By now, San Francisco is famous not just for unaffordable rent, but also for its acrimonious debates about how to solve the problem. One well-funded contingent asserts it’s all about making it easier and cheaper to build privately owned homes, but as even the corporate media is now noting, we’ve done a lot of that, and housing isn’t forthcoming. In an unusually frank comment, an advocate for this market-oriented approach admitted at a public hearing, “One of the challenges we face in San Francisco is we need the rent to go back up to get housing to work” Clearly, private development is, at best, limited in what good it can do. We need something more.

Social housing can be that something more. Referring to housing that’s permanently affordable, permanently off the speculative market, tenant governed, and home to people at a range of income levels but always including those who need it the most, social housing has been inspiring socialist organizers in cities across North America, including New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago. But efforts in San Francisco have been stymied by opposition from our previous and current mayors, and the new Big Tech-backed majority on our board of supervisors only makes the headwind greater.

That’s why we we in DSA SF’s Ecosocialism Working Group were so interested to learn from Seattle, a west coast city of similar size to San Francisco, which also had a business-backed mayor and city council opposed to social housing but managed to sidestep them and create and fund a social housing developer through a ballot measure. How did they do it, and what can we learn? To answer that, we hosted a conversation with Eric Lee from Seattle DSA and House Our Neighbors, and to speak to the work already happening towards social housing in San Francisco and in California, we also included Shanti Singh from DSA SF and Tenants Together. What follows is an edited transcript from that conversation, on October 3rd, 2025.

Can you both introduce yourselves?

Shanti Singh: Hi, comrades. I’m Shanti Singh, I have been a DSA SF member for over eight years and used to be co-chair way back in the before times. And my day job is working at Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant unions and other organizations like legal aid and housing justice coalitions. I’m the legislative director, but most of what we do beyond advocacy is organizing and base building and trying to make sure every California city has a tenant union. And that’s drawn us into social housing in a big way.

Eric Lee: Hello, everyone. My name is Eric. I am on the steering committee for House Our Neighbors. I’m also a member of Seattle DSA and was co-chair of our housing justice working group for two years during our fight for social housing. House Our Neighbors built a coalition that went toe-to-toe with some of our city’s most powerful actors, like the landlord lobby, tech companies, financial firms, etcetera. And we won. We won the creation of a Seattle social housing developer, which is a public development authority designed to provide publicly owned, permanently affordable, tenant-run housing. And we also won a tax on some of the city’s wealthiest and some of the world’s wealthiest corporations to fund that development. I’m interested to learn also about your all’s struggle for a more just housing system and share the details of what we’ve done up here.

How do you define social housing?

Shanti: There’s not a settled definition: it’s contested in good ways and bad. But there are some basic principles I think are useful. It’s permanently decommodified, so it’s not a speculative tool. A lot of our “affordable housing” in the United States can revert to purely private housing after 15 to 55 years, depending on where you live.

So that takes me to social ownership, defined broadly to include public housing and public ownership, community land trusts, and limited equity cooperatives that are run by the tenants themselves.

Universality. Who is social housing for? It should be for the people who need it most. But we also want to have targeted universalism, where it’s available to everybody who needs it, regardless of their status or their ability or their employment.

And then of course, there’s community control. Tenant-led development and tenant autonomy, so that social housing is actually run by the people that live in it. That doesn’t just mean tenants are picking the paint color on their walls, but maybe even being able to determine their rents. The tenants really have control over the housing that they live in.

Eric: Those are our key pillars that we’ve organized around, as you’ve said: publicly owned, permanently affordable. Tenants don’t pay more than 30% of their income in rent, ideally much less than that. It’s tenant-run, so 50% of the development authority’s board has to be elected by the tenants the developer serves. Also the buildings have councils and committees that manage operations of the buildings themselves.

Union built, green housing as well. New housing in Seattle will be built to the Passive House standard. The built environment has a relation to climate justice.

How did Seattle’s campaign get started?

Eric: House Our Neighbors emerged out of a response to a business-backed initiative to enshrine sweeps in our city charter, and make incredibly vague, unfunded commitments to shelter. It fortunately never made it to the ballot. House Our Neighbors filed a lawsuit, and it was thrown out by a judge.

Coming out of that victory, House Our Neighbors wanted to take on a more positive vision instead of fighting against something. That became I-135 [in 2023], which was a ballot initiative that established a social housing developer. Unfortunately, due to Washington state’s wonky laws, a ballot initiative can only focus on a single thing, so we couldn’t fund the developer within that initiative.

The initiative provided minimal startup funds so the developer could hire staff and lease office space, and we were hoping our local or state governments would provide funds for property acquisitions or actual development. However, they didn’t.

So we were forced to run another initiative [Prop. 1A in February 2025] that implemented a payroll tax on businesses that pay an individual employee over a million dollars. This tax is estimated to raise $50 million annually for the developer. We faced steep opposition from tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and the real estate lobby. And we won, and the developer should be receiving those funds early next year.

How did you structure this program to ensure it was implemented in spite of opposition from your mayor and all but one of your city council members? Based on our experience in San Francisco, I’m thinking to myself, “The mayor is going to say, ‘I’m just not going to do that.’” Or he won’t allocate the funds.

Eric: The initiatives are binding. I-135 actually created the public development authority (PDA) and required the city to allocate a certain amount of money for their startup funds. The mayor did drag his feet on providing those initial startup funds and the city actually never provided the full amount, and required a partnership with the state to provide those funds. But the text of the initiative is actually binding and they have to follow it.

Similarly with the tax itself. Those funds are allocated for the social housing developer and must be directed to the social housing developer. Again, they’re dragging their feet on providing those funds. The initiative passed in February of this past year and the funds were supposed to be retroactive to January, and they still haven’t received the initial funds. They’re expected to receive them in the first quarter of 2026. But because of the legal power of the initiative, they have to comply with it. I’d be interested to learn more about how your elected officials cannot follow the voters’ mandate.

Shanti: Our former socialist in office, Supervisor Dean Preston, with DSA and other organizations, spearheaded in 2020 a real estate transfer tax, Prop I. There were carve-outs for affordable housing, but if you sell an office building or a residential building over $10 million, the seller pays this transfer tax. That passed with 58% despite being outspent 20 to 1.

That funding was meant to go to rent relief and social housing. Unfortunately due to a legal technicality, that funding was not able to be automatically dedicated, so it went into the general fund. We’ve been fighting over that money ever since. [Prop 13 requires a two-thirds supermajority for taxes devoted to a specific purpose, unless the measure is placed on the ballot by gathering signatures, which wasn’t safe in 2020 due to Covid.]

In 2022, we won a $64 million budget allocation. A lot of it got spent on taking 200 to 250 units of housing off the private market and delivering them to community land trusts. We won an allocation to start researching what we would need to do to have a development authority like Seattle has.
And that funding is under attack. A couple years after Prop I, the city of LA passed Measure ULA, a similar transfer tax where 25% goes to social housing models. Now there is an attempt by real estate interests, both in the legislature and possibly at the 2026 ballot, to roll back ULA and potentially transfer taxes across the state. So it’s two steps forward and one step back.

How did Seattle build the coalition it needed to overcome elected officials’ opposition and win?

Eric: One key group was traditional affordable housing providers, who are severely underfunded. We didn’t want them to see the social housing developer as a competing entity for scarce funding. So we baked into I-135 a clause that the social housing developer would not be eligible for existing funds, but would require a new source of revenue. So the Housing Development Consortium came out as neutral and we saw individual affordable housing providers like the Low Income Housing Institute actually endorse our initiative.

Another endorsement we were proud to receive was the Seattle Building and Construction Trade Council. This is a group of unions who typically endorse more conservative candidates, but we baked into our initiative that the housing should built by union firms.

Regarding how we structured the campaign, a lot of campaigns use working people for photo ops or grunt work, but don’t really bring them into the decision-making. We empowered everyday volunteers, working people, to take action. We had a series of working groups—field, communications, endorsements—where anyone who expressed interest could join and help in the development of our tactics and strategies.

Part of our field strategy was to contact people who were materially affected by the social housing developer, namely renters. We looked at voter records and property ownership records, put them together, and identified if someone likely owned the unit of housing they lived in. Then we tried to get into apartment buildings to specifically talk to renters. That was just some volunteer who came up with that idea and put those two data sets together.

Seattle’s vote was held at a weirdly timed special election in February, and there was a competing measure that was a watered-down version of social housing your mayor was supporting. How did that end up happening?

Eric: Basically every step along the way, we faced some sort of opposition and that was one of the instances.

There’s a couple of phases of a ballot initiative [in Washington state]. First you file it, then you collect signatures. Then it goes to the city council and they can take one of three actions. They can pass it outright and make it a law. They can put it onto the next election. Or they can put it on the next ballot with an alternative they concoct.

We used public data requests to uncover the conversations that were going behind the scenes. The Chamber of Commerce contacted our council president with a sample alternative, and they took that sample alternative and passed it on to the ballot. 

They also delayed the vote. We turned in signatures to qualify for the November election, which had huge, 70 to 80% turnout here in Seattle. And we really wanted to be on that ballot because we felt like a higher turnout election would benefit us. Instead, they delayed the vote past the deadline to put us on the November ballot. Instead they cloistered us to a February ballot where it has like 30% turnout, and the turnout is typically mostly homeowners.

I have the flyer here that they sent out. This is our mayor, Bruce Harrell. They sort of phrased it as, “the people for responsible social housing.” It was a watered-down initiative to kneecap the social housing developer. It essentially provided two options to vote No on our initiative. But luckily people saw through this.

How do zoning changes in Seattle and San Francisco tie into the fight for social housing?

Eric: Seattle right now is going through what they call their comprehensive planning. It happens every couple of decades and outlines how Seattle will handle housing growth and zoning changes over the next two decades. The mayor and city council are largely responsible for drafting that. Most of Seattle is single family zoning, or it’s been changed to something called neighborhood residential zoning, which allows up to four townhomes on every lot.

House Our Neighbors particularly is interested in density bonuses for social housing. Traditional affordable housing providers receive density bonuses, which allows them to build larger buildings than they would be allowed to if it was market rate housing. However, the social housing developer under current Seattle and Washington state laws doesn’t qualify for those bonuses. We hope to change those laws to afford the Seattle social housing developer those bonuses and incentives.

Shanti: In San Francisco, we have to submit something called a housing element. It has to be compliant with state requirements, where there have been changes to state law lately to facilitate mostly market-rate housing construction with a little sprinkling of affordable on the side.

But that’s coming from interests that are primarily hostile to public investment. Hostile to social housing, hostile to taxing and reigning in speculation. And I think it’s especially acute in SF. In LA, because there is that funding source [ULA], there is more energy from the left to tackle single family zoning in our own way and be like, “We want to build social housing in these communities.”

But here, the problem is that everybody who’s behind this rezoning has no interest or commitment to even meeting our state goal of 46,000 low and middle income units. When you ask the folks in charge of the zoning plan, our previous mayor or current mayor, “What’s your plan to get those 46,000 units?”, it’s a question our DSA SF electeds like Dean Preston before and Jackie Fielder now are asking—they don’t have one. It’s just like, “The market will fix everything.” And that poisons the well a bit. As much as we do have exclusionary communities, the [rezoning] is very much in lockstep with real estate, who are also the ones who tried to kill our transfer tax, who don’t want social housing to happen. It makes people question what it can be used for.

Some version of this is going to pass in my opinion. It’s up to us to figure out, what is our vision and how do we weaponize the situation as DSA and as the left in SF? How do we use this to fight hard for social housing and turn lemons into lemonade?

As Shanti alluded to, we have another “pro-housing” faction in San Francisco, the YIMBY movement, and historically there’s been bad blood between YIMBYs and socialists. Does this dynamic also exist in Seattle?

Eric: I wouldn’t say we have that particular tension. A lot of urbanists in Seattle support social housing.

At House Our Neighbors, we understand that there is a supply issue. The amount of housing being built [compared to] projected housing needs for the future is insufficient. However, where most urbanists would end there, we think that’s only a key aspect of the problem. The other component is who owns and controls that housing. But I haven’t really seen that sort of tension here in Seattle. I was kind of surprised to hear that.

Shanti: I think it boils down to the progressives versus moderates divide that long predates DSA. Since Mayor Dianne Feinstein in the seventies, it’s been the tenant movement in San Francisco versus the downtown real estate interests. A lot of this was before we were born. But also, as DSA, we’re not the Democrats, right? We’re not progressives. We’re not moderates. We’re socialists. I think we should be conscious of history, do our own thing and stick to our principles, but not be bound by whatever the beef between progressives and moderates is.

What efforts are happening at the state level towards social housing in California?

Shanti: In LA, a quarter of measure ULA’s funding is dedicated to social housing. And that includes a lot of the community land trusts in Los Angeles, but could be towards building the kind of housing that’s being hopefully going to be built very soon in Seattle. So that is dedicated, though the rest of the money is going towards a lot of other programs, like legal aid for tenants, homelessness services.

I want to take this back to the movement. I consider tenant organizing in California to be at a nascent growing stage. There’s new tenant unions popping up all over, which is awesome to see. But we’ve got a long way to go.

I see social housing as an organic demand of organized tenants. You had the Moms for Housing in Oakland, homeless black mothers occupying vacant housing owned by a big nationwide speculative investor. You had a similar occupation in El Sereno in East Los Angeles, which is actually on publicly owned Caltrans-owned homes. You see the Veritas [a real estate investment firm] tenants in San Francisco, who are demanding Veritas housing be bought by the city. And you have the Hillside Villa tenants who are part of the Los Angeles Tenants Union in Chinatown, LA, demanding the city eminent domain their property and take it away from a slumlord. Fresno mobile home tenants who are winning co-ops, buying back their mobile home parks.

All of these are different social housing fights. Even with the tenant movement being in this nascent stage, organized tenants are thinking, “Why does my landlord own this housing anyway? They don’t have to. I can own it. The state can own it. A land trust can own it.” We feel that we have the power collectively to take this housing away, and off the market for good. That demand has exceeded the resources available, even as we have 60+ community land trusts growing. So the state needs to step up and do something.

We passed a study bill called SB 555 in 2023. It inspired the framework in AOC’s Homes Act. We basically said, here’s what social housing is. It’s permanently affordable. It’s permanently decommodified. It’s for people who are cost burdened by the private market. That’s a broad range from no income to middle income people. It can be owned by a community land trust. It can be owned publicly, can be owned as a limited equity cooperative.

We put some of those big-tent guidelines forward. And we demanded that the California Department of Housing and Community Development, HCD, put out recommendations. How do we get 1.2 million units of social housing, either through acquisition or construction, in California? That study is due at the end of 2026.

The purpose of this is to make sure our definition of social housing is in state law, because there are attempts to co-opt social housing. But also to get recommendations we can start turning into campaigns, locally and at the state level.

I got to go to Vienna three years ago, which was really cool. The main lesson is that there’s a social movement and a political party, the Social Democratic Party of Austria, that’s managed to maintain [their social housing system]. When we think about it as DSA, the social movements and political infrastructure are really more important even than thinking about the technicalities of public versus cooperative housing or how they have a ton of public control of land. They have tight rent controls on the private market, they keep a stranglehold on the private market to make social housing sustainable and keep growing it in Vienna, but all of that comes down to the strength of the movement.

Every day we receive more information about America’s slide into whatever you want to call it: authoritarianism covers it; oligarchy is part of it; dictatorship is Trump’s goal; and most likely we should be calling it fascism. This is deadly serious. 

Just about everyone I know has deep concerns for what’s left of American democracy. Many of us are feeling overwhelmed at the ongoing tsunami of bad news and seeming inexorable advance of the MAGA agenda. Others are close to burning out over the level of activism the moment calls for. But whether you are hunkering down in your basement, hoping for it to blow over, or out on the barricades, there are two concrete tasks you can shoulder in the next few weeks, each of which places a brick in the anti-fascist wall. Neither is difficult, and both will help to turn the tide. 

One of these is covered in another article in this issue of California Red on Proposition 50. Vote YES on Prop 50, and better, go out and do some work to pass it by canvassing or phone banking. 

“No Kings”

The other just requires your body, although it wouldn’t hurt to do some organizing as well. Saturday October 18 will see the second “No Kings” demo this year. The one on June 5 drew millions of people into the streets, including thousands of DSA comrades across the country. Other protests have been called and have been big, but this one was the biggest, and the one scheduled for October 18 is promising to be—must be—even bigger. You can find one near you here.

Authoritarian rule depends on the widespread belief by the population it rules over that it is invincible. Big demonstrations prove otherwise. Building larger and larger protests creates a compelling public picture of a countervailing majority and encourages the formation of a growing pro-democracy, anti-fascist movement that can operate on many fronts—in the courts, in elections, in workplaces and institutions of civil society, all of which ultimately depend on power in the streets. 

Numbers are important. According to studies, when 3.5% of the population in a country is regularly protesting an authoritarian regime some kind of threshold is crossed in which quantity translates into qualitative change in the possibilities for stopping the anti-democratic forces. Here that would translate into something like 12 million people. Best guestimates of the June No Kings day came to about half of that. We need to build that number up. Judging by the number of co-sponsoring organizations, the anti-fascist coalition has been growing.

But beyond magic number theory, we know that mass movements have power; in some respects, it’s the only power that ultimately matters. Come on out and be part of it. See you on October 18 —in the streets.

Our next DSA Ventura County General Meeting is happening on Thursday, October 23 at 6 PM and your voice is essential. This is where we come together to shape our chapter’s priorities and plan the upcoming month’s organizing efforts. Whether you’re new or a longtime member, this meeting is the perfect opportunity to learn how to get involved and contribute your ideas. We’ll be discussing important agenda items, including launching quarterly workshops and transitioning to monthly meetings to increase engagement. Join us in building a stronger, more connected movement here in Ventura County. Together, we can turn our collective vision into action.

Events & Actions

Events with a are especially new-member-friendly!

Tuesday, October 14 (8:00 AM – 4:30 PM): ICE out of SF courts! (in person at 100 Montgomery St)

Wednesday, October 15 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM): What Is DSA? (In person at 1916 McAllister St)

Thursday, October 16 (5:00 PM – 6:30 PM): Keep Market Street Moving Flyering (in person at Market St & Montgomery St)

Thursday, October 16 (7:30 PM – 9:30 PM): “Housing the City by the Bay: Tenant Activism, Civil Rights, and Class Politics in San Francisco” – TOWG Reading Group (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Friday, October 17 (8:00 AM – 4:30 PM): ICE out of SF courts! (in person at 100 Montgomery St)

Friday, October 17 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM): Maker Friday (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Saturday, October 18 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM): HWG Food Service (Castro St & Market St)

Sunday, October 19 (1:00 PM – 3:00 PM): Divestment Strategy Session (1916 McAllister St)

Sunday, October 19 (1:00 PM – 3:00 PM): SF EWOC Flyering (in person at Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley Park, 50 Fell St)

Sunday, October 19 (3:00 PM – 5:00 PM): Palestine Study: Understanding Zionism and Imperialism (1916 McAllister St)

Sunday, October 19 (5:30 PM – 7:15 PM): HWG Reads “Capitalism & Disability…” (in person at 1916 McAllister St and on Zoom)

Monday, October 20 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM): Labor Board x Divestment Priority Meeting (in person at 1916 McAllister St and on Zoom)

Tuesday, October 21 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM): Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (in person at 1916 McAllister St and on Zoom)

Wednesday, October 22 (4:00 PM – 7:00 PM): Zohran Debate!! (in person at The Savoy Tivoli, 1434 Grant Ave)

Thursday, October 23 (5:30 PM – 6:30 PM): Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)

Thursday, October 23 (6:30 PM – 9:30 PM): The Internet: Live & In-Person w/Dean Preston! (in person at the Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St)

Thursday, October 23 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM): Immigrant Justice Court Action Orientation (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Sunday, October 26 (5:00 PM – 7:00 PM): Capital Reading Group (in person at 1916 McAllister St and Zoom)

Monday, October 27 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM): Tenderloin Healing Circle (in person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday, October 27 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM): Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (in person at 1916 McAllister St and Zoom)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

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ICE Out of SF Courts!

Join neighbors, activists, grassroots organizations in resisting ICE abductions happening at immigration court hearings! ICE is taking anyone indiscriminately in order to meet their daily quotas. Many of those taken include people with no removal proceedings.

We’ll be meeting every Tuesday and Friday from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM at Immigration Court at 100 Montgomery. We need all hands on deck. The 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM window is when we most need to boost turnout, but if you can’t make that please come whenever works for you. 1 or 2 hours or the entire time! We’re also holding orientation sessions for folks, but that is not required to attend. See the Immigrant Justice Court Action Orientation event for more details.

DSA SF Tenant Organizing Reading Group – “Housing the City by the Bay: Tenant Activism, Civil Rights, and Class Politics in San Francisco” 

San Francisco has always had an affordable housing shortage, but solutions outside of the private sector have long been neglected or overlooked. Join us as we learn about the history of one proposed solution: public housing.

Our four-part reading group will meet every other Thursday at 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM hybrid in person at 1916 McAllister and Zoom with RSVP to discuss John Baranski’s book “Housing the City by the Bay”. The next meeting will be Thursday, October 16.

If you wish to join please RSVP here!

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Maker Friday

On Friday, October 17 from 7:00 – 9:00PM we’ll be preparing for the No Kings protest! Join us at 1916 McAllister to make signs and flyers. Everyone is welcome!

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Join SF EWOC to Organize the Unorganized!

The SF local of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) needs to get more workplace organizing leads so we can increase union density! We will have monthly regular strategizing and flyering events on the first and third Sundays of every month at 1PM. Our next flyering event will be  Sunday, October 19th at 1:00 PM at Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley. RSVP here!

Our strategy sessions (held at the DSA SF office, 1916 McAllister) will determine what neighborhoods and tactics to use at the next flyering event. You don’t need to be a volunteer or organizer with EWOC to attend! Our next strategy session will be Sunday, November 2nd at 1:00 PM at 1916 McAllister. RSVP here!

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Palestine Study on Zionism: Understanding Zionism and Imperialism for Palestine Liberation

Join DSA SF on Sunday, October 19 from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM at 1916 McAllister St for the upcoming Palestine Study exploring the foundations of Zionism and how we fight imperialism for Palestinian liberation. We will equip ourselves with a precise understanding of the history, foundations, aspirations, and contradictions of Zionism in order to fight for Palestinian liberation. Participants will walk away from this first session with a precise understanding of the forces that propelled the colonization of Palestine and how US imperialist interests continue the efforts today. This curriculum is designed especially for those new to DSA, the Palestine movement, or those deepening their commitment to being anti-zionist. RSVP here!

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DSA SF Homelessness Working Group Reads: Capitalism & Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell

Join DSA SF’s Homelessness Working Group as we read through Capitalism & Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell. We’ll be meeting every other Sunday evening starting in September for 4 or 5 sessions at 1916 McAllister. The next session is Sunday, October 19. For more info, register here: bit.ly/martacd and check the events calendar for latest details.

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Immigrant Justice Court Action Orientation

Come one, come all to 1916 McAllister St for our court watch orientation! You’ll learn how we are resisting ICE , how you can help, and participate in a biweekly art build. Bring questions and anti-ICE slogans! This event will take place every other week on Thursdays starting at 7:00 PM and the next one is October 23rd!

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Ready to Build Real Power? Join the Organizing 4 Power Training!

Want to take your organizing skills to the next level? We are looking for at least 10 members interested to attend the upcoming Organizing 4 Power (O4P) training! O4P isn’t just another workshop. It’s a world-class, hands-on program used by organizers globally to win strong campaigns. This is your chance to gain proven tools to:

• Recruit & motivate members more effectively.
• Tell powerful stories that inspire action.
• Identify & develop new leaders from within our ranks.
• Build strategic campaigns that create real change.

This is a fantastic opportunity for anyone looking to make a bigger impact—whether you’re new to organizing or a seasoned pro.

Interested in joining our cohort?
We need at least 10 people to sign up by Oct 18th!  Reach out to Erich Fiederer on slack or email labor board (labor@dsasf.org) to let us know!

The class will be 5:00-7:00PM at the office (1916 McAllister) on November 18th and 20th, then again on December 2nd and 4th.

Let’s invest in our skills and build our power together!

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Reportback: Hold Airbnb Accountable with DSA SF!

IFPTE Local 21, SEIU Local 1021, UNITE HERE Local 2, and over a dozen other unions and community organizations are protesting Airbnb as the tech giant sues San Francisco for $120 million! Companies like Airbnb use our city as their personal playground while not paying their fair share. At a time when public services are crumbling, budget cuts run rampant, and housing has become more scarce and expensive, Labor Board is endorsing this campaign in support of our workers.

This past Wednesday, October 8th kicked off the campaign with a press conference outside of Airbnb’s headquarters at 888 Brannan. Comrade Firas (of IFPTE Local 21) gave a strong speech condemning Airbnb’s corporate greed, displacement of workers, and reliance on the very same public services and beautiful city that they’re refusing to pay taxes for. Capitalism enables and encourages billionaires and corporations to avoid paying their fair share, and we will not let them get away with it!

Support this campaign by signing and sharing the pledge to boycott Airbnb, and coming to a flyering event!

Behind the Scenes

The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and publishing the weekly newsletter. Members can view current CCC rotations.

Interested in helping with the newsletter or other day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running? Fill out the CCC help form.

The democratic road to socialism needs state power, so democratic socialists need to engage in and win elections. Why? Once the office is won, it can be used to win strategic reforms, move more people into working-class ‘for itself’ activity, and accelerate the break away from capitalism. For that to happen, elected officials need to be guided by a socialist theory of change and make choices based on information and experiences coming out of working-class activity. 

Over the last decade or so, socialists have been bedeviled by electoral strategy. This is in part because we have been getting the order of operations wrong. If ‘accountability’ has to happen after the fact, your electoral strategy has already failed. It means the officeholder feels comfortably disconnected from the organization and the political program it has developed, and empowered to act in a way that directly conflicts with that program. Any accountability process is more likely to drive an even bigger division between the office and the organization.

In response to this reality, many democratic socialists have theorized how to develop ‘cadre’ candidates who will be disciplined by virtue of the fact of being ‘cadre’, and therefore less likely to act in a way that requires ‘accountability’. If the candidate owes their political development to the organization, goes this theory, they simply won’t break from the organization. 

The problem is that this ignores institutional pressure. Starting as ‘cadre’ does not address the immense pressure on elected officials from formal party apparatuses, organized constituencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profits, and other state and non-state organs. Setting aside the very real phenomenon of opportunists, even the most earnest and sincere cadre candidate will only be able to resist that institutional pressure for so long until compromise builds on compromise and one day they find they are no longer cadre at all.

So what is the answer? What is our theory for engaging in elections and holding elected office? That is still unclear. Like one of those optical illusion drawings of a vase or two faces, the statement “democratic socialists need to engage in and win elections” can be interpreted one of two ways: that individual democratic socialists (the candidates) need to be elected to office, or that “democratic socialists” as a collective political body via campaigns need to engage in and win elections. 

Unlike those optical illusions, though, there is actually one answer: the latter. The democratic road to socialism requires that the democratic socialist movement, consciously and as a body, determines the strategic way to engage in win, and collectively hold state power through elections.

If we can agree on this theory, we can agree that running cadre candidates may be the wrong way to think about accomplishing our goals. What we actually need to do is run cadre campaigns. Everything we need to achieve through our electoral work can be gained only by this approach: big-picture strategy, mutually reinforcing work, non-reformist reforms, victories for the working class, and wielding state power to bring about a rupture with capitalism. 

A cadre campaign is one where the relationships needed to win and hold office are developed, managed and held by the organization, not the individual candidate; the candidate will always be in a weaker position than the organization. Chapters should pick offices where running the campaign and winning it will be based on the strength of the chapter’s relationships, not the candidate’s. Discipline and accountability will result from that, because conflict with the chapter will automatically jeopardize those relationships. It is not a question of what the chapter can ‘offer’ a candidate in terms of support or the candidate’s stated or apparent ‘loyalty’ to the organization. It is a matter of the practical power the chapter holds in a given campaign. It is our responsibility to build our power to the point where we can exercise it as the decisive factor in winning. The campaign, not the candidate, is the path towards accountable cadre. 

The Relationships Needed to Win Power

A successful electoral campaign requires a web of political relationships: to funders, voting blocs, and institutions and organizations that provide these. The first are direct relationships and the second indirect. 

Who  can you call to raise money for an aldermanic election in Chicago? Those are direct relationships. Through your work on a local school council or other organizations, do you know 200 people who would vote for you? Those are direct relationships. A good candidate has both of those. A cadre candidate holds the same relationships the chapter primarily holds; a cadre campaign connects the relationships held by the organization to a specific electoral campaign. The organization’s endorsement (and the process by which it gets to that endorsement) is enough that it can lend its direct relationships to that candidate. 

DSA’s challenge is to build relationships where a democratic decision of the membership results in activating them for a specific electoral campaign – and can also sever those relationships. Will the chapter’s union members build committees at their workplaces in support of a campaign? Will the branches reach out to community organizations and leaders to proselytize for the candidacy? Will the chapter convincingly pitch the campaign to regular PAC donors who are likely chapter members? 

Traditional politics means that leaders of organizations confer and decide on good candidates and good races. That is not a viable long-term strategy for the democratic road to socialism. If a DSA chapter’s relationship is with leaders of a union, for example, that is helpful and healthy; but the real relationship needs to be ‘body-to-body’ – between organizational memberships. DSA members need to make the case to their union siblings and their leadership to make an endorsement; that is how individuals are minimized in the relationship, and discipline and accountability become built into the electoral strategy.

Within a chapter, the candidate is not cadre merely by being chosen, or really liking socialism. The candidate is cadre by virtue of their standing in the chapter and the relationships they’ve developed through their work. The chapter can send out fundraising e-mails, but if there is no membership buy-in or relationship with the candidate, they won’t bear much fruit.

The Relationships Needed to Hold Power

Once an election is won, a democratic socialist holds power; but do democratic socialists hold it? This is why there actually is a right way to see the puzzle. If the candidate’s relationships are held in common by the organization, the SIO (socialist in office)  holds formal power, but practical power is collectively held by the organization. 

The ends will look like the means, always. The way we win power will shape the way power is held and used; the last decade of DSA electoral work bears this out. Fighting over discipline and accountability are just different forms of frustration over failure to develop and execute cohesive long-term electoral strategy. 

No DSA chapter has the resources or relationships to win major elected offices on its own; for the foreseeable future, we will need to bring in other organizations and high-visibility figures to be part of a winning coalition. The question is not whether that has to happen, or whether it will require some degree of compromise on our message. That is inevitable, and denying it only marginalizes us by choice. The question is whether the political relationships that bring those coalitions together are held by the organization collectively, and therefore whether the membership has made the democratic decision to accept compromise or change. 

It should never be the case that the leaders of a chapter are worried about damaging their relationship with an elected official. It should always run in the other direction. That will happen when the SIO knows that if they piss off the teachers’ union too much, it will reverberate into the DSA chapter and vice versa. That reverberation can only happen when members are kept informed and have the opportunity to deliberate and discuss. When that happens, that is when accountability becomes real. The accountability happens before the fact, not after. 

“I am Awake”

In neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia, he writes about Clive Wearing, who suffered from anterograde amnesia and was unable to form new memories, and describes how Wearing would write in his journal, “I am awake” each time he came back into consciousness realizing he could not remember anything he had been doing. Wearing lived in a “continuous present.”  DSA chapters all over the country seem to get stuck in these continuous presents, with little institutional memory of campaigns past, of their relationship with various SIOs, and with other organizations. With each new membership bump or leadership turnover, we, too, are awake.

This lack of institutional memory is partly because of our all-volunteer, high-leadership turnover structure, but it is also because there is a culture of quiet around SIOs and other organizations. We’re often afraid to talk about the dysfunctional or non-existent relationship with this or that “DSA elected” because we do not want to alienate them or harm an already poor relationship. In other cases, the relationship is good but precarious, because the chapter knows that other than create mild embarrassment for a couple of news cycles, there isn’t much it can do to pressure an SIO. 

Being more open about the nature and history of these relationships is easier said than done, but it is important for experienced chapter leaders to discuss these things with newer members, and for those members to seek out this history in order to understand the challenges ahead of them. Otherwise, we are constantly waking up, living in an eternal present, doomed to make the same mistakes over and over. 

This phenomenon is particularly damaging to any meaningful electoral strategy, because the SIOs have stability and continuity our organization lacks. As a result, not only can this phenomenon reverse the flow of accountability, but it can harm the SIO project itself, as electeds feel they cannot rely on the organization to provide resources they need – volunteers, policy experts, donors, and organizers – to move their constituencies around a program. 

There’s no shame in admitting that while CDSA’s support may have tipped the scale in aldermanic elections of the past, it was neither necessary nor sufficient to be the only factor. 25th Ward alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez is the SIO who has maintained a meaningful and productive relationship with CDSA, but his relationships in Pilsen were already deep before his winning 2019 campaign. He had strong relationships with an influential local union of which he had been a member, and he had been director of a highly visible and well-respected community organizing group. Byron’s ideological and personal commitment to growing socialism, and his understanding of what only socialist organizing can do, has kept him close to the chapter and its membership, but – quite reasonably – he also knows that to stay in office and potentially grow beyond it, he needs a broad political base, and, as any elected official would be, he is very aware of how he won his two terms.

In New York City, the story of Zohran Mamdani’s capture of the mayoralty is instructive to a degree. Mamdani was an active member of the Queens branch of the chapter; his first electoral work in leadership was for a NYC-DSA-endorsed candidate, Father Khader El-Yateem, in a campaign where El-Yateem lost with a respectable 31% of the vote. Mamdani surely developed relationships in the course of that campaign, but having operated on the campaign through NYC-DSA, they were not his relationships alone. His experience in electoral campaigns revolved around NYC-DSA’s electoral program, including working on Tiffany Caban’s Queens district attorney race. As NYC-DSA grew stronger in these constituencies, it became more possible to win a statehouse race—which is exactly what Mamdani did in 2020, in a district that overlaps with Caban’s current seat. Even after winning, Mamdani attended NYC-DSA meetings and relied on its members for organizing activity and the ability to connect him to labor struggles they were involved with. Interestingly, as NYC-DSA developed its electoral strategy, Mamdani advocated for the “1234” proposal which would have welded SIOs closer together through common messaging and data sharing. A narrower CDSA version of 1234 was defeated in part due to opposition from supporters of Chicago SIOs who were against the idea of sharing of campaign data. 

Mamdani communicated to NYC-DSA that he would not run for mayor if he could not win its support for that campaign, and set about winning over the various factions in the chapter. This was an acknowledgment that he would need major organizational mobilization to make his campaign viable in the early stages, but it also recognized that his personal relationships to donors, volunteers, and labor and community organizations were insufficient to get him the early momentum he would need to compete. Only an organizational expression of his viability could do that, and NYC-DSA was the organization that could accomplish that. The activity of DSA members in United Auto Workers Region 9A won him a crucial early endorsement, and NYC-DSA activity in other unions coalesced groups of members into informal “[X] for Zohran” committees inside those unions that could fundraise, identify volunteers, and agitate for endorsements, as with the United Federation of Teachers and the AFSCME Council of public sector workers. These relationships not only help a candidate, but also undermine other candidates who try to force union or community leaders to make “pragmatic” endorsements against the will of their membership. A chapter needs to be able to deploy these kinds of activities and relationships for a campaign in order to have the result be cadre-in-office SIOs. 

The challenge for NYC-DSA, should Mamdani win, will be related directly to whether they as an organization have the resources and relationships necessary to maintain their place in a governing coalition, or whether they will be rapidly displaced by more powerful institutions.

The post Cadre In Office, Socialists In Power appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

by Blair Goodman

Purpose and Use

This is a training and reference guide (or maybe just a vision) for developing cadres—members who form the committed core of an organization.  It helps participants understand both the skills and the culture needed to sustain effective socialist organizing.

What is a Cadre?

“I liked doing it, Mac. I don’t know why. It seemed a good thing to be doing. It seemed to have meaning. Nothing I ever did before had any meaning.”
— John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle

In political organizing, cadre refers to the trained, committed core of activists who form an organization’s backbone. The term comes from the French for “framework”—the people who provide structure and continuity to movements. While it has formal connotations from Leninist party-building, the functional distinction is simple: every organization has general members, active participants, and a reliable core that holds it together.

In DSA, we rarely use the term “cadre,” but the role exists. These are the members who show up consistently, train others, and keep chapters functioning between the exciting moments. They provide continuity, institutional memory, and capacity for growth.

How Cadres Develop

There’s no application or credentialing process to become a cadre. You don’t need a degree or professional experience—these skills are learnable through practice, mentorship, and reflection. Most members remain active participants, but a smaller number become reliable organizers who hold things together. Their development combines three dimensions: practical skill, political understanding, and emotional sustainability.

Core Organizing Skills

These are the foundational abilities that connect people, ideas, and action. They interrelate and reinforce one another.

• Relationship Building & Recruitment: Conducting meaningful political conversations, identifying people’s interests, and moving them along a ladder of engagement. Cadres can assess someone’s political position and help them take the next step.
  
• Meeting Facilitation: Running meetings with clear goals, time management, and inclusivity; encouraging participation while moving toward decisions.
  
• Campaign Planning: Designing strategic campaigns with clear goals, timelines, and escalation strategies. Understanding power mapping and leverage points.
  
• Political Education: Leading study groups, connecting theory to practice, and explaining Marxist or socialist concepts in accessible ways.
  
• Communication: Writing leaflets, press releases, and social media content; public speaking; and internal communications that build unity and motivation.
  

Operational Skills

Operational skills turn plans into effective, coordinated action. They complement the core organizing skills by focusing on logistics, implementation, and management.

• Direct Action Planning: Organizing pickets, rallies, and protests with attention to logistics, safety, legal needs, and media coordination.
  
• Labor Organizing: Understanding workplace mapping, union drives, contract campaigns, and how to connect labor struggles to broader socialist politics.
  
• Electoral Organizing: Managing canvassing and GOTV operations, supporting endorsed campaigns while maintaining DSA’s independence.
  
• Coalition Building: Working across organizations with different traditions, balancing principled positions and practical collaboration.
  
• Administrative & Digital Competence: Maintaining data (Action Network, VAN), budgeting, fundraising, and using communication tools effectively (Slack, Signal, Zoom, Canva).
  

Political and Theoretical Knowledge

Political grounding keeps cadres oriented and principled through complex or demoralizing conditions. Theory clarifies purpose and prevents burnout or disorientation.

• Ideological Literacy: Understanding different left traditions (Marxism, democratic socialism, anarchism, etc.) and how to navigate a multi-tendency space.
  
• Historical Awareness: Drawing lessons from labor, civil rights, and socialist movements—successes and failures alike.
  
• Current Analysis: Following political developments, class composition shifts, and right-wing organizing, connecting analysis to action.
  
• Organizational Theory: Understanding democratic structures, accountability, and how to balance democracy with effectiveness.
  

Distinguishing Features of Cadre

• Skill Integration: Deploying multiple skills in combination—facilitating, teaching, and advancing campaigns simultaneously.
  
• Consistency & Reliability: Following through on commitments and maintaining presence through highs and lows.
  
• Strategic Thinking: Seeing how immediate campaigns fit into long-term power-building.
  
• Political Maturity: Managing conflict and setbacks without demoralization; keeping eyes on shared goals.
  
• Initiative & Ownership: Acting without waiting for direction—identifying needs, organizing others, and taking responsibility.
  
• Reproduction Capacity: Training others, sharing knowledge, and building sustainable organizational capacity.
  

Mentorship and Reproduction Practices

The mark of a mature cadre is the ability to reproduce leadership. This happens through structured mentorship and intentional knowledge transfer:

• Apprenticeship: Pairing new members with experienced organizers to learn through observation and shared work.
  
• Delegation: Giving others real responsibility, not just tasks, and trusting them to learn through doing.
  
• Documentation: Writing guides, maintaining notes, and passing down institutional memory.
  
• Feedback: Offering constructive criticism and praise as part of a regular organizational culture.
  

Example: A chapter organizer pairs a new comrade to co-facilitate a meeting, then debriefs afterward about what worked and what didn’t. This transforms experience into shared learning.

Political Discipline and Collective Accountability

Cadres balance initiative with collective discipline. They understand that personal autonomy operates within democratic decisions. Once a group makes a decision, cadres help implement it faithfully while ensuring dissent remains principled and productive. They maintain message discipline, coordinate action, and avoid freelancing that undermines organizational trust.

Internal Democracy and Conflict Navigation

A healthy cadre culture depends on internal democracy and transparency. Cadres:

• Model democratic behavior by encouraging participation and accountability.
  
• Address conflict directly but constructively, seeing it as part of growth.
  
• Uphold decisions once made while ensuring open, honest debate before decisions.
  

Sustaining Ourselves and Each Other

Organizing is emotionally demanding. Sustainability is a collective practice that allows us to endure and grow.

• Emotional Regulation: Staying calm under stress and managing interpersonal challenges productively.
  
• Boundaries and Burnout Awareness: Recognizing limits and respecting others’ capacity.
  
• Collective Care: Normalizing check-ins, rest, and mutual support. Rest is part of revolutionary practice.
  
• Maintaining Perspective: Seeing our work as part of a longer historical struggle; neither despairing nor romanticizing.
  
• Reflection and Assessment: Building feedback loops—evaluating campaigns, identifying lessons, and celebrating victories.
  

Inclusion and Equity in Cadre Development

Cadre work must be inclusive. Historically marginalized comrades often face additional barriers to leadership. A healthy cadre culture:

• Ensures access and participation across lines of race, gender, class, and ability.
  
• Confronts gatekeeping and informal hierarchies.
  
• Uses practices such as rotating facilitation, accessible meeting times, and multilingual materials.
  
• Centers mentorship that lifts comrades from underrepresented groups.

This essay by Maine DSA member Marianne was originally printed in Building Up, which is published by DSA caucus Groundwork. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

***

When I was making calls last Thursday for Maine DSA’s $19 minimum wage campaign in Portland, a voter asked me, “how screwed do you think we are?,” broadening the scope of the conversation from a single ballot question in a municipality of 70,000 people. I wasn’t sure, I told him. Things look pretty grim. Since the inauguration of the second Trump presidency, we’ve witnessed the brutality and oppression that the US empire has funded abroad come home to roost on the streets of American cities, with masked thugs kidnapping immigrants and assaulting protestors in a show of naked authoritarianism. Republicans control both houses of Congress, and they’re eager to rubber stamp Trump’s far right billionaire agenda.

But it’s not all bad news. A majority of Americans reject rising fascism. Working people are mobilizing to demand something better, but the official opposition, the Democratic Party, is in disarray. In the No Kings protest movement, the Democratic voters are taking to the streets to express their outrage at the administration and its oligarch backers, but also at their own leaders who have failed to resist the fascist takeover happening before our eyes. This raises a question that DSA must answer: Will we meet the mass outpouring of anti-fascist energy where it’s at, seize the chance to make DSA the face of anti-fascism they are searching for, and organize them into DSA? Or are we too afraid that standing next to liberals in the streets will damage our radical brand to even try?

[Read next: What’s at state in Maine in 2026?]

Working people are hitting the streets in record numbers, and we need to be there with them. In Maine where I live, 3,000 people came out to the statehouse for the first No Kings rally on June 14. For scale, that’s in Augusta, a town of 19,000 people in an almost entirely rural state. As socialists, we know that our democracy is flawed at best, slanted in favor of the rich and powerful since our country’s founding. But the ordinary people coming out to protest know that if we don’t defend the limited democracy we have, it can get so much worse.

It’s easy to cringe at the liberal #resistance. I joined DSA in 2017, frightened by the Trump administration and wanting to continue fighting for the demands of the Bernie 2016 campaign. Like so many of my comrades in that wave of newly-minted DSA members, I didn’t think we had much common ground with the pussy hat and pantsuit resistance that emerged from Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the general election. As I saw it, they wanted to go back to brunch. We wanted to build a better world. I was angry at the Democratic establishment over Bernie’s primary loss as much as I was upset about Trump winning the election. And I was living as a man, five years away from when I would eventually come out as a trans woman. In retrospect, some of those liberals probably did want to tune back out as soon as Trump was gone, but many more were deeply sincere about defending LGBTQ+ rights, fighting for racial justice, and taxing the rich, even if we expressed ourselves differently.

Frankly, I was mad but I didn’t feel the visceral fear I do now when I look at what the Trump administration is doing. While Trump may be back in office, it’s not 2017 anymore. This time, only 9 months in, Trump has launched military occupations of our cities and his administration is openly plotting to seize even more unaccountable power. But also this time the mainstream 2025 resistance is built different. The people in the streets are fed up with appeals to norms and decorum in the face of a fascist takeover. This time, they want blood. What they don’t have is a leader.

[Read next: Support, but don’t endorse Platner]

In 2025, corporations and establishment figureheads have abandoned the pretense of opposition. This time around, they’ve chosen to accommodate MAGA rule. The resistance needs leadership, and DSA must lead. We have a duty as socialists to stand with the masses against fascism. In fact, we may be thrust into it whether we like it or not, given the call-out of DSA by name to Trump himself at a White House roundtable on Antifa.

This moment is more than an obligation; it is an opportunity. By joining the popular front against fascism, we can show the millions of outraged working people in this country that we need more than a return to the collapsing neoliberal order that Kamala Harris offered voters in 2024. We can show up on the streets and declare that to fight fascism, we must build socialism. When we do this, we will undoubtedly encounter people whose politics are all over the place or who are brand new to political struggle. These people, like the voter who asked me if we were screwed, are waiting for someone to show them the power that they have. It would be easier if everyone in the streets were all socialists waiting for a party, rather than a diverse group of working people who don’t like ICE agents pulling kids out of classrooms or CEOs raking in millions while everyday people struggle to pay off their debt. But that’s why we became organizers: to turn these people into socialists. One of the best things we do in DSA is develop the skill of talking to regular people about what is wrong in our communities and how we want things to change. We do it when we knock doors and we do it in our workplaces. We need to do it in the streets at No Kings rallies on October 18th.

Sign the petition calling on the NPC to endorse No Kings!

The post Harness street power: endorse No Kings! appeared first on Pine & Roses.

This is a special meeting of the GRDSA Chapter to consider a proposal to endorse and support several ballot initiatives.

We will have reps from each campaign to give a brief presentation and answer any questions. Then chapter members will present a proposal to endorse and circulate these petitions as a chapter.

Michigan for the Many (M4M) is an alliance between the MOP Up Michigan (Money Out of Politics) and the Invest in MI Kids (wealth tax to fund education).

Rank MI Vote (RMV) would amend the Michigan Constitution so that we would use Rank Choice Voting (instant runoff) for elections.

Join us Sunday, October 19, 4pm, on Zoom to hear how these initiatives can empower the working class of Michigan.

The post Special Chapter Meeting: Campaign Proposal Town Hall appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

The following article is the result of a visit to the People’s Republic of China to participate in celebrating China’s 80th Anniversary of its victory over Japanese fascism. Dee Knight and DSA China Working Group coordinator Anlin Wang were part of a five-person self-organized delegation of DSA members.

Beijing buzzed with excitement on September 3, as leaders of friendly countries poured into the city from around the world. They came to celebrate China’s 80^th anniversary of defeating Japanese fascism in World War II and to participate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) Summit meeting. It was an impressive display of “unity in multi-polarity” featuring Russian President Putin and Indian Prime Minister Modi, as well as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, among about two dozen others.

With participation of most southeast Asian members of ASEAN, as well as the “stans” of central Asia, China was literally surrounded by the representatives of countries representing well over four billion people and nearly half the world economy. Another prominent participant was President Pezeshkian of Iran, which maintains close economic and military partnerships with both Russia and China.

The New York Times called Beijing’s Victory Day parade on September 3 “a defiant warning to its rivals.” The awesome display of China’s military might at the V-Day parade lent “a menacing tone” for Western leaders and media. CNBC said Xi Jinping made “a thinly-veiled swipe at Trump’s global tariff campaign” when he said “shadows of Cold War mentality and bullying have not dissipated, with new challenges mounting.”

CNN offered a more measured tone, quoting Xi: “I look forward to working with all countries for a more just and equitable global governance system… We should continue to dismantle walls, not erect them; seek integration, not decoupling.” CNN added that “Xi’s vision pushes back against the foundations of a US-led world order, opposing alliances like NATO.”

Russian President Putin commented to Russian media after the summit that “The SCO is not designed to confront anyone. We do not set ourselves such a task. And… during the discussions and bilateral meetings, there has never been anything that could be described as a confrontational beginning during these four days.”

In kicking off the SCO Summit, Xi said “We should advocate an equal and orderly multipolar world, and a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization, and make the global governance system more just and equitable.”

How defiant is that? (Strange that advocating “universally beneficial and inclusive economic organization” can actually be considered a death threat for the US-led “rules-based” system.)

The massive military display at Beijing’s V-Day celebration left little doubt that China would never allow itself to be bullied again. More than 35 million Chinese were killed in Imperial Japan’s invasion and occupation of their country from the early 1930s to the end of World War II in August 1945. That’s even greater than the USSR’s loss of 27 million from the German Nazi onslaught. Together those numbers prompted Trump to say “Many Americans died in China’s quest for victory and glory. I hope they are rightfully honored…” 

Through the summit, we can see the past and future in contention for a world that’s striving to break away from overwhelming U.S. domination and unipolar rule. 

The “American Century”

The US lost about 420,000 soldiers in World War 2, according to the National WW2 Museum. But it assumed the role of overall victor, launching “the American Century” along with a global war against communism. It has maintained occupation troops in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam and other Pacific islands – all of which are deployed today against China, just as NATO (and its “defensive alliance” against the Soviet Union) continues to threaten Russia. Which side is threatening and destabilizing? It depends largely on your point of view.

During the Korean War, from 1950 to 53, the US slaughtered millions of Koreans, and flattened all buildings of more than one story, in a massive bombing campaign. Its threats to extend the war into China were repelled by the mobilization of half a million Chinese to fight alongside the North Koreans. The US war against Vietnam began shortly after the French colonizers were routed in 1954 and lasted until the US too was finally defeated in 1975, at a cost of additional millions of Vietnamese victims and tens of thousands of US troops. Some estimates put the total number of Vietnamese dying from the U.S. war there at over 3 million, a staggering amount of human loss. Both wars were also aimed at China, and China provided troops and weapons to support their allies in both, staving off further ruin and destabilization within their own territory.

The war zones of today, in Eastern Europe, West Asia and the Far East, are continuations of eighty years of US unipolar domination, both militarily and economically. But the way the US is protecting its interests in all three areas has exposed a blunt reality: the constant official refrain that “America is protecting democracy and human rights” is nothing but war propaganda and mythology. For most of the world’s population, America’s leadership has only meant invasion, coups and more death. 

The US: Sponsor and Protector of Fascists

While China and the USSR achieved major defeats against fascism, the US sheltered and rehabilitated Imperial Japan’s fascist rulers, helping them form and maintain the country’s far-right Liberal Democratic Party which has ruled virtually non-stop for 80 years. (The US CIA did the same for the fascists of Ukraine, and have since sponsored them against Russia.) Japan’s rulers have been obstinate in acknowledging their role in the horrors their empire had perpetrated across Asia, refusing  to apologize for slaughtering millions in their invasion and occupation of China. Ditto for Japan’s 35-year colonial hold on Korea, from 1910 to 1945. In both countries the Japanese imperialists were notorious for setting up systems of “comfort women” – sex slaves for Japan’s occupation forces (not very different from the hospitality enjoyed by US occupation forces across Asia today, but a significant contrast to the status of women in China today).

In South Korea, a country formed by Korean collaborators with the Japanese empire,  the U.S. has sponsored a series of military dictatorships in South Korea, until democracy finally broke through in the 1990s. Such dictatorships were aimed at threatening China, most notably in the so-called Korean War, that resulted in an armistice in 1953 but never officially ended, which has kept Korea split in two and maintained a kleptocratic U.S. client state in power in the south for generations to come. In fact, through the armistice deal, the US working with its anticommunist counterparts in South Korea, awarded itself a forever military presence there, guaranteeing “operational control” of the massive Korean military in case of war against the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea (DPRK), China, or both. Such belligerence underscores the significance of DPRK leader Kim standing next to Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi at the V-Day event. It would seem that America’s network of alliances is now being faced with a counter-alliance of groups and nations no longer willing to accept its rule. 

Even the internal politics of South Korea has been scrambled over the last few months. Its new president, Lee Jae Myung, came to power last June, following six months of intense popular struggle to oust the US puppet President Yoon, who was impeached and jailed after declaring martial law, and trying to provoke a war with US backing. When President Lee visited Trump in August, he resisted US pressure for him to join US escalation against China, which is South Korea’s number one trading partner.

The friendly leaders from around the world who joined both the SCO summit and the Beijing V-Day celebration showed that US efforts to surround and threaten China are failing. Most of the southeast Asian countries that make up ASEAN, notably Vietnam, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia, attended after recent visits to their countries by Chinese President Xi. The significant exception was the Philippines, where the US maintains a military alliance aimed at China. But like in South Korea, the popular movement against US domination is strong, with serious efforts to force the US bases out, and to help US soldiers refuse to engage in a hopeless war that can only lead to needless suffering and death.

The American century, part two, is in a phase of serious reckoning, as China does what the U.S. has never done, which is build alliances rather than simply imposing its will on other nations. 

Remembering When the US Helped China Against Fascism

The week before China’s national V-Day celebrations, there was a special event in the southwestern province of Guizhou, honoring doctors and nurses from the US and European countries who formed an International Medical Rescue Corps. As this Xinhua article reports, “Dozens of foreign medical workers worked alongside thousands of their Chinese counterparts from the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps to save lives and provide medical training under harsh conditions. Today, these foreign medical workers are collectively remembered as the International Medical Relief Corps (IMRC).”

On August 26, a delegation of the descendants of these volunteers attended a commemoration in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, “to pay tribute to their forebears and mark the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War,” the Xinhua report said.

“As descendants of the International Medical Relief Corps, we are incredibly grateful to you for keeping our ancestors’ memory alive,” said Peter Soyogyi, whose father served in the IMRC. “For them, as international anti-fascists, this was not just China’s war; it was their own. It is essential for future generations to understand the fight against fascism and the struggle for freedom,” he added.

Following the commemoration ceremony, the descendants’ delegation and a group of solidarity activists from the US traveled along the famous “24-Zig Road” – also known as the Stilwell Road – which served as a supply line from Burma (now Myanmar) and India for medical supplies to the US-supported Chinese resistance to Imperial Japanese aggression. The road was a joint project of US and Chinese forces, and a symbol of their united efforts against Japanese fascist forces at the time.

US commanding General Joseph Stilwell had many conflicts with Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) leader Chiang Kai-Shek, who called for his ouster. Stilwell argued for unified efforts of the KMT and Red Army forces, which led to his replacement.

The descendants’ delegation, and the solidarity group from the US, got a close-up view of the challenges faced by US troops, as well as US and European medical workers, in helping the Chinese resistance to fascism during World War II.

Official US support during World War II for Chinese resistance to fascism was a major factor in defeating global fascism. But the switch to supporting fascism after the war, including up to the present day, poses a challenge to the world’s progressive forces. The existence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization constitutes a giant bulwark in that fight. But the struggle continues, as challenging as ever, as can be seen in the US-backed genocidal assault on Palestine. Just as the world’s progressive forces united to stop fascism in the 1940s, history calls on us to unite even more strongly today. Victory against fascism today may spell the end of imperialism and capitalism, and usher in the common prosperity and shared future the world needs now. China, clearly, in its honoring of U.S. medical teams from the past, and in its willingness to bridge divides between itself and other countries, some who have been less than sympathetic to China such as India, should be taken seriously by those of us studying world events and the trajectory of history. So far, a new world order appears to be possibly forming right before our eyes, a world order promising far more diplomacy than explicit warmaking, a world order led by China and countries emboldened to try a different route than what had been the norm under U.S. unipolarity for generations. The recent summit exemplifies this new possible path that China and other countries are now willing to risk against the terrorism of the West. 

Photo: General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea Kim Jong Un, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and President of Indonesia Prabowo Subianto at China’s Victory Day military parade in Beijing. Courtesy of the government of Indonesia.