Steve Williams

Background and Early Career

Steve Williams is a radical-left organizer aligned with several socialist organizations. According to his biography, he spent 20 years earlier in his career working for POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), a San Francisco Bay Area-based left-of-center community organizing group that works on specific projects in addition to its general advocacy in support of union-backed employment policies such as raising San Francisco’s already exceptionally high minimum wage, expanding public housing and government subsidies, and increasing leniency in student discipline. Williams was co-founder and co-executive director of POWER, which operates several projects related to promoting far-left economic policies in San Francisco. In 2015, POWER merged into Causa Justa Just Cause, another Bay Area community organizing entity. ^{3 4 5}

In 2005, Williams lectured at the Marxists School of San Francisco, delivering a presentation with Jason Negron-Gonzales titled “Anti-Imperialism from the Grassroots.” ⁶

Williams also worked for the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness from the early 1990s until 2010s. ⁷

In 2020, Williams announced his support for the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, stating that under America’s election system, supporting Biden was the only way that President Donald Trump could be defeated. ⁸

LeftRoots

In 2014, Williams founded LeftRoots with Ntyanya Lee and other San Francisco-based organizers. LeftRoots is a far-left organizing organization that works to transform from a capitalist economy to a socialist one. The organization does not take part in electoral or issue politics. Instead, it strategizes on how to achieve what it calls “21st century socialism.” ⁹

“Demand Everything”

In 2013, Williams published an article through the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Foundation), a Germany-based socialist think tank aligned with the country’s Die Linke (The Left) political party, titled “Demand Everything: Lessons of the Transformative Organizing Model,” which served as a framework for strategic plans for several far-left, socialist-aligned organizing groups including Metro Justice and Funders Together to End Homelessness. ^{10 11}

In the paper, Williams laid out a framework for strategic organizing to dismantle capitalism and quotes one organizer citing the need to “escalate the militancy of our tactics.” The paper also cites Marxist organizers and thought leaders, including Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and quotes Samora Machel, a socialist revolutionary who later served as President of Mozambique. ¹²

Williams’s paper drew heavily on anecdotes from his time leading POWER in San Francisco and concludes with him discussing efforts to mediate between the African-American and Latino constituencies within the organization. He concludes by stating, “Our task is to transform social relations in order to liberate the planet and humanity. This will require the cohesion of the strengths and insights learned on the frontlines of struggles in workplaces and communities around the world. Drawing from the experiences of historical and contemporary social movements, the transformative organizing model demands everything. It sets out audaciously revolutionary objectives because we deserve nothing less.” ¹²