California DSA

California is the fourth largest economy in the world, with a growing number of billionaires, and an expanding crisis of poverty due to concentration of wealth and divestment from public goods like education and healthcare. This has been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s HR1 (“the big beautiful bill”), which cut $1 trillion from Medicaid nationally, resulting in a $100 billion cut to Medi-Cal, and a $20 billion cut to Calfresh, public programs that support our most vulnerable neighbors.

After the California Federation of Labor Unions, led by Lorena Gonzalez, voted at its August 4 convention to endorse two ballot measures to tax the rich – Propositions 3 and 40 – California DSA took the opportunity to reach out with a proposal: a California “Tax the Rich Day” on October 10. Gonzalez liked the idea, and the Labor Fed entered into a partnership with California DSA and SEIU-UHW (the proponent of Prop 40). 

In 2012, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and a progressive tax coalition organized across the state in an effort that culminated in the passage of a measure that put a tax on the top 2% of income earners in California in order to fund public education and healthcare. This year, voters will decide on whether to make that tax permanent via Prop 3. It currently generates between $5 to $15 billion annually. If it does not pass, the tax will sunset in 2030, and 1 in 6 public school teachers will be facing layoffs.

In response to HR1’s cuts to Medi-Cal, Service Employees International Union - United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), a labor union of over 120,000 healthcare workers across California, advanced a ballot measure, Prop 40, to create a one time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, payable either all at once, or via 1% increments over 5 years. This is anticipated to raise about $100 billion and to provide adequate funding to cover the gap in Medi-Cal’s budget wrought by HR1. This tax applies to any billionaires who were residents of the state at the start of 2026, or who will pay state income taxes for the year (at the start of 2026, around 216 billionaires lived in the state; presently, there are around 240).

California DSA endorsed both measures earlier this year, and has been coordinating canvasses, phonebanks, and communications in the run up to election day as we work to build a stronger left-labor pole capable of taking on the billionaires. 

Coming just a week after Bernie Sanders held rallies in San Francisco and Los Angeles to promote Prop 40, the day of action featured multiple local rallies and canvasses in which DSA members joined their local labor councils and union members to spread the class-struggle message that it was high time for the working class to take on the ultra-rich. In the lead up to Tax the Rich Day, Gonzalez blasted out an email, titled “It's time to Tax The Rich!,” in which she promoted events on California DSA’s landing page, and wrote: 

“I think we can all agree: billionaires have too much damn money. … No matter where you are in California, there is a protest or a canvass event near you this Saturday, October 10, where you can join our fight to tax the rich and pass Prop 3 and Prop 40, and to defeat Prop 41 and Prop 42!”

Actions took place that day across 8 cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, the Inland Empire, and the East Bay. The Labor Federation promoted and celebrated them on social media

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxkcazz6422v

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In Hayward, an East Bay city south of Oakland, East Bay DSA joined forces with the Alameda Labor Council for a tax the rich rally and canvass. The Labor Fed posted that “the East Bay did not come to play!” East Bay DSA, since August, has been partnering with the Labor Council to provide volunteers for phone banks and canvasses of the labor council’s 130,000 union members in Alameda County, focused on passing Props 3 and 40 and re-electing DSA-endorsed school board candidates in Oakland.

East Bay DSA’s posters, signs and banners, designed by David Solnit and fashioned at an EBDSA art build, have been featured at canvasses, like this one on September 19.

Inland Empire DSA heard the call from CA DSA for a Tax the Rich Day on October 10th, and put together a rally in collaboration with SEIU-UHW and PSL at City Hall in downtown Riverside. Over fifty volunteers from Inland Empire DSA, SEIU-UHW, PFP, PSL and Teamsters 1932 as well as Riverside City Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes showed up in support of taxing the state’s billionaires. Volunteer organizers led a march around City Hall and the surrounding area and held a tabling event in front of City Hall to speak to passers-by about how vital passing Proposition 40 (and defeating Propositions 41 and 42!) is to save our healthcare system and provide necessary funding to education and food assistance in the state. Immediately afterward, volunteers headed down to the SEIU-UHW headquarters in downtown Riverside to phone bank for Proposition 40, and IE DSA will be hosting joint phonebanks with SEIU-UHW weekly from now until the election. 

Angelenos turned out to canvasses in South Central and the Eastside to talk about LA City Council District 9 candidate Estuardo Mazariegos and Congressional District 34 candidate Angela Gonzales Torres alongside the need to pass Prop 40 to redistribute power from billionaires to working people. Later that day, a comedy and karaoke fundraiser capped the night off in support of efforts to tax the rich.

California DSA’s statewide working group will be meeting Tuesday, October 20th, at 6pm in order to continue planning and coordinating efforts in support of Props 3 and 40. You can RSVP here: https://www.californiadsa.org/calendar/tax-the-rich-wg-2026oct20 

The California Federation of Labor Unions Prop 40 will be hosting a phonebank in support of Prop 40 on October 21st and 5:30pm: https://www.mobilize.us/caaflcio/event/1056391/

“You can sleep when you’re dead.”

—Benjamin Franklin

There are just two weeks to go before one of the most consequential elections in the history of California. Driving the existential nature of this election is the onset and growth of the fascist cancer within American capitalism, pushed into metastatic overdrive by the election of Donald Trump to his second term in 2024. 

In the two years since, he has checked every box in any rational person’s understanding of what the word “fascism” means. As a result we are facing End Times Fascism— the term (and the title of their new book) coined by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor—meaning that this time around, fascists are sucking us down the chutes of climate destruction, democratic devolution, and rapidly eroding institutional means to reverse the tide. 

While all of DSA’s endorsed election campaigns throughout the state are important and contribute in various ways to the anti-fascist cause, I will go out on a limb to suggest that the campaign that can best serve the anti-fascist struggle is the dual effort to tax the rich via Props 3 and 40.  Why? 

Here we find an unprecedented opportunity—not one, but two tax the rich ballot measures up for a vote in one election. Each is essential to the wellbeing of the working class—one for education, the other for health care. Loss of either would be a disaster and a boon to billionaires.

Conversely, passage of both would send an urgently needed message:  that the wealth of the rich is not invincible, because an organized working class can be the greater force. 

Money shores up the power and power shores up the money 

You recall those two photos of Elon Musk early in 2025: wielding with sick glee a chain saw to demonstrate what his DOGE project was doing to the helping services of the federal government, and his Nazi salute at a MAGA rally? These were accurate signals of an emboldened and newly unified far right sector of capital, melding the formerly antagonistic interests of fossil fuel and big tech, brought together by Trump to supercharge the development of AI and its evil twin, data centers, under the control of corporations. 

The combined resources of these two capital sectors united in support of the fascist program is the reason why political spending hit record levels in the 2024 elections, and why it is on track to break the record again this year.

As Klein and Taylor make clear, mix hitherto undreamed of quantities of capital with Christian nationalism, perpetual war in the Middle East fanning the flames of religious fantasy along with the climate crisis, reckless investment in AI, the Trump administration’s removal of all federal regulatory controls, and you have the perfect cocktail for apocalypse. The richest people in the world think they can escape the dystopia they are consciously unleashing—to island bunkers, to the Rapture, to outer space—as they run the rest of us over the cliff and the earth to the end of its tether.

Here in California the billionaires’ push to defeat Prop 40 will set new spending records for ballot initiatives. That’s pocket change from their bloated portfolios. The campaign to pass Props 3 and 40 directly challenges the fascist program, valuing human need over uncontrolled profitmaking, saying yes to life and to the earth, and reducing the purses of the superrich and thus their power. If we win, we demonstrate that the power of people can outweigh the power of money.  

Time to Overdo it

I’m asking everyone who reads these words to add just a bit of work—something, anything— to election work you are already doing in the next two weeks to help get Props 3 and 40 passed. 

I’m not arguing that anyone should stop their campaigning for a local city council candidate or US congressional seat and replace that work with the Prop 3 and 40 tax the rich campaign between now and November 3. I’m saying something else, and I admit it runs against the grain of the advice that a lifetime of activist labor and socialist politics has led me to consistently offer comrades and other activists, which is, “Don’t overdo it.” Passion for political causes can easily tip over into burnout, which is not helpful for the long run. But we are up against an enemy that is literally attempting to destroy the long run. And so I make an exception this time so that it’s not the last time. 

In other words, for the next two weeks, let’s overdo it. 

Our final California DSA Tax the Rich Working Group meeting of the campaign is this Tuesday night at 6 pm; join us to hear what we’re planning. You could also join the Prop 40 phone bank on 10/21 at 5:30. Here is tonight’s Prop 3 phone bank link. 

It can also be simpler. You can grab a posterboard from an art supply store and make your own sign for Yes on 3, Yes on 40, Tax the Rich and stand on a street corner with a friend or two. You can put a sign up in your window. You can call your friends and tell them to vote yes on 3 and 40 and no on 41, 42, and 43. You can download flyers and pass them out in your workplace. 

With your help taxing the rich is possible. Once we’ve done that we can rest (contra Franklin, we don’t have to wait til we’re dead) recover from burnout, and breathe the air of a world slightly less imperiled by fascism.

In the early 1970s, when many student activists were migrating from campus to industrial jobs to promote working class radicalization, no labor film was more influential than Salt of the Earth.

This pioneering docudrama was made two decades earlier by a producer, writer, director, and several actors who were unemployable in Hollywood, due to McCarthy era-blacklisting.

This left-wing creative team recruited a cast of workers and their families from the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) to play themselves in a fictional account of a long strike at the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. 

Local 890 members knew something about red-baiting too. Shortly before their 1951 fight for better conditions and an end to wage disparities between Anglo and Chicano workers, Mine, Mill was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), along with the left-led United Electrical Workers (UE) and west coast longshore union, the ILWU. In 

In real life, and later on screen, the key to the success of this mining community struggle was the militant participation of strikers’ wives, mothers, daughters and sisters after their own mass picketing is enjoined by a local judge.

In Salt of the Earth, this picket-line replacement strategy, which challenged and changed traditional gender roles in a socially conservative company town, is heatedly debated by film’s two lead characters. 

Blacklisted and Deported

Playing the role of Ramon Quintera, Juan Chacon, an actual IUMMSW local president, initially objects to the strike activism of his fictional wife Esperanza, played by Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas (who was deported for making the film). Other members of an entirely male and largely Latino workforce are similarly conflicted about the emergence of a vocal and empowered women’s auxiliary.

When Esperanza and her fellow female pickets are arrested, she takes her small baby behind bars with her. The resulting boisterous jail house protest—which prefigures southern civil rights and peace movement tactics in the 1960s--forces the sheriff to release them all. The miners’ subsequent defense of the Quintera family--when the company tries to evict them--becomes a turning point in the long strike which ends in a contract settlement.

Berkeley journalist and now first-time novelist Barry Bergman was among the many young radicals much inspired by this now iconic depiction of Mexican-American labor struggle.  Before Bergman relocated to California and began a long career as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer/editor, and communications specialist for UC Berkeley and numerous non-profits, he worked for several years in a copper smelter near Tucson.

That experience as a rank-and-file member of the United Steel Workers (USW)--which gobbled up the IUMMSW, after years of raiding it--led to his writing Proles. (Serving House Books). Bergman’s novel is a funny, moving, and historically accurate account of workplace “colonizing”—or “salting” as it’s called today-- told from the point of view of the author’s fictional alter-ego. 

Via a college course entitled “Celluloid and Social Change,” Simon Bussbaum learns about a film called City of Emeralds. He is captivated by its depiction of “dirt-poor Chicano miners in the Southwest” and their humble but charismatic leader, Naldo Galvin.

Art Imitates Life

Simon does further research and discovers that Galvin—like the real-life Juan Chacon in the 1970s—has become a dissident in the Steel Workers. The former strike organizer—and Salt of the Earth co-star-- is now rallying his co-workers against “a class collaborationist union which muscled its way into zinc and copper mines in the Sun Belt” by marketing itself as a labor-management partner, rather than a class struggle foe.

The bookish film buff from Queens (the author’s hometown as well) leaves anti-war politics behind for a very different blue-collar life in open shop Arizona. Arriving for his first shift at Cobra Copper Company (aka “ThreeCo”) near Turcson, Simon walks into a scene lifted from the film that inspired his turn toward the working class.

“Outside the giant garage doors that opened out from the smelter’s shell, hundreds of men clustered in small groups, coveralls gone or dangling at their waist. Some were standing, others lying on bare ground or using their hardhats for seats. A handful were shirtless, glistening in the sun. It might have been a disorderly line at the Fillmore East, save for the work clothes and industrial boots.” 

A new co-worker, a “hard-looking Chicano with a missing tooth, a Fu Manchu mustache and a cobra tattoo on his right forearm” tells Simon what’s going on.  “It’s a ‘wildcat,’”  explains Snake, who seems happy to follow the crazy "white dudes” who started it all by “waving their arms, walking out, and shouting, ‘Join us!”. 

Other hard hats in the now idle crowd are pissed off about losing a few hours pay. “Anarchists,” one grumbles. “Commies and agitators. They don’t like it here, can’t blame them for that. But you can’t strike till the contract’s up. That’s the law.”

A manager addresses the crowd with a bull-horn and repeats the same message. “This is an unlawful work stoppage. Your local union has not authorized this action, and joins us in ordering you to immediately cease and desist. This is your final warning.”

A Tactical Error?

The “cadre” organization members--who have inducted Simon into their small circle at a local radical bookstore--are among “the twelve people pegged as troublemakers and fired.” After this “tactical error,” Simon attends his first Steelworkers local union meeting. There, he encounters bureaucratic lethargy and business union routine familiar to many rank-and-file activists, then and now.

Only a smattering of members show-up—at a VFW hall with an “American flag on the pole outside the building and another hung on a wall behind the podium.” Much time is spent on the financial report and a reading of minutes from the last meeting. The biggest agenda item is the e-board’s unanimous decision “not to pursue grievance arbitration cases for employees who were terminated.”

As the union treasurer explains, this will result in “a big savings for the local because we could not have prevailed in defending an action that went against the ‘no strike’ clause in our own contract.” (“Good riddance,” blurts out the local’s business manager, “a pudgy man in a short sleeved white shirt,” who gavels the meeting to a close soon thereafter.)

Bergman’s workplace descriptions are equally on target. Some resemble the best passages in The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s fictional account of job hazards in mid-western meat-packing plants a century ago or in Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Voung’s new novel about low wage work in 21st century New England.

“The smelter, known as ‘Freako,’ was a cavernous, ramshackle Big Top featuring spark-spewing furnaces, splashing cauldrons dangled from the cranes like murderous marionettes, rapids of liquid fire tumbling down in harrowing dayglow ribbons. Danger was everywhere, lurking beneath the dull roar and the rotten eggs stench. Everything black and orange, darkness and firelight, a waking nightmare Halloween that left him in terror of any possible misstep.”

Unfortunately, the hottest shop floor issue is not the threat of being scalded to death or maimed and killed in many other ways.  It’s ThreeCo’s controversial decision to hire its first female laborer, a feisty former high school athlete, who is a half-Latino and a single mother. It’s 1973, after all, and the era of equal opportunity is dawning. 

As the fictional reincarnation of Esperanza, Samantha Tanager is not just showing that she can, in a pinch, take a man’s place on the picket-line; she’s going to join them on the shop floor, in a fire-resistant orange jump suit, aluminum hard-hat, and steel-toed boots. But the sudden arrival of a “fetching copper miner’s daughter,” as a local newspaper describes her, proves to be very triggering for Bullock. 

He’s the big, tobacco-chewing redneck with “a natural talent for cruelty” that Bussbuam is assigned to work with. Already suspicious of Simon’s rather obvious East Coast Jewishness and college boy ways, Bullock views “Tanager’s admission to the sacred sanctum of the smelter as sacrilege, a grievous affront to the Code of the Working Stiff, Nonferrous Division.” 

Besides, he believes that Samantha is a lesbian. (Spoiler alert: much to Simon’s love-struck chagrin, Bullock’s gaydar is right.)

Casual Racism

Simon’s New Left idealism is now further tested amid Freako’s “dark, depraved beauty, which reeked of musty maleness that gave rise to a loose-knit, shambling ‘esprit de corps, wrapped in a kind of casual racism and sexism so expansive, so deeply rooted, it had started to feel—Simon not being of this world, and without standing perhaps to judge his co-workers’ cultural values—like just another flavor of assholism.”

When that “assholism” takes the form of a nasty campaign by Bullock to make Tanager’s life miserable on the job, Simon’s own personal class struggle ends in a parking lot brawl between two “union brothers.” It doesn’t end well for the new hire and little resembles more heroic scuffles, between labor and management, in Salt of The Earth. 

But it does lead Bussbaum to bid blue-collar life adieu and head for the greener pastures of California. (Tanager and her female partner leave for the more tolerant Texas oasis of Austin.)

Proles was definitely not written as a how-too manual for members of the Rank-and-File Project, a present-day effort to “recruit, educate, and support a new generation of activists who will join the fight for working-class power by taking union jobs on the shop floor.” 

But the book should be required reading, in such circles anyway, due to its deft exploration of the nexus between the personal and the political. Any left-wing “salt” trying to befriend un-class conscious (and sometimes weird) co-workers, while dealing with draining night shifts, imperious managers and not much nicer union bosses, will find humorous respite in Barry Bergman’s fictional rendering of his real-life experience with the “salt of the earth” in Arizona fifty years ago.

“The new lords of the global village are not just Wall Street insiders or run-of-the-mill plutocrats; they are a disparate, distinctly more anarchic group of powerful forces.”

Just in time for the midterms, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have delivered an incredibly relevant new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, that quite plainly lays out what is at stake in the coming election. We are living under a new form of authoritarianism that has already deeply weakened our democracy and threatens to push us over the cliff toward a dystopian future where only our new oligarchs will be able to survive the harsh social, economic, and environmental realities we face.  

Klein and Taylor survey the landscape of contemporary analyses of authoritarianism and name the present system “End Times Fascism,” a unique strain of political disease that has flourished due to several factors that have emerged out of the circumstances of our current Gilded Age.  What characterizes the malady that afflicts us? In sum, we are ruled by a nearly totally unaccountable elite.  As they note:

At its core, end times fascism is a crisis of rampant impunity born of concentrated power and wealth.  Far too much money, information technology, and weaponry have been allowed to concentrate into the hands of the few, and that unchecked power has deranged our elites, goading them to take risks that put our societies and countless species at risk.

And if the risks taken by contemporary elites seem to be crossing lines that other members of the traditional oligarchy were loath to trespass, that’s because they are.  The new lords of the global village are not just Wall Street insiders or run-of-the-mill plutocrats; they are a disparate, distinctly more anarchic group of powerful forces.  End times fascism is not the product of a coherent movement: “rather than a monolith, it is an alliance of very different groups, each one racing toward a different but related apocalyptic dream, sutured together in common cause . . . religious end timers, the tech end timers, and the ethno-nationalist end timers.”  

Hence the ongoing barrage of assaults on everything from education, civil rights, and freedom of speech to environmental sustainability and democratic institutions of all kinds seems like an unfocused shotgun blast because it is coming from several different angles all at once. Rushing towards climate catastrophe, unchecked oligarchy, and patriarchal, white supremacist retrenchment as the AI onslaught undermines our sense of reality and ability to think critically is only possible because the chaos creates polycrises and a blitzkrieg of disruptions makes it hard for the average person to get a clear cognitive map of power.  

And the resulting radical uncertainty unmoors people from their traditional bearings and allows the end times fascists to portray themselves as our saviors from the very threats that they have unleashed on the world.  We might not survive them, but they don’t care.  Their end game is not to save anything but themselves.  

As Klein and Taylor argue:

[F]ascist movements claim to be defending powerful institutions—the nation, the market, the military, the family—from internal and external pollutants.  In the logic of fascism, the task of defeating those threats and reimposing order, requires emergency measures, often destroying many of the very institutions fascists claim to be defending.

Enter Trump and company as they prepare to contest what is looking like a tsunami of Democratic voters this November.  The huge margins they will likely lose by in most places have made their task harder, but this has not deterred them. After discovering that their initial attempts to interfere with the midterms would not bear fruit, the MAGA right has simply found new roads to the ruin of American democracy. 

Seymour Hersch outlines their most likely next move on his Substack: 

So here comes the GOP’s Plan B, which still depends on election deniers who have been voted into office in states with contested Senate seats that could decide the fate of Trump’s last two years in office.

I was told that the targets, in terms of putting election deniers to work, are now limited to five states where a few thousand votes could make the difference in the political makeup of the Senate: Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas. The election counting machinery in each state is now in the control of elected Republican voting officials who are Trump supporters. In two other states, Georgia and North Carolina, Republican candidates are in trouble and Democratic candidates are comfortably ahead in polling.

“If the election is close,” one insider explained to me, “you would only have to disqualify as few as seven thousand voters” in primarily Democratic precincts “to change the outcome.” One thought now, I was told, is to call on election deniers in the toss-up states to find ways to use existing federal data, verified or not, to challenge thousands of votes in key Democratic precincts. (Trump said yesterday that he would not rule out invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, if he deems it necessary. Let us call that Plan C.)

Hence, it would not be wise to let the ugly polls for the GOP make us complacent or allow Trump’s increasingly pathetic public persona to lead us to underestimate the danger we face.  

In sum, the crazier Trump seems, the more likely it is that he may just try to do the previously unthinkable and bring more troops back onto American streets.  His Triumph of the Will style taxpayer funded TV ads are signaling how he will portray himself as a defender of American institutions as he blithely destroys them.  

Trump is the very embodiment of an end times fascist.  As Klein and Taylor argue, “We should believe our eyes.  The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”  

Vote and be vigilant, dear reader. The end times fascists will not go gently into their good night.  

Indeed, even if we are successful in pushing back against the tide of authoritarianism in the midterms, so much more remains to be done.  Klein and Taylor note that the task at hand will require us commit to the continuous work of occupying and defending the “paradise” of the “here” and “now.”   Following Walter Benjamin, they call for a “messianism of the here and now” that is best embodied at present by the movement, with DSA at its center, that brought Zohran Mamdani to power in New York.  

Mamdani’s campaign does not give us the perfect answer, but it does show us some of the rules of the road:

There is no cut-and-paste formula for fighting end times fascism; every front will take on the character and texture of its place.  There are, however, some guiding principles that are beginning to emerge across locations, and the Mamdani campaign embodied many of them.  Start from love of place; conjure a radically inclusive future where everyone can afford dignified lives: embrace common goals across difference; get outside and gather offline and in person; take on the powerful joyously, draw on history and don’t be afraid to stir the soul.

We need to build a world where we start to see “the word neighbor growing to expand to include thousands of people we have never met and who have yet to arrive.”  More than anything else, Klein and Taylor suggest, we need to never lose sight of either what we are fighting against nor what the future we want should look like.  

This article first appeared in The Jumping Off Place

DSA chapters across the golden state from San Diego to Humboldt have endorsed candidates and ballot measures and are mobilizing to support them. Here our contributors lay out what we are up to in promoting a democratic socialist political agenda.

DSA Santa Barbara has decided to endorse candidates for local city council, including a mayoral candidate. As of 2024, Santa Barbara has enjoyed a slight 4-3 progressive majority on City Council, allowing for such policies as a local Rent Stabilization Ordinance and the non-renewal of a contract with Flock. However, this majority hangs in the balance in the upcoming election with four seats on council being up for grabs. The current mayor, a conservative man who has hurt progress in the city, has decided not to run for reelection, and three council members have termed out, two of whom are progressives. 

One of these progressive city council members, Kristen Sneddon, has decided to run for mayor and has received our endorsement due to her continued work on protecting renters and her overall alignment with DSA principles. We have also endorsed Gabe Escobedo, Ian Baucke, and Devon Wardlow, who are running for the other City Council seats in different districts. All of them have shown willingness, if not eagerness, to work with our local chapter. Furthermore, they all support strong tenant protections and are adamant on limiting ICE activity in Santa Barbara to whatever extent they are able. DSA-SB is incredibly focused on the local level and therefore has made no other endorsements.

—Beckett S 

We’re excited to announce the results of our phase 3 electoral endorsement process! DSA-LA is proud to newly endorse:

• Nithya Raman for Los Angeles City Mayor

• Angela Gonzales-Torres for Congressional District 34

• Noland Sutherland for Burbank City Council

• Mike Van Gorder for Burbank City Council

• Stephan Post for West Hollywood City Council

• Estefany Castenada for Centinela Valley UHSD Trustee

• Yaritza Gonzalez for Inglewood Unified School District, Trustee

They join their fellow members Marissa Roy and Estuardo Mazariegos on our team of union leaders, renters, tenant organizers, parents, and activists who are running for office to fight for working class values and create real change across Los Angeles. You can learn more about our candidates on our website shakeup.la. 

DSA-LA is ready to unite tenants, union members, immigrant communities, and working Angelenos behind a slate that can break corporate interests’ grip on city government. Our vision is clear: win office, build a governing majority, and deliver a city working people can afford to call home. But we can’t win without your help: now’s the time to mobilize to knock doors, organize your neighbors, and get out the vote.

DSA San Diego canvasses for Alexander Kraft for mayor.

This November, DSA San Diego has endorsed two mayoral candidates and two ballot measures. Kenneth Zuniga is a longtime DSA member running for Mayor of the city of Vista here in San Diego County! He served on the Homelessness Commission and has successfully organized to keep ICE out of city facilities. He has also organized against the installation of Flock cameras in Vista. As Mayor, he hopes to lower the cost of living in the city, and advocate for union-backed jobs and truly affordable housing. 

Alexander Kraft is a socialist labor organizer running for Mayor of El Cajon. Kraft is fighting back against the far-right mayor and city council, for police reform, housing, and protecting El Cajon’s large immigrant community from ICE. 

The chapter has also endorsed two ballot measures aimed at funding important services through taxing the rich. These measures are Proposition 40 and Proposition 3. Prop 40 is a one-time 5% emergency wealth tax on billionaires in the state, raising 100 billion dollars to fund healthcare and education. This measure was created after Medicaid funds were taken away from Californians by the federal government (called “Medi-Cal” in California). It is vital that this passes so that millions of working-class people don't lose their healthcare. Prop 3 is a proposal to make permanent an existing tax on high-income earners to help fund K-12 and community college education. The loss of this funding would be incredibly detrimental to the future of access to education. DSA San Diego is excited to support these campaigns and continue building socialism in the region!

Over the past few months, OC DSA has seen an undeniable socialist surge to over 800 dues-paying members in good standing. 

We held an endorsement forum and with an overwhelming vote of over 90% of that day’s participating membership, OC DSA elected to provide endorsement and on the ground field support for three Santa Ana City Council candidates: Isuri Ramos (Ward 6), Sandra De Anda (Ward 4) and Ben Vasquez (Ward 2). 

Sandra De Anda has been one of Orange County’s strongest warriors against OC’s ICE incursion, utilizing the OC Rapid Response Network and fighting for families through policy making across the county. 

Isuri Ramos is a community advocate and planning commission chair who has been fighting tirelessly against data centers, for tenant rights and for police accountability. 

Benjamin Vasquez is seeking re-election. He is a teacher and reform leader in his union who has been a champion of workers’ rights, rent control and affordability as well as expanding necessary social services for all of Santa Ana. 

Inside Orange County exists two wolves:  a billionaire-worshipping fascist supremacist movement that seeks to push down all workers in favor of jailing our neighbors, pushing unwanted data centers, and creating an ever-present Flock police state—and the Socialists relentlessly pushing back against their tide for equality, affordability and dignity for all.

It is our hope that we can start electing the type of leaders we want to see in office, gain electoral power and use the template that has been so successful in New York to build up Orange County’s ground game to bring about the type of county we all want. A victory in these races will show the power of socialist organizing in Orange County and be a strong sign of things to come in one of Southern California’s more traditionally conservative counties. 

We want to thank all three for sharing their time and effort in seeking OCDSA’s endorsement. OCDSA has appointed liaisons for each campaign as we work toward a shared vision of power for OC’s working class. 

Inland Empire DSA is proud to endorse Joz Sida for Fontana Mayor, Joe Alvanez for Fontana City Clerk, and Proposition 40, the Billionaire Tax. These endorsements reflect our commitment to building working-class power, electing leaders accountable to their communities, and making the wealthy pay their fair share to fund the services working people rely on.

First day Tax the Rich canvass for DSA Long Beach.

Our Billionaire Tax kickoff canvass for Prop. 40 launched today! ✊

Thank you to everyone who knocked doors with us. Learn about more @dsa_lb Tax the Rich events and get involved. Election Day 2026 is right around the corner!

dsalb.org/taxtherich

G Mario Fernandez has served on the Eureka City Council for the past four years. He has been a consistent advocate for the working class, for the unhoused, for immigrant, LGBTQ+, and marginalized communities. He has supported important measures including Eureka’s Sanctuary Declaration for Transgender People, the boycotting of Avelo Airlines for working with ICE, and calling on CalPERS to divest from companies participating in the genocide of Gaza. Mario has championed programs like Uplift Eureka (helping the unhoused secure housing and jobs) and CARE (Crisis Alternative Response Eureka, using mental health clinicians and case managers to handle non-violent crises) for community response rather than law enforcement officers. 

Mario understands that true public safety comes from investment in people’s quality of life, not through surveillance. He advocates denser, mixed-use planning, expanding available housing, stronger renter protections, and strengthening our public transit system. Mario champions green jobs and workforce development through infrastructure improvement projects and upgrades to address climate change. Eureka is the heart of Humboldt County and needs someone who will advocate for living wages, peace, and human dignity. Mario has the proven, experienced leadership necessary to continue building a livable and safe community for all. Humboldt DSA proudly endorses G Mario Fernandez for Eureka City Council!

Sacramento DSA has endorsed Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang for Congress in CA-D7, Emily Smet for American River Flood Control District Division 2, and Prop 40, the California Billionaire Tax Act.

Mai Vang has an established history of advocating for the working class by delivering essential infrastructure and social services to her constituents.  She is running on a platform of universal child care, Medicare for All, ending the genocide in Gaza, and abolishing ICE.

Emily Smet is an environmental scientist and former chapter co-chair of Sacramento DSA running on a platform of responsible environmental stewardship, cooperation with rather than punishment of our unhoused neighbors living near the American River, and interrupting the interests of former developers and lobbyists who use local boards to enrich themselves rather than serve the people.

Editorial assistance:

Jack R - CA DSA Comms Committee

Contributors:

[reprinted by permission from The Press Democrat]

This Labor Day (weekend), it’s essential to highlight that reducing inequality is the main purpose of labor unions through collective bargaining for living wages, comprehensive benefits, and improved workplace health and safety conditions.

Moreover, unions provide a political voice for their members and lobby for legislation, such as restrictions on child labor, a minimum wage, the forty-hour week, and Social Security, that benefit all working people. 

Recently, the California Federation of Labor Unions, representing 1300 affiliated unions with 2.3 million members, endorsed Proposition 40, the California Billionaire Tax Act on the November ballot.

Prop 40 is a one-time 5% wealth tax spread over five years on California’s 250 billionaires who lived here on January 1, 2026. Prop 40 defines wealth as the value of stocks, bonds, trusts, and specified property holdings, minus outstanding debt.

According to the California Budget and Policy Project, if approved, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth would decline from $200 billion to $190 billion. 

Why is such a tax necessary?

First, wealth inequality has soared nationally and in California. A report by UC Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, and Jasper Boll of the Paris School of Economics, finds that from 1982 to 2026, California billionaires' wealth has skyrocketed by 38-fold to $2.3 trillion, while the real family income of the average California family has merely doubled.

Second, the measure would generate about $100 billion in revenue that the state desperately needs because of the massive Trump tax cuts for the wealthy last year and the slashing of health care funding (H.R. 1).

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that up to 1.6 million California Medi-Cal recipients could lose health insurance. Eighty-three California hospitals are at risk of closing, and up to 145,000 health care workers could be laid off, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Ninety percent of the Prop 40 revenue will backfill these health care cuts, with the balance dedicated to public education.

Third, Zucman, Saez, and Boll claim that billionaires pay less in taxes than the average taxpayer, relative to income. They calculate that between 2018 and 2020, across all local, state, and federal taxes, billionaires paid just 24 percent of their income in taxes, whereas the typical taxpayer paid 30 percent.

The main reason is that both the federal government and California tax investment income or capital gains (about 72 percent of billionaire wealth) only when stock is sold.

Most billionaires earn very little in salaries, such as Zuckerberg’s, which is $1 a year. They borrow tax-free against their colossal wealth to pay for ongoing expenses.

The billionaire tax provides a remedy by taxing all wealth regardless of whether it has been realized or not.

The argument opponents make is that if Prop 40 passes, billionaires will leave the state, resulting in the loss of capital and jobs. However, there is no historical evidence to support this assertion.

Sociologist Cristobal Young, author of The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight (2017), studied 13 years of millionaire tax records nationwide and found that only 2.4 percent of millionaires moved to another state annually, compared with 2.9 percent of the population at large. 

Young also researched California millionaires after the voters in 2012 approved the largest tax increase ever on top earners. Two years after the ballot initiative, the state experienced a loss of just .04 percent of millionaire residents.

Studies reached similar conclusions for other states boosting taxes on the wealthiest, including New Jersey in 2020, New York in 2021, and Massachusetts in 2022

Why?  

The research has found that 60 percent of California millionaires are older than 50 years; most have children and are socially and professionally tied to where they made their money. With children in school, property ownership, and extensive professional and social connections, they are unlikely to move for tax reasons.

Moreover, California tech billionaires depend on skilled professionals who are graduates of UC and CSU, and on innovation that is a byproduct of the exchange of ideas among tech workers across companies clustered in places like Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

California billionaires benefit immensely from the publicly financed infrastructure of universities, transportation, and healthcare. It’s time for them to pay their fair share to offset the pending catastrophic health care cuts.

Most of the attention on the California state ballot has been focused on the Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, thanks to heavy-handed spending by a dozen superrich reactionaries who are horrified at the idea that any part of their beyond-Gilded Age-level wealth might get redirected to health care for people who desperately need it.

But there are four related measures that require the attention of voters who care about economic inequality and want to address it fairly, since these measures also relate to appropriate taxes for rich people in the Golden State. One, the Education and Health Care Act of 2026 (Prop 3) is a currently existing but temporary income tax on the top two percent of income earners—individuals who make at least $370 thousand, or joint filers who make $740 thousand a year. This top-brackets income tax brought a tidy $14 billion to the state treasury last year. The bulk of its revenue goes to K-12 schools and community colleges. I’ve written previous articles dealing with Prop 3 and so will concentrate on the other three here.

Props 41 and 42 are designed to thwart the Billionaire Tax, and Prop 43, if it passes, will make it very difficult to raise revenue at the local level.

Props 41 and 42 were put on the ballot by billionaires hiding behind the anodyne title “Building a Better California” to trick voters into nullifying the billionaire tax. This positive-sounding organization is a PAC funded by right wing ultrarich like Sergey Brin.

Prop 41 would supposedly create audits of new state tax revenues and makes them subject to a state cap. The Billionaire Tax will easily earn more than the cap, over which any money is either returned to voters or goes to education. Prop 41 doesn’t mention the Billionaire Tax directly, but it contains a standard California ballot measure poison pill: if it receives more votes than other measures with an overlapping topic (i.e., the Billionaire Tax) it nullifies it. 

Prop 42 would prohibit new taxes on personal property including retirement accounts, financial assets or business interests. It deceptively proposes that unnamed “Sacramento politicians” are planning to do this to everyone. The only tax it would apply to—again without naming it—is the Billionaire Tax. As with Prop 41, more votes for Prop 42 than 40 nullifies the latter. 

Let us be very clear. These initiatives aren’t about helping California taxpayers, and they’re not about audits or retirement savings. They are about defeating Prop 40. Knowing who supports a ballot measure as well as who opposes it provides excellent context for understanding its purposes. One of Prop 41 and 42’s main funders is Google founder Sergey Brin, who has recently become the third richest person in the world. Brin has already spent a psychotic $100 million against a tax that would preserve healthcare access for millions of Californians. Other sociopathic billionaires have chipped in $50 million more. 

Proposition 43, also backed by billionaires and corporate entities like the Chamber of Commerce through their shill, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, would impose a supermajority requirement for all local special tax initiatives.  It would require at least two-thirds of local voters to approve any local initiative that would create, extend, or increase a special tax. It applies to initiatives placed on a local ballot on or after January 1, 2027.

This new supermajority vote requirement, replacing simple majority for local citizen-initiated measures, would apply to measures raising revenue for all forms of local government—cities, counties, school and community college districts, and any other local or regional government entity.

Majority rule is the basis of local democracy. Prop 43, if it passes, would represent a giant step backward, and make it easier for giant corporate interests like the Realtors’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, fossil fuel companies and other similar entities to wreck funding for the things we all need.  

Propositions 41, 42, and 43 represent profound threats to California’s future.  Putting a lockbox around our cities’ and state’s ability to raise revenue will result in devastating cuts to education, healthcare, public safety and transit and our ability to safely breathe air and drink water.  VOTE NO on Propositions 41, 42 and 43.

Dorothy Healey (third from right) and other Communists arrested by U.S. Marshals for violating the Smith Act, 1951 (L-R): Unknown, Henry Steinberg, Philip Connelly, Healey, Unknown, Rose Chernin.

PART ONE OF TWO

On July 9, 1973, Dorothy Healey sat behind a microphone at KPFK in Los Angeles and ended a political commitment that had consumed nearly her entire adult life. She had joined the Young Communist League at 14, organized farmworkers and cannery workers, gone to jail, rose through the ranks of Communist Party leadership, and for two decades led its Southern California district. Now, at 58, she told her radio audience that she was resigning from the party.

The immediate cause was almost painfully characteristic of the organization she was leaving. The national party had denounced Al Richmond, the former editor of its West Coast newspaper, the People's World, for his memoir A Long View from the Left. Southern California Communists were instructed to uphold national leaders’ judgment whenever they discussed the book publicly. Healey refused.

Her resignation was anything but a renunciation of radical politics. "My hatred of capitalism," she told her listeners, remained as intense as when she had joined the YCL in 1928. She described herself instead as "a communist ... without a party."

That distinction would define the rest of her life.

Dorothy Healey's political history is often told as a journey from Communism to democratic socialism. The description is accurate but flattens a much, much more interesting story. Beginning with the crisis of world Communism in 1956, Healey spent decades trying to salvage the radicalism, working-class politics, and organizational seriousness of the Communist tradition while discarding authoritarianism, sectarianism, and toeing the party’s foreign policy line.

Much of that reinvention happened right here in Los Angeles. From the late 1950s through the early 1980s, Healey occupied an unusual position amongst successive generations of the city's left: the Communist Old Left, the civil rights and antiwar movements, Black and Chicano radicalism, socialist feminism, the New American Movement and finally Democratic Socialists of America. 

Her story is therefore less about leaving the Communist Party than about the harder question that flowed from it: What do you build after it?

For American Communists, 1956 was an earthquake.

At the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev exposed a portion of the crimes committed under Joseph Stalin. Healey later remembered hearing the secret speech in New York and being devastated by its revelations. That autumn Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, generating debate through out Communist parties around the world.

Thousands of Communists in the US responded by voting with their feet and leaving the party. Healey did not. Instead, she became an advocate for democratizing the Communist Party USA from within.

That decision made Los Angeles unusually important. Under Healey and her longtime comrade Ben Dobbs, Southern California became a center of dissent, sufficiently independent that the national leadership repeatedly tried and failed to dislodge them. 

This was not an insignificant backwater club. Healey had been brought into LA’s leadership after World War II and eventually headed what the Los Angeles Times described as the party's second-largest district after New York. 

The old Popular Front had been broken by the Cold War. Communists had been driven from unions, prosecuted under the Smith Act, blacklisted, surveilled and pushed toward the margins of public life. Healey herself had been convicted under the Smith Act in 1952 before the Supreme Court reversed the California convictions in 1957.

Yet Southern California radicalism was already beginning to regenerate outside the party. Civil rights organizers, peace activists, students and young radicals were creating their own political networks. Healey's great post-1956 wager was that the surviving Old Left could enter into conversation with this new one.

LA became one of the laboratories.

Cover photo from Dorothy Healey’s memoir, California Red, 1990

In 1959, the same year KPFK began broadcasting in Los Angeles, Dorothy Healey went on the air.

The new Pacifica station was itself an experiment. Commercial-free and listener-supported, KPFK gave airtime to an extraordinary range of political opinion, from conservatives such as William F. Buckley and Howard Jarvis to the Communist leader of Southern California. Healey's program, Communist Commentary, gave an avowed Communist a regular voice on the Los Angeles airwaves at the height of the Cold War.

Radio suited her. Healey could be ferociously political without sounding mechanical, and she possessed little patience for the wooden language that often passed for Communist public communication. Even critics of her politics encountered something difficult to fit into the stereotype of the obedient party hack: a funny, combative, recognizably local political personality.

The program also gave Healey something increasingly important: a political identity larger than the institution she led. As her disagreements with the national Communist Party widened, Angelenos could encounter Dorothy Healey directly, not merely as a representative of the CPUSA. By 1963 her presence at KPFK was prominent enough to become an issue in congressional attacks on Pacifica's broadcasting license.

More importantly, KPFK placed Healey inside a rapidly changing Los Angeles political culture. The station became one of the spaces where the Old Left, pacifism, the New Left, feminism, Black radicalism, antiwar activism and the counterculture could collide with one another. Healey no longer had to wait for those movements to enter the Communist Party; she was already talking to them over the radio.

That convergence was happening elsewhere in the city as well.

Despite the party's losses after 1956, Healey worked to restore relationships with liberals and peace activists and to open the Southern California organization toward younger radicals. Communist youth participated in southern Freedom Rides, and the party's Black membership later developed the Che-Lumumba Club, which became an important political base for Angela Davis. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener have argued that this continuing interaction between Los Angeles's Old and New Lefts distinguishes the city's 1960s history from the familiar national story in which the Communist movement simply disappears before the New Left arrives. Healey became one of the human bridges between those worlds.

1966 Healey campaign button when she ran for Los Angeles County Assessor.

Her peculiar place in Los Angeles politics became visible in 1966, when Healey ran for Los Angeles County Assessor.

She made no attempt to disguise her politics. This was a Communist running openly for countywide office less than 15 years after the height of McCarthyism. She received 83,891 votes, 5.4 percent of the total.

The result was politically meaningless if measured by winning (and by current DSA LA standards). But it was remarkable as a measure of survival. After blacklists, prosecutions, loyalty investigations and years of official anticommunism, more than 80,000 LA County voters deliberately marked their ballots for Dorothy Healey.

The campaign also tells us something about the politics Healey was trying to construct. She was not retreating into a purified revolutionary subculture. She was attempting to make socialism visible within the ordinary political life of Southern California.

That strategy put her increasingly at odds with a national party whose instincts remained tied to Moscow and to an increasingly insular organizational culture. Los Angeles Communism had survived the catastrophe of 1956, but the contradiction at its center was becoming harder to contain. Healey wanted the party to open itself toward the new movements; the party leadership continued to demand political reliability.

In 1968, the contradiction broke open.

In August 1968, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed Prague Spring and Socialismus s Lidskou Tváří (Socialism with a Human Face).

Healey had visited the country the previous year and had close connections with Czech communists like Edward and Marta Goldstucker. She condemned the invasion, while Communist Party general secretary Gus Hall and the national leadership defended it. Healey resigned as head of the Southern California district.

For Healey, Prague brought the argument that had begun in 1956 to its conclusion. Could socialism exist without democracy? Could a communist movement possess an independent political judgment, or was its loyalty to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union ultimately stronger than its commitment to democratic change initiated by other communists?

But she still didn’t quit.

Healey had spent 40 years in the Communist movement, and a political organization built over a lifetime is not simply a bundle of positions from which one unsubscribes. It was comrades, marriages, campaigns, jail cells, organizing drives, friendships and a way of understanding one's own place in history.

So Healey remained inside for another five years, stripped of her old leadership role and increasingly alienated from the national organization. KPFK gave her somewhere else to stand.

The microphone allowed Healey to remain a public Marxist while becoming steadily less identifiable with the party hierarchy. A 1972 KPFK recording preserved by the Pacifica archive, for instance, has Healey giving an extended discussion of Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Marxist who had famously battled the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies of her own movement and criticized the Bolsheviks even while joining the Spartacists in Germany.

Then came July 1973.

When the Southern California party instructed its members to repeat the national leadership's attack on Al Richmond, Healey refused one final demand for obedience. She announced her resignation not in a private letter or internal meeting but over KPFK, before the Los Angeles audience she had cultivated for 14 years.

The symbolism is almost too neat. Dorothy Healey left the Communist Party through the microphone.

[Stay tuned for Part Two in the October California Red.]

OCDSA’s Mutual Aid Committee, affectionately abbreviated to “MAC”, has been one of the chapter’s longest operating undertakings. Following the Marxist ideal of a society sharing goods and services according to ability and need, MAC’s work, directly within the chapter and with members of the community at large, has long been the focus of the group, even before our formal establishment as a committee in 2026. 

MAC works with community partners to provide meals and groceries to the county’s at-risk and unhoused populations.

In the pandemic years, MAC provided taillight services for free to the community in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and helped provide groceries to low-income community members directly at their doors during lockdown. Following the easing of social distancing restrictions, MAC worked with community partners to provide meals and groceries to the county’s at-risk and unhoused populations, helped get medical supplies to besieged countries through our partners at Not Just Tourists, established close ties with other mutual aid organizations such as Costa Mesa Mutual Aid, Lucha, and 714 Mutual Aid, and responded to individual requests from members and non-members alike for support with material, emotional, and social needs. 

MAC takes a friendly “as you are” approach to service, accepting members regardless of their experience with mutual aid endeavors, and works within their abilities to help empower them through direct work with the community. MAC meets twice a month virtually, provides onsite training at events to help members and volunteers find their footing, and co-hosts events regularly with our community partners. MAC works within the comfortability of our members, taking into consideration people’s interests, capacities, abilities and disabilities, diversity considerations, and opinions to operate horizontally, reciprocally, and in a participatory manner.

Grocery packing nights serve as equal parts socials, networking events, and direct actions.

Because it is the nature of MAC events to involve direct action and accessibility, they are often some of the first events new members attend. Lower-key MAC events like our “cookovers” or grocery packing nights serve as equal parts socials, networking events, and direct actions, while more involved events allow members to interact with orgs outside of DSA to cross-pollinate. MAC has been a powerful tool for OCDSA and its members to demonstrate that we actively stand by our ideals, are friendly with and supportive of the community at large, and that the nurturing, prosocial world that Marx envisioned is possible, even within the belly of the beast

What do our members have to say?

• NH: “Our goal is creating a community where a core value is lifting each other up. We want to build this into the fabric of our community, with systems that provide necessary aid to those in need, with the understanding that at some point, we will also need aid. During my time with OCDSA's Mutual Aid committee, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with other mutual aid groups in OC to foster community and help build and strengthen these systems. The organizing skills I have learned have been invaluable, but even more so, the connections we have made with these incredible people have made a major impact on me. It's been said before that without hope, no one would have the drive to do this work, and I wholeheartedly agree. My cup overflows with hope when I see the overwhelming number of kind-hearted, dedicated people who are activated. If everyone engaged in mutual aid, the world would be a better place, but I also think that every person would be happier, less lonely, and more fulfilled.”

• PB: “Being a member of MAC is a personal reminder for myself that there’s a need out there, there are like-minded people who want to help fill it, and that though the world can seem discouraging and that I alone can feel powerless to change it, I can at least shape a better place in my corner.”

• SB: “DSA-MAC is a true demonstration of community and people’s ability to rely on each other when capitalism tries to make everything so scarce and isolated.”

• ZR: “To me, mutual aid means helping people with what they need without expectations or administrative barriers and being able to be helped when I need it. Being a member of MAC makes me feel like I have a community of people who will support me, and also it gives me space to help others when I am able to and that what I have to give means something.”

• AL: "As a disabled person I often feel invisible and erased from society. Our needs are often forgotten about by the government and even our fellow man. For me that stopped when I joined the DSA and MAC. As both a member of MAC and someone who benefits from the help it provides, I felt a sense of community that I wasn’t sure was even possible. I felt seen and supported. My comrades put hard work and dedication into our services every week to provide mutual aid to our communities, where like me, people are seen, not discarded."

PART ONE OF TWO [Reprinted from Geese]

Too often, mutual aid, direct action, and electoralism are treated as exclusive contrasts. Reflecting on his work in the San Diego chapter of DSA, Aldo B. argues that each tactic is part of a necessary whole and that any of them, taken individually, are ineffective as a revolutionary strategy.

Abolish ICE May Day 2026. Edgar Ramirez photo

A colleague of mine once said that his revolutionary cocktail for the systemic change we needed as a movement entailed three key elements; direct action, mutual aid, and electoralism. This concoction has stuck with me and rolled around in my head since he said it over a year ago in his millennial-style car vlog that he posted on Instagram. I've since expanded these three components into conceptualized processes:

• Direct Action is the means by which existing conditions are confronted head on to the point of rupture in the mode of production.

• Mutual-Aid is the logistical metric for satisfying the consumption of a community by an organized grassroots network of distribution and production. 

• Electoralism is the competition between politically organized factions over the attention economy of the electorate, aka, the 30-60% of the population that is allowed to vote.

With the recent primaries across the country, my own personal hajj to NYC, and of course the lovely DSA discourse on X the Everything App, this revolutionary cocktail has only come to sit evermore in the front and center of my thinking about how to organize internally around a variety of issues my comrades feel passionately about—especially in light of those issues seemingly being at odds with one another. 

I’ll state explicitly now that I fundamentally disagree with the framing of these three tactics as being antagonistic towards each other. In fact I would go as far to state that the distilled critiques which a proponent of direct action or mutual aid might level against electoralism and a staunch electoralist against the proponents of mutual aid or direct action, are all the same. None of these tactics are an end in and of themselves. 

Standing alone, Mutual-Aid is mere charity at best, or bandaids for bullet holes at its worst; Direct Action is frankly adventurism at best, or in the worst case acts as a revolutionary release valve; and Electoralism may demonstrate a shift in the Overton Window, but at the expense of cooptation and complacency with a tepid reformism. It is only together, united by a coherent and democratically decided strategy, that its potency for revolutionary change can be actualized. 

That's enough theory for now, but I want this conceptual engine to be humming in the background as you read this piece. 

DSA contingent at Progressive Labor Summit 2026. Random attendee photo

Personally, since I was a young man, I have always strived to be a well-rounded organizer, a Jack of All Trades if you will. My mother would call me a metiche (nosey?), but that's neither here nor there. The way that manifests in my organizing today is that I have a tendency to stick my fingers in every pie within arm’s reach. I run the political education committee as an elected leader in my chapter, founded and am an active participant of our migrant rights subcommittee, am the former mentor for the electoral working group and current campaign manager of a chapter cadre campaign, a proud member of the Springs of Revolution network championing our national priority Labor for an Arms Embargo locally in conjunction with our Palestine Solidarity and Labor working groups; and last, but certainly not least, my day job is as an organizer for a statewide non-profit that leans towards tenant organizing. All that to say is, six years into my organizing journey, I have yet to pigeonhole myself into just one avenue of organizing. I may not have done it consciously initially, but I try to embody the concoction of this revolutionary formula in my day-to-day organizing projects. 

Through my experience, I believe there is something to be abstracted from the overlaps in these tactically diverse projects and campaigns.Allow me to explain.

I will start with direct action as it is probably the most contentious and certainly the most volatile element of the cocktail. I want to clarify now that I am not necessarily talking about the high-risk civil disobedience operations of a Palestine Action or of a civil uprising nature; though assuredly those too have their place in the cocktail. The primary methods of direct action organized by DSA San Diego are pro-Palestine banner drops, anti-ICE community defense, and strike line support. 

In my opinion, banner drops are a sort of guerrilla political education and agitation. Of the near dozen banner drops we have organized or supported in the last year, they have proven to be opportunities for some of the most frank organizing conversations amongst the membership and with the general public. I recall one instance during a banner drop in the South Bay, a predominantly Latine working class community, where a woman began to lightly criticize us; not for being pro-Palestine, but genuinely interrogating us as to how hanging a piece of painted cloth over a bridge helps the Palestinian people. The working group cochair and I explained to her that our intentions were to keep Palestine in the public’s mind. Nearly three years into the genocide and almost a year into Trump’s regime, it almost feels as though, with the onslaught of tragedy after tragedy domestically, people might forget or deprioritize Palestinian liberation in order to deal with the struggles we have to overcome at home. What we were really trying to do was emphasize that the struggle in Palestine was the same struggle we faced here.

ICE Rapid Response First Aid Training. Antonio Raass photo

In the same vein, our anti-ICE community patrols are another form of direct action. Just as in Palestine the genocide was result of a century of development by the Zionist entity, experimenting with different methods of occupation and disenfranchisement, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security are fomenting the early stages of an ethnic cleansing of working class black and brown people from our communities. When I motivated to prioritize community self-defense in the chapter, I was met with some well-intentioned pushback. The main worry was the high-risk nature of the work and associating with organizations like Union del Barrio (which had just been the target of a congressional investigation for their role in the LA resistance to ICE occupation). Ultimately, enough members of the working group reasoned that, if DSA defending migrant communities was unlawful, then that long arm would eventually come for us anyway. 

We spent the first three months investigating how radical projects like this had been executed in the past. We examined the Black Panthers and engaged with the plethora of resources that organizations like CrimeThinc, SiempraNC, and Front Line Defenders had compiled on ICE tactics and strategy. We read historical and contemporary pieces of theory on how a ragtag group of socialists could even stand a chance at hampering in any way an imperial terror machine like the US government. As we grew and developed, we realized that patrolling the community was beginning to inspire discourse on the notion and structures of public safety. This consciousness was spreading not just among patrollers, but within the communities themselves. The patrols became prefigurative for how a community protects itself from an entity that wishes to do it harm, and our chapter was a driving force in that.

Direct action also takes the form of labor work. We are lucky enough locally to have a talented and knowledgeable labor working group chair that keeps tabs on every union in contract negotiations, prepping for a strike, or already on the strike line. By the time they have begun, we are already actively organizing in support of it. We are turning out members to the strike line, donating to strike funds, and even anchoring strike kitchens. My experience walking strike lines has displayed (and tested) the vast spectrum of revolutionary optimism that can emerge out of solidarity with militant workers fighting against unfair labor practices. It is almost a form of political education similar to what occurs during a banner drop, except no one is wondering what exactly the picketers are trying to accomplish—it’s right there on the signs! 

Most recently, on a 24-hour Teamsters picket line, I got to talk to workers about everything from the world cup to the Iran war. But the most consistent topic the workers brought up was that, in spite of the risk they were taking, they felt deeply convinced that they could win this fight. It was deeply inspirational and to my mind demonstrated the potency of direct action as not just a tactic for fighting the good fight, but as a method for motivating workers that a better world was in fact possible. All they needed was to take the risk to fight for it.

[Stay tuned for Part Two in the October California Red]

“…people believe, 'Well this is a really affordable premium experience.' Because they're saying like, 'Well it's less than $10 and I get a really premium experience'." 

—Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, Wall Street Journal interview, April 2026.

The unionization movement will drag Starbucks and companies like it kicking and screaming into a world where “good business” means treating workers and customers fairly.

Being ordered by your boss to do the impossible is nothing new. Nearly everyone has multiple stories of a boss holding them to an unreasonable standard. But those managers may not just be one-off cranks whose demands of their employees don't ultimately affect the overall business model and instead are a symptom of a much deeper problem. My argument is that this phenomenon has not only become more common in lower management; these unrealistic and often contradictory expectations are increasingly common in the corporate upper management of the monopolies that dominate our daily lives.

I've been working at Starbucks for nearly a year. Under the tenure of Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, I have become well-versed in the corporate double talk Starbucks deploys. Starbucks corporate waxes poetic about creating a cozy, calm, local-feeling cafe atmosphere. The reality is we are a fast-food restaurant, and we are designed to operate like one. During peak hours we are expected to send a car in the drive-thru on its way, on average, every 45 seconds. This is an impossible standard to reliably maintain. Barring miraculous circumstances, with everyone working as efficiently as possible, we can expect to hit 55-65 seconds, and that’s still without writing on cups.

As you may know, we baristas are supposed to write a personalized message on the drinks we make. We’re not even supposed to write messages on cups ahead of time based on the logic that they couldn’t have been written with personalized intent. Baristas generally forgo the cup writing altogether, only pulling out their sharpies when the district manager drops by. Needless to say, this mass-produced personalized experience Starbucks ostensibly pursues is not possible, let alone while keeping drive times under 45 seconds. This is what Starbucks corporate thinks can be pawned off as a “really affordable premium experience”. They sincerely believe customers will read the words “pumpkin vibes” hastily scrawled on their pumpkin spice latte and forget Starbucks raised prices again. It betrays a frighteningly low opinion of their consumer base’s intelligence. Customers are smart enough to understand that the message on their cup wasn’t written for them personally—it was written to meet a quota.

The greatest example of Starbucks’ anti-reality obtuseness is its refusal to bargain in good faith with Starbucks Workers United. After years of fighting, Starbucks has racked up mountains of labor law violations. For now, they write the fines they have to pay off as the cost of doing business. This is not a sustainable strategy. The Starbucks unionization effort spreads further and faster each year, as does the DSA takeover of the Democratic party. Eventually, one of two things will happen: Starbucks union density will reach critical mass and force Starbucks to settle a contract, or an insurgent socialist administration will prosecute Starbucks’ labor violations so vigorously that continuing to incur fines becomes completely untenable. 

If Starbucks is serious about saving its flailing company, they will have to start with meeting the demands of their employees. The unionization movement will drag Starbucks and companies like it kicking and screaming into a world where “good business” means treating workers and customers fairly, not maximizing shareholder value at the expense of the entire planet.

Every so often we have an opportunity to do something transformative. I’m not talking about “changing the narrative”, although that’s important and part of the picture. I’m talking about changing the world. 

Easy to say, hard to do. But on October 10 we will have that opportunity by countering right wing billionaire lies with a simple truth: education and health care are rights, not privileges reserved for the wealthy few.

East Bay DSA and the Alameda Labor Council joined forces to launch the first Tax the Rich canvass in Oakland September 19, two days after the chapter’s art build created the signage.

On the November 3 state ballot there are two initiatives—Prop 3 and Prop 40—that together give us the chance to help the richest Californians part with a significant amount of money, unneeded by them, and absolutely necessary to bettering the lives of millions of the rest of us.

Prop 3 makes a temporary state income tax on the top two percent of income earners permanent. It supports public education. Prop 40 taxes California billionaires on their enormous wealth, five percent to backfill cuts Trump made to Medi-Cal. If it doesn’t pass three million Californians will lose access to health care.

Currently there are phone banks and door to door canvassing happening, and you can join these to help. Sign up here for Prop 3, and here for Prop 40. But there’s one other thing you can do that potentially can make the biggest difference: come out on October 10 for both measures.

On that day people across the state will hold signs on streets, banners on freeway overpasses, leaflet in public places, and demonstrate. Perhaps we might pay a visit to a billionaire or two and say hello. We often hear that while the rich have the money, we have the people. That equation only works when the people are organized enough to counter the money power.

What does the money power look like? A handful of sociopathic billionaires, claiming without justification to speak on behalf of all 250 members of that group in California, have spent more than $150 million so far against Prop 40. That spending has bought confusion and fear on the basis of lies (California will lose investments, taxes and jobs; first they tax billionaires, then they come for you; this is a tax on all of us, etc.). Even relatively well-informed people are perplexed, as I found in talking with voters in the first East Bay Tax the Rich canvass on September 19.

This is unsurprising. We know that if a lie is repeated enough times at least some people will be persuaded, or at least confused. And at this point the lying commercials and digital ads are everywhere. But the good news is that the lies are easy to address in one-on-one conversations. The deep anger in the electorate toward Trump-supporting billionaires is waiting there ready to tap. Through the phone banks, and at the doors.

So we organize. By coming out on October 10 with a high public profile we can provide the truthful alternative view. We may not have the money for the advertising, but we can earn a spot on the news, in social media, and turn around the confusion in neighborhood conversations. 

California DSA is working with the labor movement and other coalition organizations to make October 10 California Tax the Rich Day. This is how we organize the day of action: we do it ourselves. No one is coming to the rescue except us: Workers over Billionaires. 

To get involved, contact your local DSA chapter, your union, your local central labor council. Plan to come out. Put together an art build. Make signs. Make banners and set them up where the public can see them. Find a place to stand, and stand there together on October 10. It will make a difference in this campaign, and in this world.

Join the California DSA Tax the Rich Working Group.

For more info, contact Working Group co-chair Mark G.

There has been a momentary lull in the mass demonstrations against Trumpian fascism. We haven’t seen a “No Kings Day” since March 28 (although one is being scheduled for October), and it’s been almost four months since the most robust May Day participation in this country since the 1940s. Thus as we count down to the November 3 election it is all the more important to get out on the streets on Labor Day, Monday September 7, to rebuild the public profile for mass action, which in turn supports enthusiasm for progressive candidates and ballot measures.

Traditionally Labor Day is the official kick-off within the labor movement to canvassing in an election year. This time around in California the difference is that it features a rejuvenated left edge to the state’s unions in the wake of the important decision at the August 4 California AFL-CIO convention to support the Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, along with Prop 3, the Education and Health Care Act. Enactment of this dual hit on ruling class income and wealth will produce a fairer share of taxes paid by the state’s richest residents to support public education and health care. 

It will also send a signal to the most reactionary tech bro capitalists that their insane level of political spending can’t buy our democracy.

Historic Opportunity

The marquee political campaign for California DSA this year is our Tax the Rich effort. Our state council endorsed both measures before any other organization in the Golden State. As a result we have set up committees and working groups in our chapters, held (and continue to hold) educational forums and trainings, and crafted materials to use in educating our members, unionists, and the electorate. 

Due to our level of preparedness, our chapters are in good position to work with local central labor councils and their new mandate to support Props 3 and 40 across the state on Labor Day and onward toward the election. One example: East Bay DSA is partnering with the Alameda Labor Council to phonebank and canvass for the two tax the rich measures along with candidates for office endorsed by both groups. 

The increased cooperation between organized labor and DSA has been driven by the tremendous successes of DSA’s electoral program around the country. There is a new level of respect within unions for the hard work and principled cooperation of socialists in politics. 

The labor movement, for its part, is more prepared for Labor Day than I’ve seen in a long time. The California Federation of Labor Unions has posted the upcoming activities of its councils well in advance of the holiday and is organizing for marches, picnics, and other actions and celebrations. See the local events here.

This Labor Day let’s continue to build on the synergy. A strong socialist presence at Labor Day events will grow both movements. 

• Labor Day events

• Tax the Rich campaign materials

• Taxing the Rich in American History: A Forum with Vanessa Williamson September 16

Revealing Results of a Berkeley Community Health Study

I operate a physical therapy clinic in downtown Berkeley, Calif., which has been in service to the community for over 35 years.  I have worked here for fifteen years and witnessed the deterioration of our healthcare system firsthand as it relates to addressing the functional mobility needs of our community members. 

Through daily interactions with patients, I’ve seen consistent patterns of discrepancy between insurances and access to care.  However, these valuable insights remained largely anecdotal. So we sought to formally document them in a proposed community-based study, which would confirm that these factors result in perpetuating inequities in our community.

True experiences and obstacles

Our clinic teamed up with UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies and two community organizations, Healthy Black Families, Inc., and the Friends of Adeline, to highlight the true experiences and obstacles our patients face when attempting to access care. 

The study attempted to understand the level of recognition and attention that patients received from referral sources and insurance providers when trying to navigate these realities. 

Our aim was to transform these observations into actionable knowledge and present it to our city, county and state governments. 

Community physical therapy clinics face deteriorating support systems.

We formulated a successful grant application on this subject for a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Grant, which awarded us the opportunity to formally study our community’s access to care. 

The study cohort consisted of patients from different insurance coverages who were placed into a listening study.  The study design included three workshops with 27 participants and a facilitator who administered the questions.  All of the workshops were video- and audio-recorded and later transcribed and interpreted by three different readers (no AI). 

As our recordings demonstrate, the majority of patients from the most vulnerable socio-economic bracket covered by Medi-Cal were people of color and senior citizens.  We juxtaposed their experiences to others in the listening study, who are cash-paying clients and higher-income private insurance members. 

This study revealed clear and substantial inequities present in the healthcare system.  It also revealed a disconnect between the city of Berkeley and its community healthcare clinics, which the city supports materially. 

As the community clinics that support Medicaid clients do not provide physical therapy (PT) services under their umbrella, they must refer PT to an outside clinic.  However, the reimbursement levels are so low for these services that the majority of the clinics refuse to accept these patients.  Facing this obstacle, affected patients typically discontinue pursuit of care and their physical mobility becomes significantly impacted or lost altogether, further damaging their overall health and generating a greater burden to their community. 

Study findings: themes and solutions

Our findings also illuminated the disconnect between those who seek care and those who are providing it.  After studying the transcripts, five key themes were identified, which will be brought to the attention of city, county and state policymakers to address potential solutions: 

1) The need for Medicare for All to address delayed treatment, and lack of insurance coverage.

2) The negative effects of virtual physical therapy (isolation, lack of physical touch, static vs. dynamic assessment).

 3) No health without care (positive effects of manual physical therapy, human touch, one-on-one care).

 4) The importance of preventative care (independence and mobility impact quality of life, reduction of negatively impacting social networks and, thus, the greater healthcare system).

 5) A disconnect between city of Berkeley support of the Lifelong Medical Care clinics that request PT, while not supporting PT clinics as part of their structure.

The overarching voice of the Medicaid group, in contrast to the private-pay groups, underscores the perils of accessing care, continuing care and the debilitating cost to members to the detriment of their communities and the healthcare system as a whole.

The hardworking staff at Berkeley Community Physical Therapy.

Our study focused intentionally on insurance levels that point to socio-economic sectors as opposed to race/ethnicity.  However, because we identified participants by their insurance coverage, we know that 50 percent of the participants are below the poverty line (very low or extremely low-income bracket).  

Our study clarified the fact that this portion of the population must wait for extended periods of time while their physical status deteriorates, as opposed to participants who have direct access to care with no waiting times.

The listening study also emphasized the importance of manual therapy care and one-on-one care, which many insurance carriers no longer reimburse for. The classic relationship between the physical therapist practitioner and the patient that used to be based on face-to-face, hands-on care has been replaced by “patient mills,” where patients are being given exercises and monitored by unlicensed aides and hardly ever physically touched. 

This approach is used to bridge the financial gap of poor reimbursement by the practitioners to make up for the loss in revenue.  The study overwhelmingly revealed the effectiveness of manual therapy and direct care in healing the patients who participated in the study or, to put more simply, people before profit.

The cost of “wealthcare”

The political and economic system in which Californians are presently ensnared orients state healthcare policy around private ownership and above all, profit. The actual cost of this “wealthcare” regime is orders of magnitude higher than the exorbitant profits investors extract. Indeed it is a price Californians pay with their bodies, their community, and their human agency. Quoting from the most recent DSA Program, Workers Deserve More: “The political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs. As capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism. Big business makes deals with the government to line their pockets.”

The study highlighted the positive effects of preventative care and manual physical therapy.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the health care system, with big hospital systems being rewarded huge profits at the expense of our communities. As community clinics are driven under and funding is lost, our traditional safety nets disintegrate for the benefit of a small handful of privileged oligarchs.As community clinics (which have historically treated the working-class) are driven under and funding is directed upwards, our traditional safety nets are being disintegrated for the benefit of a small handful of privileged investors. We must go beyond merely countering this moral calamity by organizing local DSA chapters to demand that California’s top public institutions center the findings of this study and others like it to fund policy and programs that foster community-based health care accountable to elderly, disabled and underprivileged Californians. We must also demand our elected representatives center community-based healthcare hand-in-hand with adequate reimbursement through policies that strengthen and center patients and their healthcare providers above the interests of the medical insurance industry.

Cancel Thanksgiving? A Progressive Guide for Handling the Holidays

It’s a good thing that labor journalist and author Matt Witt was not running for governor of Wisconsin this year like DSA candidate Francesca Hong. Democratic primary rivals and Republican opposition researchers would have badly distorted the message of Witt’s new book Make Holidays Your Own (Common Ground Press). It encourages creative rethinking of family gatherings and community practices on major holidays.

In their effort to discredit Hong, her foes in both parties created what the New York Timescalled a “social media kerfuffle” over old social media posts dissing Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.

The outspoken state legislator and former restaurant owner from Madison lost her August 11 primary despite polling very strongly beforehand. Given the annual sense of foreboding that overtakes millions of Americans when tense family re-unions draw near in late November, Hong’s past call for Thanksgiving to be “cancelled”—because of its connection to “colonialism”—probably had its local fans.

Under fire on the campaign trail, Hong did concede that bringing people together around a table can be “a good thing.” But, according to the Times, she also courted controversy by “questioning the value of Valentine’s Day and Christmas trees.” So not only Wisconsin turkey farmers, but gift card sellers and Christmas tree growers—if sufficiently miffed—might have voted instead for the moderate Democrat from Milwaukee, David Crowley, who won the primary. 

And even if Hong had prevailed, according to the Times, she faced the challenge of winning over voters like John Wilson, a 61-year-old pharmacist from Platteville WI, who usually “leans Democratic.” However, when asked whether he favored Hong or U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, Wilson chose the latter because “you have to take people at their word” about serious matters like Thanksgiving.

Tiffany has strong views on holidays too; in 2021, he was one of 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth Day a federal holiday, which won’t be popular with African-American voters statewide.

Just A Few Days Off

In the future, left-leaning candidates can avoid even momentarily distracting flaps like this by reading Matt Witt’s book—hopefully, before pulling the trigger on Twitter in a moment of pique. The few paid days off that most Americans get to enjoy should not be cancel culture targets, when, as the author argues, they can be celebrated in ways “more historically accurate, meaningful, inclusive and fun.”

In Make Holidays Your Own, Witt offers much creative advice about dealing with that day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day and eight others; his focus is on countering their crass commercialization, historical baggage, stultifying traditionalism, or exploitation by the right. 

See, for example, the garish 250th birthday party staged on July Fourth of this year in Washington, D.C. by the White House and its corporate funders. While no doubt critical of that, Abdul El-Sayed, the successful Democratic Senate primary winner in Michigan is definitely tiptoeing around the issue of fireworks on the Fourth.

As the Times notes, “he has deleted a number of videos and posts where he floated the idea of abandoning fireworks on Independence Day.” El-Sayed’s press spokesperson is now reminding voters that he “is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander.”

In other words, he’s an All-American guy! As Witt explains, “In every culture, holidays matter. They come with a message and symbols— with a story that reinforces a certain way of looking at society and passes on certain values to the next generation.” According to the author, what’s good about remaking holidays, in ways that send a different message, “is that you don’t have to convince everyone in your community who doesn’t agree. They can celebrate however they want and so can you.”

A Labor Day History Lesson

And sometimes the development of alternative celebrations—such as the reclaiming of May Day by the modern day, more immigrant-influenced U.S. labor movement—can lead to two opportunities to picnic, protest, and march, rather than just one!

As a former communications director for the United Mine Workers and Service Employees International Union, the author delves most informatively into the political agenda behind the creation of Labor Day, as a counter to nascent working-class internationalism in the late nineteenth century.

Readers will learn that it was a corporate Democratic President—rather than any anti-union Republican—who first tried to erase the memory of May 1 as an international workers’ holiday born in the U.S.A., and replace it with an end of summer day off out of step with the rest of the world. 

Thanksgiving can be a dangerous holiday in various ways.

To add insult to injury, May 1 then got officially rebranded, during the McCarthy era, as Law Day—although nobody, even corporate lawyers, get time off for that. Yet, thanks to multiple MAGA threats to the “rule of law” since Trump got re-elected, more than a thousand California bar members used their lunch hour to stage a first-time ever May Day-style protest in downtown San Francisco.

As Witt recounts, massive demonstrations seeking shorter working hours occurred in Chicago and other U.S. cities on May 1, 1886. When repeated on May Day four years later, workers in “dozens of countries in Europe and Latin America also held rallies and marches to support the eight-hour day demand.” 

Thereafter, much to the alarm of “robber barons” here and abroad, May 1 protests became “an annual event for workers all around the world” and an expression of cross-border solidarity between labor radicals of varying stripes.

Forget May Day?

By 1894, however, a business-backed resident of the White House named Grover Cleveland needed a “sop to unions.” He had, after all, just called out federal troops to crush the Pullman strike organized by the American Railway Union, a pioneering alternative to craft unionism led by future Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs (who was jailed for his role in the strike).

At Cleveland’s request, Congress declared that workers should be given a day off, every year, on the first Monday in September so that, as Witt notes, “actions taken by U.S. unions would not be coordinated with their counterparts in the rest of the world.”

Today, Labor Day is a paid holiday for about 3 in 4 workers in the U.S. Ironically, the lowest paid workers are the least likely to have the day off with pay. That includes non-union workers in food service, retail, hotels, agriculture, delivery and janitorial services, as well as part-time workers, or those whose companies claim are ‘independent contractors’ rather than employees.

On the holiday counter-programming front, the good news is that May Day (as noted above) has made a major come-back over the last two decades. There is also “the shining example of the transformation of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day as now observed in many cities and states.”

Thanks to the efforts of progressive veterans’ groups like Veterans for Peace and Common Defense, at least some commemorative events on Memorial Day and Veterans Day now focus on peace and justice issues, rather than uncritical celebration of past wars. 

In his chapter on Martin Luther King Day, the author suggests a range of activities that “can be about the movement and not just the man.” (This is advice that venerators of Cesar Chavez are taking, but only belatedly, after recent revelations about his history of sexual abuse while president of the United Farm Workers.)

Witt reports that all proceeds from his book are going to Rethinking Schools, a 

…national nonprofit organization that supports social, economic, and environmental justice teaching at a time when the very idea of public education is under attack. Rethinking Schools’ materials have been used by tens of thousands of educators and have reached millions of students.

Let’s hope that Make Holidays Your Own also gets into the hands of many educators who have to come up with fresh ideas for in-school celebrations of holidays, that cannot be cancelled even in blue states—but of course, don’t want their personal creativity in the classroom (or pet peeves) unleashing a conservative backlash of the sort that did not help Hong.

After six months of nonstop right-wing bloviating about the Terrible Horrible No Good Billionaire Tax (Proposition 40 on the upcoming November California ballot) and an accompanying “No” campaign supported by some leading liberal allies, there is new wind in the sails of progressive tax politics. 

"I don't know how to lead a labor organization that stands to the right of the Democratic Party on economic issues", said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, the state affiliate of the AFL-CIO, just before her convention voted on August 4 to support the Billionaire Tax. 

Representing some two million plus workers within fifty unions, the CFLU wasn’t the only major organization to come out for Prop 40, a temporary 5% wealth tax on 250 California individuals, earlier this month. Gonzalez was referring to the endorsement delivered just days before by the California Democratic Party (CDP), which raised a single digit-laden hand at Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the most prominent opponents of Prop 40 (along with probable next Governor Xavier Becerra). 

Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, told her convention delegates how embarrassing it would be to get outflanked to the left on economic issues by the Democratic Party.

Newsom seemed to think he could play it both ways, opposing the actually existing billionaire tax proposal in his own state, while calling for imaginary/aspirational higher taxes on billionaires and corporations at the federal level in preparation for his all-but-announced run for president. This transparently opportunistic ploy didn’t cut it with either the CDP or the delegates to the labor fed convention. As icing on the cake, the 100,000-member California Nurses Association also came out for Prop 40 the day before the CFLU convention. 

But as promising as all this movement may be for progressive tax advocates in the Golden State, the greater lesson may be in what it portends for messaging strategies more broadly in the midterm elections.

Slow drip

For the past two months, directly after the California Democratic primary eliminated Tom Steyer— the only major gubernatorial candidate supporting the Billionaire Tax—a slow drip of labor and liberal organizations trashed the proposal with reasoning ranging from somewhat principled to proven lies curated by $100 million in billionaire PAC monies. A week after the primary the 300,000-member California Teachers Association (CTA) and the state Building and Construction Trades Council (BTC) went public with their opposition, followed by Planned Parenthood, the California Medical Association and others. 

Why did the CTA—a leading advocate of the other progressive tax on the ballot, Prop 3—oppose a temporary tax meant to backfill a $20 billion per year hole in the state’s Medicaid budget created by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill? Some 14 million Californians are supported by Medi-Cal, the state version of Medicaid. The coming massive reduction in federal Medicaid funding, which pays for tax cuts for the richest Americans, directly impacts the students and families served by CTA members. As most teacher unions ritually announce in defense of their students every time a state public health budget is slashed, “You can’t teach a child who comes to your classroom sick.”

The answer is complicated, and I have addressed it in detail elsewhere. The short version is that the union that sponsored the Billionaire Tax, SEIU-United Health Care Workers, designed the tax to send 90% of its revenues to address the Medicaid problem, and the remaining 10% to be split among other services. This violated the understanding in Sacramento that 40% of general fund revenues should go to public education. It also raised, possibly, a hurdle to passage of Proposition 3, the Education and Health Care Act, planned by the longstanding progressive tax coalition CTA is part of before UHW launched the Billionaire Tax. 

Prop 3, an income tax on the top two percent of taxpayers in the state, has no lack of supporters. The coalition did its homework and by last year everyone to the left of Attila the Hun was on board its project, which is to make a temporary tax that currently brings in upwards of ten billion dollars a year for schools and services permanent. 

DOA?

As the organizations, or at least their leaders, were piling onto the anti-Billionaire Tax train, pundits rushed to pronounce Prop 40 dead on arrival. Mainstream media reportage breathlessly announced the “split” in the labor movement. Op eds in major newspapers by right wing think tank wonks distorted the numbers to “prove” that the mechanism of the tax couldn’t work. Political newsletters pondered the arcane mysteries of Proposition 98, the ballot measure passed by voters in 1988 that mandates 40% of the California state budget to education. 

Undeterred, SEIU-United Health Care Workers (UHW) plugged away. Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna splashily supported the tax. It collected signatures and courted coalition partners like California Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which provided a dual endorsement of the Billionaire Tax and Proposition 3 early in the year. California Teamsters and California AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), along with two large hotel and restaurant union locals, came on board both taxes as well. UHW suffered and survived negotiations with Newsom’s office to relinquish the ballot measure if the Governor and Legislature would agree to a reduced 2% tax, an offer that Newsom rejected. It sent its organizers to talk with California Democratic Party delegates and unions in the labor federation. 

Molten Reservoir

The persistence paid off. Rumblings of discontent bubbled up within labor at top-down leadership maneuvering against what seemed to most rank and filers a righteous cause. One sign of what was to come emerged a week before the CFLU convention, when the local San Diego labor council and building trades council both voted to support the Billionaire Tax.

This points to a more significant issue than the infighting within labor and purportedly progressive organizations over a couple taxes. It should come as no surprise that a year and a half into the ruinous Trump 2.0, there is an enormous molten reservoir of electorate anger at billionaires— especially the insufferably arrogant tech bros leading the charge against the Billionaire Tax—ready to be tapped. 

Shifts in the electorate

Much of the attention around shifts in the electorate has been focused on the war inside the Democratic Party between youthful DSA and other left candidates for office versus old guard centrist Democrats. But equally significant to understanding what is and isn’t going to work in the mid-term elections is something that has always been the case: that the voters, when given the opportunity to vote to tax the rich, generally do so with enthusiasm. And when the theme is folded into the campaigns of left candidates—as in Mamdani’s in New York—it helps, both because of what it promises to fund on behalf of working people, and because it puts meat on the bones of populist economic appeals.

An opening now exists in the Golden State, three months before the election, to craft a united tax the rich campaign with national implications. California, launchpad to neoliberal tax politics with Prop 13 in 1978, can redeem this stain by passing the first state level wealth tax in the nation’s modern history at the same time as making a more traditional top bracket income tax permanent. Passage of both will not erase California’s vast economic inequalities overnight. It will not even mean that the rich are paying their fair share of taxes—just a fairer share. What it can do is firmly underscore the immense importance in elections of acknowledging economic inequality and doing something about it.

What will be needed to win both Props 3 and 40, against the tsunami of fascist billionaire anti-tax spending, is a common progressive tax message and grassroots campaign, an approach that will more likely bring victory to both measures than separate campaigns that ignore their commonalities. This common messaging should contain at its center the idea that education and health care are rights, not privileges, and that passage of both measures would represent the wealthy finally paying a fairer share for that common good.

After more than a half century studying, teaching, writing about and participating in the California labor movement, I am completely clear about one simple lesson: when we are united, we win, and when we allow ourselves to be divided, we lose.

This is, of course, not an original idea. We might look to Abraham Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself cannot stand” on the eve of the Civil War as one similar observation among many others along the way. But the difficulty, over and over again, is that powerful forces are always working to divide us, and they succeed all too often. And they are doing it again right now.

This year California’s unions have an unprecedented opportunity to tap the well-deserved anger its members are feeling toward the anti-union Trump administration and its ultra-rich supporters in our state. Two ‘tax the rich’ ballot measures, Prop 3 and Prop 40, will be voted on by the state’s electorate on November 3. 

Prop 3 is a currently existing tax on the wealthiest two percent of income earners. Last year it brought over $14 billion into the state treasury to support public education, as well as other public services. But it is temporary. If allowed to expire it will cause devastating reductions in an already-strapped public education system. Prop 3 proposes to make it permanent. 

Prop 40 is a proposed temporary wealth tax on the state’s couple hundred billionaires. It would assess a one-time tax, to be paid over five years, on the billionaires’ collective hoard of two trillion dollars—a sum bloated by their federal tax cuts engineered by Trump and his congressional allies. The amount to be raised—one hundred billion dollars—will prevent cuts in Medi-Cal spending that otherwise will throw millions of the state’s poorest families off of their health care. 

Neither of these taxes will harm in the slightest the well-off people who will pay them and they will benefit all Californians who wish to be educated and healthy. A no-brainer for the labor movement, yes?

The state’s unions are in two camps supporting one or the other. There are only a handful of unions on board both measures. There are reasons for this, as there always are. Some of the reasons are better than others, but what they add up to is trouble for the state’s working families and the entire labor movement if either of the measures fail to pass. 

The obvious direct harm would be to students and patients, but it radiates outward from there to their families and communities. That’s easy to see. How does it harm the state’s unions? In general, unions, when they have their heads screwed on straight, understand the necessity for the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. Without that, the responsibility of supporting social services falls on the shoulders of the working class, union members and non-members alike, who generally are willing to take on their fair share, so long as their employers, large corporations and the rest of the capitalist class are doing so too.

The effort by a small cadre of ultra-conservative ultra-rich to divide and confuse the California working class over this issue has been underway since late last year. The sociopathic greed of a dozen or so megalomaniac tech bros have propelled them to spend an astonishing $125 million against the Billionaire Tax. Their arguments are simple and false, but when you have that kind of money to burn we enter the territory of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ infamous advice that a big lie repeated enough times becomes true. Mailers, digital ads, right wing think tank “studies” and now an $87 million television buy are demonstrating two things: that the ideas of our contemporary right wing anti-tax propagandists owe much to fascist thinkers; and that the effectiveness of such a campaign is enhanced when it has largely gone unanswered by the proponents of Prop 40 and Prop 3.

Prop 40 proponents haven’t answered in kind because they don’t have that kind of money at their disposal. But they also haven’t shown that they are building the kind of grassroots union campaign—big coalition, major mobilization of rank and file members in phone banks, canvassing and visible street demonstrations; in other words, the best tools at unions’ disposal—that it will take to defeat the billionaires.

Prop 3 proponents haven’t answered because the attacks—so far—have only been against the billionaire tax, and the Prop 3 coalition leaders do not seem to understand that there is a higher principle involved here than the violations of labor coalition-building protocols committed by SEIU-UHW. The higher principle is, quite simply, the general good of the entire California working class—not to mention understanding the damage that will be done to momentum around the country for tax the rich campaigns (most recently successful in places like Massachusetts and Washington state) should the Billionaire Tax be defeated. A defeat will also hurt the chances of future progressive tax campaigns here in California.

IWW leader Big Bill Haywood explained to striking Lawrence textile workers in 1912 that while the AFL organizes “like this”, the IWW organizes like this: a fist. The lesson is still the right one.

In 1912, during the massive “Bread and Roses” strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Industrial Workers of the World leader Big Bill Haywood spread out his fingers during a speech and told the crowd, “This is how the AFL organizes”, and enumerated the different craft unions organizing separately from one another. He noted that individual fingers could be easily disabled. Combining his fingers into a fist, the miners’ union leader roared, “This is how the IWW organizes”. Acting upon that lesson led the Lawrence workers to victory. But memory within organized labor of that point has been, time after time, victim to a deadly historical amnesia.

The California Federation of Labor Unions meets on August 4 to debate and vote on Prop 3 and Prop 40, among other issues. A vote to endorse both measures is in the interest of every union in the federation and every one of its more than two million members. The delegates to the meeting would do well to heed the words of Haywood and not succumb to narrow trade-conscious interests and the barrage of lies launched by their class enemies. Instead, it’s time for a unified labor movement to lead.

UTLA bargaining team members on 4/12/2026.

It’s become tradition in Los Angeles that when teachers strike, it rains. At 3 am on April 12th, 2026, the 150-member bargaining team of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) was still negotiating with Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), with only two days before the planned strike of 37,000 teachers in the second largest school district in the nation. They would be joined by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, which represents custodians, bus drivers, and maintenance staff; Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA), which represents middle management such as principals; and DSA-LA in solidarity. The three unions striking together would be more than 70,000 workers. 

It is the 26th bargaining session for the 2025-2027 UTLA contract, and it is pitch-black outside in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood, with thousands awaiting news of whether their daily lives will be upended in just two days. The walkout would have been the union’s third strike in seven years, following a six-day strike in 2019 and a three-day solidarity strike with SEIU Local 99 in 2023. Before those two strikes, UTLA had not struck since 1989.

Just before 4 am on April 12th, the UTLA bargaining team came to a tentative agreement (TA) with the district administration after more than 14 months of negotiations. Later that day AALA followed suit with its own TA, and at 2 am on April 14th, just six hours before the planned three union strike, SEIU Local 99 reached its own TA with the district. By maintaining a credible strike threat, UTLA won a historic contract that fixed broken salary scales for the first time in decades; secured an average salary increase of 13.86%, with a minimum increase of 8%; established paid parental leave for the first time; protected workers against subcontracting; preserved Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) funding; and won breakthrough Special Education agreements, among many other gains—all without actually striking.

Moments after TA is reached on 4/12/2026, Meredith Schafer, UTLA Research Director (left), Cheryl Coney, UTLA Executive Director (center left), and Brian McNamara, UTLA Organizing and Representation Director (center).

“We averted a strike. We shot down the district's arguments with figures that backed up what we've been saying all along,” says Gloria Martinez, now UTLA president. (She was UTLA treasurer and a lead officer for the UTLA bargaining team during the 2025-2026 contract negotiations. She was also a DSA member and plans on rejoining, she says; she’s just been busy.) 

What Martinez is speaking of is LAUSD’s narrative of austerity, used during every cycle of contract negotiations for years. Regardless of how good or bad the economics of the district are at the time, such as having over $5 billion dollars in unrestricted reserves as a “rainy day fund” at the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year equaling 35% of total spending, the CFOs of the district sow fear and doubt. They mainly do this through economic projections that in one year, two years, three years, the district will fall off a fiscal cliff, and so they claim their hands are tied. To be fiscally responsible, the district cannot spend another dollar more, if their economic projections are to be believed. 

“When you have a multibillion-dollar organization like LAUSD who can invest in PR machines that use budget figures to scare off folks into believing they can't afford what workers are demanding, I think that it creates confusion and hesitancy and allows for that fear and uncertainty to creep in,” adds Martinez.

The figures UTLA mustered to combat the administration’s scarcity and austerity arguments came chiefly from the UTLA research team, UTLA staff members who were with the UTLA bargaining team during the contract negotiations. LAUSD administration argued it could not spend a dollar more because when it looks toward the future, it expects that it will not have enough money to afford what the union is demanding. The UTLA research team investigated how accurate LAUSD’s past financial predictions were. California school districts are required to do a three-year projection of their budget, and when you consider LAUSD’s projections for where they would be three years out, every year from the 2013-2014 school year through 2024-2025, a pattern emerges. Historically, on average, the difference between what the district projects and what they end up with one year later is off by 57 percent. Two years out they are off by 268 percent and three years out they are off by 888 percent.

This would be similar to a friend asking to borrow $2,000 from you because, they say, they are $2,000 in debt, only for you to later discover that they actually had $16,000 in the bank. They keep saying this to you every year. For 10 years. Understanding this track record deflated much of the fear and doubt the UTLA bargaining team first experienced when the district’s negotiation team began presenting how badly their finances would deteriorate over the next three years if it agreed to the union’s proposals. 

Though the UTLA research team is essential for countering the administration’s claims of scarcity, it was not the only reason for UTLA’s victories.

“The main reason we were able to win without going on strike this time was that we had a credible strike threat. We've become an organizing and strike-ready union through the efforts of many people who have helped transform UTLA since 2014, including members of the Educators Organizing for Power (EOP) caucus and DSA members,” says Ryan Andrews, a UTLA bargaining team member, EOP member, and DSA member. “We talk with every member of the union, understand the issues they care most deeply about, and involve them in organizing. That's how we built the power to cut through the district's austerity narrative.”

A union which for 30 years before 2014 had become a low-participation organization is now a union which is known for winning its contract through being strike-ready, even without actually going on strike. This change began in 2014 when Alex Caputo-Pearl, a DSA member, and the Union Power caucus slate running with him were elected to leadership in UTLA. The new leadership’s years spent rank-and-file caucus organizing with Chicago’s Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators germinated a change in UTLA. Five years later in 2019, under Caputo-Pearl, UTLA would go on strike alone for 6 days in the rain and win pay increases, first-ever enforceable class size caps, more nurses and librarians, an LAUSD call for a moratorium on charter schools, a first-ever Community Schools initiative, and racial justice victories, among other gains. 

Four years later in 2023, this change in the union proved durable as the next UTLA president, Cecily Myart-Cruz, led UTLA to strike in solidarity with SEIU Local 99 while UTLA was in its own negotiations with LAUSD. After striking for three days again in the rain, UTLA and SEIU Local 99 won their contracts, with UTLA winning significant pay raises, further lowering of class sizes, enshrining the Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP), and an expansion of Community Schools initiatives into the UTLA contract, among other victories.

Three years later, UTLA has won again, and though there was no strike for teachers to march through a downpour, I and others in the bargaining team at 1 am got caught in the rain just hours before the TA, keeping the tradition alive and well. 

“What we can learn from this contract is listening to what is felt throughout the city, the issues that impact the workers and our community,” Martinez says when I ask what lessons the union should carry into 2028, when UTLA and many other unions across the country will again negotiate contracts. “We have a system that is failing them. Standing up for the issues that are deeply felt allows us to consolidate that collective power, it allows us to change the narrative.”

Over 30,000 for UTLA, SEIU Local 99, and AALA 3/28/2026 at Grand Park.

Canvassing in Irvine.

A candidate no one had heard of entered a statewide race no one really knew about and ended up with more than half a million votes. Oliver Ma’s campaign for Lieutenant Governor was California DSA’s first statewide candidate race and will not be the last. 

Across the board, people were excited about Oliver and about his platform, too [see accompanying article with chapter campaign reports]. Affordable housing, free healthcare, abolishing ICE, ending the genocide in Palestine—a platform familiar to us as socialists, but one that many voters are just now warming up to.

This race was a familiar story: we were up against long-serving politicians and candidates with deep pockets; we needed a mass movement of organized people to challenge that. 

With the support of DSA members, DSA chapters, and committed volunteers, this campaign showed that California voters, more than 620,000 of them, are supportive of Democratic Socialism and are ready for change. 

Oliver’s campaign was heavy on social media.

Going viral on social media is not enough to win elections, but it can be an extremely valuable tool when used intentionally. 

You may have seen Oliver on TikTok, Instagram, or even on one of your favorite streams talking boldly about Democratic Socialism and the importance of building a government that works for people, not corporations. Nearly every single volunteer I met or leader I trained certainly told me they had seen him online. And, of those people, many told me this was their very first time engaging politically. These volunteers helped us reach out to hundreds of thousands of voters across the state and they might not have ever even known about this race if it wasn’t for social media.

Motivating someone to turn out and vote, especially if they do not usually vote or if they feel abandoned by the current government, is often a more challenging task. It requires more than just seeing a few cool videos on the feed, so you can’t count only on social media if you want to build power (and win). Ultimately it was the conversations we had with voters in their communities, and on their phones, about the issues that matter most to them. Of course, those conversations are much easier if they have seen your candidate on social media before, but that alone is not enou

Crowd canvassing at No Kings in downtown Los Angeles.

The things we are fighting for as socialists are broadly popular, even if the term “socialism” is not. We talked to voters all across the state in all different communities, but we so often heard the same issues coming up. Housing costs are rising. Healthcare is unaffordable. Everything is unaffordable. People should be safe in their neighborhoods, at home and abroad. What we have going now really isn’t working for working people. 

This gave us the chance to talk about how corporations and billionaires are often at the root of all these issues—and then about how Oliver was going to use the powers of this office to improve conditions for working people and tackle the issues impacting their daily life.

As socialists, we can diagnose that capitalism is broadly at the crux of nearly every problem, but it’s not always easy to have that conversation.

The author with Oliver at an “ICE Out” protest and march in L.A.

Running candidates who are Democratic Socialists allows us to talk about these broadly popular ideas. Then electing those candidates to positions of leadership, and power, can fundamentally change the lives of the working people in the communities they serve.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York is proof that it is possible, and those wins on the east coast have reverberated across the country. 

When voters saw “DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST”at the top of Oliver’s literature they often asked us, “Like Zohran?”. This easily opened the door for us to have a conversation about DSA and socialism that might have been more challenging or less explicit otherwise. If voters didn’t know Zohran, or even if they were not sure about the whole DSA thing, we were still able to have those important conversations with them about their struggles and our common enemies. 

We might not have ever had these conversations with our community members if we did not show up in their neighborhood to knock on their door and talk about this election and this candidate.

The time to prepare for the next election cycle is now

Building and refining chapter infrastructure and process takes time, but time is always of the essence during an election year. Start having conversations now about your chapter’s endorsement timeline, process, and electoral program. Consider what it would take not only to endorse a candidate, but also to win. Does your chapter have tools you need? Do your members have the skills they need? If not, what can you do now to be prepared for the next electoral cycle? 

Socialism continues to gain momentum. We have the opportunity to build power for working people at the local and federal level; but it will take an organized mass movement to win.

California Red asked several chapters to assess their participation in the Oliver Ma campaign for Lieutenant Governor, California DSA’s first foray into a state constitutional officer race. Their responses give us snapshots of the challenges and gains experienced in emerging chapter electoral structures at a time of rapid membership growth and new leader development. 

Inland Empire DSA knocked 600 doors for Ma.

The Inland Empire chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America’s electoral committee had not been active for nearly three years, but the energy and the excitement that brought in a flood of new members eager to reproduce the work done in New York needed to materialize here in our chapter. Thus arose from the collective imagination of our membership a yearning, an ambition, a dream—to build something, as workers have done throughout time immemorial, building a machine… the canvassing machine.

The canvassing machine became a collective project and an inside joke that inspired our membership to think of the endeavor as something we were building and refining through grass roots organizing. In total we knocked over 600 doors in Perris and Riverside. 

Overall, the campaign was a success for our chapter. Although we fell short on Election Day, the campaign gave our relatively new Electoral Committee invaluable experience running a serious electoral effort alongside a strong democratic socialist candidate. Members were highly engaged throughout the campaign, gaining practical organizing experience through canvassing, phone banking, and having meaningful conversations with voters about the issues and our vision for the community. Those experiences strengthened both our members' skills and our chapter's capacity to run future campaigns.

The campaign also highlighted several important areas for growth. We learned the importance of beginning our organizing earlier, establishing clear leadership roles, and building stronger campaign infrastructure from the outset. These are foundational lessons that will make our future electoral work more organized, efficient, and effective.

Perhaps most importantly, the campaign helped grow our chapter. We recruited new members directly at our canvass launch locations, and many people were motivated to get involved after seeing a local DSA chapter actively supporting a viable democratic socialist campaign. While Oliver did not win the election, the campaign was far from a loss. It strengthened our chapter, developed new organizers, expanded our active membership, and left us better prepared to run even stronger campaigns in the future. 

Said one Inland Empire member, Crystal: “Canvassing for Oliver Ma was heartwarming. It was a unique experience in that the candidate we canvassed for actually came out to knock doors with the people! Amidst the backdrop of an otherwise fascistic and suffocating reality, there are people willing to commit their hearts and time for humanity. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”

Long Beach DSA Electoral Politics Committee members gather to phonebank for Oliver Ma.

DSA-LB is proud to have endorsed Oliver Ma for Lieutenant Governor and campaigned for his candidacy in Long Beach. The June 2026 primary marked our chapter's first statewide endorsement, first Voter Guide, and our Electoral Politics Committee's first significant experience with electoral campaigning, canvassing and phone banking. Although Oliver's election outcome wasn't what we had hoped for, campaigning for Oliver significantly boosted our chapter's electoral politics skills, which we are carrying forward into the November election. DSA-LB is now campaigning for the Billionaire Tax initiative; we have built a Billionaire Tax Now ("BTN") Working Group and are putting the skills we honed for Oliver into action for BTN and future campaigns. We're grateful to Oliver for running and can't wait to see what all of us in California DSA do next. 

Orange County DSA and UAW Local 4811 members gather to canvass in Irvine.

Oliver Ma’s campaign came at a time when our chapter was rebuilding our electoral committee from the ground up. When we held the candidate endorsement forum for Oliver, we saw new faces excited to ask questions of a candidate they completely aligned with. One of the campaign’s strengths that we really benefited from was its goal to recruit new DSA members and engage them in electoral work. Through the campaign, we not only grew our electoral committee, but the chapter as a whole and new leaders began to emerge. The campaign provided the tools for many of us to learn how to canvass and phone bank and many members who had never knocked on doors for a candidate before participated in canvassing. Oliver’s mission and his platform made it easy to talk to voters in our community, and we started to have hope that California could be a place where massive change could take place.

One of our biggest lessons from this election was simple: be early.

If possible, avoid entering an election cycle while still in Organizing Status. By the time we were ready to engage seriously, other organizations had already endorsed candidates, including candidates we believed offered less to the working class than Oliver. Many of our members and the broader activist community were also already committed to other campaigns. 

Kern County also needed to start earlier and organize more intentionally around the campaign. As campaign captain, I did not do enough to build internal enthusiasm, recruit volunteers, and turn an endorsement into sustained member participation.

At the same time, we were trying to bootstrap an electoral operation while still building the chapter itself. We were developing structures, relationships, and organizing capacity in real time.

Those are growing pains, but they are also lessons. Endorse early. Organize early. Assign clear responsibility. 

For us, an endorsement is not an aspirational checking a box, but a mandate to put momentum behind what we believe in.

Odeh G. and Lawrence C. are members of Inland Empire DSA. Odeh is chapter co-chair.

Sidra G. is a member of DSA Long Beach Electoral Politics Committee and serves as Communications Coordinator of the Chapter.

Kathryn M. is an At-Large member of the Orange County DSA Steering Committee.

Robert F. is on the Kern chapter Steering Committee.

Jack R. provided editorial support.