By Rachel M Toiling to survive and a long day of labor deadens the best parts of We. Are there instructions? A guide map? How do we document the end of an empire nourished by blood, built on brazen exploitation… the thought of writing with sincerity only elicits fatigue Fatigue that reverberates, penetrating far into […]

By Austin DSA

For over a year and a half, Austin DSA has argued that the state of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people is inseparable from struggles for justice in Texas and the United States. We see this everywhere: from the militarized police forces that stalk Black and Brown neighborhoods after being trained by the Israeli military, to the women in Gaza forced to navigate reproductive healthcare structures that have been obliterated by imperial US foreign policy as reactionary domestic policy destroys those same systems at home. The local is inseparable from the international, as the violence that the US oversees abroad returns to our own communities in the form of fascist violence. 

We stand in solidarity with Nueces Mosque, Austin Diyanet Center, and the Islamic Ahlul Bayt Association (IABA), which on May 22 were spray painted with “symbols, including Stars of David, defacing the mosque’s main entrance and surrounding property.” 

Conventional media in the United States often frames violence in Palestine as a religious conflict that has lasted for centuries. The spray painting of a Star of David on a mosque perpetuates this myth, when in fact, this conflict is defined by the aggression of a Zionist, racist, setter-colonial state against an indigenous people which refuses to let itself be destroyed. Framing this as a religious conflict hides a national liberation struggle and inflames both Islamophobia and antisemitism around the world. While Zionism claims that no Jewish person can be safe from antisemitism without a militarized ethnostate, Jewish people suffer when their religion is co-opted and equated to the violent, political ideology of Zionism.

The use of a Jewish religious symbol as a hate crime object against Austin’s Muslim community at large and the UT community at Nueces Mosque in particular is only one more example of how these dynamics have tangible consequences in our city. Recall the stabbing of Zacharia Doar following a Palestine solidarity protest in Austin in 2024, the attempted drowning of a child in Euless, TX later that year, and the emboldening of local neo-nazi groups to carry out actual antisemitic hate crimes in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election. None of us are safe unless all of us are safe.

Austin DSA and Austin Against Apartheid organize for a free Palestine by diverting US resources away from Israeli genocide and apartheid. In doing so, we are standing against all occupational forces that stand between working class people and freedom. We all deserve to live in a world free from money spent on state violence and war instead of life affirming services like housing, healthcare, and social safety nets. Israel’s aggression and religious framings of the conflict breed acts of hatred around the world. The struggle for Palestinian liberation affords us a vocabulary for envisioning a safer, freer world. A free Palestine means a safer society at home and abroad.

The post Solidarity with Austin’s Muslim Community first appeared on Red Fault.

In his failed presidential bid, Human Health and Services Secretary RFK Jr. remarked that he would help people struggling with addiction become healthy again by having them work on unpaid “wellness farms.” If they refused, they would face incarceration. Throughout his career, RFK Jr. has railed against vaccination and modern medicine, taking particular aim at measles and HPV, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and even weight loss drugs. He now serves on Trump’s team of wreckers, an administration that’s dismantled public health infrastructure like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) during our sixth year of COVID-19 and as the threat of a bird flu pandemic grows. 

It should be no surprise that fascism often comes first for the disabled and people deemed as a “societal expense.” In Nazi Germany, Krankenmorde, or the “euthanasia” of the disabled, marked the beginning phase of mass death, and in fascist Italy, mental asylums swelled and transferred their patients to Nazi death camps. Both of these initiatives were preceded by American psychologist Henry Goddard’s writings against the “feebleminded” and the United States’s forced sterilization of the disabled. Fascism’s contemporary resurgence, especially in the U.S., is not a surprise to disabled activists who have warned since the onset of Covid that the rapid normalization of eugenics in regards to the pandemic would be its modern precursor. Yet, both the socialist left and the labor movement remains unprepared for this moment and continues to ignore a public health crisis that fundamentally threatens the vision and hope for an organized, militant working class. 

The Cost of Modern Eugenics

Disability has what is referred to by theorist Sara Ahmed as “stickiness,” or the idea that bodies are impressed upon by their relationships to other bodies, signs, and cultural associations. Race and disability have long been wedded through eugenics. As a recent example, racism and disability were enmeshed at the onset of COVID-19 when Asian people, specifically Chinese Americans and the broader diaspora, were condemned as being the cause of the pandemic, echoing the racist history of Asian people having been situated as “carriers of contagion.” A similar pattern unfolded during the AIDS epidemic, with AIDS having been deemed by major politicians as a disease contracted by “degenerate” queer and Black people. 

Necropolitics and who is mournable have framed much of American history, but especially the last six years. At the start of the pandemic, hospital overcrowding led to infamous triage protocols worldwide where some lives were valued more than others. Nursing homes across the US piled up with deaths without so much as dignified preservation in a morgue. In that time, we began manufacturing consent for the death of the working class from a preventable airborne illness. The CDC claimed early on that Covid would only severely impact the disabled or people with comorbidities, not because they intended to inspire care for the disabled, but to justify their deaths so everyone else could carry on with life as normal. Since 2020, over 1 million Americans have died from Covid-19. 

Infectious disease and a crumbling healthcare infrastructure incapable of providing accessible preventative care continue to leave lasting effects on our communities. Our government takes solace in the active spread of infectious disease and in the culling of the disabled because fascist states believe we must weed out the unfit. The “Make America Healthy Again” Executive Order, RFK Jr.’s announcement of a “disease registry” taking aim at autistic people, and the dismantling of the FDA’s regulatory power over our food supply are just the latest steps taken by this administration that will hurt all segments of the working class. For workers in America, the precarity of health is universal.

And yet, many of us remain largely in denial about our own proximity to disability. Apart from the fact that about 45% of Americans have a comorbidity, Covid has been proven to remain in the body post-infection and cause lingering damage to cardiovascular and organ systems, and having been infected with Covid even just once makes it more likely you’ll develop long-Covid. Studies on the prevalence of long-Covid show that nearly 7% of the population, or 1 in 13 Americans, currently has it and of those, 1 in 5 report having symptoms that disrupt their daily life. Some doctors estimate that within four years, most Americans will have long-Covid. As of the summer of 2024, 13.9% of those experiencing long-Covid had failed to return to work; we know what happens to people who can’t work under capitalism. 

The material repercussions of Covid infection and reinfection have already begun to show themselves. The most apparent impact is the disruption to our immune systems. We saw reports of a “quademic” this past holiday season (Covid, RSV, flu, and norovirus), and this season our flu infections and death rates are higher than they were at the peak of swine flu. As disability rates climb, services and social safety nets for the disabled become harder to access. Our life expectancy is in decline. Our cancer rates are on the rise. Since the onset of modern medicine, Americans have seemingly never been sicker.

But the left’s reluctance, including DSA, to fight for disabled people is not just a mistake that costs us our health, it is also making us deeply vulnerable to attacks on workers. In a police state reliant on facial recognition technology to squash threats to power, mask bans are an obvious next step, and multiple counties and states are banning them entirely. 

Most recently, Columbia University announced plans to implement a mask ban on campus because of protests in solidarity with Palestine. Kathy Hochul is following in lock-step to ban masks in public in the name of safety, and Maryland is contending with a Democrat introduced statewide ban in service of the Anti-Defamation League, another decision also directly connected to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Simultaneously, we’re seeing an end to Covid era worker benefits like telework, which was originally intended as a disability accommodation, and even threats to OSHA. A wider, bolder movement invested in disability solidarity that sees disabled struggle as class struggle would be better equipped to protect workers and their organizing rights. 

The longer we continue to ignore our public health crisis, the more vulnerable the working class will become to sickness, disability, and state repression.

What is to Be Done? 

The seemingly innocuous limit of socialist solidarity with the disabled is masking. Despite the claims we made in early pandemic days that a refusal to mask was a refusal to engage in community care, we have adopted the ultimately neoliberal principle that each person can and should make an individual choice about masking. It should be evident that public health matters significantly to the physical and mental wellbeing of the working class. Organizing for socialism will become increasingly difficult as our peers continue to get sick, become disabled, or are caught in a cycle of working to afford caring for sick loved ones who have no social safety nets. 

We know that masks work at preventing the spread and contraction of airborne viruses. N95s and KN95s are the most effective at doing both. For the right-wing, that isn’t a fact. The Trump administration’s latest report about Covid being a lab leak says as much: “There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19.” 

Socialists must counter these fascist, unscientific narratives not just in voice, but through collective action. There was once a time when we did. At the start of the pandemic, socialists prided themselves on understanding the science behind why masks work and why we should wear them. Unionists fought for worker access to PPE and air filtration systems. Some workers even went on strike over it. Now, it is exceedingly rare to find socialist organizations or unions routinely calling for and enabling spaces that require masking, and both have mostly stopped contending with the ongoing ramifications of a lack of public health infrastructure or the working class’s vulnerability to sickness.

The inaccessibility of healthcare in America is why most of us want universal healthcare, a collective solution to the problem, and although every broken piece of the for-profit healthcare system was exposed by the pandemic, the US left failed to win it. Unfortunately, there are segments of the left that still choose to shirk any responsibility to public health. Medicare-for-All is no longer the public rallying cry it once was for national DSA, or its surrogates. Similarly, the Party for Socialist Liberation’s presidential candidate Claudia De La Cruz, in a livestream for her campaign, directly addressed the question of mask mandates in PSL spaces saying, “People are asking about masking, well there’s no federal mandate on masking, right? But we do have masks at our different events. People choose whether to use them or not. We can’t implement something that the federal government, having the power to do it at a national scale, does not do.” 

Why not? Is the role of socialist organizations claiming to counter capitalism and empire to mimic the United States government? We set rules about our spaces all the time. We have bylaws, codes of conduct, harassment and grievance policies– all things that aid in the mission to keep our spaces safe, and yet when disabled activists ask for masking requirements, no one hears us. We’re told that masking makes us “out of touch with the working class,” that we’re “freaks,” or that we’re simply asking too much. Many of these claims run counter to the science behind masking and public health that would benefit most working people, especially those of us already struggling with various forms of disability. 

While we may list universal healthcare as a primary socialist demand, electoral campaigns associated with the DSA must actively advocate for it. Locally DSA endorsed candidates, like Zohran Mamdani, who I hope wins, should be elevating healthcare as an issue and loudly supporting initiatives like the New York Health Act to establish statewide single-payer healthcare. Universal healthcare must be a core part of our agitational electoral campaigns, regardless of district or region. 

DSA and other socialist and labor organizations must take material steps to protect the health of the working class. It is possible and necessary for us to require masking and air filtration at DSA events, run electoral campaigns that agitate around universal healthcare, and encourage our union members to push their Locals to take up the issue of public health. We should also be engaging in political education on the history of eugenics and disability activism here and abroad. 

The argument for solidarity with the disabled community doesn’t begin or end with Covid mitigation. It requires a sharper analysis of how capitalism preys on our health for profit and disposes of us when we’re sick, and of how it uses sickness and eugenics as a scapegoat to justify the policing and state-sanctioned execution of people of color, the disabled, and political dissidents. Disability touches all of our lives at any given stage, and it is latent in class, social, and ecological struggle. The opportunities for disability solidarity are all around us and as fascism rises worldwide and continues rendering more of us unmournable in the eyes of the state, it is the responsibility of socialists to intervene.

Unless we commit to practicing true solidarity with the disabled, eugenics will disable and kill the working class base we claim to want to organize, fight for, and protect.

Image Description: Official portrait of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States secretary of health and human services. Photo taken Feb. 21, 2025.

This article is a first attempt to review what happened leading up to and surrounding this year’s May Day rallies, who organized the rallies, how they accomplished it, and what comes next. It’s based on discussions with union leaders and DSA members in a half dozen cities and our experience here in Maine. The breadth of the protests means this assessment is necessarily anecdotal and incomplete. The author welcomes corrections and hopes DSA members will write up and share their experiences across the country. For background to the UAW’s call for a 2028 May Day general strike, see the fall 2024 issue of Socialist Forum featuring an interview with CTU, UAW, and DSA organizers.

What happened? 

Hundreds of thousands of workers marched and rallied on May Day, making it the largest International Workers Day since 2006 when two million immigrant workers left work and marched to demand their rights. Protests were organized in 1300 locations, large and small; no doubt the first May Day protest in many places. Broadly speaking, there were three different levels of mobilization. First, as in 2006, Chicago stood out with some 30,000 marching, organized by a mass coalition of labor and immigrant rights organizations. Second, cities like Philly, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Oakland, Burlington, and Portland, Maine mobilized between two and fifteen thousand. Third, hundreds of cities and towns turned out crowds from a couple dozen to hundreds, including smaller cities like Davis, California. This ranking is not intended as a judgement on the organizers. In fact, some of the smaller rallies included higher percentages of the population than the largest. For instance, in the town of Wayne, Maine—population 1,000—seventy-five people turned out for both morning and evening rallies. 

It’s worth noting that the crowds were not as large as the April 5 day of protest initiated by Indivisible; however, participants were noticeably more multiracial, younger, and radical with widespread support for transgender rights and opposition to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Though an important step in the process of building working-class unity against the billionaires and capitalist class, these efforts have a long way to go. For instance, although multiracial, at the national level, the marches did not entirely reflect working-class diversity. And if immigrant rights organizations were critical in many cities, Trump’s reign of terror against immigrant workers suppressed turnout from this community in many places. 

Who organized it and how? 

Memory and sacrifice play a role in sustaining oppositional working-class culture. No Haymarket Martyrs, no May Day. More recently, the 2006 May Day protests provided a living link to the past as well as the importance of International Workers Day globally. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for unions to align contracts and lead a 2028 general strike, have introduced May Day to a whole new generation of labor organizers.

 Recently, precursor actions in the wake of Trump’s election laid the basis for pulling together a mass, class-based response. As the saying goes, the best organizing tool is a bad boss and Trump is one of the worst bosses possible. Repression and widespread layoffs do not always provoke resistance, but this time targeted workers put up a critical mass of opposition that gummed up the works and provided the time to organize a strategic response. 

Thousands of teachers from across the country responded to a call by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers for walk-ins in March to protest Trump’s destruction of the Department of Education. Bay Area activists organized a “Day of Resistance” against ICE even before Trump was inaugurated. The Maine State Nurses Association led a rally to protest Medicaid cuts in March and organized a mass town hall to prevent the closure of the obstetrics department in the small town of Houlton. Kathryn Lybarger, president of AFSCME 3299 representing 22,000 workers at the University of California, summarizes her union’s approach, “My union went on its fourth strike in six months on May Day, and the energy felt great. For union members fighting a powerful employer for our families’ futures, it was amazing to be joined on the picket line by all kinds of community members who are fighting billionaires for their futures too. The day felt like an event and an important step in building the movement we need to stop Trump and win a better world.”   In the single biggest display of working-class power on May Day, 55,000 LA County employees in SEIU 721 walked off the job and marched through downtown LA. 

As federal workers reeled from Trump’s layoffs, the Federal Unionist Network was one of the most important elements blunting the blitzkrieg. FUN organizer Chris Dols explains, “Amidst all the necessary defense we’re playing against the billionaires’ offensive, May Day is the labor movement’s opportunity to articulate a positive vision for the world we deserve. Federal workers are uniquely positioned and proud to help advance such a vision because, above all else, we are public servants, and it is the entire public that is under assault. As is captured by the FUN’s ‘Save Our Services’ demand, our approach to May Day was to foreground the crucial services and protections federal workers provide in an effort to not only cohere fighting federal labor movement but also to develop and deepen alliances with all who stand to lose the most if Trump gets away with smashing up our agencies.”

Pair these factors with decades of bipartisan misery inflicted on the working class, and it’s not surprising workers are angry. Politicians have failed to deliver on demands like healthcare for all, affordable housing, and a stronger public education system. Add inflation, union-busting, white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia and homophobia, genocide in Gaza, and anti-immigrant bigotry, and the potential for uniting large parts of the working class across its many divisions comes into focus.

Chicago takes the lead

Yet objective conditions alone cannot make a plan. Organized forces with the credibility and capacity to think through a strategy and to put it into practice are needed. 

According to Jesse Sharkey, past president of the Chicago Teachers Union and lead organizer with the newly-formed May Day Strong coalition, “Chicago became a center of May Day organizing this year for two reasons—first, there was a local coalition that got a lot of people involved. Activists from the immigrants rights community were extremely important in initiating it, and they held open meetings. They invited anyone who wanted to help organize. That drew in trade unionists, and many others. On a second front, Chicago was in the middle of initiating a national call for May Day protests… The call for that effort came from the Chicago Teachers Union and a handful of allied organizations such as Midwest Academy, Bargaining for the Common Good, and the Action Center on Race and the Economy. The NEA also played an extremely helpful role. In late March, we had about 220 people from over 100 organizations join us in Chicago to start planning for May 1 actions. The reason we were able to initiate such a widespread effort was because we have a past practice of closely linking trade union fights to wider working-class demands. In places where local unions have worked with community and activist groups, we had networks of communication and trust. Then, once that effort had reached a certain critical mass, some of the big national networks like Indivisible and 50501 got on board, and that really grew the reach of the day.”

It’s not that the CTU and immigrant community organizers in Chicago were the only ones thinking about May Day, but their action drew together and amplified similar efforts across the country, nationalizing the protest by providing a framework and resources for labor and community organizers in hundreds of towns and cities. Chicago didn’t create May Day 2025—thousands of activists across the country had to take up the call—but it did open a door. 

Socialists and the united front

Assessing the impact of May Day for the working class as a whole should not be conflated with DSA’s role in the organizing. But as this is an article that will mostly reach DSA members, it’s worth reviewing what we contributed. First, thousands of DSA members across the country turned out for May Day. This fact alone shows our organization’s strength, and it points to opportunities and responsibilities. If all your chapter was able to do was to turn out members or help publicize the local protest among coworkers and the broader community, that’s an important contribution. Second, at the National Level, DSA’s National Political Committee and National Labor Commission joined May Day Strong and organized membership Zoom meetings to encourage branches to take action starting in March. Third, and this should come as no surprise, DSA played a bigger role in some places than others. I think it’s worth considering the impact of the strategic and tactical choices local chapters made on the influence they wielded and the organic ties they deepened. After speaking with comrades from across the country, I will offer a few positive examples. I hope comrades will add to this picture and offer alternative ideas or criticisms. 

New York 

In October, the NYC-DSA chapter adopted a resolution to support the UAW’s call for a 2028 May Day strike. The chapter subsequently held an internal May Day 2028 strategy retreat and identified May Day 2025 as a key link in the chain of developing power and political momentum to fight against Trump and the broader machine. As one DSA organizer puts it, “It’s not enough to circle May Day 2028 on a calendar, we need to build a coalition to organize it and politicize it.” Rooted in this perspective, NYC-DSA turned out to support a mass post-election labor-left anti-Trump rally, the FUN day of action in February, the subsequent Stop the Cuts rally on March 15, and Hands Off on April 5. 

Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth, co-chair of NYC-DSA Labor Working Group and National Labor Commission SC member (as well as a twenty-year member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA) picks up the story, reflecting, “After Stop the Cuts, I went to Chicago on March 19 and 20 as an NLC representative to join the May Day Strong meeting. Stacy Davis Gates, Jackson Potter, and Jesse Sharkey welcomed us all into the house that CTU built. Shawn Fain was there along with Randi Weingarten, who was enraged because Trump signed his executive order gutting the Department of Education that same day. We broke out into regions and were charged with going back home to build May Day as big as possible. In New York City, broadly speaking, there were three important currents: the core of the union movement represented by the Central Labor Council, the left-liberals like Tesla Takedown, and the labor/left, of which DSA is a part. Through a lot of coalition work, we made a circle out of this Venn diagram. Trump helped along the way. Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation really angered the Building Trades, further galvanizing them into participation. DSA played an important role in mobilizing: we had a huge contingent, and even more members marching with their unions. But more than that, we helped politicize May Day to point to the billionaires who are benefiting from the Trump administration’s attacks on us.” 

Part of this work included successfully advocating—alongside many others—for both AOC and Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyer to speak at the rally, which garnered significant national media attention, helping broadcast our message far beyond May Day participants. It’s important to point out that DSA did not initiate the coalition, but worked alongside long-time labor activists to support May Day, earning our stripes as a trusted and capable partner. 

On the day, NYC-DSA turned out some 500 members, many of whom marched with their unions. They did so while keeping up with other work—DSA member Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor—with NYC-DSA labor organizers having advanced a month-long Build to May Day campaign. Organizers called on committees and working groups across the chapter to make May Day a priority, turning out members and volunteer marshalls. The chapter is now in a stronger position to discuss next steps with the broader coalition and consolidate a layer of new members and allies. There’s more pain ahead, but May Day helped gather working-class forces together for action and to take the temperature of the most active and militant layer of trade unionists and community activists. As NYC-DSA Labor Working Group member David Duhalde suggests, “The New York City May Day rally and march from Foley Square to the iconic Wall Street Bull statue was a microcosm of the shift in energy in labor during Trump’s second term.” How far that shift goes can only be tested in practice.

Philadelphia

As in New York, Philadelphia DSA did not initiate the call for the May Day rallies. The AFL-CIO led the charge in alliance with immigrants rights organizations such as Milpa, New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, and Juntos, mobilizing some 5,000 workers. But Philadelphia DSA did add its organizing muscle, assigning Luke M to act as liaison. The chapter followed many of the same tactics as their New York comrades. When the AFL-CIO opened up the coalition, DSA members proved themselves energetic organizers; for instance, running the marshal training and providing a large portion of marshals. DSA members constituted a large part of the seventy-two people arrested at the end of the march in a civil disobedience action, including Rick Krajewski, a DSA member elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Seven union presidents joined in this calculated escalation of tactics, demonstrating a broad understanding that workers will have to take matters into their own hands to back down the billionaires and capitalist elites. 

And in a lesson passed down through generations, from the IWW to Sit-Down Strikes to the Civil Rights Movement to Occupy to Black Lives Matter to Gaza, no protest is finished until jail support is organized, a responsibility that was taken up by DSA members and coalition partners alike. That unity in action demonstrated the most important aspect of united front work, but the chapter also raised the socialist banner. Taking placards and membership interest card ideas from DSA members in California, Philadelphia DSA formed a visible presence on the march with some 200 members, and signed up sixty-two new recruits. It didn’t hurt that the unions invited Bernie to speak. After all the hard work, Luke praised his Philly comrades, “I have to say I’m genuinely proud of what we accomplished, and I’m looking forward to the debrief meeting to see what comes next.”

Portland, Maine

Maine DSA’s Labor Rising working group decided to focus on May Day in December, laying the basis to help initiate an organizing meeting open to all community groups and unions. Maine AFL-CIO leaders and UAW graduate students participated in a preliminary meeting to brainstorm ideas, and more than 70 people attended an April 12 meeting in the South Portland Teamsters’ Hall, where the group democratically planned Portland’s May Day. Working groups took up all aspects of the action, and we took all important decisions back to the coalition for votes. Running a long a related track, Maine Education Association and Maine AFL-CIO leaders called for actions across the state, amplifying the Chicago May Day Strong call and dramatically broadening what the Portland coalition could organize. 

Nearly 2,000 people turned out in Portland, starting with a rally at the University of Southern Maine to back UAW graduate students’ demands for a first contract and then marching to the Post Office to hear from postal workers. Members of the Portland Education Association and a trans student poet headlined the stop at Portland High School and a librarian union rep spoke in Monument Square before the final rally that heard from the president of the Metal Trades Council at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, a rep from the Maine State Nurses Association, members of the Maine Coalition for Palestine, an organizer from LGTBQ+ community group Portland Outright, a local immigrant rights group called Presente! Maine, and others. It was a great demonstration and showed the thirst for a broader coalition. Twenty-five other towns held actions, bringing the total number of Maine participants to over 5,000, the largest Maine May Day anyone can remember. 

It would be shortsighted to overstate the power and stability of this fledgling coalition. Large doses of patience and understanding will be necessary to foster bonds of trust. Sectarian pressures to draw “red lines” that exclude workers new to political activity and organizations who have various programs and interests represent one danger. A narrow focus on the midterm elections represents another. Fortunately, there’s a lot of room for creativity between those two extremes. 

Long road ahead

May Day was the first test of strength for the left and working class against Trump, MAGA, and forty-plus years of neoliberal rot. We face a long, complex problem where political pressures to return to passivity will be strong, but May Day 2025 constitutes a small step towards healing deep wounds in the American working class, the divide between organized and unorganized, immigrant and US born, etc. If brother Fain’s call for 2028 is to grow strong, then 2026 and 2027 must be practice runs.  If 2026 and 2027 are to be real demonstrations of strength, they must grow out of tighter bonds between labor, community, and the left, more active membership participation in all of those forces, and a combination of defensive struggles we are forced to fight and battles we pick on our own terms. As Sarah Hurd, co-chair of DSA’s National Labor Commission, spells out, “This year’s May Day actions showed the power of what we can accomplish just by setting a date and inviting people to take action together. It has also highlighted what work we need to do to scale up our level of organization in the next three years.” 

What did May Day teach us? Fittingly, the last word goes to Kirsten Roberts, a rank-and-file Chicago teacher, “The most important element of May Day 2025 is the explicit entry of organized and unorganized labor into resistance to Trump. Trump’s attacks are aimed directly at dividing the working class and turning ordinary people against one another while the billionaires rob and plunder us all. An agenda for working class unity can be built when we stand up for those most victimized and vilified by the right-wing bigots AND when we stand together to fight for the things that the billionaire class has denied us—the fight for healthcare, education, housing, and good-paying jobs for starters. For decades, we’ve been told by both parties that funding war, incarceration, and border militarization are their priorities. May Day showed that working people have another agenda. Now let’s organize to win it.”

On February 21, 2025, Elon Musk walked onto the stage of the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference and waved around a chainsaw before declaring “I am become meme!” The chainsaw was handed to him by President Javier Milei of Argentina, who used the chainsaw as a symbol of his campaign to “cut bureaucracy” and bring prosperity to Argentina–a campaign so successful that 57% of Argentinians now live in poverty. In typical Muskian fashion however, the chainsaw did not actually function, and instead Elon himself made chainsaw noises. 

As Elon jumped around, his ex-girlfriend Grimes took to messaging him publicly on X (Twitter) begging him to please stop ignoring their child’s medical needs. “Plz respond about our child’s medical crisis. I am sorry to do this publicly but it is no longer acceptable to ignore this situation. This requires immediate attention,” She then explained to others on the site, “I’m not giving any details but he won’t respond to texts, calls or emails and has skipped every meeting and our child will suffer lifelong impairment if he doesn’t respond asap.” 

This is the man who Trump has granted near-limitless power to cut budgets and fire employees at will through his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

As of writing, this administration has already ordered the firing of 220,000 federal workers. Tens of thousands have been fired so far. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its activities protecting people from debt collectors have been effectively ended. Plans are underway to eliminate the Department of Education. DOGE has already ended dozens of education programs, seemingly targeting in particular those meant to help disabled students, as part of DOGE’s campaign against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Thousands have been fired from the Department of Veteran Affairs, and the administration has ended many of its programs researching cancer and veterans’ healthcare. They have also cut hundreds of millions of dollars in research and education funding, particularly healthcare-related research conducted through the National Institutes of Health. Following in the footsteps of Argentina’s Millei, these government cuts are triggering a reduction in consumer spending, an increase in inflation, and risking negative economic growth in the United States–all potential signs of a nosedive towards economic recession.

Listen: these guys suck.

They just plain suck. It’s not even funny! These people are freaks, and not the good kind.

So let’s just get rid of them!

There is, in fact, a long tradition of working people defying governments and organizing for revolution in their workplace: this tradition is called syndicalism.

Syndicalism is a form of action that focuses on organizing unions as the primary revolutionary vehicles to overturn the power of the capitalist class, take control of the workplace, and run our workplaces and economic system together democratically.

The ideas can perhaps best be summarized by the 1906 Charter of Amiens, which became the program of many syndicalist unions: “In daily protest work the union pursues the coordination of working class efforts, and the growth of the well being of workers, through the carrying out of immediate improvements, such as the diminution in work hours, the increase in salaries, etc. But this task is only one side of the work of syndicalism: it prepares complete emancipation, which can only be fulfilled by expropriation of the capitalists; it advocates as a method of action the general strike; and it considers that the union, today a resistance group will be, in the future, a group for production and redistribution, the basis of social reorganization.”

Prior to World War I, syndicalism was an important form of revolutionary socialist struggle in industrial societies. Animated by the vision of a socialist and egalitarian future, syndicalists organized the first major national unions that many countries ever had, mobilizing millions of workers for revolutionary struggle. With this vision, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) was organized in France in 1895, and to this day it remains the largest labor union in France. The Freie Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften (FVdG) was organized in Germany in 1897, later reorganizing in 1919 as the even larger Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (FAUD). The Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA) was organized in Argentina in 1902. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was organized in the United States in 1905. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was organized in Spain in 1910 out of the merger of several earlier regional syndicalist unions. The Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) was organized in Italy in 1912. The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) was organized in South Africa in 1919, evolving out of the IWW chapter there. The Confederação Geral do Trabalho (CGT) was organized in Portugal also in 1919. Each of these unions would reach over a hundred thousand members, and many of them remained in their time the largest labor union in their country. In some cases they became international unions, such as the IWW with its branches in the tens of thousands in Chile, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.

There are many lessons we can draw from these movements. However, I would like to focus on one particular example of syndicalist organizing relevant to our current crisis. In 1918, the German Empire was overthrown, with a leading role played by a group of labor militants known as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards.

How did this happen?

In 1914, the empires of Europe went to war with each other over competing territorial claims. This was World War I. In a shock to the international socialist movement, the socialist party of Germany, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), did not oppose the German Empire’s war of conquest. Instead, they embraced it! The SPD leadership whipped its parliamentary politicians into funding the war, and opponents of the war within the party ranks were quickly expelled, with many then imprisoned by the Empire. The SPD and the Empire further entered into an agreement called the Burgfrieden, whereby the SPD-affiliated labor unions agreed to not go on strike for the duration of the war and to discipline workers to increase productivity for the war effort. The syndicalist FVdG was the only German union to release a statement opposing the war and Burgfrieden, and for this its leaders were imprisoned and driven underground.

Many rank-and-file workers recoiled at the actions of the SPD and began organizing their own opposition to the war. Labor militants and shop stewards created an independent underground network known as Revolutionäre Obleute, or in English–the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (RSS).

RSS members were organizers recruited from workplaces across unions and firms where the workers were opposed to the war and would be willing to go on strike irrespective of the position of the union leadership. The RSS member from that workplace was chosen by the workplace’s workers as a sort of delegate to the RSS, someone who had the leadership abilities to organize strikes while also being trusted enough to represent coworkers and maintain secrecy. The RSS also targeted the war material industries in particular to recruit members and organize anti-war sentiment as a way to position themselves to halt the entire war effort and the Empire’s military capabilities.

As the war dragged on, the Empire began rationing food and energy, and there were scarcities throughout the economy. Casualties mounted. Family members and loved ones were lost. Dissatisfaction began to grow. RSS militants flexed their muscles in their respective workplaces more and more by initiating illegal strikes for better wages and working conditions, violating the Burgfrieden. By 1916, the RSS felt confident enough to begin organizing their first general strike against the government when SPD parliamentary leader and anti-militarist agitator Karl Liebknecht was arrested, spurring the anti-war movement into public action.

With public anger forming against the war and Liebknecht’s arrest, the RSS decided now was their chance to launch a general strike. The RSS tried to hold an emergency meeting of members at a dancehall, but police had been tipped off and arrived before them. The thrity RSS organizers instead chose a local pub to meet, and there they decided that they had enough support in their respective workplaces to call a strike for the following day, June 28, 1916. They returned to their workplaces, and the following day, they left their workplace for the streets–with thousands alongside them. Initially this meant the large metal-working companies in Berlin went on strike, since this is where the RSS was most densely organized, but thousands of other workers soon went on strike in support. In Berlin and Braunschwig, 55,000 workers in total struck to demand Liebknecht’s freedom, despite mainstream union leadership and the SPD publicly opposing the strike.

This strike did not succeed in its goals–Liebknecht was conscripted to the army, then imprisoned again after he kept trying to organize soldiers against the war. He remained in prison until 1918. For many, this was demoralizing. But the RSS understood this was a long game, and the fact that they were able to muster tens of thousands of workers on an illegal strike for a political goal, rather than a purely workplace-related issue, was a promising sign of what could be achieved. So they organized another strike. After a harsh winter, the Empire reduced everyone’s food rations in March, and a new law was passed conscripting civilians to work in the war industries. The RSS felt there was enough popular anger against the Empire again to launch another strike.

Among syndicalists there is a recurring question of whether to work within the mainstream labor unions and convert them to syndicalism or build new independent radical syndicalist unions outside of them. The majority of the syndicalist movement at this time chose the latter. However, the RSS opted for something a little in between. The RSS agreed with their syndicalist comrades that unions should be the major revolutionary vehicle to overthrow the capitalist system and become the infrastructure of the new democratically-organized economy. And although individual members of the RSS were members of various socialist groups, they were committed to maintaining the independence of the RSS and revolutionary labor movement outside the influence of any political parties. However, the RSS did not attempt to build an independent union. 

Instead, RSS members came together across different unions to organize. To that end, their network was both: 1) a parallel infrastructure meant to allow militants to directly organize with their fellow workers and coordinate with each other across workplaces, bypassing the authority of the mainstream union leadership; and 2) a network within each union to coordinate taking over the leadership and direction of that union. Everything is an organizing opportunity, everywhere is a battlefield for class war. To that end, Richard Muller, one of the key leaders of the RSS, successfully passed a resolution in the metalworkers union to demand an end to the new law conscripting civilians to work in the war industries. They then used the union’s upcoming general assembly to organize with RSS and non-RSS union members alike for a new general strike. Muller was imprisoned by the Empire for his actions, but that only served to inflame the more moderate members of the metalworkers union, who now felt that one of their own was being attacked.

The result was an April 1917 general strike that was even bigger than the 1916 one, with an estimate of over 100,000 strikers paralyzing the cities of Berlin, Braunschweig, Halle, Magdeburg, Leipzig, and others. Demands came to free Muller, increase the food ration, and establish democratic political representation. After a day, the pro-war leader of the metalworkers union called for an end to the strike, but tens of thousands continued striking for another week anyway. None of the demands were met. That didn’t stop anyone though. In fact, it just made them more angry.

Several months later, Muller was released, and the RSS began planning another strike. They attempted to forge coalitions with other anti-war elements, in particular the USPD and the Spartacus League. These groups were formed by people who were expelled or resigned from the SPD because they opposed the war, perhaps the most well known of them being Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, and even by this point, the famously moderate Eduard Bernstein. If you’ve lost even Bernstein, you’ve really done it! And done it they did – the German Empire was losing the war, and badly. The SPD’s continued support for the war lacked any credibility. After extensive surveying of their members and fellow workers, the RSS in consultation with the USPD and Spartacus League organized for another general strike on January 28. This time the strike demand was explicit: the people demand the downfall of the regime. RSS members went to general meetings of their unions to call on all workers to strike. Some of the mainstream union leadership denounced the strike but to no avail.

On January 28, 1918, the metalworkers announced the start of the strike by banging hammers on metal oxygen tanks in the factories. Eventually over 500,000 workers went on strike across Germany demanding the overthrow of the government. The police responded with brutality, assaulting assemblies and raiding union offices, targeting and arresting strike leaders. The military was called in to Berlin, and RSS leaders feared they would be willing to fire on the strikers. Out of caution, they called off the strike only a week after it began. This was the third general strike.

It was soon followed up by a fourth and final general strike. Knowing they would have to face off against the military, the RSS and allies began assembling weapons and prepared to initiate the next strike in November. They smuggled thousands of rifles into Berlin and hid them throughout the city. They made plans for armed marches through the city to occupy critical infrastructure and surround the military barracks before the army could be mobilized. Then something unexpected happened: sailors in the German Navy in the northern port of Kiel mutinied, refusing to fight anymore in a losing war, and Kiel itself came out in protest to support them. A revolutionary wind in the air, the RSS moved up their plans and launched the fourth general strike on November 9, 1918. This time, the SPD and pro-war union leadership didn’t dare to oppose it. They saw the writing on the wall.

When the day came, everyone did their duty. Contemporary observers noted with surprise how bloodless and automatic it all seemed. The barracks were surrounded. The soldiers either surrendered or joined the strikers. The railways, bridges, telegraphs, and other critical infrastructure were occupied by armed workers. An armed march on the parliament building, with Richard Muller at its head, led to the pro-war parliamentarians scattering and trying to escape as the armed strikers began seizing each room. New revolutionary committees to manage food, welfare, and trade were already being established in the old offices that once were occupied by war planning. Karl Liebknecht, now freed from prison, declared a new socialist republic from the balcony of the former royal palace to thunderous applause from thousands.

The rest of the story doesn’t have a happy ending. But the post-revolution politics that eventually led to the rise of the Nazis is a story for another time.

What can we learn from this part of the story?

As of writing, Trump is attempting to institute his own Burgfrieden, with an extra emphasis on Burger. He has granted permission to Israel to continue their genocide of the Palestinian people with US weapons, as he organizes murderous US airstrikes against Yemen. He has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport any immigrant, regardless of visa or residency status, who has expressed opposition to the genocide, including the high-profile arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and others. Now Trump is expanding his attempts to arrest and deport hundreds, targeting university activists, academic union organizers, and immigrant labor organizers. Trump additionally signed an executive order nullifying collective bargaining agreements with most federal labor unions, ending union protections for over 800,000 workers. Trump’s threats to withhold funding from universities that don’t crack down harder on anti-genocide protests has led Columbia University to expel Grant Miner, the pro-Palestine president of the university’s academic worker union UAW 2710 of which Mahmoud Khalil was also a member. This was only one day before union contract negotiations were to begin–the university has since cancelled the negotiations. Twenty-two students at Columbia have either been expelled, suspended, or had their degree revoked. Opponents to the war, including labor organizers, are being suppressed and arrested–does any of this sound familiar?

Noticeably absent from the opposition to Trump’s new Burger-frieden is the opposition party itself, the Democratic Party. Leading Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand have instead voted to pass the Trump-Elon austerity bill, which cuts billions in public spending and thousands of jobs. Only a handful of Democratic members of Congress have spoken out against the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and others, while the top party leadership remains silent. The result has been a collapse in public approval of the Democratic Party to literally record lows.

Although the people may not yet demand the downfall of the regime, they at least are demanding a real opposition to it. The layoffs among federal employees have led to nationwide protests by federal labor unions. Federal labor organizers have formed the Federal Unionist Network to coordinate collective action against the administration. They have organized mass rallies in major cities under the banner of Save Our Services. Many of these Save Our Services rallies occurred outside of Tesla vehicle dealerships, helping inspire the Tesla Takedown pickets of Tesla facilities and direct action against Tesla vehicles. In parallel, academic labor unions have mobilized thousands of workers in Stand Up for Science and Kill the Cuts rallies. During the April 5 nationwide day of action, which mobilized at least one million in protest, labor unions joined in marching on the capital to demand freedom for Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and other political prisoners.

We can take a few lessons from the history of syndicalism and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards. For one, the revolutionary syndicalist unions built their strength through organizing the unorganized. DSA is doing this through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and Workers Organizing Workers (WOW). These successes could be even further expanded upon through deep organizing in immigrant communities, which perhaps some chapters are already doing. This would include the translation and dissemination of organizing materials in local languages, developing organizers for EWOC and WOW who can field organizational efforts in local languages, as well as holding organizing meetings in immigrant neighborhoods in the languages of the neighborhood.

As the organizing base widens, more organizers are recruited, and the organizing network expands, there arises a need to coordinate collective action. This could be done in the manner of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards by establishing a formally-organized network of labor militants across workplaces where the workers are opposed to the Trump administration and willing to take politically-motivated labor action. Many labor militants already connect through DSA, and these connections can evolve into the kind of tightly-organized structure that labor confrontation demands: uniting upon a common platform, common strategy, common actions, whereby all members take responsibility for the mobilization and success of the action within the workplace they represent. Like the RSS, this socialist labor network could also fulfill the dual role of organizing militancy within unions while also coordinating action between militants across unions in a way that bypasses potential blocks from moderate leadership. A lot of this work can begin at the chapter level for local labor organizing and can expand nationally, facilitated by resources and connections from the DSA National Labor Commission.

Ultimately, like the RSS, this militancy could organize a succession of nationwide general strikes against the administration. It goes without saying it will take long and intense organizing work to reach this kind of critical mass, but it’s a critical mass we can reach. And these would be hard fights, but they’re hard fights that can be won. We can take heart from some recent successes of illegal strike actions: the Durham city sanitation workers strike in 2023, the public school teacher strikes in right-to-work states in 2018, the Indiana Graduate Worker Coalition strikes in 2022 and 2024, the UAW 4811 strike for Palestine in 2024, and more. Additionally, we have a long history of general strikes in the United States to draw inspiration from, such as the St. Louis General Strike in 1877, the Seattle General Strike in 1919, and the San Francisco General Strike in 1934.

Perhaps the prospect of taking such a direct and combative stance against the administration seems scary. But if left unchecked, Trump and Elon will engineer a reality far more frightening. People are being sent to prison camps. Hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs. The economy is crashing. The country is being thrown into a generalized crisis. As things stand, each and every one of us in this society is stamped with an invisible number that marks our place next in line for losing a job, losing housing, or getting imprisoned. Our only defense is to band together and fight. We have it in our power to change the world. And we must change it. If we stand still, we will lose everything. If we act, we will win everything. The choice is clear. The world is yours, if you simply reach out to seize it.

“I can’t support myself and my kid with just this job,” she said. “I need to get a second gig.”

“Shouldn’t you be able to?”

“What do you mean?”

“Shouldn’t you be able to pay all your bills,” I said, “with one job?” 

I asked this while a coworker and I were killing time before we both clocked in, and it was clear that she had never considered this idea before. She thought for a second and cited our hourly wage. It’s too low, of course, to cover her expenses. “We work for the biggest coffee company on the planet, whose CEO just got a multimillion-dollar quarterly bonus, but you don’t get paid enough to live. Why not?”

It was an open-ended question, and deliberately so, because I was genuinely curious to see what she thought. The question has been answered with entire books of political thought, but I wanted to see what this person whom I work with every day would make of it. She leans conservative and wouldn’t have responded to any blanket leftist statements or jargon-heavy theory. But none of that was necessary, because with one question, we were suddenly having a real and specific conversation about what it means to survive in a coercive economy. “I was going to say that maybe they can’t afford to pay us more,” she said, “but, I mean, is that actually true? I don’t know.”

Our conversation went from wages to worker exploitation, to rising prices and corporate greed, to the privatization of healthcare, education, and housing, without ever actually talking about capitalism or socialism. I came away from that conversation feeling a sense of solidarity with a coworker despite all the seeming lines of division between us. We work the same job, with the same physical and emotional stresses, the same unpredictable hours, and the same financial pressures. But we also live in the same community and face very similar struggles. And though we often view them from different lenses, we fear the same fears. But in that conversation, I felt like we took a small step forward, together, against the blaze of capitalist greed burning its way through the world. 

The sense of doing this together is crucial. The only thing that can counter a minority of capitalist vultures is a fed up majority of united workers. The ‘reform versus revolution’ question is an old and endless debate in leftist circles, but the way out of that loop is coalition building. Without a critical mass of united citizens, neither reform nor revolution is even an option. But how do we build strong coalitions in our present fractured reality? We have to start in the places and with the people we share our time and our labor with, our coworkers. We have the opportunity to do this every day over lunch, during breaks, and in all those moments we put down our tools and step away from our tech to collectively catch our breath. The latest phase of the takeover of our world is happening at top-down, national levels, but our resistance can be waged in the offices, kitchens, and worksites we occupy every day. This isn’t yet a type of struggle where we need to take up arms against the government, but it is very much a struggle that demands we link arms with our community. The good news is that this particular style of unarmed socialism already has a rich tradition from which we can learn, even here in the States.

In the first half of the 20th century, Americans elected a handful of socialist mayors and other local officials who weren’t focused on overthrowing capitalism, they were focused on using the municipal government to guarantee a quality of life for its citizenry. As John Nichols wrote, “public parks, public libraries, public schools, and public utilities were their concern” and are their lasting legacy in this country. These “sewer socialists” left behind a living example of street level leftist engagement and a way to affect national change through local effort. We don’t have their access to the levers of power, but we have each other and the potential to organize into a concerted movement to change the nature of those levers forever. It’s through our conversations at work that we can bring about that movement. The sewer socialists of today need to be “smoke break socialists.” 

Part of the power of this approach is that conversations at work are of a completely different nature compared to normal conversations between friends or family members. They’re removed from those spheres, disconnected from the rest of your life, and they involve people you might otherwise not talk to. But that’s also exactly what makes them so powerful and full of revolutionary potential. No matter where the other person comes from or what the circumstances of their life are, in that moment on break at work, you’re united by a shared viewpoint as a worker. Your workplace is a crossroads where disparate identities find common ground. 

This same unique aspect of break time conversation also precludes the more traditional means of persuasion. In the fleeting space shared by coworkers as they catch their breath and recharge their batteries, political speeches and soapbox sermons fall flat and feel inauthentic. Theoretical jargon breaks the spell and kills the magic of the moment. Smoke break socialism’s most powerful tool is a question. A genuinely curious, open-ended question that compassionately, but insistently, challenges people to interrogate their beliefs and assumptions. A question that invites them to see themselves in a wider context as a worker amongst a world of workers, all of whom share a dream of more time spent living and less time spent surviving.

My conversation about wages with my coworker was only one of several, all revolving around the same fundamental question. As rents and food prices and college tuition and gas and every other cost of living continue to rise while our wages barely twitch upwards, everyone wonders: why can’t we ever seem to get ahead? I counter with a question of my own: how come in one of the richest countries in the world, we could end up on the street if we lose our jobs? These conversations never go the way I expect. We start out talking about wages and end up talking about guaranteed housing, free education, and what kind of financial and emotional burdens would be relieved by universal healthcare. When one coworker disparaged all this as going against the American trait of self-sufficiency, I asked him about Thomas Paine’s plan for universal basic income. He’d never read Agrarian Justice but immediately looked it up and downloaded a copy. If it was good enough for a Founding Father, I hoped it would be good enough for him.

I live and work in Southern California, so of course the recent and devastating wildfires have been a topic of conversation during breaks. Everyone agrees that the fires and floods are worse each year, and the summers seem to get hotter and hotter. And of course, since we’re living in a conservative county during an age of conspiracy, a few coworkers raised the idea that the fires were a result of the Governor undermining the President over water rights or DEI initiatives undermining the fire department’s ability to effectively fight fires. Gentle requests for reliable sources and verifiable data clear up the conspiracies fairly quickly in these conversations, and they open the way for deeper questions about who has control over our planet’s future and why it isn’t us. I asked once about our reliance on fossil fuels and got into a lengthy conversation about suburban sprawl and our forced dependency on cars. This led to a conversation during a shift the next day about corporate control of public land and the endless consumption of public resources for private profit. 

I should note here that I work for a multinational chain of coffeehouses whose revenue reports continue to increase by the billions while its frontline employees huddle in break rooms to collectively groan about our 3-cent hourly raises. My fellow baristas are hardworking people trying their best to survive a corporate culture that mandates an unbreakably cheerful attitude in the face of ever more desperate policies and ploys to increase profits. A lot of smoke break socialism at my job is fueled by the situations we face every day. There’s a large unhoused population in our neighborhood, for example, who have always been able to get free water at our bars and open access to our restrooms. A recent policy update stated that water and bathrooms would only be available to paying customers. This struck most of my coworkers as a needlessly callous move that would also place us in the stressful position of having to deny already struggling people even the smallest gesture of help. During one conversation about this, a simple question about the profit motive behind the policy led to a wide-ranging discussion about the roots of the unhoused crisis, the privatization of mental health care, and defunding police budgets in favor of more social services. Eventually, the conversation became about the overall tendency towards extraction rather than reinvestment by the corporation we work for. In a surprising twist, my most conservative coworker raised the point that the new company policies seemed to be designed to not only extract as much profit as possible from the customer but also as much labor as possible from us.

These conversations have been transformative and liberating for me on several levels. Rather than feel paralyzed by the onslaught of news about the dismantling of my country’s constitution and the public embrace of white supremacy by my government, I feel empowered to seize this moment as an opportunity for mental revolution. Smoke break socialism has come to be a daily chance to take action and affect change, however small and however local. But more importantly, it’s come to be a way to organize and fight back. Before these conversations and collective explorations with my coworkers, our shop was a crew of friends helping each other get by. Now, we’re becoming a crew of fighters working to get control of our lives. We’re talking about unionization and what that would mean for each of us personally. As the organizers would say, we’re seeing our stake in this struggle. We’re seeing how we can take our collective concerns and transform them into collective solutions. 

If this approach to socialism is to be of any use, it needs to transform us all from coworkers into coalitions. Which it can do by allowing people to come to a shared understanding of the change they want to see and tying that to community programs and mutual aid projects already in existence. That discussion I had with my coworkers about our unhoused neighbors and their treatment by the company led to several of them asking to accompany my DSA chapter’s next volunteer day at a local soup kitchen. How many more of them would be open to canvassing for immigration justice or rallying for striking workers if they could come to see how these concerns connect to their concerns through more powerful conversations? 

Image: Woman taking a smoke break in New York City. Photo by Benjamin Gardere. Photo distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

DSA’s modern political resurgence, from a handful of chapters to over 70,000 members across the country, has been in part due to its relationship with the “Bernie Sanders” movement starting in 2016. The moribund New Left organization got a renewed lease on life when the senator from Vermont launched his presidential campaign while labeling himself a “Democratic Socialist.” Claiming this designation opened the floodgates for Americans inspired by the campaign (ranging from the famed “Downwardly Mobile White Millennial” to those expecting more from racial liberalism in the post-Obama age) to join DSA. Although numbers have dipped in recent years, DSA has remained the largest socialist organization in the U.S., and one that many have turned to in order to channel their frustrations against the system.

In this time of rapid growth and consolidation, DSA has developed a core, internal political contradiction. At the national level, the organization has a leadership drawn largely from NGOs, professional workplaces, and electoral campaigns that is committed to reproducing the tactics and political environment of 2016. However, alongside this retrenchment in the national organization, hundreds of new chapters have sprung up, with tens of thousands of members who have little to no connection to previous generations of socialist organizing. These members are creating, through trial and error, a new culture and tactics that respond to the questions of the moment.

Essentially, DSA has become one organization split between two parallel and disconnected development tracks. The resulting conflict between the national organization and the local chapters is one of the primary factors holding back the development of the organization, and resolving it is key to making DSA into the party of a revolutionary working class. To resolve this contradiction, and unlock the full potential of our organization, National DSA needs to reconstruct itself as a coordinating body that represents chapter needs and priorities, rather than as a super-chapter that takes on national campaigns by itself.

THE DILEMMA OF NATIONAL & LOCAL 

The parallel development of local chapters and the national organization has created parallel cultures and parallel pools of organizers. While it’s generally a simple matter to get involved in your local chapter as soon as you join DSA (so long as a chapter exists in your area), it’s typically a much more difficult task to get involved in the the national organization, which operates much more through informal channels and sporadically documented procedures. National, consequently, draws disproportionately from caucus members, who are much more likely to have access to institutional knowledge and connections to let them know when applications go live, who makes decisions, and what experience they need to move forward. 

Similarly, activity in the majority of national committees tends to be administrative rather than deliberative, with decision making being mostly the purview of leadership. Many committees have strict and sometimes arbitrary rules for admission, but then fail to engage members who make it past their screening process, resulting in bodies where formal leadership makes all the decisions (mostly about what work they themselves will be tackling ) while dozens or hundreds of inactive members sit on their hands waiting to be told what to do next.

In stark contrast, however, DSA’s chapters have developed much more robust internal cultures, with tens of thousands of new members signing up and getting involved. They are the first (and often only) point of contact for new members and, as such, were forced to develop onboarding methods, to create new committees to tackle issues that new members were invested in locally, and to develop new bylaws and new democratic systems to handle all of the new input and energy. This imperative helped these chapters develop and mature, and local chapters tend to be hotbeds of political debate and democratic engagement, especially compared to the national organization. While the operations of local chapters are by no means perfect, it is nevertheless at the chapter level where the vast majority of DSA’s membership gets hands-on practice with democracy, learn the practical skills of organizing and debating, and develop their political and theoretical understanding about the social and political world they and their ideas inhabit.

As DSA has grown, this contradiction between the political culture at the national level and the upsurge of socialist democratic leadership that has been incubating in chapters across the country has heightened. This last NPC term saw an increased willingness by the NPC to start opening up national bodies, and many of the issues that were raised this term were (directly or indirectly) about this widening contradiction between the chapter and national levels. Efforts have been made to be more transparent about the opaque inner workings of the NPC, to open up committees that have been largely only accessible to the disproportionately caucused members that already participate in national organizing.

However, such ideas and proposals haven’t been a cure-all for the disconnection between the national organization and chapters. Although the gates were flung open, not many people walked through them. The pool of national organizers looks a lot like it did before, and even if there has been some shift in the political perspectives represented at the national level, that alone hasn’t meaningfully altered the course of DSA so long as the national apparatus remains insulated from the more vibrant democratic culture in chapters. A top-down approach that doesn’t grapple with truly channeling the energy that’s found at the local level into national committees will not be a sufficient solution to this problem. 

Even as the national organization has begun to move toward more open engagement, the essential work of developing and empowering a new generation of leaders for National is far behind schedule. While many chapters have created a strong leadership pipeline, it’s not currently connected into National, and we can’t be satisfied only with a federation of chapters working independently in each city. A strong national structure is crucial to our success as a socialist organization. We need a national institution filled with engaged people who can and will pull others up behind them. However, more work needs to be done to even begin the process of having this broader pool of people for the national organization to pull from. And, maybe ironically, that work begins at the local level.

Solutions

To transform DSA into a home for a broader coalition of budding revolutionaries would require us to lean into the things that make chapters successful: member-led protagonistic organizing, frequent and robust democratic practice, a diversity of struggle, social connection, community engagement, and a particularist strategy. Our existing approach has yielded neither congressional power nor a truly mass membership. So what can DSA do to build those foundations? Here are some suggestions to at the very least, get the conversation going. 

Extend Chapter Democracy Up Into National DSA

Chapter leadership should be a necessary precondition for national leadership. A principal source of the misalignment of the national organization with local chapters is that national bodies are staffed and directed without consistent meaningful input from chapter-elected leaders. They often have very little active and consistent input from outside of their respective leadership bodies, and, second, they are often composed and led by people with no democratic mandate from their chapter, or even any connection to them. 

By having the membership of these committees be composed of elected chapter leaders, and establishing a standard democratic structure and practice for their operation, national committees could serve as a vital conduit for the democratic will of the membership to flow directly into the operation of National DSA. It will no longer be about one set of people leading the national organization and another serving as leadership at the local level. Instead, those who take chapter organizing work seriously will be the ones elevated into higher positions of authority, and be able to align themselves with their peers from chapters across the country. 

Develop and Expand Chapter Democratic Practice

National DSA has the opportunity to develop and implement standards for chapter democracy, which are especially weak in some of DSA’s largest chapters. The national committees should reinforce the opportunities for debate that exist at the local level, because chapters promote political development only when members are empowered to challenge, debate, and reshape their local work. When chapters try to replicate the centrally-controlled national apparatus and its attendant theory of change, they end up stifling the member development that represents the actual potential for a powerful party in the future. 

Instead, national committee leaders should insist on committees at the local level holding more consistent meetings, and assist chapters in finding ways to facilitate chapter member engagement. All in all, national leaders should discuss strategies on how to help expand the democratic culture of various local chapters in order to create a deeper bench of leaders and organizers who then could tackle issues and campaigns at the national level someday. 

Invest in Growing and Strengthening Chapters

Another morbid symptom of the bifurcation between the national and local chapters is the conflict over dues. As it stands, National gets about 85% of all dues, and 15% or so is returned to chapters in accordance with the number of members that pay monthly dues. Alongside this, there is an extremely uneven development of local dues structures, which confer no privileges of membership but are essentially a donation to your local chapter. For some large chapters, local dues represent a large portion of their overall income, while in others it’s a pittance at best. This funding structure prioritizes the national organization’s capacity, then large chapter funding, and lastly small chapters, while a patchwork system of local dues allows for a few wealthy chapters to make large investments in local organizing. This dynamic not only sets the stage for crises down the line, but, in the short term, it also starves the most promising sites for our organizing – the many small chapters throughout the country – while investing the majority of our dues into the national organization, which is least likely to grow and develop members and, therefore, the organization itself.

Convention should support efforts to expand the portion of our budget that gets reinvested into chapters. The NPC should instruct national committees to direct their funds and attention towards chapter organizing, and well-off chapters should start to convert their local dues into national dues.

A NEW WAY AHEAD IS POSSIBLE

These suggestions aren’t intended as a retreat from DSA operating as a national organization. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create, for the first time, a national organization that can stand on a firm footing of solid leadership and membership engagement.. Right now, National DSA is much like a castle in the sky, and unless we can connect it to some solid foundation of chapter democracy, it will come crashing down to crush everything beneath it, including whatever socialist momentum we’ve managed to sustain over the years.

As we pursue this work, we’ll be able to actually give force to a new national organization, one that serves as a central nervous system that receives and transmits signals from across the country, that manifests the combined politics of our membership. Rather than a retreat, this is a refoundation of National DSA, and a recommitment to us acting as a collective force in the United States fighting to win socialism for working people. 

Image description: Military police Soldiers attached to the Texas Army National Guard’s 136th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade support local law enforcement during a protest in Austin, Texas, on May 31, 2020. On May 30, 2020, Governor Greg Abbott activated elements of the Texas National Guard to augment law enforcement throughout the state in response to civil unrest. The Texas National Guard will be used to support local law enforcement and protect critical infrastructure necessary to the well-being of local communities. (U.S. Army photo by Charles E. Spirtos). Photo taken June 8, 2020.

American electoralism is all but dead. Under the two-party system, mainstream politics is rendered into a ceaseless war between two parties overtly hostile towards the working class, with the Democratic Party serving, at best, as the lesser of two evils against the Republicans. As the genocidal Biden Administration and disastrous campaign of Kamala Harris have shown, the Democrats are far from a competent opposition, proving themselves incapable and unwilling to fight for the needs of working people, nor to defend against relentless Republican assaults on workers, migrants, women, Palestinians, queer and trans people, non-Christians, people of color, and what little remains of American democracy. 

Democrat leaders have instead chosen to welcome the return of Donald Trump to the White House with smiles and handshakes, prioritizing the genocide of Gaza and the interests of capital over the needs of the American people. Attempts by figures like Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Ohmar, and Cori Bush to realign the party have been met with repression, censorship, and out-right defeat, with the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Convention, Ken Martin, fighting relentlessly to marginalize the left-wing of the party, decrying DSA and the broader Palestinian Movement as “disgusting.” What’s more, by virtue of the two-party system itself, pro-realignment electeds are forced into the role of collaborators, ceding their radical platforms in an effort to obstruct the Republicans at any cost. It has never been more clear that the Democratic Party cannot be trusted to protect everyday Americans; the working class needs an alternative.

Yet, under our current electoral system of plurality voting (also known as “first-past-the-post” or “winner-takes-all”), no alternatives can exist. Attempts to form new political parties continually end in failure, either rendered irrelevant from the outset or, at best, succeeding only in guaranteeing the victory of one establishment party over the other by splitting the vote. Despite Gallup polls indicating that a majority of Americans are warm to the idea of a multi-party system, no such change can come without systemic reforms of national, state, and municipal governments, leaving the decaying two-party system–gridlocked, detached, and subservient to capital–in place, while socialists remain barred from the political mainstream, unable to be heard within a system tailored by and for capitalists. 

Why Proportional Representation?

It does not have to be this way–the bourgeois democracies of other western nations operate under variations of proportional representation (PR), lowering the barrier to entry for ideologies of all stripes. While specifics vary across countries, proportional representation is broadly defined as an electoral system where the percentage of votes a party receives approximately translates to the percentage of seats they hold in the legislature; as an example, if a party wins a third of a district’s votes, it earns a third of the seats for that district.

Under a proportional system, legislatures would consist of numerous parties, each capable of representing the specific demands of their constituents; supporters of Bernie Sanders would no longer be forced into the same party as Kamala Harris, nor would socialists be coerced into associating with either wing of the Democrats for the sake of preventing Republican hegemony. The GOP could likewise fragment, their base rupturing into establishment and far-right parties, undercutting the rising tide of fascism which threatens us today. American politics would become less static and more democratically representative, forcing once-stable power blocs into a turbulent parliamentary arena. The influence of gerrymandering and the urban-rural divide would likewise be weakened, as representation would be dependent on the raw percentage of votes parties receive in multi-member districts, rather than narrow majorities allowing a single party’s candidate to dominate entire constituencies. 

What’s In It For Us?

Socialists may rightly question the utility of trying to reform American electoralism; a proportional multi-party bourgeois democracy is, at the end of the day, still bourgeois, and electoralism on its own has never resulted in a lasting socialist experiment. Why, then, invest valuable time, resources, and effort into fighting for proportional representation? Friedrich Engels answered the question best in an 1882 letter to Karl Kautsky,

“In order to be able to fight one needs first a soil to stand on, air, light and space. Otherwise all is idle chatter.”

American socialists, to be blunt, have no ground to stand on. Without the ability to platform ourselves to mass audiences during elections, the American public’s perception of socialism will remain defined by the bourgeoisie, distorted into a malevolent caricature by state propaganda and endless cycles of red-baiting. While socialists have made progress in entering the cultural mainstream, particularly among young adults, these gains will remain transient unless cohered into tangible political power, an all but impossible task under the two-party system. Indeed, the duopoly’s exclusion is by design, with New York City’s brief experiment with multi-party democracy crushed in the 1940s due to its perceived threat to the establishment parties and their capitalist backers. 

So long as the terms of discourse are firmly in the grip of the bourgeoisie, socialists will continue to struggle in reaching the working class, whether on the debate stage or through policies that materially benefit the lives of ordinary people. Within the confines of the Democratic Party, tepid social democracy–always compromised, always under siege–will remain the limit of the party’s radicalism on any appreciable scale, a controlled opposition within the controlled opposition. While socialists may at times be able to tactically exploit the party’s ballot line with success, as demonstrated by Zohran Mamdani’s highly visible campaign for New York City mayor, these instances are confined largely to the municipal level. The Democratic Party, by virtue of the binary structure of the duopoly, must always prioritize appealing to the broadest possible base, subordinating left-populism to the interests of the donor class, petit-bourgeoisie, and liberal partisans, who will never tolerate the party realigning into a genuinely left-wing force. 

Under these conditions, socialists are reduced to either a permanently marginalized voice within the party, or third parties which the public cannot support in any appreciable numbers without indirectly elevating the Republicans. In both scenarios, socialists are forced into the role of fringe radicals incapable of enacting the systemic changes we platform ourselves on, and–when push comes to shove–will continue to be dismissed as such by the electorate, in favor of either “voting blue no matter who” or the reactionary populism of the Right. Without mass visibility to disseminate our ideas, nor the institutional power of a political party to advance the interests of workers, thereby credibly representing the labor movement, American socialists will not–cannot–build substantial political power. 

Trade unionism and labor organizing have been offered by some tendencies as an alternative to electoralism, arguing that the organization of workers into militant unions will advance the development of class consciousness and undercut the economic power of the bourgeoisie. While essential tools of working class organizing, however, unionism alone–like pure electoralism–has historically struggled to translate labor militancy into a revolutionary seizure of political power. By virtue of their responsibility to win the best possible contract for their members, the ambitions of unions seldom expand beyond ameliorating the worst excesses of capitalism, endlessly fighting, to quote Marx, “a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it.” 

In effect, this means falling prey to the same lesser-evilism trapping the electorate, with union workers and leadership alike endorsing whichever bourgeois party appears least overtly hostile (in rhetoric, if not action) to their organizing. It is for these reasons that the first demand of the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) 1891 Erfurt Program was the establishment of proportional representation, thereby elevating the SPD from an underground movement to a national political force capable of representing and cohering the interests of the working class around a socialist political platform. Without a viable party of our own to represent the labor movement and align unions towards socialism, American workers will, per Lenin, “develop only trade union consciousness,” while bourgeois law and labor relations remain otherwise intact. 

Under a proportional electoral system, however, socialists could assert our independence from the capitalist parties, win limited–but exploitable–institutional power, and provide a genuine working class alternative to declining neoliberalism. In establishing a new, nationally-viable Workers Party, socialists and the broader American Left could reach heights unseen since the presidential campaigns of Eugene V. Debs, cohering once more around a common party capable of challenging the entrenched power of the bourgeoisie, without the risk of losing public favor by splitting votes in pivotal elections. Candidates in multi-member districts could win seats without a raw plurality of votes, allowing for a “red tide” of socialists to enter office in numbers unparalleled in US history. 

Though the creation of such a party is not an end in it of itself, the question of how to proceed from reform to revolution will not be one we are capable of asking if the nation continues its rapid acceleration towards fascism, an outcome all but assured by the duopoly’s stifling of a left-populist party capable of counterbalancing the Right. Whether it is closer in form to Hitler’s Germany or Putin’s Russia, an America under consolidated fascist rule will not offer conditions any more favorable to organizing than exist today; in neither example did the public flock to socialists in a revolutionary struggle. With an electorally viable Workers Party, socialists would–at minimum–buy ourselves time to wrestle with these questions while establishing a broader base of support, with the potential to reach the heights of Mexico’s Morena, the French New Popular Front, and Brazil’s own Workers’ Party, opportunities that flatly will not exist under stronger domestic repression.

What’s more, positive publicity and pan-left unity can materialize from the struggle for multi-partyism itself. By taking a leading role in fomenting a mass movement for PR, DSA would have the opportunity to shatter decades of Red Scare propaganda, acting as champions of democracy fighting on behalf of a broadly popular demand. In doing so, we would be asserting the former half of democratic socialism, thereby rehabilitating the image of the latter in the eyes of the nation. Greater unity across the US Left would likewise manifest from participating in a shared struggle, with coalition partners representing every organization, demographic, and cause burned by the duopoly working alongside one another towards a common, mutually-beneficial goal. 

While it is true that certain reactionary groups (ex. the Libertarian Party) may have their own reasons for supporting electoral reform, the fact remains that the alliance between capital and the far-right has seen great success in weaponizing the duopoly to its advantage. By reducing the Democrats to a controlled opposition incapable of seizing the populist current without alienating its donors, the Republicans have had free-reign to seize on popular discontent and divide the working class along identitarian lines. To abandon this strategy would threaten the mutual interests of capitalists and fascists, to say nothing of their opposition to democratic pluralism on principle, reducing the significance of any reactionary presence in the electoral reform movement.

If undertaken in conjunction with robust mutual aid efforts to directly meet the needs of the working class–an essential facet of our struggle if we are to build grassroots support–mobilizing for proportional electoral reform could propel DSA to new heights of membership, power, and prominence that could in turn be harnessed towards a reinvigorated, politically powerful labor movement. In the event of victory, we will have shattered the duopoly and laid the groundwork for a thriving Workers Party; in the event of defeat, the capitalist parties will have made clear the impossibility of even the most popular common-sense reforms, mass radicalizing large segments of the population, ready to be integrated into a revitalized, organized American Left with DSA at its center. Simply put, no matter if electoral reform succeeds or fails, we stand to gain. 

How Do We Win?

Victory will rely on two tactics: direct democracy and indirect pressure on the Democratic Party. The former depends on the use of citizen ballot initiatives (CBIs) in states where they exist, which allow for popular referendums on policies petitioned for directly by the citizenry. While the precise qualifications for getting an initiative on the ballot vary from state to state, CBIs generally offer the simplest route to enacting proportional electoral reform (PER) on the state-level. Similar referendum mechanisms exist in many municipalities, providing opportunities to implement locally-scaled proportional reforms while building momentum for large-scale change.

Where CBIs do not exist, we must instead pursue a strategy of indirect pressure modeled after that of the “No Votes for Genocide” and “Uncommitted” campaigns, albeit on a far larger scale. Under this strategy, DSA and our coalition partners will mobilize voters and organizations to withhold their ballots, campaign contributions, and endorsements from any candidate not advocating PER. Our most critical organizing will be in swing states and congressional districts, where voters are simultaneously most powerful and disillusioned. When elected, ostensibly pro-PER representatives must be kept in check by the real and ever-present threat of our coalitions organizing strikes, protests, encampments, and uncommitted campaigns, to prevent backsliding and empty rhetoric. Buy-in from unions is critical for the success of these pressure campaigns, necessitating a clear articulation of why and how proportional representation can benefit the labor movement more than the duopoly. 

The Democrats, wracked with infighting and having just lost a pivotal election season by neglecting the demands of working people, will be most vulnerable to our strategy, and their base most receptive to our demands. While the recent “Fighting Oligarchy” tour by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have raised hopes for realigning the party by primarying incumbent Democrats with younger, more progressive candidates, the fact remains that the party cannot detach itself from the interests of capital, and will remain incapable of, or outright hostile towards, the popular progressive policies (i.e. Ending weapons shipments to Israel; broadening the public sector; universal healthcare; a Green New Deal; strengthening unions). The DNC’s ongoing attempts to oust vice-chair David Hogg, the architect of the “progressive primary” strategy, is the latest demonstration that the fundamental contradiction of a bourgeois party attempting to represent labor interests is unresolvable, offering no future for those in opposition to the interests donor class; only a genuine leftist alternative can, which necessitates joining the struggle for multi-party democracy.

The Democrats will not be unaware of our efforts to weaken the party, and indeed, we make no secret of it. Our leverage instead comes from forcing them into one of two unfavorable outcomes: losing elections today, cementing GOP dominance and the continued erosion of establishment norms, or losing their hegemonic status tomorrow in exchange for immediate results for pro-PER candidates. What’s more, they will be compelled to decide, in no uncertain terms, whether there is a place for the working class and for democracy in the Democratic Party, or whether it will remain dedicated solely to the interests of capital. Regardless of the answer, Democrat leadership will be forced to alienate a portion of their base, thereby increasing the likelihood of the party rupturing in the long-term and creating a power vacuum that leftists could exploit.

If and when DSA and the broader movement escalate to the national scale, two-layers of the coalition will form: the Outer Coalition, comprising every organization working to erode the two-party system, and the Inner Coalition, made up of organizations closely aligned with the labor movement (unions, leftist parties, etc.) and/or DSA specifically. It is the Inner Coalition that DSA can build the strongest rapport with by virtue of our shared class struggle, through which the basis for a new Workers Party can emerge. DSA’s cooperation with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) to create the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) is a tangible example of the good socialists and trade unionists can achieve when united by a common cause; against an electoral system which disadvantages both unions and socialists, the potential for cooperation–and through it, solidarity–can manifest, working to reunite the socialist and labor movements. It must be stressed that, as the battle for electoral reform is being waged, DSA must continue its ongoing process of becoming a formal political party, so that if and when the two-party system is shattered, we are prepared to hit the ground running. We have already taken our first steps towards this goal with the “Workers Deserve More” program, which specifically endorses the formation of a Workers Party and the advancement of proportional representation–now is the time to carry that momentum forward as the basis for our counterattack against the Right. 

To persuade voters to support our cause, credibly risk throwing elections, and–eventually–form the base of a new party, DSA and our coalition partners must work to assist, educate, and organize the working class. These efforts will begin on the local level, agitating for municipal and state reforms while simultaneously undertaking mutual aid campaigns to assist the people of our communities, with cooperative, coalition-run services building rapport among workers. The Middle Tennessee Chapter is currently leading by example with its “Burn Debt, Not Books” program, which is fighting to abolish the medical debts of working class southerners. If similar programs were started by local coalitions across the country, DSA and our coalition partners could endear ourselves to millions of working class Americans, forging the solidarity necessary to mobilize en masse against the two-party system.

It is crucial to emphasize the bottom-up, long-term nature of our struggle. The Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967 (UCDA) outlaws multi-member congressional districts, while institutions like the Electoral College and the Supreme Court routinely empower authoritarianism by suppressing the will of the majority. Overcoming these challenges will require long, hard work to assist, educate, and organize voters into a movement capable of uprooting the duopoly from its foundations. With every reformed city council and state legislature, we offer concrete examples of how proportional representation can empower everyday people; with every soup kitchen and winter clothes drive, we show our sincere commitment to doing what the duopoly will not–improve people’s lives. Through these actions, we will build the power necessary to overthrow the two-party system; to mobilize at the polls and in the streets; to take our grievances to the highest courts and legislative chambers, until the establishment–weakened by a thousand cuts–submits to the people, or is rendered so despised as to invite its own destruction.

Where Do We Start?

Organizing for proportional representation has already begun in DSA under the auspices of “Voters Deserve More (VDM),” a cross-caucus group dedicated to expanding upon the “Workers Deserve More” campaign’s commitment to proportional representation via coalition-building for a democratic mass movement. At time of writing, the campaign has taken root in the Kansas City Chapter, with ongoing efforts to expand to New York City, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, and other chapters across the country. The campaign has outlined the following five demands as the basis for its organizing:

1. The restructuring of state and federal Houses of Representatives into proportionally elected chambers comprised of officials from multi-member electoral districts; i.e., the repeal and/or amendment of the Uniform Congressional District Act (UCDA) and passage of the Fair Representation Act (FRA).

2. Implementation of a variant of the Dutch Model of open-list proportional representation on the federal, state, and municipal (exceeding five hundred thousand persons) levels, wherein voters select their first and second choice of parties (or independents, listed with/as parties), then rank candidates from said parties’ lists in order of preference, with the overall highest ranked officials occupying their party’s seats.

3. The implementation of single-transferable voting (STV) in municipalities below five hundred thousand persons.

4. Abolition of private campaign financing in favor of public funding for all electoral campaigns; i.e., the overturning of Citizens United v. FEC.

5. Election of the President through direct popular vote; i.e., the marginalization of the Electoral College via the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC).

Conclusion

American socialists are running out of time. Staring down the twin barrels of climate catastrophe and ascendant authoritarianism, socialism cannot–must not–remain marginal in the United States. While electoralism is not enough in itself to achieve power, the formation of a nationally viable Workers Party is essential for the dissemination of socialism to the general public, and to provide a pole around which the American Left can consolidate. Our road into mainstream politics, however, cannot be walked alone, and will require the organization of a mass movement for the one goal that would stand to benefit every cause, party, demographic, and voter with ambitions beyond the duopoly: proportional representation. If it is to be the standard-bearer of American socialism, then DSA must commit to its promise of winning the Battle for Democracy by forging coalitions across the nation fighting for proportional electoral reform, acting as the vanguard of socialism and democracy against an electoral system hostile to both. The moment has never been more ripe, nor more dire–we decide whether to let it pass quietly, or to cry out for all to hear, 

“Workers and voters deserve more!”

Image: Paper ballots from 2022 elections in Latvia, which uses an open list proportional election system. Photo by Minnekon, distributed using the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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

Executive Governance

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

The Socialist Strategy

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

How To Build democracy

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

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

Crisis Periods

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

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

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

Assemblies of Various Types

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

Workplace Representation: 

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

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

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

People’s Assemblies: 

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

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

The policing problem

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

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

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

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

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

Towards transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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