By Meagan R It’s January 10th, 2026, the morning of our Mutual Aid distribution event, and it’s cold and windy outside of the Davenport Public Library. My fellow DSA members and I prepare the items we have spent the last few weeks fundraising and shopping for: coats, sweaters, socks, blankets, bus passes, boxes of food […]

Film bridges gaps that emerge when working primarily with theoretical text. Reading helps us develop a shared language, shared frameworks, […]

The People’s Tribunal for Justice in Palestine and the Demilitarization of Mexico Reaches Its Verdict By Seth Garben February 23, […]

Kat Armas’s Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World meets readers amid a renewed consolidation of Western imperialism. It is equally part memoir, spiritual and consciousness-building guide, and cultural criticism. By tracing the long history of imperialism and how its violence continues to live “unchecked” in our contemporary minds, bodies, language, and social practices, Armas points the way for how we can begin to heal through a global decolonization project rooted in radical Christian hermeneutics.

By emphasizing the beginning point of this comprehensive decolonization project, Armas suggests we largely hold off–for now–on the concreteness of the project’s political dimension because so many are still in a recovery phase. As such, Liturgies serves as a humbling reminder to students of liberation theology of how early we still are in the struggle and how much necessary spiritual work remains to be done on both inter/intrapersonal levels before the Christian Left (and the broader U.S. Left) can meaningfully confront and overcome empire. 

The Two Tracks of Healing from Empire

Each of Liturgies’ nine chapters follows a four-part structure: a folklore tale from the colonized world; an analysis of topics long discussed in post-colonial studies (such as ideology, hierarchy, dualism, dominance, violence) and its corresponding, desired alternatives (think wisdom,kinship, paradox, connection, peace); a prayer of resistance; and last, a benediction. 

“This is not just about individual transformation but also a commitment to fostering collective change.” Armas writes. “We cannot build something in the world that we haven’t first cultivated within ourselves.” Accordingly, Armas argues that the path to decolonization unfolds along two sequential tracks, reflecting liberation theology’s insistence that a commitment to God is both horizontal and vertical: first, a healing oriented toward the self, our ancestors, and all within the “kin-dom” who have been harmed by imperial power; and second, resistance to an imperialist apparatus enforced by a conjuncture of the state and its military hardware, capitalism and extractivism, and the soft power of the reactionary forces in Christianity.

Liturgies tilts heavily toward this first healing track, focusing on the unlearning of the beliefs and affective habits that Armas and other victims of empire have internalized as part of a colonized existence. We read about Armas’s experience as a young adult in Miami with an evangelist church to which she enthusiastically gave up her life to serve faithfully. But when Armas became disillusioned with her church’s aggressive, commodified push to prioritize the recruitment of “twenty thousand souls,” she pivoted away from evangelism. Armas speaks of her Cuban-American ancestry and separation from the homeland in the context of Cold War politics as well as of the trauma of her Abuela Flora’s multiple suicide attempts. 

Armas’s writing evokes the voices of bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, Homi Bhabha, and especially Gloria Anzaldúa. The Anzaldúa influence is evident when Armas argues that healing rejects “clean lines of binaries” and is instead a process where we sit with the “tangled tension of human life” and embrace the “thin space” that disrupts the borders between heaven/earth and time/space. Faith is a “paradox” and the mysteries of Christian theology (Jesus/human/divine and Mary/virgin/mother) are ones never to be solved.  

I found this discussion on the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes the most interesting feature of the book. But in this moment of political despair, my mind longs for a political and precise description of the most potent strategies for organizing a collective, decolonization project. 

Constituting Theology

Certainly, the absence of a “What is to be Done?” strategy in Liturgies isn’t because Armas lacks a direct understanding of those suffering from the impact of imperialism. 

Armas recounts how, during a mission trip, she helped distribute free Bibles to Haitians. One woman thanked Armas for the gift but declined it, stating that eye glasses were much more a priority. After that exchange, Armas shares that she felt “useless” for having failed to “see” what was most critical to the poor. Armas therefore recognizes the urgent need for Christians to organize to do the type of collective, political work described in Romans 1:11–12 and elsewhere.

Using “liturgy” in the book’s title evokes a distinctly Christian vision of power from below, as liturgy signals an engaged community poised for resistance. As Armas writes, empire “fears our togetherness, our longing for belonging.”

In her efforts to flesh out some sort of a specific political vision, Armas cites Acts 2 where a decentralized multitude is “wrapped in chaos” as each speaks in languages other than the language of empire, thus representing a subversive threat to empire. There are references contra state power, and “kingdom” becomes “Kin-dom” in a world decolonizing. The activities described in Jeremiah 29:5 (building houses and planting gardens) operate alongside prayer as concrete political actions that can spark “rebellion,” Armas suggests.  

Both personal and collective healing–as well as political transformation and the transition to socialism–are extended political processes that don’t come with exact timetables. This has long been recognized in classic Marxist texts such as Lenin’s State and Revolution, Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, Engels’s “The Principles of Communism,” and in specifically-imperialist context, Cabral’s “The Weapon of Theory.” But Armas’s political playbook for struggle includes just a handful of tactics and practices (such as land reform) in which to bring down empire–and none of them particularly revolutionary. Once again, we can’t help but seek more militant solutions that directly speak to the urgency we face on the U.S. Left. Yet the constricted political terrain available for resistance and reconstruction in Liturgies may be by design, directing readers toward the cultivation of a faith-based foundation before engaging the political structures necessary to overcome imperialism. 

The Trajectory of Trauma & Political Mobilization

Like many of us on the U.S. Left, Armas is understandably pessimistic about any immediate, political insurgency to get things going in the right direction. One might be tempted to compare Armas’s political vision unfavorably with the clarity and confidence of earlier generations of liberation theologians. In the 1970s and 1980s, Juan Hernández Pico interpreted the Book of Joshua (6–9, 18) and other passages to argue that Salvadoran guerrillas and campesinos rightly embraced a “co-responsibility” with God in launching social struggles. Just as the Israelites urged Joshua to see himself alongside God as a liberatory agent for his people, Hernández Pico contended that Salvadorans, too, were called to become active protagonists in their struggle for freedom.Yet Armas surely recognizes that our present political moment is markedly different from Pico’s El Salvador of forty years ago.

This is speculation, but I believe that Armas is addressing the collective trauma that has long occupied a significant place in postcolonial scholarship. Because many aspiring revolutionaries only read Fanon’s famous first chapter (“Concerning Violence”) in The Wretched of the Earth, they’re missing out on the larger, more important point he outlines in the last chapter, which consists of a series of clinical reports on psychiatric patients (who include both the colonized and colonizers). For Fanon, political violence against empire may be necessary to decolonization, yet it is not, by itself, liberatory. Violence, then, in his account, is not an end but a catalyst for healing—a process the colonized must continue long after the achievement of state independence. 

The preliminary task for the activation of healing, Fanon argues, is for the colonized to continually ask–and contemplate–during the resistance and beginning again, nation-building phases of decolonization, “In reality, who am I?” Certainly, readers of faith will welcome such non-violent, regenerative practices in constructing political alternatives to empire. 

Several generations later in the never-ending struggle against imperialism and in the tradition of the colonized speaking in their own voices on the experience of trauma (including as they do throughout the Bible), Armas also recognizes that the U.S. Left is nowhere near articulating the organizational capacities and power structures that could be put into place to overcome imperialism. Accordingly, the starting point for Armas’s approach to launching such a political project is for us to be vulnerable in “bearing witness” so that we may first call things as they are–and then deploy an appropriate political response. Such a strategy is on the surface a modest one but it is vital to overcoming our despair and isolation and ultimately, activating the long struggle leading to liberation. 

The post First Things First: Why Politics Needs to Wait appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Congratulations to Marek Broderick of Green Mountain DSA, we proudly endorse your re-election to Burlington’s City Council!

Marek’s time so far on the city council is marked by his dedication to protecting renters, supporting students, and public service!

When students at UVM organized for better living conditions, Marek listened, and acted! The city council passed a resolution to address the deteriorating dorms thanks to Marek’s action and students’ organizing!

DSA is proud to continue fighting alongside Marek for a better Burlington!

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

by Skye Winspur

I want to make the case that democratic socialists should care about interest rates set by central banks. While I do not worship capitalism, or trust the stock market at all, I do see the value to our society in having central banks. The US Federal Reserve was created, as almost all the US government’s “deep state” institutions have been – Social Security, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Medicare are other examples – as a response to repeated failures of capitalism. Financial panics in 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1907 were distressing enough to the investor class, not to mention ruinous to many workers, that in 1913 they pushed Congress and President Wilson to create a central coordinating institution for banking. The wisdom of not tying the value of money to shiny metallic elements would have to wait about sixty more years.

Apparently one thing Jeffrey Epstein believed strongly in was the virtue of negative interest rates. And for quite a while, the world was accommodating to him in this regard as in others, with the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke embracing a zero-interest-rate philosophy, and the central bank of Japan wedded to it for an even longer stretch (raising interest rates barely above zero only in March 2024). I turned 26 years old in 2008 and I remember how we were all told (by Bernanke and Larry Summers and every other Wall Street man) that slashing interest rates would “stabilize the economy,” create jobs jobs jobs, encourage every poor striving youngster to take entrepreneurial risks, cure cancer faster … What it actually did do, unquestionably, was stimulate the construction of new coal plants, usually in the Global South; encourage predatory subprime lending to people whose incomes were very precarious (the subprime rate always being substantially higher than the central bank one); and generally enable already mega-rich men to embark on vainglorious capital-intensive boondoggles that caused harm to the environment and surrounding communities (like Elon Musk’s “city” complex Starbase, which the Obama-era EPA could probably have done something about if it really wanted to). Because as soon as interest rates fall below zero, it is more profitable to spend one’s money on anything at all than store it in the bank. Of course, paying one’s workers more rarely if ever spontaneously enters the thoughts of those possessing this money, despite some economists’ claims that wage increases are “organic” or “natural” in a growing economy.

Morally speaking – and this may just be my inherited Scottish thrift speaking – I feel that saving is not the same as hoarding. Still, I also feel that wealth inequality has reached hyper-outrageous levels. Therefore, I think a wealth tax on all assets above $50 million, as Saikat Chakrabarti has proposed, is absolutely justified. I also think raising the FDIC insurance cap on deposits to half a million dollars is a very good idea, because young adults should be able to save up for homeownership in Dane County with one bank account without fear of bank failure during the next panic. The problem here is that if interest rates on CD savings accounts are zero or even less than one percent, as Kevin Warsh appears to want to push for with all the fervor of a recent convert to Trumpist orthodoxy, there is little to no financial incentive to save the sums required for a house or any similarly large purchase. Young people may even be (more) tempted to sign up for ICE or CBP and grab a quick signing bonus, hoping that they will not be asked to do anything too atrocious in the next three years. Quite a way to compound the systemic evil of the carceral state.

I am not a Marxist and I do not believe in a final, total abolition of capitalism. I think if we are going to have a central bank like the Fed (and despite the paranoid rantings of Rand Paul-aligned libertarians, I think we should) it should maintain a robust interest rate, not so high as to make borrowing impossible but not so low as to promote the creation of Starbases and Fyre Festivals and other spectacular wastes of financial resources – and no, the money Netflix made off the Fyre Festival documentary does not redeem that project. The evil of capitalism cannot be changed by loosening regulations, refusing to use preferred pronouns, or cutting borrowing costs – this is the false promise of which Trump is always trotting out new variations – it can only be reduced, and reduced very substantially, by strong enforcement of an equitable rule of law and applying brakes in the form of central bank monetary policies. To my mind, keeping interest rates well above zero is one of those brakes.

Milquetoast retellings and moderate cooptation cannot bury radical Black history. Socialists would do well to remember that as we build our movement.

The Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and their allies are telling the Milwaukee Common Council to pass the ICE Out legislation package.

Announced earlier this month at City Hall, the package includes several pieces that will work to limit ICE operations in Milwaukee and help protect people here from the death, abuse, and chaos brought on by ICE during their operations across the country:

• Resolution declaring opposition to how federal immigration enforcement activities are occurring in the United States and amending the City of Milwaukee’s legislative package
• Communication from various City agencies relating to strategies and responses the City might use in response to militaristic actions undertaken by the federal government targeted at the City
• Resolution prohibiting the use of City property by federal law enforcement agencies engaged in immigration-related activities
• Resolution instructing the Milwaukee Police Department to protect the rights of community members when they engage in constitutionally protected speech and assembly, and intervene to protect community members if anyone, including other law enforcement agency personnel, attempts to abridge the public’s constitutional rights
• Ordinance prohibiting all law enforcement officers, when acting in an official capacity, from wearing masks or face coverings, and requires that both agency and individualized identification be worn
• Motion modifying Milwaukee Police Department Standard Operating Procedure 340 – Uniforms / Equipment / Appearance
• Motion modifying Milwaukee Police Department Standard Operating Procedures regarding the duty to intervene, investigate, and report unreasonable uses of force
• Motion modifying Milwaukee Police Department Standard Operating Procedure 172 – Sick and Injured Persons
• Ordinance creating an office for new Milwaukeeans

“Let this legislative package serve as a message that Milwaukee will step up against ICE and the authoritarian Trump administration ripping families apart,” Milwaukee DSA Co-Chair Autumn Pickett said. “I’m so proud to see that—after less than a day—nearly 4,000 emails have already been sent to City Hall, as everyday people join the call for these protective measures.”

DSA organizers are calling on members, supporters, and allies to email Milwaukee City Hall and tell the Common Council to pass this package quickly and do its part to keep Milwaukee safe from ICE.

“Our work doesn’t end here: More than 20,000 Milwaukeeans have already joined the local community defense network to watch for ICE activity, deliver groceries to at-risk families, inform our neighbors of their rights, organize within our unions to protect our workplaces, and so much more,” Pickett said. “We will continue to fight for the better future that all working people deserve.”

Milwaukee DSA is Milwaukee’s largest socialist organization fighting against imperialism for a democratic economy, a just society, and a sustainable environment. Join today at dsausa.org/join.

In Part I we described the mainstream political landscape of Los Angeles, the large scale and the major constituencies of the single-party Status Quo Coalition: a wing of wealthy corporate and business Democrats in an uneasy coalition with multiracial liberal democracy blocs of non-profits, labor organizations, and ethnic interest groups. Since publication, another dramatic series of events has shaken up the 2026 Mayoral race in Los Angeles. Center-left Austin Beutner is out of the race following the death of his daughter, while a shocking last-minute announcement from Councilmember Nithya Raman has introduced a new set of challenges for Los Angeles’s DSA chapter to reckon with, sparking hot debate within the membership about the nature of the chapter’s relationship with endorsed Socialists in Office (SIOs). The media comparisons to Zohran Mamdani have only intensified, but the differences between both the candidates and their local political contexts remain stark enough for LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano to take note. 

To help make sense of the moment, we will describe how DSA-LA’s endorsements have evolved in response to the local factors sketched in Part I, and how our victories have in turn begun to reshape that political landscape. DSA’s 2025 National Convention resolutions defined an ideal-but-not-exclusive candidate archetype: the “cadre candidate.” We include some evaluation of our endorsees’ relationships with the LA chapter, as this concept looms large in the post-Zohran DSA environment and colors many chapter activists’ perspective on endorsements. We start with a brief history of the chapter’s electoral endorsements since 2020.

2020

Nithya Raman was modern DSA-LA’s first endorsement for LA City Council, running a 2020 campaign that centered on the city’s wasteful and cruel approach to homeless sweeps and opposing the power of organized landlords. For Los Angeles, Raman was a transformational candidate, the first to unseat an incumbent in a generation. 

Far from a core or “cadre” member, Raman only joined DSA in the leadup to her campaign, and has never been an organizer within the chapter’s ranks. Rather, she joined DSA after co-founding the SELAH Neighborhood Homelessness Coalition. At the time, DSA-LA was organizing across renters and unhoused tenants and against the inhumane policies of the city through campaigns like Street Watch LA and Services not Sweeps. Raman’s campaign was backed by the Services Not Sweeps Coalition that included both DSA-LA and SELAH. Though the vote was contested, her campaign received endorsement from DSA-LA and National DSA, and the chapter ran a robust member campaign in support – but notably, never represented a majority or even a plurality of her grassroots volunteer campaign.

Councilmember Raman’s relationship with DSA-LA, and indeed the broader Angeleno grassroots left, has been strained. At the time of her victory, Raman had made no explicit commitment to ongoing engagement (often referred to as co-governance) with DSA-LA — and no Socialists in Office program yet existed within the chapter to enable such ongoing engagement. Though Raman was consistent in her support for renter protections and a humane homelessness policy, she still shies away from adopting the “democratic socialist” label, and her relationship with the chapter almost broke in 2024 when membership approved a censure over accepting an endorsement from a small pro-Israel Democratic club during her hard-fought reelection campaign.

Regardless of these tensions, the impact of her win on the electoral landscape in Los Angeles is undeniable. Despite the entirety of the Status Quo Coalition (including late interventions by Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi) supporting her opponent, Raman’s election began to hint at the electoral influence of the new DSA core constituency: young, multiracial, low and middle-income renters dissatisfied with the city’s neoliberal status quo. That such a constituency could organize and seriously disrupt the city’s comfy electoral order set off alarms among LA’s established powers.

2022

The impact of the new democratic socialist constituency roared into full force when two new DSA-endorsed candidates, directly inspired and endorsed by Raman, defeated incumbents from LA’s multiracial liberal democracy blocs. 

In 2022, Eunisses Hernandez unseated former Latino-labor stalwart incumbent Gil Cedillo in Council District 1, a rapidly-gentrifying district containing Highland Park, a neighborhood friendly to socialist candidates. Cedillo’s history as a labor leader with SEIU and a champion for undocumented immigrants in the State Assembly had established him firmly on the labor edge of the Status Quo Coalition. His city council tenure demonstrated clearly the compromises and contradictions of his Latino liberal bloc – its flexibility to become an early endorser of Bernie Sanders in 2016 while simultaneously embracing support from real estate and business interests.

Hernandez was also decidedly not DSA cadre, joining the chapter during the endorsement process and with a background in anti-carceral political advocacy, the founder and former director of abolitionist nonprofit La Defensa. In office, she has been among the most outspoken members of the socialist bloc, and has organized in office extensively with the chapter in her district.

Hugo Soto-Martinez, representing Los Angeles’ socialist hotbed neighborhoods in Echo Park and Silver Lake, is the clearest LA example of a cadre candidate. From 2018 until his campaign launch, he organized within DSA-LA in the chapter’s NOlympics campaign, and then its Central Branch as a pandemic-era neighborhood organizer. Council District 13 office staff are active DSA-LA members in the central branch, and a burgeoning district committee is taking shape in CD13 to enable mass engagement among constituents. Importantly, Hugo was politicized in and maintains his primary political home in Los Angeles’ labor movement, particularly UNITE HERE Local 11, a fixture of LA’s powerful immigrant-led service and hospitality union sector with a long history of involvement in municipal politics.

The elections of Soto-Martinez and Hernandez coincided with the LA Fed Tapes leak and signaled a shift in the Status Quo Coalition. Soto-Martinez’s deep labor connections allowed him to win endorsements from a significant portion of Los Angeles’ strongly-incumbent-preferring labor federation. Hernandez’s ties to the broad anti-carceral and abolitionist nonprofit world solidified opposition to police funding as a core value of the newly forming political bloc, which has been repeatedly outvoted on questions to expand LAPD. DSA-LA’s non-electoral campaigns in support of workers, immigrants, and renters are increasingly co-organized with LA’s unions, while organized socialists grow in number and organization among some of labor’s rank and file. Los Angeles’ status quo coalition has begun to slowly reshape itself: DSA and the progressive edge of Los Angeles labor and justice-based nonprofit worlds are coming into connection, and police, landlord, and commercial interests are cleaving in reaction. It remains to be seen how durable or consistently ideological this realignment and its associated movement connections are.

2024

By the end of 2023, DSA-LA had to confront the limits of organizing a candidate as loosely aligned as Nithya Raman. Both a censure and revoking her endorsement were put to a chapter vote, with 60% of votes cast approving the censure, and 40% in favor of revoking the endorsement altogether. The endorsement stood, the chapter mobilized a field campaign, and Raman squeaked out a 50% win in the primary round, avoiding a runoff against LA Police Protective League and landlord backed challenger Ethan Weaver.

Additional endorsements in this cycle focused on spurring growth in the chapter’s San Fernando valley branch: longtime chapter member Konstantine Anthony, who cruised to victory as an incumbent on Burbank city council, and the unsuccessful runs at Burbank and LA council seats for Mike Van Gorder and Jillian Burgos.

2024’s general election added Ysabel Jurado to the city council bloc, a tenant attorney who replaced disgraced labor figure Kevin de León. Jurado, who spent two years as an organizer with DSA-LA’s Power Mass Transit campaign leading into her campaign for office, notably received the support of the LA Fed. It was a startling turnaround for de León, who was previously a poster child for the Eastside ethnically Latino Labor-supported Status Quo Coalition. But mainstream Democrats all the way up to Joe Biden had called on Kevin de León to step down in the wake of the leak; de León responded by not only remaining in his seat, but seeking reelection. The optics of the moment were surely clear to the Fed, and Jurado became the first DSA-LA member in the modern era to secure their powerful endorsement.

The four-person bloc of Socialists in Office has achieved policy wins, most recently leading the way for city council to respond to years of organized pressure by the Keep LA Housed coalition. Tenants in rent-stabilized housing have won significant relief from exorbitant rent increases for the first time in 40 years, as well as codified anti-harassment provisions. A focus on services over sweeping encampments has shown promise in lowering the horrific rate of unsheltered homelessness in the city, though the scale of the problem remains overwhelming, and the economic outlook under Trump increasingly bleak. Major labor-backed initiatives to increase wages for tourism workers were passed over fierce opposition from LA’s tourism industry. The socialist bloc can often win alignment from progressive council members, but sometimes functions as a distinct minority that takes dissenting or protest votes, particularly regarding police funding.

This alone is a departure from norms in city government. Since at least the early 2000s in the wake of Los Angeles’ last charter reform, Los Angeles City Council established an ever-growing culture of consensus, under which items were only brought to a vote once they had overwhelming support. Under Council President Herb Wesson prior to Nithya Raman being seated, council consistently held a 99.9% unanimous vote rate. Though these habits are beginning to break, the expectations of “executive consensus” among LA’s “mini-mayors” remains a source of conflict between movements and their candidates.

2026

In the 2026 endorsement cycle, new candidates resemble the mix of longtime DSA organizers and movement allies that characterize NYC-DSA’s endorsed candidates. Challenging Los Angeles’ most conservative incumbent in Council District 11, Faizah Malik is public policy attorney for progressive policy shop Public Counsel, and like Raman and Hernandez, joined DSA-LA as a part of her preparation to run for office. 

Estuardo Mazariegos, running against termed-out councilmember Curren Price’s hand-picked successor in Los Angeles’ most impoverished District 9, is a director in the community organizing, base-building NGO Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). A member since mid-2020, he served for a time as a coordinator for DSA-LA’s South Central-Inglewood branch. These two candidates were both leaders on behalf of their employers in the successful Los Angeles rent stabilization campaign alongside DSA-LA, building trust and goodwill.  

Marissa Roy, our endorsed candidate for city attorney, may have the tightest links with the chapter: a member since 2021, she strengthened her organizing skills through leadership in electoral working groups, while also being a regular participant in DSA’s political decision-making. Roy is also involved in various non-socialist political organizations around Los Angeles – most notably the Working Families Party (WFP), but also including the circuit of Democratic Party clubs and progressive Democrat-affiliated political organizations like the California Women’s List. On the strength of her legal career, which kicked off with campaigns to end worker misclassification and wage theft in the Port of Los Angeles, Roy has secured endorsement from the LA Fed, as has Faizah Malik.

If the increasing willingness of Los Angeles Labor to support democratic socialist candidates for municipal office heralds a realignment of LA’s historic powers further towards a politics of class— of tenants and workers against landlords and bosses— this realignment is ongoing and incomplete, with Estuardo Mazariegos splitting labor support in his race with two other challengers. It has also triggered a backlash. Los Angeles’ business associations, typified by the anti-DSA PAC “Thrive LA”, has singled out Eunisses Hernandez as their top target this cycle, while drafting another business challenger to Hugo Soto-Martinez, forcing DSA to split our resources in defending multiple candidates. But in response, labor at large is backing a massive independent expenditure to support the re-election of Eunisses Hernandez as well as the insurgent Faizah campaign.

A left-labor political pole

To date, conditions in Los Angeles have incentivized a focus on LA city council rather than state legislative seats. The imperative to win those seats has primarily surfaced candidates who sit at the intersections of DSA with other elements of Los Angeles’ existing movement and progressive networks. The significant power of LA’s council seats has allowed DSA-backed council offices to win major policy victories, while also complicating messaging as movement and candidates try to build shared inside-outside tactics and strategies, with all the contradictions that effort entails. These victories have brought DSA-LA increasingly into alignment with the left wing of organized labor and Los Angeles’ robust nonprofit sector, aiming to sow the seeds of a left-labor political pole mobilized against Los Angeles’ committed capitalist interests.

Of course, winning a campaign is only the very beginning for a socialist in office— everything changes when an upstart “outsider” begins to experience the pressures of the “inside”. This has profound implications for organizers, as winning powerful positions with outsider candidates cannot be decoupled from the practice of political coordination, democratic decision-making, and an empowered chapter membership actively engaged in the institutions of civil society. Our core belief is not in any given candidate, but in the transformative power of a democratic socialist organization – one that emphasizes a deep commitment to the twin goals of member political education and member democracy.

In our next piece, we will do a closer examination of key players and electoral strategies among DSA and the Angeleno left, as well as the challenges facing DSA-LA as the organization navigates governance and mass organizing in the newly-forming left-labor political landscape.