On May Day, hundreds of protesters descended on Oakland International Airport (OAK). Their demands: to abolish ICE, end US wars (including stopping the shipment of military cargo to Israel), and tax the rich. As a protest of over 150 on foot at Terminal 1 reached a crescendo, another hundred protesters inched past the terminal in a four-lane car caravan, honking horns and displaying messages. News camera crews captured some of the excitement.

OAK is home to a FedEx terminal that ships military cargo to Israel, making the airport the subject of the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo Campaign, of which East Bay DSA is a member. Terminal 1 is also the ticketing location of Delta Airlines, which deported Liam Conejo Ramos. Finally, it is the site of labor struggle involving airport workers organized by SEIU-USWW. 

The OAK action coincided with another, at SFO, where SEIU-USWW members working without a contract led a demonstration that resulted in 25 arrests. (A third airport action took place later in the day in San Diego.) It was organized in less than a month, led by East Bay DSA, along with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) and Indivisible East Bay, with support from leaders of the Arms Embargo Campaign, such as the Palestinian Youth Movement and Arab Resource and Organizing Center. Many other community and labor organizations participated, including contingents from ILWU local 6, Oakland teachers, and Bay Area Labor for Palestine. 

ILWU Local 6 Hosts a Pre-Action Meeting

Nearly 350 people, a third of them DSA members, met up in the morning at the ILWU Local 6 union hall, a few blocks from the airport entrance. We heard from speakers about May Day, the struggle of OAK workers, and about our three demands. A statement of support was also read from Angela Davis, who apologized for not being able to make it. 

Grace Martinez, statewide deputy director with ACCE, a co-leader in planning the event, reflected that the numbers exceeded our turnout goal. “There were people who had been in the movement for a very long time,” she said, “but for many, including many of our members, this was their first May Day – and their first protest. That was very powerful.” 

The Action at Terminal 1

The action at Terminal 1 kicked off when the first busload of people arrived from the ILWU hall. We wanted to let airport workers and passengers know through our banners, chanting, and flyers why this action was happening at the airport. By the time the second busload arrived, over 150 people were participating on foot.

Our signs, flyers, and chants proclaimed our overall immediate demands - tax the rich, stop US wars, abolish ICE - and also educated people about the fact that there’s an ongoing campaign to stop the shipment of military cargo through OAK (via FedEx) to Israel. An August 2025 study from the Palestinian Youth Movement found that 16% of Lockheed Martin military cargo bound for Israel passes through OAK - with over 250 military shipments to Israel from January to August 2025 alone. 

This demonstration came a few weeks after a car caravan organized by the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo campaign, and the addition of an on-foot rally made our action an escalation and a reminder to the airport, which is governed by the Oakland Port Commission (appointed by famed anti-war politician and Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee), that business as usual will continue to be disrupted so long as military cargo flows through OAK. The action felt even more powerful when we saw our comrades in the car caravan shut down the only road into the airport, moving slowly enough that our banner holders were able to walk in front of them.   

One of our coalition partners, Nancy Latham, a member of Indivisible East Bay’s steering committee, recalled waiting for the caravan at Terminal 1. “The moment they turned the corner,” she said, “they looked like a bunch of huge animals ready to stampede. And then as they drove toward those of us standing outside the terminal, it was as if two tributaries were flowing together. We all felt a surge of power to have this other group meet us. It was a peak experience.”

The View from the Car Caravan

To prepare for the caravan, May Day organizers incorporated the lessons learned from the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo caravan two weeks before, including preparing for the possibility of arrest. While we did not plan to disobey authorities, confronting the possibility of arrest focused participants on the risks and heightened personal security necessary in these times of authoritarian surveillance. After all, airports are among the heavily surveilled environments in the country. We secured our phones and conducted our chats in Signal, good practices for all activists. We had caravan training sessions with East Bay DSA members a few days prior to May Day and during the pre-action training at the ILWU hall.

Before getting into our cars, we practiced on foot the formation we would deploy. We had over 60 cars ready and able to join the caravan, each with a driver and at least one “co-pilot” to monitor the Signal chat. The cars were decorated in car chalk proclaiming “Abolish ICE”, “Stop US Wars”, “Tax The Rich”, and “No Killer Cargo Thru OAK”. 

This intensive preparation led to the execution of a wildly successful caravan. The key tactic was having four lead cars, with the co-pilots in constant communication, along with a police liaison in the middle of the formation, and a rear car providing updates from there.

When we reached the point where four through-lanes emerged, we slowed to two miles an hour in four columns and proceeded to the terminal area. As we approached Terminal 1, we were greeted with raucous cheers and sign waving. We responded with car horns and fists in the air out of the car windows. Suddenly, people carrying three banners emerged from the crowd, took the street, and led us through the airport on foot. Horns and cheering continued. It was exhilarating and powerful. The sheriffs decided to intervene by segregating the last third of the caravan into the far left lane reserved for car shares. So now the caravan was slowing traffic in that area as well.

It took the caravan 40 minutes to snake through the airport. We were able to stay in formation across all the lanes and keep our speed at 2 mph until the entire caravan cleared the airport. By then, the sheriffs had blocked off the two closest exits leading back to the terminal.

No worries. With the Terminal 1 rally concluded, we cheered our victory and drove back to the union hall. 

The road to May Day 2026

Complementing the traditional afternoon rally and march by the Oakland Sin Fronteras coalition, the morning airport action marked a structure test and turning point in the coalescence of progressive and working class East Bay organizations around demands and tactics that we can build on over the coming two years. Getting to this point was the work of many months by East Bay DSA’s Fighting the Oligarchy campaign.  

The campaign, voted East Bay DSA’s top priority at our June 2025 convention, began by organizing in solidarity with the Federal Unionists Network. It was an important goal of the campaign to help the FUN’s Bay Area Hub grow their ranks and develop their organizing capacities and reach. By the early Fall, that goal was well advanced, through a variety of means that included regular canvasses of federal workers at workplaces in Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco. 

Another important campaign goal, however, was focused more broadly on the growing mass resistance to the Trump regime:

“Shape the politics of East Bay resistance: Cohere the growing mass movement in the East Bay to fight the oligarchy and incipient fascism by providing support and leadership, democratic organizational practices, and a political analysis that this is a fight in solidarity with the working class against capitalism, not with the Democratic against the Republican party.”

Since Labor Day, the Fight the Oligarchy campaign turned our focus to becoming a valued partner of Bay Area resistance organizations and coalitions.

We met with the Alameda Labor Council and SEIU 1021, proposing a series of “May Day in the Time of Trump” political education and organizing trainings, which both organizations endorsed, along with ACCE, Bay Resistance, the FUN and several more unions. The first event covered the history of May Day, and brought together a panel of partner organizational leaders who spoke to their vision for using this May Day to build power toward May Day 2028. The second featured Eric Blanc speaking to the Lessons of Minneapolis, followed by a table discussion and organizing training.

At the national level, one of our co-chairs was actively engaged in MayDayStrong, and in the NLC May Day committee. Locally, we focused on several key centers of resistance activity in the East Bay: Bay Resistance (a coalition led by numerous labor and community organizations), ACCE and Indivisible East Bay. Through building relationships and showing up to do work, we proved ourselves to be good leaders and organizers in the final months of 2025, at No Kings in October, and a People over Billionaires action at the homes of several SF billionaires, led by ACCE. This resulted in our being included in the planning committees for No Kings 3 and the Bay Area’s MayDayStrong solidarity school. 

With partners convened by Bay Resistance, we planned a February 27 “train the trainer” event geared to turning people out to the solidarity school, and a solidarity school in San Francisco attended by about 1,000 people. East Bay DSA contributed two trainers at the solidarity school, including co-leading a training for union members, which was focused on organizing No Kings participants to take action on May Day. The planning for the OAK action began at these regional convenings, with East Bay membership organizations, primarily DSA, ACCE and Indivisible, taking on the challenge of quickly planning the OAK action.

Internal Organizing

With more than 2,000 members and dozens of active chapter projects spread across four counties, it took work to coordinate and get everyone on the same page about shared priorities in our chapter, even for a big event like May Day. 

Over the last couple of years we’ve worked at improving our ability to turn out to protests en masse - first by establishing rapid response endorsements and turnout infrastructure for Palestine solidarity work after October 7, and more recently by calling and planning our own actions, like our solidarity march and rally with Minneapolis in Oakland on January 23. 

By late February, it was clear that East Bay DSA would be playing a major role in making May Day big in the Bay this year, and a core group sprang into action to get organized internally. We began meeting in late March, setting a goal of 200 East Bay DSA members committing to not work on May Day. Our initial group of ten members from different chapter projects eventually grew to include nearly twenty actively planning East Bay DSA’s roles in the OAK action as well as the Oakland Sin Fronteras rally and march. We coalesced on the demands we wanted to center, brought those back to our coalition partners, made a communications and turnout plan, held a chapter leaders’ meeting to incorporate our May Day asks into their organizing, and held a large community meeting on April 28 to get final preparations in place. All of this meant that  dozens of chapter members from several different committees and campaigns helped organize hundreds of people to take action on May Day. 

What comes next

We aspire to play an even bigger role in making sure that May Day actions disrupt the flow of capital next year. That means both continuing to build coalition relationships and getting even more organized as a chapter to be able to put forward clear demands and plan significant actions. 

Our proposed mechanism for doing so (subject to approval at our annual convention on June 7) is establishing a May Day Working Group that will work all year to identify potential opportunities for mass and escalating actions, especially workplace actions. This group will be structured explicitly to bring together leaders from different chapter projects, maximizing our reach and coordination. The hope is that this will put us on an even stronger footing as we look towards May Day 2028. 

This approach is consistent with the national labor priority established by the DSA NPC encouraging chapters to organize toward actions on May Day 2028. The resolution calls for a “2026-27 strategic plan that may add detail, scope, timelines, staff time allocation, budget guidance, and concrete goals to these priorities [including preparing for May Day 2028].”

Meanwhile, several of us will be in St. Louis at the end of May with our local partners, and many DSA members from around the country, to learn and plan together, anticipating major provocations and mass resistance to come.

We’ll go to St. Louis with a new sense of what’s possible. As a structure test, the OAK action exceeded our expectations. ACCE’s Martinez said, “The whole point was to have an assessment of where we were as a movement, a coalition and organizations. While the May Day action came together in just three weeks, it was the culmination of a series of escalating actions that we pulled off together going back to last Fall.” Now, she added, “May Day is becoming more real for a lot of people.”

As one of our members, Eileen T, explained after returning from an exhilarating May Day visit to Chicago, “May Day is a distress signal. It can come at any time.” When it does, we aim to be prepared to fight back and protect our working class communities.

California DSA will be hosting a zoom meeting on May 28 at 6:30 to provide an overview of the two progressive tax measures that will be placed before voters on the November state ballot. You will hear about recent tax the rich efforts in California, and speakers from the campaigns will provide updates. You will also have an opportunity to ask questions and get answers. Register here.

From the time of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto to the present day, taxing the rich has been a central project of the socialist movement. Why?

As long as the capitalist class extracts surplus value from the labor process it will continue to grow richer at the expense of the working class. (See Piketty, R > G). Economic inequality has surpassed Gilded Age proportions. Progressive taxation is an essential means of clawing back some of the wealth created by the working class so that we may fund vital public services and provide the basis for a more egalitarian and democratic society. Campaigning for progressive taxes provides a direct opportunity to raise class consciousness, as the discussion naturally revolves around how inequality benefits the rich, hurts everyone else, and can be at least partly fixed with this solution. 

As such, a tax the rich campaign opens the door to the next level of discussion: how capitalism works, and how democratic socialism can fix its problems. 

A common thread

The other benefit of a tax the rich campaign is that it represents a common thread through just about every other issue and concern to DSA members. If you are working on issues like public transit, public education, universal childcare, public health and safety or social housing, none of these issues can be properly addressed without adequate funding from the state. Taxing the rich is pivotal to success in any of these areas.

If you are interested in electing democratic socialists, once in office they need more funding than currently possessed by the public sector. We shouldn’t be electing socialists to administer austerity, but that’s what usually happens, given the bad choices they face without progressive taxation to fund their work. The ‘electing’ part of local electoral work is also supported by a tax the rich campaign, because taxing the rich remains consistently popular, and when presented in cooperation with local DSA-endorsed candidates who are on board, it broadens their appeal as well.

If you want to stop the imperialist war machine of the US government in its corrupt alliance with private sector capital—including the current AI investment bubble that supports data centers, environmental destruction, and surveillance technology alongside new forms of mass death in other countries—we must wrest as much of that capital as we can out of the hands of the ruling  class so that it doesn’t control these enormous sums to invest. Taxing the rich is a vehicle to do that.

If you wish the labor movement to become more militant, raising class consciousness can be transferable from the ballot box to the workplace. The working class has two methods to retrieve the capital it produces through the labor process: militant, democratic organizing unions that extract a greater share of the pie through collective bargaining, and political organizing to tax the rich. With socialist education as the nexus, each method can reinforce the other.

After November, more taxing the rich

We have created a Tax the Rich Working Group in East Bay DSA to work on the two state ballot measures that will appear in November before the voters. Similar groups have been chartered in other chapters. But our progressive tax work won’t be over with the election. Even if both measures pass, capital will continue to be bloated and the multiracial working class will continue to have needs that can only be met through other forms of progressive taxation, like increased corporate taxes and splitting commercial property off from residential property. After November we intend to turn to political education and legislative efforts along these lines. These will be key components of our ongoing May Day education and coalition-building project, reinforcing the idea of what May Day 2028 signifies in terms of a political economy for workers over billionaires. 

If your chapter has not yet started working on the campaign here’s a chance to get going. Check out the campaign page on the California DSA website. Joining this work will engage the diverse activities of California DSA chapters within a unifying theme and effort. It will help us to stand alongside and uplift our allies in the labor movement and community in common struggle. And it provides the opportunity for pushing beyond reform toward revolution. 

What:‍ ‍Online forum on taxing the rich in California

When: Thursday, May 28, 6:30 – 8 pm

Who:

• Matthew Hardy, Communications Director, California Federation of Teachers

• Doug Jones, Organizer, United Health Workers-SEIU

• Fred Glass, Co-Chair, East Bay DSA Tax the Rich Working Group

Register here.

Here’s how DSA members and other progressives can organize to compete in upcoming intra-party contests.

Oligarchs and the donor class still have a firm grip on the Democratic Party apparatus and politics. But the cracks are increasingly obvious:

Zohran Mamdani; Analilia Mejia; the crumbling of AIPAC/DMFI sway; burial of the DNC’s 2024 autopsy report for fear of what it might reveal; polling numbers that show a party less popular than even Donald Trump; widening gaps between the progressive and corporate wings. 

And now, still small but growing numbers of DSA cadre and allied candidates are competing and winning local, state and federal elections around the country, defeating some guardians of the status quo.

When will the ice break in California?

The day may be coming soon. We’ll know a lot more after June 2 primaries and November 2, when progressives who make “top two” test the thesis that the road to victory is the opposite of chasing Republicans to the right in pursuit of mythical centrist “swing” voters. 

Next, we’ll have an opportunity to contest for control of the state Democratic Party.

Compared to many other states, the composition of the California party’s Central Committee, which elects its officers and endorses candidates, approves the party platform and passes resolutions, enables significant small D democracy, if we organize. 

About a third of the approximately 3,500 members are elected in caucus-like processes—4 in each of the 80 state Assembly districts. Voting has gone more and more by mail and online since the pandemic, with plenty of opportunity for mischief but also real opportunities for progressives —again, if we organize. 

Path to success

The path to success in the 2026-27 ADEMs (Assembly District Election Meetings) is to create solid, diverse slates of candidates in each district, with strict solidarity—each member working hard to get out the vote for all—facilitated by an effective system to register voters in a special process. (It’s not enough to simply be a registered Democrat, though that is required.)

Another third of delegates to the state Central Committee will be selected by county central committees, which in most of the state will be elected on the 2028 primary ballots (exact methods vary some from county to county, confusingly). In most locations, a similar process of creating progressive slates and campaigning for them will be in order.

Recruiting candidates to construct ADEM slates needs to begin now. They must file by late this year, with voter registration following, and balloting in early 2027 (exact dates to be announced). Many DSA members have run in recent rounds, which come every two years, though participation has been passive to negligible in many chapters. Chapter electoral committees may want to change that, determining the best strategy—and it can vary a lot depending on the demographics, politics (e.g. union strength, local Democratic leadership) of the district.

Help for Organizing

Gearing up to help organize locally is a PAC in formation, the People’s Democracy Network (PDN), operating fully outside the Democratic Party but dedicated primarily to building power for the left inside the party. We hope to accelerate the ability to work with local progressives to build ADEM slates this year, but the main organizing needs to be done by people with local relationships and skills in each district. Careful navigation is often needed to forge coalitions where necessary and to counter fake “progressive” rivals. Last time, we saw an unusual infusion of money for competitors in some districts by PACs apparently fronting for Israel lobby groups.

PDN will soon be recruiting members to support its particular narrow mission – building progressive power in the California Democratic Party, from the outside. Exact criteria are in the process of being determined, but to be clear, it’s not exclusive: members of DSA or other groups are welcome. To read PDN’s mission statement and 2024 policy platform (needs updating, including the name), go here.

For a more detailed description of the ADEM process and advice on constructing local slates, please see here.

And to let us know of your interest in helping organize in your district, please submit this form.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Senate candidate Aber Kawas — the first of a series with members of New York City DSA’s 2026 slate.

The post Aber Kawas sees a Path to Principles in Public Office appeared first on Democratic Left.

By Ian Mark

Like many of my comrades, I have a vision of a DSA with millions of working class members that can meaningfully influence politics on the scale of the next presidential election, a potential general strike and more. Only through growing DSA to this scale can we hope to build an organization capable of dismantling capitalism and winning socialism. Our goal is nothing short of building DSA into a genuine mass political party and a historic political force that can transform this country and the world…all in our lifetime.

At present, our chapter has nearly 1,400 members. That’s almost double the number of members we had in 2024. Recent DSA wins like Zohran Mamdani’s election underline that we are living in a time of historic opportunity for socialist politics, but our work is just beginning.

I’m running for Membership Engagement Chair to lead recruitment building the chapter to 2,000 members by the end of 2027 and position us for 3,000 by the end of 2028. I’m also running to support key efforts in driving engagement in our chapter’s projects and democracy, including developing practical organizing skills like how to hold effective one on one conversations and analyze power structures.

I’ve been in DSA for nearly 10 years. I joined Huron Valley DSA in 2017 because I felt compelled to do something other than doomscroll through the mind-numbing cruelty of the first Trump administration. I was angry and scared and I wanted to fight for a better future.

In 2020, I stepped up as the Member Engagement chair for Huron Valley DSA, serving on the steering committee and leading the committee through the surreal first year of the pandemic. In that time, I’ve talked to hundreds of new members and learned a lot about what truly drives engagement.

In this article, I’m outlining my plan for my three priorities of recruitment, engagement and development for the Membership Engagement Committee (MEC). These are the same priorities included in the MEC resolution that the general chapter membership unanimously and democratically voted to approve at our annual convention this April.

Building Metro Detroit DSA to 2,000 Members in Good Standing by 2027, and 3,000 or More by 2028

As exciting as our recent growth is, we can’t take this momentum for granted. Just three years ago, our membership had rapidly shrunk to less than 700 members. Furthermore, most people across Metro Detroit still have never heard of DSA or don’t understand what socialism is. Even many self-described socialists don’t understand why it’s important to join a socialist organization.

If we’re serious about building real power in Metro Detroit, we must ensure sympathetic people across the region are aware that a large chapter exists in their community and invite them to join the movement at scale.

Like most chapters across the country, our recruitment to nearly 1.4k members has been mostly passive, meaning there’s a lot of untapped potential for new members across southeast Michigan. If our chapter had the same proportion of DSA members to population as Twin Cities DSA, we would have over 2.3k members.

If we’re already growing at this rate, imagine how fast we can grow if we apply a concerted effort in recruiting.

I recently launched a new project with several comrades called “database building” (this is often called list building, but I prefer to call it database building to avoid confusion with list work, a totally different organizing tactic).

The database building approach is based on the model provided by New York City DSA, which is by far one of the fastest growing chapters in the country (even before Zohran launched his campaign).

In short, here’s how the plan for database building works:

1. We start by collecting names and contact information for individuals across Metro Detroit sympathetic to DSA and our politics at scale. This is a high-volume play.
2. There are many ways to build a large database of sympathetic non-members, but NYC-DSA cited letter-writing tools and mass calls like the call their chapter hosted with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as highly-efficient tactics for collecting thousands of names.
3. With a growing list of thousands of sympathetic “prospective” members in Metro Detroit, we phone or text-bank this list periodically asking them to join DSA, strategically timing outreach to occur following galvanizing political moments like the ICE surge in Minneapolis for maximum effect.

With this strategy, I am confident we can reach 2,000 members by our annual convention as outlined in our consent resolution for MEC. However, I’d like to go even further so that we can exceed 3,000 in 2028.

To Increase Engagement, We Must Build a More Consistent New Member Onboarding Experience

If we are going to deliver real wins for the working class in Metro Detroit, we don’t just need more members in the chapter. We need more members who are truly engaged, and that starts with new members.

If we use general meeting and convention attendance as a crude yardstick for engagement, only 150–200 members are actively engaged in any given month out of the nearly 1,400 members in good standing.

Our chapter currently excels at engaging new members in two crucial ways: our robust five-part new member political education program and a range of popular socials including game nights, Dances Against Fascism, regional meetups, cookouts, parties at local bars and bowling alleys, and more.

Continuing these programs is vital, and I commend my comrades in MEC for their exceptional efforts here in fostering a true sense of community in the chapter and grounding new members in sound socialist thought.

Where there’s the most room for improvement is ensuring all new members receive an accessible introduction on how the organization is structured, how our democracy works, what campaigns, projects and initiatives we have running and how they can contribute.

The biggest issue I see for engagement is the same issue I saw in Huron Valley DSA: with so many working groups, committees, projects and scattered communication channels, it can be very difficult for new members to understand what’s happening in the chapter and where they fit in. It’s hard to overstate how overwhelming and confusing the new member experience can be without a veteran member to guide you, but in MEC we simply don’t have time to do that for every comrade.

We do an admirable job calling new members weekly in MEC, but due to time constraints we only ever connect with a fraction of incoming members. Besides, in a 10–15 minute call, it’s not possible to share everything a new member needs to know. Lastly, even if we could, it wouldn’t be scalable for the amount of growth we need to build real power.

At the same time, we have to carefully assess what a brand new member truly needs to know, as it’s easy to overwhelm folks by throwing too much information or too many options at them all at once.

I believe MEC must streamline and standardize the new member experience by ensuring new members are consistently and quickly familiarized with the following:

1. The general structure of our chapter, including basic information on:

- General meetings and event schedule on our website

- What committee/working groups exist and what they’re working on

- How to access primary chapter communications (Slack, Signal)

- How our democratic process works, like Robert’s Rules 101 and how to bring resolutions to convention

2. Basic political education

- Basic orientation of what DSA is and does, what socialism is, and why we are socialists

- Schedule for upcoming new member political education events, OR other political education events if above is not in near future

3. Clear tasks to making a meaningful impact in the near future

- Accessible, tangible and specific opportunities to make an impact within the organization and get more involved

One way to achieve this would be consolidating our new member events with a session combining all of the above information in a DSA 101-style event hosted monthly. This would also provide a general entry point for prospective members.

New members would receive a primer on everything they need to understand the basics of our organization and how we operate. They’d get a chance to connect with other members and walk away with information on upcoming political education sessions as well as details on accessible, clear ways to make a meaningful impact, like the No Appetite for Apartheid boycott campaign or canvassing for the Chris Gilmer-Hill campaign.

This would supplement, not replace, our existing new member political education program. It would serve as the go-to first event to direct all new members within Metro Detroit DSA.

Other options include making this information more broadly available in a concise format on our website and in new member email and text outreach. Regardless, the point stands that we must ensure everyone receives the key details on how to navigate DSA in an accessible manner.

Developing Practical Organizing and Leadership Skills to Build Chapter Capacity

Since the majority of new members enter the organization with minimal or zero prior organizing experience, it is vital that we help everyday people grow into effective socialist organizers, thinkers and leaders. This development takes time and doesn’t happen by accident, so we must start this work now with an actionable, structured plan, building on the strong political education program and campaign structure that already exists within the chapter.

I recently launched a list work pilot program for developing leaders with the Chris Gilmer-Hill campaign. In less than two months, this initiative has already identified three members ready to step up as new canvass captains, who are the members that train new canvassers at the event and launch the canvass.

This is a big leap forward from the structure we built to elect Denzel McCampbell to Detroit City Council just last year. Each of these canvass captains gain valuable experience that they can later transfer to other leadership roles in the chapter.

Beyond leadership, MEC must also expand the general organizing skills trainings offered by our chapter. I believe that holding effective organizing conversations should be the number one skill every organizer learns, which is why I co-faciliated a training on the topic this spring. I’d like to run this training again every quarter to ensure every member is familiar and comfortable applying techniques like agitation and making a hard ask. Every single member should feel confident in their ability to galvanize their friends, family members, neighbors and comrades to action with this approach.

Furthermore, I believe we should run trainings on practical skills like facilitating effective meetings and creating agendas, how to use Robert’s Rules, analyzing power structures and more to complement the annual Organizing 101 series from the political education committee. These are skills that you often don’t learn before joining DSA, but are critical to being an effective organizer.

Together, We Can Build Thousands of Skilled Socialist Organizers in Metro Detroit

I have big dreams for MEC and our chapter, but I can’t do any of this work alone. Regardless of the results of the steering committee election, I will be working hard to implement the above agenda, and I’ll need the help of my comrades.

If you’re excited about the possibility of growing our chapter into the thousands and helping ordinary people grow into effective, powerful organizers, please join us. If you have your own ideas for how MEC should operate or what we should prioritize, let me know. Though I’m a proud member of the Groundwork caucus, I’d love for MEC to be a truly multi-tendency committee that serves as a model for how we can support diverse political perspectives and organizing tactics across the chapter.

Solidarity!

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To 3,000 Members and Beyond: How MEC Can Build a Stronger, More Effective Metro Detroit DSA was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Shasta County DSA faces the challenge of organizing in a rural, heavily Republican corner of far northern California — but years of persistent effort have paid off.

The post North California Home to New DSA Chapter appeared first on Democratic Left.

The candidate for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District is one of at least 14 DSA candidates on the ballot Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Oregon, and Kentucky.

The post Chris Rabb Makes the Establishment Nervous appeared first on Democratic Left.

A friendly boss and a healthy wage are increasingly rare, but do workers lucky enough to have both need a union?

The post I have a good boss. Do I still need a union? appeared first on EWOC.

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By: Chris Brady, James N, Dan Albright, Mitch Gayns

MASSACHUSETTS – Working people and unionists coalesced in May Day events throughout Massachusetts on May 1, 2026, which is likely to be seen as a moment of a historic cultural revival for the holiday in the United States.

Also known as International Workers Day, May Day honors the martyrs of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in the fight for the 8-hour workday. May Day is a seminal holiday across most of the world, where red banners are unfurled down major thoroughfares, but the holiday has largely been confined to the margins on its home turf of the United States. Instead, influenced by anti-labor sentiments, the United States moved to officialize and honor the much more patriotic Labor Day on an entirely different part of the calendar.

But as Working Mass uncovered in several events and actions in Massachusetts throughout the day, May Day is turning mainstream once again. The mainstream ‘No Kings’ pages share ads about May Day actions in their own networks that have emerged since Trump’s election, the unions use the holiday for actions, and pro-worker organizations hold their socials with genuine joy everywhere from Boston to Worcester to Holyoke. While May Day revives across the country in massive actions of tens of thousands from New York to Portland to Minneapolis, in Massachusetts, May Day shows a labor movement captured in time.

Boston Logan Workers Take Off

EAST BOSTON – The day’s packed itinerary kicked off with the Coalition of Boston Logan Airport Workers (CLAW) rallying at East Boston Memorial Park. CLAW, a consolidated coalitioon of ten unions that split bargaining representation of Boston Logan’s pilots, flight attendants, food service workers, and baggage handlers, had rallied between four and five hundred workers to march.

One of the key issues the unions marched against alongside their allies was a management policy that limited pickets on airport property to an arbitrary ten people, effectively demobilizing workers. Luke Williams, President of the Boston Association of Flight Attendants, told Working Mass:

We’ve been told if United Airlines is having a picket today, then American can’t have a picket, or you can have five and five people each and split it. We’ve been limited to ten people for any action at the airport – point blank.

Williams represents 900 flight attendants at Logan.

Addressing the limitation, Rep. Ayanna Pressley highlighted the importance of organizing against authoritarianism:

We need to be able to organize to apply pressure…no one should be intimidated from exercising their constitutional right to free speech.

Workers also rallied for better wages and healthcare, many wearing lobster iconography. Signs read “CLAWing back our rights.”

Four to five hundred unionists marched from Memorial Park to Logan Airport. At the edge of airport property, an airport management official flanked by state police officers forced the march to stop, which action planners anticipated. In a dramatic exchange with hundreds of workers looking on, management spoke to SEIU 32BJ Executive Vice President Kevin Brown.

According to Brown in an announcement to the crowd, management had “committed that they will review the policy so that airport workers can protest with more than ten people at a time.” The primary demand of CLAW, in its action, had been won.

Worcester Celebrates its Annual May Day, Alongside Rhode Islanders

WORCESTER — Workers across trades, academia, and professions gathered in University Park around 6 p.m. on Friday, May 1st, for the Worcester DSA’s annual May Day rally. Speakers from the Worcester and Rhode Island DSA spoke to working people across the crowd with a clear message: generations of workers across the world have fought, and continue to fight, for a better world.

Worcester DSA Steering Committee member Jake S read a speech from Peter Fay, a longtime labor organizer and Rhode Island DSA member. Fay’s speech traced the history of the labor movement in the city and its bond with immigrants, often victims of capitalism.

“We didn’t come here looking for freedom or entrepreneurship,” he said.  “We came because capital pushed our ancestors off of their land.”

Political violence against communists, socialists, and labor organizers in the early 20th century spread across the country. The textile mills and factories across New England were home to workers fighting for a better world, like labor leader “Seditious Annie” Anne Burlak Timpson, and the capital looking to stop them. 

Fay said:

She unflinchingly organized Black and white workers together, despite all of capital’s best attempts to set them against each other, to buy off and bribe some at the expense of others.

One common theme throughout the rally was the failure of both political parties in America, and their unified support of international violence. James L said:

A U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine, war in Iran, war in Lebanon, rampant looting of public funds by conspiring billionaires, attacks on the rights of trans people, abduction, extraordinary rendition, and murder of immigrants, political dissidents, now heads of state in Venezuela and Iran, by our completely unaccountable government. Most of the so-called opposition party happy to collaborate, sign off and roll over.

James noted Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) called for a general strike last year, but offered no vision, organizational structure, or demands for a general strike.

While speakers noted the failures of the two dominant political parties, the historic and ongoing repression of workers rights, and capital’s division of the working class, all offered a message of hope and solidarity that starts with labor organization. Cayla Dodd, a bus driver, union activist, and member of IBT Local 170, said:

The problem isn’t that workers are asking for too much, the problem is that capitalism requires workers to live on too little. It requires instability. It requires fear. It requires workers to be one emergency away from disaster, because a worker who is scared of losing everything is easier to control. That’s why they hate workers talking to each other, because the moments that workers stop seeing ourselves as isolated individuals and start seeing ourselves as a class, everything changes.

Boston Worker Organizations Touch Grass

NORTH END – Back in Boston, as the airport action concluded, socialists gathered in a harbor park in the North End at midday to socialize and hear speakers from the labor movement.

Evan McKay, Boston DSA-endorsed candidate for state representative in the 25th Middlesex District, spoke on how union work fighting harassment as President of Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU), currently on strike, led them to socialism:

We need to have the union in these circumstances. That was one of the things that brought me into socialism, the sense that we need to have fighting unions in order to take on these struggles.

Energy at Field Day was high. Organizers had set up a volleyball net in the corner of the field. Although the net was left largely unused, organizers assured Working Mass that DSA is actually a very athletic group. Socialist soccer jerseys were on display, and given the high level of active recruitment for the Boston chapter’s running league, they may have a point.

Tables prominently featured the chapter’s campaigns for rent control in Massachusetts, an upcoming socialist job fair, as well as pamphlets for different working groups and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

Dr. Anisah Hashmi, a Resident Physician at Boston Medical Center and a delegate for the Committee for Interns and Residents (CIR-SEIU) compared the conditions of resident physicians to academic workers.

Like grad workers, hospital corporations label us students and trainees. It’s a slap in the face to the 80-hour work weeks that we put in to deliver high quality patient care. It’s unsustainable to expect us to fully show up for our patients as we struggle to afford to live in the city of Boston.

DSA then marched through Downtown Crossing to join the rest of the labor movement for the premier rally at the Boston Common.

On May Day, Western Mass Shows Itself as Focal Point for a More Militant Labor Movement

This was originally published as video footage for Working Mass digital on Instagram. Reporting was supplemented for print.

HOLYOKE – Even further west from Worcester, in the River Valley, hundreds of unionists and workers marched through downtown Holyoke to rally for working peoples’ rights and pay and against war, as well as signal a new moment in the history of the Western Mass labor movement.

The rally was organized by the Western Mass Labor Federation and led by the Holyoke Teachers Association. Holyoke teachers are approaching a full year without a contract, and centered the day’s militancy around pressuring Mayor Garcia and statewide leaders.

Labor Federation President Jeff Jones spoke to Working Mass about the systemic defunding of education.

They never seem to have a problem allocating money for war, but the moment we talk about funding schools like these Holyoke teachers are here today, all of a sudden it’s a problem, and all of a sudden we can’t accommodate it.

Western Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley is a historic progressive stronghold with a strong labor history, dominated by industries in higher education and agriculture. Holyoke has the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans per capita outside of Puerto Rico.

The labor collective has been intentional about cultivating militancy and rank-and-file democracy. According to Ethel Everett, a social worker and union leader with SEIU, innovation in the labor movement is urgently needed.

We have these shared values about what’s happening in this country, what’s happening in this world. We have to think differently and not be so focused on this is the way labor has always been.

The connection to May Day was also intentional, organizers argue. “May Day is Workers’ Day, a communist holiday,” said Barbara Madeloni, former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and Education Coordinator at Labor Notes. She continued:

The history of May Day is the history of working people accessing the fullness of their collective power to say, damn it, these are our demands and we’re going to do whatever we need to do to win those demands.

Western Mass unionists are pushing their politics upward.

The Western Mass Area Labor Federation has moved beyond traditional bread-and-butter unionism: launching political education programs, building deeper ties with rank-and-file workers, supporting new organizing in collaboration with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee and River Valley DSA, and taking public positions on international issues that many U.S. labor bodies have avoided.

In November 2023, the federation voted unanimously to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, breaking a gag order imposed by the national AFL-CIO on the issue. In 2024, it went further, backing a call for an arms embargo. And this year, the federation condemned the war with Iran and what it described as the kidnapping of Venezuela’s head of state.

Holyoke teachers are still fighting for a contract. But on May Day and after, they will be supported by the collective Western Mass. labor movement. The rest of the country would benefit from taking notes on how labor itself can support the networks of the rank-and-file across the region.

Boston Teachers Fight Cuts and Pour Hundreds Into the Common

BOSTON COMMON – In a finale of the day before workers wrapped up to hit bars and socials, workers marched on the Common. The Boston Teachers Union (BTU) was a key player in the rally at Boston’s traditional heart, aimed directly at Mayor Michelle Wu: stop the layoffs. 

BTU speakers noted that the Mayor’s proposed budget spared all departments from staffing cuts – with the exception of 400 teachers and paraprofessionals at Boston Public Schools.

While the Mayor and major news outlets cite enrollment declines of 3-4%, these cuts represent more than 5% of total staff, with the paraprofessionals (who are overwhelmingly Black and Latino) especially hard hit. These cuts are contradictory to BPS’s stated desire to move toward a ‘co-teaching’ model, the gold standard in K-12 education finally beginning implementation due to the unrelenting advocacy of students, parents, and educators.

Boston Public Schools (BPS), and the national education landscape at large, has been constrained by Medicaid cuts increasing the city’s healthcare cost burden and attack on immigrants undercutting student enrollment.

The Mayor chose to cut critical education staff at a time when they are needed more than ever. Her decision is all the more alarming in contrast to her laissez-faire attitude toward police overtime, which consistently lands 70-100% over budget, significantly higher than her predecessor Mayor Walsh.

Shortly afterward, at the Boston Common, BTU joined hundreds of workers who turned out for the keynote May Day event. A tapestry of eclectic unions, pro-worker organizations, and liberal groups joined together with shared interest in fighting for the labor movement.

“Today is International Workers Day,” said Greater Boston Labor Council President Darlene Lombos. Lombos explicitly acknowledging the legacy of the Haymarket Massacre as “the courage and the sacrifice of those majority immigrant workers sent a beacon seen around the world.”

Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL)-endorsed U.S. Senate candidate Joe Tache spoke about the suppression of May Day actions in the United States:

For the most part, May Day in our country has been pushed to the margins, because the billionaires and the politicians that represent them, don’t want us to know our history. But here in Boston we’re shaking things up…we’re putting May Day back on the table.

DSA wrapped up the rally marathon at Democracy Brewing, a worker-owned cooperative near the center of the city and host to many worker-organized meetings. Discussions turned to moving workers from mobilizing to organizing. The central challenge remains taking energy from the rally turnout and funneling it into sustained political action. But after reclaiming May Day, workers are one step closer to doing just that.

Chris Brady is a member of Boston DSA and an editor of Working Mass.

James N is a member of Worcester DSA and contributing writer to Working Mass.

Dan Albright is the chair and an editor of Working Mass.

Mitch Gayns is a digital creator and campaign organizer based north of Boston.

The post May Day is Turning Mainstream Again appeared first on Working Mass.

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Kansas City DSA has grown faster than similarly-sized DSA chapters during the post-election membership surge. A member of KC chapter leadership explains the strategy behind the surge.

The post Reflections on the “Missouri Miracle” appeared first on Democratic Left.