On Wednesday, July 22, four Madison Police Department officers surrounded and executed Corey Ruiz on the corner of Williamson and South Baldwin streets, mere blocks away from where Tony Robinson was murdered by Matt Kenny in 2015. We condemn in no uncertain terms the murder of Corey Ruiz by the Madison Police Department. Regardless of the events leading up to the murder, there is no situation where this is justified. For days our members have participated in demonstrations, protests, and vigils in solidarity with our community.

This is not the first time Madison Police officers have taken a neighbor’s life;  the police continue to use excessive force and perpetuate racism and classism with absolute impunity. In March 2015, Madison Police officer Matt Kenny shot and killed 19-year-old Tony Robinson. Despite widespread protests and calls for accountability, Matt Kenny has faced no charges and is still employed by the Madison Police Department more than ten years later. He even trains new officers. Even Tony Robinson was not the first victim of police murder in this neighborhood—in 2012, Paul Heenan was murdered by police on South Baldwin Street, and in 2006, Victor Montero-Diaz was murdered by police at the gas station on Williamson Street. 

We stand behind the community’s demands for:

1. The immediate arrest of Kiel Baitinger-Peterson and all those accessory to the murder we witnessed on Wednesday afternoon
2. That all information found in the investigation conducted by the Department of Criminal Investigation be turned over to the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Civilian Oversight Board
3. Community control over the police.
   

We demand accountability for Corey’s murder, and for the systems that have led to this point— systems that value property over human life. We demand full transparency, including the immediate release of the names of every officer involved and all available squad car camera and surveillance footage.

These common-sense demands only address this most recent harm done to the community and ensure accountability follows. If we truly want to stop further violence, we must not treat this as an isolated instance but rather a part of a larger structure that perpetuates violence. Instead, we must focus on the kinds of reforms that will prevent future police violence against our communities. 

We must demilitarize police departments, redirect funding to public services, and strengthen the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Civilian Oversight Board to have real community authority over the police. These changes, among others, are steps that will bring us closer to changing the violent carceral system that destroys communities and takes lives. We need to recognize that any reform that does not decrease the power of the modern punishment bureaucracy is no reform at all.

Time and again we’ve seen politicians break promises, make compromises that lead to half measures, and roll back reforms. We’ve seen momentum toward progress stall as soon as the news cycle moves on. Non-profits are limited by their mandate, structure, and fundraising, and advocate but do not deliver. To win our demands, members of the community must get organized and work together.

Support and attend the vigil, connect with your community, and be ready to take concrete action in the coming days and weeks to ensure true accountability and justice for Corey Ruiz. 

[[{“value”:”

By: Cayla Dodd

MARLBOROUGH- A union contract campaign among school bus drivers and monitors has developed into something much larger than a dispute over wages and benefits. What is unfolding reveals in stark clarity the architecture of privatization – how private equity reshapes essential services, how union-busting operates under contemporary labor relations, and why even basic fights for dignity at work eventually run up against the larger structure of capitalism itself.

This is a story about a group of workers trying to win a decent contract. They want better wages, more stable hours, stronger benefits, safer buses, fairer route assignments, and protection from arbitrary discipline and on-the-job surveillance. They want, in other words, the same things workers have always wanted: security, respect, and some measure of control over the conditions under which they labor.

The question is why those demands are treated as unreasonable in the first place.

Workers who transport children every day can be left without meaningful retirement security, with subpar healthcare, and with schedules so fragmented and unstable that some cannot reliably afford housing, a car, or even their basic monthly bills. A sector plagued by chronic driver shortages continues to produce working conditions that drive experienced workers out. When workers begin organizing seriously enough to challenge those conditions, management responds with escalation.

Work Unseen by the Public

School bus driving is routinely misunderstood by people who don’t do its work. From the outside, school bus drivingt is often imagined as part-time work with limited responsibilities: a few hours in the morning, a few in the afternoon, summers off, and not much more to it. That caricature has done enormous ideological work on behalf of employers and municipalities alike, helping justify low standards, weak benefits, and public indifference. But it has very little to do with the actual labor involved.

In reality, school transportation is skilled, stressful, high-responsibility work. Drivers are responsible for safely transporting children through traffic, weather, construction, behavioral incidents, shifting route conditions, vehicle issues, and the endless unpredictability of day-to-day life. They are expected to exercise judgment constantly. They are responsible for operating large vehicles safely, managing student conduct, navigating difficult roads, responding to emergencies, and ensuring that students are released appropriately and arrive where they are supposed to be. A mistake can have enormous consequences. The job requires discipline, focus, and local knowledge. This is not a casual side gig. This is essential infrastructure.

Yet the structure of the work is built around instability. Drivers are commonly scheduled on split shifts, with a block of work in the morning and another in the afternoon. On paper, that can look manageable. In practice, it means the workday stretches across most of the day while providing only a fraction of full-time pay. A driver may start very early, finish a morning run, sit unpaid for hours in the middle of the day, and then return for afternoon routes. Those unpaid gaps are too large to ignore and too awkward to make a second job realistic. The result is a schedule that dominates your day without paying for your day.

That contradiction sits at the center of the economic misery so many school bus workers experience. They are not fully employed in a way that provides a stable living, but they are also not free enough to easily build a second source of income around the job. Workers can find themselves trapped between part-time pay and full-day obligation. From the standpoint of capital, that structure is useful. From the standpoint of labor, it is punishing.

Benefits do not compensate for that instability. Healthcare is often inadequate. Workers may technically have coverage while still facing costs substantial enough to make actually using that coverage a source of stress. Retirement security is rare. A worker can spend years performing essential public labor and still face old age with little to show for it beyond worn-out knees, accumulated stress, and a deep familiarity with financial precarity. That is one of the clearest expressions of what the system thinks workers are worth.

These conditions have real human consequences. Workers fall behind on rent. They fear eviction. They delay car repairs because they cannot afford them, even though a reliable car may be necessary just to get to work. They struggle to secure stable housing. Some take on humiliating and physically draining side measures just to survive, including selling plasma to cover everyday expenses. This is the lived reality produced when socially necessary labor is organized around cost minimization rather than human need.

Shortages as Tactic in the Class Strategy

Massachusetts has dealt for years with school bus driver shortages. Public discussion of this crisis is often shallow, described as though a natural disaster or demographic inevitability: a regrettable staffing problem that somehow descended on the industry from outside. Employers and public officials talk about recruitment, as if the main challenge is persuading enough people to enter the field.

Workers know better. The real crisis is retention. People leave because the job has been made unsustainable.

There is no mystery about why workers leave a job with unstable hours, weak benefits, inadequate retirement, rising surveillance, stagnant wages, and constant stress. There is no mystery about why new hires do not stay when they quickly realize the public image of the job bears little resemblance to its reality. There is no mystery about why experienced drivers burn out, seek better-paying work elsewhere, or leave the profession entirely. The shortage is the predictable result of labor conditions designed to suppress costs.

Once you see that clearly, much else comes into focus. The constant shortages intensify pressure on the workers who remain. Routes are stretched, doubled up, or constantly rearranged. Expectations increase. Management leans harder on flexibility. Workers are told to absorb more instability in the name of keeping the operation functioning. The strain accumulates. More people consider leaving. The shortage deepens. The system devours the very workforce it depends on. This is one of the ways capitalism presents its own contradictions as technical problems: treating the workforce as an input to be purchased as cheaply as possible, then acts confused when that workforce becomes difficult to sustain.

The conditions in school transportation did not emerge in a vacuum. They are the product of a political project. Municipalities were steered toward privatization over decades through austerity politics, anti-union ideology, and the broader neoliberal assault on public goods. Public services were increasingly reimagined as budget lines to be minimized rather than social obligations to be met. Outsourcing became attractive because private firms promised savings, but those savings had to come from somewhere.

They came, overwhelmingly, from labor.

Privatization is often defended in the language of efficiency. This is one of the ruling class’s great rhetorical tricks. Efficiency sounds neutral, modern, and practical. But in the context of public services, “efficiency” usually means shifting risk downward, stripping labor standards, weakening democratic accountability, and enabling more aggressive management over workers than would be politically tolerable in direct public employment. A private contractor can more easily suppress wages and benefits, fragment the workforce, impose unstable schedules, and retaliate against worker organization while local officials keep their hands clean and point to lower budget numbers.

That is the real social meaning of privatization: a class strategy. School bus workers are facing hardship through privatization. The whole model depends on labor being cheaper, more replaceable, and easier to discipline than it would be under more robust public-sector standards. Municipalities outsource because private companies are willing to do what public employers often cannot or will not: grind labor harder.

The worker experiences this as a thousand small humiliations and pressures. The politician experiences it as budget relief. The company experiences it as a business opportunity.

Sharpening the Blade of Capital

In this case, that logic runs through NRT Bus, Inc., its parent company Beacon Mobility, and, as workers understand it, the private equity firm Audax. Whatever the precise current corporate structure may be at the moment this article is read, the broader pattern is clear enough: school transportation has been folded into a larger world of corporate consolidation and financial ownership in which essential public services are treated as sites of extraction.

Privatization supplies the basic structure. Private equity intensifies its logic. When financial firms enter sectors like school transportation, the pressure to extract returns becomes even more relentless. The service itself becomes secondary to the imperatives of financial management. Essential public goods are treated as revenue streams. The workforce becomes a site of value extraction. Every wage increase, every improved benefit, every additional guarantee, and every reduction in management discretion is viewed through the lens of profitability.

This is what financialization does to work: it disciplines the entire enterprise around investor return. That means pressure for labor flexibility, tighter cost controls, consolidation, standardized management practices, and hostility toward anything that reduces managerial command over the workforce.

In a sector like school transportation, private equity’s influence is especially corrosive because the service is socially indispensable but politically neglected. Children still have to get to school. Families still depend on buses running. Municipalities still need contracts fulfilled. That creates a relatively stable flow of public money into the industry. For finance, that looks appealing. For workers, it means they are trapped inside a system where public necessity is being mined for private return.

This helps explain why even modest worker demands are so fiercely resisted. Better healthcare is a cost increase. Retirement security creates obligations that constrain extraction. Guaranteed hours reduce managerial flexibility and increase labor expense. Under a private-equity-influenced model, these become threats because they interfere with the deeper function of the enterprise.

Private equity brings a more concentrated and shameless form of capitalist discipline. It strips away even the remnants of paternalism or long-term stewardship some employers once used to legitimize themselves. What remains is naked extraction.

To Act in Concert

Against these conditions, workers built a contract campaign that aimed at more than symbolic change. The demands at its core were practical, concrete, and rooted in lived experience. Workers sought stronger hour guarantees because they knew unstable scheduling was wrecking their finances and their ability to remain in the job. They sought better wages because the existing structure was not keeping pace with the real cost of living. They sought improved healthcare because nominal coverage without actual affordability is not security. They sought retirement because a lifetime of work should not end in poverty. They sought safer buses, better route practices, and enforceable maintenance expectations because the labor itself is dangerous enough without being compounded by management neglect. They sought limits on surveillance and arbitrary discipline because “safety” rhetoric is too often weaponized as a tool of control rather than used to genuinely support workers and students.

None of these are fringe demands. They are exactly the kinds of demands any rational society would consider baseline. But because they conflict with the cost discipline built into privatized school transportation, they immediately become political.

What also distinguished this campaign was the way it was built. This was not simply a staff-driven process of bargaining behind closed doors, with workers receiving occasional updates. Rank-and-file workers themselves played a central role in the organizing. They held conversations with coworkers. They built visible solidarity actions. They created shared expectations that participation mattered. They used meetings, chats, and direct outreach to transform the campaign from something happening above workers into something workers were doing together.

Employers can tolerate a certain amount of passive dissatisfaction. They can tolerate symbolic complaints. They can even tolerate low-level grievances as long as the workforce remains fragmented and dependent. What they fear is organization: workers understanding themselves as a collective force with shared interests and the capacity to act in concert.

Visible Solidarity

To outsiders, a solidarity action like a red-shirt day can look small. But that misunderstands the function such actions serve. In a workplace structured by isolation, where drivers are split across routes, schedules, and classifications, visible collective participation is not cosmetic. It is one of the first ways workers learn to see each other politically.

When a worker looks around and sees that many of their coworkers are willing to participate in a common action, however modest, something changes. Fear begins to loosen. A private frustration starts becoming a public alignment. What had previously existed as scattered grievances begins to cohere into an organized workforce. Small collective acts create the conditions for larger ones. They build confidence, social trust, and a sense that the employer’s authority is not total.

This is one reason bosses often react disproportionately even to low-risk collective actions. They understand what many observers do not: participation itself is dangerous. Once workers get used to acting together, more becomes possible.

By the time a campaign reaches the point of a strike authorization vote, much of the real work has already been done. Such votes are measurements of trust, political development, and collective will. A workforce does not produce an overwhelming yes vote by accident. It does so because countless conversations, tests of solidarity, and small decisions have accumulated into something stronger.

That is why a 98 percent yes vote matters so much. It is evidence that workers were crossing from grievance into power.

Retaliation

Management’s response must be understood in that light. When a key rank-and-file leader is terminated at a critical point in a campaign, the question is not only whether the stated justification is plausible on its own terms. The question is what function the action serves in the broader struggle.

People often expect union-busting to look dramatic and explicit. Sometimes it does. But under modern labor relations, employers often operate through deniability, selective discipline, legal complexity, and timing. A worker is targeted in a way that does not openly announce anti-union intent, but can be narrated as an individualized matter detached from the collective context. This does not prove anti-union motive is absent. It shows that employers have become more sophisticated.

The purpose of such discipline is larger than the individual case. The point is to introduce uncertainty into the workforce, to make workers wonder whether participation is worth the risk, to force organizers to divert time, energy, and emotional bandwidth into defense, to destabilize the social infrastructure of the campaign, and to remind everyone that management still claims the power to punish.

Retaliation belongs inside the contract fight. In fact, it often emerges precisely when workers are becoming effective enough that management sees no other way to regain initiative.

The same is true of broader escalation through legal threats or lawsuits. Whatever their technical merits, such moves function politically. They muddy the waters. They force workers and unions to defend themselves on terrain chosen by the employer. They attempt to recast the conflict from one about wages, benefits, and worker power into one about impropriety, scandal, or misconduct. They raise the stakes of participation and create a climate in which caution can start masquerading as prudence.

This too is union-busting, just adapted to a labor regime in which employers know how to use formal legality as a weapon.

Labor-Management Relations and Their Contradiction

Mainstream discourse often treats labor-management conflict as though it were a misunderstanding between stakeholders who ultimately want the same thing. That fiction is useful to employers and to the political class that mediates between labor and capital without ever wanting to resolve their antagonism. But it does not survive contact with reality.

Workers and employers do not stand in a neutral relationship. The employer purchases labor power and seeks to get as much from it as possible for as little as possible. The worker sells labor power because they must survive, but has every interest in increasing their compensation, securing their conditions, limiting arbitrary control, and preserving their body and time. There can be temporary accommodations. There can be negotiated settlements. There can even be periods of relative peace. But the underlying interests remain opposed.

In school transportation, that contradiction appears in condensed form. Workers need stable hours, strong benefits, safe equipment, and real voice on the job in order to make the work livable. The employer, especially under privatization and private equity pressure, needs labor costs contained, managerial flexibility maintained, and worker militancy suppressed in order to preserve margins and secure contracts. These are conflicting goals.

That is why so many workers eventually reach a political realization through workplace struggle: management is not simply failing to understand their needs. Management understands perfectly well and resists because meeting those needs would alter the balance of power and the distribution of resources.

That is class analysis born from experience.

None of this means contract fights do not matter. They matter deeply. Workers need better contracts. Workers need to defend themselves using every tool available, including grievances, bargaining, arbitration, public pressure, and strike readiness. But campaigns like this also reveal the limits of what can be won if the fight remains confined to the level of a single workplace and a single employer.

Even strong workplace organization is forced to operate within a broader structure that reproduces the same pressures. Competitive bidding pits contractors against one another on labor cost. Municipal austerity rewards cheapness over human need. Private equity demands returns. Labor law constrains worker power while legitimizing endless employer aggression. A union can win gains, but those gains are always under pressure so long as the structure remains in place.

This is one of the central political lessons of the campaign. Workers can and should fight for every immediate improvement. But they also run up against the reality that exploitation is not just a matter of bad bosses or bad decisions. It is institutional. It is reproduced through markets, contracts, finance, and the state.

That realization is often the bridge between trade union consciousness and socialist consciousness. It is the moment when workers begin to see that they are not only fighting an employer but confronting a mode of social organization.

The answer cannot be better management of privatized services. The answer cannot be pleading for more enlightened contractors or slightly less predatory financial owners. The answer has to be political and structural. Essential public services should not be organized around private profit. School transportation should be brought back into public ownership and operated as a public good. The financial actors extracting wealth from essential services should be removed. Labor standards should be raised across the sector in ways that prevent public entities from using outsourcing to undercut workers. Drivers and monitors should have stable, sufficient hours, real healthcare, and meaningful retirement security. Workers should have enforceable rights on the job, including protection from surveillance abuse and retaliation. And the people who do the work should have a meaningful voice in how the work is organized.

This is far more practical than the existing system, which produces chronic shortages, burnout, turnover, declining conditions, and endless labor conflict while pretending to be efficient.

Capitalism does not merely generate inequality in the abstract. It organizes everyday life in ways that subordinate human need to accumulation. It takes indispensable work and turns it into a site of austerity. It transforms public necessity into private opportunity. It relies on worker insecurity as a lever of discipline. And when workers resist, it deploys law, management authority, and financial pressure to preserve that arrangement.

The campaign in Central Massachusetts therefore matters beyond one contract or one yard. Instead, it’s a window into the broader social order.

They Tried to Cut Off The Head

For socialists, labor organizers, union members, and community supporters, the appropriate response is not passive sympathy. It is organized solidarity linked to a political program.

That means materially supporting workers in active struggle. It means treating retaliation against worker leaders as an attack on the whole class, not an isolated personnel matter, demanding that municipalities stop hiding behind the language of contracting and take responsibility for the labor standards of the services on which the public depends. It means fighting privatization not only where it is proposed, but where it is already entrenched. It means building connections between workplace fights and wider campaigns for decommodified public goods.

It also means rejecting the idea that labor struggles should remain narrow, apolitical, or purely economistic. Workers do not benefit when socialism is kept out of labor politics; employers do. The more clearly workers can connect their immediate experience to the structures of capital, the more durable and transformative their organizing can become.

A contract campaign can win raises. A strong shop-floor organization can beat back some retaliation. But a movement capable of ending the rule of private equity over public services would do much more than that. It would begin to shift who society is actually organized for. When management moved against a key organizer, the intention was clear. It was a classic move in a contemporary form: isolate leadership, destabilize the campaign, remind workers who claims power in the workplace. But that move also had another effect: clarifying the struggle, making visible what is so often hidden, showing the conflict was never just about a few contract proposals. The move showed that workers had built enough power to provoke a serious response. And once workers begin to see all of this together, it becomes much harder to return to the comforting fictions of before.

The fiction that management and labor fundamentally want the same things. The fiction that shortages happen for mysterious reasons. The fiction that privatization is about efficiency rather than class power. The fiction that private equity is just another ownership model rather than a machine for intensified extraction. The fiction that the problems facing workers are isolated, accidental, or unfortunate rather than systemic.

When those fictions start to fall apart, something politically dangerous begins to happen. Workers stop interpreting their conditions as personal failure or bad luck. They start recognizing them as products of a social order. And once that recognition is collective, once it is organized, once it is tied to solidarity and action, the balance of power can begin to shift.

That is why this fight matters.

The fight matters because it is about wages and healthcare and retirement and schedules and safe buses and retaliation and respect. It matters because it is about whether workers can remain in the profession at all. It matters because it reveals the real causes of driver shortages. It matters because it exposes the class content of privatization. And it matters because it points beyond itself, toward a socialist politics capable of saying plainly what liberal management discourse never will: that essential public services should not be run for profit, that workers are entitled to dignity and control, and that the capitalist organization of social life is incompatible with either.

The workers in this campaign are fighting for a contract. They are also, whether everyone around them fully recognizes it yet or not, fighting over a much larger question.

Who should society serve: the people who do the work and rely on it, or the people who profit from keeping them insecure?

That question is not limited to one bus yard in Massachusetts. But it is being asked there with unusual clarity. And how workers answer it together — on the job, in the union, and in politics — will matter far beyond this one campaign.

Cayla Dodd is a school bus worker and member of Worcester DSA.

The post They Tried to Cut Off the Head: School Bus Workers in Central Mass Confront Private Equity appeared first on Working Mass.

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The aim of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is unique among major American political organizations: to democratically bring about socialism in the United States. For most DSA members, engagement with that goal is limited. They help fund the organization through membership dues and donations and vote for our endorsed candidates. Some may even engage through additional small acts like sharing our social media content, attending one of our events, or refusing to cross a picket line that we are supporting. While we should always find ways to lead these members to additional engagement, it is fine (and healthy for one’s psyche) to accept that most of them will not consistently increase their engagement.

This piece is not written for these casual members, but instead for the footsoldiers and captains that are our vocal minority and the organization’s shepherds: socialist organizers. This cadre is not content to merely count themselves as  members of a socialist organization and as supporters of socialism – they want to pour the concrete of its foundation. They are compelled to take action because, after all, if we don’t take action, who will? We understand that the question is not only what economic system should we have, but what is to be done to bring it about.

Unfortunately for us, there is little to guide our way in terms of modern applicable instruction. The socialist organizers I have known have picked up their skills and tactics from a variety of sources that are rarely directly socialist organizing. Some learn politicking from working for the Democratic Party. Some learn list building and planning an escalation strategy from the world of organized labor. From ACORN to Occupy Wall Street, our organizational pasts may be socialist-adjacent, but rarely are they outright socialist. Instead, we were the ones at LGBTQ rights rallies trying to convince our community that corporate recognition would not liberate us. We may have even gotten on the megaphone at the Black Lives Matter rally and tried to name the link between racist policing and class war. We were the ones bemoaning the fall from influence of socialism in the Palestinian liberation movement, criticizing Hamas for reasons that had nothing to do with them lobbing rockets at the fascists occupying their homeland.

Paolo Freire once said “we make the road by walking,” and indeed many of us become socialist organizers not by taking a socialist organizing class or even being trained by a mentor within an organization. We begin by trying and failing, and trying a little differently and failing again, and trying a little differently again and maybe pulling off a win. And while experience is the best teacher, any self-taught musician can tell you that experience without pedagogical foundation can lead to bad habits. These may seem small on their own, but they can stop us from reaching our full potential and set artificial ceilings to what we can achieve.

A pitfall we must constantly be vigilant against as socialist organizers is the conflation of being a socialist with organizing for socialism. Being a socialist, no matter how loudly and proudly, is not organizing for socialism. While this tendency has always been an issue (Marx and Engels derisively called it “the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine”), it is particularly reinforced today by social media. Social media mines the entire world, humans and bots alike, for interactions, and so one’s “hot take” feels demonstrably powerful because some invisible hand has determined it merits thousands or even millions of “internet points.” This charade should fall away with even a minute of critical interrogation – it requires no effort to “like” a post, barely any effort to comment on one, and engaging with socialist thought in this way reinforces the thoroughly disorganizing behavior of spending our time “doom scrolling” rather than talking to one another and actually organizing. But while supercharged by social media, the problem is not caused by social media itself.

To return to the previously cited Communist Manifesto, the core deficiency with what I will call the “aesthetic socialists” was the same then as it is now – a lack of class consciousness.  They are happy to endlessly discuss the ideas of socialist thinkers, and they may even invoke terms including “communism” and even “revolution.” But as Marx wrote in his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

The aesthetic socialists will post memes and share videos, but rather than to drive organizing they are always focused on the promotion of aesthetic supremacy by lashing out venomously at any actual organizing project. Socialist elected officials? Traitors for any action they take that does not align with some mythic pure socialist set of values. Labor unions? First-world labor aristocrats. And for general use, they can always throw out general denunciations unaccompanied by evidence, including “liberal,” “racist,” “Zionist,” etc. If you are involved with socialist organizing, you’ve been exposed to someone like this at some point, or even worse, had them dragging down your organizing project. If they engage in any organizing, it will inevitably face inward, obsess over constructing a faberge egg of socialist organization for its aesthetics rather than its utility in building socialism among the working masses.

Too often though I see well-meaning comrades propose inept and misinformed solutions to the problem of aesthetic socialists. Some suggest it is the problem of not having the right kind of socialism. But from social democrats to hardline Maoists, from DNC Underground to the Austin Red Guard, the aesthetic socialist spans the spectrum of socialist thought. Some see how social media has reinforced the delusions of the aesthetic socialists and think prohibiting or restricting social media is the answer. And while social media restrictions are warranted for other reasons (especially to prevent delusions or depression), aesthetic socialism long predates social media, and the reinforcement from likes and retweets can also be obtained from reading groups, niche conferences, or the triumph of one’s caucus or faction. Having been to Left Forum and seen a dozen Noam Chomsky lookalikes pontificate on Lacan, I can assure you that social media merely magnifies rather than causes the problem.

There is only one solution: prioritizing class consciousness in socialist organizing. Regardless of any other variable, when a socialist has their eye on their class position and how it relates to the working class, it becomes practically impossible to justify aesthetic socialism. When the socialist has the people’s need for bread and rent and childcare on their mind and in their heart, the unimportance of their own socialist aesthetic becomes clear. Internal organizing becomes a means to ensure the prioritization of external organizing rather than an end to itself. To put it simply, your internecine fight with another DSA member seems stupid when you’re reminded most people are just worried about putting food on the table and not getting evicted.

Some comrades understand this centrality of class consciousness but mistake it as being baptismal. That, once one has attained class consciousness, they are born again and saved, their actions forever anointed in holy enlightenment. Not so – class consciousness must be maintained, adjusted, sharpened, and constantly re-examined. The working class and its movement through history is not static. While fundamental relationships may persist as long as we are in a capitalist economy (between workers and the means of production, between capitalists and the state, etc.), the precise dynamics and most importantly the lived experiences of working people constantly shift. Teaching ‘M-C-M’ is not organizing – it’s economics. Even teaching the writings of Lenin is not organizing – it’s political science. Understanding someone’s lived experience and connecting that to class struggle is fundamental socialist organizing. Marxist theory can give us a foundation to build on, but having class consciousness requires more than being well-read.

For purposes of maintaining class consciousness of our membership, I have always insisted that our members should be engaged in at least one of two DSA organizing fundamentals – electoral or labor. Good electoral organizing means exposure to dozens or even hundreds of persuasive conversations every month with working class people on why they should vote for a socialist. Good labor organizing means exposure to such conversations with working class people on why they should form a union or otherwise demand more from their employer.

There is no other advocacy or organizing that will foster class consciousness in the way that DSA’s electoral or labor organizing does for our membership. And this is not to discount the importance of other advocacy. But the nature of that advocacy under capitalism divorces it from class consciousness, even for those groups (Black people, immigrants, trans people) that are majority working class. At worst this leads to the liberal nonprofit world, and even at best it leads to disorganizing separatism and standpoint supremacy. It isolates on a pedestal the people (Black people, immigrants, trans people) most in need of working class solidarity and connection to the collective, ennobling their marginalization and suffering rather than seeking its end. Only a select few organizations have been able to navigate these treacherous waters, and they are notably akin to DSA in being membership organizations rooted in some form of class analysis (e.g., New York Communities for Change, Southerners on New Ground, GoodKidsMadCity Englewood, etc.). 

Sometimes when I have given this argument I’ll receive pushback that the organizing targets of electoral and labor are also subsets of the working class rather than perfectly representative. And there is no perfect representative of the working class, of course. But it is the nature of the subjects that creates the class consciousness, the people as “voters” and as “workers.” Organizing people as voters confronts them and ourselves with the contradictions of bourgeois democracy – how capitalists use democracy to grant their domination of the working class legitimacy, even though this democracy creates risk for them of losing control of the government. Organizing people as workers confronts them and ourselves with alienation and division of the working class and shows the power of withholding labor by proximity to the means of production. Or, put more simply, electoral organizing shows people the government is captured by capitalists but that we can end that capture through democratic organizing, and worker organizing shows people capitalism exploits workers but that we can end that exploitation through strikes and other collective worker actions.

We all have different roles to play in the struggle for socialism, and even among organizers are roles that may look very different but be equally valuable. We need the introvert pouring over spreadsheets and the homebody making beautiful graphics for our literature. I’m not asking these comrades to overhaul their personalities and become the weekly canvasser or shopfloor socialite. Nor am I asking our elected officials or new parents or caretakers or any number of comrades who literally do not have the time to do that frontline work to somehow do it anyway. But what I am asking of them is to stay connected to the frontline work. Do it when you can, and when you cannot, openly ask your comrades who are on the frontlines of electoral and labor, knocking the doors and talking on the shop floors, what their experiences are like and to internalize it and trust it. Class consciousness after all is about the humility of the individual as much as the power of the collective, the feeble strength of one compared to the awesome power of a united working class. 

The post Socialist Organizing Must Be Rooted in Class Consciousness appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Democratic Left invites DSA members to reflect on the birth of the U.S. by imagining a fully democratized America.

The post Imagining the Next 250 Years appeared first on Democratic Left.

After more than a half century studying, teaching, writing about and participating in the California labor movement, I am completely clear about one simple lesson: when we are united, we win, and when we allow ourselves to be divided, we lose.

This is, of course, not an original idea. We might look to Abraham Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself cannot stand” on the eve of the Civil War as one similar observation among many others along the way. But the difficulty, over and over again, is that powerful forces are always working to divide us, and they succeed all too often. And they are doing it again right now.

This year California’s unions have an unprecedented opportunity to tap the well-deserved anger its members are feeling toward the anti-union Trump administration and its ultra-rich supporters in our state. Two ‘tax the rich’ ballot measures, Prop 3 and Prop 40, will be voted on by the state’s electorate on November 3. 

Prop 3 is a currently existing tax on the wealthiest two percent of income earners. Last year it brought over $14 billion into the state treasury to support public education, as well as other public services. But it is temporary. If allowed to expire it will cause devastating reductions in an already-strapped public education system. Prop 3 proposes to make it permanent. 

Prop 40 is a proposed temporary wealth tax on the state’s couple hundred billionaires. It would assess a one-time tax, to be paid over five years, on the billionaires’ collective hoard of two trillion dollars—a sum bloated by their federal tax cuts engineered by Trump and his congressional allies. The amount to be raised—one hundred billion dollars—will prevent cuts in Medi-Cal spending that otherwise will throw millions of the state’s poorest families off of their health care. 

Neither of these taxes will harm in the slightest the well-off people who will pay them and they will benefit all Californians who wish to be educated and healthy. A no-brainer for the labor movement, yes?

The state’s unions are in two camps supporting one or the other. There are only a handful of unions on board both measures. There are reasons for this, as there always are. Some of the reasons are better than others, but what they add up to is trouble for the state’s working families and the entire labor movement if either of the measures fail to pass. 

The obvious direct harm would be to students and patients, but it radiates outward from there to their families and communities. That’s easy to see. How does it harm the state’s unions? In general, unions, when they have their heads screwed on straight, understand the necessity for the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. Without that, the responsibility of supporting social services falls on the shoulders of the working class, union members and non-members alike, who generally are willing to take on their fair share, so long as their employers, large corporations and the rest of the capitalist class are doing so too.

The effort by a small cadre of ultra-conservative ultra-rich to divide and confuse the California working class over this issue has been underway since late last year. The sociopathic greed of a dozen or so megalomaniac tech bros have propelled them to spend an astonishing $125 million against the Billionaire Tax. Their arguments are simple and false, but when you have that kind of money to burn we enter the territory of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ infamous advice that a big lie repeated enough times becomes true. Mailers, digital ads, right wing think tank “studies” and now an $87 million television buy are demonstrating two things: that the ideas of our contemporary right wing anti-tax propagandists owe much to fascist thinkers; and that the effectiveness of such a campaign is enhanced when it has largely gone unanswered by the proponents of Prop 40 and Prop 3.

Prop 40 proponents haven’t answered in kind because they don’t have that kind of money at their disposal. But they also haven’t shown that they are building the kind of grassroots union campaign—big coalition, major mobilization of rank and file members in phone banks, canvassing and visible street demonstrations; in other words, the best tools at unions’ disposal—that it will take to defeat the billionaires.

Prop 3 proponents haven’t answered because the attacks—so far—have only been against the billionaire tax, and the Prop 3 coalition leaders do not seem to understand that there is a higher principle involved here than the violations of labor coalition-building protocols committed by SEIU-UHW. The higher principle is, quite simply, the general good of the entire California working class—not to mention understanding the damage that will be done to momentum around the country for tax the rich campaigns (most recently successful in places like Massachusetts and Washington state) should the Billionaire Tax be defeated. A defeat will also hurt the chances of future progressive tax campaigns here in California.

In 1912, during the massive “Bread and Roses” strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Industrial Workers of the World leader Big Bill Haywood spread out his fingers during a speech and told the crowd, “This is how the AFL organizes”, and enumerated the different craft unions organizing separately from one another. He noted that individual fingers could be easily disabled. Combining his fingers into a fist, the miners’ union leader roared, “This is how the IWW organizes”. Acting upon that lesson led the Lawrence workers to victory. But memory within organized labor of that point has been, time after time, victim to a deadly historical amnesia.

The California Federation of Labor Unions meets on August 4 to debate and vote on Prop 3 and Prop 40, among other issues. A vote to endorse both measures is in the interest of every union in the federation and every one of its more than two million members. The delegates to the meeting would do well to heed the words of Haywood and not succumb to narrow trade-conscious interests and the barrage of lies launched by their class enemies. Instead, it’s time for a unified labor movement to lead.

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It’s become tradition in Los Angeles that when teachers strike, it rains. At 3 am on April 12th, 2026, the 150-member bargaining team of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) was still negotiating with Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), with only two days before the planned strike of 37,000 teachers in the second largest school district in the nation. They would be joined by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, which represents custodians, bus drivers, and maintenance staff; Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA), which represents middle management such as principals; and DSA-LA in solidarity. The three unions striking together would be more than 70,000 workers. 

It is the 26th bargaining session for the 2025-2027 UTLA contract, and it is pitch-black outside in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood, with thousands awaiting news of whether their daily lives will be upended in just two days. The walkout would have been the union’s third strike in seven years, following a six-day strike in 2019 and a three-day solidarity strike with SEIU Local 99 in 2023. Before those two strikes, UTLA had not struck since 1989.

Just before 4 am on April 12th, the UTLA bargaining team came to a tentative agreement (TA) with the district administration after more than 14 months of negotiations. Later that day AALA followed suit with its own TA, and at 2 am on April 14th, just six hours before the planned three union strike, SEIU Local 99 reached its own TA with the district. By maintaining a credible strike threat, UTLA won a historic contract that fixed broken salary scales for the first time in decades; secured an average salary increase of 13.86%, with a minimum increase of 8%; established paid parental leave for the first time; protected workers against subcontracting; preserved Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) funding; and won breakthrough Special Education agreements, among many other gains—all without actually striking.

“We averted a strike. We shot down the district's arguments with figures that backed up what we've been saying all along,” says Gloria Martinez, now UTLA president. (She was UTLA treasurer and a lead officer for the UTLA bargaining team during the 2025-2026 contract negotiations. She was also a DSA member and plans on rejoining, she says; she’s just been busy.) 

What Martinez is speaking of is LAUSD’s narrative of austerity, used during every cycle of contract negotiations for years. Regardless of how good or bad the economics of the district are at the time, such as having over $5 billion dollars in unrestricted reserves as a “rainy day fund” at the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year equaling 35% of total spending, the CFOs of the district sow fear and doubt. They mainly do this through economic projections that in one year, two years, three years, the district will fall off a fiscal cliff, and so they claim their hands are tied. To be fiscally responsible, the district cannot spend another dollar more, if their economic projections are to be believed. 

“When you have a multibillion-dollar organization like LAUSD who can invest in PR machines that use budget figures to scare off folks into believing they can't afford what workers are demanding, I think that it creates confusion and hesitancy and allows for that fear and uncertainty to creep in,” adds Martinez.

The figures UTLA mustered to combat the administration’s scarcity and austerity arguments came chiefly from the UTLA research team, UTLA staff members who were with the UTLA bargaining team during the contract negotiations. LAUSD administration argued it could not spend a dollar more because when it looks toward the future, it expects that it will not have enough money to afford what the union is demanding. The UTLA research team investigated how accurate LAUSD’s past financial predictions were. California school districts are required to do a three-year projection of their budget, and when you consider LAUSD’s projections for where they would be three years out, every year from the 2013-2014 school year through 2024-2025, a pattern emerges. Historically, on average, the difference between what the district projects and what they end up with one year later is off by 57 percent. Two years out they are off by 268 percent and three years out they are off by 888 percent.

This would be similar to a friend asking to borrow $2,000 from you because, they say, they are $2,000 in debt, only for you to later discover that they actually had $16,000 in the bank. They keep saying this to you every year. For 10 years. Understanding this track record deflated much of the fear and doubt the UTLA bargaining team first experienced when the district’s negotiation team began presenting how badly their finances would deteriorate over the next three years if it agreed to the union’s proposals. 

Though the UTLA research team is essential for countering the administration’s claims of scarcity, it was not the only reason for UTLA’s victories.

“The main reason we were able to win without going on strike this time was that we had a credible strike threat. We've become an organizing and strike-ready union through the efforts of many people who have helped transform UTLA since 2014, including members of the Educators Organizing for Power (EOP) caucus and DSA members,” says Ryan Andrews, a UTLA bargaining team member, EOP member, and DSA member. “We talk with every member of the union, understand the issues they care most deeply about, and involve them in organizing. That's how we built the power to cut through the district's austerity narrative.”

A union which for 30 years before 2014 had become a low-participation organization is now a union which is known for winning its contract through being strike-ready, even without actually going on strike. This change began in 2014 when Alex Caputo-Pearl, a DSA member, and the Union Power caucus slate running with him were elected to leadership in UTLA. The new leadership’s years spent rank-and-file caucus organizing with Chicago’s Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators germinated a change in UTLA. Five years later in 2019, under Caputo-Pearl, UTLA would go on strike alone for 6 days in the rain and win pay increases, first-ever enforceable class size caps, more nurses and librarians, an LAUSD call for a moratorium on charter schools, a first-ever Community Schools initiative, and racial justice victories, among other gains. 

Four years later in 2023, this change in the union proved durable as the next UTLA president, Cecily Myart-Cruz, led UTLA to strike in solidarity with SEIU Local 99 while UTLA was in its own negotiations with LAUSD. After striking for three days again in the rain, UTLA and SEIU Local 99 won their contracts, with UTLA winning significant pay raises, further lowering of class sizes, enshrining the Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP), and an expansion of Community Schools initiatives into the UTLA contract, among other victories.

Three years later, UTLA has won again, and though there was no strike for teachers to march through a downpour, I and others in the bargaining team at 1 am got caught in the rain just hours before the TA, keeping the tradition alive and well. 

“What we can learn from this contract is listening to what is felt throughout the city, the issues that impact the workers and our community,” Martinez says when I ask what lessons the union should carry into 2028, when UTLA and many other unions across the country will again negotiate contracts. “We have a system that is failing them. Standing up for the issues that are deeply felt allows us to consolidate that collective power, it allows us to change the narrative.”

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Brief overview

A candidate no one had heard of entered a statewide race no one really knew about and ended up with more than half a million votes. Oliver Ma’s campaign for Lieutenant Governor was California DSA’s first statewide candidate race and will not be the last. 

Across the board, people were excited about Oliver and about his platform, too [see accompanying article with chapter campaign reports]. Affordable housing, free healthcare, abolishing ICE, ending the genocide in Palestine—a platform familiar to us as socialists, but one that many voters are just now warming up to.

This race was a familiar story: we were up against long-serving politicians and candidates with deep pockets; we needed a mass movement of organized people to challenge that. 

With the support of DSA members, DSA chapters, and committed volunteers, this campaign showed that California voters, more than 620,000 of them, are supportive of Democratic Socialism and are ready for change. 

Lessons Learned

Going viral on social media is not enough to win elections, but it can be an extremely valuable tool when used intentionally. 

You may have seen Oliver on TikTok, Instagram, or even on one of your favorite streams talking boldly about Democratic Socialism and the importance of building a government that works for people, not corporations. Nearly every single volunteer I met or leader I trained certainly told me they had seen him online. And, of those people, many told me this was their very first time engaging politically. These volunteers helped us reach out to hundreds of thousands of voters across the state and they might not have ever even known about this race if it wasn’t for social media.

Motivating someone to turn out and vote, especially if they do not usually vote or if they feel abandoned by the current government, is often a more challenging task. It requires more than just seeing a few cool videos on the feed, so you can’t count only on social media if you want to build power (and win). Ultimately it was the conversations we had with voters in their communities, and on their phones, about the issues that matter most to them. Of course, those conversations are much easier if they have seen your candidate on social media before, but that alone is not enou

The things we are fighting for as socialists are broadly popular, even if the term “socialism” is not. We talked to voters all across the state in all different communities, but we so often heard the same issues coming up. Housing costs are rising. Healthcare is unaffordable. Everything is unaffordable. People should be safe in their neighborhoods, at home and abroad. What we have going now really isn’t working for working people. 

This gave us the chance to talk about how corporations and billionaires are often at the root of all these issues—and then about how Oliver was going to use the powers of this office to improve conditions for working people and tackle the issues impacting their daily life.

As socialists, we can diagnose that capitalism is broadly at the crux of nearly every problem, but it’s not always easy to have that conversation.

Running candidates who are Democratic Socialists allows us to talk about these broadly popular ideas. Then electing those candidates to positions of leadership, and power, can fundamentally change the lives of the working people in the communities they serve.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York is proof that it is possible, and those wins on the east coast have reverberated across the country. 

When voters saw “DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST”at the top of Oliver’s literature they often asked us, “Like Zohran?”. This easily opened the door for us to have a conversation about DSA and socialism that might have been more challenging or less explicit otherwise. If voters didn’t know Zohran, or even if they were not sure about the whole DSA thing, we were still able to have those important conversations with them about their struggles and our common enemies. 

We might not have ever had these conversations with our community members if we did not show up in their neighborhood to knock on their door and talk about this election and this candidate.

The time to prepare for the next election cycle is now

Building and refining chapter infrastructure and process takes time, but time is always of the essence during an election year. Start having conversations now about your chapter’s endorsement timeline, process, and electoral program. Consider what it would take not only to endorse a candidate, but also to win. Does your chapter have tools you need? Do your members have the skills they need? If not, what can you do now to be prepared for the next electoral cycle? 

Socialism continues to gain momentum. We have the opportunity to build power for working people at the local and federal level; but it will take an organized mass movement to win.

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California Red asked several chapters to assess their participation in the Oliver Ma campaign for Lieutenant Governor, California DSA’s first foray into a state constitutional officer race. Their responses give us snapshots of the challenges and gains experienced in emerging chapter electoral structures at a time of rapid membership growth and new leader development. 

Inland Empire

The Inland Empire chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America’s electoral committee had not been active for nearly three years, but the energy and the excitement that brought in a flood of new members eager to reproduce the work done in New York needed to materialize here in our chapter. Thus arose from the collective imagination of our membership a yearning, an ambition, a dream—to build something, as workers have done throughout time immemorial, building a machine… the canvassing machine.

The canvassing machine became a collective project and an inside joke that inspired our membership to think of the endeavor as something we were building and refining through grass roots organizing. In total we knocked over 600 doors in Perris and Riverside. 

Overall, the campaign was a success for our chapter. Although we fell short on Election Day, the campaign gave our relatively new Electoral Committee invaluable experience running a serious electoral effort alongside a strong democratic socialist candidate. Members were highly engaged throughout the campaign, gaining practical organizing experience through canvassing, phone banking, and having meaningful conversations with voters about the issues and our vision for the community. Those experiences strengthened both our members' skills and our chapter's capacity to run future campaigns.

The campaign also highlighted several important areas for growth. We learned the importance of beginning our organizing earlier, establishing clear leadership roles, and building stronger campaign infrastructure from the outset. These are foundational lessons that will make our future electoral work more organized, efficient, and effective.

Perhaps most importantly, the campaign helped grow our chapter. We recruited new members directly at our canvass launch locations, and many people were motivated to get involved after seeing a local DSA chapter actively supporting a viable democratic socialist campaign. While Oliver did not win the election, the campaign was far from a loss. It strengthened our chapter, developed new organizers, expanded our active membership, and left us better prepared to run even stronger campaigns in the future. 

Said one Inland Empire member, Crystal: “Canvassing for Oliver Ma was heartwarming. It was a unique experience in that the candidate we canvassed for actually came out to knock doors with the people! Amidst the backdrop of an otherwise fascistic and suffocating reality, there are people willing to commit their hearts and time for humanity. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”

Long Beach

DSA-LB is proud to have endorsed Oliver Ma for Lieutenant Governor and campaigned for his candidacy in Long Beach. The June 2026 primary marked our chapter's first statewide endorsement, first Voter Guide, and our Electoral Politics Committee's first significant experience with electoral campaigning, canvassing and phone banking. Although Oliver's election outcome wasn't what we had hoped for, campaigning for Oliver significantly boosted our chapter's electoral politics skills, which we are carrying forward into the November election. DSA-LB is now campaigning for the Billionaire Tax initiative; we have built a Billionaire Tax Now ("BTN") Working Group and are putting the skills we honed for Oliver into action for BTN and future campaigns. We're grateful to Oliver for running and can't wait to see what all of us in California DSA do next. 

Orange County

Oliver Ma’s campaign came at a time when our chapter was rebuilding our electoral committee from the ground up. When we held the candidate endorsement forum for Oliver, we saw new faces excited to ask questions of a candidate they completely aligned with. One of the campaign’s strengths that we really benefited from was its goal to recruit new DSA members and engage them in electoral work. Through the campaign, we not only grew our electoral committee, but the chapter as a whole and new leaders began to emerge. The campaign provided the tools for many of us to learn how to canvass and phone bank and many members who had never knocked on doors for a candidate before participated in canvassing. Oliver’s mission and his platform made it easy to talk to voters in our community, and we started to have hope that California could be a place where massive change could take place.

Kern County

One of our biggest lessons from this election was simple: be early.

If possible, avoid entering an election cycle while still in Organizing Status. By the time we were ready to engage seriously, other organizations had already endorsed candidates, including candidates we believed offered less to the working class than Oliver. Many of our members and the broader activist community were also already committed to other campaigns. 

Kern County also needed to start earlier and organize more intentionally around the campaign. As campaign captain, I did not do enough to build internal enthusiasm, recruit volunteers, and turn an endorsement into sustained member participation.

At the same time, we were trying to bootstrap an electoral operation while still building the chapter itself. We were developing structures, relationships, and organizing capacity in real time.

Those are growing pains, but they are also lessons. Endorse early. Organize early. Assign clear responsibility. 

For us, an endorsement is not an aspirational checking a box, but a mandate to put momentum behind what we believe in.

Contributors:

Odeh G. and Lawrence C. are members of Inland Empire DSA. Odeh is chapter co-chair.

Sidra G. is a member of DSA Long Beach Electoral Politics Committee and serves as Communications Coordinator of the Chapter.

Kathryn M. is an At-Large member of the Orange County DSA Steering Committee.

Robert F. is on the Kern chapter Steering Committee.

Jack R. provided editorial support.

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Before Mamdani, There Was A “Red Mayor” Named Bernie

Forty-five years ago, a socialist, who previously couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Vermont, walked into his state’s largest city hall and claimed the office of mayor by a landslide margin of ten votes.

Dan Chiasson’s Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician (Knopf) focuses on the eight years after Sanders ran, as an independent, against incumbent Burlington mayor Gordon Paquette. Despite being a college town and new address for a few 60s-influenced “flatlanders,” the city’s politics were very old school in 1981. Just a few months before Sanders won his mayoral squeaker, GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan carried Vermont with 44% of the vote, in a three-way race.

For a long time, there weren’t many other lefties following in the footsteps of now U.S. Senator Bernard Sanders, the longest serving independent and socialist in Congress. But Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns helped change the landscape of the U.S. left.

Tens of thousands of Bernie supporters swelled the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group that previously claimed few elected officials as members. Local DSA chapters have since developed the capacity to recruit and run credible candidates for municipal office in cities and towns across the country, inspired by Sander’s personal example.

Nationwide, about half the 250 elected officials affiliated with DSA are members of city councils or commissions. Seven are mayors, including Emma Mulvaney-Stanek, the former teachers’ union organizer who today occupies Sanders’ old office on Church Street in Burlington (population: 44,000). Another recent mayoral campaign winner is Zohran Mamdani, an out-of-state mentee of Bernie who now occupies Gracie Mansion in New York City (population: eight million).

Newly elected DSA members like these have gained historical perspective on the challenges facing them in public office by consulting Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism (Verso). Shelton Stromquist’s book describes the experience of more than 1,200 municipal officials elected as candidates of the Socialist Party during its early 20th century heyday. It includes many still relevant case studies of struggles to improve city services, raise labor standards, make housing affordable, and place local utilities under public ownership—in the face of business-backed opposition from Democrats and Republicans alike.

A Newer Blueprint

Thanks to Burlington native Dan Chiasson, a poet and literary critic who teaches at Wellesley College, DSA “electeds” now have a shorter and more recent blue-print for “municipal socialism” to study. It includes much practical advice about to how avoid being undermined, discredited, and defeated by that same “duopoly” a century later.

Back then, Burlington was a “dowdy, backward” blue dot in a rural state long dominated by Republicans. Municipal affairs were much influenced by French-Canadian, Irish-American, and Italian-American clans, with close ties to the local business community. As Chiasson recalls Mayor Paquette, “Gordy was a jolly Chamber of Commerce type,” who often sat in a pew behind his own equally observant Catholic family at Sunday Mass. A ten-year incumbent, Paquette tightly controlled the city’s elected Board of Aldermen and its appointed commissions, by stacking the latter with friends and relatives.

Sanders’s resume included being Jewish from Brooklyn, then a civil rights activist at the University of Chicago, and then a back-to-land carpenter and video maker in Vermont. He was also a four-time loser as a Liberty Union Party (LUP) candidate for statewide office. (In the interests of full disclosure, I was a volunteer helper of Bernie’s 1976 campaign for governor, which drew 6.1 percent of the vote.)

Like California’s Peace and Freedom Party, then and now, Liberty Union was a product of Sixties’ radicalism. In his own patriotic Burlington family, Chiasson grew up “being told that Liberty Union was the party of the communes, the draft dodgers, and the strung-out runaways.” This was not true of several brave working-class Vermonters who ran for office under its banner initially.  But the performative politics of others, plus their “lifestyle left” orientation, was not a big draw for blue collar voters, even in a state where the United Electrical Workers (UE), a left- wing critic of the AFL-CIO, was its then largest industrial union. Sanders believed that UE members and other workers could be won over by his own more effective class-based appeals.

Going Local

As the Reagan era dawned nationally, Bernie decided to go local. He re-invented himself as a champion of low-income tenants, of whom he was one. At the time, two-thirds of Burlington residents rented their housing, which meant that its “mainly Catholic, culturally conservative working poor” often lived “in badly maintained properties” whose owners “were unscrupulous, if not exploitative.”

When renters sought help from city government, its building inspectors sided with landlords, actually “abetting the eviction process” rather than fixing code violations. To further private re-development plans, Paquette also allowed neighborhoods to deteriorate, because “blighted homes and buildings were much cheaper for the city to acquire and raze.”

Sanders started door knocking, heard such complaints, and fine-tuned his pitch that city hall could actually serve the people. At Chiasson’s house, his grandfather, a brooding World War 11 vet named Milford Delorme, told his wife not to open the door if Sanders was outside. But Bernie’s longshot mayoral bid did gain street cred when influential working class-voices like former mill worker Sadie White, a neighbor of Chiasson’s in Burlington’s Old North End, backed his campaign.

Sanders’ surprise victory gave the local political establishment a huge shock. The local Democratic Party machine, backed by the business community, tried to render the new mayor “completely ineffective so voters would turn him out after his two-year tenure.”

Over four terms, Sanders would eventually increase his city council allies from one to a near majority, helping to lay the groundwork not just for a local Progressive third party, but a statewide one. However, any initial implementation of his pro-worker, pro-tenant agenda required the creation of a volunteer-driven “shadow government,” which got things done “outside the official administrative circuitry of city hall.”

The best parts of Bernie for Burlington—the ones worth closest study by embattled municipal reformers today—describe the creative solutions that Sanders, his staff, and supporters developed to address the need for affordable housing, property tax reform, better parks and cultural programs, youth jobs and public service provision, like snow plowing. To meet that seasonal challenge in a new way, Bernie made sure that streets and sidewalks in poor and working-class neighborhoods, with more pedestrians, got cleared first, rather than wealthier sections of town, while a volunteer network also pitched in to help the elderly shovel out.

As Chiasson noted in a recent interview, Burlington also “set up the first community land trust of its kind in the country.” Under Bernie, the city bought up distressed properties, put residents in job training programs to work fixing them up, and then, through their sweat equity, enabled them to own the “four walls,” while the city retained ownership of the land. Homes rebuilt this way could only be sold back to the land trust with any individual profit capped at 25 percent. According to the author, as city owned properties—selling below market value—proliferated, greater affordability was achieved by “establishing a new market value.”

By the time Sanders was ready to move up and beyond Burlington city hall, he was, like Chiasson, waxing poetic. In one of his final speeches as mayor, Bernie cited the many accomplishments of his administration as proof that, in a better civic environment, “men, women, and children can come together in relationships that are not based on greed, exploitation, and domination — but on love, cooperation, and mutual respect.” That’s a vision for “re-claiming the city” still worth aspiring to, four decades later in two, three, many Burlingtons.

[Reprinted from Beyond Chron]

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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) recently passed 100,000 members across the country, reaching levels of socialist organizing not seen in a century and closing in on the largest socialist organization in United States history. (N.B. Since this article was drafted, DSA surpassed the peak of the Socialist Party of America by reaching more than 120,000 members, although we still need to grow by three to four times to reach the proportion of the US population organized by SPA). California DSA (CA-DSA) is a unique entity within our organization. Most members know DSA through their local chapter, and most of our on the ground organizing is housed within them. Despite being the lifeblood of our organization, chapters also develop unevenly and interchapter coordination is sporadic (some have called DSA two hundred chapters in a trench coat). CA-DSA is an effort to build connective tissue and increased coordination among chapters in the most populous state in the nation, a necessity if we are ever to take power. I am excited about the potential for CA-DSA to accelerate socialist organizing in our state, but we must overhaul structure and practice if we are to succeed. 

CA-DSA operates as a vehicle for chapters to share with and learn from each other rather than primarily doing organizing on its own. It consists of delegates who represent their chapter in meetings every other month, so it lacks the mass membership base that powers the engine of chapter organizing. Delegates share organizing experiences, report back from campaigns, and introduce resolutions for deliberation by the body. If any chapters have organizing work they want to expand beyond their territory, their delegates can bring a resolution for CA-DSA to adopt in support of the efforts. In turn, members inspired by resolutions from CA-DSA can bring a version back to their own chapter for deliberation. I served as a delegate from Silicon Valley DSA (SV-DSA) last term (’25 - ’26). An issue with the previous year's voter guide put out by CA-DSA motivated my decision to run. The body recommended a candidate for State Assembly that our chapter had a fractious relationship with after they worked against a chapter priority to outlaw caste-based discrimination and co-sponsored a bill to legalize facial recognition technology. In this piece I share reflections on the interplay between CA-DSA and SV-DSA. In some cases the statewide organization has been a model and inspiration for chapter organizing, whereas in other cases our local conditions could help improve statewide efforts.

Communications

A place where CA-DSA shines is in the bimonthly statewide newsletter, California Red. This publication is a venue where comrades across the state can share stories of chapter development or ongoing campaigns. By contrast, in SV-DSA our newsletters were sporadic until the newly revamped Communications Committee took over and made them a structured monthly endeavor. Even as our internal newsletter has become a strength of the chapter, it fills a different role than California Red. Updates on our organizing over the past month and upcoming events support local work rather than raise class consciousness across the state. California Red is helped by economies of scale—with so many comrades organizing across the state, there are consistently relevant stories to share, and the administrative burden of editing and publishing the work is streamlined by having a single statewide newsletter. We can rapidly report on local conditions as we develop ties with and help organize workers throughout the state. Similar arguments were made by Lenin in What is to be Done?extolling the value of an integrated press organ rather than myriad individual efforts.

On the other hand, SV-DSA has a much more robust internal communication structure. In our chapter, we have a Slack digital workspace where we communicate in between meetings. That is our main space for sharing updates, reminders about meetings, and member-to-member communication. CA-DSA lacked such a platform for delegate-to-delegate communication until halfway through our term last year. Noting the barriers to organizing and statewide coordination the absence of such a platform raised, I wrote a resolution mandating the body create such a space. After initially trying to dissuade me from bringing the resolution forward, the Steering Committee adopted it and eventually rolled out a Discord open to all DSA members in California. Unfortunately, there has been limited uptake—Steering rarely posts meeting reminders in the shared digital communication space. As CA-DSA moves forward, delegates can improve its functioning by regularly engaging with the statewide Discord and inviting comrades from their chapter to share perspectives of rank-and-file members across the state.

Meeting Logistics

Scheduling Meetings

Scheduling meetings is another area where CA-DSA can look to SV-DSA for improved practice. For planning our 2026 Chapter Convention, an active chapter member introduced a resolution at our January Membership Meeting to create a Planning Committee and set the date for our Convention as March 28. Shortly after membership approved that timeline, No Kings 3 was announced as targeting the same date. Our chapter had previously passed a resolution endorsing mobilization to those events, which have been good opportunities to meet people where they are and have organizing conversations. Recognizing the conflict between membership desire to attend the mass protest and a Convention date set by resolution, we introduced a new resolution in February to allow the Convention Planning Committee discretion in setting a new date. Members approved the change from the previously adopted timeline.

In contrast, meeting scheduling from CA-DSA lacked robust engagement with delegates. Our last meeting of 2025 was suddenly moved from December 6 to December 13 to accommodate an external event that had never been discussed by delegates as CA-DSA. A few of the largest California chapters, disproportionately represented on Steering, had endorsed the external action and decided to move our meeting with one week’s notice. Despite having received a suggestion to poll delegates to determine our desire to move the meeting, Steering unilaterally moved the date with only limited delegate engagement. At least that meeting still occurred, however. 

More egregious was the decision to cancel the final meeting of the 2025-2026 State Council. First the date was shifted from April to May for not having hit noticing deadlines within our bylaws. Then, Steering canceled the meeting with 24 hours notice, claiming the ongoing election of delegates for the next term raised confusion about who would have authority within the meeting. This action removed the lame duck session of last year’s body, undemocratically disempowering the duly elected representatives from participating chapters. Moving forward, CA-DSA must have a robust process of delegate engagement and a democratic means to determine meeting timing. Participating in the body becomes unnecessarily difficult if previously scheduled meetings are changed on short notice at the whim of Steering. 

Tech Tools

One area of meeting logistics where CA-DSA is an effective model for chapters statewide is in the utilization of tech tools to run our meetings. CA-DSA utilizes OpenSlides, a tool created and maintained by comrades in the National Tech Committee. Steering deserves recognition for their ability in showcasing OpenSlides and effectively using it to coordinate our meetings. While we have an active Tech Committee in SV-DSA, we have not yet brought OpenSlides to our monthly meetings. CA-DSA shows how our meetings can be effectively facilitated leveraging homespun tools. Seeing OpenSlides in action makes it easier to see the utility in bringing it back to our home chapters as attendees of the 2023 National Convention can attest, venue-specific internet difficulties in 2025 notwithstanding.

Bringing Resolutions Forward

Introducing resolutions for democratic consideration is another area where CA-DSA could improve practice. In SV-DSA, anyone can bring a resolution forward if five members in good standing sign in support and authors share the resolution with general membership in line with noticing requirements outlined in our bylaws. For the 2025-2026 CA-DSA State Council, standing meeting rules required at least ten delegate signatures and had no requirement for representation of multiple chapters. Only two chapters are allocated ten or more delegates - LA and East Bay get 49% of delegates - with the majority having far fewer. Fully half of chapters (10) have a single delegate. 

In practice, this meant that a single chapter could dominate what was introduced for consideration, while the barrier for smaller chapters was insurmountable. For the coming year’s term, the threshold has been lowered to five delegates but with no requirement for collaboration across chapters. For CA-DSA to effectively fill the role of statewide coordination of efforts, it would be best served to structurally bake that cross-chapter coordination into bringing resolutions forward by requiring delegates representing multiple chapters signal support for a resolution to be considered. Ideally those resolutions would reflect local organizing already occurring in two or more chapters that would benefit from statewide collaboration.

Supporting New Organizing and Increased Coordination

A major purpose of CA-DSA is to enhance coordination of chapters across the state. Beyond coordination in electoral campaigns (more on that below), CA-DSA has made strides in building cross-chapter ties and organizational capacity statewide. One particular strength is in helping new organizing committees and chapters form. Steering members occasionally provided brief updates of outreach and organizing support at our bimonthly meetings. For At Large DSA members without a home chapter, it can be difficult to know how to start organizing and contributing to our mass movement. CA-DSA meetings are a place where fresh organizers can connect with comrades and get ideas for organizing projects to kickstart work in their local area. In the past year we have seen new Organizing Committees form and existing OCs move towards chapterhood. The only way to build power statewide is if we have a presence everywhere, and Steering deserves commendation for its work in fostering new organizing. California Red helped elevate the story of Sonoma County as it developed into a political force, and socialist organizing is blooming in Shasta County DSA and Humboldt County DSA. Any contribution towards those developments are valuable. And delegates and rank-and-file members can now talk across chapters on the CA-DSA Discord.

Another positive development in CA-DSA is the creation of a monthly housing organizers call introduced by resolution at what turned out to be our final meeting of the previous term. The purpose of the call is to convene comrades organizing around housing from chapters across the state. The calls are open to all DSA members in California working on housing issues, expanding capacity by not needing to rely on the limited pool of delegates to the body. The first call had high participation, with even DSA members in chapters that did not elect delegates to CA-DSA joining. The promise of sharing with and learning from each other is attractive and capacity building; SV-DSA members are excited to learn from our comrades as we seek to build up the Silicon Valley Tenants Union. 

The housing calls are a model for building the connective tissue between chapters doing local organizing through formal and informal ties that we will need to be a serious political force statewide. Similarly in SV-DSA, we are working to build better connections across our various issue-based working groups for more coordinated collective action as part of this year’s Chapter Strategic Plan. At the first delegate meeting for the CA-DSA ‘26-’27 term, delegates approved endorsing a CalSTRS divestment campaign to amplify East Bay organizing and connect comrades across the state fighting against the genocide in Gaza. This is a marked improvement from an earlier CA-DSA delegation that rejected an anti-Zionist resolution in 2024. Connecting organizing around the same topic statewide is the major potential of CA-DSA. 

Electoral endorsements

Although DSA organizes to build working class power in myriad ways, including organizing workers as a class through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee or renters as a class with the Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee, we are perhaps best known for our electoral work as we march down the democratic road to socialism. The DSA Difference comes from our ability to mobilize dedicated members in force to support our democratically decided campaign priorities. Whether it is rightwing fear mongering or progressives trying to “find the next Zohran”, there is no denying the popularity of our mass movement for socialism. DSA members can competitively fight and win anywhere and at any level, from Mayor of DC to Atlanta City Council to statewide races in Georgia, Kentucky, Oregon, or New York to Congressional seats in New York or Pennsylvania or Colorado to fighting for Governor of Wisconsin. Meaningful differences exist in the local chapter-level and California statewide approaches to electoral organizing as detailed below with a description of our different endorsement processes and specific case studies.

Endorsement Process

At the chapter level in SV-DSA, we have a very high three-quarters threshold for a ballot endorsement (including individual candidates for office). This threshold is in recognition that an endorsement from our chapter involves significant mobilization of resources and member energy. We abstain from paper endorsements where our main intervention is adding our logo along with a sea of other organizations on candidate campaign literature. This approach is part of our strategy adopted at our recent Chapter Convention to lay the foundation for a strong electoral program where we can run and win with cadre candidates. We will turn out members for deep neighborhood canvassing and phonebanks of voters. Such actions also represent membership development opportunities as newly involved members can build organizing skills and begin to step into leadership roles like shift lead as the campaign continues. If membership does not think the chapter has capacity to dedicate the necessary attention to a campaign, we will refrain from endorsing. 

For measures that membership supports but does not have capacity for a full fledged endorsement, we can approve a recommendation by simple majority at a chapter meeting. A recommended measure can go into a voter guide created by the electoral working group and approved by general membership but cannot receive allocation of chapter resources beyond that.

In contrast, CA-DSA has a more convoluted framework for ballot endorsements given that it lacks the mass membership base that drives turnout for the DSA Difference. There are multiple tiers of endorsement, from a Priority Campaign to No Recommendation. A Tier 2 Endorsement is most akin to a traditional chapter endorsement—something that is voted on and approved by delegates to the CA-DSA State Council by simple majority vote. Ballot measure campaigns are supposed to adhere to the body’s electoral vision by building class consciousness and organization, rooting socialists in the multiracial working class, strengthening DSA, and having winnable and transformative objectives. Beneath that are simple recommendations or analyses without recommendations to be included in the voter guide. The next step above, a Priority Campaign, is adopted when at least two independent chapters also endorse a measure that has reached Tier 2 approval by CA-DSA. 

In other words, the most impactful intervention, coordination of turnout across chapters, is not something that is within the control of CA-DSA itself. Without the mass membership base of chapters, a simple Tier 2 endorsement can have only limited impact from the involvement of CA-DSA in a race. When multiple chapters get on board, we can support each other to amplify impact beyond what we’d be able to achieve individually. Specific case studies from the past year are analyzed below.

Prop 50 Redistricting

CA-DSA passed a resolution endorsing Prop 50, the California redistricting measure, in August 2025. That meeting was the second gathering of the term's State Council and the first after delegates were seated in June and elected a new Steering Committee. The endorsement decision was not without controversy, as members penned articles in California Red forand against the decision. The open debate is a good sign of organizational health as members argue for their position within the big tent of DSA. On its own, the resolution was rather modest: it called for CA-DSA to host a webinar with union partners and empowered the body to make campaign literature chapters could utilize. CA-DSA cannot do much by itself even if it passes a Tier 2 Endorsement. It is only upon uptake of resolutions by multiple chapters that a statewide campaign can see success.

In SV-DSA, we had already endorsed a local Measure A designed to support the Santa Clara County hospital system, including the only burn unit in the Bay Area. One reason members passed the endorsement was due to its alignment with a goal in our chapter’s Strategic Plan to develop closer ties with local labor unions. We endorsed Measure A and started canvassing and turning out for phone banks organized by the South Bay Labor Council, which had endorsed the measure. Labor was also canvassing for Prop 50, and the decision by CA-DSA gave enough impetus for a chapter member to introduce an endorsement resolution to SV-DSA, which also passed. 

Suddenly we could canvass for both Measure A and Prop 50, which increased trust between our members and local labor unions. We could also use the Prop 50 canvassing to talk to people about Ranked Choice Voting, a previously existing chapter priority. Members did not make any efforts to endorse a candidate for a local special election despite labor canvassing for them, showing our decision was strategic rather than opportunistic. In the last weekend before the election, we carried campaign literature provided by CA-DSA. Our labor allies respected us bringing our own Prop 50 literature, something we would not have had the capacity to do on our own in SV-DSA without the support of CA-DSA. 

Once the celebrations of victory died down after election night, we learned that our chapter of fewer than 1,000 members had the second most volunteers canvassing and phone banking during election season, second only to the lead union behind the campaign that has more than 10,000 members. We punched above our weight and gained the respect of our labor allies, and part of that was due to CA-DSA. Our ties to local labor have grown from that seed, with the South Bay Labor Council endorsing and inviting members to attend our Labor Movie Night in June where we showed Pride (2014) in honor of Pride month.

Billionaire Tax Proposal

At our end of year meeting in 2025, CA-DSA voted to endorse the California Billionaire Tax initiative, resolving to create materials chapters could use canvassing or tabling and to host a webinar with labor partners. Once again, the body on its own is not really able to have the impact associated with DSA involvement in a race unless multiple chapters opt in and campaign themselves. During debate, at least one delegate raised concerns about the limited list of coalition partners involved in the effort to date. Nonetheless, the resolution passed even as proponents acknowledged the challenges with limited buy-in from many labor unions at the start of the year. It is an easy political argument that billionaires need to give back to the common good after they’ve spent decades robbing us blind, most recently with HR1.

In SV-DSA, the debate surrounding the Billionaire Tax took a much different tone. When an endorsement resolution was introduced at our February chapter meeting, members voted to extend debate to continue hearing respective arguments. Everyone agreed with the politics of taxing billionaires, but many of our most active members rose to speak against endorsing. The reasoning was simple: a question of chapter capacity to meaningfully intervene in the race. The Electoral Working Group was already supporting a local Rent Control measure in Redwood City. 

Seeing that membership may not hit the high threshold for endorsement, one experienced member moved to postpone the resolution until the next meeting so questions of capacity and campaign leadership could be addressed. That same member also wrote a resolution to put in place endorsement expectations including identifying campaign leads and volunteers to address capacity concerns. With that model, a new member stepped up to be a campaign lead and the endorsement measure sailed through when it was certain there were comrades who could bottom line the work. Our chapter was also strengthened by building in expectations that members will address capacity concerns when bringing an endorsement forward.

With comrades and allies across the state participating, the Billionaire Tax got nearly twice the number of signatures required to make it on the ballot in November. With billionaires using their limitless cash to oppose the measure, supporters will need to use our people power to reach voters and perform political education to counter oligarchs’ talking points. CA-DSA also endorsed a separate ballot measure to permanently extend an existing tax on high earners as part of a unified Tax the Rich campaign that can support our different organizing threads if successful. Part of the goal of that campaign is to bridge the gap between different arms of labor each supporting one but not the other measure for a coordinated effort. 

This campaign is a good structure test for our ability to unite Labor and the Left as we gear up towards a planned presidential run in 2028. Unfortunately we are a few months behind where we could be if the final meeting of the previous term was not cancelled. Process issues negatively impact our organizing.

Oliver Ma for Lt. Governor

For the June primary, CA-DSA made its first endorsement of a statewide candidate in choosing to support Oliver Ma. Oliver is a DSA member who ran for Lt. Governor as a democratic socialist with an endorsement from his home chapter in DSA Kern County announced in January. Days later when delegates received notice of our standard bimonthly meeting at the end of February, there was also an announcement of an endorsement forum followed by online vote for CA-DSA to consider endorsing Oliver in just eight days. (Incidentally, it was at this same off-cycle meeting and online vote where the second measure in the Tax the Rich Campaign mentioned above was unanimously endorsed). CA-DSA endorsed with 61% of voting delegates supporting, recording votes in a way that chapter representation required for quorum calculations was unknowable. Oliver also picked up endorsements from Inland Empire DSA, DSA Ventura County, and the YDSA chapters of UC Davis, UC San Diego, and UCLA, showing a real base of support across multiple DSA chapters.

In SV-DSA, Oliver Ma for Lt. Governor was one of several endorsement petitions for statewide office members brought forward at our Chapter Convention. The other potential endorsements introduced by members were for Peace & Freedom Party candidates Ramsey Robinson for Governor and Lalo Vargas for Insurance Commissioner, socialist candidates supported by PSL. Each of these endorsements were brought forward by members tired of being told to vote for the lesser of two evils and who wanted to canvas our neighbors to talk about socialism. 

However, none of the petitioners introduced a campaign plan identifying leads and volunteers in line with the resolution mentioned above that we had passed the previous month. Added to concerns about capacity and project ownership were members' questions about the viability of any of the candidates and the impact SV-DSA would be able to have so late in the race, with about six weeks until the election. Although each candidate was considered in turn, the result was the same: members at our largest meeting of the year overwhelmingly voted against endorsing any statewide candidates. Unlike the PSL candidates, Oliver Ma did get a recommendation in our voter guide.

The outcome of the Lt. Governor race holds some lessons. Before the June 2 primary, Oliver was not counted among the five “major” candidates according to CalMatters. In the end, he broke that barrier with a distant fifth place finish, the first candidate with fewer than one million votes. Although Oliver overperformed relative to pre-election expectations, there were missed opportunities: he did not include a statement in the voter guide that every California voter receives. The campaign did help strengthen OC DSA, including by spurring them to create new guidelines and expectations for their endorsement process.

National DSA lets members request trainings on many topics, and the National Electoral Committee has many resources for comrades to learn from successful efforts across the country. One piece of advice from the trainings is that endorsements should be happening months in advance of an election date; the next time CA-DSA considers getting involved in statewide campaigns we should start the process much earlier. With a March primary in the 2028 presidential election year, the issue of timing is even more salient.

Primary Voter Guide

One activity taken on by the Electoral Working Group in SV-DSA is to research and assemble a voter guide for upcoming elections pending approval by general membership at a monthly meeting. There are local working class people that make up our base but are currently politically disengaged who look to our voter guide and share with their friends and family when deciding how to vote. For the June primary, comrades researched local elections and analyzed candidates based on the limited available information. The working meetings were regularly advertised on the chapter Slack, posted on our calendar, and discussed at monthly meetings with brief reports back so interested members could help shape our collective analysis. 

During our Chapter Convention, the voter guide became a source of raucous but comradely debate. Members rose to amend recommendations for individual seats based on their personal knowledge and politics. One normally reserved member gave a fiery speech that I did not know they had within them. Ultimately, the only change membership approved was to modify the Governor’s race from no recommended candidate to an anti-recommendation opposing San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, the Tech Bro billionaire puppet that wanted to extend his reign of mayhem from the South Bay to the whole state. 

After the voter guide was published, some members noticed we did not include a recommendation for a race that had minor overlap with our chapter territory. Since one candidate was endorsed by a neighboring DSA chapter and there was a membership base that wanted to include a recommendation in that race, members introduced an amendment to the voter guide at the next chapter meeting, following our standard democratic practice.

In contrast to the democratically approved and robustly debated SV-DSA voter guide, the CA-DSA voter guide was rife with issues. Although the Electoral Committee posted its biweekly meetings on the CA-DSA calendar, it never advertised its meetings nor provided reports back on the statewide Discord in contrast to past practice where the full State Council got updates during a synchronous meeting. At a meeting with only four members in attendance, the Steering Committee broached but ultimately rejected the idea of getting the full CA-DSA delegate body to approve, amend, or reject the voter guide. 

The lack of widespread engagement and democratic oversight led to an analysis of the race for Governor that all but recommended a billionaire. Despite an official “no recommendation” stance, the plain text of the guide calling Tom Steyer the most progressive viable candidate led to reports tying DSA to supporting billionaires, a confused stance contrary to our shared politics. The betrayal of our values led to no material gain since the top two candidates ended up being a corporate stooge Democrat with support from the Chamber of Commerce and a MAGA Republican. Moving forward, CA-DSA must reserve the ability to approve the voter guide for the full body of delegates and not allow it to go out with only Steering Committee approval.

Organizational structure

Like chapters across the country, SV-DSA is in the midst of an organizational overhaul in response to the Democracy Commission reforms approved at the 2025 National Convention. Although the chapter already utilizes many of the best practices required in the Democracy Commission reform package, we are undergoing a structured and deliberate review of our governing documents and internal democracy. Membership adopted a resolution to create a Bylaws Committee open to all members tasked with introducing any necessary changes for debate and voting at a monthly chapter meeting. 

Although we could move faster if one or two Steering Committee members introduced the changes by resolution, we would miss important opportunities for membership development. By inviting general membership to participate, we can synthesize multiple viewpoints in the final resolution(s) and help socialize the baseline standards of democracy that all DSA members should expect regardless of their home chapter. We can also address structural topics that are not required by Democracy Commission reforms, like simplifying our quorum requirement which is currently unwieldy and non-trivial to calculate.

By contrast, CA-DSA has not taken a measured approach to organizational reform that generates buy-in and consensus from members statewide. With multiple chapters not participating in CA-DSA for various reasons, reaching quorum on any individual decision faced difficulty in our term. In order to speak with authority on statewide organizing, the body must have a minimum level of buy-in from chapters across the state. If there are fewer chapters participating, a higher degree of consensus within the body is required to move forward. At the same time, it is prima facie ridiculous to include chapters that no longer exist in quorum calculation requirements. The balance between a functioning body and a proper democratic mandate to act was a consistent topic of discussion in the previous CA-DSA term.

To address the possibility of non-extant chapters needlessly raising the threshold for action by CA-DSA, a fellow delegate from SV-DSA wrote a bylaws amendment that would allow for excluding dormant chapters from quorum calculations. Shortly afterwards, Steering Committee wrote their own bylaws amendment that did not incorporate any of the ideas from my comrade’s resolution. When I pointed out that the text as written could theoretically allow a single chapter to claim to speak with statewide authority, one of the authors conceded that it was a well-made point and the language could be changed to provide a minimum threshold of chapters before voting. 

Unfortunately, those changes never materialized. The unmodified language from the Steering Committee was introduced, but the February meeting failed to reach quorum under any interpretation of the bylaws. Perhaps the low attendance was due to the off-cycle candidate endorsement forum earlier in the month. Steering then decided to hold an online vote to change the bylaws in contravention to the process laid out for changes in the bylaws themselves. Despite the process being out of order, CA-DSA is now operating as if that vote was valid.

Given that chapters across the country are undergoing reforms to improve our internal deliberations in response to the Convention-approved Democracy Commission reforms, this term of CA-DSA is an ideal time to reconsider its structure. The National Democracy Commission is still seated to help chapters adopt required reforms and could be a resource for statewide delegates. Delegates from last term who expressed interest in a Bylaws Committee for structured reform were not engaged, a state of affairs that current delegates could alter. Having a few years experience, CA-DSA could decide what has worked and what needs to change. 

Many chapters require a two-thirds threshold for endorsements rather than a simple majority, which CA-DSA may want to consider. Quorum and allocation of delegates is another area for possible change. It is hard to claim to speak for DSA statewide when a limited number of chapters participate in decision making, but we also don’t want to recreate the undemocratic Senate by over-counting sparsely populated areas. At the same time, capping the body size at 85 delegates risks recapitulating the Permanent Apportionment Act that limits the size of the House and fails to account for chapter growth. SV-DSA increased from 473 to 745 members between our 2025 and 2026 Chapter Conventions, a 58% increase, but we were allocated one fewer delegate to CA-DSA. Artificially capping total delegate number limits the full spectrum of member views from being represented, collapsing entire chapters to their single delegate. Delegates should be elected by membership using STV for proportional representation similar to the requirement for delegates to the National Convention rather than allowing for appointment by chapter steering committees. Thoughtful deliberation from as many viewpoints as possible under the big tent serves our movement far better than rushing through changes that align with one approach within DSA.

Conclusions and Future Directions

If you've read this far, you are as invested in the success of our collective political project as I am. If we want a better offering of national politicians and policies from California than Gavin Newsom or Xavier Becerra, DSA will need to expand our power and reach. We can't do that without statewide coordination among chapters. CA-DSA is a first of its kind experiment for statewide cross-chapter collaboration, differing from single state chapters like Maine or Connecticut. Comrades across the country can learn from our story in California. The three New Jersey chapters have made their own decision to remain separate rather than merging or forming a statewide body like CA-DSA. Since its founding, there has been a consistent practice of critical analysis to determine successes, failures, and next steps for the CA-DSA. This article is meant to carry on that tradition.

CA-DSA currently only has limited capacity. Some argue that problem would be solved if only the organization got a share of dues and could hire staff. My alternative analysis is that we could expand capacity by connecting existing organizing across chapters rather than trying to create new projects for chapters to take on. The organic energy within each chapter can bloom through cross-pollination of ideas and tactics, strengthening our project. That would work better than creating projects from scratch and trying to herd cats to make chapters collaborate on topics that aren't already priorities. 

We can't take power in California without being able to coordinate to take collective action everywhere, including within smaller chapters and in areas that don't yet have chapters. Unfortunately, CA-DSA has alienated some chapters with its current approach, despite some successes. Although the participation by DSA-LA in the Healthy California Now Coalition led to the mass exodus of its Healthcare Justice Committee due to perceived tactics delaying single payer health care in California, CA-DSA also decided to join the coalition. Several chapters reported on the National Forum that the CA-DSA voter guide all but recommending a billionaire for the 2026 Governor primary harmed their local organizing. We won't always agree under the big tent, but we do need to substantively engage with each other to navigate those differences. We can’t win without a means to coordinate statewide in California, but the current instantiation of CA-DSA needs to change to effectively fill that role.

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