In last month’s California Red progressive tax column, “The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality” we learned that our state’s billionaires are busy making unintentional arguments for raising taxes on themselves. As Exhibit A, we heard the statement by tech mogul Tim Conway who, in speaking of the Billionaires Tax, described it as “…the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt”. We’re fairly certain that, say, Native Californians who suffered a genocide in the nineteenth century, falling from a third of a million people pre-contact, to fifteen thousand by 1910, might disagree with Conway’s historical viewpoint.

It would be hard to top this perspective for revelation of the navel-gazing narcissism of the billionaire set at the prospect they might have to pay their fair share of taxes to support the society that had made them rich, but at least it had the virtue of honesty, albeit of the self-delusional variety. No such sideways move accompanied billionaire activities earlier this month, when a large envelope landed in the letterboxes of homes across the state. 

Designed to mimic official state electoral mailers—the printing even said “OFFICIAL 2026 VOTER PETITION ENCLOSED”—it contained three elements: a flyer headed “Yes to Protect Retirement and Life Savings”; a petition for an initiative measure for the November state ballot; and an already-paid return envelope to send the filled-in petition to something called “Californians To Protect Retirement and Life Savings” at a Burbank P.O. Box. 

Reading between the lines

The outside of the mailer said, “Sign now to stop Sacramento politicians from taxing your personal property”. On the inside, the unnamed politicians pushing their unnamed tax on everyone were further chastised.

You would have to read between the lines, but two of the flyer’s three bolded bullets give away its actual agenda. One tells us that the ballot measure petition we are being urged to sign “prohibits new state taxes on personal savings, and personal property…” . The other “prohibits retroactive taxes”.  

The only proposed tax on personal savings and property, which is indeed designed to apply retroactively to January 1, 2026 (that much is true), is the Billionaires Tax, which will fall on the shoulders of precisely 246 people in the Golden State. Nonetheless the flyer argues that “Politicians should not be allowed to change the rules and tax what you have worked a lifetime to earn” (emphasis added). 

Despite the second person form of address, no one will be taxed by the Billionaires Tax unless he or she is a billionaire. However, the Billionaires Tax is not mentioned anywhere in the flyer. To do so might undercut the multiple deceptions at the heart of this mailer.

Worn and tattered economic blackmail banner

The BT is not emanating from scary Sacramento politicians. It is an effort spearheaded by a health care workers union, United Health Workers-SEIU, to plug the $20 billion per year hole opened up in the California state budget for Medi-Cal recipients by Trump’s HR1, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”, beginning in 2027.  Should the Billionaires Tax fail to make it, with no other action taken, millions of the poorest Californians would lose their health care, and tens of thousands of decent union health care jobs would disappear as well. 

As for those unnamed but undoubtedly evil “Sacramento politicians” supposedly pushing the tax, Sacramento politician numero uno, Gavin Newsom, among many others, opposes the Billionaires Tax. His deeply unoriginal reasoning is the worn and tattered economic blackmail banner that always gets waved about by wealthy would-be tax dodgers—they’ll all leave the state! and take all the jobs with them!—which research has proven to be largely fallacious. 

The main argument—dishonest in form, as well as content—is the one that states that the proposed tax is on “you”—and since everyone hates taxes, or so it is assumed by the makers of the argument, “you” will become incensed and get to work opposing it. Here the authors of the mailer thoughtfully provide a petition for “you” to sign and return in a pre-paid envelope. (They must be hoping that the “you” is more than the 246 people who are actually the “you”.)

Certainly a handful of anti-social billionaires oppose the tax. It’s hard to imagine a more selfish perspective. According to the Billionaires Tax campaign website, “California billionaires have increased their wealth 158% over the last three years, making a 5% tax, spread over five years, truly negligible relative to their enormous gains.” In other words, this wealth tax doesn’t actually decrease billionaire wealth; it merely slows down its rampaging growth in order to save Medi-Cal. 

Tsunami of lies headed our way

The goal of this mailer and its petition is nullification of the Billionaires Tax, should it pass. Let’s be clear: the billionaires tax campaign hasn’t even finished gathering signatures, let alone qualified for the ballot, and, dare we mention the final hurdle, gained fifty percent plus one of the votes of the electorate. We are seven months from Election Day, and tens of millions of dollars in right wing billionaire money has already been dropped into our mailboxes and into credulous mainstream media stories breathlessly announcing the drain-circling our fourth largest economy in the world will undoubtedly suffer when all the billionaires leave. Imagine the tsunami of advertising, mailers and surrogates lying through their teeth all washing over us once the measure qualifies.

Lost in all the noise are two simple points. First, everyone, meaning the megarich too, needs to pay their fair share of taxes—Silicon Valley billionaires who have benefited hugely from Trump’s federal tax cuts included. Second, elections in a democracy should be decided on the basis of the merits of the argument—not dishonest scare tactics amplified by unlimited billionaire spending. Ironically, the dirty tricks already pulled by this campaign demonstrate that the billionaires behind it have more money than is good for truth, fair elections and their own better selves, should they actually have any. 

They might want to pay a bit more attention to the rising public perception that their political spending is bad for democracy. They might then decide it’s in their own interest too to pay their fair share to support the basic public services needed by the rest of us. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it over a century ago, taxes are “the price we pay for a civilized society”.

On Tuesday, November 3rd the voters in this country may deal a significant blow to the Trump and MAGA movement by taking away the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Every vote will be important in these very important elections.

What role will DSA play in this important battle? Tens of thousands of activists across the state will work to defeat the Republicans. Will DSA be there with them? Will DSA be known as an organization that stood up to do what was best for the people in this critical moment of history?

I hope so.

That's why I am proposing that we organize and direct our effort to support the Democrats in the five swing districts across our state.  One way we could do this is by developing a California DSA Congressional Elections Committee

I recorded this short video introducing myself and proposing we build this committee. Please take a moment to watch it. I will expand on it more here in this article, but it will introduce the idea.

Why should we focus on the swing districts? The swing districts are the battleground. Most districts are solidly Republican or solidly Democratic. They are stable territory for either side. The swing districts are where the two parties fight and gain or lose ground.

California has five of them: 

• CA-13 is held by Democrat Adam Gray, who won in 2024 by only 187 votes. The district also voted for Trump. CA-13 includes all of Merced County, most of Madera County and parts of Stanislaus, Fresno and San Joaquin Counties. Our closest chapters are North Central Valley, East Bay and San Francisco. 

• CA-21 is more likely to remain Democratic. Current representative Jim Costa won by 10,065 votes, but that is still close enough to have it make the swing districts list. It includes part of Fresno County and Tulare County. Our closest chapters are North Central Valley, East Bay and San Francisco. 

• CA-22 is held by Republican David Valadao. It includes most of Kings County and parts of Tulare and Kern Counties. The closest chapter to this district is North Central Valley DSA and we also have an Organizing Committee in Kern County.

• CA-45 is held by Democrat Derek Tran, who narrowly won in 2024 by just 653 votes. It is located mostly in Orange County and includes a small part of Los Angeles County. Our Long Beach, Orange County and Los Angeles chapters could collaborate on this race.

• CA-48 is also held by a Republican and it includes parts of San Diego and Riverside counties. We have chapters in the Inland Empire and San Diego.

You can check out maps of the districts and voting results of the 2024 general elections here in this site I put together.

The election committee will include people from chapters across the state.  We will help each other organize members in our chapters to participate in these elections, discuss how things are going and to help each other out and share ideas and resources.  We will discuss successes and challenges getting members involved in the campaigns.

I acknowledge that these Democratic candidates in the swing districts hold positions on some issues that many DSA members may be strongly opposed to. But priority number one right now must be stopping MAGA fascism in its tracks, and one crucial and necessary tool is a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. 

All we as DSA members need to do is show up and participate in the campaigns and we can figure out together how best to do that. 

Participants from a chapter could tell the congressperson’s campaign that they would like to focus on an area where many of the members live or an area that participants want to focus on for some other reason. We can publicize campaign events to our members and encourage them to help. We can look at voter statistics for the areas we choose and become more advanced in our understanding of the voting history of the area we focus on. Some of you will have other ideas about what to do as well and they will be welcomed. We will discuss them openly together!

Working together on this important political event will help us to function in an organized and collective way, like an organization bigger than our isolated chapters, and to learn to work together smoothly, efficiently and with unity.

We need to work that way if we are going to successfully march down the long and difficult road of building socialism. Right now MAGA stands ahead of us, right in the middle of that road. 

Please contact me (lealfaro@protonmail.com) to work together on getting our people to help with any campaign event.  Contact me if you have questions or views on this very important time.

[reprinted by permission from Jacobin]

On a late March afternoon, beneath the vaulted, medieval-revival ceiling of Immanuel Presbyterian Church, more than four hundred members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) gathered in the lingering heat of a citywide heat wave. The air inside the sanctuary was thick and stubborn as members fanned themselves with paper copies of the meeting agenda and shifted in their seats.

The proceedings moved briskly at first. Members discussed strike solidarity with the teachers’ union, upcoming labor actions, and campaign work. But as the temperature held and the room settled, the chapter turned to the main act, a more contentious question: whether to reopen its endorsement process for the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral race. What followed was a three-sided debate, carried out with intensity but also with (mostly) practiced comradely discipline.

More than one hundred members had signed petitions backing housing activist Rae Huang. Another one hundred supported City Councilmember Nithya Raman. Others argued that reopening the process would risk overextending the chapter’s resources and undermine a carefully built electoral strategy. In the end, 54 percent voted to reopen endorsements, but the measure failed to reach the required supermajority.

It was the kind of debate that would have once remained obscure and relevant only to a relatively small organization. As DSA’s LA chapter has grown to five thousand members, and the national organization has become an increasingly prominent force, DSA-LA’s decisions have begun to register as reportable events in the political life of the city. What was once “inside baseball” now carries implications for multimillion-dollar races and the direction of governance in the second-largest city in the United States — part of a broader maturation of socialist politics.

For years, DSA-LA has pursued a disciplined electoral strategy focused primarily on city council races, with massive districts that each encompass over 260,000 residents — but where, when the Left concentrates its forces, it can still meaningfully shift outcomes. This strategy flows from both ongoing campaign work and the chapter’s political program, and has delivered results on the council.

Shake Up City Hall Slate

Nithya Raman’s 2020 victory marked a breakthrough, and in the years since, DSA-backed candidates have steadily expanded their presence. Today multiple members or allies of the organization sit on the fifteen-member city council, and the chapter has built a reputation for running serious, field-heavy campaigns rooted in tenant organizing and alliances with labor unions.

In the current cycle, DSA-LA has endorsed the Shake Up City Hallslate of six candidates. DSA-LA’s 2026 slate includes both incumbents and challengers, with councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, a Highland Park organizer advancing tenant rights and advocating for improving public safety through better social service and mental health provision, and Hugo Soto-Martínez, a former hotel worker and union organizer who has delivered legislative wins for renters, immigrants, and labor.

The challengers include Estuardo Mazariegos, a South LA organizer running on social housing, tenant power, and a Green New Deal, and Faizah Malik, a tenants’ rights attorney focused on housing affordability and land use reform on the Westside.

Beyond council races, school board member Rocío Rivas is seeking reelection as a defender of public education against privatization. And Marissa Roy is mounting an insurgent bid for city attorney to reorient the office toward civil rights and corporate accountability.

The Other Citywide Race

That last race represents something new. The office of city attorney has historically been low-profile, technocratic, and largely insulated from ideological contestation. Roy’s campaign, by contrast, seeks to transform it into a site of democratic accountability, raising questions about prosecution priorities, tenant rights, and the legal architecture of inequality in Los Angeles.

“The city attorney is one of the most powerful and least understood offices in LA, and the current city attorney is using the office to obstruct the pro-tenant, pro-worker agenda our DSA electeds are trying to implement in city council,” said Sydney Ghazarian, cochair of DSA’s Marissa Roy Working Group and a former DSA National Political Committee leader. “We’ve learned the hard way that the policies we pass don’t matter if the city attorney refuses to enforce them. ”

Roy’s candidacy is not just another race. It is a test of whether democratic socialists can expand their project beyond legislative bodies into the legal machinery of the city itself. It’s one thing to pass legislation; it’s another thing to enforce it and have the city devote its legal might to supporting tenants and workers.

“Right now, we have a city attorney who wastes the office’s resources defending indefensible LAPD misconduct instead of prosecuting slumlords, bad bosses, and polluting corporations,” added Ghazarian. “Marissa will use the power of the office to defend tenants, workers, and millions of working-class Angelenos, not just the powerful few.”

The Mayor’s Race Enters the Room

The debate over the mayor’s race sits uneasily alongside this strategy. Before Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor last November, the question of intervening in the race wasn’t on the minds of many LA chapter members. But that upset election rippled out in energizing waves across the country.

On one side were those who saw a mayoral endorsement as a natural next step. With DSA-backed candidates now holding multiple council seats and with the deep polling weakness of LA’s current mayor, Karen Bass, the prospect of a democratic socialist mayor no longer feels entirely out of reach. A mayoral campaign, in their eyes, would bring visibility, attract new members, and potentially consolidate the gains of the past decade.

“I want our chapter to be able to seize this moment and demonstrate to thousands of working-class Angelenos that DSA-LA is an organization worth joining, and I want a movement that understands 2028 is not just about returning to corporate Democratic policies but rather reshaping the fabric of American society,” said chapter cochair Leslie Chang, who supported a Nithya endorsement. “Supporting Nithya for mayor is our chance to build a movement here in Los Angeles that is ready to support a democratic socialist for president in 2028.”

On the other side were those who view such a move as premature or even counterproductive. The chapter’s strength has been its disciplined allocation of resources, particularly volunteer labor for phonebanking and canvassing. A citywide race could absorb enormous capacity, potentially weakening the campaigns where DSA has its clearest path to victory.

There are also political considerations. Raman, despite her history with DSA and her strong record on tenant protections and advocacy for the homeless, has at times diverged from the organization on key issues, including Palestine, housing policy, policing budgets, and the implementation of the city’s “mansion tax.” Raman has drawn heavy fire at times from DSA members nationally for being accommodating to local pro-Israeli groups. For instance, she was censured by the chapter in 2024 for accepting the endorsement of Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles. At the recent chapter debate, some members active in housing fights raised concerns about her being an inconsistent ally to the housing left in the city and criticized her efforts to rewrite Measure ULA, the city tax on top-tier property sales that flows directly into the city’s affordable housing programs, to exempt apartments, condos, and mixed-use housing. Raman contends that it is a tactical move to keep lobbying groups opposed to the measure from gutting the law with a statewide ballot initiative..

Huang, by contrast, is seen by some members as more closely aligned with socialist principles but faces questions about electability and citywide recognition. “She’s not on the Shake Up City Hall slate, but she’s here to shake up city hall,” says Gabbie Metheny, a DSA-LA chapter member and volunteer community manager for the campaign.

Democracy Is Good, Actually

These are not superficial disagreements. They reflect a deeper tension within democratic socialist strategy: whether to prioritize ideological clarity or electoral viability, and how to balance the two in a political environment still largely hostile to socialists.

What stands out, however, is not the existence of disagreement but the form it takes. The debate inside DSA-LA is structured, participatory, and transparent. Petitions circulate. Members argue openly. Votes are taken, and decisions are respected even when the margins are narrow or the outcome frustrating. The result is messy, sometimes slow, and occasionally anticlimactic.

Members also sometimes vote with their feet in a mass organization where democratic socialism spills out into a broader movement not always contained by DSA. Formal endorsement or no, over 120 DSA-LA, Long Beach, and Orange County members (mostly new recruits) are volunteering for Huang’s campaign (out of 1,110 volunteers total), taking up organizing roles in canvassing, digital outreach, policy, and more. Many DSA members active in the United Auto Workers have been pillars of support for the Nithya campaign. But messy or not, DSA-LA’s internal debates provide a rare example of large-scale democratic practice in an era when most political organizations operate through top-down decision-making or informal influence networks.

The stakes extend beyond Los Angeles. As democratic socialism becomes an ever more powerful force in American politics, questions of strategy, scale, and internal democracy will only become more pressing. DSA-LA offers one possible model: a mass-membership organization capable of contesting elections, organizing in social movements, and still arguing, in full view of its own members, about how best to proceed.

Brooke Pinto wants to represent the District in Congress. What does her policymaking history tell DC voters?

While the initiative to implement ranked-choice voting in DC purported to give voters more power, its implementation may do the opposite.

With Earth Day coming up this week, Seattle DSA’s Ecosocialism Working Group sat down and answered some questions about the environmental impact of Data Centers, A.I. and how our chapter is working to educate the public about this important issue and how you can get involved!

Question: Last year the Ecosocialism Working Group held a series of Forums on AI. Can you tell us what the specific focuses of those events were and what some of the biggest takeaways were? 

Ecosocialism Working Group: We held three People’s Forums on AI, each centered on different aspects of the AI conversation. The first focused on Data Centers, Water, and Energy; the second on Power, Labor, and Control; and the third was a workshop-based session geared toward developing strategies for regulating, resisting, and reimagining AI and data centers. Highlights included a testimony from the former mayor of Quincy, Washington on the impacts of the data center buildout on her town and its water, air, and electric grid; a rousing speech from Adrian Reyna Chavoya of the People’s Tech Project on building data center resistance across the country; and a presentation from DSA Ecosocialism’s own Raj Mirpuri on what the technology marketed as AI actually is and does and why we don’t need to let Big Tech determine our collective future.

There were many informative and revealing facts and perspectives shared at the forums, some of which you can watch here. But the biggest takeaway came from the numbers and enthusiasm of people who showed up and engaged with the sessions. There is a clear energy—including among tech workers—to first understand what the industry has planned for data centers and AI and second to challenge the idea that we should wait passively for them to have their way with our communities, ecosystems, jobs, and society. 

Question: There has been a lot of news nationally about the impact of data centers, can you give us some insight into how and where data centers are affecting Washington State?

Ecosocialism Working Group: Currently, there are 107 data operating in Washington state, with the majority in Seattle and Quincy, followed by Wenatchee. There are also several more being built or proposed throughout the state, including larger hyperscalers in Walla Walla, Spokane, and Richland-Kennewick. Big Tech is also eyeing parts of the state to build small modular reactors or nuclear fusion to power data centers both here and in Oregon. 

The colocated traditional data centers in Seattle add up to 270 megawatts across 50 or so data centers. These traditional data centers are the ones that run our internet and cloud services—we’re less concerned about these ones. However, news just broke this month that four tech companies approached Seattle City Light about building five large data centers that would have a maximum demand of 369 MW, approximately one-third of the city’s average daily energy usage. This raises obvious concerns about where the power will come from as Seattle continues to grow and electrify, and what the impact will be on ratepayers.

Quincy is an example of the impacts of larger hyperscaler or AI data centers, where around 53 centers add up to 1 gigawatt (or 1,010 MW). A 100 MW data center uses more electricity than all the homes in Everett combined. The tech industry wants us to believe that these new, large hyperscale data centers are necessary for running the internet, and we know that’s just not true. We’ve been getting by with these smaller data centers just fine. What has changed is the rollout of AI and its demand for energy.

Quincy has emerged as one of the largest data center markets in the country, and is a good example of the unadvertised effects of data centers on communities. Many members of the community support the data centers, which have been built over the past 20 years, as they have generated tax revenue that has funded a new high school and hospital. However, there are signs of growing frustration. Quincy once generated surplus electricity via hydropower, but now Grant County PUD wants to build a new transmission line and methane gas pipeline to power current and additional planned data centers. To build the new transmission line, it is condemning private land impacting 120 homes and 449 acres of farmland, sparking outrage among farm- and homeowners who say the route through their properties was chosen behind closed doors.

In general, the statewide data center buildout threatens Washington’s hydropower supply, already diminished by the impacts of climate change such as drought and reduced snowpack, and then risks exacerbating those impacts when utilities rely on methane gas to make up the difference. At the same time, the buildout could undermine the state’s climate commitments and further raise energy bills amid an affordability crisis. 

Question: It seems many of the issues around data centers tend to hit rural communities first and hardest. As residents of Washington’s biggest city, what can we do to support our rural neighbors in these fights?

Ecosocialism Working Group: Out of the planning process for the AI forums, a new network emerged known as Washington Artificial Intelligence Resistance (WA-AIR), of which Seattle DSA is a founding partner. This network is reaching out to communities across the state where data centers are active or planned to support local communities and struggles and help them in building local power and capacity to push back against the extraction of our state’s land, energy, and water resources.. This includes the landowners in Quincy as well as community members in Walla-Walla, whose port recently sold land to Amazon for a data center despite widespread opposition. 

That said, the news this month that major data centers are now planned for Seattle indicates that we can’t assume our more urban communities are safe. With our community partners, we have launched a letter-writing campaign calling on the Seattle City Council and Mayor Wilson to implement a moratorium on new data centers in Seattle. You can add your name here. If you are interested in getting more involved with the fight against data centers, both in Seattle and statewide, you can sign up here.

Question: During the last state leg session, Seattle DSA member and WA State Rep. Shaun Scott helped to pass HB2089, a bill which will help fund Wildfire Mitigation. Are there other victories like this we’ve seen locally?

Ecosocialism Working Group: Seattle DSA Ecosocialism focused most of its legislative energies around bills regulating data centers and AI. While the main bill that would have regulated data centers, HB2515, did not pass, a small victory emerged with the passage of SB 6231, which removed a tax exemption for the replacement of data center equipment. This will save the state $155 million through 2031 and gives us something to build on for further regulating and taxing Big Tech. 

Rep. Scott’s bill also helped, by stripping away tax incentives from financial institutions that lend to big development projects like data centers, redirecting those funds to wildfire mitigation. But we still have more work to do. We still give millions per year of taxpayer money to some of the wealthiest corporations in the world to build out new data centers across our state, when instead we should be requiring them to support our communities with energy affordability or renewable and distributed energy systems to mitigate the strain these companies and their data centers are placing on our grid. 

Question: With the escalating climate crisis sowing chaos in the natural world, can you tell us about current efforts to protect wildlife in Washington State?

Ecosocialism Working Group: The data center buildout could threaten Washington’s efforts to help salmon recover and thrive, as further strain on hydropower usage could lead to the waiving of provisions to help migrating salmon cross dams. At the same time, the water used to cool the data centers could be released back into watersheds at higher temperatures and with added contaminates, further threatening fish and other wildlife. Data centers can also contribute to the heat island effect, which means nearby plants have to work harder to retain water, increasing wildfire risk. DSA Ecosocialism plans to collaborate with local environmental and land defense partners to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Question: Are there some specific types of environmental legislation you’re hoping to see introduced in the upcoming legislation such as a data center moratorium? 

Ecosocialism Working Group: Seattle DSA Ecosocialism has signed a national call for a moratorium on the approval and construction of new data centers. We are interested in any and all legislation that addresses the big threats posed by the unique tech industry in our state, including any efforts to expand nuclear power.

With WA-AIR, members of our group are currently drafting an AI Bill of Rights that is designed to be used as a springboard for future campaigns and legislation, which will focus on fairness, transparency, and privacy. That will be up on our website soon—stay tuned!

Minnesota labor and anti-ICE organizers are finding common ground and tools in the fight against authoritarianism in the workplace and on the streets

The post How to organize against authoritarianism appeared first on EWOC.

Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition offered a model for success for today's Left, writes an author who helped build DC's Rainbow.

The Iran War sends the world a stern warning about neglecting food systems transformation.

Eric Blanc and Chris Winston have both written articles recently investigating why there is currently no mass anti-war movement in the US and proposing actions for us to take to address that problem. I’m glad that they each put forward their analysis, because both are grappling seriously with this issue, and we do need to figure out what we can do to build a mass anti-war movement. Although I lean more towards Winston’s position, my primary objective in this piece is not to argue for why he is correct or why Blanc is wrong, but rather to dig into the underlying assumptions that lead some of us to Winston’s conclusions and others to Blanc’s.

Both authors propose various tactical interventions that they believe will help to build a mass anti-war movement. However, selection of tactics is downstream from strategy. In this case, the primary strategic question should be, “Who is our base?” Who do we seek to organize into this mass anti-war movement? Once we have the answer to that question, determining tactics is much more straightforward. With a war as unpopular as this one, it seems obvious that the potential base for the anti-war movement would be that majority of the American people who oppose the war, but when we look at the imperialist system more comprehensively, the base becomes smaller.

I propose that the potential base for the anti-imperialist movement within the US consists of the following:

1. The portion of the American ¹working class that is exploited by capitalism to a greater extent than it benefits from imperialism,
2. People in the United States, regardless of class status, who, due to ties of family or friendship, suffer net harm from imperialism when all impacts are taken into account, and
3. Individuals who, despite benefiting more from imperialism than they are exploited by capitalism, desire the end of the imperialist system because they believe it to be abhorrent and are willing to sacrifice the benefits they derive from the system in exchange for its end.

There is a potential fourth group: people who benefit more from imperialism than they are exploited by capitalism, but desire the end of the imperialist system in part because they don’t believe that they will have to endure any reduction in their standard of living when the imperialist system is dismantled. It is potentially possible that the productive forces could be developed more rapidly than the malapportionment of resources is redressed, such that the people in this group won’t actually face a reduction in their standard of living. Personally, I believe that doing so should be one of our objectives should we gain enough power to implement preferred policies, because it will be easier to carry out the changes we want to see if this group is not actively opposed to us. However, this group should not be considered part of the base. It might not be possible to develop the productive forces with sufficient speed to protect them from any decrease in their standard of living, and to pretend that we can definitely do so would be to act in bad faith. In order to presume good faith of our comrades, unless presented with evidence to the contrary I will assume that no one is including this group in their calculations of what constitutes our base.

The second and third groups of our base will be important, and are likely overrepresented among the organizers already involved in the anti-war movement, but the key factor determining the size of the base is the first group. This, I believe, is the primary point of dispute between those who agree with Blanc and those who agree with Winston. Before we get to that, though, I’d like to make explicit four points that I have been assuming so far, because I believe both sides of the debate agree with them:

1. The American working class is exploited by the capitalist system, given their position as workers.
2. The American working class benefits from imperialism, given their position as Americans.
3. At least some members of the American working class are exploited by capitalism to a greater extent than they benefit from imperialism.
4. At least some members of the American working class benefit from imperialism to a greater extent than they are exploited by capitalism.

The question is, of course, how big is the “some” in points 3 and 4? I will leave it to future articles (by me or others) to seek to quantify the degree of exploitation by capitalism and benefit from imperialism, but we now at least have the crux of the issue. If one believes that the group in point four is merely a small fraction of the American working class, then our base makes up a majority of the American public, and majoritarian ²tactics are the correct path to build a mass anti-imperialism movement. On the other hand, if one believes that the group in point four is a majority of the American working class, or even just a large minority, then our base does not make up a majority of the American public, and we should pursue minoritarian tactics instead.

What does it mean to pursue either majoritarian or minoritarian tactics? Well, here are some examples. In electoral work, majoritarian tactics would involve seeking to either win enough elections to pass our preferred policies, or to demonstrate the counter-majoritarian nature of the electoral system. Minoritarian tactics would mean seeking to win races in certain areas where the electorate is friendlier to us, running other races that we don’t expect to win, and having those elected officials and candidates use their higher profiles to encourage people to participate in the movement. In labor organizing, majoritarian tactics would involve strengthening our relationships with whatever unions we can and supporting any worker organizing. Minoritarian tactics would be specifically building relationships with unions that represent large portions of our base (and organizing unions in unorganized workplaces where members of our base are overrepresented), whether that is workers who are exploited more by capitalism, workers who have personal ties to the imperial periphery, or workers who are more likely to be willing to suffer reductions in their standard of living as the cost of ending imperialism. In direct action, majoritarian tactics means mobilizing as many people as possible to events such as the No Kings rallies, while minoritarian tactics requires researching specific pain points where a smaller number of people can put effective pressure on the imperial system.

Blanc’s preference for majoritarian tactics is most explicit in section 6, “Sectarianism Has Helped Marginalize Anti-War Activity.” He presents building “the broadest and deepest possible opposition to US military aid and interventions abroad” as the preferred option, and laments that the movement has tied “widely supported demands against war to unjustified and unhelpful romanticization of any and all anti-imperialist forces.” This is a long-running dispute within the left, where anyone who expresses support for the people who are putting their lives on the line to resist imperialism will be lambasted as romanticizing “any and all anti-imperialist forces”. Because such forces are universally condemned in American media, any support for them whatsoever (justified or not) tends to be incompatible with cohering majority support, at least in the short term. Blanc also explicitly criticizes the encampments on college campuses for lacking, “concerted efforts to win over and mobilize majorities on campuses,” but he does not explain why winning over majorities would have been preferable to other strategic objectives that could conflict with an effort to win over majorities. Blanc’s bias towards majoritarian tactics is so strong that he never bothers to argue for why such tactics should be preferred; it is self-evident to him that majoritarian tactics are necessary.

On the other hand, Winston’s preference for minoritarian tactics does not come out in any overt rejection of majoritarian tactics, but rather a belief that there are some things more important than staking out a majoritarian position, and those things are sometimes incompatible with such a position. In response to Blanc’s assertion that Americans are overwhelmed by all the terrible things Trump is doing, and thus don’t have time to build an anti-war movement, Winston asserts, “We have plenty of time to meddle in their [Palestinian and Iranian] affairs, and allow DSA politicians such as Zohran and AOC to manufacture consent for these wars, yet none, it seems, to build a competent, powerful movement to actually be of service.” In this section, Winston counterposes the need to build a movement that can materially impact the situation with public criticism of anti-imperialist forces, and crucially, presenting it from the perspective of our comrades in other countries: why would they have any respect for our critiques of their social systems if we aren’t actually inhibiting the mass slaughter our government is subjecting them to? Thus, building a powerful anti-imperialist movement must precede any critiques of their societies. This line of reasoning does not allow for any exceptions in the event that public criticism of anti-imperialist forces may be necessary to build a majoritarian movement in the US, so if such a necessity exists, then we have to rely on minoritarian tactics. However, the gaze of anti-imperialist forces is not the only reason to refrain from public criticism of them. For Winston, “What distinguishes us, however, is that we also hold AOC and Sanders and Zohran to account for their role in normalizing, from the left, the American narrative regarding Iran.” Public criticism of anti-imperialist forces, even when paired with rhetorical opposition to the war, strengthens the narrative that is employed to justify the war. As a result, any potential gain from a broader base being willing to support us if we concede the flaws of the enemy du jour is more than offset by the harm done by reifying imperialist narratives.

I do not expect us to all agree on whether or not our potential base makes up a majority of the American public. Even if someone effectively quantifies the relative degrees of exploitation and benefit I allude to above, there will be many who dispute the results of their calculation. However, I hope that this piece will help us to all understand the reasons for or against the various tactics that we propose.

by Eric Herde

1. While I am not fond of using the word “American” as a demonym for the United States, the English language does not have a workable analogue to Spanish’s “estadounidense”. “UnitedStatesian” just feels to clunky for formal writing. In the context of this piece, “American” is used as a demonym for the United States, not for the Americas as a whole. ︎
2. The term ‘majoritarian’ is not meant to imply that anyone thinks we can organize a majority of the population into DSA, or get a majority of the population to actively participate in any particular campaign. The majoritarian/minoritarian distinction refers specifically to the size of the base; the people whom we could reasonably expect to passively support or at least not oppose our actions ︎