DSA’s candidate for a Denver House seat is going up against an incumbent in office since 1997.

The post Melat Kiros is Challenging “the System Itself” appeared first on Democratic Left.

Events & Actions

Wednesday June 24 (12:00 PM – 1:00 PM) Mass Mobilization for Environmental Justice @ City Hall (in person at 1 Dr Carlton B Goodlett Pl)

Wednesday June 24 (5:30 PM – 7:30 PM)  Guarantee Act Phone Banking (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday June 24 (6:45 PM – 8:30 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Thursday June 25 (6:30 PM – 7:30 PM) Public Bank Project Meeting (zoom)

Friday June 26 (9:30 AM – 10:30 AM)  District 1 Coffee with Comrades (in person at 2 Clement St)

Friday June 26 (4:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Guarantee Act Petition Dropoff/Pickup @ Horsies (in person at 3368 19th St)

Friday June 26 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM) Maker Friday (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Saturday June 27 (10:00 AM – 2:00 PM)  No Appetite For Apartheid Store Canvass (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Sunday June 28 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) Guarantee Act Mobilization at Clement Street Farmers Market (152 Clement St)

Sunday June 28 (1:00 PM – 2:30 PM)  What Is DSA? (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Monday June 29 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board – New Union Organizing (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday June 30 (6:30 PM – 7:30 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday June 30 (7:00 PM – 10:00 PM)  Tenant Organizers Social (in person at 1600 17th St)

Thursday July 2 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM)  Education Board Open Meeting  (zoom)

Thursday July 2 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 6 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM) Labor Board Meeting – Office Hours (zoom)

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

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Ways to Support Affordable Housing Guarantee Act

The Affordable Housing Guarantee Act is officially accepting contributions! This is a grassroots, community-led campaign, and we need whatever you’re able spare to help us protect our affordable housing funds and tax the rich! Head to fairhousingsf.com/donate to donate!

If you’re not in a position to donate at the moment, we can still use your help gathering signatures. Head to fairhousingsf.com/events to find a volunteer event near you!

Mass Mobilization for Environmental Justice

Mass Rally! Today, Wednesday, June 24 at 12:00 PM @ the steps of City Hall. 

For decades, the people of Bayview-Hunters Point have lived in the shadow of one of the most contaminated former military sites in the United States: the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund Site. The Marie Harrison Community Foundation and Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, as well as DSA SF and 20+ endorsing organizations, are calling on concerned residents to stand with Bayview-Hunters Point in a united public demonstration for environmental justice. We demand that the Mayor reject the transfer of contaminated land for development. Join us and look out for the DSA SF banner! RSVP here.

Guarantee Act Phone Banking

Come help us phone bank supporters of the Guarantee Act from 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM Today, June 24 at 1916 McAllister St.

Can’t make it to the office? No problem! Join our virtual meeting here.

​No experience necessary!

No Appetite For Apartheid Store Canvass

Come join us for our next NA4A store canvass on Saturday June 27 at 10:00 AM! We will be meeting at the DSA office and canvassing stores in the Japantown / Pacific Heights area. 

Let’s keep the momentum going for an apartheid free Bay Area and connect with small businesses in our local neighborhoods! RSVP here!

Tenant Organizers Social

Meet tenants organizers from across the Bay. Come to Thee Parkside, 1600 17th St on Tuesday, June 30 at 7:00 PMfor one final time before it closes it’s doors for good. 

The same forces of rampant speculation and gentrification responsible for destroying local culture spaces (like Thee Parkside) are causing the massive displacement of tenants throughout the Bay Area. Pleace come and share your experience as tenants organizing in the face of finance capital’s agenda to build their “luxury city”.

EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing Course

Sign up here!

EWOC holds a regular training course 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 in person at the DSA office (1916 McAllister). We’ll watch the EWOC lecture together and then go through the discussion activities. If you can’t make all of the sessions, reach out to Caitlin Stanton (SF EWOC local lead coordinator) for accommodations.

SCHEDULE:
Week 1: Developing Leadership
Tuesday, July 14 (7-8:30PM)

Week 2: The Organizing Conversation
Tuesday, July 21 (7-8:30PM)

Week 3: The Arc of the Campaign
Tuesday, July 28 (7-8:30PM)

Week 4: Inoculation and the Boss Campaign
Tuesday, August 4 (7-8:30PM)

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.

The post Who Holds Up the World appeared first on Democratic Left.

This year’s May Day activities saw significant mobilizations and marches, some school closures, and even small examples of strike action. Yet, many activists had reason to hope for a much more powerful action to confront Trump and his right-wing authoritarian agenda. The enormous victory against ICE after the January 23rd mass strike in Minnesota set a high water mark for resistance. A day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” set a profound example that inspired national discussion about next steps to fight Trump and ICE’s Gestapo tactics. I counted myself among those looking to make May Day 2026 a day to build on the Twin Cities’ momentum. 

I am an elementary special education teacher, a proud Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) member, and an elected school delegate. In Chicago, we had ICE in our streets kidnapping neighbors just months before they descended on the Twin Cities. Many schools, including my own, had spent the fall building school-based ICE response networks that included Safe Passage shifts and know-your-rights (KYR) trainings.

Leaders of the CTU joined the January 23rd mass strike in the Twin Cities in person. They pointed to it as a positive example to build on, and later announced plans for a May 1st “Day of Civic Action.” As put forward at the March House of Delegates (HoD) meeting, the CTU’s monthly delegate meeting, the Day of Civic Action implied shutting down the city and called for “No Work, No School, No Shopping” to be joined by educators and families. 

What actually happened in the schools was quite limited. Important awareness was raised around the significance and history of May Day among educators, students, and the Chicago school community. But there was no shutdown, no disruption of business as usual, and no direct challenge raised against Trump’s racism and warmongering.

News outlets reported staff absences just a bit above average for the week. Student attendance remained normal, with the exception of high schools, which reported 72% attendance compared to the previous Friday’s 75%. While students from around forty schools participated in field trips to community hubs or to the main rally in Union Park, all schools remained in session. Some schools organized assemblies or resource fairs and some teachers gave lessons in their classrooms, but many did not participate at all. After weeks of discussion and planning, May Day in Chicago, as it was initially conceived by CTU leaders and approved by CTU rank-and-file delegate leaders, was essentially a flop.

Why did the Day of Civic Action underperform so much? Answering this question is important for class struggle unionists like myself and those across the country. 

CTU’s Political Influence Fails to Cancel Classes

In my opinion, May Day should have been a disruptive, powerful action. The movement had slowed after the victory against ICE in Minnesota, but with prominent unions like CTU taking the lead, there was an opportunity to keep up the pressure. We could have shut down the city and led the way for workers across the country. I believe the reason it fell short was due to the weakness of the CTU leadership’s chosen strategy to rely on leveraging Democratic Party politicians that the union helped elect.

CTU leaders initially seemed to have secured the support of both Mayor Brandon Johnson (a former CTU teacher and union staff organizer) and the Johnson/CTU-influenced school board. If they signed off on a “Civic Day of Action,” the union would not have to take full political responsibility for the shutdown. In the leadup to the Day of Action, Mayor Johnson continuously said “May 1st is happening.”

As every class struggle unionist knows, progressive Democratic politicians are unreliable allies even in the best of times due to their conflicting ties with big business. As May Day approached, these political leaders flinched and capitulated. Whether Johnson and the school board genuinely planned to shut down schools and then backed down due to pressure, or if they had planned to water things down all along, remains unknown. Either way, absent action by city and district officials, CTU was left in a trap of its own making. The union struck a Memorandum of Understanding with Chicago Public Schools to allow for May Day lessons and trips, but there was no Plan B for “No School, No Work.” 

May Day showed the limits of CTU’s political influence. Unions should, of course, make use of politicians’ support where they can get it. However, far too often, the CTU leadership of President Stacy Davis Gates and Vice President Jackson Potter uses the strategy of leveraging friendly Democrats as a one-size-fits-all shortcut. Our power is not primarily in dues money flowing to electoral campaigns, but in our power as vital workers with social authority and the means to shut things down. In their consistent focus on political influence, CTU leaders neglect the tools of rank-and-file organizing and class struggle. Make no mistake: Members can see that they are being made into observers, rather than participants, in our own union’s actions. We need more confidence in our independent worker power.

I want to be clear that I am making a different critique of CTU leadership than the Illinois Policy Institute or the Chicago Tribune. There is also a minority of more conservative members, very active on social media, who echo pro-business propaganda, calling CTU a “political machine.”

Working people have an absolute right to our own representation, and unions should be involved in electoral politics. But union members need to be aware that even where we are decisive in a winning campaign, the capitalist class can bring enormous pressure on any representative. They have the advantage in the halls of state power. As it stands, CTU’s strategy exaggerates the strength these politicians give us, to the point that an overreliance on arrangements with politicians is actually harming our union’s democratic vitality and fighting capacity.

By pushing for May Day action, CTU compared favorably with most of the rest of the labor movement, which let the moment pass by. CTU leaders consistently prepared members for May Day for months and came up with member-led structure tests that steadily built this support among the rank-and-file. The problem? The overall strategy hinged entirely on friendly political representatives facilitating the union’s actions, rather than the union guaranteeing it through an independent commitment of its class power. 

Thousands of members were prepared to shut down the schools on May 1st. Dozens of delegates, like myself, prepared for this, school by school. Yet when the politicians’ support dissolved, so did our May 1st “No Work. No School. No Shopping,” project. Instead, we were handed more work planning in-school civics lessons – and many frustrated, dejected, and confused members on top of it.

Organizing for the Day of Civic Action and Its Opponents

For the union membership, these events unfolded in a confusing fashion. The discussions between the CTU leadership and powerful city and district officials were not transparent to us, so following the public twists and turns had many members themselves feeling twisted into knots.

To their credit, CTU leadership began laying groundwork for May Day as early as the February HoD meeting. Delegates were given a poster to bring back to our schools for members to sign as a structure test. The poster read “Our school is ready to protect our students, tax the rich to fund our schools, defend our democracy, and fight back on May 1st.” The meaning of fighting back was still not totally clear, but many members in the schools signed on in agreement that we should be doing something.

At the following March HoD, CTU leadership brought forward a resolution on May 1st and the Day of Civic Action. Delegates voted overwhelmingly in favor, after a short discussion. The ones I spoke with were under the impression that we were calling for a day of non-instruction so that teachers, students, and families could attend the May Day rally. 

All members were mobilized to sign a petition demanding Mayor Johnson and the board of education declare May 1st a “Day of Civic Action.” Although the resolution passed overwhelmingly, the petition itself ultimately gave the mayor and the board the power to define the fate of May Day, leaving delegates and members alike with vague guidelines for action.

In March and April, national newspapers ran oppositional editorials and reporting, and public debate intensified. Nonetheless, in early April, it seemed we were just waiting for the gears of the decision-making process to turn. At that time, the board of education held a closed session; it was shared that a straw poll indicated support for a Day of Civic Action. Following this, a rumor spread that Johnson-appointed interim CPS chief executive officer Dr. Macquline King was also on board. So far, so good!

However, just hours after buzz hit our schools, Dr. King walked back her perceived agreement in an e-mail to all CPS staff, in which she wrote: “My position is to maintain May 1 as an instructional day. As a career educator, I believe that every minute in the classroom is vital for students. My position has been consistent and has not changed.” Following this back and forth, member activists were concerned, and CTU leaders did not have concrete answers. 

CTU leaders responded by mounting several lines of public rebuttal. As a result of both on the ground experience and the public back-and-forth, May Day looked shaky. It became a hot topic among the rank-and-file members in the schools. Rumors spread through different news outlets, internal CTU communications, CPS e-mails, and on social media. Feelings of whiplash and a negative view of May Day began to circulate among some members, who complained that they were being forced to participate in something political they didn’t vote for, or that the union had planned poorly and made their path uncertain.

Nonetheless, if the union had taken action, I believe a majority of members would have been ready to go. But time was running out. Discussion raged: What the hell are we doing on May Day? Are we calling off work? Is this a one-day strike? Are we holding out and waiting for Mayor Johnson to cancel school? What is the plan?

We got an answer at the HoD meeting on April 15th, where I was surprised to be given three different options to take back to membership: 1) coordinate field trips to community hubs for students to participate in a day of civic education around May Day; 2) host a “Day of Civic Action” at our schools; or 3) take a Benefit Day. CTU leadership continued to blame CPS for all the confusion and reiterated that delegates needed to be flexible and have a plan in case school was not cancelled. They said they were working towards an agreement with CPS, but they didn’t have concrete details or full terms. At this point, schools were instructed to ‘choose their own adventure.’

May Day in Chicago: More Work for Educators, School in Session

Hope was still kept alive that CPS would relent. However, CTU leadership had effectively retreated, and the “Day of Civic Action” was redefined. Members struggled to keep up and understand the shift. The ‘choice’ meant that some schools were going all in to plan field trips or a day of action, but it also meant that many were off the hook to do nothing at all. 

With just the Memorandum of Understanding in place, obstructive administrators at CPS had the ability to water down our plans. They skirted around the language, denying field trips and avoiding required paperwork. Rather than uniting members around a common struggle to fight back against the right-wing dismantling of educational funding, CTU’s failure to secure a non-instructional day siloed May Day actions to inside the schools. It also undermined delegates and activist members that had spent a lot of effort convincing members to get behind a bold action. May Day, as it was initially envisioned and discussed in Chicago, was a bust. 

Ultimately, many schools across the city participated in May Day, but it depended on activists within the school, the willingness of administration, and buy-in from individual communities. Some students went on field trips to CTU Headquarters, Rainbow-PUSH, and BUILD; some high schools held assemblies and teach-ins for students and neighboring schools; schools hosted their own “Days of Civic Action” with community clean-ups, resource fairs, and mini-marches around their buildings; and some teachers used a May Day curriculum to teach lessons in their classrooms about labor history. Any actions taken required work and flexibility from teachers to make happen, but in the end, they raised consciousness among educators and in school communities. Yet CTU’s bold May 1st strike threat, which had rattled Chicago’s ruling class, had been withdrawn, and this was a success for the rich and powerful.

An Alternative Class-Struggle Approach

CTU leaders should have decided on a solid strategy for actual disruption. This might have come in different forms, like an attempt at a sick-out or an actual strike vote (which would have likely been ruled officially unlawful, like many great union struggles of the past). There would have been a contentious and robust debate over this among the rank-and-file, with no guarantee of success. But the debate, on clear terms, could have been educational and empowering in itself. Perhaps these proposals may have even lost in a democratic vote, something CTU leaders surely feared; but, of course, we did not succeed in having a “No School” May Day with Mayor Johnson, either. 

The CTU’s approach to May Day was just one example of the leadership’s disorganized approach and lack of transparency. This conduct has been typical since Johnson became mayor, but the problems go back further. It’s part of a longer-term strategy of placing too many eggs in the basket of gaming politics through the state. These maneuvers are then brought to the membership, preventing the union from organizing power with us.

The takeaway is, as Jane MacAlevey famously said: “there are no shortcuts.” To win, we have to build and rely on the massive power we possess as educators to galvanize school communities, unite with other workers, and disrupt and resist. We hand this power over to others at our peril.

A class-struggle approach genuinely involves the membership in deciding how to use the union’s independent collective power. It allows for multiple proposals, differing opinions, intense debate and discussion, and vibrant democracy. This strategy understands that capitalism does not grant us easy victories. We must commit to building a wider, multi-racial working-class movement that understands the need to challenge the normal functioning of capitalism in order to force change.

The CTU Dues Restructure: Leadership Loses a Referendum on Their Struggle Strategy 

At the May HoD, each CTU officer report championed our May Day action and characterized it as a success. Some members would agree, but for many, May Day was an unpleasant disappointment that raised numerous doubts about the union and leadership. For me, the HoD created cognitive dissonance. As a collective, we weren’t grappling with the result. I felt it was tragic that we ended up with so much disappointment and unease when there was a lot of possibility around May Day and a great deal of work put into organizing.

How can post-May Day member sentiment be gauged? Interestingly, the May HoD also initiated a new democratic procedure in the union. In addition to preparing for other end-of-the-year votes, delegates were also responsible for organizing discussions and voting on a proposal to restructure CTU dues, held on May 20th and 21st. Leadership brought forward a constitutional amendment to restructure the dues in a more equitable way, proposing that all members pay 1.75% of their base hourly salary instead of the current flat rate. 

Delegates were first informed about a possible dues hike in January, but it did not feature prominently at meetings until March. When the official language of the amendment was brought to delegates to discuss in April, I was already overwhelmed. It was a lot to consider alongside the May Day confusion, and CTU leadership added an additional question to the mix: Another new clause to the constitution about exhausting all union structures before taking CTU to court. All things considered, I was hesitant to give more in dues money to an unclear political strategy, not to mention the need to convince my colleagues why this was critical.

Ahead of the all-membership vote, CTU and staff organized one of the biggest member engagement campaigns I have ever seen. Leadership explained the dues change from a number of different angles: we need money to fight back against Trump and the right wing, to pay for organizers to defend our contract wins, for the upcoming school board races, and for the inevitable fight to defend against school closures. Given this long list of reasons summarizing the union’s political outlook, the vote acted as a referendum on the leadership’s approach, and was seen as such by members I spoke with. 

There was strong opposition from the more conservative parts of the union, which could be seen all over Facebook, but ultimately the proposal was not endorsed by a wide part of the general membership. It was defeated, with 62.9% opposed. By comparison, the CORE leadership was reelected with 64% of the member vote in 2025.

For me, the vote did not leave any doubt that CTU is still a majority-progressive, fighting union. Even despite inflation pressure on members, a dues increase might have passed if the proposal were tied clearly to empowering activism. But given the context, many members were not inclined to send the union more dues money, and instead, sent a message of frustration. I think the vote result can fairly be described as an example of the growing disconnect between CTU leadership and the rank and file. 

Equitable dues could be the right step for the union down the line. But for our union and the broader working class to be stronger in the righteous fights that CTU leadership correctly identifies are coming, money is not necessarily decisive. Truly powerful collective action can best be measured in the risks, time, and sacrifices members make to build it. The rank and file need to push CTU leadership to take a class-struggle approach featuring democratic meetings that include us in the fight, rather than a demand that members join actions with no critique of tactics and strategy allowed. 

We need a vision of working class-power and a clear, determined organizing strategy to bring everyone in. More dues money for organizing could help with this, but it’s the self-activity of the members that is our true strength. If money is simply used to double down on a limited strategy to contribute to more political campaigns, we are no closer to being prepared to fight like we need to be fighting. 

That fight is not letting up. In recent days, Chicago educators have faced notice that CPS expects to conduct the largest set of layoffs in years. COVID relief money is drying up, and Trump is at war with public education. School closures are back on the table. Principals have said these cuts compare to those of the early 2010s, when the city was coming out of the Great Recession. The fight to tax the rich and fund our schools is urgent.

I am proud to be a member of the CTU and grateful to be in a position to engage in genuine collaboration about how to work towards a fighting strategy in our unions. I hope that leftists and unionists read this piece and consider how we can empower our unions and raise the level of resistance against Trump and the capitalist billionaires ruining the country – and the planet. 

The post Assessing Chicago’s May Day: What Was the Chicago Teachers Union’s Day of Civic Action? appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

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

The post LIVE BLOG: Precinct Level Maps of U.S. House Wins appeared first on Democratic Left.

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.

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.

by Jean Allen

Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In The Grass is the first full length album of Rochester’s local folk supergroup, Georgie. Founded by Claire McClusky in 2022, the band consists of an activist and a group of musicians involved in other Rochesterian bands (the rock band Comfy, the acoustic folk Garden of Evil Doers and Bugcatcher, Rochester’s very own Pavement Kitchen, indie darling Shep Treasure, Star Bby which is definitely good but which I do not know enough about to know the genre of) and has become an organizing nucleus of Rochester’s DIY music community (which, I think, designates a punk sensibility applied to an aesthetically broad set of bands). Three elements of Georgie’s live shows bear stating. The first, in as segregated a city as Rochester is, as divided into micro-sub-communities as its music scene is, Georgie shows have been intentionally mutli-genre and multiracial. This has led to the second thing about Georgie, the increasingly large Georgieverse of collaborative bands and fans from various parts of Rochester’s radical community. The other is that the ‘folk’ label I gave Georgie obscures what’s fully going on here. 

Georgie’s live music has shown a consistent desire for experimentation, for pushing past the boundaries of some banjoes and fiddles into music that can emotionally meet the moment we are in. Songs that seem tame on the record become rock anthems in rooms filled with cheering fans, songs that are 5 minutes recorded can become 20 minute jam sessions, new instruments are added and experimented with, puppet shows are incorporated. This album is similarly expansive, with the production leaning towards an acoustic wall of sound at moments, while providing perfect clarity for the vocals at others.

McClusky writes Georgie lyrics through automatic writing, a method designed to avoid conscious intention, and that leads to songs that are deeply radical while being partially opaque. The choruses of Georgie songs are often a repeated simple phrase, like a thought the mind’s gotten hung up on and cannot fully process. For instance, “What’s Legal Now?”, the lyrics describe a person whose human ineffableness is reduced to nothing by the label of perpetrator, by people who look away from conflict or look to conflict in order to establish categories of human and non-human. The question “Did you know? I’m a crime? Did you know? How I died?”, ends with the band repeating “What does it mean to make a mistake” over and over, through into a next song that features a Silvia Federici sample, back to the chorus, back to the conclusion: 

“Teach shame. I hold it, I carry it every day, hold it inside my body, you know I don’t talk to nobody. But I left it on the table, where I couldn’t quite read your face. It’s not that I’m unable, I just choose to look the other way. Cause babe you make me wonder what it means to make a mistake, babe you make me wonder, why I can’t quite define rape”. 

This gets at, could be about, so many things. Interpersonal relations, international relations, the way our society treats homeless people to constant debasement to allow for their further dehumanization, the way we ourselves become smaller when we start accepting our society’s dehumanization of our peers. It could be about all of these things, and because of that it draws our attention to how all of these problems stem from the same issue.

The ineffable quality of Georgie’s lyrics are, to me, a tremendous advance over the tendency towards didacticism we’ve seen in radical music lately. There are any number of bands who speak-sing lyrics that could double as event slogans. As an example, take Mr.Dinkles’ newest song, Socialist Ditty, which repeats 

“You don’t need to be that rich, just give it to me, I can pay off my loans and my mouth to feed, cause you don’t even know what to do with it, just give it to me, cause you don’t need to be that rich!”

To be clear, this song is a bop and I’ve listened to it constantly since it’s come out. Further, from Joe Hill to Pete Seeger our movement is always going to need artists who provide us with agitation in the form of songs. But to give the humble opinion of a cultural dingdong, we should aim for higher horizons in radical art. The desire for art to act solely as agitation reduces art and reduces ourselves. We do not experience the world through the easy rationality that agitational didacticism cloaks itself with. I am a literal socialist pamphleteer and MY experience of life is not reducible to an aesthetic frustration with the way the rich dominate us. I’ll leave a pin in this, but I will say now that the problem of domination – of a ruling class which has infantilized us by disallowing us from making choices about the direction of our lives – has a blast radius. Domination transforms the dominator and dominated, dehumanizing both of us in ways that are often complicated and painful to fully uncurl. If radicals are going to make truthful art about our current condition they need to use the full range of emotion, the full spectrum of rhetorical affect. There is a desire right now for art or theory to be simple and surface-level, just expressing simple goals, but the world is not just a series of surfaces. Just as in this album, my brain repeats images I’ve seen, images or arguments that are incomprehensible or horrific, trying to understand them. I turn to theorists to structure my thinking of the world, I try to act in it. 

To listen to Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In The Grass is to feel a sense of dread and a desire to understand that dread. The song where McClusky reads Bookchin talking about the intimidating and physically overwhelming structure of an institutionalized city turns to “Canyon”, a wail at a left that hasn’t gotten strong enough, hasn’t stayed principled enough, has given itself too easily to too many fights over nothing while the world burns up and bodies pile up: 

“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t look at us flailing on the floor, will you still love me when I kill our landlord? Won’t you be on the same side of the barricade? Won’t you help me pour sand in these machines? Let’s strike, the earth is still alive.” 

The failure of the radical left to intervene meaningfully in the last decade, despite the tremendous amount of work we have all done, despite a series of protest waves culminating in the largest protest wave the country has ever seen, coming to nothing, that’s not something people only process in a rational way. That a series of protest movements for Black lives has achieved nothing more than more cameras everywhere has given us all a new knowledge of the society we live in, a society where life is cheap and fights against each other are the only thing that will show meaningful change. This comes up in the conflicts shown in “What’s Legal Now?”, in the author’s desire to stop dreaming that “the world didn’t end” in “Lathe of Heaven”, and like everything else in the album it culminates in “Contamination”.

The swirling thoughts throughout the album all point towards “Contamination” – in “The Propaganda and the Pesticides”, Georgie sings the refrain which was once “Contamination”’s opening (you have to understand, I have to make my money, I have to be the man) while Shola raps about the wages we struggle for which make us enslaved. “Limits”, the first introduction to Canyon, quotes Bookchin describing the way the personal forces which dominate us are transformed by the cityscape into a seemingly impenetrable System of institutions. We see throughout the album the way our broken society makes broken individuals, and it can be easy to generalize this, to imagine we are totally dominated by faceless beings who we could never affect. But we know better.

“Call it what it is, it’s not a disease, it’s that motherfucker upstream, and I’ll find him and I’ll kill him. It’s your cigarettes and orange juice, cigarettes and orange juice, it’s your cigarettes and orange juice, that woman who takes care of you.”

Again we are transposed between all the situations this can refer to. There’s the case worker’s misogyny, where any failure in someone’s health has to emerge from someone incorrectly performing gender, but there’s also the truth at the heart of this whole album and this whole society – that our domination by institutions is also a domination by particular people, who are empowered to make choices about our lives and whether we die. Cigarettes and orange juice is a deeply evocative image. It’s two things associated with poverty and food deserts – cigarettes in lieu of a meaningful meal, orange juice in lieu of fresh fruit and vegetables; but there is also something childish about this deadly combination. Orange juice, the thing advertised to us from childhood, cigarettes, the addictive and deadly symbol of adulthood sold to generations which couldn’t afford it. Our society offers all sorts of addictions and brain-killing pastimes in lieu of active participation in its direction, and that domination has made us all childish, a toxic and addictive smallness in lieu of child-like-ness. We cannot afford financial independence, we cannot move our society the way we want, and so we are left with these adolescent pleasures instead of the responsibility an ‘adult’ who has to make decisions for themselves is given. The song’s end flips the script, imagining us killing the capitalists with the same empty and cheap luxuries they kill us with. The album ends with a gleefully childlike song about swimming, depicting perhaps the kind of relaxation and freedom we will only find when we understand that the best way to take care of our loved ones is to upend our masters.

What strikes me throughout the album is a sensitivity to pain, a sensitivity to the ways we are transformed by pain, and a genuine curiosity about the world. Earlier on I compared this album to a variety of (also good) agitational bands which traffic in cocky pamphleteer writing. The cockiness in left art today does not speak to me because it feels just as much like a product of our infantilization as these cigarettes and orange juice. It’s the attitude of a newly awakened youth who realizes that their adults do not follow the rules they lay down, who then thinks that there are no rules whatsoever, that it is all a matter of will. We have a world to govern, or perhaps win, or perhaps defend, or perhaps just survive in, but none of these are easy tasks. We will need people who have been made deeply imperfect by the cruel, violent, and colonial society we live in to succeed in any of those efforts. The attitude of humbly sorting through our existence, parsing through our personal experience and the theories we adore, trying to understand how to strike while the earth is still alive, is something I wish more of the left took up. 

Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In the Grass is a genuine advance in radical DIY music and Georgie is the best band to come out of Rochester since Machine Girl left the city a decade ago. It is at times tough and at times torrential but I would recommend it, and Georgie’s live shows, to any reader of this publication with an appreciation for folk music.

The post Articulating Revolution Through Art: A Review of Georgie’s Scratching At The Door Until It Opens And Running Outside And Rolling In The Grass first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

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.