Socialism Wins In DC

The post Socialism Wins In DC appeared first on Metro DC DSA.

Author’s note: This paper, which was presented in April at Historical Materialism Istanbul 2026 at Bilgi University, was written in the context of both a series of seminars on liberatory psychoanalysis and ongoing study with the TDSA Trans Rights & Bodily Autonomy (TRBA) reading group. I am deeply grateful for the dedicated participation of the members of this reading group, and look forward to what our study continues to yield. 

In what ways are war and resistance, revolution even, gendered and raced? What work does an economy of war require of the bodies and psyches of those subject to it? (How) can logics of domination be interrupted via the labor of (transing) gender, or the lens of blackness? That is to say, how do we critically engage race with gender against logics of marginalization? How do we approach race and gender as axes and sites of hegemonic ideological production — as well as the sites for the possible liberation from supremacist hegemony? 

Paul Preciado, writing in his epilogue to Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire, and assessing the conditions of feminist and gender-revolutionary movements in the prior half century in Europe, highlights a warning in Hocquenghem’s text — “Hocquenghem alerts us,” he writes, that “’it is possible that revolutionary politics are in themselves repressive processes.’” The “provisional lesson” that Preciado derives from this is that revolutions may not be just what they seem, raising the possibility that “causes capable of becoming logics of power are not really the most revolutionary ones” and that “revolutions also construct their own margins” (AT 130-131). 

For Preciado, the “micropolitics of fags, dykes, queens, and trans people [travesti] are opposed to the traditional model of politics as war… and [these micropolitics] propose a new model of politics as relation, fiesta, communication, self-experimentation, and pleasure” (138). The re-publication of the text of the epilogue as a zine (Anal Terror) by the baedan journal of queer time travel includes an introduction by the baedan collective wondering if Preciado’s portrayal is an overly rosy one. They write that “there is a remarkable elision of violence, perhaps even of force, in Preciado’s text” representing “a kind of historical positivism or optimism that we are not inclined to share” (AT 120-121). This is the tension within which we are reading and working today — just as, for the baedan collective, it is important to “see what in [Preciado’s text] responds still too much to the production and reproduction into which every citizen-subject in a society like ours is interminably seduced and coerced” (AT 121), so too are we investigating the flows, seductions, coercions, into the production and reproduction of hegemonic normativity — even in what are cast and understood as revolutionary or liberatory struggles. 

The thesis here, and what is under investigation, is that there are ideological currents which are manifested and projected on, in, and through the body — its ornamentation, its movement, its sound, its relations… and that the apprehension of the functioning of these ideological currents — their utterly real effects on our lives, relations, deaths— is possible through the terms and sites of race and gender. Judith Butler, in a lecture at the University of Cambridge, enumerates that gender has as its topics life and the body, and thus implicates broad “zones of passion and fear, of hunger and illness, vulnerability, penetrability, relationality, sexuality, and violence” as well as “distinct or differentiated modalities of embodiment [including] modes of porosity and closure, dependency, relationality, relations to food, protections from unwanted intrusion, from assault, from exposure to the elements, hunger.” [30:00, LGBTQCam] 

Thus treatments of gender and of race illustrate and implicate in a material way treatments and interpretations of other social, political, and economic phenomena, and provide a quotidian lens and context for liberatory political projects— which we delineate here as commitments to life, care, autonomy, and their conditions. 

One of the tasks of the hegemon, as the baedan collective’s comment alerts us to, is the production of subjectivities that are conducive to its particular ideological reproduction and expansion. The means by which hegemonic normativity accomplishes this vary — from discipline to propaganda to coercion to medicalization to segregation to force to colonization of the very modes of being, relation, and language that we exhibit to one another. In W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, he details the confluence of conditions during the American Civil War that resulted in the extension of the legal classification of citizenship to the formerly enslaved black population. He writes: 

“It had been a commonplace thing in the North to declare that Negroes would not fight. Even the black man’s friends were skeptical about the possibility of using him as a soldier, and far from its being to the credit of black men, or any men, that they did not want to kill, the ability and willingness to take human life has always been, even in the minds of liberal men, a proof of manhood” (BR 129). This “proof of manhood required of the [black man]” was, in Du Bois’s words, “to seize a bayonet and rush mad with fury or inflamed with drink, and plunge it into the bowels of a stranger” (BR 129). Let us pause on this constellation: the challenge of manhood, as a conditional status to be proved; this proof taking the form of seizure, rush, inebriation, inflammation, plunging, and lack of other relation; the directionality of proof, to white men, already citizens (made such through genocide), who doubt and other the black subject, and thoroughly devalue his labor, autonomy, speech, and care. Du Bois makes clear that it was only through this proof that the black man in Civil War-era United States was able to accede to citizenship — ‘citizenship’ then, too, is manifestly constituted by this gendered and raced constellation. 

Du Bois notes that the black man “might plead his case with the tongue of Frederick Douglass” yet “the nation listened almost unmoved” (BR 129). Speech, Du Bois observes, resulted in (almost) no motion; it was madness, fury, the ability and willingness to take human life that had a legal effect. This is another relevant question to our inquiry into the conditions and traits valorized in revolutionary life. What are the conditions required for motion, or a change of motion? What do we do if e.g. speech yields (almost) no motion? What labors in this (almost),

prohibiting motion, or concealing micromotions? Du Bois shows us that the American nation, the status of citizenship, and the gender category ‘man’ are directly related to the failure of Reconstruction via the devaluation of care, the denigration of black life, and the hostility of privileged subjects toward groups which ‘threaten’ to dislodge the superiority and supremacy around which their subjectivity is organized. 

Let us turn to the text of Frantz Fanon’s under consideration, from the chapter on “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” in Wretched of the Earth. While Fanon lucidly formulates that “imperialism… sows seeds of decay here and there that must be mercilessly rooted out from our land and from our minds” (WoE 181), we also see in the text the difficulty of this task, for these ‘seeds of decay’ labor to invisibilize themselves, to contour the ‘normal’ – and recruit the body and the mind toward their propagation. One of the case studies Fanon writes about concerns a 26 year old Algerian man working with the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale). When a raid goes wrong, the patient goes “underground… without ever going home” (WoE 186). It takes several months for any news to arrive of the patient’s wife and toddler daughter. After the patient goes underground, French soldiers go to his residence and kidnap his wife for interrogation. She is beaten for days, and then raped, both alone and in front of other soldiers. In the case study Fanon reports, second-, third-, fourth-hand that the colonial soldiers tell her “If you ever see that bastard your husband again, don’t you forget to tell him what we did to you” (WoE 186). Despite the violence to which the patient’s wife is subjected, in this case study, Fanon is concerned with the patient’s “dignity as an injured husband” (WoE 187), and with his inability to have sexual intercourse (it is not detailed with whom, but we infer that it is not the patient’s wife). 

How is the act of rape — the epitome of gendered violence— figured here? It is an attack on the husband, who is ‘injured’; it is a medium of communication between the colonial soldiers and the resistance fighter— tell him what we did to you. This attack, then, takes place via the body of the wife as property of or as extension of the husband. Notably, the wife is not considered or referred to as a militant (as the husband is) and her work is excluded from the content of the liberation struggle. Yet the text makes clear that she is a significant material support to this struggle, cooking the meals to which he sits down every night in silence, raising a child, protecting her husband. Indeed, she displays a great commitment to the relations she is imbricated in, refusing to inform on her husband or other FLN associations; which is punished directly with rape. Her body, her marriage, her quotidian routines— as well as those of her young daughter— are the very field of war, and this fact is summarily repressed. The husband, who is legible as a member of the resistance, is protected underground; the wife, who is not legible as such for the extremely obvious reason of her gender, gets tortured. What margins appear here? Who is acceptable collateral damage in the contention of power? Fanon’s case study here illustrates precisely the seeds of decay he muses on earlier — the importation of hegemonic gendered violence into the schema and behaviors of the anti-colonial revolutionaries. 

The task before us, to follow another decolonial psychoanalytic theorist, Ignacio Martín-Baró, is one of de-ideologization; of the rigorous rooting out of ideologies that keep us located in the motion of colonial, imperial, supremacist logics of domination. These examples have shown us

how the site of the body is colonized, and violence doled out on the basis of a strict supremacist ordering of race and gender relations. I will now bring in the work of Marquis Bey, and their essay in their book Cistem Failure to look at the work of blackness and transness as radical invention — against the politics of war, which are the politics of gendered and racialized violence, the politics and logics of supremacy and extermination. Projects of liberation worthy of the name cannot include or utilize sexual violence, cannot utilize exclusion or extermination of the ‘other’, we opine. 

In their essay “Heart of Cisness”, Marquis Bey interrogates the qualities and behaviors of a cisgender system of bodily regulation, including the co-constitutive racialization of the gender ‘cistem’, and theorizes blackness and transness as “assert[ing] radical invention” (CF, 26). Blackness, for Bey, is “the written name given to an open ‘imagining of things’ that converges astoundingly with the abolitionist imaginatory jailbreak that must include all vectors of violence” (CF 28). Bey goes beyond the epidermalization that constitutes so much discussion of race, and the gender policing that appears even in discussions of transness. Bey synthesizes “whiteness as necessarily subtendant of cisgender” and asserts that “blackness as a critique of [cisgender] [questions] the very notion of cisgender itself” (CF 25). Reflecting on their experience in the American high school football locker room, and the exhortations of their coach toward masculinity as toughness, ability to withstand and dole out abuse, Bey distills that it was “conquest, via violent means, [that] was how we got our currency” as boys-becoming-men. What an echo of Du Bois, writing of events now 175 years past, where conquest and violence was also what made manhood possible and legible, and what permitted subjects to accede to the violent category of citizen (even as the fruits of this category continued to be systematically denied on the basis of race, via the dismantling of Reconstruction through new legal mechanisms)! 

Responding to this status, Bey conceptualizes “black and trans, then, as radically non-exclusionary” (CF 26), and invites non-racist, non-cisssexist reconceptualizations of blackness and transness. This “invitational pull of a capacious, ‘inexclusive’ blackness” represents for Bey “an expansion, not a dilution, of its radical abolition of the violent tethers of this world” (CF 27). I follow Bey here in insisting on a “hell-bent liberatory refusal of the violences that have been inscribed into us and that we’ve been told we must perpetuate” (CF 40). 

In contrast to what white supremacist organizations of power demand, we do not have to endorse or utilize schemas of domination and supremacy in our struggle toward liberation — in fact, liberation as such depends precisely on being able to interrupt these schemas and on discovering, rediscovering, inventing, reinventing modes of relation that radically include the ‘other’ and refuse power whose engine is marginalization. 

By Caitlin Murphy 

Works Cited: 

• baedan collective & Paul Preciado. Anal Terror: Notes on the First Days of the Sexual Revolution [zine]. Seattle, 2015.
• Bey, Marquis. Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender. Duke University Press, 2022. 
• Du Bois, W. E. B. Black reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. 
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004. 
• LGBTQ Cam (University of Cambridge). Who’s Afraid of Gender? | Judith Butler’s public lecture at University of Cambridge 2023 [Video]. YouTube. June 2, 2023. 

Expression of Disapproval – Burbank City Council Budget Flock Inclusion

On June 2nd, after receiving a multitude of constituent comments objecting to the renewal of the City of Burbank’s $250,000 contract with Flock Safety, the Burbank City Council voted unanimously to pass the city budget unamended, resulting in the renewal of the contract with Flock. This included DSA endorsed Socialist in Office Burbank City Council Member Konstantine Anthony.

DSA-LA and many other chapters of DSA have opposed Flock contracts in our cities, and the DSA-LA Immigration Justice Committee currently has an ongoing campaign to end Flock contracts in Los Angeles. Flock routinely shares data with DHS and ICE, breaking sanctuary ordinances and California State Law in the process, and has a proven track history of extreme data vulnerabilities and violations of their own privacy policies. Flock cameras have been used to track immigrants, women seeking abortions, and even in one instance to access cameras in a children’s gymnastics room. The bottom line: “Flock Safety” is not safe.

DSA Los Angeles strongly disagrees with the council member’s vote. As an avowed socialist, Council Member Anthony should have cast a vote of principled opposition to the use of public funds to surveil working class residents. At the same meeting, the council member was targeted for censure for organizing opposition to a Moms of Liberty, a hate group’s, anti-trans event in Burbank. We understand that this motion put him in a difficult position to take a position of courage – however, the expectation of our SiOs is to take positions of conviction, especially when the community demands it.

The struggle for socialism, multiracial democracy, and immigration justice continues. We are in communication with Council Member Anthony about actions to make amends going forward, and will work with him in the future to build a Burbank for all.

The post Metro DC DSA Statement on Trump’s Threats to Revoke DC Home Rule appeared first on Metro DC DSA.

Photo: Governor Tina Kotek and Mayor Keith Wilson toasting champagne with Portland Metro Chamber president and CEO Andrew Hoan.

Like all American cities, Portland has a local ruling class. The exact contours of this class evolve over time, but one institution has served as a pillar of the ruling class’s political aims for decades: the Portland Metro Chamber (formerly known as the Portland Business Alliance). Although the PMC has been around for a long time, Portland’s new form of government and a true left flank of representatives on City Council has forced these corporate hacks out of the shadows and into full public view. Read on to learn about the makeup of the PMC and their 10 most egregious actions since January 2025, and how to take part in an upcoming action against corporate cronyism.

The Corporate Front

The PMC is the smoke-filled room where the ruling class formulates its plans. The PMC staff are the highly-paid mercenaries who, for decades, have shaped the direction of the City of Portland. The PMC also throws money into state and local political campaigns to try and shape the makeup of elected government.

The PMC is where the country’s biggest corporations come together to influence Portland’s politics and economy. A quick glance at its member directory reveals a Who’s-Who of banks, fossil fuel companies, union busters, insurance companies, corporate law firms, technology companies, communications firms, private hospitals, and more. Nearly every mainstream media outlet is also a member, and the President of The Oregonian even serves on the PMC board. The PMC, like all Chambers of Commerce, uses propaganda to try to represent itself as the champion of the small business. But, in practice, only members who spent $12-$17K per year get a seat on the Board and access to the CEO. This means the PMC is a pay-to-play organization, driven by the big corporations, in the interest of the big corporations.

The PMC still holds a lot of influence in so-called “moderate” and conservative political circles, but its ability to operate under the radar has been substantially restricted since we won reform to the City’s charter. The PMC’s political success was for decades a product of its relative obscurity, where it operated most effectively from back offices and annual luncheons. Forced now into the sunlight, the lobby seems ill-adjusted to scrutiny.

In the last months of the previous City Council, the PMC engineered a deal to expand a program called “Downtown Clean & Safe” that, astonishingly, forces property owners to subsidize a substantial portion of PMC staff salaries. This policy was strongly opposed by incoming Portland City Councilors and dozens of community organizations (who wrote a letter calling for a delay of the decision to give a substantial portion of a “$58 million, no-bid contract to the Portland Metro Chamber” until the new council took over). But former mayor Ted Wheeler, along with a then-majority of PMC-endorsed City Commissioners, decided to rush the new program through, effectively securing up nearly half of CEO and President Andrew Hoan’s ~$333,000 salary, and 30-80% of the high salaries of other PMC staffers.

The PMC also lobbies the Portland City Council far more than any other entity, with over 35% of all recorded lobbying instances since 2014. In 2025 alone, PMC reported making 686 contacts with city officials, which represents close to one-third (30%) of all lobbying visits to Portland City Officials that year according to lobbying reports submitted to the City Auditor. As an example of the disproportionate amount of time PMC spends with City Officials, look at one quarter of 2025. Of the 32 entities that lobbied City Officials in the first quarter of 2025, PMC reported 322 visits. The next closest entity as measured by visits is RealPage, the rent-fixing software company that was banned in Portland, and they had a total of 41 visits in that quarter, which is 1.8% of all visits in that quarter. So, in effect, the PMC has managed to secure for itself a massive, publicly-guaranteed subsidy to influence Portland government. On top of receiving public dollars to lobby the City on behalf of business interests, there is also a revolving-door relationship between the PMC and the City: many of the PMC’s current and former employees used to work at the City of Portland.

The Dirty Deeds

With the above overview, here are some of the most egregious PMC actions since January 2025, paid for, in part, with public funds:

10.  The PMC declares war on municipal socialism

Doug Moore, who runs the one of Portland Metro Chamber’s political action committees, United for Portland, told the Willamette Week last year that “socialists are trying to take over the City Council and turn it into an ideological showcase for the rest of the country.” He also said the number one priority of the PMC is to “stop DSA from taking over the council.”

So, in the era of Donald Trump, the number one goal of the local ruling class is not protecting immigrants and other vulnerable communities or preventing a federal invasion, but stopping policymaking that benefits the working class.

9. PMC lobbies to protect ICE detention facility

In January 2026, Portland City Council adopted a Detention Facility Fee Ordinance that declares a public nuisance to use tear gas and assigned new costs to detention facility owners to offset the fiscal impact that these facilities cause for the government. The PMC, along with developers and home builders, opposed this policy because even though it only targets detention facilities like the Macadam ICE facility, they were worried about the precedent of adding new fees to building owners (“victims of protest”) and because the policy did not hold individual protestors accountable. Per their letter, the policy “places the entirety of the financial burden on the business being targeted — regardless of the actions of demonstrators.”

Yes, you heard that right. They want people protesting ICE abductions and detentions to pay for the costs of their protests.

It’s very good to know that there’s someone looking out for the interests of the poor, victimized owners of detention facilities where our neighbors are processed and held after they are abducted and before they are deported.

8. PMC threatens to sue the City of Portland for a proposal to raise taxes on CEOs

Last year during the budget cycle, Councilor Novick proposed a CEO tax to close some of the budget gap. In response, the PMC trotted out an absurd legal analysis to argue that the city can’t raise taxes without voter authority. 

Councilor Novick called the analysis “a joke” in the Willamette Week and pointed out how stupid it was to suggest that the city had been illegally raising revenue for over a century. It’s clear that the PMC went shopping for lawyers to write a legal analysis that fit their ideological desire and purely to try to derail progressive revenue raising plans.

7. PMC threatens to sue the City of Portland for plans to exempt poor people from the arts tax

When Portland City Councilors came up with a reform plan to exempt people who make under $20,000 (or $40,000 for joint filers) and increase the tax to $35 for other filers, the PMC again threatened to sue (and recycled the ridiculous legal analysis it began circulating in 2025).

Undeterred by this weak threat, Portland City Council passed the arts tax reforms.

We’ll see if the PMC’s threats have any teeth! We think it’s pure bluster.

6. PMC lobbyist tries to kill bus lanes… twice

In spring 2025, residents of 82nd Avenue called for Bus And Turn (BAT) lanes on the rebuilt 82nd to speed up buses along the corridor. Over 1400 people responded to a survey where 70% of residents (54% of business owners!) wanted BAT lanes along most or all of 82nd Ave. The Portland Metro Chamber, out of touch as ever, activated against the BAT lanes, with PMC execs Jon Isaacs or Michael Liu testifying at every single public meeting (often both). Though Liu claimed to speak for the tenants at his shopping center, opposition to BAT lanes did not materialize in the monthly public meetings, and Trimet would go on to recommend BAT lanes to the fullest extent possible. In one particularly cringey episode, Isaacs attempted to testify twice as long as everyone else — once as a representative of his Neighborhood Association, and again for the Metro Chamber. Trimet cut him off in the middle of his second testimony.

5. Anti-DSA red scare push polls

In April 2026, Democratic Party voters in Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington County received invitations to answer questions in bizarre polls about left-wing candidates running for office. The polls were “push polls” — a negative campaigning technique used to influence voters by asking loaded or misleading questions to bias the poll-participant against a candidate. The polls attempted to tie candidates to DSA (even candidates not supported by DSA) and asked questions like this:

Many speculated on who was behind these push polls, until Alex Baumhardt at the Oregon Capitol Chronicle found out that it was Jon Isaacs from the Portland Metro Chamber who, through the PMC-run Portland Alliance PAC, spent $43,000 to Chicago-based Elevated Campaigns.

Ultimately, Isaacs wasted tens of thousands of dollars on dirty tricks only to get shellacked by DSA in two high-profile Washington County legislative races.

4. Wasting money trying to protect data centers and polluters in Washington County elections

Consistent with its fear of DSA candidates, the PMC spent big to try (and fail) to prevent Dr. Tammy Carpenter and Myrna Muñoz from winning elected office. One of the big issues for voters in the election was data centers.

As we wrote in our blog post about The Data Centrists of Washington County, the PMC “play[s] a critical role in whipping support for the data centers, and their relationships with the transnational technology corporations are substantial. […] In Portland, firms with substantial data center interests helm the Metro Chamber’s Board of Directors, including Amazon, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Northwest Natural Gas, and Portland General Electric.”

The PMC spent big in support of their data centrist candidates, and despite the Oregonian incorrectly calling the races before all the votes were counted, both Janeen Sollman and Ashley Hartmeier-Prigg were defeated by DSA, unions, and environmental groups.

3. Back room dealing to protect Zenith Energy

Community advocates (and DSA) have been fighting against the expansion of the Zenith Energy oil terminal for years. After repeated backroom deals, the election of DSA Councilors Mitch Green, Angelita Morillo, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Sameer Kanal in November of 2024 finally signaled that we would have a city council ready to hold Zenith accountable. In fact, in December 2024, Zenith was hit with a historic penalty that gave the new Mayor and City Council the opportunity to act.

However, while Councilors Green and Morillo were readying the paperwork to pause any new permissions for Zenith and to hold the company accountable, there was another backroom deal; this time over sazeracs.

Street Roots (now Portland Mercury) reporter Jeremiah Hayden broke a story that PMC lobbyist Jon Isaacs met with Deputy City Administrator Donnie Oliveira off hours at a bar and discussed the pending Zenith Energy Land Use Compatibility Statement application over drinks. Zenith Energy is a member of the PMC and the PMC publicly opposed any City Council action to hold Zenith accountable.

After meeting with Isaacs, Oliveira rushed to approve Zenith’s new LUCS before the City Council could act, despite telling the Council in a work session that there was no legal reason to rush the decision, creating a clear appearance that Oliveira’s decision was influenced by his personal friend Jon Isaacs.

After these actions, advocates sued the City of Portland and alleged that the LUCS was granted illegally and without adequate public process. The advocates won important procedural victories and this case will soon go to trial. We expect that the PMC’s corruption will be uncovered and that this night out for sazeracs might cost their buddies at Zenith a lot of time and money.

2. Tax flight lies and anti-Preschool for All propaganda

For years, the PMC and their local ruling class allies have promoted a bullshit theory that the wealthy are fleeing Portland because of their supposedly high tax burden. After publicly declaring their intention, the PMC used this false claim to try to kill the Preschool for All program on numerous occasions. The false tax flight claim is also one of the core assumptions behind Governor Tina Kotek’s so-called Prosperity Council that has recommended a Reaganite approach to taxes and regulation in Oregon.

As the PMC and Governor Tina Kotek attempted, again, to attack Preschool for All, Councilor Mitch Green — a Ph.D. economist — and his staff produced a report that debunked the tax flight claims. The press release announcing the report described the findings as such:

“The data shows income gains, not flight: The reported increase in average income of those leaving the county during the pandemic is better explained by massive, nationwide windfall gains from capital gains, interest, and dividends—not an exodus driven by local taxes. This pattern could be seen in major cities across the country, regardless of their tax rates.

No mass exodus of high-income households: The number of households in Multnomah County with incomes over $200,000 has grown by 28.7% from 2021 to 2023. The total number of filers paying the PFA tax increased by 16.5% in the same period.

A flawed use of averages: Opponents’ arguments depend on a “statistical sleight of hand”using mean averages, which are easily skewed by a small number of very high-income individuals. This method is inappropriate for analyzing migration trends.”

Armed with this report, Preschool for All supporters went on to defeat efforts at killing the program and forced Governor Kotek to back away from her attacks on PFA (for the time being).

The PMC and their allies on the Prosperity Council continue to advance myths about tax flight to try and bolster their deregulatory and anti-tax austerity agenda.

1. The Moda Center Billionaire Ball-Room

Earlier this year, the Blazers organization and its new owner, billionaire Tom Dundon (a man who became rich in the subprime auto lending industry), launched a campaign with corporate Democrats in the Oregon State Legislature to scare everyone into appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars in public money for Moda Center stadium upgrades. The Oregon State Legislature approved $365 million in state bonds for these stadium upgrades, with a requirement that the City of Portland and Multnomah County to contribute over $200 million in additional funds. Along the way, we learned that there were series of backroom negotiations between public officials like Mayor Keith Wilson and Multnomah County Commissioner Julia Brim Edwards, which were hidden from the public under the code-name “Project Mt. Hood.”

After signing the bill into law, Governor Kotek attempted to pressure the Portland City Council to quickly appropriate public money for the Moda Center, saying this is “not a time to play politics.”

However, things are not going to be so easy for Dundon and his corporate Democrats. Led by Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane, DSA City Councilors have signaled that they will push back on any attempt to hand public money over to a billionaire without adequate public process and community benefits. They’ve also signaled that they want to have a public vote on the issue.

Just last week, RipCityNotRipoff published a 2024 City of Portland facilities inventory analysis for the Moda Center, which showed that only ~$112 million is required for necessary repairs, far below the over $600 million dollars pledged by the state legislature. The rest of the money is for improvements that would make the Blazers organization and Dundon more profits, like luxury suite renovations, a concourse bar, and a new team store.

At Portland DSA, we say that no public money should go toward making a billionaire even more profits, especially when our schools are being closed and our neighbors go unhoused.

As it happens, the PMC is hosting its annual meeting at the Moda Center on June 24, 2026. Members of the public can pay $350 to meet with billionaire Tom Dundon, Mayor Keith Wilson, State Senators Kate Lieber and Rob Wagner, and other corporate cronies and political hacks. Unsurprisingly this event is sponsored by corporate looters and polluters like US Bank, Comcast, Chevron, NW Natural, Pacific Power, Lyft, The Oregonian, and more.

Join DSA and partners for a community picket and picnic where we will confront Portland’s biggest looters and polluters while they flaunt their access to the Mayor and top Democratic Party leaders!

Wednesday, June 24, 1-6pm, at the Moda Center. We hope to see you there!

by AC

Our chapter is fortunate to be growing and maintaining a high percentage of active members. Folks have taken this to indicate our chapter can expand to take on additional work. In the past few months, I have been deeply skeptical of our ability to expand on our current work largely from my experience on the Trans Rights Priority Project leadership team and observing the trajectory of the Immigration Solidarity Priority Project first term. While our chapter’s growth has led many to believe we can expand our work, I’m increasingly convinced that growth in membership alone is not enough; without significant member engagement across the chapter, we risk projects that are doomed to fail and further burning out our most experienced organizers.

What finally put my nebulous feeling about our lack of capacity into perspective was my recent trip down to Louisville DSA to canvas for their electoral candidates. Louisville DSA is supporting four candidates for local- and state-level offices concurrently in a chapter virtually the same size as Cleveland DSA. They also have a Trans Safe Haven campaign similar to our Trans Rights Priority Project, which is pushing sanctuary city legislation. This project has the support of over 100 local unions and political organizations and has collected at least 3,000 signatures from residents in the two years it has been running. Louisville DSA also has several other active campaigns, a building fund with over $10,000 towards purchasing a permanent office, and several educational projects. Talking with Louisville comrades, I must be honest that my initial reaction was one of embarrassment that our chapter is struggling to succeed in a fraction of the work of our southern comrades. I feel there is a significant barrier in our way to accomplishing what Louisville DSA has, which is a lack of militant engagement across our membership. 

Our work requires militancy; not in the sense of posturing or burnout, but in the sense of disciplined, collective commitment to carrying out democratically decided work. To be militant socialists, we must be dedicated and principled in our organizing. That means showing up to meetings on time and prepared, to be uncompromising in our pursuit for liberation of the working class. It also means taking responsibility and initiative to carry our democratically decided work forward – even when we might have our own personal reservations – and thinking critically and strategically about all projects as we design and deliberate on them. As a brand new member in late 2024, I sometimes took it for granted that every project the chapter took on would build power for the working class, even if only a little bit. At the time, that little bit was good enough for me and I was often frustrated when experienced comrades pushed me to articulate explicitly how certain work would build power for the chapter and/or the working class as a whole. Now, over a year in with some leadership and organizing experience under my belt, I can see more clearly how this is the critical question that should inform every action we do as DSA. 

Newer members often have understandable hesitancy and insecurity about entering into political activism and organizing work, which is counterintuitive to the rugged individualism and liberalism under which we have been indoctrinated our entire lives. Experienced organizers must cultivate an environment of support and empowerment to overcome this capitalist indoctrination. Newer members must also be willing to challenge themselves and take the leap into the unknown. They will encounter failures and make many mistakes, but that is a critical and unavoidable part of the learning process. 

Outside of DSA, I teach for a living. My own teaching philosophy, based on the science of teaching and learning, rests on a foundation of practice and feedback. Whether it is learning in a classroom or in a conference room, it makes no difference; personal growth and development are iterative processes. Few of us are thrilled by the notion that trial and error involves error, and many “baby leftists” are understandably risk averse – they want to avoid letting their comrades down or sounding dumb. In our current internet age, social media cancel culture and purity testing within the leftist spaces that radicalize so many of us also infect us with the fear that holds us back from meaningfully engaging. Still, this is what the role of a militant member of a collectively run organization asks from us. Sharing your opinion in a meeting can be nerve-wracking, but participation is both something every member is entitled to and something the organization desperately needs from its members.

When I talk about doing the work, I don’t just mean actions like canvassing for a petition, bottomlining an event, or organizing a new member. Doing the work is also voicing your opinion during a project meeting, commenting on proposal drafts, and speaking for or against proposals during the general meeting. All members in good standing are entitled to participate in all of these activities and are responsible for doing so. We cannot defer to the oldest, loudest voices in the room. It allows for personal biases and cliques to dominate the governance of the chapter, and it robs members of their own political development. Often in meetings I observe the same people dominating conversation, including myself. When I try to pull back and make space for others, often the void remains unfilled. I find this both personally frustrating and concerning with respect to the long-term health and viability of the chapter. Our work is one of collective, participatory democracy, after all.

I feel an aspect of militancy that is especially important to our chapter as of late is the act of showing up when it is inconvenient or hard to do, or when the project isn’t your personal favorite thing. No matter how much or how little someone has on their plate, organizing is hard work. It will take all of us and so many more to bring about the socialist future we dream of. Of course, there must be a balance between maintaining militancy and avoiding burnout. This balance is something I personally struggle with. I like to joke that I suffer “chronic volunteering disease” and often catch myself internally asking some version of “If not me, then who?” I know I’m not the only one who feels this way; in one of my all-time favorite books on organizing, Dean Spade describes what sounds an awfully lot like my own chronic volunteering disease:

“For years I had a pattern where whenever I was in a meeting and the group identified a task that needed to be done, I would feel a strong impulse to volunteer for the task. It stemmed from my unconscious desire to be seen as useful, and to secure my place in the group by being of service. It also often included a tinge of anxiety that the work either wouldn’t get done, or wouldn’t get done in what I thought was the ‘right’ way. This pattern sometimes resulted in overwork, exhaustion, and neglect of other parts of my life.”

Chronic volunteering disease contributes to unsustainable relationships with the movement that create the conditions that stoke resentment and organizer burnout. Objectively my brain knows this, and yet I continually return to “If not me, then who?” It isn’t a fully rhetorical question– someone really has to do the tasks of maintaining the movement, whether that is creating an agenda, writing a proposal, throwing a social, or showing up to canvas on a Sunday morning. As the Trans Rights Priority Project likes to say, “It’s YOUR project, it doesn’t work without YOU!”, where “you” is everyone in the chapter, from the most seasoned organizer to the comrade who signed up to pay dues yesterday. 

One additional observation that informs my opinion is that many of our most experienced, long-term organizers are currently sitting on the “burnout bench”. This situation obviously arises from a variety of factors: some have other life obligations or obstacles, some are dealing with interpersonal conflicts, and some have a necessary and well-earned break after intense service to the chapter. In my discussions with Louisville DSA comrades, I wondered about whether they were able to carry out their large amount of work sustainably, and asked if each project was successful due to an unreasonable amount of work put in by senior organizers. There was a telling pause in the conversation, before the comrade acknowledged several of the projects were relying on several members pushing themselves to the brink of burnout – potentially a cautionary tale for us to consider as we grow here in Cleveland. It is expected that individuals’ capacity ebbs and flows throughout their tenure in the movement. Therefore, we have to ensure that our work continues when members need to take a step back. This requires other members to step up and support their comrades and the work of the movement. 

Overall, I do have faith that our chapter can continue to build power for the Cleveland working class and should be able to grow the work we are engaged in, but only if we approach our current and future work with intention to build power, increased militancy, and care regarding membership capacity. My ask to the “oldheads” – practice pausing for others to speak and to intentionally ask newer comrades what their thoughts are. Be mindful about how you respond, especially if you disagree. Check in with yourself about your capacity. If you need to take a break, actually take it! It is difficult to feel restored when ruminating on chapter work, even if you aren’t actively showing up. But also, ask yourself about whether a situation calls for militancy. My ask to newer comrades – take a chance and challenge yourself to become comfortable with the inevitable mistakes that will and must happen. Seek out information from comrades you respect and trust (and some you might not yet!). Volunteer for a small task at a meeting. Connect back to the reasons you joined DSA in the first place – hopefully to become meaningfully engaged in the socialist movement!

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