By: Justin Skytta

You’ve probably heard before that DSA is a member-funded and driven organization. However, if you’ve never worked “behind the scenes” on administrative projects, it’s easy to take for granted the sheer amount of unpaid labor that our dedicated volunteers put into running the organization.

Every Zoom meeting, sign-up form, resolution, general meeting, social and Dance Against Fascism, convention, membership vote, SC vote, appropriation, contract, and Douglass Debs dinner is planned and run by volunteer members.

None of this would happen without the many members who collectively devote dozens of hours every week to keep the chapter running. It is not an exaggeration to say that these administrative duties often feel like a second job, if not another full time job!

In this article, I’m going to outline why splitting the current secretary role on the steering committee into an administrative secretary and communications secretary role will not only make the workload more manageable, but position our chapter for sustainable growth and more effective day-to-day operations.

The Secretary Role as It Exists is Essentially a Full-Time Job

Per our chapter’s bylaws, the secretary is responsible for creating meeting agendas, keeping meetings during steering and general meetings, distributing these notes, maintaining all chapter records, and overseeing all external communications, including organizing the communications committee, chapter newspaper, graphic design and information technology.

That’s a lot of work for one person to handle for a 1,300 member organization! As a member of the steering committee and an officer myself, I’ve personally witnessed the demanding, time-intensive and wide-ranging duties of the chapter secretary role. It makes it very difficult for the individual to devote time to any other organizing tasks, makes it inaccessible to anyone but members able to devote 30+ hours a week, and risks burning out a chapter leader.

There are many roles within our growing organization that bear similar issues. My own position as Treasurer, for example, routinely requires 20+ hours a week on various duties, projects, and planning. I can’t recall a day I didn’t do DSA work. Those challenges, however, will hopefully see solutions with the further building out of our Finance Committee.

But when life gets busy or a member inevitably burns out or falls ill, agendas are published late, meaning members may come less prepared to discuss vital issues at general meetings, and notes aren’t distributed. This leads to confusion or miscommunication, and external communications like statements on current events may be delayed to the point where they are no longer relevant.

It’s just too much to ask any one given member to do, which is unhealthy for both the individual in the role and the chapter as a whole. Furthermore, it opens the individual up to criticism when realistically their duties have simply grown too broad and time-intensive for a single volunteer. We can do better.

Splitting the Role Creates a Manageable Workload

By splitting the role into two secretarial positions — administrative and communications — both roles become much more approachable and sustainable. Furthermore, it ensures both functions are much more likely to run smoothly as the workload becomes more manageable for the average member with a full-time job and other personal obligations.

The administrative secretary would handle publishing meeting agendas, keeping meeting minutes during steering and general meetings, distribution of minutes and agendas, maintaining all chapter records, and maintaining a register of the contact information and addresses of the steering committee.

On the other hand, the communications secretary would oversee all chapter communications and media — the communications committee, chapter newspaper, graphic design and tech working group. That includes all outward facing media and communications, including social media.

Building MD-DSA Into a Chapter Ready to Fight for the Long Haul

From winning a seat on Detroit City Council to growing the chapter to 1,300 members and counting, from joining striking workers on the picket line to socials to keep our members engaged, nothing in Metro Detroit DSA would operate very smoothly without the hard work of our secretary. But heaping an excessive workload for an entire year on a single volunteer is neither healthy nor sustainable.

By splitting the position into two distinctly segmented roles, we enable members to step up and sustainably run the vital administrative work our chapter requires to function for many years to come. It’s going to be a long fight to Build the Party, beat fascism and dismantle capitalism, so let’s plan accordingly by supporting our comrades and sharing the load for these critical tasks.

Building Admin for The Party was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Amanda Matyas

Committees in DSA allow members to focus their work on specific areas. Their primary goal is supporting the chapter as a whole, and their members and decisions are accountable to decisions made by the membership of the chapter. Our chapter’s Political Education Committee (Pol Ed) is “responsible for coordination of political education events for the chapter.” Education is a top priority of Detroit DSA, and Pol Ed takes that responsibility very seriously. The resolutions the committee brings to the 2026 convention are based on two years of dedication and experimentation on a particular project. Here’s some of that history in brief.

FOCUS & EXPERIMENTATION

Two years ago, members of the Pol Ed committee brought an amendment to their base resolution dedicating 30–45 minutes of every monthly General Membership meeting (GM) to political education. The reasoning was simple: As the most important space for our chapter, the GM deserved our attention. We would bring an array of socialist education topics over the course of the next year.

By presenting this as a separate amendment, Pol Ed hoped to spark an engaging debate to convention on the importance of education. However, the idea was so well received that only one member spoke against it (beginning with the caveat that their remarks were not really “against”). The amendment passed by an overwhelming majority (only 8 nays).

The committee developed and presented ten GM topics in as many months. The work was spread across the committee, with ten different leaders organizing the effort each month. We had a broad range of topics:

1. Four on chapter projects or campaigns
2. Four on current events or history
3. One socialism 101 topic
4. One national DSA project

Over the course of 2024 we also organized four Red Squares, multiple monthly reading groups, lectures, trainings, and movie nights. Each of these different venues provided a different context for our work, with varying strengths and weaknesses. We began to think about the best venue for different kinds of topics, and how different methods of presentation affect the way members engage with the information. The committee debriefed following each presentation or event, and through those conversations we also realized we needed more planning time for each topic.

At the 2025 convention, we reaffirmed our focus with a second resolution, which was included in the Consent Agenda. Soon after, the committee adopted a motion to focus half of our GM topics over the next year on Socialism 101, topics of perennial importance to the history and development of socialist organizing and our class politics:

1. Why We’re Socialists
2. Why the Working Class
3. Racial Capitalism
4. Socialist Feminism and the Patriarchy
5. Why a Socialist Organization

At the time, a huge influx of new members/seekers were joining our monthly meetings with a wide variety of backgrounds and political experience. Our intention was to help all members grow their confidence speaking to what socialism means and why it provides the necessary political framework for addressing the issues that millions face. With a syllabus of five topics, we left the alternate months open for current events or suggestions from members outside of the committee.

In addition to the Socialism 101 topics, we presented a panel of local Palestinian activists, a history of “sewer socialism,” and collaborated with our chapter’s Black & Brown Alliance (BBA) to bring a guest speaker on imperialism (unfortunately the speaker had to cancel due to illness, and a replacement discussion on ICE was cut from the agenda).

The commitment to a syllabus allowed us to spend more time developing each topic (preparations often began two months ahead), and to organize new and experienced members to the planning groups. That additional time also allowed us to work with members outside of the committee, focusing especially on collaborations with BBA leadership and our chapter’s Steering Committee (SC), who all expressed interest in the project.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

For the 2026 convention, the Political Education Committee developed three resolutions that fit together to form a comprehensive syllabus covering the basics of socialism, DSA’s strategy, and an overall vision for our GMs:

• R4–26 Political Education Committee Resolution, which now includes the five socialism 101 topics
• R16–26 General Membership Meetings Pol Ed Series on Debates in DSA, a proposal for a series of debates in the months alternating the 101 topics
• A1-R8–26: Agitation, Deliberation, Education: A Radically Democratic General Meeting, (formerly a resolution — through reasons outside of our control this became an amendment) an overall vision for how we spend our time at each GM, including a process for responding to current events

This suggested syllabus is based on two years of preparation, experimentation, and feedback. MDDSA members are encouraged to volunteer to work collectively on any topic. Our meetings are open to all members, and we meet twice a month, alternating between in person and online to accommodate differing schedules and availabilities.

Committing to a syllabus does not mean Pol Ed can’t also do other things. We have an amendment that allows for flexibility should the horrors of life in the twenty-first century demand our attention (as they so often do these days). We have Red Squares open to a wide variety of topics, and the ability to run as many as membership-power allows. We have an on-going organizing school where members can learn a wide-variety of organizing skills.

And because the basics of socialism form the building blocks for every socialist campaign, they are inherently related to the work that we do in the world and can be continually tailored to meet the moment. We need deep conversations, repeated over time with new and old members, about systematic forms of oppression (racism, patriarchy, and capitalism) because those conversations inform our strategy in our campaigns, projects, and workplaces. Socialists must be strategic in order to make real systemic change. It is through conversations about the basics that we can start to recognize the systems we are fighting.

Amanda Matyas is co-chair of Detroit DSA’s Political Education Committee. She is also a member of the national Bread & Roses caucus and the local Democracy Coalition, a new self-organized, cross-tendency formation.

Political Education at our Monthly General Meetings was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Francesca S.

The general meeting is the most well attended event that Detroit DSA hosts, and is an opportunity to engage with the broadest swath of our active membership. We only have two hours a month to engage our membership as a whole, and it’s important to use that time wisely.

I’m presenting R8, “General Body Meetings: A Scalable, Balanced Model for a Growing MD-DSA” to establish a formal structure for meetings with time divided into three blocks: political education, working group updates, and campaigns. This plan allows us to agree on a path forward that prioritizes the work of winning socialism.

The past few years have been a time of unprecedented growth for MD-DSA. Our chapter has doubled in size, and greatly expanded our scope of work and our internal structure. Denzel McCampbell’s city council victory has mainstream news outlets talking about democratic socialism. For the first time in years, DSA is a political force to be reckoned with. Our largest meeting should reflect that by dedicating the agenda to the work that we are doing. Our members come to the general meeting because they want to get involved in our projects. We should be giving them that opportunity every month.

Political education at the general meeting should give members context for the work we are doing as a chapter, which is why R8 dedicates 30 minutes to it. A shorter time frame makes the lectures more digestible and avoids overly broad topics. The shorter time also makes it easier to pivot when the national conversation changes due to rapid movement in current events. Long lectures on theoretical topics are best suited to standalone events, not as one agenda item in a meeting about the work of the entire chapter.

R8 also dedicates 30 minutes to updates from committees and working groups, so that members can get a complete picture of the work that our chapter is doing (and that our dues are funding). General meeting presentations are a great way for working groups to recruit new members, or announce upcoming events.

This block could also be a good time to do skills training that relates to different areas of organizing. For example, electoral could talk about how to get a valid petition signature. Labor working group could talk about how to agitate your coworkers into taking action against the boss. Ecosocialists could explain the state of public transit in Detroit. Our work is multifaceted, and our general meeting should be too.

R8 sets aside the largest amount of time, 60 minutes, to discussing endorsed campaigns. This could be updates on existing campaigns, or debate on resolutions proposing new ones. The campaign endorsement process is the most democratic way to do work in DSA. Campaigns are first presented at the general meeting, then there is a deliberative process where members can propose amendments. After debate with equal time given to each side, the endorsement is voted on by the entire membership.

Dedicating the most time to endorsed campaigns ensures that we are giving equal consideration to all areas of chapter work because every group is able to bring an endorsed campaign. It also incentivizes the use of the campaigns process, which prompts organizers to think critically about the scope and feasibility of their project, a plan for action, and how to get buy-in from the membership.

Please come to convention on April 11th, and vote yes on R8. Let’s continue this momentum and turn DSA into the political home for the working class.

Francesca has been a member of Metro Detroit DSA since 2019. She currently serves as chapter secretary. She is a member of Groundwork.

Why We Need A Scalable, Balanced Model for a Growing MD-DSA was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why We Need Term Limits and Real Democracy in Metro Detroit DSA

By: Jonathan Mukes

The Moment That Changed Everything

When I ran for my second term as co-chair of the Black and Brown Alliance (BBA), I expected there to be several contested seats on our chapter’s Steering Committee. I expected a multi-tendency debate about strategy or maybe some deliberation about political vision, and how we build working-class power in Detroit’s communities of color. Instead, I watched the old steering committee agree with themselves along caucus lines. The same officers switched seats around the room, claiming new positions. It wasn’t about who had the best vision but about who was next in an unspoken line.

That experience showed me something many of us have felt for too long. Our chapter has a leadership stagnation problem. It’s not an accident. It’s the obvious outcome of power concentrating in the hands of a semi-permanent cohort that treats leadership positions as entitlements rather than responsibilities. They are managers rather than activists. Functionaries rather than revolutionaries.

This was the reason why I wrote the term limits resolution–linked here–for the upcoming convention. It’s a simple, commonsense proposal. Every leader in the chapter gets two consecutive terms in any elected or appointed leadership position. Afterwards they are expected to have a one-year return to general membership before returning to leadership. There should be no exceptions. There should be no loopholes. It’s a simple rule that works to preserve leadership pipelines, prevent burnout, and ensure that strategies remain grounded in the needs of the entire membership.

But despite broad support from plenty of independents and major caucuses like MUG and Bread & Roses, Groundwork’s leadership has responded with an amendment that guts the resolution. They’ve done what entrenched power always does when challenged. They are reaching for procedural weapons to protect their position.

The Ghost of R22: A Pattern Emerges

This isn’t news. We’ve seen them do a very similar tactic on a national level, you just need to look back at Resolution 22.

R22 was a resolution at the 2025 DSA national convention that aimed at cementing DSA’s anti-Zionist stance. The Detroit Chapter historically has had an interesting history with Zionism and my experience with convention showed me that the specter hadn’t fully left the building. R22 was introduced to align our organization with principled anti-imperialism and the liberation of the Palestinian people. I was one of the only Metro-Detroit delegates who voted for it unamended. Who, with the Detroit delegates at our table, argued that our organization’s political and moral compass demanded we take a clear stance against occupation and genocide, regardless of the impact it may have on our electoral work.

The Groundwork delegates from Detroit didn’t just disagree with me. They actively worked to kill the anti-Zionist resolution by using the same procedural maneuvering they are using now against term limits. They spread misinformation, they gutted the resolution with an amendment, they did everything in their power to preserve the status quo. The amended text removes the expulsion clause for members who are currently affiliated with Zionist lobby groups, oppose the Palestinian movement, or have knowingly provided material support to Israel.

Why does this matter? What does this have to do with a local bylaws fight about term limits? Well, it reveals a pattern. Groundwork’s leadership treats internal democracy as an obstacle whenever the outcome doesn’t suit them. Whether it’s a national stance on Palestine or a local effort to build new leadership, their instinct is to entrench power, control the narrative, and dilute accountability.

The Case for Fresh Air

Term limits aren’t a new or radical idea. They’re a civic principle. Everyone understands that no one should hold elected office forever because when power concentrates, perspective narrows, and the leadership class becomes pretty far removed from the rank and file.

In Metro Detroit DSA, the concentration of leadership not only creates burnout but also creates high ceilings. New members join with energy and ideas just to find a top-down culture where decisions are made before general meetings behind closed doors. The lack of shared responsibility means that newer members have fewer opportunities to organize, which is detrimental to the project of building working class power within our chapter and the movement as a whole. This culture creates the conditions for the “freshmen retention challenge”. There exists a steep drop-off where almost half of these new members leave after a single year. When new members feel as though they don’t have a say within the organization, or when they sense that real power is held by an unshakeable few, they disengage. They stop coming to meetings. Their dues lapse. And our movement loses that new energy. This is why it is especially important to cycle out leadership within the chapter. We need to remove entrenched leadership to make room for members with different perspectives from independents and smaller caucuses.

Groundwork’s amendment tries to strip the spirit out of my resolution. It seems to me like they want to keep the door open for unelected appointments and consecutive terms. If we limit elected terms, leaders will actually have to train and trust new leaders rather than cycling the same faces through the same seats. Leadership development takes work and some would rather preserve their positions than do that work.

How Democracy Is Circumvented

Appointed positions should not be the norm. The general body or the appropriate working group should vote for positions that directly impact the work that is going on. Leadership should reflect the democratic will of the people. While appointed positions may be needed for highly specialized positions, an election should be tried first.

My resolution is an attempt at fixing that problem. It explicitly states that no member can hold multiple officer or appointed positions simultaneously, and that after two terms, members must return to general membership for a full year. Groundwork’s amendment removes the restriction for appointed positions, albeit in a confusing, contradictory way, saying that term limits will be applied to appointed positions but also that those positions are exempt.

This is about ensuring that leadership is “a responsibility shared by the many, not a privilege held by the few,” as the resolution states.

A Vision for What Comes Next

Imagine a chapter where every leader is actively building more socialist organizers, where Steering Committee meetings include new faces with new ideas. Imagine a chapter where we don’t have to guess who’s really running things and how, because the structure is clear and the rules apply equally to everyone. Imagine a socialist organization in Metro-Detroit that has a leadership body with representation across numerous socialist tendencies, caucuses, with a focus on leadership development and working together as comrades in a project to overthrow liberalism and to dismantle capitalism.

The culture that would emerge from these practices would not only build a stronger, more robust movement, but we would see new leaders that would expand the capacity of the chapter. making way for more projects, more political education, and more impact in our communities. The power we build will bring more people to DSA. I desperately want to build socialism in my lifetime, but if that doesn’t happen, I want to create as many leaders and movement builders so the project can be realized after I’m gone. That can only happen if institutional knowledge within our chapter is openly shared, if strategy and tactics are heavily deliberated and debated, and if responsibilities are shared across caucus lines.

I want to be clear with my framing, these types of pro-democracy reforms are not only good for our chapter, but for the entire socialist movement. Revolutionary ends will always match their revolutionary means. If the organization that is building this revolutionary movement doesn’t take its values of democracy seriously, the new society that emerges from the project will not either.

To the members who are close to Groundwork but believe in democratic norms, I am not asking you to reject your friends. I am just asking you to look at the resolution text. Look at how they amended R22 at the national convention. Compare that to how they are amending this resolution. If our bylaws don’t protect against leadership hoarding, we are leaving the door open for the same anti-democratic practices that we are actively fighting against outside. We are telling new members that their energy is welcome, but their leadership is not. We are telling the experienced ones that burnout is their only exit strategy.

Return to Membership, Return to Democracy

I didn’t write this resolution because I have a personal grievance against any individual. I wrote it because I believe in what this chapter could become. I’ve seen the energy at BBA events. I’ve seen the passion at our general meetings. I’ve talked to newer members who are hungry to contribute but don’t know how to break through.

The term limits resolution is our chance to tell those members there is a path. Your turn is coming. We are building something that will outlast any of us.

We need a leadership pipeline, not a fence. We need a chapter where your second term is about training someone else and building new leaders, not about securing your seat. We need a return to membership, not as a punishment, but as a promise that leadership is a cycle, not a permanent state.

Vote for the original, unamended resolution. Vote to build a chapter where democracy isn’t just something we preach, but something we practice.

Jonathan Mukes is Co-Chair of the Black and Brown Alliance (BBA) and a member of the Democracy Coalition — a cross-caucus group of MUG, Bread & Roses, and independents working for transparency and democratic revival in Metro Detroit DSA.

Building a Pipeline, Not a Fence. was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Peter Landon

For nearly ten years, DSA has prided itself on being a “big tent.” What is meant by that shorthand? That the organization we share is filled with comrades who have different views of socialism and more importantly, the practices or paths of how to achieve it. These differences tend to be expressed through a range of caucuses asserting their politics in the day to day life of chapters and the national organization. They are most evident in the run up to, and deliberations of, our national conventions.

This holds true for our Detroit chapter and our annual conventions. But at the chapter level, and even nationally, you don’t need to be in a caucus to have a set of politics that is far different than many of your DSA comrades. Most, even the majority of DSA members, are not in caucuses — and obviously we all have our individual politics to express and organize around. Generally we join DSA because we want to make our politics impactful — and find others to make a collective difference.

Differences have existed in the socialist movement for over 150 years. Over our history, these perspectives have helped refine our paths to socialism but they’ve also created significant divides in our movement that have been consequential. There is much to learn from these outcomes. One lesson is that differences and debate are inevitable. How do we learn from this very much lived fact, and grow our organization and movement by addressing it?

In this spirit, I’ve submitted R 16–26.

It’s an attempt to openly address the differences that exist in DSA and deepen our shared knowledge of the various perspectives of socialism and the range of views for the steps necessary to get there.

The Reform & Revolution caucus produced the book, “A Users Guide to DSA” prior to the 2025 national DSA convention. It contains articles by over 30 DSA comrades representing a range of views from various caucuses on key differences within DSA. The debates are:

1. How to Fight Trump and Defend Working-Class and Oppressed People
2. Electoral Strategy and the Democratic Party
3. Labor Organizing and the Role of Socialists in the Workers Movement
4. How to Change the World?
5. What is Socialist Internationalism?

There’s also a very useful Introduction and a set of essays addressing “What is DSA?”

The goal is that these debates would give our Detroit membership a greater sense of the politics — and differences — competing to orient DSA. Ideally it deepens our collective understanding of our “big tent” socialist politics, the differences of emphasis, and puts the membership in a far more informed position to determine the possible directions for our organization — both in Detroit and nationally. The ways we sort through these debates, what conclusions we come to both individually and collectively, matters when it comes to how we engage the world. They can help hone our day to day politics and move the organization forward.

Should the resolution pass, the political education committee would be charged with organizing five debate sessions at the general membership meetings over the course of 2026–27 in the run up to the next national DSA convention in the summer of 2027. Planning these sessions would be based on the “DSA Users Guide” and could be supplemented as necessary. Members of the various caucuses, as well as non-caucused independents, would be encouraged to get involved in the preparations. The political education committee would coordinate the efforts.

Peter is a retired Teamster living in SW Detroit and a member of the Bread & Roses caucus.

Open Debate Is Necessary For Developing Socialist Politics & Practice was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Popular education is a method of teaching that centers the voices of students starting from their unique perspectives and situations.

The post How to use popular education to build worker power appeared first on EWOC.

DSA’s mass politics make it the only real political party in the United States.

The post It’s a Party in the USA appeared first on Democratic Left.

“The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity.” – Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Writing is one of the most important inventions in human history. It allowed us to build civilizations, to coordinate social structures across vast distances, and to fuel humanity’s social, political, and scientific development into the modern age. Thanks to the written word, we can read the exact thoughts of scholars who lived many thousands of years ago, communicate complex ideas to millions of people, and build the democratic political movements capable of remaking society for the benefit of working people.

It has never been more important to preserve and expand our ability to write and communicate clearly. Original writing is now being severely devalued by a current of anti-intellectualism, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, and an unprecedented public disinvestment in education. This is why Midwest Socialist wants to encourage Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members in the greater Midwest to develop their own skills at writing and communication.

Learn, Learn, and Learn Again

During the heyday of the democratic socialist movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, deep engagement with Marxist theory was considered a prerequisite to leading workers in their struggle against oppression. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs, Antonio Gramsci, and countless others spent years developing tomes of political theory while they organized tirelessly to overthrow capitalism. They did not see organizing and theorizing as two separate activities, but as two integral parts of the same effort.

In the twentieth century, socialist governments considered mass political education an essential step in building a post-capitalist society. In 1961, Cuba sent 250,000 educated people into the countryside to teach millions of poor workers and campesinos to read, virtually eliminating illiteracy on the island within a few short years. The methods developed during this campaign served as an example for the entire Global South, and the model was successfully implemented in other countries around the world.

Socialist states with highly literate populations took this idea a step further. In East Germany, government-sponsored programs established spaces to encourage workers to express themselves creatively, including through prose and poetry. These programs would have been considered wasteful and useless in a capitalist society, but the socialist government of that country saw value in the political development of the working class through creative pursuits.

Closer to home, universal public education is one of the greatest surviving accomplishments of the working class movement in the United States. The collective knowledge of humanity is our birthright as working people, and it is our responsibility to engage with these ideas and educate ourselves.

A Hollow Education

The relevance of political broadsheets and hand-printed pamphlets has declined precipitously in the last hundred years, but the necessity to write clearly and convincingly has not. We live in a time when a significant percentage of young Americans are falling behind in school, when college students at our nation’s most prestigious universities are incapable of reading a whole book, and when AI is taking away the livelihoods of creative and intellectual laborers on an unprecedented scale. In this context, reading, writing, and learning have taken on new significance.

Public schools are under attack in the U.S. Compounding the damage of decades of chronic disinvestment, Republicans and Democrats alike have established charter school systems across the country that take state money to fund academies – often with reactionary pedagogical mandates –  and predatory, unstable for-profit schools through “school voucher” programs. These efforts take away resources from public schools and leave students behind. This is in addition to the current administration’s broad anti-intellectual right-wing attacks on science, history, tolerance in the classroom, and the basic principle that education should serve students rather than the state’s extremist political agenda.

Furthermore, all modern forms of mass media are deliberately constructed to turn working people into passive consumers of carefully curated political messages that shut out the possibility of radical change. They shamelessly promote unjust and insane wars, give billionaires and their servants unlimited airtime and space to advance their own agendas while marginalizing progressive voices, attempt to smear left-wing candidates for public office, and turn people away from transformative social and political structures.

AI is just the most recent extension of the centuries-long effort to control what working people know, think, and feel. A recent meta-study by the Brookings Institute highlights the dangers of using this untested technology in classrooms. Evidence is mounting that students and adults alike suffer a “cognitive debt” when they over-rely on chatbots to perform intellectual tasks, rendering them incapable of the basic skills needed to function in society and sharply limiting their ability to develop any kind of meaningful political consciousness.

This is why Midwest Socialist does not accept AI-generated writing and strongly discourages the use of AI writing programs. For too many, an ‘AI-assisted’ piece of writing is the end of a conversation rather than the beginning of one. It is an excuse not to engage with ideas, a way to treat essays and creative writing projects as problems to be solved, published, and put away as quickly as possible rather than an exercise in critical thinking and creativity. In this context, the adage “if you couldn’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it” takes on new meaning.

At a time when it appears possible to offload every intellectual exertion to an unthinking machine, engaging with ideas seriously and honestly is quickly becoming a revolutionary act in itself. Despite all the hype from tech companies, working people are still quite skeptical that AI will benefit society in the long run. We can consciously reject the implementation of technologies that don’t serve the needs of the working class.

Why We Write

“Our task is to make thinkers out of fighters and fighters out of thinkers.” – General Gordon Baker, revolutionary educator

All progressive transformation finds its energy from the creative labor of working people. To give an example from American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the face of the New Deal and arguably its most important champion, but he did not implement it. It required legions of skilled, educated, and competent artisans, craftspeople, engineers, laborers, administrators, artists, writers, and countless others working toward the unified goal of transforming society. We are going to need millions of engaged, curious people eager to work to better society. We will build the future we deserve through a combination of organizing, community building, and unshakable solidarity.

Right now, none of those efforts are where they need to be. In the context of economic stagnation and repression at home and abroad, the fight for a better world can at times feel hopeless. Individual action is not enough to reverse the long-term trends of illiteracy and intellectual shortcutting that have plagued our society for decades. We need robustly funded schools, mass political education, a media not beholden to private interests, and an economy that fosters creative pursuits as more than products to be packaged for consumption. But that effort starts by building our own capabilities, collaborating with others, and working tirelessly to create and sustain the kinds of unapologetically socialist institutions that will build a better society.

There’s a reason every child is taught to write essays in school. Writing teaches us to organize our thoughts, to engage with primary sources, and to express ourselves clearly and succinctly to a wide audience. These skills are essential to any political movement. We cannot rely on capitalist-controlled media and obsequious AI to do our thinking for us.

If it is indeed true that every cook can govern, as the old saying goes, then any DSA member can write. Not every single person must become a journalist, theorist, or polemicist. There are a million ways to contribute to our struggle. But if you wrote stories on lined notebook paper in the fifth grade, composed multi-paragraph social media posts in response to articles you see online, or simply have had ideas and perspectives on our work and movement, we want to hear from you. 

If you would like to write for Midwest Socialist, contact us through our Google form. Be sure to read our Editorial Policy before submitting. We publish op-eds, articles about leftist history, interviews, left-wing reviews of recently released media and leftist classics, and other forms of writing, and we are particularly interested in original journalism about events happening in the Midwest.

If you have an idea that you need help turning into an outline, an outline you need help turning into a draft, or an article you’re wrestling with, our Editorial Board offers Zoom appointments to discuss your ideas and help you build them into a publishable article. The editorial board doesn’t guarantee that every individual article will be published, but we will work with you to build your project into a piece we can all be proud of. Once you’ve submitted a draft, we will make edits and send a final draft ready to be published.

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In 1988 and 2016, DSA backed insurgent primary campaigns by gifted outsiders — but the aftermath of the Jesse Jackson and the Bernie Sanders campaigns were very different.

The post Why Wasn’t There a Long Jackson Moment? appeared first on Democratic Left.

You’ve probably received enough communications regarding this Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations, which will be held all across the country. At last count more than three thousand demonstrations are being organized, and there will no doubt be at least one near you.

In case you have been procrastinating, here is a link to find the demonstrations closest to you.

The first of these demos last June had a million or two people attend. The next one, in October, had at least five million. We’re aiming to double that this time, which would put us in striking distance of the 3.5% of the US population that research says is necessary to topple authoritarian regimes in the making. 

Against the backdrop of brutal anti-immigrant violence and preparation for election suppression at home, and clueless trade policy matched with deadly wars abroad, a growing number of Americans are coming out to the streets. These include people who have never been politically involved outside of voting every few years, and progressives who sat out the 2024 presidential elections because they didn’t think there was any difference between the two parties and the two candidates. Within DSA and the rest of the left this often took the form of denouncing the “twin parties of capital”. Which they are. But that picture, drawn without nuance, underestimated what fascism is and does.

Now we know. 

A reasonable question at this point is, ‘What sort of message should socialists be sending to the other demonstrators, and the world, a year into America’s fascist descent?’ You have the opportunity to weigh in on that as you make your protest sign. “No Kings” is a start, not a program. “Workers Over Billionaires” moves us closer to the ideas we need.

This mass demonstration of opposition is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to stop MAGA from dragging us along on its road to hell. For that we need to be broadening the struggle with other tactics and strategies (mutual aid, mass strikes, non-violent direct action, and electoral politics) that build a powerful anti-fascist movement and lay the basis for moving past the failed politics of the past. What happened in Minneapolis/St. Paul on January 23—‘No Work, No School, No Shopping’—is the best example so far. DSA has joined with labor and community partners in the May Day Strong coalition, which understands “No Kings” as a step toward a sharper critique of capitalism on May 1. On that day we will see how prepared we are to advance beyond a nationwide demonstration to a national movement.

We’ll see you out in the streets this weekend. And then we’ll continue to train and educate and prepare ourselves for the struggle ahead.