Labor organizer Daniel Gross's new book, Unions of Our Own, helps workers build progressive, militant, and sustainable unions driven by the rank-and-file.

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I’d wager not. 

In a union campaign, the way to answer a question like this is through a structure test. Before going on strike, organizers know that they’ll need a supermajority of workers to authorize the strike, given that a vicious anti-union drive by the boss will likely reduce their numbers. Some campaigns might have a mobilization where workers do something like wearing pro-union attire in order to gauge support. Ideally, this would be one of several escalatory structure tests meant to evaluate a worker’s risk tolerance as well as how effective the channels of communication are in terms of getting the word out. In other words, a structure test measures the strength of an organization and its ability to mobilize towards a specific goal. 

Chicago DSA (and the DSA in general) is not a union. However, as a prospective mass-membership party that anyone can join, our level of organization is low. We should think and act more like a union fighting a campaign. Amidst conversations of leadership burnout, tremendous uncaptured membership growth, and increasing need for urgency in the political landscape (no source needed), Chicago DSA is at an impasse. What we do next will shape the organization for years to come. While we are poised to become a major player in the labor movement and Chicago politics, failing to build our organizational cohesion risks souring newcomers and leadership to the movement. Instead, it’s time we seize the moment and live up to our vision.

CDSA Vision – What are we organizing towards? 

When discussing strategic choices for the direction DSA will take, it is important to center the conversation around our shared vision. We are working towards democratic socialism, or the demand that “our economy should be run to meet human needs for all, not to make profits for a few” (https://chicagodsa.org/). Different people have different ideas of what this might look like. Many of us will think of universal healthcare, a Green New Deal, or of recent national and local politicians in the limelight, but being a democratic socialist and a member of CDSA is more than a positive feeling towards items on this agenda, as laid out on our chapter’s website:

“Our primary tasks are to organize the working class, make more socialists, and lay the foundation for an independent mass party capable of conquering political power and transforming our society” (https://chicagodsa.org/). 

As socialists, we care about a lot of issues, from protecting our trans and immigrant comrades who have been the latest targets of the Trump administration’s attacks, to issues like environmental justice, prison abolition, overpolicing, and countering American imperialism. We need to be fighting on all of these fronts. However, as emphasized by our tasks above as an organization, we need to continue asking the question: “how are we building power?”. Without the crystallization of short-term mobilizations such as the “No Kings” protests into long-term organizational capacity, we will forever be putting out fires and responding to crises rather than proving that a better world is possible and leading the fight. 

How do we build working-class power?

Working-class power is our ability to force elected officials, the government, and the owning class to meet our demands. This power comes from the fact that we, the working class, work the jobs that make society run. Also, as workers comprise a huge majority of the population, we can vote to elect people to represent our interests in government. However, the nature of these two sources of power is not the same. 

First, let’s start with the weaker of the two: electoral power. Elected officials are–in theory–held accountable to their constituents through their desire for reelection. This power is diluted by the fact that elections are increasingly decided by spending and fundraising. This gives capitalists a decisive advantage in influencing and subverting democratic elections. Given the current lax campaign spending laws and skyrocketing levels of wealth inequality, elections are increasingly determined by the sheer volume of money poured into a given campaign, which is a losing position for the working class. Nevertheless, recent campaigns have found success with a grassroots or “Mass Movement Electoralism” approach. For example, Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 Mayoral campaign managed to mobilize 100,000 volunteers to knock doors thanks in large part to NYC’s DSA chapter as well as its active left ecosystem. The problem is, no matter how a working-class-friendly politician is elected, two things remain true: there are certain things an elected official cannot do (especially with regards to challenging capital’s interests), and there is little recourse for working people to hold them accountable. 

Luckily, working people have another, more reliable, source of power: the ability to withhold our labor. To build working class power, we need to organize workplaces into fighting unions. This is the crux of the left’s emphasis on organized labor and the recent excitement surrounding the idea of a general strike. It is not just a commitment to fairness and equality in the workplace, but an understanding that working people as a class are the only ones who can transform society. Work stoppages hit the capitalist class where it hurts: their profits. This is what gives the working class its greatest leverage and transformational power. 

Then, to answer our question of what it takes to build working class power, it is clear that we must organize workplaces and unions to be capable of militant strike action, using their political power to aid the working class in electoral politics and thus building power independent of state institutions. 

What is organizing, really? Where does the DSA fit in?

At its core, organizing is bringing people together into a long term structure to “mobilize” for certain tasks and work towards a bigger goal. Almost any organization can build a hierarchical structure to accomplish a goal, but as democratic socialists, we must accomplish our goals while simultaneously modeling and prototyping the kinds of radically democratic structures we are fighting to build and sustain. In line with the Labor Notes tradition of democratic organizing this means relying on a “leadership-dense” model. Carla Villanueva and Michael Belt, organizers with UAW, define a leader of a union drive as someone, a worker: 

“…who is willing to fight for the union, receptive to feedback on how to speak with coworkers, and capable of moving their coworkers into action. Leaders are those who are public and willing to speak to their coworkers when the time is right. Throughout the campaign, leaders are given a steady flow of training and tools to better answer their coworkers’ questions. This approach is grounded in a belief that workers in any industry can understand and make complex strategy decisions and are able to have difficult organizing conversations with their coworkers.”

A leadership-dense model of organizing depends on finding workers willing and able to build a union, and developing them into organizers. The more leader-organizers that can be developed, the better. Furthermore, we need to trust that average workers are capable of organizing themselves when given access to structure, resources, and guidance. This requisite belief in the competency of workers is more than a principle; it’s foundational to our strategy and is essential to winning. Any worker can be a leader. The benefit to this orientation is that worker-organizers are constantly training new organizers, building the project’s capacity. Also, after a certain point, there is no single organizer or identified “leader” who is carrying the bulk of the work on their own; the campaign is self-sustaining and can recover and succeed even if a key organizer needs to take a step back from the work.. 

Another way to think about organizing is as an ideal. Just as there is no way to achieve “democracy”, there is no such thing as a “perfectly organized” workplace, either. There are certainly workplaces and institutions which are more organized or democratic than others, and what sets those apart is the strength and number of connections between people. Put differently, what we are organizing is a network of people, within which each node has a varying number of connections with varying levels of strength. To build the network, existing connections must be strengthened or new connections added. To do this more effectively, individual “nodes” must be trained and developed.

At last, we can see how our definition of “organizing” can be applied outside the workplace and to our work with Chicago DSA. Many of those reading this may be among the most active in the chapter and already fill leadership roles in various committees and working groups. We are the DSA’s version of the worker-organizer, the “member-organizer” or cadre. As member-organizers we may already have this orientation; we view our chapter as a network of relationships and are willing to fight for its vision. But are we using tried-and-true fundamental organizing skills to get there? Are we developing new member-organizers to apply those same skills and build further organizational capacity? Our ability to strengthen and expand this network depends on our utilization of fundamental organizing skills. 

Conclusion

With recent wins nationwide like Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, the wave of left flank democrats bringing excitement to primary elections, our own local DSA chapter’s worker organizer job fair and successful bid to get Byron Sigcho-Lopez on a ballot, the future of democratic socialist politics is brighter than ever. Despite this, we need to seriously reconsider our organizational structure and strategy if we expect to contend for power and build the foundation for our aspired-to independent mass party.

As mentioned previously, we struggle to retain both leadership and new members, something which costs us institutional knowledge, skills, and growth. In “Middle-Level Organizing: The Key to a Successful CDSA”, Monk lays out this problem in detail as well as its solution: organizing fundamentals. We conduct political education for new members, yet struggle to convey skills like organizing conversations, making asks, and how to run a meeting. These things are just as important as understanding our long-term vision and past. The history of social movements is the history of organizers. 

One of the important lessons Monk reminds us of is to “Clarify Your Goals”. With changing leadership and a flux of new membership, it’s fair to say that we might not all be on the same page. In fact, we can prove it. We should conduct a survey of every member in Chicago DSA. Surveys are used in union drives as structure tests to gauge support. Rather than texting out a form for people to fill out, a proper structure test requires being systematic and having one-on-one conversations with everyone. In these conversations we can gauge members’ understanding of our vision, hear about their theory of change and power, invite them to action in a specific way, and simply get to know them. 

As a collective, we can struggle with the questions of how we actually contend for power. Do we recruit people to organize workplaces and the labor movement where so much of our power resides? Do we run our own candidates or support others who match our vision to communicate our politics to a broad base and win non-reformist reforms? How do we weave the fights that are already happening across the city into something cohesive? Together, we can find out. Together, let’s organize Chicago DSA!

The post If Chicago DSA were a union, could it pull off a successful strike? appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

This article is a response to “A Vision for a Lean, Political, and Effective Executive Committee” to address some concerns being raised about the Local Democracy Commission (LDC)’s majority bylaws proposal.

The LDC met over two and a half months to collaborate on creating new bylaws for the chapter. We spent much of our time on non-Executive Committee (EC) fixes, such as standardizing chapter formations and allowing amendments to bylaws changes. I am very proud of these consensus reforms, and I consider those changes alone to have made the LDC worthwhile. Reforming the EC was a small but important part of the LDC’s work after the issue was raised at the last GCM.

This original EC reform proposal was drafted over four months and introduced at two separate general chapter meetings, with input solicited from across the chapter, including every member of the EC. The proposal won 57% of the vote, just 16 votes shy of the needed two-thirds majority. Several speakers against the proposal said they were voting no so they could see what the recently chartered LDC would propose at the subsequent Chapter Convention in June. The others were centered around a lack of a labor representative and a lack of branch representatives. It is unsurprising, then, that we ended up with a similar proposal with one key addition – the Labor Coordinator. The LDC considered methods of adding branch representatives, but the majority ultimately decided that adding them was too unwieldy. 

The case for EC reform was laid out in Comrade Deana C’s article published ahead of the March 2026 GCM. I recommend reading it first for context. 

The Data

The first thing one sees when looking at the data is that Chicago has not done well. Out of the 16 chapters that the LDC analyzed, we’ve had the second lowest recruitment rate and worst net increase in membership. There are other things to look at than just our total numbers, but they don’t paint a better picture. Our active membership rate is more or less the same 1:5 ratio every chapter has. “Membership commitment” is monthly dues payers plus solidarity dues payers, which we are solidly average on. Both are numbers proportional to chapter membership, so lower membership means a lower number of active and committed members. It is clear that what we are currently doing is not working. Change is needed.

Our comrades writing the amendment to the LDC proposal claim that 14 to 17 members was a common and reasonable range for EC size. I would like to counter that claim with the data itself. Of the 16 chapters we studied, only 2 chapters were within this range, and only one was above it – Chicago. This four-year weighted average doesn’t take into account change in chapter EC size. For example, Detroit cut their EC size in half partway through the dataset, and almost all of their growth is from that latter half, but here it is represented as a middling amount of growth for their now 11-member EC. Looking at just the top five performing chapters, we get an average of 11.8 members. If you look at just the top five Huge chapters, you get 12.6. The numbers of high-performing chapters are much more in line with the base proposal’s 12 members than the amendment’s 16. The amendment would give us the second-largest EC of all 16 chapters studied, with only Philadelphia being larger, and even then Philadelphia only grew larger this year as their EC grows with chapter size.

Addressing Siloing

Another concern raised by the amendment’s authors was that the base proposal could lead to siloing in the branches or overworking branch leadership. I believe this fear is unfounded.

Looking at other chapters, voting representation for branches is a rare position. Atlanta, Portland, Twin Cities, Denver, Metro DC, LA, Seattle, and East Bay all have branches without voting representation. Philadelphia and North New Jersey are the only studied chapters with any form of branch representation, and even there it is limited to suburban branches, but they do not divide the core of their territory into branches with representation. The other five chapters studied don’t have territorial branches at all. This amendment to the LDC proposal, then, is suggesting something not done in any comparable chapter, and none of those chapters have had a disastrous break between their EC and branches. 

There are other methods of reducing siloing. I have been a major advocate for moving more chapter work to the territorial branches, but it should be understood that that is not where most members do their work. As a branch SC member, I see far more new members than deeply involved members showing up at our branch meetings. Members commit themselves to committees and working groups, with each branch having a small group of activists who have chosen to primarily do branch organizing. Over the next year, the branches may absorb more members as they take on local electoral work under the Elecgtoral Working Group’s 2027 plan.  According to the plan, members in the working group or committee act as branch organizers. The Byron Sigcho-Lopez campaign, which has had branch liaisons on its Steering Committee, has also been organizing branch-specific canvasses. This does not rely on overburdening the branch SC members, and keeps the work attached to the chapter formations. 

I believe we should continue moving work to the branches in this way. As we do, territorial branches will become the least siloed bodies in the chapter, as they have more active, on-the-ground work with other chapter formations than any other group does. This is a much more effective method of reducing siloing than the amendment’s suggestion of a top-down connection with the EC through branch delegates.

The Executive Committee Takes Political Leadership

It is true that the EC is not a legislature; the GCMs are. However, there are only four GCMs a year, and every GCM this past year referred at least one proposal to the EC. This means that for members, they are relying on the EC to take political leadership.

Since the EC necessarily takes political leadership for the chapter, it must be representative of the chapter membership. The amended proposal would give one delegate per branch; this means a branch of 200 members gets five times the voting power of a branch with 1,000 members. This is akin to recreating the United States Senate, which DSA rightfully decries as undemocratic. 

The amendment’s authors argue that the Labor Branch needs a delegate on their SC to liaise with leadership as a voting EC member. The Labor Coordinator in the LDC proposal already does this.The amendment gives a seat on the EC to every “institutional branch” (see Article VII, Section 3 of the proposed bylaws) elected exclusively by members of that branch. Few would contend that the Political Educator Coordinator should be elected by just Poli Ed members or that the Membership Engagement Coordinator should be elected by just the Membership Engagement Committee. Having a seat elected only by one specific body reduces buy-in from the rest of the chapter and contributes to, rather than combatting, siloing. 

Our chapter’s labor work – like all of its work – is not the domain of just the Labor Branch, but the whole chapter collectively. A Labor Coordinator elected by the chapter as a whole contributes to tying the important work the Labor Branch does back into the rest of our chapter rather than isolating it. Labor work is one of the most important functions of DSA. Uniquely cutting it off from the rest of our membership is a disservice to their work and the chapter as a whole.

Another concern raised by the comrades amending the LDC proposal is that the EC risks becoming too factional. On the contrary, a more political EC and more politicized chapter is a progression in chapter democracy. Politicization increases and elevates political questions which can be debated openly and resolved rather than papered over. It also reduces siloing between working bodies, as members from each organize in factions, they communicate ideas and work together. A politicized chapter is only disorganizing if those disagreeing become hostile to each other. Having a variety of ideological groups on the EC, invested in working together, can actually reduce this issue. 

The Steering Committee of the Executive Committee

Like the current bylaws, the LDC proposal does not explicitly create a Steering Committee for the EC. By remaining silent on the question, the base proposal allows chapter leadership and membership to be flexible without unnecessary proscriptions. If leaders or members feel it is necessary to establish a smaller body, they may do so within the limits and with the composition that suits the needs of the moment.

The amendment to the LDC proposal explicitly enshrines a Steering Committee in the bylaws with set powers and composition. It empowers it and overly confines it. Their Steering Committee would not include the Treasurer, which is a necessity on any leadership body overseeing spending. This year’s Steering Committee has authorized thousands of dollars in spending. It would be irresponsible to authorize a body to approve that level of spending without the Treasurer’s expert input on the budget and liability issues. I fear a Steering Committee without one could authorize over-spending or get the chapter into legal trouble without that consultation. It is also possible we could become too cautious, and wait on any budget requests to the next EC meeting or GCM that could be up to a month away.

Under the amendment, the chapter’s EC meets eight months out of the year and the SC meets every month. It allows the SC to count meetings of the EC towards their required monthly meetings only if a majority of its members are present. These dual quorum rules create a situation where the SC may have to meet twice a month if its quorum was not satisfied at that month’s EC meeting. 

The proposal’s greatest flaw rests in establishing the SC and the EC as equally powerful. Neither has official authority over the other, but what happens when a resolution is passed by the SC’s 6 members, but the next month the 16 members of the EC take a different stance? Whose ruling stands? Does the SC prevail because it decided first? Or does the EC have the authority to change course? Could the SC use its email voting powers to immediately repeal a vote by the EC the day after the EC meeting? These questions have no answer in the amendment and could empower a faction of our leadership to grind the chapter to a halt if it disagrees with the EC. Far simpler than untangling this tension would be having a single executive body which meets monthly and has no proscriptions on how it may delegate its authority other than what membership may impose on it. The base LDC proposal creates exactly such a body. 

Conclusion

The original LDC proposal’s EC structure is a collaboration over the course of half a year, a scientific process of studying other chapters to see what works and what has not worked here. The LDC proposal itself had many compromises, with others losing out on specific proposals but choosing to support the package as a whole for the sake of consensus. Should the minority LDC amendment pass, we are concerned that it will create an undemocratic and needlessly complicated structure that hampers our chapter organizing. 

I urge membership to vote against any amendment to the LDC proposal that changes its EC structure. However, even if the amendment passes, I encourage members to vote yes on the final resolution. Not passing anything would result in a disastrously large 30 person EC which would devour hundreds of hours from more than a dozen of our best organizers over the course of the term. 

The post For an Effective, Decisive, and Democratic Executive Committee appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Eon Huntley as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA's insurgent slate.

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DSA candidates are on the ballot in California, New Jersey, and New Mexico

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Around the world, support for parents and young children is denied or hedged by means-testing. Zohran Mamdani’s childcare initiative is a welcome exception.

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At the upcoming 2026 General Chapter Convention of Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, we will be considering an overhaul of our bylaws and several amendments to that overhaul. The overhaul itself is much needed, and the cross-tendency body of drafters, the Local Democracy Commission (LDC), found consensus on most important issues. 

One of the amendments we will be considering is called “All Power to The Members.” Given the title of this amendment, it is worth noting that meetings of the general membership are already the highest decision-making body of the chapter, a fact that I will return to shortly.

This amendment purports to expand chapter democracy, but I believe it will have the opposite of the intended effect. Further, it represents nothing more than an attempt to expand the use of online voting in (C)DSA – an effort that has been voted down by members time and time again (see the “CB02: One Member, One Vote for National Leadership Elections” proposal, which did not pass at National Convention, and the “Increasing Member Participation in Our Chapter Endorsement Process” resolution which did not pass at our last General Chapter Meeting [GCM]). This effort has, in my view, had the opposite of the intended effect of increasing participation in chapters where its use has been more widespread.

What the Amendment Does

The amendment is quite straightforward in that it replaces all mentions of “Article IV Meetings” with “a vote of the general membership” (in Article V, “Officers”, Sections 6 and 7, which refer to the Communications Coordinator and Campaigns Coordinator respectively, in various subsections of Article VII, “Chapter Formations,” and in Article XII, “Addenda to These Bylaws”).

It is important to note here a definitional distinction between a “vote of the general membership” and a “vote of a general membership meeting,” the latter of which is synonymous with an “Article IV meeting” in the proposed bylaws revision. 

What this means in practice is that important decisions relating to the election of these two officer roles, how chapter formations are created and governed, and how addenda to the bylaws are created, must go to a vote of the entire membership, presumably through electronic ballot or e-mail, since there are no other means of reaching the entire membership to deliver a ballot. 

Why This is Unproductive

On its face, this amendment purports to increase member engagement on these questions. However, as has been argued a number of times before in debates about the merits of online voting, the quality of our democratic deliberation matters as much, if not more than, the number of votes. I believe that participation is best measured by the number of members who are meaningfully engaged with chapter activities and debates, not simply the number of people casting ballots. 

A democratic culture must include comradely debate and discussion that gives people the opportunity to change their minds and the minds of others, and, most importantly, to have one’s mind changed. This is best done in mass meetings where discussion, nuance, and temperament can be measured, and where there are rules for keeping debate focused and comradely. While a move to online discussion would seem to open things up to more participation, the reality is that it pushes debate into a space where the most online portion of our membership will have an outsized say in the nature of the debate. 

We should always be seeking out ways of increasing participation in our democratic process, but making sure that our meetings have clear stakes and outcomes that make it worth committing one’s time to attend will always be much more effective than relinquishing decision-making to passive online engagement.

What Does Robert’s Have to Say?

The well-established manual of parliamentary procedure we use in DSA to make sure our deliberations remain productive is Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised (RONR). RONR strongly recommends that steps are taken to avoid commingling in-person and absentee voting precisely for the reasons stated above, noting that it is a “fundamental principle of parliamentary law that the right to vote is limited to the members of an organization who are present in a regular or properly-called meeting” (RONR 45:56). This is a fundamental principle because the process of in-person deliberation is central to healthy democratic decision-making. 

The same section of RONR doesn’t outright ban absentee voting, but it does state that the procedures for absentee voting must be spelled out explicitly in the bylaws to avoid issues with quorum and process. This amendment does not clear this bar. A “vote of the general membership” would presumably require a ballot to go to every member in good standing (MIGS) of the organization, but there are no provisions for how deliberation (if any) should be structured, how many votes need to be cast for a decision to be valid, or how long the vote must remain open. 

Not all questions of process need to be worked out through the bylaws, but fundamental questions such as these really should be. If a ballot goes to the general membership, but only stays open for an hour, or if only 2% of MIGS voted, is that decision valid? Under the terms of this proposed amendment, the answer would be yes, since the rules that govern quorum and validity at in-person meetings do not apply to absentee voting of this nature and are not otherwise covered in RONR. Leaving such ambiguities unaddressed represents a major risk for the health of the organization.

Why This Amendment Would Cause a Bylaws Crisis

The proposed bylaws revision does state that meetings of the general membership “shall be the highest legislative body, and shall set the work priorities of the chapter”. But the proposed bylaws create a conflict by insisting that certain questions be voted on by the general membership (meaning all members, not all members at a meeting). This would create a conflict within our own bylaws, but even more problematically, it puts us in contravention of the National DSA bylaws.

Article 3, the “Chapters” Section 5 of the National DSA bylaws, is quite clear that in-person meetings of the general membership of a chapter must be the highest decision-making body of a chapter. In this respect, members already have all the power – which is good! The specific subsection reads: “There shall be no higher decision-making body in a chapter than a synchronous General Meeting or Convention open to all members in good standing. This shall not prevent an elected leadership body from acting between such meetings.”

It is important to restate the definitional distinction between a “vote of the general membership” and a “vote of a general membership meeting”, the latter of which is synonymous with an Article IV meeting in the proposed bylaws revision. “The general membership” means that every member in the organization must be polled, something that can only be accomplished asynchronously and remotely. Thus, this amendment proposes that the in-person, synchronous meetings not only can be, but must be, eclipsed on questions relevant to the amended sections. This is likely a substantial violation of the DSA bylaws that would create ambiguities and a governance crisis that, at best, would sap our organizational attention and resources as we navigate it.

Conclusion: What Could Happen Instead

An in-person, synchronous membership meeting can delegate its authority as it sees fit, so long as it remains the highest decision-making body. This happens all of the time in our organization; in fact, every time we create a chapter formation, we are in essence delegating some authority held in common by the general membership for a specific purpose. It’s entirely possible that a GCM could, without adopting this amendment, delegate the authority to consider a given matter via an absentee vote of the entire membership (ideally with well-worked-out rules in place for such a procedure).

However, enforcing online membership votes in the bylaws, as a requirement – even on specific questions – would, in my opinion and for the reasons outlined above, be disallowed, unnecessary, and counterproductive. We may have perfectly good reasons for referring something to an online vote of the members (as is already the case in officer elections), but these should be taken up on a case-by-case basis that clearly leaves synchronous, in-person meetings as the highest decision-making body of the membership. 

The bottom line is that membership throughout DSA has, time and time and again, upheld the value of in-person, synchronous, democratic discussion, and we should do so again. We should not adopt an amendment that would damage our democratic culture, violate well-established and important norms of democratic deliberation, or put us at risk of losing our charter as a chapter of DSA by being in conflict with the national organization’s bylaws.

The post Online Voting… Again appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

New York, LA slates on deck, “Not On Our Dime” reintroduced, Houston DSA backs police reform initiative and more in the May edition of Chapter and Verse.

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By Rodney Coopwood

On May 1, 2026, Metro Detroit DSA rallied at Roosevelt Park as part of the city’s labor coalition for May Day. From the first planning meetings at the IBEW Hall through the day-of march and the debrief that followed, MDDSA (led by members of the Mobilization and Labor Working Groups) sat at the table with Teamsters Local 337, SEIU Michigan, IBEW Local 58, UAW Local 600, UAW Region 1, Moratorium NOW!, Michigan United, and other unions and organizations of the Detroit left. Being in those rooms was the most instructive part of the work.

We were invited in because of the history our members carry in this city’s labor and left movements, and because our chapter has spent the last year building the capacity to show up. A seat at the planning table is not given for free; it is the product of contingent discipline at previous actions and the steady labor of people who have made themselves useful to the broader left. The Mobilization Working Group, formalized at convention, was the structure that let us convert that capacity into coordinated participation and it did so as a genuinely cross-tendency effort, with members from across the chapter’s committees, caucuses, and coalitions working under the MWG’s coordination.

What the Room Looked Like

The most striking thing about the planning process was watching unions sit across from each other under the AFL-CIO umbrella and actually deliberate. These are organizations with different memberships, different cultures, and different relationships to militancy. The fact of them being in the same room, working through speaker order, route logistics, and messaging — that, on its own, was not nothing, and reminiscent of our own practices in DSA.

Still, sitting through those meetings as someone from the organizing side rather than the unionist side, I was struck by how much of the work became institutional rather than political. Speaker order became a question of which body’s position carried what weight, not which voice the day most needed. Logistics bent toward what city authorities would permit and protect rather than toward who the event was for. Parts of the program felt divorced from the meaning of the day itself. May Day belongs to the rank-and-file and in many respects to workers outside unions entirely, and that fact deserved more weight in the room than it fully received.

The People Who Made the Day

What made this May Day special for me was not what happened in the planning room. It was what happened on May 1st itself. We had volunteers from MDDSA across every role the day asked for: tabling, banner bearing, flag bearing, marshaling, medic, day-of flyering, and back-end logistics. New members standing alongside members who have been doing this work for years. People taking on new roles for the first time. People who had never carried a banner or been to a planning meeting walking up on the morning of May 1 ready to be useful.

That is what a chapter looks like when it is functioning. It is also what May Day is supposed to look like. The holiday is not just its program; it is its people. The shape of any given year’s coalition matters less than whether the bodies on the street are organized, prepared, and politically conscious. By that measure, what MDDSA put in the street this year was something we should take seriously, and every member who showed up — for the first time or the fifteenth — should know the chapter saw them.

What Worked

The march itself was phenomenal. Speakers connected the labor question to immigration, to racialized policing, to U.S. imperialism, to the specific intersectional realities of the working class in this city — the working class as it actually exists, not the working class as it appears in a 1950s photograph. That part of the day did the work May Day is supposed to do. It said out loud that the labor movement and the broader struggle against capitalism are not separate fights with separate constituencies.

The fact that the unions came together at all is the bigger story. The goal of this year’s May Day, as I understood it from inside the planning room, was modest and correct: get the relevant Detroit unions into the same physical space, working on the same calendar, talking to each other about something concrete. That goal was met. Relationships do not form in the abstract. They form when people have to figure out together how a rally works.

This rally took place under AFL-CIO sponsorship, something that, by accounts inside the planning room, had not happened in Detroit in a very long time. For most of the twentieth century, mainstream American labor kept its distance from May Day’s radical origins, favoring the September Labor Day that Congress established in 1894 in the wake of the Pullman strike. The AFL-CIO returning to May Day is a real shift, and one that creates room for a fuller program in the years ahead.

What The Numbers Said

Turnout at the rally was an estimated 500 attendees. By my count, roughly half were rank-and-file union members. The rest were politically conscious community members and active organizers, with SEIU showing the most prominent and organized presence. The unions did not turn out their memberships in significant numbers. Michigan’s union membership rate is 13 percent, well above the national rate of 10, and Detroit sits inside one of the more heavily unionized regions in the country. The “No Kings” mobilization earlier this year and last, with broadly anti-authoritarian messaging not specifically tied to labor, pulled thousands into the streets of this same city. May Day, with the city’s organized labor leadership formally behind it, did not. The gap is the question.

Part of the answer is practical. A 4pm Friday start excluded most day shift workers and most service workers whose schedules are not their own, and is worth noting for next year. But timing does not explain the whole gap. If union structures had more time to actively mobilize members for May Day in the weeks leading up to it, a Friday afternoon would have moved more people than it did.

The honest version is the one that came out of the debrief: this was a year of using unused muscles. The apparatus of political mobilization through union locals has been dormant for a generation, and that capacity does not return in a single planning cycle. That is partly an explanation. It is also a question. What would unions themselves have to change for next year’s May Day to actually move their members? Further, where is the current state of class consciousness in the U.S. if unions struggle to connect labor to May Day?

What’s Worth Building On

First, the Detroit left should carry more weight at the table. There is history between labor leadership and the broader left that predates my lifetime, and I will not pretend to fully understand it all yet. But even with that history, the moment demands engagement. Capitalism’s contradictions are visibly tearing at the lives of people in this city, this country, and every country the American empire reaches. A leftist — labor coalition strong enough to meet that crisis needs the organizers, writers, and educators who have spent their lives developing the political analysis the movement needs.

Second, and as has already been agreed to, the planning has to start earlier. Much earlier. The skeleton of next year’s May Day, who is in the coalition, what the political program is, who the speakers are, what the demands are, should be sketched in the fall, not in March. Earlier planning creates space for harder conversations and the programmatic clarity a workers’ rally deserves.

The Debrief

The most important conversation of the entire cycle was the debrief. That sounds counterintuitive, the rally is the visible thing, the debrief is internal, but it is the meeting where the organizers decided what kind of coalition it wanted to become.

The clarity that came out of that conversation was this: the goal of 2026 was first contact, and first contact was achieved. The goal of 2027 is to deepen — to pull in rank-and-file participation at a scale this year’s event did not reach.

Some of that conversation pointed toward the possibility of a general strike in 2028. However, a general strike is not a thing you can just announce; it is a thing that becomes possible after years and years of organizational work most people never see, in sectors of society that have been exploited by capital for decades. Treating 2028 as a horizon can be reasonable, if work of a strategically adaptable and principled nature is achieved prior.

What this May Day did was build one vertebra of a skeleton that does not yet have most of its bones. There is a great deal of work between here and any plausible strike horizon, and the honest version of the optimism coming out of the debrief is that the work is finally beginning to look like work, rather than like a wish.

Beyond the Union Hall

If the labor movement is going to grow into the force this moment demands, DSA, the broader left, and the unions themselves have to take seriously the work that exists beyond the union hall. Detroit no longer looks like the city that defined American industrial labor. Manufacturing accounts for under one in ten jobs across the metro area. Health care, education, retail, food service, logistics, these are where most actually work, and the great majority of those workers carry no union card. The Starbucks Workers United campaign has shown that a young, low-wage, dispersed workforce can build real power against an employer the labor establishment had largely written off as unorganizable. The labor movement that meets this decade is going to be built in workplaces like those, or it is not going to be built at all.

May Day’s politics speak to exactly this work. The holiday does not require a union card. It belongs to anyone who works for a wage, and the power it celebrates is the power of labor itself — the capacity to withhold work, to act in concert, to recognize that the people who do the actual work of running this society can stop running it. May Day started as a revolutionary leftist holiday, built by communists, socialists, and anarchists who understood the workplace was one front of a much larger fight. Keeping that history visible in the present and operative in the future is the work that has to follow. This year, we got into the room. Next year, we have to help change what the room can do — and start building the rooms that do not yet exist.

Forming the Skeleton: May Day 2026 and the Work Ahead was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Diana Moreno as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA’s insurgent slate

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