Open Letter to Ben Jamal, Director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Instead of Helping Implement the Proscription of Palestine Action You Should Be Doing Your Best to Frustrate It - As Martin Luther King said:

Please note the date is wrong but the link is correct.

It is Friday 4 July 7.30 pm

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If you want to add your name to this Open Letter please let me know at azvsas@gmail.com

Monday 30 June, 2025

Dear Ben Jamal,

I write as one of the original founders of Palestine Solidarity Campaign although I resigned in 2022 as a result of PSC’s abandonment of anti-Zionism in the new Constitution which you supported.

I have subsequently observed in wry amusement that you now claim to have been anti-Zionist all along. However as long as you don’t call for the replacement of  a Jewish Supremacist state by a Unitary Democratic State it is impossible to consider PSC anti-Zionist.

We are living through the world’s first live streamed genocide in Gaza and the fulfilment of Zionism’s Messianic End Times. US and British imperialism are wedded to supporting Hitler’s Bastard Offspring. Today when genocidal and exterminationist ideas are commonplace in Israel and when nearly half of Israeli Jews support exterminating the Palestinians of Gaza, the last thing we should do is retreat in the face of government threats of proscription. Today the Nazi doctrine of Death by Hunger is the official policy of the Israeli government.

Ben Jamal

Despite the creation of a mass Palestine solidarity movement, both in Britain and internationally, we have not been able to stop the Genocide. At best we have been able to limit the carnage and force Zionism’s mafia bosses in Tel Aviv to admit a bare minimum of aid.

PSC, together with Stop the War Coalition and other groups, have organised impressive demonstrations in London but by themselves they have failed to change British government policy, wedded as it is to NATO and the alliance with the United States. Today we are led by war criminals and we must act accordingly.

A chance was missed in January when the Police banned the march from starting from outside the BBC. The Metropolitan Police adopted wholesale the Zionist smear that the marches offended Jews worshipping in a distant synagogue,. Instead of saying that you would call the march at the BBC regardless of the Police’s attempt at sabotage you meekly complied by rearranging the starting point in Whitehall, which enabled the Police to kettle, harass, arrest and attack protestors.

By way of contrast, one of the most successful groups in the past five years has been Palestine Action.  It has been so successful that the government has been forced to try and proscribe it as a terrorist organisation. This is the first attempt to ban a protest group as ‘terrorists’. This attempt has been met with a wave of opposition from other protest  and civil liberties groups, charities and academics reaching into the Home Office itself.

If anything represented a line in the sand then this is surely the issue – the proscription of a protest group as ‘terrorists’. It is an assault on the most basic of rights of a democratic society, the right to protest and freedom of speech, Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

As you are aware, having often quoted them yourself, protest movements have a long history of defying coercive and repressive laws when democratic rights and basic freedoms were under attack. Slavery abolitionists, trade unionists, Chartists and Suffragettes were prepared to put themselves on the line. As Martin Luther King said in his Letter from a Birmingham Gaol

‘one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

A law, which is passed, which erodes our democratic rights is an immoral law. This was the position of the Suffragettes, the Chartists and all manner of social movements in the past. This is a law fit for a Police State and yet you insist that PSC branches and members meekly comply. In your ‘advice’ you write

PSC’s position is clear – we will not allow any branch to jeopardise the organisation and the movement by taking such actions in the name of PSC. It is vitally important for all branches to understand this and to act accordingly – ensure that no branch communications profess support for a proscribed organisation, that no events are planned in support of a proscribed organisation, and that no clothing or signs are used which profess support for a proscribed organisation

The Police, the Courts and the State have been implacably opposed to the Palestine solidarity movement.  Why?  Because the West’s alliance with Israel is based on strategic imperialist interests. Israel is the West’s attack dog. This is why Palestine Action has been targeted. To the state Palestine Action’s opposition to Britain’s military co-operation with Israel is no different from that of Hamas. Hence the proposed proscription.

Whereas Western regimes have supported the Zionists the people have supported the Palestinians as opinion polls have consistently demonstrated.  The reception of the audience at Glastonbury to Kneecap and Bobby Vylan’s chants of ‘death to the IDF’ demonstrates who has the ear of the young.

We see this in the decision of the High Court on Monday approving the sale of F-35 components even though the judges knew full well that they will be used to commit genocide.

The Guardian reported on Saturday that ‘concerns about proscribing Palestine Action extended into the home secretary’s own department.’ A senior civil servant was quoted as saying that ‘Home Office staff are concerned about the “absurd” decision to ban Palestine Action under UK anti-terrorism laws.’

 “From desk to desk, colleagues are exchanging concerned and bemused conversations about how absurd this is and how impossible it will be to enforce. Are they really going to prosecute as terrorists everyone who expresses support for Palestine Action’s work to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel as it commits war crimes?

If ever there was a time for civil disobedience it is now. It is fine citing the example of groups in the past which broke the law for the common good but there comes a time when PSC has to decide which is more important – obedience to the law or solidarity with the Palestinians. If PSCrefuses to contemplate civil disobedience it is more of an NGO than a solidarity campaign.

The time to refuse to accede to the proscription of Palestine Action, whilst Zionist genocide groups go unmolested, is now. If thousands of people openly defy the proscription by refusing to accept Police State Starmer’s equation of Protest Groups with Terrorism then the law will  become inoperable.

As it says in Ecclesiastes 3 (and Pete Seeger’s song Turn, Turn, Turn)

‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’

Now is that time but to the leadership of PSC, afraid as you are of your own shadow, the idea of civil disobedience is something you praise in history not something you yourselves participate in. Past heroism is easy to praise. Doing it yourself is something else.

PSC has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Unlike the Anti-Apartheid Movement of the 1970s it is afraid to build a popular movement that challenges the State’s support for genocide. The vast majority of the population, both in Europe and the United States are utterly sick of the genocide in Gaza yet PSC is afraid of breaking the law. 

Now is the ideal time to put a spoke into the Zionist wheel. Now is the time to defy yet another anti-Palestinian law with both right and public opinion on our side. Yet what do you do?  You instruct members and branches of PSC to fully implement the ban on supporting Palestine Action if the law comes into effect. Let’s be blunt. You are doing the work of the Zionists for them. You don’t know what to do with a mass movement except march them up the hill and down again.

You have no perspective beyond the accumulation of funds and the employment of more staff.  PSC has made over a million pounds from Israel’s genocide in Gaza yet politically you are still as timid as when, in 2022, you took anti-Zionism out of the constitution.

What is your justification? The threat of 14 year prison sentences? I doubt if even Lady Justice Carr, the most reactionary Chief Justice since Lord Denning would dare impose such a sentence but more importantly public opinion would not stand for it. The best way of avoiding prison sentences is mass defiance of the law such that it will be impossible to implement it since it is clear to all that Palestine Action is not a terrorist group. Embedding a lie within the law will not make it true.

A mural was painted in Gaza over a year ago to thank us for taking direct action against Israel’s war machine.

Now, more than ever, Palestinians need us to step up.

Join our workshop tomorrow and #ShutElbitDown: https://t.co/Aw3ubRyNC0 pic.twitter.com/cBqMk5gUuz

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) October 20, 2023

Your fear of challenging the unjust laws that Yvette Cooper is proposing stems from your fear of upsetting the applecart. To be blunt you are afraid of challenging the undemocratic British state and prefer to sacrifice the Palestinians instead. It was not PSC but Palestine Action that had a mural painted for it in Gaza.  Palestine Action have achieved in 5 years more than PSC have done in 40.

What is the purpose of PSC if not to support the Palestinians?  Palestine Action has closed 3 Elbit factories and premises in its five years of existence. It has posed a challenge to the Israeli state’s operations in this country which PSC with all its staff and resources have not been able to match. Hence its proscription.

I am not at all surprised by your behaviour. When Palestine Action was formed in July 2020 PSC did all that it could to strangle it at birth. Your ‘legal advice’ then was a carbon copy of your advice today. You wrote:

PSC has sought legal advice about the potential liabilities arising from the commission of acts of criminal damage of high monetary levels ... If the value of the damage caused exceeds £5000 a person can be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.

These liabilities potentially extend to both individuals encouraging or assisting criminal acts (including, for example, providing financial support), and organisations, including PSC branches that offered encouragement or assistance.

These concerns are not raised because PSC, or the BDS Movement is opposed to any form of direct action. Instead, they are raised because of the strategic and legal risks associated with the type of action being conducted by the group.

If supporters of the Palestinians had taken your advice and if members of PSC had gone along with it then Palestine Action would not have existed. You were forced to change course because PSC members and supporters disregarded your advice. Today you write that:

Publicly inviting support, for example through a social media post, wearing clothing which indicates support, or arranging a meeting where a member of a proscribed organisation speaks or a speech indicating support for the organisation is given are all criminal offences which can carry prison sentences of up to 14 years

That is true, theoretically and that is why mass action in defiance of this law is necessary and should be organised, with PSC’s help if possible, without it if necessary. The proscription of Palestine Action can only be challenged by mass defiance, not the timidity of PSC under your tutelage. PSC itself should be taking the lead instead of trying to frighten its members. There is nothing stopping national PSC declaring that its support for PA remains unchanged.

You and the leadership of PSC have always been hostile to PA because you saw it as a competitor. In January 2022 when PA achieved its first victory with the closure of Elbit’s Oldham factory PSC was eager to claim the credit. You issued a statement which said:

We pay tribute to all those who have campaigned since Elbit Systems purchased the site in 2007, including many members of the Manchester PSC branch 

As I wrote at the time:

‘I have to pay tribute to whoever drafted the statement. It must have taken some effort to draft a statement welcoming the closure of the factory without at the same time mentioning the group which was responsible for the campaign that was responsible for this success.

Because British imperialism supports Zionism and Israel there is no legal way to prevent the state supporting Israel short of mass action. That is why defiance of the law is an essential component of any solidarity action. Of course that does not mean we defy the law on any and every occasion but we choose the time and place. This is such an occasion. The classifying of a protest group as a terrorist group breaks new ground. It is a red line for more than just the Palestine solidarity movement. It has united Palestine solidarity supporters with virtually the whole liberal and even not so liberal establishment. It is indefensible. If any issue was likely to be won by a refusal to cowtow to the Police and State this is the time.

Your real reasons for opposing a refusal to implement the law have nothing to do with possible prison sentences for those who defy the law. They have everything to do with your empire building and the cushy salaries that comes with it.

You say that ‘The people of Palestine are depending on us now, during their darkest hour, and we cannot afford to let them down.’ Yet by colluding in the implementation of this law that is precisely what you are doing. You are helping the British state implement this police state law.

Tony Greenstein

Supported by:

Leeds Students Against Apartheid Coalition

Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC)

Socialism in the United States – Is it making a Come Back?

Focus on Milwaukee and Chicago – Can the United States put the Cold War and McCarthyism behind it?

Bernie Sander’s challenge for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016 was unique for a number of reasons, not least for the fact that he was the first mainstream Presidential contender to openly call himself a socialist. The fact that he nearly won the contest was remarkable, especially given that ‘Crooked’ Hilary and her friends openly cheated.

Whereas Europe has had a tradition of strong socialist and communist parties in the United States such parties have always been confronted with a virulent anti-communism. Attacks against labour unions and the right to organise have been particularly vicious in the USA.

Sacco and Vanzetti

Frank Little of the Industrial Workers of the World was lynched in August 1917 by six thugs who pulled him out of his bed and Joe Hill was judicially murdered in Utah in 1915. Twelve years later two Italian born anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were again judicially murdered on trumped up charges in Massachussetts.

Nonetheless the United States has had a rich socialist history of class struggle such as in the car factories of Detroit in the 1930’s. In 1912 when Eugene Debbs stood for President he got nearly a million votes and 6% of the vote.  In 1920 he stood again and got nearly a million votes but just 3.4%.

The first Red Scare was in the first World War when Debb’s Socialist Party opposed the draft. A speech in Canton Ohio on June 16 1918 at the end of the war when Debs declared that:

“The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. If war is right, let it be declared by the people – you, who have your lives to lose.”

led to a prosecution under the Sedition Act and Debs being sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, of which he served 32 months before being pardoned.

Debs campaigning for President in 1912

In the post-war period McCarthyism and anti-Communist hysteria led to a witch-hunt of supporters of all progressive and radical politics.  This was depicted by Arthur Miller in The Crucible, which was ostensibly about the Salem Witchhunt. People like Pete Seeger and Charlie Chaplin were victims of the determination of the American Right to root out anyone who was seen as an opponent of US imperialism and its war machine.

It was only with the movement against the Vietnam War that radical and socialist organisations began to resurface and grow. Nonetheless the American political environment is very different from that in Britain or Europe.  There is no equivalent to a mass social democratic or Labour Party.  Instead there are two capitalist parties – Republican and Democrat.

The Democrats were originally the party of Dixieland, the KKK and White Supremacy. In the 1950’s and 1960’s it became the party of civil rights and an end to segregation and the Big Society.  This caused a rupture in its southern base with the Democratic Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, running an independent campaign for US President in 1968 having coined the slogan 5 years earlier ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’. Wallace won 5 states in the Deep South.

Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes

In the Congressional elections last year, Bernie Sanders, the Independent Senator for Vermont was joined in Congress by two members of the Democratic Socialists of America Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. It has to be said that the DSA are a social democratic not a Marxist party. Class struggle is not to the fore in their politics.

Nonetheless this has provoked a backlash. In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump railed against the advance of socialism. when he warned that

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. ... Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country”

Not only Congressional Republicans but Nancy Pelosi joined in the applause!

An article in The Hill by Paris Dennard, a CNN political commentator and former Bush official explained:

‘The Democratic Party continues to go further to the extreme left. Their latest clarion call is the idea of "Democratic Socialism." Socialism by any other name is still socialism, and trying to infiltrate it into our modern political process and system of government is dangerous. 

There is no doubt that this new rise of socialism found in the base of the Democratic Party is a flawed economic ideology that must be challenged by all Americans who support free enterprise....

This is, of course, what the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign and the launch of Chuka Ummuna’s now failed TIG was all about.  Making the Labour Party into a safe party of capitalism.

Below are two interesting articles on socialism in Milwaukee and the Democratic stronghold of Chicago, home to the infamous Mayor Daley.

Tony Greenstein

When Socialism Was Tried in America—and Was a Smashing Success

For much of the 20th century, Milwaukee was run by socialists—and Time magazine called it “one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”

April 6, 2019 John Nichols The Nation

Dan Hoan, Milwaukee’s mayor from 1916 to 1940. (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection), (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection)

“If I owned all the real estate in the world, I wouldn’t feel so powerful as I do on the streets of this socialist city,” declared former New York City councilman Baruch Vladeck when he arrived in Milwaukee in 1932 for the Socialist Party’s national convention in that city.

Norman Thomas, the famed civil-rights and economic-justice campaigner who became the party’s presidential nominee that year, celebrated the fact that he was chosen for that honor in a city governed by Socialists. The success of Milwaukee under then-Mayor Dan Hoan, Thomas said, was proof that the party’s social-democratic “dreams will someday come true.”

“Someday” was dramatically delayed by the results of the 1932 elections. The Socialist ticket did well, securing almost 900,000 votes nationwide and registering its highest percentage of the total vote in Wisconsin. The winner of that year’s race, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took notice: He met with Thomas after the election and borrowed liberally from proposals that had long been championed by the Socialists—for a Social Security system, unemployment compensation, strengthened labor unions, and public-works programs. Roosevelt’s New Deal took the wind out of the Socialist Party’s sails in the national arena, but the party remained a force in Milwaukee for decades to come.

Now that Milwaukee has been selected as the host city for another national convention—that of the Democrats in 2020—Republicans have suddenly discovered its history. “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” griped Wisconsin Republican Party director Mark Jefferson. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.” Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson said the Milwaukee convention would provide a “firsthand look” at “the risk of Democrat socialistic tendencies.”

Apart from the fact that Wisconsin’s top Republicans don’t seem to like the state—or its history—very much, the GOP response is comic. Many Wisconsinites know that their state has a long, rich socialist tradition, and that Milwaukee’s association with it is one of the coolest things about the city. It even earned a mention in the movie Wayne’s World, when rocker Alice Cooper explains, “I think one of the most interesting aspects of Milwaukee is the fact that it’s the only major American city to have ever elected three Socialist mayors.”

The Democratic Party is not a socialist party, but the delegates to its 2020 convention might nominate a democratic socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for president. And when they convene in Wisconsin’s largest city next summer, they shouldn’t hesitate to take the Republicans up on their call to highlight lessons from Milwaukee’s Socialist past. Doing so will strengthen the hand of the party’s eventual nominee, whether it’s Sanders or another of the contenders, all of whom will surely be labeled “socialist” by Donald Trump and his troll army.

Instead of fearing mention of the S-word, Democrats can and should approach it as smart Republicans have the L-word—“libertarian.” Republicans frequently borrow from the libertarian lexicon and toolbox, and acknowledge as much, without abandoning their essential partisanship. Democrats ought to be similarly limber. It’s great that the party now has a strong democratic-socialist wing, which includes Sanders and members of Congress like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. But Democrats who do not identify as socialists can still follow the lead of FDR and the late senator Edward Kennedy, who worked closely with and celebrated the ideas and ideals of democratic socialist Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, a groundbreaking study on poverty. Another 2020 Democratic presidential contender—Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana—gets it right when he says that the old Republican strategy of attaching a “socialist” label to every progressive idea is just that: old. “Today, I think a word like that is the beginning of a debate, not the end of the debate,” explains the most millennial of the Democrats’ presidential prospects.

Buttigieg says that the S-word has “lost its ability to be used as a kill switch on debate,” arguing: “If someone my age or younger is weighing a policy idea, and somebody comes along and says, ‘You can’t do that—it’s socialist,’ I think our answer is going to be, ‘OK, is it a good idea or is it not?’”

Polling tells us that young voters are more comfortable with socialism than capitalism. Older voters may still be susceptible to Republican appeals rooted in Cold War hysteria, but the challenges posed by the existential crisis of climate change and the radical transformation of our economy in an age of AI-driven automation are going to make everyone far more open to radical responses. And many of the best of these—especially those that call for expanding the social-welfare state—will draw from historic and contemporary socialist thinking.

Democrats can get ahead of the curve and disarm Trump and the trolls by embracing the opportunity that Milwaukee offers to talk about socialism as it has existed and succeeded in the United States. For American socialists in the 20th century, Milwaukee was a political mecca, a city that tested and confirmed the validity of their ideas. Vladeck, then the manager of The Jewish Daily Forward (these days known simply as The Forward), called it an example of “the America of tomorrow.”

Socialists were proud to point to Milwaukee, which had a Socialist mayor for most of the period from 1910 to 1960, as a model of sound and equitable governance. And they were not alone: During Hoan’s 24-year tenure, Time magazine reported, “Milwaukee became one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”

Hoan also took on the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, at a time when politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties were compromising with the violent racists as they extended their reach from the South to northern cities. “The Ku Klux Klan will find Milwaukee a hotter place to exist in than Hades itself,” the mayor declared in 1921.

Hoan’s integrity, along with his managerial skills, would eventually earn him recognition as one of the 10 finest municipal leaders in American history. In The American Mayor, his groundbreaking 1999 assessment of municipal governance in cities across the country, Melvin Holli wrote: 

“Although this self-identified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and was a fervent but unsuccessful champion of municipal ownership of the street railways and the electric utility. His pragmatic ‘gas and water socialism’ met with more success in improving public health and in providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging graft from Milwaukee politics.” 

Emil Seidel and Frank Zeidler, the mayors who served before and after Hoan, were Socialists as well. And Milwaukee voters elected dozens of Socialists to the city council, county board, school board, state legislature, and Congress. Milwaukee’s Socialists were so fiscally and socially responsible that historians to this day hail them as exemplars of a uniquely American form of democratic socialism. Zeidler once explained to me, 

“Socialism as we attempted to practice it here believes that people working together for the common good can produce a greater benefit both for society and for the individual than can a society in which everyone is shrewdly seeking their own self-interest.” 

That worked well for Milwaukee in the 20th century—so much so that “socialism” ceased to be a scare word for the city’s residents. What frightens Republicans today is that “socialism” is ceasing to be a scare word in our contemporary national discourse.

John Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent. He is 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.

America's Socialist Surge is Going Well in Chicago

Tuesday night’s elections saw the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history

April 3, 2019 Micah Uetricht

The United States is experiencing a socialist surge right now. That surge came to Chicago last night, where democratic socialists won big in the second, final round of municipal elections.

Three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won their city council races in runoff elections on Tuesday: Byron Sigcho-Lopez in the 25th ward, Jeanette Taylor in the 20th and Andre Vasquez in the 40th. The fourth candidate, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, is locked in a race in the 33rd ward that is too close to call and will await the counting of mail-in ballots, but was up by 64 votes once all precincts’ votes were counted.

They will join two other socialists who handily won the first round of elections outright in February: Carlos Rosa, an incumbent in the 35th ward, and Daniel La Spata, who defeated an incumbent in the first ward.

Add them up and you’ve got at least five, maybe six democratic socialists who will be on the 50-member Chicago city council. Few major American cities have seen even a single socialist councilor in generations; the third-largest city in the US could soon have half a dozen. It’s the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history.

The socialists won by strong, straightforward campaigning on working-class issues. Rosa, for example, made his race a referendum on affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, painting big real estate developers as the enemy and demanding rent control in the city.

Taylor, a longtime neighborhood and education activist on the city’s South Side, demanded the forthcoming Barack Obama presidential library in her ward include a community benefits agreement to fight displacement of working-class residents. In 2015, she participated in a 34-day hunger strike to demand the reopening of Walter H Dyett high school; her website homepage reads: “Send a Dyett hunger strike to city hall.”

And Rodriguez campaigned on a history of activism for affordable housing and immigrant rights in a gentrifying, working-class immigrant neighborhood and against privatization of public services and expansion of police power in the city.

In other words, these democratic socialists ran as unabashed fighters against corporate greed and austerity and for the city’s working class.

Political observers and organizers should take these victories as a lesson: voters found that strong leftwing message appealing – and weren’t scared off by candidates who proudly called themselves “socialists”.

Socialism is spreading throughout the US, as seen in the popularity of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the huge bump in DSA membership, increasing more than seven times over to 60,000 in the past three years. But what sets Chicago apart from many other cities in America – and played a crucial role in last night’s socialist victories – is that the left wing of the city’s labor movement hasn’t been afraid to partner with democratic socialist candidates.

Since its 2012 strike, the Chicago Teachers Union has served as the anchor of the city’s labor left. The CTU, along with community groups and other progressive unions such as SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, formed a political organization called United Working Families (UWF) in 2015. Many union leaders, in Chicago and elsewhere, are skittish about backing openly socialist candidates.

UWF appears to be, endorsing most of the DSA’s city council candidates (and in many cases expended significant resources on them). Another progressive electoral group, Reclaim Chicago, was the principal backer of two of the victorious DSA members, Vasquez and La Spata.

That coalition of left unions and community groups will be crucial in the years to come. Last night also saw the election of the Chicago’s first black woman mayor, as well as its first lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, a former prosecutor and corporate lawyer.

Lightfoot claimed to be a progressive, but her record has been scrutinized by criminal justice activists and the CTU (which backed Lightfoot’s opponent, Cook county board president Toni Preckwinkle); she drew a large donation from a murky “dark money” group that uses vague pro-austerity rhetoric as well as support from Emanuel’s personal lawyer. The city’s labor movement and left will probably find themselves joining together to fight Lightfoot in office.

Chicago’s socialist victories last night weren’t a fluke. Throughout the country, people are tired of low wages, soaring housing costs, privatization of public goods, budget cuts and corporate giveaways of public money. They have tried austerity and found it miserable.

If Chicago’s elections are any indication, maybe they’re ready to try socialism.

• Micah Uetricht is the managing editor of Jacobin magazine. He is the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity (Verso, 2014) and a member of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America