River Valley DSA is proud to announce that our candidates for local office in Agawam and Amherst, Tom Hendrickson and Jill Brevik, have won their elections. Tom is a tireless fighter for the working-class of Agawam who has spent his time in office fighting for green energy, public school funding and government transparency. Jill is […]

Happy Halloween, socialists! Have fun out there tonight, and if you're dressed up as a zombie, remember only to eat the rich.

Soon enough, it'll be back to business: for the next couple weeks, we'll be getting ready for our annual chapter convention on Sunday, Nov. 16, at the Old Labor Hall (46 Granite St.) in Barre. There, we'll elect new officers and set priorities for 2026.

No event plays a bigger role in shaping the direction of our chapter's work. We need your attendance!

And if you're a member, you still have time to declare your candidacy for an officer position or to submit a resolution or bylaws amendment. We'd like to receive proposals by Nov. 3 in order to give ourselves time to put together a convention bulletin.

RSVP here. We'll start with a potluck at 11 a.m. Carpools will be available. See our flyer and a couple photos from last year below.

Meanwhile, those of you who live in Burlington may have heard that GMDSA member Marek Broderick has announced his bid for reelection as Ward 8's city councilor. If you missed the launch party last week at Folino's Pizza, you can learn more about Marek's campaign on his website.

Below, you'll find a smaller-than-usual calendar of GMDSA committee meetings. That's because all of our committees must be reauthorized annually at the chapter convention: after Nov. 16, we technically don't know which committees will or won't exist.

If you want to create a new one, you can do so by submitting a resolution. You can email us here if you need any help writing one or have any other questions about the convention. See you on Nov. 16!

GMDSA MEETINGS & EVENTS
🚲 Our Urbanism Committee will meet on Monday, Nov. 3, at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

🧑‍🏭 The next meeting of our Labor Committee will take place on Monday, Nov. 10, at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

🔨 Talk about your job and learn about shop-floor organizing from peers at Workers' Circle (co-hosted by the Green Mountain IWW) on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month, including Nov. 12, at 6 p.m. at Migrant Justice (179 S. Winooski Ave., Burlington).

‼️ Again, our annual chapter convention will take place on Sunday, Nov. 16, at Barre's Old Labor Hall (46 Granite St.) at 11 a.m.

STATE AND LOCAL NEWS
📰 Burlington band Marxist Jargon has released a new album, to each according to their needs.

📰 The Vermont State Employees' Association staged a demonstration in Waterbury against Gov. Scott, who has ordered the state's remote workers to return to the office by Dec. 1.

COMMUNITY FLYERS

By: Jane Slaughter

This article represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of The Detroit Socialist or Metro Detroit DSA as a whole.

A hot take on Zohran Mamdani’s win: Zohran won while leaning into socialism, not downplaying it.

Partly this wasn’t his choice: the media picked up on his DSA membership and hammered him with it. But over the course of the campaign, Zohran actually became more outspoken about being a democratic socialist as he went along, far more than just having the DSA logo on his literature.

Does this mean that the million New Yorkers who voted for Zohran are all pro-socialist? No, but it does mean that they weren’t scared off by Zohran’s allegiance to socialism — and that they appreciated his honesty and forthrightness, his refusal to back off and start using weasel words.

“I am young. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this,” he said in his victory speech.

That’s similar to Bernie in 2016 and 2020. Bernie’s version of socialism often seemed to be synonymous with the New Deal (so, not actually getting rid of capitalism) — but people appreciated his consistency over the years and, again, his refusal to let the red-baiters back him off.

Around the country, DSA often backs candidates who are kind of progressive but don’t openly identify as socialists. We call their campaigns “socialist” because we’re supporting them, but their platforms aren’t distinguishable from any good-government pol–certainly not rising to the level of the life-changing planks of Zohran’s platform. (Imagine what it would mean for an average family to suddenly be able to get free childcare! To have their rent frozen! To get to work reliably on time! It’s still capitalism, but it does inspire ordinary people to think they matter.)

For me, Zohran’s win means we can be bolder in our electoral runs. We don’t have to hide our socialist light under a bushel. We can lift our constituents’ aspirations higher.

Zohran didn’t talk about the “middle class.” He talked to the working class.

BUILD IT FOREVER

Another crucial point about the campaign (and there are many) is that Zohran explicitly asked his army of volunteers not to just go home and rest after Election Day. “This is part of a lifelong struggle,” he told his volunteers. “Not an electoral one. You have joined a movement for the rest of your life. Now, however you want to be a part of that movement is your decision, just as long as you continue to be a part of it.”

That will be the hard part–convincing tens of thousands of people that they have a part to play in winning the Zohran agenda, and finding meaningful ways for all those people to participate now that the canvassing is done. Not him, us!

Several New York DSAers have floated ideas for how that could happen:

“Rather than disbanding his massive volunteer machine after November 4 — as is the norm in electoral operations — Zohran’s team could transition it into a broader organizing apparatus to help secure his agenda under the banner of a broad new campaign, something like a Movement for an Affordable New York (MANY).” — Eric Blanc, Wen Zhuang and Emily Lemmerman

“We propose the formation of a proto-party like what Mayor Bernie Sanders built in Burlington — a place where tens of thousands of volunteers can go to keep organizing beyond the November election.” — Jeremy Gong and Oren Schweitzer

“A group of unions and community organizations came together to form a citywide alliance called the People’s Majority Alliance — to be ready to go into the streets, to lobby the city council and state legislature, and to keep up the organizing we need to bring a bold agenda into being.” — Stephanie Luce

“This is a great moment to get serious about organizing thousands of workers who want a union and don’t have one.” — Brandon Mancilla

Some of their ideas are more exciting than others. We sure don’t want to replicate the tired formula of an NGO-driven “table” where the heads of nonprofits meet to speak on behalf of their supposed (unorganized) constituents. I hope and assume NYC DSA is aggressively recruiting those who volunteered on the campaign–and will invent creative campaigns both for them and for tens of thousands of other New Yorkers. I stand in awe of their audacity in beginning this campaign and their skill in growing it huge.

Finally, just a quote from Zohran Mamdani, who cited Eugene Debs in his victory speech: “The truth is as simple as it is nonnegotiable: we are all allowed freedom. Each one of us, the working people of this city, the taxi drivers, the line cooks, the nurses, all those seeking lives of grace, not greed — we all get to be free.”

Jane Slaughter is a member of Metro Detroit DSA and a retired Editor for Labor Notes.

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Zohran Won While Leaning into Socialism, Not Downplaying It was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Democratic Socialist Kelsea Bond was just elected to the Atlanta City Council. Kelsea is a long-time DSA member and organizer. For many years, they have worked closely with local labor unions to expand workers’ rights on picket lines, at sip-ins and community meetings, in marches, and inside and outside of the State Capitol. They have canvassed for reproductive justice and advocated for the City to fund life-saving abortion care. They have fought to Stop Cop City and instead fund public services, build affordable housing, and expand mass transit. Our Chapter is immensely proud of their victory, as well as the work of the hundreds of volunteers and Atlanta DSA members who made this historic win possible.

For months, our members knocked doors and talked to District 2 residents about the issues that matter to working people — affordable housing, green public transit, and an economy for the 99%. The success that came from this massive effort proves that these bread-and-butter issues are broadly and deeply popular — even here in the deep south, even in a city whose government too often bends to corporate interests and the capitalist class.

This people-powered campaign was about standing up to billionaire commercial property owners who aren’t paying their fair share in taxes, and colluding landlords who are jacking up our rent year after year. It was about closing Atlanta’s wealth gap, which is one of the highest in the nation, by fighting for workers’ rights and a guaranteed living wage. It was about protecting the trans and immigrant members of our community, who are under attack by the fascist Trump administration and the Republican-controlled State government.

It was about building greener, more resilient city infrastructure that can withstand climate disaster and make Atlanta a more convenient and affordable place to call home. It was about ensuring that no Atlanta resident is without housing, healthcare, and a truly democratic say in how our city is run. We plan to continue our fight for working-class Atlantans alongside proud DSA member and Atlanta City Councilmember Kelsea Bond this spring, and we’re bringing the movement into City Hall with us.

Help us maintain our momentum and continue our work to make Atlanta more affordable, equitable, and safe for the 99%. This election is only the beginning. From here, we’ll continue relentlessly organizing to build a mass movement for working people.

Get involved today with Atlanta DSA to be a part of this fight, and win the socialist future workers deserve: atldsa.org/organize

The Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are joining local union leaders in calling on the Milwaukee Common Council to include a raise for city workers in the upcoming city budget.

The call comes after members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union working across multiple departments in the city of Milwaukee said they are supporting an omnibus package of amendments that includes a 3% raise for all city workers and a 4% raise for city workers who live in the city, a compromise that will slow the erosion of workers’ quality of life as it fails to meet cost-of-living increases brought on by inflation.

“This campaign is a first step toward obtaining economic justice for some of the hardest-working people in Milwaukee,” Ian Gunther, Chief Steward of AFSCME Local 47, said. “At both of the public hearings on the 2026 budget, city workers gave their personal accounts of how they are struggling to make ends meet while providing critical city services and working on crucial city infrastructure. The members of the common council rely on the labor of DNS employees to take care of their constituents’ issues, yet some DNS employees work a second job just to get by; Milwaukee residents rely on Water Repair Workers to get safe drinking water, and yet only a couple years ago, many of those workers banded together in a sick-out to draw attention to their punishing working conditions and low pay—all this, while the city administration failed to provide any raise in last year’s budget.”

The omnibus amendment to the 2026 budget proposes to give city workers a compromise raise and gives city leaders the chance to pay workers wages near what those same workers made last year, before the most recent round of inflation.

“As a Socialist elected official, my office stands with the workers of the City of Milwaukee,” Alderman Alex Brower, the sole DSA-endorsed member of the Common Council, said. “It’s time for this city to appreciate its workers by giving them a well-deserved raise.”

DSA organizers are asking their members to push their alders to support the raise amendment on Budget Adoption day, November 7.

“While the police demand a 15.75% raise and threaten our city with an invasion by the National Guard, our city workers are asking for the first real cost-of-living adjustment in years,” Autumn Pickett, Co-Chair of Milwaukee DSA, said. “Our workers deserve more: I’m proud of DSA-elected Alderman Alex Brower for his proactive conversations with city workers ahead of the budget process to understand the real needs of our community, and I commend the rest of the budget committee for pushing these raises forward to the whole of the common council. Milwaukeeans are paying attention and will remember any alder who votes against the working people who make our city run.”

Milwaukee DSA is Milwaukee’s largest socialist organization fighting for a democratic economy, a just society, and a sustainable environment. Join today at dsausa.org/join.

DSA is beginning to engage in the fight against Trump, while simultaneously building the socialist wing of the movement. By Twin Cities DSA members Ramy K, Sam G, and Emma F October 18th was one of the largest days of political protest in US history!  (See crowd-counting estimate) On April 5th, 2-3 million protestors participated […]

November 3, 2025 (PORTLAND, OR) – Portland Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) condemns in the strongest possible terms Mayor Keith Wilson’s decision to begin enforcement of the city’s “public camping” ban, a policy of profound cruelty that criminalizes poverty and will exacerbate the city’s homelessness crisis.

This enforcement begins on the same day that federal SNAP benefits expire for over 15,000 homeless individuals in Multnomah County, stripping them of essential food aid while the city simultaneously threatens them with fines and jail time. Many low-income renters will also risk eviction and homelessness. Rather than offering support and leniency in the face of this federal abandonment, the Mayor has chosen to pile on penalties.

“Mayor Wilson’s decision to unleash the police on our most vulnerable neighbors on the very day they lose their food assistance is an act of stunning inhumanity,” said Chris Olson, Co-Secretary the Housing Working Group in Portland DSA. “He is exploiting a national tragedy to advance a policy of sweeps and cages that we know, from overwhelming evidence, kills people. To call this ‘compassion’ is a lie. It is a deliberate choice to inflict suffering in a misguided attempt to make poverty invisible.”

The Mayor’s punitive approach is further underscored by his recent decision to place the Director of the Portland Housing Bureau — a national expert in social housing — on administrative leave. This move signals a clear rejection of the long-term, housing-first solutions that are proven to work, in favor of a failed strategy of criminalization. 

The shelter system remains hundreds of beds short of need, operates with restrictive hours that fail to meet the needs of many, and does not address the root cause of the crisis: a catastrophic lack of affordable housing. This misallocation of funds has directly deprived proven, cost-effective solutions — like direct rental assistance, food aid, and public housing — of critical resources.

“Mayor Wilson promised us he was an innovator,” said Nathan Johnson, Co-Chair of the Housing Working Group in Portland DSA. “Now he’s slammed the door in innovation’s face to insist on the same discredited approach that has given us a continuously declared housing state of emergency since 2015.”

Portland DSA questions the fiscal prudence and underlying motives behind the Mayor’s rushed push for a shelter-based solution. The organization calls on the Portland City Council to immediately launch a formal investigation into whether the Mayor’s office wasted millions of taxpayer dollars to prop up a temporary shelter system that was designed to fail.

“We have serious concerns that public funds were squandered to create a pretext for this camping ban,” said Brian Denning, Co-Chair of Portland DSA. “Did the Mayor waste money on a shelter system he knew was insufficient, just to create a veneer of ‘available shelter’ and justify a punitive crackdown? The City Council has a duty to investigate this potential misuse of taxpayer money. Every dollar spent on a failed shelter strategy is a dollar stolen from a rental assistance program that could have actually kept a family in their home.”

The “Finding Home” report recently published by the Welcome Home Coalition and Sisters of the Road confirmed that 91% of homeless Portlanders need rental assistance, and 65% want to live in a house—not a congregate shelter or a temporary bed. The Mayor’s focus on coercion and criminalization is a direct rejection of what people actually need and want.

Portland DSA stands in solidarity with the unhoused and joins Councilor Mitch Green and community advocates in demanding a radical change in direction. A first step would be passage of the Renters’ Bill of Rights — a landmark set of protections which would stem the deepening houselessness crisis. We must stop criminalizing poverty and start investing in real, permanent solutions: social housing, lowering the cap for the eviction relocation ordinance, universal rental assistance, and low-barrier services that offer a hand up, not a sweep away.

The post Portland DSA Condemns Mayor Wilson’s Cruel Camping Ban, Calls for Investigation into Misuse of Public Funds appeared first on Portland DSA.

This piece addresses the reactionary threads and narratives of blame, spoken and unspoken, that exploded in the direct wake of the CK assassination. It argues that the marginalized parties that fascists dishonestly blame (for a wide variety of social effects) can find solidarity with one another’s struggles through a critical examination of the rhetorical moves this blame employs. 

In the wake of the events of September 10, much has been said about the identities of the two people directly involved. Here I want to situate the event and its consequences in a broader political discourse, based on threads of narratives and events that seem to be revitalized in the week now since the event. On the one hand, the narrative of blame which is explicitly formulated has had an extremely gendered component. As Judith Butler (a queer Jewish scholar of gender who is themself presently under attack from the administration) points out, gender is an overdetermined site, which many social anxieties both cluster around and find articulation through. The language of gender is used, hegemonically, to voice anxiety, and people pushing on the boundaries of normative gender are used as screens upon which to project this anxiety. We can certainly see how many existential anxieties have attached to trans people, which fascists “justify” by invoking the “deviance” of transness: anxieties about things like social order, demographic futurity, normative sexuality, the multivalenced term “safety”, children & their development, the body and its permeability… indeed we have seen many of these anxieties intersecting and amplifying one another in transantagonistic narratives. 

Even if we abstract away the question of the perpetrator, the assassination itself represents a severe rupture in hierarchy, and in the ordering of who is supposed to be safe and why. Any violence Kirk incited was meant to play out on other bodies, other flesh. (Indeed, the outsized reaction seems to attest to how unthinkable his death was as a young white conservative man beloved by the regime.) Again regardless of the perpetrator, the intensity and spectacle of the event has offered an opportunity for power to consolidate itself around the production of an enemy who bears responsibility. This narrative production has been able to ground itself in both liberal elegies and in a reactionary constellation of ‘trans’ and ‘antifascist’. To this point, as of writing this, the terms have been fully elided into Project 2025’s recently released info sheet on “trantifa”. These have been the two threads of explicitly formulated narrative formation: 1) the posthumous praise and laundering of Kirk’s figure and 2) the triangulation and amplification of a political enemy. Maga accomplishes this latter move by reaping the already-sown seeds of anxieties projected onto and through gender, and by having rhetorically associated trans people with threat through many vectors.

At the same time that there is this narrative above the surface, I want to also suggest that there is a parallel narrative of blame. This parallel narrative is, as yet, running beneath the level of formulation– it is not explicitly spoken– and we instead have seen it play out in direct political actions that have as their basis racialized violence. I am thinking here about the bomb threats that targeted HBCUs immediately following the shooting, despite there being– and remaining– no connection of any suspects to HBCUs. I am thinking of the opinion writer who was fired for merely being a Black woman and quoting Kirk’s own words on Black women. I am thinking about the 18 year old Texas college student who was arrested and expelled, images of her arrest and mugshot rapidly populating the internet. I am also thinking of the early reports of mysterious hangings of black and homeless men in Mississippi, from the week following the shooting. Each of these stories, of course, become spectacles in themselves of racialized violence for the American appetite. Of course we know that the founding gesture of the formation of the United States is a program of racialized violence called genocide; we know, too, that the foundation of all the capital accumulated here is the brutality of slavery. Racialized violence is our national unaddressed symptom, recurring and recurring because we have not made real conditions to heal it.

What I want to suggest with this piece is that there is an (at least) double motion of gendered and racialized blame and reaction happening in the wake of September 10. I want to argue that this multiple articulation displays the intimate solidarity between all groups scapegoated and targeted, explicitly or implicitly, as threats to (white supremacist) order. This “threat to order” is both the basis of our targeting, and the potential strength of our solidarity. The specificities of the order that is being enforced are written over and over in this country’s history, and we continue to see its living edicts today in the racialized and gendered violence that unfolds in front of us – in the media, in hateful chats, in bomb threats to HBCUs, on the streets in traffic stops, at the detention center just down at the port. In light of that I want to invite us to think together about the question of how to frame and use this moment, and any coming moments like it, for the necessary project of solidarity. How can we build new relationships in principled rejection of what Kirk stood and advocated for, in principled rejection of the logics of gendered and racialized violence that his assassination has been recruited to justify, in principled rejection of the nationalism coalescing around his figure? This seems to be the task before us, and it is imperative we do not imitate the Democrats’ cowardly collapse into silence or forced honor for this man who wanted so many of us dead, and who is now, instead, himself dead. 

by Caitlin Murphy

This August marks 80 years since the United States detonated two atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 

This gets a lot of attention in history books and the media, as it marks the end of World War II and the United States’ ascendance to nuclear superpower status.

But a little-known fact, not featured in textbooks and media, is the sheer number of unnamed, unacknowledged people who suffered the consequences of the Atomic Age.

One example: 70,000 Koreans were victims of the bombings. After the Japanese Empire colonized Korea, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to work in mines and factories in places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki during wartime. Estimates state that about 30,000 Koreans in those cities survived the initial blast.

The U.S. government has never offered acknowledgment, apology or recompense. Survivors and their descendants continue to press the U.S. and Japan for justice and recognition.

I recently visited Hapcheon, South Korea, to attend events commemorating these victims. Because of the many bomb survivors and descendants living there, Hapcheon is called the “Hiroshima of Korea.”

While the bombings happened long ago, the residents of Hapcheon continue to live with the fallout. Exposure to acute radiation breaks apart strands of human DNA, literally shredding the building blocks of life. Atomic bomb survivors, and as many believe, their children are many times more likely to develop cancers, specifically thyroid cancer and leukemia, than the general population.

I first learned of the plight of the Korean A-bomb victims after a delegation visited Seattle in 2023. Early this year, another delegation, including first-generation survivor Park Jeong-soon, 92, shared their pain and desire for a formal U.S. apology. Park will be a plaintiff in the 2026 International Peoples Tribunal on the 1945 Atomic Bombings, in New York City.

During my time in South Korea, I heard testimony at the Korean National Assembly from nuclear-impacted communities from around the world, including the Navajo Nation (Diné Bikéyah), the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, Kazakhstan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Representatives spoke of the intergenerational effects of radiation exposure and “nuclear colonialism.”

The testimony highlighted yet another untold story — that of the Congolese. The Manhattan Project, the huge undertaking to build the world’s first nuclear weapons — which enriched uranium and produced plutonium at facilities in Hanford and in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — was supplied with uranium from the Belgian-colonized Congo in central Africa. The Belgians were notoriously brutal overlords. In a mine called Shinkolobwe, Congolese people were forced to mine some of the purest radioactive uranium ore by hand, with no safety protection. Birth defects and severe illness are still recorded in the communities near the mine.

Under a campaign of secrecy, Shinkolobwe claimed the first victims of the nuclear arms race. Miners and residents died of radiation exposure. The United States attempted to distance itself from the atrocities committed there by claiming that the uranium from the Manhattan Project came from Canada, but the vast majority came from Shinkolobwe. There are more victims of nuclear weapons than we can possibly imagine.

Meanwhile, the NewSTART nuclear arms control treaty, which caps the deployment of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals, expires in February 2026. The Trump administration has yet to appoint a negotiator or enter formal negotiations, and despite Washington state being home to over 1,000 deployed nuclear weapons, only two lawmakers from our state — U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith — have signed on to H.Res 100, expressing alarm at the impending expiration. The U.S. has said it plans to spend over $1.7 trillion on new nuclear weapons in the next three decades. Nuclear weapons, nuclear production and nuclear testing are a war waged in the bodies of its victims through generations, and in the environment at places like Hanford and Chernobyl. Our leaders must do more to prevent another Hiroshima, another Hapcheon and another Shinkolobwe. 

Sean Arent: is the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program manager for Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and coordinates the regional Northwest Against Nuclear Weapons coalition. He lives in Tacoma.

by Sean Arent

Charlotte Metro DSA will not endorse the one-cent sales tax increase as we do not believe the framework created under the PAVE Act will adequately reflect the concerns of working families dependent upon public transit. As written, lower-income communities will face the highest cost burden given the regressive nature of sales taxes while Mecklenburg's capitalist class and political outsiders will be overly represented under the newly created 27-member Metropoitan Public Transit Authority (MPTA). Given this, we believe that any future projects will prioritize public transit not as a vehicle for connecting people but rather to enrich developers. In addition, the 60-40 allocation, 40% for roads, 40% for rail, and 20% for buses, intentionally divides communities by limiting where investment will go. Eastern Charlotte in particular loses out the most while North Charlotte will receive much of the immediate benefit under the planned Red Line. Charlotte Metro DSA believes that public transit investment should serve the working class without strings attached. The PAVE Act represents the deeply cynical nature of North Carolina state politics, in which politically-aligned business interests pollute legislation with obvious poison pills aimed at burdening workers and dividing communities.

Charlotte Metro DSA believes that public transit investment should serve the working class without strings attached. We are building a mass organization of the working class to fight and win key reforms like a fast and reliable mass public transit.

Sound good to you? Then join DSA Today!

In Solidarity,

Charlotte Metro DSA

You can view our Resolution from the 10/2025 General Meeting Here which authorized this post.