By: MJ

This article represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of The Detroit Socialist or Metro Detroit DSA as a whole.

Armed conflict between states is the highest form of class warfare. In the case of two imperialist nations, the ruling classes of each nation are competing for the division of the world, using the working classes of both nations as expendable pawns. The victory of either one is a victory for imperialism writ large, and a loss for the working classes of both nations. A victory for the working class is achieved only through the defeat of both of their respective imperialist governments. This is the general logic behind the practice of revolutionary defeatism. But this does not apply to conflict between an imperialist nation and a non-imperialist nation. In that situation, victory for the non-imperialist nation is a victory for all working people everywhere, including for the working people of the imperialist nation. The latter situation is clearly what we are finding ourselves in with this conflict between the US and Venezuela.

There are endless debates and discussions that can be had over the state of Venezuelan society. One can make arguments either for or against it being a “socialist” state. One can argue all day over whether Maduro is a “dictator.” Both of those discussions are interesting, but are completely irrelevant to our practice as socialists in the United States. Since we live and struggle within the (albeit declining) global imperialist hegemon, our attitude towards armed conflict by our government must be one of total opposition. There is no righteous war that can be waged by the United States on behalf of capital, no prism or lens through which we can look at aggression on the part of our state as anything other than imperialist, full stop.

Over the coming hours, days, and weeks, our government (and in particular, the Republican Party) will attempt to portray the capture of Nicolas Maduro as liberating the Venezuelan people. We as socialists must be able to see through this, and loudly declare it as a lie. The only liberation that comes from imperialist war is the liberation of capital. In his address on January 3rd, just a few hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump confirmed that his administration’s intention was the direct occupation and control of Venezuela. As he has alluded to elsewhere, the immediate course of action of that administration will be to liberalize access to the Venezuelan oil reserves. Foreign investment, spearheaded of course by the US, will liberate Venezuelan oil from its captors, freeing it to be profited off of by capitalists. The imperialists will repeat ad nauseum that Venezuela’s oil is now in the hands of its people, but the only Venezuelans who will benefit from this are those willing to betray their country for profit.

Statements by prominent opposition figures make this trajectory unmistakably clear. Maria Corina Machado, who famously won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize (which Trump hilariously took as a direct snub to himself), has openly declared her commitment to privatization and market liberalization should she be installed as leader. Her vision for Venezuela includes removing the state from the oil sector, opening markets, and privatizing national industries. While at this point, it seems that Trump is not interested in having her oversee the American occupation of Venezuela, these policies will undoubtedly be pushed by any administration that ends up in power in the country. These policies represent a wholesale reversal of efforts to assert national control over strategic resources — in effect, a reversal of the Bolivarian Revolution. This agenda is imperialism, distilled to its essence, and promises Venezuelan workers renewed exploitation and dependency on the US.

One wonders how newly inaugurated Zohran Mamdani will handle this situation. In 2020, Maduro was indicted in New York’s Southern District, and if he goes to New York for arraignment and eventual trial, Zohran and our comrades in the NYC chapter will be in a particularly difficult position. He said in his inauguration speech that he would “govern as a democratic socialist.” What does a democratic socialist do when an ostensibly leftist foreign head of state has been abducted by the federal government and is facing charges in the city they are governing? Will he use his position to protest against the actions of the Trump administration? Will he show solidarity with the people of Venezuela? I have faith that he will try and that his heart is with Venezuela, but he is already in a nearly impossible situation, only a couple days into his term.

The choice facing socialists is stark. We can either accept the narratives offered by imperial power — debating which foreign leaders deserve our sympathy — or we can remain committed to a materialist analysis that centers class struggle on a global scale. Opposition to US imperialism is the minimum requirement of socialist politics. The presidency, by its very nature, lends itself to personal dictatorship. Even the most hands-off of presidents (Coolidge and his ilk) still have near limitless power within easy reach. The presidency has gathered more and more power to itself over the past century, and the ideal of the separation of powers (already a fiction at our nation’s birth, but hidden under a veil of democratic norms and “good-faith” governance) has been rendered a comfortable, if quaint myth. The president can start a war on his own initiative (with 90 days to deliver Congress a fait accompli), can deploy troops on American soil, and can even abduct a foreign head of state.

Political power is ultimately a question of force, and who can exercise it. Therefore, if the presidency is now capable of wielding every form of direct state violence, what can he not do? What can Congress or the Supreme Court do but offer a sternly worded rebuttal? The solution to this is to finish Reconstruction: to demand full democratization of the state, the abolition of the imperial presidency, of the Supreme Court, and of the oligarchic Senate, and the empowerment of a new representative body, directly elected by the people, holding full legislative and executive power. This is the foundation of the Democratic Socialist Republic.

MJ is a member of the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America.

Socialists have to mean what we say and say what we mean. The working class cannot win power for itself without a political vehicle of its own, and the Democratic Party is not – and will not ever be – that vehicle. Our long-term project has to be building that new party, which means taking bold steps to learn how to do so.

We need to take chances as they come, not only to do our part but also to teach future socialists. We have a chance, if we are willing to step out of our comfort zone, to set an example and engage in a practical experiment in true political independence. In order to make this meaningful step towards political independence – to create a campaign our comrades across the country and across time can point to as an example to build on and learn from – we, as a chapter, will have to invest heavily in it. 

Three years ago, Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez and I published an article arguing that, at some point, socialists will have to make the conscious decision to take those first steps towards true political independence, building an independent political party. In that article, we acknowledged that those initial steps towards independence would be the most difficult, because it will mean stepping into the unknown. 

Now is the time. Alderman Sigcho-Lopez of the 25th ward (which includes Pilsen, Little Village, University Village, and Chinatown) intends to run for Congress as an independent in the Fourth Congressional District, a seat held by Jesús “Chuy” García since 2018. The district is a progressive district with a majority Latino population covering much of Chicago’s southwest side and a number of working-class suburbs, including Cicero, Berwyn, and Bridgeview up through Melrose Park. Sigcho-Lopez is a known quantity who has won tough elections and is a committed socialist with a vision of building independent power for the working class. By breaking with the Democrats, he will not be able to count on much formal institutional support from major unions or organized progressive groups. 

Hard as that break may be, it is increasingly necessary. The Democrats’ popularity is at an all-time low, and beyond that, they have proven themselves incapable of facing down the advance of right-wing authoritarianism. Just as they’ve done for the last thirty years, they are relying on their place in the two-party duopoly to be the default choice when the Republicans go ‘too far’ and are content to hold power for no more than a few years before the Republicans return with even more dangerous politics. 

In New York City, organized socialists showed that they can win power in high-profile, high-stakes races. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary showed that socialists can provide an organizational base, working with other groups and constituencies to win even against the odds. Until his primary win, Mamdani had institutional support only from United Autoworkers District 9A, a reform local that endorsed him six months before. Major unions and progressive groups stayed away, and a Working Families Party endorsement came only three weeks before the primary. He couldn’t rely on massive six-figure checks or million-dollar donations, and instead had to raise money from tens of thousands of small-dollar donors as the entirety of his fundraising.  

Mamdani’s win was a thunderclap for the Democrats. It showed that true bottom-up organizational power can, in fact, win big offices, and that even without progressive NGOs or union officialdom, even a self-proclaimed socialist can win, and win big, when their support is built from the bottom up and involves thousands of people who believe in the campaign’s vision. 

Still, Mandani’s (and the NYC Democratic Socialists of America’s) win comes with a lot of caveats: matching funds, ranked-choice voting, the presence of historically unpopular opponents in Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo. Nonetheless, it was a remarkable feat that proves that with full commitment and a vision, bottom-up politics works. 

If the New York mayoral race was a thunderclap, the Democrats losing a safe, progressive seat to an independent challenger from the left – one who didn’t even need their ballot line – would be an earthquake. It would knock down the key pillar that keeps movements from leaving the Democrats behind: the ‘brand loyalty’ of voters to the Democratic Party ballot line. It would set an example for how socialists can build the coalitions needed to win independently. This model would relieve the pressure on organized groups, including unions, to stick with Democrats as the lesser evil. Without that pressure, the gates to true working-class independence can open. 

But ours has to be a long-term plan. We cannot keep trying to design a strategy and abandon it after one cycle. Political independence requires experimentation, trial, and error. We learned much from the Mamdani victory; now we must see if we can go further. Winning in this district will require a lot of things to go right and an immense amount of resources. 

The Fourth Congressional District is the right campaign, and Alderman Sigcho-Lopez is the right candidate, to start the long work of building an independent socialist party for the working class. Knowing the nature of the serious challenges ahead shouldn’t be a reason not to do it; it should inspire us to make sure our experiment is a worthwhile one by giving everything we’ve got. 

Money

If he fails to win formal union support, Sigcho-Lopez will have to raise half a million dollars (if not more) from small donors. That number is only an estimate; Chicago-area districts rarely have competitive elections to go by. The closest analog is probably the highly competitive 2024 Seventh Congressional district primary race between incumbent Danny Davis, Melissa Conyears-Ervin, Kina Collins, and others. Davis spent just under $1 million to win that primary; Conyears-Ervin spent $750,000 to get 22% of the vote, with the other three candidates combined spending around $350,000 for another 26%. That’s $1.1 million for 48% of the vote. 

Sigcho-Lopez will start with decent name recognition, so he won’t have to spend as much just to be known. On the other hand, he will have to overcome the Democratic Party’s ballot line advantage. Let’s say conservatively that he will need to spend $500,000 between now and November to win more votes than Patty García, Chuy’s preferred successor. The average donation to Mamdani was around $75, so to raise half a million dollars from small donors, the campaign would need around 6,500 donors. 

Mamdani had 54,000 such donors, with 63% or 34,000 of them from inside New York City. If the same proportions hold for Sigcho-Lopez, the city probably maxes out at around 4,000 donors, i.e., the same proportion of 63%, which alone is very ambitious and still requires raising money across the country. This means nationalizing the campaign, and giving socialists everywhere a reason to invest in our effort to build independent political power in Illinois. 

To compensate for the tendency to default to the Democratic Party ballot line, the campaign will have to be visible everywhere in order to give the sense that it can win. That means thousands of volunteers putting in tens of thousands of hours to reach every voter, but it also means lots and lots of money to boost its message. With institutional support likely to go to the hand-picked Democrat, there will need to be organizing at the grassroots level to get people involved directly in the same way Mamdani’s campaign organized workers directly rather than hoping to win over union leadership.

This will require targeted support from the strata of workers most able to give at a slightly higher level: unionized workers and professionals with more disposable income who can give between $250 and $500 in one election cycle. That means identifying such members in our chapter and in the national organization, communicating the vision of the campaign, and getting them to give. One hundred such donors means $25,000 to $50,000; five hundred means as much as a quarter million. That requires work and building on the organic connections our members have with workers. 

Votes

Patty García is by most standards a progressive, and Chuy was one of the most progressive members of Congress. That means every vote Sigcho-Lopez wins will be a vote for democratic socialist politics, not just a protest vote against a weak or moderate Democrat. That alone would be an important step in learning how to build an independent socialist vehicle.

Chuy García announced he would not be seeking reelection immediately before the close of petition-gathering for the Democratic primary, and only his chief of staff, Patty García, was ready with petition signatures. She will be unopposed in the primary and face only nominal Republican opposition in the general election. The Fourth was created as Illinois’ first majority-Latino district in 1992, and since then, only two people have held the seat: Luis Gutierrez and Chuy García. The latter took the seat in a similar hand-off from Gutierrez. In other words, in Illinois’ only Latino-majority district, the voters have never had a meaningful election, especially since the district was also substantially re-drawn in 2022. 

For that reason, it is somewhat difficult to forecast what could happen. It is useful to know, though, that in 2022 the general election vote was about 134,000, with 49,000 (37%) coming from Chicago, and 7,500 (6%) from Sigcho-Lopez’s 25th ward. The Democrat won with 91,000 votes, with a Republican drawing 37,300 and a candidate from the Working Class Party gaining 4,600. 

That same year, 38,000 people voted in the Democratic primary and 12,200 in the Republican primary for the district. That’s a difference of about 83,000 between self-identifying (and presumably partisan) Democrats and Republicans and the total number of voters. To win, Sigcho-Lopez would need to win enough of those more casual voters and peel off enough Democrats. The math is not friendly, but it is hardly impossible; he would need to win about 60,000 votes, or just over half of the non-Republican vote, since, assuming there are 150,000 voters and 25% go with a Republican, that leaves about 110,000 voters.

Sigcho-Lopez has won two bruising elections in Chicago. Nobody has ever voted for Patty García for anything, and because she is unopposed, nobody will really be voting for her even in the primary. Can Sigcho-Lopez grow a base of the 7% of the district in his ward (around 7,000 votes) and win over 50,000 voters in one of the most progressive districts in the country in the wake of a shady hand-off of power? It hardly seems impossible; if there is any way to see how far the democratic socialist message can get, now is the time and the Fourth District is the place. 

The Candidate and the Cadre

One way to characterize Byron Sigcho-Lopez is a ‘firebrand.’ Certainly, he has been the least compromising socialist elected official we have seen in a long time. His hostility to the Democratic Party establishment has been open, often to his political detriment. While he is a Democratic Party Committeeman (and so technically a part of the Cook County leadership structure), that does not seem to have dampened his appetite to take on and break from the party. Byron is an ideologically committed socialist. 

His time in office has been turbulent, with a variety of conflicts both within and outside of his ward. Nevertheless, he has repeatedly shown himself to be tireless and always on the front line anywhere the working class is under attack.

Sigcho-Lopez has worked closely with the Chicago DSA going back to the chapter’s early involvement in the Lift the Ban campaign in 2017, when he invited us to participate. The South Side branch brought the rest of the chapter into the work, running referenda in support of lifting the ban on rent control in a number of precincts and becoming one of our earliest electoral efforts. He remained closely connected to the chapter’s Socialists in Office (SIO) committee and kept lines of communication open. 

He is not, however, ‘cadre’ in the usual sense; his relationships across his ward and the Fourth Congressional district are not a result of his political development inside DSA. They predate his relationship to CDSA, and as an elected official, they are considerably wider than the chapter could ever provide. 

The Campaign

If not a cadre candidate, would this therefore be a ‘cadre campaign?’ It will have to be. Taking on a Democratic party candidate from the outside – not trying to knock out an establishment Democrat from within, but costing the party a safe seat, in an election year  where every win will be vital – will dry up just about every resource outside of what organized socialists and bottom-up people power can provide. If formal institutional support is not forthcoming, DSA and CDSA, and whatever other local groups are willing to join in coalition to take on the Democratic establishment, will have to do the hard work of organizing affinity groups in support of the campaign. That includes community groups, unions, ethnic and religious organizations, and other political formations where formal support can’t be expected. 

CDSA will need to orient itself heavily towards this campaign. Organizing within our unions, building on our relationships with other community and affinity groups, stepping up to captain door-knocking and fund-raising operations, creating media, and staffing the campaign to produce policy, are among the myriad things needed to win. 

The process matters. If we invest strongly in developing our relationships across the district and the city, building our internal campaign, media, and coalition-building skills, honing our message of political independence, and identifying thousands of people who agree with our vision of an independent working-class party, democratic socialism wins. Even if the campaign fails, those relationships and experiences will be a net win for the cause, but only if we take the effort to build them seriously. 

In other words, it is not worth endorsing this campaign if we as a chapter are not going to leave everything on the field. We must do the work to discover what it would takes to win against the Democratic Party from the outside, despite what it may take.

The post Independence Requires Investment: The Time is Now for an Independent Run appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

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By: Haywood Cabral

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.

As Donald Trump’s second presidency is nearing the 1-year mark, we’ve seen a number of attacks directed at working class communities of color. From ICE raids targeting racialized immigrants, to National Guard deployments in blue cities with large Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities, Trump has made it clear who he is targeting and in many ways, it’s nothing new. 

This has not come without organized community resistance. We’ve seen people confront secret police agents to protect members of their communities across the country, we’ve seen organized ICE watch groups form, such as LUCE Immigrant Justice Network in Massachusetts. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has been a part of these efforts, but insufficiently; historically, majority white socialist or communist organizations have struggled to maintain solidarity with BIPOC communities. This is a trend that we cannot continue. DSA needs to become an organization where BIPOC communities feel welcomed as leaders and organizers, and trust DSA as a representative of their class interests. 

To do that, we must understand where the socialist and labor movements have struggled to adequately consider people of color and the consequences of that, why DSA’s class makeup skews so heavily towards the labor aristocracy, and what DSA can do to fix that.

Race, Class, and White Supremacy Culture

Race, constructed, began to emerge roughly around the sixteenth century to facilitate European settler-colonialism. As Spain struggled to gain a foothold in what is now the United States, due to the resistance of the Indigenous population, it became clear to British colonial leaders that a broader front of settlers would be needed in order to ensure that colonies had the manpower to control both the Indigenous peoples and African slaves. The British colonial power embarked on a pan-European project, constructing whiteness over a labor force of enslaved African and Indigenous workers. This meant that, unlike the Spanish, the British were willing to overlook the religious differences of the time to a degree, and accept Catholic, Protestant, even some Jewish settlers and rebrand them as “white.” This allowed Britain to have a larger pool of settlers to bring to the “New World” and fight enslaved Indigenous and African people, while Spain struggled to find enough Catholics to risk their lives.

Many of these European settlers were able to become landowners as these colonies eventually developed into the United States, something that would not have happened for these people had they stayed in Europe. The land transfer necessary to provide those settlers their landownership and subsequent class stake in white supremacy was bloody – a mass land grab through the genocide of Indigenous people, providing the basis for the class collaboration between the settler working class and the bourgeoisie.

This new “white” identity was solidified in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. While Bacon’s Rebellion tragically targeted the Indigenous population, it was in response to rampant poverty in the Virginia Colony and saw interracial unity primarily between white indentured servants and black slaves. The British colonial power was terrified by this and made explicit concessions to the white indentured servants to facilitate the class collaboration with the ruling class and deepen racial lines between black and white workers.

This class collaboration between the settler working class and the bourgeoisie under the new category of “white” created a culture of white supremacy as a means to control and oppress Africans and Indigenous peoples through manner and mannerism, policing the very nature by which they engage and incentivize socially, a white supremacy culture reinforcing whiteness’s own standards. We see this still today in a number of ways, from black hairstyles being deemed unprofessional in the workplace, to black women being labelled too loud or too masculine, to black men and women being seen as more dangerous or more threatening.

We can see these dynamics replicated in many DSA spaces, where white workers unconsciously follow the same script, reinforced by a rank-and-file and leadership that also consists primarily of workers from the white middle classes. People of color in DSA have frequently encountered class reductionist (meaning reducing all other social questions to class and nothing else) responses to systemic racism, the deprioritization of organizing projects by white comrades, and the silencing of those who call out not just racist microaggressions, but also misogyny and ableism, by calling their critiques “uncomradely” backed by an uncomradely reluctance to commit to intentional organizing in primarily BIPOC cities and neighborhoods.

This culture programs people into whiteness, especially but not exclusively white people, through the dominant class ideals and values (i.e. bourgeois ideals and values) necessary to perpetuate the racism that maintains these class perspectives. This tends to foster feelings of superiority, fear of black people, and this great replacement theory-type of attitude when seeing black people succeed. In turn, among BIPOC workers and organizers, this creates its own cycle of self-hatred and inferiority. In this, we can look to similarities with what Fanon discusses in The Wretched of the Earth about the psychology of the colonizer versus the colonized, where shame leads to envy of the colonizer’s social position and a desire to replace the colonizer. In the US context, this is manifested when BIPOC workers want to be “one of the good ones.”

Racism in Labor and Socialist Movements

Historically, many mainstream elements in the labor movement had no problem excluding BIPOC workers from their idea of working class solidarity. During the Civil War, the nascent labor movement in the North largely favored deportation of African slaves instead of radical abolitionism galvanized by the Black general strike and Black-led organizing ferment in movement centers like Boston. Unions were segregated, with the exception of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the question of civil rights and self-determination for black workers largely ignored. White workers generally viewed enslaved people as low-wage competition for the meagre set of jobs allowed by the ruling class, not as fellow workers to be organized — the class collaboration of whiteness in tact. This culminated in the New York race riot where white working class New Yorkers began to blame free black people in the city for the Civil War, slaughtering black people around Manhattan Island and beyond.

When the New Deal was passed, the labor movement celebrated it as a victory, ignoring the qualification that black workers were disproportionately represented in agricultural and domestic work and excluded from many of the labor protections of the New Deal. Most of labor celebrated the New Deal as black tenant farmers were evicted, rehired, and forced to work for extremely low wages.

Racism and white chauvinism existed in the early years of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) — but to differing degrees. Both the SPA and the CPUSA initially held the position that black liberation and civil rights were simply extensions of the labor movement and therefore required no special consideration. The SPA even had some of their chapters in the South supporting segregation because black workers were sometimes used as scabs, thus they believed that black workers were a threat to their job security, a sentiment that should sound familiar. The SPA chapter in Louisiana adopted “The Negro Clause” in which they opposed disenfranchisement of black people but endorsed segregation both in society and in the party. 

CPUSA eventually would develop the line of self-determination for black people in the Black Belt, a part of the South spanning roughly from Virginia to Texas, two hundred counties that at the time had majority black populations (most still do). This led to CPUSA prioritizing organizing in the South among black workers and gave the party real legitimacy among the black working class, however the white chauvinism among the party leadership ultimately led to this effort being relatively short lived.

As a result, the black middle class and black bourgeoisie would come to dominate the coming Civil Rights Movement, which was a mass uprising of the black population in the US that had the potential to serve as a revolutionary struggle against capitalism and internal colonization. However, the necessary organizing for this to happen did not occur, and as a result the Civil Rights Movement became one led by the class interests of the black bourgeoisie and black middle class. The energy of the movement was focused on integration, not on liberation. CPUSA and SPA’s lack of sustained organizing among black workers allowed the black bourgeoisie to take the lead, and the pursuit of integration was largely in the interest of that class. 

This isn’t to say that the Civil Rights Movement was not impactful for all black people, or even that socialists and communists were uninvolved, but rather that integration primarily allowed already economically well off black people increased access to the benefits of US capitalism by removing the legal barriers that limited them. It did not do nearly enough to lift up the millions of black working class families forced into ghettos and poverty. We see the evidence of this in the differences in income between black and white families, the continued segregation, and mass incarceration that immediately followed the Civil Rights Movement. 

DSA: How We Got Here, Where To Go

DSA’s membership and largest base of support consist largely of white, upper middle-class professionals, even if some campaigns like Zohran Mamdani’s may have shifted these dynamics in local landscapes where organizing projects have prioritized BIPOC communities. This may not seem like a crucial problem at first glance, but the history of settler-colonialism in the US, and its operation in organizational cultures, shows that the fact that the DSA base remains so limited also profoundly limits the organizing, potentials, and efficacy of DSA organizing. When we think about the material interests involved in land back for Tribal Nations, or autonomy for black workers in the Black Belt, this is often perceived as in contradiction to the interests of white workers, particularly because most white workers today take on the interests of the capitalist class in the name of whiteness. 

Now this isn’t to say that white workers and intellectuals can’t contribute to the movement, when the history of Abolitionism, Civil Rights, and the George Floyd Uprisings shows us that they can. I only suggest that the base of any socialist revolution in the United States (i.e. the classes most heavily represented) must center on BIPOC working classes. The BIPOC workers represent the most oppressed elements with the most to gain from revolution and have demonstrated a history of powerful and successful class struggle, lineages that connect to regular contact with the repressive apparatus of the state and intentional underdevelopment that provides the necessary material conditions for mass radicalization. It’s no coincidence that the ruling class incarcerates this population at such high rates, as a means of counter insurgency against a population most likely to rise up.

DSA was formed out of a merger between the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM), forming around the politics of the American New Left. This movement was a primarily white student and professional class movement, led primarily by college students against the Vietnam War. Membership bumped in response to movements such as the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders, the activist core of which skewed white. Bernie struggled significantly with black voters, particularly older black voters who were less familiar with him than with Clinton in 2016, a trend that continued with Zohran in the New York City primary back in June before Mamdani’s heavy prioritization to socialist politics and targeted constituency oganizers led to significantly more work in particularly Black communities. When he did so, and showed his campaign to be viable, the wave of support was massive — demonstrating the reservoir for socialist politics within the Black working class.

Solving DSA’s struggle to center BIPOC workers is twofold. DSA must prioritize organizing in BIPOC communities around issues impacting these communities most while also challenging the implicit white supremacy culture within the organization. The latter is the place to start, because it does no good to organize in BIPOC communities if DSA’s culture only drives these members away from the organization. In short, DSA needs to seriously incorporate anti-racism into our organizational norms. DSA organizers need to understand that being in DSA does not absolve oneself from upholding racism and white supremacy, when one Yale study suggested that those who participated in the study and viewed themselves as far left and allies of the black community tended to simplify their vocabulary when talking to black people compared to when they talked to white people even more so than conservatives in the same study did. Now, of course, this isn’t to suggest that the left is secretly more racist than the Right, but what it does suggest is that the implicit bias assumes black people are inherently less intelligent and less capable of understanding complex words and concepts. And that is present in the minds of comrades, present even in those who consider themselves allies to the struggle of black people. 

DSA members understand that the key to anti-racism is a systemic approach to combating racism rather than an individualistic one, but we still must call out microaggressions that occur against BIPOC members. We must stop ourselves and protect each other from quips and comments that make BIPOC members feel unmoored, antagonized, and alienated, all deeply disorganizing experiences, whether those come in the form of class reductionism or referring to accusations of racism as “uncomradely” critiques. This requires us to conduct systematic political education around what anti-racism is and the issues that face BIPOC communities in their unique experiences within the working class. We will also need to work to cultivate a culture where BIPOC members are able to call out microaggressions without facing accusations of “bad faith criticism” and “uncomradely criticism” by continuing projects like the wholehearted praxis presentation from the General Organizing Meeting (GOM) of the Boston DSA chapter in October 2025, to develop our collective ability to give and receive criticism constructively.

From there, we should shift priorities towards organizing BIPOC workers around issues that impact BIPOC communities most heavily. For Boston DSA, specifically, this could look like focusing on supporting tenant union networks like Greater Boston Tenants Union (GBTU) to help them expand tenant organizing in places like Dorchester, Roxbury, Hyde Park, Mattapan, Brockton, Fall River, New Bedford and other more diverse areas. Gentrification and massive rent increases in Boston has led to more and more BIPOC individuals being forced out of the city or forced onto the streets. Combined with redlining, these factors have also created a dramatically segregated Boston, with large chunks of the city’s BIPOC population in Roxbury, Dorchester, Hyde Park, and Mattapan. Tenant unions are a great method for fighting these processes. When tenants organize we are able to use our collective power, as the ones providing the rent the landlord so desperately craves, to fight rent increases, bad conditions, slow to respond landlords, and more. Many of these tenants are already organizing their neighbors to help fight evictions, but are systematically cut off from the time, money, and people power to do it on a larger scale. DSA and GBTU can provide these resources that will allow tenants to organize on a larger scale and lead this movement themselves.

Another example could be working with existing community groups on prison abolition, where the goal is to prevent a municipality from opening more prisons or prevent police departments from receiving more funding, complete with chokepoints and victories that can be fought by coalitions. This is particularly relevant today, with the intensification of ICE raids around the country, targeting BIPOC migrant workers and their families. Mass incarceration has disproportionately targeted BIPOC communities primarily as a means to quell any revolutionary energy by targeting those most likely to rise up against the system as a result of their material conditions and the degree of exploitation they face. Any reduction in the state’s ability to repress class struggle through mass incarceration would allow us to grow the socialist movement exponentially.

The point is to work in BIPOC communities, to build trust through praxis, to prove that DSA is an organization that will stand up for the right of self-determination for all oppressed nations. 

DSA should take inspiration from some of the core tenants of CPUSA’s organizing in Alabama during the Third Period Era, emphasizing organizing in BIPOC communities around issues that particularly impact BIPOC communities, and committing to developing a base of BIPOC membership and leadership in these struggles. A great first step, which is already under way in Boston, would be developing neighborhood groups in these communities that can take on a lot of this work.

This is a process that will take years to see the fruits of, but this is the only way for DSA to become the party of the working class. We need our primary base of support to shift away from the white, upper middle class professional worker, and shift towards the heavily oppressed BIPOC workers in the United States and around the world.

Haywood Cabral is an engineer and a member of Boston DSA.

The post OPINION: DSA and the BIPOC Working Classes appeared first on Working Mass.

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By: Liam Noble

BOSTON COMMON, MA – 2026 is off to an ignominious start. In the morning of January 3rd, Boston woke up to bizarre and disturbing news: the U.S. government had abducted the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in the night. Caracas had been bombed. In a symbolic act of vandalistic terrorism, the mausoleum and final resting place of Hugo Chavez had been blown up. The US military Southern Command had violated the most basic principles of state sovereignty – with no attempt at hiding imperial motive, unlike the Bush Administration in Iraq.

Less than twelve hours later, outraged protests erupted in every major city across the United States.

In Boston, at least 250 people turned out to hear speakers from the antiwar ANSWER Coalition and Boston Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), alongside Massachusetts Peace Action and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Considering the very short notice on a freezing Saturday afternoon, the turnout was spectacular.

Rage simmered in the cold air. 

The speakers hit continuous beats: opposition to imperial madness, opposition to murder and war, opposition to the venomous and ignorant lust for domination in our rulers that Americans are all too familiar with.

Again and again the question was tip-toed around: How do we stop the war machine? Answer: Organize, organize, organize!

Brian Garvey, representing Massachusetts Peace Action, said:

Go to your friends and family. Go to your neighbors. Talk about what is happening. We are creeping towards fascism, and have been for a long time. And join an organization!

Both Boston DSA co-chairs Bonnie Jin and Estefania Galvis spoke in the rally around the Park Street Station, and to reporters after.

Jin reported to WCVB:

The kidnapping of President Maduro from Venezuela is an illegal act. Whatever you think about the politics of Venezuela, the United States taking illegal intervention is an illegal act and will only make this worse.

The national DSA organization similarly organized a rapid response. A mass call was scheduled by noon and a statement released before rallies rocked the cities, and a statement analyzing the situation and issuing demands was released in hours:

This is a nakedly imperialist war to install a US puppet government that will give Venezuela’s oil resources over to US corporations and to force US hegemony over Latin America — the new “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

Other speakers emphasized the sovereign choice of the people of Venezuela as paramount and referenced the wealth extraction that Trump and his billionaires are poised to now preside over. Hersch Rothmel of the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) called the attack “an outrageous violation of international law.” He went on: “The only people who benefit are the oil billionaires.”

Trump himself, by the end of the morning, was boasting about the Venezuelan oil he planned to sell off and threatened the same upon nations not subservient to the U.S. empire. He wrongly claimed Mexico was run by cartels, aiming a threat at another Latin American socialist leader. The bloody, ridiculous imperial game will be repeated again and again. 

This also marks the outbreak of a monumental crisis for the world— there is no international law any longer. This attack was carried out in the middle of negotiations, just to lull Caracas into a false sense of security. Colombia, with the People’s Republic of China and Russia both assenting, has requested a Security Council meeting at the United Nations — scheduled now for the next business day, on Monday.

Today Maduro, tomorrow, who knows?

If Trump’s War Department can abduct a sovereign head of state, just as his ICE agents abduct our neighbors, what about any of us?

Liam Noble is a photographer and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Boston Common Shakes With a Rally Organized in Hours After US Attack on Venezuela appeared first on Working Mass.

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Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, commonly known as “SpaceX,” is challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in a lawsuit that could undermine the enforcement of national labor law. To date, the strategy is working, with its prospects unclear until the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority weighs in definitively. The litigation is […]

The post Elon Musk and SpaceX attack the National Labor Relations Board appeared first on EWOC.

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Statement of the UE Officers – December 18, 2025

PITTSBURGH, PA – Our government’s escalating attacks on Venezuela are unconstitutional, immoral, and a massive waste of resources. The idea that Venezuela represents a military threat to the U.S. is patently absurd; the use of the U.S. military to carry out lethal attacks on fishing boats and seize oil tankers amounts to simple murder and piracy. We demand that our government immediately cease these attacks, and that Congress exercise its power to reign in this overreach by the executive branch.

In the resolution “For Jobs, Peace and a Pro-Worker Foreign Policy,” delegates to our most recent convention declared that “Foreign and military policies should defend the interests of working people, not the wealthy. UE has long believed that the labor movement should promote its own foreign policy based on diplomacy and labor solidarity.” This commitment to diplomatic rather than military solutions led delegates to demand that the U.S. government “[c]ease using U.S. military and intelligence agencies in interventions against nations which pose no threat to the American people” and, specifically, that the U.S. “[c]ease all harassment of and economic sanctions on Venezuela.”

The administration has been attempting to justify its attacks with claims that the vessels it is attacking are smuggling drugs into the U.S., and that this is being funded by the Venezuelan government — claims for which it has not produced a shred of evidence. Even if these claims are true, the appropriate action would be to interdict the vessels, seize the drugs, and pursue criminal charges against the smugglers, not to carry out extrajudicial killings. Even if our country were in a legitimate armed conflict with Venezuela, the intentional killing of survivors, such as happened during a second strike on September 2, would still constitute a war crime.

We agree with Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-TX) that the blockade of Venezuela ordered by President Trump this week is “unquestionably an act of war. A war that the Congress never authorized and the American people do not want.”

As recent comments by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles make clear, these attacks are not about drugs, but are instead an attempt to bring about regime change and gain control over Venezuela’s oil. Although President Trump campaigned, in part, on keeping the U.S. from getting entangled in the internal politics of other countries, the course his administration is pursuing risks getting our military bogged down in a military conflict that few Americans want.

The administration’s actions are putting our service members in harm’s way and making demands on them to carry out illegal orders. Several senior military leaders have resigned in protest, and Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), who served as a Navy fighter pilot, has spoken out, reminding service members that they have the right to refuse illegal orders. In a disturbing use of the military to pursue a partisan political agenda, the Pentagon has opened and escalated an investigation of Senator Kelly.

Unfortunately, the use of extrajudicial killings as a tool of U.S. foreign policy is a bipartisan affair. During his eight years in office, President Obama ordered over 500 drone strikes, killing almost 4,000 people, including over 300 civilians, and normalizing the use of military power to engage in targeted killings in foreign countries. Congress must reassert its authority over the power to make war, not as a partisan measure, but because no president of either party can be trusted with this power.

As working people in the U.S. face an increasing affordability crisis, our government’s resources should be directed to meeting the needs of working people, not wasted on illegitimate and immoral military adventures. We demand that Congress pass H.Con.Res.64, a bipartisan bill which would invoke the War Powers Resolution to put a stop to this unconstitutional military aggression. War with Venezuela would be a disaster for the working people of both countries, and we as a labor movement must do our part to prevent it.

Scott Slawson
President

Andrew Dinkelaker
Secretary-Treasurer

Kimberly Lawson
Director of Organization

The post No More Blood for Oil: UE Condemns Military Attacks on Venezuela appeared first on Working Mass.

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The author of this piece chose to remain anonymous.

This is a review and commentary on “A Queer Marxist Trans Feminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction” by Nat Raha, from Transgender Marxism. This review is from an agender perspective.

In the essay, Raha says that domestic social reproduction is a “feminine act.” In other words, they reify gender based on the particular gendered expression that occurs in the context of various societies where gendered signification is fungible, and ultimately arbitrary, based on which generation you’re in. In other words, the essay romanticizes a domesticated, sexist view of femininity, where feminine people do domestic work. I always disliked the word feminine, as it implies a traditional, binary sex, and never tries to overcome this binary to go beyond a representational view of gender.

Gender is fungible in every generation you’re in. Queerness itself is outside of time, responsible for all change – temporality, time itself, and the variable context of each generation is what constitutes the gendered expression of each era. Gendered expression does, as the book says, have its own emotional labor that one must go through for queer people. For queer people such as myself and my partner, not being recognized as queer is a sort of invisibility that can occur. Essays like this erase the experience of being agender. An agender view of these gendered phenomena is that like capitalism and its axiom of profit, gender is not extended anywhere in space. Heteronormativity is in contrast to queer gender, which takes traditional gender and performs it as straight people perform it, or it bends the expression.

But for me, gender expression is fungible. Archers in the past wore high heels; indigenous peoples and royalty such as pharaohs wore leggings and makeup. The makeup industry made makeup a feminine thing, as with other things that are bought and sold back to us through gendered expression of capital; we try to differentiate ourselves as the particular tries to differentiate itself but end up only creating a new universal. This is what occurs in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the “Sense Certainty” and “Perception” sections. When you point to a thing, you get a universal of language. Language can only speak about things on a general level; it cannot capture the infinite difference of sense, and our ideas about gender are in fact immobile.

Because the only things which relate to the immobile motor in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti Oedipus are Oedipus, capital, and heteronormativity, it makes me wonder: is gender itself a sort of machinic normativity, reproduced by representational sameness? Whenever we try to say gender is a fixed idea, we are not recognizing that our concepts of gender flow as through a stream, or as through the flows of the mega-machine; whatever its dominant beauty standards deem is gender is bought or sold to us. Ultimately, this strain of Marxist feminism does not want to produce rhizomatic views of gender that are not based on binary dichotomies. They focus on an idea of a binary domesticated sexism, but nonetheless think femininity relates to a very narrow time in history’s view of domesticity and femininity. It’s a performative contradiction.

The essay suggests that there should be compensation for all the extra work that queer people do that is not caught up in the creation of surplus value for capitalists, like emotional labor and nurturing actions. Wouldn’t it be beneficial to call nurturing and mutual aid a human action, instead of further stigmatizing and entrenching rigid gender boundaries that make one think they need to repress their emotions to perform as a man or diminish their needs for the sake of others to perform as a woman? That’s an ass backwards view of gender, and gender itself is an identity which is formed under capitalism. It would be better to reject it for a view that does not even have a work/play divide. In Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman shows that work and play are a false dichotomy, a dichotomy that goes unaddressed by essay 5 of Transgender Marxism. It would instead claim emotional labor for “femmes” and reify gender essentialism amidst its claims to emancipation. Another performative contradiction.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of DSA Cleveland as a whole.

Sources/Further Reading:

• Transgender Marxism
• Perlman, Fredy. Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit
• Gilles, Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus

The post Critique of Transgender Marxism, Essay 5 appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

By Anthony D., Diane R., Ashley H., Dave N.

Compared to liberals and progressives, socialists have a unique perspective about the purpose of electoral politics and winning elected office. We understand that the mass social change we want cannot be accomplished unless millions of ordinary people are moved to fight for their own liberation in the class war against bosses and billionaires. To that end, the socialists we elect have a historic role to play in bringing this about by operating primarily as organizers who bring workers into the struggle alongside them.

Within the modern left, most electoral endorsements have been viewed strictly as a commitment to support candidates throughout their campaign: to fundraise, build up their communications infrastructure, and develop a field program to knock thousands of doors and talk to voters. If our endorsed candidates win, the level of support we offered during the campaign immediately drops off after Election Day and we move on to the next campaign. Very rarely, if ever, do we devise a plan during the endorsement process for how they will operate once in office and what they should prioritize. We send them off on their own into completely hostile legislatures designed and controlled by two political parties completely beholden to capital and hope that they alone can beg and bargain for reforms on behalf of the working class.

Over the last half century this individualistic approach has ultimately been unsuccessful in winning gains for the working class or in getting our class organized to fight. As DSA becomes more adept at winning elections in the vacuum created by a pro-genocide Democratic Party, our modern task as socialists is to think of Election Day as a checkpoint rather than as the finish line. In practice, this means orienting our endorsed candidates and elected officials towards the primary goals of making more socialists, building socialist organization, and leading as spokespersons of our independent party.

At the 2023 Metro Detroit DSA Membership Convention, our chapter’s highest decision-making body, members voted to take the first steps in this direction by launching the Socialists in Office Committee (SIOC) as a body in which elected chapter leadership would coordinate our organizing work with our endorsed elected officials, also known as Socialists in Office (SIOs). The resolution and amendment we passed called for an organizing-focused purpose and vision for the SIOC that prioritized creating our own party-like infrastructure so we could recruit and train socialist candidates from within our own ranks, who would think of themselves primarily as organizers of the working class, rather than purely as legislators. It was also a move towards building a working-class movement outside of electoral work by using our SIOs’ offices to reach, educate, and organize their constituents into class struggle and self-activity. Unfortunately, very little has been done to see this through since then.

At our 2025 Convention, members passed an amendment to the SIO Committee consensus resolution that created a unique and experimental ‘Geographic Working Group’ as a space for rank-and-file DSA members residing within State Representative Dylan Wegela and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s overlapping districts to regularly meet with and organize alongside them. Our SIOs are surrounded on a daily basis by politicians ranging from corporate Democrats to fascist Republicans who serve the same ruling class, so we imagined this group as the socialist antidote and support system. The idea was to experiment with a new concept of how to operate in office and carve a path towards our political independence. The amendment included the clause below, which initiated both this article and a verbal summary of it given by group members at the December 2025 General Meeting.

The Geographic Working Group will issue a report at both the six month (December 2025) and twelve month (June 2026) mark to:

• provide an update on progress towards our goals and explain any roadblocks to accomplishing them
• offer an analysis and critique to consider whether it should be replicated by future similar bodies or other SIO Committees around the country
• normalize open reporting on the progress of this and other unique experiments in the chapter — all of which can be expected to have misses and fails, which are acceptable so long as the lessons learned are defined and shared with membership similar to past electoral campaigns

Since Dylan Wegela was endorsed by the chapter while in office in 2024, he has been requesting help to launch bottom-up organizing projects in his district with support from Metro Detroit DSA members. Calling back to his experience of leading rank-and-file Arizona public school teachers in a statewide strike in 2018, this approach is meant to bring his constituents into permanent mobilization beyond a typical re-election campaign cycle. The idea was to put them in touch with socialist organizers and strategy, building towards a long-lasting base for socialist politics and worker self-organization in his district. Because of his limited staff capacity, this vision needed help from DSA members.

Dylan’s predominantly working class district (Garden City, Westland, Inkster, Romulus) is geographically distant from the main concentration of where chapter members live and is a 30–40-minute drive from Detroit and Hamtramck, the city where we hold our monthly General Meetings. In 2022, when the Electoral Committee declined to move Dylan’s endorsement request forward, to instead focus on Rashida, one of the main reasons was that just five dues-paying members lived in his district. Since membership bumps in response to both Trump’s re-election and Zohran’s primary win as well as intentional recruitment by both Dylan and this group, there are now 40 dues-paying members in his district.

We believed that if we did the work to create a regular, local, in-person meeting space within Dylan’s district and conducted careful outreach and onboarding, that many of the new members in the district would be more likely to show up and organize with a group located closer to them. Texting through the list of members in Dylan’s district produced around 10–15 onboarding calls. Almost everyone we talked to expressed some amount of demoralization over Trump’s reelection and a desire to build more local connections with socialists. Many felt compelled to finally get active because of Zohran’s primary victory in June. Throughout our meetings, we’ve also heard:

• Folks have been more likely to participate in DSA through this group since it’s very close to them and they get to meet their socialist neighbors. The group offers DSA members a way to connect with their neighbors and talk about shared concerns. The smaller group setting has been an easier way to interact with each other and start to build community and social connections.
• Folks have come into DSA already socialist-leaning and gone to their first DSA meeting but were overwhelmed with how much was going on. This group felt like an easier point of engagement with DSA.
• The group has felt like a welcoming space for DSA members to bring their friends and significant others.

As of the December 2025 General Meeting, the group has met eight times with an average attendance of around 12 people, usually composed of DSA members, non-DSA members brought along by members, and constituents that Dylan recruits through door-knocking, social media, or coffee hours. We meet in person every two weeks, and the Signal group chat that people are invited to after attending a meeting is at 33 members. Only six of those members had participated in DSA prior to joining this group and three people have been moved to join DSA through participation in it. Dylan joins every meeting, calling the group “a refreshing reminder that none of us are in the struggle alone,” and says, “We’re seeking to answer an essential question for our movement: Now that we hold office, how do we use it to organize the working class and grow our mass movement?”

The group’s meetings run for two hours and start with someone reiterating our political purpose (Dylan and Rashida need a mass movement behind them and this group can help develop socialist organizers and potential future socialist candidates to make that happen) and experimental concept (this is how SIOs should use their elected office). Each attendee then introduces themselves and shares why they’re a socialist or what brought them to the meeting, followed by a 30-minute political discussion based on a reading (distributed in advance) on basic socialist theory, organizational democracy, or electoral organizing strategy. These political discussions are based around easy-to-read, short Jacobin articles and have acted as a way to onboard new members and non-members alike who are new to socialism and organizing. They’ve also allowed us to talk about the broader goals of socialist organizing and our theory of social change beyond just supporting our SIOs.

We spend the rest of our meetings working on organizing plans, as a means to develop group members who have never organized into experienced leaders. Our projects are in various stages and led by different members:

• Collected signatures for the Michigan For The Many campaign, the three chapter-endorsed statewide ballot initiatives, including at the October No Kings rally in Livonia and the November Santa Land parade in Westland. Notably, none of the nonprofits leading the ballot initiatives had established a presence in this area. Signature collection at events has been used as a conversation opener to talk to people about socialism and DSA, give them one of our DSA palm cards, and try to recruit to our group.
• Started power mapping of Dylan’s district so we can learn about local political dynamics, as a counter to the typical “insider politics” preferred by establishment political operatives.
• Launched a public donation drive in response to the government shutdown and SNAP benefit suspension, to funnel donations to local food pantries.
• Planned a group budget for the year to fund food, drinks, and a private meeting space. The budget allows more transparency to the chapter for our plans and helped us to deliberate on our priorities, like meeting in person, every two weeks, at a quiet, private space with plenty of room to expand, and offering food to entice more folks to attend.
• Organizing tenants at a 300-unit apartment complex in Inkster. This was initiated by Dylan, with a town hall attended by 50 tenants, after he learned many of them were living in really bad conditions and did outreach to the whole building by mailing them surveys about it paid for with office funds. Organizing is temporarily on hold, due to political dynamics with Inkster City Council members who collaborated with Dylan on the event. They preferred to wait until the spring to do an outdoor community engagement event before building the tenant organizing group.
• Building towards a public event led by Dylan, Rashida, and Westland/Wayne and Dearborn teachers as a way to facilitate communication among multiple teacher unions and help DSA members in those unions to organize with their coworkers. SIOs, public school teachers, and local DSA members organizing together are some of the key components towards the long-term goal of establishing a local socialist political machine.

Group members have shared responsibilities for running the meetings, with some members facilitating our political discussion by preparing discussion questions beforehand and others taking turns to take notes and chair. Distributing the work teaches through experience, including experience in making group democratic decisions.

Diane, from Romulus, says the group is “investing our time and efforts directly in the communities we live in, building our grassroots movement while building our DSA chapter as a whole.” In October, Diane spent 19 days in the hospital. “This group stepped up to support me in my recovery, creating a GoFundMe. This is community in action,” said Diane, adding, “Being a part of this group made me see how change can take place in my own community and I have discovered my own voice in creating the changes I hope to see.”

We plan to continue expanding this group as a training ground to create more socialist organizers in an area where our chapter has not previously had an established presence. For workers to take over and transform society, we need to be everywhere we can to produce more organizers and force the hand of capital in legislatures and workplaces. Socialist organizers developed through this group can confidently go out into their neighborhoods, unions, and workplaces and lead other workers.

Socialist in Office: Training New Socialist Organizers in Dylan Wegela’s District was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.