weapon in the hands of the powerful, completely divorced from morality and righteousness. As a weapon of the powerful, once you stand crosswise to their goals, the law will be used to hammer you back into place. It is time for us to seize the hammer.

We know we stand firmly on the right side of history, because between solidarity and hate, we will always choose the former.  In time, we will win; the only question is, for how long will we all need to suffer until we can put an end to this madness? How many of us will be caught up in the gears? When the working class has unified to fight this fight together, we will no longer have to wonder. We will have already won.

The post Solidarity is Not a Crime first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

The Class podcast interviews an organizer on the importance of bringing a political vision to the pushback against AI data centers.

The post Portland DSA Organizes Against Data Centers appeared first on Democratic Left.

Ahead of Tuesday's elections Democratic Left has published interview with ten DSA candidates on the ballot in New York City.

The post Meet NYC DSA’s 2026 Slate appeared first on Democratic Left.

U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat has failed his district as his constituents are priced out. His opponent represents a real challenge to the displacement crisis.

The post Darializa Avila Chevalier Represents the Future of her District appeared first on Democratic Left.

Foreign atrocities and domestic repression share a common racist logic. Movements that recognize the connection may be best positioned to resist both.

The post Trump’s Wars, Foreign and Domestic, Extend a Long Imperial History appeared first on Democratic Left.