At the same time, we face a new wave of social repression and oligarchic power that demands we adopt a strategy for combating capital strikes and police and military occupations that threaten to undermine even a modest program of reforms.

New York is brimming with experiments in dual power as the home of countless non-hierarchical, non-state institutions like radical tenant unions, anti-bureaucratic labor unions, mutual aid groups, direct immigrant defense networks, and neighborhood solidarity organizations. Moreover, New York is the site of the country’s leading Palestinian liberation movements. In spite of all this, NYC-DSA is suffering from a democracy deficit. We are arguably the most electorally-focused chapter in the country with a voter turnout operation that rivals the capitalist machine while failing to address the challenges of our own chapter democracy, insisting we are simply too large to manage, and instead resorting to online member polls without meaningful deliberation or opportunities to participate. This orientation weakens the organization‘s ability to respond to new challenges, develop competent leadership, and present a united and militant front in the face of powerful enemies. Only in this way can socialists chart the course and cohere popular forces.

At such a pivotal moment for socialism in our city, what is our role as anarchists and libertarian  socialists in DSA? What work should we be doing in order to best advance our grass-roots, anti-authoritarian vision? What opportunities does our position within DSA offer? After membership polling and much internal discussion, the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of NYC declares that to organize for our Points of Unity in the context of the NYC-DSA, our program of action will be as follows:

1. Develop Bridges From Electoralism to Direct Action and Build Local Autonomous Organizations to Fight ICE, The Pigs, The Polluters, The Landlords, The Capitalists, and The Zionists

Our chapter’s impressive electoral operation brings in many people passionate about abolitionist, anticolonial, and local material struggles only to leave them feeling disconnected from the work that occurs in their neighborhoods. We will intervene to change that dynamic through continued engagement with the chapter’s electoral and onboarding processes, identifying people with interests in specific sites of struggle, and helping connect them to groups engaging in that organizing work.

2. Radicalize Those Direct Action Initiatives With Politicized Interventions To Promote Anti-Statist Socialism and Sustain Working-Class Institutions

When people begin to organize alongside their communities on the basis of direct action, rather than by appealing to a higher authority, they acquire a sense of agency that lends itself to a deeper political critique of the state as a means of achieving socialism. This agency is critical in the context of resisting fascist advances on the terrain of culture, capital, and the state. We seek to activate this participatory spirit by engaging in existing centers of organization such as labor and tenant organizations where we fight for internal reforms and engage in collective struggles. We will be present in these struggles to speak with these comrades directly about the libertarian means capable of charting the path to a classless, stateless, moneyless society – a future which social democracy, left populism, and statist Marxism cannot bring.

3. Fight For Chapter Transformation To Turn NYC-DSA Into A Deliberative Democracy

NYC-DSA is infamous for its challenges with member democracy, a struggle that becomes  understandable when considering the size of the chapter and the complexity of making collective decisions towards our ambitious aims. We will fight to hold deliberative meetings, let branches have a stronger say in the decision-making process, and bring large-scale deliberation to the membership for an ultimate synthesis and decision. We will agitate, organize, recruit, network, and whip to bring deliberative, rules-based member democracy, proportional representation, and transparent structures and practices to NYC-DSA. In doing so as libertarian socialists, we will help to diversify our social base and provide a concrete example to other progressives and socialists of the democratic direction we want to move towards.

4. Actively Coordinate With Libertarian Socialist Groups to Strengthen Each Other And Win Support For Our Vision

The demands that DSA, as America’s de facto pro-social democracy party, makes of the state are valuable and laudable, but they won’t end capitalism. Meanwhile, radical struggle against the capitalist state is being waged by anarchists and libertarian socialists across a variety of fronts. Without dismissing involvement in elections, we will prioritize organizing and mobilizing our caucus and aligned individuals to join in the formation of dual power and be a conduit for people and groups to connect into that effort. We will build through collective struggle inside working-class institutions and beyond a purely local or affinity-group terrain in order to develop popular power. By doing so, we will demonstrate the value of our strategy to our ideological compatriots through the fruits of our labor.

5. Foster Connections Between Autonomous Groups and Working-Class Institutions to Facilitate a Municipalist Conception of Self-Organization and Power

Communities across the city have formed numerous politicized structures against capitalism’s many forms, such as anticapitalist mutual aid groups,  tenant unions, and community defense networks . These formations have helped develop popular assemblies and political programs around tenants and the right to the city, abolition, and municipal budgets that can shape governance and direct social movements alike. We will work, both with the branch Community Solidarity Committees and as a caucus, to support and network these groups to increase their capacity to draw upon each other, strengthening autonomous groups’ capacity to fight bigger fights and make bolder demands. As they grow accustomed to collaboration with DSA members, we can ask their help in joining DSA for common struggles, in which the more democratic NYC-DSA we advocate for would amplify their voices, helping DSA serve as a shared project of an increasingly larger and more representative cross section of society.

A Center for Capital & Its Socialist Opposition

During the 21st century, NYC has intensified its role as a center for capital and real estate speculation to the detriment of its working class. This has led to contradictions in its governance as real estate and financial interests have placed their own in the position of Mayor (Michael Bloomberg) and deepened development and displacement with the help of co-opted representatives.

The city transformed from an ostensible New Deal social-democracy at mid-century, if never one that was fully progressive or racially integrated. What were typically reformist unions mediated power relations between corporate and governmental forces while more militant left and autonomous/community groups like the Black Panther Party intervened in them in a more ad-hoc and disruptive way.

NYC’s subsequent emergence as a capital of neoliberal finance and restructuring reflects deep economic and political forces. From the mid-century campaign by elites to eliminate manufacturing in favor of real estate to the aftereffects of the city's bailout and the Reagan austerity and various Wall Street Boom and Bust cycles, these have transformed the city into a haven for oligarchs and their capital.

Our formal and electoral politics are constrained by these forces. Notably, this transition has occurred despite opposition from POC communities and some Democratic Party representatives. The growing socialist wing of the party in the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn represents a force that has won increasing numbers of seats since 2016, partly in response to frustration with establishment politics and the cost of living. But it has had mixed success in passing transformative legislation after initial successes on housing and climate/energy bills or expanding beyond a minority in legislatures, even when allied with “progressive” politicians and factions.

A growing social crisis, thus, has played out across multiple economic and financial crises, political movements, as well as increasingly repressive social and governmental responses in the outskirts of the Metropolitan area and on the state and federal level. The anti-globalization and anti-war movements, Occupy Wall Street, the George Floyd uprising, and the Movement for Palestine were partially successful projects that have shifted the methodology and intellectual and organizing armature for the left toward a more autonomist practice and vision of the future.

But we face renewed austerity, a crisis of social reproduction represented by a cost of living crisis, and a situation of declining capitalist profit outside of technology and finance bubbles. Rather than resolve dynamics that threaten renewed economic and social catastrophe, the state and factions of the elite classes have repeatedly interfered with elections, universities, and social movements and are now turning to openly genocidal imperialism and ideological and social repression along the lines of a Third Red Scare. While our ranks are growing, the crisis of the liberal state has fomented corresponding trends toward directly fascist and nihilistic ideology among disengaged people–not all older or white–outside NYC and to some extent within it.

Social movement struggles, notably, have led to useful but also opportunistic and counterproductive political interventions and strategies. Among a progressive political class associated with NGOs, the limitations of their base and a top-down and non-participatory strategy of internal coordination are becoming clear. Setting aside the role these groups have played in counterinsurgency since the New Left, they have failed to advance successful candidates or policy programs. But they remain vulnerable to the whims of donors, executive/appointed leadership, and potentially entryists. In effect, they have disorganized social movements while failing to develop independent political power.

By the same token, political clubs and ersatz party formations have failed to win legislative seats or connect with an atomized social base. The Working Families Party, significantly, has failed to advance its goals as a movement leader rather than a part of a left coalition dominated by NYC-DSA.

Meanwhile, aspects of horizontal and participatory coordination such as working groups, direct democracy, and federations between autonomous groups remain part of the common sense of activists. They reflect the only viable path for all elements of the left to achieve their goals and to prevent the ossification and attrition of experienced members from left organizations.

NYC-DSA and the Road to Reform

These conditions suggest how necessary it will be to engage with the internal structures of our social movements and institutions if they can serve as a forum for counterpower against reaction. The NYC-DSA has grown exponentially since the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign and resistance to the first Trump Administration. At the time, the local convention involved a few dozen participants in the basement of a church. It has evolved into what is the most significant political club–perhaps even a machine–in NYC despite the power of oligarchs. The growth has not ameliorated tensions between internationalist or autonomist social movements and the chapter, however. Unlike other DSA chapters, it lacks member meetings or adherence to rules of procedure standard in political and non-profit organizations. It has adopted a form of virtual polling associated with failures and crisis in multiple contemporary left and populist parties like Podemos and the Italian Five Star Movement. The chapter, while broadly aligning with different reformist factions, has posed and continues to present obstacles toward autonomous organization and projects from mutual aid to tenant organizing.

The chapter more recently has taken down its democratically passed policy platform from its website. It has repeatedly overridden the will of its members, as expressed through branch votes on the Break the Chain campaign and a more holistic approach to organizing with and engaging in deliberation with the Zohran Mamdani campaign. It has also repeatedly raised tensions over national electoral endorsements for Congressional candidates Jamal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, held its own international events, and even appeared to contest the definition of membership.

The chapter's trajectory appears to mimic the insider gamesmanship and crisis following the purge of syndicalists and communists from the Socialist Party of America, New York Chapter one hundred years ago.

Today, tensions are reflected in conflict with social movements outside the organization, from the Palestine freedom struggle to mutual aid and tenant groups. The primary mode of engagement, at times, involves uniting with union and movement leadership, as part of what is effectively a popular front. In centering campaigns and mobilization, too, the chapter does not develop organic leaders or protagonists. These practices may result in short-term electoral or legislative advances but they do not build shared power, transform the common sense of disengaged and rightly cynical civic citizens (i.e. residents), or sustain independent institutions. The same challenges that non-profits face are increasingly present within the DSA chapter. The existing program will therefore face obstacles even if the goal is to defend social democratic “affordability” reforms.

For these reasons, we call for the chapter to adopt a municipalist and direct action/community program and the democratic structures associated with the post-Occupy moment and our growth as a movement: participatory and member-led collective institutions. These are able to grow rather than ossify like so many leadership cadres, Board-controlled non-profit or political organizations, and sectarian outfits before them.

The chapter should consider adopting reforms that include:

• An expanded Steering Committee that's elected at large through a proportional election rather than single seats
• Instituting an appointed Administrative Committee to handle technology, membership, and other specialized roles with members able to serve on committees
• Expanding the subsidiary Citywide Leadership Committee, holding more proportional and at-large elections, and removing the Steering Committee from its ranks
• Requiring supermajority membership support for budgeting items and approval of the citywide budget
• Holding quarterly citywide membership meetings, following rules of order, with virtual attendance and branch attendance possible and employment of meeting facilitation technology such as OpenSlides
• Expanding communications to include
• shared and moderated chapter forum
• newsletter on chapter business
• historical archive
• and publication featuring member positions on upcoming resolutions
• Requiring branch meetings to be monthly and to follow rules of order for introduction of business
• Recall process for internal officials
• Ensuring working groups and membership committees follow democratic voting procedures and elections
• New branches and methods of organizing to expand the engagement of POC inside and outside the Chapter
• Federation of the branches into borough-sized or smaller locals that can easily operate
• Incorporation of Bylaws changes to reflect requirements of national membership and in line with democracy commission resolutions
• Long-Term Chapter Democracy Commission with supermajority (¾) requirements for passage of proposals to be adopted by convention, along the lines of Metropolitan Washington D.C. DSA (MDCDSA)

Libertarian Socialist Caucus - New York City: Old Struggles & New Terrain

LSC-NYC has gone through two waves, with its initial formation post-2017 alongside the caucus as a whole. While heavily engaged in autonomous tenant activity, political education, abolition, and mutual aid in its first iteration, the local caucus’ focus has always remained on contesting internal elections and participating in key efforts around political elections and policy campaigns. Caucus members continued organizing around national and local issues as part of left coalitions inside and outside party structures.

Since its post-Covid reformation in 2023 and following the revamp of national LSC in 2021 as an inside-outside group, the caucus has been engaged in fights to reform the DSA chapter, send delegates to convention and elect a representative to the DSA NPC, and efforts to extend the municipalist vision and direct action efforts within the chapter and beyond. As one of the militant tendencies within the left, we're concerned about implementing an effective vision that extends inside and outside NYC-DSA. We don't aim to preserve working relationships and present positive PR for the chapter at any cost. As we've done on the national level, we aim to unite left tendencies around a program for internal democratic reform and the class-independence of the chapter. The aim is to build a unified front for oppositional forces while participating in existing formations.

Methods & Strategies for Transformation

The possibilities that follow from Zohran Mamdani's victorious race for NYC mayor include a return to a social-democratic horizon of affordable housing, food, and renewed union power. But they also include federal military and immigration invasions and martial law. A combined attack by capitalists through their control of the press and market power to engage in capital strikes (and removing housing from the market) could undermine the mayoral administration. Similarly, a hostile federal executive; non-cooperative state executive, state legislature, and city council under the liberal-fascist syncretism of likely leader Julie Menin; corrupt and anti-rational state and federal courts; and implacable administrative (particularly police and security) state present as serious an obstacle to a successful Mamdani administration as they did to prior DSA Mayor David Dinkins or similar minority social democrats like Chicago Mayors Harold Washington and Johnson.

As such, we need to develop new popular, democratic institutions and build them into the foundation for municipalist power if we want to stand up to our opponents. We can't ignore autonomous movements in the streets that defend immigrants, tenants, workers, racial justice, or the cause of international solidarity in Palestine. We may need to ensure they operate democratically and unite with broader working class forces, as far as those criteria are possible under conditions of exigency. Autonomous movements have historically provided the spark necessary for popular power to catch fire. They can provide the scaffolding for public assemblies and independent working class institutions to develop a situation of dual power, no matter the mayor.

There will also be an increasing need for mutual aid and education as health-care, welfare, and housing funding come under attack from a hostile and increasingly erratic presidential administration. Our task is to build a response that meets people's needs and is not focused on the state but coordinates beyond the purely community-oriented and local efforts notable in these arenas. By helping to conduct popular assemblies in which demands and governing instructions are developed and uniting our efforts, we can develop a social commons while we organize beyond the scope of neighborhoods.

In this way, we can rebuild union movements and institutions from parties like DSA to solidarity and mutual aid groups as participants rather than external critics or independent actors with a narrow ideological vision. Our goal is not sectarian advancement but coordination between and social insertion within existing institutions. We aim, ultimately, to build popular power in a society that is often atomized, co-opted, and repressed.

On November 23rd, 2025, the Horizon Federation was formally dissolved by a vote of Horizon’s General Assembly. This decision was formally enacted on January 7th, 2026. The Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) will inherit Horizon’s assets and continue as a caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Horizon as a concept emerged after the 2021 DSA National Convention. This Convention was a pivotal event in LSC’s history, as the culmination of years of internal discord resulting from the wider diversity of political views within  the pre-2023 iteration of the caucus, which our members refer to as “Old LSC”. Strategic disagreements over LSC’s response to the delegate credentialing of Portland members of the Class Unity Caucus resulted in an escalation of disunity over LSC’s organizing strategy within DSA.

After years of frustration from hostility toward our politics by other tendencies within the organization,  a number of disillusioned caucus members finally sought to pursue a direct break with DSA. Many wanted to shift direction to organizing solely outside of DSA in new, potentially more promising organizations such as Symbiosis, and some went as far as to openly degrade any ongoing interaction or relationship to LSC or DSA, often disrupting what productive organizing work was ongoing, or levying personal attacks against members with differing views. For most who were in LSC at the time, these events were simply a bridge too far. Many left outright, while others left over time. Some former members nonetheless professed a desire to maintain the ties they had built with LSC, despite ceasing their personal political involvement in DSA. The Horizon Federation was the compromise.

In its ideal form, Horizon was intended as a gathering place of LSC and like-minded libertarian socialist organizations for mutual work and communication. However, that ideal never came to be. The desired Federation was, even at its height, merely a front group of LSC, and was unable to actualize the federation of movements that its founders had envisioned. Though at one point it enjoyed input and participation from a few libertarian socialists outside DSA, it never became a collaboration of outside groups working toward the same goals. What groups did emerge and “federate” with Horizon often had narrow points of contact that created brittle relationships. At worst, Horizon was a shell, only created to facilitate communication with former LSC members. We never built a true coalition, nor the structure needed to sustain one. Horizon’s bylaws were essentially a political document created in strife; a tenuous compromise, yielding to every possible perspective by its founder members.. Instead of serving as a clear and unobtrusive description of structure, in practice the Horizon bylaws were dense, arcane, and confusing to most of its members. After many of the individuals who had pushed the hardest for Horizon’s creation ceased their involvement, what remained of Old LSC was left adrift with a messy internal structure that failed to suit its interests or needs.

Frustrated with this cumbersome framework, the Horizon members who remained in DSA simply re-constituted LSC anyway as a “circle” of Horizon. This project was known as the “Caucus Revamp.” Shortly afterward, at the 2023 Convention, LSC received an infusion of newly involved organizers— “New LSC”— who identified more with the prospect of continuing to engage in DSA than the confusing and underutilized apparatus of Horizon. Over time, this dynamic only accelerated. Horizon’s General Assemblies routinely failed to make quorum. Its Standing Committee, Horizon’s de jure executive, struggled to maintain basic membership and participation. The LSC Circle made up more than 75% of  Horizon’s active membership, while Horizon struggled to independently sustain itself. This state of affairs was not improved by a late effort to revise Horizon’s bylaws, which proved to be a major undertaking that was ultimately never fruitful. Ironically, many of the same dynamics that plagued the Symbiosis Federation and led to its collapse also emerged within Horizon. Horizon lacked binding ties motivating involvement between members, work was still abandoned and left to a small, overwhelmed core, and the majority of Horizon’s members placed more of their focus on smaller, more immediate struggles. These issues did little to address a largely hypothetical superstructure that still lacked a compelling raison d’être, especially problematic at a time when LSC was growing more active, productive, and prominent within DSA, especially given the enthusiasm we’ve received around the program and candidates we offered at the 2025 DSA Convention.

There are many lessons for us as members of LSC and as libertarian socialists to glean from Horizon’s dissolution. Importantly, this is less an end, and more a cessation of a pretense which served neither our caucus nor wider libertarian socialist projects. Horizon’s biggest flaw was in its failure to nurture an independent identity from LSC. Horizon didn’t establish a separate presence from LSC in communications or strategy, and most of its members were only in Horizon by default, as LSC members. Horizon lacked projects that were materially distinct from LSC. Most damning, rather than forming organic, independent, and mutually-beneficial connections with other organizations, the expectation of political and activity commitments, submission to internal membership lists, and Discord participation, all baked into Horizon’s structure from the outset, proved a bridge too far for many organizers outside Horizon who had been careful to forge their own independent political identities and operational security standards. Horizon failed to provide meaningful incentives for other organizations to federate, whose Horizon participation would impact their autonomy and take focus, time, and energy away from projects that they saw as higher priorities, for little in return.

This approach to organization was frankly juvenile, and significantly more optimistic than the reality of how organizations and coalitions truly collaborate or benefit from cooperation. True collaboration requires effectively communicating with other groups before lasting political and strategic expectations can be established, not siloing ourselves before an effective movement has been built. For us to create an effective federation, or even a coalition, we need to be willing to communicate with different established organizations on our purpose together, and not solely define those objectives on our own. A true and lasting federation of organizations cannot just be declared unilaterally before such a discussion has even been attempted.

One encouraging sign we’ve recently seen was in the response we’ve received to our 2024 Letter to the Libertarian Left, which many organizations have shared, and others, such as the Black Rose Anarchist Federation and LIZA, have critically engaged with. This kind of interaction was something that LSC was not effective at as part of Horizon, the main structure we’d previously associated with organizing projects external to DSA. It is our hope that we can start to more proactively establish lasting political dialogue with others who are open to discussion and collaboration at the current stage of our organizations’ individual politics, without false pretenses of federation. We as a formation should also remain open to adapting and further developing our own organizing strategies in response to the feedback we receive from those outside of our membership. This cannot happen if we are unwilling to solicit or receive such feedback to begin with.

Internally, while much of Horizon’s brief history was beset by failure, this period has been important as a learning experience for how we should constitute ourselves. Ultimately, there needs to be better organizational synthesis in our activity between top-level administrative work and bottom-up communication between members if we are to avoid replicating the same mistakes within LSC that were experienced in Horizon. We have to ensure, when people join our caucus, that members accept the call for active involvement and meaningful contribution to our activities, rather than allowing cadres to form through inaction.

If we cannot do that, we can’t grow a movement, and we certainly can’t provide a meaningful contribution to our organizing presence, whether internally or externally. In dissolving Horizon, we now have a clearer picture of how our approach needs to adapt, both in how we relate to other organizations and in how we maintain our purpose and direction within the Democratic Socialists of America. As LSC turns a new page in its history, we must remain conscious of our past failings, and be willing to continue to engage them as we improve and grow.

Contact us: lsc.dsa.lux@gmail.com

Join LSC: dsa-lsc.org/join

Written by: Nikhil S, New York City DSA

For dedicated organizers on the U.S. left, it's an article of faith or even common sense that recurring state intervention and institutional conflict inform our current social atomization, cooptation, and disorganization. But there's a more immediate set of progressive politics–social democracy and populism– that have led to sectarian failures within DSA and political interventions that are neither sustained nor capable of unifying popular forces to defeat the right.

In adopting what are in practice leadership or institutionalist ideologies but failing to consider political conditions and the need for social organization in the form of robust unions or leaders accountable to movements, right elements in DSA and beyond have effectively disempowered members. They have opted, in particular, for inflexible programmatic strategies, purely mobilization tactics, popular front coalitions, and membership polling and engagement methods that are vulnerable to cooptation.

Our current context instead requires a strategy that builds popular power and secures political power as part of a broader project of building democratic institutions outside the state. By adopting modes of municipalist governance as well as strategies of electoral accountability and the united left front, we can sustain socialist institutions and party formations. Only if we respond effectively to historical lessons and organizing conditions in the global north can we be effective in our local and internationalist organizing.

Victories on Unstable Terrain

From Bernie Sanders to AOC, it's true that progressives have scored tactical victories through the election of reform candidates who can secure limited reforms and even some material gains on legislation like tenant protection. But what remains unresolved are two central questions: the form our organizing program should take and whether democratic and popular forms or instrumentalization of movements are the best way to develop and sustain member capacity and popular power.

Mid-20th century social democracy and 21st century left populism continue to provide a false horizon in the global north both to progressive politicians and movement cadre who seek out simple theories of movement victory. They suggest an alternative to deeper organizing, not irrationally, in a country where the spectre and partial collapse of state communism has been employed to propagandize against all forms of popular power. The paths toward victory, especially in the case of left populism, are always obscure. But the popularizers of the twin, off-the-shelf doctrines only offer easy shortcuts and outright wrong directions to a movement desperate for guidance.

These have always been incomplete doctrines. Early social democratic projects such as the pre-Weimar Republic German SDP aimed to unify labor and electoral projects as a project with ostensible goals that are ultimately Marxist and revolutionary even if their battles with their internationalist and anti-corporate left flanks suggested otherwise. But today, it's indisputable that parties like Olaf Scholz's German SDP or Francois Hollande's French Socialist Party are more interested in maintaining productive and private sector forces that generate surpluses useful for funding social welfare programs and the imperial systems–from Francafrique to Palestine–that support them. They do so even if this involves disciplining their own social base and ultimately losing the elections that are their raison d'etre. These transitions don't only reflect the ameliorative and reformist orientation of the parties but also their desire to respond to the logic of neoliberalism and monopoly capitalism following the chaos of the Great Financial Crisis and decades of speculation.

Americans, too, often interpret movements that have proven their effectiveness without attention to their historical and social grounding. In essence, unlike comrades in certain contexts in the global south and even ostensible outliers in wealthy countries like Scandinavia, we lack existing institutions like tenant and workplace unions and communal projects or mass efforts to build and sustain popular and counterpower outside of brief ruptures and mass demonstrations like Occupy.

The common trajectory is for a proto-leadership cadre to insert themselves as political arbiters who rely on the single tactic of mobilizing a voting public in electoral and legislative fights. But without transforming more than a fraction of those individuals into leaders or participants in strategic and institutions decisions, these projects can quickly lose capacity and direction. As in quasi-membership NGOs, this can lead to a series of ad-hoc strategies for “member engagement” that include push polling and campaign mobilizations and demonstrations.

In the example of the Working Families Party, outside movement upsurges, there is a focus on the tactics of the popular front governments and alignment with liberal forces. (The hostility of right factions within the socialist movement to abolitionist, rank-and-file, tenant-led, or internationalist projects suggests an absence of anything other than short-term tactics for achieving occasional electoral and legislative victories.) The reformists within DSA implement the same plans even though they are not operating in the multi-party parliamentary coalitions that are functional if not always long-term or radical vehicles in more genuinely democratic political-economic contexts. What's worse, the popular front governments were not capable of defeating fascism in France and helped destroy the left in the only country where it was victorious: the USA.

Left Populism as Doctrine and Reality

The more complicated arena of left populism requires us to transcend the dogmatic invocation of the term as an all-purpose invective against anti-establishment forces. If we investigate populism's history from the late 19th century, it takes the form of a US movement against corporatism and plantation power. The complicated class and racial politics of the American People's Party reflect the persistence of smallholding farmers and an incomplete unity with workers across lines of racial differences.

In the 21st century, however, the term has been employed by theorists such as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau to describe leaders who stand in for the whole people as part of a project of national transformation. In contexts such as Venezuela, collective action and cooperation are fundamental to social and political life. As such, the figure of the leader does not stand alone or entirely independent of the popular base.

As employed in the global north, however, projects such as developing the commune through participatory, proletarian processes that have been essential to movements in places like Venezuela are excluded. This is the case even formations such as Podemos in Spain emerged out of democratic formations such as the post-Financial Crisis Movement of the Squares/Occupy Movement. (The history of Barcelona En Comu and other more radical and municipal parties stand in distinction to this trajectory of leadership domination.)

The result is a politics that augments the autonomy and unaccountable leadership of politicians such as Pablo Iglesias and AOC and the cliques that have developed around them. (We would acknowledge the altered trajectory of the Venezuelan government following the death of Hugo Chavez but emphasize its qualitative distinction from governments in the global north.) The ability of these groups to secure significant ameliorative social welfare programs, let alone conceptually transformative legislation such as the Green New Deal, has been at least partially disproven even as individual politicians retain their popularity. Worse, there is a tendency to rely on digital and highly mediated forms of member polling that can be infiltrated by malicious outsiders or manipulated by leadership. The operatives desire a Bonapartism without an army but can't understand why they're constantly losing.

Both the projects of building popular and electoral power have seen reversals where they have not faltered entirely. Whether the model is US NGO “membership engagement” or “The Digital Party” that both Prof. Paolo Gerbuado and DSA's own Democracy Commission have critiqued, the result is an absent and disempowered membership and autonomous party leadership and elected officials. The 2025 convention proposals by social democratic factions in DSA to use electronic votes and membership polls, for instance, will undermine the power of national conventions and elections for internal representatives (NPC).

Parties that haven't turned toward more open, democratic engagement or ironically traditional party models during the fifteen years since their formation and significant advances during the period following the Great Financial Crisis, Occupy, and the Movement of the Squares have faltered with even charismatic leaders like Spain's Pablo Iglesias, with the Podemos Party, and the leader of the second-wave Left Populist vehicle Sumar, Yolanda Diaz, failing to win electoral victories or sustain party membership and social power. The Italian 5-Star Movement (M5S) is an example of a successful if not radical turn toward long-term political viability that occurred with the transition from a purely digital and potentially unreliable membership voting model. In that case, their trajectory has aligned MS5 in formal coalitions at all levels of government, including key mayoral posts, with the center-left (both post-communist and liberal) Italian Democratic Party.

Contradictions in the U.S. Progressive Coalition Model

The Working Families Party has run into these roadblocks under our exact social conditions. It is an ersatz project of building social democracy with first non-radical unions beholden to state and city executives and then donor-dominated and top-down if effective non-profits. But the project confronts more hostile governmental and corporate factions. As such, the risks of outside cooptation and leadership inflexibility both threaten the viability of the social democratic project and its electoral success. The Working Families Party even shares its General Counsel with a DSA NPC member and principal Socialist Majority Caucus leader, Renee Paradis.

With technofascists and their allies in government intent on intensifying ecological collapse and reversing the entire arc of political-economic developments since Reconstruction, these visions of national champions and win-win cooperation between weak unions and corporate forces–which can't even control the beasts some played a role in summoning–are worse than useless.

As was evident in the primary election of Zohran Mamdani as Democratic Party Candidate for NYC Mayor, WFP has increasingly needed to follow the lead of stronger and more adept organizations like DSA. The cost of hollowing out membership institutions is an inability to adjust or lead popular movements.

Even within DSA, the models of the leader and the coalition party have resulted in chaotic and disorganizing dynamics. First, elected officials such former Congressman Jamaal Bowman or current Federal Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have maintained the pretense that they lead the movement rather than engage dialogically with its demands, or better yet, are accountable political representatives have been empowered by social democratic factions. When they've taken bad positions on internal issues such as funding for Israel, Zionist apologism, NATO, housing, abolition, or Democratic Party presidential candidates, the backlash weakens the movement and DSA as an institution.

Second, disempowering members (by limiting discussion forums and voting assemblies, as has been the case in NYC-DSA) and allowing electoral officials freedom to act as they choose tends to disorganize members and the broader movement. It also leads to a reactive amd insular sectarianism (governance by toxic groupchat) that seeks to characterize open exchange of views as actions beyond the scope of legitimate politics (often termed those of “ultras” or “wreckers”).

The Alternate Program for Popular Power through Municipalist & Party Vehicles

These failures and reversals require honesty and accountability for the direction and effectiveness of the movement and DSA, in particular, as an organization. It's essential to consider projects with chances of success under our social conditions rather than turn to idealized or past models: municipalist electoralism and the project of building mass popular institutions.

We must grow not only the membership and elect politicians to office but develop popular power as part of a united front strategy. We have to unify left forces, whether the framework is party or federation of autonomist groups. This would not be a centralist formation of the type that has never been effective in the US. It would create, however, a coherent formation, which some commentators have defined into “The Party As Articulator,” that preserves a degree of tactical autonomy for different groups.

Municipalism offers an alternative to the mechanistic conception of electoral campaigns as independent of their social base and focused on parliamentary tactics and campaigns. As conceived by libertarian socialist scholar Murray Bookchin, the term describes the unity between social forces such as tenant organization and popular assemblies as the basis for waging electoral fights. Bookchin notably helped the middle-aged, perennial activist Bernie Sanders in his very narrow, Reagan-era victory to become Mayor of Burlington, VT. The vision has found success abroad in recent decades as an expression of the Movement of the Squares and building of new parties on a model of popular power rather than institutional unity.

We can build municipalist formations or those more similar to left parties globally while ensuring that parties are negotiating and making decisions to ensure cooperation around the implementation of a shared program. It will also require the even more difficult project of placing the popular classes as protagonists in all forms of democratic institutions and autonomous projects. This will ensure a robust social front that can confront and oppose the inevitable reaction of fascist and systemic forces. These include factions from the nihilistic far-right to corporatists in both systemic parties. They also require us to break from the model of ad-hoc popular fronts and draw clear divides between socialists and the liberal establishment class and those supporters who back their faltering projects of imperialism and domestic counterinsurgency with a human face. Such a sustained effort requires rank-and-file membership openly organizing around socialist goals ranging from Palestine liberation to electoral campaigns in labor unions, tenant unions, mutual aid groups, and other community organizations.

As an essential part of this project, we need to support DSA 2025 convention proposals and ongoing efforts to build a united front with left parties and groups that stretches beyond an accommodation with liberal groups and elected officials. Our resolutions to censure elected officials and to institute clearer mechanisms for electoral accountability are central to developing a less opportunistic and more powerful electoral front. The popular base should not be subordinated in the electoral project but instead integral to its success.

If we fail to build the commune or develop new and democratic institutions and a program for overcoming blockages, as has occurred in Venezuela and during the Pink Tide governments, recent political struggles demonstrate that we will only find ephemeral horizons. They will disappear even as we approach them by securing tactical victories on traditional electoral and organizational terrain.

By developing municipalist and popular political power, we can address the dead ends and failures of social democratic and left populism. Neither politicians nor simple coalitions are an alternative to popular power and left unity. The challenge is deep and requires sustained and democratic organization of the type, whether inside or outside the party, that seasoned left organizers have always known is essential to the project of winning a genuine socialist future.

If you like this pamphlet and agree with the LSC Points of Unity, you can join LSC here.
You can discuss this on the DSA National forums here.

DSA Co-Chair

1. Megan R
2. Alex P

National Political Committee

1. David J
2. C.S. Jackson
3. Byron L
   
   UPDATED 8/9/25
   The below rankings are those decided upon by the LSC Convention Delegation pursuant to Article VI, Section 10 of the LSC Bylaws. The LSC Convention delegation recommends ranking these candidates immediately following the LSC candidates:
   
   
4. Luisa M (Springs of Revolution)
5. Other SoR candidates in the order of your choice: Nell G, Ahmed H, Francesca M, Andrew T
6. John L (Red Star)
7. Adithya P (Red Star)
8. Other RS candidates in the order of your choice: Andrew D, Hazel W
9. Josh R (Uncaucused)
10. Sarah M (Reform and Revolution)
11. Marxist Unity Group Candidates in the order of your choice: Cliff C, Sidney C, Amy W

The LSC Convention Delegation also recommends delegates not rank candidates from Groundwork (Sumter A, Eleanor B, Kareem E, Frances G, Alejandra Q, Carl R, Cara T) and Socialist Majority Caucus (Christian A, Jeremy C, Leslie C, Clayton R, Renée P, Katie S, Seth W).

Convention Rules

Support the amendment to mandate masking on the convention floor. At the 2023 Convention, many people got positive COVID tests after convention, and as early as Thursday this year there are already confirmed COVID cases and confirmed exposures! With around 1500 delegates all in close proximity to each other, and lax masking, Convention is poised to become a super spreader event. Enough KN-95 masks are being provided by Convention for every attendee to have one for every day of programming, so there would be no undue financial hardship amongst delegates if this rules amendment passes.

Agenda Amendments

Oppose the agenda amendment from Socialist Majority Caucus and Groundwork that lowers R44: Resolution on Staff, Contractors, and Budgeting to near the end of general orders, almost ensuring Convention does not hear its only resolution pertaining to how the budget as a whole is allocated. This agenda amendment would bring forward items that Convention was already likely to hear as long as Convention proceeds at a timely pace. Every single debatable procedural motion results in one less resolution heard, so we encourage delegates to use them sparingly.

Constitution & Bylaws Amendments

CB-01: Democracy Commission Comprehensive Structural Reform Proposal

LSC supports the division of CB01 at Convention.

• CB01-1: Archive Policy - Support
• CB01-2: Abolishing Constitutional Membership - Support
• CB01-4: Member Input Policy - Support
• CB01-5: National Commission Policy - Support
• CB01-6: Changes to the NPC - No recommendation
• CB01-7: Standards for the NPC - Support
• CB01-8: Implementing Chapter Affiliation Agreements - Support
• CB01-9: Reauthorizing the Democracy Commission - Oppose
• CB01-10: Repealing the Ban on Democratic Centralism - Support

CB02: One Member, One Vote for National Leadership Elections - Oppose

CB03: Setting Fee Structures for the Organization’s Print Publications - Support

CB04: Fair Representation via STV Delegate Elections - Support

Consensus Resolutions

CR01: Democracy Commission DSA National & Chapter Affiliation Agreement Proposal - Support

CR02: International Committee Consensus Resolution – Building an Internationalist Party - If amended by CR02-A02 Oppose, otherwise Support

• CR02-A02: Democratic Socialist Internationalism - Oppose

CR03: 2025 Green New Deal Campaign Committee Convention Resolution - Support if amended by CR03-A01, otherwise Oppose

• CR03-A01: For a Radical and Resurgent Ecosocialist Working Group - Support

CR04: National Political Education Committee Consensus Resolution -- 2025 - Support

CR05: National Electoral Commission Consensus Resolution - Oppose if amended by CR05-A05, otherwise Support

• CR05-A02: One DSA, Toward a Unified Endorsement Process - No recommendation
• CR05-A03: Towards Deliberative Federal Endorsements - Support
• CR05-A04: Carnation Program Amendment to the NEC Resolution - Oppose
• CR05-A05: Invest in Cadre Candidates and Political Independence - Oppose

CR06: 2025 DSA Housing Justice Commission Consensus Resolution - Support

CR07: Young Democratic Socialists of America: Building DSA for the Future - Support

CR08: Unified Grievance Policy - Oppose regardless of amendment

• CR08-A01: Member Expulsion Policy (formerly CB01-3) - Support
• CR08-A02: For a Member-Led Grievance Response - Support
• CR08-A03: Fix the At-Large Loophole in Grievance Policy - Support

CR09: 2025 TRBA Consensus Resolution - Support if amended by CR09-A01, otherwise Oppose

• CR09-A01: Amendment for the Organizational Merger of QSWG and TRBA (formerly R38) - Support
• CR09-A02: CR09-A02: Removal of the Staffer Requirement - Support

CR10: 2025 National Labor Commission Consensus Resolution: Building A Worker Led Labor Movement - Support regardless of amendment

• CR10-A01: A Partyist Labor Strategy - Support
• CR10-A02: Carnation Program Amendment to the NLC Resolution - Oppose
• CR10-A03: Support Federal Worker Organizing - Support
• CR10-A04: Non-Reformist Labor Reforms for Worker Power - Oppose

Member-Submitted Resolutions

R01: DSA for One Palestinian State - Support regardless of amendment

• R01-A01: DSA for Palestinian Self-Determination - Support
• R01-A02: DSA Endorses the One Democratic State Campaign - Oppose

R02: No AI Images! - Support

R03: For a Politicized and Member-Driven Growth & Development in DSA - Support regardless of amendment

• R03-A01: Not Just Large Chapters - Support

R04: For a Socialist Party in Years, Not Decades - Support if solely amended by R04-A01, otherwise Oppose

• R04-A01: The Party is DSA - Support
• R04-A02: For Democratic Co-Determination of an Independent Working-Class Politics - Oppose

R05: Fight Fascism, Build Socialism - Oppose regardless of amendment

• R05-A01: Leave Hiring to the NPC - Support

R06: One Member, One Vote for Federal Endorsements - Oppose
Note: the parliamentarian has issued an opinion saying this resolution to be out of order and not in compliance with the DSA National Bylaws, Article XIII.

R07: Principles for Party-Building - Support

R08: Democratic Discipline: A Uniform Process for Electoral Censure Across DSA - Support

R09: For Political and Technological Independence: A Path to Exit from Capitalist and Democratic Party Tech - Support

R10: Make DSA More Diverse - Oppose regardless of amendment

• R10-A01: DSA for Multiracial Liberation - Support

R11: A 50 State Strategy - Support if amended by R11-A01, otherwise Oppose

• R11-A01: Administrative over Political - Support

R13: For a Robust & Centralized National Resource Library - Support

R15: Take the Fight to the Rural Front - Support regardless of amendment

• R15-A01: Rural Organizing Under the GDC - Support

R17: Democratize National Commissions - Oppose

R18: Seize the Moment! Defeat Corporate Democrats and Elect More Socialists - Oppose

R19: From Palestine to Mexico: Fighting Fascist Attacks on Immigrants - No recommendation

R20: Workers Will Lead the Way: Join with Unions to Run Labor Candidates - Oppose regardless of amendment

• R20-A01: Democratic Socialists and the Labor Movement Need Each Other - Support

R21: Democracy For All: a NEC Subcommittee for Voting Rights - Support

R22: For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA - Support if unamended by R22-A01, otherwise Oppose

• R22-A01: Align with the BDS Movement - Oppose

R24: To Defeat Trump, Turn Toward the Masses - Oppose regardless of amendment

• R24-A01: Turn Towards the Masses (With Our Own Message) - Support
• R24-A02: Fight the Right in General Elections - Support

R25: DSA and the Democratic Road to Socialism - Oppose

R26: Fight Fascist State Repression & ICE - Support

R27: Staff Relationship to Members in a Democratic Organization - Support

R29: Proposal to Launch a Member-Led National Design Committee - Support

R30: Fighting Back in the Class War: Preparing for May Day 2028 - Support regardless of amendment

• R30-A01: Tenants & Workers Together in 2028 - Support

R31: Rejecting the Normalization of Zionism and Occupation - Support

R32: Towards a Multilingual DSA / Hacia un DSA Multilingüe - Support

R33: Unite Labor & the Left to Run a Socialist For President and Build the Party - Support if amended by R33-A02, otherwise Oppose

• R33-A02: Building a United Front Toward 2028 - Support

R34: Workers Deserve More, Forever: For a Coherent and Continuous Program Befitting DSA’s Political Growth - Support if amended by R34-A01, otherwise Oppose

• R34-A01: A Fighting Socialist Program for DSA - Support

R35: For Working-Class Member Leadership - Support if amended by R35-A01, otherwise Oppose

• R35-A01: Stipend the NPC - Support

R36: A Unified Democratic Socialist Strategy for Palestine Solidarity - Oppose

R39: Organizing Against the IHRA Working Definition - Oppose

R40: Build Worker Power, Defeat Amazon - No recommendation

R42: Labor for an Arms Embargo - Support if amended by R42-A01, otherwise Oppose

• R42-A01: For a Strike-Ready Labor for an Arms Embargo - Support

R43: Locals-First DSA: Increase Dues Income for Locals and Stabilize National Budget - Support if unamended, otherwise Oppose

• R43-A01: Towards a Well-Financed Federation - Oppose

R44: Resolution on Staff, Contractors, and Budgeting - Support regardless of amendment

• R44-A01: For a Member-Guided Budgeting Process - Support

R45: Voting Rights for All Members - Oppose

R46: Resolution to Censure LA City Councilwoman Nithya Raman - Support

R47: Resolution to Censure U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  - Support

R48: Equality Before Convention - Support

R49: Resolution on the Use of X.com - Support

What is LSC Doing in DSA?

One LSCer's Understanding of Their Caucus

Written by: Owen H, Wilmington DSA

“The Libertarian Socialist Caucus seeks to provide a political home within the Democratic Socialists of America for all socialists who are opposed to the state. We are a diverse body of libertarian socialists, libertarian Marxists, anarchists, left communists, and adherents to other schools of thought within the left wing of the socialist movement. We strive to build an equitable, democratic and open society, and we believe that such a goal cannot be achieved if our organization is hierarchical, bureaucratic, and opaque in its function. As such, we have come together within DSA with two overarching purposes: first, to preserve and advance those tendencies which harmonize with our vision of socialist means and ends, and second, to create a point of contact and organizing between our faction and the broader socialist movement.”
-Preamble to the Points of Unity of The Libertarian Socialist Caucus of DSA^[1]

“What is the Libertarian Socialist Caucus and what is it doing in DSA?” is a question that has been discussed heavily within the caucus, as well as with others in DSA and beyond. This is a natural enough question given that Libertarian Socialist is often associated with anarchism and is undeniably at least adjacent or affiliated. Anarchism is a notoriously anti-state, anti-electoral ideology, while DSA is a notoriously pro-state, pro-electoral organization. These contradictions and complexities of multi-tendency organizing on uneven terrain are real and have expressed themselves throughout the last two years of growth in the caucus.

Any proper analysis must begin with at least a rough definition of terms and context. It is my assessment that LSC is not and cannot be an “anarchist caucus” strictly speaking. LSC is composed of a wide range of anti-state socialists with many influences including anarchism, but also libertarian strains of Marxism, Maoism. DSA is (currently) a non-revolutionary reform and electoral organization. Therefore, between the ideological mix of our members and the nature of the organization we work in, it is not possible at this time to be an “anarchist caucus” in DSA. While many of our members do engage in classic anarchist organizing, such as direct action and mutual aid, when we do this work within the big tent, non-revolutionary, state-affirming framework of DSA, it stretches definitions to consider such work “anarchism.” This is not a bad thing but rather a necessary and honest analysis of how our work does and does not align with the dominant ideology it is associated with.

That dominant ideology: anarchism is a word dense with diverse interpretations of history and futurity. While much of this article explores how we diverge from anarchism, I wanted to foreground where we align and why I and other comrades still think we have complementary roles to play in the struggle against capitalism and the state. LSC’s anarchist inspirations fall firmly in the camp of organizational or social anarchist communism. Like much of the modern libertarian left, many of us are also inspired by the ideas of Murray Bookchin which we will discuss more later. And finally, especifismo, a method of anarchist organization developed in Latin America has been critical to both our self-conception and to our relationships with other anarchist organizations. There are many anarchists in LSC and we move with great respect for those principles even as contact with reality urges us to broaden the range of strategies, tactics, and theories we employ. So why are we in DSA? What are our goals? And if not anarchism, how do we conceive of the theory informing our praxis? While the specifics of these questions have yet to be definitively answered by our membership, it is my intention here to explore them soberly and critically in order to provide a constructive outlook for how the Libertarian Socialist Caucus can galvanize the best aspects of DSA over the next two years and beyond.

Why are we in DSA?

While answers differ member to member on the specifics, broadly speaking there are two camps on this question, though they are not completely mutually exclusive. One is folx who join out of some necessity in their local context, the other is folx who believe in the capacity of DSA specifically to be an active and positive force in the struggles of the U.S. left. As an aside this is not a dynamic unique to libertarian socialists. I personally joined DSA from a combination of my isolated context in the southeast U.S. and the existence of LSC as a space for libertarian socialists within DSA. Without that feeling of an aligned space I could explore, learn from, and organize with, I would have been more reluctant to commit.

Many others are in similar contexts away from the urban areas where niche political sects and subcultures are usually more easily found and founded. The isolation of suburban and semi-rural sprawl and the anxiety of marginalization compound the issue. In these contexts DSA is often the only organization in town left of the Democratic Party for people inspired by anarchism and/or communism and desperate to do anything at all beyond voting. We decide that imperfect organizing is better than no organizing and show up and get to work.

The big tent nature of DSA along with its diffuse highly localized chapter structure provides a lot of hope to this kind of new member for the possibilities of libertarian organizing. The organization also places a lot of emphasis on democratic culture and while development remains uneven, many of the small and mid size chapters especially do foster real participation and deliberation. In addition to all of this is the much touted size of the organization, offering greater possibility for the necessary building of solidarity with various sectors of the organized left than the traditional affinity group or specific anarchist organization models provide. So in short, we find ourselves in DSA largely out of necessity but also because many of us see real promise in the liberatory seeds throughout DSA’s structure, culture, and position in the landscape of the U.S. left.

What are our goals?

I believe this question is the real crux of confusion about LSC both from within and without. While there is still work to be done cohering the caucus around a unified analysis, I offer the next two sections as a sketch of the answers which arise from our circumstance. The immediate horizon of our caucus is constrained by the current functioning of the broader organization we exist within. The fact is, DSA remains an organization heavily focused on electoralism and state-backed reform in stark contrast to the anarchist line of militant mass organizing and direct action to overthrow the state and dispossess the capitalists. On top of this there is the fact of institutional capture by the more moderate and state-affirming wing of the organization, both at the national level and in many of the largest chapters. Yet here we are, many personally identifying as anarchists, in an organization with significant structural inertia in the direction of social democracy and statist reform. So what, then, can our near-term goals be?

It is my belief that the first and foremost goal of LSC by virtue of being a caucus in DSA, is broadly: to win power in the national organization and wield that power in line with and pushing the organization towards our ideals of anti-authoritarianism; and, elevating the non-electoral means of struggle already being nurtured throughout chapters and national bodies alike. In addition to these main overarching goals, our caucus is dedicated to raising the bar within the organization for accountability, anti-chauvinism, and principled cross-tendency collaboration. This is not a settled position within our caucus and is certainly not the main focus of all of our most active members, however it is my opinion that this is merely an unavoidable fact of our context.

If LSC can cohere around the aforementioned short term goals, we can begin to envision a medium term goal of contributing to a DSA that works to empower the people to develop their capacity for direct action and direct democracy. DSA is unlikely to ever be an insurrectionary catalyst but we can ensure that it is an organization that truly works in the interests of popular power. On the national level we can transfer political agency downward to chapters by supporting their autonomous projects and offering guidance. At the same time we can transfer administrative burden upward, allowing National to handle things in the realm of law, tech, comms and the like. On the chapter level we can lead the way on integrating deeply with our neighbors and other local progressive elements. We can and should provide the growing mass of the disaffected and disenfranchised with community, political education, and comrades to stand alongside them in their struggle.

What do you call this?

Many of us are inspired by the especifismo ^[2] school of anarchism and its advocacy for a specific anarchist organization to be present in social movements and popular struggles. It is this author's opinion that this theory is the closest strictly anarchist theory to what I have found in LSC in practice. However inspiring the theory is to many of us though, due to being a “big tent within a big tent” we cannot be applying the theory to its fullest^[3]. In the language of especifismo, LSC is not a specific anarchist organization but a small grouping of tendencies within the political organization that is DSA. I will note that it is my belief that we can and should move closer to the especifist model of organization.
In addition to especifismo, I see in the practical situation of LSC many reflections of the later writings of Murray Bookchin as he embraced broad left coalitions, municipal elections, constitutions, and majoritarian voting in what he called “communalism” or "libertarian municipalism.”^[4] He believed that a 21st century revolution must be one of the majority of the people, growing from a dual power rooted in neighborhood councils and that it must be towards what he called a “rational and ecological society.” Bookchin himself was often criticized by anarchists for his commitment to these positions which ultimately drove him to coin the term “lifestyle anarchists” and disavow the anarchist label entirely. While I do not particularly care about the individual political IDs of my comrades, I do think a similar reckoning with how we conceive of the work of the caucus is in order.

I believe currently our group is functionally a communalist caucus; that is to say, we engage in a broad left coalition doing work that flows into municipal elections, with the goal of developing more and more libertarian possibilities, and with a strong focus on local work. This is not a claim of any individual or group ideology but rather an observation about what is actually happening. I, for one, find much encouragement in this reality. I think the communalist perspective has much potential to synthesize the energy of the U.S. left into something durable and generative. If we are able to come to terms with this, I believe we can cohere a synthesis between our especifist inspirations and communalist reality with the potential to achieve our goals of an anti-authoritarian, bottom-up DSA with electoralism reduced to one node in the ecology of tactics, instead of the one thing all other work flows into.

If you like this pamphlet and agree with the LSC Points of Unity, you can join LSC here.
You can discuss this on the DSA National forums here.

Humanity stands at the precipice of a global ecological catastrophe. As both reactionary and liberal forces in the United States retreat from the necessity of collective action, the possibility that technocratic, welfare-state models can address the deepening crisis becomes increasingly remote. The present political system in the U.S., whether in overtly fascistic red states or in nominally pro-environmental blue states, has snuffed out any pretense of viability for the Green New Deal. These conditions require us, in climate advocacy groups, frontline communities, and DSA in general, to progress beyond these ineffective political solutions and re-evaluate our ecosocialist strategy. To do this, we must develop modes of analysis and strategic interventions that, while predicated on the lessons of the Green New Deal, including the partially-stalled campaigns by DSA’s Green New Deal Campaign Committee (GNDCC) to implement it, allow us to move beyond its limitations as a political and organizing roadmap. This will require the GNDCC to again operate democratically, as envisioned by CR03-A01: “For a Radical and Resurgent Ecosocialist Working Group”, and for DSA to adopt bottom-up, popular campaigns for climate and social justice. The latter will bolster broad social power that can confront and overcome state cooptation and intransigence. Real ecological and social liberation requires a radical break from the industrial-capitalist model — one centered on Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, degrowth, and ecological reciprocity.

The Incomplete Ecology of the Green New Deal

Science shows we have now breached six of the nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for Earth: climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, and novel chemical pollution, with the total amount of plastics on the planet exceeding twice the mass of all living mammals. Beyond just carbon emissions, the current rates of material extraction and pollution of all types are overshooting the Earth’s regenerative capacities, risking irreversible damage to the vital circular systems which sustain life. The timeline for action is shockingly short: the latest IPCC reports underscore that any further delay will slam shut our “brief and rapidly closing window” to secure a livable future. At current emission rates, only about six years’ worth of CO₂ emissions remain before the world exhausts the remaining carbon budget for a 1.5 °C warming limit.

It is crucial to understand that our ecological problems cannot be solved merely by way of transitioning to renewable sources of energy. The predicament we find ourselves in today is a predictable culmination of the capitalist system, which thirsts for indefinite growth on a finite planet. The “green growthism” and underlying productivist attitude at the base of the Green New Deal are informed by an unexamined and obsolete belief in material scarcity. The world already produces far more than enough to meet human needs. Global food production provides nearly 3,000 calories per person per day, more than enough to eliminate hunger. Yet hunger persists due to poverty, food waste, and unequal access—not lack of supply. In the U.S. alone, there are approximately 17 million vacant homes, while only around 600,000 individuals are experiencing homelessness. What’s more, studies by Julia Steinberger and others in the “Living Well Within Limits” project show that decent living standards (nutrition, shelter, healthcare, education, mobility) can be achieved at a fraction of the energy currently used in rich countries. It is not for a lack of resources that the working people of the world are immiserated by scarcity; that is entirely the consequence of the unequal distribution of resources in our stratified society. If we fail to abolish this imperial mode of production, not only will we never eliminate poverty, but the very Earth which we call home, which for eons has generously provided us with all the means to live and to prosper, will soon become the final victim of capitalist exploitation.

Now let us turn our attention to the pertinent political realities. Since returning to power, Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have launched a sweeping assault on environmental stewardship - gutting climate regulations, slashing research funding, expanding fossil fuel extraction, and dismantling protections for air, water, and wildlife in favor of corporate interests. Our enemies have shown their hand. They are willing to condemn all life on Earth to destruction, for the sake of accelerating profits for a few more years. We are witnessing the death throes of a system crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.

At this stage, the ascendant forces of reaction have abandoned all pretenses of benevolence. The Republican Party's leaders are no longer merely espousing conspiracies about progressives to fuel their base; they are now pursuing direct punitive attacks on egalitarian policy and perceived opponents in both education and the administrative state. GOP legislators are acting with impunity, cutting Medicaid and SNAP to the tune of tens of millions potentially losing coverage, all to fund gargantuan tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. It must be inferred from their actions that they no longer expect to be held accountable by their constituents. And given the unprecedented and virtually uncontested steps the White House has taken to undermine election integrity, including demanding voter rolls and voting-machine access in multiple states, pushing an executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship, and consolidating partisan control over the FEC, there can be no doubt that the stage is being set for sabotage against electoral opposition.

The Illusion of Climate Governance

Buoyed by a sense that the political firmament had broken, in the 2010s progressives and socialists alike embraced a maximalist, often technical policy agenda. This agenda was supported by academic think tanks and non-profit organizations best suited for prior social struggles and which, often lacking internal mechanisms for deliberation or a mass social base, were unable to adjust to deteriorating political conditions. Even as they accrued incremental or partial gains, these formations were forced to align with imperial, industrial, and extractive forces inimical to a vision of ecological and social transformation, and encountered reversals by reactionary and corporatist forces both inside and outside of the state.

Progressive forces in Europe achieved a liberal-social democratic vision of social spending and industrial renewal in the form of a European Green Deal. While not without its problems, including an ostensible right-populist critique of its role in driving up costs, this marked a transition from the prior neoliberal model of carbon pricing and the structural austerity program imposed on the European Union. But in the U.S., environmentalists only were able to prevail over hostile actors within the Democratic Party to secure a partial vision of a national GND (the Inflation Reduction Act), that failed to deliver on even the modest social welfare state (an expansive list that included a higher minimum wage, childcare, healthcare, housing, and conservation corps) that green progressives had long promised. Worse, party leaders and economic elites sidelined activists in the IRA’s drafting, won an expansion of the military-industrial complex, and tethered the rollout of renewable energy projects on public lands and waters to mandatory oil and gas lease sales in an unconscionable compromise with fossil fuel barons.

This program, along with the companion Chips Act, was justified in insalubrious if not overtly contradictory terms as a means to combat a Chinese state that had already delivered on a technocratic climate agenda. These ill-conceived (and ultimately compromised) “green growth” initiatives have since been rendered dead in their tracks as a result of the subsequent power transfer in Washington, and the overarching legacy of the Biden-era climate initiatives has actually been to the detriment of the planet. Under the new administration, the bill’s subsidy-driven approach and concessions to fossil fuel industrialists have been weaponized to accelerate the very emissions it sought to curb. Finally, even if the IRA’s policy package had been seen through to completion as intended, its utter lack of binding regulations would have done little to slow ecological breakdown, while its green-tech incentives would have led to an explosive expansion of mining for lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth metals, threatening devastating effects on deep sea ecosystems and Indigenous communities in the global south.

The state-level fights in places like New York for public power and free transit, by contrast, won clear victories that were nevertheless often stalled by political leadership in the regulatory process and in the courts. The GNDCC and the NYC-DSA Ecosocialist Working Group, principally, were able to pass the Build Public Renewables Act [BPRA] through the NYS legislature during the 2023 legislative session after liberals and leftists, in response to the first election of Donald Trump, won permanent control of the gerrymandered State Senate for the first time since the Second Red Scare. This victory reflected overwhelming Democratic registration and a broad opposition among the party base to the 7-member Independent Democrats Committee, which maintained effective Republican control and a blockade of progressive legislation. NYC-DSA and other chapters throughout the state helped pass legislation to protect tenants among other reforms that appeared decisive in the context of persistent and inarguably irrational political obstruction. The BPRA, for its part, represented a significant intervention within a complex policy environment to replace fossil-fuel power generation with green energy through state ownership and regulatory vehicles left as relics of the New Deal era.

But under Governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, state appointed regulators associated with the power utilities and Republican Party, like the NY Power Authority's Justin Driscoll, who received a recess appointment after encountering legislative opposition, worked to stymie and sabotage the implementation of the BPRA, effectively killing the legislation’s impact. As a result, the BPRA delivered on neither its promises of affordability nor a comprehensive strategy of wind and hydropower energy for an energy transition. Although this represented a limited advance, DSA was reduced to lobbying for basic regulatory compliance in accordance with the law around annual budgets rather than pursuing the promised transformation it had fought for. Despite being widely regarded as the incompetent successor who took control of the state following pressure from DSA electeds after the scandals that led Cuomo to resign, Governor Hochul reestablished the dominance of the corporate class in New York politics. While climate advocates continue to fight, the second Trump administration's illegal and politicized reversal of clean energy permits has further intensified the barriers to even incremental progress.

To be clear, these green energy policy initiatives were not unreasonable, even where they lacked a deeper analysis. Yet, they have neglected and failed to contend with increasingly hostile and reactionary forces within the capitalist state. Those forces, as every socialist practitioner since the First International has recognized, are unevenly distributed among unelected courts, executives, and corrupt state bureaucrats, making electoral success at the state level inadequate for establishing statewide power. In effect, those institutional actors are able to subvert popular forces and the types of legislative pressure campaigns that may have been more effective in a prior regulatory era, as the history of the Clean Air Act demonstrates. In response to external opposition and internal demands for more democracy and radical strategy, leaders within groups like the GNDCC and Sunrise Movement doubled down on the top-down NGO model and chased an opportunistic, ad-hoc program of intervening in legislative and budgetary fights as well as electoral battles. These were often properly the domain of other DSA working groups and organizations, however, resulting in reduplication, inefficiency, and fights for factional control.

The GNDCC of 2025 has been left crippled by burnout and a hollowed-out membership core after endless mobilization and repeated impasses from its reformist political strategy. The GNDCC asserted early on that they had won electoral and legislative fights through an overarching strategy, but their subsequent defeats demonstrated an inability for that strategy to adapt, and for the leadership to understand the nature of the particular states, industries, and political conditions that they repeatedly confronted. Without a democratic structure or system of accountability within the group, there was no ability to address the theoretical or practical problems that had arisen from their failures, nor was there a mechanism to transform the factional leadership cadre in power during this period.

Towards an Anti-Fascist, Socialist Ecological Politics

Now, more than ever, there is an urgent need for those of us fighting on the front lines against ecological disaster to face reality. We are engaged in a struggle for survival against a nefarious private-public partnership that will not compromise with us. The institutional channels for reform have been utterly foreclosed, and it behooves us to evolve our strategic orientation accordingly. The question we must pose to ourselves is thus: “What does the potential crumbling of American democracy and a coherent administrative state mean for our struggle as socialists, and even more fundamentally as humans fighting for a future on this planet? And how can we even begin to progress towards the dream of a sustainable and ecological society while locked out of all the organs of state power?” To this question, we as revolutionary socialists aim to suggest that those state institutions never actually offered the hope they promised us in the first place. Which is to say, compromise was never an option.

Even insofar as the legislative pathway does offer the possibility of progress, that incremental form of progress will never restore balance between humanity and nature. Its only purpose is to buy us time before collapse sets in. And even those stalling tactics cannot be realized through a purely electoralist approach founded on campaigns and appeals to the entrenched power of incumbent officials. We simply do not have the luxury of time. We can no longer afford to continue concentrating all of our efforts on promoting inadequate reforms within corrupt, captured institutions; Not when the science is clear that we are already on pace to invoke a doomsday event within the coming decades.

As socialists, we must recognize the symmetry between the capitalist exploitation of human beings for our labor and the industrial plundering of nature for her “resources”. With fascism ascendant in the US, the time has come to acknowledge what Indigenous groups have been arguing for many decades, and what we, as revolutionaries, have known all along: extractivism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, and capitalism are all cut from the same cloth. In each case, economic elites loot, pillage, and profit, inflicting untold suffering and destruction whilst claiming it was to the benefit of society broadly. For each injustice, salvation can never come from above. The movement for an ecological future can only be built from the bottom up, through grassroots organizing to create new community-based institutions and radicalize existing ones.

Liberals insistent on the “abundance” model will claim that the climate emergency is a technological problem that can be ameliorated by for-profit enterprise, if only the left would abandon its dusty regulatory frameworks in favor of policies that accelerate private-sector innovation. The contradiction inherent in entrusting corporations with the task of extinguishing the very fire they started and profiteered off of, is lost on the liberal mind. Social democrats and Marxists see through the naivete of this thinly-veiled market fundamentalism, understanding that the interests of the capitalists are misaligned with that of society at large. Yet they fail to extend their critique of class outward to a broader critique of the fundamental dynamic at play - hierarchy, and thus believe that state bureaucracies, nationalized industries, and even centralized communist parties are capable of transcending the essential nature of hierarchical power structures. But the injustices we seek to eliminate - ecological degradation, forced scarcity, and imperialism - are themselves imposed by the unequal power distribution characteristic of our hierarchical society. These authoritarian structures will be used to dominate the masses and facilitate exploitation as long as they are allowed to persist. If the solutions we devise recreate those same hierarchical systems, we will only reproduce the tools for oppression, to the detriment of every social and ecological end we strive towards.

Though the emergence of industrial machinery massively increased the destructive capacity of human civilization, the origins of the ecological crisis date back to long before the rise of capitalism in 16th century England. Therefore, confronting the problem in earnest requires challenging the notion that by simply arresting control over capital from the bourgeois and transferring it to a privileged class of political elites, we can usher in a utopia. By the same token, it requires looking beyond merely technocratic and economistic solutions rooted in the same antagonistic logic of domination, extraction, and accumulation that inflicts all social and ecological harms. It requires abandoning the futile paradigm of begging for concessions from a cynical, corrupt, and genocidal political class, who would sooner doom the whole of civilization to collapse than challenge the interests of their donors. Most importantly, it requires that we conceive of a radically egalitarian future in which hierarchies have been dissolved and the compulsion to dominate both our fellow humans and the natural world has been surpassed by the mutual solidarity between members of a democratic, self-organizing, and communitarian society.

In embracing transformation, elements within DSA and the broader environmental movement can move beyond the strategic impasses of the last decade. Projects which, despite their socialist content and objectives, were managed within the terrain and assumptions of hegemonic liberalism and non-profit intervention within the state, could only have succeeded under vastly different organizing conditions. Additionally, the intensifying climate and political conflicts we face in the present demand that we embrace a vision of ecology that finally leaves behind extractive and imperial modes of production and the social order that has been associated with them. Only by embracing the member-driven democracy critical to the success of working groups in DSA and climate initiatives more broadly can we prevail on this new terrain and in the struggles to come. We can’t fall back on the failures of the past. We need to draw new perspectives and strategies directly from our members in order to regroup, re-evaluate, and advance our ecological vision.

It’s time for DSA’s national ecosocialist organizing to join its membership on the front lines of the fight to end both human and ecological exploitation, once and for all.

Join LSC at: https://dsa-lsc.org/join/
Discuss this on the DSA Forums: https://discussion.dsausa.org/

Currently, LSC recommends the following amendments for signatures:

LSC Amendments

In the interest of good faith debate, LSC members have authored or coauthored amendments to some resolutions which the caucus could not support as written, or which we felt could otherwise be improved. We urge DSA members to sign both our amendments and their base resolutions:

Rural Organizing Under the GDC

Decolonial Anti-Imperialism

Stipend the NPC

Not Just Large Chapters

The Party is DSA

Democratic Socialists and the Labor Movement Need Each Other

Signature Recommendations

We asked DSA members to consider signing the following resolutio LSC did not officially endorse and did not necessarily support all of these resolutions as written, but we believed that they meaningfully addressed important issues facing DSA and thus merited consideration by Convention. This list was also not an exhaustive list of all proposals LSC may have supported.

Platform Change

PC: Ecosocialism Within Ecological Limits: Expanding the Green New Deal

Constitution and Bylaws

CB: Require National Conventions to be either hybrid or virtual

CB: Fix Constitution Contradicting Itself Regarding Secretary and Treasurer

CB: Bylaws Amendment Clarifying Setting Fee Structures for the Organization’s Print Publications

CB: Fair Representation via STV Delegate Elections

CB: Special Convention Overhaul

Resolutions

R: No AI Images!

R: For Political and Technological Independence: A Path to Exit from Capitalist and Democratic Party Tech

R: For a Robust & Centralized National Resource Library

R: Resolution for the Organizational Merger of QSWG and TRBA

R: Take the Fight to the Rural Front

R: Rejecting the Normalization of Zionism and Occupation

R: For a Socialist Party in Years, Not Decades

R: A Fighting Socialist Program for DSA

R: Anti-Imperialism in the 21st Century

R: For a Politicized and Member-Driven Growth & Development in DSA

R: Principles for Party Building

R: Democratic Discipline: A Uniform Process for Electoral Censure Across DSA

R: Democracy for All: An NEC Subcommittee for Voting Rights

R: Staff Relationship to Members in a Democratic Organization

R: Organize the Masses! For the National Political Committee as Organizing and Political Leadership

R: Locals-First DSA: Increase Dues Income for Locals and Stabilize National Budgeto

R: For Working-Class Member Leadership

R: For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA

R: Building a United Front Toward 2028

R: Fighting Back in the Class War: Preparing for May Day 2028

R: Fight Fascist State Repression & ICE

R: Towards a Multilingual DSA / Hacia un DSA Multilingüe

R: Proposal to Launch a Member-Led National Design Committee

R: Equality Before Convention

As before, to sign resolutions proposed for the 2025 National Convention, DSA members will require access to the National Forums. One of our members has authored a useful guide to show DSA members how to register for forum access to sign resolutions.

Join LSC: https://dsa-lsc.org/join

Discuss this on the DSA National Forums: https://discussion.dsausa.org/

LSC is proud to announce our slate for the National Political Committee at the 2025 National Convention: C.S. Jackson, David Jenkins, and Byron L..

Our three candidates are active organizers who have consistently engaged in DSA projects at both the national and local levels. They've led and participated in working groups, led chapter and branch organizing, and facilitated grassroots campaigns and actions. Their candidacies represent multiple intersections of identity and experience within our caucus. They each emerged from specific local political conditions yet hold the same belief in DSA as a multi-tendency mass organization. This does not simply represent  an ideal, but instead reflects an active practice designed to foster unified democratic organization, independent working class institutions, and autonomous and bottom-up responses to reactionary forces

All three NPC candidates from LSC are organizing veterans. They each represent the core values of our caucus, striving for a culture of horizontalism, non-sectarianism, good faith, and genuine member-led democracy. As we approach the 2025 National Convention, LSC is focused on preventing future budget crises while also promoting electoral discipline, principled anti-Zionism, and the power of working groups as member-led bodies and vehicles of serious material change. These are not simply convention priorities but persistent and deeply-held values for our organizing, reflected both in the resolutions our caucus has put forward and in our slate of candidates.

C.S. Jackson joined DSA in 2018, seeking a political home in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, a president who, to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, embodies what their ancestors referred to as a "Town Destroyer”— not an aberration but a continuation of settler-colonial violence. For three of his seven years in DSA so far, he served as Treasurer for the San Diego chapter. As a disabled Native organizer, C.S. centers anti-fascist and Indigenous resistance in the fight for socialism. He currently serves on the steering committees of both the Queer Socialist and Disability Working Groups as part of his ongoing commitment to advance intersectional solidarity in DSA and the American Left. For C.S., DSA must stand unflinchingly against fascism, rooted in collective struggle and the belief that another world is possible.

David J. is an abolitionist, tenant organizer, anti-fascist, and mime. He joined DSA in 2020 after meeting members in South Carolina while volunteering on a six-state Bernie road trip through the South. He took root in the Racial Justice Working Group and the DefundNYPD campaign before organizing with his neighbors and serving on the founding Organizing Committee of the Flatbush branch of NYC-DSA. He has also contributed to five of NYC-DSA’s Socialists in Office campaigns, several legislative efforts, countless protest actions, and is unbearably earnest. His radical optimism is fueled by a belief in DSA's big tent potential and his experience facing fascism on the ground, from NYC's City Hall to the Capitol Riot on January 6th.

Byron L. is a proud Anarchist, DSA-LSC co-founder, and sign maker. He has been an active DSA member since 2017 and helped found Orange County DSA, having served in multiple positions including organizer, Secretary, and Co-chair. Byron got his start organizing anti-fascist actions with OC DSA against the OC branch of the Proud Boys and Rise Above Movement, helping drive those organizations out of the area by 2019. He then moved onto chapter administrative roles with the primary goal of creating a healthier and safer organizational culture. He was also the primary OC DSA organizer on the successful Rise Up Willowick campaign to fight the city of Garden Grove’s gentrification  of immigrant and low income renters of Santa Ana. A firm believer in DSA's political pluralism, he has dedicated his entire adult life to DSA's struggle to bring about socialism in our times.

LSC remains committed to promoting a vision of DSA that is led by its members and not its elected leadership. We welcome all DSA members to join LSC’s vision for freedom, solidarity, and democracy in DSA and lend their support to our NPC slate this August.

You can discuss this on the DSA national forums here.

If you are a DSA member in good standing, you can join the forums here.
If you like our candidates, and agree with our points of unity, join LSC to help us ensure an NPC that stands for our values: https://dsa-lsc.org/join/. We also encourage you to sign on to our convention resolutions on the forums here; resolutions must reach 250 signatures by May 11 to be heard at convention.

We believe the resolutions we are endorsing for the 2025 National Convention can provide a basis for concrete, constructive conclusions to some of these conflicts, and commit DSA more strongly to Palestinian liberation, electoral discipline, and organizational democracy. By offering these resolutions relatively early in the submission process, we also intend to leave the door open for debate on our specific approaches to these questions, and we encourage other tendencies to offer amendments on points of disagreement. Likewise, the list below is not an exhaustive list of all the proposals we will ultimately support, and we hope to collaborate productively on points of agreement as independent members and other caucuses release their own proposals.

Resolution on Staff, Contractors, and Budgeting

In order to prevent the 2024 budget crisis from reoccurring and resolve some of the conflicts which emerged as a result of the budget crisis, the resolution establishes a number of policies relating to DSA’s expenditures and the budgeting process. In particular, the resolution raises DSA’s reserve requirement, caps staff expenditure at half of recurring income, requires the NPC to propose and the National Convention to debate and approve budgets, and places procedural limits on new expenditures over fifty thousand dollars per year, among other measures.
Read and sign on here.

Red Lines for DSA National Endorsements

The resolution raises the bar for eligibility for DSA’s national endorsement, establishing red lines for candidates seeking DSA’s national endorsement relating to public affiliation with DSA and a series of policy requirements. The resolution also changes the national endorsement process such that candidates’ campaigns will themselves apply for endorsement, rather than receiving a referral from a chapter, and requires that all red lines for endorsement be communicated to candidates as part of the endorsement process.
Read and sign on here.

DSA For One Palestinian State

The resolution reaffirms DSA’s support for BDS and commits DSA to pursuing the political defeat of Zionism, the end of the Zionist state, the establishment of a single, secular, democratic Palestinian state, and reparations to the Palestinian people. It also makes explicit acceptance of these aims prerequisites for endorsement by national DSA and provides messaging guidelines for communicating DSA’s anti-Zionist politics to the public.
Read and sign on here.

For a Radical and Resurgent Ecosocialist Working Group

Despite the efforts of the Green New Deal Campaign Coalition (GNDCC), DSA’s climate justice work has stagnated under a Congress that has no interest whatsoever in preventing climate apocalypse. Recognizing that the GNDCC's efforts are not finding traction in the current political climate, this resolution will reorganize it into a reinstated Ecosocialist Working Group, allowing DSA members to collaborate on a revamped ecosocialist project to include strategies beyond just the Green New Deal.
Read and sign on here.

Resolution to Censure LA City Councilwoman Nithya Raman

Despite her continued endorsement by DSA Los Angeles, Nithya Raman’s support of Zionism and her acceptance of funds from Zionist organizations puts her at substantial odds with DSA. It is DSA’s responsibility to demonstrate that Raman’s actions are anathema to our organization’s values through a formal censure. This resolution censures DSA-LA elected Nithya Raman, calls for her membership to be formally reviewed by national DSA, and mandates that its text be made public on adoption.
Read and sign on here.

Resolution to Censure U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tacit support of Zionism in the face of liberal betrayal of international law, and her dogged support for the Democratic Party establishment to the detriment of DSA’s member-led organizing, have actively harmed our organization. Such action warrants censure by the DSA Convention. This resolution censures NYC-DSA elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calls for her membership to be formally reviewed by national DSA, and mandates that its text be made public on adoption.
Read and sign on here.

The below resolutions were not included in the initial launch, but were added later.

Equality Before Convention

DSA's National Political Committee is DSA's highest governing body while the National Convention is not in session. The NPC therefore holds significant influence over Convention, such as in approving the requirements for member-submitted business to reach the Convention floor. Under current practice, the NPC may exempt itself from those requirements, privileging motions brought by the NPC over those brought by rank-and-file members. This proposal closes that loophole and requires equal treatment of member-submitted and NPC-submitted resolutions.
Read and sign on here.

Special Convention Overhaul

A Special Convention is the only mechanism available to DSA’s membership to overrule or exercise oversight of our elected leadership, but the high thresholds to call a Special Convention, the expense entailed by holding one, and the substantial disruption an irregular Convention could cause to DSA’s regular functioning all render the mechanism unusable in a practical sense. This amendment lowers the thresholds to call Special Conventions while restricting their scope and cost, providing DSA’s membership with a functional emergency process for holding DSA’s leadership to account.
Read and sign on here.

If you like these resolutions and agree with the LSC Points of Unity, you can join LSC here.

You can discuss our slate as a whole on the DSA National Forums here.

To fight the dictatorship of the rich, join DSA today

The following text was written as part of the LSC Pamphlet Program. It reflects only the opinions of the author(s) and not the consensus of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus.

A Guide to DSA Politics

Written by: Bryce Springfield, Princeton YDSA
Edited by: Syjil A, Delaware DSA; Alex M, Seattle DSA
Budget section by: John Lewis, DSA Treasurer and New Orleans DSA

Introduction

As the 2025 Democratic Socialists of America Convention approaches, several major developments have arisen in US socialist organizing since a previous article on the same topic. New DSA members are bound to feel lost in understanding some of the organization’s national dynamics. This article seeks to give a broad overview in terms of institutional knowledge and organizational history in order to help members who are either disengaged from national DSA or new to organizing in DSA.

Before getting into more specific descriptions, we should clarify some basic facts about DSA. Contrary to some perceptions of the organization, DSA is not simply focused on electoral campaigns. It has also played a key role in organizing and leading efforts for militant, class-struggle labor and tenant unions; anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist protests and direct actions; social housing and public renewable energy campaigns; expansions of reproductive and trans rights; police and prison abolitionism, and more across the country, with significant variations in priorities across chapters, caucuses, and ideological tendencies.

Secondly, unlike most other socialist organizations in the United States, DSA has no single “line,” but is rather designed to include the widest range of tendencies within socialism, save some extreme exceptions that contradict core socialist principles (e.g., labor Zionism, MAGA Communism, etc). Under this umbrella fall ideologies such as Trotskyism, anarchism, reformism, orthodox Marxism, libertarian Marxism, the democratic road to socialism, Marxism–Leninism, and more. In other words, there is no such thing as being “more left-wing than DSA”—the organization is meant to be a big tent that includes all socialists from the center-left to the far-left. This diversity has developed a strong culture of debate, open thought, and ultimately substantially greater membership numbers than other more sectarian organizations, allowing for not only collective unity around common goals, but also more complete information with diverse perspectives involved in regular deliberation and simultaneously practicing different theories of organizing.

If you feel that this guide does not provide sufficient information about DSA’s politics, I encourage you to review the 2024 DSA Program, which covers some of the overarching purpose, big tent ideology, and organizing of DSA.

Key terminology

Some terms are widely thrown around in DSA, but may not be entirely clear to those who are not already engaged in the national organization. Many of these are centered around major debates within the organization. In this section, I first discuss the governance structure of DSA, before moving into DSA’s three official national priorities set at the 2023 DSA Convention—electoral, labor, and ecosocialist organizing—and internationalism as a de facto priority particularly following October 2023. All levels of the organization are meant to have democratic structure in some form or another, from the local chapter to the national organization.

Internal governance

• Chapters are where the vast majority of work happens within DSA. These are local semi-autonomous formations in which DSA members carry out the bulk of the organization’s labor, tenant, housing, electoral, reproductive justice, internationalist and other organizing. Chapters are typically independently incorporated but, as part of the national organization’s federated structure, are officially recognized sections and rarely have their own staff like national DSA does. National DSA works with chapters through mentorship carried out by staff, National Political Committee members, and/or national committee leaders to solve problems or discuss the general direction of DSA and local recruitment. Some chapters have branches which are subsections within the chapter, designed to give special attention and structure to the organizing priorities of and issues facing certain geographic regions within a broader chapter. For example, this includes the San Fernando Valley Branch of DSA Los Angeles and the North Virginia Branch of Metro DC DSA. Some chapters may also form state-wide formations to better coordinate amongst themselves, such as California DSA.
• Convention is the biannual organization-wide event for which delegates are elected by each DSA chapter to attend and vote on the future direction of the organization as a whole. This is the highest decision-making body in DSA, given more power than all other structures in the organization. YDSA also has a convention that is held annually for the youth wing of the organization.
• The National Political Committee (NPC) is the highest decision-making body in DSA outside the biannual conventions. This body is elected by convention delegates and consists of 17 seats, consisting of 16 elected at the DSA National Convention, and one shared by the two co-chairs of YDSA who are elected at the YDSA National Convention. Two of these members are then elected by convention delegates to serve as the national DSA co-chairs. Within the NPC there is also a six-seat Steering Committee made up of five elected by NPC members and one seat again shared by the YDSA co-chairs; this committee’s purpose is to commit additional time to DSA affairs that the whole NPC is unable to get to.
• The National Coordinating Committee (NCC) is similar to the NPC but is specific to YDSA. This body is elected by YDSA National Convention delegates and consists of 9 seats, including two co-chairs and seven at-large. The NCC does not have a steering committee like that of the NPC.
• National working groups, committees, and commissions are national autonomous groups recognized by DSA which focus on organizing and mobilizing around specific issue areas, such as the International Committee, the Housing Justice Commission, the National Labor Commission, the Afrosocialists Caucus, the Queer Socialists Working Group, the Abolitionist Working Group, and more. There are currently more than a dozen of these in DSA, as well as others specific to YDSA. Other formations, such as the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee (EWOC) and Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) are managed by DSA members, but operate with some degree of autonomy. In the case of EWOC, it is an independent initiative for labor organizing and training managed by both DSA and United Electrical; in the case of ETOC, it is a program under the DSA Housing Justice Commission for tenant organizing and training. The Student Worker Alliance Network (SWAN) is an informal body run by socialist (largely YDSA) leadership as the “Student Workers Alliance,” but serves as a group for student labor union organizers inside and outside of YDSA and the socialist movement to connect and share skills.
• As of the time this was published, there are 20 paid staff members of DSA who are hired by the NPC to carry out DSA’s democratically-decided national goals, as well as local chapters’ organizing. Staff are not meant to set the organization’s priorities, but instead to help the volunteer members of the NPC, NCC, working groups, commissions, and chapters in fulfilling their goals. Non-directive staff are unionized with the Communications Workers of America as the DSA Union. Previously, the number of staff reached 33, but shrunk due to national budget issues and some staff subsequently stepping down or being laid off.
• Caucuses are informal factions of DSA members, typically with a particular ideological tendency, theory of organizing, or political priority. Some smaller caucuses may also distinguish themselves by their geographic region. Caucuses coordinate events among their members, promote their theories of change within the organization, make proposals aligned with their specific platforms at conventions and on national bodies, and run national body candidates. Slates serve as similar formations, as they market certain candidates or ideological tendencies, but they do not have caucus-like structures with permanent members and activities. Some factions are neither caucuses nor slates, instead simply being represented by entryist parties who otherwise operate as independent entities, such as Socialist Alternative. It should be noted that the Afrosocialists “Caucus” is a misnomer, in fact being an official national working group including all people of color in a variety of caucuses.

Electoral organizing and the party question

• The dirty break strategy is the dominant position in DSA on the party question, which adopts a strategic use of the Democratic Party ballot line only in the short term due to the prevailing political conditions which typically preclude third party candidates from winning elections. However, the ultimate goal is still to build the independent infrastructure and resources for an effective independent socialist party.
• The party surrogate strategy is a variation of the dirty break strategy, wherein DSA operates as a faction within the Democratic Party. This approach focuses on cultivating elected discipline (i.e., political discipline of Socialists in Office) and independent infrastructure, with the aim of this faction of the Democratic Party becoming an independent socialist party.
• The realignment strategy involves working within the Democratic Party for an extended period of time with the goal of shifting the party to the left. Generally, this means pushing for the Democratic Party to adopt more social democratic or socialist principles, enabling socialist politics to eventually prevail within the party. Supporters of the realignment strategy usually prefer less restrictive elected discipline, and may refer to the strategy as more in line with "mass politics."
• The clean break strategy advocates for DSA to immediately and completely break from the Democratic Party and exclusively use a third-party or independent ballot line instead. Supporters of the clean break strategy argue that any electoral campaigns done via the Democratic Party ballot line are very difficult or impossible to beget authentic working-class independence and committed socialist politics in government.
• The dual power or “base building” approach is primarily adopted by libertarian socialists and rejects the party question as a priority, instead seeing building “counterpower” outside the state as the best route to challenging capitalism. This may include building independent democratic structures for labor, tenant, co-op, council, direct action, and protest organizing. While those who reject dual power or base building frequently support these activities as well, the distinction here is that those who support these approaches tend to deprioritize or even entirely reject electoralism or the party model. Although “dual power” is a term which originates from Vladimir Lenin’s description of the February Revolution of 1917, when workers’ councils co-governed with the Russian Provisional Government, the term has been appropriated to describe this model of transition wherein counterpower institutions gradually build the leverage necessary to overthrow capitalism and possibly the state.

Labor organizing

• The rank-and-file strategy involves socialist organizers entering the labor movement as shop-floor workers rather than union staff with an orientation toward class struggle and radicalization through experience. This approach focuses on agitating for militant activity against bosses and concessionary union bureaucracies, democratizing labor unions, and developing organic labor leaders from the rank-and-file. The rank-and-file strategy is dominant in DSA, with other models having minority support.
• The rank-and-file strategy is distinguished from staff-centered models, in which labor union staff drive the organizing rather than the workers themselves. This is different from red unionism, which refers to union organizing with exclusively socialist leadership, and business unionism, which refers to concessionary, non-militant labor organizing as exemplified by “labor-management partnerships,” quick willingness to avoid strike activity regardless of situation, or weak workplace demands or orientation toward class struggle organizing.

Ecosocialist organizing

• The Green New Deal is a term for public policy that secures a “just transition” away from fossil fuel dependency and in favor of decarbonization, demilitarization, and decommodification of energy systems and resources with the goal of putting them under democratic control. The term was first popularized by anti-capitalist Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins in his 2010 New York gubernatorial race, before receiving wider exposure from the work of DSA member and US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez since 2018. Oftentimes, the term specifically refers to legislation similar to the AOC-Markey GND or New York’s Build Public Renewables Act. The Green New Deal is more often prioritized by DSA “right” caucuses, but support for the Green New Deal is the official position of DSA as a whole.
• Degrowth refers to an ecosocialist perspective that is sometimes positioned in contrast to the “Green New Deal” and seeks to intentionally reduce unnecessary or wasteful economic production and consumption. This is meant to ultimately bring about a decline in faulty metrics like GDP in order to prevent climate catastrophe and improve quality of life for the majority of people. This perspective does not necessarily center on public policy, but rather a broad range of organizing, including direct action, participatory democracy, and “anti-work” changes toward alternative economies, worker and community ownership, and a cultural shift away from “economic growth” as an indicator of prosperity and quality of life. The degrowth perspective is adopted by some, but not all, DSA “left” caucuses, and is part of the official position of YDSA.

Internationalist organizing

• Third campism refers to an internationalist perspective originally rooted in the perspective of Trotskyist groups influenced by Max Shachtman. Shachtman opposed both the capitalist “first camp” and the Stalinist “second camp,” instead purporting to be in favor of the international proletariat “third camp.” Historically, third campists, unlike orthodox Trotskyists, have not been defenders of the then-existing “workers’ states.” Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, this view has typically referred to simultaneous opposition to the Western “first camp” as represented by the US, Western Europe, Israel, and their allies, as well as the non-Western “second camp” as represented by China, Russia, Iran, and their allies.
• Campism focuses specifically on Western imperialism as the primary threat to global peace and liberation while arguing that the actions of other states are at least not currently relevant to American socialists. Campists may also argue that third campism inadvertently serves to support Western imperialism. While this term has historically carried negative connotations, it has become more of a reclaimed descriptor in recent years.
• Anti-Zionism is DSA’s position on the Palestine question, wherein Zionism is recognized as a colonial and racist ideology that enables “Israel” to exist as an apartheid regime built on ethnic cleansing and genocide. Anti-Zionists completely reject arguments regarding Israel’s “right to exist” or to “defend itself” as they see it as an illegitimate entity, particularly in the context of its foundation as an explicitly settler colonial project and its continued oppression of the Palestinian people and other Arabs. Since its 2017 National Convention, DSA has supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for a consumer boycott of Israeli products and companies which support the oppression of Palestinians; divestment from endowments and investment portfolios containing the same; and political, economic, and cultural sanctions on the Zionist entity and its institutions.
• Typically, anti-Zionists favor a one-state solution (1SS) or one democratic state (ODS), wherein the Israeli occupation of Palestine is resolved with a single, multinational, democratic state spanning “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea,” i.e., all of historic Palestine. This does not refer to the Zionist one-state solution, which seeks to have a Jewish ethnostate in at least all of historic Palestine, usually also including the Golan Heights and, in its most extreme form, wide swaths of the Levant and Middle East. Proponents of the one-state solution typically argue that the two-state solution is either no longer viable or was never viable due to Israel’s continued occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza or by pointing to the explicitly stated motive, since the early days of the Zionist movement, to establish a Jewish ethnostate in historic Palestine through colonization and ethnic cleansing.
• The official state position in the U.S. is a two-state solution (2SS) wherein the Israeli occupation is resolved by establishing two separate states, typically along the lines of the current UN-recognized borders of Israel and Palestine. Supporters of a 2SS see it as either a valid compromise or the only possible solution in which the Zionist state maintains its existence. In order for this to happen, Zionists still must completely de-occupy the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights—a move that U.S. politicians have largely done nothing to encourage Israel towards—and end internal apartheid. This view is more common among DSA members who are relatively less engaged in the broader organization, as well as among members who were part of DSA prior to 2016, influenced by founder Michael Harrington. Additionally, party members of Socialist Alternative and the old guard of the Reform and Revolution caucus officially support a 2SS. It is disputed whether the two-state solution represents an anti-Zionist or merely a non-Zionist perspective in the context of pro-Palestine organizing.
• Another significant view is that it should not be our role to determine the ideal solution from outside of Palestine, but rather it is the responsibility of Palestinians themselves to determine the path forward, whether that be a one-state solution, a two-state solution, or some other solution.

Factions

Internal debates in DSA are often driven by the various caucuses, slates, and other factions, each advocating for distinct organizing theories, ideologies, and political priorities. Many members describe broad "left" and "right" camps with varying definitions—however, the "left" here will refer to those with more revolutionary or non-electoral priorities, while the "right" here will refer to those with more reformist or electoral priorities.

Anti-Zionist Slate

The Anti-Zionist Slate (AZ) is a former slate of National Political Committee candidates for the 2023 DSA National Convention dedicated to organizing for Palestinian liberation. They are strongly in favor of strict elected discipline in an effort to foster strong relationships with allied organizations and to produce ideal conditions for anti-Zionist and socialist organizing. Although the vast majority of DSA supports anti-Zionism, the Anti-Zionist Slate is known for their expertise in Palestine solidarity work, anti-Zionist organizing and for centering unwavering anti-Zionism as an essential part of socialist organizing. With a broadly more revolutionary socialist outlook, supporters of the AZ platform also prioritized local organizing via labor and tenant union organizing and redirection of national resources to chapters, as well as restoring lost membership through training and recruitment programs. The Slate is not an active group, as its purpose was specifically for the 2023 Convention. However, one member remains on the NPC as part of the broader left bloc.

Bread and Roses

Bread and Roses (BnR or B&R) is a caucus formed in 2019 that espouses Marxism, Nicos Poulantzas’s “democratic road to socialism,” the rank-and-file strategy, and a vision of internationalism resembling third campism. The caucus evolved from Solidarity and the former International Socialist Organization, both independent Trotskyist organizations involved in the United Secretariat of the Fourth International; and the Left Caucus, Momentum, and Spring Caucus, all former DSA caucuses with similar politics as today’s BnR.

Much of BnR’s organizing centers around rank-and-file labor organizing in particular, but the caucus also has a substantial electoral program that includes prominent local DSA electeds such as Richie Floyd in Florida and Jesse Brown in Indiana. BnR also has some connections to projects not explicitly part of DSA organizing, such as Jacobin and the Rank and File Project. More recently, BnR has worked with the Communist Caucus to form the Strike Wave Slate for National Labor Commission leadership in 2023. Bread and Roses’ caucus publication is The Call, where members write articles reflecting their perspectives.

BnR members are identifiable on social media by their use of the bread (🥖 or 🍞) and rose (🌹) emojis, with their caucus name being a reference to suffragette Helen Todd’s 1911 slogan “bread for all, and roses too” and the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. They currently represent 3 out of 17 seats on the NPC, and 3 out of 9 seats on the NCC. Often described as part of the DSA “left,” BnR is closer to DSA’s center than other caucuses and are on the right within YDSA.

Caracol

Caracol is a minor caucus formed in 2023 to platform degrowth as an alternative to traditional Green New Deal organizing in DSA. Specifically framing themselves as Marxist organizers, Caracol members describe their goal as a “radical Green New Deal” with priorities beyond the AOC-Markey Green New Deal, including decolonization of the global economy, reduction of consumption, mining extraction, and work, and regeneration rather than economic growth. Its activity has remained limited thus far but has still received attention from some notable degrowth figures.

Caracol members are identifiable on social media by their use of the snail emoji (🐌), an international symbol for degrowth politics and a reference to their name which is Spanish for “snail.” Although Caracol has yet to participate more broadly in DSA, they aim to take a bigger role in DSA's national committees.

Communist Caucus

The Communist Caucus (CC or Commie Caucus) is a multi-tendency communist and Marxist caucus with autonomist Marxist and Dutch-German left-communist leanings that emphasizes “spadework,” or an outward-facing “mass work” approach through militant labor union, tenant union, and workers’ association organizing. Describing itself as a “big tent” Marxist caucus, Commie Caucus accepts a wide range of Marxist organizers committed to their base building strategy, although its members tend to lean more toward libertarian tendencies.

Largely concentrated in East Bay DSA, Commie Caucus has grown into a national caucus that rejects bureaucracy and top-down organizing. Its work has led to the creation of the Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) within DSA’s Housing Justice Commission, which serves to organize tenant unions and support other tenant organizers. Commie Caucus is generally less involved in national DSA politics than other caucuses on the left, instead almost exclusively centering itself around local labor and tenant union organizing. The Communist Caucus endorsed Red Star’s candidates in the 2023 DSA National Convention instead of running its own candidates, but it did form the Strike Wave Slate with Bread and Roses for leadership of the National Labor Commission in 2023. The caucus’s associated publication is Partisan, which they share with Emerge.

Commie Caucus members often identify themselves on social media with a spade emoji (♠️) in reference to their “spadework.” The Communist Caucus is on the DSA left, although they have minimal presence in YDSA.

Constellation

Constellation is a YDSA-specific caucus founded in 2022 that primarily seeks to expand the “national bureaucracy” of DSA and YDSA in order to empower political leadership to make meaningful decisions, connect chapters to national leaders, and  build toward the formation of a mass socialist party. They believe in rigorous opposition to US imperialism including attacks on socialists in state power, the party surrogate electoral model that has defined DSA’s strategy over the last 8 years, and the expansion of democratic culture and practice including the regulation of caucuses and setting a limited set of strategic campaigns.

Constellation is generally on the left in DSA on some questions including anti-imperialism and member-driven grievance structures while further to the right on other questions, including budgetary priorities. Constellation does not necessarily follow an exact ideology in the traditional sense, instead focusing on developing DSA’s internal structure, however they take inspiration from broad swathes of the pink tide, the Cuban Revolution, and the heyday of the Communist Party USA. The caucus once considered a merger with the larger Red Star caucus due to overlapping views, particularly on internationalism, but such considerations fell through due to overall differences in ideology, mass politics, and YDSA strategy.

Constellation members often display the shooting star emoji on social media (💫). Constellation currently claims 3 out of 9 seats on the YDSA NCC, including one of the co-chairs, which means it also occupies half of a seat on the NPC

Emerge

Emerge is a caucus that was formed in 2018 and was specific to New York City, but has begun to informally expand nationally in 2024. Emerge is a multi-tendency communist—but especially autonomist Marxist and Dutch-German left-communist—caucus united around abolition, anti-imperialism, and supporting working class self-organization. Emerge believes in collective struggle and unity of the socialist movement with the masses to build a robust multi-racial, counter-hegemonic force toward revolution. Emerge has some ideological overlaps with the Communist Caucus and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus.

While they believe in running socialists for office on either Democratic or third-party ballot lines in the present and participate in electoral and legislative campaigns that engage class struggle, Emerge emphasizes that electoralism is only one part of politicizing all aspects of life. They advocate for binding standards for endorsements under a party surrogate model and for the local community base-building that would support Socialists in Office in maintaining those standards. Emerge supports participatory democratic, big tent socialist organizing. They support the rank-and-file labor strategy, but view it as only one aspect of a vibrant labor revitalization that must also include workers not sufficiently represented by unions or labor law such as domestic workers, sex workers, and workers in the gig economy.

Emerge has had three members on the NPC and two co-chairs of the International Committee. The caucus has ties to the anti-Zionist and abolitionist street movements, and its members have significant overlap with the DSA International Committee, racial justice, immigration justice, and anti-war working groups, Red Rabbits, and local mutual aid/grassroots organizing. Caucus members can be found on social media using the cherry blossom emoji (🌸), a reference to the pink flowers in their logo. The caucus’s associated publication is Partisan, which they share with the Communist Caucus, and they are on the DSA left.

Groundwork

Groundwork (GW) is a Marxist, ecosocialist caucus that believes in organizing for transformative reforms that change the terrain of struggle. It is thought of as the more moderate descendant of the Collective Power Network (2019 to 2021) and formed out of the Green New Deal Slate (2021) that formed a governing coalition on the NPC with Socialist Majority Caucus for most of the 2021-2023 term. Participants in the national Green New Deal campaign who ran a slate for the NPC at the 2023 Convention officially declared they had become a caucus in 2024. Some local caucuses merged into Groundwork during its formation, including Uniting to Win and the Los Angeleno “Sol.”

Groundwork supports a party surrogate strategy, though its view is that the party surrogate does not act as a faction within the Democratic Party, but is a fully independent organization that tactically uses the Democratic ballot line to put its own candidates in office and build independent political power, and it rejects both breaking with and realigning the Democrats as distractions from the primary task of building up the party surrogate through electoral, labor, and tenant organizing campaigns. The caucus believes DSA should lead progressive coalitions to win ecosocialist policies, and electeds should have some leeway to act in their best judgement, in line with a general perspective of electoral representation and legislative organizing being key ways to build toward socialism. However, Groundwork is more explicit in favor of party-like elected discipline than the Socialist Majority Caucus and North Star.

Groundwork was one of two caucuses who most strongly prioritized maintaining funding for DSA staff over other spending during the 2024 budget crisis. Some of its members were involved in the Build Public Renewables Act campaign in New York, considered the largest Green New Deal and public renewables legislative victory in US history, although progress has stalled within the New York state government.

Groundwork members often indicate their membership on social media with the potted plant emoji (🪴) or the orangutan emoji (🦧), in reference to the caucus logo and its ecosocialist principles. Groundwork is on the DSA right and claims 4 of the 17 seats on the NPC, including one of the DSA co-chairs. It has a smaller presence within YDSA.

Libertarian Socialist Caucus

Since 2017, the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) has united various libertarian socialists within DSA, including anarchists, libertarian Marxists, communalists, and Dutch-German left-communists. The caucus emphasizes a dual power framework that prioritizes “base building” in the form of campaigns to build militant labor and tenant unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, protests and direct action, and other democratic organizing.

LSC advocates for direct democracy, horizontal structure, and decentralization, as well as stricter elected discipline and anti-Zionism. This is reflected in their decentralization proposals at the 2021 DSA National Convention, their work in Milwaukee with the Lead Free MKE campaign for replacing lead pipes in the city, and their participation in Cooperation Milwaukee for cooperative and union development.

At one point, LSC was by far the largest caucus in DSA, but its membership numbers declined dramatically in 2019. In 2022, former and current LSC members formed the Horizon Federation, an organization meant to unite libertarian socialists inside and outside of DSA while maintaining LSC as a caucus within DSA. LSC’s Marxist wing has ideological overlaps with the Communist Caucus and Emerge, with some dual-card members of Emerge.

Members of LSC often indicate their membership on social media with the black flag emoji (🏴), representing a common symbol of libertarian socialism. Part of the DSA left, LSC no longer has representation on the NPC or NCC, but members still hold leadership positions at the chapter-level and nationally in both DSA and YDSA at the time of this writing.

Marxist Unity Group

A relatively recent addition to DSA, Marxist Unity Group (MUG) was founded in 2021 in adherence with an orthodox Marxist and democratic centralist ideology with various inspirations, including the Second International, the Bolsheviks, revolutionary abolitionists, Kautsky pre-renegade, and the SPD’s Erfurt Programme.

The caucus’s primary plank is the overthrow of the current American constitutional order and the foundation of a new democratic socialist republic, with a majoritarian democratic system in its place. MUG is committed to an oppositional electoral strategy, aiming to build socialist legislative blocs, operating under the democratic discipline of DSA’s membership and program, that use elected office to build support for socialism while committing to the abolition of institutions which limit popular democracy such as the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and the independent presidency. At the same time, it supports building a broad party-movement, with tenant and labor unions, cultural associations, and other independent working class organizations operating in the orbit of a socialist party.  While MUG calls for democratic centralist unity of action around a socialist party structure, it also supports the construction of a distinctly socialist consciousness within unions and a dirty break from the Democratic Party.

MUG has been particularly vocal about its support for stricter elected discipline and its hard lines against Zionism and decentralization. The online publication Cosmonaut is associated with MUG, and the caucus also has strong relations with the UK publications Prometheus and Weekly Worker. Some of its members originated from the Marxist Center but its broad origins are diverse. On the NPC, it played a major role in opening the National Electoral Commission to mass membership, put forward the initial proposal for DSA to endorse protests against the Democratic National Convention, and supported the No Votes for Genocide movement in the 2024 Presidential election.

Members of MUG often indicate their membership on social media with a mug emoji (🍻 or 🍺), or the blue book emoji (📘), representing their book, Fight the Constitution: For a Democratic Socialist Republic, which describes the caucus’s politics in greater detail. MUG is on the DSA left and occupies 2 NPC seats and 1 NCC seat.

Mass Action Caucus

The Mass Action Caucus (MAC), locally named the Red Clover Caucus, was a caucus active from 2022 to 2024, unique for its platform for realignment of the Progressive Party in Vermont. MAC pursued an electoral vision that departed from both SMC and Tempest in their respective aims for very loose and very strict endorsement standards, reflecting an outlook that more closely resembled that of Groundwork or the more moderate wing of BnR. The caucus revived CVDSA from previous collapse by reactivating an initial core of socialist organizers around its platform, and formed the UVM YDSA chapter.

The caucus became defunct due to lack of interest, with many members joining Groundwork. Though its short lifespan makes it challenging to precisely classify, it is often thought as part of the right-wing of DSA, particularly due to its members' subsequent affiliations.

Mass Work

The Mass Work Caucus is a revolutionary socialist caucus, established in Twin Cities DSA, in November 2024. While the caucus is still in its incipient stages, its Points of Unity indicate uncompromising support for de-siloization of distinct areas of struggle within DSA, grounding electoral and labor work in a mass communist struggle, and promoting degrowth, self-determination, and decolonization as core elements of their ideology. They additionally express support for "immediate … organiz[ing] for an explicit break from the Democratic Party" in favor of a communist party of the working class. Mass Work is on the DSA left, but its precise role has yet to be seen.

North Star

North Star (NS) is a small national caucus created in 2018, descending from the Unity Through Diversity Slate (2017) and the pre-2016 Harringtonite popular front consensus. As a result, North Star typically aligns itself with social democratic or progressive liberal organizations.

The caucus strongly advocates for realignment and popular front strategies, seeing them as the most pragmatic route to socialism. North Star is controversial among other caucuses, including more moderate ones, because of its defense of elected officials’ votes to break the 2022 rail strike and to fund Israel’s Iron Dome, its strong support of liberal candidates, perceived hostility toward other members on its official accounts, its critique of anti-Zionist slogans, and its nebulous positions on international issues.

Although it is often stereotyped as consisting of mostly older members following a very reformist and especially electoral program, the caucus claims to have no particular line. It is also skeptical of the existence of caucuses within DSA, finding them to create excessive divisions or to house ultraleftist tendencies. North Star is the most right-leaning caucus within DSA, clearly distinguishing itself from others on the DSA right, and has minimal involvement with YDSA.

Red Labor

Red Labor was a small Boise-based caucus that was formed in 2020 and dissolved in late 2024. The caucus was relatively unique in its urge for a clean break from the Democratic Party and the immediate creation of a new socialist party, including active efforts to do so in Idaho. Red Labor believed in strong democratic centralism with critiques remaining internal in order to foster socialist unity. Members of Red Labor included Trotskyists, De Leonists, Maoists, and Marxist–Leninists. They did not hold any NPC or NCC seats, but they did have a notable presence in Boise DSA and Boise State YDSA.

The caucus voted to disband in late 2024 as they had decided against continuing to organize as an independent caucus. According to former leadership, significant segments of Red Labor will be joining adjacent caucuses or remain uncaucused in the immediate term; but many former members maintain a commitment to moving as a bloc in the future.

Red Line

Red Line is a small East Coast coalition of revolutionary Marxists in DSA, including members with and without caucus affiliations, and seeks to support revolutionary socialists broadly in internal DSA elections, regardless of tendency (including non-Marxists, such as anarchists). It primarily seeks to build a militant labor movement and an independent socialist party via dirty or clean break, explicitly denouncing the realignment strategy. The group formed in 2023 and recently put on a call for DSA chapters to use Single Transferable Vote to elect delegates to the National Convention.

Red Star

Red Star (RS) is a national Marxist–Leninist caucus, formerly limited to San Francisco, that formed in 2019. Red Star members previously classified themselves simply as scientific socialists and revolutionary Marxists, but more recently they have formulated more explicit politics around Marxism–Leninism.

Red Star is the direct successor of Refoundation (2017) in San Francisco, with a small but notable segment of members coming from the Collective Power Network (2019 to 2021). They are generally considered to be on the DSA left but have also had major disagreements with other left factions over issues such as budget cuts and staff layoffs in 2024. Red Star opposes both horizontalism and autocracy, advocating for big tent socialist organizing with a central pole agitating for revolutionary Marxism within a democratic workers’ party. The caucus supports strong elected discipline under a party surrogate model while explicitly opposing third campism. Red Star members tend to be more favorable toward “Actually Existing Socialist” states than other caucuses.

San Francisco DSA has seen significant Red Star involvement in various campaigns, such as the push for a vacancy tax and for the unionization of Anchor Brewing. Red Star also initiated the Good Governance Pledge in 2023 through which various factions pledged for transparency, accountability, democratic conduct, and behavioral discipline. Their publication, Zenith, is where Red Star members often share their perspectives on DSA issues and where the caucus may publish its position statements.

Red Star claims 3 out of 17 seats on the NPC, including one of the DSA co-chairs.

Reform and Revolution

Reform and Revolution (R&R or RnR) is a Trotskyist caucus formed in 2019 by former members of Socialist Alternative, the largest Trotskyist party in the US, who defected due to perceived sectarianism. Like SAlt, R&R is related to the Grantite tendency within Trotskyism but it also makes notable departures.

The caucus emphasizes a dirty break from the Democratic Party to form a new socialist party, as well as a rank-and-file labor strategy, democratic central planning of the economy, some third campist positions, and transitional politics. Unlike BnR, R&R continues to follow a clearly Trotskyist line today, although it diverges from Socialist Alternative in supporting rank-and-file organizing over red unionism, declaring support for a one-state solution in Palestine, not practicing democratic centralism, supporting a dirty break rather than a clean break, and conditional favorability toward AOC. R&R notably opposes military aid to Ukraine, unlike Solidarity and similar Trotskyist tendencies, as well as US sanctions on Russia, unlike BnR. Its members have been involved in the Seattle campaigns for Kshama Sawant and the $15 minimum wage. R&R’s dominant politics most closely resemble BnR’s left, but they also have strong relations with MUG particularly due to some shared perspectives around party building. R&R has relative internal diversity compared to many other caucuses, as its minority "old guard" and majority "new guard" often hold distinct views, such as on the precise details of their perspectives on elected discipline and Palestine, with the former perhaps being more moderate.

R&R members often use a box emoji (📦) on social media to identify themselves as part of the “Trot box,” a reference to Red Star’s 2023 NPC endorsement graphic which grouped MUG, BnR, and R&R—all of which have some degree of Trotskyist influence—together under “party building." R&R is generally considered to be on the DSA left but less so than other left caucuses, as it tends to align with BnR on internationalism and holds a more moderate stance on elected discipline and internally-oriented anti-Zionist resolutions. The caucus has seen significant recent growth in both DSA and YDSA, recently gaining an NCC seat in YDSA.

Socialist Alternative

Socialist Alternative (SAlt) is a Trotskyist international in the Grantite tradition with a section in the United States and is the largest Trotskyist party in the country. While it has existed since 1998, it began openly entering into DSA around 2020 in an attempt to expand favorability toward Trotskyism broadly and push DSA toward a clean break from the Democrats. It has been especially vocal for elected discipline within DSA but since 2023 has gone largely quiet. Socialist Alternative is likely the largest instance of entryism into DSA, albeit other Trotskyist parties have attempted to do the same with much less success. SAlt is on the DSA left, but appears to be fading into obscurity within DSA, especially after a recent major split that included its most high-profile member, former Seattle Councilwoman and dual-card DSA member Kshama Sawant, due to internal conflict over organizational democracy and various political issues.

Socialist Majority Caucus

Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) is a moderate and reformist caucus focused on electoral organizing since 2018. SMC is aligned somewhere between a party surrogate and realignment strategy, and supports a slightly looser discipline of elected officials than Groundwork. Likewise, SMC was also part of the former governing coalition in the NPC for most of the 2021-2023 term.

SMC is generally aligned with Groundwork on most issues, the primary distinction being that SMC focuses less on Green New Deal legislation in its actual organizing. Most of its activity involves canvassing and phonebanking for DSA-endorsed candidates for public office, seeing a reformist focus as the most practical route to moving toward socialism today and bringing mass appeal to DSA via electoral representation. SMC represents 2 out of 17 seats on the NPC and is on the DSA right.

Tempest Collective

The Tempest Collective largely descends from former members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Solidarity, similar to BnR. Tempest is a Trotskyist publication with a focus on rank-and-file labor organizing, elected discipline, and third campist internationalism. While most members now work outside DSA, their presence was once strong in the Madison DSA chapter.

Winter Caucus

The Winter Caucus is a minor caucus that consists largely of former members of the Class Unity Caucus. The caucus favors Marxism but strongly opposes “identity politics.” The caucus believes in the primacy of class over other struggles in socialist organizing and has called for a moratorium on federal endorsements until DSA can build strong mechanisms of elected discipline.

The Winter Caucus is vocally in favor of a dirty break from the Democratic Party. They are considered part of the DSA left but differ from most caucuses in their opposition to intersectionality as a legal theory and a "shorthand for placing all forms of oppression on an equal plane as class exploitation." In particular, they see this understanding of intersectionality as divisive to the working class or in conflict with Marxism. Winter Caucus members are identifiable by the snowflake emoji (❄️) on social media. The Winter Caucus has some activity in DSA and YDSA, but it is not currently as influential as its predecessor.

Notable issues and events within DSA and YDSA

Anti-Zionist organizing

Since the 2017 DSA Convention, DSA has officially endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) and expressed opposition to Zionism as a racist, colonial, and apartheid ideology and movement. DSA has been particularly active in the movement for Palestinian liberation, especially since October 2023,  including by leading major protests across the country and primary campaigns for “Uncommitted” as a protest vote for a ceasefire in Gaza. DSA-endorsed federal electeds Rashida Tlaib (MI-02) and Cori Bush (MO-01) led the effort for a ceasefire in Gaza within Congress, with 18 co-sponsors and 86 total supporters of a ceasefire. Some electeds represented DSA at protests themselves, including Tlaib and Bush to some extent, but especially certain officials like Zohran Mamdani (NY-36, State House) and Jabari Brisport (NY-25, State Senate), who were arrested on multiple occasions for protesting, with Mamdani also participating in a prolonged hunger strike at the White House in late 2023, an effort coordinated by a variety of pro-Palestine organizations.

At the 2024 YDSA Convention, DSA’s youth section made several substantial changes to its stance on Palestine after nearly a year of many chapters putting themselves at the center of militant protests and encampment organizing, usually alongside organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Some of these changes included overwhelming approval for censures of DSA members in office Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nithya Raman for undermining pro-Palestine organizing and showing support for Zionism, a process for expulsion of Zionists who have consistently opposed Palestinian liberation as well as a mechanism for restoration of former Zionists, and national infrastructure to support chapters organizing in the following year while formally endorsing a democratic and multinational one-state solution in Palestine. Other resolutions that more narrowly passed include one that calls to prepare for a national student strike for Palestine, and another that sets standards for endorsing candidates and declares YDSA’s official position to be “No Votes for Genocide,” with the latter passing by a single vote.

However, DSA was neither always anti-Zionist nor has its recent dealings with the rest of the Palestine solidarity movement been smooth sailing. Because DSA largely followed the politics of its founder Michael Harrington, until around 2016, outdated documents from DSA were often rife with allusions to “Israel’s right to exist,” a Zionist talking point, and a full rejection of anything outside of a two-state solution. Harrington’s labor Zionism dominated the organization until the organization grew past its historical 5,000-person membership rolls after 2016, as more diverse politics and typically younger socialists joined the organization en masse. While the two-state solution is not an entirely uncommon position within DSA, particularly among less active members, the organization has increasingly approached consensus for a one-state solution, in contrast to its history as an explicitly Zionist organization.

DSA has become more militant on anti-Zionism with time, beginning with the 2017 shift in favor of BDS and against Zionism and leading up to later struggles involving elected discipline when some DSA-endorsed electeds failed to align with anti-Zionist principles. As a result of the latter issue, various chapters and the youth section have expressed clearer positions against Zionism within the organization, and more militant anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine organizing actions.

In 2021, DSA faced some of its strongest internal struggles after then-endorsed Congressman Jamaal Bowman supported providing additional military aid to Israel and met with far-right Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on a trip organized by J Street, a liberal Zionist organization. As this violated DSA’s anti-Zionist and pro-BDS platform, these actions ignited strong debates about the role of elected discipline in the socialist movement, with many DSA members and the National Political Committee condemning Bowman’s actions and unendorsing him. Those on the DSA right often argued against strong immediate discipline due to Bowman’s large platform and in hopes of working with Bowman’s office to improve his positions on Palestine; on the other hand, the DSA left typically argued in favor of strong immediate discipline, potentially including expulsion from the organization, as a show of support for pro-Palestine solidarity and organizing and establishing standards for those representing DSA to the public. The controversy reached a climax in March 2022, when the NPC narrowly voted to de-charter the national BDS Working Group and temporarily ban its leadership from other positions due to accusations of disruptive and uncomradely behavior, a decision later reversed after substantial backlash from members and other leftist and Palestinian liberation organizations. Since then, some argue that Bowman has become more supportive of restricting support to the State of Israel, describing it as an apartheid regime; however, by his run for re-election in 2024, others maintained that his positions had not substantially improved, particularly due to his lack of an apology, his continued support for “Israel’s right to exist” and continued harms to DSA’s standing within the movement. Notably, many repudiated an accusation made by Bowman that critics within DSA were involved with a COINTELPRO-type scheme. These divides are apparent, for example, in New York City DSA’s decision to endorse his 2024 re-election campaign in contrast to national DSA’s lack of the same.

In addition to issues with Bowman, a great amount of skepticism has grown around DSA’s most well-known member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, following October 2023. In particular, many on the DSA left argued that she was likewise harming DSA’s organizing for Palestine due to her often publicly rejecting DSA statements on Palestinian liberation, including supporting “defensive” military aid to Israel, platforming Zionist lobbyists as “experts” on antisemitism, and speaking against some protests which challenged Israel’s “right to self-defense” on occupied territory. By New York City DSA’s request, the NPC considered national re-endorsement of AOC close to the primary election date, ultimately passing a conditional endorsement which required her to improve her stances on Palestinian liberation, much to the dismay of both left members who sought her full disendorsement and right members who sought an endorsement without conditions. In a surprise turn of events, the New York City chapter then successfully requested for the conditional endorsement to be rescinded, claiming that they had not obtained permission from AOC’s office to apply for a national endorsement. It should be noted that some members on the DSA left believe that this move was actually meant to avoid necessary confrontation with AOC on Palestinian solidarity, while those more favorable toward NYC DSA or AOC tended to agree that it was an honest error.

Despite these internal struggles on how to enforce DSA’s anti-Zionist principles, DSA has been a key player in various organizing projects to advance Palestinian liberation. YDSA, in particular, has been widely involved in university-based encampment organizing to exert strong pressure on university administrators to divest from the Zionist state. DSA has also led or co-led major protests numbering in the hundreds or thousands across the country, pushed public legislation in favor of divestment from Israel, supported labor unions leveraging their labor power to directly challenge investments in Israel, and more. Some universities have already won major concessions, such as the University of Oregon, California State University, University of Minnesota, and others.

Budget crisis

By: John Lewis, DSA Treasurer
Editor: Bryce Springfield, Princeton YDSA

DSA faced a serious budget crisis in 2024, primarily driven by a combination of declining membership renewals and increased expenditures on staff and other spending over previous NPC terms. Concerns about DSA’s finances had been regularly reported by rank and file DSA members across tendencies via the DSA Observer (2021) and the Washington Socialist (2023). In previous years, due to DSA’s rapid growth, the organization was able to collect substantial savings for future spending; however, this ultimately led to a projected deficit of around $2.4 million once DSA’s income had stopped increasing. The severity of the budget crisis was not apparent for a while, but the DSA Treasurer, part of the NPC, demonstrated through the most updated metrics available that the deficit was projected to reach such an unsustainable level that it would lead to the shutdown of the organization by 2025 unless further action was taken. What followed was an extended struggle between caucuses and interest groups regarding the steps to be taken.

Overall, the DSA left generally favored cuts to staff, which had by far become the largest expense over the previous couple of years, rather than cuts to other spending such as dues shares to chapters, stipends for elected leadership, subsidies for YDSA, and other spending. On the other hand, the DSA right generally aligned with the DSA Union in attempting to minimize layoffs as much as possible by prioritizing cuts to other spending. Red Star occasionally aligned with the right on some budget questions, often favoring compromise measures in order to quickly resolve the growing spending issues.

A History of Financial Strain

As DSA is a member-funded grassroots organization, its financial viability fluctuates with the number of members the organization has; thus, from the organization's founding, it has faced multiple fiscal crises when membership numbers have dipped. During the founding merger of DSA between the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM), it was discovered that DSOC was 1 million dollars in debt.

DSA’s first financial crisis came in 1988, and its number of staff were reduced from 6 to 5. A rebound happened in the early 1990s as DSA doubled its number of members to 10,000. Yet, by 1997, the National Director couldn’t give a financial report to the National Convention, leading to the creation of the Secretary-Treasurer role, later split into separate Secretary and Treasurer roles.

The early 2000s saw DSA’s funds fall even lower. By 2004, DSA could only fund 2 staff positions (National Director and Youth Organizer), and both of these positions had to go on unemployment assistance. The Budget and Finance committee worked with them to put out requests for dues and funding from membership. The organization was only able to post the position for National director again in 2009, after donor Marianne Wells passed away and left a significant sum to the organization.

DSA hired its longest tenured National Director in 2011, Maria Svart, and its membership returned to its late 80s numbers of around 5,400. DSA had its first surplus in almost 20 years in 2015. Starting in 2017, DSA’s membership exploded during this period, leading us to the present era.

Rising Tension

As the DSA 100k Recruitment Drive passed without the organization reaching 100k financial or constitutional members, signs of membership decline were beginning to show in 2021. The renewal rate of lapsed and constitutional members far undershot the amount needed to retain other methods that were sought to shore up income for our member-driven organization. DSA’s finances and membership numbers were unclear to members and there was uncertainty about the actual fiscal position of the organization.

Tensions rose in the run-up to the 2023 convention, as warnings of a fiscal crisis loomed. Although not everyone believed the organization would truly reach a crisis, others reacted by trying to increase dues amount per member, with monthly dues and income-based "Solidarity Dues," alongside recommitment drives. Despite this, DSA’s active membership dwindled to closer to around 53,000 by 2024. Ultimately, the 2023-2025 NPC set about examining the issues as DSA’s Finance Director resigned just before the 2023 convention. The new NPC Treasurer organized weekly meetings for the Budget & Finance Committee and openly shared all of DSA’s financial data for the first time with the Open Budgeting Proposal. After DSA’s finance staff produced a draft operating budget, it was found that expenses exceeded income by more than $2.4 million.

Crisis Upon Us

In its December meetings, the Budget & Finance Committee deferred several large items to the NPC. Items put on the table included cutting dues share, permanently closing the national office, ending Democratic Left, cutting the National Harassment and Grievance Officer early, cutting member-organizing funds, a travel freeze, ending all in-person meetings, and a hiring freeze. Budget & Finance cut $268,000 of items and deferred the larger items to the NPC due to the nature of the impact. The first round of cuts summed to $1.09 million across 78 line items, with many reduced to zero including most stipends, the closure of four open staff positions and two internships, a hiring freeze, a travel and event freeze including in-person YDSA conventions, ending the NHGO contract early (alone costing $30k per month), closure of the national office, and a technology audit. All earmarked fundraising was frozen with the exception of the Labor Solidarity Fund. Still, these cuts only covered less than half of the $2.4 million dollar deficit.

During this time, the DSA Staff Union's collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was finalized, approving a $2,000 raise for all staff. At the February meeting, another round of cost reductions included chapter dues share, CBA-aligned layoffs, and a third budget freeze of the year. During this time, both the Operations Director and National Director resigned, and two other staff members were promoted to Operations Director and Finance Director, respectively. Three staff positions left vacant from this process were frozen. The NPC cut an additional $273k which included Democratic Left, all non-YDSA stipends, 14.5% of DSA Co-Chairs' wages, and some national committee funds. As the NPC moved into layoff negotiations, an additional $400,000 dollars was added to the 2024 income largely from members switching to solidarity dues. Even these measures, still, left a rolling deficit.

Four unionized staff and one director were ultimately laid off, following layoff bargaining. The tech manager and several staff members resigned to retain staffers with less tenure. In total, 12 staff positions and 2 intern positions were left vacant, leaving the budget in May 2024 at a small surplus of $5,799. This surplus further grew due to quarterly budget adjustments and the passing of another member who left a bequest in the range of six figures.

DSA still had a looming issue, however, as the convention typically caused a large deficit -$500k during the years it was held. As had been the norm, DSA would typically try to run a surplus in the off-years to be able to afford convention, but with the 2024 budget close to balanced, questions still remained for odd years. Alongside this, DSA’s membership numbers continued to decline, albeit at a slower rate.

Ultimately, the budget crisis boiled down to unclear finances and unclear membership numbers, which led to issues when DSA’s membership fluctuated. Most members and leaders of DSA were unaware of prior layoffs and financial crises, let alone that they happened multiple times. The key task remains: developing, retaining and recruiting socialists. Comrades are what allow the organization to exist.

Salting and student unionism

Across many DSA chapters, organizing such as salting key workplaces – whether to form new, militant unions or to radicalize existing ones via democratic reform – is a major priority, with the goal being to build institutions that can build working-class power and increasingly challenge capitalism. While much of the work that DSA members do in terms of labor work is focused on supporting unions, as has been the case in recent years with auto workers in the United Automotive Workers (UAW), UPS workers in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), and Starbucks workers in Workers United, there is also substantial direct activity on shop floors. To some extent, DSA members have salted workplaces such as Amazon, Starbucks, public schools, and others across the country with these goals in mind.

Several YDSA chapters across the United States have also worked to develop undergraduate unions at their universities over the last couple of years. One of particular note is the University of Oregon YDSA chapter, which won the largest undergraduate workers’ union in the United States in October 2023 with 97% of the vote, covering more than 4,900 student workers in a wall-to-wall campaign. The union is now negotiating its first contract with the University. Other major successful student workers’ unions led by YDSA include the Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth and the Columbia University Resident Advisors Collective, with YDSA also being involved with the Wesleyan Union of Student Employees. Other public drives with YDSA involvement include the Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee, the California State Student Workers Union, and the Macalester Undergraduate Workers Union.

Build Public Renewables Act

After four years of leadership by DSA chapters in New York state, the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) successfully passed as the largest and most prominent public renewable energy legislative victory in U.S. history. With strong provisions for rapidly expanding publicly-owned renewable electricity, unionized public jobs, electricity price discounts, and closures of fossil fuel plants, the BPRA campaign was initiated and led by New York DSA chapters (and coordinated with elected DSA officials in the state legislature through Socialists in Office committee activity). It demonstrated perhaps the most significant ecological legislative victory in the U.S. socialist movement.

The effort began in late 2019 with the Public Power NY campaign by the ecosocialist working group of the New York City chapter of DSA in response to rising electricity rates and declining electricity access by the private electricity provider ConEd. The failures of ConEd resulted from its neglect of infrastructure upgrades for which it received subsidies, along with its extensive lobbying efforts against regulations and renewable energy development. Public Power NY connected with the community through town halls and canvassing, finding a need for strengthened public utilities to replace private utilities—not just for higher quality service and environmental benefit, but even for economic efficiency and fiscal responsibility.

At that point, the campaign expanded beyond New York City to go statewide by working with socialist state legislators, which led to expanding socialist representation, moratoriums on shutoffs, and cancellations of debts. This also enabled the drafting of the BPRA, which was formed with input from DSA and labor groups to include language for both public renewables and strong labor benefits. The BPRA ultimately passed in 2023, giving the New York Power Authority much stronger requirements to build public renewables and close fossil fuel plants when private electricity companies inevitably fail to keep up with aggressive climate goals. The campaign also provided decent public union jobs.

However, progress on implementation of the BPRA has been delayed by slow enforcement of public construction of renewable energy infrastructure, and as the dominant liberal and market-centered politics of New York have held back the intended radical effects. The next steps in the project are currently unclear as DSA members in New York attempt to find new ways to pressure toward public renewables via this legislation. Some in DSA who are more favorable to degrowth politics have pointed to the stalling of the BPRA’s implementation as evidence of legislative campaigns not being the ideal praxis for ecosocialist organizing, instead favoring the construction of counterpower infrastructure outside of the capitalist state in hopes of more revolutionary changes in the long-run. Those more favorable to Green New Deal politics often see these setbacks as expected roadblocks that only call for continued BPRA organizing and pressure campaigns.

International delegations

The DSA International Committee (IC) has engaged in notable international delegations, forming relationships with socialist and resistance groups globally. In recent years, DSA delegations have visited Okinawa, Japan, where they platformed and showed solidarity with local activists opposing US military expansion on the island. Delegates have also engaged with Cuban socialists to learn about their governance model and social welfare despite US sanctions, and to highlight DSA's fight for ending the US embargo on the country. The IC has organized election observation missions in Venezuela and Mexico, where delegates documented their findings to promote democratic practices and help protect voting rights.

Alongside DSA's membership in the São Paolo Forum and the Progressive International, these delegations and the IC's work allow for socialist parties in other countries to have wide awareness of DSA and engage in mutually beneficial forms of international cooperation. Smaller delegations have been spearheaded by various caucuses, such as to collaborate with Irish socialist parties and support their canvassing activities.

2024 YDSA Convention, YDSA NCC, and DSA NPC

The 2024 YDSA Convention was a unique convention in many respects. For one, never before had such substantial changes occurred in a single convention, whether in DSA or YDSA, as described in the previous subsection on anti-Zionist organizing. Secondly, two votes won or lost by just a single vote out of about 160 delegates, including R15: No Votes for Genocide (passed), and R22: Class Struggle Internationalism (failed). Thirdly, a major floor resolution titled “Rise Up For Rashida” was proposed only minutes after President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would drop out of the presidential race, which called on DSA-endorsed elected Rashida Tlaib to symbolically run for the Democratic presidential nomination, but in the long run aimed at encouraging YDSA and DSA to develop plans for platforming socialist politics in the 2028 presidential election. Fourthly, it was a virtual convention, unlike most conventions, due to the aforementioned budget cuts.

Overall, one could argue that the YDSA left largely “won,” as most of the resolutions they endorsed passed, while the resolutions related to internationalism and budget autonomy endorsed by BnR largely failed. R&R may not perfectly fit into the YDSA left or right, as R&R aligned with BnR on many resolutions; yet, they still were able to pass all of their proposed or endorsed resolutions.

Additionally, R&R won its first seat in either DSA or YDSA in winning an NCC seat, with MUG maintaining the seat it held in the previous term. Constellation secured three seats, including a co-chair, as did BnR. David L, a Marxist–Leninist independent involved in the UO Student Workers campaign and in leading anti-Zionist organizing in UO YDSA, likewise won a seat. However, other independents as well as LSC and Groundwork failed to win NCC seats. The previous NCC ended with three Constellation members (including a co-chair), four BnR members, one MUG member, and one independent co-chair. As such, this means that Constellation, MUG, and independent seats remained the same, but BnR lost a seat they previously held while R&R picked up a seat.

From left to right*:

• 1 Marxist Unity Group: Steven R
• 3 Constellation: Aron A (Co-Chair), Callynn J, Sean B
• 1 independent Marxist–Leninist with UO Student Workers: David L
• 1 Reform and Revolution: Daniel S-C
• 3 Bread and Roses: Carlos C (Co-Chair), Jeffrey C, Uma C

The YDSA Conventions have no direct effect on DSA, apart from the YDSA co-chairs each having a half vote on the 17-seat NPC. The NPC thus remains largely unchanged from prior to the 2024 YDSA Convention, with a half seat which was formerly independent having been replaced by a BnR half seat.

From left to right*:

• 2 Marxist Unity Group: Rashad X and Amy W (Secretary)
• 3 Red Star: Megan R (Co-Chair), John L (Treasurer), Sam H
• 1 Anti-Zionist Slate: Ahmed H
• 1 independent Chavista in the International Committee orbit: Luisa M
• ½ Constellation: Aron A (YDSA Co-Chair)
• 3 ½ Bread and Roses: Alex P, Kristin S, Laura W, and Carlos C (YDSA Co-Chair)
• 4 Groundwork: Ashik S (Co-Chair), Cara T, Frances G, and Rose D (Resigned 1/2025)
• 2 Socialist Majority Caucus: Colleen J and Renée P

Notably, due to Bread and Roses being the median member of the NPC, they often have disproportionate influence during the current term. However, Red Star has sometimes played this role instead when it comes to budget-related issues.

Within the National Political Committee, a Steering Committee of 6 seats has five of its seats chosen by the entire NPC, and the final seat is shared between the two YDSA co-chairs. The Steering Committee determines the general direction of what the broader NPC deals with, while also taking on additional roles to keep DSA running. This body is depicted below, but note that it is not as politically consequential as the broader NPC as a whole.

From left to right*:

• 1 Marxist Unity Group: Amy W
• 1 Red Star: Megan R (Co-Chair)
• ½ Constellation: Aron A (YDSA Co-Chair)
• 1 ½ Bread and Roses: Alex P and Carlos C (YDSA Co-Chair)
• 1 Groundwork: Ashik S (Co-Chair)
• 1 Socialist Majority Caucus: Renée P

* Although I attempted to order the seats according to their “left”-”right” stance in YDSA or DSA, the orders may be debatable.

2024 US elections

As in other years, DSA supported a multitude of candidates and ballot measures. Some of these efforts included fights for abortion rights and electoral campaigns with strong focuses on ending the genocide in Gaza and supporting working-class communities. DSA candidates gained several local and state seats, while endorsee Rashida Tlaib maintained her congressional seat in Michigan's 12th congressional district. Notably, however, Cori Bush lost her primary in Missouri's 1st congressional district after the American Israel Public Affairs Committee alone spent over $9 million to unseat her.

As noted in the section on anti-Zionist organizing, DSA endorsed "Uncommitted" for the Democratic presidential primary, alongside on-the-ground organizing for Palestinian liberation, ultimately seeing substantial protest votes. After the primary elections, however, DSA surveyed members on how the organization should respond to the 2024 presidential election. In particular, there were major debates between those who supported a "lesser of two evils" voting strategy, in a strategy aimed at defeating the right as a priority in its own right; and those who supported third party candidates as protest votes against both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's genocidal policies in Palestine, in a strategy aimed at building leverage for the Harris campaign to commit to an arms embargo on Israel. In particular, third party candidates often discussed among third party voters in DSA included Jill Stein of the Green Party, Cornel West of the Justice for All Party (and a longtime member of DSA), and Claudia De la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Notably, YDSA and several DSA chapters committed to "No Votes for Genocide," although the debate between lesser evil voting and third party voting remains contentious within DSA and YDSA. While YDSA endorsed "No Votes for Genocide" and opposition to voting for either of the major presidential candidates, DSA ultimately maintained no official position on voting strategy in the 2024 elections beyond their candidate and ballot measure endorsements, and expressed strong opposition to both parties' genocidal politics.

Acknowledgements

Thank you for providing details that informed this guide: Syjil A (General edits, International Committee), Alex M (General edits), John Lewis (Budget), Amber R (Public Power NY), Aron A-C (YDSA), Sean B (Constellation), Larkin C (Red Star), April M (Trotskyism), Ben L (Red Line, SAlt), Aaron L (Red Labor), Karry M (Caracol), Jorge R (International Committee, Emerge), Trey C (MAC), Tom J (Budget), Spencer M (Reform and Revolution), C.S. J (Libertarian Socialist Caucus), Isabel E (Mass Work), Anemone W (MUG, Tempest), Victoria B (Red Star); and, more broadly, various members and leaders of University of Oregon Student Workers, the Youth Labor Committee, Red Star, Emerge, Marxist Unity Group, Constellation, Reform and Revolution, Libertarian Socialist Caucus, Winter Caucus, and Mass Work. All caucuses noted in the factions section were contacted for input before the final version.

If you like this guide and agree with the LSC Points of Unity, you can join LSC here.

You can discuss this on the DSA National forums here.

Bryce Springfield is a student organizer in Princeton YDSA, and a member of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus.

This guide was last updated with minor edits on September 16, 2025. No further edits will be made, in anticipation of a new version of the guide, and to preserve an early 2025 snapshot of DSA.

The NCC did not release the censure within the timeframe, and instead now released a statement condemning Raman, only two months before the resolution submission process opens for the 2025 YDSA convention. The NCC wrote the statement in December, but decided to wait as they deemed it was not strategic to release the statement during the holiday season. This decision was not the NCC’s to make. Convention mandated the release of the statement within the specified timeframe.

This statement was not released publicly, and only was released on the DSA Forums as part of a broader statement on electoral politics in the new year. The NCC claims that this satisfies the requirement as stipulated in R15-1. However, it is the position of LSC that a private condemnation within DSA is no censure at all; a censure must have public pressure to be effective. A censure is defined to be a formal, public, group condemnation of an individual. There is no incentive for Raman to change her behavior based on this resolution if the statement is not made public. The NCC decided to release the statement in a way that was as minimally destructive to Raman’s political capital as possible. Even DSA-LA released their censure of her publicly on their website. By taking this position, the NCC states that electoral discipline should happen behind closed doors.

LSC calls on the NCC to respect the will of convention and release a public statement censuring Nithya Raman in a timely manner, no later than the opening of the resolution submission window for the 2025 YDSA Convention. By not doing so, the NCC is bypassing convention which is a dangerous expansion of executive power within YDSA. In the event LSC receives a seat on the NCC, we commit to following convention mandates, even if it is something we personally disagree with.

If you want an NCC that respects the democratic decisions of the membership, and you accept the LSC Points of Unity, we urge you to join LSC here.

You can discuss this on the DSA forums here.

“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.” James 5:1–6, NIV

It is a fact in the United States, and in most of the modern western world, that religion is generally the purview of the reactionary or the liberal. Over the past 40 years or so, the Christian Right in America has grown into the spine of the modern fascist movement, spawning demagogues such as Nick Fuentes, Pete Hesgeth, Matt Walsh and others. Religion is ever inseparable from American politics (god forbid we ever elect a Quaker in our slavery loving country!) and increasingly is forming into a movement which seeks to make laws and conduct of the state to be ruled by a very strict and fascistic interpretation of biblical law, essentially Dominionism. Dominionism is a theological/ideological position found in modern Christofascist and Christian nationalist movements, which essentially seeks to replace any semblance of secular society or governance with a system governed by an ultra-conservative, literalist interpretation of biblical laws. In effect, Dominionism seeks to replace democracy with a fascistic, oligarchic, theocracy where “sinners” and otherwise non-believers would face punishments as described in the Bible and determined by a council of theocrats. This is akin to how many churches have church elders to whom people go to discuss matters of discipline and concern in the church, but as the governing procedure of an entire country regardless of one’s personal belief. Their wrath would not simply be limited to non-Christians or non-believers, but would extend to Christians who Dominionists might view as “heretical” or “corrupted”. While there are examples in other communities (Zionism, Salafism, Hindutva, Fascism, etc. in Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Pagan communities respectively), I shan’t mention them here as those are not my communities to comment on. I’m a Christian, I belong to no denomination and to elaborate my beliefs beyond “Christian anarcho-communism” would take a considerable amount of time to articulate, which is ultimately not the focus of this essay. The religious right has long been growing a cancer which continues to fester while the left leaves religious spaces largely abandoned. This is a shame, for many religious groups and communities are largely progressive on a lot of issues, but have been so influenced by Christofascist and Christian nationalist propaganda that our organizing within these communities often becomes harder. We can’t abandon religious spaces to the right anymore. We as a movement must stake our claim and push on from there, we must not cede an institution under considerable influence in day-to-day life from the American Right.

“We Fool You!”

Marx famously said: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).

Marx’s argument ultimately amounts to the political analysis of religion, which is to say that religion is something created as a salve to explain and justify things, a product of the material conditions from which it comes and not from some genuine spiritual revelation in his eyes. Marx’s problem with religion is that it is a system which, in his eyes, inherently requires one to embrace delusions of happiness in their condition and therefore make them unwilling to rise up against the conditions which create his real misery. Marx ultimately then concludes that religion is ultimately contrary to the liberation of the working class.

Bakunin, his rival, makes a much more emphatic and somewhat similar statement, “With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice. Unless, then, we desire the enslavement and degradation of mankind… we may not, must not make the slightest concession either to the God of theology or to the God of metaphysics. If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose. Is it necessary to point out to what extent and in what manner religions debase and corrupt the people? They destroy their reason, the principal instrument of human emancipation, and reduce them to imbecility, the essential condition of their slavery. They dishonor human labor, and make it a sign and source of servitude. They kill the idea and sentiment of human justice, ever tipping the balance to the side of triumphant knaves, privileged objects of divine indulgence. They kill human pride and dignity, protecting only the cringing and humble. They stifle in the heart of nations every feeling of human fraternity, filling it with divine cruelty instead.” (Bakunin, God and the State).

Whereas Marx’s appeal is of a more political, anthropological character, Bakunin’s objection is much more metaphysical, but all the same they describe the same conclusion: Religion is a means to enslave humanity. This belief has long been a cornerstone of Anarchism and Marxism and has largely proceeded apace with the modern day. Gramsci noted as well his objection to religion, Max Stirner noted god (and everything else) as narratives which sought to deprived man of his freedom, the USSR declared itself as state atheist, the relationship the CNT-FAI had with the church was one of hostility for its allegiance to the Francoists, and so on. Indeed, one of the most common depictions of capitalism used in the US is the Pyramid of Capitalism. This piece was first published in the US by the Industrial Worker in 1911 and depicts different levels of the Capitalist hierarchy, on the third to top level we have the clergy on a platform which reads “We Fool You!” (Nedeljkovich, Brashich, and Kuharich, Pyramid of Capitalism, The International Pub. Co., 1911. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-capitalism_color%E2%80%94_Restored.png )

If You Ever Obey a Human like Yourselves…

In our absence in religious spaces and in organizing religious communities, the christo-fascist rot has become a plague among the faithful of the US. Look out the window, read the papers: What bigot does not invoke Christ in their justification for genocide be it against Palestinians, BIPOC, or queers? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Christian nationalism first formed: Some scholars have suggested its roots begin at the very first European settlements in the Americas, others point to the Pilgrims and their philosophies, and then some point to the Civil War, where one James Henley Thornwell called for a breaking down of the wall between Church and State in the Confederacy. I would posit however that Christian nationalism in the modern day really found its roots in the 1930’s –1950’s with the anti-communist movement that would become the hallmark of the Cold War. Business interests began to vilify socialist ideals as satanic, pointing to the anti-clerical and anti-theist messages of many socialists, and a threat to the “natural order”, which in turn also lent itself to segregationist arguments which stoked fear around “amalgamation” and introduced other racial and bigoted dog-whistles and terms.

The 1980’s–1990’s was a period of fertile ground for the hyper-moralist philosophies of Christianity, and thus a nascent Christian nationalist movement started to pop up. The era of Ronald Reagan and the Waco siege became the spawning ground of the modern fundamentalist Christian nationalist ideas which have become commonplace in American conservatism. Reagan, in his attempt to rally voters against Jimmy Carter, invoked fears of moral degradation and chaos and inherently began to tie conservatism explicitly with Christianity. This conservative moralism had always existed, but the specific brand and method in which he did so was heavily influenced by groups like the Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell Sr. and other prominent figures and members of the broader Shepherding movement. It was this move by Reagan and others in his circle that truly mobilized white middle-class Christians as a force in politics. The image Reagan crafted of the “Empire of Evil” for the Soviet Union as a place where Christians were oppressed by the government, having to hide from being persecuted and needing to escape to the free West, was powerful to many. This not only led him to the White House, it cemented Republicans as the “religious” party in the eyes of voters. The Waco siege arguably sparked the formation of right-wing Christian militias in America. Waco truly cemented the idea that Big Government was trying to suppress the rights of the faithful, and thus the faithful needed to arm themselves for their protection, just as Reagan and others had warned.

Since the 90’s, we have seen movements such as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and The Seven Mountains Mandate, and popular figures such as Nick Fuentes, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and the Robertsons, weaponize right-wing Christian ideals to move more explicitly into increasing conspiratorial, violent, and insurrectionary actions against queer, BIPOC, immigrant and non-Christian communities. Project 2025 is itself heavily inspired by many of the aforementioned movements and people, many of whom have ties to the Heritage Foundation. This movement has no signs of stopping and even in places where no self proclaimed members exist, Christian spaces online and in public are heavily influenced by right-wing ideology. For instance, if you search the question “What is the role of women in the Bible?” you will often find people quoting Timothy 1, Timothy 2, and Titus (otherwise called the Pastoral epistles). These arguments formed the bedrock of the Shepherding movement and continue to inspire Christian nationalists, in spite of scholarly evidence discrediting [Ehrman, Bart D. Forged. HarperOne, 2011.], [MacDonald, Margaret T. "The Deutero-Pauline Letters in Contemporary Research," in The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 258-279.], [Matthijs den Dulk, (2012), "I Permit No Woman to Teach Except for Thecla: The Curious Case of the Pastoral Epistles and the Acts of Paul Reconsidered", Novum Testamentum 54 (2012), pp. 176–203] the Pastoral Epistles due to their direct contradictions with Paul and his opinions on the role of women in the church, celibacy, and marriage as outlined in Corinthians!

Regrettably, if you were to look for Christian content in the modern day, much of it will inevitably be right-wing, or at the very least outline some of the self-same beliefs whether indirectly or otherwise. Your preacher himself or any number of Christian influencers might attempt to dispense the “True” interpretation of the Bible based on their own beliefs. Oftentimes, people will believe them, because these are influential people who, as fellow Christians, we are ostensibly predisposed to wanting to believe the best in. Most Christians are ignorant as to the extent of the control these institutions and their agenda have gained in congregations. If you as a priest or a member of a congregation disagree with their doctrines or beliefs, you risk ostracism or even censure—which can be incredibly dangerous if you rely on the resources churches might provide.

What does that have to do with us?

The situation for the faithful is bleak and it seems that there’s no real opposition to the rightward march of American Christianity. As it stands, Christian nationalism stands concerningly poised to conquer the spiritual sanctums of America. The right has long held control of churches, and Christofascism presents yet another tool for them to utilize in pursuit of power. If the Civil Rights Movement taught us anything, it’s that the church is a powerful tool for organizing. During the CRM, it was Black Churches which played an incredibly important role in helping to organize direct action by giving black communities support in the form of meeting spaces, funds, and connections across the country. Certain religious communities, such as the Quakers, have played a historically significant role in supporting civil rights and abolitionist efforts in the US. Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau have presented some of the earliest attempts at American environmental activism and socialist ideas, and some of the earliest attempts at socialist communes find their roots in Fourierism. Such instances reflect the power of religious communities to advance liberatory movements! If we do not include religious communities and help incorporate socialism into their beliefs, they will always remain at odds with our vision and thus resent us.

Many moderately liberal progressive churches in communities have coalitions which work to pull together resources to charity ends. What if we could perhaps contribute and turn these projects into sustainable mutual aid projects? What if we used churches as sanctuaries to protect queer youth and immigrants from authorities? What if we used churches as third places for our communities to meet each other and organize actions? I envision the Church as a place for the faithful and otherwise alike to benefit together, as it should be. The messaging infrastructure and the connections with already existing aid structures in churches would make them invaluable for our goals as socialists.

All of this being said, I do not wish to give a free pass to Christianity in the US. It has played a great role in colonialism; arguably North American settler colonialism does not exist without Christianity: Justifications for Slavery, The Code of Handsome Lake, “the curse of Cain”, Indigenous Boarding schools, Manifest Destiny, etc. were all major tenets of Christian belief in North America. While Christian churches still have yet to properly reconcile their active participation in settler-colonialism and make restitution, this must start with a decolonization of Christianity from within the ranks of the faithful. Most churches have patriarchal, male-dominant congregations, where the role of women is often limited to at best deacons or church workers in most churches. Churches also largely remain abusive towards queer youth, women, and minors, and the abuse of the clergy is rife. These are all things we must seek to dismantle as socialists.

We have a lot of work ahead of us, but in my heart I believe we can take back these communities and drive reactionaries from the core of American society. Pillar by pillar, we can take the structures of power, dismantle them, and create something beautiful, something free, something, if I may be bold to say so, very Christian in nature!

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. I myself am convinced, my [siblings], that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge and competent to instruct one another.” Romans 15:13–14

Trigger warnings: discussions of sexual assault, cruelty towards unhoused folks, and genocide

by duskfall of earth laliberté

Bafflement

It’s easy to be angry at the horrors in this world exactly because it is a reasonable response to have. Who wouldn’t be angry when you learn of the (rising) death toll in Gaza^[1]? Who wouldn’t be angry when you see (more and more) people being arrested for sleeping on sidewalks? Who wouldn’t be angry when you see a(nother) rapist and pedophile elected into office^[2]? Hierarchies of oppression are insidious and ever-present, but they do not have to be. Together, we all have the power to end travesties.

And yet some people are not angry, or don’t ever show it, and some are even glad. How is it possible? Even the richest in the world have access to the news, learning materials are freely available, and yet they don’t put a shred of their privilege to help. No anger! No outrage! It’s baffling that people don’t care about injustice when it is easier than ever to see and easier than ever to connect with others to right it. Why is this?

A few city councils in the northeast of Turtle Island on stolen Wampanoag land (known by some as “The United States”) recently passed ordinances that criminalize “unlawful camping” on public property. These laws are popping up in many places after the Supreme Court allowed such abhorrent treatment in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (28 June 2024)^[3]. That is, it criminalizes unhoused people. Just under thirty citizens of our city spoke against this ordinance, nearly one hundred supported those speaking against it, and one city councilor voted against it. Every person who spoke against the ordinance had their own reasons: some people were previously or will be imminently unhoused; some pushed for allocating funding to actually useful places; and one business owner was scared that they’ll be forced to kick people out into the deadly winter chill. Though the ordinance ended up passing, everyone speaking against it, as well as those just sitting and supporting, took their anger and channeled it into something helpful. Though the city council was never going to listen—they have business interests to serve and fears to peddle—we spoke to the people of our city and got the word out about this vile ordinance.

The three citizens who spoke in favor of criminalizing unhoused people, as well as the rest of the city council, used the framing that unhoused people are icky, dangerous, diseased, and blemishes upon beautiful property. What they miss is that unhoused people are not radioactive lawn ornaments, they are humans who are suffering some of the worst trauma that can be inflicted in this so-called society. As any person living paycheck-to-paycheck can tell you, you are never more than a handful of unfortunate coincidences away from losing your housing.

It must be asked—why can’t those councilors see how much harm they’re causing?

How can they possibly not care?

Is it a problem with empathy? Empathy is multimodal: It can be the ability to intuit another’s feelings based on perceptual clues. It can be synonymous with compassion. It can also be the ability to think through another’s material conditions and wonder how that would make oneself feel.

We ourselves don’t have that first kind of empathy, likely due to autism. When our life partner cries, we can’t intuit why. However, we can think about what conditions lead her to crying and can consider whether that would make us cry. From there we can act with compassion and help her. Any person, if they take a second to think and have a good grasp on the situation, can think through the apparent effects and piece together how they would feel if they were in those conditions. That is, Empathy can function through the veil of ignorance^[4].

So, there are at least three conditions that would make one want to help folks in harm’s way—that is, to have solidarity: proper knowledge of conditions besetting those facing harm (conscience), proper knowledge of what ways one can help (awareness of opportunities), empathy, and the capacity to help. If someone has all of those, they will help.

Conscience

Oppression is the suffering reified by hierarchical society. Knowledge of oppression is necessary to care. In the hierarchical societies that most people live in, suffering is readily apparent. For those at the bottom of hierarchies, they are likely to suffer more often and to suffer worse. For those benefiting from hierarchies, the everyday suffering of this world can affect them less often and less painfully, but even the richest of the rich are able to sometimes glimpse the low-wage worker cleaning up their messes.

Everyone can feel hierarchy. Those who have the most power over others (“power-over”) and those who feel that they deserve power believe that hierarchy—and thence, oppression—is right, inevitable, and good. These ideas, emitted in plumes by those with the most power-over, pervade the air, choking us all.

It is possible to live under a rock, but the news is freely available and is replete with stories of atrocities across the world. Those city councilors clearly have seen unhoused people and some have definitely interacted with them. Videos of Palestinians being brutally murdered en masse are common, and any person must at some level be horrified, at least at the desecrated remains of actual human people. The news is readily available to show you that the so-called “President” of some parts of Turtle Island committed statutory rape, among many, many instances of vile misogyny that any reasonable person would call rape and sexual assault, but which rapists, fascists, and those with the most power-over (but we repeat ourselves) call “slander”.

Suffering pervades this world and it is impossible to never notice it. Everyone knows that something is wrong, there must be reasons for suffering, but echo chambers, propaganda, and the lies pushed by those with the most power-over the world distort knowledge and thus prevent people from knowing about oppression.

Empathy

Humans are products of their material conditions. In general, a human’s reaction to particular conditions makes sense: It’s readily apparent that if someone is sleeping outside in the winter, hungry, alone, scared they’ll be randomly arrested, they’ll be in a pretty sour mood and may lash out. Though the mind is incredibly complex and how it functions is arcane, the mind is also a material condition that people live in and act through, albeit with reactions that may not be apparent to those outside of the mind in question. When our PTSD is triggered by something most people consider inconsequential, we may cry and run away. To someone without PTSD, crying and running away from that stimulus may seem extreme and inappropriate, but given how this trigger makes us feel (sudden fear, overwhelming anxiety, flashbacks, et cetera), this is a reasonable response.

Any person, if they have proper knowledge of a situation, can figure out why someone is acting the way they are because humans are living in and responding to material conditions. Any person can realize that if they were the sole survivor of their entire family, neighborhood, community being slaughtered by American bombs, they’d be extremely opposed to America funding the genocidal fascist settler-colonial Zionist state.

Awareness of opportunities

The proper knowledge of what ways one can help can be obscure or nonexistent. For instance, you may need to bulk order t-shirts for a company event; any t-shirts you buy are almost definitely made with slave labor. Your boss needs you to put in this order today and he can’t tolerate another delay. You fear you may be fired. What can you even do? In a world where ruthless Capitalist exploitation reigns supreme, there is often no ethical option available.

Other scenarios are more assailable than toppling the whole of Capitalism. In practical terms, you could: show up to a city council meeting and protest, unionize your workplace^[5], volunteer at a Food Not Bombs^[6], or simply donate some money to help Palestinians^[7]. The YouTube channel “Anark” has a good video on how to start organizing if there’s nothing around you^[8].

Solidarity

Elected representatives will always be in favor of continuing the state—power structures of the state, combined with every other hierarchy (the kyriarchy^[9]), have a vested interest in perpetuating itself. The state is, and always has been, counterrevolutionary because of this undying self-interest in perpetuation.

Those who enact law to arrest unhoused folks for the crime of being poor in public, those who work for Raytheon, those who rape, must be missing any shred of conscience. Information on the oppression and suffering in this world is plentiful. The kyriarchy and the distorted knowledge that pervade this world prevent those most benefiting from hierarchy to know what is the real problem, but anyone can and ought to care, if only because with too much bad luck they’ll be the one with the boot to their neck. The solution to combat this knowledge falsely so called is to generate horizontal power. That is: We must generate the power to effect change via community, with reciprocal support, without hierarchy, by engaging in mutual aid that betters the lives of all people, allows them to truly effect change, and truly decide what is best for them and others simultaneously.

To be healthy, anger must have at least two components: that burning you feel inside you, the way it makes you tremble in what could be fear, could be terror; and knowledge and direction of where and how to channel it. Healthy anger is thus formed of rage and hope. There are many causes to care about, and many ways to help. You may not have the power to smash the kyriarchy single-handedly, but you do have the power to build a better future.

It is not only unreasonable to perpetuate oppression, it is wrong and clearly so. It is not only reasonable to be rageful at injustice, it is right. The kyriarchy is insidious—it is not only good and just to combat it, it is good and just to struggle against it to allow every single human being the power to decide their own life through freedom, solidarity, and equity.

“Anarchy cannot come but little by little—slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension. Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchy today, tomorrow or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward Anarchy today, tomorrow and always.” — Errico Malatesta^[10]

For those comrades interested in joining the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (DSA-only), or the broader Horizon Federation (no DSA membership required), join today!

References

Anark. Anarchism vs The Mega-Machine (A Modern Anarchism Part 1), 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCgr2g0cQ5Y&t=1401s.

———. The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Organizing, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU0DfVvsV5Q.

Baryon, Daniel. “Kyriarchal Power.” In A Modern Anarchism, 2022. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-a-modern-anarchism#toc4.

BuildPalestine. “Trusted Organizations to Donate to Palestine,” May 15, 2021. https://buildpalestine.com/2021/05/15/trusted-organizations-to-donate-to-palestine/.

City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, No. 23-175 (Supreme Court of the United States June 28, 2024).

Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. Transforming Vision. 1517 Media, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt22nm87s.

Food Not Bombs. “2024 Food Not Bombs Locations.” Accessed November 25, 2024. http://foodnotbombs.net/info/locations/.

Gallagher, Collin. “Lowell Says: Sleep, Starve and Suffer Elsewhere.” The UMass Lowell Connector, November 26, 2024. https://umlconnector.com/2024/11/lowell-says-sleep-starve-and-suffer-elsewhere/.

Golden Jr., Thomas A., and Shawn Machado. Unlawful Camping on Public Property, The Code of Ordinances City of Lowell, Massachusetts § 222.22 (n.d.). https://www.lowellma.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/29477?fileID=59581.

IWW. “Industrial Workers of the World.” Accessed November 25, 2024. https://www.iww.org/.

Khatib, Rasha, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf. “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential.” The Lancet 404, no. 10449 (July 20, 2024): 237–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01169-3.

Malatesta, Errico. “Toward Anarchy.” In The Method of Freedom : An Errico Malatesta Reader, edited by Davide Turcato, translated by Paul Sharkey, 27–31. 1899. Reprint, Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-toward-anarchy.

Sidhwa, Feroze. “Letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris.” Gaza Healthcare Letters, October 2, 2024. https://www.gazahealthcareletters.org/usa-letter-oct-2-2024.

Wikipedia contributors. “Original Position.” In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, November 15, 2024. Page Version ID: 1257510499. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Original_position&oldid=1257510499.

by Jesse M.

There are three places in Las Vegas I truly liked: two of them were bars, and the third was Writer’s Block, a wonderful bookstore shaped like a literal block. It was here, a couple days into a job with the Nevada State Democratic Party, that I picked up Chomsky’s “On Anarchism” to get an introduction to the ideology.

It’s a terrible introduction to the ideology. Great bookstore, best ideology, not a very good book.

I start with this because I don’t want to mislead you. If I was a pure propagandist, I would say that this experience of working for the state Dems made me into an anarchist, when the truth is that I was thinking about it almost from the very start. Becoming an anarchist, however, helped me interpret what I was experiencing while I had the job.

I had worked in electoral politics before: fresh out of high school, age 18, I got a job on the Obama campaign, mostly because I wasn’t finding other jobs, and showing up to the Obama office to volunteer seemed a better use of time than trying in vain to get a job at Best Buy. So, I wasn’t a complete novice… but in 2008, I was mostly working with the IT department. Organizing was all new to me.

Backstory

Nevada’s caucus in 2016 went poorly. More accurately, the state convention went poorly, which you can go down a whole rabbit hole reading about, if you want. What’s important to establish is that the Hillary and Bernie sides absolutely hated each other. The Hillary side thought the Bernie Bros were violent, rampaging sexists who had threatened to kill the state party chairwoman; the Bernie side thought the whole process had been rigged against them in 2016. Because of all that, the most important thing was for 2020’s caucus to go smoothly: no one threatening to throw any chairs (if you mention “chair throwing” to anyone involved with Nevada electoral politics, you will get a long explanation of how this did or did not really happen), no one accusing anyone of fraud, just a simple, transparent process with a clear winner.

The job

It was both a campaign job and it wasn’t: it was for a political party, and we were doing the same work (phonebanking, planning events, managing volunteers) that any political campaign would do. The difference was that this organizing for the 2020 Nevada Democratic Caucus wasn’t for any of the candidates, it was the neutral, referee-like logistical work to set up the volunteers running the caucus.

The most important thing to know about caucuses is that they suck and everyone hates them. Seriously, everyone. The progressive wing of the Democrats hate them because they’re undemocratic, forcing people to show up in person to a specific place at a specific time to participate, thus suppressing turnout (especially among the working class); the establishment wing of the party hate them because candidates like Bernie, with an extremely enthusiastic base who will do real voter-to-voter organizing, have a huge advantage.

The main difference between a caucus and a primary is that primaries are Official Elections: you go and vote in an election run by the government. A caucus is entirely party-run, and election rules (to my non-lawyer knowledge) essentially don’t apply to it, because it’s not technically an election. You can make them as accessible or inaccessible as you want, they’re events run by a political party to the rules of that political party. So, that means that the entirety of planning two of the first three elections in the primary cycle (up through 2020) was done on a shoestring by the state political parties. And that means they were organized by first-time political workers working way too many hours for not very much money, in way over our heads.

That’s me! I worked for the Nevada Dems from August 2019 through March 2020, making $3,250 a month. I had to find over a hundred people to volunteer to chair their precincts, spread across more than 20 locations across Nevada (my turf was basically everything south and east of Vegas).

Because paying people enough that they’d be able to afford housing would cost campaigns a lot more money, they instead rely on “supporter housing.” That means instead of your own place to live, some nice person or family lets you sleep in their guest bedroom for a while. On the one hand, it’s a great way for scrappy campaigns to get organizers on the ground with little cost, but even bigger campaigns have come to rely on it. It puts added pressure on the organizer to not act up and jeopardize your job: it’s one thing to not have paychecks in and risk getting evicted, but this isn’t even a formal living arrangement with a lease, it’s just some guy letting you sleep there because he wants to help the Democrats. And if you’re not with the Democrats any more, what then?

The hours for the job started off bad and got worse. At the beginning of the job, we worked five and a half days a week. With seven weeks until the election, our schedule changed: ten hour days, seven days a week.

There’s a certain amount of hours one can devote to something in a week before it takes over every other part of the brain. If you’ve ever played a video game so much that you can still see it when you’re trying to go to sleep, you’ve probably felt this; it’s called the “Tetris effect” in that sense. But it’s even worse when it happens with a job; in our case as electoral organizers, a job involving politics. Even when we would go out to the bar to drink after working 70 hours, there’s no way we could talk about anything else, because we hadn’t done anything else to think about. (I had a Tinder date with a gorgeous Bernie organizer, and I asked “can we talk about something else” at one point. I don’t think we did.)

So what did we spend those endless hours doing? A lot of phone calls. Early on, it was basically taking a shotgun approach and calling through our lists (at least 200 dials a day) of previous volunteers for the party or people our data had otherwise tagged as being potential volunteers (based on voting patterns, etc). Later on, once we had a good network of volunteers to rely on, we could set up phonebanks with them and otherwise outsource the work of recruiting more precinct chairs to those volunteers.

Especially early, calling people to get them to volunteer really sucked. Because of all the 2016 drama, the former Hillary supporters didn’t want anything to do with it because they thought a gang of Bernard Brothers would tear them limb from limb, and the Bernie supporters thought it would be rigged from the start. I was calling through a list of people to try to get them to run the caucus, and people were telling me they didn’t even want to participate.

In addition to our volunteer recruitment, we were required to get a certain number of new Democrats registered to vote per week; something about this got us money from the national DNC. My true “welcome to Vegas” moment was standing on the asphalt outside a Wal-Mart when it was close to 100 degrees registering people to vote. Being a Seattleite, I didn’t put on any sunscreen, and got a glorious sunburn followed by a farmers’ tan in about two days. (Wal-Mart kicked us out of their parking lot. I found that the two best spots were at UNLV and outside a 99-cent store. UNLV was great because it had plenty of shade; the 99-cent store’s security not only didn’t kick me out, I registered one of them to vote.)

Our job was mostly self-directed, with metrics we had to hit that were based around results: this many precinct chairs, etc. We had trackers upon trackers in Google docs. Because I had pretty easy turf, I was hitting all my numbers without making their recommended/required phone calls per day, but since I was getting results, hey, no one cared.

This was interrupted by what I started calling “HQ Freakout Days,” when HQ staff went nuts over organizers not making enough phone calls, and we needed to stop all other work and just make X number of dials. Not any tangible result from them, just make that many phone calls. Basically, stop the actual work you’re doing and hit our made-up metrics instead, because we’re your boss. For those days, I made what I euphemistically called my “youth vote outreach” list, which was people 29 and under who we’d never contacted before. Because I knew none of them would ever pick up, and we only had to let it ring four times and hang up without leaving a message, I could get through over 100 of those in an hour, easily. That’s what they get for valuing input metrics over output ones.

I hate our electoral system

If you’re like most people, when you think of people who work in politics other than politicians, you think of morons like David Axelrod or James Carville who at one time had real jobs on campaigns, and now collect paychecks going on TV while a title like “Democratic strategist” appears under them. This infuriates me, firstly because that’s not a job. Watching them has made every media consumer think they, too, could be a “strategist” for their political party, like video game fans think they can be in charge of a video game developer as an “ideas guy” without being able to make anything.

Part of what makes our electoral system so terrible is its system of what jobs do exist. Most people who work in politics do so for very short stretches of time, like I did. If you make it through one campaign cycle and work into the next one, you’re an aged, rugged veteran. The person who hired me, two levels of experience above me, was 21 years old at the time.

When I say “our electoral system,” I don’t just mean the laws around how elections work. I mean the broader system of our two parties, the massive industry of consultants and pollsters either supporting or grifting them, and our news media treating the election like a two-year leadup to its Super Bowl.

When a campaign cycle starts up, like for the 2020 cycle, all the campaigns hire at once. There’s not nearly enough locals to hire to staff up every campaign’s offices across the state, so campaigns hire from wherever. It ends up being a lot of recent political science graduates who just want to Work In Politics for a bit. So, these 21 year-olds are airdropped in from New York, California, and Massachusetts to organize in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina for six months. Then their job ends and they go back home. (Talking to one Buttigieg organizer, she sent resumes to every Democratic candidate and took the job with Buttigieg because that’s who got back to her first. We’re supposed to take seriously these people saying that democracy is at risk if we don’t vote, but they’re so apathetic about who wins that they’ll help any Democrat become president who pays them? Mind-boggling. “Blue no matter who,” truly.)

The electoral system is so focused on the specific immediate task at hand, the election these people were hired to win (and working people to the bone doing it), that there’s never any room to step back and build something long-term. No one is planning for the Democratic party five or ten years from now (at least, not in a way that affects local organizing) because that’s ten or twenty times as long as the average staffer is expected to last. The feeling seems to be that every minute spent planning for something further out than the next election is a minute not spent working on winning the next election.

So, when I get on my anarchist high horse now and talk about how we need to spend our time, energy, and money on something other than electoral politics, it’s not the voting part that upsets me. It’s all this bullshit. Every election, we have to burn out all our most promising organizers in six months because there was no infrastructure for them to build on, and they have to make it all from scratch every time. It’s like we’re working extra hard to pay off our last payday loan, then taking out a new payday loan at the end, ensuring we’ll have to do the same thing over again next time.

Classism in the Democratic Party

The “HQ staff,” the higher-paid people with the campaign, worked out of a building in a little office that housed some other campaigns. The field staff, such as myself, got to work there for maybe a few days of training, and then off to our new office: Panera Bread.

For about a month, despite constant promises that it was just around the corner, we didn’t have a field office. In the pre-COVID times when “work from home” was an alien concept, that meant that instead of doing our work from wherever, we all had to meet up at a local Panera Bread together at 9am six days a week and make calls there together. Five years later, I still can’t walk by a Panera Bread without shuddering.

When we did get our own field office, it wasn’t in the nice upscale office park that HQ was. I don’t mind that they found something outside of a white neighborhood–I’ll organize anywhere, and if it was my money, I’d certainly save money on rent that way–but it’s worth noting that the HQ staff didn’t choose to put themselves there. It was in what seemed to be an abandoned doctor’s or dentist’s office, and it didn’t have modern conveniences like “drinkable running water.” We had to carry jugs of water over from the gas station every day just to have something to drink, and if you’ve lived in Vegas without dying, you know you have to drink a lot of water.

Having a physical separation, by around a 15-minute drive, is a perfect metaphor for how the professional class of the Democratic Party sees themselves compared to the ordinary people of the field staff. We weren’t let in on any strategy discussions, we weren’t told any inside information (because they were certain we’d leak it), we weren’t even allowed to physically be around them.

Trying to unionize

From the start, I was far more interested in trying to unionize the job than the job itself. I had developed a big interest in unions since I had gotten a union job at an AT&T store, gone on strike with CWA, joined DSA, gotten fired from AT&T, gotten my job reinstated through a grievance, and became a union steward. I had sent off a couple resumes to become an organizer at SEIU, to no success.

There was no shortage of issues to organize around: our pay sucked, with the next-lowest pay from a campaign being Bernie’s at $3,500 a month (they may have, ironically, suffered from unionizing first). Our mileage reimbursement was awful, which was a big deal for people like me who had to drive to rural areas of the state. Above all that, there was an overall feeling that the HQ staff just didn’t care about us at all.

I got my first organizing lesson when I reached out to a couple of the more senior field organizers on the campaign: what someone says their political beliefs are doesn’t mean shit when it comes to workplace organizing.

These two people were who, when I was first thinking of the idea of organizing, I assumed would be onboard. They were both Bernie-supporting DSA members. I called them up, and the response I got was some variation of, “I really need to maintain a good relationship with management because I need a promotion/letter of recommendation.” (They both left the campaign fairly quickly anyway.)

This would have been a small unit, around a dozen people, so every card signed mattered a lot. (In organizing electoral campaigns, unlike most others, voluntary recognition is assumed; forcing the workers to go through an NLRB process would be political suicide when your bosses are trying to keep leadership of various unions happy.) I reached out to Campaign Workers Guild, a scrappy independent union that represents some political campaign workers, including, most relevantly, some state parties. (Checking their website, Biden for President Harris for President organized with CWG! Great job, y’all.)

Because we were split between Vegas and Reno staff, the hardest part was getting anyone in Reno onboard. If it had just been a vote in Vegas, we would’ve won handily, but the only person to ever join up from Reno flamed out from the job within a week or two. (You should be getting the idea by now that people come and go from these organizing jobs very quickly.)

I thought we had a majority at one point: another organizer in Vegas, a local, someone I thought I was developing a good relationship with, a self-described anarchist, told me that they wouldn’t sign up first for fear of retaliation, but that they’d be the final card we needed. Okay, fine. So we got the other six cards, and I came to them to get the seventh card needed. Instead, they gave me a lot of objections that made it clear they never intended on signing in the first place. I went to my car and cried.

Our union attempt stalled, but with real pressing issues, the card-signing and non-card-signing people came to a separate course of action: we would draft a letter to management of things we wanted to change. Not a list of demands, but of requests. Things like more car mileage reimbursement, cell phone reimbursement, more pay, drinkable water, and even basic things like a weekly meeting with HQ staff so we could check in.

I took the letter to the HQ office and sat down the the Caucus Director and Executive Director of the party. First, they wanted to let me know how much they appreciated that it was requests and not demands. Then, we went down the list of everything: no, no, no, no, no. The only thing they agreed to was the weekly meeting, and I think we ended up having that all of once.

Knowing what I know now about organizing, this would have been a key step in an escalation plan: I could have gotten the non-card-signers to buy into a plan of, “okay, if this letter doesn’t get a serious response, what do we do next?”, but instead, it didn’t go anywhere. It was too close to the caucus to leave us time to make any change by that point.

Talking with a staffer who was there after I left, I heard they did end up unionizing with IBEW 2320.

The App

Like the essay equivalent of a Godard film, seven pages in I’ll start telling something resembling a story.

Part of the way the 2020 caucuses would be better than 2016, we were told, was that instead of an old-fashioned hotline to call in the results from each precinct, we would be using The App. Not just to report the results, but to run the caucus itself. Everything that happened in the caucus would be put into The App, which would guide you the whole way.

The problem we had was that this app didn’t exist. In our training presentation for how to be a precinct chair, only a few months before the caucus, we had essentially placeholder slides for “this is what you will be doing with the app, when we have it. Which we will. Just not now.”

Then, closer to the election, The App materialized. First, you had to download some extremely sketchy-seeming other app that seemed like a dev tool for testing apps that aren’t finished yet. Then, through that system, you had to download this caucus app.

As I had mentioned, I worked retail selling cell phones for about four years total, including a lot of senior citizens. Getting them onto their Facebook was hard enough. But for The App, we had to have a guide telling Android owners how to enable developer options so that they could download this app-before-you-download-The App. And then, one day in February, they’d have to use this app all on their own in a room full of potentially angry people, and this would have an impact on who would be the next president.

Why did they have to download some other app as a platform to download The App? Because it wasn’t finished yet. Not just in a way that it had a couple kinks to work out, it was blatantly, comically unfinished using it. Pressing the wrong button on nearly any screen would crash it. We weren’t just buying some off-the-shelf app to use, or maybe tweak a little bit; this company was making The App at the exact same time as we were training people how they’d be using it.

We had an event for all our precinct chairs where we were supposed to debut The App for the first time, and get them all to download it, and then run mock caucuses using it. This was, without exaggeration, the worst day I’ve ever had at a job in my life. No one could figure out how to get it on their phones, let alone run a caucus with it. There was too little support for too many people who needed help, and the help they needed, none of the staff knew how to help with. This had been the event we’d been building for, that we recruited all our best volunteers to all come to, and instead of teaching them how they’d run the caucus, we looked incompetent, understaffed, and scared.

It was at this point that the HQ staff could have seen that result, heard the feedback, and made the reasonable decision that The App was clearly not going to work. Instead, they just shrugged it off as something that would get better. The App is a work-in-progress, after all. (And we were just field organizers, what did we know?)

Then, February 3rd, 2020, the best possible thing for Nevada happened: Iowa stepped on the rake before we could. Maybe HQ staff could ignore their precinct chairs and the field organizers, but they couldn’t ignore that.

Overnight, everything changed. The state party that had no money to pay us for cell phone reimbursements had someone who was clearly a crisis communications consultant telling us extremely obvious shit in a conference call the next morning. Our digital media person told us very specifically not only were we not to talk about anything related to The App on social media, we couldn’t even “like” anything related to it, and they would be checking. (To see if they really would, I went and made my Twitter likes all dril tweets to see if anyone would notice. No one said anything.) While publicly, we were insisting that we had extremely real backup plans we were happy to use, in every video call with HQ it was obvious from the bags under their eyes that they had been working on coming up with a new plan instead of sleeping. The class separation of HQ from everyone else didn’t just hurt us in the lower class, it put way too much of a burden on the class exclusively allowed to make decisions.

A whole new group of people arrived: in the same office park as the HQ, a dozen or so people from the DNC came to… I don’t know what they did, exactly, but they were at their laptops and seemed very serious about it. All their food was catered for them.

Soon, we had a new plan: instead of The App, we now had a digital tool WHICH IS NOT AN APP on iPads to help precinct chairs report their results. The “tool” was a Google Form. We were told specifically not to tell anyone that it was a Google Form, but when one of my precinct chairs asked me straight up, “is this a Google Form?” I said… yeah. He responded, “oh, great! That’s just how I would have set it up. Thanks!” It was honestly pretty easy to use. Even the smartphone-averse could fill out a form on one of the iPads we provided.

Early vote and the caucus

Our job so far had focused not on the four-day early vote window, where people could “caucus” by filling out a form, but on the day-of caucus itself. When early vote came around, though, it was clear that everyone wanted to vote early instead of participate in another shitshow like 2016.

The field staff spent the day filling in at early vote sites that needed extra hands. At one library, I helped people cast their early vote ballots who had waited in line for five and a half hours.

The enormous volume of people who voted early meant that all the weight was taken off the day-of caucus, in terms of managing huge crowds of people. While we were working sixteen hours days during early vote, to get people through the lines, open and close sites, and then drive the ballots around, the caucus itself was smooth. I went to a small site with three precincts that only had one person there who wanted to be a precinct captain, so I ran one precinct as another one waited a bit over an hour for me to be done. They didn’t seem upset at all; if anything, they were grateful that it was just a little waiting around, and that someone who knew the process was running it.

After driving the final caucus boxes back to HQ, I spent time with the caucus director doing my favorite task of the entire six months: puzzling through the “problem precincts,” the ones with results that didn’t make any sense or that the precinct chair had clearly messed up. It was a fun bit of problem-solving, working through what it seemed like the precinct captain was trying to do, and essentially re-doing their work for them.

One thing I can say confidently is that I didn’t see any anti-Bernie foul play from anyone on the campaign. Everyone at HQ was firmly in the establishment Democratic camp, to be sure (as will come up soon), but they were first and foremost about covering their own asses and not having another 2016-like disaster on their hands. They just wanted a caucus where the story about it afterword would be about who finished in what place, not what a mess it was.

Fortunately for everyone’s asses being covered, the bottom-line result from the caucus was clear: Bernie won in a landslide, more than twice as many votes and delegates as runner-up Biden. Because it was such a blowout, none of the candidates were going to sue the party over this or that delegate being wrong.

For people following Bernie, you might remember this moment: probably the high point of morale for any reformist socialist or social democrat in the United States in many years. It’s hard not to connect Bernie’s impending doom with that other impending doom hanging over us at the end of February 2020.

The stench

After all the votes were cast, it was time to clean up. The email-sending squad from the DNC had all left, and no one had been in their office for a couple days. They had left all their trash, including uneaten food, such as an entire chicken carcass from one of their catered meals. The field staff wasn’t allowed to be in the office nearby HQ, but we were required to go there to clean up after the more important people who were using it.

I was probably 20 feet from the door when our supervisor opened it and I got hit with a physical wave of stench. A childhood full of sinus infections leave me with a weakened sense of smell, but this wasn’t so much an odor as a steamroller, or a targeted command telling my body to retch.

Leaving

It was early March 2020, and I was convinced I never wanted to work in electoral politics again. I wanted to be a union organizer. With plenty of postings at union-jobs.com, I thought it would be pretty easy to find a position, so I declined the bosses’ invitations to stay on.

I ended up staying with my parents and collecting unemployment until I moved back to Seattle in 2021 instead.

After I left

You might have heard about the entire staff of the party quitting, giving themselves a severance payment for doing so. If not, you should have, because I think it’s rather instructive.

Basically, someone from DSA (and it’s important to emphasize it was just “someone,” not a democratically-decided-upon DSA project) won the leadership of the party, so the Dems, instead of handing over the infrastructure, torched it instead. The same party that didn’t have the money to pay us handed over $450k that they just had sitting around to Cortez Masto’s fund.

State parties often run something called a “coordinated campaign:” basically, it doesn’t make sense to have entirely separate campaign structures for all these different Democrats in a state, so you’d have one campaign that would turn people out for all your candidates, whether they’re Governor, Senator, Representative, etc. Makes sense. The NV Dems always ran this in off-cycle elections. In 2022, though, that power was taken away from the state party, and given to Washoe County (where Reno is, about seven hours north of Vegas). But, with no staff, how was Washoe County, of all places, going to run this? By hiring a company of all the former NV Dems staff to do it, of course. (And I’d be surprised if they were unionized this time around, like they were before.)

Which leads me to some conclusions.

Conclusion I: taking over the infrastructure of the Democratic Party will not work

Don’t try to take over the Democratic party like that, they’ll never just hand it over to you. Some people might protest that Trump’s bootlickers have successfully taken over local Republican parties from more establishment Republicans, but it’s a totally different scenario: none of the Republican officials want to piss off Trump, whereas Democratic ones would gladly piss off Bernie just because they hate him. The Republican party basically gets taken over by a new upstart wing every decade, from Nixon to Reagan’s hard-right to the neo-conservatives to Trump, but there’s no similar history for the Democrats.

Establishment Democrats will not weigh the pros and cons of socialist organizers and reasonably conclude that while they disagree on some economic issues, at least they’re on the same page about things like abortion rights and protecting LGBT people. They hate socialists with nearly the same passion that they hate Trump, and probably more than they hate pre-Trump conservatives. They will salt the earth and burn the infrastructure rather than hand it over to socialists.

Conclusion II: electoral-campaign-by-electoral-campaign union organizing isn’t a long-term strategy

For those non-union-nerds out there, you might not realize how different the structure of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA are from other unions. I’m not an expert on them, but my basic understanding is that you don’t show up to a movie set non-union, and then organize it, go through the NLRB, and hope you get a contract before the movie finishes; people join the unions, which already have contracts with the studios covering the entire industry, and each production signs onto the existing union contracts. Then, those union members go to work for those productions that have agreed to the unions’ rules. Movies don’t use non-union labor because they’d get boycotted by all the other workers.

Campaign workers desperately need a similar system. Under the current (non-)system, only a minority of political campaigns are going to be unionized, and it’ll be a hodgepodge of wildly different contracts and pay rates, each negotiated individually. No one is covered on day one of a new campaign; you have to spend half your time fighting for the union while trying to do your actual job simultaneously.

How I’d imagine it working is that CWG forms an alliance with traditional large unions, and makes a demand of the DNC and other big organizations that every Democratic or “progressive” political campaign in the country needs to only use union labor, or else [insert thing the unions could threaten the DNC with here, use your imagination]. They negotiate a sector-wide contract. Then, anyone who gets a job on a campaign has to join the union and is covered under the contract from day one.

It’s not a perfect solution (and any anarchist reading this will certainly have reasonable objections about how top-down and not bottom-up it is), but as long as we’re running electoral campaigns, I can’t think of a better way to protect the workers.

Conclusion III: electoral politics is a massive sink of resources and is rewiring our brains

Just like as workers, we worked such long hours that we lost the ability to talk or think about anything other than our jobs in electoral politics, as a country, we’ve focused so much on electoral campaigns that we’ve lost the ability to do or even think about non-electoral ways to make political change.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with voting, or registering other people to vote, but the all-encompassing focus on it means that everything else gets filtered through a vision where the only pathway is electoral changes. Imagine a conservative and a liberal see a news story about a strike on the docks by longshoremen. Conservatives are going to filter it through their Fox News propaganda and somehow link it to, “this must be because of DEI programs somehow.” Liberals are going to wonder how the strike impacts the election, and maybe whether it’s a ploy by a pro-Trump union to support him by tanking the economy. Neither is analyzing it as a political action on its own terms, without some external filter applied to it.

It’s not even that people are burning themselves out on electoral organizing (though some are); it’s just their focus, their news consumption. Liberals are reading the news and scrolling through five hours of takes on the election and the latest polls every day and feel exhausted from all the energy they’ve just put into politics, despite not doing anything productive.

It doesn’t even get better once the election ends: those people burned themselves out on electoral politics, and get hit with a wave of post-election exhaustion, like D&D characters after a Haste spell. Even if they were successful, once they’re done celebrating a win, they don’t put that same time into non-electoral work. They just go do something other than politics, and save up their time and attention for the next election cycle.

Conclusion IV: anarchism!

We have to break the loop of stumbling in an exhausted haze from one election to another, over and over. We have to get people organizing, not for or against one candidate or party, but in ways unrelated to elections. Some people might argue that we need to devote some energy toward electoral politics, that we can’t just abandon it entirely. Maybe that’s true. But it feels like about 99% of our political energy is spent on electoralism. We have to move that balance toward everything else: organizing our workplaces into labor unions, our buildings into tenants' unions, our neighborhoods into communities that will fight for each other when we have to. We have to do organizing that I, a straight white guy focused on workplace organizing, can't even conceive of, because it's outside of my personal experiences.

What ended up making me an anarchist was not just realizing that I didn't think electoral politics was going to win us socialism, but seeing how it sapped resources that could be going into things that, just maybe, could. It was seeing not just that the Democrats are bad, but that the entire hierarchical structure that mandates some people make all the decisions and some people blindly follow orders is ineffective.

Control what you can control. You can’t decide the next president by yourself, so start small and build from there: talk to your immediate neighbors, your coworkers. We’re at a time uniquely deprived of community. We have to build community ourselves.

For those comrades interested in joining the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (DSA-only), or the broader Horizon Federation (no DSA membership required), join today!

You can also discuss this on the DSA Forums here.