Air Canada was forced back to the bargaining table after thousands of flight cancellations and hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded.

The post Flight attendants standoff with Air Canada appeared first on EWOC.

By: Nate Foster

LOWELL, MA – UMass Lowell (UML) has always had deep ties to American industry. Located in a city that was founded to manufacture textiles during the Industrial Revolution, the university can trace its roots back to the Lowell Textile School in 1895. Integrated into the University of Massachusetts System in 1991, the UML mission statement echoes its predecessor’s founding purpose: preparing students for the American workforce through industry connection. 

Much has changed since the days of the Lowell Textile School. Domestic textile manufacturing is a thing of the past in the mill town, retreating to urban immigrant worker enclaves. Now, UML uses debt to turn students into engineers that leave Lowell to find employment in tech hubs far from Lowell. In the 21st century, students in the former mill town find career and research opportunities in the military and security sectors. And with each passing year of graduates, UML welcomes thousands of new undergraduates each year that are drawn to its trademark programs leading to careers in U.S. tech industries – all five of the highest earning degrees at UML are in computer science or engineering.

These are tech disciplines increasingly dominated by large corporate contractors. These behemoths have come to control increasingly larger portions of the U.S. military in recent decades, with the Department of Defense spending over $431 billion in corporate contracts last year and over $100 million of those funds allocated toward just fourteen university R&D programs. These staggering figures illustrate the integral role the U.S. military plays in research funding for UMass Lowell, which has prioritized institutional connections to the booming military and security markets. Focusing on a growing military industry is a predictable move for UML, given its status as a public university with state funding concerns, a strong research apparatus in engineering and technology, and a student body filled with future industry professionals.

Six-figure opportunities are available to escape the financial hurdles and career uncertainties attached to higher education in Massachusetts. Lowell students are 41% students of color, 39% first-generation college students, and 30% of are pell grant recipients. Incentives for comfortable careers in lucrative defense fields are abundant, which makes the university’s push toward funnelling students with limited options toward these fields all the more insidious. All students have to do in return is join the ranks of the leading U.S. war profiteers, where designing the most destructive technologies in human history is another 9 to 5. 

In Debt? Sell Your Labor to War.

UML is sharpening its military focus at a time when college is historically unaffordable for students in Massachusetts. As a public, state-funded institution, UML is supposed to present an affordable path to higher education for its students. In reality, students at Massachusetts public schools have been missing out on assistance for decades. 

Despite a national 15% increase in state-funded financial aid across the country between 2001-2021, aid in Massachusetts simultaneously decreased by 47%. The cost of attendance for public universities in Massachusetts went up by 59% over the same timespan. With the absence of aid, many students are forced to borrow their access to education: 2001-2021 saw a 105% increase in students taking out loans at public universities in Massachusetts. UML is no exception, as 73% of students graduated with some form of student debt in 2020, with an average debt load of $33,500 per graduate. Debt drags upon students like a chain. 

As financial pressures mount, many students prioritize fiscal responsibility over ethics and passion. Cost-consciousness is accommodated to avoid class-consciousness. Students take lucrative majors that will pay the bills in the future, complete with undergraduate research and networking opportunities for employment after graduation – military-funded jobs for military-funded purposes. Student debt doesn’t just lead to selling out to some corporate position; instead, because of how industry has captured engineering, student debt leads to selling labor to facilitate a smoother, more technologically savvy war machine.

Corporate Recruitment on Campus

UML students are an invaluable resource to the US military-industrial complex. Every fall semester, a campus full of future working professionals keeps its eyes peeled for career opportunities that offer financial stability. These students are at a critical juncture in the recruitment process for war profiteering companies that need college-educated employees and sustained university research systems. 

Industry partnerships are further incentivized by the U.S. government, which provides funding to UML research initiatives that prop up its defense apparatuses. In a DOGE era, when the federal government is slashing one agency and one research fund after another, universities like UML have even greater incentives to do everything to facilitate the most stable research funds and institutional relationships with the institution: those prioritized by the U.S. government itself, in areas deemed critical by the government, like defense. Post-graduation employment rates, an increasingly important metric among powerful college rank lists, also push universities to match students’ skills with market needs dominated by defense. 

Forty-four official UML corporate partners mention servicing various sectors of the defense industry on their official websites, including weapons manufacturing, aerospace, cybersecurity, communications, electronics, robotics, advanced materials and polymers, and energy. UML organizes their corporate partnerships into a tier system, recognizing special proximity to their “premier,” “select,” and “advantage” partners. At the top of the pyramid, both premier partners, Raytheon and Draper Laboratory (a nonprofit company), are active in the military industry.

UML’s partnerships with war institutions for corporate recruitment is blatant. Raytheon, for example, has collaborated with UML to establish the Raytheon UMass Lowell Research Institute (RURI). Located on campus at the Emerging Technologies and Innovation Center, Raytheon has clearly defined the founding purposes of RURI to be “workforce development” creating a “talent pipeline of new employees trained in additive and microwave technologies.” Raytheon’s UML partnership has been a profound success on both the research and recruitment fronts; the corporation employed over 700 UML alumni as of 2021, far outpacing any of the university’s other corporate affiliates. RURI has also secured numerous research projects with the U.S. Department of Defense.

Raytheon is on the front lines of corporate recruitment into war efforts at UML, but far from the only example of the school’s pipelining. RURI is just one of seven of UML’s listed research centers and institutes and eleven laboratories and research initiatives that work with military contractors or the U.S. military directly. An affiliated nonprofit entity called the UMass Lowell Applied Research Corporation (UMLARC) is explicitly dedicated to securing DoD research contracts. UMLARC is staffed by UML vice chancellors, former U.S. Air Force members, and corporate representatives, and is active through the Northstar Campus, a branch of the UML Research Institute which was established to strengthen university-corporate-government relations in the military industry.

UML has reserved entire sections of land for the pipeline.

Outcomes of War Profiteering in 2025

War profiteering only works when there is war to profit from. Markets surge with the onset of the newest invasion, proxy war, or security concern, as conflict leads to windfall profits for corporate contractors. There is a human cost associated with tying research and career opportunities to such an industry that does not show up on a corporate bottom line or the UML website. 

A potent case study in the effects of war profiteering at UML is the school’s participation in Israeli apartheid and mass-murder campaigns via military research for the U.S. defense industry. UML is partnered with numerous U.S. weapons contractors that provide the bulk of arms sales to the Israeli occupation. Most notable are UML partners Raytheon and Lockheed Martin; the world’s two largest arms dealers supply the missiles, bombs, and fighter jets that have seen heightened and indiscriminate use on large populated areas in Palestine, killing tens of thousands of people directly and likely hundreds of thousands more to follow from the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure. Raytheon also helped create Israel’s trademark Iron Dome missile defense system, and provides various other radar systems to Israel; this may raise eyebrows towards RURI at UML, which primarily conducts radar and communications research. Coincidentally, RURI was created in August of 2014, as Raytheon-made bombs were falling on Palestinians during what Israel called “Operation Protective Edge,” a high-tech killing spree of over 2,000 people in just 50 days. 

UML seems disinterested in what its closest industry partner does with its research, and the school certainly isn’t trying to distance itself from Israel. One student profiled on the official UML website as part of the UML Center for Terrorism and Security Studies (CTSS) described his experience studying abroad in Israel: 

Each week was a different topic, including Jihadi terrorism in the Middle East and Israel national security threats. In the morning there were classes and lectures, taught by numerous individuals, including faculty from The University of Tel Aviv and retired generals from the IDF… On the last day of the week they took an all day excursion to locations such as the Syrian Boarder [sic] and the Gaza Envelope. During the free time they has [sic] the ability to travel and would go to places such as Jerusalem, the beach, or the market. This program can be taken as a 3-credit course under a Security Studies elective.

UML promotes a school-sponsored trip to multiple violent occupation zones deemed illegal under international law, described with an enthusiastic sense of adventure that would not be out of place in an advertisement for a Disney cruise vacation. UML students embarking on this trip in the summer of 2017 were learning jaw-dropping “security” tactics; it was just a year later that IDF soldiers were admitting to holding kneecapping competitions while putting down the peaceful Great March of Return demonstrations, which protested Israel’s ongoing illegal blockade of Gaza and denial of the rights of refugees to return to their homelands. Over 200 Palestinians were killed and over 13,000 were wounded by Israel during the demonstrations that took place at the Gaza border fence. One imagines that the bodies were cleaned up quickly, should the next batch of UML CTSS students be sightseeing on their way to Tel Aviv beaches. 

UML understands the potential for public backlash to its controversial institutional connections. This is especially true in the midst of relevant political movements, which bring those connections into uncomfortably sharp focus in the public eye. However, when faced with institutional criticism, UML did not respond with institutional change in any way.

After October 7, UMass Lowell Chancellor Julie Chen issued a single vague 119-word blurb calling for a “swift end to the violence” that managed to avoid naming a single involved state or actor. This abstract position of “neutrality” serves only to publicly distance the school from its proximity to Israel, and stands in profound contrast to the substantial volume of war profiteering opportunities at UML, which obviously indicate a strong partisan stance on the “war” in question. Such a throwaway PR campaign also misinforms students, who are exposed to all of the career specifics of war profiteering and none of its outcomes. It is no surprise that 20 months after Chen’s statement, there has been anything but a swift end to the violence in Palestine, and UML’s cheap one-time message of neutrality crumbles under the weight of its institutional actions as students are funneled into the ranks of Israel’s biggest weapons suppliers. UML’s underlying wants are clear: not a swift end to the violence, but a swift end to the perception of violence by the public or the student body that may implicate the university, or cut its funding.

From Palestine to the Border

The U.S.-Israeli genocide is not the only case of UMass Lowell’s aiding and abetting of state violence. In April 2025, Trump’s second administration revoked a UML undergraduate’s immigration status alongside fourteen other UMass students. UMass administrators condemned the anti-immigration campaigns, but without acknowledgement of its own series of  research centers and initiatives at UML that support the secret police and surveillance state apparatuses sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) itself. 

Only four months earlier, UML unveiled the plans for a new “Cyber Center” on campus in collaboration with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a Fortune 500 technology company and prime contractor for DHS. SAIC is responsible for AI-based governance and biometric solutions in the U.S. border system – an automation and digitalization of surveillance technologies that can and are deployed against immigrants. UMass President Marty Meehan, who in April 2025 would call the “actions of the federal government” on campus “unprecedented” and “extremely troubling and upsetting”, said the following only five months earlier in December 2024 regarding the UML partnership with a major DHS contractor: 

The SAIC partnership and creation of a Cyber Center is great news for UMass Lowell and the city of Lowell… These developments promise new knowledge and technological advances in a critically important field. At the same time, this collaboration will produce an important pipeline of talent as we develop the workforce urgently needed to join the work of securing our networks and information infrastructure and ensuring their resilience into the future.

For students pursuing engineering and technology careers, this pipeline characterizes futures. Whether through campaigns of aggression using corporate weaponry, violent “security” tactics, or discriminatory federal policies, students are coerced into participation in an industry that uses university research and educated workforces to produce catastrophic real-world outcomes. Hands are wrung and emails carefully crafted when the blowback from those outcomes reaches university doorsteps, but ultimately none of this concern is translated to what UML as an institution actually does with its resources and personnel. When it comes time to announce the newest contract or research initiative, there is nothing but vociferous adulation in LinkedInese from all of the relevant higher-ups in university and industry. 

UML couples full-steam-ahead military investment with empty community assurances, and pipelines and partnerships are elevated over the people who bear their consequences. 

For the Many, Not the Few

UMass Lowell, with the breadth of its involvement in war profiteering, is yet another cog in the expansive U.S. military-industrial complex. The pipeline that creates the next generation of weapons designers and security scholars is at work on campuses across the U.S., embedded in our public schools, supported by the institutions educating the American people. 

The U.S. defense budget balloons every year, yielding more government contracts and subsequent corporate profit maximization. Well-connected to this booming industry, UML gains research funding and corporate connections. Debt-riddled engineering students get pointed towards the lucrative career paths that are spoonfed to them. People are killed at the other end of the newest weapon to hit the market, yet their deaths are never brought up in the classroom where the weapon was conceptualized.  

The solution is education that prioritizes human need and human welfare instead of the weapons supplies of apartheid states: an engineering for the many, not the few. That requires viable STEM and technological alternatives that actually serve the people made available for students, but offering that is difficult without fundamental changes to how the U.S. economy is organized. Careers in military research will be prioritized by students for as long as the military-industrial complex profits through warfare and enlists university help to bolster its workforce and technology. The increased military privatization efforts and cost of attendance spikes of the 21st century have only exacerbated this dynamic.

There is no magical divestment button or replacement industry partnership to give UMass Lowell without addressing the root causes of its institutional decision making. Students and workers must also have far more democratic and empowered control over institutional decision-making, as equal stakeholders in the public institution. Students cannot control their career paths if they have no say in the administration of their universities. Workers who don’t own the products of their work have no way to challenge a boardroom decision to use those products for violent means. War profiteering is not actually profitable for the vast majority of people, and would not take its present form in a democratically organized society. 

With this ultimate goal in mind, many actions can be taken in the moment. Students should continue to organize towards a collective understanding and dismantling of war profiteering on campus, and demand participation in the decision-making processes of their tuition-funded shcools. Universities and corporations that participate in the military-industrial complex and disregard its human cost need to face popular pressure for the damage, for the sake of both students herded into the military industry and the people around the world that suffer for it.

A future of ethical technology-based livelihoods is possible – but only once students are unencumbered by an industry that exchanges bombs for bottom lines. 

Nate Foster is a member of Boston DSA.

The post Inside UMass Lowell: How to Create a University Pipeline to War Profiteering appeared first on Working Mass.

If you’re considering a union in your workplace, you may wonder, “Are union dues expensive?” The good news is, you get a lot for what you give.

The post Are union dues expensive? appeared first on EWOC.

By Gregory Lebens-Higgins

Readers new to Karl Marx may be surprised to learn that his “dangerous” writings do not contain an explicit blueprint for revolution, but more often read like an Econ 101 textbook. His most significant work, after all, is titled Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. How do these writings inform a socialist movement seeking to liberate the working class?

Capital is the material basis for our present mode of production. This economic base shapes the superstructure of our social relations. A hunter-gatherer society lives much differently than an agrarian society, which lives much differently than industrial society. Under capitalism—the mode of production premised on the private accumulation of capital—social relations are polarized into the working class (proletariat) and owning class (bourgeoisie). 

Capital is exchange value that circulates in the process of production. In Capital, Marx depicts its pathway as such: 

In its money form [M], capital is used to hire workers [L] and purchase the means of production [MP] (machines and raw materials) as commodities [C]. The labor power of workers, with the assistance of machines, acts upon these materials in the process of production [P], to manufacture commodities with augmented value [C’]. These commodities are sold at profit [M’] to begin the circuit anew. Importantly, it is the added labor of workers in the process of production that creates surplus value. Yet all but a bare minimum is accumulated by the capitalist—the worker receives merely enough for the reproduction of their labor power.

Investment in the process of production for the expansion of capital differs from other historical modes of exchange. Under barter, goods are traded for other desired goods [C–C]. Exchange is not premised on the expansion of value, but differing use values (food versus clothing, for example). Even the intervention of money [C–M–C] is not synonymous with its accumulation [M–M’]. 

The expansion of capital at all costs leads to varying crises. A blockage in circulation at any stage sends shockwaves throughout the economy. Once they are produced, the value of commodities must be realized in the marketplace; converted into money for reinvestment in labor and materials. With the exception of luxuries and materials used in the process of production, the sale of commodities depends on working class consumers. Yet capitalists, incentivized to cut costs, drive down wages, leaving workers unable to make purchases and products sitting to rot. This “overproduction” also occurs when capitalists chase irrational trends, investing in products with artificial value. When consumers move on to the next fad, capital is frozen in the form of unwanted commodities. 

Speculation is spurred, in part, by a falling rate of profit. As technological innovation increases output, each commodity takes less labor to create, leaving it inhered with less additional value.  Less profit returns to the capitalist, making them less likely to reinvest in production and leading to speculation in pursuit of higher returns. 

The process of circulation also reveals the power of the working class. As the source of capital, workers are positioned to stop the gears by withholding labor to make demands upon the capitalist; or to use numerical superiority to seize the means of production. “To be radical is to grasp things by the root,” says Marx. The victory of the working class occurs from a growing working class consciousness that understands the mechanisms underlying its exploitation, and the radical solutions necessary for liberation.

The post C is for “Capital” first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

How candid should we be when making labor propaganda?

The post ‘Union:’ Don’t Hide the Mess appeared first on EWOC.

by a comrade

This article is written by a DSA member and does not formally represent the views of MADSA as a whole or its subgroups.

I am excited to present a new format of content on Red Madison – a recurring summary of what kind of work we’re doing in our chapter each month! My goal as a contributing author is to inform people about MADSA’s everyday efforts in a convenient and easily accessible place.

The content in this publication overlaps significantly with our DSA newsletter and monthly General Membership Meetings. To sign up for the newsletter or check out an upcoming General Membership Meeting, visit: https://madison-dsa.org/events/

Celebrating a Local Win

We saw a win this summer after our Abolitionist Working Group, in collaboration with other groups in Madison, spoke up at a county board meeting in late July against an alarming contract with the county jail. The contract would implement a for-profit digital “mail scanning” system, robbing inmates’ rights to receive and hold their own physical mail. The “mail scanning” would entail forwarding all mail to a privately owned facility in Florida, scanning mail items into an online system, and making mail accessible only via digital tablets in the jail which inmates would not have round-the-clock access to. Mail scanning is billed as a inmate safety measure to prevent overdoses, but evidence from other jurisdictions that have implemented such systems show that mail scanning at best does not prevent the majority of drugs from entering prisons and at worst it can make the problem worse. The ability to receive and hold physical mail – like a letter of encouragement from a parent or a drawing from one’s child – is vitally important to inmates on their rehabilitation journeys. Protecting the rights of incarcerated individuals and promoting humane criminal justice policies with the goal of decreasing recidivism is a chief concern for the Abolitionist Working Group, who rallied MADSA and other community members show up in opposition to this unnecessary and dehumanizing contract being proposed. Around a dozen people provided in-person testimony against the contract, others shared comments via Zoom, and still others registered their formal opposition online ahead of the county board subcommittee hearing, adding up to around 50 people in total! After this overwhelming response from the community, two county board subcommittees have recommended the contract be denied. The contract will appear in front of the entire county board at its upcoming September 4th meeting for a final determination. DSA members and non-members alike are encouraged to check the board agenda the Friday before the meeting and attend in person or register your opposition ahead of time to continue this important battle!

Keep an eye out for the board meeting agenda around Friday, August 29th, and check out this article in Tone Madison for more about the contract and the fight against it.

Topic Highlight: Act 10 Series

As the days steadily shorten and summer comes to its end, so too ends a recent education and organizing series within MADSA: the Act 10 Series by our Labor Working Group. Wisconsin Act 10, passed in 2011, severely gutted union power by ending most collective bargaining rights for a majority of government employees. A court case challenging Act 10 has been working its way through the Wisconsin appellate court system and may appear before the Wisconsin Supreme Court within the next year. Learning about Act 10 is a powerful piece in understanding levers of change for workers in Wisconsin. 

The Labor Working Group hosted previous Act 10 events this summer, including a reading group and a movie night, and will be finishing their series with How Workers are Overturning Act 10: a Panel Discussion on August 28th. As usual, this event is open to the public and all workers are encouraged to attend – unionized or not!

Reporting Back from the DSA National Convention 

MADSA had the pleasure of sending nine delegates and one alternate to the DSA National Convention, which establishes priorities, policies, and leadership at the national level for our organization. Our delegates reported back in the August General Membership Meeting and shared some of their experiences. We confirmed that our chapter is doing well in terms of our activity levels relative to our size and recent membership expansion. Some key national topics included the details of the DSA’s stance against the genocide in Palestine, strategies for national unionizing and workplace organizing, and DSA’s political program for the foreseeable future. Between debate blocks, delegates attended programming sessions regarding prescient organizing areas and exploring how to strengthen our members’ leadership and decision-making skills. Delegates also discussed the role of electoral politics in our collective struggle, and debated strategies for building an independent working class party.

Hot Strike Summer: MADSA Stands in Solidarity with Striking Workers

This summer, workers across Wisconsin – and around the world – are taking action and striking for higher wages, better working conditions, and dignity at work. MADSA members have taken to the picket lines, helped fundraise, and raised awareness about these struggles. Here are just a few of our recent strike support efforts:

• Since July 2nd, more than 130 members of UAW Local 95, a local representing wall-to-wall healthcare workers at Janesville’s Mercy Clinic East, have been on strike to demand fair compensation and better workplace safety. Our members have visited the picket lines, donated supplies, and participated in Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement’s strike support fundraiser. 
• MADSA members held an informational picket at the Hilldale Lululemon, as part of a global day of action in solidarity with Filipino garment workers. Read more here.
• Immigrant workers at W&W dairy in Monroe are on strike because the dairy’s new, out-of-state owners implemented an e-verify system that effectively bars undocumented workers from working, even those that have worked at the company for 20 years. Wisconsin is not America’s dairyland without the workers that make our cheese. MADSA members joined them on the picket line on August 19th, and we encourage everyone to donate to their legal defense fund. Follow Voces de la Frontera for more updates and information on how to support these brave workers!
• Workers at Festival Foods and Hilton Monona Terrace have recently won their union elections! MADSA stands in solidarity with these workers and will support them as they begin to bargain their first contracts. 

Do you want to help with strike support or other labor organizing? Join MADSA’s Labor Working Group & sign up for updates from the LWG Text Tree! 

Further Organizing Highlights This Month

Our work continues in so many more ways thanks to our dedicated membership. Here are other key organizing efforts taking place this August in MADSA. This summary is not exhaustive! 

• Doing Politics in Public – This committee has been working on researching the formal systems of power in Madison, and exploring ways to make this information widely available to the general public. The group is looking into the various entities relevant to major decision-making in Madison, including governmental systems and non-profits. At our general membership meeting, members of this group presented preliminary information, including a report on our chapter’s geographical distribution and specific information about local electoral systems.

• Political Education Working Group – Our PoliEd group has been conducting a survey to learn more about topics of interest within our chapter, with the hopes of developing more events inside and outside of our membership. The group has also been running a “Socialism 101” series!

• Free School Lunch Campaign – This project is part of a coalition in Madison working towards a shared goal – that children and their families never have to worry about their next meal at school. As their next step this Fall, project members are planning to gather information from the Madison school system about the real costs of a free school lunch program.

• Hands Off Medicaid – Members continue to take organizing steps, including protest actions and ongoing communications with the governor’s office, to defend Medicaid in Wisconsin (also known as BadgerCare). Medicaid is currently under severe threat due to spending cuts and other restrictions being enacted at the federal level. 

Social Opportunities

Lastly, MADSA has had some budding social opportunities (get it?) as our membership grows! Events in the past month have included our regular Coffee with Comrades gathering and weekly jogging group. The chapter has also restarted a program called “Rose Buddies,” where members can submit a request for a 1:1 meeting with a member around an interest or question. You can sign up for that here! 

We’ve also had thriving reading group opportunities, including V.I. Lenin’s What is to Be Done, meeting Sundays at 11am, and Alec Karakatsanis’ Copaganda with the Abolitionist Working Group, every other Monday at 7pm.

Comrade’s Protest Song of the Month

To bolster morale in these times, I figured I’d include a protest song to close things out!

My pick for this month is a nod to labor, in Peggy Seeger’s Song of Myself (lyrics here). 

And that concludes our monthly round-up!

The 2025 national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America wrapped up this weekend, right here in Chicago – home of some of the most vibrant and dynamic working-class communities in the history of this country. As often happens, our speakers, delegates, caucus members, and organizers correctly spoke of the importance of building a mass movement of the multi-racial working class in order to fight capitalism and win socialism.

But there is a curious tendency, even in the most enlightened and class-conscious spaces on the left, to discuss the working class in a strange, detached way, as if they are an object and not a subject, a signifier and not the signified. It can have a disorienting effect, especially on newly organized members and people who are not used to the rarefied language often employed in activist circles, to hear workers, the poor, and the marginalized referred to as if they are specimens to be coaxed, cajoled, and studied before being released into the wild.

This is understandable! Just as DSA struggles with its racial composition, it struggles with its class character, with many of its members drawn from the white middle and upper-middle class. It’s not a cause to feel guilt; people have no say in how, where, and when they are born, and anyone can be part of the struggle. It is a fact that, especially in America – the most capitalist country in the history of the world, one whose citizens are inundated in anti-communist propaganda from the cradle to the grave – many people only develop class consciousness, leftists political tendencies, and an understanding of material analysis by attending elite colleges and spending time around socially aware academics. 

But if we are going to reach the working class, let alone organize the working class into the only weapon that can end the dominance of capitalist imperialist hegemony, we must understand how to talk about the working class. While it was being in solidarity with educated children of the bourgeoisie that gave me the language to understand Marxism and develop a theory of change, it was being around other working-class people that gave me the life lessons to translate those theoretical frameworks into action that can bring more and more workers into the fold. Here are four commandments for talking, thinking about, and organizing the working class.

I. UNDERSTAND WHAT THE WORKING CLASS IS.

Defining the working class can be deceptively difficult, especially in the U.S., where the bosses have developed all kinds of tricks and rhetorical feints to discourage class consciousness and solidarity and discourage the working class from identifying them as the true enemy. But here, as in most things, we look to the source: Karl Marx. We must conquer our shyness around words like “comrade” and “proletariat” and turn our attention to the most basic definition of the working class that Marx gave us: those great masses of people who have nothing to sell but their labor, and who must do so in order to live. That is why the working class is larger than we allow ourselves to imagine, as it comprises every person on Earth who does not directly control capital. It does not matter how much you are paid for your labor; it does not matter what that labor consists of you selling. If you must sell it, whether it is muscle or brains, to live, you are the working class.

II. UNDERSTAND WHAT THE WORKING CLASS ISN’T.

One particular trap people fall into is to mistake cultural signifiers of class for the true class marker of what you must do to earn a living. Again, this is an easy pitfall, because the bosses are forever muddying the waters through propaganda, and in America – a country that claims to have no classes – we often talk ourselves into the delusion that class consists of certain cultural markers. Even people on the left do this out of the same confused impulses that makes reactionaries do it: teachers aren’t working class, but plumbers are. Truck drivers are working class, but baristas aren’t. Blue collar workers are working class, but white collar workers aren’t. Real working-class people drive like this, fake working-class people drive like this. Don’t fall for it, comrades! This is the same old ruling-class trick to keep us fighting among ourselves instead of the people keeping us all down. Your fellow workers are your allies, no matter how they talk, what they do for work, or what their taste in music is.

III. THE WORKING CLASS ARE EVERYWHERE.

To hear some people talk, the working class is like a rare species of bird or a mythical creature like gnomes cavorting among the toadstools. The truth is, you do not have to go anywhere to find working-class people. They are everywhere you look! They are your friends and they are your neighbors. They are the people who drive your cabs and serve you food. They are the security guards at the office building where you work. Unless you are part of the bourgeoisie (and it’s fine if you are; class traitors are part of a great leftist tradition going all the way back to original communist gangster Friedrich Engels), they are your co-workers! Talking to them is as simple as having a conversation with them about how their day is going, when their shift ends, or how long it is before they get to go home. Most working-class people are more than happy to talk to anyone (besides the boss) about how alienated they are under capitalism. From there, a conversation about workplace organizing is an easy next step.

IV. THE WORKING CLASS SHOULD LEAD.

Perhaps the most dangerous mistake many leftists make is to assume the working class are helpless, hopeless, and politically idle, and are waiting in a kind of ideological limbo from those of us who come from on high to liberate them. But disorganization is not helplessness! The truth is that the working class has been organizing for its own interests long before we ever came along. When we say we believe in workers controlling the means of production, that means the workers are the ones we trust to organize for themselves. All workers know their workplaces, their social conditions, and the nature of their exploitation. They may not have the language to describe it or the know-how to resist it, but we don’t need to explain their own lives to them. As one of the speakers at our convention this year, a grocery worker encountering DSA for the first time, put it: “We do not need saviors. We just need people with knowledge and organization to stand with us.”

V. DON’T GET HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY.

Okay, technically, that’s one of the Ten Crack Commandments, but related to the above, it’s desirable to introduce Marxist language to the working class, because it’s for them to use in pursuit of their own liberation. But it’s easy to overwhelm people with jargon, or use particular academic argot that can be confusing to newcomers to theory. By the same token, it’s important to remember that it is class that binds us, and while moving in unfamiliar circles allows for lots of opportunities to introduce related forms of liberatory solidarity, we shouldn’t disqualify people from membership in the working class because they aren’t as politically developed as we are or as socially integrated as we are. Once we unite them in struggle, we will have plenty of time to help them move beyond whatever prejudices they retain from growing up in a reactionary environment encouraged by the bosses. You were a worker first, and so are they. Having comrades who trust you is better than being assured of your own righteousness.

If we could distill all of this into a single Golden Rule, it would be “Don’t other the working class.” The working class is you, it’s us, it’s practically everyone. As our chapter strives to teach in our political education platform, we do not value the working class as the means to revolution because it is uniquely moral, especially politically developed, or the most oppressed; we value the working class because it is us, in our vast numbers, a huge army of labor equipped and suited to fight the bosses and overthrow the rule of capital for the benefit of all. For workers to be a class of themselves and for themselves, they must be seen as ourselves, our allies, and our comrades – not an exotic animal at the zoo. Reject the egoistic notion that you are different, better, or even inferior to other workers and embrace the totality of solidarity, and you will begin to see that the path to building a mass movement of the multi-racial working class is not as rocky a road as it may seem. 

The post THE FIVE WORKING-CLASS COMMANDMENTS appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Today, California DSA (to which I am now an LA delegate) voted to endorse Proposition 50, the Election Rigging Response Act. Prop 50 will be on the ballot in a special November 4 election this year and will redraw California federal congressional districts to (frankly) shut out current Republican seats. 

As a former longtime Austinite, I’ve seen firsthand what Republican gerrymandering does. Austin—one of the most left-leaning cities in the South—was deliberately carved into multiple congressional districts, each stretching out hundreds of miles into deep-red territory–some all the way to the border with Mexico. The effect was simple: no matter how the people of Austin voted, they would never elect a representative who actually reflected the city’s majority in full.

That taught me what’s at stake. Gerrymandering isn’t just an abstract fight about maps—it’s about whether working-class communities can have any real say in shaping their future.

That wasn’t an accident. It was a calculated assault on democracy. It's a naked move openly embraced by Texas state senator Phil King (R-Weatherford): “I did not take race into consideration when drawing this map, I drew it based on what would better perform for Republican candidates.”

In states like Texas and Florida, they’ve built maps that guarantee minoritarian rule: the Far Right dominates Congress even without majority support. 

California has already been in the crosshairs. Trump unleashed mass ICE raids on our neighborhoods in Los Angeles, terrorized farmworkers in the Central Valley, mobilized active duty marines to occupy us, and made open threats against our cities. If Republicans lock down Congress through putting a big fat thumb on the scale in 2026, those attacks will only escalate—with California’s communities bearing the brunt.

Should We Care?

Some may ask (and rightfully because the Democratic Party is a shitshow): why should we care at all about this? Why do we need a dog in this fight? 

Because the fight over maps is a political fight over not letting rightwing authoritarianism expand. Gerrymandering is the Right’s most powerful weapon for locking working people out of politics. It’s the natural progression of a broken two-party system and first-past-the-post voting method. 

Backing redistricting shouldn’t mean tailing Democratic strategists. Gavin Newsom is a centrist turd who has moved vicious campaigns against the homeless and stripped environmental protections as part of the hyper-YIMBY Abundance agenda. We should have no illusions about the party establishment and what it wants out of this (which–let's be blunt and real–is the same kind of thumb-placing). 

But this moment gives us a chance to both take a realpolitik move to reduce the GOP advantage from Texas gerrymandering and to agitate and push beyond the rigged two-party system. We should also back Prop 50 but we also can and need to demand more fundamental reforms in CA: proportional representation, multimember districts, ranked-choice voting, and political pluralism. (California DSA’s endorsement commits us to this).

Unions are already mobilizing for redistricting. I don’t want to overstate it, but this is an opening. By standing with unions in this fight, we can again strengthen ties that are essential for building a Left-Labor pole in California politics—exactly the kind of force we need for the battles to come in 2028 and beyond. New district lines could also open space for us to run strong DSA “cadre” candidates for Congress, giving working people real choices at the ballot box.

The Right wants to lock us into permanent minority rule. Corporate Democrats want to tinker around the edges and only have us move around their banner. We can do something different: fight in the immediate struggle while making the deeper case for democracy, pluralism, and working-class power.

Fascism.

It’s a charged word—one that can appear to many as histrionic, and to others, the perfect description of the social and political environment we find ourselves in. It is a movement that begs for definition to properly counter it, yet is broad enough to render such a definition endlessly debatable. Whatever the case, whatever we call it, however we define it, we are living with the material reality, accelerating headlong into the collapse of even a nominal democracy.

DSA-LA saw the writing on the wall, and acted accordingly by passing a priority resolution to create a Working Group focused on developing our organization in a way that can respond rapidly and effectively while establishing a long-term vision and executing against a political program—to react while playing the long game, including direct action tactics and strategies, mass politics, and effective coalition building.

This body has been put to the test and has had to adapt and grow every day since June 6th, when the invasion of Los Angeles by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) saw our friends, families, and neighbors chased through the streets and dragged out of their places of business.

Our early response was naturally largely reactive as comrades were moved to act: taking to the streets in the face of violent repression, coordinating jail support for protestors, and signing on with rapid response networks in their neighborhoods. Weeks of triage felt like months as the administration escalated tensions by deploying the National Guard and Marines, engaging in disturbing shows of force, and increasing the brutality and frequency of the raids themselves. Members adapted as quickly as possible as they connected with local organizations with decades of experience in immigrant justice, plugging in and activating branch-by-branch.

Our earliest and longest running action has been with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), with every branch adopting a Home Depot—a consistent target of ICE here in Los Angeles—to patrol daily. Volunteers act as early warning systems, inform jornaleros of their rights, advocate for them with store staff, and bear witness through documentation and reporting should raids occur—which they have, with all the violence that entails. Our comrades have witnessed the impunity with which these “agents” act and the terrorism inflicted upon those the federal government deemed scapegoats to feed to a rabid base.

The “agents” have adjusted their tactics as we have adjusted ours, notably shifting their raid schedules, and employing a “hit-and-grab” strategy that sees them in and out in minutes. These tactics were on full display in early August, as ICE defied the Temporary Restraining Order in a stunning series of what can rightfully be described as abductions. Where a location might have been hit once in a day, we watched—many of us in shock, while away at DSA’s national convention in Chicago—as they returned multiple times in a series of blitz attacks. As if this were not enough they cosplayed as special forces in tactical gear, smuggled in via a Penske truck to conduct a raid they dubbed “Trojan Horse”, abducting 16 jornaleros outside of a Home Depot in Westlake.

Such an escalation and disregard for any semblance of the law makes permanent patrols and empowered communities all the more important—especially given how many of those abducted are denied access to a lawyer, or lost in the system should bystanders not get their information to track them.

To be properly reactive, we must be proactive.

To achieve this end, our comrades have organized consistent ‘Know Your Rights’ and ‘Rapid Response’ training for both members and the public. Branches and neighborhood groups conduct block walks to prepare local businesses, and where possible we have begun cultivating a more meaningful presence in our most vulnerable communities with our Socialists in Office (DSA members who are elected officials) and the tenants unions-—an especially critical component as impacted families often face a loss of income, fear going to school, avoid critical appointments and face retaliation from landlords who use their status as a threat.

Through these actions, we continue to coordinate and build relationships with the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), Community Self-Defense Coalition, Unión del Barrio, Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California, and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Los Angeles (CHIRLA), as well as local street vendors’ unions. The importance of coalition-building has never been clearer—to properly defend our neighbors we must create an expansive and connected network. This Working Group will continue to develop partnerships with the mindset of understanding where to plug in and learn versus when to lead. In doing so, we will recruit membership into our chapter and expand the base of those who identify with the movement, a pool that grows as left-leaning liberals become increasingly radicalized by the ineptitude of the gerontocratic establishment Democrats.

These direct actions were at first largely self-organized, an initiative taken to fight back before the Working Group could formally be established. They spread to every branch, with each building a system based on its unique environment, providing training to both prospective and existing members, and creating a sustainable network to keep boots on the ground every day for as long as they are needed. While we have since taken the steps to consolidate related channels and provide the structure for cross-team (and for that matter, cross-chapter) collaboration through a broader Community Defense campaign, we have remained agile and flexible.

Going forward, the Working Group will help guide and support comrades in the Immigrant Justice, Queer Socialist, and Palestine Solidarity Working Groups, while connecting committees and Working Groups across the chapter to collaborate on strategic initiatives. Through consistent and focused research, education, and training, we will grow our ability to proactively respond to the ways fascism manifests in Los Angeles, California, and the world. With clear eyes, we will set our sights on ending the genocide in Gaza and ensuring the safety of our comrades at home as we fight to end imperialism from Palestine to Mexico, understanding that fascism enacted abroad will always come back to us.

We will not lose sight of the need to organize around the issues that matter most to the working class. Indeed, these issues will be the foundation for strong, popularized messaging, the expansion of our electoral presence, and the means by which we build collective power to not only fight fascism, but to bring about a society governed by the working class that keeps it running.

There is much to learn, bridges that need to be repaired and reinforced, a base that requires expansion and activation, leaders to develop, and a local and national body that must begin to cohere around a program that speaks to the masses.  Where we find ourselves is not in an isolated response, not simply a “moment,” not a project. It is quite likely a protracted battle, one that will test our commitment and our grit. We will not win with piecemeal action.

Ours is not an ad hoc resistance—it’s a Democratic Socialist model in action: member-led, coalition-backed, and scalable.

As we fight on we must remember: Just as fascism did not arrive overnight, it will not be defeated in a day. Our hearts will be broken daily. We will be shaken by the violence of the state. We will be energized. We will feel like collapsing under the weight of it all. Yet we will fight—as a community, for our community: family, friends, those we will never know.

While we might not know when this will end, there IS an expiration date. Our mandate is to ensure that when we win, it lasts. This can only happen if we fight fascism with socialism.

Everyone’s asking: how do we reverse the tide of fascism? One of the most important ways is to get into the streets with as many other people as we can turn out. With a little luck and your help, that’s about to happen on Monday, September 1, Labor Day.

An anti-fascist movement has been getting its act together, albeit in a somewhat lumbering fashion. DSA members in coalition with other community groups in California and elsewhere are showing up to protect immigrants from kidnapping by Trump’s secret police. Discussions are taking place among local elected officials and community coalitions to convince local law enforcement to refuse cooperation with the cruel, inhumane and often violent actions of ICE. Many people are leading or attending trainings on non-violent direct action, safe participation in demonstrations, and preparing for the 2026 elections.

Delegates to California DSA state council at its meeting on Saturday August 23 voted to endorse the off-year special election put in place by California governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature, with Proposition 50, a statewide ballot initiative coming up this November 4. Devised in response to the actions of the Texas legislature to gerrymander its districts and elect five more Republican representatives to Congress, California’s state elected representatives have decided to fight fire with fire. [See article elsewhere in this issue.]

Actions like these, along with many others, are necessary types of work in building the anti-fascist movement. But for the coming week one item should be at the very top of our to do list: planning to come out on the streets on Labor Day, and make it the biggest nationwide demonstration yet. The May Day Strong coalition effort has scheduled hundreds of events across the country behind the banner of “Workers Over Billionaires.”

Next offramp

DSA members have been helping to organize for the national days of anti-Trump action, adding their bodies to millions of others across the country at events such as “No Kings Day”, expressing the firm desire to take the next offramp from Trump’s Road to Fascist Hell.

Although Labor Day is better known for barbecues and consumer discounts than militant demonstrations of worker solidarity, that’s not the way the holiday started out. Signed into law by President Grover Cleveland in 1894, it was meant to intervene within a moment of peak industrial class struggle. By giving workers a paid day off, the capitalist class hoped to lead them to believe that U.S. society might have something to offer besides the points of National Guard bayonets during strikes, all too fresh in mind the year of the American Railway Union’s Pullman Strike.

Labor Day was offered as a less radical substitute for International Workers Day, held on May 1, the campaign for which had sparked the only national general strike in US history, but was bloodily repressed in Chicago and elsewhere in 1886. The past few years have seen a revival of interest within organized labor to mark May Day as a time for remembrance of class struggles of the past and preparing for those to come. May Day 2025 served as one of the big days of national demonstration against Trumpian fascism, and labor leaders are calling for Labor Day to function the same way.

Making the event especially significant this year is a growing understanding that it’s up to all of up to stop the steady erosion of democracy, and that we can use events like Labor Day as steppingstones to build toward a strong mass anti-fascist movement, and to aim high at May Day 2028, when we answer United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain’s call to leave work together and begin to take back some of the historic power that the working class lost during the long years of neoliberalism.

Click here or here to find Labor Day events near you. See you on the streets.