Tuesday, October 27 (2:00 PM – 7:00 PM) GOTV Turnout (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday, October 27 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday, October 27 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Ballot Measure Turnout Tuesday (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday, October 28 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) TOWG x Prop I Canvass | Know Your Rights (in person at 1499 California)

Thursday, October 29 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Yes on I: Tenant Phonebank (in person at 11 Grove St)

Thursday, October 29 (6:30 PM – 9:30 PM) Spooky, Scary Socialists: Electoral Bar Crawl (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, October 29 (7:30 PM – 10:00 PM) Haunted Housing: Movie Night (in person at 16 Sherman)

Friday, October 30 (10:00 AM – 8:00 PM) Election Weekend GOTV (in person at 650 Ellis)

Friday, October 30 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) TOWG x Prop I Canvass | Know Your Rights (in person at 650 Ellis)

Friday, October 30 (6:00 PM – 9:00 PM) Open Mic Night (in person at Mercury Cafe, 201 Octavia)

Saturday, October 31 (10:30 AM – 1:00 PM) Touch Grass! with Florence Fang Community Farm (in person at 1 Diana)

Sunday, November 1 (11:00 AM – 8:00 PM) Election Weekend GOTV (1916 McAllister and 558 Capp Street)

Sunday, November 1 (3:00 PM – 4:45 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Monday, November 2 (10:00 AM – 7:00 PM) Election Eve GOTV (1916 McAllister and 558 Capp Street)

Monday, November 2 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Yes On I – Social Housing Working Group Lit Drop 

Monday, November 2 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Working Group Meeting (zoom, meet, and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday, November 3 (8:00 AM – 8:00 PM) Election Day GOTV (1916 McAllister and 558 Capp Street)

Wednesday, November 4 (6:00 PM – 9:00 PM) New Member Happy Hour (in person at Zeitgeist, 199 Valencia)

Wednesday, November 4 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, November 5 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, November 5 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, November 7 (2:00 PM – 4:00 PM) TOWG Film Screening: Home is a Hotel (in person at 1975 Post st)

Saturday, November 8 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) No Appetite for Apartheid – Consumer Canvas 

Saturday, November 8 (1:00 PM – 2:30 PM) What is DSA? (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, November 8 (2:00 PM – 4:00 PM) Canvas Workers with SF EWOC (in person at corner of 15th and Valencia)

Saturday, November 8 (3:00 PM – 4:45 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (in person at corner of 15th and Valencia)

Saturday, November 8 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group Meeting (zoom)

Saturday, November 8 (6:15 PM – 7:30 PM) Working Class Gender Liberation (zoom)

Monday, November 9 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (in person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate)

Monday, November 9 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Get out the Vote for Our Endorsed Campaigns

We are 1 week out from election day, and we need all hands on deck for our endorsed campaigns. We need YOUR help in this final stretch to make sure San Franciscans don’t fall for the lies being spun by the oligarchs and tech elites. Fill out this form and join us!

Haunted House Movie Night

A spectre is haunting our housing… 

Come watch Bernard Rose’s horror classic, Candyman, which terrifyingly depicts our cursed housing system. Set in Chicago’s Cabrini Green projects we see how disinvestment from public housing and gentrification create a monstrous rift in which a vengeful spirit emerges. With hair raising rents and ghoulish landlords San Francisco is experiencing its own real estate nightmare. Join us as we discuss how real estate forces harm our communities and what we can do together to fight back. DSA SFs Tenant Organizing Working Group will be hosting this free film screening at 16 Sherman Street, SF on Thursday, October 29th, 7:30pm. 

Food and drink provided. Thanks!

Open Mic Night with DSA SF

Join us this Friday for a DSA SF open mic at Mercury Cafe (201 Octavia St) from 6 PM – 9 PM. We’ll be hearing performances from comrades and community members, and invite you to perform or listen. All languages are welcome, no experience necessary. Costumes are encouraged!

EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing — November Session

Do you have problems at your workplace or generally have frustrations with the systems governing your communities? Would you like to learn how to talk to people in order to build collective power? Are you interested in discussing organizing strategies with comrades of various organizing levels?

If you said “yes” to any of those questions (or are just a radical person), attend our sessions each Sunday of November 3:00 – 4:30 PM for the EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing course! Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) is a collaboration between national DSA and the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) to organize unorganized workplaces and build a distributed, grassroots organizing program to support workers organizing at the workplace.

This training course is meant to help you build your union from the ground up alongside workers in your industry. It doesn’t require an organizing background to understand the material, which covers topics including mapping and charting, building an organizing committee, uniting over common concerns, and how to take action. If you’re interested in becoming any level of organizer for EWOC, this course is mandatory.

This course will be in-person, with the group watching the EWOC lectures and the discussion activities occurring at the DSA office (1916 McAllister). If you can’t make all of the sessions, reach out to san-francisco@workerorganizing.org for accommodations.

RSVP here

Hands Off Our Vote!

DSA SF joins other organizations in the Bay Resistance coalition to support an election defense resolution that will introduced by Supervisor Chyanne Chen at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors this Tuesday. This resolution asks that San Francisco commit to protecting election integrity, oppose interference in the election and voter intimidation, and that San Franciscans have the right to exercise their constitutional rights of freedom of speech and right to assemble to defend free and democratic elections.

Organizations that have signed onto this resolution include Bay Resistance, SF Rising, the San Francisco Labor Council, the California Nurses Association, SEIU USWW, the California Federation of Teachers, Indivisible SF, just to name a few. A 9:30 AM press conference is scheduled to take place this Tuesday at SF City Hall to announce the resolution.

We need to be ready to stand up to Trump and MAGA should they cause election chaos and try to delegitimize the election results.

You don’t need to agree with “The Blueprint” that market socialism and workplace democracy beat central planning to see that a vision of how socialism would work is a key organizing tool.

The post When Making the Case for Socialism, a Plan Beats No Plan appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Javier Moreno Zacarés

This was originally published in New Left Review on October 9, 2026.

Fifteen years after the indignados occupied the Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s central plaza is once again the locus of a mass movement that has brought Spain to a political impasse. How are we back here again? The immediate trigger was the eviction of an elderly tenant. Maricarmen Abascal, who had occupied her rent-capped apartment in central Madrid since 1956, was expelled from her home on 23 September after the investment fund Urbagestión acquired the property and exploited a legal loophole to quintuple her rent. Maricarmen’s age and vulnerability – the 87-year-old was removed on a hospital bed and has since died – made it a particularly egregious breach of the moral economy. The case struck a nerve, prompting a political storm; the government has now announced a snap election. As protests spread nationwide, the encampment at Puerta del Sol consolidated under the leadership of the Sindicato de Inquilinas, Madrid’s tenant union. Media outlets are reporting on the motions passed at the open-air general assembly. One decision has been of particular public interest: a general strike for the right to housing, announced for 11 November, a few weeks before the election.

The political elite faces a reckoning. At the outset of the current parliamentary term in 2023, the progressive coalition headed by Sánchez’s centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE) placed housing at the top of the agenda. The promises were ambitious: the provision of mass social housing, the imposition of rent controls, the reassertion of the public interest against rentier logics. Yet these commitments yielded little. This was partly due to the obstruction of the right, both in parliament and in the regional governments under its control. But a share of the blame lies in the ambivalence of the Socialist Party itself, whose ministers have repeatedly expressed discomfort with what they regard as excessive regulation of housing. The junior coalition partner Sumar, a nebulous alliance of progressive parties, has proven feeble in holding the Socialists to account. They are now also a target of the protests, who charge the entire governing alliance of complicity with the rentiers. Amid the fury in the streets, Sumar’s cabinet members hastened to pressure the Socialist housing minister, Isabel Rodríguez – herself a landlord who owns multiple properties – to approve emergency measures to block evictions and institute permanent rolling contracts, both key demands of the tenant unions. Last Friday, both measures were struck down in parliament, to the anger of the masses gathered outside.

That a recalcitrant right-wing opposition – comprising the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox – would block the measures was entirely predictable. What was less so was that the deciding vote would be cast by an ally of the government: the centre-right Junts, party of the Catalan-nationalist bourgeoisie. The vote revealed a peculiarity of the Spanish conjuncture. Though the right-wing bloc is the largest in parliament, it is divided along nationalist lines, fractures the government has exploited – drawing support from the Catalan right to keep the Spanish unionist right out of power. It was always an unstable arrangement, premised on nation trumping class. On the housing question, the plurinational right voted in alignment with its shared interests (Junts has the largest proportion of landlords in parliament).

The Spanish right now enjoys a comfortable lead in the polls, which point to a PP–Vox coalition if elections were held tomorrow. But the wind is blowing in an uncomfortable direction for them. Over the past week, public opinion has swung massively in favour of regulating house prices, even among a slim majority of right-wing voters. In a matter of days, the protests have shifted the national conversation away from the right’s preferred talking points of crime and migration, overwriting a summer of hysteria around the border crisis in Ceuta. They have also deflected attention from the corruption scandals afflicting PSOE: only last June, a former minister in Sánchez’s cabinet was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison for influence-peddling related to substandard Covid-19 face masks. Ever the survivor, Sánchez has seized the moment with a characteristically audacious move. He has framed the election on 29 November as a plebiscite on the housing question, shifting the blame for it onto the right and boldly appealing to the electorate to ‘subdue the elites’, hoping to ride the wave of unrest that is also aimed against him. 

*

Housing has been a political flashpoint in Spain ever since a giant real estate bubble crashed the economy between 2007–14. The circumstances in many ways paralleled those that led to the Great Recession: financial liberalization; easy credit supercharged by cross-border flows; homeowners mortgaged to the hilt; skyrocketing house prices stoked by reckless speculation. What stood out in the Spanish case was the extent to which growth and employment came to depend on a hypertrophied construction sector, rendering broad sections of the economy highly exposed to the inevitable crash. In the 2000s, as rapid population growth and the arrival of Eurozone capital accelerated house-price increases, Spain built more homes than the UK, Italy and Germany combined. At the peak of the boom in 2006, when annual housing construction reached 700,000 units, reports from the property sector estimated that ‘structural demand’ – that is, demand for housing to live in – was only 400,000 homes a year. The resulting surplus, built on a purely self-referential, speculative demand, was the substance of the bubble. When household indebtedness hit its ceiling in 2007 and transactions slowed, it burst: prices stagnated and then plummeted. Speculative developers ceased building, grinding the engine of the economy to a halt and releasing shockwaves of job destruction. At the height of the crisis in 2013, unemployment reached a historic high of 26 per cent (56 per cent among the young). Developers, banks and the state rushed to expel families who could not meet rent or mortgage payments. Between 2008 and 2015 there were roughly half a million evictions, half of them foreclosures. The bitter irony was that hundreds of thousands lost their homes because there were hundreds of thousands of homes too many.

In a series of costly bailouts, the state absorbed the losses of the property-financial complex, bringing it to the edge of insolvency. Successive administrations – of both the PSOE and the PP – passed the cost to the masses, inflicting punitive austerity under the watchful eye of Europe’s fiscal hawks. The usual sanctimony about belt-tightening and living beyond one’s means fell flat. Political parties were plagued by relentless corruption scandals, the majority involving dealings with developers and builders no less. Bankers, meanwhile, flaunted their rapacity by paying themselves obscene bonuses as their banks were being nationalized, leaving the state to foot the bill.

The ensuing crisis of legitimacy set the scene for the rise of the indignados, or the 15-M movement as it is more often referred to in Spain. On 15 May 2011, a series of mass protests descended on city squares, taking aim at austerity measures and the oligarchic bent of the political system. The movement radiated out from Puerta del Sol, where protesters emulated the camp then ongoing in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Though the social composition of the protest was broad, it was led by downwardly mobile middle-class youths, many of whom became politicized for the first time at the movement’s assemblies. The memorable yellow T-shirts of the activist group Juventud Sin Futuro captured the feeling with a defiant slogan: ‘no home, no job, no pension, no fear’. Eventually, the 15-M’s occupations dispersed into neighbourhood councils, where a wave of radicalized youngsters flooded into a myriad of militant groups. A cycle of mass unrest and civil disobedience followed. The most prominent organization was the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), whose activists acted as the shock troops of the anti-austerity movement. Sabotaging eviction procedures was their staple practice: they confronted bailiffs and their riot police escorts on arrival, barricaded themselves with the families being expelled, occupied repossessed homes, or squatted entire tower blocks to provide accommodation for the dispossessed. The extra-parliamentary struggles of these years proved extremely successful in repoliticizing questions previously regarded as shameful personal failures – unemployment, debt, eviction – turning them into vectors of mass resistance.

Yet they were much less successful in bringing the state to heel. Ironically, the first major electoral outcome of the 15-M protests was a crushing landslide for the right in November 2011. Though the movement had wide public support, its injunction to abstain from voting for the neoliberal uniparty – ‘PPSOE’ – was followed more by the left than the right. PSOE’s vote collapsed while PP’s remained stable, translating into an absolute parliamentary majority for the neoliberal conservatives of Mariano Rajoy, who proceeded to further slash public spending, introduce a draconian labour market reform, and sell off the real estate assets acquired from the banks to global corporate landlords. With its dominance in parliament, the new administration was able to invoke the support of a ‘silent majority’ to rule by decree while cracking down on protest. At the behest of its Interior Minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz – an ultra-Catholic in the habit of praying in Franco’s mausoleum – the government introduced the notorious ‘Gag Law’ tailored to the new social movements, which included punitively high fines for blocking evictions. Meanwhile, in a perfect visual metaphor for the dissociation of the elite from the masses, parliament was fenced off from the public and fortified with a permanent detachment of riot police.

After years of being stonewalled, street-fighting fatigue began to set in around 2014. The gigantic March for Dignity that year – demanding ‘bread, work and a roof’ and culminating in riots in Madrid – was the final flashpoint of this insurrectionary cycle. Seeing the tide turning, activists previously committed to the extra-parliamentary ethos of the 15-M began to form political parties, and probe strategic entry points into the state. One approach was to capitalize on the anti-establishment mood to mount a broad, left-populist offensive aimed at capturing state power ‘from above’; the path taken by Podemos, founded in 2014 with the priority of ‘storming the heavens’ in a general election. Another was the formation of electoral coalitions between urban activists and pre-existing left-wing parties to wrest state power at the local level; a route explored by the multitude of municipalist platforms that in 2015 won office in the country’s largest cities, including Cádiz, Santiago, Zaragoza, Valencia, Madrid and of course, Barcelona, where PAH’s charismatic spokeswoman, Ada Colau, was elected mayor with housing at the top of her agenda.

Both strategies ran into the trouble of operating in the inhospitable terrain of the state. Barcelona’s Right to Housing Plan of 2016 was fairly successful in blocking evictions and expanding the social housing stock through a combination of public construction, aggressive acquisition campaigns and the imposition of social housing quotas on developers. But this was the most advanced expression of a municipalist strategy that faced severe challenges from the start. Local reformers ran up against the austerity imposed by the central government; encountered entrenched resistance at all levels of the state bureaucracy; and were forced to water down their policy proposals to navigate the political fragmentation of local councils and/or of their own electoral alliances. Frustration set in among activists and voters as the grinding pace of reform failed to live up to the revolutionary rhetoric. Most of the administrations in the ‘cities of change’ proved short-lived, voted out of office in 2019. Barcelona followed suit in 2023.

Podemos faced a different set of challenges. Upon its founding, the party quickly drew in hundreds of thousands, swelling new branches in what promised to be a participatory party-movement. However, the leadership – a group of academics sceptical of the potential of grassroots activism – quickly centralized power and reduced internal democracy to a plebiscitary exercise in which the membership merely ratified decisions handed down from above. Such behaviour followed logically from a left-populist strategy that soon became familiar in Europe and North America, one that revolved around charismatic leadership and disciplined media messaging. This strategy did not require a vibrant, independent grassroots layer, but rather the subordination of the whole organization to an ‘electoral war machine’ commanded from the top. The party’s branches withered away as its members were largely reduced to passive clicktivists. What the party gained in short-term agility from this strategy, it lost in long-term resilience: without organized cadres, it became vulnerable to media attacks and personality-driven factionalism.

Meanwhile, Podemos’s appeal waned as its electoral assaults on the central state were successively repealed. However, in the general elections of 2019 it was able to clinch enough seats to enter coalition with a reluctant PSOE, locking both parties into a fraught partnership. Podemos’s main legislative achievement was the Housing Law of 2023, which introduced a nationwide framework for rent controls. Passed as the municipalist wave died out, it seemed to confirm that the strategic entry point into the state was ‘from above’. Yet the gap between law and practice became apparent soon enough. In control of most regional administrations, the People’s Party and their far-right allies Vox have simply refused to implement it. To this day, the law is only in force in Catalonia and in areas of the Basque Country. The bill also left a glaring loophole around short-term tourist rentals, letting the hollowing out of cities through platforms like Airbnb continue unabated.

*

That rent controls have become a burning issue in a society in which 73.3 per cent of households are owner-occupiers reflects the permutations of the Spanish housing system since the crash. When the bubble burst, the state nationalized a huge pool of ‘toxic assets’. This devalued property could have been used to create a public housing system, badly needed at a time of rampant evictions. Instead, starting in 2013, the state opted to sell them off at fire-sale prices to investment funds. Blackstone became the country’s biggest landlord. In order to relaunch the property market as quickly as possible the state incentivized the business of the ‘mega-landlords’ with tax advantages and tailored regulations, which also benefited a broader swathe of middle-class landlords. Meanwhile, the share of the tenant population has increased for the first time since the 1950s (+7 per cent of households since 2011). Those homeowners expelled from their homes during the crisis returned to the market as tenants. There, they were joined by a new generation excluded from the mortgage market, more strictly regulated in the wake of the crisis. Credit restrictions have suppressed the leveraged purchases of the 2000s, which allowed many to ride the bubble by borrowing against the rising value of their homes or ‘flip’ them for profit.

Meanwhile, residential accumulation has reoriented itself around squeezing the growing captive market of tenants or, failing that, the exploitation of tourist rentals. Economically, the new housing regime is more stable than the previous one. Rents rise more or less in line with wages, devouring the disposable income of tenants, but without the debt-fuelled speculative excesses of the bubble. Politically, however, the present arrangement is far more unstable and more prone to social explosions, owing to the greater prominence of rent tenure, where the conflict between the residential and rent-bearing functions of housing is more transparent than in a mass market of ‘petty-rentier’ speculative homeowners.

Since 2017, Spain has witnessed the emergence of militant tenant unions, which have gained prominence for defeating Blackstone in court and for employing an old tactic of working-class struggle: the rent strike. Although tenants remain a small minority (17 per cent of households), they are demonstrating a capacity to punch far above their weight politically, as their demands mobilize broader strata around the right to housing. A rentier bloc has been taking shape in opposition, headed by large investment funds but sustained by a substantial layer of middle-class landlords, who act as its electoral base. The political frontier of this bloc is difficult to determine, but it clearly runs through the heart of the coalition government. This has been demonstrated by successive PSOE ministers, whose reluctance to regulate rents or openly support the right to housing has repeatedly given them away. With Podemos diminished, since 2023 the Socialists have governed alongside its more cooperative successor, Sumar; an entente cordiale that has failed to bear fruit on housing matters. (Perhaps for this reason Sumar is now floating Colau, former mayor of Barcelona, as a presidential candidate.)

As the left-populist wave recedes, a younger generation of activists is coming to terms with the limits of the electoral experiments of the previous decade – as well as the horizontalism that immediately preceded them. In Puerta del Sol today, formal similarities with 15-M conceal differences of substance. The encampment is once again a plural space – it is populated by three dozen organizations – where successive generations converge and where previously apolitical youngsters are acquiring a new radical consciousness. But in the assemblies there is less blue-sky philosophizing and more strategic discussion; less spontaneity and more coordination of an agreed calendar of escalation. The festive mood of the first iteration has given way to one of discipline, reflecting the maturing of a radical civil society with organizational memory and political experience. The initiative for a general strike came from the Sindicato de Inquilinas; the anarcho-syndicalist unions, which have a presence in the square, promptly joined. The major trade unions – otherwise docile and cooperative with the government – have followed suit. In recent days, the Sindicato has gradually shifted its activity away from the square toward its ‘nodes’ or neighbourhood councils, in preparation for the strike. The vacuum has been increasingly filled by the Movimiento Socialista, a Marxist youth movement highly sceptical of reformist politics, upon which a number of political currents have converged in recent years.

If Sánchez pulls off a comeback in the November election and manages to cobble together another progressive coalition, the balance of parliamentary forces will likely resemble that of today, as will the pace and scale of reform – which is increasingly intolerable to swathes of the population. But if the election plays out as it did almost fifteen years ago, and the right wins a comfortable majority, we can expect a replay of brutal austerity and police crackdown. Only this time, a government more overt in its fascist sympathies will have to face down a hardened and more disciplined extra-parliamentary left – one that will have to come to terms, sooner or later, with how to influence the state and find a fresh synthesis of the dialectic between revolution and reform. Whether this takes the form of new political vehicles contesting state power directly, or of an antagonistic yet tacit division of labour with reformist forces, remains a critical question.

Javier Moreno Zacarés is an Assistant Professor in International Political Economy in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University.

The post Fifteen Years Later appeared first on Working Mass.

This appeal was issued by the World Federation of Trade Unions.

The World Federation of Trade Unions issues a militant, class-oriented and internationalist call to its member organizations and trade unions around the world to make the 2nd International Day of Action of Dockworkers on Oct. 30, 2026, their own cause and support it.

The mobilization is taking place at a critical time, as military conflicts are spreading and war fronts are dangerously expanding and becoming interconnected, from Ukraine to the Middle East. The murderous state of Israel, with the support of the U.S., the European Union and NATO, continues its crime against the Palestinian people and escalates its military aggression against Iran and Lebanon, increasing the danger of an even broader conflict.

Behind the various pretexts lies the conflict among powerful capitalist states and the confrontation between the Euro-Atlantic bloc of the U.S. – NATO – EU and other imperialist centres over markets, energy, raw materials, trade routes and control of strategic infrastructure.

Imperialist wars are not a departure from the “normal” functioning of the capitalist system. They are the continuation of exploitation and competition by other means. Billions are being spent on armaments and the war economy, while wages are squeezed, social spending is cut, healthcare and education are commodified and exploitation reaches extreme levels, with exhausting schedules, including 13-hour working days and work seven days a week.

The peoples have nothing to gain from wars and the antagonisms of the imperialists. They are called upon to pay for profits, wars and the consequences of a new capitalist economic crisis, to sacrifice themselves for interests that are alien to their own, while business groups claim ever larger shares of the spoils.

Ports, railways, airports and transport infrastructure as a whole are being turned into critical hubs for the movement of weapons, ammunition, military equipment and troops. Workers are being pressured to become cogs in the war machine and accomplices in crimes against the peoples.

Dockworkers have already proved that, through organization, collective struggle and coordinated internationalist action, they can prevent ports from being turned into staging grounds for war. They can block the cargoes of death that fuel the Israeli state’s slaughter of the Palestinian people and the spread of war throughout the Middle East.

February 2026 action in 20 ports

On Feb 6, 2026, strike action was held in 20 ports across seven countries. In May, in Istanbul, trade union organizations from 35 ports formed a coordination network, which now encompasses more than 40 ports across the Mediterranean and Europe, with the participation of organizations from France, Greece, the Basque Country, Türkiye, Morocco and Italy, under the slogan: “Dockworkers do not work for war.”

On Oct. 30, trade unions will hold new militant actions and strikes. The common framework “Ports for Peace – Jobs with Dignity” links the struggle against imperialist war with the fight for Collective Labor Agreements, wage increases, stable employment, shorter working hours and substantive health and safety measures.

This is also linked to opposition to privatizations, subcontracted and temporary employment and the use of automation and artificial intelligence to eliminate jobs and intensify exploitation. Technological and scientific progress must serve to reduce working time and improve workers’ lives, not the profitability of the monopolies.

The experience of dockworkers has wider significance for workers in the metal industry and shipyards, railways, energy, telecommunications, transport and logistics. These sectors connect ports, industrial zones and military infrastructure and can play a decisive role in the common struggle against imperialist war and exploitation.

October 30 can mark a major new step in the international, militant coordination of the working class. From port to port, in every workplace and sector, from country to country, workers are sending the message that they will not choose between the camps of their exploiters, will not become cogs in their war machine and will not sacrifice their lives and rights for the profits of the monopolies.

No sacrifice for the profits and wars of the imperialists!

Long live the internationalist solidarity of the working class!

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) is an international federation of trade unions established on October 3, 1945. Founded in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the organization built on the pre-war legacy of the International Federation of Trade Unions as a single structure for trade unions world-wide, following the World Trade Union Conference in London, United Kingdom. The federation went from representing 48 million workers in 2005 to 105 million in 2022.

The post WFTU for Oct. 30 dockworkers’ antiwar action: No sacrifice for imperialist profits & wars! appeared first on Working Mass.

Editorial note: The following is a letter response to Hazel W.’s piece, “In Defense of Abolition.”

In July, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) amended its program to call for “abolishing the police and prison system.” Taken literally, that is a mistake. Society needs institutions to patrol and isolate the dangerous few. Even the most radical socialist societies understood this. For example, the Paris Commune — that libertarian-left experiment — had a prefecture of police. It established neighborhood watches and incarcerated thousands as “hostages of the people of Paris.” The commune is not proof of concept for prison and police abolition. It is stark evidence of just how foundational, including under socialism, those institutions are. Even the society you might least expect to have a carceral system did not go without them.

But the drafters of the DSA’s programmatic amendment tell us it isn’t literal. “Abolishing the police and prison system” is merely a shorthand. It translates roughly to “abolishing prisons and police as they exist under capitalism.” Hazel Williams, a driving force behind the amendment, assures this doesn’t foreclose “some community force under communism” that promotes accountability. She cites approvingly the Paris Commune that, according to Karl Marx, turned the cops into its responsible agents. In other words, according to Williams, there can still be “police” as we ordinarily use that word. She even leaves open the possibility of separating people “hellbent on committing violence” from those “they intend to hurt.” Separation, you say? That sounds an awful lot like prison.

Williams isn’t against, in ordinary English, “prisons” and “police.” She’s against prisons and police under capitalism, “as institutions of capitalist domination.” The issue, then, is not badged officers or constables. It’s capitalist domination that Williams truly opposes.

And that position is almost ubiquitous within the organization. The DSA, as the name suggests, is an avowedly socialist outfit. It opposes capitalism, which its program already makes abundantly clear. The very first line asks workers to “[i]magine… a future without capitalism.” Later, it states that its enemy is “the entire global system of capital.” Elsewhere, the program calls “for ending capitalist oligarchy.” If the amendment on “abolishing… police and prison” simply amounts to a disavowal of capitalism, it adds nothing.

But it’s worse than that, because the amendment isn’t mere surplusage. It sows confusion. Anyone reading “abolishing… police and prison” will understandably assume that cops and incarceration are a no-go. But, according to Williams, that plain meaning isn’t what the amendment is saying. Drafters made this disconnect all but inevitable. The amendment originally mentioned “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state.” Drafters “simplified” it to “abolishing the police and prison system.” Their simplification erased the words that carried the meaning.

Williams bristles at those who view abolition as “an abstract proposition that all coercion must vanish forever” — and fair enough. That’s an unjustified interpretation. But expect a broader audience to interpret “abolish prisons/police” literally. That is the natural reading. If that’s not your message, you aren’t expressing yourself well. Don’t use a totalizing word like “abolition” unless you mean it.

Many leftists don’t mean it, but insist on using the word anyway. They’re married to it — and stuck in the haze of 2020. COVID-era progressivism didn’t birth abolition. The idea existed for decades, with the DSA officially endorsing it in 2017. But 2020 brought a peculiar obsession with slogans at the expense of clear, effective messaging. This milieu moved abolishing prisons and police from the academic fringes to the mainstream. Calling for abolition became so fashionable that, years later, people still insist on using the word despite its political toxicity.

Living in the most dangerous developed nation on Earth, vast majorities of Americans think that crime is a serious problem. Dismantling the criminal justice system will strike them as a surefire way to invite more danger into their lives. The DSA saying it wants to abolish prisons and police will thus dampen its appeal and fuel allegations of extremism. It’ll especially sabotage outreach to the working class, whose communities are most ravaged by crime. These people should be the DSA’s primary constituency, and are those whose interests its economic platform serves most. If it cannot get them on board, that spells doom for the movement. Abolition is bad policy. It may be worse politics, as evidenced by its underwater poll numbers, even among those who identify as very left-leaning.

Of course, public concern cuts both ways. Police malfeasance and squalid, overcrowded prisons are also legitimate and widespread worries. These are serious societal failures that, like crime, hit the working class hardest. But addressing those failures neither requires nor warrants eliminating prisons and police entirely. Reform is an option, and it’s what most Americans want. Polls show that the vast majority believe the police system is at least somewhat sound but needs improvements. Americans similarly admire how prisons isolate dangerous individuals and reject abolition while desiring better, more rehabilitative conditions. Plenty support shifting certain carceral funds toward welfare spending. These are demands the DSA could champion with broad support — and, to some extent, already does. Its program, after all, calls for “redirecting funding to public services.” But what follows — “as [a step] toward abolishing the police and prison system” — overshadows it.

The finalized amendment makes it sound like the DSA’s vision requires abandoning the most important tools of criminal justice. Democratic socialism in the public imagination, then, becomes even more anathema to safety and order. That not only reinforces a blatant falsehood but is a gift to the Right. Such generosity is unwarranted. “Abolition” is not a magic word. The DSA doesn’t have to use it.

And it shouldn’t. Eliminating prisons and police, which are socially necessary, is an unworthy goal. But, if you’re going to call for that anyway, at least mean it. The drafters don’t, yet still issue the call. It’s the worst of both worlds. For a medicine they aren’t prescribing, the movement suffers side effects all the same.

A testimonial from a comrade working their way through America’s war on the homeless.

The post  A Working-Class Testimony: From Grief to Homelessness and the Struggle for Stability appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Travis Covitz

Combining my long-standing interest in animal welfare with Gilded Age politics, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy caught my eye at the local library. This 2024 book explores the rise of the American animal welfare movement from the 1860s through the 1890s, looking at pets, livestock, scientific research, wildlife, circuses, and more.  Although I was frequently underwhelmed with the politics of the authors, I found this book quite thought-provoking. It is absolutely true that the relationship between the average American and different animals has completely transformed in the past 150 years. Anybody who wants to achieve social change should learn how this came to be. 

Today the street is considered the place of the car, but it has not always been that way. Our Kindred Creatures starts by asking us to turn back time to the birth of the American industrial city, where the street was shared by man and beast. Stray cats and dogs ran loose, covered in fleas and acting as a constant threat of rabies. Cattle, swine, and more were herded from the farms where they were raised to the butchers who processed them. Horses were, well, the workhorses, moving people, goods, and equipment across the city. Individual acts of cruelty and violence were the norm, not the exception, and Enlightenment philosophy decreed that these animals were unfeeling automatons. 

To tell the story of American animal welfare, the authors follow three main “heroes” of the movement. All three were white elites in New England. However, rather than leaning into the individualist narrative of social change, the authors consistently demonstrate that these people did not act alone, but used their influential, organized relationships to achieve widely-felt change. The structure of focusing on these three activists serves, rather, to compare and contrast their different tactics in the cause of animal welfare. Henry Bergh was a ‘vigilante’ who used lawfare to protect animals, George Angell was an ‘educator’ who fostered social clubs and magazines for animal welfarists to come together and share ideas, and Caroline White was an ‘innovator’ who helped establish the first animal shelter. Wasik and Murphy highlight the uniting feature of Romantic philosophy, and the other forms of activism these individuals took part in. White was involved in the suffragist movement and Angell became an anti-war advocate. The authors argue that the animal welfare movement came to be as a way for white elites to focus their good will after the success of abolition.

The authors themselves relied frequently on emotional appeals and vivid imagery to get their point across. I generally fall pretty evenly on the need for balance between emotion and reason, so I am not inherently opposed to emotion in a political argument, but it did frequently make me so activated that I had to put the book down. Wasik and Murphy clearly have a lot more experience with archives than with animals. They meander between animal welfare and animal rights, in a way that is unclear whether they are staying wholly committed to the Gilded Age context, or they are just that out of touch with modern animal use philosophy. Occasional leaps from the Gilded Age to today feel forced and politicized, rather than a genuine attempt to synthesize history. 

A phenomenon that I found quite interesting was the way in which anti-welfare politicians made use of the contradictions in animal welfare elitism. For example, labor rights were consistently pitted against the advancement of animal welfare, and some animal welfare legislation was fought specifically on the grounds that it would discriminate against immigrants. Animal welfarists also had a troubled relationship with paternalism and frontier colonialism. The whole concept of animal welfare is, arguably, paternalist in nature, ‘providing a voice for those without one’. Gilded Age animal welfarists who lamented the extinction of the bison saw it as an inevitable part of the march of progress – just as Manifest Destiny was inevitable – and the establishment of national parks, like Yellowstone, were acts of displacing indigenous nations. Wasik and Murphy do try to push back on this paternalism as a mis-step, but they themselves occasionally fall into the trap of valorizing animal ‘innocence’ over human ‘sin’. 

Despite the difficulties I had with some of the choices of the authors, I did really appreciate how this book sketched out Gilded Age activism. Seeing the way that clashes between Enlightenment ideals and Romanticism, the changing role of religion, and different ideas of ‘progress’ informed what was possible for changemakers was informative and allowed me to think more deeply about our own moment of social upheaval. I do not think this book is especially helpful for someone trying to learn about the animal industry, but it is a great read for someone wanting to learn more about Gilded Age politics.

The post Natural Progress and the Gilded Age: A Review of Our Kindred Creatures first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

By: Travis Wayne, Fiona P

MEDFORD – On October 19, Tufts library workers organized with SEIU 888 rallied to demand union recognition in their fight for a contract that affords them fair and sufficient compensation to be able to live in Medford, Somerville, or anywhere else in Greater Boston. The Tufts library workers support major research infrastructure for the university, as well as community initiatives.

Six weeks before the October 18 rally, library workers — both librarians and other library staff — organized with SEIU 888 delivered their petition for unionization to Tufts University.

Library workers were joined by the other campus unions at both the march on the university and the rally on October 19. 32BJ SEIU and SEIU 509, both representing other parts of the campus workforce, mobilized their memberships in solidarity. One worker, Elizabeth McCall, reported to Working Mass that:

This feels like coworkers together coming together for a better world, for better lives.

While peer schools embroiled in their own struggles with their workers also face unions that may show solidarity with one another, the Tufts unions have been demonstrating that connection from day one of the SEIU 888 drive — showing good signs for coming battles with the university. It’s less clear whether this is more byproduct of rank-and-file connections between union siblings of different unions or the fact that all three parts of the workforce are represented by locals affiliated with the same parent Service International Employees Union (SEIU).

Other universities facing their workers do not face one international union organized into locals. The Harvard labor landscape is notably different, for example; at Harvard, the grad workers (HGSU) on strike are joined this fall by two other unions on campus simultaneously on strike, but neither of those unions are affiliated with the same parent (UNITE HERE Local 26, representing dining hall workers at Harvard, and HAW, representing Harvard academic workers).

Struggles for Wages and Healthcare

According to librarian Elizabeth McCall, the union seeks equilibrium for all workers – both librarians and other staff.

“By voting yes, by forming our union, and eventually entering ccontract negotiations, we want to see higher pay for our work, to make sure people are not working assignments not in their job duties, and so they aren’t working twelve hour days due to workload,” she said. McCall further elaborated to Working Mass:

I have coworkers that have children, and they sometimes live in other states, or in Lowell, or further, places that get so long to get to day-to-day. Coworkers of mine want kids and families in future but they don’t know how to save money for that, because the cost of living is so high around here, everything you make is going into something already.

At Tufts, not only do library workers, including but not limited to librarians, not get paid enough; they’re also subject to few holidays and opaque processes. One library worker was hired at thousands of dollars below the posted salary range, but when she appealed to her supervisor ended up in an advisory process that is not an option nor open for all library staff, leaving the workforce open to major exploitation and gaps in pay equity.

Another library worker, Jess, also discussed how options for healthcare have been threatened by the university, which would be much more difficult when those decisions must first be negotiated with the union. In late summer, Tufts announced a healthcare change to faculty, but not to staff just as impacted by healthcare changes. Jess was seeing a new medical practitioner only to have that coverage threatened with no warning. “As library staff, we want to come together and demand more,” she said.

Jess told Working Mass:

This is so important to demand a voice to the people that make the institution run. The library workers are here for everybody, at the Tufts community and beyond, and we want to support everybody, so we love to see the support as well.… I love where I work and would love to stay here, but the way things are going, I won’t be able to — and neither will my coworkers.

Management has countered the union by arguing that archives workers, in libraries with other staff in most cases, are not workers. Tufts is disputing the status of archive workers that SEIU 888 filed to include as part of the bargaining unit, even though they experience similar training and complete similar tasks in conjunction with other coworkers in the unit.

Travis Wayne is the managing editor of Working Mass.

The post Tufts Library Workers Unionize with SEIU 888 appeared first on Working Mass.