Saturday, July 04, 2026

Democratic Primaries Reveal What the DNC Autopsy Buried


 July 3, 2026

Photo by Colin Lloyd

The Democratic National Committee’s 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled “Build to Win. Build to Last,” failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?

The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party’s old guard. It calls for renewed focus on “Middle America,” criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points. But these points alone did not cost the party America — not just Middle America.

The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable whether the interviews were of local party leaders or general democratic voters. Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Or to account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020, where they went, and why they left.

There was no breakdown of Harris’s collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

This is not a methodological oversight. It is engineered by the plan. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged the question existed.

Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris “was not well prepared,” Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab Americans’ vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.

The autopsy’s authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party’s youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation — and the base at large — when it comes to Israel.

Recent primary results could not be clearer, exposing the DNC autopsy’s failure. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the Party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned; it is a whitewash.

The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”

This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that findings are edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.

The autopsy’s Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.

The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure; it smothered it. Fifty thousand words telling Democrats to organize better, message harder, and court the working-class voter they lost. Sound advice, and entirely beside the point, as long as the party establishment continues to dismiss the verdict of 80% of its rank and file.

Without an honest accounting of the party’s failures in 2024 and without acknowledging the winning streak for anti-Israel democratic candidates in 2026, there can be no realistic path forward. The DNC must root out AIPAC funding in Democratic primaries and recognize the views of the party’s majority on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans now see not only as wrong, but as criminal.

If over 80% of Democratic voters hold an unfavorable opinion of Israel, and candidates running on that sentiment keep winning primaries, the data is not ambiguous. The base has moved. The party leadership has not.

Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Palestine/Arab world issues for various national and international publications.


Victims of Communism?

July 3, 2026


Photograph Source: cspirtos – Public Domain

The ruling class appears shaken, their brains rattled, and their nightmare once thought vanquished—the Red Menace—appears reborn. Following the recent sweep of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York and Colorado elections, there has been a torrent of backlash and public meltdowns from President Trump claiming, “I’d be the greatest communist in history,” to humanity’s first billionaire posting the usual anti-communist nonsensical blather that communism has the “[h]ighest death count of any philosophy.” Elon Musk unabashedly cites inflated, unserious death counts that include in their tally of so-called “victims of communism” the Red Army’s liquidation of Nazis and fascists during the World War II.

Adding to the frenzy, one New York City council member even invoked the halcyon days of the FBI and the CIA, bragging that they would have “made sure unabashed revolutionaries” like the DSA National Political Community “were neutralized one way or another. In fact, that was basically the entire point of having them.” Vicki Paladino made a candid admission that domestic and foreign intelligence agencies were never designed to defend “democracy.” Rather, they were engineered as clandestine political police forces operating with lethal, counter-revolutionary violence.

And decades of disclosures and investigations reveal this. From the Church Committee convened five decades ago that investigated illegal intelligence operations to Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna’s recent hearing on the CIA’s mind control program called MK-ULTRA, domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have been mired in deeply nefarious practices, from illegal surveillance and counterintelligence operations to outright assassination. Put bluntly, the CIA and FBI, during the glory days of Cold War Red Scare politics, acted in service of capital, alleviating real or imagined threats to the profits of an increasingly paranoid ruling class, and building their own pile of bodies along the way as they waged a protracted and often secret war against those seeking to build power for the many rather than the few.

Indian Country itself paid a heavy price. And only recently have we begun to come to terms with the consequences, with the commutation of Leonard Peltier’s two consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents during the federal reign of terror waged against the American Indian Movement on the Pine Ridge reservation. While Peltier walked out of a federal prison, many more never went home and still more await justice. While we have yet to heal from the wounds of the past, this generation faces a different battle.

Putting aside whether the recent DSA electoral wins pose an existential threat to the capitalist class, the underlying fear has a material basis. As the billionaire class, and now, grotesquely, the trillionaire class, reap record profits, the quality of life in the heart of global capitalism and imperialism appears to be in rapid decline. Among the top leading causes of death for young people in the United States are drug overdoses, death by suicide, and gun deaths. Life expectancy has cratered across the board. For American Indian people, the decline in life expectancy is particularly acute, falling in recent years from an already abysmal of 71 years down to 65—with South Dakota reporting a median age of death for American Indian people of death at a staggering 58 years. Despite more than a million COVID deaths in the United States, the drop in life expectancy is caused by more than the pandemic; it includes massive inequalities and social and economic factors.

It should be no surprise this generation has little hope in the system that robbed them of a future, to say nothing of a bleak present. A poll last year by the rightwing think tank the Cato Institute found that more than a third of people under the age of 30 in the United States had a favorable view of communism. Still more, nearly two-thirds, looked kindly on socialism. While the turn towards anti-capitalism may be partially a natural reaction to the death drive of capitalism, it doesn’t mean the embrace of left wing and liberatory politics translates directly into socialist and communist movements or just societies. In fact, revolutions are quite rare events, and when they succeed or fail, they can be quite deadly, with much of the violence often stemming from the forces of counter-revolution. What is often misunderstood is that this counter-revolutionary violence doesn’t necessarily happen in the context of, or in reaction to full-blown revolution. It instead should be understood a structural phenomenon, something that is expressed in policing and intelligence agencies ready to crush even the most benign forms of resistance, such as the most recent sentencing a Prairieland defendant to 30 years in federal prison for moving a box of antifascist zines.

As historian Gerald Horne has pointed out in his aptly titled book The Counter-Revolution of 1776, the founding of the United States was borne of a counter-revolution against the abolition of slavery. Most African people sided with the British against the colonists, viewing the British empire as a more favorable ally in the ending the tyranny of chattel slavery. One might add that this counter-revolution also included the genocidal assault on Native people, whom Thomas Jefferson described as “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence. Indigenous wars against the United States often entailed allying with the competing empires such as Britain against the American colonists, whom Indigenous nations viewed as a greater threat. This was in an effort to stave off the white invasion of Indigenous homelands. While counterfactual history has its limits, it is a worthy pursuit to examine the freedom dreams of Black and Indigenous people—and to understand exactly how U.S. imperialism has suppressed those aspirations. Those aspirations have sometimes coalesced with socialist movements and often not, but the general ignorance of their liberatory impulses is a symptom of the larger miseducation project.

To start, most people in the United States are ill-equipped to discuss the actual social policies of past or present communist societies. Decades of anti-communist indoctrination have effectively blunted the public’s ability to conceptualize alternatives to capitalism. This mass ignorance is no accident; it is the result of a deliberate miseducation that reduces socialism to a caricature of authoritarian misery, while sanitizing capitalism as a beacon of personal liberty and market choice. Consequently, history is viewed through a double standard: the structural failures of socialist states are deemed unforgivable atrocities, while the global body count of capitalism is dismissed as the unavoidable friction of an imperfect but necessary system.

These myths are supposedly backed up by the numbers, which attribute 100 million deaths to communist societies, numbers that far exceed the Nazi and fascist body counts and do not begin to offer up comparable studies of colonial and capitalist societies. It is worth noting that these overblown statistics come from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by a unanimous act of Congress in 1993 and opened a museum in 2022. The foundation even counts deaths from COVID-19 as victims of communism. This asymmetric accounting leaves the capitalist empire entirely off the hook. If we apply the exact same rigorous, unforgiving metrics of state responsibility to U.S. capitalism alone, the narrative of Western benevolence completely collapses into an endless ledger of mass murder.

Factoring the true cost of U.S. capitalism and imperialism requires mapping what historian David Michael Smith terms the “endless holocausts” of U.S. empire. This global empire was built on the theft of a continent through Indigenous genocide and the theft of tens of millions of Black lives via the transatlantic slave trade. Smith places the total body count of the U.S. empire at close to 300 million dead. If we scrutinized global capitalism’s daily, preventable toll—from structural poverty and enforced starvation to imperialist wars and corporate healthcare monopolies—with the same metrics applied to communist societies, the free market might register 100 million deaths every few decades. Ultimately, the ruling class does not fear the Red Menace because they value human life; they fear it because they know their empire of accumulation by dispossession is fundamentally fragile, driving them to unleash the counter-revolutionary violence they have always weaponized to survive.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).


When Trump Sounds the Alarm Against Mamdani’s “communists” and Their Electoral Triumphs!

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

“Communism is the greatest threat to our country since its founding 250 years ago”! Undoubtedly, this thunderous statement by U.S. President Donald Trump, issued in writing on June 26, is intended to sound the alarm and rally behind him all the conservatives, reactionaries, and anti-communists in the United States ahead of the midterm elections this coming November. Nevertheless, with this statement, Trump is, for once, spot on. And this is much to the embarrassment of the liberal—or even “moderate” left-wing—media around the world, which persist in labeling Mamdani a… “Democrat” and pretend not to understand whom or what the U.S. president is referring to when they claim he is talking about the leaders of the… Democratic Party!

And yet, Trump is not only referring specifically to Zohran Mamdani and his fellow Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—who just made a huge splash in last week’s Democratic Party primaries—but he is also fiercely attacking the Democratic Party leadership with these words because they are not fighting back and are letting “the communists do whatever they want”: “ In many ways, they’re allowing them to go their own way. They’re afraid they will lose their Election, they’re afraid of conflict. They’re not smart enough or tough enough to fight this plague. If they fought them the way they fight Republicans, or me, they’d be victorious, but they don’t have the courage to do so. ”. And to leave no room for doubt, Trump describes his assertions as “a statement on the recent election of communists in our country”, while clarifying that these newly elected officials ”are not social democrats. These are hardcore, godless communists“. Moreover, according to accounts from Republican senators who met with Trump in the wake of the Democratic Socialists’ electoral successes, he “at times let his emotions get the better of him, explaining in essence that communism was gaining the upper hand”…(1)

That said, it must be acknowledged that Trump is largely correct in dramatizing the situation. On the one hand, victories by DSA activists in the Democratic Party primaries are now becoming the norm, with or even without the overt support of Mamdani—whom the American media currently describe as a “kingmaker”—while there are already DSA mayors in New York, Seattle, soon in Washington, D.C., and in a few months likely in Los Angeles. On the other hand, the Democratic Party leadership is terribly unpopular, demoralized, completely discredited among its base, lacking in ideas, without a platform, without figures capable of rivaling Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and above all, devoid of any will to stand up to Trump. The result is that little-known or virtually unknown young women, as well as young men from the DSA, have recently managed to defeat—and often even crush—incumbent representatives and senators who are part of the Democratic establishment, supported and financed by the wealthy and other billionaires, and above all by AIPAC, the Israeli lobby that until recently was all-powerful.

At this point, it is worth digressing to highlight the decisive role of the “Mamdani phenomenon” in what amounts to the historic failure of Netanyahu and his Israel in the war in the Persian Gulf. By conquering New York, “the world’s largest Jewish city”—thanks in part to the active support of tens of thousands of young New York Jews, whom he himself had mobilized and organized—Mamdani accelerated and deepened what was already the “divorce” of American Jews from the Zionist state, as well as the historic shift in American public opinion in favor of the Palestinians. Given Israel’s extreme and long-standing dependence on financial, military, and diplomatic support from the United States—as well as from the Jewish community in that country— there is no doubt that the aforementioned events have greatly contributed to Israel’s weakening, to Trump and his administration distancing themselves from Israel, and ultimately to what has made the Jewish state, according to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, “the most hated in the world”. And all this at a time when Israel is facing its moment of truth and is plunged into a terminal crisis—a crisis from which there is likely no turning back!

But let’s return to Trump’s United States, which is also plunged into a historic crisis. Trump is right to be concerned and to sound the alarm, for he and his regime are in crisis, to the point of appearing almost incapable of standing up to Zohran Mamdani and his “communists.” For example, there is no Republican leader—Trump included—who can rival the leaders of the “communist” camp in popularity. In fact, all polls show Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, and Bernie Sanders to be far more popular than any leaders of either the Democratic or Republican parties! As a result, a potential presidential run by Ocasio-Cortez in 2028 is gaining credibility and popular support…

All these events—which might have seemed impossible and pure political fiction just a few years ago—are now possible because they reflect the very real, unprecedented, and increasingly profound and rapid transformation that North American society has undergone over the past two tumultuous decades. As a result, the percentage of American citizens who believe it would be “a good thing” for their country to transition from capitalism to socialism now exceeds one-third (38%) of the population, up from just 18% in 2010. And in a very telling detail, it is now the vast majority of Democrats (72%) and Independents (60%) who believe that the capitalist system is not working well or is not working at all! (2)

In short, the recent avalanche of electoral successes by Democratic Socialist activists, the immense popularity of Zohran Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, and above all Bernie Sanders—or even the radical shift in public opinion in favor of the Palestinians and against Israel—did not come out of nowhere and are not fleeting products of some passing protest movement by American citizens. In reality, they are deeply rooted in the historic (multi)crisis facing the United States and its society, a crisis that has been greatly accelerated and deepened by the rise to power of that Nazified Caligula, Donald Trump. Not to mention, of course, the most popular American of all, that old independent senator Bernie Sanders, whose two presidential campaigns have radicalized and politicized an entire generation of young Americans—who now find themselves at the forefront of what Trump somewhat blithely calls the “communist threat” looming over the American superpower. And finally, we can be sure of only one thing: the course of events promises to be incredibly exciting…

Notes

Giorgos (Yorgos) Mitralias is a journalist, one of the founders and leaders of the Greek Committee Against the Debt, and a member of the international CADTM network.

How Socialists Should Govern, Part 2

Source: The Last Farm

In the first part of this series, I discussed in theoretical terms how an elected socialist can use the capitalist state to advance socialism. In this second part, I’ll begin offering a series of concrete proposals, using New York City as an example.

Let’s review the criteria for assessing whether a left government is advancing socialism according to Erik Olin Wright in his conclusion to “Class, Crisis, & The State”:

  1. Have welfare and social benefits expanded or contracted?
  2. Have capitalism’s fundamental interests been prioritized in policy making?
  3. Has the state’s direct role in the economy increased or decreased?
  4. Has the bureaucracy been remade in the service of the working class and brought into the Left political coalition?
  5. Has left political organizing been repressed or granted greater space to operate?
  6. Has grassroots democracy and working class mobilization expanded or contracted?
  7. Have reactionary elements within the military/police been weakened and socialist forces empowered?

Policy proposals

So, what could the mayor of a big city–someone like Zohran Mamdani–realistically do that would satisfy Wright’s criteria? Which reforms can he make that are non-reformist in nature? What can he accomplish with the power he has and the political obstacles he faces?

Here are my proposals:

  1. Build the worker co-op sector
  2. Decommodify the food shed
  3. Create participatory assemblies
  4. Advance library socialism
  5. Wage war on cars
  6. Leverage emergency powers
  7. Start a repair network
  8. Establish City Corps
  9. Mandate public logistics

In this post, I’ll run through the first three of these, with the rest to come in later installments in this series.

Build the worker cooperative sector

Worker-owned cooperatives are businesses owned and democratically governed by their worker members. NYC has provided a small amount of funding to the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative since 2014, which provides technical support to co-ops (around 80 each year). It’s a fine initiative, but how could a socialist mayor push it further, much further?

First, by ramping up funding for the initiative so that there’s sufficient technical expertise to support growth in the sector. Then, by juicing that growth with a city procurement directive that gives preference for municipal contracts to be awarded to worker co-ops (in NYC, this could be done entirely at the mayor’s discretion.) The city could also create a revolving loan fund to facilitate worker co-op start-ups and conversions, ensuring access to capital. It could add co-op training to existing workforce development programs and K-12 education. It could add a lease preference for worker co-ops at city-owned properties and redevelopment sites (also entirely at the mayor’s discretion.) And in the private sector, it could require that workers have the right of first refusal to convert failing or relocating businesses to worker co-ops. Additionally, the city could target specific sectors for worker co-op start-ups, such as platform co-ops in the exploitative gig economy, later using its lawmaking power to grant them a competitive advantage or even a monopoly on things like ride-sharing and food delivery.

These measures could create guaranteed demand for worker co-ops while easing the hurdles to their development. Any expansion of worker co-ops means shifting some control of capital to the working class, thus advancing democratic socialism in the economy.

Decommodify the food shed

Mamdani ran on a promise to open one city-owned grocery store in each borough, a good idea that he sadly gutted in office (he is now proposing publicly-subsidized, privately-owned and operated grocery stores with the city acting as landlord and developer.) But even if he had stuck to his original plan, the mayor could deliver far more bang for his buck by creating a municipal buyer cooperative instead, beginning with the city’s public housing residents.

A food buyer cooperative is a group that pools their purchasing power to regularly order wholesale food for delivery. In a city like New York, such groups could be organized by the municipal government in NYCHA buildings or blocs, with members opting-in to select what foods to order and how much. Such cooperatives provide much steeper discounts than brick-and-mortar grocery stores due to low overhead and a simplified distribution chain.

The city could maximize these benefits by leveraging existing city-owned infrastructure–like warehouse space and trucking–combined with its massive purchasing power. The buyer’s club model avoids the very high capital costs of developing grocery stores (currently estimated at $70 million in NYC), plus the enormous on-going expenses of staffing and running large retail businesses. All of those savings are then passed on to members, turning the 5-15% discount offered by a city-owned grocery store into a 35-40% discount for buyer co-op members.

The democratic governance of a buyers club has the dual benefit of reducing food waste (nothing expires on the shelf), while shifting control over food to the working class, training its members to become protagonists in their own subsistence, rather than passive consumers. And such a program could get off the ground with only the mayor’s directive, no city council or state legislature needed.

If successful, the mayor could expand the cooperative beyond the confines of NYCHA and begin the process of vertical integration. The next logical step would be to create a city-owned food wholesaler, which would not only serve the buyers’ cooperative but food buyers throughout the city, both public and private. This could have the effect of reducing the cost of staple goods citywide, while offering 50-60% discounts to cooperative members.

Combine that with seeding worker co-ops in the food processing industry–again, utilizing existing city infrastructure, like public school kitchens after hours–and a direct farm procurement program, and you start to see the transformative potential here, in addition to the cost savings.

Create participatory assemblies

Remaking state bureaucracy in the service of the working class goes beyond appointing socialist functionaries. It requires entrenching the working class in the very structure of government so it can continually advocate for its own interests. This requires democratizing the decision-making of municipal departments.

A logical place to start would be social services client assemblies. Since the welfare state serves the working class, the working class should have decision-making power over how it operates. People who use public social services, like housing assistance, childcare, disability services, and workforce training programs would form democratic bodies–elected or chosen through a lottery–to shape how services are delivered.

The assemblies would have a say in how public agencies interact with and deliver benefits to their clients, not just via tedious surveys, but by directly voting on budget priorities, evaluating agency performance, and participating in hiring senior leadership. The application process for services would be shaped by clients, as would the on-going features of service.

This would have dual the benefit of improving agency performance while empowering the working class to assert authority over a critical state function. When state agencies are required to not just consult their constituents but to gain their vote, the balance of power shifts from the bourgeois state to the working class. Such a shift is necessary to win socialism, and it can begin right away.


This article was originally published by The Last Farm; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

Yes, It’s Possible! A Handbook for Building Power from Below


July 3, 2026

Interview with João França

Building movements is an arduous and involved process. It takes organising people, building morale, and grit, and that isn’t even half of it. Don’t you wish you had a positive blueprint for how to move forward, to draw inspiration from, to continue the fight? Look no further than João França’s Yes, It’s Possible! A Handbook from Building Power from Below (Common Notions, 2026). Based on the success of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), a movement in Spain that has stopped evictions, kept people in their homes, and changed perceptions of housing and financial institutions. França explains how PAH showed, through small everyday victories, that “yes, it’s possible.” This is a critical mindset needed now more than ever, given the context of rising fascism and the need to continue to be inspired to build movements today.

Ly: What first compelled you to write this book?

João: I used to work as a journalist and the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) was one of the strongest movements occurring. It was really inspiring to see how effective it was, actually responding to the real life problems that people had. The PAH was tangibly keeping people in their houses and blocking evictions. People connected really well to this movement, as they felt they were doing something real. It was really inspiring and moving to see how it transformed people’s lives.For me, who got involved in movements later, it was my main political school, of a different way of doing politics.

As a journalist, I felt that I was supporting the struggle through my work to communicate what was occurring to a wider audience. For this book, I approached the movement, to see if they wanted to work on this together, and that got me more involved, so it was a collaborative endeavor.

Ly: At what point in the journey did it really feel, Yes, It’s Possible? In what way is that a positive and encouraging mantra?

The most amazing thing about the PAH is that you see everyday that Yes, It’s Possible. Because everyday you are making a big difference for the family that lives in that house. So every time we go to an eviction, and stop the family getting evicted, you see it can be done. This movement changed the perception of housing and financial institutions, for example people used to trust the banks, and now they do not.

It has made an impact in other movements, and all the different organisations that, even when they have differences with the PAH, they are inspired by the mutual aid model that the PAH created.

One of the lessons that the people that the PAH started, who came from other social movements, they always had big goals, and it’s difficult to see the world to come. Within the PAH, they realised the importance of the small everyday victories, so when you have these, you are showing the movement that we do win things, and we know we can build bigger things.

External communication was extremely important to the PAH organisers. For the very first eviction that PAH blocked, it was a small village far from Barcelona, they had to rent a bus to go there, and they weren’t sure what the impact would be, but they still went with two or three cameras and the video they published later had a huge impact, and it showed that people can stop the bank from kicking people out of their houses. The shift of narratives has also to do with other ways of telling things, and making fun of those in power, having fun while fighting, and these are also connected. Trying to simplify bigger problems in our system and explain them in a simple way, and make them fun and appealing. There are fun PAH videos of doing parodies of famous songs which do really well on social media.

There was a person who was previously involved in anarchist organising and used to wearing black, and always being quite serious and a woman brought him to dance, inside the takeover of the bank – showing that you can do movements differently. People are always having so much fun.

When people are having fun week after week, it makes it sustainable for the long-term. When I read the book Joyful Militancy, it really made me think about the PAH.

If there is no joy in struggling, it’s very hard to get the people who need it the most, to get involved in the struggle.

Ly: I was struck by the fact that the PAH welcomed all people, from the far left to the far right, even when some members questioned this. What does that show about the need to work together across political lines?

J: What’s interesting about the PAH is that it’s not too ideological. The PAH was meant to get to the individuals who are actually struggling, so they had to listen to them. It is a movement based on mutual aid. Sometimes when you have a staff of organisers, they are probably more ideological, and might have more specific political projects. When it’s based on mutual aid, and it’s horizontal and all the decision making is democratic and involves everyone who is part of it, the person who is dealing with the housing issue can focus less on ideological divides. If there is someone struggling with a housing problem, maybe coming to this organising group will change their political views in the long run. But that’s not the main goal.

In other spaces you might say this person has infiltrated the movement and we have to get rid of them, but in this space, you welcome people based on the issue they need support with, and it can change people’s views over time.

Ly: Why is it so critical to build power from below?

J: Most of the people who were not activists or organisers before the PAH, but are now. Most people highlight the empowerment they feel from being part of this movement. The movement helps people realise they have power when they act together and when they organise.

There is something characteristic of many Spanish movements, is autonomy from institutional power, so there is a fear here of co-option, by power, or political powers. So “building power from below” is not about the institutions, but building a powerful actor that can influence politics and fight against the powerful from outside. It’s about autonomy and non-partisanship.

Ly: Can you explain how PAH operates differently compared to organising in the US?

J: A lesson to learn from PAH is that you can organise without money, and for a lot of organisations in the US it is hard to imagine. There does have to be a lot of unpaid work and hours.When you have a space where people come and share their problems, there are those with more experience and less experience, they can help others, and this makes the movement sustainable. If you build a strong enough base for a movement like this, if you can’t make the meeting, it’s ok, because everyone can keep the movement going.

A lot of the PAH chapters are run by people who got there from having a housing issue, with no organising background.

Ly: How do you see the role of civil disobedience in making change? How critical is it to grassroots movements, and what can we learn from the PAH in this regard?

J: It’s key in the PAH experience, and it isn’t the same around the world as the laws are different everywhere, so the power to sit and negotiate, to shift narratives and perceptions, shift common sense, these are all part of the process of building legitimacy. When the PAH does civil disobedience, it’s saying we have done everything that the system has offered us to solve this problem, then we must do civil disobedience because we have no other option. So for evictions, we can prove and show that this family cannot afford to pay for a different house, and we have spoken to the bank or the landlord, who haven’t offered any other alternatives, we have spoken to the system, gone to court to try to find a solution there etc, so that’s why we are now standing in front of the door and the police to block it. This is showing the building of legitimacy, and this is one of the main lessons we can learn from the PAH.

Ly: Can you talk about the role of care in sustaining grassroots movements?

J: Something that I find really important that changes people’s subjectivities, is how people are coming from an individualistic life of what the system and the powers impose on us, so they come to the PAH looking for a solution to their specific problem and they learn how to be together, how to be in common, how to build things together that can improve their life and help think about a different better life. There is the part of being together. The other mantra of PAH is that you are not alone, so when you cross the door into the PAH, you are not alone anymore, you will have support.

There are other practices that others may not see as political, but it’s about celebrating birthdays, and festivities. When you stop an eviction, people cook something, and bring it to the meeting. It ties people to the movement and keeps it sustainable. Making sure that everyone has something to do. Recognising that it’s being a spokesperson, and writing a press release, is just as important as cooking and having a collective lunch etc., recognising that all these different tasks are necessary and needed in the movement and is part of the care work that makes the movement sustainable.

Ly: Can you talk about creative resistance?

J: Building alliances and collaborations with other people in other movements, so you can ask people who are in an artists collective that will make the media put attention on it. When the movement was getting less media attention over time, it would be harder to get the banks to meet with them etc., so they would have to constantly reinvent new ways of communication to get attention, and it’s also more fun to always be doing new things together. When you always have to reinvent yourself, as the PAH is good at, though it’s very exhausting. In the book, it’s about actually showing how the PAH does things, with the QR codes embedded within it that are mostly videos, for example, the parody of Fresh Prince of Bel Air song, while occupying a bank branch.

I tried to transmit all that has moved me about the PAH, but I think seeing it is always stronger.

Ly: Do you have a final message to leave with readers?

One of the things most inspiring in the movement, is to see how common people with no organising or activist background, but who are struggling with really hard problems like risk of homelessness, come together. It’s really inspiring to see that through mutual aid and organising that in common they have power, and can really change things.

Ly Rosengard (they/them) is a Chinese-English writer, activist, and community organizer based in New York, with non-fiction, fiction, and poetry published in The Rejoinder Literary Magazine, The Progressive, Wireworm Magazine, and others. You can find their writing, speaking and workshops on their website, and The Mental, their interview series on mental health, art and activism.