This article sums up the third and final day of the 2024 YDSA national convention. Deliberation Block 4  Deliberation began with Resolution 16 – “Ecosocialism Beyond the Green New Deal.” R16 seeks to recognize the legislative gridlock that the Green New Deal has fallen into and politicize our ecosocialist vision beyond reform efforts. The amended…

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DSA Cleveland’s Public Pressure Non-Campaign Activity for Trans Rights was passed unanimously at the February 2024 general meeting. The “non campaign activity” was NOT a priority project of Cleveland DSA, therefore it did not have an elected leadership body and other privileges of being a priority. From February-April 2024 DSA sent members to make public comment at meetings where the restrictions on trans health care were being considered, including the Ohio Health Advisory Board, Ohio Department of Health and Department of Mental Health. DSA members also attended a public meeting of the Cuyahoga County Board of Health to bring up our concerns about anti-trans legislation. We made 345 phone calls and sent countless emails and public comment submissions. We engaged 58 DSA members and community members in this work. We also worked directly with Abortion Fund of Ohio on an education event. At the end of the authorization period for this activity, it was ultimately the lower Ohio courts that opted to block and stall the implementation of HB 68, and interest in mass action over the issue died down.

We wanted to host a large scale demonstration occupying the Cuyahoga County Department of Health, this also did not happen. We hosted a smaller demonstration in the Cuyahoga County Board of Health parking lot where we distributed literature to the workers there. The culmination of the work on this project is a plan for a Trans Liberation Priority Project. While the authors of this proposal believe it holds untapped potential, they did not recommend it for approval due to a lack of developed leaders ready to take on the four elected roles; legislative researcher, project administrator, comms coordinator and membership coordinator. DSA new members and observers should note that although we do not have ongoing work in every issue-area we have experience and projects prepared for prioritization when chapter capacity and external circumstances align, we are ready and we need your help.

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What Jarkesy and Loper Bright mean for labor organizing and interactions with the NLRB

The post What Do the Recent Supreme Court Rulings Mean for Labor Rights? appeared first on EWOC.

DSA International Committee applauds the courage and determination of the Kenyan people in their tireless struggle against the imposition of the now-withdrawn 2024 Finance Bill. Amid fierce state repression, including the murders of as many as 200 protesters by police forces, thousands continue to mobilize, demanding the resignation of President William Ruto.

Protests against the 2024 Finance Bill, which promised to intensify an increasingly dire cost-of-living crisis, have united Kenyans of all ages, genders, and ethnicities. The Communist Party of Kenya describes the situation as, “not merely about an imposed IMF finance bill, [but] a potent manifestation of the deep-seated inequalities that plague Kenya. Millions of our people languish in abject poverty, while a stinking corrupt elite flaunts their ill-gotten wealth with shameless opulence.”

Austerity economics continue to ravage the working poor, unemployed, and landless in cities and rural areas all over the world. When we speak of austerity and neoliberalism, we lay responsibility first and foremost at the feet of the United States, which holds greater institutional power over the international financial system than any other nation on Earth. And it is US imperialism which guarantees, through force and subversion, the conditions necessary to reproduce austerity for billions across the world, generation after generation. Kenya is but the latest site of resistance to the mercenary demands of the US-led capitalist world system.

President Ruto’s government is fighting for its survival on multiple fronts. As Kenyans vehemently reject the draconian proposals of the 2024 Finance Bill, Ruto faces widespread domestic opposition and a substantive legal challenge for contributing more than one thousand police officers to a US-backed invasion of Haiti in service of the imperialist Core Group.

Haiti remains captured, controlled, and terrorized by Western forces, its treatment yielding minimal opposition across the Americas. Nevertheless, Kenyans have refused to sit by idly as they are enlisted as proxies to meet the military objectives of colonial powers and their collaborators in the region.

Kenya’s future belongs to its people. So, too, does the future of humanity depend on the persistent organizing and solidarity of socialists in the United States— a solidarity that must include willing sacrifice. Ours, too, is a struggle against the depravities of capitalism, the violence of imperialism and militarism, and the illegitimacy of anti-democratic rule over the working masses. We gain strength from our comrades in Kenya, and support every effort to advance their struggle and the struggles of all peoples around the world for justice, land, and dignity.

The post DSA IC Stands with the Kenyan People against Austerity and Imperialism appeared first on DSA International Committee.

Project 2025 calls for a dramatic weakening of employment and labor law, as well as a counter-mobilization of the working and middle classes against the labor movement.

By Henry De Groot

The Threat of Project 2025

Much has been written in the last few weeks about Project 2025. But what does it mean for the labor movement?

As the increased threat of a second Trump term and what that entails fosters widespread concern about potential authoritarian measures, article after article points to the concerning content of the 900 page Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership. 

Project 2025 outlines concrete steps which could be taken to overhaul the departments of the executive branch. The document is this presidential cycle’s version of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership; the first Mandate for Leadership was drafted prior to Reagan’s 1980 election, and included many of the policies which typified his neoliberal assault on the working class. The Heritage Foundation is one of the original and central pillars of the neoliberal billionaire network, which includes other organizations including the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Founded in 1973 by right-wing activists Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner, as well as billionaire Joseph Coors of Coors Brewing, the foundation sought to implement the conservative strategy laid out in the notorious Powell Memo. 

Project 2025 is close to Trump and his entourage but shouldn’t be seen as identical to Donald Trump himself. There is a clear contradiction and differentiation between the more traditionally neoliberal preferences of the right-wing billionaires represented by the Heritage Foundation and the more working and middle class elements of the MAGA movement which Trump mobilized as his own personal army. Project 2025 presents both but generally defers to MAGA orthodoxy. 

While the Democrats have drummed up Project 2025 to energize their base, Trump claims that he knows “nothing about Project 2025.” But Trump is a habitual liar, and the proximity is undeniable; 6 of his former cabinet advisors as well as more than 140 Trump Administration staffers have contributed to the Project 2025 effort. Moreover the ideas very closely mirror the 2024 Republican Party platform which was more directly drafted by Donald Trump’s team. 

In terms of Project 2025’s labor angle, Trump’s former Secretary of Labor, Patrick Pizzella, was one of the senior Trump officials involved in drafting Project 2025. The chapter on the Department of Labor is written by Jonathan Berry, a frequent contributor to the Federalist Society on labor and employment law.

In just the last few days, labor has expressed growing concern about Project 2025. The Center for American Progress laid out Project 2025’s attacks on the NLRB, Labor Notes recently published an article “Project 2025: Eliminate Unions,” and several unions have come out with statements with concerns about its contents. The American Federation of Government Employees warns that Project 2025 calls for the termination of up to 1 million federal employees, IBEW Local 2222 highlights the planned attack on overtime, and the Wisconsin AFL-CIO issued a general warning about the far-right threat of Project 2025.

We should be careful neither to underestimate nor exaggerate the threat posed to labor by a second Trump term. There is nothing in Project 2025 which would “eliminate unions” in their entirety, and much of the hype around Project 2025 is part of the Democratic campaign narrative that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and the constitutional order.

But we would also be remiss if we were to consider a 2024 Republican victory as simply a more open and honest version of the Democrats’ pro-business agenda. There are elements in the Republican Party who absolutely would prefer a more typical Republican administration; but many of these forces rallied around Nikki Halley and were roundly rejected. If — and it is not clear which plans are serious and which are bluster — Trump carried out the full program of Project 2025, it would entail the mass deportation of 10 million undocumented Americans, massive expansion of presidential powers, deportation of Palestinian demonstrators, hundreds of thousands or millions of layoffs of civil servants, and other policies that go beyond naked corporate interest.

I have written elsewhere on the larger prospects of authoritarianism under a second Trump term. They are very serious. Ultimately, only Trump knows what his plans are for a second term. How far he is willing to move past the pro-corporate agenda of his first term in taking on a dangerous authoritarian direction is known only to him.

The Corporate Wish-List for Employment and Labor Law

Jonathan Berry’s chapter outlines a systematic attack on US employment and labor law.

In terms of employment law — the rules which affect all workers regardless of union status — Project 2025 lays out several damaging policies. 

Berry calls for stripping many of the protections offered to marginalized groups under the law. Project 2025 would “Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics,” including allowing for discrimination against trans people in hiring and firing. Project 2025 would also strip several important race-based protections from employment law. And the proposal would allow employers to deny abortion coverage.

The initiative would also erode overtime protections, expanding the overtime calculation period to 80 hours over two weeks instead of 40 hours over one week. And Project 2025 would allow employers to provide earned paid vacation instead of overtime pay.

Even more radically, Project 2025 undermines the very role of federal employment law as the national floor for workplace standards. One policy proposal would allow states to exempt themselves from federal employment law, allowing for lower state minimums to prevail. Another would allow for unions to accept work conditions below the federal minimums during collective bargaining. 

Also in this vein, Berry calls for the NLRB to loosen rules on employee misclassification, allowing employers to deny workers rights by classifying them as “independent contractors,” and calls for “safe harbor” for any employer using independent contractors as long as they provide workers with benefits. This would allow for the expansion of the misclassification which allows Uber and Lyft to refuse basic worker rights to their drivers.

In terms of labor law — the rules covering union rights and collective bargaining which are generally enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act and enforced by the National Labor Relations Board — Project 2025 calls for several policy changes which would dramatically weaken the US labor movement.

Berry calls for several rule changes which would make it harder to unionize. This includes a return to the 2019 Alstate Maintenance precedent, which imposes an 8-part checklist on what counts as protected concerted activity. This means employers would have broader powers to fire employees for expressing concerns about and within the workplace. Berry would also eliminate the recent Board changes which expanded the role of “card check” elections.

The chapter also calls for a limited interpretation of “joint-employer” precedent. This means large companies could more easily use subcontractors or shell companies to frustrate union efforts by denying they employ the workers at all.

Berry also calls for the elimination of the NLRA’s Section 8(a)(2) prohibition on company unions, calling for the establishment of “Employee Involvement Organizations.” This would revive company union tactics which have long been illegal, but in recent years have nonetheless been taken up by Uber and Lyft.

Berry’s chapter also calls for an attack on common union strategies for building power for working people outside of direct unionization. This includes the expansion of “duty of fair representation” to allow for employees to argue that a union’s political contributions violate its duty of fair representation to its members. And Berry also calls for increased financial scrutiny of workers centers, the union-adjacent non-profits which the labor movement backs to run campaigns and support workers outside of the traditional sectors of the labor movement.

Employment and labor law are weak even under Democratic administrations. But they nonetheless codify decades of gains in working conditions and union rights which were won only through hard fought struggle. If enacted, Project 2025 would set us back by decades and dramatically weaken the labor movement’s ability to organize new workplaces, deliver strong contracts, and fight for working people in society as a whole.

Corporate Attacks, Sector by Sector

In addition to the specific attacks on the US labor relations system outlined by Berry’s chapter and summarized in the section above, Project 2025 proposes various other policies which amount to a sector-by-sector attack on the labor movement. While these attacks don’t go so far as to “eliminate unions” as Labor Notes describes Project 2025, they are still a serious threat.

Perhaps the sector most directly in the crosshairs of Project 2025 is the government sector. The plan proposes expanding by 10x the number of political appointees, from around 4,000 today to up to 50,000. This means that some 46,000 civil service jobs would lose protections given to ‘neutral’ civil servants and instead be subject to political calculations in hiring, firing, and promotions. As noted above, AFGE also warns that an additional 1 million federal workers could be laid off as part of drastic cuts to government departments.

Project 2025 would also dramatically undermine unions in all sectors which rely on federal contracts. This includes getting rid of the mandate for federal contractors to pay prevailing wages and enter into project labor agreements, which would open a “race to the bottom” in working conditions on infrastructure projects. This would especially affect the conditions in the construction sector.

The education sector is also a major focus of Project 2025. The document proposes bans on teaching critical race theory, gender studies, and other progressive curricula which could dramatically reverse the expansion of anti-establishment ideas over the last decade. And more materially, the plan to dissolve the Department of Education could mean more than $80 billion in cuts to the department’s federal programs, which help provide subsidized meals, fund schools in poor districts, and much more. Cuts to financial transfers from the federal government to poor school districts could result in mass layoffs of educators in these districts.

Although it isn’t specifically listed in Project 2025, the 2024 Republican Party platform does call for the deportation of “pro-Hamas” radicals active on campuses. Carrying out such a deportation campaign would likely mean targeting graduate worker union activists, and actual deportations would likely just be the most extreme action of a larger campaign of harassment and intimidation of pro-Palestinian activists. This attempt to revive McCarthyism could conceivably be extended further to other unions outside the university sector. In the past, Republicans enforced an anti-communist oath in order for union leaders to access the NLRB, and Trump would have the power to revive similar mechanisms — like banning access to unions which are critical of Israel — to especially disenfranchise the left of the labor movement.

It is likely that the 900 pages of Project 2025 contains far more additional attacks on the various sectors of the US economy. More research is needed.

Attacks on employment law, labor law, and aggressive campaigns in at least several major sectors of the economy would all combine to be a tremendous assault on working people broadly and union power more specifically. Unions would immediately be thrown on the defensive — a posture which we have just broken out of with new organizing. Unions would have to devote tremendous resources just in fighting off legal cases and defending against cuts.

Although even if carried to its conclusion, Project 2025 would not entirely eliminate unions. But there is a potential for a broad elimination of bargaining units through the combined strengthening of decertification campaigns, legalization of company unions, and expansion of independent contractors.

Under such conditions it would be incredibly challenging to advance new organizing. Even after the modest improvements to the NLRB under Biden, it is still far too weak — but under Project 2025’s plan it would be actively hostile against the labor movement.

The Labor Politics of MAGA

While the erosion of employment and labor law as well as the specific attacks on various sectors which are outlined above would be serious in their own right, they do not entail the totality of Project 2025’s plans for and threats to labor. 

In terms of labor, the threat we are facing cannot be reduced to legal changes to the technical mechanisms of labor law, nor cuts or policy changes to individual executive departments. We also face a political threat — the counter-mobilization of the working class by the right.

Trump’s MAGA politics have their own working class angle which distinguishes them from more traditional pro-corporate politics, and are a key part of Trump’s success. 

Since the 2016 Republican primary, Trump has differentiated himself from the rest of the Republican Party through his anti-elitist appeal to economically dispossessed sections of the American working class, especially white workers and downwardly mobile middle class people in the ‘Rust Belt’ and other de-industrialized areas of the country. Promising pro-worker ‘America First’ trade policies and immigration policies which promise to protect the labor market for native-born workers, Trump was able to develop these sections into a loyal base.

The Heritage Foundation did not back Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries. But over the last eight years the establishment of the conservative movement has had to accommodate itself to Trump and his political vision. Project 2025 attempts to balance between corporate politics-as-usual and the economic nationalism of the MAGA movement, but largely defers to MAGA priorities, resigning its more traditional views to meager counterpoints sprinkled weakly throughout the 900-page document.

In fact, the anti-union strategies of the more traditional conservatism have already for years relied on a certain degree of counter-mobilization of workers in order to block the labor movement. Appealing to workers is, after all, the goal of every anti-union drive and decertification campaign, and anti-union forces are always looking for useful anti-union stooges to develop into plaintiffs in the next anti-union lawsuit.

Project 2025 extends this more traditional approach of mobilizing working people against their own interests. The expansion of opportunities for decertification, challenges to duty of fair representation, and rules which empower union busting would all further empower the existing type of anti-union counter-mobilization. And the legalization of company unions would go even further in terms of mobilization of working people against their own interests. These “Employee Involvement Organizations” could be stood up by corporations in order to block or otherwise cut across genuine union efforts. If these company unions are allowed to achieve exclusive bargaining representative status, they could even “negotiate” to adopt standards beneath federal minimums under the Project 2025 plan.

But MAGA goes further, by outlining a counter mobilization of certain sections of the working class and middle class which transcends the workplace for the political field. This begins with Trump’s appeal for workers to vote for him on the basis of his economic nationalist program. But it extends beyond the polls, calling on these workers to organize for MAGA politics within society, developing them into a countermobilization directed against the organized masses of the labor movement and other social movements.

The pressure of these forces was evident by Sean O’Brien’s appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Although O’Brien used the platform to level attacks at corporate America, the result of his speech was providing working class cover for Trump and his agenda. O’Brien called Trump ‘tough’ and said that J.D. Vance “cares about working people, even though the AFL-CIO has given Vance a voting score of 0.

For O’Brien, speaking at the RNC may be less about trying to win special privileges from Republicans, and more so that it gives him internal political cover from the numerous MAGA supporters within his membership. This pressure is widely felt by union officers, especially in blue collar bargaining units. By developing this fight within the labor movement, MAGA politics help to divide the labor movement so that it cannot present a clear united front against Trump.

MAGA politics also call for mobilization of reactionary sections of working people against the most progressive elements of the labor and social movements. During the pandemic, the MAGA movement was able to engage further layers of working people through the development of parent groups opposed to or frustrated by COVID-19 policies. The increased focus of parents on the education of their children allowed for this energy to be transitioned into a movement against progressive educational curricula in general, with a new crop of right-wing activists running for school boards in order to curtail critical race theory, gender studies, or other progressive topics from school curricula. The mobilization of these elements comes into direct conflict with the teachers unions, which is not only one of the most progressive and militant sections of the labor movement, but also perhaps the section which has the broadest connections with working people as a whole.

Don’t Mourn. Organize

We must educate ourselves in the labor movement about the specifics policy threats posed by Project 2025, as well as the larger threat of a descent into authoritarianism. Now more than ever, it will be necessary to rely on the strength of our class which grows from its economic position in society. If Trump wins in November, it will be necessary to build tremendous mass movements of working people, through street demonstrations, political strikes, and other direct actions, in order to resist and turn back the tremendous attacks which are now being prepared.

We are not defeated yet.

Henry De Groot is the Managing Editor of Working Mass. He is active in the Boston DSA Labor Working Group, and a member of the DSA caucus Reform and Revolution.

If voters pass Propositions 5 and 33 on the November 2024 state ballot, we will take a couple of important steps toward addressing the housing crisis in California. That’s why California DSA has endorsed the ARCH campaign—Affordable Rent-Controlled Housing. 

California voters on November 5th can take back control over local rents from the developers and real estate industry that have stymied rent control efforts for decades. By passing the Justice for Renters Act—Prop 33—cities and counties will regain the ability to set rent rate regulations by repealing the Costa-Hawkins Act that currently prohibits vacancy control and other rent control policies. 

For good reasons, California DSA has made this effort our priority campaign. Housing costs are the largest driver of poverty in California. Real estate comprises roughly 45% of all financial assets globally. These are related phenomena: the consolidation of real estate by large holding companies has accelerated gentrification, displacement, eviction, rent burden, and homelessness. Rent increases are a major driver of inflation. Speculation and absentee landlordism are rampant. Urban redevelopment and the privatization of public housing into “affordable” housing has not resulted in the alleviation of poverty, but merely its relocation. 

As socialists, we say enough: everyone deserves a home, regardless of their ability to feed the rent-seeking economy! Passing Prop 33 is a strong step toward making housing a human right.

Build Social Housing

California also needs to de-commodify housing and to improve public infrastructure. Prop 5 would lower the voter threshold from a two-thirds supermajority to 55 percent to approve local general obligation bonds and special taxes for affordable housing and public infrastructure projects. This would make it easier to generate public funds toward housing that is built as a public good, rather than as a commodity investment.

The California DSA ARCH campaign will work with pro-tenant state-wide housing coalitions and will complement local fights this November to win tenant protections, elect rent board members and support pro-tenant DSA-endorsed candidates. All DSA members engaged in electoral work are encouraged to include Prop 33 and Prop 5 materials in your canvassing and outreach. 

Passage of Prop 33 and Prop 5 would reset the table for housing organizing. In both cases, socialists and our allies would start from a stronger foundation to improve the lives and economic conditions of workers, specifically their right to housing, while being disadvantageous to the interests of capital. Although these propositions do not fully achieve the policies we want, they will make it much easier to win those policies.

The coalition supporting Justice For Renters/Prop 33 is led by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has organized two prior initiatives to repeal Costa-Hawkins, and is very active in local and state housing issues. ACCE, which is a community-based organization that engages grassroot supporters in pro-tenant struggles throughout California, and organizes progressive campaigns state-wide, is also playing a lead role in the campaign. Labor unions including UNITE/HERE, United Teachers Los Angeles, United Union of Roofers, San Francisco City College Federation of Teachers, and the California Nurses Association, along with a diverse array of advocacy groups including Housing NOW!, CHIRLA, IE Votes, ACLU-SoCal, ADA, the Poor People’s Campaign and Housing is a Human Right have endorsed Prop 33.

Working class solidarity and militancy

Realtors and landlord-friendly legislation like Costa-Hawkins are just some of the ways that Real Estate capital shapes the world we live in. The fight does not begin or end with any one piece of legislation. We aim to investigate, educate, and organize in and across our communities, drawing inspiration from and working collaboratively as tenants in struggle. In this work we seek to build a campaign that fosters working-class solidarity and militancy that carries into the next fight, wherever and whenever (and whatever) it is.

Now is the time to join the California DSA ARCH campaign for Affordable Rent-Controlled Housing. 

• Fill out the interest form to join the campaign. 

• Have your DSA chapter and local organization pass a support resolution.

More about Prop 33

More about Prop 5

California DSA’s top priorities include electoral work, labor support, and housing. There are no doubt other priorities we could establish. Late capitalism provides us with plenty of opportunities to fight against various forms of social injustice, and many of our members across the twenty chapters of the state are involved with important struggles addressing structural racism, imperialist aggression, and ecocide—in other words, for equality, a sane international policy, and ameliorating the climate crisis by moving to a sustainable green economy. But within the limited resources of an all-volunteer state organization, these are the current designated areas, as voted on by our state council. 

The ARCH campaign (see Michael Lighty’s article in this issue of California Red) involves all three priorities. It is focused on changing the position of renters for the better through the state ballot, and its component parts (Propositions 5 and 33) are backed by a number of progressive unions, within a broad community-based coalition. 

At the local level, California Red would like to highlight four other DSA-backed campaigns: one each in the East Bay and Los Angeles, and two in San Francisco. As we approach the November elections we will continue to follow these and other local DSA campaign developments. 

DSA-LA Canvasses for Ysabel Jurado

We have launched and cleared the tower! DSA-LA had its official Ysabel Jurado general election canvass launch on July 14th in Eagle Rock, and it was a great start to the campaign. There was plenty of enthusiasm from our volunteers as they carried the energy of success from the primary into the general election campaign. The response from Eagle Rock residents in this initial canvass was equally enthusiastic for a Ysabel win because she is for the things they care about such as expanding affordable housing, ending homelessness, and tackling the climate crisis, to name a few. 

Still, we can’t let up and we have no intention of doing so. Each week, we will be phone banking to gather volunteers for that weekend’s canvass, and on the weekends, we will be knocking on doors reminding people that success in the primary is great, but success in the general is even better. So please join the Ysabel Jurado mailing list if you want to get involved. Here is the link for that. 

Shelby, a volunteer for the campaign, had this to say as to why she gives up some of her free time to support Ysabel: “Ysabel is an opportunity to be represented by someone who truly wants better for the district and has a clear plan to do so. With her background as a tenant rights attorney, I know she will work to establish much needed protection for renters. She cares about the community because she is an active member of the community, which we need more of in city hall.”

In order to help foster volunteer enthusiasm, we will soon be handing out nifty Ysabel campaign zines that will keep track of each person’s contribution of time and energy to the campaign. Besides being cool on their own, there will also be a prize at the end of the campaign for the person who contributes the most.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The end is months away, and we are making each week count because that is how we get a win for Ysabel Jurado. 

If you want to donate to this incredible campaign, please go to Ysabel’s website and donate. 

San Francisco: Preston and Fielder
San Francisco DSA members are mobilizing to secure seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for two of their own. Dean Preston and Jackie Fielder, both endorsed by the chapter, are running as proud democratic socialists on bold platforms.

Dean Preston, seeking re-election in District 5, faces deep-pocketed opposition, including most publicly from Elon Musk. During his time in office, Dean has successfully taxed extreme wealth to fund affordable housing and rent relief, prevented tens of thousands of evictions, restored Muni lines and championed Free Muni for Youth, and more. 

In his vision for the next four years, Dean plans to launch a public bank to invest in small businesses, affordable housing, and green infrastructure. Bernie Sanders has thrown his weight behind Dean, stating in his endorsement: “We need bold leaders like Dean Preston in every state, at all levels of government.”

To volunteer click here 

To donate click here

Jackie Fielder, running for District 9 supervisor, is a Democratic Socialist, renter, water protector, and climate advocate who is dedicated to social housing, community safety, and a public bank. San Francisco DSA is excited to be backing her campaign, which promises to double the number of socialists in office on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors come November!

To volunteer click here
To donate click here

In addition to DSA SF, Fielder and Preston are backed by a strong coalition of unions and progressive community organizations. The chapter has been campaigning hard, making calls and knocking on doors on a weekly basis. The electoral campaigns have focused on building new chapter leaders and organizing new members. While SF DSA knows that electoral victories alone will not bring us to socialism, they view these campaigns as important ways to bring people into our movement and win meaningful reforms for working people.

PHOTO: Campaign kickoff for Dean Preston. March 24, 2024

Jovanka Beckles for State Senate, District 7

East Bay DSA member Jovanka Beckles is running for State Senate in District 7, encompassing a broad swath of the East Bay through Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond. A former member of the Richmond City Council, Beckles is a leader in the fight organized by the Richmond Progressive Alliance against Chevron’s company town platform for profits over people. She is currently serving on the Alameda County Transit District Board of Directors.  If elected, Jovanka would be the only current DSA member to hold a state-level office in California. 

She is running on a broad platform of working class issues, including paid time off work for mothers, free early childcare, and women’s reproductive rights. Jovanka is fighting for fair wages, workplace power, and reforming Prop 13. She is a champion of quality public health care, transit and education, and demands services such as these to be free to all. She also calls for a Green New Deal for the East Bay. 

These commitments have earned her recent endorsements from two major California unions: Service Employees State Council and the California Teachers Association. They join a growing host of labor and community groups determined to stop the corporate-funded juggernaut of apostate Berkeley mayor Jesse Arreguin, who is backed by mega-dollars from Lyft and Uber and wealthy real estate interests against Beckles for the District 7 seat.   

With East Bay DSA scheduling canvasses and other events, Beckles has already anchored a ‘Divest from Apartheid’ campaign kickoff in mid-June, attended by dozens of EBDSA members and pro-Palestinian liberation organization activists.  On July 14 the chapter organized the first of four canvasses for Jovanka; the next one will be on August 24.  

• Click here for details.

• Click here to donate. 

• Click here to volunteer.  

If you are in Los Angeles, San Francisco or the East Bay, volunteer to help these DSA-endorsed campaigns. If you are elsewhere in the state, you can still help out by donating to the campaigns at the links above. Don’t let this opportunity to bring democratic socialists into public office pass you by. Watch future issues of California Red for updates and other DSA-backed campaigns.

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Thank you to Dan L. from DSA-LA for contributing to this piece

San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958

By Robert W. Cherny, University of Illinois Press, 2024

San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958 is the third book by Robert W. Cherny published within a seven year span covering left labor San Francisco in the twentieth century. The first two, Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (2022) and Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (2017) are biographies with a strong emphasis on their subjects’ relationships with the CPUSA.  In San Francisco Reds Cherny documents the party itself, from its founding during the post-World War I Red Scare, through the glory years of the Popular Front in the 1930s and 40s, and on into its decline under unrelenting attack during the McCarthy era. 

Beyond its firm grasp of Communist activities and policy within the Bay Area’s political culture, against the backdrop of the Party’s national and international contexts, the book’s strength is its focus on several dozen individuals, for whom Cherny provides capsule biographies, tracking their lives and involvements with the party and with various social movements it supported over several decades. 

As with the previous books, the scholarly research is impressive and meticulous. Mostly relying on primary sources (archival and oral history interviews, many conducted by Cherny himself) the author also casts a wide net on secondary sources, leaning especially on California Red, longtime CPUSA leader Dorothy Ray Healey’s as-told-to memoir with Maurice Isserman. It is worth noting the lines of continuity here, as Healey (Old Left) and Isserman (New Left) were early leaders of DSA as well. 

Cherny portrays both leaders and rank and file Communists as they attempt to mold a “Soviet America” and find their way through the often treacherous thickets of policy changes and reversals mostly ordered from on high in the Communist International via the leadership of the CPUSA.  But this isn’t a story about robots and their masters (although there is some of that). Thanks to the portraits, it’s a history of passionate and mostly well-meaning people, many of whom develop tremendous organizing talents and energies, doing their best to make a better world by fighting fascism and racism, building unions, and running electoral campaigns

There’s Bill Bailey, who got himself beaten badly after sneaking aboard a German ship docked in the New York harbor in 1936 to tear down the Nazi flag it was flying. There are the young women like Caroline Decker and Dorothy Ray Healey who as teenagers moved from organizing unemployed demonstrations in the cities to the central valley fields to support strikes of farmworkers. There’s Sam Darcy, the district CP organizer who, believing his own eyes instead of the Comintern’s directives, moved decisively out of Third Period sectarianism and abstention from AFL unions to help seed west coast maritime organizing before, during and after the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. 

San Francisco Reds serves as a cautionary tale for socialists who would build a mass left wing party in the USA today, with parts reading like commentary on contemporary tasks. 

The story of the CPUSA—like that of the Socialist Party before it—makes clear that the dominant organization on the left invariably has fissures and fault lines, consciously exploited by the security apparatuses of the capitalist state to sow suspicion and dissension and weaken the potential for united action. Cherny also demonstrates how those splits are unconsciously exacerbated by members who find fighting one another more compelling than seeking points of common interest and fighting capital. 

The infiltration of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s by COINTELPRO FBI disruption? Been there and done that in the CP throughout its earlier history. It’s hard to say, though, whether the worst enemy of the party was the government and ruling class, or at times itself.  

The Party was in a tough spot as the Cold War progressed. The dire conditions of Depression and war that had fueled its earlier growth had given way to prosperity, even to the extent of some dispersal of profits to the working class. Between the undeniably better conditions (less so for non-whites), the multi-pronged legal, undercover and political attacks on the party in the McCarthy era, bitter infighting among factions, and the Khruschev revelations about the murderous Stalin era in the Soviet Union, underscored by the invasion of Hungary, the organization collapsed. 

The CPUSA lost half of its membership (from 75,000 to 37,000) between 1947 and 1950; two thirds of what remained dropped away within a year of the 1956 double whammy. 

Cherny gives short shrift to other organizations on the left. He mentions Joseph James and C. L. Dellums in connection with the fight to integrate the Boilermakers union at Marinship during World War II, but doesn’t note their Socialist Party membership. Ray Thompson, a leader in the East Bay in another site of the struggle, is given the full nod as a Communist. 

His description of the Smith Act prosecutions in the 1950s tells us that Communist maritime union leader Al Lannon, “among the first Smith Act defendants…served two years in prison.” The Smith Act, later found unconstitutional, was passed in 1940, and its first victims, in 1941, were Trotskyist leaders in the Minneapolis Teamsters union—an outcome cheered on at the time by the CP. 

We find the occasional moment of dry humor here and there in San Francisco Reds. The last section of the book resembles the documentary movie trope where we see as the credits roll what happened to the central characters after the period described in the film ends. Cherny shows us that most of the activists who dropped out of the party continued to fight for social justice in other ways later in their lives. In detailing the later activities of a prominent left wing law firm, he tells us that “Hillary Rodham spent the summer of 1971 as an intern at Truehaft and Walker but was apparently not radicalized.”

Like Isserman does at length in his If I had a Hammer, the latter portion of San Francisco Reds explores in brief the baton being handed off from one generation to the next of the left. In recounting the story of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings in the late fifties and 1960, we see how much the famed free speech struggle at UC Berkeley and less well-known sit-in battles to integrate employment in the hotel and auto sales sectors of San Francisco’s economy relied on children of the Old Left stepping up. The party’s legacy was a mixed bag. But the values it championed, however poorly, did not die with it. 

The June mini-issue of California Red noted that we have been bringing you the state’s democratic socialist news for a year now, and we felt it was important to get direct feedback from you, our readers on how we are doing. Forty-six of you took the time to fill in the survey (thank you!). Here are the results, listed by percentage of responses.  

Of the survey respondents, 54% read CR every month; 39% read it occasionally; and 6% rarely or never read it. 25% read one article or less; 48% read a few articles; and 26% read most or all of the articles.

How often do readers read CA Red?

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How many articles are read per issue?

The category of article liked best is local DSA chapter news (a third), followed by political opinion pieces (22%), with labor and California DSA news tied at 17%, and book or movie reviews trailing at 7%. 

What type of articles do readers prefer?

In open-ended responses, you said that what you liked best about CR was hearing about the work of other chapters in the state, learning about California DSA State Council activities and decisions, its graphic design, and how thoughtful the articles were. 

The question asking what you liked least mostly received comments like “It’s good” or “No complaints”; of the few criticisms received, we got one requesting more Palestine movement coverage; another asking for greater frequency of publication; and one wanting news from more chapters.

In terms of what we could do to improve, we got a suggestion to expand to multi-media; publish a print version; deliver more in-depth pieces; hold more debates; tell how chapters are accepting California DSA goals; and integrate with national DSA communications. 

Our call for more authors got eight responses from readers willing to contribute articles. You will be hearing from them in the near future.

The all-volunteer team of California Red thanks the respondents for their thoughtful answers, and for our readers’ continued interest in the only regular democratic socialist news publication devoted to coverage of the Golden State. 

Science fiction is blossoming in China in book, cartoon, video game, movie and TV series forms, and available in English translation. Inspired by the commercial success of the Chinese movie The Wandering Earth, The Three Body Problem was introduced on Chinese television in January 2023. The thity-part series by writer Liu Cixin was followed by an Americanized version on Netflix in April 2024.

Both American and Chinese versions deal with the first book of the three-book trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The storyline begins in the Cultural Revolution when a young woman becomes an astrophysicist. She is in a secret project to send messages to the stars.

She receives a warning from a pacifist Do Not Answer from a three-star system four hundred light years away.  Communicating through giant radio telescopes gives way to mysterious reality video game headsets that are not made from any material on Earth.  We learn that the three-sun system is environmentally degraded and the Trisolarians have launched a fleet to settle on Earth but it will take four hundred years to arrive. We learn that through quantum physics and quantum entanglement the Trisolarians are able to monitor physics on the Earth to prevent the Earth from developing weapons that would oppose them. 

Like the American science fiction writers Isaac Asimov in Foundation and Orson Scott Card Ender in his Game series, Liu Cixin explores the rise and fall of civilizations and species. Both the Chinese and American series comment on historical cycles, science vs. anti-science and the historical fact that civilizations with technical superiority dominate those without. Both countries plan to serialize books two and three. 

Cultural productions like these are seen as an important part of Chinese society and are highly political in nature. During the Cultural Revolution science fiction was banned in China and discouraged in the 1980s as being “spiritual pollution”. Two months ago the Hong Kong paper China Morning Post published an editorial from a People's Liberation Army theory group. The article criticized the Netflix version of Three Body Problem for changing the setting from China to Europe. In the Chinese version this struggle against Earth's scientists takes place within China. The PLA critique is that the Netflix version puts forward the theme that white people are portrayed as the saviors of the human race.  In an aspect that might appeal to many DSAers, the Trisolarians test five people using historical problems via virtual headsets. 

American history is replete with the examples of colonial conquerors like Columbus, Pizzaro and Cortez. We know what happened to the Iroquois and Cherokee nations. While science itself is not neutral and reinforces class interests, the central struggle in this book is how the Trisolarians use anti-science ideology. They promote anti-scientific ideas to destroy the Earth's ability to defend itself. The contemporary parallel here is to destroy science in favor of theology or removing science-based government regulation.