By a Comrade

This article is written by a DSA member and does not formally represent the views of MADSA as a whole or its subgroups. 

Welcome to Vol. 3 of the monthly round-up! The content in this publication overlaps significantly with our DSA newsletter and monthly General Membership Meetings. To sign up for the newsletter or check out an upcoming General Membership Meeting, visit: https://madison-dsa.org/events/

Union Efforts Continue in Madison

In August we celebrated the successful union elections at Festival Foods, and Hilton Monona Terrace. Another union battle continues in Madison, however, led by healthcare workers at GHC, and supported by patients and community members.

The GHC union effort was able to initiate a Special Member Meeting on October 13, where patients with GHC could express opinions on unionization, and conduct an “advisory” vote directing GHC to support the union. Members unanimously supported the union, and asked GHC’s board for transparency around how much money they’re spending on union busting.  Read more here! 

Beating Back the Political Doom

MADSA members have been creating more opportunities to learn and be in community, for members AND non-members. These are crucial antidotes to the doom, overwhelm, and helplessness that many people are feeling about the current state of the world. 

This month, these events included:

• A discussion with Copaganda author Alec Karakatsanis about policing, media, and narratives around safety;
• A presentation, for people of all knowledge levels, on understanding the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, titled Marx’s Capital and Global Capitalism Today;
• An Organizing 101 workshop for people to learn about workers’ rights and the union process.

The Electoral Working Group is also busy at work in this realm. Members of this WG have been canvassing local residents to learn more about the issues that matter most to them, and what solutions they hope to see. The working group also organized a public Madison Community Town Hall, with the goal of creating a space for community members to express grievances and connect around possible next steps.

There was also fruitful internal discussion this month about a potential change to a MADSA voting policy, and how this interacts with the role of meetings in our organization. Some members made compelling points about meetings as a space for developing important leadership skills, refining our ideas and worldviews, changing each others’ minds, and strengthening community bonds; on the other hand, other members discussed concerns around accessibility and inclusivity, and encouraged the chapter to ensure that people can participate meaningfully in major decisions if they have limitations around meeting attendance. Debates like this reflect the chapter’s process of growth, and ongoing work around participatory and inclusive democracy. 

Further Organizing Highlights This Month

Our work continues in many ways thanks to our dedicated membership. Here are other key organizing efforts taking place this month in MADSA. This summary is not exhaustive! 

• No Kings, No Bosses – The “No Kings” protests had a massive presence across the country this month, and this included Madison, WI! MADSA members showed up with a strong presence at the rally.
• The petition process begins for potentially endorsing candidates in statewide elections. When MADSA endorses a candidate, it is not just a symbolic seal of approval; the chapter is also pledging to provide consistent labor and organization to help that candidate win and to collaborate with them throughout their term. Candidates who wish to gain backing from MADSA must go through a process that includes collecting petition signatures, meeting several times with various chapter bodies, and ultimately winning a chapter-wide endorsement vote. The candidate must demonstrate their commitment to following the expectations outlined in the chapter’s endorsed candidate policy, found here.
• MADSA’s No Appetite for Apartheid contingent is supporting members in making a pledge to boycott Israeli products. Click here to take the pledge, and to get updates about stores who commit to being an Apartheid Free Store.

Social Opportunities

Our chapter has several ongoing reading groups, including:

• Skyscraper Jails, discussed in the Abolitionist Working Group meetings;
• Wretched of the Earth, discussed on Sundays, in a hybrid virtual/in-person format.

We continue hosting recurring social events – New Member Orientations, Coffee with Comrades, Crafting with Comrades,  MADSA Run Club, and the Rosebuddies program.

Protest Song of the Month

The song I choose for this month is “Freedom Now” by Tracy Chapman! This song was dedicated to Nelson Mandela and his work in the anti-apartheid movement. I think that the sentiments in this song still resonate to this day.

And that concludes our monthly round-up!

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.

DSA is beginning to engage in the fight against Trump, while simultaneously building the socialist wing of the movement. By Twin Cities DSA members Ramy K, Sam G, and Emma F October 18th was one of the largest days of political protest in US history!  (See crowd-counting estimate) On April 5th, 2-3 million protestors participated […]

November 3, 2025 (PORTLAND, OR) – Portland Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) condemns in the strongest possible terms Mayor Keith Wilson’s decision to begin enforcement of the city’s “public camping” ban, a policy of profound cruelty that criminalizes poverty and will exacerbate the city’s homelessness crisis.

This enforcement begins on the same day that federal SNAP benefits expire for over 15,000 homeless individuals in Multnomah County, stripping them of essential food aid while the city simultaneously threatens them with fines and jail time. Many low-income renters will also risk eviction and homelessness. Rather than offering support and leniency in the face of this federal abandonment, the Mayor has chosen to pile on penalties.

“Mayor Wilson’s decision to unleash the police on our most vulnerable neighbors on the very day they lose their food assistance is an act of stunning inhumanity,” said Chris Olson, Co-Secretary the Housing Working Group in Portland DSA. “He is exploiting a national tragedy to advance a policy of sweeps and cages that we know, from overwhelming evidence, kills people. To call this ‘compassion’ is a lie. It is a deliberate choice to inflict suffering in a misguided attempt to make poverty invisible.”

The Mayor’s punitive approach is further underscored by his recent decision to place the Director of the Portland Housing Bureau — a national expert in social housing — on administrative leave. This move signals a clear rejection of the long-term, housing-first solutions that are proven to work, in favor of a failed strategy of criminalization. 

The shelter system remains hundreds of beds short of need, operates with restrictive hours that fail to meet the needs of many, and does not address the root cause of the crisis: a catastrophic lack of affordable housing. This misallocation of funds has directly deprived proven, cost-effective solutions — like direct rental assistance, food aid, and public housing — of critical resources.

“Mayor Wilson promised us he was an innovator,” said Nathan Johnson, Co-Chair of the Housing Working Group in Portland DSA. “Now he’s slammed the door in innovation’s face to insist on the same discredited approach that has given us a continuously declared housing state of emergency since 2015.”

Portland DSA questions the fiscal prudence and underlying motives behind the Mayor’s rushed push for a shelter-based solution. The organization calls on the Portland City Council to immediately launch a formal investigation into whether the Mayor’s office wasted millions of taxpayer dollars to prop up a temporary shelter system that was designed to fail.

“We have serious concerns that public funds were squandered to create a pretext for this camping ban,” said Brian Denning, Co-Chair of Portland DSA. “Did the Mayor waste money on a shelter system he knew was insufficient, just to create a veneer of ‘available shelter’ and justify a punitive crackdown? The City Council has a duty to investigate this potential misuse of taxpayer money. Every dollar spent on a failed shelter strategy is a dollar stolen from a rental assistance program that could have actually kept a family in their home.”

The “Finding Home” report recently published by the Welcome Home Coalition and Sisters of the Road confirmed that 91% of homeless Portlanders need rental assistance, and 65% want to live in a house—not a congregate shelter or a temporary bed. The Mayor’s focus on coercion and criminalization is a direct rejection of what people actually need and want.

Portland DSA stands in solidarity with the unhoused and joins Councilor Mitch Green and community advocates in demanding a radical change in direction. A first step would be passage of the Renters’ Bill of Rights — a landmark set of protections which would stem the deepening houselessness crisis. We must stop criminalizing poverty and start investing in real, permanent solutions: social housing, lowering the cap for the eviction relocation ordinance, universal rental assistance, and low-barrier services that offer a hand up, not a sweep away.

The post Portland DSA Condemns Mayor Wilson’s Cruel Camping Ban, Calls for Investigation into Misuse of Public Funds appeared first on Portland DSA .

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.

Caitlin Murphy

This piece addresses the reactionary threads and narratives of blame, spoken and unspoken, that exploded in the direct wake of the CK assassination. It argues that the marginalized parties that fascists dishonestly blame (for a wide variety of social effects) can find solidarity with one another’s struggles through a critical examination of the rhetorical moves this blame employs. 

In the wake of the events of September 10, much has been said about the identities of the two people directly involved. Here I want to situate the event and its consequences in a broader political discourse, based on threads of narratives and events that seem to be revitalized in the week now since the event. On the one hand, the narrative of blame which is explicitly formulated has had an extremely gendered component. As Judith Butler (a queer Jewish scholar of gender who is themself presently under attack from the administration) points out, gender is an overdetermined site, which many social anxieties both cluster around and find articulation through. The language of gender is used, hegemonically, to voice anxiety, and people pushing on the boundaries of normative gender are used as screens upon which to project this anxiety. We can certainly see how many existential anxieties have attached to trans people, which fascists “justify” by invoking the “deviance” of transness: anxieties about things like social order, demographic futurity, normative sexuality, the multivalenced term “safety”, children & their development, the body and its permeability… indeed we have seen many of these anxieties intersecting and amplifying one another in transantagonistic narratives. 

Even if we abstract away the question of the perpetrator, the assassination itself represents a severe rupture in hierarchy, and in the ordering of who is supposed to be safe and why. Any violence Kirk incited was meant to play out on other bodies, other flesh. (Indeed, the outsized reaction seems to attest to how unthinkable his death was as a young white conservative man beloved by the regime.) Again regardless of the perpetrator, the intensity and spectacle of the event has offered an opportunity for power to consolidate itself around the production of an enemy who bears responsibility. This narrative production has been able to ground itself in both liberal elegies and in a reactionary constellation of ‘trans’ and ‘antifascist’. To this point, as of writing this, the terms have been fully elided into Project 2025’s recently released info sheet on “trantifa”. These have been the two threads of explicitly formulated narrative formation: 1) the posthumous praise and laundering of Kirk’s figure and 2) the triangulation and amplification of a political enemy. Maga accomplishes this latter move by reaping the already-sown seeds of anxieties projected onto and through gender, and by having rhetorically associated trans people with threat through many vectors.

At the same time that there is this narrative above the surface, I want to also suggest that there is a parallel narrative of blame. This parallel narrative is, as yet, running beneath the level of formulation– it is not explicitly spoken– and we instead have seen it play out in direct political actions that have as their basis racialized violence. I am thinking here about the bomb threats that targeted HBCUs immediately following the shooting, despite there being– and remaining– no connection of any suspects to HBCUs. I am thinking of the opinion writer who was fired for merely being a Black woman and quoting Kirk’s own words on Black women. I am thinking about the 18 year old Texas college student who was arrested and expelled, images of her arrest and mugshot rapidly populating the internet. I am also thinking of the early reports of mysterious hangings of black and homeless men in Mississippi, from the week following the shooting. Each of these stories, of course, become spectacles in themselves of racialized violence for the American appetite. Of course we know that the founding gesture of the formation of the United States is a program of racialized violence called genocide; we know, too, that the foundation of all the capital accumulated here is the brutality of slavery. Racialized violence is our national unaddressed symptom, recurring and recurring because we have not made real conditions to heal it.

What I want to suggest with this piece is that there is an (at least) double motion of gendered and racialized blame and reaction happening in the wake of September 10. I want to argue that this multiple articulation displays the intimate solidarity between all groups scapegoated and targeted, explicitly or implicitly, as threats to (white supremacist) order. This “threat to order” is both the basis of our targeting, and the potential strength of our solidarity. The specificities of the order that is being enforced are written over and over in this country’s history, and we continue to see its living edicts today in the racialized and gendered violence that unfolds in front of us – in the media, in hateful chats, in bomb threats to HBCUs, on the streets in traffic stops, at the detention center just down at the port. In light of that I want to invite us to think together about the question of how to frame and use this moment, and any coming moments like it, for the necessary project of solidarity. How can we build new relationships in principled rejection of what Kirk stood and advocated for, in principled rejection of the logics of gendered and racialized violence that his assassination has been recruited to justify, in principled rejection of the nationalism coalescing around his figure? This seems to be the task before us, and it is imperative we do not imitate the Democrats’ cowardly collapse into silence or forced honor for this man who wanted so many of us dead, and who is now, instead, himself dead. 

By Sean Arent

This August marks 80 years since the United States detonated two atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 

This gets a lot of attention in history books and the media, as it marks the end of World War II and the United States’ ascendance to nuclear superpower status.

But a little-known fact, not featured in textbooks and media, is the sheer number of unnamed, unacknowledged people who suffered the consequences of the Atomic Age.

One example: 70,000 Koreans were victims of the bombings. After the Japanese Empire colonized Korea, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to work in mines and factories in places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki during wartime. Estimates state that about 30,000 Koreans in those cities survived the initial blast.

The U.S. government has never offered acknowledgment, apology or recompense. Survivors and their descendants continue to press the U.S. and Japan for justice and recognition.

I recently visited Hapcheon, South Korea, to attend events commemorating these victims. Because of the many bomb survivors and descendants living there, Hapcheon is called the “Hiroshima of Korea.”

While the bombings happened long ago, the residents of Hapcheon continue to live with the fallout. Exposure to acute radiation breaks apart strands of human DNA, literally shredding the building blocks of life. Atomic bomb survivors, and as many believe, their children are many times more likely to develop cancers, specifically thyroid cancer and leukemia, than the general population.

I first learned of the plight of the Korean A-bomb victims after a delegation visited Seattle in 2023. Early this year, another delegation, including first-generation survivor Park Jeong-soon, 92, shared their pain and desire for a formal U.S. apology. Park will be a plaintiff in the 2026 International Peoples Tribunal on the 1945 Atomic Bombings, in New York City.

During my time in South Korea, I heard testimony at the Korean National Assembly from nuclear-impacted communities from around the world, including the Navajo Nation (Diné Bikéyah), the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, Kazakhstan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Representatives spoke of the intergenerational effects of radiation exposure and “nuclear colonialism.”

The testimony highlighted yet another untold story — that of the Congolese. The Manhattan Project, the huge undertaking to build the world’s first nuclear weapons — which enriched uranium and produced plutonium at facilities in Hanford and in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — was supplied with uranium from the Belgian-colonized Congo in central Africa. The Belgians were notoriously brutal overlords. In a mine called Shinkolobwe, Congolese people were forced to mine some of the purest radioactive uranium ore by hand, with no safety protection. Birth defects and severe illness are still recorded in the communities near the mine.

Under a campaign of secrecy, Shinkolobwe claimed the first victims of the nuclear arms race. Miners and residents died of radiation exposure. The United States attempted to distance itself from the atrocities committed there by claiming that the uranium from the Manhattan Project came from Canada, but the vast majority came from Shinkolobwe. There are more victims of nuclear weapons than we can possibly imagine.

Meanwhile, the NewSTART nuclear arms control treaty, which caps the deployment of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals, expires in February 2026. The Trump administration has yet to appoint a negotiator or enter formal negotiations, and despite Washington state being home to over 1,000 deployed nuclear weapons, only two lawmakers from our state — U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith — have signed on to H.Res 100, expressing alarm at the impending expiration. The U.S. has said it plans to spend over $1.7 trillion on new nuclear weapons in the next three decades. Nuclear weapons, nuclear production and nuclear testing are a war waged in the bodies of its victims through generations, and in the environment at places like Hanford and Chernobyl. Our leaders must do more to prevent another Hiroshima, another Hapcheon and another Shinkolobwe. 

Sean Arent: is the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program manager for Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and coordinates the regional Northwest Against Nuclear Weapons coalition. He lives in Tacoma.

Charlotte Metro DSA will not endorse the one-cent sales tax increase as we do not believe the framework created under the PAVE Act will adequately reflect the concerns of working families dependent upon public transit. As written, lower-income communities will face the highest cost burden given the regressive nature of sales taxes while Mecklenburg's capitalist class and political outsiders will be overly represented under the newly created 27-member Metropoitan Public Transit Authority (MPTA). Given this, we believe that any future projects will prioritize public transit not as a vehicle for connecting people but rather to enrich developers. In addition, the 60-40 allocation, 40% for roads, 40% for rail, and 20% for buses, intentionally divides communities by limiting where investment will go. Eastern Charlotte in particular loses out the most while North Charlotte will receive much of the immediate benefit under the planned Red Line. Charlotte Metro DSA believes that public transit investment should serve the working class without strings attached. The PAVE Act represents the deeply cynical nature of North Carolina state politics, in which politically-aligned business interests pollute legislation with obvious poison pills aimed at burdening workers and dividing communities.

Charlotte Metro DSA believes that public transit investment should serve the working class without strings attached. We are building a mass organization of the working class to fight and win key reforms like a fast and reliable mass public transit.

Sound good to you? Then join DSA Today!

In Solidarity,

Charlotte Metro DSA

You can view our Resolution from the 10/2025 General Meeting Here which authorized this post.