David Duhalde’s essay, “The Long Reroute: A Historical Comparison of the Debsian Socialist Party of America and the New Democratic Socialists of America,” places debates within today’s DSA in historical context while advocating for democratic decision making as the best means for resolving them. For those not familiar with the author, it’s useful to know a little bit about his background. David’s father survived Chilean fascism and imbued in him a profound faith in democratic socialism and the working class. He joined DSA in 2003, so he is just about the oldest of the new DSA. He’s held many responsible posts—from the bottom to the top and back again—in DSA over the last quarter century and is just as committed and involved today. That is a model of leadership to which all DSA cadre ought to aspire. And, as he makes clear in a footnote—always read the footnotes—he is a member of the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC). I consider him an outstanding thinker and a good friend. I learned long ago that making friends with politicos in competing or complementary factions or organizations is one of the best ways to keep your balance under conditions not of our own choosing.

David’s essay is divided into four parts, starting with a sketch of Socialist Party history and the long metamorphosis of one part of it into today’s DSA, followed by three punchy sections comparing debates around labor, elections, and internal party organization in the SP and DSA. David admirably compresses 100 years of history into a few pages and I think his overview is an excellent primer for new DSA members. Rather than cutting ourselves off from all that messy history, David invites us to learn from it in order to fight more effectively today. And, to put it bluntly, to toughen up. Faction fights, splits and bad tempers are just as much a part of our history as are comradeship, faith, and unity.

If I’m being a critical critic, I think the first section could have been extended to focus on the causes and conflicts that led to the SPs rise and fall. For instance, David notes that the SP “steadily declined nationally in the 1920’s” after reaching 120,000 before World War I. But he doesn’t really offer us a convincing “why.” It’s a tough question and he wanted to get to his main points, but I’d like to know what he thinks. For comrades who want to know more about the contest between the SP and the CP in the 1920s and 1930s, I’d recommend perusing David’s comprehensive bibliography. If you’re interested in filling out the picture of post-WWII democratic socialism, read Chris Maisano’s A Precious Legacy in Socialist Forum. And if you buy me a beer, I’ll tell you more than you want to know about the “takeover attempt” by Trotskyists in the 1930s.

But those are minor preliminaries. The real strength of David’s piece follows in three sections dedicated to labor, elections, and internal party organization. I’ll comment on each and then conclude with a few summary remarks. 

Labor

All socialists worth their salt have looked to the organized working class as the only force powerful enough to defeat the billionaire class. Exactly how to transform the proletariat from a class in itself to a class for itself (Marx’s old dictum) has been, and continues to be, easier said than done. David provides us with a useful crash course in U.S. labor history, from the Knights of Labor to the AFL to the IWW and the CIO and traces how competing strategies divided sections of the socialist movement. I think he’s right to highlight that today’s DSA, with the benefit of hindsight, has managed to coalesce around some of the most successful of these strategies, what we might call a flexible rank-and-file approach. As he notes, “While this strategy was not universally accepted when it was proposed in 2019—many veteran DSAers were uneasy with publicly siding in internal union disputes and elections—it has gained more widespread acceptance among different caucuses and factions of DSA over the last few years.” I don’t think it’s possible to overstate just how important this insight is and David is correct to draw attention to it. This ethos is not the property of one or another caucus, but represents the shared experience and intelligence of thousands of DSA members fighting to build durable labor unions. 

Elections

David points out that the Debsian-era SP’s electoral strategy had sought political independence from the beginning. Electoral independence did not constitute a left v. right tension. Remember, the Democratic Party of this era was the party of the Klan in the South and Tammany Hall in the North. Debs and Berger both wanted an independent Socialist ballot line. There’s a lot more to say about what happened in the 1930s during the New Deal, but David concentrates on how a section of the SP—led by Michael Harrington in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the 1960s and 1970s—hit on the strategy of “realignment,” which aimed to transform the Democratic Party into a kind of social democratic party. The results were, generously, a mixed bag. 

Today’s DSA has adopted, according to David, a new strategy, “contesting Democratic primaries as the main arena for struggle,” typically conceived of as preparing for a “dirty break”—or a “dirty stay,” as David has suggested elsewhere—with the Democrats. Just how and when and under what circumstances such a break might occur, has led to “serious tensions” inside DSA today. As he puts it, “unity around the mere idea of being or becoming a party does not necessarily result in consensus around how the party and its elected officials should operate, especially together.” Although David’s SMC caucus has a definite view on this question, here David raises a political conundrum that all of DSA will have to confront, namely, “the polarization today between the Democratic and Republican parties, which did not exist when the Socialist Party operated,” adding how such polarization “makes voters more partisan and less open to new options.” He concludes that “Democratic voters may be happy to vote for socialists within primaries, but may not want to vote for the same candidate if they ran on another line.” The road to any kind of break leads through demonstrating, in practice, how to overcome this dilemma. 

Internal organization

This final section of David’s analysis contains—and it ought to—his most controversial assertions. Rather than shy away from the debate, or paper over disagreements, David makes a clear case for how he believes internal debates are most fruitfully resolved. I would characterize David’s view as a strong belief in the efficacy of conducting and resolving political debates within DSA’s structures, however imperfect they may be. There’s simply no other way to settle sharp disputes. At times, as has been common in the past, that turns out to be impossible and some comrades may decide to leave. For example, David summarizes the case of several debates around Palestine:

1. The factions and partners in the new DSA can change but the program such as Palestine solidarity will continue. 2. These disagreements are largely born out of internal, “homegrown” struggles over major strategic disagreements about how to approach politics. Both groupings who departed DSA were active in the organization as individual members, not as outsiders trying to influence DSA policy to foster splits. People leave when they feel they can no longer achieve their objectives through the existing democratic process.

Turning to factionalism, David argues there are two principle kinds: entryism and homegrown. In terms of entryism, I differ with his view—it’s overly generalized and defensive—but I’ll leave that discussion for another time. I will simply point out the danger that lumping together any future organizational merger with different political tendencies—whether they emerge from labor, civil rights, or other socialist movements—under the banner of “entryism” can be counterproductive. For instance, longtime—and now former—DSA member Maurice Isserman placed the “blame” for DSA’s forthright defense of Gaza on unnamed “entryists.”

More fruitful, in my view, is David’s description—drawing on his discussion with Bill Fletcher–of the new DSA as “an unplanned left-wing refoundation.” That is, “the idea that a stronger left is possible through both regroupment of existing radical structures into a new formation alongside the rethinking and retooling of current left-wing strategy into an alternative orientation.” Of course, there is a difference between an entryist smash and grab operation and honest regroupment, my only point is that comrades should be careful not to paint any organizational regroupment as necessarily entryism with a negative sign placed above the latter. David, I believe, provides the tools to do so by placing his matter-of-fact summaries of the many homegrown caucuses within DSA next to his observation that some of those caucuses have “external influences,” which is only natural and to be expected. In fact, those influences are a sign of DSA’s openness and vitality, not a weakness. As such, “factionalism” is just a normal consequence of any genuinely democratic organization, especially one that has grown as explosively as DSA. As David explains, 

DSA’s factionalism is homegrown. Simply put, the divisions and debates originate largely within DSA, not outside of it. For the hundreds of members who were long-time members of other organizations before joining DSA, tens of thousands more had their first experience in a political organization, much less a socialist one, in DSA. These two groups do interact with each other and many of the caucuses have external influences—both contemporary and historic. Every grouping has their own unique history.

David is, I think, right to downplay generational conflict within DSA, although he does note that older and more experienced members can have difficulty adapting to new melodies and—to extend Irving Howe’s metaphor—new and younger members might not recognize the lyrics. My only quibble here is that David’s one example of intergenerational dynamics is the resignation of some long-term, high-profile members over DSA’s forthright defense of Gaza. That is certainly worth pointing out. But I would also point out that—to my understanding—the “old guard” welcomed the transformation of the organization in 2017. That decision to turn over the keys to the newbies represents an act of political perspicacity on the part of DSA’s veterans and, in my experience, is not as common as one might hope. Of course, David’s own middling generation, those who joined between 9/11 and Bernie 2016, represented a mediating layer of cadre who paved the way for mass growth by creating institutions such as Jacobin and revitalizing YDSA. It’s a lesson that the new generation of DSA cadre should take to heart as we prepare for larger influxes of new socialists and new phases in the ongoing “unplanned left-wing refoundation.”

Lastly, The Long Reroute fits squarely into an undervalued category of what I might call cadre writing. It is a form of exposition that draws on academic and specialist knowledge, but extracts political value expressly designed to speak to socialist organizers and leaders. The general public may get something out of it, although they may well be overwhelmed by all the history and acronyms. And academics may well dismiss it as lacking in original archival research, even as the best of them engage with it. It’s just what the doctor ordered for DSA’s developing cadre, that is, our most active and dedicated members who aspire to help lead DSA on both a national and local level. David’s work provides a framework and language for raising our cadre’s sophistication and capabilities and expands the possibility for caucus and non-caucus cadre to communicate and collaborate, even while debates rage on. It is a must read.  

We’ll be hosting our next Greenville event on Saturday, August 23rd, from 2-4 pm at the Flat River Community Library.

We’ll be discussing Trump’s new ICE Detention Center in Baldwin, Michigan. The conversation will center around the racist anti-immigrant efforts rising around us, why we’re against them, and what we can do about it!

RSVP to the event here, and share the details with a friend! We’re looking forward to a robust discussion with you.

The post Concentration Camp in Your Community: Discussing the Baldwin ICE Detention Center with the GRDSA appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

Champion for working class wages, Michael Westgaard has qualified for the 2025 General Election in Renton!

The Renton City primary on August 5th narrowed the pool of candidates to the top two, which will go on to the General Election.

Michael and his Seattle DSA comrades began raise the wage efforts in earnest in 2023 and the initiative won in 2024. However, Renton residents have yet to see these democratically demanded wage increases from $16.28 to $20.29. Michael is determined use his position to defeat the bureaucratic blockade preventing Renton residents from raising the minimum wage.

As with Zev Cook in Tacoma, Michael is facing extreme opposition in his race, in this case with funding coming from Amazon and big real estate. Unsurprisingly, Michael’s General Election opponent has even argued that minimum wage should not be a living wage and disgustingly cast minimum wage workers as “unskilled.” In stark contrast, Michael is channeling the sewer socialism tradition, which Alex Brower successfully campaigned on earlier this year in Milwaukee.

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We encourage all DSA members to help out with the Michael Westgaard campaign or send a donation!

Our DSA candidates in Washington state are sending a clear message – whether it happens this November or in a future year, socialist cash will take out the capitalist trash.

Tireless advocate for the Palestinian cause and Co-Founder of Tacoma for All, Zev Cook, has qualified for the 2025 General Election!

Tacoma’s primary election narrowed down the pool of candidates to a total of six, which will go on to the General Election for selecting the three new city council members.

Motivated by her Jewish values of community repair, Zev has worked with various direct aid and non-profit organizations and co-founded Serve the People Tacoma which has provided over 10,000 meals and other supplies for homeless neighbors over two years.

Super PAC money has been flooding into Tacoma to oppose Zev and mislead voters into equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Zev will be facing off with Joe Bushnell this November, who plans to increase policing should he win. These two have previously battled over Zev’s wildly popular efforts to protect renters, Tacoma for All. Despite this fact and Zev’s years of community organizing to protect the most vulnerable of the population, she is facing very difficult odds for the General Election. Fellow Washington state candidate Michael Westgaard is similarly facing steep opposition, in his case from Amazon and real estate interests.

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We encourage all DSA members to help out with the Zev Cook campaign or send a donation!

We are thrilled to announce that one of our most recent National DSA endorsees, Denzel McCampbell, just won his August 5th primary!

Denzel has spent more than a decade working on issues such as voting rights, water affordability, and equitable transportation. He also has a keen focus on community violence intervention programs and mental health services.

Denzel is part of a slate of candidates in the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising project!

Can’t afford to donate at this time? Support Denzel by phonebanking your DSA comrades!

Chaz Howard, Chaplain at University of Pennsylvania, joins the podcast to talk about purpose and vocation, Black Liberation Theology as a needed remedy for American religion, and the necessity of spirituality in our activist work. We also discuss his new book, Uncovering Your Path, which you can purchase here: https://www.charleslattimorehoward.com

DSA member Zohran Mamdani’s victory in NYC’s mayoral Democratic Party primary is a case study in effective coalition-building. How did Zohran accomplish the impossible, going from 2% support in early polling to a decisive victory just 6 months later? Mamdani’s Obama-esque ability to resonate with voters across demographic and political lines played a part, as did the campaign’s strong field and communications operations. But another decisive factor came early in the campaign, at an endorsement forum hosted in February by DC 37, New York City’s largest union of public sector workers. Mamdani was received by the audience with rapturous applause throughout. Zohran’s campaign manager, Elle Bisgaard-Church, cited this forum as the moment she began to believe Zohran could win. “The energy in that room when he was on the stage was absolutely remarkable,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “I remember sitting in the front row and feeling completely overwhelmed by it. That was a major sign to me of the breadth of this campaign’s resonance.”

DC 37 endorsed and joined the coalition for Zohran, but their support was far from guaranteed. In 2021, the union endorsed New York City’s current mayor Eric Adams, a scandal-ridden establishment politician who looks to face off with Mamdani in November’s general election. DC 37’s historic decision to endorse a ranked slate for mayor, including Zohran Mamdani, was the product of sustained rank-and-file organizing cohered through “DC 37 for Zohran,” a group of Zohran supporters who work for the city. As DSA considers interventions in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election, the story of “DC 37 for Zohran” contains lessons DSA can take away to successfully build a movement, organization, and consciousness in support of our program at the largest stages of US politics. Delegates to DSA’s 2025 convention who are inspired by this story should vote in support of the two “A DSA Presidential Platform” amendments to ensure our organization helps create rank-and-file formations, like DC 37 for Zohran, that can organize activists and the politically disengaged, moving the labor-liberal Democratic Party establishment towards support for DSA’s slate of candidates and building the durable mass organizations necessary for the long-term political struggle for revolutionary democratic socialism. 

How We Win

Just like the Zohran campaign, DC 37 for Zohran is a coalition in its own right. The group was formed from a cadre of long-time activists in the public sector union movement. I was a member of this initial group. In addition to being city workers, some of us are DSA members, some are members of other socialist organizations, and some are unaffiliated. We share programmatic goals: transforming DC 37 from an ossified, disengaged business union into a democratic, member-driven and politically progressive union. But what really united us was the trust we built through years of organizing together. Activist city workers who formed DC 37 for Zohran struggled together on the shop floor and in our locals. And we had experience organizing city-wide political interventions together, around COVID-19 working conditions, 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, and most recently around Palestinian liberation and the divestment of our pension from Israel. For this campaign, DC 37 for Zohran’s specific goals were to organize public sector workers in support of the Zohran Mamdani campaign, and push DC 37 to endorse Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy and invest media and field resources to support the campaign.

To build public sector union member support, DC 37 for Zohran hosted a public town hall with the campaign. Attendees had the opportunity to hear from Zohran Mamdani and other city workers. They also had the opportunity to ask about issues important to city workers, like underfunding, understaffing, privatization, and threats to retiree healthcare, and push the Zohran campaign to consider these issues seriously. We also organized regular “city worker” canvassing shifts and held regular organizing meetings where supporters could join and “level up” their participation by getting involved in the group’s strategy development, event planning, and execution. These efforts helped cohere a strong, active, and organized city worker support base for Zohran, which extended far beyond the initial reach of the core organizing group. We were creative and organized in building a list of supporters, reaching out to city worker activists organizing in our workplaces and for Palestinian solidarity, coworkers who may have been previously politically inactive, and identifying leads using publicly available data on Zohran campaign contributors. This effective list-work expanded our reach and allowed us to mobilize a large number of supporters and identify new organizing leaders to support the Zohran campaign and our long-term union reform efforts. Our ability to collaborate with the campaign while retaining the political independence to build our own organization and advocate for our own political goals was key to building trust with coworkers and nimbly scaling up our organizing.

One of the first ways we tested the strength of our group was through a campaign calling on the union’s leaders to include Mamdani in the union’s endorsement slate and not to rank Mamdani’s primary competitor, Andrew Cuomo, another scandal-ridden establishment figure in New York. We turned out a sizable contingent to the mayoral forum hosted by DC 37 to demonstrate members’ support for the campaign, and followed that up with countless emails, phone calls, and texts to union leaders asking them to endorse Zohran. This campaign was a success, and DC 37 leadership voted to include Zohran second on their mayoral endorsement slate. While DC 37’s field and media efforts in the primary were focused on the union’s number-one-ranking candidate, Adrienne Adams, Zohran supporters joined DC 37’s field operation and pushed from within to focus the union’s efforts on Zohran, the more exciting and viable candidate (Adams won under 5% of the first-round primary votes). Duncan Freeman wrote in the Chief Leader, “the union showed up for Mamdani in other ways,” adding, “The union’s president, Shaun Francois, who heads Board of Education Employees Local 372, spoke in support of Mamdani at a campaign rally inside of a Brooklyn concert venue in May, and Maf Misbah Uddin, the union’s treasurer, spoke enthusiastically in support of Mamdani… [h]e was also a presence at rallies for the candidate with South Asian labor leaders.” Even the presence of DC 37’s logo on campaign literature helped legitimize Zohran outside the activist left. 

Let’s be crystal clear: DC 37’s support for the Zohran campaign was a victory of rank-and-file organizing. It shows that we can dislodge the power of the Democratic Party’s powerbrokers and start the process of shifting the labor unions and political non-profits towards a more progressive agenda. It shows that, when merged through an exciting popular campaign, base-building and electoral campaigning, areas of work often counterposed on the left, can complement one another and help us accomplish our shorter and longer-term objectives. As we shall see, the long-term success of this work hinges on DSA and the broader left organizing with the political independence necessary to promote its platform and organize its base. This is why the amendment calls for DSA to organize autonomous rank-and-file initiatives, put forward its own presidential platform, establish some standards for a DSA-endorsed candidate’s alignment with our organization and our presidential platform, and ensure DSA’s ability to criticize a campaign’s shortcomings and organize for change within the campaign apparatus.

Looking Forward

Of course, winning the mayoral race is one thing: governing and delivering on campaign promises is another. DC 37 for Zohran finds itself in the peculiar predicament of having successfully campaigned for the election of our next boss. Conversations within the group have already started about how to organize in this brave new world, where a democratic socialist is the mayor of our city. We have begun drafting a platform for the future of city work under Zohran’s administration and plan to host a town hall on this topic. We certainly hope to fight with Zohran on shared priorities, like investing more in staffing and public services for New Yorkers, fighting against outsourcing, and protecting retiree healthcare. However, we will also have to negotiate with the Zohran administration for our next contract, and all the political alignment in the world does not change the fact that every New York City mayor has to choose how to staff their administration and where to invest limited resources. The mayor can try to appoint political allies to key administrative positions, but faces pressure to rely on experts whose leadership abilities come with the status quo political beliefs one obtains after a career going through the city’s revolving door of executives in the private and non profit sectors (one key example: current NYPD police commissioner and billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch, who Zohran is considering retaining for his administration). The mayor can try to raise taxes, but will need political support from the council to do so. Further, while the city’s largest revenue source, property taxes, is controlled locally, much of the city’s additional revenue comes from state and federal sources, putting them out of the mayor’s or the council’s control. 

Here, Zohran’s city worker supporters have no illusions. We do not support Zohran because we believe he will wave a magic wand and solve all our problems, or because he represents a full program for the socialist movement. We support him because we believe he is the candidate most conducive to our organizing goals: building an organized, independent, militant workers’ movement that fights for city workers, the working class New Yorkers we serve, and workers all over the world.  After Mamdani wins the general election in November, we will continue the fight for wages that keep up with inflation, for an end to the wasteful practice of farming out public sector work to private contractors, for fully funded city agencies that are responsive to community needs, and for divesting our pension to end the city’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal project of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.  

On some of these issues, Zohran is a clear ally. For example, he has already expressed an interest in fully funding city agencies and auditing the city’s private contractors. On some issues, like more maximalist DC 37 contract demands or abolitionist demands around the NYPD, the Mamdani administration may side with city leadership in calling for moderation. Ultimately, we will work with the mayor’s office when we can, but against them when we must. This is a key insight: independent rank-and-file organizing can power leftist politicians to victory, but it is the only vehicle to ensure that, after taking power and facing heavy institutional pressures to compromise, politicians continue to support the program of DSA and the worker’s movement, from fast and free buses to divesting city workers’ pension from Israel all the way to a democratic socialist society. The purpose of such independent political entities like DC37 for Zohran is not just to help candidates win campaigns but to keep them politically sharp and honest, as we continue to build consciousness and support for our own political program and organization. 

Looking to 2028, it is worth asking: what coalition could potential presidential nominees – AOC, Shawn Fain, Sara Nelson, or Rashida Tlaib – build around themselves? What coalition does DSA want to build in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential elections, and how can we help cohere that coalition? As we answer these questions, DC 37 for Zohran is a model we can take inspiration from. It shows us that through the rank-and-file organization DSA helps cohere, we can organize activists and the politically disengaged to move the labor-liberal coalition towards our goals. Most importantly, it shows us that we can use these campaigns to raise consciousness, grow our lists, and build durable mass organizations for the political battles that occur after every election, win or lose. Delegates to DSA’s 2025 convention who resonate with this vision should vote in support of the “A DSA Presidential Platform” amendments and ensure our organization helps create these powerful rank-and-file formations.

Image: Zohran Mamdani speaking at a New York City DSA fundraiser in 2023. Photo by Alexandra Chan.

Another convention season is here, and yet, the demand for a hybrid convention— a key focus for the Disability Working Group (DWG)— has failed to meet the requirements for  consideration by the convention committee. As a candidate for the National Political Committee, I included this sentence in my responses to the requisite questionnaire: “In DWG, we confront DSA’s institutional ableism, from inaccessible events to token accommodations.” This is something that every disabled organizer in DSA confronts every day. This institutional form of ableism can range from having to remind staff two conventions in a row to book more accessible rooms for the DSA block, to dealing with statements like “We don’t know where the accessible entrances are; this has never been an issue before.” Frustrations among members of our community have been mounting over the years. Frustrations that can cause more alienation, and fellow disabled comrades leaving the organization at a critical juncture. My comrades in the DWG have asked me why this consistently happens to us. I have to admit that I did not have a good answer.  This piece is my attempt to give voice to my own frustrations and theirs.

A focus on disability and accessibility is critical to developing a DSA that’s growing in strength and one that’s effective in winning broader demands. Without us, there is no revolutionary horizon to be achieved. 

A History of the Disability Working Group

In 2019, there was a mass resignation of the Steering Committee of the Disability Working Group. The text of their resignation can be found here and is worth reading in its entirety. However, unmentioned in this text is that prominent leftist writer and co-host of the popular podcast Chapo Trap House Amber A’Lee Frost was a key player in the harassment that the DWG Steering Committee faced. Given Amber’s turn towards advocating for an “anti-woke” left and masculine working class fetishism, it’s hard not to see the historic parallels in how attacks on disabled people are often harbingers of latent right-wing tendencies. Years later, and ableist slurs and ableist rhetoric has once again proliferated in the broader society. 

I strongly believe that the DWG went dormant for a time after this due to a lack of people willing to subject themselves to the ableism that the previous group experienced. At the end of the 2019 convention, an anti-identity politics caucus formed, announcing their formation with the ableist article “Let Them Clap,” published in Class Unity. Thankfully, like many things founded in opposition to other people’s existence and rights, this caucus has since split from DSA to focus on a podcast. Many of its former members are still active in DSA, however, and while they may no longer be part of a caucus that openly presents such divisiveness, I’m sure their influence is still playing a part in DSA’s orientation towards disability justice.

In 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the national convention was held online. Advocates of a hybrid convention or an online convention finally had proof that it was feasible. However, a group of delegates dropped a harassment complaint against a slate of NPC candidates in the middle of the convention and exacerbated the vicious interpersonal conduct that sometimes plagues DSA’s organizational culture. This incident and the online fallout thereafter are now used by a significant section of our membership to argue that we need an in-person-only convention. But the logic of this argument is one that chooses to accommodate toxic behavior and papers over the serious issues at the expense of people with accessibility needs. To put it bluntly, this line of reasoning is more invested in prioritizing avoiding holding bad-faith actors accountable rather than making convention a more welcoming space for disabled comrades, a significant part of our socialist base. The 2023 National Convention had uneven adherence to supporting disabled members. Masking and vaccination were mandatory. Yet,the Disability Working Group worked on several resolutions, including the first hybrid convention resolution, but it did not meet the requirements to be considered. Many disabled delegates also experienced in-person ableism, such as a quiet room that was too close to the convention hall  for those experiencing sensory overload. A delegate was left in tears after a request for the chair to ask other delegates to stop clapping and yelling was denied. In the aftermath of the 2023 convention, the bulk of the Disability Working Group has left DSA yet again.

This history is only a fraction of the issues that affect the wider organization. I have not spoken of the personal incidents that occur throughout chapters because I can’t possibly know them all, but I do know that they occur with alarming frequency. This has led to an organization that is less reflective of the working class that we claim to represent—in just one of many ways it fails to do so. According to the Centers for Disease Control, at least 1 in 4 people in the U.S. have a disability. About 78 percent of all disabled adults participate in the country’s labor force, with nearly 27 percent, twice the rate of able adults, languishing in poverty. If anything, as much as the DSA has become the leading socialist organization in the U.S., it’s regressed terribly when it comes to issues of basic accessibility and respect for its disabled members. 

The Dilemma of Disability Rights Persists

In 2025, the issues of accessibility and ableism persist. Currently, the major focus of opposition to disability justice has to do with masking, transmissible infections, and the cost of accessibility. For many, masking after the initial outbreak became a way of life, and I currently mask on public transit and in enclosed spaces. Members of the DWG have asked me to push for more chapters to have mandatory masking policies, and I have tried advocating for that in various DSA spaces, such as in online discords and the DSA national forums. The opposition to this has crystallized in the optional masking policy adopted by the NPC for the 2025 convention. As a member of the Accessibility Committee for convention, I had pushed for stronger standards, but the committee deadlocked on the final vote and then never met again. Already, some delegates who were democratically elected to their seats have dropped out from attending because of this failure to protect their health. The organization makes explicit institutional commitments to fighting racism, transphobia, and homophobia, yet when it comes to disability, we remain stuck debating whether inclusion is worth the effort. I am not raising this point to pit race, transness, or disability justice against one another, as I know this is not a zero-sum game. I am pointing out that DSA can successfully welcome people into our organization and make them a priority, but it selectively chooses when to do so, and oftentimes, falls short on such commitments.

Many DSA members who are able-bodied perpetuate the ableism present in our society, and many of the arguments that they make are the same arguments that disabled people encounter in their day-to-day life as to why society cannot adjust or accommodate us. Members, including those in the top-most positions of leadership, couch these arguments in concerns about cost but have no problem booking convention at an expensive complex or asking delegates to pay their way to and from convention, even with the cost of living increasing exponentially every year, which also deeply impacts many of us who are disabled and living precarious lives financially. I find it incoherent to say that the cost of a hybrid convention would be somehow more than the cost being passed on to individual delegates in order for us to have our face-to-face time.

Setting aside convention, far too many chapters continue to have events at inaccessible locations and fail to prepare for the possibility of having a disabled member participate fully in chapter activities that some others may take for granted. Every chapter and every working group actively asks members to use pronouns. Why can’t this same level of effort be made for disabled people who are part of a working class feeling squeezed in a neoliberal ableist America? Instead, the issues and concerns of disabled people in the organization are dismissed, and members of the community are made to feel like a burden instead of comrades in this common struggle against oppression and class exploitation. 

I want to think the best of my more able-bodied comrades (although that line between abled and disabled are always blurring), and, while I don’t think any of this is based in explicit forms of eugenics, I do think, like the rest of able-bodied society, there is some kind of squeamishness about what disabled people represent: an otherness that goes unspoken but nonetheless screams with visibility. At some point in their lives, all able-bodied people will need the accommodations that disabled people so fiercely advocate for. Maybe this possibility, this equalization by time and the stress of capitalist life, makes some deeply uncomfortable in ways that they can’t express or don’t know how to. Either way, we are all left with an organization that is weaker for it, with fewer and fewer disabled members who are willing to endure this implicit hostility. We are left with disabled comrades leaving the organization, oftentimes alienated by politics overall, disenchanted and ever more isolated. We are left with policy demands that do not in fact, take seriously accommodations and health issues that all people, abled and disabled alike, shall face, like having facilities that are well ventilated and a healthcare system that cares about our basic health. Such things should be the bedrock of a socialist agenda and yet, such ideas are barely mentioned, along with those of us who need these policies the most. 

The eternal question is always: What is to be done? I don’t know the specific answer to that. I do know that I cannot guilt my comrades into doing better. I cannot simply ask nicely, for I have done that repeatedly and gotten nowhere. I can organize a resolution or proposal that doesn’t gather enough signatures. I can buy my chapter portable wheelchair ramps which will then get lost in the shuffle. As a leader in the National Disability Working Group and DSA, I choose to stay, but I feel it keenly every time a comrade chooses not to. I constantly ask myself: Is there more I could have done? Could I have supported them more? Could I have talked to their chapter leaders? But ultimately if the organization as a whole is unwilling to act, even my substantial efforts won’t be enough. We are all members of DSA because we recognize the limits of the individual. I recognize my limits more and more, and I am proactive about asking my comrades to respect and accommodate them. I wish that the organization would reciprocate and recognize its responsibility in managing and choosing its own limits rather than reinforcing an individualist and anti-socialist culture when it comes to accessibility and inclusion for members of our community, whose lives are often at the frontlines of capitalist decay and class war

I leave with my most recent encounter with how the organization erases disability from within our ranks. While in the process of writing this piece, I filled out my delegate registration form, which asked a variety of demographic questions, but did not include a general question displaying a similar interest in gathering the demographic data related to disability. The only question regarding whether or not our members are disabled and what disabilities they may have was what accommodations they need. Based on past experience, I am not hopeful that these accommodations will be present. This theater of inclusion will play out every convention and in every chapter until it matters to DSA. It’s only a question of how many disabled members we’ll lose before DSA starts to care, and maybe then, for the broader movement, it might be too late.

Image: Handicap parking spots in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 29, 2024. Photo by Tony Webster. Photo distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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