In many ways, Minneapolis has shown us what is possible. Not simply the response of a mobilized, militant community, but also the lengths that a despotic administration will go to in order to increase its power and accomplish its racist policies.

May 16, 2026 Chad Washington Socialist


"We are simply neighbors gathering, looking out, exchanging notes. We are calling ourselves 'Militant Sesame Street' because that's what it feels like to live here. ...'militant' does not mean militaristic, or recklessly violent, or highly trained; 'militant' means being deeply committed to a collectivist sense of well-being, and being willing to set aside the norms of daily life in order to pursue that horizon." -- Keep Whistling: Life Recently in Autonomous Minneapolis by Militant Sesame Street

IN 2025, 2,000 IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents descended onto the city of Minneapolis in an unprecedented show of federal overreach and state violence. In response, the people of Minneapolis flooded the streets by organizing rapid responses, patrols, block parties, barricades, and mutual aid to protect their neighbors. On January 7, 2026, an agent fired into the windshield of a community rapid responder and mother, Renée Good, killing her.

This escalated the brewing anger in the city, and as the number of agents in Minnesota grew to 4,000, the streets exploded. When speaking to organizers in DC about the situation in Minneapolis, many argued that the violence and militant response of the invaders would dampen Minneapolis’s resistance. Remarkably, the opposite occurred: the number of rapid responders skyrocketed, and 50,000 people marched in freezing temperatures through downtown Minneapolis on January 23, 2026, demanding that ICE leave their city.

Despite the city’s defiance, federal agents repeated their murderous actions and fired 10 times into the subdued body of Veterans Affairs Intensive Care Unit nurse Alex Pretti, only one day after the city-wide march. Again, unafraid, the city fought back, bringing so much attention to the Trump administration’s actions that Greg Bovino, the commander-at-large of the CBP and leader of “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis, was relieved of command. While intense federal activity continues in the Twin Cities metro area, large numbers of agents left in the spring of 2026.

Minneapolis’s success at ejecting the invading force inspired the city’s organizers to share the lessons they learned with people around the country. From February 25 to March 1, organizers in the Twin Cities hosted hundreds of people from around the country for what was called the “Melt the ICE” week of action. That included myself and several comrades from the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America. We traveled to Minneapolis as representatives of both Metro DC DSA's Community Defense Working Group and as organizers in the rapid response efforts in DC, which is experiencing its own federal immigration crackdown and ongoing occupation. 

In those few days, we participated in noise demos, rallies, panel discussions, training, and blockades at the Whipple Federal Building (base camp for ICE in the Twin Cities). Speakers and attendees, including ourselves, shared our experiences building systems of resistance against ICE in the hope that these stories could provide inspiration and models for others to apply in their own cities. As expected, we walked away with renewed hope, inspiration, and a desire to strengthen our own efforts in the DMV to prepare us for what we are experiencing now and what may lie ahead.

"2020 never ended"I have been in discussions with people who claim that it was simply the massive number of surging agents that made the situation in Minneapolis so unique and that the public response was proportional and inevitable — but that could not be further from the truth. Ask anyone in the Twin Cities, and they would say that such a response was only achieved through the lessons they learned and the networks they built during the George Floyd uprising in 2020.

To the people of Minneapolis, the George Floyd uprising was a wake-up call, a disruption to the way people acted and thought about each other. Thousands of protesters marched in the streets, clashing with the police and the National Guard. The overwhelming majority of protesters were not particularly political in the days preceding Floyd’s murder. They were not “activists,” but simply members of a community that had had enough. They realized they could show up, face down a more powerful force, and push it back; a realization that became muscle memory for how to react when faced with another social and political crisis.

The people of Minneapolis learned how to take care of each other. When the 2020 uprising resulted in the destruction of several grocery stores, people in the community quickly banded together to create networks of support and establish food delivery for those in need. They learned how to work together effectively and realized the value of establishing a community ready to jump into action. They also learned how to grieve as a community and acknowledge the pain that this system has perpetrated on all of us.So, when ICE and CBP began invading their city six years later, this muscle memory kicked in. Neighborhoods reactivated old group chats from 2020 and used them for rapid response and mutual aid. They relied on their shared knowledge and experiences, prepared for whatever happened next. They did not pause and wait for permission. They acted.

Lesson #1: Do Not Hoard Power and Resources. Throughout the weekend, Twin Cities organizers argued that one aspect of their success was the decentralization of their response efforts. Without decentralization, the movement would have died before it ever began — because running decisions through a central hub would have eliminated the nimbleness and innovation of the movement. This decentralization didn’t mean that people were encouraged to be independent actors, allowed to do what they wanted with no concern for others; agreements were made and norms were established. It instead allowed people to feel a part of something, rather than in the service of something outside themselves. They felt empowered and connected to the action instead of simply sitting around waiting for directions from self-designated leaders and/or organizations/nonprofits. 

Decentralizing led to free-flowing information and the space for people to do the work that they did best (things that are much, much harder to achieve with a more typical leadership structure). Organizers in Minneapolis stressed the importance of information exchange and shared responsibilities among everyone involved, activists and neighbors alike. No single organization or charismatic leader should be favored for being around the longest, for being first, for being the largest, or for having the most funding. Everyone plays a part in the struggle, and it is simply not possible for one group or person to handle everything that needs to be done. Each person must work to their strengths and let go of those things that are not.  

A panel with organizers from Minneapolis, Chicago, the East Bay, and Northfield (a rural city south of the Twin Cities) discussed how many nonprofits were scared that sharing information could put immigrant community members at risk, or that simply being associated with radical actions could expose them to legal action or risk having their funding pulled. So they started over-vetting chats and hoarded information like detainment numbers or license plates. When things got worse, when people needed to fight more, these nonprofits receded further and further inward, causing more harm than good. Movements are always going to have infiltrators and bad apples, but the only way to counteract this is by having more people on the ground and more eyes on the streets, so that people who wish to do harm get muscled out and overwhelmed. The smaller the leadership group is, the more power and influence available to those who wish to harm. This does not mean that organizers and activists are careless and ignore dangers; instead, their charge should be to educate people, make sure they assess their risks, and take every opportunity to meet people as people and as members of a community.

At a discussion panel titled "2020 Reflections for This Season," organizers from Relationships Evolving Possibilities and Reclaim the Block discussed the lessons they learned organizing around George Floyd's murder with — and within — NGOs and organizations, namely regarding funding. Funding is necessary for any coalition, group, or movement to survive, not only for purchasing materials but also to pay people for their labor. The panel cautioned that once money is involved, it will always change the nature of the work. More militant or radical tactics might be excluded because they do not appeal to the more moderate donor class. In other cases, the loudest voices driving the work are those with higher education credentials or experience within professional-managerial work environments. Ask yourself: who are the voices centered when the work is being done by people who are not paid, and who are the voices being centered when the work is paid?  

The speakers warned us to be wary of this thing called “organization.” Not everything has to live forever, especially organizations. They encouraged organizers to focus on the purpose of the work over the organization itself. Too many times, organizations (or any advocacy group, for that matter) get too focused on themselves, the people within them, and their own hype. But if we are spending too much time working on internal issues, the struggle outside of the organization can end up ignored.

Lesson #2: Do Not Shy Away From Organic Leadership. It was obvious throughout the “Melt the ICE” week that organizers in Minneapolis were wary of NGOs and organizations that projected themselves as established leaders or experts. The surge was an unprecedented event, and it would be absurd to claim that any one group or person knew exactly what to do. Instead, they found that it was the organic leaders, those who emerged and developed from the action on the ground, who became the people that communities turned to for knowledge and inspiration. 

A lot of people in Minneapolis were not originally opting into action; it was coming to their neighborhoods. The atrocities they saw and the anger they felt radicalized them, and it became essential to provide political education along with rapid response training. This provided leadership, mentorship, and trust across the city for radical and everyday people.

The highlight of my stay was the car patrol that I participated in with Northeast/Southeast (NE/SE) Minneapolis patrollers. The trainer of this group explained that things in the city were so active at one point that this group of trainers was conducting two training sessions a day, seven days a week, which required a lot of sacrifice on their part. They spent time away from their families, their friends, and for some, their jobs (we ran into more than one person who had been fired due to the time they were spending on rapid response work). The NE/SE patrollers are not an organization, and they receive no funding, so they are not paid for their efforts. They are simply a group of community members dedicated to making a change. 

The NE/SE patrollers believe that their success over the last several months depended on trainers and rapid response veterans willingly and openly taking the role of leaders. In turn, they said, these leaders need to bring their stories and experiences as an offering to the community, because everyone in the community needs the same knowledge to be effective. This is done with face-to-face training (anyone can read an online handbook or slides); with connections, from one person to another, from one experience to another.

Lesson #3: Do Not Underestimate People's Militancy. The story of Minneapolis is one of confrontation. When a taqueria was raided by ICE at the beginning of June 2025, hundreds of protestors gathered, shouting at federal agents while they shoved and released chemical weapons. When their local leaders called for calm and urged people to remain peaceful, the people of Minneapolis chose to fight back against an armed and ruthless invading force.

Throughout our stay, panel speakers talked about these confrontations and the willingness of the people of Minneapolis to take direct action. And we witnessed this ourselves at protests, rallies, demos, and blockades. We also were able to hear personal stories, like those shared with us by a car patroller we had the chance to ride along with.

This car patroller told us that they started doing this work on their own, right after the killing of Alex Pretti. Filled with rage and disgust, they decided to get up and do something. They grabbed a whistle and left the house, looking for ICE. Since then, they have connected with a larger group of patrollers, had experience after experience facing off with ICE, and spent hours patrolling the street. As we passed a gas station, they said, "That's where a group of us confronted Greg Bovino and a horde of ICE agents."

This was a common story in Minneapolis. I do not know the level of activism my driver had in the past, but before Alex Pretti was murdered, they were waiting at home with their child, unsure of what they could contribute to the madness that was going on in the city. That one event jolted them awake, and they could no longer ignore the urge to find, confront, and drive out an invading force.

Each confrontation strengthened that militancy and resiliency. I was frequently told that participating in rapid response felt empowering. It was the people’s chance to show ICE that they were not afraid and that they would not simply stand by while their neighbors were abducted. In November of last year, there were 2,500 people trained as rapid responders in the state, but by February, that number had ballooned to 30,000 in 77 out of 87 counties in Minnesota.

Northfield's rapid response efforts were especially impressive. At last count, they had 30 rapid responders. This may sound insignificant, but Northfield is a rural city of 20,700 people. This tells us that the people of Minnesota, not just the Twin Cities, were ready to take action.

The energy of Minneapolis was on full display on January 23, when 50,000 marched through downtown Minneapolis in 20-below weather, demanding an end to the occupation of their city. Labeled as the “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom,” this action called for “no work, no school, no shopping” (essentially, an economic blackout). Estimates are that 1,000 businesses either reduced their sales or completely stopped all business for the day. Nearly one in four adults in Minnesota (1.5 million people) participated in the day of action in some way, and an estimated 8% of all Minnesotans refused to work that day. 

During the course of the week, organizers expressed that none of this could have been done without the efforts of rank-and-file union members and the grassroots. When residents of Minneapolis first approached nonprofit and union leadership regarding a "general strike," they were quickly turned down. United States labor law outlaws wildcat and secondary boycotts and strikes, so essentially, union participation in general strikes is illegal. This, along with other restrictions and no-strike clauses, makes the idea of a general strike poisonous to labor union leadership. Unions were simply too worried about what this could do to them financially and legally. But ultimately, the unions had to concede in some way. As one Minneapolis union organizer told me, "They had no other choice. The people were going to have it anyway."  
January 23, 2026. Photo by Lorie Shaull, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lesson #4: Community Is The Key. Community was mentioned more than anything else during those few days in Minneapolis. It was considered the "secret sauce" of their success and was the critical holdover from the George Floyd uprising. 

The sense of community was keenly visible in the rapid responder/patroller spaces. The concept of rapid responder/patroller/community defender has become an identity that everyone in Minneapolis shares, no matter their level of involvement. Free whistles, notebooks, and instructional zines are available everywhere in the city. In Minneapolis, this is how people contribute to the safety and maintenance of their way of life. 
Coming around full circle, organizers stressed that effective rapid response requires people living in the affected areas to build relationships within them. Many organizers noted that immigrants from the area saw the patrollers and rapid responders in their community; that, in turn, led to more trust in patrollers. Community deepened in the exchange of information and knowledge: neighbors shared best practices, local resources, and self-care tips. This all served to solidify the reality that everyone was working towards a common goal as a united people. Community- and relationship-building is not only necessary for the work during a crisis, but also for preparing for the future. And that future depends on taking care of each other and taking care of ourselves.

Lesson #5: Self-Care Isn't Optional. A smaller force defeats a larger opponent by hitting weak or vital points in the system, eventually wearing them down. That work takes energy and time. Too many times, organizers and activists burn themselves out. Organizers in Minneapolis regularly address burnout head-on and stress the necessity of self-care to keep up the fight.

Before a training during the week of action, I went to a coffee shop where make-shift shelves against a far wall caught my eye. I saw that the shelves were full of free items available for rapid responders and community members alike. Aspirin, band-aids, masks, protein bars, eye drops, and more — all packed in plastic bins ready for whenever a community member was in need. They even had detachable ice cleats for those freezing temperatures and icy sidewalks.

These acts of support and community were everywhere, in shop after shop and in places of worship throughout the city. Direct actions freely provided mutual aid. When a federal truck pulled in with a long-range acoustic device (LRAD), responders pulled out bins full of earplugs to provide as much protection as possible. Another action at a detention center featured a DJ who played cumbia music for both the attendees and those behind the wall, as well as chants of "We love you" from the megaphone.

The panel with members of Relationships Evolving Personalities and Reclaim the Block emphasized the importance of preserving yourself for the long haul. They realized in the wake of the George Floyd uprising that there are immediate reactions to circumstances, and then there is the longer-term work. These are not isolated actions. They are connected and flow. So you must maintain your spirit in the short term to make the long-term changes. Martyrdom does not bring liberation.  

Final Takeaways: Building Our Own Militant Sesame StreetIt was probably a day or two after I returned home that I took the opportunity to glance through the handouts and zines I collected during my stay. Keep Whistling pulled me in: what the fuck is a militant Sesame Street? The answer to that can be found in the quote at the beginning of this article — but it can also be found in the deeds of the people of Minneapolis. Every day, for months, neighbors took care of neighbors. Standing guard on street corners in the snow, escorting children to school, and delivering groceries to those who were too vulnerable to leave their homes: what they call "unextraordinary work," but necessary in the fight against oppression, violence, and fascism. This is community, pure and simple. And if you contribute to this in any way, you are considered a part of that community.

I have heard from several people in DC that the reaction from the people of Minneapolis was exaggerated, that the confrontations between average community members and ICE were single incidents, overhyped, and social media fodder. But I can tell you, after meeting the people on the ground, hearing their stories, and seeing their fight, that this is simply not true. The people of Minneapolis had the militancy and the will to fight back because it was planted years ago and allowed to grow. People in the Twin Cities didn't raise an army, and they didn't take up arms. But they did have courage, ingenuity, and a concept of their place amongst a much larger social system that allowed them to outmaneuver ICE and frustrate them at every turn.

We were not quite sure what to expect when we signed up for Melt the ICE. Over 100 unvetted leftists from around the country converging on one city: what could go wrong? The end of February was not a period of calm in Minnesota. The organizers were holding this event while large amounts of ICE agents still terrorized their neighborhoods, despite a so-called "draw-down."  This event would have been an enormous challenge for a city not facing these extreme circumstances. But using the very same principles shared throughout the week of action  — cooperation, empowerment, militancy, and community — they were able to organize a truly inspirational event.

In many ways, Minneapolis has shown us what is possible. Not simply the response of a mobilized, militant community, but also the lengths that a despotic administration will go to in order to increase its power and accomplish its racist policies. The Trump administration’s blatant disregard for the Constitution could present an unseen problem: have these surges yanked the Overton Window so far to the right that any amount of draw-down seems like a blessing, or that American citizens accept this as simply the status quo? 
The majority of DC residents, its leaders, and organizations are already forgetting what is happening here (or have simply chosen to move on). I have heard of countless conversations that organizers have had with friends who did not realize that the federal immigration crackdown here did not end in August of 2025. The National Guard, a military force directed by the president to police our city, still roams our streets and harasses our youth. Federal law enforcement stalks our neighborhoods, targeting people of color for minor offenses just to allow an egotistical maniac to claim that he is making DC safe and beautiful. All the while, our leaders and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) condone and collaborate. For the people of DC, this occupation has not left. We have to decide: will we continue to ignore what is happening, or can we take action and fight for all residents of the District? Can we start to build our own militant Sesame Street?
Metro DC DSA’s Community Defense Working Group is attempting to do just that. Nine months ago, members of this working group organized patrols in one of the hardest hit areas of the District, and those patrols continue today. We have marched to the doorsteps of our councilmembers, demanding oversight of the MPD and their collaboration with federal law enforcement. This work played a large role in requiring MPD to document the identifying information of federal agents at the scene of an arrest. We have been, and will continue to be, a force of resistance in DC.

But the fight is not over, and the landscape is constantly changing. We must be capable of outthinking our opponent and bringing people into the struggle. So join us and be a part of this work. Visit the Community Defense Working Group’s Instagram, and sign up to be part of our mailing list and be kept up to date on rapid response, direct action, and educational opportunities. We, too, can simply be neighbors gathering, looking out, exchanging notes. We, too, can kick occupiers out of our community.


Chad is a member of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer with the chapter’s Community Defense Working Group.
The monthly Washington Socialist informs readers about perennial and evolving aspects of democratic socialism. Each issue includes essays, briefs, and articles covering topics oriented to specific local campaigns and broader socialist analysis. Each issue of the Washington Socialist is a produced by members of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America, although contributors from the DMV's political left should always feel welcome to contribute!

by Brian Nuckols

The American left doesn't know what to do with God. Twenty-five percent of the country skips meals to pay bills while leftists debate whether prayer is counterrevolutionary. The right, meanwhile, transforms Jesus into a hedge fund manager who despises food stamps. But another tradition existed once: churches that read the Kingdom of Heaven as immediate political demand rather than afterlife consolation.

Leszek Kolakowski, whom the Polish Communist Party expelled after he defended the 1956 uprising, understood something essential about revolutionary consciousness. Writing from Oxford exile, he argued that impossible goals must be articulated precisely because they remain impossible. Revolutionary movements require what he called "mental counterparts" to material struggle—not mystification but the symbolic architecture that sustains hope through inevitable defeats

Marx knew this, which makes his famous opium observation more complex than internet atheists assume.

The Opium Was Medicine Everyone quotes "opium of the people" without finishing Marx's sentence: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." In 1844, opium meant medicine before addiction. Marx diagnosed religion as both symptom of suffering and response to it. The problem wasn't that people reached for transcendent meaning but that capitalism forced them to seek it outside material life.

Edmund Wilson traced this complexity through the socialist tradition in "To the Finland Station"—that neglected masterpiece about revolutionary genealogy from the French Revolution through Lenin's arrival at Petrograd. Young Marx absorbed biblical imagery through his father's conversion from Judaism to Christianity for career advancement, creating a peculiar consciousness about faith and power. When Marx condemns capital, he sounds less like an economist than the prophet Amos raging against those who "sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals."

Wilson demonstrates how this prophetic strain saturated early socialism. Saint-Simon envisioned "New Christianity" based on mutual love rather than individual salvation. Fourier designed utopian communities that functioned like monasteries with sexual liberation. Robert Owen, the Welsh factory owner turned communist, drew explicitly on Quaker models of consensus and mutual aid. These weren't confused pre-scientific socialists stumbling toward Marx's clarity but revolutionaries working out what Ignacio Martín-Baró would later theorize as liberation psychology: genuine transformation requires simultaneous material and consciousness change, neither possible without the other.

Wilson's genealogy reveals repeated attempts to create what Kolakowski calls "mental counterparts" adequate to revolutionary demands. The Babouvists sang hymns to equality during their conspiracies. The Paris Communards declared Year One of the Universal Republic, inventing new calendars to match their new world. Each movement developed rituals, symbols, languages of transcendence—not from confusion about materialism but from understanding that humans need meaning alongside bread.

The Quakers Understood Power The Society of Friends discovered something about domination that predates Foucault by three centuries. Refuse to doff your hat, insist on "thee" and "thou" for everyone from servant to king, and hierarchy reveals itself as performance requiring audience participation. Stop performing deference and power exposes itself as violence. Which explains why Quakers were hanged on Boston Common—not for theological deviation but for disrupting the social choreography that sustained Puritan authority.

John Woolman, the Quaker abolitionist who walked everywhere because coaches hurt horses and ships brutalized sailors, embodied what Paulo Freire would recognize as "limit-acts"—practices that push against the boundaries of the possible. Woolman refused sugar, cotton, dyed clothing, anything touched by slave labor. Not individual moral purity but collective witness: another economy could exist. The Underground Railroad emerged from this tradition, transforming charity into what liberation psychologists call "conscientization"—the process through which oppressed people recognize their situation as historically created rather than naturally ordained. Every escaped slave demonstrated the system's fragility. Every conductor proved solidarity could overcome terror.

This is what Martín-Baró meant by the "preferential option for the poor" as lived practice rather than theological abstraction. The Quakers developed psychological technologies for sustaining resistance across generations, creating communities that could endure persecution while maintaining revolutionary hope.

John Brown's Psychology John Brown gets dismissed as religious fanatic, but read him through liberation psychology and he becomes something different: someone who understood slavery as psychological system requiring what Martín-Baró called "fatalistic syndrome"—the internalized conviction that suffering is natural, unchangeable, divinely ordained. Slavery survived through consciousness as much as coercion.

Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry failed militarily but succeeded psychologically, demonstrating what Kolakowski means about revolutionary defeats preparing consciousness for eventual victory. Brown proved white people would die for Black freedom, exploding the racial psychology that sustained the peculiar institution. His execution transformed him into what liberation theology calls "martyr-witness"—death that testifies to unrealized possibility.

W.E.B. Du Bois understood this when he called Brown "the white man who could not be a slave"—meaning couldn't be a slaveholder. Brown experienced slavery as violence against his own humanity, not just the enslaved. This illustrates Freire's insight that oppression dehumanizes oppressor alongside oppressed, making liberation a mutual necessity rather than charity from above.

Debs Discovers the Social Gospel Eugene Debs entered prison a railroad unionist with no particular religious interest. But incarceration clarifies things. Jailed for the Pullman Strike, he encountered Marx but also Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward," which imagined American socialism as Christian evolution rather than violent revolution. Debs emerged sounding like a circuit preacher who had discovered political economy.

"While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." That's not Marx's prose but Matthew 25: "I was in prison and you visited me." Debs discovered what liberation theologians call the "hermeneutic of the poor"—reading scripture from below reveals meanings invisible from positions of privilege.

The Socialist Party of Debs's era teemed with former ministers and active Christians. George Herron, Congregationalist preacher, founded the Rand School for socialist education. Walter Rauschenbusch wrote "Christianity and the Social Crisis," arguing Jesus died for challenging economic exploitation rather than theological heresy. These Christian socialists didn't dilute Marx with moralism but sharpened Christianity through class analysis.

Oscar Ameringer, the socialist organizer known as the "Mark Twain of American Socialism," described camp meetings where workers sang hymns rewritten with revolutionary lyrics—"There is Power in a Union" to the tune of "There is Power in the Blood." Not false consciousness but what Antonio Gramsci would theorize as counter-hegemonic cultural work: taking forms people understand and filling them with transformative content.

The Black Church as Revolutionary Institution The Black church tradition provides the clearest American example of what Kolakowski means by "mental counterpart to the social movement." From slave rebellions through civil rights to Black Lives Matter, Black churches have functioned as what Martín-Baró called "church of the poor"—not ministering to the oppressed but emerging from and remaining accountable to them.

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't a Marxist who happened to preach but a preacher who discovered Marx helped explain what the Hebrew prophets condemned. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail" weaves together Socrates, Aquinas, Buber, and Tillich to demonstrate that unjust law constitutes no law at all. Not eclecticism but what liberation psychology calls "psychosocial trauma recovery"—drawing on all available resources for healing and resistance.

King's final project, the Poor People's Campaign of 1968, explicitly linked economic justice with spiritual transformation. Not capitalism with human face but what he called "revolution of values." He was assassinated for making connections explicit: racism, poverty, and militarism as "triple evils" requiring structural change alongside what Frantz Fanon called "the creation of new men."

Liberation Theology Changes Everything When Gustavo Gutiérrez coined "liberation theology" in 1971, he wasn't adding religion to revolution or vice versa but recognizing what already existed: base communities throughout Latin America reading the Bible as resistance manual. Peasants discovering God might actually prefer them to landlords rather than blessing their suffering as spiritual growth.

Liberation psychology emerged from identical conditions. Ignacio Martín-Baró, Jesuit priest and psychologist murdered by U.S.-trained Salvadoran troops in 1989, developed psychology from the "underside of history." Traditional psychology asked how to adjust people to existing society. Liberation psychology asked how to transform society to meet human needs.

Martín-Baró's concept of "de-ideologization" explains what religious socialism offers beyond secular analysis alone. People need more than intellectual understanding of exploitation. They require experience of themselves as historical subjects rather than objects of others' decisions. This demands what he called "recuperation of historical memory"—understanding present suffering as product of specific choices that can be changed rather than natural conditions that must be endured.

The Sanctuary Movement brought liberation theology north during the 1980s. Churches harbored Central American refugees fleeing U.S.-backed death squads, congregations that began offering charity discovered they were protecting revolutionaries. Middle-class Americans learned from Salvadoran peasants about their own government's violence abroad. This exemplifies what Freire called "dialogical action"—solidarity as mutual transformation rather than condescending aid.

But Marx Had a Point About Religion Being Dangerous We can't skip past the fact that Marx spent considerable energy explaining why religion usually served reaction rather than revolution. The "Theses on Feuerbach" aren't about finding radical Jesus but about Feuerbach's insufficient atheism—he killed God but kept worshiping "humanity" as abstract concept rather than concrete historical actors.

Marx's critique remains sharp: religion typically projects human powers onto imaginary beings. Instead of recognizing we create our own history, we imagine gods determining it. Instead of changing material conditions, we pray for supernatural intervention. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it." Religion, Marx argued, represents interpretation on steroids—endless commentary on sacred texts instead of action on social relations.

The danger persists. Religion encourages acceptance of brutality as divine will. "God never gives you more than you can handle"—tell that to someone working three jobs without healthcare. "The meek shall inherit the earth"—convenient if you're a landlord wanting compliant tenants. Liberation theology emerges precisely because most theology serves domination rather than resistance.

Lenin called religion "spiritual booze" designed to keep workers drunk on heavenly promises so they won't demand earthly justice. American Christianity proves him correct: slaveholders quoted Paul on servants obeying masters, bosses funded revivals to prevent union organizing, prosperity gospel preachers tell poor people their poverty reflects insufficient faith rather than structural inequality.

Even Kolakowski, defending utopian consciousness, warns about this danger. Revolutionary movements that gain power risk becoming reactionary institutions. Look at actually existing socialism: Stalin as secular pope, Mao's Little Red Book as scripture, party doctrine as theology requiring faith over analysis.

So why risk religious language? Because Marx also wrote this: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness." Not religion OR happiness but religion AS illusory happiness blocking the genuine article. People need happiness—real happiness—not just correct analysis of their misery. The question becomes whether religious symbols can serve authentic liberation or inevitably become mystification.

Martín-Baró argued yes, but only through continuous "de-ideologization"—constant criticism exposing when religious ideas serve power rather than resistance. The Magnificat says God "has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly." That can inspire revolutionary organizing or function as safety valve promising future justice to prevent present action. Depends who's reading and whether they're building collective power or individual consolation.

The atheist critique stands: most religion is opium. The liberation response: let's synthesize different compounds with these materials. Not escape but explosion. Not blessed assurance but holy insurrection. Religion against itself, constantly dying to its own tendency toward comfort and rising as disruption to power.

Why This Matters for Today's Left Contemporary American leftists abandon religious language, so the right monopolizes it. Socialists dismiss spiritual needs as false consciousness, driving people with genuine spiritual hungers toward reactionary alternatives. Those Guardian polls showing Americans spending three hours daily worrying about money represent more than material deprivation—what Martín-Baró called "psychosocial trauma" inflicted by economic insecurity. People need more than policy proposals. They require what Kolakowski calls utopia: vision of radical difference that makes present suffering meaningful rather than absurd.

Religious socialism provides emotional technologies for sustaining impossible struggle across time. Weekly gatherings create rhythm beyond electoral cycles. Seasonal rituals mark time beyond quarterly profit reports. Songs and stories carry memory across generations when immediate victories seem impossible. Not decorative elements but survival technologies developed over millennia for communities under pressure.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses Catholic faith informing her socialism, when Rashida Tlaib connects Palestinian liberation to Islamic justice, when Jewish Voice for Peace reads Exodus as anti-Zionist text—they're not confused about materialism but recognizing what Wilson traced through revolutionary tradition: transcendent vision as necessary component of historical transformation.

The Kingdom Isn't Behind Us The crucial insight distinguishing religious socialism from fundamentalism: the Kingdom of Heaven represents creation fulfilled rather than Eden restored. Not nostalgia for imagined past but commitment to unprecedented future. This is what Walter Benjamin called "messianic time"—the eruption of possibility within historical constraints rather than escape from history altogether.
Marx expected religion to wither as material conditions improved. Liberation psychology suggests different: humans need meaning alongside material security. The question isn't whether people will have frameworks of ultimate significance but whether those frameworks serve liberation or domination, collective transformation or individual consolation.

The choice isn't between religious false consciousness and secular truth but between despair that accepts existing conditions as permanent and what Cornel West calls "tragic hope"—hope that acknowledges defeat without surrendering to it. Religious socialism chooses hope not as feeling but as discipline, what Jonathan Lear calls "radical hope" for possibilities we cannot yet imagine but must proclaim to make them possible.
Kolakowski understood: the left needs utopia precisely because it seems impossible. The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth must be announced while unattainable. Not as compensation for historical suffering but as historical suffering's abolition. Not escape from material struggle but material struggle's transcendent meaning. Not the people's opium but their dynamite—explosive force that shatters the possible and creates space for more.

by Marie Venner, DSA and Lakewood Left, Colorado

In times when it is easy to get discouraged, our comrade Fran Quigley’s book on Religious Socialism lifts up a lamp of optimism, happiness, and hope that nourishes a socialist spirituality, community, vision, and action. Our comrade’s engaging stories of social justice movements and leaders over the past century or two make for exciting, encouraging, and easy reading. He also provides context and connectivity to such stories and lets us know about many more players in the struggle, new even to those of us who have been making a dive into learning more about our nation’s real history, as opposed to what we were taught in school (individualist/great white man school).

Fran draws on a wide array of primary and secondary sources and presents connects them with humor, perspective, and an uncommon lightness, full of colorful anecdotes. We learn the faith basis and convictions that powered their work for the dignity of all and basic rights for all, sooner rather than later. His recounting gives hope for how regular people stepped forward, inspired by their religious values, and took on a calling for social change -- understanding their strength, wisdom, and capacity, accompanying as well as leading in related struggles.

Many of us grew up with a religion and culture that characterized socialism as a threat and a step toward authoritarianism and oppression, but more and more people can see how anti-democratic our current system is. More and more political and economic power for the top fraction of 1% is leading to greater and greater social, economic, clean air and water and climate risks for us all, amid a system where the executive branch even in Dem trifecta states like Colorado (under DINO gov Polis) keep public interest and public health (clean air, climate) laws from being implemented by controlling commissions and agency appointments. The Guardian reported on recent polling and data on how much Americans are struggling financially, grappling with debt and the rising cost of living, a lack of services enabling all to live and thrive that contradicts our socialist values and morality: (poll and article highlights below)

• More than six out of 10 Americans said it had become more difficult to find a good paying job, buy a home and afford childcare.
• Nearly 80%, including 70% of Republicans fear that Trump’s tariffs will increase the price of everyday goods.
• Americans are left on their own to face high prices and low earnings, are building their own safety nets from a web of financial products, credit cards, buy now, pay later loans, payday loans and student debt. 48% of people would have trouble covering a $500 unexpected expense. 1 in 4 said it would be “very difficult”.
• In fact, a quarter of those surveyed said they spent at least three hours a day worrying about their finances and ability to afford basic necessities. Another 25% of respondents said they or someone in their household had skipped meals in the past year in order to make ends meet, and 26% said they had fallen behind on their monthly bills over the past year.
• 83% said they were concerned about the cost of groceries, with 46% saying they were very concerned. Some 47% said they were worried about being able to pay their rent or mortgage, 64% said they were worried about affording an unexpected medical expense.
• Americans have been losing hope in the parties, leaders, and overall system for a while. Now 76% of those polled say they fear a looming economic recession.
• Only 51% are connecting (big) corporations to these problems, as having had an active role in making life more difficult for average people over the past 25 years, and 52% saying billionaires have made life tougher. A similar number believe congressional Republicans have made life more difficult, with 41% believing Democrats have made life more difficult.
  
  

Gen Z and socialists have been in the forefront of calling out how anti-democratic our current system is as well as inhumane, keeping a majority of the population in a state of precarity without the basics of life comprehended in FDR’s economic rights and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. For a time with and shortly after Bernie’s first run, the majority of young people and persons of color in the U.S. expressed support for socialism; however, the increasingly dire situation and unresponsive government, including Dem leaders, have led to a decline in this, and arguably growing disgust and giving up.  In times like these, belief that “a better world is possible” is critical. We have an encouraging array of those who came before us who believed that, often supported by their religious upbringing or ongoing convictions.  The DSA Religion and Socialism group maintains this space.

Most Americans still say religion or spirituality is important to them. And there is a history of people running for office in the US on socialism as their religious convictions in action, from  Eugene Debs, who ran for president many times and inspired Bernie Sanders, to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Cornel West, with Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim socialists in between. Quigley shows how we can draw hope, amusement, and inspiration from all; they and so many others in key social movements and the growth of socialism in the US are a legacy of Faith in Action for a Better World.

Religious Socialism: Faith in Action for a Better World, published by Orbis books, August 25, 2021.  Fran Quigley is a longtime human rights activist and member of faith-based and health care access advocacy groups, as well as a professor at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.

Originally published in LeftLinks
 
By Carl Davidson
LeftLinks Newsweekly for March 6, 2026

The week finds us fully immersed and, we hope, fully engaged in the common front against war and fascism, both at home and abroad.

It is not a drill. The current challenge confronts us everywhere, from what books are allowed in our libraries to destroying schools full of young girls in Iran.

As a U.S. left, we are in a defining moment. Can we unite our ‘militant minority’ and expand a principled opposition to Trump’s ICE attacks and unrestricted war waging alongside a solidarity with the insurgencies of the oppressed and exploited inside Iran and elsewhere? Then, can we also deploy our ‘militant minority’ as a critical force that seeks wider unity with a latent but awakening progressive anti-MAGA majority?

First, why ‘principled?’ Because there is a wide array of political forces opposing Trump and his ‘war of choice.’ Some oppose Trump for lack of clarity in how to render Iran into a subordinate U.S.-Israeli protectorate. Others seek to use standard ‘rules of engagement’ that our ‘War Secretary’ Pete Hegseth has dumped into the wastebasket:

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

Our War Secretary doesn’t understand the most important thing about warfare. Wars are political battles, not simply soldiers with advanced weapons plus boot camp rhetoric about unrestricted ‘killing people and breaking things.’ Throwing out ‘rules of engagement’ with a smirk, messaging that only sissies are concerned with such matters, tells us what we need to know: Hegseth’s hidden rules were written as a combination of Confederate lynch law, Gestapo practices and Old Testament Iron Age genocidal instructions regarding the Amalek nomads from Yahweh: “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!” (1Samuel: 15) The Amalikites, the ‘Christian’ right will remind us, were kith and kin to the Persians, the core of today’s Iran (Esther 9: 5-10).

It’s not a minor slip. Hegseth has had his Christian Reconstruction pastor, Douglas Wilson, a Biblical patriarchal theocrat opposed to the Constitution on multiple grounds, delivering sermons to officers at the Pentagon. In addition, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, stated, when asked about the biblical promise of land to Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates, “It would be fine if they [Israel] took it all.”Finally, Hegseth-aligned officers, according to a non-commissioned officer quoted in The Guardian on March 3, 2026, had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ”….“He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”

Now we know why Hegseth, Trump, and the Department of Justice have so relentlessly attacked the six Members of Congress, all veterans, who produced a video where they simply cited the Uniform Code of Military Justice on the duty and legality of disobeying illegal orders.

Trump and his War Secretary wanted them immediately hanged for treason, but the six vets stood their ground. They knew the UCMJ, which took effect in 1951, was significantly shaped by the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Nuremberg established the legal principle that “following orders” is not a valid defense for war crimes, thus compelling the U.S. military to adopt a duty to disobey manifestly illegal orders. Trump and Hegeseth, by their opposition to the UCMJ, find themselves backing the case of the Nazi defendants. Instead of a trial at Nuremberg, one small but significant victory of the anti-fascist war, they would have simply shot them all without trial.

With the Middle East region teetering on the edge of a wider catastrophe, progressive activists and concerned citizens must rise to the challenge of opposing destructive military actions while standing in solidarity with those struggling for freedom and justice inside Iran. Our response must be deeply rooted in our core values.

The first and most immediate responsibility for us is to oppose all forms of U.S. and Israeli military aggression against Iran. This includes not only bombings and naval attacks, but also economic sanctions and covert operations that inflict suffering on ordinary Iranians. History has shown that such actions rarely weaken authoritarian regimes; instead, they devastate civilian populations, fuel nationalism, and close off space for dissent. The U.S. left must demand an end to these policies, calling for de-escalation and diplomacy over violence and collective punishment.

At the same time, our solidarity must extend to the courageous ‘Woman Life Freedom’ movement, rights for the Kurds and other oppressed nationalities, and working-class and small business insurgencies inside Iran that challenge the repressive theocratic regime. These movements, often led at great personal risk, seek genuine social and economic justice, gender equality, and democratic freedoms. The U.S. left should amplify their voices, support their campaigns, and foster connections that transcend borders—without imposing outside agendas or overshadowing their agency. This solidarity is not just a moral imperative; it is a vital part of building a future rooted in internationalist mutual liberation.

In this way, we are opposed to the ‘campist left’ that would ignore, downplay, or even slander the forces for national and democratic revolution in Iran. Instead, they stress the ‘anti-imperialism’ of the clerical fascists because of their material support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine/Israel. Iran has had its own hegemonic aims to envelop all the Shia throughout the Middle East. We might compare Iran’s ‘anti-imperialism’ with Japan’s ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ pegged at the time by Japan as a common front of peoples of color against ‘white world supremacy.’

At the same time, we do not ignore the sphere of ‘state-to-state’ relations in a world order. In this volatile context, the United Nations remains an important—if imperfect—avenue for pursuing diplomatic solutions and upholding international law. The U.S. left should advocate for the U.S. to make use of the UN to facilitate negotiations, allow for internal development and international trade, monitor human rights, and press all parties to respect the sovereignty and rights of the Iranian people. International bodies can help provide alternatives to war and sanctions, even as we recognize their limitations and the need for ongoing reform. The UN today is very different from the UN of the 1950s.

Demanding that our government heed the UN Charter and its principles of peaceful coexistence, the Declaration of Human Rights, and the two world courts is a worthy cause that can also unite a militant minority with a broader, emerging progressive majority. With their incredible organizing efforts, the third ‘No Kings’ rising promises to be the most powerful yet. It demands—No Kings, No ICE, No wars—are exactly what the times require of us as a starting point.

We must oppose the machinery of war and economic strangulation, and we must express unwavering solidarity with those inside Iran fighting for a better world. By holding fast to these principles, the U.S. left can help chart a course away from destruction and toward justice, peace, and international solidarity. That program serves the American people on the home front as well. The time to act and build our organizations is now.

Sisters and Brothers - 
We are living in a pivotal moment in history.

At a time of exploding technologies, we can create a nation and world where every man, woman and child lives in peace, enjoys democracy and has a decent standard of living. 

Or.

We can live in a world controlled by a handful of Oligarchs, with massive income and wealth inequality, authoritarian government and never-ending wars.

That’s the choice before us. That’s the struggle we’re engaged in. And that’s the struggle we must win.
Here’s the bad news.

We’re living in a nation where the people on top have never had it so good. At a time when 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93% and one man, Mr. Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households.

These Oligarchs also shape public opinion through their increased control over what Americans see, hear and read. They not only own much of legacy media (television and radio) but have major ownership of social media and the internet. 

Further, through their massive campaign contributions, the billionaires are undermining democracy and electing candidates who represent their interests. Increasingly, elections are not about debates over different points of view. They are about dueling super-PACs, consultants and well-funded advertising campaigns. 
And then, on top of all of that, there is Donald Trump, a president who does not believe in the Constitution or the rule of law. He is a demagogue who wants more and more power in his own hands, and is moving us rapidly toward an authoritarian society.
 
Not only has Trump unleashed ICE, his domestic army, against communities across America, he is now following Netanyahu’s lead and is waging a brutal and illegal war against Iran that has already resulted in thousands of deaths. 

Here’s the good news.

Donald Trump’s actions and his ideology are increasingly unpopular and his poll numbers are in steep decline. The American people do not like oligarchy, do not want to live in an authoritarian society and do not want endless wars.

Trump is not only strongly disliked by a majority of Americans, but his support within the Republican base is also fracturing. Leading right-wing figures are opposing him for his war in Iran, his brutal policies on immigration and his support of the Oligarchs as they ram a frightening and unregulated AI down the throats of American workers.

Our progressive vision of economic, racial and environmental justice is gaining more and more support. In California, despite massive opposition from the entire ruling class, a wealth tax on billionaires is extremely popular, as is the national wealth tax on billionaires that I have proposed.

More and more Americans are standing up and demanding accountability from the billionaires who are pushing their revolutionary AI and robotics technologies. Data centers, which will raise electric rates and cause severe environmental damage, are being opposed and defeated in community after community. Working people understand that AI must be used to improve life for ALL, not just make the billionaires who own these technologies even richer.

Progressives are winning elections and running great candidates throughout the country. Zohran Mamdani started his campaign for mayor of New York at 1% in the polls. He recruited 90,000 volunteers and ended up defeating the Democratic establishment, the Republican establishment and the Oligarchs. And, as Mayor, he is already implementing universal child care in New York, something that his opponents claimed could not be done.

Analilia Mejia began her campaign for Congress in New Jersey with virtually no name recognition. Yet, she defeated a former Congressman and a former Lieutenant Governor to win the Democratic primary.
Nida Allam of North Carolina took on an incumbent Democratic Congresswoman, and the entire state and national Democratic establishment. Sadly, she lost but received 49.2% of the vote. A very impressive showing.

More and more candidates, at the local, state and national level, are mounting strong campaigns against the Oligarchs and the political establishment. Supporting Medicare for All, an $18 an hour minimum wage, free tuition at public colleges and universities, public funding of elections and strong progressive taxation are no longer considered “radical” ideas.

In these very difficult times, now more than ever, we need to strengthen our progressive movement. We need to stand with workers against the Oligarchs, we need to stand with minorities against racism, we need to stand with the environment against polluters, we need to stand for peace against war and destruction. 

Thanks for all you have done and will continue to do.
In Solidarity,
Bernie

By Max B. Sawicky
Originally published in Jacobin 
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/socialism-liberalism-economic-policy-agenda
https://sawicky.substack.com/

It's increasingly difficult for US political commentators to neglect the centrality of socialism to the country’s affairs. We now see a spate of polling results and other commentary testifying to the popularity of socialist ideas, if not the label, as well as to the prospects of rising political stars like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Katie Wilson in Seattle, and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis.

Whenever democratic socialism has a moment in the mainstream media, as it is having now, pundits and reporters ponder what “democratic socialism” really means. Those on the Left speculate on how, if at all, it differs from “social democracy” — generally taken to refer to the more egalitarian economic arrangements observed in the Nordic countries, and to a lesser extent across Western Europe. The relationship between democratic socialism and social democracy is a matter of dispute on the Left, but in general, democratic socialists imagine a more far-reaching transformation of economy and society than they expect from social democracy.

I would contend that democratic socialism and social democracy are more alike than different, and so the term “social democrat” can be kosher again. The important justifications for seeing a close connection between democratic socialism and social democracy are twofold. First, in practical political terms in the here and now, they are identical. Take Medicare for All (M4A), for instance. Whatever you think M4A is or should be, there is nothing inconsistent between M4A advocacy, social democracy, and democratic socialism.

Second, the European nations whose policies most Americans are comfortable with — and that American socialists like Bernie Sanders point to as models — often are led by governments and parties that self-identify as social democratic. It’s the word “socialism” that tends to scares Americans, not the content offered by most socialist politicians. Yet while the terminology of “socialism” still scares many people, “social democracy” is unfamiliar and foreign-sounding, so it is not a very politically effective label either. Clearly, Mamdani, Wilson, and Fateh, among others, are finding a language that appeals, without running away from the socialist label.

In the immediate term, then, the difference between the two concepts may not matter too much. Unless you think the capitalist state can be replaced wholesale, in one fell swoop, you are interested in politically feasible reforms achieved through our maddeningly dysfunctional democratic processes. The “socialist reforms” that many are finding digestible are not categorically different from the common and old advances of social democracy in Europe, so by all means, let’s have more of it. And the popularity of figures like Mamdani, Sanders, Fateh, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are due to the prospects they offer for reforms, not to a revolutionary smashing of the state.

Some on the Left, including fellow Jacobin contributors, want to stress the difference between the status quo and socialists’ desired end state. In so doing, however, there is the risk of glossing over the essential, inescapable path from here to there and narrowing socialists’ political appeal and accomplishments. My contention is that socialism is as much about the steps toward the goal as the goal itself. Neither means anything without the other.

Socialism is an important brand, but it is something more: it reflects a particular objective — in a nutshell, the reduction of alienation in the Marxian sense. The chief means for conquering alienation is increasing democratic control of the economy. Following Karl Marx, the central democratic decision is the disposition of the aggregate accumulation of “surplus value,” including the composition, distribution, and level of net investment. National economic planning would be opened up to popular input. At the enterprise or business-firm level, workers would take over management of day-to-day operations. This is all foreign to liberalism but not to social democracies around the world (though the extent of worker management in social democratic countries is still rather limited).

When Sanders broke the national political ice on the word “socialism” in 2016, I recall sappy messages to the effect that “socialism is nice; even your public library is socialist.” But that’s wrong — socialism is so much more than that.

Here I want to describe some economic policy projects that might define a distinctively socialist (or social democratic) approach to policy in the United States today, one that pushes beyond the frontiers of liberalism. These are differences in kind, not of degree. For the principal US social democratic projects, I suggest the following breakdown:

1. Labor power
2. Industrial policy
3. Social insurance
4. Social ownership
5. Anti-federalism
   

There are traces of all of these in the history of liberal social policy, but I want to highlight the categorical distinctions between liberal and socialist approaches to each element. Such distinctions can give rise to political themes and to explicit campaigns.

(Socialists also crucially differ from liberals in our commitment to internationalism and our opposition to the United States’ militaristic imperialism. But I focus here on the distinctive elements of socialists’ domestic policy agenda.)

Labor PowerThe great liberal John Kenneth Galbraith proposed or at least popularized the idea of “countervailing power” as a justification for elevating trade unionism. The implication was the desirability of a “fair” political competition between labor and capital.

Who needs fair? As anarchists say, “No gods, no masters!” We want to stack the deck in favor of the working class — or at least unstack it from its contemporary extremely biased state. This is one distinction between socialism and liberalism. There has been plenty of thinking done about how to do this, but the objectives are clear: remove constraints on union organizing and agitation.

Liberalism has been historically unfriendly to industrial policy, in obeisance to the mythical free market.The Obama administration disgraced itself in this context by its weak support for the public employee upsurge in Wisconsin. Both Barack Obama and, before him, Bill Clinton sold out their own allies in labor with their advocacy of anti-worker “free trade” deals. Joe Biden made a bit of a splash by not merely calling for labor peace and a labor-management kumbaya but by explicitly favoring the contract sought by the United Auto Workers in their historic strike against the Big Three automakers. It says a lot about the Democratic Party that this was an unusual milestone.
Industrial Policy

Again, we got a taste of industrial policy (IP) under Biden and now a bit more, albeit of a perverse nature, under Donald Trump. The idea is to restructure the economy — to shift the composition of what is produced — in the direction of higher-value-added industries. That means higher profits and wages and ultimately more tax revenue. Liberalism has been historically unfriendly to IP, in obeisance to the mythical free market.

How would IP be pursued? The first problem is to determine which industries to expand and then to reckon with which ones would contract (and disemploy people, often at great personal financial harm). The tools for Biden’s attempt at IP were disproportionately tax credits. Relief for anyone negatively affected was usually nonexistent, though Biden broke this pattern temporarily with his extraordinary COVID-era expansion of unemployment benefits.

For Trump, it’s whatever idea comes into his howling wilderness of a mind, legalities aside. His objective here has been showing off, to demonstrate that our national CEO can deliver tangible factories and good manufacturing jobs. It’s mostly a con. If anything, the scandal of the Georgia raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the ensuing mistreatment of Korean workers will have a negative impact on foreign direct investment in the United States.

For socialists, the tools for IP would be a mix of direct grants, loan guarantees, and public enterprise. An important qualification is to ensure transition assistance for workers negatively affected by structural changes in the economy in the short term.

An obvious candidate for IP is production in the service of transition away from fossil fuels. That means solar, wind, and maybe nuclear. (I’m skeptical of the latter because I doubt our regulatory apparatus is up to enforcing prudent safety standards, but I won’t get further into that thicket of weeds.) For energy aficionados, there is also the need for a robust, national power grid.

A negative example of IP has been the US government’s historic support for automobile transportation and lack of investment in social transit. A leading case is our pathetic intercity passenger rail system, aka Amtrak. There are also urban intraregional rail systems begging for upgrades, support for which is plausibly in the national interest.

The climate benefits of social transit are obvious. Since our metro regions are the drivers of the national economy, so, too, is the health of the cities at their centers. We may be getting a teaspoon of this with Mamdani’s free buses — hopefully a prelude to more.

One branch of IP is trade policy. Here, too, we see a clear difference between liberal and social democratic approaches. Trade policy can be used to actively restructure a domestic economy, not merely to facilitate whatever corporations are wont to do. Liberalism tends to default to the latter, since traditionally Democrats have been in bed with Big Tech companies and finance, who desire government protection of their “intellectual property.”

As mentioned above, a common objective of IP is supporting higher-value-added industries. This of course is what most other nations want to do as well, so negotiation is required to get a division of the spoils that is superior to whatever would happen absent such negotiations — a different kind of trade deal. Trade deals can serve IP goals, and not incidentally, the interests of labor. Liberals, with their emphasis on free-trade deals that effectively prioritize the interests of capital, have been on the wrong side of this struggle.

Another branch of IP emphasized by liberals is antitrust. Again, the underlying motivation for breaking up big corporations is for the sake of a mythical free market, a delusion upheld by liberalism. It is true, there can be opportunities to enhance market efficiency by breaking up monopolies. But what tends to be overlooked is the option of replacing monopolies with public enterprises. That’s the social democratic or socialist alternative.

Social InsuranceThe chief basis for social welfare in the social democratic nations of Europe has been their social insurance schemes. The idea is you tax people to finance benefits against likely, adverse events, what Franklin D. Roosevelt called “the great disturbing factors of life.” Injury, illness, and involuntary unemployment are top of the list, followed directly by retirement, disability, and death of the family breadwinner.

Social insurance should not necessarily be financed through progressive taxation; the idea is people should be willing to pay for what we are selling. If they aren’t, something is wrong with us or with the product. One benefit of the approach is that it provides political robustness to a program. It’s harder to take something away if people have been paying for it and feel they are owed a debt.

The liberal commentary about social insurance has been unhelpful. In the case of Social Security, it has featured flat-out bogus predictions of insolvency or crackpot remedies such as individual, privatized stock market accounts. Long ago, someone suggested that, if he hadn’t been consumed by the scandal with Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton might have wrecked Social Security with privatization.
In the case of health care, we have of course the Rube Goldberg Obamacare system. I would not deny it was an improvement in its time, but more straightforward, simpler models are available and on view in other countries. Even here in the United States, we still have the federal Veterans Administration, which employs its own doctors and provides health care directly.

The biggest poison pill in Obamacare was spurious, liberal defense of deficit reduction that constrained the subsidies made available to the insured. At the root of Obama’s crippled health care reform effort was the Democratic establishment’s mantra “We believe in the market.” Of course, if they had a clue what a market really is, either in ideal terms or in the real world, their behavior would be very different.

But the Left has also been mixed up about social insurance, including cash benefits. In the matter of health insurance, it is reduced to the slogan of taxing the rich to pay for M4A. First, socialism will require more dough than we can get just by taxing the rich and corporations. The idea of focusing taxes on the rich has reached absurd lengths with the Democratic Party’s now-standard assurances that it doesn’t want to further tax anyone earning less than $400,000 annually, or some similarly ridiculous number.

Second, M4A is an empty box. What is it, exactly? Existing Medicare, for all? I’m on it, and no thanks. Medicare covers only 80 percent of catastrophic expenses. For most, including me, 20 percent of a catastrophic expense is still a catastrophe. Furthermore, it’s hard to find doctors who accept Medicare patients.

Some other version of Medicare? What exactly? The possibilities are endless, and you wouldn’t like some of them. The Left needs to deliver specifics about what its envisioned national health system, or national health insurance plan, would look like, including how it will be realistically financed.

On cash assistance, we have the faux-left dead end known as the universal basic income (UBI). Not for nothing have some libertarians latched onto it. The hope is to set up all cash assistance to be like “welfare,” then come in swinging with the wrecking ball. If you’re for socialism, consider what social democratic governments actually do: it’s social insurance, not UBI.

Social OwnershipHere we are out past Bernieland. Bernie says he is uninterested in “nationalizing the means of production.” (So am I, to be honest; I don’t want the US Congress trying to run Nvidia.) That hasn’t stopped Sanders from making some friendly noises about Trump’s machinations in establishing US government stakes in tech companies, however.

As usual, there are many incremental way stations. Once again, Mamdani gives us a taste with his public grocery stores. At one point, in the teeth of the COVID-19 pandemic, even the loathsome Andrew Cuomo fiddled with the idea of New York State producing protective equipment to deal with the Trump administration’s shortages. In 2020, California governor Gavin Newsom took steps to acquire COVID supplies the federal government was failing to provide.

Perhaps the two most pressing needs for social ownership are in the fields of energy policy and housing. In both, the private sector has proved itself utterly inadequate. We rely too much on fossil fuels, and housing costs, due in large part to supply shortages, have become prohibitive for aspiring homeowners and renters.
It perhaps feels a little easy to say, “Well, the government can build this stuff.” But it is also true. As I mentioned above, we will need much more revenue to do so, a bullet most liberals are not willing to bite.
Perhaps the two most pressing needs for social ownership are in the fields of energy policy and housing.Social democrats can first sell the program; if you build it, people will be willing to pay. Liberals usually wring their hands and lead with, “Gee, how will we pay for it?” But if what you build is more beneficial than foregone tax revenues, it is more difficult for the other side to take it down. If it is not, then somebody screwed up somewhere.

Anti-FederalismFinally, there is the conundrum of US federalism. Decentralization of the public sector in the United States is extreme by international standards and retards economic and social progress. Back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, “anti-federalism” meant opposition to a strong central government, in favor of states; I mean the opposite.

Centralization begins with an expanded revenue system — more taxes, and not exclusively progressive ones. Such revenues could go to the states in part while serving the purposes described above

Some public services are properly national in scope and require federal design, funding, and management. Examples already mentioned are intercity rail and a national power grid. Transition off of fossil fuels must be a national policy, though implementation can and will likely be decentralized and incremental.

What’s so bad about federalism? Income and wealth, as they are in most nations, are unevenly distributed geographically. The larger the nation, the greater the burdens of a unitary central government. Insofar as we assign taxing and spending to local jurisdictions, we get inadequate public funding and gross inequality. A state tax is better than a blizzard of local taxes. For one thing, it raises more revenue, even if the rate is the same. And a federal tax is better than fifty state taxes.

It is possible to take the principle too far, since people have sorted themselves out geographically, to some extent, based on preferences for public services, and it is possible to excessively flout those preferences. I would say we presently have the reverse problem, however — too much indulgence to decentralized finance.
A Social Democratic AlternativeOn all these dimensions, social democratic or socialist policy visions are categorically or conceptually distinct from “more liberalism.”

In a nutshell, the Left can make political hay by advocating more power for labor, industrial policy, social insurance, social ownership, and less federalism. These are well-regarded ideas. Making clear that democratic socialist politics need not mean a pell-mell avalanche of new and unfamiliar programs can reduce people’s fears about the ideology. The popularity of Mamdani’s baby steps in these directions attests to their political viability, as do the polls that suggest that people are receptive to the content of democratic socialism, even if the label makes some apprehensive.

A common alternative understanding of democratic socialism foregrounds the question of the political power of the working class. I find this notion amorphous. Who, exactly, is the working class, and how does it, whatever “it” is, win and exercise that power

One idea in this vein is worker ownership, or at least worker control of workplaces. There is no question such an arrangement would be an improvement, but the gains can be exaggerated too. Workers at a particular workplace could be as collectively self-seeking as the owner they replaced, and there are still all the problems inherent in commodity production. There are also questions about how control without ownership would be meaningful or how the transfer of firm ownership should be financed.


Worker ownership of individual firms encounters the same problem as local financing of public services that I discussed in Jacobin recently. There will be rich firms and poor firms, and their geographic locations will be haphazard, fomenting inequality.

Labor management of firms is a benign improvement, but it seems a dubious candidate for a systemic improvement. So, too, with cooperatives or renters’ unions. Of course, these are not novel ideas nor is there anything wrong with them. There have been attempts in the past, and there are many existing examples. But in the absence of broader change, their spread would still leave us with capitalism.

A socialist vision has to go beyond the atomized management of firms or a proliferation of cooperatives. The crucial political point is to grasp a dynamic of comprehensive change, through the inauguration and expansion of progressive policies and institutions that strengthen workers’ bargaining power and expand democratic public control over the economy.

Socialists championing these reforms can offer a robust, realistic alternative to liberalism while showing the American public that the “S-word” is nothing to be afraid of. And if they start by enacting just some elements of this agenda, they can grow momentum and popular support for more changes to build a less alienated economy.

Over the weekend of December, 5-7 Bernie Sanders spoke to the How We Win conference, a gathering of democratic socialist elected officials and their staff in New Orleans sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, Jacobin, the Nation, and other partners. Below is a transcript of his remarks.

"Thank you for inviting me to say a few words. Let me begin by thanking all of you for having the guts to run for public office. It’s a lot harder to go out and knock on doors to represent constituents with the problems they face seven days a week, so I want to thank you very much for that. Despite the horror in the White House right now, they’re out there all across this country. We’re seeing strong progressive growth. It is not just Zohran Mamdani in New York or Katie Wilson in Seattle. From coast to coast, you are seeing progressive democratic socialists standing up, taking on the establishment, and winning elections.

And one of the great secrets of the corporate media is that right now in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has about one hundred members, including dozens and dozens of very strong progressives. That is the result of the hard work all of us have done over the last number of years.

I’ve been asked to give you some advice. What I’m gonna tell you is probably what you already know. Number one, here is a radical idea: do your job that you were elected to do. Now, I’ll tell you a story. I was elected to be mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and won it by ten votes way back in 1981. We had a strong foreign policy. We had exchange programs. We dealt with national issues. But I’ll never forget, there was an article in the local newspaper, and the report asked some guy, “But what does it mean? What do you think about having a socialist as your mayor?” And the guy said, “Well, I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting the snow off of the streets a lot faster than they used to.”

You gotta do your job. If you’re on the city council, the school board, the state legislature, you gotta do it. And if you do your job well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many, many other issues. But don’t lose focus regarding the job that you are elected to do.

Second of all, establishment Democrats have the brilliant idea that the only people they can talk to are establishment Democrats. They literally have lists of people: “Don’t knock on this door; don’t knock on that door. Only on these.” I strongly disagree with that suggestion. Knock on every door in your district. And what you’ll find when you do that is you’ll have the right-wing people slam the door in your face. You’ll have some unpleasantness. But by and large, what you’ll find is that there is a lot more commonality of interest than you might have appreciated. In my view, the reason Donald Trump is president of the United States today is not because people voted for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1 percent or massive cuts in health care. He is the president of the United States because of Democratic establishment candidates’ failure to provide a real analysis and agenda that meets the crises that we face today

Establishment Democrats believe that you can tinker around the edges, you can tell the world how terrible Donald Trump is, and that’s fine. But right now, what the American people understand is that übercapitalism — an oligarchic form of society, which is what we have today — is a disaster for the working class of this country. We don’t have to tinker around the edges. We have to create a very new form of society.
So for just your average person out there, you are in many cases going nowhere in a hurry. You understand that with real inflation accounted for, wages are basically the same as they were fifty years ago, despite a huge increase in worker productivity as a result of all of the expansion of technology. And almost all of the gains of that new technology have gone to the 1 percent. And ordinary workers know that there’s something wrong with 60 percent of our people living paycheck to paycheck while Elon Musk owns more wealth himself than about the bottom 52 percent of American society. They know that.

Here is a radical idea — do your job that you were elected to do.They know that there’s something wrong when we have a campaign finance system that is totally corrupt and allows billionaires in both political parties to buy elections. That’s a broken system. I say these things because you’re gonna have Republicans who understand this as well. They understand if you look at the basic necessities of life — just think for a moment: you’re living in the richest country in the history of the world, and it cannot even provide the basic necessities of life for working people.

Just take a look at the health care in your community. Talk about health care. Everybody will tell you that despite spending twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation, the health care system is totally broken. Everybody knows that. The educational system is largely broken, and the childcare system is a disaster. Kids can’t afford to go to college, or they’re leaving school deeply in debt. Public schools are under enormous pressure. Teachers are underpaid. They’re dealing with all kinds of disciplinary issues, kids who come from troubled families or are acting out in school. We are dealing with a situation where our food system, just nutrition . . . we are the most obese and unhealthy nation on earth because you have a food industry that makes huge profit by selling our kids crap, and the price of groceries is soaring.

People understand that. I flew in from the National Airport in Washington; there was a four-hour delay because they couldn’t figure out how to de-ice the plane. All over the country, you are looking at basic problems people are struggling with. The system is failing. Our job is not to run away from that reality but to offer a real alternative. Because in my view, what the future is gonna be about isn’t establishment Democrats. All over Europe, for example, the establishment parties are fading away. The struggle is going to be between the Trumpists of the world — right-wing extremism — and a democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working families.

So what Donald Trump does is go, “Yeah, we got a lot of problems. And the problem is undocumented people, the problem is the trans community, the problem is that we have Somalians who are ‘garbage.’” That’s what demagogues do. They take the problems that we face — often that they cause — and then they blame a powerless minority. Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the real cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country. So that’s where we’re at now. And it ain’t gonna be easy. Especially with Trump in the White House.

To summarize, the American people know the system is broken. They are hurting. They can’t afford groceries. They can’t afford health care. They can’t afford education. They can’t afford a lot of things. And at the same time, the billionaire class has never had it so good. The establishment Democrats cannot talk about these things because, very often, they’re getting funded by the billionaire class. So what we have gotta do right now is get out into the streets. We gotta talk to our people — all people, not just people within our zone of comfort. And we’re gonna be providing real solutions to the crises that we face. So once again, what you have done is extraordinary. I thank you so much and congratulate you for getting out on the streets, for winning elections, and for standing up for working people."

Originally published in Jacobin.

By  Robert Pollin

Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.


Is stagflation—the toxic blend of high unemployment and high inflation—taking hold now in the U.S. economy? The most recent evidence mostly signals “yes.” If stagflation is on the way, we can mainly thank President Donald Trump’s imposition of unprecedented tariffs—that is, taxes on the products we import from more than 90 countries. The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that only 106,000 jobs had been added to the U.S. labor market between May and July.

This represents a nearly 80% drop in job growth relative to the 474,000 jobs created over the same three-month period last year. Meanwhile, wholesale prices spiked by 0.9% in July, the largest monthly wholesale inflation increase since May 2022. It was in response to the dismal May-July job report that Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, after claiming, without evidence, that she had “rigged” the numbers to make him look bad.  

How could Trump’s tariff polices produce stagflation? According to the Yale Budget Lab, as of July 30, U.S. consumers are facing an average import tax/tariff rate of 17.5%, the highest since 1934. At the same time, imports account for 14%of overall purchases in the U.S. economy. Therefore, if the average 17.5% tariff rate were simply passed on, dollar for dollar, to U.S. consumers, this alone would raise average prices in the United States by 2.5% (that’s 17.5% x 0.14 = 2.5%). But price increases resulting from the tariffs don’t need to be confined to imported products only. This is because higher prices for imports create cover for businesses to raise prices on domestically produced goods and services as well, enabling them to boost their profit margins.

Of course, nobody forces businesses that sell imported products to raise their prices. The alternative is for them to pay the tariffs to the U.S. Treasury and then just eat their average 17.5% cost increases by cutting their profits. Obviously, businesses would much rather raise prices before letting their profit margins shrivel.    

Why should employment conditions also get worse in this situation? This is because businesses worry that the tariffs will cut into their profits. They therefore hold off on plans to expand their operations and hire new people.  

To date, the Trump program to combat stagflation has two prongs. First, cook the government data to make reality disappear. Second, lambast Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve (which is the U.S. central bank, and commonly referred to as “the Fed”), into cutting interest rates. Trump regularly ridicules Powell as a “stiff,” “numbskull,” or “moron” for not having cut interest rates so far.  

Most recently, Trump also began attacking and demanding the resignation of Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a member of the Fed Board of Governors and a Biden appointee.  Trump and company claim that Cook committed mortgage fraud in 2021, before she joined the Fed. Cook vehemently denies the charges and insists that she will not resign. Trump’s real purpose here is to replace independent voices at the Fed with loyalists who will toe his policy line, whatever that line happens to be.  

In fact, by maintaining relatively high interest rates to fight inflation, Powell, Cook, and the other Fed policymakers are only following the standard Fed playbook. The aim with high interest rates is to slow the economy and increase unemployment. The higher unemployment rate then weakens workers’ bargaining power, which lowers labor costs for businesses, enabling businesses to maintain their profit margins without raising prices. Thus, it is baked into the standard Fed inflation control program that working people are the designated sacrificial lambs, even if their wage increases have not caused the inflation in the first place.

Trump’s tantrums aside, there are indeed major problems with this standard Fed approach. To begin with, workers gaining excessive bargaining power has never been the driver of stagflation in the United States. In the 1970s and early 1980s, stagflation resulted because global crude oil prices rose roughly tenfold between 1973 and 1980, from $3.56 to $39.50 a barrel. The only other bout of stagflation was after the COVID lockdown was lifted. In this case, stagflation resulted because the production of major items, like new cars, had been cut during the lockdown conditions. Demand for cars then returned quickly when lockdown conditions lifted, but with new cars in short supply, used car prices roseby 40%.  

From a longer-term perspective, we also have to remember how the U.S. working class has fared, on average, under the 50 years of neoliberalism that preceded Trump. The most central facts are that average wages for nonsupervisory workers are basically where they were 50 years ago, at roughly $50,000 per year (in 2024 dollars), even while average worker productivity has increased by 150%. Meanwhile, over this same 50-year period, average CEO compensation has risen nearly tenfold, from $1.5 million to almost $15 million.   

In fact, in a major August 22 speech, Powell signaled that, at its next official meeting in September, the Fed is likely to modestly reduce the main interest rate that it controls (the federal funds rate), due to mounting evidence of worsening employment conditions. As Powell knows well, this will accomplish nothing to reduce the inflationary pressures created by Trump’s tariffs. In other words, through deploying the Fed’s main policy tool of manipulating interest rates, you can either reduce inflation through raising unemployment or reduce unemployment at the cost of higher inflation. What you can’t do is combat both sides of stagflation—inflation and unemployment—at the same time.    

The first obvious step right now for fighting stagflation is for Trump to dump his tariff policies. We shouldn’t rule that option out. Trump didn’t earn the nickname TACO—“Trump Always Chickens Out”—for nothing. But even if Trump does chicken out on the tariffs, we will still be stuck at square one in terms of advancing inflation control policies that also enable U.S. workers to get the long-overdue raises they deserve. 
     
Published in: Left Hook Economics

Originally published by Metro DC DSA's newsletter.

Washington, occupied city: Popular front emerges to fight fascist invasion — rally and mass cop watch this Saturday, August 23 at 6pm

“There is no takeover,” Mayor Muriel Bowser uttered in a press conference on the night of Monday, August 18. By Wednesday evening, the mayor and MPD Police Chief Pamela Smith were smiling and shaking hands with Trump’s favorite pet, Stephen Miller.

The initial invasion of DC, launched last week by President Trump in a naked power grab, flooded DC’s streets with armed federal agents. Their stated objective was to stop crime. In reality, the forces escorted agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement around the city to attack the vulnerable and launch a shock and awe campaign designed to pacify the city through fear. Throughout the week, the nation watched harrowing videos emerge from the District: a disabled immigrant rammed with a vehicle; parishioners abducted on their way to mass; a delivery driver sucker punched on their way to work; homeless folks ripped from encampments and marched to shelters already at capacity; checkpoints erected spontaneously to grow and develop an unaccountable dragnet; messages of solidarity ripped down and mocked; and bystanders threatened with arrest and assault.

Senseless violence. State torture. Force as spectacle. This is fascism. The occupying forces' hit-squad tactics may be overlooked to a certain kind of upper class resident of the city. But there is no escaping the cost of this outrageous terrorism. As increasingly audacious methods of state violence are normalized, nihilism and sadism will grow across the government and society, creating a despondent and sociopathic population. Materially, these wasteful incursions reduce state capacity to address the actual sources of poverty and violence that plague American life. This unchecked rot will spread with time, bearing increasingly high costs to the life of working-class people. This is the nature of all austerity regimes, which require compounding levels of violence and corruption to maintain.

Mutual aid networks, tenant and labor unions, immigrant rights groups, and homeless advocacy organizations rapidly initiated defense protocols to fascist repression. But many were left wondering: where is the DC government? An expose published by the Washington Post answered that question. Despite secret discussions held by the Council, Mayor Bowser, Attorney General Brian Schwalb and senior administrators, the DC government failed to cohere a response to Trump's attack on DC autonomy. Police Chief Smith seemed to disappear entirely, shocking even MPD officers. Although the DC government eventually filed a lawsuit to contest Trump’s formal sequester of the police department, no steps have been taken to functionally limit federal control. Several councilmembers have even mused open collaboration with the occupying forces. On national radio, at-large Councilmember Henderson openly welcomed coordination with the occupying forces. The sacrifice of immigrants, civil liberties, the poor and District autonomy are all seen as fair tributes in the eyes of DC's myopic political elite.

Locally, hope lies in the popular front summoned from DC's working-class enclaves. In reaction to federal assault, organizer networks have formed communication chains to rapidly coordinate neighborhood response to federal attack and intervention. These networks have culminated in ripostes against federal assault, producing several heroic maneuvers over the past week. Just a few spotted:

• Columbia Heights: A rapid mobilization chased ICE out of the neighborhood on Tuesday night. After notice was issued of ICE presence, the community mounted sustained pressure against the officers patrolling our streets, shouting and following the feds until they fled the scene.
• The movement surged to DC Jail to rally support for local activist Afeni, who stood up to police harassment of youth and was pepper sprayed, slammed to the ground, and arrested before being released last Saturday.
• Locals are rooting out undercover agents.
• Vice President JD Vance and Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth were booed and showered with chants of “Free DC” during a craven photo-op at Union Station.
• Several rallies on U Street have demonstrated mass opposition to the occupying forces.
• Behind the scenes, clandestine anti-fascist networks have developed community patrols to identify, communicate and document federal activity.

This federal assault must not be normalized; the time to get involved is now. 

MORE RESOURCES AND ACTIONS: Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, one of the few voices in DC government trying to stop political collaboration with the occupying forces, has created a Federal Enforcement Incident Report form for Ward 4. DC Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid has a hotline for ICE sightings, know your rights materials, and resources for community members. The DC Safety Squad is running We Keep Us Safe Wednesdays, sharing political education information on Instagram and has issued guidance for travel together.

Metro DC DSA statement on ICE harassment of chapter member

Metro DC DSA issued the following statement on Thursday, August 21:

“Earlier this week, DC police collaborating with ICE agents stopped a longtime Metro DC DSA member while he was driving his work vehicle in northwest DC. Falsely claiming the stop was for a vehicle violation, the police racially profiled our member and his colleague, both of whom are Latino landscape workers. They ripped the colleague out of the vehicle and tackled him to the ground, eventually handing him over to ICE, where he remains in custody. A bystander who filmed the incident was also arrested. Our member, a US citizen, briefly filmed the encounter before being handcuffed and eventually released.

Metro DC DSA declares full solidarity with our member, his colleague, and everyone who is under attack from this fascist administration.

The occupation of DC has nothing to do with keeping our city safe. It’s a spectacle intended to obscure the fact that Trump and his local collaborators are destroying the programs working-class people depend on to survive — all for the sake of enriching oligarchs who profit from our suffering. This is a brutal class war on working people waged by the rich and their political puppets.

The law will not protect us. We know that from this most recent outrage, as well as the long history of state brutality in communities across the US. Rights are meaningless without a strong political movement to give them substance. Our safety as a community depends above all on our ability to organize and build solidarity. Our solidarity especially extends to our immigrant neighbors, who are an essential part of our collective working-class family. We call for the abolition of ICE. We call on everyone to actively join the movement to end the occupation of DC, the condition of DC statelessness that enables it, and the predatory capitalist system that underpins them both..."


We must not give up on the fight for a democratic future. There are guides on North Star's Fight Fascism pages for where to start.  Defeat Fascism/Fight for Democracy. List of opportunities:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cRIJsSJwtF72ckJ8QLQu5cDCGnoeh5OIIjwqRkDKdBg/edit?usp=sharing

 

Republished from Portside.

Max Böhnel
August 12, 2025
nd - journalismus von links

DSA's 2025 convention was, in many ways, a snapshot of the American socialist movement itself: energized, diverse, and ambitious — but also fragmented, insular, and unsure of how to seize the political moment staring it in the face. 

The big moment came on Sunday afternoon. Delegates to the Democratic Socialists of America’s biennial convention had been waiting all weekend for the announcement: Who would be elected to the organization’s 23-member National Political Committee (NPC)?
One by one, names and portrait photos of the winners flashed across two giant screens in the cavernous Chicago Convention Center. Cheers erupted in pockets around the hall — here, then there — as more than 1,200 delegates celebrated victories for their respective factions. The seating arrangements themselves told the story: Delegates had clustered by political affiliation, so the joy was as geographically concentrated as the disappointment. Just before, they had all stood together, fists raised, to sing The Internationale.
When the last name was read, applause rippled across the room. Then phones came out. Delegates began tallying up the results: Reformers versus revolutionaries, sectarians versus pragmatists, advocates of broad-based socialist organizing versus believers in a tightly disciplined workers’ party. The day before, delegates had re-elected Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique as co-chairs.
A movement stuck in place

The new NPC lineup suggested a rough stalemate between the two dominant blocs, with no clear power center emerging. Compared with the 2023 convention, not much had shifted. At the national level, DSA — the largest left-wing membership organization in the country — still seems unlikely to wield significant political clout. In certain cities and regions, however, the organization remains a meaningful force.
Siddique, a member of the Groundwork caucus, which champions mass politics, was quick to argue that the election results didn’t match the mood inside the organization. “The composition of the new NPC doesn’t reflect the balance of forces in DSA,” he told reporters, noting that the candidate slate had been finalized before Zohran Mamdani’s headline-grabbing victory in the New York mayoral primary. The excitement around Mamdani’s win, Siddique said, had not been translated into representation at the top.

Big tent, big problems

The factionalism was hard to miss — even for international guests. Pelle Dragsted, leader of Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten), had come to Chicago to observe what he called “the other America.” He was inspired by the sight of so many young socialists in one place, and stressed that the U.S. left “has an enormous responsibility” to build an alternative to Trumpism, something he believes the Democratic Party establishment is incapable of doing. Still, he admitted, DSA’s “very big tent” comes with internal divisions that are "perhaps a little concerning." The movement, he argued, needed a unifying purpose.
Those divisions were on full display outside the plenary hall, where factional activists handed out flyers, pamphlets, and stickers to push their preferred resolutions and NPC candidates. In the evenings, separate parties were held in different neighborhoods. A pre-convention tally had identified more than 20 caucuses represented among the delegates; only about 20 percent of delegates were unaffiliated.

Trump? Not the main topic

On day one, a majority rejected a motion from the “moderates” to prioritize debate on anti-Trump strategy. Instead, the convention focused largely on internal organizational questions. Nearly every caucus supports, in principle, the creation of a U.S. socialist party. Yet there was little appetite for discussing why past third-party experiments — from the Green Party to smaller socialist formations — had failed.
Delegates did spend several hours debating anti-Zionism, eventually passing a resolution calling for the expulsion of members who make “pro-Zionist” statements or engage in “pro-Zionist” activity.
For some, this was a missed opportunity. Paul Garver, a veteran member of DSA’s International Committee, agreed that factionalism and the absence of a coherent strategy to confront Trumpism were the convention’s defining features. Still, he pointed to bright spots: DSA chapters across the country are mobilizing in defense of immigrant rights and against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He cited a boycott campaign against the low-cost airline Avelo, which had signed a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to transport detained migrants to facilities inside and outside the U.S. In July, Avelo announced it would close its base for “financial reasons” — a decision organizers took as an early victory.

A warning from within

One longtime DSA member, speaking on condition of anonymity, warned that nearly all caucuses share an “idealism-based” assumption that “DSA should be the core of a third party.” Without a coherent, organized push for socialist mass politics, they cautioned, the organization risks devolving into “a swamp of competing sects” — with or without Zohran Mamdani’s leadership.
The 2025 convention was, in many ways, a snapshot of the American socialist movement itself: energized, diverse, and ambitious — but also fragmented, insular, and unsure of how to seize the political moment staring it in the face.

Max Bohnel is a U.S. based freelance journalist working for German-speaking media, among them nd - journalismus von links (independent socialist daily newspaper, formerly Neues Deutschland) 

The following is a statement on behalf of the North Star Caucus Steering Committee

No Kings Day turned out to be an event of massive historical as well as political import. With estimates of participation ranging from 3 to 5 million in communities large and small across the US, it was both the largest demonstration in US history and a truly national mass mobilization. While many DSA Chapters across country turned out in support, they did so without the endorsement or support of their own national leadership. Amid the near unanimous chorus of endorsements for the action DSA was conspicuous by its absence. While it seems the NPC did indeed take up the question of endorsing/supporting No Kings Day, it was defeated by a narrow majority comprised of Red Star, MUG and Bread and Roses who argued that the call encouraging people participating in No Kings Day to display US flags meant that DSA would be endorsing a demonstration where the US flag, symbolizing US imperialism, would be displayed. This was taken to mean that endorsing the demonstration would be tantamount to endorsing imperialism.

Apart from the argument that could be made in support of the idea of “taking back” the symbol from the Right--as in declaring the flag to represent equally the flag of anti-Monarchism, abolition and emancipation,  and the modern War Against Fascism--what strikes us about this decision is that it implicitly elevates symbolism (symbolic politics) over consideration of the actual political context (real politics). This seems to reflect 1) a shockingly faulty analysis of the current political context and 2) a problematic or non-existent idea regarding the political strategy and action required to address it.

The political context is the rise of a fascist movement and the election of its leaders to power, bringing dire threats of authoritarian suppression of what remains of democratic protections and rights for our people as well as massive transfer of wealth and power to an oligarchic, kleptocratic ruling class. The situation is urgent both because of the immediate harm being done to multiple vulnerable groups as well as working people as a whole and because of the long term prospect of an entrenched right wing authoritarian power that will do untold damage to people and the environment throughout the planet. The urgency of opposing this outcome seems to have been completely ignored by the NPC.

The political strategy that seems obvious at this moment, and has been articulated by other DSA members as well, is the need to be part of the broad coalition/movement to defeat MAGA and oppose the 60 years of growing reactionary Right roll back of liberal reforms and movements. DSA would need to constitute an organized radical force within that movement that grasps the deep roots of the problem and has a more comprehensive vision of the necessary social transformation required. This is necessary not only in order to fight for that transformation in the long term, but to prevent in the short term the Democratic party engaging in a superficial and opportunistic defeat of the Right electorally while offering nothing to the people that would modify the nihilism and despair regarding democracy and prospects for change that has seized a large part of our population and made them vulnerable to fascist ideas.

As shown by the recent campaign and success of Zohran Mamdani in New York, a broad-based political strategy is necessary, one that directly confronts this failed strategy of the Democratic Party. Our campaign having demonstrated our power to inspire the larger population regarding the possibility of a better life for all, it is now critical  for our organization to assume a leading role as the voice of radical transformation. Without this voice the movement against MAGA may fail and we may also lose an historically vital opportunity to advance a socialist agenda. Avoiding both such outcomes must be held in awareness and inform of our current strategy and action.

No Kings Day was an event of massive historical and political import. With estimates of participation ranging from 3 to 5 million in communities across the US, it was both the largest demonstration in US history and a truly national mass mobilization. An event in which DSA Chapters across country turned out in support. The curious point being that they did so without the endorsement or support of their own National leadership. Amid the near unanimous chorus of endorsements for the action the DSA National Political Committee was conspicuous by its silence.

In the wake of events the question as to why this was so naturally arises. Obviously not because DSA's national leadership has any sympathy with the Trump regime. So why did the NPC effectively ignore this mobilization?  Well now it can be told. It seems the NPC did indeed take up the question of endorsing/supporting No Kings Day. It was reportedly defeated by a narrow majority. That majority, comprised by Red Star, MUG and Bread and Roses, took alarm at a call encouraging people participating in No Kings Day to display US flags. The argument seems to be that since the US flag symbolizes US imperialism, endorsing a demonstration where the flag is displayed is tantamount to endorsing imperialism.

So now we know. DSA as a national organization was AWOL from the largest single day popular mobilization US history because of a matter of political symbolism. In this instance highly contested symbolism. Symbols by definition are open to multiple sometimes conflicting, paradoxical readings. The US flag may indeed be the flag of US imperialism but is equally the flag of anti-Monarchism, abolition and emancipation and a flag of the War Against Fascism. It is emblematic of all these things and more. Good and bad, for good or ill. This because symbols do not have intrinsic, material meanings but draw their associations from the context in which they are presented. 

It would seem obvious that US flags displayed at No Kings Day protests would have a far different symbolic impact than flags displayed at Trump's ego driven Military parade but not, evidently, to the majority on the NPC. For them it seems that symbolic meanings are fixed ideas, unalterably embodied in a chosen symbol and excluding all other readings.  Consequently this narrow reading dictates their tactics and strategy.

To be fair, Bread and Roses didn't actually take a firm position but argued that the question needed to be debated by the entire organization. However, having opposed endorsement on those grounds they then issued a public statement some two days before the event calling for chapters to support local actions for No Kings Day. One has to wonder at such a pivot.

In sum what we have seen is a classic case of obstructionism by a narrow majority of the NPC more concerned with theoretical abstractions than practical effect. Something to be kept in mind as the next National Convention and its elections approaches.

Walter Reeves, Atlanta DSA

 The following article is reposted from Chartist https://www.chartist.org.uk/

Original Sin and the Road to Redemption

By Paul Garver on 02/07/2025

Paul Garver on the Democratic Party cover-up and denial of Biden’s incapacity and the rise of the left in the shape of Zohran Mamdani

Original Sin* is a depressing book to read and review. Tapper and Thompson narrate in excruciating detail how Democratic Party operatives collaborated to cover up and deny the increasing cognitive decline of President Biden in the final years of his presidency.    Their misguided actions denied the base of the Democratic Party any opportunity to select a more viable candidate in open Democratic primaries.  Thereby, they helped facilitate the election of a sociopathic demagogue, together with the dangerous schemes of his followers to establish a White Nationalist neo-fascist regime over the USA.

The authors conducted some 200 interviews of Democratic Party insiders and strategists. Many of them admit that they were aware of Biden’s incapacities, but for one reason or another, did not speak out publicly until it was too late to unwind the damage caused by their silence.  Their motives are many, including personal loyalty to Joe Biden and his family, coupled with the belief that only even a diminished Biden could defeat Trump in the 2024 election.

It is hard to prove a counterfactual. It is quite possible that Trump would have steamrolled over even a more viable Democratic opponent than Kamala Harris.    Harris was badly advised by the Democratic Party insiders, who focused on winning over a handful of Republican defectors rather than shaping a message to the traditional base constituencies of the Democratic Party - working class, young voters, people of colour, etc.  About 10 million of these did not vote at all.   A smaller but noticeable number in Michigan defected over Biden’s and Harris’s kowtowing to Netanyahu’s genocidal war in Gaza. 

Media pundits have been playing the blame game since the election.   However, many Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, and some Democratic state governors, persist in the hope for a normal electoral correction in the midterm elections of 2026.  I call this the “lying flat” or the “head-in-the-sand” strategy.   Why would the electorate reward the Democratic Party for its cowardice and calculated inaction in the face of the grave threat to the fundamentals of the American constitutional order?    Polling indicates that a large majority of normally Democratic constituencies are frustrated with the feeble response of the Democratic Party to creeping fascism.

I am writing this on the day after the heartening Democratic primary victory of democratic socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani running for mayor of New York City.   A Muslim immigrant and only a U.S. citizen for a few years, Mamdani campaigned around bread-and-butter issues like transit and housing, with the support of New York City DSA, the Working Families Party and nationally known democratic socialists Bernie Sanders and AOC.   We had hoped that Mamdani might squeeze through by picking up votes in a ranked-choice voting system through his alliances with other progressive candidates like Brad Lander.  In fact, Mamdani got over 43% of the total first-round votes, while Lander got another 11% [boosted by his arrest by ICE agents for daring to ask them to show a judicial warrant].  Discredited former NY governor Andrew Cuomo, backed by major corporate donors, Bill Clinton and most Democratic officeholders in New York City, got only 36% of the vote on the first round, and not enough second choices to overcome Mamdani’s large lead.  Cuomo may run as an Independent in November.  He would join disgraced incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who had to be pardoned by President Trump for his flagrant corruption in return for a highly unpopular collaboration with Trump’s ICE raids, as well as a feeble Republican candidate, to contest Mamdani in November.

Panicking large donors, billionaire businessmen, and Democratic Party insiders are already lining up to support either Cuomo or Adams, running as independents.  Mamdani frightens them because he is a Muslim, a democratic socialist, and a charismatic campaigner with simple populist social democratic messages that appeal to the majority of New Yorkers - rent control, free transit, etc., while threatening to slightly raise taxes on the ultra-rich.

Those same interests futilely spent some $25 million in negative advertising against Mamdani in the primary.  He was libelled as anti-Semitic and communistic, as well as being called inexperienced and impractical.  These negative ads against Mamdani were not very successful, since Zohran had consistently been upfront with his views on immigration, free transit, higher taxes on the rich, and support for Gazans and Palestinians, and his opposition to ICE raids.

We expect that Mamdani’s opponents will receive much more extensive funding to run scurrilous attacks on him between now and the November election.

Mamdani will counter mainly by further amping up his extensive campaigning network that carried him to his primary victory.  Some 40,000 volunteer canvassers had come not only from the organized Left (DSA, Working Families Party, etc.), but also from dozens of progressive organisations, community and neighbourhood associations representing the full spectrum of NYC.  In the fall, Mamdani will rely even more heavily on volunteer canvassers and small donors as well as on his own creative social media and personal appearances.  Hopefully, they will be reinforced by labour union activists, even though most union leaders endorsed Cuomo in the primary.

As a member of DSA’s International Committee, I have been scanning the congratulations to DSA flooding in from international socialist organisations on Mamdani’s victory.  I have also noticed that Mamdani is being hailed in social media by a wide spectrum of progressive organisations in the USA.   So far, I have seen only a trickle of congratulations from Democratic Party officeholders outside NYC.  Could it be that many Democrats in office still fear retaliation by the Democratic National Committee in their own districts in 2026 and beyond if they support    Mamdani?

I would like to believe, hope against hope, that the Democratic Party will not double down on the original sin so well highlighted by Tepper and Thompson.   Their revised version of original sin will be to try to stop Mamdani at all costs. For many Democratic operatives, the victory of the Left in the Democratic Party, now represented by Sanders, the Squad, and Mamdani, would be a catastrophic blow, at least as obnoxious as MAGA and Project 2025. 

Will we be able to overcome these reactionary Democratic diehards at the same time we creatively battle the creeping Fascist takeover that will close most space for political resistance? The odds remain long, but not insurmountable.  Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will!





Comment

To: NPC
From: North Star Caucus for Socialism and Democracy Steering Committee
 
Dear Comrades:
In view of the current political crisis, we have some observations about the current position of DSA at the national level that we would like to share with you. We ask that you take them into serious consideration:
 
Given the capture of our government and institutions by dangerous right-wing forces, we believe there is a need for the broadest possible movement -- not only to defeat the MAGA forces in the immediate moment but also to reverse the tide of reactionary rollback of all the reforms and social protection begun in the New Deal. For this to succeed, an organized radical force within the movement is needed, one that grasps the deep historical roots of this rollback and offers a more comprehensive vision of the necessary social transformation. This movement is developing, but we believe it needs a radical analysis and vision to succeed. It must, in effect, do what the Democratic Party has failed to do, indeed even prevented: inspire in the larger population a belief that change is possible, and a better life can be had. This is essential to ensure that the Right is actually defeated, not momentarily held at bay by an electoral win by the Democrats that allows the reactionary forces to spring back unharmed in the next electoral cycle.
 
It appears that DSA has been reluctant to identify with the necessity of becoming that radical force within the current mass movement to resist MAGA. There is no other socialist organization on a national level that can play this role. Therefore we urge you to consider how DSA can become fully engaged with the current mass movement.  To begin, as we urged on our letter of June 1, 2025, please endorse the  “No Kings” demonstrations planned to take place throughout the country on June 14.


Barbara Joye and Bill Barclay, Co-Chairs, North Star Caucus for Socialism and Democracy

DSA’s North Star Caucus for Democracy and Socialism has resolved to endorse the June 14th,   2025 No Kings Day of Action, and we urge national DSA as a whole to endorse it as well. 
 
The Trump administration continues to execute the Project 2025 playbook, both domestically and globally. However, both domestically and globally the largest anti-fascist mobilization is also emerging.  We believe it is crucial that DSA join this growing mass resistance and do everything possible to help build the broadest and strongest resistance movement possible.  The stakes are extremely high. Uncounted lives are literally in the balance.  The courts and Congress alone are incapable of halting this rapidly unfolding disaster that endangers the freedoms and lives of more and more people -- and even the future of life on our planet -- daily . Only a broad-based mass resistance movement can stop it.
 
DSA cannot afford to absent itself from this struggle. Working people will remember who stood with them in this fight and who did not. Please:
 
(1)            Endorse the June 14th, 2025 No Kings Day of Action;
(2)            Publicize this endorsement both to DSA chapters and to the larger public as soon as possible. 
 
Bill Barclay and Barbara Joye, Co-Chairs,
North Star Caucus for Democracy and Socialism

  Trump’s Authoritarian Power Grab in Los Angeles Is an Attack on Democracy—and on ImmigrantsBy Carlos Alcala, California Democratic Council.  Media Director

  Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles—over the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass—isn’t just a dangerous abuse of power. It’s an authoritarian stunt aimed at silencing protest, undermining democratic governance, and scapegoating immigrants while cutting off every legal avenue they’re supposed to use.
Let’s not mince words. The people of California overwhelmingly elected Newsom and Bass to lead their communities, manage public safety, and reflect their values. These leaders made it clear: they did not want or need military troops flooding their streets. But Trump—true to form—ignored that democratic mandate. In doing so, he revealed exactly what kind of governance he supports: one where force overrides consent, and the will of voters is trampled by federal intimidation.
This move fits into a broader, deeply cynical strategy. Trump has spent years dismantling legal pathways to immigration—shutting down asylum processes, gutting refugee programs, and imposing cruel and arbitrary barriers to lawful entry. Then, when people flee violence and poverty and arrive at the border seeking help, he turns around and blames them for not “doing it legally.” It’s a rigged system by design: close the door, then punish people for knocking.
Now, he’s bringing that same hypocrisy to the streets of Los Angeles, conflating protest, immigration, and public disorder to justify militarized crackdowns. It’s not about security. It’s about optics, fear, and division.
What Trump is really doing is targeting communities who dare to stand up—for immigrant rights, racial justice, and democracy itself. The people in the streets are demanding an end to police violence, an end to xenophobia, and a government that actually listens to them. Trump’s answer? Send in troops. Silence dissent. Pretend it’s about “law and order.”
Let’s be clear: true law and order comes from justice, not occupation. It comes from investing in communities, not militarizing them. And it absolutely comes from respecting the democratic will of the people—not overriding it with tanks and troops.
This is not just a local issue. It’s a national crisis of democracy. If a president can ignore elected leaders and flood cities with soldiers, where does it end? What happens the next time a protest erupts in a city that doesn’t share his politics—or his prejudices?
The answer lies in collective resistance. Progressives, immigrants, organizers, and everyday citizens must speak with one voice: we will not allow fear to replace freedom. And we will not allow a twice-impeached former president to rewrite the rules of democracy to serve his authoritarian ambitions.
This is our fight—not just for Los Angeles, but for every city, every immigrant, and every person who believes in democracy over dictatorship.
California Democratic Council. Representing 420 Democratic Clubs in the California Democratic Party.  Carlos Alcala is Chair of the Chicano Caucus.

HERE’S THREE THINGS YOU CAN DO ABOUT ICE RAIDS IN LOS ANGELES RIGHT NOW
This weekend’s shocking and violent raids in Los Angeles are meant to be a show of force from the Trump regime. This is about instilling fear and terrorizing Angelenos. But we can fight back.
Given the latest news about National Guard Deployment, we expect raids to continue and encourage community members to be safe and thoughtful.
The Trump regime’s raids have terrorized our community this weekend. Students and parents targeted at schools. Lawyers illegally denied access to speak to those detained. Protestors and observers brutalized.
The LAPD has abetted the raids in the name of “preserving public safety”, in violation of the spirit if not the letter of LA’s Sanctuary City Ordinance. Angelenos protecting our communities are not a threat to public safety, militarized agents kidnapping our neighbors is. DSA-LA opposed the appointment of Jim McDonnell as police chief precisely because of his history of collusion with ICE.

1. CALL THE COMMUNITY HOTLINE

888-624-4752
If you see federal agents in your neighborhood, call the LA Rapid Response Network. Community groups rely on these calls to deploy trained volunteers to document and monitor immigration actions.

1. ATTEND AN ACTION

 Citizens who know their rights can disrupt and slow ICE incursions, as well as pressure local authorities to take action. Here are two upcoming events - stay tuned for more details:

• TODAY 6/8, 2pm, LA City Hall, ICE Out of LA / National Guard Go Away
• Monday 6/9, 11am, Gloria Molina Grand Park, 200 N Grand Ave. Los Angeles 90012 - Local unions are organizing a rally during the arraignment of detained union leader David Huerta.
• Tuesday 6/10, 6pm, Glendale City Hall- Glendale City Council has a contract to lease their jail beds to ICE. Attend their meeting and make your voice heard at general public comment to demand this contract be terminated.

 Use best protest practices. Here are resources from the National Lawyers Guild - Los Angeles.
Do you know of any other actions? Share them by replying to this e-mail! We will continue to broadcast other events at which DSA members will have an organized presence.

1. CONNECT WITH YOUR COMRADES

“These raids are freaking me out. Are you doing okay?”
 Now is the time to reconnect with friends and family, fellow DSA members, union siblings, and members of other community organizations resisting ICE like the Community Self-Defense Coalition. Online tools can help spread the word, but we can only fight fascism through real community. Don’t just scroll - talk to someone!
 If you aren’t a member of an organization, now is the time to join one.
Los Angeles DSA

"Most of the time it makes sense to skip past Donald Trump’s rantings on social media to examine the underlying material dynamics that shape US politics: The crisis of the neoliberal economic model. The erosion of US global hegemony. The 60-year right-wing backlash against the gains of the 1960s. The persistence of economic inequality, racial injustice, and patriarchy. The impact on the US working class of deindustrialization, COVID, and post-COVID inflation. The anti-democratic features built into the US electoral system.

The Left’s assessment of the moment and our strategies for transformative change need to be grounded in these realities. But a periodic check on Trump’s messages on Truth Social is also warranted. It tells us a lot about the way this aspiring dictator thinks and what appeals to a MAGA base consisting of 70% of Republican voters and 35% of the electorate overall. Left assessments and strategies will be mechanical and one-sided if this dimension of class struggle—what Marx calls “the ideological forms in which men (sic) become conscious of conflict and fight it out”— is neglected."

Read the full article here.

Bill Barclay 
On September 2, 1987, a full-page ad appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globedenouncing the failure of U.S. political leaders to stand up against the countries – Japan and Saudi Arabia  were named – that were “ripping us off.”  The answer: tariffs.  
 
The ad was signed by Donald J Trump.
 
Today Trump’s tariff tantrum’s target is, of course, China.  And the ostensible reason for China tariffs is to bring manufacturing – and maybe coal mining – back to the United States.   Today he has – or at least has assumed in the face of a flaccid Congress – the power to throw various tariffs against the wall, 50% one day, 100% another, then retreat the next day.  The back-and-forth pattern has created what financial markets are calling the TACO trade (“Trump Always Chickens Out,” an epithet that enrages Trump).  
 
In 2000 U.S. manufacturing represented 25% of the global total; China was only 6%.  Today the United States, with 4.2% of global population, accounts for 16% of global manufacturing by value and China, with 17% of global population, produces almost 32%.  More significantly, in 2000 China’s leading manufactured export was textiles; today textiles are not even in the top 10.  (For a deeper analysis of China’s rapid rise in the global political economy, see Bill Barclay, “Dangerous Inflection Point: Is China's Growth Model Exhausted?.”
Is this a reason for concern?  And, if so, what should/could be done about it?
 
We can begin by looking in greater detail both at manufacturing itself and at the components of the U.S. manufacturing trade deficit with China. The United States is not the only country where manufacturing has been declining. The manufacturing share of  GDP and employment has dropped in both Germany and Japan (although it remains above that of the Unites States), and the global GDP share of manufacturing at about 20%.  .   
 
Manufacturing jobs are at stake in Trump’s trade war with China – in both countries,  While the US employs only 12.7 million workers in manufacturing to the more than 100 million in China, productivity in US manufacturing is more than 6 times that of China.
 
This productivity disparity is primarily driven by the large labor-intensive manufacturing sector in China – textiles, furniture, footwear, etc.  Although Commerce Secretary Lutnick claimed that Trump’s tariffs would result in US workers producing shoes, t-shirts and more, this is extremely unlikely: average textile worker wages in the US, as low as they may be, are 3 – 4 times those in China, and more than 30 times that of a Bangladesh textile worker, the second largest textile exporter.  The US textile trade deficit with China was about  $100 billion in 2023.  
 
No, nothing Trump can do will bring large scale textile manufacturing back to the U.S. – nor should we want it to.
 
So, let’s look at some examples of more advanced manufacturing – like the ubiquitous cell phone. In 2024 the US trade deficit with China in goods was $295 billion – and almost 15% of that was Apple with 90% of its products assembled in China. Trump has recently raised the possibility of a 25% tariff on China-assembled iPhones. We’ve seen this movie  before – in 2017, during his first term, he Trumpeted that Foxconn, the iPhone Apple iPhone assembler in  China, would build a $10 billion plant in Wisconsin. The only result was a short-lived mask pandemic-era production facility, now mostly unused and never built. 
 
Could we make -  or more accurately, assemble - iProducts in the US?  Probably, if we were willing to pay 2 – 4 times their current price. And even then, the parts, largely manufactured in Germany, South Korea and elsewhere would be subject to Trumps tariffs. 
 
But manufacturing is important for commercial innovation, technological progress and long-term environmental sustainability.  There are other types of leading-edge manufacturing that contribute to these goals and in which the US could actually be competitive – with the right industrial policies. For example, remaking our transport system – cars, trucks and trains – into a driver of the energy transition.   But that would require acknowledging the reality of climate change.  Today China produces 70% of all EVs and over 60% of Li-ion batteries essential to EVs.  We have a long way to go.
 
And the question, especially for advanced manufacturing, is how the facility will be operated?  Trump sees large numbers of men (“manly jobs”) working on the factory floor. But high-tech manufacturing demands high-tech skill capabilities – including robots. The United States ranks only seventh in robot manufacturing density, behind Japan, China, and Germany.  One last point: it is  often argued that manufacturing provides high wage jobs, but that confuses correlation and causation.  There is nothing inherent in manufacturing jobs that dictate high pay: today a Danish worker at MacDonald’s is paid more than a Kia auto assembly line worked in Alabama.  The difference? The Danish worker is in a union.
 
The possibility for a manufacturing renaissance in the US is real – but very unlikely to be realized  by Trump’s approach to tariffs.  In fact, his rejection of climate change and unwillingness to understand the  thrust of high-tech manufacturing will likely cost the US manufacturing industry, especially the auto production and parts sector going forward.  
 
Oh, I forgot – we’ll be the crypto capital of the world – crypto plus coal –a vision for the future.  
 
Think I’ll make some TACOs for dinner.
​
Bill Barclay is a political economist and lives in  Ventura, CA.  He was a founding member of DSA and the Chicago Political Economy Group (cpegonline.org) and is on the steering committee of the North Star Caucus of DSA. 

 
 
 
 
 
 

At its May 25, 2025 meeting, the NS SC took the following actions.

 (1)   NS endorses the June 14th No Kings Day of Action; and

(2)   NS will urge that the NPC also endorse the No Kings Day of Action 

(3)   NS will urge other caucuses to also endorse the  No Kings Day of Action.    
 The No Kings Day of Action is a mobilization against the Musk/Trump political and economic attack on all of us.  Please join – or help organize – one of the many events near you.

 

More information on June 14th No Kings Day can be found here:  

https://indivisible.org/statements/indivisible-and-partners-announce-no-kings-nationwide-day-defiance-flag-day-during;
Here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/50501movement/posts/1036778238059505/;

Here: https://www.nokings.org/partners; and 
Here: https://www.mobilize.us/aft/event/792871/
 
 

Bill Barclay and Barbara Joye, 
NS SC co-chairs

open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/what-should-we-do-now-live-with-rev?What Should We Do Now?  with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
ROBERT REICH
 AND 
WILLIAM J. BARBER, II
HTTPS://ROBERTREICH.SUBSTACK.COM/P/WHAT-SHOULD-WE-DO-NOW-LIVE-WITH-REV?