The Nutmeg Socialist

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Welcome to The Nutmeg Socialist:

A forum for CT socialists to share thoughts, develop ideas, document organizing work, and help us grow our collective understanding of our oppression within capitalism in Connecticut and discover our path towards liberation together.

Who we are:

We chose to name this project after Connecticut’s nickname of “the Nutmeg State.” But the nutmeg has a surprisingly radical history in socialist movements, as both a symbol of capitalist exploitation and possibilities of liberation. Stay tuned for a new logo and a detailed history of the nutmeg coming out soon!

This space is an extension of CT-DSA’s political education work. We are dedicated to developing our members’ interest in and capacity for rigorous political analysis, cultivating a shared political consciousness, and advancing our commitment to liberatory socialist politics in our communities and beyond. 

This project grows out of DSA’s conviction that working people understand and take seriously the urgency of our historical moment and the intellectual work required to meet it.

We invite you to engage with these contributions, to bring them into conversation with your own organizing work, and to join the collective struggle for a world beyond borders, cages, and capitalism. Further, we invite you to consider contributing your own writing to future issues. Reach out to us at politicaleducation@ctdsa.org

Volume 1

Issue 2

Current Issue: 250 Years of Class War

It is always difficult to disentangle any commemoration of the US’s founding from the brutality the US has authored throughout its existence. Official celebrations tend toward triumphalism and spectacle, flattering the powerful and erasing the people. This is true even when presided over by a less vulgar avatar of American violence than Trump. But for socialists to ignore this moment all together brings with it its own erasures. While we would certainly reject the idea that the US stands as a great beacon of liberty, we do recognize that within the boundaries of this settler colonial project, for as long as it has existed, radical contests over the terms of liberty have unfolded, and that exploring the history of these struggles can offer valuable lessons for the socialist project today.  

In this issue, you will find that history in a Bridgeport roofer’s political rise and slow capitulation to the very forces he once opposed, in the oral histories of two New Bedford millworkers, in accounts of insurrectionist action that preceded the Declaration by more than a decade, in a Connecticut Mayday march and an ICE protest deliberately kept off the record. You will find it, too, in the practical work of abolition organizers, in a soccer pitch turned stage for capital’s excesses, and in one writer’s personal journey through a movement he has spent decades helping to build. Each piece asks some version of the same question: what does it mean to do the emancipatory work of socialist organizing within a world shaped by conquest and mediated by the violence of capitalist accumulation?

Liam and Angelo’s “Jasper McLevy, and the Perils of Electoralism for the Sake of Electoralism: An Abridged History of the Socialist Party in Bridgeport” recounts Jasper McLevy’s 24-year run as Bridgeport’s socialist mayor, arguing that his early anti-corruption appeal curdled into fiscal conservatism, landlord alignment, and eventual estrangement from the working-class base that once sustained him. It traces how McLevy’s break from the national Socialist Party and his personalist grip on the local apparatus left no structure capable of holding him accountable, so that “socialism” came to mean whatever he happened to support. The essay offers a cautionary tale for contemporary socialists about uncritical enthusiasm for singular charismatic figures and closes by making a case for Connecticut DSA’s own patient, small-scale organizing, resisting pressure to manufacture a local Mamdani before a base exists to keep such a figure accountable.

Henry Snow’s “1776, or Earlier?” urges us to resist the traditional framings of the American Revolution, arguing for a deeper consideration of the conflict’s radical origins. Working backward through the Stamp Act riots, the Newport mob’s resistance to naval impressment, and the 1763 collapse of the Native “Middle Ground” after the Seven Years’ War, it recovers a revolution driven by artisans, sailors, and other ordinary colonists in pursuit of interests different from those we associate with the Founders. The essay remains attentive to the settler colonial and genocidal violence bound up in that same popular energy, and closes by asking readers to hold both threads at once, the emancipatory and the violent, and to consider what kinds of inheritance the revolution’s “complicated victory” may offer contemporary socialists.

Walrider’s “The New Bedford Textile Strike: A Socialist Historical Analysis” turns to New Bedford, Massachusetts, tracing transformations of the city’s economy from one based in whaling to one based in textile manufacturing, paying particular attention to 1928’s six-month strike. Through the oral histories of Mary Law and Nora Duprey, two women whose labor and organizing rarely made it into official strike narratives, the essay shares rank-and-file perspectives on a struggle waged against pay cuts, unsafe conditions, and industry’s violence toward women and immigrant workers. It offers a thoughtful reflection on the strike’s defeat, without treating it as evidence of futility. Written against the backdrop of present-day struggles from Box Elder County to Delaney Hall, the piece closes by asking what solidarity and persistence, imperfect and human as they were in 1928, might still teach a movement confronting its own moment of crisis.

Billy Y’s “De-Fanging A Non-Violent Collective Action: How ‘Friendly’ Cops & Corporate Local Media Undermine Anti-ICE Messaging” examines a June 3 non-violent action against ICE in Hartford, staged by the CT For All coalition, and the subsequent effort by Hartford Police and CT Insider‘s coverage to soften its edges. It argues that police restraint is not neutrality and draws a sharp distinction between protests planned in coordination with police and those that are not.

Nick L’s “May Day in Connecticut is Proof of Labor’s Power” traces Connecticut’s labor history from the union strongholds of Winchester Repeating Arms and Scovill Manufacturing to today’s fragmented service and academic economy, arguing that deindustrialization should be understood as, among other things, a weapon against organized labor. He grounds this in the 2006 Danbury May Day strikes, where undocumented workers risked deportation to demonstrate the value of their labor, and in Yale graduate workers’ decades-long fight for union recognition. The piece closes with 2026’s Connecticut For All coalition, reading its mass mobilization as evidence that a fragmented working class can still build power and threaten capital.

Pearson C’s “Organizing for Abolition in Hartford” reports from Hartford’s DSA branch on the work of organizing for abolition, urging us to think in practical and explicitly socialist terms. It details rapid response networks built to counter ICE activity, political education work, and focuses on peer support and shared joy as antidotes to the oppressive moments of anti-humanity we encounter within contemporary capitalism. The piece closes by asking where the work goes from here as new branch leadership takes shape. 

Kate Kosturski’s “A Socialist Sport Straying From Its Roots: Soccer and Capitalism” looks at how the World Cup has become a capitalist spectacle. Soccer’s working-class roots and social ethos make the game an unlikely stage for capitalism’s defining contradictions, and yet, or perhaps for that very reason, graft among the leadership class, the commodification of social goods, the proliferation of high tech, and militarized security all show up in stark relief when the sport takes the world stage. Kate’s article demonstrates how sport is an important site through which to understand class conflict and concludes with a case for a leftist reclamation of the sport.

Finally, Bob Reutenauer ‘s personal essay “Which Group has the Rose” traces his path into the movement, from bus trips to Solidarity Day and the King holiday march, through decades of Connecticut organizing with CCAG and the labor movement, arriving at a 1992 lecture by historian David Montgomery during the District 1199 Oak Hill School strike. Montgomery’s words on collective action, internationalism, and the everyday socialism of childcare, transit, and housing anchor his longer meditation on what has and hasn’t changed since, from the “re-radicalization of labor” to Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory. Along the way, the essay finds in reading Marx a call for transformation (“a place of new dance moves, a new world through criticism of the old”). It closes by thinking through the continuities that link DSOC and NAM’s 1970s mergers to Connecticut DSA’s present and to the contributions of people like Montgomery, who taught the value of continuing the struggle.

Our histories are more defined by courage and loss than by clean victories. Nothing in the following pages will suggest otherwise. These pieces resist fatalism and despair. They help us to learn from, rather than discard or romanticize, our past struggles. 

– The Editors 

Volume 1

Issue 1

Current Issue: 

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