By Mike Nutt

We have family in England. A merciful vacation at an idyllic homestead in rural Devon awaits me there. There will be sheep. It will be overcast and cool while it is hot and unbearable in Raleigh. 

I mutter synonyms for 'radical' and 'leftist' at the laptop as I search for bookstores near the small towns we're visiting. Predictably, the results on the map are long train rides away from our destinations.

Something unexpected, though. Better. The Socialist Workers Party is having its annual Marxism Festival in London the day before we fly back to the States from Heathrow. Such things are not luck; they are synchronicities, and all good socialists must learn to recognize them, ride them. 

With my partner's blessing, on Saturday, July 6, I get up early to peel away from the family. They will visit Arundel Castle's Medieval Festival. I am dragging large suitcases closer to our hotel by LHR. 

I get to the Emsworth train station early. I eat a delicious sausage roll from the local baker. I have my pick of seats when the train arrives. There is nothing to see, say, or sort, despite the constant security reminders. I relax and look out the window.

Three trains later, I leave my luggage in the basement of the Simpli Fresh convenience store in central London. Unburdened, I walk towards Marxism Festival 2024 at the University College of London.

On Thursday, July 4, the first day of Marxism Festival 2024 (MF24), England's Conservative party suffers a historic loss, ending 14 years of rule. I am attending the festival two days later on Saturday. One of the first people I see is an old man wearing an old t-shirt that says "FUCK THE TORIES." I resolve to also wear punk shirts as an old man.

Labour's win is hardly impressive, however, earning fewer total votes than in its last election. The festival's organizers, the Trotsykyist Socialist Workers Party [1], have already dismissed Keir Starmer as a typical agent of neoliberalism. A speaker on Saturday name-checks Jeremy Corbyn (a MF24 speaker himself, on the topic of poetry) as "one of five independent Members of Parliament (MPs) elected to the left of Labour." Speakers and audience members dissect the loss of the Tories throughout the day, and there is an obligatory cheer for their downfall at every talk. 

This overcast and cool Saturday is also one day before the second round of National Assembly elections in France, where the far-right will underperform expectations. But today, we don't know that, and I see dozens of people race-walking to get a good seat at one of the first talks of the day, "France: Le Pen, Fascism and the Popular Front" by Denis Godard.

I find the location of my first session, which is in a building called Cruciform. I am the first to sit down for Julie Sherry's presentation, "Coal Mines to Call Centres: Has the Working Class Lost its Power?" Sherry is a former lead labor organizer for the SWP. She is sitting behind a small table at the front of a lecture hall, without shoes, waiting for her facilitator to arrive. The tube is running late.

Sherry's answer to the question posed in her talk title is that, no, the gig economy has not made the coal mining trade unionism of the past irrelevant, though of course circumstances are different so tactics should change. She pinpoints a dynamic in modern movements: people are highly motivated to demand an end to injustice but have low levels of class-consciousness and little experience with organizing for working-class power.

Therefore, Sherry explains, socialist labor organizers must be ready to join, support, and have mutually beneficial relationships with social justice movements like the Palestinian freedom movement or Black Lives Matter. The movement for a free Palestine (or any movement) can be an entry point for unions to address social problems by building working class solidarity and demonstrating the power of direct democracy. Yes, it is genocide. Yes, resistance is justified in an illegal occupation. Now, what are we going to do about it, together? Sherry is the first person in the day to say that socialists should "be stuck in to" every fight. This is the way to build trust and influence in our communities and to ultimately cultivate more revolutionaries.

The next meeting is with Lewis Nielson, one of the authors of the SWP's new book. He and Sophia Beach have just completed a crisp and powerful 80 page pamphlet entitled Why You Should Be a Socialist: the Case for Revolution (WYSBaS) [2]. All three of the talks I will see today purposefully revolve around themes from the book, an impressive display of party unity. The speakers reinforce and unpack themes from WYSBaS, but with a sharp focus on recent and looming elections, their importance, and the limitations of elections in general for Marxists.

Nielsen is a good speaker. His talk, "Party and Class: What Kind of Organization do We Need?" runs through some of the book's main points. He charges through his speech with only a couple glances at his notes. The SWP, says Nielson, should proudly declare themselves revolutionaries. Conditions change through rupture, not the incrementalism and reform of a limited representative democracy. Electoralism is not a strategy that can win.

From WYSBaS:

"...the reality is that socialism can't come from above through parliament" (p42). "...what really matters in society is not what happens in parliament, but what happens on the streets and communities and, above all, in our workplaces" (p48).

Still, says Nielson, elections are not unimportant. It matters who wins because they can create more or less favorable conditions for non-electoral organizing. The SWP even allows for strategic collaboration with the capitalist workers party, Labour. "Any serious revolutionary should look to work with Labour Party members in joint campaigns and struggles whenever possible" (p47). Nielson's assertion that election outcomes matter seems to imply approval of a united front with liberals against the fascist threat represented by Reform UK, the National Rally in France, and presumably the Republicans in the United States (Nielson predicted a Trump victory a week before he was an assassination target. He also stressed the ongoing threat from fascist elements in the UK, despite Reform UK's drubbing. A month later, the country erupted in race riots).

The most blood-pumping part of the speech is when Nielson takes a turn calling for socialists to be stuck in to every fight. The Socialist Workers Party must be a party of member-leaders, where the rank and file member is empowered to take the initiative necessary to organize the unorganized at the local level. Only a revolution from the bottom up will have legitimacy and democracy. Yes, comrade Lewis.

The movement for a free Palestine is on everyone's lips and the movement is in the London streets that weekend.

Palestine is all over the program, from the Palestine 101 session first thing Thursday July 4 to Sunday's closing rally on "Resistance in a world of imperialism and crisis." I force myself to buy only one Palestine-related book in the Bookmarks pop-up store, a biography of Leila Khaled [3].  

Lewis Nielson notes early in his talk the incredible radicalizing power the movement for Palestine has had. He notes a poll: 54 percent of young people in England now say Israel doesn't have the right to exist. This would have been unimaginable on October 6, he says.

At noon there is a break in the conference and I march with one hundred thousand Londoners——including at least a thousand socialists, conservatively——to demand a Free Palestine. [4] I am wearing my Democratic Socialists of America Labor shirt. We ruck and chant and wait and dance and make demands in the streets for two hours. 

I skip the culminating rally by the Thames to eat and get back to the conference. I try to find a pub for some food and a pint on the 45 minute walk back to the College, but all the tables are full or reserved. England is playing Switzerland in the Euro football championship.

My last talk of the day is in the enormous and impossible-to-find Chris Ingold chemistry building auditorium XLG2. Joseph Choonara delivers "Revolutionaries, Elections and the Way Forward." Choonara asks, "How do we use the election tactic?" He reminds us Lenin said that until you're ready to seize power, it's obligatory to participate in elections. However, "mass working class struggle from below is our tradition." In any case, the game is rigged. Reformists are better at winning elections than revolutionaries because they drop their principles to win elections.

In a best case scenario, Choonara says elections allow Marxists to raise working class consciousness, gauge where the working class is at, and "generalize and spread our ideas." Still, he cautions that people can be put off from a tactic by bad experiences. I think of DSA and its avoidance of long-shot socialists in the electoral sphere. 

To close his portion of the talk, Choonara puts his palms on the large table in front of him and leans into his parting shot: "No honeymoon for Starmer."

After each main speaker of the day, there is an audience engagement portion of the hour. We are instructed to turn to our neighbors to discuss our thoughts on the topic at hand for three minutes. Then, we raise their hands to be recognized to address the whole room. It is during this last audience-interaction moment that my Festival experience reaches a climax. 

The talks have been consistent throughout the day, along with the responses from the attendees and my conversations with strangers. I have read three WYSBaS chapters between sessions. I'm ready to raise a specific question to...someone, but I resolve not to be the one American DSA guy who makes a fool of himself challenging all of XLG2 to explain themselves. I turn to the three in the row above and behind me.

"I'm sorry, I'm American and not a Party member. May I ask a question? Throughout the day, people have only talked about national elections. Does the SWP have a strategy for local elections?"

The three SWP members stare silently at me for a socially awkward amount of time. The woman with short hair and a nose piercing to my right says, "Well, it's just a much different system than in the US." The brunette guy agrees. For a beat, no one elaborates further. I'm holding my tongue, practicing my organizer listening skills, trying not to be the stupid American, waiting to see if they will fill the silence. The third in my group, an old man in a tweed beret, eventually says "Palestine is the most important issue." He says Palestinian freedom is a national, not local, issue. 

Just then, the meeting chair interrupts to tell us to wrap up. The four of us are silent for a few moments more. I'm trying to figure out why my question is being dismissed so easily. 

I turn back to the man in the beret. "Can I ask you another question, since you mentioned Palestine?" He rolls his eyes dramatically but leans forward on his arms and looks at me and waits. "I understand we have different systems, but are there no local opportunities for BDS [6] of Israel, where local politicians could pursue divestment in municipal budgets, for example?" It's not a great question; it doesn't get to the theoretical rationale for a national-only electoral tactic. But it keeps the man in the beret talking.

He starts telling a story about an MP whom the SWP supported but couldn't keep in line and who ended up a corrupt disappointment. Strangely, the story seems to be proving that national MPs are too distant to be held accountable. As he’s getting into the story, the chair calls us back to hear Choonara's response to the audience comments. 

When Choonara is done, I bound into the aisle. The man in the beret calls after me, "Aren't you going to let me finish what I was saying?" I wave and say, "No, thank you." I walk out of the lecture hall fairly certain that the Socialist Workers Party of England has a giant contradiction in its blind spot.

As I take the evening tube to my hotel, I think hard about the meetings I attended and the contradictions I saw at their center The Socialist Workers Party made a good case for revolution, but it was silent on how a revolutionary is supposed to approach local elections. The book, the speakers, my lecture hall neighbors...no one seemed to think local elections are "common struggles" worth our time. If elections matter and socialists need to be in every fight and we have to build from the bottom up, then socialists need to be running for municipal offices. 

If we're building from the bottom up, we cannot ignore the local opportunities to build strong, radicalizing relationships through bottom-up elections. If radicals are going to use the electoral tactic at all, it must be deployed at the local level. You are not stuck in to every fight if you are ignoring local elections.

A few months before leaving for England, I discovered Murray Bookchin through Jackson Rising Redux, a book of essays about the radicals at Cooperation Jackson who are building cooperatives and dual power [6] in Mississippi. Bookchin once said, "The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality—-the city, town, and village—-where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy." [7] He did not mean that simply voting in the town council election will change society. Rather, he was identifying a social-geographic place of power where socialists can best exercise people-power across a range of democratic projects, including elections. 

The Triangle DSA's recent electoral successes demonstrate how socialists can win seats in city councils, where we can not only "generalize and spread our ideas" but have positive material impacts on the lives of the working class which can be directly attributed to socialist praxis. In Durham, "we endorsed the electoral campaign of Nate Baker--a DSA member, whose campaign was managed by a DSA cadre and chapter HGO...Our elected officials have held the line on Palestine with total discipline: Nate Baker’s first action as a Durham City Council member was to call for a ceasefire and we secured the first ceasefire resolution passed in North Carolina with the help of DSA cadre and Carrboro town councilor Danny Nowell." [8]

This coming Raleigh town council election is the most exciting in my 11 years as a city resident, with two self-identified socialists on the ballot endorsed by our Triangle chapter. This is the first time I'll be able to vote for a candidate I first met as a comrade organizing in the community. Reeves Peeler's story and campaign represent a model for how socialists can raise up local organizers to claw back the trust of the working class, too battered to care about voting for yet another pro-gentrification Democrat. 

Similarly, I am proud of our chapter's overwhelming endorsement of town council incumbent Mary Black. As one comrade noted after her endorsement meeting, she has "a clear fighter's spirit, being driven by a clear antipathy to the current political order and a desire to see a different, better world in its place. She's been a clear, public leader in Raleigh willing to take risks on Palestine even in a conservative district."

Socialism from below must do more to foster the delegation of individuals from our midst to positions of power in our local institutions. From public school Parent Teacher Associations to Citizen Advisory Councils and our own peoples movement assemblies. That means clear-headed engagement in local politics when conditions are right. The trick will be to recognize when the conditions are right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers_Party_(UK)

[2] https://socialistworker.co.uk/product/wysbasbook/

[3] Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation by Sarah Irving. My English copy has the cover shown here, which is much better than the American one. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20140601-leila-khaled-icon-of-palestinian-liberation/

[4] Other socialist orgs were represented at the march, including the Socialist Equality Party who wrote this report: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/07/qisb-j07.html

[5] Boycotts, divestment and sanctions. https://bdsmovement.net/get-involved

[6] See Dual Power Then and Now: From the Iroquois to Cooperation Jackson by the ROAR Collective

https://roarmag.org/magazine/dual-power-then-and-now-from-the-iroquois-to-cooperation-jackson/

[7] "Interview with Murray Bookchin" by David Vanek. https://social-ecology.org/wp/2001/10/harbinger-vol-2-no-1-%E2%80%94-murray-bookchin-interview/

[8] https://www.dsanc.org/leftangles/2023/12/31/nyreport23

This month’s Maine Mural podcast presents the first episode in a three part series focused on notable Maine socialist and naturalist, Norman Wallace Lermond. Born in Warren, Maine, Lermond was a member of the Maine People’s Party, and later helped found the Maine Socialist Party in 1900. This episode covers his upbringing and education, as well as early activist work. We hope you enjoy the program!

The post Maine Mural: A Maine Socialist – Norman Wallace Lermond, pt. 1 appeared first on Pine & Roses.

We are happy to announce that we have endorsed Jacob Luallen for Johnson City Commission: jacobluallen.com.

The three incumbent Commissioners running for re-election this cycle – Todd Fowler, Aaron Murphy, and Joe Wise – have spent years letting the JCPD run amok while catering to high-end housing developers, the Ballad Health monopoly, and the Chamber of Commerce. The Commissioners have willfully neglected local housing needs, and now nearly half of Johnson City renters are rent-burdened (putting at least 30% of their monthly income directly into a landlord’s pocket). Over one in five renters gives more than 50% of their earnings to a landlord just to have shelter. The people of Johnson City need a change, and Jacob is the candidate to deliver.

A participant in the recent Protect the People’s Voice Campaign, Jacob’s platform is about meeting the needs of the working people of Johnson City: affordable housing, functional public transportation, and increased transparency and accessibility in city government. He is our neighbor, and we know he is the right choice for the people of Johnson City.

But simply saying he’s the right choice will not make it so. If we want Jacob to win, it is up to us to make it happen. We need to get out to knock doors and convince our neighbors that there is an alternative to the landlord’s paradise created by Fowler, Murphy, and Wise. That’s how we won the Protect the People’s Voice Campaign. That’s how we will win again!

To get involved, check out Jacob’s campaign website or Facebook page and sign up for a canvass (or two!)

Source for our data on JC’s dire housing situation: “Preliminary Housing Needs Assessment” for Johnson City, TN, 2022.

At September 2024’s General Body Meeting, Las Vegas DSA passed a Resolution For an Anti-Zionist Las Vegas DSA in both Principle and Practice. The vote passed 90% in favor, 10% opposed.

Read the full resolution below:

Resolution For an Anti-Zionist Las Vegas DSA in both Principle and Practice

Adapted from; Resolution: For an Anti-Zionist DSA San Francisco in both Principle and Practice and Resolution: For an Anti-Zionist Houston DSA in both Principle and Practice

Whereas, and in line with Convention Resolutions #4 and #62 from 2019, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is an anti-imperialist organization;

Whereas, and in line with Convention Resolution #50 from 2019, DSA is an anti-colonialist organization committed to advancing decolonization projects;

Whereas, and in line with Convention Resolutions #41 and #45 from 2017 and Resolutions #4 and #31 from 2021, DSA is an anti-racist organization;

Whereas, and in line with Convention Resolutions #7 and #8 from 2017 and Resolution #35 from 2019, DSA National has publicly declared on numerous occasions in recent years that it “unapologetically stands in solidarity with Palestinian people everywhere;”

Whereas, Zionism – as popularized by Theodore Herzl and explicitly described by him as “something colonial,” meant to be “a wall of Europe against Asia… an outpost of [Western] civilization against [Eastern] barbarism” – is and has always been a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project that has resulted in the ongoing death, displacement, and dehumanization of Palestinians in Palestine and in diaspora around the world;

Whereas, by Zionism, we refer to the philosophy that took hold and stands today and is a settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state where the Jewish people have more rights than others, and which has resulted in Palestinian dispossession and occupation;

Whereas, Zionism transforms the victims of a millennium of European bigotry into a buffer class it scapegoats first for British, and then for American imperialism, while deliberately and ceaselessly working to identify the safety of international capitalism – a system that eighty years ago murdered two-thirds of European Jews – with the safety of Jewish people worldwide;

Whereas, and antithetical to DSA’s contemporary principles and policies, DSA’s founding merger was heavily predicated on ensuring that DSA would uphold DSOC’s (Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) position of supporting continued American aid for Israel’s Zionist settler-colonial project, as explicitly noted in our organization’s founding merger documents (e.g., Points of Political Unity) and by Michael Harrington himself in his autobiography;

Whereas, and antithetical to DSA’s contemporary principles and policies, a number of DSA endorsed electeds (e.g., Jamaal Bowman & Nithya Raman) have consistently demonstrated a commitment to Zionism through their public opposition to BDS and/or support for legislation that harms Palestinians everywhere (e.g., public support for and votes in favor of U.S. financial aid to Israeli military, which forcefully advances the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine through systematic tactics of abuse, forcible displacement, and murder of Palestinians; governmental adoption of definitions of antisemitism that conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, leading to the suppression of speech of Palestinians and those in solidarity with them);

Whereas, DSA’s historic and contemporary association with and enablement of Zionism has jeopardized DSA rank-and-file membership’s confidence in the integrity of DSA’s overall politics, as well as our organization’s working relationships with major Palestinian-led grassroots organizations across North America;

Whereas, DSA membership has overwhelmingly denounced Zionism through its stated principles and convention mandates since 2017 but has struggled to articulate these newfound principles into a more coherent praxis;

Whereas, the resolution “Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis” (MSR #12), failed to be heard or deliberated on at the 2023 National Convention, and there is an urgent need to address this on a chapter level;

Therefore, be it resolved, LVDSA denounces the national organization’s Zionist roots and reaffirms its commitment to being an anti-racist, anti-imperialist organization by explicitly committing to being an anti-Zionist chapter– in both principle and praxis;

Be it resolved, LVDSA once again reaffirms our organization’s commitments to Palestinian liberation and the broad, international BDS movement

LVDSA’s endorsed candidates hold true to the following basic commitments:

• Publicly support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement;
• Refrain from any and all affiliation with the Israeli government or Zionist lobby groups, such as, but not limited to, AIPAC, J Street, or Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), including participating in political junkets or any event sponsored by these entities;
• Pledge to oppose legislation that harms Palestinians, such as…
  • Any official adoption of a redefinition of antisemitism to include opposition to Israel’s policies or legal system, or support for BDS (e.g., IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism);
  • Legislative and executive efforts to penalize individuals, universities and entities that boycott Israel;
  • Legislative and executive efforts to send any military or economic resources to Israel;
• Pledge to support legislation that supports Palestinian liberation, such as…
  • Legislative and executive efforts to end Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians and promote Palestinians’ rights to return to and live freely on the land (e.g., H.R. 2590), the right to resistance, the right to self-determination (statehood), and Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine;
  • Condemnation of Israeli apartheid and colonial practices (e.g., H.Res. 751);
  • Attempts to end the spending of U.S. tax dollars on Israel and/or sanction Israel until it ceases its practices of apartheid and colonialism;

Be it resolved, potential candidates who cannot commit to the aforementioned basic expectations will be disqualified from endorsement by LVDSA at every level;

Be it resolved, endorsed candidates who do not commit to the aforementioned basic expectations will have their LVDSA endorsements swiftly revoked;

Be it resolved, all LVDSA members who are credibly shown to:

1. Be consistently and publicly opposed to BDS, Palestinian liberation, the right to return and land back, the Palestinian right to self-determination, or
2. Be currently affiliated with the Israeli government or any Zionist lobby group(s), or
3. Have knowingly and intentionally provided material aid to the state of Israel’s Zionist colonialist project

will be considered in substantial disagreement with LVDSA’s principles and policies, and thus, the chapter will initiate the expulsion process in line with Article 10, Section 3 of the LVDSA bylaws;

Be it resolved, members expelled on these grounds may be reconsidered for membership reinstatement once per year provided they write a statement to chapter membership that 1) demonstrates a basic understanding of Palestinian issues and Zionism and 2) apologizes for past anti-solidaristic behaviors with a commitment to putting their new anti-Zionist principles into practice.

Are you interested in becoming the best organizer you can be? Do you want to expand socialism here in Milwaukee, but are unsure of where and how to start? Have you been involved but feel like the project did not go anywhere? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class is for you! 

This nine week program will focus on holistically teaching you to be an unstoppable organizer who builds socialism, changes hearts and minds, and impacts our city.  You will learn direct action organizing, as defined by Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists, in which we organize actions, campaigns, and tactics to “1) win real, immediate, concrete improvement in people’s lives . . . 2) Give people a sense of their own power . . . 3) Alter the relations of power.” 

Interested individuals will apply (Click here, which is due by 11:59 p.m. on Monday September 23, 2024), be interviewed, and enter the program if selected.  DSA membership is not required to participate, but is encouraged. 

This education program will be a combination of in-person events with virtual events if necessary. Each unit will be roughly a week, with a week break in the middle of the program. Each unit will consist of classroom-style instruction in the unit topic (no more than 2 hours, which will be in-person), field work in organizing (which will be at least 3 hours and consist of having conversations, moving people to action, and building infrastructure for a strong socialist movement involving several types of campaigns), and time for personal reflection. Each participant must commit to the entire program and, unless excused, attend every unit instruction, and field work session.  Missing more than two classes and field work sessions may result in removal from the program.  

This is the sixth time this program has been offered, and it is back by popular demand!  The two instructors have updated and revised the course to make you even more prepared to lead in socialism.  

Additionally, there is a strong chance that this class will be taught in a room that is not wheelchair accessible.  

Time commitment per week: 

Unit instruction: 2 hours 

Organizing work: 3 hours 

Miscellaneous tasks: 1 hour 

Total time per week: 6 hour

Weekly Schedule 

Class will be conducted on Thursday evenings from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. and held in-person at Zao MKE, located at 3219 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, 53211.  

Field work will be held at regular intervals over the week, with options to organize at several points during the week: 

(tentative schedule, subject to change . . .) 

Saturdays, 9:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m.

Sundays 12:00 p.m. until 3:00 p.m. 

Mondays 5:30 until 8:30 p.m. 

Program Timeline: 

September 23 at 11:59 p.m.:

Application deadline – apply here

September 26:

Start of nine week program ( class held, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.), held at Zao MKE, located at 2319 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI 53211

October 3:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

October 10:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

October 17:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

October 24:

Break Week – No Class

October 31:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

November 7:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

November 14: 

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

November 21: 

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

November 22: 

End of class party (tentative) 

November 25:

Completion of program

Units

Each unit helps to answer the question: what is organizing? 

Welcome: what is organizing?

• Get to know participants and instructor
• Define scope of class and intentions 
• Determine goals and desired outcomes 

Organizing is one-on-one Conversations

• Learn the 7 point organizing conversation 
• Practice the conversation and its elements 

Organizing is building the committee and the campaign 

• The importance (or not) of the committee
• Power Mapping the campaign 
• Strategy Chart 

Organizing is holistic productivity 

• Traction versus distraction 
• Time management and its importance
• The Reverse Calendar 
• Overcoming blocks to action

Organizing is a mindset 

• Acknowledging hurdles and setbacks 
• Failure is a great option
• Develop a practice to keep you going

Organizing is raising money and managing it

• Why money is OK 
• How to bring energy and money to your campaign 
• The basics of campaign budgeting and finance 

Organizing is communications

• What does “messaging” mean? 
• The power of media 
• Writing workshop

Organizing is bringing it all together

• You’ve got momentum – now what? 
• Recap of unit themes

Reviews

Here is what previous students have to say about the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class: 

“[Before the class] I had no idea about the actual work of organizing.  Now I feel confident that I would be able to become a leader in a campaign setting . . .” 

“I loved the practical application of socialism . . . [and] I loved the far-reaching application of some of the class content.” 

“This is a great way to move into the world of socialism. . . thank you so much for offering this course” 

“This [class] is a great first step for anyone looking to start organizing . . .” 

“I radically grew in my comfort around being upfront and simply being able to approach a complete stranger with a potentially controversial topic.” 

“New organizers and experienced organizers can benefit from this class.” 

“Generally speaking my confidence level just interacting with people about socialism has gone through the roof.  I have been given a phenomenal overview of how to organize and I feel confident that I can find out what works best for me in the future.”  

“It was great to grow as an organizer within the confines of a welcoming community/instructor.” 

“I feel more confident organizing outside of an electoral context.”  

Meet your instructors: 

Alex Brower

Alex Brower is a labor leader, socialist organizer, and the chapter co-chair of the Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America. Professionally, Alex is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, which organizes union retirees.  In his organizing work, Alex has saved jobs from privatization, helped workers win a union voice on the job, defeated a temp agency, organized against a proposed iron-ore mine, helped bring comprehensive sex education to Beloit Public Schools, and won workplace healthcare for many uninsured MPS Substitute Teachers. As an MPS substitute teacher and former Milwaukee Rec. Department instructor, Alex brings a host of experience teaching others. Alex has also been a candidate for Milwaukee City Comptroller and School Board, running both times as a socialist. 

Autumn Pickett

Autumn Pickett is a union organizer and Communications Director for American Federation of Teachers – Wisconsin. She helped win back voting rights for 20,000 students while attending college in Indiana, protect 100’s of custodial and grounds crew jobs from privatization across Wisconsin, sunk Billionaire Howard Schultz’s 2016 presidential run, use organizing tactics that garnered national headlines, and mentor dozens of YDSA chapters across the country that continue to make real wins for working people. She has served on the National Coordinating Committee for YDSA, as Milwaukee DSA’s Education Officer, and currently represents Milwaukee DSA on the statewide Socialists in Office committee. Autumn is excited to bring her years of experience mentoring new socialist organizers over to the Milwaukee Organizer Class for the first time and help build a people powered movement in Cream City alongside each of you.

Any questions? 

Contact Alex Brower at 414-949-8756 or milwaukeedsa@gmail.com 

Apply now!

Apply here, or copy and paste this URL into your web browser: https://forms.gle/7eja5qqaJtxoVqta8 

Note: posts by individual CVDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

All political parties’ policy priorities reflect the material interests of their power bases. A workers’ party, which derives its primary support from labor unions, can say so directly and proudly. Every other type of party has to make up some other reason for why it’s doing whatever it’s doing, which its representatives usually end up believing wholeheartedly.

In Vermont, the big topic on all three major parties’ minds is property tax. This year, the average homeowner received a 13.8% hike on the largest portion of their bill: the homestead education tax, which pays for public schools. Amid widespread outrage, all three parties have agreed that something must be done to protect struggling homeowners.

For Republicans and many Democrats, that means cutting spending. For the Progressives, it above all means designing a more “equitable” tax system. Their apparent instincts about how to do it say a lot about the political and economic makeup of the party.

The Burlington Progressives, whose municipal electeds played no role in boosting the homestead education tax rate, evidently share the statewide party’s concern about placing an excessive burden on the average homeowner. Municipal taxes account for a smaller portion of the average homestead’s overall bill, but naturally, taxpayers are eager for savings at every level.

After her campaign platform’s lengthy “community safety” plank, Progressive Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s number-one policy proposal last winter was to “create a more progressive and sustainable municipal property tax system.” Several of the Progressive Burlington City Councilors, who released a video on the same theme this summer, have also pointed to the “regressive” nature of the current property tax regime.

They’re not the first politicians, nationally or locally, to level this criticism. But what does the word “regressive” mean in the context of property tax specifically? There are a few possibilities.

Across the country, advocates for tax fairness have observed that local authorities tend to assess cheap houses at a significantly higher percentage of their market value than expensive houses, and they can cite various studies to back up the claim. Intriguingly, the City of Boston abates the first $100,000 of every home’s assessed value – a big chunk of the total for a modest house, but only a small fraction for a mansion – partly as a means to counteract the unfairness produced by this tendency, which may prove difficult to correct in itself.

In Burlington, many of the complaints about property taxes focus on 2021’s citywide reappraisal in particular, which assessed commercial properties at what seemed to be a pandemic-era low point, thereby shifting more of the responsibility for funding city services onto homeowners. This is “regressive” in a hazy, populist sense in which “business owners and landlords are getting off easy” while “ordinary folks” pick up the slack, but it’s not clear that many commercial properties actually were assessed incorrectly, and the ideal division of the tax burden between homestead property owners and commercial property owners is subjective in any case. Many American cities charge separate rates for residential, commercial, and even industrial properties, but we have no established formula that would allow us to say in mathematical terms whether one tax regime is more progressive than another on that basis.

Elsewhere, critics of the regressive property tax have lamented its flat rate. While the income tax has a bracketed structure, with higher rates for higher earners, a homeowner with a $200,000 house pays the same property tax rate as a homeowner with a $2 million house. Introducing progressive marginal tax rates for more expensive properties would go hand-in-hand with abating the first portion of the property value in that both changes would mirror the structure of the federal income tax, which, thanks to the standard deduction, offers a 0% tax rate on earnings below $14,600.

Finally – and most importantly, it seems – a property tax is said to be regressive in the same way as a sales tax. A sales tax is regressive because, over the course of a year, a high earner pays less in sales tax as a percentage of their annual income than a low earner does. This will hold true even if, as expected, the high earner treats themself to a significantly higher level of consumption than the low earner can.

Under this formulation, there are many examples of regressive taxes – from the payroll tax that funds Social Security to user fees on public goods, such as bus fares – but only one tax can be strictly progressive: the income tax itself. On a trivial, case-by-case basis, even a wealth tax on  multimillionaires would sometimes fail the test.

Imagine, for instance, a pair of plutocrats, one of whom invests primarily in growth stocks while the other invests primarily in dividend stocks. The former may have a slightly larger net worth than the latter, and if so, they’d pay a slightly bigger wealth tax, even though their friend’s income would be greater on account of the dividends.

Does this “regressive” hypothetical present a problem? Not to me. Obviously, the purpose of the wealth tax is to tax wealth, not income. In a sense, the same is true of the property tax. Targeting a single asset and declining to account for liabilities, it nonetheless remains the closest thing that we have in America today to a wealth tax.

Consider another hypothetical. A 68-year-old Burlingtonian, who owns a house worth $800,000, has retired after a remunerative career. Their overall net worth is $1.5 million, but so far, they haven’t cashed in on any of the unrealized capital gains in their IRA. Thanks to Social Security and interest on savings and bonds, their income in 2023 was $50,000.

Half a mile away, in a crummy apartment, lives a 31-year-old renter who earned $55,000 last year. They own no significant assets, so due to student debt, their net worth is negative.

According to the crude theory of progressive taxation, the renter should have paid more in taxes than the homeowner. By this understanding, the property tax, which prevented that from happening, intruded regressively upon the perfect justice of the income tax.

Yet the fundamental principle of progressive taxation is not necessarily that income matters above all but that an individual’s tax burden should depend upon their “ability to pay.” Once we remember that wealth exists, we realize that we have no way to measure with certain accuracy or confidence that ability for anyone. Neither the City of Burlington nor the State of Vermont knows my net worth or yours; the state knows our income, which functions with imperfect reliability as a proxy for general economic well-being.

We should still strive to achieve tax fairness, but the problem of how to do it is more ambiguous than many of the concept’s proponents let on, and the retiree of relatively high wealth and relatively low income presents an especially ambiguous case. And it’s not an unusual one in Vermont, which has the third-highest median age in the country. In order to grapple honestly with the difficult question of how much the aforementioned retiree should pay in taxes, we have to recognize some kind of difference between them and the no-wealth, low-income worker.

Over the next year or two, we may see various new “equity”-based proposals on the city and state levels to phase out or reduce homestead property tax as a revenue source, with new or increased income taxes replacing it, or to expand income-based property tax adjustments. Such proposals are incomplete if they assess their own progressivity strictly as a comparative measure of how much high-, middle-, and low-income Vermonters would pay as a share of their income under the revised system. Ideally, they would also consider their progressivity in terms of how much high-, middle-, and low-wealth Vermonters would pay as a share of their wealth.

This alternative method of gauging progressivity would not suddenly unmask the progressive income tax as a regressive nightmare. In general, of course, low-wealth people tend also to have lower incomes (and thus pay little in tax), and high-wealth people tend to have higher incomes (and thus pay more). Senior citizens make up only 21% of Vermont’s population, and the truly wealthy ones receive big enough regular payouts from their investments to remain high-income even after retirement, if they ever had a job beyond “investing” in the first place.

Yet an up-close look at each wealth ventile on our hypothetical graph would reveal a huge number of disconcerting outliers and notable microtrends. In the low-wealth groups, we’d find high-salary but nearly assetless young professionals paying a big income tax; in the middle-wealth groups, we’d find ordinary retirees paying extremely little income tax despite the considerable value of their paid-off houses; and in the highest-wealth group, we’d find one-percenters with stock portfolios so enormous that, even with significant investment income and a high tax rate on it to match, the income tax could never amount to anything more than a miniscule sliver of their wealth.

How would we address these subgroups? The solution would not be to discontinue the income tax but to introduce additional taxes to ensure that every middle-wealth Vermonter contributes in a reasonable way to the system and to ensure that all high-wealth Vermonters pay considerably more than an income tax alone can extract. The homestead property tax isn’t the best way to do even a portion of the job, but it has some merits – most of all, the very considerable merit of existing already.

A wealth-based analysis of tax progressivity can only be imagined, since Vermont doesn’t collect precise data on personal wealth. But if such data existed, would anyone want to crunch the numbers? The movement in support of a more strongly income-based tax system transparently includes both blue-collar homeowners for whom the property tax represents a serious expense for which they must economize and bourgeois retirees who’d simply prefer not to pay. Without the political power of the latter, it wouldn’t have come so far. Both groups benefit by keeping silent about the mixed composition of their coalition and presenting their preferred tax policy as a truly straightforward, across-the-board improvement in equity.

In Burlington, where the median home value exceeds $500,000, the rare figure of the working-class homeowner occupies an especially outsized role in local political discourse. This is so the bourgeois homeowner can hide behind them. Most Burlingtonians are renters, and among working-class Burlingtonians specifically, it’d be hard to argue that renters aren’t an overwhelming supermajority. Homeownership is especially rare in the wards that tend to vote for Progressives, but you wouldn’t know it from the party’s rhetoric or policy focus.

I’ve gone to a few meetings and events organized by the Burlington Progressives and have observed the demographic character of the party’s active supporters and internal committee members, most of whom belong to a generation where homeownership wasn’t necessarily an outlandish dream for a family of relatively modest means. I don’t think it would be unfair to assume that this plugged-in group of longtime partisans plays a larger role than the average Progressive voter in determining the party’s political outlook. Logically, the average Progressive voter wouldn’t care at all about property taxes because the average Progressive voter doesn’t pay property taxes, except indirectly as a portion of their rent. For them, the rent is what matters.

As a transplant, I found the Progs’ fixation on the injustice of property tax especially striking upon arriving in Vermont from New York City, where every left-of-center politician has set a laser focus – rhetorically, at least – on the problem of high rents. Among all the meetings that I attended as a socialist activist in North Brooklyn or as a journalist covering the Democratic Party in a part of town that would soon elect three DSA-endorsed public officials, I never once encountered a proposal to lower homeowners’ property taxes as a means to make the city more affordable. The idea would’ve seemed comical. Now I hear about it all the time, and it’s driven me crazy enough to write this essay.

Of course, left-wing politicians in different places have to adapt to different realities. But the difference between the rates of homeownership in Burlington and New York City isn’t as dramatic as you might think: here, 38% of homes are owner-occupied, and down there, 33% are.

Deprioritizing property tax reform could help the Burlington Progressives form a more vibrant and meaningful connection with both young people and the city’s working-class majority. It might also benefit their municipal electeds’ political fortunes for the simple reason that municipalities have very little power to change the tax system, which means that a mayor or city councilor’s promise of action is very likely to yield disappointment.

State law determines what sorts of taxes cities in Vermont may collect and how those taxes work. Without action in Montpelier, Burlington can’t set different tax rates for different types of properties (e.g., second homes), create progressive tax brackets for expensive properties, or introduce a preset abatement.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear that anyone outside of a few policy wonks has any interest in any of those reforms anyway. The central demand of the “low- and moderate-income homeowners” in Burlington is to modify the municipal property tax for the purpose of duplicating the income-sensitized structure of the homestead education tax. The State of Vermont’s Education Fund derives its revenue through a complex mathematical formula that sets a property tax rate for each town based on the local school district’s spending per “equalized” pupil, but only one third of homeowners pay that rate, while households earning below $128,000 receive a sliding deduction, capped at $5,600. On the municipal level, only households earning below $47,000 receive a deduction, capped at $2,400, which the state refunds to the municipality.

On its own, the City of Burlington could theoretically mimic the education tax’s more expansive deduction in a jury-rigged, back-end fashion by offering a sliding rebate on municipal taxes for homeowners who would submit their income tax returns to City Hall as proof of their low or moderate earnings. Calculating their refunds and mailing out their checks would probably amount to a pretty costly administrative burden, but the bigger foreseeable obstacle is that, in order to maintain revenue neutrality, the city would have to convince residents to authorize a big increase on the statutory municipal property tax rate, which would become the effective rate only for high earners. A hard-to-understand promise of progressive redistribution on the basis of income – in which a lot of the biggest checks, however, probably would go out to comfortably retired Joan Shannon voters in the southern Hill Section – might not sway a majority of voters.

Another problem of sorts is that, even with income sensitivity, homeowners still hate the homestead education tax, still say it’s regressive, and still want it abolished. On the state level, this is a Progressive priority, and in 2022, a legislative committee authored a report that put forward a blueprint for funding public schools via income tax.

Unlike mayors and city councilors, state legislators have real power to change Vermont’s tax system. The current proposals are a little disappointing.

Right now, Vermont’s tax system funds public education through local property tax bills whose payments subsequently mingle in a statewide Education Fund that redistributes them to the school districts, and its rather clever design ensures that a property-rich town and a property-poor town will always pay the same education property tax rate as long as both towns’ school districts decide to spend the same amount of money per “equalized” pupil. The purpose of the system is to allow property-poor towns to spend more on education than they otherwise could afford to, and one of the results is that, in the towns where the houses are expensive, homeowners pay a lot more property tax than they would in a purely local tax system, where a property-rich town could have a nice school even with a pretty low tax rate.

This creates a lot of anger about education property taxes among the Vermonters with the loudest collective political voice of all: upper-middle-class homeowners. They represent one more big reason why getting rid of education property taxes has become a popular idea, despite its radicalism of a sort (currently, every American state uses property tax as a major revenue source for education). According to Vermont Public, the proposed method for doing so – replacing the homestead education tax with a new income tax based on the same fundamental structure, where income-rich towns and income-poor towns would pay identical rates for identical per-equalized-pupil spending – would offer “modest decreases” in taxation for most Vermonters who earn between $90,000 and $175,000. It would make up the difference progressively, with “significant increases” for Vermonters earning more than $250,000, but on its own terms, reducing the tax burden of the former group is a bad idea.

I’m not sure that “modest decreases” would pacify them anyway. With the homestead education tax abolished, their anger would likely shift to the perceived problem of excessive spending. One of the major critiques of Vermont’s system for funding education observes that it discourages cost containment because, for each local district, which sets its own budget, the full benefit of each dollar spent stays local while the cost of each dollar spent is to some degree distributed throughout the state. This incentive structure doesn’t seem like a big problem as long as you’re in favor of generous school budgets, but the system ends up producing a total education expenditure derived from the clumsy interplay between 122 self-interested school districts and a mathematical formula that hardly anyone really understands, and in the end, the figure feels pretty random. Evidently, it can generate a lot of outrage.

The best way to undo the byzantine structure of Vermont’s education funding system would be to get rid of local budgetary decision-making altogether and to allow the legislature simply to set an education budget on the state level, sending an identical per-equalized-pupil distribution to every school in Vermont while prohibiting rich towns from supplementing this funding for their own schools through any local mechanism. This would create a clear, simple process for determining whether we as a society want to spend more or less on education than we currently do, but there’s no visible push on the state level to adopt a system of this kind.

Instead, we have a big, longstanding debate about whether to continue to fund schools through an education property tax tied to local spending or to introduce an education income tax tied to local spending. The income-based tax would have benefits in terms of progressivity by the standard measure – which, for all its limitations, should probably remain the standard measure – but it’s worth noting that the income-sensitized property tax is not wildly regressive, either.

2022’s Act 175 report contains a graph showing the amount of education property tax currently paid as a percentage of income for low earners, middle earners, and high earners. By fits and starts, the line goes up until it hits the 18th ventile (Vermonters who make $141,000 to $171,000), where it begins to descend and then drops precipitously for households with more than $233,000 in income. The same graph would look better with an income-based tax.

It would be very difficult to correct the education property tax’s tendency to go relatively easy on the highest earners. We could make the tax system as a whole more progressive by replacing the education property tax, as proposed, or by reducing its share within rich people’s overall tax burden without reducing or abolishing the tax itself. The latter could be achieved simply by upping the normal income tax at the highest levels. Think of it this way: a left-wing government’s ideal tax system would for various purposes include secondary and tertiary taxes of imperfect progressivity (New York City’s failed congestion pricing, for example) – it doesn’t matter much unless the sum total of all the taxes is insufficiently progressive.

Earlier this year, Fair Share Vermont advocated for H.828, a somewhat gimmicky proposal to add a 3% marginal “surcharge” on individual income over $500,000. Logically, it would make a lot more sense to add new income tax brackets at normal increments than to tax every dollar between $229,550 and $499,999 at the same rate and then insert a bump at $500,000, but the political experts must’ve determined that people making $400,000 are essentially sympathetic while people making $600,000 aren’t. Still, it didn’t pass, although it came pretty close.

Fair Share Vermont also pushed for H.827, a more radical bill that would’ve applied a tax on unrealized capital gains for taxpayers worth more than $10 million. This proposal, which presidential candidate Kamala Harris now claims to support on the federal level, represented an important recognition that wealth – not just income – matters, yet it restricted its scope to what people seem to regard as the most income-like portion of an individual’s wealth: the net appreciation of their assets over the course of a year, a sort of on-paper income that would be taxed as real income.

Politically, this move had two potential benefits: a lot of people don’t know what unrealized capital gains are, so it might be hard to stir up popular outrage over an effort to tax them; and a tax that looks a lot like an income tax might be conceptually less frightening to those in the know than a tax on net assets, since we’ve already acclimated ourselves to income tax. But it had a big practical downside (or would have if it had passed): the tax’s volatility.

In a year where the stock market goes down, a tax on unrealized gains would collect virtually no revenue at all, whereas a tax on net assets would remain relatively stable. The latter might also hit a more expansive range of assets: it’d be reasonable to ask Vermont’s lone billionaire to include a rough estimate of the market value of his Picasso in a calculation of his overall wealth, but his accountant genuinely might not know how much its price has changed from one year to the next. Once more, the perceived political advantages of a somewhat stupider tax didn’t get it across the finish line.

Proposals of this general sort, however, remain the real key to improving Vermont’s tax system. Crucially, they are not revenue-neutral. They bring in money.

Social democracy costs a lot of money – Denmark collects almost twice as much tax per dollar of GDP than the United States does – and a left-wing fiscal politics should begin with an understanding that almost no one in the United States is overtaxed in absolute terms. A middle-class American is overtaxed in a relative sense: they should be paying somewhat more, while a wealthy American should be paying much, much more. But the movement for property tax reform in Vermont promotes the notion that a vast swath of homeowners pay too many actual dollars in tax and that we need to find a way to make them pay fewer while maintaining revenue at its existing level.

This won’t get us anywhere. While we can’t ask people to pay for government services that don’t yet exist in our country or our state, we can ask them – moderate-income homeowners included – to pay more to shore up our existing underfunded public sector, where improvements would help generate an appetite for new social programs.

This isn’t to say that every property tax reform idea is bad. Some are very good, although the good ones (like transitioning to a land-value tax) tend to get less attention than the mixed-at-best ones, which appear to derive a lot of their political momentum from a popular misunderstanding of how property tax works. Most homeowners believe that if the value of their house has gone up, so too has their property tax burden. In reality, public services cost whatever they cost, and unless a home has risen in value proportionally more than the average property, its owner’s share of that cost stays the same.

Partly for that reason, dramatic mismatches between a homeowner’s property tax bill and their ability to pay are fairly infrequent. Property value inflation in an in-demand city (or in a state with a housing shortage) may place an outrageous price tag on a middle-sized, middle-quality house, but the city asks the middle-class owner of that house to cover roughly the same middling percentage of its spending as it did when its owner deemed the house affordable to buy. Over the years, however, the cost of public services has gone up, and the owner may blame an unfair property tax burden for a bill that, to them, no longer feels appropriate.

The homeowner imagines that someone else is getting a free ride, and of course they’re right in a way. There’s no persuasive philosophical justification for taxing the value of property but not taxing the value of stocks or bonds. It’s not a coincidence that real estate is the only form of personal wealth whose ownership isn’t concentrated almost exclusively among the investor class and also the only form of personal wealth whose ownership comes with a tax.

But if we created a true wealth tax tomorrow, we’d probably want to keep the property tax, too, because, for ease of collection, the wealth tax would likely begin at a very high net worth, while the property tax would ensure that we continue to capture a portion of the wealth at lower levels. And until then, the abolition of the property tax – or even just of the homestead education portion – would seem to dim the prospects for enacting a wealth tax, since the argument against both is basically the same: “Hey, just because I have a valuable asset, that doesn’t mean I have cash lying around to pay a tax on it.” We can’t afford to make that argument victorious.

Moreover, after replacing the property tax – or the lion’s share of it, anyway – with a second income tax, we might have a harder time raising the normal income tax thereafter. Immediately, Vermonters would begin paying the highest total income tax rate in the country. At some point, assetless earners would begin to contend that, by placing too large a burden on income and almost none on property, we’re advantaging current homeowners and taxing away the next generation’s ability to build wealth of its own.

It wouldn’t be a disaster if the legislature did it anyway. It sounds insane to say so after writing thousands of words on the topic, but I don’t especially care one way or the other. Whether we fund schools through property tax or income tax ultimately has very little to do with the core economic injustices in our state. Right now, a Vermont household earning $40,000 annually, if it pays the education property tax, contributes $800; although details remain uncertain, a bracketed education income tax would likely bring that figure down to about $680, and while the same unimpressive savings could be achieved in a hundred other ways, the household in question wouldn’t say no to $120. What troubles me is the Progressives’ excessive focus on this battle.

It shows whom they’re talking to, and in those conversations, the cruder arguments against the education property tax end up trickling down into an equal hostility against property tax on the municipal level, where there’s no realistic plan to replace it with a municipal income tax. Instead, we’ll just have to give in to cheapskate homeowners and defund our city.

A common knock against the property tax in general, for example, is that it strains the average retiree’s ability to “age in place,” but this can be viewed as a bug or – particularly within a politics that aims to reconceptualize housing as a public utility, not a private asset – as a feature. Disincentivizing empty-nesters from continuing to live in big, energy-eating, single-family houses, instead of passing them on to the families with children who actually need space, makes sense, but unfortunately, Vermont doesn’t currently offer a lot of opportunities for easy downsizing.

That’s because, for decades, homeowners have used their political power to prevent the development of multifamily housing. We need to change that. In the meantime, retired homeowners can continue to count on the Vermont Property Tax Credit to ease their burden. I wouldn’t support expanding the municipal deduction – $47,000 sounds like a low ceiling until you remember that Vermont’s smaller tax credit for renters expires at $23,900 in individual income in Chittenden County (or at $34,100 for a family of four) and even less elsewhere, and somehow our politicians never talk about it – but I could make peace with the state’s current program with just a couple changes.

First, very expensive houses should be fully ineligible, regardless of their owners’ incomes. We don’t owe anyone the ability to live in a mansion; if they can’t afford the property tax, they should cash in and move somewhere normal. Second, if the program genuinely intends to prevent forced sales and tax lien foreclosures (that is, if it intends to prevent displacement, not simply to give away public dollars to homeowners), we should defer the deducted tax until the home’s sale instead of forgiving it. We have to take seriously the need to raise revenue if we’re going to build a different kind of society.

Instead, thanks to a liberal susceptibility to contrived middle-class sob stories, the Progs are playing a part in driving a Reaganite taxpayer revolt by helping to convince homeowners that they’re all getting ripped off. Of the six elected Progressives serving the City of Burlington, four are homeowners themselves, and that probably makes a difference. They may still love income-based taxation, but on the municipal level, the property tax is what we have, and if we can’t embrace it, we can’t do much.

It’s true that the municipal tax rate in Burlington is already higher than in rural towns. I’d like to see it go higher still, but there are limits. Half an hour south, Vermonters in Charlotte pay little in municipal property tax because they live in a rich, quiet suburb that doesn’t need a police department, but most of them work in Burlington, earning large incomes that they wouldn’t have if not for the particular economic opportunities afforded by a city, which can’t operate without an expensive municipal workforce. Using this reasoning, we must demand injections of state-level funding for urban services – most of all, public transit, which, at a high level, always requires broader support. The whole state benefits when its cities prosper.

But we can’t wait around for the state to save us. Regular Burlington homeowners have to be willing to pay for a functional city, and their leaders have to tell them that it’s their responsibility to do so. A sentimental leftism with a fuzzy class analysis – under which we’re all innocents and victims beside the billionaires and big corporations – becomes a major obstacle in this task. Without a change of perspective, things will get worse, and there are bad signs already.

For instance, in June, facing a major budgetary deficit, Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak declined to use the full authorized amount of a new public safety tax increase, sparing homeowners from paying the rate that they themselves, in a reactionary fit of panic about crime that temporarily overrode their usual stinginess, had approved at Town Meeting Day. Revenue from the public safety tax can’t directly pay for anything other than police and fire, but because that revenue covers only a fraction of those departments’ budgets, a boost could’ve defrayed a portion of the general fund transfer that pays for the rest, freeing up those dollars for other parts of city government, which, as it is, had to leave 17 positions unfilled.

Ultimately, the bare-bones staffing at City Hall – which inevitably affects the quality of public services, which most of all affects the quality of life of Burlingtonians who can’t afford to buy houses – isn’t Mulvaney-Stanak’s fault, but instead of presenting this year’s austerity as an unfortunate necessity that we must work to reverse, she framed the FY25 budget as a “right-sizing” of city government. This is just normal fiscal conservatism, and that’s where we’re headed.