In light of an increasingly active and militant labor movement, the question of DSA’s strategy and role in the movement presents itself with greater urgency. DSA Santa Cruz’s Labor Working Group offers this analysis as an attempt to pose crucial strategic questions and offer guiding principles we believe can provide a path forward. As a chapter with many members who were active in both the 2019-20 University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) wildcat strike and the recent 2022 contract fight at the University of California (UC), we had a front row seat to the ways DSA’s imprecise labor strategy has been an obstacle to growing militant rank-and-file union movements capable of challenging the bosses. It is crucial that socialists clarify how we relate to rank-and-file militancy and how we understand effective strike strategy, in general, and in our own unions. The recent contract fight and extended strike at the UC is a critical juncture to deepen DSA’s position on these questions.

Presently, DSA doesn’t have a labor strategy. The 2021 DSA convention passed a labor resolution that side-stepped advancing strategic choices. Authored by representatives from different caucuses and tendencies, the 2021 patchwork resolution had a little something for everyone. It recommitted DSA to prioritizing labor but went on to affirm virtually every possible orientation towards the labor movement as a “top priority.” The resolution passed with overwhelming support by delegates who agreed on little else but found their preferred tactics represented in this pastiche resolution. Among the “priorities” of the resolution were passing the PRO Act, supporting shop floor organizing at Amazon, advancing new organizing drives, strengthening EWOC, supporting “rank-and-file” strategy, creating industry and sector networks, building power in the south, supporting chapters in mapping their own labor networks, prioritizing working with Black and brown workers, strike solidarity, and promoting an internal organizing campaign to get DSAers to join unions. These are laudable projects, and we should aim for a strategy that encompasses many tactics. But what is notable about the DSA’s current labor orientation is its inability to prioritize a specific militant, socialist strategy for workers.

This is a problem in DSA as a whole, but the stakes of this strategic incoherence are higher for labor because of its centrality to building proletarian organization. In high-stakes fights, such as the 2022 UC strike, all sides of any issue can claim to represent the DSA position. DSA members made up an important part of both leadership and the more militant rank-and-file of the 2022 UC-UAW fight. DSAers were prominent on the union’s executive board, including the UAW 2865 president, on the bargaining team, on the staff, and among the ordinary strikers on the picket. DSAers advocated for both YES and NO positions on the tentative agreement and simultaneously argued for the “long-haul” grade strike strategy as well as flashy direct actions. DSAers, at times, pushed for open bargaining and, at others, for closed “mediation” with the boss. Some DSAers argued that the strike had passed “peak power,” while some argued against the concept of “peak power” itself (instead arguing for a power-analysis centered on the boss’s weaknesses). In other words, on virtually every controversy that came up during the campaign, DSAers found themselves on all sides of the fight–to the point that the disputes within UC-UAW were simultaneously disputes within DSA, and conversely that the UAW contract fight dramatized the core strategic questions that have remained in suspension within DSA since least the last convention.

A Little Background 

Core organizers at UC Santa Cruz sought to foster a strategy based on patience, resilience, and principled commitment to our demands. This strategy became known as the “long-haul strike.” Workers come to learn the power that we possess: building up greater trust and solidarity such that we continue collectively withholding our labor until our demands are met. Academia is not an industry in which striking for a few days or even two weeks necessarily causes intense disruption to the boss. It is only through the gradual accumulation of incomplete work and grading deadlines that the power of withholding labor makes itself felt in this sector. Because of high levels of specialization within academic fields, graduate worker labor is difficult to replace. In our analysis, if workers in this sector are able to commit to an extended strike, the university will make concessions to our demands to continue operating normally. This is not to suggest that the strategy of this strike or the lessons learned through its course are exclusive to the kinds of intellectual labor that Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Student Researchers perform. Rather, against perspectives that propose that a mere demonstration of power through a strike authorization vote or short symbolic actions are sufficient, we propose that workers in various industries should consider the action of striking itself, often in the long-haul, as a potent force with the capacity to change the balance of power between themselves and the boss.

In contrast to the “long-haul” perspective, the union’s statewide leadership appeared to enter the strike with the expectation that it would be resolved quickly. They assumed that a decisive strike authorization vote and the threat of a labor stoppage would foment fear and panic within the UC administration, resulting in quick concessions. This positioned the exercise of power through the strike itself as secondary to the demonstration of power through the vote and the picket as a media spectacle. This was never a strategy conceived to win our demands in full. The feeble goal was to meet the UC somewhere in the middle. Indeed, the more conservative majority faction of the bargaining team always appeared to accede to the UC administration’s framing of the COLA demand as an unreasonably high raise, rather than a necessary social demand based on living conditions in the cities where we work. The way we see it, the COLA demand is not a simple raise, but a fundamental restructuring of what wages are and how they operate. This is especially salient in light of the fact that the UC was not only the boss in the UC strike but also the landlord of many of the strikers. As tenant organizer Tracy Rosenthal points out, “The U.C. system generates revenue not only by depressing wages in its role as the state’s third-largest employer but by extracting rents as a landlord to some 106,000 students.” By indexing wages to the cost of living, the COLA demand is part of the larger socialist strategy to guarantee that workers can afford to live where they work, no matter how much the cost of living rises.

Some among those claiming Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts as an organizing bible were deeply committed to the concept of the supermajority action’s ability to scare the boss into concessions and on this basis approved the obvious shortcut of secret closed-door bargaining sessions before the strike had even begun. We note that while McAlevey herself is pointedly critical of closed bargaining, the emphasis on the spectacle of worker action and the myopic focus on supermajority as the only form power can take ultimately led UAW leaders to adopt precisely this closed door strategy.  We think that this points to a tension, or perhaps a contradiction, in McAlevey’s conceptual framework. That statewide leadership believed that a better deal could be achieved through negotiation without worker input was one among many indications of the paternalism and lack of confidence with which this leadership treated the rank-and-file. When no serious UC concessions occurred after the strike authorization vote or in the first couple of weeks of the strike, statewide leadership began to panic — the fear that they had hoped to stimulate in the administration shifted to the union leaders themselves as the UC held its nerve. This is the point at which, on the basis of showing our “seriousness” at the negotiating table, the bargaining team made unilateral concessions. First, the bargaining team dropped the COLA demand for future years, and second, decreased the starting wage demand from $54k to $43k. These decisions sought class compromise rather than engaged in class struggle. Rank-and-file members responded by packing Zoom caucuses within minutes of their opening to voice their opposition to these concessions.

While far less pernicious than statewide leadership’s concessions, Santa Cruz core organizers also voiced skepticism regarding calls for spectacular direct actions, such as blockades and dining hall occupations. These are all legitimate tactics available to strikers, but many calls to “escalate” appeared to come from a panicked rush for quicker results, rather than being integrated into a broader strategy. While calls for greater militancy initially came from quarters denouncing the union in its entirety, without differentiation between rank-and-file organizing and top-down approaches, ironically, statewide leadership began adopting similar calls for direct actions aimed at generating media spectacle later in the strike. This is to say that the liberal-bureaucratic and ultra-militant tendencies in the union collapsed into one another based on a shared register of impatience and lack of utilization of strike power itself. A further irony here is that the union’s statewide leadership had long accused UCSC wildcat strike organizers of being “ultra-leftists.” This term has become little more than an invective in DSA discourse, but its connotation of impatience and an absence of strategy clearly applies better to the statewide leadership itself and not to those willing to wildcat.

A further twist came during the contract ratification vote, in which the dominant bureaucratic tendency in the bargaining team sought to co-opt the language of the long-haul strategy to, counterintuitively, argue for the strike’s conclusion. On December 23, the final day of the vote, UAW2865 president Rafael Jaime sent a mass email to union membership with the title “Vote YES and organize for the long-haul.” This usage of “long-haul” rhetoric to kick the can down the road exemplifies the proclivity of statewide leadership to twist militant language into its opposite. This same proclivity was on display with catch phrases such as deep organizing, class struggle unionism, and mass action. At the same time, that statewide leadership felt the need to frame their political perspective in our terms — even though the two approaches are ultimately incompatible — demonstrates the influence of our intervention to promote the long-haul strategy among rank-and-file workers in the union.

Our Strike Strategies During the UC Strike 

Our long-haul approach to organizing aimed at building worker power, which we see as the top priority of socialists. And while the long-haul strike is an essential part of our contract struggle, it was just one element of a greater strategy to organize power among workers as a class, which we’ve been building at UC Santa Cruz for years. There are a few key tactics we’ve used to build power among graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz. It’s important we highlight the ways in which these tactics differ from those that were being championed by our union’s statewide leadership, and moreover, how our differing positions on tactics indicated a larger schism in the overall strategy of what it would take to win our demands and what would most successfully build worker power.

The first tactic employed by DSA members at UC Santa Cruz was to form an active and vibrant stewards network, in which departmental stewards kept communication channels strong between academic departments. The stewards network is a way to disseminate information from internal organizing circles outward. But stewards also act as the eyes and ears of their department. They are able to talk to workers in their department, learn about the challenges they are undergoing at work, and report back to the organizing committee. During the strike, the stewards network became a mode for assessing how great our power was as a body of workers withholding our labor. While statewide leadership spent the weeks leading up the strike (and the first couple weeks of the strike) obsessed with maintaining a large turnout on the picket line, we were more interested in meeting consistently with our stewards network. A couple of times a week, we would meet on the picket line for a stewards meeting, in which every steward would share if there were any challenges in their department, and what percentage of workers they estimated were on strike. This had dual effects: it enabled us to accurately determine how many workers were withholding labor on our campus and indicated which departments we needed to work harder on. Furthermore, it busted the myth that the picket line was the “structure test” of the strike. Halfway through the strike, we determined that, despite having an at times thin picket line, 18 out of 30 departments had more than 90% of workers on strike. The culmination of this engagement in the strike, empowered by the stewards network, was when 80% of academic student employees and 81% of student researchers at UC Santa Cruz voted to reject the ratification of the contract we currently have. Our analysis is that this rejection, at least at UC Santa Cruz, was solidly grounded in an organized workforce that saw a path forward to continue striking.

The second tactic we used to build and assess our power as workers was viewing participation in the strike as defined by withholding labor, as opposed to taking action on the picket line. Our assessment that the picket line numbers did not correspond to the strength of the strike also aligned with our strategic decision to avoid certain “militant” actions that would result in potential altercations with police. At a certain point during the strike, statewide union leadership began advocating for strikers to occupy buildings and block intersections (a sharp turn from their initial position that this could get the union in legal trouble). We saw this turn as an indication of suspicious intentions to create a spectacle that might distract workers, the media, and the public from the behavior of elected bargaining team members who were capitulating to the university. Moreover, we viewed this as a potential drag on our resources (should we need to shift energies toward jail support), and a misreading of the real power of the strike: the withdrawal of our labor.

As DSA members, we must continue to demonstrate that we, the workers, are the union –– not the staff who are hired to work for the union. Hired staffers tried to make decisions on behalf of workers, making every effort to pre-determine the actions of striking workers. But despite this, workers on our campus consistently looked outward to their coworkers, not upward at bargaining team members and staffers.

Class Struggle Unionism: The Strike as Weapon

During the strike, DSA Santa Cruz Labor Working Group was a site in which extensive strategic discussion took place among strikers and other workers in the community, much of it centered on furthering a strategy termed by veteran labor organizer Joe Burns as “class struggle unionism,” as opposed to a milquetoast and spectacle-oriented approach that he refers to as “labor liberalism.” Terms such as “class struggle unionism” and “rank-and-file strategy” are phrases we see evoked in many labor organizing debates on the left. It has become common to point to strikes and direct action as tactics that are unequivocally tied to building a strong, militant, rank-and-file and that support class struggle unionism. But tactics should not be conflated with strategy, and even militant tactics can work in opposition to class struggle unionism and undermine the rank-and-file when the strategy is not centered on disrupting the production of capital. It is with this in mind that we pose that within DSA there are two different strategies associated with the same tactics: class struggle unionism and labor liberalism.

Class struggle unionism aims to lean into the antagonisms between workers and bosses, and sees bosses always as the enemy of the working class. In this way, class struggle unionism uses a variety of tactics to disrupt the production and flow of capital and to severely limit the boss’s profits. Class struggle unionism believes that power lies in the hands of the rank-and-file and that through their collective action gains can be demanded and won and with this in mind, focuses on shop floor organizing and rank-and-file agency. Class struggle unionism uses militant tactics as a weapon against the boss.

Labor liberalism, on the other hand, seeks to negotiate peace between workers and bosses, and sees bosses as collaborators in a common struggle. In this way, labor liberalism uses a variety of tactics as an appeal to the press to garner outside support and a speedy resolution. Labor liberalism believes that power lies in the hands of elected officials and lobbyists and that worker action should always be oriented towards appealing upward to the people with the real power. Labor liberalism focuses on turning out workers to support contract campaigns and relies on professional staff for critical decisions. Labor liberalism uses militant tactics as a spectacle.

All sides of every debate in UAW 2865 throughout the strike framed their positions in the language and aesthetics of class struggle unionism. But were the tactics pursued by the union’s statewide leadership consistent with a strategic outlook based in class struggle and the agency of workers themselves, or do they correspond more closely to the strategy of labor liberalism, which seeks to garner the support of the press and politicians? Against the dilution and aestheticized appropriation of the term “class struggle,” we would assert that a more rigorous set of criteria is required to determine if a given tactic is being used in service of class struggle unionism, as outlined in the following concluding and guiding principles.

7 Strike Principles

1. The strike is a weapon, not a spectacle: power comes from hurting the boss, not publicizing the strike.
2. Strike to win: socialists should make demands with the aim of actually winning the demand, as in the COLA demand, rather than as a signal in a back-and-forth game with the boss.
3. Strike for the long-haul: our power comes from our ability to withhold labor as long as it takes to win our demands.
4. Tactics must serve strategy: the stewards network and emphasizing withholding of labor rather than picket line numbers were successful tactics for strengthening the capacity of the rank-and-file to act and organize.
5. Our tactics must strengthen the capacity of rank-and-file to act and organize.
6. Our tactics must aim to disrupt or limit the flow of capital.
7. “Supermajority strikes” should not be elevated to the only form that worker power can take. The choice between supermajority and minority action is not a moral one, but a strategic one, and must be settled by strategic debate between rank-and-file workers themselves as they fight the boss.

With the labor movement poised for a militant resurgence, many of the categories and terms that have structured socialist approaches to labor strategy –– and which were operative in our recent strike –– have been rendered significantly more blurry than they were in previous decades when the distinction between a bad “business unionism” in power and a good “rank-and-file” or “organizing tendency” struggling to take control had bright lines between them.  The partial successes of the latter have meant that the bad, old form of unionism has grown a lot more sophisticated and has metabolized much of the critiques we used to distinguish ourselves from it. Our experience of the UC strike in Santa Cruz was one in which the contest over the meaning of these terms (rank-and-file, structure test, deep organizing, power-analysis, peak-power, long-haul, etc.) was appropriated for use against the workers.

We are in a moment when self-professed allies of UAW’s Administration caucus can articulate their positions in terms borrowed from the pages of Labor Notes and argue that closed door mediation is an essential component of, rather than an alternative to, open bargaining. A time when DSAers who nominally support the Rank-and-File Strategy argue that supermajority action by rank-and-file workers requires union staffers shutting down minority action initiated by that very rank-and-file. To us, this all indicates the need for socialists to engage in sustained conceptual labor and strategic debate, something DSA has historically struggled with. While the UC strike did generate copious discussion, little of it actually added clarity to these core strategic questions raised by the strike. More often, different factions would simply deploy their preferred terminology taken from the pages of No Shortcuts as a cudgel against opponents. We call on socialists and communist militants in the labor movement to develop a more critical engagement with the whole coterie of concepts we use, first and foremost, those handed down from McAlevey and which tend to serve less to clarify strategy than as a sort of catechism for leftists in the labor movement. The UC strike is over. Real material gains were made, alongside the imposition of a two-tier pay system and a contract that fell far short of the hopes of most graduate workers. If we want the next fight –– whether at the University of Michigan, at UPS, at the Big Three automakers, or anywhere else –– to have a less ambiguous result, socialists need to go into it with a much clearer sense of strategy.

The post Rebuilding the Socialist Labor Strategy: Lessons from the UC Strike appeared first on Socialist Forum.

A fellow Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member recently told me I’m the first person they met who joined the organization because of Michael Harrington. It’s true – I joined DSA in the late 1990s largely because of Harrington’s influence. Like Harrington, I was raised a devout Catholic, and in Catholic school I was fortunate to learn about the preferential option for the poor, the dignity of labor, and the rights of workers. I stumbled upon The Other America, the 1962 book on poverty that made Harrington famous, read it, joined DSA, and have been a socialist ever since.

The remark reminded me that I’m not a spring chicken anymore, and it underscored just how much the organization has changed since I first joined. For years, many of the people I knew in DSA worked with Harrington before his death, at only sixty-one, in 1989. We all took it for granted that democratic socialism was a distinct political tradition, with a clear lineage and a core set of principles that distinguished it from other currents on the anti-capitalist left. Since DSA’s revival and expansion, however, the meaning of “democratic socialism” has become somewhat fuzzy and, at times, contested.

Political organizations, if they possess any vitality at all, change with time. The average person who has joined DSA since 2016 has an entirely different frame of reference than those from the organization’s founding generations. Many of the newest recruits joined with little or no connection to the Old or New Lefts, the labor movement, or the progressive religious institutions that furnished the socialist cadres of an earlier period. Many of us have no memory of the Cold War or the bitter fights among the various factions of twentieth century socialism. This is, in many ways, a positive thing. At the same time, the lack of a broad consensus about what exactly constitutes democratic socialist politics sometimes contributes to internal conflicts, reflecting an anxious search for collective identity.

These dynamics can lead to the question of whether democratic socialism is a distinct political tradition at all. For skeptics, “democratic socialism” often simply seems to mean whatever those who call themselves democratic socialists happen to say it is. This view embodies the relative lack of dogmatism that has attended the socialist left’s revival. But it also makes it difficult to respond with any consistency to the most basic questions a political movement needs to answer: what do you want, and how do you plan to get it?

Democratic socialism is a distinct political tradition that has found expression in many countries, with common roots in a democratic interpretation of Marxism. In the United States, whose democratic socialist movement I will specifically focus on here, it has also drawn extensively on the country’s secular and religious reform traditions, from radical republicanism to the Black social gospel.

Three core elements, in my view, have defined it historically: a vision of “democratic socialization” that deepens political democracy and extends it into the economic and social realms; a strategic emphasis on social alliances and coalition politics, rooted in but reaching beyond the labor movement; and a commitment to democratic internationalism. Here in the United States, it has seen liberalism — particularly its left wing — as an important ally because it has been the political home of the country’s mass-based reform movements, including the labor movement since the New Deal era.

If there is hope in getting human civilization to the next century with even a modicum of freedom and democracy, it lies in the democratic socialist movement. As democratic socialists in the world’s most powerful country, we bear a heavy responsibility to be as committed and effective in our efforts to change America as possible. It is no exaggeration to say that everyone’s future depends on it.

Fortunately, we do not need to begin from scratch, for we stand on the shoulders of giants. Harrington described the invisible world of the poor as the “other America,” but this phrase has many resonances. We are heirs of the other America that has fought, since the country’s founding, to make it live up to the best aspects of its national creed: abolitionists and feminists, Socialists and Populists, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and civil rights movement, New Leftists and participatory democrats. Our calling is to respect this tradition, draw upon it, and carry it forward as we fight the battles of our own time.

Toward Democratic Socialization

In the opening passages of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels survey the development of capitalism with an admiration bordering on awe. As the bearers of capitalist social relations, the bourgeoisie “played a most revolutionary part” in breaking the bonds of traditional society and creating “more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” It did this by bringing scattered people and means of production together in ever greater combinations, concentrating property ownership in the hands of a few and the exercise of political power in the modern state. In doing so, the bourgeoisie laid the foundations for a world of abundance by tapping the power of social labor, the cooperation of many individual workers in the production of commodities.

The problem with this arrangement, from a Marxist point of view, is the contradiction between the reality of social production and the private ownership of the means of production. Before capitalism, an individual owner of the means of production would also tend to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Think of a subsistence farmer producing directly for their family’s own consumption using their own land and tools. Under capitalist social relations, people tend not to produce directly for themselves, but are dependent on securing their livelihood through market exchange with others.

As Engels observes in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the “socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals.” The products produced collectively by large numbers of workers, who now did not own their own means of production nor necessarily need to come into direct contact with each other in order to cooperate, “were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists.” Before capitalism, people tended to produce small amounts of goods, mostly food and other agricultural products, and either consumed it themselves or turned it over to a landlord. Under capitalism, people tend to produce not for themselves but for others, and it doesn’t really matter what the product is so long as it finds a buyer on the market. But when those products are sold it’s the employer of those who do the work, not the workers themselves, who reap most of the benefit.

This contradiction between socialized production and private, individual appropriation of the product is capitalism’s calling card. It “contains the germ,” Engels concludes, “of the whole of the social antagonisms of today,” which finds fundamental expression in the conflict between the working class created by capitalism and the capitalists who employ workers’ labor power.

In his final book Socialism: Past and Future, Michael Harrington describes this process as the “antisocial socialization” of the world through capitalist development. The social organization of work unleashed human productivity on a previously unimaginable scale. But under capitalist social relations, this process gave birth to a novel social condition: poverty amid plenty. The deeply contradictory — and for many around the world, utterly disastrous — consequences of capitalist development spurred the emergence of socialist organizing, which in Harrington’s words was the first political movement to pose the question: “How does one democratically control the revolutionary consequences of our increasingly social human genius?”

One major twentieth-century answer to this question was Communism, which grew out of the socialist tradition but departed from it in important ways.

Following Marx and Engels, socialists tended to assume that the most advanced capitalist countries with the strongest labor movements would be the main theater of socialist revolution. But it was tsarist Russia, not Britain, France, Germany, or the United States, where socialist revolutionaries made their first breakthrough. Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power on the assumption that the Soviet experiment could survive only if it was the first explosion in a chain reaction of world socialist revolution. Those hopes were quickly snuffed out, and the Soviets embarked on a crash course of modernization to overcome tsarist stagnation and catch up to the leading capitalist states of the west. They called it socialism, but socialist critics of the Soviet system and its emulators thought otherwise.

Harrington, for example, argued that the upshot of Communist revolutions was not “to achieve the democratic production and distribution of the wealth of a successful capitalism,” as he argued in Socialism: Past and Future, but rather a “desperate attempt of emergent elites in poor countries to catch up, to modernize” and compete economically and militarily with the leading capitalist states. For democratic socialists, this was not socialism but a variant of antisocial socialization – even if this was not what its architects originally intended.

It is certainly true that some Communist party-states have made impressive achievements in reducing extreme poverty or providing comprehensive health care services, and these advances should be respected. The Communist movement’s support for anti-colonial and national liberation struggles around the world should also be recognized. While Washington shamefully backed the government of apartheid South Africa, for example, the African National Congress found allies in the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and others in the Communist world. “Actually existing socialism” certainly did not turn out the way its inaugurators hoped, but it retained some connections to socialism’s emancipatory heritage. This is why it is problematic to lump Communism together with fascism – a project that has contributed nothing but hatred, violence, and death to the human experience – under the rubric of “totalitarianism.”

At the same time, democratic socialists have always viewed the freedom to organize, speak, and publish as the “light and air” necessary for working people to develop their capacity to rule and to organize toward a society without classes. Here is where democratic socialism’s contrast with other expressions of socialist politics, particularly those which claim the mantle of the Bolshevik revolution, becomes most clear. Communist parties have historically been extremely undemocratic organizations, and the party-states they’ve run have suppressed representative democratic institutions and many basic political freedoms. Nicos Poulantzas, the Greek theorist of democratic socialism, posed the question in no uncertain terms:

It is necessary to take sides. If we understand the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism itself to involve, among other things, political (party) and ideological pluralism, recognition of the role of universal suffrage, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms including for opponents, then talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal trick. What is involved, through all the various transformations, is a real permanence and continuity of the institutions of representative democracy — not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism.

Many Communists, it must be said, were sincerely committed to the cause of democracy, equality, and freedom and made very important contributions to those ends. In the US, Communist Party activists like Dorothy Healey and Jack O’Dell played key roles in labor organizing and the fight for racial equality, among other struggles. People became Communists not because they wanted to become Kremlin agents but because they were outraged by injustice and wanted to fight for a better world, and they thought joining the Communist movement was the best way to do that. Many had their lives ruined by state surveillance, harassment, and persecution because of this commitment. At the same time, however, we cannot forget the terrible crimes committed in the name of “socialist construction,” the undemocratic and sectarian nature of many Communist parties, or their subservience to the needs and interests of the Soviet party-state. All of this did massive damage to the socialist movement, and we have only recently started to recover from it.

What would a practical program for democratic socialization look like? In a 1978 essay titled “What Socialists Would Do in America – If They Could,” Harrington sketched the outlines of a democratic socialist program for political and economic reconstruction, much of which is still a useful starting point for us today. First, he proposed the adoption of a national planning process “in which all the people would have an effective right to participate.” This would be done by ensuring the technical capacity of citizen groups to challenge official plans and present counter-plans, and by radically democratizing the already existing political process.

The second major element would be a “profoundly modified private sector,” with institutions of workers’ control and public participation in corporate governance and major curbs on profit making through tax and regulatory policy. Finally, there would be a dramatically expanded, locally oriented cooperative sector based on cheap credit subsidized by the federal government. An expansive welfare state would collectively provide goods and services in areas where market provision is not effective like health, education, and transportation. Markets would still function in areas where private choice is actually efficient and does not determine the basic direction of the economy.

This is a radically ambitious agenda, and the socialist movement is nowhere near capable of achieving even part of it on its own. This is where the strategic element of democratic socialism comes into focus.

Forging a Democratic Majority

Here, I will consider the strategic orientation of the mid-to-late twentieth-century iteration of US democratic socialism, particularly as it was expressed through the civil rights movement, not the early twentieth century heyday of the Socialist Party (SP). This is not because Eugene Debs and his contemporaries were not democratic socialists – they certainly were – or that they are unimportant. It is because the conditions under which they operated are very different from those we face today.

The SP was the last sustained, nationally organized third party in US history. Outside of residual pockets of strength like Milwaukee, it ceased to be a viable independent electoral formation by the mid-1920s. While the party found success in a number of states and localities, it only ever succeeded in electing two members to Congress, Milwaukee’s Victor Berger and New York’s Meyer London. London was voted out of office in 1922, Berger in 1928, and they were never replaced.

The spread of direct primary elections at all levels, legal rulings that made parties less like private membership organizations and more like public utilities for nominating candidates, and the political-economic changes inaugurated by the New Deal and its underlying coalition (which crucially included organized labor), closed off the available space for independent left-wing parties. Debs, Berger, Morris Hillquit, and other early SP leaders were, as historian James Weinstein observes in The Long Detour, “products of the years when the door to participation in major parties had been tightly shut.” Those doors were pried open roughly a century ago, and the most effective democratic socialists have decided to walk through them ever since.

Democratic socialists decisively reject minority strategies for winning political power. Since self-conscious socialists have rarely constituted a majority of the population anywhere, not least the United States, this necessarily entails a strategy of social alliances and coalition-building aimed at forging a democratic majority. This is a strategic imperative in any context, but it is especially salient in the US, where the lack of a proportional representation system shoehorns the wide array of social and political groupings into one of two big coalition parties.

The outlines of this strategy were, to a significant extent, developed by Black and white socialists in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, for example, worked with many organizers who came out of various corners of the Old Left. These included SP members A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, former Communist Party members and fellow travelers like Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levison, and non-party socialists like Ella Baker and Pauli Murray. Harrington was a follower of Max Shachtman, a former Trotskyist who brought his Independent Socialist League into the SP in the 1950s. The Shachtmanites were a rather small group, but they were able to punch far above their weight because their number included key strategists and organizers like Rustin who made important contributions to developing the movement’s strategic orientation.

In their excellent book A Freedom Budget for All Americans, Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates outline “The Strategy” formulated by the democratic socialist wing of the civil rights movement. In their telling, The Strategy had two main elements. First, it projected “a mass struggle against segregation and second-class citizenship” in the form of direct action campaigns against Jim Crow. Second, it incorporated civil rights demands into a comprehensive program of economic reconstruction, “channeling the struggle against the Jim Crow system into an even more massive struggle (through a coming together of the anti-racist and labor movements) for jobs for all, an end to poverty, and democratic regulation of the economy, which would involve a transition from capitalism to socialism.”

The earliest formulations of this strategy aimed at the formation of a new labor party independent of the Democrats and Republicans. In his contribution to a new volume on Bayard Rustin, historian David Stein recounts a 1959 letter to Rustin from SP activist Tom Kahn about a plan for civil rights protests at the upcoming Democratic and Republican national conventions: “just keep repeating the formula: 1960 ProjectProject → increased tension within Democratic Party → Split Democratic Party → formation of Labor Party → Labor Party, under influence of mass socialist left.” In this sense, their approach as originally conceived was rather similar to the “dirty break” strategy some DSA members advocate today.

But no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Kahn and other socialist civil rights activists modified their strategy as their engagement with the US political system deepened. Stein conveys the experiences of former SP activist Rachelle Horowitz, who recalled that “We got hit in the head with…two realities…that, one, the labor movement was not about to split to form a labor party,” and second (as Stein summarizes it) that “most Black people were not willing to abandon the Democrats, Dixiecrats notwithstanding.” While Rustin, Harrington, and others remained SP members, by the mid-1960s they thought that the main political vehicle for their program would be a realigned Democratic Party led by its liberal-labor elements. In their view, this approach was necessary to break the power of the de facto party that had a stranglehold over American politics for decades: the conservative Dixiecrat-Republican coalition.

The reactionary Southern Democrats who dominated key committees in Congress and held great sway over presidential nominations would be pushed into the Republican Party, together with northern and western conservatives. Without the albatross of racist, anti-union reactionaries hanging around their necks, the Democratic labor-liberal coalition could be pushed to adopt a program responsive to the needs and interests of trade unionists, African Americans and other racial minorities, the poor, and the “conscience constituency” of progressive professionals and religious faithful.

Martin Luther King, the greatest democratic socialist the US ever produced, was a consistent and forceful advocate of this strategy. Like Randolph, King did not shy away from criticizing the racism and discrimination that still plagued the house of labor in his time. Nevertheless, he was committed to the proposition that a political alliance between organized labor and the Black freedom movement was the key to progress for both groups, and the essential foundation of a mass movement to transform American society.

In a speech to the AFL-CIO’s 1961 constitutional convention, King declared that the “two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement.” African Americans, King noted, were an overwhelmingly working-class people whose interests and methods of struggle overlapped considerably with the labor movement. They needed allies because they constituted a minority of the population; labor needed allies to prevent technological progress “from becoming a Moloch, consuming jobs and contract gains” won over decades of hard-fought battles. It’s in labor’s best interest, King implored his audience, to support the fight for racial equality, because labor’s political strength would thereby be multiplied. “Negroes given the vote will vote liberal and labor because they need the same liberal legislation labor needs.”

The Black-labor alliance was at the heart of The Strategy, but even this would not be enough to forge the majoritarian coalition needed to win and wield political power. It was already evident in the mid-1960s that organized labor faced a difficult future if it could not organize new sectors, find more allies, and regain its former dynamism. In a 1965 speech to the Illinois AFL-CIO, King observed that the labor movement was organizationally powerful but “stagnating and receding as a social force. As the workforce has grown substantially in the past twenty years, the ranks of organized labor have remained stationary, and its moral appeal flickers instead of shining as it did in the thirties.”

In addition to working-class Blacks and the poor of all races, one potential source of renewed strength was the growing strata of educated professionals in postwar America. As Harrington argued in his 1968 book Toward a Democratic Left, the rising tide of “collective-bargaining impulses among professionals” — nurses, teachers, technicians, and other kinds of highly credentialed workers — “is something more than a new attitude within a traditional social class. Perhaps it is one portent of the appearance of a social class which has never existed before and which will play a significant role in the formation of a new majority of the democratic Left.”

Such an outcome is far from guaranteed. People occupying the twilight zone between the working and middle classes could be, in Harrington’s estimation, “an ally of the poor and the organized workers — or their sophisticated enemy.” Given its growing size and social weight, this group, which is disproportionately composed of women and often the source of feminist and queer liberationist demands, had to be brought into a political alliance with organized workers, the poor, and another group democratic socialists paid close attention to: religious progressives from the full range of faith traditions.

For King, Harrington, and others in the democratic socialist tradition, a coalition strategy uniting disparate groups on the basis of common interests and values is essential. It is forced upon those who seek a thorough transformation of American society, because there simply is not, as Harrington concluded, “some majoritarian proletariat with internal cohesion and solidarity seeking its own mighty voice.” Nor is there, absent fundamental changes to the US electoral system, a viable alternative to being the left wing of a coalition party that includes non-socialist progressives and liberals.

We should strive to gain a leading position in that coalition, but winning it will be a very difficult task. Pursuing, much less attaining, the lofty goals of democratic socialism in the US requires a healthy dose of strategic realism, an avoidance of sectarianism, and a consistent policy of alliances. The alternative is political isolation and all of the self-defeating habits that come along with it.

Democratic Internationalism

“Workers of the world, unite!” has been socialism’s watchword for nearly two hundred years. If there is no socialism without democracy, the same can be said of internationalism. International solidarity, opposition to national chauvinism, and the fight against militarism is in the movement’s DNA, and it has been a key element of democratic socialist politics in the US.

Internationalism is a moral and political imperative for socialists everywhere, but it is a particularly crucial aspect of democratic socialism in the US. Since the country’s founding, the US working class has been composed of all the nations and peoples of the world — some through voluntary immigration, others through forced importation and enslavement, and in the case of indigenous people, through violent expropriation of their land. Another dimension of the internationalist imperative is the fact that the US has been the world’s leading economic, political, and military power for nearly a century. This places an enormous burden of responsibility on Americans to minimize the harm our government causes and promote the world’s common good whenever possible.

Once again, democratic socialists in the civil rights movement provide some of the best examples of these principles in action. Though not as well known as King, Reverend James Lawson — still alive and active at age ninety-four — is a key figure in the history of our movement. He embodied the kind of democratic internationalism that suffused the Black freedom struggle and shaped its strategies and tactics. Lawson was working in India as a Methodist missionary when he got the news about the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. According to historian Michael Honey’s account in Going Down Jericho Road, “Lawson leaped out of his chair, clapped his hands, and shouted for joy. This was the movement he had been waiting for…He was eager to build a movement to overturn what he called the interlocking ‘cruelty systems’ of colonialism, racism, and war, using a revolutionary philosophy called nonviolence,” Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha (“soul force”).

According to Honey, Lawson “met socialists and nationalists in India and toured Africa. Observing a parallel freedom struggle building among the colored peoples of the world, he vowed to become a part of it.” Upon his return from abroad he met King; joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a religious pacifist group that counted socialists A.J. Muste and Norman Thomas among its founders, as a southern field organizer; and sought to mobilize the power of nonviolent direct action against Jim Crow in Tennessee. He played a key role in leading the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike where King was assassinated and continued his work in support of workers, immigrants, womens’ and queer liberation, and international solidarity for decades afterward.

Nobody, however, could move masses of people with a vision of universal humanity like Martin Luther King. By the mid-1960s, King was a moral and political leader of truly global stature. In that capacity, he did what he could to promote a vision of common humanity against the powers and principalities on both sides of the Cold War.

In 1964, Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin and the future social democratic chancellor of West Germany, invited King to visit the city to headline a cultural festival. He spoke to a rapt crowd of 20,000 West Berliners, met with students and clergy, and preached a message of peace and common humanity. King insisted on crossing the Wall to East Berlin, where he gave a powerful sermon to an overflow crowd on the topic of reconciliation. “It is with great humility that we in the United States in the freedom struggle have taken the liberty to assume that we are serving as agents of God’s reconciliation.”

He recounted the main events in that struggle and extolled the faith that allowed the movement to keep pushing forward toward victory, even in the face of death. “This is the faith I commend to you Christians here in Berlin,” King intoned in his peroration. “A living, active, massive faith that affirms the victory of Jesus Christ over the world, whether it be an Eastern world or a Western world.” King’s message of democratic, nonviolent revolution left a deep impression on both sides of the Wall, inspiring youth in particular to take action against “the kingdoms of this world” who would keep them divided and afraid.

Vietnam was a major test of democratic socialists’ internationalism, and unfortunately the record in this regard was mixed. Harrington did not support the war and thought US policy in Vietnam was immoral and indefensible. But his wariness toward what he saw as the “middle-class elitism” of the anti-war movement and his lingering personal loyalty to Max Shachtman, who was an apologist for the war on anti-Communist grounds, prevented him from taking a more effective position against the war. Harrington came to regret his approach and broke with long-standing comrades like Shachtman and Rustin over it. As he put it in his memoirs, Rustin — a pacifist who educated King in the theory and practice of nonviolence in the 1950s — “made the wrong decision: to subordinate his anti-war convictions to what he became convinced were the imperatives of domestic coalition politics. He was wrong because this position assumed that the social programs could succeed while the war raged, and because it ignored one agony to deal with another.”

At the 1972 SP convention, Rustin and his allies defeated the faction around Harrington and a smaller faction known as the Debs Caucus, and changed the party’s name to Social Democrats, USA. Harrington and his allies resigned to form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, while the Debs Caucus formed the Socialist Party USA. Simply put, the Vietnam war was a moral abomination and a political disaster. It divided the labor movement, split the democratic Left, and dealt a fatal blow to the hopes for economic reconstruction outlined in the visionary Freedom Budget. King, in Harrington’s retrospective estimation, made the right decision. While King shared the aversion to Communism common among democratic socialists, he did not let this prevent him from demanding an immediate US withdrawal from Vietnam, even if this meant victory for the Communist-led National Liberation Front.

In his remarkable 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” King lacerated not just the US war in Vietnam, but the deeper spiritual decay the war represented. In laying waste to Vietnam, America wasn’t only destroying the lives and homes of millions of Vietnamese. Its war effort acted like a “demonic, destructive suction tube” wasting American lives and resources that could be put to far more constructive use at home. He denounced the US government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and called on Americans to “get on the right side of the world revolution” against “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” King paid a heavy price for his forthright condemnation of the war, isolating him from many he once considered to be allies. Yet over half a century later, this speech stands as a shining testament to King’s moral clarity and the international consciousness that suffused his democratic socialism.

Democratic internationalism requires frequent opposition to US foreign policy, which has too often wreaked havoc and destruction around the world. But democratic socialists like King never let this responsibility, nor their horror at the violence our government has so often unleashed, morph into the kind of radical alienation that drove the New Left’s most self-destructive tendencies. They were able to galvanize mass movements because their politics were grounded in an immanent critique of American society that, in Gramscian terms, transformed its “common sense” into “good sense” — a critical consciousness forged out of materials from the dominant ideology itself.

They called on the nation to actually live up to its democratic and egalitarian ethos, with no double standards based on race or anything else. The country had written a “promissory note” of freedom to all Americans, including those who were poor or Black, and they fully intended to collect on it. King made this plain in the speech he gave to striking Memphis sanitation workers the night before he was assassinated:

All we say to America is to be true to what you said on paper. If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they haven’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say we aren’t going to let any dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around.

The revolution of values that King called for in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech was, in important respects, an appeal to return to the country’s origins in a revolt against British imperialism. He pointed out the supreme irony of American support for counterrevolutionary movements in the post-colonial world. “It is a sad fact,” King lamented, “that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.” Communism’s appeal to revolutionaries in what was then called the Third World was, in King’s view, “a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

Once again, King identified himself with the country’s revolutionary, democratic heritage in order to criticize its conduct that much more effectively. In doing so, he held out the possibility of a positive, constructive role in the world for America — so long as people of conscience fought to build a more perfect union at home.

Shortly after King was assassinated in Memphis, his wife Coretta Scott King — a steadfast political activist in her own right — summed up the democratic, internationalist spirit that shaped her husband’s life and work. “He gave his life for the poor people of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam,” she eulogized. “The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace.”

King, Lawson, and other democratic socialists at the forefront of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements set an enduring example for those who seek to take up their banner. Their example inspired millions around the world, including democratic socialists in other countries. One of them was Sweden’s Social Democratic prime minister, Olof Palme, who got a first-hand look at American racism and the struggle against it while living in the US after World War II.

During an election campaign in the early 1980s, Palme declared:

I am proud and glad to be a democratic socialist. I became that when I traveled around India and saw the appalling poverty, contrasted with the immense wealth of a few; when I traveled around the United States and saw what in some ways was even more degrading poverty; when, as a young man, I saw at first hand the lack of freedom and the oppression and persecution in the Communist states; when I visited the Nazi concentration camps and saw death lists with the names of Social Democrats and trade unionists.

During his two stints as prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, Palme was critical of political repression in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc while opposing the Vietnam war, supporting Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, supporting national liberation movements in Latin America and Africa, and backing the Palestinians’ struggle against Israeli occupation.

The challenge for democratic internationalists is to vigorously oppose our own government’s actions whenever necessary, while avoiding a self-defeating alienation from our own country. It means opposing interstate rivalry in principle, holding all the powers of the world to a single standard while supporting all genuine movements for democracy and justice however we can.

Democratic Socialism in the 21st Century

Democratic socialism, as I have described it here, is a distinct political tradition grounded in three core elements: a vision of democratic socialization, a strategic emphasis on social alliances and coalition politics, and a commitment to democratic internationalism. It has roots in a democratic interpretation of Marxism but draws on a diverse array of ideological and intellectual sources, including a deep well of religious commitment as exemplified in the civil rights movement, where democratic socialists like Martin Luther King played leading roles. Finally, democratic socialists in the United States have, particularly since the New Deal, treated the left wing of liberalism as an important ally because that is largely where popular movements for social change, including the labor movement, have been politically organized.

Democratic socialists are enormously fortunate to have this tradition to draw upon, for it furnishes valuable intellectual, political, and moral resources rooted in our country’s history and culture, and which already have a deep resonance with millions of people who aren’t socialists. Why look to tsarist Russia or imperial Germany for guides to practical action when we have our own movements and traditions to learn from?

The examples I have recounted here nearly all come from the twentieth century. It is fair to ask how (or even whether) this tradition is relevant in the twenty-first century, where we confront crises and dilemmas our forebears scarcely could have foreseen. One often hears that the crises of the century don’t afford us enough time for the sort of politics outlined here. Majoritarian, democratic politics can be slow and painstaking, and the political system we have in the US places many barriers in its path. Faced with the truncated timetables of the climate crisis, propaganda of the deed and other minority strategies born of a sense of desperation may well find a renewed appeal. But actions born of despair are far more likely to facilitate the imposition of some sort of authoritarian statism than anything else.

Are the ideas and strategies our democratic socialist predecessors left behind adequate to the tasks we face? With certain modifications and adjustments, I think they are.

To begin with, the electoral revival of American socialism vindicates many of our predecessors’ strategic conceptions. The realignment that they and many others fought for — the polarization of the Democratic and Republican parties, with Southern reactionaries pushed from the former to the latter — actually happened. It did not necessarily have the effect many hoped for at the time, not least because it happened at precisely the moment organized labor entered a long period of defeat and decline. In recent years, however, the Left has used primary elections to oust moderate Democrats, replace them with socialists and progressives, and start winning victories for working people and the climate.

There is still much further to go in this regard. The Left has won a surprising number of successes in a short period of time, but it needs to keep growing its geographical and social base. If pushing the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic coalition was round one of the process, confronting the neoliberals and winning a leadership position for the progressive Left — including, but not limited to, democratic socialists — is round two.

This electoral project’s chances of success would be enormously improved if the current glimmers of labor movement revitalization continue to brighten. Unions are more popular than they have ever been, young workers are showing a marked interest in organizing across sectors, and two of the largest private sector unions — the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers — are now led by reform administrations who put a strong emphasis on organization and struggle. These are still just glimmers. We are probably not on the verge of a big bang in union organizing on the scale of the 1930s. But the fruitful interplay of left-wing electoral insurgency with the renewed stirrings of labor organization provides grounds for hope. If these trends continue to reinforce and propel each other, the dynamic left-labor alliance that earlier generations of democratic socialists worked so hard to build could become a renewed political force.

One area of strategic consideration our predecessors did not pay enough attention to is how to transform state institutions outside of electoral politics and representative bodies. Here is where US democratic socialists can learn quite a bit from our counterparts in the Global South, like Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra, MST). The sociologist Rebecca Tarlau developed the concept of “contentious co-governance” based on her study of the MST, which has been dealing with these issues in a highly challenging political environment for nearly forty years. For Tarlau, contentious co-governance is “not just implementing a reform, you are having a social movement enter an institution as part of a broader plan for social change.” Protest, pressure, and negotiation continues to keep reforms moving forward after legislation has been passed.

This is especially the case when political opponents win elections, but it can sometimes entail conflict with allies in public office. It also entails winning footholds within the agencies and institutions of the state itself, not just elected offices in representative bodies. “State power exists in a lot of different spaces,” Tarlau observes, “so we need to think about how we can solidify a movement and then find the spheres of state power in which we might be able to wield some control.”

The MST does this primarily through educational institutions; there are many other potential sites of power building in addition to this obvious example. The democratic Left must continue to elect democratic socialists to office, but this is just one aspect of the project of democratic socialization. We must also, as Nicos Poulantzas insisted, increase the “intervention of the popular masses in the state: certainly through their trade union and political forms of representation, but also through their own initiatives within the state itself.” The War on Poverty arguably made a tentative, highly contentious move in this direction through its Community Action Agencies, which were intended to facilitate the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor and oppressed in the local administration of federally-funded health, medical, job training, and education programs. It also provided funding for local civil rights organizations, which often used these resources to challenge entrenched political machines and business interests. The growing crop of democratic socialist legislators and policymakers should study the history of maximum feasible participation and work to implement updated versions of it in our own time.

The US Left has a proud heritage and a usable past – the democratic socialist tradition. It is a precious legacy, deeply intertwined with our country’s history and culture, with much to say about our current moment. Let us embrace it, learn from it, and continue building on it together.

The post A Precious Legacy appeared first on Socialist Forum.

Rounding the bend to election, DSA endorses SIX candidates with Boston DSA! First off, check out Joel Richards running for Boston City Council, District 3 – going head to head with conservative interests. Joel is looking to consolidate left/progressive support after coming in second in the primary.

Dan Totten is an active DSA member running for Cambridge City Council, whose top priorities are reducing homelessness, universal afterschool care, and raising the minimum wage for city workers.

Also running for Cambridge City Council, Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler joins the rest of Boston’s “sidewalk socialist” crew, also focusing on housing justice and afterschool care. With robust labor support, he’ll support organizing on the shop floor and the streets.

Running for Medford City Council, Zac Bears is focusing on better funding for city services, housing and displacement, and enhancing city democracy. He’s been endorsed by Our Revolution, the Environmental League of Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Labor Council.

Somerville City Council incumbent Willie Burnley, Jr. has passed significant legislation expanding rights for tenants and workers and increasing protections for LGBTQ+ folks with first-in-the nation non-discrimination ordinances.

Also a Somerville City Council incumbent, JT Scott has been a champion for DSA and has regularly met with the chapter’s Socialists in Office committee. His platform includes transparency around new development, affordable housing, and defunding the police.

DSA joins Houston DSA in endorsing Proposition A for the November 7 general election, which will enable three or more city councilmembers to amend council meeting agendas. The current charter creates a functionally impossible barrier for any elected official other than the mayor to set the agenda.

Greater accountability means minding the details of government process – democracy is in the details!

By the Young Democratic Socialists of America at UW-Madison

We all know the conservative shtick by now. The right-wing organizations on campuses across the nation invite inflammatory, hateful, and reactionary talking heads to promote their bigotry and cry victim each time a student protest is mounted against them.

According to Nick Baker of YAF, our organization is “appalled that someone with different views than their own would be allowed to step foot on campus”. Seems like an inaccurate oversimplification of the situation, but what else would you expect? Because obviously it’s not about a simple difference of opinion. When Matt Walsh spoke a year ago at UW-Madison, Walsh promoted his anti-scientific, anti-trans documentary and YAF inciters took it upon themselves to put up posters advertising the event in spaces of inclusion on campus. Walsh delightfully praised this behavior and suggested the targets of his event ought to be (forcibly) exposed to this material, should it be taxing on their mental health (which, by the way, is not how therapeutic exposure works, but again what can you expect?).

These folks intend to provoke and terrorize. They know they make marginalized people of all backgrounds uncomfortable and unwelcomed with their events. They thrive on people’s fear, yet they have the audacity to condemn us for ensuring their bigotry and lies receive a decided unwelcome from the solidaric union of university students who instead embrace diversity, equality and justice.

Ben Shapiro founded the Daily Wire and has employed other hateful folks, such as Candace Owens, Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh. Owens, like other contemporary conservatives, has tried to redeem nationalist ideology. She sported “White Lives Matter” jackets with Kanye West, who devolved into white supremacist politics. Owens also declared she has a “great contempt” for transgender people. Knowles said transgenderism must be “eradicated” and was panned for promulgating trans genocide. Matt Walsh has echoed several white nationalist talking points, describing diversity as “anti-white”, and entertaining the great replacement theory. Ben Shapiro patronized and vilified trans people in his career, and does not support equal rights for partners of same-sex. Shapiro also virulently advocates for the settler-colonialism of Israel and actively justifies the slaughter of Palestinian people. The matrix system of control that Israel imposed on Palestinian people is inexcusable and indefensible. Occupation is a crime, and Zionism and racial segregation are fascism; it is also not hard to see with the far-right ideologies and alliances with far-right European political parties the Israeli state harbors.

Our point is, conservatives aim to ‘restore and preserve tradition’ and they know that means discrimination and inequality. The banner of conservatism is a masquerade and facade for folks like YAF to propagate and normalize hateful, fascist and white supremacist ideologies into mainstream discourse. We will not let that happen.

We reiterate: the views and values YAF demands you to respect and allow to permeate onto our campus are dangerous and harmful to the UW community. As the Young Democratic Socialists of America at UW-Madison, we will not welcome fascists on our campus. We stand in solidarity with queer, indigenous, people of color, marginalized and oppressed people and victims of hate. We don’t believe their rights are here for debate and we vow that fascism will never win the day. Please join us Monday at 5:30 pm in front of the MemU in solidarity if you support our mission.

The Green New Deal Campaign Commission and Chapters that are Building for Power have been up to a lot the past two months….!

Chapter & Campaign Updates

New Chapters are Building for Power

We’re so excited to announced three new chapter campaigns that are Building for Power! Regional membership bodies passed the following Green-New-Deal-style priority campaings at the chapter level:

• Chicago DSA, Fix the CTA: Organizing alongside Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) workers in Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Locals 308 and 241 in their contract fight to not only bring service back to normal but also implement a vision that expands our transit system and transforms current working conditions.
• Charlottesville DSA, Build 4 Power with Cville DSA Land Trust Advocacy: Mount strategic pressure to convince Charlottesville’s City Council & City Manager to commit to increasing their investment in purchasing land and buying multi-family homes for the Piedmont Community Land Trust (PCLT) and other affordable housing partners such as Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA).
• St. Louis DSA, A Green New Deal for St. Louis, Starting with Our Schools: A new GND Working Group will engage with teacher and labor unions, school boards, and PTO groups, to demand investment in public schools: hiring union contractors to electrify and decarbonize school buildings, employ unionized public works employees to maintain and expand green community spaces, provide raises and resources to teachers who have long struggled for them, significantly expand wraparound services for students and their families, and expand the capacity of public schools to offer emergency relief during climate change-related and other disasters.

We’ll be working with these chapters to refine their demands, assess strategy, and provide material resources.

Building and Building for Power

Chapters we’re working with have made huge strides in their work the last few months. On the labor front, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1447 in Kentucky became public-facing partners with Louisville DSA’s transit campaign “Get on the Bus, Fund TARC“! Our commission sees working lock-step with labor as a critical part of DSA’s work:

Meanwhile, Milwaukee DSA is charging ahead with its Power to the People campaign, which the Milwaukee Teacher’s Education Association officially endorsed in October!

#ICYMI MTEA has endorsed our Power To The People campaign! Join us tomorrow at 6pm for the next phone bank! RSVP: https://t.co/AVOsWXq9uu pic.twitter.com/LnXzxyqt2h

— MilwaukeeDSA (@mkedsa) October 18, 2023

In September, we provided funds for Milwaukee to print bi-lingual flyers for a town-hall which got over 100 RSPVs from English and Spanish speaking community members. To date, Milwaukee DSA has collected over 50,000 signatures in support of public power.

Chapter Organizing

Mid-West Regional Organizing Retreat

In October, DSA hosted a Regional Organizing Retreat for mid-western chapters in Milwaukee. GND Steering Committee Member Soleil S. presented on our campaign mandate. A dozen attendees then joined her in a breakout session to discuss winning a green new deal in their cities and states.

Chapter Campaign Huddles

Organizing is a muscle that needs to be exercised like any other. And jumping into campaign mode without learning the right techniques can lead to treading water and burnout. So every month, we host an hour-long “campaign huddle” session where we not only give B4P campaign updates, but also review key organizing strategies.

Last month, we reviewed the Organizing Bullseye and challenged organizers to assess if they have been moving people to the center — turning supporters into activists and activists into core leaders. Some participants came to the conclusion that they are not! As organizers, it’s imperative we take hard looks at our work and change course when things are not working.

If this sounds like the kind of conversation you need to have, join us every last Wednesday of the month at 8pm ET.

Commission Updates

New Steering Committee

Per our 2023 Priority Resolution passed at Convention, we have a new 15-member steering committee for the 2025-2025 term. The body represents a wide cross-section of chapters, including YDSA, and internal and external organizing experience. Meet the new leadership here.

Green New Dues

In October, our body hosted a “Green New Dues” dues drive as part of a convention mandate to “give 1% for the 99%.” We made over 801 calls asking members to pay 1% of their income to DSA dues; 40% of our conversations ended with a yes!

If you’re a member, will you step up to the challenge and help build the powerful mass working class organization we need to win by switching to Solidarity Income-Based Dues today?

Maine Public Power Convening

From October 19-22, more than 60 organizers representing 45 groups from across the country converged in Portland, Maine to learn, strategize, and collaborate on how to win public power. They also textbanked and canvassed for Maine’s upcoming Pine Tree Power ballot initiative.

Steering Committe members Lake L., KC C., and Matt H. went as reps of the Green New Deal Campaign Commission. They handed out brochures and provided a truncated version of our training series for attendees.

What a fall! Sign up for our mailing list to get updates and resources delivered to your inbox.

Regular listeners of Revolutions per Minute will be familiar with our coverage of Palestine solidarity work within the Democratic Socialists of America. We recognize that the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the violence of settler colonial displacement are both ongoing. Tonight, our coverage continues with a live conversation with Sumaya and Daphna, two NYC-DSA members and organizers with deep experience in Palestine solidarity work.

We discuss this month’s outbreak of violence in Palestine and Israel, which has led to the genocidal and illegal bombardment of Gaza happening as we speak. Socialists in New York and across the country have joined forces with the multi-cultural, international movement for Palestine solidarity, with hundreds of thousands flooding the streets of major cities, conducting civil disobedience, and calling on the country’s leadership to end United States support for Israel and a ceasefire now. Join us to learn more about why Palestine liberation is a priority for socialists. 

Visit https://socialists.nyc/no-money-for-massacres/ to find an upcoming NYC-DSA-endorsed solidarity phone bank or action. Visit gazaispalestine.com to find or post an upcoming protest in your city anywhere in the United States.

by Gumbo

The DSA international Committee (IC) sent a delegation to Cuba in October 2023. Austin DSA member and former Justice of the Peace candidate, Andrew Hairston, went. Gumbo discussed the trip with Andrew before they left.

Gumbo: Why were you interested in going with the Cuba delegation?

Hairston: I’ve been to Mexico and to Jamaica and I have always been fascinated by the way that Cuba and Cubans have sustained themselves under U.S. embargo. I applied on a whim after the IC announced the trip at the DSA convention and I really wanted to go not just as a tourist, but as an organizer and as someone with so much to learn about the struggle of the Cuban people to build and preserve socialism.

Gumbo: So you’ve been outside the U.S. before – what about the Cuba trip makes this different for you?

Hairston: I don’t speak much Spanish, so I’m going to be building the plan as we fly it on that front. I’m excited to be going as a socialist, as a member of DSA, and as an organizer. There was a point in my life where I think I would’ve been a socialist organizer sooner but after my experience running for office as a socialist and now as a rank-and-file member of the organization, that’s really come full circle for me.

At one point in law school, I was reading about socialism and having these conversations with my classmates. “Maybe capitalism is the problem. Maybe we need to build socialism or just something different,” and a classmate from Miami with Cuban ancestry, rebuffed me and told me how it was a horrible ideology and how Fidel Castro and Che Guevara murdered thousands of people and so I just tucked that political awakening away. There is another comrade in the delegation who I organized with years ago, so in many ways this trip feels like coming full circle for me in my political journey.

Gumbo: What are you most looking forward to on the Cuba delegation?

Hairston: First and foremost, just being among the people. I think that we’re going to see just how wrong all of the U.S. propaganda about Cuba really is. I’ve heard we’ll be touring a vaccine manufacturing plant and I know Cuba was key to creating and distributing a vaccine that was available to U.S. foes. We are also touring an elementary school and we were encouraged to bring school supplies. To me, that’s the best part of this trip: we aren’t just going to be tourists, we’re going to learn and to build relationships and to practice that solidarity that we are always talking about at home.

There’s another element to it too, an emotional and familial element. I pray with my family every Thursday over FaceTime and it’s a way for me to stay close with my mom and my sister and niece. When I broke the news a few weeks ago about going to Cuba, it launched a wider conversation with my family about socialism and my political views. My family lives in a rural part of a deeply conservative state. They’ve been so deeply harmed by this system of private property in the United States. My aunt has perennially dirty water, and she  has had to fight to keep her house. They stand to gain so much from a politics rooted in the land that they live on and the work that they do, and I’m really excited to come back from the delegation with even more to talk to them about.

Gumbo: Speaking of your family and your position as a Black comrade in the Southern U.S., how do you feel that your relationship to race and religion and region has played into your expectations for the trip?

Hairston: For starters, I think if this opportunity had come up for me just a year ago, I would have tried to push boundaries a little harder: try to bring more supplies through the embargo, or bring more goods back, some cigars or something. But now, I am just a sober Baptist deacon and I’m content. I really felt called to the spiritual grounding of my dad and the 148-year-old Black church that I minister at. There is a 101-year-old Black woman who comes every single Sunday and I get to see the joy in her face when she tells me stories of what it was like to grow up in Austin so long ago.

At times I am reticent to say that I’m doing this [political] work for Black people, but unequivocally I am. I want a better world that is built in part by and for Black people and I try to bring that into my ministry as well, talking at church about how the main reason that Black people have come as far as they have is because of a socialist struggle against racial capitalism.

I am looking forward to reading more about the historical relationship between the Cuban people’s struggle for liberation and the struggle of Black people in the United States. I know Castro was welcomed with open arms and wide smiles in Harlem in the 1960s and that the roots run deep. I’m also glad to be embedded in DSA to have the resources to be learning and pursuing all of this work.

Gumbo: Were there any special hoops you had to jump through, or any particular difficulties you faced in preparing to visit Cuba?

Hairston: Surprisingly less than you might think! We are registered as visiting the island and I had to get my passport renewed and everything as you usually would, but so far it has all been pretty straightforward. The most difficult part was the fundraiser, because within 24 hours of setting up a fundraiser page on PayPal, it was flagged and taken down. About 72 hours later, PayPal said, “hey explain this page or your account might be compromised.” It wasn’t easy to raise money because of the material impacts of the embargo.

The IC leadership organizing the trip also warned the delegates to expect to be accosted when we return about what we were “really doing” while we were there. Like I said, a younger me might have pushed those boundaries and said, “Man we were down there building international solidarity and socialism!” But I plan on just getting through that process slick and smooth. Speaking of those material impacts of the embargo, the IC also said not to expect the best of food while we’re there, because they don’t have access to the same array of spices and sugar and salt and all that we have come to expect here in the States.

I do think that there was an inherent racial disparity involved in that having the money to front for the delegation was more difficult for Black and brown people, but I am grateful for my comrades who helped me figure it out and scrape things together. I have some recommendations I plan to make to the IC once we return, but right now my sights are set squarely on learning as much as I possibly can from the wonderful people of Cuba about practicing the world we all hope to build, and I’m looking forward to the hard interpersonal conversations with my family, my friends, and my comrades once we’re back home.

The DSA 2023 Cuba Delegation visited the island from 22 – 26 October 2023 under the leadership of the International Committee. When they’ve settled back in at home, Gumbo plans to sit down with Andrew again to talk about how the reality of the visit lived up to the expectations, the things he learned, and the wisdom they want to impart on Austin DSA.

The post Austinite Joins DSA Delegation to Cuba first appeared on Red Fault.

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