The following remarks were prepared for the No Kings protest in Brighton, NY (one of several events held across Monroe County) on October 18, 2025. Due to “not having a permit for amplification,” the Brighton event did not include speakers, and these remarks were not delivered – an issue that demonstrates the limitations of these protests, described previously in the pages of Red Star and alluded to below.

My name is Greg and I am the Secretary of the Rochester chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. Thank you to the organizers who put this event together, and for inviting us to speak.

We’re here because we oppose the Trump Administration’s assault on our democratic values and the rising tide of fascism in America. We oppose the deportation of our neighbors and the invasion of our communities by federal agents. We oppose unauthorized deadly attacks on fishing boats in Venezuela and the expansion of US imperialism. And we oppose the erosion of social safety nets, union rights, and so much more.

But we must recognize that the conditions for the present did not develop in 2024 as a result of Trump’s second election; nor 2020 in response to Covid; nor 2015 when Trump descended his golden escalator to announce his candidacy by calling Mexican immigrants “criminals and rapists.”

We must recognize the legacy of our country’s founding upon the genocide of Native Americans and the theft of land; the forced transportation and enslavement of Africans; the WWII internment of US citizens of Japanese descent; colonialization and military interventions in the Philippines, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, and elsewhere; and red scare tactics against those who have voiced opposition.

That is why we must not fight for a return to the status quo, but for our collective liberation. Despite what we were taught in grade school, the project of a “free and equal” America is far from complete.

Today, the working class is crushed by low-paying and demanding employment, rising prices, and increasingly innovative methods of exploitation in pursuit of endless corporate profit.

The confounding popularity of the Trump administration is this: We are confronting real problems. But they are not the result of those who are scapegoated by fascism. It is the ailment of a system where everyone’s personal worth is reduced to the monetary value they produce for the capitalist.

We must provide a competing vision. One in which everyone is truly free. Where everyone has access to healthcare. Where everyone belongs to a union with democratic control of the workplace. Where we can all afford the necessities to live a dignified lifestyle.

It’s great to see everyone out here today, and to see the protests that have occurred since the start of Trump’s second administration. Yet we must take this energy beyond the streets. We must get organized, and find the pressure points to push back on the encroachment of fascism. We can’t wait for the ballot box in 2026, we must start now. Go to rocdsa.org to learn more about our organization, but whatever you do, don’t let being here today be the end of it. 

We have a world to win.

The post “No fascists, NO KINGS!” first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Workers in Italy have been extremely successful in using the strike as a tool against war and connecting this with their lives at work.

The post Italian workers packed the streets for Palestine appeared first on EWOC.

The Nov. 4 Parks Levy effort becomes part of the Chapter’s emerging Family Agenda. 

On September 14, members of the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America voted to endorse the upcoming Portland Parks and Recreation Levy 2025 Ballot Initiative as part of its Family Agenda campaign, and is training members to canvass Portland communities in support. 

The 2020 voter-approved levy to support parks and recreation operations expires at the end of the fiscal year. If the Nov. 4 levy is not approved, the Parks operating budget would be cut nearly in half, resulting in far fewer programs and services. The Parks Levy ensures Portland can maintain parks and community centers by increasing the property tax rate by 60 cents per $1,000 in assessed property value. That means a median homeowner would pay about $26 per month and the median commercial property owner would pay around $37 per month.

Why it matters

Parks are about more than recreation: they are sites of community, climate resilience, public health, and intergenerational, cross-cultural connection. In a city increasingly shaped by privatization and budget cuts, securing resources for public parks is essential. Local governments around the country have found that investing in parks, and providing equitable access to them, can increase economic vitality and make their cities more attractive for existing and potential new residents. 

“The levy is an important piece of our community’s future, particularly for renters who rely on city parks to access the outdoors. With everything costing people more these days, parks are a great example of the community coming together both literally and figuratively, to ensure we have free outdoor spaces for all. My coworkers and I are the first line of defense to make sure these spaces are welcoming and well-maintained. I wish we had a more secure funding model but for now, the levy is essential.”

• Ryan Heidt, horticulturist for the City of Portland and LIUNA 483 member (Parks & Rec workers)

The wealth is here, if we want it

Contrary to the stories that wealthy people like to tell, we know that the rich only get richer by exploiting their workers: as of 2024, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio for major companies was $285-to-$1. We also know that “tax flight” is a myth cooked up by the city’s elite to get out of paying their fair share. That’s why Portland DSA supported City Councilor Steve Novick’s proposal earlier this year to increase the existing surcharge on corporations that have highly skewed ratios of CEO-to-worker pay, in addition to DSA member and City Councilor Mitch Green’s Healthy Parks, Healthy Climate Plan which would have built on Novick’s proposal. These are examples of the creative policy-making this city desperately needs right now.

At the same time, the 2025 Parks Levy is necessary but insufficient. This is especially true given that the Portland Metro Chamber threatened a campaign of opposition to the levy if the City Council didn’t reduce the amount, thereby protecting the Chamber’s elite base from having to pay a more equitable share. While the levy will provide urgently needed funding, relying on periodic levies to sustain critical infrastructure is an inequitable and unstable approach. Public goods should be guaranteed through progressive, permanent, and reliable funding—paid for by taxing the wealthy and corporations who benefit from our shared resources, not through regressive measures that disproportionately impact the working class. That’s why we need more elected leaders with the guts to push back against the arm-twisting elites at the Portland Metro Chamber and to stand up for working people.

“For years, Portland DSA members have shown up and testified for more sustained funding for the essential services that parks and community centers provide. The 2025 Portland Parks Levy will be no different. We’ll engage our neighbors and push to pass the levy while remaining crystal clear: a longer term funding structure is sorely needed and we’re ready to fight for that too.”

• Olivia Katbi, parent and co-chair of Portland DSA.

We need you. Yes, you! 

Portland DSA believes in vibrant public spaces as a collective right. Do you? Then sign up to stay in touch on future events and actions. Over the long term, the City Council must put more resources in public hands, but right now passing this levy is our best shot at retaining what we love about our parks and community centers. 

About the Parks Levy

The 2020 Parks Levy was a success for the city, as shown through both an independent audit and reports from the existing Parks Levy Oversight Committee. The 2025 Parks Levy would:

Preserve Program Access

• Continue free and discounted recreation programs for families experiencing poverty
• Provide free lunch & play programs, movies, concerts
• Preserve classes, community center hours, arts and cultural centers, parks, pools 

Ensure Neighborhood Parks Maintenance 

• Daily restroom cleaning, trash pickup
• Routine maintenance, minor repairs
• Repair or renovate facilities like playgrounds, restrooms, pools
• Park ranger safety patrols, incident responses 

Protect Nature in a Changing Climate

• Plant, maintain trees
• Preserve natural areas, trails, water quality, wildlife habitat
• Clear brush, maintain emergency access routes to reduce wildfire risk 

About Portland DSA’s Family Agenda

Families, however you define them, are a crucial part of a movement for a better world. Through the Family Agenda campaign, Portland DSA seeks to build a culture of collective care for working people, children and elders in our community, while rejecting the right-wing nationalist definition of family. We will make our voices heard at the city, county, and state to stop the slashing of programs that families rely on, and to demand that our parks, community centers, and after-school care programs are fully funded. We’ll be working to expand public support for public education and fight for full implementation of universal preschool at the county level – a policy that Portland DSA fought for and won in 2020.

Contact: family.agenda@portlanddsa.org  

The post Portland DSA Endorses Parks Levy, Calls for More Ambitious Public Investment appeared first on Portland DSA .

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

On September 6, Free the People Rochester (FTP ROC)—a police and prison abolition organization formed in 2020 during the mass mobilization against police brutality—held its inaugural conference on “Abolition: A Practice of Resistance and Resilience.” The conference occurred in a similar moment of urgency, as expanding carceral resources are deployed against immigrant communities and cities, mirrored by growing resistance to the ideologies embodied by Trump. It is a moment for the left to advance solutions to the structural issues perpetuating these circumstances.

Modern carceral systems maintain the legacy of slavery, with methods of oppression evolving from plantation systems of control—slave patrols, overseers, and forced labor. These mechanisms represent the coercive arm of capital that disciplines labor; and like capital, they are expansive. We now live in an era of global policing, with cross-border surveillance and coordination by increasingly militarized police forces.

Carceral solutions are not effective at “solving crime.” If spending on police and prisons correlated with safety, the United States would be the safest country on earth, pointed out keynote speaker Philip V. McHarris, author of Beyond Policing. Poverty is the greatest indicator of crime, so why not put a stop to that? Because safety is not the goal. Rather, it is policing class boundaries and protecting power.

What is Abolition

Prison abolition is the continued struggle against systems of slavery and human subjugation. The Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on slavery excepts the practice “as a punishment for crime.” Abolitionists recognize there can be no exceptions in the struggle for collective human liberation.

Abolition has a dual component: Alongside organizing to end systems of oppression, we must develop and implement new solutions. There are legitimate concerns regarding crime in our community. Nobody wants to become victimized or fear for their safety. The problem is that the dysfunctional solutions currently offered don’t actually make us safer. 

“We must broaden how we think about violence and harm,” suggests McHarris. As we see all too often, police themselves carry violence and harm into communities. So does a lack of nutrition, insecure housing, and social alienation. When people are housed, fed, and cared for, says McHarris, “the justifications for policing disappear.” 

Abolition is a practice; it is the horizon of what we must achieve. Abolitionists affirm that another world is possible, and deploy imagination and collective power to bring it forth, says McHarris. Who would include police and prisons in their vision for a perfect world? We must build toward that vision to make it a reality.

The road to abolition will not result in the immediate dismantling of prisons or disbandment of police forces; yet this transformation is the goal. Too often, criticisms of abolition are framed using the most egregious examples—What are you going to do about the Ted Bundys and John Wayne Gacys of the world? But these are not representative of the majority of those caught up in the tentacles of the carceral system, deserving of true opportunities for rehabilitation that incarceration claims (i.e., the Department of Community Corrections), but fails, to deliver.

Carceral systems discipline our imagination by imposing limitations on what is seen as possible. McHarris uses the example of 911—now ubiquitous, this universal emergency services number was only developed in 1968. Notably, as a recommendation of the Kerner Commission to help suppress “civil disorder” (i.e., Black protest); with Alabama white supremacist Eugene “Bull” Connor a party to the first 911 call. Yet calling 911 is now the reflexive response for many, from minor annoyance to emergency.

Limits of Reform

Can’t we just reform policing? Police forces could become more effective and kind; jails and prisons more comfortable. In short: no. If conflict is produced by structural conditions, we need to address those conditions. When we reform policing we put more resources into policing, resulting in further expansion. Abolition requires divestment. Organizers must ask, “Is this action taking power (energy, resources, and legitimacy) from the institution?”

The bourgeois state will never grant reforms sufficient power to have teeth. In Rochester, the Police Accountability Board was defanged by the police union; now having no real power to discipline cops and becoming a form of “legitimacy theater.” The Person in Crisis (“PIC”) response team, created for mental health intervention, responds to less than half of calls, and are often accompanied by police—resulting, still, in carceral management.

With the implementation of body-worn cameras, “we see when they kill us, but they’re still killing us,” said city councilperson Stanley Martin. Increased training—whether for bias, deescalation, or use of force—does not change the role of police. A more diverse police force does not change its class dynamic. Ultimately, the question is where we focus the energy of our movement in the demand for change.

Abolitionist Solutions

Abolition requires “an abundance of experiments,” says McHarris, including components of prevention, intervention, and response. How do we limit the occurrence of crises, resolve conflict, and heal in its aftermath?

One such experiment was unveiled at the conference: HOPE (Healing Outreach and Peer Engagement) First ROC. Like PIC, HOPE First is intended as an alternative to police intervention in mental health crises. Yet it is community driven to avoid co-optation by the carceral state. We tried creating alternatives through the system, now we’re building through community, explained Martin.

The program relies on a paid peer-response team and will utilize a different number than 911. People in crisis can call to connect with a care team, discuss options and decide the best way for help. After receiving care, follow-up ensures ongoing support. This system is premised on the belief that “people can define crisis in their own terms,” says Mallory Szymanski, Co-Founder of the Upstate New York Policing Research Consortium. The project is currently limited to the 19th Ward, with hours from 3:00pm – 11:00pm (based on analysis of 911 calls), but is looking to build 24/7 availability.

HOPE First ROC is modeled upon similar “experiments.” CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) was founded in Eugene, Oregon in 1989 to “provide[] immediate stabilization in case of urgent medical need or psychological crisis, assessment, information, referral, advocacy and, in some cases, transportation to the next step in treatment.” STAR (Support Team Assisted Response), based in Denver, Colorado, “is an alternative response team that includes behavioral health clinicians and paramedics to engage individuals experiencing mental health distress and substance use disorders.” HOPE First is funded by a legislative grant from Samra Brouk, Chair of the New York State Senate Mental Health Committee. The program will build in consistent evaluation and reflection to improve its services and inform further experimentation.

How We Get There

Attendees workshopped potential challenges for the program. The revolution will not be funded, and we cannot rely on those in power to indefinitely fund programs that challenge power. HOPE First must also overcome public backlash from stigmatization and the political influence of the Locust Club. And first responders must understand the population they are working with.

To be effective, HOPE First must be truly community driven—by building relationships of trust and visibility in the community, providing avenues for community involvement and decisionmaking, and educating the community on the availability of alternatives and demonstrating effectiveness through transparency. HOPE First must also develop adequate “secondary responses,” by networking with other resource providers. 

The conference—bringing together organizations across Rochester—“is what the work of abolition looks like,” said Martin. We are building a coalition of aligned activists that can exert pressure for change. To quote escaped slave and abolitionist Rochesterian Frederick Douglass, “power concedes nothing without a demand.”

McHarris acknowledged that these “abundance of experiments” won’t necessarily each end in success. But we must be critical in how we understand success—the ending of one “institution” or phase of organizing does not mean the end of the ideas expressed or the lessons learned. We must “keep imagining, keep dreaming.”

The post Defund, Rebuild first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

By: Frederick Reiber

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s students, workers, and union comrades gathered outside of the university’s Lobby 7 on Friday, October 10th to protest and celebrate MIT rejecting the Trump administration’s compact. 

Earlier this month, the White House sent offers to nine universities in what the administration titled “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Contained within these agreements were a number of stipulations—including commitments to accept the government’s priorities on admissions, women’s sports, free speech, student discipline and college affordability—exchanged for better access to federal research funding.

Following calls from the graduate worker union, professors, and numerous other student-led groups, MIT president Sally Kornbluth rejected the compact. She cited the numerous messages she had received asking for the compact’s rejection. In doing so the university becomes the first to reject the president’s proposal and the only such university at the time of writing.

Trump’s Continued Attacks on Higher Education

Trump’s proposal follows numerous attacks and challenges to higher education. The administration has paused federal funding of many top research universities, signed several executive orders targeting colleges, and attacked international students’ rights. These have emptied out entire neighborhoods in areas like Allston-Brighton as international student enrollment dropped precipitously this semester, and while the compact may be seen as an attempt to change course, academic leaders were quick to point out its true intent. Ariel White, vice president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at MIT, said:

This wasn’t an invitation letter, it was a ransom note… the goal is to leave universities powerless and at the whim of the federal government.

Other academic leaders agreed. MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU) – UE 256 president Lauren Chua called the proposal  “a thinly veiled attempt to divide us, to make us turn against each other, and to weaken the very communities that make our university thrive.” 

Chua couldn’t be more right, as the compact seeks to enforce harmful gender definitions, denying transgender students recognition and rolling back university protections, all masked under the language of “equality.” Other stipulations include forcing universities to be more accepting of conservative lines of thought, potentially overruling scientific consensus in academic research. The compact also bans colleges from using sex, ethnicity, gender, or political orientations, continuing the overturning of decades of academic work that finds strong connections between affirmative-action like policies and increasing opportunity for those with less money, or those who continue to face systemic racism. As Jade Personna, the speaker for the MIT Black Student Union, argued: “the battle is decades old and the Black Student Union has been fighting it since our inception.”

U.S. conservatives will continue their attacks on academic and intellectual freedom. That is part of a larger ideological project only furthered by the practical program of Project 2025. Long seen as bastions of “deceit and lies,” higher education has long been seen by conservatives as a threat. Some claim that colleges “teach that America is an evil, racist nation” purely for harboring left-wing scholars,. Now-Vice President JD Vance summarized their perception back in 2021: “the universities are the enemy.” 

In reality, American colleges reflect and reproduce America’s troubled history. Universities are learning institutions that are also landlords, schools that are also workplaces. 

Recognizing People Power

One important takeaway from the academic and student rally was the need for people power. Despite what other headlines may imply, the university’s rejection of the Trump Compact was not simply a matter of a good executive. The university’s rejection was a coordinated and community-led effort, won by the numerous student, worker, and professor-lead groups that organized against the compact by applying pressure on an executive amenable to that pressure.

The unfortunate reality is that American universities are businesses. Run by boards of trustees, colleges will do little to protect their students’ rights to academic or intellectual freedom in the face of financial turmoil. We have seen this time after time with pro-Palestine protests, and will likely continue to see similar protests dispelled. 

Kornbluth was forced to reject the compact by the very people who make MIT the institution of MIT. It is the professors, workers, and students who stood up for their communities, risking their bodies against an administration unafraid to kidnap or coerce. As Chua stated in her speech:

This is a victory for every single one of us, because we acted with unity and urgency, [because] we mounted a pressure that could not be ignored.

Fighting against fascism is not easy, it is not pretty, and it certainly is not done by CEOs, academic presidents, or a board of trustees. It is done through the blood, sweat, and organizing of workers, who—much like the community leaders at MIT—make themselves heard.

Frederick Reiber is a PhD student at Boston University researching collective action and technology. He is a member of SEIU 509, Boston DSA, and covers tech, labor, and education for Working Mass.

The post MIT Refuses to Sign Trump Compact Following Pressure from Grad Workers’ Union and Other Groups appeared first on Working Mass.

From the beginning, the Trans Liberation Priority Project has put on its agenda passing trans sanctuary city legislation in the cities of Lakewood and Cleveland.
Lakewood is our first success.

The Cleveland DSA Chapter first submitted draft legislation to the City of Lakewood in April 2025 and showed up in support of this at a city council meeting, with numerous DSA members who resided in Lakewood giving testimony. Afterwards, representatives from DSA kept in touch with Council President Sarah Kepple about this for several months. In addition, we attended several events in Lakewood and canvassed, gathering resident signatures in support of the legislation.

The City, after consulting with leading local and state LGBTQ rights organizations, transformed our original draft into a Gender Freedom Policy which enshrines and upholds transgender rights in Lakewood. Sarah joined a DSA call in September and discussed the policy further. The legislation was formally brought to the floor of council in September and passed on October 6th, 2025—and we gained an earned media opportunity by being featured in an article in Ohio queer news publication The Buckeye Flame!

What does this show? Our efforts work. There is strength in numbers. Public support can sway minds. There is an appetite to protect our most vulnerable populations in Ohio, despite what legislation our state and federal governments pass. Persistent, polite communication and pressure works with local politicians. Blue cities can be beacons of hope, even in red states.

Our goal is to emulate this in the City of Cleveland. Through concentrated, democratic efforts with local partners and politicians, we aim to encourage Cleveland to pass similar legislation. The fight for another victory is only just beginning, and we are ready for it!

The post DSA’s Success: Lakewood Passes First-of-its-Kind “Gender Freedom Policy” appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

By: Taina Santiago

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has deported more than 400,000 people since Donald Trump took office again in January of this year. The administration recently allocated 75 billion dollars of funding to bolster the agency, which was originally formed in 2002 under George W. Bush and has been utilized by every administration to target immigrant communities since.

With ICE’s accelerated kidnapping and deportation operations, the Supreme Court legalizing racial profiling of Latine people, and the building of the shuttered-then-reopened concentration camp that the right disgustingly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”, many have compared this current era of attacks — specifically against Mexican immigrants — to the rise of fascism in Germany and the Nazis’ early antisemitic targeting of Jewish people in the 1930s. And while these comparisons are valid, we can also look in our own front lawn to see history repeating itself. The Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s–a period of time where as many as 2 million people of Mexican ancestry were forcibly or coercively sent to Mexico–took place on U.S. soil in the exact same period of rising fascism in Germany, but has gone largely unacknowledged since.

In the 1930s, The Great Depression brought on unprecedented levels of poverty and unemployment in the U.S. and around the world, a catastrophic downturn that was used by the government to scapegoat people of Mexican ancestry as the cause of these economic issues. President Hoover and his administration pushed an anti-immigration campaign at the time that revolved around keeping “American jobs for real Americans,” a dog whistle that quietly communicated that American meant–and still means–white.

In a white supremacist nation like the U.S., instead of the state of the economy being used as a mobilizing force for the working class, it is used–very successfully–to turn white working class people against Black and Brown people. Any time there is a recession or depression, minorities are to blame rather than the rich people who gamble with our livelihoods and abuse workers. Today, that economic rhetoric has been replaced by another set of lies that fear-monger about undocumented people committing more crimes–a claim that has been proven false. But it is all the same message of dehumanizing minorities in order to maintain white supremacy.

Back in the early 20th century, instead of ICE, it was the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) doing the deportations of 82,000 Mexican people between 1929 and 1935. But there were also many state and local “repatriation programs”–supported by the federal government–that encouraged people of Mexican ancestry to leave their homes, businesses, and communities for jobs, food stipends and financial assistance that did not materialize as promised, with cities like Detroit and Los Angeles carting off train cars full of people who were just living their lives. According to Professor Ana Raquel Minian in their contribution to this TIME article, “60% are believed to have been American citizens — most of them children.” This is a shocking statistic until you begin to understand that the very purpose of these “anti-immigration” efforts are nothing more than a tool to rid the U.S. of Black and Brown people, undocumented and documented alike.

Just as it is today, terror was used in the 1930s as a tool of coercion, with racial profiling and raids making life difficult for all people of Mexican ancestry. The USCIS website itself admits that, “though the effort was not aimed expressly at Mexican [people] it affected them more than other nationalities. For example, in 1930 Mexican [people] accounted for over half of all deportations.” It affected them more because they were people of color, othered by the U.S. government.

That othering continues today, where you can see on ICE and other immigration websites that every instance of the word “non-citizen” has been changed back to “alien” since Trump took office again. As it pertains to raids, the website also states that, “[a] more important result of [INS] raids, however, was that the threat of increased federal deportations likely hastened the departure of thousands of Mexican [people].” ICE’s sweeping raids of immigrant communities is creating this same fear in people around the country, and that is by design.

Detroit had its own Mexican Repatriation program that was advertised by the local government and Diego Rivera himself–the artist who painted the famed Detroit Industry murals at the DIA. He was recruited by the governor at the time, Wilber Brucker, and the Detroit Mexican Consulate, to help convince people of Mexican descent to leave Michigan. He falsely believed they would be greeted by new worker cooperatives, so he saw it as a liberating opportunity for his people and country. However, as he later came to find out, he was sold a bill of goods.

Detroit’s Mexican Repatriation program reduced the city’s population of Mexican people by 90% by 1936. And because of this pervasive, years-long ethnic cleansing, generations of Mexican-Americans were traumatized into silence, often opting for assimilation to survive. Only recently have we been able to hear the oral histories of Mexican-American Detroiters through projects like Maria Cotera and Elena Herrada’s documentary, Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land (2001), which asked elders who experienced the repatriation to recount their experiences of loss and suffering.

I was inspired to write this article because of a PBS documentary (you can watch it here) that happened to be playing on TV one night, which featured John Leguizamo documenting the history and activism of Latine people in America. In it, he talked about this repatriation operation, something I had never heard of in my life. I sat on the couch, confused. Confused about how I was unaware of this decade-long event that has shaped immigration policy and rhetoric ever since, and confused about why more parallels were not being drawn between it and the current times. The answer was that we simply hadn’t been taught about it en masse.

An essential feature of the propagation of U.S. imperialism is to erase history and frame ourselves as “the good guys”. We are taught in school and the media that most egregious human rights violations happen elsewhere, not here. Black and Brown people have always known this to be a blatant and seemingly obvious perversion of the truth–even if some of the specific examples like the Mexican Repatriation are also hidden from us. But it is a lie that white America falls for time and time again, even while they witness historically marginalized people suffer around them.

This present moment–the fascism, the racial targeting, and the white supremacy leading it all–was happening in the U.S. in the 1930s. So it is not solely Germany’s history we are repeating, but also our own. In fact, people of color have been living under fascism in the U.S. since the inception of this country, but it is only now that white America is waking up to this reality. It is time for the U.S. to look its ugly history in the face and finally–for the sake of the lives of Black and Brown people–learn from both the world’s and this country’s atrocities.

If you are looking for more ways to help in the struggle against ICE in our neighborhoods, join Detroit’s People’s Assembly contingent this Saturday, October 18th, 3PM at Roosevelt Park for the No Kings Rally taking place to connect with community members with the same resistance goals as you. Stay strong. Stay safe. We can only do this together. Solidarity forever!

The U.S. Playbook: How The Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s Mirrors Our Current Moment was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

No — but just-cause rules protect unionized workers from unfair firing and discipline.

The post Do unions protect bad employees? appeared first on EWOC.

by Antonio Rhodes

The claim that Zionism can be redeemed because it has a good side in its political left is nothing more than a weak imperialist attempt to court ignorant circles in favor of the colonial enterprise. The most rudimentary historical knowledge of the conflict in Palestine confirms its sophism:

When the British Mandate ruled Palestine, “socialist” Zionists pursued a policy of usurping and ethnically segregating the economy of the country, dubbed “Hebrew Labor.” One of the more important ones, David Hacohen, illuminated the practice of the policy when reminiscing of it in 1969:

[I was] one of the first of our comrades to go to London after the First World War… . There I became a socialist… . I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there. … To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies the Kereen Kayemet [Jewish National Fund] that sent Hankin to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendi [landlords] and to throw the fellahin [peasants] off the land—to buy dozens of dunams from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited. [1]

Left Zionists were the principal perpetrators of the Nakba—the 1948 expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what is now called “Israel” to Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and many other Babylons. As the Haganah demolished homes, expelled villagers, and committed massacres, its more than conscious commanders—Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Moshe Carmel, Yisrael Galili, Yitchak Rabin—were largely ideological “socialist” Zionists, who would affiliate with parties like Mapai, Labor Unity, United Workers, Alignment, and the Israeli Labor Party in their later political careers. Kibbutzes—i.e., Zionist colonial settlements—of self-purportedly leftist ethoses absorbed much of the land which the Haganah cleansed, and the man who was the political face of the cleansing—who directed the commanders of the Haganah, who declared the independence of the State of Israel in the robbed land of Palestine—was the seminal face of left Zionism, then and now: David Ben-Gurion. After the fact, until 1967, the early left Zionist Israeli governments—under prime ministers Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, and Levi Eshkol—subjected those Palestinians not removed during the Nakba, now often reductively called “Arab Israelis,” to military surveillance and to land theft laws.

In 1956, the UK and France launched an imperialist and internationally condemned invasion of Egypt; the latter had attempted through nationalization to direct the profits of the Suez Canal toward improving the lives of everyday Egyptians, not foreign Franco-British capitalists, whereas the two parasitic empires wanted the Canal back. Predictably, the State of Israel prostituted itself to the latter side. Under the prime ministership of David Ben Gurion and the general governance of left Zionism, it invaded Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula as the British and French militaries landed on the Egyptian Mediterranean coast. The imperialist onslaught stopped only when the vast majority of the world condemned it at the UN.

Another of the early left Zionist governments, under Levi Eshkol in 1967, conquered, occupied, and commenced the colonization of the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights on winning the Six Day War. Notwithstanding the relinquishing of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982—the action of a conservative Zionist government—post-Eshkol left Zionist governments up to the present, under Golda Meir, Yitchzak Rabin, Shimon Peres, again Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert, have all followed that long policy of occupation and settlement.

After a right Zionist Israeli government invaded Lebanon in 1982, succeeding left Zionist governments under Peres and Rabin maintained the military occupation of the south of the country which had been established. In 2006, one left Zionist government under Ehud Olmert attempted to reestablish the occupation after it had ended in 2000—though luckily not to avail, on account of the resolve of Hezbollah and the Lebanese people.

The especially extreme suffering which Gazans have suffered for the past twenty or so years, which is now culminating in a holocaust, has its origin in the policy of a left-liberal Zionist government under Ehud Olmert, coordinated with the imperialist US and the imperialist European Union. When Hamas won the parliamentary elections of the Palestinian Authority fair-and-square in 2006 and threatened to make that puppet into a real body of resistance in both Gaza and the West Bank, this Olmert government and a quartet of the United Nations, the US, the EU, and the Russian Federation demanded that it renounce what made it so popular amongst Palestinians: that it relinquish decolonial armed struggle and legitimize the illegitimate State of Israel. When Hamas rightfully rejected the arrogant, antidemocratic, imperialist ultimatum, this government and the quartet had their Palestinian puppet in the washed bureaucrat-comprador party Fatah orchestrate a coup. [2] Though the attempt was repelled in Gaza, it succeeded in the West Bank; there, the bureaucratic, imperialist-sponsored comprador rule of Fatah has since given Israel almost free reign to colonize. On the other hand, because Gaza managed to effectively remain a province in revolt, this left Zionist government and the US Bloc imposed a siege on its access to food, water, electricity, internet, medical infrastructure, and many other essentials; that was how the economic chokehold, the starvation, and eventually the periodic slaughters began.

Over the past two years, the principal left Zionist in Israeli politics, Yair Golan, has exhibited, at best, only slightly less settler-colonial rhetoric than right Zionist politicians. He outright supported the Invasion of Lebanon and the resulting occupation of southern Lebanese soil, and though he has criticized the War on Gaza—more to release the few remaining Israelis confined in Gaza than to protect the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians massacred and uprooted there—he wants Fatah and reactionary Arab imperialist satellite states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to rule the Strip in the place of a direct Israeli occupation, and thus has a position antithetical to Palestinian self-determination. Other Israeli “opposition” politicians, like Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, have been even worse; for example, the latter was a member of the vile Netanyahu government for about half of a year, in favor of the Gaza Holocaust, up until June 2024.

But if historical events are not enough, how about a brief exploration of quotations of seminal left Zionists, so thieving and bigoted that one could confuse them to be from Jabotinsky, Begin, or Ben-Gvir?

David Ben-Gurion, 1937: “We must expel Arabs and take their place.” [3] The same year: “[T]he compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish State could give us something which we never had… . This is more than a state, government and sovereignty—this is national consolidation.”[4]

Moshe Sharett, 1915: “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture… . Recently there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about ‘the mutual misunderstanding’ between us and the Arabs, about ‘common interests’ [and] about ‘the possibility of unity and peace between two fraternal peoples.’… [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes … for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate—all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise.” [5]

Golda Meir, 1969: “There was no such thing as Palestinians.”’ [6]

The contradictions between the different tendencies of Zionism are nonantagonistic at best, fake at worst. Indeed, some Zionists want to clothe the robbery of a country and the uprooting of its people in a “socialist” cloak, others want it in a national conservative or national liberal one, others in a religious one, etc. But the point is that all pursue that robbery and that uprooting; if one were not to, it would not actually be under the umbrella of Zionism—it would be distinctly non-Zionist. The problem of the conflict in the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean is not merely one Zionist tendency, whether “socialist,” liberal, conservative, religious, or whatever other flavor, and the solution is not merely another. Zionism in general is the problem. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Mujahideen Movement, the whole anti-Zionist Palestinian Resistance, and all its international allies, from those close, in the Arab World, to those all the way here in the US, are the real solution. Real socialists and anti-imperialists stand with the colonized in their agency, not with the leftwing of colonialism.

Footnotes

1. Nur Masalha, The Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 25.
2. David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair (New York), March 3, 2008, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/04/gaza200804. 
3. David Ben-Gurion to Amos Ben-Gurion, 5 October, 1937, https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2013/04/06/the-ben-gurion-letter/. 
4. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 142.
5. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 91.
6. Alasdair Soussi, “The mixed legacy of Golda Meir, Israel’s first female PM,” Al Jazeera English, March 18, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/3/18/the-mixed-legacy-of-golda-meir-israels-first-female-pm. 

The post Denounce “Left” Zionism first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

In an ideal world, our ballot wouldn’t contain a measure like Proposition 50. We would have a political system built on true proportional representation, where the maps are drawn by and for the people, not by a political class to serve its own ends. But this is not that world. For decades, corporations and billionaires have spent enormous sums of money to rig our elections and consolidate their power, leaving us with a broken system that offers us two unpalatable options in a political game designed to keep the working class out of power.

Now, we are confronted with a clear and present danger: a coordinated, authoritarian project at the national level that seeks to rig elections and cement minority rule. In Texas, a partisan gerrymander is designed to steal congressional seats and consolidate power, with direct and devastating impacts on our communities—from attacks on labor rights to the ongoing assaults on immigrants.

This is a tactical moment that demands a tactical response. A "No" vote on Prop 50, while a symbolic stand against gerrymandering in all its forms, would be a unilateral disarmament in the face of an active assault on our democracy. This would be a “sideways” move. Sometimes we must fight fire with fire. 

This is where we must move onward, not sideways. Our movement is about moving forward toward a just and equitable society, rather than getting distracted by lateral battles that don't advance our cause. A "sideways" move would be to lose focus on the primary threats to our communities, or to get caught up in a political game that doesn't serve our long-term interests. That is why our endorsement of a "Yes" vote is a pragmatic one, born out of a clear-eyed assessment of the stakes.

Passing Prop 50 is an essential step in stopping the advance of fascism in the United States. It will counter Republican-led rigging of elections in states like Texas and Florida and give us a tangible chance to fight back against the Trump and billionaire agenda. 

Crucially, voting yes on Prop 50 does not disband or replace California's independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. The commission will remain in place and is set to resume its work after the 2030 census. This is a temporary, tactical measure that buys us time to continue organizing for a better world.

Beyond the immediate tactical gains, our endorsement of Prop 50 aligns us with the broader labor movement in California. Unions across the state recognize the critical importance of fair representation in protecting workers' rights and advancing a pro-labor agenda. When the working class stands united, we are a formidable force. Our vote for Prop 50 is a vote of solidarity with our labor comrades, strengthening our collective power against the forces of reaction and fascism. By standing with labor, we reinforce the understanding that the fight for fair elections is inseparable from the fight for economic justice and a socialist future.

We cannot cede this part of the fight against fascism and leave the center to lead it alone—they will fail. Only socialism can beat fascism. We are not just voting on maps; we are voting to protect our fellow workers, our immigrant neighbors, and our climate from a right-wing agenda that seeks to dismantle our unions, gut our social safety net, and accelerate climate collapse.

Vote yes on Prop 50, not as an act of faith in the establishment, but as an act of tactical resistance. And then, let's get back to the real work of building power from the ground up, for a political system that truly serves the many, not just the few.

Fight back California! Onward and not sideways!