A member of Southwest Michigan DSA reports on a strike at American Axle, a GM supplier. Workers sacrificed to keep the auto industry solvent after ’08 — sacrifices only now being clawed back from their now-profitable employers.

The post Strike Secures $30 by ’30 appeared first on Democratic Left.

DSA SF unequivocally condemns the police violence directed at our fellow San Franciscans in the LGBTQIA+ community this past Pride weekend. Thousands gathered for San Francisco’s Trans March to celebrate trans joy and stand in defense of trans lives amid escalating attacks on our communities locally and nationwide. The march was met with police violence as San Francisco Police Department officers rushed into the crowd, assaulted participants, and carried out arrests, turning a celebration of liberation into a stark reminder of ongoing state repression.

The police violence did not end there. Similar acts of intimidation and force were deployed at a queer SOMA block party on Saturday as well as outside of the Pride celebration at Civic Center on Sunday. The actions of the SFPD, including pointing so-called “non-lethal” weapons at attendees of peaceful gatherings, and repeatedly escalating situations through overwhelming shows of force, prove that they are more interested in intimidating our communities than protecting them.

It is important for us to forcefully affirm our unwavering solidarity with the movement for LGBTQIA+ liberation and the fight for trans rights as well as to stand against police brutality and all other forms of state repression.

The violence the SFPD unleashed over Pride Weekend was no miscalculation. Like all capitalist state violence, it served to defend property, preserve the existing social order, and intimidate radical working-class communities. The alleged justification for this escalation was property damage, yet the overwhelming display of armed force was directed at people peacefully celebrating Pride, exposing a system that repeatedly chooses repression over care. This is what years of rewarding police violence with expanding budgets, political cover, and unconditional institutional support produce: an emboldened force in tactical gear marching into our communities, shouting “whose streets?” while attempting to crush the radical spirit that Pride has embodied since its inception. We reaffirm our commitment to dismantling the capitalist system that has terrorized queer communities for generations, because true liberation cannot coexist with institutions built to suppress it.

San Francisco’s queer and trans liberation movement was forged in resistance to police violence. Nearly sixty years ago, trans women, drag queens, and other members of San Francisco’s LGBTQIA+  community fought back against police harassment during the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in the Tenderloin, an uprising that helped lay the foundation for the modern movement for transgender liberation. Today, the building that once housed Compton’s is owned by the GEO Group and operates as a private detention facility, a reminder that systems of state repression do not disappear on their own. 

State repression will never extinguish our commitment to justice, collective liberation, and the rights of marginalized communities to organize, march, and exist free from violence. Pride was born from political resistance against state violence, and we stand firmly in solidarity with that tradition. Our liberation has always been won through collective struggle, not granted from above. 

We invite everyone outraged by the violence of this weekend to organize with us, not only to respond to this moment, but to build the political movement that will ensure it does not happen again.

Join DSA.

The sometimes overlooked stories of members of the Communist Party USA have lessons to teach the U.S. Left

The post Celebrating Red Lives appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Reid J

DEDHAM – In September 2025, broke and desperate, I was running food deliveries for the richest neighborhoods in Waltham while trying to get my resumé in the door anywhere and everywhere when Best Buy hired me. A friend was already working there and helped me get on the sales team with a recommendation, so that I started work full time two months before their Black Friday rush. I had never worked in sales before, barely even worked retail, but this was my last stop on a year long train of unemployment. 

It was not my plan to try to unionize my workplace of 72 employees over the coming months.

My first jolt of inspiration was sent directly into my signal DMs. Travis, the managing editor of Working Mass, asked me if I could finish an article for the paper. I replied that my focus was currently dedicated to Best Buy. I wanted a good foundation here since I was fired from the last two jobs I had. Without missing a beat, he asked me a simple question that kicked off my path to organizing:

You got an organizing plan with EWOC yet?

EWOC: the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a co-venture of DSA and the UE, to support new organizing. There was something about how he phrased it, like it was an already forgone conclusion that if I was working and not searching like so many comrades in the barren wasteland of Trump’s job market, I would already be hard at work building the foundation of the socialist future as a rank-and-file worker. The mode of thinking changed my whole attitude about my time there. I shouldn’t just wallow in gratitude that a corporation had decided to give me a meagerly-above-minimum-wage job. I should look to seek something more, no matter where I am in life.

This question stuck with me while I spent eight hours a day ringing out PlayStations and selling credit cards to senior citizens. I was here, I was employed, I had my parents off my back (still living at home), but I was making money. That’s all a man needs, right? Dutiful employment? But Travis was asking me about something more, about having a goal, a horizon at the end of a weekly forty hour cycle where I could look back at the time I’ve spent at 700 Providence Highway and say that I’d accomplished something more than sales numbers and a 3% annual pay raise.

I began, from a place inside myself where I knew in order to keep working monotonous, mind-numbing retail shifts, that I wanted either an exit strategy like everyone else I was working with, or a project I could commit myself to. I figured why not undermine some authority, spend some time talking to the people I spend eight hours with, and learn just how much they hated their job and more importantly, the company that employed them.

The American retail coworker relationship is mostly defined by a sequence of nods, fist bumps, and “thank yous” after completing a task together. Outside of this, you’ll have a handful of two to three minute interactions when not burdened by customers, daily tasks, or supervisors requesting your presence. My job was to distill the incredibly complicated and controversial idea of union labor into a digestible pitch and intake their opinion in the brief opportunities I had. I never had any training for being an organizer, I had never even worked in sales before I started the job, but I threw myself at every opportunity I saw, catching my coworkers in the break room, in our warehouse, and sometimes even running across the football field sized parking lot to introduce myself, my ideas, and whether they could see themselves fighting for better pay and benefits like the rest of us. 

My progress was staggering given my inexperience, and I quickly found momentum in every department of the store, kids fresh out of college and tenured full timers, everyone agreed with the core of my message: something has to change. 

Union Organizer, the Quality Employee?

My greatest weapon in my crusade to reach all 65 of my union eligible coworkers was a crusade to become the most well-liked guy in the store, for both my fellow hourly employees and the store’s managers. It wasn’t part of my grand strategy to end up as one of the top sales advisors in the store, but it came naturally from a desire to keep my employment secure after my last two failed attempts. 

This gave me two benefits in my endeavor: it insulated myself from targeting by management based on my performance, and created real magnetic power with my coworkers to convince them of the power of our labor. The power to say to your fellow sales advisors that you rang out $200,000 of product during the Black Friday sale was pivotal to demonstrate to my coworkers how critical their labor is to the company’s operation. 

Many of my coworkers didn’t need anything explained to them, and enthusiastically joined my cause as an outlet against the company that had underpaid them, undersupported them, and fired and rehired them at the corporation’s convenience. Although some were concerned about retaliation from a company that has historically created presentations about union busting tactics for internal use.

This was less of an obstacle for the majority of the retail personnel entering the workplace, many of whom live with others like their guardians while running DoorDash orders, fighting for credit cards and memberships. Kids like me who have nothing to lose and everything to gain often already are looking to jump to the next non-minimum wage opportunity they have before them – a pattern of instability.

As many people that jumped to my side in my support, there was still a fear among some of the workers that the workers would face retaliation following hallway meetings and parking lot sprint downs. Whether due to Best Buy’s faux-pleasant corporate approach to union-busting or because of my managers disinterest in firing their most reliable revenue driver, I was not the target of any visible interference from the company. 

The Limited Resources of the Labor Movement

The ecosystem of Best Buy relies on a steady flow of part-timers who work for months at the store, usually during the holidays, get burnt out, quit, and then are replaced by new part-timers. This is not only a foundational aspect of Best Buy’s retail structure, but a common destabilizing underpinning of global labor markets. The not-so-veiled threat behind every new hire in the store is the idea that your labor is replaceable to the corporation, whether you’ve just been put on or are a twenty year veteran, you can be cut if the numbers don’t align in your favor. Best Buy pretends and posits itself as a “people-centered” corporation, using faux-pleasantries and corporate jargon to navigate their vile practices of cutting labor at the expense of working class people and the convenience of a multi-billion dollar corporation. 

This phenomenon was always going to be the biggest challenge to an organic labor movement with a modern retail environment; the turnover rate is the company’s greatest weapon against organization, and the structure of the work is designed to leverage that advantage to their benefit as often as possible. The store employs just enough workers so that if you decide to call out from work, you’re not hurting the company, you’re only hurting your coworkers.

This is why when I started getting word from my union supporters that they’d started looking for other jobs and were putting in their two weeks, I knew that this was it. There wasn’t any more time to waste. I had built up my support, and it was time to call my organizer to request to make the campaign public, to push our strategic advantage based on momentum. A week passed after my phone call, before the union replied: “Dedham Best Buy’s union campaign is not viable for the local’s support.”

My first reaction was frustration and anger — all the effort and risk of organizing a workplace of around 70 employees, just to face a rebuke that felt like communication that the work was meaningless and was not deserving of formal support from the local. In a labor movement allergic to moves short of the 70% threshold prepared for union-busting, the unions seemed unwilling to support a campaign with support enough for a majority election at a major retail storefront. But in the coming weeks with the changes I began to see at my work, I started to see the larger context.

My organizer explained the monumentality of any union embracing a campaign like ours, with a company that had international reach and resources. In essence, the campaign was huge — it would not mean a quick or easy victory. He impressed upon me the nature of the interconnected ecosystem of union labor battles, that when one front suffers, resources from every part of the union are drained – as one example, the organizer pointed to the REI union negotiations that the company has dragged out for the last four years, which have created a black hole of sunken resources and energy. Especially now, even international unions take great pause when looking at another potential slugfest with corporate giants like Best Buy.

This is where I began to doubt my own self-assured confidence. Maybe these organizers who had been unionizing since before I was born knew more about how this was going to shake out than I did. If I thought the waiting between weeks for union communications was bad now, I wouldn’t be ready when our campaign has to be put in stasis during NLRB filings, or negotiations, or even strikes. My coworkers and I could be sparing ourselves from locking into a death grip with a company that has more time, money and employees than anyone on our side. 

An obstacle to unionization that I never anticipated is federal interference in filing for a union election. The current administration has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and brought union elections and proceedings to an effective standstill. Our filing for recognition, separate from even the company’s objections and interference, could be stalled for years in legal proceedings, while Best Buy simply waits for every member of the store to filter out in the inevitable turnover that would erode the union’s support.

The most depressing thought of all was doubt: whether anything above mattered in the real world of fighting for union labor. Even if we did everything right, played by the rules and waited our turn to get the recognition we deserve as workers, the company would likely break the rules as they always do. They could hire strikebreakers, stall and delay as long as they want, and in the end if they have the most resources and the most sway with whatever biased, Trump-appointed judge our case appears in front of, they can rule against our union.

With this framing in mind, it’s easier to understand the unquantifiable risk associated with throwing the full weight of a union against a hideously anti-worker company of the techno-feudal age. I wasn’t any happier about it, but the experience underscored the importance of every arena opened between capital and labor, and how different organizers may hold different situated knowledge of our fight, from the unionists with decades of experiencew to radicalized minimum wage workers like me.

Corporate Executives Panic Over Worker Demands

Within the next week, the store responded to our union-building efforts in a series of workplace changes.

First, they raised pay for every worker in the store, about $1.50 per hour, then for the rest of the district as well. Then came the parade of maintenance workers and exterminators to fix our long-neglected break room and rat infestation. And innocently, in the middle of all these changes, our store manager began meeting with every willing employee to begin the anti-union training. These were hostage meetings: our workers had the option of sitting in the comfy chairs of the office for 20 or 30 minutes and listening to propaganda from the company or to continue working their shift. 

This exposed Best Buy’s incredible fear of a unionized store to myself and my fellow workers. If they were confident that a union couldn’t happen in their backyard, they would not spend the money to give a hybrid distribution center on the side of the highway the attention they were. Flying consultants and company faces from Minnesota and relenting ever so slightly on a pay increase and better working conditions, two of our store’s most core demands. This showed to my coworkers and I that our demands were not only reasonable, but very easily able to be fulfilled by the company with little effort.

The current state of our campaign is relatively subdued, with numerous workforce changes and faces leaving the building and new ones being hired on, as the moment of potential momentum decreased and the boss neutralized key demands from above. Overwhelmingly among my lessons has been how to not take “no” for an answer. When discussing the nature of labor organizing with my coordinators at both unions, they agreed that persistence is the most critical skill to possess when you are taking on the task of organizing labor. You must not be afraid to embarrass yourself, or make a situation awkward, when what you are pursuing is an increase to the standard of working and living for your coworkers and yourself.

Regardless of external support or lack thereof, there is proof out there: with enough organization, the giant will blink.

Reid J is a union organizer and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Notes from Organizing a Union at Best Buy appeared first on Working Mass.

Events & Actions

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

Wednesday July 8 (6:45 PM – 9:00 PM) DSA SF General Meeting (zoom and in person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Thursday July 9 (6:30 PM – 7:30 PM) Public Bank Project Meeting (zoom)

Thursday July 9 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Emergency Planning(1916 McAllister St)

Friday July 10 (9:30 AM – 10:30 AM) District 1 Coffee with Comrades (2 Clement St)

Saturday July 11 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) No Appetite for Apartheid: Consumer Pledge Canvass (Dolores Park)

Sunday July 12 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (zoom)

Monday July 13 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday July 13 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board Meeting – Existing Union Support (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 14 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 14 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 15 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) What Is DSA? (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday July 16 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (zoom)

Thursday July 16 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday July 18 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) HWG Food Service (Castro St & Market St)

Sunday July 19 (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM) Understanding Socialism with DSA SF (1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 20 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 20 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board – Flex Meeting (zoom)

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

Consumer canvass for No Appetite for Apartheid

Come out to the next consumer canvass for No Appetite for Apartheid; a boycott campaign to deshelve Israeli products from San Francisco stores which financially contribute to/perpetuate genocide and apartheid! We will be walking around Dolores Park on Saturday, July 11 from 11am – 1pm, to gather signatures from consumers who want to go apartheid-free!

Hope to see you there! RSVP here or in the QR code on the poster.

FREE PALESTINE 

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)

Understanding socialism group reading & discussion

When: Wednesday, July 19th, 3:30-5PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

Join DSA SF’s Education Board for a group reading of excerpts from “The Long Transition Towards Socialism”. We’ll be examining what makes capitalism as a system function, its inherent contradictions, and how the transition to socialism can be achieved within those conditions.

No advance reading required! We’ll provide everything at the event

When: Wednesday, July 19th, 3:30-5PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

 Socialist Shop Talk

Come chat with comrades about socialism through the lens of current events! In this new series, we will read a short text together, then discuss and analyze it from a socialist point of view.

This is a low-key environment where comrades can develop their skills of applying socialist analysis to current events, while having an outlet to discuss and process everything that’s happening in the world together. This event is open to all, whether you’re socialism-curious, new to DSA, or a longtime member.

In this post-primary election session, we’ll discuss an article written by a DSA SF comrade discussing the role of electoral politics in progressing toward and winning socialism.

When: Wednesday, July 22nd, 7-9PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St
RSVP to come! 

Reportback: Social housing on the ballot in November

Last week, we submitted over 20,000 signatures to get the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act on the November 2026 ballot!
This measure will dedicate existing revenue from the city’s Prop I transfer tax — a tax passed in 2020 on ultra-luxury real estate deals over $10 million — to fund social and affordable housing along with eviction defense.
Join the fight, help us win in November: fairhousingsf.com/get-involved

Reportback: Solidarity rally

Last Friday, as many as 100 people rallied to show solidarity with immigrants in detention centers at Delaney Hall in New Jersey and Adelanto here in California who went on hunger strike to demand their freedom while protesting substandard living conditions, including lack of medical care and inedible food. GEO Group, the billion dollar corporation that runs both detention centers, also runs a so-called “re-entry facility” in the heart of the Tenderloin at the site of the Compton Cafeteria riots, the first documented uprising against police violence by the trans community in the U.S. DSA SF, alongside our partners at the Compton X Coalition and AROC Action, organized the rally to show support for hunger strikers’ demands while telling GEO Group that they aren’t welcome in our city.

Adam Rouhiainen is on the Red Madison Editorial Board.

Throughout Milwaukee, dozens of solar-powered cameras mounted on the side of the road record the license plate numbers, make and model, and unique features of every vehicle that passes by it. The data from these automated license plate readers (ALPRs) is streamed to and stored by a private company, Flock Safety, who puts it into a searchable database, with access given to law enforcement agencies around the country. In March 2025, Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala got busy, searching the database 179 times over the next two months for just two different vehicles.

Meanwhile, possibly by chance, Officer Ayala’s girlfriend at the time looked up her license plate number on haveibeenflocked.com; what she found was that “J. Aya” searched the Flock database for her license plate number over 100 times. The reason listed for these searches? “Investigation.”

According to the criminal complaint charging him with Attempted Misconduct in Public Office, Ayala made 124 license plate searches on his girlfriend’s vehicle, and another 55 searches on his ex’s. Both victims filed restraining orders; Ayala’s now ex-girlfriend wrote, “I was horrified, disgusted, embarrassed and terrified.” The second victim wrote, “When Ayala was using the Flock system repeatedly to stalk me via MPD resources, I feared for my safety.”

Milwaukee Police Department’s investigation into Officer Ayala began only after one of his victims searched for their own license plate on an activist website.

On May 7 of this year, The Milwaukee Police Department presented ALPR auditing guidelines. Each license plate search, and each officer’s searches, will be tested on a monthly basis for statistical outliers. This new auditing system, reducing the number of officers who have access to the Flock database down from 370 to 100, and the national news of Ayala’s misuse of Flock, was not enough to deter a second Milwaukee police officer from misusing the technology. Milwaukee Police Department Chief of Staff Heather Hough revealed this second instance of Flock misuse at the May 7 Fire and Police Commission meeting, saying, “There is an investigation pending, but I cannot disclose any other information at this time.”

MPD Chief of Staff Heather Hough discloses that a second Milwaukee officer is being investigated for ALPR misuse

Ayala ended up pleading guilty to a Class A misdemeanor, never having to deal with felony stalking charges. Menasha Police Officer Cristian Morales was not so lucky. On January 7 of this year, the Appleton Police Department arrested Officer Morales for stalking, a Class I felony. Their press release lacks any details on what Morales actually did, but a criminal complaint says Morales used the Flock network to search for his now ex-girlfriend’s vehicle 5 times in October 2025. He listed the reason for his searches as “welfare.” Morales’s ex-girlfriend wrote “I am concerned for my personal safety” in a petition for a restraining order.

These Milwaukee and Menasha/Appleton incidents of police misuse of ALPRs were ultimately disclosed to the public in some form by the police departments themselves. The Kenosha County Sheriff Department has been much more silent about their ALPR misuse incident. An open records request by the Wisconsin Examiner show Kenosha County sheriff’s deputy Frank McGrath made 16 Flock searches on a vehicle owned by another deputy. Why? From the Examiner’s analysis of the records they obtained, “McGrath was apparently stalking another Kenosha County deputy whom he was dating.” McGrath was offered a severance package to resign; he has not been charged with a crime.

Security issues involving government use of intelligence to spy on a love interest are not a new concept; the NSA even coined the term LOVINT since at least 2013 to describe such issues occurring in their agency. How has Wisconsin prepared for the age of fast and efficient image detection?

Wisconsin has no statewide oversight on local police’s use of ALPRs. By default, Flock stores all collected data for 30 days. The previously mentioned cases of police misconduct show that this is not nearly a small enough window of time to prevent bad actors in the government from infringing on people’s privacy. In contrast, New Hampshire must delete all ALPR data within 3 minutes of collection if there is no investigation hit.

Over 200 police forces across Wisconsin have contracts with Flock; some have auditing guidelines, as we saw in Milwaukee, and some have no publicly stated policy at all.

One of those 200 used to be the Dane County Sheriff. Some time in late 2022, the Dane County Sheriff began a pilot program of 26 Flock cameras. The County Board officially approved $80,000 in funding for Flock ALPRs in 2023. After a dozen MADSA members and other privacy advocates showed up to the April 20, 2026 Board meeting to speak against Flock, County Board voted to end their Flock contract by May 1.

Victory was short lived, because on June 4, the County Board held a vote to reinstate the $80,000 for a different ALPR network. MADSA members showed up again to speak against police surveillance networks. Is the Dane County Board of Supervisors aware of the aforementioned ALPR security issues we’ve seen, just in Wisconsin? I spoke at the June 4 County Board Meeting to make sure they were, reading off each of the previous four Wisconsin love interest spying cases. I also argued that any ALPR network, not just Flock, could be abused by individual officers.

Dane County Supervisors speaking against ALPRs included MADSA member Aria Trucios and MADSA-endorsed Heidi Wegleitner. On the capitalist incentives that private surveillance companies have when working with law enforcement, Supervisor Trucios argued, “The profit motive necessarily will push companies to seek as much profit out of that as possible, and the best way to seek that profit is by finding ways to aggregate that data, even if you anonymize it, share it with other partners, sell it off to other partners.”

Speaking about basic privacy and potential Fourth Amendment violations, Trucios continues: “It would be feasible that a federal agency would step in and say actually this is a matter of national security that we have a dragnet ability to track anybody within the U.S. at any time… I don’t believe that we should be privatizing our way around the Fourth Amendment. I don’t think our citizens and residents should be paying to create this dragnet automated tracking system.” On how this type of technology is still untested in the U.S. court system, they add, “Would we want to be the institution that’s on the hook?”

Dane County Supervisors Trucios and Wegleitner explain the issues with ALPR networks

Supervisor Wegleitner spoke about overpolicing communities of color. “I think the amount of surveillance we have all around us over the last 40 years also coincides with mass incarceration in this country and real harm inflicted on black and brown communities… Instead of law enforcement reacting to criminal behavior based on individualized suspicion, we have massive data networks and predictive data tracking and technology being funneled to law enforcement to try to intervene, to more closely monitor, to further overpolice and surveil communities that have always, consistently been harmed by law enforcement activities, that have disproportionate contact with the criminal legal system, that are disproportionally sitting in our jail right now, in our prisons. This automatic license plate reader system takes us further down that path.” Hinting at the security lapses we’ve seen with Flock, Wegleitner argues, “We don’t have the capacity of this Board and our committees to ensure this won’t be used for harm… I don’t see how a system like this could not be used for harm.”

At this June 4 meeting, the Board voted 26 to 7 to restore the $80,000 to the Sheriff for a new ALPR system “with enhanced privacy, security, transparency, and data control safeguards.”

Meanwhile, Flock cameras are still active throughout the Madison Area. Even though Dane County will be using a new ALPR provider, and Madison Police have never had a contract with Flock, four Flock cameras are located on the Capitol square as contracted with the State, UW-Madison has several Flock cameras throughout campus strategically pointed at crowded roads, and Maple Bluff has about a dozen.

ALPRs have reached the attention of only one candidate in the Wisconsin Governor’s race. In her AI policy, Francesca Hong singles out Flock specifically, demanding an “open-source, independently audited, and not controlled by a private vendor with a financial interest in its continued use.” Add a narrow data retention window, and we might be getting somewhere. No other candidate for Governor has Flock, ALPRs, or police surveillance policies on their website. This is particularly telling for Milwaukee County Executive and gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, who has seemingly made no recent statements in regards to the current debate over Flock in Milwaukee.

Even if the Wisconsin state government fails to regulate the various police forces across the state, we have various tools for more direct action. The site haveibeenflocked.com was used by the Josue Ayala’s victim to start that investigation. An open records request by the Wisconsin Examiner uncovered the Kenosha County Sheriff Department’s lack of action regarding their deputy’s misuse of Flock. DSA chapters, privacy advocates, and abolitionist groups are speaking out against Flock, and Fitchburg, Monona, Verona, UW-Police, and Dane County have all ended or are in the process of ending their Flock contracts. Even though Flock has earned the majority of recent attention on ALPR misuse, any brand of ALPR network recording every vehicle passing by its cameras and storing it into a searchable database is poised for misuse and violates our basic privacy rights.

Greeting to our comrades in the United States. In the past, you have been members of the International League of Religious Socialists, the longest-lived socialist organization in Europe. For its centennial Congress, the ILRS met in Barcelona in April and also participated in the Global Progressive Mobilisation Conference that brought together 5,000 people from trade unions, social democratic and socialist parties, and movements fighting for justice and peace.

During the ILRS Congress I had the honor of being elected president, along with an 11-member executive committee. In my home country of Norway, I am the leader of Kristne Arbeidere (Christian Labour), an independent organization within the Norwegian Labour Movement.

The ILRS is an organization for reflection and action that brings together national organizations of religious people who channel their political commitment through socialist and social-democratic parties. The member organizations are for the most part Christians, but membership is not limited to one faith. As Europe has become multifaith, so has the ILRS. Our hope is to expand beyond eurocentrism.

We don’t believe in religious states, but we believe in practicing our faith and taking the values of our faith out to the people. Faith that does not influence our attitudes toward other humans, becomes a dead and dormant faith. 

Our member organizations want to build bridges among communities and parties committed to policies in favor of peace, social justice, the care of the planet, gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights. We live in an unsafe world, and much of what the labor movement has built is threatened by right-wing populism and right-wing extremism.

In its Constitution, the ILRS states that one of its primary aims is “to reduce the historical prejudices and to overcome the traditional prejudices between religious believers, religious communities and the socialist movement.” 

Religious socialists choose to believe in a future that is good for people. The labor movement has always been working with faith in the future, and we will continue to do so. I believe that goodness triumphs over evil, that solidarity triumphs over selfishness, fair distribution triumphs over injustice, love triumphs over hatred,  and dialogue and peace triumph over war.

We are happy to have reopened communication with the Religion and Socialism Working Group in DSA and we hope to continue dialogue with you.

The world needs us more than ever!

The post Letter to U.S. Religious Socialists appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Kiros. Valdez. Avila Chevalier. Lewis George. Roy. Rent freeze and budget. Membership surge. All this and more in this monthly wrap-up of chapter news.

The post Chapter and Verse: Mensis Mirabilis appeared first on Democratic Left.

After joining in early 2025, my first interactions with MADSA left me, Corrin, unsure on what to do next. I attended DSA 101 and joined a few General Membership Meetings to start learning more. I knew I wanted to stay involved in the chapter’s work to advocate for bold, transformative changes to society to build a more democratic and sustainable future. The problem was that I didn’t really know anybody and I didn’t have a clear project to work on. Luckily for me, there was a brand new organizing effort in the Fitchrona area, where I live and work, that gave me the chance to develop my community organizing skills. That effort developed into the first-ever branch of MADSA.

Today, the Southern Dane County Branch, which has doubled in size in the last year, promotes MADSA’s campaigns and goals in the region. We’ve kicked off two priority campaigns to support Francesca Hong’s gubernatorial campaign and to build social connections with the branch. Here’s how we built the branch.

Branch Development

The inaugural meeting of what would become the branch took place in February 2025 at the Verona Public Library. This location was explicitly chosen to be outside of the Madison city limits to draw in suburban members who may struggle to make it to the isthmus on weekdays. Meetings functioned as experiments, a marked contrast to the usual DSA chapter body structure with a direct focus. The priority was getting people in a room together to start figuring out what issues we could focus on in Verona that wouldn’t be suitable for the entire chapter of MADSA. Over multiple monthly meet-ups, a common structure evolved to include report-backs on local politics, reviews of chapter decisions that affect local members, and an article we read out loud and discussed for about 20 minutes at the end of each meeting.

After some initial power mapping, tenant organizing quickly became a priority, especially given the large rent hikes in the area after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. We compiled a list of our allies, such as unions and left-leaning cafes and bookstores. Over the summer, we drafted and executed a plan for posturing for the Queer Liberation March, helping to build visibility for the chapter’s activities beyond the isthmus. We had early successes as two Verona Common Council members attended our meetings, as well as a Saint Louis DSA member who was in the area for work and found the meeting posted on MADSA’s website.

These small examples of autonomous member activity demonstrated we could organize around chapter goals within our region. This led us to think about formalizing as an accountable chapter body. Luckily enough for us, MADSA already had branches in the bylaws, even though as far as we know there hadn’t been any before. The base requirements for branch formation were already met; we already had five consistent members, so we began the more challenging task of creating bylaws for the branch.

We based the first drafts of the bylaws on a those of a branch of Louisville DSA. From there, we tailored the bylaws to fit with the language in MADSA’s bylaws and sought feedback from the Executive Committee to develop a second and third draft. This brought up many interesting questions. What authority should branches have to act independently in the name of the chapter as a whole? What kind of leadership structure should it have? Should the branch be empowered to send a voting representative to the Executive Committee? After a month or so of edits, the Executive Committee agreed to agendize the creation of the branch at the December 2025 MADSA General Meeting. The branch and the chapter agreed to limit the branch to public events supporting the work of chapter bodies. We landed on the usual structure of MADSA leadership by having two co-chairs, and we decided to send a voting representative to Executive Committee. We added plans for our future growth, including creating a steering committee after reaching fifteen average members in attendance. After some debate at the General Meeting, the resolution passed overwhelmingly, and the Southern Dane County Branch became an official chapter body.

With that milestone behind us, we began to put forward a vision for how we could grow as a chapter body. We passed a resolution to commit to two priority campaigns, one internal-focused and one external-focused, to balance limited bandwidth with the need to have meaningful work to drive engagement. This inside-outside organizing model was based on a blog post we read together written by a Boston DSA member. Just after MADSA’s yearly convention, we settled on our two priority campaigns: firstly, to support the chapter’s endorsed candidate for Wisconsin Governor, Francesca Hong, via canvassing in the branch area, and secondly, to organize social events for branch members to build cohesion and get new members involved. Our first canvassing event was a success, bringing in new faces to the group as we knocked about 200 doors. We followed that up with our first social event at a nearby bar. These campaigns are just getting started, and with the branch, there is a ton of potential to make a difference in the areas where our members live and work.

Lessons Learned and Successes

These are the lessons and takeaways that I think are the most important to the branch and MADSA as a whole.

There’s significant value in having a low barrier to entry for new members. Several members attended the branch meetings before getting involved in General Meetings with the complexities of Robert’s Rules, and they’ve told me that they’re glad they did. Having a convenient location with a smaller group of people and easy-to-understand procedures helps get people in the door, and before long these members began joining other chapter bodies, like working groups and campaigns. Once there, they often already knew a fellow branch member and were more comfortable and more likely to keep coming back.

Since the branch membership are all fairly close to each other geographically, it was easy to start forming carpool groups to General Meetings and other events. This helped build camaraderie and saved some gas to boot.

Integrating political education into branch meetings was surprisingly valuable. The choice to read articles together forced us to select short, to-the-point praxis pieces by fellow DSA members from a variety of chapters, caucuses, and online blogs. These pieces provide important, high-yield learning points meant to be shared with other DSA members rather than for an academic or theoretical audience.

Still, not everything came up roses. One of our thorny moments occurred when we elected a branch representative to the Executive Committee; it became quickly apparent that in practice this could lead to some difficult questions. With only a limited membership and single-digit attendance, our representative suddenly had as much voting power on the committee as chapter co-chairs. Pretty quickly, both chapter and branch members began to feel that sending a voting member felt undemocratic. Although a resolution at MADSA’s yearly convention that would have stripped branch members of voting representatives didn’t end up passing, we decided not to send a voting representative for the time being.

We also had some difficulty keeping new members involved beyond the core membership. With relatively infrequent monthly meetings, missing one meeting felt like a big setback. Many members showed up just once or twice. We have addressed this by planning additional events beyond the branch meetings to help keep people coming back. We expect that our branch campaigns will make visitors feel that they are using their time wisely and will drive retention.

Conclusion

Now that the first branch of MADSA has been formed, it’s easier than ever for new branches to be formed. Using our bylaws as a reference, a new branch could bypass a lot of the logistical challenges that slowed us down while formalizing. Especially now that neighborhood groups have popped up all over the city and beyond as ICE OUT organizing has exploded city-wide, there are ready-made networks that a branch can integrate with to bring more members into the chapter and our work. Consider setting up a casual event in your area and help grow a new branch, and by extension, MADSA along with it.

Blair Goodman and Colin Gillis are members of DSA’s Socialist Majority Caucus.

There is a meeting today in a DSA chapter somewhere in this country. Someone new showed up. They sat through an hour of business they did not understand, watched three veterans talk past each other about something that happened two years ago, and left without anyone getting their contact information. They will not come back.

There is another meeting happening somewhere else. It started on time. Someone explained the agenda. New members were introduced and offered a specific thing to do before the next gathering. At the end, a person who had never been to a socialist meeting in their life walked out feeling like they had joined something real.

The difference between those two rooms is not ideological. It is organizational. Over the last two years, DSA has grown enormously, climbing from roughly 50,000 members to over 100,000 nationally. There are many reasons for the surge: the unpopularity of Donald Trump and his policies, and the historic victory of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, chief among them. We want to name another cause whose importance has been badly underappreciated: DSA is able to seize this moment in part because it has spent years promoting and standardizing good practice in how meetings are run and how chapters are built.

Some may perceive this focus on infrastructure as a retreat from politics. They may say Robert’s Rules is a distraction from class struggle, that worrying about meeting culture means you have run out of things to say about capitalism. Building a socialist organization that can sustain itself, develop new leaders, and prosecute a political project over the years requires the same seriousness about institutional conditions that any fighting organization brings to its work. Infrastructure points outward. A chapter that runs perfect meetings but never knocks on a door has missed the point just as badly as one that canvasses every weekend but cannot keep the people it recruits. The two approaches depend on each other. The capacity to do mass work depends on building an institution capable of holding and developing the people who show up to do it.

That institution is built at the chapter level. A friend who rarely participates but is an influential member of our local political community attended a General Membership Meeting earlier this year, in March. Afterward, he confessed he was taken aback by some of the positions members took in a debate about electoralism, but he spent more time talking about how impressed he was with the facilitation. A hybrid meeting of more than a hundred people was expertly run, allowing members to disagree forcefully and in a comradely way. There is a material dimension to organizational hygiene, too. This year, the branch secured office space in the Labor Temple. That is not solely a procedural decision. It is a declaration that the chapter believes in its own future, and members respond to it because serious institutions attract serious people. It is also a clear upgrade: our previous space was plagued by flies and clutter. The new one is bright and well-appointed, in the heart of Madison’s labor community. Physical space, financial stability, trained facilitators, documented roles, and meeting cultures that do not drive working people away are all part of the same project. Ninety percent of movement building is infrastructure.

The left has two recurring ways of falling apart. The first is structurelessness. This occurs when a movement refuses formal leadership and decision rules. Without clearly defined processes and roles for meetings, informal power does not simply vanish. Instead, it becomes unaccountable. Occupy Wall Street had enormous energy and no machinery to hold it, and the encampments scattered without leaving a durable organization behind. The second is the cadre model, which imposes discipline and public unity and treats standing disagreement as a threat to be managed. It can act decisively, but it cannot absorb dissent. The International Socialist Organization, the most significant American group in that tradition, dissolved in 2019. Many of its most dedicated organizers found their way into DSA, where disagreement need not mean departure. DSA’s wager is that democratic process is the alternative to both: an organization that can hold real ideological disagreement and still function, as long as members share a process that makes disagreement productive rather than fatal.

What does this mean concretely? It means a new member should leave their first meeting knowing three things: what the chapter is working on, what they can do, and who to call. It means meetings should start and end on time, not because punctuality is a bourgeois virtue, but because respecting people’s time is how you keep working-class members who have two jobs and a commute. It means decisions should be made transparently so that members who disagree with the outcome can nonetheless trust the process that produced it. And it means leadership development is not a program you launch when things are going well. It is the continuous work of an organization that intends to survive its own successes.

The difference shows up in the work itself. A chapter with real infrastructure can organize tenant unions, building by building, showing up consistently enough that residents trust it with something real. It can run a rigorous endorsement process, reliably put canvassers on doors, and hold the candidates it elects to something after elections are over. A chapter without it cannot do any of those things consistently, regardless of how correct its politics are. Infrastructure is not what you build after you figure out what you stand for, it is what lets you stand for anything at all.

Process gets weaponized. Rules of order can be used to slow decisions, bury inconvenient resolutions, or exhaust opponents. This happens across the political spectrum within DSA, and anyone who has attended a contentious convention knows it. But the answer to procedural manipulation is not less procedure. It is better shared norms, practiced consistently, at every level of the organization. The chapter meeting is where those norms are built or broken, not the convention floor.

DSA is a big tent. Whether this big tent stands or falls depends above all on whether the chapters inside it are real institutions: communities that retain members, train successors, and show up with capacity when the political moment demands it — that is built meeting by meeting, office by office, follow-up call by follow-up call.

To the comrade reading this who just joined: the arguments you will encounter inside DSA are real arguments, worth having, among people who mostly want the same things. You have every right to form your own view of them, but know that a chapter that works is not a chapter that has resolved its political disagreements. It is a chapter that has built the capacity to have them, keep its members, and still show up next month. That capacity is not separate from socialism. It is what socialism looks like in practice, right now, in the rooms where we organize.