A budget presentation at the organization's national convention in August clarifies the budget for members.

The post DSA Finances Demystified appeared first on Democratic Left.

Author: Mike Z

Things aren’t the best right now. I think we can probably all agree on that. The Trump administration is seemingly speed running the dismantling of our civil liberties while nakedly attacking any opposition of any kind. He’s declared war on anyone even remotely to the left of his positions with with broad and sweeping declarations of illegality so as to target and silence dissent within society. Even the most milquetoast liberals are being attacked and silenced for their modest criticism of Trump. Endless tariff uncertainty and corporate back dealing have led to ever increasing pinch in the wallet for the average person. ICE continues to attack our neighbors in the name of unlimited deportations. Federal troops and the national guard are being deployed en masse to ccities Trump deems to be “crime infested” to normalize their use against American citizens. Israel continues its genocide of Gaza from occupied Palestinian territory while the American media landscape consolidates control in the hands of a few Zionist sympathizers.

I think many of us did not expect things to fall so fast. That there would be at least some kind of fight or pushback that would slow things down. I think many of us thought we’d have more time to prepare for a fight that we knew may be coming, but just not yet.

We do not.

The fight against fascism is here. And with this recognition there is a sense of helplessness and hopelessness that can become paralyzing or empowering depending on your outlook. I recently helped run a new member orientation and when we talked about why we all joined, those feelings of helplessness and hopelessness were at the top of the list. For these people those feelings motivated them to seek out something more, but for so many others it leads us to shut down. Even those of us who have been in this fight for any amount of time are susceptible to this as well. What we do is not easy and we are all just human at the end of the day. It is something I have fought with on hard days as I’m sure many of you have as well, but we must be wary of letting those feelings set in and stay for any significant length of time. They can lead us to doomerism – that nihilistic feeling that nothing can change, try as we might, so what’s the point? It leads us to isolate and pull away from our comrades who are in desperate need of our support and solidarity. It leads us to comply with our ideological enemies before so much as a word is even uttered.

Do not comply in advance. Kill the part of you that dooms.

Your doomerism is the final boss of overcoming your liberalism. Liberalism teaches us to be oriented towards the individual and to hold that ability to operate unfettered from the restrictions of society and our peers as the highest virtue. It would have us believe that a single person, with enough pulling of the bootstraps, could change society. But anyone who has lived in one of our so-called liberal democracies understands the powerlessness of the individual in the face of systemic oppression. I believe this is where that doom comes from. But as socialists the remedy is simple. It is the knowledge that throughout history it has always been the case that true change only happens when the average person bands together in a fight for a vision of a future that has yet to be. A future that WILL be if we do the work now to materialize it.

We must remain endlessly hopeful that these actions we are taking right now will be the ones that start the fall of the first domino. We must remain steadfast in the face of overwhelming power and adversity to keep fighting for what we know to be right and just. We must remain assured in our convictions that the emancipation of all people from the evils of capitalism is worth fighting for to see a better future for our descendants who will reap what we sow today. And this is not to say it will be easy, because it certainly will not be, but remember that by joining with our comrades we can help each other foster and maintain the spirit of unyielding optimism that our fight requires. The future we want to build must remain our lodestar to bind us together in a movement larger than any one of us single actors.

In writing this I am constantly thinking of the Palestinian people, as I do most days for the past 2 years of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Every day there are new atrocities to learn about. Every day more innocent lives are lost in the name of genocidal irredentist conquest. But every day I am also stunned by the stories of ongoing resilience by those who remain and continue to fight for their very existence. They would have every right to despair. Nearly 80 years of occupation and systematic ethnic cleansing by Zionist forces, the majority of it patently unknown to much of the western world funding their destruction, and yet they carry on. They continue to fight for their homeland and their humanity with such grace and compassion. They remain unbroken.

Just as they dream of a world where they can live free in their land once more, we can embody this endless optimism in our fight to transform the world. We can work to build a world that will ensure that the oppressed and marginalized peoples around the world may never suffer a fate even remotely similar to those of Palestine, or Sudan, or Sri Lanka, or any of the other communities across the globe being persecuted ever again. For the sake of all people we must steel ourselves so we may respond to their cries for help both at home and abroad.

I recently finished a wonderful book, “Let This Radicalize You” by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba Cover to cover it was an amazing read that I highly recommend to any organizers looking for salient real world stories of other organizers and how they’ve struggled and succeeded. But that’s not what I want to talk about. During the book Mariame quotes one of her previous works and it has become permanently emblazoned into my mind –

“Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.”

And that’s really the whole thing right there to me. To me this quote really encapsulates the concept of Revolutionary Optimism in its entirety. When faced with heinous societal developments, don’t let it silence you, let it be the fuel that powers your resistance. Be it hope, anger or anything in between. And if you can’t do that, do it out of spite.
Remember that the average person does not like what is going on. They don’t like Trump and all the violence he is fomenting. They don’t like the attacks on their neighbors. They don’t like everything becoming endlessly more expensive while becoming worse every year. They don’t like the threats and restrictions on their freedoms across the board.
Remember that people want clean air and safe food. They want universal healthcare. They want affordable childcare. They want high quality infrastructure and public transit systems. They want affordable public housing. They want to feel safe with their family when they are out in the world. People want peace and prosperity, not war and destruction.

The average person is feeling all the same emotions of helplessness that we are – it’s our responsibility to help them. As those on the forefront of this struggle it is our duty to share our knowledge and strategies with the masses. To organize them and bring them into the fold of our fight. To show them a better future is possible and that they are a vital part of the equation that will free us all.

Organizing is the antidote to the despair we are all collectively feeling and working to stave off every day. In my short time in DSA I have found that surrounding myself with my comrades working together, no matter how small that work may be, has been the surest path to feeling secure in what we are doing. It’s helped me feel a little less alone in such uncertain times. It’s helped me feel reassured in the mission we are all here to fight for and the world that DSA believes in. I hope it can be that for you as well.

Kill the doomer inside you. A better world is possible for us all – let’s build it together.

Join DSA

If you’ve read this far I want to reward you with some of my current favorite videos that help me maintain my optimism for the future by reminding me why we fight. They help me lock back in. Yes, 3 of them are from Andor – don’t give me that look. Light spoilers if you haven’t seen it (go watch it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-asb8zTiuZ4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKB67KzjO4A 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaKrm5txGCQ

And finally an excerpt from one Michael Parenti’s many wonderful lectures

https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc?si=0o_HW2fb4jdUY-I4

The post Revolutionary Optimism and Why You Should Kill the Doomer Inside You appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Workers in Italy have been extremely successful in using the strike as a tool against war and connecting this with their lives at work.

The post Italian workers packed the streets for Palestine appeared first on EWOC.

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By: Frederick Reiber

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s students, workers, and union comrades gathered outside of the university’s Lobby 7 on Friday, October 10th to protest and celebrate MIT rejecting the Trump administration’s compact. 

Earlier this month, the White House sent offers to nine universities in what the administration titled “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Contained within these agreements were a number of stipulations—including commitments to accept the government’s priorities on admissions, women’s sports, free speech, student discipline and college affordability—exchanged for better access to federal research funding.

Following calls from the graduate worker union, professors, and numerous other student-led groups, MIT president Sally Kornbluth rejected the compact. She cited the numerous messages she had received asking for the compact’s rejection. In doing so the university becomes the first to reject the president’s proposal and the only such university at the time of writing.

Trump’s Continued Attacks on Higher Education

Trump’s proposal follows numerous attacks and challenges to higher education. The administration has paused federal funding of many top research universities, signed several executive orders targeting colleges, and attacked international students’ rights. These have emptied out entire neighborhoods in areas like Allston-Brighton as international student enrollment dropped precipitously this semester, and while the compact may be seen as an attempt to change course, academic leaders were quick to point out its true intent. Ariel White, vice president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at MIT, said:

This wasn’t an invitation letter, it was a ransom note… the goal is to leave universities powerless and at the whim of the federal government.

Other academic leaders agreed. MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU) – UE 256 president Lauren Chua called the proposal  “a thinly veiled attempt to divide us, to make us turn against each other, and to weaken the very communities that make our university thrive.” 

Chua couldn’t be more right, as the compact seeks to enforce harmful gender definitions, denying transgender students recognition and rolling back university protections, all masked under the language of “equality.” Other stipulations include forcing universities to be more accepting of conservative lines of thought, potentially overruling scientific consensus in academic research. The compact also bans colleges from using sex, ethnicity, gender, or political orientations, continuing the overturning of decades of academic work that finds strong connections between affirmative-action like policies and increasing opportunity for those with less money, or those who continue to face systemic racism. As Jade Personna, the speaker for the MIT Black Student Union, argued: “the battle is decades old and the Black Student Union has been fighting it since our inception.”

U.S. conservatives will continue their attacks on academic and intellectual freedom. That is part of a larger ideological project only furthered by the practical program of Project 2025. Long seen as bastions of “deceit and lies,” higher education has long been seen by conservatives as a threat. Some claim that colleges “teach that America is an evil, racist nation” purely for harboring left-wing scholars,. Now-Vice President JD Vance summarized their perception back in 2021: “the universities are the enemy.” 

In reality, American colleges reflect and reproduce America’s troubled history. Universities are learning institutions that are also landlords, schools that are also workplaces. 

Recognizing People Power

One important takeaway from the academic and student rally was the need for people power. Despite what other headlines may imply, the university’s rejection of the Trump Compact was not simply a matter of a good executive. The university’s rejection was a coordinated and community-led effort, won by the numerous student, worker, and professor-lead groups that organized against the compact by applying pressure on an executive amenable to that pressure.

The unfortunate reality is that American universities are businesses. Run by boards of trustees, colleges will do little to protect their students’ rights to academic or intellectual freedom in the face of financial turmoil. We have seen this time after time with pro-Palestine protests, and will likely continue to see similar protests dispelled. 

Kornbluth was forced to reject the compact by the very people who make MIT the institution of MIT. It is the professors, workers, and students who stood up for their communities, risking their bodies against an administration unafraid to kidnap or coerce. As Chua stated in her speech:

This is a victory for every single one of us, because we acted with unity and urgency, [because] we mounted a pressure that could not be ignored.

Fighting against fascism is not easy, it is not pretty, and it certainly is not done by CEOs, academic presidents, or a board of trustees. It is done through the blood, sweat, and organizing of workers, who—much like the community leaders at MIT—make themselves heard.

Frederick Reiber is a PhD student at Boston University researching collective action and technology. He is a member of SEIU 509, Boston DSA, and covers tech, labor, and education for Working Mass.

The post MIT Refuses to Sign Trump Compact Following Pressure from Grad Workers’ Union and Other Groups appeared first on Working Mass.

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From the beginning, the Trans Liberation Priority Project has put on its agenda passing trans sanctuary city legislation in the cities of Lakewood and Cleveland.
Lakewood is our first success.

The Cleveland DSA Chapter first submitted draft legislation to the City of Lakewood in April 2025 and showed up in support of this at a city council meeting, with numerous DSA members who resided in Lakewood giving testimony. Afterwards, representatives from DSA kept in touch with Council President Sarah Kepple about this for several months. In addition, we attended several events in Lakewood and canvassed, gathering resident signatures in support of the legislation.

The City, after consulting with leading local and state LGBTQ rights organizations, transformed our original draft into a Gender Freedom Policy which enshrines and upholds transgender rights in Lakewood. Sarah joined a DSA call in September and discussed the policy further. The legislation was formally brought to the floor of council in September and passed on October 6th, 2025—and we gained an earned media opportunity by being featured in an article in Ohio queer news publication The Buckeye Flame!

What does this show? Our efforts work. There is strength in numbers. Public support can sway minds. There is an appetite to protect our most vulnerable populations in Ohio, despite what legislation our state and federal governments pass. Persistent, polite communication and pressure works with local politicians. Blue cities can be beacons of hope, even in red states.

Our goal is to emulate this in the City of Cleveland. Through concentrated, democratic efforts with local partners and politicians, we aim to encourage Cleveland to pass similar legislation. The fight for another victory is only just beginning, and we are ready for it!

The post DSA’s Success: Lakewood Passes First-of-its-Kind “Gender Freedom Policy” appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

By: Taina Santiago

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has deported more than 400,000 people since Donald Trump took office again in January of this year. The administration recently allocated 75 billion dollars of funding to bolster the agency, which was originally formed in 2002 under George W. Bush and has been utilized by every administration since to target immigrant communities.

With ICE’s accelerated kidnapping and deportation operations, the Supreme Court legalizing racial profiling of Latine people, and the building of the shuttered-then-reopened concentration camp that the right disgustingly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”, many have compared this current era of attacks — specifically against Mexican immigrants — to the rise of fascism in Germany and the Nazis’ early antisemitic targeting of Jewish people in the 1930s. And while these comparisons are valid, we can also look in our own front lawn to see history repeating itself. The Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s — a period of time where as many as 2 million people of Mexican ancestry were forcibly or coercively sent to Mexico — took place on U.S. soil in the exact same period of rising fascism in Germany, but has gone largely unacknowledged since.

In the 1930s, The Great Depression brought on unprecedented levels of poverty and unemployment in the U.S. and around the world, a catastrophic downturn that was used by the government to scapegoat people of Mexican ancestry as the cause of these economic issues. President Hoover and his administration pushed an anti-immigration campaign at the time that revolved around keeping “American jobs for real Americans,” a dog whistle that quietly communicated that American meant — and still means — white.

In a white supremacist nation like the U.S., instead of the state of the economy being used as a mobilizing force for the working class, it is used — very effectively — to turn white working class people against Black and Brown people. Any time there is a recession or depression, minorities are to blame rather than the rich people who gamble with our livelihoods and abuse workers. Today, that economic rhetoric has been replaced by another set of lies that fearmonger about undocumented people committing more crimes — a claim that has been proven false. But it is all the same message of dehumanizing minorities in order to maintain white supremacy.

Back in the early 20th century, instead of ICE, it was the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) doing the deportations of 82,000 Mexican people between 1929 and 1935. But there were also many state and local “repatriation programs”–supported by the federal government–that encouraged people of Mexican ancestry to leave their homes, businesses, and communities for jobs, food stipends and financial assistance that did not materialize as promised, with cities like Detroit and Los Angeles carting off train cars full of people who were just living their lives. According to Professor Ana Raquel Minian in their contribution to this TIME article, “60% are believed to have been American citizens — most of them children.” This is a shocking statistic until you begin to understand that the very purpose of these “anti-immigration” efforts are nothing more than a tool to rid the U.S. of Black and Brown people, undocumented and documented alike.

Just as it is today, terror was used in the 1930s as a tool of coercion, with racial profiling and raids making life difficult for all people of Mexican ancestry. The USCIS website itself admits that, “though the effort was not aimed expressly at Mexican [people] it affected them more than other nationalities. For example, in 1930 Mexican [people] accounted for over half of all deportations.” It affected them more because they were people of color, othered by the U.S. government.

That othering continues today, where you can see on ICE and other immigration websites that every instance of the word “non-citizen” has been changed back to “alien” since Trump took office again. As it pertains to raids, the website also states that, “[a] more important result of [INS] raids, however, was that the threat of increased federal deportations likely hastened the departure of thousands of Mexican [people].” ICE’s sweeping raids of immigrant communities is creating this same fear in people around the country, and that is by design.

Detroit had its own Mexican Repatriation program that was advertised by the local government and Diego Rivera himself–the artist who painted the famed Detroit Industry murals at the DIA. He was recruited by the governor at the time, Wilber Brucker, and the Detroit Mexican Consulate, to help convince people of Mexican descent to leave Michigan. He falsely believed they would be greeted by new worker cooperatives, so he saw it as a liberating opportunity for his people and country. However, as he later came to find out, he was sold a bill of goods.

Detroit’s Mexican Repatriation program reduced the city’s population of Mexican people by 90% by 1936. And because of this pervasive, years-long ethnic cleansing, generations of Mexican-Americans were traumatized into silence, often opting for assimilation to survive. Only recently have we been able to hear the oral histories of Mexican-American Detroiters through projects like Maria Cotera and Elena Herrada’s documentary, Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land (2001), which asked elders who experienced the repatriation to recount their experiences of loss and suffering.

I was inspired to write this article because of a PBS documentary (you can watch it here) that happened to be playing on TV one night, which featured John Leguizamo documenting the history and activism of Latine people in America. In it, he talked about this repatriation operation, something I had never heard of in my life. I sat on the couch, confused. Confused about how I was unaware of this decade-long event that has shaped immigration policy and rhetoric ever since, and confused about why more parallels were not being drawn between it and the current times. The answer was that we simply hadn’t been taught about it en masse.

An essential feature of the propagation of U.S. imperialism is to erase history and frame ourselves as “the good guys”. We are taught in school and the media that most egregious human rights violations happen elsewhere, not here. Black and Brown people have always known this to be a blatant perversion of the truth — even if some of the specific examples like the Mexican Repatriation are also hidden from us. But it is a lie that white America falls for time and time again, even while they witness historically marginalized people suffer around them.

This present moment — the fascism, the racial targeting, and the white supremacy leading it all — was happening in the U.S. in the 1930s. So it is not solely Germany’s history we are repeating, but also our own. In fact, people of color have been living under fascism in the U.S. since the inception of this country, but it is only now that white America is waking up to this reality. It is time for the U.S. to look its ugly history in the face and finally–for the sake of the lives of Black and Brown people–learn from both the world’s and this country’s atrocities.

If you are looking for more ways to help in the struggle against ICE in our neighborhoods, join Detroit’s People’s Assembly contingent this Saturday, October 18th, 3PM at Roosevelt Park for the No Kings Rally taking place to connect with community members with the same resistance goals as you. Stay strong. Stay safe. We can only do this together. Solidarity forever!

The U.S. Playbook: How The Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s Mirrors Our Current Moment was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

No — but just-cause rules protect unionized workers from unfair firing and discipline.

The post Do unions protect bad employees? appeared first on EWOC.

DSA is proud to endorse Frankie Santos Fritz for Greenbelt Mayor & City Council!

Frankie is a longtime local organizer and branch leader with Metro DC DSA. He is a proud member of a union family and plans to introduce a collective bargaining ordinance to cover the city workforce. Frankie is also a member of the Greenbelt Home Inc housing co-op and is championing laws to empower tenants who wish to convert their communities to cooperative or social housing.

Frankie plans to expand rent stabilization protections to cap annual rent increases with the rate of inflation. He is dedicated to supporting federal workers who are under attack from DOGE and the federal administration. His top transportation priority for the next term would be getting the long-promised Capital Bikeshare station built at the Greenbelt Metro Station and getting it stocked with numerous E-Bikes.

Check out the rest of Frankie’s campaign priorities!

Who are our other candidates?

DSA’s Nationally-endorsed socialist candidates are running for local office in Washington, Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts!

Our candidates are incredible fighters for the working class, championing rent stabilization and higher minimum wages, while also protesting ICE’s human rights violations.

This year, we launched a rotating fundraising slate and held phonebanks to foster cross-chapter solidarity. And we’ve raised over $100,000!

Donate to the Slate!

In an ideal world, our ballot wouldn’t contain a measure like Proposition 50. We would have a political system built on true proportional representation, where the maps are drawn by and for the people, not by a political class to serve its own ends. But this is not that world. For decades, corporations and billionaires have spent enormous sums of money to rig our elections and consolidate their power, leaving us with a broken system that offers us two unpalatable options in a political game designed to keep the working class out of power.

Now, we are confronted with a clear and present danger: a coordinated, authoritarian project at the national level that seeks to rig elections and cement minority rule. In Texas, a partisan gerrymander is designed to steal congressional seats and consolidate power, with direct and devastating impacts on our communities—from attacks on labor rights to the ongoing assaults on immigrants.

This is a tactical moment that demands a tactical response. A "No" vote on Prop 50, while a symbolic stand against gerrymandering in all its forms, would be a unilateral disarmament in the face of an active assault on our democracy. This would be a “sideways” move. Sometimes we must fight fire with fire. 

This is where we must move onward, not sideways. Our movement is about moving forward toward a just and equitable society, rather than getting distracted by lateral battles that don't advance our cause. A "sideways" move would be to lose focus on the primary threats to our communities, or to get caught up in a political game that doesn't serve our long-term interests. That is why our endorsement of a "Yes" vote is a pragmatic one, born out of a clear-eyed assessment of the stakes.

Passing Prop 50 is an essential step in stopping the advance of fascism in the United States. It will counter Republican-led rigging of elections in states like Texas and Florida and give us a tangible chance to fight back against the Trump and billionaire agenda. 

Crucially, voting yes on Prop 50 does not disband or replace California's independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. The commission will remain in place and is set to resume its work after the 2030 census. This is a temporary, tactical measure that buys us time to continue organizing for a better world.

Beyond the immediate tactical gains, our endorsement of Prop 50 aligns us with the broader labor movement in California. Unions across the state recognize the critical importance of fair representation in protecting workers' rights and advancing a pro-labor agenda. When the working class stands united, we are a formidable force. Our vote for Prop 50 is a vote of solidarity with our labor comrades, strengthening our collective power against the forces of reaction and fascism. By standing with labor, we reinforce the understanding that the fight for fair elections is inseparable from the fight for economic justice and a socialist future.

We cannot cede this part of the fight against fascism and leave the center to lead it alone—they will fail. Only socialism can beat fascism. We are not just voting on maps; we are voting to protect our fellow workers, our immigrant neighbors, and our climate from a right-wing agenda that seeks to dismantle our unions, gut our social safety net, and accelerate climate collapse.

Vote yes on Prop 50, not as an act of faith in the establishment, but as an act of tactical resistance. And then, let's get back to the real work of building power from the ground up, for a political system that truly serves the many, not just the few.

Fight back California! Onward and not sideways!