Authors: Jesse D, Aiden S, Jesse J (Electoral Working Group leadership)

The city of Portland is six months into its grand experiment in a new form of government. Portland City Council’s expansion and the multi-member geographic districts are providing new horizons of political action for the socialist movement and the city’s broader progressive milieu.  When thinking about our relationship with the new system, we find it important to refer to the past – in order to understand the present and to fight for a better future. 

Historically, candidates elected by people-powered movements to Portland city council have had short shelf lives. Their elections came as shocks to the establishment, who then fought to claw back those seats for the capitalist interests which dominate our city: the developers, the metro chamber, and their intersection in the Democratic Party of Oregon. For example, Commissioners Chloe Eudaly (elected 2016) and Jo Ann Hardesty (elected 2018), were identified by the establishment as part of the left. They both served single terms and then faced well-funded and aggressive opposition in their second elections, resulting in losses in 2020 and 2022 respectively. 

The second round of elections under the new system will fall first in Districts 3 & 4, where three DSA members are going to be up for re-election. It is imperative that we create a vigorous campaign plan to maintain our socialists in office. It is in the interest of all chapter members, and the city at large, that we succeed in that plan in 2026.

If you believe in our councilors’ mission – building a city that works for everyone, and not just the rich – consider these actions to get involved in defending our mandate:

1: Commit your time to the Electoral Working Group, which meets every third Thursday (find our next meeting on the chapter calendar here)

• Train with other members on how to run an electoral campaign, how to launch a canvass, how to be an effective canvasser, and fight for the candidacies of our DSA councilors on the front line!
• Attend the National Electoral Commission‘s upcoming “Electoral Academy” training series. This series is filled with important nuts-and-bolts trainings addressing all aspects of campaign work.
• Make an outreach plan for your non-DSA network: Highlight the work of our councilors to your non-DSA friends, coworkers, and family members. Encourage them to commit to donating to our Socialists in Office re-election campaigns or to canvass when we launch our field campaigns. Watch and listen for updates on these campaigns in chapter general meetings, Electoral Working Group meetings, and via direct communications (texts, emails, etc.).

2: Help prepare the chapter for a vigorous campaign

• Make the jump to solidarity dues to fund the chapter’s work between campaigns.
• Are your friends stoked about socialists on city council? Ask them to join the chapter!
• Keep up the good work in your Working Groups, Committees, and caucuses. We’re not just running on our councilors’ achievements but everything we do as a chapter!

3: Keep active with the chapter’s interventions at city hall

• We’ve seen greater group cohesion in our Socialist bloc when the chapter is organizing and mobilizing around our councilors’ legislative priorities.
• Bolster working groups’ policy priorities in the chapter (Renter’s bill of Rights, Family Agenda, public power etc.).

The post A Call to Action to Prepare for the 2026 Elections appeared first on Portland DSA.

Michael P. is an organizer with NYC-DSA.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

GNDCC: What is the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA)? How did it happen?

Michael P: New York State has some of the most aggressive climate laws in the country—mandating a rapid transition to renewable energy, directing benefits of the transition to disadvantaged communities, people who have suffered from the adverse effects of the fossil fuel system. That is a great goal to have, but from the beginning it was clear that the State was not going to take the aggressive action that was needed to meet those goals. So when we were developing ideas for a campaign, we saw that clearly there needs to be some mechanism to force the State to deliver on this promise.

It happens that New York State has a sort of secret weapon for the energy transition, which is the New York Power Authority (NYPA). That’s the largest state-level public utility in the country. It has a very storied history, founded by Franklin Roosevelt and very much a model for a lot of the public power and electrification work that happened during the New Deal. But that legacy had kind of tailed off; over the last decades it’s been more in a holding pattern. Some of our strategy team saw it as an opportunity. The State has this amazing resource; rather than rely on private developers to build renewables, which was quite simply not happening at a rapid pace, we could get the State itself to step up and build the renewable energy we need. 

That push for renewable energy was always tied in our minds with a more comprehensive vision of a just transition that really benefits everyone and realigns politics around energy transition as a public good. So we went about this as a plan to create a huge amount of green jobs; to shut down fossil fuel plants that are continuing to pollute, especially in lower-income places with predominantly Black and brown people living there; and also work on lowering utility bills, which is really affecting everyone.

With that as the context, BPRA is basically a law to give NYPA both the power and the mandate to build a ton of publicly owned renewable energy and create all these benefits in the process.

How did you guys win? What was the campaign like?

This campaign was not waged by hardened politicos or 20-year veterans of legislative work; we really had to figure it out as we went along. Of course we have people with all kinds of skills, but it essentially took us becoming experts and taking that expertise and mixing it with what DSA does really well, which is build power and frighten people in power through organizing. So it was really a multi-year process where, on the one hand, we developed and sharpened our analysis of what the bill should do, and then, on the other hand, gradually built more and more of a base and deployed more and more aggressive tactics to first get the bill on the map—it’s hard to even have something be noticed—then make it one of the main things people were talking about in Albany for climate action, and then ultimately to a place where they had to pass it because there was so much pressure and it was really just a question of how strong we could make the final bill.

That took really every single tool in the toolbox: canvassing people and knocking on doors, tabling and talking to people on the streets, very sophisticated comms targeting a mass audience, knowing how to get our story into the press, knowing how to build relationships in the legislature and how bills really get passed and what’s the realpolitik of that. It also took significant electoral power, in the end, to show that this is a force to be reckoned with, this cannot be ignored anymore.

So it was a massive effort. It’s great to think that thousands of people contributed to passing this law. The ground is breaking for the first project in mid-July. This is something that was a massive collective achievement, and that gives me hope for replicating this and building on it at a much larger scale.

Can you say more about the electoral power and having DSA elected officials and how that helped?

There are a couple of pieces with electoral power. You mentioned the socialists in office that we had elected. That was a really important precondition, because that meant we had people who were on the inside of the legislature. They are there in conference when they are talking about what bills they’re going to debate and prioritize. They are there building relationships across the political spectrum. But they are also very much public agitators for socialist politics and policy, so they were crucial in getting our story out there into the press and in front of the public. That was the product of years of winning campaigns for State Assembly and State Senate.

But the intensification was in 2022 actually running a slate of candidates that had a shared focus on climate, and in particular BPRA, including the candidate I worked for, Sarahana Shrestha. Actually, her campaign grew out of BPRA organizing in the Hudson Valley. She was confronting a 20+ year incumbent who was functionally blocking the bill from moving. This is something we learned over time. The way things work is not, Okay, X number of legislators support this, and then it gets to a vote. It’s really gatekeepers in positions of very specific power, are they motivated to to move the bill? So we found that there’s a lot of things these people can put off and ignore, but they cannot ignore a credible electoral challenge. Obviously, we won some of these races. But even in ones where we didn’t, that had a significant impact on the bill moving through committee and to a vote.

What was the role of working with labor in this and getting it passed?

From the start, the entire concept of the law and the campaign to pass it was structured around the absolutely crucial role of labor in the transition. Both in terms of the political power labor has, but also that it’s workers who are going to build the wind turbines, solar fields, geothermal, all that stuff. They’re going to physically be the ones driving the transition. And of course, it’s also just a part of a broader socialist strategy that labor has to be central.

So from the beginning we wanted to make sure the law would have the strongest possible protections for workers. This is a notorious problem in the private sector renewable development field—a lot of abuse of workers, a lot of non-union labor. So we saw this as an opportunity to show the climate movement really does stand with workers, and that goes beyond just saying nice things about a just transition, but actually fighting to make sure that that’s a crucial piece in developing renewable energy.

Part of our getting to collaborate with labor was just showing how serious we were, showing that this is a bill that had support. It was already gaining support in the legislature and when they saw that, for example, the state AFL-CIO then wanted to collaborate on developing the labor language in the law. That’s how we came out with a law that has the best possible labor protections, because they were determined by the labor movement. That was crucial as we built up. Also rank-and-file workers, especially in education, were very behind this and moved resolutions to ultimately move their parent unions to support this. That was huge.

Now we’re kind of moving into a new phase where projects are actually being developed and work is going to be starting very soon. Really our hope is that the more projects are built and going forward, the more we can collaborate with labor unions so that they get what they want to see out of this. To make sure, for example, their workers have a really good future where there’s plentiful work and that’s happening with all of the protections of a union in terms of wages and benefits and protection from bad treatment from employers.

So it passed two years ago. What’s been happening with the implementation since then?

Partly from all the lessons we learned in the campaign, we knew that the fight was not going to end with passing the law. With very little of a break after passing it, we launched a campaign to essentially dismiss the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority, who is a registered Republican who worked for a law firm or lobbying firm that worked for fossil fuel companies, who had a very spotty record on civil rights under his tenure as CEO, and who was just dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal in terms of how he ran the Authority. We were able, very quickly, to build a mini campaign that actually prevented him from being confirmed by the New York State Senate as the permanent CEO. Unfortunately, he got to stay through a weird legal loophole that literally no one knew about.

But that really put them on notice. We’re not messing around, we’re not going to settle for scraps—you build a couple of solar fields and call it a day. No, we are in this to effect the full transition in our energy system. From there we prepared ourselves to have a phase two of our campaign where, instead of fighting to pass a law, we’re developing and propagating a vision for what it looks to realize all of this, to actually build these projects. Where should they be built? How much? What kinds of technologies? Where does the system need the most help? All these kinds of questions.

We had to develop our own vision and then, basically at every step of the way, try to preempt wishy-washy planning by the state with popularizing a really strong vision that foregrounded all of the benefits people would get: lower bills, green jobs, less dangerous air pollution, and of course, hopefully a livable future. It entailed building even more expertise and publishing serious research modeling the future of the grid in New York State, but, like everything else, grounded in building tremendous people power.

People spent weekends tabling and gathering public comments. We also worked with the Professional Staff Congress, which is the faculty and staff union at the City University of New York. They organized 10 town halls across the City University system. Then when they actually had public hearings around the State, we were able to send crowds of people to all of these hearings, and I think that the State officials were legitimately shocked because this kind of public comment process hearings is generally an incredibly sleepy thing because nobody even knows about it. They’re not making an effort to engage the public. Our idea was the State should consult the public to see what is needed. What do people want to see? But instead, we had to kind of build that ourselves.

So on some level, I’ve seen our campaign over the last two years as essentially an exercise in, Okay, if you don’t want to run a democracy, we’re going to build the democratic mechanisms to force the input on you. In the end, we had over 5,300 public comments on their first plan. Then the New York City hearing was packed to the rafters. Dozens of people couldn’t even speak because there were so many speakers. Because of that, they have already said they’re going to double the amount of renewable energy that they’re planning to build.

To me, as an organizer, when I see people acceding to our demands, that is a signal not to rest, but to actually go harder because it’s working. So that fight is going to continue. There are a lot of things we need to push for. We need to make sure that they’re actually building projects all over the State. Right now, their earlier stuff is much more focused on upstate, but actually for urban areas like New York City, there are tremendous benefits to building renewables near where a huge amount of the demand is. That will also allow us to shut down these peaker plants, which are hyper-polluting when they’re spinning up to actually provide power to the grid. They emit all kinds of noxious chemicals that cause hugely disproportionate asthma rates. They contribute to massive hospitalization for children and adults.

So these are things that we need to address, and we can’t do that unless we’re actually building the renewable energy to replace the super-dirty fossil fuel energy. A bright spot there is, thanks to our influence, the New York Power Authority is moving ahead with starting to plan for large-scale battery storage in the city, which is one way to replace the capacity of those fossil fuel plants. But they’re barely scratching the surface of what they can do in New York City. Yes, it’s not like we have millions of acres of open space, but there’s massive amounts of space available to build distributed energy resources that are smaller scale, but lots of them all over the place. We see our role as we continue to push and fight until we get what we need, essentially.

So, thanks to you guys, they’ve doubled the amount of renewables they’re going to build. This is their first plan, then they’re going to start building their first projects because of BPRA?

Yes. So the first plan was approved in January. Even in that plan document, they already said, “Okay, we’re going to look at doubling this.” They didn’t say, “This is because these massive crowds of people came and confronted us,” but we know that that’s why. They had a Board of Trustees meeting last week where they formally said, “Yes, we’re going to do this.” So that’s our pressure working.

Another thing I want to mention is, on the labor front, BPRA authorized the State to give up to $25 million per year for green job training. And so far, NYPA has, I think, dispersed over $25 million. This is going to a mix of training programs with labor unions, with trade schools, with state universities. So we’re really winning tangible help for people. We fought to make sure that that would include programs like apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs with wraparound services for people who take this on. A lot of people can’t break into the green jobs area because maybe they don’t have a car, they can’t afford to get to the union training center, or they can’t afford childcare so they can’t do evening classes or something like that. These programs are going to be able to pay for all of that stuff so that we can bring people who have been locked out of being able to get these good-paying and family-sustaining type jobs into this workforce so that everyone benefits.

The vision of the private developing sphere is a bunch of private companies make money. But ultimately, it’s really big finance that is driving all the private renewable development and reaping the benefits because they’re the ones who are fronting the money for all of these projects. We have always been about: if we’re going to make climate action popular, we need to show that it can be a part of improving people’s lives. We need to dispel the very powerful propaganda of the Right that there’s a zero-sum game between climate action and people’s quality of life.

It’s a vision in the Green New Deal that the climate transition is an opportunity to restructure our economy, our society, and our democracy, and put some of this into the hands of regular people, because we do the work, we make things run, and it’s our world.

How has BPRA built up the strength of New York City DSA? Do you feel like it’s helped set the stage for you guys to do even more?

One thing is a lot of leaders in the chapter now went through the crucible of this campaign. Even if they’re working on something else now—maybe they’re working on electoral races or trans rights organizing or recruitment and building our future as a political party—a lot of these people cut their teeth and went from somebody who is just enthusiastic and excited to someone who is an ultra-experienced organizer who knows how to lead large numbers of people into action, which is what organizing is all about. So that’s a huge part of it.

I do think having BPRA as a shared policy plank in electoral campaigns really helped create a certain identity and cohesion in what we were putting forward. Having managed one of those campaigns, it was really motivating to people at the doors to see a positive vision for climate. And that actually is a massive piece of this. For a lot of people, the conventional wisdom was you cannot run on climate, that’s too scary or it’s too dicey. People want to talk about only bread-and-butter, kitchen table-type stuff. But ultimately, this is that. How much are you paying for utilities? How much are you paying in medical bills because your kid has asthma? So that’s another part of it. Ultimately BPRA put our chapter and chapters statewide on the map as one of the key forces shaping the climate fight in New York.

And it has brought in a lot of new people into our orbit. We work extremely closely with the City University staff, faculty, and students. These are all people who are now closer to the center of the organizing bullseye. We’ve made this seem possible, to actually win something. That was also always a part of this, to show socialists can pass transformative legislation that actually delivers results for the working class in the short, medium, and long term. It’s really a proof of concept for what our chapter has been doing all along. It remains one of our biggest legislative victories ever.

The post Campaign Q&A: Building Public Renewables in New York appeared first on Building for Power.

Every June, Chicago DSA holds our annual membership convention. Typically, our convention is more-or-less another General Chapter Meeting of the type we hold every quarter. Currently the only unique features of the convention are that any existing chapter Priority Campaigns are sunset unless they submit a resolution to “reauthorize” for a period of time up to a full year, and that there is generally a forum with candidates running for Chapter Officer.

As I wrap up my term as Chapter Co-Chair (and run for a second one), I’ve been thinking a lot about 1) how we give our chapter a clearer political focus, and 2) how we can make our chapter convention a bit more special. While it’s good that we use every convention to evaluate our Priority Campaigns, not every political priority is going to be an issue campaign. I think it’s important we spend time at the chapter convention to debate our broader priorities and direction as an organization, and I hope next year we can do more proactively to start that discussion in the lead up to the convention. 

This year, I am submitting a resolution that outlines four major political priorities for Chicago DSA, both in hopes of giving our chapter a clearer direction, and to help facilitate discussion and debate about what our priorities should be if not these four. Those four priorities are as follows:

1. Fight the boss. We must work to get masses of workers into motion against the capitalist class by encouraging, supporting, and precipitating class struggle, whether waged in the form of labor action, issue campaigns, direct action, or at the ballot box. 
2. Make more socialists. We must work to expand democratic socialist consciousness in the working class. We define democratic socialist consciousness as both engagement in purposive action (i.e., fighting the boss) and awareness of the ultimate goal of socialist transformation.
3. Be socialists everywhere. We need to become embedded in working class communities, especially in our workplaces and in unions, as well as in civic life and organized communities of all kinds.  
4. Build a class party. We need to build DSA as the foundation for a mass party of the working class. The party is an instrument to carry out the aforementioned tasks and for conquering the political power necessary for the transition to socialism.

The resolution is supplemented by a longer “commentary” on these priorities, which is presented in full below. 

Some of these priorities are already oft-repeated mantras by chapter cadre. That’s good, but we should formalize them and incorporate them into our orientation events and refer to them regularly as a way to evaluate ongoing and potential chapter work, not dissimilar to the Campaigns Criteria we adopted for our priority campaigns in 2018. 

The state of the world in 2025 is ever-changing and chaotic. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, to feel powerless, and to get pulled in new directions every week as the second Trump administration carries out its ultra-reactionary program. These priorities are designed to be “evergreen” and be applicable nearly no matter what the current situation is. We will always need to be working to carry out these four tasks. 

Additionally, while these are priorities for our chapter, and the commentary makes specific references to some of the particularities of Chicago DSA, these are also broadly applicable enough that I think any DSA chapter and the national organization could adopt them as well. Let’s trial run them in Chicago first and see how they work for us.

I hope that this proposal will lead to productive debate in our chapter. I would encourage anyone interested to submit amendments, whether partial or full on “substitute” amendments that would propose a completely different text entirely for us to adopt. Midwest Socialist is also a great avenue to share perspectives in longer form. You can also share your thoughts directly with me at Co-Chair-2@chicagodsa.org. 

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Forward

Commentary on “Political Priorities for Chicago DSA”

There is no dignity or democracy under capitalism. It is a system for producing life that depends on exploitation and dictatorship ensuring private accumulation of wealth and power by an elite few. We are democratic socialists because we believe we, the working class, should control our own labor power and run society democratically to benefit everyone. Our ultimate goal is a complete rupture with capitalism and the establishment of a new political order where workers rule.

Socialism will require uniting and empowering workers the world over in common pursuit of a shared vision for a new socialist society. To commit to the socialist project is to commit to lifelong struggle, to commit oneself to a larger whole, and to commit to working towards a total transformation of life as we know it today.  

Our organization, the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, has adopted the following political priorities to move us forward towards a socialist future. 

I. Fight the boss. 

We live today under the dictatorship of the capitalist class: the bosses. The bosses live in luxury off our labor while we spend the majority of our waking hours toiling at their behest to “make a living”. Our two classes are locked into a relationship of domination and subjugation. It is an irreconcilable conflict, and the only resolution will be through a total abolition of the capitalist system. 

The capitalist class have erected a vast superstructure to veil this class conflict and to prevent workers from realizing their common interests and common purpose. Our first task as socialists is to bring this conflict out and into the open through organizing workers as workers against the bosses — to encourage, support, and precipitate class struggle. We must take every possible opportunity available to engage in these struggles and leverage our membership and organization to achieve victory. 

Naturally, a primary site of class struggle is the workplace and through unions. This makes our chapter’s Labor branch an essential project. In addition to supporting labor struggles through strike solidarity activities, our members must work to cultivate a “militant minority” in their workplaces that can lead workers in struggle against the bosses directly from the shop-floor. While we want to see workers organize everywhere, our members should focus on industries, employers, and unions determined to be strategic priorities by the Labor branch, up to and including taking specific jobs to that end.

Our fight against the bosses extends to all their encroachments into our lives outside of the workplace, and in particular political struggle against the bosses’ representatives in government. Half a century into the neoliberal era we continue to find ourselves in retreat, fighting back against the further erosion of civil liberties and social welfare. We must wage a vigorous defense against these attacks while also working to go on the offensive, organizing to win transformative “non-reformist” reforms that shift the balance of power in our favor, such as those in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program. We need to fight for major structural changes to our political system too, from the expansion of voting to all residents including non-citizens and the incarcerated, to winning proportional political representation and an end to restrictive ballot access laws, all the way to a new democratic constitution that puts an end to minoritarian rule. 

These kinds of revolutionary reforms not only chip away at the power of the bosses but through their achievement give workers an understanding of their potential power and the necessity of political struggle. We need to run campaigns around these reforms and around issues that are widely and deeply felt by the working class. These campaigns should develop winnable demands and identify clear targets and timelines for escalation, emphasize tactics and actions that engage the largest number of people possible, and center the development of new activists and leaders. 

Because of our conflicting material interests, there is no way for both workers and bosses to win on any issue. A victory for workers is necessarily a loss for the bosses. This is why we must prioritize mass action that forces concessions over negotiation that yields meager compromises. 

A common tactic of the bosses to try to dull class conflict is by dividing workers based on race, nationality, gender, religion, immigration status, and other lines of difference. Working class unity cannot be achieved by simply trying to ignore these divisions and specific forms of oppression. We must fight them head on and identify them as attacks on the international working class as a whole. This means committing to organize around issues and through campaigns that focus on fighting these specific oppressions directly, such as struggles to weaken the power of the police, to combat imperialist wars and US militarism, or to fight back against attacks on bodily autonomy and transgender rights.

II. Make more socialists.

To achieve victory in the class struggle, the US working class needs a massive expansion in democratic socialist consciousness. While many in the US have come to hold a more positive view of socialism in the past decade than they have since the Red Scare, socialism is still quite marginal, and the common understanding of socialism by most is very rudimentary. 

We define democratic socialist consciousness as both engagement in purposive action (i.e., fighting the boss) and awareness of the ultimate goal of socialist transformation. Many workers are engaged in some level of the former, and many who identify as socialists or leftists have an understanding of the latter, but a much smaller number possess both qualities. 

No one is born a socialist. One becomes a socialist through a combination of action and education. This brings us to our second major task: guiding workers towards the path of becoming socialists, towards achieving both purposiveness and awareness. 

Our aim is not shallow indoctrination or to bring salvation to workers from above. Our aim is the transformation of workers’ capacity for analysis and self-activity, and to grow the ranks of workers who identify with a socialist tradition that spans the globe, several centuries, and many distinct tendencies. It is through strengthening workers’ insights and organization, through making more socialists, that socialists can hasten the day that the working class emancipates itself.

Making more socialists means an extensive focus on political education. While the elucidation of Marxist politics is paramount, socialist political education must involve the direct application of this theory to understand the present moment, to contextualize history, and to shape concrete organizing. Training workers in the practical skills required for organizing must likewise be an essential objective of a socialist political education program.

Political education is for everyone. We have to accommodate a series of concentric circles of different audiences ranging from organizational leaders and activists all the way out to the non-monolithic masses. This is a challenge given our limited resources. 

Focusing solely on the specific interests of members who are already deeply committed socialists is not very effective for developing new cadre (members who have made a serious long-time commitment to building the organization and advancing socialism). Developing popular education is of crucial importance for socialists, but popular education cannot scale without a corresponding increase in organizational capacity resulting from the recruitment and training of new cadre. For now we must prioritize political education programming that can bring together the socialist curious, non-cadre members, and core activists and leaders into shared spaces of vibrant debate and discussion, as is exemplified by our chapter’s most successful Socialist Night Schools.  

Intellectual awareness in total isolation is not consciousness though. Consciousness requires motion. This makes direct participation in class struggle perhaps the most valuable form of political education. These engagements transform abstract concepts into observed phenomena and resituate individual experiences into a dialectical framework. This makes both getting workers into motion against the bosses, and creating dedicated space to collectively debrief and evaluate those struggles, fundamental for the process of making more socialists. 

III. Be socialists everywhere.

Socialism in the United States today is largely subcultural. Like with many subcultures, the demographic make up of self-identified socialists is generally very skewed and unrepresentative of the working class as a whole. DSA’s current membership is disproportionately white, non-union, college educated, white collar, and millennial. In Chicago, our chapter’s membership is especially dominated by “transplants” who may have only recently moved to the city in their adult life and are less likely to have deep social and community ties as a result.  

If we want to expand our reach and grow beyond our existing narrow social base we need to work to become embedded in working class communities, in our workplaces, and in civic life. And we need to do so as socialists. We call this being socialists everywhere. 

The clearest example of this in practice is the model of the socialist shop steward. The socialist shop steward builds tight organization and unity against division amongst their coworkers. They know their contract backwards and forwards, keep watch for when the boss inevitably violates it, and take responsibility for being their coworkers’ advocates in grievances and disciplinary matters. To be effective, and generally to get elected in the first place, the socialist steward must win and sustain the trust of their coworkers. This is not accomplished overnight through sloganeering and polemics, but through the slow work of developing personal relationships and demonstrating a capacity for purposive action and leadership. 

The socialist steward does not discriminate. They stick up for even the most reactionary or even anti-union workers. Through this they come to gain the respect, however begrudgingly, of those same coworkers. The socialist steward does not substitute themselves for the union either. They act as a conduit for collective action, bringing others with them into motion against the boss. The degree to which the socialist shop steward identifies themself as a socialist will depend on the conditions of each particular shop. Ultimately though, even if it takes years, workers should come to understand that the reason that the socialist shop steward acts as they do is because they are a socialist, that a socialist is someone who looks and acts like their shop steward. 

This process taken at scale is how we begin to transform the popular understanding of socialism in the working class, how we grow from subculture to mass culture. These same principles can be applied outside of the workplace too, though there will be some major qualitative differences. 

US society today is deeply individualistic and atomized. This is not human nature. It is the product of a half century of neoliberal rule. Everywhere workers are taught to fear each other, that anyone who struggles to survive has only themselves to blame, and that the only way to advance in the world is to advance individually and at a necessary cost to others. 

Socialists need to build a culture of solidarity and cooperation for the common good. We do this by uniting others, by leading by example, by being socialists. We do this at work with our coworkers, on our block with our neighbors, around elections with voters in our precinct, in civic life, and as members of organized communities that few think of as being political, such as leisure and athletic groups. 

A significant challenge we face is the way that screens, digital media, and the internet have become the primary way that social life is mediated. Whatever expansion in potential reach for socialists that has resulted from social media has also come at the cost of our most basic social muscles atrophying. It’s not hard to imagine how a sudden black out of telecommunications could be entirely paralyzing for many. Only organizations built on strong social ties and personal relationships will  be resilient through such crises.

IV. Build a class party.

Fighting the boss, making more socialists, and being socialists everywhere will require socialists to build and participate in many different kinds of organizations. However, socialists and their various organizations need a connective tissue, a political organization that acts as a ballast to give focus and direction to the larger workers movement. We need a party.

The party we need to build is nothing like the existing political parties in the US today. We do not need a “third party”. We need to build the first party in the United States that is truly democratic, has a mass character, is explicitly socialist, and is solely of and for the working class. Much more than a ballot line, more than a caucus of elected officials in legislatures, the party is an instrument the working class uses to become “a class for itself”. It is an instrument for fighting the boss, making more socialists, being socialists everywhere, and ultimately, an instrument for conquering the political power necessary to catalyze the transition to socialism. 

We know we cannot simply declare the formation of such a party today. We see DSA as the foundation that can make such a class party possible. As such, building a class party means building DSA, both the national organization and our local chapter. We see DSA as well positioned to be the foundation for a working class party because it is explicitly socialist, because of its multi-tendency “big tent” nature, its commitment to being member-driven and democratic, and its nation-wide scope. In contrast to the large number of progressive NGOs that are staff-driven and dependent on foundation money, DSA is an organization that any ordinary working class person can not only join but actively shape and have ownership over through their participation in it.

There is, of course, much work to be done to build DSA. We need to shape DSA into an organization that can regularly fight and deliver for workers, that unlocks members’ potential for activism and leadership, that is more representative of the working class as a whole, and that is recognized as a powerful political force, a force independent from the Democratic Party, from entrenched political elites, and from the ruling class. We need to transform DSA from an activist organization to a mass organization that can be the political home of millions of ordinary working class people who do not yet see themselves as political actors.

***

Our road to power is long and the path will not always be clear, but our hope is not dimmed. At every possible juncture along the way we will need to engage in constant analysis of the present moment, evaluate our trajectory, and rigorously debate our next steps. As we undertake this journey we see these four priorities as guiding principles to keep us focused, to keep us united, and to keep us moving forward towards democratic socialism. 

The post Political Priorities To Move Chicago DSA Forward  appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Pasco hernando DSA is back and now on instagram, with plenty of new members ready to organize! See us on instagram, twitter, and bluesky. Check the bottom of the website for the links!

Are you interested in becoming the best organizer you can be? Do you want to expand socialism here in Milwaukee, but are unsure of where and how to start? Have you been involved but feel like the project did not go anywhere? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class is for you! 

This nine week program will focus on holistically teaching you to be an unstoppable organizer who builds socialism, changes hearts and minds, and impacts our city.  You will learn direct action organizing, as defined by Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists, in which we organize actions, campaigns, and tactics to “1) win real, immediate, concrete improvement in people’s lives . . . 2) Give people a sense of their own power . . . 3) Alter the relations of power.” 

Interested individuals will apply (Click here, which is due by 11:59 p.m. on June 10, 2025), be interviewed, and enter the program if selected.  DSA membership is not required to participate, but is encouraged. 

This education program will be a combination of in-person events with virtual events if necessary. Each unit will be roughly a week, with a week break in the middle of the program. Each unit will consist of classroom-style instruction in the unit topic (no more than 2 hours, which will be in-person), field work in organizing (which will be at least 3 hours and consist of having conversations, moving people to action, and building infrastructure for a strong socialist movement involving several types of campaigns), and time for personal reflection. Each participant must commit to the entire program and, unless excused, attend every unit instruction, and field work session.  Missing more than two classes and field work sessions may result in removal from the program.  

This is the sixth time this program has been offered, and it is back by popular demand! The two instructors have updated and revised the course to make you even more prepared to lead in socialism.  

Time commitment per week: 

Unit instruction: 2 hours 

Organizing work: 3 hours 

Miscellaneous tasks: 1 hour 

Total time per week: 6 hours

Weekly Schedule 

Class will be conducted on Thursday evenings from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. and held in-person at Zao MKE, located at 2319 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, 53211.  

Field work will be held at regular intervals over the week, with options to organize at several points during the week: 

(tentative schedule, subject to change . . .) 

Saturdays, 9:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m.

Sundays 12:00 p.m. until 3:00 p.m. 

Mondays 5:30 until 8:30 p.m. 

Program Timeline: 

June 10 at 11:59 p.m.:

Application deadline – apply here

June 12:

Start of nine week program ( class held, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.), held at Zao MKE, located at 2319 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI 53211

June 19:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

June 26:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

July 3:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

July 10:

Week Break

July 17:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

July 24:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

July 31: 

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

August 7: 

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Units

Each unit helps to answer the question: what is organizing? 

Welcome: what is organizing?

• Get to know participants and instructor
• Define scope of class and intentions 
• Determine goals and desired outcomes 

Organizing is one-on-one Conversations

• Learn the 7 point organizing conversation 
• Practice the conversation and its elements 

Organizing is building the committee and the campaign 

• The importance (or not) of the committee
• Power Mapping the campaign 
• Strategy Chart 

Organizing is holistic productivity 

• Traction versus distraction 
• Time management and its importance
• The Reverse Calendar 
• Overcoming blocks to action

Organizing is a mindset 

• Acknowledging hurdles and setbacks 
• Failure is a great option
• Develop a practice to keep you going

Organizing is raising money and managing it

• Why money is OK 
• How to bring energy and money to your campaign 
• The basics of campaign budgeting and finance 

Organizing is communications

• What does “messaging” mean? 
• The power of media 
• Writing workshop

Organizing is bringing it all together

• You’ve got momentum – now what? 
• Recap of unit themes

Reviews

Here is what previous students have to say about the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class: 

“[Before the class] I had no idea about the actual work of organizing.  Now I feel confident that I would be able to become a leader in a campaign setting . . .” 

“I loved the practical application of socialism . . . [and] I loved the far-reaching application of some of the class content.” 

“This is a great way to move into the world of socialism. . . thank you so much for offering this course” 

“This [class] is a great first step for anyone looking to start organizing . . .” 

“I radically grew in my comfort around being upfront and simply being able to approach a complete stranger with a potentially controversial topic.” 

“New organizers and experienced organizers can benefit from this class.” 

“Generally speaking my confidence level just interacting with people about socialism has gone through the roof.  I have been given a phenomenal overview of how to organize and I feel confident that I can find out what works best for me in the future.”  

“It was great to grow as an organizer within the confines of a welcoming community/instructor.” 

“I feel more confident organizing outside of an electoral context.”  

Meet your instructors: 

Alex Brower

Alex Brower is a labor leader, socialist organizer, and Milwaukee’s 3rd district alderperson as a DSA endorsed elected. Professionally, Alex has been the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, which organizes union retirees. In his organizing work, Alex has saved jobs from privatization, helped workers win a union voice on the job, defeated a temp agency, organized against a proposed iron-ore mine, helped bring comprehensive sex education to Beloit Public Schools, and won workplace healthcare for many uninsured MPS Substitute Teachers. As an MPS substitute teacher and former Milwaukee Rec. Department instructor, Alex brings a host of experience teaching others. Alex has also been a candidate for Milwaukee City Comptroller and School Board, running both times as a socialist. 

Autumn Pickett

Autumn Pickett is a union organizer and Communications Director for American Federation of Teachers – Wisconsin. She helped win back voting rights for 20,000 students while attending college in Indiana, protect 100’s of custodial and grounds crew jobs from privatization across Wisconsin, sink Billionaire Howard Schultz’s 2016 presidential run, use organizing tactics that garnered national headlines, and mentor dozens of YDSA chapters across the country that continue to make real wins for working people. She has served on the National Coordinating Committee for YDSA, as Milwaukee DSA’s Education Officer, and currently represents Milwaukee DSA on the statewide Socialists in Office committee. Autumn is excited to bring her years of experience mentoring new socialist organizers over to the Milwaukee Organizer Class for the first time and help build a people powered movement in Cream City alongside each of you.

Any questions? 

Contact Alex Brower at 414-949-8756 or milwaukeedsa@gmail.com 

Apply now!

Apply here, or copy and paste this URL into your web browser: https://forms.gle/JLgc33sE3fpK8TSH7

By Bennett T The United States intends to target socialists for political persecution. It will investigate them inappropriately, it will charge them spuriously, it will revoke their legal protections, and it will remove them from the United States. The administration has already sent surveys to researchers and organizations overseas who receive federal funding, and this […]

By B. Maloney Politics permeate every aspect of our lives. While discussions may arise about distinguishing human issues from political ones, it is evident that human issues are becoming increasingly politicized. How can we protect ourselves from the overwhelming and divisive attacks on human issues? On Tyranny offers insights into the resistance needed to navigate […]

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

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

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

The Cost of Modern Eugenics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is to Be Done? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) as we know it existed, New York City’s bus system was an amalgamation of private bus companies that operated on a franchise basis – they had contracts with the city detailing where they could run and what fares they could charge.

One such private company was Fifth Avenue Coach (FACO). It had a monopoly on most of upper Manhattan and all Bronx routes, and was staffed by TWU Labor. In the early 1960s, real-estate mogul and transit poacher Harry Weinberg orchestrated a hostile takeover of FACO’s board. He purchased a majority of its shares and coordinated a proxy faction (who included Roy M. Cohn, lawyer for THAT Senator Joseph McCarthy) that installed him as Chair. Transit labor knew Weinberg had a past of taking over transit systems, keeping their real estate holdings, then offloading the systems to their cities or states but benefiting from the real estate gains, as he did in Dallas, Scranton, and Honolulu. His goal as a capitalist was not to provide quality public transportation to the public, but to use quasi-public transportation services as a tool of private capital accumulation.

On the morning of March 1st, 1962, Weinberg laid of 29 TWU fare collectors, doorman, and watchmen, all of whom were unable to drive because of age, injury, or illness. The TWU stopped work on all FACO lines by 5pm that day.

More photos here: http://www.twulocal100.org/story/60-years-ago-fight-survival-and-birth-mabstoa

Mayor Wagner meanwhile wasted no time condemning Weinberg for precipitating a strike and threatening cuts, layoffs, AND a fare increase. Within 2 days he moved with the Board of Estimate and the state Legislature  to condemn FACO’s buses and garages and seize them for municipal use.

On March 8th, the Board of Estimates striped FACO of 80% of its franchises.
On March 15 & 19th, the state assembly and senate passed the bills needed for the city to condemn and seize FACO’s garage/maintenance properties and rolling stock.
By the end of the month, under the newly created Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA), the buses were back online (repainted to city colors) and strikers went back to work as public employees.

The state, neither before nor since, has never moved so quickly in public transit. Perhaps this is because public sector workers are no longer legally able to strike under the Taylor Law, which severely curtails the strength Labor has as an organized body to defend not only their rights, but the rights of the public.

History taken from From a Nickel to a Token (2016) by Andrew J. Sparberg.

The post The Power of the State + Labor: A fascinating history of NYC buses appeared first on Building for Power.