There has been a momentary lull in the mass demonstrations against Trumpian fascism. We haven’t seen a “No Kings Day” since March 28 (although one is being scheduled for October), and it’s been almost four months since the most robust May Day participation in this country since the 1940s. Thus as we count down to the November 3 election it is all the more important to get out on the streets on Labor Day, Monday September 7, to rebuild the public profile for mass action, which in turn supports enthusiasm for progressive candidates and ballot measures.

Traditionally Labor Day is the official kick-off within the labor movement to canvassing in an election year. This time around in California the difference is that it features a rejuvenated left edge to the state’s unions in the wake of the important decision at the August 4 California AFL-CIO convention to support the Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, along with Prop 3, the Education and Health Care Act. Enactment of this dual hit on ruling class income and wealth will produce a fairer share of taxes paid by the state’s richest residents to support public education and health care. 

It will also send a signal to the most reactionary tech bro capitalists that their insane level of political spending can’t buy our democracy.

Historic Opportunity

The marquee political campaign for California DSA this year is our Tax the Rich effort. Our state council endorsed both measures before any other organization in the Golden State. As a result we have set up committees and working groups in our chapters, held (and continue to hold) educational forums and trainings, and crafted materials to use in educating our members, unionists, and the electorate. 

Due to our level of preparedness, our chapters are in good position to work with local central labor councils and their new mandate to support Props 3 and 40 across the state on Labor Day and onward toward the election. One example: East Bay DSA is partnering with the Alameda Labor Council to phonebank and canvass for the two tax the rich measures along with candidates for office endorsed by both groups. 

The increased cooperation between organized labor and DSA has been driven by the tremendous successes of DSA’s electoral program around the country. There is a new level of respect within unions for the hard work and principled cooperation of socialists in politics. 

The labor movement, for its part, is more prepared for Labor Day than I’ve seen in a long time. The California Federation of Labor Unions has posted the upcoming activities of its councils well in advance of the holiday and is organizing for marches, picnics, and other actions and celebrations. See the local events here.

This Labor Day let’s continue to build on the synergy. A strong socialist presence at Labor Day events will grow both movements. 

• Labor Day events

• Tax the Rich campaign materials

• Taxing the Rich in American History: A Forum with Vanessa Williamson September 16

Revealing Results of a Berkeley Community Health Study

I operate a physical therapy clinic in downtown Berkeley, Calif., which has been in service to the community for over 35 years.  I have worked here for fifteen years and witnessed the deterioration of our healthcare system firsthand as it relates to addressing the functional mobility needs of our community members. 

Through daily interactions with patients, I’ve seen consistent patterns of discrepancy between insurances and access to care.  However, these valuable insights remained largely anecdotal. So we sought to formally document them in a proposed community-based study, which would confirm that these factors result in perpetuating inequities in our community.

True experiences and obstaclesOur clinic teamed up with UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies and two community organizations, Healthy Black Families, Inc., and the Friends of Adeline, to highlight the true experiences and obstacles our patients face when attempting to access care. 

The study attempted to understand the level of recognition and attention that patients received from referral sources and insurance providers when trying to navigate these realities. 

Our aim was to transform these observations into actionable knowledge and present it to our city, county and state governments. 

We formulated a successful grant application on this subject for a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Grant, which awarded us the opportunity to formally study our community’s access to care. 

The study cohort consisted of patients from different insurance coverages who were placed into a listening study.  The study design included three workshops with 27 participants and a facilitator who administered the questions.  All of the workshops were video- and audio-recorded and later transcribed and interpreted by three different readers (no AI). 

As our recordings demonstrate, the majority of patients from the most vulnerable socio-economic bracket covered by Medi-Cal were people of color and senior citizens.  We juxtaposed their experiences to others in the listening study, who are cash-paying clients and higher-income private insurance members. 

This study revealed clear and substantial inequities present in the healthcare system.  It also revealed a disconnect between the city of Berkeley and its community healthcare clinics, which the city supports materially. 

As the community clinics that support Medicaid clients do not provide physical therapy (PT) services under their umbrella, they must refer PT to an outside clinic.  However, the reimbursement levels are so low for these services that the majority of the clinics refuse to accept these patients.  Facing this obstacle, affected patients typically discontinue pursuit of care and their physical mobility becomes significantly impacted or lost altogether, further damaging their overall health and generating a greater burden to their community. 

Study findings: themes and solutionsOur findings also illuminated the disconnect between those who seek care and those who are providing it.  After studying the transcripts, five key themes were identified, which will be brought to the attention of city, county and state policymakers to address potential solutions: 

1) The need for Medicare for All to address delayed treatment, and lack of insurance coverage.

2) The negative effects of virtual physical therapy (isolation, lack of physical touch, static vs. dynamic assessment).

 3) No health without care (positive effects of manual physical therapy, human touch, one-on-one care).

 4) The importance of preventative care (independence and mobility impact quality of life, reduction of negatively impacting social networks and, thus, the greater healthcare system).

 5) A disconnect between city of Berkeley support of the Lifelong Medical Care clinics that request PT, while not supporting PT clinics as part of their structure.

The overarching voice of the Medicaid group, in contrast to the private-pay groups, underscores the perils of accessing care, continuing care and the debilitating cost to members to the detriment of their communities and the healthcare system as a whole.

Our study focused intentionally on insurance levels that point to socio-economic sectors as opposed to race/ethnicity.  However, because we identified participants by their insurance coverage, we know that 50 percent of the participants are below the poverty line (very low or extremely low-income bracket).  

Our study clarified the fact that this portion of the population must wait for extended periods of time while their physical status deteriorates, as opposed to participants who have direct access to care with no waiting times.

The listening study also emphasized the importance of manual therapy care and one-on-one care, which many insurance carriers no longer reimburse for. The classic relationship between the physical therapist practitioner and the patient that used to be based on face-to-face, hands-on care has been replaced by “patient mills,” where patients are being given exercises and monitored by unlicensed aides and hardly ever physically touched. 

This approach is used to bridge the financial gap of poor reimbursement by the practitioners to make up for the loss in revenue.  The study overwhelmingly revealed the effectiveness of manual therapy and direct care in healing the patients who participated in the study or, to put more simply, people before profit.

The cost of “wealthcare”

The political and economic system in which Californians are presently ensnared orients state healthcare policy around private ownership and above all, profit. The actual cost of this “wealthcare” regime is orders of magnitude higher than the exorbitant profits investors extract. Indeed it is a price Californians pay with their bodies, their community, and their human agency. Quoting from the most recent DSA Program, Workers Deserve More: “The political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs. As capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism. Big business makes deals with the government to line their pockets.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the health care system, with big hospital systems being rewarded huge profits at the expense of our communities. As community clinics are driven under and funding is lost, our traditional safety nets disintegrate for the benefit of a small handful of privileged oligarchs.As community clinics (which have historically treated the working-class) are driven under and funding is directed upwards, our traditional safety nets are being disintegrated for the benefit of a small handful of privileged investors. We must go beyond merely countering this moral calamity by organizing local DSA chapters to demand that California’s top public institutions center the findings of this study and others like it to fund policy and programs that foster community-based health care accountable to elderly, disabled and underprivileged Californians. We must also demand our elected representatives center community-based healthcare hand-in-hand with adequate reimbursement through policies that strengthen and center patients and their healthcare providers above the interests of the medical insurance industry.

Cancel Thanksgiving? A Progressive Guide for Handling the Holidays

It’s a good thing that labor journalist and author Matt Witt was not running for governor of Wisconsin this year like DSA candidate Francesca Hong. Democratic primary rivals and Republican opposition researchers would have badly distorted the message of Witt’s new book Make Holidays Your Own (Common Ground Press). It encourages creative rethinking of family gatherings and community practices on major holidays.

In their effort to discredit Hong, her foes in both parties created what the New York Timescalled a “social media kerfuffle” over old social media posts dissing Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.

The outspoken state legislator and former restaurant owner from Madison lost her August 11 primary despite polling very strongly beforehand. Given the annual sense of foreboding that overtakes millions of Americans when tense family re-unions draw near in late November, Hong’s past call for Thanksgiving to be “cancelled”—because of its connection to “colonialism”—probably had its local fans.

Under fire on the campaign trail, Hong did concede that bringing people together around a table can be “a good thing.” But, according to the Times, she also courted controversy by “questioning the value of Valentine’s Day and Christmas trees.” So not only Wisconsin turkey farmers, but gift card sellers and Christmas tree growers—if sufficiently miffed—might have voted instead for the moderate Democrat from Milwaukee, David Crowley, who won the primary. 

And even if Hong had prevailed, according to the Times, she faced the challenge of winning over voters like John Wilson, a 61-year-old pharmacist from Platteville WI, who usually “leans Democratic.” However, when asked whether he favored Hong or U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, Wilson chose the latter because “you have to take people at their word” about serious matters like Thanksgiving.

Tiffany has strong views on holidays too; in 2021, he was one of 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth Day a federal holiday, which won’t be popular with African-American voters statewide.

Just A Few Days OffIn the future, left-leaning candidates can avoid even momentarily distracting flaps like this by reading Matt Witt’s book—hopefully, before pulling the trigger on Twitter in a moment of pique. The few paid days off that most Americans get to enjoy should not be cancel culture targets, when, as the author argues, they can be celebrated in ways “more historically accurate, meaningful, inclusive and fun.”

In Make Holidays Your Own, Witt offers much creative advice about dealing with that day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day and eight others; his focus is on countering their crass commercialization, historical baggage, stultifying traditionalism, or exploitation by the right. 

See, for example, the garish 250th birthday party staged on July Fourth of this year in Washington, D.C. by the White House and its corporate funders. While no doubt critical of that, Abdul El-Sayed, the successful Democratic Senate primary winner in Michigan is definitely tiptoeing around the issue of fireworks on the Fourth.

As the Times notes, “he has deleted a number of videos and posts where he floated the idea of abandoning fireworks on Independence Day.” El-Sayed’s press spokesperson is now reminding voters that he “is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander.”

In other words, he’s an All-American guy! As Witt explains, “In every culture, holidays matter. They come with a message and symbols— with a story that reinforces a certain way of looking at society and passes on certain values to the next generation.” According to the author, what’s good about remaking holidays, in ways that send a different message, “is that you don’t have to convince everyone in your community who doesn’t agree. They can celebrate however they want and so can you.”

A Labor Day History LessonAnd sometimes the development of alternative celebrations—such as the reclaiming of May Day by the modern day, more immigrant-influenced U.S. labor movement—can lead to two opportunities to picnic, protest, and march, rather than just one!

As a former communications director for the United Mine Workers and Service Employees International Union, the author delves most informatively into the political agenda behind the creation of Labor Day, as a counter to nascent working-class internationalism in the late nineteenth century.

Readers will learn that it was a corporate Democratic President—rather than any anti-union Republican—who first tried to erase the memory of May 1 as an international workers’ holiday born in the U.S.A., and replace it with an end of summer day off out of step with the rest of the world. 

To add insult to injury, May 1 then got officially rebranded, during the McCarthy era, as Law Day—although nobody, even corporate lawyers, get time off for that. Yet, thanks to multiple MAGA threats to the “rule of law” since Trump got re-elected, more than a thousand California bar members used their lunch hour to stage a first-time ever May Day-style protest in downtown San Francisco.

As Witt recounts, massive demonstrations seeking shorter working hours occurred in Chicago and other U.S. cities on May 1, 1886. When repeated on May Day four years later, workers in “dozens of countries in Europe and Latin America also held rallies and marches to support the eight-hour day demand.” 

Thereafter, much to the alarm of “robber barons” here and abroad, May 1 protests became “an annual event for workers all around the world” and an expression of cross-border solidarity between labor radicals of varying stripes.

Forget May Day?

By 1894, however, a business-backed resident of the White House named Grover Cleveland needed a “sop to unions.” He had, after all, just called out federal troops to crush the Pullman strike organized by the American Railway Union, a pioneering alternative to craft unionism led by future Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs (who was jailed for his role in the strike).

At Cleveland’s request, Congress declared that workers should be given a day off, every year, on the first Monday in September so that, as Witt notes, “actions taken by U.S. unions would not be coordinated with their counterparts in the rest of the world.”

Today, Labor Day is a paid holiday for about 3 in 4 workers in the U.S. Ironically, the lowest paid workers are the least likely to have the day off with pay. That includes non-union workers in food service, retail, hotels, agriculture, delivery and janitorial services, as well as part-time workers, or those whose companies claim are ‘independent contractors’ rather than employees.

On the holiday counter-programming front, the good news is that May Day (as noted above) has made a major come-back over the last two decades. There is also “the shining example of the transformation of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day as now observed in many cities and states.”

Thanks to the efforts of progressive veterans’ groups like Veterans for Peace and Common Defense, at least some commemorative events on Memorial Day and Veterans Day now focus on peace and justice issues, rather than uncritical celebration of past wars. 

In his chapter on Martin Luther King Day, the author suggests a range of activities that “can be about the movement and not just the man.” (This is advice that venerators of Cesar Chavez are taking, but only belatedly, after recent revelations about his history of sexual abuse while president of the United Farm Workers.)

Witt reports that all proceeds from his book are going to Rethinking Schools, a 

…national nonprofit organization that supports social, economic, and environmental justice teaching at a time when the very idea of public education is under attack. Rethinking Schools’ materials have been used by tens of thousands of educators and have reached millions of students.

Let’s hope that Make Holidays Your Own also gets into the hands of many educators who have to come up with fresh ideas for in-school celebrations of holidays, that cannot be cancelled even in blue states—but of course, don’t want their personal creativity in the classroom (or pet peeves) unleashing a conservative backlash of the sort that did not help Hong.

After six months of nonstop right-wing bloviating about the Terrible Horrible No Good Billionaire Tax (Proposition 40 on the upcoming November California ballot) and an accompanying “No” campaign supported by some leading liberal allies, there is new wind in the sails of progressive tax politics. 

"I don't know how to lead a labor organization that stands to the right of the Democratic Party on economic issues", said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, the state affiliate of the AFL-CIO, just before her convention voted on August 4 to support the Billionaire Tax. 

Representing some two million plus workers within fifty unions, the CFLU wasn’t the only major organization to come out for Prop 40, a temporary 5% wealth tax on 250 California individuals, earlier this month. Gonzalez was referring to the endorsement delivered just days before by the California Democratic Party (CDP), which raised a single digit-laden hand at Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the most prominent opponents of Prop 40 (along with probable next Governor Xavier Becerra). 

Newsom seemed to think he could play it both ways, opposing the actually existing billionaire tax proposal in his own state, while calling for imaginary/aspirational higher taxes on billionaires and corporations at the federal level in preparation for his all-but-announced run for president. This transparently opportunistic ploy didn’t cut it with either the CDP or the delegates to the labor fed convention. As icing on the cake, the 100,000-member California Nurses Association also came out for Prop 40 the day before the CFLU convention. 

But as promising as all this movement may be for progressive tax advocates in the Golden State, the greater lesson may be in what it portends for messaging strategies more broadly in the midterm elections.

Slow drip

For the past two months, directly after the California Democratic primary eliminated Tom Steyer— the only major gubernatorial candidate supporting the Billionaire Tax—a slow drip of labor and liberal organizations trashed the proposal with reasoning ranging from somewhat principled to proven lies curated by $100 million in billionaire PAC monies. A week after the primary the 300,000-member California Teachers Association (CTA) and the state Building and Construction Trades Council (BTC) went public with their opposition, followed by Planned Parenthood, the California Medical Association and others. 

Why did the CTA—a leading advocate of the other progressive tax on the ballot, Prop 3—oppose a temporary tax meant to backfill a $20 billion per year hole in the state’s Medicaid budget created by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill? Some 14 million Californians are supported by Medi-Cal, the state version of Medicaid. The coming massive reduction in federal Medicaid funding, which pays for tax cuts for the richest Americans, directly impacts the students and families served by CTA members. As most teacher unions ritually announce in defense of their students every time a state public health budget is slashed, “You can’t teach a child who comes to your classroom sick.”

The answer is complicated, and I have addressed it in detail elsewhere. The short version is that the union that sponsored the Billionaire Tax, SEIU-United Health Care Workers, designed the tax to send 90% of its revenues to address the Medicaid problem, and the remaining 10% to be split among other services. This violated the understanding in Sacramento that 40% of general fund revenues should go to public education. It also raised, possibly, a hurdle to passage of Proposition 3, the Education and Health Care Act, planned by the longstanding progressive tax coalition CTA is part of before UHW launched the Billionaire Tax. 

Prop 3, an income tax on the top two percent of taxpayers in the state, has no lack of supporters. The coalition did its homework and by last year everyone to the left of Attila the Hun was on board its project, which is to make a temporary tax that currently brings in upwards of ten billion dollars a year for schools and services permanent. 

DOA?

As the organizations, or at least their leaders, were piling onto the anti-Billionaire Tax train, pundits rushed to pronounce Prop 40 dead on arrival. Mainstream media reportage breathlessly announced the “split” in the labor movement. Op eds in major newspapers by right wing think tank wonks distorted the numbers to “prove” that the mechanism of the tax couldn’t work. Political newsletters pondered the arcane mysteries of Proposition 98, the ballot measure passed by voters in 1988 that mandates 40% of the California state budget to education. 

Undeterred, SEIU-United Health Care Workers (UHW) plugged away. Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna splashily supported the tax. It collected signatures and courted coalition partners like California Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which provided a dual endorsement of the Billionaire Tax and Proposition 3 early in the year. California Teamsters and California AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), along with two large hotel and restaurant union locals, came on board both taxes as well. UHW suffered and survived negotiations with Newsom’s office to relinquish the ballot measure if the Governor and Legislature would agree to a reduced 2% tax, an offer that Newsom rejected. It sent its organizers to talk with California Democratic Party delegates and unions in the labor federation. 

Molten Reservoir

The persistence paid off. Rumblings of discontent bubbled up within labor at top-down leadership maneuvering against what seemed to most rank and filers a righteous cause. One sign of what was to come emerged a week before the CFLU convention, when the local San Diego labor council and building trades council both voted to support the Billionaire Tax.

This points to a more significant issue than the infighting within labor and purportedly progressive organizations over a couple taxes. It should come as no surprise that a year and a half into the ruinous Trump 2.0, there is an enormous molten reservoir of electorate anger at billionaires— especially the insufferably arrogant tech bros leading the charge against the Billionaire Tax—ready to be tapped. 

Shifts in the electorate

Much of the attention around shifts in the electorate has been focused on the war inside the Democratic Party between youthful DSA and other left candidates for office versus old guard centrist Democrats. But equally significant to understanding what is and isn’t going to work in the mid-term elections is something that has always been the case: that the voters, when given the opportunity to vote to tax the rich, generally do so with enthusiasm. And when the theme is folded into the campaigns of left candidates—as in Mamdani’s in New York—it helps, both because of what it promises to fund on behalf of working people, and because it puts meat on the bones of populist economic appeals.

An opening now exists in the Golden State, three months before the election, to craft a united tax the rich campaign with national implications. California, launchpad to neoliberal tax politics with Prop 13 in 1978, can redeem this stain by passing the first state level wealth tax in the nation’s modern history at the same time as making a more traditional top bracket income tax permanent. Passage of both will not erase California’s vast economic inequalities overnight. It will not even mean that the rich are paying their fair share of taxes—just a fairer share. What it can do is firmly underscore the immense importance in elections of acknowledging economic inequality and doing something about it.

What will be needed to win both Props 3 and 40, against the tsunami of fascist billionaire anti-tax spending, is a common progressive tax message and grassroots campaign, an approach that will more likely bring victory to both measures than separate campaigns that ignore their commonalities. This common messaging should contain at its center the idea that education and health care are rights, not privileges, and that passage of both measures would represent the wealthy finally paying a fairer share for that common good.

[[{“value”:”

By: Steve Dubb

This article was originally published by Shelterforce on August 12, 2026.

In the world of movement organizing, few groups in the past decade have undergone a faster demographic transition or greater growth than the Democratic Socialists of America, better known as DSA. Between 2015 and 2017, boosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, the average age of DSA members dropped from 64 to about 30, and membership tripled from 8,000 to about 25,000, according to Washington Post reporting. Growth has continued since then. As of December 2025, DSA reportedly had 92,912 members—more than 10 times the number from a decade earlier.

DSA is best known for its electoral organizing. Famously, last year, in New York City, the local DSA chapter played a major role in supporting the successful mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani. But DSA’s organizing extends far beyond elections.

A significant number of local DSA chapters have adopted tenant organizing as a focus of their work. In some communities, the local tenant union and the DSA tenant organizing working group are one and the same. More often, DSA housing organizers and tenant unions are close allies, though they operate independently of each other.

A motivating factor for DSA members is the opportunity to use organizing to make a material difference in people’s lives. This effort to connect with people’s material conditions has deep roots in socialist organizing. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not uncommon for democratic socialist activists to join labor unions as a way to build stronger bonds with the working class.

As a Jacobin article notes, these efforts echo today in institutions such as the union democracy group Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the publication Labor Notes. DSA similarly supports union organizing through its support for such institutions as the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. 

Tenant organizing has now become an important vector of DSA activity alongside labor. There is a history here as well. As John Altas, one of Shelterforce’s founders, explains, Shelterforce itself was founded in 1975 in an environment in which “the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the National Lawyers Guild [were] engaged in tenant organizing in several cities across the country.”

Shanti Singh, a member of DSA San Francisco who has long worked for Tenants Together, a statewide tenant coalition in California, says the 2008 housing crisis drove a resurgence of both tenant unions and DSA.

“Everyone needs housing. … It’s a very easy way to connect people’s everyday lives to larger economic systems,” says Nicole Zimmerman, a member of DSA’s Montgomery County branch in Maryland, adding that this makes it an obvious entry point for power building and political education. “When you’re talking to tenants or talking about landlords, there’s a very clear class divide there. … There’s power in numbers and [in] bringing people together to take on the landlords.”

Singh makes a similar point. “Rent eats first, right?”

Sebastian Fernandez Giraldo, a member of DSA’s North Carolina Triangle chapter, argues that tenant organizing is an easier way for DSA chapters to reach working people than labor organizing because it doesn’t require organizers to first get employed at the worksite to be organized.

Tenant organizing is also powerful, Fernandez Giraldo adds, because it “creates the opportunity for people [who might] otherwise [not] be in touch with each other to talk about their issues and to see how they have a lot in common.”

A National Commitment

The convergence of DSA and tenant organizing dates to 2016, when some local DSA chapters—including Asheville, North Carolina; Flagstaff, Arizona; the San Francisco Bay Area; Chicago; Des Moines; and New York City—launched local tenant organizing efforts. Nationally, DSA established its Housing Justice Commission in 2019.

Allison Geroi, a member of DSA’s Metro DC chapter and an organizer with its tenant organizing affiliate Stomp Out Slumlords, wrote in a description of DSA’s 2019 convention that there was support for tenant organizing but also a concern that a national resolution might lead the national body to push a favored approach and discourage local experimentation. This concern was addressed by an agreement that the “national housing group would function primarily as a space to share resources and develop a strategy for national targets, rather than a campaign-in-a-box that would be exported to locals.”

By the time this language was developed, support was strong, but other delays made it “clear that we would not reach the housing section of the agenda.” Supporters felt strongly enough that housing should be a DSA priority that they “actually ran up to the stage right as the convention was about to end and pushed that resolution through,” recalls Singh, who was among the delegates who did so.

In 2021, buoyed by an uptick in tenant organizing across the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the national DSA passed a resolution that established “housing justice, with a focus on tenant organizing, as a national priority campaign”; dedicated the equivalent of one full-time position of national staff time to support local tenant organizing efforts; and “establish[ed] a permanent and ongoing train-the-trainers education curriculum and regular intake of new organizers seeking to establish or strengthen tenant organizing programs in their chapters.”

In 2022, DSA implemented that resolution by launching a national tenant organizer training program, the Emergency Tenants Organizing Committee (ETOC), which “connected with over a dozen DSA chapters to share experiences and learn about their on-the-ground local organizing.” By 2023, it had trained 18 DSA chapters and mentored 14 new local tenant unions “from as far west as Honolulu to as far east as East Tampa.” Between 2023 and 2025, nearly 300 tenant organizers participated in ETOC trainings, and DSA members contributed to the formation of eight new tenant unions.

DSA’s support of tenant organizing was reinforced in 2023 through additional training, funding, and a commitment to translating organizing materials (especially into Spanish). In 2025, the national convention committed to undertaking a national mapping assessment of tenant organizing capacity and sought to link workplace and tenant struggles under a nationwide campaign with the theme of: “Organize your workplace, organize your building.”

Building Power, Community by Community

Although tenant organizing has become a high priority at the national level, DSA is a highly decentralized organization in which local chapters have considerable autonomy; not all of them have made tenant organizing a core part of their work. Those that have embraced tenant organizing have adopted varied approaches, depending on their local conditions.

Mark Firla, who actively participated in DSA and tenant organizing in Connecticut between 2020 and 2023, relates that he and some of his fellow DSA members realized that there were unutilized state and local tenant protections on the books that they could use to generate interest among tenants and help them flex their political muscles. For example, a state statute allows the formation of local fair rent commissions to examine and eliminate excessive rental charges, and New Haven, where Firla lives, has had one since 1984.

More than 70 percent of New Haven’s population are renters. This means the city has considerable, if latent, tenant political power. Firla says DSA worked to activate that power by “literally cold knocking doors and saying, ‘Hey, who’s your landlord? Do you have issues? Are they responsive?’” and then pushing the city to implement or enforce preexisting rules. This had concrete effects in terms of increasing local political power; it enabled the chapter to position itself to help lead a lobbying effort to pass a statewide right-to-counsel law in 2021. “One of the outcomes that the state has seen over the last three, four, five years is much more significant involvement [among] organized tenants,” says Firla, which, he adds, is likely why a lot more cities in the state now have fair rent commissions.

But from a DSA perspective, Firla says, the power-building opportunity that tenant organizing provides has largely been squandered in the state. “If you’ve got a town of 20,000 people … and you have 200 organized community members or tenants, and those folks are willing to go work for a politician or work against a politician … they’re going to have a profoundly outsized impact,” he says. Instead, however, according to Firla, tenant organizers and DSA largely parted ways, and he argues that the state’s tenant organizing looks more like traditional lobbying.

In Albany, New York, the relationship between DSA and the local tenant union has been much more symbiotic, according to Bebhinn Francis, who is both a Capital District DSA (CDDSA) member and lead tenant organizer at United Tenants of Albany (UTA).

UTA, which was founded more than 50 years ago, is clearly independent of DSA. It receives its tenant union training from the Tenant Union Federation, not from DSA’s ETOC program, says Francis.

But in terms of the actual work of forming and supporting tenant unions, UTA and CDDSA are highly integrated. Without DSA volunteers, UTA’s tenant union organizing program would effectively consist of only Francis. Francis goes so far as to say that without the work of CDDSA members, the local tenant movement “would not even exist.” 

With DSA volunteers, however, the situation is quite different. Working with CDDSA, Francis has helped lead eight large tenant union building campaigns, with the largest building housing 250 families. The people power from DSA greatly speeds operations: At one 150-unit building, Francis says, the team of door knockers from the CDDSA housing committee enabled organizers to amass 62 percent support for a tenant union in just three days.

“CDDSA and I work hands-on throughout this process,” says Francis. “CDDSA helps with the outreach, the sign-ins. … When a tenant is afraid to give testimony for whatever reason …  it’s a Capital District DSA member who reads that testimony on behalf of the tenant.”

In North Carolina, the level of integration between DSA and tenant organizers is less pronounced than in Albany but more pronounced than in Connecticut. Another difference from Connecticut is that North Carolina lacked tenant-friendly policies or political environments at the state or local level. Therefore, the approach of making existing policies work for tenants was not available.

Tenant and housing organizing in North Carolina, in short, often had to start from the ground up. Fernandez Giraldo joined the Raleigh branch of DSA’s North Carolina Triangle chapter in 2018 and became very active in Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. After that campaign fell short, he saw the 2020 eviction moratorium as an extraordinary opportunity to reach people where they were and engage them politically.

Fernandez Giraldo and a friend looked up addresses where evictions had been filed. “We figured out which ones were apartments,” he says, “and we would knock on every door in the apartment complex, and be like, ‘Hey, you’ve got these rights. There [are] also these resources that you can access.’” Slowly, he says, others within the DSA chapter joined in, eventually connecting with people in Chapel Hill and Durham to create the Triangle Tenant Union. The union includes DSA members, but it is institutionally autonomous.

Fernandez Giraldo notes that the Raleigh City Council is “very right-wing, very controlled by real estate.” Other DSA chapters in North Carolina faced similar situations with their city councils, so they independently decided to focus on building tenant-union infrastructure and later linking up to create a statewide network of city- or regional-level groups. In 2024, with support from the Cypress Fund, a local philanthropic group, these groups formed the North Carolina Tenants Union. As with the Triangle Tenant Union, the tenant groups intentionally remain politically autonomous, even though many of their organizers are also DSA members.

Perhaps ironically, given that the initial focus on tenant unions stemmed in part from local policy not looking promising, the new statewide tenant infrastructure is beginning to enable tenant organizing groups to advance policy at the local level. A major breakthrough occurred last fall in Durham, where, after years of tenant advocacy being stymied, the city council passed a resolution strengthening habitability rules. Tenant organizers are already mobilizing at the building level to remedy unsafe conditions.

In Washington, D.C., the pandemic fueled a DSA chapter’s tenant organizing. Metro DC DSA already had a directly affiliated tenant organizing project, Stomp Out Slumlords, but it grew sharply from 2020 to 2021, increasing from 13 to more than 40 organizers and from 7 to 20 sites.

In fall 2025, tenants organized by Stomp Out Slumlords won a $41 million judgment in a case brought by the tenant association and the District of Columbia against the former owners of Marbury Plaza apartments in Anacostia. In her order, Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams noted that mold remediation had been “required in 645 of 672 individual units and all 98 common areas.” 

Zimmerman says Montgomery County, Maryland, has focused first on achieving policy wins, notably the passage of a rent stabilization ordinance in 2023, while D.C. proper has focused more on building tenant unions to stand up to landlords directly. Zimmerman serves on a coordinating committee that seeks to bridge the two strategies by advising the D.C. group on policy issues and connecting folks in Montgomery County with DSA Stomp Out Slumlords tenant organizers in D.C. when Maryland tenants are seeking to organize a building.

In California regions with preexisting tenant organizing, such as the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the DSA chapters can directly channel electoral energy into housing, through initiatives such as right to counsel and taxing vacant apartment units. DSA San Francisco has enough political energy around housing to maintain two working groups, one on tenant organizing and one on social housing, says Singh.

In other, more traditionally conservative regions of the state, such as the Central Valley, Inland Empire, and Orange County, Singh says, tenant unions are a newer phenomenon, and DSA chapters are helping many of them get off the ground. “Our dream,” she says, “is that every city in California above 100,000 people should have a tenant union.”

Negotiating Tensions

Firla notes that DSA chapters getting into tenant organizing face the familiar tension between pursuing the kinds of wins achievable by professional tenant association staff and the leadership development at the heart of successful long-term organizing. While the D.C. tenant union is an official DSA affiliate, this is not the norm.

Formally, as stated in DSA’s 2025 housing justice resolution, the organization’s goal is “to create and strengthen tenant unions led democratically by rank-and-file tenants and not NGOs.” But maintaining a “rank-and-file” orientation can be easier said than done when funding often depends on philanthropy, with rank-and-file dues collections often secondary.

A 2023 report from Stomp Out Slumlords captures this tension: “Organizational institutionalization in the current context virtually requires becoming a grant-seeking nonprofit and all of the restrictions on political advocacy and militancy that entails. At the outer limit of our hopes in 2021 was a collective entity with a thousand dues-paying members, but even if that were achieved and dues were set at $100 a year (well beyond most tenants’ actual willingness to pay), this would only support a single staff member and no office space.”

According to Firla, in Connecticut, a lack of political education weakens the power that could come from tenant organizing. It’s “a really exciting opportunity,” he says, “if you can get folks to understand that same set of facts and have a broader understanding of who … we are as a community, and how we can exercise power that, in many cases, working people don’t understand they have.”

Francis also emphasizes the importance of political education in maintaining alignment between DSA volunteers and tenants in tenant union organizing. “We’re really, really clear in our political education when we’re communicating with our tenants about lines of division and what class is,” she says. “There’s basically the ruling class and the working class. And even though our paychecks might vary in what they look like … we are all closer to the homeless side of this equation than the big CEO who’s owning these buildings, sitting in their mansion … in New Jersey.”

Tenant Power Drives Electoral Wins

DSA’s electoral ambitions have benefited from its focus on tenant issues. This may be particularly evident in New York, where DSA members have secured high-ranking political positions and advanced housing policy. For instance, State Sen. Julia Salazar, the first New York DSA member elected to the New York State Senate (in 2018), has consistently run on housing issues. In April 2026, Salazar introduced the Tenant Power Act to create legal protections for tenant unions. In New York City, a call to freeze the rent for rent-stabilized apartments—realized in late June—helped propel Mamdani to victory.

In Washington, D.C., Aparna Raj, a DSA-backed tenant organizer, won the Democratic Party primary for city council in Ward 1, typically tantamount to winning the general election. Her campaign, notes The 51^st, centered on housing and “addressing the District’s affordability problem.” Janeese Lewis George, D.C.’s Democratic mayoral nominee (and hence the city’s presumptive next mayor), is also a democratic socialist and won with the endorsement and active support of Metro DC DSA.

In San Francisco, Singh notes, tenant and electoral organizing are often intertwined. “A lot of our electoral stuff has to do with housing,” she notes, including a ballot measure in 2026 that would raise $100 million for affordable housing in the city.

As Singh says, “You can’t have economic [justice] and leave real estate capital untouched.”

Steve Dubb is strategic initiatives editor at Shelterforce. Prior to Shelterforce, Steve worked as senior editor of economic justice at Nonprofit Quarterly. Before that, he worked at The Democracy Collaborative … and was also previously the executive director of NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation), a U.S. and Canadian association of housing cooperatives, focused on campus communities. Steve has authored and edited multiple books. Most recently, he co-edited (with Raymond Foxworth) Invisible No More: Voices from Native America (Island Press, 2023). Steve is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and actively volunteers in the area with multiple groups on economic justice work.

The post Can Tenant Organizing Build Political Power? The DSA Experience appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

This article first appeared in the spring issue of Washington Socialist. It has been lightly edited.

The imperial hegemons are on the march. As Israel and the United States forge ahead with their (paused, for now) futile war of choice in Iran, the ancient Persian country has retaliated asymmetrically by attacking nearby US bases and launching strikes on Gulf-area fossil fuel infrastructure. Combined with Iran’s conditional closure of the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of global oil and gas supplies transit — these events have sent oil and gas prices skyrocketing, portending a possible global recession.

The world is witnessing a world-historic oil shock that could acutely harm the global working class, especially the poorest among us. This is all due to Israel’s unhinged, insane desire to destabilize Iran, a country roughly four times the size of Iraq that boasts more than 90 million people and a military system built to withstand prolonged conflict. Western capitalists are clutching their pearls like we’ve never seen before. As Isabella Weber and Gregor Semieniuk write in The New Statesman, “one thing is certain: there is a blow coming for the global economy through the supply chain, no matter how soon the war ends,” characterized by “inflation, redistribution shocks, shortages, stagflation and global financial instability.” The authors elaborate how “the far right is the likely winner,” as such effects will by and large strengthen capital at workers’ expense.

While oil prices and widespread inflation represent two of the most palpable effects of this conflict, fragile supply chains mean another critical sector will suffer — food. This war is likely to cause almost immediate damage to global agriculture through increasing energy and fertilizer costs as Africa and Asia begin their planting seasons, potentially pushing tens of millions into acute hunger.

The illegal, unprovoked war on Iran has thrown several truths into stark relief in dramatic fashion. First, petrochemicals have become an existential weak link for capitalist civilization. Global society metabolizes fossil fuel as its lifeblood. Petrochemicals go into the production of everything from jet fuel and pharmaceuticals to semiconductors, medical imaging, and industrial manufacturing. Much of Europe could freeze without a steady supply of methane gas. Such over-reliance on fossil fuels leaves societies increasingly vulnerable to disruption; all this despite scientists’ years-long global consensus that we need “rapid and far-reaching transitions across all sectors and systems… to achieve deep and sustained emissions reductions and secure a liveable [sic] and sustainable future for all.”

The Gulf region and Strait of Hormuz represent a single point of failure for the production not just of oil and gas, but many other commodities such as chemicals — the region is exposing deep fragility in the global capitalist system. As Peter McKillop writes, “fossil fuels aren’t a shield against chaos. They are a conduit for it.” Fossil fuels’ unparalleled profitability make them lightning rods for conflict. 

Humans and their societies are utterly dependent on fossil fuels to grow, process, transport, and make food. To the world’s misfortune, 58% of synthetic fertilizer production depends on fossil fuels, namely methane (euphemistically misnamed “natural”) gas. As a result of the imperialist war in the Gulf, methane gas production has taken heavy blows, sending the prices for some fertilizers soaring 30–40%. Alarmingly, because the Strait of Hormuz facilitates 30% of global fertilizer trade, the war could endanger two key ingredients in synthetic fertilizer production, ammonia and urea. Reuters reports that “there are no strategic global stockpiles for fertilizers,” so if we lose them, many national food systems could soon be imperiled.

It is in the interests of no one but capitalists to have such a key food system input entirely reliant on fossil fuels, a volatile class of commodities at the utmost mercy of geopolitical power plays and dangerous price fluctuations. Socialists must organize against fossil capitalism by working to transform our toxic, industrial, and unjust food system into one that empowers workers and communities around the world to feed themselves while regenerating nature.

Mining the Soil, Poisoning Life

How is it that a regional war halfway across the world could have such a disproportionate impact on global food systems? Because of humanity’s reliance on industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture (IA) was the inevitable creation of capitalism, a social system reliant on unlimited physical expansion and a logic of violence against land and labor. The story of how IA arose in the United States is a complex yet vital one for understanding how we got here.

According to Johns Hopkins University, during the 20th century, agriculture “underwent greater change than it had since it was first adopted some 13,000 years ago.” The pillars of this massive change? Specialization, mechanization, chemical inputs, and consolidation and concentration of capital. Before IA gradually dismantled traditional food systems in the US, the typical American farm produced many different products, both animal and plant. But over the last 150 years, farms have become a kind of land factory, with outputs — such as grains, animals, vegetables — and inputs, such as feed, fertilizer, antibiotics, and pesticides. The new logic was actually the same logic capitalists had been using to run factories and exploit workers for decades: maximize efficiency and productivity while minimizing labor and costs. And this new system was inherently dependent on oil for energy and feedstock — it needed coal, oil, and gas to power itself, as well as to create fertilizers and pesticides. Diets changed as emboldened agribusinesses promoted and normalized fake butter substitutes and industrial seed oils to displace traditional fats like coconut oil, lard, suet, and butter.

With IA, the landscape changed dramatically, too. Whereas rural areas once boasted diverse “agro-ecosystems” mixing crop and animal production, pastures, and woodlands, we now had monocultures — large, single-crop farms specializing in just one product. These new monoculture-based economies of scale pressured farmers to consolidate into larger and larger operations, crowding out smaller, more biodiverse farms. Our food system further changed for the worse as capital consolidated animal slaughtering and processing operations, leading to a decline in once-abundant local slaughterhouses.

If farms became factories, farmworkers became factory workers — and they have traditionally been some of the most vulnerable workers in our society. Both the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, two of the US’s cornerstone labor laws, explicitly excluded farmworkers. This gave owners and capitalists the power to exploit the people who keep us alive by growing our food in all imaginable weather conditions, day in and day out. Even though extreme heat has been increasing since 2015, as of 2026, farmworkers still have no federal heat protections in place.

Monocultures were central to the so-called Green Revolution (GR), the neoliberal, 1960s project to address hunger by focusing on maximizing efficiency and crop yields through chemical fertilizers and mechanization. As agroecology expert Miguel Altieri details, the GR’s intensification of agriculture may have enhanced crop production — but it also “proved to be unsustainable as it damaged the environment, caused dramatic loss of biodiversity and associated traditional knowledge, favored wealthier farmers, and left many poor farmers deeper in debt.” 

In many ways, the world is still reeling from the effects of the Green Revolution. IA’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels continues to worsen climate change. Fertilizer use generates the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N₂O), and conventional pesticides and herbicides — like neonicotinoids and RoundUp — wreak havoc on human health and decimate bee populations. By organizing food production around monoculture, IA treats land as if it were barren and expendable, when the exact opposite is true. 

Even worse: in their current form, global food systems fail to meet the world’s dietary needs, with 1 billion people hungry and 2 billion people overweight. Widespread hunger and diabetes-obesity are two of the biggest manifestations of malnutrition, and both stem from the fact that food systems exist to maximize profits, not optimize human diets. From corporate consolidation to malnutrition and the chronic disease epidemic, the modern food system fails to provision human and planetary health, driving instead the deterioration of each.

The causes of hunger are complex, including poverty, conflict, and food loss. But there is no excuse for hunger on a planet that produces enough food for 10 billion people. Twenty percent of all food produced goes to waste, amounting to 1 billion meals per day; this equals $1 trillion in total losses to the global economy. 

Clearly, nothing about the industrial food system is sustainable or desirable. By prioritizing size and efficiency over quality and nutrition per acre, modern farms crank out nutrient-poor foods laden with toxins that harm human health and the environment. Consolidation incentivizes the cheapening of food quality at everyone’s expense. By contrast, creating a food system within planetary boundaries to reverse chronic disease and ecosystem destruction would mean relocalizing food production, making it economical, organic, biodiverse, and as free of toxic inputs as possible. Strong state support will be vital to such food systems transformation toward sustainability and agroecology. Effectively transitioning our food systems away from fossil fuels will harden them against oil price shocks, as well as energy and fertilizer shortages we are very likely to witness as a result of the Iranian war. This is what socialists must organize for — for the good of our farms and the life-support ecosystems that keep earth habitable for us.

A Just Transition Must Center Food Systems Transformation

The war in Iran is exposing the world’s reliance on the fossil fuels destroying our life-support ecosystems — and making clear the urgent need for a just transition to a green economy. What ecosocialists and others on the Left must contend with is that equitably transitioning the food system is just as urgent as quickly phasing out the fossil fuel industry. They go hand in hand. If we do the latter without the former, we are setting up the food system — and society itself — for collapse as extreme weather intensifies.

Remaking our food systems around worker and community control must be core to our project of realizing a socialist society. It is also vital to our work of saving the life-support ecosystems, and earth systems, that our species depends on to survive. Socialists may be unaware that the most important group of climate scientists on Earth, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that land-based solutions — including agriculture, forestry, and ecosystem management, of which agriculture is a key part — “can not only provide large-scale reductions of emissions but can also remove and store CO₂ at scale,” including benefits to biodiversity and ecosystems. Soil is the largest land-based system that stores carbon — and the most powerful way to enhance soil carbon storage is through agroecology. Agroecology is the holistic, integrated, and Indigenous-informed science of designing and maintaining sustainable food systems. It’s about food production with nature, rather than against it. Current evidence suggests that fully implemented sustainable agriculture could help offset 10–15% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

With the Iran war threatening an energy crisis worse than what we saw during COVID-19, and one based on supply rather than demand disruption, the Left has an opportunity to elevate sustainable food systems to their just priority — not as a strategically optional issue, but rather a central tenet of our movement. A survival imperative. (Indeed, the crisis may already be accelerating the global transition to renewables and electrification. Sam Butler-Sloss of the global energy think tank Ember recently opined, “[high] fossil prices drive switching, making already cheap electrotech even more competitive… With electrotech, nations now have the tools to increasingly eliminate imported fuels altogether.”)

We urgently need to bring about a just transition to create a global food system based on food sovereignty and justice, not biopiracy and poor working conditions for farmworkers; biodiversity, not monoculture; one based on climate resilient, small- and medium-scale farming, not industrial farms. The new food system must use integrated pest management and organic principles to maximize human and planetary health, instead of applying toxic pesticides that cause Parkinson’s Disease, cancer, and other maladies. Instead of a highly unequal, corporate-controlled food system dependent on toxic fossil fuel-based inputs, we must seize the means of food production to create a liberatory food system for all. 

Justly transforming the world’s food system would empower global South countries with national sovereignty, including food sovereignty, so they could chart their own developmental course and prioritize feeding their populations first. But while we may aspire to global transformation, we must not neglect our responsibility to change local conditions stateside.

Where the Left Should Go From Here

Internal dynamics on the Left reflect the broader societal tendency to take food systems and food workers for granted. Even on the climate Left, of which I am a part, we have a lamentable tendency to deprioritize — or even dismiss altogether — food systems and rural communities. Yet without them, we couldn’t do socialism. We would starve.

Granted, community gardens are modestly popular among Democratic Socialists of America members and in some DSA chapters. However, while useful for mutual aid and community building, they are an incomplete approach to food systems organizing without rural-urban solidarity work like farmworker organizing. Part of the deprioritization I mention above is understandable; the US population, and thus socialist and leftist capacity, is concentrated in urban areas. Socialists in DSA focus on local-level work in their own or adjacent communities by default — which makes sense — and consequently spend most of their time organizing in cities and neighborhoods. But have we been neglecting rural-urban solidarity work to the detriment of the movement? I believe so.

I am not the first person on the Left to acknowledge this. I strongly agree with AJ Kohler, who writes, “…in order to form a movement that can beat the capitalist class, socialists and DSA must develop a dedicated rural organizing strategy… Census data indicates that about 20% of the entire population lives in ‘rural’ areas…” 

At least some socialists have been concerned about this for some time. Several years ago, a Rural, Suburban, and Small City DSA caucus formed to advocate for priorities that benefited smaller chapters at the 2019 DSA National Convention in Atlanta. To my knowledge, that caucus has since dissolved — but the sentiments behind it have not, because DSA has many rural chapters. Ongoing advocacy has resulted in promising developments for smaller and rural chapters. Dues-sharing, wherein chapters receive a cut of the dues payments their members make, has facilitated fairer resourcing for DSA’s urban and rural chapters alike. Recently, the DSA National Political Committee passed a resolution to increase dues shares to chapters significantly through DSA’s 2027 fiscal year, a promising move to create even more equity across less resourced chapters.

For my chapter, Metro DC DSA, a strong first step for farmworker organizing would be to get the lay of the land by reaching out to organizations such as the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Virginia Farmworker Advocacy Network, Farmworker Justice, and the legendary United Farm Workers union. These organizations may be well-positioned to consult us on how and where to connect with local farmworkers, in addition to understanding the extent of unionization in local agriculture. From there, DSA members could connect directly with farmworkers in the DMV, learn about their issues and concerns, and solicit ways or potential campaigns for advancing their causes. 

We can also build stronger urban-rural relationships within DSA. Several years ago, I organized a Regional Solidarity Conference in Northern California to build connections between urban and rural chapters. At the time, I was active in DSA’s East Bay chapter, and Fresno DSA was kind enough to host the conference. The concept was simple: each chapter gave a presentation on its activities, strengths, challenges, and help needed. We were treated to a tour of Fresno, a city in the heart of California’s vast, heavily rural, and agricultural Central Valley — and a city that coastal California routinely dismisses. It was very rewarding to learn from our rural comrades, dance cumbia, and socialize with them. I’m proud to say that that effort led to the strengthening of ties among Central Valley chapters. This is just one example of what is possible when urban chapters intentionally set out to foster ties with their smaller, more rural counterparts.

The Democratic Socialists of America has matured and grown tremendously in the past seven years, through several fraught national leadership cohorts and dramatic political crises. Yet we have a long way to go to strengthen rural-urban solidarity on the one hand, and build an effective campaign for sustainable food systems on the other. Socialists should demand a climate-resilient, worker-controlled, planned, and decentralized food system that is not reliant on single points of failure. We should organize for a food system whose core principles are food sovereignty, carbon negativity, ecological regeneration, and food justice. Without food, the global working class would starve, and societies everywhere would collapse in short order. 

We should no longer take food system workers and the complex ecosystems that allow food to happen for granted. Through farmworker organizing, forging urban-rural solidarity, and advocating for sustainable agriculture policy, we can help evolve the food system from one based on waging war against nature to a system based on food sovereignty, economic justice, climate resilience, and healing the “metabolic rift.” The socialist movement’s success depends on it.

Cape Coral, Florida. Lincoln, Nebraska. Toledo, Ohio. Decatur, Georgia. Minneapolis, Minnesota. These are just a handful of the municipalities in which vigilantes have taken action to cut down, unplug, set fire to, or otherwise disable the automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras installed by Flock along roadsides across the US.

The spontaneous vandalism of Flock cameras serves as anecdotal evidence of the widespread disdain for this fast-growing network of AI-enabled surveillance technology. But, what exactly do these cameras do?

Flock cameras are marketed to local governments as a tool for public safety. But, what they really do is create a powerful surveillance network capable of recording where and when vehicles travel, with the goal being to build detailed records of people’s movements. That raises serious questions about the ability of law enforcement to track eople without meaningful oversight. It’s also left communities across the country to grapple with the rapid expansion of the technology, and to debate how best to fight back.

Why Should Floridians Care About Flock Cameras?

The Guardian reports that Flock cameras “scan license plates billions of times each month in about 6,000 communities in nearly every state in the US.” As Zach S., a PDSA member and one of the organizers helping launch our DeFlock St. Pete campaign explains:

“These cameras scan the license plate of every passing car and feed this data into a database that can be used by law enforcement to track people’s locations without requiring a search warrant. They also use AI features to record other identifying features of cars like make, model, color, racks, etc. Flock data is also typically shared with thousands of other law enforcement agencies across the country through broad data sharing agreements.

St. Pete started a pilot program in 2022 with 25 cameras, then extended this in 2024 with a $730,000, five-year contract for 50 cameras. This agreement was approved by city council on the consent agenda without any discussion or public input. Due to the limited transparency of St. Pete PD and difficulties acquiring public records, it is very hard to see how Flock is actually being used in the city or what sort of data sharing agreements are in place.”

Did these mass surveillance cameras sprout with any meaningful democratic input from the people being surveilled? Of course not.

Courts have long recognized that certain forms of location tracking require law enforcement to obtain a warrant. For example, courts have ruled that police generally cannot obtain cell phone location data or use GPS trackers to monitor someone’s movements without meeting constitutional requirements.

Flock cameras raise concerns because they can enable a similar form of location tracking without any safeguards. By recording license plates and the locations and times at which vehicles are observed, networks of ALPR cameras can be used to reconstruct where someone has traveled and when.

Anyone who drives through a neighborhood with a Flock camera can have their movements recorded. This isn’t just a civil liberties issue in the abstract; it carries frighteningly real and practical ramifications. Earlier this month, right here in the Tampa Bay area, Haines City Police officer Christopher Goodson was arrested for “misusing” a Flock camera database to stalk his former spouse. As Fox 13 reports, Goodson “logged 717 unauthorized inquiries into his estranged wife’s vehicle between September 2024 and June 2026.”

“Our Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect us from unreasonable search,” Zach added. “Flock is subverting these protections and allows law enforcement to track anyone they want without a warrant. Since the courts are not protecting our Fourth Amendment right, we must take action at the local level to get rid of these cameras so they can not be abused. Until we do so, anyone could be the victim of the[se] abuses.”

Flock Cameras are a Tool of Class & Racial Violence

It shouldn’t go unremarked upon that, wherever these cameras are installed, they can — and will — be used as a tool of racialized class warfare by the ruling class against working people.

“[Flock cameras] are being used to target immigrants, women accessing reproductive healthcare, and political dissidents,” Zach said. “Despite Flock’s claims that ICE is not accessing their data, independent reporting has found multiple times that this is not true. In Texas, a woman was tracked using Flock data for getting an abortion. There are many cases of law enforcement tracking protesters using Flock data.”

The data sharing agreement is of particular concern when we remember the St. Petersburg Police Department still has a 287(g) agreement in place with ICE. This agreement effectively deputizes local officers to perform federal immigration enforcement functions, including issuing immigration detainers to hold individuals for ICE, as well as identifying, interrogating, and processing suspected non-citizens.

Mayor Ken Welch and Police Chief Anthony Holloway have consistently claimed that the city’s 287(g) is just a formality and that local officers are not actively collaborating with ICE. But, where is our assurance that ICE is not being given access to data from the city’s dozens of Flock cameras? Every ALPR stands as an inherent threat to immigrant communities.

Existing data on real-world use of Flock cameras backs this up. The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism found that law enforcement conducted “nearly 3,000 searches related to immigration enforcement on Virginia’s Flock Safety network” in just a single 12-month period.

The threat is not limited to immigrant communities. An analysis by Christopher Newport University found that majority-Black neighborhoods had four times as many Flock cameras installed compared to majority-white areas. Additional data from Oak Park, Illinois, revealed that 84% of drivers stopped in incidents tied to Flock data were Black, even though Black residents made up only 19% of the local population.

All this shows that Flock cameras are not merely an issue of individual privacy. They are woven into the struggles for racial justice, health justice, international solidarity, and more. This is why, here in St. Petersburg, we’re organizing against the use of Flock cameras and demanding that our city put an end to its contract with the company through our new DeFlock St. Pete campaign.

What are We Asking the City to do?

Our demand is straightforward: remove the cameras. Cancel the city’s contract with Flock and do not replace it with another ALPR vendor.

Dozens of cities and counties around the country have taken action to restrict or end their relationships with Flock. We believe St. Petersburg should join them.

We understand that, in theory, there could be practical applications of ALPR technology. But, the broader question is whether we want to allow a system in which the government can continuously collect information about where ordinary people travel without any meaningful oversight or accountability. This is critical; if we fail to reject this level of surveillance overreach now, then it will be almost impossible to undo later.

Our message to St. Pete city leaders: public safety and civil liberties are not mutually exclusive. We can protect our communities without creating infrastructure that can be used to surveil, over-police, terrorize, and abuse them.

How Can You Get Involved?

This campaign is just getting started, and building a successful movement will require educating and organizing people throughout our community.

We’re planning presentations to local organizations, canvassing, social media outreach, and other public education efforts. We’ll also be reaching out to elected officials and candidates in St. Petersburg to discuss our concerns surrounding Flock cameras and ask where they stand on the issue.

The interest from the community is there. The DeFlock St. Pete campaign kickoff event hosted at the Barack Obama Main Library on August 15th saw an overwhelming turnout; so much so, in fact, that more than two dozen people unfortunately had to be turned away due to capacity issues at the library. This shows that concerns about surveillance extend well beyond our organization, and plenty of ordinary Pinellas County residents are already onboard to #DeFlockStPete!

Organizers have set up dedicated communication channels to help coordinate the campaign. Pinellas DSA members who want to get more involved in the campaign are welcome to join! More information will be available through Discord and, where appropriate, at meetings of our Socialists in Office Working Group.

Flock cameras are already here. The question we now face is: do we allow an expansive surveillance infrastructure to become a permanent part of our community? Or, do we organize now to stop it?

Get involved, talk to your neighbors, and help us demand a St. Petersburg where privacy and civil liberties are protected for everyone! Together, we will DeFlock St. Pete!

Gender is a historical process. It is not the same thing from century to century, decade to decade, or even moment to moment. At one point, archers used high heels to get an advantage on the battlefield, leggings were worn by royalty, pink used to be seen as a ‘guys’ color because it was calm and collected, they used to think it was manly to put rainbows on trucks, and makeup used to be for everyone, before in the 20^th century the fashion industry made these things marketed to women.

Historical performances of gender are not the same throughout time and culture – in other words they are not essential to a person, they are something which can be undermined, and change throughout a person’s life. No person is essentially any gender, because gender is a performance. That does not mean that people do not express themselves as one gender or another, or cannot continue to do so, it means that gender is so variable that it cannot be boiled down to a binary. The reason that it’s so valuable for reactionaries to focus on issues such as binary gender, and create such an essentialist paradigm for gender, is because the ruling class want to use it as an scapegoat to advance the agenda of brainwashing people with transphobia, so that they can uphold an American exceptionalist facade. The goal is to cover over all the genocide, the patriarchy, and the white supremacy, which is the United Snakes of Amerika.

Every person is a multiplicity of gender expressions, and this is “micro transsexuality” that Deleuze and Guattari talk about in “Anti-Oedipus.” Gender expression and gender identity are also separated, and have no necessary relation to each other. That means that if you identify as a man, you could behave in mostly what your era deems feminine, and this has no relation to what a person could identify as. The identity and the expression are chosen, not innate, and they can be arbitrarily undermined by any variable expression, which occurs in thousands, if not millions, or more, at every second.

Gender as a historical process

What we think of as gender changes from moment to moment. As a historical process, gender is part of change, and flux, as opposed to a constant fixed thing in the past like Heidegger’s notion of being. Gender might be thought of as coterminous, happening with and at the same time as time itself. Gender and time can be thought of contrasted to queerness as a rupture with the continuum of time. Gender, through history, has been a process of capture into a submissive role in Europe, through the middle ages when women were vilified and seen as witches. Witches were actually women that had set up their own crafts and shops according to Butch Lee in “Military Strategy for Women and Children.’ Women, likewise, according to Abdullah Ocalan were subjugated by religious leaders and strong men in ancient Mesopotamia, which formed into a Christianity which made Eve the cause of the fall of man.

Gender, however, in the West was a less hierarchical process. There was a matriarchy at one point for the Pueblos in the Southwest in Mesa Verde according to “A Pueblo Social History” by John Ware, which shows that the Pueblo society was predominantly matrilocal, and matrilineal, meaning the women would own the fields and the house, and the men would take care of different tasks. In the Hopewell there was a decentralized society with weakly institutionalized roles according to Christopher Carr’s “Gathering Hopewell,” which had gender variation on the record in the Shaman at the late Woodland period. There were likewise, many accounts of gender variation which were called “berdaches,” from Spanish colonizers which Roscoe describes in his monograph “Changing Ones.” People are multiple genders as well in the Arctic, and the account “The Many Faces of Gender” show people sometimes even becoming another gender to escape a ghost. But all of these practices, threatened by culture and time; things such as television show traditional western roles, which enculturate people into specific genders. Such as the continual creation of films that involve a man and a woman in a relationship, without any alternatively gendered characters. If there is a queer character, they may be a punchline, or a stereotypically sassy character. Sometimes movies and TV, unless they are shows like “Hazbin Hotel,” or “Stephen Universe,” don’t feature any queer characters. Some would argue Spongebob is a queer character, due to his lack of attention to what is considered manly, but queerness is never really explored very deeply in the original seasons of Spongebob.

Even the notion of gender as tied up with biology is an outdated assumption. Biology is variable, and has people who have chromosomes that don’t match their gender assigned at birth, that may make someone have a body that does not match what typically is expected for certain bodies. This means people can be intersex, or they can have an assigned male or assigned female body that has parts that don’t match up to just xx or xy. This is aside from the fact that performances vary throughout the ages. In the 80s people like Prince, and Boy George were bending gender expression, and even in the 60s and 70s David Bowie was crossdressing and expressing himself in ways that were not usual for the assigned male at birth person at that time. There was also glam rock such as the New York Dolls, who work makeup and dresses as an expression of queer rebellion, when most of the genre was actually supposed to be coded as cisgendered and heterosexual. You could construct a whole wardrobe of basically what is considered a feminine outfit, constructed through clothing through history that is considered “for men.” So what does that mean?

It means that there is no reason to say that one item of clothing is “for” one group, and “not for” another. Gender expression is a fungible signifier, meaning it is an expression that can be changed through time.

Queerness as escape

If fixed, binary gender, is what Max Stirner would call a “fixed idea,” then queerness is a rupture with the temporal flow of gender, into a multiplicity of expressions. Queerness is not in time the same way that gender is, queerness is a temporal instant in which change occurs, and the word queer also has the implication of unusual. Something which is unusual strikes you as uncanny, something which is familiar, and yet unfamiliar. Why do homophobic, transphobic, conservative people, usually online, react so negatively when confronted with the notion of queerness, seeing it, thinking about it, thinking it may apply to them? It’s because gender requires upholding an image when it is a fixed idea that is obeyed dogmatically, a fixed idea that makes people behave in a negative manner when what Lacan calls “the imago,” (Ecrit) is threatened, meaning the image of yourself. The transphobic person actually needs the trans person to uphold their imago, in the sense that without the trans person the insecurity would have nothing to uphold itself by saying what it is not. Bigoted cisgender, meaning gender assigned at birth identity, is parasitic on trans people, in that it needs them as a scapegoat to uphold its own rigid gender roles, but it also is not a symbiosis, but a parasitic relationship, because the bigot seeks to eliminate the trans person, either in expression or in life.

Queerness is also a multiplicity of impulses beneath consciousness. It’s change itself, difference, multiplicity. Gender identity itself is part of an assemblage of social machines. Clothing companies, marketing techniques, family influence, friend circles, they all influence us, but we can choose to cut against the flow of time and make our own choices as to what we want our expression to be. There is no qualitative difference in abolishing essentialist notions of gender, while at the same time expressing yourself however you want. Abolishing gender essentialism is a matter of hierarchy, in a way, as even difference, and what Deleuze calls the rhizome can have hierarchy. There is hierarchy mixed in with everything we do, but there is also good and bad hierarchy. Gender essentialism is a micro fascism, meaning it is an intensity of restriction forcing people out of their own desiring machines. One’s own desiring machines are one’s own impulses, which are directed or repelled towards various social forces. Social machines interact with desiring machines as one and the same process of arrangement, otherwise known as assemblage. Micro fascism is an intensity of bad hierarchy, like queerphobia, Islamophobia, racism, etc. based on essentialist thinking. Desiring machines are the impulses, which themselves are infinitely multiple, and cut against against the flow of the fixed ideas of gender in time and consciousness. It is because of queerness that gender changes through time. Plato had what he calls the instant, which he calls a queer thing in the Parmenides.

Identity and expression disconnected

We’ve talked about how gender identity is a conscious phenomena, and queerness is a rupture with conscious identity, but further complicating the gender picture is the way that your identity can be one thing, but your expression could be an entirely different cultural expectation. David Hume had what is called the “is/ought” divide, but this is not because is and ought are separate. Facts and values can be looked at the same way as the identity and the expression. In the same way that facts and values are connected, gender and identity are connected. If you have a fact in one corner, it does not necessitate that there will be a corresponding value in another corner. For instance, if you’re a Catholic, that doesn’t mean that you won’t be a trans person. You could hold the facts of the Catholic Church, and still feel that you are trans, or even be trans and identify as a Republican. A great example of the disconnect between gender and identity is what is called a “femboy.” Femboys dress in feminine attire, deemed feminine by culture and the fashion industry. They can identify as a man, but their expression has nothing to do with their manliness sometimes. Everyone is a mixture of different expressions, so they may still have some expressions that are one expression or another.

But this is another thing that should be avoided even, the idea that we have “male or female enculturation.” This is an argument that Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF) use to try to say that if you were assigned male at birth you still act like a man because you have been taught to behave as a man. That assumes that all men are treated equal, or that all men identify with the label of man, and that this label of man would correspond with an identity and expression that is infinitely man, to the infinite exclusion of the woman. That is not true, just like facts and values, gender identity and gender expression are infinitely mixed. There’s an array of identities which we pass through through life, infinite of them which are related to all the past events that have happened before. All the different time periods and their genders have meaning that expresses itself in a warped, and reconfigured way in the assemblage of each generation’s machines.

The eternal return and gender abolition

Abolishing essentialist notions of gender is a societal wide task, and all the expressions that have ever happened recur through trends that take what happened in the past and make it new again. Time is cyclical, and while the heat death of the universe may still occur, in the representational, scientific sense of time, there is always an infinite recurrence of everything that has happened, happening again in the eternal return. Queerness is not inside or outside of our heads, it is in a singularity as Deleuze would say in Difference and Repetition. The singularity means that all things are happening in a virtual field of identities and arrays of past expression re-occurring through the instant, which is the moment of change in which everything happens.

Gender is part of a colonial capture into an expression where infinitely variable expressions are attempted to segmented lines into a conveyor belt. Queerness is not necessarily a good, or bad thing, it is outside of conscious expressions and responsible for them all. Throughout time, the ways that people have expressed their gender has seen different levels of acceptance. The goal is not to be detached from all time, and try to exist in a fortress of a-temporality. We all have consciousness, unless we are in a coma or dead, that is inescapable. We will always have hierarchical thoughts mixed in with our rhizomatic, and variable lines of flight which evade capture into dominant structures of gender hegemony. But there is always the threat that if we are not careful about avoiding restructuring a new gender, instead of micro transsexuality, the full array of the expressions of the impulses, then we risk reinstituting forms of control over people’s gender again.

Sources:

“Baedan: A Journal of Queer Heresy.” Contagion Press, 2014. 

Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, editors. *Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction*. Springer, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles. *Difference and Repetition*. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. *Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Frink, Lisa, Rita Shepard, and Gregory Reinhardt, editors. *Many Faces of Gender: Roles and Relationships through Time in Indigenous Northern Communities*. University Press of Colorado, 2002.

Heidegger, Martin. *Being and Time*. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt, SUNY Press, 2010.

Hume, David. *An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding*. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Lacan, Jacques. *Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English*. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton, 2006.

Lee, Butch. *Military Strategy for Women and Children*. Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2011.

Öcalan, Abdullah. *Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution*. International Initiative Edition, 2013.

Plato. Parmenides. Translated by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, Hackett Publishing Company, 1996.

Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Edited by David Leopold, translated by Steven T. Byington, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Ware, John. A Pueblo Social History: Kinship, Sodality, and Community in the Northern Southwest. University of Arizona Press, 2014.

The post Abolishing Gender Essentialism appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

---

This Week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it is abandoning its intention to build a detention facility in a warehouse on Salt Lake City’s west side. This partial victory belongs not to politicians grandstanding in the courts but to the tireless mass organizing of Salt Lakers and working people nationwide. From the activists who showed up week after week to protest at the site of the planned concentration camp, to the citizens who put pressure on elected officials to get creative when opposing this facility, to the workers who refused to build DHS’s brutal machinery.

While we are under no illusions that the abandonment of one cog in the mass deportation machine will end ICE terror, we nevertheless celebrate this as a win and commit ourselves to continuing the fight. We must work to abolish ICE and DHS altogether. This starts by forcing cities like Riverton to cut their 287(g) contracts, the current campaign by our Immigrant Solidarity Working Group. If you, like us, believe that the only way to grind the gears of deportation to a halt is to build working class power, we invite you to join Salt Lake DSA and organize with us.

Contact: SLDSA Steering Committee | steering@saltlakedsa.org

The post SLDSA Statement on DHS Cancelling ICE Warehouse Plans first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

Bosses will argue that full-time employees are simply contractors to cut benefits and save money. Here's how to tell if you're misclassified.

The post How to know if you’re misclassified appeared first on EWOC.