By: Andrew S

FENWAY PARK, MA – For the first time in over a century, America’s Favorite Ballpark’s concessions workers are on strike.

UNITE HERE Local 26 gave Aramark a 48-hour deadline on Wednesday, July 23, to meet worker demands before one-thousand workers walked out of Fenway Park and MGM Music Hall. After a month of negotiations with management’s feet to the fire of the strike threat, Fenway’s concession company Aramark has still not come close to meeting the demands of their workers for adequate wages and against automation.

Aramark Strikes Out

The main fight for Fenway workers is over wages, especially for non-tipped workers. President Aramayo noted in June that Fenway workers are “paid peanuts” compared to their counterparts in other stadiums. Even in the city of Boston, workers in concession services at Boston University and Simmons University are paid $26-$28 an hour. Fenway workers are paid $18-$20 an hour at the highest level of seniority.

Non-tipped workers are essential to making Fenway’s and MGM’s concessions work function. Charbel Salameh, a beer seller for 28 years and counting, told the press on Wednesday:

There are a lot of hourly folks who don’t earn gratuities here, like cooks and warehouse workers that nobody really sees. If the warehouse workers don’t deliver the product, there is no product.

There’s also the struggle against automation. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, sports and music venues have begun to introduce more computer systems and mechanisms in concessions areas. Aramark has introduced more computerized cash registers in the years since COVID-19 at Fenway, too. The surge in automation has heavily impacted the Fenway workforce and their service without much of a wage increase. 

Salameh described a workforce that Aramark has hollowed out through automation:

It used to be that there were four beer sellers per stand. Now, we have one person overseeing four registers.

The more time is spent working at Fenway, the more likely one is to get a higher-earning shift. But with the introduction of automation and the decreasing numbers of shiftable staff, employees who have been working at Fenway for even fifteen years are much less likely to get picked up for a shift.

For employees like Amanda Savage, who have been working at Fenway for eighteen years, earnings have fallen dramatically. The money she’s able to bring in is far lower than before there were computers replacing her coworkers. Savage is on track to receive half the earnings from gratuities last year, half of what she had earned the year before, even as the price of everything goes up.

The introduction of automation has likewise hindered workers from making personal connections.

For Savage, one of the best parts of working at the park used to be serving little kids with ice cream. The installation of computer systems has stolen the joy and alienated her more. The computer systems that prevent customer-to-worker interaction have decreased the number and quality of interactions shared between fan and concessions workers; in fact, Aramark has discouraged workers from maintaining that connection altogether. Savage reported that Aramark once warned her not to be so close to the concessions stand as customers were checking out.

Gratuities that workers once enjoyed have decimated exponentially. Heidi Kertatos, who has worked at Fenway for nineteen years, had put her time year after year to work herself up the ladder as a beer seller. After COVID-19, though, she immediately noticed differences:

Once COVID came, Aramark changed things. They took away cash, so now, you have to split a thousand dollars between six people for working four registers.

Like many companies, Aramark used a global pandemic to underpay workers more.

Fenway Workers Take a Walk

Many workers still held hope Aramark would meet their demands in the eleventh hour.  

Lauren Casello, a suite attendant, has worked Fenway for twenty-two seasons. She shared her concern “I’m nervous. This is my full-time job. I need to work, so we’re hoping that Aramark comes to us with something good.” But they have no choice – as Salameh stated during Local 26’s press conference: “none of us want to walk out, but all of us want to make a living wage.” 

After his last meeting at the negotiating table, Salameh’s last glimmer of hope was dashed:

Right now, it feels like we’re treated like cattle. We have all put in a lot of time, and everybody used to know our names. Now, they don’t wanna know who you are.

For most workers, it was the final straw.

Our strike @fenwaypark & @MGMMusicHall is off to a POWERFUL start! Workers are on strike at Fenway Park for the first time in history. pic.twitter.com/X6corGUfhk

— UNITE HERE Local 26 (@UNITEHERE26) July 25, 2025

At noon on Friday, July 25, Fenway Park workers went on strike. Their black-and-red signs sprung up around the Fenway area with rapid succession, alerting passersby to the strike, and workers took to the picket line with bravado and baseball-shaped strike signs in hand. Within an hour, dozens, then hundreds of supporters from organizations including other unions and the Boston Democratic Socialists of America joined workers at the frontline. Around 3PM, Boston City Council member Julia Mejia also joined the picket line.

Organizations across the city are making plans to join the picket line on the weekend as the Boston Red Sox face the Los Angeles Dodgers. Union workers are asking fans to attend games but to not buy beer, food, or other concession items, to ensure Aramark feels the pain of their absence. Supporters can join workers on the picket line at Fenway Park.

Nineteen-year old beer seller Laura Crystal described the standoff simply:

What Aramark’s doing is the epitome of corporate greed. We need to squash it. 

Andrew S is a Boston DSA organizer and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post In 113-Year First, Fenway Park Concessions Workers Go On Strike appeared first on Working Mass.

By: Jade DeSloover

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Rabbit Hole v.003 was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More New Mainers live in Cumberland County than any other county in the state. It’s not even close. So to play on an old saying: As Cumberland County goes for immigrant rights, so goes Maine. In Portland, some 34 percent of students are multilingual learners, speaking some 60 languages. Cumberland County will either look the other way as Trump terrorizes our immigrant neighbors, or it will build on the legacy of the Personal Liberty Laws during the days of the Fugitive Slave Act, when the state legislature made it illegal for local police and prosecutors to cooperate in any manner with federal slave catchers. That’s how the Underground Railroad worked in Maine. 

What’s happening now? ICE and Border Patrol are racially profiling, especially, Latino and African workers and disappearing them into concentration camps in Maine and across the country. Only a few of the stories have made the press because so many immigrant families are afraid to speak out. But the stories that have gone public are enough to demonstrate that ICE and Border Patrol are operating outside the Constitution. Nevermind Los Angeles, it’s happening right here in Cumberland County and throughout Maine. 

What is ICE? If it ever had anything to do with something called legality, it’s clear now that Trump’s ICE is the training grounds for an openly–if cowardly, mask-wearing, wannabe–fascist militia. The Big Beautiful Bill will make ICE larger than the FBI, DEA, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.

Why Cumberland County? The Cumberland County Jail is the largest ICE detention facility in Maine. At a meeting with representatives of the No ICE for ME campaign, Sheriff Kevin Joyce reported ICE detentions surging by more than 100% since Trump’s election. He claims he’s powerless to do anything other than follow orders from the Feds. But the contract signed between ICE and the Cumberland County Jail states on the first line that either party can cancel it with thirty days notice. 

This is where the Board of Cumberland County Commissioners (CCC) comes into play. These five elected officials have the power to vote by a simple majority to cancel the contract. Public protests at the last three CCC meetings have grown from 45 in May to 80 in June to more than 125 on July 21. So many people responded to No ICE for ME’s call to give public comment that the board tried to cut it short, refusing to hear from everyone in the meeting room who wanted to speak. That did not go well for the board. 

Board members are in a tough spot. They didn’t run for office in order to draw a line in the sand against a fascist ethnic cleansing campaign. It’s not what they signed up for. But this disaster isn’t what any of us signed up for. Despite tempers flaring at the last board meeting, I believe there is a majority that wants to vote to do the right thing and end the contract. To do so, they will have to follow their better angels by putting aside proceduralism and the public speaking to them in ways they are not accustomed to.

If they do so, a large majority of Cumberland County residents will have their backs. As State Representative Grayson Lookner pointed out at a meeting with members of the board and the sheriff, a large majority of Cumberland County elected officials in the legislature voted for LD 1971, which prohibits local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. Putting that into practice in Cumberland County means canceling the contract at the jail. 

If the board drags its feet–they have suggested holding a hearing in late September with a potential vote in October… or later–they will face mounting public protest. But more to the point, every day they delay only extends the county’s collaboration with ICE and the attack on our friends, family members, students, neighbors and fellow workers. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail explained why, under extreme circumstances, well-meaning advice to “wait” just a little longer for justice is no virtue at all. 

No one believes cutting the contract will send ICE running. They have $45 billion for concentration camps. We have to prepare to stop them from building one in northern New England in the coming months. And the best way to do that is to take a stand today in Cumberland County. Not later, not somewhere else, not someone else. Now, here, us. The Board of Cumberland County Commissioners can either be part of that movement, or they can stand in the way. 

For more information about No ICE for ME and how you help, sign up here.

The post As Cumberland County goes, so go immigrant rights in Maine appeared first on Pine & Roses.

By: Zachary Wright

WORCESTER, MA – On July 4, 2025, Donald Trump signed into law his “Big Beautiful Bill.” The bill is draconian and destructive on every level of the social contract. One of the most deadly provisions is the Big Beautiful Bill’s decimation of Medicaid programs.

During my career as a rank-and-file nurse, I’ve worked with diverse populations of different cultures and ages. I’ve worked in cardiac, intensive care, and the emergency room, so I’ve been able to see patients from many different stages of their hospital stay. Rootedness in the workplace allows us not only to advocate for and observe our patients and their needs, but that of the wider community in which the hospital exists. The community around the hospital is a mix of urban and rural, lower-income workers and tenants.

Many are part of the two million Massachusetts residents who rely on Medicaid assistance to obtain healthcare in the form of MassHealth.

When MassHealth Falls, So Do Patients

MassHealth is the name we give Medicaid in Massachusetts. Almost 2,000,000 of our family members, friends and neighbors are enrolled in MassHealth. 76% of the adults enrolled in Medicaid are employed, most full-time. Approximately ⅓ of births in Massachusetts are covered by Medicaid and ⅔ of nursing home residents receive assistance from Medicaid through MassHealth. 

This “Big Beautiful Bill” will cause severe challenges to the most vulnerable of our fellow residents by taking a dagger to MassHealth. Those already struggling with rising prices of groceries, housing, childcare and more will be unable to cope with higher out of pocket costs. People will choose feeding their children, keeping roofs over their head, and gas for the car to get to work instead of medical care. Even before Medicaid cuts began, American workers were rationing. In April 2024, researchers found a fifth of Americans rationed medication. And as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer rise in Massachusetts just like the rest of the nation, our neighbors who put aside seeking medical care due to their inability to afford it will be sicker when and if they do finally seek care.

Rural hospitals rely on Medicaid reimbursement to keep their doors open; those funds help pay their staff, keep medications stocked, their lights on and their beds available.  Hospitals, when deprived of those reimbursements, will need to cut costs to make up the difference if they want to stay open.  That means fewer nurses, fewer beds, fewer procedures, greater costs for the patients, longer wait times, and an overall decrease in the availability of care.  

We are “fortunate” in Massachusetts that only one hospital is at risk of closing due to Medicaid cuts: Baystate Franklin Medical Center, in Greenfield. But as we saw when Steward Health Care’s CEO oversaw a regime of mismanagement resulting in the closing of both Carney and Nashoba, even the closure of a single facility can cause secondary effects downstream that harm patients and communities. Surrounding hospitals caring for the former Carney and Nashoba patients had more patients to care for with their limited beds; fewer beds on the medical floors led to admitted patients waiting longer for a bed in the emergency room; packed emergency rooms led to greater waiting times for those in the waiting room, delaying critical and time sensitive care. 

Time is tissue; strokes and heart attacks need prompt treatment to prevent disability or death.

Cuts to Medicaid Mean Cuts to Workers’ Community

Trump on July 4 moved to throw 10 million off Medicaid over 10 years

Biden let states dump 25 million people from Medicaid in two

DSA says no one is undeserving of health — all care for all people!

Build an alternative to the death cult of capitalism:
https://t.co/m8H5AXxjfE

— 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗦𝗔 (@WorcDSA) July 5, 2025

Over 300 rural hospitals across the country may close due to the Medicaid cuts. Many of them not only serve rural white Americans; they serve Native communities and Tribes that depend on access to rural healthcare from reservations they were forcibly displaced to live in. Despite HHS Secretary Kennedy’s alleged attempts to shelter critical services like the Indian Health Services (IHS) from these cuts, rural Native communities are still on track to face the impact of rural hospital closures as well as by the cuts that many Tribal leaders consider violations of sovereign treaties between their nations and the United States. For rural people, both Native and non-Native, every hour traveled is one less hour of healthcare.

Every minute matters.

As a result of Medicaid cuts, long-term care facilities will become affordable only to the richer and fewer. Residents rely on Medicaid to afford the care they receive in these facilities; without Medicaid, they would be unable to afford the 24/7 care they need.  Cuts to Medicaid ensure some working families will need to shoulder the burden of care for elders. Caregiving is not easy, nor possible within the backbreaking wage labor necessary to pay even for rising cost of living and rent, so accommodating this to make up for Medicaid will come at a significant cost.  If you work full-time, you cannot be present to help change the diaper of your incontinent mother every other hour, or turn them to ensure they don’t develop bed sores.  Without these being attended to, skin breakdown, ulcer formation, infection, sepsis, disability and death can result. 

The challenge grows exponentially when you add chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and other musculo-skeletal conditions, COPD and more. All of these require intensive caregiving that working families will feel forced to shoulder as a result of stupendously high costs for healthcare.

Caregiving can be difficult in other ways, as well, from potential violence to fall prevention. I was once struck by a confused patient who mistook me, the nurse caring for them for the past week, as a burglar who broke into their house at night.  Every winter there are news stories of an Alzheimer’s patient who left home, incapable of understanding the risk or preparing for the conditions, who died of exposure. And when elders fall, from poor lighting to brief loss of balance to disability, they face one of the leading causes of deaths for older adults: injury. 

It’s possible to make a home fall-resistant, but not fall-proof. Medicaid cuts will force working families to try to make their homes increasingly fall-resistant, another hidden cost and burden upon pocketbooks caused by the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Cutting Medicaid isn’t just going to affect the patients who lose their insurance coverage; it affects their whole community.  From the workers who lose their jobs when their hospital closes, to the families who must now find a way to care for their elderly parents, to the febrile baby waiting hours in the ER to be seen. Downstream effects will eventually negatively impact the lives of every American and every resident of the Commonwealth.

Death For What?

An additional 50,000 deaths per year are estimated to result from Medicaid cuts.

For what?  What are these cuts for?  For the most simple, capitalistic reason you can imagine: money. The money cut from the healthcare of our people will be used to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, who already have more money than most of us can even imagine. The oligarchs and bourgeoisie who pull the strings of the government for their own benefit will see the numbers in their bank accounts go up as we will watch our loved ones die.

MassCare is one step. The United States famously lacks any form of universal healthcare, alone among industrialized nations, despite some of the best medical education, the best rates hospitals, and cutting edge technology.  We have the wealth to ensure that no American needs to worry about being unable to afford medical care or risk crushing debt to obtain it, with the means to guarantee healthcare for every workers. And we don’t. Instead, our leaders have decided that the people should die. They have decided that the American people do not deserve the healthcare that we are capable of providing. They have decided that the working class must bear the burden to ensure that the wealthy elite continue to live lives of luxury. If we want to ensure the healthcare of all workers in the face of the Trump Administration’s cuts, we could fund universal healthcare for all workers.

I dread what is coming for my patients and my community.  I have already seen what happens when a patient can’t obtain or afford care; I had a patient who waited to come in and go into cardiac arrest when they did; someone lost their mother that night.  I’ve heard the cry of someone told that their father will never wake up; they weren’t able to afford their blood thinners, threw a clot, and had a catastrophic stroke.  I fear that there will be many more such stories as a result of these cuts. 

Thanks to the “Big Beautiful Bill,” many more loved ones will be lost too soon just to satisfy the greed of the wealthy.

Zachary Wright is a Registered Nurse (RN) at UMass Memorial in Worcester and a rank-and-file member of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA). He is a member of Worcester DSA.

The post ‘Time is Tissue’ – Medicaid Cuts Set To Decimate Mass Workers’ Healthcare appeared first on Working Mass.

Every year, the Maine chapter of Democratic Socialists of America holds two conventions; a Winter Semi-Annual held in January, and a Summer Semi-Annual held in July. Both events are where larger proposals are discussed, not typically brought up during regular general meetings. These include potential bylaw amendments, endorsements, and committee charters. They also include workshops and panels, so they last a while, usually four to five hours. Oh, and don’t forget the snacks, raffle, and socializing!

This year, Maine DSA’s Summer Semi-Annual is a hybrid event, taking place both in-person in Portland and on Zoom, Saturday, July 26th, with plenty on the agenda to get through. For those who might be curious about how Maine DSA operates and deliberates, or for those who are interested in our workshops, it’s a great chance for members to help steer the chapter into the next six months, and for non-members to meet like-minded folks, listen, chat, and learn a little bit about what Maine DSA is up to.

After the usual introductions and community agreements, attendees will hear reports from current committees and working groups. What they’ve been up to since January, including achievements and challenges, as well as their plans for the remainder of 2025. This is a great way to find out if there’s work being done that you might be interested in getting involved with. Groups like the Portland Committee, Midcoast Committee, Bodily Autonomy, Mutual Aid, Labor Rising and more!

After reports and re-charters, the chapter will launch into business. This is the juicy stuff. With DSA’s National Convention around the corner, there are a number of national resolutions for chapter members to decide if they want the chapter to endorse or not. If endorsed, delegates to the convention from Maine would be expected to vote in favor of those items. After that, it gets into proposals that focus on the actual Maine chapter, with one looking to amend the chapter’s anti-zionist policy, a vote on whether a new office space is needed, and more. 

During the business portion above, only chapter members will be allowed to vote. However, non-members are welcomed as observers. And the two events held directly after business are open to everyone. What are those events, you ask?

After business and a brief break for snacks and chatter, the chapter will hold one panel and one art build. Starting at 4:00, there will be a Socialists in Office Panel featuring Maine DSA members who have experience either running as a candidate or managing an electoral campaign. They’ll be making themselves available to talk through what they’ve learned, how to get started if you’re interested in running, and answer questions.

If that panel doesn’t sound up your alley, the chapter will also be holding an art build at the same time, where they will be focusing on creating new merchandise like shirts, bags, prints, using screen and lino cut printing! While the panel will be a hybrid event, the art build is in-person only.

After all the business is finished, folks who wish will be congregating at a local brewery to hold a social hour and unwind. A lot goes into planning and facilitating these long semi-annual chapter conventions, so the chance to kick back and socialize afterward is well earned by members and allies alike. If you would like to learn more about Maine DSA’s Summer Semi-Annual coming up on July 26th, please click here! 

The post Maine DSA to Hold Summer Semi-Annual appeared first on Pine & Roses.

As the current socialist movement, we need to ask questions about what our goals for electoralism should be. The “default” goal, putting one person in office, is not as important as being shamelessly socialist. The power the electoral system has is extremely limited. It’s time for us to stop compromising our messaging in order to put people in office.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders ran for president as a Democrat. Almost every candidate for at large DSA members running for this year’s slate  listed more electoral involvement, either on the local or national level, as a goal the DSA should strive for in the future. The potential for socialists in government is real as the rotting Democratic party finally begins its decomposition. Take Bernie Sanders. He didn’t even win the primaries. But there are people reading this article right now who owe their interest in socialism to Bernie Sanders’s run.

Many in the Democratic Party insisted that Sanders was “too extreme” to run for president, and they used numerous dirty tricks to derail his movement. Those efforts to smear him have largely failed.Sanders was not elected president, but electoral success is not the only important consideration. Sanders’s run pushed the issues that voters cared about leftwards and even forced the Democratic Party itself in a more socialist direction. If he had chosen a more moderate line, the Democratic establishment would have been friendlier, but he would not have the ideological effect that he did. Ever since 2016, we have seen how one person can move the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. As Donald Trump’s rise shows, people are attracted to ideas that don’t fit into the mainstream. We at the DSA have an ability to offer people what other parties and candidates are simply not able to.

Like Trump and Sanders, Zohran Mamdani—the candidate who recently won the Democratic primary in New York as a self-proclaimed democratic socialist—is unignorable in current discourse. Candidates for state and federal office have a unique chance to spread their message and advance anti-capitalist ideas seen as dangerous.American democracy is in critical danger, but independent, left-wing candidates are still able to run and win despite the numerous impediments placed in their way. Electoral campaigns, with all their associated canvassing, publicity, and news coverage, must be acknowledged as perhaps our most effective mass media method of spreading ideology.

This also means that any electoral campaign isn’t just a local campaign. Once it gains enough publicity, it is national. Not everyone who engages with the candidate or the campaign can vote in the election, but they are certainly hearing and forming their own opinion on anyone who calls themselves a socialist candidate—and by extension opinions on the DSA, socialists, and socialism.

The mayor of New York City is a powerful office, but its power is not unlimited. As socialists, we know that we cannot rely on establishment Democratic candidates to back socialist reforms, and Mamdani is likely to be hemmed in by hostile Democratic forces all around. The New York City Council, which has ultimate authority on budgetary concerns and land use permissions, could seriously cut back on his power. How much he is able to accomplish depends on who wins the New York State Governor race, which could be won by Cuomo’s former running mate, Kathy Hochul. The New York State Legislature has a large Democratic majority, but there are no guarantees that Cuomo’s remaining supporters and the mainstream Democratic Party will work with him on any significant reforms.

Socialists will by default be the minority in any government in the U.S. This means that any meaningful reforms will have to be enacted in cooperation with capitalist political parties. In this case, Mamdani’s most ambitious policies will depend on a slate of Democrats who may not be willing to back even the most basic of reforms and have huge conflicts of interest across the board. 

Mamdani’s campaign also raises the question of how likely his rent freeze plan is to be implemented. The landlord lobby can throw millions at an independent Cuomo run for mayor, and it plans to spend heavily in the New York City council primaries. If disgraced New York City Mayor Eric Adams is smart, he might be able to throw a wrench in Mamdani’s plans by stacking the Rent Guidelines Board with term-length candidates before Mamdani is able to take over. Despite all the choices by Mamdani’s campaign to water down his ideological communication from the beliefs of the wider DSA, his victory or defeat will still end up being most effective as an advertisement for socialist ideology.This is the way the political system right now operates.

IT’S TIME FOR RADICAL MESSAGING

As we contend with the possibility that Mamdani could be the next mayor of New York City, we must ask ourselves a critical question:  Is it truly possible, in a system dominated by capital and elite interests, to accomplish socialist goals just by passing bills? No. Capital won’t allow it. The entire system is created and run by capital and those who benefit from it. 

The fact that the current administration is tearing down the very rules of our democracy itself proves it. Democracy is less and less able to hold power as the contradictions of capital deepen.  These systems of power exist at the will of the ruling class, and they cannot be relied on to carry our cause to victory. In the wake of a new, dangerous Supreme Court ruling sharply limiting the ability of the judiciary to enforce federal laws, can we be sure that the federal government won’t end Mamdani’s candidacy by illegally deporting him?

Socialist parties seeking to abolish capitalism are not the same as other political organizations. Our movement represents the working class, and that means that our power does not come  from the act of holding office or exercising executive or legislative authority within a capitalist state. Instead, our power comes from the people themselves, in the sense that socialism must (if it is to succeed) command a power that goes beyond peoples’ willingness to vote for us. Our base does not exist to win elections.Electoralism is only one arm of the socialist movement, which works in social justice, labor movements, and in anti-establishment movements. 

Running an election-first campaign might mean watering down the message to make it more mainstream, working to appeal to donors who don’t share our beliefs, or changing the tactics of an entire chapter to appeal to different demographics of people. These might sometimes help win elections, but as a practice hurts the wider DSA. We should not forget where our real power comes from and what our ultimate goals are. In Mamdani’s case, his campaign sacrifices radical socialist rhetoric in order to merely be elected.

Mamdani isn’t officially endorsed by the national DSA, but he’s still the face of socialist politics at the moment. Mamdani enthusiastically chooses to associate himself with the Democratic Party—a party which openly serves the interests of capital above all else and currently  supports the genocide in Gaza and control at the border. Practically speaking, the Democratic Party is a hostile force and any wise socialist would treat them as such.

Mamdani was also criticized for not taking a stand against the police. He explicitly assures people he’s not going to defund them in a way that plays to his critics. When asked if he would use the NYPD to clear the streets for ICE, he equivocated about “ensuring we keep order across the city.” To him, the NYPD is no longer an enemy.

Mamdani’s line is a clear concession to the needs of the campaign rather than the message of the movement. Nobody, not even those who defend these statements, disagrees. It’s only a question of strategy. This strategy is harmful. Fighting against the Democrat-backed Gaza genocide and defunding the police are popular keystones of the modern radical movement. Elected candidates should fully represent the DSA. If they don’t, why are we running them in the first place?

Our cause needs propaganda,  in the sense of ferociously spreading ideas and beliefs. What we give  up rhetorically for one election for fleeting power might lose us more people in the long run.Candidates have great potential if we take the opportunity to use them as members of the DSA socialist project instead of as individual campaigns which exist to serve only their own ends. The DSA runs candidates—candidates shouldn’t  run the DSA.

A ‘left-wing Trump’, capable of having a similar meteoric effect on national political discourse, won’t expect to win the presidential election. They won’t shrink from saying things that are wildly unacceptable in the Overton window. In doing so, they will be able to have ten times more of an effect than a candidate hedging their bets and focusing on being elected within the lines that are set out for us by the Democratic establishment. 

Getting people elected is just a means to an end, not our ultimate goal. The battle we are fighting on the international stage is, and has been for a long time, one of ideology as much as law.Our goals as socialists cannot be focused on merely the next four years and the legislation in our county. Instead they must be for the century and for the entire working class.

The post There Are More Important Things Than Getting Elected appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

One hundred and fourteen years ago a democratic socialist was poised to become Mayor of Los Angeles. Not yet the sprawling megalopolis of today, the city nonetheless ranked second largest in California, and was growing fast. A socialist in the top municipal office? The idea sent the L.A. ruling class into a freakout of redbaiting, lies, half-truths and an occasional accurate depiction of Job Harriman’s progressive positions.

The Socialist Party candidate—a labor attorney, and former vice-presidential running mate of Eugene Debs—had come out on top of an open primary, just short of the majority he needed to win outright. Now he faced off against the incumbent, a champion of the interests that had earned Los Angeles the moniker of “scabbiest town on earth” within the city’s unions. Adding spice to the mix, this would be the first major election in the Golden State in which women could vote, Proposition 4 having just squeaked by in a state referendum the same day Harriman won the mayoral primary.

The business elites threw everything they could muster into their effort to stave off the Apocalypse. The Los Angeles Times—a virulently anti-union publication owned by Harrison Gray Otis, leader of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, a close friend and business associate of corrupt Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz—warned every day with a creative variety of arguments that if Harriman were elected, the sky, along with the economy, would crash onto Angelenos’ heads. He editorialized that this election represented “the forces of law and order against Socialism; peace and prosperity against misery and chaos; the Stars and Stripes against the red flag.” What program so enraged and frightened the capitalist class of southern California? Harriman promised to:

• Reverse an anti-picketing ordinance that had filled Los Angeles jails with peaceful union members for the crime of walking on sidewalks with signs, singing labor songs, while on strike;

• Investigate the real estate deals that had brought giant payoffs to Otis and his friends when the Owens Valley aqueduct terminated on land they had purchased via insider information (the real life backdrop to events depicted in the film Chinatown);

• Municipalize city services to save the taxpayers money and improve efficiency;

• Invest in building community centers, public pools and baths, and increase support for public schools;

• Oh, and modestly raise taxes on the rich and large businesses to pay for these reforms.

Pretty radical stuff.

Ultimately none of these political ideas or the opposition’s counters to them defeated Harriman. What did was an early historical appearance of the “October Surprise”. A year before the election, a bomb ripped through the Los Angeles Times building, killing twenty workers. When brothers James and John McNamara (a national leader of the Ironworkers union) were arrested and put on trial, Harriman, the top labor attorney in southern California, defended them, believing in their innocence. When he decided to run for mayor, he turned the defense over to crusading lawyer for the damned Clarence Darrow. Darrow had previously proven that labor leaders in Colorado accused of a bombing had been framed, and like Harriman, thought the McNamara brothers trial was a rerun.

But the McNamaras were guilty, as Darrow ultimately found out. After secret negotiations with Otis and other Los Angeles business leaders, Darrow—a fervent opponent of the death penalty— unexpectedly changed his clients’ plea to “guilty” just days before the election. The timing was key to the agreement. In exchange the prosecution agreed to ask for prison instead of death sentences.

Although left out of the loop, Harriman suffered the consequences. Heavily favored to win a week before the election, but firmly tied in the public’s mind to the McNamara’s defense, he and the entire Socialist slate went down to defeat.

Today democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is in good position to win the New York City Mayor’s race. With a ferocious ground game, smart media, charisma to spare and a set of goals clustered under the umbrella of “affordability” popular with the working class and youth, his coalition will be a formidable force between now and November. He’ll likely confront a Republican rival, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and the disgraced former governor Cuomo, whom he just defeated in the Democratic primary. If both run the latter two will split the anti-Mamdani vote sufficiently to get him elected. In the interests of ruling class solidarity, Cuomo has suggested the lesser not-Mamdanis drop out in favor of the one best positioned to beat him by September.

The climb will be slippery. The mud is already being flung by the usual suspects. One shouldn’t be surprised by Trump’s characterization of Mamdani as “a one hundred percent Communist lunatic.” That won’t be the deciding factor, as the unpopular former New Yorker POTUS will probably add more votes to Mamdani’s column than he removes.

The two biggest problems will come from the right wing of the Democratic Party—intransigent Zionists and the city’s Wall Street and real estate sectors. Alongside mountains of cash from billionaire bank accounts, the leading edge of the anti-Mamdani campaigns will comprise redbaiting and spurious charges of antisemitism.

What does card-carrying DSA member Mamdani actually stand for?

1. A freeze in rents for stabilized apartments

2. Free city busing

3. Raising the city’s minimum wage to something close to liveable: $30/hour by 2030

4. A community safety department separate from police to deal with mental health related issues

5. City-run grocery stores to bring down food prices

6. Free childcare for children six weeks to five years old

7. Oh, and modestly increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for the above.

Like Harriman’s wish list, not exactly the Bolshevik revolution here, but you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from what the other side is already saying and what they will flood the airwaves with for the next few months. It’s the last item, of course—raising taxes on the rich and corporations—that, as in L.A. in 1911, especially infuriates the city’s plutocrats.

Currently most New York City residents pay around 3% of their income in city taxes. The wealthiest income earners pay closer to 4%, with an absurdly flat cap for people making $500K and above. New York City at last count is home to 350,000 millionaires. The richest 1 percent of New Yorkers tripled its share of the city’s total income from 12 percent in 1980 to 36 percent in 2022.

These statistics represent a flashing red sign about the city’s lack of affordability—along with an “X marks the spot” for the buried treasure that can pay for decent public services for the 95 per cent of the city’s inhabitants who aren’t millionaires. The slight tax increase Mamdani is calling for—2% on individuals making a million dollars a year—will not crimp the lifestyle of the rich in the least.

When socialists run for public office, or when measures to reduce economic inequality are placed before the voters (e.g., taxing the rich, a raise in the minimum wage, help for renters), you can count on the most reactionary sectors of the ruling class to spend freely to convince everyone to see the world through the same warped lens they do. You can also bank on the same tired tropes at the core of their argument. Behold: these tax increases are going to hurt everyone; small business can’t afford it; the wealthiest New Yorkers (mislabeled “job creators”) will flee the city and go to a more welcoming business environment; and all the jobs will leave with them.

In the real world, these things never happen. Take the California example, 101 years after Harriman’s defeat. In 2012, over the dire predictions that the “job creators” and their jobs would flee California, voters passed a progressive tax bumping top income earners up a couple percentage points. The tax, Proposition 30, has brought in seven to nine billion dollars a year, and prevented public services from going over a fiscal cliff in the aftermath of the Great Recession. In the years following its passage, the state minted ten thousand new millionaires, and 1.4 million new jobs.

In New York, where much of the wealth is clustered in finance and real estate, the former creates relatively few working class jobs and the latter can’t move. The lies may be countered with clear messaging explaining the real problems, how to address them, and who should pay to fix them. Which is what Mamdani has been doing.

But there is another weapon in the anti-Mamdani arsenal: the charge of anti-semitism—which for AIPAC and its candidates of course means the duplicitous conflation of ‘anti-Zionist’ with ‘antisemitic’. A deluge of these talking points and ads in support of Cuomo failed to take Mamdani down in the primary, but that doesn’t mean that the stream of invective will stop during the next stage of the campaign. For a recent example we could turn our gaze across the Atlantic to England, where another democratic socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, who achieved a surprise momentary capture of leadership in the Labor Party, was brought low principally by a combination of the highly organized repetition of the lie (mostly by the right wing of his own party) and a fumbled response to it.

Two big things are different in this regard in New York 2025 compared with the England of a few years back: the war in Gaza and its impact on Jewish opinion about Israel, which means the deception in the equation of Jewish and Zionist is much clearer to many more people; and the charismatic Mamdani is not the curt Corbyn, despite similarities in their democratic socialist politics.

What would a Mamdani victory mean at this moment in our history? A democratic socialist mayor in the largest city in the United States would be a tremendous boost to anti-fascist morale as the mass movement to oppose Trump and MAGA is slowly gaining steam. It would arguably provide a programmatic roadmap to victory in the 2026 elections (presuming they are going to be held, and held fairly).

Yes, we are aware that New York City is not the rest of the country. But the largest urban centers are farther to the left than any other stash of votes, and they are where the resistance to Trump and MAGA has been and will likely continue to be strongest—an important indicator of possible electoral victory, if the coalitions emerging from organization of the mass demonstrations are able to develop the necessary synergy between street and ballot box forms of activism. A sclerotic neoliberal politics as usual will not mobilize this base.

Here in California municipal democratic socialist politics have gained ground over the last few election cycles. In all, there are more than three dozen DSA-affiliated officeholders in the state—the most since the heyday of the Socialist Party more than one hundred years ago—including four mayors, fifteen city councilmembers, a state assemblymember, a county supervisor, and occupants of various down ballot offices, all of whom push for progressive policies shunned or feared by most of their fellow officeholders.

If Mamdani loses, the leadership of the Democratic Party will redouble its push to field empty neoliberal suits in 2026. Harriman’s defeat in LA in 1911 set back the cause of working class politics for decades. A high-profile loss like that today would make it that much harder to remold the Democratic Party as a majoritarian progressive force. Alternatively a win will provide wind in the sails to the anti-MAGA movement, on the strength of which Democrats can reclaim power. That’s why it’s necessary to forcefully demonstrate the viability of Mamdani’s politics now.

California DSA members may be three thousand miles away from this historic battle but we can nonetheless help. Mamdani needs every penny he can raise to fight the onslaught of right wing lies propelled by billionaire funding. Send him your hard-earned dollars here.

The massive cuts to Medicaid in Trump’s budget package promise devastation, not only to the 13 million people who will be stripped of eligibility, but to hospitals and clinics in rural and other underserved communities that rely on Medicaid funds to remain solvent. Many will close or be taken over by private investors who specialize in buying public entities and "downsizing" them, maintaining only those services that turn a profit. Public hospitals everywhere will tighten their belts, laying off workers and stonewalling in contract talks with their unions. People who have been cut off Medicaid will have nowhere else to go for care but already overburdened emergency rooms.

Sooner or later, most seniors and people with disabilities requiring long-term care wind up relying on Medicaid to pay for it, because it can wipe out your savings in a hurry. As of July 2024, Medicaid is the primary payer for 63% of nursing home residents; the cuts will put them in an impossible situation. In the Black community, maternal mortality rates are already shockingly high; the cuts will push them even higher.

Congressional Republicans claim they are saving money by stripping away eligibility from illegal immigrants and the people who don't meet work requirements (what were known in Victorian England as "the undeserving poor"). But nearly two-thirds of those on Medicaid actually do hold jobs, and most of the rest are either ill, disabled, or serving as primary caregivers for someone else. As for the undocumented, federal spending on their health care is already against the law. In states where all residents are eligible, regardless of citizenship or immigration status, the state picks up the tab for their care.

Far more people will be affected by the cuts than the GOP is letting on. Rep. David Valadao represents Bakersfield, California, and the surrounding area. Nearly two-thirds of his constituents are on MediCal, California's version of Medicaid. Valadao promised to oppose any cuts to Medicaid, but when it came time to vote on the House budget bill, he caved and voted yes. There are others in Congress like him. If only one of them had voted no, the bill would not have cleared the House.

But the Republicans are right about one thing: soaring health care costs are making both Medicaid and Medicare unsustainable. There is an enormous amount of waste built into both programs, and continuing down the current path is fiscally irresponsible.

Problems due to subsidies of private capital

This isn't because the wrong people are getting coverage. It's because, over the years, every move by the federal government to extend health care access has been accomplished with massive subsidies of private capital. Many people were helped by the Affordable Care Act, but the private insurance industry benefited from it to the tune of $10 billion of our federal tax dollars. A majority of people on Medicare now get it from private Medicare Advantage plans, paid for out of the Medicare trust fund. These are a gold mine for corporations like United Health, bilking the system even further by claiming patients are sicker than they actually are, while denying costly claims for those who are truly sick.

As for Medicaid, East Bay DSA member Michael Lighty, who chairs the statewide Healthy California Now coalition, points out that “90 to 95 percent of the benefits nationwide through Medicaid are administered by for-profit managed care organizations. That’s where the waste is, that’s where the fraud is.”

In some parts of the country, Republicans counter Democratic charges of throwing the poor under the bus by pointing out the Democratic Party’s ties with corporate hospital chains. And private for-profit hospitals do, in fact, make a killing off federal programs, often at the expense of patient care.

The threatened cuts to federal health care spending are symptoms of a crisis that neither party has shown a willingness to confront, despite efforts by a minority of Congressional Democrats to promote a single payer solution. Each party uses the health care system's failures to attack the other, but only independent political organizing can defend the millions of people whose lives and well-being are at stake.

This applies not only to electoral politics but to unions. Maintaining health benefits in the face of steadily rising costs has long been a millstone around the neck of organized labor. Union negotiators are forced to sacrifice much of their leverage at the bargaining table not to win better coverage, but just to keep what they have. When contract talks break down, health coverage is usually the cause.

Unions need to do more than pass convention resolutions

Organized labor is arguably the only institution with the resources and infrastructure to counter the influence of the health care industry. Union leaders who have had to bargain over health benefits know all too well the stiff price of a system of private, employer-based health coverage. Many will readily acknowledge that a universal, publicly funded health care system would be far better for workers. But union political behavior is notoriously risk-averse, and telling your members that they can no longer count on the union to win decent coverage is an admission of defeat that few union officials are willing to make. For them to do more than simply pass single payer resolutions at conventions, their members will have to demand it.

The appalling cruelty of the Medicaid cuts has emerged, quite properly, as a major talking point for Democratic politicians. But it falls to us to point out that real solutions require a willingness to attack the source of the problem: the looting of public health care dollars by private capital. Until that happens, every effort to extend access to care will be held hostage in the face of exploding costs and the states’ fiscal crisis.

Perhaps necessarily, health care reform has been a lower priority in recent years for many in labor and the left. But the federal budget has pushed it onto the front burner, whether we like it or not. In the wake of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, single payer was at the top of DSA’s agenda. It's time for us to take it up again in earnest.

No shortage of opportunities to engage

The impact of the cuts is so sweeping that there will be no shortage of opportunities to engage. Something like 70 percent of the money spent on health care in California ultimately comes from our tax dollars. Massive cuts at the federal level–which include premium subsidies under the Affordable Care Act as well as Medicare and Medicaid–will be felt across the board:

• Insurance companies can be expected to try to make up for lost federal revenue by jacking their premiums, making it that much harder for unions to bargain over health benefits. We need to pay close attention to union contract struggles and not simply lend our support, but be prepared to talk about why it will take more than tough bargaining and militant picket lines to protect those benefits. We need to persuade our unions to not just pass resolutions, but to actually invest resources and political capital in the fight for single payer.

• Community hospitals and clinics that serve MediCal patients were already under growing pressure to economize by cutting back on care, struggling just to stay open. The federal cuts will drastically worsen the situation. Community members most directly affected will need organized support, and local officials will need to have their feet held to the flames to make sure everything possible is done to keep those facilities running and adequately funded.

• Two years ago, after years of struggle, California became the first state in the country to extend Medicaid eligibility to all qualified residents, regardless of age or immigration status. But even before the federal budget was passed, Gov. Newsom and the state legislature were walking back on the commitment—there will be no new enrollees among the undocumented starting next year, and those already enrolled will be required to pay a $30 monthly premium (thankfully, the legislature scaled back Gov. Newsom’s original proposal of $100). With the state facing a budget deficit, there will be enormous pressure to further undermine a victory that immigrant rights forces fought long and hard to achieve.

When you or a loved one is denied needed care, or can't get it without financial hardship or ruin, it's the most natural response in the world to think, "This is just wrong," and react with anger. It's highly personal, and all too real. But once the conversation turns to economics, how health care is to be financed and what its cost drivers are, you've moving beyond direct experience and into the realm of public policy. All too often, this involves a dive into the weeds that not everyone is prepared to make.

Here is where a socialist perspective becomes indispensable: everything about our health care system that involves the taking of profits drives costs upward, and those costs have soared beyond the point where the system can continue to absorb them. During the debate over the Affordable Care Act, one of Obama’s policy wonks remarked that health care reform was complicated because the system has so many moving parts. But all of the machine’s components have a single power source, and it’s on us to name it. There is a reason why the world’s most market-driven health care system is also far and away the most expensive.

Naming the system is not enough; you need an effective strategy to defeat it. Here again, DSA is equipped to bring something to the table that is badly needed: an analysis of the different forces that can be won over, an understanding of how and when their interests intersect and what it might take to “unite all who can be united” and get them working together. The catastrophic cuts to the federal health care budget are an opportunity as well as a crisis. Let’s not squander it.

On Friday July 11 the East Bay DSA “Fighting Oligarchy” campaign shifted from internal organizing and planning to organizing on the streets. Nearly twenty DSA and Federal Unionists Network (FUN) members turned out on a sunny downtown Oakland afternoon to test our idea that we could recruit federal workers and the broader public into the struggle against Trump’s attacks on federal workers, collective bargaining rights and vital services by canvassing outside a federal workplace.

To avoid prohibitions on soliciting on federal property, we set up our table across the street, at the foot of a pedestrian mall where many federal workers come out for lunch. We began by hearing inspirational remarks from Sol Hilfinger-Pardo of the FUN, and former East Bay DSA co-chair Keith Brower Brown, about the attacks on workers and our opportunity to establish a place to fight back in solidarity.

Over the next couple hours, we had a lot of good conversations and signed up several dozen people, most of them federal workers. In our debrief we agreed that the event validated our premises and marked a successful beginning to the public dimension of the campaign.

East Bay DSA’s Top-Priority Campaign

Six weeks earlier, East Bay DSA’s annual convention adopted the “Fighting Oligarchy” campaign, which had been in the works since March, as a priority resolution. The membership voted separately to make the fight against the Trump oligarchy the chapter’s top priority for the coming year. The campaign resolution provided that “a central focus of our campaign” will be solidarity support of the FUN, “a group of self-organized federal workers who play a strategic role in the national struggle, and here in the Bay Area.”

Mark Smith of DSA SF, a founder and national steering committee member of the FUN and president of Local 1 of the National Federation of Federal Employees, was on hand to help motivate the resolution at the convention. As he notes in a short video promoting the campaign launch, “There are over 2 million federal workers across the country” (3 million including postal workers) “and tens of thousands of us right here in the Bay Area. We’re the ones delivering essential services the working class depends on, getting social security checks delivered on time, putting out wildfires, delivering your mail, answering phone calls from veterans in crisis, and keeping your food and water safe.”

The Role of Labor Notes

A few weeks later, campaign organizers spread the word to 400 rank-and-file union members at Oakland Technical High School for a day-long Labor Notes event, the Bay Area Troublemakers School. Labor Notes was a critical incubator of the FUN, which coalesced at a meet-up of federal employees at the national Labor Notes conference in Chicago. FUN’s co-founders modeled their new network on Railroad Workers United, another group of self-organized rank-and-file workers from multiple unions within the same sector that also had its roots in a prior Labor Notes conference.

Leaders of the FUN joined the Oakland event as participants and featured speakers. Hai Binh Nguyen, a FUN leader at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, spoke at the opening plenary, and Mark Smith, a Veterans Health Administration worker, spoke on a panel about “Fighting Cuts and Layoffs” with local public-sector workers.

An Energizing Public Meeting Brings in New Members

By the end of June, campaign organizers, who had been meeting weekly since the convention, led our inaugural event: a political education and member engagement session that filled the hall of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555.

We were fortunate that Alex Pelletieri of New York City DSA, and a member of DSA’s National Political Committee, was in town to open the meeting. Leading a familiar chant—“When workers’ rights are under attack, what do we do? STAND UP, FIGHT BACK!”—Pelletieri then broke it down for the audience. He laid out the attacks on workers, unions and the working class, and how the Federal Unionists Network is leading the charge in fighting back.

“For people to get involved in the fight for a better world,” he concluded, “they have to believe that one is possible. They have to believe that the people around them have their back. So the FUN and DSA are giving us hope. In the face of horrific attacks from Donald Trump, we are providing a place for working class people to fight back.”

Six leaders of the Federal Unionists Network were on hand, three of whom spoke on a compelling panel moderated by former East Bay DSA co-chair Zach McDonald. Representing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Veterans Health Administration, the panelists described the attacks on federal workers and unions, the impacts of those attacks on the broader labor movement, and some of the ways they erode programs, protections and services on which the working class and general public depend.

“This administration is attacking federal workers from all directions,” said Bethany Dreyfus, a FUN leader who works at the EPA, and is president of AFGE Local 1236. “They are firing our newest employees, laying off those in mid-career, and leading the most experienced out with early retirements. But without people in these positions, the workforce will be too small to ensure that vital services get to the American people.”

After hearing from the speakers, participants reviewed the campaign’s goals: build a broad working-class movement in the East Bay by engaging local federal workers in the FUN, and by connecting their fight with local political and labor struggles and with the fights of other union workers (e.g., teachers, nurses and academic workers) to serve our community.

Participants then broke out into small groups to begin planning public events, political education programming, research, communications and member engagement activities for the coming months. They also signed up to join the public launch: a tabling and canvassing action at the Ronald Dellums federal building in Oakland a few weeks later.

"Having East Bay DSA on board has been really energizing,” said Hilfinger-Pardo, who works at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “There is incredible potential in organizing the 2 million federal workers in this country, but it is no small task. So when DSA helps us organize, it puts wind in our sails. We're really excited to see how this partnership develops."

Canvassing Federal Workers

The action at the Dellums Federal Building was the moment we had all been waiting and planning for. In remarks before we fanned out to talk with federal workers, Hilfinger-Pardo, a member of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Chapter 335, said “We have been very active in our union for years now because we have to fight every single day for our collective bargaining rights,” adding that “Right now, the federal workforce is under attack in an unprecedented way.” She concluded that “today is just the beginning” of a campaign that will “create those connections” between federal and non-federal workers so that “we continue to grow and strengthen each other through collective action.” [See video]

Former East Bay DSA co-chair Keith Brower Brown pointed out the massive betrayal of the Trump administration in cutting 17 million people from Medicaid a week earlier. “We're going to capitalize on that,” he said. “We're going to build a movement that can keep pushing not just to fix these cuts and defend these workers, but keep pushing for the kind of universal social programs that we all deserve.”

The event proved that many Californians are looking for an opportunity to get involved in the fight. A dozen pairs of DSA and FUN members fanned out across the mall on both sides of the building and on the sidewalk. Another pair was turned back by security as they made their way to the cafeteria. Our campaign lit (written and designed by California Red editor Fred Glass) provided a political framing for the conversations and included QR codes to sign up with the FUN and connect with DSA.

Besides connecting federal workers with the FUN, we used the opportunity to begin to achieve another goal of the campaign: connecting federal and local struggles. A few days after the canvass, healthcare workers at the Alameda Health System, the county’s public hospital and clinic network, held a rally at Highland Hospital in Oakland to call on Governor Newsom to fully fund MediCal. We shared information about that event during our picket.

As we debriefed, exciting new ideas came up. Could we develop a “canvass in a box” so that pairs of canvassers could easily and nimbly come out again, soon and regularly? Could we design a poster with a QR code, and poster-canvass the nearby businesses frequented by federal workers? Could we plan an event at a nearby national park?

“So many federal workers are new to organizing,” MT Snyder, chair of the FUN’s Bay Area organizing committee, said afterwards. “DSA's campaign gives us a huge opportunity to learn from experienced organizers and build our own skillsets while engaging members of our unions.”

More Events to Come

In the next month, we will hold a political education event, “Trump 2’s Crusade against Labor,” which will feature speakers and a discussion about DOGE and the disastrous effects of slashing the American scientific and social safety nets. East Bay DSA’s new “Socialism Beats Fascism” Committee is hosting a public meeting featuring the “Fighting Solidarity” campaign on August 5. And we are planning a social event to bring together FUN members, socialists and local workers.

We will also be supporting a DSA-endorsed, FUN-led event on July 23, “Federal workers say: ICE Out of Our Workplace! ICE Out of ALL Workplaces!” at San Francisco City Hall.

The summer’s organizing will culminate with mass actions on Labor Day, an opportunity for us to reach many more federal workers, members of other unions, and the broader working class.

“Trump’s attacks on the federal workforce and public services aim to create a climate of fear, precarity and desperation for all working Americans,” said campaign co-chair Zach McDonald. “But we can unite millions around the expectation that working people deserve good jobs and all the protections and programs federal workers deliver that we depend on. That’s what federal union members are fighting for, and that’s why it has never been more important for us to stand together.”

Native Californians today are a powerful force. They are paddling a river they have recently liberated from multiple dams, recovering vast parcels of stolen Tribal lands and multiple languages, and transforming their relationships with the state itself. They are making schools finally teach children the truth about their history, and proudly wearing regalia formerly banned in graduations. And they are doing it in California, where the invasion of white settlers eradicated 95% of their ancestors not long ago. Given these and other extraordinary Native achievements, what might California DSA members learn from our Native neighbors about how to harness the power to survive -- and overcome -- horrible things?

The Slaughters Ongoing

Americans are facing a lot of death right now. The president signed into law a bill projected to kill more than 51,000 people annually through its impacts to federal health care programs alone, and our weapons have been used to slaughter more than 57,000 Gazans. These are the very definition of horrible things.

Our soil in California is hardly new to bloodstain. The scale of the genocides against Native Californians since the arrival of Spanish missionaries is difficult to contemplate. From mass rapes and child abductions to the state-funded scalpings, murders, enslavement, and comprehensive land theft, nearly every settler, through action or inaction, was in some way complicit. Efforts to eradicate Native people and their lifeways continued for many decades, including through multiple treaty violations and betrayals, and the forced enrollment of children in the deadly Indian boarding school system.

The effects of these dire public policies continue to linger. Recent research indicates being "American Indian or Alaska Native" still costs a person, on average, 6.5 years of life.

Tribal people fought from the beginning against their total erasure, and they are still fighting today. Native studies scholar Gerald Vizenor defines "survivance" as "an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion" and "stories that renounce dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry."

Ceremony as Praxis

We sat down to discuss this question of surviving horrible things -- survivance -- with Gregg Castro, who enjoys and engages deeply with his own t'rowt'raahl Salinan, and rumsen & ramaytush Ohlone ancestry. Castro holds leadership roles in multiple Tribal, cultural and historical entities advancing Native Californian survivance, including the California Indian History Curriculum Coalition, California Indian Conference, and Society for California Archaeology’s Native American Programs Committee. He is an energetic man with a long ponytail who at one point in our conversation whipped out a deer hoof rattle to shake at our Zoom screen with a twinkle in his bright eyes. He brought an infectious optimism to our conversation, and in spite of our subject, we left feeling uplifted and hopeful.

How does one survive a genocide? Not only physically, but culturally and spiritually? We're both disabled and concerned about what fascists may try to do to us, but as white people, genocide isn't the reason why.

As we talked with Castro, the word that he kept using when answering our many, uncomfortably existential questions was: “ceremony.” “Those that have managed to trudge on have done it because they remembered who they were and remembered the rituals, the ceremonies, that connected them to who they were and where they came from," he said. “The purpose of ceremony," he told us, "is really a prayer. And prayer is to constantly renew and replenish and strengthen our relationship to ourselves, to each other, and the place we came from.” This kind of ceremony connects to the past, to a shared culture, and to a hopeful future.

It would be mighty white of us to appropriate either Castro’s or any other Native ceremony, so we asked uncomfortably about that, too. He readily stressed a critical point: “We can give you a ceremony; we can’t give you your ceremony.” 

Ceremony here is a form of embodied praxis. In her book We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms & the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies (University of Washington Press 2018) Hupa scholar and Tribal member Cutcha Risling Baldy sets out to describe the successful effort to "(re)write," "(re)right," and "(re)rite" Native feminisms through the revival of a dormant, multi-day Hupa ceremony, known in English as the "Flower Dance". It celebrates girls' first menses and their honored and powerful new status as women. The physically rigorous ceremony is rich in dancing and other forms of physical embodiment (running, swimming, practiced stillness); abundant singing, humor, joy and storytelling; and deep and intricate community bonds, engaging participants in many activities from lengthy preparation through the several days and nights of the ceremony itself.

Ceremonies like this were deliberately targeted during the genocidal terror, which was particularly gruesome in northwestern California, where the Hupa have lived from time immemorial. Women were special targets. "Attempts to subvert the roles and place of Native women were built into settler colonial policies because Native women, who at one time exercised autonomy in Native societies, represented a threat to the settler colonial state and settler colonial societal organization," Risling Baldy writes. Native genders and sexualities were more diverse than the invaders' heteropatriarchal system could tolerate. The federal government further forbade in 1882 all "heathenish dances" and ceremonies, adding imprisonment to the potential cost of participation.

Thus, "Native women had to constantly negotiate between continued practice of their rituals and threats of violence" from colonizers who raped, abducted, slaughtered and imprisoned them, and especially during ceremonial practices that made them physically vulnerable, like the Flower Dance. As a result of the violence, while Native peoples persisted in their ceremonies, those "that were led by or featured women" were practiced less, Risling Baldy writes.

“For a regime to have joyful people is dangerous. And that’s what dance often brings,” Castro noted. In this he echoed socialist and legendary DSAer Barbara Ehrenreich in her Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Granta Books 2007): "When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order."

During the Flower Dance, "first menstruation is tied to world renewal and to the girl's newfound ability to commune with the sentient power of the universe." The Hupa believe singing and dancing "in a certain manner" during world renewal ceremonies corrects the world's spiritual imbalance. The neighboring Wiyot Tribe was in the middle of performing their own world renewal ceremony on nearby Tuluwat Island in Humboldt Bay, when white marauders ambushed and tried to eradicate them, slaughtering hundreds in a single week in 1860.

The Wiyot Tribe has also revived that sacred ceremony in recent years, and got the island back, too.

Like the wins of the #LandBack movement, the revival of Tribal ceremonies in recent decades is a "tangible, physical, spiritual, and communal act of healing and decolonization," Risling Baldy writes. While non-Native menstrual taboos had made participants shy about the Flower Dance, "as more and more girls observed and experienced this dance, the dance became more socially acceptable. After ten years, girls started to request that the dance be done for them, instead of being approached by elders hoping they would want one." This was more than "a static re-creation or an attempt to recapture a 'traditional' ceremony from the 'old days'. Instead the ceremony was being reclaimed as a dynamic and inventive building block of Hupa culture."

Toward a Socialist Ceremonial Praxis

This got us thinking: where are democratic socialists' own timelessly defiant, community-connecting ceremonial practices?

Castro told us, “When we reawaken these ceremonies, we’re reawakening really critical, important parts of ourselves and remembering who we are.” Could communing in an explicitly embodied, ceremonially socialist way with the best aspects of America’s creation stories actually renew its ability to realize them?

The Founders "borrowed" foundational concepts of democracy, common among continental Indigenous cultures, from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, then gritted their wooden teeth and plopped out a nation. For all its capitalist, slaveholding capitulations and hypocrisies, it was hypothetically engineered to improve over time, and not upon the edicts of a king. It even aspired to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. When amended by the global struggles for liberation from all oppressions, it's not a bad origin story to tell.

"[S]o how are you going to face the end of the world?" a Hupa medicine woman asked, thinking of a foster child's re-traumatizing dislocation even as she prepared to be honored by the Flower Dance. "With laughter, with joy, with an open mind and an open heart," she answered. Risling Baldy writes, "We are not sad, dying Indians, and this documentation of our revitalizations is not of a dying culture, but instead a culture that has always envisioned an Indigenous future."

Similarly, socialism must remain up for renewal and reinterpretation across eras and cultures. Risling Baldy quotes anthropologist Peter Nabokov: "Keeping many versions of its primordial claims and cultural experiences fluid and available for discussion enables a society to check and adjust its course through uncertain times." What can be experienced in the moment as unweildy sectarianism might turn out to be key to our long term survival.

According to Castro, "There is a peace to [ceremony]. An innate peace that strikes a part of us that was itself asleep." Perhaps the practiced flow of lively and productive democratic process can also be its own kind of Zen. Ehrehreich wrote that even as they persecuted ecstatically celebratory masses, in truth "'loss of control' is what the colonizers feared would happen to themselves."

Power feels precarity and threat when political collectives seize public fora to passionately plead for justice, or raise iconic fists in an upswelling of defiance, or swarm as neighbors in response to thuggish ICE raids, or hold picket lines. But really each of these embodied practices are a restoration of order. Even as a trans-forward Pride march in MAGA-land is a colorful explosion of celebration, it is also a return to the natural, peacable order of human relations, one in which joy and delight vanquish stuffy oppression.

Tule is a wetland plant once used throughout much of Native California. These long reeds make a light, flexible material which, when carefully bundled together, craft a buoyant boat that was widely used for travel throughout California's many waterways and even coastline. However, staying on and piloting a tule boat requires considerable skill and practice, Castro told us. Without that knowledge, people lose their balance, fall off, and splash abruptly into the drink. The invaders' (his polite term is "newcomers'") theft and pollution of tule harvest sites drove that crucial cultural knowledge dormant for a long time. But multiple Tribes are now reviving traditional tule harvest and boat-making practices, holding festive inter-Tribal races.

The gathering and bundling of separate lives into a whole, the buoyancy and challenge of navigating with them, and their muscular, collective resurgence after a long dormancy are themes socialists can also relate to. An old journey, renewed.

Whatever ceremonies we revive, reimagine and reinvent, they hold potential to steer us away from the traumas now threatening our tenderest togetherness. Many Californian native plant communities need periodic fire to truly regenerate. In like fashion, may the crucible of this nation's authoritarian moment, and our transformation within it, make each of us, and most importantly, all of us together, into the best version of who we might yet become.