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The Danish parliamentarian argues that parts of the economy are already run on democratic lines. DSA can learn from his blueprint for building from these institutions to a more just economy.

The post Democratizing Our Economies: Nordic Socialism by Pelle Dragsted appeared first on Democratic Left.

California DSA (CA DSA) has recently voted in favor of supporting Proposition 50, a proposal to redraw California’s districts that is aimed at creating enduring structural Democrat electoral supremacy in California. We strongly dissent from this endorsement and reject its strategy, lay out a rebuttal to the argument for the endorsement of Prop 50, and, most importantly for DSA members, analyze what this debate reveals about the issues within CA DSA itself.

What Does DSA Stand To Gain from Prop 50?

In a piece laying out the argument for CA DSA’s endorsement of Prop 50, Chris K. relates Prop 50 to Republican gerrymandering efforts in Texas, which he calls a “calculated assault on democracy” and “the Right’s most powerful weapon for locking working people out of politics.” While he claims to have “no illusions about the [Democratic] party establishment and what it wants out of this,” he argues that gerrymandering can be used in California as a counterweight to Republican gerrymandering in Texas and in other red-states. However, this illustrates the defining political error of CA DSA and those within the organization that would back this proposal: mistaking the goals of the Democratic Party for the goals of DSA.

Prop 50 makes perfect sense from the Democrats’ perspective. Of course Democrats want to minimize Republican footholds and shape the American political map in ways that maximize the electoral power of their (shrinking & demoralized) base. To lend our endorsement to a measure designed in their party’s interest, not ours, is to sacrifice our independence and organizing efforts without gaining any leverage.

Indeed, if we truly have “no illusions” about what this is, then we must admit it is very likely that Governor Gavin Newsom is using this redistricting process to engineer mid-layer support for his 2028 presidential campaign. Prop 50 provides him and his allies with another mechanism for consolidating their networks of patronage, rewarding loyalists, disciplining the working class, and structuring the political field to his benefit. Indeed, the CA Dem website itself says that the redistricting is designed to gain Democrats 5 more seats in California, and those seats would be in districts that Newsom helps draw. Why align with that now unless we aim to be junior partners in the Democrat presidential campaign in 2028? But the junior partner strategy has been shown repeatedly to backfire against us, as most recently shown in the Democrat’s refusal to support a DSA-backed candidate in Minneapolis, because we consistently see the Democratic party strike against us as soon as we pose a threat.

In his piece, Chris K. states “this moment gives us a chance to both take a realpolitik move to reduce the GOP advantage from Texas gerrymandering and to agitate and push beyond the rigged two-party system,” but this point raises more unsettling questions than answers. How can we simultaneously be agitating against a rigged two-party system while supporting one of the parties rigging it? Chris also suggests that we demand more fundamental reforms in CA such as proportional representation, which gerrymandering is designed to decrease. Such contradictions between our rhetoric and our endorsements will not be lost on the working class of California, especially those who’ve been desperate for a true left-wing alternative to the business elites managing both major political parties.

But let’s also be clear on what we’re advocating for: if DSA wants to credibly demand an expanded democracy, our demand cannot be for “fair” electoral maps under capitalism, an idea which itself is based on very narrow liberal assumptions of political rights. It must be for a new kind of political system entirely — one in which workers control their workplaces, communities, and governments directly, not one in which capitalists shuffle district lines to their advantage.

How Our Experience in the Central Valley Shapes Our Position

North Central Valley DSA (NCVDSA), a small chapter which organizes in four counties throughout rural California, has experienced steady growth since 2022, which it owes to working class Californians who reject partisan divides in favor of class struggle. The palpable disdain for both Democrats and Republicans can be seen both within and beyond the electoral context, and there is a critical demand among rural Central Valley workers for an alternative to the capitalist two-party duopoly. In 2024, dozens of NCVDSA members participated in the CA DSA ARCH campaign, canvassing voters who spoke of the hardships they’ve faced for generations; astronomical rent increases, abandoned public transportation projects, extreme land subsidence, unbearable drought, unbreathable air. These attacks on Central Californians are bipartisan, conducted by politicians who switch-hit between D and R on a whim. Many NCVDSA ARCHers felt like we were fighting on two fronts: convincing our neighbors that, while not a panacea, some proposed pieces of legislation (e.g. raising the wage) are an important tool to help the working class, while at the same time convincing them that we were not sent by the Democrats, which would have instantly lost us credibility.

Being forced to support Prop 50 sets back the progress we’ve made throughout California by showing up as an alternative to the capitalist two-party system and developing a level of trust and participation among our working class peers. Rejecting an endorsement of Prop 50 does not mean ignoring the real frustrations people feel about Republican gerrymandering. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to connect those frustrations to a broader critique of capitalist politics. We can explain to workers why both Democrats and Republicans manipulate district lines, why neither party is invested in their empowerment, and why only socialist politics can deliver real democracy. The campaign to support Prop 50 loses sight of our broader political horizons and the opportunities that are truly before us to engage and agitate around a socialist agenda rather than an agenda that aligns neatly with the Democratic leadership.

California DSA’s Fundamental Political Error: Identifying the Democrat’s Goals with DSA’s Goals

CA DSA seems to be operating on the premise that the current primary contradiction in the United States is Trumpism, and the primary task before us as DSA is to stymie Trump. But we cannot absorb such a myopic view of the struggle between capital and the people: Democratic capital cannot save us from Republican capital and we cannot organize the working class through building the personal brand of Gavin Newsom. Our organizing work throughout California’s East Bay and Central Valley regions has made it clear to us that DSA must win the support of the working class regardless of party affiliation or lack thereof.

The mission of DSA as an organization is not to push the Democrats into action to defeat the Republican Party. Our class enemies are just as powerful within the Democratic network as they are within the Republican side – in fact they are often the same people – and losing sight of class contradictions is a huge political error. Our mission is instead to organize the broad working class and win political power on their behalf and with their support. It is not possible to achieve this goal by playing by the partisan rules of today’s political system.

What Would Organizing the Broad Working Class Look Like?

Last year, only 34% of California’s eligible voters voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. If we aim for a strategy that alienates the near supermajority – 66% – of eligible voters who didn’t vote Democrat, then we will forever limit our horizon to being a minor advocacy group in the Democrat orbit. It’s our responsibility as scientific socialists to assess the political terrain objectively, and be ready to make new alliances that upend the existing balance of forces. DSA chapters in California and throughout the country are learning how to organize people who oppose the Democratic Party, and supporting Prop 50 would present a significant setback to this work.

Imagine, instead of endorsing Prop 50, DSA aimed at agitating along class lines, communicating simply and clearly that both Democrats and Republicans are rigging the electoral system and disregarding the working-class. We could point to how working-class communities of color, immigrant neighborhoods, and rural towns alike are carved up by politicians at the peoples’ expense. We could argue that true representation will never be achieved through bourgeois redistricting, but through building worker-power independent of all capitalist parties. We could use this moment not to strengthen the Democrat hegemony in California, but to destabilize it, and to create openings for DSA to present an alternative.

Segments of the working class correctly view the Democrats as failing to fight back against Trump in any meaningful way, but simply fighting Trump to gain electoral ground without actually addressing the demands of the working class. We propose that DSA’s most effective strategy will be to lead with our popular socialist agenda, and explicitly reject Democratic party priorities – such as gerrymandering more seats for Democrats – that do not represent a mass working class constituency.

It’s worth emphasizing that the issues we find with Proposition 50 is not much to do with the principle of using tactics to undermine one’s class enemy. In fact, we recognize that antidemocratic measures are sometimes necessary, especially in revolutionary scenarios! But antidemocratic measures should be targeted squarely at the capital class, not against a broad political/social brand that many of the working class aligns with by normative default. Put simply: if people see DSA associate with a Democrat-coded move to disenfranchise them, they’re likely to write us off as yet another Democrat NGO, even if they would agree with the actual policies we have led with in the past, such as the ever-popular Medicare-for-all. Polarizing your potential base against your policy platform because you can’t see beyond the current identitarian alignment of party politics is a grave political error, and one that we should have learned to stop making long ago.

What this means for California DSA broadly

California DSA’s arguments for the Prop 50 endorsement repeat a common pattern that highlights the dysfunction within the body. It’s hard to find anything but an uncritical acceptance of myopic Democratic partisanship. In the rebuttal to the authors’ earlier piece in California Red, CA DSA leader Fred G. asserts that a position against DSA endorsement of Prop 50 is equivalent to aligning with right-wing billionaires, and that the Republican party is fascist without qualifiers, with all the implications that term carries. This binary style of thinking heightens the polarization of the political choice at hand and makes it seem like there are only two options – either support Democrats or support Republicans – and this rigidity leads to self-marginalization in the long term. The Republican program is highly anti-social and destructive, but if we can’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with workers who have voted Republican in the past, we are bound to lose. 

In addition to that section of the working class, there are many who have voted Democratic in the past but have ceased doing so because the Democratic party leadership is increasingly out of step with their own progressive values. At the national level, most Democrats who refused to vote Kamala Harris did so out of a justified anger at the Biden/Harris administration’s support for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. Aligning ourselves with the Newsom administration means aligning ourselves against the most progressive Democrat voters who have historically constituted much of DSA’s base and have increasingly begun to stray from the party.

The only way to break through the current partisan alignment is to break off the working class element from both parties, and that strategy cannot be taken when we ally with one party against the other.

As DSA SF’s Hazel W recounts in her Reflections on California DSA, CA DSA was born out of a cross-chapter effort during the Prop 15 campaign (taxing commercial real estate to fund public education), with hopes that it would evolve into a lasting infrastructure for coordination, chapter growth, and statewide strategy. California DSA was meant to be broadly representative, but rather than serving as the connective tissue among a statewide web of chapters, it is increasingly disconnected from them. CA DSA’s stated goal of uniting & strengthening California chapters has remained unfulfilled, and Prop 50 represents a further step back. 

With only two chapters – East Bay DSA and DSA-LA – represented on its 2025-2026 State Committee, California DSA is far from representative of California, and is in fact a shell of a body increasingly reflexive to DSA-LA’s politics: according to the records the authors have seen of the ‘24-25 state council, DSA-LA’s delegation constituted close to a majority of the body – 30 DSA-LA delegates vs. 37 non-LA delegates. CA DSA uses a misleading framing of its statewide endorsements, political messaging, and campaigns as broadly representative of California chapters’ politics with little substantive input from inland, rural, or lower-density regions. With less than a week to go until election day, only six California DSA chapters/OCs have taken up the Prop 50 campaign, representing only a quarter of the DSA chapters and OCs in California.

As a general warning sign of the health of the formation, it is unknown to the authors whether California DSA is quorate according to its bylaws, which outline the quorum conditions as: “One or more delegates representing 50% plus one (1) of the local affiliates shall constitute a quorum, provided there be a minimum of one-third (1/3) of the registered delegates present at the meeting.”

Since we know that several California chapters do not participate at all in CA DSA, it is an open question to us whether these CA DSA quorum conditions are being met during deliberation sessions. In order to know the answer, we’d need access to attendance records, but attendance is not recorded (or at least is not made public). As a general rule, delegates change over annually and chapters aren’t required to send delegations, so it is very possible that CA DSA has gone out of quorum in the past. This is not a technical quibble; it is a sign that there is a trend among California chapters to withdraw energy and consent from a state formation that can’t justify its existence.

Hazel W raised alarm bells of dysfunction earlier this year, and the disconnection between the State Committee and individual CA chapters has only deepened, further eroding the legitimacy of the body. The ambition in the founding vision to facilitate skill-shares, seed new chapters, or liaise with YDSA never took root in a meaningful way, and has instead given way to CA DSA leaders deriding the growth of rural California chapters and its cochair attacking comrades as “fascist collaborators” for expressing concerns about Prop 50. None of this helps us with the formation’s stated goals of “unit[ing] and in unity strength[ing] the power and influence of its affiliated locals”.

CA DSA has become an endorsement shop that focuses on high-visibility, low-leverage endorsements, and fails in its attempt to portray itself as representative of a broad consensus among California chapters. If CA DSA can issue endorsements on legislative propositions across the state but overwhelmingly reflects the political views of only a small percentage of the state’s chapters, then what value is the formation really adding to our project?

We call on chapters throughout California to reckon with whether California DSA is representative of their politics. If the State Council cannot be made functional, transparent, and responsive, chapters have a responsibility to intervene, including by pulling delegations. The state body must prove it has the support of California chapters in the form of quorum by publishing its delegation attendance records, and it must cease hollow top-down campaigns in favor of amplifying the work that chapters are already doing.

If California DSA cannot reform, it risks becoming a redundant progressive NGO that insists it speaks for California chapters, while it undermines the work those chapters are doing. We must knit together the work that has actual support at the chapter level, not impose political priorities on chapters with an email list. California DSA must reset, or we’ll continue to waste time and energy on lending symbolic consent for the Democratic party’s priorities.

Image: LA County Sample Ballot for Prop 50 in the 2025 Special Election. (Public domain)

We are excited to announce our endorsement of Ayah Al-Zubi of Boston DSA, running for Cambridge City Council! Despite a narrow loss in her council race in 2023, Ayah has remained a tireless organizer for justice in the Cambridge community. When the city announced the closure of a 58-bed homeless shelter, she worked directly with the impacted residents and empowered them to advocate for their needs at several crucial council meetings.

Ayah is a young Muslim woman and renter with a lived experience that uniquely positions her to understand the struggles of immigrants in Cambridge, young people, renters, and more. She does not accept real estate or corporate money because she believes in people over profit.

Ayah is running on an ambitious platform to support the working class in a variety of areas like housing, transportation, climate, education and childcare, and racial and economic justice.

Ayah’s campaign centers mechanisms such as the Affordable Housing Trust, investing in the Community Land Trust, and retaining the 20% inclusionary zoning requirement to build permanently affordable housing. For transportation, Ayah has a focus on making the #1 bus free, as well as improving access to services for elderly in Cambridge. Finally, Ayah’s campaign is dedicated to making food more accessible especially in light of Daily Table closing to create Cambridge’s first city-run grocery store. Everyone deserves to live in this city with dignity and Ayah will work hard to bring this vision to life.

Support Ayah with a donation!

Who are our other candidates?

DSA’s Nationally-endorsed socialist candidates are running for local office in Washington, Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts!

Our candidates are incredible fighters for the working class, championing rent stabilization and higher minimum wages, while also protesting ICE’s human rights violations.

This year, we launched a rotating fundraising slate and held phonebanks to foster cross-chapter solidarity. And we’ve raised over $100,000!

Donate to the Slate!

In the coming days, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits will end for more than 100,000 Monroe County residents who rely on the program to feed themselves and their families. While local charities are stepping up in an attempt to fill the gaps, it will not be enough to keep many in our community from sinking further into poverty. The result will be more crimes of desperation like theft, more negative health outcomes, and more strain on shelters and other existing resources.

Donald Trump and his agenda of austerity are to blame. This is social violence and financial warfare—the richest elements of society are seeking to destroy any infrastructure that permits average families access to the means for a dignified life. Meanwhile, government resources remain available for weapons and military strikes abroad, alongside the brutal displacement of our immigrant neighbors at home.

Socialism means that caring for people comes FIRST. We cannot tolerate a society that privileges destruction over providing for life; that is willing to sacrifice millions on the altar of profit. Though the circumstances of our immediate situation have been created by Trump, they are the inevitable result of our capitalist system. 

In spite of these attacks, we must find the energy to come forward and fight. We call on our members and the broader community to find ways to care for one another in these trying times, and to bring ourselves closer as an organized class. Together, the working masses will defeat those who aim to further enrich themselves at our expense.

In solidarity,
ROC DSA

RESOURCES:

The post Chapter Statement: ROC DSA Stands with SNAP Recipients Against Financial Warfare by the Capitalist Class first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

A reflection on Lotta Comunista's organizing and an interview with an activist.

The post Experience of the Italian Internationalists appeared first on Democratic Left.