Mayor Brandon Johnson’s First Year

Simon Swartzman

IN THE SPRING of 2023, there was a budding hope in the Chicago political left. In the final days before the election, Brandon Johnson held a large rally with Bernie Sanders, packed with supporters who lined up to get in. Many wore black market Brandon t-shirts that had popped up in an online store soon after Johnson made it to the run-off. City officials had decades ago discarded parties and primaries for municipal races to undercut progressive Black candidates from following in Harold Washington’s footsteps, but Brandon Johnson seemed like he could maybe still win.

Every other day, volunteers were knocking on doors in neighborhoods all over the city. At the election night party, I saw familiar faces from Black nationalist housing organizers, labor staffers and union members, anarchist street medics as well as staffers and neighborhood organizers for left alderpeople — all gathered in a downtown hotel to celebrate the dizzying victory.

Later, at a panel in a Northwest Side bar, we celebrated the decades of struggle that got us to this moment, and the gear shift it called for across the city. Our neighborhood’s aldermanic staffers attended a conference on municipalism to learn from experiences around the world in implementing progressive citywide reforms.

In the time since, that horizon of possibility in Chicago has receded to a large extent, and the organized citywide base for left electoral politics along with it. I will track some evidence of the deteriorated situation and the root of the problem as I see it: the failure to build a party that can co-govern and organize left electoral projects at a citywide level.

I’ll also look at the organizations that have struggled most with the attempts and failures to build a citywide party, most notably the left-labor alliance United Working Families (UWF), as well as more hyper-local neighborhood organizations. I’ll discuss how these organizations may still be the strongest basis for correcting our path. However with Trump’s victory, that path continues to narrow.

In the first-year-and-a-half of the Brandon Johnson administration, there were some clear reforms. Among the wins are a “one fair wage” ordinance that abolished the subminimum $9.48/hour wage for tipped workers, increasing it yearly until it matches the city’s standard $15.80/hour minimum wage; new loans for public investment in housing; and paid parental leave for city and county employees. Johnson also cast a tiebreaking vote for a city council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, making Chicago the largest U.S. city to do so.

Treatment Not Trauma is progressing towards replacing police responses to community crises with mental health professionals, and the city ended its contract with police surveillance tech ShotSpotter (although the decision may devolve back to individual alderpeople). While these wins are the result of protest and organizing, it’s safe to assume they would have required much more organizing to pass city council without Johnson.

During this time we’ve also seen some clearer difficulties for the Left in Chicago. Over 47,000 newly arriving immigrants have been given a very mixed welcome. Rightwing national figures like Texas governor Greg Abbott have cynically sent them as pawns to make Democratic cities like Chicago deal with the contradictions of U.S. border policy. While Abbott is maybe the most vocal and prominent politician taking this tactic, other Republican governors of Arizona and Florida have joined in, and Abbott was given the stage at the 2024 Republican National Convention to talk about his buses, suggesting that this tactic is coordinated (or at least endorsed) by Republican Party leadership.

While many left alderpeople, community organizations and mutual aid groups have worked tirelessly to help integrate and support new neighbors, the issue has been used by rightwing Chicago politicians, who tag them as “coming here illegally.” If these centrist or rightwing politicians opposing new immigrants represent majority Black or brown communities, they point to their constiuents’ under-resourced neighborhoods as justification for blocking additional aid for new neighbors. Mayor Johnson has occasionally buckled under this anti-immigrant pressure.

Johnson’s attempt to hire security contractor Garda World to build a “base camp” to house arrivals ultimately fell through, but it showed increased willingness to alienate the progressive activist and pro-immigrant base rather than alienate the Black Caucus. The conflict reached a rolling boil late last year: key members of the caucus tried to strip Chicago of its “sanctuary city” status that prevents collaboration between ICE and local police. Johnson’s floor leader Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa tried to prevent the vote. The vote failed, but rightwing members of the council agitated the racialized tensions into a new vote that stripped him of his committee chairs, and Johnson acquiesced.

Housing justice is a key issue in Chicago so the loss of the BCH referendum was an incalculable setback. Sarah Jane Rhee

Johnson’s attempts to pursue progressive revenue reforms have taken a similarly vacillating route. His largest effort to champion housing reform — Bring Chicago Home (BCH) a March 2024 referendum to tax housing purchases more progressively — went down to defeat. This revealed that Johnson has lost a significant chunk of his voter base in the city’s South and West sides.

Since then Johnson has looked for less progressive, even sometimes regressive, sources of revenue to fund reforms. These include surpluses retained in special tax district funds called Tax Increment Financing districts; property tax increases; short-term loans. These faced pushback, but more importantly don’t broadcast the clear message that the rich must pay their fair share.

In an October 2024 United Working Families meeting with Johnson‘s ostensible base, the mayor’s main takeaway was that Chicago is essentially out of options for progressive revenue and can only be redeemed through state-level budget fights.

The primary forces that have put Johnson on the defense are the strong capitalist forces we knew would undermine him. The real estate interests shoveled money to defeat BCH.

But Johnson, an organizer trained in struggles against neoliberal education reformers, has responded to those forces in ways that are disorganizing for the people who volunteered to elect him in the first place. Instead of an organizer-in-chief, Johnson has positioned himself as a mediator with morals, both in how he speaks to movements and to the press. We won a mayor’s seat, but have in some ways “lost” our candidate to that mayor’s seat.

Staffing provides another example of this disorganization. After Johnson’s victory, the first focus for the campaign and United Working Families was to staff the new administration. We have a situation where “movement staffers” are butting heads day-to-day with “Lori’s leftovers,” — as a comrade calls them — though some have careers going back to the Daley administration.

Johnson’s first chief-of-staff (now retired and replaced with a progressive) was “City Hall lifer” Rich Guidice, who was “likely to be reassuring to the City Council, business leaders and longtime observers of city government,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Similarly his CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Pedro Martinez, has been a source of continuous and distracting drama.

Martinez was appointed by previous mayor Lori Lightfoot, and brought with him a resume of dramatic fights with school boards in Reno and the teachers union in San Antonio, where he expanded privatization and charter schools. Yet Johnson kept him on, and he has remained in power throughout the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) contract negotiations.

This has led to the disorienting situation where the person reporting to Johnson is saying “no” to the demands put forward by the largest social movement organization that brought Johnson to power.

Reports indicated that Johnson was looking for ways to remove Martinez. The mayor’s October 2024 re-appointments to the school board suggest that Johnson is trying to find a more cohesive pro-public education footing. However, the results of the November school board elections (the first elections for these seats since the ’90s) showed the same problem we saw in the Bring Chicago Home referendum. Privatization and charter-aligned candidates, “independent” candidates, and CTU-aligned candidates won roughly equal slices of the 10 seats.

Johnson will be able to secure a pro-public education board since he will appoint the 11 remaining board seats. But like the failure of BCH, this election can be read as a barometer on Johnson’s weakened legitimacy. And because of his close identification with the Chicago Teachers Union, a portion of the populace has soured on CTU. This is a change from five years ago, when the CTU was quite popular even as they were about to go on strike and potentially disrupt many people’s daily lives.

While such contradictions may be inevitable when taking power, there has been little shared learning from these experiences. What role can movements outside government play to support the democratization of a historically anti-democratic city government?

Johnson instead reacts fairly defensively to questions about staffing. There has been some self-organization of “Chicago Progressive Staffers” for progressive goals like supporting a Gaza ceasefire, but even that Twitter account is closed now.

Receding of Left Strength

Over 47,000 immigrants were shipped Chicago without any infusion of federal funds. Many communities were welcoming, but some were not. Sarah Jane Rhee

The general trend towards disorganization on the city council certainly preceded Johnson’s victory, particularly given the previous mayor’s obstinance and maneuvers. Lori Lightfoot’s dangling of special perks for those who voted with her broke up a socialist caucus that had grown to six alderpeople. The promise of a united left bloc gave way to issue-by-issue alliances, and the slow work to build collaborative individual relationships.

Chicago DSA (CDSA) and United Working Families both attempted to help this group cohere into a united front, with only occasional success. Coming out of the 2023 elections, the progressive and social bloc was very much of a minority on the council, but a growing one. Sitting socialist alderpeople were able to hold onto their seats, and new progressive allies such as Angela Clay, Julia Ramirez and Jessie Fuentes joined the ranks.

But instead of uniting this progressive/socialist minority of allies, Johnson backed down under attacks from the right at crucial junctures. He went along with demands to strip socialist alderpeople of their committee chair roles.

Centrist and rightwing aldermen, often representing majority Black or Latino wards, attacked Johnson for seeking to replace police with mental health professionals or ending ShotSpotter, an expensive police surveillance technology. They either neutralized or won over progressive and socialist alderpeople like Jeanette Taylor on votes such as implementing ShotSpotter as a way to provide safety in underserved Black neighborhoods.

Johnson sought to mediate between council blocs, even when one of those blocs consisted of his biggest allies. Sometimes he cast tiebreaking votes alongside these allies (the ceasefire resolution; blocking a censure of Johnson’s floor leader at the time, Ald. Carlos Rosa), but at other times distanced himself.

At the same time, Johnson has attempted to close the distance between himself and national Democratic Party figures. He must have felt he needed their victory last November to secure the federal funding to broaden municipal services around education and housing. Even as he cast a vote for ceasefire in Gaza, he faltered on protestors’ right to demonstrate during the Democratic National Convention. He avoided the infamous brutality of 1968, but Chicago police still limited free assembly and arrested dozens, including journalists.

Why is it going this way? A too-easy analysis would see this as simply a reflection of Johnson’s “reformist” politics. It would point out, perhaps rightly, that Johnson and the political leadership in his campaign didn’t set out to radically transform or democratize the capitalist state. Rather they only set out to use the state, or a section of it. Or perhaps Johnson may see the need to democratize Chicago government, but feels constrained by the objective situation.

Another analysis would say that this is because of the limits imposed by the structure of the capitalist state itself. “Politics as usual” limits how much can be transformed by changing which individuals sit within that structure. Perhaps these structural forces reveal a “deep state” political class like Guidice and Martinez and other “leftovers.”

Put another way, Chicago politics-as-usual under Daley II and even Rahm Emanuel looked like a mayor brokering between various special interest groups. Perhaps we’ve so far only reproduced “the Chicago Way plus social movements, unions and community organizations” — but haven’t yet figured out how to break out of this “politics as usual.”

These analyses may have some truth. But the very fact that Johnson’s strategy, or the limits imposed by the capitalist state itself, remains a mystery to committed activists within his movement, suggest a deeper issue: the absence of an organization that could facilitate conversations between rank-and-file organizers and the leadership they elected.

Longtime activist and author Barbara Ransby noted after the victory that the ground game and organizing that won Johnson the election was built on years and years of organization building. So why didn’t a trained organizer’s victory sustain or even increase the organization building that brought him to power?

Some might say that it’s not the mayor’s job to organize us, it’s our job to organize ourselves for class power. In a recent In These Times roundtable of organizers who all have played vital roles in this moment, the lack of mass organized movements that could set the agenda was one point raised. Another was that the capitalist state will always attempt to (dis)organize us as it sees fit, even if an ally sits in the executive office.

This line of thinking is useful for understanding in concrete terms the forms that power takes, both for the working class and capital, both in political and socio-economic spheres. Does Brandon Johnson winning an election signify “class power,” or “governing power,” or simply “administrative control”?

While I agree that we need to continue to build class power and independent mass movements, it can be somewhat easy to fall into a one-sided view of “governing power” vs. “class power.” Working-class organization won ground in Chicago over the past decade because it fought for economic and social wins, until those wins bumped up against the limits of political power (such as Rahm Emanuel’s ability to close schools even after a successful strike in 2012), and then started fighting for electoral wins too.

Many organizers — educators, anti-police brutality organizers, undocumented immigration activists — learned this same lesson in many different movements and waded into the cold waters of elections. (These lessons are not unique in Chicago, as highlighted in Marta Harnecker’s analysis of Latin American municipal socialist projects.)

If we are bumping up against a limit with “governing power,” the way is not by unwinding our steps back to the streets, back until we learn this lesson all over again. It’s by understanding this limit and overcoming it through a higher form of organization, through a party. Far from distracting us from building mass movements, it seems to me this is the only way to continue the fight for class power and movements in a way that is honest, resilient, and clarifying about the limitations we face.

It is true that the level of organization across the city is limited and uneven. The demands voiced by political leaders reflect this unevenness. Decades of disinvestment in Black and Latino communities makes investments in police surveillance tech seem stabilizing, and so Black aldermen are raising this demand.

March in support of the ceasefire resolution before the city council. Chicago is the largest U.S. city to pass a ceasefire in Gaza resolution. Sarah Jane Rhee

For decades, mayors have invested in a downtown that welcomes convention attendees and businesspeople to enjoy our “world-class city” at the expense of our working-class city. As a result, alderpeople representing some working-class Black and Latino wards have fought the current mayor’s investments to welcome new immigrants because they seem to come at the expense of existing residents. These attitudes are strongest in the least organized, most disinvested parts of the city in the South and West sides.

Mixed white and Latino communities on Northwest Side and some (more integrated, though heavily white) communities on North Side have more organizations for housing, immigrant rights and public resources. Alderpeople in those neighborhoods reflect those demands, but organization in even these more progressive wards has limited penetration. And even while canvassing in my neighborhood, which has relatively stronger organization, a large Latinx population and a pro-immigration alderperson, I still hear anti-immigrant sentiment.

If the path to overcome reactionary ideas is through organizing and winning demands, we need a rich ecosystem of organizations that touches multiple parts of the lives of Chicagoans: labor unions, tenant unions, immigrant rights groups, mutual aid. Every kind of working-class organization can play a role, and they can mutually support each other.

It’s somewhat easy to fall into hierarchical or “staged” ideas about base-building being the first step and then working up to political organizing — base and then superstructure. Sometimes leaps in political campaigns — either at the neighborhood level or the national level — can help orient otherwise unorganized residents and spur organization-building. And sometimes projects at larger geographic scale can jumpstart local organizing.

Citywide political organization can play a specific role that is unmet in Chicago, and may help us leap beyond the block-by-block, community-by-community base-building that, though also necessary, has been clearly insufficient.

After a group of Northwest Side independent political organizations (IPOs) sat down with Johnson to ask him to be an organizer alongside us, I realized why he couldn’t be an “organizer-in-chief.” To be an organizer, you need to be building an organization, and there was no shared organization or party that encompassed us all.

Worse, to prevent the racist caricature that he is a puppet getting his strings pulled, the mayor has tried to distance himself from too strong an association with organizations that supported him such as the Chicago Teachers Union. To be bound together in a shared commitment to building people power, we need a form of citywide organization, with the capacities to strengthen, not isolate ourselves and our political project.

In a less optimistic light, if the absence of a party or party-like organization has helped the situation deteriorate over the past 18 months, how will that absence manifest in new problems in the coming years? What happens if the disorganization leads to deeper fractures — between Black and brown communities, between community and educators that supported Johnson, between different sides of the cities and their aldermanic blocs — or even open antagonism?

Seeing how successful national rightwing politicians like Texas’ governor Greg Abbott have been in deepening those fractures through external pressures, what will happen as the Trump administration uses federal machinery to raise the pressure even higher? Will the Chicago Left hold its ground in this new period? Can we gain ground?

Party-building Potential in Chicago

The unifying and strengthening capacities that Marta Harnecker describes may seem foreign to us when we think about parties. This is far from the national Democratic Party; it has an internal life, membership, and ongoing democratic processes.

It is also not the historically corrupt Cook County Democratic Party; it has an explicit ideological and social goal, beyond the material needs of its party workers. How a party like this operates day-to-day would probably look different from Harnecker’s Latin American examples, due to the objective conditions in a city like Chicago.

But it’s not completely foreign to us. Within the 33rd Ward Working Families, we talk about a symbiotic relationship between elected officials and our non-electoral organizing and mutual aid: one builds the other that builds the one that builds the other. Mijente, a national membership organization for Latinx rights and justice whose goals and endorsements have often overlapped with our organization’s, has a similar framework of sin, contra, y desde el estado that we’ve looked to.

We’ve had success with building a mutual metabolism on the local level of the Northwest Side, with ward offices and movement groups help each other build collective responses in the face of wave after wave of crises. But as we move to a citywide level, we can see the risks in trying to keep this mutual metabolism moving forward, both from internal contradictions and from external threats. As we try to grow to the citywide level, the bodies (city council committees, the city council as a whole, administrative bodies in City Hall staffed by movement staffers) are much larger and harder to “capture,” and the risk increases of “capturing the movement” instead.

And as an external threat, after success in a couple rounds of mutual metabolic building, capital may look for and seize on opportunities to intervene and interrupt the metabolism as a whole. We’ll need to build the metabolism at higher stages to prevent these threats from stopping it in its tracks.

The fight for immigrant rights locally has been one example of this metabolism in action. Chicago’s sanctuary city status and resistance to Trump’s threats of mass raids show clear wins from the collaboration between immigrant rights movements and elected socialist officials.

Capital attempted to wedge apart that mutual metabolism. The Republican Party’s effort to bus immigrants to Chicago was a cynical attempt to break or undermine that collaboration, especially at the citywide level. The response from our alderwoman Rossana Rodríguez Sánchez was to encourage more organizing.

She convened meetings of neighborhood groups, immigrant rights activists, and community service organizations to form mutual aid response networks in our side of the city, while she also advocated support within city council for new arrivals. Even with these local efforts, the citywide response to new immigrants — in the mayor’s office, in other neighborhoods, etc. — has shown weakness in defending immigrant rights.

Evictions have devastating implications. Sarah Jane Rhee

In this struggle, we see the need for the symbiotic, party-like relationship between movement and our representatives to operate at a larger citywide level.

What are the main capacities for a party-like operation? I outlined some items a few years ago, before the mayor’s seat seemed a remote possibility:

• Points of unity or a program

• Pipelines for identifying and developing candidates and activists

• A process to transform points of unity or program into policies for sitting politicians to champion

• Commitment from your candidates that they will pursue these policies in exchange for political power (i.e. volunteers and financial resources during campaigns)

• A defined and democratically empowered membership, either individually or via a coalition of member organizations, that can be mobilized as a volunteer and fundraising force

• A shared fund, apportioned out to campaigns

The experience of being in government would probably add some other important features:

• In addition to pipelines for developing new candidates, capacities to rotate politicians and staff who take on roles within government, preventing stagnation or burnout.

• Internal membership communications that can continue to organize and educate members on the functioning of the party’s politicians, outside of corporate media.

• Co-governance structures, internal organizing, and conventions with votes or plebiscites that can provide avenues for members and non-members to defend the government from attacks and transmit viewpoints they’re hearing on the ground, and bind together mass movements and the political power they fought to win.

• Institution building and member-to-member discussion that can foster expansion of “popular protagonism” into other areas of Chicagoans’ daily life, or throughout parts of the city that organization has not yet reached. This couldn’t replace the need for movements outside government, such as fighting to remove ShotSpotter or support newly arrived immigrants, but it could make sure that they have the best opportunity to develop in coordination with a left government.

We’ve been sorely missing this kind of citywide organization.

Four years before Johnson’s win, in 2019 we actually had multiple citywide organizations all clamoring to lay claim to coordinating the progressive and socialist victories that year: United Working Families, Chicago DSA (CDSA), and People’s Action-affiliate People’s Lobby/Reclaim Chicago. Independent political organizations (IPOs) around the city also laid claim to neighborhood-level victories, but with minimal inter-IPO coordination between those victories.

In the years after 2019, Chicago DSA fell short of the task needed to develop into any kind of pre-party apparatus. It attempted to unite its endorsed electeds as a bloc, but stumbled in this goal. Members played a crucial role in 2019 as doorknockers and donors, but the organization played an increasingly marginal role thereafter.

CDSA often eschewed coalitional electoral efforts, in favor of running candidates independently of other organizations or only where they could be the “senior partners.” After some seriously underwhelming electoral results for these CDSA-backed candidates in 2023, the organization has essentially drifted deeper into political sectarianism. In a city that has seen more electoral fronts opening, and more working-class and left organizations jumping into the fray, they have taken an increasingly less active stance on electoral fights.

CDSA avoided the Johnson campaign, draping their reasoning in skepticism about the limitations of municipal budgets. But this has meant they’ve in effect sidelined themselves as a force to push Johnson to test those limits. As DSA nationally may be discussing breaking with the Democratic Party, when confronted with experiments that tested that mettle, CDSA has abstained from the experience to flesh out its theory.

People’s Lobby continues to play a role as an umbrella organization for community organizations and IPO activists. But from my understanding, it aims to continue its role as a network of (often non-profit or grant-funded) member organizations and electeds, though it may attempt to become more party-like as it wins more seats.

And unlike a party that is member funded, it seems that People’s Lobby is funded about 10-to-1 outside of Illinois, and more than 10-to-1 by organizations rather than by individual membership dues (though some donor organizations are member-funded unions like National Nurses United and Amalgamated Transit Union).

It is possible that through transformations, People’s Lobby will attempt to reposition itself as a citywide party, but it is not positioned to do so in the context of the current Johnson administration, or its weaker relationship to non-electoral social movements currently.

Of the contenders for citywide party-building in the last few rounds of elections, then, UWF has been the clearest citywide organization that could approximate a party-building approach — and has been openly pursuing this. As they stated in their 2016 Platform and Points of Unity:

“We declare our commitment to form a new political party, independent of corporate control, with a grounding in working-class communities and leadership from the emerging American majority — Black, Latino and Asian, female, queer, and young. We see the recognition and support of black leadership and engagement in independent politics as primary in building a successful progressive political movement in this country and commit ourselves to popularizing the need for independent organization and action in our communities and workplaces.”

Two major election cycles later UWF has spurred huge developments in establishing leadership and self-determination from working-class and oppressed communities. In the case of CTU president Stacy David Gates, that leadership is recognized citywide. They have built coalitions across unions, community organizations, progressive political movements and independent organizations.

UWF also maintained these coalitions while still responding seriously to more spontaneous events like the George Floyd protests, such as organizing political messages from elected officials to support protestors and joining the calls for defunding police and funding public health and public education.

But UWF has not yet materialized into a political party by most definitions, whether as a ballot-line designation like the Democratic Party or a political instrument as Marta Harnecker describes. And where these gaps were becoming noticeable before Brandon Johnson’s election, they have since revealed to be endemic weaknesses in the political project as a whole.

While they have developed strong leadership that has provided needed direction and coordination for the organization, they lack the internal capacities for two-way communication — assemblies or participatory budgeting from Harnecker’s examples, or even primaries and caucuses within the current Democratic Party — that make a party a party.

At a certain point, UWF expanded membership from coalition organizations to individual members. But they seem to have failed to recruit much beyond the periphery of their member organizations. Most members identify more with their neighborhood group or union than the citywide organization.

UWF’s occasional conventions have rarely discussed and voted on decisive questions like the 2021 budget. Rare newsletters provide little in terms of democratic involvement between conventions. After Brandon Johnson’s election, when there has been so much more to communicate, communications to members (and even internal committee members) about major shifts and updates (leadership changes, major drops in revenue, coordination on upcoming campaigns) have trickled in.

A recent and rare member meeting titled “Reconnecting” illustrated the tension within UWF around motivation to actually organize and engage members, with minimal or disorienting effort in that direction. UWF staff and some elected leaders — including Johnson — offered some political orientation and organizational updates (like a passing reference to a near 100% staff turnover) to the 50 or so members attending, most of whom were representatives or organizers in more active organizations, some with thousands or tens of thousands of members.

Confusingly, the asks put forward by the staff were individualistic (e.g. “sign up for an election day volunteer shift,” “call your alderman”), though in the city budget breakout I attended at least one member from a nurses’ union raised the need for a broader political conversation among UWF members. As underwhelming as it was, the attendance and the coalition itself indicate that, if there is a path towards revitalizing Chicago’s left political project, it will have to be something like what was assembled in that room.

We can see the same double bind with leadership when it comes to elected leaders. UWF has empowered strong leaders who have transformed the nature of Chicago politics, but is still developing the mechanisms to cohere those elected leaders to points of unity and commitments.

UWF — even more so than the Chicago DSA example —endorsed and supported elected politicians who later wriggled under scrutiny or even turned their back on the endorsement, especially earlier in its history.

For example, after winning big in 2019, UWF saw the need for even deeper commitments, and attempted to unite its endorsees around a “no” vote on Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2021 city budget. Lightfoot made concessions to individual alderpeople, and some broke ranks and voted “yes.” After an accountability process that petered out, the pattern was set for following years, when UWF refrained from even attempting a coordinated bloc during city budget votes.

UWF and other organizations have talked about “co-governance” as a means to overcome these dynamics, but this leaves a bit of an open question: govern with who? One interpretation is for electeds to govern with the organizations that elected them, similar to Harnecker’s idea of “a party mediating body … and a political team that looks beyond day-to-day affairs.” Even then, how that party or political team operates can take different forms depending on the nature of the organization that plays that role.

A second interpretation is to “govern with” social movements, unions, and community organizations, instead of via some “mediating body.” A third interpretation would be to “govern with the people” even more “immediately,” like using participatory budgets or open assemblies, as Harnecker describes in the Latin American municipal experience. The strongest version of “co-governance” could probably include multiple approaches at the same time.

But our local experience with participatory budgeting has made it fairly clear that even the most “immediate” version of taking governing questions directly to the people still requires mediating organizations to support and build up engagement with people who aren’t used to “popular protagonism” in capitalist society.

Given these struggles with maintaining a voting bloc and co-governance in the years leading up to Johnson’s election, it’s unsurprising that after the election, UWF lacked the capacities and experience needed to prevent the scattering and disorganizing dynamics described above — between movements and elected leaders, and between elected leaders themselves.

This was not written in stone — and it still isn’t. There were key junctures during and after the Johnson campaign when these patterns could have been reversed. Particularly during the Johnson campaign, UWF gained some structure as a cohering force, because they needed to. Effective grassroots campaigns require two-way communication between volunteers and leaders.

 Compare UWF’s approach after Johnson’s win to how the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) transformed CTU after their victory. The caucus recognized that the next step was building an organizing department to prepare membership in every school to take the “popular protagonism” of going on an historic strike.

It was the Bring Chicago Home referendum that starkly revealed the disaster unevenness can bring. Although the referendum mostly succeeded in parts of the city with strong local organizations, it failed citywide. Without citywide organization a crucial referendum went down to defeat.

After victory, focus shifted from running a heroic campaign to governing like working-class heroes, starting with staffing up obscure offices. UWF pursued some internal organizing, seeding neighborhood-level political organization on the majority Black West Side. While necessary, it now seems insufficient.

In a city where many organizations have grown in the wake of insurgent and unexpected victories, Brandon Johnson’s win has taken UWF in the opposite direction. Why?

After Johnson won, activist brian bean summarized UWF’s potential and challenges as a mixed success in building a party. He suggests that the main barrier is political independence from the Democratic Party.

I think more attention is warranted on how UWF has failed to organizationally make good on its party-building aims, more so than in its ballot-line or policy independence — though perhaps, as serious efforts continue, we can learn more about the relationship between political independence and organizational or institutional capacities.

In my opinion, political independence from the Democrats nationally and acting like a party within Chicago are not currently mutually exclusive efforts, nor does one hinder the other. If anything, I suspect that building itself organizationally as a democratic, member-led party with an activated and politicized base of members would provide UWF more openings to develop political independence, rather than the other way around.

Another explanation for UWF’s direction may be the health of the broader local Left ecosystem. Multiple organizers in the In These Times roundtable mentioned earlier agreed that the big gap is in on-the-ground organizations and movement infrastructure. Tania Unzueta said, “I think we need to strengthen our movement infrastructure. We need to focus on base building. It’s really apparent to me — particularly when it comes to immigration issues with the Johnson administration — that there still needs to be a movement outside of City Hall pushing for policies and moving policies to the left.”

In looking specifically at the labor movement in the city, UWF remains a bit of an island as a progressive coalition of mostly unions. CTU anchored many political alliances of progressive labor and community organizations since CORE’s victory in 2010, but it has had difficulties since then, and has pulled only a minority of the city’s labor movement into UWF.

The building trades remain largely conservative, and some now vocally oppose Johnson. The Teamsters locally have engaged with rightwing politicians like Paul Vallas and the ousted patronage clerk, Iris Martinez. UAW may be on the march nationally, but is not as active in Chicago politics. Some unions which are active in Chicago politics outside of UWF, like National Nurses United and Amalgamated Transit Union, do so via the People’s Lobby.

This limited affiliation among unions makes it difficult for UWF to make the leap into a party, though it has added more union affiliates since its founding. I believe that a more coordinated and democratic party-building process could pull in more unions as a pole of attraction, and isolate the rightwing union leaderships. Democratic processes would also protect the coalition from crumbling based on interpersonal or sectoral tensions among union heads.

It’s possible that the past decade has been more about the illegitimacy and the weakness of the Right in Chicago than the Left’s positive strengths. We can see some signs of the Right’s weaknesses in dynasties like the Daleys and Mells that collapsed over the past decades, replaced by neoliberals like Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot who also left office deeply unpopular.

While the Right is not defeated by any stretch, its weaknesses have presented the Left with some opportunities to gain ground, especially in certain parts of the city. If that’s the case, perhaps UWF and our progressive current around it has enabled electoral victories that are out of pace with the movements and organizations they were built on.

The victories that expanded democratic mechanisms in local government — the newly elected police district councils, or the newly elected school board last November — have moved forward, but the ability to participate in those as movements or coalitions has been underwhelming.

Coalitions fought for this new horizon and successfully unwound some of the legacies of Boss Daley controlling every aspect of city politics. But despite a decade-plus of campaigning for the right to elections, these same coalitions failed to find and run strong progressive candidates for many of the seats. We’ve removed the remnants of Boss Daley, but without an alternative political leadership we’ve set up a power vacuum. This “interregnum,” Gramsci warned, can breed new monsters.

Despite all these difficulties, the fact that UWF and allied organizations have continued such a string of successes, culminating in winning the mayor’s seat, suggests that these barriers are something that can be surmounted through deeper investment in organization and party infrastructure.

If the current volunteer and activist base of the Chicago left, plus the grassroots and union funding, have been able to win so many seats this far all over the city, it suggests that a party may be feasible. That requires, however, a shift in organizational focus, one discussed but never seriously pursued by UWF and some of its affiliates. This also requires a shift away from the heavier investment in hyper-local politics, which has reached its own barriers and limitations.

Hyper-local Responses and Limits

In spite of the lack of citywide organizational focus, there are some hyper-local pockets of electoral strength in specific neighborhoods. My organization, 33rd Ward Working Families (33WF), working along with our alderwoman Rossana Rodríguez Sánchez, has had a string of successes in the past decade. We have built stronger ties with our Northwest Side sister organizations.

But we’ve also seen the limitations. There are still opportunities in this hyper-local organizing, but if we continue to carry our wards while losing initiatives citywide, our horizon for change on a hyper-local level may shrink.

As some of us organizers from Chicago’s “Red Kedzie Corridor” have summarized, independent political organizations (IPOs) have taken a hyper-local, ideologically explicit strategy that tries to build organizations autonomous from the Democratic Party.

Although IPOs have strong history in Southwest Side Latino communities going back to the 1980s, over half the IPOs these days are on the (generally whiter) North Side, with a quarter of them on the more mixed racially Northwest Side. One-third of IPOs are on the South Side, mostly in more predominantly Latino communities though some in traditionally white enclaves. A couple are on the West Side. Only one currently exists in a predominantly Black community, the 290 IPO (named after the West Side highway), which is supported by UWF.

In the 2023 elections, two-thirds of these IPOs ran a candidate for city council. Most ran as open socialists (as judged by the fact that they were either members of, or sought endorsement from, DSA). Over a third were incumbents who won re-election but there were a couple of new wins as well.

These organizations have also supported their local Left alderpeople, and built co-governance structures with them on a local level. (A cross-town IPO summer softball league in 2023 revealed eight progressive/socialist/abolitionist organizations, each fielding teams of about eight to ten people.)

Where UWF has failed to cohere party-like capacities citywide, IPOs attempted to build these capacities in smaller, more experimental settings. UWF has also invested its organizing capacities into supporting these all-volunteer grassroots organizations, as well as relying on them for field operations in their campaigns.

The victories of the electoral Left in Chicago have depended to a substantial degree on these grassroots formations. 33WF has won election after election, including helping anchor the wins of Congresswoman Delia Ramirez and State Senator Graciela Guzman, an organizer with CTU who won as state senator in a 20% margin, over a centrist incumbent backed by the Springfield Democratic Party and $2.6 million.

Each of our victories are shared with coalitions of unions, citywide progressive groups, and other IPOs within our congressional districts, as well as other hyper-local neighborhood movements like Albany Park Defense Network and Autonomous Tenants Union. These movements have expanded in power and shifted the balance of forces in local politics to the Left.

Campaigners in the 33rd Ward turned out for the 2023 election. 33 Ward WF

Almost a decade old, 33WF has grown alongside these movements, but also grown as an organization in its own right. We’ve helped support our alderwoman to advance legislation like Treatment Not Trauma and establish democratic transformations in the ward-level executive functions (participatory budgeting, community-driven zoning). We defended it against rightwing attacks during and between election season.

We’ve also expanded into new areas of organizing such as mutual aid (running a pantry from our office during the first year of the pandemic, and supporting the organizations helping new immigrant neighbors) and state-level races. We’ve established a precinct organizer program in many parts of the ward, which has helped increase our win margins by at least five percent more in those precincts.

All the while, new layers of members have assumed leadership positions as some founders moved on to other political work. Our experiment in building party-like capacities at a hyper-local level has often been a model for other organizations attempting to do the same in their neighborhoods.

And yet we’ve hit some of the limits of hyper-localism. IPOs on the Northwest Side have consolidated our efforts and encouraged each other’s organizational growth, but it seems to me that many of the IPOs that sprouted during a period of efflorescence in 2019-2021 have since disappeared.

In 2021 I estimated that there were around 15-20 IPOs in the city, accounting for 30-40% of the wards, half of them formed in the previous one to two years. In 2023 I estimated that leading up to that municipal election, IPOs continued to spread. Now, it seems likely that many have collapsed.

Some IPOs in the city have been demoralized by internal conflict, lost elections or both. This could change in the leadup to the next round of municipal elections in 2027, but what would it mean if that downward trajectory continued through then? How would members of the Left bloc, already a minority, fare in the face of diminished political organization?

Just as worrying are the divides within Chicago’s working class that could be reflected in this hyper-local unevenness. The relative lack of progressive electoral organization in the Black community — despite UWF’s attempts to seed IPOs — has created an opening for centrist and rightwing Black electeds to thwart Johnson’s reforms.

The Bring Chicago Home referendum is emblematic of this unevenness. it won overwhelmingly on the Northwest Side but failed citywide. Even on the Northwest Side, where BCH won, we may be seeing some organizational limits from the lack of a more citywide party-like formation.

Our ward contains 60,000 residents and our candidates have received thousands of votes. Our organization’s members, contacts and sympathizers are only in the hundreds (or maybe thousands during a heated campaign season). And we’re one of the larger IPOs in the city.

I’m guessing that there are limits to the participation and growth of a grassroots organization of volunteers like this, and so there will be a limit to fostering new hyper-local organizations like this across the city. Meanwhile, our string of electoral victories hit an unusual and unexpected loss with one of our candidates for school board, Jason Dónes.

Pro-privatization candidates successfully hammered on the fact that Dónes was part of CTU’s slate, and through that tied him directly to the increasingly unpopular Brandon Johnson. When facing this anti-Brandon and anti-CTU sentiment, our canvassers would point out how Jason related to other popular local electeds in our side of the city and how the pro-privatization opposition had overlapping billionaire backers and education policies with Trump. But these messages were either not convincing enough or drowned out by the millions spent by pro-charter forces in the city.

My conclusion is that we should try not to fall into a stage-by-stage view of organizing that believes hyper-local organization is needed in every part of the city before constructing a citywide organization. Yet UWF has aimed their internal and external organizing efforts at building hyper-local organizations in specific, under-organized communities.

In the time UWF managed to seed a new organization in one neighborhood, others hit their hyper-local limits. Based on the experiences of the 2010s — when citywide struggles and victories in some neighborhoods galvanized others without any organization — suggests that citywide projects could help galvanize local neighborhood groups.

Next Steps

With two-and-a-half years left in Johnson’s first term, there may still be some opportunity to turn around his trajectory. If we don’t, it could drag down the broader progressive and left-labor movements that have been associated with Johnson.

However, success will not come from changing his mind or the (perhaps closed) circle around him. It will also not come from building independent movements and organizations as if Johnson were just another politician in power. It will only come from organizing left-labor and social movements into a united formation. Most likely that will either be a transformed UWF or its replacement.

The election of Trump throws these questions into more urgent focus, but may also indicate new paths for party-building. On the Northwest Side of the city, progressive and socialist elected officials, along with IPOs and community organizations, rapidly pulled together a summit to discuss what Trump’s election could mean and next steps.

Around 500 attendees — members of IPOs, CTU, and many more — dove into breakout groups on the environment, immigrant rights, reproductive rights, education, labor and a half-dozen other topics. Each was facilitated by movement organizers and elected officials in an open conversation.

Moderators and participants throughout voiced the importance of continued organization for these different issues, but at the end of the event the primary ask was to help form deportation defense squads to prepare for Trump’s Day-One promises of mass deportation.

While it’s too early to tell where this experiment goes, it shows the need and the potential in this moment for a pole of attraction together under a shared organizational umbrella. If Johnson has any hopes for a second term, or if the Chicago Left has any hopes of weathering the remainder of his first term, we definitely need to reach for the same umbrella.

January-February 2025, ATC 234