“I can’t support myself and my kid with just this job,” she said. “I need to get a second gig.”

“Shouldn’t you be able to?”

“What do you mean?”

“Shouldn’t you be able to pay all your bills,” I said, “with one job?” 

I asked this while a coworker and I were killing time before we both clocked in, and it was clear that she had never considered this idea before. She thought for a second and cited our hourly wage. It’s too low, of course, to cover her expenses. “We work for the biggest coffee company on the planet, whose CEO just got a multimillion-dollar quarterly bonus, but you don’t get paid enough to live. Why not?”

It was an open-ended question, and deliberately so, because I was genuinely curious to see what she thought. The question has been answered with entire books of political thought, but I wanted to see what this person whom I work with every day would make of it. She leans conservative and wouldn’t have responded to any blanket leftist statements or jargon-heavy theory. But none of that was necessary, because with one question, we were suddenly having a real and specific conversation about what it means to survive in a coercive economy. “I was going to say that maybe they can’t afford to pay us more,” she said, “but, I mean, is that actually true? I don’t know.”

Our conversation went from wages to worker exploitation, to rising prices and corporate greed, to the privatization of healthcare, education, and housing, without ever actually talking about capitalism or socialism. I came away from that conversation feeling a sense of solidarity with a coworker despite all the seeming lines of division between us. We work the same job, with the same physical and emotional stresses, the same unpredictable hours, and the same financial pressures. But we also live in the same community and face very similar struggles. And though we often view them from different lenses, we fear the same fears. But in that conversation, I felt like we took a small step forward, together, against the blaze of capitalist greed burning its way through the world. 

The sense of doing this together is crucial. The only thing that can counter a minority of capitalist vultures is a fed up majority of united workers. The ‘reform versus revolution’ question is an old and endless debate in leftist circles, but the way out of that loop is coalition building. Without a critical mass of united citizens, neither reform nor revolution is even an option. But how do we build strong coalitions in our present fractured reality? We have to start in the places and with the people we share our time and our labor with, our coworkers. We have the opportunity to do this every day over lunch, during breaks, and in all those moments we put down our tools and step away from our tech to collectively catch our breath. The latest phase of the takeover of our world is happening at top-down, national levels, but our resistance can be waged in the offices, kitchens, and worksites we occupy every day. This isn’t yet a type of struggle where we need to take up arms against the government, but it is very much a struggle that demands we link arms with our community. The good news is that this particular style of unarmed socialism already has a rich tradition from which we can learn, even here in the States.

In the first half of the 20th century, Americans elected a handful of socialist mayors and other local officials who weren’t focused on overthrowing capitalism, they were focused on using the municipal government to guarantee a quality of life for its citizenry. As John Nichols wrote, “public parks, public libraries, public schools, and public utilities were their concern” and are their lasting legacy in this country. These “sewer socialists” left behind a living example of street level leftist engagement and a way to affect national change through local effort. We don’t have their access to the levers of power, but we have each other and the potential to organize into a concerted movement to change the nature of those levers forever. It’s through our conversations at work that we can bring about that movement. The sewer socialists of today need to be “smoke break socialists.” 

Part of the power of this approach is that conversations at work are of a completely different nature compared to normal conversations between friends or family members. They’re removed from those spheres, disconnected from the rest of your life, and they involve people you might otherwise not talk to. But that’s also exactly what makes them so powerful and full of revolutionary potential. No matter where the other person comes from or what the circumstances of their life are, in that moment on break at work, you’re united by a shared viewpoint as a worker. Your workplace is a crossroads where disparate identities find common ground. 

This same unique aspect of break time conversation also precludes the more traditional means of persuasion. In the fleeting space shared by coworkers as they catch their breath and recharge their batteries, political speeches and soapbox sermons fall flat and feel inauthentic. Theoretical jargon breaks the spell and kills the magic of the moment. Smoke break socialism’s most powerful tool is a question. A genuinely curious, open-ended question that compassionately, but insistently, challenges people to interrogate their beliefs and assumptions. A question that invites them to see themselves in a wider context as a worker amongst a world of workers, all of whom share a dream of more time spent living and less time spent surviving.

My conversation about wages with my coworker was only one of several, all revolving around the same fundamental question. As rents and food prices and college tuition and gas and every other cost of living continue to rise while our wages barely twitch upwards, everyone wonders: why can’t we ever seem to get ahead? I counter with a question of my own: how come in one of the richest countries in the world, we could end up on the street if we lose our jobs? These conversations never go the way I expect. We start out talking about wages and end up talking about guaranteed housing, free education, and what kind of financial and emotional burdens would be relieved by universal healthcare. When one coworker disparaged all this as going against the American trait of self-sufficiency, I asked him about Thomas Paine’s plan for universal basic income. He’d never read Agrarian Justice but immediately looked it up and downloaded a copy. If it was good enough for a Founding Father, I hoped it would be good enough for him.

I live and work in Southern California, so of course the recent and devastating wildfires have been a topic of conversation during breaks. Everyone agrees that the fires and floods are worse each year, and the summers seem to get hotter and hotter. And of course, since we’re living in a conservative county during an age of conspiracy, a few coworkers raised the idea that the fires were a result of the Governor undermining the President over water rights or DEI initiatives undermining the fire department’s ability to effectively fight fires. Gentle requests for reliable sources and verifiable data clear up the conspiracies fairly quickly in these conversations, and they open the way for deeper questions about who has control over our planet’s future and why it isn’t us. I asked once about our reliance on fossil fuels and got into a lengthy conversation about suburban sprawl and our forced dependency on cars. This led to a conversation during a shift the next day about corporate control of public land and the endless consumption of public resources for private profit. 

I should note here that I work for a multinational chain of coffeehouses whose revenue reports continue to increase by the billions while its frontline employees huddle in break rooms to collectively groan about our 3-cent hourly raises. My fellow baristas are hardworking people trying their best to survive a corporate culture that mandates an unbreakably cheerful attitude in the face of ever more desperate policies and ploys to increase profits. A lot of smoke break socialism at my job is fueled by the situations we face every day. There’s a large unhoused population in our neighborhood, for example, who have always been able to get free water at our bars and open access to our restrooms. A recent policy update stated that water and bathrooms would only be available to paying customers. This struck most of my coworkers as a needlessly callous move that would also place us in the stressful position of having to deny already struggling people even the smallest gesture of help. During one conversation about this, a simple question about the profit motive behind the policy led to a wide-ranging discussion about the roots of the unhoused crisis, the privatization of mental health care, and defunding police budgets in favor of more social services. Eventually, the conversation became about the overall tendency towards extraction rather than reinvestment by the corporation we work for. In a surprising twist, my most conservative coworker raised the point that the new company policies seemed to be designed to not only extract as much profit as possible from the customer but also as much labor as possible from us.

These conversations have been transformative and liberating for me on several levels. Rather than feel paralyzed by the onslaught of news about the dismantling of my country’s constitution and the public embrace of white supremacy by my government, I feel empowered to seize this moment as an opportunity for mental revolution. Smoke break socialism has come to be a daily chance to take action and affect change, however small and however local. But more importantly, it’s come to be a way to organize and fight back. Before these conversations and collective explorations with my coworkers, our shop was a crew of friends helping each other get by. Now, we’re becoming a crew of fighters working to get control of our lives. We’re talking about unionization and what that would mean for each of us personally. As the organizers would say, we’re seeing our stake in this struggle. We’re seeing how we can take our collective concerns and transform them into collective solutions. 

If this approach to socialism is to be of any use, it needs to transform us all from coworkers into coalitions. Which it can do by allowing people to come to a shared understanding of the change they want to see and tying that to community programs and mutual aid projects already in existence. That discussion I had with my coworkers about our unhoused neighbors and their treatment by the company led to several of them asking to accompany my DSA chapter’s next volunteer day at a local soup kitchen. How many more of them would be open to canvassing for immigration justice or rallying for striking workers if they could come to see how these concerns connect to their concerns through more powerful conversations? 

Image: Woman taking a smoke break in New York City. Photo by Benjamin Gardere. Photo distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

DSA’s modern political resurgence, from a handful of chapters to over 70,000 members across the country, has been in part due to its relationship with the “Bernie Sanders” movement starting in 2016. The moribund New Left organization got a renewed lease on life when the senator from Vermont launched his presidential campaign while labeling himself a “Democratic Socialist.” Claiming this designation opened the floodgates for Americans inspired by the campaign (ranging from the famed “Downwardly Mobile White Millennial” to those expecting more from racial liberalism in the post-Obama age) to join DSA. Although numbers have dipped in recent years, DSA has remained the largest socialist organization in the U.S., and one that many have turned to in order to channel their frustrations against the system.

In this time of rapid growth and consolidation, DSA has developed a core, internal political contradiction. At the national level, the organization has a leadership drawn largely from NGOs, professional workplaces, and electoral campaigns that is committed to reproducing the tactics and political environment of 2016. However, alongside this retrenchment in the national organization, hundreds of new chapters have sprung up, with tens of thousands of members who have little to no connection to previous generations of socialist organizing. These members are creating, through trial and error, a new culture and tactics that respond to the questions of the moment.

Essentially, DSA has become one organization split between two parallel and disconnected development tracks. The resulting conflict between the national organization and the local chapters is one of the primary factors holding back the development of the organization, and resolving it is key to making DSA into the party of a revolutionary working class. To resolve this contradiction, and unlock the full potential of our organization, National DSA needs to reconstruct itself as a coordinating body that represents chapter needs and priorities, rather than as a super-chapter that takes on national campaigns by itself.

THE DILEMMA OF NATIONAL & LOCAL 

The parallel development of local chapters and the national organization has created parallel cultures and parallel pools of organizers. While it’s generally a simple matter to get involved in your local chapter as soon as you join DSA (so long as a chapter exists in your area), it’s typically a much more difficult task to get involved in the the national organization, which operates much more through informal channels and sporadically documented procedures. National, consequently, draws disproportionately from caucus members, who are much more likely to have access to institutional knowledge and connections to let them know when applications go live, who makes decisions, and what experience they need to move forward. 

Similarly, activity in the majority of national committees tends to be administrative rather than deliberative, with decision making being mostly the purview of leadership. Many committees have strict and sometimes arbitrary rules for admission, but then fail to engage members who make it past their screening process, resulting in bodies where formal leadership makes all the decisions (mostly about what work they themselves will be tackling ) while dozens or hundreds of inactive members sit on their hands waiting to be told what to do next.

In stark contrast, however, DSA’s chapters have developed much more robust internal cultures, with tens of thousands of new members signing up and getting involved. They are the first (and often only) point of contact for new members and, as such, were forced to develop onboarding methods, to create new committees to tackle issues that new members were invested in locally, and to develop new bylaws and new democratic systems to handle all of the new input and energy. This imperative helped these chapters develop and mature, and local chapters tend to be hotbeds of political debate and democratic engagement, especially compared to the national organization. While the operations of local chapters are by no means perfect, it is nevertheless at the chapter level where the vast majority of DSA’s membership gets hands-on practice with democracy, learn the practical skills of organizing and debating, and develop their political and theoretical understanding about the social and political world they and their ideas inhabit.

As DSA has grown, this contradiction between the political culture at the national level and the upsurge of socialist democratic leadership that has been incubating in chapters across the country has heightened. This last NPC term saw an increased willingness by the NPC to start opening up national bodies, and many of the issues that were raised this term were (directly or indirectly) about this widening contradiction between the chapter and national levels. Efforts have been made to be more transparent about the opaque inner workings of the NPC, to open up committees that have been largely only accessible to the disproportionately caucused members that already participate in national organizing.

However, such ideas and proposals haven’t been a cure-all for the disconnection between the national organization and chapters. Although the gates were flung open, not many people walked through them. The pool of national organizers looks a lot like it did before, and even if there has been some shift in the political perspectives represented at the national level, that alone hasn’t meaningfully altered the course of DSA so long as the national apparatus remains insulated from the more vibrant democratic culture in chapters. A top-down approach that doesn’t grapple with truly channeling the energy that’s found at the local level into national committees will not be a sufficient solution to this problem. 

Even as the national organization has begun to move toward more open engagement, the essential work of developing and empowering a new generation of leaders for National is far behind schedule. While many chapters have created a strong leadership pipeline, it’s not currently connected into National, and we can’t be satisfied only with a federation of chapters working independently in each city. A strong national structure is crucial to our success as a socialist organization. We need a national institution filled with engaged people who can and will pull others up behind them. However, more work needs to be done to even begin the process of having this broader pool of people for the national organization to pull from. And, maybe ironically, that work begins at the local level.

Solutions

To transform DSA into a home for a broader coalition of budding revolutionaries would require us to lean into the things that make chapters successful: member-led protagonistic organizing, frequent and robust democratic practice, a diversity of struggle, social connection, community engagement, and a particularist strategy. Our existing approach has yielded neither congressional power nor a truly mass membership. So what can DSA do to build those foundations? Here are some suggestions to at the very least, get the conversation going. 

Extend Chapter Democracy Up Into National DSA

Chapter leadership should be a necessary precondition for national leadership. A principal source of the misalignment of the national organization with local chapters is that national bodies are staffed and directed without consistent meaningful input from chapter-elected leaders. They often have very little active and consistent input from outside of their respective leadership bodies, and, second, they are often composed and led by people with no democratic mandate from their chapter, or even any connection to them. 

By having the membership of these committees be composed of elected chapter leaders, and establishing a standard democratic structure and practice for their operation, national committees could serve as a vital conduit for the democratic will of the membership to flow directly into the operation of National DSA. It will no longer be about one set of people leading the national organization and another serving as leadership at the local level. Instead, those who take chapter organizing work seriously will be the ones elevated into higher positions of authority, and be able to align themselves with their peers from chapters across the country. 

Develop and Expand Chapter Democratic Practice

National DSA has the opportunity to develop and implement standards for chapter democracy, which are especially weak in some of DSA’s largest chapters. The national committees should reinforce the opportunities for debate that exist at the local level, because chapters promote political development only when members are empowered to challenge, debate, and reshape their local work. When chapters try to replicate the centrally-controlled national apparatus and its attendant theory of change, they end up stifling the member development that represents the actual potential for a powerful party in the future. 

Instead, national committee leaders should insist on committees at the local level holding more consistent meetings, and assist chapters in finding ways to facilitate chapter member engagement. All in all, national leaders should discuss strategies on how to help expand the democratic culture of various local chapters in order to create a deeper bench of leaders and organizers who then could tackle issues and campaigns at the national level someday. 

Invest in Growing and Strengthening Chapters

Another morbid symptom of the bifurcation between the national and local chapters is the conflict over dues. As it stands, National gets about 85% of all dues, and 15% or so is returned to chapters in accordance with the number of members that pay monthly dues. Alongside this, there is an extremely uneven development of local dues structures, which confer no privileges of membership but are essentially a donation to your local chapter. For some large chapters, local dues represent a large portion of their overall income, while in others it’s a pittance at best. This funding structure prioritizes the national organization’s capacity, then large chapter funding, and lastly small chapters, while a patchwork system of local dues allows for a few wealthy chapters to make large investments in local organizing. This dynamic not only sets the stage for crises down the line, but, in the short term, it also starves the most promising sites for our organizing – the many small chapters throughout the country – while investing the majority of our dues into the national organization, which is least likely to grow and develop members and, therefore, the organization itself.

Convention should support efforts to expand the portion of our budget that gets reinvested into chapters. The NPC should instruct national committees to direct their funds and attention towards chapter organizing, and well-off chapters should start to convert their local dues into national dues.

A NEW WAY AHEAD IS POSSIBLE

These suggestions aren’t intended as a retreat from DSA operating as a national organization. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create, for the first time, a national organization that can stand on a firm footing of solid leadership and membership engagement.. Right now, National DSA is much like a castle in the sky, and unless we can connect it to some solid foundation of chapter democracy, it will come crashing down to crush everything beneath it, including whatever socialist momentum we’ve managed to sustain over the years.

As we pursue this work, we’ll be able to actually give force to a new national organization, one that serves as a central nervous system that receives and transmits signals from across the country, that manifests the combined politics of our membership. Rather than a retreat, this is a refoundation of National DSA, and a recommitment to us acting as a collective force in the United States fighting to win socialism for working people. 

Image description: Military police Soldiers attached to the Texas Army National Guard’s 136th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade support local law enforcement during a protest in Austin, Texas, on May 31, 2020. On May 30, 2020, Governor Greg Abbott activated elements of the Texas National Guard to augment law enforcement throughout the state in response to civil unrest. The Texas National Guard will be used to support local law enforcement and protect critical infrastructure necessary to the well-being of local communities. (U.S. Army photo by Charles E. Spirtos). Photo taken June 8, 2020.

American electoralism is all but dead. Under the two-party system, mainstream politics is rendered into a ceaseless war between two parties overtly hostile towards the working class, with the Democratic Party serving, at best, as the lesser of two evils against the Republicans. As the genocidal Biden Administration and disastrous campaign of Kamala Harris have shown, the Democrats are far from a competent opposition, proving themselves incapable and unwilling to fight for the needs of working people, nor to defend against relentless Republican assaults on workers, migrants, women, Palestinians, queer and trans people, non-Christians, people of color, and what little remains of American democracy. 

Democrat leaders have instead chosen to welcome the return of Donald Trump to the White House with smiles and handshakes, prioritizing the genocide of Gaza and the interests of capital over the needs of the American people. Attempts by figures like Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Ohmar, and Cori Bush to realign the party have been met with repression, censorship, and out-right defeat, with the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Convention, Ken Martin, fighting relentlessly to marginalize the left-wing of the party, decrying DSA and the broader Palestinian Movement as “disgusting.” What’s more, by virtue of the two-party system itself, pro-realignment electeds are forced into the role of collaborators, ceding their radical platforms in an effort to obstruct the Republicans at any cost. It has never been more clear that the Democratic Party cannot be trusted to protect everyday Americans; the working class needs an alternative.

Yet, under our current electoral system of plurality voting (also known as “first-past-the-post” or “winner-takes-all”), no alternatives can exist. Attempts to form new political parties continually end in failure, either rendered irrelevant from the outset or, at best, succeeding only in guaranteeing the victory of one establishment party over the other by splitting the vote. Despite Gallup polls indicating that a majority of Americans are warm to the idea of a multi-party system, no such change can come without systemic reforms of national, state, and municipal governments, leaving the decaying two-party system–gridlocked, detached, and subservient to capital–in place, while socialists remain barred from the political mainstream, unable to be heard within a system tailored by and for capitalists. 

Why Proportional Representation?

It does not have to be this way–the bourgeois democracies of other western nations operate under variations of proportional representation (PR), lowering the barrier to entry for ideologies of all stripes. While specifics vary across countries, proportional representation is broadly defined as an electoral system where the percentage of votes a party receives approximately translates to the percentage of seats they hold in the legislature; as an example, if a party wins a third of a district’s votes, it earns a third of the seats for that district.

Under a proportional system, legislatures would consist of numerous parties, each capable of representing the specific demands of their constituents; supporters of Bernie Sanders would no longer be forced into the same party as Kamala Harris, nor would socialists be coerced into associating with either wing of the Democrats for the sake of preventing Republican hegemony. The GOP could likewise fragment, their base rupturing into establishment and far-right parties, undercutting the rising tide of fascism which threatens us today. American politics would become less static and more democratically representative, forcing once-stable power blocs into a turbulent parliamentary arena. The influence of gerrymandering and the urban-rural divide would likewise be weakened, as representation would be dependent on the raw percentage of votes parties receive in multi-member districts, rather than narrow majorities allowing a single party’s candidate to dominate entire constituencies. 

What’s In It For Us?

Socialists may rightly question the utility of trying to reform American electoralism; a proportional multi-party bourgeois democracy is, at the end of the day, still bourgeois, and electoralism on its own has never resulted in a lasting socialist experiment. Why, then, invest valuable time, resources, and effort into fighting for proportional representation? Friedrich Engels answered the question best in an 1882 letter to Karl Kautsky,

“In order to be able to fight one needs first a soil to stand on, air, light and space. Otherwise all is idle chatter.”

American socialists, to be blunt, have no ground to stand on. Without the ability to platform ourselves to mass audiences during elections, the American public’s perception of socialism will remain defined by the bourgeoisie, distorted into a malevolent caricature by state propaganda and endless cycles of red-baiting. While socialists have made progress in entering the cultural mainstream, particularly among young adults, these gains will remain transient unless cohered into tangible political power, an all but impossible task under the two-party system. Indeed, the duopoly’s exclusion is by design, with New York City’s brief experiment with multi-party democracy crushed in the 1940s due to its perceived threat to the establishment parties and their capitalist backers. 

So long as the terms of discourse are firmly in the grip of the bourgeoisie, socialists will continue to struggle in reaching the working class, whether on the debate stage or through policies that materially benefit the lives of ordinary people. Within the confines of the Democratic Party, tepid social democracy–always compromised, always under siege–will remain the limit of the party’s radicalism on any appreciable scale, a controlled opposition within the controlled opposition. While socialists may at times be able to tactically exploit the party’s ballot line with success, as demonstrated by Zohran Mamdani’s highly visible campaign for New York City mayor, these instances are confined largely to the municipal level. The Democratic Party, by virtue of the binary structure of the duopoly, must always prioritize appealing to the broadest possible base, subordinating left-populism to the interests of the donor class, petit-bourgeoisie, and liberal partisans, who will never tolerate the party realigning into a genuinely left-wing force. 

Under these conditions, socialists are reduced to either a permanently marginalized voice within the party, or third parties which the public cannot support in any appreciable numbers without indirectly elevating the Republicans. In both scenarios, socialists are forced into the role of fringe radicals incapable of enacting the systemic changes we platform ourselves on, and–when push comes to shove–will continue to be dismissed as such by the electorate, in favor of either “voting blue no matter who” or the reactionary populism of the Right. Without mass visibility to disseminate our ideas, nor the institutional power of a political party to advance the interests of workers, thereby credibly representing the labor movement, American socialists will not–cannot–build substantial political power. 

Trade unionism and labor organizing have been offered by some tendencies as an alternative to electoralism, arguing that the organization of workers into militant unions will advance the development of class consciousness and undercut the economic power of the bourgeoisie. While essential tools of working class organizing, however, unionism alone–like pure electoralism–has historically struggled to translate labor militancy into a revolutionary seizure of political power. By virtue of their responsibility to win the best possible contract for their members, the ambitions of unions seldom expand beyond ameliorating the worst excesses of capitalism, endlessly fighting, to quote Marx, “a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it.” 

In effect, this means falling prey to the same lesser-evilism trapping the electorate, with union workers and leadership alike endorsing whichever bourgeois party appears least overtly hostile (in rhetoric, if not action) to their organizing. It is for these reasons that the first demand of the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) 1891 Erfurt Program was the establishment of proportional representation, thereby elevating the SPD from an underground movement to a national political force capable of representing and cohering the interests of the working class around a socialist political platform. Without a viable party of our own to represent the labor movement and align unions towards socialism, American workers will, per Lenin, “develop only trade union consciousness,” while bourgeois law and labor relations remain otherwise intact. 

Under a proportional electoral system, however, socialists could assert our independence from the capitalist parties, win limited–but exploitable–institutional power, and provide a genuine working class alternative to declining neoliberalism. In establishing a new, nationally-viable Workers Party, socialists and the broader American Left could reach heights unseen since the presidential campaigns of Eugene V. Debs, cohering once more around a common party capable of challenging the entrenched power of the bourgeoisie, without the risk of losing public favor by splitting votes in pivotal elections. Candidates in multi-member districts could win seats without a raw plurality of votes, allowing for a “red tide” of socialists to enter office in numbers unparalleled in US history. 

Though the creation of such a party is not an end in it of itself, the question of how to proceed from reform to revolution will not be one we are capable of asking if the nation continues its rapid acceleration towards fascism, an outcome all but assured by the duopoly’s stifling of a left-populist party capable of counterbalancing the Right. Whether it is closer in form to Hitler’s Germany or Putin’s Russia, an America under consolidated fascist rule will not offer conditions any more favorable to organizing than exist today; in neither example did the public flock to socialists in a revolutionary struggle. With an electorally viable Workers Party, socialists would–at minimum–buy ourselves time to wrestle with these questions while establishing a broader base of support, with the potential to reach the heights of Mexico’s Morena, the French New Popular Front, and Brazil’s own Workers’ Party, opportunities that flatly will not exist under stronger domestic repression.

What’s more, positive publicity and pan-left unity can materialize from the struggle for multi-partyism itself. By taking a leading role in fomenting a mass movement for PR, DSA would have the opportunity to shatter decades of Red Scare propaganda, acting as champions of democracy fighting on behalf of a broadly popular demand. In doing so, we would be asserting the former half of democratic socialism, thereby rehabilitating the image of the latter in the eyes of the nation. Greater unity across the US Left would likewise manifest from participating in a shared struggle, with coalition partners representing every organization, demographic, and cause burned by the duopoly working alongside one another towards a common, mutually-beneficial goal. 

While it is true that certain reactionary groups (ex. the Libertarian Party) may have their own reasons for supporting electoral reform, the fact remains that the alliance between capital and the far-right has seen great success in weaponizing the duopoly to its advantage. By reducing the Democrats to a controlled opposition incapable of seizing the populist current without alienating its donors, the Republicans have had free-reign to seize on popular discontent and divide the working class along identitarian lines. To abandon this strategy would threaten the mutual interests of capitalists and fascists, to say nothing of their opposition to democratic pluralism on principle, reducing the significance of any reactionary presence in the electoral reform movement.

If undertaken in conjunction with robust mutual aid efforts to directly meet the needs of the working class–an essential facet of our struggle if we are to build grassroots support–mobilizing for proportional electoral reform could propel DSA to new heights of membership, power, and prominence that could in turn be harnessed towards a reinvigorated, politically powerful labor movement. In the event of victory, we will have shattered the duopoly and laid the groundwork for a thriving Workers Party; in the event of defeat, the capitalist parties will have made clear the impossibility of even the most popular common-sense reforms, mass radicalizing large segments of the population, ready to be integrated into a revitalized, organized American Left with DSA at its center. Simply put, no matter if electoral reform succeeds or fails, we stand to gain. 

How Do We Win?

Victory will rely on two tactics: direct democracy and indirect pressure on the Democratic Party. The former depends on the use of citizen ballot initiatives (CBIs) in states where they exist, which allow for popular referendums on policies petitioned for directly by the citizenry. While the precise qualifications for getting an initiative on the ballot vary from state to state, CBIs generally offer the simplest route to enacting proportional electoral reform (PER) on the state-level. Similar referendum mechanisms exist in many municipalities, providing opportunities to implement locally-scaled proportional reforms while building momentum for large-scale change.

Where CBIs do not exist, we must instead pursue a strategy of indirect pressure modeled after that of the “No Votes for Genocide” and “Uncommitted” campaigns, albeit on a far larger scale. Under this strategy, DSA and our coalition partners will mobilize voters and organizations to withhold their ballots, campaign contributions, and endorsements from any candidate not advocating PER. Our most critical organizing will be in swing states and congressional districts, where voters are simultaneously most powerful and disillusioned. When elected, ostensibly pro-PER representatives must be kept in check by the real and ever-present threat of our coalitions organizing strikes, protests, encampments, and uncommitted campaigns, to prevent backsliding and empty rhetoric. Buy-in from unions is critical for the success of these pressure campaigns, necessitating a clear articulation of why and how proportional representation can benefit the labor movement more than the duopoly. 

The Democrats, wracked with infighting and having just lost a pivotal election season by neglecting the demands of working people, will be most vulnerable to our strategy, and their base most receptive to our demands. While the recent “Fighting Oligarchy” tour by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have raised hopes for realigning the party by primarying incumbent Democrats with younger, more progressive candidates, the fact remains that the party cannot detach itself from the interests of capital, and will remain incapable of, or outright hostile towards, the popular progressive policies (i.e. Ending weapons shipments to Israel; broadening the public sector; universal healthcare; a Green New Deal; strengthening unions). The DNC’s ongoing attempts to oust vice-chair David Hogg, the architect of the “progressive primary” strategy, is the latest demonstration that the fundamental contradiction of a bourgeois party attempting to represent labor interests is unresolvable, offering no future for those in opposition to the interests donor class; only a genuine leftist alternative can, which necessitates joining the struggle for multi-party democracy.

The Democrats will not be unaware of our efforts to weaken the party, and indeed, we make no secret of it. Our leverage instead comes from forcing them into one of two unfavorable outcomes: losing elections today, cementing GOP dominance and the continued erosion of establishment norms, or losing their hegemonic status tomorrow in exchange for immediate results for pro-PER candidates. What’s more, they will be compelled to decide, in no uncertain terms, whether there is a place for the working class and for democracy in the Democratic Party, or whether it will remain dedicated solely to the interests of capital. Regardless of the answer, Democrat leadership will be forced to alienate a portion of their base, thereby increasing the likelihood of the party rupturing in the long-term and creating a power vacuum that leftists could exploit.

If and when DSA and the broader movement escalate to the national scale, two-layers of the coalition will form: the Outer Coalition, comprising every organization working to erode the two-party system, and the Inner Coalition, made up of organizations closely aligned with the labor movement (unions, leftist parties, etc.) and/or DSA specifically. It is the Inner Coalition that DSA can build the strongest rapport with by virtue of our shared class struggle, through which the basis for a new Workers Party can emerge. DSA’s cooperation with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) to create the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) is a tangible example of the good socialists and trade unionists can achieve when united by a common cause; against an electoral system which disadvantages both unions and socialists, the potential for cooperation–and through it, solidarity–can manifest, working to reunite the socialist and labor movements. It must be stressed that, as the battle for electoral reform is being waged, DSA must continue its ongoing process of becoming a formal political party, so that if and when the two-party system is shattered, we are prepared to hit the ground running. We have already taken our first steps towards this goal with the “Workers Deserve More” program, which specifically endorses the formation of a Workers Party and the advancement of proportional representation–now is the time to carry that momentum forward as the basis for our counterattack against the Right. 

To persuade voters to support our cause, credibly risk throwing elections, and–eventually–form the base of a new party, DSA and our coalition partners must work to assist, educate, and organize the working class. These efforts will begin on the local level, agitating for municipal and state reforms while simultaneously undertaking mutual aid campaigns to assist the people of our communities, with cooperative, coalition-run services building rapport among workers. The Middle Tennessee Chapter is currently leading by example with its “Burn Debt, Not Books” program, which is fighting to abolish the medical debts of working class southerners. If similar programs were started by local coalitions across the country, DSA and our coalition partners could endear ourselves to millions of working class Americans, forging the solidarity necessary to mobilize en masse against the two-party system.

It is crucial to emphasize the bottom-up, long-term nature of our struggle. The Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967 (UCDA) outlaws multi-member congressional districts, while institutions like the Electoral College and the Supreme Court routinely empower authoritarianism by suppressing the will of the majority. Overcoming these challenges will require long, hard work to assist, educate, and organize voters into a movement capable of uprooting the duopoly from its foundations. With every reformed city council and state legislature, we offer concrete examples of how proportional representation can empower everyday people; with every soup kitchen and winter clothes drive, we show our sincere commitment to doing what the duopoly will not–improve people’s lives. Through these actions, we will build the power necessary to overthrow the two-party system; to mobilize at the polls and in the streets; to take our grievances to the highest courts and legislative chambers, until the establishment–weakened by a thousand cuts–submits to the people, or is rendered so despised as to invite its own destruction.

Where Do We Start?

Organizing for proportional representation has already begun in DSA under the auspices of “Voters Deserve More (VDM),” a cross-caucus group dedicated to expanding upon the “Workers Deserve More” campaign’s commitment to proportional representation via coalition-building for a democratic mass movement. At time of writing, the campaign has taken root in the Kansas City Chapter, with ongoing efforts to expand to New York City, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, and other chapters across the country. The campaign has outlined the following five demands as the basis for its organizing:

1. The restructuring of state and federal Houses of Representatives into proportionally elected chambers comprised of officials from multi-member electoral districts; i.e., the repeal and/or amendment of the Uniform Congressional District Act (UCDA) and passage of the Fair Representation Act (FRA).

2. Implementation of a variant of the Dutch Model of open-list proportional representation on the federal, state, and municipal (exceeding five hundred thousand persons) levels, wherein voters select their first and second choice of parties (or independents, listed with/as parties), then rank candidates from said parties’ lists in order of preference, with the overall highest ranked officials occupying their party’s seats.

3. The implementation of single-transferable voting (STV) in municipalities below five hundred thousand persons.

4. Abolition of private campaign financing in favor of public funding for all electoral campaigns; i.e., the overturning of Citizens United v. FEC.

5. Election of the President through direct popular vote; i.e., the marginalization of the Electoral College via the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC).

Conclusion

American socialists are running out of time. Staring down the twin barrels of climate catastrophe and ascendant authoritarianism, socialism cannot–must not–remain marginal in the United States. While electoralism is not enough in itself to achieve power, the formation of a nationally viable Workers Party is essential for the dissemination of socialism to the general public, and to provide a pole around which the American Left can consolidate. Our road into mainstream politics, however, cannot be walked alone, and will require the organization of a mass movement for the one goal that would stand to benefit every cause, party, demographic, and voter with ambitions beyond the duopoly: proportional representation. If it is to be the standard-bearer of American socialism, then DSA must commit to its promise of winning the Battle for Democracy by forging coalitions across the nation fighting for proportional electoral reform, acting as the vanguard of socialism and democracy against an electoral system hostile to both. The moment has never been more ripe, nor more dire–we decide whether to let it pass quietly, or to cry out for all to hear, 

“Workers and voters deserve more!”

Image: Paper ballots from 2022 elections in Latvia, which uses an open list proportional election system. Photo by Minnekon, distributed using the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Zohran Mamdani has, in recent months, led an incredible campaign for mayor of New York City, generating unprecedented levels of energy and excitement around his candidacy. But the campaign may soon be, according to some, suffering from success. While Mamdani’s mayoral campaign was meant to be chiefly an agitational run, his recent successes have generated some serious questions and debate over the problems posed to DSA as an organization if he were to win come election time. A DSA mayor of NYC would, in the words of Sid C., writing for the Socialist Tribune, “thrust DSA into a governing coalition without a mandate to govern.” This, obviously, presents us with some major problems we must reckon with sooner rather than later. 

Executive Governance

A mayor, in the vast majority of cases, represents the executive branch of the city government. The most vital of an executive’s powers are not enumerated but are inherent to the position itself. The concept of the “bully pulpit” wielded by US Presidents, who transcend their humanity and become semi-deities in the American civil religion, is no less applicable to mayors. By occupying such a central, powerful position, one becomes the complete and total representation of the political entity itself—the mayor of New York City is not merely the chief administrator of the municipal government, they also act as the human representative of the city itself, with all the burdens and complications that entails. The plus side, however, is that this naturally means the opinions of the officeholder are amplified and broadcasted to the world. It is a powerful position; some may say too powerful. There is a strong argument, well made by Bruno Leopold in Marx’s Social Republic (an excellent analysis on Marx’s conception of socialist society), that executive powers are by their nature undemocratic and that legislative supremacy (based upon the collective decisionmaking of elected and recallable representatives) of the people is a far more stable system of government. While such an office exists, however, in our deeply undemocratic society, it must be utilized to its full extent to bring power to the people as much as possible. This is all well and good—“power to the people” is an excellent slogan; it has been utilized for decades for a reason. But what does it look like? How is it achieved? 

The Socialist Strategy

In his article, Control the Bureaucrats, Marxist scholar and historian Mike Macnair demarcates a key breaking point in strategy between socialists and social democrats, as the two groups as we know them today began to diverge in the early 20th century. The battleground of this divergence was the state; subtly but vitally different understandings of the bourgeois state, its class character, and its limitations led to vastly differing strategies and conceptions of the immediate tasks and goals of the working-class movement. Social democrats have, historically, taken the modern state as a class-neutral institution—while it, under our current economic framework, is under the rule of the capitalist class, this is not inherent to the state itself. Through reform and, particularly, through winning an absolute majority in the legislature—the working class may take hold of the ready-made state machinery and utilize it to its own ends. That being said, while social democratic parties throughout much of Europe have, at various times, held absolute majorities in their countries’ respective parliaments and enacted sweeping reforms, the essential class nature of the state has remained unchanged. Even in the much celebrated social democratic Nordic states, the essential rule of the capitalist class over the economy and state has been preserved. Meanwhile, in the socialist conception of the transformation of society, a different calculation is made. This approach highlights the capitalist state as bound by its organizational form and structure to the will of the capitalist class. Instead, Macnair (and Marx before him) advocate for the total abolition, or “smashing,” of the modern state and its replacement with a socialist, working-class-led state. Such a society, perhaps best exemplified by the famous Paris Commune of 1871, would democratize all facets of public life. The workplace, industry, and the new socialist government would each be reorganized on the basis of one worker, one person, one vote. From the electoral college to unequal representation to the very structure of our workplaces and economy, the many anti-democratic elements of our current governing systems are not the markers of a broken system—they are the markers of a functioning system, one that is intended to separate the people from decision-making. Thus, any socialist strategy for operating in public office within a capitalist state must be concerned not merely with reforming the capitalist state (though this is not to discount reform, a central piece of any electoral strategy, and something Mamdani’s campaign has better messaging on than perhaps any other DSA elected in the past), but also with establishing and building democracy outside of the existing state structures. As explored in August Nimtz’s The Ballot Box, the Streets, or Both, socialist political strategy cannot rely merely on standard political avenues of decision-making, where the people are purposefully minimized in favor of a ruling elite; it must go beyond them. Executive positions, such as that of mayor, are especially capable of being utilized for these purposes.

How To Build democracy

The power of the bully pulpit, as well as the prime source of the basically undemocratic nature of the executive in government, is centered in the concept of legitimacy—the automatic legitimacy executives possess as actors grants them power far beyond those that are specifically enumerated; legitimacy that is independent of the legislative branch executives contend with. An executive represents their polity, much like a monarch is the human encapsulation of their kingdom, and this fact is enormously important to our understanding of how to function in this role. Presidents of the United States, as chief executives of the national government, have not hesitated to use this legitimacy to strengthen their office at the expense of the legislature. We must go another way; the power of the executive must be used to grant  legitimacy to new, non-governmental institutions. Socialist mayors (and socialist executives more generally) must undercut the legitimacy of the state in favor of new, directly democratic organs. 

To build new branches of government is not under the mayor’s purview—these popular institutions would thus, of course, not be a part of the government per se, but instead a set of conjoined “popular clubs.” A mayor may delegate a large portion of their power to these democratic organizations, thus building them up as a real way for people to affect change through direct participation in governance. For example, in many city governments, mayors may submit proposed laws to the city council; a socialist mayor may delegate this ability to the popular assemblies, pledging to automatically submit any measures demanded by the populace through them. Such an arrangement would serve to get citizens more actively involved in the governance process and more apt to do so through radically democratic institutions. By showing ordinary, working-class people they can actually affect the political process in ways that go beyond simply voting for candidates, we prime them to become more actively engaged on the whole, something that is absolutely necessary should we ever hope to see the working class take power. In taking such actions, mayors will not merely be executives of the city government, they will also be acting as organizers within a larger movement. By virtue of their office and of the reach of the “official statement,” the mayor-organizer has a reach and power to draw crowds far beyond that of any other single individual in the city. But this is not the only, or even the primary, reason for the establishment of the democratic assemblies. 

Crisis Periods

There come times in history during which polities undergo crisis periods, whether brought about by natural disaster, civil unrest, or social catastrophe. During these periods, standard modes of authority often break down, whether by loss of legitimacy or inability to enforce laws. It is within these periods that we observe some of history’s most wonderful experiments in democratic governance. From the Paris Commune to the Petrograd Soviet, the Shanghai Commune, the Rojava, and the Zapatistas, popular institutions occasionally are able to fill the void and pursue the interests of the majority. We have seen several crisis periods resulting from civil unrest in recent US history; from the Occupy Movement to Black Lives Matter to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, we see movements that had real public support and the potential to wield genuine power. But, in each of these cases, they did not. Why is this? 

Without a ready-made organizational form, these movements decay to the tyranny of structurelessness. Imagine how things could have gone differently were citizens endowed with ready-made procedures and methods of popular organization during these “crisis moments.” In 2020, for example, following the public murder of George Floyd, two-thirds of Americans were in support of the Black Lives Matter movement before the Democrats effectively hijacked the movement. In the years since, support for the movement has, of course, dwindled, with the sudden energy being lost to entropy. The job of socialists must be to prepare ourselves to meet and sustain popular anti-establishment energy like this—chiefly by providing organization.

Socialists elected to city office can play a role in building dissent and parallel institutions, as demonstrated by such figures as former Seattle City Councillor (and current DSA Member) Kshama Sawant, who, during her time in office, was a defender and even leader of CHAZ and an active supporter of anti-government protests. 

Assemblies of Various Types

But what form is this organization to take? History and experience provide us with various ready-made institutional frameworks, each of which comes with its own particular drawbacks and merits. At the risk of wading into the territory of utopianism, I will explore a few potential institutions a mayor-organizer could help assemble.

Workplace Representation: 

One of the most tried and true methods of socialist radical democracy, workplace representation, helps to bridge the false divide between “economic” and “public” spaces. Additionally, it could play a role in helping to massively expand union representation, getting people and their coworkers talking in protected discussions about labor issues (alongside discussions about politics in general). Representation could either be based on region, with workplaces electing delegates to either neighborhood workers’ councils, or on trade, with workplaces electing delegates to syndicates based on industry. Such assemblies, besides submitting legislation, could advise the mayor and council on labor issues and, with support and codification from a city council, even play a role in setting labor standards. 

Although such a body would be specifically rooted in the working class and have some serious disadvantages. First, workers’ councils, of course, have a controversial legacy, due in large part to their integration into the party-state of the USSR, in which they became organs not of democratic representation but mere rubber stampers of party decisions. That being said, the examples of early council governance in what became the USSR and also in various other European nations (Finland, Germany, etc.) demonstrate that councils can indeed act as democratically representative organs when given the room to do so — indeed, they can be far more radically democratic than parliamentary systems, with a right to recall and imperative mandate. The long and storied history of council democracy is explored in detail by Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen and Gaard Kets in their article Workers’ Councils and Radical Democracy: Toward a Conceptual History of Council Democracy. Madsen and Kets explore the massive impact the council system had on thinkers within and without the Marxian tradition and the salience the idea still holds as a model for the future of government, specifically highlighting how the (open, autonomous) council government “makes participation in the creation of society’s fundamental laws open and accessible to all citizens.” 

But the council system, for all its virtues and for all its storied past, still poses some potential political issues, particularly for the purposes of this strategy. For not all workers in a city are residents; in New York City, for example, 20% of employees live outside of the city. This arrangement has positive and negative sides – while it involves people living in the larger region, the “representation gap” may alienate residents. They may identify the city government as more representative of them and their interests than any sort of worker-based assembly and ultimately reject the validity of the councils. 

People’s Assemblies: 

Another, more currently “in vogue” organizational method is the People’s Assembly—a town-hall-style, directly democratic assembly. Popular assemblies are utilized by the EZLN and, closer to home, in the Occupy movement. Delegates, and executive/organizing committees may be elected by these assemblies but act on the delegate mode of representation, in which they are given explicit instructions by the assembly and expected to follow through, subject to recall and democratic oversight. This is a far cry from the sort of “representation” offered in the United States and most capitalist states, based on the trustee method of representation, in which the representative is not accountable to their constituents beyond the narrow window of the election period. Thus, a system of popular assemblies in various neighborhoods, convened on a regular schedule (say, once a month), could, in the minds of many residents, and indeed in reality, be far more representative of the masses than the city government. Several regional assemblies from different sections of the city (or, indeed, depending on population and feasibility, a single city assembly) could give common people a place to voice their complaints and make demands of their government. It would allow working-class people to get direct experience in the process of governance and democratic decision-making, an opportunity that many unfortunately never have. That can, itself, be a radicalizing process. 

Such an institution is not without flaws, however. The time constraints of a monthly meeting would inevitably exclude some people, regardless of its scheduling (though a city-wide right to be excused from work to participate in a neighborhood popular assembly could and should be a suggestion by any mayor interested in convening such meetings). Additionally, the difficulty of sustaining energy around groups such as this has been noted by many. That being said, as long as the assemblies are kept alive and routinely elect a dedicated committee of organizers, the framework can remain, hibernating, in wait for a potential crisis. 

The policing problem

All of this could be for naught, however, if the mayor-organizer cannot adequately address the problem of policing. As it currently stands, the NYPD is the largest police department in the country—then mayor Michael Bloomberg once bragged (erroneously) that it was the “7th largest army in the world.” In New York City, as in other places, the mayor is not capable of singlehandedly abolishing the police but is expected to regulate the department (making recommendations on budgeting and appointing/firing commissioners). How can a socialist, who wants to dismantle the oppressive, racist structure of US policing, stand as the chief administrator of the violence they speak against? It presents deep problems for DSA of both a moral and political character. The moral concerns with having to spearhead and represent such a blatantly racist institution should be obvious, but let us stop for a moment to consider the political angle.

Socialists are meant to serve as beacons of the working class, champions of a new, brighter future—allowing ourselves to become associated with the exercise of repressive state violence is thus not only a tough situation we must face, something we must hold our noses and carry out, it is anathema to our entire political project and a deadly threat to how we are perceived by those who elect us. Socialists, then, should take a directly oppositional stance to such institutions. But how does one do so in a way that adequately addresses the deep contradictions of serving in such a role? State representative and DSA-elected Shaun Scott has demonstrated one highly valuable path forward: presenting alternatives. In the newly opened session, Scott has brought forward a bill that would allow towns of a certain size to create non-police crisis response centers and 911 alternatives. By championing such programs on a municipal level, mayors can help people to truly think outside the narrow box of our police system. With these alternatives in the minds of constituents, a mayor should continuously distance themselves from the violence of the police, calling for defunding, an end to police unions, and an end to qualified immunity (outside of the few cities, like New York, where this has already occurred). 

In addition, some amount of local public defense may be transferred to a citizens militia—an open, volunteer-based community organization with democratic election of leadership—in short, a sort of empowered neighborhood watch. Such a system may be contrasted with traditional police departments, which, being based on long-term employment and structured under an internal bureaucracy, more closely resemble a professional army than a citizen’s guard. In Robert Leicher’s The Modern Militia, the legal and constitutional scholar explores the history of the debate between proponents of a citizens’ militia vs. a professional army. As Leicher highlights, the American Founders were highly skeptical of the concept of a standing, professional army. By establishing a caste of professional officers with their own interests separate from that of the general population, it is easy for these organizations to take on lives of their own, leading those they were meant to protect down the path of despotism. The state is inherently based upon a monopoly on (so-called legitimate) violence. By giving the right to apply that force to an organization separate from the people, the people themselves cannot be said to control the state. Only once people are empowered to defend their own communities, rather than being policed by some quasi-military organization imposed upon them, can accountability and freedom truly be possible. The importance of such forms of community self-defense to the socialist project is covered in depth within French Reformist Socialist Jean Jaurès’s 1911 text The New Army and more broadly touched upon in Engels’s Can Europe Disarm?. As Jaurès covers, the debate between the standing army and the citizens militia was not limited to North America, circa 1776. The founders’ contemporaries, other revolutionary Republicans of the 18th and 19th centuries, not to mention the democrats of ancient Greece, also railed against the professional army as a predictor of tyranny. Small wonder why, when, historically, professional armies have spelled the end of no shortage of Republican states, from the legions of Julius Caesar to the soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte. Such conspiratorial dangers can also be seen in US police departments, most notably in the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and member of the city Board of Supervisors Harvey Milk, progressives who sought to curb police violence in the city. For their trouble, they were killed by police and fire officer Dan White. Following the murder, police unions rallied around White, successfully preventing his conviction on a murder charge and reversing the fledgling reforms sought by Milk and Moscone.

Further, a mayor could, particularly in extreme cases like that of New York City, even fire current police commissioners, refusing to reappoint replacements until the policing system of the city is restructured. By consciously refusing to carry out certain repressive duties, a mayor may not be able to fully deconstruct the repressive state apparatus on their own, but they can effectively “jam the gears” of the machine. Once again, such a strategy would constitute mayors not merely contenting themselves to administer the state with a so-called “progressive” agenda, but instead actively building people power and, where possible and useful, using their position to effectively do battle with the state. Such a move would no doubt be dramatically controversial, however, in the long run, it would reintroduce concepts of police abolition and restart a much-needed conversation on a national scale. That being said, due to the extreme risk of controversy, mayor-organizers should avoid such sweeping moves without, as previously mentioned, strong,  viable alternative proposals to replace those public functions that the police are currently expected to carry out. Without a viable alternative, we run the risk of making our politics seem utopian to the average worker; broad, sweeping, unworkable, and without grounding in actual concrete proposals. If we make such proposals, however, make them loudly and often; we will help to show that the violent, much maligned status quo can be changed. No doubt such a road is perilous; one only needs to look to examples like that of the small town South Carolina mayor George Gardner, who was murdered by police following a dispute between the city government and the department that apparently included threats of defunding. Yet, DSA electeds, as “tribunes of the people,” must be ready to call out the cops, along with all forces that oppress and exploit. To confront such violent systems is, inherently, dangerous. “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn,” as said by Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panthers, “is that he is a doomed man.”

While there is little chance that a citizens militia would be able to fully supplant the police in a modern US city overnight, empowering civilians to police their own communities and giving this citywide “neighborhood watch” real responsibilities and structure, we can truly begin the long process of abolishing the police and moving towards an equitable, community-centered model. As long as demands to abolish the police are isolated, without the presence of organizations and programs the community can fall back on, we can expect to make very little progress.

Towards transformation

It may be doubted that organizations sanctioned by the city government can play a truly transformative role in the class struggle. Such concerns, I believe, are adequately answered with a close study of historical revolution. Many revolutionary bodies, from the National Guard during the age of the first French Revolution to analogous bodies during the Revolutions of 1848, popular bodies sponsored by a certain state and a certain class are quite capable of taking on lives of their own during periods of instability, given that they have autonomy from the state and sufficiently open membership. 

The other response of many to these proposals will likely be that they, while agreeable in essence, are unworkable in practice. While popular representation may be a preferable model to current forms of government, and a community militia may be preferable to militarized police forces, these proposals cannot be meaningfully implemented under capitalism and will doubtlessly provoke all manner of foot-dragging and resistance from the ruling class and their foot soldiers through legal and extralegal means. This, I think, is true. Alternative forms of administration cannot be implemented in their totality under capitalism, and any attempt to do so will doubtlessly be mired in conflict. But the job of the socialist elected official is not to broker neat and tidy class collaborationist programs and technocratic solutions. It is to sharpen the edge of class conflict, to stand unflinchingly in solidarity with the working class, and to demand rancorously, repeatedly, and unceasingly the fulfillment of the promise of democratic rule of the people, for the people, by the people. By placing such transformative demands front and center, we can expand the imagination of constituents and bring us one step closer to those demands’ realization.

Image Description: Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park on Oct 27th 2024. Image taken by Bingjiefu He.

On May 26th, Marcos Henrique and Lucas Segobia, both skilled workers here in Maine, were abducted by ICE on their way to work at 6am. They are being held at Twin Bridges Facility in Wiscasset on no charges, and they fear removal from the state and deportation. As of this report, a representative stated that the men were informed they would be moved shortly. If and when they are, it will be hard for their legal representatives to locate them. This is how the government disappears people.

In response, there was a press conference today, May 30th, at 10 AM in front of Portland City Hall. Roughly 100 people showed up on short notice to show support, along with local news outlets. Those who spoke included friends, family, and coworkers of the two who were abducted.

When neither of Lucas or Marcos showed up for work on Monday morning, loved ones tried to locate the pair for over 36 hours. In that process of calling Border Patrol, ICE detention Centers, Local prison facilities, and using the ICE locator page, family members were misled and lied to multiple times before they were located. Worse, Marcos and Lucas were lied to about where they were, believing they were in Portland when they were in Wiscasset. Every person in this country has a right to due process and habeas corpus. To waive the rights of people based on their immigration status is not just an attack on the immigrant community, it is an attack on everyone. We must bring Lucas and Marcos home to their friends and family. 

People’s Inclusive Welding, Southern Maine Worker’s Center, Maine DSA, and more are desperately urging the Maine community to contact their representatives, both locally, statewide, and nationally, to express outrage at this miscarriage of justice. 

The post Two Men Abducted by ICE in Maine appeared first on Pine & Roses.

By Ecosocialist WG member Jordan Lewis

Transit isn’t just a nice-to-have; someone in your community relies on it, and they deserve better service.

In anticipation of Oregon’s once-a-decade Transportation Package, which decides transportation spending priorities for the years ahead, Portland DSA boarded TriMet’s busiest bus and train routes to survey actual daily riders. Our goal was to learn the needs of those who depend on transit so we could best advocate for them in state deliberations over the transportation package. We felt riders were not advocated for in these negotiations, as proceedings tended to center lane expansion projects and a “back to basics” framing over any kind of transit service improvements. This was confirmed when the Oregon Transit Association warned of coming service cuts if the existing STIF Payroll tax were not raised from 0.1% to 0.5% (early drafts of the package proposed a mere 0.18% STIF rate).

“My commute time to work used to be 15 min to the Portland VA when the 64 still existed. Now my commute time is 1 hour with transfers even though I live 15 min driving distance from work. This has been an abysmal change that has made my workdays so much harder […] It doesn’t help that I am also disabled with constant chronic pain, to add to how difficult my life has become since this bus schedule was unnecessarily changed.”

The Ecosocialist Working Group, itself composed of many regular transit riders, recognized Elite Projection in how media, local and state governments told stories about public transit. While they describe our buses and trains as “Portland’s largest homeless shelter”, with otherwise fine service interrupted by homelessness on the streets and on trains, our membership did not think that was the whole story. Our suspicions were supported by Trimet’s own Attitude & Awareness Survey (A&A) which did report safety concerns twice as common as cleanliness or service concerns, but whose demographic data showed a non-representative sample. 66% (!) of A&A respondents had Bachelors Degrees or higher; 24% had the option to work fully-remote.

It is our belief that the A&A survey, which was distributed via advertisement, mail and e-mail to those already on TriMet’s internal contact lists, oversampled professional office workers who may not ride as much post-pandemic. Our survey was designed to be distributed in-person, either digitally or with pen and paper, to those riding the bus, MAX or streetcar during rush hour or on weekends. We thought this approach would better represent the average TriMet users who rely on it as a public service. We surveyed every “Frequent Service” transit route in the city of Portland in order to maximize response rate, and we selected sessions geographically in order to distribute surveys evenly across the city. We did not collect any identifying data other than ZIP Code, regularity of riding and Transit route (due to data privacy concerns), but the geographic distribution seemed very even across the city. In total, we canvassed 340 riders from 65 zip codes, across 33 transit routes. While 11% of our respondents rode less than once per week, 40% of “Attitude & Awareness” respondents rode less than once per month.

The survey findings did not totally contradict the A&A survey; most riders still listed passenger behavior as their most common negative experience, but poor stop shelter conditions trailed it by a few percentage points. When increased service frequencies were offered alongside increased outreach workers, the same riders who reported feeling unsafe preferred increased frequencies.

“Specific to the 77, more frequency. Overall unpleasant conditions at stops makes the experience waiting at the bus uncomfortable. I ride with my toddler and there is often human feces and drug paraphernalia. Lack of marked well lit crosswalks at stops also means I get off further than I would like to so that I can feel safer crossing at night.”

Our theory as Ecosocialists is that ridership follows service quality just as much as it follows homelessness rates. A strategy to improve transit service, both for current riders and for potential new ones, must prioritize increased service frequency, cleaning/maintenance of shelter facilities, and an increased presence of unarmed rider ambassadors to de-escalate difficult situations onboard.

“Most buses downtown have incredibly difficult disabled access. trimet security and police intimidate and harass people and delay trips and make riders feel unsafe. NARCAN. security should be public safety such as narcan, not policing fare.”

All of these improvements require an increase in funding to agencies like TriMet through raising the STIF Payroll Tax to at least 0.5% by 2030, and ideally to a full 1% by 2035.

The next steps are to lobby for these changes, both through discussion with state representatives and senators, and during the public testimony opportunities which are as-of-yet unannounced. The Package (now known as TRIP) is still under discussion, and so the specifics of the Bill have not yet been revealed, though a draft was released in early April and a controversial May memo has not inspired much confidence. Move Oregon Forward has an email form through which you can contact state officials with influence over the bill. Ecosocialist WG member Jordan Lewis has reserved a public communications slot at Portland City Hall at 9:30 AM on June 11, which he will use to present the findings of this report to city council.

You can view or download the full report here (PDF, 854KB):

“We need more seating and shelters at more stops, it sucks to have to stand at a stop while waiting for a ride.”

The post Ecosocialist Working Group Releases Transit Rider Survey Report appeared first on Portland DSA .

Before the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) as we know it existed, New York City’s bus system was an amalgamation of private bus companies that operated on a franchise basis – they had contracts with the city detailing where they could run and what fares they could charge.

One such private company was Fifth Avenue Coach (FACO). It had a monopoly on most of upper Manhattan and all Bronx routes, and was staffed by TWU Labor. In the early 1960s, real-estate mogul and transit poacher Harry Weinberg orchestrated a hostile takeover of FACO’s board. He purchased a majority of its shares and coordinated a proxy faction (who included Roy M. Cohn, lawyer for THAT Senator Joseph McCarthy) that installed him as Chair. Transit labor knew Weinberg had a past of taking over transit systems, keeping their real estate holdings, then offloading the systems to their cities or states but benefiting from the real estate gains, as he did in Dallas, Scranton, and Honolulu. His goal as a capitalist was not to provide quality public transportation to the public, but to use quasi-public transportation services as a tool of private capital accumulation.

New York Times, Feb 2, 1962

In New York, Weinberg announced a reorganization plan that included layoffs of 800-1,500 workers, elimination of most night and weekend service, and a halt to pension payments. He also wanted to increase the fare from 15 to 20 cents (about $1.45 to $1.90 in today’s dollars) and re-instate a 5 cent transfer between lines (note: when they eliminated the free transfer just months before, the company thought it would put their books in the black; instead, ridership plummeted).

The TWU saw right through Weinberg’s capitalist ploy. In February, they authorized a strike should Weinberg make cuts or layoffs. At that meeting, TWU president Micheal J. Quill said he would like to see the city take over the whole company.

He would get his wish.

On the morning of March 1st, 1962, Weinberg laid of 29 TWU fare collectors, doorman, and watchmen, all of whom were unable to drive because of age, injury, or illness. The TWU stopped work on all FACO lines by 5pm that day.

More photos here: http://www.twulocal100.org/story/60-years-ago-fight-survival-and-birth-mabstoa

Mayor Wagner meanwhile wasted no time condemning Weinberg for precipitating a strike and threatening cuts, layoffs, AND a fare increase. Within 2 days he moved with the Board of Estimate and the state Legislature  to condemn FACO’s buses and garages and seize them for municipal use.

On March 8th, the Board of Estimates striped FACO of 80% of its franchises.
On March 15 & 19th, the state assembly and senate passed the bills needed for the city to condemn and seize FACO’s garage/maintenance properties and rolling stock.
By the end of the month, under the newly created Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA), the buses were back online (repainted to city colors) and strikers went back to work as public employees.

The state, neither before nor since, has never moved so quickly in public transit. Perhaps this is because public sector workers are no longer legally able to strike under the Taylor Law, which severely curtails the strength Labor has as an organized body to defend not only their rights, but the rights of the public.

History taken from From a Nickel to a Token (2016) by Andrew J. Sparberg.

What We Did

As we close the book on another NPEC term, I’d like to use one of my last acts as chair to recap the past year, debrief how we did, and preview what’s to come.  

The centerpiece of this term was NPEC’s inaugural National Capital Reading Group (CRG).  This ambitious project was our first foray into reading a foundational socialist text at a national level.  The Reading Group divided Capital Vol. 1, into several monthly sections, where we would meet on Zoom to have rotation facilitators review key ideas and discuss.  We also provided our guide so that chapters or regions could have their own Capital reading group.  Our kickoff event had over 500 RSVPs in October. While there was a dropoff, like any reading group, we did have a good number of members make it to the final session at the end of February. We feel that the CRG went so well, we will make it an annual tradition, and would like to adopt the format to other foundational socialist texts.  

Chapter Support

Our Chapter support subcommittee continued on its mission by mentoring 20 chapters and multiple trainings, including how to have a socialist night school, talking to non-socialists, and our how to have a childwatch in your chapter.  

Curriculum 

We published two new modules this term: Race and Capitalism in the United States: An Introduction and Fascism and the American Right. Next term, we are committing to publishing even more modules while revamping our old modules with new readings, materials, and resources for chapter to political educators to use out of the box.  We are also excited to share that our modules will be moving to a DSA Moodle shortly.  

Events 

They had a very active term, producing 4 of their typical mass calls while venturing into new territory and planning the first series of national foundational calls in collaboration with the NPC.  Events also lent a hand with the Capital Reading Group, the annual Educators’ Conference, and other NPEC mass calls.  You can find recordings of these events and series on the DSA YouTube.  

Comms and Podcast

We democratized our podcast production to expand the scope of topics while maintaining quality, producing 13 episodes. The Class podcast has grown its listenership by over 10,000 downloads in the past year, moving past 26,000 this past month. Our newsletter Redletter, is also gaining popularity through its quality and pertinent information about political education in DSA. It is read by an average of 3,600 members monthly this term.  

Meeting Goals 

At the beginning of this term, we set some goals about the content, events, and materials we’d like to produce this year. I wanted to reflect on those goals to highlight the ones we met and put a pin in what we can strive for this coming term.  

• We had the ambition to create several new trainings and how-tos geared at new and at-large members, along with developing chapters. A new facilitation and how-to start a political education training will debut soon, after the member surge in the wake of the 2024 election. We did implement our national foundations call in conjunction with the NPC and help wrangle DSA 101 and new member resources. So, we didn’t check all our boxes, but we did get some important ones marked, especially those that met the moment. 
• Resources depot This is halfway met. Over the past term, we have gathered many new and diverse chapter-created materials, but we haven’t yet sorted, categorized, and posted those on the resource page. 
• Democratic Socialists of America: A Graphic History, which we helped the DSA Fund produce, is finished and available digitally. As of this writing, a Kickstarter campaign will soon launch to produce physical copies. NPEC’s next step is to possibly make an accompanying lesson plan for chapters to utilize along with the Graphic History.
• The Spanish translations of our foundational modules are complete and can be found here. It went down to the wire, but NPEC was able to complete our initial goal of offering our materials in more languages. With a language justice and accessibility resolution up for debate at this year’s convention, we look forward to having a wider and more diverse set of translated materials.  
• We wanted to continue to have contact with every chapter, no matter the size, to see if they are doing political education and how we can help them better facilitate their programs.  The goal of reaching every chapter and getting their status still eludes us, but our yearly survey, which we sent out many times and worked with the NPC to circulate it, had the most interactions of any term. With that, we could work with large and established chapters like Philly down to Organizing Committees like Alachua County in Florida. NPEC and our Chapter Support subcommittee will continue our outreach through every avenue at our disposal to reach out and communicate with chapters.
• Through an NPC resolution after the 2024 election results, we were asked to put on another round of socialist foundations mass calls. This was an excellent opportunity to meet one of our goals and revamp the program with the participation of our national co-chairs. These calls were well attended and are now on DSA’s YouTube.  
• The Capital Vol. 1 Reading Group was the feather in our cap this past term. It created the most buzz of any event that NPEC has put on, with over 200 members attending our kick-off event. Along with reading a seminal socialist text, the reading group made many members aware of our committee and offerings.  There was a drop off like any reading group, but especially one of this density. Still, we finished with a solid core and built the foundations to make this an annual event while providing the blueprints to do it with other essential readings.  
• We also hosted a second national reading group for Eric Blanc’s recently released book, We Are the Union, in collaboration with the DSA’s National Labor Commission, YDSA, and EWOC.  This strong collaboration led to one of our best-attended calls, with over a thousand people turning in for the launch call that featured Eric Blanc, labor writer Kim Kelly (author, Fight Like Hell), and Moe Mills of Starbucks Workers United. The Recap Call featured Jane Slaughter of Labor Notes and Jaz Brisack, an original organizer of Starbucks Workers United, to discuss their impressions of the book with the author, Eric Blanc.  

Next Term

NPEC members came together and democratically decided our goals for the future in our 2025 Consensus Resolution. After meeting our charter goals from Resolution 33 at the 2019 Convention, we outlined how we will continue improving our current fair and what we strive to do next to keep developing political education in DSA, thereby shaping the future of DSA as we grow and develop as an organization. 

• Expanding our volunteer and contributor pool of members
• Structurally, shore up our place as a dynamic national committee with an increase in budget and staff time
• Add depth and width to our media offerings and member outreach
  • Expanding the scope of topics and increasing the frequency of our podcast Class
  • Creating more video content for DSA’s YouTube channel
  • Ensuring that our Educators’ Conference is held regularly throughout the term. 
• Continue to expand and improve our curriculum offerings
  • 4 new Socialist Night School Modules
    • Democracy, Civil Society, and Socialist Politics
    • What is Internationalism for Socialists?
    • Socialist Analyses of Nativism and Racism
    • Socialist Feminisms & Gender Liberation
  • Refine and improve past modules for use in Socialist Night Schools
  • Found a Party School to be used in conjunction with the Growth and Development Committee’s hard skills trainings
  • A Socialist Sprouts curriculum for children, parents, and caregivers
  • The Capital Reading Group will continue annually, with the prospect of offering more reading groups for other critical socialist readings.  

Seattle DSA Condemns Anti-Trans Police Violence in Cal Anderson Park

APPROVED FOR RELEASE 25 MAY 2025

Seattle DSA strongly condemns the violent police riot that occurred yesterday, during which officers assaulted, peppered sprayed and arrested protestors and bystanders including DSA members as they peacefully exercised their 1st Amendment rights to demonstrate against a bigoted anti-trans hate rally in Cal Anderson Park hosted by an out-of-state astroturf group.

It is egregious that the city and state would use public resources to protect a hate rally. Sending in law enforcement to attempt to provoke, arrest and injure Seattleites advocating for a city free from discrimination and hatred is disgusting.

We condemn Mayor Bruce Harrell for using the police to target queer protestors in one of Seattle’s gayest neighborhoods, and call on every local elected official to condemn these actions by police and investigate how this hateful, bigoted event was ever allowed to take place.

Today is a shameful reminder that the state has chosen to side with hatred and discrimination, and the police will always come down on the side of those who seek to attack and erase us. Seattle DSA will always stand with the trans and queer community – an attack on one is an attack on all.

Seattle DSA Statement on Those Arrested at Cal Anderson Park

APPROVED FOR RELEASE 26 MAY 2025

This past Saturday, 24 May 2025, twenty-three Seattle community members were arrested after the Seattle Police Department and Washington State Troopers violently attacked protestors exercising their constitutionally protected free speech to tell the anti-queer, transphobic, anti-choice astroturf group MayDayUSA their hate is not welcome here. Seattle DSA condemns this recent exercise of state violence and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s equivocating statement on the events of last week as he attempts to absolve himself of responsibility.

While several of the arrested were soon released, many remained in jail over the weekend under false, trumped-up charges including felony assault. Among these political prisoners are close comrades of Seattle DSA, individuals with deep ties to our community who have been active in the wider movement for a just, collectively liberated world.

This uncalled-for attack at the hands of the police and courts will not go unchallenged by Seattleites as we face many mounting crises, an increasingly hostile Mayor and City Council, and a growing recognition that politics-as-usual is a dead-end. Seattle DSA stands with our queer and trans neighbors as they fight for their liberation from both the violence of cisheteropatriarchy and the many violences of capitalism, and we stand with political prisoners who fight for justice and freedom.

As we mark the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and the summer of uprisings it sparked, we have seen demands for police accountability and disarmament as well as prison abolition be met with further police impunity, more police funding, and an ever-growing prison-industrial complex. Time and time again marginalized communities have borne the brunt of state violence in defense of an untenable status quo, communities including our BIPOC, queer, unhoused, migrant, and low-wage neighbors. And time and time again these communities have risen up to declare this situation unbearable and fought back.

We demand charges be dropped for the Cal Anderson Defendents and for Bruce Harrell to immediately resign. Seattle DSA further continues to demand for the end of prisons and police militarization as tools of domination and capitalist exploitation along with the wider structural violence of racism, settler colonialism, and imperialism that underlie them.

Without justice, there can be no meaningful peace. And attack on one is an attack on all.