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.

The post How Chris Rabb Won, Precinct by Precinct appeared first on Democratic Left.

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

The post Diana Moreno: Organize as if the World You Want is Within Grasp appeared first on Democratic Left.

As a rising leader in the Democratic Socialists of America, you could be forgiven for feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. You weren’t sure what to expect when you first started attending meetings, but you were excited about DSA’s goals and glad to be among like-minded people. You took on some low-stakes projects like flyering or phone banking, and became a regular face in the crowd at your branch or working group meetings. You still felt like the ‘new kid’, but you were starting to get your bearings and develop an understanding of how and why the organization operates.

But something felt a bit unbalanced. The steering committee of your branch or working group was clearly juggling a ton of work—planning meetings, doing outreach, onboarding new members, and trying to figure out how to carry out the work they were tasked with doing for the chapter. The leadership and longtime members all seemed to know each other well, but they didn’t appear to have much time to get to know the revolving cast of newcomers at their meetings, let alone engage with them one-on-one outside of group settings. They rarely made concrete asks of general members beyond attending more meetings or basic agitprop. At times, they even appeared to be on a different page from other parts of the chapter, or to lack clear goals beyond maintaining the structure of their organizing body. 

But you believed in the work, so you kept showing up to do whatever was asked of you. Then, one day, you were approached by a member of leadership: Someone had stepped down from the steering committee for whatever reason, and they wondered if you’d be interested in filling the seat. You said yes, of course—you were eager to take on a higher level of responsibility, but hadn’t been able to find a clear path to doing so. 

Fast-forward a month or two later, and you’re running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off: Zoom meetings are multiplying across your calendar like spores, you’re getting dragged into leadership debates about internal stuff you barely understand, and your sense of your steering committee’s medium- and long-term goals is somehow not that much clearer to you than before you entered leadership. The most maddening part, however, is that you feel alone in a crowd. Plenty of new members are showing up to your meetings each month, looking for work to do. But you can’t seem to offload major tasks, because doing so would require you to engage, train, and mentor these new members—which you don’t have time to do. Eventually, you step away, burnt out, and one of the more engaged members takes your place, like a fresh-faced actor stepping into the superhero costume.

Many of our current and former chapter leaders, myself included, have reported feeling caught in this cycle of organizational burnout. As our membership has continued to grow, the chapter has elected to take on more and more work. As a result, our base workload never feels sustainable no matter how many new members sign up each month. It’s a vicious cycle. Leaders are spread too thin to develop new members into future leaders, so they struggle to carry the burden all by themselves. Meanwhile, all but the most industrious general members watch from the sidelines, waiting to be directed and developed. The membership continues to grow, but the organization doesn’t. How do you break the cycle?

I found myself asking this question throughout my tenure as a leader of the North Side Red Line (NSRL) branch. At the time I was appointed to fill a vacancy on NSRL’s steering committee, the branch didn’t have nearly as deep a pool of engaged general members to recruit from. This was in part due to high leadership turnover and structural disadvantages that date back to the split of the former North Side Branch’s split into Red and Blue Line groups in 2020. As a result, we lacked close working relationships with other leaders across the chapter, and we weren’t facilitating nearly as much activity as other branches.

Since then, NSRL has taken great strides to break the cycle of “middlelessness.” Our monthly branch meeting attendance has nearly doubled. We’ve developed a reliable organizing committee open to all branch members that focuses on logistics and operations. We’ve grown a kick-ass agitprop team and a crew of neighborhood leaders, and we’ve built effective working relationships across different parts of the chapter. 

The process of getting there as a group was at once painstaking and revelatory. And it has led me to view “middlelessness” as one of our most crucial organizing challenges across the chapter – one we ought to make a central focus of internal conversations as we approach the chapter’s June convention and look toward the next year of organizing. 

I’ve outlined here a road map of sorts based on my experience in NSRL leadership, in the hope that these insights might be helpful for other leaders across the chapter, both new and established.

1: Clarify Your Goals

Because of DSA’s significant membership and leadership turnover, new leaders sometimes end up inheriting a position of responsibility for an organizational body or initiative whose founding leaders are no longer active cadre. If these organizers have been “rocketshipped” into leadership from general membership before they have a chance to be integrated into the organizational culture, they’re likely to lack a sense of institutional history. In some cases, they may be unclear on the medium- and long-term goals of the entities they serve. Multiply that across several cycles of turnover, and you might end up with a steering committee whose members may unknowingly have different ideas about our basic goals.

As a newer leader, I recall feeling nervous asking my fellow branch steering committee members for clarity on our goals and priorities. I worried it might come across as a criticism, or even just a stupid question. But as it turns out, I didn’t need to be worried at all! My comrades were extremely supportive, and we met soon after to discuss what work needed to be done to thrive as a branch, per the priorities set for us by the chapter. How could we best divide work between us to handle the ongoing workload while also leaving ourselves with enough time and energy to develop new members into middle-level leaders?

If there’s one thing this past year has taught me as an organizer both inside and outside of DSA, it’s that these types of purposeful resets, when initiated with a positive spirit and genuine curiosity about others’ experiences, can be really transformational. They lead not only to clearer goals, but also to stronger working relationships and more deliberative processes.

2: Get Connected!

Chicago DSA is a large chapter in a geographically vast municipality, and the neighborhoods with the densest DSA membership are scattered across the city from one another. This alone makes it very difficult for members who don’t live near one another to get enough face-to-face interaction to form enduring organizing relationships. Add to that the fragmentation of our capacity across different bodies—branches, working groups, committees, etc.—and it’s not hard to see why it takes a conscious effort to avoid disconnection and siloing between different parts of the chapter.

One of my first priorities as a branch leader was to get in touch with at least one leader from each chapter body, ideally someone who was also a member of our branch, to talk about what we could do in branch meetings to better facilitate their work. Forming those connections not only gave us a clear picture of how the entire chapter was operating at any given point in time, but it also made other chapter leaders feel invested in the growth of our branch, and eager to lend a hand to help us figure out organizing and logistics challenges as they popped up.

3: Get to Know Your Members

Generally speaking, spending your downtime doing unpaid organizing work for a socialist party is a pretty unusual thing to do, and one without much precedent for most people. Nearly everyone who comes through our doors—even the most outgoing and enthusiastic folks—will arrive with some uncertainty as to whether there’s a place in this project for them. That’s why it’s so important that we meet people as people, rather than mere numbers or pairs of ears to listen to us talk about our politics and program.

Regular social events have helped us facilitate this work by allowing us to learn about our new members as people: their jobs, their interests, their pets, and so on. It might not feel like important work—there are no pragmatic goals to be set or immediate indicators of success. But by putting in the time to get to know your comrades well enough that you can have a real, non-DSA-related conversation with them, you build trust in each other and in the institution.

4: Set Up Shop

If you want to determine who among your general membership is interested in taking on a higher level of involvement, carving out a dedicated space for those members to opt into is crucial. Create opportunities to get people involved at a slightly deeper level than a canvas or volunteer shift. Name a time, name a place, and invite the members—but don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t take off right away. In NSRL, for example, we knew we wanted to form an organizing committee (OC) to take on some of the administrative and logistical work of running the branch, so we started advertising a weekly Zoom call for general members to join for just that purpose. At first, there were many weeks in which no one outside of the steering committee showed up. But we kept having them every week, until one or two people started consistently showing up—and then more people joined from there.

5: Make Small Asks 

Putting people together in a room doesn’t magically make delegation start happening. You need to build habits that support thoughtful task delegation, no matter what space you’re in. Don’t be afraid to start small—in fact, that’s the ideal place to start. At an in-person general membership meeting, for example, there are myriad opportunities to make small asks: you need someone to keep time, someone else to greet new members when they walk in, a third person to take notes, another to bring snacks, and so on.

It’s possible that leadership has the capacity in the moment to do all of these tasks themselves, but that doesn’t matter. The point of delegating them is much less about their completion than about letting members step up to take responsibility within the space in a way that feels safe and approachable. By doing so, you help these members feel more confident, and establish a space that feels cooperatively operated by members, rather than managed solely by leadership. And when you see a member consistently stepping up for small tasks, you can eventually try making a larger ask of them; they may even step up and offer to help with an unfilled need themselves.

6: It Just Takes Some Time

Some members will be confident and enthusiastic right from the jump, and they will quickly find a niche within the operations of your organizing body. Others will be trickier. Perhaps they’re friendly and consistent about showing up to things, but you can’t quite figure out how to encourage them to step into the middle layer of leadership no matter how much you chat with them after meetings or at socials. This is normal, and typically not a poor reflection on them (or you). Everyone moves at their own pace, for their own reasons. The most important thing is to foster people’s curiosity and recognize their consistency, no matter what stage of development they’re at. 

It’s also important to remember that you cannot be all things to all people. Your background, personality, and interests will enable you to mobilize and develop some kinds of people, but perhaps not others. The beauty of relational organizing, in fact, is that you and your fellow chapter leaders don’t have to carry the weight of middle-layer development alone. 

For example: let’s you’ve seen Wanda at nearly every general meeting and social event for months. She seems to really enjoy being a member, but she hasn’t stepped up to take on any tasks and you can’t seem to figure out how to encourage her. Meanwhile, you’ve formed a strong working relationship with a newer member named Suzanne, who’s on your OC. Lo and behold, Wanda and Suzanne totally click, and before you know it, Suzanne’s convinced Wanda to help schedule calendar events for the OC.

The fact that you couldn’t figure out how to empower Wanda isn’t a failure on your part. You just weren’t the right person to develop Wanda. Suzanne was the right person to develop Wanda, and you were the right person to develop Suzanne. Trust between members builds organically, but not randomly. It takes intention, self-awareness, and a willingness to be approachable and listen to your members with care and curiosity.

Trust the Process

A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a fellow branch member that I was planning to attend an OC meeting for the first time since I took a break from leadership two months prior. He suggested I swing by a meeting the week after next—next week’s meeting, he told me, would be a “heads down” work session where they’d be hammering out final logistics for an upcoming town hall event hosted by the branch.

When he told me this, I nearly wept from joy. There was no way we could have gotten nine or ten people in a room together to plan an event like that a year ago. Organizational growth and replication isn’t easy—in all honesty, I took a break from leadership earlier this year in part because the stress of this process had caught up to me. I needed time to recharge. But watching new members find their niche in the organization and grow into leadership in a more sustainable and supported way than I and others could is an indescribable honor and blessing. 

This is why middle layer organizing is of such profound importance to me, and why I want to see our chapter embrace it as a core internal priority. In the next year, our chapter will attempt to build on the momentum of Byron Sigcho Lopez’s congressional campaign to grow our membership and fight for big external wins. As we do this, however, we need to focus as much as possible on our capacity to grow as an institution made up of people. We must work to slow member attrition, encourage a healthy and sustainable pace of work, and build meaningful working relationships that can stand the test of time and the inevitable stresses of building a working-class party together.

The post Middle-Level Organizing: The Key to a Successful CDSA appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

In September of 2024, I brought a resolution to a Chicago Democratic Socialists of America general chapter meeting to continue our “Crash the DNC” campaign, which had reached its natural conclusion after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago a month earlier. I’d proposed that we continue the campaign for a few more months to focus on engaging the wider public in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program ahead of the general election in November. The proposal passed unanimously, without anyone motivating against it. But at our committee meeting the next week, only one other person showed up. It was humiliating. Members had voted “yes” with their hands at the meeting, but voted “no” with their feet once it was time to take action. 

One of the challenges of democracy in a membership organization is that without member discipline, democratic decisions can become meaningless. Some organizations attempt to address this problem by imposing discipline from above; if you fail to carry out a decision, or worse yet, work to oppose it, you are stripped of your membership rights. This rigid centralism solves the initial problem, but creates many more in the process, and often degenerates into exclusively top-down decision-making. What’s more, following this path means excluding the vast majority of people who aren’t ready to accept this level of direction, at least not on day one. The demands of this type of centralism are tenable for a sect, but not for a mass organization. 

So, what to do? Organizations like ours need to cultivate a kind of voluntary discipline among our members: the will to carry out democratic decisions not because you fear some form of punishment, but because you voluntarily hold yourself accountable to enacting them, regardless of what side of the debate you were on.

But as much as we need to cultivate discipline of action among our members, we also need them to exercise discipline as voters at meetings, such as General Chapter Meetings and Conventions. That is, you have to vote with your hands in a way that reflects how you are likely to vote with your feet afterwards. To exercise this discipline, we must each ask ourselves: 

1. Am I willing and able to contribute to making this thing happen? 

2. Are enough other people likely to contribute to making this thing happen, even if I don’t? 

If the answer to both those questions is “no”, you should have some serious concerns about voting “yes” — even if the proposal is a great idea in theory. 

This kind of voting discipline is difficult to maintain, and for good reason. It can be very uncomfortable to shoot down your comrades’ ideas, especially when the ideas may be good — even if the likelihood of successful execution is low. A voluntary organization like DSA can’t operate in the same way as a state with powers of taxation and coercion at its disposal, or as a non-profit organization with many paid staffers and a top-down, unelected leadership. We need members to voluntarily choose to carry out our work. Without this kind of discipline we get situations like the zombie post-DNC campaign, where everyone in the room was willing to say “yes”, but no one had the capacity to actually do the work to execute the proposal. Just because we should doesn’t mean we can.

When you vote “yes” on a proposal that seems doomed to stall out due to a lack of member involvement or organizational capacity, you avoid disappointing your comrades in the room during the meeting, especially the ones who brought it forward in the first place. But those comrades still experience disappointment afterward. Not for the span of a single vote, but gradually over time, in rooms and Zooms with fewer and fewer people each week after the project is out of sight and out of mind. 

But what’s the harm in letting people try anyway? The chief risks are that everyone becomes demoralized, and that resentments bubble up as organizers fail at a project that has become siloed. They feel isolated from their comrades and can think the membership has done little to help them succeed, which can lead to burnout and disillusionment with the greater work.

Comrades sometimes look to technical and procedural solutions at this juncture. Perhaps you simply restrict the amount of projects any one member can vote for, imposing a hard limit on members’ tendency to overcommit the organization with their votes. But these solutions don’t address the larger cultural problem at play. Members’ tendency to sign the organization up for more work than it can collectively accomplish can only be changed through action from below — from the conscious effort of moving with discipline both in carrying out decisions and in making them. This kind of transformation is not just necessary for the success of a socialist party like DSA, but is also reflective of the larger transformation needed for the entire working class to transition to workers’ democracy and socialist production. 

So when you’re at your next DSA meeting, think about how you’re going to vote with your feet before you vote with your hands. If you’re going to vote “no” with your feet, I think the most honest thing you can do is vote “no” with your hands, too. We can’t do everything. We can only succeed in the things we set out to do if we do them together, moving in the same direction as a collective.

The post “Vote With Your Feet” and With Your Hands appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Remarks delivered by DSA Co-chair Megan Romer at the Party of the European Left conference in Brussels.

The post Militarism: the Biggest Obstacle to Socialism and Most Dire Threat to Humanity appeared first on Democratic Left.

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A crowd gathers to hear speeches from MNA Nurses at Baystate Franklin hospital. (Working Mass)

By: Mary Ann Sheppard

GREENFIELD – On April 7, unionized nurses at Baystate Franklin Medical Center staged an informational picket to advocate for better wages and staffing. The picket, organized by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), was attended by nurses, community members, and supporters of the labor movement outside of Franklin County’s only hospital. 

Nurses at Baystate Franklin have been struggling with poor nurse-to-patient ratios, a central complaint which nurses argue stretch workers thin and lead to inadequate treatment. The fight is a familiar one; the union had already won staffing grid protections in 2017 – a contract stipulation that requires the hospital to implement minimum staffing and nurse-to-patient ratios. 

Union nurses consider safe staffing ratios non-negotiable, as they have been proven to save lives. However, hospital management has attempted to undermine these protections in recent negotiations, threatening to staff Baystate Franklin with non-union “float” nurses from other hospitals. In essence, the union is being threatened with scab labor unless they accept staffing levels that nurses say make their patients less safe.

The MNA has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board  (NLRB), which may take more than a year to adjudicate. In the meantime, the hospital’s contract violation has forced nurses to the bargaining table.

Bargaining committee co-chair Marissa Potter has led advocacy for nurses’ demands to management. In addition to safe staffing ratios, the Potter and the nurses have demanded wage parity with other regional hospitals, which pay their nurses an average of 10% – 25% more. 

Potter spoke to the strength of the union at Baystate Franklin: “We always have been a union facility.” 

The large crowd which gathered in support of the MNA picket attests to deep roots that organized labor has in the community. Union workers came out to support the nurses, bearing signs and shirts with the names of other unions such as Mass. Teachers Association, AFSCME, UNITE HERE, and the Teamsters. Some in the crowd were nurses from other hospitals, or knew medical workers personally. Others were motivated by political principles or a hope for organized labor to bring about better health care. However the message was clear: We have your back.

Speakers from within and outside the union expressed support for the nurses in securing a fair contract. Ethel Everett, the incoming president of the Western Mass Area Labor Federation, spoke in terms of class conflict. “Nurses are the ones who keep us alive,” she said, “This is part of an ongoing war on the working class.” She led the crowd with a call and response chant – “When we fight, we win!”

Greenfield Mayor Ginny Desorgher and Ward 6 Councilor Patricia Williams also attended the picket. Both had ties to the union, Desorgher a former union nurse, and Williams  is a former MNA staff representative. Baystate Franklin hospital is located in Councilor William’s district: “You are my constituents,” she said, announcing her plans to propose a resolution in Greenfield City Council in support of the union. 

MNA nurses were cautiously optimistic about negotiations. As with any strike action, workers would have to forgo wages in order to force the company’s hand. Baystate Franklin’s nurses can only win their contract through solidarity with one another. “We don’t want to strike,” said Marissa Potter. “But if we have to, we will.” 

Mary Ann Sheppard is a member of Worcester DSA and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Greenfield Nurses Prepared to Strike At Franklin County’s Only Hospital appeared first on Working Mass.

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

The post David Orkin Wants to Bring His Advocacy for Immigrant Workers into Office appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Justin W

I Love Boosters is a story about a trio of “boosters,” women who steal from department stores and resell the items to the community, and their fight against a local billionaire. The billionaire’s name is Christie Smith, whom one of them admires so much she has her platitudes memorized, which makes for a complicated relationship that evolves as the movie goes along. The CEO is very clearly a genius, having graduated college at 17 and spent years working in physics departments, but her platitudes still sound just as vapid and amorphous as any other CEO or motivational speaker. During their heists the trio find a Chinese worker who steals the designer wear so quickly they legitimately believes she has a magic bag, and given that this is a Boots Riley film, you believe it too until it’s revealed to be a teleporter. 

The Chinese factory worker, Jianhu, is stealing the clothes as a way to attack Christie Smith for the horrible conditions in the factory she and her family work in. This brings the trio and Jianhu together as they start stealing more from Christie Smith. As they’re in the process of stealing clothes a discovery is made: The teleporter does more than teleport, it deconstructs and accelerates the contradictions as well. It becomes clear this is a machine based on Dialectical Materialism as the machine brings two things together (teleports), it deconstructs (as shown when they deconstruct clothes into their base components AND when they aim it at a person and turn that person into their parents having sex), and it accelerates the contradictions of a given entity (a cop car is turned into a parody of overmilitarization and reconstructs a person from their parents from before). 

This leads to the personal conflicts in the movie and what I believe to be the thesis. We have the main character Corvette and her best friend Sade, one who is trying to overcome the ills brought about by capitalism (Sade) and the other who is so lonely a loneliness demon tries to pick her up on multiple occasions (Corvette). Sade sees MLM marketing as the way through the ills of capitalism and Corvette sees vengeance as her way out of her loneliness. This is resolved when they link their struggle against Christie Smith to the workers both in China who are making the clothes as well as the workers building a union to stand up against the billionaire. The resolution is built through the combining of the efforts of all workers against Christie Smith and the fashion industry, starting in China and the United States but then the rest of the world, and the community organizing that needs to happen to build those strikes and protests. 

We see this through Corvette rejecting the loneliness demon and her confronting the rolling ball of bills, tickets, and failures of Corvette’s past (seen the entire movie following her just out of sight of everyone else), which shrinks once she has a community to help her deal with those problems. The problems are still there, just reduced to a more manageable size. 

Given this is a Boots Riley film, there are some incredible design and artistic choices that combine to create wonderful metaphors. The CEOs office is tilted, showing her skewed view of the world. The loneliness demon who has been around for millenia can only remember two years back when they were lost in a Target, or, one might say, lost in a capitalist hellscape (please listen to the song “Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash). At one point some characters who have been seen interviewed on TV take off their skins, revealing that they play characters on TV (like workers arguing for less pay and benefits as well as Candace Owens, among others) or lead MLMs to generate in people the need for more brutal cop tactics, anti-worker propaganda, and false solutions (like MLMs) as part of a campaign created by the billionaire to reduce in workers the desire for real solutions like collective action. 

The skin suits also demonstrate how those with anti-worker sentiments but still working class themselves literally sell their identities to be used and interchanged by anyone who needs them for whatever purpose. They give away their ability to identify themselves for the purpose of fulfilling the whims and desires of a billionaire. In true Boots Riley fashion, he tries to make the metaphors as overt as possible, with a little bit of surrealism thrown in the mix. The comedic elements of the movie shine through these metaphors and are so littered throughout I am very surprised the movie isn’t considered a comedy. Boots Riley’s love of storytelling and visual metaphor make him one of my favorite directors and this was terrific and just the right amount of silliness to push through the slightly radical position he’s leading towards through the film.

But this wouldn’t be a Marxist take on a very overtly Marxist movie (the main catalyst for the movie is a Dialectic Materialism machine) without some discussion on the theory presented. The Dialectical Materialism machine is initially seen only as a teleporter, but later in the movie a union organizer explains the full functionality, urging the trio to use it to help them accelerate people into the union they’re building. Initially, the Velvet Gang (the name of the boosters’ group) turns her down in favor of their plan to simply steal from the billionaire thinking that would be enough. As the movie progresses and we reach the climax of the film, the machine is used to link the struggles of the union in the United States to the factory workers in China, creating the solidarity needed to fight against their collective boss. 

Through the explanation of the functions of the machine we get a decent description of dialectical materialism, in a way that is simple enough that we can progress with the movie, while still being faithful to the concept itself. I think Boots’ decision to purposefully inject actual theory into the movie gives a stepping stone for those who like the movie something to grasp onto when deciding to work on their own politics, but does mean the resolution of the movie cannot be as explicit in the direction I think we should go. The CEO is not removed nor a communist revolution waged by the end of this film, instead a worldwide strike against the fashion industry is started, and characters from the movie are seen leading the union in their fight for a better wage, though the main characters are not participants. The most recent film to have such overt Marxist themes, also made by a black director, is Sinners. 

Sinners, for those who haven’t seen it (Why haven’t you? Go watch it!) has a black community fighting against a vampire who uses racism to escape from justice and controls the actions of those whom he has bitten. It is a story about a blood sucking parasite who had oppression forced on him years ago and wants to forcibly create the community he lost due to colonialism and imperialism by stealing the music and soul of a community that hasn’t yet lost themselves to that same oppressive force. The black community fights and kills the vampire, in a bloody struggle that lasts all night, ending with one character killing the racists who came to kill him. In interviews following the release of the film, director Ryan Coogler was asked multiple times about the Marxist implications of the movie and what was being said through the metaphors, every time keeping silent about what he wrote. He could not, at any point, be explicit in the aims and messaging of his movie, lest he lose what position he has to make films like Sinners again. He was able to show the action of the theory, but wasn’t allowed to be explicit in the ideology that created it. 

I see Boots Riley’s choice to name the theory but not show the action as the flip side of the coin. Even on a good day Hollywood would not allow both sides of the coin to be shown on screen at the same time, as Capital knows what it can allow anti-capitalist art to show, as well as what it can’t. Were I Love Boosters to show the fall of capitalism and say the words “Dialectical Materialism,” a producer would have simply shut down the movie and not let it see the light of day. There must be a balance struck between what can be said and what can be shown while still being funded by those who would otherwise be the target of said action or the villain of theory. The theory of the film is presented in a relatively clear way, but the film needed to reel in the actions shown to compensate. When we say “The Revolution will not be televised” this is an example. You can see that revolutions happen or you can hear theory be spoken, but never the twain shall meet, at least not on the big screen. So we need to read between the lines, and see the direction Boots Riley or Ryan Coogler are pointing us in. (On a related note, come join us at Book Club sometime.) 

Overall, this movie is terrific and I recommend everyone go see it. The bright colors, wonderful fashion, comedic style, and the only just so slightly over the top surrealism blend together into a wonderful movie that I would definitely watch again, and recommend others watch too. Combined with the theory hilariously intertwined into the movie, it is one of the best movies I have ever seen and I want to hear your thoughts on it too.

The post I Love “I Love Boosters” appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.