May Day was born from a struggle that ran headlong into the United States Constitution. The workers who built the eight-hour movement, who struck in 1886 and rallied at Haymarket, wanted what many of us want today: an economy that works for those who do the work, freedom from state violence, and a basic guarantee that labor would not consume every waking hour of a person’s life. Time and again, the Constitution — not as an abstraction, but as a functioning legal order with its anti-majoritarian design, its unelected judiciary, and its deep protections for property over people — was the weapon their enemies used against them.

Today, “Defend the Constitution” has become a rallying cry for many who rightly oppose the Trump regime’s lawlessness and contempt for democratic norms. That impulse comes from a real and legitimate place. But the history of May Day asks us a hard question: can a document that has so often been turned against working people truly be the foundation of a movement for workers’ justice? Or do we need a different framework — one equal to the demands we’re making this May Day?

The Constitution in the Time of Haymarket

A call to move beyond the Constitution would have surprised few American workers or poor farmers a century and a half ago. By the late 1800s, the subordinate classes in America had decades of experience on the receiving end of the US Constitution’s antidemocratic and reactionary provisions. The Constitution was built around intentionally indirect systems of elections, a legislature that represented states rather than people, a judiciary whose judges were confirmed by an unrepresentative Senate, and a set of negative freedoms that favored the propertied over the propertyless — and over those once claimed as property. Most workers saw the Constitution not as a foundation for justice, but as an obstacle to it.
The events that gave birth to May Day — the long struggle for the eight-hour workday, the great strikes of 1886, and the Haymarket rally that ended in catastrophe — can be understood as a rebellion against the Constitution and the economic and legal order it reinforced. The eight-hour demand at the heart of those struggles ran up against the Constitution in two distinct ways.

The first was the Constitution’s privileging of negative liberties — the protection of private property, for instance — over positive liberties that would affirm and expand people’s rights to certain opportunities and wellbeing, such as the right to a living wage. In a world of capitalist exploitation, a constitutional order built exclusively around negative liberties handed capital a structural advantage: employers could invoke constitutional freedoms to resist any regulation of the terms they imposed on workers.
The second obstacle was a constitutional order designed to neutralize popular victories won through political struggle. Then, as now, the federal judiciary operated without regard for public opinion, appointed through a constitutional system that flowed through an indirectly elected president and a Senate that represented states rather than people. Time and again, those courts ruled in favor of monied interests over the people, most notoriously in Lochner v. New York (1905), which struck down a state law limiting bakers’ working hours as an unconstitutional infringement on employers’ freedom to contract. When workers turned to state legislatures to win their basic demand for “Eight Hours Work, Eight Hours Rest, Eight for What You Will,” the Constitution handed capitalists useful tools to reimpose the choke-hold.

For decades after Haymarket, the constitutional order continued to deal blows to the workers’ movement. When the Pullman Strike of 1894 threatened railroad capital, President Cleveland dispatched federal troops and obtained from the courts a federal injunction ordering the strike called off. Eugene Debs, the union leader who refused to comply, was imprisoned. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the use of such injunctions against unions in its In Re Debs ruling, handing employers a powerful new weapon against organized labor. In the same term, Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust struck down the federal income tax as unconstitutional, while U.S. v. E.C. Knight gutted antitrust enforcement against manufacturing monopolies. In a single year, the Court mobilized the Constitution to crush labor, protect monopoly, and nullify tax reform.

Even before those rulings, people had come to see the Constitution for what it was. As legal scholar Aziz Rana documents in The Constitutional Bind, reformers and radicals of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era widely regarded the Constitution as an antidemocratic instrument to be overcome. The Populists’ Omaha Platform of 1892 defined the Constitution’s fruits as a society where “Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.” They named the Constitution’s design as the problem, and many of their demands — a progressive income tax and direct election of Senators most notably — were won only through altering the Constitution, not by accepting or defending it.

Our Constitutional Bind

More than a century later, the Constitution presents most of the same barriers. For all the talk of it being a “living document,” the U.S. Constitution has remained remarkably rigid over time — widely regarded as the world’s most difficult constitution to change. Even the moderate assertions of positive liberties contained in the Equal Rights Amendment ran aground when confronted with the framers’ anti-majoritarian order.

Yet today we face an additional obstacle: a political culture that treats the Constitution as sacred. This reverence — this “creedal Constitutionalism” — narrows our political imagination, provides cover for imperialist adventures abroad, and funnels popular outrage into channels that leave existing power structures intact. It presents what Rana calls the Constitutional Bind.

Our descent into Trump 2.0 is Exhibit A in the case against creedal Constitutionalism. The Constitutionally valid Electoral College installed Trump in 2016 without even a popular plurality. The unrepresentative Senate’s Constitutionally valid confirmation process packed the Supreme Court. That Constitutionally packed Court, in Trump v. U.S. (2024), granted Trump sweeping immunity for “official” acts, emboldening the authoritarian turn of the last sixteen months. The monster was born not against the Constitution, but by it.

The Constitution and Our May Day Demands

And what of our May Day demands? No war. No ICE. Workers over billionaires.

In the weeks before Trump launched the US war of aggression against Iran, an SSRS poll found that only 21% of Americans favored an attack on Iran — yet a Congress unrepresentative of American opinion by constitutional design allowed the administration to forge ahead. That same Congress confirmed the pro-ICE fanatic Markwayne Mullin as DHS secretary at a time when a majority of Americans want ICE abolished. These are not failures of the administration to live up to the Constitution, but rather consequences of the Constitution’s aversion to basic democratic accountability¹.

And the stakes are often life and death. While we demand that workers’s needs come before billionaires’ profits, Trump is gutting Medicare and Medicaid to bomb Iran and enrich war profiteers. Meanwhile, it is the US Constitution that grants district-drawing powers to plutocratic state legislatures, allowing them to draw district lines so that they, not the people, have the greatest say in who represents the states in Congress.

We should not avert our eyes from the reality that is before us. We cannot call for workers over billionaires, for abolishing ICE, for taxing the rich to fund healthcare and housing — and simultaneously ask people to put their faith in a document whose mechanisms created and recreate a society in which we must call for these things.

From “Defend” to “Overcome”

None of this means abandoning the legal and political terrain entirely. We should oppose Trump’s defiance of court orders — but not out of faith in the courts as such. We should oppose Trump’s imperialist aggressions in Iran and elsewhere — but not on procedural grounds. We should name specific rights worth defending — but we should root these demands in a universalism that exists independent of any particular text.

“Defend the Constitution” as a first reflex is understandable. We have been raised in a political culture of Constitution veneration. But we must now have the wisdom to choose our words carefully and the courage to state clearly that our allegiance is to a better, future world, not to a document that was designed to fail us.

“Defend the Constitution” cannot be the slogan for a movement that demands workers over billionaires, no ICE, no war, healthcare and housing for all. Our slogan must instead be “A New Constitution for a New and Better Future.”

And to get there, we must build power outside and against the political system — labor and tenant unions, neighborhood assemblies, student groups, and solidarity networks like those being forged today. These are the building blocks of a movement capable of winning a constitutional order based on direct elections, proportional representation, a strong legislature, and the expansion of those positive liberties we have too long been denied. In short: democracy.

That is a constitutional future worth fighting for. It will be won not by defending the Constitution but by building sufficient people power to overcome it.

References:

1. Prospects of War with Iran

1. Don’t Quit. Organize!

Everyone’s situation is different, but if you can do so, stay on the job and organize to change the things at your workplace that aren’t working for you. Organizing is the best way to make your bad boss regret their crappy practices. Chances are that your co-workers have some of the same problems.

2. Talk to Your Co-Workers

Don’t go it alone. As workers, our power comes from collective action alongside our co-workers. Find out about others’ concerns. Ask them questions and listen to their answers. Share your own concerns with trustworthy people, but follow the rule of one mouth, two ears. We organize people by listening and showing them we hear them. Identify the issues that are widely and deeply felt in your workplace and take those issues seriously. Common issues include unmanageable workloads, substandard equipment, and unpredictable scheduling — and more. Help people overcome their fear by finding their righteous anger.

3. Find Places Where You Can Talk and Build Solidarity

What the boss doesn’t know can’t hurt you. Where are the places you and your co-workers can speak freely? This could be the proverbial water cooler, a smokers’ corner, a break room, or anyplace away from prying ears. Find solid people and establish a means of communicating outside of work: a text thread, an after-work hangout, or the like. Bosses try to divide us in many ways — backstabbing gossip, pitting us against each other for small rewards, racism, anti-woman or anti-queer sexism. Organizers build solidarity between co-workers.

4. Map Who Has Influence

The most powerful co-worker on your shift may not have a title. Identify the co-worker everyone respects and listens to. When they speak up, others follow. Talk to them about your issue. Their buy-in is worth more than a dozen casual supporters.

5. Every Collective Action Matters

Solidarity is a muscle that gets stronger with exercise. Strikes are the most powerful weapon we have as workers, but they are like the Solidarity Olympics, and you have to build up to them. Any action that you and your co-workers take together to improve your conditions builds the collective power to achieve what none of you could alone.

6. Document Everything

Keep a shared record of incidents, promises made, and responses received. When workers compare notes, patterns emerge, and patterns are evidence. A single complaint is easy to brush off. A pattern documented by ten people is much harder to ignore.

7. Learn from Experience

Make connections and get support from labor movement organizations. There’s no need to go it alone and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can start by contacting the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee at workerorganizing.org.

Every protection you have at work, every hour shaved off a seventy-hour week, every child who is not working in a factory right now, exists because workers organized and forced it.

The bosses know this. Which is why they never stopped organizing against you.

While you were working your shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was spending more money lobbying Congress than any other organization in the country. While you were figuring out how to pay your rent, the American Legislative Exchange Council was writing model legislation in hotel conference rooms, handing it to state legislators, and watching it become law, here in Tennessee and in thirty other states. While you were deciding whether the union was worth the trouble, your employer was paying a union avoidance consultant massive sums of money to make sure you decided no.

This is their business model: spending untold amounts of money to not have to pay you more or work you less.

The union-busting industry generates an estimated $340 million a year. Consultants train managers to hold captive audience meetings, to identify and isolate organizers, to make workers feel that a union would only bring conflict into an otherwise peaceful workplace.

The conflict, of course, was already there. They just don’t want you to think you can do anything about it.
“Right to work” did not spring up spontaneously in twenty-seven states. It was coordinated, funded, and executed by a network of foundations and advocacy organizations that have been at this for decades. Tennessee passed its right-to-work law in 1947. The infrastructure that built that law is still running — in fact, it spent buckets of money in 2022 to get that law enshrined in the state constitution, and that law wasn’t even facing a threat at the time.

So, if the people who own your workplace are organized into associations, coordinated through lobbying groups, advised by consultants, and protected by laws that they helped write — what does it mean that most workers are not organized at all?

It means the fight is not even. Every individual grievance, every whispered complaint in the break room, every person who got fired for speaking up — all of it runs into an apparatus designed to absorb from the start to absorb exactly that — one person, one complaint, one firing at a time.

There is only one thing that changes that math: We organize. We build relationships with the person next to us on the line, the one across the aisle, the one who has been there twenty years and knows where the bodies are buried. We stop thinking about work as something that happens to us and start thinking about it as somewhere we have power — if we build it.

The bosses figured this out a long time ago. That is why they work so hard to make sure you don’t.

I’ll be honest, I was a little skeptical when I first heard about the effort to achieve universal health care in Maine through a statewide citizen initiative.

Not because we shouldn’t try this by referendum (I’m a “by any means necessary” kind of guy on good policy), but because this initiative is a “Resolve.” Resolves are mostly non-binding short term expressions of opinion, not actual enforceable law. A directive to send a strongly-worded letter of disdain, offer praise for an achievement, or maybe to create a temporary task force to do a study that will end up on a shelf.

In short, they are mostly just to make a point.

Not that I am opposed to making a point. Indeed, in 2003, as a state senator, one of my proudest moments was sponsoring a resolve opposing the pending war in Iraq. The Maine Senate became the first state senate in the nation to go on record opposing that senseless attack, which certainly made a statement in the form of national headlines. But that was all it did. Pres. George W. Bush went through with his attack (in case you missed it).

So, when I saw this initiative I thought, why spend all the time and money collecting signatures – and then additional time and money to win a campaign – just to make a statement? In truth, we already know Mainers want universal health care, as poll after poll has shown.

But then I read the initiative.

While it is indeed a resolve, it is crafted in such a way that might just actually work. Instead of crafting the details of a complex universal single-payer health care law that the industry can tear apart in a well-funded misinformation campaign, the resolve simply, but very specifically, directs the legislature to come up with and pass said legislation. 

While a resolve directing the legislature to come up with legislation certainly leaves some concern for what that legislation might ultimately look like, the initiative is pretty precise at making clear what it must include and achieve.

Here’s how the resolve appears to work. It directs the legislature to come up with legislation to create a universal health care plan that will reduce costs, preserve choice, and pay providers expeditiously. It’s very specific in terms of these values.

But what it also says is that said legislation must, “Ensure that all residents of the State possess comprehensive, publicly funded health care coverage.” [emphasis added]

Whoa. 

That is not simply directing the legislature to nibble around the edges with ineffective market-based solutions. That gets right at the heart of the best solution possible – a single payer health care system like Medicare for All that the people have been clamoring for.

This kind of reminds me how Barack Obama gave the reins of creating ObamaCare to Nancy Pelosi and the Congress. Instead of drafting his own plan, he asked them to do it, as long as it met certain criteria to earn his signature.

Now, to be clear, as we learned under former Gov. Paul LePage – who refused to implement the voter approved elimination of the tipped wage, or the expansion of Medicaid that voters approved – the legislature/governor can always try to ignore the will of this vote. And, as mentioned earlier, since the legislature has the leeway to craft the bill, that does give corporate health care lobbyists a shot at trying to influence what the final legislation looks like.

But that is a battle we will have to fight either way, resolve or law.

In the meantime, getting this initiative on the ballot for 2027 is an important step toward getting a publicly funded single-payer health care system in Maine enacted. I’m looking forward to signing the petition on Election Day. You should too.

***

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Beacon, sign up for the free Beacon newsletter here.

The post Why I am excited to sign the petition to pass Health Care for All Mainers appeared first on Pine & Roses.

Welcome to the new website of the DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group. Many thanks to Devon Bussell, Ian Hyzy, Matthew Carroll, Ron Hogan, and content editors Maxine Phillips and Russell Fox, who have worked many volunteer hours to bring all of our activities and resources together. This site is a work in progress, and we hope you’ll give us feedback and ideas for what you want to see and potential writers and topics. Look at our categories and let us know if you want to write something for us. Query us at religioussocialism@dsacommittees.org first. —Ed.

Today, as the Religious Right threatens the rights and lives of so many in this country and uses religion as an excuse to wage endless war, we’re heartened by the renewed spirit of progressive religious folk.  They may not all be socialists, but they know in which direction their moral compass points. This article from the Guardian describes some of what’s going on.

The post Righting the Wrongs of the Christian Right appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Newspapers publish letters from Portland DSA members all the time. Occasionally, the takes are too hot for corporate news media. We are publishing those letters here.

Portland City Councilors: Pass Police/ICE Mask Ban

At a time when our community’s trust in federal law enforcement has reached its nadir, it is crucial that the City take steps to restore our faith and confidence in those sworn to protect Portlanders and uphold the laws. The “Right to Know Who is Policing You” ordinance would do just that. When we authorize uniformed and armed law enforcement to patrol our city, and at times to restrict our freedoms, the ability to immediately recognize those officers and distinguish them from masked and anonymous vigilantes or impersonators can be a matter of life and death.

Last month the legislature passed and the governor signed HB 4138, directing state and local police agencies to implement policies like those found in the proposed ordinance. Policeofficers, whether local, state or federal, are public servants whom we entrust with solemn responsibility. This ordinance would codify the City’s policy as one of “trust, but verify,” grounded in transparency and backstopped by accountability in cases where that trust is misplaced or abused.

Requiring clear, visible identification, including recognizable uniforms identifying the specific agency and individual officer,protects all members of our community including sworn officers themselves. This ordinance is an important step toward repairing the damage that has been done to community–police relations in recent years, and underlines our commitment to the bedrock principle of the rule of law, no matter how tattered and torn that principle may be in Washington, DC.

I urge every member of city council to support this ordinance.

-Michael W.

And beginning the feminist conversation with myself

This is an opinion piece written by an individual member and was not voted on by membership. Opinion pieces from members do not reflect the opinions of other members and are not chapter approved statements.

2/10. Would not recommend. This book plays up some of the worst stereotypes and effects of white American culture, and it does so through horrific themes. Suicide and incest are pervasively spoonfed to you throughout the novel in ways that make me sick. Hate that. Hated the book.

Unfortunately, Irving’s emotional jiu-jitsu and exploration of dark and morbid topics is supposedly part of the fun. He’s been praised for his matter-of-fact presentations of heavy themes. Failure to find stability in a family, the loss of loved ones to a plane crash, and suicide are all explored to magnify the absurdity of loss’s effects on us. There is a tremendous depth to his works at times. This is, in theory, the work of someone who truly understands the human condition.

But come on. He doesn’t need to romanticize everything morbid. I don’t know what incest looks like with two consenting adults (as is so tastefully portrayed in the novel), but it doesn’t look like that. I mean, I would know. I haven’t spent the last year grappling with the internalized misogyny my family instilled in itself to keep victims quiet just to think the book was accurate. Irving barely explores the difficulty of finding, documenting, and addressing households affected by incestual abuse—no matter how often that abuse happens. Sure, I wasn’t directly impacted, but I had my close encounters. I knew enough to know how it worked. If nothing happened, it wasn’t going to be talked about. An odd interaction with an uncle; a strange drawing with familiar faces- that’s nothing. And if something did happen? If an abuser was amongst the family again? If you told someone what was happening? Don’t worry. It’s taken care of. Don’t. Talk. About. It.

It won’t be reported.

And if it is, what happens in the courtroom stays in the courtroom. There will be no family dinner-table discussion. 

Look, all I’m saying is if John Irving is gonna discuss the perverted nature of our society, he should do it right. I’m aware most of his writings begin about a decade or two before the Epstein class really started to dig into our cultural framework, but I just think that’s no excuse. For me, once what was going on really started to click, I began to ask questions. Like a half-decent writer, I tried to make sense of what was happening. I tried to understand it so that I could talk about it correctly. Obviously, that’s been difficult and so far unsuccessful. I still feel the effects of asking those questions in myself, in the ways I shut down. There’s no correct way to talk about it when there’s no one willing to talk.

So I guess I’m just upset that I don’t think Irving accounted for that in this novel—in any of his novels. I mean, he has like 20 of them and the majority portray incest, so I think this might just be his thing and not something he’s “unafraid to talk about”. And he still hasn’t taken the time to get it right. He talks about it the way most people misinterpret Lolita. As if it’s almost a beautiful thing in his misunderstood eyes. But whatever. He’s gonna get the praise he’s gonna get.

It feels like Irving has this self-righteous air around the subject, like he understands it differently and can therefore talk about it differently. And it’s frustrating because, well, I can’t talk about it at all. I don’t mean within my family. I mean because I can’t. I can’t get myself to talk about it. I can’t talk about it because my family’s conditioning to keep us quiet worked. Every conversation about gender-based violence; every conversation about defining feminism; every conversation where I feel like it could come up, I avoid. And if I don’t avoid it, I walk away shaking. Having been through what I’ve been through, within and without my family, it’s almost easier to be victimized and to dissociate than to go through the process of analyzing what happened. I was trained to be more afraid of how I’ll be perceived if I talk about it than of actually being abused.

But

I can’t keep watching my mom turn into a scared little girl whenever her brother’s name is mentioned. I can’t avoid my cousin anymore because I don’t know how to ask if he meant to send me what he did. I can’t keep watching my aunt relive finding those notebooks at 15 and reading her own name in them. I can’t keep asking myself if the decades-long family friends know how their daughter was talked about; that when I hit puberty, my body was compared to hers; that her sister was written about in those notebooks too. I can’t hear more stories from other women in my family about the patriarchs within it. And now that it’s “over,” I can’t watch while the older generations fight to keep these things undiscovered, as if there was never a judge or jury involved—to pretend they haven’t paid extra for people to have personal security during their prison sentence. I can’t learn about them lying to protect the abusers. I can’t do this anymore. So, so much has been buried under the rug that any discussion was suffocated before those most hurt could get peace.

So I’ll learn to speak up. At home, and out in the world.

I haven’t been much of a feminist yet; I’m just now truly addressing my internalized misogyny. In recent years I’ve become much more aware of what it means to me to be a woman: This comes at the same time that I’ve begun to face the world as a mother. This new understanding of the world has been difficult to accept, and something I spent the last year trying to avoid in the chapter. 

No matter how much I didn’t feel ready, being asked repeatedly to figure out childcare, and to attend male-dominated events to make other non-cis men comfortable, and experiencing unintentional-yet-outright sexism eventually led me to “accept my fate.” I let the project I was slowly, privately, and personally working through become a bandaid for others’ bruised egos, all while knowing I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t know what lines were where, or how they were being crossed. I didn’t say anything. As I helped push part of this conversation within SLDSA, I found that I’m still unwilling to actually talk about it. I’m unable to vocalize my thoughts without feeling deeply uncomfortable; presenting the Centering Children Resolution—itself born from my first time really confronting what feminism means to me—is the most emotional and distressing experience I’ve had during my time in the chapter. 

That distress was needed. I’ve spent years terrified of how every word I said and wrote would sound. Addressing these things within the chapter carried the same emotional weight that I would be buried under addressing them at home. After passing the resolution, the discomfort grew, and I couldn’t sit in silence anymore. Now was the time to address those ghosts which lingered in the hallways of my childhood home. I’m beginning to open the conversation at home, and I’m finally ready to talk out loud. To identify myself as another angry feminist, and actually sit and think through what that means to me: politically, spiritually, personally. Beginning with a book first recommended to me by a family member at 14, I’m on my way to developing a clear feminist framework to bring forward to the world.

In the meantime, I hope Irving comes to actually understand how this plays out in a home; what it means to be a child raised in a family with strange rumors. The Hotel New Hampshire does not capture it right, and what a shame that is. He really could’ve given life to an often hidden conversation. What a waste. The rest of the novel is fine though, if you were wondering. 

The post An Overdue Review of The Hotel New Hampshire first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

A union can democratize your workplace, protecting you against at-will employment, ensuring just cause, and raising standards for all workers.

The post Your boss is lying when he says unions are no longer necessary appeared first on EWOC.

DSA has become an important vehicle for climate politics. A new book uses the campaign for a New York state climate law as a lens for understanding the organization and its approach to the crisis.

The post Feel the Burn appeared first on Democratic Left.

State Rep. Rabb has fought for working-class Philadelphians in the legislature for years. Now, he’s taking his fight to DC to continue the struggle for housing for all, universal healthcare, and for real democracy in America! DSA is incredibly proud to endorse Rep. Rabb and make sure our voices are heard in the halls of power!

Rep. Rabb is our second Congressional endorsement this cycle. He has some tough opponents, and AIPAC and other dark money groups are already boosting his opponents. Philadelphia DSA has built up a powerful canvassing operation, but we can all help!

Rep. Rabb is joining Oliver Larkin on our Congressional slate. It’s going to take a lot of us standing together to bring more voices and votes into the halls of power.

Rep. Rabb is part of a slate of candidates in the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising project!