During the last several New York election cycles featuring DSA-endorsed candidates, it has been common to hear comrades referring to these would-be electeds as “class struggle candidates” or to the contests themselves as “class struggle elections.” If we take these descriptions to merely mean candidates and elections that center the struggles of the working class, then they have been accurate enough. Yet if we understand “class struggle” here in its more proper technical sense, as struggle by a class that is conscious of itself as a class, then these descriptions are not accurate. Given the ideological fragmentation of the electorate by decades of neoliberalism, which has taught voters to understand their struggles through every lens but a class one, we must assume that “class struggle” is at best a misleading way of describing what motivates these voters to the polls. 

This dissonance between language and reality raises important questions for our electoral organizing, particularly in light of our recent vote to begin acting like an independent party. Might there be a disconnect between the way we see our work at doors and how it is actually perceived by voters? If this disconnect exists, then to what extent is it due to taking class consciousness for granted, or at least having an outdated understanding of it? And if the creation of a new party depends on cultivating some form of collective consciousness where it appears to be lacking, does the electoral sphere bear any responsibility for helping to make that happen? 

Those who see the party question as a needless complication of current electoral strategy will surely cringe at these questions. Canvassing is tough enough as it is, they will say, and hardly leaves time for discussions about policy and platform, much less worker self-understanding. There is also the fact that the broad electoral universes of our campaigns demand that we mobilize voters who would seem to be across socioeconomic and cultural lines, making the issue of cultivating a unified consciousness seem daunting at best and unwise at worst. Finally, there is the related issue of whether class consciousness is, in an age of proliferating identity-based frameworks for understanding oppression, still the most useful one, or whether a strategy oriented around a more broadly conceived populism might instead be warranted.   

These are all reasonable concerns. Yet if we are honest about the work required to form an independent party, then one thing is certain: we will not accomplish this difficult task without the electoral sphere—an essential point of contact with the general public—thinking through these challenges to play a more active part. The assumption implied by current strategy is that the mere accrual of electoral victories, coupled with the occasional win elsewhere in the organization, might be enough to transform political consciousness enough to support a new party. In truth, this trickle-down approach to consciousness building drastically overestimates the degree to which voters are able to perceive our politics as something meaningfully different from the “progressive” politics of the Democrats—particularly when we bury our candidates’ socialist affiliations in the field. This is due to the absence of class consciousness and class struggle among the voting electorate, not their presence.

What we need instead is an electoral strategy that engages more deliberately with the party project. That means, first and foremost, fearlessly celebrating our movement as much as our candidates with voters at doors. Yet it also means understanding the degree to which the liberal-individualist mindset of the Democratic party’s progressive neoliberalism holds sway over many of those voters’ political imaginations. Only then can we fully realize how little there is for the language of a more collectivist-solidaristic politics—public ownership, universal policy, mass political power, and so on—to meaningfully resonate with in these voters’ minds. With that understanding, we can begin to use our language and framings in a more strategic way to cultivate what Gramsci called a new common sense. Rooted in collectivist rather than individualist values, the new common sense would help to inoculate voters against Democratic Party liberalism while providing a solid ideological foundation for the party-building work ahead—and all while fulfilling our electoral mandates to win. 

The Fragmented State of Class Consciousness

We largely have neoliberalism to thank for the impoverished state of class consciousness in the electorate. Instituted in the 1970s as the ruling class’s answer to a crisis in capital accumulation, neoliberal policy—deregulation and privatization for the rich, decimated unions, and austerity for the rest—disciplined workers in ways that did far more than merely weaken working-class power for decades to come. In gutting unions in particular, it also robbed the working class of a crucial way in which it could recognize and understand itself as a class—much less a powerful class—at all. Unions not only embody power: they also reflect and inspire it, and weakening them meant losing this crucial demonstrative function for the public. Neoliberalism’s defunding of the public sector—from schools and hospitals to transit—has had a similar effect, depriving the public not only of important services but also of critical mirrors in which it can see itself precisely as a public—as a collective citizenry deserving of minimal care from  the state. All of this has taken place alongside the decimation of countless other communal forms of self-understanding by an array of atomizing social forces, from the rise in gig/contract labor and hyper-individualized consumerism to the atomizing effects of digital media and stay-at-home streaming culture.

The essential point is that the legacy of neoliberalism hasn’t just been to rob the voters we talk to of power over their lives: it has also been to change them, eroding the solidaristic political imaginary in ways that DSA members, the lucky denizens of a robust democratic political community, at times struggle to appreciate. As neoliberal policy has devolved political problems that were once the state’s responsibility onto the backs of workers, it has also used various forms of coercive soft power to discipline and “responsibilize” those workers into accepting the resulting burdens as normal and natural. In addition, it has trained them to see the market and not government as the proper source for solutions. This has had severe consequences for collectivist politics. As Wendy Brown writes, “citizenship, reduced to self-care, is divested of any orientation toward the common, thereby undermining an already weak investment in an active citizenry and an already thin concept of a public good.”

All of this has left voters more vulnerable to potentially divisive, less broadly universal, and solidiaristic forms of political identification—racialized divisions within the working class, for example—which have in turn led to more limited political expectations and demands. The self-serving omission of class discourse from the ineffectual and performative social justice initiatives of corporate employers and media have only further encouraged workers to understand their struggles through these circumscribed prisms. The result is different forms of social closure, whereby identity-based interest groups within the working class are led to compete against each other for limited political resources rather than uniting for the sake of mass -political power to demand more dramatic forms of redistribution.

But there is also the way class consciousness has been affected by the shifting composition of the working class itself. Traditionally associated in the cultural imaginary with white male jobs in manufacturing, today over 70 percent of the workforce is represented by the service sector. Workers of color and women now make up nearly half of this new working class. Education, or lack thereof, is no longer a proxy for class membership, since the most it can now guarantee are precarious jobs that do not translate into guaranteed socioeconomic status. And the rise of precarious labor and gig work, in which seemingly flexible working schedules mask the loss of control over real leisure time, has further obscured what it means to be working class by eroding the traditional contours of the working day. Simply put, the cultural imaginary has not caught up to these new realities, combining with the forces discussed above to leave working-class people as unlikely as ever to identify as such. These are the realities underwriting our purported class struggle elections.

A Solution for Doors: A New Common Sense

Some will claim that this frustrating reality is precisely why the goal of a unified consciousness is anachronistic and ill-suited to both party building and getting socialists elected in 2025. On top of the issues discussed above, the math of electoral majorities, they will insist, requires that we cater not just to the material concerns of working class voters, but to the cultural concerns of all manner of credentialed, managerial, and clerical workers who do not identify as working class and whose votes we need to win. The problem with this thinking is that, along with overstating the degree to which material and cultural issues are unrelated, it also abdicates any responsibility for convincing voters of this relatedness. In other words, it reduces canvassing to a superficial and uninspired task of talking to different types of voters about different “issues,” forgetting that the greater task for party-building socialists is to create some degree of commonality; it is to connect these differences to a common enemy, common cause, or common principle that can serve as the basis for what Gramsci called an “intellectual and moral unity” between allied classes. This is not “political reductionism” so much as populism. It is the creation of a new “we.” 

Yet if we concede that class consciousness no longer seems feasible as the basis of this new unity, given the realities described above, what can we turn to? What this “intellectual and moral unity” across classes requires is a more expansive conception of consciousness such as we find in another of Gramsci’s concepts: the notion of common sense. For Gramsci, a people’s common sense is “the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed” as a kind of taken-for-granted folk wisdom. In its default form, it is also inextricable from ruling class hegemony, underwritten by its ideas as a kind of broadly manufactured consent. When working people do not question the fairness of treating housing as a commodity, for example, or normalize the lack of public provisions through neoliberal notions such as “self care,” they are exhibiting a form of common sense propped up by the progressive-neoliberal hegemon. In Gramsci’s conception, our goal at doors and elsewhere would be to create an alternative common sense founded instead on, say, the deeply intuitive rightness of collective forms of ownership, decommodified public goods, and the right of workers to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. In the context of municipal elections, it would involve cultivating an intuitive sense of what Henri Lefebre called the “right to the city” as a place that, being collectively produced, should be collectively enjoyed. 

What is useful about Grasmci’s concept in relation to our electoral project is its ability to apply to any voter, regardless of their class identifications. A new working-class-inflected common sense would be anchored in part by values that anyone could possess, yet values that had been refracted through a working-class lens to the benefit of working-class struggle. For example, the idea of democracy, supported across classes yet normally understood in the limited bourgeois sense of electoralism, would be reclaimed by our candidates and canvassers to also include things like democratic control over the workplace and community. In this way, a radicalized notion of an accessible idea like democracy becomes both a unifying element for a broad cross-class alliance of voters as well as the litmus test clarifying the commitments of the party. Moreover, the concept’s evocation of the “common” reminds us that what a new party requires is the cultivation of not just a new mindset for individuals to possess but a shared collective understanding that is understood as shared and rooted in socialist principles that are themselves about sharing. It is about the construction of a new “we” that sees itself as specifically collectively deserving of the public good it also helps to produce.

But there is an even more important way that Gramsci’s concept can help our electoral and party-building work. Unlike the notion of cultivating class consciousness, which tends to be understood as an act of building something out of nothing, the notion of creating a new common sense implies the need to displace or dislodge something old as much as cultivate something new. In this sense, it is a critique of the notion of “depoliticization,” which implies that some sort of vacuum exists in the place of the old and frayed political consciousness, waiting to be filled by we, the enlightened socialist canvassers. But what we mistake as a vacuum is, of course, always also a politics, Gramsci’s notion suggests, just one whose normalization of various forms of suffering we mistake as an absence. This is the deeply embedded politics of progressive neoliberalism that we must actively dismantle.

What this means for our work at doors and elsewhere is that simply making people interested in our materialist, collectivist vision is not enough. When we stop there, we fail to ensure that it is properly disentangled from the more seemingly benign aspects of Democratic party politics from which it might seem indistinguishable. This means that we fail to ensure that we have, in Gramsci’s words, “ma[de] the governed intellectually independent of the governing.” In order to give our vision clarity, then, we must also explicitly call out and reject the politics it is meant to displace. We must “destroy one hegemony and create another,” Gramsci writes. In order for this new “we” to have clarity, we must also call out the “they.” We must name the enemy.

If we have any hope of casting our politics in the clearest possible light for voters, that is, we must call out the Democratic Party when it makes sense to do so. Otherwise, there is nothing to set our vision and our new common sense into relief and allow it to become maximally intelligible to voters. To be sure, we can continue stringing together votes and victories without doing this. But in doing so, we risk overestimating the meaning of those victories while abdicating a certain amount of commitment towards a longer-term party-building goal. What to us will look like the spread of excitement about Democratic Socialism will, to voters insufficiently separated from progressive-neoliberal hegemony, look like the election of politicians who are different in degree and not kind. And yet what we are advocating is nothing if not a difference in kind.

Of course, this new common sense would ideally also lead voters to understand something else that is critical to building democratic socialism: the power of workers to win these things for themselves. This critical aspect of socialist organizing has traditionally been an awkward fit with the individualist nature of electoral politics. Whereas in fights with bosses and landlords, we ask tenants and workers as collectives to realize the power they have to change their own lives, we speak to voters in the electoral realm as individuals and ask them to delegate that power to someone else. And whereas tenant and worker fights are about realizing power in a form that itself develops class consciousness and can persist indefinitely, voting is a solitary act that requires only the most superficial political consciousness, and one that we ask people to wield only sporadically. We thus tend to speak to voters differently than those in other terrains of struggle, removing discussions of agency and power from our conversations and framing voting in terms that have little to do with the solidaristic political imaginary that animates the rest of our politics.

As we will see below, this need not be the case. In fact, it cannot be. If we want to run anything resembling “class struggle elections” that prioritize long-term gains as much as short-term goals, then we must be devoted everywhere in our organizing—the electoral realm included—to cultivating a new “we” rooted in a new common sense that intuitively grasps its collective power—even at the ballot box. This means using the electoral arena to reinforce the powerful, solidaristic, movement-building sensibilities we cultivate elsewhere in our work. In what follows, then, I offer a framework of eight different ways that we can better and more intentionally use our conversations at doors to help in this difficult yet exciting work.   

1. Distinguish ourselves at doors. 

If we agree that building a new party requires us to displace the politics of our enemies, then we must recognize, first and foremost, the necessity of distinguishing ourselves from those enemies. This is doubly important in the wake of the second Trump victory, which has all but assured that disenchanted voters will have less tolerance than ever for politically earnest Democrats bothering them at their doors. Voter turnout has dropped off precipitously, and disillusionment is at crisis levels, something that we as canvassers experience daily. And because those voters will assume that we are Democrats (in large cities, at least), we must be prepared to thwart those expectations with a strategy that is at least moderately new in form and unabashedly socialist in content. This includes avoiding treating voters in the typical manner: as passive political subjects who exist arbitrarily in their communities as so many random tenants and workers, ever at the mercy of the politicians they bestow with power. Instead, we must treat voters in a manner befitting of our theory of power: as the active creators and owners of the urban commons whose destiny they can control by joining—and voting as a part of—our exciting movement. We must frame elections as a matter of reclaiming our communities by voting, not of voting for those who will reclaim our communities. 

2. Lead with the movement, not the candidate.

Voters expect canvassers to be at their doors pitching candidates—and in most cases, Democratic candidates. Given current levels of disillusionment with the latter, any strategy that continues to invite these associations makes questionable sense, particularly when we have something genuinely new and different to offer at doors. What makes us distinct from the Democrats is that we represent a movement, not that we represent candidates. This is why we should lead with our movement. Movements imply newness, forward motion, protean possibility. Candidates imply the possibility of yet another lost election and more failed promises. Movements can be joined and participated in. Candidates cannot. But candidates can be associated with movements and so, in order to differentiate ourselves from Democrats while satisfying our electoral mandates, we must pitch one as a function of the other. We say something to the effect of, “My name is [name] with the Democratic Socialists of America. We’re an exciting movement that’s building real power for tenants and workers in this neighborhood and we want you to be a part of it. Have you heard of [candidate]?” The mass political form of the movement becomes a natural pivot to talking about the mass political potential of a worker-centered politics in general, leaving voters with an inspirational message that far transcends the bounds of the ballot box.   

3. Create a new “we.”

By leading with our movement at doors and introducing our candidates as parts of that movement, we center something that is much more distinctive and important about our politics than the individuals we run: its collectivism—an electric mass-political formation, rooted in a sense of dignified deservedness, that voters can realize their place in. We maintain a thruline, in other words, with the socialist theory of power put into action by our other terrains of struggle by framing voting not as a solitary act done by atomized individuals to elect other individuals but as itself an expression of mass political power acting on its potential to change the world. This helps to save our electoral project from being a deradicalizing outlier forced to vote wrangle on the liberal-individualist terms of the Democrats, allowing it to instead evoke and reinforce the consciousness-building work we do elsewhere. Instead of asking voters to vote, we would ask them to realize their place in our exciting movement by voting. Instead of saying “[Candidate] will make things better!,” we say “We as working people can make things better by voting for [Candidate]!” But we would also do the crucial work of framing voting in this manner as an extension of the class-conscious mass politics that might exist elsewhere in their lives—tenant unions, worker unions, or the like. This would help to create a link between those formations and our politics in voters’ political imaginaries. All of this together would bring discussions of collective worker agency and power back into a domain that, in the interest of lowest-common-denominator vote-getting, has for too long gone without them.

4. Name the enemy.

To organize a voter into our movement is to organize them into something that exists only to the extent that they can imagine it. These are isolated individuals in their isolated homes who may or may not identify as working class and may or may not have experience or positive associations with unions, mass politics, DSA, or other left formations. We must also assume that many of these voters do not have ideologically consistent politics as we tend to imagine them having, and that the politics they do have are underwritten by the progressive-neoliberal common sense we are attempting to displace, which teaches voters to blame social ills on everything but capitalism. What this means is that while we can work to turn voters onto the materialist, working-class basis of our movement, that ideological conversion to a new common sense will, for a time at least, be incomplete, leaving its actual contours—where it stops and something else starts, whether it includes “progressive democrats” or doesn’t—at the mercy of these disparate political imaginations. This is why we must name the enemy. A new “we” made up of such diverse subject positions can continue to gain internal clarity only by having a class enemy to define itself against—only by knowing precisely what it isn’t as much as what it is. In the electoral domain, that enemy must be, along with billionaires, CEOs, and landlords, the Democratic Party. This includes races in which we run on the Democratic line: we must trust voters to understand what we mean when we say that we are running on the Democratic ticket to create a new politics from the inside out. This does not mean canvassing dogmatically and inflexibly, insensitive to the persisting allegiances that older or more rural voters in particular still have with the Democrats. But it does mean taking advantage of widespread discontent with our political parties, taking risks, and trusting that the winds of class dealignment are at the backs of socialists as well.  

5. Focus.

Insofar as our Democratic political rivals name enemies, they are many. There is racism, sexism, and ableism, ageism and anti-semitism. There is misogyny and white supremacy, the patriarchy and the prison-industrial complex. There is homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia. While Democratic Socialists fight against each and every one of these forms of oppression, we also know that it is in the interest of the hegemon to reify these concepts—to treat them as things that exist as such apart from their relation to other things, namely capitalism—in order to obscure the role the latter has played in all of them and “stop analytical work right where it should begin.” We need only think here of the way “white gentrifier” narratives, routinely perpetuated by Democratic candidates who take real estate money, inhibit voter understanding of the largely capitalist origins of neighborhood displacement and change. This is why, in order to stand out from and  displace this progressive-neoliberal politics, we must cut through the noise by repeatedly bringing the attention of voters—even more affluent ones—back to the importance of material issues. This is not to ignore more identitarian cultural concerns, which are also essential to address. It is merely to uphold our commitments to the working class by ensuring that empathy for its struggles form the heart of the new common sense. But it is also to aid in the critically important work of building the broadest possible coalition by drawing the clearest and simplest possible line in the sand. It is a line that says: in terms of the belief that all people deserve to lead a dignified life freed from basic material struggles, and the belief that those who work to create the social surplus should have a democratic say in how that surplus is spent, you are either with us or against us. We must constantly evoke this line in conversations with voters at doors. If politicians take corporate money from real estate, utilities, and others that put profits above people, they are against us. If they support the private at the expense of the public, they are against us. If they wring their means-tested hands over the affordability or feasibility of free provisions and services, they are against us. If their conception of Democracy stops at elections and does not include worker control of workplace and communities, they are against us. It is only after clarifying this line that it becomes effective to ask voters, finally: which side are you on?

6. Repeat.

The task of displacing the old common sense, with its deep roots in even the most banal corners of everyday life, will not happen without faith in the long-term work of disciplined repetition—of our language, our framings, our message. Only through this incremental work can these habitual modes of understanding be displaced by something new. It begins with our fearless embrace of Democratic Socialism itself, every mention of which gradually chips away at old stigmatized associations with Cold War and MAGA fear mongering and replaces them with our egalitarian vision, aided by its association with the faces of kind canvassers spreading a hopeful message at doors. We must also incessantly repeat the language of the public, public ownership, and public amenities in order to revive the sense of belonging to that particular “we,” deserving of basic, democratically controlled civic services and provisions. And we cannot forget the language of universalism and universal policy in order to instill the conviction that those public goods should be offered to people as nothing less than a dignified, undivided whole. Reinscribing all of these terms as anchor points in the new solidaristic political imaginary would go a long way towards instilling a new dignified deservedness to inoculate against the means-tested and merit-based compromises of the rival politics. But this new dignified deservedness must itself be cultivated and that can only come through the incessant repetition of the language of class and class framings. Only by instilling in workers and tenants a sense of their structural deprivation in the face of dignified deservedness can the normalization of austerity be overcome and more be demanded. Democratic socialism, public, universal, class—while we already use these words at doors, the idea is to be more intentional in positioning them as the essential keywords that differentiate our politics and found its common sense, pairing them with their opposites (private, means-tested, etc) to give them maximal clarity while repeating them as so many conceptual “impressions” meant to displace the old politics and serve as nodal points for the new. 

7. Talk dispossession, not high prices.

In describing work under capitalism, Søren Mau writes of the “amputated proletarian body,” cut off from the means of reproducing itself in a relationship of “transcendental indebtedness” to capital. While it would be unproductive to talk in these terms at doors, we must nonetheless find ways to remind voters that the basic indignity of material struggle in communities produced by workers yet owned by billionaires is not high prices and low wages but the condition of being repeatedly robbed. To be sure, corporate Democrats will talk about lowering rent, capping utility bills, and raising wages. Yet they will do so in an impersonal, market-friendly way that conceals the true enemies and implies that it is the rent, bills, and wages that have the agency, having allowed themselves to become too low or too high. We can counter these manipulations while adhering to our mandate to name enemies by always framing these matters as involving a victim and a villain. We don’t just fight to lower rent: we fight to stop rich landlords from profiting off of voters’ basic need for shelter. We don’t just fight to raise wages: we fight to make capitalist employers treat workers with dignity and pay a living wage. We must pull all of these different threads together into a single comprehensive picture of dispossession to emphasize the extractive power that the rich have over every corner of material life. And we must demonize the rich as people who do not work or contribute productively to the city yet live off the backs of those who do.

8. Restore a sense of the right to the commons.

Our communities are not just places where people live and work, create and play. They are themselves  the products of labor, and those that all working people—from cashiers to consultants—help to collectively produce. In that sense, we should see these communities—whether local or national—not simply as concentrations of resources, services, and amenities that are available for people to use but as a vast common that should reflect and answer democratically to the workers who make it. The public sphere is the name of one ever diminishing sector of these spaces that still at least minimally reflects this collective vision. Yet over the past half century, neoliberal policy has worked to not just steal and enclose this common by passing more and more of it into private hands; it has also been to destroy the very notion and value of the public, public belonging, and public ownership in the collective imaginary while stigmatizing what is left of it as hopelessly quaint compared to the on-demand, tailor-made utopias of private enterprise. To restore among workers of all types a deeply ingrained sense of the right to the commons is to restore a widespread belief in the public sector as such, as the name of that aspect of community life that exists as both a form of recognition of, and compensation for, workers’ collective labor on these spaces. Conversely, it is to understand the private sector as the opposite, as one of further enclosure and dispossession. And it is to understand the economic hardships associated with these continued enclosures not as some impersonal “cost of living crisis” but as the monetary expression of this dispossession. Class-conscious canvassing for things like free bus fares, free child care, public grocery stores, and social housing would mean framing these policies not just as ways to address the crisis but as ways of returning to workers more and more of the cities and communities that are already theirs. It would mean instilling a deep understanding that what these policies offer is not so much relief as restitution. But it would also mean cultivating a sense that this restitution is just the beginning, opening the door to more directly democratic forms of urban possibility woven warp and weft from worker dignity. The right to the commons, we must convey to voters, is a right to demand nothing less.

Conclusion

A new socialist party requires the creation of a new “we” founded in a worker-centered common sense. If we can no longer count on that “we” arising from class struggle alone, then we must use all of our organizational resources to help construct it by other means. The suggestions above are not meant to be prescriptive so much as to simply inspire critical thinking about how we might use language and framings in our conversations at doors to help in this discursive work. But they are also meant to be starting points in a process that should be democratic and iterative—tweaked, honed, embraced, rejected, and shared based on canvassers’ experiences in the field and the discussions among comrades that follow. All of this work would ideally be in the name of a less siloed electoral project that sees itself less as an organizational outlier, constrained by electoral convention, and more as an organic extension of the whole of DSA’s organizing. Driven by a genuine faith in the inspirational nature of our broader project, the idea would be to one day see our door knocking less as electoral canvassing per se and more as organizational canvassing about a game-changing party-building project in a way that has electoral implications. It is one idea among others. But it’s the type that we must start considering if we truly want to “destroy one hegemony and create another.”

Image Description: Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, around 30 years of age, in the early 1920s. Public domain.

Zohran Mamdani has, in recent months, led an incredible campaign for mayor of New York City, generating unprecedented levels of energy and excitement around his candidacy. But the campaign may soon be, according to some, suffering from success. While Mamdani’s mayoral campaign was meant to be chiefly an agitational run, his recent successes have generated some serious questions and debate over the problems posed to DSA as an organization if he were to win come election time. A DSA mayor of NYC would, in the words of Sid C., writing for the Socialist Tribune, “thrust DSA into a governing coalition without a mandate to govern.” This, obviously, presents us with some major problems we must reckon with sooner rather than later. 

Executive Governance

A mayor, in the vast majority of cases, represents the executive branch of the city government. The most vital of an executive’s powers are not enumerated but are inherent to the position itself. The concept of the “bully pulpit” wielded by US Presidents, who transcend their humanity and become semi-deities in the American civil religion, is no less applicable to mayors. By occupying such a central, powerful position, one becomes the complete and total representation of the political entity itself—the mayor of New York City is not merely the chief administrator of the municipal government, they also act as the human representative of the city itself, with all the burdens and complications that entails. The plus side, however, is that this naturally means the opinions of the officeholder are amplified and broadcasted to the world. It is a powerful position; some may say too powerful. There is a strong argument, well made by Bruno Leopold in Marx’s Social Republic (an excellent analysis on Marx’s conception of socialist society), that executive powers are by their nature undemocratic and that legislative supremacy (based upon the collective decisionmaking of elected and recallable representatives) of the people is a far more stable system of government. While such an office exists, however, in our deeply undemocratic society, it must be utilized to its full extent to bring power to the people as much as possible. This is all well and good—“power to the people” is an excellent slogan; it has been utilized for decades for a reason. But what does it look like? How is it achieved? 

The Socialist Strategy

In his article, Control the Bureaucrats, Marxist scholar and historian Mike Macnair demarcates a key breaking point in strategy between socialists and social democrats, as the two groups as we know them today began to diverge in the early 20th century. The battleground of this divergence was the state; subtly but vitally different understandings of the bourgeois state, its class character, and its limitations led to vastly differing strategies and conceptions of the immediate tasks and goals of the working-class movement. Social democrats have, historically, taken the modern state as a class-neutral institution—while it, under our current economic framework, is under the rule of the capitalist class, this is not inherent to the state itself. Through reform and, particularly, through winning an absolute majority in the legislature—the working class may take hold of the ready-made state machinery and utilize it to its own ends. That being said, while social democratic parties throughout much of Europe have, at various times, held absolute majorities in their countries’ respective parliaments and enacted sweeping reforms, the essential class nature of the state has remained unchanged. Even in the much celebrated social democratic Nordic states, the essential rule of the capitalist class over the economy and state has been preserved. Meanwhile, in the socialist conception of the transformation of society, a different calculation is made. This approach highlights the capitalist state as bound by its organizational form and structure to the will of the capitalist class. Instead, Macnair (and Marx before him) advocate for the total abolition, or “smashing,” of the modern state and its replacement with a socialist, working-class-led state. Such a society, perhaps best exemplified by the famous Paris Commune of 1871, would democratize all facets of public life. The workplace, industry, and the new socialist government would each be reorganized on the basis of one worker, one person, one vote. From the electoral college to unequal representation to the very structure of our workplaces and economy, the many anti-democratic elements of our current governing systems are not the markers of a broken system—they are the markers of a functioning system, one that is intended to separate the people from decision-making. Thus, any socialist strategy for operating in public office within a capitalist state must be concerned not merely with reforming the capitalist state (though this is not to discount reform, a central piece of any electoral strategy, and something Mamdani’s campaign has better messaging on than perhaps any other DSA elected in the past), but also with establishing and building democracy outside of the existing state structures. As explored in August Nimtz’s The Ballot Box, the Streets, or Both, socialist political strategy cannot rely merely on standard political avenues of decision-making, where the people are purposefully minimized in favor of a ruling elite; it must go beyond them. Executive positions, such as that of mayor, are especially capable of being utilized for these purposes.

How To Build democracy

The power of the bully pulpit, as well as the prime source of the basically undemocratic nature of the executive in government, is centered in the concept of legitimacy—the automatic legitimacy executives possess as actors grants them power far beyond those that are specifically enumerated; legitimacy that is independent of the legislative branch executives contend with. An executive represents their polity, much like a monarch is the human encapsulation of their kingdom, and this fact is enormously important to our understanding of how to function in this role. Presidents of the United States, as chief executives of the national government, have not hesitated to use this legitimacy to strengthen their office at the expense of the legislature. We must go another way; the power of the executive must be used to grant  legitimacy to new, non-governmental institutions. Socialist mayors (and socialist executives more generally) must undercut the legitimacy of the state in favor of new, directly democratic organs. 

To build new branches of government is not under the mayor’s purview—these popular institutions would thus, of course, not be a part of the government per se, but instead a set of conjoined “popular clubs.” A mayor may delegate a large portion of their power to these democratic organizations, thus building them up as a real way for people to affect change through direct participation in governance. For example, in many city governments, mayors may submit proposed laws to the city council; a socialist mayor may delegate this ability to the popular assemblies, pledging to automatically submit any measures demanded by the populace through them. Such an arrangement would serve to get citizens more actively involved in the governance process and more apt to do so through radically democratic institutions. By showing ordinary, working-class people they can actually affect the political process in ways that go beyond simply voting for candidates, we prime them to become more actively engaged on the whole, something that is absolutely necessary should we ever hope to see the working class take power. In taking such actions, mayors will not merely be executives of the city government, they will also be acting as organizers within a larger movement. By virtue of their office and of the reach of the “official statement,” the mayor-organizer has a reach and power to draw crowds far beyond that of any other single individual in the city. But this is not the only, or even the primary, reason for the establishment of the democratic assemblies. 

Crisis Periods

There come times in history during which polities undergo crisis periods, whether brought about by natural disaster, civil unrest, or social catastrophe. During these periods, standard modes of authority often break down, whether by loss of legitimacy or inability to enforce laws. It is within these periods that we observe some of history’s most wonderful experiments in democratic governance. From the Paris Commune to the Petrograd Soviet, the Shanghai Commune, the Rojava, and the Zapatistas, popular institutions occasionally are able to fill the void and pursue the interests of the majority. We have seen several crisis periods resulting from civil unrest in recent US history; from the Occupy Movement to Black Lives Matter to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, we see movements that had real public support and the potential to wield genuine power. But, in each of these cases, they did not. Why is this? 

Without a ready-made organizational form, these movements decay to the tyranny of structurelessness. Imagine how things could have gone differently were citizens endowed with ready-made procedures and methods of popular organization during these “crisis moments.” In 2020, for example, following the public murder of George Floyd, two-thirds of Americans were in support of the Black Lives Matter movement before the Democrats effectively hijacked the movement. In the years since, support for the movement has, of course, dwindled, with the sudden energy being lost to entropy. The job of socialists must be to prepare ourselves to meet and sustain popular anti-establishment energy like this—chiefly by providing organization.

Socialists elected to city office can play a role in building dissent and parallel institutions, as demonstrated by such figures as former Seattle City Councillor (and current DSA Member) Kshama Sawant, who, during her time in office, was a defender and even leader of CHAZ and an active supporter of anti-government protests. 

Assemblies of Various Types

But what form is this organization to take? History and experience provide us with various ready-made institutional frameworks, each of which comes with its own particular drawbacks and merits. At the risk of wading into the territory of utopianism, I will explore a few potential institutions a mayor-organizer could help assemble.

Workplace Representation: 

One of the most tried and true methods of socialist radical democracy, workplace representation, helps to bridge the false divide between “economic” and “public” spaces. Additionally, it could play a role in helping to massively expand union representation, getting people and their coworkers talking in protected discussions about labor issues (alongside discussions about politics in general). Representation could either be based on region, with workplaces electing delegates to either neighborhood workers’ councils, or on trade, with workplaces electing delegates to syndicates based on industry. Such assemblies, besides submitting legislation, could advise the mayor and council on labor issues and, with support and codification from a city council, even play a role in setting labor standards. 

Although such a body would be specifically rooted in the working class and have some serious disadvantages. First, workers’ councils, of course, have a controversial legacy, due in large part to their integration into the party-state of the USSR, in which they became organs not of democratic representation but mere rubber stampers of party decisions. That being said, the examples of early council governance in what became the USSR and also in various other European nations (Finland, Germany, etc.) demonstrate that councils can indeed act as democratically representative organs when given the room to do so — indeed, they can be far more radically democratic than parliamentary systems, with a right to recall and imperative mandate. The long and storied history of council democracy is explored in detail by Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen and Gaard Kets in their article Workers’ Councils and Radical Democracy: Toward a Conceptual History of Council Democracy. Madsen and Kets explore the massive impact the council system had on thinkers within and without the Marxian tradition and the salience the idea still holds as a model for the future of government, specifically highlighting how the (open, autonomous) council government “makes participation in the creation of society’s fundamental laws open and accessible to all citizens.” 

But the council system, for all its virtues and for all its storied past, still poses some potential political issues, particularly for the purposes of this strategy. For not all workers in a city are residents; in New York City, for example, 20% of employees live outside of the city. This arrangement has positive and negative sides – while it involves people living in the larger region, the “representation gap” may alienate residents. They may identify the city government as more representative of them and their interests than any sort of worker-based assembly and ultimately reject the validity of the councils. 

People’s Assemblies: 

Another, more currently “in vogue” organizational method is the People’s Assembly—a town-hall-style, directly democratic assembly. Popular assemblies are utilized by the EZLN and, closer to home, in the Occupy movement. Delegates, and executive/organizing committees may be elected by these assemblies but act on the delegate mode of representation, in which they are given explicit instructions by the assembly and expected to follow through, subject to recall and democratic oversight. This is a far cry from the sort of “representation” offered in the United States and most capitalist states, based on the trustee method of representation, in which the representative is not accountable to their constituents beyond the narrow window of the election period. Thus, a system of popular assemblies in various neighborhoods, convened on a regular schedule (say, once a month), could, in the minds of many residents, and indeed in reality, be far more representative of the masses than the city government. Several regional assemblies from different sections of the city (or, indeed, depending on population and feasibility, a single city assembly) could give common people a place to voice their complaints and make demands of their government. It would allow working-class people to get direct experience in the process of governance and democratic decision-making, an opportunity that many unfortunately never have. That can, itself, be a radicalizing process. 

Such an institution is not without flaws, however. The time constraints of a monthly meeting would inevitably exclude some people, regardless of its scheduling (though a city-wide right to be excused from work to participate in a neighborhood popular assembly could and should be a suggestion by any mayor interested in convening such meetings). Additionally, the difficulty of sustaining energy around groups such as this has been noted by many. That being said, as long as the assemblies are kept alive and routinely elect a dedicated committee of organizers, the framework can remain, hibernating, in wait for a potential crisis. 

The policing problem

All of this could be for naught, however, if the mayor-organizer cannot adequately address the problem of policing. As it currently stands, the NYPD is the largest police department in the country—then mayor Michael Bloomberg once bragged (erroneously) that it was the “7th largest army in the world.” In New York City, as in other places, the mayor is not capable of singlehandedly abolishing the police but is expected to regulate the department (making recommendations on budgeting and appointing/firing commissioners). How can a socialist, who wants to dismantle the oppressive, racist structure of US policing, stand as the chief administrator of the violence they speak against? It presents deep problems for DSA of both a moral and political character. The moral concerns with having to spearhead and represent such a blatantly racist institution should be obvious, but let us stop for a moment to consider the political angle.

Socialists are meant to serve as beacons of the working class, champions of a new, brighter future—allowing ourselves to become associated with the exercise of repressive state violence is thus not only a tough situation we must face, something we must hold our noses and carry out, it is anathema to our entire political project and a deadly threat to how we are perceived by those who elect us. Socialists, then, should take a directly oppositional stance to such institutions. But how does one do so in a way that adequately addresses the deep contradictions of serving in such a role? State representative and DSA-elected Shaun Scott has demonstrated one highly valuable path forward: presenting alternatives. In the newly opened session, Scott has brought forward a bill that would allow towns of a certain size to create non-police crisis response centers and 911 alternatives. By championing such programs on a municipal level, mayors can help people to truly think outside the narrow box of our police system. With these alternatives in the minds of constituents, a mayor should continuously distance themselves from the violence of the police, calling for defunding, an end to police unions, and an end to qualified immunity (outside of the few cities, like New York, where this has already occurred). 

In addition, some amount of local public defense may be transferred to a citizens militia—an open, volunteer-based community organization with democratic election of leadership—in short, a sort of empowered neighborhood watch. Such a system may be contrasted with traditional police departments, which, being based on long-term employment and structured under an internal bureaucracy, more closely resemble a professional army than a citizen’s guard. In Robert Leicher’s The Modern Militia, the legal and constitutional scholar explores the history of the debate between proponents of a citizens’ militia vs. a professional army. As Leicher highlights, the American Founders were highly skeptical of the concept of a standing, professional army. By establishing a caste of professional officers with their own interests separate from that of the general population, it is easy for these organizations to take on lives of their own, leading those they were meant to protect down the path of despotism. The state is inherently based upon a monopoly on (so-called legitimate) violence. By giving the right to apply that force to an organization separate from the people, the people themselves cannot be said to control the state. Only once people are empowered to defend their own communities, rather than being policed by some quasi-military organization imposed upon them, can accountability and freedom truly be possible. The importance of such forms of community self-defense to the socialist project is covered in depth within French Reformist Socialist Jean Jaurès’s 1911 text The New Army and more broadly touched upon in Engels’s Can Europe Disarm?. As Jaurès covers, the debate between the standing army and the citizens militia was not limited to North America, circa 1776. The founders’ contemporaries, other revolutionary Republicans of the 18th and 19th centuries, not to mention the democrats of ancient Greece, also railed against the professional army as a predictor of tyranny. Small wonder why, when, historically, professional armies have spelled the end of no shortage of Republican states, from the legions of Julius Caesar to the soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte. Such conspiratorial dangers can also be seen in US police departments, most notably in the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and member of the city Board of Supervisors Harvey Milk, progressives who sought to curb police violence in the city. For their trouble, they were killed by police and fire officer Dan White. Following the murder, police unions rallied around White, successfully preventing his conviction on a murder charge and reversing the fledgling reforms sought by Milk and Moscone.

Further, a mayor could, particularly in extreme cases like that of New York City, even fire current police commissioners, refusing to reappoint replacements until the policing system of the city is restructured. By consciously refusing to carry out certain repressive duties, a mayor may not be able to fully deconstruct the repressive state apparatus on their own, but they can effectively “jam the gears” of the machine. Once again, such a strategy would constitute mayors not merely contenting themselves to administer the state with a so-called “progressive” agenda, but instead actively building people power and, where possible and useful, using their position to effectively do battle with the state. Such a move would no doubt be dramatically controversial, however, in the long run, it would reintroduce concepts of police abolition and restart a much-needed conversation on a national scale. That being said, due to the extreme risk of controversy, mayor-organizers should avoid such sweeping moves without, as previously mentioned, strong,  viable alternative proposals to replace those public functions that the police are currently expected to carry out. Without a viable alternative, we run the risk of making our politics seem utopian to the average worker; broad, sweeping, unworkable, and without grounding in actual concrete proposals. If we make such proposals, however, make them loudly and often; we will help to show that the violent, much maligned status quo can be changed. No doubt such a road is perilous; one only needs to look to examples like that of the small town South Carolina mayor George Gardner, who was murdered by police following a dispute between the city government and the department that apparently included threats of defunding. Yet, DSA electeds, as “tribunes of the people,” must be ready to call out the cops, along with all forces that oppress and exploit. To confront such violent systems is, inherently, dangerous. “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn,” as said by Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panthers, “is that he is a doomed man.”

While there is little chance that a citizens militia would be able to fully supplant the police in a modern US city overnight, empowering civilians to police their own communities and giving this citywide “neighborhood watch” real responsibilities and structure, we can truly begin the long process of abolishing the police and moving towards an equitable, community-centered model. As long as demands to abolish the police are isolated, without the presence of organizations and programs the community can fall back on, we can expect to make very little progress.

Towards transformation

It may be doubted that organizations sanctioned by the city government can play a truly transformative role in the class struggle. Such concerns, I believe, are adequately answered with a close study of historical revolution. Many revolutionary bodies, from the National Guard during the age of the first French Revolution to analogous bodies during the Revolutions of 1848, popular bodies sponsored by a certain state and a certain class are quite capable of taking on lives of their own during periods of instability, given that they have autonomy from the state and sufficiently open membership. 

The other response of many to these proposals will likely be that they, while agreeable in essence, are unworkable in practice. While popular representation may be a preferable model to current forms of government, and a community militia may be preferable to militarized police forces, these proposals cannot be meaningfully implemented under capitalism and will doubtlessly provoke all manner of foot-dragging and resistance from the ruling class and their foot soldiers through legal and extralegal means. This, I think, is true. Alternative forms of administration cannot be implemented in their totality under capitalism, and any attempt to do so will doubtlessly be mired in conflict. But the job of the socialist elected official is not to broker neat and tidy class collaborationist programs and technocratic solutions. It is to sharpen the edge of class conflict, to stand unflinchingly in solidarity with the working class, and to demand rancorously, repeatedly, and unceasingly the fulfillment of the promise of democratic rule of the people, for the people, by the people. By placing such transformative demands front and center, we can expand the imagination of constituents and bring us one step closer to those demands’ realization.

Image Description: Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park on Oct 27th 2024. Image taken by Bingjiefu He.

On May 26th, Marcos Henrique and Lucas Segobia, both skilled workers here in Maine, were abducted by ICE on their way to work at 6am. They are being held at Twin Bridges Facility in Wiscasset on no charges, and they fear removal from the state and deportation. As of this report, a representative stated that the men were informed they would be moved shortly. If and when they are, it will be hard for their legal representatives to locate them. This is how the government disappears people.

In response, there was a press conference today, May 30th, at 10 AM in front of Portland City Hall. Roughly 100 people showed up on short notice to show support, along with local news outlets. Those who spoke included friends, family, and coworkers of the two who were abducted.

When neither of Lucas or Marcos showed up for work on Monday morning, loved ones tried to locate the pair for over 36 hours. In that process of calling Border Patrol, ICE detention Centers, Local prison facilities, and using the ICE locator page, family members were misled and lied to multiple times before they were located. Worse, Marcos and Lucas were lied to about where they were, believing they were in Portland when they were in Wiscasset. Every person in this country has a right to due process and habeas corpus. To waive the rights of people based on their immigration status is not just an attack on the immigrant community, it is an attack on everyone. We must bring Lucas and Marcos home to their friends and family. 

People’s Inclusive Welding, Southern Maine Worker’s Center, Maine DSA, and more are desperately urging the Maine community to contact their representatives, both locally, statewide, and nationally, to express outrage at this miscarriage of justice. 

The post Two Men Abducted by ICE in Maine appeared first on Pine & Roses.

By Ecosocialist WG member Jordan Lewis

Transit isn’t just a nice-to-have; someone in your community relies on it, and they deserve better service.

In anticipation of Oregon’s once-a-decade Transportation Package, which decides transportation spending priorities for the years ahead, Portland DSA boarded TriMet’s busiest bus and train routes to survey actual daily riders. Our goal was to learn the needs of those who depend on transit so we could best advocate for them in state deliberations over the transportation package. We felt riders were not advocated for in these negotiations, as proceedings tended to center lane expansion projects and a “back to basics” framing over any kind of transit service improvements. This was confirmed when the Oregon Transit Association warned of coming service cuts if the existing STIF Payroll tax were not raised from 0.1% to 0.5% (early drafts of the package proposed a mere 0.18% STIF rate).

“My commute time to work used to be 15 min to the Portland VA when the 64 still existed. Now my commute time is 1 hour with transfers even though I live 15 min driving distance from work. This has been an abysmal change that has made my workdays so much harder […] It doesn’t help that I am also disabled with constant chronic pain, to add to how difficult my life has become since this bus schedule was unnecessarily changed.”

The Ecosocialist Working Group, itself composed of many regular transit riders, recognized Elite Projection in how media, local and state governments told stories about public transit. While they describe our buses and trains as “Portland’s largest homeless shelter”, with otherwise fine service interrupted by homelessness on the streets and on trains, our membership did not think that was the whole story. Our suspicions were supported by Trimet’s own Attitude & Awareness Survey (A&A) which did report safety concerns twice as common as cleanliness or service concerns, but whose demographic data showed a non-representative sample. 66% (!) of A&A respondents had Bachelors Degrees or higher; 24% had the option to work fully-remote.

It is our belief that the A&A survey, which was distributed via advertisement, mail and e-mail to those already on TriMet’s internal contact lists, oversampled professional office workers who may not ride as much post-pandemic. Our survey was designed to be distributed in-person, either digitally or with pen and paper, to those riding the bus, MAX or streetcar during rush hour or on weekends. We thought this approach would better represent the average TriMet users who rely on it as a public service. We surveyed every “Frequent Service” transit route in the city of Portland in order to maximize response rate, and we selected sessions geographically in order to distribute surveys evenly across the city. We did not collect any identifying data other than ZIP Code, regularity of riding and Transit route (due to data privacy concerns), but the geographic distribution seemed very even across the city. In total, we canvassed 340 riders from 65 zip codes, across 33 transit routes. While 11% of our respondents rode less than once per week, 40% of “Attitude & Awareness” respondents rode less than once per month.

The survey findings did not totally contradict the A&A survey; most riders still listed passenger behavior as their most common negative experience, but poor stop shelter conditions trailed it by a few percentage points. When increased service frequencies were offered alongside increased outreach workers, the same riders who reported feeling unsafe preferred increased frequencies.

“Specific to the 77, more frequency. Overall unpleasant conditions at stops makes the experience waiting at the bus uncomfortable. I ride with my toddler and there is often human feces and drug paraphernalia. Lack of marked well lit crosswalks at stops also means I get off further than I would like to so that I can feel safer crossing at night.”

Our theory as Ecosocialists is that ridership follows service quality just as much as it follows homelessness rates. A strategy to improve transit service, both for current riders and for potential new ones, must prioritize increased service frequency, cleaning/maintenance of shelter facilities, and an increased presence of unarmed rider ambassadors to de-escalate difficult situations onboard.

“Most buses downtown have incredibly difficult disabled access. trimet security and police intimidate and harass people and delay trips and make riders feel unsafe. NARCAN. security should be public safety such as narcan, not policing fare.”

All of these improvements require an increase in funding to agencies like TriMet through raising the STIF Payroll Tax to at least 0.5% by 2030, and ideally to a full 1% by 2035.

The next steps are to lobby for these changes, both through discussion with state representatives and senators, and during the public testimony opportunities which are as-of-yet unannounced. The Package (now known as TRIP) is still under discussion, and so the specifics of the Bill have not yet been revealed, though a draft was released in early April and a controversial May memo has not inspired much confidence. Move Oregon Forward has an email form through which you can contact state officials with influence over the bill. Ecosocialist WG member Jordan Lewis has reserved a public communications slot at Portland City Hall at 9:30 AM on June 11, which he will use to present the findings of this report to city council.

You can view or download the full report here (PDF, 854KB):

“We need more seating and shelters at more stops, it sucks to have to stand at a stop while waiting for a ride.”

The post Ecosocialist Working Group Releases Transit Rider Survey Report appeared first on Portland DSA.

Before the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) as we know it existed, New York City’s bus system was an amalgamation of private bus companies that operated on a franchise basis – they had contracts with the city detailing where they could run and what fares they could charge.

One such private company was Fifth Avenue Coach (FACO). It had a monopoly on most of upper Manhattan and all Bronx routes, and was staffed by TWU Labor. In the early 1960s, real-estate mogul and transit poacher Harry Weinberg orchestrated a hostile takeover of FACO’s board. He purchased a majority of its shares and coordinated a proxy faction (who included Roy M. Cohn, lawyer for THAT Senator Joseph McCarthy) that installed him as Chair. Transit labor knew Weinberg had a past of taking over transit systems, keeping their real estate holdings, then offloading the systems to their cities or states but benefiting from the real estate gains, as he did in Dallas, Scranton, and Honolulu. His goal as a capitalist was not to provide quality public transportation to the public, but to use quasi-public transportation services as a tool of private capital accumulation.

New York Times, Feb 2, 1962

In New York, Weinberg announced a reorganization plan that included layoffs of 800-1,500 workers, elimination of most night and weekend service, and a halt to pension payments. He also wanted to increase the fare from 15 to 20 cents (about $1.45 to $1.90 in today’s dollars) and re-instate a 5 cent transfer between lines (note: when they eliminated the free transfer just months before, the company thought it would put their books in the black; instead, ridership plummeted).

The TWU saw right through Weinberg’s capitalist ploy. In February, they authorized a strike should Weinberg make cuts or layoffs. At that meeting, TWU president Micheal J. Quill said he would like to see the city take over the whole company.

He would get his wish.

On the morning of March 1st, 1962, Weinberg laid of 29 TWU fare collectors, doorman, and watchmen, all of whom were unable to drive because of age, injury, or illness. The TWU stopped work on all FACO lines by 5pm that day.

More photos here: http://www.twulocal100.org/story/60-years-ago-fight-survival-and-birth-mabstoa

Mayor Wagner meanwhile wasted no time condemning Weinberg for precipitating a strike and threatening cuts, layoffs, AND a fare increase. Within 2 days he moved with the Board of Estimate and the state Legislature  to condemn FACO’s buses and garages and seize them for municipal use.

On March 8th, the Board of Estimates striped FACO of 80% of its franchises.
On March 15 & 19th, the state assembly and senate passed the bills needed for the city to condemn and seize FACO’s garage/maintenance properties and rolling stock.
By the end of the month, under the newly created Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA), the buses were back online (repainted to city colors) and strikers went back to work as public employees.

The state, neither before nor since, has never moved so quickly in public transit. Perhaps this is because public sector workers are no longer legally able to strike under the Taylor Law, which severely curtails the strength Labor has as an organized body to defend not only their rights, but the rights of the public.

History taken from From a Nickel to a Token (2016) by Andrew J. Sparberg.

What We Did

As we close the book on another NPEC term, I’d like to use one of my last acts as chair to recap the past year, debrief how we did, and preview what’s to come.  

The centerpiece of this term was NPEC’s inaugural National Capital Reading Group (CRG).  This ambitious project was our first foray into reading a foundational socialist text at a national level.  The Reading Group divided Capital Vol. 1, into several monthly sections, where we would meet on Zoom to have rotation facilitators review key ideas and discuss.  We also provided our guide so that chapters or regions could have their own Capital reading group.  Our kickoff event had over 500 RSVPs in October. While there was a dropoff, like any reading group, we did have a good number of members make it to the final session at the end of February. We feel that the CRG went so well, we will make it an annual tradition, and would like to adopt the format to other foundational socialist texts.  

Chapter Support

Our Chapter support subcommittee continued on its mission by mentoring 20 chapters and multiple trainings, including how to have a socialist night school, talking to non-socialists, and our how to have a childwatch in your chapter.  

Curriculum 

We published two new modules this term: Race and Capitalism in the United States: An Introduction and Fascism and the American Right. Next term, we are committing to publishing even more modules while revamping our old modules with new readings, materials, and resources for chapter to political educators to use out of the box.  We are also excited to share that our modules will be moving to a DSA Moodle shortly.  

Events 

They had a very active term, producing 4 of their typical mass calls while venturing into new territory and planning the first series of national foundational calls in collaboration with the NPC.  Events also lent a hand with the Capital Reading Group, the annual Educators’ Conference, and other NPEC mass calls.  You can find recordings of these events and series on the DSA YouTube.  

Comms and Podcast

We democratized our podcast production to expand the scope of topics while maintaining quality, producing 13 episodes. The Class podcast has grown its listenership by over 10,000 downloads in the past year, moving past 26,000 this past month. Our newsletter Redletter, is also gaining popularity through its quality and pertinent information about political education in DSA. It is read by an average of 3,600 members monthly this term.  

Meeting Goals 

At the beginning of this term, we set some goals about the content, events, and materials we’d like to produce this year. I wanted to reflect on those goals to highlight the ones we met and put a pin in what we can strive for this coming term.  

• We had the ambition to create several new trainings and how-tos geared at new and at-large members, along with developing chapters. A new facilitation and how-to start a political education training will debut soon, after the member surge in the wake of the 2024 election. We did implement our national foundations call in conjunction with the NPC and help wrangle DSA 101 and new member resources. So, we didn’t check all our boxes, but we did get some important ones marked, especially those that met the moment. 
• Resources depot This is halfway met. Over the past term, we have gathered many new and diverse chapter-created materials, but we haven’t yet sorted, categorized, and posted those on the resource page. 
• Democratic Socialists of America: A Graphic History, which we helped the DSA Fund produce, is finished and available digitally. As of this writing, a Kickstarter campaign will soon launch to produce physical copies. NPEC’s next step is to possibly make an accompanying lesson plan for chapters to utilize along with the Graphic History.
• The Spanish translations of our foundational modules are complete and can be found here. It went down to the wire, but NPEC was able to complete our initial goal of offering our materials in more languages. With a language justice and accessibility resolution up for debate at this year’s convention, we look forward to having a wider and more diverse set of translated materials.  
• We wanted to continue to have contact with every chapter, no matter the size, to see if they are doing political education and how we can help them better facilitate their programs.  The goal of reaching every chapter and getting their status still eludes us, but our yearly survey, which we sent out many times and worked with the NPC to circulate it, had the most interactions of any term. With that, we could work with large and established chapters like Philly down to Organizing Committees like Alachua County in Florida. NPEC and our Chapter Support subcommittee will continue our outreach through every avenue at our disposal to reach out and communicate with chapters.
• Through an NPC resolution after the 2024 election results, we were asked to put on another round of socialist foundations mass calls. This was an excellent opportunity to meet one of our goals and revamp the program with the participation of our national co-chairs. These calls were well attended and are now on DSA’s YouTube.  
• The Capital Vol. 1 Reading Group was the feather in our cap this past term. It created the most buzz of any event that NPEC has put on, with over 200 members attending our kick-off event. Along with reading a seminal socialist text, the reading group made many members aware of our committee and offerings.  There was a drop off like any reading group, but especially one of this density. Still, we finished with a solid core and built the foundations to make this an annual event while providing the blueprints to do it with other essential readings.  
• We also hosted a second national reading group for Eric Blanc’s recently released book, We Are the Union, in collaboration with the DSA’s National Labor Commission, YDSA, and EWOC.  This strong collaboration led to one of our best-attended calls, with over a thousand people turning in for the launch call that featured Eric Blanc, labor writer Kim Kelly (author, Fight Like Hell), and Moe Mills of Starbucks Workers United. The Recap Call featured Jane Slaughter of Labor Notes and Jaz Brisack, an original organizer of Starbucks Workers United, to discuss their impressions of the book with the author, Eric Blanc.  

Next Term

NPEC members came together and democratically decided our goals for the future in our 2025 Consensus Resolution. After meeting our charter goals from Resolution 33 at the 2019 Convention, we outlined how we will continue improving our current fair and what we strive to do next to keep developing political education in DSA, thereby shaping the future of DSA as we grow and develop as an organization. 

• Expanding our volunteer and contributor pool of members
• Structurally, shore up our place as a dynamic national committee with an increase in budget and staff time
• Add depth and width to our media offerings and member outreach
  • Expanding the scope of topics and increasing the frequency of our podcast Class
  • Creating more video content for DSA’s YouTube channel
  • Ensuring that our Educators’ Conference is held regularly throughout the term. 
• Continue to expand and improve our curriculum offerings
  • 4 new Socialist Night School Modules
    • Democracy, Civil Society, and Socialist Politics
    • What is Internationalism for Socialists?
    • Socialist Analyses of Nativism and Racism
    • Socialist Feminisms & Gender Liberation
  • Refine and improve past modules for use in Socialist Night Schools
  • Found a Party School to be used in conjunction with the Growth and Development Committee’s hard skills trainings
  • A Socialist Sprouts curriculum for children, parents, and caregivers
  • The Capital Reading Group will continue annually, with the prospect of offering more reading groups for other critical socialist readings.  

Seattle DSA Condemns Anti-Trans Police Violence in Cal Anderson Park

APPROVED FOR RELEASE 25 MAY 2025

Seattle DSA strongly condemns the violent police riot that occurred yesterday, during which officers assaulted, peppered sprayed and arrested protestors and bystanders including DSA members as they peacefully exercised their 1st Amendment rights to demonstrate against a bigoted anti-trans hate rally in Cal Anderson Park hosted by an out-of-state astroturf group.

It is egregious that the city and state would use public resources to protect a hate rally. Sending in law enforcement to attempt to provoke, arrest and injure Seattleites advocating for a city free from discrimination and hatred is disgusting.

We condemn Mayor Bruce Harrell for using the police to target queer protestors in one of Seattle’s gayest neighborhoods, and call on every local elected official to condemn these actions by police and investigate how this hateful, bigoted event was ever allowed to take place.

Today is a shameful reminder that the state has chosen to side with hatred and discrimination, and the police will always come down on the side of those who seek to attack and erase us. Seattle DSA will always stand with the trans and queer community – an attack on one is an attack on all.

Seattle DSA Statement on Those Arrested at Cal Anderson Park

APPROVED FOR RELEASE 26 MAY 2025

This past Saturday, 24 May 2025, twenty-three Seattle community members were arrested after the Seattle Police Department and Washington State Troopers violently attacked protestors exercising their constitutionally protected free speech to tell the anti-queer, transphobic, anti-choice astroturf group MayDayUSA their hate is not welcome here. Seattle DSA condemns this recent exercise of state violence and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s equivocating statement on the events of last week as he attempts to absolve himself of responsibility.

While several of the arrested were soon released, many remained in jail over the weekend under false, trumped-up charges including felony assault. Among these political prisoners are close comrades of Seattle DSA, individuals with deep ties to our community who have been active in the wider movement for a just, collectively liberated world.

This uncalled-for attack at the hands of the police and courts will not go unchallenged by Seattleites as we face many mounting crises, an increasingly hostile Mayor and City Council, and a growing recognition that politics-as-usual is a dead-end. Seattle DSA stands with our queer and trans neighbors as they fight for their liberation from both the violence of cisheteropatriarchy and the many violences of capitalism, and we stand with political prisoners who fight for justice and freedom.

As we mark the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and the summer of uprisings it sparked, we have seen demands for police accountability and disarmament as well as prison abolition be met with further police impunity, more police funding, and an ever-growing prison-industrial complex. Time and time again marginalized communities have borne the brunt of state violence in defense of an untenable status quo, communities including our BIPOC, queer, unhoused, migrant, and low-wage neighbors. And time and time again these communities have risen up to declare this situation unbearable and fought back.

We demand charges be dropped for the Cal Anderson Defendents and for Bruce Harrell to immediately resign. Seattle DSA further continues to demand for the end of prisons and police militarization as tools of domination and capitalist exploitation along with the wider structural violence of racism, settler colonialism, and imperialism that underlie them.

Without justice, there can be no meaningful peace. And attack on one is an attack on all.

Upcoming Events

Tuesday, May 27 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tech Reading Group (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Tuesday, May 27 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.):  Da Vinci Code Reading Group – Day 2 (In person at 1916 McAllister and Zoom)

Wednesday, May 28 (7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.):  Maker Wednesday (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, May 29 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Ecosoc Vision and Strategy (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, May 29 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Immigrant Justice Working Group (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, May 31 (6:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.):  Chapter Movie Night: A Screening of Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) (In person at Carr Auditorium, SF General Hospital, 22nd St)

Sunday, June 1 (5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Capital Reading Group (In person at 1916 McAllister and Zoom)

Monday, June 2 (5:50 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Socialist in Office + Electoral Board Meeting (Zoom)

Monday, June 2  (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Ecosocialist Biweekly Meeting (Zoom)

Monday, June 2 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board Meeting (Zoom)

Wednesday, June 4 (6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): New Member Happy Hour (In person at Zeitgeist, 199 Valencia)

Thursday, June 5 (5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.):  Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)

Saturday, June 7 (1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Outreach and Training (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, June 7 (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Know Your Rights Canvassing (Location TBD)

Monday, June 9 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.):  Tenderloin Healing Circle (In person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate)

Monday, June 9 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Events & Actions

Maker Wednesday

Join us for Maker Wednesday on May 28 from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.! Come make some art and connect with comrades. All are welcome, see you there!

Visioning an Ecosocialist San Francisco

Join us for “Visioning an Ecosocialist San Francisco” this Thursday, May 29 6:00-8:00 p.m.! We’ll meet in-person at 1916 McAllister to imagine, brainstorm, strategize, and plan our ecosocialist future.

Move Night: Soy Cuba

The Labor Board and Immigrant Justice Working Group are excited to announce our upcoming Spanish Language Movie Night! As part of our desire to improve our Spanish, learn more about Marxist movements in Latin America, and connect with the Spanish speaking community of San Francisco, we are going to be showing “Soy Cuba,” an 1964 international co-production of Cuba and the USSR. We are planning on having food, so please RSVP so we can know how much food to order. We will be watching at the Carr Auditorium at SF General, Saturday, May 31 from 6-8:30 p.m. Invite your friends, eat snacks, and sharpen your knowledge of Spanish and Marxism in Latin America. Hope to see you there!

Socialist in Office Reportback

At the Socialist in Office meeting on May 19, the electoral board discussed several items

• Land use permitting reforms being pushed by the Mayor which threaten gentrification of districts in the City like Calle 24
• A debrief on on the Four Pillars hearing. Notably, SFPD admitted to not being able to solve the underlying issues surrounding drug overdoses.
• Proposed ordinance from Jackie Fielder preventing unhoused families from evictions from shelters for at least a year
  • The board is organizing a contingent for a rally in support of the hearing on the resolution on June 9 at City Hall. Keep an eye on the calendar for full details and a link to the RSVP which will be posted shortly.

If you would like to be involved in these conversations, join the electoral board on Mondays at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom and find us on Slack at #electoral-discussion.

EWOC Fundamentals Training Reportback

Behind the Scenes

The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.

To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.

While the conclusion of the 2024 election season offered most DSA chapters an opportunity to pause, reflect on their campaigns, and regroup ahead of the following electoral cycle, special elections called in Oakland immediately launched East Bay DSA back into action. The recall of Oakland’s mayor and the election of the District 2 Councilmember to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors created two vacancies to be filled in an April special election.

Both elections were pivotal for political control of local government in Oakland, as progressive wins in both races were necessary to secure a progressive majority. The left quickly coalesced behind a single candidate in each race: former Representative Barbara Lee for Mayor and housing policy director Kara Murray-Badal for District 2. Lee, both a progressive icon and a longtime mainstay of East Bay politics, was easily able to assemble a broad coalition of support ranging from the left to the establishment and from labor unions to the business community, and faced only former Councilmember Loren Taylor, an arch-centrist figure in Oakland politics who narrowly lost the 2022 mayoral election and subsequently emerged as a leader in the recall movement.

But despite her progressive credentials, most notably being the only member of Congress to vote against the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Lee is not a socialist and East Bay DSA did not intervene in the mayoral race. Murray-Badal, on the other hand, is not only a socialist but a once-active member of East Bay DSA, having founded the chapter’s Racial Solidarity Committee and organized for Medicare for All as a canvass lead. Members of the chapter were enthusiastic about her run, and the chapter voted overwhelmingly to endorse her.

It was, however, clear that Murray-Badal faced a much greater challenge. Her main opponent, environmental policy advisor Charlene Wang, started with a financial and name recognition advantage, having run only a few months prior for the at-large position on City Council. Wang also benefited from being able to position herself between the progressive and moderate wings of local politics, aided by the presence of candidates to her right such as Harold Lowe and Kanitha Matoury. Murray-Badal would need to rely on a strong field operation through her core coalition of labor unions and progressive organizations to win.

Immediately following our chapter’s endorsement in February, we began to co-host and support canvasses on a weekly basis. In total, we held or supported eight weekend canvasses, three weeknight canvasses, and one phonebank, in addition to conducting turnout phonebanks and textbanks during the week, knocking nearly three thousand doors in the process. We developed a strong relationship with the Murray-Badal campaign, and multiple DSA members served as campaign staff.

Ultimately, though, our efforts were unsuccessful. Wang won the election, leading with 47% of the vote to Murray-Badal’s 34% in the first round and winning 59% to 41% after ranked-choice voting.

Electoral analysis

District 2 is in many ways a microcosm of Oakland as a whole, exemplified not least by its demographic makeup. A racial and socioeconomic gradient spans the district; the hills in the north are mostly white and wealthy, while the communities in the flatlands, closer to the shore, are overwhelmingly non-white and working-class. Wang won both extremes, while Murray-Badal won the diverse and mixed-income center of the district, in particular Cleveland Heights and most of the Eastlake neighborhood. In Crocker Highlands, the wealthiest part of the neighborhood, Wang won easily and Murray-Badal finished third behind centrist candidate Harold Lowe. Wang was strongest in Chinatown, the westernmost part of the district, and also performed well in San Antonio in the southeast, a neighborhood which notably awarded Trump his best performance in Oakland last November with over 20% of the vote.

A precinct-level estimate of the results after ranked-choice calculations produces a similar map, though with Wang flipping one precinct and improving significantly on her result in Crocker Highlands thanks to the distribution of Lowe’s second-choice votes.

Examining turnout at the precinct level most clearly demonstrates the gradient described earlier. While some San Antonio precincts saw turnout below 20%, a whopping 64% of Crocker Highlands voters cast ballots, a particularly high figure for an off-cycle special election. Turnout disparities between wealthier and poorer areas are obviously commonplace, but they are exacerbated in lower-turnout scenarios such as special elections.

Takeaways

The trichotomy between conservative wealthy areas, progressive middle-income areas, and conservative poor areas is not unique to this election; rather, it reflects voting patterns commonly encountered by progressive and socialist candidates across the country and indicates an issue we must tackle if we are to be more electorally successful. We must expand beyond our base of college-educated, downwardly-mobile young people and make inroads among working-class communities that have been ignored by campaigns and political organizations and often move toward reactionary politics as a result. Toward this end, East Bay DSA’s Electoral Committee plans to undertake deep canvassing campaigns in areas such as West Oakland and East Oakland, inspired by and hopefully in collaboration with left-wing community organizations such as the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment which are successfully building bases in these areas.

Internally, too, there is work to be done. While there was a core group of consistent volunteers throughout the campaign, most chapter members did not engage with the campaign, and some even expressed opposition to participating in the campaign or electoral politics in general. Getting more members on board with engagement in elections will be crucial to building our capacity and strength as an organization. Additionally, our decision to hold canvasses every weekend may have dampened attendance at each canvass, especially considering our limited capacity to turn out members on a weekly basis; for future campaigns, we are considering instead hosting a smaller number of canvasses but concentrating turnout efforts on those few canvasses to maximize impact.

But while we lost the election, our efforts were still fruitful for East Bay DSA and our electoral organizing, both internally and externally. Our canvasses and phonebanks provided valuable campaign experience and leadership development to members, growing the Electoral Committee’s core and preparing us for future campaigns. 

Antonio G, co-chair of East Bay DSA's Electoral Committee, put it this way: “The campaign was an outlet for local political agency. Kara’s campaign and values were for some new members the perfect starting point to connect with strangers and organize in community."

Our consistent involvement made us one of the strongest components of the Murray-Badal campaign’s coalition, strengthening our relationship with allied organizations and the broader left in the East Bay. While we have much room to grow, learn, and improve, this experience has helped us as we look toward 2026 and beyond.