Socialism Wins in the South — Your National Political Committee newsletter
Enjoy your May National Political Committee (NPC) newsletter! Our NPC is an elected 18-person body (including two YDSA members who share a vote) which functions as the board of directors of DSA. This month, celebrate DSA electoral wins, support striking workers, stand up against genocide in Palestine, and more!
And to make sure you get our newsletters in your inbox, sign up here! Each one features action alerts, upcoming events, political education, and more.
- From the National Political Committee — Socialism Wins in the South!
- Tonight, Thursday 5/23 — Join Our UAW 4811 Strike Support Call!
- Give to the UAW 4811 Hardship Fund
- RSVP for Thursday 5/30 Electoral Call — How We Won in the South
- Member Feedback Requested: Should the NPC Re-Endorse AOC?
- Apply for the International Committee’s Brazil/USA Political Education Exchange Course! Deadline Monday 6/3
- DSA is Hiring!
From the National Political Committee — Socialism Wins in the South!
Tuesday night was a huge night for socialists in the south, with two major electoral primary wins for DSA chapters in states that have long been considered hostile territory for socialist electoral work. Both campaigns were run almost entirely by the chapters themselves, and both candidates are long-time active DSA member-organizers — “cadre candidates,” as we like to call them, and we can’t wait to see what they’re able to do when they take office.
In Louisville, KY, former Louisville DSA Co-Chair JP Lyninger took home an overwhelming win with nearly 50% of the vote in a three-way primary race for Louisville Metro Council District 6. This is a major win for a chapter that has been developing an electoral program for years and was hugely galvanized by the Access for All Kentucky reproductive justice campaign, which JP chaired and which won abortion protections across the state.
In Smyrna, GA — a working-class majority-minority suburb of Atlanta and part of Atlanta DSA’s catchment — Gabriel Sanchez beat an incumbent moderate Democrat (and a number of heavy-hitting establishment endorsements and the money that accompanies them) by 14 points in his campaign for Georgia House District 42. Gabriel is a long-time chapter organizer, and was a field lead for the Stop Cop City campaign. His DSA-led campaign replicated the tireless sidewalk-pounding canvass-heavy strategy the chapter developed during that campaign.
That’s a huge part of the DSA Difference: we aren’t just running electoral campaigns in a vacuum. We’re building a mass movement of the working class, which means we need to meet our fellow members of the working class where they are: on the shop floor, in our apartment buildings and mobile home parks, at our PTA and library board meetings, in marches for reproductive freedom and in protests against police brutality and in encampments for Palestinian liberation. And we take the skills we learn, we mobilize the formations we’ve built, and we empower the organizers we’ve developed, and we just keep winning bigger, and transferring more and more power from the ruling class to the working class.
DSA’s power as an independent organization is especially important in a national election year, where we can show how we organize for the power we deserve against a political system stacked for the ruling class. Our member-led organizing is strengthened with collective resources that help us punch way above our weight. Just this month, DSA passed a milestone of over 2,500 solidarity dues payers, giving 1% of their annual income for the 99%! If you haven’t made the switch yet, we encourage you to become a solidarity dues payer — organized people and organized money get the goods. And join us for our last Solidarity Dues Call-a-Thon phonebanks this month on Sunday 5/26 and Tuesday 5/28! We keep having great conversations with fellow DSA members across the country about how we are building for the long haul.
We have a world to win and we’re doing it together! Check out the happenings in your local chapter and check out the offerings below for other ways to get involved!
Tonight, Thursday 5/23 — Join Our UAW 4811 Strike Support Call!
The academic workers of UAW 4811 are going on an unprecedented strike to protect their rights to free speech, protest, and collective action. The University of California system allowed counter-protestors to assault peaceful demonstrations against genocide in Palestine, and called riot cops on its students and workers. That’s why UAW 4811 members have voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike over the violation of basic workplace rights like safety. Campus by campus, UAW 4811 workers will be standing up and walking out.
Join us tonight, Thursday 5/23 at 7pm PT/6pm CT/5 pm MT/4pm PT for a mass call featuring academic workers from the University of California system! On this call, you’ll hear how the strike is going and how DSA members can ramp up support. This call is co-sponsored by DSA’s National Labor Commission and Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA).
Give to the UAW 4811 Hardship Fund
Donate now to support striking University of California workers standing up for Palestine! For the rest of this month, for every dollar donated to the UAW 4811 Hardship Fund, DSA will be matching the amount in the form of grants to chapters doing picket support. Upload a screenshot of your donation receipt here for it to be matched. Our goal is $5,000 of support from DSA members!
RSVP for Thursday 5/30 Electoral Call — How We Won in the South
Join DSA’s National Electoral Commission Thursday 5/30 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT. On this call, you’ll hear Louisville DSA and Atlanta DSA members debriefing, discussing, and celebrating their recent electoral wins: JP Lyninger for Louisville Metro Council and Gabriel Sanchez for Georgia State House!
Member Feedback Requested: Should the NPC Re-Endorse AOC?
Recently, the NPC passed a resolution soliciting feedback from members on whether to re-endorse Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14). We encourage members to share their thoughts on this question in 250 words or less using this form by Thursday 6/6. Please also share this form with other members of your chapter, as we would like to hear from as much of the membership as possible.
Apply for the International Committee’s Brazil/USA Political Education Exchange Course! Deadline Monday 6/3
Democratic-socialist political movements in Brazil and the US are focused on fighting neo-fascist political projects, and at the same time, seeking to better represent the multi-racial, multi-gendered working class in large, complex countries marked by the legacies of settler colonialism and slavery.
Join DSA’s International Committee and Fundação Perseu Abramo for this six-module political education course aimed at providing new tools and strategies to a cohort of local and national leaders of US and Brazil socialist currents. The application deadline is Monday 6/3.
DSA is Hiring!
Join our team as an Operations Director or a Development Director! If you are passionate about making a difference and have the skills and experience to thrive in these roles, we encourage you to apply. For more details and to submit your application, please visit our Careers Page.
The post Socialism Wins in the South — Your National Political Committee newsletter appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Campaign Q&A: Building Public Power in Milwaukee
Milwaukee DSA is Building For Power through its public utilities campaign. Campaign leader Andy B shares how building a mass base will lead to a democratic, green energy future.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
GNDCC: What’s Milwaukee’s Building For Power campaign?
Andy B: Milwaukee’s GND campaign is called Power to the People. Our local private energy company, called We Energies, does not treat our community well at all—they made $1.3 billion in profits last year, and yet they are attempting to do the third rate hike in three years. Other publicly owned utilities in Wisconsin, which comprise about 11% of our power grid, have electric bills that are on average 30 to 40% lower.
We’re trying to replace We Energies with a publicly-owned, municipal power company. Our strategy to do this is through a particular Wisconsin law that gives the city a legal avenue to use eminent domain to purchase all of the private energy utilities in the city and convert them into public ones.
It requires the support of our Common Council in the city and will need to pass a referendum. A huge part of this campaign is building overwhelming community support for an initiative like this. There aren’t really any magic shortcuts; it takes a critical mass of public support demanding change from our city leaders for this sort of initiative to take place.
Why is public-owned power so important to the green transition?
Private companies like We Energies are driven by maximizing profit, and that’s not compatible with the rate of change we need to adopt green energy. Their idea of switching to more green energy is investing in a brand new billion-dollar natural gas power plant. They claim they want to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 80% by 2030 (compared to 2005 levels) and halt the use of coal as an energy source by the end of 2032, but there’s no accountability to actually ensure that happens. It’s not the bold action we need to see in the climate moment we’re in right now. A community-controlled, publicly owned power company gives the people of Milwaukee an actual say in how to transition to an ecologically sound power utility using solar and wind power.
Is there a particular reason why now is a good time for this public power campaign?
There is a funny bit of history in Milwaukee. This exact same legal avenue was pursued in the 1930s. They got further than we are right now; they actually went to a referendum and, unfortunately, that referendum failed. So here we are, almost 100 years later, trying it again, and better late than never. I wish it would have happened a lot sooner, but we’re gonna win this time.
Tell us about Milwaukee—what are the conditions like there and how do they affect this project?
Milwaukee, unfortunately, is a very geographically segregated city. The energy rate hikes overwhelmingly affect Black populations in this city. About 16% of the Milwaukee population is Black, but around 65% of residents who have a high energy burden are Black. It’s an issue that really affects marginalized communities, and that’s where we are especially succeeding in building our base for this campaign.
It does help that Milwaukee is, by and large, a very liberal city. So a lot of folks are already conditioned to understand the need to transition toward green energy and are on board with this specific plan that we can put in front of them. It’s a popular campaign, probably the most popular campaign I’ve worked on. Whenever we have canvassers go out pretty much anywhere in the city, folks are very receptive. I think it’s going to be a success.
It seems like it has a lot of popular support. What are some of the challenges that are facing this campaign?
The biggest, most immediate hurdle is that in order to actually get a referendum on our ballot to kick off this legal process, we need the support of the Milwaukee Common Council. We have 15 Common Council members. One of them is vocally in support of this campaign, and we’ve had a couple of the more kind of liberal progressive members who have basically implied that they’d be willing to support the campaign as soon as it becomes popular, as soon as it would start to benefit them politically. But we have quite a ways before we have a majority support on the Common Council.
That’s the most immediate hurdle, and even then, it is a complicated process. The referendum will need to pass, and we’ll need to make sure the community is educated against all the propaganda that We Energies is inevitably going to be pumping out. Maine, a few months back, had a state referendum to convert their entire power grid to a public power grid. And it failed, because the private energy corporations spent a ton of money to campaign against it. That is a tough hurdle to overcome.
This is a very, very long-term project. It’s popular, it’s fun, it’s exciting. The pitfall is it’s going to take a long time and a lot of effort.
How do you keep folks engaged when the fruition of the project is such a long-term thing?
One of my favorite ways we do that is by periodically hosting rallies and public-facing events. A month ago, we held an event at our city hall where we gathered all of the petitions that we’ve been collecting from folks around the communities expressing their support for the campaign. We had over 7,000 of them in this very large stack, and about 100 of us gathered outside City Hall and a very public rally, and we marched into City Hall and delivered them directly to the mayor and the Common Council. That’s the second time we’ve done that; the first time was when we only had 2,000 signatures. Events like that are really good for energy, and they keep folks aware of where the campaign is and engaged.
If someone was interested in running a similar public power campaign in a different chapter, what advice would you give them?
The most important thing is building that community support. There’s no magic sequence of making deals with elected officials or courting fundamentally “capital L liberal” folks into making this sort of radical change happen. You need the political will of an entire community to collectively demand it—that’s the most important aspect.
Additionally, find ways to not only fight for this campaign, but organize around it. An important aspect is that it does bring members into DSA, into our other projects. It does bring money and capacity into our chapter that we can use for this and other campaigns. It’s very important that this isn’t just a single campaign in a vacuum; it is part of something much larger.
Is there anything surprising that you’ve learned about public power through this process?
I didn’t realize how ubiquitous it was. Los Angeles, Memphis, Seattle; even here in Wisconsin, 11% of all power is public. I enjoy sharing that info with folks. Because, initially, it seems like such a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream that we can have a municipal power company, but it’s been tried and tested over and over again. It’s everywhere.
How can folks in Milwaukee get involved with your campaign?
The most important thing they can do, in my opinion, is join our canvases. We canvass all around Milwaukee every single Sunday. We also have phone banks every Thursday evening, where we call the folks who have signed our petitions and folks in DSA and invite them to join us in our efforts. Because that’s what it’s going to take. It’s going to take repetitive informing of the community, rallying of the community, organizing the community to make this project happen. So anybody interested in being a part of that process, I would love to see that.
The post Campaign Q&A: Building Public Power in Milwaukee appeared first on Building for Power.
The Politics of Care: An Introduction
My grandfather died a month after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. My grandmother had just undergone heart surgery and required a significant amount of help, both from grief and continuing medical issues and recovery. As most of our family was distant from her, we sought care workers to fill in gaps in family aid, and through searching for and conversing with these care workers, I learned several valuable lessons. First, care work is prohibitively expensive, and much of it isn’t at all covered by health insurance (thank you American healthcare system). I also learned that care work, and those involved in it, are devastatingly undervalued, something I had known conceptually but not seen in person. The activist in me sought a comprehensive explanation of exactly how care work is exploited and what could possibly be done. In so doing I stumbled across a concept that was unfamiliar to me at the time, the “politics of care.”
The term “politics of care” has existed for decades in academia, historically with an explicit focus on healthcare and the impact public policy has on it. The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, has encouraged wider adoption of the more liberatory conception of the term long pushed for by feminist and anti-racist advocates, such as Joan Tronto and Patricia Hill Collins. Its usage outside academia is still new and the term is nebulously understood, but the component parts are already widely agreed upon by socialists: queer liberation, disability advocacy, universalized healthcare, racial justice, community building, and the like. Understanding the intersectionality of these issues, alongside the classic trifecta of race, class, and gender, and how a more equitable system would beyond repressive capitalist approaches to care work, constitute what we mean by a new “politics of care.”
Care, to use a single, brief definition, is the labor through which society is maintained and thrives. Healthcare and disability assistance are, naturally, significant parts of care work, but so are child and family care, social reproduction, education, and domestic work. Much of care work is behind the scenes, unpaid, and socially enforced as well as deeply gendered and racialized in terms of who shoulders the burden. It is “women’s” work, expected of people who society categorizes as women or feminizes regardless of their own self-conception and of those otherwise or additionally marginalized. Internationally, one study found that women spend three times as much of their week dedicated to unpaid labor as men while another study highlights that queer and black people are much more likely to engage in unpaid care work than their counterparts. These disparities extend to paid care, where the same populations are disproportionately employed amidst poor wages, workplace discrimination, and record lows in mental wellness. Care work is shouldered disproportionately by the marginalized. This weakens their financial independence, forcing workers to seek other avenues of survival, which in turn affects the quality of care work and provides yet another justification for its devaluation, at least to the minds of conservative lawmakers.
Real wages for care workers have declined in the twenty-first century. Nearly 40% of care workers are on public assistance, and the number of care workers is beginning to falter while the number of those reliant on care work increases. It’s not hard to understand why care work is so difficult. The labor of women and people of color has long been systematically devalued in the US, whose patchwork and capricious welfare system forces many families to take on additional care work themselves. Patriarchal and white supremacist denigration of feminized and racialized labor economically disadvantages care workers and reduces their wellbeing and overall health as well.
Traditional conceptions of care insist on maintaining a hierarchy between physicians, nurses, and the great number of care workers that subsist on minimal or nonexistent wages. Many different kinds of care workers are underpaid and overworked, but there are still significant inequalities among them. While 13% of healthcare workers are unionized overall, support staff are less likely to be unionized than nurses, and physicians are the only group whose real wages have grown in this century. The fabrication of care as a scarce resource to be rationed shifts the onus of patient health from the industry onto the needy themselves.
Nancy Fraser argues that concern for the well-being of care workers themselves happens only when their labor is considered valuable, as it temporarily was during the worst days of the pandemic. In the wake of Covid-19, it appeared care work might gain limited economic ground with welfare policies primarily directed at care workers, such as the dramatic expansion of federal child tax credits under the 2021 American Rescue Plan. This expansion, which cut child poverty by more than half in a very short time, was phased out by 2023. However, none of the expansions were ever sufficient to compensate for the financial devastation from the pandemic suffered by care workers.
Much of the socialist understanding of care and care work rests on the conceptual foundation of the Marxist-Feminist advancement of “social reproduction.” However, a newer politics of care not only acknowledges the labor of family care performed primarily by women but also the intersections of identity often neglected by Marxist writers. Any discussion of the gendered nature of care work has to recognize that the lowest strata of the industry are filled disproportionately by women of color, especially immigrants. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins refers to “controlling images” (e.g., “mammies,” Black matriarchy, and “welfare queens”) that justify systemic bigotry and silence accusations of discrimination. Indeed, 60% of Black care workers describe workplace discrimination, often from their own patients. These workers further express their fear of retribution for voicing their concerns.
While Collins’ largely focuses her ire on controlling images of Black women, she also articulates that this process is weaponized against other oppressed people. Just as diametrically opposed controlling images of subservience and wantonness are used to silence Black women, so are they used to silence others in feminized positions. From these, we have caricatures to bludgeon marginalized people and all working people who ask for more than they are given by our hostile system.
Thus far, we’ve only touched upon one of the major groups damaged most by the devaluation of care work: people with disabilities. These people are themselves more likely to be unpaid care workers and thus subject to the financial turmoil and stress that status needlessly brings. Unacceptable work conditions and wages drive away candidates for care work they rely on, leaving a deficit in disability services. Because uncontrolled insurance and healthcare costs drive up expenses, family and friends need to work to make ends meet and pay for care. As a result, people with disabilities are left without the care they need, and too often, cannot afford.
Unfortunately, even many socialists fail to consider people with disabilities or neurodiversity. As James Graham points out in “Socialism Needs Disability Justice,” the reduction of people with disabilities to another group of workers to advocate for, while frequently true, disregards disabilities that preclude traditional and outmoded conceptions of productivity. Class reductionism will leave behind people with disabilities who cannot sell their labor if identity is unaccounted for, just as it would with gender and racial inequalities.
The problems of care work under capitalism are many but relatively clear: necessary, sustaining, potentially enriching work has been feminized and racialized, so it might be cast aside and profited from. Factoring in the crisis of care, the outlook can appear grim. While no one person may have all the answers, once again feminist and antiracist writers have blazed the trail. The solutions are as varied as the problems involved and can be split into two broad categories: cultural and structural, or as matters of social and economic capital, respectively.
The denigration of care work is, primarily, patriarchal in nature, and secondly, part of the mass devaluation of the working class endemic to all capitalist societies. Everyone, especially those who have traditionally been exonerated by masculinity of the responsibility, must be brought in to shoulder an equal amount of care work, paid or unpaid, without setting aside the marginalized peoples that have thus maintained society through this work. Disentangling care from structures of gender and race underlines its nature as a universal benefit, something from all of us to all of us. More broadly, the dissolution of gender norms and the concept of “men and women’s work,” alongside the concepts of man and woman themselves, are needed for real parity. The nuclear family, as a hallmark of conservative self-management and upholder of traditional values, must also be displaced from its status as the typical family model.
There is, of course, a significant intersection between a necessary cultural shift to solve gender discrimination and one to eliminate racial injustice, advance queer, feminist, and black liberation, and combat racial and class inequalities. However, just as identity reductionism can too often result in a celebration of milquetoast politicians from marginalized identities, the inverse abandons the social and psychological effects of discrimination and bias as something not worthy of consideration and thus leaves those lingering prejudices in place. As we work towards our economic and political ends as socialists, we can never forget to uphold and respect the voices and experiences of marginalized people and adopt a collective liberation against sexism, racism, queerphobia, and discrimination against disabled people. Class reductionism would lead to the fragmentation of our movement and the abandonment of the causes of marginalized people.
Targeting segments of our population as responsible for the care of all only harms the common welfare,burdens the targets with labor they cannot achieve alone, and individualizes the pursuit of care instead of acknowledging the interdependent nature of communal systems. Cultural shifts alone will do little to rectify the material injustices created by the capitalist devaluation of care. Many of the structural changes necessary to value and uphold care work are policies familiar to and advocated by socialists already. These, however, must be taken with due respect in regard to identity, not only on a class basis. Paid leave for parents, for example, is an important step, but compensating parents and family members for currently unpaid care and domestic work is the surest method to aid the material stability of families and ensure that care workers are able to do their work sustainably.
The unionization of care workers would, of course, be one of the most significant benefits to their situation. Recent years have seen, propelled by the increased visibility and recognition of care workers from both the pandemic and our unique labor conditions, noticeable ground gained in this area, such as the unionization of healthcare workers at the University of Rochester and the University of Michigan. New York City and Chicago have both played host to significant movements to unionize home care workers this year alone.
There is also, of course, universal health care. Libraries of socialist literature have already been written on the myriad of benefits universal health care would provide, particularly where patients’ wallets are concerned, but it bears mentioning in brief the impact such policy would have on individual care workers. In addition to the myriad benefits of such a program for all workers, even a decidedly capitalist think-tank such as the Economic Policy Institute agrees that universal healthcare would relieve pressure on care workers by removing health insurance and medical costs as driving forces in workers’ lives.
State-based solutions are, however, slow in implementation and can only go so far under our current system. Mutual aid fills in these gaps and provides bottom-up methods of care. Given how thoroughly inefficient our care industry is, it should come as no surprise that care workers (especially non-health professionals), and those who rely on them benefit significantly from mutual aid networks, and there is room for much more than currently exists. Notably, mutual aid networks kept many people housed and fed while the state faltered in its response to the pandemic, and many continue to do so specifically for care workers due to the instability of their income.
We must move beyond the misconception that care is a finite resource. It is a common labor and a common benefit. We as socialists, those in DSA in particular, are well positioned to effect change on care work and its workers. We hold the power as a collective to better the world for care workers and the people that rely on them, by better distributing care, and improving its quality.
Image: Works Progress Administration (WPA) photograph (1939) depicting women participating in a program aimed at training Black women to become domestic workers in New Orleans.
The post The Politics of Care: An Introduction appeared first on Socialist Forum.
Editorial Note: May Day Edition
The new editorial board of Socialist Forum welcomes you to our May issue, where we explore the significance of May Day, a day that encompasses both the arrival of spring and International Workers Day. May Day serves as a reminder of the ongoing struggle for fair wages, safe working conditions, and democracy for all. This May Day, we’re inspired by the thousands of people at the Labor Notes conference who are thinking of more militant approaches to the problems of late capitalism and the thousands of students who have put their education on the line to demand a ceasefire in Gaza.
This issue begins with Gaza. We talked to Erin Lawson, a recent NYU graduate and current member of the YDSA National Coordinating Committee. She recounts her involvement in NYU’s Gaza encampment, the broader NYC student movement, and where it might go from here.
Paul Garver discusses DSA’s involvement in the labor movement and the efforts our organization has made to connect with and support workers internationally. He also talks about the importance of the holiday as a global holiday for solidarity and coming together.
Socialist Forum’s managing editor, Chris Maisano, explores the current state of the labor movement in the US, contrasting it with previous periods of more successful union activity. He argues that labor’s current challenges include low membership, a lack of growth, as well as the absence of the political and social factors that fueled previous waves of unionization. Though the labor movement may not see another dramatic surge in union organizing like in the 1930s, still, Maisano believes there is room for growth.
Socialist Forum editorial board member Todd Chretien reviews the history of mass strikes in the US, highlighting the state and employer violence the strikers often faced. Chretien examines the barriers the labor movement faces to mass striking, including the need to build solidarity and set unifying strategic goals in light of UAW President Shawn Fain’s call for a 2028 general strike.
Turning our attention to the upcoming presidential election, Sarah Hurd, co-chair for DSA’s National Labor Commission, reports on conversations between DSA union activists as they prepare for a challenging presidential election cycle.
Expanding our traditional understanding of labor, Caleb Sneeden lays out a new “politics of care,” which breaks down how and why our society undervalues care work. Care work, which includes healthcare, disability assistance, child and family care, social reproduction, education, and domestic work, is disproportionately handled by marginalized communities. Traditional conceptions of care prioritize a hierarchy between physicians and nurses, with many care workers underpaid and overworked. The pandemic has highlighted the need for a more equitable system that acknowledges the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, and goes beyond repressive capitalist approaches to care.
Bringing the labor movement home, Don and Dominic Driscoll discuss their roots in DSA as a father and son team. Don, who has been a member since 1983, grew up in a red household and was taught values such as love, equality, and a sense of responsibility. His son, Dominic, joined DSA at 18, after witnessing the atrocities of late capitalism. They discuss what the organization can do to improve participation, democracy, membership, and build a mass party.
Turning to political theory in the socialist movement, Harlei Morency and Luke Pickrell advocate a return to democratic republicanism, outlining its historical context and subsequent abandonment by Marxists. To establish a new democratic constitution, the left must refocus on agitating for a working-class-led government, and bold measures like a constitutional convention and the abolition of the Supreme Court, Senate, and Electoral College.
Finally, Sam Lewis ponders the role of paid political leadership in DSA, and the delicate balance between maintaining grassroots democracy and incorporating paid staff. He considers the need for guidelines, consistent policies, and preserving the dynamic member democracy that makes DSA so great.
As always, we welcome your feedback at socialistforum[at]dsausa.org.
The post Editorial Note: May Day Edition appeared first on Socialist Forum.
When DSA is a Family Affair
For Dominic Driscoll and Don Driscoll, DSA is a family affair. Dominic has been a DSA member for 8 years, and his father, Don, has been a member since 1983. They recently had a wide-ranging conversation about democratic socialism, DSA, and the challenges facing the democratic socialist movement. Socialist Forum presents an edited transcript here in the interest of promoting inter-generational dialogue in DSA.
Dominic Driscoll: I’m pretty sure I asked you this when I was a kid. I may be biased growing up in a red household, but I think every kid starts out as a socialist until it is drilled out of them. Everyone doing their part and sharing is important. These are two key components of preschool. I still call myself a socialist, anarchist, or whatever I’m feeling that day for ethical reasons. I still hold onto what I was taught, that all people are created equal, that we should seek to improve the world with love in our hearts, and that everyone should have a say. Apparently, because capitalism is opposed to all those concepts, I am some sort of radical. How about you?
Don Driscoll: It started at home and at Mass. I listened when our priest talked about loving your neighbor and taking care of the least of these. Your grandparents lived and taught us those values and actions, fighting for school desegregation and funding, participating in their unions, and working to elect women to office. Later I understood that it was family tradition: Irish Wobblies, Italian anarchists, and women who demanded their place in the world. We were taught to fight for ourselves and for others. Simply put, I am a socialist because human beings matter and we are all in this together.
Dominic Driscoll: Why did you join DSA?
Don Driscoll: I turned 14 in 1979, and my teen years were radicalizing. Ronald Reagan was elected, launching the corporate right’s deregulation of capital and globalization. They forced plant closings, created mass unemployment, went to war with labor, and intervened in Central America. Four of my uncles were laid off. The Soviets repressed dissent and invaded Afghanistan, while the Chinese Communist Party repressed dissent and invaded Vietnam. Nuclear war seemed possible.
I start fighting and looking for answers. I got involved with union and peace activists. I started reading and looking for answers. Massive resistance was flowering, especially in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, and South Africa. It was crystal clear that both capitalism and “communism” needed to go. I decided I was fighting for a world where every human is valuable, collectively and individually, and where people are subjects and not objects. The only solution is a society that is democratic in every way.
DSA had those values, and the strategy was common sense. There is no mass movement for socialism without uniting the progressive forces. Those forces have been gathering in the Democratic Party since the 1930s, which is when our family started voting Democrat. It helped that I could explain it to my great-aunt.
Dominic Driscoll: Did you keep paying dues?
Don Driscoll: My compas and I dug in as organizers in unions and social movements. I went to work in the South, where DSA largely wasn’t. I want to stay connected to the democratic left around the world. And the strategy still made sense. I was glad I stayed because in 2016 Bernie executed that strategy and the ground shifted. Suddenly, I went from being the youngest person at meetings to the oldest.
Why did you come along with me to that first meeting?
Dominic Driscoll: I was looking for a new place to organize that focused on the problems at hand. DSA had this energy that “anything was possible if we put our minds to it.” I haven’t seen that in many other places.
That said, I think DSA faces some big internal challenges. There is a bad habit in the organization, especially when we look at the national level, of looking at others in the organization that we disagree with as enemies or “not real socialists” instead of what they are, which are comrades with different opinions. This has led to some “cut your nose off to spite your face” behavior. We see members will ignore a point not based on its validity but on who is saying it and if their side can “win.” This type of mindset is unhealthy and detrimental to all of us, both as individual organizers and as a greater organization.
Don Driscoll: The energy of young activists was electrifying and filled me with hope. I also saw toxic internal conflict and an absence of trust. I have some impressions as to why based on my experience in Seattle DSA, and from my work in Texas and Florida.
Most of our activists are relatively new to radical politics. With shrinking civic engagement and unions, many activists have never been in functional, sustained organizations. In uncertain times people tend to look for certainty. There have always been tendencies in the socialist movement to believe that only one line is correct and that those who disagree with us are the enemy. When you add in a pandemic that challenges the personal connections that build trust and understanding, you have a recipe for conflict. It also put us out of contact with the bulk of our membership, with many falling behind on their dues.
Dominic Driscoll: A major piece of declining membership is opening up accessibility. Right now we are running into a problem we’ve had since the founding of the organization, which is how to accommodate parents of young children. While hybrid meetings have helped with this, we still need to have our chapters have events that are accessible to parents with children. Mobilizing members is the best way to prevent them from leaving or letting their dues lapse. Another major component is chapter culture. We need to make sure we are using our ears to listen to people and their concerns, even if we disagree with them. For example, I’ve talked to many disabled comrades who have had issues with the accessibility of meetings and socials, especially the immunocompromised.
Beyond that, when we look to remobilize inactive members and recruit new people, we need to listen to them just as much as we talk to them. We have one mouth and two ears, and we need to use that to our advantage.
Don Driscoll: Well, the number one way is to ask people to join and rejoin. It will work better if we think about who we are talking to and create modes of participation that make sense. You can’t build a mass party if the organization isn’t accessible, and not just inaccessible meetings, but programs that make sense. Done right, electoral campaigns that build mass support build membership.
There has been a lot of discussion about internal democracy in DSA. Do you think we have issues with internal democracy, and if so, how should we address it?
Dominic Driscoll: Yes, DSA has a democracy problem. This is unsurprising for an organization that has grown magnitudes in size in under a decade. Couple that growth with a lot of passion, but limited political experience, and you get to where we are.
While there are macro issues that need to be addressed, I think we need to address the DSA culture first and foremost. While DSA has very low official barriers of entry (and this is our strength), some issues make it intimidating for newer members to engage easily. A good example would be the widespread use of Robert’s Rules of Order. While it can be useful, Robert’s Rule of Order can be very unwieldy, overly complicated, easy to abuse, inefficient as all get out, and very intimidating. This leads to lower participation from newer members. Along with our active members who don’t have time to study parliamentary procedure, 98% of which is not remotely necessary or makes sense.
Having some more requirements for chapter democracy is important as well. We need one consistent policy for issues like the power of steering committees, expulsions, rules for both bylaw changes and resolutions, elections, and even chapter cultures. This is especially important for dissent. We are an organization that believes in radical democracy, and part of that is understanding that often the minority may have a point.
On a national level, it would be wise to utilize the convention delegates more. Technically, a delegate’s term lasts until the next convention. The National Political Committee (NPC) often has carte blanche to make whatever decisions they think we want. While this makes sense when we cannot communicate directly, we have technology that allows 750 people to communicate and vote across the country. We need to build structures allowing the convention to be an oversight body for the NPC outside convention. If our NPC is having issues and acting in a way that doesn’t reflect well on the organization, we should have the right to oust them or override their ruling. This is a part of bottom-up organizing and radical democracy.
I know we’ve had many discussions about this before, and a large part of it is the gap between the membership and the national level of the organization. Most of our work is going to be local, which is a good thing, but there is this gap between our national work and local work that isn’t just communication issues.
We have a missing middle that doesn’t allow us to effectively address state or regional issues. We need democratic state and regional work not only to provide a path to national organizing for members, but also to allow us to address state-level actions like state initiatives, state-wide Socialists in Office committees, gubernatorial campaigns, and state-wide direct action. We could also undertake actions like helping members move people safely across states to address things like inadequate reproductive healthcare and gender-affirming care.
When it comes to caucuses in DSA, my thoughts are a little complicated. I am a member of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, and you are not in a caucus. I think caucuses have become important because they are filling a vacuum in the organization around political education and discourse. I think having them as formations is nice, but it fills the need for lines of communication in the chapter. We do need to emphasize them less, however. The fact of the matter is that most of the organization is not in any caucus. I think that’s good as it has prevented factionalism from overtaking the organization. That being said, I think we need to make sure caucuses do not cause factionalization. We have seen a bit of this already, but we know from history this can kill us as an organization. Caucus beef needs to be squashed because it is not conducive to constructive organizing, and it is often picked up by new caucus members who have nothing to do with whatever issues have taken place in the past. I also think the “left vs. right” dichotomy some promote regarding caucuses is frankly a false dichotomy. It doesn’t accurately capture people’s politics.
DSA faces plenty of external challenges and problems too. To me, and I think we agree on this, there is the threat of fascism both at home and abroad. Currently, we are running into the United States openly supporting a fascist regime in Israel. This is going to cause a fascist regime to be more likely stateside. While this is not a call to support Joe Biden, it is important to acknowledge that a second Trump administration would be much more dangerous than the first one and prepare for it.
Don Driscoll: When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. We do agree that this is the moment I have been worrying about all your life. Faced with this situation, what do you think we should be focusing on as an organization?
Dominic Driscoll: I’ve never been a huge fan of this question as it can lead us to pit ourselves, especially our working groups, against each other for resources. In reality, we need to be fighting on all fronts as it were. That means we need to focus on electoral, labor, community building, and direct action. In my experience, when we are working on all of these approaches they end up strengthening each other instead of detracting from each other. It is important to be in the streets and to be at the ballot box. If you only focus on one it’s easier to lose both. Even for small chapters, it’s possible, but this makes coalitions super important. Chapters don’t have to run their own mutual aid program or field cadre candidates, but you can encourage people to go to others in the community. You don’t need to lead street actions, but you can help with specific parts of the actions.
This is especially true when we are addressing issues like fascism because history has shown that if you leave a political/communal flank open, the fascists will hit you there. That includes the halls of power and the streets. Coalitions are going to be important to form an organized popular front that covers all aspects of society. This is the only way that we, as people, are going to survive.
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The Uncontrolling Love of God | Jeff Wells
Alexandria residents pass "People's Ceasefire" resolution
Practicing Labor Internationalism in a Time of Crisis
Most labor and socialist movements around the world celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1 with rallies and marches. The US is an exception. This is ironic since that day was chosen to honor the five anarchists who were hanged in the aftermath of a bombing that killed seven Chicago policemen on May 4, 1886 during a rally for the eight-hour day.
Instead, US workers have the Labor Day holiday in September, usually celebrated with family picnics, motorcades, and breakfast speeches by labor leaders, and politicians angling for the labor vote. I usually participate in May Day events in the Boston area, consisting of marches for immigrant rights in Chelsea and East Boston, and small rallies and speeches by leftist groups on Boston Common.
Because of my global labor organizing work, I had the opportunity to participate in May Day events in several other countries. In Geneva, Switzerland, the annual May Day marches normally had fewer than a thousand participants, but with large contingents of international solidarity activists, most notably Kurds. In Stockholm the parades were working class family events, decorously Social Democratic but large and spirited. In Marseilles, where May Day was a semi-official holiday and the unions curtailed most public transport, most participants were older white and black industrial workers mobilized by the Communist Party, but with a notable lack of international participants and little interest in the North African neighborhoods through which the march proceeded. In San Salvador in 1986, the march was relatively small but militant, vocal and understandably concerned about military or police repression. Key worker organizers that I met with there were assassinated in following years.
May Day events are so different from place to place because they reflect specific characteristics of working-class existence in their respective societies. I have not been to countries where May Day consists mainly of showing off the latest military hardware and long speeches by party officials, but that sadly may be what most people think May Day is about.
Fellow DSA member Jana Silverman and I made a case for supporting global class struggle through labor internationalism in a previous issue of Socialist Forum. To buttress that case, we referenced the twinning of socialist organization and working-class organizing over nearly two centuries at the international level. We also referenced specific cases up to that point where DSA’s International Committee had sufficient consensus to move forward together on creative and positive campaigns, as well as a few areas where we failed to show solidarity with unions under attack outside the US because of internal dissension. What I will do here is to discuss the role of labor internationalism in the concrete case of Gaza and Palestine, which is still developing as of this writing.
Gaza and Palestine
The National Labor Network for Ceasefire (L4CF) was formally launched on February 22 with a Zoom webinar called “Building Bridges for Peace,” which attracted over 500 participants. The webinar, capably moderated by Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now, featured speakers Wendy Pearlman of Northwestern University, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain, National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle, and US Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Summer Lee (D-PA).
As both Shawn Fain and Becky Pringle pointed out on the webinar, trade union rights and human rights should be inseparable. Social justice and peace are traditional goals of workers’ movements throughout the world, including the US. An unbroken chain of solidarity stretching from workplace to the globe based on a mobilized rank-and-file is an indispensable part of international socialism. An injury to one is an injury to all.
Ten major national U.S. unions and some 230+ local labor organizations endorsed an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Together these national unions represent nearly 60% of total union membership in the US. Seven national unions are formally part of L4CF (UE, UAW, NEA, IUPAT, APWU, NNU, AFA), while SEIU, AFT and CWA (and even the AFL-CIO, if tepidly and late) have also endorsed some form of a ceasefire.
The creation of the L4CF less than five months into the Israel-Gaza conflict represents the most rapid and successful mobilization of US unions against a war supported by the US government. In parallel historical cases like Vietnam, Nicaragua and Iraq, labor mobilization against the war was relatively slow to develop and fragmented when it did, never reaching the broad basis of union support this campaign is now gaining.
Some of this accelerated mobilization can be attributed to the sheer magnitude of suffering that’s been inflicted on Gaza’s civilian population, much larger in scale than the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 inflicted on Israeli civilians. But another major factor is the powerful bottom-up rank-and-file-based mobilizing strategy within several U.S. labor unions.
Evidence for this can be viewed in the comprehensive list of union caucuses, state and local unions that endorsed a ceasefire even before most national unions did. In the case of the UAW, Regions 6 and 9A and the Unite All Workers for Democracy rank-and-file caucus led the parade. For the NEA it was several state and city teachers’ associations that led the way. The 1199 healthcare workers division of SEIU signed on months before the national SEIU leadership issued its own statement.
Many DSA labor members were key organizers within their own unions and councils throughout the country. I will focus on two examples from Massachusetts.
The Graduate Students Union HGSU-UAW Local 5118 endorsed a ceasefire through a mass democratic vote that went to its thousands of members. HGSU-UAW President Evan Mackey commented on the “UAW’s commitment to democracy, informed by our reform caucus UAWD, Unite All Workers for Democracy. Brandon Mancilla, the UAW 9A Regional Director who announced the national UAW support for a ceasefire at a rally in DC, comes from the HGSU-UAW.” Evan and Brandon are both members of DSA.
Ruth Jennison and Phan Huang of River Valley DSA, both longtime pro-Palestine activists, helped win the support of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) for a ceasefire as leaders of its faculty division. The MTA has been led by members of its reform caucus for several years since Barbara Madeloni,who now works for Labor Notes, was elected as MTA president in 2014.
Labor for Palestine activists were able to mobilize quickly within the own unions because they were already part of internal networks of solidarity forged around reform campaigns, as shown in the case of the UAW and the MTA.
The United Electrical Workers (UE) helped launch the National Labor Network for Ceasefire because of its long-time commitment to international solidarity. As UE President Carl Rosen writes in Labor Notes, the UE demand for a ceasefire was anchored in decades of membership education and debate.
International Level
Global Union Federations (GUFs) responded both with statements and with concrete measures of material and political support to Gazan workers. GUFs include unions from different countries in specific broad sectors of work. Their members are not individual workers, but unions from multiple countries. Most of the time GUFs are mostly concerned with creating global networks of unions and workers in their respective sectors to create a counter-power to capitalist corporations and governments. For an analysis of how one particular GUF, the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF), functioned in creating global networks of workers within Coca-Cola and Nestle, please see a paper I wrote with colleagues from Russia, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.
Most Palestinian unions are affiliated with one GUF or another. When the Palestinian Trade Union Federation issued a general call for solidarity with workers in Gaza, all GUFs responded positively. Although their affiliated unions and their own governing structures come from politically diverse traditions, they usually agree on basic principles of human rights, peace, and social justice. While their means of direct intervention are limited and making rapid decisions in a sprawling global organization is often cumbersome, a genuine humanitarian crisis faced by Gazan workers and families evoked unusually concerted action.
Most GUFs have made impassioned statements and expressions of sympathy for the plight of workers in Gaza and their families, focused on unions and workers in their sectors. For instance, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), to which the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS) is affiliated, campaigns against the heavy losses of journalists and other media workers trying to cover the slaughter of civilians in Gaza. On March 25, the IFJ partnered with the PJS and the League of Arab States to organize a parallel event to a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to call for the protection of Palestinian journalists. PJS President Nassar Abu Baker told representatives of the missions from 70 countries: “If you aggregate all the journalists killed since October – without counting those who have been seriously injured – you will find that nearly 10% of the 1200 journalists from Gaza have been targeted and obliterated. This is perhaps the largest number of journalists killed in any war since Vietnam.”
As the war in Gaza continues, GUFs are coordinating to throw light on the crisis workers in Gaza are facing across all sectors. GUF websites are sharing essays and articles on their websites to expose the devastating impact on the safety and well-being of all workers and their families in Gaza, while stressing the urgent need for a ceasefire. For example, on the website of IndustriALL I found an eloquent statement from another GUF, Public Services International (PSI), about the conditions facing Gazan public sector workers of all kinds, including emergency responders, health care and utility workers. PSI is organizing donations to its Gaza Solidarity Fund to provide humanitarian assistance and support to these public service workers and their families.
As the US affiliate of Education International (EI), the NEA joined the pledge to provide aid to teachers and students in Gaza, where all universities and most school buildings have been destroyed. Rather like the MTA transmitted rank-and-file pressure upward to influence the NEA’s support for a ceasefire, the NEA as a member of EI influences its policies.
As you go to the highest level of labor’s international structures, the rival International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the World Confederation of Trade Unions (WFTU), the air becomes more rarified and the possibility of action other than statements diminishes. At that level, the main activity is trying to influence organizations connected with the UN, such as the International Labor Organization and the Human Rights Council. The letterhead Council of Global Unions (the ITUC, the GUFs and the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD) has focused on restoring UNRWA funding to feed and educate civilians in Gaza and in Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East. The WFTU has issued a statement supporting Palestinian Land Day protests on March 30. This level is several layers distant from the interests and needs of any real workers in Gaza or anywhere else.
What possibilities exist for workers who support Palestinian rights to act directly? The problem is that effective solidarity among the workers of the world, long a slogan and goal of socialists, is difficult to organize and maintain across a global working class that is very fragmented among multiple union structures and political ideologies. It functions at a few crucial nodes where the conditions are most favorable, for example the solidarity shown by unions in Sweden and other Nordic countries for a few score Tesla workers in Sweden. The unions where other more general appeals to international solidarity achieve some kind of resonance are in countries like South Africa and Brazil, which themselves benefited in the past from international solidarity.
A resilient global labor solidarity network will be built out the same way that genuine unions emerge at local workplaces and through focused national reform caucuses. DSA is focused on a sophisticated rank-and-file driven strategy in domestic union organizing that can play a similar role at the international level, in coordination with like-minded democratic socialists in other countries. UAW President Shawn Fain, for example, is trying to create a building block for that aspirational approach by trying to line up contract expiration dates for a potential general strike on May Day, 2028. Can we imagine that on May 1, 2028 workers in many countries could mobilize a one-day general solidarity strike against global capitalism and repressive governments? Think big, and organize at the molecular level!
Image: Drawing of a scene from the May 1886 Haymarket Riot from Harper’s Weekly (1886)
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