How practical socialism helped India Walton win

Hard work and an emphasis on local issues means Buffalo could have its first female mayor.

India Walton celebrating her victory on election night. | Nate Peraccini


By ZACH WILLIAMS
JUNE 24, 2021

An upset victory by socialist India Walton over four-term Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown in the Democratic primary this week follows a familiar tale. An overly confident local power broker dismisses a lefty challenger as an amateur and takes reelection for granted. The underdog mobilizes local activists and captures the imagination of the rising political left. Brown, like others before him, tried to make up for lost time in the home stretch of the race, but Walton, a registered nurse and community activist, ended up 7 points ahead on election night. This story of incumbent arrogance, however, only explains so much about why she will become the first big-city socialist mayor in America in decades. “People are just ready for a change,” Walton said in an interview. “We have a message that resonates in a city like Buffalo, a blue-collar working-class city, (where) people are looking for a working-class hero, and that’s what I bring to the table.”

Walton does not run from the socialist label, but she does not lead with it either. Her campaign website does not even use the word to describe her policies, but it does have a lot of details about potential police reforms, stormwater management – and jobs. Buffalo will likely have its first female mayor because she worked hard, attracted support from established groups like the Working Families Party that had previously backed Brown, and focused on local issues rather than ideology. That is a significant difference between her and democratic socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx and Queens, who put that ideology front and center in building her political brand.



Buffalo was once a model for racial integration in the country, but those days are long gone. Its industrial base has eroded and while the local economy is recovering from the pandemic, unemployment remains a significant problem. This is especially the case in long-struggling places like the East Side, a predominantly Black neighborhood where residents have not shared in the wealth generated by rising rents and the big-ticket public investments in the private sector that Brown had touted alongside political allies, according to Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo. “It wasn’t a mixed pattern of development … and it was a development that gave the market full rein to run,” he said in an interview. “(The election) was a rejection of the neoliberal city that Byron Brown sought to build.” A spokesperson for Brown did not respond to a request for comment.

Socialist candidates of color have pulled off more than a few upsets in recent years, but there have been questions about how much they appeal to relatively wealthy, highly educated white lefties (white voters make up nearly half of Buffalo’s population) compared to the Black voters (who make up 36.5% of the city’s population) who disproportionately suffer from economic and racial inequality. “I don’t think we saw it play out that way at all,” said Clarence Lott, a former Brown supporter, longtime grassroots organizer and leader of the local community group East Side Political Network. A map of the Election Day results and early voting (absentee ballots have yet to be counted but have little chance of switching the primary outcome) showed that Brown – who like Walton, is Black – won a majority of the precincts in the East Side while also doing well in white areas like South Buffalo. Walton, however, did well enough in those areas to win an outright majority of all voters. She did especially well in racially mixed areas along the waterfront.

Buffalo results credit Zach Williams.jp
The blue dots show where India Walton got more votes, while the red dots are where Byron Brown got more votes. ( Zach Williams 

She credits the Working Families Party with providing the political know-how and resources to mobilize voters in an election where about 20% of voters turned out this year, which is well in line with past mayoral elections. “Everything from planning our media strategy and attracting national media, to our fundraising campaign, to our field game – you name it – the Working Families Party was very involved and super helpful to every single part of this campaign,” Walton said in an interview. “We could not have done it without them.” Another key source of support came from the union representing Buffalo’s teachers. Its thousands of members alone might have put Walton over the top in a race where she was ahead by less than 2,000 votes on Election Day. Like the WFP, they too used to support Brown, but this time around used their institutional influence to help a political outsider.

Her victory means less talk about Tesla as a savior for the downtrodden and more consideration for ideas backed by Walton like public banks and giving minority- and women-owned businesses more help getting government contracts. She is also vowing to end the school speed camera program that Brown defended as promoting public safety. It generated animosity in communities of color, according to Lott. “It was a money grab,” he said of the speed camera program. Brown had won previous reelections by comfortable margins, but he likely lost voters because of his response to Black Lives Matter protests last year when he defended the police department despite controversial incidents like two officers violently shoving an older man to the ground. “He didn’t read his base accurately at all,” Lott said. “He really didn’t.” Compare that to how Walton’s pragmatic socialism plays out on public safety. “Defunding police is not a thing,” she told The Buffalo News editorial board earlier this month. “It’s not an effective way to communicate with people.” She has talked about independent oversight of the police department and not having officers respond to people suffering mental health episodes.

Brown is reportedly considering a write-in candidacy for the November general election, but Erie County Democratic Chair Jeremy Zellner has already said the party is backing Walton this fall. Other political leaders are also getting behind her after not endorsing in the primary. “I’m eager to have a partner that will be responsive,” said Assembly Member Jonathan Rivera, who represents part of the city. “It’s not rocket science. The personal touch and (her) consistency of message was just going to win.”

Republicans meanwhile did not nominate anyone for mayor despite recent precedence for Republicans unexpectedly winning races in Democratic strongholds. Instead, Buffalonians are likely to get their first socialist mayor. “This is why you put up token opposition,” said Jacob Neiheisel, associate professor of political science at the University at Buffalo. “It’s because stuff like this happens.” Former GOP gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who has said he is “not a racist” despite a history of controversial remarks, is reportedly considering a long shot write-in candidacy, though Neiheisel added the odds are firmly against any Republican prevailing in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

With Walton winning the Democratic primary, the big question is what she might do with her future power to overcome resistance from influential local political interests. The city’s police union is already promising to fight her agenda. Real estate interests are waiting to see how threatening she will be to their bottom line. Wealthy donors – including Merryl Tisch, the wife of Loews Corp. President and CEO James Tisch – had donated thousands of dollars to Brown in recent weeks. They can now spend money on other causes, which may or may not include funneling money to thwart Walton’s political agenda. While Walton has seemingly made the politically impossible happen, she is not aiming to surprise anyone once in office. After running for mayor in plain sight, others may have to catch up to the pace of change she wants to bring to Buffalo. “Not everything is going to happen the way we want, when we want, but I’m not going to mislead people,” she said. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Zach Williams
is senior state politics reporter at City & State.

India Walton Is Reviving the American Tradition of Municipal Socialism

BY JOSHUA KLUEVER

JACOBIN

06.29.2021

With her win last week, Buffalo’s India Walton will almost certainly become the first socialist mayor of a major US city in years. She’s reviving a robust American tradition: municipal socialism.
India Walton defeated incumbent mayor Byron Brown in Buffalo’s Democratic primary on June 22. (Photo courtesy India Walton for Mayor)

Last Tuesday, as news coverage focused on New York City’s mayoral race, an upset occurred in New York’s second-largest city. India Walton, a nurse and union activist endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Working Families Party, defeated incumbent mayor Byron Brown in Buffalo’s Democratic primary.

Walton proudly called herself a democratic socialist throughout the campaign, and on election night, she refused to back away from that label. Responding to a reporter’s question about whether she considers herself a socialist, Walton was adamant: “Oh, absolutely. The entire intent of this campaign is to draw power and resources to the ground level and into the hands of the people.”

At a victory party the same night, she laid out her political vision: “All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us.”

Having won the primary in Democrat-heavy Buffalo, Walton will almost certainly become the city’s first female mayor — and the first socialist mayor of a major US city in years. Her upset is another milestone in the rise of DSA, which put considerable energy into Walton’s campaign. But her victory also points to an important, if often overlooked, tradition of US politics: municipal and state-level socialism.

During the early twentieth century, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) fielded formidable candidates across the country. The most prominent was Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, including from a federal prison in 1920. (He was serving time for opposing World War I.) New York’s Meyer London and Wisconsin’s Victor Berger both won election to the US Congress as Socialists in the 1910s and ’20s.

1912 Socialist ticket for president.

The real action, however, was down-ballot, where Socialists secured spots on city councils, state legislatures, county boards, and an array of other governing bodies. The SPA elected over 150 state legislators during the early twentieth century. They also won mayoral races. There was Jasper McLevy in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Louis Duncan in Butte, Montana; J. Henry Stump in Reading, Pennsylvania, and John Gibbons in Lackawanna, New York, just south of Buffalo. In Buffalo itself, Socialist Frank Perkins won a city council seat in 1920. All told, Socialists won office in at least 353 cities, the vast majority in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The longest socialist administration was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where from 1910 to 1960 the city had three socialist mayors. Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan, and Frank Zeidler’s administrations promoted “sewer socialism,” a moderate form of socialism aimed at delivering workers immediate material improvements and de-commodifying society through a democratic process. While they de-emphasized strikes and labor struggles, the sewer socialists were able to build an incredibly well-organized machine and a rich working-class culture.

Emil Seidel was elected in 1910, becoming the country’s first Socialist mayor of a major city. During his brief tenure, he created the city’s first public works department and started the city parks system. After losing reelection, Seidel served as Eugene Debs’s running mate in 1912.

Milwaukee Socialists regained power with Daniel Hoan’s victory in 1916. Hoan’s twenty-four-year tenure remains the longest continuous Socialist administration in US history. Milwaukee set up the country’s first public housing project, Garden Homes, in 1923, and the Hoan administration pushed for municipal ownership of street lighting, city sanitation, and water purification. It also financed public marketplaces, raised funds to improve Milwaukee’s harbors, and purged the corruption that had plagued past administrations.

Hoan’s tenure ended in 1940, but socialist governance returned under Frank Zeidler starting in 1948. Zeidler continued the “sewer socialism” tradition while overseeing Milwaukee’s territorial expansion and population rise. He stood out as a strong supporter of civil rights as Milwaukee’s black population increased following World War II (an especially laudable stance given the bigotry of earlier sewer socialists like Victor Berger).

The Wisconsin Socialist Party’s success wasn’t limited to Milwaukee. From 1905 to 1945, Socialists sent seventy-four legislators to the state capital, where they passed over five hundred pieces of legislation, often aimed at supporting the municipal administrations back in Milwaukee. A 1919 socialist bill, for instance, gave the city permission to create public housing.

Like their city-level comrades, Socialist state legislators worked to deliver tangible changes to workers’ lives. Socialists authored Wisconsin’s first workmen’s compensation bill, which passed in 1911, and pushed legislation that allowed women to receive their paychecks instead of having it sent to their husbands. They updated housing codes, reduced working hours for women, and funded public county hospitals. They exempted union property from taxation and made it illegal for company investigators to infiltrate unions.

Daniel Hoan, Socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1916 to 1940. (Milwaukee Public Library)

Socialist state legislators in Wisconsin didn’t accomplish what they did alone. They aligned with progressive Republicans when possible and, as a result, much of the legislation that came out of the legislature looked like a mixture of socialist and progressive positions.

Still, Socialists were more than happy to call out progressives for not going far enough to help the working class. In 1931, the legislature debated a state unemployment system to combat the effects of the Great Depression. The socialist version of the bill called for $12 a week in benefits and included a provision to create an eight-hour working day across all industries. Progressives rallied around a bill that called for $10 a week in benefits and no cap on working hours. Socialist representative George Tews summarized the caucus’s sentiment when he declared on the House floor that a progressive was a “socialist with their brains knocked out.”

The Milwaukee socialists became mainstays of the state legislature, managing to survive the First Red Scare following World War I. Elsewhere, state repression (and deep splits within the party) proved more devastating. In New York, for instance, state officials operating under the anti-radical Lusk Committee targeted Buffalo, where Frank Perkins had been elected city councilor in 1920, and the nearby steel town of Lackawanna, where socialist John Gibbons won the mayor’s office. Under the cloud of federal repression, neither Perkins nor Gibbons won reelection.

The Wisconsin Socialists’ numbers and electoral victories evaporated following World War II, and for decades, socialists largely found themselves outside the halls of power (some exceptions: Oakland, California mayor Ron Dellums; St Paul, Minnesota mayor Jim Scheibel; Berkeley, California mayor Gus Newport; Santa Cruz, California mayor Mike Rokin, and Irving, California mayor Larry Agran — all DSA members).

But DSA victories in congressional, state, and local races have again placed socialism on the map. The key now will be to fight for concrete improvements in workers’ lives, raising their expectations about what is politically possible.

In her victory speech last Tuesday, India Walton laid out an optimistic view of socialist successes to come. “This victory is ours. It is the first of many. If you are in an elected office right now, you are being put on notice. We are coming.”

That kind of optimism was warranted at the state and local level during the early twentieth century. There is no reason it cannot be so again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua Kluever is a PhD candidate of twentieth-century American history at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

India Walton Is a Sign of What the Socialist Movement Could Become

BY GABRIEL WINANT

JACOBIN
07.02.2021

India Walton’s victory in Buffalo is an enormous advance. With a clear political strategy, the socialist movement could become less dominated by professionals and more driven by the working-class base it requires.

India Walton's victory in Buffalo's Democratic mayoral primary marks the advance of a historical process of class formation. (Courtesy India Walton for Mayor)

How should we think about India Walton’s victory in Buffalo’s Democratic mayoral primary?

Capturing a significant executive office, while not unprecedented in the history of American socialism, has until now mainly eluded the resurgent movement. Over the past several decades, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won mayoral office in college towns like Ithaca and Berkeley or acted as conventional left-liberal politicians with a mainly sentimental link to the radical left, like David Dinkins in New York City and Ron Dellums in Oakland.

These figures largely represented the electoral afterlife of the New Left: their campaigns followed the New Left’s repression and disintegration in the 1970s and 1980s and amounted to accommodation to the impossibility of radical change. To point this out is not to criticize them, necessarily; defeat brings on difficult choices and constrains what is possible at the local level. Nonetheless, Walton is different: she marks the advance of a historical process of class formation.

Over the last half decade of its emergence, the new socialist electoral politics has faced a genuinely existential challenge about its social basis: it has been a politics of mainly white and mainly middle-class activists, a reality that is ultimately incompatible with socialist analysis and vision. Insurgent candidates on the Left have succeeded where this group is numerous enough as an electorate, as a volunteer base, or both.

It is important not to obfuscate the issue with semantics about how members of the middle class, unable to live off their property and forced to sell their labor, are really workers. Such an axiom may obtain in theory, and certainly it embodies an important political aspiration — but we cannot abstract away the concrete problem that college-educated professionals are separated socially and politically from the working-class mass base that socialist advance requires. Nor is it sufficient simply to note the impressive work of the many socialist activists who are more squarely working class, people of color, or both. At the same time, the limited but real strides toward a multiracial, working-class socialist base imply that these social origins are historically contingent rather than structurally fixed — and that effective political work can broaden the socialist movement.The limited but real strides toward a multiracial, working-class socialist base imply that these social origins are historically contingent rather than structurally fixed — and that effective political work can broaden the socialist movement.

The possibility of socialist realignment begins in the cities. There we find concentrations of downwardly mobile or indebted professionals, who have made up the most significant ideological cadre for socialist politics but have struggled to establish a sufficiently broad base. Brooklyn’s Emily Gallagher, the socialist New York state assembly member for Williamsburg and Greenpoint, provides a useful example: formerly an educator in museums (an industry that has seen significant labor activity in the past few years), Gallagher now represents neighborhoods that symbolize gentrification more distinctly than any others in the country. So ripe was her district for political turnover that she was able to oust an incumbent without institutional support from either DSA or the Working Families Party.

The radicalization of the lower layers of the professional middle class, however, also allows us to imagine a political continuum into the upper fractions of the working class. These groups are still different from each other, but less than ever before, particularly as first-generation college students burdened with debt and faced with limited career prospects grow in number and fill the ranks of the socialist movement. Figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tiffany Cabán, and Jabari Brisport embody this area of overlap.

Often more stably employed but residually a notch lower in the class system are the organized professional workers, particularly concentrated in the social service industries — teachers and nurses especially — who constitute much of the durable political leadership of the militant sections of the working class. Figures like Cori Bush (nurse), Jamaal Bowman (teacher/principal), Phara Souffrant Forrest (nurse), Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (teacher), and India Walton (nurse) exemplify this phenomenon in electoral politics; the Chicago Teachers Union’s Stacy Davis-Gates (and before her Karen Lewis) and United Teachers Los Angeles’s Cecily Myart-Cruz and Arlene Inouye do so in the labor movement

.

Another nurse, Phara Souffrant Forrest, was elected to the New York State Assembly last year with a slate of other DSA-backed candidates. (Courtesy Phara for Assembly)

Beneath this layer is another, both more militant and more diffuse: the low-wage, less regularly employed, more heavily policed and punished fraction of the proletariat that formed the riotous core of the 2020 street uprising. While it is less present in formal politics or trade unions and lacks visible spokespeople, figures like St. Louis’s Cori Bush, Buffalo’s India Walton, and Chicago’s Jeannette Taylor maintain real links to this social layer through the Movement for Black Lives.

It is also clear that friction occurs along the fuzzy boundaries between these layers. While they are all increasingly burdened with housing costs, the neighborhoods where they rent are typically not the same, and if they do overlap, one group encounters the other as the face of gentrification (even if newcomers’ presence is the result of much larger forces). Older members of the more secure working class may own homes (whose value may or may not be rising depending on urban geography), while younger professionals are frequently locked out of homeownership (though in some cases poised to inherit housing wealth from aging parents).

The jobs where they work are unalike: a precarious graphic designer does not struggle with the same economic problems as a teacher, a nursing assistant, or a custodial worker, much less an unemployed person. The kinds of debt they incur are quite different: student and credit-card debt as opposed to medical, court, auto, payday, and for the more secure stratum, mortgage debt. As we have been reminded repeatedly, the more stably employed and home-owning sections of the working class are presently much warier about defunding the police than either the socialist activists or the rebels in the street.

We can compare experiences across these boundaries and identify commonalities, then, but we cannot collapse them. Organizing is the form of activity in which this comparison makes up the content. As Gallagher puts it on her website,

I’ve been a renter, a roommate, a cyclist, a commuter. I’ve been unemployed, underemployed, and have known too many months where I scrambled to make rent. I’ve worked in retail, the gig economy, public education and the nonprofit sector. I’m a survivor of sexual violence and harassment. I have friends who have experienced police brutality and friends who have faced their rapists in court and watched them walk free. I’ve lost loved ones to traffic violence and the opioid crisis. These experiences don’t make me unique.

While these differences originate in the working class’s economic stratification, they’re often mapped onto and understood through racial divisions: the professional group (largely although not only white) does not mingle enough with the broader metropolitan working class (which is much less white) to foster the propagation of socialist ideas through ideological common sense and cultural atmosphere — the way it has mainly happened for the professionals. If Gallagher’s district were less white, she would have been far less likely to win initially; the same is probably true for figures such as Brisport, Cabán, and Ocasio-Cortez.African Americans — who most polling indicates are more favorably disposed to socialism in general and specific left-wing policies in particular than any other racial group — still remain largely separated from the official socialist movement.

What this means, quite uncomfortably, is that African Americans — who most polling indicates are more favorably disposed to socialism in general and specific left-wing policies in particular than any other racial group — still remain largely separated from the official socialist movement. This is the political paradox that socialists must resolve: neither accepting the substitution of professionals as a political base, nor abandoning socialism because it has not yet won the working-class support it requires, nor becoming resigned to the inevitability of a largely white socialist movement, but rather analyzing and attacking the barriers separating the groups from each other. This is a challenge of the utmost political importance.

At the same time, even as the New York Times warns of an emerging “disconnect between progressive activists and . . . rank-and-file Black and Latino voters,” it is not clear the problem is getting worse. Take New York City itself. In an examination of voting patterns in Astoria Houses, a public housing project in Queens, Matthew Thomas points out that the power of the Democratic establishment appears to be waning.

For years, progressive challengers have performed worse in the complex than they have in the rest of the borough, the city, or the state. Cynthia Nixon won only 23 percent of the vote there in 2018 but 34 percent statewide. Nixon’s running mate, Jumaane Williams, a progressive black New Yorker who already enjoyed some local popularity, only managed 48 percent of the vote in Astoria Houses against Kathy Hochul — almost identical to his statewide performance. This is a particularly challenging outcome to grapple with: a more progressive and presumably better-known black candidate losing to an unknown white moderate from upstate among a precinct-level electorate that would almost certainly select Williams’s views over Hochul’s if asked in the abstract.

But things appear to be changing. In the 2019 Queens primary for district attorney, Tiffany Cabán — who fought the party favorite to a virtual tie borough-wide — lost the complex by 4 percent. In her city council race this year, Cabán won Astoria Houses easily, even as centrist candidate Eric Adams did the same in the mayoral race. This presents a paradox — but also evidence of the possibility of resolving it leftward.The black political elite’s declining ability to deliver black votes to establishment candidates in contested congressional elections presents a key marker of left advance.

Nationwide, this same possibility has revealed itself in glimpses. During the presidential primary, even as he performed worse in places like West Virginia and Michigan in 2020 than in 2016, Sanders cleaned up with historically demobilized Latino voters in California and union members in Nevada.

The black political elite’s declining ability to deliver black votes to establishment candidates in contested congressional elections presents a key marker of left advance: the victories of Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush in their 2020 primaries suggest that this historically significant source of conservative power within the Democratic Party is fading in the face of direct challenge. The party establishment’s obvious fear of a Nina Turner victory this summer in Cleveland offers further encouragement.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s reelection contains positive information as well. If detractors were right and her initial victory was simply an aberration — hyperactive Astoria “gentrifiers” taking a complacent incumbent by surprise — then she ought to have been vulnerable in 2020 to a well-funded opponent who could pull the district back to its supposed political center of gravity. But Ocasio-Cortez’s coalition broadened, and Michelle Caruso-Cabrera’s $3 million campaign garnered only 20 percent of the vote.

Perhaps even more heartening was Larry Krasner’s overwhelming reelection this year as Philadelphia district attorney. Krasner won among the city’s white liberals and black working and middle classes even as panic about crime and social disorder returned as the preferred weapon against the Left.

This brings us back to Buffalo. Walton, a nurse by training, became politically active as an adult while part of Buffalo’s enormous workforce in “educational services, and health care and social assistance.” In 2019, 33 percent of employed people in Buffalo fell into that “eds and meds” category — more than triple the size of the next group.

Buffalo, a former steel town, is in this regard little different from Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, or even New York (the Bronx has a proportionally larger health care workforce than any other populous county in the country). Across the former industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest, deindustrialization has produced massive social service sectors, with workforces disproportionately composed of women of color. The health workforce’s expansion is an index of disinvestment and social inequality, as abandoned populations become older, poorer, and sicker, and are dumped onto the health care system, which — as a nexus of public funding and private profit — grows to absorb this displaced surplus and hires labor from the postindustrial ruins.

Walton embodies the political possibilities that arise from this economic transformation. As care workers have become responsible for keeping the population alive and holding society together through the agony of economic abandonment, they have come to personify our mutual interdependency. As Walton put it, describing how she made it as a young and poor single mother, “We’re never alone, we’re not built to be islands.”Care workers are both ideologically open to more radical politics and socially positioned to exercise leadership across the differentiated strata of the working class.

This principle is woven into the everyday work of nurses, teachers, and others like them, who exercise judgment continuously about how to compensate for insufficient resources and overwhelming need with their own effort. They’re both ideologically open to more radical politics and socially positioned to exercise leadership across the differentiated strata of the working class. While the phrase “essential worker” seems like a cruel joke, these workers’ indispensability has long been clear to those who depend upon them. The enormous popularity of the 2018–2019 teachers’ strike wave provided an object lesson in this regard.

After some youthful activism, Walton politically reengaged as an adult while working as a nurse, as a member, and then as a worker representative in SEIU. Having witnessed health inequality in her own family and at her workplace, she moved on to become a community organizer, and from there a housing organizer, an activist in the struggle against police violence, and finally a candidate for mayor. Her position as a trade unionist in the city’s largest industry, a participant in its militant Black Lives Matter uprising, and an activist for housing, health, and environmental justice allowed her to mobilize elements from each of the constituencies a socialist political project requires.


Still, Walton has not resolved the paradox of race and class that socialist politics faces. She ran better in the city’s poor multiracial and Latino lakefront and the largely white and fast-gentrifying downtown and North Buffalo sections than in the poor black neighborhoods east of Main Street. In the Fruit Belt, the neighborhood where she runs a community land trust, Walton carried the Latino western half but not the African American eastern half. Strikingly, this means Walton did not capture the areas of the city where the health care workforce from which she hails is largest — as in the East Side precincts southeast of the intersection of Ferry and Fillmore, where health and social assistance constitutes 50 percent of jobs. For Walton, too, a less white electorate would have been a more difficult one to win.

India Walton embraces her family as results come in on election night in Buffalo on June 22. (Nate Peraccini / India Walton for Mayor)

What this means is that a layer of militant and activist African Americans, demarcated especially by generation, has diverged from the bulk of the black electorate and moved leftward in both street politics and formal politics — arenas bridged by Walton. We may view this divergence as a problem, or we may view it as an opportunity — akin to the paradox of the Cabán-Adams voters of Astoria Houses — to resolve a contradiction in our favor.

Achieving the latter requires more than universalist rhetoric (though that too is important) — it requires durable organization that can deliver immediate victories and offer proof of concept to the skeptical and pragmatic black working-class rank and file. Most of all, it requires permeating the working-class black social world: the neighborhoods east of Main Street in Buffalo, south and west of the Loop in Chicago, west of 45th Street and north of Girard in Philadelphia.

The social and economic transformation of cities like Buffalo has not yet produced a militant, united working class. What it has produced are organic intellectuals and leaders — figures like Walton — who are positioned to mobilize new activist layers that reach across social boundaries, and thereby stitch together enough of the separated social elements of the postindustrial working class to win a foothold and earn an audience with unconvinced working-class people.

This is a tremendous sign of progress; it is a moment of advance in the process of class formation. The next step is more frontal attack on the residual power of the Democratic political machine with the black working class: this power is weakened but not destroyed, and it will require a massive increase in organization of the kind Walton embodies.

The rewards, however, should be obvious: when a militant nurse can carry those neighborhoods where 50 percent of workers are in her industry, she will be leading a far more powerful movement than the one that squeaked by in Buffalo last week.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gabriel Winant is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. His book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, was published this year.

Can the Socialist Mayor Rise Again?

India Walton is running to be the next leader of her beloved Buffalo. But what she really wants is to revive a tradition of social democracy in America’s great cities.

ILLUSTRATION BY LINDSAY BALLANT

Danielle Tcholakian/June 18, 2021

India Walton greets me alone at her campaign office, which is actually just a one-desk room in a co-working space, sparsely decorated but for a few books, stacks of campaign lit, and a whiteboard where people have left each other messages both practical (“I’ll call you at 5”) and motivational (“We will win because we can!”). A few minutes later, she’s guiding me through the streets of downtown Buffalo, New York, like it’s her home—which it is, the place where she was born and raised and had her babies and raised them—cutting through parking lots as she tells me about the city she believes deserves so much more than “waiting for economic development to trickle down,” which it never does.

In the tableau of New York State politics, Buffalo evokes the Buffalo Billion, a markedly top-down economic development deal that has become shorthand for political corruption (Governor Andrew Cuomo’s closest friend and aide, Joe Percoco, is currently in federal prison because of his involvement with it). Walton is running for mayor as a socialist, and has faith that will translate for people. “We have socialism for Tesla,” she says, one of the beneficiaries of the Buffalo Billion deal, “and rugged individualism for everyone else. I want to flip the paradigm.”

Walton speaks about the needs of a city she knows well. She had her first child when she was 14; her mom wasn’t happy about that, so Walton moved out and lived in a home for young mothers just outside Buffalo in Lackawanna, raising a baby born with a painful chronic illness while still a child herself. She tried hard to finish high school, only leaving to work when she had her twins at 19. They were born premature and “teeny-tiny,” she tells me, barely a pound and a half each, one with a central line in his chest and the other on oxygen. Walton didn’t have a car, so she rode the bus through Buffalo, with her babies, to all those follow-up appointments.

Looking back, she balances gratitude to a health system that saved their lives with a clear-eyed remembrance of how that same system was stacked against someone like her: “I didn’t like the way my family was treated when we were in the NICU,” she tells me. “I felt dismissed a lot.”


“That’s just an example of the resources it takes to live a decent life, right?” she told me, of those early days toting the twins and all their medical equipment to repeatedly come up against a medical establishment that categorically sneered at a poor, young, Black mother. “And the expectation we have with people, to be able to function in a society where they are led to believe their resources are so scarce that they’ll never be able to achieve anything.”

That NICU experience was the first stirring of the Walton you’ll meet today: She set out to become a nurse herself, so that anyone like her who came into that system might have a chance at a different experience than the one she had. (“When I went back to work there,” she tells me of the hospital where her twins were born, “it was even worse. I mean, people just openly—not only racist, but classist as well, saying disparaging things about some of the families and their means and resources.”) She soon became active in her union, 1199 SEIU, and learned what it meant to be an organizer—to build power with other people.

Buffalo is a blue city—all nine council members are Democrats, and there hasn’t been a Republican mayor since The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered—deeply entrenched in the New York Democratic machine, which its current mayor, Byron Brown, chaired until 2019. If Walton wins the primary on June 22—a big “if”—she would not merely unseat a four-term incumbent, she would be the first socialist mayor of a major American city in more than half a century.

The last was Frank Zeidler, who served three terms as the mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the birthplace of “sewer socialism,” a specifically municipal and hyperpragmatic form of socialism focused on how “you can run or plan a city for the working class,” according to Gabe Winant, a historian at the University of Chicago. Zeidler came of age in the Great Depression, reading Eugene Debs and seeing a markedly flawed system not so dissimilar from the one giving rise to a new heyday for socialism today, at least among young people whose adult lives have been marked by vast resource inequality. That is to say: people much like India Walton.

Walton might be a long-shot candidate, but there’s palpable excitement around the country for new local leadership, especially as the federal government proves itself to be a place where broadly popular ideas go to die. The pandemic cracked something open, too; that’s part of what pushed Walton to spill a little prematurely to a Buffalo News reporter that, yes, she was going to run for mayor.

Walton believes Buffalo deserves better than it’s gotten. Not through billions poured into empty revitalization or a tech hub, but by investing in housing, health care, and community. These are simple planks, but they anchor the campaign. People seem to get it. She was in the middle of talking to me about home being “a place for families,” while also “dispelling the myth that a family is mom, dad, and kids,” when a woman in a minivan stopped traffic to shout her support (“I’m votin’ for you, India! I got my family, too! I see you!”); Walton smiled and waved and shouted, “Thank you,” before picking back up: “A family is me and all of my friends, and my neighbors are my family, and Buffalo is my family,” she tells me. “We deserve community and to have leadership that is going to be rooted in the values of care and love. I think it’s something that’s becoming more and more attractive to people because we have been isolated for so long, right?” At least, that’s what she’s betting on come Tuesday.

The three hours I spent with Walton on a Monday afternoon in early June were pretty standard for a campaign profile: I drove in from out of town to meet her, walk around and see Buffalo through her eyes, and capture a day in her campaign. But it was quieter than usual: no handlers, no campaign staff running interference, cutting off or reframing her answers.

Her campaign is small, lean by both necessity and desire. Its institutional structure and knowledge has been provided by the Working Families Party, a political apparatus with deep roots in New York with an ideological bent that’s left of the state’s Democratic Party (though it often works with state centrists). The party was so enthusiastic about Walton, they not only abandoned Byron Brown for the first time in his lengthy political career, they’ve effectively run her insurgent campaign.

Brown resembles a lot of Democratic politicians across the state: a slim record of major achievements but a slow drip of failure when it comes to the values the party is supposed to represent. Even before the pandemic, Buffalo’s poverty rate was more than twice the national average, with residents on its largely Black East Side suffering higher rates of fatal illness and infant mortality. Brown was a target of continued protest over the Buffalo Police Department’s Strike Force, which came under investigation by the New York attorney general for brutalizing Black and brown Buffalo residents. His grand plan to revitalize Buffalo’s crown jewel of a waterfront was to install a massive Bass Pro Sports; the company pulled out after nine years of deliberations, much to the relief of local community activists who came together to make the waterfront the flourishing city attraction it is today.

It was what Walton called Brown’s inaction during the pandemic that ultimately spurred her to run for his office: When neighbors called the community land trust she was running, desperate for help getting food and supplies to people unable to leave their homes, she and her network of activist allies mobilized a massive effort to put together bike deliveries of fresh groceries.

Walton’s platform carries the same vision—a community-directed transformation of various areas of public life. She wants to end police involvement in mental health emergencies, create an unarmed public security detail for quality of life issues, and codify public participation in police union contract negotiations, among other changes to policing. She wants to institute a tenants’ bill of rights protecting renters and offer financial relief to small landlords in exchange for rent forgiveness and a citywide land trust federation with democratic decision-making. On climate, she proposes an office of sustainability and task forces for green workforce and zoning policies. Each plan has a set timeline, ranging from her first 100 days in office to six months and ultimately four years. Walton notably plans to be a one-term mayor. The idea is to build infrastructure for socialist policies, not a personal legacy.

“There’s already a defense being mounted against the principles that we’re bringing in,” she says. “I’m doing this to bring change and improve quality of life for people. And I also don’t want to get caught up in the patronage, in that cycle to make deals and more deals.

 I want to do the work.”

Socialism today is often derided as less than its more blue-collar predecessor, because its most vocal proponents are “radicalized downwardly mobile professionals,” Winant of the University of Chicago said, and “you can’t have a socialist movement led by grad students.” But in reality, the other major bloc in the movement is “Black and Latinx city dwellers who have to deal with low wage markets, police violence, and environmental racism,” from which an increasingly vocal, visible, and powerful “layer of working-class people led by teachers and nurses, particularly people of color and often women” is emerging. This was Walton’s path to organizing and then, eventually, to politics. It mirrors the stories of other left politicians, like Cori Bush in Missouri, a registered nurse turned activist, and Jamaal Bowman in New York, a former public school teacher.

In Buffalo, Walton is one of a few newcomers to local politics who came out of last year’s uprisings after the death of George Floyd. Dominique Calhoun led a police accountability protest we attended and is running for County Council. Myles Carter was tackled by Buffalo P.D. while giving a live television interview at a protest; he’s now running for sheriff (a tremendously long-shot campaign, as Buffalo is a blue dot in a very red county that is unlikely to respond well to the “defund” message). There are candidates like them around the country, and the challenges they face are not unusual—popular policy proposals but low name recognition, coupled with attacks not just from Republicans but from the right within their party that sees any anti-capitalist insurgence as an existential threat.

These are underdog campaigns, but they are also efforts to revitalize a robust history. Social democracy forms the foundation of American cities: public transportation, libraries, city colleges. When Frank Zeidler ended his tenure as the mayor of Milwaukee, he’d overseen the purchase of the city’s first garbage trucks, built new fire stations and roads and low-income and veteran housing, and grown the city to be the twelfth largest in the nation. New York City, while it never had a socialist mayor, was shaped by “a robust and ambitious public sector, also a strong ethos and faith in that public sector: free CUNY tuition, expansion of public higher education, investment in public health and public hospitals,” according to Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City.

Walton talks a lot about community centers, and the socialist historians I consulted lit up at the idea: Erik Loomis at the University of Rhode Island pointed to the “communitarian aspect” of the right’s power “because they’re still going to church.” The left needs its own community base, is the idea. Walton, and other young socialists across the country, are trying to build it.

“There’s no easy answer to rebuilding communitarian structures, but I do think the left has to take that really seriously,” Loomis said. “It’s a huge reason why conservatives are winning on all of these issues.”

It’s also a huge reason why Walton has campaigned so hard, in person, on podcasts, showing up to union rallies anytime she’s asked, even by unions who endorsed her opponent. She knows that if she can meet people, she can meet them where they are. She doesn’t bicker with other activists, doesn’t think twice about whether someone “doesn’t use the right language.” She worked for years as one of four Black nurses in a bargaining unit of 170 and credits this with teaching her how to fight for and work alongside people who may not even like her, let alone agree with her.

And to Walton, if she can meet people where they are, she can get them to understand, and she can show them they deserve more.

Still, there’s a mountain to climb. In a recent survey from WFP, Brown led Walton 43 to 21 percent overall. But among voters who knew enough about Walton to have an opinion about her—40 percent of respondents—she led Brown 49 to 33 percent. In the intervening weeks, Walton has racked up major endorsements from the Buffalo Teachers Federation and The Challenger, a local newspaper geared at the Black community, and released her first TV ad and direct mailers. She also earned a rare endorsement from the national Democratic Socialists of America and has had the energetic support of the Buffalo DSA. She hopes the pool of people who think they know enough about her grows from there.

But it’s a strange line to walk for Walton. She needs to be out there to win, but she also wants to build a kind of politics that decenters hero candidates and turns its focus, instead, to infrastructure and, ultimately, lasting change that is diffuse and leaderless. It’s one of the reasons she admires the Black Lives Matter movement—it’s the collectivity, the sense of being alive and bigger than any one person.

So that’s what she’s trying to do. In addition to her own campaign, she says she has a slate of nine progressives lined up to run for local office next year; all of her policy proposals aim to create deeply rooted new infrastructure on which to balance a more just society.

When I asked her to tell me about her Buffalo, she talked about the waterfront, and a four-seasons city, and the potential Buffalo has for being a filming location, and its proximity to the Canadian border, and the festival-filled summers. And she also talked about Buffalo as a “big living room” and as her “beloved community,” the place and people “who kept me, who held me down, who made sure my children and I had groceries.” Even now, while attending to the work of running for mayor, people take her son to baseball and bring over meals and stop in just to do dishes. That’s the city she thinks is possible. That’s the campaign. “That, to me, is beloved,” she tells me. “My Buffalo is a place that deserves the best we can possibly give it. And we’ve not had that yet. I want to be able to raise the floor.”

Source photograph of Walton; Lindsay DeDario/Reuters
Danielle Tcholakian @danielleiat
Danielle Tcholakian is a freelance reporter and writer in New York City.

Socialists Were Once Serious Contenders for Mayor of New York, and They Will Be Again

Tuesday’s mayoral primary lacks a prominent democratic socialist contender. But the next mayoral race will almost certainly feature one.

By John Nichols

THE NATION
JUNE 21, 2021


A New York City polling site during the 2021 mayoral primary. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

New York Mayor David Dinkins, just months after taking office in 1990, welcomed members of the Socialist International to Manhattan with a robust reflection:

Socialist ideals have played a powerful role in this city and this country—which have served as gateways for millions of immigrants, many of whom were socialist activists. Public education, a strong and vibrant trade union movement, and many great cultural institutions are products of the socialist movement. As Eugene Debs said, socialists believed in an America of “great possibilities, of great opportunities and of no less great probabilities.”

Dinkins knew the history from personal experience. He was a longtime comrade of Michael Harrington, and had joined the American author and activist in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee of the 1970s and then in Democratic Socialists of America. Tracing his association with Harrington back to the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, “when the Socialist Party garnered its forces in the struggle for equality and justice led by the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.,” Dinkins recalled the author’s groundbreaking work to end poverty in America and told the Socialist International Council gathering, “Today, we must rededicate ourselves to Michael’s mission—to close the yawning gap that exists between the rich and the poor in so many nations of the world.”

Dinkins passed away last year, at age 93, and a lot of New York history went with him. But not the connection to democratic socialism. If anything, the movement is more potent now than at any time in many years. So it is a bit strange that the city does not have a prominent socialist, or at least a close ally of the movement, in serious contention for the mayoralty this year.

The race for the top job in the nation’s largest municipality is almost certain to be decided June 22, or whenever the ranked-choice votes from the Democratic primary are finally counted. None of the leading Democratic candidates has positioned themselves as a champion of socialist ideals—even if many of them borrow from the tool kit of ideas that socialists have been carrying into our politics since the days when Debs campaigned for president as an advocate for labor rights and what would come to be known as Social Security, and when Harrington prodded Senator Edward Kennedy to embrace national health care. The increasingly influential New York chapter of DSA, which has played a vital role in a number of Democratic contests for local, state, and federal posts, has not endorsed anyone in the mayoral race. And it isn’t looking like a socialist running on an independent or minor-party ballot line will gain much traction in November.

m the past when the independent Socialist Party was a major player in New York politics. A little over 100 years ago, in 1917, Morris Hillquit, an immigrant from Riga in what is now Latvia, who became a prominent union activist and lawyer, won almost 22 percent of the citywide vote. Hillquit finished ahead of the Republican nominee and took almost a third of the vote in the Bronx. Among the more than 145,000 voters who cast ballots for Hillquit were many opponents of the US entry into World War I and civil libertarians who were aghast at moves by the administration of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson to charge war foes with sedition. “If I had the right to vote, I would vote for you, Mr. Hillquit, because a vote for you would be a blow at the militarism that is one of the chief bulwarks of capitalism, and the day that militarism is undermined, capitalism will fall,” wrote Helen Keller, one of the most prominent authors of the era.

Though she understood that Hillquit was unlikely to win, Keller underscored the importance of a large Socialist vote in a letter to the New York Call, a socialist daily, that declared:

It would be an unequivocal denial that New York City stands for the kind of democracy that prevails here just now, a democracy where freedom of assemblage is denied the people, a democracy where armed officials behave like thugs, forcibly dispersing meetings, burning literature and clubbing the people; a democracy where workingmen are arrested and imprisoned for exercising their right to strike, a democracy where the miners of Bisbee were torn from their homes, huddled in freight cars like cattle, flung upon a desert without food or water and left to die; a democracy where Negroes may be massacred and their property burned, as was done in East St. Louis; a democracy where lynching and child labor are tolerated, a democracy where a minister who follows the feet of the Messenger of Peace beautiful upon the earth was flogged almost to death…

When Hillquit ran again for mayor in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, he won more than 250,000 votes on the Socialist Party line and finished ahead of Acting Mayor Joseph McKee—though behind Democrat John O’Brien. Norman Thomas, the party’s frequent presidential nominee, won 175,000 votes as the Socialist candidate for mayor in 1929; and throughout the 1920s and ’30s, the party regularly won elections for New York City Council seats and other posts—including the Lower East Side congressional seat that Meyer London, a Lithuanian immigrant who was one of the city’s most prominent champions of labor rights, began winning in 1914.

Today, democratic socialists and their allies are again winning congressional seats representing New York, as well as legislative seats. This year, DSA is focusing attention on a half-dozen City Council contests, and candidates the group has endorsed are considered to be top contenders for a number of offices. The mayoral race was tantalizing for DSA activists, but the group chose to steer its energy toward building a base in municipal politics. “If we had a mayoral candidate who came from DSA, I think that would have been one thing,” Susan Kang, a DSA member who is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The New York Times last winter. “We’re trying to be very strategic in how we use our labor.”

That’s smart. If DSA-backed candidates such as Tiffany Cabán—a 33-year-old public defender who came within a few votes of being elected as Queens district attorney in 2019—win council seats, they will be positioned for future bids for high-level city posts. Cabán recognizes that a lot of New Yorkers want “a mayor that is going to say that this is not about safe, small, incremental change that tinkers around the edges.” They may not get what they want this year. But it’s a good bet that 2021 will be the last year when New Yorkers lack the option of backing a democratic socialist who is a serious contender for mayor.



John Nichols  is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and the author of the new book The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace's Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics (Verso). He’s also the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.

Donald Rumsfeld – War criminal, torturer-in-chief, enemy of the world’s people

Richard Becker

July 3, 2021

Donald Rumsfeld, a primary architect of the criminal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on June 30. Rumsfeld was best known for his terms as Secretary of “Defense,” 1975-77 and again in 2001-06.

As is standard practice for nearly all high government officials on their death, the corporate mass media, while not without mild criticism, treated Rumsfeld as a generally honorable person. He wasn’t. In reality, he was a mass killer, a co-conspirator in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who never did or could threaten the United States.

Rumsfeld, with President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney (a Rumsfeld protégé), Paul Wolfowitz, and National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice along with others, constituted the core of a neo-con gang determined to reorder the world in their own twisted image. They failed but at the cost of millions of lives, vast destruction and trillions of dollars in wasted resources.

In his second tour at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld oversaw the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the 2003 “shock and awe” massive air assault and occupation of Iraq and the institutionalization of torture in such infamous prisons as Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram military base in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and many lesser known dungeons. He joked about torture and demanded to know why prisoners placed in prolonged stress positions – causing excruciating pain – were only kept in such positions for four hours at a time.

A 2009 Senate report stated: “The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply a result of a few soldiers acting on their own . . . “Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantánamo] … Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques [writer’s emphasis] and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officers conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”

From the day they took office in 2001, conquering Iraq was at the very top of the agenda for Rumsfeld and his cohort. Rumsfeld’s immediate reaction to the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington was to see it as offering a possible opportunity to invade Iraq, even though there was zero proof that Iraq was the source of the attacks.

According to an aide’s notes, Rumsfeld said he needed, “best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” Later the same day he advocated: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related [to the 9-11 attacks] and not.”

Clearly, Rumsfeld was hoping that shocked U.S. public opinion in the aftermath of the attacks would allow carrying out assaults on Iraq and perhaps other “enemies” in addition to Afghanistan.

In fact Al-Qaeda, which claimed the attacks, and the secular government in Iraq were bitter enemies. That undeniable fact did not stop Rumsfeld, Cheney and others from seeking to make a false link right up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In the lead-up to the war, they relentlessly promoted the fabricated “intelligence” that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” including nuclear weapons.

After the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, Rumsfeld said the removal of Saddam Hussein “created a more stable and secure world.”

He also proclaimed: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.”

Twenty-eight months later, as the Iraqi resistance to occupation was gaining momentum by the week, Rumsfeld denied that the U.S. and allied forces were sinking into a quagmire. “I don’t do quagmires,” he said.

By then, public opinion was turning dramatically against both the war, Rumsfeld and the other war makers. After the 2006 mid-term election, Bush fired Rumsfeld in an attempt to defuse the opposition to the war.

U.S. forces, while much reduced in number, are still in Iraq today in defiance of the will of the Iraqi people and government.

Despite playing a key role in the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld never issued a word of apology to the people of those countries or to the families of thousands of U.S. troops killed or to the tens of thousands wounded in wars based on false pretences.

In 2004, Rumsfeld sent U.S. forces, along with those from France and Canada, to overthrow the elected Haitian government of Jean Bertrand Aristide and occupy the country. Haiti remains occupied to the present.

He was part of the U.S.-orchestrated coup against the Hugo Chavez-led government of Venezuela in April 2002, which was turned back by the mass mobilization of the Venezuelan people and revolutionary forces inside the military there.

Rumsfeld was a sworn enemy of Cuba, North Korea, the Palestinian people and all national liberation and progressive movements in the world.

While Rumsfeld is best known for wars and interventions, he was also an enemy of the working class here. Appointed by Nixon to be director of the new Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969, he immediately set out to slash recently enacted Medicare benefits, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) and other programs that met the needs of low-income people.

Like so many other high-ranking officials, Rumsfeld took full advantage of the revolving door between government and private business, amassing a fortune in the hundreds of millions.

Unlike so many of his victims, he lived out his life in luxury and was, unfortunately, never brought to justice. But history will remember him for the criminal he was.

Newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation

Victory for Pavement Coffeehouse workers, first union coffee shop in Massachusetts
Malcolm Clark
June 30, 2021

Workers at Pavement Coffeehouse — a company with eight locations across the Boston area — have organized the first union coffee shop in Massachusetts. An organizing committee began meeting in late May with representatives from the New England UNITE HERE joint board and delivered a letter to management June 1 stating their intent to unionize. Now they have completed a card check this June 28 with more than 80% of workers in favor, winning the union.

Such rapid organizing was made possible by the overwhelming support of the workers. After just one day of collecting signatures, the organizing committee of the Pavement UNITED union had 60 out of about 90 eligible workers sign union authorization cards. Because of the unity of the workers, management was immediately forced to concede and recognize the union.

Conor, a member of the Pavement union organizing committee, told Liberation News that working at a coffee shop “takes skill, and it takes craft. … Other baristas who don’t work in specialty coffee shops, like Dunkin baristas, they also have a craft. There are people who work as short order cooks at a restaurant: that’s a really f***ing insane craft. Fast food workers at a McDonald’s, the whole spectrum of food service, the whole spectrum of service is skilled labor.”

“We are unionizing because we are people who deserve rights. … All labor deserves rights.”

Food service workers need unions

The food service industry employs over 9.3 million people nationally, with about 247,000 of those workers in Massachusetts. Many thousands of workers are paid “tipped wages,” meaning it is legal to pay them well below the federal or state minimum wage. Tipped wages start at $5.55 per hour in Massachusetts, and $2.13 is the federal minimum. Workers who are not tipped usually make only a few dollars more, around their state minimum wage. The median earnings for food service workers nationally is just $11 per hour.

Pavement Coffeehouse is the first unionized coffee shop in Massachusetts, and one of only a handful nationwide. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 1.2% of workers in the food service sector are unionized. On average, union food service workers earn $100 more per week than non-union workers.

At SPoT Coffee, workers organized in 2019 and faced management retaliation, including the firing of two staff. They boycotted and picketed while gathering support from the community in Buffalo, New York. Eventually, management conceded and recognized their union.

Two other coffee shops — Augie’s in Southern California and White Electric in Rhode Island — became worker-owned cooperatives after workers attempted to unionize. The worker co-op Slow Bloom was created by former employees from Augie’s who were all fired for their organizing efforts.

Pavement, pay, and the pandemic

At Pavement, the lowest and starting wage is $13.50 an hour, which is the state minimum. Workers are eligible for a $0.25 raise if they pass a performance review after six months. Promotions can lead to a wage of anywhere from $14.00 to $15.25 an hour.

All of these are well below the living wage in Boston, which according to MIT’s living wage calculator is $19.17 per hour. Many workers at Pavement are in their 20s or in college, meaning they often have the additional burden of student debt or tuition fees.

Pavement’s sick time accrues slowly. Only their highest pay-grade employees get a small amount of paid time off, and management utilizes unpredictable scheduling, all to maximize their profits at the expense of workers.

During the pandemic, management at Pavement laid off all their staff ostensibly so they could collect unemployment benefits and quarantine at home. But when they were rehired later in 2020, their sick time and PTO were erased, and many workers were hired back at lower pay or were demoted.

Management made all COVID-19 safety policies without the input of workers. Changes in indoor capacity and the lifting of restrictions in stores were handed down from on high, while workers paid the price in stress and risk.

The road ahead

As workers enter contract negotiations with management, Pavement UNITED plans to bargain for paid mental health days, a more flexible break schedule, an audit of everyone’s salaries across the company with gender and race equity in mind, transparency in how revenues and profits are reported, and an increase in base pay for everyone.

Victory for the Pavement Union is a step forward in the struggle for workers’ rights across Massachusetts and the United States, particularly for exploited food service workers.

“There has been such an outpouring of support,” said Conor, “not just from the community, but there have been people from other shops — whether it be coffee shops or just general cafes or bakeries — who have come to us and said, ‘How do you do this? We need this.'”

A tweet from Jude, another member of the organizing committee.