Strategize!
The section provides articles on strategy to assist you in making your campaigns more effective. They include case studies of social movements and information about the current resistance environment. Visit the Resources Page for links to organizations that provide both online and in-person training on strategy and tools for designing and evaluating your campaigns and actions.
Public school educators in 32 union locals across California are joining forces to maximize their power in a campaign called “We Can’t Wait.” It covers 77,000 educators—about a quarter of the California Teachers Association’s total membership—serving a million students.
The campaign started with 11 locals that worked to align their contract expiration dates for the end of June: Anaheim, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Natomas, Oakland, Richmond, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, and Twin Rivers. And it quickly spread from there.
Locals have organized educators to sign onto the campaign’s platform, rally before school and walk in all together, and join informational pickets. The goal is to have educators strike-ready in the fall.
Experts Credit Harm Reduction For 27% Drop In Overdose Deaths
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on May 14 that the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States dropped by nearly 27 percent in 2024. The number represents a significant decrease after more than a decade of steeply climbing drug-related fatality rates that billions of dollars in federal spending on policing and border enforcement failed to contain.
At the beginning of 2015, the CDC reported fewer than 50,000 overdose deaths annually. By 2021, that number had surpassed 100,000 before peaking at 111,451 during the summer of 2023. The CDC found massive racial disparities in the data, with the number of deaths recorded between 2019 and 2020 falling among white populations with better access to public health interventions while skyrocketing in Black and Indigenous communities where heavy policing trumped health care, for example.
Black People, Palestine, And The Maintenance Of Empire
May 15, 2025
Terri Frick, Black Agenda Report.
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Black America, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity
When Palestinian resistance forces broke free from their open-air prison in Gaza on October 7th, 2023, many did not realize the events that would unfold–that we were all about to bear witness to the world’s first live-streamed genocide. Israel thought this would be business as usual, that they could continue their brutalization of the Palestinian people, and the world would go about its business—as it has for decades. Not only did they have to contend with the resistance on the ground in occupied Palestine, but the groundswell of support around the world, and specifically from within the imperial core that is the U.S.
This Is What Democracy Looks Like
May 15, 2025
Kahlil Shahyd, Resilience.
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climate crisis, Democracy, Environmental Movement, Participatory Democracy
The community of Boxtown in southwestern Memphis, Tennessee, has long been accustomed to fighting for its rights. Founded in 1863 shortly after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, this neighborhood of 3,000 people has a long history of battles against the unjust siting of polluting industries, which have increased residents’ health risks and lowered life expectancy. And today, the community is at the center of a growing fight between the future of our freedoms and technocrats.
In June of 2024, Boxtown residents discovered that xAI, an artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, intended to locate the “world’s largest” supercomputer in their community—without environmental reviews or community outreach.
Whole Process People’s Democracy: The Path Forward
May 14, 2025
Hanna Eid, Black Agenda Report.
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Bolivia, China, Democracy, Economic Democracy, Indigenous Rights, Socialism
China’s political form is called ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.' Chinese scholar Zhang Weiwei calls the Chinese political content ‘whole-process people’s democracy’. He distinguishes this model from the formulaic, procedure-obsessed, and anti-democratic model of the North American Republic and European social democracies. What separates the Chinese model from the political model of the central capitalist formations are a number of variables: firstly, mass participation from top to bottom is a key feature of Chinese socialism. Secondly, the subordination of the capitalist class to the party-state and thus the imperatives of the masses defines China’s ability to develop a socialist market economy.
The Best Protection For Students Is A Mass Movement
May 14, 2025
Nidaa Lafi, In These Times.
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Campus Movement, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Repression, Student Activism, Trump Administration
On March 20, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) hosted a conversation with Cornell University student and pro-Palestinian activist Momodou Taal. Less than a week prior, Taal had filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging the new executive orders that sought to target international noncitizen students for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.
The day after this conversation, Taal was told to surrender into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. On March 31, he self-deported.
In this conversation, in which Taal is interviewed by Nidaa Lafi, an organizer with PYM’s Dallas chapter, Taal shares his first-hand experience with being targeted for peacefully protesting, discusses the true function of universities today and offers wisdom on why the increasing repression against students is a sign of empire’s weakness, not its strength.
From Inner Change To Systemic Change
May 14, 2025
David Bollier.
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climate crisis, social transformation, Solidarity Economy, The Commons
“Be the change you want to see in the world!” is the familiar counsel of great social movements. The advice echoes the lyric from the great African-American song, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!”
But how, exactly, might our inner epiphanies and transformations catalyze systemic change? We may individually develop new insights and values from wisdom traditions and contemplative practice, but how might they radiate out into something larger, collective, and consequential?
At this particular moment in modern civilization, as societies grapple with climate change, savage inequalities, and authoritarian rule, the pathways for bringing about change seem terribly murky.
A Fighting Union’s Path To Renewal: The UE Story
May 12, 2025
Chris Townsend, Portside.
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History, Labor Movement, UE, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs
The ongoing organizational renewal and substantial growth of the United Electrical Workers (UE) is one of the most distinctly remarkable stories in the U.S. labor movement in decades. Few other unions have suffered such losses from state repression, raiding attacks by opportunist unions, and the catastrophic effects of corporate job relocation — and survived. Of the original 42 unions who comprised the founding roster of the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) in 1938, a grand total of eight survive intact today. UE is one of them. The remainder have passed out of existence, been destroyed by repression and employer attacks, or been merged into larger unions and lost forever.
Want To Stop Trump’s Attacks On The NLRB?
May 11, 2025
Kevin A. Young, Truthout.
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Donald Trump, History, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Strikes, Worker Rights and Jobs
May Day 2025 in the United States came amid the most aggressive assault on U.S. workers in a century. The federal agencies that provide some minimal protection against corporate power — the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and many more — are being systematically destroyed. On May 1, hundreds of thousands protested at roughly 1,300 actions across the United States. Under the broad theme “Workers Over Billionaires,” they condemned union-busting, austerity, climate destruction, anti-immigrant terror, the U.S.-Israeli genocide, and other facets of the assault.
Black Politics And Mutual Comradeship: A Manifesto
May 10, 2025
Charisse Burden-Stelly, PhD, Black Agenda Report.
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Black Radical Tradition, Ca[italism, Imperialism, Racism, Solidarity
Now is the time of monsters. From ongoing genocide in Gaza and Sudan, the foreign-backed forever war in Congo, and Western occupation and recolonization of Haiti to capitalist greed and state violence against immigrants, unhoused folks, and racialized people in the context of the fires ravaging the Los Angeles area, it’s difficult to feel optimistic about the state of politics in 2025. This feeling of dread can be only partially attributed to the Trump regime, given that these catastrophes started, intensified, or ossified under Joseph R. Biden. As the U.S. government continues to make a mockery of democracy and justice by, for example, putting a bounty on the head of the democratically elected president of Venezuela while threatening sanctions on the International Criminal Court for issuing righteous arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals, it can seem naïve to believe that if we organize and fight, we will indeed win.
Class War At Universities: Workers, Students Unite Against Fascism!
May 10, 2025
Will Hodgkinson, Workers World.
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Boston, Fascism, Higher Education, Solidarity, Working Class
Boston - Students, professors and workers are confronting the Trump administration’s fascist crackdown at universities across the U.S. Since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, immigration officials have revoked at least 1,700 student visas. In the Boston area alone, hundreds of students at Harvard, Northeastern, Emerson, Berklee School of Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts have already lost legal protection and face deportation.
Over the past few months, authorities have kidnapped and detained dozens of students and university workers who have opposed the ongoing Zionist genocide in Palestine.
How Federal Workers Without A Union Can Still Act Like A Union
May 10, 2025
Colin Smalley, Labor Notes.
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Executive Orders, Federal Workers, Trump Administration, Unions, Worker Rights
The reality for over 1.3 million federal government workers leading up to the second Trump Administration has been collective bargaining through unions recognized by the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA).
This recognition comes with the right to bargain over working conditions and conditions of employment. It also includes an individual right to representation when the boss is asking questions that could lead to discipline.
However, for a majority of these workers, Trump’s Executive Order 14251 strips those rights in the name of “national security.” These workers, myself and my union included, are now faced with a scenario that’s been all too common.
Students And Faculty Denounce Genocide And Resist Repression
May 9, 2025
Tatiana Cozzarelli, Left Voice.
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Higher Education, Israel, New York City (NYC), NYPD, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Repression
Today Brooklyn College showed the strength of student-worker unity.
And today Brooklyn College showed the brutality of university administrators and the NYPD.
On May 8 CUNY-PSC — the union representing 30,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York — organized an action to support adjunct faculty, the most precarious and lowest-paid faculty who struggle to make ends meet each month.
At the same time, students organized an action in solidarity with Palestine to denounce the ongoing genocide, the bombardments, and the forced starvation of Palestinians by the brutal Zionist state of Israel, as well as CUNY’s continued investments in Israel.
Imagine You Are A Poor Nation, Trapped By Debt And Strangled By Climate Change
May 9, 2025
John Feffer, Resilience.
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Climate Adaptation, climate crisis, Debt, Global South
Imagine you are a low-income country. You suffer from a heavy debt burden. You’ve been trying to catch up to the more affluent countries for decades, but you’ve been unsuccessful, mainly because of that debt hanging around your neck like a giant millstone. And you are spending more and more of your precious resources dealing with the effects of climate change, from rising waters to superstorms, a crisis that you played only a small part in creating in the first place.
You face a terrestrial version of the three-body problem. These three “bodies”—debt, development, and climate change—impact your country in difficult-to-predict ways.
Putting Reentry Out Of Business
May 8, 2025
Calvin John Smiley, In These Times.
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Criminal Justice and Prisons, Mass Incarceration, Prison abolition, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs
About a decade ago, Richard Trumka, then president of the AFL-CIO, told a crowd gathered at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles that “the theme of this event is mass employment, not mass incarceration.”
A year earlier, the AFL-CIO had committed to addressing mass incarceration as a labor issue. In his speech at the jobs and reentry organization, where he was introduced by labor leader María Elena Durazo, Trumka described why: “When some people are forced to work for close to nothing, all workers’ living standards are pushed down.”
Then, Trumka repeated the refrain “it’s a labor issue because,” followed by explanations about mass incarceration’s impact on families, communities, the economy and voting, among others, until finally: “because labor rights and social justice and civil rights are intertwined.”