California DSA

A political storm has been sweeping through the Golden State for the past half year. It’s called “The Billionaire Tax”. Its detractors, until now, have mostly been a handful of the ultrarich conservatives targeted by the proposed tax itself, and their ostentatious shoveling of tens of millions of dollars into a “No” campaign has helped buy them the public anger that these sociopathic tech bros so deeply deserve. 

On the other side, along with SEIU-United Healthcare Workers (sponsor of the measure), were to be found progressive stalwarts like California congressman Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, and several unions. To all intents and purposes—at least from the outside—it had the look of a class struggle in political form.

But with the elimination of the lone gubernatorial primary candidate who supported the measure, Tom Steyer, from contention in November, things have pivoted quickly, revealing complex dynamics largely unseen in public view until now. In the past couple weeks, unions and progressive organizations have joined the opposition; and under pressure, the SEIU-UHW is now offering to withdraw the ballot measure if the governor and Legislature agree to back a smaller but still substantial tax on the state’s billionaires.

Two tax the rich measures

There are in fact two ballot measures seeking to raise state revenues via progressive taxes in November: the Billionaire Tax (a wealth tax), meant to fill the massive budget hole created in the state’s Medi-Cal system due to federal funding reductions, and the Education and Health Care Act (an income tax), which already exists, but is a temporary tax, the revenues of which go to schools and services. Its principal backers, public education unions, are seeking to make it permanent. 

You might think that it would be a no-brainer for unions to stand united on these measures. The Billionaire Tax would affect a grand total of 250 people in the state who collectively hold two trillion dollars in wealth. They would pay out five percent of their hoard over five years, and then the tax would sunset. This would amount to one hundred billion dollars, or twenty billion dollars a year, so that millions of working class Californians, mostly children, would keep their access to health care. 

The initial proponent of the Billionaire Tax, SEIU-United Healthcare Workers, was joined along the way by AFSCME California, the California Council of Teamsters, and UNITE HERE Local 11 in Los Angeles, among others, because they recognized that the outrageous economic inequality symbolized by the growing wealth of a tiny fraction of the population, making Gilded Age inequities of yore seem quaintly egalitarian, contained the seed of a solution. More importantly than the symbolism, they also understood that many of their own members’ families are served by Medi-Cal, which covers close to 15 million state residents.

The Education and Health Care Act is likewise a progressive tax. Since its enactment as Prop 30 in 2012, and renewal as Prop 55 in 2016, it has raised over one hundred billion dollars for the state’s general fund through its creation of three high end marginal income tax brackets, affecting roughly the top two percent of income earners. Last year it brought in 14.5 billion dollars, or six percent of the state general fund. Here the charge is led by the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and the SEIU State Council, all of whom have been involved in a progressive tax advocacy coalition since the 2012 campaign. The Secretary of State’s office has recently announced that it has validated the signatures for ballot qualification of both measures. 

Strange bedfellows?

Last week CTA came out against the Billionaire Tax. So did the state Building and Construction Trade Council, the umbrella organization of construction unions. What was their reasoning? For CTA, the opposition was not entirely surprising. The Billionaire Tax represents a violation of their prime objective: defense of Proposition 98. Passed by voters in 1988, it sets aside 40% of the state budget for K-12 schools and community colleges. The 300,000 member association considers this a bright red line and marshals its considerable resources every time legislators or opponents seek to cross it. As written, the revenues of the Billionaire Tax are tightly aimed at saving Medi-Cal, with just ten percent allocated to education.

Fair enough. There is principle involved here for CTA. Not so much with the building trades, as far as I can tell, whose public justification echoes the transparently false propaganda of the right wing billionaires opposing the Billionaire Tax, i.e., that all the “job creators” will flee California and take all the jobs with them in their gold-lined suitcases. This was the argument offered by opponents of Prop 30 in 2012. It is, in fact, always the first line of defending ultra-privilege every time any progressive tax is ever offered anywhere. Copious research has shown this to be untrue. Here in California by 2015, three years after passage of Prop 30, 1.5 million new jobs had been created, and tax records demonstrated that ten thousand new millionaires had been minted. (Let’s set aside for now the question of what the current California “job creators” are actually creating: AI, which destroys more jobs than it generates.)

But as one of the big dogs in California politics, CTA’s position also merits a deeper look. The union claims it opposes the Billionaire Tax because “this policy will not provide the sustainable and long-lasting funding that our schools and communities deserve”, i.e., it is temporary. Ahem, so was Prop 30 and 55, which didn’t stop CTA from supporting the earlier temporary iterations of the measure it’s backing to make permanent now. 

Worse, and bizarrely, the only visible sign on CTA’s website about its position on the Billionaire Tax is to be found in its November election recommendations, where alongside the “Oppose” notation, a link is posted to the “Building a Better California” website, which nowhere says anything directly about the Billionaire Tax, but happens to be the web footprint of a front for the right wing billionaires dumping their couch cushions into the anti-Billionaire Tax campaign, a PAC whose contributors are headed up by tech bros Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel. Strange bedfellows—along with Governor Gavin Newsom, who has never met a progressive tax he likes.

So what’s really going on? Before SEIU-UHW launched the Billionaire Tax its leaders briefly consulted with the members of the progressive tax coalition. That coalition had a plan: get Prop 55 renewed and made permanent in 2026 before it expired in 2030, and then go after a wealth tax or take another swing at commercial property tax reform (narrowly lost due to COVID in 2020) in 2028. This plan was disrupted by the UHW, leading to the fear (plausible, but debatable) that another progressive tax on the ballot would muck up the works. Even SEIU State Council, the parent organization of UHW, isn’t on board the Billionaire Tax. When UHW went ahead on its own, nearly every member of the coalition that had been doing this work for fifteen years was pissed.

But alongside the fear of voter confusion over the two measures lurked another potential issue, one that has now been revealed as a valid concern. UHW leader Dave Regan has a well-known history of running state ballot measures as bargaining chips to gain traction in the state legislature. One example: a proposal to require higher minimum staffing levels in dialysis clinics, which lost on three separate occasions. Queried opponents and supporters alike, was the Billionaire Tax real or legislative leverage?

With the offer to withdraw the ballot measure if the legislature acts to find some significant funding for Medi-Cal, that question has regained life—although the governor’s office, which solicited the late-in-the-day negotiations with UHW, hasn’t made a substantial proposal, according to UWH sources. Thus at this point it appears likely the measure will go to the voters.

Where is an alternative solution?

California DSA, a small mammal scurrying around the ankles of the dinosaurs duking it out, and supporting both measures, is one of the few exceptions to the side-taking (AFSCME California and the California Teamsters Council are others), which has now become increasingly contentious. 

The Billionaire Tax was addressing a problem no one else was: a gutted Medi-Cal means people will get sick and die. The CTA in its opposition statement remained silent on this end of things. As communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, sometimes rival and sometimes partner with CTA, through a fair amount of the earlier history, I can attest that this is not new. The fierce defense of Prop 98 guarantees tended, for CTA, toward rigidity, while CFT, part of the AFL-CIO, and likewise a strong defender of school funding, nonetheless always bent one principle against another, acknowledging at moments like this, “We can’t teach children who come to school hungry or sick.”

In fall of 2011 and 2012, CFT was leading a labor-community coalition effort to get a Millionaire Tax on the ballot to address the giant state budget deficit left in the wake of the housing crash and Great Recession. Governor Jerry Brown, with a competing ballot measure, a mix of progressive and regressive taxes, refused CFT’s offer to come aboard the millionaire tax. Instead, he stripped away the other unions in the coalition (including CTA) by threatening to withhold his signature from their legislative programs. The pressure on CFT was enormous to cave, much like what UHW is undergoing right now. 

But CFT prevailed, due to its careful coalition building over several years. It had solid allies in the community who weren’t stepping away. Many union leaders told us in private that while they couldn’t publicly resist Brown’s blackmail, they were with us in spirit. After a half dozen straight opinion polls showed the Millionaire Tax likely to win, and following a massive rally in front of the state capitol, Brown capitulated, merging his measure with CFT’s, which became Prop 30, the largest bump in state income taxes on the rich since World War 2.

The same gubernatorial agreement is unlikely for UHW, both because of the transparent desire of Gavin Newsom to keep billionaire pocketbooks within reach for his presidential run, and because in place of the spadework of coalition-building over time that builds trust and loyalty, UHW leadership accomplished precisely the opposite, alienating its most likely progressive tax partners. Let’s sum up: good cause, bad process. And now we approach midnight.

Possible outcomes

All might not be lost for the Billionaire Tax. If its proponents and the governor and legislature are unable to reach a deal, it’s still possible to win at the ballot box. Yes, there will be a hellstorm of billionaire opposition funding. We won’t be able to watch TV or surf the web or go on social media without popup ads telling us that sad billionaires are taking all of California’s jobs with them when they move to Texas.

But billionaires are not exactly popular at this historical moment. Even with a hundred million dollars already spent by the opposition before the measure qualified, the most recent polls show the Billionaire Tax with a 20-point lead, with 23% undecided. There might just be enough voter animus for the richest Californians—especially the ones that have publicly embraced Trump, who happen to be the ones making all the noise about the Billionaire Tax—that pitchfork fever could carry the measure across the finish line. 

The California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO hasn’t weighed in yet. This is an important factor in how things will play out. The CTA’s opposition, while significant, is not the final word. As an independent union outside of the labor federation, it has no direct say on Labor Fed policies. The Building Trades’ votes are more to the point here. But if the UHW can rally an endorsement from the fed there will be new life in the measure. The CFLU convenes in early August. 

One of the arguments that makes the Billionaire Tax a problem for the usually progressive groups like CTA is also why they should let it go: it’s temporary. True, if pieces of the budget are carved away for more health care, that will not help education’s forty percent. But the tax as written does not compete for state budget dollars—it augments them with a five-year tax on billionaires that will expire after Democrats are in control of Congress and the White House, and the federal government will be able to resume paying its way in California. 

That’s a pretty big assumption, you might say. My answer is that if it’s not the case, and the fascists are still running the federal government in 2030, we will all have bigger problems than preserving Prop 98.

BOOK REVIEW

Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (Second Edition)

Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller

Seven Stories Press, 2026

Beyond the Theme Park: Struggle and Solidarity Under the San Diego Sun

Interviews by Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller

Center for Policy Initiatives and American Federation of Teachers Guild, Local 1931

This year’s republication of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See has been anxiously awaited by San Diego progressives and leftists. A master work by the late Mike Davis and his co-authors Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew, Under the Perfect Sun went out of print only a few short years after its original publication in 2005, and has since then been passed around, checked out via interlibrary loan, and transmitted via PDF among organizers and activists hungry to learn about a city that hardly seems to know itself. Yet the new edition means more than an opportunity for San Diego leftists to finally have and hold their own copy—it’s an opportunity for our comrades across California and beyond to understand how one city’s development shaped the contemporary forces we must map, move and overcome in our quest for working-class rule.

Under the Perfect Sun stands alone as a record of San Diego’s left and labor history, but it’s also distinguished by the structure of the collaboration. The book is made up of three main sections, separately authored or, in the case of Mayhew’s contribution, curated. Following an introduction by journalist David Reid is a political and economic history by Mike Davis, then a chronicle of insurgent fights by Jim Miller, and the book concludes with a compendium of oral histories gathered by Kelly Mayhew. The new edition includes a sampling of contemporary testimonials gathered by Mayhew and Miller to accompany this year’s republication; available in full free and online as the companion publication Beyond the Theme Park (download available from the Center for Policy Initiatives website). (Full disclosure: I am one of the activists interviewed for that book.) 

Structuring opportunity

Flipping the order, let’s start with the oral histories. And what a start. In both Under the Perfect Sun and Beyond the Theme Park, Mayhew opens with leaders in San Diego’s civil rights fights – Harold Brown in the former, Shirley Weber in the latter. I want to be very clear: DSA members and other leftists who only know Shirley Weber as California’s current secretary of state nonetheless need to read her story. It reveals what is possible once a structure is changed to unblock opportunity, and consequently how crucial it is to examine and understand structures at all levels. From Harold Brown, you’ll learn the lonely experience of fighting for economic parity and how that focus determined agendas of the early 2000s. Also in Beyond the Theme Park is Center for Policy Initiatives’ executive director Kyra Greene, who at the launch event for the new edition noted that the comparatively small civil rights movement in San Diego factors into the persistent struggles of the left today.

Also featured in both books are many of the area’s most significant labor leaders, movement organizers, nonprofit directors and politicians. As Mayhew put it at the launch, what you get from oral histories rather than third-person narratives based on newspaper articles and other archives is an understanding of experience. It matters to know what moved Lorena Gonzalez and Sean Elo-Rivera into their current positions and commitments (Beyond the Theme Park), just as much as it matters to see how binational activist Enrique Davalos ended up choosing San Diego, and what working for the Environmental Health Coalition looked like for Sonia Rodriguez, who lived the toxicity of Barrio Logan firsthand (Under the Perfect Sun).

The IWW Free Speech Fight was a landmark struggle in San Diego labor history.

Repression and amnesia

Jim Miller’s episodic journey through San Diego’s left struggles changed my perspective utterly when I first read it 7-8 years ago, newly activated and unsure why everything in San Diego’s mainstream political life seemed so remote. Though I am myself a transplant, San Diego was always a fixture in my life as the birthplace of my military-family parents, who continued in that tradition. They graduated from UC San Diego’s first bachelor’s degree cohort. They grew up with the city as it boomed through the Cold War years. Yet I never learned anything from them about San Diego’s political life, and in the truest sense possible, San Diego hid itself from many of its own children. As Miller writes, struggles beginning with the Free Speech Fight in the early 20th century onward were dealt with by both repression and amnesia, summarily dismissed or distorted beyond recognition by credulous historians drawing exclusively from tilted accounts.

Chicano Park is the largest collection of public murals in the nation, and extraordinary in their virtuosity.

What’s so significant about memory? After all, capital manipulates government and its aligned institutions everywhere; newly developing leftists might understandably believe that since the factors of capital control are continuous, the dynamics of contesting them are transferable from one place to the next. What is so critical about Miller’s history, though, is learning about the victories alongside the setbacks. While the Magonista revolt was a rout and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizing was effectively suppressed by vigilantes in the early twentieth century Free Speech Fight, the establishment of Third College at UC San Diego and the creation of Chicano Park are examples of community interests consolidating as exercised power. What’s so significant about erasure? Last year I walked my elderly parents around Chicano Park – the largest collection of public murals in the nation, and extraordinary in their virtuosity – and told them the story of its founding. They had no idea. Not even that it exists.

Completing the flipped order, Mike Davis’ history of political and economic power in San Diego visits many of the themes in his Los Angeles histories, such as City of Quartz (1990) and his last-published book, Set the Night on Fire (2020). While Davis is recognized as one of the last century’s most influential Marxist authors, many DSA members may be new to his work. Under the Perfect Sun is a fantastic start. The section asks who rules San Diego, answered by the overriding contest of “smokestacks” versus “geraniums.” With smokestacks understood to be the faction driving for infrastructure that could enable large industry, the geraniums of San Diego’s past and present generally prevailed, focused on slow urban growth and economic sectors that alienated mass organizing and working class consciousness by their very nature – tourism and the military. 

Davis’ thesis is that through these competing capital factions, San Diego’s power has oscillated between what can be thought of as private governments, with the government of publicly elected officials acting primarily for those interests. As this history progressed beyond the publication of Under the Perfect Sun his thesis and indeed the center have held: first Republican, now Democratic, San Diego’s officials stand on a continuum of stewardship for private elites. Without working class institutions effectively contesting for power, that center has reconstituted in the last 20 years to include the racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation minorities rebuffed by a myopic GOP. At a time when parties are first and foremost brands, the center-right now makes its approach through campaigns formally unaffiliated with the GOP like Larry Turner for mayor in 2024 and now Richard Bailey for city council, who adopted Zohran Mamdani’s design palette for his primary campaign.

Look beyond slogans, follow the money

Tracing how these fights have articulated is critical for leftists across the U.S. as urban politics are gripped by the polarity of “YIMBY” versus “NIMBY.” As climate change advances – a key concern of Davis in his later years – leftists, unions and working class communities of interest draw factional lines around what is to be done about unaffordable housing, the unequal and unjust distribution of pollution, rapid transportation and the U.S.’ overreliance on home ownership to build social security. Reading about the stratagems of San Diego’s smokestacks and geraniums illustrates just how handily working class anxieties can be manipulated to serve masters we did not choose – even to the extreme of surrendering public resources to a power as remote and impervious as the U.S. military. Look beyond the slogans and follow the money.

In the 2026 coda, Jim Miller reflects on the changes in San Diego in the last 20 years and narrates some of the most significant events since Under the Perfect Sun was first published. While the cost of living is now driving workers out, the representation of historically marginalized groups in office is marked as a welcome change. A recent win is the reversal of bans on project labor agreements (PLAs) by municipalities across the county and the commitment by the City of San Diego to adopt PLAs going forward. Often, labor in San Diego now leads where our politicians falter, and the closer cooperation between unions and community organizations like DSA gives hope that someday we’ll escape the recurrent corruption dogging San Diego as Enron-by-the-Sea.

Under the Perfect Sun gives a view of collaboration as process and praxis, with each author bringing to the book a life of service in its different forms. Mayhew and Miller have both served as leaders in their local AFT chapter, bringing their San Diego City College students into organized activity through the AFT internship program they launched as a pedagogy of experience. Together they founded City Works Press and with it the San Diego Writers Collective, and with journalist Doug Porter publish The Jumping Off Place, an online platform for independent writing. Their legacy is still evolving, and humbling in its scope. The presence of Mike Davis the organizer and working class son in his writing gave us one of the clearest voices in a quintessentially American Marxism, and a view to how the natural riches of Southern California can be ours when we fight. Elbows up and solidarity bound, let’s carry his spirit on.

Many East Bay DSA members were among the enthusiastic canvassers for Richmond mayoral candidate Claudia Jimenez. Sue Wilson, Richmond City Council/RPA photo.

The top of the ticket statewide races and big city primaries grab the headlines, but at the local level and in smaller municipalities DSA members have been working hard to elect working class champions as well. In some cases the reward was winning outright or landing in the top two for the November 3 election runoff. In others our DSA candidates didn’t get there, but working on their campaigns strengthened the infrastructure of the chapters for next time. Here is an example of each: the mayoral race of Claudia Jimenez in Richmond, and the longshot lieutenant governor campaign of Oliver Ma as it played out in Orange County. 

Claudia Jimenez for Richmond Mayor!

The stakes have never been higher in Richmond, California. Chevron recently agreed to a $550 million dollar settlement with the city and the race is on to see if that money will be controlled by progressive politics or conservative business politics. The Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) endorsed Claudia Jimenez as their candidate for mayor: she is a proud Colombian immigrant, community organizer, city councilwoman, and political mentor to many of us who live in Richmond. East Bay DSA, often perceived as an Oakland-heavy organization, endorsed her mayoral campaign this year and members devoted significant people power to assisting her throughout the primary. 

Up to twenty EBDSA members showed up to the widely promoted canvasses. A core group of DSA members also attended weekly canvasses and phonebanks in the months leading up to the primary. Claudia has spoken at membership meetings and participated in debate at our convention. Our chapter’s monthly “Socialism Beats Fascism” event dedicated its May meeting to promote Claudia’s campaign and helped plug new members into volunteering with her. This is EBDSA’s best support so far for an RPA candidate and we are exploring more ways to support Claudia heading into the fall, such as organizing fundraisers and putting together a policy research team. 

DSA members are attracted to the RPA’s principled and highly successful track record in city government. Richmond currently has the lowest homicide rate in city history, a million-dollar legal defense fund for immigrants targeted by ICE, a mental health crisis response team (ROCK) that assists in emergency calls alongside police, and the city has extracted itself from high-cost debt swap investments that kept us in financial peril for decades. However, not everybody is a fan of such progress. Claudia’s opponents include Chevron, which doesn’t like being held accountable; the local police association, which thinks all settlement money should be used on overpolicing; and groups associated with AIPAC, who didn’t like Richmond leading a wave of municipalities calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza. All have deep pockets which is why fundraising for the November election is going to be key for Claudia victory! You can donate now at www.claudiaformayor.com! 

Working on the Oliver Ma campaign revitalized OCDSA.

Oliver Ma Campaign a shot in the arm for OCDSA

It is June 2nd, the primary election night, in a crowded brewery in Santa Ana, California and conversation is flowing while televisions on the wall show the current state of each race. The room is filled with comrades from the Orange County Democratic Socialists of America (OCDSA) and the United Auto Workers union, Local 4811 (many of whom are in both organizations). Everyone here has spent the previous months canvassing their neighborhoods, phone banking, text banking, and even hand-writing postcards for Lieutenant Governor candidate Oliver Ma. When Ma, who actually grew up in Orange County, comes into the bar everyone starts chanting his name as he passionately starts a speech about how we collectively ran a grassroots campaign to be proud of.

Oliver Ma did not end up getting enough votes to move forward to the November election, receiving nearly 620,000 votes, or 7.3%. But the campaign was a shot in the arm for Orange County DSA. The campaign came at the opportune moment when the Electoral Committee of the chapter needed direction and revitalization. Since the conclusion of the Oliver Ma campaign the committee voted through new guidelines and expectations for the endorsement process, as well as helpful tips for those looking to apply for OCDSA endorsement.

During an open call with California DSA earlier this year, Oliver Ma described his intentions with the campaign. He described a campaign that would ideally uplift, train and funnel the people working on his campaign into DSA, whether or not he won the election. From the perspective of OCDSA this plan worked. We had current members who had their first canvassing experience for a democratic socialist candidate they actually wanted to endorse instead of a corporate Democrat. We have had new members come in from the campaign, energized and ready to move towards the next committee project. Just like any socialist project, we will learn, train, and do better next time.

The threatened explosion of a military contractor’s toxic storage tank caused the evacuation of 50,000 mostly working class residents of Orange County.

On Thursday, May 21st around 3:30 p.m., a hazardous chemical leak was reported from a GKN Aerospace plant in Garden Grove, California. The chemical leak was caused by an overheating storage tank for methyl methacrylate, a toxic chemical used in the production of plastics such as those in airplane canopies. The failure was caused by a faulty valve in the tank’s cooling system leading to a rise in tank temperature and pressure. Additional safety mechanisms from GKN to halt the reaction on May 21st also failed. As a result, the GKN tank threatened a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion (BLEVE), endangering the lives and homes of thousands of Orange County residents.

Located in the middle of a working class neighborhood, the emergency prompted an evacuation order from city officials which displaced approximately 50,000 residents for five days before being lifted on May 26th. The threat was resolved with emergency response from OC Fire Authority to cool the tank as well as a partial crack which relieved tank pressure and heat gradually.

Major hub for military contractors

GKN Aerospace, a subsidiary of the British-based Melrose Industries, is an aerospace parts manufacturer serving contracts for plane engine parts and airframes with private and public sector clients. A 2025 report shows that 35% of Melrose Industries’ revenue from airframe sales comes from defense contracts, such as the contract for canopies for the F-35 fighter jet produced by Lockheed Martin. Currently, 48 of these jets are in use by the Israeli military to facilitate genocide in Palestine. GKN additionally serves contracts producing military parts for BAE, Leonardo, Airbus, other Lockheed Martin projects, drone projects for Anduril (an Orange County-based defense contractor), and direct government defense contracts. The GKN Garden Grove plant began operating in 2004 according to reporting from the LA Times.

The GKN Aerospace emergency highlights the glaring contradictions in the political economy and developmental priorities of Orange County. Southern California has been a major hub for defense contractors since World War II. Its location provided proximity to many of the largest military bases in the US, ideal geography and climate for weapons testing, and a massive supply of white- and blue-collar labor already trained for weapons production fueled by immigration waves and federal investment. The resulting economic development empowered a growing class of white suburban defense industry executives who relied on extracting the labor of Southern California’s diverse working class in urban manufacturing for private profit. 

The organization of Orange County’s military-industry class went beyond economic interests, becoming the epicenter of the Cold War counter-revolution in the US and generating political machines which led Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Decades of deindustrialization have since destroyed most of the manufacturing base of Orange County. However, toxic plants remain siloed in marginalized communities like Garden Grove, threatening the same workers on whose backs Orange County’s capitalist class arose in the first place. After intervening years of capitalist deregulation, we are left with a harrowing chemical emergency created by a system of interconnected political and economic interests hostile to workers in Orange County and abroad.

Community response

In response to this emergency, the Orange County community has shown an inspiring dedication to direct mutual aid, with volunteer organizations including Orange County DSA, 714 Mutual Aid, Costa Mesa Mutual Aid, Orange County PSL, World Central Kitchen, and many others helping organize the delivery of food and essentials to sheltering Garden Grove residents. Our community understands what our politicians do not: we protect us. In the absence of a political infrastructure committed to the needs of the working class, we must continue to build networks of solidarity, mutual aid, and community defense capable of supplanting our atrophied state capacity.

Garden Grove residents are still struggling in the wake of the evacuation. Workers in Garden Grove are facing missing paychecks, unreimbursed hotel stays, and the stress of a narrowly avoided environmental catastrophe. Predictably, most insurance companies are refusing to pay out on claims for these losses. As capitalism repeatedly fails to provide care and safety for the working class, Orange County DSA remains committed to supporting the needs of Garden Grove workers and opposing the interests of the military-industrial complex in Orange County.

Red scares often attack teachers and public schools with threats of censorship and assaults on academic freedom.  NEA graphic.

As the Trump Administration continues to blame its failures on anyone left of the far-right, the federal Department of Education (DoED) has just taken another step towards what can only be called a new Red Scare.  In late May, the DoED unveiled a press release that proposed several critical changes to how institutions of higher education are accredited. If implemented, these reforms would force universities to, among other mandates, hold “policies that support, promote, and appropriately prioritize intellectual diversity” and implement “academic freedom protections.” 

The overwhelming majority of universities already insure intellectual diversity and academic freedom. Conservatives just want to use universities as platforms to push their anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-democratic, and socially backwards ideas to the next generation. They despise these “woke propaganda factories" because they promote critical thinking skills and intellectual diversity which empower students to question the systems and ideas their ideology relies on.

DSAers must acknowledge that these reforms will not just be used to deny funding from universities who refuse the DoED’s demands, they will make campus organizing much harder. As the largest and most successful socialist organization of the century, we cannot pretend that these developments won’t affect DSA and the broader left. 

The last two administrations have had mixed success legally compelling colleges to bend the knee to its policies. Some colleges like Brown and Columbia have capitulated while others like Harvard and UCLA are still resisting. At the state level, MAGA activists have been increasingly hacking away at public education, with some states funding “hostile takeover[s]” of entire universities.  The Trump White House is now looking to change the rules completely (again), and (Y)DSA must be ready to organize with students and faculty against them, or risk losing momentum.

Red Scare exhibit number one is Joe McCarthy in the late 1940s and early 1950s, who lent his name to the phenomenon, but there have been other red scares in US history, including the one unfolding today.

Not Out of Nowhere

These proposed reforms did not come out of nowhere. Far-right discourse around higher education has saturated social and national media for decades. Conservatives have long tried—and failed—to build institutional power from within public universities. In recent years, the rapid spread of Turning Point USA has created magnets for the most racist and hateful students on campus; even without Kirk, they remain one of the fastest-growing fascist youth orgs in the country. 

However, astroturfed campus organizing hasn’t afforded conservatives much institutional power inside higher education. Many of the noted Youtube college campus crusaders have burned out—or gone cold—since the first years of Trump 1.0. Now with unchecked power over the government, conservatives are opting for a sweeping, top-down approach to higher education reform.

This is a scary reminder that the long held conservative tradition of discrediting and dismantling higher education never truly dies. With the certainty of capitalism’s boom-bust cycle comes the recurring fear of its logical solution. When we look at the history of Red Scares in the United States, it can be hard to tell when one begins and one ends. Historians are undecided on exactly how many distinctive Red Scares there have been, but there can be no doubt that the current scare we face has the potential to be more consequential than that of the McCarthy-era.

The chill of McCarthyism

During the Red Scare you probably learned about in school, the chill of McCarthyism was felt across many industries, especially in higher education. The general anti-communist paranoia amongst post-WWII U.S.A. was exploited and catalyzed by McCarthy and the Eisenhower administration. McCarthyism would go on to plague leftist organizing in the United States for generations.

But even McCarthy’s Republican party eventually turned on him when they grew tired of his aggressive rhetoric and interrogation tactics. His reign ended with a whimper because the president was forced to step in to save the “decency” of the Republican party. But what about the GOP of today? They’re in a much better position to engage in McCarthyism than McCarthy. Trump 2.0 has a trifecta control over the government, with his cult following stretching across his cabinet, congress, and supporters. McCarthy was lambasted by his party for having “no sense of decency,” but the MAGA movement has proudly solidified itself and the GOP as ardent defenders of pedophilia, abuse of power, and treasonous corruption. Let's be real: do we expect the feckless Democratic party to step in and defend higher education?

DSA demographics

DSA appeals heavily to the working class, but an overwhelming majority of our membership still comes out of higher education. In a 2021 Growth and Development Committee survey, a resounding 80% of members held a bachelor's degree while one of every ten members worked in academia. This correlation between attaining higher education and holding more progressive views has not only been known for decades, it is increasingly getting stronger. Conservatism relies on servile minds that are unwilling to question boogeyman narratives, and willing hold multiple contradicting positions. Leftists, and even progressive liberals, are more often skeptical of systems and the status quo in large part due to their critical thinking skills. This is not to say that uneducated workers are not or cannot become leftists, but data consistently shows they are not flocking to the cause. 

Even among our most recent growth spurts, new membership continues to be young and educated. DSA Ventura County doubled their membership during the 2025-26 academic year after committing to a college campus recruiting campaign; this resulted in a radical revitalization of the chapter and the sprouting of at least one YDSA club. With over 150 YDSA chapters currently leading campus organizing efforts, it is safe to say academia remains one of the most reliable pipelines for DSA growth. 

These campus organizers have already demonstrated their importance in recent electoral campaigns, providing volunteers, chapter leadership, and long-term organizational capacity. Recent electoral gains—including multiple citywide wins in L.A., and mayoral wins in NYC and D.C.— underscore the growing organizational capacity of DSA across the country. These victories would not have been possible if not for the thousands of volunteers who were recently activated and empowered by our growing coalition of lefty organizations. 

College students have far more free time than other demographics, especially if they are privileged enough to remain solely focused on school. As they contend with the uniquely bleak country they are inheriting, several political avenues beckon to them at the crossroads of alienation, disenfranchisement, and radicalization. They can keep their head down and hope the world fixes itself, join a democratic club and hope the status quo prevails, succumb to fascist grievance politics, or courageously believe a better world is possible. 

The proposed accreditation reforms are more than another policy dispute. If passed, they would inflame a new Red Scare that would threaten the left’s most effective recruiting and organizing institutions. If DSA chapters want to continue building on our current momentum and build capacity, defending higher education cannot remain a secondary concern.

California teachers have unknowingly invested billions of dollars in companies fueling the genocide in Gaza. Here’s how you can get involved in the historic divestment campaign targeting CalSTRS that is spreading across the state. 

Since October 2023, as Israel bombed and starved the people of Gaza and terrorized the entire region, the question of “how can we stop this?” has pumped unrelentingly through our hearts. We took to the streets and our electeds’ offices in protest and became increasingly frustrated each time we were ignored. 

Trying to appeal to some semblance of humanity in politicians using the democratic process has been enragingly ineffective at bringing about justice, or even a brief respite from violence, to our relatives in Palestine. To dismantle the death machine, we have to address what powers it. This monster that builds bombs and drops them requires vast amounts of resources. It is expensive to mine resources and build sophisticated killing devices. It’s expensive to hoist them in the air and position them exactly over a school. It requires a constant input of capital to keep this genocide going. The reason this death machine supply chain continues to murder families is because the violence generates profits for individual, corporate, and institutional investors. 

To stop the carnage, we must destroy those profits. And there’s a way we can do that together.

Divesting from Genocide

In 2005, Palestinian civil society launched the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS) – modeled after the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa – to cut the artery sustaining the parasitic companies that leech from the circulation of capital and funnel it into atrocities. BDS pressures institutions to withdraw investments from Israel and companies enabling Israeli apartheid in order to make support for Israel unprofitable. Since 2024, dozens of institutions divested from Israeli apartheid, with DSA members and chapters – including mine – often contributing to these victories. And now California’s educators are joining the movement.

CalSTRS Divest is a state-wide campaign by teachers and retirees who object to their retirement contributions enabling the murder of Palestinian children. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS, is the pension fund for public school teachers, and it is truly massive. At $390 billion with 1 million members, it is the largest educator-only pension fund in the world, and the second-largest pension fund in the US. At this scale, the fund has real power in the world economy, and the choice of investments makes a difference in where capital is pumped, and consequently, which industries flourish, and which wither. 

Many educators, myself included, were shocked to learn that CalSTRS invests the money we set aside for our retirement in Israeli bonds and companies like Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and Chevron that manufacture the bombs dropping on refugee camps in Rafah, the bulldozers flattening family homes in the West Bank, the planes and jet fuel used to bomb Palestinian hospitals, and the cameras and AI systems used to surveil families in the West Bank. In fact, CalSTRS currently has $2.7 billion invested in the Israeli genocide. While teachers struggle to find the resources to educate our students in overcrowded classrooms, our pension fund provides financing that allows a genocidal actor to murder classrooms full of students. 

As teachers, we often spend more time with the kids we teach than with our own families, and grow to love them. Taking teachers’ retirement money and using it to murder kids, then forcing retired teachers to live on blood money is sick and twisted. An unimaginably grotesque machination of empire, it turns the social welfare afforded to people “here” into a dependency on the depredation of people “there”. The CalSTRS Investment Board has tried to wheedle their way out of responsibility for its bureaucratic complicity by saying that without these investments, teachers would not have a safe way to retire. Looking beyond the disgusting nature of this argument that it is okay to kill babies if it makes money, research refutes the claim: Divesting completely from Israeli Apartheid would not significantly affect the returns of the portfolio. 

The CalSTRS Divest Campaign

Disgusted by the horrors that our pension system finances, current and retired teachers and educator unions across the state have joined the CalSTRS Divest campaign in droves. The potential victory here is huge: Not only is the divestment amount enough to make the complicit companies take notice themselves, but a divestment on this scale would set a powerful precedent for further divestment around the country.  If one of the country’s largest pension funds says no to blood money, it opens the door for organizers in states across the nation to demand that their retirement systems follow suit. 

Further, this divestment will be a huge labor win. Teaching is one of the few remaining professions in the United States with substantial union density and the guarantee of a pension. This divestment victory would show that workers will be heard when it comes to decisions regarding their retirement funds and continue the proud tradition of international labor solidarity.

This is not the first time teachers have won divestment.  In 2018, Bay Area teachers, horrified by increased incarceration of children as part of Trump’s immigration policy, convinced the CalSTRS Board to divest $12 million from private prisons with help from the California Federation of Teachers. Teachers have also won divestment from thermal coal and tobacco. Persistent organizing paid off in the past, and it is time to do it again!

Between the scale of a state-wide campaign and the conservatism of the CalSTRS Board, winning divestment will be a substantial challenge. While most teachers are not in favor of genocide, there are thousands of teachers across the state who are unaware of the contents of their retirement portfolio. We need to substantially increase our outreach in order to hold the CalSTRS board accountable to its own ethical investment policy. The re-election of many of these board members and those who appoint them is fast approaching, which gives us an opportunity to pressure them, but we need everyone’s help to act in time. 

Join the campaign!

DSA chapters from several areas including Sacramento and my chapter in the East Bay are organizing to strengthen this movement. But since the pension fund represents teachers across the state of California, we need all DSA chapters in California to engage to make divestment a reality. Here’s what we can do to help win this campaign:

1. Develop connections with public educators and teacher union locals in our respective areas and ensure that they pass resolutions supporting CalSTRS Divest. Sign up for the Teach-In on June 13 to learn more!

2. Get your chapter to adopt a resolution supporting CalSTRS Divest (template here) and be prepared to mobilize attendance at a quarterly CalSTRS Board meeting (stay tuned here)

This will be a significant undertaking with its share of challenges. But we are not starting from scratch. CalSTRS Divest has done tremendous groundwork to get to this point and is ready to teach your chapter how to get plugged into the campaign. This genocide runs on money. Together, we will starve the beast and feed the children. 

To find out more about how to get involved, please fill out our interest form at ebdsa.us/calstrsdivest.

A Flock camera

Living under capitalism, we are all used to the enshittification of everything it touches. One of the worst contemporary examples is the increasing expansion of the surveillance state. Cautionary tales about the dangers of mass surveillance and building a panopticon like Orwell’s 1984 have instead been taken as instruction manuals. The most glaring case study is automated license plate readers (ALPRs) represented by Flock Safety, the largest purveyor of the technology. As socialists, we must organize to oppose those who would seek to turn a profit at the expense of human needs.

Contrary to what proponents of ALPRs claim, mass surveillance is a major threat to public safety rather than an effective tool to support it. These unblinking cameras create a massive 24/7 surveillance dragnet that provides time-stamped location data of every vehicle that drives by regardless of whether they are involved in a crime or not. Based on data from May 5 for the Flock transparency portal for the city of Palo Alto, less than 0.5% of captured vehicle data was related to previously designated ‘hot lists’ involved with a crime. The number of arrests or cases closed per ALPR recording of innocent passersby is guaranteed to be even lower. Since data is typically stored for 30 days or more, police have the ability to recreate your movements over the past month without a warrant, finding out where you live, where you work, where your children go to school, and where you organize even without any articulable suspicion that you have been involved in a crime.

The threats to our collective safety are not simply hypothetical. Police have used nationwide ALPRs to hunt down a woman seeking abortion. They’ve violated First Amendment rights by searching for people engaged in peaceful protest. The countless examples of ICE and CBP illegally accessing ALPR data show that the prohibition on sharing data out of state (illegal for a decade in California) is insufficient to protect our privacy. After ICE shot Marimar Martinez five times, they used historical ALPR data to trace her movements over the previous month to find support for their baseless claim she was a domestic terrorist. Repeated cases show police officers using Flock to stalk former partners. Flock employees have accessed video feeds pointed at a children’s gymnastics center, showing these cameras are not just about license plates but instead are part of a broader surveillance network. It was just earlier this year Amazon paid for a Super Bowl ad to announce their ultimately aborted partnership between Flock and Ring. Data from multiple streams including and beyond ALPRs get integrated into regional intelligence fusion centers where democratic oversight is limited and there is no guarantee local policies will be adhered to.

All of these violations of our rights and threats to public safety are enabled by a tool for which claims of efficacy are dubious at best. False positive hits from ALPRs are a consistent problem. A Black woman in San Francisco was pulled over and held at gunpoint due to a mistaken ALPR hit. Police handcuffed a 12-year-old in New Mexico when an ALPR misread a “2” as a “7”. A Black man in Toledo was mauled by a police dog after an erroneous notification (this time a “7” read as “2”). A man in Colorado can no longer use his vehicle because he keeps getting pulled over after police recorded both “O” and “0” in a data entry error mandated by policy. Even if the cameras were 100% accurate all the time, they would still be ineffective  -  swapping license plates is enough to fool the cameras despite claims of creating a “vehicle fingerprint”. Police pulled over a woman in Oakland in March after her license plates were swapped despite the fact that she had a silver Honda Fit and the crime-involved car was a black Honda Civic. After the mass shooting at Brown University, the killer swapped license plates on his vehicle and was able to murder a professor in Massachusetts. Police in San Diego had a specific car and license plate to search, but could not act in time to prevent murders at an Islamic center even with ALPRs. The claim ALPRs support public safety is not supported by the data; in fact the contrary is the case - they harm public safety.

Within California, SB 34 requires ALPR operators implement a usage and privacy policy in addition to forbidding sharing of data with out of state agencies. Even private entities are required to publish such a policy at risk of $2,500 per violation. Time and again, carefully crafted policies are violated by ALPR vendors. The city of Mountain View required written approval from the police chief and agreement to the city’s policies before sharing data, but unauthorized federal and statewide agencies gained access. Flock turned on an illegal nationwide lookup tool without telling local agencies, resulting in ALPR data sharing with out of state agencies in multiple cities. At an April 2026 council meeting in Sunnyvale, city staff revealed that Flock only just implemented two factor authentication to access ALPR data after the press reported on data breaches in Mountain View at the end of January. Although Flock Safety is the largest vendor of ALPRs and therefore has the most information available on data breaches, it is not a company-specific problem. Motorola Solutions provides cameras for UC Merced and allowed CBP to illegally access ALPR data. Many California cities grant access across jurisdictions, so if your city is currently sharing or has previously shared with El Cajon PD then your local data has also been accessible to out of state agencies due to their flagrant violation of California law and is at risk of multi-million dollar lawsuits.

Effective tools?

Proponents of ALPRs claim they are effective tools for preventing crime locally. The reality of data access undercuts that claim. From August 2024 to December 2025, the Mountain View Police Department performed approximately 25,000 searches of the city’s ALPR data while outside agencies performed more than 3,000,000 searches. In other words, only 0.8% of searches were done locally and the overwhelming majority were from external and mostly unauthorized entities. Proponents also claim that anyone concerned with privacy should turn their focus to the location tracking data provided by smart phones. This argument fails to take into account that there is a difference in kind with the type of data. One can opt out of smart phone location tracking but cannot opt out of ALPR data collection. Furthermore, a private company having data is also different from it being collected by the State and accessible to law enforcement. Police require a warrant before they can access your location data but no warrants are needed to search ALPR data. The persistent Fourth Amendment violations have led to numerous lawsuits against private entities, vendor Flock Safety, and local cities, including Los Angeles, Oakland, and several lawsuits against San Jose.

Mass movement required 

The Tech Bro Dystopia we already inhabit can only be effectively opposed if we organize together in a mass movement. You can start the fight in your local chapter by submitting FOIA requests regarding ALPRs for local cities in your area. Ask for all communications between city officials and any ALPR vendors, but don’t be surprised if it takes longer than allowed or if you get back files with redactions that would make the editors of the Epstein files blush. If you have Flock as a vendor like most cities in California, your city may have got a sales pitch from Flock employees and illegally eschewed a competitive bidding process in the same style as Trump. Make requests for data access logs that disclose agencies who searched your local data and reasons for the search. Just know that police are told to be “as vague as permissible” and Flock recently restricted responses to a pre-approved dropdown menu of reasons. Don’t be surprised if you find federal and out of state agencies on the access list in violation of state law, but do use that knowledge in your fight against surveillance capitalism. Also know that absence of ICE in data access logs does not mean the agency never accessed your data - a 2021 Biden era DHS policy mandates that ALPR operators leave no trace of ICE in audit logs except for the logs available only to ICE.

The standard Flock contract you can get from a FOIA request contains several objectionable provisions in the fine print your elected representatives may not have realized when approving it (assuming that Flock didn’t change the contract language from what the city proposed as they have been shown to do). Despite claims that only the city controls the data, Flock reserves the right to grant access without a warrant if they have a good faith belief it supports a legitimate law enforcement purpose. Even though Flock claims they just capture license plates and a vehicle fingerprint, their patent claims ability to identify people by personal or immutable characteristics like age, clothing, gait, gender, height, race, and weight. Although Flock claims cities own all data, the company reserves an exclusive, worldwide license to keep a fraction of everyone’s data to train their AI models. They need a worldwide license because they exploit workers in the Global South for model training. The real business model for Flock is to sell fear to our local police departments so taxpayer dollars are used to lease cameras to let Flock get the thing it actually cares about: our data. WE are the product; Flock cares about making a profit, not public safety. That became abundantly clear when the company installed two unauthorized cameras in Cambridge, MA before being kicked to the curb for the violation of trust.

To force the surveillance state out of your local city, get ready to mobilize to a city council meeting when the ALPR contract is up for renewal. Build a coalition with allied organizations and be prepared to pursue an inside/outside strategy. Set up a letter writing campaign to send messages to the relevant body (this is relatively easy with dues-funded tools each chapter gets from National). Some organizers should seek meetings to lobby council members. That approach can let you assess their position, defuse any pro-surveillance talking points, and find allies to raise questions during the meeting that you submitted in advance with your letters. If an ALPR contract is not up for renewal anytime soon, repeatedly mobilize for public comment on non-agendized items to demand a contract discussion until the topic can no longer be ignored.

At the same time, we must apply pressure to make supporting ALPRs politically intolerable. Write op-eds for your local publications. Create a document with talking points for public comment (our coalition can help you, see contact details at the end of this article). Hold a rally before the ALPR contract or surveillance use policy meeting and invite the media with a press release articulating your position. Balance speakers on the topic with chants from the crowd (my personal favorite: MOVE Flock, Get out the Bay!), then hold a public comment training session right before the meeting starts.

Tim MacKenzie tells the Mountain View City Council in February to end its contract with Flock Safety

Track record: successes and setbacks

In Silicon Valley, we’ve seen success and setbacks. At the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, we used our one minute of public comment time to introduce ourselves and read as much of the coalition letter as we could, with the next person picking up where the previous one left off. In Mountain View, we had speakers pool time to give ten minutes each to two coalition members to read through our entire letter at the head of a marathon public comment session. We are fighting to remove Flock ALPRs from Stanford University, the largest landowner in Silicon Valley. The County Supervisors set a surveillance use policy to remove Flock as an ALPR vendor and had two votes that were in favor of forbidding the technology entirely. Mountain View unanimously canceled the Flock contract and said it would not pursue other ALPR vendors. Just before those decisions, Los Altos Hills chose not to renew their Flock contract. Our neighbors to the south in Santa Cruz were the first in California to terminate their Flock contract in January. On the other hand, in April the city of Sunnyvale unanimously voted to keep the Flock contract and East Palo Alto decided against changing the Flock contract after it was brought up for reconsideration. The City of Santa Clara received an informational report on ALPRs without any action and Palo Alto is trying to sweep massive data breaches under the rug.

If your city doesn’t seem ready to cancel its ALPR contract, fight for stronger guardrails in the surveillance use policy. You can push for a shorter data retention period - San Jose dropped from one year to one month of data retention, and ALPR data in New Hampshire is deleted within three minutes if the vehicle is not on a pre-approved hot list. The demands in our coalition letter pushed San Jose to prohibit cameras near sensitive areas like abortion clinics, places of worship, consulate offices, and health care facilities providing gender affirming care. Demand a surveillance use policy that requires any ALPR vendor to meet all your guardrails for public safety, including the requirement for a judicial warrant for any search of data.

A better world is possible, but only if we organize to build it together. A National Week of Action against ALPRs is planned for August 16-22. You can access an organizer’s toolkit our coalition has built if you want to start anti-ALPR organizing in your chapter by emailing ca@stopalpr.org.

Despite the use of dashes in the body of the text, every word was chosen by a human mind and no generative AI was used for this piece.

SVDSA convention

The setting is Silicon Valley DSA’s 2026 Annual Convention. And on April 18th in San Jose, California, something special can be heard emanating from the SEIU 521 event hall.

“Little T! Little T! Little T!” 

That something special is a chorus of voices chanting in approval of one of the chapter’s most beloved members, the affectionately monikered “Lil’ T.”

Today, this sort of chanting is common in our chapter. If you are a DSA member reading this, that might be a bit foreign to you. However, it should not be. For the good of your chapter and this movement, you should be chanting all the time. Now is the time to turn the volume up.

“Okay, but how?” Good question. In this article, I will outline how SVDSA transformed itself in about a year – from feeble and feckless to a chapter with booming growth, exciting wins, and a glorious member experience. It all culminated in our “Strategic Convention,” as our current pinnacle. I’ll focus on how we used tight infrastructural management and intentional tactics to create a joyful, supportive environment where members flourish, and where building Socialism is a damn good time.

Phase One

In 2024 (my first term on the Steering Committee), SVDSA faced the same challenges that plague many other chapters. We had steady attrition and minimal presence in the community. We were aimless and struggled to articulate chapter priorities, never mind execute them. In November, we lost a re-election bid for Redwood City Council by 13 votes. That loss was devastating and avoidable. Our approach had to change. 

The first serious change came that Summer, when we began holding most of our in-person meetings at the local SEIU union hall. This location has been reliable, easy to access (it’s where I work), and spacious for large gatherings. It has allowed many of our members their first opportunity to step foot in a house of labor, lending historicity and gravity to our organizing. It’s a major upgrade from scavenging for meeting space in libraries and Unitarian churches, all varying in levels of tech and wifi, cost, and comfort. The union hall has given us a stable and familiar home base. For your chapter meetings, I strongly recommend securing access to one of these routinely empty buildings.

Now, after decades of red scare tactics, many Socialists understandably feel shy publicly sharing their beliefs. The momentum behind our presence in the new union hall overcame this bashfulness. We began literally declaring our presence. Whether at chapter meetings, late night socials, or celebrating at an electoral watch party, we’d inevitably break into a raucous chant of, “DSA! DSA! DSA!” It's fun, it's loud, and projects our shameless joy in being Socialists.

Leveling Up

The early months of 2025 were spent mining our membership, seeking fresh faces to recruit for leadership candidacy at our April Convention. When the day came, we also introduced the chapter’s first-ever “Strategic Plan.” This new framework was critical. Finally, we had direction, but staying the course required focus. We created clear priorities and monitored them weekly. The payoff? During our campaign for Santa Clara County Ballot Measure A, we phonebanked and knocked on more doors than any organization besides the largest union on the Central Labor Council. These efforts surged our visibility. And of course, earning a victory made our members feel accomplished. 

Resolutions were made accessible for members to review in advance of the Convention, publicized on our chapter Slack and Linktree

If the Mamdani moment has taught us anything, it’s that the best political experiences reflect the best human experiences. It's part of what made me fly to New York City to canvas for him. No doubt, it would have been nice to watch his win at home from my living room. However, at a Brooklyn DSA election party surrounded by hundreds of comrades, it became one of the most memorable nights of my life. Nothing could erase what I felt in that building.

Despite what the purveyors of SeclusionChatBot2000 might have you believe, humans yearn for a shared purpose. We will go the distance for a worthy cause. Conversely, we give up quickly when we feel alone, especially when attempting something new. For most people, political organizing will be a very new ‘something’. To ease that anxiety, DSA members need to feel supported, and they need time to build confidence. Your DSA chapter should be your safe place to wade into uncharted waters. Yes, the ocean is deep, but together, we can all learn to swim.

The SVDSA chapter worked on the successful Measure A campaign with labor

In the wake of the Measure A triumph, a few strong chapter leaders set in motion the plan for a full-fledged “Strategic Convention.” Conventions are where most of the proposals for our chapter’s long-term vision, heretofore referred to as resolutions, are raised. They are then deliberated and voted upon by the membership. Resolutions tend to be drafted by a handful of highly active and politically conscious members. Our goal this time was to foster strategic planning as a tool for mass member development and engagement.

Leading up to our 2026 Convention, we set up working sessions for members to brainstorm “Strategic Resolutions.” This was a benefit in multiple ways: 1) it helped our leaders guide new members proactively, 2) it elevated the stakes of the convention, and 3) it created a shared sense of vision in the chapter. In the past, we struggled to make this democratic element of the chapter accessible. Most members had simply not engaged with DSA’s internal processes to this degree.

Chapter leaders created templates to help members develop their own resolutions. Regular leadership check-ins encouraged members who were working on their resolutions, even when it was not their primary focus. Effective organizing requires regular reminders; neglecting them threatens the goal. Resolutions deemed ‘Strategic’ were placed in a special compendium. Other resolutions were separated out. All were made accessible for members to review in advance of the Convention, publicized on our chapter Slack and Linktree.

The Big Day

When the highly anticipated moment of Convention finally arrived, our Strategic Compendium bore the marks of nearly all our most active members. This created investment in and focus on the essential business of our six-hour meeting. Long meetings can be quite challenging. If people don’t see themselves reflected in what is happening, interest will fade.

Walking into the convention space, it was obvious: this was special. Decorations abounded; the room was festooned in red and white tablecloths, balloons, streamers, flags, banners, and welcome signs. Music was jamming during the one-hour lunch session. One comrade created ice-breaker bingo cards. Another constructed a “Who’s that Socialist?” trivia game, offering winning contestants my favorite variety of prize — merch from other DSA chapters.

Our Steering Committee kicked off convention by giving out Recognition Awards. Members received them for specific contributions to our chapter throughout the year. Intentionally, more were given out at each break. This kept the excitement up throughout the long day. A veteran member who re-engaged after some dormancy received “Generational Talent”; another won “Friendliest Comrade,” and the member who booked our catering received “Chapter Chef.” Besides being a cute photo op, giving out actual awards, graduation-style, provided the chance for members to have their name chanted as approached the podium. 

Awards provided the chance for chanting comrades' names

As chapter co-chair, I was honored to give the “State of the Chapter” address. I devoted my ten minutes to naming and recognizing as many chapter leaders as I could muster. I closed out with a call-and-response style chant developed from picket lines:

Are you ready to fight for trans folks?
“Yes!”
To fight for immigrants?
“Yes!”

To fight for socialism?
“Yes!”

The collective “Yes,” binds members’ voices together. It is intended to both affirm the question itself and answer the deeper question, “Are we all in this together?”

That day, at every opportunity, we gave out big choral hugs to one another. When former San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston made his way to the podium for the keynote speech, he too was showered with chants of, “Dean! Dean! Dean!” which I think he appreciated.

If you’re excited by what’s been written so far, that’s awesome. But I wish stories like this weren’t so rare. Perhaps you’ve heard the refrain about DSA being an unwelcoming, or even hostile space. I know I’ve heard it. Though with so much variety from chapter to chapter, I have not experienced it myself. If the warm and inviting culture at our chapter is an outlier, it need not be.

The practices I am recommending may not come naturally. Maybe you feel silly chanting and getting all “ra-ra.” Or maybe voices raised to the sky evoke unpleasant memories of involuntary church attendance. No doubt, DSA is a big tent, so you might feel awkward cheering for people you often disagree with. But reader, I urge you: have a little faith and give it a try. What do you have to lose?

No one will do anything for long if it feels like shit. The same goes for if it’s exhausting, lonely, or boring. Those of us who love DSA cannot afford losing people for easily avoidable reasons. The creativity and color you give to your chapter will make the difference. If we want to grow, we need to make sure people have a good time being here. So go ahead and chant your comrade’s name. Maybe one day they’ll chant yours too.

“Look over there!”

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.

Qatar LNG facility burns

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. 

Pump prices are changing some political views

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.

The transition to socialism is not utopian; it takes work to get there

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.

Make it stand out

The Little Red Hen taught us, “From each according to their ability; to each according to their deeds”.

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

May Day participants gather at the ILWU Local 6 hall ahead of the OAK action

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.” 

An East bay DSA volunteer talks to a passerby about the action outside OAK Airport Terminal 1 (Matt Takaichi photo)

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.”

Demonstrators, including East Bay DSA members, rally outside Oakland Terminal 1 (credit: Matt Takaichi photo for Bay Area Current)

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.

Make it stand out

CBS News footage of demonstrators taking the street in front of the car caravan at OAK

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 East Bay DSA chapter contingent before the Oakland Sin Fronteras march and rally

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.

“A Garland for May Day, 1895”, by Walter Crane

Nine things to do before Friday May 1, and one thing to do on that day

1. Plan to take the day off work, either by going on strike at your workplace (probably not that many of you have that option), or by taking a personal or sick day.

2. Find a demonstration near you statewide here and here. Bay Area here (scroll down).

3. Reach out to your union, affinity group, pod, friends, co-workers, family members, parishioners and/or comrades, and invite them along.

4. Make signs. Here are four slogans to start you off: 

• Tax the rich for schools and health care

• Fund communities, not war

• Yes to socialism, No to fascism

• Abolish ICE! Immigrant rights = everyone’s rights

August Spies addresses crowd of workers outside the McCormick factory, Chicago, May 3, 1886, by Jos Sances, illustration for We Mean to Make Things Over: A History of May Day

5. Read about the history of May Day.

6. Grab some popcorn and set up a group screening of the thirty-minute documentary video, We Mean To Make Things Over: A History of May Day, streaming for free here.

7. Join DSA, the largest socialist organization in the United States since the 1940s. If you’re already a member, recruit a friend.

8. Spend some time thinking about the best, most sustainable activity you can involve yourself in  to fight fascism.

9. Grocery shop on April 30 so you don’t have to on May 1.

10. Join millions of workers around the country and the globe on May Day, International Workers Day, in demonstrating for a better world. Workers over billionaires! No Work, No School, No Shopping!

The 1946 Oakland General Strike was the last city-wide general strike before Minneapolis-St. Paul’s this year.

For many years I taught labor history at night to working students at City College of San Francisco. Since Bay Area workers and their unions had carried out two consequential general strikes (San Francisco in 1934, and Oakland in 1946), each semester I assigned my pupils an essay question:  Is it possible—or even desirable—for our region’s workers, if faced with oppressive circumstances, to replicate those feats today?

My students’ essays appeared along a range of responses between two poles. On one end, no, not possible, even if desirable, due to changed conditions like suburban distances between home and workplace, along with the decline of union density. On the other, yes, both desirable and possible, because new communications technologies allow ideas and organizing to spread rapidly online, and labor’s steep decline means that workers are angry enough to make it happen. Few students in either camp thought it would be an easy lift, reflecting a general sense of limited horizons for labor-led progressive change in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

The 1946 Oakland General Strike was the very last one American workers had managed to put together, literally a lifetime ago. But metaphorically, post-January 23, 2026, we might now be onto a new calendar. In the wake of the powerful “No Work, No School, No Shopping” day that erupted in the Twin Cities, alongside a steady drumbeat of growing demonstrations and electoral successes against the Trump regime, there’s wind in the sails for mass action on May Day 2026.

Just in my neck of the woods many events have already taken place, and more are on the boards, combining planning, training and coalition building for that once-unpopular holiday, officially observed in one hundred or so nations across the globe but not in the country that birthed it. I hear from a friend in Minneapolis that he’s been going to meetings attended by hundreds of people dedicated in a serious way to making May 1 another day of action. 

We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of what happened January 23. In the midst of a brutal occupation by poorly trained, heavily armed troops operating with seeming impunity on behalf of their fascist mission of ethnic cleansing, the ordinary people of Minneapolis organized themselves to defend their streets, their democratic rights, their immigrant neighbors, and their idea of a decent society to demand “ICE out!”. Somewhere around 75,000 people showed up on a cold Minnesota winter day to freeze the gears of the local economy and the occupation. 

It was pretty close to a general strike, and unlike all the other dozen-plus city-wide general strikes in American history it was waged not around an economic struggle between workers and bosses, but on behalf of a political idea, more like what happens every so often in other countries. Which is very much in the spirit of May Day.

Tools are there to be found

Doing such things will not suddenly become easier. The Minnesota circumstances are unique, with an unprecedented level of assault running into a recent baseline increase in labor-community alliance and activism. The ICE invasion reignited the embers of powerful alliance-building and union contract victories that peaked in 2024. But every city has its own local history, culture and traditions of collective action, and despite the diminished capacities of the labor movement, the tools are there to be found—providing they are sought out seriously.

One hurdle is the legitimate fear of labor leadership over legal consequences for calling a general strike, forbidden by the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a federal legislative backlash by the Republican-controlled Congress against the 1946 strike wave. Unions can be fined and labor leaders jailed for overtly calling for sympathy strikes. Thus while mostly supportive behind the scenes, unions were muted in their participation in the May 1 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations and the November 2011 “Day of Action” in Oakland that shut down the docks and shuttered many businesses in support of Occupy Oakland’s call for a general strike. 

January 23 in Minneapolis-St. Paul showed the general strike tactic is no longer solely in the rear view mirror.

Making distinctions

In Minneapolis unions and labor federations advanced the ball down that field without quite uttering the words “general strike”, although everyone was pretty clear what “No Work, No School, No Shopping” meant. Which brings us to the distinction between what Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch termed ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopias. Both contain the hope for something better than what we’ve got, and both can propose action to get us from here to there. But an abstract utopia fails to marshal full consideration of the many-sided realities that need to be navigated in order to arrive at a successful endpoint. A concrete utopia pays attention to what Marx was getting at in his Introduction to the Grundrisse when he noted that “The truth is concrete; hence, unity of the diverse.”

What didn’t do that? The cry immediately after January 23 by various individuals and organizations to replicate “No work, no school, no shopping” nation-wide a week later on January 30, which predictably fizzled, absent the hard work of analysis and organizing that produced January 23.

What did do that? In the background, helping to set the stage for Minneapolis, was United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain’s call—issued in 2023—for unions across the country to line up their contracts for common expiration on May 1 2028. Here was a call not to have a general strike, but to organize one. A concrete utopia is one that bridges the gap between the current unsatisfactory situation and the desired outcome with appropriate tactics, strategies, and inspiration—and above all, with a cleareyed picture of and willingness to do the work needed in the timeframe needed to do it.

We may be learning that there is nothing like a dose of fascism to clarify the minds of labor and other progressive movement leaders. Besides all-but-calling a general strike, and getting onto the May Day train, unions around the country have been stepping up ‘tax the rich’ efforts at the state and local levels and signing onto coalitions supporting socialists running for office. Not everywhere, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and it seems to be starting. There are some 250 democratic socialists in office today in the United States, the most since the heyday of the Socialist Party in the early twentieth century, nearly all elected with union support. The imagination of the labor movement, perhaps not coincidentally mostly slumbering since the 1946 strike wave, is waking up.

The direct confrontation with fascism experienced in places like the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere is not everywhere. Where it’s happening it’s real and deadly serious, on the wrong end of weapons wielded by our government against its own citizens. Fascists are occupying the federal government apparatus, and as they are wont to do, they are stripping it of its helping functions and shifting resources to the repressive functions. But the occupation is being contested. Civil society is the playing field, and democracy is still in play.

Mayhaps

May Day has always been about collective imagination—to be precise, workers imagining a new world, one in which they will be in charge. This act of collective imagining involves another pairing, not the same as but rhyming with the concrete/abstract utopias distinction: individual imagination and fantasy. In psychoanalytic terms, fantasy is a regressive and often self-destructive escape from reality, a defensive flight toward would-be omnipotent control, but only in one’s head. The ultraleft posturing that goes into a call for a general strike without regard to material circumstances is a good example. Imagination, by contrast, actively and creatively engages the work necessary to move from internal conception to making something actually happen—like lining up our contracts to expire on the same day, May Day 2028, with a timeline matched to the magnitude of the task. 

Fain’s concrete utopia also rhymes with how May Day began. Following the execution of the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago, the Socialist International declared a day of commemoration, with demonstrations in every country for the eight-hour work-day, the cause for which the Chicago labor leaders were put to death. Wisely, the call did not impose a one-size-fits-all set of instructions, but instead suggested that each country assess its situation and determine what sort of demonstrations made sense in their own context. The results ranged from weekend marches to general strikes. In some places, over the years, the marches became general strikes, May First became a workers’ holiday, and the labor movement achieved the shorter workday.

For eight decades in this country we’ve done the weekend marches, not the general strikes, the door to which has been shut tight. The people of Minneapolis showed us something remarkable on January 23—that with the work that accompanies imagination, it just might be possible to crack the door open and let the light through. Minneapolis isn’t everywhere, nor should we expect it to be—like Mamdani’s victory could happen because it happened in New York, and New York also isn’t everywhere. But both events show us that something different is possible when collective imagination is fired by the vision of a better world, and the vision is matched with the work it takes to get there. 

On May 1 2026 we’ll be testing how far along we are on the path to the mass actions necessary to push back the fascist tide. We should expect the results to be uneven, but we can learn from them and thus be stronger as we head toward the next rounds of struggle.

The envelope pretended that the unnamed Billionaires Tax was a tax on everyone, not the 246 people actually targeted by the ballot measure.

In last month’s California Red progressive tax column, “The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality” we learned that our state’s billionaires are busy making unintentional arguments for raising taxes on themselves. As Exhibit A, we heard the statement by tech mogul Tim Conway who, in speaking of the Billionaires Tax, described it as “…the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt”. We’re fairly certain that, say, Native Californians who suffered a genocide in the nineteenth century, falling from a third of a million people pre-contact, to fifteen thousand by 1910, might disagree with Conway’s historical viewpoint.

It would be hard to top this perspective for revelation of the navel-gazing narcissism of the billionaire set at the prospect they might have to pay their fair share of taxes to support the society that had made them rich, but at least it had the virtue of honesty, albeit of the self-delusional variety. No such sideways move accompanied billionaire activities earlier this month, when a large envelope landed in the letterboxes of homes across the state. 

Designed to mimic official state electoral mailers—the printing even said “OFFICIAL 2026 VOTER PETITION ENCLOSED”—it contained three elements: a flyer headed “Yes to Protect Retirement and Life Savings”; a petition for an initiative measure for the November state ballot; and an already-paid return envelope to send the filled-in petition to something called “Californians To Protect Retirement and Life Savings” at a Burbank P.O. Box. 

Reading between the lines

The outside of the mailer said, “Sign now to stop Sacramento politicians from taxing your personal property”. On the inside, the unnamed politicians pushing their unnamed tax on everyone were further chastised.

You would have to read between the lines, but two of the flyer’s three bolded bullets give away its actual agenda. One tells us that the ballot measure petition we are being urged to sign “prohibits new state taxes on personal savings, and personal property…” . The other “prohibits retroactive taxes”.  

The only proposed tax on personal savings and property, which is indeed designed to apply retroactively to January 1, 2026 (that much is true), is the Billionaires Tax, which will fall on the shoulders of precisely 246 people in the Golden State. Nonetheless the flyer argues that “Politicians should not be allowed to change the rules and tax what you have worked a lifetime to earn” (emphasis added). 

Despite the second person form of address, no one will be taxed by the Billionaires Tax unless he or she is a billionaire. However, the Billionaires Tax is not mentioned anywhere in the flyer. To do so might undercut the multiple deceptions at the heart of this mailer.

Part of the text of the flyer inside the mailer. Who exactly is the “you” here?

Worn and tattered economic blackmail banner

The BT is not emanating from scary Sacramento politicians. It is an effort spearheaded by a health care workers union, United Health Workers-SEIU, to plug the $20 billion per year hole opened up in the California state budget for Medi-Cal recipients by Trump’s HR1, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”, beginning in 2027.  Should the Billionaires Tax fail to make it, with no other action taken, millions of the poorest Californians would lose their health care, and tens of thousands of decent union health care jobs would disappear as well. 

As for those unnamed but undoubtedly evil “Sacramento politicians” supposedly pushing the tax, Sacramento politician numero uno, Gavin Newsom, among many others, opposes the Billionaires Tax. His deeply unoriginal reasoning is the worn and tattered economic blackmail banner that always gets waved about by wealthy would-be tax dodgers—they’ll all leave the state! and take all the jobs with them!—which research has proven to be largely fallacious. 

The main argument—dishonest in form, as well as content—is the one that states that the proposed tax is on “you”—and since everyone hates taxes, or so it is assumed by the makers of the argument, “you” will become incensed and get to work opposing it. Here the authors of the mailer thoughtfully provide a petition for “you” to sign and return in a pre-paid envelope. (They must be hoping that the “you” is more than the 246 people who are actually the “you”.)

Certainly a handful of anti-social billionaires oppose the tax. It’s hard to imagine a more selfish perspective. According to the Billionaires Tax campaign website, “California billionaires have increased their wealth 158% over the last three years, making a 5% tax, spread over five years, truly negligible relative to their enormous gains.” In other words, this wealth tax doesn’t actually decrease billionaire wealth; it merely slows down its rampaging growth in order to save Medi-Cal. 

Tsunami of lies headed our way

The goal of this mailer and its petition is nullification of the Billionaires Tax, should it pass. Let’s be clear: the billionaires tax campaign hasn’t even finished gathering signatures, let alone qualified for the ballot, and, dare we mention the final hurdle, gained fifty percent plus one of the votes of the electorate. We are seven months from Election Day, and tens of millions of dollars in right wing billionaire money has already been dropped into our mailboxes and into credulous mainstream media stories breathlessly announcing the drain-circling our fourth largest economy in the world will undoubtedly suffer when all the billionaires leave. Imagine the tsunami of advertising, mailers and surrogates lying through their teeth all washing over us once the measure qualifies.

Lost in all the noise are two simple points. First, everyone, meaning the megarich too, needs to pay their fair share of taxes—Silicon Valley billionaires who have benefited hugely from Trump’s federal tax cuts included. Second, elections in a democracy should be decided on the basis of the merits of the argument—not dishonest scare tactics amplified by unlimited billionaire spending. Ironically, the dirty tricks already pulled by this campaign demonstrate that the billionaires behind it have more money than is good for truth, fair elections and their own better selves, should they actually have any. 

They might want to pay a bit more attention to the rising public perception that their political spending is bad for democracy. They might then decide it’s in their own interest too to pay their fair share to support the basic public services needed by the rest of us. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it over a century ago, taxes are “the price we pay for a civilized society”.

The 2026 congressional elections can provide a bulwark against fascism if Democrats retake the House of Representatives.

On Tuesday, November 3rd the voters in this country may deal a significant blow to the Trump and MAGA movement by taking away the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Every vote will be important in these very important elections.

What role will DSA play in this important battle? Tens of thousands of activists across the state will work to defeat the Republicans. Will DSA be there with them? Will DSA be known as an organization that stood up to do what was best for the people in this critical moment of history?

I hope so.

That's why I am proposing that we organize and direct our effort to support the Democrats in the five swing districts across our state.  One way we could do this is by developing a California DSA Congressional Elections Committee

I recorded this short video introducing myself and proposing we build this committee. Please take a moment to watch it. I will expand on it more here in this article, but it will introduce the idea.

Why should we focus on the swing districts? The swing districts are the battleground. Most districts are solidly Republican or solidly Democratic. They are stable territory for either side. The swing districts are where the two parties fight and gain or lose ground.

California has five of them: 

• CA-13 is held by Democrat Adam Gray, who won in 2024 by only 187 votes. The district also voted for Trump. CA-13 includes all of Merced County, most of Madera County and parts of Stanislaus, Fresno and San Joaquin Counties. Our closest chapters are North Central Valley, East Bay and San Francisco. 

• CA-21 is more likely to remain Democratic. Current representative Jim Costa won by 10,065 votes, but that is still close enough to have it make the swing districts list. It includes part of Fresno County and Tulare County. Our closest chapters are North Central Valley, East Bay and San Francisco. 

• CA-22 is held by Republican David Valadao. It includes most of Kings County and parts of Tulare and Kern Counties. The closest chapter to this district is North Central Valley DSA and we also have an Organizing Committee in Kern County.

• CA-45 is held by Democrat Derek Tran, who narrowly won in 2024 by just 653 votes. It is located mostly in Orange County and includes a small part of Los Angeles County. Our Long Beach, Orange County and Los Angeles chapters could collaborate on this race.

• CA-48 is also held by a Republican and it includes parts of San Diego and Riverside counties. We have chapters in the Inland Empire and San Diego.

You can check out maps of the districts and voting results of the 2024 general elections here in this site I put together.

The election committee will include people from chapters across the state.  We will help each other organize members in our chapters to participate in these elections, discuss how things are going and to help each other out and share ideas and resources.  We will discuss successes and challenges getting members involved in the campaigns.

I acknowledge that these Democratic candidates in the swing districts hold positions on some issues that many DSA members may be strongly opposed to. But priority number one right now must be stopping MAGA fascism in its tracks, and one crucial and necessary tool is a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. 

All we as DSA members need to do is show up and participate in the campaigns and we can figure out together how best to do that. 

Participants from a chapter could tell the congressperson’s campaign that they would like to focus on an area where many of the members live or an area that participants want to focus on for some other reason. We can publicize campaign events to our members and encourage them to help. We can look at voter statistics for the areas we choose and become more advanced in our understanding of the voting history of the area we focus on. Some of you will have other ideas about what to do as well and they will be welcomed. We will discuss them openly together!

Working together on this important political event will help us to function in an organized and collective way, like an organization bigger than our isolated chapters, and to learn to work together smoothly, efficiently and with unity.

We need to work that way if we are going to successfully march down the long and difficult road of building socialism. Right now MAGA stands ahead of us, right in the middle of that road. 

Please contact me (lealfaro@protonmail.com) to work together on getting our people to help with any campaign event.  Contact me if you have questions or views on this very important time.

[reprinted by permission from Jacobin]

(Courtesy Chloe Dykstra)

On a late March afternoon, beneath the vaulted, medieval-revival ceiling of Immanuel Presbyterian Church, more than four hundred members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) gathered in the lingering heat of a citywide heat wave. The air inside the sanctuary was thick and stubborn as members fanned themselves with paper copies of the meeting agenda and shifted in their seats.

The proceedings moved briskly at first. Members discussed strike solidarity with the teachers’ union, upcoming labor actions, and campaign work. But as the temperature held and the room settled, the chapter turned to the main act, a more contentious question: whether to reopen its endorsement process for the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral race. What followed was a three-sided debate, carried out with intensity but also with (mostly) practiced comradely discipline.

More than one hundred members had signed petitions backing housing activist Rae Huang. Another one hundred supported City Councilmember Nithya Raman. Others argued that reopening the process would risk overextending the chapter’s resources and undermine a carefully built electoral strategy. In the end, 54 percent voted to reopen endorsements, but the measure failed to reach the required supermajority.

It was the kind of debate that would have once remained obscure and relevant only to a relatively small organization. As DSA’s LA chapter has grown to five thousand members, and the national organization has become an increasingly prominent force, DSA-LA’s decisions have begun to register as reportable events in the political life of the city. What was once “inside baseball” now carries implications for multimillion-dollar races and the direction of governance in the second-largest city in the United States — part of a broader maturation of socialist politics.

For years, DSA-LA has pursued a disciplined electoral strategy focused primarily on city council races, with massive districts that each encompass over 260,000 residents — but where, when the Left concentrates its forces, it can still meaningfully shift outcomes. This strategy flows from both ongoing campaign work and the chapter’s political program, and has delivered results on the council.

Shake Up City Hall Slate

Nithya Raman’s 2020 victory marked a breakthrough, and in the years since, DSA-backed candidates have steadily expanded their presence. Today multiple members or allies of the organization sit on the fifteen-member city council, and the chapter has built a reputation for running serious, field-heavy campaigns rooted in tenant organizing and alliances with labor unions.

In the current cycle, DSA-LA has endorsed the Shake Up City Hallslate of six candidates. DSA-LA’s 2026 slate includes both incumbents and challengers, with councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, a Highland Park organizer advancing tenant rights and advocating for improving public safety through better social service and mental health provision, and Hugo Soto-Martínez, a former hotel worker and union organizer who has delivered legislative wins for renters, immigrants, and labor.

The challengers include Estuardo Mazariegos, a South LA organizer running on social housing, tenant power, and a Green New Deal, and Faizah Malik, a tenants’ rights attorney focused on housing affordability and land use reform on the Westside.

Beyond council races, school board member Rocío Rivas is seeking reelection as a defender of public education against privatization. And Marissa Roy is mounting an insurgent bid for city attorney to reorient the office toward civil rights and corporate accountability.

The Other Citywide Race

That last race represents something new. The office of city attorney has historically been low-profile, technocratic, and largely insulated from ideological contestation. Roy’s campaign, by contrast, seeks to transform it into a site of democratic accountability, raising questions about prosecution priorities, tenant rights, and the legal architecture of inequality in Los Angeles.

“The city attorney is one of the most powerful and least understood offices in LA, and the current city attorney is using the office to obstruct the pro-tenant, pro-worker agenda our DSA electeds are trying to implement in city council,” said Sydney Ghazarian, cochair of DSA’s Marissa Roy Working Group and a former DSA National Political Committee leader. “We’ve learned the hard way that the policies we pass don’t matter if the city attorney refuses to enforce them. ”

Roy’s candidacy is not just another race. It is a test of whether democratic socialists can expand their project beyond legislative bodies into the legal machinery of the city itself. It’s one thing to pass legislation; it’s another thing to enforce it and have the city devote its legal might to supporting tenants and workers.

“Right now, we have a city attorney who wastes the office’s resources defending indefensible LAPD misconduct instead of prosecuting slumlords, bad bosses, and polluting corporations,” added Ghazarian. “Marissa will use the power of the office to defend tenants, workers, and millions of working-class Angelenos, not just the powerful few.”

City Councilmember Nithya Raman is running for Mayor of Los Angeles.

The Mayor’s Race Enters the Room

The debate over the mayor’s race sits uneasily alongside this strategy. Before Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor last November, the question of intervening in the race wasn’t on the minds of many LA chapter members. But that upset election rippled out in energizing waves across the country.

On one side were those who saw a mayoral endorsement as a natural next step. With DSA-backed candidates now holding multiple council seats and with the deep polling weakness of LA’s current mayor, Karen Bass, the prospect of a democratic socialist mayor no longer feels entirely out of reach. A mayoral campaign, in their eyes, would bring visibility, attract new members, and potentially consolidate the gains of the past decade.

“I want our chapter to be able to seize this moment and demonstrate to thousands of working-class Angelenos that DSA-LA is an organization worth joining, and I want a movement that understands 2028 is not just about returning to corporate Democratic policies but rather reshaping the fabric of American society,” said chapter cochair Leslie Chang, who supported a Nithya endorsement. “Supporting Nithya for mayor is our chance to build a movement here in Los Angeles that is ready to support a democratic socialist for president in 2028.”

On the other side were those who view such a move as premature or even counterproductive. The chapter’s strength has been its disciplined allocation of resources, particularly volunteer labor for phonebanking and canvassing. A citywide race could absorb enormous capacity, potentially weakening the campaigns where DSA has its clearest path to victory.

There are also political considerations. Raman, despite her history with DSA and her strong record on tenant protections and advocacy for the homeless, has at times diverged from the organization on key issues, including Palestine, housing policy, policing budgets, and the implementation of the city’s “mansion tax.” Raman has drawn heavy fire at times from DSA members nationally for being accommodating to local pro-Israeli groups. For instance, she was censured by the chapter in 2024 for accepting the endorsement of Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles. At the recent chapter debate, some members active in housing fights raised concerns about her being an inconsistent ally to the housing left in the city and criticized her efforts to rewrite Measure ULA, the city tax on top-tier property sales that flows directly into the city’s affordable housing programs, to exempt apartments, condos, and mixed-use housing. Raman contends that it is a tactical move to keep lobbying groups opposed to the measure from gutting the law with a statewide ballot initiative..

Huang, by contrast, is seen by some members as more closely aligned with socialist principles but faces questions about electability and citywide recognition. “She’s not on the Shake Up City Hall slate, but she’s here to shake up city hall,” says Gabbie Metheny, a DSA-LA chapter member and volunteer community manager for the campaign.

(Courtesy Chloe Dykstra)

Democracy Is Good, Actually

These are not superficial disagreements. They reflect a deeper tension within democratic socialist strategy: whether to prioritize ideological clarity or electoral viability, and how to balance the two in a political environment still largely hostile to socialists.

What stands out, however, is not the existence of disagreement but the form it takes. The debate inside DSA-LA is structured, participatory, and transparent. Petitions circulate. Members argue openly. Votes are taken, and decisions are respected even when the margins are narrow or the outcome frustrating. The result is messy, sometimes slow, and occasionally anticlimactic.

Members also sometimes vote with their feet in a mass organization where democratic socialism spills out into a broader movement not always contained by DSA. Formal endorsement or no, over 120 DSA-LA, Long Beach, and Orange County members (mostly new recruits) are volunteering for Huang’s campaign (out of 1,110 volunteers total), taking up organizing roles in canvassing, digital outreach, policy, and more. Many DSA members active in the United Auto Workers have been pillars of support for the Nithya campaign. But messy or not, DSA-LA’s internal debates provide a rare example of large-scale democratic practice in an era when most political organizations operate through top-down decision-making or informal influence networks.

The stakes extend beyond Los Angeles. As democratic socialism becomes an ever more powerful force in American politics, questions of strategy, scale, and internal democracy will only become more pressing. DSA-LA offers one possible model: a mass-membership organization capable of contesting elections, organizing in social movements, and still arguing, in full view of its own members, about how best to proceed.

January 23 in the Twin Cities showed what could be done.

You’ve probably received enough communications regarding this Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations, which will be held all across the country. At last count more than three thousand demonstrations are being organized, and there will no doubt be at least one near you.

In case you have been procrastinating, here is a link to find the demonstrations closest to you.

The first of these demos last June had a million or two people attend. The next one, in October, had at least five million. We’re aiming to double that this time, which would put us in striking distance of the 3.5% of the US population that research says is necessary to topple authoritarian regimes in the making. 

Against the backdrop of brutal anti-immigrant violence and preparation for election suppression at home, and clueless trade policy matched with deadly wars abroad, a growing number of Americans are coming out to the streets. These include people who have never been politically involved outside of voting every few years, and progressives who sat out the 2024 presidential elections because they didn’t think there was any difference between the two parties and the two candidates. Within DSA and the rest of the left this often took the form of denouncing the “twin parties of capital”. Which they are. But that picture, drawn without nuance, underestimated what fascism is and does.

Now we know. 

A reasonable question at this point is, ‘What sort of message should socialists be sending to the other demonstrators, and the world, a year into America’s fascist descent?’ You have the opportunity to weigh in on that as you make your protest sign. “No Kings” is a start, not a program. “Workers Over Billionaires” moves us closer to the ideas we need.

This mass demonstration of opposition is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to stop MAGA from dragging us along on its road to hell. For that we need to be broadening the struggle with other tactics and strategies (mutual aid, mass strikes, non-violent direct action, and electoral politics) that build a powerful anti-fascist movement and lay the basis for moving past the failed politics of the past. What happened in Minneapolis/St. Paul on January 23—‘No Work, No School, No Shopping’—is the best example so far. DSA has joined with labor and community partners in the May Day Strong coalition, which understands “No Kings” as a step toward a sharper critique of capitalism on May 1. On that day we will see how prepared we are to advance beyond a nationwide demonstration to a national movement.

We’ll see you out in the streets this weekend. And then we’ll continue to train and educate and prepare ourselves for the struggle ahead.

Make it stand out

Find materials like this in the May Day Strong toolkit.

In the February issue of California Red we ran a background article on the California DSA campaign we call “The Fair and Responsible Tax Plan for California’s Wealthy”, which embraces both measures currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November state ballot. That was the first in a series we are running between now and the election. Here is the next installment.—Editor

The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality

Our East Bay DSA crew of five had planted ourselves in the parking lot of a supermarket in North Berkeley on a warm mid-March afternoon. We were collecting signatures for the Billionaires Tax and the Protecting Education and Health Care Act. During our three-hour shift we did not do badly, gathering several dozen for each measure. Even better were the conversations, which ranged from informing voters about the nuts and bolts of the proposals to broader questions about economic inequality: how much money do billionaires have, anyway? What share of the total income of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, goes to the one percent? What would be the right amount of taxes for them to pay? And how do we get them to pay their fair share? 

We explore a few of these ideas and numbers below.

A cool million

It used to be hard for the typical working class stiff to imagine what a million dollars looks like. A million dollars? That’s what millionaires have, and I’m not even close to being one of those, we would say. But that was before a million dollars or thereabouts became the average price of a house in Los Angeles. It’s slightly below that statewide, and slightly above that in San Francisco. But you get the idea. Generally speaking, if you can afford a home, you know what a million dollars looks like—it looks like your house. (If you’re a renter, it looks like that house.)

A billion dollars was even more unfathomable. We didn’t have many in the United States until relatively recently; as late as 1990 there were just 66 of them. Now there are close to a thousand, and we’ve got 213 right here in the Golden State. Since we know that a million dollars looks like a house these days, we can imagine that since a billion is a thousand millions, it would look like a thousand houses. 

No one needs a thousand houses to live in, so most billionaires scrape by with just ten or twelve. Of course, being billionaires, they need somewhat larger houses than most people, so they might spend five or ten million dollars or even more—fifty million! A hundred million!—on their humble abodes. If they owned ten of those, that could put a pretty big dent in their billion dollar fortune. But guess what? The average wealth of a billionaire is not a billion dollars. It’s currently around 8.6 billion dollars, according to inequality.org. So that would be 8,600 houses. 

Minus the dozen they “live” in, that would leave them with enough money to purchase 8,588 more houses. I don’t know about you, but as the numbers climb my ability to translate the million dollar house into a clear image of the wealth of billionaires is beginning to get somewhat unequal to the task. And that’s before we try to imagine what the total wealth of 213 billionaires looks like. 

Trillions

It is reliably estimated that thanks to the ginormous growth of their fortunes during the past ten years (Trump I’s tax cuts, pandemic economy when there was nothing to invest in except stock buybacks, Trump II’s continuing tax cuts, massive AI bubble, and outright looting of public resources) our couple hundred California billionaires collectively own (hold onto your “tax the rich” baseball cap) two trillion dollars’ worth of assets. In California they’re doing a little better than the average 8.6 billionaire; they’ve each got around 9.4 billion. 

Although I just said I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the houses when they added up to the average 8,600 houses each (adjusted now to 9,400), let’s try it out with trillions. That’s a thousand billions. So collectively our 213 ultra-rich people with their two trillion dollars would have, let’s see, carry the one, a bit over 1.8 million houses, at a million dollars each. 

You might think that that’s enough for anyone, and these individuals must be looking around for philanthropies to unload to. But no, according to a recent New York Times article, billionaire giving has fallen precipitously in the last few years as their ‘uneasy accommodation with fascism’ (fascism scholar Robert Paxton’s formulation describing the initial response of economic elites to the uncouth new political rulers) has grown considerably less uneasy—more like downright comfortable. The 213 billionaires in California have seen their total wealth grow by nearly a third in this period as the rest of us have been essentially running in place—and that’s not enough for some of them. 

If you listen to one of their loudest mouthpieces, tech mogul Ron Conway, the proposed billionaire tax is not only bad for his 212 other peeps; it’s way worse than that. He was recently quoted in a New York Times article with a sentiment that inadvertently revealed how that kind of bank account can warp one’s perspective: According to Mr. Conway, referring to the billionaire tax, “This is the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt.” Hmmm. I wonder whether the families of dozens of people who lost their lives and thousands who lost homes in the Eaton and Palisades fires in 2025 agree? Or if Japanese-Californians, 93,000 of whom were incarcerated during World War II, share that view? Or if Native Californians, whose population fell from a third a million people in 1800 to about 15,000 by 1910 during the genocide that did them in, would agree with Conway’s historical research? 

On the other hand

At the other end of the economic spectrum, California’s borders contain about 7 million people below the official poverty line, or 18% of its roughly 40 million people. But the official federal poverty line ($33,000/year for a family of four) is laughably (that’s probably the wrong word) below an actual ability to live. One measure of how many people are barely getting by in California is the number of MediCal recipients, dependent on the federal Medicaid funding stream for most of their care costs. Although California is a net donor to the federal treasury, it does rely on $20 billion per year from the feds to support MediCal. Some 15 million Californians are enrolled in MediCal.

Let’s move on from the tiny extremely rich and the very large poor slices of the state and look at the condition of the merely rich, the top 1% income earners, which includes the billionaires but extends downward to the merely well-to-do. Although calculations vary, the bottom rung of the ladder for a one percenter is just about a million dollars a year in income; the median merely rich, right in the middle of the one percent, is $3.6 million a year. Here’s chart to help us visualize how their share of total California income has grown over the past half century. 

That’s right, believe your eyes. The top 1%’s share of income in the Golden State has grown over the past half century from about one twelfth of total income to almost one third. Richest state in the richest country in the world? Yes, but a vast chunk of the riches seems to have ended up in the pockets of people who didn’t need the transfer. 

On the third hand, if all of the state’s total income had been divided up equally, every person in California in 2024 would have received around $80,000—which means that for a family of four, combining their incomes, the household would have had $320,000—just a little under ten times the official poverty line.  

“But that would be socialism!” cry the billionaires, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and probably quite a few temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Well, sort of. We’ll get into that some other time. One thing is clear: it would certainly be different from what we’ve got.