Zoelle Lane is running for Fort Collins Council. Zoelle is an immigrant, union member, and renter running to tackle Fort Collins’ cost of living crisis and to empower its residents. One of her goals for office is to raise the minimum wage, which is long overdue!

Zoelle is part of a slate of candidates in the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising project!

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By: Stacey Yuen and Alana Edwards, with contributions from Thomas Baker

This article was originally published in Long-Haul Magazine in its Winter 2025 Issue.

In Fall 2024, Boston University’s Resident Assistants (RAs) pulled off a rare, week-long strike in this new corner of the labor movement. Over seven days, Residence Life (ResLife) workers held their weight amid frazzled union staffers, hostile supervisors, and internal fracturing to strike during Fall move-in – a high-leverage period during which tens of thousands of students rely on RAs to move and settle into campus housing, with parents in tow. This was our second strike to win higher stipends, better protections against harassment, and paid health insurance for those not on family plans, in the context of negotiations for our first contract. On September 5, BU threatened to withhold RAs’ compensation, which comes in the form of housing and meals. Workers voted to end the strike shortly after this threat. To the surprise of some of us, BU increased their semesterly stipend offer from $1,000 to $1,700 a few days after the strike ended.

We are two rank-and-file members who helped organize BU RAs’ “Marathon Monday” strike in the Spring and the Fall 2024 move-in strike. As RAs, our job involves looking after the safety and well-being of more than 12,000 campus residents at BU. We work on-call shifts to respond to student emergencies, assist with housing needs, connect residents with resources, and plan community programs. Undergraduate students make up around 85% of our 300-member unit and graduate students account for the rest. Workers are compensated with housing and meal plans, although only half the unit received the latter before our strikes. The unit tends to be staffed by some of the most working-class, housing and food-insecure, and racially diverse students at the university. We are, therefore, relatively young and unversed in our dealings with both management and union. Our status as workers is also complicated by our other relations to the employer, as students and tenants. 

In recent time, the “upsurge” of labor organizing in higher education has drawn much attention, along with the university’s exploitation of student debt through tuition and rent.¹ Yet the organizing potential for many thousands of residential assistants around the country, who stand uniquely at the nexus of these trends, has been comparatively overlooked. We hope our experience can be instructive for RAs elsewhere.

A YEAR ON THE JOB (STACEY)

In August 2023, I began my two-week RA training program at Boston University. The sessions ran daily from 9am and ended in the evenings, occasionally as late as 10pm. I was 30, but was immediately made to feel 12 again. Our supervisor yelled at us to keep quiet, called us out if we looked at our phones, stared at us if we talked with each other, pulled us aside if we were five minutes late, and policed us into performing a charade of attentiveness during presentations, even as they droned on for hours with few breaks. Graduate RAs (GRAs) like myself, who have some responsibility to supervise and provide additional support to undergraduate RAs, were also roped into acting like their parents. If “our” RAs were not on time for a meeting, we were told, we had to retrieve keys from the office to enter their rooms and bring them down.

On the last day of training, all 300 fatigued and pissed-off RAs were made to participate in a treasure hunt and put on dance and chant performances as part of our “team building.” The audience and judges were our supervisors (primarily university staff) along with other administrators involved in student affairs. There was a fancy buffet, staff promotion announcements, and other such things. It was clear that part of our training involved being habitually infantilized and, for the GRAs, becoming some mix of parents and managers. This dynamic was weaponized against us when we attempted to fight for ourselves as workers.

“The worst is over,” I was told. “The job isn’t actually that difficult.” But, in my first week of duties, I found myself frantically setting up meetings to try and save a coworker’s job. They had not met academic grade requirements in the spring for continuing their RA role and were only informed about their predicament after they were rehired for the fall semester, already in full swing. “If they had told me at the end of spring,” my coworker said, “I could have just taken a summer course to boost my grade and everything would have been fine.” Instead, they were removed from the role and evicted from their on-campus residence with one week’s notice.

These experiences illustrate some of the unique realities of undergraduate labor. Undergraduate workers are “young,” not only in the literal sense, but in terms of how they ought to be treated by management. Managerial truisms like “they do not know what is good for them” infiltrate supervisor-employee relations. At BU, RAs must seek their supervisors’ permission to leave their residences for more than 24 hours even when they are not on call. My coworkers have been denied permission, without explanation, for something as innocent as attending a cousin’s wedding. And so, the pressure to perform obeisance to our supervisors becomes part and parcel of life as an RA. 

But many RAs have been working multiple jobs since high school. One told me about a time they had a gun pulled on them while working as a fast-food restaurant manager in their teens; another complained about working under the hot Texas sun for $12 an hour, 12 hours a day, at an amusement park while a full-time high school student. Moreover, the nature of RA work, at its most intense, requires that workers attend to residents in crisis, to violent altercations, and even deaths. In the wake of one tragic student death on campus, my coworkers and I set up emergency discussions about how to respond to our residents and support one another in the face of confusing instructions and administrative oversight that had put workers in unacceptably difficult positions. It was apparent from those discussions that undergraduates’ maturity, wisdom, and workplace savvy are in abundance, whether administrators recognize it or not. But, of course, it’s in management’s interest not to.

“WE NEED TO PROVIDE THAT EDUCATIONAL MOMENT”

For management, ResLife workers’ youth and inexperience were reason enough to dismiss our organizing. We learned that BU was characterizing us as “ungrateful” and “aggressive” at the bargaining table. These complaints about our supposed childishness spilled over into daily interactions with our supervisors.² RAs made several efforts to meet with supervisors about how RAs themselves understood the negotiations – as a path toward ending food insecurity and the necessity of juggling multiple jobs. We were unable, however, to have this middle layer exert any pressure upward; more often, it came down on us in the form of mounting tension at work. During the strike, some supervisors grew openly disdainful of workers with whom they formerly had friendly and warm relationships. 

Ignorance and inexperience were also key tropes in the university’s public messaging. In an interview with the university paper about the administration’s plans to slap room and board charges on striking workers, the Dean of Students stated, 

My goal is to educate everybody in the bargaining unit on the effects of withholding labor during negotiations or at any point in their role. We’ve heard from many RAs who are confused about what this means; they’re not getting clear communication. We need to provide that educational moment.³ 

Unfortunately, there was also a tendency for union staff’s attitudes to resemble management’s. Micromanagement in the form of repeated calling and texting workers to track progress on tasks was common. Behaving like summer camp counselors, staff typically led meetings in ways that resembled a Q&A rather than facilitating discussions among workers.⁴

STRIKING “MARATHON MONDAY”

In Spring 2024, workers began to feel the need to do something to gain more movement at the bargaining table. The annual drop in staffing over the summer and massive turnover going into the fall semester contributed to this sense of urgency. The only meaningful concession the university had made was to offer meal plans for all workers and RA and GRA stipends of $1,000 and $1,500 per semester, respectively. Prior to contract negotiations, only about half of workers were getting meal plans and a small number were receiving stipends of a few hundred dollars.

BU RAs decided to organize a strike over Boston’s Marathon Monday (“MarMon”) long weekend in mid-April. Apart from the anticipated additional workload (responding to noise complaints, investigating overly raucous parties, booking out keys to residents who lost them, etc.), that weekend was critical because it coincided with the university’s Family and Friends weekend, where ResLife workers take on additional shifts to engage and welcome BU’s visitors and patrons.

With “MarMon” as our target, the union began assessing strike-readiness. Union staff declared that we needed strike commitments from 270 of our 300 members in order to authorize a Strike Authorization Vote (SAV). This high bar was raised further when the staff required us to collect “selfie” photographs from coworkers as proof of their strike readiness and send them to staff, who would then mark those individuals as strike-ready on our wall charts. 

The process of collecting these strike-readiness selfies caused several frustrations. First, many RA organizers were confused about the logistics and purpose of the selfies. RAs themselves asked important questions about how we were tracking them, whether they would be publicized, and how they were relevant to the strike. Organizers found it difficult to explain the rationale, making for extremely awkward interactions. The lack of clarity around the process, and more importantly, the hazy analysis of the relationship between the selfies on the one hand and our collective power on the other translated into demoralization and forced us to direct our energy toward sorting these questions out with each other and with union staff. Other essential efforts, like running small group conversations focused on strike preparation, power analysis, and inoculation faded into the background. We graduated from dancing and singing for our supervisors only to send selfies to our union staff.

Some organizers attempted to address the lack of bottom-up organizing and worker segmentation across campus by starting at the “neighborhood” level. ResLife workers are split across seven residential areas, also called “neighborhoods,” that are spread out around BU’s famously long and skinny campus. Workers do not interact across neighborhoods for most of the academic year. Until this point, neighborhood meetings were either poorly attended or nonexistent. This was true for both neighborhoods that relied on union staff’s initiative as well as those that attempted a more bottom-up approach. Three neighborhoods were almost totally disengaged. Meanwhile, attendance at bargaining and collective action team meetings flagged, in part because those meetings often felt uninspiring or inconsequential. 

Some rank-and-file organizers began meeting and talking one-on-one and in very small groups with workers from different neighborhoods in an effort to build a core of cross-neighborhood stewards. One priority was engaging “organic leaders” from disengaged neighborhoods. Since we wanted more workers to take ownership of our workplace and union, we began with workers who were less habituated to staff-led decision-making. Within weeks, a new core developed, comprising about eight workers, three of whom were from previously disengaged neighborhoods. We also formed a group of about 15 rank-and-file neighborhood stewards and began sharing and discussing neighborhood organizing strategies and resources on WhatsApp.

Workers had no edit access to their own wall charts and could only leave comments. So we made our own chart, which decoupled strike-readiness from selfie commits. In the second half of March 2024, these rank-and-file leaders started strike assessments, focusing especially on three newly organized neighborhoods where staff had limited reach. 

Our approach enabled us to gain traction within certain neighborhoods. As a result, it eventually became necessary to hash out our differences with the advocates of the selfie-based strike readiness plan. This led to an emergency meeting between rank-and-file leaders and the Local president, during which workers attempted to convince staff that we were ready to strike, whatever the selfie metrics indicated. We negotiated over the number of selfies that would trigger a strike authorization, ultimately compromising on a reduction from 270 to 170, or from 90 percent to approximately 56 percent of our bargaining unit. 

Unfortunately, in the same meeting, we were less successful in winning over coworkers or staff to the idea of an indefinite strike. The staff proposal for a four-day “warning strike” over MarMon ultimately prevailed, hoping that the threat of a strike would win specific demands like back pay, better training provisions, and having masks in offices. Although unconvinced that this could force such concessions from the university, our new group oriented towards this action as a “practice strike” – i.e. a window to learn BU’s pressure points and tactics, as well as our areas of strength and weakness, in order to organize for an indefinite strike during the move-out window at the end of the semester. Within a mere week, led in large part by a surge in the newly organized neighborhoods, ResLife workers hit 92% assessment, 70% of whom were strike-ready, and another 12% leaning yes. The Local conducted our SAV, which passed comfortably: we were going on strike. 

In hindsight, our approach had not adequately prepared for the realities of a strike. Our assessment of strike-readiness had fallen into the trap of getting as many Yes votes as possible at the cost of creating power-building spaces where workers could collectively build the necessary relationships, skills, and structures to navigate high-stress, high-stakes situations. There was no way we could critically discuss and respond to problems that arose in real time. 

After the strike, rank-and-filers got together to discuss what we had accomplished, how we fell short, and where we were headed. The strike forced small victories. We began to receive masks at big meetings and our RA training the next academic year was much improved in terms of duration. By summertime, BU also provided air conditioning for all RAs and relocated summer RAs out of the notoriously stuffy rooms at Warren Towers. We had managed to strike roughly 90 percent of assigned shifts over the MarMon weekend. However, this overwhelming success was achieved, in part, by strike-ready workers swapping shifts with less confident workers. This, of course, was only possible because we were not on the long-term strike that we thought was necessary to win. 

We also identified the picket line (combined with staff insistence that the strength of our strike could be gleaned from picket attendance) as a site of demoralization, alongside the pervasive feeling of just trying something disruptive and hoping that it might work, rather than formulating a defensible strategy based on a rigorous assessment of our leverage relative to our demands. Workers came away from this “warning” or “practice” strike less, rather than more, unified, coherent, and ready to fight. Our plan to organize for a subsequent indefinite strike was in tatters, and our experience defied the commonplace wisdom of successively escalatory action. 

Finally, we reflected on the role played by union staff and considered possible ways of navigating our relationship with them differently in future. We discussed setting boundaries with them and crafted a memorandum that we then signed, presented to, and discussed with staffers. The memo emphasized that workers would maintain full control of our organizing strategy, timelines, goals, wall charts, and data. Staff were directed to refrain from repeatedly calling or texting us.

“I’VE NEVER SEEN THIS MUCH PARTICIPATION IN ALL MY TIME ORGANIZING”

By the end of the four-day MarMon strike, our major contract demands remained unmet and an agreement was nowhere in sight. Though much of the unit had turned over between the Spring and Summer semesters, a small core of committed rank-and-file organizers remained. Restrictive timelines regarding SAVs in the Local’s constitution made the prospect of launching a sanctioned strike incompatible with striking at the point of our highest leverage vis-a-vis the employer: namely, Fall move-in. Our core organizers decided therefore to organize towards a wildcat strike to begin on the first day of Fall semester move-in.⁵ Fortunately, the intensive RA training in August provided, in addition to much frustration with supervisors, an opportunity for RAs to discuss this plan.

During August’s RA 2024 training, core organizers called a general membership meeting that saw our largest attendance yet, with more than a third of the unit showing up. Importantly, there was a new energy and hunger in the room and this moment felt to workers like a high point in our campaign. In a vote, 94 percent of us agreed to start preparing for a move-in strike by talking with our coworkers who were not present. At the same time, these deliberations revealed concern about striking without support from the Local, as did a follow-up survey, filled by close to 80% of membership. However, the genuine swell of militant energy and collective deliberation from below was not lost on the Local’s staff or officers. Following a second meeting attended by more than half of the membership, one of them said, “I’ve never seen this much participation in all my time organizing.”

The conviction of workers pushing for immediate action even compelled the union to permit a constitutional amendment that would allow an SAV to pass quickly enough that we could strike at least part of move-in. The SAV stipulated that, in order to pass, we would need 80% of the entire unit to vote Yes and it is a testament to this swell of momentum that such an outcome was possible. We cleared this high bar and set out on strike. Here is the reflection of a core undergraduate organizer:

Even after participating in the MarMon strike, striking move-in felt wildly new, exciting, and empowering, although very challenging. The emotional rollercoaster lasted from strike preparations all the way through the strike itself. The morning of the walk-out, my racing heartbeat woke me up before my alarm could. I would regularly remind myself that even though fear and doubt would always seem more valid responses to the decision we were making, I was choosing to strike because I believed in the justice we were seeking, because I knew it was what was right and it would be worth it, and because I committed to myself and my coworkers that I would give it everything I could. 

Throughout that day and each that followed, me and my coworkers exerted our collective power, took action, and formed new bonds of comradeship together. We stood by each other while we anxiously waited to be picked up by a strike train. Every chant I sang, every flyer I handed out, and every poster I attempted to put up was part of a larger struggle. I also fought for former coworkers, and every future and current 19-year-old RA who deserved better than the harassment my friends and I should have never faced. I even fought by doing TikTok dances in our ResLife polos with a friend I’d made just days before, in the most visible spot on campus, when we were too frustrated with each other to make another rushed decision.

We won the battles we faced simultaneously as individuals and collectively. We won as we met each other’s eyes when passing on the picket line. We won as security guards raised their fists and cheered with us as we walked out of campus’s largest dorm. And we won as students, parents, faculty and staff members, community members and leaders expressed their support through every email, tweet, and repost, through loud shouts of encouragement, through the moments they spent listening and calling on our behalf, even the smallest gestures of solidarity.

Notwithstanding such tireless efforts, confidence in the strike had begun to erode with the many sudden turns and lurches in the lead-up. Not a few who had previously agreed to strike pulled out. This was partly due to misinformation from Local staff, who were trying to rework restrictive internal policies to support our strike (we are the first RA unit in the Local). Core organizers were also under great pressure to make high-stakes decisions within a compressed time frame and tried to do so democratically. But the high tempo of informational and procedural changes, charged emotions, and clunky mass decision-making wore us out. Another challenge was that a large proportion of workers were brand new to the job, much less the union.

In the days that followed, ResLife workers went on what turned out to be a minority strike, with uneven numbers of workers withholding labor across neighborhoods during their move-in shifts. After the time lost in the back-and-forth with the Local, the strike ended up beginning on the fourth day of the week-long move-in and continued beyond it. Seven days into the strike, the university threatened to impose room and board charges for striking workers. Organizers, scrambling to respond, tried to assuage fears by saying workers would be more protected if more people struck. This was the wrong approach, especially as numbers dropped, because it divested workers of a sense of their own power when striking by sidelining genuine questions of strategy. It instead encouraged workers to find security in abstract metrics rather than to build structures, processes, and resources that would support a long-haul strike, one that might even have been powerful if concentrated in specific neighborhoods, despite relatively low overall numbers. There was widespread demoralization when some coworkers pulled out of the strike, creating a domino effect and the eventual collapse of the strike. 

CONCLUSION

To workers’ surprise, BU increased their semesterly stipend offer from $1,000 to $1,700 after the fall move-in strike ended, despite its weaknesses. We think that the chaos and visibility of the strike meant that management, far from being unbothered, felt relieved that things did not get as disruptive as they might have. The many last-minute emergency meetings called by middle management, as well as the outbursts of various managers, suggested a workplace in panic. Although many of our shifts were successfully scabbed, our strikes caused logistical headaches for management because we do essential university labor in housing safely some 12,000 residents and patrons, who each pay upwards of $16,000 annually in room and board.

Importantly, both ResLife strikes occurred alongside a militant long strike undertaken by the university’s graduate workers. From March to October 2024, the BU Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) ran the longest graduate strike in US history, pushing for demands such as a cost-of-living-adjustment tied to the rental market. When ResLife workers hit the picket, the university was also facing the prospect of another semester with BUGWU workers on strike. It is conceivable that the university, sensing this new worker militancy from RAs on the ground, was eager to settle the ResLife contract to foreclose the possibility of another strike like BUGWU’s. Less than a month after the RAs reached a tentative agreement, BU also made unusually quick concessions in a clear effort to reach a contract with BUGWU and end the strike. Their contract was eventually ratified in October.

Despite the persistent and frustrating condescension by our employer and, at least initially, our union staff, budding militancy within BU’s ResLife union delivered us to two strikes that pushed our Local and won us materially significant pay and compensation increases from the boss, as well as stronger protections and a relatively streamlined training program. From where we sit, the collective deliberation by rank-and-file workers, which dramatically changed the course of our campaign, was the real “educational moment,” impressing upon management and our Local staff certain lessons they won’t easily forget. After the strike, a staffer said to one of us that getting ResLife representation on the Local’s chapter executive board was critical to reforming the Local’s existing policies – clear recognition that we had something to teach the “old timers” as well.

Building up and layering this kind of militancy in both graduate and RA unions within the same university, in order to strategize and move in tandem, is a clear next step. While the connections between these struggles were glimpsed at BU, where some workers are members of both BUGWU and ResLife and where we share the same Local, we cannot claim to have fully developed the potential leverage of joint solidarity against the employer. This is no simple prospect, but appears newly in reach in the aftermath of our respective struggles, and might be pursued wherever undergrad and grad workers are in motion, whatever their organizational affiliation.

The post On for Young and Old: How Boston University’s Resident Assistants Pulled Off a Double Strike appeared first on Working Mass.

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Retail workers often face some of the worst trends in employment, but they're uniquely positioned to put pressure on their bosses to get what they deserve.

The post How to organize a retail union appeared first on EWOC.

Thanks to all who attended the Labor Day rally in Burlington, one of countless major protests across the country on Sept 1. We were proud to stand side-by-side with so many unions and activist organizations demanding an end to America's oligarchy.

Vermont's labor movement is growing more powerful, unified, and assertive. Right now, in St. Albans, workers want their milk money.

They also want shorter workdays and better health and retirement plans. Last week, members of Teamsters Local 597 went on strike against their employer, the Dairy Farmers of America. The processing plant, which supplies Cabot and Ben & Jerry's, brought in scabs.

If you can, please show your solidarity with the workers, as several Green Mountain Democratic Socialists already have, by joining the 24/7 picket line at 140 Federal St., St. Albans City, VT 05478. You can even ask them about donating to their strike fund.

Sept. 1 in Burlington
Sept. 27 in St. Albans

And if you want to help build working-class militancy across the country, join DSA. In Vermont and everywhere else, we are fighting to organize workplaces, win elections, and advance a better world for all.

With that in mind, please consider marking your calendar for our next general meeting (10/11). Details below.

GMDSA MEETINGS AND EVENTS
🚲 Our Urbanism Committee will meet on Monday, Oct. 6, at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

🔨 Talk about your job and learn about shop-floor organizing from peers at Workers' Circle (co-hosted by the Green Mountain IWW) on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month, including Oct. 8, at 6 p.m. at Migrant Justice (179 S. Winooski Ave., Burlington).

🤝 GMDSA's East and West branches will come together for another general meeting on Saturday, Oct. 11 at 11 a.m. at Burlington's Fletcher Free Library (235 College St.), where we'll continue last month's discussion about forming a chapter-wide priority campaign for 2026. Newcomers can show up at 10 a.m. for an optional orientation.

🧑‍🏭 Our Labor Committee will meet on Monday, Oct. 13, at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

🗳️ The next meeting of our Electoral Committee will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 15, at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

👋 Find out how you can help our Membership Committee improve recruitment and involvement in our chapter on Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

STATE AND LOCAL NEWS
📰 Striking school bus drivers in Windham County returned to work, subsequently ratifying a new union contract.

📰 A Burlington musician has launched a campaign to become Chittenden County sheriff on a promise to refuse to carry out unjust eviction orders.

COMMUNITY FLYERS

By: Rodney Coopwood

The Illusion of Choice

What Americans call political diversity is actually ideological uniformity. Turn on any news channel, scroll through any political debate, and you’ll see the same tired performance: conservatives versus liberals, Republicans versus Democrats, each side convinced they represent fundamentally different worldviews. But here’s what I’ve come to understand as a socialist looking at this spectacle from the outside — they’re all playing variations of the same tune.

Conservatives, liberals, and even libertarians aren’t offering different philosophical frameworks. They’re offering different flavors of the same ice cream: liberalism. The marketing makes them seem distinct, even opposed, but strip away the branding and you find they all believe in the same core values — just different approaches to achieving them.

This confusion runs so deep that when progressives push for reforms like universal healthcare or wealth taxes, they get labeled as “radical leftists” when they’re actually just trying to make the existing liberal-capitalist system function closer to its stated ideals. True leftist positions — like worker ownership of the means of production or democratic economic planning — don’t even register in mainstream political discourse because they fall outside the artificially constrained liberal framework that defines America’s political vocabulary.

Unmasking the Liberal Consensus

At their very core, conservatives, liberals, and libertarians all operate within the classical liberal tradition that emerged from the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. They all accept:

• Individual rights as the foundation of society
• Private property as sacred and natural
• Market relations as the default way of organizing economic life
• Constitutional government with checks and balances
• The basic legitimacy of democratic institutions (though they may disagree on their scope)

The differences people get so heated about are really just different emphases within this shared framework. Conservatives might say they want minimal government interference in the economy while liberals want more regulation, but both accept that the economy should be organized around private ownership and market exchange. Libertarians take classical liberalism to its logical extreme, but they’re still working within the same philosophical boundaries.

When I say this is about marketing, I don’t mean the policy differences are trivial — they have real impacts on people’s lives. What I mean is that the ideological packaging makes these tactical disagreements appear to be fundamental philosophical divisions when they’re really just different management styles for the same basic system.

Libertarianism perfectly illustrates this point. Libertarians present themselves as radically different from both conservatives and liberals, advocating for minimal government and maximum individual freedom. But libertarianism is actually what you get when you push liberal principles of individual rights and limited government as far as they can go while still maintaining private property and market relations. The libertarian’s “radical” position of eliminating most government functions isn’t a departure from liberalism; it’s liberalism without the moderating influences that other liberals accept as necessary to manage capitalism’s contradictions. This is why libertarianism sits even further right than conservatism — conservatives at least accept some government intervention as necessary, while libertarians want to strip it down to almost nothing.

Here’s where American political discourse gets it fundamentally wrong: liberalism isn’t the “left” — it’s the center of the political spectrum. In mainstream American conversation, “liberal” gets treated as synonymous with “left-wing,” but this is a profound misunderstanding that distorts our entire political vocabulary.

The real political spectrum runs like this: To the left of the liberal center, you have progressivism (what Americans often mistakenly call “liberalism”), then socialism, then communism, then anarchism. To the right of the liberal center, you have conservatism, then libertarianism, then far-right extremism.

But American discourse compresses this entire range into a false binary where “liberal” means left and “conservative” means right, completely erasing actual left-wing positions from the conversation. When Americans say someone is “liberal,” they’re usually describing what should properly be called progressive — someone who wants to reform the liberal system to make it work better, not someone who wants to replace it entirely.

This linguistic confusion isn’t accidental. It serves to make the liberal framework appear to encompass the full range of legitimate political thought, when in reality it represents just the center position with some variations to either side.

The Structural Contradiction

Here’s where it gets interesting from a theoretical standpoint. Capitalism developed as a purely economic system focused on market relations and private ownership. But any economic system needs a political and social framework to sustain it, and liberalism provided that framework for capitalism.

The problem is that these two systems have contradictory logics. Liberalism promises political equality — the idea that all individuals have equal rights and equal say in democratic governance. But capitalism requires economic inequality to function. Someone has to own the means of production, someone else has to sell their labor. Capital needs to accumulate, which means wealth concentrates. The system literally cannot work without creating and maintaining class divisions.

This isn’t some unintended side effect –- it’s structural. Political theorist and historian Roy Casagrande describes how liberalism essentially became capitalism’s philosophical framework, providing the ideological justification for a system that contradicts liberalism’s own stated values.

Even early Enlightenment thinkers who developed liberal theory recognized this tension. They understood that capitalism’s tendency toward inequality could undermine political equality, but they believed this could be managed through institutions and reforms rather than by questioning the economic system itself.

The Evidence: When Theory Meets Reality

This contradiction isn’t just theoretical — it plays out in concrete ways that affect real people’s lives.

Black Americans provide the clearest example of how formal political equality coexists with systematic economic exclusion. Despite decades of civil rights legislation, anti-discrimination laws, and diversity initiatives –- all liberal solutions — the racial wealth gap has barely budged. Median Black family wealth remains about one-tenth that of white families. This isn’t because liberal reforms haven’t been implemented, but because they address symptoms while leaving untouched the underlying system that created and maintains these disparities.

The caste system that affects Black Americans operates alongside the class system. When economic downturns happen, Black Americans face distinct and often disproportionate impacts not just because of class position but because of how race and class interact under racial capitalism. Liberal frameworks struggle to address this because they’re designed to treat race and class as separate issues rather than understanding how they’re systematically intertwined.

Native Americans face even starker contradictions. They’re simultaneously sovereign nations and colonial subjects, with formal treaty rights that exist alongside ongoing land theft and resource extraction. The reservation system creates a form of internal colonialism that liberal political theory can’t even properly name, let alone address. How do you reconcile individual property rights –- a cornerstone of liberalism — with collective indigenous sovereignty and traditional land use practices? You can’t, which is why liberal solutions consistently fail to address the root issues.

Latino Americans demonstrate how immigration status creates tiered citizenship that serves capital’s need for exploitable labor. Some have formal rights while others are deliberately kept in precarious legal positions that make them more vulnerable to exploitation. This isn’t a policy oversight — it’s exactly what the economic system requires to maintain cheap labor pools.

Even European social democratic models, often held up as examples of successful liberal reform, reveal these same fundamental contradictions. Sweden’s domestic equality coexists with arms exports to authoritarian regimes. Germany’s strong worker protections rely on exploiting Southern European labor through EU economic structures. The welfare state ameliorates capitalism’s worst effects domestically while often intensifying exploitation elsewhere.

The Progressive Trap

Here’s what’s particularly revealing: every time progressives push for reforms to address inequality, they’re essentially admitting that capitalism doesn’t naturally produce the outcomes liberalism promises.

Universal healthcare? That’s because market-based healthcare creates inequality. Strong labor protections? Because unregulated capitalism exploits workers. Wealth taxes? Because capitalism concentrates wealth. Affirmative action? Because “merit-based” systems reproduce existing inequalities.

Each progressive reform is an acknowledgment that the economic system undermines the political ideals. The more adjustments liberals have to make to capitalism to achieve their stated goals of equality and freedom, the more they’re proving that socialism’s analysis was correct — that you can’t have genuine political equality while maintaining private ownership of the means of production.

This is why liberal reforms, no matter how well-intentioned, keep failing to address root causes. They’re trying to solve systemic problems with tools provided by the same system that created those problems. It’s like trying to fix a broken foundation by rearranging the furniture.

Beyond the Liberal Horizon

Understanding this helps explain why American political discourse feels so constrained and circular. When both major parties operate within the same fundamental framework, when the boundaries of “realistic” policy are drawn by that framework’s limitations, genuine alternatives become literally unthinkable within mainstream political conversation.

Socialism offers something different because it addresses both the economic system and its supporting political structures. Instead of trying to manage capitalism’s contradictions, it proposes replacing the system that creates those contradictions in the first place. Worker ownership of the means of production. Democratic planning of economic priorities. An economic system designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate capital.

This isn’t utopian thinking — it’s practical recognition that the problems liberalism struggles to solve are inherent to the economic system liberalism was designed to support.

Breaking the Frame

The first step toward real political alternatives is recognizing how narrow the current frame actually is. What gets presented as the full spectrum of political possibility is really just different management strategies for the same basic arrangement of economic and political power.

Once you see this, a lot of things start making sense. Why Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on so much when it comes to fundamental economic structures. Why reforms that sound transformative end up changing so little. Why the same problems keep recurring regardless of which party is in power.

We live in a liberal Enlightenment society with capitalism as its economic model. Until we’re willing to question that framework itself, we’ll keep having the same debates, implementing the same types of solutions, and wondering why the same problems persist.

The real political spectrum is much broader than American discourse suggests. It’s time we started acting like it.

This article represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of The Detroit Socialist or Metro Detroit DSA as a whole.

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Beyond the Liberal Mirage: Why American Politics Is a Closed Loop was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If those deploring "political violence" are serious about stopping it, let's start with abolishing ICE.

Central Indiana DSA’s Fully Funded, Fully Public Committee unequivocally stands with educators in the face of state repression of their free speech.  In recent public posts to his Facebook page, […]

San Mateo County Opts In to Regional Funding Measure

Follow-up to Get on the Bus: Retaking Bay Area Public Transit

Bay Area public transit notched a generational win for operational funding thanks to grassroots organizers and transit advocates. Throughout 2025, Peninsula DSA (PDSA) in suburban San Mateo County engaged transit riders and activists to save light rail Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART, 178,000 weekday riders) and commuter rail Caltrain (37,000 weekday riders) from looming fiscal cliffs and severe service cuts. 

In partnership with Transbay Coalition, PDSA organizers reached people via many channels, including PDSA’s social media; flyering BART and Caltrain stations and talking to riders; posting to r/BART and r/Caltrain on Reddit; mobilizing PDSA chapter members via email, text messages, and our own Discord server; and a successful coalition rally during rush hour at a major transit hub in Millbrae. Our underlying message to transit riders? Demand San Mateo County opt in to SB 63!

PDSA identified SB 63, Senator Scott Weiner (District 11) and Senator Jesse Arreguín (District 7)’s 2026 five-county regional funding measure, as a priority campaign for our chapter. The Senate bill authorizes a 2026 citizens ballot initiative campaign to raise new funds to sustain BART, Caltrain, Muni (San Francisco), and other transit agencies in the Bay Area as they continue to recover their pre-COVID ridership. The tens of millions of dollars in new dedicated revenue would save these fixed-rail operators from massive service cuts that would render them virtually unusable.

The importance of maximum funding

But of course there’s a catch: Politicians chose to give both Santa Clara County and San Mateo County, the two wealthiest counties of the five, the option to decline to participate in the group project or opt in at a lower tax rate than the other three counties. Transit riders like us immediately understood exactly how important it is to get maximum funding for our county, which relies on Caltrain for more than just Giants games and has six BART stations, including an essential stop at San Francisco International Airport (SFO). 

But transit riders aren’t the decision makers in San Mateo County. That’d be SamTrans, the county-wide bus system, or more specifically, the nine members of the Board of Directors. To save BART and Caltrain, PDSA members and allies attended the monthly SamTrans Board of Directors meetings to push them to think beyond San Mateo County’s borders and invest in regional transit for the people through SB 63. Our consistent pressure tactic—whether in person, via Zoom, or by email—was making well-coordinated public comments in support of opting in to a progressively funded regional funding measure. 

Comrades and allies used our time at the podium to share personal transit stories and educate the Board members, most of whom never use transit, on how transit cuts would negatively impact local SamTrans riders and San Mateo County residents. We also took the opportunity to push for funding SB 63 with a gross receipts tax (0.112% tax on the top 2% of businesses) instead of a regular regressive sales tax (of ¼ or ½ cent) that would hit low-income SamTrans riders the hardest. 

Final Showdown with SamTrans

The August 6 SamTrans Board meeting, when the Directors voted on SB 63, was highly unusual. Chair Jeff Gee refused to hear or discuss any public comments focused on the gross receipts tax, despite the hundreds of emails on that topic that we had encouraged transit riders to send to the Board of Supervisors and other influential political bodies. PDSA member Marc S used his public comment to gesture to gross receipts anyway: “The proposed sales tax, compared to other tax options, might not even prevent all cuts. Participating in SB 63 today is the bare minimum [to] address the San Mateo County residents' need for affordable, safe, and equitable transit both within the county and around the Bay Area.”

In the eleventh hour, California Assemblymember Diane Papan was given the floor and used her time to advertise her own overreaching amendment to SB 63 that called for “accountability” regarding how other counties would spend the funds at their transit agencies, while repeating misinformation about how BART operates and railing against “taxation without representation”—the Boston Tea Party was mentioned. (Note: San Mateo County would already have a seat on BART’s Board of Directors, and the vote and oversight Papan desires, if politicians hadn’t opted out of the network in the 1960s!) “The fiscally conservative rhetoric came from the fact that none of these board members seem to know there are citizens of San Mateo County who rely on transit to get around,” said Becca W, a PDSA member who publicly commented. “But now with this public pressure, they are well aware.” 

Even so, PDSA’s s organizing efforts paid off. The SamTrans Board voted 8-1 to opt in to SB 63 to raise new revenue to fund the transit agencies in the five-county Bay Area: Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Francisco. (The one dissenting vote was Jackie Speier.) SamTrans opted in at the higher ½ cent sales tax rate, a huge win considering they had been leaning toward opting out of the measure before our campaign kicked into gear. The public records of their official correspondence shows SamTrans received more than a hundred emailed public comments specifically in support of SB 63, exceeding their average inbox haul by a factor of ten.

Coordinated Public Transit Is the Way Forward

Assuming the citizens’ ballot measure is approved by a simple majority of voters in November 2026, the five-county Bay Area will have a new shared revenue source for maintaining current levels of service for public transit. Because Bay Area residents and visitors cross county borders all the time, it only makes sense that we plan and fund projects together. Robust public transit networks will be key in building a green future where a polluting private car is no longer the only viable option for getting around San Mateo County. 

Of course, with inflation and tariffs, even more money will be necessary if transit operators are to deliver faster, rider-friendly, affordable, and coordinated service around the region. Though the gross receipts tax didn’t make it into the final bill, keeping Bay Area transit operational with an assist from wealthy San Mateo County allows PDSA organizers the space and time to plan our next strategic move to win better (and eventually free!) transit for all.