Medication Abortions on Campus and Nationwide
Abortion providers across the country are bracing this week for a decision expected soon out of a Texas federal court which will immediately block access nationwide to one of the two medications commonly used for medication abortions. As the anti-abortion lobby and their allies in the United States government attempt to deal yet another blow to this fundamental human right, organizers here in New York state are continuing the struggle to ensure abortions remain safe and accessible for all. On tonight’s show, we are live with Nix from Reproductive Justice Collective and Marian from NYC-DSA’s Socialist Feminist working group to discuss the upcoming decision and what it means for abortion providers and patients. We’ll also hear about their efforts to ensure abortion access in NY state and how you can get involved with this crucial struggle.
Visit https://reprojusticecolumbia.org/abortion-pills to learn more about the campaign to ensure access to abortion on college campuses, then text NYCREPRO to 50409 to ask your elected officials to sign on the New York state legislation. Follow @NYCSocFem on Twitter for updates on NYC-DSA's Socialist Feminist Working Group.
The Shared Mission of Socialists and Unionists
Portland DSA Labor Working Group
Once in 2021 and again 2022, Portland DSA received political donations of $10,000 from the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals. We want to express our deepest gratitude to OFNHP for trusting us to carry out our shared political goals, and we are honored to have worked in solidarity with OFNHP to fight the profit-seeking medical system. Health care workers take on some of the most unforgiving working conditions in order to fulfill some of the most essential roles in our society. Their dedication to preserving the dignity of that work through threatening a strike is an inspiration to us all. We want to explain what their donations mean to our organization and the socialist movement.
As socialists, we understand that there are fundamentally two competing sides: the working class and the ruling class. The working class is composed of most people you’ll ever meet – everyone who is forced to get a job to survive, or depend on someone who can. The ruling class is a tiny group of obscenely rich people who get to own and control resources and profit from our labor.
Union members understand this conflict intuitively. Although all working class people suffer under capitalism, few are organized enough to fight back and win. But through collective action, working class people can wield power. When we refuse to go along with management’s nonsense, when we stick together and demand respect, when we withhold our labor and go on strike – suddenly we aren’t at the mercy of the millionaires and billionaires. For a moment, we call the shots.
That’s why Portland DSA members are fully committed to building a strong labor movement – not just as fans on the sidelines, but as union members ourselves and on solidarity committees to rally the community.
But working class people don’t just want a decent pay raise or a longer break here and there. We’re tired of this whole inhumane system. We want a world where no one has to worry about going broke when they visit the doctor, or ruining their health in an unsafe and grueling job, or losing their home because they missed a payment, or staying in an abusive relationship because they have no safety net, or getting hurt in an environmental disaster created by corporate crime, or watching their neighborhoods and schools decay as legislators starve public services of funds.
For major, lasting transformation, we need an even greater level of power that reaches beyond a single workplace or a single union. We need political organizations that are loyal to working class interests and independent of our employers’, that can harness shop-floor power on behalf of people everywhere, and that can wage battles outside the workplace in public arenas. That is our mission as DSA.
Last year we used the donation from OFNHP to send DSA members in unions – many of whom joined DSA after meeting us on their own picket lines – to the Labor Notes conference in Chicago. There they met other like-minded rank-and-file organizers from around the world and shared notes on how to energize and democratize the labor movement. Going forward, we will be thrilled to use that money to expand the scope of our efforts, particularly on selecting and running our own candidates for public office who champion class struggle politics.
For years we have brought the power of the community to countless unions in their workplace struggles: nurses at Providence, healthcare workers at Kaiser, Starbucks baristas, City of Portland workers, Portland Community College faculty and staff, New Seasons workers, Burgerville workers, and many others. We will offer our support to any workers that are organizing for justice and a better life. And we hope you will join us in a shared mission to not just change our workplaces, but change the world.
EcoSocialists Say: No Cop City Anywhere!
How do you build a $90 million police training complex and bulldoze 85 acres of vulnerable forest in Atlanta? By using Connecticut logistics, investments, and insurance.
The fight to Stop Cop City, now an international struggle over the sanctity of the Georgia metropolis’ Weelaunee Forest, came to Connecticut last week for the National Week of Action. The Ecosocialist Working Group started building a statewide coalition with Worker’s Voice and 350 CT last summer, which has gained significant momentum since the police killing of the Forest Defender known as Tortuguita on January 18th. After flyering and convening with other coalition members on Zoom, Ecosocialist activists picketed at AXA XL Headquarters in Stamford and Atlas Technical Consultants in East Hartford. These events are part of a coordinated effort to target the police industrial complex supply chain and jam the flow of carceral capital. Though we may be miles away from the site of struggle, these efforts extend the reach of local Atlanta organizers like so many satellites sharing a political message. And that message could not be any more dire.
Cop City represents a perfect storm of police violence and environmental destruction. It is an attempt to revitalize a former prison farm used to incarcerate Atlanta’s petty criminals into a 21st-century training ground for urban police tactics. The proposed design includes replica city blocks so that police can practice suppressing mass movements and was planned as a direct response to the 2020 uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks. Up to 400 acres of forest containing old-growth trees adjacent to the majority of Black and low-income neighborhoods of south Atlanta are at risk of destruction to make way for Cop City and movie studios. Anarchists and environmental activists began occupying the forest and living full-time in tree forts over a year ago. In more recent events following the city’s sustained protest against this violent new institution, the police murdered Tortuguita. They arrested many others with outsized charges of domestic terrorism as they swept out the encampments.
The CT DSA Ecosocialist Working Group sees this conflict as part of the battlefield in the mass struggle against climate change and environmental racism. Such a struggle is grounded in the abolition of policing and the privatization of land. By liberating land from the capitalists who own it and the police who secure it, we can bring about democratic solutions to climate change.
Our working group will participate in events to be announced during the month of March, including a fundraiser for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. DSA members can join Connecticut’s Forest Defenders support coalition by emailing StopCopCityCT [at] gmail.com. We will also plan EcoSocialist meetings to discuss the Justice for Our Streets project to find an equitable solution to flooding in Stratford and Bridgeport and to determine the future trajectory of this recently revitalized working group. Reach out to Fiona McElroy on Mattermost to get involved!
Contact (Link contact form) Fiona McElroy to get involved with CT DSA and any of our Ecosocialism Working Group campaigns.
Season '23 Overview
Doing a Repair: Meditations on an Ordinary Experience
Member Bruce Nissen shares a story about repairing his air fryer, and what it can teach us about capitalism and global exploitation.
The other day our air fryer had a minor breakdown. The drawer that you pull out of the main body to put in food was becoming loose and a machine screw was missing. Here’s what the entire thing, drawer and the container pan that holds it, looks like:
If you look at this closely, you can see that it is an inner drawer where you place the food, and an outside container that holds it. The problem was the outer container. Here’s a picture without the inner drawer in it:
If you look carefully at this outside container pan (taken after I fixed it), you can see two screws which attach the outside cover and the inner pan. At the time, one of these two screws was missing. At first, I thought I would just find a similar size screw, screw it in, and be done. However, when I did that, the screw didn’t engage with anything; you could turn it clockwise forever freely and nothing was happening. The screw would fall right back out.
I could hear something rattling around inside the front cover and soon realized that these screws connected with nuts that were inside the cover. One of the nuts had come loose, the screw had fallen out and was lost, while the nut was still trapped inside the cover. My only hope of fixing it would require me to disassemble the cover itself.
If you look carefully at the last picture, you can also see two much smaller screws that are helping to hold the two pieces of the front cover together. I removed those two screws — not enough. Then I found two more identical screws down at the bottom and removed them. Still not enough. Then I noticed 6 extremely tiny screws (3 on each side) that also connected the two parts of the outer cover. I took them out and finally was able to separate the two parts of the outer cover. Sure enough, a loose nut was rattling around in the cavity between the outer and inner walls of the front cover.
As I was going through this elaborate job of removing layer after layer of screws just to get to the inside of the front cover, I was thinking to myself, “What’s with this? Why this elaborate and intricate assembly of parts? It’s ridiculous. Why would they design something like this?” I was also thinking was that it was a good thing I did not do this kind of work for a living — I was thorough but way too slow to ever last as an employee. Any repair company would require much faster work so they could get me on to the next profitable job. It reminded me of my dad who lost several jobs as a welder because he did a thorough quality job of welding but not rapidly enough to suit the employer’s speed requirements.
I put the nut back into its designated cubbyhole, reattached the six tiny screws, put in the four screws, and finally inserted a suitable size/length/thread screw to replace the missing one. It engaged with the reinserted nut and screwed in tight. I was done! Repair completed! I felt proud of myself but noted that it had taken close to two hours to do the job, most of it sifting through my mason jar of random screws accumulated through the years to find the exact right size and length and thread of screw. Job done well but not efficiently.
I was still puzzling why the construction of the container pan and its outside front cover had been so complicated. It reminded me of an experience back in the mid-1970s when I was trying to help the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) organize shops in New Jersey. I applied for jobs at numerous places, both UE-represented shops and unorganized shops they hoped to organize in the future. I was first hired at a non-union shop at minimum wage. I was what later became known as a “salt” — someone taking a job in a nonunion workplace to aid a union in beginning an organizing drive.
The shop assembled electronic parts for some final product that I’ve long since forgotten about. Our job was to sit all day assembling an intricate array of circuit boards, washers, wires, nuts, etc. It was not an assembly line — each person individually did each product (or component) according to a choreographed routine. Over and over. Over and over. I especially remember that some wire posts required two washers, some required one, and some none. It was all very confusing, and I made repeated mistakes at this allegedly unskilled minimum wage job.
The job was abysmal. Almost all the workers were Black or Hispanic or Asian. A majority were women. The foremen were white men. I lasted at that job approximately one week because a UE-represented union shop called and offered me a job at double the wages and a much more relaxed atmosphere. I jumped at that offer and thus began my career in union activities.
At the time of my one-week job, companies doing that kind of minimum-wage work were going out of business because their work was being outsourced to China or Mexico or Central American countries. They had only survived in business because they offered extremely cheap labor, but even cheaper labor was becoming available elsewhere in the world.
This repair job led to a Eureka! moment when I realized that the air fryer’s front cover is designed to require manually tightening numerous screws because labor is so cheap (in some parts of the world) that it is economical to require more repetitive manual labor than it is to expend any more money on better design or different materials. If work was paid decently around the world, these products would be designed very differently. I looked to see where my air fryer had been assembled and sure enough, there it was: designed in California and built in China.
If you repair a household appliance with an enquiring and analytical mindset, there’s a lot to ponder. You might develop insights into the structure of worldwide capitalism and the exploitative conditions under which many of our consumer products are produced. Ditto for how our capitalist consumer culture discards people like my father who did high quality work but not at a fast assembly line pace. Our mass production worldwide economic system fails some segments of humanity even as it provides ever-higher levels of mass consumption for growing numbers. As Karl Marx noted, capitalism is a progressive force compared to earlier economic systems, but it is an exploitative system at its core and should be replaced by a more humane system that is centered on people, not private profit. Who would have thought that repairing a household appliance could illustrate all this? For me, it did!
GEO is Fighting for You
By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso
The Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), the graduate worker union at the University of Michigan, is currently in the process of bargaining with the university to obtain a new contract for the upcoming three-year contract cycle. Despite months of ongoing negotiations, the university has left the union with little if anything to work with thus far. It wasn’t until earlier this year that their Human Resources (HR) representatives agreed to allow open bargaining, a process by which all graduate workers — as well as invited guests affected by the negotiation process — are allowed to attend bargaining sessions in-person/virtually alongside the union negotiators themselves. This is a substantial win for GEO, as open bargaining allows for a comprehensive viewing of the negotiation process, giving grad workers and other stakeholders the chance to see their futures deliberated on first-hand. However, with this victory coming in the middle of January, little time remains to conduct actual bargaining, as the deadline to finalize a contract with HR is March 1. What’s more, the union’s demands have been almost entirely rejected by the university, with its central editorial mouthpiece, The Michigan Daily, even referring to them as “unreasonable and extravagant”. Under such circumstances, it has become paramount to clarify and emphasize one outstanding point: GEO’s current contract campaign — and by extension, its rich history of labor organizing — is not just about the betterment of graduate worker life; it is a fight for the rights and dignity of our university and city-wide communities at large.
Talks of union contracts often begin with mentions of pay and working conditions. GEO’s campaign is no different in this regard. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a living wage in Ann Arbor amounts to an annual salary of approximately $38,537. As it stands, graduate workers at the university earn approximately $24,053 annually for their labor, meaning that a $14,484 gap exists between the compensation graduate workers are currently receiving and that which they require to survive. Perhaps this is why 1 out of every 10 graduate workers at the university worry about having enough food to eat and another 1 out of every 6 would not be able to incur a spontaneous $500 emergency expense. The same is true for working conditions. GEO is currently demanding a discussion section class size cap of 18, as larger class sizes mean burdensome workloads for graduate workers and lackluster educational experiences for students as a result. Moreover, a lack of agency pertaining to COVID policies has left many grad students — especially those with disabilities and/or immunodeficiency disorders — without recourse in the event of a nearby contamination, as the university does not currently grant Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) the ability to require masking nor pivot to a virtual modality if need be.
However, it is when one moves beyond these two areas of demands that GEO’s contract campaign truly begins to encapsulate the university and broader Ann Arbor communities. As a union that engages in “bargaining for the common good”, GEO stands out as an organization that uses the contract negotiation process to its advantage, leveraging worker-specific demands alongside asks that speak to the needs of its surrounding communities. Examples of this dynamic abound, but two outstanding manifestations are its calls for paid positions to establish a Disability Culture Center as well as a community-based, unarmed non-police emergency response team. In solidarity with disabled university community members — and in support of Central Student Government’s (CSG) campaign to establish a Disability Culture Center — GEO has decided to take the conversation of on-campus disability justice a step further by proposing paid positions for those spearheading these efforts. Similarly, the union acknowledges the inherent danger posed to BIPOC students, faculty, and staff by a robust police presence and law enforcement-based response to on-campus emergencies. As such, they’ve reiterated the vision put forth by the Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety (CROS) and demanded that the university contribute funds of its own to finance this community-centered approach to public safety across Washtenaw County. Beyond these asks, GEO has also championed trans-inclusive/gender-affirming healthcare, parent/caregiver accommodations, and harassment/discrimination protections with their demands.
This isn’t a new course of action for the union, either. GEO has a rich history of pushing the envelope when it comes to individual and community-level changemaking. Officially certified in 1974, GEO was one of the first unions to represent graduate student workers in the country. In the mid-1980s, the union won a formal recognition of Affirmative Action from the university alongside tuition waivers for Teaching Assistants (TAs). The 1990s and 2000s similarly featured victories in International GSI compensation and trans-inclusive health benefits, respectively. Since then, GEO has worked to fortify the university’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and has maintained an unwavering commitment to organizing efforts and collective power building, even as conservative state-level decision making — such as the “Right to Work” legislation approved by Republicans in 2012 — seeks to hinder their progress.
So where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us with a comprehensive contract campaign — formulated by hundreds of grad workers over an extended period of time — chalk full of reasonable and necessary demands that improve the lives of graduate workers as well as those of our university and Ann Arbor communities. As we close out the month of February and approach March 1, we cannot forget that the success of this campaign relies not just on the efforts of the union, but on the solidarity of every university community member and ally, working alongside GEO to make these demands a reality.
To show your support, sign the “I Stand With U-M Grad Workers” letter and remain up to date on campaign happenings via GEO’s social media platforms which can be found @geo3550.
GEO is Fighting for You was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Ron DeSantis’s Greatest Achievement
Member J. Cooke shares their thoughts on the Florida Democratic Party’s Chair vote.
As the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) chair race came to a conclusion yesterday, I was reminded of a story from the United Kingdom. Before she passed, the right wing British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was asked what she thought her greatest achievement was. Her response was a bit of a surprise at the time. “Tony Blair and New Labour.” Thatcher said. “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” Thatcher was referring to Tony Blair and the Labour Party’s anti-working class positions and abandonment of left wing economics that betrayed the values of previous Labour leaders and governments.
Former Florida Agricultural Commissioner Nikki Fried was narrowly elected chair of the FDP with 52% of the (convoluted and not exactly democratic) delegate vote. Before becoming Agricultural Commissioner, Fried worked as a corporate lobbyist in Tallahassee for a variety of odious special interests, including a tobacco company, Duke Energy, and Rick Scott’s former company HCA that committed the largest Medicaid fraud in history and is still being accused of doing so by its workers. She ran in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last year, finishing in a distant second place to former Republican governor Charlie Crist. Her campaign stirred controversy when a prominent staffer hurled personal insults at a progressive state representative. Her opponents in the chair race criticized her for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to, her lack of support for the $15 minimum wage ballot initiative in 2020; her refusal to support Democratic candidates because she was friendly with their Republican opponent; and her political consultant’s ungodly amounts of money spent trying to unseat a progressive Tallahassee’s City Commissioner. The list of criticisms goes on (and boy does it go on! I haven’t even mentioned her alleged “friendship” with Matt Gaetz or her recent campaigning for Republicans), but I think you get the point.
Maybe more importantly is what her supporters say about her, and a tweet by former gubernatorial candidate Philip Levine presents a prime example:
“I support @NikkiFried. She believes in the American dream of responsible capitalism w/ a strong economy, smart border control, strengthening professional policing, parents having a say in their children’s education and fights for an FDP that is based on unification not division!”
Border control? Policing? These talking points are nearly identical to a GOP platform. Parental control of education is literally the exact justification Ron DeSantis is using for his book bans and attack on public education. One can only wonder how a voter who hears this is supposed to be able to distinguish it from the Republican platform.
None of this, however, means that her main opponent was an ideal option either. Annette Taddeo appeared to be running away with the race until Fried swooped in at the last moment. Taddeo has been a fixture in FDP politics for over a decade, having run unsuccessfully for Florida’s 18th, 26th, and 27th congressional districts, Miami-Dade County Commission, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor. Her only elected office was a five year stint in the State Senate. Taddeo was endorsed by some well-known progressive activists and elected officials and did at least support some progressive policies like the $15 minimum wage, but she has a history of fighting her left flank as viciously as anyone. In interviews, she blamed socialism for her party’s misfortunes (you know, the ideology that Pew found a majority of Democratic voters view favorably), despite every party leader constantly condemning it. While chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic party, Taddeo did make strides at ensuring someone actually ran for office as a Democrat. She had an organizing campaign as well, showing that she does have an idea about what needs to be done, and is willing to bring a message to voters instead of just shaming them for not voting. While it’s safe to say that Taddeo wouldn’t exactly have been a working class champion either, she just may have been a little more promising than Fried.
Large majorities of Democratic voters favor policies like Medicare for all (88%), free college (85%), and The Green New Deal (82%), yet it appears they will be left without a party in Florida that represents them yet again. Florida Democrats have insisted on repeatedly running to the right, and this time is no different. We’re less than four months removed from an election in which 20% of the Democratic base in Florida decided it wasn’t worth their time to cast a ballot despite the fact that right wing authoritarianism is on the rise. If you’re hoping to cajole those people back into action, or if you’re part of the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters that supports a progressive vision for the future, then the FDP Chair race, and ultimately Fried’s victory, may not exactly lift your spirits. But if you’re Ron DeSantis watching your opponents choose the most right leaning path forward, then you may look back on this moment and realize that it is your greatest achievement.
Abolition Zine Resource Page
References
Statistics on Racial Disparities: Sentencing Project, The Vera Institute, MacArthur Foundation
U.S. Ranking in Incarceration Rates vs. The World: Prison Policy Initiative
Incarceration Rates in Colorado by Geography (heatmaps), including breakdowns by ZIP codes
The private contractor families blame for deaths in El Paso County CJC
Suicide and mental health disparities in El Paso County CJC
The complete list of CJC deaths in 2022
The growth of jails in the U.S. - and how they are harming our communities
A Reuter’s investigative report on deaths in jails nationwide
66% of the people who died in jails from 2009-2019 were awaiting trial - meaning they were never convicted of a crime
How for-profit “community corrections” facilities set parolees up for failure and contribute to high recidivism
Report on recidivism rates state-by-state
Out of Reach Colorado Housing Prices (report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition)
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in jails & prisons*
Mental illness in jails and prisons nationwide
The mental health impacts of incarceration
*The original ACE study was racist. Check out this resource instead.
Police Brutality in Colorado Springs
De’Von Bailey murdered by CSPD after being stopped for a false report
CSPD murders a 63-year-old man having a mental health crisis
CSPD Excessive force against a 17-year-old girl
CSPD Excessive force and violent language against Colorado Springs Black Lives Matter protestors in summer 2020
Club Q
The Club Q shooter’s 2021 terrorism
How the D.A. and Judge failed to prevent the shooting at Club Q
Low enforcement of red flag laws in Colorado
Preliminary Hearings that presented evidence against Aldrich, including evidence that the shooting was bias-motivated
The Receipts
Reporting on CSPD’s infiltration and surveillance of leftist organizations in Southeast Colorado Springs
Reporting on attempts by CSPD and the FBI to entrap leftists
CSPD Body camera footage of cops discussing beating Colorado Springs Housing for All protestors
The Alphabet Boys podcast series on how the FBI planted a sex offender in the Denver BLM movement to surveil, incite violence, & entrap leftists (with an episode on surveillance and attempts at entrapment in Colorado Springs)
Community Alternatives to Public Safety
CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) is a Eugene, Oregon-based street clinic that intervenes in mental health crises without the presence of law enforcement. They receive funding as an alternative to policing and have saved the city millions of dollars.
STAR (Support Team Assisted Response) Program is a response program in Denver that sends trauma-informed behavioral health professionals to respond to community crises related to mental health, homelessness, substance use, and more without the assistance of police. They have reduced the number of arrests and improved community well-being since their beginnings in 2020.
Colorado HB17-1326 was a two-part bill that created parole reform by reducing the amount of time a person could be reincarcerated for a technical parole violation. The second part of the bill redirected $4 million in savings from the parole reform into a program called Transforming Safety , which provides grants to community organizations in North Aurora and Southeast Colorado Springs — two communities that are overpoliced and disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration — for creating crime prevention programs.
Work and Gain Education and Employment Skills (WAGEES) is a program to support people reentering society from incarceration by using Colorado Department of Corrections funds to allow community organizations to provide job skills training and assist with employment placement. This program has been so successful at reducing recidivism and helping people transition back into community that it has received increased funding and been set for renewal in legislative sunset reviews.
The Gathering Place in Denver provides free supportive, wrap-around services to women, children, and transgender people struggling with poverty in the Denver area. They provide housing assistance, food assistance, education and job training, healthcare, and mental health services.
Liberatory Harm Reduction is a philosophy that centers freedom of choice and treatment for those who use substances if they want it. Colorado has several harm reduction programs that offer clean syringes, overdose prevention education, and Narcan distribution to help people stay safer as opposed to using incarceration to punish substance use. However, many of these programs operate under a public health model rather than a liberatory model. Check out the link to learn more about the difference and why we need more programming that works under a liberatory harm reduction model.
One Million Experiments is a project that shares stories of community projects that redefine safety and explore alternatives to community-based public safety.
Interrupting Criminalization is a resource organization that provides a platform for programs and ideas around alternatives to policing and incarceration. They also coordinate between organizations to help build bigger campaigns for abolition work.
Do No Harm is a philosophy and guide for healthcare professionals to commit to serving clients while refusing to cooperate with the process of criminalizing and incarcerating them.
What is Transformative Justice?
Abolition Reading List
We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, and Erica Meiners
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The End of Policing by Alex Vitale
Saving Our Own Lives: Liberatory Harm Reduction by Shira Hassan
Ready to join the fight against mass incarceration and police brutality? Join DSA!
You can also help support our work by donating to help us print more copies of our abolition zine! You can also share a downloadable version here.
On the Path to Power – CT DSA 2022 Year in Review
A retrospective on the efforts of Connecticut DSA to build democratic socialism and working class power in 2022.
By Bryan C.
Following the labor of love and principled example from chapter secretary Jason R. in reviewing CT DSA’s organizing in 2021, it is my honor to reflect on our efforts this past year in building democratic socialism and working class power in Connecticut.
PERSONAL GROUNDING
I joined DSA in 2020 during the end of Bernie Sanders’ second campaign for president. As a student organizer for Bernie, I was recruited into the Wesleyan chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA, DSA’s campus section), where we organized for a just pandemic response from the university. In the midst of statewide mutual aid organizing as well, Jason found and recruited me into CT DSA.
CT DSA was a dramatically different organization then than it is now. 2020-2021 saw a new Steering Committee confront a total rebuilding of the chapter, from membership to administrative function and political direction. The Housing Justice Project (HJP) was formed as the new heart of CT DSA. Joining right at the height of our reorientation, my campaign experience led me to help found our Electoral Working Group, which I started co-chairing in 2022. Electoral grew along other working groups like Housing Justice, International Affairs, Labor, Reproductive Justice, and Ecosocialism.
At the end of 2021, I was coming off an intense election season. On one hand was the historic victory of JAM, the CT DSA-endorsed slate for Hamden city council and board of education; and on another, the taxing but educational process where I tried and failed to get a mayoral campaign endorsed by our chapter. In between these two situations, I found myself interrogating the purpose of electoral campaigns, raising questions about working class party building and base building, which our chapter had committed to via organizing tenant unions. Thus, I threw myself into tenant organizing to help consolidate our chapter core and develop a working class base, a cadre of organizers, and a political vision – all necessary ingredients for effective campaigns, electoral or otherwise.
When 2022 began, I learnt tenant organizing with our Hartford branch and recruited our future core Middletown organizers to canvass with us, while helping to mount an ambitious drive to prospect candidates for state legislative elections. I then took time off chapter work to organize a union drive with Wesleyan student workers, the organizing experience that has impacted me most to date, and that also empowered me to organize rideshare drivers with our Labor Working Group. These developments gave me the unique opportunity to tie experiences and analyses across three fields of organizing: electoral, housing, and labor. I will review our efforts in these fields and more below.
2022 BUILDING SOCIALISM IN CONNECTICUT
HOUSING
The resounding victory of our 2021 legislative campaign – guaranteeing the Right to Counsel to tenants in eviction court – put our chapter on the map, with legislators crediting CT DSA by name on the floor of the Connecticut State House upon bill passage. We had clearly punched above our weight, and won.
Winning Right to Counsel was only one step in our strategy of building a mass tenant base, as protecting tenants from evictions gave folks more time and leeway to organize. Building off that victory meant doubling down on organizing autonomous tenant unions (TUs), first manifesting as Connecticut Tenants Union (CTTU), a statewide formation organized by DSA members to allow individual tenants and city, building, or landlord based tenant unions to federate.
Over months of canvassing, meetings, organizing 1-on-1s, and structure tests, we were able to launch several tenant unions, going public with their struggles against corporate slumlords in various cities, building on the successes of Quinnipiac Gardens TU in New Haven in 2021. Seramonte TU, now expanded as the citywide Hamden TU, started through CT DSA-endorsed Councilor Justin Farmer connecting constituents with DSA organizers. Blake Street TU in New Haven, Wedgewood TU in Bloomfield, and Avalon/Maple TU in Hartford followed, the last of which is also expanding into a citywide TU. Union drives continue in other cities across the state. Throughout all these wins, we brought tenant leaders from different unions together in statewide CTTU meetups, so they could learn from and build solidarity with one another.
While TU projects were taking off, we tried to leverage Fair Rent Commissions (FRCs), municipal bodies where appointed members can process complaints from tenants and rule on unfair rent collections or increases. FRCs could also create a legal mechanism for recognizing TUs officially, through issuing “collective remedy” to groups of tenants (ie. TUs) filing complaints against the same landlord, if the municipal ordinance chartering the FRC allowed it.
To that end, our Hamden Socialist Caucus on the city council led the passage of a resolution calling for a stronger FRC, better code enforcement, and regulating predatory towing, a favored tactic of local slumlords. DSA members then organized to pass an ordinance that enshrined similar policies in neighboring New Haven, making it the first city in Connecticut to recognize tenant unions by law. Meanwhile, Hartford DSA organizers won massive funding for housing inspectors, housing repairs, and legal aid. I joined efforts to replicate these projects in Middletown, where months of canvassing without strong union leads led to this tactical shift, as an FRC that recognized TUs would theoretically facilitate tenants to organize their buildings. In Middletown, we worked with a tenant leader who had organized his own building to lobby for an ordinance, an effort that continues today.
As the year wrapped up, CT DSA sent a delegation to the first ever regional tenant union meeting in Worcester, MA, connecting with and hearing presentations by organizers from seven unions in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
In 2022, we made leaps and strides towards a replicable model of autonomous tenant unions, a form of independent class organization that would not only pursue transformative reforms at both municipal and statewide levels, but also continue to agitate the broader working class and organize class struggle in our neighborhoods. CT DSA’s current priority campaign, Cap the Rent CT – fighting for a cap on annual rent increases and good cause eviction protections – will be leaning heavily on these structures to succeed.
ELECTORAL
Following the election of JAM in Hamden, Justin Farmer and Abdul Osmanu for city council, Mariam Khan for Board of Education, CT DSA turned toward supporting their municipal governance and the 2022 state legislative elections.
Organizers from our Electoral Working Group (EWG) and New Haven branch provided ongoing support to JAM, who were now joined by sitting councilor and DSA member Laurie Sweet. This practice was modeled after NYC-DSA’s Socialists In Office (SIO) Committee. The four electeds announced the formation of the Hamden Socialist Caucus with their statement condemning the Dobbs decision, staking out a principled socialist position and framing on reproductive justice and the fight for abortion rights. In addition to the Fair Rent Resolution, the Caucus has been working to hold the Hamden Police Department accountable for illegally shredding civilian complaints, expanding religious equity in public school holiday observances, and restoring working class hubs such as the Keefe Community Center.
Elections at the state level in Connecticut offer a unique opportunity absent in municipal elections: public campaign financing, $30,000 and $100,000 respectively for qualifying state representative and state senate campaigns. The EWG considered an ambitious strategy to take advantage of this resource – a statewide slate running a coordinated campaign that could pool resources into needs such as hiring staff and developing materials. However, the big cart before the horse was recruiting candidates in winnable districts. We ran phonebanks to find DSA members interested in being candidates or being involved in a campaign.
While we had many great conversations on the phone, none resulted in finding the interest we needed. However, we learnt several lessons from this prospecting operation. First, the level of work going into pre-campaign research, such as calculating win numbers and assessing local conditions. Second, the time needed to prospect and prepare any potential candidate for not just any campaign, but a DSA campaign accountable to our membership. The third lesson is a personal conclusion: without a working class base, a cadre of organizers, and a political vision, it is difficult to develop and run a dedicated socialist candidate who can be both organizer and official, while also expecting them to differentiate themselves from the liberal hegemony.
The EWG rounded out 2022 with a Midterm Elections debrief, joined by Councilor Osmanu and allied State Representative David Michel (a member of the French Parti Socialiste), where we discussed statewide developments and led a power mapping exercise of the Connecticut state legislature for the chapter, in anticipation of the Cap the Rent campaign.
LABOR
After celebrating the victory of the reform slate led by DSA member Leslie Blatteau, which swept the leadership elections of the New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) in 2021, our Labor Working Group (LWG) continued to support both rank and file worker organizing and legislative campaigns. At the municipal level, the LWG started “No Respect, No License”, a campaign to pass a city ordinance in New Haven that would rescind licenses of any business that committed wage theft.
In LWG meetings, we brought DSA-member rank and file teachers together with Connecticut Drivers United (CDU), a grassroots formation of rideshare drivers, to engage in training and conversation on strategic organizing. Over many months, we supported CDU in developing a statewide legislative campaign, the Rideshare Worker Equal Rights Act, to win legal protections for rideshare drivers in Connecticut, who are especially disadvantaged compared to drivers from neighboring states of Massachusetts and New York. One highlight of the CDU campaign was a rally with NHFT President Blatteau and Councilor Abdul Osmanu, who delivered a rousing speech invoking solidarity in class struggle against app company “overlords,” tying the drivers’ struggle to those of Amazon and Starbucks workers, and calling on established organized labor to stand with CDU.
On the shop floor, CT DSA members were leaders in the historic campaign of UNITE HERE Local 33, unionizing more than 3,000 Yale graduate student workers with 91% voting yes – generations of CT DSA cadre were involved in this struggle over three decades. 40 minutes north in Middletown, YDSA members such as myself helped win another historic campaign to unionize undergraduate Resident Advisors at Wesleyan University, forming the Wesleyan Union of Student Employees (WesUSE), OPEIU Local 153. This marked the first time ever that an undergraduate union won voluntary recognition without needing a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election, a campaign explained further in this Jacobin article I co-authored.
REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
Our chapter is proud to have led the socialist response to the Dobbs decision in Connecticut, with a strong turnout for the immediate post-decision unity rally and march in New Haven. Our member delivered an electrifying speech calling out the Biden administration’s violent response to peaceful pro-choice protesters and the Democratic Party’s support of policing, further framing reproductive justice in terms of housing, healthcare, and economic justice. She ended with a call on protestors to take the fight out of nonprofits and into their own hands through direct action, mutual aid, and movement organizing. Our speech was widely regarded as the best of the rally based on crowd response, and CT DSA signed more than 20 people up to join the chapter that day.
These new members would go on to rekindle socialist feminist organizing in our chapter by forming the Reproductive Justice Working Group (RJWG), pursuing organizing to end fake abortion clinics (ie. “crisis pregnancy centers”) in Connecticut. RJWG worked with our Housing Justice Project as speakers at a coalitional reproductive justice teach-in in New Haven. We delivered a presentation about the intersections of reproductive and housing justice, and advanced a socialist analysis that grounds reproductive justice in the material needs of the working class. Members also participated in a reading group of Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon by Aaron Jaffe, Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis, and We Organize to Change Everything, a collection of essays on the fight for reproductive justice published by Lux Magazine and Verso. This outburst of enthusiasm demonstrated the eagerness of working people for the intersectional analysis that only socialist feminism can articulate, and is willing to join our movement if we boldly engage them on a program distinct from the liberal hegemony.
ECOSOCIALISM
Although the Ecosocialist Working Group went into dormancy during the pandemic, we have been reviving ecosocialist organizing in CT DSA through two projects in 2022. First was Justice 4 Our Streets, an initiative started by a Stratford DSA member to organize neighbors around relief from flooding caused by the nearby Bruce Brook and poor infrastructure. DSA members rallied residents for city council meetings to demand capital improvement spending, beginning to organize a working class base in Bridgeport and Stratford.
We also started solidarity action for Stop Cop City, a campaign that Atlanta DSA also supports to prevent the mass demolition of historic forest to build a new $90 million police training facility. This year, the Atlanta Police murdered forest defender Tortuguita, spurring nationwide protests in response which we have continued to participate in.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
In 2022, CT DSA’s International Affairs Working Group (IAWG) organized vigorously in solidarity with the anti-imperialist and decolonial struggles of Cuban and Palestinian liberation. Galvanized by the decision of DSA’s National Political Committee to revoke the charter of the national BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group (BDS WG), which included CT DSA members, IAWG led an effort to successfully pass a chapter resolution dissenting against the decision. This resolution increased members’ awareness of the urgency around Palestinian solidarity work in DSA, and the IAWG recruited activated members for local organizing.
With this energy to recommit towards Palestine solidarity, the IAWG led the organizing of a Nakba Day coalitional rally and did a Connecticut launch of No Appetite for Apartheid, a boycott campaign launched by the National BDS WG, in commemoration of the Nakba or Catastrophe of 1948. For the campaign, the IAWG canvassed local stores and asked them to become Apartheid-Free Stores, by taking off the shelves products by companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine. From this organizing, four stores have pledged to be Apartheid-Free and a few more have expressed tentative interest. The IAWG mobilized members to visit these shops and continue conversations with owners and workers about the BDS movement.
IAWG members also mobilized a CT DSA delegation to meet Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta, the Cuban Ambassador to the UN, when he was invited by State Representative and lifetime DSA member Edwin Vargas to visit multiple cities and towns in Connecticut. As a result of this visit, IAWG members were invited by the Cuban delegation to stand in solidarity with them at the United Nations Headquarters and watch the 30th vote against the US embargo of Cuba. These instances are benchmarks in a relationship that the IAWG is actively cultivating with Cubans and the broader movement of Cuban solidarity in Connecticut, with important implications for future organizing opportunities – from passing municipal and eventually state resolutions demanding an end to the embargo, to organizing with future delegations to Cuba.
Also of note were efforts to oppose the war in Ukraine. The IAWG participated in several anti-war mobilizations in coalition with other organizations. The IAWG also endorsed a coalitional letter pressuring Connecticut’s federal elected officials in calling for a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine, and to cease the sales and shipments of weapons. The vote to pass a chapter-wide resolution to endorse failed by a small margin, although members engaged in generative discussion on our position and its relationship to our organizing.
DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN: CLOSING THOUGHTS
In 2022, we in Connecticut experimented with a break from the typical progressive electoral and legislative framework that has become standard, even in DSA. We directly built and developed new class-independent vehicles for collective action, instead of remaining shackled to the staff-driven strategies of the nonprofit-industrial complex that do not address the key problem of our time: proletarian disorganization. Through bringing tenants into organized conflict with landlords, we are developing class consciousness, leadership, and perhaps most importantly, inspiring hope in the working class that change, victory, and liberation are possible.
All of that said, we in CT DSA still have immense tasks ahead of us, beyond the immediacy of Cap the Rent CT or continuing the long road of building a mass tenant base. The pandemic put our chapter in the position of having to build the plane as we started flying it, and we can observe this from the uneven development of our working groups and external vs. internal organizing. We have started drawing the political connections between housing and other work. We must keep fostering those connections and grow different organizing cores in our chapter. We have started cultivating layers of organizing leadership. We must advance political leadership as well.
While I may feel daunted by the magnitude of our mission, I have deep energy and profound hope for CT DSA in 2023. Not the kind of brash energy emitted erratically in countless directions, nor the kind of naïve optimism expecting things to just work themselves out, but committed energy towards a vision and strategy, towards love and solidarity, and hope from seeing how the working class is taking the wheel, taking charge of their own destiny, in Connecticut and across the country. In the words of Fred Hampton, “If you dare to struggle, you dare to win.” In 2023, let’s keep struggling, and let’s keep winning.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Bryan C is an electoral, labor, and tenant organizer with Connecticut DSA and national YDSA.
Image credits: Connecticut DSA’s Housing Justice Project Summer 2022 retreat.
Letter to Fred Miller of Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group
We recently received a request from Fred Miller of Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, asking to join one of our meetings to promote the work they’ve done with Troy Police Department.
We are not interested. This is our full response.
Dear Fred,
We received your request to come to our meeting “to share information about our work with the Troy Police Department and the May event … and answer any questions. We only need 10-15 minutes on your agenda.”
You’ve done work with the City of Troy and the Troy Police Department for two years with no community involvement until now. To presume that 10-15 minutes to talk at our membership about your solutions to problems we were never originally consulted on underscores that this is nothing but a public relations campaign to whitewash the Troy Police Department’s long history of reckless and hateful violence.
We are not interested in exposing our members or the community to your pro bono work to overhaul the TPD’s reputation. We are connected to this community as residents, students, workers, parents, and neighbors. When we received this invitation, our first step was to check who else you’ve included in this long process up to now. We were made aware that you have not reached out to prominent Black-led organizations, and your work has lacked transparency and real outreach. By removing the voices of those most impacted by police violence, you told us everything we need to know about your event.
You are not welcome in our space, because you represent cops, not the people of Troy. Cops hurt the people in our community. This is a fact. The Times Union’s editorial board released a statement today on the city’s secrecy around police disciplinary records, and the long history of violence against Black and Brown people in Troy. Meanwhile all media outlets are covering how an officer killed a young man while driving recklessly through a dangerous intersection.
The people in our communities do not need to be subjected to your PR campaign about emotionally disturbed persons training and six new community officers. The City and TPD have repeatedly ignored years of outreach, activism, political involvement, social justice work, requests from leaders and non-profits, an executive order from the NYS governor, and the cries of 11,000 people in the streets of Troy.
We provided our recommendations publicly in the past. We’d like to know how many of those were considered in your work. You can share the status of that free labor in writing.
Troy DSA encourages anyone who received a similar invitation to boycott this meeting in May.
-Troy DSA