Statement on November Election Results

Today we wake up to a world more in dire need of our solidarity than ever before. As votes continue to be counted across the United States, it becomes more and more clear that the Democratic Party is not the opposition we need or deserve to beat back the far-right.

 

For months, we raised the flag on the need to address working peoples’ needs, their fears, and especially their calls for their families to stop being murdered. The Democratic Party chose its donors, pundits, and the ruling class’ project in imperialism.

 

Who will choose to stand up for workers here and abroad? Who will stand up for healthcare, housing, and education for all? Who will stand up for our bodily autonomy, our civil rights, our democracy, and our planet?

 

Under Joe Biden, the United States has prioritized maintaining a massive military budget, expanded oil drilling, racist immigration policies, and a genocide in Gaza. The Harris’ campaign chose to continue (and even expand upon) many of the same policies put forward by an unpopular Biden administration and is now answering for it. Under a second Trump administration the threat of repression and consolidation of power has never been greater.

 

Without a working class alternative to the Democratic Party, and one that organizes in our homes and in our workplaces, we will fall further behind.

 

The Democratic Socialists of America believe that we can, as a united working class, beat the ruling class and build a better world. Just last night we defended rent control in Hoboken, NJ in an overwhelming victory. DSA elected socialists to office in New York, Oregon, Georgia, and Kentucky. DSA-supported ballot measures won massive victories expanding abortion rights in Montana, Nevada and Arizona. Nebraska and Missouri expanded sick leave, raised the minimum wage and cemented labor rights. Michigan Representative and DSA member Rashida Tlaib won a landslide re-election in a district Harris lost. It is clear that policies and candidates that offer genuine opposition to the far-right continue to win, and Democrats choose not to be on the side of the working people’s demands.

 

These next four years the far-right will be emboldened, but just as they ascend the need for political alternative will grow increasingly clear.

 

Will you join us? Will you stand with us as we face incredible headwinds in 2025?

 

Will you join the fight for our lives, our neighbors and our planet?

 

Join DSA

###

 

The post Statement on Election of Donald Trump first appeared on North NJ DSA.

Following a grueling presidential campaign and a gut-wrenching election night, our worst fears have been realized.

Donald Trump will once again be the next president of the United States.

The scale of Kamala Harris’s loss has been stunning. Not only did she manage to lose all seven swing states in the Electoral College, she is also very likely the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the popular vote to a Republican in twenty years.

Harris deserves much of the blame for Democrats’ defeat. She replaced an unpopular incumbent at the last minute, and instead of running on a radically different platform than her predecessor, she stuck to Biden’s extremely unambitious strategy. She refused to break with Biden on Israel despite the dire moral imperative of ending a genocide and the severe unpopularity of his position. She campaigned with far-right Republican politicians instead of shoring up support among the Democratic base. Perhaps most importantly, she failed to promise that anything of substance would change if she were elected president at a time when most Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.

Despite the valiant and selfless efforts of millions of progressives and socialists to prevent Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Harris made it clear from the beginning that her campaign took the Left’s support for granted, and she repeatedly ignored its warnings that her centrist platform would alienate key constituencies.

The most radical utterance of the campaign, Tim Walz’s impromptu October 9 remark that the electoral college “needs to go”, was immediately shot down by the Harris campaign. The Democrats’ pathological aversion to risk has made their platform all but untenable, especially now that Republicans are on the verge of cementing long-term control over our broken electoral and political system.

Even though Harris’s tack to the center is clearly to blame for her defeat, the Left will suffer relentless attacks over the next four years. Democrats will use the party’s brief flirtation with mild social democracy in 2020 as a scapegoat, claiming the positions Harris was “forced” to take to compete in the primary that year poisoned her image with moderate voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, have plans to unleash a different type of attack altogether.

***

Over the coming months, there will be thousands of articles in the liberal press detailing the exact kinds of harm Trump is likely to inflict on our country and the world during his second term. All of it needs to be taken seriously. He has promised to pursue personal vendettas and to use the military to crush protests. He seeks to purge the federal bureaucracy and administrative state of competent leadership and radically transform the national economy to suit himself and his supporters among a certain subset of the capitalist class. He plans to target millions of immigrants and refugees using a vast militarized police apparatus. He is likely to renege on his promise not to sign a law banning abortion nationwide. He and his inner circle have enthusiastically supported and even proposed expanding Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. He has pledged to actively sabotage the fight against climate change, primarily out of spite. And on and on and on it goes.

This is a grave moment in the history of American democracy. Trump will use the power of the state in unprecedented ways to target his perceived enemies and to entrench right-wing dominance over the American political system. Many of the freedoms we currently enjoy under the Constitution are likely to be curtailed, and some will be abolished altogether.

Democrats have spent the past five years assuring us that there is no “other side” to a Trump victory. Either the anti-Trump coalition wins, or democracy dies. There is no contingency, no plan to rally against the onslaught of nightmares we’ve been warned endlessly against.

And yet, we are still here.

***

The American far right is gleefully preparing for what they see as their final victory, and much of their strategy depends on intimidating their enemies into silence. They want the Left to go into hiding, to flee the country, to stop speaking out for fear of retribution, and to abandon the political sphere to right-wing extremism.

In the frenzied time between this catastrophe of an election and Inauguration Day, we must guard against overestimating the power of the far right. It is easy to imagine that they are capable of anything, and the vague perception that they can get away with literally any crime and ignore all existing law will pre-emptively demobilize opposition to the incoming administration.

As soon as Trump takes the Oath of Office, the far-right will be hampered by its own unpopularity, infighting, and incompetence. Trump will surround himself with the same sycophantic and profoundly incompetent medley of toadies and conmen, and they will spend much of their time propping up a man who does not have the faculties to govern.

Trump’s return to the White House is likely to be a farce of Ronald Reagan’s second term, during which an ailing president increasingly unable to lead was puppeted by a ghoulish cast of right-wing charlatans. Unfortunately, Trump’s prospective cabinet makes Reagan’s rotating cast of misfits look like Boy Scouts. We don’t know exactly what horrible things they will try to do once the MAGA right grips the levers of power once again, but we must prepare however we can.

***

Liberalism has proven once and for all that it cannot save American democracy. Neither Biden nor Harris considered any serious reforms to our economic and political system, not even vastly popular ones. The multiracial working class will bear the brunt of their failure to act. The only alternative to the coming barbarism is to organize.

We must join together in opposition to Trump’s efforts to undermine American democracy. The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, and it is committed to opposing fascism and supporting the working people of all nations. There are hundreds of other progressive and left-wing groups across this country that will take up the fight to defend our communities and our people. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, we have no option but to protect one another.

The coming years will be difficult. Laws will be written to target the most vulnerable among us. Democratic structures will be damaged and will not easily bounce back. Regional and global conflicts will intensify in ways that cannot be reversed. Environmental damage will be wrought that cannot be undone. People will die who cannot be brought back to life.

But we are still here, and we still deserve a better world. We have no choice but to press on.

The post We are still here appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

By Adam S

DSA is an organizational chimera–– a delightful and dazzling yet fragile and baffling assemblage of different pieces all in one–– and I think we should talk about it.

Allow me to explain.

Socialists have historically been divided between those who believe socialism can be guided along, or even instituted, by governments, and those who believe socialism must be built by working class organizations made up of working class people. In the nineteenth century, these hostilities were on full display in the rifts that broke out between social democratic parties who sought a parliamentary road to socialism through a combination of legislation and trade union activities and anarchist-oriented syndicalists who thought that, "by organizing industrially," they could form "the structure of the new society within the shell of the old," to quote the Industrial Workers of the World. 

Democratic Socialists of America does not fit neatly into either of these camps. On the one hand, we are not a syndicalist organization, and much of our membership is not directly based in the trade union movement. But neither are we a political party, though we do endorse candidates and intervene in elections. Instead, we operate on many political fronts simultaneously –– we are a union incubator, a civil rights group, and an electoral machine all at once. In this way we are an organizational chimera: multiple different pieces all assembled into one collective, rapidly growing, rapidly changing body.

This also causes DSA to function as a social network for the Left. Those who recognize the need for a change in our economic system join DSA at a higher rate than than any other socialist organization in the United States, learn about and connect with similarly minded people, and, in the best cases, engage in the hard work of organizing for a better world. This has the benefit of imbuing our work with a coherent alternative to neoliberal or reactionary thinking and is an invaluable means of identifying the social origin of many ills that affect modern life under the capitalist system. It is also the primary aspect that unifies the disparate pieces that make up DSA. 

However, DSA’s function as a social network means that socialists are often connected to campaigns through DSA, rather than in or by DSA. This causes problems with retaining focus on DSA’s organizational core, and in the long run this jeopardizes the substantial gains that DSA has made in membership and influence since 2016. 

Members joining an organization who end up working for other organizations do not easily retain their original, rather than inherited, responsibilities. This is just a description, not an attack on the good work that is being done: yours truly is certainly guilty of this to a certain extent. But it means that some appendages to DSA take on an importance that can be substantially different from work that builds DSA. 

This conundrum has affected the work of some working groups within DSA, including the Labor Working Group. The Labor Working Group has provided support to an array of efforts in the Triangle area and beyond, including supporting CWA workers on strike, supporting REI workers organizing to unionize and gain recognition, providing a forum for grad students at UNC and Duke to connect with fellow socialists, and providing extensive support to the Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, or CAUSE, perhaps the single most exciting and dynamic grassroots Amazon union in the entire country. 

At the same time, the Labor Working Group has struggled to retain membership to develop its core competencies, leaving its main leaders under-supported and over-worked on internal DSA matters even as their members plug in and rapidly spin off to provide consistent support to external campaigns. 

To provide one concrete example of how these contradictions harm DSA’s ability to do even its most important work, at the very same time that CAUSE began collecting cards to take their campaign to the next level, the key members of the Labor Working Group, which has had a priority resolution in force providing invaluable support to workers on that campaign for almost a year, had so little support that they were considering dissolving. Even now, its future remains uncertain, and even if the work is reshaped in new ways, the conflicts between internal growth and external organizing will likely remain. Again, the problem here is not with those who took on leadership responsibilities within the working group, but that so few did. 

So what is the path forward? How can we make this chimera into something more elegant? A few solutions have been offered. Some have suggested that the working group model is out of date and that encouraging people to meet regularly on general thematic topics like “labor,” “socialist feminism,” or “ecosocialism” rather than specific campaigns risks burning people out. There is some truth to the idea that committees should be task-oriented. Yet at the same time, that diagnosis does not address the wider problem of DSA being a “forum through” rather than a “hub of” organizing. Saying our dear chimera should have functional pieces does not itself knit it into a more unified body.

Others have suggested that members should be doing more as workers, organizing directly in their own workplaces and communities around specific ways to build power. This suggestion is especially relevant for contexts like union building or tenant organizing where the task is very specific. 

Yet not all workers are able to organize in this way, either because they do not have the capacity to organize their tenants or are not employed somewhere that gives the ability to organize. This means that the exhortation of members to organize does not always make sense. Workers join an organization because of what they can do for the organization, not just themselves. Saying our wonderful chimera’s individual pieces should, amoeba-like, have their own organizational ecosystems, is at odds with why it was ever assembled. 

What is common to both these approaches is arguably the idea that solving this problem–– making DSA a hub rather than a forum–– will require a change in the relation of DSA members to DSA itself, an alteration in the significance of what members believe they are joining for. It will require that members come to understand that they are joining DSA at least as much for themselves as for other people, and to change their conditions, as the conditions of their fellow workers. It will also require that they understand that DSA does not exist by fiat –– it is only empowered when we do the hard work of strengthening it ourselves.

This entails becoming an organization that conceives of collective solidarity as also a personal act placing each individual’s own experiences alongside those of other members in the movement for socialism, and not as external to, or supportive of, some other movement. The paradox is, seen in this way, arguably that DSA members must see ourselves as members of the socialist movement in the way we live our lives, not as abstract bringers of support to something beyond or above us, not as representatives bringing some exalted sense of “socialism” to fellow workers in our communities, but as individuals bringing the energy of solidarity into all that we do for DSA as well as through it. 

The hybridity of DSA can also be a source of strength. By building a community of socialists engaged in struggle across many fronts, we can channel our energies collectively to transform our communities, our unions, and our political systems for the better. We can connect the struggles our members face across different arenas into a single unified movement, and we can live lives that give expression to our goals in many ways rather than pigeonholing ourselves into narrow manifestations of political engagement. 

In doing this, DSA can realize the promise it holds of being a way for workers to build collective power with one another and build a new world within the shell of the old, made–– like a chimera–– out of many pieces, the pieces of our daily lives.

Every four years, working class Utahns are faced with the same “options” for president, a conservative Democrat creeping further right, a deranged Republican set on crushing the working class and marginalized people on behalf of our oppressors, and a few minor party candidates more interested in validating their vanity than actually winning. Since the undemocratic electoral college makes it so Utah will almost certainly go to Trump, the national Democratic Party has completely abandoned Utahns who reject the fascist Republican party. Similarly, the ultra-right supermajority in the State Legislature, which is filled to the brim with landlords (including Sen. Kirk Cullimore, who evicts more people than anyone in the state of Utah) and open neo-Nazis (including Rep. Trevor Lee, who self identifies as a “Deseret Nationalist,” a Mormon-flavored brand of Nazism), has undemocratically gerrymandered state and congressional districts so they choose their voters, and working class Utahns are not actually represented in the government. Because of this, the Democratic Party in Utah has stopped even pretending to try. These choices seem impossible, and for many working class Utahns, voting doesn’t seem worth the effort.

If elected, both Donald Trump and Republican gubernatorial candidate Spencer Cox would be a disaster for the working class of Utah and attack the people of Salt Lake City for the crime of being more progressive than the corrupt state government. As described in “Project 2025,” the extreme right Republicans plan to end civil rights for minority groups, destroy the already weak social safety net and public education, eliminate bodily autonomy for women and queer people, poison the environment, dangerously deregulate businesses, and crush dissent and target immigrants and people of color through an authoritarian police state commanded by a Trump dictatorship. Trump and the State Legislature have vocally supported this plan, and Cox silently subscribes to it. Trump, Cox, and the State Legislature want to make Utah unlivable for everyone who is not a wealthy, white, cisgender/heterosexual, Mormon man.

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are no real alternative. They have embraced Trump’s racist border wall and Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Harris would repeat destructive policies carried out under previous administrations like mass deportations and global imperialist warfare. She has alienated the progressives and young people who made her vice president in the first place to court the most reactionary forces in our country, such as war-criminal Dick Cheney, architect of the illegal Iraq war and overseer of the torture and abuse of thousands of Iraqis and political dissidents within America. She has no intention of ceasing oil drilling or fracking, and likely will not reverse the deregulation of businesses that defined the Trump years that has made even our basic needs like food more dangerous for consumers. The threat of a Trump presidency is possible because of her deliberate political choices. Should Trump win, it will be entirely the fault of Kamala Harris and the Democratic party that enabled her behavior.

Both candidates uncritically support Israel’s genocide of Gaza. Both candidates serve the ruling class at the expense of the working class. This impossible  “choice” is why millions across the country and thousands here in Utah are itching for an alternative.

Salt Lake DSA has made no recommendation to our members on who to vote for president. Many of our members are voting for candidates that support Palestinian liberation, and some are plugging their nose and voting tactically to defeat Trump. How our members choose to vote is the least important thing Salt Lake DSA members will do over the next four years.

As democratic socialists, we understand that the multi-racial working class has been on the defensive for far too long, and it is time we as a class go on the offensive against our oppressors. We reject the false dichotomy of the Republican and Democratic factions of the ruling class. The ruling class wants us to feel hopeless and alienated from each other– and we reject that as well. We choose solidarity. We understand that only a mass movement of the working and marginalized majority can fundamentally change our lives for the better. We must organize in our workplaces, our apartment buildings, our schools, and our communities. We must organize unions and strikes to build worker power in a state that has the 5th lowest union density in the country. We must carry out campaigns to build working class power and defend our rights outside of and from the corrupt State Legislature. We must organize boycotts against Israeli goods, and work to overturn Utah’s unconstitutional ban on citizens’ right to criticize the genocidal state of Israel. We must hold protests, sit-ins, and marches. Everything we must do as a class to achieve our liberation will require powerful labor and tenant unions, student groups, parent groups, and community coalitions. It will also require running more candidates for office that understand the problems the working class faces and want to build a party of our own to solve those problems.

Salt Lake DSA is building a party that fights for real working class democracy, abolition of the carceral state and white supremacy, dignified union jobs and wages, Medicare for all, education for all, housing for all, a just transition to a climate conscious economy, an end to the U.S. war machine and exploitation of the Global South, a free Palestine – and the transformation of our economy from capitalist exploitation to collective liberation. Workers in Utah deserve more; we deserve a party of our own, and Salt Lake DSA is building the party the multi-racial working class of Utah deserve.

Regardless of what happens or who wins tonight, the sun will rise tomorrow morning; and as long as the sun continues to rise, Salt Lake DSA will continue to organize and fight for the working class and all marginalized people in Utah. Join us in fighting for our future.

The post We Choose Solidarity: Salt Lake DSA Statement on the 2024 Election first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

by Gumbo V.

I had the honor of attending the 2024 Socialism Conference over Labor Day weekend. Socialism Conference has been hosted by Haymarket Books since the collapse of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in 2019, before which the conference effectively served as an activist conference for members of the ISO. Since being taken up by Haymarket, however, the conference has taken on a more pluralistic, cross-tendency character that is rare among the western left. DSA members took on myriad roles at the conference this year, from speaking on panels such as Tenant Organizing and Social Housing for All and Bodily Autonomy and Trans Rights: Undoing Fascism at Its Roots, to hosting an entire pre-conference session focused on DSA the morning before the conference began in earnest. Alongside national DSA leaders and rank-and-file members were such big names in the US left as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Vincent Bevins, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Noura Erakat, Ashley Dawson, Linda Sarsour, Ilan Pappé, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Nick Estes, Daniel Denvir, Sarah Jaffe, and so many more—a veritable who’s-who of the western left and many of our international counterparts.

My conference experience conveyed three theoretical throughlines that set the tone of most discussions and perhaps demonstrate the dominant focus of the western Left’s theorizing: abolition, imperialism, and Palestine. From abolitionist geographers Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, to renowned anti-Zionists Ilan Pappé and Noura Erakat, the dozen and a half livestreamed keynotes of the conference hit on these three themes more than anything else, and they were woven throughout many of the smaller, unstreamed sessions as well. At first, I found the centrality of abolition a bit surprising given the overwhelming focus in the past 11+ months specifically on Palestine and the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza, with a secondary focus on the 2024 US election cycle and the interplay between the two. However, as Gilmore’s first session, Capital and Abolition, elaborated, abolition and the carceral nature of the state is so bound up in the many evils which we fight, that even when we are talking about other topics, we are often also talking about abolition.

My surprise also comes in the context of the four years since the Summer 2020 Uprisings for Black Lives—the Left has thus far failed to grapple effectively with the aftermath of that tumultuous year, nor its implications for our collective future. A recent article in n+1 Magazine reflecting on the 2024 DNC in Chicago, just one week before Socialism Conference, ended with a rumination on the Left’s tendency to focus on moments of rupture, on planning for an impending rupture or looking backwards to argue over the historicity of this or that given event’s status as The Rupture. The question is not, however, which event was or was not the “real” rupture, but to accept that a rupture has already happened and to organize accordingly. As Nolan Perla-Ward stated in the article, “What could be more of a moment of rupture than 2020, and then October 7?” The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, followed almost immediately by massive global uprising against police violence and white supremacy, was the moment that the American Empire’s die was cast, and if socialism is our demand then we had best learn to keep up. What better method of learning to keep up could there be than continued focus on learning from our comrades in struggle at future Socialism Conferences?

DSA at the Conference

Let us turn first to the experience as a DSA member at the conference. This was not the first year that DSA has participated heavily in the Socialism Conference; at Socialism 2022, DSA essentially held a parallel conference that was dynamic and far-reaching in terms of attendance. Comrades hosted panels on the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee (EWOC), analyses of rank-and-file strategy and socialist organizing under a declining liberal democracy, and questions of multiracial organizing and party-building. In 2023, members of the 2021-23 National Political Committee (NPC) hosted panels on the future of DSA, organizing across differences, and rank-and-file organizing in large unions like the Teamsters and the Railroad Workers United reform caucus. I did not attend those conferences, so I cannot speak to the depth of DSA’s involvement throughout them, but in conversation with other comrades at Socialism 2024, DSA appeared to be less of an organization at the center of the conference. The question remains open whether this is a symptom of DSA’s declining membership, its sidelining in the struggle for Palestinian liberation due to complicated relationships with electoral politics, or a general flattening of the formerly dynamic character of the organization in the boom years of 2016-2020.

Nevertheless, DSA maintained a strong presence at Socialism 2024 and hosted a morning of pre-conference events specifically for DSA members. The panels, Building DSA Through Strategic Campaigns and DSA Reflections & Planning Beyond 2024, and corresponding breakout sessions, had cross-factional participation from across DSA. They were led by current and former NPC members from caucuses such as Red Star, Groundwork, Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC), Marxist Unity Group (MUG), and Bread and Roses (B&R), as well as uncaucused regular members. DSA Co-Chair Ashik S opened the DSA session with a speech thanking Haymarket Books for providing a space for DSA-specific discussions, noting that DSA members generally do not get the chance to gather in-person outside of National Conventions and the Socialism Conference, and that the sessions that morning might be a precursor to the renewed DSA National Activist Conference that was passed at the 2023 Convention. He went on to reiterate that DSA cannot simply organize people who are already ideologically aligned with the Left, but that we must organize people of all kinds and bring them to the Left. Comrades then went on to have a fruitful discussion about strategic campaigns that their chapters have run, such as the UAW Strike Ready, We Power DC (public power), Raise the Wage (rent control), and Uncommitted Washington campaigns. The reflections on these campaigns were modest, and grappled with questions of campaign structures, member recruitment, and how to prioritize limited chapter resources for one campaign over another.

The second panel focused on the recent history of DSA as a mass political organization, what challenges we have faced, and what tools have helped us overcome them. The tone of this panel was more triumphant, but still sat with the soberness of reflection. Comrades discussed the massive amount of administrative work that goes into keeping a chapter running and how having part-time staffers has helped alleviate administrative burdens from political leadership in larger chapters like NYC and Chicago. They also advised against hashing out internal political disagreements on Twitter and other platforms that Asad Haider calls “the media apparatus of the enemy.” Interestingly, many comrades pointed to Slack as a disorganizing/demobilizing communications platform and discussed moving to Discord, WhatsApp, and email newsletters for most communications. Co-Chair Megan R closed out the DSA session reiterating what comrade Ashik said previously: that we are at a critical juncture in the United States and in the Left especially, that it is empowering to gather together for these important, high-level discussions, and that we must find ways to work together across or through political differences because we are comrades, and thus united in a shared struggle.

Factionalism in DSA: Finding Common Cause Through Struggle

Participation in the conference proper broke down some of those high concepts of shared struggle and comradely gathering. I noticed—and must admit to my participation in—a breaking out of DSA members into smaller groups along well-trodden factional lines as the weekend began. This was not an organized dispersal, but rather something we can understand as an organic development of the rare in-person gathering of comrades who are more accustomed to interacting online any other day of the year. Socialism Conference is unlike the National DSA Convention in that members who attended are more likely to be in the most activated layer of their chapters and seemed to predominantly belong to one caucus or another as a result of their high activation. Comrades who belong to a caucus, or who are in the orbit of a particular caucus, tend to interact more with members of their caucus in other chapters than with general members in other chapters. Taken together, these dynamics point to an understandable choice for members to socialize with comrades they are more familiar with from online interaction.

Nonetheless, the factional dynamic led to a situation where some members seemed to be attending parallel, but distinct, conferences throughout the weekend. Members of some factions, such as Groundwork and SMC, generally appeared to attend panels about the rise of the far right and legislative organizing, whereas members of factions like Red Star, MUG, and Reform & Revolution (R&R) appeared to attend panels about mass work organizing, theory, and internationalism. The above example is by no means definitive, nor should it be taken as a matter of fact—it is merely my limited observation. However, it does point to a broader issue among the DSA cadres in attendance: we did not successfully come away from the conference with a common conception of how to collectively build socialism in the 21st Century United States. It was not a conundrum specific to DSA either; the same can be said of the conference as a whole, and the other large socialist organizations in organized attendance, like the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Maoist Communist Union, and the Tempest Collective.

Towards a shared, emancipatory political horizon for DSA

Let us consider the ramifications of factionalism within DSA in terms of how it was displayed at Socialism 2024 Conference. Sectarian conflict has long been part and parcel of the national politics of DSA and, similarly, it has been a familiar dynamic across the Left for generations. However, the minor factionalism at the conference is not representative of a deeper rift within DSA so much as it is indicative of a movement that has faced significant growing pains in the roughly eight-year period of rapid growth and Left resurgence. The factional disagreements throughout DSA do speak to real political differences between comrades, but they are also emblematic of an organization that was essentially re-founded around a massive, unifying project (the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns) and has since struggled to define itself in as all-encompassing of terms.

As our organization has exploded in growth, made real and serious strides in national and local politics, and found a new footing amongst a resurgent Left and a resurgent Labor Movement, we have had to face new questions: how do socialists govern in an extreme minority position? How do we relate to the utter disorganization of the working class en masse? How do we articulate a politics beyond the neoliberalism that has been dominant for longer than many of us have been alive? These are not simple questions, and in the face of large-scale defeats like the primary losses of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush and, especially since 7 October 2023, our collective inability to stop a genocide funded by our own tax dollars, it is once again understandable for comrades to turn inwards and lash out at one another in a fit of misdirected grief and frustration.

What is to be done, then? This is not a novel position to take, but what DSA needs now more than ever is a shared political horizon. The Workers Deserve More national program is a healthy start, but a shared political horizon cannot simply exist in the realm of slogans and programs. Referring back to Haider’s “On Depoliticization” quoted above, “The contemporary Left is mired in circular and disempowering disputes whose material implications are ambiguous… What is obscured by the affective intensity of these disputes is that in the absence of a guiding political orientation, they represent little more than forms of adjustment within the existing world, and therefore an investment in what is.” That is to say, without proper organization of a breadth and a depth hitherto unseen on the US Left in almost a century, coupled with near total loss of the transference of radical politics from one generation to the next thanks to the successes of COINTELPRO in the late 20th Century, we continue to argue amongst ourselves about how to interpret the current state of the world, rather than articulating how to change it. To do so requires organization, and it requires committing to each other as comrades, and not as fairweather allies in a temporary struggle.

We will depart from this lengthy discussion on DSA with the most impressive case of an organized DSA presence at the conference, the so-called “Comrade Scribes.” As the conference got under way, most of the DSA members in attendance were invited to a large Signal chat and comrade Peter L of Northern Indiana shared a collaborative notes document with the group which contained the title of every session for the weekend and a space for notes. Comrades independently signed up to take notes on the sessions they planned to attend with the purpose of consolidating as much of the information as possible for comrades to review and reflect upon later. I am proud to have contributed to these notes on several sessions. The collaborative notes are now available for anyone in DSA to review, and though it seems a small act, it was a vast effort and a labor of love for each other that demonstrated the benefits of collectivity.

All Politics is Rehearsal

We shall now turn towards the content of the conference itself, beginning from the center of the weekend and working towards the periphery. I choose to begin in the center, with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s panel, Lenin and the Politics of Rehearsal, because such a course mirrors my own path to understanding the key lessons of the conference. In her speech, which can now be found on Haymarket’s Youtube channel, Gilmore used both Lenin and the revolutionary playwright Bertolt Brecht as jumping-off points to discuss how all politics, and especially revolutionary politics on the Left, is a practice of rehearsal. For context, Brecht is perhaps most famous for his conception of “Epic Theatre,” a practice of playwriting that sought not to stir the audience to identify emotionally with the characters or action onstage, but rather bring the audience to a place of rational self-reflection. He wanted his audiences to be moved towards a critical view of the events onstage such that they would recognize injustice and exploitation and leave the theatre prepared to take action and change the world, rather than simply be satiated by an emotional, cathartic climax. To achieve this, he employed techniques that would remind his audiences that what they were viewing was only a representation of reality, and not reality itself.

She goes on to elaborate that Brecht and his comrades understood something that Lenin also understood, which is that as revolutionary socialists we must present an idea to society in such a way that those who are not already party to the idea (i.e. not revolutionaries) come to understand through the course of the presentation that the presentation itself, and thus the idea presented, depends on all of us collectively to bring it to fruition. Put more simply, all politics is a rehearsal of the world to come, and rehearsal itself is an ongoing process of interpretation and reinterpretation, not simply planning for a singular act by one party or organization. This begs the question: what kind of worlds are we rehearsing?

I returned to the subject of rehearsal again and again over the course of the weekend, applying the framework retroactively to all the previous sessions I attended or reflected on with comrades. One shining example of rehearsal in action came via the Religion at the Encampments panel hosted by comrades Maryam and Jonah from University of Chicago. They discussed the radical deployment of religion and ritual at the encampments that swept across universities worldwide during the Student Intifada in April and May of this year. The space that ritual held at the encampments could easily be viewed through a liberal lens as an indication of the multicultural nature of the camps, and thus their strength as a movement based solely on their use of representation or identity politics. Maryam argued, however, that while it could’ve been a tactical decision NOT to hold religious services at the camps, the decision to hold them openly was to decide that religion itself must be a terrain of struggle. Further, they proposed that religious institutions and ideology are key sites of social reproduction—places where people bring not only their bodies and their demands, but their spirit and the strength that it lends to the movement—and thus can be important displays of class struggle more broadly. Jonah built on this discussion with theses on the use of religion in the camps:

1. The religiosity of Jews in the camps was a construction of a new Judaism in real time;
2. The novel engagement with Jewish theology is the articulation of a Jewish identity politics specific to our current post-neoliberalism era; and
3. A significant factor in the power and authenticity of this Jewish spirituality was its non-clerical character.

As a Jewish communist myself, I found this discussion especially engaging. The Zionist entity of Israel has long attempted to conflate Judaism as faith with Zionism as ideology, and in so doing, has created a class of clerical and secular Jews that are beholden more to Zionism than Judaism. However, there is vast potential for liberation in theology, and one need only look to the liberatory analyses of religious scholars across generations to find it. The radical deployment of Judaism as faith in the movement was thus integral to the militancy of the movement, and constituted a rehearsal of a new, liberatory, and anti-Zionist “Judaism of the barricades.”

In all politics, but especially in a moment of unrecognized rupture, rehearsal is crucial to building the world we hope to see. We are socialists and communists. We understand that labor is the source of all value, and labor is entitled to all that it creates. Not only does that mean that organizing on the basis of our waged labor is fundamental to abolishing capitalism, but that there is labor to be done and value to be created outside of the capitalist system, in doing things that bring us our humanity back. 

Such was the crux of the Logoff and Meetup: Building Third Spaces to Change the World session, which featured speakers from Pilsen Community Books, P.O. Box Collective, and East Side Freedom Library. Third spaces, first theorized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in 1991, “host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home [first space] and work [second space].” As capitalism is founded on the alienation of workers from the products of their labor, it must also alienate workers everywhere from each other, which has led to an epidemic of loneliness wherein more than 50% of adults in the US report experiencing loneliness in a given year. While loneliness is not an expressly material condition on its face, it has dire material consequences, carrying a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. It also carries greater risks for the kinds of societal alienation that contribute to criminalized behaviors and thus to increased incarceration. It is in this context that we must consider the importance of third spaces for Left organizing. The “Logoff and Meetup” panel conveyed practical steps for creating and operating third spaces, but also sowed seeds for understanding the centrality of abolition to every other discussion held at the conference. The carceral state would love nothing more than to leave loneliness untreated and jail more and more people to justify massive capital expenditures on the prison industry. We must rehearse and create alternatives.

The Capital and Abolition panel with Ruth Wilson-Gilmore and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs discussed in detail the sheer amount of capital spent on prisons, especially in the US Gulf South. They pointed to the windfall of oil money as a driving force behind Louisiana’s massive capital investment in state prisons like Angola State Penitentiary, contributing to an increase in incarceration of around 4,000 in 1970 to 40,000 by 2010. The state was able to directly fund the construction and renovation of prisons in the late 20th Century rather than relying on finance capital largely because of the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s driving up demand for domestic oil production. Flush with cash, Louisiana invested in carceral systems rather than public goods because of what the speakers described as the “anti-state state.” This comes from a framework of understanding the state not as a single, immutable entity but as a collection of institutions and organizations that are in contradiction to one another, riven with problems and often in direct competition for shares of the total state budget. These various state organizations are all funded by the same stolen social wage, that is the labor value of all workers, taken through state taxes and other forms of coercion, and used for public goods that are only possible through such massive collectivization of labor and value. 

The “anti-state state,” then, is a particular kind of state that tends towards fascism and is based on a politics that considers the state’s provision of public goods as the core problem to be addressed, and funnels money into militarism and policing to prevent the use of state funds for anything but violence. The speakers contrast this with the “pro-state state,” which is a kind of state that is theoretically run by and for workers on the grounds that their social wages must be put to use for common, public goods that allow for the flourishing of all life: public transportation, clean air and water, free education, healthcare, and so on. Such goods cannot really be achieved through mutual aid or voluntarism alone, which serve as valuable rehearsals of what a real workers state might achieve, and which is why the state is such a key terrain of struggle even in abolitionist and anti-imperialist organizing.

The OPEC embargo referenced above was itself a direct consequence of the militarized anti-state state and US imperialism in the Arab world vis-a-vis its support of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Such imperialism has only been emboldened and re-entrenched since Palestinians took History into their own hands on 7 October 2023, which has necessitated new forms of combatting imperialism at home and abroad. At the From the River to the Sea: UAW Labor for Palestine panel, comrades working as public defenders, electricians, and grad students all organized under the United Auto Workers (UAW) discussed their approach to labor organizing that is internationalist in scope and anti-imperialist in principle. The panelists, including Michael Letwin, Marcelina Pedraza, Sherena Razek, and Shahinaz Geneid, discussed their firm belief that workers deserve good union jobs, high wages, free healthcare, and everything else which their labor creates, but that none of it should come at the cost of their moral compass or their unwavering solidarity with workers around the world. Sherena in particular discussed her visit to Ramallah in the West Bank last year and how the day she returned to the US, a general strike was called by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions in protest of the Israeli invasion of Jenin. Such massive strikes happen often in Palestine, and draw on a rich history going back to the Great Arab Revolt of 1936, which began as a general strike against collaborating British and Zionist capital and imperial interests.

All politics is a rehearsal for the future, so we must ask ourselves: what are we rehearsing? With the same stroke that we are abolishing capitalism, what are we creating? 

Palestine is Everywhere

This brings us to imperialism and, consequently, to Palestine. Palestine hung over the entire conference weekend. The spectre of genocide and the US left’s heretofore impotence to defeat such evils was felt in every corner of the conference center and in every panel and workshop. Small details were the first I noticed: a shrine to the martyrs in Gaza, posters from Visualizing Palestine plastered across the walls, conference attendees draped in keffiyehs and clothing announcing “Not In Our Name” or other slogans and imagery of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Even the banner for the conference itself depicted protestors flying the Palestinian flag while surrounded by smoke, above the words “Socialism 2024.” To say “Palestine is Everywhere” is not just to make a moral argument, but a material one.The topic permeated almost every session in one way or another.

How deep the connection would run came into focus during the Opening Plenary on Friday evening, titled All Eyes on Palestine: Solidarity, Liberation, Intifada and featuring historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Rabbi Brant Rosen, poet George Abraham, lawyer Noura Erakat, and community organizer Linda Sarsour. I wept often at the conference, but I wept the most during that plenary session. The unimaginable horror of this genocide was present in the room, especially as Rabbi Brant Rosen of Tzedek Chicago reminded us all that, “We are living in a time of genocide,” and the Palestinian poet George Abraham read their out long-verse work eulogizing Gaza and evoking the overlapping imagery of bombs and freedom. Not a single eye was dry. Beyond the sheer immorality of the Israeli apartheid regime, the material consequence of their violence was brought to bear throughout the plenary. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every bullet and missile fired at Lebanon and the West Bank, is paid for by us, however indirectly. In purchasing those arms, the Israeli regime consequently funds our class enemies so directly that they have immense capital to repress our unions, hike our rents, and kill us in the streets when we dare to speak up.

Palestine is Everywhere because, as with the southern border, as with the Gulf South, as with Global South more broadly, Palestine is a vision of our collective future should we fail to dismantle capitalism in our lifetimes. Hyper-militarized border violence, the most extreme surveillance state on earth, restrictions on water and electricity and on life itself. This is what fascist want, and it is what capitalists and liberals will give them if it means they can nominally stay in power just a little longer for just a little more profit.

With ever more resources flowing into police departments and militaries, the state requires an outlet for the excesses of death capital. It sends that excess out to the periphery of the American Empire in the form of weaponry, funding, and physical boots on the ground. We are not innocent in this, as evidenced by the sessions “From the River to the Sea: UAW Labor for Palestine” and Blue Collar Empire: On the History of the ‘AFL-CIA’ and Possibilities for Labor Internationalism. Whether it is our tax dollars or the literal fruits of our labors, workers in the US are often materially implicated in overseas imperialism. This has been a bugbear for the Left that points to inherent contradictions even within DSA. We are stuck between the rock and the hard place of needing to hold power in the US government as it exists, while having to grapple with the extreme pressures that such a position places on us to conform to imperial pursuits. We have very clearly not resolved this contradiction.

And when we fight back against that fascist disaster nationalism? We will surely be shot where we stand. Palestine is teaching us how to resist, how to be free. Palestine is teaching us that freedom is not just a noun, but a verb. An action that we must take before it becomes a distant memory. In the words of rapper-activist Usaama Minhas, “Palestinians are already free, it’s Palestine that we are freeing.”

A Discourse on Grief

Palestine is teaching us to grieve again, too. Another of the keynote panels, From the Ashes: Grief, Care, and Time in our Movements discussed how grief, a fundamentally human experience that is incomprehensible to capitalism, can be both disruptive and revolutionary. Grief does not happen linearly. It cannot be optimized or streamlined. Grief happens on its own terms. It does not bow to the whims of a 9-5 or an assembly line. It is our right to grieve, and in our grief, we are able to make peace with the losses we have taken, with the family, friends, lovers, and comrades we must put to rest. When we allow ourselves to grieve, and to really feel that grief, we are feeling our humanity returning to us, and then we are able to return to the struggle in front of us. The struggle against all those systemic forces which force grief upon us too soon in this short life.

I did not grieve on 7 October 2023, as Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip took History into their own hands. I didn’t even grieve on 27 October 2023, when Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza. Months and months of footage streamed directly to my phone of murdered children, maimed bodies, and unimaginable destruction, and I only really began to feel my grief upon hearing a new song from the working class folk singer, Nick Shoulders. Grief is nonlinear, its intricacies unfathomable, and thus it opens space for us to struggle on ever-changing terms.

Grief is incompatible with capitalism. Capital wants us back to work as soon as possible after we experience a loss, but grief does not abide by profit margins and work schedules. Grief also does not abide by the confines of organization. That may be part of why we in DSA have struggled so much internally since the start of Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October. The sheer horror that we have borne witness to in the last year and change has forced us into a perpetual cycle of organizing, mobilizing, and action, with very little space and time devoted to grieving, healing, and communing. The scale is so great that we cannot but feel urgency in every waking moment and often even in our sleep, but without time to grieve and to build, we will eventually run out of fuel. We have carried such immense grief for the crimes against humanity, compounded by our own various individual grieving, and we have learned in real time that we simply do not possess the power to actually stop these horrors. How can we deal with that? What kinds of worlds are we rehearsing, wherein we have the tools to halt and prevent genocides, to grieve in the same breath as we organize, and to struggle through our pain?

Personally, my grief has given me no patience for semantics. No patience for masking politics behind procedure, or for turning on my comrades because, seeing as I am unable to harm the Israeli and American regimes, I will harm those around me instead. My grief has given me anger, and it has given me purpose. I invite you to grieve as well, that together we might find a way through.

Conclusion, or Why DSA Members Should Attend

I could not begin to summarize the entirety of the conference weekend into a single piece of writing. Whole articles could be written on individual sessions alone! In four days, I moved from being on the very furthest edge of burnout, just a few bad days away from quitting DSA outright, to feeling reinvigorated by the dynamism and vitality of the socialist movement. I met comrades from all across the country, from all corners of the movement we call home, and I learned more than I could have ever imagined, both in sessions and in between.

As the largest socialist organization in a generation, more DSA members should attend Socialism Conference every year. As mentioned above, DSA passed Member-Submitted Resolution #16: Renew the National Activist Conference at the DSA National Convention in August 2023, which called for the DSA National Political Committee and DSA staff to plan National Activist Conferences in the years between annual conventions. Given the tight budget that the new NPC has had to contend with, and the continued presence of COVID-19 and other public health crises, it would make far more sense to put that effort into the Socialism Conference, leveraging the existing structure and logistical support of Haymarket Books to inject even more committed organizing into an already phenomenal conference. Focusing on an existing conference that brings in comrades from across the Left would also contribute to DSA’s position in a broader Left coalition across the United States and cement our standing as a socialist organization with strategy, wisdom, and power.

I will be attending the Socialism Conference in 2025, scheduled for July 4th weekend in Chicago. I invite all my comrades reading to attend with me, and together we can sharpen our tools and recommit to the struggle ahead. Remember: we are in this for the long haul. We do not have time to waste on petty squabbles and interpersonal conflicts, we have a fucking world to win, and nothing to lose but our chains. Onward, comrades!

The post In Our Thousands, In Our Millions: Reflecting on Socialism 2024 Conference first appeared on Red Fault.