Columbus DSA condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the actions of President Trump and his administration, the United States armed forces, ICE, and the LAPD in their relentless brutality against peaceful protestors fighting to protect their communities from the thugs abducting their friends, family, and neighbors. We condemn the violence of ICE and their campaign of mass deportations that has come to our city of Columbus. On June 3rd ICE arrested Leonardo Fausto at a court hearing for a dismissed misdemeanor traffic violation. Fausto has lived in Columbus legally for 4 years while waiting to be granted asylum. Ohio senators have also passed a bill that will require public officials to allow the arrest of suspected undocumented immigrants with or without warrants, while other Ohio lawmakers have proposed the “America First Act”, making it a felony to be in Ohio undocumented. We stand in unshakable solidarity with our undocumented neighbors: no one’s existence is illegal.

The recent protests in Los Angeles and other cities demonstrate that the American people are aware of the cruelty that this administration inflicts upon our families, our neighbors, and people in our communities, and we demand that these abuses stop.

Left unchecked, this administration, alongside ICE and local law enforcement, will continue to hide what the ‘land of the free’ has become from the world. They obscure their names and faces so that no one knows who to hold accountable for their crimes, all while they vanish our neighbors, family, and friends. ICE has only existed since 2003 but is being used like the Gestapo of Nazi Germany to create terror among us. We have lived without their presence for most of our existence, and we don’t need them now. To that end, we demand the following from our own community of Columbus:

We demand ICE be abolished. We demand that undocumented citizens be given amnesty and a swift path to citizenship. And we call for the immediate release of every person that ICE has arrested in LA and across the nation.

We demand that Columbus City Council end their contracts with ICE, make Columbus a sanctuary city, and protect its residents from these illegal abductions.

Columbus DSA will continue to fight for the power of the working class and the freedoms of people all over the world, immigrants or not. We will not stand by as the people of our community are abused by state violence. An injury to one is an injury to all. Free the prisoners, abolish ICE, and end the authoritarian regime currently in power.

On Thursday, June 19, we celebrate what began as Jubilee Day, and what we now recognize as Juneteenth. This year, it marks 160 years since Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to finally enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and deliver the word of freedom to some of the last enslaved Black Americans.

We are experiencing the most sustained and broad attacks on US democracy since the McCarthy period. MAGA has put together a fascist coalition of white supremacist, reactionary nationalists, Christian fundamentalists, libertarians, and techno-authoritarians, and they are on an offensive against the 20^th century. All the gains of labor, civil rights, women, and the LGBTQ community are under assault. The fascists intend to fundamentally restructure institutional democracy and to impose a straitjacket on civil society. This closely parallels the McCarthy period, and there are important similarities and differences between now and then, and lessons we can draw.

My uncle (Fred Fine) was on the leading committee of the Communist Party (CP) and closely involved in discussions about organizing an underground apparatus of safe houses for Party leaders. Fine himself was assigned to the underground, and was there for four years. During that time, he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, and never once spoke with his wife or young son. My father, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, was threatened with deportation, and the FBI threatened to declare my mother “unfit” and told her they would have her children (ages 6 and 11) put into foster homes without visitation rights. Thousands suffered similar threats and intimidation, key leaders were jailed, some cadre turned informant, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed.

When the Party leadership discussed how to respond to McCarthy, there were two key assumptions: fascism was imminent and war with the Soviet Union inevitable. The similarities to today are striking. Many people feel fascism is imminent and war with China inevitable. The CP drew a number of conclusions from these assumptions that had drastic consequences for its members and mass organizing.

First, they purged members they considered untrustworthy or politically weak. And perhaps more damagingly, the Party concluded repression would be worst in the South, and so shut down all its southern districts and withdrew its organizers after 25 years of outstanding work organizing the South. When my parents divorced, my mother left Chicago and went to Florida with my brother and me to join a close friend—a woman who had been a nurse in the Spanish Civil War, working with the world famous doctor Norman Bethune. My mother was kicked out of the Party for moving to the South, and was only let back in when we moved to California. That didn’t stop the FBI from following her to Florida and getting her fired from several jobs.

My mother kept a journal of her time in Florida. Here is one short excerpt of her experience:

TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY…35 years. Nobody knows except the FBI. My gift from them
was once again being fired. This time from a job short lasted.
But I truly enjoyed working as proofreader on the St. Petersburg Times.
Well, at least I was let go early in the day. So now I’m home with enough time to
change into my waitress uniform. And time enough left to wait for Paulie to come home
from school. Young Jerry is only 4 and Paulie 9. The best birthday.
We’ll be playing a few games of baseball before I take off for my night shift.
There sits the limousine of the FBI. Another obstacle of fears,
confusion of what the future holds. This is the time for courage and bold adventures.
For it is now, I have come to understand, and someday so will my sons.
Of that I’m confident. For my mother’s heart tells me so.

The author’s mother, Rose Fine, (center) at a protest in Chicago (c. 1955)

The Party went to great lengths to set up an underground apparatus. This had at least two levels: the most secure, in which eight national leaders were sent into hiding, and a less secure state and city underground into which hundreds of local leaders were assigned. This eliminated many of the best organizers from doing mass work. Moreover, local underground networks were largely penetrated by the FBI. Even at my uncle’s level, four of the eight leaders were captured by the FBI. Although he had a number of close calls at different safe houses, he held out until the Party decided to come out of hiding and he eventually stood trial with several other leaders in New York.

When the Party’s first line of leadership (William Foster, Eugene Dennis, and others) went on trial, they tried to defend themselves by educating the jury about the true meaning of Marxism-Leninism. The result was prison time for all. On my uncle’s wanted poster (up in post offices throughout the country) was the following charge: “unlawfully conspiring with other persons to knowingly teach and advocate the duty and necessity of overthrowing and destroying the government of the United States by force and violence.” Of course, the Party never told members to arm themselves, they never organized armed cells, nor did they have plans for an armed insurrection. They did teach about the armed revolution in Russia, the history of capitalist violence, and the ultimate need to defend any socialist electoral victory from a reactionary counterrevolution.

FBI “Most Wanted” Poster for the author’s uncle, Fred Morris Fine

By the time my uncle stood trial, the Party had switched its defense strategy to asserting the freedoms of speech, association, and assembly. There is a difference between speech and advocacy and actively organizing acts of violence. This focus on civil liberties proved more successful with the courts. In 1957 the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected radical speech, overturning the conviction of 14 Communist Party officials and effectively ending the use of the Smith Act to target leftists for their political beliefs. A series of subsequent rulings forbade the use of blacklists and other methods of political persecution, which helped bring about the end of the Second Red Scare. However, the proceeding period of internal debates and bitter feelings resulted in about half the remaining members leaving the Party by 1957.

Lessons for Today

During the McCarthy period the ruling class was united in its efforts to destroy the left. From conservatives to liberals, Republicans to Democrats, a united front was made impossible. Even the ACLU purged Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from its board for being in the CP. Furthermore, social democratic union leaders like Walter Reuther were more than happy to rid labor of Communists. Loyalty oaths were demanded at universities, public schools, unions, Hollywood, and various industries. Public show trials were held by the House Un-American Activities Committee in cities across the country. Many former friends of the Party were running scared.

But while the persecution the Party faced was real, “the almost fatal blow,” as Party leader Peggy Dennis later wrote in her Autobiography of an American Communist, “was self-inflicted.” The decision to shutter its Southern districts and take the Party leadership underground anticipated a level of repression far greater than that which materialized. Designed to protect the Party from the advent of fascism and world war, it instead deprived mass struggles of thousands of their most militant organizers and activists, weakened the labor movement, cut off key linkages with the Black freedom struggle, and contributed to a decline of CPUSA membership from 80,000 in 1945 to less than 15,000 by 1957.

Today, conditions are in some important ways more favorable for us than during the McCarthy era. The ruling class is split. Already we see mass rallies and protests. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders, Hands Off, and May Day marches have already gathered millions in opposition to fascism. Courts as of yet have often ruled against Trump. A united front is not only possible, but is in early formation.

In this moment, many leftists are concerned about safety and security – understandably. The harms caused by Trump’s repressive regime are real. But a key lesson from the McCarthy Era is that we must not let our fear of persecution isolate us from the masses and from mass movements. We can and must continue to organize, even as we take measures to help keep ourselves and each-other safe. The following are some suggestions for this period:

• Stay rooted to mass work, defend our friends and allies, and ask them to defend us.
• Defend the Bill of Rights, civil society, civil liberties, and civil rights for all.
• Stay calm but be aware of security.
• Make sure your financial records—particularly organizational finances—are in order.
• Organizations should have a house counsel, and individuals should always keep the number of a lawyer with you.
• Never write on social media or in email what you don’t want read back to you in court.
• Vocally reject all proposed violent acts at public meetings
• NEVER TALK TO THE FBI. Legally you don’t have to, but if you lie, you’re committing a federal crime. So, NEVER TALK TO THE FBI.

This is the time for courage and bold adventures. Collectively, our actions now will help determine what the future holds.

The post Lessons from the McCarthy Red Scare appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Enjoy your June National Political Committee (NPC) newsletter! Our NPC is an elected 18-person body (including two YDSA members who share a vote) which functions as the board of directors of DSA. This month, standing against ICE, celebrating Pride and Juneteenth, preparing for Convention, and more!

And to make sure you get our newsletters in your inbox, sign up here! Each one features action alerts, upcoming events, political education, and more.

• From the National Political Committee — Struggle and Joy
• RSVP for The Fight for a Socialist Green New Deal Call Wednesday 6/25!
• Monthly Convention Update — Secondary Amendment Submissions, Observer Registration, Volunteering at Convention, and More!
• Save the Date: DSA Fund’s A World To Win Fellowship Nominations Open Wednesday 6/18
• Fundraising Committee Membership Applications are Open!
• Send Chapter News to Democratic Left
• Socialist Forum 2025 Convention Special Issue — Call for Pitches

From the National Political Committee — Struggle and Joy

Things are scary out there. Here in the States, the Trump administration and their ICE jackboots are throwing union leaders in jail on ridiculous, inflated charges, raiding workplaces from coast to coast, ripping healthcare away from trans folks, and deploying the US military in our cities. Internationally, Israel continues to starve and massacre Palestinians and seems to be starting, with bottomless US financial support, a war with Iran. This Saturday, June 14, in Washington DC, Trump is hosting a $92 million military parade from the Pentagon to the White House for his birthday — a victory march meant to celebrate his agenda of war and destruction, rally far-right support, and project strength to the world, while massively wasting taxpayer dollars amid his government’s life-threatening cuts to basic social services.

But when the working class is under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!

DSA unequivocally stands with our immigrant neighbors — and not just with words. Our members are holding strong with our communities from Los Angeles to Boston, from San Antonio to Seattle, and especially mobilizing with our labor unions in response. We will be out in numbers this weekend demanding the better, safer, kinder, more just world that we know is possible. 

Against Trump’s militarized birthday parade on June 14, the people of Washington DC are choosing to reject fear, and instead will celebrate local culture, community, and connections to one another at #DCJoyDay.

In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialist campaign for mayor keeps surging in momentum, and is now within striking distance of the flagrantly corrupt frontrunner Andrew Cuomo, with just under two weeks to go until the primary election. The ruling class of the world’s wealthiest city is nervous — they don’t understand political success without their own big money strings attached. In a debate last night, Cuomo even said “we wonder who’s funding DSA?” The answer is you — and tens of thousands of working class members giving whatever we can in dues, to punch way above our weight together!

If you’re not sure where to start taking action, here are some steps you can take:

• join our Boycott Avelo campaign to hold the companies that collaborate with these fascist ICE deportations accountable
• join our campaigns to Boycott Chevron
• RSVP for our Labor vs ICE call Wednesday 6/18
• organize Labor for an Arms Embargo, to make it clear that we will not stand for genocide

Our class enemies know that all of these issues are connected; we must, too.

In the midst of the fear and uncertainty, we also remember that June is a month to revel in the joy of victory over fascist forces. Pride and Juneteenth celebrations are both steeped in that tradition: Pride started when trans and queer folks refused to let a fascist police force take away their community space and collective joy; Juneteenth celebrates the end of chattel slavery in the United States, and comes with a reminder that liberation is incomplete — none of us are free until we are all free.

We encourage you to let these celebrations help you remember the long game here. These fights are difficult, the enemies are terrifying and extremely well-equipped, but when we organize, when we use and expand our collective strength, when we stand in solidarity, then we are more powerful than anything the ruling class can throw at us, and the fight for socialism is a fight for a better world for everyone. There is light at the end of the tunnel; there is joy at the end of the struggle. Let that fuel you.

¡Hasta la Victoria!

Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique
DSA National Co-Chairs

P.S. We want to send a warm welcome to our newest DSA organizing committees: Upstate SC, Owensboro (KY), The Shoals (AL), and Pinal County (AZ); and a special shout-out to our newest full-fledged chapters: Rock River DSA (WI) and St. Cloud DSA (MN)! 

RSVP for The Fight for a Socialist Green New Deal Call Wednesday 6/25!

Join Wednesday 6/25 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT us to hear from union leaders, DSA campaign organizers, and socialists in office who are continuing the fight for a better future. Given the hostile federal terrain we now face, local pressure campaigns in our communities and bargaining for the common good in our union contracts are the most viable pathways for winning a socialist Green New Deal this decade.

Monthly Convention Update — Secondary Amendment Submissions, Observer Registration, Volunteering at Convention, and More!

Submit or sign on to an Amendment to an existing Resolution, Constitution/Bylaws Amendment, or Platform Amendment via our Convention Hub! Amendments to proposals are also processed through the Portal on our national Discussion Forum. The deadline for secondary amendments is Sunday 6/29. You can find more information on our proposals page here.

And Convention registration is now open! For Delegate and Alternate Registration, Delegation Chairs will receive registration information after their chapter’s election results have been submitted. The election results will be checked for any errors or expired memberships. Any issues found must be resolved before registration information is provided, and we will provide you with directions to resolve it. You can find registration information on the Convention website here. Early bird delegate registration is $175. The deadline for early bird registration is Sunday 6/22.

Observer registration is open as well. DSA members in good standing can attend the Convention in a non-voting capacity as an Observer. The Observer registration fee is $225.

Observers can view plenaries and deliberation on proposals and attend breakout sessions. Observers are not eligible for scholarship funding. For questions, please email DSACon@dsausa.org.

To make sure all delegates and alternates can fully participate, scholarships will be available through our Solidarity Fund. If a duly elected Delegate or Alternate needs assistance with registration fees, travel costs, housing, or food assistance they may apply for a scholarship. Please see your Delegation Chair for details. The scholarship deadline has been extended to Sunday 6/22. And as a socialist organization, we support each other! To help sponsor a comrade, you can give here.

This year’s Convention will be one of the largest member gatherings in DSA’s history. The check-in process, debate sessions, and our voting tools need to run smoothly for our 1,500+ attendees. If you are a DSA member in good standing who can provide support during the Convention, in any of these areas, please check out the shifts we have available at the form here!

Are you an artist, maker, creator, collector, or just a cool comrade with an even cooler item that you’d love to donate to a good cause? Please consider donating to our 2025 DSA Convention fundraiser live auction! The submission deadline is Monday 6/30. We’re looking for art pieces, handmade items, one-of-a-kind socialist collectibles, experiential gifts (a weekend stay at a vacation property, a dance lesson, concert tickets, a tattoo, perhaps?) or some funky or creative thing we haven’t even thought of! Funds raised will go directly to Convention costs, helping it stay affordable for working-class comrades from around the country.

And say hi to comrades in the Convention Solidarity Journal! This year’s National Convention will feature a printed Solidarity Journal that will be distributed to all Convention attendees and shared online. You, your chapter, working group, or committee can place an ad in the Solidarity Journal to send a message of solidarity or of celebration to your chapter, work, or comrades. The deadline to purchase an ad is Friday 7/18. 

Please note that Solidarity Journal messages advocating for or against any convention proposal, NPC candidate, slate, or DSA caucus will not be accepted. Journal space is available in three sizes, plus text-only solidarity messages. Ads should be sent as PNG, JPG, or TIFF files, color or black and white. You can find more details and buy your ad here.

Save the Date: DSA Fund’s A World To Win Fellowship Nominations Open Wednesday 6/18

Nominations for DSA Fund’s inaugural A World To Win fellowship open Wednesday, June 18th!

Organizers in every state are bringing new communities into the movement for democratic socialism, often with little support or recognition. They’re organizing new DSA chapters or bringing new comrades into growing chapters. They’re organizing workers or building tenant unions. They’re fighting for immigrant rights and trans rights. They’re bringing democratic socialist messages to new audiences, whether knocking on doors or posting TikToks. They are organizing everywhere, online and offline, small towns and big cities, red states and blue states.

DSA Fund’s A World To Win fellowship is for organizers doing groundbreaking work to bring new communities into the movement for democratic socialism. The fellowship includes a $5,000 award, a set of virtual workshops with democratic socialist luminaries, and opportunities to share their work with comrades across the country. Start thinking today of who you want to nominate!

Fundraising Committee Membership Applications are Open!

“Yes, that campaign sounds cool, but how are we going to pay for it?” If this question doesn’t scare you a bit and you have some experience fundraising either in your DSA chapter or outside DSA, you might just be a good fit for the DSA National Fundraising Committee! This committee helps us fundraise to keep DSA solvent at a national level, through things like dues campaigns, one-off fundraisers, and small-dollar donor asks, as well as helping chapters learn to fundraise for their own work. Whether your experience is in event planning, non-profit giving, fundraising communications, or anything of the like, or maybe you’ve just got a track record of throwing great fundraisers for your chapter, apply to become a member of the Fundraising Committee today!

Send Chapter News to Democratic Left

Our member publication Democratic Left is looking for news items for “Chapter & Verse,” its monthly wrap-up of chapter news. Check out the April edition for examples of the chapter campaigns, events, and accomplishments DL hopes to cover in this feature. 

Items can be submitted using the form available here. The editors want to highlight the amazing work DSA chapters across the country are accomplishing. Chapters interested in showcasing their efforts regularly may want to consider designating correspondents who will regularly submit items. Questions can be sent to edboard@dsacommittees.org.

Socialist Forum 2025 Convention Special Issue — Call for Pitches

As the DSA Convention approaches, Socialist Forum is accepting pitches for pieces debating the merits and demerits of the resolutions up for debate at our national convention in August on a rolling basis. We are interested in pitches of essays of a variety of lengths (preferably between 1,000-2500 words) tackling proposals and issues related to the upcoming convention. This could be an essay discussing the specificities of DSA’s position on anti-Zionism or a pitch to discuss or elaborate on a particular proposal having to do with DSA supporting more electoral fights across the country. You can find last Convention’s issue here for reference. Please email submissions or questions to socialistforum@dsausa.org.

The post Your National Political Committee newsletter — Struggle and Joy appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

El Comité Nacional de Educación Política de DSA (NPEC) se complace en anunciar el lanzamiento de nuestros primeros módulos curriculares traducidos al español con tres módulos introductorios titulados: ¿Qué es el capitalismo?, ¿Qué es el socialismo? y ¿Por qué la clase trabajadora?

Estos módulos, incluyendo recursos prácticos para el desarrollo de organizadores socialistas principiantes y potenciales, se han utilizado para facilitar la educación política fundamental en todo el país desde su publicación en inglés hace dos años.

Esperamos traducir más de nuestros materiales educativos en futuras publicaciones. Si le interesa colaborar con el NPEC en este proyecto, escríbanos a politicaleducation@dsacommittees.org

Enlace a los módulos de español/Link to the modules in Spanish

DSA’s National Political Education Committee is excited to announce the release of our first translated curriculum modules, featuring all three of our introductory modules in Spanish: What is Capitalism, What is Socialism, and Why the Working Class!

These out-of-the-box modules containing guided resources for developing new and prospective socialist organizers have been used to lead foundational political education around the country since their publication two years ago.

We hope to make additional translations of our committee’s educational materials available in future releases. If you are interested in assisting NPEC with our translation efforts, write to us at politicaleducation@dsacommittees.org

Michael P. is an organizer with NYC-DSA.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

GNDCC: What is the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA)? How did it happen?

Michael P: New York State has some of the most aggressive climate laws in the country—mandating a rapid transition to renewable energy, directing benefits of the transition to disadvantaged communities, people who have suffered from the adverse effects of the fossil fuel system. That is a great goal to have, but from the beginning it was clear that the State was not going to take the aggressive action that was needed to meet those goals. So when we were developing ideas for a campaign, we saw that clearly there needs to be some mechanism to force the State to deliver on this promise.

It happens that New York State has a sort of secret weapon for the energy transition, which is the New York Power Authority (NYPA). That’s the largest state-level public utility in the country. It has a very storied history, founded by Franklin Roosevelt and very much a model for a lot of the public power and electrification work that happened during the New Deal. But that legacy had kind of tailed off; over the last decades it’s been more in a holding pattern. Some of our strategy team saw it as an opportunity. The State has this amazing resource; rather than rely on private developers to build renewables, which was quite simply not happening at a rapid pace, we could get the State itself to step up and build the renewable energy we need. 

That push for renewable energy was always tied in our minds with a more comprehensive vision of a just transition that really benefits everyone and realigns politics around energy transition as a public good. So we went about this as a plan to create a huge amount of green jobs; to shut down fossil fuel plants that are continuing to pollute, especially in lower-income places with predominantly Black and brown people living there; and also work on lowering utility bills, which is really affecting everyone.

With that as the context, BPRA is basically a law to give NYPA both the power and the mandate to build a ton of publicly owned renewable energy and create all these benefits in the process.

How did you guys win? What was the campaign like?

This campaign was not waged by hardened politicos or 20-year veterans of legislative work; we really had to figure it out as we went along. Of course we have people with all kinds of skills, but it essentially took us becoming experts and taking that expertise and mixing it with what DSA does really well, which is build power and frighten people in power through organizing. So it was really a multi-year process where, on the one hand, we developed and sharpened our analysis of what the bill should do, and then, on the other hand, gradually built more and more of a base and deployed more and more aggressive tactics to first get the bill on the map—it’s hard to even have something be noticed—then make it one of the main things people were talking about in Albany for climate action, and then ultimately to a place where they had to pass it because there was so much pressure and it was really just a question of how strong we could make the final bill.

That took really every single tool in the toolbox: canvassing people and knocking on doors, tabling and talking to people on the streets, very sophisticated comms targeting a mass audience, knowing how to get our story into the press, knowing how to build relationships in the legislature and how bills really get passed and what’s the realpolitik of that. It also took significant electoral power, in the end, to show that this is a force to be reckoned with, this cannot be ignored anymore.

So it was a massive effort. It’s great to think that thousands of people contributed to passing this law. The ground is breaking for the first project in mid-July. This is something that was a massive collective achievement, and that gives me hope for replicating this and building on it at a much larger scale.

Can you say more about the electoral power and having DSA elected officials and how that helped?

There are a couple of pieces with electoral power. You mentioned the socialists in office that we had elected. That was a really important precondition, because that meant we had people who were on the inside of the legislature. They are there in conference when they are talking about what bills they’re going to debate and prioritize. They are there building relationships across the political spectrum. But they are also very much public agitators for socialist politics and policy, so they were crucial in getting our story out there into the press and in front of the public. That was the product of years of winning campaigns for State Assembly and State Senate.

But the intensification was in 2022 actually running a slate of candidates that had a shared focus on climate, and in particular BPRA, including the candidate I worked for, Sarahana Shrestha. Actually, her campaign grew out of BPRA organizing in the Hudson Valley. She was confronting a 20+ year incumbent who was functionally blocking the bill from moving. This is something we learned over time. The way things work is not, Okay, X number of legislators support this, and then it gets to a vote. It’s really gatekeepers in positions of very specific power, are they motivated to to move the bill? So we found that there’s a lot of things these people can put off and ignore, but they cannot ignore a credible electoral challenge. Obviously, we won some of these races. But even in ones where we didn’t, that had a significant impact on the bill moving through committee and to a vote.

What was the role of working with labor in this and getting it passed?

From the start, the entire concept of the law and the campaign to pass it was structured around the absolutely crucial role of labor in the transition. Both in terms of the political power labor has, but also that it’s workers who are going to build the wind turbines, solar fields, geothermal, all that stuff. They’re going to physically be the ones driving the transition. And of course, it’s also just a part of a broader socialist strategy that labor has to be central.

So from the beginning we wanted to make sure the law would have the strongest possible protections for workers. This is a notorious problem in the private sector renewable development field—a lot of abuse of workers, a lot of non-union labor. So we saw this as an opportunity to show the climate movement really does stand with workers, and that goes beyond just saying nice things about a just transition, but actually fighting to make sure that that’s a crucial piece in developing renewable energy.

Part of our getting to collaborate with labor was just showing how serious we were, showing that this is a bill that had support. It was already gaining support in the legislature and when they saw that, for example, the state AFL-CIO then wanted to collaborate on developing the labor language in the law. That’s how we came out with a law that has the best possible labor protections, because they were determined by the labor movement. That was crucial as we built up. Also rank-and-file workers, especially in education, were very behind this and moved resolutions to ultimately move their parent unions to support this. That was huge.

Now we’re kind of moving into a new phase where projects are actually being developed and work is going to be starting very soon. Really our hope is that the more projects are built and going forward, the more we can collaborate with labor unions so that they get what they want to see out of this. To make sure, for example, their workers have a really good future where there’s plentiful work and that’s happening with all of the protections of a union in terms of wages and benefits and protection from bad treatment from employers.

So it passed two years ago. What’s been happening with the implementation since then?

Partly from all the lessons we learned in the campaign, we knew that the fight was not going to end with passing the law. With very little of a break after passing it, we launched a campaign to essentially dismiss the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority, who is a registered Republican who worked for a law firm or lobbying firm that worked for fossil fuel companies, who had a very spotty record on civil rights under his tenure as CEO, and who was just dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal in terms of how he ran the Authority. We were able, very quickly, to build a mini campaign that actually prevented him from being confirmed by the New York State Senate as the permanent CEO. Unfortunately, he got to stay through a weird legal loophole that literally no one knew about.

But that really put them on notice. We’re not messing around, we’re not going to settle for scraps—you build a couple of solar fields and call it a day. No, we are in this to effect the full transition in our energy system. From there we prepared ourselves to have a phase two of our campaign where, instead of fighting to pass a law, we’re developing and propagating a vision for what it looks to realize all of this, to actually build these projects. Where should they be built? How much? What kinds of technologies? Where does the system need the most help? All these kinds of questions.

We had to develop our own vision and then, basically at every step of the way, try to preempt wishy-washy planning by the state with popularizing a really strong vision that foregrounded all of the benefits people would get: lower bills, green jobs, less dangerous air pollution, and of course, hopefully a livable future. It entailed building even more expertise and publishing serious research modeling the future of the grid in New York State, but, like everything else, grounded in building tremendous people power.

People spent weekends tabling and gathering public comments. We also worked with the Professional Staff Congress, which is the faculty and staff union at the City University of New York. They organized 10 town halls across the City University system. Then when they actually had public hearings around the State, we were able to send crowds of people to all of these hearings, and I think that the State officials were legitimately shocked because this kind of public comment process hearings is generally an incredibly sleepy thing because nobody even knows about it. They’re not making an effort to engage the public. Our idea was the State should consult the public to see what is needed. What do people want to see? But instead, we had to kind of build that ourselves.

So on some level, I’ve seen our campaign over the last two years as essentially an exercise in, Okay, if you don’t want to run a democracy, we’re going to build the democratic mechanisms to force the input on you. In the end, we had over 5,300 public comments on their first plan. Then the New York City hearing was packed to the rafters. Dozens of people couldn’t even speak because there were so many speakers. Because of that, they have already said they’re going to double the amount of renewable energy that they’re planning to build.

To me, as an organizer, when I see people acceding to our demands, that is a signal not to rest, but to actually go harder because it’s working. So that fight is going to continue. There are a lot of things we need to push for. We need to make sure that they’re actually building projects all over the State. Right now, their earlier stuff is much more focused on upstate, but actually for urban areas like New York City, there are tremendous benefits to building renewables near where a huge amount of the demand is. That will also allow us to shut down these peaker plants, which are hyper-polluting when they’re spinning up to actually provide power to the grid. They emit all kinds of noxious chemicals that cause hugely disproportionate asthma rates. They contribute to massive hospitalization for children and adults.

So these are things that we need to address, and we can’t do that unless we’re actually building the renewable energy to replace the super-dirty fossil fuel energy. A bright spot there is, thanks to our influence, the New York Power Authority is moving ahead with starting to plan for large-scale battery storage in the city, which is one way to replace the capacity of those fossil fuel plants. But they’re barely scratching the surface of what they can do in New York City. Yes, it’s not like we have millions of acres of open space, but there’s massive amounts of space available to build distributed energy resources that are smaller scale, but lots of them all over the place. We see our role as we continue to push and fight until we get what we need, essentially.

So, thanks to you guys, they’ve doubled the amount of renewables they’re going to build. This is their first plan, then they’re going to start building their first projects because of BPRA?

Yes. So the first plan was approved in January. Even in that plan document, they already said, “Okay, we’re going to look at doubling this.” They didn’t say, “This is because these massive crowds of people came and confronted us,” but we know that that’s why. They had a Board of Trustees meeting last week where they formally said, “Yes, we’re going to do this.” So that’s our pressure working.

Another thing I want to mention is, on the labor front, BPRA authorized the State to give up to $25 million per year for green job training. And so far, NYPA has, I think, dispersed over $25 million. This is going to a mix of training programs with labor unions, with trade schools, with state universities. So we’re really winning tangible help for people. We fought to make sure that that would include programs like apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs with wraparound services for people who take this on. A lot of people can’t break into the green jobs area because maybe they don’t have a car, they can’t afford to get to the union training center, or they can’t afford childcare so they can’t do evening classes or something like that. These programs are going to be able to pay for all of that stuff so that we can bring people who have been locked out of being able to get these good-paying and family-sustaining type jobs into this workforce so that everyone benefits.

The vision of the private developing sphere is a bunch of private companies make money. But ultimately, it’s really big finance that is driving all the private renewable development and reaping the benefits because they’re the ones who are fronting the money for all of these projects. We have always been about: if we’re going to make climate action popular, we need to show that it can be a part of improving people’s lives. We need to dispel the very powerful propaganda of the Right that there’s a zero-sum game between climate action and people’s quality of life.

It’s a vision in the Green New Deal that the climate transition is an opportunity to restructure our economy, our society, and our democracy, and put some of this into the hands of regular people, because we do the work, we make things run, and it’s our world.

How has BPRA built up the strength of New York City DSA? Do you feel like it’s helped set the stage for you guys to do even more?

One thing is a lot of leaders in the chapter now went through the crucible of this campaign. Even if they’re working on something else now—maybe they’re working on electoral races or trans rights organizing or recruitment and building our future as a political party—a lot of these people cut their teeth and went from somebody who is just enthusiastic and excited to someone who is an ultra-experienced organizer who knows how to lead large numbers of people into action, which is what organizing is all about. So that’s a huge part of it.

I do think having BPRA as a shared policy plank in electoral campaigns really helped create a certain identity and cohesion in what we were putting forward. Having managed one of those campaigns, it was really motivating to people at the doors to see a positive vision for climate. And that actually is a massive piece of this. For a lot of people, the conventional wisdom was you cannot run on climate, that’s too scary or it’s too dicey. People want to talk about only bread-and-butter, kitchen table-type stuff. But ultimately, this is that. How much are you paying for utilities? How much are you paying in medical bills because your kid has asthma? So that’s another part of it. Ultimately BPRA put our chapter and chapters statewide on the map as one of the key forces shaping the climate fight in New York.

And it has brought in a lot of new people into our orbit. We work extremely closely with the City University staff, faculty, and students. These are all people who are now closer to the center of the organizing bullseye. We’ve made this seem possible, to actually win something. That was also always a part of this, to show socialists can pass transformative legislation that actually delivers results for the working class in the short, medium, and long term. It’s really a proof of concept for what our chapter has been doing all along. It remains one of our biggest legislative victories ever.

The post Campaign Q&A: Building Public Renewables in New York appeared first on Building for Power.

Every June, Chicago DSA holds our annual membership convention. Typically, our convention is more-or-less another General Chapter Meeting of the type we hold every quarter. Currently the only unique features of the convention are that any existing chapter Priority Campaigns are sunset unless they submit a resolution to “reauthorize” for a period of time up to a full year, and that there is generally a forum with candidates running for Chapter Officer.

As I wrap up my term as Chapter Co-Chair (and run for a second one), I’ve been thinking a lot about 1) how we give our chapter a clearer political focus, and 2) how we can make our chapter convention a bit more special. While it’s good that we use every convention to evaluate our Priority Campaigns, not every political priority is going to be an issue campaign. I think it’s important we spend time at the chapter convention to debate our broader priorities and direction as an organization, and I hope next year we can do more proactively to start that discussion in the lead up to the convention. 

This year, I am submitting a resolution that outlines four major political priorities for Chicago DSA, both in hopes of giving our chapter a clearer direction, and to help facilitate discussion and debate about what our priorities should be if not these four. Those four priorities are as follows:

1. Fight the boss. We must work to get masses of workers into motion against the capitalist class by encouraging, supporting, and precipitating class struggle, whether waged in the form of labor action, issue campaigns, direct action, or at the ballot box. 
2. Make more socialists. We must work to expand democratic socialist consciousness in the working class. We define democratic socialist consciousness as both engagement in purposive action (i.e., fighting the boss) and awareness of the ultimate goal of socialist transformation.
3. Be socialists everywhere. We need to become embedded in working class communities, especially in our workplaces and in unions, as well as in civic life and organized communities of all kinds.  
4. Build a class party. We need to build DSA as the foundation for a mass party of the working class. The party is an instrument to carry out the aforementioned tasks and for conquering the political power necessary for the transition to socialism.

The resolution is supplemented by a longer “commentary” on these priorities, which is presented in full below. 

Some of these priorities are already oft-repeated mantras by chapter cadre. That’s good, but we should formalize them and incorporate them into our orientation events and refer to them regularly as a way to evaluate ongoing and potential chapter work, not dissimilar to the Campaigns Criteria we adopted for our priority campaigns in 2018. 

The state of the world in 2025 is ever-changing and chaotic. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, to feel powerless, and to get pulled in new directions every week as the second Trump administration carries out its ultra-reactionary program. These priorities are designed to be “evergreen” and be applicable nearly no matter what the current situation is. We will always need to be working to carry out these four tasks. 

Additionally, while these are priorities for our chapter, and the commentary makes specific references to some of the particularities of Chicago DSA, these are also broadly applicable enough that I think any DSA chapter and the national organization could adopt them as well. Let’s trial run them in Chicago first and see how they work for us.

I hope that this proposal will lead to productive debate in our chapter. I would encourage anyone interested to submit amendments, whether partial or full on “substitute” amendments that would propose a completely different text entirely for us to adopt. Midwest Socialist is also a great avenue to share perspectives in longer form. You can also share your thoughts directly with me at Co-Chair-2@chicagodsa.org. 

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Forward

Commentary on “Political Priorities for Chicago DSA”

There is no dignity or democracy under capitalism. It is a system for producing life that depends on exploitation and dictatorship ensuring private accumulation of wealth and power by an elite few. We are democratic socialists because we believe we, the working class, should control our own labor power and run society democratically to benefit everyone. Our ultimate goal is a complete rupture with capitalism and the establishment of a new political order where workers rule.

Socialism will require uniting and empowering workers the world over in common pursuit of a shared vision for a new socialist society. To commit to the socialist project is to commit to lifelong struggle, to commit oneself to a larger whole, and to commit to working towards a total transformation of life as we know it today.  

Our organization, the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, has adopted the following political priorities to move us forward towards a socialist future. 

I. Fight the boss. 

We live today under the dictatorship of the capitalist class: the bosses. The bosses live in luxury off our labor while we spend the majority of our waking hours toiling at their behest to “make a living”. Our two classes are locked into a relationship of domination and subjugation. It is an irreconcilable conflict, and the only resolution will be through a total abolition of the capitalist system. 

The capitalist class have erected a vast superstructure to veil this class conflict and to prevent workers from realizing their common interests and common purpose. Our first task as socialists is to bring this conflict out and into the open through organizing workers as workers against the bosses — to encourage, support, and precipitate class struggle. We must take every possible opportunity available to engage in these struggles and leverage our membership and organization to achieve victory. 

Naturally, a primary site of class struggle is the workplace and through unions. This makes our chapter’s Labor branch an essential project. In addition to supporting labor struggles through strike solidarity activities, our members must work to cultivate a “militant minority” in their workplaces that can lead workers in struggle against the bosses directly from the shop-floor. While we want to see workers organize everywhere, our members should focus on industries, employers, and unions determined to be strategic priorities by the Labor branch, up to and including taking specific jobs to that end.

Our fight against the bosses extends to all their encroachments into our lives outside of the workplace, and in particular political struggle against the bosses’ representatives in government. Half a century into the neoliberal era we continue to find ourselves in retreat, fighting back against the further erosion of civil liberties and social welfare. We must wage a vigorous defense against these attacks while also working to go on the offensive, organizing to win transformative “non-reformist” reforms that shift the balance of power in our favor, such as those in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program. We need to fight for major structural changes to our political system too, from the expansion of voting to all residents including non-citizens and the incarcerated, to winning proportional political representation and an end to restrictive ballot access laws, all the way to a new democratic constitution that puts an end to minoritarian rule. 

These kinds of revolutionary reforms not only chip away at the power of the bosses but through their achievement give workers an understanding of their potential power and the necessity of political struggle. We need to run campaigns around these reforms and around issues that are widely and deeply felt by the working class. These campaigns should develop winnable demands and identify clear targets and timelines for escalation, emphasize tactics and actions that engage the largest number of people possible, and center the development of new activists and leaders. 

Because of our conflicting material interests, there is no way for both workers and bosses to win on any issue. A victory for workers is necessarily a loss for the bosses. This is why we must prioritize mass action that forces concessions over negotiation that yields meager compromises. 

A common tactic of the bosses to try to dull class conflict is by dividing workers based on race, nationality, gender, religion, immigration status, and other lines of difference. Working class unity cannot be achieved by simply trying to ignore these divisions and specific forms of oppression. We must fight them head on and identify them as attacks on the international working class as a whole. This means committing to organize around issues and through campaigns that focus on fighting these specific oppressions directly, such as struggles to weaken the power of the police, to combat imperialist wars and US militarism, or to fight back against attacks on bodily autonomy and transgender rights.

II. Make more socialists.

To achieve victory in the class struggle, the US working class needs a massive expansion in democratic socialist consciousness. While many in the US have come to hold a more positive view of socialism in the past decade than they have since the Red Scare, socialism is still quite marginal, and the common understanding of socialism by most is very rudimentary. 

We define democratic socialist consciousness as both engagement in purposive action (i.e., fighting the boss) and awareness of the ultimate goal of socialist transformation. Many workers are engaged in some level of the former, and many who identify as socialists or leftists have an understanding of the latter, but a much smaller number possess both qualities. 

No one is born a socialist. One becomes a socialist through a combination of action and education. This brings us to our second major task: guiding workers towards the path of becoming socialists, towards achieving both purposiveness and awareness. 

Our aim is not shallow indoctrination or to bring salvation to workers from above. Our aim is the transformation of workers’ capacity for analysis and self-activity, and to grow the ranks of workers who identify with a socialist tradition that spans the globe, several centuries, and many distinct tendencies. It is through strengthening workers’ insights and organization, through making more socialists, that socialists can hasten the day that the working class emancipates itself.

Making more socialists means an extensive focus on political education. While the elucidation of Marxist politics is paramount, socialist political education must involve the direct application of this theory to understand the present moment, to contextualize history, and to shape concrete organizing. Training workers in the practical skills required for organizing must likewise be an essential objective of a socialist political education program.

Political education is for everyone. We have to accommodate a series of concentric circles of different audiences ranging from organizational leaders and activists all the way out to the non-monolithic masses. This is a challenge given our limited resources. 

Focusing solely on the specific interests of members who are already deeply committed socialists is not very effective for developing new cadre (members who have made a serious long-time commitment to building the organization and advancing socialism). Developing popular education is of crucial importance for socialists, but popular education cannot scale without a corresponding increase in organizational capacity resulting from the recruitment and training of new cadre. For now we must prioritize political education programming that can bring together the socialist curious, non-cadre members, and core activists and leaders into shared spaces of vibrant debate and discussion, as is exemplified by our chapter’s most successful Socialist Night Schools.  

Intellectual awareness in total isolation is not consciousness though. Consciousness requires motion. This makes direct participation in class struggle perhaps the most valuable form of political education. These engagements transform abstract concepts into observed phenomena and resituate individual experiences into a dialectical framework. This makes both getting workers into motion against the bosses, and creating dedicated space to collectively debrief and evaluate those struggles, fundamental for the process of making more socialists. 

III. Be socialists everywhere.

Socialism in the United States today is largely subcultural. Like with many subcultures, the demographic make up of self-identified socialists is generally very skewed and unrepresentative of the working class as a whole. DSA’s current membership is disproportionately white, non-union, college educated, white collar, and millennial. In Chicago, our chapter’s membership is especially dominated by “transplants” who may have only recently moved to the city in their adult life and are less likely to have deep social and community ties as a result.  

If we want to expand our reach and grow beyond our existing narrow social base we need to work to become embedded in working class communities, in our workplaces, and in civic life. And we need to do so as socialists. We call this being socialists everywhere. 

The clearest example of this in practice is the model of the socialist shop steward. The socialist shop steward builds tight organization and unity against division amongst their coworkers. They know their contract backwards and forwards, keep watch for when the boss inevitably violates it, and take responsibility for being their coworkers’ advocates in grievances and disciplinary matters. To be effective, and generally to get elected in the first place, the socialist steward must win and sustain the trust of their coworkers. This is not accomplished overnight through sloganeering and polemics, but through the slow work of developing personal relationships and demonstrating a capacity for purposive action and leadership. 

The socialist steward does not discriminate. They stick up for even the most reactionary or even anti-union workers. Through this they come to gain the respect, however begrudgingly, of those same coworkers. The socialist steward does not substitute themselves for the union either. They act as a conduit for collective action, bringing others with them into motion against the boss. The degree to which the socialist shop steward identifies themself as a socialist will depend on the conditions of each particular shop. Ultimately though, even if it takes years, workers should come to understand that the reason that the socialist shop steward acts as they do is because they are a socialist, that a socialist is someone who looks and acts like their shop steward. 

This process taken at scale is how we begin to transform the popular understanding of socialism in the working class, how we grow from subculture to mass culture. These same principles can be applied outside of the workplace too, though there will be some major qualitative differences. 

US society today is deeply individualistic and atomized. This is not human nature. It is the product of a half century of neoliberal rule. Everywhere workers are taught to fear each other, that anyone who struggles to survive has only themselves to blame, and that the only way to advance in the world is to advance individually and at a necessary cost to others. 

Socialists need to build a culture of solidarity and cooperation for the common good. We do this by uniting others, by leading by example, by being socialists. We do this at work with our coworkers, on our block with our neighbors, around elections with voters in our precinct, in civic life, and as members of organized communities that few think of as being political, such as leisure and athletic groups. 

A significant challenge we face is the way that screens, digital media, and the internet have become the primary way that social life is mediated. Whatever expansion in potential reach for socialists that has resulted from social media has also come at the cost of our most basic social muscles atrophying. It’s not hard to imagine how a sudden black out of telecommunications could be entirely paralyzing for many. Only organizations built on strong social ties and personal relationships will  be resilient through such crises.

IV. Build a class party.

Fighting the boss, making more socialists, and being socialists everywhere will require socialists to build and participate in many different kinds of organizations. However, socialists and their various organizations need a connective tissue, a political organization that acts as a ballast to give focus and direction to the larger workers movement. We need a party.

The party we need to build is nothing like the existing political parties in the US today. We do not need a “third party”. We need to build the first party in the United States that is truly democratic, has a mass character, is explicitly socialist, and is solely of and for the working class. Much more than a ballot line, more than a caucus of elected officials in legislatures, the party is an instrument the working class uses to become “a class for itself”. It is an instrument for fighting the boss, making more socialists, being socialists everywhere, and ultimately, an instrument for conquering the political power necessary to catalyze the transition to socialism. 

We know we cannot simply declare the formation of such a party today. We see DSA as the foundation that can make such a class party possible. As such, building a class party means building DSA, both the national organization and our local chapter. We see DSA as well positioned to be the foundation for a working class party because it is explicitly socialist, because of its multi-tendency “big tent” nature, its commitment to being member-driven and democratic, and its nation-wide scope. In contrast to the large number of progressive NGOs that are staff-driven and dependent on foundation money, DSA is an organization that any ordinary working class person can not only join but actively shape and have ownership over through their participation in it.

There is, of course, much work to be done to build DSA. We need to shape DSA into an organization that can regularly fight and deliver for workers, that unlocks members’ potential for activism and leadership, that is more representative of the working class as a whole, and that is recognized as a powerful political force, a force independent from the Democratic Party, from entrenched political elites, and from the ruling class. We need to transform DSA from an activist organization to a mass organization that can be the political home of millions of ordinary working class people who do not yet see themselves as political actors.

***

Our road to power is long and the path will not always be clear, but our hope is not dimmed. At every possible juncture along the way we will need to engage in constant analysis of the present moment, evaluate our trajectory, and rigorously debate our next steps. As we undertake this journey we see these four priorities as guiding principles to keep us focused, to keep us united, and to keep us moving forward towards democratic socialism. 

The post Political Priorities To Move Chicago DSA Forward  appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

In his failed presidential bid, Human Health and Services Secretary RFK Jr. remarked that he would help people struggling with addiction become healthy again by having them work on unpaid “wellness farms.” If they refused, they would face incarceration. Throughout his career, RFK Jr. has railed against vaccination and modern medicine, taking particular aim at measles and HPV, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and even weight loss drugs. He now serves on Trump’s team of wreckers, an administration that’s dismantled public health infrastructure like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) during our sixth year of COVID-19 and as the threat of a bird flu pandemic grows. 

It should be no surprise that fascism often comes first for the disabled and people deemed as a “societal expense.” In Nazi Germany, Krankenmorde, or the “euthanasia” of the disabled, marked the beginning phase of mass death, and in fascist Italy, mental asylums swelled and transferred their patients to Nazi death camps. Both of these initiatives were preceded by American psychologist Henry Goddard’s writings against the “feebleminded” and the United States’s forced sterilization of the disabled. Fascism’s contemporary resurgence, especially in the U.S., is not a surprise to disabled activists who have warned since the onset of Covid that the rapid normalization of eugenics in regards to the pandemic would be its modern precursor. Yet, both the socialist left and the labor movement remains unprepared for this moment and continues to ignore a public health crisis that fundamentally threatens the vision and hope for an organized, militant working class. 

The Cost of Modern Eugenics

Disability has what is referred to by theorist Sara Ahmed as “stickiness,” or the idea that bodies are impressed upon by their relationships to other bodies, signs, and cultural associations. Race and disability have long been wedded through eugenics. As a recent example, racism and disability were enmeshed at the onset of COVID-19 when Asian people, specifically Chinese Americans and the broader diaspora, were condemned as being the cause of the pandemic, echoing the racist history of Asian people having been situated as “carriers of contagion.” A similar pattern unfolded during the AIDS epidemic, with AIDS having been deemed by major politicians as a disease contracted by “degenerate” queer and Black people. 

Necropolitics and who is mournable have framed much of American history, but especially the last six years. At the start of the pandemic, hospital overcrowding led to infamous triage protocols worldwide where some lives were valued more than others. Nursing homes across the US piled up with deaths without so much as dignified preservation in a morgue. In that time, we began manufacturing consent for the death of the working class from a preventable airborne illness. The CDC claimed early on that Covid would only severely impact the disabled or people with comorbidities, not because they intended to inspire care for the disabled, but to justify their deaths so everyone else could carry on with life as normal. Since 2020, over 1 million Americans have died from Covid-19. 

Infectious disease and a crumbling healthcare infrastructure incapable of providing accessible preventative care continue to leave lasting effects on our communities. Our government takes solace in the active spread of infectious disease and in the culling of the disabled because fascist states believe we must weed out the unfit. The “Make America Healthy Again” Executive Order, RFK Jr.’s announcement of a “disease registry” taking aim at autistic people, and the dismantling of the FDA’s regulatory power over our food supply are just the latest steps taken by this administration that will hurt all segments of the working class. For workers in America, the precarity of health is universal.

And yet, many of us remain largely in denial about our own proximity to disability. Apart from the fact that about 45% of Americans have a comorbidity, Covid has been proven to remain in the body post-infection and cause lingering damage to cardiovascular and organ systems, and having been infected with Covid even just once makes it more likely you’ll develop long-Covid. Studies on the prevalence of long-Covid show that nearly 7% of the population, or 1 in 13 Americans, currently has it and of those, 1 in 5 report having symptoms that disrupt their daily life. Some doctors estimate that within four years, most Americans will have long-Covid. As of the summer of 2024, 13.9% of those experiencing long-Covid had failed to return to work; we know what happens to people who can’t work under capitalism. 

The material repercussions of Covid infection and reinfection have already begun to show themselves. The most apparent impact is the disruption to our immune systems. We saw reports of a “quademic” this past holiday season (Covid, RSV, flu, and norovirus), and this season our flu infections and death rates are higher than they were at the peak of swine flu. As disability rates climb, services and social safety nets for the disabled become harder to access. Our life expectancy is in decline. Our cancer rates are on the rise. Since the onset of modern medicine, Americans have seemingly never been sicker.

But the left’s reluctance, including DSA, to fight for disabled people is not just a mistake that costs us our health, it is also making us deeply vulnerable to attacks on workers. In a police state reliant on facial recognition technology to squash threats to power, mask bans are an obvious next step, and multiple counties and states are banning them entirely. 

Most recently, Columbia University announced plans to implement a mask ban on campus because of protests in solidarity with Palestine. Kathy Hochul is following in lock-step to ban masks in public in the name of safety, and Maryland is contending with a Democrat introduced statewide ban in service of the Anti-Defamation League, another decision also directly connected to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Simultaneously, we’re seeing an end to Covid era worker benefits like telework, which was originally intended as a disability accommodation, and even threats to OSHA. A wider, bolder movement invested in disability solidarity that sees disabled struggle as class struggle would be better equipped to protect workers and their organizing rights. 

The longer we continue to ignore our public health crisis, the more vulnerable the working class will become to sickness, disability, and state repression.

What is to Be Done? 

The seemingly innocuous limit of socialist solidarity with the disabled is masking. Despite the claims we made in early pandemic days that a refusal to mask was a refusal to engage in community care, we have adopted the ultimately neoliberal principle that each person can and should make an individual choice about masking. It should be evident that public health matters significantly to the physical and mental wellbeing of the working class. Organizing for socialism will become increasingly difficult as our peers continue to get sick, become disabled, or are caught in a cycle of working to afford caring for sick loved ones who have no social safety nets. 

We know that masks work at preventing the spread and contraction of airborne viruses. N95s and KN95s are the most effective at doing both. For the right-wing, that isn’t a fact. The Trump administration’s latest report about Covid being a lab leak says as much: “There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19.” 

Socialists must counter these fascist, unscientific narratives not just in voice, but through collective action. There was once a time when we did. At the start of the pandemic, socialists prided themselves on understanding the science behind why masks work and why we should wear them. Unionists fought for worker access to PPE and air filtration systems. Some workers even went on strike over it. Now, it is exceedingly rare to find socialist organizations or unions routinely calling for and enabling spaces that require masking, and both have mostly stopped contending with the ongoing ramifications of a lack of public health infrastructure or the working class’s vulnerability to sickness.

The inaccessibility of healthcare in America is why most of us want universal healthcare, a collective solution to the problem, and although every broken piece of the for-profit healthcare system was exposed by the pandemic, the US left failed to win it. Unfortunately, there are segments of the left that still choose to shirk any responsibility to public health. Medicare-for-All is no longer the public rallying cry it once was for national DSA, or its surrogates. Similarly, the Party for Socialist Liberation’s presidential candidate Claudia De La Cruz, in a livestream for her campaign, directly addressed the question of mask mandates in PSL spaces saying, “People are asking about masking, well there’s no federal mandate on masking, right? But we do have masks at our different events. People choose whether to use them or not. We can’t implement something that the federal government, having the power to do it at a national scale, does not do.” 

Why not? Is the role of socialist organizations claiming to counter capitalism and empire to mimic the United States government? We set rules about our spaces all the time. We have bylaws, codes of conduct, harassment and grievance policies– all things that aid in the mission to keep our spaces safe, and yet when disabled activists ask for masking requirements, no one hears us. We’re told that masking makes us “out of touch with the working class,” that we’re “freaks,” or that we’re simply asking too much. Many of these claims run counter to the science behind masking and public health that would benefit most working people, especially those of us already struggling with various forms of disability. 

While we may list universal healthcare as a primary socialist demand, electoral campaigns associated with the DSA must actively advocate for it. Locally DSA endorsed candidates, like Zohran Mamdani, who I hope wins, should be elevating healthcare as an issue and loudly supporting initiatives like the New York Health Act to establish statewide single-payer healthcare. Universal healthcare must be a core part of our agitational electoral campaigns, regardless of district or region. 

DSA and other socialist and labor organizations must take material steps to protect the health of the working class. It is possible and necessary for us to require masking and air filtration at DSA events, run electoral campaigns that agitate around universal healthcare, and encourage our union members to push their Locals to take up the issue of public health. We should also be engaging in political education on the history of eugenics and disability activism here and abroad. 

The argument for solidarity with the disabled community doesn’t begin or end with Covid mitigation. It requires a sharper analysis of how capitalism preys on our health for profit and disposes of us when we’re sick, and of how it uses sickness and eugenics as a scapegoat to justify the policing and state-sanctioned execution of people of color, the disabled, and political dissidents. Disability touches all of our lives at any given stage, and it is latent in class, social, and ecological struggle. The opportunities for disability solidarity are all around us and as fascism rises worldwide and continues rendering more of us unmournable in the eyes of the state, it is the responsibility of socialists to intervene.

Unless we commit to practicing true solidarity with the disabled, eugenics will disable and kill the working class base we claim to want to organize, fight for, and protect.

Image Description: Official portrait of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States secretary of health and human services. Photo taken Feb. 21, 2025.

This article is a first attempt to review what happened leading up to and surrounding this year’s May Day rallies, who organized the rallies, how they accomplished it, and what comes next. It’s based on discussions with union leaders and DSA members in a half dozen cities and our experience here in Maine. The breadth of the protests means this assessment is necessarily anecdotal and incomplete. The author welcomes corrections and hopes DSA members will write up and share their experiences across the country. For background to the UAW’s call for a 2028 May Day general strike, see the fall 2024 issue of Socialist Forum featuring an interview with CTU, UAW, and DSA organizers.

What happened? 

Hundreds of thousands of workers marched and rallied on May Day, making it the largest International Workers Day since 2006 when two million immigrant workers left work and marched to demand their rights. Protests were organized in 1300 locations, large and small; no doubt the first May Day protest in many places. Broadly speaking, there were three different levels of mobilization. First, as in 2006, Chicago stood out with some 30,000 marching, organized by a mass coalition of labor and immigrant rights organizations. Second, cities like Philly, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Oakland, Burlington, and Portland, Maine mobilized between two and fifteen thousand. Third, hundreds of cities and towns turned out crowds from a couple dozen to hundreds, including smaller cities like Davis, California. This ranking is not intended as a judgement on the organizers. In fact, some of the smaller rallies included higher percentages of the population than the largest. For instance, in the town of Wayne, Maine—population 1,000—seventy-five people turned out for both morning and evening rallies. 

It’s worth noting that the crowds were not as large as the April 5 day of protest initiated by Indivisible; however, participants were noticeably more multiracial, younger, and radical with widespread support for transgender rights and opposition to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Though an important step in the process of building working-class unity against the billionaires and capitalist class, these efforts have a long way to go. For instance, although multiracial, at the national level, the marches did not entirely reflect working-class diversity. And if immigrant rights organizations were critical in many cities, Trump’s reign of terror against immigrant workers suppressed turnout from this community in many places. 

Who organized it and how? 

Memory and sacrifice play a role in sustaining oppositional working-class culture. No Haymarket Martyrs, no May Day. More recently, the 2006 May Day protests provided a living link to the past as well as the importance of International Workers Day globally. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for unions to align contracts and lead a 2028 general strike, have introduced May Day to a whole new generation of labor organizers.

 Recently, precursor actions in the wake of Trump’s election laid the basis for pulling together a mass, class-based response. As the saying goes, the best organizing tool is a bad boss and Trump is one of the worst bosses possible. Repression and widespread layoffs do not always provoke resistance, but this time targeted workers put up a critical mass of opposition that gummed up the works and provided the time to organize a strategic response. 

Thousands of teachers from across the country responded to a call by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers for walk-ins in March to protest Trump’s destruction of the Department of Education. Bay Area activists organized a “Day of Resistance” against ICE even before Trump was inaugurated. The Maine State Nurses Association led a rally to protest Medicaid cuts in March and organized a mass town hall to prevent the closure of the obstetrics department in the small town of Houlton. Kathryn Lybarger, president of AFSCME 3299 representing 22,000 workers at the University of California, summarizes her union’s approach, “My union went on its fourth strike in six months on May Day, and the energy felt great. For union members fighting a powerful employer for our families’ futures, it was amazing to be joined on the picket line by all kinds of community members who are fighting billionaires for their futures too. The day felt like an event and an important step in building the movement we need to stop Trump and win a better world.”   In the single biggest display of working-class power on May Day, 55,000 LA County employees in SEIU 721 walked off the job and marched through downtown LA. 

As federal workers reeled from Trump’s layoffs, the Federal Unionist Network was one of the most important elements blunting the blitzkrieg. FUN organizer Chris Dols explains, “Amidst all the necessary defense we’re playing against the billionaires’ offensive, May Day is the labor movement’s opportunity to articulate a positive vision for the world we deserve. Federal workers are uniquely positioned and proud to help advance such a vision because, above all else, we are public servants, and it is the entire public that is under assault. As is captured by the FUN’s ‘Save Our Services’ demand, our approach to May Day was to foreground the crucial services and protections federal workers provide in an effort to not only cohere fighting federal labor movement but also to develop and deepen alliances with all who stand to lose the most if Trump gets away with smashing up our agencies.”

Pair these factors with decades of bipartisan misery inflicted on the working class, and it’s not surprising workers are angry. Politicians have failed to deliver on demands like healthcare for all, affordable housing, and a stronger public education system. Add inflation, union-busting, white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia and homophobia, genocide in Gaza, and anti-immigrant bigotry, and the potential for uniting large parts of the working class across its many divisions comes into focus.

Chicago takes the lead

Yet objective conditions alone cannot make a plan. Organized forces with the credibility and capacity to think through a strategy and to put it into practice are needed. 

According to Jesse Sharkey, past president of the Chicago Teachers Union and lead organizer with the newly-formed May Day Strong coalition, “Chicago became a center of May Day organizing this year for two reasons—first, there was a local coalition that got a lot of people involved. Activists from the immigrants rights community were extremely important in initiating it, and they held open meetings. They invited anyone who wanted to help organize. That drew in trade unionists, and many others. On a second front, Chicago was in the middle of initiating a national call for May Day protests… The call for that effort came from the Chicago Teachers Union and a handful of allied organizations such as Midwest Academy, Bargaining for the Common Good, and the Action Center on Race and the Economy. The NEA also played an extremely helpful role. In late March, we had about 220 people from over 100 organizations join us in Chicago to start planning for May 1 actions. The reason we were able to initiate such a widespread effort was because we have a past practice of closely linking trade union fights to wider working-class demands. In places where local unions have worked with community and activist groups, we had networks of communication and trust. Then, once that effort had reached a certain critical mass, some of the big national networks like Indivisible and 50501 got on board, and that really grew the reach of the day.”

It’s not that the CTU and immigrant community organizers in Chicago were the only ones thinking about May Day, but their action drew together and amplified similar efforts across the country, nationalizing the protest by providing a framework and resources for labor and community organizers in hundreds of towns and cities. Chicago didn’t create May Day 2025—thousands of activists across the country had to take up the call—but it did open a door. 

Socialists and the united front

Assessing the impact of May Day for the working class as a whole should not be conflated with DSA’s role in the organizing. But as this is an article that will mostly reach DSA members, it’s worth reviewing what we contributed. First, thousands of DSA members across the country turned out for May Day. This fact alone shows our organization’s strength, and it points to opportunities and responsibilities. If all your chapter was able to do was to turn out members or help publicize the local protest among coworkers and the broader community, that’s an important contribution. Second, at the National Level, DSA’s National Political Committee and National Labor Commission joined May Day Strong and organized membership Zoom meetings to encourage branches to take action starting in March. Third, and this should come as no surprise, DSA played a bigger role in some places than others. I think it’s worth considering the impact of the strategic and tactical choices local chapters made on the influence they wielded and the organic ties they deepened. After speaking with comrades from across the country, I will offer a few positive examples. I hope comrades will add to this picture and offer alternative ideas or criticisms. 

New York 

In October, the NYC-DSA chapter adopted a resolution to support the UAW’s call for a 2028 May Day strike. The chapter subsequently held an internal May Day 2028 strategy retreat and identified May Day 2025 as a key link in the chain of developing power and political momentum to fight against Trump and the broader machine. As one DSA organizer puts it, “It’s not enough to circle May Day 2028 on a calendar, we need to build a coalition to organize it and politicize it.” Rooted in this perspective, NYC-DSA turned out to support a mass post-election labor-left anti-Trump rally, the FUN day of action in February, the subsequent Stop the Cuts rally on March 15, and Hands Off on April 5. 

Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth, co-chair of NYC-DSA Labor Working Group and National Labor Commission SC member (as well as a twenty-year member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA) picks up the story, reflecting, “After Stop the Cuts, I went to Chicago on March 19 and 20 as an NLC representative to join the May Day Strong meeting. Stacy Davis Gates, Jackson Potter, and Jesse Sharkey welcomed us all into the house that CTU built. Shawn Fain was there along with Randi Weingarten, who was enraged because Trump signed his executive order gutting the Department of Education that same day. We broke out into regions and were charged with going back home to build May Day as big as possible. In New York City, broadly speaking, there were three important currents: the core of the union movement represented by the Central Labor Council, the left-liberals like Tesla Takedown, and the labor/left, of which DSA is a part. Through a lot of coalition work, we made a circle out of this Venn diagram. Trump helped along the way. Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation really angered the Building Trades, further galvanizing them into participation. DSA played an important role in mobilizing: we had a huge contingent, and even more members marching with their unions. But more than that, we helped politicize May Day to point to the billionaires who are benefiting from the Trump administration’s attacks on us.” 

Part of this work included successfully advocating—alongside many others—for both AOC and Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyer to speak at the rally, which garnered significant national media attention, helping broadcast our message far beyond May Day participants. It’s important to point out that DSA did not initiate the coalition, but worked alongside long-time labor activists to support May Day, earning our stripes as a trusted and capable partner. 

On the day, NYC-DSA turned out some 500 members, many of whom marched with their unions. They did so while keeping up with other work—DSA member Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor—with NYC-DSA labor organizers having advanced a month-long Build to May Day campaign. Organizers called on committees and working groups across the chapter to make May Day a priority, turning out members and volunteer marshalls. The chapter is now in a stronger position to discuss next steps with the broader coalition and consolidate a layer of new members and allies. There’s more pain ahead, but May Day helped gather working-class forces together for action and to take the temperature of the most active and militant layer of trade unionists and community activists. As NYC-DSA Labor Working Group member David Duhalde suggests, “The New York City May Day rally and march from Foley Square to the iconic Wall Street Bull statue was a microcosm of the shift in energy in labor during Trump’s second term.” How far that shift goes can only be tested in practice.

Philadelphia

As in New York, Philadelphia DSA did not initiate the call for the May Day rallies. The AFL-CIO led the charge in alliance with immigrants rights organizations such as Milpa, New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, and Juntos, mobilizing some 5,000 workers. But Philadelphia DSA did add its organizing muscle, assigning Luke M to act as liaison. The chapter followed many of the same tactics as their New York comrades. When the AFL-CIO opened up the coalition, DSA members proved themselves energetic organizers; for instance, running the marshal training and providing a large portion of marshals. DSA members constituted a large part of the seventy-two people arrested at the end of the march in a civil disobedience action, including Rick Krajewski, a DSA member elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Seven union presidents joined in this calculated escalation of tactics, demonstrating a broad understanding that workers will have to take matters into their own hands to back down the billionaires and capitalist elites. 

And in a lesson passed down through generations, from the IWW to Sit-Down Strikes to the Civil Rights Movement to Occupy to Black Lives Matter to Gaza, no protest is finished until jail support is organized, a responsibility that was taken up by DSA members and coalition partners alike. That unity in action demonstrated the most important aspect of united front work, but the chapter also raised the socialist banner. Taking placards and membership interest card ideas from DSA members in California, Philadelphia DSA formed a visible presence on the march with some 200 members, and signed up sixty-two new recruits. It didn’t hurt that the unions invited Bernie to speak. After all the hard work, Luke praised his Philly comrades, “I have to say I’m genuinely proud of what we accomplished, and I’m looking forward to the debrief meeting to see what comes next.”

Portland, Maine

Maine DSA’s Labor Rising working group decided to focus on May Day in December, laying the basis to help initiate an organizing meeting open to all community groups and unions. Maine AFL-CIO leaders and UAW graduate students participated in a preliminary meeting to brainstorm ideas, and more than 70 people attended an April 12 meeting in the South Portland Teamsters’ Hall, where the group democratically planned Portland’s May Day. Working groups took up all aspects of the action, and we took all important decisions back to the coalition for votes. Running a long a related track, Maine Education Association and Maine AFL-CIO leaders called for actions across the state, amplifying the Chicago May Day Strong call and dramatically broadening what the Portland coalition could organize. 

Nearly 2,000 people turned out in Portland, starting with a rally at the University of Southern Maine to back UAW graduate students’ demands for a first contract and then marching to the Post Office to hear from postal workers. Members of the Portland Education Association and a trans student poet headlined the stop at Portland High School and a librarian union rep spoke in Monument Square before the final rally that heard from the president of the Metal Trades Council at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, a rep from the Maine State Nurses Association, members of the Maine Coalition for Palestine, an organizer from LGTBQ+ community group Portland Outright, a local immigrant rights group called Presente! Maine, and others. It was a great demonstration and showed the thirst for a broader coalition. Twenty-five other towns held actions, bringing the total number of Maine participants to over 5,000, the largest Maine May Day anyone can remember. 

It would be shortsighted to overstate the power and stability of this fledgling coalition. Large doses of patience and understanding will be necessary to foster bonds of trust. Sectarian pressures to draw “red lines” that exclude workers new to political activity and organizations who have various programs and interests represent one danger. A narrow focus on the midterm elections represents another. Fortunately, there’s a lot of room for creativity between those two extremes. 

Long road ahead

May Day was the first test of strength for the left and working class against Trump, MAGA, and forty-plus years of neoliberal rot. We face a long, complex problem where political pressures to return to passivity will be strong, but May Day 2025 constitutes a small step towards healing deep wounds in the American working class, the divide between organized and unorganized, immigrant and US born, etc. If brother Fain’s call for 2028 is to grow strong, then 2026 and 2027 must be practice runs.  If 2026 and 2027 are to be real demonstrations of strength, they must grow out of tighter bonds between labor, community, and the left, more active membership participation in all of those forces, and a combination of defensive struggles we are forced to fight and battles we pick on our own terms. As Sarah Hurd, co-chair of DSA’s National Labor Commission, spells out, “This year’s May Day actions showed the power of what we can accomplish just by setting a date and inviting people to take action together. It has also highlighted what work we need to do to scale up our level of organization in the next three years.” 

What did May Day teach us? Fittingly, the last word goes to Kirsten Roberts, a rank-and-file Chicago teacher, “The most important element of May Day 2025 is the explicit entry of organized and unorganized labor into resistance to Trump. Trump’s attacks are aimed directly at dividing the working class and turning ordinary people against one another while the billionaires rob and plunder us all. An agenda for working class unity can be built when we stand up for those most victimized and vilified by the right-wing bigots AND when we stand together to fight for the things that the billionaire class has denied us—the fight for healthcare, education, housing, and good-paying jobs for starters. For decades, we’ve been told by both parties that funding war, incarceration, and border militarization are their priorities. May Day showed that working people have another agenda. Now let’s organize to win it.”