Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Eon Huntley as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA's insurgent slate.

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DSA candidates are on the ballot in California, New Jersey, and New Mexico

The post Live Blog: LA City Attorney Candidate Leads After Election Night appeared first on Democratic Left.

Around the world, support for parents and young children is denied or hedged by means-testing. Zohran Mamdani’s childcare initiative is a welcome exception.

The post Three Models for Childcare  appeared first on Democratic Left.

New York, LA slates on deck, “Not On Our Dime” reintroduced, Houston DSA backs police reform initiative and more in the May edition of Chapter and Verse.

The post How Chris Rabb Won, Precinct by Precinct appeared first on Democratic Left.

By Rodney Coopwood

On May 1, 2026, Metro Detroit DSA rallied at Roosevelt Park as part of the city’s labor coalition for May Day. From the first planning meetings at the IBEW Hall through the day-of march and the debrief that followed, MDDSA (led by members of the Mobilization and Labor Working Groups) sat at the table with Teamsters Local 337, SEIU Michigan, IBEW Local 58, UAW Local 600, UAW Region 1, Moratorium NOW!, Michigan United, and other unions and organizations of the Detroit left. Being in those rooms was the most instructive part of the work.

We were invited in because of the history our members carry in this city’s labor and left movements, and because our chapter has spent the last year building the capacity to show up. A seat at the planning table is not given for free; it is the product of contingent discipline at previous actions and the steady labor of people who have made themselves useful to the broader left. The Mobilization Working Group, formalized at convention, was the structure that let us convert that capacity into coordinated participation and it did so as a genuinely cross-tendency effort, with members from across the chapter’s committees, caucuses, and coalitions working under the MWG’s coordination.

What the Room Looked Like

The most striking thing about the planning process was watching unions sit across from each other under the AFL-CIO umbrella and actually deliberate. These are organizations with different memberships, different cultures, and different relationships to militancy. The fact of them being in the same room, working through speaker order, route logistics, and messaging — that, on its own, was not nothing, and reminiscent of our own practices in DSA.

Still, sitting through those meetings as someone from the organizing side rather than the unionist side, I was struck by how much of the work became institutional rather than political. Speaker order became a question of which body’s position carried what weight, not which voice the day most needed. Logistics bent toward what city authorities would permit and protect rather than toward who the event was for. Parts of the program felt divorced from the meaning of the day itself. May Day belongs to the rank-and-file and in many respects to workers outside unions entirely, and that fact deserved more weight in the room than it fully received.

The People Who Made the Day

What made this May Day special for me was not what happened in the planning room. It was what happened on May 1st itself. We had volunteers from MDDSA across every role the day asked for: tabling, banner bearing, flag bearing, marshaling, medic, day-of flyering, and back-end logistics. New members standing alongside members who have been doing this work for years. People taking on new roles for the first time. People who had never carried a banner or been to a planning meeting walking up on the morning of May 1 ready to be useful.

That is what a chapter looks like when it is functioning. It is also what May Day is supposed to look like. The holiday is not just its program; it is its people. The shape of any given year’s coalition matters less than whether the bodies on the street are organized, prepared, and politically conscious. By that measure, what MDDSA put in the street this year was something we should take seriously, and every member who showed up — for the first time or the fifteenth — should know the chapter saw them.

What Worked

The march itself was phenomenal. Speakers connected the labor question to immigration, to racialized policing, to U.S. imperialism, to the specific intersectional realities of the working class in this city — the working class as it actually exists, not the working class as it appears in a 1950s photograph. That part of the day did the work May Day is supposed to do. It said out loud that the labor movement and the broader struggle against capitalism are not separate fights with separate constituencies.

The fact that the unions came together at all is the bigger story. The goal of this year’s May Day, as I understood it from inside the planning room, was modest and correct: get the relevant Detroit unions into the same physical space, working on the same calendar, talking to each other about something concrete. That goal was met. Relationships do not form in the abstract. They form when people have to figure out together how a rally works.

This rally took place under AFL-CIO sponsorship, something that, by accounts inside the planning room, had not happened in Detroit in a very long time. For most of the twentieth century, mainstream American labor kept its distance from May Day’s radical origins, favoring the September Labor Day that Congress established in 1894 in the wake of the Pullman strike. The AFL-CIO returning to May Day is a real shift, and one that creates room for a fuller program in the years ahead.

What The Numbers Said

Turnout at the rally was an estimated 500 attendees. By my count, roughly half were rank-and-file union members. The rest were politically conscious community members and active organizers, with SEIU showing the most prominent and organized presence. The unions did not turn out their memberships in significant numbers. Michigan’s union membership rate is 13 percent, well above the national rate of 10, and Detroit sits inside one of the more heavily unionized regions in the country. The “No Kings” mobilization earlier this year and last, with broadly anti-authoritarian messaging not specifically tied to labor, pulled thousands into the streets of this same city. May Day, with the city’s organized labor leadership formally behind it, did not. The gap is the question.

Part of the answer is practical. A 4pm Friday start excluded most day shift workers and most service workers whose schedules are not their own, and is worth noting for next year. But timing does not explain the whole gap. If union structures had more time to actively mobilize members for May Day in the weeks leading up to it, a Friday afternoon would have moved more people than it did.

The honest version is the one that came out of the debrief: this was a year of using unused muscles. The apparatus of political mobilization through union locals has been dormant for a generation, and that capacity does not return in a single planning cycle. That is partly an explanation. It is also a question. What would unions themselves have to change for next year’s May Day to actually move their members? Further, where is the current state of class consciousness in the U.S. if unions struggle to connect labor to May Day?

What’s Worth Building On

First, the Detroit left should carry more weight at the table. There is history between labor leadership and the broader left that predates my lifetime, and I will not pretend to fully understand it all yet. But even with that history, the moment demands engagement. Capitalism’s contradictions are visibly tearing at the lives of people in this city, this country, and every country the American empire reaches. A leftist — labor coalition strong enough to meet that crisis needs the organizers, writers, and educators who have spent their lives developing the political analysis the movement needs.

Second, and as has already been agreed to, the planning has to start earlier. Much earlier. The skeleton of next year’s May Day, who is in the coalition, what the political program is, who the speakers are, what the demands are, should be sketched in the fall, not in March. Earlier planning creates space for harder conversations and the programmatic clarity a workers’ rally deserves.

The Debrief

The most important conversation of the entire cycle was the debrief. That sounds counterintuitive, the rally is the visible thing, the debrief is internal, but it is the meeting where the organizers decided what kind of coalition it wanted to become.

The clarity that came out of that conversation was this: the goal of 2026 was first contact, and first contact was achieved. The goal of 2027 is to deepen — to pull in rank-and-file participation at a scale this year’s event did not reach.

Some of that conversation pointed toward the possibility of a general strike in 2028. However, a general strike is not a thing you can just announce; it is a thing that becomes possible after years and years of organizational work most people never see, in sectors of society that have been exploited by capital for decades. Treating 2028 as a horizon can be reasonable, if work of a strategically adaptable and principled nature is achieved prior.

What this May Day did was build one vertebra of a skeleton that does not yet have most of its bones. There is a great deal of work between here and any plausible strike horizon, and the honest version of the optimism coming out of the debrief is that the work is finally beginning to look like work, rather than like a wish.

Beyond the Union Hall

If the labor movement is going to grow into the force this moment demands, DSA, the broader left, and the unions themselves have to take seriously the work that exists beyond the union hall. Detroit no longer looks like the city that defined American industrial labor. Manufacturing accounts for under one in ten jobs across the metro area. Health care, education, retail, food service, logistics, these are where most actually work, and the great majority of those workers carry no union card. The Starbucks Workers United campaign has shown that a young, low-wage, dispersed workforce can build real power against an employer the labor establishment had largely written off as unorganizable. The labor movement that meets this decade is going to be built in workplaces like those, or it is not going to be built at all.

May Day’s politics speak to exactly this work. The holiday does not require a union card. It belongs to anyone who works for a wage, and the power it celebrates is the power of labor itself — the capacity to withhold work, to act in concert, to recognize that the people who do the actual work of running this society can stop running it. May Day started as a revolutionary leftist holiday, built by communists, socialists, and anarchists who understood the workplace was one front of a much larger fight. Keeping that history visible in the present and operative in the future is the work that has to follow. This year, we got into the room. Next year, we have to help change what the room can do — and start building the rooms that do not yet exist.

Forming the Skeleton: May Day 2026 and the Work Ahead was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Diana Moreno as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA’s insurgent slate

The post Diana Moreno: Organize as if the World You Want is Within Grasp appeared first on Democratic Left.

Remarks delivered by DSA Co-chair Megan Romer at the Party of the European Left conference in Brussels.

The post Militarism: the Biggest Obstacle to Socialism and Most Dire Threat to Humanity appeared first on Democratic Left.

[[{“value”:”

A crowd gathers to hear speeches from MNA Nurses at Baystate Franklin hospital. (Working Mass)

By: Mary Ann Sheppard

GREENFIELD – On April 7, unionized nurses at Baystate Franklin Medical Center staged an informational picket to advocate for better wages and staffing. The picket, organized by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), was attended by nurses, community members, and supporters of the labor movement outside of Franklin County’s only hospital. 

Nurses at Baystate Franklin have been struggling with poor nurse-to-patient ratios, a central complaint which nurses argue stretch workers thin and lead to inadequate treatment. The fight is a familiar one; the union had already won staffing grid protections in 2017 – a contract stipulation that requires the hospital to implement minimum staffing and nurse-to-patient ratios. 

Union nurses consider safe staffing ratios non-negotiable, as they have been proven to save lives. However, hospital management has attempted to undermine these protections in recent negotiations, threatening to staff Baystate Franklin with non-union “float” nurses from other hospitals. In essence, the union is being threatened with scab labor unless they accept staffing levels that nurses say make their patients less safe.

The MNA has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board  (NLRB), which may take more than a year to adjudicate. In the meantime, the hospital’s contract violation has forced nurses to the bargaining table.

Bargaining committee co-chair Marissa Potter has led advocacy for nurses’ demands to management. In addition to safe staffing ratios, the Potter and the nurses have demanded wage parity with other regional hospitals, which pay their nurses an average of 10% – 25% more. 

Potter spoke to the strength of the union at Baystate Franklin: “We always have been a union facility.” 

The large crowd which gathered in support of the MNA picket attests to deep roots that organized labor has in the community. Union workers came out to support the nurses, bearing signs and shirts with the names of other unions such as Mass. Teachers Association, AFSCME, UNITE HERE, and the Teamsters. Some in the crowd were nurses from other hospitals, or knew medical workers personally. Others were motivated by political principles or a hope for organized labor to bring about better health care. However the message was clear: We have your back.

Speakers from within and outside the union expressed support for the nurses in securing a fair contract. Ethel Everett, the incoming president of the Western Mass Area Labor Federation, spoke in terms of class conflict. “Nurses are the ones who keep us alive,” she said, “This is part of an ongoing war on the working class.” She led the crowd with a call and response chant – “When we fight, we win!”

Greenfield Mayor Ginny Desorgher and Ward 6 Councilor Patricia Williams also attended the picket. Both had ties to the union, Desorgher a former union nurse, and Williams  is a former MNA staff representative. Baystate Franklin hospital is located in Councilor William’s district: “You are my constituents,” she said, announcing her plans to propose a resolution in Greenfield City Council in support of the union. 

MNA nurses were cautiously optimistic about negotiations. As with any strike action, workers would have to forgo wages in order to force the company’s hand. Baystate Franklin’s nurses can only win their contract through solidarity with one another. “We don’t want to strike,” said Marissa Potter. “But if we have to, we will.” 

Mary Ann Sheppard is a member of Worcester DSA and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Greenfield Nurses Prepared to Strike At Franklin County’s Only Hospital appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate David Orkin as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA’s insurgent slate.

The post David Orkin Wants to Bring His Advocacy for Immigrant Workers into Office appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Justin W

I Love Boosters is a story about a trio of “boosters,” women who steal from department stores and resell the items to the community, and their fight against a local billionaire. The billionaire’s name is Christie Smith, whom one of them admires so much she has her platitudes memorized, which makes for a complicated relationship that evolves as the movie goes along. The CEO is very clearly a genius, having graduated college at 17 and spent years working in physics departments, but her platitudes still sound just as vapid and amorphous as any other CEO or motivational speaker. During their heists the trio find a Chinese worker who steals the designer wear so quickly they legitimately believes she has a magic bag, and given that this is a Boots Riley film, you believe it too until it’s revealed to be a teleporter. 

The Chinese factory worker, Jianhu, is stealing the clothes as a way to attack Christie Smith for the horrible conditions in the factory she and her family work in. This brings the trio and Jianhu together as they start stealing more from Christie Smith. As they’re in the process of stealing clothes a discovery is made: The teleporter does more than teleport, it deconstructs and accelerates the contradictions as well. It becomes clear this is a machine based on Dialectical Materialism as the machine brings two things together (teleports), it deconstructs (as shown when they deconstruct clothes into their base components AND when they aim it at a person and turn that person into their parents having sex), and it accelerates the contradictions of a given entity (a cop car is turned into a parody of overmilitarization and reconstructs a person from their parents from before). 

This leads to the personal conflicts in the movie and what I believe to be the thesis. We have the main character Corvette and her best friend Sade, one who is trying to overcome the ills brought about by capitalism (Sade) and the other who is so lonely a loneliness demon tries to pick her up on multiple occasions (Corvette). Sade sees MLM marketing as the way through the ills of capitalism and Corvette sees vengeance as her way out of her loneliness. This is resolved when they link their struggle against Christie Smith to the workers both in China who are making the clothes as well as the workers building a union to stand up against the billionaire. The resolution is built through the combining of the efforts of all workers against Christie Smith and the fashion industry, starting in China and the United States but then the rest of the world, and the community organizing that needs to happen to build those strikes and protests. 

We see this through Corvette rejecting the loneliness demon and her confronting the rolling ball of bills, tickets, and failures of Corvette’s past (seen the entire movie following her just out of sight of everyone else), which shrinks once she has a community to help her deal with those problems. The problems are still there, just reduced to a more manageable size. 

Given this is a Boots Riley film, there are some incredible design and artistic choices that combine to create wonderful metaphors. The CEOs office is tilted, showing her skewed view of the world. The loneliness demon who has been around for millenia can only remember two years back when they were lost in a Target, or, one might say, lost in a capitalist hellscape (please listen to the song “Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash). At one point some characters who have been seen interviewed on TV take off their skins, revealing that they play characters on TV (like workers arguing for less pay and benefits as well as Candace Owens, among others) or lead MLMs to generate in people the need for more brutal cop tactics, anti-worker propaganda, and false solutions (like MLMs) as part of a campaign created by the billionaire to reduce in workers the desire for real solutions like collective action. 

The skin suits also demonstrate how those with anti-worker sentiments but still working class themselves literally sell their identities to be used and interchanged by anyone who needs them for whatever purpose. They give away their ability to identify themselves for the purpose of fulfilling the whims and desires of a billionaire. In true Boots Riley fashion, he tries to make the metaphors as overt as possible, with a little bit of surrealism thrown in the mix. The comedic elements of the movie shine through these metaphors and are so littered throughout I am very surprised the movie isn’t considered a comedy. Boots Riley’s love of storytelling and visual metaphor make him one of my favorite directors and this was terrific and just the right amount of silliness to push through the slightly radical position he’s leading towards through the film.

But this wouldn’t be a Marxist take on a very overtly Marxist movie (the main catalyst for the movie is a Dialectic Materialism machine) without some discussion on the theory presented. The Dialectical Materialism machine is initially seen only as a teleporter, but later in the movie a union organizer explains the full functionality, urging the trio to use it to help them accelerate people into the union they’re building. Initially, the Velvet Gang (the name of the boosters’ group) turns her down in favor of their plan to simply steal from the billionaire thinking that would be enough. As the movie progresses and we reach the climax of the film, the machine is used to link the struggles of the union in the United States to the factory workers in China, creating the solidarity needed to fight against their collective boss. 

Through the explanation of the functions of the machine we get a decent description of dialectical materialism, in a way that is simple enough that we can progress with the movie, while still being faithful to the concept itself. I think Boots’ decision to purposefully inject actual theory into the movie gives a stepping stone for those who like the movie something to grasp onto when deciding to work on their own politics, but does mean the resolution of the movie cannot be as explicit in the direction I think we should go. The CEO is not removed nor a communist revolution waged by the end of this film, instead a worldwide strike against the fashion industry is started, and characters from the movie are seen leading the union in their fight for a better wage, though the main characters are not participants. The most recent film to have such overt Marxist themes, also made by a black director, is Sinners. 

Sinners, for those who haven’t seen it (Why haven’t you? Go watch it!) has a black community fighting against a vampire who uses racism to escape from justice and controls the actions of those whom he has bitten. It is a story about a blood sucking parasite who had oppression forced on him years ago and wants to forcibly create the community he lost due to colonialism and imperialism by stealing the music and soul of a community that hasn’t yet lost themselves to that same oppressive force. The black community fights and kills the vampire, in a bloody struggle that lasts all night, ending with one character killing the racists who came to kill him. In interviews following the release of the film, director Ryan Coogler was asked multiple times about the Marxist implications of the movie and what was being said through the metaphors, every time keeping silent about what he wrote. He could not, at any point, be explicit in the aims and messaging of his movie, lest he lose what position he has to make films like Sinners again. He was able to show the action of the theory, but wasn’t allowed to be explicit in the ideology that created it. 

I see Boots Riley’s choice to name the theory but not show the action as the flip side of the coin. Even on a good day Hollywood would not allow both sides of the coin to be shown on screen at the same time, as Capital knows what it can allow anti-capitalist art to show, as well as what it can’t. Were I Love Boosters to show the fall of capitalism and say the words “Dialectical Materialism,” a producer would have simply shut down the movie and not let it see the light of day. There must be a balance struck between what can be said and what can be shown while still being funded by those who would otherwise be the target of said action or the villain of theory. The theory of the film is presented in a relatively clear way, but the film needed to reel in the actions shown to compensate. When we say “The Revolution will not be televised” this is an example. You can see that revolutions happen or you can hear theory be spoken, but never the twain shall meet, at least not on the big screen. So we need to read between the lines, and see the direction Boots Riley or Ryan Coogler are pointing us in. (On a related note, come join us at Book Club sometime.) 

Overall, this movie is terrific and I recommend everyone go see it. The bright colors, wonderful fashion, comedic style, and the only just so slightly over the top surrealism blend together into a wonderful movie that I would definitely watch again, and recommend others watch too. Combined with the theory hilariously intertwined into the movie, it is one of the best movies I have ever seen and I want to hear your thoughts on it too.

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