Introducing Majority: news for the many, not the few.

When you hear the words “working class,” who do you think of?

Maybe you picture a burly autoworker, or a guy in a hard hat on a construction site. While these people are certainly members of the working class, so is almost everyone else in our society. Nurses, teachers, tech workers, service and retail workers, drivers in the gig economy – all these people and their families depend on waged work in order to live. This describes hundreds of millions of people of all genders, races, and nationalities in America. We make up the diverse working-class majority of society, along with everyone who’s unable to work while caring for children or the elderly, or because they have a criminal record, poor health or disability, or are incarcerated.

If we’re the majority, the many, then who are the few? A tiny and ultra-wealthy minority controls our politics, our economy, and our lives: the bosses at the top of our companies, the finance vultures who run the economy like a casino, and at the top, the billionaires who amass their wealth by plundering and poisoning the world the rest of us must live in.

While the working-class majority builds our cities, teaches our children, heals our sick, grows our food, and produces our society’s wealth, the elites who employ us pay us wages that are only a fraction of the value we produce — and then keep the rest as profit for themselves. At the top of this pyramid scheme called capitalism are three men, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, who between them own more wealth than the poorest 50% of our country combined. The rich use their wealth to buy our politics and eliminate progressive labor and environmental regulations that impinge on their profits. They lobby for tax cuts for themselves that drain our schools, hospitals, and transit systems of desperately needed funds. They use racism, sexism, and other divisive ideologies to keep workers fighting each other over scraps. And they own the mainstream media.

As democratic socialists, we are committed to building a united, diverse, and progressive working-class movement that can challenge the concentrated power of corporations and the wealthy few and transform our society into one built for human flourishing, democracy, and environmental sustainability — not the profit motive.

Our hope with Majority, a publication of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, is to cover issues that matter to ordinary people and to provide a working-class analysis of local news and politics that you won’t find in the corporate media. We’ll be starting with coverage of the Oakland public school teachers’ contract campaign, which is heading for a potential strike in early 2019. If you’re a teacher, parent, or student in OUSD, we want to hear and share your stories – please contact us at majority@eastbaydsa.org.

We hope you will join us in fighting for a world that works for the many, not for the few.