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Imagine that in the poorest neighborhoods of Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago, you could find a public park with glistening swimming pools, world-class sports and recreation facilities, and spectacular landscape architecture rather than vacant lots. If you are a single mother, rather than being forced  to lug your clothes blocks away to pay to wash your clothes, you can come to a public, well-maintained, space to do your laundry for free while you eat delicious food grown at the agroecological garden nearby. Meanwhile, your children can learn how to swim, attend workshops on how to grow food in the city, hit up the planetarium to learn how Mayan Cosmology relates to the Big Bang, hang out at the skate park, or take a guitar lesson.

As you eat your lunch and do your laundry, there is a staffer whose job it is to talk to you and be on the lookout for any whiff of domestic violence in your life. If you are dealing with domestic violence, right next door is a counselor who can help you. Imagine in this scenario, somewhere in the most gutted sections of U.S. cities, you can have access to an expert lawyer should you need one. Regardless of what you’re dealing with at home, you are welcome to see the massage therapist and acupuncturist in this same public building, a space for women known as Casa Siemprevivas. She doesn’t just provide you with bodywork, but will teach these practices to fifteen of your neighbors and friends so that you can use this space for peer-support bodywork circles. These are spaces where emotional release through laughter and crying are encouraged. All of this is free and funded by the government.

In the U.S., this kind of investment in such expansive public services remains imaginary, for now, but it is very much real and operating efficiently in Mexico City under the leadership of the MORENA party of President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the left-wing populist leader of the country. 

Such public institutions in Mexico are called “Units for Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony” or UTOPIAs for short. There are now sixteen of these, at present exclusively in Mexico City’s most populous and poorest borough of Iztapalapa. Virtually all UTOPIAs provide services for women dealing with domestic violence, harm-reduction forward centers for drug users, spaces to support queer and trans folks, community centers for the elderly, and workshops to support men in deconstructing toxic masculinity – which in practice involves teaching men whose relationships are in terminal decline or men who have become single fathers due to unforeseen tragedy, how to do things like wash dishes, fry eggs, or braid hair. No small thing.

Each UTOPIA  has a range of other specialized services. For example, UTOPIA La Libertad, sited directly behind a prison wall, has a petting zoo and a planetarium. UTOPIA Meyehualco, occupying what used to be an extensive park full of soccer fields for use by exclusive leagues only, now has a large animatronic dinosaur park (yes, you read that right) and a hockey rink. UTOPIA Olini hosts extensive manicured ponds, a tidepool, and gym that’s the home field for an outstanding breakdancing squad. UTOPIA Estrella Huizachtépetl sits atop a reclaimed drainage area from a water treatment facility that has been converted into an extensive wetland ecosystem. And UTOPIA Quetzacoatl, sited unusually across multiple discontinuous buildings and spaces in a dense urban area, has a strong focus on children’s mental health services, with an art therapist on staff. Some of the UTOPIAs have regular workshops supporting residents, especially women, in forming small businesses and cooperatives under the banner of the ‘solidarity economy.’

In the following section, I will share more stories of how people use and benefit from the services provided at the UTOPIAS based on several months of research on the ground in Mexico. My aim is to expand our collective imagination in the United States and elsewhere in the imperial core about what a robust urban commons of care can look like. In addition, I hope to share the deeper history of working class organizing and struggle that made these programs a reality. Despite the many differences between our organizing contexts, I suggest that US organizers have much to learn from organizers who have built mass power in Mexico.  

Stories from below: how the UTOPIAs improve the lives of working people

With all of these free social services on offer with a strongly anti-carceral, feminist, and ecological inflection to boot, it is no wonder that the UTOPIAs have garnered attention among international left-wing circles as a concrete example of what municipal ecosocialist politics can look like.  As part of my research in urban political ecology, I’m now spending a sabbatical semester here and I’m basing this article on visits to eight of the sixteen UTOPIAs and interviews with a range of staffers, users, and functionaries.

Across these visits and interviews, an unambiguously positive picture emerged. Mental health counselors told me about how they were able to spend far more time with clients working at the UTOPIAs than they had been working at understaffed clinics. 

An OB-GYN who rotated among the UTOPIAs believed that she was finally able to do what she went to school to do: “bring reproductive justice directly to the people.”

A farmer on staff at UTOPIA La Libertad shared that his agroecological vision for the future was that “cities can and must grow their own food.”

An elderly woman told me that the workshops on death and dying provided her with community and solace after her husband passed. 

A 24-year old butcher who used to be addicted to heroin got clean thanks to the harm reduction and counseling services at UTOPIA Teotongo, and he now goes to the site at least once a week to assist the on-site shaman in conducting temazcal sweat lodge ceremonies. He explained, “the UTOPIAs provided me with a life that I could have never imagined before.”

A group of teenage girls who started a punk rock band confirmed that there was no way they could have done so without the free instruments and practice spaces provided by the UTOPIA.

The UTOPIAs also demonstrate that expanding the urban commons of care-giving does not need to be expensive. The government of Iztapalapa has stated that each UTOPIA cost $100 million pesos (about $5 million USD) to build, with an operating budget of about $1 million USD. Even if these figures are underestimates, and even if they were ten times higher in the United States due to higher prices for materials and labor, the numbers would still not be very burdensome when you consider the billions that our big cities spend on cops and tax breaks for the rich.

As I spoke to workers and users of the UTOPIAs and asked about how these spaces were built, one name came up consistently: Clara Brugada, the former mayor of Iztapalapa and now Head of Government of all of Mexico City. I was told by mental health workers, retirees, hydroponic technicians, and site administrators that the UTOPIAs were the brainchild of Brugada, and that it was through her vision and through the sheer force of her political will, backed as it was by the people, that the UTOPIAs were built. 

The consensus that I heard was so widespread that it felt silly to simply deny it , even if it seemed implausible that a single individual could compile such a radical set of diverse services related to issues as varied as mental health, science education, and urban agriculture. But still, something seemed incomplete – so I dug deeper. Through my research into the recent history of Mexico City’s politics,  it became clear that there was in fact a mass movement that shaped the city’s urban political matrix, developed and piloted many of the initiatives commonly found at the UTOPIAs today, and in a significant way directly produced Clara Brugada. It’s called the Urban Popular Movement. 

The Urban Popular Movement and MORENA: political organization in the wake of neoliberalism

Decades before the MORENA party took shape, a far more scattered constellation of urban organizations were fighting for working people’s immediate demands for titles to their land, water services, and electricity. But in some instances, these organizations went beyond fighting for immediate political demands, and also experimented with and ultimately built direct services to improve people’s lives. They created centers for women dealing with domestic violence, grew food, regenerated urban forest ecosystems, and provided harm reduction services for drug users. In essence, they built many of the elements that we now find, at scale, across the UTOPIAS.

That urban organizers in Mexico City managed to create a forceful social movement with real political muscle under these conditions should give us further confidence that we can too.

The Urban Popular Movement itself built political power among the city’s disenfranchised squatters, the informally employed urban poor, and other working class people clinging to some semblance of normality and dignity.  This movement grew in the fertile soils of urban disaffection with the decades of pro-capital rule by the Institutional Party of the Revolution(the PRI) and subsequent conservative opposition. 

The ruling PRI party had historically maintained its power from the late 1940s all through the 1990s and even part of the 2000s through a corporatist structure built on three organizational pillars under its strict control: theConfederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM), representing labor, the Confederación Nacional de Campesinos (CNC) representing peasants, and the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP) representing urban middle classes, “civil society” organizations, and, in theory, the urban poor. 

By the 1980s, though, large numbers of Mexico City residents were neither in industrial unions nor were they meaningfully represented by the CNOP. For those of us living in the United States in the 21st century, this likely sounds very familiar: union density has plummeted in our own country since the 1980s, and ‘civil society’ organizations have gradually receded from popular life.  

Just like in the United States, by the 1980s the labor movement in Mexico was a shadow of its militant past.  The CTM formed in the crucible of the 1930s. The progressive president Lázaro Cárdenas established the organization with the aim of bringing together the more militant and communist-inflected industrial proletariat with more independent workers in the transit sector and those working for smaller businesses. But after the rightist Miguel Alemán Valdés came to power in 1946, he rechristened the official party as the Institutional Party of the Revolution(the PRI) and set out to purge militants from organized labor. He appointed Alfonso Ochoa Partida, nicknamed “el charro” for his love of the Mexican rodeo sport of charrería, as the head of the CTM to carry out these purges. To this day, flat-footed pro-capital unions are known as “sindicatos charros” in Mexico. These capital-friendly unions remained powerful political forces throughout the economic halcyon years of relatively prosperous Import Substitution Industrialization during the 1950s and 1960s. 

This era of relative class harmony held together by the PRI’s corporatist structure started to unravel in the late 1960s. The 1968 Tlaltelolco and subsequent Halconazo massacres of student activists, followed by the dirty war of the 1970s carried out by José López Portillo, created a crisis of political legitimacy for the PRI. Despite the relatively moderate demands of the student movement for political reform, the PRI was unwilling to tolerate any challenge to their corporatist hegemony. The PRI’s crisis of political legitimacy was supercharged by the global economic crisis of the late 1970s, which sounded the death-knell for Import Substitution Industrialization that had maintained rising standards of living in the postwar decades. These combined crises spelled the beginning of the end for the PRI, and created political openings for left-wing opposition to organize and build.

During the 1970s and 1980s, radical organizers and students who had fled to the countryside during the repressive days of the Dirty War had been hard at work carrying out rural political education programs, often inspired by the Maoist mass line theory.  Many peasants already had existing radical commitments anchored in the legacy of Emiliano Zapata, the militant champion of peasant land rights from Mexico’s revolutionary days. Such commitments were reinforced by their lived experiences of rural economic struggle over the years. 

As the 1970s economic crises began to make rural livelihoods less viable, tens of thousands of these newly dispossessed peasants began to move to the outskirts of Mexico City. While these new arrivals were poor, lacked formal political power, and were highly vulnerable to the predations of greedy landlords, they were far from passive actors. They brought their radical political analyses with them and quickly began to form politicized community organizations. As the legitimacy of formal avenues for popular urban political participation collapsed, these organizations grew into the Urban Popular Movement. 

The story of thirty-year-old Enrique Cruz, a militant with one of the organizations of the Urban Popular Movement known as the UPREZ (the Emiliano Zapata Popular Revolutionary Union), helps shed light on this history. He explained to me, 

I’m an Indigenous Soque-speaker and I was born in Oaxaca. My parents and grandparents were deeply involved in the struggle against gold and silver mining that was destroying our land and threatening the ecosystems we cared about. When I moved to the city, I found a school run by the UPREZ adorned with murals of Emiliano Zapata, and I knew that these were my people. Through the UPREZ, I gained a strong political education and became an organizer fighting for dignified housing, providing direct education and political education to others, and working on other issues.

Organizations like the UPREZ emerged in the 1980s, and became especially strong in the aftermath of the catastrophic 1985 earthquake that sparked a wave of urban mutual aid activity. One of the strongest of these organizations is known as the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo (the Union of Settlers of San Miguel Teotongo), located in the far northeast corner of Iztapalapa on the edge of Mexico City.  

When I visited their community center and office to examine their archives in August and explained that I was interested in the history and political consequences of the UTOPIAs, staffer Marco Antonio Flores informed me that “If you’re interested in the UTOPIAs, you’ve come to the right place. Much of what you see in the UTOPIAs – services for women facing domestic violence, support for drug users, agroecology – we piloted those things, experimented, and developed them starting in the 1980s. To see them widespread and supported by the government now is a wonderful thing.” 

On first encountering the UTOPIAs, there were some things that seemed familiar. In my political and academic work, I have seen an impressive range of projects with similar aims, from scrappy anarchist outfits doing land projects, to non-profit sexual health and harm-reduction centers, to community-based agriculture organizations. But to see these things, and so much more, packaged together and brought to scale with the full muscle of the state behind them felt like something quite different. 

What made these organizations successful in not only fighting for basic urban services and also finding a foothold in national and city politics? I asked Marco Antonio why his organization seemed to be so robust and so persistent, with such a strong presence in the community today, while other member organizations of the Urban Popular Movement seemed to have disbanded. He responded, “In the 1980s, many of the organizations focused narrowly on demanding land titles, water hookups, electricity, and even rent control. Once some of those demands were met, they didn’t have much of a reason to continue. Our focus was larger: we fought for basic rights but also built  a vibrant community center with a more expansive goal of providing for the well-being of community members in a comprehensive way.” 

Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada herself is of this movement. While she was a student, she began organizing with Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo. She worked to organize for basic services like electricity, water, and sewage. According to an elder woman organizer who has lived in the community since the 1970s, Brugada played a critical role as a young strategist in the early 1980s. She pushed their group to lobby the government to fulfill these demands, in addition to self-organizing to provide services that the state would not.

In the 1990s, Brugada was a leader in a campaign to repurpose a women’s prison that also held political prisoners during the dirty war into a preparatory school. This campaign, which we might today describe as ‘abolitionist,’ ultimately succeeded and the school was inaugurated in the year 2000. While they fought for land titles, Brugada continued to organize with the Unión de Colonos to establish a community center to support women dealing with domestic violence, to restore urban ecosystems, and to provide support for drug users.

Here, there is a larger lesson for the US left, for DSA, and perhaps even more specifically for an incoming Zohran Mamdani administration in New York City. We have movements in our cities that are building the capacity for mass, militant mobilizations. These include the tenant movement and the labor movement. But they also include innovative projects carried out by community-based groups focused on environmental justice, reproductive justice, agroecology, and more. 

In other words, the community organizations of Iztapalapa that endured the test of time and won durable political power didn’t just fight for things like rent control and basic urban sanitation, as vital as those things were. They also directly built the means of providing urban community care with scarcely any resources, and in doing so ensured that when a political opening came about, their ideas and practices would be right there on the table for sympathetic political forces to run with. 

These groups intentionally built partnerships with people who would eventually build the MORENA party and become part of the state apparatus. As the MORENA party consolidated power, these groups were therefore integrated into municipal governance rather than kept on the periphery. 

Existing community organizations and the battle for the urban commons

Each of the UTOPIAs is situated in a neighborhood with a particular political and economic history. While the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo was a powerful and visionary force for community organizing and development, other UTOPIAs had significant if less persistent community organizations in place. Many UTOPIAs are sited on formerly abandoned lots and parks. The Tecoloxtitlan and Papalotl UTOPIAs, for example, were both sited in empty urban fields that used to be black markets for stolen auto parts. 

The programming coordinator from UTOPIA Papalotl, Rodrigo Castellano Hernández, shared  that starting in the late 2000s, a group of community members came together to start running youth programming around the community. They offered martial arts classes and started to experiment with urban agriculture. By the time that Clara Brugada became the mayor of Iztapalapa, there were already robust community efforts in place to reclaim the site for positive and care-forward community activities. 

Likewise, in UTOPIA Tecoloxtitlan, a group of neighbors combined community resources to start a center for special education and an Alcoholics Anonymous center in the park, self-organizing community labor to clean up the dilapidated urban field. And in UTOPIA Meyehualco, which was built in a park that was previously available only for private soccer league members. The municipal government, alongside allied community organizations, organized to secure this land for free public use despite objections from the private club members who sought to maintain their complete ownership over the property.

In cities in the United States, the specific process of finding space for projects like this would likely look very different than it did in Iztapalapa. At the same time, US cities do have considerable leeway over municipal budgets, even if the ruling classes have been terribly successful at maintaining funding cops rather than care year in and year out. But radical movements in the US have demonstrated that things need not be this way. From teachers striking for better conditions over the past 15 years, to abolitionist campaigns in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, our own movements have revealed that municipal budgets can be meaningful sites of class struggle.

It is worth emphasizing that the UTOPIAs do not merely function as an organ of the MORENA party and Mayor Clara Brugada. Radical community organizations use the spaces to organize independent political power too. In September, I attended an event at UTOPIA Paplotl put on by one of the most important member organizations of the UPREZ, Enrique’s organizing home. In a packed auditorium of about five hundred people hailing from dozens of smaller community-based organizations and cooperatives focused mainly on housing issues, the leaders of the UPREZ formally inducted these groups and their many working class members into their organization. 

One of the founders and movement elders of the URPEZ, Jaime Rello, described how these mass movements relate to the UTOPIAs and the MORENA party succinctly:

Comrades, the UTOPIAS are the synthesis of all this experience and struggle of more than 57 years since the 1968 movement. Our comrade Clara, who emerged from the popular movements and the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo, learned well from all this experience of struggle and now puts it into practice. But that’s not enough, comrades, if there isn’t a strong movement to continue to fight for these issues, because the pressures that we face and that Clara faces from the right, the pressures we face from the interests of capital, are very strong. 

Our organizations are not built solely by leaders. Our organizations are built by everyone. We need everyone to contribute and put the collective interest before our individual interests. We have come as far as we have because of  thousands and thousands of social activists who have dedicated their lives to transforming this country and this city.

The UPREZ and the larger Urban Popular Movement are undeniably allied with the MORENA party. Clara Brugada herself came from these working class movements of Iztapalapa. Nonetheless, it is clear that these organizations are not demobilizing simply because one of their own is in power. The relationship between these mass organizations and the MORENA government could serve as a model for how DSA and other left organizations might relate to a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty or similar administrations: using the spaces, resources, and platforms provided by such an administration to fiercely organize for the rights of workers and tenants, to build independent centers of community power, and to develop a robust urban commons of care both within and outside of the state.

The historical roots of the UTOPIAs show us that community-driven initiatives to care for one another can be elevated and brought to scale by the state when conditions are right. It is not necessary to build good ideas for community care, urban agroecology, and physical and mental well-being from scratch. Many organizations have been doing this work. With relatively modest funding from the state, they can blossom into serious programs available to the masses. In the U.S. context, we can find similar types of local and regional organizations that have the vision and experience that could help  our versions of UTOPIAs flourish.

Armed with visions of community care similar to what has been realized in Mexico City along with the growing political muscle of DSA, we are in a position to fight for precisely these things in our cities. We should seize this opportunity, in New York City, and across the country.

Bibliography

In addition to interviews and field observations, this piece draws heavily on the following books on the urban history of Mexico City:

• Davis, Diane. 1994. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. Temple University Press.

• Gerlofs, Ben. 2023. Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City. Vanderbilt University Press.

• Vitz, Matthew. 2020. A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. Duke University Press.

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By: Terence Cawley

On Wednesday, November 5, Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) announced the results of their strike authorization vote initiated on October 24.

A supermajority of 92% of SBWU voted to strike dozens of cities on one of the company’s most profitable days of the year, November 13, if Starbucks does not “finalize fair contracts and stop unionbusting.”

BREAKING: After months of stonewalling by Starbucks, unionized baristas just voted 92% to authorize a ULP strike unless $SBUX finalizes fair contracts & stops union busting.

If forced, our baristas will strike in dozens of cities on Nov 13– the company’s busiest day of the year.

— Starbucks Workers United (@SBWorkersUnited) November 5, 2025

Baristas at unionized stores across the United States voted on whether to authorize a strike over the course of several days. The voting process coincided with a wave of seventy practice pickets occurring in sixty cities nationwide (including Worcester, MA; Epping, NH; and Providence, RI) from the 24^th through November 1, as the union ramped up efforts to secure a fair first contract for union stores. 

“Workers are done waiting around,” said Starbucks Workers United spokesperson Michelle Eisen. “We’re coming up on close to one year since the last official bargaining session with the company, so it seems like it’s the right time.”

Further strategy for the strike remains in the hands of membership, with ommittees that determine the timeline, duration, and scope of any future actions. “All of our escalation strategies are worker-developed,” said Eisen.

As the strike authorization ramped up, practice pickets offered an opportunity not just for workers to literally practice for a possible strike, as well as to show customers what such a strike would look like while demonstrating to Starbucks workers’ commitment to this fight.

We’re not bluffing. We’re showing how strong we are and making Starbucks ask: is this really something they want to deal with at their busiest time of the year?

A Brief History of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)

Since Starbucks workers in Buffalo, N.Y. started Starbucks Workers United in August 2021, over 650 stores representing over 12,000 workers have unionized. However, none of these stores have reached a collective bargaining agreement.  

Starbucks Workers United’s demands include changes that will enable more baristas to make a living wage, like higher pay, expanded healthcare benefits and paid leave, and more consistent scheduling. The union is also asking for stronger protections from racial and sexual harassment, as well as the enshrinement of current benefits in a contract so they cannot be revoked by the company later. 

Starbucks initially opposed unionization efforts aggressively, leading to over 700 charges of Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) filed against Starbucks with the National Labor Relations Board. The company reached an agreement with Starbucks Workers United in February 2024 to negotiate a “foundational framework” for contracts for union stores. Starbucks then failed to meet its own deadline to agree to this framework by the end of 2024, leading to workers at over 300 Starbucks location going on strike on Christmas Eve for the largest labor action in company history. 

Starbucks Workers United and the company entered mediation in February 2025. The union has made some progress in contract negotiations, reaching 33 tentative agreements with the company on important issues including just cause, dress codes, and worker health and safety. However, Starbucks continues to hold out on the workers’ three core demands: increasing worker hours to address understaffing and ensure workers qualify for benefits, increasing take-home pay, and resolving all outstanding ULP charges. 

Eisen, who originally organized in Buffalo as part of the initial wave of unionization prior to becoming SBWU’s spokesperson, said: 

More take-home pay means workers won’t have to choose between paying rent and buying groceries. Sufficient staffing of stores means one barista won’t have to be working the jobs of three baristas.”

The most recent offer from Starbucks, which the union rejected in April, offered no raises for union workers in their first year, 1.5 percent raises in subsequent years (“it is actually pennies when you do the math for most workers,” said Eisen), and no solutions for understaffing and the outstanding ULP charges. There was also no indication that the company was willing to move on these points. 

Worker Dignity Means Customer Dignity

Beyond improving worker quality of life and repairing the damage Starbucks has done to its brand by being “the largest violator of U.S. labor law in modern history,” Eisen argues that the reforms the union is fighting for would also improve the customer experience. When she first started working for Starbucks fifteen years ago, she recalls how adequate staffing allowed stores to maintain higher quality standards for food and drinks. 

Eisen noted:

You walk into a Starbucks now, and there are two people on the floor running back and forth trying to play the role of multiple positions because the stores aren’t staffed appropriately. If I haven’t been a long-time Starbucks customer and I walk into a Starbucks now, the likelihood of me coming back, seeing the state of the stores, is pretty slim. We have to invest in the people running these stores.

Starbucks Workers United claims on their website that Starbucks could finalize fair union contracts for less than the over $97 million Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol made for four months of work in 2024. Starbucks also covered the cost of Niccol commuting from his home in California to company headquarters in Seattle via private jet. The 2024 wage gap between Niccol and the median Starbucks worker was the largest of the 500 biggest public companies in the U.S., with Niccol making 6,666 times more than the average Starbucks employee.

On September 25, Starbucks announced that they would be closing hundreds of stores nationwide, along with firing 900 corporate workers. Of the 59 union stores included in this round of closures, eight of them were in Massachusetts. Several of those stores, like the Harvard Square and Davis Square locations, had just unionized within the last few months. 

In the weeks following the closures, Starbucks Workers United held practice pickets at stores in 35 cities, including one at the shuttered Harvard Square store and one in New York City which received a supportive visit from mayoral candidate and DSA member Zohran Mamdani. According to Eisen, the closures, rather than weakening the union, have led to a surge in organizing leads as workers are more motivated than ever to win a fair contract.

“It’s another example of the company making decisions with little to no notice and absolutely no input from workers,” said Eisen. “A lot of non-union workers are saying, ‘whoa, we need to get in on this. It’s clear the company doesn’t care about us.’” 

What Comes Next? 

The strike authorization vote and practice pickets come at a critical time for Starbucks Workers United. The holiday season, typically the busiest and most profitable time of year for Starbucks, is approaching fast. A strike during this season could add to the company’s already significant financial woes.

Starbucks stock is down 6 percent since the beginning of 2025. Same-store sales have declined for six consecutive quarters. 

Meanwhile, public pressure on Starbucks to bargain in good faith with its workers continues to intensify. In September, a coalition of 45 progressive organizations representing over 85 million people, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), sent an open letter to Niccol urging him to finalize fair union contracts with SBWU. Starbucks investors have also grown frustrated with the company’s unwillingness to resolve its labor issues, with several groups sending their own open letters to the Starbucks Board of Directors over the last few months.  

“Every day, more and more workers are willing to join the fight despite how they’re being treated, which is giving me hope, especially with the current political climate,” said Eisen. “If workers are willing to take on the risk to fight, how can I not fight?”

Supporters can join SBWU on the picket line and sign the No Contract, No Coffee pledge at https://sbworkersunited.org/take-action/. 

Terence Cawley is a member of Boston DSA.

The post Starbucks Workers United Supermajority Authorize ULP Strike for November 13 appeared first on Working Mass.

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Zohran Mamdani and New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) won the biggest electoral victory of the socialist movement in my lifetime and may have started a new era for the socialist movement. What comes next is up to every organized socialist in DSA and every soon-to-be organized socialist inspired by victories like Zohran’s. 

The post Zohran Won and You Can Do It Too appeared first on Democratic Left.

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Digital organizers from the Catherine Connolly campaign give insights into the tech tools that helped drive Connolly and Zohran to victory.

By Dan Albright and Henry De Groot

In the last two weeks, two monumental electoral victories have reenergized the international left: Catherine Connolly’s landslide victory in the Irish Presidential Election, and Zohran Mamdani’s heroic triumph in the New York City mayoral election.

The two campaigns were won both on the doors and online. In addition to both campaigns being powered by massive volunteer participation from broad layers of the socialist and progressive left, the two also utilized almost identical digital infrastructure and strategies.

Here are five of the digital approaches which won it big in 2025.

1. Dynamic Video Content: Instagram, FB Reels, and TikTok

It is almost a cliche now to note that Zohran has found success through his dynamic use of video content, and most especially his “man on the street” and “walk and talk” style videos. And the same has been noted about Connolly’s campaign, with the commentariat noting her campaign’s use of relatable content (like her keepie-uppies) to drive accidental virality. There is no doubt that video played a significant role in both campaigns, both in conveying a coherent political message capable of assembling a winning coalition and in bringing joy and whimsy into the political arena.

What is also interesting to note—at least for future campaigners seeking to replicate this video-campaigning style—is the use by both campaigns of supporter-sourced content in addition to high production value videos. Mamdani’s appearances on popular podcasts as well as tags in videos by social media influencers and spontaneous volunteers became a symbol of his popular appeal. Similarly, on the Connolly campaign, we leaned into grassroots desire to help the campaign, assembling a volunteer video team to edit timely and fun, if imperfect, videos and reels. We made it a priority, time allowing, to give volunteers runway to contribute as well as a platform for their work that they could be proud of. The core team created a brand kit of template guides and graphics that we shared on easy-to-use, collaborative platforms like Canva and CapCut. With some guidance and feedback, volunteers were able to make significant progress on or almost entirely independently edit content such as other volunteers’ testimonials, event recaps, and candidate appearances on popular podcasts, TV, and radio shows. Alongside high production value content we created, this content helped provide a steady stream of IG/FB story content and even video and reel posts throughout every day of the campaign. 

But the secret sauce was neither greater volume of social content nor jumping onto the trending formats of each week. The key is presenting the candidate authentically by channeling their ideosyncratic voice, style and perspective. In her trademark stubbornness to her convictions, Catherine Connolly refused to do anything staged or gimmicky for self-promotion. She’s the polar opposite of Mamdani’s social media ready style. So instead of trying to copy the now-cliched Mamdani walk-and-talk format or force a TikTok fad recreation, we let the cameras roll and let Catherine do Catherine. What we discovered and leaned into was Catherine’s vulnerable side—her comradely athleticism, musical skill, and playful way with children—the perfect counterbalance to the moral clarity and conviction that she was known for before the campaign. As Catherine spoke of building a movement, moments of Catherine engaging with the people proved to be some of our most viral clips.

2. Attention To Activation: ManyChat

It is no secret that Mamdani and Connolly used video to great effect. But how is attention on Instagram, X, or TikTok actually translated into people power? For a content creator, attention fuels brand deals or direct payments from social media platforms, and for a candidate, attention alone does lead to increased voter awareness, and therefore votes.

But attention can also lead to volunteer activation. Like the Mamdani campaign, we leveraged Manychat to direct message actionable links to engaged viewers. This led to thousands of contacts we could feed into our supporter development pipeline.

3. The Central Database: Solidarity Tech

Both campaigns relied on the same database software to collect and manage signups and volunteers: Solidarity Tech. This contact relationship software (CRM) built for organizers grew out of the rideshare organizing movement before being taken on by larger institutional unions to facilitate new organizing drives, in the auto industry and elsewhere.

Each campaign’s Solidarity Tech database was the central node of the campaign, where signups could be directed towards campaign events, WhatsApp groups, or volunteer shifts. The databases were used to source specialized volunteers or surrogates for video content, allowing for campaign HQ’s to maximize volunteer participation. They were also used to drive deeper engagement through targeted or micro-targeted content like volunteer pages in Irish or Bengali, or issue-based sign-on forms such as Artists For Connolly. And both campaigns made use of Solidarity Tech’s contact automation feature to build out layers of pre-set email and text progressions to allow campaign organizers to engage consistently at scale.

4. Online-To-Offline: Volunteer Event Maps

The Zohran campaign built its own custom volunteer map page to geographically display its array of Solidarity Tech RSVP pages, taking innovation from a tactic used effectively in the Bernie 2020 campaign. 

Volunteer event maps helped facilitate engagement at the hyper-local level, helping supporters clearly visualize volunteer opportunities, and therefore driving the high levels of doorknocking which was needed to win the campaign in the field.

Within weeks, the feature was replicated by the Solidarity Tech team so it could be used by the Connolly campaign. The Connolly campaign replicated the basic function of mapping canvassing shifts. But it also used the campaign map to facilitate locally organized cultural events, including trad music nights, nature walks, pub quizzes, and opportunities to meet up with Catherine as she traveled the country twice over.

In this way, the campaign leaned into a vibes-based, personable approach to campaigning. This was not only run in parallel with a more target-focused, traditional canvassing turnout approach, but also served as an accessible entry point to active supporters beyond the “usual suspects” to engage a new layer of progressives in political activism. 

5. Digital, But Local: WhatsApp Communities

There is a long-standing dispute within DSA about which is a better messaging tool: Signal, WhatsApp, or Discord.

And I hate to say it, but this election season has proved the WhatsAppers right. 

With the introduction of WhatsApp Communities in 2022, multiple group chats can be integrated into one ecosystem, or “Community.” This replicates the depth of engagement made possible by apps like Discord, without the same obstacle of accessibility.

The Zohran campaign made use of local WhatsApp communities to powerful effect, to bring together … This also allowed the campaign to more easily access the countless immigrant communities in New York City, many of which already use WhatsApp to communicate among themselves and with family back home.

The role of WhatsApp was perhaps even more prominent on the Connolly campaign, where, in Ireland as in many countries, it is already both the primary way to message and the existing predominant choice for coordinating progressive groups.

The campaign even built an in-house “WhatsApper,” which facilitated the text-banking of contacts stored in Solidarity Tech through WhatsApp, a workaround necessary to replace the CRM’s SMS feature, which is not yet operational in Ireland.

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International Solidarity, Parallel Victories

And it’s no accident that the two campaigns share a number of similarities in both political messaging and organizing methods.

The multi-party alliance which assembled during the Connolly campaign from its early days—including People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, the Green Party, and independent leftist trade union and housing activists—was in some ways the exact Irish parallel to the early Zohran coalition of the Democratic Socialist of America’s New York City chapter and its close allies like the New York Communities For Change.

In both cases, an early consolidation by the political left allowed the two campaigns to pick up less radical endorsements, such as the Working Families Party and the Irish Labour Party. Then, this momentum paved the way for support from the institutional center-left, with Brad Lander and many Democrats joining the Mamdani wagon between the primary win and the general election, while Sinn Féin endorsed Connolly around one month before the Irish election, consolidating her place as the official candidate of the opposition.

And the two campaigns were not only built of virtually identical political coalitions, but also almost identical campaign technological infrastructure, with the Zohran campaign providing the Connolly campaign with tactical insights in its early days.
Despite the tremendous, almost comical stylistic differences between Zohran’s triumph in metropolitan NYC and the Gal From Galway’s successful run for the Irish Presidency, the actual election results in both cases are quite similar.

New York City has a population of some 8.5 million, with around 5 million registered voters. Turnout in New York was around 40 percent, and Mamdani won 1,036,051 out of 2,055,921, or 50.4 percent to Cuomo’s 41.6 percent and Sliwa’s 7.1 percent.

The Republic of Ireland has a population of around 5.5 million, with some 3.6 million registered voters. Irish turnout was around 45 percent, with Connolly receiving 914,143 out of 1,656,436 total votes, or (when including spoiled votes) 55.1 percent, to Humphrey’s 25.6 percent, Gavin’s 6.2 percent, and 12.9 percent of ballots spoilt, mostly by right-wing voters.

Dan Albright is a founder and the Board Chair of Working Mass. Henry De Groot is an editor and a founder of Working Mass.

The post The Digital Playbook: 5 Tactics That Helped Connolly and Zohran Win appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

Happy Halloween, socialists! Have fun out there tonight, and if you're dressed up as a zombie, remember only to eat the rich.

Soon enough, it'll be back to business: for the next couple weeks, we'll be getting ready for our annual chapter convention on Sunday, Nov. 16, at the Old Labor Hall (46 Granite St.) in Barre. There, we'll elect new officers and set priorities for 2026.

No event plays a bigger role in shaping the direction of our chapter's work. We need your attendance!

And if you're a member, you still have time to declare your candidacy for an officer position or to submit a resolution or bylaws amendment. We'd like to receive proposals by Nov. 3 in order to give ourselves time to put together a convention bulletin.

RSVP here. We'll start with a potluck at 11 a.m. Carpools will be available. See our flyer and a couple photos from last year below.

Meanwhile, those of you who live in Burlington may have heard that GMDSA member Marek Broderick has announced his bid for reelection as Ward 8's city councilor. If you missed the launch party last week at Folino's Pizza, you can learn more about Marek's campaign on his website.

Below, you'll find a smaller-than-usual calendar of GMDSA committee meetings. That's because all of our committees must be reauthorized annually at the chapter convention: after Nov. 16, we technically don't know which committees will or won't exist.

If you want to create a new one, you can do so by submitting a resolution. You can email us here if you need any help writing one or have any other questions about the convention. See you on Nov. 16!

GMDSA MEETINGS & EVENTS
🚲 Our Urbanism Committee will meet on Monday, Nov. 3, at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

🧑‍🏭 The next meeting of our Labor Committee will take place on Monday, Nov. 10, at 6 p.m. on Zoom.

🔨 Talk about your job and learn about shop-floor organizing from peers at Workers' Circle (co-hosted by the Green Mountain IWW) on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month, including Nov. 12, at 6 p.m. at Migrant Justice (179 S. Winooski Ave., Burlington).

‼️ Again, our annual chapter convention will take place on Sunday, Nov. 16, at Barre's Old Labor Hall (46 Granite St.) at 11 a.m.

STATE AND LOCAL NEWS
📰 Burlington band Marxist Jargon has released a new album, to each according to their needs.

📰 The Vermont State Employees' Association staged a demonstration in Waterbury against Gov. Scott, who has ordered the state's remote workers to return to the office by Dec. 1.

COMMUNITY FLYERS

Democratic Socialist Kelsea Bond was just elected to the Atlanta City Council. Kelsea is a long-time DSA member and organizer. For many years, they have worked closely with local labor unions to expand workers’ rights on picket lines, at sip-ins and community meetings, in marches, and inside and outside of the State Capitol. They have canvassed for reproductive justice and advocated for the City to fund life-saving abortion care. They have fought to Stop Cop City and instead fund public services, build affordable housing, and expand mass transit. Our Chapter is immensely proud of their victory, as well as the work of the hundreds of volunteers and Atlanta DSA members who made this historic win possible.

For months, our members knocked doors and talked to District 2 residents about the issues that matter to working people — affordable housing, green public transit, and an economy for the 99%. The success that came from this massive effort proves that these bread-and-butter issues are broadly and deeply popular — even here in the deep south, even in a city whose government too often bends to corporate interests and the capitalist class.

This people-powered campaign was about standing up to billionaire commercial property owners who aren’t paying their fair share in taxes, and colluding landlords who are jacking up our rent year after year. It was about closing Atlanta’s wealth gap, which is one of the highest in the nation, by fighting for workers’ rights and a guaranteed living wage. It was about protecting the trans and immigrant members of our community, who are under attack by the fascist Trump administration and the Republican-controlled State government.

It was about building greener, more resilient city infrastructure that can withstand climate disaster and make Atlanta a more convenient and affordable place to call home. It was about ensuring that no Atlanta resident is without housing, healthcare, and a truly democratic say in how our city is run. We plan to continue our fight for working-class Atlantans alongside proud DSA member and Atlanta City Councilmember Kelsea Bond this spring, and we’re bringing the movement into City Hall with us.

Help us maintain our momentum and continue our work to make Atlanta more affordable, equitable, and safe for the 99%. This election is only the beginning. From here, we’ll continue relentlessly organizing to build a mass movement for working people.

Get involved today with Atlanta DSA to be a part of this fight, and win the socialist future workers deserve: atldsa.org/organize

DSA-endorsed candidates will be competing for office across the country.

The post DSA Campaigns to Watch on Election Night appeared first on Democratic Left.

Chapter & Verse: a Summary of Chapter News for October 2025

The post 80,000 Members nationwide, Divestment Wins, Progress on Public Bank and More appeared first on Democratic Left.

Multiple exchanges between DSA and MORENA this fall has strengthen connections between the two organizations.

The post Solidarity Knows No Borders: DSA Builds Ties with MORENA through People-to-People Exchanges appeared first on Democratic Left.

Management is already using the hype over AI to make workers fearful. We need a plan to get a say over the tools we use and how we use them.

The post How to organize your co-workers around AI appeared first on EWOC.