Quick, what action is guaranteed to freak out the capitalist class? If you answered, “Propose a credible campaign to pass a progressive tax”, congratulations! Ever since Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto included “taxing the rich” among activities the working class could take to advance its cause, the response by capital to any notion of parting with any portion of its ill-gotten gains has been predictable. Recently we witnessed the lurid warnings of disaster looming in New York should democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani be elected Mayor, emanating from his idea for a modest income tax increase on the wealthy to fund improvements needed by all New Yorkers if they wanted to be able to afford to live in the city in which they work.

The arguments against taxing the people best able to pay higher taxes are stored in a well-thumbed playbook, rolled out of mothballs by defenders of privilege every time the notion of tax fairness re-enters public conversation. But just as mothballs tend to lose their potency over time, shibboleths about taxes in place since Prop 13, passed in 1978 in the dawn of the neoliberal era in California, have lost their ability to shield the rich from voter anger. 

Why? Economic inequality, growing over the past fifty years in tandem with the decline of organized labor, has accelerated since the first Trump presidency, and now, with an oligarchy and the MAGA movement well on the way to crushing the sad remnants of New Deal regulations and programs, replacing them with open looting of the public sector, the tired anti-tax refrains are no longer playing well in New York and elsewhere.

Does anyone still believe that billionaires are “job creators”, who would rather pay workers a wage to produce a product than invest in job-killing AI? Does anyone other than Republican elected officials think cutting taxes for the wealthy actually leads to more jobs, versus adding more mansions or yachts to their hoard? 

Two proposals head toward the ballot

Here in the Golden State, fourth largest economy in the world, and home to one quarter of the country’s billionaires, two proposals are potentially heading to the November 2026 ballot that would provide the working class with opportunities to retrieve some of the wealth it produces, in the form of state revenues to pay for desperately needed public services. These initiatives will also hand the wealthy a choice:  either do right, agree to a modest restoration of tax fairness, and demonstrate that they remain a part of the broader human community; or resist, watch their failed messaging fail again, and further cement pariah status for themselves. 

The two ballot measures are currently gathering signatures to qualify for the 2026 November ballot. The “Permanent Funding for Schools and Health Care” is the product of a re-energized progressive tax coalition, dormant since the defeat of Proposition 15 in 2020 (a split roll initiative that would have separated residential and commercial property tax collections), but responsible for two prior victories, Proposition 30 in 2012 and its renewal in 2016 as Proposition 55. These bumped the top state income tax bracket—the top two percent of income earners, or a current $721,000/year and above for joint filers—up to 13.3% (including a 1% surcharge on incomes of a million dollars), bringing in between six and twelve billion dollars per year to bolster schools and social services in the wake of the Great Recession, while other states were slashing funding along with education and healthcare services. 

Prop 30 was written as a temporary tax. Prop 55 extended it to 2030. The current petition drive, headed by public sector unions but mainly bankrolled by the California Teachers Association, aims to make the tax permanent. As a tax already in place for more than a dozen years, its rollover is unlikely to produce more than token opposition from right wing rich people who have lost on the issue twice before. Perhaps some of them have learned from experience that (shocker) they are still rich despite paying the highest state income taxes in the country. And the very richest among them might be keeping their powder dry to try to stop the other initiative.

Billionaire tax

This one, a wealth tax on billionaires spearheaded by SEIU-United Health Workers (UHW), has been getting a lot of press lately. The “California Billionaire Tax Act” proposes a one-time tax of 5% on the assets of the state’s two hundred billionaires (who combined hoard almost two trillion dollars) to offset the pending impact of federal cuts to Medicaid funding to the state, estimated to be around $20 billion per year. If left unaddressed, these cuts would throw several million people off of Medi-Cal (California’s version of Medicaid) and destroy tens of thousands of health care jobs. The UHW proposal—issued a title and summary by the state attorney general in the closing days of 2025, a necessary step before signature gathering—is also supported by a southern California hospital association. The tax would raise an eyepopping estimated $100 billion over five years and then expire.

California DSA endorsed the measure at its State Council meeting in December. Crucially, however, the “California Billionaire Tax Act” has no other labor backers, not even the parent organization of UHW, the SEIU State Council. The campaign website foregoes the standard “supporters” page, most likely because there aren’t any. No matter. UHW probably has the money to qualify the initiative by itself, should it choose to do so. Passing it is another question. 

Opposed are, of course, billionaires, several of whom are loudly but not very originally proclaiming that they are moving themselves and their businesses out of the state if the measure passes. Their mouthpieces and credulous mainstream media reporters have kept up a steady drumbeat of hysterical “the sky is falling” rhetoric for the past month. Just a few of the many headlines billionaires can buy: “California’s divisive plan to tax billionaires” (The Financial Times); “Billionaires are Ramping Up Their California Exits on Threat of Wealth Tax” (Bloomberg.com); “Billionaires make strategic moves out of California ahead of proposed wealth tax” (Fox); and “A Wealth Tax Floated in California Has Billionaires Thinking of Leaving” (New York Times). 

Class traitor

At least one billionaire isn’t buying the hype offensive, however. As reported in The Guardian, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (worth $159 billion) sensibly says, “We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes they would like to apply, so be it.” Class traitor Huang must be onto something that eludes the likes of David Sacks, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel in their supposed panicked rush to the exit: they will all still be stinking rich and way too powerful for the public good after the measure passes. The public might even come to think they should keep existing if they’re paying a fairer share of taxes.

Silicon Valley Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna agreed on social media: “I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much.’ This historical reference point brought a chorus of right wing calls to primary Khanna.

Let’s be mathematically precise about the potential impact of the tax on the crocodile tear-emitting billionaires. Instead of two trillion dollars in their piggy banks, after passage of the billionaire tax they will be left with one trillion, nine hundred ninety-five billion dollars—pretty much enough to scrape by on, one would think, until rage over economic inequality creates mobs and torches large enough to burn down their mansions, yachts and jets. 

Newsom’s consistency

Unfortunately joining the billionaires in opposition is Governor Gavin Newsom. The best that can be said of his position is that he is consistent. Since taking office he has steadfastly opposed any talk of taxing his buddies the ultrarich, no doubt keeping his eye on the prize of billionaire backing for his inevitable presidential run. Here’s a secret, Gavin: taxing the rich is extremely popular with the electorate. Take a cue from Zohran Mamdani. You and your neoliberal ilk in the Democratic Party leadership would be far better off building a campaign from the bottom up than the top down. Or conversely, did you really learn nothing from the Kamala Harris campaign either?

Newsom’s efforts are especially offensive given two bits of historical data. Compare and contrast with former Governor Jerry Brown.  Brown, a pragmatic politician, under great pressure from business interests opposed to an increase in taxes on the top two percent, nonetheless refused to allow his state’s schools and services to crater on their behalf, campaigning vigorously for Prop 30 in 2012. Worse than that comparison: Newsom is parroting the canard that taxing the rich drives them out of the state and with them all the supposed jobs they create. In 2012 the same blackmailing lie was repeated endlessly by the opposition. What actually happened? By 2015, the state’s millionaire population had grown by ten thousand; and the state had added a million and a half jobs following passage of Prop 30. With a tiny allocation of investigative reporting, the prestigious publications printing these stories might have added a smidgeon of balance to the billionaire-friendly fear mongering.

No denying the need, but…

No sane person who cares about health care for the poorest Californians can disagree about the need for something like a targeted billionaire tax, given the Trump regime’s federal budgetary moves. And glib, historically false arguments about runaway rich people leaving California a smoking fiscal desert aside, it’s past time for billionaires to cough up a fairer share of taxes. 

But many questions arise, out of which I’ll just broach two: if both measures make the ballot, will the feverish campaign against the Billionaires Tax harm the chances of making Prop 30/55 permanent? Failure of the latter measure would blow a large hole in the state’s budget, especially for K12 schools and community colleges, which receive 40% of the proposition’s income. And, can the two campaigns figure out how to get along and push common conversation about taxing the rich into a positive and dominant narrative—instead of, say, allowing the capitalist class to spend bajillions against a divided left to make it “union thugs kill the goose that lays the golden egg for the golden state”?

Time is short. November 2026 will be upon us before we know it. Let’s hope the necessary work of coalition building, message agreement and assembling the field campaigns will show the way to getting the wealthiest Californians to pay their fair share for the common good.

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, edited by Andrew Stone Higgins, Haymarket Books, available March 2026.

DSA’s “rank-and-file strategy” has 60s roots at UC Berkeley 

"The lessons of the International Socialists can help point us in the right direction by sharing what has worked and what has failed in past decades" —Andrew Stone Higgins

Some DSA members are still pondering how they should relate, personally and collectively, to the labor movement. Should they try to become agents of workplace change while serving on the staff of local, regional, or national unions? Or should they organize “on the shop-floor”—in non-union shops or as a unionized teacher, nurse, or social worker? And then, later on, seek elected, rather than appointed, union leadership roles? 

A few years ago, the DSA convention debated this latter strategy and then narrowly passed a resolution favoring the rank-and-file route. Some members locally have joined the Rank-and-File Project which supports this approach “to fighting for a better world from the bottom up.”

Fifty years ago, Sixties leftists pondered the same options before launching their own reform efforts, within the labor bureaucracy or as challengers to it. Some had the foresight to transition from campus and community organizing to union activism in healthcare, education, and social work where college degrees were helpful and job security good.

Other former student radicals—under the (not-always-helpful) guidance of multiple left-wing formations—opted to become blue-collar workers in trucking and telecom, mid-west auto plants and steel mills, and West Virginia coal mines in the 1970s. Unfortunately, in the decade that followed, de-regulation, de-industrialization, and global capitalist restructuring produced enormous job losses and industrial contraction. 

Radicals who made a “turn toward industry” often lost union footholds they had struggled for years to gain. But thankfully, many ended up back on the academic track, retooling as teachers, lawyers or pro-labor college professors. Others became community organizers, public sector union activists, labor educators or staffers, and, in some cases, even entered the business world.

Socialism from Below

Andrew Stone Higgins’ history of the International Socialists (IS), From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, brings together individual oral histories or contributor-written chapters by 26 former members of that organization. The IS was founded in 1969 by veterans of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley and other hotbeds of Sixties’ activism. FSM alums featured in the book include the late Mike Parker, an East Bay DSA member whose chapter on “The Student Movement and Beyond” contains good advice for campus radicals today.

Like organizational rivals on the left less interested in promoting “socialism from below,” the IS made a decade-long attempt to “bridge the gap between a left disproportionately formed on college campuses and the working class, which, of course, remains a central concern for all American socialists.”

In Higgins’ collection, contributors like Candace Cohn, Gay Semel, and Wendy Thompson provide vivid first-person accounts of their experience leaving student life or white-collar jobs to become embedded in industry. Each of them helped fight the discriminatory treatment of women and/or African-American workers widespread in the blue-collar world they entered in the 1970s.

Cohn became politically active as a member of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Michigan. After graduation, she moved to Pittsburgh and helped create a local advocacy group for Mon Valley workers exposed to hazardous health and safety conditions.  She then became “one of the first women hired into basic steel since World War II” at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, “the world’s largest coking operation and its filthiest and deadliest.”

In the mill, “sexual harassment was non-stop, both from foremen and from older white co-workers.” Nevertheless, Cohn built relationships with black workers and other female steel workers, started a shop floor paper, Steelworkers Stand Up, and helped rally fellow rank-and-filers on behalf of Ed Sadlowski and his “Fight Back” slate in a 1977 international union election.  

Sadlowski was a “left social democrat,” who was heavily red-baited during his exciting but, ultimately unsuccessful, challenge to labor-management partnering in the steel industry. “In the employer’s offensive that followed,” Cohn writes, “tens of thousands of steelworkers were thrown onto the street, mills shuttered, and steel valley voices silenced.” She was able to retrain as a labor and civil rights lawyer.

Like Cohn, Gay Semel went to law school after her tour of duty in the IS, as its national secretary and editor of Workers Power, an “agitational newspaper” featuring a popular column called “Labor Notes.” Before that, she worked as a telephone operator in N.Y.C. In that well-timed intervention, she got herself expelled from the Bell System company union then representing her-co-workers, which the Communications Workers of America was trying to oust. As a lawyer, she spent most of later career working for CWA, the union she also tried to support, back in 1971, when she wouldn’t cross its picket-lines during a nine-month strike by 38,000 N.Y Tel technicians.

Unlike Cohn and Semel, Wendy Thompson actually made it to the finish line of a good union pension in the auto industry after becoming a labor-oriented radical during her junior year abroad (in France, circa May 1968). Thompson worked for General Motors at a Chevy gear and axle plant, with a predominantly black workforce. Surviving lay-offs and repeated management attempts to fire her, Thompson battled sexism on the shop floor, contract concessions, and the long dominant influence of the Administration Caucus in the United Auto Workers (UAW).

During her 33 years in the plant, only one Administration Caucus critic was ever elected to the UAW international executive board. But the 2022 membership vote to ditch convention voting for top officers—and switch to direct election by the rank-and-file—enabled a slate backed by Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) to win what Thompson calls an “unprecedented victory—and a great culmination of my many years of activity” on the shop floor.

A Hard Sell

The recollections of individual IS members definitely support Higgins’s conclusion that their “pre-party formation” of 500 failed to create an organizational culture “more fully welcoming to diverse working-class recruits.” The latter numbered only about one-fifth of the IS’s peak membership, and, according to Higgins, here’s why:

While refreshingly democratic and seriously committed to political education of new members, the IS culture of deep reading, broad discussion, fierce debates, and long, numerous meetings was a hard sell to prospective members, pressing familial obligations, and a limited amount of free time.

And then there was the internal feuding that disrupted the group’s initially well-coordinated labor work. In 1976-77, the IS split three ways. Several hundred loyalists stayed put; seventy five formed a group called Workers Power, and one hundred created the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which grew bigger over the years but then suddenly imploded in 2019. In the mid-1980s, as part of a more constructive “regroupment” process, Workers Power members got back together with remaining ISers to form Solidarity, a looser network of socialists which publishes the journal Against the Current.

According to former Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) supporter Dan LaBotz, now a Brooklyn DSA member and co-editor of New Politics, “one of the principal reasons for the IS split was differences over the labor work,” which some members argued was “making the group more conservative.” 

As feminist historian Barbara Winslow recalls, the grounds for her expulsion from the IS, in the late 1970s, was arguing “for a larger engagement in all possible areas of working-class women’s struggles—blue-, white-, and pink-collar movements as well as other women’s liberation activities.”  She and her then husband, former IS National Industrial Organizer Cal Winslow, became targets of a subsequent purge, when they were expelled from the ISO, despite being among its founding members.

Contributors to Higgins collection like UC Santa Barbara Professor Nelson Lichtenstein, David Finkel, co-editor of Against the Current, and others cite TDU and Labor Notes as the main legacies of the IS. That uniquely durable labor education, rank-and-file organizing, and alternative media project was launched forty-six years ago, during an era when other socialist or communist formations were still mired in highly competitive self-promotion. 

For example, their organizational newspapers usually put a higher priority on new “cadre” recruitment than helping to build broad-based, multi-tendency rank-and-file movement. In contrast, as Thompson recalls, “the IS clearly rejected the model that many socialist groups had of maintaining their front groups rightly under their control. Originally staffed by IS members, Labor Notes became a project where workers would feel they were in a comfortable milieu but also a pond where socialists could swim.”

This may have “violated all the norms of so-called Leninism,” Finkel notes. But, in the end, a more ecumenical approach was critical to developing a multi-generational network of rank-and-file militants that now meets every two years with 5,000 or more in attendance, as opposed to just 600 in the early 1980s, which was good turnout back then. (To attend the June, 2026 Labor Notes conference, register as soon as possible at https://www.labornotes.org/2026.)

This very readable volume has much solid advice for socialists trying to revitalize existing unions or create alternatives to them today.  One key lesson is that building a big labor or political tent is better, for the left, than becoming a small one. If you prefer the latter result, then endless meetings, too much organizational “discipline,” and fractious debates over the finer points of Marxist theory—followed by destructive purge—will get you there pretty quick. On the other hand, if you want to be an individual or organizational long-distance runner on the labor left, there are, in this book, some very good role models to follow.

On January 1, 2026, DSA’s most visible and astonishing electoral success story to date, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, was inaugurated as mayor of the largest, most culturally iconic city in America. Much media hay has been made of Mamdani’s long-shot run, incredibly well-organized and executed campaign, and the long-theorized but seldom-achieved mass mobilization of untapped voter blocs that underlay Bernie Sanders’ two runs at the White House in 2016 and 2020. 

In the immediate aftermath of Zohran’s victory, hundreds of thinkpieces from The Guardian to the LA Times asked: who’s the next Zohran? Will there be one in Los Angeles? Mayor Karen Bass is up for reelection in 2026, facing a narrow set of challengers now that her 2022 opponent, crypto-Republican real estate billionaire Rick Caruso, has declined a rematch. Likely opponents will include Rae Huang, occupying a progressive-nonprofit-activist lane that Bass herself is aligned with, and former LAUSD superintendent Austin Buetner, a candidate in the mold of a post-Obama technocrat.

The question betrays a misunderstanding of how socialist electoral power is built in practice, both confusing running candidates with movement-building, and trying to map New York City’s political context onto Los Angeles. A Mamdani mayoralty will challenge NYC-DSA in uncountable ways as they seek to realign city and state politics around a democratic socialist pole, with DSA as a proto-party organization amassing institutional power alongside its electeds by way of establishing a regional electoral machine.

DSA’s Los Angeles chapter is ramping up to support our own six endorsed candidates for 2026: two incumbents on city council, one school board incumbent, and challengers for two new city councilor seats and for city attorney. These races continue the chapter’s pursuit of a very similar realignment under different conditions than NYC. On this front, DSA-LA’s electoral program has a strong track record, demonstrably shifting the political calculus among elected officials, operatives, labor unions, allies and class enemies alike. Once grounded in an uneasy multiracial “Status Quo Coalition” tying capital and labor together into ethnic blocs of interest, the shape of LA politics has begun to shift, with big business, landlord, and police interests pouring money into crushing the fragile pro-tenant and pro-worker wins of the past few years.

In this first piece of a planned series, we offer an overview of the Los Angeles political landscape and DSA-LA’s recent electoral history to explain its similarities and differences from NYC, the power (or influence) DSA-LA does (and doesn’t yet) wield, the ongoing realignment of major political forces in Los Angeles, and what these all mean for the democratic socialist movement.

Structural Factors Shape Local Strategy

DSA-LA’s electoral program to date is distinguished by a significant focus on municipal city council offices. While NYC-DSA has elected two councilmembers and 9 state legislators (the tenth of whom left office to become Mayor), DSA-LA’s wins so far have been concentrated in the city of Los Angeles, with four elected Los Angeles City Councilmembers and two Los Angeles school board members.

The relative strength and weakness of mayors and city councils informs municipal electoral strategy. The city councils in the two other largest cities in America, NYC and Chicago, each have 50+ members. (Chicago’s mayor is weak in theory, strong in practice - though the current mayor is testing the limits of mayoral powerlessness.) In contrast, the mayor’s office in Los Angeles is relatively weak compared to city council, with each of our 15 city council offices functioning more as a midsize localized executive office than a legislator in an assembly.

A California Red article during the 2024 campaign cycle as well as our chapter’s Democratic Socialist Program provide a good overview of the political interests that oppose or support our candidates, which are largely similar for DSA candidates across the country. We describe below some of the most salient factors a DSA-LA candidate faces in mounting a winning campaign.

Election System & Scale

The sheer scale of LA politics creates the most formidable obstacles. Assembly districts contain 485,000 people and city council districts 260,000—compared to New York's 120,000 and 170,000 respectively. For example, in the 2022 primary, DSA-LA’s Hugo Soto-Martinez won the most votes in the primary against incumbent Mitch O’Farrell with just over 19,000 votes to O’Farrell’s 15,000. Meanwhile, only about 17,000 votes in total were cast in Zohran’s first primary race for New York State assembly in 2020. In NYC, the general election is typically a guaranteed victory for the Democratic-line candidate. In 2022 Los Angeles, Soto-Martinez needed to win another bruising run-off against O’Farrell which he won 38,069 to 27,797.

The chapter has attempted endorsements in state legislative seats in the past, and those results further illustrate the overwhelming scale of Los Angeles electoral campaigns: former Culver City councilor Daniel Lee badly lost a special election for State Senate District 30 in 2021 against a chair of the “Women for Mike Bloomberg 2020” campaign – despite winning more votes than Zohran Mamdani did in his Assembly victory that same year. DSA-endorsed candidate Fatima Iqbal-Zubair lost twice in bids to unseat oil-money Democrat Assembly District 65 incumbent Mike Gipson in 2020 and 2022, despite receiving over 50,000 votes in her first race.

California's "top-two" jungle primary system compounds the challenge, requiring candidates to appeal beyond partisan activist bases to a broader electorate regardless of party affiliation. This primary system is in many ways more “small-d democratic” than a system of closed party primaries like NYC’s. At the same time, it has largely accomplished the goal of the Republican state legislators who championed it: boosting moderate candidates over left-wing challengers. It has also inspired establishment Democrats to strategically fund the primary races of their desired opponents, as Senator Adam Schiff did in 2024 when he poured millions into boosting Republican Steve Garvey to avoid a runoff against a progressive.

Another factor is our system of neighborhood councils, LA’s smallest official unit of city government. The 15 absurdly large city council districts are paired with 99 hyper-local, citizen-led political institutions with elected leadership. The very small size of these races (with vote totals in the tens to hundreds) makes them attractive targets for activists; neighborhood councils were swept by grassroots progressives in recent years. (DSA-LA ran some neighborhood council races in 2020 and 2021.) Unfortunately for these progressives, each council is funded to the tune of $25,000 and granted purely advisory powers, while being subject to many state laws applicable to regular governing bodies; in practice, more of a timesink for NIMBY home- and business-owners than a venue for collective power.

DSA-LA has additionally endorsed candidates for some of the county’s 87 smaller jurisdictions: Ricardo Martinez for the City of La Puente, Mike van Gorder for Burbank Council, and recently re-elected Burbank councilor Konstantine Anthony. But the chapter has generally struggled to develop both candidates and membership outside the overwhelming gravity of LA city. LA city electeds are simply much more powerful than our comrade councilor from Burbank, so their seats are more hotly contested; their districts are more densely populated with DSA members, and their races eat up more attention and resources.

Constituencies and their Property

DSA-LA's core constituency is well-established through years of electoral experience: highly educated, mostly white voters facing downward mobility relative to their parents, alongside an upwardly mobile, educated multiracial working and middle class often experiencing greater prosperity than their immigrant parents. In Los Angeles—a majority-renter city where median home prices have long exceeded $1 million—housing scarcity sharpens these class dynamics. Decades of intentional underdevelopment have turbocharged homeowners' political power, creating conditions where DSA candidates perform well in dense, renter-heavy neighborhoods where the housing crisis hits hardest. 

The statewide albatross of Prop 13 has also fed this dynamic. The 50-year-old constitutional amendment, as the state Board of Equalization puts it, “converted the market value-based property tax system to an acquisition value-based system.” Among other effects, it functionally ensures new homeowners pay proportionally more for local services relative to established homeowners, driving an increasingly obvious generational divide. The components of California’s property tax system remain incredibly difficult to dislodge even as vast disparities in taxable property values impact education funding, state and local budget stability, and class and housing mobility.

Left-Labor Landscape

Every city has its own system of NGOs carving up the turf of its left-electoral and donor- or grant-funded movement landscape. Candidates for office must contend with this network of interpersonal and institutional relationships. In Los Angeles, Karen Bass herself serves as an exemplar. Once a member of the US Communist Party (CPUSA) and linked to Cuba through the Venceremos Brigade, Bass followed the path of much of the 20th century’s New Left. Like many who spent their younger years in SDS or adjacent social justice movement organizations, Bass rose to prominence in LA channeling her political energy into the nonprofit world as the founder of Community Coalition (CoCo) to exercise influence and achieve elected office.

Like many “blue” electoral strongholds, durable one-party rule has shaped the Democratic Party in California into a very large tent. While there is a corporate wing of Democrats courted by everyone from Chamber of Commerce lobbyists to crypto shills, there is also room for what we might call multi-racial liberal democracy blocs. Compared to New York, these blocs have been fairly adaptive and responsive to working class politics. Case in point: in the 1990s, a Latino-labor bloc emerged in LA that is still very powerful today. (In 2025 DSA-LA ran a political education series on Labor’s place in the power politics of LA— essential reading.) These leaders were considered quite progressive, and there are few outright terrible Democratic legislators in DSA’s best-performing neighborhoods. But wedges do open up within these coalitions, which gives a less well-connected candidate room for an upset victory.

In 2022, city politics was thrown into chaos after the release of leaked audio recordings of city officials scheming to turn redistricting to their favor at the LA County of Federation of Labor. All four officials lost their positions - three city council members, two of whom have since been replaced by DSA-LA endorsed candidates, plus Ron Herrera, Teamster and former president of the LA Fed. The “Fed Tapes” exposed politicians explicitly pitting racial groups against each other, an ugly display of the pursuit of raw power in which the highest levels of organized labor were implicated.

The Fed’s deep historical roots, transformational ties with immigrant communities, and 800,000 represented workers constitute a dominant force in LA politics. Unions with high profiles in the city include the building trades and longshoremen working the ports, healthcare unions like NUHW (whose six-month strike against Kaiser ended in 2025), SEIU’s public sector workforces, including some of the 100,000 SoCal members of SEIU 721, and UNITE HERE Local 11. UTLA, among other unions in public and higher education, remains a powerful progressive force within the Fed. Meanwhile Hollywood labor has been stretched thin by years of receding industry tides, with the disruption of Covid and 2023’s prolonged strikes giving way to sectoral contraction, erosion by AI, and a corrupt federal administration eager to extort favors for mega-merger approval, driving further monopoly consolidation among media companies.

Next time, we consider how DSA-LA’s endorsements have evolved in response to these factors.

There’s no good reason to believe Donald Trump, a serial liar of the first magnitude, any time he opens his mouth. His propensity to evade the truth, fudge, misdirect and outright lie is well documented. Yet a recent moment in the bright light of national media exposure may be an exception to that rule. 

I’m referring to the fascinating press event shortly after Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York and he and Trump chatted in the Oval Office in front of reporters. As reported by the New York Times, a troublemaking Fox News reporter attempted a gotcha, asking if Mamdani still thought that Trump was a fascist. 

“That’s OK, you could just say, ‘Yes,’” Mr. Trump said, looking highly amused by the whole thing. He waved his hand, as if being called the worst term in the political dictionary was no big deal.

“OK, all right,” Mr. Mamdani said with a smile.

“It’s easier,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s easier than explaining it.” Chuckling good-naturedly, he reached up and gave Mr. Mamdani a pat on the arm. “I don’t mind,” he added.

Of course, just because Trump agreed with that description of his politics doesn’t necessarily mean anything. He says one thing one day and contradicts it the next all the time. But one interpretation of this oddball encounter—and many have been offered—is that Trump took the opportunity to reassure the hard core of his movement base that he was still exactly who they thought he was. He may have framed the event as one old time powerbroker New Yorker talking with the new one, but don’t you worry: beneath the smiles and arm-patting ‘I’m still the old blood and soil’. 

Why might Trump feel he needed to do this? Perhaps because after his pardon of the January 6 conspirators in his first day of his second presidency he has paid relatively little attention to the movement that voted him back into office. And why would he? He has been too busy—expanding executive and federal overreach, bombing boats and countries, lying about ICE murders and conspiring with fellow billionaire oligarchs to loot government—to bother with the rabble, some of whom however may finally be growing restive over their lack of tangible benefits, stonewalling on the Epstein files and now, horrors, a democratic socialist elected in New York. 

It’s monstrous

Last spring I wrote a response in Jacobin to an article that made a case against calling what’s happening in the United States “fascism”. The author and I did agree that whatever we call it—authoritarianism, oligarchy, despotism, plutocracy etc.—it’s monstrous, needs to be fought and defeated, and the conditions in the country that brought it into being must be transformed. 

But drawing on the thinking and definition developed by Robert Paxton in his Anatomy of Fascism, I was and remain convinced that we are at the very least well along the path of ‘fascisization’ (the somewhat ugly neologism coined by Richard Seymour in his thoughtful Disaster Nationalism) if not fully arrived at the end of that treacherous road. I’m advocating here that it’s important for all of us involved in the resistance to be talking about it in this precise way.

I’ve laid out the main arguments elsewhere. Here’s another consideration, relating to popular perception rather than categorical discussion. So far the majority of the population has not been suffering beneath some iron heel, which in the cultural imagination is what fascism is about: the universal knock on the door at midnight; neighbors spying on neighbors and reporting them to the authorities, etc. People do see armed thugs in masks taking people away in unmarked cars to undisclosed locations—and more recently executing them—but that’s on the news. It’s not them it’s happening to.

One way of viewing this: the fact that the majority of us is not in the manacles of ICE, or among the quarter million or so federal employees who no longer have jobs, or amid the millions of poorest Americans dependent on the social services that federal workers once provided, simply means there hasn’t yet been time enough in twelve months to extend these abuses to more people. They keep coming. An alternative perspective: in countries that have gone full on fascist the worst impacts weren’t felt directly by the majority of the population—at least not until the warmongering part led to disastrous defeat. And with an imperialist war machine boasting a budget dwarfing all other countries’, that may never happen in our particular fascism variant. 

The essential question

But let’s set aside quibbles over definition and go with a more practical approach. The essential question remains:  “Is labeling the assault on American democracy ‘fascism’ helpful or not in fighting it?” I believe that if I’m talking with someone scared of what’s happening and looking for action to prevent things from getting worse, using the “F” word provides a common — and accurate — understanding of what we’re up against and basis for next steps.

I admit I haven’t seen any studies or opinion research in the last year that can quantify my assertion that calling it ‘fascism’ is persuasive to people not yet ready to jump into the streets. It would be helpful if a pollster were to ask, “Is this fascism?” and see how the demographics broke down in the responses. I have been relying on my gut instinct, the many conversations I have had with people, and informal scans across the media landscape as the population has attempted to metabolize events since Trump was elected for the second time. But recently I have gathered some new data. 

As a result of writing several articles on the topic I was asked to make a public presentation for DSA-LA in September. Seventy members turned out. We had a good discussion after my remarks and several comrades told me they were going to get more active than they had been.

Since then I’ve delivered this slide/lecture five times, sponsored by DSA, Working Families Party and other political- and labor-adjacent organizations. The crowds have been averaging close to one hundred people, and they are still there wanting to talk more after the advertised closing time. I provide them with some modest amounts of usable analysis, history, and scary empirical detail, and leave them with some hope—drawn from movement history and present-day resistance activities—about how we might prevail. 

Takeaway: You can do this too

I’m not famous. I’m retired, my last book came out ten years ago, I’m distributing my most recent video myself, and I am not so delusional as to think that it’s my name that has been bringing in the crowds. Rather, it’s the title of the talk (along with some good publicity by the sponsoring groups): “American Fascism: What it is, what to do about it.” (The one last week in Sonoma was recorded. Here it is.)

The people coming out clearly have a direct interest in the topic, but that’s the point: if you build it, they will come. At each of the presentations we make sure that various co-sponsoring organizations have tables and are given space to make brief presentations about the work they are doing (ICE defense, electoral efforts, affinity group formation, anti-war organizing, etc.) and a way to sign folks up. 

The takeaway: you can do this too. Get a couple organizations together and have them sponsor a similar event. The lurid details and steady drip drip drip of information—this innocent person killed by ICE, that new war front being opened up by Trump for oil, this professor told they cannot teach Plato because he promotes “gender ideology” (to take just three items from today’s news)—can drown out the central reality that we should all be directly confronting every day. We need action, we need numbers, we need to stitch groups into coalitions, and we need these things now.

While differences around the definition of our problem might still trouble some of us, the proof is in the pudding: use of the term “fascism” gets attention and provides a platform for discussion, education and organizing. That’s useful. And besides—it is fascism.

[An earlier version of this article was published in The Jumping Off Place]

Richard Hofstader, drawing from sociologist Max Weber, distinguished in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964) between the “intellectual” and the “professional”: the former a free critic of our ideas and social fabric; the latter living off his skills, not for them. At the turn of the 21st century, however, academia—the primary site of the siloed away “intellectual”—resembled little of what it did only decades earlier. No longer was the University of California free to all residents of the state as it had been for over 100 years. With decreased state funding for university operating budgets, public (and nonprofit) universities had become less and less of a public good: transformed instead into an increasingly premiumized hazing ritual imposed on working people seeking mythologized class mobility: “degree mills.” Fittingly, university academics simultaneously featured more specialized contingency in an increased reliance on residual low-wage intellectual labor. The minting of ever more of these graduate and non-professorial workers has, naturally, led to the rise of unions through which they fight to represent their interests. 

Universities today are increasingly research-oriented and produce important advancements in fields such as climate science and disease prevention—as well as continuing their educational missions (in an albeit ever more ancillary, impoverished form). After years without raises, and a 16-year legislative fight to win collective bargaining rights, graduate workers won a union at the University of California in 2000 with the United Auto Workers. Today, UAW represents over 60,000 workers across the UC system (and over 125,000 in higher education across the country) with jobs in various research, teaching, and staffing capacities—30,000 of whom at UC are currently fighting for a new contract, and 10,000 of whom are fighting for their first. The expansion of academic worker unions in the UC system and beyond isn’t only about ensuring equitable working conditions in higher education, but about fighting to protect and expand the University as a public service which produces public goods.

Statize or politicize

After the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court ruling in 2018 stripped public sector unions’ ability to collect fair-share fees and forced them to cultivate active membership, they were left with two paths, per Chris Maisano: statize, and become junior partners to government employers; or politicize, and fight “to put the level and quality of public services on the bargaining table.” UAW 4811, as well as its UAW Region 6 siblings at USC (Local 872), Cal State (Local 4123), CalTech (Local 2478), and beyond are doing exactly this politicizing effort by undertaking one of the biggest efforts to increase funding for public goods in California history: fighting to authorize Senate Bill 895, and through it $23 billion in grant funding from the state for public research.

UAW is leading the way in large part due to the fascist Trump regime’s attacks on higher education, and research in particular. As long ago as in Ancient Greece, the pursuit of knowledge for the public has been politically fraught. In The Apology, Socrates, facing the death penalty, defends himself from his accusers against charges of “corrupting” Athenians by leading them to criticize orthodoxy and thereby expand the knowledge of the public. Today, research workers are under siege in a similar manner—attacked by the climate-denying, anti-vax, anti-education regime for improving public knowledge about our world and lives through examination and experimentation. In the absence of funding from the state government, climate science has grown reliant on funding from the National Science Foundation, lifesaving health research likewise on funds from the National Institutes of Health. Rather than relegating these discoveries to the proprietary knowledge of capitalists in the oil industry or big pharma, respectively, federally funded research has still served the broader public by making scientific discoveries available to all for decades.

Hollowing out

That research, and the now union jobs which produce it, however, have been imperiled by Trump’s attacks. “The Trump administration’s attacks on research funding—cutting the budgets of funding agencies, firing staff responsible for reviewing proposals, withholding money for funded projects—are hollowing out this workforce,” says Ahmed A., a postdoctoral scholar at UC Irvine, financial secretary for UAW 4811, and member of DSA-LA. “Postdoctoral Scholar and Academic Researcher hiring has slowed down, and we’re seeing a massive uptick in layoffs. In 2025, the size of both bargaining units has decreased, and this trend shows no sign of stopping.” This decline in jobs will take another year to play out in the admission numbers for graduate workers who make up the bulk of the rest of research staff at UC.

These cancellations have targeted health and science which runs contrary to reactionaries’ “MAHA” and climate denial narratives. At UC Irvine, the NSF grant which funded the Climate Justice Initiative (CJI)—a longstanding research project studying health effects of climate change and pollution on Southern California communities—was abruptly cut in 2025, resulting in the attempted layoff of eight UAW-represented researchers, which would have effectively ended the project. Because workers were able to fight through their union, these researchers were able to win their jobs back, and thus to continue this vital research. CJI demonstrates how the damage of these cuts extends even beyond research institutions, says Thi T., a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Irvine and member of Orange County DSA who works on the project: “Our community partner organizations in OC broadly rely on a patchwork of their own federal grants that have gotten disrupted.”

 Fighting for the future of public research and education

The decrease of funding (particularly policies like capping indirect cost rates for granting agencies, which pay for day-to-day operations and facilities maintenance) to institutions has also cut into the quality of instruction, while providing cover for administrators to keep raising tuition for students. Some departments have seen instructional budget cuts of 50% or more as management offsets operations (and ballooning executive compensation) costs onto instruction. “There aren’t enough courses offered for undergraduates to complete their degree requirements quickly, while graduate students still struggle to find work,” says Trevor S., a teaching assistant at UC Irvine, and officer for OC DSA. “There is a high demand for teaching and a high supply of qualified instructors, but everyone somehow still loses. Fewer and fewer courses are being offered and class sizes keep growing.”

While UAW and others have successfully killed many grant cancellations in court, and the proposed federal budget for 2026 ended up restoring most funding for research—the targeted cancellation of federal grants which go against the Trump-prescribed narrative will persist for at least three more years, if not longer. This is why UAW is the primary sponsor of the California Health and Science Research Bond Act. SB 895 would put the largest bond in state history on the November 2026 ballot, $23 billion dollars over 10 years to fully fund public health and climate research. This funding would also take the pressure off of educators, caught in the University's targeted austerity which is driving down the quality of public education and forcing students to pay more. While funding at the federal level may never be truly secure again, UAW workers offer a model for how to win funding for the public good by organizing—one which DSA members can learn from and join because, as Thi T. puts it: “California communities face multi-billion dollar climate and environmental catastrophes every few months. We need multi-billion dollar solutions today.”

It’s going to be imperative that DSA members across California organize to protect and grow public research and education through every possible avenue as we move deeper into Trump’s second term. The passage by popular mandate of UAW’s bond this November will set the stage for public workers across the country to follow suit, safeguarding public goods and services when under siege by reactionaries at a national level. In 2026 California has the opportunity to lead the way in protecting the health and climate of all people, in the U.S. and around the world—as well as to strengthen and politicize the union of science, labor, and socialism!

Yes, it is no longer the holiday season. But due to technical issues preventing some California Red readers from taking our Holiday News Quiz offered in December, we are offering a reprise opportunity to take the quiz and win Socialist Prizes! These include books, posters, pamphlets, t-shirts and more. Don’t hesitate—it’s working now. Winners will be announced in the next issue. Note: If you took the quiz and successfully made it to the end and submitted your answers, don’t worry; we still have your entry and you are still in the running.

Rules: Find the answer to the quiz questions in a 2025 California Red article or articles, give the answers, cite the articles, and send it along.  Helpful hint:  All the older news articles containing the answers are on the California DSA website and are archived here. 

Take the quiz here

At California DSA’s State Council meeting in December, around fifty members from across the state came together to reflect on our interventions into Prop 50. Chapters around California ran canvasses which we used to talk with our neighbors about the need to not only oppose the far right’s increasing encroachment on our democracy through redistricting, but to commit to organize, and to get involved in DSA in order to help build out a positive program that can respond to the existential threats we face. In the span of about a month that the campaign ran, DSA members talked to over 3000 people about the strategic merits of redistricting in this moment, and about how people can get involved in longer term efforts to protect our immigrant neighbors, and protect public workers, and transform conditions at the municipal level.

People over billionaires

We heard from Estuardo Mazariegos, DSA-LA endorsed candidate for LA City Council, on the developing People over Billionaires program that ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), DSA, and other community and labor organizations have been coordinating actions around, including recent marches through wealthy enclaves, including La Jolla, Beverly Hills, and San Francisco to call out the billionaires’ agenda, and to build support for a peoples’ first agenda to prioritize education, climate justice, solidarity across borders, and dignity for working people.

Álvaro López, a member of NYC DSA, talked about the Zohran campaign and NYC’s process for scaling up field operations from the campaign launch through election day, and the leadership and skill development the chapter was able to build over the campaign as its membership almost doubled.

A SEIU United Health Workers (UHW) Political Organizer and DSA member, Maky P, gave a presentation on HR1 (the so-called “big beautiful bill”) and its impacts on public education and social safety net programs like Medicaid. Delegates deliberated and voted in favor of endorsing the state Billionaire Tax ballot measure, currently circulating petitions for signatures [see “We Need to Tax the Rich” in this issue of California Red]. Over the coming months, chapters will take up local endorsement votes and a statewide working group will create resources to build out campaigns to make the case for taxing the rich in order to tackle wealth inequality and agitate around a broader socialist vision. Members interested in getting involved can fill out this interest form.

Seattle DSA calls on Mayor Katie Wilson to reconsider her refusal to commit to shutting down the vast network of surveillance recently unleashed across our city. 

Across both Washington State and the United States, we have seen Flock license plate reading cameras used to arrest and deport immigrants and strip others of the right to protest, and there is no doubt that the Trump administration will continue to expand its use of this surveillance in order to strengthen its authoritarian regime. Seattle must not allow for this data to be collected, as there is no doubt the Trump administration will access and use it. We must fight against each and every way Seattle’s government is complicit with fascism. 

The Seattle Democratic Socialists of America stand in strong opposition to any and all policies that make it easier to surveil, harass, and deport our neighbors.  We fundamentally reject the premise that living in a permanently surveilled police state makes anyone safe.

It is unconscionable that Seattle’s city government would continue to maintain these systems while other cities have removed them, and Seattle’s own Surveillance Advisory Working Group have advised Mayor Wilson to do the same. While Mayor Wilson has claimed to be a socialist, we feel obligated to point out every major socialist program we are aware of gives clear guidance on what socialist policy regarding mass surveillance should look like.

We encourage all members of the community to engage the incoming Wilson administration to take a stand on this issue, to reaffirm her commitment to protecting our city from the expanding American police state, and to commit to taking measures to claw back the freedoms that have already been taken through mass surveillance in our city.

The Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are calling for action to stop the violence of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as new video footage shows ICE agents shooting and killing ICU nurse Alex Pretti.

The call comes just days after agents gunned down Renee Good, a Minnesota mother, prompting thousands to take to the cold streets of Minneapolis and beyond and demand ICE leave their community alone.

“Across the country and around the world, we have just witnessed yet another public execution at the hands of ICE,” Milwaukee DSA Co-Chair Andy Barbour said. “It’s horrifying to see the Trump administration and so many of our political leaders continue to empower such brazen acts of violence, but we must remember that there are more of us than there are of them—we will not rest until ICE has been abolished.”

DSA organizers across the country are asking members and allies to join the call against ICE and their backers by telling Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to stop an ICE funding bill the Senate is voting on in the coming days.

Milwaukee DSA is Milwaukee’s largest socialist organization fighting against imperialism for a democratic economy, a just society, and a sustainable environment. Join today at dsausa.org/join.

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

On May 25, 2020 George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. In the wake of the incident, captured on video, an outpouring of rage coalesced in protracted protest across the country. Tens of millions turned out to demand change. A militarized response of tear gas and rubber bullets only underscored the extent of police brutality. 

Floyd’s murder was far from the first incident of modern police violence to reach public consciousness. Rodney King’s brutal assault in 1991 set off riots after the involved officers were acquitted. The killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, and far too many others before and since have established a rhythm that is metabolized as part of our cultural fabric. In Rochester, officials “knowingly suppressed” evidence of Daniel Prude’s fatal encounter with police, without charges. 

While Derek Chauvin was sentenced to prison for Floyd’s murder, little has been done to address the affliction of police killings. Beyond the occasional punishment of individuals, no systematic reckoning has taken place. The limited reforms implemented in the wake of Floyd’s death only serve to direct more resources toward policing, which remains an institution of protection for private property and class control. Rochester police receive more than $100 million annually (over 15% of the budget), while the Police Accountability Board – approved overwhelmingly by Rochester residents in 2019 – has been stripped of its authority to discipline officers and deprived access to materials necessary to perform its duties.

Over the past two years genocide has been broadcast daily on our social media feeds. Atrocity after atrocity – including the bombing of hospitals and universities, killing of journalists, collective punishment, starvation, and torture – abetted by liberal complicity in funding and rhetoric. Again, millions demonstrated their disapproval and demanded an embargo and other policies to end the violence. The response to these acts of conscience was more brutal police repression, including in places of learning. The lesson for students protesting on college campuses was the taste of tear gas. 

The second Trump Administration has witnessed the descent of federal agents upon our cities with the purpose of abducting our neighbors. Again, those who have tried to stop the violence have become its victims. In the past month we witnessed the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. These are only the latest in numerous killings by immigration agents across the country. 

The violence now exacted by ICE is a continuity of systems of policing and dehumanization that have been permitted for far too long. The Trump Administration may have removed the final restraints, but the structures had already been built in the preceding decades by both parties. The response now must not end at reforms that create nicer or gentler forms of deportation and control. The unrestrained accumulation of profit will always unravel any limitations on ruling class capacity for total domination. Our demand begins with “Abolish ICE,” but continues by dismantling all systems of repression used to keep the working class in place.

The post On the Continuity of ICE Violence first appeared on Rochester Red Star.