For many queer people, sexual liberation consists of embracing sexual desire and pursuing sexual gratification without the shame imposed on them through cisheteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality. But many others who claim an asexual identity experience sexual liberation as a liberation from sex.

As a trans fem, my understanding of the varieties of asexual experience comes mainly from conversations with other trans fems who have claimed an ace identity. These conversations sometimes include raw and harrowing discussions of past trauma, but are, overall, wonderfully intimate experiences of shared joy. For us, asexuality is a revelatory discovery, and for many of us, this discovery allows us to experience, for the first time, an entire world of beautiful intimacy that feels safe, satisfying, and natural. Unfortunately, when we try to share our joy with our allosexual friends (those whose sexuality is more in line with normative expectations), we are often met with confusion, hostility, and, worst of all, a patronizing disbelief that we could happily remove ourselves in any way from the pool of available and enthusiastic sexual resources.

Perhaps the first thing I would like my allosexual friends to understand is that when I tell them I'm ace they can't leap to any conclusions about my sex life. The only conclusion they can reasonably come to is that sex and sexuality are decentered in my day-to-day experiences and in particular in my relationships with others. And I won't reveal anything personal beyond that here!

The second thing I would like my friends to understand is that, just as transgender people often have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of gender than cisgender people because we have struggled long with our own genders, ace people often have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of sexuality than allosexual people because we have struggled with our own sexualities, made fine distinctions, and compared notes with each other. We have identified many axes of sexuality that are supposedly identical in normative sexuality, but are in fact merely correlated in allosexual experience, such as sexual desire, sexual attraction, and libido.

Allosexual people assume all ace people are sex- or even touch-averse, and I want to stress that many of us are. For some of us, though, our asexuality is defined as much or more by a positive orientation toward nonsexual forms of intimacy than by a negative orientation toward sex. We may experience great pleasure and intimacy from non-sexual physical touch, or we may experience it from different kinds of stimulation, like music and dance (I suppose I don't mind revealing that I fall in these categories: the most purely pleasurable and intimate experiences I've had with others come from touch without sex and from ecstatic shared experiences of dancing, listening to music, and making music). Some of us have neutral or positive attitudes toward sex, but our positive sexual experiences are not, for us, notably sexual, and may stem from simply an intellectual interest in sex stemming from our struggles to understand ourselves and others, or in aspects of the experiences that are not inherently sexual. Allosexual people are often surprised when I tell them that ace people are overrepresented in sex education and even kink. Indeed a few ace people I have talked to who are completely sex-neutral have more experiences that normative sexuality considers sexual, with more partners than most allosexual people.

While aromanticism, the experience of living a life where romantic feelings and connections are decentered compared to what is normative in society, is a different spectrum, or set of axes, than asexuality, it bears some consideration here. Aromantic people engage in the same kind of careful and nuanced consideration of something that cisheteronormativity and compulsory sexuality takes for granted that asexual people do. Not all asexual people are aromantic. Some of us cherish romantic relationships and experience profound desire and yearning for others without desiring to have sex with them, while others find the concept of romantic desire profoundly alien to our experience.

Many people who consider themselves allosexual would benefit from learning more about asexuality and aromanticity, and would find the exercise challenging to and informing of their own ideas about themselves. I have had more than one person react to my description of my sexuality with something like, "that's not ace, that's just normal," even as others hear the same description and do not question my ace identity in the slightest.

The third, and perhaps the most important, thing I would like my friends to understand is that struggles with sexual trauma in no way invalidate someone's ace identity. Allosexuality is really just another imposed social construct, like gender, and all forms of social compulsion are achieved through means of force that leave trauma scars. This is the only way that compulsion to behave against one's nature and desires can function. It is perfectly valid for someone to claim an ace identity as a result of trauma, and though some of us, after working through our trauma, eventually claim a different relationship to sexuality, many do not. Whether we do or do not is nobody else's business but ours.

The worst impulse someone can have is to treat an ace person's trauma as a problem to be solved. When people attempt to "fix" us they most often reinforce our traumatic relationship to sex. This attitude is dehumanizing and treats us more as resources than as people. Instead, naive allosexuals (those who have not thought deeply about their own sexuality) would benefit from listening to us and considering how much of their own sexuality is natural to them and how much is learned behavior. 

As a boy, I was told by other boys, and many men behind the backs of the women in their lives, that girls should be pursued, that the goal of such pursuit was my own sexual gratification, and that my allegiances should be to my male friends and not to the girls and women in my life. This attitude was pervasive and dominant in my social interactions with other boys and men. Some of the filthiest jokes I've heard are told among trans fems, and they are variations on the degrading jokes and scenarios we endured from cis boys and men or viewed in pornography growing up, but often inverted, with ourselves as the humiliated objects. Children of all genders are given a brutal and brutalizing education in sexuality from an early age in a system of cisheteronormative grooming that is discussed with genuine discomfort and regret by many adults, but which is culturally tolerated because it is a primary mechanism by which patriarchy is communicated and reinforced. And it's not just patriarchy.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici discusses how during the medieval and renaissance eras of primitive accumulation in Europe, through the mechanism of witch hunts and persecution of heresy, reproductively female bodies were dehumanized, stripped of their economic autonomy, and made reproductive slaves en masse to enable biologically male bodies to become the wage-laboring proletariat class. In some times and places, proletarian women were forced into public brothels, making the rape of proletarian women functionally legal.

Asexual people exemplify, on the other hand, the ideas that we are not entitled to each other's bodies or affections, that we are autonomous beings who may freely choose the number, frequency, and kinds of intimate relationships that we engage in according to our own natures and desires. Asexuality is a direct threat to the capitalist treatment of sexuality and fertility as a problem of resource allocation and labor exploitation. In fact, it is a far bigger threat to capitalism and patriarchy than that posed by the choices that transgender people make about how and whether we wish to alter our bodies in ways that affect our fertility, given there are far more people poised to discover they are on the ace spectrum than there are trans people. With the rise of global fascism, I expect panic over asexuality to become a successor moral panic to the current one over transgender people, and, as an ace trans fem, I look forward to continuing to be a reviled outlaw in the coming years, should I survive to see them.

The project of liberation is always both personal and political. The more we uncover and understand the parts of natural human variation and experience that have been denied to us, hidden from us, and traumatically beaten out of us, within ourselves and each other, the more we liberate ourselves and each other, the more we respect each other and our choices, the more we are able to form honest, authentic, non-carceral, celebratory bonds and connections with each other, the more we quietly degrade the hold that violent systems of capitalist oppression have over us and create a more just, loving, and equitable future.

"Every empire needs a story that makes its actions sound necessary, even noble. For the United States, one of the most persistent tools in building a narrative is what historians call the “Great Man Theory of History.”

In simple terms, the Great Man Theory claims that history is driven mainly by powerful and/or unique individuals. Kings, presidents, generals, and dictators are presented as the people who shape the fate of nations. According to this way of thinking, if you want to understand a country, you don’t need to look at its workers, its institutions, its economy, or its political movements; you just need to look at the person at the top.

This idea might seem harmless, even intuitive,but it has played a powerful role in how Americans are taught to see the rest of the world. In U.S. foreign policy, it has become one of the most effective tools for selling intervention and regime change. When Washington wants public support for economic sanctions, covert operations, or military action, the story is almost always the same: identify a villain, make him the face of an entire country, and convince the American public that removing that individual will solve everything. Reduce a society to a single “bad man,” and suddenly intervention looks like liberation.

Turning Countries Into Villains

The Great Man narrative works because it simplifies complex political tensions into something that fits neatly into a headline. Countries are complicated places. Socialists with a dialectical mindset know they are shaped by decades of political conflict, economic pressures, class struggles, and historic experiences. Explaining those dynamics requires time, context, and nuance. Blaming everything on a single leader is much easier.

Instead of asking why a country developed the way it did, Americans are told that the entire political system is simply the result of one tyrant’s personality. If that leader disappears, the story goes, democracy and stability will naturally take his place. This makes intervention easier to justify, and also turns foreign policy into a moral drama. After all, if history is shaped by heroes and villains, then removing villains becomes a moral obligation. Removing the villains allows us, the morally righteous, to shape history.

Venezuela and the “Maduro Problem”

Take Venezuela. For years, American political discourse has framed Venezuela’s crisis almost entirely around President Nicolás Maduro. Economic collapse, inflation, migration, and political unrest are presented as the result of one man’s inept rule. If only he had international, American led corporations to guide their economy. But Venezuela’s situation is far more complex than that narrative suggests.

The country’s economy has long been dependent on oil exports, making it vulnerable to global price swings. Internal political conflict between socialist movements and economic elites has shaped Venezuelan politics for decades. U.S. sanctions have dramatically worsened the country’s economic crisis. But  nuance rarely fits easily into a soundbite.

Instead, Americans are told a much simpler story: Venezuela has a dictator. Remove him and the problem disappears. This framing turns a complicated geopolitical situation into a morality play. It makes regime change sound less like foreign interference and more like humanitarian rescue.

Iran and the Personalization of Politics

The same narrative is used when Washington talks about Iran. Listen to the way Iran is discussed in American political rhetoric and media coverage. The country’s entire political system is often reduced to the figure of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran becomes less a society (or more accurately: multiple societies) and more a personality. Iran is not a monarchy ruled by a single man’s whims. It has a complex political structure with multiple power centers, elected institutions, internal factions, and a long history shaped by  internal political movements and foreign intervention. The existing regime has support, but that support is never acknowledged in the western narrative.

One of the most important events shaping modern Iranian politics was the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 that overthrew the country’s elected government. That history still influences how Iranians view American power today. Yet that context rarely appears in mainstream discussions. Instead, Americans are told that tensions with Iran exist primarily because of the decisions of one leader. The implication is clear: remove that leader, and relations would improve overnight. Once again, the Great Man myth replaces historical reality.

The Next Target: Cuba

Now we see the same narrative beginning to take shape around Cuba. For decades, American political rhetoric treated Fidel Castro as the embodiment of the Cuban political system. Even after Castro’s death, the story continues to revolve around a handful of leaders rather than the broader forces shaping Cuban society. Cuba is portrayed as a country held hostage by its rulers rather than a nation shaped by its own history, political institutions, and popular movements.

This framing conveniently ignores one key factor: more than sixty years of U.S. economic sanctions. Those sanctions have had enormous effects on the Cuban economy and everyday life on the island. But in the Great Man narrative, structural pressures like sanctions fade into the background. The blame rests on the leadership alone. The message is familiar: change the leaders, and the system collapses.

History Is Made by People

Socialists have long rejected the Great Man theory for a simple reason: it misunderstands how societies actually work. History is not driven by a few powerful individuals. It is shaped by millions of workers, activists, communities, and social movements struggling over the direction of their societies. Leaders matter, but they do not exist in a vacuum. They rise from political systems, economic conditions, and historical struggles that cannot be erased simply by removing a single person. We call this framing a ""people's history.""

Understanding that reality forces us to ask harder questions about U.S. foreign policy. It forces us to examine the structures of power: economic pressure, sanctions, military alliances, and global inequality. Those questions are uncomfortable. They challenge the comforting idea that America is simply rescuing the world from a series of bad leaders. But if we want an honest conversation about empire, we have to stop telling ourselves fairy tales about great men."

Yeah, I know, 

gas has gone up lately. 

Well, I can't afford to 

not go to school because 

I need the loans. 

I know you need the loans too. 

I know, three bankruptcies. 

That must be hard. 

You won't talk to the union rep. 

No, yeah, I'm sure he's incompetent. 

So you quit? 

And your car got repossessed? 

And you need mine? 

And your wife's parents got deported, so they can't help either? 

Yeah, I know. 

Well, you know if you...

Have you eaten? No? 

We can stop at McDonalds. 

No, I know I said we're boycotting them

but I'm too tired to think of

anything else. 

I'm okay. 

Yeah, you're right, if we had communism in America, we wouldn't have Subway anymore. 

Yeah, I see the stuff in Iran. 

Yeah, he's doing okay. Medical care is just expensive. 

You paid for your wife's out of pocket and now you can't afford groceries and she won't get on government sponsored care because she's not sick enough, even though everything is chronic? 

Yeah, I know.

I know. 

I love you too.

The Colorado Democratic Party caucus and assembly process just wrapped, culminating in the state assembly on Saturday, March 28th in Pueblo. Thank you to the hundred-plus comrades who participated. Your presence made a palpable difference.

We learned in Pueblo that Democrats are hungry for material change. Some of the loudest cheers from delegates came when candidates named wealth discrepancies and the purchase that the billionaire class has on Colorado politics. Concrete demands landed with far more force than the vague platitudes so common in stump speeches.

That energy translated into results. DDSA-endorsed Melat Kiros beat Diana DeGette 158-77, nearly locking the fifteen-term incumbent out of the primary ballot entirely. Julie Gonzales won roughly 75% of delegates, not only securing ballot access but preventing Karen Breslin from clearing the 30% threshold. David Seligman closed the gap to within a percentage point of Jena Griswold for Attorney General. Amanda Gonzalez beat out Jessie Danielson for Secretary of State by a nearly two-to-one margin.

It is notable that establishment figures of the Colorado Democratic Party, Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper, were absent from the assembly. They chose to bypass the democratic process rather than face a base that has moved well past them. That choice concedes that the progressive and socialist base now sets the terms of engagement, and it may cost them more in credibility than an expensive signature-gathering campaign ever could.

The platform told the same story. DSA members had fought to defend progressive language against establishment attempts to water it down in the lead-up to the assembly. When that language came before delegates on Saturday, they reinstated it by an overwhelming margin. The platform now includes opposition to the genocide of Palestinians, support for their right to statehood, a call to cut off aid to Israel, and support for 340B drug pricing. The Abolish ICE minority report won 92.4% support. While the platform is both imperfect and non-binding, it represents a clear demand by Democrats to move away from establishment politics, and a real opportunity for DDSA to capitalize on.

Despite these wins, there were hard lessons. In the state treasurer race, two progressive candidates, Brianna Titone and John Mikos, both ran on a public bank of Colorado as part of their platform. They split the vote, each missing the 30% threshold. This allowed Opportunity Caucus-adjacent Jeff Bridges to easily make the ballot and run unopposed in the primary. Mobilizing just fourteen more delegates could have swung that race. When aligned campaigns falter like this, we should study them as organizing blueprints and as the clearest argument yet for Ranked Choice Voting in the caucus and assembly process.

Electoralism is simultaneously a point-in-time checkpoint where we get to see what people are responding to and an opportunity to build a movement that extends beyond any one campaign. This cycle's wins show that progressives are ascending, and we socialists are the clarion call for that work. We should not turn away from the hard work of electoral campaigns and the piecemeal gains that come with it. Nor should we let our vision of a mass movement prepared for a true rupture atrophy. Instead, we double down and use these results to organize harder between elections so that our skills and influence grow while others wait for the next cult of personality to seize them.

This is not the end but the beginning. Now that ballot access has been secured for Melat, the work is just starting. Will you join us in ensuring she wins the June 30th primary and is the Democratic nominee for CO-1? Will you help us build lasting power across the metro area to advance socialist values? There are many ways to get plugged in: join our electoral meetings or the electoral Slack channel to learn more.

how many weapons of mass destruction will our country find –

searching in the burned-out craters where once stood a family’s home

symbols of resistance cooked into the flesh of civilians.

or are they victims or human shields or casualties or puppets of the regime or terrorists?

draw a peace sign on our hellcats so they know it comes with good intentions,

pray they sought the white Christian religion out before meeting an unavoidable death.

we were just following orders from America’s rich and powerful–

please don’t take it personally.

how many war crimes will our country commit

so the girls we killed can go to school,

the people elect a president, one of America’s choosing, 

give their oil rights to the rich?

& how many Iraqis will be denied a funeral–

no bodies for their family to find.

less than a hundred is an accident, more than a million is a statistic

if you’re brown – labelled collateral. 

how many Americans will be sent home in coffins?

their parents bury their kin, 

draped in the flag that sent them to die.

politicians crocodile teary-eyed speeches, lay medals drenched in blood.

called a hero, a martyr, or a symbol of a cause– 

ask not what your country won’t do for you

but what you’ll give for them.

how much of your humanity are you willing to sacrifice 

for a government that doesn’t love you back

“You can just do stuff, you know?” I’m told by Gillian Pasley, one of the organizers of the upcoming Blucifer’s First Rodeo, an artist-run music festival set to take over South Broadway this July 23rd-26th.

“It started with group texts and telling jokes and kind of spiraled into this really big thing.”

This post-ironic approach to making social change seems to be everywhere right now. It perfectly fits our strange moment in time: so much that we once sought feels just out-of-reach and yet so much possibility hangs densely in the air. It’s at once cynical and liberatory; belief in an expert-class whose gatekeeping was a rational expression of their abilities is gone, wholly replaced by a kind of faithless hope that we must – and ultimately can - get it done ourselves.

Gillian and her fellow organizers didn’t set out to start a new music festival, but when the opportunity appeared, they’d already started to lay the groundwork. “It goes back for a long time and being a part of this local music scene, but I would say the big sort of catalyzing event was perhaps our Last-Minute Last Waltz at the Hi-Dive in November.” Gillian explained. “That was like 40 or so musicians from 25 or so local bands kind of banding together over the course of three weeks to do this big show. We ended up raising about $3,000 for Kaizen Food Share. From that I think everyone was sort of feeling like we can do more big things that we want to and just sort of waiting for an opportunity for something else big to come along and feeling like we had the capacity to do something at a larger scale.”

Watching beloved cultural institutions move away from South Broadway has become an all too regular affair of late, so it wasn’t too surprising when Underground Music Showcase decided that last year’s music festival would be the last one, at least “in that form” they coyly added.

The organizers Youth on Record had been signaling for years that it was becoming increasingly untenable, taking too much time away from their non-profit arts outreach, and not long ago they’d partnered with experiential creative agency Two Parts to share the load. When they said it was over, many felt optimistic (or suspicious) that YoR just needed to get out from under its administrative burden and that we’d see UMS again. But when the buyer was announced as the RiNo Business Improvement District, that said more than enough.

The unsung heart of the festival had been cut out of the deal: South Broadway and its vibrant community of artists, venues, and fans. The once warm and airy atmosphere of the late July event had coldly blown across town and the vacuum was palpable.

“I started talking this winter about how there wasn't going to be a local music festival on South Broadway this summer and the vacancy that that created for something that could really be artist run and artist centric felt like a natural move in a lot of ways.”

It's fitting that it was the musicians themselves who stepped up. These local artists are what make South Broadway the kind of stretch you can walk down any random weekday and have a half dozen shows to choose from.

“It's affordable to go to these shows and it happens all year round. I think for a lot of people, you know, they have the idea that every July they might come down to South Broadway and see some local music, but those bands are playing all the time.”

And the dive-bars and lounges of the neighborhood know it. So when this small group of musicians who already knew these venues’ staff and ownership sought a meeting to discuss their bookings for the end of July, the response was supportive and excited. Swiftly, Blucifer’s First Rodeo was putting up a polished website, announcing lineups, and accepting hundreds of applications to perform and to volunteer from across the community.

“This is something that people really, really wanted to see happen. And so somebody just had to move really fast to make it happen.”

However, it’s one thing to be first, but it’s quite another to keep that goodwill through the festival. The organizers knew that to support a community of musicians that they would have to meet the material needs of working artists.

“We have a very equitable floor for bands and solo acts and DJs who are playing the official festival. And yeah, it's just all coming from the idea that we as working musicians should learn to value the work that we do in the community as truly valuable.”

Looking to your friends, saying to each other “why not?”, and then just putting in maximum effort is perhaps the only current strategy we can rely on. The spiritual clarion call of the down-but-not-out, looking to each other because the cost of doing nothing is just too high.

“Someone just needed to step up to the plate to organize something that now we're all going to do together.”

Hard to believe that this is the sentiment behind the first great Denver cultural victory of 2026 - but would you really believe it could happen any other way? 

If you still want there to be an organic artist-supporting musical culture in your city, visit bluciferfest.com to get tickets and get involved. Blucifer rides for you and me.

Insights from a Democratic Socialist

When a fellow comrade first mentioned the People’s Movement Assembly (PMAs) to me I was curious, but never expected the groundbreaking impact that would resonate through me, all the Atlanta DSA members, and the broader community that engaged with the idea. Done frequently enough with the goal of connecting different social activists and their groups they can become something akin to a mobilized and organized social movement against fascism, beginning in our backyard and local communities. Literature reflecting the organizational ideas made it clear that the PMA is not just about fighting fascism; it is about a whole range of different survivability tactics against ecological devastation and economic exploitation particularly affecting historically marginalized communities 

As an attendee of the March 14 PMA, one had the opportunity to engage in two sessions with the opportunity to choose from around ten breakout groups. Each group had one to three facilitators who were tasked with moderating the discussions.

​The radical, revolutionary nature of PMAs is that they bring community members together. However, true revolution happens when we involve the full extent and power of working class people. The organization that coordinated with other grassroots orgs and spearheaded this event was Project South; an org dedicated to an abolitionist approach to ending poverty so as to put people over profit. DSA runs on the same logic, but has mainly seen progress through electoral, mutual aid, and other collaborative organizational means; Even if we disagree, the very act of opening dialogue, bringing people together, and connecting different orgs breeds the political dissent not against each other but against fascism that is becoming increasingly central to American citizens in the current era.

Many participants understood proper conduct even if it was not directly outlined at the  PMA because there is a deep seated frustration with politics today. For example, diverse backgrounds breed diverse perspectives that we must acknowledge, participants should allow space for others to contribute but also honor their unique voice, even if groups do not find complete consensus there must be an effort to unify under certain values, principles, or actions, and finally cooperation over debate should be encouraged. These are all PMA rules that even if not stated are self-evident. The central theme of these PMAs is to inquire into what issues concern which citizens. 

​When the Olympics came to town in 1996, organizers formed Project South and the Hunger Coalition to react to the changing city. Project South coordinators for the PMA emphasized the generational nature of the social justice project and noted that formerly enslaved populations built the Atlanta community over 150 years ago. Some of our major goals as activists and organizers is fostering real public safety, ensuring basic needs, and fostering some semblance of equality in decision making especially during times of authoritarianism. The PMA goals are fourfold: Spreading knowledge, skills, and connections, and cultivating community building. Every PMA had a major community oriented priority: The first Atlanta PMA on March 22, 2025, sought public safety on community terms through the building of third party organizations. The second Atlanta PMA on September 6, 2025 set goals of stronger hyperlocal institutions and challenging misinformation from AI. The third PMA voted to share skills and coordinate for power, reaching beyond the assembly.

​After a second breakout session, the groups came together, appointing a representative to report back the group’s discussion on their issues. I joined participants young and old in the “Know Your Rights” breakout group, including an attorney as one of the main coordinators. We discussed how to be more aware of several legal realities in America: differences in laws between states, the importance of de-escalation work, policy changes on multiple levels, and advocacy against the most inhumane deportation laws on the books. Someone even mentioned the importance of knowing the hotline number for mentally ill crises situations that could avoid unnecessary violence. When the groups came together I was also struck by the value in having the phone number of representative state organizations like the Georgia Latino Association for Human Rights (GLAHR) to vouch for targeted citizens, and having talking points for organizers when speaking with law enforcement and other commercial bodies. I wanted to know: Is there a potential for any real social, cultural, or political power through such PMAs?

​The Step-by-Step Guide to Making your own Neighborhood Assembly emphasizes that: We must grapple with what democracy means to us, when our politicians no longer represent us, we’ve expanded the surveillance system and have an operational Cop City, seen the city privatize decisions away from democratic control, and allowed a continued housing crisis that’s forcing people onto the streets. The value of the PMAs is that they seek to transcend political partisanship in favor of true cultural and social transformation by bringing together diverse groups of people with diverse perspectives and skills to find solutions to problems in their neighborhoods. As the guide concludes: Food, housing, healthcare, education, self-determination, self-defense, resistance are all human rights, but they can only be achieved when communities organize to build real lasting change. The final ask was for individuals to connect with each other, with the sponsoring orgs, and mobilize  as many of these groups as possible for the planned May Day protest.

For DSA’s other projects, like electoral strategy, deeply democratic bodies like peoples’ assemblies are pathways to organize mass action and rally the people to our side.

The post Atlanta People’s Movement III appeared first on Red Clay Comrade.

Read more at Memphis-Midsouth

By: Siobhan McDonough

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.

CAMBRIDGE — Last Monday, community members crowded into Cambridge City Hall to voice our support for a proposed resolution calling for an end to the U.S.’s devastating Cuba blockade. Cambridge City Councillors and democratic socialists Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler and Ayah Al-Zubi, along with Councillor Marc McGovern, proposed the resolution.

In opposition to her colleagues, Councillor Patty Nolan cut off discussion using her “charter right” authority, which postpones further debate to the Council’s next meeting on May 11, 2026. Councillor Nolan argued the Council had no business addressing foreign policy:

I do not believe that the City Council should deliberate or use time during regular business meetings on foreign policy issues, which I see this as.

Councillor Nolan is correct that the Cuba blockade, in a very narrow sense, is about foreign policy. Cambridge’s action on this resolution is, by itself, insufficient to force the Trump administration to change its posture toward Cuba. The people of Cambridge, like most people in the United States, have almost no say in our federal government’s aggression toward other countries. The president dictates U.S. foreign policy in practice. Trump, without Congressional approval, kidnapped Venezuelan President Maduro and started a catastrophic war with Iran. Just last week, he unilaterally issued an executive order expanding international sanctions on those participating in the Cuban economy. 

The U.S. awards its globe-spanning military and economic apparatus to the winner of the Electoral College, a system which makes most U.S. citizens’ presidential votes essentially meaningless. Through the anti-democratic Electoral College, both Republican presidents this century first came into office with fewer votes than their opponent. Winning that non-democratic institution also authorizes presidents to pick lifetime appointees to the Supreme Court. The Court gave itself the power of judicial review to strike down acts of Congress, but on foreign policy, courts allow presidents free rein by consistently refusing to enforce laws that limit presidential acts of war.

Nominally, Congress should be able to represent popular will and thwart presidential warmongering. However, both chambers of Congress—the Senate and the House—have their own barriers to popular input. The Senate prioritizes the representation of land over the representation of people and protects its members from voters with six year terms. Thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s rulings in Rucho and Callais, the House is an ever-worsening mess of gerrymandered safe seats designed to entrench the status quo and disenfranchise non-white voters. Corporations and elite interest groups flood the Senate and House with campaign contributions to offset popular pressure. Altogether, it’s no wonder that popular will has almost no impact on federal policy compared to the preferences of economic elites.

But that’s exactly why we must act. When the state of U.S. democracy itself is so woeful, representative governing bodies like the Cambridge City Council must use their democratic legitimacy to serve as a voice for the community’s values on such crucial issues as the lives and freedom of the Cuban people facing the deep violence and social murder of the blockade. The democratic structures of the Cambridge City Council are relatively strong, compared to the non-democratic ones above. Instead of gerrymandered single-member districts, we have a proportional City Council that represents the ideological diversity of Cambridge voters and open, public council meetings that begin with an opportunity for residents to be heard. 

Our democracy in Cambridge is far from perfect. We do not allow non-citizens to vote, we do not have automatic or same-day voter registration, and our unelected City Manager retains far too much power over the budget and city operations. Wealthy donors and corporate interests hold too much sway in the political process. Still, the City Council remains the best institutional voice Cambridge residents collectively have.

Our city’s residents overwhelmingly oppose the oppressive U.S. blockade of Cuba. As Trump ratchets up sanctions while openly threatening that “Cuba is next,” we demand our institutions push back on the violence done in our names. With Congress non-responsive, that duty falls to the representative Cambridge City Council.

Cambridge community members should show up in force at City Hall once again on May 11 at 5:30pm to demand Cambridge City Council affirms our city’s anti-imperialist values.

Siobhan McDonough is the treasurer for Boston Democratic Socialists of America, the trustee chair for the National Organization of Legal Services Workers (UAW 2320), and a civil rights attorney for working-class people.

The post OPINION: Cambridge, Take Action To Oppose the Cuba Blockade appeared first on Working Mass.