Monthly Newsletter of the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America

Brett A., Secretary. We talk about “solidarity” a lot as socialists, whether standing in it, or singing our favorite songs about it. It’s a simple concept that can seem somewhat mystified in our current political climate. We are conditioned to think “Everyone for themselves”, looking out for our own self-interest only, selling our skills on the market as a single economic unit, casting a single vote within limits already marked out by elites. Solidarity is the antidote to the chill of this lonesome individualism. And it does not entail a hive-mind-like unity as if we were a colony of ants or bees. Solidarity is not unity, but it is cohesion of diversity across differences. We may disagree on specific tactics, but we know to come together and support one another, basking in the warmth of shared struggle. 

What’s crucial is that solidarity is not merely a feeling, it is made real in action. There is nothing more empowering and more indicative of our shared humanity than fighting for your neighbor, on the picket line, at city hall, on the streets or whatever terrain we call home. As socialists, these bonds need to be reconstructed, and I encourage you to spread solidarity wherever you go. Our work will require us to organize with those whose politics are close to ours to extreme opposites, yet we know that all humans are siblings and that is the power we must harness to achieve our goals.    

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Interested in contributing? Send submissions to bit.ly/SubmitRedStar, or get involved with our Communications Committee. Reach out to steering@rocdsa.org and join DSA today!

The post Rochester Red Star | August 2026 | (Issue 28) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Bush is fighting to reclaim a seat in the U.S. House that was lost to a historic barrage of cash in 2024. Election day in Missouri is Aug. 4.

The post Cori Bush Hopes to Extend the Black Radical Tradition appeared first on Democratic Left.

From Thomas Paine to Social Security, Americans have fought for state provision for those in need.

The post Welfare Transfers are a Proud U.S. Tradition appeared first on Democratic Left.

By Asanti M

We will all be sick, but we will not all receive care. Our mortality guarantees the former, but it is the system, chosen for us, that forces us to cope with the latter. For the unempathetic or short-sighted among us, the latter is a sad fact, but one not worthy of any recourse. They see themselves as happily positioned to receive their care and don’t dare dream that they will ever count themselves among the sick. To them, there exists a stark separation between those who will and who won’t receive healthcare: the deserving and the listless, the good and the wicked, so on and so forth. Whatever rationale is necessary to obfuscate the human condition of ailment is employed to justify a perverse system.   

The collective effort to care for the sick stands as a testament to the inherent communal nature of human life in which two important points ought to be discerned. First, there’s recognition of the necessity of communal bonds. To organize and use resources on the impaired as opposed to the healthy suggests either a strong utility to gain from the health of others, or an emotional bend towards the preservation of another that surpasses the expense necessary to care for them. Of course, both can be true at once. Second, ailment is a universality embedded in the human condition in which we all can empathetically enter, to some degree. Therefore, some semblance of systematic healthcare that promotes communal health and safeguards the fragility of life naturally emerges as a joint effort to alleviate one’s own suffering. Healthcare, being an extension of communal relations and common sentiments, is then naturally positioned as a public good.  

The contortion of healthcare into a product sold solely to maximize monetary ends, fundamentally alters how we discuss and analyze the preservation of life. This peculiar transmutation yields the very sinister consequence in which callous indifference is amplified and allowed to tear apart the very basic ties of empathy. This virulent apathy numbs the public to the condemnation of our neighbors who are left to the selfish and subversive schemes of profiteers, whose existence is made entirely on maximizing public extraction. The conversation shifts from life and death, suffering and repose, to the economic jargon that surrounds the client-supplier model and wholly conceals the humanitarian gravity of such a callous approach.  These profiteers move to restrict the communal aspect of healthcare fully ceding any semblance of its humanitarian nature until the sick and suffering become unwitting consumers. All talk of preservation of life loses meaning when the preservation of dividends supersedes its importance and constricts its application. 

The apathy elicited by the transformation of healthcare exists not solely as a natural byproduct of the commodification, but as a sought-after condition that must be met in order to maximize the profitability of suffering. Under the benign contentment of apathy, an all too familiar structure takes root.  Executives are selected to manage funds and generate profits; administrators are hired to push efficiencies towards cost reduction; and managers enter as mediators between bureaucratic will and clinical expertise. With such a normative system in place it’s difficult to see the intrinsic contradictions that produce its disparities until we look among its victims. Far too many of us are forced to weigh the options of an agonizing abstinence, or seek care that thrust us into destitution. The hailed “market forces” drive the public to the upper limit of what they can afford at which point the invisible hand of the market becomes indistinguishable from the sordid hand of death. Both equally unfeeling and equally cold. The atmosphere of apathy transitions to a confused helplessness as the general public questions “how did we get here” and any answer provided sums up to “this is how things have to be”.   

With the inquisition underway, the public forcefully ascribes their poor conditions to a variety of pernicious players, accusing them of all manner of “rule breaking” leading to the degradation of the system. This line of thought mistakenly grants too much consequence and culpability to the disposition of individual players and fails to see the ghost in the machine, the invisible hand. To perform well in an environment bent on making profit is to shift efforts towards that end as demanded by competition or collusion, despite how scrupulous an individual might be. What results is a race yielding higher and higher costs of care, even if it means neglecting the preservation of life. This is not to say that any one profiteer acts as an exceptionally malevolent operator but acknowledges that their motives are entirely irrelevant when positioned within a system designed to commodify life and wellness. Competition rewarded based on the generation of revenue bends the health care industry towards extraction. Hospitals, insurance agencies, pharmaceuticals, medical device companies, medical coders, etc. all claw to extract as much wealth from the public as possible. This economic position is by no means unique, but when adopted by health care it’s difficult to distinguish lifesaving medical treatment from extortion. The makeup of such a system leaves culpability lost in its machinery. Employers move to stay alive in response to market forces and employees follow suit so as to not become victims themselves. Cornered clinicians are reduced to cogs, and whether ambivalent or begrudging, complicity becomes the defining mode of all components. Each piece turns independently towards their personal wellbeing, and in doing so inadvertently line the gears perfectly to perpetuate our Machiavellian healthcare machine. 

The life of our Frankenstein system requires close collusion between those who benefit from its monstrous design, and the absolute atomization of all who blindly grasp its contours with their hopes and fears in hand. Collective action is reserved for the corporate but fiercely condemned amongst the “consumers” and the “cogs”. Collusion at every junction of our system forces both prices and public confusion to outpace legislation as monopolies systematically tip the scale in their favor. It’s imperative that “consumers” remain impotent and assert no will that runs contrary towards the higher purpose of profit if healthcare is to exist solely as a commodity. The ideal consumer becomes both the perpetrator and the victim. Under the cloak of apathy, the national exaltation of the individual over the community begets an ecosystem ideal to undermine any step towards humanitarian solidarity. However, in true dialectical fashion, the conditions forced on the majority become a unifying factor, fomenting the prerequisites for change and tearing at the seams of apathy. The countless barriers to access once again make the inescapable nature of ailment front and center in the national consciousness. Through the lens of solidarity any system that forces such a cruel reality on far too many of us becomes criminal; the callous discussions surrounding human life become untenable; and the humanitarian position becomes emboldened. The unified potential of the uncared-for drives discussions both foreboding and inspiring as an opportunity to steer history emerges.   

Further Reading

• An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal 
• Priced Out by Uwe E. Reinhardt 
• The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good by Michael J. Sandel 
• Evicted by Matthew Desmon

The post To Care for the Sick: Thoughts of an ICU RN first appeared on Red Fault.

by Megan N

Indian Myths and Legends: The Pleiades – The Creation – The Coming of the Chinigchinich – The Island of the Dead By Reuben Kadish

The first piece I saw on the recent Austin DSA “field trip” to the Blanton Museum of Art was Indian Myths and Legends: The Pleiades – The Creation – The Coming of the Chinigchinich – The Island of the Dead (1937-41) by Reuben Kadish¹. It wasn’t really fair to the rest of the works in the exhibit, to start off so strong.

The blurb in the museum said he was born to immigrant parents from Kovno, or presently Lithuania. His Wikipedia page² adds the context that this land was under the Russian Empire at the time of his birth, and that his father had been a part of the General Jewish Labor Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party, before emigrating. Wikipedia does not mention his mother, Ida Saks, whose name I found from a biography website that seems to have been written by a descendent³.

As an artist for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Kadish made plans and sketched “studies” for as many as twenty murals, but only two were accepted and completed: Physical Growth of Man / History of Medicine (1936)⁴ and Dissertation on Alchemy (1937)⁵. Both were heavily inspired by his time in Mexico with muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The museum label said he ascribed his rejections to their being “too flamboyant, too revolutionary, too this, too that.” Regardless, he still got paid for coming up with ideas. Artists hired for the WPA were salaried and paid by the week, not by commission or output.

Left: Photograph of Dissertation on Alchemy (1937) by Reuben Kadish.

Right: Photograph of a section of Physical Growth of Man/History of Medicine (1936) by Reuben Kadish and Philip Guston.

Among those flamboyant and revolutionary rejections was Indian Myths and Legends. I’m a sucker for anything with space references in it. The Pleiades is a star cluster that has six stars visible to the unaided, 20/20 eye; seven, if you are atop a mountain with perfectly clear skies and a new moon; and over a thousand stars if you have a telescope to help you out. The Western understanding of the Pleiades as the “Seven Sisters” comes from Greek mythology, as many of our astronomical names do. The Greek story involves young women, all mothers, who were fleeing the hunter Orion (a nearby constellation) who relentlessly pursued them for their beauty.

It’s one of the myths that’s strikingly similar across the world. Kadish lived in southern California for most of his life, where the Payómkawichum (Luiseño) and Tongva (Gabrieliño, Fernandeño)⁶ peoples understood the Pleiades as women escaping death by retreating to the skies. I could not find why the women were fleeing death in the Payómkawichum version, but they do so via a rope, and they cut the rope while a man is trailing behind them. He ends up as a bright star separate from the Pleiades, in the constellation we know as Taurus⁷. In the Tongva tale, the women “found out their partners were holding back food from the community” and catapulted themselves into space. One of the men came back home with food for his partner after all, and loved her so much that he, too, rushed to the skies, becoming the entirety of Taurus⁸.

Kadish’s representation sits six cave-like drawings of bodies at the center-left on a gray background, with two more to the right, these separated on a blue background and sitting just underneath a large red-and-black body that I presume represents the men in the stories who followed the women into space, lagging just behind.

How curious that the Pleiades cluster, visible from most of Earth in the winter as long as you’re not at the South Pole, has been so universally perceived as women, let alone as runaways and escape artists. The stories almost certainly predate ancient Greece⁹. Kadish’s depiction mostly evades gender, but I don’t know if the work would have struck me in the same way without its amorphous bodies swimming alongside the fish, without the sharp skeletons dancing on their postmortem island.

I found no history or analysis of this piece online. I wonder from whom he heard these stories, and what he hoped to convey to Americans had it become a WPA-sponsored mural after all. Kadish’s political convictions were no secret; he and Philip Guston are responsible for a mural in Mexico so momentous that it has multiple names (though I favor The Struggle against War and Fascism). The mural had to be hidden behind a fake wall for three decades after being deemed offensive by the Catholic Church. Both men were also targeted by the Los Angeles police’s “Red Squads” for making art with the Marxist-affiliated John Reed Clubs to protest the racist trial of the Scottsboro Boys¹⁰. The LAPD didn’t just destroy a dozen paintings, they shot at the people depicted in each one. Kadish was already familiar with this kind of persecution: his childhood home had been ransacked for his father’s “Bolshevik sympathies.” He continually spoke about worker’s rights and the abolition of class in interviews throughout his life. Why the artistic focus on indigenous mythology?

In 1943, not long after his stint with the WPA, Kadish was recruited to document the war as an Army artist. In an interview conducted with Kadish a few months before his passing in 1992, he had this to say about the impact of the war on his art:

“Well, you can’t have the impact of the horrendousness of the kind of death that the world had seen without asking yourself some questions as to where we came from and where do we think we’re going, and who’s your mother and who’s your father, and who do you think you can choose to find in this world of ours? … In all religions, and when we read the [stories] that seem to be most gratifying … they’re the ones that we least understand. They’re the ones that have more poetic elements in them, that carry out more than just the fringe of what a mother figure is all about.”¹¹

But Indian Myths was made before Kadish had seen that “kind of death” up close in a war. He was clearly thinking about storytelling, creation, and loss before then. Did he witness another kind of death in his youth that compelled his interest in these themes? Political repression and the police state followed him throughout his formative years. Yet his art highlighted the humanity of nearly everyone but himself. Kadish chose solidarity, reminding us that we achieve universal dreams of peace and livelihood by working as a collective, that disconnected people across the world can look at a blurry patch of sky and see the same vision.

Works Cited

1.  https://blanton.emuseum.com/objects/21172/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuben_Kadish
3. https://kadishart.org/biography-reuben/
4. https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/city-of-hope-guston-and-kadish-mural-duarte-ca/
5. https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu/do/814f8546-f84f-41bc-9082-74c4f41b1af4
6. I only provided the Spanish-given names to make one’s independent research easier, as I found these names were used more often in text.
7. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/before-the-telescope
8. https://www.lacountyarts.org/experiences/civic-art/memory-and-futurity-yaangna
9. https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568
10. https://reubenkadish.org/publication/double-consciousness-in-mexico/
11. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-reuben-kadish-12170

The post Reflections on Austin DSA’s Field Trip to the Blanton Museum of Art first appeared on Red Fault.

by Eugene V. Debs

Eugene V. Debs (1855 – 1926) was a labor leader and socialist candidate for president. As president of the American Railway Union, Debs took part in the Pullman Strike. Debs was arrested when federal judges issued an injunction, and forces were dispatched to stop the strikes.

Debs was sentenced to six months in jail, during which time he “began to read and think and dissect the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke,” and became a socialist. In the following excerpt [PDF], published on July 4, Debs reflects on the supposed American liberties of our founding, and decries their betrayal in the “despotic decree” of the injunction. – GLH

Sitting in Woodstock Jail, behind prison bars, and permitting my fancy to have free rein, what more natural than to contemplate the resounding acclamations of a great nation celebrating the anniversary of the birthday of Liberty? What more natural than to commune with the dead, who, when living, in the spirit of heroism expanded to the full stature of patriots and dared all things, battles, wounds, imprisonment, confiscation, and death, to secure liberty for themselves and their posterity.

But in the midst of such ardent admiration of the men who wrested the scepter from England’s proud monarch and secured for the American people the priceless boon of liberty, I am compelled to ponder present conditions and ask myself, “What remains of the liberty thus secured for the American people? Why celebrate the ‘birthday’ of American liberty when Liberty itself lies cold and stiff and dead, stabbed to death by nine gowned and ermined men, who, if they have any mission connected with the affairs of the American people, it is to forever stand guard over their constitutional and unalienable rights.”

It has been regarded as a patriotic duty for Americans, on the 4th of July, to apostrophize Liberty and to select from the vocabularies of all languages eulogistic words to describe its value and its glory, and when words failed to express those essential attributes of liberty which made life itself an inferior blessing, bonfires have blazed, cannons have belched their thunder, banners have waved, drums have throbbed, and bugle blasts have called the people to assemble and rejoice together over God’s inscrutable decree in bestowing upon Americans blessings denied to all other peoples, kindreds, and tongues since time began. Nor do I doubt that on this anniversary such exhibitions will be repeated, but it will be a hollow mockery. The stage will be gorgeous with scenery for the play of liberty, but liberty will be absent – only its ghost will appear, only its “canonized bones” will be present; only its skeleton jaws will move to tell American slaves that the supreme “funeral directors” have buried it in a potter’s field without so much as a slab to mark its resting place.

And yet the farce will proceed, and orators will be found to bombard the air to convince the people that in the nation’s grand march across the continent and in its physical achievements, the ultima thule of its destiny has been reached. If liberty is referred to at all, it will be to emphasize the plutocratic doctrine that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people and constitutional guarantees of liberty are as so many vagaries and that a strong, centralized government is what the Fathers designed should be established upon the ruins of the Republic, and that the Constitution itself, ceasing to be a guarantee of the liberties of the people, should be eventually so construed that one man, robed, crowned, and sceptered as a judge, combining the characteristics of caitiff and satrap, could, as whim might influence him, strike down every constitutional right of the citizen and send him to prison. . . .

If the anniversary of the 4th of July is devoted to arousing the American people to a realization of their great misfortune, if they will resolve to regain their liberties by renewing he pledge of the Fathers to perish or conquer, then Woods and Woodstock Jail may stand in the future monumental infamies, from which the people may go forth as did the revolutionary heroes from the infamous edicts of King George to regain their lost liberties – and all along the lines of the hosts of the common people, the victims of plutocracy and their corrupt agencies, should resound again the battle cry that was heard from Lexington to Yorktown: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

The post Liberty’s Anniversary (1895) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Wondering which U.S. labor law protects your job? Learn if your sector (private, public, gig, rail, or ag) has the legal right to organize, strike, and unionize.

The post Federal labor rights: A sectoral guide to organizing appeared first on EWOC.

by Jean Allen

As I write, the 12th of June, everyone around the world is celebrating. All our struggles, all our toil, all the sadness and stress and anxiety you live your life in, all of it has been made worth it.

Your wealth has trickled up.

The world has its first trillionaire!

It’s Elon Musk, the great South African genius.

Don’t you feel great?

Doesn’t this make you feel happy?

Elon Musk has become a trillionaire because his company, SpaceX, went public in an initial public offering set to be one of the largest in history. Why is that happening? Among talk that we are in an AI bubble, among serious questions about the profitability of any element of SpaceX besides Starlink, SpaceX has launched itself into a stock market whose regulations have been drastically changed recently. Shorter financial reporting requirements, combined with a new requirement that all ‘indexed’ funds (aka, wealth being institutionally managed which operates by fixed indexes of stocks) have to treat new offerings as if they were existing companies, is leading to a tremendous amount of wealth flowing into Elon Musk’s pockets from our retirement funds. This is a tremendous climb for a man born to a South African emerald empire, that he now alone has more wealth than all of South Africa and Romania combined.

And isn’t that great?

I think it’s good, personally. For a long time Americans have lived under the delusion that we live in the best of all possible worlds. We believed we lived in a place where wealth was distributed perhaps slightly unfairly, but which generally went according to merit. The rise of the tech billionaire seemed to be a sign of this, with these odd geniuses who seemed able to connect the world. Elon Musk has certainly been one such genius, having used his money from 2010 on inserting himself in media he liked, buying favorable appearances with Iron Man, Lisa Simpson, Rick & Morty, and more. After his daughter came out as trans and in opposition to his (already far-right) politics, he decided to become more explicitly involved in politics, buying Twitter and turning it into a vector for far-right beliefs the world over and using it to, among other things, help instigate the Belfast race riots. Elon Musk is a hateful mediocrity who blares out his lack of curiosity or taste on a daily basis. His money comes from various means of defrauding the public. And he is the world’s first trillionaire.

All big capital is like this.

There is this idea that the wealth of a capitalist is a just reward for all the great decisions they make, that the money a capitalist has is quantitatively the same as the money we have. This is false. For you and me, money is something we need to buy necessities, services, perhaps the occasional major purchase or luxury. And as wealth gets larger it stays the same. Apartments become condos become homes become mansions. But at a certain point wealth stops being just a sum of currency, the ability to purchase yet better necessities or yet more luxuries. At a certain point currency becomes capital, becomes the ability to independently plan the economy.

In my hometown there are two schools. The public school was built a century ago on a hill, with a classic red-brick veneer. It was built on the behalf of a wealthy widow (Mrs.Russel Sage), who I was taught to appreciate as a great philanthropist in the elementary school she founded. The private school was built in the 00s, with a hyper-modern aesthetic, and was built when a wealthy widow (Mrs. Courtney Sale Ross) decided she wanted her daughters to get a liberal arts education out on Long Island. That is what wealth does to political economy. Instead of a school system designed by our democratic representatives, wealth allows planning to be done according to nearly any whim a rich person might have. And building private schools with non-unionized workforces according to your personal whims is often one of the best kind of whims a rich person might have.

You might be in a city that’s been trying to establish public transit for decades, and Elon Musk can individually decide to build a nonsensical Hot Wheels tunnel for individual cars designed by one of his other subsidiaries.

Or you might be Musk’s colleague who does international health planning according to your desire to reduce the African population.

“Elon Musk is possibly the greatest living inventor!” – Lisa Simpson

I think we should put this whole class on a performance improvement plan (PIP). I don’t see what society is really getting out of such a substantial investment in such a narrow set of people. I think it is morally and ethically wrong for such a small number of men to have so much decision-making power while so many of us have so little. I think that this imbalance makes everyone involved worse people. You can see it most obviously in Elon Musk.

Do you think Elon Musk is happy?

It doesn’t seem so to me. He seems like the last in a long line of pathetic rich men I’ve met, men who never faced pushback and so never had to mature. He is the world’s richest man, and he claims to be on the leaderboards of Diablo IV, a game known for being a relentless time suck that only real gamers (read losers) would spend so much time in. He is the world’s richest man and it is nearly impossible to watch an interview with him for not flinching. He is desperately emotionally needy for something the world’s richest man can never get – approval. No one is his equal and so he can not be truly respected and so he desperately seeks the approval of our demented old patriarch. Put him on a PIP for all our sakes.

The post I Want to Put Elon Musk on a PIP first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Any analysis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its current geopolitical role has to begin with a puzzle: Why did the institution outlive the enemy it was created to deter? Why is it still so beloved by Western liberals and neo-conservatives alike, despite the on-again, off-again grumbles by Trump and other neo-isolationists that it has become a burden for the coffers of the US Treasury? And what alternatives can socialists on both sides of the Atlantic propose in order to truly promote geopolitical stability in the face of a social, economic, political and environmental polycrisis (understood to be a situation in which “crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects”) engulfing the planet? In this article, we postulate that the North Atlantic left must advocate for a full decoupling from NATO and the social, political, and financial costs that sustaining the organization entails, and instead advocate for a vision of geopolitical security based on environmental sustainability, social equality, and democratic and inclusive multilateral frameworks that are not hegemonized by the US or any other individual neo-imperialist power.

For most of the North Atlantic liberal-left, NATO has long been part of the furniture of the international order: an institution whose particular wars might be criticized, but whose existence and indefinite expansion are taken for granted as the guarantee of a “rules-based order” or, at most, regarded with an ambivalence that never matures into opposition. The reflex is bipartisan and transatlantic. When thirty members of the US Congressional Progressive Caucus signed a letter in October 2022 gently urging the Biden administration to pair military support for Ukraine with diplomatic effort, they withdrew it within twenty-four hours under a hail of accusations of appeasement, a measure of how narrow the permissible spectrum of transatlantic debate has become. Socialists do not share that ambivalence, and cannot afford its silences. Our argument is that an European decoupling from NATO, in the military, digital, and environmental sense, looking for real independence and sovereignty is not one demand among many, but the precondition for social and ecological progress on either shore of the Atlantic.

The NATO puzzle has acquired a further layer of irony in the second Trump era. The President who muses about leaving “delinquent” allies to their fate, who has refused to rule out economic or even military coercion to annex Greenland (which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding NATO member) and who dispatched his Vice President to scold European allies from an American base on Greenlandic soil, has nonetheless declined to junk the organization. This article will address the reasons behind his strategy in the context of the current configurations of late-stage capitalism. 

NATO’s Original Purpose

NATO, the West’s quintessential Cold War security alliance founded in 1949, which aimed to shelter key European allies from the “Soviet threat” by including them under the US’ “nuclear umbrella,” was not discarded and deactivated as its counterpart Warsaw Pact was in 1991 (Miles 2023/2024). Instead, the Golden Years of the so-called Pax Americana that followed the disbandment of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s led to a surprisingly small decrease in military expenditure by the United States, which registered a mere –21% decline in its military budget during the period 1986–1994, as compared to a –49.5% drop in military spending in the non-NATO world (including the former Soviet Union) during the same period. During the Clinton years, NATO did not shrink or disappear, instead it expanded eastward and began a series of military interventions outside of its core area of influence: former Yugoslavia in 1999 without UN Security Council authorization, Afghanistan at the height of the post-9/11 “anti-terrorism frenzy” from 2001-2014, and Libya in 2011 far beyond its mandate, just to name a few.

Despite NATO outliving its original purpose, it began to repurpose its existence, while simultaneously revealing the purpose that it served all along, in accordance with the argument made by Panitch & Gindin in The Making of Global Capitalism (2012). According to these authors, NATO continues to be an essential part of the machinery through which the US State supervises global capitalism, with Western Europe’s ruling classes as junior partners in an imperial alliance. In this way, post-Cold War NATO has stopped acting as a guarantee of security and peace for the Western world, because it was never designed to principally function as a mutual security pact. From its founding, indeed, the alliance’s internal enemies mattered as much as its external one. NATO’s first decades were dedicated as much to insulating Western European states from their own Communist-friendly working classes (from Marshall-conditioned aid to the stay-behind networks later exposed as Operation Gladio) as about deterring the Red Army. An offensive imperial instrument can never be reformed into a defensive one, even under deeply transformed political, social, and military conjunctures.

From Burden Sharing to Protection Racket

The need for maintaining a robust NATO in the post-Cold War, increasingly multipolar world began to be seriously questioned during the first Trump administration. Trump’s insistence on economic “burden sharing” came to the forefront of NATO’s agenda by 2018, when he pushed hard for European members of the organization to pledge 4% of their annual GDP for defense expenditure (up from a 2% commitment made by the Europeans in 2014). Shocked by Trump’s abandonment of Western mutual defense grand strategy, liberal foreign policy analysts began to wring their hands at the notion of an unmoored and underfunded NATO without the capacity to defend Fortress Europe from the evils of Vladimir Putin, cast as the new post-Cold War “boogie man” (despite or perhaps because of his similarities with the former Cold War “boogie men”) by Washington establishment elites. 

The complaint itself was hardly new. American elites have grumbled about European free-riding since Eisenhower complained privately that the allies were making a “sucker” of the United States. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield spent the early 1970s introducing amendments to halve US troop levels in Europe; and Robert Gates devoted his 2011 farewell address as defense secretary to warning of a “dim if not dismal” future for an alliance in which Americans paid and Europeans merely philosophized. This grumbling is a signal of imperial decay. A hegemon that has full confidence in its powers subsidizes its allies, as post-WWII Washington did, because protection purchased markets, dollar seigniorage, and political obedience at a discount. A hegemon in relative decline, however, begins to monetize its protection directly.

As part of its intentions to restore US standing in the world through rejoining global alliances and reprioritizing multilateral commitments, the incoming Biden administration “bent the stick” in the opposite direction when it came to foreign relations with Western European powers. Under Biden, the US simultaneously returned to non-contentious relations with its traditional Western European allies and reinforced claims of the “indispensableness” of NATO (not only as a military shield but also as an instrument for democracy promotion), through actively encouraging the expansion of the geographic scope of the organization. While that expansion undoubtedly was a motive behind Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, its logic went unquestioned and even celebrated by Biden who was eager to unleash both the “hard” and “soft” versions of US imperial power on the European continent. As Biden stated at a 2024 summit celebrating NATO’s 75-year anniversary, “for those who thought NATO’s time had passed, they got a rude awakening when Putin invaded Ukraine. […] Some of the oldest, deepest fears in Europe roared back to life because once again a murderous madman was on the march. But this time, no one cowered in appeasement, especially the United States.”

Now, under the second Trump administration, the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to drag on, tragically transformed into yet another forever war that is being underwritten on both sides of the Atlantic by capitalist interests linked to the military-industrial complex. It is important to say that the motivations for Trump “staying the course” in Ukraine are quite different from that of the former Biden administration. For Western liberals, Ukraine is the legitimating war—the conflict that redeemed NATO after Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. It restored the moral vocabulary of the “defense of democracy,” and made alliance politics electorally viable again. Trump’s coalition has no need of that legitimation, as it organizes consent through civilizational nationalism at home, not liberal internationalism abroad, and the fractions of capital closest to it have different balance sheets. Fossil-fuel capital eyes sanctions relief and Arctic hydrocarbons; the venture-backed tech-defense complex of Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX profits from Pacific-facing rearmament regardless of what happens in the Donbas; and the MAGA strategic imagination treats Russia as a potential junior partner in a world of great-power spheres, with China as the only rival that counts. Ukraine, in this scheme, is a European liability to be offloaded, profitably, since the offloading takes the form of European purchases of American weapons. As US foreign policy towards Europe becomes more and more unilateral and erratic the NATO burden sharing debate is now back front and center, in a context underlain by mistrust on the part of European partners and inflated imperialist bravado exhibited by Trump.

An Alliance of Equals?

At the June 2025 Hague summit, European NATO members adopted a target of 5 percent of GDP for defense and security spending by 2035; Spain, the only country to refuse, was answered not with coherent arguments but with Trump’s unilateral threat to make it “pay twice as much” through trade. When Madrid in March 2026 would not allow US aircraft to use the Rota and Morón bases for strikes on Iran launched outside the UN Charter, Trump ordered a full cut-off of trade with Spain. Alliances of equals do not behave this way; metropoles disciplining peripheries do. The discipline has a business model. Rosa Luxemburg called militarism a province of accumulation in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), and the description has aged well: according to figures cited in the Draghi report, 63 percent of EU defense procurement between mid-2022 and mid-2023 went to US suppliers. Rearmament on NATO’s terms is a historic transfer of European public money to American arms capital. The 5 percent target is less a strategy than a tribute schedule with a procurement funnel attached.

The Spanish Alternative

The case of Spain matters analytically because it shows how resistance is possible, what this strategy depends on, and why it is domestically and internationally important. The how is documented: at The Hague, as the Spanish government secured the alliance’s only exemption, arguing NATO’s own capability targets could be met at roughly 2.1 percent of GDP. It has since dropped the F-35 in favor of European aircraft (a substitution of suppliers rather than a reduction in lethality, a distinction whose importance will become clear below) and in March it conditioned any use of Spanish territory on conformity with principles enshrined in the UN Charter.

The why is material as much as political. Politically, the governing coalition depends on left and peripheral-nationalist parties for whom rearmament carries a price—above all on Sumar, the ecosocialist coalition led by Yolanda Díaz, which formally rejected the government’s rearmament plan. Sumar instead supports a different political project, based on strategic autonomy, European independence and real sovereignty, without subordination to the United States, and security as protection of people’s social and ecological conditions of life, not weapons procurement, as the EU already outspends Russia threefold in this budget line item. Materially, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity since 2019. Due to this, by early 2026 gas became the minority source of energy domestically, equalling only 9 percent of total megawatt hours. When the war on Iran sent European gas prices surging, Spanish wholesale power averaged €42 per megawatt-hour against €143 in Italy, while heavily gas-dependent Germany absorbed the full shock. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016) traces how fossil energy systems embed class power and imperial hierarchy; the Spanish case shows the inverse. Every gigawatt of domestically owned renewables removes a lever of external coercion.

The Spanish exception should not be idealized, however. As Ekaitz Cancela has argued, the same Sánchez government that refused access by the US to the Rota and Morón bases has presided over the largest defense budget in Spanish history, mutating from the “pandemic Keynesianism” of the post-COVID recovery period to military neoliberalism. In December 2025, the Defense Ministry adjudicated €15.8 billion to private contractors to comply with NATO targets, while the State’s digital backbone was quietly handed over to Silicon Valley: SpaceX satellites for military communications, Palantir software inside the armed forces’ intelligence systems (under NATO eyes), and Microsoft software licenses for federal administrative employees. What is marketed to European electorates as “military Keynesianism”, specifically, jobs and growth through rearmament, operates in practice as military neoliberalism: public spending to prop up the private military-industrial complex. A decoupling from Washington of this type would merely Europeanize the suppliers of militarism while leaving a NATO-focused political economy intact. That is why Sumar’s position within the coalition against the rearmament plan as a whole, and not just a veto of American vendors, marks the actual dividing line regarding defense policy in the Sanchez administration. 

Two Sovereignties

Here conceptual precision matters: the idea of “European sovereignty” is now being invoked to support two diametrically opposed projects. What the European Commission calls strategic autonomy—the €800 billion ReArm Europe program, hastily rebranded Readiness 2030—suspends neoliberal deficit rules for weapons purchases while leaving Europe’s deeper dependencies untouched, for example, US firms hold 85 percent of the European cloud market. 

The EU spending rules are notorious for their harshness. Since the ratification of the Maastricht treaty in 1991, EU member states have been bound to keep budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP and public debt below 60 percent. After the 2008 global financial crisis, these restrictions were the building blocks of the austerity architecture that gutted Southern Europe’s health care, education, and social protection systems. In March 2025, the Commission moved to activate “national escape clauses” exempting increases in military spending of up to 1.5 percent of GDP from precisely those ceilings, laying bare the real priorities of “social” Europe. These policies undermine any attempt at popular sovereignty, which would allow for budget priorities to be set on the national level in consonance with the real needs of each country’s working classes. 

That is not an exit from imperialism but an application for promotion within it—and the application will not be granted. Poulantzas explained why in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1975): postwar American capital did not confront Europe from outside, as a rival across a frontier, but was replicated within European social formations themselves. In this way, a Western European capitalist class was created, that was neither a national bourgeoisie capable of an autonomous project nor a typical comprador class. Instead it was (and still is) a bourgeoisie with its own domestic base of accumulation but whose conditions of reproduction and valorization nonetheless depend on American technology, finance, and military prowess. The procurement and cloud figures are not deficiencies to be corrected by better industrial policy; they are the shape of the relation. An anti-imperialist Europe is therefore a project impossible to reproduce without dramatically transforming the inherently US-dependent nature of the modern Western European capitalist class. Sovereignty can only be reclaimed by another historical subject—the working class.

A socialist concept of sovereignty starts from a radically different focus on the well-being of peoples, not States. Popular sovereignty is inextricably linked to the concept of what Marxist feminists call social reproduction (Bhattacharya 2017)—the everyday systems of energy, food, housing, care, tech and knowledge through which a society maintains its vitality. Whoever controls those systems governs, no matter what national Constitutions say; that is why popular sovereignty is built in grids and cloud infrastructure as much as in armaments and military readiness.

National and regional defense follows the same materialist logic. What principally matters is not how much is spent, but what is defended. NATO’s rearmament defends the circuits of accumulation—sub-Arctic shipping lanes, mineral extraction frontiers, capital’s investments far beyond Europe. On the other hand, a socialist concept of defense protects and uplifts the well-being of all peoples, and is therefore defined by its self-imposed limits by what it refuses to do as much as by what it protects. Where NATO doctrine is organized around the unlimited projection of “hard power,” a socialist doctrine of defense, independence and sovereignty is bounded: by the UN Charter’s absolute prohibition of wars of aggression; by the consistent application of human rights principles within and beyond Western borders, without the exemptions Washington and Brussels grant themselves; and by solidarity as an organizing principle (as expressed by energy interconnections, technology transfers, and robust protections for refugees and migrants) rather than protection rackets between States. 

Using a consistent socialist logic, we should also reaffirm that Russia’s war on Ukraine is also a form of imperialist aggression, and a left that answers NATO’s imperialism by excusing Moscow’s will never find emancipatory solutions to the existential challenges faced by the working class posed by competing fractions of global capital. Those fractions can be named. On one side stands the Northern Atlantic military-industrial-fossil fuel bloc, now enhanced by a venture-backed tech-defense complex. These fractions of Western capital need permanent rearmament and therefore a permanent enemy, in order to guarantee increased profit margins. In competition with Western capital is the Russian extractive-military oligarchy, for which war has become a dual strategy to ensure capital accumulation and political survival. Who gets left behind on both sides of this transnational duel for the spoils of extraction and exploitation is the global working class, including the Ukrainian and Russian workers currently being used as cannon fodder on both sides of the battlefront. As formulated by Bah, this war is an expression of the modern “banality of oppression” suffered by the global working classes, which serves to brutally reinforce ingrained economic, social and racial injustices. 

The Ecological Question

The ecological question is not a superfluous issue here; it provides a material base for any effective anti-war strategizing. The war economy and the fossil fuel economy are structurally fused not because the working class family heating its home with natural gas is complicit in war, but because both economies run on the same infrastructure, the same fiscal circuits, and the same premise of limitless extraction. It is undeniable that fossil fuel energy is still needed for material survival—people still cook, heat, and move with it. But this fossil fuel dependency was not inevitable. According to Malm (2016), it was engineered as a function of the current neoliberal capitalist order, and has created a form of thermodynamic and geopolitical path dependency. The US Fifth Fleet patrols the Gulf because the Carter Doctrine pledged military force in defense of hydrocarbon flows. The fiscal circuits overlap one another, petroStates recycle profits into weapons, and weapons then secure additional profits for these same States and for their imperial allies. Likewise, the world’s militaries are the fossil economy’s most voracious institutional consumers (Crawford 2022)—accounting for an estimated 5.5 percent of global emissions, a larger footprint than even Russia’s. 

An ecosocialist transition starts from the opposite premise: the planet has biophysical limits, and production must be democratically planned within them. This means scaling down what is destructive for human existence, namely military and fossil fuel infrastructure first, in order to then expand what sustains life. That is the rift Marx saw opening between capital’s compulsion to grow and the natural cycles it exhausts—the ecology Saito (2023) has reconstructed from Marx’s late notebooks as degrowth communism. That transition cannot be financed from inside an arms race; a continent mobilizing €800 billion for weapons has already chosen which limits it respects. Decoupling from NATO across military, energy, and digital dimensions is therefore not a gesture but a precondition. This precondition, though, is not yet a binding program. We can perfectly imagine a unilateral exit from NATO by the Trump administration which would still keep the fossil fuel-military coupling intact under new national management. A real geopolitical transformation would transcend the issue of NATO per se, and point towards a national and transnational realignment of political values and economic priorities away from death and extraction and towards ecological sustainability and egalitarian social reproduction. 

A Transatlantic Horizon

The logic for an ecosocialist transition is equally applicable in Europe and in the US. As growing US defense and security expenditures are increasingly used to wage war both abroad and at home, with a hyper-militarized ICE terrorizing immigrant communities, and an emboldened CIA and Special Forces illegally kidnapping sovereign heads of state in America’s “backyard,” socialists must lead the fight against the devaluing and precarization of life on both the domestic and international fronts. DSA was right in including the abolition of NATO as a plank in its political platform approved at the 2021 Convention. And, on the other shore of the Atlantic, Sumar was right to say no to more spending in defense and to begin a process of decoupling from NATO grounded on energy sovereignty, technology and internationally-recognized human rights.

Now, as we gain organizational strength and greater political representation in both the institutional and extra-institutional spheres, DSA must take its “No to NATO” position to its next logical step, by working to build a new kind of peoples’ transnational mutual defense, based on the preservation and expansion of the global commons outside of any profit- or war-seeking logic, in conjunction with our foreign partners in networks such as the Foro de Sao Paulo (the standing conference of Latin American and Caribbean left parties and movements first convened in 1990 and of which DSA is an associate member), and Progressive International, the global coordinating body of left parties, unions, and social movements launched in 2020 of which DSA is a full member. We have a world to win, or to lose, depending on our willingness and capacity to promote popular, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist human security, in the weeks, months and years to come.

References

Miles, Simon. 2023/2024. “We All Fall Down: The Dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the End of the Cold War in Eastern Europe,” International Security. 48(3): 51-85.

Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press.

Cancela, Ekaitz. 2026. “Pedro Sánchez contra el trumpismo.” Revista Anfibia, 5 March. Extended Spanish version of “Sanchismo’s Last Stand,” The Ideas Letter, 2026.

Crawford, Neta C. 2022. The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions. MIT Press.

Lenin, V.I. 1917. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. International Publishers.

Lundestad, Geir. 1986. “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952.” Journal of Peace Research 23(3): 263–277.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1913. The Accumulation of Capital. Routledge.

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. Verso.

Saito, Kohei. 2023. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge University Press.

Photograph by Shealah Craighead.