In mid-August 2025, on a sweltering Chicago weekend, ringing with camaraderie, over 1200 socialists descended for the Democratic Socialists of America’s biennial National Convention. The Democratic Socialists of America or DSA is the largest socialist organization in the United States, boasting 80,000 members nationwide. DSA, democratically run by this membership, organized in different chapters, is on the front lines of building a better tomorrow through: labor organizing, international solidarity, standing up to America’s fascist administration, and many more actions. 

The National Convention is DSA’s highest decision-making body, where the next two years of direction is decided by delegates, elected by the membership of each chapter, and the National Political Committee is elected to shepherd DSA until the next Convention. From Silicon Valley DSA (SV DSA), there were 12 delegates, from veteran attendee Chapter Officers to DSA newcommers.

DSA has several diverse tendencies, many of them disagreeing on specific issues, often vehemently. However, there is still unity in this diversity, as all DSA members share a vision for a better tomorrow under socialism, no matter what form that takes. One visiting officer commented regarding this unity at the Convention, “Being surrounded by so many like minded comrades was an energizing experience”, demonstrating that DSA’s membership has more in common than it has differences.

At the Convention, DSA delegates deliberated and debated many resolutions, putting its democratic values into practice. One item that took more than a day to debate was Resolution 22: For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA, which would reaffirm a previous resolution to “Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis.” Our Chapter’s delegates, by the democratic will of the Chapter, swore to vote “yes” on this Resolution and “no” on a controversial amendment, which some (including much of our Chapter) argued would dilute the intent of the original resolution. The resolution passed with a majority of 675-524 votes. This would earn DSA the praise of groups like Palestinian Youth Movement and outlets like Middle East Eye, who noted DSA’s evolution into a truly Anti-Zionist group devoted to Palestinian Solidarity.

Additionally, on Saturday afternoon, DSA hosted its first Cross-Organizational Political Exchange from 3 PM-6 PM, where groups were invited from all over to observe the convention and how DSA’s socialists conduct themselves within the Convention. Groups represented an entire section of the left, from activists like the Palestinian Youth Movement and Sunrise to American labor unions.

However, organizations were not only restricted to the US, as comrades from around the world came to the Convention. Some, like the Democratic Socialists of Canada, were smaller and sought to emulate DSA’s internal democracy in their own country. Others, though, were much larger, including well-known parties like Mexico’s MORENA, the current ruling party of the country, and La France Insoumise, most famously represented by Jean Luc Melencheon. Other guests included members of Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL) from Brazil and comrades from Japan, Belgium, and many more. 

In this diversity of groups though, was a unified message for comrades in DSA. Of their message, our officer said: “our comrades are looking to us and relying on us to do some major organizing. We are in the heart of the Empire, and the decisions of the United States impact the organizing terrain of everyone. It was humbling and inspiring to hear that people were counting on us to have an impact and shape the trajectory of the country and the world”. Additionally, he regarded the support of American organizations as proof that DSA and its members are not alone in seeking to build a better world.

The events at the Convention show that DSA has an important role to play in building a better tomorrow not only for America, but for the whole world. As Silicon Valley DSA’s delegates returned home, they brought many lessons with them. Some like Tyler N and Fred, nicknamed “The Red”, gained a newfound appreciation for Robert’s Rules, a code of conduct that DSA uses to run meetings. “The rigidity of Robert’s Rules is worth it for large meetings where some set of parliamentary rules is required for having any reasonable debate and when the motions considered feel consequential and conducive to debate,” Tyler said regarding the rules, with Fred adding, “in the right hands, Roberts Rules can be used to ensure everyone equal access to be heard, and to weed out disruptors, ego-trippers, and saboteurs”. Such were lessons taken by our delegates to the Convention.

Times may seem tough. The government is increasing its targeting and repression of dissenters and the marginalized with each and every day, stripping away our rights. Working people seem to have less and less power every day. However, a better world is possible. And based on the lessons our comrades brought home from convention, there is only one way: working together as comrades, side-by-side. For what is weaker than the feebler strength of one? And what is mightier than the power of the masses united?

The post Thoughts on our National Chapter Convention appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

The High Peaks Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (HPDSA) mourns the lives of the more than 334 transgender and gender non-conforming people (TGNC) lost in 2025, including the more than 57 people who lived in the U.S. Many of those lost were trans people of color, a pattern that continues year after year, and a tragic reminder that we are failing the most vulnerable people in our communities. We are heartbroken by the loss of our comrades. 

We believe that trans people deserve to live free and full lives of peace, joy, and happiness without fear of being discriminated against, harmed, or even killed for how they choose to express their gender. We know that any lives lost–whether to direct or stochastic violence–represent a failure by all of us to address pressing issues within society. We ask everyone to stand up and defend our TGNC community at every opportunity, and push back against harmful anti-trans ideologies wherever they may appear.

We have seen an alarming increase in hateful rhetoric directed at TGNC people in 2025, along with tens of millions of dollars spent by political campaigns in recent elections to sour public opinion against them, with little political defense from the mainstream Democratic Party and its allies. Combined with influencers masquerading as experts and discredited or misrepresented studies being used as proof of harm, all backed by conservative think tanks and politicians funded with dark money, TGNC people have never been at greater risk. This damaging propaganda has led to trans people losing their jobs, new and vindictive restrictions on their ability to travel abroad safely, bans from participating in sports, and hundreds of thousands of TGNC youth losing access to life-saving medical care. Further potential injustices are a constant threat on the horizon.

“As a trans person myself, I feel the incredible pressure we’re under every day,” says Cayenne Wren, member of HPDSA. “We wake up, turn on the news, and we’re instantly confronted with unhinged social posts about us. Our very right to exist is endlessly debated about, even though we’re never included in those discussions. All too often we’re underemployed and unemployed, and when we do get a job, we are frequently harassed. Our greatest risk of harm is often from intimate partner violence and even our own family members. My heart breaks continuously for not only those we’ve lost, but also for my trans siblings who must continue to live with injustice every day of our lives. I love each and every one of you, and please know that you are never alone.”

For gay and bisexual individuals who fail to see the fight for trans liberation as central to the broader queer struggle, and for feminists who reject trans women as part of their coalition. Like Jewish liberal Zionists over the last two years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, they will continue to find themselves ostracized further from the broader social justice movement, and forced into the untenable position of having to align politically with reactionary right-wing forces that subjugate them as well to uphold the white supremacist heteropatriarchal order.

HPDSA asks you to join us today in pledging to end all forms of violence against TGNC people. You can make a difference by directly donating to TGNC people in need, uplifting trans voices, showing up to public meetings to advocate for trans rights and inclusivity, being vocal against anti-trans propaganda, participating in local and state elections, and advocating for our elected officials to do more to protect TGNC in our state and provide a sanctuary for those individuals who face greater threats elsewhere. 

Together, we can make a difference in the lives of our most vulnerable community members and work towards a future where trans people can live openly and authentically without fear. 

Resources

• New York Name Change Guide

The post High Peaks DSA Honors Transgender Day of Remembrance appeared first on High Peaks DSA.

This article was first published in Power Map Magazine, and is being re-printed here with the author’s permission. We are including this piece as part of our ongoing debate in Maine DSA about candidates in 2026. Pine and Roses welcomes contributions. 

Earlier this year Maine Governor Janet Mills made national headlines when she quipped “see you in court” to Trump at the National Governors Association summit after he threatened the state over its laws that allow transgender athletes to play sports. In the bleak days of February, when it seemed like everyone was capitulating and few Democratic figures had yet to mobilize against the new administration, it was a bright moment for opponents of the president and trans people alike. For a relatively low profile governor from an otherwise sleepy state, it was also much of the country’s first introduction to Mills as a figure. Overnight she became a liberal icon. Sites selling shirts with her likeness and her now famous quote quickly cropped up.

Given her national reputation, one would assume that Mills’s entrance into next year’s Democratic primary race would galvanize Democrats across the political spectrum. From this outside perspective it would be easy to be confused as to why an alternative candidacy in Graham Platner so quickly ballooned when Mills was on offer. Many were quick to ascribe this to Mills’s advanced age or that Platner, as a burly white working class male type figure, had some intrinsic appeal. While both of these factors may have been in the mix, they don’t explain the full story. 

Missing from much of the discussion online is much substance about who Janet Mills actually is as a political figure. Afterall, there is a reason why I, a trans woman who is appreciative of Mills’s stance on Trump, and someone who is on the record as hating the hyper-masculine populist trend as a solution to our post-2024 woes, am so opposed to Mills’s candidacy and jumped on the Platner campaign (although now after tattoo-gate, I have jumped off it). And I am obviously not the only one, given a recent poll showing her behind by 34 points. The fact is that in Maine, and to those familiar with the state’s politics, our governor has a far more complicated history than her more recent image depicts. Far less paid attention to, for example, was what Mills was at the time doing with her powers as governor, such as (unsuccessfully) trying to cut funding for childcare, refusing to sign a bill that would end the state’s cooperation with ICE, or more recently, opposing a ballot question on Maine’s gun laws—changes being pushed in the wake of a mass shooting that claimed the lives of 18 people.

It would be easy to think from her comments to Trump that Mills is a liberal champion, but within Maine she is well understood as a moderate, leaning to the right of the Democratic Party (a party whose legislative caucus she frequently is out of step with). One should not expect her to be straightforwardly a safe vote as a senator under a hypothetical future Democratic administration trying to push anything like court packing, or trials for ICE agents. While she may not be quite the level of a Lieberman, a Manchin or a Sinema, Mills will almost certainly be in the bloc of moderate Senators who endlessly frustrate liberals with their positions, and will be a roadblock to progress—after all she’s already announced as much with her declared support for the retention of the filibuster.

It’s not uncommon for residents of a state, particularly politically active ones, to have a quite different perspective on a local figure than those looking in from elsewhere across the country. Yet the gap between how many progressives in Maine view Janet Mills, and those only familiar with her from the Trump incident, is wide and divergent. With her new national prominence, it’s worth exploring her history in detail.

First, we should give Mills a bit of credit: it was genuinely quite bold of her to stand up to Trump in the meeting. It is also not something out of character for her to do. As Attorney General, she was frequently at loggerheads with Governor Paul LePage, a far right Republican elected with only 37% of the vote, who has often been compared to the president. It was this record that helped propel Mills to victory in a crowded 2018 gubernatorial primary. And four years later she would face LePage in her 2022 reelection campaign in which she trounced him, attaining the highest vote share by a gubernatorial candidate since 1998 (and the largest by a Democrat since 1982). With Trump occupying the White House, these are certainly desirable traits in a candidate. 

At a time when trans people are under intense attack, and Democrats are under pressure to abandon trans people in the name of electability, that Mills chose to defend us is worth immense praise. Her actions put her in a tradition of Maine politicians standing up to authoritarianism, not unlike when Maragret Chase Smith (a family friend of the Mills family during her childhood) gave her Declaration of Conscience speech against McCarthyism in 1950. But it would also be a mistake to assume (as evidently many have) that the reason Mills did so is because she is a passionate defender of trans rights. Mills has a solid record on the issue—as much as any Democratic governor would—but as anti-trans bills were later introduced and debated in the Maine State Legislature, she would clarify her comments: “if [lawmakers] wish to change [the law], they have the authority to change it, but you don’t change it by executive order or by wishing it differently.” When asked about her personal stance on the issue, she declined to comment, saying the issue of trans children in sports was “worth of a debate, a full democratic debate.” Not exactly a full throated defense of trans people.

Instead these comments make clear Mill’s real passion: the law.

When Mills stood up to Trump, she wasn’t so much doing it out of strong conviction about trans issues, she was doing it because she was “complying with state and federal law.” Her disagreement with the president was around his use of executive orders to unilaterally change the law, something he straightforwardly does not have the power to do. This should not be surprising to anyone who knows Mills’s history. A graduate of Maine Law, Mills spent her whole career as a prosecutor, becoming the first female district attorney in New England in 1980, and culminating in her appointment as Maine’s Attorney General in 2009, which besides for a brief two year window, was an office she would continue to hold for the next decade. Like LePage before him, Mills is not going to simply let Trump get away with violating these laws, and the institutions she has spent decades defending and enforcing. To do so would go against the animating impulse that has defined her career. 

But there is a far darker side to Mill’s commitment to our legal institutions, and one that causes her to frequently clash with those in the state who want more out of our government and who are critical of the injustices that it has wrought. The clearest example of this is the issue of Wabanaki Sovereignty. 

Maine’s relationship with its indigenous nations can be described as rocky at best. Unlike all other federally recognized tribes, the four in Maine (the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, the Mi’kmaq Nation, the Penobscot Nation and the Passamaquoddy Tribe) have a unique set of rules that govern their relationship with the state. This is based on the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, a law passed by Congress to settle a dispute between the Wabanaki and the state government, and since then the state has used the settlement to deny these nations the sovereignty to which they are entitled. Because of this, the Wabanaki nations do not have the same rights and legal protections as sovereign nations that other federally recognized tribes hold, nor do they have the same access to federal benefits and programs, a fact that is hindering their economic development and causing the state to lose out on thousands of jobs.

In her role as governor, Mills has played a major role in enforcing this status quo, using her veto pen to oppose both sweeping legislation, and piecemeal reform. To be quite clear this is not a question of moderation on Mills part, nor is this a partisan issue, many Republicans as well as Democrats are quite supportive of changes to the law. LD958, the reform Mills vetoed earlier this year, was introduced by the Republican House Minority Leader, and passed by the majority Democratic legislature. Mills’s defense of the institution of Maine’s state government is something we may welcome when it comes under federal attack, but we can’t forget that it also limits what she is willing to support when it comes to changes, and that it leads her to support ugly, racist policies.

Since coming to office Mills has used her veto power against a wide variety of issues, covering everything from tenant protections, to the rights of farmworkers, to the rights of public sector workers (who she has been no friend to when it comes to wage negotiation). Glaringly, she vetoed a proposal to close down the infamously racist Long Creek facility, the state’s youth prison. This past session in addition to blocking the anti-ICE legislation mentioned previously, Mills also pushed back on expanding ranked choice voting to state offices (Maine only uses RCV for federal offices due to an obscure constitutional wording—again the law). One of the major wins of Mills’s time in office—paid family and medical leave—only happened with the threat of a ballot question hanging over it. Currently, as her senate campaign gets off the ground, she is doubling down on the state’s existing “yellow flag law,” a compromise that failed to prevent the 2023 mass shooting. Following that shooting, while even conservative Democratic Congressman Jared Golden was flipping on gun rights, Mills was vetoing a bump stock ban.

Her approach to the budgetary process has been similarly frustrating. While Republicans may try to frame her as such, Mills is certainly no tax and spend liberal and under her time in office, the state has taken an extremely fiscally cautious approach. During the boom years following the COVID-19 pandemic, as federal funds flowed to the states, rather than using the flush of cash the state had to improve things for residents, Mills instead opted to save, running up huge surpluses in the state’s budgets. In fact these surpluses were so significant (and continue to be so) that the state’s rainy day fund—an account where any excesses in state funds go—earlier this year reached its legal maximum. While the state’s accounts are filling up, under the guise of responsibility Mills has pushed for cuts to public services, and generally resisted funds for new programs. She has also been an opponent of new taxation, even vetoing a proposed bipartisan tax hike on the wealthy put forward by a Republican.

It should also be understood that while Mills has nothing but contempt for the LePages or the Trumps of the world, she doesn’t have the pure hatred of the GOP that the moment calls for. Coming from a Republican family, she endorsed her brother when he ran for governor in 2006. While this is somewhat understandable, more recently, and far more damningly, when asked about her soon to be opponent just a few months ago, Mills told reporters “I appreciate everything [Collins] is doing,” something the Collins camp is already taking advantage of in its ads.

It is obvious that our system is broken. Most Americans do not think it is working. Our institutions have failed to prevent Donald Trump from attempting to rule the country as a monarch. If Democrats return to power in 2028, a return to normalcy will not vanquish Trumpism anymore than it did in 2020, and we need elected officials willing to enact greater change if we hope to see it defeated. We need to be willing to overhaul our institutions if we want to protect our democracy. And that is not Janet Mills. She will speak out against authoritarianism—a brave and laudable thing to do—but will do little to go on the attack. As a trans woman living in Maine, I am incredibly thankful that Mills did not buckle when Trump threatened the state. Because of her actions (Maine did beat Trump in court) my community continues to be protected to an extent from a federal government that hopes to attack our existence. But with our country in crisis, her particular brand of politics is not suited for the moment. Electing Janet Mills in the hopes of getting the anti-Trump crusader, is likely to get you Janet Mills, the moderate lawyer. Having those sorts of senators is what got us into this mess in the first place.

The post Maine Voters Don’t Want Janet Mills for Senate. There’s a Reason for that. appeared first on Pine & Roses.

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Imagine that in the poorest neighborhoods of Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago, you could find a public park with glistening swimming pools, world-class sports and recreation facilities, and spectacular landscape architecture rather than vacant lots. If you are a single mother, rather than being forced  to lug your clothes blocks away to pay to wash your clothes, you can come to a public, well-maintained, space to do your laundry for free while you eat delicious food grown at the agroecological garden nearby. Meanwhile, your children can learn how to swim, attend workshops on how to grow food in the city, hit up the planetarium to learn how Mayan Cosmology relates to the Big Bang, hang out at the skate park, or take a guitar lesson.

As you eat your lunch and do your laundry, there is a staffer whose job it is to talk to you and be on the lookout for any whiff of domestic violence in your life. If you are dealing with domestic violence, right next door is a counselor who can help you. Imagine in this scenario, somewhere in the most gutted sections of U.S. cities, you can have access to an expert lawyer should you need one. Regardless of what you’re dealing with at home, you are welcome to see the massage therapist and acupuncturist in this same public building, a space for women known as Casa Siemprevivas. She doesn’t just provide you with bodywork, but will teach these practices to fifteen of your neighbors and friends so that you can use this space for peer-support bodywork circles. These are spaces where emotional release through laughter and crying are encouraged. All of this is free and funded by the government.

In the U.S., this kind of investment in such expansive public services remains imaginary, for now, but it is very much real and operating efficiently in Mexico City under the leadership of the MORENA party of President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the left-wing populist leader of the country. 

Such public institutions in Mexico are called “Units for Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony” or UTOPIAs for short. There are now sixteen of these, at present exclusively in Mexico City’s most populous and poorest borough of Iztapalapa. Virtually all UTOPIAs provide services for women dealing with domestic violence, harm-reduction forward centers for drug users, spaces to support queer and trans folks, community centers for the elderly, and workshops to support men in deconstructing toxic masculinity – which in practice involves teaching men whose relationships are in terminal decline or men who have become single fathers due to unforeseen tragedy, how to do things like wash dishes, fry eggs, or braid hair. No small thing.

Each UTOPIA  has a range of other specialized services. For example, UTOPIA La Libertad, sited directly behind a prison wall, has a petting zoo and a planetarium. UTOPIA Meyehualco, occupying what used to be an extensive park full of soccer fields for use by exclusive leagues only, now has a large animatronic dinosaur park (yes, you read that right) and a hockey rink. UTOPIA Olini hosts extensive manicured ponds, a tidepool, and gym that’s the home field for an outstanding breakdancing squad. UTOPIA Estrella Huizachtépetl sits atop a reclaimed drainage area from a water treatment facility that has been converted into an extensive wetland ecosystem. And UTOPIA Quetzacoatl, sited unusually across multiple discontinuous buildings and spaces in a dense urban area, has a strong focus on children’s mental health services, with an art therapist on staff. Some of the UTOPIAs have regular workshops supporting residents, especially women, in forming small businesses and cooperatives under the banner of the ‘solidarity economy.’

In the following section, I will share more stories of how people use and benefit from the services provided at the UTOPIAS based on several months of research on the ground in Mexico. My aim is to expand our collective imagination in the United States and elsewhere in the imperial core about what a robust urban commons of care can look like. In addition, I hope to share the deeper history of working class organizing and struggle that made these programs a reality. Despite the many differences between our organizing contexts, I suggest that US organizers have much to learn from organizers who have built mass power in Mexico.  

Stories from below: how the UTOPIAs improve the lives of working people

With all of these free social services on offer with a strongly anti-carceral, feminist, and ecological inflection to boot, it is no wonder that the UTOPIAs have garnered attention among international left-wing circles as a concrete example of what municipal ecosocialist politics can look like.  As part of my research in urban political ecology, I’m now spending a sabbatical semester here and I’m basing this article on visits to eight of the sixteen UTOPIAs and interviews with a range of staffers, users, and functionaries.

Across these visits and interviews, an unambiguously positive picture emerged. Mental health counselors told me about how they were able to spend far more time with clients working at the UTOPIAs than they had been working at understaffed clinics. 

An OB-GYN who rotated among the UTOPIAs believed that she was finally able to do what she went to school to do: “bring reproductive justice directly to the people.”

A farmer on staff at UTOPIA La Libertad shared that his agroecological vision for the future was that “cities can and must grow their own food.”

An elderly woman told me that the workshops on death and dying provided her with community and solace after her husband passed. 

A 24-year old butcher who used to be addicted to heroin got clean thanks to the harm reduction and counseling services at UTOPIA Teotongo, and he now goes to the site at least once a week to assist the on-site shaman in conducting temazcal sweat lodge ceremonies. He explained, “the UTOPIAs provided me with a life that I could have never imagined before.”

A group of teenage girls who started a punk rock band confirmed that there was no way they could have done so without the free instruments and practice spaces provided by the UTOPIA.

The UTOPIAs also demonstrate that expanding the urban commons of care-giving does not need to be expensive. The government of Iztapalapa has stated that each UTOPIA cost $100 million pesos (about $5 million USD) to build, with an operating budget of about $1 million USD. Even if these figures are underestimates, and even if they were ten times higher in the United States due to higher prices for materials and labor, the numbers would still not be very burdensome when you consider the billions that our big cities spend on cops and tax breaks for the rich.

As I spoke to workers and users of the UTOPIAs and asked about how these spaces were built, one name came up consistently: Clara Brugada, the former mayor of Iztapalapa and now Head of Government of all of Mexico City. I was told by mental health workers, retirees, hydroponic technicians, and site administrators that the UTOPIAs were the brainchild of Brugada, and that it was through her vision and through the sheer force of her political will, backed as it was by the people, that the UTOPIAs were built. 

The consensus that I heard was so widespread that it felt silly to simply deny it , even if it seemed implausible that a single individual could compile such a radical set of diverse services related to issues as varied as mental health, science education, and urban agriculture. But still, something seemed incomplete – so I dug deeper. Through my research into the recent history of Mexico City’s politics,  it became clear that there was in fact a mass movement that shaped the city’s urban political matrix, developed and piloted many of the initiatives commonly found at the UTOPIAs today, and in a significant way directly produced Clara Brugada. It’s called the Urban Popular Movement. 

The Urban Popular Movement and MORENA: political organization in the wake of neoliberalism

Decades before the MORENA party took shape, a far more scattered constellation of urban organizations were fighting for working people’s immediate demands for titles to their land, water services, and electricity. But in some instances, these organizations went beyond fighting for immediate political demands, and also experimented with and ultimately built direct services to improve people’s lives. They created centers for women dealing with domestic violence, grew food, regenerated urban forest ecosystems, and provided harm reduction services for drug users. In essence, they built many of the elements that we now find, at scale, across the UTOPIAS.

That urban organizers in Mexico City managed to create a forceful social movement with real political muscle under these conditions should give us further confidence that we can too.

The Urban Popular Movement itself built political power among the city’s disenfranchised squatters, the informally employed urban poor, and other working class people clinging to some semblance of normality and dignity.  This movement grew in the fertile soils of urban disaffection with the decades of pro-capital rule by the Institutional Party of the Revolution(the PRI) and subsequent conservative opposition. 

The ruling PRI party had historically maintained its power from the late 1940s all through the 1990s and even part of the 2000s through a corporatist structure built on three organizational pillars under its strict control: theConfederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM), representing labor, the Confederación Nacional de Campesinos (CNC) representing peasants, and the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP) representing urban middle classes, “civil society” organizations, and, in theory, the urban poor. 

By the 1980s, though, large numbers of Mexico City residents were neither in industrial unions nor were they meaningfully represented by the CNOP. For those of us living in the United States in the 21st century, this likely sounds very familiar: union density has plummeted in our own country since the 1980s, and ‘civil society’ organizations have gradually receded from popular life.  

Just like in the United States, by the 1980s the labor movement in Mexico was a shadow of its militant past.  The CTM formed in the crucible of the 1930s. The progressive president Lázaro Cárdenas established the organization with the aim of bringing together the more militant and communist-inflected industrial proletariat with more independent workers in the transit sector and those working for smaller businesses. But after the rightist Miguel Alemán Valdés came to power in 1946, he rechristened the official party as the Institutional Party of the Revolution(the PRI) and set out to purge militants from organized labor. He appointed Alfonso Ochoa Partida, nicknamed “el charro” for his love of the Mexican rodeo sport of charrería, as the head of the CTM to carry out these purges. To this day, flat-footed pro-capital unions are known as “sindicatos charros” in Mexico. These capital-friendly unions remained powerful political forces throughout the economic halcyon years of relatively prosperous Import Substitution Industrialization during the 1950s and 1960s. 

This era of relative class harmony held together by the PRI’s corporatist structure started to unravel in the late 1960s. The 1968 Tlaltelolco and subsequent Halconazo massacres of student activists, followed by the dirty war of the 1970s carried out by José López Portillo, created a crisis of political legitimacy for the PRI. Despite the relatively moderate demands of the student movement for political reform, the PRI was unwilling to tolerate any challenge to their corporatist hegemony. The PRI’s crisis of political legitimacy was supercharged by the global economic crisis of the late 1970s, which sounded the death-knell for Import Substitution Industrialization that had maintained rising standards of living in the postwar decades. These combined crises spelled the beginning of the end for the PRI, and created political openings for left-wing opposition to organize and build.

During the 1970s and 1980s, radical organizers and students who had fled to the countryside during the repressive days of the Dirty War had been hard at work carrying out rural political education programs, often inspired by the Maoist mass line theory.  Many peasants already had existing radical commitments anchored in the legacy of Emiliano Zapata, the militant champion of peasant land rights from Mexico’s revolutionary days. Such commitments were reinforced by their lived experiences of rural economic struggle over the years. 

As the 1970s economic crises began to make rural livelihoods less viable, tens of thousands of these newly dispossessed peasants began to move to the outskirts of Mexico City. While these new arrivals were poor, lacked formal political power, and were highly vulnerable to the predations of greedy landlords, they were far from passive actors. They brought their radical political analyses with them and quickly began to form politicized community organizations. As the legitimacy of formal avenues for popular urban political participation collapsed, these organizations grew into the Urban Popular Movement. 

The story of thirty-year-old Enrique Cruz, a militant with one of the organizations of the Urban Popular Movement known as the UPREZ (the Emiliano Zapata Popular Revolutionary Union), helps shed light on this history. He explained to me, 

I’m an Indigenous Soque-speaker and I was born in Oaxaca. My parents and grandparents were deeply involved in the struggle against gold and silver mining that was destroying our land and threatening the ecosystems we cared about. When I moved to the city, I found a school run by the UPREZ adorned with murals of Emiliano Zapata, and I knew that these were my people. Through the UPREZ, I gained a strong political education and became an organizer fighting for dignified housing, providing direct education and political education to others, and working on other issues.

Organizations like the UPREZ emerged in the 1980s, and became especially strong in the aftermath of the catastrophic 1985 earthquake that sparked a wave of urban mutual aid activity. One of the strongest of these organizations is known as the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo (the Union of Settlers of San Miguel Teotongo), located in the far northeast corner of Iztapalapa on the edge of Mexico City.  

When I visited their community center and office to examine their archives in August and explained that I was interested in the history and political consequences of the UTOPIAs, staffer Marco Antonio Flores informed me that “If you’re interested in the UTOPIAs, you’ve come to the right place. Much of what you see in the UTOPIAs – services for women facing domestic violence, support for drug users, agroecology – we piloted those things, experimented, and developed them starting in the 1980s. To see them widespread and supported by the government now is a wonderful thing.” 

On first encountering the UTOPIAs, there were some things that seemed familiar. In my political and academic work, I have seen an impressive range of projects with similar aims, from scrappy anarchist outfits doing land projects, to non-profit sexual health and harm-reduction centers, to community-based agriculture organizations. But to see these things, and so much more, packaged together and brought to scale with the full muscle of the state behind them felt like something quite different. 

What made these organizations successful in not only fighting for basic urban services and also finding a foothold in national and city politics? I asked Marco Antonio why his organization seemed to be so robust and so persistent, with such a strong presence in the community today, while other member organizations of the Urban Popular Movement seemed to have disbanded. He responded, “In the 1980s, many of the organizations focused narrowly on demanding land titles, water hookups, electricity, and even rent control. Once some of those demands were met, they didn’t have much of a reason to continue. Our focus was larger: we fought for basic rights but also built  a vibrant community center with a more expansive goal of providing for the well-being of community members in a comprehensive way.” 

Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada herself is of this movement. While she was a student, she began organizing with Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo. She worked to organize for basic services like electricity, water, and sewage. According to an elder woman organizer who has lived in the community since the 1970s, Brugada played a critical role as a young strategist in the early 1980s. She pushed their group to lobby the government to fulfill these demands, in addition to self-organizing to provide services that the state would not.

In the 1990s, Brugada was a leader in a campaign to repurpose a women’s prison that also held political prisoners during the dirty war into a preparatory school. This campaign, which we might today describe as ‘abolitionist,’ ultimately succeeded and the school was inaugurated in the year 2000. While they fought for land titles, Brugada continued to organize with the Unión de Colonos to establish a community center to support women dealing with domestic violence, to restore urban ecosystems, and to provide support for drug users.

Here, there is a larger lesson for the US left, for DSA, and perhaps even more specifically for an incoming Zohran Mamdani administration in New York City. We have movements in our cities that are building the capacity for mass, militant mobilizations. These include the tenant movement and the labor movement. But they also include innovative projects carried out by community-based groups focused on environmental justice, reproductive justice, agroecology, and more. 

In other words, the community organizations of Iztapalapa that endured the test of time and won durable political power didn’t just fight for things like rent control and basic urban sanitation, as vital as those things were. They also directly built the means of providing urban community care with scarcely any resources, and in doing so ensured that when a political opening came about, their ideas and practices would be right there on the table for sympathetic political forces to run with. 

These groups intentionally built partnerships with people who would eventually build the MORENA party and become part of the state apparatus. As the MORENA party consolidated power, these groups were therefore integrated into municipal governance rather than kept on the periphery. 

Existing community organizations and the battle for the urban commons

Each of the UTOPIAs is situated in a neighborhood with a particular political and economic history. While the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo was a powerful and visionary force for community organizing and development, other UTOPIAs had significant if less persistent community organizations in place. Many UTOPIAs are sited on formerly abandoned lots and parks. The Tecoloxtitlan and Papalotl UTOPIAs, for example, were both sited in empty urban fields that used to be black markets for stolen auto parts. 

The programming coordinator from UTOPIA Papalotl, Rodrigo Castellano Hernández, shared  that starting in the late 2000s, a group of community members came together to start running youth programming around the community. They offered martial arts classes and started to experiment with urban agriculture. By the time that Clara Brugada became the mayor of Iztapalapa, there were already robust community efforts in place to reclaim the site for positive and care-forward community activities. 

Likewise, in UTOPIA Tecoloxtitlan, a group of neighbors combined community resources to start a center for special education and an Alcoholics Anonymous center in the park, self-organizing community labor to clean up the dilapidated urban field. And in UTOPIA Meyehualco, which was built in a park that was previously available only for private soccer league members. The municipal government, alongside allied community organizations, organized to secure this land for free public use despite objections from the private club members who sought to maintain their complete ownership over the property.

In cities in the United States, the specific process of finding space for projects like this would likely look very different than it did in Iztapalapa. At the same time, US cities do have considerable leeway over municipal budgets, even if the ruling classes have been terribly successful at maintaining funding cops rather than care year in and year out. But radical movements in the US have demonstrated that things need not be this way. From teachers striking for better conditions over the past 15 years, to abolitionist campaigns in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, our own movements have revealed that municipal budgets can be meaningful sites of class struggle.

It is worth emphasizing that the UTOPIAs do not merely function as an organ of the MORENA party and Mayor Clara Brugada. Radical community organizations use the spaces to organize independent political power too. In September, I attended an event at UTOPIA Paplotl put on by one of the most important member organizations of the UPREZ, Enrique’s organizing home. In a packed auditorium of about five hundred people hailing from dozens of smaller community-based organizations and cooperatives focused mainly on housing issues, the leaders of the UPREZ formally inducted these groups and their many working class members into their organization. 

One of the founders and movement elders of the URPEZ, Jaime Rello, described how these mass movements relate to the UTOPIAs and the MORENA party succinctly:

Comrades, the UTOPIAS are the synthesis of all this experience and struggle of more than 57 years since the 1968 movement. Our comrade Clara, who emerged from the popular movements and the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo, learned well from all this experience of struggle and now puts it into practice. But that’s not enough, comrades, if there isn’t a strong movement to continue to fight for these issues, because the pressures that we face and that Clara faces from the right, the pressures we face from the interests of capital, are very strong. 

Our organizations are not built solely by leaders. Our organizations are built by everyone. We need everyone to contribute and put the collective interest before our individual interests. We have come as far as we have because of  thousands and thousands of social activists who have dedicated their lives to transforming this country and this city.

The UPREZ and the larger Urban Popular Movement are undeniably allied with the MORENA party. Clara Brugada herself came from these working class movements of Iztapalapa. Nonetheless, it is clear that these organizations are not demobilizing simply because one of their own is in power. The relationship between these mass organizations and the MORENA government could serve as a model for how DSA and other left organizations might relate to a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty or similar administrations: using the spaces, resources, and platforms provided by such an administration to fiercely organize for the rights of workers and tenants, to build independent centers of community power, and to develop a robust urban commons of care both within and outside of the state.

The historical roots of the UTOPIAs show us that community-driven initiatives to care for one another can be elevated and brought to scale by the state when conditions are right. It is not necessary to build good ideas for community care, urban agroecology, and physical and mental well-being from scratch. Many organizations have been doing this work. With relatively modest funding from the state, they can blossom into serious programs available to the masses. In the U.S. context, we can find similar types of local and regional organizations that have the vision and experience that could help  our versions of UTOPIAs flourish.

Armed with visions of community care similar to what has been realized in Mexico City along with the growing political muscle of DSA, we are in a position to fight for precisely these things in our cities. We should seize this opportunity, in New York City, and across the country.

Bibliography

In addition to interviews and field observations, this piece draws heavily on the following books on the urban history of Mexico City:

• Davis, Diane. 1994. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. Temple University Press.

• Gerlofs, Ben. 2023. Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City. Vanderbilt University Press.

• Vitz, Matthew. 2020. A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. Duke University Press.

Portland DSA Celebrates Zohran Mamdani’s Historic Victory in NYC, Signals Parallel Path for Portland on Affordability Issues

PORTLAND, OR — The Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) today celebrated the historic election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City, hailing it as a watershed moment for the socialist movement and evidence that a politics centered on working-class issues resonates with voters in major American cities, including Portland.

“The victory of Zohran Mamdani shows what is possible with grassroots energy and people power,” said Tiffany Koyama Lane, Portland City Council Vice President, District 3. “In Portland and across Oregon, we stand on the same side of the fight for: no-cost childcare, housing by and for the people, people over big banks and billionaires, dignity for everyone and protecting democracy. Zohran’s win proves that when we organize, regular working people can change the rules, and win a better world.”

“Mamdani’s victory is a clear sign that people want representatives who relentlessly and unapologetically fight for working class people, stand against genocide, and share a vision for a world where everyone lives a life of joy and dignity,” said Angelita Morillo, Portland City Councilor for District 3. 

Mamdani’s victory, powered by an army of volunteers and a platform of affordable housing, free transit, free childcare, and taxing the rich, demonstrates that voters demand concrete solutions to the affordability crisis. Here in Portland, DSA-endorsed city councilors are already advancing a similar agenda.

A Shared Vision for Governing

The policy priorities championed by Mamdani in New York mirror the work Portland’s socialist councilors are already advancing. In New York, Mamdani ran on a platform tailored to the needs of working people. Similarly, in Portland, DSA and our electeds are championing and defending universal Preschool for All, advocating for major expansions and improvements in public transit, recommitting the city to eliminating traffic deaths, advancing police accountability, funding our parks, exploring new models for social housing, taking on the fossil fuel industry, protecting sensitive habitat in Forest Park, affirming Portland’s Sanctuary City status, protecting Portlanders from ICE and Trump’s promised military invasion, and demolishing the false narratives of the Trump Administration on national television (1, 2).

Portland DSA has a long history of advocating for a progressive tax revenue program, famously encapsulated in its “Tax the Rich Portland” initiatives, which resulted in a successful universal preschool ballot measure This aligns directly with Mamdani’s pledge to fund social programs and public services by ensuring the wealthy pay their fair share.

“The same energy that elected Zohran Mamdani in New York is alive and well in Portland,” said Olivia Katbi, co-chair of Portland DSA. “For too long, our city has been told that corporate-friendly policies are the only way. Mamdani’s victory, and our own successes on the Portland City Council, prove that when you offer a clear, bold vision for a more affordable and just city, people will rally to it.”

Earlier this year, Portland DSA launched a new initiative called “The Family Agenda for Portland,” which aims to win policies that help families and children. Members have been canvassing for the Parks levy as the first official project under this campaign. The Family Agenda was inspired by one of Zohran’s campaign proposals earlier in the year, which promised “baby boxes” to all new parents in the city as part of a comprehensive Family Agenda for NYC.

Portland DSA’s Record of Action

With four members on the Portland City Council, Portland DSA has become a decisive force in city politics, setting the agenda and passing substantive policy changes. Key budget achievements include rerouting $1.8 million from the Golf Fund to parks maintenance and fully funding the city’s Small Donor Elections program. The socialist bloc also championed a move to divert $2 million earmarked for the Police Bureau to fund parks, reflecting a commitment to reallocating resources to community needs. 

Even where DSA priorities didn’t achieve council majorities during budget season, DSA electeds stood clearly for our values. Councilor Mitch Green led a charge to reallocate Prosper Portland’s “Strategic Investment Fund” to critical public services under threat, criticizing the development agency’s history of “directing public funds for unaccountable private profit-making.” Councilor Angelita Morillo proposed an amendment redirecting funding for 1 of Portland’s 20 encampment sweep teams to emergency rental assistance.

After budget season, Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane championed a unanimous council reaffirmation to Vision Zero, moving the head Vision Zero Staffer under the Deputy City Administrator and ensuring traffic deaths are responded to as seriously as any other public safety concern. Councilor Sameer Kanal led a resolution codifying our “Sanctuary City” reputation, prohibiting city employees from cooperating with ICE and directing city employees on how to engage with immigration enforcement. Council Morillo’s Detention Facility Impact Fee — which would disincentivize new detention facilities like the ICE facility on Macadam — will be considered by the city council this week. 

Portland DSA maintains its power through consistent street-level mobilization and a strong relationship between its members and its elected officials, ensuring accountability to the movement, not corporate donors. DSA‘s member base is expanding rapidly, because the organization produces results. 

Denouncing the Corporate Backlash: Portland Business Alliance Aims to Block “Socialist Majority”

This rising socialist influence has drawn the ire of Portland’s corporate establishment. The Portland Business Alliance has explicitly stated that its #1 goal is to “prevent a socialist majority” in the city council, a goal that is completely out of touch with the material needs of Portlanders who are struggling to keep up with housing and healthcare costs and protect their neighbors from ICE raids.

“This is not a surprise,” said Jesse Dreyer, a co-chair of Portland DSA’s electoral working group. “The Alliance represents the same corporate interests that Mamdani defeated in New York. They are threatened because we are proving that a city can be governed for the benefit of its working people, not for private profit. Their goal to block a socialist majority is an admission that our movement is growing and that their agenda is unpopular.”

Political staffer Doug Moore recently admitted that the PBA’s goal was to “stop DSA from taking over the council”, calling our commitment to bread-and-butter issues as an attempt “to take over the City Council and turn it into an ideological showcase for the rest of the country.” Similarly, District 2 Councilman Dan Ryan has repeatedly publicly questioned what the North star of the DSA aligned city councilors is. 

“The Portland Business Alliance and our local oligarchs are stuck in a self-serving echo chamber, advancing debunked arguments about tax flight and arguing that tax cuts for the rich will somehow help ordinary Portlanders who are suffering,” said Brian Denning, co-Chair of Portland DSA. “Both Zohran Mandani and Portland DSA are offering a new direction for city politics and the local economy, based on fair redistribution of wealth, functional public services, a healthy environment, and affordability for all.”

A Unified Movement for the Future

Mamdani’s victory in New York signals a national shift and provides a model for how socialists can win and govern major cities. The Portland DSA chapter, now recognized as a major power broker in the city, is committed to this same path.

“The future of Portland will be decided in the coming years,” said Mitch Green, Councilor for District 4.” We can choose a city managed for the wealthy and corporations, or we can follow the lead of New Yorkers and build a Portland for the many, not the few.”

The post An Historic Night for Socialism appeared first on Portland DSA.

Christopher Columbus is widely considered one of the greatest villains ever to set foot in the Americas. His crimes have been extensively documented by modern historians, and even his contemporaries were so disgusted by his behavior that he was returned to Spain to stand trial for his crimes as a governor in the so-called “New World.”

The myth of Columbus as a heroic explorer has been shattered, in Chicago as everywhere else. In July 2020, massive protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd led to the removal of the city’s public monuments to Columbus in Grant Park and Arrigo Park. The city announced earlier this year that these monuments will not be returned to public display.

The defense of Columbus represents a reactionary effort by a small minority of Chicagoans to launder the reputation of a murderer. This group seeks to use public land and funds to push a regressive, sanitized version of a history of unrelenting violence and oppression. The people of Chicago expressed their will that statues honoring Columbus be removed from the city’s parks, and the city’s elected officials have ratified that decision through peaceful, deliberative, and democratic action.

Unfortunately, another monument that advances that exact same mission of intimidation and historical whitewashing is still on display in Chicago to this day. It was gifted to the city by Benito Mussolini himself, and it lionizes a key architect of the original fascist movement in Italy: Italo Balbo.

—

Italo Balbo started his political career after World War I as an organizer of the fascist Blackshirts in Ferrara, where he and his men spent years terrorizing and murdering agricultural workers for attempting to unionize. He trained fascist thugs as strikebreakers, and they used extreme violence to reassert control of the countryside on behalf of wealthy landowners. Balbo himself was accused of ordering the brutal murder of anti-fascist priest Giovanni Minzoni, though he was acquitted of the crime in an Italian court after Mussolini took power.

In 1922, Balbo helped orchestrate Mussolini’s March on Rome, in which the future Duce threatened to launch a civil war unless the king of Italy appointed him as Prime Minister. The king relented, and Mussolini proceeded to use the power of the police and military to terrorize his enemies and establish an authoritarian state. Balbo was rewarded for his loyalty with a position as a member of Mussolini’s inner circle (a quadrumvir on the so-called “Grand Council of Fascism”) and as the head of Italy’s Royal Air Force, where he developed the country’s military air power in preparation for the Second World War. In a leadership shakeup in 1933, Mussolini appointed Balbo as Governor-General of Libya. He served there until his death in 1940, when poorly trained Italian forces shot down his plane in the mistaken belief that it was a British bomber. Allegations that Mussolini orchestrated Balbo’s death are unsubstantiated and likely untrue.

—

In 1933, Balbo personally flew across the Atlantic Ocean from Italy to Chicago, arriving with a fleet of twenty-four amphibious aircraft to visit the Chicago World’s Fair. The spectacle was well-received by the public, especially the Italian-American community of the city, and Mussolini saw it as an opportunity to propagandize in favor of fascism.

The following year, Mussolini shipped a Roman column to Chicago to commemorate the flight. On the base of the column, he wrote the following words in English and Italian (emphasis added): 

THIS COLUMN 
TWENTY CENTURIES OLD
ERECTED ON THE BEACH OF OSTIA 
PORT OF IMPERIAL ROME 
TO SAFEGUARD THE FORTUNES AND VICTORIES 
OF THE ROMAN TRIREMES
FASCIST ITALY BY COMMAND OF BENITO MUSSOLINI
PRESENTS TO CHICAGO 
EXALTATION SYMBOL MEMORIAL 
OF THE ATLANTIC SQUADRON LED BY BALBO
THAT WITH ROMAN DARING FLEW ACROSS THE OCEAN 
IN THE 11TH YEAR 
OF THE FASCIST ERA.

The text has since worn away from the base, but the monument has remained in Burnham Park for over ninety years. During Balbo’s visit to Chicago, the city chose to further honor Balbo by renaming Seventh Street as “Balbo Drive,” a fact that made Mussolini extremely jealous. Balbo’s flight drew explicit comparisons to Christopher Columbus at the time, and the statue of Columbus that formerly stood in Grant Park was dedicated in Balbo’s presence during the World’s Fair in 1933.

Balbo died before the United States entered the war in December 1941, so he never featured in anti-Axis propaganda as one of Mussolini’s vile toadies. This is likely what allowed the monument to slip through the cracks in the country’s united opposition to and hatred of European fascism.

—

Some of the positive characteristics extolled by Balbo’s defenders are not complete fabrications. By all historical accounts, Balbo was personable, courageous, adventurous, and sincere. He criticized Mussolini’s turn toward anti-Semitism, and he believed Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany was a strategic mistake. He had a complicated relationship with Mussolini, and his political disagreements with the Duce became more pronounced in the final years of his life.

Fortunately for Balbo, his position in the regime afforded him the luxury of criticizing Mussolini in public. His victims in Ferrara and throughout Italy were not granted the same liberty. The crimes of the legions of jackboots he commanded are extensively documented, and Balbo is likely guilty of many acts of violence that don’t appear in the historical record. He also played a key role in amassing the fighters and bombers that later killed thousands of Allied servicemen as they liberated North Africa, Sicily, Naples, and Rome from fascist tyranny.

Balbo spent his term as a supposedly ‘moderate’ governor of Libya preoccupied with a project to ship tens of thousands of Italian settlers to the colony and eventually displace the colonized. He dreamt of an Italian empire stretching across the Mediterranean and East Africa, unconcerned with the ultimate fate of the non-citizen Arab, Berber, Black, and Jewish ‘subjects’ who were terrorized by the brutal colonial regime he helped oversee. Balbo was eager to criticize Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler only when he wasn’t rubbing elbows with the Führer himself on an official state visit to Nazi Germany.

Most importantly, Balbo orchestrated the destruction of democracy in Italy and was a senior minister in Mussolini’s fascist government. He never recanted his profoundly held belief in fascist ideology or his support for Mussolini. Nothing Balbo said or did during his lifetime can absolve him of the horrible crimes he committed.

—

There have been numerous attempts to remove the monument and rename Balbo Drive over the years, most recently in 2017 and 2020. A tiny minority of right-wing Chicagoans consistently turns out to defend the monument when it is threatened, and all City Council measures to remove the monument or rename the street have failed.

In 2018, a measure was introduced to the Chicago City Council to rename Balbo Drive as Ida B. Wells Drive. At the last minute, the Council caved to pressure from right-wing groups and chose to rename Congress Parkway instead.

In 2022, the Chicago Monument Project published a report that recommended the removal of seventeen monuments and works of public art in the city, including the Balbo Column. In their rationale for the removal of the column, the Monument Project stated:

The Brandon Johnson Administration pledged to follow the recommendations of the report upon his election in 2023, but there has been no movement on the Balbo question since.

Today, a tiny minority of Chicagoans defend the monument out of a strong but profoundly ahistorical sense of pride in Balbo’s accomplishment divorced from its context as an expression of fascist state power. Balbo’s apologists have aligned themselves with a nasty flavor of right-wing Italian-American civic pride that attempts to excuse his numerous crimes and his lifelong disdain of democracy and basic human rights.

In one guest essay written for the Monument Report, a defender of Columbus and Balbo writes “These monuments are not, nor were they intended to be, political statements. It is senseless to try and make them into a political agenda.” Indeed, most of the attempts to sanitize Balbo’s legacy seek to bring him out of the political sphere and turn him into a benign cultural figure, an Italian hero who was, at worst, ‘a product of his time.’

This is an extreme distortion of Balbo’s legacy. Mussolini saw Balbo’s flight as an explicit exercise in fascist propaganda. He followed the progress of Balbo’s ‘expedition’ with great interest, and Balbo’s men took careful note of the presence of a small number of anti-fascist protesters in Chicago and New York. The flight was an explicit attempt to legitimize Mussolini’s totalitarianism in the eyes of the American public, and the continued presence of the monument is evidence of how thoroughly this effort succeeded.

—

Balbo’s values and life’s work should be reprehensible to any person who believes in free expression, democracy, an independent civil society, and freedom from political coercion. Democratic rights are under dire threat in America, and our city’s official valorization of a proud fascist has never been more embarrassing.

Between the ongoing authoritarian takeover of the United States by the Trump Administration, the continuing death and destruction in Palestine, and a number of other emergencies at home and around the world, leftists in Chicago have had a lot of other things to focus on in recent years. But symbols matter a great deal, and our city’s continued veneration of an avowed enemy of everything we as socialists hold dear is an insult we must not abide.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to the present state of affairs. The city should give Balbo the same treatment it gave to Columbus in 2020: rename Balbo Drive and loan or donate the column to a private historical society.

Chicagoans have the right to honor whomever they like on their own property, no matter how vile their hero’s actions were in life. Earlier this year, the Columbus statue formerly standing in Arrigo Park was loaned by the city to the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans.

I, for one, think the Balbo column would look wonderful right next to it.

—

Markus van Drenthe is a democratic socialist and anti-fascist living in Chicago. Much of the information on Balbo in this essay was sourced from the biography Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life by Claudio G. Segrè (University of California Press, 1987).

The post In Chicago, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus Lives On in Italo Balbo appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

In 1847, the Choctaw Nation donated $170 (almost $7,000 in today’s money) to a small coastal town in Ireland called Midleton. Ireland had been facing a famine and a British economic blockade for two years. Despite facing their own recent genocide that killed over 2,000 Choctaw, the nation donated what money they could to the people of Ireland.

Over a century later, the people of Midleton realized the aid had come from the Choctaw and recognized their shared histories of forced famine and ethnic cleansing. In 1995, former Irish president Mary Robinson visited the Choctaw Nation (now in Oklahoma), reestablishing ties between the two nations. Two decades later, an Irish artist named Alex Pentek created the stainless steel structure “Kindred Spirits”, which is located in Midleton’s Bailick Park in commemoration of the Choctaw’s aid. Just last year, the Choctaw commissioned their own sculpture, titled “Eternal Heart,” by Sam Stitt, an enrolled Choctaw artist.

These two indigenous peoples and their shared history reminded me of the recent Global Sumud (meaning “resilience” in Arabic) flotilla and the nearly 500 participants from 44 countries who sailed across the Mediterranean to break the illegal Israeli blockade on Gaza. Twenty-two participants from the United States sailed with the flotilla. The flotilla was established in July of this year to denounce the genocide in Gaza and call on the international community to help Palestinians in desperate need of food, medicine, and other basic supplies.

The flotilla, however, did not reach Gaza. It was illegally intercepted by the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF). While one of the boats, the Mikeno, did make it past the Gaza blockade, it too was boarded nine miles off the coast of Gaza. The participants were arrested, taken to the port of Ashdod, paraded around by far-right settler and Jewish Power party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir for Israeli social media, and shipped off to the Ktzi’ot Prison, located in the occupied Negev desert. For almost a week, the families of the American participants did not know where they were, how long they would be held, or their condition. The U.S. consulate did little to provide aid, and participants were prevented from speaking to legal counsel. 

On October 7th, 2025, Nelson Mandela’s grandson and Sumud participant Mandla Mandela posted a video about his release from Ktzi’ot. American activist David R.K. Adler could be seen in the background of the video. A few days before, X, the mother of one of the participants, received word from the Japanese consulate in Jordan that the Americans were deported from Israel to Jordan and allowed to return home. 

On October 8, five of the American participants made it back to the U.S. and flew back to the O’Hare International Airport. Al Hub, a Palestinian-led youth forum based in Bridgeview, or “Little Palestine” in Chicago, formed a welcome committee for those returning. The action was originally organized for Illinoisan and former Marine Jessica Clotfelter. I was one of the people who turned out in support of the returning Sumud participants. Taking the CTA Red and Blue lines, I made my way to the international terminal (Terminal 5) to join the welcome committee for Jessica Clotfelter, Tommy Marcus (a.k.a. Quentin Quarantino on Instagram), Stephen Wahab, Logan Hollarsmith, and Paul Reid. Jessica’s family, her parents, brother, and cousin, and Stephen’s brother anxiously waited for their return.

The Sumud quintet came from across America. Stephen and Paul are from Oregon, Tommy from California, Logan from Arizona, and Jessica from Illinois. Not all of them were on the same ship during the flotilla. Stephen, a Palestinian-American, was aboard the Alma with activists Greta Thunberg, Thiago de Avila, and Mandla Mandela. Paul was sailing on the Inna with a mostly Spanish and French crew. The Ohwayla hosted Logan (who served as one of its captains), Jessica, and Tommy, as well as fellow American activists David R.K. Adler and Greg Stoker. 

It was around half an half-hour before we saw the five heroes emerge from Exit A in Terminal 5. The Sumud quintet was not expecting this small but mighty welcome home. Paul clutched his heart as he walked towards our group, clearly not expecting such hospitality after nearly a week in an Israeli internment camp.

Jessica and Stephen’s reunions with their families were some of the most heartfelt moments; you could feel the emotion between the families as they were finally reunited with their daughter, sister, brother, or cousin. Al Hub bought bouquets for Jessica’s mother to hand to her and individual flowers for the rest of the quintet. It was touching to witness families reuniting after the wrenching uncertainty of the past week. Tommy, Paul, and Logan did not expect a grand reception just for them.

Once greetings were done and calm settled over the group, some of the gathered community members, including myself and independent journalist Jackie B., asked the five activists questions about their journey to Gaza, their treatment under Israeli captivity, and their eventual release into Jordan.

Tommy Marcus took the lead in answering the first set of questions, as the rest of the group were jet-lagged and still processing the experience. “Yes, we are back in the United States, even after our own government and consulate failed us,” he said. Marcus described how the group was illegally captured by the Israeli Navy in international waters and taken to the Port of Ashdod. There, they and the rest of the Sumud participants were placed in front of Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli politician, leader of the Otzma Yehudit or “Jewish Power” party, and a known settler in the occupied West Bank. There, Israeli military media showed Ben-Gvir calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas.” This is ironic because Ben-Gvir is a Kahanist, who had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, where 27 Palestinian Muslims were murdered, in his house.

After the Israeli propaganda tour, or hasbara, they were then shipped off to the Negev to Ktzi’ot, the largest Israeli prison, or an internment camp, as David Adler called it in this “Democracy Now!” interview. According to Tommy Marcus, the camp holds thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children. Jessica and Logan chimed in, saying that men and women were separated into different isolation blocks and away from the Palestinian hostages. All five confirmed that some of the Sumud participants were held in 1 by 2 meter cells (3.3 feet by 6.6 feet) for up to 72 hours, a practice widely condemned by human rights groups. 

Marcus continued by describing how IOF guards would hold guns to their heads, try to break them by taking away medicine such as insulin or, in Tommy’s case, Lexapro, and zip-tying their hands behind their backs. Logan Hollarsmith, a captain of the Ohwayla, reported that they could hear the screams of Palestinians despite the isolation, and that there is a sub-level beneath the cellblock they were held in via other Sumud participants, who were familiar with the prison.

During this time, Jessica Clotfelter’s attorney, Farah Chalisa, attempted multiple times to locate Jessica by contacting the U.S. consulate, Jessica’s state representative, Mary E. Miller, and other Israeli and American officials. Representative Miller is a far-right Republican elected to serve Illinois’ Congressional District 15. She said in 2021 that “…Hitler was right on one thing: he said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” Ironically, when asked about Jessica’s captivity in occupied Bedu-Palestinian lands, Miller’s office responded to a request for comments by stating  that she “support[s] the right for Israel to exist.”

So how did the quintet make it out of Ktzi’ot and end up in Jordan? As mentioned before, participants’ families heard about it from the Japanese Consulate, one of them being Stephen’s brother, who found out through another Sumud participant’s mother that the Americans were being released into Jordan. 

There is only one open land route between the  West Bank and Jordan: the Allenby Bridge, named after Gen. Edmund Allenby, who led British colonial forces tasked with supporting the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in World War I. When the Sumud members were thrown into a blacked-out IOF van bound for Jordan, Tommy Marcus said he thought “…he and David Adler were going to be black bagged or disappeared and that nobody knew where they were headed”. It was Palestinian-American activist Stephen Wahab who caught a glimpse of a sign pointing to the Allenby Bridge in Arabic through a small sliver of exposed window.

In Jordan, the Sumud members were provided a 5-star hotel and traditional Jordanian/Palestinian food. The American participants stated their consulate did not provide for their comforts in Jordan and that these amenities came from the Jordanian government. After six days in prison, the quintet finally had a warm bed and food; they didn’t have to share the toilet bowl in the cellblock for water and sleep on a hard floor anymore. Before going to an official interview with Jackie B. and Fox News 32, Tommy Marcus said they, the Sumud Five, appreciated the global community for amplifying their captivity, but highlighted the importance of continuing to focus on the genocide in Gaza and the Palestinian hostages from Gaza and the West Bank, especially with the ongoing ceasefire Phase 1 talks going on at the time.

As I made my way back home with Jackie B. and Tommy, who was catching a connecting flight to L.A., I thought about the parallels between my Irish ancestors and the Palestinians. With similar experiences, they face or have faced ongoing famines and genocides. As Jackie and I sat on the Blue Line train, I wondered where future generations might place a sculpture commemorating the flotilla’s actions for the Palestinian people in Gaza. Will there be greater cultural exchanges between the Palestinians and the international community? When and how will the genocide and blockade end? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the resilience of the Palestinian people will live on as they struggle to finally be free.

Though the five Americans we greeted at O’Hare are now safely home, the danger for other activists continues. As of press time, there is one participant from Spain, Reyes Rigo Cervilla, still being held in Israeli captivity. He is imprisoned alongside participants in the recent flotilla “Thousands Madleens to Gaza” that sailed after the Sumud. We stand in solidarity with him and all who sacrifice in the name of a just peace for the Palestinian people.

I cannot begin to describe the bravery of the Sumud quintet had for joining a global flotilla sailing to Gaza to bring aid to the Palestinians. I see very clearly the parallels between the Global Sumud and its heroes and the Great Hunger, which my own family experienced in nineteenth-century Ireland. Even after hundreds of years, colonial tactics remain the same. While there is an ocean between our five heroes and Gaza or the Choctaw and Ireland, there is hope, solidarity, and resilience between all of us. Despite the current situation in Gaza and the horrible violence elsewhere around the world (in Sudan, the Congo, Kashmir, Myanmar, Ukraine, etc.), everyone can do their part, no matter how small. May we all live to see a free Palestine and where all international struggles and the oppressed are free from their shackles of Western imperialism.

The post Famines and Flotillas: From Ireland to Palestine  appeared first on Midwest Socialist.