THE 312
22 CHICAGO | SEPTEMBER 2019
PHOTOGRAPH: ABEL URIBE/CHICAGO TRIBUNESocialist Studies
Q This isn’t the first time socialists have
sat on the Chicago City Council. In the
1870s, the Socialist Labor Party, created in
response to the labor violence of the Gilded
Age, elected five aldermen. The movement
was suppressed after the 1886 Haymarket
Square bombing, but at the turn of the
20th century, the Socialist Party of America
emerged. In 1917, three Socialist aldermen
sat on the council, using their positions to
oppose U.S. participation in World War I.
When Alderman John C. Kennedy spoke out
against a resolution granting city employees
time off to register for the draft, one of his
colleagues taunted, “Why don’t you bring a red flag to the Council?” The party’s popular-
ity declined as a result of the postwar Red Scare. In 1919, the last Socialist alderman, former
Pullman electrician Charles V. Johnson, was defeated in what the Tribune called a “Hard
Blow to Bolsheviki.” It would be nearly a century before socialism returned to City Hall, with
the 2015 election of Chicago DSA member Carlos Ramirez-Rosa.
Ramirez-Rosawho was seeking the Democratic Party’s
nomination. Shortly thereafter, he joined
the Chicago chapter of the Democratic
Socialists of America, which exploded
in size, to 1,500, partly as a result of
Sanders’s campaign. This year, Vasquez
was one of two socialists challenging
Patrick O’Connor, a nine-term alder-
man and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s floor
leader. Before the election, O’Connor
publicly wondered, “Who ever thought
you’d be able to say, ‘I’m a democratic
socialist,’ and people would say, ‘That’s
a good thing’?”
To Vasquez and his peers, who came
of age during the Great Recession and
struggle to pay high rents and student
loans with low-wage jobs, socialism has
a different connotation than it does to
baby boomers who grew up during the
Cold War. The modern American defini-
tion is closer to what’s practiced in the
welfare states of Scandinavia than in the
autocracies of Cuba and Venezuela. The
council’s democratic socialists accept the
existence of a free market, while seeking
to reduce the inequities it creates.
“A democratic socialist is like a New
Deal Democrat,” says Vasquez. “We see
the influence of corporations and large
money in our political system. We need
to have legislation that makes sure that
those who have those millions and bil-
lions are paying their fair share, and that
with these funds, through taxation, we’re
going to be able to provide for a larger
social good.”
Among the proposals promoted by
Vasquez and his fellow socialists: a 1.2
percent real estate transfer tax on sales of
over $1 million, earmarked for homeless
services, and a requirement that develop-
ers build up to 30 percent of their units
as affordable housing, depending on
how likely a neighborhood is to gentrify.
Democratic socialists also favor lifting
the state’s ban on rent control.
That agenda helps explain why
socialists were so successful on the
Near Northwest Side, where rents are
rising rapidly. Housing availability and
affordability was one of the big issues
in the 40th Ward, particularly among
young apartment dwellers, who are the
democratic socialists’ base, says Maggie
O’Keefe, who ran against Vasquez for
alderman (and is now running for ward
committeeman). Besides Vasquez, Daniel
La Spata won in the 1st Ward, Rossana
Rodriguez-Sanchez won in the 33rd, and
the council’s original socialist, Carlos
Ramirez-Rosa, was reelected in the 35th.
(On the South Side, Byron Sigcho-Lopez
won the 25th Ward, which includes gen-
trifying Pilsen, and Jeanette Taylor won
the 20th, where residents are concerned
that the Obama Center will make area
housing unaffordable.)
Chicago’s socialist movement is a
response to trends both national andlocal. Nationally, income distribution
is at its most unequal since before the
Great Depression. The socialists’ solu-
tions to inequality are not so different
from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, points
out former 47th Ward alderman Ameya
Pawar. “The stuff that they’re talking
about ref lects the fact that more and
more people are living check to check.
Public investment in childcare and
housing, universal health care — that is
the rational response to people living on
the brink.”
Locally, the socialist wavelet is a
backlash to the privatization and neigh-
borhood disinvestment practiced by
mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm
Emanuel. Robin Peterson, cochair of
the Chicago Democratic Socialists of
America, called this year’s elections “a
referendum on Rahm,” which can be
traced back to the Chicago Teachers
Union strike and the 50 school closings
during Emanuel’s first term. The radical-
ized teachers’ union helped found United
Working Families, a left-wing political
action committee that endorsed three of
the socialist aldermen — including Taylor,
who in 2015 went on a hunger strike to
keep Dyett High School open.
The socialists are already nudging
Chicago politics to the left. At a July
council meeting, socialist aldermen led
a call for a feasibility study on a city take-
over of the power grid now operated by
Commonwealth Edison. It would be “the
reverse of the parking meter deal,” says
Vasquez: The city would take control of
a municipal asset and use it to create a
public revenue stream. The proposal
attracted the support of 22 aldermen,
demonstrating that even a small contin-
gent of socialists can influence the city’s
agenda. “Think about the way that [U.S.
representative] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
has totally transformed the political dis-
cussion in a very short time,” says Micah
Uetricht, the Chicago-based managing
editor of the socialist magazine Jacobin.
“That ability to reshape the political con-
versation is one they possess.”
Will a tattooed ex-rapper have that
kind of sway? We’ll see. C