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Monthly Archives: December 2025

Understanding Where We are Grows From Where We’ve Been

December 26, 2025
art, history, strategy
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By Gene Lantz

Dallas activists had spoonfuls of ice cream and local history on December 21. A group of us gathered at a Dairy Queen just 2 miles uphill and west from downtown Dallas. At that site in 1854, socialists from Europe established their communal farm and changed North Texas forever. We talked about them and then walked together to see a stone monument nearby.

A French socialist named Victor Considerant rented horses in St Louis in 1850 or so. Then he rode to an open hillside outside the grubby little town of Dallas. The town was established only a couple of years earlier and was just beginning its first main industry, tanning stinky buffalo hides.

Considerant thought the area looked like his homeland and should, he figured, be good land for grapevines and a wine industry. Back in Europe, he was able to raise money for a stock corporation to start sending European socialists to Texas. They named their commune “La Reunion.”

They were literate people. Unlike the rough-hewn Scots-Irish frontiersmen tanning hides nearby, they were cultured, artistic, musical, and far-thinking people. Like the other socialist settlements in Texas from the time, they were “freethinkers” on religious questions and had no churches. What really set them apart was that they didn’t enslave other human beings.

“History Is Bunk”

The official story of Dallas, told in almost all the books, is that the only reason it became a great city and cultural center was because of the genius and foresight of the early capitalists who created it “out of nothing.” In truth, it was a crossroads long before the first trading post was set up. It was a shallow place in the Trinity river where natives and early Spanish explorers could cross.

Dallas was also a crossroad when the first transcontinental highway went through the middle of town and then came out toward Fort Worth on the very street that now passes in front of our Dairy Queen. The Dixie Overland Highway ran from Savannah Georgia to San Diego California.

The genius capitalists didn’t make Dallas a cultural center either. It was the socialists from La Reunion. The official story about all the socialist communards in Texas is that they failed because they weren’t good farmers and socialism just doesn’t work. But that doesn’t explain why they all went out of business at practically the same time, in 1860.

When the Confederacy established its wartime draft, soldiers went after the free thinking socialist communities. One of them, Comfort, near San Antonio, tried to send its menfolk to the Mexican border, but they were hunted down and massacred. At La Reunion, a shootout with the Confederates was their last page in history as a communal farm.

But it wasn’t their last contribution to Dallas and North Texas. The population of Dallas was about 1,000. There were 500 or so communards. Most of them moved to the eastern part of town and established East Dallas, where their descendants still hold La Reunion celebrations. They contributed to the arts and even in politics. One of them became Mayor of Dallas and has a park, Reverchon, named after him today. They were the people who made grubby little Dallas a cultural center.

You can learn a lot at the Dairy Queen.

Wear Solidarity Red on Thursdays

December 26, 2025
history, strategy
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by Gene Lantz

One of the simplest and easiest things that labor leaders could do is to ask people to wear a certain color on a certain day of the week. The fact that they don’t do it and have never done it is the saddest evidence that we aren’t employing the simplest tactic for bringing union members and our allies together into an effective movement.

There are some obstacles, but they are technical and barely worth mentioning. They have to do with “what color” and “what day.” The first question is the easiest to answer because red has been the color of the workers’ movement since 1789.

My UAW local promotes wearing red on Wednesdays.” By giving away free red shirts during contract negotiations, we’ve increased participation. The AFT in Dallas promotes wearing red on the Thursdays when they go to school board meetings. Various unions promote a color and a day during times of great need such as during contract negotiations, but they choose color/date for contrast, not unity, and limit the whole idea to their particular members.

The only union with an effective program is the CWA, which promotes red on Thursdays since one of their members was killed on a picket line some years ago. Because CWA is big and because they have by far the most effective color/day program, I recommend that everybody adopt red on Thursdays, even if their union has another color or wears red on a different day. It’s not that hard to choose a color twice a week, and it doesn’t have to be a shirt.

If labor leaders are just too timid to pick a color and a day, I recommend that they run a short and cheap on-line survey of members. It wouldn’t be binding and wouldn’t even be scientific, but it would be a start and at least a formalistic indication that we intend to build a movement.

All the small stuff aside, the easiest thing would be to make a motion in every labor meeting that we ask all supporters to add wearing something red on Thursdays to their other clothing plans.

Two Bad Approaches

December 26, 2025
strategy
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In revolutionary politics, all tactics are good if they are appropriate in their time and place. Armed struggle and exclusive devotion to parliamentary work, for example, may have been good tactics in a certain nation at a certain time. In the United States right now, both are disastrous.

Don’t Shoot!

The obvious argument against armed struggle is that no one is going to out-shoot the U.S. military. It is the strongest military the world has ever known and has sufficient nuclear weapons to destroy the planet. Nevertheless, some naïve activists exhort us to “pick up the gun.” Perhaps the problem is just that they are new to the movement and haven’t thought much about what would work and what wouldn’t. More likely, they aren’t materialists in their thinking. In other words, they believe in religious or superstitious notions that exist only in their own heads. They don’t even consider the likely outcomes of their actions.

If they did think about outcomes, they might consider what actually happens when trigger-happy activists try to take on the establishment. A civil rights activist in Dallas some few years ago was able to shoot five policemen before they blew him up with a grenade attached to a robot. I’m not sure anybody remembers his name today, but the police collected large sums of money in donations. They got raises and improvements in their benefits. They held, and still hold, special public celebrations for their fallen heroes every year.

More recently, someone shot a right-wing commentator at a public presentation. The Trumpsters imposed the largest anti-free-speech movement in history. People went to jail; even more people lost their jobs – not because they had anything to do with the shooting or condoned it, but because they failed to speak about it with what the Trumpsters considered proper allegiance to the shooting victim. Presently, the guy’s wife is spreading his ideas to thousands, and the Governor of Texas has mandated that every high school in the state has to have one of his clubs.

And possibly the worst example ever is the sniper who apparently took a shot at candidate Donald Trump while he was making a televised speech. His ear may have been hit. His polling shot up. Some of his white Christian nationalist supporters said that the bullet was deflected by God. Trump implied the same. A little later, he was elected president of the United States.

Don’t Stop At Voting

The electoral sphere cannot be ignored because power actually changes hands there. Who gets elected and who doesn’t is of vital interest to the working class. But those who prioritize voting to the point of ignoring all other forms of organizing and political struggle are misleading us to the point of criminality.

The joke is that people attend a craps game where the dice are known to be loaded because, “it’s the only game in town.” The same could be said about American electoral politics. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party rigged the game decades ago so that American voters are hemmed in between them. Gerrymandering and allowing oceans of secret money to sneak into campaign treasuries are more recent deteriorations of democracy.

Around 27% of all eligible voters do not even register. 73% do. A great many don’t vote. In non-presidential races and local races, considerably more people skip voting. Wikipedia says that 64.1% of registered voters turned out in 2024. Of those, Trump won a plurality of 49.8%.  Multiply .73*.641*.498 and you will get .23. In other words, 23% of the eligible voters in America elected Donald Trump in 2024. But he has used that “mandate” to impose the most anti-working-class rulings in modern history.

With few and largely irrelevant exceptions, elections rigged by the bosses will always result in victory for the bosses. There are exceptions, of course, and all bosses are not equal. Voting matters, but it is entirely untrue that the winners of our rigged capitalist elections represent the will of the people.

Real democracy has to assert itself from underneath all the gimmicks and pressures. That means working in all possible arenas of struggle. They include labor organizing, strikes, boycotts, fund raising, and mass demonstrations. The idea of abandoning all but the legislative arena deserves the name that Lenin used, “parliamentary cretinism.”

Buckle Seat Belts for 2026

December 26, 2025
democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy
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By Gene Lantz

“Expect the worst and hope for the best.” – Accountant’s credo

The Worst

The world economic system will continue to tremble and quake

American manufacturing and the stock market will rise without improving the jobs situation

Artificial intelligence will gobble up jobs and tremendously worsen the jobs crisis that is already underway

Income disparity, juiced up by Trump policies, will drastically worsen

Communications, especially cell phone communications, may end healthy competition and become even more of an oligopoly

In the electoral arena, candidates will be straining to find a “middle” in an increasingly divided electorate

Mister Trump, who has already shown that he will stop at nothing to maintain and extend his power, will likely start a war and implement martial law as his continuing drive toward fascism continues

Unions will refuse to recognize the new situation and continue the exact policies that have so far lost nearly ¾ of our peak density

Millions will not be able to afford decent health care. Emergency rooms will be overrun

The Best

In the electoral arena, candidates will be forced to clarify their intentions during 2026. Where I live in Dallas, labor will pressure all candidates to reveal their stand on Gaza

Unions will be more aggressive in the electoral arena. Where I live, we are working on two union members running in the January 31 special election. Two Steelworkers have filed for statewide races in the coming primaries.

A growing but unguided mass movement against dictatorship has exploded

More and more people are figuring out the dangers and what to do about it

Some unions are discarding old ways and implementing a larger reliance on our magnificent popularity in the general population of workers

Youth and retirees, two sectors recently encouraged by the labor movement, are growing and adding muscle

The Starbucks workers, using a combination of strike and boycott simultaneously, are showing all workers how use labor’s popularity against the bosses. On December 22 alone, 19 Starbucks stores signed up for union elections.

The Indicators

Nearly all of this analysis comes from information gathered during the past week, and especially on Christmas Day when the Washington Post published ten charts describing the current U.S. economic situation.

Gold and silver prices set new records. The usual “gold bug” speculators are buying precious metals of course, but major investors and some governments are also buying them. Precious metals pay no dividends, but they are a haven of safety for those who think a worldwide financial crisis is imminent.

Two major financial indicators, a soaring stock market and an expected increase in manufacturing, are both rooted in investment in artificial intelligence. Investors are buying into it and energy-gobbling data center building way up and projected to be gigantic. At the same time, the labor movement is “cool.” Although Trump’s anti-labor policies explain some of the labor market problems, the main problem now and in the future is job-killing artificial intelligence. The same thing lifting the stock market and manufacturing in America is driving down the jobs market.

The union response, so far, is to try to contain artificial intelligence through union contracts. Even if this were possible, it wouldn’t solve the problem because most workers, more than 90%, have no union contracts. As the bosses without unions implement artificial intelligence to lower their production costs, they will undermine all workers, including those with union contracts.

Income disparity is the illness afflicting all workers worldwide. Among the many alarming reports comes this sentence from the current week by Politico: “Bank of America says its top account holders saw take-home pay climb 4 percent over the last year, while income growth for poorer households grew just 1.4 percent.” Even though inflation held at 3% during the past year and dropped to 2.7% for November, it’s still a lot higher than income growth for poorer households.

All of the major tech companies have hitched themselves to the Trump agenda, and for good reason. They produce artificial intelligence, and they all know that artificial intelligence is Trump’s main hope to lower production costs enough to outperform China and other worldwide economic competitors. “Lower production costs” is a euphemism for  fewer jobs.

Elon Musk, in many ways the master tech investor, has practically cornered the market in communications satellites. He has already bought the software and established the partnership with T-Mobile that he needs to change all cell phone communications to satellite. Everybody who currently works in cell phone tech is in danger. The Communications Workers of America have a vital boycott against T-Mobile, but it hasn’t yet achieved nationwide participation.

Just two recent election results are sufficient to show the strain in the electoral arena. Mister Trump successfully used the power of the United States government to overcome the progressive government of Honduras. He failed to do the same in the New York Mayoral race. Candidates in 2026 will find it difficult to dodge the issues important to working people. For example, the Dallas Central Labor Council voted to pressure all candidates who apply for endorsement to reveal their positions on the genocide in Gaza.

War in Latin America is imminent. The Trump Administration has already discarded every aspect of international law and human decency in its attacks against Venezuela. So far, they have managed to resist the provocations, but Trump isn’t finished. He needs the popularity of a wartime presidency and, if it becomes necessary to maintain power, he needs an excuse to implement martial law and end democracy once and for all.

Our unions have taken hardly any positions on the coming war nor on any of the pressing international questions. Domestically, we continue to try to organize more workplaces under the rules set in the early Roosevelt Administration. We continue to try to use our diminishing membership base to affect legislative change, just as we have since around 1947 when we had 35% of the American workforce organized. Today, we have closer to 9%.

So… Why Are We Smiling?

Clearly, the Trump Administration and the billionaires it leads are flailing around in desperation. They aren’t acting out of strength nor confidence, but like boat wreck survivors trying anything and everything to cling to life. They have very little thought of what they are doing, and they are being led by an unstable person.

Democracy has taken hits, but is a long way from disappearing in a country convinced, for 250 years, that democracy is best. The worldwide system of governance is very weak against a super power, but it has the credibility of all caring people.

Our anti-war movement may seem small, but the structures created in earlier upsurges still exist and are ours to use. Our unions may seem small and timid, but we still have the power to  shut down the major intersections of economic and social life. Organizations close to the unions, especially the youth and senior movements, are growing stronger.

Candidates in 2026 will be pressured to take our side, and more of them will

People are catching on. We have the communications ability for accelerated strategic progress. We haven’t yet agreed on a plan of coordinated mass resistance, but we are clearly headed that way.