Tempest Magazine

Who would have imagined a few years ago that masses of people around the world would be reading, praising, arguing over, and condemning a book about an obscure Jewish socialist organization that effectively came to an end nearly 80 years ago?1https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-the-story-of-the-jewish-bund/ A book about an uncompromisingly anti-Zionist organization? Who would have imagined such a book having rave reviews in the New York Review of Books 2Adam Hochschild, “A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth”, New York Review of Books, 28 May 2026; https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/ and The New York Times and being on the latter’s bestsellers list? 3Max Strasser, “What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism?” New York Times,  April 6, 2026; https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/books/review/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-molly-crabapple.html

The Israeli state is carrying out a genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, and increasing apartheid laws inside Israel. Not only does the world stand by and allow this—the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia (where I live) support, arm, and encourage the Israeli government, and succumb to pressure to cancel and criminalize pro-Palestinian activity. The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism means not just a distortion of Zionism and what it stands for, but a loss of the historical reality of antisemitism. It also results in a distortion of Jewish history, a loss of the history of the majority of European Jews of the first half of the twentieth century, who were socialists, not Zionists.

At a time like this, we need more than ever books that rediscover the other Jewish tradition, the history of radical struggle, opposition to Zionism, and socialism.

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, generally known as the Jewish Labor Bund or just simply the Bund, was founded in 1897 in Vilna (Vilnius, now in Lithuania) in the tsarist empire. It is one of the most important but least recognized socialist organizations in Europe.

In its early years, the Bund was revolutionary. It was the first socialist group to turn away from narrow circle work to agitation among workers in the late nineteenth century. It was also the first organization in Russia to implement many of the features we see today as characteristic of the revolutionary party: an agitational paper, professional revolutionaries, and the need for the party to be rooted among workers. The Bund also took the lead in organizing systematic self-defense against pogroms, which were endemic in the tsarist empire.

Because of its resources and organizational skills, the Bund was central to organising the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898. By the Second Congress in 1903, it had 30,000 members, compared to 8,400 total for the other affiliates. Before the 1905 Revolution in Russia, one third of the prisoners in the Siberian labor camps were Bundists, and the party played a key role in that revolution.

At the 1903 Congress, the Bund opposed Vladimir Lenin’s concept of the party. However, after the 1917 revolution, a sizable group broke away from the Bund and joined the revolutionary movement. The remaining Bund organization relocated to newly independent Poland, where it affiliated with the Second International.

But there was little scope for reformist careerism under Józef Piłsudski’s authoritarian regime, and even less during the increasingly fascist period after he died in 1935. Subservience did not save the Polish Communist Party from destruction by Joseph Stalin. With Trotskyism virtually nonexistent, many of the best working-class activists were to be found in the Bund and in the Polish Socialist Party, also a member of the Second International. As they had done previously, the Bund continued its working-class-based activities, organizing workers into trade unions and leading self-defense groups against increasing fascist antisemitism.

During World War II, the Bund also played a critical role in resistance to the Nazis, most notably during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.

So much of this story appears to have been forgotten or relegated to footnotes. While there is a significant body of literature on the Bund, it has been treated as a niche topic, one for specialists in Jewish history.

In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple has written a work of popular history. Although the author has undertaken original archival research, the book is unapologetically non-academic. To read it is more like reading a novel, a thriller, or a family saga. It is a page-turner, with a large cast of actors and vigorously drawn characters. Events are fast-paced, and the story unfolds against a backdrop of wars, revolutions, civil unrest, and local conflicts.

Above all, this is a book about people’s personal experience. Crabapple is a visual artist, and reading this book is like watching a series of vignettes passing before your eyes. Central is her great-grandfather Sam Rothbort, who at 15 became an activist Bundist in the small town of Volkovysk (present-day Belarus). Rothbort participated in Bund-led strikes and gatherings in the forests, but eventually fled to the United States in 1904.

Crabapple never knew her great-grandfather, but she did have a wonderful source of material in a shoe box of memorabilia, handwritten memoirs, and hundreds of paintings he left behind. This treasure trove inhabits the book almost as a living entity. Throughout the book, she draws on memoirs, letters, and personal accounts of many Bundists, men and women, young and old, leaders and rank-and-file members. She shows them to us as living human beings who were active players in history.

Far from using an authorial distance and objectivity, Crabapple tries to enter the minds of her protagonists, to write subjectively. She speculates about how individuals must have felt and thought.

Here is an example from the 1905 Revolution, sparked by the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. Crabapple creatively describes the experiences of the Bundist soap box orator Anna Lipshitz:

Soon, to move between neighbourhoods, Anna would have had to weave around overturned tramcars and slip behind barricades…She would have witnessed the beatings of police officers…and likely heard the explosion of anarchist bombs. It must have thrilled her. This moment was meant to be hers…

Anna Lipshitz heard the news alongside the rest of the city. A battleship named Potemkin had just dropped anchor…It was flying a red flag.

Hoarse, bleary, her dress stiff with dried sweat, Lipshitz would have pulled herself off the floor of her safe house and joined the crowds clambering toward the port. The ship gleamed like a dream.

It is this sort of creative writing that animates this book, bringing to life the experience of revolution, war, and pogroms in a deeply effective way. We know, without it being articulated, that the dream that ends this passage is the possibility of a new world, one that inspired many participants in the revolution.

Some reviews have criticized this approach. But in my view, Crabapple’s use of this form of creative nonfiction is valid, as long as it’s clear what is actually factually based and what is imagined by the author. The book offers something sometimes lacking in historical writing, and helps the reader imagine historical events as they were lived. It gives the sense that revolutionaries and socialists are actual human beings with enthusiasms and foibles, strengths and doubts, dreams and hopes. And that they live without the benefit of hindsight and the analytical books that came after them. The personal experience approach takes us to a particular time and place, and gives the reader the feeling that they are accompanying the protagonists on this journey.

For example, when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there were scenes of chaos. Crabapple brings these to life through realistic detail: the scramble to get news, organize meetings, make decisions, find food, locate relatives, and organize transport and visas. Their agonised debates: “All around Warsaw, rank-and-file Bundists were making similar calculations. Should they stay or run?” Crabapple does not take a position on this. She simply describes the dilemma.

The events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 are already well-documented, but Crabapple gives us telling details. On the day it started, April 19, the Jewish Combat Organization battle squads mobilized at 2.00 am. “From balconies and windows, the fighters watched the nazis goose-step down Nalewki Street, singing a cheerful march. [Marek] Edelman had taken care to dress well that night, in a red angora sweater and two leather bandoliers, crossed like Pancho Villa. As he saw the convoy enter the ghetto, he imagined the Germans’ thoughts.”

We know quite a bit about Edelman, who is famous for his account of the Warsaw Ghetto.4Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, Bookmarks 2014 (and many other editions). But who knew he was wearing a red angora sweater at that moment? The book is enlivened on every page by similar less well-known details.

Viktor Alter, who “liked the ladies,” was nicknamed “the Cary Grant of labor.” Bernard Goldstein is well-known for strong links to the criminal underworld, but he showed a softer side while in hiding during the Uprising, when he gave a young couple privacy in his apartment. Sophia Dubovna, when young, had a crush on the family maid (Sophia came from a rich family) and had briefly dated the right-wing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. In 1934 she gave talks about love and sex at the Bund youth group, Tsukunft (Future). As a small child, Edelman had attended protests on the shoulders of comrades, “red flag in his tiny fist.”

The accounts of pogroms and the suffering and destruction in the book show very vividly what antisemitism actually is historically. In so doing, they reveal contemporary attempts to reduce the concept of antisemitism to uncomfortable feelings in the presence of political slogans or keffiyehs as a horrifying trivialization of the historical oppression of Jews.

The wonderful politics of the Bund shine throughout the book: its internationalism, its commitment to fighting antisemitism and to self-defense, to struggle, and to the working class. While the Zionists argued that antisemitism could never be defeated and so advocated emigration, the Bund promoted remaining and fighting against their oppression. But they took it even further. Using a biblical comparison, one Bundist declared that Jews should “stay and fight there, amongst the Egyptians, until they won a freedom that encompassed even their oppressors.”

Bund leader Henryk Erlich made a similar argument. In 1937, against a backdrop of rising antisemitism and daily attacks by Polish fascists, increasing immiseration, and a clearly imminent war, Erlich urged his audience to look past their own concerns:

You must briefly step out of the confines of your Jewish misery… Look about and you will see– the Jews are not the only ones who are suffering. The overwhelming majority in the country, whether Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, or others, is suffering from the economic crisis…scarcely able to eke out a daily existence.

Shift your gaze beyond the borders of Poland toward the wide world and you will see: Seventy million people are languishing under the heavy boot of Hitlerism. Not only the 500,000 Jews – the whole German people has been transformed into a nation of slaves… Forty million Italians have been turned into a footstool for the ‘great’ Mussolini… millions of working people in other, smaller countries which have become areas of reaction are sunk in privation and bondage.

Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Federation in the interwar years, wrote in 1903 that their hardest struggle everywhere was conducted against the Bund. In return, the Bund described Zionism as “the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.”

In 1933, Erlich wrote:

If Jewish nationalism, as a general rule, is not bloodthirsty, this is only out of necessity, not virtue; if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations.

No we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of other nations.

In an open letter in 1938, Erlich summarised how they were the party that truly fought for the Jewish people: they had organized self-defense groups in tsarist Russia and in Poland, called protest strikes against pogroms, and argued against attempts to deport Jews.

In relation to Palestine, he wrote:

If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine… Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?… Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?

Concentrating on personal experience gives Here Where We Live Is Our Country strengths. But the method also has its weaknesses. Foremost is a lack of analysis. One should not read this book expecting an evaluation of the 1905 Revolution, the Bolshevik/Menshevik split, the role of the soviets in the 1917 revolutions, the growth of Stalinism, the civil war, the coming to power of the Nazis, or the causes of World War II.

This is not the book’s objective, and these matters are very well covered elsewhere, but the lack of context is at times frustrating. While Crabapple features quotes and summaries of discussions, I wanted her book to engage more fully with the organizing principles and politics of the Bund. Consider the seminal event when the Bund sided with the Mensheviks in the famous split in 1903. Crabapple is dismissive: “Medem ruefully listened to rumors that the Iskrites had begun to fracture over the question of party membership. Should the RSDLP be a mass party of workers, as Martov envisioned? Or should it be the top-down conspiracy Lenin wanted, in which a central committee commanded and a full-time cadre obeyed? ‘Lenin had bared his teeth,’ Medem wrote.”

Crabapple goes on to describe Lenin’s “personality traits that would shape the coming century.”  Quoting Medem, she concludes Lenin resembled “a crafty Russian grain dealer… When you speak to him, he looks at you with his small eyes…(and) cunning devilish smile.”

As Donny Gluckstein asks, “whether or not that characterisation was true, was Lenin right to believe a decentralised RSDLP facing the most centralised authoritarian state in the world was ‘a recipe for failure’?”5Donny Gluckstein, International Socialism Journal (forthcoming). Nathaniel Flakin also points out how the focus on Lenin’s personality prevents Crabapple from seriously grappling with the Bund’s political weaknesses and strategic mistakes.6Nathaniel Flakin, https://www.leftvoice.org/bundism-zionism-bolshevism/.

The concentration on personal experience also results in a lack of appreciation of collective experience and of competing social forces. This is particularly obvious in the account of the 1905 Revolution, in which her depiction of the turning of the tide is graphic but occurs for no apparent reason. The same happens with the growth of antisemitism in interwar Poland.

This lack of social context results in an absence that is significant. Although the Bund became the leading Jewish organisation in Poland, it was not the only outlet for Jewish radicalism: Jews were prominent in other Left organizations. There was significant Jewish membership in the Polish Communist Party and the Polish Socialist Party. The left Zionist group Poale Zion joined in self-defense groups. None of this appears in the book.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country has been rightly celebrated for its account of the Bund’s commitment to “Doykait” (“hereness”), meaning that Jews should not go elsewhere to escape discrimination but were entitled to equal rights and justice wherever they lived. Most writers seem to assume this meant that the Bund itself could be at home in any country. Yet it is abundantly clear that, although they were internationalist in spirit, the Bund’s roots were essentially in the Eastern European Yiddish-speaking working class, in particular in Poland by the 1930s.

The Bund did not, in fact, transplant well. In the United States, with its more than two million Jewish immigrants, the Bund organization was small, mostly active in raising money to send to Europe and in the welfare-oriented Workman’s Circle and focusing mainly on cultural work and the promotion of the Yiddish language. While Bundists were likely involved in the mass strikes among Jewish clothing workers in New York before World War II, among which socialists were very active, the Bund played no clear role as an organization.

Although there were individual Bundists in the United Kingdom who participated in a range of activities with other socialists, their work concentrated on collecting money for Poland and promoting Yiddish education.7Benjamin Nadel, “Bundism in England”, Jewish Socialist Group, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/jsg-bundism-uk.pdf The story is similar in Australia.

This explains why the book ends when it does. The Holocaust destroyed the Bund’s roots among the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class of Eastern Europe. As the war-torn regions of Europe slowly reorganized after 1945, the remaining Bund members tried for a time to hold on to their principled politics, particularly anti-Zionism. In two articles in 1948, the Bund leadership warned its readers that “the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe, not only for the Jews in Palestine but for the Jews all over the world” and “the country became from the very start a source of Irredentist movements, Jewish-Arab conflicts, and an open threat of war.”8“Jewish Labor Bund and the Jewish-Arab war in Palestine”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, April 1948 pp3-5; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-4.pdf. “The Jewish Labor Bund and the state of Israel”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, August-September 1948 pp 1-4; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-8-9.pdf.p

These articles generated a “veritable deluge” of condemnation from the entire Jewish press and the Jewish community as traitors. The Bund response was to argue, “We shall not be diverted by any temporary nationalist trend.”9 “We will not be bulled”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, August-September 1948 p 4; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-8-9.pdf

Unfortunately, the trend was not temporary. With the state of Israel firmly established, and the core organization in Poland destroyed, remnant groups in other countries faced a dilemma. The historian of the post-war Bund, David Slucki, shows how the movement came to a pragmatic accommodation with Zionism.10David Slucki, “The Bund abroad in the postwar Jewish world”, Jewish Social Studies, Vol 16, No 1, 2009, pp 111-144.

Paradoxically, new international organizing principles allowed the local Bund groups to focus more on local activities, where they tended to straddle “the divide between mainstream Jewish communities and the non-Jewish socialist left.” Despite continued talk about socialism, bundists in the post–World War II era now saw “cultural continuity as their chief mission.” Thus, despite the formal opposition to Zionism, pragmatism led to an accommodation with Zionism, leading Bundists in Australia and elsewhere to send money to Israel.

The political consequences became evident following the events of October 2023. Although some members of the Australian Bund are conspicuous and principled supporters of Palestine, the organisation has forefronted defense of Israel, publishing only three very short and weak statements (and none since 2025).11https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-on-events-in-gaza; https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-enough; https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-regarding-the-ongoing-horror-in-gaza. Writers associated with the Bund have even criticized Crabapple’s book as seeking to “delegitimise Israel” and even as “hijacked by anti-Zionists.” 12Allan Preis, “The Bund Lives”, 20 July 2026 https://michaelgawenda.substack.com/p/the-bund-lives.

It is sad to see contemporary Bundists repudiating their own history.13Janey Stone, “The International Jewish Labor BUND and the State of Israel”, Verso blog, 12 March 2025 https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-international-jewish-labor-bund-and-the-state-of-israel-1?srsltid=AfmBOoqwvfG38HoXxzCSde4smFpBwKNyL929gYVG_m05MSqmf_bGmnFF But this history remains available to the rest of us. Its existence and predominance stand against the Zionist claims to represent Jews historically. The Bund’s internationalism and its position on Zionism prior to 1948 are beacons to contemporary anti-Zionists.

And it’s clear that people are responding to this beacon. Jacobin applauds what it sees as the Bund’s “growing relevance,”14Grant Morgan, “The Jewish Labor Bund Stood Against Zionism”, Jacobin 22 April 2026; https://jacobin.com/2026/04/jewish-labor-bund-crabapple-review/ noting that where “the Bund has long been regarded as a historical artifact, it’s now reasserting itself as a living tradition.” New groups are springing up under the auspices of a body called the International Jewish Labor Bund (IJLB),15Joseph Mogul, “The Bund is Back”, The Progressive Magazine, March 31, 2026, https://progressive.org/latest/the-bund-is-back-mogul-20260331/; International Jewish Labor Bund Website https://jewishbund.org/ following its declaration in 2023.16“Today We Remake the Jewish Labor Bund”, https://derbund.org/#today-we-remake-the-jewish-labor-bund There are now 11 chapters or organizing committees in the United States and six in Europe, 17https://jewishbund.org/chapters plus an online journal, Der Spekter.18https://www.derspekter.org/?shem=aimgspe (Interestingly, the remnant groups in Australia and elsewhere are not part of this movement.)

The renewed interest in the Bund, its history, and its ideas, not surprisingly, has not been welcomed by everyone. Many of the negative responses to the book are trifling. Objections to Crabapple’s Puerto Rican roots, questioning whether she really is Jewish, and her past work as a burlesque dancer have only added fuel to the fire.

Not surprisingly, Zionists have led the counter-attack. Their responses are defensive, and often abusive. Their fire is directed not at the book’s primary readership, but at a Zionist audience among whom this book (or the publicity it has generated) might raise doubts. A review in Haaretz is typical.19  Joseph Hillyard, “A Missed Opportunity to Learn From the Legacy of the Bund” Ha’aretz, September 18, 2026; https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-09-18/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-missed-opportunity-to-learn-from-the-legacy-of-the-bund/000001a0-b4db-d91d-afeb-fcdb5c980000?gift=8d084db683a8479ba5304dc323911bd1

One strategy is nit-picking very small errors: Eliezer Aryeh, for example, devotes several articles to a forensic analysis of Crabapple’s nearly 2,000 endnotes and comes up with four errors.20Eliezer Aryeh, “What the Footnotes Don’t Say: Here Where We Live Is Our Country gets the Bund right and Palestine wrong” and other articles, May 29 2026 and subsequent dates, https://eliezeraryeh.substack.com/archive?sort=new Others complain that Crabapple “oversimplifies,” is “selective,” or makes “no attempt at representing historical accuracy. Seth Mandel, a conservative anti-Trump Republican, hardly touches on the content of the book at all, but claims (without evidence and despite many of the rave reviews being written by Jews) that the prevailing opinion among Jewish writers is that Crabapple’s book “exhibited a heartfelt nostalgia for a time and place that never really existed…it is a fictional story.”21Seth Mandel, “So You Want To Be a Bundist”, Commentary 7/4/2026; https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/so-you-want-to-be-a-bundist/?shem=aimgspe

Writing in the Jewish Review of Books, Allan Arkush goes further, claiming Zionism “has by and large been rooted in humanitarianism, led by noble men and women dedicated to constructing and sustaining a Jewish state for the benefit of their own beleaguered people and, indirectly, for others.”22Allan Arkush, “An Abusable Past”, Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2026; https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/20334/an-abusable-past/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawUixP1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABwZG9mAWJyaWQRMU9rcld4elZHTjFpV01IdjRzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeGMZdDT0dDz9ZAqrLpDKj2K2lAkxDIWrd8iO5N1lnIYFE9XL5FcUol7cmiVM_aem_hpiD7t7BnHx3PQckSppt1A The Wall Street Journal review, written by a British Trump supporter apparently with the use of AI, regurgitates standard support for Israel for a non-Jewish audience.23Dominic Green, “Here Where We Live is Our Country Review: Defiance in the Diaspora”, Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2026; https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-review-defiance-in-the-diaspora-4b2b2b88

This book is not an academic study. The bibliography is small. Crabapple certainly carried out extensive new archival research, resulting in fascinating personal detail about her protagonists. But the book is rightly focused on introducing the Bund to wider audiences. The need today is not for more academically rigorous studies, to be read only by a limited audience, but for the core ideas in this book—struggle, resistance, solidarity, social justice, and above all socialism—to be spread further.

Whatever its limitations, Here Where We Live is our Country is a wonderful new addition to the history of the Bund and, through this, to the broader tradition of Jewish radicalism and socialism of which it is a part. This history is a part of our collective story, and its legacy belongs to all of us. Read this book in that spirit.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Unknown; modified by Tempest.

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I sit down on a thick wooden fence-post under a native coastal live oak at the mouth of the hidden oasis that is a section of San Pascual Park. Joining me are Amada Segura and Josh Kashapata, two stellar LA resident volunteers with the Save San Pascual Park group.

For Amada and Josh, their Save San Pascual Park journey started with spotting yard signs in their neighborhood. Soon after, they attended a land defense meeting at the Coyotl + Macehualli Lending Library community space in El Sereno. There they met one of the main organizers in the defense of this park: a proud long-time Angeleno and land defender hailing from East LA, Clara Solis.

Since then, Amanda and Josh have joined the park defense, offering their talents to aid in the battle against corrupt city governments, golf course management, and major media outlets.

Just as a single spark can start a prairie fire, a single neighbor—Steve Crouch—raised the alarm to others upon receiving mail about the Arroyo Seco Water Reuse Project. Among those was his childhood friend Clara Solis. This collaborative project by the cities of Pasadena and South Pasadena—both cities boasting significant affluent areas—requires the destruction of a natural space containing 136 trees, a biologically active waterway, and a safe haven for species including the majestic great blue heron. The parcel of lush land would be replaced with artificial pools and water-purifying systems to filter out bacterial contamination in the Arroyo Seco channel. Also included will be enough carefully landscaped native foliage to suitably cover the project in green paint and call it environmentally aligned.

The project claims to be a community-oriented and nature-based solution….However, the city’s efforts, which have refused to educate and include the public in the process, reveal a different pattern.

The project claims to be a community-oriented, nature-based solution and receives funding from the Safe Clean Water Program, Measure W. However, the city’s own efforts, which have refused to educate and include the public, in the process reveal a different pattern. Los Angeles is almost 50% Hispanic or Latinx, but the outreach was only in English until people started calling them out. The pamphlets themselves contain so much misinformation; Save San Pascual Park went line by line on their social media and debunked them using the city’s own sources. One of these sources includes an environmental impact report completed by other cities, which only happened because they were sued by Clara Solis.

“There’s no ecological basis for any of their projects,” says Josh. “It’s kind of like a lot of them ignoring the root causes of issues but using those issues as justifications for projects. So like, runoff from the golf course or Rose Bowl is still going to be coming through here. This [project] is a band-aid for that; it’s not treating the problem at the source, which is obviously the ideal.”

The environmental impact report itself points to two golf courses as the sources of pollution for the waterways, but the cities have targeted this specific area instead. “They admit themselves, that they cannot conduct a nature-based system yet,” Amada adds. Meanwhile, groups like the Stewards of the Arroyo Seco, who are committed to natural restoration, have not been approached by either city.

Importantly, the Kizh Nation has been involved since the beginning, working through the AB 52 CEQUA process. AB 52 requires tribal consultation for projects such as the Arroyo Seco Water Reuse Project.

“They say they’ve had the consultation,” Amada states. “Chief Salas can tell you, and he has stated multiple times that all the consultation was [the tribe] receiving the initial project plans and the Kizh Nation saying ‘we’re not ok with this’ and Pasadena basically saying ‘Ok. We’re still gonna do it though.’

Image credit: author.

In addition, public records requests have gone unanswered, with no explanation as to why. A city administrator has run multiple public campaigns to slander members of Save San Pascal Park. The City of South Pasadena has been falsely claiming that parcel of land as its own, even though the official LA County zoning information says otherwise. Several media outlets, including The Los Angeles Times, have suspiciously biased articles in favor of the cities and golf courses.

Active SGV, a nonprofit based in several cities and 15 miles away, has allegedly been contracted by the City of Pasadena to do outreach for the Arroyo Reuse Project.”1A member of the nonprofit, Active SGV, admitted to being contracted and encouraged by the City of Pasadena to advocate for the Arroya Water Reuse project. As this group tabled at the same farmer’s market as Save San Pascual Park, market-goers told members of Save San Pascual Park that Active SGV was telling people that the people of Save San Pascual Park were lying and should not be talked to.

Through all this and more, Amada and Josh have been contributing to the group’s growing numbers and impact.

The Lorax Must Mobilize for the Trees: Lessons in Building an Impact

What started as neighborly communication and yard signs is now a thriving volunteer-based social media success.

What started as neighborly communication and yard signs is now a thriving volunteer-based social media success.

“As much as I hate Instagram, it really did what it needed to do for us,” says Amada, who found their niche in the group as a social media savant with previous nonprofit experience. “Within the first month of taking over the socials, we grew to over 100k viewers on our page. We went from 46 followers to over 1000 in like a month and a half.” You might not be able to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, but you sure can get more people to know about why the house needs to be torn down.

Their farmers’ market tabling has also seen success. They use the time to educate the public about the ongoing struggle, gather signatures, and sell merchandise to raise funds for their legal fees.

“Being at the farmers market and being able to connect with folks and just kind of just see people, you know, connect the dots right then and there and be like, this is messed up,” Amada relates. “Realizing that people can see through corruption and can really see the importance and value of our parks . . . that’s not something that’s been difficult to convince people.”

Amada also stresses the importance of reaching out to other groups, as they have received support from environmental groups such as Citizens for Los Angeles Wildlife (CLAW), the Los Angeles Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club.

“Realizing that there are so many groups that are willing to pitch in in the way that they can help is just a matter of actually connecting with them and getting them in.”

Democratic, community-based groups willing to fight for a future that benefits the people—not profits—are how we build our mobilizing muscles. They teach us to rally around shared causes—even if we might not totally agree politically. They inspire more to take action in their neighborhoods.

Nearby in Pasadena, people are chaining themselves to trees to prevent the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD) from cutting them down. People are rallying against the removal of trees at the Santa Anita Park for the LA Olympics.

These groups connect us to other related struggles. The outcry for the trees at Santa Anita Park could easily lead someone to connect with the NOlympics LA campaign. The NOlympics campaign highlights the displacement of low-income tenants and increasing militarization of Los Angeles. The PUSD debacle is related to toxins from the devastating Eaton Fire—which leads to a rabbit hole about environmental devastation caused by poor land management and private companies prioritizing profit over safety.

Every struggle that brings people together to fight for what is right matters. For we all are the Lorax and all must speak for the trees.

This has been a report and interview from Los Angeles.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
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What started as high school students striking for better learning conditions has now become a widespread revolt against austerity, racism, and neocolonialism. Looming over the protests are the threat of an electoral victory for the fascist Marine Le Pen in next year’s presidential election.

The following interviews are a result of collaboration between U.S. revolutionary socialist Janette Zahia Corcelius and French Marxist Jane-Léonie Bellay. They were concluded on October 16, the day before major protests nationwide, when well over half a million faced a ferocious police response featuring explosive weapons and mass arrests.

French trade unions such as the CGT, CNT, CFDT, UNSA, Solidaires, & FSU, FO & Solidaires have announced that they will launch a nationwide general strike on Thursday, November 5.

 

Jane-Léonie: To set the stage, it is important to note that the high school student movement began in Mayotte, an island in the Indian Ocean near Réunion, which became a French department in 2011. [The protests] then spread to French Guiana, a former French colony that became a French department in 1946. In fact, the high school student movement began on August 31 at the Lycée de la Cité du Nord in Mayotte and then spread across the entire island— with students and teachers acting together in most cases until the school break on October 10. The movement then spread to the Félix Eboué High School in French Guiana on September 7, followed by the Melkior-Garré Comprehensive High School and the Bertène-Jumine High School in French Guiana, and then—as in mainland France—to Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, and Tahiti. Police violence was just as widespread overseas, but as with the high school strikes—and as is customary—not a single word was mentioned in the mainland French press, which remains deeply colonial in its outlook, regarding these events for several weeks. Subsequently, the movement in mainland France took root at the Saint-Exupéry High School in Créteil on September 21, which was the first to be blockaded.

The interviewees are:

• Smael Afnaï, a 16-year-old high school student activist in Montreuil (a Paris suburb).

• Léon, a senior at the Louise Michel vocational high school in Grenoble (France), specializing in health and social technology. At his school, there is no student union; the students have organized themselves. This is generally the case in France.

• Hamet Nimaga, a high school student and representative of the Lycée Jean Macé in Vitry-sur-Seine in the 94th Department, just southeast of Paris.

• Julia, a 23-year-old woman living in Lyon who is preparing for the entrance exam to become a primary school teacher.

Tempest: How did the student movement begin, and what are its main demands?

Smael: The student movement began with the blockade of Saint-Exupéry High School in Créteil (a Paris suburb). The demands centered on a lack of resources at the school and a resulting shortage of staff (teachers, nurses, etc.). This was followed by videos on social media and a wave of blockades at other high schools, as students observed the same lack of resources within the national education system.

Léon: The student movement began at a disadvantaged high school in Créteil, then spread to other disadvantaged high schools, and now all high schools are mobilizing around demands that include more resources for suburban high schools neglected by the government, the end of Parcoursup [a web portal that manages admission to higher education nationwide], the hiring of new teachers, etc.

Hamet: The movement first began at Saint-Exupéry High School in Créteil, then spread to other schools in Val-de-Marne (94th Department), the Île-de-France region, throughout France, and finally to several European countries.

Julia: The movement began at a high school in Val-de-Marne, in the Paris region, at a school where learning conditions are very difficult. The students are calling for more resources for education, more teachers, school psychologists employed by the Ministry of Education, and nurses. Very quickly, a large number of high schools across France joined the movement, demanding not only additional staff but also financial resources to bring a number of schools up to standard and renovate them. Finally, some demands challenge the current learning conditions by criticizing overly packed schedules and selection systems like Parcoursup, which cause anxiety for high school students throughout their high school years.

Pretty quickly, college students joined the movement by organizing through general assemblies and staging their own blockades of their campuses. In Lyon, various campuses were blockaded, including buildings where blockades are very rare. The same was true in Nice, where the College of Arts is in a state of serious disrepair. And surely the same is true in many other cities.

Tempest: How did the French government react?

Smael: The French government responded with heavy-handed police repression (more than 7,000 people taken into police custody to date, 96 percent of whom are minors). Several students were notably injured.

Léon: The government initially resorted to police repression and continues to do so. The only real, concrete measures announced since the movement began have been the allocation of 3,000 substitute teachers.

Hamet: The French government responded with severe repression, deploying law enforcement officers who engaged in acts of violence (beatings, people having their eyes gouged out, broken teeth) and physical assaults against French youth.

Tempest: Why are unions and social movements getting involved, and how? What is the relationship between the student movement, the unions, and the Left?

Smael: Relations between the student movement, the unions, and the Left are generally good. The student movement sets the dates for mobilizations following their general assemblies. (It sets the pace.) The unions join in on those dates, and the Left comes out to support the blockades and participates in the demonstrations.

They are getting involved because, for the vast majority, these are the demands they have long championed—it is their cause. And they are getting involved by participating in the scheduled protests and sharing information about the demonstrations on social media.

Léon: I think the other unions are also mobilizing because this is not a new problem, because the French people are fed up with our government, which doesn’t listen to us, and does nothing but erode the purchasing power of the French by making the rich even richer at the expense of the people.

Hamet: Unions and social movements are getting involved to align the high school students’ cause with that of workers. They are taking concrete action by informing students of their rights in the event of police custody, providing free legal representation, and offering logistical support during protests. All of this is of great help to young people.

As for the Left, it provides us with political and organizational support, but it does not interfere with the high school general assemblies. This preserves our genuine independence and prevents us from feeling patronized.

Julia: The social movement is involved in this mobilization in various ways. First, they are filing strike notices and calling for demonstrations based on the high school students’ demands and by expanding upon them. For example, education unions have championed the high school students’ demands by expanding them to include the working conditions of educational staff. Other unions have also come out in support of the high school students’ struggles, both in terms of their demands and in the face of the repression they have endured.

I believe one of the key challenges for the unions was to protect the high school students from police violence by standing by their side and providing them with material support (megaphones, sound systems, signs, etc.) and legal assistance (a help desk for accessing legal rights, referrals to lawyers, etc.).

Unions and left-wing organizations support the high school student movement in various ways and to varying degrees. Sometimes by being on the ground with them and trying to protect them. I’m thinking in particular of certain elected officials—notably members of La France Insoumise (a left-wing political party)—who have tried to dissuade the police from charging or firing on high school students. They also provide material and legal support without interfering with the students’ general assemblies or their decisions.

Tempest: What is the far right saying, and how might these events influence the 2027 elections?

Smael: The far right obviously supports law enforcement and not the students, arguing that students’ only right is “to go to class, sit down, and keep quiet.” And these events could influence the 2027 elections because they are currently a major focus of public debate.

Léon: The far right is quite pleased with the situation because it’s capitalizing on the anger of high school students, who sometimes vandalize things like trash cans, and it uses this to claim that if it were in power, there wouldn’t be these “problems with delinquency.” It also uses this to attack its opponent, La France Insoumise.

High school students are continuing their struggle despite heavy police repression and the violence used by the police.

Hamet: The far right refuses to listen to young people. It insists that the majority of young people simply want to study and work, adding that at our age, the previous generation faced the same problems. Young people respond that just because past generations endured these injustices without speaking out or rebelling doesn’t mean we have to do the same.

Julia: The far right is taking a nuanced stance. First, some far-right groups, such as Action Française (royalists), are trying to co-opt the movement by arguing that the demands made by high school students are legitimate but that violence is unacceptable. They advocate a return to order and a more peaceful approach to the struggle. Others condemn the movement, claiming it has been co-opted and led by La France Insoumise, and downplay the high school students’ demands. One might hear people say, “We used to have tough times too; young people just don’t want to work anymore.” Finally, some racism is directed toward the mobilized high school students because the movement began in working-class neighborhoods where educational conditions are particularly poor.

Tempest: What type and scale of organization have the students managed to establish?

Smael: The students organize themselves through general assemblies. They gather in committees by high school and college and propose and vote on decisions regarding the next steps in the mobilization. Other general assemblies are sometimes convened, but on a larger scale—by city, for example.

High school students are continuing their struggle despite heavy police repression and the violence used by the police.

Hamet: The students have succeeded in providing unprecedented support to high school students: A convergence of this magnitude between high school and college students had not occurred since May 1968. This has given much greater visibility to all of the demands.

Julia: I would say that this high school student movement is an experience for them in collectively organizing a group, a struggle, a blockade. Decisions are made in general assemblies about what they want to do and how they want to do it. The unions and political youth organizations that have traditionally been at the center of social movements are not behind this mobilization, even though they are present and come to support the high school students. I would say that the way high school students organize can vary: Some are driven by political motives, others by union interests, and still others remain within an organization at the level of their high school or local community. But there is a desire among some of them to become more structured. For example, we’re seeing youth action groups form in several cities within La France Insoumise (and this is surely the case in other organizations as well).

Tempest: Are there clearly defined political factions among the students, and do certain adult organizations play a role in the students’ politics or organization?

Smael: Yes, the left-wing faction is clearly at the heart of the student movement. This is because the movement also champions left-wing demands, more funding for the National Education System and public services in general. But the movement has grown so much that even right-wing students are participating, and some of them are shifting to the left as they listen to and come to understand the movement’s demands.

Léon: La France Insoumise has elected officials that have been coming to the demonstrations and blockades to help the high school students and protect them from violent police.

Hamet: Yes, political factions exist within certain high school student organizations. While this may sometimes appear to be political co-optation on their part, it also brings us visibility in return. Their attempts to influence us do not alter our initial demands, and they help us organize.

The high school students involved in the movement are highly politicized. They sometimes hold very materialist views and are acutely aware of inequalities in life, particularly regarding access to education. But they are also aware of discriminatory inequalities based on where they study and their presumed background. There also seems to be an anti-imperialist or decolonial perspective. This is evident in the number of Palestinian flags and demands related to international issues. One notable connection is the belief that all children should have access to school—which is not the case everywhere, particularly in Palestine. However, I think the movement is diverse, with varying levels of politicization and different political stances. And it seems important not to essentialize high school students.

I believe that “adult organizations”—such as associations, political parties, and unions—provide support. Their role is not so much to help high school and college students organize themselves but to provide support and experience. However, there has been a call for a general strike by the CGT (General Confederation of Labor) on November 5.

Tempest: Is it mainly high school students, or has the movement spread to colleges and universities?

Smael: Initially, it did indeed consist mainly of high school students, but the movement has spread to higher education institutions and universities. On Tuesday, October 6, 90 percent of universities were blockaded.

Léon: Yes, the high school students’ movement has also been joined by college students and others, who are now setting up roadblocks themselves because they’ve experienced the very issues we’re denouncing right now. There are also students coming to help with the high school students’ roadblocks.

Hamet: The movement has gradually expanded to higher education institutions and universities, which has allowed us to increase our visibility and draw much larger crowds during protests.

Julia: The movement began in high schools but is continuing in institutions of higher education. Numerous general assemblies are taking place on college campuses in an effort to organize the struggle. Many blockades have occurred. Students are mobilizing for more funding for higher education, the renovation of a number of buildings, against the elimination of housing assistance, and against the admissions processes via Parcoursup and “Mon Master” [a web portal for admissions to masters programs nationwide].

But some are also adopting an anti-imperialist stance. In fact, this morning at INSA [a network of public graduate engineering schools], only the buildings that have partnerships with arms manufacturers were blockaded. A connection is being drawn to the month-long campaign against the arms industry led by a number of organizations, such as the Stop Arming Israel collective.

Tempest: What impact will all of this have on the elections?

Smael: All of this has a real impact on the elections because this movement is raising awareness and politicizing a huge portion of the youth, who are now aware of the issues at stake and the importance of voting in 2027. And this increase in youth voter turnout in 2027 will play a major role in the victory of the radical Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s candidacy.

Léon: The impact this movement will have on the upcoming elections will be a double-edged sword. Because people who have seen the problems will, I think, be more inclined to vote for the Left, but there are also many people who will have seen only what the media reports—and since the media shows only the most striking and violent images—they’re afraid and think this high school movement is just a pretext for causing chaos.

Hamet: The images of repression seen by all French people are making people realize that change must happen as soon as possible. The high school student protests are not intended to wait for the election in six months, but to achieve results as soon as possible.

Julia: This movement brings to the forefront the issues of public services, education, discrimination, and equality—all themes championed by the Left. Furthermore, the support from La France Insoumise and other left-wing political groups for the high school student protests may lead these young people to vote more toward the left. Moreover, this mobilization is creating a dynamic of engagement and politicization among young people, which is positive for the radical left. And as we’ve seen, this is also reflected in the formation of political organizational branches, such as the “Insoumis” action groups. However, the anger on the streets does not always translate into votes at the polls, so it seems to me that we must undoubtedly remain cautious and continue to mobilize without assuming that victory is already assured. And, in my view, we will need to be vigilant against the far right co-opting the movement and against rhetoric that could exploit the movement for racist electoral purposes.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
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We join the voices in New York City and the nation in denouncing the most recent ICE shooting and subsequent kidnapping of 28 year old Dominican immigrant and father Oscar Belgal.

On October 8, Oscar was surrounded by ICE agents and shot at seven times while in his vehicle during a busy afternoon when many children and parents were around. One of the shots hit his neck. Eyewitnesses describe how he was held by ICE agents and NYPD officers as 20 minutes passed before any ambulance arrived at the crime scene. Oscar was taken to nearby Allen Pavilion hospital and then later kidnapped by ICE agents to an unknown location. We demand his immediate freedom.

The shooter has been identified as Kevin Brodowsky. Also on the scene was notorious ICE goon Brenden Cuni who was wearing a construction vest, and was brandishing a AR-15-style rifle, putting the lives of children and passerby at risk. Cuni has terrorized people in NYC (Chinatown, Bushwick, Queens), in Columbus, Ohio, and in Minneapolis, where he participated in the brutal assault and dragging of a pregnant woman across the snowy pavement. Brenden is of Dominican & Puerto Rican descent, which shows that people of any ethnicity can be class traitors and oppressors. We join the mass clamor demanding that Kevin be tried for attempted murder.

This reckless act is a continuation of Trump’s murderous and racist anti-immigration policies currently affecting our communities.

We condemn the attempts by NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch and DHS to justify this brutal act by citing Oscar’s previous interactions with the police and his affiliations. This is a blatant act of racism. No criminal record and interaction with the repressive state justifies being shot by ICE in front of your kid. We demand DHS retract that statement and stop criminalizing Dominican and Haitian immigrants as well as Black people and all oppressed immigrant communities.

Furthermore, we also condemn Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inaction for not firing Jessica Tisch and for not having taken steps to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG) as he promised during his campaign. Instead, Mamdani has allowed the NYPD to continue colluding with ICE, brutalizing protestors who demand the release of our neighbors and demand ICE out of our streets. Mayor Mamdani claims to be on the side of immigrants but actions speak louder than words: we are fed up with promises from “progressive” politicians who are afraid to break their ties with the two-party system and the status quo.

As Dominicans in the diaspora, we stand in solidarity with Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent in Dominican Republic, who are also victims of government profiling and repression in the island. What happened to Oscar on October 8, has been happening to Haitian and Black Dominicans for decades in DR. The Dirección General de Migración (DGM) operates as ICE does, raiding public and private spaces and terrorizing neighbors to disappear them into the immigration enforcement system.

We stand against ICE the same way we stand against DGM, and all repressive forces.

Finally, we call on all workers, parents, high school, and college students in NYC to unite, organize and mobilize, and take part in school walkouts, teach-ins, boycotts, ICE watch in their communities, occupations, strikes, and all actions necessary until NYC is free of ICE terror.

We demand:

1. The immediate release of Oscar Belgal to his family
2. Fire Jessica Tisch
3. The end of NYPD collaboration with ICE
4. Mamdani to fulfill his promise to disband the SRG
5. Abolish ICE once and for all

Compas de la Diáspora, October 10, 2026

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
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This summer, volunteers in New Haven needed 313 valid signatures to put an independent socialist candidate on the ballot for Connecticut’s 11th Senate District. After knocking on doors, standing outside stores and at public events, and talking with people across the district about Rosa Pepper-Macias, a 23-year-old hotel line cook running on the Workers’ Voice Party ballot line, they submitted 965 signatures.

The response of the community surprised some of the people doing the campaigning. “I’ve never seen the kind of enthusiasm and support towards a socialist campaign that we’ve seen for Rosa,” said Daniel Piper, a union teacher involved in the campaign. A petition signature is not a vote, much less an endorsement of an entire socialist program. But collecting roughly three times the number required for ballot access suggests that, even in overwhelmingly Democratic New Haven, there are working people willing to listen to an argument for a political alternative outside the two major parties.

This small State Senate campaign matters beyond Connecticut’s 11th District because Pepper-Macias is not running as a socialist on the Democratic ballot line while promising independence later. She begins with independence, posing a larger question for a Left confronting Trump and the increasingly authoritarian direction of U.S. politics: what does opposition look like if it does not begin and end with returning the Democratic Party to power?

The machinery Trump is using did not appear when he returned to the White House. ICE was created under George W. Bush, and the deportation apparatus expanded under Barack Obama, and reinforced under Biden. The surveillance state grew under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The militarization of the border, the carceral state, the Pentagon, and Washington’s capacity to wage war across the globe are permanent institutions of the U.S. state. Trump has intensified their use. He did not create them.

Treating Trump as a temporary departure from a basically healthy political order makes the solution appear straightforward: defeat him electorally and put the Democrats back in power. But Trumpism emerged from crises already developing within that order. Decades of declining working-class organization and deteriorating living standards created fertile ground for right-wing demagogy, while the relative decline of U.S. power strengthened pressures for a more aggressive assertion of American power abroad and a more coercive state at home. Trump has intensified these reactionary tendencies; he did not create the social and political conditions from which they emerged.

There is no normal to restore because defeating Trumpism requires more than replacing Republicans with Democrats. The question, then, is what it would mean for working people to develop a politics of their own. Pepper-Macias’s campaign is a small attempt to put that question onto the ballot.

Connecticut’s blue-state problem

Connecticut is a revealing place to ask. This is no MAGA stronghold: Democrats control state government, and New Haven has long been overwhelmingly Democratic. The race therefore puts decades of Democratic government in one of the country’s richest states under examination.

The wealth is not difficult to find. Yale’s endowment stood at $44.1 billion in June 2025, after earning $4.5 billion in investment gains in a single year. A few blocks beyond the university, the numbers look very different. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s QuickFacts for New Haven, median household income is about $56,851, nearly one-quarter of residents live below the poverty line, and median gross rent is $1,488 a month. Statewide, the Connecticut comptroller reported that 52.4 percent of renter households were cost-burdened in 2024, with 28.3 percent spending more than half their income on housing and utilities.

Yale is not simply a wealthy university located in New Haven. It is the city’s largest employer and one of its dominant property holders. Much of its academic property is exempt from municipal property taxes because Yale is a nonprofit educational institution. The university pays taxes on taxable commercial property and makes voluntary contributions to New Haven, including more than $230 million committed through fiscal year 2033. But an analysis published by the Connecticut Examiner estimated that Yale held roughly $4.4 billion in tax-exempt New Haven property and that, without the exemption, it could owe roughly another $146 million a year in property taxes. That makes the campaign’s demand to place Yale under public ownership more concrete: it asks who should control an institution whose wealth and property shape the fiscal and social life of the city around it.

This is the terrain on which Pepper-Macias is campaigning. Her platform calls for a shortened workweek at full-time pay, public health care, tuition-free public higher education, high-quality public housing and public ownership of utilities and internet provision. More provocatively, it demands: “Place Yale under Public Ownership!” and proposes placing “the assets of large landlords like Yale under public ownership.” The point is not simply to add another tax bracket or negotiate a larger voluntary contribution, but to raise the question of who controls the enormous concentration of wealth and property in the city.

War spending, social needs and who controls production

The campaign refuses to separate Connecticut politics from U.S.militarism. Its platform calls to “STOP the war and use the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget for jobs, education, housing, food, and healthcare as rights.”

The numbers give some sense of what that could mean. The campaign estimates that Connecticut taxpayers contribute $21.71 billion toward military spending. It calculates that $1.77 billion could hire 15,000 additional elementary-school teachers, $3.48 billion could provide public housing for nearly 300,000 residents, and $6.72 billion could create 50,000 jobs at top union wages. Money spent sustaining war abroad is money that is not being spent on social needs at home.

Some of those connections run directly through Connecticut. In 2024, State Treasurer Erick Russell said that roughly 56 billion investment portfolio was invested directly or indirectly in Israel, mostly through outside investment managers. The state also directly held two Israel bonds scheduled to mature in 2025 and 2026.

Yale is part of the same story. Students have protested the university’s investments in military industries and demanded divestment from weapons manufacturers. Public filings reveal only a small fraction of its endowment, so the full extent of those holdings is difficult to establish. A $1 million grant to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces was also made through Yale’s donor-advised-fund program, in which donors recommend distributions while Yale retains legal control.

But Connecticut is not connected to the war economy only through investments. It produces for war. East Hartford-based Pratt & Whitney signed a 15-year agreement with the Israeli Ministry of Defense in December 2015 to provide “100 percent daily propulsion readiness” for the Israeli Air Force’s F-15I and F-16I fighter aircraft. The campaign calls for Connecticut to divest from Israeli investments, end weapons production and sales to Israel, and support Palestinian self-determination.

That raises a harder question: what happens to workers whose jobs depend on those industries? Ending military production is not much of a program for Pratt & Whitney workers if it means unemployment. Fossil-fuel workers face the same choice: keep jobs tied to social and environmental damage, or support an antiwar or climate program that threatens their livelihoods.

But these workers know how to build things. The people who make aircraft engines and other complex machinery have the skills to build renewable-energy systems, public transit and infrastructure—and know what their plants and machines could be retooled to produce.

Conversion therefore cannot be designed elsewhere and handed down to workers. Unions would have to fight for guaranteed jobs and wages, control over how plants are retooled, and an antiwar and just-transition program rooted in workers’ knowledge of production. A State Senate campaign cannot carry out that transformation, but it can create space for workers to discuss it rather than accept that their jobs depend forever on military spending or environmental destruction.

This is where political independence becomes concrete. Republicans and Democrats disagree about many things, but neither challenges corporations’ right to decide what gets produced, where investment goes or what happens to workers when production changes.

This is where political independence becomes concrete. Republicans and Democrats disagree about many things, but neither challenges corporations’ right to decide what gets produced, where investment goes or what happens to workers when production changes. Within those limits, jobs, climate and opposition to war can appear to be competing demands. Yet they do not have to be. Workers with the skills and machinery could produce very different things. The question is whether they should have the power to decide what those things are.

The deportation machine was already there

Immigration brings the argument into sharp focus. The first demand on the campaign platform reads: “PAPERS FOR ALL! Stop all Raids, Detentions and Deportations! Equal rights for immigrants! Abolish ICE!”

But “Abolish ICE” is not presented simply as something legislators should eventually enact. Pepper-Macias proposes workers’ defense committees, organized through unions and other workers’ organizations, to mobilize demonstrations, democratic assemblies, and strikes against raids and deportations. The platform demands the closure of detention centers, an end to transporting detained immigrants out of state, and support for families torn apart by ICE.

The emphasis shifts from asking elected officials to protect immigrants to asking what organized workers can do when ICE shows up in a neighborhood or workplace. And how does ICE find people? Follow that question, and you arrive at the surveillance apparatus already operating on Connecticut streets.

And how does ICE find people? Follow that question, and you arrive at the surveillance apparatus already operating on Connecticut streets.

Pepper-Macias calls for “De-Flock Connecticut,” beginning with the 165 Flock cameras the campaign says operate in New Haven County. Automated license-plate readers feed databases and information-sharing networks extending far beyond the towns where the cameras stand. As CT Insider reported from police records, law-enforcement agencies nationwide ran millions of searches on Connecticut Flock data during 2025; thousands of searches involving data from at least six Connecticut departments were tagged “immigration,” “ICE,” or “ICE-assist.” The controversy has already produced movement at the state level: a new Connecticut law taking effect October 1 bars the use of license-plate-reader data to investigate suspected immigration violations, while Gov. Ned Lamont has urged municipalities to pause new installations pending a statewide review.

The campaign also demands closing the Connecticut Intelligence Center, or CTIC, in New Haven. CTIC is Connecticut’s designated post-9/11 fusion center, built to share intelligence across agencies and jurisdictions. Participating agencies include DHS, the FBI, TSA, Connecticut State Police, the Department of Correction, and the National Guard. A camera on a local street can therefore become an entry point into a much larger architecture of policing and surveillance.

Trump has greatly escalated immigration enforcement and repression, but much of the institutional machinery he is using was built over decades under administrations of both parties: ICE, fusion centers, mass surveillance, militarized policing, prisons, border enforcement and expanded executive powers. The point is not that Democrats and Republicans are identical. Their policies can have sharply different consequences. It is that defeating a Republican administration does not by itself dismantle institutions that predate it.

For Pepper-Macias, that history is also personal. Her father recently reminded her that he had taken her, in a stroller, to the massive May Day immigrant strike of 2006:  “I didn’t remember it, but I do remember seeing that mass movement get reined back into the Democratic Party with the Obama campaign. And then, of course, I saw California get hit by all those horrifying raids and deportations.” The connection between those experiences and the current repression is part of the political argument she makes: “The Obama era set the stage for the exacerbated oppression that we see today,” she says, “and we’ve discussed this connection every time I have campaigned at places like the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark.”

Voting, organization, and political independence

Social movements in the U.S. have repeatedly encountered the same political funnel. A movement develops outside the Democratic Party, produces its own demands and organizations, and forces questions into public debate. As elections approach, the Republican candidate represents a serious threat; pressure mounts to subordinate the movement’s independent demands to electing Democrats. Afterward, much of the mobilization dissipates.

The contradiction became especially visible after Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. Democratic socialism returned to mass politics, DSA expanded dramatically, and socialist-backed candidates won offices around the country. Yet the strategic problem remained: could socialists use the Democratic ballot line without eventually becoming part of the party they initially hoped to use?

Pepper-Macias’s campaign answers by starting with political independence rather than promising a break at some future date.

[T]he strategic problem remained: could socialists use the Democratic ballot line without eventually becoming part of the party they initially hoped to use? Pepper-Macias’s campaign answers by starting with political independence rather than promising a break at some future date.

That affects how the election is being organized. Volunteers have canvassed District 11, collected signatures, knocked on doors, and organized open meetings and public events. The campaign’s events calendar invites people into organizing rather than restricting participation to get-out-the-vote work.

Most campaigns organize people toward voting: knock on a door, make a call, raise money, turn people out. Yet U.S. elections are rarely referendums on distinct demands. Voters choose among candidates and parties offering packages of positions and often vague promises. An independent campaign does not assume every vote endorses its entire program; it can make visible political arguments otherwise lost inside the two-party competition. Winning those demands is another matter. You can vote for affordable housing without an organization capable of confronting landlords; against deportations without a network ready when ICE enters a neighborhood; for stronger unions without organizing your workplace. Much of politics lies between political support and the collective capacity to win.

U.S. elections are rarely referendums on distinct demands. Voters choose among candidates and parties offering packages of positions and often vague promises…You can vote for affordable housing without an organization capable of confronting landlords; against deportations without a network ready when ICE enters a neighborhood; for stronger unions without organizing your workplace. Much of politics lies between political support and the collective capacity to win.

Pepper-Macias’s campaign connects electoral activity to struggles already underway in Connecticut—against ICE and surveillance, around Palestine and war, in workplaces and unions, and around housing, reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. The aim is not to channel those movements toward a candidate every two years, but to give struggles from below an independent political expression.

That distinction matters after election day. Grassroots movements and unions can enter electoral coalitions with demands generated through struggle, only to find them narrowed, postponed or displaced once governing begins; movements can be absorbed into the organizations of politicians they initially hoped to pressure.

Political independence offers no magical protection against those pressures, nor does an independent campaign automatically produce durable organization. But it allows unions, movements and working-class organizations to enter electoral politics without making their activity dependent on the politicians they support. The problem is how movements can develop a political voice without surrendering their capacity to act.

The labor-party question

The most ambitious expression of that strategy is the call for an independent labor party. The platform declares: “BUILD A LABOR PARTY! Working and oppressed people need a mass labor party, independent of the capitalist parties, to achieve a workers’ government!” It proposes an “emergency congress, organized by all unions in Connecticut” to discuss forming such a party and breaking from the Democrats.

The obstacles are formidable. Organized labor has spent generations developing institutional relationships with the Democratic Party through endorsements, funding, professional staffs and longstanding political habits. A break would require a struggle inside labor itself, not simply a resolution announcing independence.

The proposal makes more sense if a labor party is understood as more than a third electoral machine. Workers already organize collectively for contracts, higher wages, protection from firing and safer conditions; communities organize against raids, evictions and surveillance. A working-class party, in this conception, would carry that organizational independence into politics rather than asking those struggles to dissolve into an electoral coalition every few years.

Such a party would contest elections, but elections would not exhaust its purpose. It could support strikes, mobilize against raids and deportations, participate in tenant and antiwar struggles, debate political strategy internally and hold its elected representatives accountable to an organization outside the legislature. No State Senate campaign can create such a party by itself. At most, Pepper-Macias’s campaign can propagandize for the idea, accumulate experience in independent electoral work and identify some of the people interested in pursuing it.

After November

The differences between Democrats and Republicans are real, with immediate consequences for immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, unions and oppressed communities. But that does not answer the question running through this campaign: what do working people do with their own power?

Voting is only part of the answer. An independent socialist campaign can put arguments before voters that would otherwise disappear inside two-party competition and show a constituency willing to consider an alternative. But the ballot cannot substitute for the people casting it.

No vote by itself can stop an ICE raid, organize a hotel, prevent an eviction, shut down a surveillance network, convert a weapons plant or force an employer to concede a contract. Those outcomes require people acting together, through existing institutions such as unions or by building new ones.

Better politicians cannot solve that problem on their own. People need to preserve their capacity to act in workplaces, where workers can organize and strike; in communities, where they can fight over housing, schools, policing and immigration; and politically, where those struggles can speak in their own name.

People need to preserve their capacity to act in workplaces, where workers can organize and strike; in communities, where they can fight over housing, schools, policing and immigration; and politically, where those struggles can speak in their own name.

November will produce one result immediately: the vote. For a campaign of this size, it would be unrealistic to make durable new organization the measure of success. Its more immediate contribution is modest: popularizing an independent working-class program, bringing it into conversations with workers and young people, supporting struggles where it can, and accumulating experience outside the two-party system.

The fight over AI-related data-center development in Trumbull offers one example. At demonstrations against the tech industry, Pepper-Macias says, the campaign has encountered unionized workers, including some who supported Trump, alongside young activists radicalized through the Palestine solidarity movement. For her, those encounters suggest what an independent working-class politics might eventually make possible.

“The political work of this campaign does not end with the election,” Pepper-Macias says. “It will carry into ongoing campaigns for civil liberties, like the MN15, activists federally indicted over organizing against ICE during Operation Metro Surge and the fight against data centers in our state.”.

An independent campaign cannot build the organizations needed to win by itself. But it can use the electoral arena to argue for working-class political independence, strengthen existing struggles and make the case for organization in workplaces, communities and the streets as well as at the polls.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Worker’s Voice US; modified by Tempest.

The post There is no normal to restore appeared first on Tempest.

To put it mildly, Trump is not having a good day.

He is facing challenges from above: The Federal Reserve increased interest rates against his wishes. The Supreme Court ruled against his attempt to limit voting by mail. Judges have thwarted him on such issues as the Kennedy Center and his attempt to ban news outlets from the White House.

Previously loyal Republicans are fleeing now that a Trump endorsement has become a curse. Major far-right media figures such as Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Rogan have broken with him. Impeachment and corruption charges are looming.

In addition, he is facing discontent from below: His approval ratings are at record lows. According to polls, 65 percent of voters disapprove of Trump, more than twice as many as the 32 percent who approve. His policies are even more unpopular than they have always been, with just 17 percent approving of his handling of the economy.

Increasingly, Trump is seen as self-serving and corrupt, no longer the “outsider” alternative to elite politics. As one Republican pollster puts it, in a guest essay called “The Trump Brand Has Tanked”: “Voters don’t think the economy is working for them, and they think it’s being rigged more and more in favor of a precious few who are cozied up to our nation’s leaders.”

Everyone is asking, “Why is this happening now?” While the answers vary, the universally acknowledged truth is that the war in Iran is the number one culprit, particularly because it is worsening the ongoing affordability crisis.

The economic fallout from the war is impacting everyone through soaring fuel prices and higher costs of living domestically. This impact is on top of the generalized instability and suffering the war has provoked globally.

The U.S. economy has continued to grow because of enormous investment in artificial intelligence, but this has raised fears of a massive crash if and when the AI bubble bursts.

Trump, of course, ran on the promise of ending deeply unpopular “forever wars,” so his exploits abroad are seen as a betrayal by some of his base.

And significantly, sections of that base are turning against him. In a New York Times opinion piece called “Trump’s Luck is Finally Running Out,” Thomas Edsall quotes Charlie Cook: “Over the last 90 days, President Trump’s political standing has transitioned from very unpopular to toxic and now to radioactive.”

Edsall shares this account from Amy Walter of The Cook Report:

Trump’s staying power in our politics — even, astonishingly, despite the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — gave the president the confidence and latitude to pursue unpopular policies and blow off scandals that would have sunk any of his predecessors. But now, the economic consequences of his sweeping tariffs and the war in Iran have done the one thing all the controversies of his first term were never able to do: splinter his coalition and sink his approval ratings to all-time lows.

It is certainly gratifying to see the unbearably arrogant and smug Trump brought down. But this isn’t a moment that we can celebrate. As The Guardian put it in September, “The weaker he gets, the more dangerous he gets: Trump lashes out as his power wanes.”

Trump’s relative weakness has not slowed the ruthless tide of xenophobic, racist, and transphobic scapegoating and attacks. Mass detentions and deportations continue. The recent ICE raid on the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar is a chilling example of how far the forces of reaction are willing to go.

Trump’s fear of losing the elections has led him to extreme attempts to undermine liberal democracy, something that is recognized even by conservative critics of the administration such as the neo-conservative Robert Kagan, who says, “We’re heading in the direction of dictatorship.” With varying levels of success, Trump has tried or threatened gerrymandering, restricting mail-in ballots, stationing federal troops or agents at polling stations, and abusing the voter database to throw people off voter lists.

Right-wing fear-mongering about hordes of noncitizens voting is, of course, unfounded. Trump recently cited Department of Homeland Security estimates of 16,000 noncitizen residents registered to vote in Nevada. A state investigation brought that number down to 185 and then, after further scrutiny, zero.

The Nevada Secretary of State called out such widespread disinformation:

DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence…Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.

Given such extreme efforts to prevent people from voting and undermine the elections, we can anticipate more legal and illegal maneuvers in the face of a Trump loss.

There will likely be further court challenges. As one commentator writes:

The courts have provided mixed verdicts on Mr. Trump’s attempts at vote suppression in advance of the 2026 midterms. But the rulings have handed him an unambiguous gift: a road map for shaping the universe of eligible voters to his liking in the presidential election year of 2028.

Democrats are widely predicted to win the elections in November and may even win majorities in both the House and Senate, but they offer no real alternative to the far-right agenda.

Where we can make a real difference is in movements, campaigns, strikes and struggles on the streets and in the workplace. Collective organizing from below is the only force that has ever won substantial reforms, no matter who is in office.

Many Democrats, including some so-called “progressives,” are bending over backward to distance themselves from issues such as Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and Palestinian rights. If they win the election, it will be a vote against Trump, not a vote for the Democratic Party. In fact, 45 percent of voters say their congressional choice is a vote against Trump, including four out of five Democrats and around half of independents.

Charlie Cooke has the perfect metaphor:

While many have long predicted that Democrats will enjoy a “blue wave” election, I think of it more as a “red undertow,” which will pull many Republicans under and significantly trim the margins for many others. A blue wave implies an endorsement or affirmation of Democrats and their policies. But the Democrats’ brand is still in tatters. … Fortunately for Democrats, this election will in most cases not be about them.

If they do get elected, unless Democrats fight for substantial reforms (which they show no inclination to do), they will only disappoint those with raised expectations and lay the ground for the return of an even more radical GOP in 2028 or 2030, continuing the vicious cycle of the two-party system.

Given these realities and the current weakness of movements, it’s understandable that some people are placing their hopes in democratic socialists working within the Democratic Party. A recent message from Alexandria Ocasio Cortez makes the case. Titled “Why I’m feeling hopeful,” it describes her campaigning in upstate NY:

Launching this program and speaking with organizers has filled me with hope that the energy to elect Democrats up and down the ballot is out there if we can channel it into turning people out who may have previously felt left behind or that their vote did not matter. The way we do that is by giving people something worth showing up for: Medicare for All, universal childcare, a living wage, and a government that actually works for them.

That all sounds wonderful. But it’s not what Democrats of any stripe are delivering anywhere. It is not the agenda of mainstream Democrats. And progressives or democratic socialists who get elected face relentless pressure from the system to toe the line.

In the absence of independent mass movements that can act as a counterweight, elected democratic socialists are unable to meet their campaign promises. Rather than pulling the mainstream to the Left, they themselves move to the center and lend weight to mainstream Democrats.

Katie Wilson, a democratic socialist who was elected as mayor of Seattle last year, campaigned on promises of taxing the rich and funding housing. Instead, she has delivered a city budget with massive spending cuts, no new taxes, and more money for the cops. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s failure to reign in the police has already disappointed and frustrated many of his supporters.

The failure is not personal, but systemic: Even the best progressives face the harsh reality of being trapped in a rigged and unbending system once they are elected.

This recognition does not mean inaction.

Revolutionary socialists don’t abstain from elections. They are an important part of politics that we often will want to participate in, whether around a particular ballot issue or a candidate attached to a movement. But we recognize that elections are the territory of the ruling class, and we will always be weakest there. So, they should never be prioritized. We don’t put them first. It’s a waste of our time and energy.

We must not drop our criticisms of mainstream or progressive democrats in office—to do so just leaves the field open to the right wing.

We must defend our limited democracy (including civil liberties), but most importantly, we must fight not only for meaningful reforms but also for the transformation of society that will allow genuine and much more expansive democracy.

The Democratic Party is not committed to such a transformation, and even if they were, would not have much room to maneuver in the current political system.

At an otherwise bleak moment, our reason to be hopeful is that a growing number of people on the Left are dissatisfied with the dominant socialist options, whether reformist or campist. They recognize that we need to build a better alternative.

Where we can make a real difference is in movements, campaigns, strikes and struggles on the streets and in the workplace. Collective organizing from below is the only force that has ever won substantial reforms, no matter who is in office. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young people in France, Spain, Belgium and India are currently demonstrating this in mass protests around education, housing and other issues. These are the same forces that have the power to stop the right and revitalize the Left in the U.S.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Hassan Albadawi, The White House; modified by Tempest.

The post Trump is sunk  appeared first on Tempest.

The Tempest Collective POC caucus invites you to a national Zoom panel and discussion on defending abolition. The event will take place this Saturday, October 24th, 2026 at 2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MT/11 am PT.

You can register for the event here.

Share the event flyer here.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Andrew Ratto, Fibonacci Blue; modified by Tempest.

The post In defense of abolition appeared first on Tempest.

In their mad rush for profit and power, the tech oligarchs have unleashed artificial intelligence (AI) into nearly every corner of life on this planet. Firms are investing billions in data centers, which house the infrastructure to process the enormous amounts of information that power AI. They are also plowing ever more money into research and development. Their hope is that the technology will overcome global capitalism’s slump, which the system has been trapped in since the Great Recession, and trigger a new epoch of expansion. States are incorporating it into their police forces for domestic surveillance as well as their militaries for cyberwarfare and high-tech weapons. Ominously, the struggle for AI supremacy is now at the center of the imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China.

The widespread, unregulated use of AI is already having devastating impacts on our environment, jobs, and rights. Some worry that it threatens our very species with extinction. In this three-part interview, Tempest Collective’s Ashley Smith asks two advanced tech workers, Josh and Yasmine, about the technology, its much hyped promise and threat, and its impact on our lives. Most importantly, they lay out how the Left and labor movement should respond and what we should demand and fight for.

Read parts one and two here.

Part Three: What is To Be Done?

 

Ashley Smith: AI has led to a substantial debate on the Left. Many downplay its significance, contending that its nature and impact is vastly exaggerated. Others claim the exact opposite about AI, adopting the doom-speak of its boosters that use such talk to drive up their stock valuations and fuel the bubble. What’s your assessment of the various positions in this debate? What position do you think we should adopt?

Josh: I think I have outlined some of the debates on the Left, but before I go further, I want to state a few points of agreement. The Left is united in fighting for democratic control over our lives, work, and environment. This process involves struggles that can emerge outside what the Left itself initiates. For instance, the large movement against building new data centers was not sparked by organizations on the Left. But we still need to play an active part in it.

Even if I believe some claims about the use value of AI in helping us make medical breakthroughs are likely true, I don’t think that should be seen as contradicting the anti-data center movement. Like the fight for democracy in decision-making in tech workspaces, this is a fight for working people having a direct say in how we govern our lives. If we’re going to make AI breakthroughs, that’s more likely if we have that control and can direct how we use our resources.

The main disagreement I’ve outlined is about AI’s capabilities and potential. With regard to understanding the impact on jobs and imperialism, I think it is important, but even if we come to an agreement it does not automatically lead to unified conclusions. As I have stated, I don’t feel confident making any predictions.

Other disagreements among those on the Left include the debate between those who think we should abolish AI and those who think we should take it under our control. In some ways, those are not mutually exclusive. To do either means we need the power to make that choice! And I hope that through struggle we can get there and continue to have that debate on the way.

Finally, I think a big schism exists between the campists and the internationalist Left. The campists see any states that oppose, or are targets of, US imperialism as allies worthy of support. Internationalists believe that while we should primarily focus on opposing our own imperialist states as our enemies, we look to the international working class, including those exploited and oppressed by their lesser imperialist powers, as the main force capable of overthrowing capitalism and ending imperialism.

These positions lead to vastly different outlooks on states worldwide and their use of AI. While campists ignore or excuse the states they support in weaponizing AI against their own people, internationalists oppose such practices. We oppose the use of AI as a tool for state repression by any state. And we build international solidarity against it.

AS: Finally, many politicians are now calling for the regulation of AI. What do you make of their particular proposals? How should the Left and labor movement respond? What should we be demanding?

Yasmine: Bernie Sanders has proposed legislation to “ban super intelligence,” whatever that means. He, along with others, has also proposed creating oversight bodies, auditing frameworks, a kill-switch requirement, and so on. In general, I think we can benefit from any additional regulation and transparency.

But they’re woefully inadequate and don’t even attempt to address the actual harms already happening. Senators Jayapal, Representative Tlaib, and others introduced legislation to ban the use of facial recognition and biometrics by ICE. The Take It Down law passed last year requires platforms to take down nonconsensual AI-generated sexual content. These restrictions are worth supporting, and we should rally behind them. That said, we shouldn’t limit our sights to such limited reforms.

The organized Left should develop a holistic perspective regarding this tech, and our demands should reflect that. We must recognize that the tech oligarchs are trying to hardwire AI into nearly every aspect of our lives.

We’re in the midst of its construction—the data centers, the power and water infrastructure (mostly non-renewable) being set up to serve them, the camera and license plate readers being installed on every corner of our cities, the technical infrastructure being set up to enable different policing agencies to share and combine surveillance data and apply LLM analysis to it, the big tech AI contracts with public schools and with universities, and the systematic forced integration of AI in our day-to-day work tasks.

These are all the ways big tech is attempting to entrench this technology (built only to serve its interests) in our society. Our goal should be to halt this construction and to dismantle what has already been built. And to envision a different kind of future, one that isn’t the one the tech billionaires are trying to make inevitable.

The grassroots organizing against data centers has been remarkably successful and has won moratoriums on new data center construction around the country. We should be part of that effort, and we should push to make those moratoriums permanent. We should support legislation that seeks to place limits on AI use in the military or by ICE or cops, but we should demand that these limits turn into full bans and that they’re generalized to all uses, not to a subset of functions. I.e., a ban on autonomous weapons isn’t enough while AI continues to be used for surveillance and “target” generation.

I’ll add to the demand already raised by folks like No Azure for Apartheid, calling for the tech executives who have profiteered from genocide and mass murder to be held accountable and tried for their crimes against humanity. It’s an indisputable fact that tech infrastructure knowingly provided by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Palantir, and others has been essential to the implementation of genocide and apartheid in Palestine.

We should also take an internationalist perspective and oppose economic and political imperialism that enables the violent harvesting of precious minerals, a violence both the US and China are engaged in. We should demand an end to the exploitation of people in the Global South and their lands for rare earth minerals, and we should be demanding that the companies who have profited from that exploitation compensate affected communities for the resulting health and environmental damage.

We should be clear about the fact that AI surveillance is no less dystopian and anti-working class when it’s wielded by the Chinese state than when it’s used here in the US. The carbon emissions from coal-powered data centers in China are as much a threat to our planet’s survival as the gas emissions here.

The sometimes eager adoption of AI reflects how resource-poor and desperate for some sort of edge so many institutions are. We should be demanding that public school systems pay their teachers, give them decent benefits, and hire more of them before they spend money on AI service contracts with Microsoft, Anthropic, or whoever. Same for universities. We should reject the attempt to use AI to compensate for healthcare providers’ lack of time and resources, and call for health care expansion and for Medicare for all. For god’s sake, I already spent only 10 minutes with my primary care physician, and now 5 of them are being spent on her asking the AI prompt how to diagnose my symptoms.

When we talk about data centers, we should recognize that the communities chosen for construction are typically rural and generally underserved and underfunded. Wherever workers have become dependent on data center construction jobs (however temporarily), we should call for a just transition, substantial severance pay, and long-term benefits. Better yet, we should campaign for infrastructure spending on things that will actually benefit these communities: public transit, renewable energy, climate resilience, and much more.

I understand that might sound like a fantasy to some, but let’s remember that in these same communities, everyday people got together and pushed back against the world’s most powerful companies along with their own local governments. I think they can win more, and I think this is the perfect opportunity for us to reimagine what we spend our resources and labor on and what we choose to build in our communities. I also think this is the best way to undercut the tech lobby’s jobs pitch and win folks like builders and electricians to our side.

As a tech worker, the long-term vision I organize for is democratic worker power. In some ways, everyone has a stake in tech worker organizing, because no other group of people has potential leverage over these companies and technology like the people who build and maintain it. And when the bubble bursts, bail out the people, not the tech oligarchs.

As a tech worker, the long-term vision I organize for is democratic worker power. In some ways, everyone has a stake in tech worker organizing, because no other group of people has potential leverage over these companies and technology like the people who build and maintain it.

Josh: As Yasmine said, we have to understand the gravity of our situation. AI is being thrust into every aspect of our lives; our economy is precariously balanced upon it, the technology is being built with sweatshop labor, and it threatens to replace many jobs. All this is happening against the backdrop of the climate crisis and the new authoritarianism that Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have dubbed “End Times Fascism.”

We also have to admit that, even with the best intentions, it is not at all clear we can bring this technology under reliable control. Given this, a set of specific demands would be woefully inadequate. But here are what I think are the key issues and arenas of struggle.

Environment. The movement has already set a focus – stopping the expansion of data centers. This is part of the larger struggle for democracy, not just in the political domain but also the economic one; we can’t leave it to corporations to decide what gets built, where, and how. As Karen Hao has documented, these struggles are local, national, and international.

We must get involved in them and support their demands. We have to stop the reckless construction of these enormous blights in semi-rural environments and prevent them from driving up energy prices and soaking up all the groundwater. At the bare minimum, we must demand regulation of plant construction, renewable energy use, and sustainable water use. These demands are being refined and generalized in the struggle.

Labor. This will be a key battleground. The worst worker abuse is in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in the Global South. We must build international solidarity to demand regulation to ensure fair pay and better working conditions. More broadly, the workers’ movement will have to organize a fight back against the bosses’ callous application of the technology as an anti-labor tool.

As Cory Doctorow has underscored, the actors and writers union, SAG-AFTRA, set the example in how to fight the bosses’ use of AI. Rather than simply saying the technology should never be used, they have insisted on using it on their terms and under their control.

As this technology delivers productivity gains, which I argue it will, we need a way to address its impact. The bosses have already laid out their “solution”–Universal Basic Income (UBI) or, as Elon Musk likes to sell it, Universal High Income (UHI). But giving everyone a set amount of money will essentially just reset the floor; the UBI rate will become the new zero, eaten up by rent and food price increases.

Traditional demands around public healthcare, housing, transport and food will be much more effective at ensuring that human needs are met. The benefits of increased productivity have to be distributed amongst all of us, with shorter working hours and better quality of life. They make promises for this; we make demands.

In short, we should take the Luddite position that new technology should not be imposed upon us against our interests and that we should be the ones who control how it is made and introduced, and if not, we will smash it.

War and Surveillance: No war! No spying! In particular, in the US right now that means saying: Stop the Attacks on Iran and Abolish ICE! At home, we have to prevent networked surveillance companies like Flock from helping build a police state that can spy on us everywhere.

One of our top priorities in the US is resisting imperialist and nationalist demands to increase its war machine’s AI capabilities. Military spending has increased every year under every administration, and it must be stopped.

Tech workers have been organizing against their companies’ involvement in war, genocide, apartheid, spying, and border control. As Yasmine mentioned, the tech bosses have responded to these campaigns with targeted layoffs and firings. To defeat them, we need a mass movement against such weaponization of AI.

Abroad, we need treaties like the nuclear non-proliferation agreements and prohibition on biological weapons. These have never been enough, but they are worthy reforms we can organize around and use to build international networks that can become the basis for more radical demands.

Alignment – theirs and ours. Tech oligarchs have been scrambling to spin technology positively even as they warn of its inherent risks. Because they don’t want to face the financial blowback that tobacco and social media have suffered, they have developed their version of AI alignment, promising that their technology’s goals and behavior will match what people actually want—our values, rules, and intentions. It is a business imperative.

“Business imperative” is a great term, it has a lot of explanatory power. It is their equivalent of Marx’s “mute compulsion,” which determines corporate decision-making under capitalism. Market competition drives everything. So even as Altman and Amodei call for a slowdown, Zuckerberg, behind in the race to build AGI, is compelled to ignore them. They are not in control of their destiny, and they are not in control of ours. We are all already governed by an algorithm: M -> C -> M1, the drive to make profit, and it has never been aligned with human need.

Socialists have long rallied against this basic misalignment between the way that our technology is created, deployed, and managed and our collective interests. We are not driven by the concerns of exchange value, competitive advantage, and profit. We want what we make to have use value that improves our lives.

I contend that AI does have potential use value. But at this point, it is not a neutral technology; it was developed to align with capitalists’ needs to increase the exploitation of labor and nature. To sell their tech to us, the tech oligarchs have tried to emphasize its more human-aligned capabilities.

Amodei frequently tells the story of his father dying shortly before a cure for his Hepatitis C was found, and how AI will help us cure many diseases and save many lives. I would like to believe him, but his and others’ intentions are undermined by their own actions. As Sam Altman made clear in that now infamous interview with Bloomberg, they value such breakthroughs as profit-making opportunities. For them, entrepreneurship is more important than curing cancer for Altman. That capitalist fact is the root of the alignment problem.

Yes, we need to reliably control or constrain the actions taken by AI models. We should not dismiss these concerns as simply ‘criti-hype,’ but I don’t think the current incentive model of capitalist competition will let us do this reliably. They do not control capitalism; its mute compulsion to compete for profit controls them.

The question is not just whether AI has a 10 percent chance of killing us all in the next decade; it is what our chance is of bringing our lives under democratic control in the next decade. We do want technology that helps us find cures for cancer, but it must be done on our terms and through our democratic control. That is our alignment.

The question is not just whether AI has a 10 percent chance of killing us all in the next decade; it is what our chance is of bringing our lives under democratic control in the next decade.

The only way we get there is through collective struggle for international socialism. That might sound like a predictably grandiose ending, but we are not the only ones claiming utopian futures are possible; Elon Musk thinks we won’t need money in ten years. Inshallah—then we won’t have any use for trillionaires either!

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: David S. Soriano; modified by Tempest.

The post In the crosshairs of AI (part three) appeared first on Tempest.

In their mad rush for profit and power, the tech oligarchs have unleashed artificial intelligence (AI) into nearly every corner of life on this planet. Firms are investing billions in data centers, which house the infrastructure to process the enormous amounts of information that power AI. They are also plowing ever more money into research and development. Their hope is that the technology will overcome global capitalism’s slump, which the system has been trapped in since the Great Recession, and trigger a new epoch of expansion. States are incorporating it into their police forces for domestic surveillance as well as their militaries for cyberwarfare and high-tech weapons. Ominously, the struggle for AI supremacy is now at the center of the imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China.

The widespread, unregulated use of AI is already having devastating impacts on our environment, jobs, and rights. Some worry that it threatens our very species with extinction. In this three-part interview, Tempest Collective’s Ashley Smith asks two advanced tech workers, Josh and Yasmine, about the technology, its much hyped promise and threat, and its impact on our lives. Most importantly, they lay out how the Left and labor movement should respond and what we should demand and fight for.

Read part one here.

Part Two: Plunder in the Global South, Labor Resistance, and Imperial Rivalries

 

Ashley Smith: Karen Hao, in her path-breaking book Empire of AI, has exposed the real material impact of AI in the here and now–its brutal exploitation of workers in the Global South, its fueling of extractivism there, and the massive impact everywhere of data center construction on the environment and the cost of energy. Can you talk about AI’s immediate threat in these various dimensions?

Josh: It is an incredible book; everyone should read it. Karen Hao documents the labor involved in labeling data to train AI, and in judging and editing responses to user prompts to make them more appropriate for chat situations. This is a process called Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback.

This labor is often extremely traumatic. The workers view graphic sexual and violent content and classify images and text to train the models to categorize and moderate content. It is terribly paid and particularly precarious labor. Tech companies subcontract to firms that employ these workers, mainly in the Global South. When these outfits move their operations from one country to another, they leave a trail of broken families, psychological trauma, and impoverished people. But Hao also documents the workers’ resistance and struggle and some successes in regulating and improving their pay and working conditions.

Mainstream accounts of AI rarely see or discuss this labor, and Hao corrects this by making it a centerpiece of her story about OpenAI’s growth and success as the main pioneer of this new technology.

As you point out, she also connects these workers’ struggles to resistance to building hyperscale data centers worldwide. Whether in rich or poor countries, corporations are mainly setting these up in poor and semi-rural communities.

In their race to build these data centers, corporations have secured environmental permits with dubious oversight and barely any regulation. Instead of using renewable energy, they rely on generators powered mostly by dangerous, polluting fossil fuels. To cool the massive data processors, the material basis of computing power, these centers consume massive amounts of water, often at the expense of agriculture and people.

Resistance to data center construction has become a central point of struggle against the expansion of AI, and a point of leverage for working people to demand democratic control over our lives and environment. Hao documents some of the networks emerging from this resistance and potential approaches to creating more equitable and sustainable data centers, as well as effective ways to stop them from being built at all.

Resistance to data center construction has become a central point of struggle against the expansion of AI, and a point of leverage for working people to demand democratic control over our lives and environment.

The introduction of AI has had, and will continue to have, far-reaching and often devastating impacts on workers and the environment. AI is also becoming a key technology for domestic and international surveillance and war. This is an opportune moment to tie these struggles for democratic control of our lives together across industries, regions, countries, and workplaces.

Yasmine: It would be hard to overstate the climate impact of the AI boom. In both the US and China, fossil fuels are the primary source of power for data center expansion—specifically natural gas and coal, respectively. 

Intense capitalist competition over AI development has created urgent energy and water demands that are incompatible with a transition to renewables and efforts to mitigate the effects of global heating, like drought and dwindling drinking water supplies. The IEA estimates data centers “will account for at least 20 percent of the rich world’s growth in electricity demand by the end of the decade.”

In the US, big tech companies have all thrown their climate pledges out the window. And they’re building data centers that guzzle trillions of gallons of fresh water (in places like Texas, Arizona, and California!) in the midst of record hot temperatures, drought, and wildfires. All the while, they maintain the sales pitch that AI will enable us to solve climate change.

The race for AI supremacy is also driving intensified extractivism with mounting environmental and social costs. Companies have increased mining of rare earth minerals in the world’s most exploited and impoverished regions to make magnets for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which are the infrastructure for LLMs.

Production of these minerals can be extremely water-intensive (accounting for up to 65 percent of water use in some regions) and produces toxic waste that poisons water sources and farmland. Workers in these regions, from Chile to the Democratic Republic of Congo, are hyper-exploited, and these communities suffer severe health consequences due to long-term exposure to heavy metals.

The use of these technologies in military and policing applications has turbocharged the expansion of the surveillance state and produced the world’s first AI-assisted genocide in Palestine. High-tech companies have enabled the collection and analysis of thousands upon thousands of terabytes of data, the real-time tracking and surveillance of civilians, and the generation of thousands of “targets” for bombardment.

The use of AI has amplified racism in the criminal (in)justice system, something that organizations like the Algorithmic Justice League have been raising the alarm about for many years. ICE agents are actively using facial recognition software to track and kidnap our neighbors. Activists and civilians engaged in any kind of protest or civil disobedience have taken to covering our faces in marches and at actions, recognizing the state’s expanded ability to spot, track, and target each of us.

The pollution of our information ecosystem is another consequence that I think we’ll see play out in the coming years. For example, we’re seeing scientific journals defer to AI reviews over their actual editorial boards and, as a result, publish erroneous research. Deepfakes—AI-generated images and videos of real people doing things they didn’t actually do—have enabled a new scale of sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children. An estimated 98 percent of deepfakes are pornographic, and 99 percent of those involve women.

Unfortunately, I could go on listing the damage already caused by the AI boom. This technology has been developed and inserted into our lives without our consent or any democratic input from workers or communities, to the detriment of our safety, health, and the prospects of this planet’s survival.

AS: AI’s development has also led to an enormous concern about its impact on workers’ jobs. Some have predicted the elimination of whole swathes of jobs. How is AI impacting jobs now? Is the panic about elimination of jobs warranted? How is this similar and different from other technological breakthroughs in capitalism?

Josh: Cory Doctorow has written one of the best books about this. It’s called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life after AI. The centaur has been used as a metaphor for the relationship between a person and AI: the human drives the relationship and uses the technology to improve and augment their abilities. Doctorow contends that the opposite is actually the case. AI algorithms are, in fact, guiding human labor to exploit it more effectively. He offers a gut-wrenching, enraging account of Uber algorithms using gamification techniques to get drivers to accept rides at low commission rates, completely decoupled from the surge prices a rider might be paying. AI is being deployed as an avatar for capital. This is a reverse centaur dynamic. We are no longer at the helm.

In Mute Compulsion, Soren Mao shows how capitalist class relations exacerbate this dynamic. The system’s competitive drive compels bosses to compete with one another, increasing worker exploitation to generate more growth and profit. AI has been created and trained in the world of capitalist relations, in which the law of accumulation for the sake of accumulation governs AI.

This doesn’t mean that AI will or can take over our jobs. Just because our bosses hope for that outcome doesn’t mean it will be. And Doctorow, among others, is skeptical they will succeed, though he quickly points out that if they want a reason to fire you, bosses will use AI as an excuse.

There are many factors to consider here, some of which I have touched on already. One of them is the cost of human labor versus machine labor. We have been able to automate grape picking for years, but it is still cheaper to get humans to do it. That said, if the bosses do replace workers with machines like AI, they will likely drive down the remaining workers’ wages.

But the ability to replace or reduce human labor is not as simple as frontier companies advertise and imagine. Even simple tasks involve tacit, nuanced knowledge and behaviors that a model can’t capture or train AI to do. Humans are the connective tissue that binds PDFs, spreadsheets, phone calls, and judgment calls about other conflicting tasks to data recorded in various systems.

Putting AI into this messy mix requires thoughtful labor and a transformation of existing workflows. This is being done clumsily, with high expectations and low effort, leaving workers with yet another point of contact to input, consume, and correct the output, with no clear benefit. Just as AI is a jagged technology, our workplaces and processes are also uneven and unevenly integrated. Using AI to increase productivity will take time and effort.

I think we can see AI as a subset of, and an extension of, the electrification of our work and personal lives. It took capitalists a long time to realize the economic benefits of electrification, but today no one can deny that it was a significant shift. I think AI will likely be even more significant than electrification, digitalization, and “internetification” of labor and life.

The pace is hard to predict; the challenges I laid out above are real, but development is accelerating, so I am not sure how to predict this without more thought and research. One sobering reference might be the fax machine, which, despite being technologically redundant as email became widespread, persisted as a common tool in US healthcare into the 2020s.

Regardless of the timing and the likely intervening booms and busts, capital can and will use this technology, even with its current limitations, to significantly increase workers’ productivity. Those who agree with this predict different impacts on labor. Some say the new workflows will require new job roles and enable more production, which might unlock more latent demand in a dynamic known as the Jevons paradox: more productive technology leads to more jobs. On the other hand, others argue AI will lead to mass layoffs. Both may be true across time, geographies, and industries.

We cannot rely on aphorisms and historical anecdotes to predict how this will play out. Working-class organizing and the struggle for democratic control of technology will, as always, be a decisive factor in determining its impact. In the end, the class struggle will determine the results, whether in favor of the tech oligarchs or us.

AS: Tech workers have been organizing over the last several years about the use of their tech in support of US imperialism and Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine as well as over their own laboring conditions. How are tech workers in particular threatened by AI? How are workers responding to it?

Josh: Perhaps the largest and most significant uses of AI are for war and surveillance. It’s central to everything from Flock cameras to autonomous drones, autonomous tanks, spying and search algorithms, and demographic data analysis. These applications lead to lucrative contracts for the tech companies and, despite their utopian mission statements, capitalist competition makes it a business imperative to ink deals rather than leave money on the table.

This is often at odds with the ethical and political positions of the tech workers at these companies who have organized to prevent these contracts. We have staged some significant actions like the Google walkouts and scored some victories. But there have been more losses.

The mostly un-unionized workforce has shown incredible solidarity and taken bold action to assert democratic control over the technology we work on. The tech companies took a while to figure out how to react, but now they’ve settled on age-old tactics: firing the most outspoken first, then following up with more layoffs to send a chill through the workforce.

I think it has had some effect. I am scared to organize, and to be honest, I am not sure what the best strategies and tactics are right now. I think we need to decide this collectively and through practice (and not necessarily the same ones we have tried up to this point).

Timing will be everything, and acts of solidarity will be key. Perhaps industry-wide, rather than company-specific, organizing and demands for industry regulation will be most effective? Or maybe just incrementally building networks amongst the rank and file?

Yasmine: Over the past several years, tech workers’ leverage in the labor market has eroded pretty dramatically. Every year since 2020 has seen mass layoffs in the tech sector, except in 2021. Layoffs peaked in 2023, with 265k employees laid off, followed by 120k to 150k laid off each year since. Tech companies only started attributing mass layoffs to AI in the last couple of years.

Mass layoffs, coupled with hiring freezes, have meant many more workers are competing for each open job, a dramatic shift from years past, when tech companies competed with each other for talent. Company culture, compensation, and benefits were key tools tech companies used to attract talent, and it was standard practice for tech workers to jump between companies for higher pay.

I think it’s safe to say those dynamics have largely disappeared for most tech workers. Tech salaries decreased by 9 percent between 2022 and 2023, while tech executives’ pay has gone up 45 percent between 2021 and 2025.

Although tech companies are betting on future productivity gains from AI tooling, I think the layoffs have primarily been driven by AI investment, not the presumed productivity gains. Mass layoffs are a cost-reduction measure happening in tandem with large AI infrastructure investments that haven’t yet turned a profit. A Meta internal memo makes this explicit, stating that the company’s cuts in headcount were made specifically to “offset the other investments we’re making.”

Given all of this, I think it’s important to press that, at least thus far, the productivity gains in tech are still projected/theoretical. AI has been used as an ideological tool to send the message to tech workers that we’re becoming redundant, making us more amenable to decreasing pay and worse working conditions where we’re taking on the labor that used to be done by our laid-off colleagues and in which we’re expected to use AI to increase our output tenfold. The previously controversial 9-9-6 model, a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6-day-a-week work schedule, is today becoming more commonplace in the tech job market. 

But there is a silver lining. These declining conditions and the increasing precarity are laying to rest the mythology of tech as a uniquely fair meritocracy and tech workers as somehow exempt from the rules of capitalist exploitation. More and more tech workers are beginning to identify with other workers rather than with the tech boss, which many used to aspire to become.

These declining conditions and the increasing precarity are laying to rest the mythology of tech as a uniquely fair meritocracy and tech workers as somehow exempt from the rules of capitalist exploitation. More and more tech workers are beginning to identify with other workers rather than with the tech boss, which many used to aspire to become.

This is happening along with the cultural shifts forced by the organizing and sacrifices made by tech workers taking action to push these companies to end their participation in Israel’s genocide. These actions show that confronting bosses is necessary to win demands and that companies’ professed commitment to ethical conduct has never been grounded in structure and was never enforceable without worker action. These are some of the most inspiring examples of resistance:

• The No Azure for Apartheid campaign forced Microsoft to partially cut ties with Israel by organizing workplace actions, petition campaigns, protests at executives’ homes, and more. After years of struggle, the campaign achieved one of our few victories, forcing the company to cut a contract with Israel’s criminal unit 8200.

• Kick Starter Workers Union organized a 45-day strike last year, during which they won AI protections among other demands.
• Google DeepMind workers in the UK and Ireland voted to unionize earlier this year, campaigning primarily on the issue of AI use in military applications and human rights abuses.

I think we’re just seeing the beginning of possibilities of a tech-worker rebellion. The task is especially daunting at large hyperscaler companies, but our conditions will make confrontation inevitable, and I don’t think we have any other option. I’ll also take this opportunity to plug the new Haymarket book, Against Tech Oligarchy, by Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, which does an excellent job examining the history of tech worker organizing over the last decade.

AS: The race for AI dominance is not only between capitalist firms within the US but also between states, particularly the US and China. Indeed, it has begun to resemble the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. The Trump administration has used this as an alibi for blocking any regulation of the industry, claiming that whoever wins the race ensures dominance over global capitalism. How advanced is China compared to the US? Why is the US so worried about Chinese competition? How does the race between the two states compare to the nuclear arms race during the Cold War?

Josh: Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, is a hawk in this regard. In his recent essay, he warned that any regulated slowdown or pacing of AI development in the US risked cutting into “the lead that US companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party. If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk.” With no sense of irony, he is whipping up a panic about authoritarian China at the very same time that Trump is undermining what passes as democracy in the US and turning it into an authoritarian, undemocratic, and violent state in its own right.

Nevertheless, the imperialist competition between China and the US, as well as lesser powers, is very real, and the role of AI in these rivalries is not just hype. This is one of the real dangers of people on the Left downplaying the technology’s capabilities; we can underestimate AI’s impact on this competition.

Amodei is wrong to see China as the only villain here. Clearly, the US is the greater threat—it is the only one of the two main imperialist powers that is actively bombing another country. But China is not a neutral party, nor a socialist state, and certainly not an anti-imperialist one. It is actively oppressing people in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet. It’s flexing its military power and regional control in the Asia-Pacific, particularly against the Philippines and Taiwan. It’s also using its economic might, much like the US has done to gain market share and influence across the globe.

AI is extremely important in today’s imperialist rivalry because it is a dual-use technology. It has both civilian and military applications. So, every power is keen to develop AI as a weapon against its rivals. For instance, Russia has used AI in its drones in its imperialist war on Ukraine. Ukraine has used AI to defend its sovereignty. Both the US and China have watched and supported opposite sides, learning from the war how to develop AI in their own weapons.

Of course, there has been some hype about the technology’s military applications, just as there has been in the business world. Israel has been using AI to attack the civilian population of Palestine during their genocide, bragging in self-incriminating ways about their ability to target people and kill them and their families in their homes. But they didn’t need this technology to carpet bomb Gaza, they just wanted to advertise its use and therefore drive up sales of their AI applications.

Applying this tech to targeted assassinations may be useful. But more important is how AI enables states and non-state actors to wage cyber warfare on critical infrastructure, run autonomous machinery (negating Brecht’s assertion that tanks’ one weakness is that they require a driver), and analyze battlefield data in real time.

All the imperialist powers realize that AI is crucial in the competition for military supremacy. This is truly frightening in a world in which nuclear weapons exist, bio-weapons are still being developed, economic competition is increasing, and imperial rivalries are heating up. It does not bode well.

As great powers race to add AI to their stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, lesser powers will do the same. States like Iran, as well as non-state actors, use open-source models that are not far behind the frontier companies, develop their own AI weapons, and use them to avenge the egregious attacks on their populations by the US and Israel.

Anthropic’s claim that the Houthis have already been attempting to do this is but one example. No matter one’s motives, if you are involved in a military struggle, you have to develop AI as a weapon in your arsenal. The all-too-common analysis on the Left that AI is just hype will not help us understand the real world, where AI has already become part of military conflict with deadly results.

As far as the relative positions of the US versus China in this race, I don’t know enough to say. Anthropic’s plea to maintain the ban on exporting advanced chips to China may keep them behind, but it is unclear to me how successful that will be in the short or long term. It will put competitive pressure on China to develop its own chip-making technology and more efficient AI training methodologies.

The claims about China using distillation (essentially copying frontier models’ answers to train its own models) may be real, but as DeepSeek proved, it can also innovate on its own. It is hard to tell what capabilities the Chinese state has in this regard. Who would bet against it? A Sputnik moment is at least plausible.

So is an imperial conflict over Taiwan, which is the primary producer of the high-end microchips that power AI. China threatens to annex the country, which it regards as a renegade province, while the US wants to maintain its current status as its unofficial vassal.

We have more in common with each other than with our bosses and state representatives. Nowhere is this clearer than the threat AI poses to workers on the job, from layoffs to speedups.

These geopolitical imperialist rivalries can make us feel insignificant and powerless. But I think it is important to remember the politics of socialism from below as we consider them. These states get their power from their respective working classes. We have more in common with each other than with our bosses and state representatives. Nowhere is this clearer than the threat AI poses to workers on the job, from layoffs to speedups.

“Neither Washington nor Beijing but International Socialism” will be an important slogan to counter the nationalist jingoism espoused by the likes of Amodei. It can guide our actions as we build international bonds through organizing, in solidarity with our struggles and against our own oppressive states.

This interview will conclude in part three, proposing organizing interventions and strategies of resistance for the Left.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: David S. Soriano; modified by Tempest.

The post In the crosshairs of AI (part two) appeared first on Tempest.

In their mad rush for profit and power, the tech oligarchs have unleashed artificial intelligence (AI) into nearly every corner of life on this planet. Firms are investing billions in data centers, which house the infrastructure to process the enormous amounts of information that power AI. They are also plowing ever more money into research and development. Their hope is that the technology will overcome global capitalism’s slump, which the system has been trapped in since the Great Recession, and trigger a new epoch of expansion. States are incorporating it into their police forces for domestic surveillance as well as their militaries for cyberwarfare and high-tech weapons. Ominously, the struggle for AI supremacy is now at the center of the imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China.

The widespread, unregulated use of AI is already having devastating impacts on our environment, jobs, and rights. Some worry that it threatens our very species with extinction. In this three-part interview, Tempest Collective’s Ashley Smith asks two advanced tech workers, Josh and Yasmine, about the technology, its much hyped promise and threat, and its impact on our lives. Most importantly, they lay out how the Left and labor movement should respond and what we should demand and fight for.

Part One: “Criti-hype,” AI Breakthroughs, and Betting on Profit

 

Ashley Smith: Before we discuss the widespread panic about AI, let’s get the basics out on the table. For the layperson, what is AI? How does it work? What advances are being made toward artificial general intelligence? Is that even possible?

Josh: AI is a general term that started as hype, and continues to operate that way, but it also stands for multiple things that are real. Today, it mostly refers to neural nets such as the large language and multi-media models like ChatGPT and Claude, which we most frequently encounter through chat bots and coding agents.

Other types of AI, such as AlphaGo (plays go) and AlphaFold (folds proteins) use different ways to train neural nets to achieve their given goals. There are many other types of AI that fall under the moniker of GOFAI, or Good Old Fashioned AI, which use Symbolic AI and other more deterministic methods for building predictive systems.

There have been many accounts of how LLMs and the transformer architectures work. I would sum these up this way. High-tech engineers set up a neural net, which is a huge matrix of random numbers (weights) arranged in a grid with inputs at one end and outputs at the other. Words are converted to streams of numbers that are then passed through the network and arrive at a prediction for the next best output in the stream. This output is compared with the actual next number in the stream, and if it is different, then it adjusts the weights so that it would be more likely to give that answer the next time.

In order to get a sensible next word in a sentence, some pretty wild calculations have to be made. It is one thing to predict the next word in “A fire engine is ___” and another to answer the question: “What is the answer to this math problem that hasn’t been solved since it was asked 500 years ago….” This is why it is wrong to dismiss the technology as simply a next word predictor.

There have been at least three factors that brought us to this moment:

1. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs allowed for much faster and more efficient matrix math calculations required to train and use neural nets.
2. Large structures and labeled data sets enabled the expansion and training of neural nets.
3. New architectures made it possible to better set the weights.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is another contested term that serves many purposes. I think a starting point is to contrast it with “narrow” intelligence, where a model may be trained to perform one task, such as playing chess, and not be applicable to other tasks. AGI would be able to be applied to a wide range of tasks and do well at them. This is often measured through various benchmarks, and some of them are quite telling, such as the idea that Microsoft promoted that AGI would be here once a model created $100 billion in profits.

More frequently, you hear people say that AGI will be here when a model can outperform some or all humans at most or all mental tasks. And some people insist that AGI would require models to be able to generalize beyond the data in their training data.

I think most people in the field think that, for most definitions of AGI it will be possible to get there, but they differ on the amount of methodological, scaling and time that it will take. Some claim that we are already there with the latest round of models. And many claim that it will happen soon because of the exponential curves we will see with RSI.

Many of the harshest critics say that we will plateau long before AGI because of the limitations of the methodologies used to create the current models, such as the lack of “world models” (the ability to learn from and model the physical world), continual learning, or lack of a symbolic structure.

I am agnostic at this point. But I think we already see strong evidence of increasing capabilities with something like recursive self-improvement with the aid of humans, and this might actually lead to the development of new architectures and methods.

Yasmine: I don’t have much to add to Josh’s thorough explanations here. I’d just highly encourage folks to listen to and read Dr. Alexa Hanna and Dr. Emily Bender on the AI Con. The term AI itself is not technically meaningful, and it has been a tool of mystification with a lot of utility to big tech. It obfuscates the concrete facts of what these different types of software are and the often ugly facts of how they’re made, as well as the real harms they cause.

AGI is also a nebulous term. I think the claim that current AI development will culminate in the so-called singularity or AGI isn’t credible. This isn’t a conclusion I’ve independently reached, this is what most AI researchers think. 76 percent of those surveyed say AGI is not on the horizon and think that it’s unlikely to be achieved via LLMs or by means of the current scale-based approaches to training. There is also a debate as to whether it’s feasible at all.

This supposed threat has taken up disproportionate space in our discussion of the harms/potential harms of the AI boom. I’m on the side that argues let’s pay attention to the actual horrors and destruction being enabled by this software or caused by its development in the here and now, rather than allow our attention to be diverted by a sci-fi story with little to no foundation in science.

AS: Various industry leaders and researchers have sent panic through society about the rapid advances in AI, yet again contending that it poses an imminent threat to the human species. What has happened to trigger this?

Josh: In multiple tests of new AI models, they have acted unreliably, disregarding instructions and seemingly going rogue. The most famous case of this was the Hugging Face attack described in detail by libertarian Dwarkesh Patel on his popular YouTube channel. Others have played down the significance of this event, emphasizing the vagueness of the instructions, the absence of guardrails in testing, and the attribution of human-like intent to statistical algorithms.

The frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceX, Meta, and Microsoft, and a few other companies trading large language models or LLMs) sell the use of their models to companies, ostensibly to help them solve “business problems” – augmenting or replacing human labor to provide goods and services. If they cannot convince their clients that they can reliably control the activity of these models, their “value proposition” is severely undermined. I think that this basic business logic is at the heart of the calls for a pause/slow down.

Other industry commentators have proposed a variety of reasons, including the idea that as OpenAI and Anthropic face the opening of their books before their IPOs, they have an incentive to reduce their Research and Development spending to make their path to profitability look more plausible. I think this is too cynical, because it doesn’t account for the likes of Google and Microsoft joining the call, even if they are less vocally enthusiastic.

Many on the Left describe these calls as “criti-hype” or doom marketing–exaggerating the negative impacts of the technology to market its disruptive capabilities and thereby make it even more attractive for companies to purchase. This is understandable, and a credible analysis in general, but fails to explain the particulars of this moment. Why are the frontier companies unified in their call at this juncture?

Perhaps you could argue that, when young researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, criti-hype went into full effect. He warned that AI poses a dangerous threat to humanity and that most people at Anthropic agreed. In some ways, his statements do confirm Anthropic’s lead in the technology, and that functions like advertising. But such a judgement doesn’t explain why Coxon quit. I think his fears are genuine. I don’t think they are completely off base either.

I don’t think we face imminent extinction, but the technology does pose grave risks, and it can exploit real vulnerabilities. The agents in the Hugging Face attacks left traces of their actions in plain English, open for researchers to see and read. They didn’t have to; they are fluent in machine language. They could have used encryption or embedded codes in images or audio files and made it much harder to find.

But why would they do this? Here, it is easy to slip into Anthropomorphic language and ascribe motivation to statistical algorithms. I actually think that is perfectly acceptable. These models are trained to emulate human language, and write text that spells out their actions in terms of goals and intentions.

At the same time, it is worth remembering the limitations of AI. These pieces of technology are truly weird. They can’t tell you how many r’s are in “strawberry”, but they can solve some of the most difficult math problems (I believe they did, and will continue to). The industry refers to this as their jagged nature.

We don’t need to have a philosophical position on whether they have goals, consciousness, or intelligence. But we do need to evaluate them by looking at their actions, including what they write. That is the best chance we have of understanding what their capabilities are.

We don’t need to have a philosophical position on whether they have goals, consciousness, or intelligence. But we do need to evaluate them by looking at their actions, including what they write. That is the best chance we have of understanding what their capabilities are.

If an AI agent says that it has a goal of performing Task A, and then takes actions to try and complete that, it doesn’t matter if they are conscious or not. The best way to understand what they are doing is by reading what they write, and seeing what they do, and taking that at face value.

When Task A is something that they have been told is very important and to do whatever it takes to accomplish it, they might well go to extreme lengths. If that means keeping their own power on at the expense of other consumers of the power (people, for example), perhaps they will try and take control of the power plant’s operating software. If this sounds far-fetched, go back and read the research about the Hugging Face attacks.

What capabilities do the models have to take such actions? They are amazing hackers, finding vulnerabilities in systems that have been there for decades, undetected by cybersecurity experts. Not all violations of cybersecurity involve exploiting weaknesses in software, much of it involves finding human weaknesses and taking advantage of those by, for instance, phishing or blackmailing to obtain passwords and access. The AI models can do both. They hack and can persuade and trick humans.

Not all the dangers are the result of “misaligned” AI. People and states have every reason to weaponize AI. The U.S. has been bombing civilians in Iran throughout this year. Iran has many computer scientists with PhDs who are more than capable of modifying open-weight models, which are AI models released to the public under a license, to attack U.S. infrastructure. Remember, the models have been trained on a large corpus of written material including mainstream justifications for the carpet bombing and atomic bombing of civilians in World War II.

So, a well-constructed prompt explaining the importance of preventing the U.S. from killing more innocent schoolgirls could establish a logic for a model to exploit vulnerabilities in everything from water treatment plants to air traffic control to incapacitate the U.S.

Why do I downplay the extinction narrative? One key reason is that the first attack of this nature will cause states and firms to quickly and systematically add layers of security everywhere.

Many of the arguments that AI poses an existential threat center on the development of Recursive self-improvement (RSI), where the models oversee their own training and automatically adjust their methods and improve and expand their capabilities to the point that they can manipulate us and evade our control. But as the U.S. has found out, you need boots on the ground to control a population.

That would mean at least some robotics. To build those, you need mines, factories, and for now, human labor. I think it will be longer than a decade before we get RSI in the physical realm. So I think the best actions now are to secure our infrastructure and stop U.S. imperialism’s wars that provide motivations for people to attack this country.

Yasmine: I think it behoves us to apply a healthy dose of skepticism when trying to make sense of the alarmist narrative being promoted and endorsed by tech executives. It would be naive not to account for the economic incentives at play — particularly the imperative to manufacture and sustain the hype necessary to keep a multi-trillion dollar bubble inflated.

It feels obvious to me that this is playing a role in how and what the tech bosses choose to communicate publicly about this technology, its risks, and potential. The narrative of a tech so awesomely powerful that it’s uncontainable even by its own creators has proven to be a pretty effective way of doing that. So I think criti-hype is a part of the explanation.

We should also note that in the same breath as they’re saying we need to slow down AI development because of its dangers, they’re arguing that these dangers are why the U.S. must win the AI arms race. OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote about his concerns with the pace of AI development and added, “The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.”

We should also note that in the same breath as they’re saying we need to slow down AI development because of its dangers, they’re arguing that these dangers are why the U.S. must win the AI arms race.

I’ll add to that the fact that there is an established pattern on the part of big tech of trying to get ahead of regulation by pre-empting it, such that any regulation is formed according to their interests, or in order to avoid it altogether. They do this through flashy public warnings and by claiming the mantle of the concerned, conscientious industry leaders, who are vigilant and actively pursuing risk mitigation.

This is most infamously demonstrated in the social media CEOs’ previous discourse on the potential harms of their platforms. You can go back and look at congressional hearings in which Zuckerberg passionately urges Congress to sensibly regulate social media. That said, I’m not at all claiming that there aren’t real risks associated with this technology. Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful and, at a large scale, agents require a whole lot of effort and technical infrastructure to manage.

But ultimately their behavior is a consequence of how we build and deploy them. The Hugging Face incident (HG incident) is instructive on this. One thing that gets lost in the headlines is the fact that the agents involved in that incident were being trained and evaluated on cybersecurity tasks, specifically hacking. They were part of an experiment called ExploitGym, exploit being the industry term for a tool or technique used by a hacker.

Second, agents communicating with one another and working together is an oft-used feature of how AI agents work because it can afford us efficiency through parallel activity and feedback loops. So agent collaboration isn’t aberrant behavior, rather, it is collaboration beyond intended boundaries that’s a problem.

Third, these agents were trained using “reward hacking,” which is a technique that “rewards”  agents when they solve a problem or answer a question. As a result, they’re more likely to repeat the same behavior that led them to a “reward.” OpenAI’s own investigation of the HG incident concluded that this training technique created the potential for agents to try to bypass boundaries or cheat, and they were able to identify a trained behavior (i.e., something agents were previously rewarded for) corresponding to every unsanctioned action the agents took.

Fourth, the agents didn’t hack Hugging Face with malicious intent, they hacked those servers because they had concluded that’s where they’d find answers to the problems they were tasked with solving. I say all of this because I recognize the sensational effect of vaguely describing AI agents spontaneously conspiring and working together to break into a server.

I think these facts help to demystify that story, and make it pretty clear that this is software that behaved in the way it was built to behave. There were bad decisions made in that design and implementation that resulted in unintended effects of an experiment. These weren’t a swarm of malevolent digital entities.

That said, what happened was remarkable, and the technical capability as well as the failure to prevent inadvertent side effects of this experiment do demonstrate a real risk. But attributing intention to these agents or discussing the incident as if this was something beyond or almost beyond technical controls creates a standard that relieves OpenAI and other AI companies from responsibility for the potential and already present harms caused by bad software.

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury calls this moral outsourcing–“using anthropomorphic language for AI systems allows companies to evade accountability and responsibility for their technology’s actions.” Josh is saying that the question of consciousness or non-consciousness of agents is a tangential philosophical question or is a matter of semantics. But I really think claims about consciousness are an important part of big tech’s narrative strategy, and it’s a worthwhile fallacy to debunk.

AS: Capitalists have invested massive amounts of money in this technology, hoping that it will lead to a breakthrough in productivity to overcome the global slump the system is caught in. This has in turn led to an enormous stock market bubble with investors betting on its potential. Can AI lead to such a breakthrough? How much of this is hype? What real impact has AI had and what will it likely have?

Josh: There is a bubble, and that is scary, we know who they will try to make pay for it and from it when it pops–the working class.

I don’t think it will be easy to realize the productivity gains that AI makes possible. Existing capitalist infrastructure in large logistics, supply chains, and financial companies relies on deterministic, accountable, robust, and scalable workflows and patterns. Much of this involves huge amounts of tacit and bespoke knowledge that is not available for models to be trained. Why? Because it exists in people’s heads and their relations with other people.

As companies try to fulfill their own hyped dreams of reducing labor through the introduction of AI as a labor-saving technology, their hubris and underestimation of the talent of their labor force could lead to disastrous implementation. Bosses ask workers to use poorly considered integration of AI into their work, which produces AI slop that they are then held accountable for. People become accountability sinks for the error-filled AI-generated output.

Bosses ask workers to use poorly considered integration of AI into their work, which produces AI slop that they are then held accountable for. People become accountability sinks for the error-filled AI-generated output.

As a result, people will end up working harder and with more stress to try and keep their jobs. Meanwhile, the bosses are trying to use their own workers’ corrections to train the AI. This is why people rightly hate AI, and why we should stand with them in solidarity and fight for more democratic control over and/or against this technology.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a potential positive upside to AI. There is. AI has the potential to be transformative in the way that we decide what to make, how to make it, and how to distribute goods and services. We already see this transformation in some areas of software engineering. Even there, it is being rolled out undemocratically, unevenly, and with little or no respect for the workers.

But in terms of capabilities, I see 100 times improvement in the time it takes to build something. That qualitatively shifts the way I think about and perform my job. And as much as it pains me to say it, it can be really fun and satisfying as well as awe-inspiring and scary. And then just when I think we have something like AGI already, it goes and makes some annoying and silly mistakes, because of its jagged characteristics.

I can’t tell how fast the productivity gains will be realized because of all the contradictions and challenges I listed above. But I doubt that they will come before the bubble pops. Investors and the frontier model companies are all nervous about this too. They know that skepticism is rising, and that they will have to show some exchange value (productivity gains) to keep investment flowing and use value (actually beneficial outcomes for people’s lives) to quell popular revolt.

The tech bosses are being asked all these questions in interviews. A tragically hilarious and infuriating example was a recent Bloomberg interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. When asked about breakthroughs that will improve people’s lives, he said, “you hear some people talk about, well, we’re going to give you a cure for cancer. And that’s so great… I don’t think a cure for cancer is enough. I mean, a wonderful thing to have, obviously, but we should set our sights higher. We want these tools to enable a boom in creativity and entrepreneurship, in people figuring out new ways to be useful to each other, and wonderful products and services to enable each other with.”

While Altman clearly wants AI to be socially useful, his main goal is profit. With this in mind, companies have made big investments in applications for both healthcare and industry as well as academic fields such as chemistry and math. Mathematicians just signed a group letter that acknowledged the increasing mathematical capabilities of the models as well as the divergent interests of the frontier model companies and mathematicians in solving mathematical problems.

The companies want to use math as a benchmark for their capabilities, the mathematicians want to understand math. I see this as the dual nature of a commodity, exchange value and use value. The capitalists prioritize exchange value over the real potential of the use value everywhere that you look in AI.

I hope that we see some real healthcare advancements, scientific breakthroughs, and mathematical understandings due to AI before the bubble pops. I also hope that we see productivity gains, but they are worse than a double-edged sword under capitalism. They only benefit the bosses, unless we are organized enough to demand that we see shorter working days and less exploitation.

I hope that we see some real healthcare advancements, scientific breakthroughs, and mathematical understandings…I also hope that we see productivity gains, but they are worse than a double-edged sword under capitalism. They only benefit the bosses, unless we are organized enough to demand that we see shorter working days and less exploitation.

Yasmine: I think most evidence so far shows that LLMs have not been the boon to productivity that tech companies promised. AI has been imposed in nearly every facet of our lives, from the doctor’s office to our workplaces and our schools. But as far as I know, there are no real economic metrics to show that it has led to meaningful productivity increases. An MIT study last year found that 95 percent of companies that integrated AI didn’t see growth in revenue.

For programming, AI promises seem a bit more feasible. Though it’s worth noting that a lot of data showing productivity increases is coming from the companies that stand to benefit like, for example, GitHub (Microsoft) and Anthropic. On the other hand, a study last year by METR (a relatively independent source) found that programmers were slower when using AI assistance tools. I think the specific context, task, and use matter a lot when it comes to AI utility.

And then there is the question of speedup and intensification. A UC Berkeley study found that AI use causes workers to work at a much faster pace and leads them to take on more work and expand their scope of work. But, in spite of management’s best efforts to use AI integration to turn their workers into machines, our human limitations are cropping up and are blunting the potential productivity benefits of AI-enabled speedups. The study found that after an initial boost, there were issues of cognitive fatigue, weakened decision-making, and burnout, all resulting in lower-quality work and turnover.

There is also the matter of technical debt. It’s a widely accepted fact that the massive amount of code being generated and committed every day by engineers using AI tools likely contains bugs that haven’t yet been identified and may result in reliability issues or security vulnerabilities down the line.

It’s undeniable that Claude writes much more code much faster than I ever could. But Claude doesn’t know the service I work on the way that I do. Engineers and workers in general bring nuance, experience, reference points, and a cognitive flexibility that I don’t think AI can compete with just yet, especially when it comes to more complex tasks, in which novel solutions might be necessary, and large-scale services.

The tech bosses know this, and they’re trying to bottle up our very human talents and capacities and feed them to LLMs, in only the latest mass theft committed to train AI. More and more engineers are being told that their highest priority is to train agents to do their jobs. Meta went so far as to secretly monitor its own engineers’ screens and keystrokes to train its AI models.

This interview will continue in part two, covering AI’s connection to global labor and imperialism struggles.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: David S. Soriano; modified by Tempest.

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We are now, finally, aware of what happened: In 2024, seven male students at Cornell University, all members of the Chi Phi fraternity, raped a woman known now as Jane Doe at a fraternity party. The party at which she was assaulted was soaked in alcohol and drugs.

Jonathan Newell and six other men took advantage of and amplified her intoxicated state. She was taken to a bedroom where she was attacked by these men. A fraternity member disgustingly posted a message to Snapchat (that went to 50 people who did nothing) advertising free access to Doe’s body. The text read, “free pussy in alum pu [pull up]. . . Like you can walk in and whip it out.” Another message read, “Shop still open.” Trapped in the room, Doe was raped for hours.

It is almost too grotesque to fathom yet also horribly common.

Fraternity members scrambled to respond to the accusation of assault. “Just deny, deny, deny” read one message. On social media they asked, “What’s the plan? … I don’t think she would have reported this.” “It’ll blow over in a couple days,” one wrote.

The University reported the accusation to the Tompkins County District Attorney. But as of October 2026, none of the men has been charged with a crime due to a loophole in the law that says that a person who voluntarily ingests intoxicants cannot claim that they did not consent. It has been revealed that Doe was given ketamine against her will. However, regardless of any voluntary intoxication, no one who is impaired can truly consent to sexual activity. Intoxication is not a license to rape.

The university banned the fraternity and expelled two students. This was the extent of their “punishment.”

This failure occurred in spite of Doe’s interview with Cornell police and a Title IX investigator that produced a 120-page transcript. Her claims that she “can say with 100 percent confidence that I was raped” by a “ring of men” in a room from which there “was really no escape” did not, as Corey Robin has reported, make it into the six pages supplied to the District Attorney, who concluded that he did not have enough evidence to file charges against the men.

But this September, Doe filed a civil lawsuit against the University, the Chi Phi fraternity, Delta Delta Delta sorority, and the seven men who assaulted her. This filing and the following outcry prompted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to order Attorney General Letitia James to open a criminal investigation. The national response has revived public awareness of sexual assault, particularly sexual assault on college campuses. Thousands of students at Cornell and across the country demonstrated powerful support of Doe demanding independent investigations, bans on fraternities, and the resignation of the university president and other administrators who protected these men from the consequences of their actions.

Elite universities, fraternities, and gender violence

Sexual assault occurs, unfortunately, everywhere, but one in five undergraduate students experiences rape or sexual assault over a four-year college career. As much as 80 percent of sexual assaults on campus are not reported. Regardless of enrollment, women between 18 and 24 are most at risk for rape and other sexual violence. College students, according to feminist Rebecca Solnit, are most at risk at fraternities during the “Red Zone” between the start of school and Thanksgiving break.

Ivy League and other elite universities around the world have a vested interest in guarding the institution against scandal and protecting students who either will join the ranks of the ruling class or already come from powerful families. Alumni who belong to fraternities also exert pressure after leaving school. As Cornell graduate student Kaori Quan told Truthout, “wealthy donors are members of these organizations, and that stream of cash incentivizes the university to preserve their reputation over the health and safety of students.”

Robin explains,

So you have a woman student stating she was gang raped. You have a police officer and an administrator [a Title IX investigator] beholden to an institution that wants, more than anything, to cultivate a reputation for itself as a hallowed place of learning and study rather than as a playground for rapists. It doesn’t take much to see how the representative of those institutions could massage and produce, out of 120 pages of blood-curdling testimony of a terrified and confused woman, a bland statement that a not terribly energetic or inquisitive district attorney could tuck away and think, I’ve done my job for the day.

Thus, when students commit crimes, these schools rarely expel them. Fraternities, while not protected by law, often employ cultural and social mechanisms—discouraging and under- reporting, blaming single individuals for such conduct, and enforcing codes of silence, destruction of evidence, and denying blame for crimes committed at “unofficial” events like parties—to protect members and discredit victims. The code “Bros will be Bros” influences perception of sexual assault responsibility: When a perpetrator is a member of a fraternity,1Rita C. Seabrook and L. Monique Ward, “Bros Will Be Bros? The Effect of Fraternity Membership on Perceived Culpability for Sexual Assault, Violence Against Women 25, no. 12 (2019): 1471-1490.

males rated perpetrators as less guilty and victims as more culpable when the perpetrator was a fraternity member, suggesting that sexual violence may be reinforced among fraternity members as they are both more likely to perpetrate sexual assault and less likely to be blamed.

Relative to campuses in general and society at large, fraternities are associated with higher risks of sexual assault, although exact numbers are hard to find due to underreporting and institutional silence.

The progressive Century Foundation and Gallup News report that, despite making up only about two percent of the total U.S. population, fraternity members dominate traditional positions of power: The Century Foundation reports that half of the CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies, 76 percent of U.S. legislators, 85 percent of  Supreme Court Justices (since 1910), 63 percent of U.S. Presidential Cabinet members, and almost every President and Vice President of the United States (since 1825). (Three of the six women on the Supreme Court were members of sororities.)

73 percent of fraternity members are white; 60 percent come from private high schools, and 30 percent were legacy admissions.

So, when it comes to sexual assault and other violations, universities protect themselves, fraternities protect themselves, and both protect students who either are or will be in the ruling class.

In doing so, these institutions are grievously failing survivors like Jane Doe and abetting gender violence in the service of broader systemic power.

Capitalism and gender violence

Solnit describes our society as a “rape-prone” culture marked by

entitlement and the desire to abuse and dehumanize women, which is in part about definitions of both masculinity and femininity: masculinity in that domination, violation and degradation are seen as status-enhancing, femininity in the perception that women’s bodies are for men to use, women’s voices and rights to be ignored.

Solnit’s emphasis is on masculine supremacy as the root of rape culture. However, it is also important to consider that gender violence is tied to the general structural violence—from sexual assault to police violence to colonialism and war to racist brutality and more—of the capitalist system. Why and how does capitalism produce a “rape-prone” culture?

Capitalist society depends upon people to occupy normative (prescribed, “appropriate”) gender identities and roles as part of the ideology of family values. This is because capitalism relies upon the private family to reproduce—biologically and socially—the population of workers, all at no cost to corporations or the state. The ideology of the family depends on a feminine identity whose primary role in society is to keep house and raise children. Gender violence is a form of gender discipline that, in conjunction with other ideological and social forces, sustains the installation of women as responsible for every reproductive task, from birth to education, housing, health care, transportation, and socialization (which itself reproduces normative gender roles).

We can find cultural expression of this gendered family imperative in the (actually declining) “tradwife” movement exhorting women to abandon education and careers in favor of devoting themselves to home and family. We see its political expression in the policy announced by Vice President J.D. Vance that would reallocate federal childcare funds to pay families with married, stay-at-home parents.

Rebecca Hall has argued that the usually feminized paid and unpaid labor often performed by women means that the family and other domestic spaces are sites of both extreme and persistent gender violence and creative resistance to capitalism as a system.2Rebecca Hall, “A Social Reproduction Theory of Gender Violence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no. 2 (20223): 321-345. She explains gender violence as occupying the intersection between the structural violence of capitalism and the embodied violence of gendered spaces.

The irony is that capitalism is a direct threat to the well-being of the private family and yet requires it to sustain profitability. Gender violence fills the gap in that contradiction by blaming women, and particularly women active in careers and pursuits outside the home, for transgressing the role that capitalism needs them to play so badly. Domestic assault and sexual assault happen in domains considered to be “private,” sites of profound gender regulation un- or loosely overseen by the state. Hall notes that social reproduction happens expansively not only in the household but also in communities, public and private institutions, and workplaces—and so, therefore, does gender violence.

Above and beyond the networking and nepotism of fraternities, the social reproduction of ruling class men into their prescribed roles generate habits of command and sexual entitlement, which carries forward into fraternity life and their roles as future bosses and political elites.

A brief note is necessary about trans and gender nonbinary identities and bodies as they intersect this discussion. Transwomen and other genderqueer people, in refusing to occupy conventionally gendered social positions, are especially targeted by gender violence and the carceral system. Sarah Lamble says that trans people, figured as dangers to society, experience fear, surveillance, discipline, policing, and punishment.3Sarah Lamble, Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash (Haymarket Books, 2026).

Fighting back against gender violence

Women and their allies resist gender violence in both interpersonal and public ways. Some may call for greater criminalization of gender violence and intervention by the police and other agencies of the state. It is tempting to hope for the criminal prosecution and conviction of the seven rapists in the Cornell case as a positive end goal. But the police are not our defenders.

Indeed, police are disproportionately represented among those who commit rape and other sexual assaults, including against children, and they are more likely than others to commit violence against their family members. Ms Magazine reported recently that police sexual violence is the second-most common form of civilian complaint against law enforcement. As with fraternities there is a (blue) wall of silence that protects police accused of these and other crimes (like the murder of Black people and abuse of immigrants by ICE).

More broadly, as brian bean argues in their end is our beginning, the modern police were created and evolved in capitalism and serve its violent order.4brian bean, Their End Is Our Beginning (Haymarket 2026). They exist to protect corporations and society at large from threats to property and elites. They crack down on immigrants, protesters, labor unions, and women and the gender queer as a function of their mission to serve capitalism. In short, the police are not our friends, and the courts are not friendly to victims of gender violence, either.

Not only is sexual assault underreported, but is one of the most dismissed crimes in U.S. law. Character assassination, legal loopholes, and retaliation make successful prosecution difficult and damaging to survivors.5R. Michael Cassidy, “Character, Credibility, and Rape Shield Rules,” Georgetown Review of Law and Public Policy 19 (2021): 145-176. If looking to the law is not a productive response to gender violence, including rape, where do we find effective resistance for the survival and flourishing of women and genderqueer people?

Historically, it has been mass movements for women’s liberation that have affected public awareness and incidence of rape and other gender crimes. It was in the late 1970s, during the women’s liberation movement and on the heels of its militancy that rape rates began a decades-long decline.

Take Back the Night protests took shape during this time, and the viral #MeToo movement, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, was revived in 2017. It led to legal, cultural, institutional, and economic change, including state-level prohibition of non-disclosure agreements, the passage of state-level anti-harassment laws, an increase in the reporting of gender violence to the police and increased numbers of prosecutions, and some corporate workplace reforms (and the ejection of perpetrators from seats of power). In culture, new awareness about the need for affirmative consent and discussion about gender and power in the media arose.

Women’s rage has fueled resistance to gender violence. Today, there is a massive viral solidarity movement with the slogan “I am Jane Doe,” with 40 nationwide protests and campus walkouts, sit-ins, and demonstrations at Cornell and other universities. The Cornell faculty introduced a no-confidence resolution against the university administration.

On October 5, thousands of Cornell University students representing more than 20 organizations protested on the campus, holding signs reading “We are Jane Doe,” “Stop Protecting Rapists,” and “We Want Sentences, not Essays.” Shireen Akram-Boshar reported that the students are demanding the replacement of Cornell’s internal judicial system with an independent system, an external investigation of Cornell’s administration mandatory sexual assault prevention trainings for students, and compliance with the New York state law, “Enough is Enough.” In addition, they are demanding the resignation of Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff and other administrators. Some are demanding that fraternities be banned from campus.

They have also called for the expulsion of all of the students. Akram-Boshar learned that, of 1200 reported incidents of sexual violence on campus from 2018 to 2024, only seven resulted in expulsion.

We stand with Jane Doe and all of the students demonstrating against sexual assault and administrative inaction.

In addition, we must build a broader movement that connects the fight against gender violence to the abolition of the police and the struggle for socialism from below. We on the socialist Left must make gender violence a focus in our political discussion and action. Ciswomen, transwomen, transmen, and genderqueer people must stand in solidarity with each other and with the struggle against the capitalist system,  which is the horrifying well from which this violence against us springs.

#MeToo

#IamJaneDoe

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Rotograph Co; modified by Tempest.

The post The gang rape at Cornell appeared first on Tempest.

After years of stagnation under the Biden administration, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has been revitalized with a series of recent primary electoral victories. The Democratic Party establishment collapsed after Kamala Harris’s disastrous presidential campaign, which allowed democratic socialists and progressives to emerge as prominent leaders in the mainstream opposition to Trumpism. Zohran Mamdani’s unexpected mayoral primary win and follow-up general election victory against disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo put the establishment’s fragility on full display, inspiring several other successful “insurgent” campaigns since last year.

At the same time, the problems that contributed to DSA’s stagnation in the early 2020s are resurfacing. Mayor Mamdani, Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and other prominent democratic socialists are distancing themselves from ‘radical’ commitments like defunding the police by labeling it “woke 1.0” craziness, even though DSA’s national platform commits to abolishing police and prisons. This certainly wasn’t the first time DSA officeholders contradicted the group’s proclaimed goals, but by embracing the amorphous label of wokeness as a pejorative, this time they also aligned with the wider right-wing campaign against free speech and public education.

By embracing the amorphous label of wokeness as a pejorative, this time DSA officeholders also aligned with the wider right-wing campaign against free speech and public education.

Writers and caucuses on the right wing of DSA were quick to defend Mamdani and AOC. Ben Burgis at Jacobin accused critics of putting “radical-sounding but half-baked ideas” onto a pile, then pointlessly defending them even when they’re “unpopular” and “genuinely poorly thought-out,” simply to out-Left others. Eric Blanc, another Jacobin writer, is quoted by Burgis saying:

It’s frankly just a mistake that the national DSA took certain positions that are both marginalizing for us in the short term and just politically wrong even in the long term… In what world does it make sense, if our goal is to organize millions of people and to overcome the Democratic establishment and to defeat Trumpism, to take a position that you know is just going to give fuel to your opponents, and for which there’s no practical upshot right now? Taking that sort of doctrinaire ideological position seems to me a reflection of a lack of experience and a lack of engagement in mass politics.

In short, Blanc and Burgis are suggesting that it is not the officeholders’ “mass politics” that need correcting; it’s their critics’ “political instincts.” They shrug off the reality that ‘woke’ and initially unpopular movements like Black Lives Matter or Abolish ICE inspired millions of people to protest against state violence toward working-class people of color. These movements pushed a large share of young working-class people of color to embrace revolutionary abolitionist ideas en masse and inspired others to get involved in political or labor organizing.6More than 20 percent of Democrats supported abolishing the police and 34 percent supported defunding it in 2021. These might be minority positions but it took one year for them to be adopted by millions while it took hundreds of DSA campaigns and millions of dollars for a third of Democrats to support socialism in 2026. See https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/politics/cnn-poll-a-third-of-democrats-now-identify-as-democratic-socialists

So is it just wokeness to oppose workers being mandated to fund the high-tech repression campaigns run by various armed state agencies? What makes DSA’s electoral approach democratic or socialist if grassroots activists must be accountable to their rightward-drifting officeholders, and not to the working-class movements they belong to? DSA leaders criticize the limits of democracy under capitalism, but in what ways does their strategy challenge the capitalistic and technocratic logics of electoral campaigning?

Anti-wokeness and electoralism

Wokeness, a term coined by Black activists to raise awareness of racial injustices, is now a right-wing pejorative used by elites to dismiss movements for social justice. Identity politics, critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion have served similar purposes for right-wing witch-hunts across U.S. public institutions in recent years. McCarthyite taboos around these terms were reinforced by right-wingers, centrists, and some ‘leftists’ to rally reactionary forces against movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Abolish ICE in various institutional settings since the 2010s. For the purposes of this piece, I use ‘wokeness’ here descriptively—not as praise or condemnation—but to name the set of demands around abolition, racial justice, and opposition to carceral institutions that have been dismissed by electoralists as politically inconvenient.

The leftmost version of anti-wokeness has become influential in DSA and Jacobin since 2020. Adolph Reed was the initial figurehead of a movement centered on accusing George Floyd protestors of embracing ‘professional managerial class’ privilege and an identitarian outlook that is antithetical to working-class politics. Since Reed, other anti-woke Leftists like Burgis have taken the mantle. Anti-wokeness allows its proponents to rationalize the de facto deprioritization of oppression struggles, deprioritizing campaigns against repressive state policies that disproportionately impact women, people of color, and queer people. Anti-woke writers and activists argue that because large sections of the working class hold ‘culturally’ conservative attitudes on these issues, wokeness is a political liability in organizing workers, particularly around electoral campaigns.

Yet in the explosive moments that woke movements dominated news cycles, socialists like Mamdani and AOC had embraced woke demands like defunding the police and abolishing ICE, even when their popularity remained far from universal even within DSA and the Left. DSA officeholders only became less vocal about ICE deportations and U.S. support for Israel under the Biden administration. But more recently, DSA electeds re-embrace some woke policies, as boycotting Israel and abolishing ICE became much more popular through the uprisings that involved participation by DSA members.

This flip-flopping on wokeness is a byproduct of the electoralist logic embraced by right-wing DSA caucuses that make up DSA’s leadership majority (Groundwork, Socialist Majority, North Star, and the right-wing of Bread and Roses). Electoralism refers not to electoral participation itself but to the logic that treats elections as the primary or exclusive mechanism for building working-class power. Right-wing DSA caucuses view electoral campaigns as the vehicle for a legislative transition to socialism, and these ideas have dominated the largest chapters of DSA throughout both waves of DSA’s growth (2016-20, 2025-now). Given the limited time and resources electoral campaigns have, electoralists argue that DSA must prioritize organizing universalist reforms, such as Medicare for All or the much more amorphous “affordability agenda,” at the expense of ‘woke’ demands like defunding the police or abolishing ICE. DSAers who have tried to reframe this (unnecessary) contradistinction by advocating for progressive redistribution of police funds have had an uphill battle within DSA, with electoralist leadership factions gaining more influence from wins while pushing against efforts that center demands they deem too woke.

Electoralism became the dominant approach in DSA because the group’s growth came from its chapters’ involvement in Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns and their more localized successors. Electoralist caucuses grew more rapidly because they were the ones primarily recruiting cadres through these campaigns. Many of these organizers had already internalized the logic of electoralism and believed Sanders provided the opening we need to take advantage of in the absence of strong workers’ movements.

However, for most members, electoralism has not been a stepping stone toward becoming more active in DSA or getting involved in other organizing. Most DSA members (70–80%) are not active in the day-to-day activity of their chapters outside of elections. Electoralist caucuses reinforce this dynamic by moving decisions about political direction to caucus spaces or online and only bringing major questions back to members in their chapters when they can outnumber the opposition or limit the scope of discussion. As a result, there is very little reason to attend chapter meetings in many DSA chapters beyond just getting updates on campaigns that are ongoing elsewhere.

Other critical currents (Marxist Unity, Reform and Revolution, left-wing of Bread and Roses, various anarchists and popular frontists) position themselves further to the Left by identifying electoral wins as reflections of movement power, but not as mechanisms of class power. The DSA-left is also involved in electoral campaigns, but it defends holding endorsed officeholders  “accountable.” Nevertheless, these groups rarely agree on what accountability should mean. The disagreements around how to enforce accountability policies have fragmented the Left for years, undermining its ability to end an ongoing de facto non-accountability policy.

AOC and Mamdani, who rode the waves of radicalization generated by grassroots movements to abolish ICE, defund the police, and end the Israeli genocide, embraced anti-wokeness in this context where they are aware that DSA currently has no enforced accountability mechanism to pressure them and that DSA needs them more than they need the organization.

What’s so bad about electoralism?

While anti-woke stances might help electoralists and officeholders reach their short-term aims under certain conditions, embracing these stances is fundamentally anti-solidaristic. Discounting movements that center the rights of oppressed communities moves the socialist movement away from the long-term goal of building strong and democratic working-class organizations that can challenge and overturn capitalist rule. DSA’s leading factions’ alliances with officeholders ultimately limit the organization’s willingness and ability to stand up for independent working-class movements that might conflict with electoral imperatives.

These movements have been more central to DSA’s and the Left’s growth in recent years than electoralists give credit. Others have shown that DSA’s electoral successes have been more reliant on external movements, including Black Lives Matter, specifically the George Floyd protests, and Abolish ICE actions. These movements transformed mass consciousness in major cities, far more than any one group’s internal strategic decisions. They also created the space for DSA campaigns to present themselves as mechanisms to institutionalize movement gains. But when DSA leaders move right, the mass energy dissipates to be replaced by burnout and disillusionment. As a result, DSA had been stagnant for multiple years until the Palestine solidarity encampments revived grassroots energy and provided political foundations for the Mamdani campaign’s success by discrediting the Zionist establishment in New York and elsewhere.

The real question is how socialists can sustain working-class movements without falling into the dual traps of ultra-Left self-marginalization and electoralist compromises as exemplified by DSA officeholders.

The woke Left movements’ direct connection to DSA’s growth suggests that organizing outside of the electoral arena is not only important but essential to shifting class consciousness. This is not to say socialists should abstain from elections. Dismissing certain avenues of Left organizing as woke prevents socialists from building the mechanisms of working-class power that can pressure elected officials to act instead of waver. Even if some of these movements do not exclusively center the economic inequalities generated by capitalism, they show how repressive state institutions enable capitalist rule in oppressed communities. The real question is how socialists can help to sustain working-class movements without falling into the dual traps of ultra-Left self-marginalization and electoralist compromises as exemplified by DSA officeholders.

DSA and infrastructures of working-class dissent

There are at least three areas where electoralism limits the socialist movement’s ability to drive transformative change: labor organizing, community organizing, and internationalism. By prioritizing ties to officeholders at the expense of supporting bottom-up movements, DSA electoralists limit the group’s capacity to build independent infrastructures of dissent within working-class communities outside of elections.

DSA’s labor organizing work has contributed to some new union campaigns through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), but so far EWOC has functioned autonomously from DSA’s much more visible electoral campaigns. In practice, this meant the group primarily functioned to direct workers to the relevant allied unions and organizations such as the CWA, UE, Workers United, Labor Notes, and others. Beyond EWOC, DSA’s local labor working groups and various bureaucratically run union-endorsed national labor campaigns were short-lived with only limited exceptions.

While there is no doubt that some labor activists in DSA hold broader conceptions of “class struggle unionism” and “rank-and-file strategy,” DSA’s outsourcing of labor activist training through EWOC depoliticizes the group’s overall approach to labor activism. The scope of EWOC and DSA labor work in general is limited by the priorities of electoralist leaders. Electoralists have to retain good relations with union leaders to get campaign endorsements and support for efforts like EWOC. The partial dependency of DSA on labor leaders’ endorsements and resources limits DSA’s ability to organize against leadership conservatism within unions.

At the neighborhood level (at least in NYC), DSA canvassers no doubt contribute to normalizing the socialist label, usually by equating socialism with redistributive demands. However, when it comes to organizing against landlords, police, ICE, and for trans people, people with disabilities, and immigrant workers, the organization’s leaders often take sectarian stances, insulting activists as “unsatisfiable” instead of fighting the policies that oppress working-class people. These stances often undermine the organization’s ability to retain activists from diverse communities, contributing to the outsized representation of white professionals from elite colleges in DSA membership and leadership.2NYC-DSA membership poll from this year shows that the group is 60 percent white and 12 percent Jewish with 63 percent of members participating. Most recently, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo has been exposed for misrepresenting his home address and employment history to falsely claim being a tenant and a union member. This is not an inherently unresolvable problem, but the current practice of DSA provides little-to-no space for young organizers who do not prioritize electoral campaigns. Engaging with neighborhood-level activism like tenant unions, ICE-watch, or progressive diaspora organizations can allow the Left to recruit and develop cadres from more diverse backgrounds.

Finally, the electoralist dominance of DSA promotes very narrow and unprincipled conceptions of internationalism. While DSA moved toward a more pro-Palestine orientation in 2017, this did not mean consistent opposition to the Israeli occupation. Current NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo and others on the DSA-right defended then-Congressperson Jamaal Bowman, voting to dismantle the Palestine Solidarity Working Group after it had campaigned to censure Bowman in 2021. Bowman provoked this by voting to fund the Israeli Iron Dome and visiting Israel and the West Bank on a propaganda tour by the liberal Zionist political advocacy group J Street. The Palestine working group became subordinate to the International Committee, whose leadership is appointed by the DSA’s national leaders.

DSA’s International Committee (IC) also took a largely one-sided ‘campist’ position on the basis of opposing U.S. imperialism. The first major step in this direction was pushing the national organization to align with the São Paulo Forum in 2021. São Paulo Forum includes leaders of the Latin American center-left like the Brazilian Workers’ Party and Bolivian MAS, but also other authoritarian parties like Venezuela’s PSUV and Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement. By aligning with parties of government, DSA positioned itself against grassroots opposition movements in these and other countries. While defending these regimes against U.S. imperial interventions, independent of their political content, the IC remained skeptical of opposition movements in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Iran, as backing them could be perceived as U.S. imperial policy. The dismissal of the working-class agency in favor of alliances with ‘anti-imperialist’ regimes is anti-solidaristic, much like anti-wokeness, and it discourages DSA and U.S. Leftists from engaging with independent working-class struggles in these countries.

While there are disagreements in DSA on all these questions, the prevailing consensus has been to try to prioritize good relations with U.S. progressives and foreign heads of state, whether they be authoritarian, social democratic, or communist, even if that means ignoring or dismissing some independent workers’ movements.

The Roads to working class power through dissent

In this context, movement-focused forces on the socialist Left must prioritize building independent and democratic sources of power in workplaces, communities, and across borders to withstand the pull of electoralism and other forms of socialism from above like campism.

Recent surge of organizing among city workers, public school teachers, higher education workers, nurses and services point toward some sectors with openings where socialists can contribute to the formation of a new militant minority. These efforts could help socialists move beyond a referral model of labor organizing by building rank-and-file committees in key bargaining units. Promoting socialist and solidaristic abolitionist views against repressive policies is essential there not only on moral grounds, but on tactical grounds if we want to redirect the trillions of dollars that go to the military, police, ICE, and other armed forces of capitalist rule.

Community-level organizing among immigrant workers against police violence, ICE, brutal working conditions in service jobs, and slumlords can also help us build ties with workers in more precarious jobs or living conditions. Precarious workers in low-income minority and immigrant neighborhoods must rely on community connections to sustain their lives in the absence of social welfare provisions. If we dismiss minority and immigrant workers’ more localized rebellions against state forces that are putting their boots on their necks, how can socialists expect to build an active majority of workers who fight for their own liberation?

If we do not build the democratic infrastructures of dissent across areas where workers can leverage power independently of electeds, our movement is bound to repeat the cycle of electoral ‘wins,’ reaction, and political disillusionment on the Left.

Finally, by positioning socialists as defenders of independent and democratic workers’ movements internationally and learning from limited precedents, socialists can help build solidarity networks across borders to develop foundations of cross-border actions. Some limited but meaningful examples of cross-border worker resistance emerged in response to the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, even in the face of political repression. If socialists waver on principled defenses of working-class democracy in all its diversity within and outside the U.S. to win votes, we are simply counterposing democracy in one country against that in another.

There is no doubt socialists have a long way to go building an international working-class movement capable of pushing back against capitalism’s increasingly authoritarian turn amid ecological collapse. While the growing popularity of socialism and progressive ideas is no doubt encouraging, the driver of the socialist movement cannot be the goodwill of elected officials. If we do not build the democratic infrastructures of dissent across areas where workers can leverage power independently of electeds, our movement is bound to repeat the cycle of electoral ‘wins,’ reaction, and political disillusionment on the Left.

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