As CDSA forges ahead into a busy and demanding aldermanic cycle, membership is set to consider a new slate of potential endorsees at September’s General Chapter Meeting: four candidates for Chicago’s first fully-elected school board.

Before those votes take place, I’d like to make the case for why lending our chapter’s endorsement of all four candidates is critical to amplifying our “Workers Deserve More” program and furthering the class-struggle messaging that will help build out our movement and propel us to victory in February’s municipal elections. All four school board candidates under consideration (Hilario Dominguez, Jason Dones, Karen Zaccor, and Debby Pope) are self-identified socialists who have a clear-eyed vision for what it means to bring socialism to the Board of Education. 

But perhaps it would be illustrative to first share what the stakes are in these elections; in other words – what we stand to lose should charter and billionaire-backed candidates take these seats instead. 

Should a right-leaning school board take the helm after November’s elections, there can be no doubt that school closures would be on the table. This would be sold to us under the tired slogans of “fiscal responsibility” and “chronic under-enrollment.” It’s quite the masterful gambit, really. These schools are chronically under-enrolled because of decisions at all levels of government that have left Black and Brown neighborhoods starved of resources for decades. Now, those same actors are returning to demand the closure of schools that they intentionally underfunded.

A right-wing school board would likely forsake any attempt at progressive revenue streams from the state. Instead, it would likely close schools exclusively on the South and West sides of the city, just as it did in 2013. School closures aren’t just about underinvestment. They are a form of violence inflicted on the most vulnerable neighborhoods in this city. They leave communities divested, depopulated, and scarred. Today, the vast majority of CPS schools closed in 2013 remain in disrepair, a constant reminder for neighbors that Chicago has long valued the lives of certain residents over others. Additionally, school closures themselves are often antecedents to violence. Research has consistently demonstrated that areas immediately surrounding closed schools have seen higher rates of gun violence since 2013. 

Schools are community anchors and hubs where neighbors and their families convene to dream of a better tomorrow – one made possible only by the right to a free, accessible, and comprehensive public education. In many cases, they serve as centers for community programming, provide free summer enrichment programs, and welcome families that have recently arrived to the United States. When families are stripped of that right and forced to send their children to schools miles away at the behest of a school board that’s been bought and paid for by the charter school lobby, it’s an example of how the boot of racial capitalism continues to crush communities of color while enriching their oppressors. 

How can we seek to grow our presence on the South and West sides under the message of “Workers Deserve More” if we stand by while they’re given less and less? If “Workers Deserve More” is to be an actual vision for the implementation of democratic socialism, rather than a mere rallying cry, it must account for the workers (and their families) most likely to be affected by school closures: in Austin, Garfield Park, Englewood, and Auburn Gresham, among so many other neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. 

Furthermore, the election of a right-wing school board would likely mean cuts to services for students across the board. The first programs to go would likely be those that support Diverse Learners, students who require special education services. At a time when schools are already understaffed for the personnel that would accommodate these students’ needs (SECAs, paraprofessionals, etc.), it would be unconscionable to consider further cuts. Many students who receive accommodations and curriculum modifications have disabilities. As socialists, we must view this fight through the lens of disability justice. To ensure that every child, in every part of this city, has access to education as a tool of liberation, we must fight to expand funding for our Diverse Learners, not sit idly by while it’s rolled back.

While the prospects are quite somber should the school board swing right, there’s also much to be excited about should the board remain aligned with workers and their children. Just as with the City Council, we are fighting to build a bloc of school board members who have proven records as organizers for the working class. These candidates will mobilize the working class to demand the progressive funding for our schools that Governor Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly have been refusing to answer for. 

With stable, progressive revenue, we can start to dream bigger. We can work with our bloc of board members to develop a coherent set of policy planks around education that transforms and integrates our schools even deeper into the fabric of the communities they serve. We can begin to imagine a district of Sustainable Community Schools, with wraparound programs like free healthcare, legal aid clinics, and nutrition education. Our district could also fund Universal Pre-K at age 3. Both of these are policies that school board president candidate Hilario Dominguez is running on.  It is a program we as a chapter can and should rally around.

So in the words of educators across this country: “Raise your hand if you’re here, CDSA.” We need to be here to fully fund our schools. Here to push back against the tide of corporate and billionaire money. Here to ensure that the schools in our black and brown communities are as well-resourced as any school in Lincoln Park or Lakeview, not shut down. And here to dream and organize around a better future for Chicago’s children.

The post Raise Your Hand if You’re Here: Why CDSA Must Intervene in the Board of Education Races appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

by Martin O.

One of the critical questions, if not the most critical and contentious in Cleveland DSA, is our strategic and tactical orientation toward “The Groups.” As we pursue our objectives, where do the many NGOs and activist groups in the metro area fit in? This debate encompasses a variety of political perspectives that have been represented historically for hundreds of years. In fostering healthy discussion of this issue, it’s important to recognize that these positions represent a place in this broader historical political debate rather than simply a particular moral or ethical viewpoint about the value of particular causes.

None of the information I’m going to convey here is new; there are no new insights, it’s all available in other places. However, as I’ve been in the middle of discussion with comrades both to the “left” and “right” of me lately (as you’ll see, this terminology breaks down completely at a certain point), I felt it might be important to put all this together in a single post. After all, it’s easier for someone to read one post than 12 and I think it’s essential that comrades recognize the full scope and nature of the discussion and the positions their fellow DSA members hold.

This will be about the three most prominent orientations in Cleveland DSA (and really the socialist movement as a whole) toward its direction as it relates to cooperation with outside forces, along with the pros and cons that others have laid out, in the way that I see them. These are, as I’ll refer to them, the “Popular Front”, “United Socialist Front” and, “For a single mass party” positions. These positions to some extent exist on a spectrum of their own that seems to defy the traditional left and right descriptions. 

Individuals’ positions in this debate are determined to some degree by their personal relationships to these groups around Cleveland and the issues the groups deal with, but there is also an important political assumption often being made in the background around the question of “is DSA one group out of the many groups that an individual might want to do work in and weigh equally?” or “Is DSA the most important group to me out of all of these possible groups?” This assumption affects one’s position on coalitions to a massive degree. There are also questions about the tactics these groups use, beliefs about their effectiveness, their effectiveness in building long-term power, etc. 

I’ll be upfront that I am a believer in the “for a single mass party” theory of change. Some of this is just because I don’t have the time to be involved in anything other than DSA and my past political activity took me into some of The Groups such as Justice Democrats (not particularly active in Cleveland) and then out of them. My point with this post is to help members understand the perspectives on display so that they can learn to frame questions themselves and we can argue about the politics of the situation and the historical justifications for one approach or the other rather than taking personal shots at each other.

Popular Front

Popular Front politics, as a historical phenomenon, have roots in the earliest days of the movement for working class political power. A popular front simply means an alliance of cooperation between socialists/communists and liberal political forces, usually against reactionary elements such as Fascists. This is almost always a cross-class coalition between people who depend on wages and people who own capital (in some sense). The working class fought alongside the Republican elites (in the “we want a Republic not a Monarchy” sense) in the 1830 and 1848 Revolutions in France in order to eliminate the Monarchy. In the 1920’s & 30’s, Communists, Anarchists, Syndicalists, and liberals formed popular fronts across Europe to oppose Fascism. 

Today in the DSA of 2026, many argue that the conditions of Trump’s second term such as state violence and climate change mandate a popular front approach for DSA to orient itself as part of a “movement of movements”. This “movement of movements” would be an alliance of groups all across non-Fascist politics like Indivisible, labor unions, issue/advocacy-based nonprofits, DSA, to Trotskyist groups (maybe, maybe not), etc. Some examples of DSA writing representing this are “DSA For the Masses: Organizing The Anti-Fascist Majority” by Emmett M and “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda:  A Vision for a Nimble, Mass‑Oriented DSA” by Chris K of LA-DSA. In Organizing the Anti-Fascist Majority, Emmett writes:

 “We are witnessing the breakout of large amounts of unrest targeted at the Trump administration, without DSA at the forefront to meet the masses. DSA should support any anti-Trump protest from the Left instead of applying purity tests to them and thereby allowing liberals to control the anti-fascist and anti-Trump narrative….A strong principled Left opposition is needed to stand up to the threat of Trump, and DSA should be at the forefront of it nationally, not standing by self-consciously worrying that we may be mistaken for liberals.”

The argument goes that DSA is still a small organization, unable to effectively oppose fascism by itself and that the circumstances demand a unified defense of the American people by DSA acting in cooperation with their allies. Skeptics of this assumption might ask if the popular front itself is even able to cohere the necessary numbers & political power, or question its capitalist character. Proponents of popular front positions might argue however that the actual chance to build a large movement depends precisely on the cooperation with non-socialist forces because DSA is so small and in such an embryonic stage of life, being barely over 120,000 members as of 2026. It follows that the membership of progressive and liberal groups are the closest to DSA politically and the most likely of anyone on the political spectrum to join DSA and build its numbers, which are required to fight fascism. The essential point being made is that the demands of the historical moment or the threat presented by fascism dictate the need to cohere the greatest numbers to oppose fascism in the short term, through a diverse coalition of political perspectives. 

Critics of popular front approaches such as Jack L in “Coalitions of the Liberal & Socialist Left” argue that this approach has innate limitations that proponents of popular front politics fail to acknowledge or even ignore, such as apparent historical evidence that the bourgeoisie will eventually betray the working class’s political goals. This manifests in particular ways. In “Ultraliberalism: The Dominant Tendency of the American Left”, Chicago DSA member Ramsin Canon argues that the influence of the NGO sector on the left through cross-pollination of membership and the general class position of politically active people means that the socialist movement must fight to maintain its drive to liberate the working class and this requires rejecting the liberal individualist politics of the nonprofit sector that is influenced by competing for funding and the careerism of executive directors.

The traditional historical argument such as in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution by Vladimir Lenin says that unprincipled partnership between socialist groups and the bourgeoisie results in the “liquidation” of revolutionary politics to maintain the needs of the coalition. Overall the critical position is represented by a belief that coalitions between socialist groups and liberal groups have inherent limitations. These limitations can be driven by class interests, differing theories of change, disparate organizing capabilities, and competition between activist groups and their leaders, but they represent essential differences between DSA and liberal groups. 

Points in favor

• Historically, popular front movements such as in Spain & France have mounted strong opposition to Fascism even if they didn’t always defeat fascism. In Russia, the Tsar was in part able to be overthrown because the national bourgeoisie were tired of him as well. 
• Cooperation between DSA & issue-based advocacy groups has resulted in some huge legislative wins like NYC-DSA’s Build Public Renewables Act. 
• Important electoral wins such as Zohran Mamdani’s in NYC over Andrew Cuomo (backed by Trump) that have energized hundreds of thousands of people 
• Simple reality that DSA is not politically strong enough to get policies passed on its own because this requires legislative majorities or executive power 
• Proponents claim that each incremental reform won allows a new baseline from which to agitate for more changes and which validate the effectiveness of the socialist movement 

Points against

• Skeptics say that liberal organizations are more concerned with control of the state in the sense that they can better manage it than fascists, while (as skeptics say) socialists should be concerned with opposing the state as it exists
• This can take the form of the political horizon being shrunk to simply incremental reforms – this shows acutely on the topics of policing & anti-imperialism
• Reconciling strategic objectives & decision-making across both liberal groups and DSA can be very difficult when they are structurally so different – mass member democracy vs nonprofits run by executive directors & full-time staff 
• Issue-based coalitions often encounter friction between activist leaders along with mission drift which can lead to wasting time 
• Liberal groups fighting for control of the state / favor with the state might end up shifting their struggle solely to parliamentary concerns or focus just on liberal “consciousness-raising” as Ramsin Canon puts it 

United Socialist Front

As if to address some of the concerns the critics of popular front politics point out, some socialists believe partnerships should only be built with Groups that meet particular political standards such as advocating for police abolition or Anti-Zionism. Operating off a similar assumption that DSA is still a small, still mostly weak formation, they advocate for strategies like running electoral candidates in coalition with other socialist groups like Party for Socialism & Liberation, and using DSA resources to support candidates from those groups. Examples in DSA include the arguments in Akron DSA and elsewhere to support PSL candidates for office and the Springs of Revolution caucus’s strategy of coalitional electoralism.

Similar to the popular front argument, this train of thought says that these groups are all “close enough” to DSA and that the demands of the historical moment require us to form the most numerically robust opposition to fascism that we can, except that Zionist groups or pro-NATO groups and such aren’t included. Some of these groups include (but are not limited to) PSL, FRSO, CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA), Socialist Alternative, Revolutionary Workers’ Party, and the Revolutionary Communist Party (of Bob Avakian fame). I personally never bothered until recently to learn what any of these groups were or were about because I came to DSA from the progressive electoral world and I looked at most of these groups as the weird people who just protest all the time and run the occasional third party electoral campaign that gets 1-2% of the vote. 

In a sense, the horizon for the Socialist Front position shifts from simply opposing fascism to also advocating for socialism unapologetically. However, just as with Popular Front approaches, problems arise immediately because of the nature of the various organizations in the coalition, that often also includes “progressive enough” liberal groups or the front groups that these various sects create in order to appear more legitimate to the general public like the Peoples’ Forum in NYC. This is a reflection of the sect groups’ particular attention to certain historical texts such as Vladimir Lenin’s “What is To Be Done,” which Lenin himself emphasizes is merely a snapshot of a debate at a point in time in the history of Russian socialism, not a blueprint for everyone.

The overarching impediment to cooperation between them (and with DSA) is that all of the sect groups believe their organization is the one that’s going to “actually” the one that’s going to cohere the working class against capitalism and the others “aren’t” for various reasons such as their “deviations” in political line. This is a result of the historical development of these groups and the particular interpretations of historical tendencies that they represent, as offshoots of the organizations that came before them. This can include Trotskyists but also Marcyites, Cliffites, Shachtmanites, etc. PSL for example is a Marcyite formation. The question of what to aim for (Socialism in some form) becomes less prominent, although this can be contentious. Instead, the question of how to get there takes center stage. 

An example of the problems inherent in these sect-type organizations is described in “The Task of Left Renewal” by Lewis N in Prometheus Mag talking about the Left in Britain: 

“The left in Britain has a number of problems – a key one of these is the age problem. Within the British left, there exists a core generation which retains control over the apparatus of the broad left (Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, union branches, etc.), primarily those within their 50s-60s. The problem is not with the participation of these comrades within the movement; it is with their insistence upon leading the movement and stifling the enthusiasm and energy of younger comrades with outdated political culture and processes, ultimately resulting in an insular left which exists simply to remember its past and rest upon its laurels (of which it has little in the past few decades). Younger comrades are consistently tokenized without actually encouraging meaningful participation, resulting in those younger comrades who fall in line with the older sections of the movement out of respect or deference for their history becoming absorbed into the same sectarian struggles which have plagued the left for decades. When we have a situation in which younger socialists are splitting into pre-existing sectarian groups based on their perceived disagreements over their interpretation of historical events for which they were never even alive, and then continue to reproduce the same toxic ideological divisions which have consistently paralyzed the left, we are unable to move forward – only to act as a living museum for those who came before us.”

This highlights the primary problem that DSA faces when trying to coordinate strategy alongside these groups. Not only do they solely represent specific niches ideologically, they often are under the control of ruling cliques such as the Becker family that dominates PSL’s central committee. This raises an essential question: are these groups really building a mass movement that can last, or simply a self-serving project of a particular set of activists, usually from a given social class? As we might ask in Cleveland DSA, are they more focused on mobilizing or organizing? 

Points in favor

• Generally more revolutionary political line than Popular Fronts that excludes problematic politics like pro-policing and Zionism 
• Preserves ability to have some strength in numbers via cooperation
• Easier to coordinate agitational campaigning across groups with generally excellent media operations
• High level of political education across “members” 
• Centralized governance makes for generally efficient operations
• Not dependent on government or capitalist funding*
  *exception for Neville Roy Singham and PSL

Points against

• Not really that many people when you add up all the alphabet soup of acronym groups – for example SAlt was ~1000 pre-split, PSL is estimated to be a few thousand, FRSO is estimated to be even smaller
• Have to argue for membership in your group vs. the other groups – Why would I join DSA who is knocking on my door when the candidate I like that they’re knocking for is from PSL?
• Can a coalition of this nature withstand the need for freedom of criticism across coalition members when many of these groups exist because they split from other ones or descend from a prior split? 
• Critics say because of the history of these groups they are bureaucratized and controlled by various cliques 
• Emphasis on purity politics and adherence to line means that organizations often split and cohere around charismatic figures and leaders (most famously, splits in various Trotskyist & Maoist groups)

“For a single mass party”

Finally, I’ll turn to my own camp, the “For a single mass party” crew. A sort of synthesis of both the popular front and the purity politics of sects suggests itself through the failures of the groups Our Revolution that originated from the Bernie Sanders campaign and Justice Democrats that originated in the NGO sphere to recruit progressive candidates. As Bernie said, the regular people of this country today have the historic task of building a mass movement to defeat fascism and demand the democratic republic that we do not currently have, restricted by gerrymandering, campaign finance, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and so on. I have always taken this idea to mean we needed one big organization that would be the standard bearer for the left that people could unify around. Notably, he didn’t say “now all of you go join a bunch of various individual groups like your local Maoist or Trotskyist cell”. It took me years to realize that the missing link was that it had to be driven by member democracy in order to be most effective. 

Our Revolution never became that organization because it was not based on mass member democracy but run like any other nonprofit around an executive board. But we also need the labor movement to be there too, as the class of society we fight for and whose historic task socialism is to carry out. The classical Marxist merger formula as stated by Karl Kautsky says “Social Democracy [meaning the mass socialist party] is the merger of socialism with the workers’ movement”. So what this “For a single mass party” orientation represents is the project of building that organization, according to its proponents.

The “focus on building DSA first” approach views DSA in this light. Supporters of this view of how to run DSA often view DSA, despite its relatively small membership, as a successor to socialist parties of the past and the best shot at a Socialist party of the future. Therefore, for it to be successful requires the organization’s politics and structure to be cultivated carefully into a true party, with conventions, a program like the Erfurt one adopted by the SPD, and so on. 

In Cleveland specifically, this dovetails with the reverence this crowd expresses for the organizing style of Jane McAlevey in her book No Shortcuts. No Shortcuts, as many would hold, is the key blueprint for building up the organization that merges socialism & the labor movement into a big whole because of its emphasis on building members of the working class into majorities for political action and building individual agency. The main criticism of both the nonprofit sector and the sects that is made by this group is that nonprofits and groups like PSL are all primarily oriented around mobilizing and direct service provision; protests, one-off rallies, harm mitigation, etc. This is in contrast to the mass-movement building that they see happening through organizing in the McAlevey style.

But why is DSA the organization most likely to accomplish this out of all the ones that have existed? The answer lies not just in its mass membership democracy but also in Mike MacNair’s thesis in his book Revolutionary Strategy that what is essential to defeating capitalism in the 21st century is a party that harnesses “unity in diversity” across the left. 

In contrast to the marginalization of the many sect groups throughout the 20th century due to splits and purges, and the absorption into liberal coalitions that the UK Labour party underwent, MacNair advocates for a multi-tendency organization to be the independent political home of the working class, one driven by mass member democracy. Because many of the “for a single mass party” people understand the importance of the multi-tendency organization (not limited to them however), they are some of the most committed to DSA for its own sake. 

Central to this debate from the perspective of this tendency is what Mike MacNair refers to as the “Strategy of Patience”, the idea that the independent class-based political party must preserve its own political independence and revolutionary character so as to ensure it can build strength and carry out its mission. This means a cautious approach to entering into government coalitions with bourgeois politicians and a cautious approach to partnerships with liberal politics, save for in specific campaigns as a tactic to advance our goals. 

However, unity in diversity and mass member democracy are not a magic wand. A “DSA for everyone” would seem to replicate the same problems of coalitions, except internally rather than externally. In that sense, it cannot “be” everything for everyone at the same time. 

Points in favor

• Emphasis on multi-tendency organizing means new ideas are generated constantly
• Focus on building majorities within 1 org means able to wield organizational power in a focused way
• Proponents say avoids pitfalls of popular front politics (risk of liquidation into liberal politics or other organizations)
• Proponents say avoids pitfalls of sect form of organizing (such as consolidation of power and lack of accountability) because of emphasis on internal democratic processes & structure-building
• ”Better off together than apart” 

Points against

• Can be hard to make decisions among clashing political perspectives
• Not always responsive to immediate conditions
• Dizzying to navigate for people joining
• Critics might say the Strategy of Patience is incompatible with the timetable presented to us by climate change 
• Can lead to strategic flip-flops as different tendencies vie for control of the organization 

The current composition of DSA is only slowly starting to move toward multi-racial nature and still biased toward a “precariat” perspective, far from fulfilling the promise of the merger formula. But many would say that this represents our best chance so far. Above all, answering the question of how you think DSA should relate to The Groups requires you to clarify what you believe DSA is FOR and how it would be most effective at achieving that. 

The post Cleveland DSA & “The Groups” appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Portland’s capitalist class animates an opaque network of political action committees & non-profits tasked with pushing Portland politics to the Right.

In a post-Citizens United world, this incestuous network of wealthy donors and corporations relies on weak campaign finance rules, splashy websites, and endless permutations of the words progressive, Portland, and action!

The Portland Metro Chamber of Secrets

The OG lobby of the capitalist class. The Portland Metro Chamber executive committee is helmed by giant multinationals like Bank of America, Amazon, Google, Nike, and Wells Fargo, but it also features local investor-owned utilities, contractors, and health insurers.

The Chamber is the main clearinghouse for right-wing candidates who want to hide campaign contributions from the country’s least popular companies, including data center operators, union-busting law firms, and weapons manufacturers.

The Chamber distributes money to corporate political candidates through 4 ‘separate’ PACs, which are all headed by the Chamber’s hardest working employee, lobbyist Jon Isaacs. According to campaign finance records, Isaacs is the Treasurer/Director of all four groups.

Dishonorable Mention: Working Waterfront is not (yet) a PAC, but the Chamber operates the organization on behalf of major corporate polluters, by fighting against accountability for the dangerous CEI hub and the Portland Harbor Superfund site (e.g. Zenith, Chevron, Exxon, etc).

Some current and recent endorsements:

• State Senate District 15: Janeen Sollman (lost to data center opponent and DSA member Myrna Munoz)
• Portland City Council: Eric Zimmerman (incumbent), Olivia Clark (incumbent), Steve Novick (incumbent), Eli Arnold (current candidate).
• Safer Portland, the failed effort to raid the Portland Clean Energy Fund and hire more cops.

People For ‘Portland Sucks’

This group is like your co-worker who says, “it’s not political” before launching into a pro-cop tirade about how homeless people are at fault for their circumstances. Rising rents and falling wages don’t come up.

These PACs are mostly jobs programs for failed candidates and fired chiefs of staff (e.g. Vadim Mozyrsky, Bob Weinstein, and Eli Arnold, and Julia Brim-Edward’s former staffer, Vikki Payne):

• Go, Portland, Go
• Future Portland
• Partnership for Progress

However, their big money originates with some of the largest check-writers funding right-wing politics across Oregon, including Columbia Sportswear head Timothy Boyle. 

Their steering committees all feature each other’s principal members, according to reporting by the Portland Mercury:

“Partnership for Progress donated $32,000 to the new effort, Go Portland Go, in June, according to state records. The organizations also share some leadership; Partnership for Progress co-leader Vadim Mozyrsky also sits on the steering committee for Go Portland Go. The group is also listed as a coalition member on Go Portland Go’s website.”

‘Go, Portland, Go’ attached several famous restaurant-owners to its list of supporters, but this grassroots is already bailing:

“Earl Ninsom’s constellation of Thai restaurants—Eem, Langbaan, Hat Yai, Paadee, Phuket Cafe, and OK Chicken & Khao Soi (the latter was erroneously listed as two separate restaurants on the Go Portland Go website)—all appeared on the coalition’s list as of Friday, August 28. But after the Mercury asked about the restaurant’s group decision to join, Ninsom said the company would be withdrawing its support.”

Among the restaurateurs still aboard the PAC is the owner of dessert-forward restaurant Papa Haydn’s, which is currently subjecting employees to a nasty union-busting campaign.

Landed Gentry

Portland’s rent-seekers. Rent-seekers are individuals or organizations that try to increase their own wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions rather than by creating new wealth or providing productive goods.

These PACs represent the inheritor class; Portland’s ‘old money’ leveraging vast birthrights to buy property and extract rent from tenants, residential and commercial.

• Revitalize Portland Coalition
• Multifamily NW PAC
  • Equitable Housing PAC (statehouse PAC)
• Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors PAC

The Revitalize Coalition is typical. A pet-project PAC of Portland property-inheritor Jordan Schnitzer, Revitalize bills itself as a “real estate collective” of commercial real estate owners, lawyers, builders, and property managers who want more public money to flow into their pockets. 

They insist this personal windfall will ‘trickle-down’ to you, despite their twin-objective of cutting public services. This PAC has an extremely high density of Preschool-for-All haters, and they are licking their lips at Julia Brim-Edwards’ persistent effort to degrade the program.

Also, unrepentant racist and sockpuppet account operator Brian Owendoff is a Revitalize member:

Revitalize’s candidates for the City elections, prior and current, include right-wingers Rene Gonzalez, Loretta Smith, Dan Ryan, Eli Arnold, Olivia Clark, and Eric Zimmerman.

On the residential side of wealth extraction, landlord lobby Multifamily NW (aka “Equitable Housing PAC”) collected and distributed over $1,000,000 since 2020 to local and state politicians, across various efforts to oppose rent control, relocation assistance, and free tenant representation. 

Recent large campaign donations include all of the statewide Democratic Party Leadership (Tina Kotek, Kayse Jama, Rob Wagner, Julie Fahey, and Ben Bowman) as well as Brim-Edwards. 

Police-Industrial Complex

Not much to say here that hasn’t already been said by police reformers and abolitionists for 50+ years. These PACs are funded by cops or by the capitalists who love the cops. 

“More police” is their hammer, and every social problem is a nail. Increased homelessness? Hire more cops. Grandpa watching too many Fox News ‘Antifa’ segments? Hire more cops? Neighbor’s dog pooping on your lawn? Hire more cops.

The PACs:

• Keep Portland Safe PAC
  • Portland Police Association PAC
• Community Safety Coalition PAC
  • Portland Police Association
  • Multnomah County Deputy Sheriff’s Association
  • Heavy crossover with the Landed Gentry and the Portland Metro Chamber of Secrets

Yet, for a bunch of “law enforcement” officers, they can’t seem to avoid breaking the law. Complainants allege canvassers were instructed to lie to potential voters during the unrealized bid to raid PCEF for cop salaries. The Portland Police Association wasted almost $1,000,000 backing the effort and were humiliated in federal court before finally giving up their campaign.

Canvassing Calendar

With election season in full swing from now until November, it’s time for the DSA Difference. This calendar is your one-stop shop where you can find all our canvassing dates.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet profiles a not-so-secret secret society that presided over a troubled and troubling metropolis.

The post Meet Me in St. Louis appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Vanessa Bartlett

EVERETT – Workers at the Encore Boston Harbor, organized in bargaining units affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 25 and UNITE HERE Local 26, went on strike September 4 in advance of Labor Day following the expiration of their contract on August 31.

These 1350 hospitality workers have made the hotel-casino located at the juncture between Everett and Boston run since 2019, when Wynn Resorts opened the hotel on one of the three territories designated by the 2011 Expanded Gaming Act as legal gaming sites.

While profits have risen, workers report that neither wages nor healthcare has kept up with company profits.

On the Picket Line

The picket line stretches along Broadway Street in Everett. A wide array of casino workers are hitting the streets every single day: housekeepers, cooks, servers, bartenders, slot attendants, warehouse workers, and drivers held signs, banged drums, and cheered at cars as they passed by honking in support.

Chant leaders yelled into megaphones: “All day, all night – Encore workers on strike!”

According to UNITE HERE Local 26, 1,350 workers at the casino are on strike after 95% of union membership voted yes to the action on August 20. They are demanding pay that reflects the “five star” experience workers are expected to provide for casino guests, as well as maintaining healthcare benefits and job security. The unions are asking the public to “stay out!” of the resort while the strike is ongoing.

Marina Guzman, a cage cashier at Encore, said that she found Encore’s response to workers’ demands “disheartening.”

No word from them, no word at all to acknowledge the work that we do and all of the work that we put into the company every single day. Because I know that right now they’re having a hard time running the show without us.

“Coming in, I didn’t know of all the responsibilities that we would [have] as a cage cashier. I honestly thought I was just changing chips for people, but there’s so much we do in the back of house that nobody sees, that literally moves the whole casino,” said Guzman. 

Guzman and other cage cashiers were on the picket line because, according to Guzman, their pay and benefits are not in line with the compensation other workers at the casino receive. “We have a lot of catching up to do. And the fact that I see all of my cage coworkers here just lets me know that they’re fighting for the same things that I am, just as hard,” Guzman said.

While she has only worked at Encore for three months, Guzman said she hopes to work at the casino for years to come. 

The Fall of Tipping

Restaurant servers and bartenders are also demanding higher pay. Two cocktail servers explained that “tipping culture” has changed significantly, leading to lower than expected hourly wages for many servers at the casino. 

Iris Beltran, who has worked at Encore for four years, reported to Working Mass:

The casino expects us to make, give or take, $400. We usually make about $200, maybe $300 [per shift]. Because of the thing with tipping culture, how people are like, ‘oh, you make enough because you’re getting tips,’… it’s heavily affecting us for sure.

Maria Zubieta, another cocktail server, said she’s hopeful the contract will include a stipend for shoes.

I got in trouble the other day because my shoes were too run-down. They’re like, ‘it’s not five stars’, you need new shoes. They’re not paying for those shoes.

Servers are asking for a $2 raise. While it won’t close the gap between expected and actual wages for servers, Zubieta said that, “it’ll at least help a little, you know. A little more security, and with our health insurance, it will help with that kind of stuff, and that will take a big load off.”

Currently, servers make $15 per hour: the Massachusetts state minimum wage. 

Beltran said:

Guests expect top notch service,  but we don’t get anything in return. So that’s what we’re trying to say… the money needs to come from somewhere, so if we’re trying to not expect tips from the guests, the casino should be the one [giving us] a raise.

Teamsters 25 and UNITE HERE 26 press releases have pointed out the vast gap between Encore profits and worker compensation. Wynn Resorts reported a total operations revenue of $1.86 billion for just the second quarter of 2026 alone. According to Wynn Resorts, Encore Boston Harbor alone made $209.3 million in revenue for that quarter. 

Luke Williams, a flight attendant for American Airlines and union president of Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA)’s base in Boston (APFA BOS), was at the picket line on day one of the strike. 

“Local 26 is one of the biggest unions in the city, and flight attendants spend a lot of time in hotels, so we like to show our support for them whenever they go on strike,” Williams said.

Williams – who joined DSA in December 2025 – has worked tirelessly on the picket line with other members providing Encore workers with strike support, including logistical support and helping workers file for unemployment. Williams explained further:

DSA has gotten at least 38 people to sign up for shifts at the strike support office, which has mostly been helping workers file unemployment claims. Most people who volunteer will go to the picket lines as well, before and after their shifts.

“The vibe on the picket line has been very upbeat, lots of people out there, it’s the first week of being out, so now things are starting to get more intense,” said Williams. “It seems to mean a lot when people show up for them when they haven’t seen people do that for them before.”

One of the most important shows of solidarity that workers need is commitment to not cross the picket line and strike benefit fund contributions.

Vanessa Bartlett is a member of Boston DSA and contributor to Working Mass.

CORRECTION: Claims without concrete citation have been trimmed from a previous version of this article.

The post UNITE HERE 26 and Teamsters 25 Hotel Workers On Simultaneous Strike At Encore Boston Harbor appeared first on Working Mass.

[[{“value”:”

By: Vanessa Bartlett

EVERETT – Workers at the Encore Boston Harbor, organized in bargaining units affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 25 and UNITE HERE Local 26, went on strike September 4 in advance of Labor Day following the expiration of their contract on August 31.

These 1350 hospitality workers have made the hotel-casino located at the juncture between Everett and Boston run since 2019, when Wynn Resorts opened the hotel on one of the three territories designated by the 2011 Expanded Gaming Act as legal gaming sites.

Encore Boston Harbor occupies one of those parcels with a replica facade of the corporation’s flagship casino building in Las Vegas, Nevada. Yet as the state and the many involved municipalities continue to critically greenlight the massive corporation’s ambitions on the Mystic River, workers report that neither wages nor healthcare has kept up with company profits. The fall of tips, encouraged by the company and economic crisis across the United States, has also dramatically decreased net income for hotel workers.

On the Line and the Picket Line

The picket line stretches along Broadway Street in Everett. A wide array of casino workers are hitting the streets every single day: housekeepers, cooks, servers, bartenders, slot attendants, warehouse workers, and drivers held signs, banged drums, and cheered at cars as they passed by honking in support.

Chant leaders yelled into megaphones: “All day, all night – Encore workers on strike!”

According to UNITE HERE Local 26, 1,350 workers at the casino are on strike after 95% of union membership voted yes to the action on August 20. They are demanding pay that reflects the “five star” experience workers are expected to provide for casino guests, as well as maintaining healthcare benefits and job security. The unions are asking the public to “stay out!” of the resort while the strike is ongoing.

Marina Guzman, a cage cashier at Encore, said that she found Encore’s response to workers’ demands “disheartening.”

No word from them, no word at all to acknowledge the work that we do and all of the work that we put into the company every single day. Because I know that right now they’re having a hard time running the show without us.

“Coming in, I didn’t know of all the responsibilities that we would [have] as a cage cashier. I honestly thought I was just changing chips for people, but there’s so much we do in the back of house that nobody sees, that literally moves the whole casino,” said Guzman. 

Guzman and other cage cashiers were on the picket line because, according to Guzman, their pay and benefits are not in line with the compensation other workers at the casino receive. “We have a lot of catching up to do. And the fact that I see all of my cage coworkers here just lets me know that they’re fighting for the same things that I am, just as hard,” said Guzman. 

While she has only worked at Encore for three months, Guzman said she hopes to work at the casino for years to come. 

The Fall of Tipping

Restaurant servers and bartenders are also demanding higher pay. Two cocktail servers explained that “tipping culture” has changed significantly, leading to lower than expected hourly wages for many servers at the casino. 

Iris Beltran, who has worked at Encore for four years, reported to Working Mass:

The casino expects us to make, give or take, $400. We usually make about $200, maybe $300 [per shift]. Because of the thing with tipping culture, how people are like, ‘oh, you make enough because you’re getting tips,’… it’s heavily affecting us for sure.

Maria Zubieta, another cocktail server, said she’s hopeful the contract will include a stipend for shoes. Workers at hotel-resorts often work physically demanding shifts, the labor of which destroys shoeware, especially the cheap kind affordable to many hotel workers.

I got in trouble the other day because my shoes were too run-down. They’re like, ‘it’s not five stars’, you need new shoes. They’re not paying for those shoes.

Servers are asking for a $2 raise. While it won’t close the gap between expected and actual wages for servers, Zubieta said that, “it’ll at least help a little, you know. A little more security, and with our health insurance, it will help with that kind of stuff, and that will take a big load off.”

Currently, servers make $15 per hour: the Massachusetts state minimum wage. 

Beltran said:

Guests expect top notch service,  but we don’t get anything in return. So that’s what we’re trying to say… the money needs to come from somewhere, so if we’re trying to not expect tips from the guests, the casino should be the one [giving us] a raise.

Teamsters 25 and UNITE HERE 26 press releases have pointed out the vast gap between Encore profits and worker compensation. Wynn Resorts reported a total operations revenue of $1.86 billion for just the second quarter of 2026 alone. According to Wynn Resorts, Encore Boston Harbor alone made $209.3 million in revenue for that quarter. 

Luke Williams, a flight attendant for American Airlines and union president of Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA)’s base in Boston, was at the picket line on day one of the strike. 

“Local 26 is one of the biggest unions in the city, and flight attendants spend a lot of time in hotels, so we like to show our support for them whenever they go on strike,” Williams said.

Williams has worked tirelessly on the picket line with other members providing Encore workers with strike support, including logistical support and helping workers file for unemployment. Williams explained further:

DSA has gotten at least 38 people to sign up for shifts at the strike support office, which has mostly been helping workers file unemployment claims. Most people who volunteer will go to the picket lines as well, before and after their shifts.

The APFA president joined DSA in December 2025.

“The vibe on the picket line has been very upbeat, lots of people out there, it’s the first week of being out, so now things are starting to get more intense,” said Williams. “It seems to mean a lot when people show up for them when they haven’t seen people do that for them before.”

One of the most important shows of solidarity that workers need is commitment to not cross the picket line and strike benefit fund contributions.

Vanessa Bartlett is a member of Boston DSA and contributor to Working Mass.

The post UNITE HERE 26 and Teamsters 25 Hotel Workers On Simultaneous Strike Against Wynn Resorts appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

At the July DSA National Political Committee (NPC) meeting, I proposed adding abolition to the Workers Deserve More program because I believe that abolishing capitalist policing and prisons is a fundamental demand of the socialist movement. I crafted the language carefully to clarify that we mean abolishing policing and prisons as institutions of capitalist rule, not conflating the abolition of capitalist policing and prisons with the abolition of every future social capacity for accountability and safety.

The specific language we added is in italics: “Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect police and prison funding to public services, as steps towards abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state.” This phrasing was eventually simplified to “towards abolishing the police and prison system.”

This amendment was opposed by the Socialist Majority and Groundwork caucuses. Soon after the program’s launch, the abolition plank came under criticism from some DSA members, and several endorsed electeds explicitly disavowed the demand. Here, I argue that these reactions are rooted in a misunderstanding of the socialist tradition of abolition, a misreading of the lessons of 2020, and ultimately serve a reformist, anti-revolutionary conclusion.    

Abolition and Marxism

Underlying the current debate over abolition are two recurring misunderstandings. The first, common among liberals and reformists, conflates the abolition of capitalist policing and prisons with the abolition of any future capacity for collective safety, accountability, or restraint. The second, more common in anarchist traditions, rejects the Marxist understanding of the state itself. Marxists reject both errors by analyzing policing and prisons as institutions historically produced by particular class relations, rather than timeless expressions of coercion. Resolving both misunderstandings requires a historical materialist theory of the state and its carceral institutions. A Marxist analysis asks the questions: What social relations produced this institution? What class function does it perform? What material conditions make it necessary?

The Liberal Reformist Error 

Marxism differs from liberalism on the question of the state. Liberalism views the state as an essentially neutral instrument that can be put to different purposes. Marxism instead asks what class relations produced particular state institutions, what functions they serve within those relations, and how they can be transformed and how society’s material conditions can be changed.

If, after the revolution, we have socialized the means of production, broken the profoundly corrupting ideological and cultural grip of capitalism, reimagined healthcare, housing, education, social services, and our communities around human need, what will we do with the rare person who remains hellbent on committing violence? How can we provide them with as much care and as many resources as we can while ensuring they are separated from the people they intend to hurt? 

It is absurd for a Marxist to equate revolutionary institutions of safety, accountability, and care with the institution of policing and prisons under capitalism or to abandon abolition as a rallying call. The possibilities of harm under any social arrangement do not establish the necessity of the institutions through which capitalist society currently manages that arrangement. Our task is to abolish those institutions and transform the social conditions that reproduce violence, not promise that socialism will make every violent act impossible.

A related argument for “carceral minimalism” by Loïc Wacquant and, more recently, Paul Heideman in Jacobin, posits that abolition is not a viable path to social justice. Wacquant explicitly understands abolition to entail eliminating the “triad” of police, courts, and prisons rather than merely shrinking or reforming them. He correctly argues that we must take victims’ safety seriously and fight to materially reduce incarceration and state violence under existing conditions, but his framework never escapes a liberal capitalist horizon. He asks how policing, courts, and prisons can be made more limited and humane under capitalism, not whether the social relations that produce and sustain these institutions can be overcome. Indeed, his piece doesn’t mention socialism or communism a single time. The persistence of violence therefore becomes a reason to preserve some version of the institutions through which capitalist society currently manages it. 

A Marxist abolition rejects this inference and seeks to transform the material conditions that reproduce violence while developing new, democratically controlled capacities for collective safety, accountability, and repair. A socialist society might, where absolutely necessary, separate people who are a danger to others while providing them with care. But Wacquant’s insistence that a penal state, as a specialized apparatus of class domination, is a permanent requirement of complex society mistakes a historically specific institution of class rule for a universal social necessity. His “carceral minimalism” ultimately offers a program for managing coercion from within liberal capitalism, not a socialist alternative to it. 

The Anarchist Error

The liberal error conflates abolition of policing with the abolition of all social accountability; the anarchist error mistakes the Marxist theory of the state for a defense of the capitalist state itself and locates the root of oppression primarily in hierarchy, bureaucracy, and coercion rather than the class relations that give the state and its instruments their political character.

Lenin outlines his conception of the state in The State and Revolution. He writes that “the state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” It arises when society becomes divided into antagonistic classes. Here, Lenin quotes Engels, who writes that the state “becomes a power seemingly standing above society,” a “special, public power” that “does not directly coincide” with the people, consisting of “special bodies of armed men,” and “a standing army and police” as “the chief instruments of state power.” Lenin does not define the state or policing merely as a form of coercion but as the product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The capitalist state is an organ of capitalist rule produced by class society and used by the capitalist class to maintain its domination. The police serve as one of its chief instruments. 

The proletarian state exists to defend the revolution against capitalist counterrevolution while creating the material conditions for its own obsolescence. As class antagonisms are overcome, coercive institutions produced by class antagonisms lose their social basis. Some critics of abolition correctly identify this need to defend the revolution, but both fail to understand the difference in political character of coercion under socialism and fail to envision a world beyond class antagonism. This is ultimately an anti-communist perspective.

Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France makes this distinction concrete. He argues “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” specifically identifying the standing army, police, and bureaucracy. Marx praises the commune because it “got rid” of these institutions and transferred their functions to serve the working class, rather than simply inheriting them:

“Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune … having once got rid of the standing army and the police —the physical force elements of the old government.”

He continues:

“Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind.”

This is the materialist basis for a socialist abolitionism. We seek the abolition of prisons and policing as institutions of capitalist domination, while recognizing that socialism will have to solve real problems that capitalism currently purports to address through those institutions. The Marxist question is not whether those problems exist nor whether society may ever require coercive measures, but what social relations make particular forms of coercion necessary, who controls them, what class interests they serve, and how the institutions reproduce the conditions that make them necessary.

In this way, abolition is not a demand to abolish social protection or accountability but a demand to abolish the capitalist form through which these problems are organized, and to transform the underlying social conditions so that institutions of class domination are unnecessary.

The Rise of Abolition 

Tracing the roots of abolition reveals its significance to the socialist movement. During the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, abolition was a central concern in socialist politics. At its strongest, the movement came to understand abolition as not only a moral appeal against punishment in the abstract but a fight against police and prisons as institutions rooted in the history of slavery, racial capitalism, and class rule, whose abolition required transforming the social conditions that reproduce them. 

This framing is rooted in the Black radical socialist tradition. From W.E.B. Du Bois to Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolition has long meant abolition of the social order that makes systems of policing and prisons necessary while constructing new capacities for collective life.

Du Bois located the origins of modern policing and imprisonment in the unfinished project of abolishing slavery. As he wrote in Black Reconstruction, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” The overthrow of chattel slavery was followed by new forms of racial domination, including convict leasing, Jim Crow, debt peonage, and modern policing, extending slavery’s social function under capitalism by ensuring a disciplined and racially stratified labor force produced by Black oppression.

Gilmore extends this analysis to the political economy of prisons in the neoliberal era. The disruption and disorganization of the working class is essential to the functioning of the system. As she writes in Abolition Geography, “Put simply, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it. Thus criminalization and mass incarceration are class war.” In Golden Gulag, Gilmore analyzes how the carceral system became a means of managing the crises produced by neoliberal capitalism. The economic crises arising from the neoliberal transformation of the capitalist economy produced a massive increase in surplus labor — a growing population of people whose labor was considered superfluous to capital’s needs. Because of the racialized hierarchy of social relations in the United States, one key response was a massively intensified campaign to criminalize Black and Latino populations, and a concomitant enormous growth of the carceral state. This transformed a surplus population into one to be managed and contained, which weakened the possibility of the solidarity required to meaningfully challenge capitalism. 

As Gilmore explains, “Capital must be able to get rid of workers whose labor power is no longer desirable — whether permanently, by mechanical or human replacement, or temporarily by layoffs — and have access to new or previously idled labor as the need arises. These necessities, as Marx’s science of capital accumulation demonstrates, are not due to the personalities or preferences of heads of firms: CEOs who resist such “adjustments” to the labor force jeopardize profits.”

Today we see the hyper-criminalization of immigrants as serving a similarly useful role for capitalism. U.S. imperialism creates the conditions for mass migration through practices of unequal exchange that impoverish the Global South, where the resulting sub-subsistence level wages force workers to migrate for survival. The creation of a maximally exploitable immigrant labor produces an underclass of laborers whose vulnerability is targeted to drive down the power of the working class as a whole. (See Migration As Economic Imperialism by Immanuel Ness.) 

Declining opportunities for profitable investment for capital dictate that workers in the United States must be disciplined to accept less, and a terrified, hyper-exploitable working class continues to lower the floor for the working class as a whole. As Mark Neocleous summarizes in A Critical Theory of Police Power, “Capital is nothing less than a social war and the conflict between classes the most significant civil war in history. Yet this class war is carried out as a generalized police war.” Given the centrality of policing and prisons to capitalist accumulation within the imperial core, abandoning abolition would mean abandoning class war.

Abolition’s Retreat

Today there is a growing retreat from the Marxist and Black radical frameworks.

Much of the current debate frames abolition as an abstract hypothetical about whether any society will ever require coercion or restraint. This framing detaches itself from the concrete institutions and social relations through which policing is organized under capitalism. Instead of asking what police and prisons are as institutions that manage the contradictions of racial capitalism, it asks whether a generalized form of public safety might exist in an imagined future society.

In contrast, a Marxist approach asks us to begin not with abstractions but with the concrete institutions and social relations that produce institutions. Police and prisons are not neutral responses to human conflict but historically specific institutions expanded alongside capitalism, colonialism, and racial domination. 

The consequences of this mistake are significant. Once abolition is framed as an abstract proposition that all coercion must vanish forever, it becomes easy to dismiss as unrealistic. Instead of being seen as a strategy for dismantling institutions that reproduce capitalism and racial domination, it’s framed as either the fantastical idealism of anarchism or the limited purview of policy reform.

It’s important to acknowledge that this retreat from abolition emerges from a real contradiction facing the socialist movement. The George Floyd uprising was the largest mass rebellion against policing in a generation,  yet it produced few lasting structural victories. It’s reasonable to ask whether the movement’s politics, including the rallying cry to abolish the police, contributed to that outcome. But this mistakes the primary lessons of 2020. The principal failure was not that abolition proved to be bad politics or messaging, but that the socialist movement lacked the durable organization, institutions, mass base, and independent politics necessary to adequately absorb the energy of the uprising and carry it forward once the streets emptied. 

This retreat also cannot be understood apart from the intensity of the capitalist and political backlash against the politics of 2020. As Alex Karakatsanis has shown, the liberal establishment and corporate media worked overtime to co-opt the outrage into reforms that left the core institutions intact and quickly began a massive propaganda campaign aimed at selling the lie that crime was spiraling out of control. Progressive politicians and liberal media were eager to return to business as usual, abandoning the rhetoric of 2020 as quickly as they could and once again supporting ballooning police budgets, happy to paper over their inability to meet people’s needs by throwing money at the criminalization of poverty in service of capital. At the same time, much of the left increasingly reduced policing to a question of municipal budgets rather than understanding it as a central institution of capitalist political power.

The basis of this liberal retreat from abolition is clear. The question remaining is: What are the core contradictions driving the left’s retreat?

Electoralism and Reformism

DSA’s electoral successes have been expanding at a rapid rate. As a result, anything that appears to threaten this success naturally faces special scrutiny. This reformist logic was recently articulated by Mayor Mamdani, who, when asked about his breaks with DSA, stated: “Especially when it comes to public safety, I’ve been very clear that we have our police force, we have prisons, we have jails. The purpose of these is also to ensure we are delivering safety & justice.” Indeed, members of the Socialist Majority Caucus and Groundwork caucuses, the Jacobin editorial board, and a number of DSA electeds and aligned candidates have argued that abolition should be de-emphasized or abandoned because it is electorally unpopular or idealistic. Often, this takes the form of stressing the urgency of passing a candidate’s affordability agenda at all costs. This risks pushing DSA towards the pitfalls of tailism and economism, subverting our political program in favor of what is immediately achievable rather than using our political organization to expand what workers see as possible.

It is of course necessary to adapt the way we communicate depending on the context. Every mass movement must distinguish between propaganda, agitation, and the demands most appropriate to a particular audience. The error lies in retreating from a political plank altogether to avoid the strategic challenge in the first place. 

Whether a particular candidate campaigns on abolition, and to what extent, is a tactical question. But allowing that question to redefine the political program of a socialist movement reverses the proper relationship between the movement and its elected officials. Independent socialist organizations must expand the political horizon of the working class, not narrow it according to what elected officials can comfortably defend. DSA’s success is because of our steadfast adherence to our core principles, not in spite of it. Our organization has grown significantly since our program was released. When another moment like 2020 occurs (and it is inevitable), the working class will remember where we stood.

Part of this challenge reflects the need for DSA to develop further towards a party of the working class: an organization with all the structure, resources, political coherence, and discipline to support our candidates in standing firm rather than leaving them isolated in their respective political arenas to fend off attacks and feel compelled to distance themselves from or abandon demands in order to win reelection or fulfill campaign promises. That requires a commitment to fulfilling our Convention mandate to build DSA’s capacity to act as an independent political organization: strengthening the National Electoral Commission’s ability to coordinate our electoral work nationally while building robust Socialists in Office programs at the local level, so our electeds remain closely connected to DSA and are not left to navigate the pressures of office alone. It also requires building connective tissue and infrastructure across chapters and between national and local levels so that DSA can act as a unified political organization rather than a collection of isolated electoral campaigns.

Of course, embracing an abolitionist horizon does not mean DSA and our electeds should abstain from reform. Socialists in office should pursue every reform that weakens the carceral state, defunds police, reduces incarceration, and expands healthcare, but they should do so as part of a strategy aimed at the eventual abolition of policing and prisons rather than as an end in itself.

For Marxists, abolition is not an abstract moral principle or a distant utopia. It’s the unfinished struggle to complete the destruction of slavery’s institutional legacy and embrace Marx’s call to seize the machinery of the state, smash it altogether, and usher in a new social order. We should recall Eugene Debs’s exhortation: While there is a soul in prison, we are not free. 

Further Discussion

If you’re interested in discussing this article with other DSA members, head over to the DSA Discussion Board.

The forums are open to all DSA members in good standing. If you’re not a DSA member in good standing, sign up or renew your dues here.

By Bridget T

First published on Substack here.

9-11-2025 was the 52^nd anniversary of the Chilean coup. Twelve years before that, on the 40th anniversary, 9-11-2013, I walked into a room at the top of Anabel Taylor Hall on the Cornell University campus to take part in an interview that would alter my view of the world forever.

In the summer of 2013, I was a Politics student at Ithaca College ready to start an internship with CUSLAR (Committee on U.S. – Latin American Relations) in the fall. I volunteered first for the summer to help organize the CUSLAR Spanish Camp for Activists where we improved our Spanish and empowered each other with good food, music, and political speakers. It was there that I heard live Chilean music for the first time around the campfire. I would later find out it was played by a man named Carlos. This is the same Carlos that I would interview about his experience in leaving Chile after the coup and coming to the U.S. in exile some months later. Political refugees from Chile had come to Ithaca, New York since 1974. My work with CUSLAR that summer also involved researching the connections and ties between Ithaca based organizations, such as CUSLAR and the Friends of Chile, and the larger refugee community that had formed a network to get exiled and imprisoned people out of Chile. From this research, we decided to put together an oral history project in preparation for the 40^th anniversary of the coup. I had the opportunity to hear the stories of those who were in Chile on the day of the coup and the years of President Allende and Unidad Popular’s administration.

Each story, or “testimonio,” gives a new perspective on the day itself, and on the years leading up to such a monumental event. Each person’s story represents a new layer of the coup and what it means in world history and in the history of the U.S. empire. Everyone I have ever talked to from Chile had an entirely different experience when their world came to a screeching halt on 9-11-73. I think this speaks to the human condition of course, but also, the truly diverse coalition that had been built around Allende and the thousands of workers who supported him.

One story unlike that of anyone else is the testimony from Ana Villa. Ana’s late father was an American diplomat working with the United Nations in Santiago at the time of the coup. Ana’s family was completely uprooted by the events of the 1973 coup. Ana had a unique viewpoint as a young person in Santiago, mingling with the international elite, but also coming of age with the people of Chile before and during the Allende government. I met Ana on 9-11-2013 when she walked into the CUSLAR office accompanied by her mother Fran Barraclough.

This is what she said:

Experiencing 9-11-73, Santiago, Chile

“I’m Annie. Ana Maria. I was born in Tennessee, but grew up mostly in Santiago, Chile. My dad, Solon Barraclough, worked with the United Nations with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), but he also had connections at *ICIRA (The Institute for Land Reform in Chile). So we went to Chile in 1959 and he went down to work for the FAO. I went to Nido de Aguilas and Santiago College which are both international bilingual schools.

I was very political, and I disliked all of the rich kids I went to school with. The kids were pretty snobbish. I started becoming very political in 1970 after Allende won the presidential election, and I was a senior at Nido de Aguilas. If the coup hadn’t happened, I never would have graduated because I was never at school! I would go to school and then run away to go to the big marches, in the middle of tear gas and everything. From 1970 onward, every time there was a Unidad Popular march I was there. . . A lot of interesting things happened at the time because of my school being children of ambassadors and international people.

“They knew that the coup was supposed to be that Monday”

The week of the coup, I went to school on Monday, September 10th and none of the other Americans were there. I asked why there were all gone, and the teacher said they all took a vacation. They all went out on vacation at the same time! That was ridiculous. They knew that the coup was supposed to be that Monday. And they took off. So I thought something was funny that Monday and then on Tuesday, I did not go to school.

On September 11th, I was supposed to go to some offices downtown to turn in papers right by La Moneda and I overslept. I overslept that morning. Now I have to explain where our house was. It was up this long street on a hill. A larger house with more land. Right across from us was the military country club.

On the day of the coup d’etat, the military ran all of their messages up to the county club all day. Through the months before the coup there was a lot of abnormal activity and many more cars. On the day of the coup, my father happened to be in Israel and my mother was at a friend’s house. I remember waking up in a panic because I’d overslept. I called my neighbor to say “we’ve got to go” and she said “we’re not going anywhere.”

“My friend said, ‘No, this is real”’

In June there had been a similar thing. The military had sent tanks up to La Moneda, attempting to do a coup or to scare people. This was called the Tanquetazo, so I said “ah it’s just another Tanquetazo. These sons of bitches don’t know what they’re doing.” But my friend said, “No, this is real.”

I got to hear Allende’s speech on the radio. I could look out and there must have been 20 soldiers with machine guns pointing at our house. They knew we were Gringanistas. I remember thinking “this is not good.” Behind our house were blackberry bushes, so I took my brother and went to the neighbor’s house and I called mother to tell her not to come home. Any car coming up the hill had to either be going to the country club or to our house so I said don’t even bother.

“We took off and left our house that day”

You could see the planes coming by- they were fighter jets. We took off and left our house that day. You could hear the shooting, the bombings, at one point you could see the smoke of La Moneda. I slept in the living room in our friends’ house, and you could hear the guns at night outside. That really stays with you.”

At the club, there were *cuidadores. I was friends with one of their daughters, and it was she who told me that they were looking for us. She told me that all the Barracloughs had to go to the police station and turn their names in. It wasn’t just us, of course. Pinochet and his command of people were going over lists of people who also needed to report in. But my friend knew where we were. So I thought, ‘wow, we’re really not very safe.’”

“I had names and books in my room that could get people in trouble”

Fran added, “She was the daughter of the sergeant” and Ana continued,

“Right. After that we weren’t allowed to leave the house for three days. We had a Volvo, and in Chile at the time, there weren’t that many Volvos. Also, we had diplomatic plates. So our car was very conspicuous and we didn’t dare go out in it. We wanted to put mud on the license plate and things, but after the third day I decided to just walk to our house because I had names and books in my room that could get people in trouble if the military got ahold of them.

This interview was a casual conversation between Ana, her mother Fran, the director of CUSLAR, Tim, and several students and interns, including myself. There were undergraduate CUSLAR interns from both Ithaca College and Cornell, and there were also graduate students, notably international students. It was common for some of the brightest Latin American scholars at Cornell to get involved in the events and campaigns of CUSLAR. Two of these students had grown up in Argentina, another country where U.S. imperialism reared its ugly head and sought to undermine the power of popular movements. During the 40^th anniversary event, the Argentinian students asked many questions that brought our conversation to an even deeper level.

One crucial piece that makes Ana’s story unique is obviously her father’s job and the specific nature of his role within the United Nations. Solon Barraclough was an American from New Hampshire who later worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization in the United Nations. After studying economics at Harvard and gaining practical knowledge on his family’s farm, Barraclough became a forester and adviser. He began working with the FAO on Latin American agriculture projects through the end of the 1950s, and, as President Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress program in 1961. Simultaneously, a global agrarian reform movement was growing. 

A 2002 obituary for Solon in the Guardian stated, “Barraclough was never happier than when out in the countryside talking to peasants.” One of the Argentinian students asked Ana, if her family or her father had any diplomatic protection. She responded:

“No! Even the U.N. was not protected. There were two pars to ICIRA, the national side and the U.N. side. And they found the national officials floating in Mapocho River two days after the coup. So no, there was no diplomatic protection. . .

“They can’t have a coup Monday because it’s foggy”

Fran: Some kid told her there was going to be a coup on Monday. And I said, “Oh the Chilean military won’t be able to do anything because it’s foggy. They can’t have a coup Monday because it’s foggy.” But it was the next day.

Ana: There was no protection really for Americans. For those who were right wing, or those in the CIA, or working with the embassy, there was protection, but my father was considered a persona non grata because he was doing land reform in Chile. Chile was made up of the very wealthy and the very poor, and those who were very wealthy were the landowners who had all these *latifundios. They weren’t using the land or were planting very little, exploiting their workers. So my father was taking that land and giving it to poor farmers, dividing it up for the workers and giving them something to live on. 

I mean we were threatened all the time to the point where my mother said, “Move your bed away from the window.” They shot at my father’s car when he was out. When I finally left the house after the coup, I couldn’t drive our car because it was recognizable, so I walked. 

I remember I walked through tenement housing that was built by the Christian Democrats, built in *Educardo Frei’s time. Frei built all these bricks houses for people. 

“What the heck are they shooting at? This is a Christian Democrat neighborhood!”

I was walking and there were helicopters flying on both sides of the road, and they were just shooting. I was thinking, “what the heck are they shooting at? This is a Christian Democrat neighborhood!” It got so that they got so close to me that I had to hide under a tree. It was spring, like that would protect me from a bullet, but that’s how naive I was, that I’m running around hiding from guns under a tree. Luckily they went away. 

The military broke into our house that night, on September 11. They said they were looking for weapons, but we had no weapons. They took our kitchen knives and said we had weapons. 

Fran: We had shish kabob sticks- real weapons!

Ana: They stole all of our radios, our washing machine, anything that we had imported without paying taxes. I had books in my room with lots of names of my friends who were against the coup. I stupidly thought, “Well, I can’t put them in the fireplace because that smoke coming up the chimney will look suspicious.” So what did I do? I threw them all out the window and had a huge bonfire in the back of my house. 

This was about the 13th or 14th, one of the first day we could go out. So what happens? I’m standing at my house, alone, with this huge bonfire and here comes a helicopter. The helicopter shows up, maybe 50 meters above me, circling me. I’m thinking “If I run, they’ll shoot. If I go in the house, and they follow me in there, then no one is going to know.” And I’m thinking “Ahhh,” so I just stood there. I’m not really looking at them, I’m thinking “How am I going to get out of this one?” And you know, I really was saved because all they did was circle maybe 30 times, and they just yelled obscenities, because there was a blonde girl, 18 years old with hair down to her waist. I thought they might not shoot but I might get killed or raped. I have to say, I just stood there, mostly because I was kind of frozen there scared. And they left me. 

“It changed those people”

The other thing that I did after the coup was that I went to a very good friend’s house who lived across the street from the Military Hospital. And he took me to his sister’s house near the *National Stadium. They were right-wing, some CDs, but they were horrified. They lived on Avenida Iglesia, so they were just seeing truckloads of dead bodies that were piled in the back and covered only with a tarp. 

My friends didn’t know what to make of it, I mean they were all for the coup, but then they started seeing these trucks at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning. They were removing bodies from the National Stadium. It changed those people. And I kept hearing about different friends who’d been shot and detained. 

Fran: One called and said the soldiers came and pushed the Cardinal, who was his neighbor, into a car and took him off. 

Student: Some of the people who committed those crimes are now in government. They just want the people to forget. 

Ana: Well, you can’t forget! We have two parts of Chile, those who favored the coup and think Pinochet was a hero, and those who had family members who were disappeared or tortured or killed. They’re still finding bones...

The Trip Out

We left on the first plane that left on the 19th of September. The only reason we got out was because we had friends give us their tickets. . . (To Be Continued in Part 2)

Lessons from Part 1: 

I haven’t talked a lot about the History is Ours project or the Chilean coup very much in recent years. I attribute that in part to my own frustration over never having brought the stories to a wider audience. I also had the time to observe over the years, that many Americans, simply did not care to know more about it. They certainly didn’t care to reflect on the U.S.’s role in this horrendous event and what it could possibly mean about U.S. foreign policy and the many, still entrenched, neoliberal institutions that hold such unbalanced power today. It’s possible that I had been so shocked and overwhelmed by the information, shocked about the coup and the things that were done to uplift fascism, shocked of course about the US’s involvement, but also shocked by the entire Western colonial project, that I went into a rather prolonged state of freeze after absorbing these stories that didn’t serve anyone, least of all the people whose stories I still held. I tried to share the stories of course in 2014 when the booklet was published. At CUSLAR, we always thought we would return to the project, revisit the interviewees, and keep telling the many unheard stories of those in Chile during this critical time period. From 2015-2018 I would bring it up at new jobs as I tried to describe who I was to co-workers; I felt like I could not relate to people my age very well without first telling them about these interviews, the book, and what had been my primary focus for that last year and my biggest accomplishment so far. The research never felt over. 

The layers behind this event would keep unfolding before me. I had to keep talking about it, always gauging what regular people knew about it, gauging their reactions when I told them about the coup, and gauging their reactions when they learned about the levels the U.S. was willing to go to in order to enforce its economic agenda on Chile, and anyone else that went against it. I eventually met other people interested in Chile through socialist activism in the U.S. I learned the story of my friend Alice Embree who had gone to Chile on the same trip as future Congressman Lloyd Doggett while they were both students at the University of Texas in 1967. She became a fierce antiwar activist with groups like the UT SDS chapter and the Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile; she worked with *NACLA and, from then to today, has always spoken about Chile. Meeting Alice and her family made me feel like Chile always finds a way back into my life (more on that in Part Two). 

Chile has long been described as a testing ground for the *Chicago Boys Economic project. The military junta regime was a Western colonial project, similar to Israel, similar to the United States itself. The project had to succeed because socialism needed to fail; whatever would uplift the people, whatever methods that would give them their land back or give them real economic power, had to fail. 

Chile was to be the example. 

Ana’s story shows that not even the UN had protection from this kind of fascist takeover. As Allende said in his final speech over the airwaves on the morning of the 11th: “At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by commander Araya, victims of the same social sector which will today be in their homes hoping with foreign assistance, to retake power to continue to defend their profits and their privileges”

“I am certain that the seed which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have strength and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.”

Allende understood that he had been betrayed by multiple figures and elements of the military, including “Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government.” 

Allende also understood that the military had the greater show of strength in this case. There is much debate on whether he should have done more, if he should have armed the workers, but my view, with Hindsight 20-20, after seeing the same pattern repeated successfully by the global elite in country after country; the people of Chile did not stand much of a chance against this fascist wave at that time. The people could not overpower a military leaders, many trained at the *School of the Americas, who were more brutal than any average person would have expected. The forces of foreign capital and imperialism were waging economic warfare against Chile from the moment Allende began his presidency and before. They sowed division between the classes with great intention and strategy. Ana’s experience even as part of an American elite family shows that human rights and international order would be discarded fully by the military regime and those who supported it. Does it show the weakness of the United Nations in protecting civilians? It’s unavoidable; yes. Whether it be a U.S.-backed coup in Chile, or a U.S.-sponsored genocide in Palestine, the UN seems unprepared to adequately respond and uphold international law when the violator is the United States or one of its close allies and proxies. 

The biggest lesson to me that needs to be remembered today is simply understanding who the United States is. These are the questions I hope someone hearing this for the first time wants to ask: Why would the United States back a coup that killed agriculture officials? Why would they back a coup that threw people doing land reform in the river? Why would they back a coup where civilians were rounded up and taken to a soccer stadium to be tortured and killed, their bodies piled onto trucks with a loose tarp and then driven to a dumping ground? If you think this started with Donald J. Trump, you have a lot to catch up on. Fascism in the United States is not new. It is not modern. 

Heed the last words of President Salvador Allende:“I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which Armed Forces broke their tradition.”  Fascism will, and will not, creep up on you. There are signs, there are subtle ways the leaders may try to hide their fullest intentions temporarily, but a fascist’s true desire will always become apparent at a certain point, undeniably. Like the Nazi that showed up to a warehouse in Los Angeles to debate Mehdi Hasan for Jubilee, fascists will loudly proclaim their beliefs, they will laugh them off with no hesitation or second thought. Fascists, by definition, believe in power; they believe that corporate power, military power, should be the deciding factor to all government decisions. They are happy to be the axe that is wielded for that agenda. If they want to break their oaths to the Constitution, they will. 

You will know when fascism is at your door. And it will be far too late then. What will you do when you know when they are down the street? What will you do when you know they are a few neighborhoods over? What will you do if they go first to a neighborhood that you don’t particularly like? Will you still know that it is fascism?

What will you do when you hear the stories of this coup, of what the U.S. was willing to do, of what the U.S. did, to cement its economic power over Chile, what the U.S. did to protect the international elites in the copper industry who were losing profits? Will you believe that capitalists are confident in their economic model? If in a democratic system, capitalism is always the logical choice of the people . . . why did they need the military to enforce that system? Why did they need to torture those who committed the ultimate “crime” to fascists: having their own thoughts? Believing in an alternative economic model? Joining a workers’ union, organizing as a student for a better world, supporting your neighbors, supporting land reform, speaking out against the military regime… all crimes. There comes a day when fascism is at your door, but before then, you must always organize for the power of the people, no matter who is elected, because the imperialists, the real criminals, are still at large. 

Allende said “People make history.” He knew that it was the belief of the working people of Chile for a better future that put him into office in the first place. He knew that it was the power of the people (and his administration’s policies that were enacting real change for the people) that became such a threat to the global elite, they conspired to orchestrate such a violent, dissent-crushing coup. It was the threat of the people realizing their own power, through these policies, and through the broader socialist movement, that terrified them most of all. 

Democratic Socialism and the nationalization of the copper industry, was the threat they needed to stop before the rest of the capitalist world could truly learn the lessons of the Allende government. The U.S. would support any government who promised to squash a movement led by the coalition of leftist organizations that backed Allende’s election, and the multi-pronged workers’ movement that gave those organizations their heart and soul. The U.S. could not allow Chile’s significant improvements regarding agrarian reform, healthcare reform, worker ownership, and nationalization of industries, to become worldwide success stories. They needed the world to believe privatization and capitalism were synomynous with democracy. 

It was always a lie. It is still a lie. It was not socialism nor a democratic socialist government enacting land reform reforms that lead to a daughter of an American diplomat burning books to hide their friends’ names, to keep them from being targets of brutal torture and “interogation”… it was when a fascist coup occured, backed by her own government, the American government itself, that such actions were necessary. That occurs when democracy has been betrayed and U.S.-backed fascism has won. Even so, history IS ours. We, the people, make history. Democratic Socialism isn’t about a powerful leader coming to save you; it’s about the people -and only ever the people- saving themselves, no matter the time, no matter the obstacle. Foreign capital and the forces of imperialism will no longer divide us, and they will no longer defeat us. 

For sources and footnotes, go to the Substack article here.

The post Stories from the Chilean Coup: Part 1 first appeared on Red Fault.

"Red All Over" — an occasional round-up of media coverage of DSA

The post There’s Always A Red Scare Somewhere appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Reid Jackson

COPLEY SQUARE – The voices and shouts of labor were audible approaching the square on September 7. Starting in the morning, the Greater Boston Labor Council (GBLC) led workers gathering between Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library. At the parade were all the ranks: the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Boston Teachers Union (BTU), SAG-AFTRA, and the United Auto Workers (UAW).

At the heart of the march was DSA: red signs, each blazened with “Socialism Beats Fascism.”

Recent Electoral Results

Labor Day 2026 in Boston is colored by the results of the midterm primaries for Massachusetts, with winners and losers alike attending the march to share in the celebration of labor power in our community. Among the attendees was Sen. Ed Markey, who just beat his moderate challenger Seth Moulton by 30 points just to show the electorate that he still has that dog in him.

Ed Markey, standing above the crowd after victoriously sweeping the state, said:

This vast movement which has gathered here today in Copley Place… is proof that the powers that be can’t hold a candle to the power of the working people.

Markey’s race against a much younger candidate was that you do not have to throw away your constituents in the pursuit of the chasing the ever elusive goal of electability, something that Moulton ended up learning the hard way when he attempted to get ahead of a perceived wave of conservatism flooding through the country by claiming that the issue of trans rights needn’t be “absolute” within the Democratic Party.

Markey’s choice to stand with the queer community wasn’t a shock to anyone who knew him and followed his pattern of maintaining solidarity with every marginalized community he represents in our state. That philosophy that guided him to stand with the trans people of Massachusetts brought him to the same square in Boston as the rest of us.

Evan MacKay, endorsed by Boston DSA in their run for State House to represent Cambridge, was also right in the heart of the march with their DSA comrades who campaigned for them exhaustively for months. They led chants on the bullhorn with “ONE STRUGGLE! ONE FIGHT! WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!” Their spirits, despite just one week from their primary defeat, were carried on by enthusiasm.

MacKay’s presence, and the presence of the Boston DSA as a whole illustrates their resolve to continue to grow and develop their movement, and the foundation of maintaining that movement is to show up to events like the Labor Day march, and the picket lines of other struggles for union labor.

DSA’s contingent marched right behind a rolling truck with an inflatable shark on it for the Southeastern Mass Labor Council and ahead of the SAG-AFTRA contingent, whose members (largely actors and other performers) dressed like Spider-Man to excite children on the parade.

In other words, socialist labor organizers were right at home with their union siblings.

Labor Day, as an alternative to May Day, represents a holiday with few militant roots. But a holiday for workers is still a holiday. For workers in Boston, who suffer under excruciating rent and low wages amidst a cost of living crisis, Labor Day became a day that showed labor itself: strong, together, capable of both rest and power while winning bread and roses.

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

The post In Photos: On Labor Day 2026, Boston Labor Has Never Been Louder appeared first on Working Mass.