When I first speak to Maximilian, it’s the start of February. The winter, which in October felt as though it would be a cold one, has turned out to be unusually mild. As I walk home from work, London is blanketed by a thick gray cloud, which swallows the tip of the Shard building.

Below me, the shapes of men working atop one of the new riverfront buildings appear and disappear, their oversized shadows cast onto a screen behind them, thrown there by sparks from the beams they are cutting.

I agreed to call Maximilian at seven, but I ended up leaving work later than planned. Some drama unfolding in the corridors of our civil service clients meant I had to rewrite a report I sent them last week so it would, in their words, “better reflect the policy team’s current focus.”

As I make it to my bus, a misty rain begins to fall. It’s getting dark, and I wonder whether I’ll have to call Maximilian while walking through the park next to my house. I’d rather not. Even a little rain is enough to send my cracked smartphone into a spasm. As it turns out, I’m lucky. The bus arrives in front of the park earlier than expected, meaning I’ll make it home on time.

I find myself reflecting on what’s been happening around the park over the last few years. The skyline has changed dramatically since I moved here in 2020.

Back then, there were only two major landmarks visible on my walk home. The first was the Shard building. The second, looming closer, was the shell of a brutalist council building: a decaying behemoth scheduled for demolition for the better part of a decade, yet somehow still standing behind a fence, armed with metal spikes and security cameras.

Now these landmarks are joined by new-build high-rises, surrounding the park like a massive, unevenly constructed wall.

I make it through my front door at 7:10 p.m. The flat is unusually quiet. My wife has gone to visit her cousin, leaving behind a pot of now-lukewarm stew and the faint smell of burning incense.

Not quite hungry enough to eat yet, I take off my coat and head into the living room that doubles as my office. When I call, Maximilian is still on his way home from work — which must mean he’s finished late, since Germany is an hour ahead of the UK.

“I don’t have much battery,” he confesses, “but we can talk until I run out.”

Feeling the pressure of time, we quickly cover the background of the KSP and the development of tenant organizing in Germany. It becomes clear that the context in Germany is very different from that of Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP) members in Chicago and the United States.

One thing Maximilian is keen to make clear from the start is that, although KSP activists play a central role in the organization, the tenants’ union itself operates as an independent entity from the campaign.

“From the beginning,” he says, “the union brought together tenants with a wide range of political views, including many who are not sympathetic to socialism. That political breadth is part of what makes the project meaningful and strong.”

The most noticeable difference is that tenants’ organizing appears to be a central focus of KSP activity in Germany. By contrast, in the United States, my impression is that tenants’ organizing has taken a back seat to organizing around immigration and deportation defense.

As Maximilian explains the history of the KSP, I begin to understand why.

“When the KSP started out back in 2018,” he recalls, “it felt like a quiet moment in German politics — the tail end of the Angela Merkel period. But the housing crisis was just emerging as a political issue. Rents had spiked, and tenants’ protests were becoming common. It seemed like a natural area for us to explore.”

“What we found,” he says, “was that tenants’ organizing was dominated by two kinds of actors. On the one hand, you had the Mietervereine, a group of large, bureaucratic tenant associations with roots going back to the 19th century, now closely tied to the state regulatory system.”

“And on the other hand, you had the newer protest movements, whose focus was mainly on demanding state solutions: stronger regulation, tighter rent controls. That sort of thing.”

The early organizers decided that the KSP would need to operate independently from both.

“Our idea was to help tenants organize using their own resources as a group,” he tells me. “Mostly that still meant using legal rights, but we wanted to break the individualization of the tenants’ rights movement, and the dependency on the state, to show tenants they could organize to solve problems collectively. That’s what led to the founding of the tenants’ union.”

I ask Maximilian how this was initially meant to work in practice, and what role the KSP imagined for itself to avoid being absorbed into either the Mietervereine or the newer protest movements.

“At first,” he says, “we imagined a kind of division of labor. There was dissatisfaction with the old organizations, people felt they couldn’t really deliver, but that’s still where most legal expertise exists. We thought we could build trust and strength among tenants, while referring people to the tenant associations for legal advice.”

“But these organizations are extremely overstretched. We found very quickly there was pressure on us to provide legal advice ourselves.”

New-build high-rises under construction beside a London park.

As we talk, it becomes clear how powerful the German legal system governing tenancy is, which, Maximilian notes, is more developed than in most other European countries. From the beginning, activity is shaped by this legal framework to a greater extent than in the American context, where organizing remains relatively informal.

“In 2019 we founded the first ‘club,’” Maximilian says. “In Germany it’s very important to create one of these legal entities, because it prevents a single person from being legally targeted or sued.”

By “club,” he means a Verein, a registered association, apparently a standard legal arrangement for grassroots organizing in Germany. Forming a Verein allows the organization to open a bank account, collect dues, hire lawyers and formally represent tenants — all mechanisms intended primarily to protect members.

Another major factor shaping tenant activity in Germany, Maximilian explains, lies in the structure of the rental sector itself.

“The rental sector here is dominated by very large corporate landlords,” he says. “Some private, some state-owned. They often manage what we call settlements, large housing developments with hundreds or even thousands of tenants.” It’s these large settlements, he points out, that became the primary focus of KSP organizing.

Maximilian was among those who helped establish activity in Frankfurt, where organizers first began reaching tenants in these developments.

“At first we struggled to reach people — leafleting didn’t work out so well,” he tells me. “Eventually we started talking to people outside local supermarkets, inviting them to meetings to discuss their problems. That turned out to be surprisingly successful. At our first meeting, 20 or 30 people showed up.”

The group’s first major campaign followed shortly afterward. It centered on contaminated drinking water in a large settlement owned by one of Europe’s biggest corporate landlords. The water system had been colonized by Legionella, bacteria capable of causing a severe form of pneumonia.

The company repeatedly applied cheaper, temporary fixes instead of replacing the contaminated pipes. As a result, the bacteria kept returning.

“The first priority,” Maximilian recalls, “was making tenants aware of the problem. We used membership fees to pay an expert to test the water, then published the results and shared them throughout the settlement.”

Tenants coordinated complaints, demanded transparency from the landlord, pushed for rent reductions and involved local authorities. Sustained pressure forced the issue into the open, eventually compelling the landlord to commit to partial infrastructure repairs.

At this point, Maximilian’s battery runs out. A shame, I think to myself, because I had more questions. But about 10 minutes later, he rings me back. “I don’t have much time left,” he says. “But let’s cover as much ground as we can.”

We shift the conversation forward in time. Rather than continuing chronologically through the early campaigns, we jump ahead to 2020 — the moment when the pandemic arrived and disrupted everything.

“Tenant organizing,” Maximilian tells me, “is a game of trust and fear.”

Tenants worry about retaliation from landlords, organizers worry about legal exposure and both depend on relationships built slowly through repeated in-person contact. “Everyone involved has something to lose,” he explains.

When the pandemic began, those relationships suddenly became harder to sustain.

“The German state restricted in-person meetings very heavily,” Maximilian says. “For organizing purposes, that was extremely disruptive.”

Without the ability to meet face-to-face, much of the union’s activity stalled. The slow, patient work of building trust between tenants ground to a halt. For a time, the organization existed only in name, with minimal activity.

Yet the period after the pandemic produced a reversal.

“When the pandemic first struck in 2020, we had roughly 20 active members,” Maximilian observes. “By 2023 that had grown to around 100. And by 2025, we were at roughly 400. Within a few years, I think we could reach 1,000.”

Growth has brought a geographical shift too. In the early years, Frankfurt was the center of activity. Now organizing has spread south to Munich, where Maximilian lives. From there, the union has begun coordinating activity across multiple German cities.

These increases in membership appear closely connected to the organization’s early victories and the visibility they generated. Successful campaigns, even partial ones, gave the union credibility among tenants who had previously been skeptical that collective action could deliver results.

One of the biggest areas of focus, Maximilian says, has been what are known as “service charges.”

I’m familiar with service charges from the UK context, where they have caused a minor scandal among younger homeowners — particularly those buying into “shared ownership” developments that have started appearing around the park near my flat.

In theory, service charges cover cleaning, trash collection, security systems, heating and other shared building costs. In practice, however, they are often opaque and difficult for residents to challenge.

Maximilian tells me that Germany is facing a similar issue, amplified by the fact that renting from large-scale landlords is much more common there than in the UK. “The inflation crisis pushed these service charges up a lot,” he says. “And often, tenants cannot even tell what services they are paying for.”

Under German law, tenants have the right to demand that landlords provide detailed documentation showing how service charges are calculated. “Tenants can demand proof of the costs,” Maximilian explains. “But many people don’t know that.”

For the union, this has opened up a significant opportunity for organizing. “If you demand proof of the costs, and the landlord does not provide it,” he says, “then tenants can organize to withhold part of the rent.”

A poster advertising a tenants’ union information event on reviewing service charges.

The same principle applies to repairs. If a landlord fails to fix damage in a building, such as broken heating systems, mold or leaking pipes, tenants have the legal right to reduce their rent proportionally until the repairs are completed. But exercising these rights individually can be risky.

This is where the collective structure of the union becomes crucial.

“Again,” Maximilian reminds me, “this is a game of fear and trust. To organize something like withholding rent, people need to believe that they can win.” And increasingly, the union has been able to demonstrate that it can produce results.

Compensation has been secured in some buildings where landlords failed to carry out repairs, and rent reductions have been coordinated across groups of tenants facing the same problems. These victories — sometimes small in financial terms — appear to have played an outsized role in convincing other tenants that participation is worthwhile.

Union activity has also begun spreading into a new type of housing environment: large developments owned not by private corporations, but by state-owned housing companies. According to Maximilian, these landlords can be surprisingly aggressive.

“Because of austerity,” he explains, “the state companies can be very hard as landlords. In some ways they behave worse than the private corporations.”

Organizing these developments has become one of the union’s next major frontiers. “Around 2024, with the move into these state-run settlements, we started getting more public attention,” Maximilian recalls. “We were on TV for the first time.”

Listening to Maximilian describe this trajectory, I find myself thinking again about the Chicago case I explored in my previous report. The contrast is striking, almost the reverse.

In Chicago, the CSP organizer I spoke with emphasized avoiding direct conflict with landlords where possible, and working quietly through existing community organizations rather than building new ones. Much of the activity remained informal and deliberately low-profile.

In Germany, by contrast, tenant organizing began outside existing institutions and has gradually grown into a formal organizational structure. Rather than staying hidden, the union has become highly visible, publicly confronting landlords and attracting media attention.

Success in Germany, however, has also brought pressures that the Chicago organizations have not yet had to confront.

“The first real attack,” Maximilian tells me, “came from one of the large private landlords. I think part of it was that we had organized two groups across their buildings in two different cities,” he adds. “That brought us to their attention as a potential problem.”

The main trigger for the attack was likely a press statement issued by the union criticizing the company for failing to carry out repairs in several buildings.

“They went after us legally,” Maximilian recalls. “We received a letter telling us we needed to retract the statement and pay a fine — which was more money than the union had. They gave us five days to respond.”

“I think it was designed to crush us,” he concludes. “And it could have worked. At the time, the union as an organization still had very limited capacity. There were only two or three of us who could organize the defense. We were desperately looking around for an attorney.”

As Maximilian sees it, the psychological dimension of such attacks is not accidental.

“The fear and trust I talked about before — it applies to organizers as well. Legal attacks are scary for people organizing the activity. Obviously, they are designed to have that effect.”

Eventually, the union managed to find a lawyer willing to represent them. The company withdrew its claim, but the episode still inflicted damage. “We lost about 1,000 euros,” Maximilian admits. “For a small organization that’s a lot of money.”

He suspects that might’ve been part of the strategy. “Maybe they thought they could bankrupt us with legal costs.”

Maximilian speaks at a tenants’ union meeting in Munich.

I ask Maximilian whether there were further attacks from landlords. He surprises me by saying that the next one came not from a landlord at all, but from one of the Mietervereine, the old tenant organizations. “This one was even worse,” he says. “It got really nasty.”

The conflict arose in a large housing settlement in Munich, where the union had been organizing tenants around inflated service charges. By Maximilian’s account, a large Mieterverein attempted to bypass the union and negotiate directly with the landlord.

“They tried to split off our members and take control of the action,” he tells me. “I think they saw us as a potential disruption. Maybe they thought we were going to steal their members.”

Part of the tension stemmed from the union’s own criticism of the traditional tenant associations. “We told tenants to be careful about trusting them,” Maximilian says. “And they obviously didn’t like that.”

What made the episode particularly striking, as Maximilian describes it, was its timing.

“Just before the attack I thought we were sorting things out. I had a fairly friendly conversation with them, and I mentioned that I was going on holiday in a few days.” That, he says, was exactly when the legal action arrived.

“They essentially argued that we were legal competitors,” Maximilian explains, “and that by criticizing them to the tenants, we had committed slander.”

The union received a legal notice giving them only two or three days to respond, accompanied by the threat of a large financial penalty that again could have crippled the union. I ask Maximilian how the experience felt. “It was unpleasant — very unpleasant.”

While relations with some of the older organizations had always been somewhat strained, he says he never expected such an aggressive move. “The fact that they waited until they knew I was on holiday, that was particularly shocking.”

Once again, the union assembled the funds for legal representation. This time the process was easier, since they had already established a relationship with a lawyer during the earlier dispute. The attack was ultimately beaten back.

Even so, I can hear from Maximilian’s tone that there is still bitterness about the event.

“It was surprising how underhanded it was,” he says. “But in a way it was an important learning experience. We learned something new about reality.”

By this point we’ve been talking for several hours. In the background I can hear my wife returning from visiting her cousin. “We should talk again,” I tell Maximilian. “Yes,” he replies, “it might take a couple of conversations.”

Reflecting on our discussion, I realize I want to understand more about the union’s internal structure — how membership works, how decisions are made and how activity is coordinated across multiple cities.

Heading to the kitchen, I find my wife sitting at the table on the phone with her mother, who usually calls at this time. “Have you had dinner?” I ask. She gives me a silent thumbs-up and I ladle my now-cold stew into a little green bowl.

Putting it into the microwave, I stand there for a moment watching it turn.

Outside the window, the rain is still falling.

This report was contributed by Campaign Reporter M. Rowton (submitted April 1, 2026).

If you’d like to join the Kampagne fur eine Sozialistische Partei (KSP) or follow their work, email 2019ksp@gmail.com or visit their website: kampagnesozialistischepartei.de or Instagram: instagram.com/kampagne_sozialistische_partei.

If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP), become a Campaign Reporter, or read more of our reports, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com or visit our Substack: campaignforasocialistparty.substack.com.

We particularly focused our activities toward the role of those rights in protecting immigrant workers from arbitrary detention at their workplaces. We offered practical educational material — and in return learned from the people we met in immigrant communities across Chicago. They taught us about what really works, what is missing and needed, and how some have already been organizing and implementing a variety of protocols against deportations over many years.

Six months ago, several federal agencies, primarily Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), commenced Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago — a deportation campaign in Chicago using a set and scale of tactics that had to be seen to be believed. Several of our members participated in rapid response activities and mutual aid in support of immigrants during and after Midway Blitz, in addition to our primary know-your-rights efforts. We became first-hand witnesses to the reality of federal immigration enforcement tactics during that time, as well as to the variety of civic responses by the Chicago workers, employers, and residents to this acute period of federal intervention in the city. These responses ranged from carefully planned to spontaneous, confrontational to quietly avoidant, from effective in preventing deportations to not.

In the short time we have engaged in this activity, we have learned more than we can responsibly report because of the civil disobedience bent of anti-deportation activism and the threat federal enforcement activities pose to the life, liberty, and property of immigrant Chicagoans. However, we hope this report will outline the broad strokes of our activities, what we learned from them, and where we believe we can both help and learn most effectively going forward. We know that deportation campaigns against immigrant workers, while particularly out-and-loud lately, occur across presidential administrations, whether it is Republicans or Democrats in charge, and we plan to be involved in this activity for the long haul.

Why Anti-Deportation Activism

The Campaign for a Socialist Party is oriented toward exploring the latent potential in civil society by engaging in liberal activism and learning from liberal activists. By liberal we do not mean the issues of capital D Democrats or the way the term liberal is abused in the media, but rather voluntary organizing and association around the social needs that need meeting and the civil rights and liberties that need defending to enable society to organize itself toward freedom for all. Immigrant rights activism in general and anti-deportation activism in particular are a natural fit for this kind of organizing work. The right to travel, the right to work, the right to private spaces free from government intrusion, the right to due process — these are classic liberal concerns which socialists historically organized to protect and expand, and anti-deportation activism touches on all of them.

Anti-deportation activism also connects our organizers to workplaces in a way that rounds out CSP’s existing organizing, in areas such as education and tenants organizing, which affect workers as consumers, rather than directly in their role as producers. In that sense, anti-deportation is really about labor — about the people who produce goods and services in society, and the particular leverage they have in that role.

If you take immigration head-on without avoiding any dimension of the matter, it becomes a complex and multi-layered issue in which many reasonable, contradictory demands are at play. It is an issue that tangibly affects people locally here in Chicago — a city where many neighborhoods are 30% or more foreign-born, built by waves of immigrants over time, and where immigrants are part of the local economy at every level — and a fundamental national and international subject. Because of its complex international nature, immigration is an issue on which neither existing political party has a coherent answer, and that absence is also an opportunity. In CSP, we welcome that complexity and seek to organize from within it.

Several Chicago neighborhoods on the North and Southwest sides have foreign-born populations exceeding 30%, including West Ridge, Albany Park and Pilsen (pictured)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, connecting with immigrant communities means encountering robust civic-social networks that have always existed for arriving undocumented immigrants, who need to find jobs, housing, childcare and meet other needs, generally without being able to approach the government for assistance or welfare, and while earning substandard wages that make standard services unaffordable. At a time when civic life is relatively depleted, and native Chicagoans tend to rely more readily on government services than on one another, immigrant communities are often a hive of civic and social activity, led by activists who have experience organizing here in the U.S. and in their countries of origin. We chose anti-deportation activism as a core new form of CSP activism because we want to learn as much as we can from such individuals and networks.

What We Did

We began by talking to contacts of ours who were already doing anti-deportation activism in immigrant communities. Through our partnership with a fantastic immigrant worker center in Chicago, whose leaders we trust, we were trained to conduct our own trainings on constitutional rights and anti-deportation strategies that had already been tested and refined through that organization’s years of work. We learned, practically speaking, what had actually worked in the past in terms of asserting rights as a means for stopping deportations, as well as tactics for how to handle encounters with immigration enforcement at various types of workplaces. The worker center gave us materials to distribute to businesses and families, and taught us how to train specific workplaces for encounters with federal agents. With permission, we took that information and went out to pass it along.

We thought carefully about the following considerations in choosing areas to canvass: (1) we selected areas where a large volume of immigrants work and run businesses; (2) we aimed for areas of the city that the worker center told us they would be unlikely to reach within the scope of their work, which focuses primarily on the Latino community in particular regions of the city; and (3) we looked for areas not likely to be saturated with progressive organizations looking to get out the vote or make a political statement out of this particular season in immigration enforcement. In short — we aimed at thriving immigrant commercial areas of mixed political persuasion and a variety of regions of origin. Not hard to find in Chicago!

We had selected canvassing to challenge ourselves to have many conversations, including challenging ones, up front, but it turned out to be a surprisingly easy issue to go door-knocking about. We easily engaged almost everyone we talked to in the South and Central Asian business district where we began. We were welcomed and offered a lot of food, and the question of how workers can protect themselves from being detained while at work turned out to be extremely front-of-mind. Many businesses were already employing ad hoc strategies to keep their most at-risk workers as safe as possible. Word of our presence traveled fast, and store owners and workers had questions. People came out of stores down the street because someone inside had pointed us out.

Despite the many organizations nominally offering similar trainings in these communities, nearly everywhere we went we were the first and often only group to directly reach out. This was also true in a Southeast Asian area we canvassed, where we heard from businesses about how immigration enforcement had been plaguing the area for decades. In a neighborhood with a dense but divided mix of Eastern Europeans, East Asians, Latin Americans, and US-born people, we encountered a more mixed response but nevertheless a surprising degree of interest in learning what we had to share — and a pronounced lack of communication across groups from different regions of origin.

We often got questions we couldn’t answer, which pushed us to deepen our understanding of the arena we are learning to operate in. While most everyone was happy to have a conversation, employers were less keen to book longer trainings, except in a few instances where they knew one of our members already. We noticed that in these conversations, avoiding deportations was approached as a practical, rather than a political matter — unlike in the press and among progressives, the focus wasn’t the Trump administration, and the problem wasn’t treated as something new. We also noticed that many immigrant groups already had, as anticipated, the kind of robust communication networks among people from their country or language-group that can help people to avoid deportations. However, there was often little-to-no communication of information outside or between such groups. Given that most everyone was happy to speak with us, we began to see a role we might play longer-term in bridging those informational divides.

After these initial conversations, we booked a small number of in-depth anti-deportation trainings through our contacts from our members’ prior CSP activism, specifically to assist in planning for potential encounters with federal agents at childcare establishments and in larger residential buildings. These began as transmissions of practical information: here are your rights if someone comes to the door, here is what a judicial warrant looks like versus an administrative one, here is what to say and what not to say.

We found “training” is something of a misnomer, as these ended up being more comprehensive planning exercises requiring us to learn about the people we were assisting and work out roles in emergencies and for day-to-day functioning during periods of high immigration enforcement activity. Our trainees needed to work through issues such as: who stays front-of-house and answers the door, who goes to the store to pick up supplies when there’s a chance of being detained at the store, how do workers who live across the city mitigate the risk of detention during their commutes, who warns the others and who gets called in the event of an encounter with agents, and when and how community members and customers can help reduce risk through mutual aid and coordination. Practice getting people comfortable with what they can say and do not have to say, in a language they often haven’t mastered.

The big principle, learned from our partner organization and reinforced by our short experience, is that when it comes to federal detentions of immigrants, the process is the punishment, whether someone is ultimately deported or not — and indeed, whether they turn out to be undocumented or not. Once someone is detained, their life is already profoundly disrupted — they typically lose their jobs due to prolonged absence, they have to pay for much or all the legal help support they need (no such thing as a public defender in immigration court), the detention conditions are dire, the uncertainty is traumatic, and so forth. So, while we did learn about and provide information for how to deal with a detention in progress, and how to amass information and support to contest a detention after the fact, we learned that for many people, by the time those resources are needed it is too little too late. Everything we learned and passed on was therefore oriented toward avoidance above all, helping ensure that people at risk never come face to face with an agent in the first place.

Operation Midway Blitz arrived not long after we began our work, and some of the areas we canvassed were hit hard by it. The mass deportation effort we witnessed during this time was quite plainly aimed not at criminals, cartels, or even recent arrivals, but at people at or on their way to work, including many people who had spent decades living and working in Chicago in a completely integrated way in the local economy. We learned quickly in our canvasses that rideshare drivers were being pulled over and detained, particularly at areas like airports where high-value fares attract drivers. Then it was childcare workers on their commutes from their homes in lower-income neighborhoods to the higher-income neighborhoods where they work. Then it was parents dropping their children off at schools. Then we saw a long string of detentions of construction workers and landscapers being picked up from yards in relatively wealthy areas of Chicago.

In some immigrant commercial districts, the detentions would begin as random street-level stops of people who seemed, by their looks and location, potentially foreign. These choices of target seemed directly geared toward two things: (1) avoiding having to bother with obtaining judicial warrants, and (2) deliberately publicizing and making visible the detentions in upscale, Democrat-stronghold areas of the city (this latter was particularly underscored by the voluble presence of DHS helicopters on almost a daily basis in areas where detentions would concentrate).

Because 4th Amendment protections are relatively weak for someone in a vehicle and even weaker for someone on a lawn, compared to someone in their home or inside a building, the particular tactics used in Midway Blitz became a frontier for us to explore further how to help immigrants avoid detention, and a reason to review and modify our materials. The answer again was avoidance first, and the practical mechanics of that avoidance were and will continue to be our focus.

In general, Chicagoans seemed perturbed by the methods employed in Midway Blitz. Witnessing these tactics really did change some people’s minds in real time. It became increasingly clear that the deportations were not really aimed at solving (and will not solve) the socioeconomic issues that propelled the initial popularity of deportations among some Chicagoans, such as drug-related crime and the diverting of welfare resources from existing lower-income residents to the recently arrived migrants during the Biden term. The federal agents seemed unprepared, and were pointlessly and publicly rough, both in how they physically handled people they arrested and in their crowd control maneuvers. And the residents being detained most often seemed to be, if not citizens by law, then citizens in practice — people who work, send their kids to school, pay taxes, and participate in the consumer economy in Chicago. In real time, the whole affair felt wrong — as if people had a common sense of a violation of civic freedom when they saw it. There was a real, spontaneous will to stop these random detentions of working people, and it brought people, including residents who are not usually active in their communities, out of their private lives to help.

ICE agents detain a protester during Operation Midway Blitz on Chicago’s East Side (Oct. 14, 2025)

As such, the much-publicized rapid response networks (most commonly messaging systems created to identify and warn people about the presence of federal agents in a neighborhood) that cropped up in certain neighborhoods grew beyond the various political agendas of their founders and individual members and drew in people of a great variety of perspectives on the broader issue of immigration. We think this showed some genuine potential which could be expanded upon in the future.

We discovered through our activity two important limits on rapid response. Firstly, a certain subset of the rapid responders were motivated by rage and/or political motivations that made them want to engage in and escalate confrontations with federal agents, when the overwhelming best option for the people most at risk is to avoid confrontation. Secondly, neighborhood-based rapid response networks often resulted in activists within a single neighborhood or cluster of neighborhoods warning one another of the presence of federal agents, but not the people most at risk of being detained, who were coming in from other neighborhoods to work and were not connected to the rapid response warning system at all, and in some cases, we learned, were unaware such networks even existed.

If these rapid response networks were maintained instead of being abandoned once political attention moves on to the next issue, broadened to include more immigrant communities, and disciplined to exclude confrontational behavior, they could become increasingly valuable and effective. Likewise for the less publicized but no less important mutual aid networks that some of our members participated in, which delivered supplies to people who, for avoidance reasons, were temporarily unable to leave their homes. Building such networks up, and organizing further around supporting people who lose significant work due to having to remain home, could be a game-changer during future upsurges in local deportation efforts.

After Midway Blitz ended and federal focus moved on, we saw deportations continue, albeit more quietly and at a lower rate. We have since revisited some of the neighborhoods where we began. One neighborhood we visited, on the more conservative Northwest Side, was barely touched at all by Midway Blitz. Another neighborhood we canvassed had experienced near-daily detentions in plain view on its major thoroughfare for a solid two months. On our return visits, we learned about the real-time practices that businesses used to protect their workers, and about how different individuals, including U.S. citizens, were affected by Midway Blitz. We learned about the economic effect of deportation drives, as local businesses lost earnings. Even when employers helped their workers to be able to show up for work, many of their customers stayed home in fear of arbitrary detention themselves.

In some cases, we found that the practices that businesses employed went beyond our training materials, protecting not just workers, but customers and passersby as well. We also had candid conversations about what did not work — what was not useful about what we offered, what we might change, and what used to work under immigration enforcement regimes in prior administrations that does not work anymore. Businesses we revisited were honest and welcoming, and we once again enjoyed great food. We will continue to return, as we know our steady presence is necessary to build the kind of trust required to effectively collaborate in this high-stakes and sensitive project.

Conclusion

All told, our work thus far has generated more questions than answers — as it is meant to; more lines of inquiry to go down, more social dynamics to explore, more interpersonal connections to deepen. As far as conclusions go, we can say that employers are broadly interested in not having their workers deported, this is a live issue for many, many regular people in Chicago, and, because this arena of activity is neither politically nor administratively saturated, engaging it is a low-barrier way to take our activists well outside the world of typical left protest-activism and into the heart of the living city.

Going forward, you will find our members continuing to canvass territories old and new, performing and improving our constitutional rights trainings and anti-deportation planning sessions with businesses and individuals, connecting with other activist groups with expertise at the nexus of immigration and the workplace, and participating routinely in mutual aid and mutual interest activities in order to expand the reach and usefulness of our efforts. There is more fertile territory for anti-deportation activism than we can possibly cover in Chicago, and because we know deportations without due process will continue indefinitely, long after 2028, we know there will be plenty of work to do going forward. We won’t be performing miracles, but we will learn.

We welcome new participants here in Chicago at any time. We also believe this type of activity can be taken up fruitfully by anyone, anywhere in the United States, and we can help you get started. You need not be an expert — just curious and thoughtful. The conversations get easier to have every time you have them, and you will get better at learning from each encounter.

Join us!

This report was contributed by Campaign members in Chicago (submitted April 25, 2026).

If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP), become a Campaign Reporter, or read more of our reports, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com or visit our Substack: campaignforasocialistparty.substack.com.

Arriving in Berlin

Luckily my friend Matthew, who I was staying with in Berlin, talked me through getting the train from the airport to his place over WhatsApp. The next evening, Wednesday, I met Odie, my KSP Berlin contact, outside an underground station and we chatted easily in the freezing, zero degrees cold of Berlin before moving to a Middle Eastern cafe to get a takeout. We then went to the KSP meetup at Syndicat, the hip anarchist bar they meet at.

Chatting easily was the theme of my time with the KSP. Most of them speak English well and were incredibly welcoming hosts. I was performing a piece at Spoken Word Berlin the next evening, and I told Odie about my comedy script in which I take the piss out of neurodiversity, as well as my upcoming blog entry on a critical mental health website. The piece is called “Neurodiversity – the Opium of the People.” Odie smiled, as did the other KSP folk when I spoke to them about it, whereas most people look bemused or offended.

My friend Matthew soon arrived at Syndicat. He is a committed Trotskyist who recently organized his workplace in Berlin and the KSP folk were interested in how he accomplished this. Odie suggested he come back another time and run a workshop on organizing for them.

Odie works in a school with children in need of extra help. Having done similar work myself, we bonded over our frustration with the authoritarian nature of schools, which often force struggling children to conform to rigid and punitive classroom rules. Odie is currently working with a Ukrainian refugee boy who is struggling in school and doesn’t speak much German. I cringed at what the school expects the boy to do and said that in my training, I learnt you build the relationship first, and then the child will learn whatever is appropriate. Odie said he did that, but it was slow, and the boy was mainly fascinated by fighter planes, which is not unusual for boys coming from war zones.

The following day, Thursday, I performed at the ultra-hip Berlin Spoken Word. The MC asked people to say what content warning they had for their pieces. I remember thinking to myself: are these softies going to have breakdowns if you talk about scary things? Surely we go to art events partly to be scared. Isn’t that why we watch Doctor Who and horror films?

When it came to my turn I said, “Content warning: I am very offensive!” and then started my piece about Moody Cow Disorder, which satirizes neurodiversity. A few people looked uncomfortable, but I also got increasing amounts of laughs.

The MC also warned us that they did not welcome racism, sexism, transphobia or anything else that perpetuates oppressive systems. I thought to myself: for goodness’ sake, can’t we just boo and hiss if someone says something we don’t like?

Traveling to Leipzig

The next evening, Friday, I traveled to Leipzig with Felix, a middle-aged beardy hippy type and KSP activist. He was involved in a recent Berlin KSP project called “Childcare Islands,” which met in cafes and provided childcare during a kindergarten workers’ strike. That strike was now over. The unions negotiated a 5.8% pay increase over 27 months, so the project went into abeyance while the KSP Berlin group reflected on what to do next and what they had learned from it.

We were met at the Leipzig train station by Jann, who was my host. I could have stayed in the art studio where the conference was being held, but while I am used to staying in squats and run-down studios at conferences, I am now 66 with high blood pressure and prefer my creature comforts, not least easy access to a bathroom in the middle of the night. We briefly said hello to Jann’s delightfully scruffy dog, packed away my bag and then headed off to the studio for the Socialist Salon: an event separate from the conference that the KSP regularly organizes in a few cities across Germany.

Jann tells me that there is a lot of suspicion about socialism in East Germany, where Leipzig is located, due to people’s memories of the Soviet era and the German Democratic Republic. I am reminded of a friend in Reading who is of Polish origin; her family settled in the UK after World War II. She told me that Stalin killed more people than Hitler and said her family had lost a small family farm to the Soviets, as did many other Poles. So this suspicion of socialism is by no means limited to East Germany.

For the Socialist Salon, I was told that the KSP usually invites other non-KSP civil social organizations to present and then answer questions in a panel-style debate. This time, however, they invited KSP organizers to present.

There were about 100 people present at the Socialist Salon, mainly non-KSP folk. I don’t understand German, so much of it went over my head, but I gathered that there were presentations on a renters’ union, an after-school tutoring project and Felix presented the Childcare Islands project. The projects I heard about seemed successful, though others might fail or have mixed results; above all, they stressed that they were learning as they went along.

Presentations on renters’ unions, childcare organizing and tutoring projects at a Socialist Salon held in an art studio in Leipzig, Germany, the same venue used for the conference.

Tina, who worked on the tutoring project, said when I asked her later that she enjoyed the tutoring and that it enriched her life. She said she wouldn’t do it otherwise and that it was important to work on projects that interest you so you are likely to stick with them long term. Doing what you enjoy was something other KSP activists also stressed to me. It seemed to be a message that got drummed into them quite early on and I liked this a lot.

The tutoring project is called “Freie Lernhilfe” (“Free Learning Support”), and it has attracted retired teachers, university students and children.

The KSP Conference: Discussions on Civil Society

The next day, Saturday morning, is the day of the conference, and at 10 a.m. I arrive at a run-down art studio. We sit on hard wooden office chairs and go around introducing ourselves; there are about 20 people present. We break into small groups to discuss the themes of the day’s workshops. We have a break, then come back and listen to reports on different projects (child care, tutoring, tenants’ unions, community kitchen, strike support, art and sport projects). One of the KSP members, Rudi, whispers translations in my ear as I take notes; I remember the whole scene feeling familiar, even though I haven’t been to a meeting like this in many years.

We break into small groups to discuss “What is civil social organizing?” There might have been different subjects discussed in other groups, such as, “What do we expect from civil social organizing?” or “Are our expectations being met?” But hey, I’m English and hard of hearing, and Rudi, though charming, can’t capture everything.

In the workshop on “What is civil social organizing?” the heart of the work became apparent. The usual big sheet of paper on the wall and a thick pen to write up summaries of the discussion came out. The KSP activists said that civil society was the part of society not organized by the state; for example, the Church was not organized by the state. They explored the differences between state, employer, capital and society, and asked whether small businesses were part of civil society. They also raised the history of civil social organizing and how, over 100 years ago, a worker could go to a community cafe to eat, attend socialist sports clubs and have much of their life revolve around other civil-society organizations.

The discussion turned to the difficulties of trying to engage people. One person said a friend had asked him what he got out of his KSP activities and he said “nothing,” and she wasn’t interested after that. Obviously he should have said he got a lot out of it; like Tina said about the tutoring project, it enriched her life and she wouldn’t do it otherwise. It reminded me of trying to organize tenants in Reading. A woman who lived in the flat above me, when I suggested inviting people in the block round for tea to talk about what it was like living there, said to me, “What do I get out of it?” The place had its problems: crack dealers used to come into the block to collect drugs, one tenant smashed up her room and another died and I had to call the police to break his door down. I stopped trying to organize the tenants at that point and eventually moved out; I couldn’t do it on my own.

The KSP activists reflected that what they were experiencing might be that the tradition of organizing has faded, perhaps because the state provides so much that people expect it to look after them. But as I type this report on Monday after the conference, I am sitting in Cafe Engels in Berlin next to my friend Matthew. He smiles at me over his laptop and says that the union he is organizing at work had a meeting yesterday; nearly everyone was there and they are planning to recruit more. Sometimes, when conditions are right, things can come together and organizing works well.

I also reflect that the KSP is only three years old. It started in 2023, yet already has people and projects all over Germany. To me that seems a success.

The discussion eventually turned to how the state is now entwined with civil society; for example, how elderly care might be provided for by the state, or at least funded by it. KSP members raised the question of how independent of the state various forms of civil social organizing are. Someone said, “we want civil society but we don’t really know what it is.” The group reflected that once a civil social organization gets big the state moves in and tries to take it over. Sometimes they violently shut it down too.

Rudi, a member of the Kampagne für eine Sozialistische Partei (KSP), translates discussions for John Hoggett during a conference session.

One example I was reminded of was the Battle of the Beanfield in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. This happened when police violently dispersed travellers who were living in old buses and heading towards Stonehenge for the annual Stonehenge Free Festival. At the time there was a wider network of free festivals across Britain where people gathered every summer, but that scene soon faded away in the years that followed. Hitchhiking also disappeared during the late 1980s as a common way of traveling the country.

Aside from the more abstract question of what civil society is, KSP members also talked about more practical matters, such as how the kindergarten project had brought striking kindergarten workers together with parents, and that the parents may have begun supporting the workers. The parents and kindergarten workers learned something from the KSP activists, and the KSP activists, in turn, learned something from the parents and workers.

As I sit in these circles, the German language washes over me, and by the end of the day I am beginning to make out the vowels, consonants, rhythms and cadences of German speech; give me another week and I’d be speaking the language.

We have a lunch break and go to a Syrian restaurant. I have hummus and flatbread. Max, a man with glasses from the tenants’ union, asks me what the most disappointing part of the conference has been so far. I say, “That’s a bit direct!” Max replies that he is German and that this is the German way. I think it has all been delightful so far, so I say, “The lack of elderly gay men (really I mean young) to flirt with.” They laugh and Rudi says, “Wait till this evening at the bar!”

We go back to the main meeting room of the art studio and sit in a circle. Rudi whispers in my ear, translating what people say. People report back from the workshops and then on various projects. Most of the discussion focuses on the projects themselves. This leads to a discussion about the structure of the day. “Keep the bureaucracy low, we want to hear and learn from the projects,” is the clamour from the group.

Earlier I had spoken with Max (with the moustache, not Max with the glasses), the chair of the organization. He told me he had been completely burnt out the previous year and had to stand down. Listening to the discussion, I found myself thinking that while people wanted to keep bureaucracy low, the organization still needed enough structure to hold things together so the projects could continue and grow. The group seemed to manage that balance without too much fuss. I realised I was almost missing the chaos of some meetings I had attended years ago, where people threw order papers around, stamped their feet, burst into tears and stormed out. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been to these sorts of meetings for such a long time?

Projects and Organising Strategy

Max (with the glasses) reported on an incident at the Frankfurt tenants’ union. It had gone really well, but there was a bit of drama because the KSP had put photographs from the project on its website and in a newsletter without permission. The main people involved in the union were no longer KSP members. This was a bit jarring, but it was completely in line with the KSP policy of starting projects without necessarily running them themselves.

A document I received later reminded me that the purpose of KSP activity is to create the conditions in which a socialist party could emerge, not to run civil social projects itself. Starting projects is their core activity, and every good community organizer knows your job is done when the group no longer needs you.

The kindergarten project reflected a similar difficulty that arises when trying to start projects. Organizers said it had been hard to get parents to see that it was their own club, not just something for them, but something they ran themselves.

Other projects the KSP was engaged with included a restaurant in Leipzig run by a mix of KSP activists and other activists, where there were arguments about whether the food should be vegan. Another project involved a man living in the countryside outside Frankfurt who was converting an old barn into an art center. His father was a construction worker and was teaching him how to do the work. He hoped the project would eventually turn into an art club, though for the moment he was working on it largely on his own in what he described as a cultural desert.

There was also a report from a basketball project with migrants in Leipzig. The group wanted to renovate the court but said it was owned by the local council, which raised questions about how independent the project could be from the state. This prompted someone to ask whether they could raise money to buy it.

Rudi tells me, as a project idea, that he wants to open an unemployed cafe that would be open toward the end of people’s benefit payment periods, when they run out of money for food. The idea is that unemployed people could come for a cheap meal and talk to one another about their situation, rather than being left isolated at home. I comment that this could become the start of a claimants’ union. I like the idea so much that at this point I almost want to nuzzle Rudi like an over-affectionate dog. During the austerity years of the mid-2010s the left organized marches and speaker meetings, but almost no one organized benefit claimants and service users, who were suffering the most.

Another project involved a man running a music school where people could learn various instruments, though he was currently looking for others to help run it. In the evening I also met a woman who told me about a socialist choir the KSP had started that sings songs by Hanns Eisler, a German Marxist composer who wrote the national anthem of East Germany.

Attendees gather for a group discussion at the conference venue to share updates on civil social organizing projects.

Beyond the projects themselves, discussion also turns to the KSP’s relationship with the wider left. KSP activists talk about the Socialist Salons, where they invite civil society organizations to present their work, and say this has been going well. When they invite other left groups, however, few of them participate. Relationships with other left groups come up in informal discussions quite a bit. KSP members have appeared on leftist podcasts, spoken with other left groups and made several attempts to engage with them. A podcaster asked a KSP member what their line on Palestine was and he replied, “We don’t have one.” The podcaster said you have to have one or the Zionists will come along and take over.

Jann tells me the KSP gets quite a lot of attention from the German left but that most people are simply bemused by it. I reckon this will continue until the KSP has major wins that get into the press, like a big renters’ strike, and then the left might try to take over and subvert the projects. The KSP still thinks it is worth trying to talk to leftist groups because it might educate them on the importance of organizing.

In a break Felix makes jokes, imagining a civil social organized train station or airport (later I learn that in the Bavarian Ilztal, volunteers organize the train connection between Passau and Freyung, it runs on weekends and holidays between May and October). I think this reflects the almost unsaid question, the dark shadow that hangs around the ceiling, “how can this work? The task is massive.” Later in the afternoon before they voted in new officers, Max, the retiring chair, said the purpose of the organizing and of the KSP was to create conditions where a socialist party could arise and if they were not doing that they could close down. It was a tense moment but a reminder of the task they had set themselves.

History and Goals of the KSP

To clarify their relationship to the wider left, KSP activists showed me a document explaining who they are as an organization. They hark back to the Second International and the SPD in the years leading up to the First World War. Many KSP members have been in contact with the Platypus Affiliated Society, which studies the history of the left and critiques the contemporary left with its slogan, “The Left is Dead, Long Live the Left.” My guess is that quite a few KSP members could recite Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg backwards, but would also say that Marxism is irrelevant until there is a proletarian movement for socialism, and for that to happen the working class has to be organized. Their main activity is organizing civil society organizations that they hope will become independent of the KSP once they are established. They do all this while keeping an eye on the larger goal of creating conditions in which a socialist party might emerge.

For anyone wanting the full intellectual briefing, they have a document called “Campaign for a Socialist Party – Information Material for New Members.” They might hand it out if you ask nicely, or refer you instead to their shorter flyer, “What is the Campaign for a Socialist Party?”

The current campaign was founded in 2022–23. There had been a previous attempt, right after the American comrades started their campaign, but it did not work out as planned, so the KSP collapsed and restarted a little later. They now have groups in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Leipzig, Marburg and Munich. They are running various projects successfully, but these are still like seeds that have germinated, pushing up seed leaves, with a few shoots showing young leaves. It all needs watering and feeding, and that is what the conference is about.

They know the task is enormous. Felix reminded me later, on the trip back to Berlin, that they are looking at a 30–40 year horizon. Felix also raised the worry of a future catastrophe, specifically the climate catastrophe. I am a resting climate change activist and think that is already unfolding. I said to Felix that if things become so catastrophic that society begins to break down, it becomes even more important that the KSP grows and develops.

Membership costs 10 euros per month, but if someone cannot afford it they can ask the treasurer if they may pay less. Members are expected to put in four hours of work each week in one of the civil society projects the KSP is running. They receive voting rights at the national assemblies, and the money goes toward the website, flyers and other operational costs.

The conference included reports from regional representatives, which invited further reflection on the civil society projects. At this time, KSP members also thanked the outgoing officers and voted in new ones, giving each of them a hearty round of applause. They then switched to a discussion of social media and how it had attracted interest, but noted that new members in more isolated regions did not always have projects they could easily take part in. Thorben later told me they once operated a “Lone Wolf” service. The CSP in America currently runs something similar for members who do not have a local group, speaking with people on Zoom and encouraging them to set up projects or join existing ones, such as food banks run by churches. Conference participants wondered whether social media should be handled by individual projects rather than centrally.

After the discussions ended, we had an evening break for the most delicious pizza, cooked outside by two young people. We came back in for the final part of the conference and then it was over, and people rushed to stack chairs, tidy up and prepare for the party.

There was a bar and tables where people sat around, with some kind of trip-hop techno playing in the background as young men rolled cigarettes. That took me back to my youth in the mid-1980s, when my housemate Michelle asked me to run the childcare for a women’s conference. I of course said yes and ran it with her boyfriend and a few hippy men I knew from the area. They took me to a party on Saturday night in a minibus, and the next day, after about four hours’ sleep, we looked after the children again. Once I was the young one at these sorts of events; now I’m the old one. Tired of chatting, I went back to Jann’s for a reasonably early bed. I had already taken my blood pressure meds. I was mildly disappointed that I hadn’t tried to cajole Thorben onto the dance floor to the trip-hop techno, and I wondered whether there had been any older gay men around I could have tried to chat up.

Concluding Observations

With the conference now over, the next morning feels more like spring than winter. It is about 8 degrees Celsius. I have breakfast in a Leipzig cafe, surfing the web while waiting for my “comrades” to wake up. I came across an article about the digitization of therapy in the UK, describing the crassness of AI therapy and how data mining from NHS therapy sessions has helped make this possible. The piece also notes that around 70% of therapists are burnt out, and that some now rely on food banks.

AI is snowballing. It is shaping up to be the next big capitalist boom. It will fundamentally change how service industries are delivered and how work is organized. The left and organized labor are not prepared for this. It will not only be therapy that becomes digitized and exploited; Uberization is spreading everywhere.

Thinking about this makes me reflect on what I had just witnessed at the conference. The KSP insists that organizing must come first, that human relationships and cooperation are the foundation of any left-wing activity, and that without them no socialist party can emerge. The KSP in Germany is still young, only three years old, with many small projects that are just beginning to take shape. Yet those small projects are rooted in human solidarity, which may be the only real antidote to the anonymous, data-driven exploitation that Big Data is accelerating.

On Monday, flying home, I find myself repeating the German safety announcements syllable by syllable. Perhaps if I find other comrades in the UK to form a British KSP or CSP, I might visit again. And perhaps next time they can teach me a bit more German.

This report was contributed by Campaign Reporter John Hoggett (submitted March 2, 2026).

If you’d like to join the Kampagne fur eine Sozialistische Partei (KSP) or follow their work, email 2019ksp@gmail.com or visit their website: kampagnesozialistischepartei.de or Instagram: instagram.com/kampagne_sozialistische_partei.

If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP), become a Campaign Reporter, or read more of our reports, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com or visit our Substack: campaignforasocialistparty.substack.com.

Community Conditions

The headquarters of the CMB is based in a housing community, where we have been organizing for about nine months, but we do most of our mutual-aid work in an apartment complex across the street from the housing community. Our chapter has been organizing in this apartment complex for years (I believe six to eight years to be exact), prior to my membership in 2024. The forms of this organization have been the continuance of mutual-aid drives and community patrols to reduce the violence in the complex.

The conditions of the apartment complex consist of gangs, violence, heavy surveillance (either by security cars and SUVs that circle around the complex or by newly installed security cameras), as well as poor tenant conditions, including infestations caused by overflowing trash, severe mold damage, and long-overdue repairs. If you were to drive through the complex, you would see a predominantly black population outside, albeit there are other nationalities, like Hispanics and Arabs, though few in number, that live in the area as well. 

We haven’t had much interaction with the latter Hispanic and Arab demographics in the apartments so our focus has been on the black community members. The majority that are outdoors consist of kids ranging from two to maybe twelve years of age (usually the first ones to come to our mutual-aid events, along with their mothers) then you have a thirteen to thirty-five age range either on the sides or middle of the street, and then the older demographic is usually sitting at the bottom of their stairway talking with others — and then, every couple weeks or so, there’s us, with our Pamper, contraceptive, or drug-awareness drives. 

The conditions of the housing community also consist of a lot of surveillance, as each house has a ring camera as a response to — as what neighbors have told us — cars being broken into. The housing community is older in age, with some residents dating back to the 80’s. If there are kids outside, it’s either on our immediate street or towards the front entrance where the apartment kids hang out or get dropped off from school. 

In contrast to the apartments, the housing community has a larger Hispanic demographic that we had to account for in our organizing efforts. For example, last month during a Pamper drive, our Hispanic neighbors from across the street let us borrow their canopy to provide us shade from a mid-afternoon Texas sun that was beaming directly on us. They even made us homemade lemonade. I bring this up not to be sentimental per se but just to say that, despite the language barrier between us and our Spanish-speaking neighbors, this act of kindness and exchange happened all the same. This has raised questions in our attempts to organize not only the black community but the remaining working-class communities in the area. 

Planning the Event

October provided us at the CMB the opportunity to help organize a combined Halloween and Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) community event, and the two articles in the Sublation Magazine Substack page provided the concepts for our project (“An Interview on Immigration Defense” and “On the Drawing Circle in Darmstadt, Germany” reports, which involved an art circle and immigration rights work being done through a church respectively). Timing was everything in regard to this project. Between our chapter leads having a baby, myself getting a second job and being without the convenience of my car (and therefore relying on Uber burning my mere part-time wages each trip) there were many forces at hand in trying to realize this project within a month. However, under these circumstances, I forgot to involve my comrades more than I should have due to attempting to compensate while our chapter leads took care of their new child.

 Days were spent putting together the plan after discovering there was a local Catholic church that did immigration rights work. The idea was to ally ourselves with this church and find out which part of the congregation celebrated Dia de los Muertos. To find this out, me and the chapter lead visited the church. We arrived maybe 20-30 minutes before service was about to end. I was in the waiting room of the church until the pastor came out from the double doors of the chapel where I greeted him and told him about our organization and the community event we were trying to do. He told me that he had members that celebrated Dia de los Muertos and to email him for more details. The manner of this exchange was brief, as he had just got done preaching, but it confirmed what was needed to move forward. 

From this group of congregants, the plan was to ask if they knew any bilingual face-painters (as this is an important aspect of Dia de los Muertos) and if they would help us with the community event. During small talk at the Halloween / Dia de los Muertos event, we would tell the painters what we do and that, if they were interested, we would like them to assist us with future events. From there, we would stay in contact, build rapport, and, over time, our relationship with the painters would naturally bring us to the point of asking whether they could lead a more permanent art circle. 

Because the painters came from the church, I figured the church could serve as the setting for the circle. The church not only provides a space for the circle and is a resource for immigrants' rights (they do food pantries as well), but also contains an established social group of working-class people that share everyday working-class issues with the rest of the community regardless of their immigration status, such as needing help to move or getting their car repaired or finding a new job, and so on. 

Flyers about the art circle were to be spread to the housing and apartment communities, as this would be a way to connect both with the church and broaden the social network of the three together. This would also bring awareness to our community work and, in the process, possibly gain us potential comrades for future tenant organizing efforts in the apartment complexes. The latter would come because of the relationships built within the circle and discussions about the material conditions of the members. 

We discussed this idea with other comrades and the chapter leads agreed that the idea was good and added other elements such as doing a “trunk-or-treat” at the community house and that we should include a petition for street lights because there are no functional street lights on our street, leaving the community pitch-black at night. We reached an agreement and then it was only a matter of implementation. 

As experience teaches us, things do not always go according to plan. The night resulted in a night with the comrades. The pitfalls were the following:

Pitfall One: Miscommunication with the Pastor

After we left the church, I emailed the pastor’s personal email that he gave me. In the subject line, I wrote “Halloween/Day of the dead community event,” thinking he would remember our conversation. I’m not sure if this postponed the response from him, but I sent out another email a couple days later with the subject line “Community event” and got a response the next day. He replied that they didn’t have painters for the event. I attribute this to my own lack of thoroughness regarding researching Dia de los Muertos. I had assumed the painters were a specialized entity based on the beautiful designs of the face-paintings I had seen before. As one of my Mexican coworkers informed me, it's usually the family that does the painting. 

I thanked the pastor for checking and quickly tried to find an alternative source for the painters. I turned to my coworkers. My mistake was not informing my comrades of the changes that were going on, as they might’ve known someone that could’ve helped us put the event together. I also missed inviting the church to the event regardless of their response. 

Pitfall Two: Last-Minute Search for Painters

One of my coworkers said they celebrated Dia de los Muertos (this is the same coworker that said that painting was done by the family) and I asked for their help, letting them know I would cover any costs for what they needed to celebrate the holiday. She seemed interested and said she had to check her schedule and that she would get back to me. At this point, it was the week of Halloween and it was between them doing it or paying for painters myself. Needless to say, I didn’t get a response, but I didn’t press the issue — I just had to pay. 

Our organization has paid for painters before via this app called Thumbtack. But when I inquired about the painters I needed for the event, they wouldn’t disclose information about whether the painters celebrated Dia de los Muertos or the nationality of the painters. This left me in the dark about who I might be hiring. I paid either way. 

The result was that one black painter came to the event. She was great (and I think she’s interested in joining the CMB) but she admitted that it would be a challenge to paint Day of the Dead style art. I think she ended up painting a few of the comrades’ kids' faces and I let her paint my hand. 

Pitfall Three: Miscommunication with Neighbors 

Not only did I reach out to my coworkers for assistance, but I also reached out to our kind neighbors mentioned earlier. Fortunately, their son served as an interpreter for me. They celebrated Dia de los Muertos and were glad to help with decorations. Around two days before the event, they provided us with decorations. However, on the night of Halloween, they were dressed in costumes as if they were going to another Halloween party somewhere else. All that we could do at that point was give them some food that we had left over — at least as a sign of appreciation for their contributions.  

Looking Ahead

The night didn’t end how I wanted but the day went well. Our chapter lead told me two or three days before the community event that we were doing a food drive with some organizations that we have collaborated with before. This was in response to what is going on with SNAP benefits and the precarity of the lives affected. I missed a majority of this event due to work, but we had two U-Haul trucks full of food set up in the apartment complex, and we passed out food there. 

 I am open to suggestions on how to better unite and organize the working-class for their own independent political interests towards achieving socialism. I’ve seen other local organizations like the chapters of Venceremos and the Brown Berets partner and do a Day of the Dead event. I’m considering reaching out to them and learning from them in the meantime. 

This article was contributed by Campaign Reporter Quenton (submitted November 11, 2025) 

If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party, become a Campaign Reporter, or both, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com

I’m in a bad mood. I’ve spent my work week interviewing what our client, a branch of the civil service, calls its “vulnerable customers”: people who, for one reason or another, are deemed to be no longer capable of integrating into normal life. At the end of projects like these I always find myself struggling with ungenerous feelings of resentment towards these “customers”. Something about their isolation, and their helplessness, starts to seep into my skin.

I have an interview to finish before I talk to Brandon, but the woman I’m meant to be speaking to keeps wandering away from the phone to argue with a man somewhere in another room – and eventually I decide to give up on it.

“Technical issues”, I message the recruiter.

Going to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea, I realise I’m looking forward to talking to Brandon. The first time we spoke, it was clear that he was in possession of a massive amount of information and enthusiasm. A good antidote, I hope, to the fog I’ve been wading through all week.

I plan to hold the conversation in my sitting room, which doubles as a sort-of office, but it turns out my wife is watching TV in there – some show about a high-powered lawyer who moves to rural Maine and finds love. So, I have to call Chicago from the bedroom instead, trying to ignore my looming reflection as I perch next to the little Hollywood style vanity mirror.

I don’t know much about Chicago beyond the half-formed image exported to the UK: deep-dish pizza, unions, gang violence — and, based on watching Chicago Med over my wife’s shoulder, a surplus of attractive doctors.

Brandon, who’s been involved in tenants organising there for the last five years or so, gave me a more up-to-date background the last time we spoke.

“The big context for tenants organising is that there’s a real cost of living crisis in the city. Housing cost is a particular problem, there’s been something like a 35% rise since before Covid, and that’s pushed a lot of people into a precarious position.”

He also pointed out that much of the existing community organising in the city remains fairly disjointed, often organised along ethnic or religious lines rather than city-wide.

“You have big, strong ethnic enclaves in Chicago. A lot of the time, the community organising in those enclaves is strong, but it’s not universal. It’s like, you have to be a member of the Polish Catholic Church if you want access to it.”

“In some ways,” he added, “that’s what a Socialist Party could try to be in Chicago, at first — the Polish Catholic Church for everybody.”

That line touched on what I originally found so attractive about the Campaign – an explorative project aimed at investigating what already exists to see how, and if, it could point towards rebuilding a genuine socialist movement.

As Brandon put it: “The ideal is you find people who are already doing organizing, and you learn from them and their efforts, the skillset they have and you don’t. But you also learn what the ceiling is on what they’re doing, because there always is one.”

This time, we’ve agreed that our conversation will be less focused on the long-term goals of the Campaign, and more on the tenants themselves. We’re going to start by talking about the kinds of problems they face in Chicago. I expect this to be primarily about rent — the obvious thing that comes to mind when someone says, “tenants’ union”.

When I finally call through to speak with him though, Brandon surprises me.

“It depends on the context, but generally I would say rent shouldn’t be the first thing you focus on. In my building, for example, our best move as tenants right now is to help each other, fix stuff around the house, and never contact the landlord.”

Never contact the landlord isn’t something I had on my bingo card for this conversation, but Brandon explains:

“This is something that people sometimes struggle to grasp. We’re hidden from our landlord right now. She doesn’t raise our rent, but if we ever were to get it into our heads that we should get together and confront her, I guarantee you she would. Or she could just sell the building to a property management company or developer. It’s a nice building, and they could easily flip it to something less affordable.”

Thinking about my relationship with my own landlord, this has the ring of truth to it. He lives hours away, and the thing I like most about her is that he barely ever pays any attention to us.

And, Brandon explains, there are risks beyond just having your rent raised.

“Let’s say you’re one of three tenants bringing legal action against a big landlord, well you’re putting a target on yourself. Yes, technically, there are laws against retaliating against tenants for organising or invoking their rights, but you have to prove it. You have to enforce it. If you actually get involved in the legal process, generally the person with the most money is going to win.”

“That’s not to say you can’t organise around rent,” he adds, “but it depends on how much leverage you have. With a hundred tenants in one building, or a hundred buildings under the same landlord, trust between members and agreement in a clear plan, the situation would change. But for most unions, that’s just not where they’re at yet.”

If rent is not the best issue to start organising around, I wonder what is?

“Safety” Brandon starts by explaining “is a big issue. In a city like Chicago, it’s a really big issue. There’s a lot that a tenant union can’t do and some things that it can. Part of the battle is knowing the difference. If there’s a guy with a gun at the door, call the police, right?”

It’s a comically extreme example– but I understand the point.

“Being able to say, we can’t handle this, let’s call the cops. That can be really hard for a leftist to do sometimes, but it’s necessary in certain cases. I think the less we’re trying to act out our political commitments in that specific way, the better.”

The same he says, probably applies for the kinds of safety problems that occur within people’s own homes.

“One thing that’s really tricky is that the tenants union can catch wind of tenants who are in fractious domestic environments. We found we couldn’t deal with that as a union, so we try to keep our focus on people as tenants. But sometimes people connected through the union organise their own responses.

At least in one case, I had a group of people form a domestic-violence support network because of shared tenant needs. That ended up being a kind of separate thing from the tenants’ union.”

Despite these limitations, Brandon tells me a tenants union can provide real benefits when it comes to safety, particularly when it comes to the simple advantages that arise from connecting people to one another.

“One of the first things we do with any building is create a Signal or WhatsApp group,” Brandon says. “It makes a huge difference for safety, people can warn each other when someone’s at the door or something’s going on outside.

“It’s actually pretty nuts that people don’t do it otherwise,” he says. “A lot of the time you have to be the conduit for the most basic neighbourly things - setting up social events, that sort of thing. And it really does make a difference: more people out and about, more people aware of each other. Even having someone to call when you’re locked out,” he laughs, and I wonder if he’s speaking from experience.

“All of that contributes to both a feeling of safety and to actual safety for people.”

This communication then lays the groundwork for other kinds of organised action.

“For example, we had a building that had a really bad package theft problem in the front lobby. The way we dealt with that is, that the union would organise to take packages from the front room and deliver them to people’s doors internally within the apartment building. That worked, people liked it – and it became a small piece of community building.”

Many of these small safety measures - WhatsApp groups, shared tools, casual cooperation - blur into another major focus of tenants’ unions: repairs.

Here, Brandon says the law can sometimes be useful, especially for serious habitability issues like no heat in winter.

“Going after a landlord who violates the law, that’s technically possible – but most tenants can’t afford to go through a sustained legal battle in court, so that’s only really useful as a threat to intimidate less savvy landlords. There’s a legal framework for repairs though that’s more tenant friendly. You can request repairs, and if they’re not made within fourteen days, you can pay for them yourself and deduct that amount from your rent.”

That, he says, shifts the burden to the landlord to contest the repair later. Because court and filing fees often exceed the cost of the work itself, many landlords don’t take it that far. In the meantime, the tenants union organizes for basic habitability, including air conditioning and space heater drives during extreme weather.

“Some tenants might be trading a bit of disrepair for affordable rent in areas they’d otherwise be priced out of. Where their family is, their kids’ schools, or just an area that’s nicer than the one they’d end up in otherwise. Then you get something like an ‘artificial slum’, not for the poorest tenants, but for the stretched middle too: a teacher and a barista sharing a flat, just managing to stay in a neighbourhood they’d otherwise be pushed out of.”

In that situation, you might be better to fix what you can yourself, because asking the landlord may mean a rent rise or a sale.”

The law then, can be one tool in the union’s belt, but most activity, Brandon tells me, is focused on small repairs - the daily problems that emerge from living in a property that someone else owns.

“A lot of people have called the landlord 400 times about something like a loose door handle, when really they just need a neighbour with a screwdriver. So much of what the tenants’ union does isn’t glamorous, it’s organising repair fairs, sharing tools, making sure people know each other’s names.”

I wonder if Brandon can tell me more about these ‘repair fairs’ and he explains that these are days when “the building gets together, and everybody sort of agrees to lend their skills and go to each other’s apartments and repair what needs repairing on a small level. It’s how people get to know ‘this guy is handy’ — I can call him when I can’t figure out what’s wrong with my thermostat.”

He laughs “I called a neighbour recently about my thermostat, it turned out I just needed batteries. It was pretty embarrassing. But I might have been sitting in my house for a week calling the landlord, saying the heat’s broken. Instead, I got it sorted out.”

After a week of speaking to distant, unhappy people over the phone - I find the idea of getting something sorted, even something small, very attractive. Perhaps a little shaming as well; I can’t remember the last time I even had a conversation with my own neighbours.

I wonder if this kind of low-level activity is what Brandon views as the backbone of the tenants organising, and he says that it is.

“These are the kind of activities that keep people invested, because they’re immediately useful. They build a certain kind of trust that’s necessary for taking on more risks. A lot of people in this city are sitting at the edge of their means, and in that context housing is a big issue to gamble with. Moving to a new place, maybe facing a longer commute, finding a new nursery – things like this can tip that balance from ‘just managing’ to ‘not managing’. To push at the edges of what’s possible, to take on that risk, people need to know who they’re doing it with.”

That, I think, gets to the heart of why I quickly found myself liking Brandon. Throw a stone in London and you’re liable to hit some well-meaning activist, busily converting the people they organise into momentum for a larger political cause. Brandon talks, first and foremost, about what tenants want and need.

Not that that’s all the project appears to be about – the dim outline of a socialist party looms somewhere off in the background. For now, at least though, ideology goes on the backburner. The spectral party appears less as a prescription, and more of a question.

I wonder how much of Brandon’s outlook stems from the Campaign’s nature as an exploratory rather than a mobilisation effort.

“That’s part of it certainly” he says, “It’s less about trying to strong-arm potential into being through organizing at this stage than it is about exploring what’s there, building on it, and trying to create a space.”

I have, I realise, a lot more questions for Brandon – about the city and about the Campaign – but we’re about to run out of time. By now, a cold midday sun will be tilting westward away from Lake Michigan, and Brandon needs to get back to work. I shelve the other questions I have and tell him we can pick up next time wherever he wants to begin.

“Great,” Brandon says, “there’s lots to talk about.”

This report was contributed by Campaign Reporter M. Rowton (submitted November 21, 2025)

If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP), become a Campaign Reporter, or read more of our reports, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com or visit our Substack: campaignforasocialistparty.substack.com.

I spoke with Irene over WhatsApp from Reading, England, where I live. Despite the distance, we found much in common given our shared experiences with community-organizing projects, and it was a joy to talk with her and reflect on my own history of organizing in Reading.

When I spoke to Irene on Sept. 10, she was late for one of our appointments because a neighbor had spotted a suspicious van parked by the local Catholic church, and she had gone to help the neighbor and see what was happening. The area was mostly Hispanic, but the men around the vehicle were not Hispanic and were wearing baseball hats, details that hinted at possible Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in the area.

This encounter was not an isolated incident. Irene recounted that a Chicago man had recently been shot by ICE, and said the overall situation in the city was “getting quite dystopian.” Partially in response to these events, she noted that the Campaign had begun focusing on resisting ICE by working with labor-leader Jorge Mújica of Arise Chicago, with whom members had attended a training on immigrants’ legal rights. The training covered what to do when ICE appears, what the employer is supposed to do, and so on. Irene explained that the Campaign planned to train people outside of Chicago and network with other groups to share the training more widely.

One of the things Irene said she appreciated about the Campaign was that it did not engage in large rallies or pamphleteering and was not solely focused on educating people through doctrinaire reading groups. She said it felt patronizing to lead with ideology instead of work, noting that “[many organizations claim] you can have these resources if you promise to take Christ into your heart, or swear allegiance to a stateless anarchism.” By contrast, Irene liked that people in the Campaign were more agnostically engaged, without such upfront commitments.

Irene said she was introduced to the Campaign about two years ago when she hosted a cooking party and invited lots of people over to cook giardiniera, which is a mix of pickled vegetables in olive oil. “Someone said the Campaign was looking for people like her,” Irene recalled, and since she had spent a lifetime involved in mutual aid work, she quickly got in touch.

Shortly after, Irene invited members of a local recovery group to another cooking party. This idea caught my attention in particular: research on mental health shows that successful recovery often depends on the person’s social connections. At gatherings like these, those connections grow naturally. For example, someone might mention they need a job, and someone else might know where to find one.

Irene has long been active in grassroots organizing, including community gardening and food-sharing programs. She is currently talking to people she knows, such as musicians, who might be interested in working with others on mutual aid projects, and in the past she was involved with Midwest Books to Prisoners, a group that sends books to incarcerated people across the United States.

My impression is that Irene is trying to explore new ways to organize while taking into account the limits and possibilities of existing organizations. For example, she has been in contact with the Chicago branch of the Independent Labor Club (ILC), which has 15 active members across the city and 30 to 40 on its mailing list. The ILC has a big presence in New York City, where its members maintain a social space and gym, share information about ICE’s activities, and use a phone tree to inform people when ICE is in the area.

In Chicago, by contrast, the local ILC is slightly smaller, and Irene is working with its members to refocus their efforts towards resource mapping: a process of identifying and compiling existing community resources into a single location so they can be more easily accessed by anyone in need of them. This includes identifying local tenants’ unions, free food sources and shared equipment such as lawn mowers, key cutters, and other tools.

Alongside these efforts, Irene is also working on starting a resume workshop with her contacts in the Chicago ILC, where people can come to learn how to write resumes for job applications. This is something she needs for herself at the moment, and it would require a space available for regular use that is fitted with computers and printers. I really liked this idea, as years ago I had gone to a resume workshop here in the UK (we call it a CV or Curriculum Vitae) which was run by the local state-funded job service. It was an easy skill to learn but I needed someone to show me how to do it, so this initiative sounds like it could be fruitful.

Irene explained that people come to the Campaign through various routes such as the Platypus Affiliated Society or by word of mouth. This has led to a recent expansion in membership for the Chicago Campaign, as there are now 15 to 30 active people who meet every couple of months. Online, many of these Chicago members help the Campaign organize quarterly meetings across the United States, six-monthly international calls, and separate “lone wolf” calls for members in isolated areas.

For Irene, the projects she is engaged in, as well as these early signs of growth in the Campaign, bring cause for excitement—albeit cautious excitement.

This article was contributed by Campaign Reporter John Hogget (submitted November 12, 2025)

If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party, become a Campaign Reporter, or both, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com

Paulina is convinced that a project, with all the work and effort it entails, can only be sustained in the long term if it truly excites you. One should therefore choose something one is passionate about—not only to maintain one’s own motivation, but also to inspire others with that enthusiasm.

For her, the drawing circle works because it allows her to meet others and collaborate creatively with them on an equal footing—something she has no opportunity to do in her job as an after-school educator or in the solitary creative work she does at home. Paulina points out that the regular drawing practice in the circle also benefits her own artistic projects. At the moment, she has no one to share the coordination with, but there are a few people who might take over if she is away.

KSP members meet in various venues in Frankfurt to review how projects are going, discuss how they might connect, and welcome newcomers. Two weeks ago, Paulina organized the first KSP meeting in Darmstadt which the KSP advertised to other leftists in the town. A few people came, but only existing KSP members and one new interested person. Paulina also made a video about the drawing circle and posted it on Instagram; here is the translated text:

“Hello, my name is Paulina. I’m a comic artist, podcaster, educator, and a member of the Campaign for a Socialist Party. I became aware of the KSP in 2020 and was immediately drawn to the idea of engaging in political practice primarily through forms of civil society activism—activism that has a tangible impact on people’s lives, especially beyond traditional leftist bubbles, and that enriches their everyday experience in concrete ways.

This inspired me to launch my own campaign project: the people’s drawing circle.

The Zeichenzirkel takes place every first Sunday of the month from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Oetinger Villa cultural center in Darmstadt. It’s open to everyone and offers a free opportunity to learn how to draw people.

After coming up with the idea in early 2023, I approached the plenary of the Oetinger Villa to ask if we could use their space. I was thrilled when they approved the request—and even more so when they agreed to sponsor our event with 50 euros a month, which we use to pay our life models.

I was very nervous before the first session, afraid no one would show up and that the whole thing might be a silly idea. But miraculously, everything went really well. Everyone was enthusiastic, and I received a lot of encouraging feedback.

To give you a better idea of how our sessions are structured: I act as a sort of Master of Ceremony—welcoming the participants, introducing the model, giving instructions, and timing the 10-minute poses. The drawing takes place in concentrated silence, where you only hear the scratching of pencils, the occasional sigh, and the sound of pencils dropping to the floor.

After one hour, we take a 10-minute break during which anyone who wants to can lay their drawings on the floor so we can admire each other’s work. Then we continue for another hour, and I end the session with a short farewell and a request to send me scans or photos of the drawings so I can publish them online.

Many participants stick around afterwards to chat. Chairs are pushed together and small groups form that often go out for food or drinks together.

In addition to the life drawing sessions, we also host events where we model for each other for 10 minutes at a time, fully clothed. Partly, this is out of necessity—we have limited financial means to compensate the hard work of professional models—but these sessions also have a unique quality I wouldn’t want to miss. There’s something special about forming a circle together for two hours, and an even more unique experience when participants step into the center themselves, shifting from observer to subject, being viewed from all angles. It’s an intimate setting that many need to muster courage for, and one that only works because of the respectful and trusting atmosphere we’ve cultivated.

Now, some of you might be wondering: that’s all very nice, but what does any of this have to do with building a socialist party?

At first glance, maybe not much. And I want to emphasize that the Zeichenzirkel definitely fulfills a different political function than, say, the KSP’s tenant union, which is about building collective power to stand up to corporations like Vonovia and defend tenants’ interests. Or labor struggles, where there’s a clear antagonism between wage workers and their bosses, and tools like strikes are used to create leverage for better working conditions. That’s not the case with the drawing circle. We don’t have an opponent in that sense.

The Zeichenzirkel is a non-commercial educational initiative in the spirit of workers’ education associations. In addition to teaching drawing skills, it cultivates discipline and focus—qualities I consider socially relevant, especially as attention spans continue to shrink.

It also builds community, bringing together people from diverse backgrounds and fulfilling a deeply human need: to gather regularly in a defined setting and dedicate oneself to something meaningful. That’s why I’m especially happy that our sessions take place on Sundays, offering a kind of secular alternative to church.

Especially after the pandemic, which greatly accelerated social deprivation, and in a time when people increasingly speak of an “epidemic of loneliness,” I believe it’s more important than ever to create spaces where people can come together informally and work toward a shared goal—something that expands horizons and nurtures the soul.

I felt reaffirmed in this belief when I heard from Max from the tenants’ union about how difficult it is for many tenants to even strike up a conversation with their neighbors to organize around shared issues. Many people are simply not used to being physically around others anymore. I noticed the same thing in my own anxiety levels—especially at the beginning of the Zeichenzirkel.

I also found it striking that a member of the tenants’ union in LA emphasized how important BBQs and block parties are in their political practice.

Considering that a central goal of KSP practice is to train ourselves to become socialists, I can say that in the year since the drawing circle began, I’ve learned a great deal and my life has changed for the better.

I’ve made many new connections and learned how to manage my time and energy to keep the sessions, online presence, and communication running consistently—all while solving the countless small problems that inevitably arise when people come together.

To expand our reach, we occasionally organize Zeichenzirkel sessions in other locations and collaborate with other grassroots cultural institutions. My long-term vision is for the Zeichenzirkel to grow into a cultural network in Darmstadt, the Rhine-Main region, and hopefully far beyond.

We generally don’t talk about politics in the drawing circle, and I’ve only ever mentioned the KSP when asked how I came to do this. The aim of this project is not to agitate people through political conversations. Rather, I see it as my role to provide a platform for building stable connections—connections that are essential for broader social organization. And just as importantly: to inspire fellow leftists through a living example—to take initiative and redirect their energy away from protests or appeals to the state, and instead create sustainable offerings that address people’s material, social, and cultural needs.

If you live in the Darmstadt area and would like to join us, you are warmly invited! We announce upcoming sessions via our Instagram page and Telegram channel “Zeichenzirkel Darmstadt.”

And maybe you’d like to start your own circle in your city—where people draw, play, do sports, or whatever it is you love to do. Or you might check out the KSP’s tenant union or tutoring initiative and get involved there.

I definitely recommend it!

Cheers,

Paulina”

Interview portion conducted by Campaign Reporter John Hogget (submitted August 25, 2025)

If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party, become a Campaign Reporter, or both, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com

From 2009 to 2011, I served as a missionary of a church in Northern New Jersey. Our primary goal was proselytizing and conversion. The group of people we were targeting were Spanish speakers in America. There was already this inherent assumption that the citizenship status of the majority of those people would be ambiguous. So the church approached the situation with a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” approach, and with the understanding that all these people we would bring in would almost certainly need some form of legal support regarding their immigration status. The immigration activism I was involved in was almost on a different planet from the anti-ICE activism you see today. Obviously that kind of politicization [on our part] was essentially non-existent.

We did a lot of connecting people together as missionaries. Our task was to find people to teach about our religion, but [to do so] we ended up cultivating locations and networks of people to support the immigrant communities we served. For example, we cultivated networks through which immigrants we served could communicate with each other in terms of knowing which jobs to avoid [as undocumented people], because they would expose them more, or knowing which workplaces to go to that would be more accepting of intermediate or remedial English skills. We never asked anybody if they were legal or illegal, but a lot of people would tell us their status on their own.

We would often engage with people we knew were not necessarily embedded in the area, and it was our task to provide them with a network to support them. Usually this involved getting in touch with local members of our organization who had contacts to lawyers or to safe houses where people could go if they were raided by immigration. Sometimes someone would get a call from someone in their house or neighborhood saying “Hey, don’t come home. Immigration is here,“ so they would have to find some place else to go to [right away], and we would use our network to help them with that.

This might sound very complicated and high level, but what it really looked like to start is us putting together English classes to bring people in, get them familiar with us and then just giving them our phone numbers.

Could you say a little bit more about the classes you put together?

The classes were very simple. We mostly spoke in English and only a little bit of Spanish. We would open with any kind of questions. We would ask if anyone had questions come up during the week-- something they heard, but didn’t understand. Maybe they were at work, doing somebody’s yard or working at construction. These are very common jobs for people coming into the US. So we would ask if there was a phrase they didn’t understand and and we would go over it together.

I was 19 back then and I had no idea how to teach, but what was interesting is that a lot of people told us our approach was more helpful than the kind of formal community college classes they had been going to for learning English. In school, they start out with “The house is red” or “I walk the dog”, these kind of phraseologies, when what people really need is to be able to ask how long to cut a piece of material on the job. In that situation you really do not care about colors. To hear that response was really helpful to us.

We would hold the classes at places with bigger rooms to hold a lot of people, twice a week and at different time so we could allow for people who might not work in the mornings to come, like one class at 10:30 am and then one at 05:30 pm or 08:30 pm. Afterwards we would always have food and refreshments. It would bring people out. People will come if there is food! That was very beneficial to us as missionaries. In some places we got like 65 people coming to the classes.

The reason why I bring all this up is because after a couple of weeks there is a lot of trust. People understand that you are helping them gain skills so they can exist in this country rather than you being threatening to them. So people would come up to us if they had issues in terms of immigration and ask us if we would have numbers for them, people to call. Even just the number of another person dealing with the same issue, so we could get them into contact for support.

In our initial conversation abut this interview, you put the “immigrant community“ in scare quotes. To what degree were these immigrants coming to your classes already connected up in the communities where they lived, versus relying on you to meet the right people and build that support system in terms of safe houses, getting a job, helping them find people who are not going to ask a ton of questions about their status for housing, etc. To what extent were you filling a space that wasn’t already filled?

Sometimes it would occur that people would be relying on us, because they were in dire situations. I remember people telling us: “I’m not in a good place. I need to find God and that’s why I’m coming here. I have nobody, I burned all the bridges.” Because of our goal as a church you get that kind of person coming in a lot, right? So in terms of relying on us, that was not uncommon. In terms of networks, it was quite common that people would come to church services once, come into the building, and see other church members from the country they were from. I have met people from every single Spanish speaking country in the world. They would see these people looking good, healthy, put together, having a family, not appearing worried about losing their job or about their status. Those would seem like desirable people to link up with. It was not that they necessarily relied on us as missionaries, but that they saw getting involved with us and our network as beneficial to them.

Did you have a building that was the hub for your activities?

Yes – there were traditional religious buildings where we met, and some spaces we had to meet in that looked more like corporate offices. But we also met at peoples houses to teach English. There you have the same kind of dynamic. People who had big houses and their life kind of together would be able to host a group.

How was the network and infrastructure you were linking people up with developed over time? Did you participate in developing this network further while getting to know the ecosystem on the ground where you were stationed as a missionary?

As young missionaries, we would be switched around areas. Each area I went, there would be older church members who had been living and working in that area for several years, and would volunteer their time to go out and support the younger missionaries. These older members would have connections they had built, so even if they weren’t familiar with immigration law, they could tap into their network and find people who were.

Whenever I came to a new area to start teaching classes, I would always start developing the network by asking people I met questions like: “Do you know people that are looking for workers? Are you a business owner yourself? Are you working on a team? Do you know anybody who has an extra room?“ We needed to build these networks because of the precarity of the people who would come to us. We‘d be trying to teach about the church, and the person we were talking to would be like: “Yes, but I need a room.” So if we wanted to teach them, we would need to find them a room. When I got to a new place I would try to find the people we needed to help with issues like that. I depended on the people already existing there. It was about organizing the already existing resources that people did not really realize they could put to different use.

We notice many people drawn to CSP activism are on the younger side and highly transient, so helping people get a kind of deep local knowledge can be difficult. It is interesting to hear you talk about the idea of there being older people permanently, who can guide new people who hop in and help out in an energetic way. How long did these older people live there?

Senior members would live in a city for at least three years at a time, and would get to know and work across the entire city they were in, rather than just serving smaller units of a city for short periods of time like the young missionaries.

What did you learn about the world in which immigrants are living and organizing, in the sense of the context you were in, in terms of how people are getting by and how social and economic life is playing out in practice (the modus vivendi), in comparison to how we hear people talking about what immigration is like and what those communities are dealing with?

I think this goes back to the reason why I have put “community” in scare quotes. I think people are really transient. At least back then in New Jersey they were. The kind of people we were dealing with were mostly like: “Oh yeah, you know, I’m here for six months and I’m going to be over there.” It was not like “here” and then “home”, it was like: “I’m here in Passaic New Jersy and then I’m going to be down in Elizabeth and then I’m going to be over here.” A lot of the people we were dealing with were like that.

On the other hand every single day I met somebody saying: “I’ve been here for 65 years. I don’t speak English. I’m not legal.” And they are just living their life, being very involved in the community usually. They would be putting on neighborhood events. That was not uncommon.

I came from Portland, Oregon to New Jersey. New Jersey is much more densely populated. I was not ready for the amount of neighborhood level engagement activity. I grew up pretty religious so in a way I always felt a little bit disembedded from every social scene I was in as I was growing up. I went from my family to New Jersey. I didn’t hear English for the next six months, because it was all Dominican and Puerto Rican and Reggaeton, like, everywhere. I was shocked by the level of community engagement and organizing experience people in the immigrant communities in New Jersey already have. There was this transience, but also an established place.

I was pretty shocked by how much people were enmeshed in their churches—not just [the church I was part of] but all kinds of churches. I got to spend time with them and I asked “Do you not have lives outside of this?” and they said, to my surprise: “Oh no, I go to work and then I have my friends to hang out with. They are all friends from church. And then we go do church things.” It was the same for every single church and every single faith group we were encountering.

The reason why I bring this up is to show how people get by. I mean these kind of networks are pretty strong. Even for people that don’t care at all, for whom there is nothing interesting about God, except that all their friends go to this one place and so they keep going too. The way that provides resources and knowledge is indispensable.

My friend who also used to be from the church and who is now in CSP talk about this all the time. I don’t think people understand what being part of a church is like. It provides a network where you don’t have to do anything alone. If you’re part of a church, and you say, “I’m moving“, there are ten people from the church that are going to help you move. Or painting your house, right? All these kinds of things. It sounds exploitative, but it is not. You are not wasting people‘s time asking them to participate. People are so happy to get up and say: “I’m just going to go help this person do this thing.”

I remember how surprised a lot of immigrants, especially undocumented people, were about Americans seeming to hate America. I just think it is so funny how today everyone is, let’s call it, swimming in this kind of ideological soup, and these immigrant groups come in, having all these informal and support networks, realizing the American possibility better than most Americans, and we’re missing all the ways in which we could actually utilize this energy and potential.

You later, after your time as a young missionary, had other experiences working in immigrant communities in Arizona and Oregon as well as New Jersey. Can you tell us about that?

In Arizona and in Oregon, my immigration mutual aid was again connected with the church. By that time, I was the older member who was planted in. I was the resource and I was the one who knew the whole network of people -- the ones you need to go to for figuring out where to live, where to find legal support, where to find a place to work.

I do want to add a caveat here. Religious-affiliated activism can be very high demand. When I was a young missionary it was a full time job and I really mean that. There was no activity outside of that. Thinking about this today it seems like too much to handle for anyone. It was literally 18 hours a day doing this kind of work. Later, as an adult in Arizona and Oregon still working with the church, I was working probably 20 plus hours a week in the church on top of my full-time job and everything else. So when I think about my missionary activity, I start thinking about how to translate it to “civilian life”, whatever we want to call it, where everybody has kids, sometimes wants to watch TV and has got other things do in their life.

In Arizona my organizing came down to the fact that I was in a leadership role in the church. I had access to a lot of people weekly. I would talk to people all the time, and note down their needs, and note who I wanted to talk to about that or connect them to, and then on Sunday I would find the people I wanted to talk to [about the person with a need]. There was a lot of constant communication, constant checking in with people.

It is important to note the needs, and then link the needs to people I already knew were a resource. People actually don’t see a lot of needs until it is much too late, and like: “ICE is at the door!”. They don’t see how peoples quotidian and innocuous needs are also part of a larger issue that they are dealing with in terms of their precarity as an immigrant. Those same needs can also be the barrier to a person getting involved themself in the group’s activities. So it is like: “Once we take care of this guys broken down car, he is actually going to become this amazing resource for us. He wants to do all these kinds of things. “ So you find somebody that knows how to fix this guy’s car.

The biggest thing I am missing are the meetings. Religious organizations have meetings all the time. The meetings are really really big. The coordination aspect of community work is massive. Even when you leave the meeting you are thinking about “Why don’t we think about THIS?” YOU are active now. YOU are thinking about this. You engage with somebody the next day and then you realize, that this why you are having all these meetings every week, to think about this thing. On the other hand if you’re having meetings with too few people (like 10 people) regularly and there is not enough to coordinate, it’ll wear on you real fast to do that semiregularly. So it is always that kind of push-pull.

Sometimes a meeting would be only 30 minutes, sometimes four hours. Those sucked. But there is food at everything. I feel like that might sound so stupid, but at all our meetings we had food. We would be like: “Oh come in, talk about this terrible, existential dreadful topic, but there is going to be pizza.” Always, always have food at all of the meetings.

Social events as well. Social events are also huge. When I was a missionary, we would host these “Noches de Hispanidad”. It means “Spanish Nights”. People would bring their favorite food from their country, put up their flags, and dress up. We did those every month. Everybody loved them. It always brought people in. Nothing about those events was about religion or the church. We were just getting people to come and show off their food, which people love to do.

The best way to get into somebody’s house as an organizer is to knock on their door and if you smell cooking to ask: “Are you cooking pupusas?” And then it goes like: “Oh come in, come in and eat our food!”

With social events you could list things off that were needed for the next event, and get people active by getting them to volunteer for one those things.

There has to be a proportionality between how much we are asking people to do this and that, and how much are we providing people a space to go to and just have a good time. There are those tensions and questions.

Could you speak more about that? Did you encounter tension or obstacles in activating or functionalizing these relationships developed through organizing? Was there any instance or structure where the divide between organizer and organized was broken down or consciously addressed?

Turning organized into organizers is something churches do, but not formally or through a a formal structure. We were taught that every new member needed a responsibility and a friend. Once you were brought into the orbit of the church, very quickly, you didn’t even have to be a member, you were given a responsibility, low level even. Along the lines of: “This person has come to church for four weeks, let’s give them this responsibility to walk to church with this other person who is new.” This isn’t on immigration now, but I think it is a good principle. We didn’t so much rely on people stepping up and be like: “Oh, I’m ready to do this kind of thing.” Sure, people will do that, but if you extend some kind of responsibility to them and they can’t do it, they’ll mediate it themselves: “No, no I’m not able do to that.” And that is totally fine. You just say, “we are happy to see you anyway, keep coming.” But there has to be an invitation for them to act.

In immigration organizing, as a practical matter, informally, people that had been helped would very often end up giving help back. I just remembered this one person we were helping. He had to move five times in the span of two months. He would always wake up and make breakfast for all the people he stayed with. He was very happy to be helping in their house. Once he got a stable location, he would always come out with us and talk with new people, giving out his number for if they ever need anything. That became the kind of animo, the excitement.

And that developed organically, not consciously?

Sometimes it did spur out of nowhere, but a lot of times it would be a little nudge from us. “Maybe you want to help out.” And they’d be like: “Oh my god, I didn’t think about it!” And they were totally on board with this. I guess you could say we were capitalizing off their excitement, but the excitement was obviously fsomething they needed to have themselves, right? So yes and no, it was an informal responsibility, but there was a conscious effort to get them to act.

Excitement plus nudges. Can you tell us about any other obstacles or limits you came up against as a church activist?

95% of the people in the congregation that I was working in in Arizona, which spoke Spanish, were born outside of the United States, but outside of the specific congregation in the wider structure of the religion you would encounter members and leaders saying that if someone is an illegal immigrant, you cannot work with them. And as leaders they would impose this. There were these ideological hang ups people brought in, even as we were doing what they wanted us to do. We were baptizing people for the church, but their political ideological beliefs, around “follow the law” and so on, would come in. The reason why that is significant is that these kinds of obstacles actually pushed us to keep everything unspoken about the status of the people we were bringing into the congregation. I was talking about the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” practice before; it was much more conscious than that. We knew we were going to need people to be legal support, but we also could not talk about it.

The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell“ practice did create big gaps in people’s knowledge about the situation, where you would only tell each person this or that much. A lot of times that would really restrict the ability to help people. I remember this one time we were working with this English speaking leader and we were trying to get this guy a job and the leader found out and it blew up the whole process, along the lines of “I don’t want to be implicated in this. I don’t want to endorse this kind of stuff.” A lot of that pushback was generated from a sense of being kept in the dark about what we were doing. That is why I bring that up. There are going to be ideological obstacles everywhere, but I think on a practical level it did create this mistrust. Some people were in the know and some people weren’t.

Outside of that, we faced the basic obstacles of working with a greatly transient population. So even the people you are relying and calling on to be the helping other people in need, they are telling you: “I have to move today. My landlord told me last night, I got to move today, right now.”

Are you still a member of the church?

No, not for some time. But as an activist outside the church now, I have no issue with getting in contact with people still in the church and seeing what they are doing now in terms of immigration activism. I would be interested in doing that again, and seeing it with fresh eyes. Not in the way of “This is the work of God!”, but asking “What is going on?”. You can’t beat the church’s community level organizing and mutual aid.

You have continued in your civic activism outside the church, and have explored immigration activism, among other areas, in that new context. What have you encountered?

In Oregon, I did participate with NGOs in some immigrant activism, but that kind of immigrant activism deeply put me off of doing immigrant activism outside of the church. You’d come in and the NGO would have some prep meetings to prepare you to teach undocumented people about what to do when they are detained. Then, when you meet [undocumented] people, what they really need to know is: “Is there a number I should call?” Of course that is not all they want to hear. But the way we were prepping to even talk about the issue of illegal immigration and of the threat that you might be deported, prevented anybody from thinking about the question of: If you are actually facing this issue, what you should do? There are people are at your house, go to someone else’s house. And stay the night there. Sure, there are other things you might want to do, but that is the immediate thing to do.

In the NGO I was working with and through, we couldn’t give advice on anything like that, we couldn’t talk about any of that, because then we would be implicating people in the community to promise to do all of that. It always felt like there were easier ways to deal with these things, which I knew from how we dealt with it as a religious missionary. So when people needed immediate, practical help, we would have to respond: “Sorry I can’t talk to you about that. I don’t know that.” And so on.

In the NGO, what we taught people had to be all about using the existing system to find a permanent solution to the problem, which is part of the existing system that is going to be deporting you.

I was very involved in it, it was part of my life. By that point I had already been out of the church for a while. I was looking for something to do like what I had done with religious organization in terms of mutual aid and community organizing, but not in the church anymore. It was totally unsatisfying.

What I’m hearing you say is that targeting the most vulnerable people at that moment of vulnerability for a know-your-rights lesson is a mismatch.

Exactly. We were not fitting the task and the tactic. There is this aspect of the NGO activism where the immediate need of somebody could not be addressed. We were not allowed to offer any low level very common sense approaches. A big aspect of why I really hated the [NGO] activism is because it required needing to know all these laws and all of these rules about “what can I and can’t I do”. I was a teenager once, I know how to run away from the cops, so I can think about how to de-escalate and avoid situations that I don’t want to be in.

In the church activism, all we were trying to do is to just avoid everything like that, because once you’re in the situation, past a certain point, if they’re gonna come down on you, you are screwed. Maybe that is a bad way to put it, but if there are like 10 cops outside of this massive building, the person in there is fucked. Maybe that’s a bad way to put it.

An immigration activist who is currently training CSP members on anti-deportation defense brought this up too. Everybody wants to do rapid response, but by the time you are rapid responding, it is over. It is done. You cannot rescue the person from the situation they are in and all that is left for them now is legal remedies which by their nature and after the fact won’t work in a lot of these cases. And even if they do work, the process of being detained pending the legal remedy is itself a massive punishment.

There is no way to perform any kind of collective action around the legal process. People wonder how to support people now that they are in the legal process, and - you fucking can’t. You can show up and maybe you bring them meals, but it is a recipe for depressing collective organizing and for burnout. You can’t go to every court case they are going to have. We are experiencing this now in the labor union I am a member of. Our union wanted to get super involved with legal support for detained immigrants with no ability to actually do it and everybody got burned out within three months, and [gave it up].

The labor union also turned to signs and marches, things like that. That was a lot of the activity that was being planned when we finally started talking about what it could look like to even just cultivate a type of network where undocumented people were able to reach out to activist groups that could provide them help, without being afraid of being targeted for whatever reason. Once we started talking about that I think there was this notion of a very long term kind of commitment. So when this immigrant action group was presented with more massive long term goals, it shifted to: “Let’s do this one thing, one aspect of this massive long term goal.” We started to take the possibility of trying do to one thing, and doing it well, more seriously.

What do you think CSP needs to be thinking about and focusing on in taking up immigration as an issue, if we are going to be guiding people into this area of activism. We know we want to focus on making it generally harder to deport people rather than on confronting ICE. What would you add to that? Where would you start?

We want to imagine what we could do as organizers in moments when we aren’t in crisis. Immigration activism presents us with an opportunity for the Campaign to do civil society organizing, reconstituting the abilities of society to take care of its own needs. It also provides us with this absolutely catastrophic kind of misstep of getting caught up in whatever crisis it is at the moment. That is why I think it is a good idea for us as a team to think about getting involved, with a hopeful deliberateness that could provide a kind of steady hand to the whole thing.

I would just start with English classes and at the end of the class see if there is the possibility for people to come and have a social engagement. Sometimes playing football or soccer. You can try to find out if people have kids and then going to meet up at the park with the kids for example. That is the first place I’d start. First off, you don’t even know how many people are around you, how many people are in need of this. You need some kind of network in order to be able to gauge those things.

Also, nobody knows you. Maybe they have seen your face every once in a while, but the way people talk, everybody’s supposedly some potential op. Let people build trust, in a very banal way, not in the way of: “Oh, I’m going to be there to bust you out of such and such place”. Making all these grandiose promises. Just be like: “Do you need help? Here is my number. Give me a call. If I can help, I definitely will. This is what we want to do.” That is the approach.

Everybody has got like “my immigrant friend“ – but if you have one friend, you don’t understand anything that is going on in the community, in the network of people, in the group of people. That needs to be built. That would be my approach. With offering a class it is going to be maybe five or even less participants for a month. Make those classes good and try to build it out, put posters for it on laundromats and stuff like that. And there are still the open boards of grocery stores that people look at.

Just offer help. “Hey, do you need help moving?” Helping with moving was probably the number one way to get contacts and then ask them if they want to come to English class. A million people got involved just through that. None of it had to be political. None of it had to be about you letting the other know how up to date you are on the political situation.

When politicized activists engage with immigrant communities, as they try to hear what their struggles are they listen for the political thing. They pick up on the word “landlord” and go: “Eat the landlords!” They take it to this higher abstract level where I feel like they do not hear an actual immediate need. There is an immediate need, and you could fill it, but instead, for some reason, because of some political engagement, people take it to: “Let’s activate their consciousness!” Instead of doing that, help somebody get active [practically]. Learn something about them. Learn something from them.

Interview conducted by Rudi G. of Germany’s KSP and a Chicago CSP member (submitted August 25, 2025)

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The weekly food distributions tend to go to the local homeless, more and less recent migrants, the elderly, and the working poor (non-mutually exclusive categories). The Store does not ask for ID or collect information about the people who come for food, which is important for the particular social niche it fills [one tiny sliver of]. The city can’t service its needy, so the moment the local city council members became aware of the food distribution center, they began sending people to it. They ask the renters who run the Free Store for political endorsements but the Free Store maintains a delicate, friendly neutrality.

The Free Store has to balance fridge space constraints, perishability, and capacity with the donations it receives; often there’s more on offer from donors than can be taken. held, and distributed, despite the almost unlimited demand on the receiving end. A bottleneck can occur because of this, in which both perishable resources and civic spirit end up lying unused. It is a common issue today: More is available to be given than can be managed and distributed by the city, NGOs, and independent community groups, combined, at their current level of capacity. I feel both challenged and excited by my general observation that, rather than being defined by scarcity and conflict, the neighborhoods around me are characterized by a great deal of agreement and resources which, lacking a working civic vessel to hold and carry them, lie motionless but radiating potential energy.

The Free Store, a mini-scale sprout of a solution to this problem, is open to anyone. Local parents stop by to make sure neighborhood kids who come home with free items aren’t shoplifting -- they imagine a “free store” must be a tall tale out of a child’s imagination. A Free Store volunteer says this is one of the most common mechanisms by which he meets adults in the neighborhood.

The Free Store volunteers manage friction between the established homeless population and incoming migrants in the line outside the store on food distribution days. The Free Store has also, accidentally, found itself assisting undocumented people who have been victims of crime to safely make use of laws that ought to (but often do not) protect their ability to report assaults and other violent crimes against them to the police without exposing themselves to deportation. Some community groups who make use of the Free Store space may advocate police abolition, conceptually, but the Free Store volunteers recognize a need for more police involvement in immediate local problems of public safety. This “service” in crime reporting is a form of self-assistance, as the Free Store volunteers too must be able to walk through their own neighborhood.

Total openness is one reason the Free Store is cool and different. The Free Store does not espouse or display, or ask its volunteers or those who come for food and supplies to espouse or display, some set of “correct” positions or certain cultural markers to be included. This is not the norm. Independent civic life in our city, reflecting back from and onto local NGOs and local politics, is dominated by cultural societies. A great deal of civic activity is done by churches, which draw people in by religious-cultural affinity. Another significant portion of existing civic activity is done by community and cultural centers based around specific ethnic and ethno-religious groups. A final, smaller portion of civic activity is done by progressives and leftists on the basis of political affinity, which here in a one-party City is really another form of narrow cultural affinity. These last groups will start from a basis of openness to anyone and then begin the carve-outs -- no landlords, no cops, no one who voted for X political candidate. The Free Store exists in the first place precisely because it does not draw such lines, and it gains strength from continuing not to draw them.

When not doing food distributions, the Free Store has opened the space up to allow a variety of community uses, from language exchanges to classes for kids to self defense lessons to open mics. It partners easily with other community groups who borrow the space, and doesn’t particularly vet them. The Store is basically supportive of all civic activity that anyone might want to do. When it comes to politics, however, the Free Store guards its neutrality -- it does not call attention to itself, not as a way of “influencing” politics, and not as a mechanism for garnering new support. If some neighborhood kids want to do a protest, they can borrow the tables at the Free Store to make their posters, but the Free Store will not lend its name to the effort. It makes one request of groups who use the space: “please check with us first before you call anyone out from here.”

This is an earned position. Not so long ago, a group of young activists who were borrowing space at the Free Store began a public campaign “calling out” the local city council representative on some political basis. On their flyers, posters, and materials, they used the name of the Free Store. Shortly thereafter, the Free Store was raided by law enforcement, and then shut down for a time pending an investigation by the city into whether it is operating a business without a license. The Free Store had to beg and reassure the local city council that it meant them no harm to be allowed to reopen. We learned from this, “no call outs.”

The Free Store’s position of quiet, neutral operation is also special and smart in many ways, and actually no sacrifice at all. Typically, self-identified “activism” in this City focuses on maximum publicity at the outset, even for very weak and nascent efforts, creating immediately a dangerous ratio of risk to participants versus any minor early rewards of civic activity. This lends itself to maximum disillusionment, quick flares and burnings out of energy, and the abandonment of many independent activist projects within (we have observed) a cycle of about two years. I haven’t settled on a metaphor but right now I’ve got “kamikaze puffer fish activism” to describe this phenomenon. You sort of inflate yourself momentarily to create a false impression of strength, juke your numbers, go for quantity over quality. Then you fling yourself at a perceived social enemy. (A normal puffer fish wouldn’t do this, of course- it has the puffer feature precisely to avoid head to head combat.) CSP has always sought to “go its own way”, not publicly call out existing powers which are far better organized than we are, because no matter how aggressively this calling out is done it is really a form of begging. Kamikaze puffer fish activism also has, we have found, extremely limited appeal to most working people, who live with a certain real precarity here and are not interested in risk for its own sake. It also has, ultimately, extremely little positive, concrete, or lasting impact, externally or in terms of the self-development and learning of civic activists. It’s hard to learn once you are, civically speaking, dead.

By contrast, the Free Store makes its choices carefully, giving it breath to maintain and strengthen itself within the highly territorial political-business-gang-NGO landscape of the city relatively undisturbed and with minimal risk. This has nothing to do with a lack of imagination for a transformed society in the future - quite the opposite! - It is a level-headed assessment of the state of civic play now, and the level of self-organized independence that would be necessary to change it. Likewise, the Free Store’s openness to working people regardless of their political stances shows a far greater potential for organizing toward truly independent civic strength than activist efforts that aim to organize the small sliver of the working, breathing city that is in political (really cultural) agreement with the activists themselves.

CSP civic activists are excited to continue to learn from and support the Free Store!

This article was contributed by an anonymous CSP member (submitted March 4, 2025)

2.) Mass = more than a sect (small or large); Socialist = more than merely democratic or liberal; Political = going beyond social and economic actions, including but not primarily or limited to holding political office; Party = more than a movement or organization.

3.) This will be an unprecedented undertaking, and in many respects the first real political party in the U.S. — The only precedents are the old pre-World War I Socialist Party of America and, before that, the Republican Party of the mid-19th century.

4.) We want to include as much of the present avowed Left as possible, from liberals to anarchists; we find the existing Left to consist of talented organizers and thinkers, but they need a new and different context to be effective; now they are condemned to ineffectiveness — or to more or less support the Democrats.

5.) We are looking ahead to a decades-long, painstaking and patient but deliberate and serious process; the building of a mass socialist political party will fundamentally alter the political but also the social landscape in the U.S. and internationally — globally.

6.) The aim is to take governing power in the U.S. — This does not preclude and indeed aims at doing so in direct political cooperation with similar parties taking power in other countries.

7.) Now, in 2016, is a good time to begin this project, because of the disarray of the existing parties as well as of society. There is a window of opportunity with a new generation to embark on a political task and possibility that has been avoided since the 1960s New Left and also avoided since the 1930s Old Left — both of which were conditioned and distorted by the gravitational attraction of the Democratic Party as well as the dynamics of anti-Communism and the Cold War. We are past this now and so can proceed to build socialist politics free of such pressures.

8.) The Sanders campaign is a distraction from this task because it is a desperate attempt to reform the Democrats which will not happen; and even if it did, would not lead to socialism in any way.

9.) All existing Left social, economic, civic, legal and political activism — of all kinds — should be conducted under the political banner of the struggle for socialism. We need to make all these disparate struggles coherent for any of them to be effective. Such struggles should take place in and through a socialist party.

10.) In the immediate future, the goal is to reconfigure U.S. politics in terms amenable to a socialist Left: the Republicans should be the capitalist party; the Democrats should be the party of middle-class democracy. A socialist party should be for the working class in its struggle for socialism.

11.) Socialism will be the realization of the social potential made possible — but held back — by capitalism. We need a party to pursue the politics of this task. — Join us!

February 28, 2016