Purpose

As a volunteer, democratically run, socialist organization we are dedicated to building a majority movement that will make democratic socialism a reality in America for the working class. We are committed to creating a safe, respectful and inclusive space for our members and comrades in both our online and in person interactions. We expect everyone who joins our chat server to abide by the following community standards.  

“Better things are in store for us. The world ever moves onward. Get into the fray. Do your part, and you will soon see the results of your efforts. Don’t expect all Socialists to be either perfect human beings or to think exactly as you do. Learn to overlook the shortcomings of your comrades. Remember we are fighting for a better system, not to make all men uniform or perfect. Filled with a conviction of right, resolved with a determination to win, nothing can stop the onward march of this movement for a higher civilization until final victory is achieved.”

Daniel Hoan, “The Failure Of Regulation”

1. Community Agreement

By joining our chat server, you agree to follow these community standards and to respect the decisions of the moderators, Harassment and Grievance Officers (HGOs), and admins. Anyone who violates these standards may be warned, muted, kicked or banned from the chat server at the discretion of the moderators, HGOs, and admins. The moderators, HGOs, and admins reserve the right to update or modify these standards at any time with prior notice.

Thank you for being part of our community and for making it a better place for everyone.

2. Community Guidelines

The following guidelines are strongly recommended best practices for community discussion. Many of these guidelines are modified from DSA Guidelines for Respectful Discussion. Repeated failure to abide by the guidelines may result in moderation actions. (see Policy: Internal Communication and Moderation section IV.)  

1. Assume good faith in your fellow comrades

Assume good faith in each other. Please try to speak from experience, speak for yourself, and actively listen to each other. When someone makes a point, repeat what you heard, summarize, and ask clarifying questions like “did you mean X” or “what makes you say that” to get more information. Encourage yourself and others to maintain a positive attitude, honor the work of others, avoid defensiveness, be open to legitimate critique and challenge oppressive behaviors in ways that help people grow. We want to “call each other in” rather than calling each other out — in other words, if you are challenging someone’s ideas or behavior, do it respectfully, and if you are being challenged, receive it respectfully. Remember, mistakes will be made, nobody is perfect.

2. Please ask yourself “Why am I talking?”

While the internet is infinite, we all have limited capacity/time for discussion and engagement. When in discussion, please ask yourself “What am I adding to the conversation?” Consider whether or not what you want to say has already been said, whether what you want to say is on topic or if there’s a better time and place to say it, and other methods for showing how you feel about the conversation (eg. ‘liking’ or reacting to other’s posts)

3. Please recognize and respect others feelings, background, and cultural differences

Many people have different levels of experience, knowledge, and feelings in social justice and radical activism and all participants should respect and embrace this diversity. Many people from different backgrounds have different definitions of what it means to be an “activist” or “radical.” While we all don’t have to agree on everything, we should respect our diversity of opinions. Recognize that everyone has a piece of the truth, everybody can learn, and everybody has the ability to teach and share something. Please, refrain from using acronyms or complicated language that could exclude others, and be ready to explain your meaning in good faith if your comrades are confused.

4. Be respectful of diversity and difference. 

Celebrate the diversity of our members and comrades and the richness of their cultures, backgrounds and experiences. Do not make any assumptions or judgments based on stereotypes or prejudices.

5. Be constructive and supportive. 

Share your ideas, feedback and resources in a positive and helpful manner. Respect the purpose and goals of each channel and topic.

6. Be responsible and accountable. 

For sensitive discussions, please take them offline or to an encrypted platform

7. Be mindful of how you present yourself online. 

It is important to organize to communicate online with members and beyond, know that it is different to interacting through voice or person to person, and some nuances may get lost in the digital space.

8. Be open and willing to learn. 

Recognize that we are all here to build a better world for everyone. Do not assume that you know everything or that you are always right. Listen to different perspectives and experiences and be open to feedback and criticism.

9. Please be mindful of what time you are sending messages into the chat server. Depending on urgency, try not to send messages to members between the hours of 10pm-6am
10. Please keep your screen name consistent with the name you introduce yourself with in meetings. It does not have to be your legal name, it can be a nickname.
11. Have a sense of humor

Who said movement building can’t be fun?  This is a great opportunity for people to get to know one another, building lasting friendships and relationships, to laugh, love, and build a movement.

12. Report any violations or concerns to the moderators, HGOs, or admins.
13. Community Standards

The following standards are required for anyone participating in online discussion in Milwaukee DSA forums. Any failure to abide by these standards will result in moderation actions (see Policy: Internal Communication and Moderation section IV.)  

1. Do not insult, harass, bully, threaten or discriminate against anyone based on their identity, beliefs, class, opinions or experiences.
2. Do not spam, troll, derail or disrupt the conversations. 
3. Do not share any confidential, personal or sensitive information without permission, (including names and contact information) 
4. Do not make posts showing nudity, or other “not safe for work” content. 
5. Do not engage in any other  illegal, unethical, or harmful activities on the chapter server. 
6. Do not make any comments/posts which could reasonably be interpreted as encouraging or threatening violence
7. Report any violations or concerns to the moderators, HGOs, or admins.
8. Do not argue about moderation decisions outside of direct messages. Moderation actions can be appealed to the HGOs. See Procedure: Moderation Appeal. 

By TZ

Citizens are outraged at Congress for wielding its power in the abusive manner we have witnessed for decades. The Patriot Act routinely violates the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments and leads us to the breaking point we are subjected to today. Frustrations increased exponentially with ICE invading communities, and citizens distrust the government more than ever.

It is important to remember that your federal representative does not hold all levers of power. Activists are protesting and arguing with city officials around the country, attempting to block ICE from infiltrating their communities. During these battles, it is often forgotten that traditional government positions (such as state and federal representatives, senators, mayors) are not the only officials with power to fight ICE. Positions such as superintendents, park directors, library boards can all exercise some level of their power against ICE. An institution that has taken a step in the right direction is Royal Oak School District. On January 29, the District announced new safety protocols that create a much sterner, strict approach for ICE and Border Patrol (CBP).

Key points within these new safety protocols will protect staff, students, and families in the community. First, any ICE and CBP agent that appears at a school building will be properly identified and redirected to the Board Office, and met by the superintendent, legal counsel, and local law enforcement.

Second, if the agents refuse this and attempt to enter the school anyway, the building will enter lockdown mode, which is the safety protocol enacted when an active threat has entered the building or is on school grounds.

Lastly, if ICE or CBP appear during arrival or departure times, the building will enter lockdown mode and an emergency alert will be sent to all families notifying them of the presence of federal agents. The same team — the superintendent, legal counsel, and local law enforcement — would meet the agents on school grounds.

This protocol was in addition to some guidance in the fall on how to speak with federal agents if needed. This included contacting administrators, protecting identities of all students, and requiring a legal warrant signed by a judge.

This protocol creates reasonable guidelines that should be expected of any school district, but not all districts do so. It is imperative for citizens to ask for their school district’s safety plans for ICE/CBP, and to demand more from the school board and superintendent if they are lacking. Schools are able to provide strict protection of students and have the capabilities to alert families as well.

It is important to note that this policy has not been tested yet — there have not been any federal agents on school grounds in Royal Oak. It is unknown who the Royal Oak police will truly side with if the situation occurs. Police departments across the country have not exactly given citizens reason to trust police to protect them from lawless federal agents.

A superintendent and/or school board using some of their limited power to create safeguards in their community against fascism is a perfect example of power that citizens can direct their attention to. Royal Oak is a community known for leaning liberal — — parents and students were outraged last fall when a Turning Point USA Chapter was created at Royal Oak High School, resulting in student walkouts and protests. Students consistently protesting fascist issues and citizens demanding transparency from the Royal Oak City Commission helps pressure school district officials into creating policies, or shows they will have support for such protections when they create them. Activism is not only about forcing those who are resistant to make positive change, but also about providing support for those who are hesitant to make bold moves.

Local institutions like schools, libraries, and parks can be some very specific zones that citizens can pressure to create protective policies for their community. After all, change often happens from the bottom up. Readers interested in stricter ICE protocol in their local school district should gather a coalition of like-minded parents and citizens to voice their concerns at school board meetings. The same approach can be applied for city commissions, library boards, etc. The more businesses, institutions, and citizens that take stances against ICE, the more likely a city or state is to create a safer protocol.

School Districts Can Oppose ICE was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Ashraf Hazeyen

Every semester, the adjunct professor walks into the classroom carrying the full symbolic weight of the university while possessing almost none of its protections. They enter with a syllabus, readings, assignments, office hours, and the responsibility of making a discipline feel alive to students who may never know the terms of their employment. In that room, they are the university’s voice, its care, and its promise that thought still matters. Then the class ends, the students leave, the emails continue, and the institution that needed them for its mission offers only a temporary place in its life.

Adjunct professors are contingent, non-tenure-track faculty members usually hired on temporary contracts to teach specific courses. They often perform the central work of the university itself: preparing classes, teaching, grading, mentoring, and sustaining intellectual life in the classroom, while frequently lacking the security and institutional protections attached to permanent academic positions.

Their labor is usually described through numbers: wages per course, lack of benefits, unstable contracts, and the uncertainty of whether another class will appear next semester. These numbers matter because they shape rent, health care, debt, family planning, and the ordinary dignity of imagining a future. The numbers tell the truth, but not the whole truth. The adjunct is present where the university performs its mission and unsettled where the university distributes continuity, status, and institutional memory.

This arrangement did not appear by accident. According to data from the American Association of University Professors, nearly 75 percent of instructional staff in American higher education now work outside the tenure system. Contingency no longer exists at the edges of academic life; it increasingly defines the structure through which the university teaches, adapts, and reproduces itself. Universities rely on adjunct and contingent appointments to sustain undergraduate teaching at lower long-term cost even as administrative structures and managerial layers continue to expand.  The system grew inside a university increasingly shaped by enrollment management, administrative expansion, budget flexibility, weakened tenure lines, and the treatment of teaching as adjustable capacity. As institutions planned around fluctuating numbers, shifting programs, and market pressure, contingent labor became the convenient answer to problems described as managerial necessities. The language of efficiency made the transformation sound practical. The cost appeared inside the lives of teachers whose work remained central to the classroom and peripheral to the institution’s durable commitments. Adjunctification taught the university how to preserve its public promise of intellectual depth while relocating the risks of that promise onto the people asked to carry it.

Adaptability has become one of the preferred moral words of modern institutions. For administrators, it means efficiency, responsiveness, and quick adjustment when budgets, enrollment, or priorities shift. For workers, it enters life as fragmentation: a late-changing schedule, a future waiting on approval, a household organized around uncertain income, and a self repeatedly bent around institutional need. The institution calls it adjustment. The worker lives it as interruption. Some lives never gather long enough to become continuous.

Precarity reaches the whole person. Wages matter because they shape rent, food, health, transportation, debt, and the daily conditions of dignity. Unstable labor also enters planning, confidence, family life, intellectual growth, and the person’s sense of continuity. A worker who lives from contract to contract learns to measure life in short intervals. Decisions about housing, children, research, care, rest, and hope pass through the narrow gate of the next assignment. Work organizes the kind of person a future can still produce. When work keeps the future provisional, the worker’s life gathers itself under pressure, always carrying the next uncertainty before it arrives.

Adjunct labor names more than an employment category. It reorganizes the conditions under which teaching, study, and sustained inquiry become possible. The modern university still presents itself as a space devoted to reflection, dialogue, criticism, and public purpose while building much of its educational structure around conditional presence and temporary labor. The contradiction enters the classroom every day. Institutions celebrate thought in mission statements, public speeches, and recruitment materials while placing many of the people responsible for sustaining that work inside unstable conditions.

This instability reaches beyond contracts and salaries. The adjunct belongs intensely to the classroom: to the students, the discussion, the readings, the long hours of preparation, and the fragile moment when an idea begins to matter for someone. Their labor turns institutional promises into lived experience while their own place inside the institution remains uncertain. They assemble academic life from borrowed offices, temporary schedules, short appointments, and partial recognition. The instability spreads across space, time, memory, and the long movement through which serious thought gathers shape and continuity.

Spatial instability begins where academic life is expected to continue after class. The adjunct teaches in the building, walks its hallways, answers students’ questions, writes recommendations, and carries much of the university’s daily teaching responsibility while remaining temporary inside the institution they help sustain. Their labor fills the space with meaning, yet the campus gives that labor only a passing address. A student stays after class to discuss a paper, a family crisis, or a sentence in a difficult text that opened a new way of seeing. The conversation happens beside the classroom door, over a library table, in a shared room between appointments, or later inside an email thread. This is the geography of adjunct labor: a living presence carried through borrowed rooms, hallway conversations, and whatever corner the campus leaves available.

Temporal homelessness organizes life through a future that arrives in fragments. The adjunct plans by semester, by enrollment, by contract, by the late appearance of a course on a schedule. January can carry one life, August another. A class opens, fills, shrinks, disappears, or becomes possible only after the budget permits it. One week, the teacher revises a syllabus with care; the next, he checks enrollment numbers, waits for a contract, coordinates travel between campuses, or wonders whether a course that shaped their plans will survive long enough to shape their semester. The university asks them to cultivate duration in others: patience, discipline, growth, intellectual confidence, the ability to think beyond the immediate moment. It places their own duration under semesterly review. That is the temporal wound: the adjunct helps students build futures inside an institution that grants their future one term at a time. Continuity exists for others first.

Intellectual homelessness appears where institutional dependence and institutional recognition move along different paths. Adjuncts shape students’ confidence, curiosity, discipline, and intellectual development while occupying temporary positions inside the institutions they help sustain. Their labor becomes part of the university’s public image of teaching excellence, student care, and transformative education, while permanence gathers around titles, committees, offices, governance structures, and institutional memory. The same instability enters the life of the mind. The adjunct begins again through new courses, new schedules, and new administrative thresholds. Serious thought develops through duration, return, and sustained relation. Teaching gains force through repeated encounters with students, texts, disagreement, failure, and revision. Precarity interrupts that movement before it accumulates weight. The university has built a system in which the labor of inquiry educates others while searching for a dwelling of its own.

Universities still speak beautifully about rigor, and those words still matter. They promise knowledge, transformation, critical thinking, mentorship, citizenship, and lifelong learning. At their best, these words name real human possibilities. A classroom can change the way a student reads the world, and a university can become one of the few places where a society pauses long enough to ask what kind of life is worth building. The fracture begins when this public language of rigor meets a private organization of disposability. The institution celebrates growth, inquiry, and mentorship while arranging much of its teaching labor through temporary contracts, shifting schedules, and adjustable teaching bodies.

The transformation reaches beyond employment structure. The persistence of adjunctification at financially stable institutions makes the pattern difficult to explain through scarcity alone. Large endowments, expanding administrative structures, and visible institutional growth often coexist beside increasing reliance on contingent faculty labor. The university preserves permanence unevenly, concentrating stability in some areas while normalizing uncertainty in others. Universities continue to describe themselves as spaces devoted to knowledge, reflection, and long-term inquiry while increasing dependence on contingent labor organized around flexibility, cost efficiency, and short-term institutional adaptation. Teaching remains publicly celebrated as central to the university’s mission even as the conditions surrounding teaching grow increasingly unstable. The contradiction gradually reshapes the meaning of academic life itself.

Many students experience the university through courses taught by adjuncts, lecturers, visiting instructors, and contingent faculty who carry much of the university’s everyday intellectual labor. They design assignments, guide discussions, grade carefully, meet students in moments of uncertainty, and translate the institution’s mission into actual encounters. Their labor gives coherence to the student experience. The arrangement carries its own pressure: the institution offers students stability through teachers whose own place inside the institution remains conditional.

Time allows ideas to accumulate weight. Thought develops through return, revision, disagreement, silence, and sustained attention. Teaching changes through repeated contact with students, texts, failures, and difficult questions that refuse quick resolution. Universities understand this rhythm well. Their public language praises rigor, inquiry, mentorship, reflection, and careful study. Their labor structures increasingly organize classrooms through speed, replacement, short-term contracts, and administrative flexibility. Knowledge loses durability when institutions build the conditions of teaching around interruption. Adjunctification exposes the contradiction clearly: universities celebrate inquiry in public while placing much of the labor that sustains inquiry inside unstable conditions. 

The crisis begins with adjuncts and opens onto a broader question about modern work. Adjunctification is no longer only a university labor problem; it is becoming one of the models through which modern life organizes human beings: necessary, available, temporary, and always adjustable. A society reveals its priorities through the conditions it gives to the people who sustain its most serious tasks. When teachers live provisionally, thought itself begins to inherit the structure of provisional life. Courses continue, students learn, institutions function, and the surface remains intact. The damage survives below visibility. Beneath that surface, something essential thins out: memory, depth, mentorship, intellectual courage, and the durable relation between a society and the people entrusted with its formation.

The adjunct remains one of the clearest figures of modern work: necessary, available, present, and permanently adjustable.

Dr. Ashraf Hazeyen is a Palestinian-Jordanian philosopher, political commentator for Roya News, and adjunct professor at the University of Rhode Island.

The post Intellectual Homelessness: The Adjunct and the Disappearing University appeared first on Working Mass.

by Anna V.

Meat is expensive. It always has been. Prices are higher, sure, but it’s never really been cheap. Many people don’t think of it as the most expensive item but ounce for ounce it is. It’s why when you go to a hotel breakfast buffet the meat will generally be placed at the very end so you fill your plate with the less expensive fruit and bagels and can’t get as much of the pricier sausage and bacon. 

The reason meat costs so much is due to the amount of resources needed to produce it. Before you can slaughter a cow you need to give it feed made from corn and soybeans for one to two years.  Grass fed beef is even more expensive as it takes longer to get a cow up to slaughter weight on grass alone. This is why multiple studies have found that vegetarian diets can be less expensive, because instead of feeding soy beans to a cow for a year or more you can just make them into tofu.

That’s why it is concerning that the new USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans increase the protein recommendations and are emphasizing eating beef – as well as the similarly expensive dairy – to meet those new recommendations. 

It would be one thing if these changes were backed by science, but most nutrition experts heavily disagree with these guidelines. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics released a statement expressing concerns over the new recommendations (source).  Furthermore, the guidelines actually contradict themselves. For example, they keep the recommendation from the previous guidelines to keep saturated fats consumption under 10% of total calorie consumption. However, in the list of recommended cooking fats are “beef tallow, butter, and olive oil,” two of which are saturated fats. Not only would canola and soybean oil be healthier, but they are less expensive, so it seems the new guidelines are going out of their way to make Americans spend more money on worse health.

Now it would be easy to write this off and say, “Well, everyone knows RFK Jr is crazy, no one is going to listen to him.” However these guidelines aren’t just suggestions for the average American. They instruct how federal food programs like WIC and School Lunches are set up. So if the guidelines aren’t making Americans healthier and aren’t reducing costs, who do they benefit? Well luckily they tell us on page 2: “We are realigning our food system to support American farmers, ranchers, and companies who grow and produce real food . . .”

A lot of people think of farmers as working class but don’t let the big trucks and boots fool you. A lot of farms are owned by large companies or families with generational wealth who make their profit exploiting the low paid farm workers who are the ones actually getting their hands dirty. These profits translate into power via groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Global Dairy Platform who go on to influence politics. 

This problem isn’t even unique to the current administration. Probably for as long as you can remember you’ve seen the recommendation that adults need three servings of dairy a day. This has been heavily contested over the years. It’s not that you can’t have a balanced diet with that much dairy in a day, it’s just that it isn’t always necessary. Many people, especially those of non-European backgrounds, get all their nutrients in with little to no dairy. However, it’s in the guidelines and therefore has an effect on government programs. I once spoke to someone who had been on WIC and complained that they gave her way more milk and cheese than she knew what to do with.  

So it seems these new Dietary Guidelines are continuing the theme of taking existing problems in our government and cranking them up to 11. The exact effects on programs like WIC haven’t been seen yet but they’re not likely to help struggling families. However, these guidelines aren’t meant to help them. They are meant to help the wealthy cattle ranchers who will destroy our environment, government, and health if it means increasing their own wealth.

The post My Beef with RFK Jr.: The Problem with the New USDA Dietary Guidelines and Who Really Benefits appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Labor organizer Daniel Gross's new book, Unions of Our Own, helps workers build progressive, militant, and sustainable unions driven by the rank-and-file.

The post Daniel Gross and Unions of Our Own appeared first on EWOC.

I’d wager not. 

In a union campaign, the way to answer a question like this is through a structure test. Before going on strike, organizers know that they’ll need a supermajority of workers to authorize the strike, given that a vicious anti-union drive by the boss will likely reduce their numbers. Some campaigns might have a mobilization where workers do something like wearing pro-union attire in order to gauge support. Ideally, this would be one of several escalatory structure tests meant to evaluate a worker’s risk tolerance as well as how effective the channels of communication are in terms of getting the word out. In other words, a structure test measures the strength of an organization and its ability to mobilize towards a specific goal. 

Chicago DSA (and the DSA in general) is not a union. However, as a prospective mass-membership party that anyone can join, our level of organization is low. We should think and act more like a union fighting a campaign. Amidst conversations of leadership burnout, tremendous uncaptured membership growth, and increasing need for urgency in the political landscape (no source needed), Chicago DSA is at an impasse. What we do next will shape the organization for years to come. While we are poised to become a major player in the labor movement and Chicago politics, failing to build our organizational cohesion risks souring newcomers and leadership to the movement. Instead, it’s time we seize the moment and live up to our vision.

CDSA Vision – What are we organizing towards? 

When discussing strategic choices for the direction DSA will take, it is important to center the conversation around our shared vision. We are working towards democratic socialism, or the demand that “our economy should be run to meet human needs for all, not to make profits for a few” (https://chicagodsa.org/). Different people have different ideas of what this might look like. Many of us will think of universal healthcare, a Green New Deal, or of recent national and local politicians in the limelight, but being a democratic socialist and a member of CDSA is more than a positive feeling towards items on this agenda, as laid out on our chapter’s website:

“Our primary tasks are to organize the working class, make more socialists, and lay the foundation for an independent mass party capable of conquering political power and transforming our society” (https://chicagodsa.org/). 

As socialists, we care about a lot of issues, from protecting our trans and immigrant comrades who have been the latest targets of the Trump administration’s attacks, to issues like environmental justice, prison abolition, overpolicing, and countering American imperialism. We need to be fighting on all of these fronts. However, as emphasized by our tasks above as an organization, we need to continue asking the question: “how are we building power?”. Without the crystallization of short-term mobilizations such as the “No Kings” protests into long-term organizational capacity, we will forever be putting out fires and responding to crises rather than proving that a better world is possible and leading the fight. 

How do we build working-class power?

Working-class power is our ability to force elected officials, the government, and the owning class to meet our demands. This power comes from the fact that we, the working class, work the jobs that make society run. Also, as workers comprise a huge majority of the population, we can vote to elect people to represent our interests in government. However, the nature of these two sources of power is not the same. 

First, let’s start with the weaker of the two: electoral power. Elected officials are–in theory–held accountable to their constituents through their desire for reelection. This power is diluted by the fact that elections are increasingly decided by spending and fundraising. This gives capitalists a decisive advantage in influencing and subverting democratic elections. Given the current lax campaign spending laws and skyrocketing levels of wealth inequality, elections are increasingly determined by the sheer volume of money poured into a given campaign, which is a losing position for the working class. Nevertheless, recent campaigns have found success with a grassroots or “Mass Movement Electoralism” approach. For example, Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 Mayoral campaign managed to mobilize 100,000 volunteers to knock doors thanks in large part to NYC’s DSA chapter as well as its active left ecosystem. The problem is, no matter how a working-class-friendly politician is elected, two things remain true: there are certain things an elected official cannot do (especially with regards to challenging capital’s interests), and there is little recourse for working people to hold them accountable. 

Luckily, working people have another, more reliable, source of power: the ability to withhold our labor. To build working class power, we need to organize workplaces into fighting unions. This is the crux of the left’s emphasis on organized labor and the recent excitement surrounding the idea of a general strike. It is not just a commitment to fairness and equality in the workplace, but an understanding that working people as a class are the only ones who can transform society. Work stoppages hit the capitalist class where it hurts: their profits. This is what gives the working class its greatest leverage and transformational power. 

Then, to answer our question of what it takes to build working class power, it is clear that we must organize workplaces and unions to be capable of militant strike action, using their political power to aid the working class in electoral politics and thus building power independent of state institutions. 

What is organizing, really? Where does the DSA fit in?

At its core, organizing is bringing people together into a long term structure to “mobilize” for certain tasks and work towards a bigger goal. Almost any organization can build a hierarchical structure to accomplish a goal, but as democratic socialists, we must accomplish our goals while simultaneously modeling and prototyping the kinds of radically democratic structures we are fighting to build and sustain. In line with the Labor Notes tradition of democratic organizing this means relying on a “leadership-dense” model. Carla Villanueva and Michael Belt, organizers with UAW, define a leader of a union drive as someone, a worker: 

“…who is willing to fight for the union, receptive to feedback on how to speak with coworkers, and capable of moving their coworkers into action. Leaders are those who are public and willing to speak to their coworkers when the time is right. Throughout the campaign, leaders are given a steady flow of training and tools to better answer their coworkers’ questions. This approach is grounded in a belief that workers in any industry can understand and make complex strategy decisions and are able to have difficult organizing conversations with their coworkers.”

A leadership-dense model of organizing depends on finding workers willing and able to build a union, and developing them into organizers. The more leader-organizers that can be developed, the better. Furthermore, we need to trust that average workers are capable of organizing themselves when given access to structure, resources, and guidance. This requisite belief in the competency of workers is more than a principle; it’s foundational to our strategy and is essential to winning. Any worker can be a leader. The benefit to this orientation is that worker-organizers are constantly training new organizers, building the project’s capacity. Also, after a certain point, there is no single organizer or identified “leader” who is carrying the bulk of the work on their own; the campaign is self-sustaining and can recover and succeed even if a key organizer needs to take a step back from the work.. 

Another way to think about organizing is as an ideal. Just as there is no way to achieve “democracy”, there is no such thing as a “perfectly organized” workplace, either. There are certainly workplaces and institutions which are more organized or democratic than others, and what sets those apart is the strength and number of connections between people. Put differently, what we are organizing is a network of people, within which each node has a varying number of connections with varying levels of strength. To build the network, existing connections must be strengthened or new connections added. To do this more effectively, individual “nodes” must be trained and developed.

At last, we can see how our definition of “organizing” can be applied outside the workplace and to our work with Chicago DSA. Many of those reading this may be among the most active in the chapter and already fill leadership roles in various committees and working groups. We are the DSA’s version of the worker-organizer, the “member-organizer” or cadre. As member-organizers we may already have this orientation; we view our chapter as a network of relationships and are willing to fight for its vision. But are we using tried-and-true fundamental organizing skills to get there? Are we developing new member-organizers to apply those same skills and build further organizational capacity? Our ability to strengthen and expand this network depends on our utilization of fundamental organizing skills. 

Conclusion

With recent wins nationwide like Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, the wave of left flank democrats bringing excitement to primary elections, our own local DSA chapter’s worker organizer job fair and successful bid to get Byron Sigcho-Lopez on a ballot, the future of democratic socialist politics is brighter than ever. Despite this, we need to seriously reconsider our organizational structure and strategy if we expect to contend for power and build the foundation for our aspired-to independent mass party.

As mentioned previously, we struggle to retain both leadership and new members, something which costs us institutional knowledge, skills, and growth. In “Middle-Level Organizing: The Key to a Successful CDSA”, Monk lays out this problem in detail as well as its solution: organizing fundamentals. We conduct political education for new members, yet struggle to convey skills like organizing conversations, making asks, and how to run a meeting. These things are just as important as understanding our long-term vision and past. The history of social movements is the history of organizers. 

One of the important lessons Monk reminds us of is to “Clarify Your Goals”. With changing leadership and a flux of new membership, it’s fair to say that we might not all be on the same page. In fact, we can prove it. We should conduct a survey of every member in Chicago DSA. Surveys are used in union drives as structure tests to gauge support. Rather than texting out a form for people to fill out, a proper structure test requires being systematic and having one-on-one conversations with everyone. In these conversations we can gauge members’ understanding of our vision, hear about their theory of change and power, invite them to action in a specific way, and simply get to know them. 

As a collective, we can struggle with the questions of how we actually contend for power. Do we recruit people to organize workplaces and the labor movement where so much of our power resides? Do we run our own candidates or support others who match our vision to communicate our politics to a broad base and win non-reformist reforms? How do we weave the fights that are already happening across the city into something cohesive? Together, we can find out. Together, let’s organize Chicago DSA!

The post If Chicago DSA were a union, could it pull off a successful strike? appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

This article is a response to “A Vision for a Lean, Political, and Effective Executive Committee” to address some concerns being raised about the Local Democracy Commission (LDC)’s majority bylaws proposal.

The LDC met over two and a half months to collaborate on creating new bylaws for the chapter. We spent much of our time on non-Executive Committee (EC) fixes, such as standardizing chapter formations and allowing amendments to bylaws changes. I am very proud of these consensus reforms, and I consider those changes alone to have made the LDC worthwhile. Reforming the EC was a small but important part of the LDC’s work after the issue was raised at the last GCM.

This original EC reform proposal was drafted over four months and introduced at two separate general chapter meetings, with input solicited from across the chapter, including every member of the EC. The proposal won 57% of the vote, just 16 votes shy of the needed two-thirds majority. Several speakers against the proposal said they were voting no so they could see what the recently chartered LDC would propose at the subsequent Chapter Convention in June. The others were centered around a lack of a labor representative and a lack of branch representatives. It is unsurprising, then, that we ended up with a similar proposal with one key addition – the Labor Coordinator. The LDC considered methods of adding branch representatives, but the majority ultimately decided that adding them was too unwieldy. 

The case for EC reform was laid out in Comrade Deana C’s article published ahead of the March 2026 GCM. I recommend reading it first for context. 

The Data

The first thing one sees when looking at the data is that Chicago has not done well. Out of the 16 chapters that the LDC analyzed, we’ve had the second lowest recruitment rate and worst net increase in membership. There are other things to look at than just our total numbers, but they don’t paint a better picture. Our active membership rate is more or less the same 1:5 ratio every chapter has. “Membership commitment” is monthly dues payers plus solidarity dues payers, which we are solidly average on. Both are numbers proportional to chapter membership, so lower membership means a lower number of active and committed members. It is clear that what we are currently doing is not working. Change is needed.

Our comrades writing the amendment to the LDC proposal claim that 14 to 17 members was a common and reasonable range for EC size. I would like to counter that claim with the data itself. Of the 16 chapters we studied, only 2 chapters were within this range, and only one was above it – Chicago. This four-year weighted average doesn’t take into account change in chapter EC size. For example, Detroit cut their EC size in half partway through the dataset, and almost all of their growth is from that latter half, but here it is represented as a middling amount of growth for their now 11-member EC. Looking at just the top five performing chapters, we get an average of 11.8 members. If you look at just the top five Huge chapters, you get 12.6. The numbers of high-performing chapters are much more in line with the base proposal’s 12 members than the amendment’s 16. The amendment would give us the second-largest EC of all 16 chapters studied, with only Philadelphia being larger, and even then Philadelphia only grew larger this year as their EC grows with chapter size.

Addressing Siloing

Another concern raised by the amendment’s authors was that the base proposal could lead to siloing in the branches or overworking branch leadership. I believe this fear is unfounded.

Looking at other chapters, voting representation for branches is a rare position. Atlanta, Portland, Twin Cities, Denver, Metro DC, LA, Seattle, and East Bay all have branches without voting representation. Philadelphia and North New Jersey are the only studied chapters with any form of branch representation, and even there it is limited to suburban branches, but they do not divide the core of their territory into branches with representation. The other five chapters studied don’t have territorial branches at all. This amendment to the LDC proposal, then, is suggesting something not done in any comparable chapter, and none of those chapters have had a disastrous break between their EC and branches. 

There are other methods of reducing siloing. I have been a major advocate for moving more chapter work to the territorial branches, but it should be understood that that is not where most members do their work. As a branch SC member, I see far more new members than deeply involved members showing up at our branch meetings. Members commit themselves to committees and working groups, with each branch having a small group of activists who have chosen to primarily do branch organizing. Over the next year, the branches may absorb more members as they take on local electoral work under the Elecgtoral Working Group’s 2027 plan.  According to the plan, members in the working group or committee act as branch organizers. The Byron Sigcho-Lopez campaign, which has had branch liaisons on its Steering Committee, has also been organizing branch-specific canvasses. This does not rely on overburdening the branch SC members, and keeps the work attached to the chapter formations. 

I believe we should continue moving work to the branches in this way. As we do, territorial branches will become the least siloed bodies in the chapter, as they have more active, on-the-ground work with other chapter formations than any other group does. This is a much more effective method of reducing siloing than the amendment’s suggestion of a top-down connection with the EC through branch delegates.

The Executive Committee Takes Political Leadership

It is true that the EC is not a legislature; the GCMs are. However, there are only four GCMs a year, and every GCM this past year referred at least one proposal to the EC. This means that for members, they are relying on the EC to take political leadership.

Since the EC necessarily takes political leadership for the chapter, it must be representative of the chapter membership. The amended proposal would give one delegate per branch; this means a branch of 200 members gets five times the voting power of a branch with 1,000 members. This is akin to recreating the United States Senate, which DSA rightfully decries as undemocratic. 

The amendment’s authors argue that the Labor Branch needs a delegate on their SC to liaise with leadership as a voting EC member. The Labor Coordinator in the LDC proposal already does this.The amendment gives a seat on the EC to every “institutional branch” (see Article VII, Section 3 of the proposed bylaws) elected exclusively by members of that branch. Few would contend that the Political Educator Coordinator should be elected by just Poli Ed members or that the Membership Engagement Coordinator should be elected by just the Membership Engagement Committee. Having a seat elected only by one specific body reduces buy-in from the rest of the chapter and contributes to, rather than combatting, siloing. 

Our chapter’s labor work – like all of its work – is not the domain of just the Labor Branch, but the whole chapter collectively. A Labor Coordinator elected by the chapter as a whole contributes to tying the important work the Labor Branch does back into the rest of our chapter rather than isolating it. Labor work is one of the most important functions of DSA. Uniquely cutting it off from the rest of our membership is a disservice to their work and the chapter as a whole.

Another concern raised by the comrades amending the LDC proposal is that the EC risks becoming too factional. On the contrary, a more political EC and more politicized chapter is a progression in chapter democracy. Politicization increases and elevates political questions which can be debated openly and resolved rather than papered over. It also reduces siloing between working bodies, as members from each organize in factions, they communicate ideas and work together. A politicized chapter is only disorganizing if those disagreeing become hostile to each other. Having a variety of ideological groups on the EC, invested in working together, can actually reduce this issue. 

The Steering Committee of the Executive Committee

Like the current bylaws, the LDC proposal does not explicitly create a Steering Committee for the EC. By remaining silent on the question, the base proposal allows chapter leadership and membership to be flexible without unnecessary proscriptions. If leaders or members feel it is necessary to establish a smaller body, they may do so within the limits and with the composition that suits the needs of the moment.

The amendment to the LDC proposal explicitly enshrines a Steering Committee in the bylaws with set powers and composition. It empowers it and overly confines it. Their Steering Committee would not include the Treasurer, which is a necessity on any leadership body overseeing spending. This year’s Steering Committee has authorized thousands of dollars in spending. It would be irresponsible to authorize a body to approve that level of spending without the Treasurer’s expert input on the budget and liability issues. I fear a Steering Committee without one could authorize over-spending or get the chapter into legal trouble without that consultation. It is also possible we could become too cautious, and wait on any budget requests to the next EC meeting or GCM that could be up to a month away.

Under the amendment, the chapter’s EC meets eight months out of the year and the SC meets every month. It allows the SC to count meetings of the EC towards their required monthly meetings only if a majority of its members are present. These dual quorum rules create a situation where the SC may have to meet twice a month if its quorum was not satisfied at that month’s EC meeting. 

The two body problem also creates a level of uncertainty at the top of our chapter structures. While the EC has the power to override the decisions of the smaller SC, they cannot do so until they meet again at least a month later. While this power exists it may be hard to exercise in certain cases. While the EC can technically overturn an SC decision at their next meeting, a lot can be done in a month. Money will be spent, posts will be posted, and events hosted. The dual structure, despite giving the EC supremacy, leaves room for people with contentious proposals to shop bodies to get the more favorable outcome. The simplest solution is the one nearly every other chapter has, a single executive body which meets monthly and has no proscriptions on how it may delegate its authority other than what membership may impose on it. The base LDC proposal creates exactly such a body. 

Conclusion

The original LDC proposal’s EC structure is a collaboration over the course of half a year, a scientific process of studying other chapters to see what works and what has not worked here. The LDC proposal itself had many compromises, with others losing out on specific proposals but choosing to support the package as a whole for the sake of consensus. Should the minority LDC amendment pass, we are concerned that it will create an undemocratic and needlessly complicated structure that hampers our chapter organizing. 

I urge membership to vote against any amendment to the LDC proposal that changes its EC structure. However, even if the amendment passes, I encourage members to vote yes on the final resolution. Not passing anything would result in a disastrously large 30 person EC which would devour hundreds of hours from more than a dozen of our best organizers over the course of the term. 

The post For an Effective, Decisive, and Democratic Executive Committee appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Events & Actions

Tuesday June 2 (6:30 PM – 7:30 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday June 3 (5:30 PM – 7:30 PM) Guarantee Act Petition Dropoff/Pickup (Mission Playground)

Thursday June 4 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Committee (zoom)

Thursday June 4 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (zoom)

Thursday June 4 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Immigrant Justice Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Friday June 5 (9:30 AM – 10:30 AM) District 1 Coffee with Comrades (Breck’s, 2 Clement St)

Friday June 5 (4:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Guarantee Act Petition Dropoff/Pickup @ Horsies (Horsies Market & Saloon, 3368 19th St)

Saturday June 6 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) No Appetite for Apartheid Consumer Pledge Canvass (Miguel Hidalgo Statue)

Sunday June 7 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) Guarantee Act Mobilization at Clement Street Farmers Market (152 Clement St)

Monday June 8 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday June 8 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM) Labor Board Meeting – Office Hours (zoom)

Monday June 8 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Monday June 8 (6:30 PM – 7:30 PM) DSA Run Club (McLaren Lodge, Golden Gate Park)

Tuesday June 9 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday June 9 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Public Transit Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday June 10 (12:00 PM – 1:00 PM) Lunch Break Book Club (zoom)

Thursday June 11 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) AV Team Training (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday June 11 (6:30 PM – 7:30 PM) Public Bank Project Meeting (zoom)

Sunday June 14 (11:00 PM – 1:00 PM) Physical Education + Self Defense Training (William McKinley Monument)

Sunday June 14 (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM) Understanding Socialism with DSA SF (1916 McAllister St)

Sunday June 14 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (zoom)

Monday June 15 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board Meeting – Existing Union Support (1916 McAllister)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Dispatch from Steering Committee

Ballots have begun arriving in the hands of San Francisco voters, and as we muddle through long lists of voter guides, candidates, and propositions, we will ask ourselves many questions.

But will we be asking the right ones?

Read more from Steering here Analysis of the Current Condition of Democracy – Democratic Socialists of America – San Francisco

Ways to Support Affordable Housing Guarantee Act

The Affordable Housing Guarantee Act is officially accepting contributions! This is a grassroots, community-led campaign, and we need whatever you’re able spare to help us protect our affordable housing funds and tax the rich! Head to fairhousingsf.com/donate to donate!

If you’re not in a position to donate at the moment, we can still use your help gathering signatures. Head to fairhousingsf.com/events to find a volunteer event near you!

No Attitude for Apartheid Consumer Canvass

Come join us for our next NA4A consumer canvass on June 6! We will be meeting in Dolores Park at 11 AM at the Miguel Hidalgo Statue. Help build support for the 200 apartheid-free zones our campaign has established in SF!

RSVP HERE.

AV Team Training

Lights, camera, action…and you! Audio and video keep some of our core chapter work going, and we need more hands on deck. Come attend the AV Squad’s comprehensive training session where we’ll walk through the AV setup for chapter meetings. No previous experience is required.

Thursday, June 11 6:30 – 8:00pm (1916 McAllister St)

Understanding Socialism Group Reading and Discussion

Join DSA SF’s Education Board for a group reading of excerpts from “The Long Transition Towards Socialism”. We’ll be examining what makes capitalism as a system function, its inherent contradictions, and how the transition to socialism can be achieved within those conditions.

No advance reading required! We’ll provide everything at the event.

Sunday, June 14 3:30-5pm (1916 McAllister St)

EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing Course

Sign up here!

EWOC holds a regular training course to help you build your union from the ground up alongside workers in your industry. It doesn’t require an organizing background to understand the material, which covers topics including mapping and charting, building an organizing committee, uniting over common concerns, and how to take action. If you’re interested in becoming any level of organizer for EWOC, this course is mandatory.

This course will in person at the DSA office (1916 McAllister). We’ll watch the EWOC lecture together and then go through the discussion activities. If you can’t make all of the sessions, reach out to Caitlin Stanton (SF EWOC local lead coordinator) for accommodations.

SCHEDULE:
Week 1: Developing Leadership
Tuesday, July 14 (7-8:30PM)

Week 2: The Organizing Conversation
Tuesday, July 21 (7-8:30PM)

Week 3: The Arc of the Campaign
Tuesday, July 28 (7-8:30PM)

Week 4: Inoculation and the Boss Campaign
Tuesday, August 4 (7-8:30PM)

At the upcoming 2026 General Chapter Convention of Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, we will be considering an overhaul of our bylaws and several amendments to that overhaul. The overhaul itself is much needed, and the cross-tendency body of drafters, the Local Democracy Commission (LDC), found consensus on most important issues. 

One of the amendments we will be considering is called “All Power to The Members.” Given the title of this amendment, it is worth noting that meetings of the general membership are already the highest decision-making body of the chapter, a fact that I will return to shortly.

This amendment purports to expand chapter democracy, but I believe it will have the opposite of the intended effect. Further, it represents nothing more than an attempt to expand the use of online voting in (C)DSA – an effort that has been voted down by members time and time again (see the “CB02: One Member, One Vote for National Leadership Elections” proposal, which did not pass at National Convention, and the “Increasing Member Participation in Our Chapter Endorsement Process” resolution which did not pass at our last General Chapter Meeting [GCM]). This effort has, in my view, had the opposite of the intended effect of increasing participation in chapters where its use has been more widespread.

What the Amendment Does

The amendment is quite straightforward in that it replaces all mentions of “Article IV Meetings” with “a vote of the general membership” (in Article V, “Officers”, Sections 6 and 7, which refer to the Communications Coordinator and Campaigns Coordinator respectively, in various subsections of Article VII, “Chapter Formations,” and in Article XII, “Addenda to These Bylaws”).

It is important to note here a definitional distinction between a “vote of the general membership” and a “vote of a general membership meeting,” the latter of which is synonymous with an “Article IV meeting” in the proposed bylaws revision. 

What this means in practice is that important decisions relating to the election of these two officer roles, how chapter formations are created and governed, and how addenda to the bylaws are created, must go to a vote of the entire membership, presumably through electronic ballot or e-mail, since there are no other means of reaching the entire membership to deliver a ballot. 

Why This is Unproductive

On its face, this amendment purports to increase member engagement on these questions. However, as has been argued a number of times before in debates about the merits of online voting, the quality of our democratic deliberation matters as much, if not more than, the number of votes. I believe that participation is best measured by the number of members who are meaningfully engaged with chapter activities and debates, not simply the number of people casting ballots. 

A democratic culture must include comradely debate and discussion that gives people the opportunity to change their minds and the minds of others, and, most importantly, to have one’s mind changed. This is best done in mass meetings where discussion, nuance, and temperament can be measured, and where there are rules for keeping debate focused and comradely. While a move to online discussion would seem to open things up to more participation, the reality is that it pushes debate into a space where the most online portion of our membership will have an outsized say in the nature of the debate. 

We should always be seeking out ways of increasing participation in our democratic process, but making sure that our meetings have clear stakes and outcomes that make it worth committing one’s time to attend will always be much more effective than relinquishing decision-making to passive online engagement.

What Does Robert’s Have to Say?

The well-established manual of parliamentary procedure we use in DSA to make sure our deliberations remain productive is Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised (RONR). RONR strongly recommends that steps are taken to avoid commingling in-person and absentee voting precisely for the reasons stated above, noting that it is a “fundamental principle of parliamentary law that the right to vote is limited to the members of an organization who are present in a regular or properly-called meeting” (RONR 45:56). This is a fundamental principle because the process of in-person deliberation is central to healthy democratic decision-making. 

The same section of RONR doesn’t outright ban absentee voting, but it does state that the procedures for absentee voting must be spelled out explicitly in the bylaws to avoid issues with quorum and process. This amendment does not clear this bar. A “vote of the general membership” would presumably require a ballot to go to every member in good standing (MIGS) of the organization, but there are no provisions for how deliberation (if any) should be structured, how many votes need to be cast for a decision to be valid, or how long the vote must remain open. 

Not all questions of process need to be worked out through the bylaws, but fundamental questions such as these really should be. If a ballot goes to the general membership, but only stays open for an hour, or if only 2% of MIGS voted, is that decision valid? Under the terms of this proposed amendment, the answer would be yes, since the rules that govern quorum and validity at in-person meetings do not apply to absentee voting of this nature and are not otherwise covered in RONR. Leaving such ambiguities unaddressed represents a major risk for the health of the organization.

Why This Amendment Would Cause a Bylaws Crisis

The proposed bylaws revision does state that meetings of the general membership “shall be the highest legislative body, and shall set the work priorities of the chapter”. But the proposed bylaws create a conflict by insisting that certain questions be voted on by the general membership (meaning all members, not all members at a meeting). This would create a conflict within our own bylaws, but even more problematically, it puts us in contravention of the National DSA bylaws.

Article 3, the “Chapters” Section 5 of the National DSA bylaws, is quite clear that in-person meetings of the general membership of a chapter must be the highest decision-making body of a chapter. In this respect, members already have all the power – which is good! The specific subsection reads: “There shall be no higher decision-making body in a chapter than a synchronous General Meeting or Convention open to all members in good standing. This shall not prevent an elected leadership body from acting between such meetings.”

It is important to restate the definitional distinction between a “vote of the general membership” and a “vote of a general membership meeting”, the latter of which is synonymous with an Article IV meeting in the proposed bylaws revision. “The general membership” means that every member in the organization must be polled, something that can only be accomplished asynchronously and remotely. Thus, this amendment proposes that the in-person, synchronous meetings not only can be, but must be, eclipsed on questions relevant to the amended sections. This is likely a substantial violation of the DSA bylaws that would create ambiguities and a governance crisis that, at best, would sap our organizational attention and resources as we navigate it.

Conclusion: What Could Happen Instead

An in-person, synchronous membership meeting can delegate its authority as it sees fit, so long as it remains the highest decision-making body. This happens all of the time in our organization; in fact, every time we create a chapter formation, we are in essence delegating some authority held in common by the general membership for a specific purpose. It’s entirely possible that a GCM could, without adopting this amendment, delegate the authority to consider a given matter via an absentee vote of the entire membership (ideally with well-worked-out rules in place for such a procedure).

However, enforcing online membership votes in the bylaws, as a requirement – even on specific questions – would, in my opinion and for the reasons outlined above, be disallowed, unnecessary, and counterproductive. We may have perfectly good reasons for referring something to an online vote of the members (as is already the case in officer elections), but these should be taken up on a case-by-case basis that clearly leaves synchronous, in-person meetings as the highest decision-making body of the membership. 

The bottom line is that membership throughout DSA has, time and time and again, upheld the value of in-person, synchronous, democratic discussion, and we should do so again. We should not adopt an amendment that would damage our democratic culture, violate well-established and important norms of democratic deliberation, or put us at risk of losing our charter as a chapter of DSA by being in conflict with the national organization’s bylaws.

The post Online Voting… Again appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

By Rodney Coopwood

On May 1, 2026, Metro Detroit DSA rallied at Roosevelt Park as part of the city’s labor coalition for May Day. From the first planning meetings at the IBEW Hall through the day-of march and the debrief that followed, MDDSA (led by members of the Mobilization and Labor Working Groups) sat at the table with Teamsters Local 337, SEIU Michigan, IBEW Local 58, UAW Local 600, UAW Region 1, Moratorium NOW!, Michigan United, and other unions and organizations of the Detroit left. Being in those rooms was the most instructive part of the work.

We were invited in because of the history our members carry in this city’s labor and left movements, and because our chapter has spent the last year building the capacity to show up. A seat at the planning table is not given for free; it is the product of contingent discipline at previous actions and the steady labor of people who have made themselves useful to the broader left. The Mobilization Working Group, formalized at convention, was the structure that let us convert that capacity into coordinated participation and it did so as a genuinely cross-tendency effort, with members from across the chapter’s committees, caucuses, and coalitions working under the MWG’s coordination.

What the Room Looked Like

The most striking thing about the planning process was watching unions sit across from each other under the AFL-CIO umbrella and actually deliberate. These are organizations with different memberships, different cultures, and different relationships to militancy. The fact of them being in the same room, working through speaker order, route logistics, and messaging — that, on its own, was not nothing, and reminiscent of our own practices in DSA.

Still, sitting through those meetings as someone from the organizing side rather than the unionist side, I was struck by how much of the work became institutional rather than political. Speaker order became a question of which body’s position carried what weight, not which voice the day most needed. Logistics bent toward what city authorities would permit and protect rather than toward who the event was for. Parts of the program felt divorced from the meaning of the day itself. May Day belongs to the rank-and-file and in many respects to workers outside unions entirely, and that fact deserved more weight in the room than it fully received.

The People Who Made the Day

What made this May Day special for me was not what happened in the planning room. It was what happened on May 1st itself. We had volunteers from MDDSA across every role the day asked for: tabling, banner bearing, flag bearing, marshaling, medic, day-of flyering, and back-end logistics. New members standing alongside members who have been doing this work for years. People taking on new roles for the first time. People who had never carried a banner or been to a planning meeting walking up on the morning of May 1 ready to be useful.

That is what a chapter looks like when it is functioning. It is also what May Day is supposed to look like. The holiday is not just its program; it is its people. The shape of any given year’s coalition matters less than whether the bodies on the street are organized, prepared, and politically conscious. By that measure, what MDDSA put in the street this year was something we should take seriously, and every member who showed up — for the first time or the fifteenth — should know the chapter saw them.

What Worked

The march itself was phenomenal. Speakers connected the labor question to immigration, to racialized policing, to U.S. imperialism, to the specific intersectional realities of the working class in this city — the working class as it actually exists, not the working class as it appears in a 1950s photograph. That part of the day did the work May Day is supposed to do. It said out loud that the labor movement and the broader struggle against capitalism are not separate fights with separate constituencies.

The fact that the unions came together at all is the bigger story. The goal of this year’s May Day, as I understood it from inside the planning room, was modest and correct: get the relevant Detroit unions into the same physical space, working on the same calendar, talking to each other about something concrete. That goal was met. Relationships do not form in the abstract. They form when people have to figure out together how a rally works.

This rally took place under AFL-CIO sponsorship, something that, by accounts inside the planning room, had not happened in Detroit in a very long time. For most of the twentieth century, mainstream American labor kept its distance from May Day’s radical origins, favoring the September Labor Day that Congress established in 1894 in the wake of the Pullman strike. The AFL-CIO returning to May Day is a real shift, and one that creates room for a fuller program in the years ahead.

What The Numbers Said

Turnout at the rally was an estimated 500 attendees. By my count, roughly half were rank-and-file union members. The rest were politically conscious community members and active organizers, with SEIU showing the most prominent and organized presence. The unions did not turn out their memberships in significant numbers. Michigan’s union membership rate is 13 percent, well above the national rate of 10, and Detroit sits inside one of the more heavily unionized regions in the country. The “No Kings” mobilization earlier this year and last, with broadly anti-authoritarian messaging not specifically tied to labor, pulled thousands into the streets of this same city. May Day, with the city’s organized labor leadership formally behind it, did not. The gap is the question.

Part of the answer is practical. A 4pm Friday start excluded most day shift workers and most service workers whose schedules are not their own, and is worth noting for next year. But timing does not explain the whole gap. If union structures had more time to actively mobilize members for May Day in the weeks leading up to it, a Friday afternoon would have moved more people than it did.

The honest version is the one that came out of the debrief: this was a year of using unused muscles. The apparatus of political mobilization through union locals has been dormant for a generation, and that capacity does not return in a single planning cycle. That is partly an explanation. It is also a question. What would unions themselves have to change for next year’s May Day to actually move their members? Further, where is the current state of class consciousness in the U.S. if unions struggle to connect labor to May Day?

What’s Worth Building On

First, the Detroit left should carry more weight at the table. There is history between labor leadership and the broader left that predates my lifetime, and I will not pretend to fully understand it all yet. But even with that history, the moment demands engagement. Capitalism’s contradictions are visibly tearing at the lives of people in this city, this country, and every country the American empire reaches. A leftist — labor coalition strong enough to meet that crisis needs the organizers, writers, and educators who have spent their lives developing the political analysis the movement needs.

Second, and as has already been agreed to, the planning has to start earlier. Much earlier. The skeleton of next year’s May Day, who is in the coalition, what the political program is, who the speakers are, what the demands are, should be sketched in the fall, not in March. Earlier planning creates space for harder conversations and the programmatic clarity a workers’ rally deserves.

The Debrief

The most important conversation of the entire cycle was the debrief. That sounds counterintuitive, the rally is the visible thing, the debrief is internal, but it is the meeting where the organizers decided what kind of coalition it wanted to become.

The clarity that came out of that conversation was this: the goal of 2026 was first contact, and first contact was achieved. The goal of 2027 is to deepen — to pull in rank-and-file participation at a scale this year’s event did not reach.

Some of that conversation pointed toward the possibility of a general strike in 2028. However, a general strike is not a thing you can just announce; it is a thing that becomes possible after years and years of organizational work most people never see, in sectors of society that have been exploited by capital for decades. Treating 2028 as a horizon can be reasonable, if work of a strategically adaptable and principled nature is achieved prior.

What this May Day did was build one vertebra of a skeleton that does not yet have most of its bones. There is a great deal of work between here and any plausible strike horizon, and the honest version of the optimism coming out of the debrief is that the work is finally beginning to look like work, rather than like a wish.

Beyond the Union Hall

If the labor movement is going to grow into the force this moment demands, DSA, the broader left, and the unions themselves have to take seriously the work that exists beyond the union hall. Detroit no longer looks like the city that defined American industrial labor. Manufacturing accounts for under one in ten jobs across the metro area. Health care, education, retail, food service, logistics, these are where most actually work, and the great majority of those workers carry no union card. The Starbucks Workers United campaign has shown that a young, low-wage, dispersed workforce can build real power against an employer the labor establishment had largely written off as unorganizable. The labor movement that meets this decade is going to be built in workplaces like those, or it is not going to be built at all.

May Day’s politics speak to exactly this work. The holiday does not require a union card. It belongs to anyone who works for a wage, and the power it celebrates is the power of labor itself — the capacity to withhold work, to act in concert, to recognize that the people who do the actual work of running this society can stop running it. May Day started as a revolutionary leftist holiday, built by communists, socialists, and anarchists who understood the workplace was one front of a much larger fight. Keeping that history visible in the present and operative in the future is the work that has to follow. This year, we got into the room. Next year, we have to help change what the room can do — and start building the rooms that do not yet exist.

Forming the Skeleton: May Day 2026 and the Work Ahead was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.