Monday, February 9 at 6:30pm PST (Online)

Join DSA Ventura County’s Mutual Aid Working Group for a planning meeting focused on addressing unmet needs in Ventura County. Bring your big ideas, suggestions for coalition partners, and a desire to stand in solidarity with others. We are cookin’ up some ideas, and will post an agenda on our slack.

Sponsored by

HOSTED BY DSA NATIONAL POLITICAL EDUCATION COMMITTEE

In light of the political urgency we find ourselves in, we are holding a special edition of our Talking to Non-Socialists training, focusing on ICE and immigration. This training welcomes all DSA members, and anyone who wants to learn some basic techniques to challenge misinformation, move people closer to our side and further from the right, and expand the struggle for democracy and socialism — one neighbor, family member or workmate at a time.

Join us Monday, February 09, 5 PT/8 ET — RSVP for more details and zoom! See you soon.

[[{“value”:”

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Password:

The post Protected: OPINION: The Current Political Moment and the Case for Building Boston DSA with No Shortcuts appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

By: Dan Albright

Editor’s Note: Working Mass has published two opposing viewpoints on Boston DSA’s current endorsement debate. Read the counterpoint,“The Current Political Moment and the Case for Building Boston DSA with No Shortcuts,” here.

As DSA chapters grow, members often ask whether we are taking on too much or not enough. This DSA capacity debate is unfolding in Boston right now as members are currently debating whether running multiple electoral campaigns would overextend us. This question comes up in chapters nationally. Campaigns require time, coordination, and energy, which are often in short supply for voluntary organizations like ours. But how we think about capacity might be leading us to the wrong answers.

A useful way to approach this is dialectically. That means examining both sides of an argument and asking how their tension can lead to growth rather than paralysis. Organizations don’t develop by avoiding contradictions — they develop by working through them.

The Case for Caution

People who urge caution have an argument. State-level campaigns cover large areas and require tremendous ongoing volunteer work. Running several races at once can pull people away from other important efforts, such as tenant organizing, community ICE defense, or international solidarity. Many believe the focus should be on building independent, working-class institutions outside of the electoral sphere.

Some people worry that a small group of elected socialists can’t effect real change in the bourgeois government, or that working in coalitions can make it harder to hold elected candidates accountable. Others think focusing too much on elections can reinforce the idea that we must outsource our power to politicians rather than build our own collective power. These are important considerations.

Sometimes people use the limited-capacity argument when they have deeper political disagreements as well. This isn’t because anyone is being dishonest, but because it can feel easier to talk about logistical issues than political ones. As socialists, we often discuss the limits of reform, the role of social democracy, and how openly socialist candidates can or should be. Some believe in gradually improving working people’s lives, while others — myself included — maintain that openly acknowledging a revolutionary socialist horizon is essential. Electoral campaigns can be a space to debate these differences openly, which in turn helps educate people on politics and, over time, helps improve electoral discipline.

But if we only see campaigns as a drain on resources and capacity, we might miss all they actually do for us.

Capacity Is Built, Not Allocated

Everyone wants DSA to be fully embedded in our electoral campaigns. This is already happening in many cases. Electoral working groups offer guidance, chapter leaders often take key roles, and DSA volunteers keep coming back as staff or leaders. From the outside, it can seem like the chapter and the campaign are the same thing.

But the reality is more complicated. Usually, the candidate’s campaign committee does most of the direct organizing, with its own budget, staff, and legal authority. The chapter acts more like an organizing ecosystem that campaigns tap into. Endorsing a campaign doesn’t mean the chapter will manage everything. It’s a political choice whether a campaign organizes openly within the chapter’s space.

Once we understand this difference, the question of capacity changes. Supporting another campaign does not always split up our efforts — in many cases, it actually increases them.

Enthusiasm Is a Resource

Most chapters have many inactive members, and even the most committed volunteers find it hard to keep everyone involved or offer regular ways for eager new members to participate. Campaigns, on the other hand, often have staff who organize phone banks and canvasses, train new volunteers, and knock on doors. When these efforts focus on DSA members and sympathizers, the campaign’s resources become extra capacity for the chapter, even if only temporarily.

This is especially true for new members. Electoral work is often the first thing that new members gravitate toward, since mainstream political culture ingrains in us the idea that elections are the arena for politics and making change. While DSA has many priorities besides elections, most people are already familiar with this kind of participation when they join.

In a volunteer group, people always spend more time on the work that they care about. The question is how to use that energy without ignoring other important tasks. In my experience, it usually works better to support people’s interests and bring in others for less popular work, rather than trying to force everyone to do everything.

Campaigns Can Generate Capacity

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t challenges. Campaign staff report to the candidate, not the chapter, and candidates are under enormous pressure during elections. This happens in every endorsed race. Still, taking on an additional campaign within reason often brings more new people than new problems. Members canvass for the first time, campaign supporters organize for the first time, and relationships are built that last beyond one election.

The same thing happens with money. Chapters rarely provide most of the funding for campaigns. Most donations come from the candidate’s district or from people the campaign reaches out to. Supporting another candidate doesn’t necessarily divide a limited pool of money. Instead, it often brings in more resources that would not otherwise be there.

This is even clearer in bigger chapters. In New York City, ongoing electoral work has helped elect at least eleven officials at different levels of government, and the chapter is now backing its largest slate of candidates yet. Contesting more elections makes it easier for new candidates to run together, and the chapter’s processes for vetting, developing, and holding people accountable continue to improve as the organization grows.

Success builds on itself. When a strong DSA candidate wins and does well in office, it makes it easier for future DSA candidates.

Meeting the Political Moment

This debate is happening in a larger context. Many people are unhappy with national leaders, the cost of living keeps going up, and there is anger about war, ICE violence, and growing authoritarianism. No matter how you look at it, most people feel the system is letting them down.

In that context, visibility matters. If DSA is not putting forward as many strong candidates as it reasonably can, it risks being seen as missing in action. Electoral politics is only one terrain of struggle, and labor organizing, tenant unions, and community campaigns remain essential.

But even within a capitalist democracy, elected officials can make meaningful improvements to people’s lives through legislation, and when they cannot pass laws, they can still use their platform to amplify struggles and support movements on the ground. 

Strength does not look identical in every candidate. Some are stronger communicators, others are stronger legislators or organizers. A clear set of principles is necessary to maintain accountability, but variation in skills can be an asset if the organization knows how to channel it.

On the DSA Capacity Debate: Capacity Grows When We Use It

Taken together, these dynamics point to a broader conclusion. The pressure of competing for the time of the most active members is real. But focusing only on already-activated volunteers misses the bigger picture. Campaigns don’t only consume capacity. They can also generate it — by training new organizers, activating inactive members, and creating political momentum that makes taking part feel meaningful rather than draining.

Capacity isn’t just about what we have today. It’s also about what we can build tomorrow. Whether a campaign helps us grow or stretches us too thin depends more on how well it brings in new people and sets clear goals than on how many campaigns we endorse.

Backing more candidates does not guarantee success, and there are always risks. But if we refuse to endorse because we think our capacity is fixed, we might end up making that true. If we want to run strong campaigns in the future, we need to focus on what helps us grow our collective capacity now. Despite their tension, campaigns are still one of the best ways to do that.

Dan Albright is chair and an editor of Working Mass and a member of Boston DSA.

The post OPINION: The Myth of Limited Capacity in DSA appeared first on Working Mass.

By: Tefa Galvis

Editor’s Note: Working Mass has published two opposing viewpoints on Boston DSA’s current endorsement debate. Read the counterpoint, “The Myth of Limited Capacity in DSA,” here.

Boston DSA Co-Chair Tefa Galvis weighs in on the 2026 endorsement debate, advocating for a No vote on endorsement of DSA member and State Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven for State Senate, 2nd Middlesex District

“Jane McAlevey is a deeply experienced, uncommonly reflective organizer. In No Shortcuts, McAlevey stresses the distinction between mobilizing and organizing and examines how systematic conflation of the two has reflected and reinforced the labor movement’s decline over recent decades. More than a how-to manual for organizers, No Shortcuts is a serious, grounded rumination on building working-class power. It is a must-read for everyone concerned with social justice in the US.”
— Adolph Reed Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

The time is now for Boston DSA to defeat the establishment, elect Evan MacKay to the State House, rebuild our base across neighborhoods, and reposition ourselves clearly within the progressive and socialist left fighting fascism, through organizing, relationship-building, and disciplined strategy, as we confront ICE, the war at home, and the war abroad.

This statement outlines a vision of how Boston DSA can build power, grounded in lessons from the NYC electoral project and from over a decade of organizing. As socialists, it is our responsibility to assess the political terrain honestly and act intentionally and strategically. Opportunities are opening for Boston DSA right now, and leadership demands that we meet them with a clear, serious power-building strategy.

None of DSA’s biggest wins have come from reactive or ad-hoc decisions. Even our losses have been meaningful when they emerged from organizing-driven electoral strategies that materially impacted working-class people, regardless of party affiliation or identity. In the moment when big, shiny, exciting opportunities arise, it is important to take a breath and consider the way that potential “low-hanging fruit” will shape the implementation of our larger, long-term strategy.

I invite you to read this with curiosity and seriousness, to learn from someone who has made real sacrifices over the last 13 years, and to engage this project with the love, care, and responsibility it deserves.

Why Comparing NYC and Boston is Not Accurate

Boston DSA elected Erika as its first state-level Socialist In Office (SIO) in 2020, the year after Julia Salazar was elected as NYC-DSA’s first state-level SIO. These races, however, are not comparable, and the outcomes over the last six years make that clear.

NYC-DSA has since built:

• 3 Socialist-in-Office Committees (SIOC)
  • Federal
  • State
  • City 
• A Candidate Recruitment Committee
• Over 25 races run
• 13+ electeds in state office
• 7 codified geographic branches
• 3 interconnected, DSA-led legislative campaigns (Tax the Rich, Housing Justice, Affordable Childcare), with multiple legislative wins
• A chapter of 14,000 members

Boston DSA, by contrast:

• Has no currently DSA-endorsed elected officials in office at the state level (except for Rep. Uyterhoeven, who was endorsed in 2020 and 2022, but not in 2024).
• Has no DSA-led legislative campaigns
• Has no consistent SIOC
• Has no candidate recruitment committee
• Has not built durable electoral power since the 2019–2020 cycle

Whatever occurred in 2021 did not leave Boston DSA stronger, more strategic, or more powerful. We now have a real opportunity to reshape how we build power — with agency, discipline, and scale — but only if we confront reality honestly.

Snapshot Comparison

	NYC-DSA	Boston DSA
Races run	25+	13+
Electeds in state office	13+	0*
DSA-written/led campaigns	3+	0
DSA campaign wins	2+	0
SIOC	Yes	No
Candidate recruitment	Yes	No

*[Editor’s Note: Uyterhoeven was endorsed by Boston DSA in 2020 and again for re-election in 2022, but not in 2024.]

What This Means for Boston DSA

I hold deep respect for comrades in NYC, not only for celebrating wins, but for rigorously analyzing losses and rebuilding from them. If Boston DSA wants to reach a similar level of power and coherence, we must stop organizing reactively and commit to serious base-building, internal development, and political clarity.

The fascist threat has forced uneasy coalitions under liberal democracy, adding urgency and gravity to our work. But long-term success requires that we be explicit about our goals. I propose that Boston DSA aim to run three to six State House races over the next two cycles, grounded in neighborhood-level base building.

Zohran Mamdani’s election was not reactive. It was a risk assessed and built toward through a decade of organizing. For Boston DSA, the analogous step is winning Evan MacKay’s race with a mandate, while simultaneously building durable neighborhood organizations and movement relationships.

Confronting uncomfortable truths is not optional if we want to win.

1. Boston DSA Electoral Program Current Results 

Our first electoral cycle in the State House was in 2020. If we are honest, we now have zero endorsed electeds in the State House. The original goal was to have a bench by now. We do not.

We also lack:

• DSA-written or DSA-led legislation
• A coherent electoral pipeline
• A clear lane within the broader progressive ecosystem

Supporting others’ legislation is not the same as building our own power. The only way forward is to talk to working-class people across our state, build real relationships with organizations, and define our role clearly.

2. Erika’s Race Is Not Comparable to NYC Campaigns

Julia Salazar ran as part of a Housing Justice for All campaign built by NYC-DSA’s Housing Working Group. She was asked to run by the membership to defeat an incumbent.

Zohran Mamdani was a DSA organizer long before running. He was recruited by the chapter, won legislation with DSA, spent years one-on-one organizing members, and ran strategically, not reactively. His first state legislature race was against a progressive incumbent, the first race of its kind in NYC-DSA, and contested progressive power to illustrate the differences between a socialist and progressive.

Somerville is not Queens. Cambridge is not Flatbush. Before Zohran ran for mayor, every level of governance in Queens already had DSA representation. That scale took ten years.

Losses matter. There is no shame in losing; only in losing without learning.

If we’re honest about Boston, the multiracial working-class base we need is not in Cambridge or Somerville. It is in Chelsea, Everett, Malden, Roxbury and beyond.

So we must ask:

• Where is the “Queens of Boston”?
• Where should we be base building now?
• How do we scale up citywide, then statewide?

I think these are answers to find as a chapter, and my strategist’s political instinct right now tells me Camberville is not the answer. 

Vision: Sustained Strategic Escalation

Our goal must be power in the State House, where harm is concentrated and decisions are made.

That means:

• Targeting three House seats in two to three years
• Challenging entrenched power, not just adding friendly faces
• Building a multiracial, multigenerational base
• Organizing outside Cambridge and Somerville

This is about being proactive.

What do we gain if we win the House? What do we lose if we lose?

If we win Evan’s race, we will gain a seat in the state House, getting us closer to our goal of building a bench in the House. We will show we can take on entrenched power and win. We will prove to labor unions, like IBEW 103, Mass. AFL-CIO, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, and many others backing the incumbent, that DSA won this race with DSA. They will have to recognize that DSA is a serious organizing project.

Losing Evan’s race would be devastating, not only electorally, but relationally. A second consecutive loss will make Evan look like an unserious candidate. The Democrat establishment would tear into us for losing, saying our movement is not viable outside of NYC. It will be hard to build credibility with other orgs if we keep losing. Groups like IBEW Local 2222 have taken real risks to support Evan’s campaign and all of us. If we fail to deliver, we will lose those new allies because we cannot be counted on. Evan’s race is about DSA taking on the neoliberal establishment. It is a campaign that has ramifications not only for Boston DSA, but for our movement nationwide. In this moment, we cannot afford to lose.

Meeting the Moment

We are at a political moment when the contradictions have heightened, where the political context, compared to last year or years prior, has changed. This is a moment where more people than ever are turning to DSA to find out how to take action. People are ready to take on fascism. There’s an appetite to expand into different neighborhoods and deepen relationships. 

Electoralism is an important tool in our toolbox, but electoralism, and our lack of long-term built electoral infrastructure in particular, also has its limits in accomplishing what we need to meet the current political moment. To meet this moment, we must organize with all on-the-ground orgs, such as LUCE, to defend our communities and build towards a better future together through our neighborhood and working groups. 

This isn’t to discount electoralism as a whole. Electoralism may be limited in its ability to meet the current political moment, but it would be a mistake to believe that our project could never grow. We should be thinking long-term about how electoralism can help us meet future political moments. To build the infrastructure we need, to build the future organizing we want, to meet the future moments we want, it’s imperative for the Electoral Working Group (EWG) of Boston DSA to: 

1. Win Evan MacKay’s race and strengthen the EWG through that campaign by building an intentional pipeline that both turns new and paper members into effective organizers and develops internal leaders to take on bigger campaigns and win.
2. Build an enduring and intentional SIOC and candidate recruitment process, and
3. Use ballot questions, especially around housing and maintaining the Fair Share Amendment, to organize around building working-class power and taxing the rich as a means through which we can strengthen relationships in communities.

Final Take 

Boston DSA has enormous organizing opportunities, but only if we are serious, if we are intentional, and if we are thinking ahead. Instead of reacting to opportunities as they come up, Boston DSA must instead:

• Strengthen our electoral work through Evan’s race
• Build a solid SIOC and candidate recruitment committee
• Expand neighborhood groups through immigrant defense and antifascist organizing
• Deepen relationships with labor, the left, and progressives
• Develop members into organizers and organizers into leaders so we can scale as we grow.

There are no shortcuts. If we want power, we have to build it.

Tefa Galvis is co-chair of Boston DSA and a labor and political organizer. They are a member of the Campaign Workers Guild, IATSE, and AFT-PSU, a former member of DSA’s National Political Committee and NYC-DSA, and an ecosocialist strategist and field organizer. Galvis previously worked on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s field staff and was part of the team that helped pass the first socialist-written Green New Deal legislation in New York State.

The post OPINION: The Current Political Moment and the Case for Building Boston DSA with No Shortcuts appeared first on Working Mass.

The Socialists Everywhere Project began in the now-defunct Organizing Committee for the North Side Blue Line (NSBL) branch. It arose out of conversations about how to learn more about the employers, landlords, and community organizations in the branch territory. The name, which was coined by former branch steering committee officer Ramsin Canon, originally encompassed an ever larger project involving both member engagement and a broader continuous research effort to do power mapping throughout the branch. This element was still present in the initial resolution authorizing the Project, which was presented to the Executive Committee, along with the part of the Project that would become the focus of work over the next year.

The initial proposal was brought at the November 2024 Executive Committee retreat and formally passed in 2025. It described a program in which local civic meetings would be cataloged and presented to branch membership. Members would be invited to attend these meetings and then submit a report to the Project leaders on what happened there. There are a lot of meetings in Chicago that fit the above description, including ward nights, local school council meetings, park advisory council meetings, and Community Alternative Policing meetings. The report back form asked members to describe what happened at the meeting, what kinds of people were in attendance, and to call out any issues that could serve as opportunities for Chicago DSA to organize in the community.

In practice, this is what the Project looked like with varying results: Ahead of NSBL branch meetings, a list would be compiled of three meetings happening within the branch territory in the next couple of weeks, in tabulated format with space for written names and phone numbers. Branch officers would then explain the Socialists Everywhere Project to the members in attendance, with the list being passed around for members to fill out if they could make the listed meeting times. Later, those members who signed up would receive a message via WhatsApp (sent manually) reminding them to attend the meeting, as well as a link to submit the report back form via Google Forms.

Word of the Project spread rapidly through the chapter, prompting a meeting between leaders in the North Side Blue Line, North Side Red Line, and South Side branches to discuss how the Project should be coordinated between the three geographic branches. For example, the leadership in the North Side Red Line branch prioritized monthly research meetings to add items on the Socialists Everywhere calendar, while classifying members by neighborhood during the branch meeting to decide how to coordinate meeting attendance. With specific goals to expand and automate the Project, research meetings began to produce a full catalog of meetings for members to attend. These research meetings proved popular among certain tech-savvy groups of members who were happy to help DSA by doing something they already knew how to do – work with computers to conduct research via spreadsheet work.

This work continued smoothly among the branches throughout the year. But after the DSA National Convention in August 2025, difficult questions arose during reauthorization. Namely: What has the Project accomplished? Though organizers set goals to build more participation using an automated calendar system rather than through a representative of the Project, only two members documented their attendance of a public, civic meetings after reauthorization, far below any reasonable goal.

What exactly was the goal of all of this work? The immediate goal was to engage new members in their communities, but the larger ambitions of the Project were never fully defined. The Project was envisioned at various times to be a research project, membership engagement, a left-wing answer to Moms for Liberty, and the initial stages of an intelligence network on community issues. If there was one definitive thing that the Project did, it gave new members something to do. Chicago DSA is full of newly minted activists who have just moved to the city and are light on experience and local knowledge, and Socialists Everywhere was ideal for giving them an opportunity to see what was happening in their local neighborhood. The loftier goals for the Project, to give Chicago DSA a foothold in local communities that could be used to organize as socialists on behalf of community members, never came to fruition. Finding a way to bridge the divide between individual volunteer action and a bigger project should be the core of any revival of the Project.

There is no particular shame in the Project’s performance, and not just because it only cost the chapter the price of a small button order. In many ways, the Project came and went at exactly the right time for the chapter. When it began, the chapter was coming out of a nadir of activity, with no significant large-scale work – labor, electoral, or otherwise – for members to jump into. But once the chapter’s campaigns kicked off, it became harder to justify pushing members elsewhere into this more piecemeal work. And once federal agents began their terror campaign in Chicagoland, it became hard not to see the Project as superfluous in the face of the higher degree of organization present in existing local groups that are leading the city’s response to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Perhaps if the Project had the capacity, infrastructure, and messaging to connect itself to the broader struggle, it could have justified its continued existence.

In January 2026, the Project was ended by a vote of the Executive Committee. It has been placed respectfully in the limbo of interesting but nascent ideas. It may one day be dug up and integrated into a more focused and effective project. Until then, it lives on as one of Chicago DSA’s political priorities: Be Socialists Everywhere.

The post An Assessment of the Socialists Everywhere Project appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Join us on Saturday, February 28 at 10:00AM on Zoom or in Mattson Ballroom at Eagles #34 (2507 E 25th St, Minneapolis, MN 55406). Check-in on Saturday begins at 9:30AM, with the meeting kickoff at 10:00AM. Please register for the method you plan on using to attend on Saturday; this allows us to plan accordingly. […]

Trump relies on anti-immigrant rhetoric to score points with its base, leaving workers to defend each other on the job. Here are proven ways to do it.

The post How to debunk anti-immigrant myths at work appeared first on EWOC.

Flagstaff DSA’s successful campaign against the surveillance contract shows that organizing can push back against rising repression.

The post “Flock Out of Flag” appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Travis Wayne

Loubna Mrie was marching up the hill in a sweeping blizzard in Vermont the first time I met her. Mrie’s first words: “I have bagels.” She handed us a large box of bagels she carried as an offering from a famous New York shop to our student organizing committee. 

Mrie, then at New York University, had crossed state lines to be a guest speaker and workshop facilitator in the symposium we organized to connect students and domestic movement activists with Syrian revolutionaries in shared talks and workshops on organizing tactics. It was 2017.

In the pages of Defiance, bearing bagels becomes more symbolic: characteristic of a change in the definition of home that seems to represent a change for Mrie, who cracks jokes about “New Yorkers’ pride in bagels and their ignorance of what is happening on our side of the world” when she first arrives in the city. After surviving one soul-crushing loss after another in service to the Syrian cause, where the big tent popular movement led by civil society leaders and godfathered by long-term socialist thinkers like Yassin al-Haj Saleh was rapidly engulfed, ravaged, and co-opted in a liquid imperialist struggle between five colonial powers, Mrie realizes the extent of her loss with the acceptance of a new future:

“It is time for me to let go of Syria and consider New York my new home. This realization gradually helps me settle. I first notice that my mindset has changed when someone asks for my phone number, and I realize that I have it memorized. When people stop me for directions on the subway platform, I no longer avoid them and keep walking like I used to; now, I can give them an answer without a map.”

Loubna Mrie’s story is testament to one Syrian experience of revolution and exile, but its themes resonate on levels far deeper than the story of any given political struggle. Mrie’s memoir is a fiercely personal testimony of the human experience of surviving struggle itself. Despite far more hellish material conditions, organizers today can see in Mrie’s experiences ghosts of our own: displacements, resolutions, family losses, revolutionary relationships, political factions, half-homes seized from under you, political opponents with far more power, manipulators and opportunists, coping with the aftermaths of campaigns – and death. Over time, lots of death. 

After describing the unique placement of the Alawite minority in the Assads’ governing political base, positioning her own lived experience within the social and political context of Syria on the eve of revolution, Loubna Mrie’s story ramps up in the household of a tyrant who lords over her household almost as much as Hafez al-Assad. “When we did everything right, we always seemed to have done something wrong” as Loubna and her mother chewed quieter and dodged phones flying just to keep the peace in the home. Abuse becomes clearer than the sun. 

The shadow of Loubna’s father stalks the pages of the story far beyond the first ones. “My father’s ability to end lives was what had lifted him and his brothers out of poverty,” from an experience of the colonized working class of midcentury Syria to believing that “poor people are just jealous of us.” Following her family is to follow the story of the consolidation of a particular political rule in Syria. Mrie’s father’s violence becomes the commodified labor needed to transport social fortunes, for which her family is paid handsomely with vast estates of national wealth. Her uncle Wahib is just one beneficiary of Hafez’s rule when he becomes the Syrian “king of steel” overseeing hundreds of workers. Women in her family received next to nothing.

Joining an uprising – and thus rejecting her conservative background for the possibility of a new world – entails deep loss for Loubna just shy of twenty. As an Alawite organizer within the strategically big tent multiethnic movement, Mrie sits in rooms filled with smoke and photos of freedom fighters; argues against conservative intellectuals that the lower classes were not too sectarian for democratic rule; laughs with songwriters cutting their hair while recording songs mocking the military; and inspires, and is inspired by, movement journalists who believe that “documenting the government’s brutality … is the first step towards stopping it.” She organizes distros and pools funds for local civic organizing projects and blocks roads so “people at the intersection are forced to look, read, and witness the courage of the few:” observation and participation, bold action to inspire mass action. She hides her face with a scarf at meetings with ululations that shake the air as organizers blanket the mosques (each Friday, imbued with significance) as organizing spaces, public squares too highly policed. 

As Mrie’s roles transitions within the movement she dedicates herself to, she goes out of her way to document municipal elections held against all odds, the first time in a generation for people to experience direct shaping of any aspect of their lives in what Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau) leader Riad al-Turk called the Kingdom of Silence: 

“The next day, Mezar and I join Monzer to film the election of the city council. Despite the constant air strikes, a few dozen people are gathered in a warehouse. They’ve bundled up against the cold and drawn their scarves tight over their heads. The air inside smells of fresh paint and exhaust from the diesel heaters burning in each corner. The windows are sweating, and the revolutionary flag is nailed to the wall behind the four candidates for office.”

Loubna eyewitnesses the noble spirit undergirding so much revolutionary activity. As she notices Kurdish migrant worker shoe shiners amidst the Syrian working class not visible within segregated urban enclaves, the mass action all around her against brutal repression inspires her to imagine new creativities to contribute to the new world:

“A popular chant around this time is for a city called Amuda, an iconic village in the Kurdish areas, but a town so isolated that most people have to spend some time searching for it on a map when they first hear the chant. Its protesters are famous for their signs that carry quotes and poems from the Spanish Civil War… 

I want to go. I could shoot a short documentary, I think, showing how a small Kurdish town is teaching us, through their signs, about world history and the revolutions and poets of generations past.”

Like any organizer, critiques of her own movement sprout in Mrie’s mind with each successive month, year, campaign, lived moment. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) became so dependent on funders, Mrie notes, that they turned a blind eye on Turkish involvement in the kidnapping of their own founding leader – a complete loss of the soul of the militias, an early sign of their oblivion. She lambasts those that call for imperialist intervention out of desperation. Even though Gulf country funders “just want a Sunni government to replace the Alawite one,” the most cynical movement leaders trade everything for money. The Syrian National Council is an establishmentarian “hotel opposition,” ripped for “friending us on Facebook just so we can mock them,” while the exiled reduced to the status of Syrian refugee in the eyes of Europe are asked how “‘the revolution in Berlin’ is going.” 

The nations expecting Syrian gratitude for basics are not spared Loubna’s wrath: “the Lebanon experienced by rich Syrians is not the same as the one experienced by the poor.”

Loubna also sees the personal horrors, how tragedy can destroy individuals in movement:

“It would take me years to understand that, under pressure, under the fear of death by execution, by torture, by bombing, people can release the monster they’ve spent most of their lives repressing. I didn’t know then that almost every marriage, every friendship that I saw blooming around us in Damascus during this time would die. The two couples that went to jail together and married right after they were released. The girl who was so scared her partner would be taken away by the police that she got pregnant just to preserve something of his smell. Or the girl whose boyfriend’s family rejected her because she was not Sunni, and who agreed to elope with him because the whole country was revolting against injustice, so why couldn’t they? Even Samar and her partner’s relationship would eventually collapse under the strain of exile and the guilt Amer was talking about. So many love stories. All of them decimated, just like our hopes of what Syria would become.”

Loubna copes with the loss of so many: so many lost friends, but also lost lovers – most brutally, Peter Kassig, a U.S. medical worker abducted by ISIS and executed by the fascists. Her partner’s murder isn’t the only one that carves a void into her life. Even movements can’t shelter us from the grief of survival, especially for someone like Mrie, who lost a whole world for a new one – only to end up lost, far from home, making a new home. 

In the end, the killer that stalks the pages of Defiance from its beginning doesn’t just murder her mother who begs her to come home; he murders her dream of what home is, till she makes it anew. But the shadow in her family is not just her own, we learn, as one of many final horrors drop in the life of the organizer. When Mrie reveals rumors of Ba’ath Party founder and early leader Salah al-Din al-Bitar’s assassination, we see just how far the shadow could extend.

Defiance stands out because of its imagery: the kunafeh sizzling on copper plates, the wistful lanes of cities, its diligent documenting of the horrific spiraling of the Syrian Revolution beyond the control of any individual. But Defiance also stands out for its insights and foresights, where comrades who end up shot in the head warn of black flags replacing the green of the revolution and of a different kind of regime to come out of the militant nihilism the movement descends into: a warning that foreshadows the massacres of Druze and of Alawites at the hands of post-Assad government actors and militias given implicit license to kill, as well as the assault on the socialist feminist autonomous zone of Rojava, which has (for now) averted all-out war in its stand-off with the consolidating state.

Read Defiance to dream, to cry, to feel – and to witness, through her own words, the experience of a fellow comrade who lost a whole world to win a world. Most of all: read Defiance, to survive and to fight, in spite of it all. 

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria is scheduled to be published by Penguin Random House on February 24, 2026. 

Travis Wayne is the managing editor of Working Mass.

The post Losing Your Whole World To Win a World – A Review of Defiance by Loubna Mrie appeared first on Working Mass.