Fascism is in power in America. But America is not yet a fascist country. This conundrum explains a war without justification, plan to win or exit strategy.

Ranking high on any checklist of items comprising the elements of fascism would be scapegoating a particular population, making it the target of frustrations, anger and envy whipped up by the ruling class. No matter whether the bullseye is affixed to Jew or Palestinian, immigrant, “antifa”, democratic socialist or trans, the acts of othering and dehumanizing an ‘out group’ in an attempt to purify the nation and bind it together through hatred of the common enemy are central tactics within the fascist project.

Similar effects may be achieved through demonization of another country, or at least its leaders, in the path to war. Trump and his administration are sloppier than their predecessors, who actually took some time beforehand to explain why “we” were going to war in Vietnam or Grenada or Iraq (fill in the blank), generally sticking to one or two more or less consistent—if untruthful—rationales. Our current administration can’t be bothered, jumping day to day among various whack-a-mole excuses—destroying Iran’s nuclear capacity; regime change; jumpstarting a revolt from below; guaranteeing Israel’s safety—for death and destruction on behalf of naked acquisitive imperialism, self-dealing and to distract from growing problems on the home front.

So now we have war (safely across the world, in our screens, not our streets) to draw our attention away from the Epstein files (high profile), the impact of massively shifting government resources from help to harm (slow motion disaster, less visible but becoming harder to ignore) and growing outrage at this administration’s assaults on immigrants, civil liberties in general, and the standard of living for the working class and middle classes. 

Pointing elsewhere

Of course, it doesn’t take fascism for capitalist rulers to push a politics of distraction; nor to redistribute state resources upward or “starve the beast”. These are well established conservative (and neoliberal) practices. From the time of The Wizard of Oz and its “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” scene, it’s commonly understood that despotic rulers, when cornered, point their finger elsewhere, anywhere away from themselves to get those pesky citizens off their backs. The politics of distraction by themselves don’t necessarily mark a regime as fascist. 

So then what does the war on Iran tell us about what we’re involved with here and now? Fascists have been in charge for the past year and counting of the most powerful force in our society, the federal government. Doesn’t that make the United States a fascist country? No. Because they have not been able to achieve the consent of the governed, a good chunk of whom didn’t think they were voting for this—or various thises—when they voted for Trump. Instead, since its electoral victory of November 2024 the MAGA regime has been steadily losing support in the electorate and in the streets. Despite its best (worst) efforts, civil society remains deeply contested. And the unpopular war in Iran could be the tipping point in the struggle for the hearts and minds of Americans.

The fifth stage

According to Robert Paxton in his Anatomy of Fascism, fascism usually passes through five phases: birth of a movement; rooting in the political system; taking power; exercising power; and then, over time, motion toward either entropy or radicalization. Entropy means a loss of forward motion, a gradual relinquishing of control during a hard-fought restoration of democratic governance. Radicalization means spiraling toward increasingly repressive actions aimed at its own internal population, and the initiation of war.

The military adventure launched by the Trump administration in Iran signals that we are moving from Paxton’s fourth to fifth stage. Faced with blowback over the Epstein files from segments of his own coalition along with opposing forces, a growing protest movement in the streets over the ethnic cleansing represented by brutal ICE invasions in Democratic-led cities, and consistent defeats in the political contests leading up to this November’s congressional elections, the flailing Trump regime has unleashed forces it cannot control. 

Externally there is the expansion of nihilistic Zionist violence from Gaza to the rest of the Middle East, directly supported by the US military, whose massive firepower is now revealed to be deployed in inverse proportion to its strategic capacities. The Maduro kidnapping in Venezuela accompanied by random murders in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean foreshadows a more sustained and deadly assault on Cuba. The deliberate alienation of once stable trade and geopolitical partnerships through erratic tariff impositions is being partially walked back, but not without having inflicted lasting worldwide economic shocks now exacerbated by the Middle East war. 

Internally, these macroeconomic factors are exerting a noticeable pocketbook impact on Americans. It’s the noticeable part, not the impact itself, that’s worrisome to Trump and MAGA leaders; hence the need for distraction. Does the war distract enough from the heavy handed assemblage of American fascism? Probably not, because each time the American car owner goes to the pump she is reminded of the costs of the war. Every American farmer facing foreclosure due to rising costs sees its impact. With every energy production and distribution center in the Middle East hit by Iranian drones on the evening news the viewer is reminded of the associations Trump wishes to avoid: war and oil and fossil fuel dependence and economic chaos.

A smaller but sizeable number of people, mostly members of the professional /managerial / technical class, have become politicized over related issues: the erosion of US technological and scientific prowess, sacrificed on the altar of fossil fuel profits as China leaps to global leadership of the green energy transition. A quarter million of these folks have been removed from the federal government payroll, with trickle down adverse effects in state governments and universities.

Birth to twins

A great accomplishment of MAGA at the outset of Trump 2.0 was the Faustian forging of a ruling class coalition between a bloated tech capital that knows better, but is too besotted with the AI bubble to care, and a fossil fuel industry that cares about nothing except extraction of as much profit from global environmental destruction for as long as possible. The two factions of capital tied the knot on the altar of a deregulated economy designed for internal surveillance and control, and external military expansion. But with its consummation in the Middle East, this ruling class marriage seems to have given birth to twins: entropy and radicalization of the current regime.

For Paxton, war is not incidental to but rather the engine of fascist radicalization; the initial battlefield victories of Germany, to take the classic example, sped the process, with expansion eastward running hand in hand with extermination of the mentally ill and physically unfit on the way to the Final Solution. 

The United States is of course a different country in a different historical situation. The internal radicalization of the fascist regime signified by state sanctioned carnage carried out by stormtroopers in the streets of the Twin Cities and elsewhere and the incarceration in detention centers of tens of thousands of immigrants, over two thirds of whom have no criminal records, does not yet compare in scale with mid-twentieth century European fascism, but marks a new departure in US history, at least outside the Jim Crow southern United States. 

It’s possible that the world capitalist system can weather all this for a while, even returning to a patched up Frankensteinian democratic skin over the metastasizing rot in the economy, as recently transpired in Hungary. But it clearly can’t stabilize for the long run this way. The continuous externalizing of climate effects from business as usual and the threats posed by 40% of American GDP growth predicated on AI investment without regulatory guardrails cannot be resolved on their own terms or without the transition to a sustainable planned economy.

The war in the Middle East pushes in the opposite direction, but its intended distractions (for the masses) and attractions (for the ruling class asses) are being undermined by its unintended effects: scrambling of the world economy, utter failure to bring the Islamic fundamentalist regime to terms, and the most sustained and determined organizing by progressive forces in the United States in decades. 

The long decay of American empire has now, thanks to fascism at the controls, hit fast forward. While it is imperative to remain watchful of the impact of the war on internal fascist radicalization (the potential to double down on ICE invasions, incarcerations and deportations, election rigging, threat of martial law), entropic unraveling and the opening for progressive coalitions may prove the stronger force. The outcome of that contest depends on whether we are able to build on the examples of Minneapolis on January 23, No Kings in March, and May Day Strong to generate a transmutable energy, alternating between the streets and the ballot box as needed.

Monday begins early, at 7:15 a.m., when the line curls out of Red Line Roasters, a worker-owned café in the old Pacific Electric train station across from the Metro. Workers grab coffees and snacks on their way to the morning shift at the new state-owned electric motor factory off Lankershim.

The espresso machine hisses and inside, Marisol checks the co-op dashboard between orders. The shop’s profits this quarter are up, but instead of disappearing upward into some distant corporate skyline, they’re already earmarked for wages, reserves, and the neighborhood fund.

A flyer near the register advertises a Thursday night community investment meeting where people actually decide how the surplus gets used. Across the street, the public childcare center opens, and parents drop off kids without doing the quiet math of whether the day’s work is even worth the cost. 

On Tuesday, the old bank on Magnolia now feels more like a library than a financial institution. Sammy sits with a planner, pitching a cooperative music studio, and the questions focus on jobs, partnerships, and sustainability rather than extraction. The loan terms from the public bank are clear and uneventful, almost boring, with no trapdoors or predatory edges.

Capital has stopped being a hunter and become something closer to irrigation. Money flows where it is needed and stays long enough to matter. The difference is decisive.

By Wednesday evening, 60 or so neighborhood council reps gather at the Maurice Sendak school auditorium for the monthly housing assembly. North Hollywood now mixes rent-controlled units, newer public housing, and cooperative buildings, and decisions about development happen in the open. Arguments unfold over timelines, design, density, and even the types of shade trees. The process is slow and imperfect. Input is collected and sent upstream to LA Housing Works, the massive countywide public builder. 

But no one is waiting on a distant landlord, a long Sacramento legislative hike, or a hedge fund’s quarterly calculation. The decisions are local, contested, and binding. The friction is real, but so is the reality of democracy.

Thursday night returns to the café, where $48,000 in surplus sits on the table. The options range from expansion to raises to community investment, and the discussion circles around balance rather than maximization. In the end, the vote splits the difference, modestly increasing compensation while contributing to neighborhood energy retrofits for solar batteries.

Outside, the streetlights hum on, powered by a cleaner, regionally coordinated grid. It isn’t perfect, but it holds, and you can feel the difference in the summer air.

On Friday, a fabrication co-op loses a contract, but no one is fired. The workers draw on reserves, adjust hours, and rely on a regional employment program if needed. Risk is still present, but it no longer translates instantly into catastrophe. Maybe somewhere this too changes but now it mostly works. 

At lunch, someone jokes that a bad quarter used to mean existential dread, and now it just means longer meetings. Everyone groans, because some things, apparently, are permanent.

Saturday brings a festival to North Hollywood Park, where people drift in on cheap or free transit. Food co-ops, local artists, and planning tables fill the space, and infrastructure proposals are explained in plain English. Nearby, a booth answers questions about the federal social dividend, which arrives monthly and softens the edges of everyday life.

It isn’t dramatic, but it’s reliable, and that reliability changes how people move through the week. The system feels less like a gamble and more just like the weather.

Sunday is quieter, a day of checking accounts and taking stock. Pay is decent and compressed, bills are manageable, and healthcare no longer sits like a threat in the background. Manny and Rose, the oldest of couples, sit on a balcony and try to name the feeling.

It isn’t prosperity exactly. It’s the sense that everything is no longer hanging by a thread, that the floor is solid even when you trip.

The neighborhood isn’t a utopia, and disagreements, inefficiencies, and ambitions persist. Markets still exist even if mixed in with planning, and some projects succeed while others lag. But the center of gravity has shifted, and the basics of life no longer depend on winning a constant series of small bets.

No one designed it all in advance. It grew piece by piece, assembled while people were already fighting for it and living inside the shell of the old order. If you walk down Lankershim at dusk, you don’t see a finished future, just a place still being made in real time by real people.

This is just one imagining of what a transitional period of a society, our society, that’s gone down the democratic road to socialism might look like. You may have your own. What would be different? If a new future could be won, what would it feel like? 

Further Reading:

• The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Alec Nove

• Nordic Socialism: the Path Toward a Democratic Economy, Pelle Dragsted

• Reclaiming Public Ownership, Andrew Cumbers

• A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, Kate Aronoff et al

On May Day, hundreds of protesters descended on Oakland International Airport (OAK). Their demands: to abolish ICE, end US wars (including stopping the shipment of military cargo to Israel), and tax the rich. As a protest of over 150 on foot at Terminal 1 reached a crescendo, another hundred protesters inched past the terminal in a four-lane car caravan, honking horns and displaying messages. News camera crews captured some of the excitement.

OAK is home to a FedEx terminal that ships military cargo to Israel, making the airport the subject of the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo Campaign, of which East Bay DSA is a member. Terminal 1 is also the ticketing location of Delta Airlines, which deported Liam Conejo Ramos. Finally, it is the site of labor struggle involving airport workers organized by SEIU-USWW. 

The OAK action coincided with another, at SFO, where SEIU-USWW members working without a contract led a demonstration that resulted in 25 arrests. (A third airport action took place later in the day in San Diego.) It was organized in less than a month, led by East Bay DSA, along with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) and Indivisible East Bay, with support from leaders of the Arms Embargo Campaign, such as the Palestinian Youth Movement and Arab Resource and Organizing Center. Many other community and labor organizations participated, including contingents from ILWU local 6, Oakland teachers, and Bay Area Labor for Palestine. 

ILWU Local 6 Hosts a Pre-Action Meeting

Nearly 350 people, a third of them DSA members, met up in the morning at the ILWU Local 6 union hall, a few blocks from the airport entrance. We heard from speakers about May Day, the struggle of OAK workers, and about our three demands. A statement of support was also read from Angela Davis, who apologized for not being able to make it. 

Grace Martinez, statewide deputy director with ACCE, a co-leader in planning the event, reflected that the numbers exceeded our turnout goal. “There were people who had been in the movement for a very long time,” she said, “but for many, including many of our members, this was their first May Day – and their first protest. That was very powerful.” 

The Action at Terminal 1

The action at Terminal 1 kicked off when the first busload of people arrived from the ILWU hall. We wanted to let airport workers and passengers know through our banners, chanting, and flyers why this action was happening at the airport. By the time the second busload arrived, over 150 people were participating on foot.

Our signs, flyers, and chants proclaimed our overall immediate demands - tax the rich, stop US wars, abolish ICE - and also educated people about the fact that there’s an ongoing campaign to stop the shipment of military cargo through OAK (via FedEx) to Israel. An August 2025 study from the Palestinian Youth Movement found that 16% of Lockheed Martin military cargo bound for Israel passes through OAK - with over 250 military shipments to Israel from January to August 2025 alone. 

This demonstration came a few weeks after a car caravan organized by the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo campaign, and the addition of an on-foot rally made our action an escalation and a reminder to the airport, which is governed by the Oakland Port Commission (appointed by famed anti-war politician and Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee), that business as usual will continue to be disrupted so long as military cargo flows through OAK. The action felt even more powerful when we saw our comrades in the car caravan shut down the only road into the airport, moving slowly enough that our banner holders were able to walk in front of them.   

One of our coalition partners, Nancy Latham, a member of Indivisible East Bay’s steering committee, recalled waiting for the caravan at Terminal 1. “The moment they turned the corner,” she said, “they looked like a bunch of huge animals ready to stampede. And then as they drove toward those of us standing outside the terminal, it was as if two tributaries were flowing together. We all felt a surge of power to have this other group meet us. It was a peak experience.”

The View from the Car Caravan

To prepare for the caravan, May Day organizers incorporated the lessons learned from the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo caravan two weeks before, including preparing for the possibility of arrest. While we did not plan to disobey authorities, confronting the possibility of arrest focused participants on the risks and heightened personal security necessary in these times of authoritarian surveillance. After all, airports are among the heavily surveilled environments in the country. We secured our phones and conducted our chats in Signal, good practices for all activists. We had caravan training sessions with East Bay DSA members a few days prior to May Day and during the pre-action training at the ILWU hall.

Before getting into our cars, we practiced on foot the formation we would deploy. We had over 60 cars ready and able to join the caravan, each with a driver and at least one “co-pilot” to monitor the Signal chat. The cars were decorated in car chalk proclaiming “Abolish ICE”, “Stop US Wars”, “Tax The Rich”, and “No Killer Cargo Thru OAK”. 

This intensive preparation led to the execution of a wildly successful caravan. The key tactic was having four lead cars, with the co-pilots in constant communication, along with a police liaison in the middle of the formation, and a rear car providing updates from there.

When we reached the point where four through-lanes emerged, we slowed to two miles an hour in four columns and proceeded to the terminal area. As we approached Terminal 1, we were greeted with raucous cheers and sign waving. We responded with car horns and fists in the air out of the car windows. Suddenly, people carrying three banners emerged from the crowd, took the street, and led us through the airport on foot. Horns and cheering continued. It was exhilarating and powerful. The sheriffs decided to intervene by segregating the last third of the caravan into the far left lane reserved for car shares. So now the caravan was slowing traffic in that area as well.

It took the caravan 40 minutes to snake through the airport. We were able to stay in formation across all the lanes and keep our speed at 2 mph until the entire caravan cleared the airport. By then, the sheriffs had blocked off the two closest exits leading back to the terminal.

No worries. With the Terminal 1 rally concluded, we cheered our victory and drove back to the union hall. 

The road to May Day 2026

Complementing the traditional afternoon rally and march by the Oakland Sin Fronteras coalition, the morning airport action marked a structure test and turning point in the coalescence of progressive and working class East Bay organizations around demands and tactics that we can build on over the coming two years. Getting to this point was the work of many months by East Bay DSA’s Fighting the Oligarchy campaign.  

The campaign, voted East Bay DSA’s top priority at our June 2025 convention, began by organizing in solidarity with the Federal Unionists Network. It was an important goal of the campaign to help the FUN’s Bay Area Hub grow their ranks and develop their organizing capacities and reach. By the early Fall, that goal was well advanced, through a variety of means that included regular canvasses of federal workers at workplaces in Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco. 

Another important campaign goal, however, was focused more broadly on the growing mass resistance to the Trump regime:

“Shape the politics of East Bay resistance: Cohere the growing mass movement in the East Bay to fight the oligarchy and incipient fascism by providing support and leadership, democratic organizational practices, and a political analysis that this is a fight in solidarity with the working class against capitalism, not with the Democratic against the Republican party.”

Since Labor Day, the Fight the Oligarchy campaign turned our focus to becoming a valued partner of Bay Area resistance organizations and coalitions.

We met with the Alameda Labor Council and SEIU 1021, proposing a series of “May Day in the Time of Trump” political education and organizing trainings, which both organizations endorsed, along with ACCE, Bay Resistance, the FUN and several more unions. The first event covered the history of May Day, and brought together a panel of partner organizational leaders who spoke to their vision for using this May Day to build power toward May Day 2028. The second featured Eric Blanc speaking to the Lessons of Minneapolis, followed by a table discussion and organizing training.

At the national level, one of our co-chairs was actively engaged in MayDayStrong, and in the NLC May Day committee. Locally, we focused on several key centers of resistance activity in the East Bay: Bay Resistance (a coalition led by numerous labor and community organizations), ACCE and Indivisible East Bay. Through building relationships and showing up to do work, we proved ourselves to be good leaders and organizers in the final months of 2025, at No Kings in October, and a People over Billionaires action at the homes of several SF billionaires, led by ACCE. This resulted in our being included in the planning committees for No Kings 3 and the Bay Area’s MayDayStrong solidarity school. 

With partners convened by Bay Resistance, we planned a February 27 “train the trainer” event geared to turning people out to the solidarity school, and a solidarity school in San Francisco attended by about 1,000 people. East Bay DSA contributed two trainers at the solidarity school, including co-leading a training for union members, which was focused on organizing No Kings participants to take action on May Day. The planning for the OAK action began at these regional convenings, with East Bay membership organizations, primarily DSA, ACCE and Indivisible, taking on the challenge of quickly planning the OAK action.

Internal Organizing

With more than 2,000 members and dozens of active chapter projects spread across four counties, it took work to coordinate and get everyone on the same page about shared priorities in our chapter, even for a big event like May Day. 

Over the last couple of years we’ve worked at improving our ability to turn out to protests en masse - first by establishing rapid response endorsements and turnout infrastructure for Palestine solidarity work after October 7, and more recently by calling and planning our own actions, like our solidarity march and rally with Minneapolis in Oakland on January 23. 

By late February, it was clear that East Bay DSA would be playing a major role in making May Day big in the Bay this year, and a core group sprang into action to get organized internally. We began meeting in late March, setting a goal of 200 East Bay DSA members committing to not work on May Day. Our initial group of ten members from different chapter projects eventually grew to include nearly twenty actively planning East Bay DSA’s roles in the OAK action as well as the Oakland Sin Fronteras rally and march. We coalesced on the demands we wanted to center, brought those back to our coalition partners, made a communications and turnout plan, held a chapter leaders’ meeting to incorporate our May Day asks into their organizing, and held a large community meeting on April 28 to get final preparations in place. All of this meant that  dozens of chapter members from several different committees and campaigns helped organize hundreds of people to take action on May Day. 

What comes next

We aspire to play an even bigger role in making sure that May Day actions disrupt the flow of capital next year. That means both continuing to build coalition relationships and getting even more organized as a chapter to be able to put forward clear demands and plan significant actions. 

Our proposed mechanism for doing so (subject to approval at our annual convention on June 7) is establishing a May Day Working Group that will work all year to identify potential opportunities for mass and escalating actions, especially workplace actions. This group will be structured explicitly to bring together leaders from different chapter projects, maximizing our reach and coordination. The hope is that this will put us on an even stronger footing as we look towards May Day 2028. 

This approach is consistent with the national labor priority established by the DSA NPC encouraging chapters to organize toward actions on May Day 2028. The resolution calls for a “2026-27 strategic plan that may add detail, scope, timelines, staff time allocation, budget guidance, and concrete goals to these priorities [including preparing for May Day 2028].”

Meanwhile, several of us will be in St. Louis at the end of May with our local partners, and many DSA members from around the country, to learn and plan together, anticipating major provocations and mass resistance to come.

We’ll go to St. Louis with a new sense of what’s possible. As a structure test, the OAK action exceeded our expectations. ACCE’s Martinez said, “The whole point was to have an assessment of where we were as a movement, a coalition and organizations. While the May Day action came together in just three weeks, it was the culmination of a series of escalating actions that we pulled off together going back to last Fall.” Now, she added, “May Day is becoming more real for a lot of people.”

As one of our members, Eileen T, explained after returning from an exhilarating May Day visit to Chicago, “May Day is a distress signal. It can come at any time.” When it does, we aim to be prepared to fight back and protect our working class communities.

California DSA will be hosting a zoom meeting on May 28 at 6:30 to provide an overview of the two progressive tax measures that will be placed before voters on the November state ballot. You will hear about recent tax the rich efforts in California, and speakers from the campaigns will provide updates. You will also have an opportunity to ask questions and get answers. Register here.

From the time of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto to the present day, taxing the rich has been a central project of the socialist movement. Why?

As long as the capitalist class extracts surplus value from the labor process it will continue to grow richer at the expense of the working class. (See Piketty, R > G). Economic inequality has surpassed Gilded Age proportions. Progressive taxation is an essential means of clawing back some of the wealth created by the working class so that we may fund vital public services and provide the basis for a more egalitarian and democratic society. Campaigning for progressive taxes provides a direct opportunity to raise class consciousness, as the discussion naturally revolves around how inequality benefits the rich, hurts everyone else, and can be at least partly fixed with this solution. 

As such, a tax the rich campaign opens the door to the next level of discussion: how capitalism works, and how democratic socialism can fix its problems. 

A common thread

The other benefit of a tax the rich campaign is that it represents a common thread through just about every other issue and concern to DSA members. If you are working on issues like public transit, public education, universal childcare, public health and safety or social housing, none of these issues can be properly addressed without adequate funding from the state. Taxing the rich is pivotal to success in any of these areas.

If you are interested in electing democratic socialists, once in office they need more funding than currently possessed by the public sector. We shouldn’t be electing socialists to administer austerity, but that’s what usually happens, given the bad choices they face without progressive taxation to fund their work. The ‘electing’ part of local electoral work is also supported by a tax the rich campaign, because taxing the rich remains consistently popular, and when presented in cooperation with local DSA-endorsed candidates who are on board, it broadens their appeal as well.

If you want to stop the imperialist war machine of the US government in its corrupt alliance with private sector capital—including the current AI investment bubble that supports data centers, environmental destruction, and surveillance technology alongside new forms of mass death in other countries—we must wrest as much of that capital as we can out of the hands of the ruling  class so that it doesn’t control these enormous sums to invest. Taxing the rich is a vehicle to do that.

If you wish the labor movement to become more militant, raising class consciousness can be transferable from the ballot box to the workplace. The working class has two methods to retrieve the capital it produces through the labor process: militant, democratic organizing unions that extract a greater share of the pie through collective bargaining, and political organizing to tax the rich. With socialist education as the nexus, each method can reinforce the other.

After November, more taxing the rich

We have created a Tax the Rich Working Group in East Bay DSA to work on the two state ballot measures that will appear in November before the voters. Similar groups have been chartered in other chapters. But our progressive tax work won’t be over with the election. Even if both measures pass, capital will continue to be bloated and the multiracial working class will continue to have needs that can only be met through other forms of progressive taxation, like increased corporate taxes and splitting commercial property off from residential property. After November we intend to turn to political education and legislative efforts along these lines. These will be key components of our ongoing May Day education and coalition-building project, reinforcing the idea of what May Day 2028 signifies in terms of a political economy for workers over billionaires. 

If your chapter has not yet started working on the campaign here’s a chance to get going. Check out the campaign page on the California DSA website. Joining this work will engage the diverse activities of California DSA chapters within a unifying theme and effort. It will help us to stand alongside and uplift our allies in the labor movement and community in common struggle. And it provides the opportunity for pushing beyond reform toward revolution. 

What:‍ ‍Online forum on taxing the rich in California

When: Thursday, May 28, 6:30 – 8 pm

Who:

• Matthew Hardy, Communications Director, California Federation of Teachers

• Doug Jones, Organizer, United Health Workers-SEIU

• Fred Glass, Co-Chair, East Bay DSA Tax the Rich Working Group

Register here.

Here’s how DSA members and other progressives can organize to compete in upcoming intra-party contests.

Oligarchs and the donor class still have a firm grip on the Democratic Party apparatus and politics. But the cracks are increasingly obvious:

Zohran Mamdani; Analilia Mejia; the crumbling of AIPAC/DMFI sway; burial of the DNC’s 2024 autopsy report for fear of what it might reveal; polling numbers that show a party less popular than even Donald Trump; widening gaps between the progressive and corporate wings. 

And now, still small but growing numbers of DSA cadre and allied candidates are competing and winning local, state and federal elections around the country, defeating some guardians of the status quo.

When will the ice break in California?

The day may be coming soon. We’ll know a lot more after June 2 primaries and November 2, when progressives who make “top two” test the thesis that the road to victory is the opposite of chasing Republicans to the right in pursuit of mythical centrist “swing” voters. 

Next, we’ll have an opportunity to contest for control of the state Democratic Party.

Compared to many other states, the composition of the California party’s Central Committee, which elects its officers and endorses candidates, approves the party platform and passes resolutions, enables significant small D democracy, if we organize. 

About a third of the approximately 3,500 members are elected in caucus-like processes—4 in each of the 80 state Assembly districts. Voting has gone more and more by mail and online since the pandemic, with plenty of opportunity for mischief but also real opportunities for progressives —again, if we organize. 

Path to success

The path to success in the 2026-27 ADEMs (Assembly District Election Meetings) is to create solid, diverse slates of candidates in each district, with strict solidarity—each member working hard to get out the vote for all—facilitated by an effective system to register voters in a special process. (It’s not enough to simply be a registered Democrat, though that is required.)

Another third of delegates to the state Central Committee will be selected by county central committees, which in most of the state will be elected on the 2028 primary ballots (exact methods vary some from county to county, confusingly). In most locations, a similar process of creating progressive slates and campaigning for them will be in order.

Recruiting candidates to construct ADEM slates needs to begin now. They must file by late this year, with voter registration following, and balloting in early 2027 (exact dates to be announced). Many DSA members have run in recent rounds, which come every two years, though participation has been passive to negligible in many chapters. Chapter electoral committees may want to change that, determining the best strategy—and it can vary a lot depending on the demographics, politics (e.g. union strength, local Democratic leadership) of the district.

Help for Organizing

Gearing up to help organize locally is a PAC in formation, the People’s Democracy Network (PDN), operating fully outside the Democratic Party but dedicated primarily to building power for the left inside the party. We hope to accelerate the ability to work with local progressives to build ADEM slates this year, but the main organizing needs to be done by people with local relationships and skills in each district. Careful navigation is often needed to forge coalitions where necessary and to counter fake “progressive” rivals. Last time, we saw an unusual infusion of money for competitors in some districts by PACs apparently fronting for Israel lobby groups.

PDN will soon be recruiting members to support its particular narrow mission – building progressive power in the California Democratic Party, from the outside. Exact criteria are in the process of being determined, but to be clear, it’s not exclusive: members of DSA or other groups are welcome. To read PDN’s mission statement and 2024 policy platform (needs updating, including the name), go here.

For a more detailed description of the ADEM process and advice on constructing local slates, please see here.

And to let us know of your interest in helping organize in your district, please submit this form.

Ballots have already begun arriving in the hands of San Francisco voters, and as we muddle through long lists of voter guides, candidates and propositions, we will ask ourselves many questions. 

But will we be asking the right ones?

It is a privilege, and wholly inadequate, to deliberate over which unsatisfactory choices we will make this election cycle, without material worry as to whether our ballots will be collected and counted, or whether our polling stations will be opened; meanwhile the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has allowed southern states to redraw Black-majority congressional districts out of existence entirely, gutting the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchising millions of Black people in a single stroke of a pen. In Louisiana alone, a state where there has never been a black person elected to a statewide executive office, over 40,000 ballots that were already cast will now be defunct according to these new maps. 

This is not an unfortunate isolated event, but rather the latest decisive move in a decades-long struggle to claw back the democratic gains won through generations of Black struggle, labor movements, anti-colonial resistance, and mass civil disobedience. Reforms were not secured because the ruling class suddenly developed a conscience, they were bloody concessions won because millions of people developed their collective consciousness, organized, rebelled, and created a political crisis so great that it threatened the legitimacy and stability of the entire capitalist system. From Birmingham to Selma, the expansion of democratic rights in the United States came through sustained pressure from below, from the oppressed masses and workers.

What does it mean for us to participate in this system of government which so easily stratifies access to basic functions of democracy, one that even after over a century and a half of effort and reforms, so easily and gleefully reverts its shape to previous racial viciousness?

The United States of America is the most advanced settler-colonial project in the world. Chattel slavery funded colonialism and was the fuel that kickstarted capital accumulation as we know it, until it was legally replaced with prison labor, with Black people still the primary targets of the USA’s forced labor industry, their communities and bodies policed and incarcerated at much higher than average rates. The United States is a prison house of not only people but whole nations as well. Indigenous peoples have endured centuries of genocide, not as an unintended byproduct of white nation building, but as the primary vehicle of it. Even today Indigenous lands are stolen and exploited, from Standing Rock to Pe’Sla water and land defenders have shown us how plainly our modern day government, courts and military coordinates with private companies to desecrate Indigenous lands and brutalize their bodies for profits. The last two decades of the creation and expansion of ICE have only been a continuation of the colonial violence which established these borders in the first place. Our government shamelessly runs concentration camps for children and trades human bodies to foreign prisons because it has no need for shame as it fulfills its intended purpose.

Our planet faces a catastrophic ecological crisis imposed on us all by capitalism. Due to our state’s most recent imperialist violence we face shortages of fuel, food and other necessities in the immediate future. Our politicians from Congress all the way down to the municipal city level are either captured by capital interests or rendered toothless before those who are. Austerity measures are being inflicted on our most vulnerable populations while the price of commodities rises endlessly, a cliff is rapidly approaching and we must prepare. 

So what then, is to be done?

We cannot merely say that “democracy is dead” and give up, this would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the contradiction; democracy is not dead, democracy has not yet been born. Instead we must collectively create democracy, bottom up, from our own power as workers and whole communities; voting is only one small part of a democratic society. History has taught us plainly that the ruling class will never concede without being forced to and that liberation is never given, it must be seized. As socialists we must recognize the electoral terrain for the limitations it reveals with its own contradictions; a system of governance that was derived from white men who owned people as livestock and who murdered and robbed whole civilizations for the pursuit of property is not the basis for a functional democracy. While we engage in elections strategically, we would be foolish to turn a blind eye to the results of centuries of struggle, the effort wasted trying to mold and reshape it into what it is not, that has failed to produce lasting material changes.

The only proven counter to capitalism which has descended into fascism is socialism; a state that only exists to manage capitalist property relations and labor extraction must be replaced with one that manages the productive relationship amongst fellow workers to provide for the needs of all. We must recognize the disenfranchisement of any of us as the disenfranchisement of all of us and fight back in every available avenue. We must identify the primary contradiction and determine our course of actions accordingly, not merely continue to play fairly within the parameters laid out by those who benefit from our oppression. It is our duty to build collective power and then to wield it in service of building socialism. To stand in solidarity with communities both near and far, we must speak out at every injustice, especially the ones that are not an injustice to us.

An injury to one is an injury to all. 

JUSTICE FOR THE NEGROS 19! River Valley DSA echoes calls to hold the Armed Forces of the Philippines accountable for their massacre of 19 individuals on the island of Negros. Among those killed were two Filipino-American comrades who had gone to Negros to learn from and be in solidarity with the brutally exploited peasant masses […]

There’s a new DSA member in Congress! In Pennsylvania, Chris Rabb defeated an establishment-backed opponent and another secretly funded by AIPAC. Now Congressman Rabb will continue the fight to abolish ICE, free Palestine and win Medicare for All in the U.S. House of Representatives!

You can find out more about Congressman Rabb’s campaign here. Philly DSA, together with thousands of other working class people across Philadelphia, organized to make this win possible. That’s the DSA difference — our work is based in solid organizing in our communities, with our neighbors.

And it’s not just Pennsylvania! Here’s just some of our nationally-endorsed state and local successes:

• In Kentucky, Louisville DSA’s former co-chair Robert LeVertis Bell, a proud union teacher, will now be the first socialist in the State House! And Andrea Parr has just advanced to the runoff for Louisville Metro Council District 9. She’s fighting for budget reform, public power, and sanctuary policies protecting trans and immigrant communities!
• Georgia wins are coming in hot! Two years ago, Atlanta DSA’s Gabriel Sanchez broke ground by becoming the first Democratic Socialist elected to the Georgia General Assembly. This Tuesday, he won his race for Georgia State House District 42. And congratulations to Mathewos Samson on advancing to the general for Georgia House District 58! Mathewos will fight to make Georgia work for the working class, not the billionaires. Athens Area DSA is celebrating as well — proud DSA member Tim Denson is advancing to the runoff for Athens-Clarke Mayor.
• In Arizona, public interest lawyer Bobby Nichols just won his race for Tempe City Council At-Large! Bobby’s platform includes making Tempe affordable for everyone, building public housing, and making it easier to form a union.
• And in Oregon, Tammy Carpenter for winning her election to Oregon House District 27! Tammy will fight alongside Portland DSA to fully fund public schools, win universal healthcare and establish a Renters’ Bill of Rights.

More elections are coming up this summer. Check out our live results tracker to find out more about DSA’s national and local endorsements!

DSA organizing goes beyond the ballot box, too. Here’s just some of our work this spring:

• This month, over 170 DSA chapters participated in May Day actions, showing our solidarity with the labor movement and the global working class in the streets, in our workplaces, in our schools, and beyond.
• From Wisconsin to Georgia, DSA chapters are standing against Big Tech’s AI and data center projects, and organizing for green projects instead!
• Chapters across the country are organizing to stop war, taking to the streets and sending tens of thousands of letters to Congress!

As a DSA member, you can help build the strong working class movement we need to stand against fascism and build a brighter future. Join today!

As the weather gets hotter, DSA members are serving up cool wins. Be a part of it!

The post Hot DSA Electoral Wins! New Democratic Socialist in Congress — Plus State and Local Wins Across the Country appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

By Dave C.- A Portland DSA Member

Socialists are the underdogs. We are constantly fighting on hostile terrain and in uphill battles. It’s easy to get lost in the play-by-play of each election, but our goal isn’t to win just a single match; it’s to take home the trophy. (That means one day wholly defeating capitalism and creating a society for the benefit of all people, not just the billionaires.) To do that, it’s the job of our socialists in office (SIOs) and our movement to construct and take advantage of moments where we can beat back the capitalist forces and their faux-gressive candidates.

Portland DSA and our SIOs helped create the conditions for Dr. Tammy Carpenter’s successful takedown of her Chamber of Commerce-backed opponent. Let’s look at some of the key pieces and events that helped shape this match-up and how we assembled the forces that could win a tough election.

Palestine Solidarity

Shortly after October 7th 2023, DSA member Rep. Farrah Chaichi became one of the first public officials in Oregon to condemn the genocide of Palestinians.  Rumors started to circulate that she would face a Zionist-friendly challenger.

In January, Portland DSA worked with Intel employees to speak out against the genocide and the ways Intel was supporting it. This resulted in a massive divestment of Intel from Israel later in the year which the BDS Movement organization called “the largest BDS victory ever.” Importantly it started to prove that support for Palestine wasn’t simply a cause for the lefty super-activists in Portland but rather something a lot of people in the suburbs also cared about. 

Rep. Chaichi’s opponent, a military drone salesman, suffered a brutal defeat in the May primary. Rep. Chaichi and all of the pro-Palestine incumbents won that spring, which was a crucial piece to proving that pro-Palestine people belong in Washington County leadership. Creating and defending this space for Pro-Palestine politics laid the groundwork for later actions.

Strike Solidarity

Massive strikes rolled through the Portland metro area. Portland DSA helped to shape the political nature of these strikes both through public solidarity and communications about the meaning and stake of the strikes that expanded public consciousness. 2023 saw a massive teachers’ strike in the fall. This nearly month-long strike galvanized public support and worked to shift the narrative from blaming public sector workers to focusing on the state providing more funding. Corporate actors tried desperately to quash this energy, but did not achieve their ends.

In January of 2025, workers across the state of Oregon went on strike against Providence. This strike was unparalleled in size and scale to anything Oregon had ever seen, and made waves nation-wide. Patients over Profits and Safe Staffing were key phrases that DSA helped to promote and foster. Our work to bolster class consciousness from strikes helped build an environment primed for pro-worker messaging and for the public to believe that wins were possible, a necessary foreground to both our 2024 electoral wins and creating the ground we would operate on in 2026. 

Socialists in Office

There is a deep credibility crisis for elected leaders. A deep cynicism is felt widely and deeply that any elected official will actually pursue change. Our DSA City Councilors have worked to buck this cynicism and socialists (and the broad community) have reaped the rewards. 

These socialists:

• Stood up for workers in union disputes not just with the city or already powerful unions but for forming ones as well like Starbucks Workers United, and New Seasons Labor Union;
• Pulled money away from an over-bloated police budget to public parks;
• Uncovered unspent funds for housing and made a plan to use them to fund Rent-Assistance, a first of its kind Social Housing Fund, and Eviction Defense;
• Banned AI Price Fixing;
• Launched a BDS Pledge and local divestment investigation; and
• Stood strong against billionaire giveaways for a sports stadium.

Even when their efforts didn’t yield a result, the public advocacy has been noticed. What people have learned in the Portland area is that when socialists say something they mean it, that socialists show up for the cause of working people across the city. This is a key part of the socialist difference. We are winning over people away from cynicism. For an electoral project to take hold, people must believe that a better world is possible and be willing to believe those who take up our banner to fight for it. Our Socialists in Office can help create fertile ground for others.

Preparing for 2026

In the run-up to our endorsements for 2026, Portland DSA became much more serious and engaged in expanding and protecting our public profile and identity. This meant extensive efforts went into cohering and promoting a socialist bloc at city hall, and seriously upgrading the focus of our public communications.

We also understood that chapter buy-in had to be built. Deep organic connections are required to have leaders and systems ready for a strong DSA-centric campaign. Farrah Chaichi’s campaign helped raise our profile in Washington County. The organizing of Justin and Karin S around school issues in the Beaverton School District along with the revival of the washington county branch (now referred to as Tualatin Valley branch) were important to cultivating our presence in the area.

Our chapter had developed a sense for both opportunity and danger after the May 2025 school board elections both struck hard. Tammy Carpenter, a DSA member and school board director on the Beaverton School Board had organized a pro-labor slate in the recent elections. Only one of the pro-labor candidates won. Zionists outraged by Tammy’s advocacy and emboldened by the election results worked to cook up an investigation into Tammy’s pro-palestine and anti-genocide social media presence. You can read more about this here.

By the time we were ready to endorse, we already knew Tammy would be a bold voice for justice, for socialism and a credit to everyone who worked with her.

Tammy recruited DSA members to her Kitchen Cabinet and hired a DSA member as campaign manager. Tammy had both organic connections and a strong group of advisors to help her formulate her campaign, her platform and her connection to DSA. She was the first ever to seek and get a Cadre Endorsement from Portland DSA. Unlike any other campaign we were simply the whole shebang for a significant period.

This race was always going to be difficult. The establishment had a real favorite in city councilor Ashley Hartmeier-Prigg, a Chamber of Commerce darling, and one of the best faux-gressives out there. Ashley secured endorsements of nearly every democratic incumbent early and her kick-off party was a veritable directory of insiders and lobbyists. We knew we needed an incredible field game and a strong focus on differentiating ourselves from the squishy language of progressives. We needed a socialist champion. Dr. Tammy Carpenter stepped into the ring.

Playing Our Hand

DSA and Tammy together built such a strong field program with incredibly clear and bold messaging. We quickly garnered attention from potential endorsers as the most legitimate campaign with a connection to voters. Endorsers understood the campaign had DSA at the core. We kept strong messaging and democratic socialist ID throughout the campaign.  We knocked over 10,000 doors in the early part of our campaign eclipsing any other field effort in the state and racked up 35,000 over the course of the campaign. It was a struggle to get our coalition partners and even our media consultants to understand the importance of using the words democratic socialism. It’s clear that we would have benefited from a socialist media team, and that our constant and impressive field presence was crucial to showing that Democratic Socialism wasn’t a fringe word but a key part of running this winning campaign.

As the campaign progressed it became clear that a major local issue was shaping public sentiment: Data Centers. Socialists in office and candidates across the state were weighing in against and this naturally fit our basic mantra: Tax The Rich.

As reports of layoffs and funding deficits have rocked the public as well as many people’s personal lives, the idea of tax giveaways to Amazon and other large tech companies for data center building grew a substantial grass roots resistance. The only working champions of such ideas were the building trades whose members hoped to get work from the construction of those facilities. Dr. Tammy Carpenter helped to champion a local moratorium petition on data centers, and kept socialist messaging about who should pay for public goods at the center. KGW interviewed candidates opposing data centers and then mysteriously canceled airing it, this just served to make people even more interested in hearing what Dr. Tammy Carpenter had to say. (Read more about data centrism here)

As the race started to reach the end, our opponents made blunder after blunder, supporting deeply unpopular policies. Tammy’s opponent even sent out texts describing DSA as “too extreme” and fear mongering that we were going to take away peoples’ homes. The icing on the cake of this moment is that socialism was supposed to be the bogey man that our opponents wielded against working class candidates. It now appears to have had the opposite effect. The chamber of commerce used some sneaky polling that actually gave DSA credit for multiple other candidates running insurgent races. Whatever happens next it’s clear there is no excuse for hiding socialism in the closet, it’s actually a benefit to credibility and popularity to be a real out and loud socialist!

Preparing for our next Match

We are sitting in an incredible position in the Portland Metro area. Many of our incumbents are likely to win in their next personal match-ups, but when we are building a movement, it is insufficient to rest on the laurels of a few elected socialists. We must shape the ground for the next match-up where scrappy socialists can take on political machines by preparing people to fight for not just bread, but roses too. 

By Emily D. Thank you for reading  This cartoon is part of Issue No. 01 of Garden State Socialist, a publication of the North New Jersey chapter of the Democratic Socialists […]