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.

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

“All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent) it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor.” – Marx

What does it mean when the socialist movement decries the exploitation of the working class? Defenders of the free market tell us that wage labor is a voluntary exchange of mutual benefit for employer and employee, and allows workers to stay or leave their jobs as they please in search of better pay or working conditions. But for workers, the free market also means exposure to market fluctuations that often result in the loss of wages, hours, or the job itself.

In a capitalist economic system, all workers are exploited. We are forced to sell our labor to access the means of life, turning to the market to purchase food, housing, healthcare, and the other necessities of modern life. There is no free real estate available to those who desire to grow all their own food, nor ready access to machines able to produce all the materials of daily comfort.

Workers create all value. Capitalists, compelled to expand their wealth, invest capital to purchase raw materials and pay wages. In the process of production, workers turn raw materials into finished goods by applying their labor. These finished goods are sold on the market as commodities. Outside of manufacturing, many modern professions create value in less tangible ways. For example, retail employees provide value to the store they work in by operating cash registers, cleaning, and stocking shelves. This added value, in the form of profit, accumulates to the capitalist.

To maximize his profit, the capitalist pays workers as little as possible, and maximizes the use of their labor-power by increasing the hours or intensity of their labor. The worker’s need to recover energy for the next shift by getting some rest presents a natural limit to their exploitation. Further limitations, such as the eight-hour workday, weekends, and the minimum wage, were only won through struggle.

The value added by workers far outpaces their wages. For example, if a worker takes two hours to reproduce the value equal to their wages for an entire eight-hour shift, the remaining six hours solely benefit the capitalist. These six hours are alienated from the worker, who has no determination over how this surplus-value is spent. The enriched capitalist, with newfound value at his disposal, has produced none of it.

The ratio of surplus-value to remunerated labor defines the rate of exploitation. “The rate of surplus-value depends . . . on the degree of exploitation of labor-power,” says Marx. The higher the rate of exploitation, the more profit that accrues to the capitalist. In the example above, the capitalist has exploited the worker’s labor-power at a rate of 300% (6 hours:2 hours). Despite any advancements in worker’s rights, the deviation between productivity and wages has expanded year over year, demonstrating an increasing rate of exploitation for the working class. Workers continue to be paid at subsistence rates while producing ever more wealth for capitalists.

Labor exploitation is not the only form of oppression under capitalism. Capitalists invest in suppressing working-class power by hiring strikebreakers, lobbying politicians, and proselytizing for capitalism. Workers who attempt to organize a force that challenges their rule by capital are often cut down by its bullets. Capital is not hesitant to use violent coercion once economic coercion has failed.

The rate of exploitation varies along racialized lines. Race is a tool exploited by the capitalist class to divide workers and to excuse the hyper-exploitation of minorities. Other groups, including women, children, individuals with disabilities, and prisoners, also experience increased exploitation.

Despite the exploitation and violence upholding their positions, capitalists may argue they have earned their profit as a reward for the risk of investment. But where did the wealth they invest originate? Their inheritance represents centuries of exploitation accumulated in generational wealth. Much of their capital has its origin in the colonial theft of land and resources, ongoing today. The self-made businessman is a myth. 

Capitalists further exploit us as consumers. Most of the wages taken home by workers go right back to the capitalist class in the form of rent, gas, utilities, and other expenses. Monopolized corporations charge whatever they can get away with for products, while wage increases continue to fall behind inflated prices. 

In its never-ending drive for expansion, capitalism seeks the maximization of profit over all other incentives. Capitalism will always trend toward an increase in the rate of exploitation. 

Any real freedoms experienced by workers have been won through struggle. Exploitation will only cease when workers democratically control our own labor; when we work not for the private accumulation of profit, but for the collective benefit of the whole of society. 

The post E is for “Exploitation” first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

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!

Enjoy your August National Political Committee (NPC) newsletter! Our NPC is an elected 27-person body (including both YDSA Co-Chairs) which functions as the board of directors of DSA. This month, check out our Socialist Summit roundup, sign up for trainings, join our housing justice book club, and more!

And to make sure you get our newsletters in your inbox, sign up here! Each one features action alerts, upcoming events, political education, and more.

• From the National Political Committee — Taking Big Swings
• August Growth and Development Trainings — and Sign Up for September Leadership Intensive Saturday 9/12–Sunday 9/13
• National Political Education Commission Application Deadline Extended to Saturday 8/29
• RSVP for Housing Justice Commission Abolish Rent Book Club Beginning Wednesday 9/16!
• Work for DSA — Application Deadlines Begin Sunday 8/30
• Don’t Miss Out on Democratic Left! Sign up for Our Monthly Newsletter
• Welcome New DSA Organizing Committees

From the National Political Committee — Taking Big Swings

DSA’s hot socialist summer continues a powerful winning streak! Over the past month, Metro Detroit DSA helped score another big congressional primary win with Donavan McKinney ousting the millionaire incumbent Shri Thanedar, on track to become DSA’s 7th member in Congress by the end of this year — bringing Black representation back to the largest majority Black city in the country, and making Detroit the first U.S. city to be fully represented by democratic socialists in Congress, along with reelecting Rep. Rashida Tlaib. At the ballot box across the country, state and local candidates from Michigan, Minnesota, Connecticut, Vermont, and Washington, joined our spring victories from Oregon to Arizona to Georgia to New York.

Even when we don’t reach our goal the first time, DSA members are taking big swings that change conversations and teach us valuable organizing lessons to keep leveling up our power. As a first time candidate in south Florida, Oliver Larkin got over a third of the vote in his bid for Congress. That’s because Broward DSA, along with comrades from Miami, Orlando, Tampa, Pinellas, and across the country, knocked on doors, phonebanked, and more to reach voters with Oliver’s message on affordability, working class democracy, and shifting resources from militarism to public goods for all. Just a year ago, it would have been unheard of for a democratic socialist to do as well as he did in south Florida, and especially in Miami. In Wisconsin, DSA chapters across the state threw down for Francesca Hong’s campaign for governor, and came within 4,000 votes of winning the primary in a major swing state — demonstrating a serious base to revive and expand on the past century’s legacy of Milwaukee sewer socialism today.

DSA has even more serious work going on to build our power all over the place:

• DSA chapters and organizing committees are fighting water-hogging data centers across the country! As just one example, Central Mississippi DSA and their community organizing partners helped push the Jackson City Council to pass a moratorium on data centers. They join chapters from Seattle to Corpus Christi to New York in organizing to protect our communities from corporate polluters!
• DSA members are organizing for migrant rights against ICE and taking on the proliferation of Flock surveillance cameras that undermine our civil liberties, from Cleveland to Houston to Los Angeles.
• In San Francisco, DSA members are advancing a ballot measure for affordable housing. The measure would dedicate city taxes on properties worth over $10 million to housing purposes.
• In Wilmington, North Carolina, DSA members built and placed over 30 bus stop benches over the past year as a mutual aid project to improve city transit. The benches were recently ordered removed, prompting an outcry that raises expectations about the quality of public transit we all deserve!
• DSA membership continues to grow, with more than 120,000 members and almost 200 chapters nationwide!

Earlier this month, we were grateful to meet so many members in Chicago at our DSA Socialist Summit. For the first time in many years, hundreds of members from across the country came together in an off-year between our national conventions  to learn new skills and share lessons from their chapter work. The Summit brought us together learn how we can organize to win a better world by strengthening labor unions, abolishing ICE, ending the genocide in Gaza and freeing Palestine, transferring power and wealth from the elites to the working class, and electing socialists in droves! Mainstream media watched closely, trying to read the tea leaves about what our members are cooking up next to take on the political establishment. Check out some of the recent coverage from MS NOW, CNN, the New York Times and NYT video, and TIME magazine! And what they’re finding is the kind of vibrant, dynamic member-led organization that is practicing democracy in a way the American political system hasn’t seen in our lifetimes. We finished off the summit with an introduction and rally for our updated Workers Deserve More program — check it out here!

Meanwhile, members of Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), our youth and student section, voted on proposals and elected their leadership for the next year at the annual Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) Convention. If you’re a high school or college student, and you want to start a YDSA chapter at your campus this fall, sign up for the YDSA Fall Drive today!

As we move into fall and the temperature drops, we have plenty of opportunities for cool socialist organizing! You can join us in person at the Socialism 2026 Conference in Chicago this Labor Day weekend to hear Hasan Piker and DSA organizers on our Workers Deserve More program, labor organizing, socialist history, and more. 

And on Thursday 9/10 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT, join us online for End Times Fascism: A DSA Conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor! DSA is growing everywhere because we know a better world is possible — and we’re up against an increasingly apocalyptic, supremacist ideology of the far right, where billionaires justify making the world unlivable for their own profits and then trying to protect themselves from the fallout by bunkering borders, retreating to private islands, or rocketing off to Mars. Writers and activists Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor lay this out in their new book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, with research and analysis we can use to inform our big task: to build a mass movement that’s strong enough to cancel the apocalypse and win the future as a public good for all of us.

As we grow and transform our communities across the country, we’re showing what a working class future can look like. Read on for more on how you can get involved today!

Solidarity,

Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer
DSA National Co-Chairs

August Growth and Development Trainings — and Sign Up for September Leadership Intensive Saturday 9/12–Sunday 9/13

DSA’s Growth and Development Committee helps keep our movement strong! Check out our upcoming trainings here. Our core curriculum spans topics from meeting facilitation to membership engagement.

And are you interested in taking on a leadership role in your DSA chapter? Or are you already in a position of leadership, but looking to up your game? RSVP today for the September Leadership Intensive the weekend of Saturday 9/12–Sunday 9/13.

National Political Education Commission Application Deadline Extended to Saturday 8/29

Join DSA’s National Political Education Commission by Saturday 8/29 to participate in our first general meeting and leadership elections! If you are a DSA member in good standing and are connected to education or scholarship either professionally or through organizing, you are eligible to join. Check out our application for more details!

RSVP for Housing Justice Commission Abolish Rent Book Club Beginning Wednesday 9/16!

Join DSA members and tenant organizers around the country for a nationwide reading of the new book Abolish Rent, written by two co-founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. You can purchase Abolish Rent from Haymarket Books here. DSA members can get a discount using code AbolishRent.

Book club meetings will be every other week starting Wednesday 9/16 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT. If you can make it, please come to all three meetings, and bring a friend!

Work for DSA — Application Deadlines Begin Sunday 8/30

DSA is hiring! Please apply if you’re interested, or send to someone you know who has the right experience.

Open positions include:

• Finance Director, application deadline Sunday 8/30
• Press Coordinator, application deadline Friday 9/4
• Regional Organizer, rolling application begins deadline Friday 9/4

You can find details on our Careers page here.

Don’t Miss Out on Democratic Left! Sign up for Our Monthly Newsletter

Democratic Left, DSA’s official news publication, has reached a new peak of readership and productivity. The 24 articles published in July attracted more than 80,000 pageviews. To make sure you never miss an article, sign up to receive our monthly newsletter! You’ll get a round-up of the previous month’s articles on the first Tuesday of each month.

DSA members interested in writing for Democratic Left can use the pitch form here to submit article ideas.

Welcome New DSA Organizing Committees

Welcome new Organizing Committees! Let’s hear it for our comrades across the country! A warm welcome to:

• Concho Valley, Texas
• Catawba Valley, North Carolina
• Marion County, Florida 
• San Juan County, New Mexico 
• Emerald Coast, Florida
• Scioto Valley, Ohio

The post Your National Political Committee Newsletter — Taking Big Swings appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

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.

by Jean Allen

A few weeks ago on Chapo Trap House (#1051), the hosts interviewed Tim from the podcast All Lawyers Are Bastards, and his conclusion was notable in how often I’ve heard permutations of it:

“It’s very hard for me to envision right now without a really severe legislative reform, a Congress in the next 8 to 10 years that’s really capable of doing anything of note, right? And that’s one of the ways the Supreme Court’s able to kind of create this space for themselves is they just kick things over to Congress and say, ‘it’s Congress’ responsibility to do this, not us, right?’ And so that’s when they decide not to act. But that does mean that Congress is probably not going to be able to create new federal legislation that carves themselves out a unique role, right? And if they do that, they’re probably not going to be able to effectively craft legislation that actually curtails those rights. So I think working in local municipalities and states can be one area where I think you can see a little more change.”

This is the logic that I have seen consistently throughout my life (that it is not realistic for any systemic change to happen), but it is rare to see it all laid out like this. My parents’ generation loved the bumper sticker slogan – “think global, act local.” Yes there are big global problems that we are increasingly connected to, but really, you have the most power locally. Like everything in our postmodern world, this is a strategy that is always new, always obvious, but it can never be said to have been tried and failed. By my sister’s apartment there is a dangerous intersection. After almost a decade of organizing, it finally has a stop sign. That is the “stuff” you get done at the local level if your goals are in any way opposed or even orthogonal to capital. I know people who have spent their whole political lives defending a few acres of wetlands, or trying to get speed bumps installed on one residential street, or trying to get the police of a village to be marginally more accountable. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has made 998 billion dollars, reactionary politics have been on the rise everywhere, hot wars are returning to global life, and the world seems destined to careen towards an unmanageable level of heating. “Act locally” has failed as a project.

I do not mean to diminish this kind of work. “Act locally” is a truism for a reason. But I want to focus on the elision here. An elision is a linguistic term for the omission of a syllable in speech, like saying you’re ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to’. There is an elision between ‘think global’ and ‘act local’ – don’t waste your time on any kind of big demands. We are totally, abjectly powerless at the systemic level. In Rochester a 75-25 vote in support of the Police Accountability Board in our 2019 referendum has been eaten, slowly, by the court system. A half decade earlier, the insurgent mayorship of Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, MI, tried to raise local minimum wages, only to have that power stripped from him by the state legislature. Any success at any point within our system requires the acceptance of the whole rest of it, requires super-majorities and the base for sustained legal fights; because the government that we have been taught is meant to serve us,  is actually tremendously stacked against the empowerment of the working class. 

That system has not served any of us in the whole of our political adulthoods. And just as ‘Capitalist Realism’ accepts that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”, there is an American Realism which accepts, to a greater or lesser degree, the perfection/permanence of the US constitution, and restricts its political project to fit itself within the disciplinary grounds of that system. 

I said this in June’s newsletter reviewing a folk album: ‘domination has a blast radius’. Constantly elliding over our total powerlessness at the level of the system is bad for us. Watching 17 years of protest movements be responded to with total indifference from the government which ‘serves us’ is not just a rational problem – it’s something that fucks up our ability to feel empowered in the rest of our lives. That’s to say nothing for the twisted kind of person who really gets into this. There is a kind of attitude developed within our schools and ‘intelligencia’ which says: any call for systemic change, any focus on how unrepresentative our government is, can be seen as the product of a lack of civics education. This person has come to love our system, which gives so many opportunities to explain the suffering it doles out, because obviously anyone with an issue simply does not have enough education to know that their suffering is actually justifiable, is actually fine. 

There is a popular tendency on the left right now that holds that this is only a problem of will – that if we win hard enough, this all goes away. To that perspective this is all nonsense, since nobody cares about our system of government anyways. I get this perspective, but even while we fight for bread and butter demands, I think it’s important that we say the thing the rest of our political punditry, including many of our comrades, elide:

“The government we have been taught is meant to serve us, actually disempowers working-class people, and that is wrong, and the world does not have to be this way.”

This is argued in DSA’s new program, which says our enemy is “not just this or that cop, judge, or president, but the entire anti-democratic structure of our society. We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” I think this is important, because the first part of empowering ourselves is recognizing that we have been disempowered, and training ourselves to see the disempowerment of ourselves and our fellow workers as a moral outrage rather than something to be ideologically explained. Because at the end of the conversation the Chapos had with Tim, Will spelled out what this perspective really means:

“[The] best you can hope for [is the] complete collapse of the United States, both as a government, and a country. So maybe some sort of natural disaster, or [something].”

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of America’s undemocratic institutions. But accepting these premises only leads to doomerism, rather than action. In order to fight for stop signs, and speed bumps, and wetlands, we need to clear the anti-democratic road blocks.

The post The Elisions of American Realism first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

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.

The health coverage cliff, the budget gaps, the bureaucratic siege on families like mine all have the same fundamental answer: the New York Health Act.

The post There is No Affordability Without Healthcare appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Tony A

ANDOVER – The yard signs for hometown candidate Daniel Koh are thick in this suburb north of Boston, as the six-way race for the Massachusetts 6th Congressional District enters its final weeks. A passerby might be curious to ask: “Who is paying for all these signs?”

At least financially, Koh is dominating the field, with over $4 million raised as of the most recent filing deadline. And as the campaign would have it, his campaign is largely funded and backed by labor.

The Massachusetts AFL-CIO, as well as a near majority of local unions, have endorsed Koh, including AFSCME Council 93, the International Association of Machinists, NAGE SEIU Local 5000, SEIU Local 888, Teamsters Local 25, UNITE HERE NEJB, and the Massachusetts Building Trades Union as well as many of its members including, IBEW Local 103, IBEW Local 104, IBEW Local 2222, IUPAT DC 35, Laborers Local 22, Laborers Local 175, Laborers Local 88, and more.

It is likely that many unions see Koh’s frontrunner status as a deterrent to endorsing other challengers. If labor leaders think Koh’s win is inevitable, the incentive to support different, more progressive candidates diminishes. 

Only a handful of unions have declined to genuflect before him. UAW International and SEIU State Council have backed candidate and State Rep. Tram Nguyen (D-Andover), a member of UAW Local 2320 from past work as a legal aide. The National Education Association and the Massachusetts Teachers Association endorsed candidate Mariah Lancaster.

Boston DSA formally recommended against moderate candidates Koh, Nguyen, and financial technology executive John Beccia, but declined to recommend any progressive challenger. 

For better or worse, Koh is the labor candidate. Given Koh’s resume, this labor coalition is disappointing, but unsurprising.

He’s a former protege of Boston’s ‘labor mayor’ Marty Walsh, and served as Mayor Walsh’s chief of staff before following him to the U.S. Department of Labor. Koh also served in the Biden White House, where he was deployed to Michigan to negotiate with the Uncommitted Movement during the presidential primary on the administration’s behalf. There, negotiations were described as “tense,” and Koh and the Biden administration left without conceding any ground in their facilitation of the Gaza genocide.

His loyalty earned him the ‘MSNBC Trifecta’ of endorsements: Former President Joe Biden, Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

Executives & AIPAC Dollars

Labor isn’t the only movement funding Koh.

Koh has received criticism for taking the maximum allowable donations from a Palantir executive and from sports gambling websites, among others. 

According to a review of FEC filings conducted by Working Mass, the Committee to Elect Dan Koh has received at least $183,700 from donors who also gave to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Koh has not received funding directly from AIPAC. But at least 68 donors donated to both AIPAC and Dan Koh’s campaign. Their combined donations to AIPAC total $206,395.

These donors include Josh Kraft, of the Kraft family, as well as executives at Apollo Asset Management, Bain Capital, and Goldman Sachs. At least 29 of these donors reside out of state, while only five live in the 6th District.

Because receipts are only available through the June 30 filing deadline, the total Koh has received is likely larger. 

The AIPAC-overlapping total is small relative to Koh’s overall haul, but sizable relative to the budgets of his progressive opponents. The $183,700 figure exceeds half of the total campaign funds raised by all of the race’s three progressive challengers, Beth Anders-Beck, Jamie Belsito, and Mariah Lancaster.

The donations are a blaring warning signal for the type of Representative Koh intends to be: business as usual, corporate, bland, and likely to continue the technocratic facilitation of extractive and genocidal American wars abroad. 

The unwitting alliance between labor unions and supporters of America’s most vilified lobbying arm is an indictment of the current state of labor’s electoral orientation: a movement on the defensive, with endorsements rarely democratically decided, and inclined to back establishment figures who prioritize incremental worker concessions over progressive candidates who might shift political leverage from capital to labor. 

If you’re driving by a Koh yard sign, remember it was likely paid for by AIPAC-linked donors, a labor union, or both.

Tony A is a contributing writer to Working Mass and a resident of Massachusetts’ 6th Congressional District. 

The post Dan Koh, Labor’s Candidate in MA-06, took over $180,000 from AIPAC Donors appeared first on Working Mass.