Originally delivered by Chapter Co-Chair Jessen F. at the 2026 SV DSA Chapter Convention on 4/18/2026.

Comrades!

The state of our chapter is strong. And it grows stronger every day. It is an honor to give this address. But to understand where we are now we must reflect on where we were before. A bit about myself…

I joined DSA in 2019 and for years I was a paper member. In Spring of 2023 one of our former Labor WG co-chairs phonebanked me. We had a short convo, set up a 1:1 and when meeting we planned the very first labor movie night. I suggested we play it where I work, at the SEIU 521 Union Hall. That was June 2023 and the first time DSA ever held an event in this building. Today it feels like our home. 

In 2024 a former chapter co-chair pushed me to run for Steering Committee. I really had no idea what that role entailed. Reluctantly I agreed to the challenge. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. And it really was a challenge. Together as Steering Committee, we strove to rebuild a chapter that had been struggling for awhile. We held our first leadership retreat, we had a wonderful International Solidarity WG, and we got acquainted with letters from the Attorney General about how we needed to fix our taxes. Shout out to our Treasurers who have helped us solve so many of our financial problems.

In 2024, We had a dream of 500 members. One year ago, at our 2025 convention we had 473. Today, I am proud to say we have 745 members! That’s a 58% increase in membership.

A year ago today, we had 3 existing working groups and one committee, Steering. At the 2025 convention we chartered 2 new working groups (Pol-Ed and Electoral) and 1 new committee (Admin). Today we have 9 working groups and 6 committees. 

For many years our chapter was directionless and unsure of what to do next. This year we voted on, built, and executed a chapter-wide strategic plan for the very first time – we have completed 15 goals on our strategic plan.

I would like to take some time now to recognize the particular campaigns, actions, and people that have made our chapter the strongest it has ever been. 

• Community Safety WG
  • Organized against Palantir.
  • Fought back against a surveillance state by organizing against ALPRs (automated license plate readers).
• Electoral WG
  • Supported efforts to get Ranked-Choice Voting in Santa Clara County and hosted Brew & Chew events.
  • Helped pass Prop 50.
  • Turned out the second-most volunteers for Measure A, only after SEIU 521.
  • Currently working on Redwood City Rent Control bill and the CA Billionaires’ Tax Bill.
  • Have four additional Electoral resolutions brought forward today.
• Housing WG
  • Supported the Summerwind Tenant Union when going before the San Jose Code Enforcement Appeals Board.
  • Assisted Emergency Interim Housing (EIH) tenants to attempt to resolve issues with service providers and develop community bonds.
  • Set up a framework to get a Silicon Valley Tenant Union off the ground in 2026.
  • Growing partnerships with other housing organizations throughout the Bay Area such as:
    • Joining the Anti-Displacement Coalition, co-hosting a listening session to spark community engagement. 
• International Solidarity WG
  • Brought dozens of people out to pressure Santa Clara County to divest from genocide (e.g., Chevron).
  • Running No Appetite for Apartheid campaigns in Redwood City and San Jose.
  • Recently scored a victory, the Santa Clara County Treasury Oversight Committee is forwarding a divestment policy to the Board of Supervisors.
  • Supporting Stanford students protesting.
  • Held a Rapid Response Network training.
• Labor WG
  • Ran Labor Movie Nights including the movie UNION about the Amazon Labor Union fight in Staten Island with the ALU president as guest speaker.
  • Supported Starbucks Workers United on the picket line.
  • Built a strong relationship with the South Bay Labor Council.
  • Participated in the May Day coalition planning.
• Mutual Aid WG
  • Tend to a thriving community garden.
  • Coordinate the well-established community free store.
  • Supported the unhoused community during sweeps.
• Political Education WG
  • Organized and facilitated monthly Socialist Night School events covering topics from understanding local government to Marxist feminism.
  • Revitalized our DSA 101 curriculum.
  • Will present resolutions today to further improve our chapter’s political knowledge, aiming to translate it into demonstrable change in our local community.
• Transit WG
  •  Successfully hosted its first bench-building collaboration with the SF Bay Area Bench Collective and Peninsula DSA.
• Liberation & Justice WG
  • Newly chartered, seeks to bring DSA’s anti-racist views to the masses and protect our most vulnerable from the prison industrial complex.

Our chapter is also so much more than our political working groups. We have also revamped the overall member experience in so many ways.

• Our Chapter built resources for new members: launched seasonal cohort groups, created a new member handbook, hosted regular DSA 101 sessions, and streamlined onboarding processes.
• Expanded resources and growth for the chapter: made the office a usable working space, formalized a retention process for existing members, and implemented skill-building modules to develop members into more effective organizers.
• Improved internal structure and efficiency: standardized task systems within committees, developed how-to guides for all members to use resources, hosted quarterly leadership retreats, organized the Google Drive, appointed chapter secretaries, created 3 sets of evergreen tabling materials for more efficient outreach, and improved our website.

Now I must run through our amazing committees:

• Admin Committee
  • Revamped our website and office.
  • Solidified our zoom accessibility.
  • Birthed many of our other committees.
• Communications Committee
  • Engaged current and prospective DSA members plus community partners with the work of our local and neighboring chapters through social media.
  • Introduced social media campaigns to highlight SV DSA wins and accessible opportunities for actions.
  • Built a consistent and popular newsletter that is easy for members to contribute to.
  • Created a structure for members, WGs, and committees to request support from the communications committee, i.e. graphic design, social media posting, highlighting wins and actions in the monthly newsletter.
• Tech & Data Committee
  • Revived this dormant committee.
  • Stabilized website infrastructure by reducing storage usage, upgrading the server, adding monitoring, and automating testing and deployments.
  • Built internal tools and infrastructure (e.g. Slack notifications, office tech setup, LinkTree, OpenProject) to support organizing.
• Membership Committee
  • Literally welcomed hundreds of new members into our org making sure they were ready to get started organizing immediately.
• Social Committee
  • Hosted our monthly event that is most popular with new members – Last Friday Socials.
  • Debuted the show and tell event and crafted a beautiful send-fff for an outbound Officer at the Holiday Party.
• Convention Planning Committee
  • Made our bingo cards, our programs, our slides, our games, booked our food, set up our decorations. And made this incredible day possible.

Our plan for today was to have a strategic convention. I believe that we have done so. But we will have gone wrong if we are merely strategic today. We must be strategic all year.

I cannot tell you how proud I am of this chapter. So many new faces, new ideas, and exciting surges of growth. Some of our members are extremely well versed in theory and dedicated Marxists. Some of our members are brand new to Socialism.

All our members want change. But one thing I know comrades, is that change does not come easily… It does not happen by accident. And it does not happen unless you are willing and ready to fight. So comrades, tell me YES if you are ready:

Are you ready to fight? Fight for your sisters? Fight for your brothers? Fight for trans folks? Fight for immigrants? Fight for Black folks? Fight for Latinos? Fight for all asian communities? Fight for climate justice? Fight for socialism? Are you ready to win? Are you ready to win?

So let’s make it happen.

The post 2026 Chapter Convention: State of the Chapter Address appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

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Our 2026 spring edition, Issue 8, is DSA at 100k. To receive a bimonthly full copy of the magazine issue delivered to your door knowing your funds directly support the independent media we represent, you can subscribe here.

Working Mass is a project of union members and members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Massachusetts and beyond. We cover strikes, new organizing, and contract campaigns, as well as labor strategy, the reform movement, and socialist politics.

History has changed. Welcome to Issue 8.

In 1912, the Socialist Party of America had grown to surpass 100,000 members. They held two congressional districts, mayoral seats, and countless council seats nationwide. That eve of the Great War was their peak.

For the first time since the SPA’s decline, DSA has reached the coveted milestone of 100,000 members. This is uncharted territory for U.S. organizers today. A mass organization of this magnitude has not been seen in generations of the socialist movement. In Massachusetts alone, thousands organize in five chapters: Boston, Worcester, Cape Cod, River Valley, and the Berkshires, membership rising across all of them, with party offices for members in Holyoke while organizers secure one in Boston to serve over thirteen neighborhood groups, many with memberships exceeding small chapters. There are socialists in workplaces and apartment complexes agitating tenants. There are socialists fighting in the streets and organizing rapid-response efforts against ICE. And there’s a pantheon of socialist officials, once again: hundreds of councilors, legislators, some mayors, while other comrades challenge our opposition for seats in the U.S. Congress to directly confront fascism and the imperialist war machine from the halls of power.

In this issue, we interview workers organizing for their first contract at breweries and dining halls; we follow carpenters fighting against bad developers; we witness marches against each successive war and invasion, from Venezuela to Iran to Cuba; we see labor’s continued work, alongside ICE watch, to muster the capabilities and unity needed to defend us. We review a deeply personal memoir about how one comrade became an organizer through revolution. She’s not the only one. Throughout the issue, DSA leaders share their personal stories of how they came into organization: as unionists, radicals, nurses, field directors, red diaper babies, and single moms involved in the first 100K Drive.

Together, we are a fighting organization.

It’s ours to choose what to do with it.

In Solidarity,

Travis Wayne

Issue 8 Contributors: Maritza S, Robin, Ben A, Tefa G, Jake S, Ezra S, Francesca M, Hayley B-B, Cerena E, Frederick Reiber, Megan Romer

How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 1)

Tefa G, Chapter Co-Chair, Boston DSA:

I went to Labor Notes in 2018 [a national conference for union activists] and met people from DSA there. And then when AOC got elected in 2018, I decided that I wanted to continue to do this work, but I needed to do it somewhere where it is going to work. So I moved to New York City in 2019 and became a fully active member of NYC-DSA.

I believe in this organization because in organized strategic efforts. As a Marxist, I need a platform to organize people who are disorganized, so that we can actually do something. I believe in civil disobedience protests, but it is important to have a plan – knowing your long-term goals, being strategic about your messaging, knowing what the next step is going to be. What you are gonna get people to do next? Who are gonna be involved? What are the repercussions?

Ezra S, Political Education Chair, Worcester DSA:

I knew what socialism was, but never called myself a socialist. I joined DSA in the summer of 2020, in the midst of COVID and the George Floyd protests. After seeing how the Democrats sabotaged Bernie’s campaign, the failure of the privatized healthcare system, and deepening my understanding about the police force’s relationship with the capitalist state, I began to ascribe the socialist label to my own politics. After nearly eleven months in NYC-DSA, I left to join a Marxist-Leninist microsect called the People’s Revolutionary Party, since disbanded.

In 2024, I found myself returning to DSA: to Worcester DSA, specifically, after I had moved to Worcester for school. The genocide in Palestine had motivated me to want to do more and be more active, and I was especially deflated by Clark SJP’s refusal to hold an encampment. I found Worcester DSA through its statements on October 7th, which I thought were incredibly strong and principled, so I joined the chapter to give it another shot. Two years later, DSA has become my sole political home. I cannot believe there was a time in my life when I debated that fact.

Francesca M, National Political Committee

I’m a red diaper baby: I was born into a socialist family. My childhood memories are dotted with candle-lit marches against the Iraq War; my brother leading a rally against education cuts; falling asleep on a plastic chair at the back of the union hall during my dad’s Party meetings; the ’70s feminist chants I sang with my mum in the car. Yet as I entered adolescence, the contradictions between my home life, the goodness and intuitive correct-ness of my family’s beliefs, and the pervasive social consensus around me — the photographs of Che Guevara on our walls, and my best friend describing Cuba as a ‘dictatorship’ with a knowing look — caused me to live with a sort of split consciousness. If asked about my political identity, I choked.

I had to first experience politics before I could articulate my politics. High school catapulted me into the student movement: every government, it seemed, took a turn at slicing off a piece of the public education system, so there was always something to fight for. And so we did: student strikes, occupations of school buildings, assemblies, bus rides to national marches, picket lines, fundraisers, panel discussions. I participated in everything, and brought my friends along too, but I didn’t have the confidence, or the certainty yet, to lead anything. I was organized, but not organizing. I did, however, begin to claim ideas: I read Marx, and anarchist anthologies, and learnt to distinguish between radical and assimilatory kinds of feminism.

After a stint in Students for Justice in Palestine during grad school, the moment that turned me into an organizer in my own right was the May 2021 Unity Intifada triggered by the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and the 11 days war on Gaza. For two weeks, I had thought of nothing but the war and how to stop it. I took time off work, turned my house into a headquarters, learned to give speeches, rehearsed talking points, travelled to every rally, allowed my friends to bring me groceries and make me coffee and offer their couch, talked to a thousand people, painted banners in my backyard, cold-emailed journalists, yelled at other journalists, yelled at politicians, yelled at the sky and God and Joe Biden, and by the time a friend in Gaza sent me videos from the street celebrations of the ceasefire, I knew I was an irreversibly changed person.

Four months later, I joined DSA.

Articles Featured in Issue 8:

1. Lamplighter Brewers Win Union Vote, Becoming the First Union Brewery Statewide

2. Is the Labor Movement Growing or Shrinking? The Incredible Views of the AFL-CIO

3. Bad Blueprints: Worcester Building Trades Challenge Subsidies to Developers

How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 2)

Hayley B.B., National Political Committee:

Growing up, my grandmother would reminisce about her organizing efforts in Southern California: walking side by side with the United Farm Workers, protecting women outside of Planned Parenthood, and mobilizing for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. I did not realize what this would mean to me years later as a 31 year-old socialist union organizer. She passed when I was a freshman in high school, long before I had the chance to ask her all the questions I now wish I could ask. Throughout high school during Obama’s presidency, I found myself angrier about ongoing political issues than my peers, but I never moved my anger to action beyond posting on social media. In 2016, while attending the University of Colorado Boulder, I yearned to get involved with the inspiring movement that was building around the Bernie Sanders campaign, but I never found a place on my campus to do this. I stumbled around working various low-wage jobs while attempting to “soul search” for a career path. When relatives suggested I do politics when I was consumed by the Kavanaugh trials, their suggestion was eye-opening to me. Within a few months, I was working for a Berniecrat legislator at the State Capitol, where I met Lorena Garcia, a current Colorado State Legislator, who in 2019, was running for the US Senate with a grassroots, socialist campaign endorsed by all four Colorado DSA chapters that took a major gamble and hired me as her full-time field director. I developed relationships with socialists all around the state. After the 2020 COVID shutdown ground her campaign to a halt, I plunged in and joined Denver DSA and was elected as electoral chair within months. In that same period, I led a successful organizing campaign with a fellow Denver DSA comrade to unionize the nonprofit we were working at under a Communication Workers of America (CWA) local. I’ve been a union member ever since and currently work as a union organizer for AFT-Oregon.

In 2022, I visited my grandmother’s home country of Slovakia for the first time to learn about my family history and visit her cousin, Martin Bútora, who still lives there. This cousin is a sociologist, writer, and professor. At the time, he was also an active advisor for Zuzana Čaputová, the first woman and youngest person ever elected to be Slovakia’s president as a member of the Progressive Slovakian Political Party. In 1948, as a teenager, he worked as a reporter when the Communist Party took over Slovakia and transitioned it into a Soviet satellite state. By November 1989, he co-founded Public Against Violence, the leading movement of the democratic revolution (The Velvet Revolution) in Slovakia, then served as the human rights advisor for a former president of Slovakia, was appointed the Slovak Ambassador to the United States from 1999 to 2003, and even ran for president of Slovakia in 2004. I spent each night during this trip gathering as much information as I possibly could from him about his own years of organizing experiences and his relationship to my grandmother, which he self-described as someone he wrote back and forth with frequently to discuss the politics of the world, and learn from each other’s organizing in their respective countries. Through our conversations I learned that throughout his lifetime, he had lived under almost every form of government, so I asked a simple question: “What form of government is the best?” He answered immediately, “Democratic socialism is the only form of government that will save our world.” This moment solidified everything for me and made me realize I didn’t come into socialism and organizing on my own; my grandmother has been leading me here the entire time. After my trip to Slovakia, I chanced upon my grandmother’s CWA union pamphlet. I never knew she was also a unionist herself, let alone the same union I first belonged to. This further crystallized what I already knew: my life path has roots much deeper than myself.

Cerena E, National Political Committee:

My parents were newly-immigrated Filipinos to NYC when my mom gave birth to me at the hospital where she worked. Their first jobs as US citizens were as nurses, with my mother being the first union nurse in my family. For most of my childhood, my parents never seemed to be in the same room at the same time unless we were on vacation with extended family. After my brother was born, I was raised nearly full-time by my godparents, both of whom were also nurses. The stories my elders would repeat to my brother and me sought to color my understanding of the world: according to them, by overcoming poverty through sheer grit and hard work, they raised me to embody their aspiration for a better life in the US. We moved to Houston in the summer before I began second grade, when my parents were able to afford a decent standard of living for my family on the combined salaries of two nurses.

To my parents’ chagrin, much of my adolescence was spent questioning whether hard work actually pays off in the real world. I dove into the nonprofit world, part with the naivete of an ambitious high school student authoring a college resume, and part out of the simmering rage I’ve come to associate with unabashed expressions of wealth in the US. I volunteered hundreds of hours at a local food bank, and fundraised, before quickly learning that nonprofits could never address the root of poverty. As long as there existed a class of wealthy donors who would sooner lift a finger to write a grant than confront the ugly economic system through which they enriched themselves, what good was my volunteer labor?

The absence of any competent opposition from the Democratic Party during Trump’s first term left me hopeless until I joined YDSA in my sophomore year of college at the University of Texas, Austin, nearly eight years ago to this day. Armed with clipboards, a YDSA banner, and a Bernie Sanders cardboard cutout, the students who took me on as a future socialist organizer raised my expectations of what we must demand of the world to change it. I joined my first union, the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU), as an undergraduate student worker. Unsurprisingly, my mentors in TSEU were also my mentors in DSA. From campaigns to protect students and university workers in the face of austerity during the COVID-19 pandemic, to electoral campaigns like Heidi Sloan’s run for Congress as an open democratic socialist in Central Texas, I saw myself and the people I organized with in Y/DSA transformed into working class champions of socialism. Now with over a year of experience working as a union nurse, just as my mother once was, and standing toe-to-toe against capitalism on a regular basis — the courage I feel to organize and fight for a just world would not be possible without the thousands of socialists I’m proud to call comrades in DSA.

4. Losing Your Whole World To Win a World – A Review of Defiance by Loubna Mrie

5. Emmanuel College Dining Hall Workers Win First Contract with UNITE HERE Local 26

6. Boston Labor Unites to Face ICE As Minneapolis Leads First General Strike in 80 Years

How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 3)

Megan Romer, National Co-Chair:

My first official title in DSA was 100K Captain, during the original 2021 100K Drive. I’d started organizing with my local chapter, Southwest Louisiana DSA, a little over a year before, but knew quickly that I had a lot of catching up to do — though I had been in activist spaces before, becoming an organizer (and becoming a socialist in any meaningful way) was new to me. My job for the first several months: snacks. (Self-imposed.) In that year, because of my comrades, I’d gone from a wobbly “Elizabeth Warren is probably the compromise choice we need” voter to a full-time Bernie 2020 super-volunteer, helped my chapter pivot to digital organizing during the pandemic, and worked on the leadership team of our chapter’s massive mutual aid response to Hurricanes Laura and Delta.

When the 100K Drive rolled around, my chapter’s leadership team, exhausted from our ongoing hurricane response, asked if I’d be willing to be the 100K Captain, our chapter’s lead for recruiting efforts, and I nervously accepted — I wasn’t sure I was ready for a formal position, but I stepped in. Our little bayou-side chapter grew by nearly double during that drive, solidifying a Top 3 spot on the chapter leaderboard and the legendary pink prize hat for several of our members. We had a distinct advantage, in that we were actively working on a campaign that was extremely easy to tap people into in the short term. Where we struggled was, of course, retention.

No chapter in the country figured out the magic potion that retained members through the Biden presidency. With Trump out of office and the daily news “back to normal” (such as it was), combined with the long tail of pandemic lockdowns, our numbers dwindled — we didn’t get all the way to 100K during that drive. It took years of rebuilding, combined with obvious external political conditions (some of which were of DSA’s own making, like the Mamdani campaign) to finally hit that big number, but we did. And now we’re here, we made it! But the work isn’t done. A DSA that is able to stop massive wars, shut down the supply chain to demand working class rights, protect our most vulnerable, and build a real democracy? That’s a DSA in the millions, and those millions need to be activated, trained, and ready to take on that fight.

We still haven’t solved the equation of retention, but when I look back at my own arc – just a regular slightly weird and artsy working-class mom who went from left-lib to communist through the social practice of collective organizing and collective learning. The question of how to pull people into that social practice — to make folks feel empowered about organizing and enthusiastic about learning both skills and theory — is one I’m still working on but which I try to bring back to my own experience. You are probably also working on this question – how to make DSA stick – and I’m so glad to be in this organization to work on it together. To the next 100K!

The post Announcing Issue 8: DSA at 100K appeared first on Working Mass.

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Welcome to the new website of the DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group. Many thanks to Devon Bussell, Ian Hyzy, Matthew Carroll, Ron Hogan, and content editors Maxine Phillips and Russell Fox, who have worked many volunteer hours to bring all of our activities and resources together. This site is a work in progress, and we hope you’ll give us feedback and ideas for what you want to see and potential writers and topics. Look at our categories and let us know if you want to write something for us. Query us at religioussocialism@dsacommittees.org first. —Ed.

Today, as the Religious Right threatens the rights and lives of so many in this country and uses religion as an excuse to wage endless war, we’re heartened by the renewed spirit of progressive religious folk.  They may not all be socialists, but they know in which direction their moral compass points. This article from the Guardian describes some of what’s going on.

The post Righting the Wrongs of the Christian Right appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

As DSA gets stronger, and as we get better at winning elections, more candidates will seek our endorsement. In some chapters, this has reached the point that multiple DSA members are interested in running for the same seat, and they all seek the chapter’s endorsement. This has not happened yet in our chapter, but it is only a matter of time, and we should be prepared for that to happen. In this piece, I will explain why we should view the DSA endorsement process as the determination of who the sole DSA candidate is in a given race, and expect all members to abide by the result.

Liberalism in Electoral Work

Many people in DSA, especially those of us with prior electoral experience, come from liberal organizing backgrounds. As a result, we have learned various assumptions about how politics works, and elections in particular. One of these assumptions is based on the fact that everyone has the legal right to run for any office (as long as they meet the legal qualifications). Comrades who still have a liberal view of electoral work view the decision to run for office as an individual decision. A candidate may confer with their family, friends, and political allies before deciding to run, but the decision is still made by the individual. Just as the liberal ideological framework in general privileges the capitalist class, this individual decision-making privileges the wealthy¹. A well-off candidate, with well-off family and friends, can easily start a campaign as an individual and raise enough money to be taken seriously by institutional actors. However, if the candidate is not well-off, and most of their friends and family are not, then they will have a much harder time raising enough money as an individual to be taken seriously. While there are individual socialists who are well-off, in order to build a strong socialist project, we need a scalable model that can work for working class candidates regardless of personal wealth.

Part of the socialist model of organizing, whether electoral or otherwise, is that major campaigns do not start as a result of individual decisions; they start from collective decisions made by a party². In order for electoral work to be a viable terrain of struggle for the socialist movement, we need to view the decision to launch an electoral campaign through this lens. Running a socialist candidate for office is a decision made by the organization, not by the individual candidate. As we work together to convert ourselves from atomized liberal individuals to members of a socialist organization, we need to identify these elements of liberal ideology and replace them with socialist frameworks. Granted, any decision made by the organization will start with an idea proposed by an individual member, but we need to draw a distinction between the origin of the idea and the point of decision: while any member can (and should) suggest that they or someone else would be a good candidate to run for any particular office, only the organization makes the decision about who will run for which office.

Socialist Framework in Practice

Applying the socialist framework to electoral work, the decision of whether or not to run a campaign is made by the organization, and then it is a campaign by the organization, not by an individual. In a cadre organization (an organization that only has active members and no paper members), this would mean that all the members would actively support the campaign (to the extent possible given their commitments to other campaigns). However, DSA is not a cadre organization, so there is no requirement that everyone support the campaign. Regardless, just like with any other campaign, we would expect all members to at least refrain from acting in opposition to the campaign, and running against a DSA-endorsed candidate would certainly count as acting in opposition to the campaign.

Because we cannot instantly replace the liberal framework with the socialist framework, we should expect that there will still be some electoral campaigns that start from individual decisions rather than organizational decisions. Thus, we will have some members who continue their campaigns even if they do not get the chapter’s endorsement. Over time, this should become less common, but in the short term, we should at least make sure that we don’t have members actively opposing the chapter’s campaigns by running against endorsed candidates.

Why do we run candidates?

There are multiple different perspectives on why we run candidates for elected office. The Bernstein model is to elect socialist majorities in legislative bodies and pass laws that will transition to socialism. The Miliband model assumes that the capitalist class will resist such laws, leading to a revolutionary rupture. Other models assume that the capitalist class will initiate a crackdown before we can elect a socialist majority, so the non-electoral wings of the party need to be as strong as possible before the crackdown comes. In these models, socialists in elected office need to serve as tribunes of the people and/or organizers, using their office to strengthen the other wings of the party.

While these perspectives have significant disagreements, they share one common feature: socialist elected officials will have to take actions that are risky to their political career but serve the interests of the party. In order to make this decision, the SIO will have to prioritize the interests of the organization above their individual political career. While we can never be absolutely confident that any SIO will put the interests of the party above their political career in all situations, we can at least implement a filter to identify some of the potential candidates who will prioritize their own political career: requiring a commitment to abide by the result of the endorsement process. Continuing to run even if the chapter endorses a different candidate would be an act of prioritizing one’s individual political career over the interests of the organization. Thus, someone who refuses to commit to end their campaign if the chapter endorses a different candidate for that race is a candidate who would be more likely to prioritize their individual political career over the interests of the organization in other contexts as well.

Instrumental case for democracy

However, prioritizing one’s individual political career is not the only reason why a candidate might be inclined to continue running even if someone else gets the endorsement. The candidate may simply believe that they are the best possible candidate for the organization to run for that office. Presumably, all of our candidates believe this, because they would not have agreed to run otherwise. However, believing oneself to be the best choice for the organization to run for an office does not mean that one should continue to run after the organization decides to run someone else, for the simple reason that everyone can be wrong sometimes.

Although we believe that democratic decision-making is inherently good, it also has instrumental value: Because we can all be wrong, a single person making a decision always has a risk of making the wrong decision. However, if the decision is made by a vote among multiple people who all have sufficient knowledge of the situation that they are more likely to be correct than not, then the group decision is much more likely to be correct than any one individual. The advantage provided by democracy is even greater when we engage in deliberation prior to the vote, sharing the relevant knowledge that each of us have, and then test our positions through carrying out the democratical decision, expanding our pool of available knowledge. 

In any major decisions that we make as an organization, we all need the humility to accept that the group decision is more likely to be correct than any one of us is as an individual. This principle applies just as much to choosing which candidate to run as it does to any other decision about a campaign. Thus, even though a candidate believes themself to be the best choice for the organization to run for a particular office, humility with respect to democratic decision-making and prioritizing the interests of the organization over the candidate’s individual political career still require that the candidate abide by the results of the endorsement process and not run if a different candidate is endorsed.

by Eric Herde

1. “Capitalist class” is not a synonym for “people with more money”, and in this case it’s technically the level of wealth of the candidate and their family and friends that matters, not their actual relationship to the means of production. ︎
2. Or party-like organization, such as DSA ︎

And beginning the feminist conversation with myself

This is an opinion piece written by an individual member and was not voted on by membership. Opinion pieces from members do not reflect the opinions of other members and are not chapter approved statements.

2/10. Would not recommend. This book plays up some of the worst stereotypes and effects of white American culture, and it does so through horrific themes. Suicide and incest are pervasively spoonfed to you throughout the novel in ways that make me sick. Hate that. Hated the book.

Unfortunately, Irving’s emotional jiu-jitsu and exploration of dark and morbid topics is supposedly part of the fun. He’s been praised for his matter-of-fact presentations of heavy themes. Failure to find stability in a family, the loss of loved ones to a plane crash, and suicide are all explored to magnify the absurdity of loss’s effects on us. There is a tremendous depth to his works at times. This is, in theory, the work of someone who truly understands the human condition.

But come on. He doesn’t need to romanticize everything morbid. I don’t know what incest looks like with two consenting adults (as is so tastefully portrayed in the novel), but it doesn’t look like that. I mean, I would know. I haven’t spent the last year grappling with the internalized misogyny my family instilled in itself to keep victims quiet just to think the book was accurate. Irving barely explores the difficulty of finding, documenting, and addressing households affected by incestual abuse—no matter how often that abuse happens. Sure, I wasn’t directly impacted, but I had my close encounters. I knew enough to know how it worked. If nothing happened, it wasn’t going to be talked about. An odd interaction with an uncle; a strange drawing with familiar faces- that’s nothing. And if something did happen? If an abuser was amongst the family again? If you told someone what was happening? Don’t worry. It’s taken care of. Don’t. Talk. About. It.

It won’t be reported.

And if it is, what happens in the courtroom stays in the courtroom. There will be no family dinner-table discussion. 

Look, all I’m saying is if John Irving is gonna discuss the perverted nature of our society, he should do it right. I’m aware most of his writings begin about a decade or two before the Epstein class really started to dig into our cultural framework, but I just think that’s no excuse. For me, once what was going on really started to click, I began to ask questions. Like a half-decent writer, I tried to make sense of what was happening. I tried to understand it so that I could talk about it correctly. Obviously, that’s been difficult and so far unsuccessful. I still feel the effects of asking those questions in myself, in the ways I shut down. There’s no correct way to talk about it when there’s no one willing to talk.

So I guess I’m just upset that I don’t think Irving accounted for that in this novel—in any of his novels. I mean, he has like 20 of them and the majority portray incest, so I think this might just be his thing and not something he’s “unafraid to talk about”. And he still hasn’t taken the time to get it right. He talks about it the way most people misinterpret Lolita. As if it’s almost a beautiful thing in his misunderstood eyes. But whatever. He’s gonna get the praise he’s gonna get.

It feels like Irving has this self-righteous air around the subject, like he understands it differently and can therefore talk about it differently. And it’s frustrating because, well, I can’t talk about it at all. I don’t mean within my family. I mean because I can’t. I can’t get myself to talk about it. I can’t talk about it because my family’s conditioning to keep us quiet worked. Every conversation about gender-based violence; every conversation about defining feminism; every conversation where I feel like it could come up, I avoid. And if I don’t avoid it, I walk away shaking. Having been through what I’ve been through, within and without my family, it’s almost easier to be victimized and to dissociate than to go through the process of analyzing what happened. I was trained to be more afraid of how I’ll be perceived if I talk about it than of actually being abused.

But

I can’t keep watching my mom turn into a scared little girl whenever her brother’s name is mentioned. I can’t avoid my cousin anymore because I don’t know how to ask if he meant to send me what he did. I can’t keep watching my aunt relive finding those notebooks at 15 and reading her own name in them. I can’t keep asking myself if the decades-long family friends know how their daughter was talked about; that when I hit puberty, my body was compared to hers; that her sister was written about in those notebooks too. I can’t hear more stories from other women in my family about the patriarchs within it. And now that it’s “over,” I can’t watch while the older generations fight to keep these things undiscovered, as if there was never a judge or jury involved—to pretend they haven’t paid extra for people to have personal security during their prison sentence. I can’t learn about them lying to protect the abusers. I can’t do this anymore. So, so much has been buried under the rug that any discussion was suffocated before those most hurt could get peace.

So I’ll learn to speak up. At home, and out in the world.

I haven’t been much of a feminist yet; I’m just now truly addressing my internalized misogyny. In recent years I’ve become much more aware of what it means to me to be a woman: This comes at the same time that I’ve begun to face the world as a mother. This new understanding of the world has been difficult to accept, and something I spent the last year trying to avoid in the chapter. 

No matter how much I didn’t feel ready, being asked repeatedly to figure out childcare, and to attend male-dominated events to make other non-cis men comfortable, and experiencing unintentional-yet-outright sexism eventually led me to “accept my fate.” I let the project I was slowly, privately, and personally working through become a bandaid for others’ bruised egos, all while knowing I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t know what lines were where, or how they were being crossed. I didn’t say anything. As I helped push part of this conversation within SLDSA, I found that I’m still unwilling to actually talk about it. I’m unable to vocalize my thoughts without feeling deeply uncomfortable; presenting the Centering Children Resolution—itself born from my first time really confronting what feminism means to me—is the most emotional and distressing experience I’ve had during my time in the chapter. 

That distress was needed. I’ve spent years terrified of how every word I said and wrote would sound. Addressing these things within the chapter carried the same emotional weight that I would be buried under addressing them at home. After passing the resolution, the discomfort grew, and I couldn’t sit in silence anymore. Now was the time to address those ghosts which lingered in the hallways of my childhood home. I’m beginning to open the conversation at home, and I’m finally ready to talk out loud. To identify myself as another angry feminist, and actually sit and think through what that means to me: politically, spiritually, personally. Beginning with a book first recommended to me by a family member at 14, I’m on my way to developing a clear feminist framework to bring forward to the world.

In the meantime, I hope Irving comes to actually understand how this plays out in a home; what it means to be a child raised in a family with strange rumors. The Hotel New Hampshire does not capture it right, and what a shame that is. He really could’ve given life to an often hidden conversation. What a waste. The rest of the novel is fine though, if you were wondering. 

The post An Overdue Review of The Hotel New Hampshire first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

A union can democratize your workplace, protecting you against at-will employment, ensuring just cause, and raising standards for all workers.

The post Your boss is lying when he says unions are no longer necessary appeared first on EWOC.

DSA has become an important vehicle for climate politics. A new book uses the campaign for a New York state climate law as a lens for understanding the organization and its approach to the crisis.

The post Feel the Burn appeared first on Democratic Left.

State Rep. Rabb has fought for working-class Philadelphians in the legislature for years. Now, he’s taking his fight to DC to continue the struggle for housing for all, universal healthcare, and for real democracy in America! DSA is incredibly proud to endorse Rep. Rabb and make sure our voices are heard in the halls of power!

Rep. Rabb is our second Congressional endorsement this cycle. He has some tough opponents, and AIPAC and other dark money groups are already boosting his opponents. Philadelphia DSA has built up a powerful canvassing operation, but we can all help!

Rep. Rabb is joining Oliver Larkin on our Congressional slate. It’s going to take a lot of us standing together to bring more voices and votes into the halls of power.

Rep. Rabb is part of a slate of candidates in the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising project!

The author of "Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993" discusses how her theory of an “Inside/Outside” strategy applies to the Mamdani era.

The post Let the Record Show: Democratic Left Interviews Sarah Schulman appeared first on Democratic Left.

The Ithaca Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America along with Mayor of the City of Ithaca Robert Cantelmo condemn the silence of New York Congressman Josh Riley from District19 during the national horror that Americans were subjected to on April 7th, 2026. While New Yorkers lived through a modern day Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if President Trump's threats of a nuclear Holocaust in Iran were genuine or merely an insane and unforgivable bargaining strategy, Congressman Josh Riley was silent. He did not issue a statement condemning the President’s declaration that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” - a clear and explicit threat of a nuclear strike or similar catastrophic event. Nor did Congressman Riley condemn Trump’s promises on Easter Sunday to destroy civilian infrastructure, a war crime in and of itself under international law.

A leader in this moment should have spoken out. A leader should have condemned the fear that the Trump administration was wielding as a weapon against all people of conscience, and communicated the steps that were necessary to keep the country and the world safe. Nothing short of a call to impeach or to invoke the 25th amendment will do. Congressman Riley would not have had to stand alone. As of writing, 50 house Democrats, led by DSA allies Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are meeting the moment and speaking out against war, showing this country what being a true opposition party looks like. Even Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Representatives Kevin Kiley of California and Nathanial Moran of Texas, and far-right commentator Tucker Carlson condemned Trump's threats while Josh Riley stayed silent.

Ithaca Mayor and member of the Ithaca DSA, Robert Cantelmo, had this to say about the events of April 7th: “Authority to declare war is clearly vested with Congress under Article I. The president’s operation in Iran is illegal and risks destabilizing the region. Worse still, his behavior threatens international norms, risks escalation, and is putting our service members and the innocent people of Iran in harm’s way. I know Congressman Riley shares my deep respect for the Constitution and I urge him to speak out against this war of choice."

Perhaps Congressman Riley’s reluctance to take a stand against MAGA fascism and our illegal war in Iran is rooted in the fact that as of February 17th, 2026, Track Aipac has found that Josh Riley has taken $882,674 from Pro-Israel Lobby groups and their donors. The breakdown of this money being $119,061 through their PACs and $763,613 through their lobby donors. While 78% of Israelis are currently in favor of this illegal war of choice by the Trump administration, Congressman Riley would do well to note more than 61% of Americans are against this war, and most relevant to a Democratic congressman, 88% of Democrats believe striking Iran in the first place was the wrong decision.

This is a moment of utter moral clarity. There are those who understand the President must be removed immediately, and there are those who are afraid to uphold their sworn oath to the Constitution. The Ithaca Democratic Socialists of America are prepared to meet this moment. If Congressman Riley will not - either due to his campaign contributions, or to calculated pandering to Trump’s MAGA base - then in NY-19, the Democratic Socialists of America must become the opposition party that our country deserves. Join us and help take back our democracy, with the Congressman’s help, or without it.