This contribution was originally published by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), and has been republished with permission. It does not represent the official position of Working Mass.

Statement of the UE General Executive Board

Since Donald Trump assumed the Presidency on January 20, he has issued a flurry of executive orders which will both directly cut living standards for working people and make it harder for us to organize and fight to improve our working and living conditions.

Trump was inaugurated surrounded by the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. They had reason to celebrate — the world’s billionaires saw their wealth grow by $2 trillion last year, three times faster than in 2023. And with a cabinet full of billionaires, the new administration is poised to carry out a program of continuing to enrich themselves while dividing, repressing and bankrupting the working class. Our country is fast moving towards a more blatant and transparent form of oligarchy — rule by the super-rich.

On his first day in office, Trump appointed Republican Marvin Kaplan as chair of the National Labor Relations Board. The following week, he fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who had moved NLRB case law in a more pro-worker direction since she was confirmed in July 2021, and then, in a move of questionable constitutionality, fired Democratic NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox.

A Trump-appointed board and general counsel will continue the track record of the first Trump presidency, consistently supporting profits for bosses over rights for workers. We can also expect attacks on our union security clauses, whether through legislation or the courts — such as happened during Trump’s first term, when his first appointment to the Supreme Court proved the deciding vote in the Janus decision, stripping public-sector unions of their right to negotiate union security clauses.

Trump has given a prominent role in his administration to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a multi-billionaire with a history of vicious anti-unionism and support for far-right and neo-Nazi parties. Musk has been given co-leadership of a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which has tried to sell Congress on $2 trillion in spending cuts. Cuts of this depth are impossible without reductions to the spending required to maintain Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security at current benefit levels.

Regardless of whether Musk is successful in cutting a full $2 trillion, his new department will almost certainly pursue massive cuts to many social safety net programs, including health care, food security, housing, retirement, job-creating climate transition initiatives, and public education. President Trump has already begun ordering freezes on crucial federal aid to state and local governments, and funding for science research and nonprofit agencies that provide services to the American people, leaving thousands of UE members unsure if they will receive their next paycheck — or any paychecks — as of this week.

All of these steps will result in workers being laid off and cuts to the living standards of large numbers of working-class families in the U.S.

Trump’s imperialist foreign policy, with his threats of tariffs and annexations, are also making the world a more dangerous place for all working people, as he raises tensions with not only China but also the European Union, Great Britain, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, and many others.

Most threatening to the ability of workers to stand together and fight for what we need, though, are the efforts of Trump and his billionaire backers to divide the working class through attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, Black/African Americans, other people of color, and all who disagree with them.

Attacking immigrant workers hurts the entire working class, as employers take advantage of the fear caused by threats of deportation to undermine wages and working conditions, and weaken unions. And removing immigrants’ rights to due process — as the recently-passed “Laken Riley” bill does — threatens the very premise of “innocent until proven guilty.”

Despite the fact that Trump is entering his second term with an even smaller Congressional majority than he had in 2017, there are worrying signs that Democrats — nominally the “opposition party” in our two-party system — will not stand up to his corporate agenda. In January, 46 Democrats in the House joined the Republican majority in passing the Laken Riley bill, and 10 Democrats supported it in the Senate. Some Democrats also seem to be cozying up to the budget-slashing “DOGE” effort.

The fact is that the Republican agenda will not improve the economic situation for working people, and is, in fact, likely to make it worse. It is up to the labor movement, along with other working-class and popular organizations, and any elected political leaders that still stand with working people, to instead unite the working class to oppose the oligarchic agenda of the billionaires and corporations.

The labor movement will need to stick firmly to the basic labor movement principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. We will need to aggressively defend all of our members against attacks on their collective bargaining rights, their wages and working conditions, and their right to participate as full-fledged members of society regardless of their race, religion, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. We will need to clearly lay the blame for the ongoing cost-of-living crisis on corporations and the oligarchs, and both political parties which enable their greed. Labor needs to demand a positive economic program on behalf of the whole working class. And in addition to fighting for justice in our own country, we will need to continue to challenge our government when it pursues unjust foreign policies.

The actions of Trump and his billionaire supporters have already begun to generate popular resistance, and we can expect to see more. The labor movement needs to play a key role in channeling that anger into an effective fightback. And in order to best fight for a better future for working people, we will need to develop a political organization, such as a labor party, that is independent of the Democratic Party.

“UE” is the abbreviation for United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a democratic national union representing tens of thousands of workers in a wide variety of manufacturing, public sector and private service-sector jobs. UE is an independent union (not affiliated with the AFL-CIO) proud of its democratic structure and progressive policies.

by Liz Henderson

Dreaming over brightly colored seed catalog photos of veggies and flowers is an intense secret pleasure shared by gardeners and farmers. The colder it gets and the deeper the snow, the more intense the longing for spring.

Local garden activists are all over this one.  There will be two seed packing events and a day-long urban farming conference – all free and open to the public.

• Saturday, Feb 8, 1:00pm – 4:00pm at the Edgerton Ballroom, 41 Backus St: Seed packing party for seeds from Fruition Seeds. At 3:00pm, participants who bring soil and pots will be able to plant onions to take home.
• Wednesday, March 19, 5:00pm – 7:00pm at the South Wedge Mission, 125 Caroline: Combination potluck dinner and seed packing party.
• Saturday, March 22, 9:30am to 4:00pm at East High, 1801 East Main St: Full day conference with workshops for beginning and advanced gardeners, garden organizers and food policy activists. Tabling by all related local groups so you can find out what is going on. A full-scale Seed Swap – you are welcome to take the seeds you need for your garden whether you contribute seed you’ve saved or not.

Workshop topics include soil health, growing mushrooms, organizing school gardens, and seed saving. Workshops in Spanish and English.

Meanwhile, Buy Direct! Cut out the middlemen: The Rochester Public Market is open Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays year-round from 6:00am to 1:00pm. The Brighton Farmers Market continues through April 13, Sunday mornings, 10:00am – 1:00pm, at 1435 Westfall Road.

Or buy from local stores that carry local products:

Abundance Coop, Rochester’s only cooperatively owned store. Shareholder or not, you are welcome to shop, but if you join ($100) you get a 10% discount once a month and get to help decide on store policy.  Keep an eye out for the “Coop Basics” signs to purchase basic organic staples at affordable prices.

Lori’s Natural Foods is an independent grocery with a lot of local products too.

Some of the corporate groceries carry local produce, mainly when a particular crop is in season. The UFCW has unionized workers at Tops, Safeway and Stop and Shop. Wegmans, Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Whole Foods compete as to who is more effectively anti-union.

The post Getting Grounded – Spring Will Come first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

by Rochester Grants Pass Resistance

Rochester Grants Pass Resistance condemns this proposal to discard hard fought legal freedoms for those with mental illness in the name of ‘safety.’ Mental healthcare changes should not strip people of their autonomy. Involuntary commitment is a traumatizing and dehumanizing experience.

One of our members, Amy D’Amico, a housing advocate who has experienced involuntary commitment, says this about a process that strips away “evidence of imminent harm” as a precursor to intervene and commit someone against their will:

“This proposal fails to appreciate what it is like to be committed involuntarily. You are not allowed to go outside, you are strongly encouraged to take medication whether you want to or not, your housing and employment are destabilized, and everything you do and say is under watch, guard, and key. It is horrific, and deeply traumatic.”

Excluding matters of public health, such as vaccination programs, no one should be forced to undergo any medical procedure — informed consent is a bedrock ideal; it cannot be done away with now or ever. This goes for mental healthcare as well.

Hochul’s administration says, “The updated law will allow intervention when individuals [lack the ability] to meet basic needs like food, shelter, or medical care.” These situations do not represent a person who is genuinely a danger to themselves, but instead is emblematic of the real problems regarding access to food, shelter, and medical care in the United States. The barriers to obtaining these — for the majority of people, including those on the street — are financial in nature. The expanded law proposed amounts to criminalizing poverty and is unconstitutional, and Rochester Grants pass Resistance strongly opposes it.

In solidarity,
Rochester Grants Pass Resistance
rocsweepsresistance@gmail.com
rocsweepsresistance.org

The post Press Release: Rochester Grants Pass Resistance first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

By Aaron Hall

BOSTON—On Saturday afternoon, members of the Blue Bottle Independent Union (BBIU) performed a walkout at three of their locations. The walkouts took place at exactly 12:30 pm at Kendall and Newbury, and 2:30pm at Chestnut Hill, meant to coincide with peak hours for each location. The walkouts came in response to the company’s decision to close their Prudential Center location. The walkouts lasted exactly 7 minutes and 59 seconds in reference to their demand for a $7.59 tip differential. 

Some of the main issues the BBIU raised were guaranteed hours, a commuter benefit for transferred workers, and the $7.59 tip differential for Prudential workers – a value based on the average amount of tips made by workers in 2024. 

A tip differential is the wage the employer must pay the worker in addition to the minimum wage for service workers, which stands at $6.75 per hour in Massachusetts, if the total valuation of tips doesn’t meet the minimum required by the state or contract. This fight comes as displaced workers will have a lower share of the tip pool as they are moved and added to different locations.

Alex Pyne, Vice President of the BBIU stated that they are “taking action today because baristas should be able to live off their wages and not rely on the generosity of customers to make ends meet. Blue Bottle could have guaranteed a tip differential for Prudential workers but instead they told us that they didn’t want to pay any ‘additional costs.’”

Alex went on to say “Blue Bottle’s continuous retaliation against us has shown that the only way we are going to win a living wage, consistent schedules, protection from harassment, or workplace democracy is through solidarity and collective action.”

Blue Bottle Coffee, Inc., is a coffee roaster and retailer whose majority stake was acquired by Nestle in 2017. Nestle is the world’s largest food company and notorious for alleged use of union-busting activity, slavery, and child labor. However, 52.7% of Nestle’s employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements as of 2023.

According to Kendall Square worker Louis Soults, negotiations began in November with the company “refusing to negotiate in good faith.” Louis went on to say that “transportation costs for [displaced] workers for 2 months would be [approximately] $8,000, which is about the amount the Prudential location makes in a day.”

The BBIU represents around 67 workers at 6 locations around Boston, including baristas, shift managers, and assistant café leaders. The union is young, forming with a vote of 38-4 on May 3, 2024. The union was formed through an NLRB election after management refused to voluntarily recognize their union, launching their effort publicly in April of 2024. The independent union faces an uphill battle against Blue Bottle Coffee and their major stakeholder, Nestle. Negotiations and bargaining sessions for a new contract remain ongoing.

Aaron Hall is a Biotech worker and a writer for Working Mass.

By Maxine Bouvier & Vanessa Bartlett

MEDFORD– Full-time lecturers at Tufts University started their two-day strike Monday morning following a strike authorization vote of 94%. Lecturers, members of SEIU-509, have been bargaining for 10 months with the university for livable wages and fair workloads. 

Faculty’s current demands are a 3.5 percent annual increase after an initial adjustment for cost of living, along with a reduction in unmanageable workloads. As it stands, Tufts offers a 2.5 percent merit raise that has remained stagnant. The average full-time lecturer salary is at or below 80 percent of the area median income (depending on household size). 

According to biology lecturer Helen McCreary, Tufts salaries are also not on par with those of peer institutions. 

“If you adjust for cost of living, we’re the second lowest. And even if you look, rather than looking at peer institutions, adjusting for cost of living, if you look at other universities in this area that are research heavy institutions, we’re also the second lowest.” 

Low salaries have meant that many full time lecturers are unable to afford to live nearby the university. As housing costs in the Greater Boston area have continued to skyrocket, these faculty members typically commute an hour plus to teach at Tufts. This affords lecturers less time to spend with their families, and with their students. 

On top of financial struggles, lecturers say they are overburdened with large class sizes as Tufts continues to up enrollment targets. McCreary’s intro biology classes have ballooned to 480-550 students, class sizes she says Tufts simply does not have the space to accommodate.

“I’m excited about Tufts having more students, the students are phenomenal, but that increased enrollment needs to come with more support for teaching,” says McCreary. 

Lecturers, whose job duties include teaching, mentoring students, and carrying out other service work feel that they are not able to deliver on the high quality of education that Tufts promises to its students under these conditions. 

“Students pay tuition, some of the highest in the country, but we don’t see that tuition being reinvested back into providing a quality education. Because, you know, we certainly are not having more faculty to teach more students. They’re saying ‘do more with less,’ says striking lecturer Penn Loh. 

Faculty on strike say the Tufts community has been deeply supportive of their efforts. Students see that they are overworked, and families are frustrated to see the high tuition costs they pay are not put into their students’ education.

A Tufts sophomore, Ben, who came out to support the full time lecturers union on the picket line, shared his reasoning: 

“I want my faculty members to be able to support themselves easily, to not have to make long commutes, so that they can be, like, good teachers.” 

Lecturers have also received support from local elected officials, including Somerville City Councillor Willie Burnley Jr., State Representative Erika Uyterhoven, and Zach Bears of the Medford City Council, all of whom were present at the picket on Monday. 

“It is incredibly frustrating to see that there are multiple unions currently rallying, fighting for their rights at Tufts when we know that they have a surplus of 34 million this past year. They have the money to support their workers and are making the choice to not,” said Burnley.

As McCreary puts it, “Our working conditions are students learning conditions.” 

Regarding the decision to strike, Loh said it was a tough choice. “I really didn’t want to have to take an action like this,  but in a lot of ways we felt like this was the only way for us to send a clear message that we are not going to do an either or, either you get a better workload or better pay. We actually need both.”

Maxine Bouvier is a member of Boston DSA.

Vanessa Bartlett is the vice-chair of the Working Mass editorial board and a member of Boston DSA.

The ultra-rich are ruining the lives of the next generation. The solution is to organize for power, fight, and win.

The post Gen Z: No one is coming to save us. It’s time to unionize. appeared first on EWOC.

Growing up in Pasadena, the Santa Ana winds are as familiar as Craftsman bungalows. They happen annually, and every few years they pick up enough to do some damage. More than once I’ve seen gusts topple trees, power lines, and city infrastructure. Usually, they amount to nothing more than a story one shares with a friend; recalling the violently swaying branches  or the bright blue blast that rockets from a nearby transformer. This time was different.

We know that climate change has made weather more extreme. Between 2022 and 2024, Los Angeles experienced extraordinary amounts of rain, in some cases for weeks in a row without pause. For the last 8 months, however, we have received less than an inch of rainfall. When you combine excess rain and growing brush, followed by eight months of drought and a sudden 100mph weather event, you have the recipe for a climate catastrophe.

The Palisades Fire started at 10:30 AM on January 7th. By noon the next day, it had already reached over 11,000 acres. For context: that means it was expanding by about seven football fields per minute. The Eaton Fire, which started above Altadena on January 7th at 6:18 PM, had grown to 10,800 acres by 10AM  the next morning. These are also just two of ten notable fires we’ve had this month.

DSA-LA’s response

As evacuation warnings started, members of DSA-LA quickly set up an emergency response message group. We included members of our steering committee, regional branch organizers, leaders of our mutual aid committee, and any who wanted to help. Our members were balancing this as we were getting real time updates about our friends and family needing to evacuate, with some having to evacuate themselves.

Our first project was creating an evolving  list of resources and information. The situation across the county was developing very rapidly, so this list would be updated many times a day.

As this resource was being created, we started a rapid-response network with our elected democratic socialists, or our “Socialists in Office (SIOs)” and their staff members. Our chapter has already established a Socialists in Office Committee, which made this task much easier. These elected officials were providing constituents with real-time updates and coordinating evacuations, relief, and evacuation centers. They also established locations where residents could relocate to get clean air.

DSA’s staff and National Political Committee worked with our chapter to send mass communications out to members along with a volunteer sign-up form to identify those who were ready and able to help. Working with our regional branches, we divided the respondents up by location and  routed  them each day to volunteer sites  in their area. These included offices of our local electeds and sites like the Pasadena Community Job Center that were accepting and distributing food and donations, as well as facilitating community cleanups. Sites like this were popping up all over LA county.

The community

The response from Angelenos to this disaster has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. Thousands of people have shown up every day to do everything from house evacuees, sort donations, raise money, foster displaced pets, clean up debris, and care for their community in any way imaginable. Volunteers were compiling lists of Gofundmes for victims. Our shelters were taking in hundreds of animals, big and small.  It didn’t take long for these sites to become so overcrowded with people willing to help, that volunteers started to be turned away. One of our own members involved in the emergency response was volunteering nonstop, even as they learned of their family’s home being lost in Altadena. For every tear I’ve cried for a loved one who’s lost their house or apartment and belongings, I’ve cried thinking about how proud I am of this place and its people.

The state

Our system of disaster response was not designed for the scale of these events. The most effective form of firefighting at scale, air support, was impossible during high winds. Our reservoirs, with the exception of one, were full and functional, but the extreme demand caused water pressure to drastically diminish. Typically, 3-4 fire engines are used to put out one structure fire. We now know almost 18,000 structures have been destroyed. Even discounting the fires burning in our mountains, that would require at least 54,000 fire engines deployed at once. Firefighters were even pouring into California from other states and countries to assist in this effort.

That doesn’t mean, however, that our government should be completely excused from what happened before and after these tragedies started. Our current system is an unfortunate reflection of the power dynamic that exists in this country. For too long, private utilities, fossil-fuel companies, and the billionaire class have purchased legislators and laws that allow their profit-seeking to take precedence over our safety and health. Over the years, Los Angeles and California have made strides away from this type of governance, in no small part due to workers coming together to make that happen.

What our government has done in response to these fires has also been fraught. Fire chiefs didn’t prepare like they had in previous years. A significant portion of the labor used to fight fires is also, shamefully, forced from those who are incarcerated. The city of LA’s mayor was out of the country as this all began (though she flew back quickly). County evacuation notifications came far too late for residents, if at all. The county even mistakenly notified millions of people multiple times that they needed to evacuate or boil their water when they didn’t. There was also little information about best practices to protect our health outside after the smoke dissipated (if a fire just ripped through a bunch of houses and businesses near you, wear your mask outside for at least a couple weeks afterward).

We’re allowed to be, and should be, upset at everything our government has done and will do wrong. We should be careful, however, about using distrustful language against our state that flirts with the libertarian and destructive sentiments of the reactionary right. We must always see these lies for what they are. They are attempts to turn sectors of the working class on each other, while distracting us from the real causes of this disaster.

Republicans, right-wing personalities, and oligarchs, particularly Donald Trump and Elon Musk, wasted no time in blaming this disaster on Los Angeles and California. They used their usual, hateful rhetoric to denounce diversity and equity initiatives, Democrats, and an electorate that is too “woke.” Billionaire developer and closet-Republican Rick Caruso, who’s mayoral run in 2022 also went up in flames, used the opportunity to attack mayor Karen Bass in a thinly-veiled attempt to relaunch his political career. He also hired private firefighters, using our water to protect his shopping center in the Palisades. If you want a sense of how important capital is to these people, Caruso decided that saving his open air mall was more important than saving his own daughter’s home, which was destroyed in the Palisades fire.

The policies that DSA-LA’s electeds have begun to propose in response to the fires (an eviction moratorium and rent freeze in response to landlord price gouging) has been evidence for why the state, and gaining democratic control of it, is so important. The recovery effort in the aftermath of these fires is going to take years. What would we want as socialists in the recovery?

This question will be taken up in Part 2 of this article in the February California Red.

Upcoming Events

Thursday, January 30 (5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.): Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)

Thursday, January 30 (5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.): Palestine Solidarity and Anti-Imperialist Working Group (Zoom)

Thursday, January 30 (6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Ecosocialist Monthly Meeting (Zoom)

Saturday, February 1 (11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.): Boycott Chevron Picket (In person at 5500 Telegraph Ave., Oakland)

Monday, February 3 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister & on Zoom)

Monday, February 3 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Reading Group (SF Reds Chapters 4, 5, 6) (Zoom)

Tuesday, February 4 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Newsletter Training (Zoom)

Wednesday, February 5 (6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): New Member Happy Hour at Zeitgeist (In person at Zeitgeist, 199 Valencia)

Saturday, February 8 (1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Outreach Training and Outreach (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Events & Actions

#BoycottChevron Picket

Join the #BoycottChevron picket on Saturday, February 1st from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at 5500 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland! Chevron is one of the largest providers of power and fuel to Israel, which they extract off the coast of Palestine, and they are a primary target of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.

Let’s stop their profits while educating our community together!

Newsletter Training

Curious about how the newsletter gets put together each week? Interested in joining the newsletter team and learning how to do it yourself? Join us on Zoom on Tuesday, February 4th from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. for an online tutorial! Working on the newsletter is a great way to stay engaged with the chapter and help out with vital but often overlooked work. We are particularly seeking out disabled comrades and folks with busy schedules who might not be able to make it to in-person DSA events regularly.

Check out the #newsletter channel on Slack or message Serena M for the Zoom link!

Tenderloin Healing Circle Recap

At the January general meeting, DSA SF members voted unanimously in favor of a proposal to continue the Tenderloin Healing Circle project (TLHC) that started in August 2023 as a part of the Mutual Aid priority.

Initially formulated as a response to our Tenderloin neighbors’ expressed need for support with gun-related trauma, the twice-monthly healing circle (think: group therapy) became a place for the TL and DSA SF community to come together and connect, process emotions, and be in solidarity.

We spent December reflecting on the successes and challenges of our TLHC work, and brought a proposal to the chapter highlighting the positive reputation the TLHC gained through community members attending and benefiting from the work, as well as the need to continue the project to strengthen the existing relationships between DSASF and the TL community. As the project continues, we want to emphasize that everyone is welcome to attend – not just those of us who live or work in the TL.

The Tenderloin Healing Circle will run through 2025! Please join us every second and fourth Monday of the month from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Kelly Cullen Auditorium at 220 Golden Gate Ave, and check out the #tl-healing-circle channel on slack to get involved.

DSA SF Education Board: 2025 Planning Survey

What did you come to DSA to learn about? What types of educational events do you think would help our organizing work as a chapter? Help the ed board shape our 2025 educational offerings by taking this three-minute survey.

Behind the Scenes

The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.

To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.

Concerned about the incoming Trump administration?  Welcome to the club. Back in 2016 many asked, “Is this fascism under construction in America?”  Today by any reasonable measure it’s no longer open to question.  

Some academics and various branches of the left continue to split hairs over what type of governing power or social movement can legitimately be called by the term, or whether there are differences between “fascism” and other sorts of authoritarian rule like “military dictatorship” and “police state”, or if those differences matter at all. 

Nonetheless, there’s a solidifying consensus—from right to left—that we are now witnessing American fascism under construction. We heard from Trump’s former administration cronies describing him as a fascist during the campaign; Kamala Harris agreeing in an interview; the New York Times editorializing along those lines; and here’s what AOC said recently: “We are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.”

But as Karl Marx put it in the eleventh “Thesis on Feuerbach”, “The philosophers have interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In other words, it is up to democratic socialists and other progressives to understand fascism so that we can build the broadest possible principled coalition to resist and defeat it.

No predictions necessary

It’s a one hundred percent safe bet that this administration will not be good for the working class, particularly immigrants, whom Trump has made clear will function as his number one scapegoat and first test case for the destruction of society’s civil liberties. This has already begun. 

Trans people and queer culture are number two in line. The left, whom Trump has castigated as “vermin”, may not be as present in his day-to-day rhetoric, but fascism never leaves socialists and communists far down the list of enemies—indeed, defeating the left is fascism’s historic origin and ongoing role. Assaults on women’s right to control their bodies launched by Trump appointees on the Supreme Court will continue and likely expand. Expect the multiracial working class to be under assault in numerous ways—all without calling these aims and actions by their actual names.

Institutions that are meant to be bulwarks of democracy are targets. Any mass media that don’t toe the line are disparaged as “fake news”.  Libraries will endure shelf-clearing, school curricula that tell the truth about American history will be attacked, and the federal government will saw off and sell off as much of the public sector as it can. (Here’s where fascism and greed merge in the Trump administration.) There will be an attempt to split and weaken organized labor, peeling off the more conservative union leadership while isolating the more militant unions. If that gambit fails, we can expect more direct efforts to crush labor and working class militancy. 

Behind all these expected actions is the threat of violence to enforce them, whether from extra-legal right-wing militias, or now, the captured security apparatus of the federal government. And don’t discount a growing collaboration between the two with Trump’s encouragement, beginning with his pardon of the sixteen hundred January 6th far right conspirators.

Finally, as I noted a year ago in California Red, “Ultimately a fascist movement, usually perceived by the capitalist class initially as a threat, becomes the defense of that class, as the upstart party entrenches itself in state power, and a significant fraction of the holders of economic power, used to operating under the fig leaf of political democracy, figures out how to make their accommodation with this more direct form of violent domination of the other social classes.”

Accommodations by big capital to fascism

Recent capitulations to Trump by leading members of the ruling class notably feature representatives of Silicon Valley capital, including formerly anti-Trump capitalists like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, among others. Each of these oligarchs control major media platforms, as does the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who, like Bezos, in the waning days of the presidential campaign last year, instructed his managers to squash editorial opposition to Trump. Thirteen of Trump’s cabinet appointees are billionaires. In other words, we are witnessing the accommodation of formerly skeptical sectors of big capital to fascism as it climbs to power.

The good news: fascism usually only lasts for so long; society eventually grows sick of the lies, the destruction, the lack of liberty, the erosion of humanity. But it takes understanding as soon as possible the nature of the beast, communicating that to as many people as we can, building the biggest coalition we can, and the courage to engage in collective action together.

The more we know about how fascism works the better we can combat it.  In that spirit we share the annotated bibliography below.  

Fascism reading list

Books

Bray, Mark.  Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Melville House Publishing, 2017. An historical and global look at what resistance to fascism has looked like from the early twentieth century to (close to) the present day, including discussion of tactics, strategies and historical lessons, through the prism of anarcho-syndicalism. 

Guerin, Daniel.  Fascism and Big Business, Monad Press, 1973. Originally published in 1936 by a left-wing journalist and updated in the 1960s, this is the classic overview of developments in Germany and Italy, informed by well-honed Marxist analysis.

McLean, Nancy.  Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Viking, 2017. How did the Republican Party move from a conservative alternative to the Democratic Party to the carrier of fascism in America? McLean tells the story of James Buchanan, whose right-wing libertarian playbook was adopted and backed by the Koch brothers. 

Paxton, Robert.  The Anatomy of Fascism, Vintage, 2005. In fascism studies all roads lead to—or at least touch on—Paxton. A non-marxist but synthetic overview of the field. If you are going to go for the deep dive this is essential reading. 

Stanley, Jason.  How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Random House, 2018. Not as rigorous or concerned with definitions as Paxton or Guerin, this short, readable discussion, concentrating on cultural factors, describes the ways fascism becomes normalized in a democracy.  

Stanley, Jason.  Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, Simon and Schuster, 2024. A continuation of the arguments of his previous book, How Fascism Works, Stanley shifts the lens from fascism in culture to how fascists destroy a democratic commons of the mind by privatizing the public sector and controlling the content of schools, universities and libraries. 

Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism, Verso, 2023. A short (160 pages), brilliant, but densely argued effort to summarize theories of fascism as they shed (or don’t shed) light on the present moment. Not for the Marxist beginner. 

Articles, websites and podcasts

Burtin, Olivier. “Fascism Has an American History, Too”, American History, V. 49, No. 3, September 2021. Argues that the previous consensus for an American exceptionalism—no fascist movement of any consequence has ever occurred in the USA—is wrong. The Ku Klux Klan in the nineteenth century is analyzed as a proto-fascism.

Churchwell, Sarah. “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here”, New York Review of Books, June 22, 2020. A similar argument to Burtin’s, but focusing more on later Jim Crow society, and how fascism will appear in a culturally endogenous way here.

https://convergencemag.com/articles/block-and-build-2-0/

“Block and Build 2.0” is an updated (January 15, 2025) strategy document by the editors of Convergence.

Fletcher, Jr. Bill. “Labor Now Needs to Be an Anti-Fascist Movement”, In These Times, November 8, 2024.  A few suggestions on how to organize resistance to the new fascist regime.

https://convergencemag.com/podcast-shows/block-and-build/

Block and Build: A Weekly Roadmap for the Left. Examines political developments from a movement perspective.  Fascism-specific: “Checking the Barometric Pressure of Creeping Fascism”, December 13, 2024

https://www.fascismbarometer.org

The Fascism Barometer.  Podcasts, toolkits, Instagram posts on various approaches to stopping fascism.

https://democracytoolkit.press

Democracy Toolkit. Resources especially for journalists, but anyone interested in defending a free press dedicated to reporting fact-based news in a democratic society.