Statement from the Madison Area DSA Executive Committee on the 2024 Election

Donald Trump’s victory is a setback for the working class and will surely threaten our communities in countless ways. But it would not be possible without the failures of the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris’s focus on upholding a sorry status quo was not enough when voters are dissatisfied and disgusted with climate change, genocide, inflation, and our corrupt political system.

Workers deserve more. Workers deserve housing, Medicare for All, unions. Workers deserve a Green New Deal, taxes on the rich, an end to the US war machine. Workers deserve a party that fights for us, not the rich who exploit and divide us. Workers deserve socialism, and we won’t stop organizing until we get it.

Democrats lost, but DSA can and does win in down-ballot races throughout the country. Progressive and pro-worker ballot measures passed in several “red” states. Here in Madison, voters overwhelmingly passed budget referendums to fund our schools and city services. With those funds, we demand free school meals, affordable housing, sanctuary for immigrants, safety for trans people, and better pay for workers.

Only socialism and building mass movements and political organizations can defeat barbarism. Don’t despair – join DSA and organize for a better world with us! Come join us this week at one of the following events!

• Saturday 11/9 at The People’s Organizing Fair
• Sunday 11/10 at the Shout Your Abortion rally
• Tuesday 11/12 at our next Madison DSA monthly meeting
• Saturday 11/16 at our next New Member Orientation

Register for all of the above at https://madison-dsa.org/events/.

In the wake of the 2024 general election, many of us are feeling despair, grief, and anger over the results, especially at the national level. We had terrible options—between a wannabe fascist dictator and a neoliberal genocidaire in the Oval Office, neither outcome would be desirable for the working class in the United States. Unfortunately, [...]

Read More... from Statement from the Leadership Council following the 2024 general election

The post Statement from the Leadership Council following the 2024 general election appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America | San Diego Chapter.

The results of the election are frightening and difficult to process.

DSA knows that Donald Trump and the Republican Party will be a terror on the working class while they remain in power. This terror will disproportionately impact already vulnerable communities, including people who are Black, indigenous, Hispanic, queer, immigrants, and more, as it did during the prior Trump term. The return of “Muslim bans”, gutting of carbon initiatives, an even more unabashedly reactionary Supreme Court, an unrepentantly hostile NLRB, an emboldened rightist paramilitary movement both in and out of the state  — all these and more are in the offing. The Israeli settler state is celebrating, brazenly announcing its intention to permanently depopulate Northern Gaza of its already starved and shell-shocked residents. Project 2025, or some other iteration of right-wing state consolidation, may yet find its day in the sun, having shed some of the aura of liability.

Meanwhile, the current leadership of the Democratic Party has failed to produce a convincing alternative to the rise of fascism and plays into the right-wing agenda in critical and unacceptable ways. While the various causes that led to Kamala Harris’ defeat will be teased out in the weeks to come, we already know that the policy that “nothing will fundamentally change” of Biden and Harris has alienated the multiracial US working class, who do not see the Democratic Party as sufficiently fighting for their needs.

We know the US political system, irrespective of its official labels, ultimately serves capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy. These imperatives lock it into a death spiral that threatens the whole of human existence. The rate of spiral may ebb and flow under the hand of different nominal masters, but the direction remains the same — as long as these forms of domination exist unchallenged.

Many of us are disheartened. We are making space to mourn collectively, while recognizing our individual forms of heartbreak. We own the failures of the US Left to credibly point a way out of our deepening polycrisis, outside of its usual circles. We also know that, per Black abolitionist organizer and academic Mariame Kaba, “hope is a discipline.” Even when the future is uncertain or dangerous, we have the responsibility to believe that we will win. We will win a world where democracy flourishes, people’s basic needs are met, and working class people have the power.

We will only win when we are organized. And we will be organized only when working people striving for a better world can genuinely find a voice in Left political life.

Regardless of the election results, our task is to organize — to become a bigger and more skilled socialist movement, to contest for power, and win big for the working class.

The DSA 2024 Workers Deserve More platform is part of the path in which we can do that. Find out more here: https://2024.dsausa.org/

If you have never organized before, or if you have had to step away, we invite you to join Silicon Valley DSA or peer organizations fighting to make Silicon Valley a place where all working people can thrive.

At our upcoming chapter meeting on November 16 at 1pm we will talk about this as a community. Please join us, and let’s cry, laugh, argue, strategize, despair, celebrate, and above all struggle together – for the better world that can and must be.

In unity,
SVDSA Officers

The post On the 2024 US national election appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

Media Advisory

For Immediate Release

November 6th, 2024

Politics Beyond the Ballot Box

Local Raleigh Organizations Hold Organizing Fair

Moore Square, Raleigh, NC

November 9th, 2024 1-4PM

NC Triangle Democratic Socialists of America, in collaboration with multiple local organizations dedicated to social justice, organized labor, and community support, will be hosting a public Organizing Fair in Moore Square in Raleigh on November 9th from 1-4pm. This will be an opportunity for community members to learn about the struggles in their area and the organizations involved in this vital work. With the end of the 2024 election, more Americans than before are paying attention to politics. But, we need to recognize that voting is only one of the essential ways we express our voices and advocate for our communities. Labor protections, civil rights, and peace cannot be advanced once every four years. They must be fought for every day, week, month, and year. 

This organizing fair will be a place for passionate Triangle residents to become connected to these fights in their own backyard. The event will have tabling to create opportunities connecting community members with organizers, speeches from veteran organizers about next steps, and tables for community members to discuss the 2024 election and its consequences. Organizations participating include but are not limited to: Raleigh Mutual Aid Hub, The Southern Workers Assembly, Jewish Voices for Peace, Triangle Tenants Union, Meals for the Masses, Palestinian Youth Movement, and the NC Triangle Democratic Socialists of America.

“The strategy of showing up every few years to cast a vote clearly is insufficient. Workers are kept out of power no matter who is in charge. It does not need to be that way though- workers are really what makes everything run. Nothing is made without labor. We have power, we just have to be organized and conscious. This event is important because it is a first step towards realizing the power we can only claim if we get organized.” - Jody, IBEW member

We encourage all Triangle residents who care about this election to turn out and learn about how they can become involved in their community’s work. We cannot trust elected officials themselves to fix the growing problems our nation is experiencing. We have to do it ourselves. And there is no other place to get started like your own community.

Statement on November Election Results

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Join DSA

###

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

And yet, we are still here.

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

By Adam S

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

Allow me to explain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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