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

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

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

By: Mary Ann Sheppard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin W

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post I Love “I Love Boosters” appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Labor organizers must prioritize developing new leaders in order to grow union density and winning new workplace fights.

The post Our goal is to develop leaders appeared first on EWOC.

The Revolutionary Potential of Metro Detroit and How the Membership Engagement Committee Can Ignite It

By Reese McCaskill Jr.

In 1966, during Ronald Reagan’s first term as Governor of California, he made it his mission to rein in public education. He did so because many college students were taking a stand against the war in Vietnam and he couldn’t have that on any UC college campus. In order to curb the anti-war protests, he thought of the idea of initiating tuition (for the first time, while UC schools never had a tuition system). Despite this new system, students courageously stood their ground.

As anti-war protests continued, he even resorted to a more aggressive move; sending national guard troops to suppress the protests at UC Berkeley. Reagan continued to show aggression towards the higher education of California colleges and was stalwart in his defense of his policies. Even his own advisor, Roger A. Freeman was an ardent defender of Reagan’s assault on higher learning. His advisor went on to say, “we are in danger of producing an educated proletariat” which he stated at a press conference, weeks before the California gubernatorial election of 1970. Reagan would go on to win his re-election for Governor and continue his assault on higher learning and the rest is history.

Now, how does Ronald Reagan and his advisor’s statement coincide with the work of the Membership Engagement Committee (MEC)? Because the revolutionary potential of the people is strong. Even in the 1960s, the capitalist class feared that an educated proletariat would recognize their potential and work to radically uplift their material conditions.

Currently, I see the revolutionary potential within Metro Detroit, which is why I am running for our chapter’s Membership Engagement Coordinator position. From the energy of the No Kings Protests to the passion at the May Day rally, Metro Detroit is itching to put the power in the hands of the people. If I am elected as coordinator, there are three strategies I believe would ignite this potential:

1. The creation of an active membership engagement strategy

2. Building stronger bonds between MEC, Committees, and Working Groups

3. Equipping new and current members with tools and knowledge to be effective socialist organizers

In the first 30 days after steering committee elections conclude, MEC would embark on the creation of a membership engagement strategy to accomplish our goal within the MEC resolution to hit 2,000 socialist organizers by the 2027 convention and get 15% of our membership actively engaged in the chapter. As your candidate, I believe our strategy should work not only to recruit new members, but also to orient new members into active organizers in our chapter.

Tangible efforts would focus on stronger social media outreach, recruiting at our campaign events, getting more involved with the community for a long-term approach to engagement, and cooperating with our Administration Secretary to look into our digital tools to consolidate our information so new members understand our chapter. The committee would also look into ways to activate 15% of our membership within this engagement strategy. With an effective engagement strategy, we would ensure every member has the opportunity to develop their political and organizing capabilities.

MEC also needs stronger ties with our committees and working groups. As one of the vital arms of Metro Detroit DSA, this committee is dedicated to engaging with all members. To strengthen our ties with the committees and working groups, MEC would establish MEC Liaisons. These liaisons would be MEC members who consistently attend committee or working group meetings and report back to MEC about the support needed from the committee. With stronger ties to our committees and working groups, this would allow for more rapid engagement of our newer members to their areas of interest and a better understanding of how to engage our entire membership.

Another important task for MEC is complementing the efforts of working groups and committees by preparing, informing, and developing members into stronger socialist organizers. But, how can we engage the membership when they don’t have the necessary tools to develop their political organizing skills? If elected, I would continue MEC’s work of ensuring every new and current member has every opportunity to develop as effective socialist organizers. We would do so by conducting socials, hosting organizer skills events, uplifting our current political education events, yearly convention planning to ensure our membership feels prepared and informed and developing ways the committee can make stronger connections with new members. Every member this committee engages with creates an opportunity to equip and teach. This movement that we are a part of is a great struggle and the only way for our members to understand such struggle is to give them every chance to learn and be ready for the task at hand.

This committee is and must be a reflection of our entire chapter. Independent comrades, Bread & Roses, Groundwork, Marxist Unity Group, Socialist Majority, etc., are crucial for the development and growth of this committee. With the rising tide of fascism, worsening material conditions, and people looking for a way out of this mess, our chapter and MEC must tell the people the good news; socialism is our path forward and Metro Detroit DSA will lead the way.

If I am able to serve as our Membership Engagement Coordinator, MEC wouldn’t be my committee, it would be an all-hands-on-deck-effort to ensure all members feel welcomed and have the chance to be effective socialist organizers. As Coordinator, I would steer the ship of this committee, but the real captains are every member in MEC. Democratic deliberation, discussion, and action would be what leads this committee and I’m proud to ask membership to rank me #1 for the Membership Engagement Coordinator position.

The Revolutionary Potential of Metro Detroit and How the Membership Engagement Committee Can Ignite… was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mona Fastvold’s 2025 film The Testament of Ann Lee, with Amanda Seyfried in the title role, shows a working-class woman passionately and relentlessly seeking the realization of her unique spiritual vision. It will bring Ann Lee’s story to scores of women who are relegated to the margins of their religious traditions despite their rich spiritual gifts. It will speak to people of any gender whose sincere faith inspires a deep hunger for spiritual and social liberation now, not just in “the sweet by and by.” And it will speak to all of us who feel out of step with a culture that passively accepts the world as it is and instead feel called to build a better one. 

The Testament of Ann Lee is an unconventional movie musical, using contemporary arrangements of Shaker hymns and stylized choreography to communicate the passion and immediacy of a  mystical eighteenth-century Christian movement that grew from the Quakers. An illiterate child factory worker in England at the dawn of the industrial revolution, Ann Lee grew to become the revolutionary spiritual mother of a religious community in the “New World” that followed a gospel of union with God, gender equality, and proto-communism. Although the film uses character amalgamations and time compressions to translate the historical events into slightly more than two hours, it is mainly true to the historical record. 

The deeper I dug, the more treasures I uncovered. By centering Shakerism’s spiritually ecstatic music and dance, The Testament of Ann Lee presents the audience with a religious experience, a sensual encounter with the Divine that is purer and truer than any of our inadequate attempts to translate it into language. And while this spirit-filled emotionalism won’t be for everyone, for those that it touches, it touches deeply.

The basic facts of Ann Lee’s story are simple, and at first glance not too different from the more oft-told tale of the Puritans: a religious leader is inspired to bring their followers to the New World, seeking freedom from persecution and new converts for their nascent protestant movement. Theologically, though,  the Shakers were the mirror opposite of the Puritans. Puritans feared and avoided pleasure but allowed sex under certain restrictive conditions (spawning psychological hang-ups that still keep thousands of therapists in business to this day). The Shakers lived in celibacy but whole-heartedly embraced and pursued pleasure as a divine gift of God. 

Through singing, dancing, and other charismatic gifts, Shakers experienced a higher ecstasy than mere sexual gratification can offer. While this may elicit a “thanks, but no thanks,” from most of us allosexuals living in the twenty-first century, the film tries to help contemporary audiences understand that celibacy was not another form of mortification of the flesh but a method to achieve something utopian: bodily autonomy and social equality for women.

The film viscerally depicts what was a common experience in Ann Lee’s time and place. Wives were compelled to be sexually available to their husbands at all times, with no thought given to their feelings or pleasure. They could expect to be constantly pregnant, at a time when giving birth was dangerous and sometimes fatal for mothers, their newborn babies, or both. 

A heartbreaking musical sequence shows a distraught Lee losing four children in quick succession, from stillbirth to other ailments. Her plight was not uncommon, but it  weighed especially heavily on Ann Lee, who never wanted marriage or sex and was forced into both by the pressures of her family and culture. 

The film also briefly touches on the sexuality of Ann’s brother William, who is shown leaving a male lover in order to commit to a celibate life. The historical record calls William Lee a “former dandy,” something that at the time probably meant “womanizer” rather than queer, though doesn’t preclude both (shout out to my fellow bisexuals). It is easy to imagine that the celibate Shaker life would have appealed to some queer people living in the eighteenth century, when “sodomy” was a hanging offense and their only option for family life might have been heterosexual marriage. Shakerism offered our queer ancestors a liberating path to spiritual fulfillment, social equality, and the love of a chosen family. Because of the large numbers of orphans at the time as well as widows with orphans, there were always children in the Shaker communities

Shakers rejected the racial order of the day as well. The film is historically accurate in depicting Black Shakers as equal members of the community, and while many famous Shaker hymns have no attribution, the song “Pretty Mother’s Home,” performed in the movie by Black actor Lark White, was written by a formerly enslaved woman named Patsy Roberts Williamson. Williamson’s enslavers initially joined the Shakers of the Pleasant Hill commune in Kentucky, but when they decided to leave, Patsy bought her freedom with help from the community and remained a member for the rest of her life. 

The Shakers and their indomitable woman leader were remarkable in successfully escaping the extremely limiting social expectations of their time and place and forging a completely new path for themselves. As the film shows, Shakerism began in England as a more outwardly expressive branch of the Quaker movement, but did not blossom into its full expression until Mother Ann, as she became known, was anointed by the Spirit through charismatic visions that began when she was in prison. 

Her visions inaugurated what Shakers consider to be the Second Coming, the presence of Christ’s spirit not just in Mother Ann, but in all true Believers. They cemented celibacy as a requirement for the true Christian life and America as the place that this new gospel seed should be planted. While the number of Shakers living today can be counted on one hand, the many Shaker communes still preserved as historic sites in the United States are the impressive material evidence of what a small band of spiritual radicals was able to achieve. 

The rule of Shaker community life was “from each according to his ability, to each according to his capacity,” a motto inspired by language from the Christian Bible that predates Marx. Leadership and labor were shared equitably  by men and women, children were raised collectively without the use of corporal punishment, and communities sustained themselves by selling their innovative yet simple goods, such as herbal remedies, straw hats, and their famously well-crafted furniture. They lived the ideals of Marxists and feminists before either of those words existed. In fact, when Marx faced doubts about achieving communism in his lifetime, Engels wrote to encourage him, “Remember the Shakers!” 

The Testament of Ann Lee not only remembers the Shakers, it brings them back to life. Through historically accurate costuming and set design, creative reimaginings of traditional Shaker music and dance, and stellar acting, especially from Seyfried as Ann Lee, the film brings us into the living dance of a people who dared to follow God beyond every limit they encountered. Unfortunately, it also shows us in graphic detail the too common fate of dissenters and resistors both in her time and our own. Ann Lee died before the age of 50 from injuries inflicted by hostile mobs. This is not a film for the faint-hearted.

Ann Lee broke through the boundaries of gender, race, conventional religion, and the economic order of the day to co-create the world of peace and liberation that God revealed to her. Despite any theological differences that the span of more than two centuries of religious and social change have created between people of faith today and the early Shakers, we can still find inspiration in their lives.

Our current times may call for new ways and forms, but today’s religious socialists can still look to this inspiring film and feel called to join with the revolutionary Ann Lee in boldly proclaiming, “We are the people who turn the world upside down.”

Works consulted for this essay include the following: The Shakers: Two Centuries of Spiritual Reflection, edited by Robley E. Whitson, and Mother Ann Lee, Morning Star of the Shakers by Nardi Reed Campion.

The post The Testament of Ann Lee: A Mystical, Musical Vision of Building a “New World” Utopia appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Florida’s gerrymander draws new battle-lines for a candidate already campaigning against an undemocratic constitutional order.

The post Oliver Larkin is Ready to Fight for Democracy appeared first on Democratic Left.

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

The post Christian Celeste Tate on Building Durable Power in Bushwick appeared first on Democratic Left.

How DSA's new rapid response protocol passed its first test in the Iran crisis.

The post More Than the Sum of Our Parts appeared first on Democratic Left.