With the conclusion of the Support Our Schools (SOS) endorsement process for Northampton’s 2025 municipal elections, the Western Massachusetts club of the Communist Party USA reaffirms our commitment to the struggle against austerity on behalf of educators, students, parents, and all working people in our community. We look forward to continued collaboration in efforts to fully fund public education and social services, and to challenge the erosion of democratic conditions in Northampton.
Our city’s incumbent administration serves a shrinking section of business interests to the detriment of working people and our civic life. Entrenched systems of clientelism and patronage, between which past administrations have been able to tenuously mediate while isolating working-class voices, have been fraying at the seams under mounting social pressures. The narrowing constituency of the Sciarra administration has sidelined a broad array of forces now contesting municipal elections, including disempowered sections of local capital which have previously been able to negotiate their positions relative to city governance. Within this new alignment, the working class has found space to advance our longstanding social needs, and fight for a leading position in the emerging terrain.
The mayor’s office and their supporters on the city council continue to insist that city matters be left to technocratic administrators, in open disdain for democratic input from the Northampton community. Disregarding open meeting law, the tight-knit clique of the capital improvement program (CIP) committee meets behind closed doors to draft budget proposals without popular consultation. The executive’s austerity regime underfunds public institutions and underpays municipal workers, then diverts the spoils to the whims of this committee, which has been constituted as an “advisory body” composed of key actors in local patronage politics. Confronted on its anti-democratic, anti-social posture, the austerity bloc has increasingly turned to tactics of intimidation and harassment in city politics – a point of growing concern as we organize our resistance to the fascist federal administration. Likewise, reactionary and far-right forces have found purchase with the rhetorical and ideological orientation of the Sciarra administration (evidenced by ward-level Republican candidates staking their claims in “budget realities” and “lowering the temperature of debate”), creating a growing space for MAGA in municipal affairs which must be decisively closed.
The convergence of working-class and progressive demands manifested in SOS has already won concessions from the incumbent administration, including a mid-year appropriation of roughly $300,000 in FY2025, the partial renegotiation of that year’s operating budget and the revocation of a Proposition 2½ override proposal put forward in bad faith. The coalition’s role in opposition has proven remarkably constructive in Northampton’s democratic life, educating hundreds of residents on municipal finance, generating interactive resources and demystifying civic processes so as to open them as new sites of mass struggle. Inch by inch and door by door, working people are finding our voices and winning space in a political sphere designed to exclude us – let the horrified reactions of the austerity bloc speak for themselves.
In contrast with sectarian organizing, which has intervened in varying attempts to impose ill-informed, personalistic and often brand-based politics on the labor-progressive coalition, we will continue to build the broadest unity of anti-austerity forces in defense of all working people. Whether at the local, state or federal level, the struggle for our public services and democratic rights did not begin with this election season, and it will not end in November. In resistance to MAGA fascism and for the dignity of our community, we must win decisive anti-privatization, anti-austerity alignments in all branches of Northampton city government that are capable of defending their respective democratic authorities.
-Western Massachusetts Club, CPUSA
Western Massachusetts CPUSA 