The massive cuts to Medicaid in Trump’s budget package promise devastation, not only to the 13 million people who will be stripped of eligibility, but to hospitals and clinics in rural and other underserved communities that rely on Medicaid funds to remain solvent. Many will close or be taken over by private investors who specialize in buying public entities and "downsizing" them, maintaining only those services that turn a profit. Public hospitals everywhere will tighten their belts, laying off workers and stonewalling in contract talks with their unions. People who have been cut off Medicaid will have nowhere else to go for care but already overburdened emergency rooms.

Sooner or later, most seniors and people with disabilities requiring long-term care wind up relying on Medicaid to pay for it, because it can wipe out your savings in a hurry. As of July 2024, Medicaid is the primary payer for 63% of nursing home residents; the cuts will put them in an impossible situation. In the Black community, maternal mortality rates are already shockingly high; the cuts will push them even higher.

Congressional Republicans claim they are saving money by stripping away eligibility from illegal immigrants and the people who don't meet work requirements (what were known in Victorian England as "the undeserving poor"). But nearly two-thirds of those on Medicaid actually do hold jobs, and most of the rest are either ill, disabled, or serving as primary caregivers for someone else. As for the undocumented, federal spending on their health care is already against the law. In states where all residents are eligible, regardless of citizenship or immigration status, the state picks up the tab for their care.

Far more people will be affected by the cuts than the GOP is letting on. Rep. David Valadao represents Bakersfield, California, and the surrounding area. Nearly two-thirds of his constituents are on MediCal, California's version of Medicaid. Valadao promised to oppose any cuts to Medicaid, but when it came time to vote on the House budget bill, he caved and voted yes. There are others in Congress like him. If only one of them had voted no, the bill would not have cleared the House.

But the Republicans are right about one thing: soaring health care costs are making both Medicaid and Medicare unsustainable. There is an enormous amount of waste built into both programs, and continuing down the current path is fiscally irresponsible.

Problems due to subsidies of private capital

This isn't because the wrong people are getting coverage. It's because, over the years, every move by the federal government to extend health care access has been accomplished with massive subsidies of private capital. Many people were helped by the Affordable Care Act, but the private insurance industry benefited from it to the tune of $10 billion of our federal tax dollars. A majority of people on Medicare now get it from private Medicare Advantage plans, paid for out of the Medicare trust fund. These are a gold mine for corporations like United Health, bilking the system even further by claiming patients are sicker than they actually are, while denying costly claims for those who are truly sick.

As for Medicaid, East Bay DSA member Michael Lighty, who chairs the statewide Healthy California Now coalition, points out that “90 to 95 percent of the benefits nationwide through Medicaid are administered by for-profit managed care organizations. That’s where the waste is, that’s where the fraud is.”

In some parts of the country, Republicans counter Democratic charges of throwing the poor under the bus by pointing out the Democratic Party’s ties with corporate hospital chains. And private for-profit hospitals do, in fact, make a killing off federal programs, often at the expense of patient care.

The threatened cuts to federal health care spending are symptoms of a crisis that neither party has shown a willingness to confront, despite efforts by a minority of Congressional Democrats to promote a single payer solution. Each party uses the health care system's failures to attack the other, but only independent political organizing can defend the millions of people whose lives and well-being are at stake.

This applies not only to electoral politics but to unions. Maintaining health benefits in the face of steadily rising costs has long been a millstone around the neck of organized labor. Union negotiators are forced to sacrifice much of their leverage at the bargaining table not to win better coverage, but just to keep what they have. When contract talks break down, health coverage is usually the cause.

Unions need to do more than pass convention resolutions

Organized labor is arguably the only institution with the resources and infrastructure to counter the influence of the health care industry. Union leaders who have had to bargain over health benefits know all too well the stiff price of a system of private, employer-based health coverage. Many will readily acknowledge that a universal, publicly funded health care system would be far better for workers. But union political behavior is notoriously risk-averse, and telling your members that they can no longer count on the union to win decent coverage is an admission of defeat that few union officials are willing to make. For them to do more than simply pass single payer resolutions at conventions, their members will have to demand it.

The appalling cruelty of the Medicaid cuts has emerged, quite properly, as a major talking point for Democratic politicians. But it falls to us to point out that real solutions require a willingness to attack the source of the problem: the looting of public health care dollars by private capital. Until that happens, every effort to extend access to care will be held hostage in the face of exploding costs and the states’ fiscal crisis.

Perhaps necessarily, health care reform has been a lower priority in recent years for many in labor and the left. But the federal budget has pushed it onto the front burner, whether we like it or not. In the wake of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, single payer was at the top of DSA’s agenda. It's time for us to take it up again in earnest.

No shortage of opportunities to engage

The impact of the cuts is so sweeping that there will be no shortage of opportunities to engage. Something like 70 percent of the money spent on health care in California ultimately comes from our tax dollars. Massive cuts at the federal level–which include premium subsidies under the Affordable Care Act as well as Medicare and Medicaid–will be felt across the board:

• Insurance companies can be expected to try to make up for lost federal revenue by jacking their premiums, making it that much harder for unions to bargain over health benefits. We need to pay close attention to union contract struggles and not simply lend our support, but be prepared to talk about why it will take more than tough bargaining and militant picket lines to protect those benefits. We need to persuade our unions to not just pass resolutions, but to actually invest resources and political capital in the fight for single payer.

• Community hospitals and clinics that serve MediCal patients were already under growing pressure to economize by cutting back on care, struggling just to stay open. The federal cuts will drastically worsen the situation. Community members most directly affected will need organized support, and local officials will need to have their feet held to the flames to make sure everything possible is done to keep those facilities running and adequately funded.

• Two years ago, after years of struggle, California became the first state in the country to extend Medicaid eligibility to all qualified residents, regardless of age or immigration status. But even before the federal budget was passed, Gov. Newsom and the state legislature were walking back on the commitment—there will be no new enrollees among the undocumented starting next year, and those already enrolled will be required to pay a $30 monthly premium (thankfully, the legislature scaled back Gov. Newsom’s original proposal of $100). With the state facing a budget deficit, there will be enormous pressure to further undermine a victory that immigrant rights forces fought long and hard to achieve.

When you or a loved one is denied needed care, or can't get it without financial hardship or ruin, it's the most natural response in the world to think, "This is just wrong," and react with anger. It's highly personal, and all too real. But once the conversation turns to economics, how health care is to be financed and what its cost drivers are, you've moving beyond direct experience and into the realm of public policy. All too often, this involves a dive into the weeds that not everyone is prepared to make.

Here is where a socialist perspective becomes indispensable: everything about our health care system that involves the taking of profits drives costs upward, and those costs have soared beyond the point where the system can continue to absorb them. During the debate over the Affordable Care Act, one of Obama’s policy wonks remarked that health care reform was complicated because the system has so many moving parts. But all of the machine’s components have a single power source, and it’s on us to name it. There is a reason why the world’s most market-driven health care system is also far and away the most expensive.

Naming the system is not enough; you need an effective strategy to defeat it. Here again, DSA is equipped to bring something to the table that is badly needed: an analysis of the different forces that can be won over, an understanding of how and when their interests intersect and what it might take to “unite all who can be united” and get them working together. The catastrophic cuts to the federal health care budget are an opportunity as well as a crisis. Let’s not squander it.

On Friday July 11 the East Bay DSA “Fighting Oligarchy” campaign shifted from internal organizing and planning to organizing on the streets. Nearly twenty DSA and Federal Unionists Network (FUN) members turned out on a sunny downtown Oakland afternoon to test our idea that we could recruit federal workers and the broader public into the struggle against Trump’s attacks on federal workers, collective bargaining rights and vital services by canvassing outside a federal workplace.

To avoid prohibitions on soliciting on federal property, we set up our table across the street, at the foot of a pedestrian mall where many federal workers come out for lunch. We began by hearing inspirational remarks from Sol Hilfinger-Pardo of the FUN, and former East Bay DSA co-chair Keith Brower Brown, about the attacks on workers and our opportunity to establish a place to fight back in solidarity.

Over the next couple hours, we had a lot of good conversations and signed up several dozen people, most of them federal workers. In our debrief we agreed that the event validated our premises and marked a successful beginning to the public dimension of the campaign.

East Bay DSA’s Top-Priority Campaign

Six weeks earlier, East Bay DSA’s annual convention adopted the “Fighting Oligarchy” campaign, which had been in the works since March, as a priority resolution. The membership voted separately to make the fight against the Trump oligarchy the chapter’s top priority for the coming year. The campaign resolution provided that “a central focus of our campaign” will be solidarity support of the FUN, “a group of self-organized federal workers who play a strategic role in the national struggle, and here in the Bay Area.”

Mark Smith of DSA SF, a founder and national steering committee member of the FUN and president of Local 1 of the National Federation of Federal Employees, was on hand to help motivate the resolution at the convention. As he notes in a short video promoting the campaign launch, “There are over 2 million federal workers across the country” (3 million including postal workers) “and tens of thousands of us right here in the Bay Area. We’re the ones delivering essential services the working class depends on, getting social security checks delivered on time, putting out wildfires, delivering your mail, answering phone calls from veterans in crisis, and keeping your food and water safe.”

The Role of Labor Notes

A few weeks later, campaign organizers spread the word to 400 rank-and-file union members at Oakland Technical High School for a day-long Labor Notes event, the Bay Area Troublemakers School. Labor Notes was a critical incubator of the FUN, which coalesced at a meet-up of federal employees at the national Labor Notes conference in Chicago. FUN’s co-founders modeled their new network on Railroad Workers United, another group of self-organized rank-and-file workers from multiple unions within the same sector that also had its roots in a prior Labor Notes conference.

Leaders of the FUN joined the Oakland event as participants and featured speakers. Hai Binh Nguyen, a FUN leader at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, spoke at the opening plenary, and Mark Smith, a Veterans Health Administration worker, spoke on a panel about “Fighting Cuts and Layoffs” with local public-sector workers.

An Energizing Public Meeting Brings in New Members

By the end of June, campaign organizers, who had been meeting weekly since the convention, led our inaugural event: a political education and member engagement session that filled the hall of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555.

We were fortunate that Alex Pelletieri of New York City DSA, and a member of DSA’s National Political Committee, was in town to open the meeting. Leading a familiar chant—“When workers’ rights are under attack, what do we do? STAND UP, FIGHT BACK!”—Pelletieri then broke it down for the audience. He laid out the attacks on workers, unions and the working class, and how the Federal Unionists Network is leading the charge in fighting back.

“For people to get involved in the fight for a better world,” he concluded, “they have to believe that one is possible. They have to believe that the people around them have their back. So the FUN and DSA are giving us hope. In the face of horrific attacks from Donald Trump, we are providing a place for working class people to fight back.”

Six leaders of the Federal Unionists Network were on hand, three of whom spoke on a compelling panel moderated by former East Bay DSA co-chair Zach McDonald. Representing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Veterans Health Administration, the panelists described the attacks on federal workers and unions, the impacts of those attacks on the broader labor movement, and some of the ways they erode programs, protections and services on which the working class and general public depend.

“This administration is attacking federal workers from all directions,” said Bethany Dreyfus, a FUN leader who works at the EPA, and is president of AFGE Local 1236. “They are firing our newest employees, laying off those in mid-career, and leading the most experienced out with early retirements. But without people in these positions, the workforce will be too small to ensure that vital services get to the American people.”

After hearing from the speakers, participants reviewed the campaign’s goals: build a broad working-class movement in the East Bay by engaging local federal workers in the FUN, and by connecting their fight with local political and labor struggles and with the fights of other union workers (e.g., teachers, nurses and academic workers) to serve our community.

Participants then broke out into small groups to begin planning public events, political education programming, research, communications and member engagement activities for the coming months. They also signed up to join the public launch: a tabling and canvassing action at the Ronald Dellums federal building in Oakland a few weeks later.

"Having East Bay DSA on board has been really energizing,” said Hilfinger-Pardo, who works at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “There is incredible potential in organizing the 2 million federal workers in this country, but it is no small task. So when DSA helps us organize, it puts wind in our sails. We're really excited to see how this partnership develops."

Canvassing Federal Workers

The action at the Dellums Federal Building was the moment we had all been waiting and planning for. In remarks before we fanned out to talk with federal workers, Hilfinger-Pardo, a member of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Chapter 335, said “We have been very active in our union for years now because we have to fight every single day for our collective bargaining rights,” adding that “Right now, the federal workforce is under attack in an unprecedented way.” She concluded that “today is just the beginning” of a campaign that will “create those connections” between federal and non-federal workers so that “we continue to grow and strengthen each other through collective action.” [See video]

Former East Bay DSA co-chair Keith Brower Brown pointed out the massive betrayal of the Trump administration in cutting 17 million people from Medicaid a week earlier. “We're going to capitalize on that,” he said. “We're going to build a movement that can keep pushing not just to fix these cuts and defend these workers, but keep pushing for the kind of universal social programs that we all deserve.”

The event proved that many Californians are looking for an opportunity to get involved in the fight. A dozen pairs of DSA and FUN members fanned out across the mall on both sides of the building and on the sidewalk. Another pair was turned back by security as they made their way to the cafeteria. Our campaign lit (written and designed by California Red editor Fred Glass) provided a political framing for the conversations and included QR codes to sign up with the FUN and connect with DSA.

Besides connecting federal workers with the FUN, we used the opportunity to begin to achieve another goal of the campaign: connecting federal and local struggles. A few days after the canvass, healthcare workers at the Alameda Health System, the county’s public hospital and clinic network, held a rally at Highland Hospital in Oakland to call on Governor Newsom to fully fund MediCal. We shared information about that event during our picket.

As we debriefed, exciting new ideas came up. Could we develop a “canvass in a box” so that pairs of canvassers could easily and nimbly come out again, soon and regularly? Could we design a poster with a QR code, and poster-canvass the nearby businesses frequented by federal workers? Could we plan an event at a nearby national park?

“So many federal workers are new to organizing,” MT Snyder, chair of the FUN’s Bay Area organizing committee, said afterwards. “DSA's campaign gives us a huge opportunity to learn from experienced organizers and build our own skillsets while engaging members of our unions.”

More Events to Come

In the next month, we will hold a political education event, “Trump 2’s Crusade against Labor,” which will feature speakers and a discussion about DOGE and the disastrous effects of slashing the American scientific and social safety nets. East Bay DSA’s new “Socialism Beats Fascism” Committee is hosting a public meeting featuring the “Fighting Solidarity” campaign on August 5. And we are planning a social event to bring together FUN members, socialists and local workers.

We will also be supporting a DSA-endorsed, FUN-led event on July 23, “Federal workers say: ICE Out of Our Workplace! ICE Out of ALL Workplaces!” at San Francisco City Hall.

The summer’s organizing will culminate with mass actions on Labor Day, an opportunity for us to reach many more federal workers, members of other unions, and the broader working class.

“Trump’s attacks on the federal workforce and public services aim to create a climate of fear, precarity and desperation for all working Americans,” said campaign co-chair Zach McDonald. “But we can unite millions around the expectation that working people deserve good jobs and all the protections and programs federal workers deliver that we depend on. That’s what federal union members are fighting for, and that’s why it has never been more important for us to stand together.”

Native Californians today are a powerful force. They are paddling a river they have recently liberated from multiple dams, recovering vast parcels of stolen Tribal lands and multiple languages, and transforming their relationships with the state itself. They are making schools finally teach children the truth about their history, and proudly wearing regalia formerly banned in graduations. And they are doing it in California, where the invasion of white settlers eradicated 95% of their ancestors not long ago. Given these and other extraordinary Native achievements, what might California DSA members learn from our Native neighbors about how to harness the power to survive -- and overcome -- horrible things?

The Slaughters Ongoing

Americans are facing a lot of death right now. The president signed into law a bill projected to kill more than 51,000 people annually through its impacts to federal health care programs alone, and our weapons have been used to slaughter more than 57,000 Gazans. These are the very definition of horrible things.

Our soil in California is hardly new to bloodstain. The scale of the genocides against Native Californians since the arrival of Spanish missionaries is difficult to contemplate. From mass rapes and child abductions to the state-funded scalpings, murders, enslavement, and comprehensive land theft, nearly every settler, through action or inaction, was in some way complicit. Efforts to eradicate Native people and their lifeways continued for many decades, including through multiple treaty violations and betrayals, and the forced enrollment of children in the deadly Indian boarding school system.

The effects of these dire public policies continue to linger. Recent research indicates being "American Indian or Alaska Native" still costs a person, on average, 6.5 years of life.

Tribal people fought from the beginning against their total erasure, and they are still fighting today. Native studies scholar Gerald Vizenor defines "survivance" as "an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion" and "stories that renounce dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry."

Ceremony as Praxis

We sat down to discuss this question of surviving horrible things -- survivance -- with Gregg Castro, who enjoys and engages deeply with his own t'rowt'raahl Salinan, and rumsen & ramaytush Ohlone ancestry. Castro holds leadership roles in multiple Tribal, cultural and historical entities advancing Native Californian survivance, including the California Indian History Curriculum Coalition, California Indian Conference, and Society for California Archaeology’s Native American Programs Committee. He is an energetic man with a long ponytail who at one point in our conversation whipped out a deer hoof rattle to shake at our Zoom screen with a twinkle in his bright eyes. He brought an infectious optimism to our conversation, and in spite of our subject, we left feeling uplifted and hopeful.

How does one survive a genocide? Not only physically, but culturally and spiritually? We're both disabled and concerned about what fascists may try to do to us, but as white people, genocide isn't the reason why.

As we talked with Castro, the word that he kept using when answering our many, uncomfortably existential questions was: “ceremony.” “Those that have managed to trudge on have done it because they remembered who they were and remembered the rituals, the ceremonies, that connected them to who they were and where they came from," he said. “The purpose of ceremony," he told us, "is really a prayer. And prayer is to constantly renew and replenish and strengthen our relationship to ourselves, to each other, and the place we came from.” This kind of ceremony connects to the past, to a shared culture, and to a hopeful future.

It would be mighty white of us to appropriate either Castro’s or any other Native ceremony, so we asked uncomfortably about that, too. He readily stressed a critical point: “We can give you a ceremony; we can’t give you your ceremony.” 

Ceremony here is a form of embodied praxis. In her book We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms & the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies (University of Washington Press 2018) Hupa scholar and Tribal member Cutcha Risling Baldy sets out to describe the successful effort to "(re)write," "(re)right," and "(re)rite" Native feminisms through the revival of a dormant, multi-day Hupa ceremony, known in English as the "Flower Dance". It celebrates girls' first menses and their honored and powerful new status as women. The physically rigorous ceremony is rich in dancing and other forms of physical embodiment (running, swimming, practiced stillness); abundant singing, humor, joy and storytelling; and deep and intricate community bonds, engaging participants in many activities from lengthy preparation through the several days and nights of the ceremony itself.

Ceremonies like this were deliberately targeted during the genocidal terror, which was particularly gruesome in northwestern California, where the Hupa have lived from time immemorial. Women were special targets. "Attempts to subvert the roles and place of Native women were built into settler colonial policies because Native women, who at one time exercised autonomy in Native societies, represented a threat to the settler colonial state and settler colonial societal organization," Risling Baldy writes. Native genders and sexualities were more diverse than the invaders' heteropatriarchal system could tolerate. The federal government further forbade in 1882 all "heathenish dances" and ceremonies, adding imprisonment to the potential cost of participation.

Thus, "Native women had to constantly negotiate between continued practice of their rituals and threats of violence" from colonizers who raped, abducted, slaughtered and imprisoned them, and especially during ceremonial practices that made them physically vulnerable, like the Flower Dance. As a result of the violence, while Native peoples persisted in their ceremonies, those "that were led by or featured women" were practiced less, Risling Baldy writes.

“For a regime to have joyful people is dangerous. And that’s what dance often brings,” Castro noted. In this he echoed socialist and legendary DSAer Barbara Ehrenreich in her Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Granta Books 2007): "When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order."

During the Flower Dance, "first menstruation is tied to world renewal and to the girl's newfound ability to commune with the sentient power of the universe." The Hupa believe singing and dancing "in a certain manner" during world renewal ceremonies corrects the world's spiritual imbalance. The neighboring Wiyot Tribe was in the middle of performing their own world renewal ceremony on nearby Tuluwat Island in Humboldt Bay, when white marauders ambushed and tried to eradicate them, slaughtering hundreds in a single week in 1860.

The Wiyot Tribe has also revived that sacred ceremony in recent years, and got the island back, too.

Like the wins of the #LandBack movement, the revival of Tribal ceremonies in recent decades is a "tangible, physical, spiritual, and communal act of healing and decolonization," Risling Baldy writes. While non-Native menstrual taboos had made participants shy about the Flower Dance, "as more and more girls observed and experienced this dance, the dance became more socially acceptable. After ten years, girls started to request that the dance be done for them, instead of being approached by elders hoping they would want one." This was more than "a static re-creation or an attempt to recapture a 'traditional' ceremony from the 'old days'. Instead the ceremony was being reclaimed as a dynamic and inventive building block of Hupa culture."

Toward a Socialist Ceremonial Praxis

This got us thinking: where are democratic socialists' own timelessly defiant, community-connecting ceremonial practices?

Castro told us, “When we reawaken these ceremonies, we’re reawakening really critical, important parts of ourselves and remembering who we are.” Could communing in an explicitly embodied, ceremonially socialist way with the best aspects of America’s creation stories actually renew its ability to realize them?

The Founders "borrowed" foundational concepts of democracy, common among continental Indigenous cultures, from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, then gritted their wooden teeth and plopped out a nation. For all its capitalist, slaveholding capitulations and hypocrisies, it was hypothetically engineered to improve over time, and not upon the edicts of a king. It even aspired to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. When amended by the global struggles for liberation from all oppressions, it's not a bad origin story to tell.

"[S]o how are you going to face the end of the world?" a Hupa medicine woman asked, thinking of a foster child's re-traumatizing dislocation even as she prepared to be honored by the Flower Dance. "With laughter, with joy, with an open mind and an open heart," she answered. Risling Baldy writes, "We are not sad, dying Indians, and this documentation of our revitalizations is not of a dying culture, but instead a culture that has always envisioned an Indigenous future."

Similarly, socialism must remain up for renewal and reinterpretation across eras and cultures. Risling Baldy quotes anthropologist Peter Nabokov: "Keeping many versions of its primordial claims and cultural experiences fluid and available for discussion enables a society to check and adjust its course through uncertain times." What can be experienced in the moment as unweildy sectarianism might turn out to be key to our long term survival.

According to Castro, "There is a peace to [ceremony]. An innate peace that strikes a part of us that was itself asleep." Perhaps the practiced flow of lively and productive democratic process can also be its own kind of Zen. Ehrehreich wrote that even as they persecuted ecstatically celebratory masses, in truth "'loss of control' is what the colonizers feared would happen to themselves."

Power feels precarity and threat when political collectives seize public fora to passionately plead for justice, or raise iconic fists in an upswelling of defiance, or swarm as neighbors in response to thuggish ICE raids, or hold picket lines. But really each of these embodied practices are a restoration of order. Even as a trans-forward Pride march in MAGA-land is a colorful explosion of celebration, it is also a return to the natural, peacable order of human relations, one in which joy and delight vanquish stuffy oppression.

Tule is a wetland plant once used throughout much of Native California. These long reeds make a light, flexible material which, when carefully bundled together, craft a buoyant boat that was widely used for travel throughout California's many waterways and even coastline. However, staying on and piloting a tule boat requires considerable skill and practice, Castro told us. Without that knowledge, people lose their balance, fall off, and splash abruptly into the drink. The invaders' (his polite term is "newcomers'") theft and pollution of tule harvest sites drove that crucial cultural knowledge dormant for a long time. But multiple Tribes are now reviving traditional tule harvest and boat-making practices, holding festive inter-Tribal races.

The gathering and bundling of separate lives into a whole, the buoyancy and challenge of navigating with them, and their muscular, collective resurgence after a long dormancy are themes socialists can also relate to. An old journey, renewed.

Whatever ceremonies we revive, reimagine and reinvent, they hold potential to steer us away from the traumas now threatening our tenderest togetherness. Many Californian native plant communities need periodic fire to truly regenerate. In like fashion, may the crucible of this nation's authoritarian moment, and our transformation within it, make each of us, and most importantly, all of us together, into the best version of who we might yet become.

In March 2025 I published a piece in DemLeft reflecting on my tenure as Co-Chair and Treasurer of California DSA. In it, I explore CA DSA’s successes and challenges, reflect on core lessons, and offer questions to help organizers across the country reckon with what it means to build a middle layer in DSA.

In May, comrades Fred G. and Michael L. responded to my piece in the California DSA Newsletter. Rather than building on or critically engaging with the analysis, however, they deeply distort its contents.

In my piece, I propose that the new CA DSA State Committee conduct a reflection on its work in order to assess what its path forward should be.

To their credit, the comrades spend a portion of their piece doing that, stating “Since Hazel’s departure, California DSA has simultaneously scaled back some of its ambitions until such time as we are able to figure out the financing and staffing, and begun, nonetheless, to achieve some of the more modest goals we laid out.”

This is not news to me. After all, I authored the resolution that scaled back CA DSA’s ambitions and successfully agitated for it to pass because I expected it to help in exactly the ways it did.

I refer to some of these successes in my piece, stating:

“In early 2024, when I felt like our experiment had largely stalled out, I put forward plans to drastically scale back, focus on a central priority, and even consider dissolving…As a result, involvement in CA DSA has largely increased, with some larger chapters like SF and LA folding ARCH campaign work into their existing electoral efforts, and smaller and medium chapters like San Diego, Long Beach, & North Central Valley with no existing campaigns stepping up to do campaign work.”

Importantly, however, I go on to urge the new State Committee to conduct the kind of rigorous and sober analysis I did of my own term by asking itself whether it achieved the goals of its own vision document such as “did we achieve material wins and have a significant impact on external political organizations and terrains of struggle?” and “did we grow and strengthen chapters?”

While the authors fail to explore these questions rigorously, they do offer an alternate diagnosis for California DSA’s challenges by citing a lack of staff and funding. I am glad for this opportunity to contrast meaningful political differences. I personally don't believe we should create and maintain new bodies in DSA that require staffing and funding without securing these things beforehand. And while I believe staffing has its place, I support the much more member-focused approach outlined in this piece by the Red Star caucus.

Unfortunately, instead of conducting a deeper investigation or engaging in more substantive internal-facing critique, the authors quickly pivot to a defensive misrepresentation my piece, ultimately muddying the waters:

“In this light, her conclusion that ‘The cost to DSA as a whole is too great, in terms of labor, money, and opportunity. It may be better to let other seeds take root’ rings hollow.”

But this was not my conclusion at all. The authors simply plucked a sentence out of context and called it my conclusion. What I actually wrote was:

“Now that the campaign is over, we should assess CA DSA once again and consider whether this pivot has addressed the contradictions and challenges above…If the answer to these questions is largely yes, our task should be to build on this priority structure while we move forward, doubling down on what worked and letting go of what didn’t...If the answer is largely no, we should not repeat our mistakes or muddle along. The cost to DSA as a whole is too great, in terms of labor, money, and opportunity. It may be better to let other seeds take root.”

In other words, I don’t come to any conclusion about what California DSA should do - I call on its organizers to carry forward the torch of self-reflection and make a diagnosis themselves based on what they find. It’s disingenuous to quote the last sentence on its own and claim that it’s my conclusion instead of acknowledging that it is part of a hypothetical.

This misrepresentation is not minor. It shapes the framing of their entire piece, from the title - “Too Soon for a Summary Dismissal” - to the final line, which reads: “It is far too soon to issue any final—especially dismissive—judgements”. An ironic ending to a piece that dismisses the entire framing of my reflection.

I’ll end by plugging Vicki Legion’s great work Constructive Criticism which serves as a critical guide for DSA members interested in the healthy giving and receiving of constructive criticism - one that honestly engages with the positions we disagree with in order to build towards a better organization. In my capacity as Steering Committee member of the national Growth and Development Committee I plan to help run Constructive Criticism sessions for chapters across the country in order to foster a culture that welcomes critique earnestly and sees its value in the collective project for liberation.

Let us be clear at the outset that we feel the time spent on responding, once more, to Hazel’s polemic on the shortcomings of California DSA would be better spent on doing some actual work against the actual problems that beset the working class and the socialist movement in California. Nitpicking infighting of this nature has not often served to advance socialist goals and this case is no exception. The world is burning, fascism is rising, and a contrived controversy doesn’t help with addressing either.

Hazel, without talking to anyone in CA DSA leadership, published a critical piece about our experiment in state structure in Democratic Left. When we responded in California Red to address what we saw as incorrect information in that piece, it meant that as far as we were concerned, she got her say, we got ours, and that should have ended matters. But apparently not. We are now publishing her response to our response. Unfortunately, she did not in her new critique actually address our main points, choosing instead to launch a debate over what she considered her conclusion versus what we understood it to be.

She claims that thanks to her intervention while serving as co-chair for a year the organization has improved: “I authored the resolution that scaled back CA DSA’s ambitions and successfully agitated for it to pass because I expected it to help in exactly the ways it did.”

One of us (Fred) was on the state committee at the time Hazel proposed her resolution, which in its first iteration simply attempted to shut down the state org entirely. Why did she try to do this? It may have had something to do with the fact that she found herself on the short end of eight-to-one and seven-to-two decisions time after time.

When that failed she amended it to reduce the number of positions on the state committee from nine to five, which would have had the effect of crippling what little volunteer capacity the leadership body possessed. The majority voted to replace that amendment with another that reduced the body from nine to seven—not because we felt it would have improved our ability to work, but in recognition of the reality that not enough people wanted to do this pretty thankless, under-resourced work, and we needed to have a quorum at our state committee meetings.

Her resolution had exactly nothing to do with the improvement of California DSA’s work. The ARCH campaign in 2024, which she claims as an example of her leadership, was already clearly viewed by our chapters as an important priority, and the state council’s vote to make that official for the state body occurred on the basis of that understanding, not due to her resolution.

Similarly, her claim that “as a result, involvement in CA DSA has largely increased” has no basis in reality. Renewed involvement came not from her effort to reduce the footprint of CA DSA but from a quite different source, months after she had left CA DSA leadership—Trump’s election, which lit a fire beneath members looking for a place to stand and fight. California DSA 101 statewide zoom presentations went from a dozen or two people in attendance before November 2024 to 60-75 attendees in each of the next several meetings after the election.

She refers us to the Red Star caucus document claiming the national DSA more closely resembles an NGO than a fighting socialist organization, and states her belief that staffing is less important than a member-driven organization. This is a sleight of hand argument, since California DSA is not the national, has no staff, doesn’t function like an NGO, and is (unfortunately) probably in no danger of finding the resources to staff up any time soon. Further, we agree with her that if we could muster sufficient activism from our membership to do without staff we’d go that way. Who wouldn’t? The more important questions to consider here are, “what are the factors that impede such enthusiasm for socialism in the masses”, and “how do we turn that around?”

She wants us to reflect on how we failed to measure up to the “vision document” she cites that supposedly was guiding CA DSA. That document, a two-page provisional sketch of the organization’s goals, was drafted by the exploratory committee for a California DSA in January 2021, more than a year before the organization officially existed. It was superseded by subsequent documents developed by the first state committee, much more ambitious in scope, which as we stated in our critique of Hazel’s DL article, were produced before fully understanding the obstacles in our path. This is reminiscent of Hazel’s omission in her DL piece, when in criticizing the lack of use of our political action committee (PAC) account, she left out the context that it wasn’t created by CA DSA but a prior ad hoc chapter-led campaign in 2018, which we inherited as CA DSA without institutional memory of what needed to be done to maintain it properly. And true, it wasn’t used while she was on the state committee. Why? Because 2023 wasn’t an election year. She didn’t respond to these corrections in her new piece.

California DSA is not some bureaucratic monolith needing to be deeply critiqued. It is an experiment in socialist democracy, the first state level DSA structure, put together in a moment of peak activism (post Bernie campaigns, during the pandemic and support for the BLM movement, and a very active tax the rich ballot measure, Prop 15, in 2020, which led to ad hoc coordination of our chapters statewide) with the high hopes that such enthusiasm for action from its membership might serve as the basis for a permanently active statewide presence.

That hopeful moment passed, and peak activism receded—not just in DSA, but in all organizations of the left and the broader progressive sphere. This is always a danger for the left when the Democrats are in office: Too many people think, “Oh, we elected these people; now they will take care of things.” This was the mistake activists made in demobilizing after Obama’s election, and the same thing, compounded by the pandemic, that happened in Biden’s term of office.

California DSA was created to say the opposite: no matter who’s in office we need to continually push them from below to do the right thing, which takes a mass socialist movement beyond the electoral moment. We had hoped the state organization might make a contribution to that perspective and that effort. If that hope has not yet been fulfilled, let’s recall that this is the first attempt in the country at a state DSA structure; it is just three years old; and we are not just trying to push California politics to the left; now we’re fighting fascism. Let’s get on with that task.

Thousands of DSA members across the state of California came out to local events on June 14, dubbed “No Kings Day”, swelling the ranks of protests from San Diego to Eureka. Here are a few snapshots drawn from the organizing of our local chapters.

East Bay

East Bay DSA brought out members to several events. Chapter co-chair Juan Canham told California Red, “I think it's a moment when our chapter’s commitment to using a diversity of strategies to combat fascism really came together, allowing us to be active on many fronts. As a chapter that encompasses a multitude of political tendencies it's not often that everyone is active at once but everyone I know in the chapter was active in some way on Saturday, some attending multiple events.”

EBDSA sent a sizeable contingent to the “No Kings” march in Oakland. The Oakland action went far beyond what the official organizers expected in terms of turnout. The sun was out, the vibes were good, and “the members spoke to a lot of people fed up with Trump, about how we have to defeat Trump but also the entire rotten system that brought him to power.”

On Friday night EBDSA got word from organizations it is working with that ICE had sent mass text messages to migrants in immigration court proceedings to report the next day Saturday at the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) office in SF or face an “infraction. Canham said, “ISAP is a private company that runs ICE’s alternatives to detention program. It is not located in a government building. Weekend reporting is unheard of. This could only mean one thing: mass arrests.”

He added, “With little notice, and despite already being committed to three other actions on Saturday, we decided that this was critical work and sent out the call to our entire list, with the caution that we did not know how this was going to go down (earlier in the week a peaceful protest outside of the ICE office in San Francisco resulted in arrests). At 7 am on Saturday many in the chapter answered the call prepared for the worst, but between us, community and faith groups there was sufficient turnout to deter ICE and SFPD from escalating. This ended as a successful 2-day community picket where ISAP didn't even try to open the office and ICE weren't visibly present. Instead 50 plus migrants were welcomed by lawyers who gave them help with their cases.”

All of this was occurring on the same day as a previously scheduled EBDSA event, a Labor Notes Troublemakers school that the chapter had been organizing for months with a coalition of unions in the East Bay. It brought together several hundred union members, labor activists, and local officers, to build solidarity, and share successes, strategy, and inspiration.

Marin

Marin DSA worked with a local immigrant rights group to organize a “No Kings, No Oligarchs” rally in downtown San Rafael attended by over 1,500 people. The rally featured many speakers, including chapter members who talked about defending social programs for seniors and working people, protesting the genocide in Gaza, and defending democracy by fighting oligarchy. The chapter partnered with other local organizers to speak about workers rights, protecting immigrants in our community from ICE, and US imperialism. Marin DSA co-chair Curt said, “It was the largest protest our chapter has ever organized and the second largest protest in Marin County since Trump took office.”

Anaheim

Orange County DSA sent a team to Anaheim No Kings Day, where one of the chapter co-chairs give a speech about how direct action is necessary and the Democratic Party gives no hope for liberation, and distributed chapter literature.

San Jose

Silicon Valley DSA comrades joined the San Jose “No Kings” rally. An estimated 12,000 people attended. One of the featured speakers was the chapter’s Rheanna, who reminded the crowd of recent events like Trump’s firing of scientists, the militarization of the local police department, and the incursions of ICE. She said, “We are going to build a movement so big so deep and powerful that no president, no King, no fascists will stand against us.” She invited the crowd to come to the next SVDSA meeting and get trained up in rapid response to be able to protect themselves and their neighbors. “Remember, we keep each other safe!” she said to cheers. [see video of her speech]

Peninsula DSA

Peninsula DSA, situated south of San Francisco, sent members to events in Pacifica, Colma, and San Mateo as well as to the big demonstration in San Francisco, to show up in solidarity and talk up DSA. Allison C reported, “We got 25 people to sign up for our newsletter, plus more folks scanned the QR code off our palm card. We definitely plan to bring more flyers (we passed out 100 plus) and signage next time.”

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Melville House, 2023, by Yanis Varoufakis

“What’s in a word?” is the title of Chapter 2 of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, where Yanis Varoufakis notes, “It is tempting to think that it does not really matter what we call the system we live in. Technofeudalism or hyper-capitalism, the system is what it is, whatever the word we use to describe it. Tempting perhaps, but quite wrong. Reserving the word ‘fascist’ for regimes that genuinely fall into that category and refraining from using it to describe regimes that, however nasty are not fascist, matters hugely.”

Varoufakis is fully aware of the odd angle—at least from a more traditional Marxist perspective—from which he is approaching the topic of his latest book. He argues that capitalism, the dominant mode of production on earth for the past two hundred years, has been replaced—not, as hoped for through generations of the left, by socialism, but by a new type of economic structure he has dubbed “technofeudalism”, and which, he says, is turning out to be even more ruthless, destructive and difficult to dislodge than capitalism.

Varoufakis, a former finance minister in Greece during the radical phase of the Syriza government, frames his analysis with the story of how his father introduced him, as a child, to understanding capitalism through the development of the forces of production throughout history, beginning with the Iron Age. By the time Varoufakis is an adult, his father poses the question to him that becomes the starting point for the book: “Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?”

This engaging approach of a dialog with his father, a touchstone throughout, serves the book well, keeping things relatively simple and straightforward as Varoufakis lays out his picture of the new mode of production. At the center is his understanding of the transformation that tech capital (which he renames “cloud capital”) has inflicted on humanity: the conversion of billions of us into “cloud serfs” willingly albeit unconsciously volunteering to labor for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners. 

How does this happen? As we switch on our computers, access the web, and lend our eyeballs to cloud capital we hand them a free gift. By clocking our clicks and following our eyeballs, the tech corporations are able to refine their targeting of our wants and desires continuously; the individual cloud serf decisions add up to mass analytics that guide ever more focused algorithms for pitches and sales individualized just for us. Cloud capital, in the form of corporations like Amazon and Apple, does continue to employ workers (“cloud proles”) in their brick-and-mortar facilities and extracts surplus value from them the old-fashioned way: through the labor process and capital accumulation. But the bulk of wealth collection now occurs, Varoufakis asserts, on platforms that have replaced markets on the web. He calls this form of wealth accumulation “cloud rent”.

Yes, he says, these platforms look like markets. But markets—as in exchanges of goods and services, and a key part of the definition of how capitalism functions—are the lesser part of what happens here, on sites he calls “cloud fiefdoms”. The bulk of the income for cloud capital comes from extraction of rent from the mostly modest-sized capitalist app developers who have to use the platforms to sell stuff to us—at an average cost to the developers of thirty percent of the transactions. The people who sell things on the platforms Varoufakis terms “vassal capitalists”.

All of this represents for Varoufakis a process that looks a lot more like how wealth was accumulated during feudalism—through ground rent, with serfs handing over a portion of what they produce on the land lent to them by its owners, feudal lords—than in capitalism, where surplus value is extracted through the difference between wages paid to the worker and the larger amount the worker generates for the capitalist.

Varoufakis’s explanation of how we got here relies on a reworking of the marxist understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. During the centuries-long emergence of capitalism out of feudalism the two modes of production were intertwined and coexisted. But eventually one part (surplus value production, creating profit) became dominant and the other (rent) operated in the shadows cast by its giant rival. Yet, rent survived, and ultimately and opportunistically today has taken on a new and monstrous form. In this way technofeudalism represents the revenge of the undead rent over profit. As Varoufakis puts it, “cloud capital is overpowering terrestrial capital, sucking cloud rent increasingly out of the global value chain” (169).

Interspersed within the more abstract discussion of the comparative dynamics of feudalism and capitalism are useful explanations of various recent real world developments. Like David Harvey, Varoufakis has a knack for making Marxist political economy understandable and clear. (The book helpfully includes an appendix where he defines all his terms.) Where did this cloud capital power come from in such a startlingly short period? Two sources: the enclosure of the internet commons, or privatization of what started out a public resource; and the massive transfers of public funds to private hands following the 2007-8 crash and Great Recession. The combination of the two created the primitive accumulation of cloud capital, which “differs from other kinds of capital in its ability to reproduce itself at no expense to its owner, turning all of us into cloud serfs.” But that’s not the only way it reproduces itself.

With the banking implosion of 2007-8 two things happened. The national central banks determined these businesses were too big to fail, so they shoveled huge amounts of cash to them. But to balance all this money-printing, their governments imposed austerity on the working class. Since the masses were in no position to buy new product lines, capital invested in non-productive enterprises like real estate and the stock market—and tech. Since there was no risk to the investment, having come from free central bank money, profit was optional. Hence the proliferation of startups and tech companies with soaring valuations while returning no profits for years.

Varoufakis spins a number of provocative implications out of this picture. In his final chapter he proposes what a new economy and society would look like if we could construct one free of profits and rents. But he also informs us that getting from here to there is a daunting challenge, larger than the one we faced under the rule of capital, which at least for a time gave us the opportunity to construct social democracy from class consciousness and union power. With technofeudalism, the proliferation of precarious employment, shrunken unions and the dispersal of community, social democracy is currently impossible, says the author. Organizing the working class is still necessary, but not sufficient. Now we need to build a bigger, broader alliance with all willing partners.

Like any analytic or political tradition, Marxism needs to renew its categories and rethink its presuppositions as the world changes in order to remain relevant and accurate. Technofeudalism represents a serious effort to accomplish this necessary task. I am not fully competent to assess the diagnostic picture Varoufakis presents in this book. For one thing, I don’t have the statistical chops to determine if the amount of value being removed from the global capitalist system by cloud rent has actually surpassed the volume of worldwide profit generated by labor for capital.

Solving this single equation should decisively answer the question as to whether Varoufakis is correct in his central argument. If you’ve made it through Volume One of Capital, that—along with not having slept through late neoliberalism—is really all the reader needs to follow the discussion in Technofeudalism. But following the discussion and being able to assess its correctness are two different things.

Whether his answer is correct or not, Varoufakis has asked the right questions in a book that plumbs some of the murkier depths of how our world works today.

Events & Actions

Tuesday, July 22 (8:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.): ICE Out of SF Courts! (San Francisco Immigration Court, 100 Montgomery St.)

Tuesday, July 22 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Social Housing Reading Group: SF Analyst’s Report (Zoom)

Wednesday, July 23 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tech Worker Reading Group: You Deserve a Tech Union (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Wednesday, July 23 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Independent Outreach (Meet at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, July 24 (6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Electoral Board Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, July 24 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Immigrant Justice Working Group Meeting (Zoom)

Friday, July 25 (5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Electoral Education: Zohran x DSA’s Victory (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday, July 25 (7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): Maker Friday: Zine Edition (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, July 26 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Excelsior Know Your Rights Canvassing (Meet in person at Silver Ave & Mission St)

Saturday, July 26 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Cuba Reportback (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Sunday, July 27 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Oakland Ballers vs Northern Colorado Owlz baseball game + “Halloween in July Night” (In person at Raimondi Park, 1800 Wood St, Oakland)

Monday, July 28 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Socialist in Office (SIO) Subcommittee Regular Meeting (Zoom)

Monday, July 28 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tenderloin Healing Circle (In person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate)

Monday, July 28 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board x Divestment Priority Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Tuesday, July 29 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Wednesday, July 30 (6:45 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.): Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (Zoom and in person at Radical Reading Room, 438 Haight)

Thursday, July 31 (5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.): Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)

Thursday, July 31 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Immigrant Justice Office Hour (Zoom)

Saturday, August 2 (12:45 – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Outreach and Outreach Training (Meet in person at 1916 McAllister)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates. Events with a are especially new-member-friendly!

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 from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30  p.m. at Immigration Court at 100 Montgomery. We need all hands on deck, even if you can only participate for 1 or 2 hours.

Social Housing Reading Group

What could social housing look like in San Francisco, and how do we get there? Join DSA SF for a reading of the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s report on how the city can build its own publicly owned, deeply affordable housing. We will also read the SF Berniecrats report, Housing for the 99%, which lays out a vision for social housing for all in San Francisco. Join us at 1916 McAllister today (Tuesday, July 22) from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

DSA SF Tech Reading Group

On July 23rd from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., come join DSA SF and Rideshare Drivers United tech workers for our next monthly tech reading group.

We’ll be reading an excerpt from You Deserve a Tech Union by Ethan Marcotte. This event is hybrid with food provided at the DSA SF office at 1916 McAllister St.

RSVP here to access the link to the reading! See you there!

Electoral Education: Zohran x DSA’s Victory

Join us Friday, July 25 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at 1916 McAllister for an open discussion about the very exciting Zohran campaign, how they did it, and how it’s shaping the national discussion about electoral politics in the United States and in our national organization! .

Audience: EVERYONE! Whether you’re new to movement or been following the Zohran campaign for a while, we hope this will be interesting for us all!

Maker Friday: Zine Edition

Join us for Maker Friday: Zine Edition on July 25 at 1916 McAllister from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.! We will learn how to make zines, brainstorm ideas for them, and make them. All are welcome, no experience necessary, come connect with your fellow comrades while making fun content to pass out.

Know Your Rights (KYR) Canvassing with Immigrant Justice

Join the Immigrant Justice Working Group this Saturday (July 26) for Know Your Rights (KYR) canvassing! We will be distributing red cards and KYR posters to businesses and community members in the Excelsior. Our meeting point will be at the intersection of Silver Ave & Mission St at 1:00 pm. New to canvassing? No worries! There will be a brief how-to training before we go out in pairs or small groups.

Cuba May Day Brigade Reportback at the Office

Join us this Saturday (July 26th) from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the DSA SF office at 1916 McAllister for a reportback from the 2025 May Day Brigade in Cuba! You’ll hear a comrade’s firsthand experience of the socialist program in Cuba, its medical and educational systems, the May Day events that occurred in Havana, the challenges the Cuban people are currently facing, and their revolutionary optimism that we should adopt in the face of our organizing in the belly of the beast.

We’ll be blasting some classic Cuban tunes to get us in the revolutionary spirit, and there will be snacks and refreshments. Hope you can come!

Summer Social(ist) Events!

On Sunday, July 27th at 3:30 p.m. we’ll be going to the Oakland Ballers vs Northern Colorado Owlz baseball game + “Halloween in July Night” (at Raimondi Park) – We will be sitting in the 3rd Base GA2 section. Tickets are $15 each, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds (just reach out to us if you need help buying a ticket!). RSVP here and purchase tickets here.

Support the Blue Bottle Independent Union

Nestlé is one of the biggest corporations in the world charged with decades of human rights violations in the global south. They’re now in our backyard intimidating baristas with surveillance, firing, and bad-faith bargaining. Last week, baristas in four Bay Area locations of Nestlé-owned Blue Bottle presented management with a super majority of union cards and demanded voluntary recognition. Instead, Blue Bottle fired one of the organizers, B.B. Young. This comes at an especially bad time for B.B. since their husband was also recently laid off.

Blue Bottle workers are asking for our support

• Donate at this GoFundMe page 
• Sign the petition to demand that the company voluntarily recognize the Blue Bottle Independent Union
• Join the Blue Bottle Independent Union email list  or follow on Instagram to stay in touch
• If you are an employee of Blue Bottle, fill out this intake form to get involved with organizing the union at your own store

Reports

What You Missed at Last Week’s Electoral Board Meeting

At the Electoral Board meeting on July 17, the Electoral Board discussed several items:

• Legislative updates from the Socialist in Office Subcommittee
  • Please join the new #socialist-in-office Slack channel to receive more frequent updates from the subcommittee!
• An upcoming meeting on  with Jackie Fielder’s office to advance our Divestment priority
• A letter campaign to support Jackie in her sole dissenting vote on the City’s budget which forces austerity and potential future actions such as an op-ed
• A Zohran Mamdani themed discussion event happening this Friday at 5:30 in the office!

If you would like to be involved in these conversations, join the Electoral Board on Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom or the office at 1916 McAllister and find us on Slack at #electoral-discussion.

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 newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.

To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.

Steve Thornton has been an activist in Hartford since moving there in the 1970’s after graduating from the University of […]

On July 17th, a vigil was called by local organizers to call attention to the detention of Imam Ayman, a local clergy member detained by President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Following the vigil, citizens peacefully protested at Roebling Bridge. The protest remained peaceful throughout.

Around 8:30 PM, the Covington Police Department (CPD) arrived in force, with a video captured from the scene showing a response of at least 15 squad cars for a small, peaceful protest. Police ordered protesters to disperse, and as protesters were in the middle of complying, CPD violently broke up the protest, dramatically escalating what had been a peaceful protest into a police attack on protesters. CPD officers were caught on camera firing rubber bullets at point-blank range against peaceful protesters, and arresting those who had complied with the order to disperse. Some of those arrested were brutally beaten, with multiple protesters requiring medical treatment at a nearby hospital. At least one journalist was also arrested by police despite continually signaling their status as a member of the press.

DSA Metro Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky strongly condemns the plain and obvious brutality deployed against this peaceful protest. Through their actions last night the Covington Police Department showed contempt for a peaceful vigil and demonstrated an active desire to cause harm under the cover of “keeping the peace”. These shocking acts are an echo of Donald Trump’s authoritarian streak with the very violence protesters came out peacefully to oppose; one big tyrant emboldens many little ones. This moment along with the police-assisted terror campaign of ICE demonstrates that Americans’ civil rights are limited more and more every day. Given this violent crackdown against peaceful protesters, we call on the Covington authorities to dismiss any and all charges against those arrested at the protest.