The following is a response to Hazel Williams's March 7 article, "Reflections on California DSA”, in Democratic Left, the online publication of the national DSA. 

As former (Fred) and current (Michael) members of the California DSA steering committee we would like to express our appreciation for Hazel Williams’s examination of the first couple years of the existence of California DSA, the first official state DSA body in the country. As she notes, this is essential work in assessing the utility of such bodies going forward.

However, while we are in broad agreement with her description of the events, we have some significant differences with her interpretations of their meaning. These interpretations result from two problems: information she leaves out that would help explain the failures she enumerates; and political differences she glosses over.

One important background factor needs to be emphasized at the outset: there were few resources made available to California DSA from the national organization because national DSA is itself understaffed and without sufficient institutional resources to anticipate and prevent such problems. A simple statement of what happened doesn’t get to this underlying dynamic.

Hazel tells us that “the PAC [political action committee] had racked up thousands of dollars in fines from noncompliance prior to my term and it took me nearly a year and over 100 email exchanges with national compliance staff to bring it into compliance. And yet the PAC was not used once during my term.” This is true. We appreciate the heroic work she did in cleaning up that mess. But the PAC was not formed by California DSA. The brand-new state body in 2022 inherited it from the ad hoc, chapter-driven statewide Prop 15 campaign of 2020.  And it was not used during her one-year term because there were no priority statewide elections during that year. 

The first state committee, prior to Hazel’s term (we have one-year terms) set as a major goal developing an income stream and hiring staff, to address the obvious lack of necessary resources. But we did not know what we were up against. As the first state DSA structure, we had no precedents to look to, nor, as it turned out, any national rules to help us develop the financial independence we knew we needed. Indeed, just the opposite: for instance, national rules, we found, prevented us from creating a bank account. 

Also key: the idea of California DSA was born in the peak moment of activism in 2020 when Bernie Sanders ran for president the second time. That level of activism continued into the first months of the pandemic as the Black Lives Matter movement scaled up and, in California, in the Prop 15 “tax the rich” statewide ballot measure campaign that fall. California DSA was predicated on what turned out to be an overoptimistic hope that a major portion of that activist cohort would continue that level of involvement. As we all know, instead we saw a national falling off of involvement and membership across the board, including in California.

Hazel notes the failure of CA DSA to live up to its founding “vision document” and enumerates the various parts of that vision we did not put in place, or only barely. Behind this failure was our inability to create the administrative infrastructure necessary to support committees, meetings, and other initiatives adequately—see as above:  no money, no staff, an all-volunteer body, layered, as Hazel notes, on top of the considerable local work state committee members were already doing. As it turned out, the conditions were not favorable to generate greater resources, which could not be foreseen, absent a crystal ball.

Since Hazel’s departure, California DSA has simultaneously scaled back some of its ambitions until such time as we are able to figure out the financing and staffing, and begun, nonetheless, to achieve some of the more modest goals we laid out. Hazel mentions that when she attended the statewide zoom presentation of “California DSA 101” six members showed up. Since late 2024 we have run this introductory ninety-minute session three times, and each time we have had more than sixty participants. She laments our failure to put in place any training during her year in office. On our website we have begun to store training modules, and last month delivered a four-part, weekly “Labor 101 for Socialists” study group to fifteen participants.

Speaking of the website, we have a regular bi-monthly newsletter, California Red, that goes out to every member in the state, and we update the news articles on the site every month, providing the only means for thousands of DSA members to learn what the other chapters in California are up to. 

This is especially important for our farflung at-large members. In a state the size of California, we have comrades reading California Red and attending our CA DSA 101s who have no chapter within a hundred miles. One recently joined our communications committee. She told us how grateful she is to have found her way to plugging into DSA work:  “When I wasn't sure whether I was ready to make a serious commitment of my time and energy to DSA, especially since all existing chapters are many hours of travel away, meeting gracious, approachable, skillful humans on this side of the country virtually through the state org made taking that plunge far less daunting. In addition to receiving their invaluable wisdom and support, networking directly with other rural and at-large members in our huge, diverse state is, in my opinion, necessary to support courageous chapter formation across California's many forgotten, often politically conservative, rural places. The state org is the most obvious place for that.”

Hazel says, “In summary, we built much of the basic infrastructure of a state body, but struggled to achieve most of our organizational goals.” Well, no. The “basic infrastructure of a state body” would include the necessary resources of staff and finances. We “struggled to achieve most of our organizational goals” precisely because we did not have that basic infrastructure.

In this light, her conclusion that “The cost to DSA as a whole is too great, in terms of labor, money, and opportunity. It may be better to let other seeds take root” rings hollow. There are, in fact, few costs at this time to DSA as a whole, and the benefits are slowly beginning to accrue. 

With extremely limited resources (the volunteer labor of about a dozen people, including the state committee and its standing committees (electoral and comms, and every other month a few dozen delegates to our state council) we are pioneering a new DSA structure. If California DSA were a person, its stage of development would be, at three years old, a toddler. It is far too soon to issue any final—especially dismissive—judgements. 

We agree with Hazel that DSA members in other states should proceed with caution, with clear objectives, and a realistic plan for resources matched with its goals. Since it is likely that political struggles over social policy will increasingly occur at the state levels, we see great value in DSA organizing state formations. We are happy to share our experiences with comrades involved in any efforts along these lines. 

Solidarity,

Fred Glass and Michael Lighty

In 1867, San Francisco passed a law making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.” Such “Ugly Laws”—in place all over the country until an intolerably recent 1974—were simply one more knot in the rope that’s been strangling disabled folks since Capital first decreed that any body that can’t create wealth for the bosses is unworthy of existence.

One might be excused from believing that the Nazi concept of a “life unworthy of life” left our world splattered across Eva Braun’s armband along with the Fuhrer's gray matter, were not the insidious echoes of eugenical thought still screaming in our ears. It ricochets from the ableist algorithm that withheld care during COVID based on a psychotic assumption linking ability and human worth, to a Canadian suicide law that coerces non-terminally ill undesirables to self-deport out of existence rather than face an unassailable scarcity of care. As Derek Beres put it in a recent Guardian article,

“When (Health Secretary Robert F.) Kennedy claims that autism is worse than Covid-19 because the latter only kills 'old people' and 'metabolically healthy' people don’t die from it, or when a Maha associate claims that measles is 'an essential rite of passage, immunologically', you’re hearing the language of soft eugenics. Don’t let vaccines protect everyone, instead let the infirm and weak be culled so that the strong will survive and perpetuate.”

Because the sky will most definitely fall if an 80 year-old-man recently hired by 81 million people exercises the humility it takes to use a mobility device in public, "Aides reportedly conceded that it was politically untenable to have the U.S. president in a wheelchair," and so conspired to prevent President Joe Biden from using one. We couldn't have a sane, rational and responsible conversation about this oldest of presidents' eventual senescence in part because so many people couldn't stand to—or trust their neighbors to—contemplate, let alone contend with, the complexities of collective responsibility among and to the aging, and the fact that the privileged are mostly the ones who get to do it.

Only in a eugenical society, where even an essential service provider like Planned Parenthood must navigate the dark words of its beatified founder—the avowed eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who once wrote that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective”—can we truly appreciate the imperfect miracle known as Medicaid (MediCal in California). This chronically underfunded federal program that provides life-saving health care to impoverished Americans with all the panache of a bobbing log after a shipwreck—was suggested by a President famous for hiding his disability (FDR) and signed into law by another who worked from the toilet (LBJ -- perhaps the Crippest thing we’ve ever heard).

Like all true miracles, Capital's begrudging acquiesence to Medicaid has a secular explanation—a boring one about compromise and compassion and Federalism in a serendipitous moment where good was painstakingly chiseled from a bedrock of fear, bias and paternalism. And it is that exact secular miracle that keeps me (Brian) alive today, sucking air through one tube while I piss out another, living not for the bosses, but for the aspirational Jeffersonian promise at the heart of any argument for American greatness. This very promise of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is ignored by a current regime hellbent on stripping so many of so much so a few can have a little more.

Choosing Interdependence Over Eradication

The life-saving log of Medicaid/MediCal isn't enough for all the human flotsam floating in the wreckage created by Capital's abuse of our bodies. Disability justice is how we—Crips, freaks, sick & mad people, neurodivergents, institutional survivors, casualties of state violence and imperial wars, Deaf and hard of hearing people, the deformed and the despairing, and those who hate us (starting the day they too are confronted with the unsparing reality that their own bodyminds are fragile, ephemeral, golden and sacred but don't actually work mechanistically like industrial cogs in a profit-fetishest's wheel)—survive the crushing reality that Capital is entirely happy to kill anyone not harvestable for material gain. We do disability justice because we know we are broken, like the split husk from which every raw green seedling emerges, and we do disability justice because we know we are whole, as part of the intricate web of life in all its diversity and complexity and unexpected magic, which continues to confound and inspire and rally us all at our best. The way we do disability justice is together. It's the only way it can be done.

Interdependence is the crux of our movement. Interdependence—a solidarity borne out of recognition of our innate vulnerabilities—is how we keep us alive and die trying. As Patty Berne, one of creators of this queer & BIPOC movement, put it: 

“Disability Justice holds a vision born out of a collective struggle, drawing upon the legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance within a thousand underground paths, igniting small persistent fires of rebellion in everyday life. Disabled people of the global majority—black and brown people—share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice. There has always been resistance to all forms of oppression, as we know through our bones that there have simultaneously been disabled people visioning a world where we flourish, that values and celebrates us in all our myriad beauty.”

Solidarity among and with disabled people is not optional if the working class is to out-survive and defeat capitalism and its currently rabid fascism. Abled people are ill-equipped to survive this antifascist fight without us. They may have never been in a situation where all of the normative rules for human existence are inverted in their own flesh and blood lives, and political inversion on a massive scale is what we are all undergoing together now. Disabled people have already had to learn how to create community out of extreme isolation, have had to muster the courage to show up in public knowing that our very presence will inspire contempt, rancor and worse. People who haven't been marginalized don't have these skills. The survival craft. They haven't cultivated the pluck that it takes to pick yourself up, again and again, day after day, when all the alarms are sounding and the doors won't open and the lights make your brain melt and your limbs are in shattering pain and you are dealing with voices that tell you to just shrivel up and die. Not as an apex existential crisis with soaring soundtracks and fabulous makeup, not as a one-off you can tie up neatly with a bow, but every. Single. Day. They haven't faced that. 

But we, the quarter of the population who have nonconforming bodyminds, live this oppression constantly, and are undeterred by its current iteration. The surreality of our embodiment in an economic hegemony that hates us for being is the air that we have adapted to breathe. We have learned to stare into the slobbering maw of economic and state and corporate and institutional violence every day, everywhere we live, across the generations and say: fuck you. We exist. We remain alive out of defiance and the defiant and limitless expanse of our love for ourselves and each other. That is our politics. The rest is details.

Natural Comrades

Disabled people are uniquely primed for socialist organizing, and it is self-defeating not to prioritize us in every DSA chapter, in every action, and in every member recruitment drive. We are more than a quarter of the population, are overwhelmingly working class (typically, poor), we are intersectional, we are where most people end up at some point during, if not the end, of their lives, and we are already excluded in large numbers even from labor organizing, because we are often unable to conform to the productivity fetish of Capital. In an articulation of the Third Principle of Disability Justice offered by Berne in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice:

“3. ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC. We are anti-capitalist, as the very nature of our mind/bodies often resists conforming to a capitalist 'normative' level of production. We don’t believe human worth is dependent on what and how much a person can produce. We critique a concept of 'labor' as defined by able-bodied supremacy, white supremacy, and gender normativity. We understand capitalism to be a system that promotes private wealth accumulation for some at the expense of others.”

Disabled people know in our bones what abled people often fear and temporarily elude facing: 

Only once we acknowledge the challenges of our shared dependence, along with our irreducible differences, can we fully value the skills and resources necessary to promote the capabilities of everyone, whatever our distinct needs, whether as carers or cared for, noting the frequent reciprocity of these positions. Recognizing our needs both to give and to receive care not only provides us with a sense of our common humanity, but enables us to confront our shared fears of human frailty, rather than project them onto those we label as 'dependent.'“

In this we hold the keys to create the "caring economy" of our dreams, as articulated in The Care Manifesto.

DSA must have the backs of disabled people, because we are you, we are who you will be, and we are the bodies you will have to step over on your way to doing anything else if you don't. Should we persist as a nation that relegates its most vulnerable members to mass graves? No? Then fight for Medicaid, MediCal in California, which rich politicians want to defund so they can buy more mega-yachts. Fight for SSI. Fight for SNAP, CalFresh in California. Fight for ramps over stairs. Fight for Medicare For All. Fight for a worker's compensation system that refuses to humiliate injured workers. Fight for your neighbor who is too scared to tell you they are sick, to ask for help when they need it, to give you the wisdom they sit in, through long dark nights and blistering days. Fight for access: language access, structural access, online access, transit access. Fight for the person who isn't in the room because of the room. 

We can fight hate with rage, or sorrow, or a patient understanding extended to those moving at a different pace, or water bottles on a sweltering picket line, but we fight it best together, interdependently, with sharp tongues and soft hearts, searching for a greatness not lost, but found in every kind word and selfless act, in every tear shed and setback faced, in every impossible possibled and bitter pill swallowed. Only through solidarity can we hold this secular miracle of our mutual survival—including Medicaid—together. It's the way we will win.

Further reading:

Sins Invalid's 10 Principles of Disability Justice is an anchor for our own work and we are grateful for the brilliance of the queer BIPOC people who articulated and exemplify it.

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Kakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press. 2018)

The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, by The Care Collective (Verso, 2020)

Matin, B.K., Williamson, H.J., Karyani, A.K. et al. "Barriers in access to healthcare for women with disabilities: a systematic review in qualitative studies." BMC Women's Health 21, 44 (2021). 

Sharpe, Jason A et al. “Social Risk Factors Are Associated With Disability Prevalence - Results From 17 States in the 2017 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.” American Journal of Health Promotion: AJHP vol. 37,4 (2023), pp. 453-463. 

(An Electoral Campaign for Us) At the risk of being cheesy, this is what democracy looks like.

Before I got active in politics, there was Bob Filner. When he was mayor, I was still married, and my focus was on trying to balance my family responsibilities with feeding my creative side as the board member of a local literary nonprofit. I had the same kind of interest in electoral politics as most Americans: not much in between presidential elections, and then with a resigned sense that the fix was most likely in.

But Filner broke into my attention and indeed the attention of millions through revelations that he’d abused an extraordinary number of women. If you don’t know who he is, I’m sorry to tell you now that what was so shocking about this wasn’t simply the number of women stepping forward, it’s that Filner was the great progressive hope. He’d served in Congress before running for mayor of San Diego and had been a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The three people who publicly blew the whistle on his behavior put their careers on the altar of justice, and I’m forever grateful to them.

Why so personal? Well, hello, I’m a woman. My daughter is a woman. I know and love so many of them. But also, the one thing that hit me clear as lightning when the accusations brought forward one woman telling her story, then another, then just an awful procession, was that his behavior had been witnessed and known by many more people than the three whistleblowers. This was a man with a long political career. People behind the scenes experience disruption, even if they don’t see an assault firsthand. They know something’s up. They ask, they talk.

The fix was in

And I’m telling you this now, because I want you to know that this is a big part of why you need to get involved in electoral politics. Even if you’re experiencing the kind of disgust I felt viscerally in 2013, even if it’s going to take you a minute to process. Even if you could not fathom how a presidential incumbent you were fixed on to support was clearly faltering in his capacities and earnestly facilitating material support for genocide. The fix was in, in spite of all these unacceptable and outrageous priors and it’s going to take many of us – masses of us – to break it.

What does that look like? In DSA, a lot of our members sign up because they’re pissed off at the conventional options. Like me they can’t handle the dissonance of living in what’s pledged to be the world’s strongest democracy, yet one in which they don’t have the option of voting for someone they trust to advance their values. Some are ready to throw in on candidate campaigns from day one, some want to focus first on alternatives for building power. Both answers are right. But ultimately, we need the masses to engage in elections.

I came to electoral politics through my organizing for ecosocialist policy; specifically, Green New Deal initiatives that expressly affirmed the need to overcome capitalism in the fight for our planetary future. I saw how DSA member candidates and elected officials in New York were using the attention on them as candidates and elected officials to proselytize for our version of a Green New Deal, not because it polled well, but because it was the right thing to do. Because I want my daughter to exist on a livable planet, I signed right up.

Fun as hell

And then I found out that when you get connected to campaigns you care about, it’s fun as hell. If you’re a private person, you might assume that people will be indignant when you knock on their doors. You might assume they’ll all shoo you away, and that it’ll be humiliating. What actually happens is that the people who don’t want to talk to anyone unexpectedly just won’t come to the door. Maybe a few will shoo you away. But in between those experiences you’re going to have sincere conversations with neighbors who wouldn’t know anything about the choices to be made in local elections or primaries without hearing from someone like you, who has no more stake in the outcome than your one precious life.

At the risk of being cheesy, this is what democracy looks like. It’s not passively being a booster for insider candidates in the desperate interest of doing something. Hopefully once you find out how fun canvassing is, you’ll start getting to know the people organizing support for one candidate or another, and you’ll start learning more about who’s really putting in the work to stay unbeholden to the donors and interests hostile to the working class. All that learning does not come overnight, but it does come pretty easily when you step one foot after another into action. Don’t lose your anger. Let it settle and decompose, nourishing a righteous tomorrow. Have fun with it and the people joining you in the work – we’re in this together.

[This article was originally published in The Jumping Off Place on May 14.]

Although Elon Musk has either withdrawn or been removed from day-to-day oversight of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the world’s richest man’s engagement with right-wing extremism continues to raise valid concerns for pro-democracy advocates. This article seeks to analyze Musk's political rhetoric using the frameworks laid out in Umberto Eco's “Ur-Fascism,” highlighting key traits like xenophobia and cult of personality. By comparing Musk's statements and actions to Eco's model, the author aims to point out the fascistic character of Musk’s rhetoric, and the potential threat it poses to democratic governments. This is a condensed version of an essay originally presented orally at California State University Northridge. 

Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism” holds significant weight within scholarship on political extremism. His fourteen-point definition of “Eternal Fascism” was immediately utilized by scholars to help understand European fascist regimes. Scholars have continued to use “Ur-Fascism” to identify current regimes. While Eco holds no monopoly on the definition of fascism or its features, the respectability of “Ur-Fascism” amongst historians and scholars, as well as its utility and relevance, merit its use today. 

Primarily a reflection on his experience in fascist Italy, Eco’s background as a semiotician also led him to discuss how fascists articulated themselves. Behind every movement lies its ideologies. In front, however, lies its rhetoricians. As fascism began to take root in Italy, Eco asserts that Mussolini “did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric”. But how can a political ideology which led to several totalitarian governments survive and spread without consistency? Eco reflects on the confusing nature of fascism:

Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions… [This] contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation…Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations. 

Eco frames fascism as a fundamentally incoherent set of ideas that, when conveniently applied, help consolidate power in the hands of a few authoritarians. Eco said, however, “It is enough that one of [these ideas] be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”. Given this, the presence of multiple fascist characteristics in Musk’s rhetoric should give serious pause amongst democracy advocates. If we smell smoke, we must act like there’s a fire; if the alarms are going off, we cannot ignore them.

Eco first speaks of Ur-Fascism as an ideology that follows a cult of tradition which is necessarily syncretistic. While not a practicing Christian, Musk has claimed to be “culturally Christian” and a “big believer in the principles of Christianity”; he also went on to tie the decrease in religion with a decrease in population. 

While he may be cherry-picking from one set of religious beliefs, he doesn’t appear to combine them with any other mythologies or religions. However, his rightward shift into the MAGA movement does give some concern. Musk has historically been moderate. But after endorsing Trump in 2024, he became the largest political donor in the 2024 election cycle, donating more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump and other Republican candidates running for congress. He even set up a political action committee that largely ran Trump’s ground campaign up until election night. 

Eco notes the Fascist Party of Italy at its beginning was republican, and that it ultimately manifested itself as a far-right dictatorship after it was financed by rich landowners.  

The rejection of modernism and anti-intellectualism are two prominent features of Musk’s rhetoric. Eco explains how the Nazis held a surface-level praise of modernism via technology, while rejecting “the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course)”. Musk has a long relationship with technology, particularly with Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has worked for decades on a plan to colonize Mars, stating that humanity should have “life insurance for life as a whole”. It’s perhaps no small coincidence that Musk was named after the alien Mars leader in The Mars Project, a science fiction novel written by Nazi rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. 

A green carmaker’s climate denial

When von Braun’s book was published, the world faced an existential threat via a Cold War nuclear apocalypse; today climate change represents a similar threat to Earth. Despite his contributions to green energy technologies, he has increasingly engaged in anti-intellectual climate change denial. While scientists have agreed agriculture and other land use make up 13-21% of global emissions, Musk has claimed agriculture has “no meaningful impact on climate change”. Since his involvement in the second Trump administration, Musk has adopted his climate denialism, prompting leading experts to call Musk a “climate denier”. While previously calling for a “popular uprising” against fossil fuel industries, experts have noticed Musk’s rapid deprioritization of climate solutions since his involvement. 

Much like von Braun’s utopian visions for Mars exploration helped the American public forget about his contributions to Nazi war crimes, Musk’s interplanetary irrationality has worked to pave over important climate realities. Eco notes that “distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism”. Musk’s distrust of climate science contradicts his green endeavors. Given Musk’s current political and economic positions of power, his continued rejection of modern climate science and his irrationalist rhetoric present a fascistic danger to America, and the world.

Attacks on cultural and social progress

While dismissing climate expertise, Musk has also attacked cultural and social progress. Eco reminds us that fascist intellectuals, like Goering, “mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values”. Musk became obsessed with the “woke mind virus” after his daughter Vivian transitioned into a woman. He publicly vowed to “destroy the woke mind virus,” claiming his “son was killed” by it. This rhetoric exemplifies Eco’s seventh feature: obsession with a plot. Eco notes that such a plot can come from within or without the nation, but their “followers must feel besieged”. Musk has claimed that the “woke mind virus,” its reevaluation of traditional values and gender norms, is causing civilizational collapse; he also blamed universities for indoctrinating students with “wokeness”. Considering every single major medical association recognizes the efficacy and importance of gender-affirming care, Musk’s unfounded obsession with “wokeness” threatens both the LGBTQ+ community and academia. This feature remains particularly dangerous, as Musk continues to target other marginalized groups. 

Musk’s rhetoric also reflects Eco’s twelfth feature: thinking as “a form of emasculation”. Musk tends to compensate for his intelligence by playing heavily into machismo. Musk has resorted to threats of violence, such as inviting Zuckerberg to a cage match over the launch of Threads. He also flexed his unelected influence over government spending policy by waving a chainsaw at CPAC. These exaggerated masculine behaviors coincide with what Eco implies as a “disdain for women” and “condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits”. While leaning into transphobia, Musk is also misogynistic. Several SpaceX employees sued Musk for firing them based on sexual bias; they documented a “pervasive sexist culture at SpaceX” rife with routine sexual harassment and comments. SpaceX also issued a $250,000 severance, and a non-disclosure agreement, to a flight attendant after Musk allegedly propositioned her for sex. Researchers also found a dramatic increase in the pervasiveness of misogynistic content and accounts on Twitter following its acquisition by Musk. This evidence firmly ties Elon’s rhetoric to a machismo that threatens women.

Great Replacement theory

Most egregiously present in Musk’s rhetoric is the fear of difference. Eco’s fifth feature notes that “Ur-Fascism is racist by definition;” fear of difference is often the first appeal made by burgeoning fascists. Musk has claimed “illegals [are] being put in swing states” so they can “replace native-born American voters”. This unfounded claim is a nod to the Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy theory believed by white nationalists and white supremacists. Dr. Suleiman, president of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, accused Musk of using his platform on X to blow “every conceivable dog whistle of Islamophobia”. For example, Musk used a baseless memo to spread a rumor campaign accusing British PM Starmer of being “complicit in the rape” of British women and girls by Pakistani grooming gangs; recent studies have found little evidence of such gangs, noting most offenders were white. 

These examples demonstrate a deep-seated racism in Musk’s rhetoric. His rhetoric has also featured antisemitic tropes and symbols. Before his involvement with Trump, Musk agreed with a tweet claiming Jews deserved hatred for their anti-white racism by replying “you have said the actual truth”. Musk infamously performed a Sieg Heil salute at a Trump rally. While the Anti-Defamation League quickly defended his “awkward gesture,” their director emeritus disagreed, calling it a “Heil Hitler Nazi salute”. Several scholars of extremism, as well as the former head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, have condemned Musk’s fascist salute; regardless of his intentions, white nationalist organizations and commentators across the US celebrated the salute. Musk also spoke to supporters of the AfD, a German far-right party with a history of neo-Nazism and xenophobia. In his speech, he called the AfD “the best hope for Germany,” claimed multiculturalism “dilutes” German culture and values, and that Germany needed to “move beyond” the “past guilt” of the Nazi era. Musk’s racist and antisemitic rhetoric resembles Eco’s fifth and seventh characteristics, firmly tying his rhetoric to fascism. 

Free speech for me, not for thee

Musk’s aversion to analytical criticism also ties him to Eco’s fourth feature. Musk has repeatedly censored his critics, despite identifying as a “free speech advocate”. After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he suspended the Twitter accounts of journalists critical of him; in 2024 he censored at least fourteen more across the political spectrum. He also failed to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate for their coverage of X. Despite his first amendment advocacy, he hypocritically allowed the Turkish government to censor speech on X before their national elections. Musk’s tendency to critique and meddle in the democratic governments of Turkey, England, Germany, and the United States, can also be associated with Eco’s thirteenth feature. These features further define Musk’s fascist tendencies, serving as a growing list of red flags for democracy advocates globally. 

If one of Eco’s features applied to the world’s richest man would be troublesome, seven is no laughing matter. In addition to Musk’s increasing economic and political power, his rhetoric has increasingly become more fascistic over time. Democracy advocates, particularly in the United States, should treat Musk’s rhetoric and rise to power as a potentially nation-ending event. Historically, rhetoricians with less wealth and influence have given birth to fascist movements and totalitarian governments. Eco implored that the rise of fascism is not obvious, that it is our duty to “uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world”. In a world of rising extremism and instability, it must be the task of the modern leader, the modern citizen, to be resiliently anti-fascist. “Freedom and liberation are an unending task”.

[A slightly different version of this article was published on May 1 in Jacobin.]

“With our comrades we remember recent victories, and we mutter against, and curse, our rulers. We take a few minutes to freshen up our knowledge of what happened there in Chicago in 1886 and 1887 before striding out into the fight of the day.”

—Peter Linebaugh, “A May Day Meditation”

When my children were little in the late 1990s, we attended an annual May Day event in verdant Tilden Park, near our home in Berkeley.  Each year a flyer, resplendent with Walter Crane illustrations, would appear in our mailbox inviting us to come celebrate. I have no memory of how we got onto the mailing list, but I recall how much my kids loved arriving in the meadow, lining up with dozens of other families, and marching around the perimeter of our “commons” behind banners and signs, before participating in a kid-led theatrical presentation featuring authority-defying woodland peoples and a cruel but eventually vanquished evil overlord.

This mashup of “green” and “red” May Days—the celebration of spring renewal dating back to time immemorial, and the more modern promotion of workers and class struggle—is typical of the dialectic that has animated the holiday in various times and places. This year’s May Day is leaning more toward red.

On April 5 an estimated three million people around the country served notice that their “consent of the governed” was not available to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their fascist billionaire cabal. The turnout for the hastily thrown-together “Hands-Off” demonstrations—more than a thousand events in all fifty states—surpassed organizers’ predictions and ramped up expectations for the next big day of action, which happens to be May 1, International Workers Day. 

A confluence of tributary factors is building attention for this year’s May Day. Beyond its traditional significance in worker solidarity, and as a display of resistance to the current extreme right wing agenda, May Day 2025 offers the opportunity to lay down a marker toward a formidable goal: the challenge issued by United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain to the rest of the labor movement to line up union contracts for expiration on May 1, 2028 as a platform for mass strikes to follow. As Fain put it, “We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.”

The history 

Although celebrated in more than one hundred countries, May Day has never been an official holiday in the United States, the country of its origin. The explanation lies in a complex history encompassing the vast differences between what workers want and what capitalists are willing to part with. Jacobin has published many articles over the years on that history, so I’ll just briefly summarize here and point you for details toward my documentary video, We Mean to Make Things Over: A History of May Day.

In 1884 the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor, decrying the inhumanity of workers’ lives crushed by too many hours of work and too little time for rest and play, passed a resolution stating that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1 1886”. Another resolution encouraged all labor organizations to vote for a general strike on that date in support of the eight hour day. After determined organizing, a third of a million workers downed tools on the big day, with decidedly mixed results. 

Chicago saw the greatest manifestation of worker power. But following police violence that resulted in fatalities, a protest demonstration was held in Haymarket Square on May 4. Here an unknown perpetrator threw a bomb, precipitating a police riot in which several more people were killed. The city’s employers and government unleashed the nation’s first red scare, targeting the most effective immigrant worker organizers. It ended in the kangaroo court conviction and hanging of four leaders, the murder or suicide of one more in his cell, and continued imprisonment of three others. Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, after examining the matter, pardoned and freed the prisoners, declaring their trial a miscarriage of justice.

The cause of the Haymarket martyrs was embraced by the newly formed Socialist or Second International, which in 1889, meeting in Paris, designated May 1, 1890 as a day of remembrance and called for a worldwide demonstration for the eight hour day. Initially there was no mention of establishing a workers’ holiday. Yet, in country after country for decades, workers’ movements pushed employers and governments to recognize May Day as a paid holiday and to establish the eight-hour day as the workplace standard. At times, the May 1 movement was met with bloody repression. In some places, it took a general strike to win the holiday and the eight-hour workday.

The first May Day demonstrations in 1890 fell on a Thursday, stimulating a conversation that’s recurring now: should workers leave work (strike) to aggressively support the cause? The Socialist International left that decision up to its affiliated parties in each country, depending on their assessment of the conditions under which they operated. The results varied from Vienna, where on May 1 a general strike shuttered the city, and some sixty rallies combined to form a march of one hundred thousand; to London, where a non-striking “May Day” was moved to May 4, a Sunday, unleashing an unprecedented demonstration of three hundred thousand. 

In the United States the AFL decided against a repeat of 1886. Instead the most prepared union, the Carpenters and Joiners, led the way and struck for the eight hour day. Other unions and allies provided as much support as they could, while planning that each May Day following another union would go out and take its turn. Ten of thousands of carpenters earned an eight hour day through these actions in 1890 (although the victory was rolled back by the economic depression later in the decade).

Within a few years, following the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, and in the midst of the Pullman strike in summer 1894, in which workers were killed by police, the national guard and armed thugs employed by the railroads, President Grover Cleveland thought it might be prudent to let a little steam out of the class struggle pressure cooker. He signed a bill proclaiming the first Monday in September a holiday celebrating the contributions of workers to America. This bill made no mention of the eight-hour day or the repression of the workers’ movement. Under these circumstances Labor Day was, in effect, an employer-friendly substitute for May Day.

Although the Socialist Labor Party, left-led unions and later the Socialist Party and IWW continued on May Day to promote the eight hour day and workers’ holiday, by the turn of the century the AFL fully accepted the non-radical substitute. With the Russian Revolution, Labor Day became a foil in propaganda wars against Communism. After World War II, it devolved still further into a Cold War workers’ holiday. “Labor Day Sales!” advertisements bolstered consumer capitalism’s claim to better serve the working class than Communism did. A nadir of sorts was reached with the redesignation of May 1st as “Law Day” in 1957 by President Eisenhower (although internationally that dubious honor would go to Hitler’s cooptation of the holiday). But a funny thing happened on the way to the death of May Day. 

The Resuscitation of May Day

After Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign and the explosive growth of DSA, the decades-long freeze on public collaboration between organized labor and the left began to thaw. DSA chapters and unions found they could work together. A rekindled interest in May Day led to collaboration on a growing number of small but feisty demonstrations.  

There were other signs of a renaissance of the unofficial workers’ day. In early 2018 my former employer, the California Federation of Teachers, asked me to testify before the State Assembly Education Committee on behalf of a CFT-sponsored bill that proposed making May Day a state holiday. The CFT legislative director told me beforehand that he had asked 39 legislators to carry the bill before one agreed. The bill got through committee but died on the Assembly floor. 

The moment that stuck in my mind occurred when I finished my brief history presentation to the legislators. A silence ensued, and lingered on, for close to half a minute. Anyone who has spent time around elected officials knows that silence in front of a crowd is not their default. I surmised that the image in their heads during that silence originated with the evening news they had absorbed each May Day earlier in their lives, when goosestepping Soviet soldiers preceded tanks and missile carriers in their march across Red Square in Moscow. I guessed that the assemblymembers were busy connecting that image with the concept of “re-election”, thus sending them into a moment of quiet contemplation of their futures.

This experience taught me that the recovery from ‘May Day fear’ of union activists post-Cold War and post-Bernie did not extend to elected public officials. Soon my brief legislative committee testimony became a longer talk, which I presented to unions, labor councils, DSA chapters (and like May Day demonstrations, often cosponsored) in April for the next couple years. With COVID’s shutdown, I delivered these talks on zoom, but also worked with a group of talented friends to turn the presentation into a video. 

When we returned to public gatherings, the video continued to be screened in the days leading up to May first each year. There was clearly rising interest in the topic. May Day demonstrations were becoming an annual labor-supported event. San Francisco demonstrations and marches, for instance, were jointly called by all five Bay Area labor councils.

This year the UC Berkeley Labor Center showed the video on April 3. The event was cosponsored by East Bay DSA, UC Berkeley YDSA, the Alameda Labor Council and UAW Local 4811, the academic workers union that had waged and won an inspirational statewide UC strike in late 2022.  The event included a reception for the art created for the video by Jos Sances, blown up and framed on the Labor Center’s walls, and brief talks by me, Jos and Tanzil Chowdhury, a PhD candidate and a statewide leader of Local 4811. The Labor Center’s event organizers told me they would be very pleased with forty attendees. Ninety showed up. 

Tanzil described the work it had taken to make the 2022 strike a success. A new militant leadership of the union (actually three separate units at the time of the strike, merged afterward into one) carefully prepared the members for several years to get to the point where the strike could be successful. He noted that in the current political situation, many people were hoping that Shawn Fain’s date for a general strike on May 1 2028 could be moved up.  But his union’s example demonstrated the importance of proper preparation. If it took several years to set up a strike of 48,000, a three-year timeline to build a national general strike of millions did not seem excessive. 

The discussion that followed his presentation seesawed between fear that we don’t have three years given the speed at which the installation of American fascism is taking place, and the recognition of how much distance we have to cover before pulling off a successful general strike.

At other screenings since then the conversations have continued to revolve around the question, ‘How do we reasonably get from here to where we need to be as quickly as possible?’

Toward the general strike?

For much of organized labor, May Day 2025 is no longer May Day 1957. Unions like the UAW have learned to surmount divide and conquer tactics utilized against labor, which included the reflexive avoidance of May Day. Shawn Fain’s stated goal of a general strike, and the concrete task of aligning contract expirations to support it on May Day 2028, provides a tangible and highly symbolic process for overcoming working class division. It addresses the desire for action so many are feeling right now, and not incidentally establishes a credible path for the American working class to reclaim May Day. 

Going back to May Day’s origins, the state repression of immigrant worker leaders and whipping up of hysterical xenophobia has periodically returned as a “look over there” tactic in times of social crisis, and the current moment is no exception. Historically some unions have turned their gaze away or even cheered anti-immigrant fervor. But today Sheet Metal workers union president Michael Coleman and National Building Trades Council leader Sean McGarvey—not generally considered radical labor leaders—are nonetheless standing up against Trump for the return of union apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose illegal deportation and imprisonment is intended to divide workers and demoralize the immigrant community. 

May Day 2025 is also not yet May Day 2028, and it remains to be seen whether we will get there.  Labor and community organizing for this May Day contains the seeds for growing another outpouring of anger and determination similar to what we saw on April 5. That’s important. The key to success of the plan for a general strike in 2028 will be found in continuously building the muscles for mass action along the way, which necessitates a sharp focus by organized labor on internal and external organizing for that purpose. We shouldn’t expect this to happen overnight. Labor is not a monolith, and different unions are moving at different speeds toward understanding and acting on the existential peril we face. 

Of course, organized labor is not the only factor in resistance to the fascist tide. But the turnout for May Day 2025 will help to show us whether labor is on track to play the role it can and should in the fight.

The California DSA State Council met for our bi-monthly meeting on April 5th. State Committee member Michael L. grounded us in our political reality. He applauded the mass mobilizations at the “Hands Off” rallies across the United States that were happening at the same time as our meeting. “Sure ‘hands off,’ but what more?” He challenged us, “What are we fighting for?” He highlighted the importance of building a base, organizing, and leadership beyond these mobilizations. 

Bonnie L. from East Bay DSA reported that her chapter’s labor committee had passed a resolution to support the Federal Unionist Network (FUN) and was bringing it to the full chapter at its upcoming yearly convention to make this work a priority for the coming year, and urged other chapters to do the same. [The chapter subsequently voted to make it the top priority.]

California DSA can also publicly take a position on legislation. We had a lively discussion about our legislative endorsement framework and the process for supporting or opposing legislation going forward. We did not formally decide to change the framework language in the meeting. 

The statewide electoral committee shared the work that its members have been doing to research key, winnable districts to build an Assembly slate for the 2026 elections. 

We also discussed the California DSA delegate elections, which are currently happening across the different chapters. 

We ended the meeting with a presentation and discussion about our collective ideas about the Vision for California campaign.

Our next State Council meeting is on June 7th where we will have our first meeting with the newly-elected delegates.

Terror is leadership: the falling
out of the plane
when you are midair, you wonder
did I sign up for this?
when you are about to hit the ?--
parachute or not--
you see
whether you made the right choice

you knew for a while it would be this,
you smelled it from afar: the fear
you were called to it by such bodies, Black ones
after colonial wars
they were the wrong bodies, that much was clear,
dead as they were in the rivers. Many of them.
This is not the solidarity you hope for.
Though that is how we all end: back to sea, back to Earth.

Terror is poverty, empty bellies stalking sleepless nights.
Terror is nothing ever smells right, because all the alerts
flash at once
Albert's story is not mine to tell. Though I fear if I don't
no one will know it.

He too was dead by the end, on the streets of a city.
Can you hear the lament? this man who gave me his trust.
And he died in the same way his fate foretold when we met,
to my deepest regret. I failed him. We all did.

I got him SSI. It was hard. Albert's head, which was beautiful
because he was a human
because he told me precisely the truth
those locks of honest hair
where he had been kissed by his wife, gripping as she does the papers she brings
for my "learned" eyes
was indented by his father's hammer, in his father's hand;
the divot--alltheseyearslater--was easy to see. His wife made it clear
when he only said it with his eyes:
he is very disabled. He really needs this help. His eyes
said You have no fucking idea.

The worst part is, I got him the help. I did
that. I fought for him and won.
It might have saved his life?
Albert died on the streets. Young. So all of us lost.

I managed to forget most of them, you know. To my shame.
Most of them were too blinding, especially cumulative,
in that long queue out the door,
in their honesty,
survival craft,
the wisdom of what others know,
the fact of their continued existence,
for my dark mind to preserve.
They deserved better. Even when we won.
From all of us. I/we owe them more. Our neighbors.

Albert was a man walking in terror. His lungs didn't much work. He had other things,
scary ones, hurting, haunting, his body. Diseases. Despair. Seizures. His dad's hammer.
Hunger.

Albert was afraid of himself. How did I come to this?

Albert was a hero. Albert was alive.
Albert made me want to cry.
Albert made me laugh. Albert was good people.
His wife made me want to be brave.
I met Albert, alive.
By the time he left this place, the city, Golden State, where the streetlights end,
he was dead.

Terror is a person like Albert beginning and ending
those ways. Those dark alleys. He was so beautiful, alive.
Terror is thousands of dollars of trauma
therapy for yourself, so that you can tell this very story,
knowing that OR that money could keep
the next Albert alive.

Terror is what you feel
when you realize
you like pretty things
and so many Alberts

Terror is your government
will torture Arab(-seeming?) people
before asking whether
it might be
the wrong thing to do
-or immigrants
-or that stranger over there
-or whomever the file is on
-because ignorance becomes malice
in that way that we do

Terror is a rich grinning man with a chainsaw
choosing who lives and who dies
and the people who keep cheering him on
Did you see them?
What did you do?

Terror is that steady stream of Black people
and brown people
and disabled people
and poor people, so many poor people
walking into your office
to tell you how they have had to learn
how to survive
White supremacist police
and their equivalent in any direction
where power thinks it can squat
The same waters of survival stream out of your office
having enlisted you
having taught you
what beauty is
having taken you to rivers of so many kinds, the wilder
the better, before hitting the Earth, parachute or not
and you could have gone your whole life
and not known
any of this

I will tell you about terror.
I will tell you about walking down streets where you
can hear the abuse, every block
and much of it not even
directed at you
and when the last man who raised his hand to strike you
liked your defiance
so didn't
you learned
what might work
until it kills you some day

Terror is walking barefoot
the perfect, delectable earth
every way that you can
which is
Californian
which is
peculiar
which is painful
which is too raw to survive
which is mostly
through the paths of your heart
which is mostly
sick in bed

Terror is
your hometown burned down
and the whole world watched
and somehow this story is yours

Terror is looking at your kin
and the fairness of our skin
and thinking:
do they actually think killing someone, anyone,
body or soul
is a good idea, ever?!?

Terror is knowing you are one medical bill away
from Albert's fate.
Terror is not saying goodbye.

the way he said thank you and all I had was sorry

Terror is alone.
Solidarity is freedom.

The Democratic Party is in a mess of trouble. And a mess.

Polls peg its public approval rating at the lowest in decades, mainly for failure to push back vigorously against the MAGA agenda. That’s no surprise to socialists, both within the party and without, who have watched it become more and more dependent on Wall Street and big business, especially distasteful elements like arms makers and sellers, neo-con warmongers, fossil fuel corporations, healthcare profiteers and financial speculators. It’s gotten to the point where Republicans, while allied with the same billionaire classes, manage to exude a phony “America first” populism by campaigning against Democrats’ elitist reputation and using cultural war opportunism to win enough of the working class—or induce us to not vote at all.

Meanwhile, insufficient attention was paid to post-election polling that showed the genocide in Gaza was the No. 1 reason people who voted for Biden in 2020 failed to back Harris in 2024.

Just a little farther to the right
Yet the Democrats’ dominant forces continue to insist that if only the party moved a little farther to the right or a little more distant from solidarity with Palestine, it could capture the votes of “moderate” Republicans in the “managerial/professional class” and stereotyped white suburbanites. The heck with working class immigrants and other marginalized groups.

We know better. Only a party by, of and for the vast majority of us who work for a living—or would if we could—can defeat the fascist right and institute a march toward societies that put people and the planet over profits. 

Could that be a drastically remade Democratic Party?  It feels implausible—and maybe is. But stalwart socialists and uncorrupted progressives are still carrying on that fight, understanding full well that comrades organizing in other formations (e.g. Greens, Peace and Freedom) or who envision DSA as a proto-party, are all our allies. Time will tell what roads will eventually converge in success.

The ostensible ruling body of the California Democratic Party (CDP) is its Central Committee, with approximately 3,500 members. About a third are elected officials, party bosses and their appointees—with some exceptions, the most conservative portion, thanks to the power of big money, incumbency and patronage. (Part of the progressives’ platform is to eliminate or greatly reduce superdelegate appointments.)

Another third are appointed by county central committees, themselves mostly elected on the bottom of the primary ballot in presidential years. The exact mechanism varies a lot by county, but they’re not typically big money operations. Progressives who banded together in slates and worked hard to get the word out have seen some success. (I’ve been elected twice.)

The final third are elected in Assembly District Election Meetings, known as ADEMS. Every two years, CDP organizes special elections to elect 14 people in each of 80 districts. The most recent was in February 2025. Traditionally, these were in-person, Iowa-style caucuses, with candidates vying to get supporters out on a weekend morning. This permitted a measure of grassroots power; where progressives organized slates effectively, they were often successful in making sure each candidate’s friends voted for all of them. 

With COVID, the party began instituting mail and online voting, now in addition to a reinstated but much more low-key, in-person option, with complicated sets of deadlines for candidate and voter registration. 

Progressives determined to win
This year, progressives determined to win a large number of seats organized—later than we should have, unfortunately—as the Progressive Delegates Network (PDN), aiming to help create and support slates in as many districts as possible. We first developed a political platform, set out to recruit and vet candidates, then helped organize and campaign. We endorsed about 360 (including significant numbers of DSA members) of a possible 1,120, and about a third of those were elected.

Post-mortems have led to some observations and conclusions:

• We needed to start organizing earlier. 

• We failed to hook up with some progressives who either organized themselves or ran, generally unsuccessfully, as individuals.

• We need to make affiliation with our slates a sine qua non for progressives, both as a key to success and a measure against opportunism that some have adopted, aligning instead with liberals or establishment figures perceived as more likely to win. We were up against a number of phony, self-declared “labor” slates, and others sponsored by state legislators who sought even more influence than they could get through their allotted appointments.

• Online voting—a large percentage of the total—provided many opportunities for mischief: we’ve seen circumstantial evidence of people being registered without their knowledge, then “voting” as they’re told with minimal understanding. In most districts, only about half of those who went to the trouble of registering to vote online actually did so. 

• People with less English knowledge or lacking Internet access had more trouble voting.

• Fewer in-person voting sites without good public transit discouraged participation, especially in rural districts.

• Voters were uncomfortable going in person to some locations housing institutions that actively supported certain candidates.

• Chaos reigned at several in-person sites, where privacy was compromised and ballots ran out. 

• For the first time, apparently, large sums were spent to get out the vote, with progressive slates particularly targeted by groups aligned with Democrats for Israel. 

Probably the biggest conclusion of all is that if progressives want to seriously challenge the CDP machine, more serious, ongoing organizing is needed, not last-minute rushes to find people for the biannual ADEMs.

A new membership organization
To that end, the small, self-appointed group of PDN organizers intends to create a new membership organization, probably in the form of a PAC, outside the party. It will be based on the platform that was hammered out and with the sole mission of fighting for power in the CDP by competing for Central Committee positions in ADEMs, county parties and through selective involvement in legislative and statewide contests—something that California DSA is also taking on. 

Meanwhile, there will be flurries of organizing around statewide party meetings, including the upcoming annual convention in Anaheim May 30 - June 1. Together with the party’s Progressive Caucus, we’ll engage in educational work, including a showing of the Oscar-winning film No Other Land about attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. PDN is waiting to get more organized before endorsing candidates for party offices, but a number of affiliated individuals are running for regional director and caucus leadership positions. Alan Vargas, a maverick Young Democrat who was PDN-endorsed for ADEMs, is challenging party chair Rusty Hicks, a nemesis of progressives and advocates for party democracy.

Battles may develop over resolutions calling for an arms embargo of Israel, Palestinians’ right of return and others—in an oppressive, anti-democratic milieu. Some of us will challenge the Rules Committee’s ongoing stall in approving our application for creation of a chartered party organization, California Democrats for Justice in Palestine. Democrats for Israel achieved that status a couple of years ago.

Anyone interested in getting involved in these efforts, contact your local folks engaged in the intraparty battles. Someone in your chapter surely knows who they are.

Before reading more, an urgent ask for all members: we want the feedback of all our membership! Please fill out our chapter survey so we can know more about your thoughts on our various areas of work and how we can improve! This will take about 10-15 minutes, so set aside some time to sit down and share your thoughts!

• Our State and Revolution reading group is coming up this Saturday. Make sure to RSVP in order to get the link!

• Our Sanctuary Cincy petition is going strong, but we need you to help us reach as many people as possible to sign! Sign up for our canvass this Saturday, May 24th in Westwood to get as many residents of Cincinnati as possible to sign the petition!

• New to DSA (or know someone interested) and want to meet others and learn more about the country's largest socialist organization? Join us for our next DSA 101!

• Our next Stitching Social is happening this May 31st at noon! Join us at the Covington Library to start or continue a craft project and socialize with fellow socialists!

• We're hosting a 101 session on Medicare for All and why we fight for it as socialists! Join us on May 31st at the Newport Library at 3 PM for a political education event on one of the core issues for democratic socialists over the past ten years!

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Climate Disaster? The Point is to Change It!

What got me out of being a climate doomer is meeting and collaborating with enough people across this organization who have been through that period of engaging with how bad things are and reckoning with that doomer aspect, and then are like, No, we just have to build something better and that's the only alternative, because otherwise we are fucked. But we have to figure out what that alternative is and how to make it happen at whatever cost because that's our collective and individual survival. Those actually are the stakes and we can build it together—there are all these reasons to think we can build it together—but we have to keep articulating that in a way that people can actually believe, that we can actually believe and also convince other people of.

• Ashik Siddique, DSA Co-Chair. READ MORE

By Gregory Lebens-Higgins

America “didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians,” wrote John Steinbeck. “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” But unless they owned the business, this “capitalist” was probably just another member of the working class, producing profit for the bourgeoisie.

“The bourgeoisie are the ruling class of our historical epoch.”

The bourgeoisie are the ruling class of our historical epoch. Replacing monarchies determined by blood or divinity, the bourgeoisie now own the means of production—land, factories, and capital—necessary to produce commodities. These commodities are created with the labor of workers in the process of production. Yet when sold for profit, only a fraction of the value is returned to its creator.

The bourgeoisie are compelled by competition to accumulate the remainder. To maintain their place in the market they must expand and innovate; and they are compelled by ego to maintain the accoutrements of their status. They must also fend off working class assertions of class interest by lowering wages, extending hours, and breaking unions.

In The Power Elite (1956), C. Wright Mills takes a broader view of the elite, as “self conscious members of a[n upper] social class.” Though dated, Mills provides a useful analysis of “those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences.”

Class consciousness is formed among the elite by psychological and social unity; ”men of similar origin and education” with similar careers and lifestyles. The interwoven institutional hierarchies of the political, corporate, and military elite further shape “the relations of their rulers.” Finally, the class-conscious bourgeoisie coordinate to maintain their position: “As the institutional mechanics of our time have opened up venues to men pursuing their several interests, many of them have come to see that these several interests could be realized more easily if they worked together, in informal as well as in more formal ways.”

However, members of the bourgeoisie do not always put their self interest aside. The bourgeoisie consists of factions shaped by their basis for securing capital. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx describes the friction between landed property and capital: What kept these two factions apart “was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property.”

“Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations.”

Another faction of the bourgeoisie are small business owners who still participate in the work. These “petit bourgeoisie” are at risk of falling into the proletariat from competition with centralized monopoly. They are less secure in their class position and become the most reactionary, fighting any encroachments on their property and finding scapegoats (rather than capitalism itself) on which to blame their troubles. They are the face of Trump’s “beautiful boaters.”

The bourgeoisie is propped up by bureaucratic institutions staffed by the professional-managerial class. These workers, elevated above manual labor by social status, come to identify with the bourgeoisie. Their loyalty is ensured by the promise of stability.

But such stability is no longer a guarantee. The professional-managerial class no longer receives the benefit of the deal. Student debt, the erosion of benefits, and rising prices push them further into the proletariat.

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie is unraveling. As Mills reminds us, its structure is not meritocratic: “The man who is rising gets involved in the accumulation of advantages, which is merely another way of saying that to him that hath shall be given.” The capabilities of the bourgeoisie erode with the pampering of each successive generation.

The very institutions that support the cohesiveness and maintenance of the bourgeoisie are being destroyed in its race to suck up remaining profits from the public sector. Meanwhile, the resentment of the petit bourgeoisie is increasingly unstable in its support for the destructive policies of Trump.

These weaknesses provide an opening for a new historical epoch. One defined by democratic control of the entire working class. The bourgeoisie has outlived its usefulness, and is unable to deliver anything beyond destruction. For progress, the means for a dignified life must be guaranteed to all.

The post B is for “Bourgeoisie” first appeared on Rochester Red Star.