Author: Andrew O

It is impossible to organize without a positive vision of the future. Placing a point on the horizon allows us to steer our ship towards that guiding star. I do not speak for the chapter here, but for myself and in hopes of spurring comrades to think about and voice their own visions of what our chapter can and should be. This document outlines what is actively and passively in my mind when I am arguing for or against something in the many debates within our chapter. These goals inform my politics and decisions. I have roughly outlined a long-, medium-, and short- term set of goals for our chapter. These goals are ambitious–as they must be for us to truly change the world.

DSA Cleveland can and should become an organized and independent political party. We should become an organization capable of building and providing mutual and material good for the working class of Northeast Ohio. This ability must be built outside the control of the state and of capital. Our membership must be militant and organized; our chapter democratic, transparent, and politically well-developed.DSA Cleveland is not and cannot simply be the left wing of the Democratic party. We are capable of being an independent party, with our own identity, program, and support base. DSA is uniquely positioned within American politics to become a true opposition party. Our message is a winning message, we have strong theoretical guides to build off, and our base is only limited by our capacity to organize.

Simultaneous to our electoral and reformist goals, it is essential that our chapter is working towards independence from the state. Our goal is not to take over the levers of power. Our goal is to build a new world.  We must create radical structures of mutual care to support our comrades and fellow workers. All of us will be required to build skills in mutual aid and true community defense, whether via food, medicine, shelter, or otherwise.

Building a new world will be the hardest fight any of us have ever seen. In order to weather it together, we must be organized and we must be militant. Each of us must build ourselves and those around us into the leaders we are all capable of being. Worker-leaders will need to be prepared to fight against the state, capital, and the disasters (natural and otherwise) that will put our entire project at risk. It is up to us to organize ourselves into a working class that can stand up to what is to come.

We will only be able to truly organize worker-leaders if we are seeking to be as democratic and transparent as possible. If we are to build a democratic world, we must start now. Member-led, bottom-up democracy cannot survive with incomplete information or an uninformed membership. Discussion and debate must be open and accessible in all ways. Structures must work to preserve the voice of the minority and to increase the general body’s democratic control of the chapter. We must ensure our elected leaders, both inside and outside of the chapter, are accountable to membership both in principle and in fact. Our membership needs to be politically mature and developed so each member has equal control over our organization.

This chapter can be a powerful base born of and built by the working class of Northeast Ohio, but it will not be easy to achieve. Movements like ours have been defeated in nearly every instance they have been built. We have yet to see a single one survive, let alone thrive, within the imperial core. In order to guide our actions, our chapter needs to work together to learn and teach ourselves political theory. We must grow our chapter through the best available methods of organizing. DSA Cleveland’s structures need to ensure our values democracy, transparency, and accountability are protected. This will only be possible if our membership is educated and knowledgeable on the history of these structures as well as the process to change them.

Every person is capable of being a great organizer. We must work together so that each of us reaches this potential. Unlike under capitalism, we want to make ourselves as replaceable as possible. Within our chapter and within our lives, we should constantly seek to organize ourselves, our neighbors, and our comrades. It is our responsibility as comrades to cultivate a wide variety of skills and pass them on as often as we are able. Organizing and teaching are frequently one in the same. For the working class to take over the world, we must make sure that each of us can lead it, together.

The idea of organizing the whole worker, as laid out by Jane McAlevy’s No Shortcuts model of organizing, is the single most effective organizing model I have encountered or tried. It is not infallible, or gospel, nor should it remain fixed and unchanged as we bring it into the various contexts and work that we are doing. It is, however, essential that we are building our organizing from this model if we want to create a truly militant and organized chapter, organization, and working class. The No Shortcuts model is frequently a lot of work, time, and energy. Not to put too fine a point on it, organizing itself is hard and there is no way to shortcut the process. If we are to build a truly organized working class that extends outside of self-selecting activists, we must do the hard work of organizing ourselves first.

To ensure we are making the best use of our capacity, our tactics, and our time, we must base our organizing, our work, and our politics in a political theory. It is our responsibility as socialists to actively cultivate and examine our own theory of politics. We must read, argue, and live our theories of politics together. Theory cannot be learned in isolation. Theory is not simply words in a book. Learning theory is, in and of itself, part of the radical work to win the future. We are each already working from our own theoretical base, whether or not we have examined it. We must come together and have our political theories debate, clash, and build our chapter. 

To guide and instruct the ways we enact our theories and have our debates, as well as to ensure our chapters’ interests in democracy, transparency, and accountability are upheld, we must work to build structures that will withstand bad actors, both those intentionally seeking to harm our chapter and those unaware that they are doing so. It is a fact that any group seeking to change the world will encounter infiltrators and bad actors. This does not mean we should seek to find these individuals, rather we should put structures in place that are better than us, less fallible than us, and structures will be able to be upheld as we continue to grow and change as an organization. These structures should strike the difficult balance between being robust enough to withstand attacks on the democracy of our organization, but flexible enough that they can be changed as needed. 

Structures are not the only method to ensuring our chapter’s democracy, transparency, and accountability is upheld, rather they are one of the tools that we have. Building a culture that values these ideals and taking steps to make sure that each member is educated and knowledgeable on the history of our chapter, our goals, and these structures will give them an understanding of why the chapter is shaped the way it is. Our chapter is built of many decisions made by members, and it can be changed and rebuilt in the same way. Members should be empowered to seek changes to our chapter as they see fit. This will ensure each member has as much ownership and control over the chapter as any other member.

In order to achieve the medium- and long-term goals laid out above, DSA Cleveland needs to realign the chapter’s dedication and support for our priority projects. We must continue the progress made in Membership Committee and bring this same system of engagement to our Education and Communications Committees. Our Priority Projects and Committees must integrate themselves into mutually supportive work. Finally, each priority we take on must move us towards our ambitious electoral and material goals.

Our chapter was in one of our most successful and sustained periods of growth during the Cleveland Housing Organizing Project (CHOP) priority project. There were many external factors for this, but also a good number of internal factors. This priority project built much of what Cleveland DSA is today. The level of commitment to the project was unlike anything our chapter has done since. Some of this was the lack of things to do in person during the lockdowns, much of this was the availability of repeatable work with predictable schedules within the project, but the fact that the chapter truly took this on as a priority cannot be ignored in the success of the CHOP Priority Project.

Our committees must be integrated with our Priority Projects to carry our mutually beneficial work. To use Membership Committee as an example, as it is what I am most familiar with, we have seen great successes this year. The membership pipeline has been rebuilt into the most effective form I have ever seen thanks to the hard work of Chad and the rest of member committee. We cannot simply be organizing members that sign up for new member one on ones and pointing them towards our projects, though. Instead we must make the work of our committees and priorities inexorable from each other. We must work to build a parallel membership pipeline into our priority projects. We must have trained and experienced organizers built into all levels of our work. This will allow us to build the engagement and capacity of both our Membership Committee and Our Priority Projects. Our Education and Communications Committees should seek to build similar methods of integration with our projects and with each other. 

Finally, DSA Cleveland must build Priority Projects that lead us to our goals. Our chapter has an appetite for electoral work and for mutual aid work. That appetite in and of itself is not enough for us to take on this work. It is important that we take on this work because building skills in these areas are essential for us to build the future we want. We cannot take on priority work merely because the work is good or worthy of being done. Our capacity is limited, but as we build and organize towards a shared positive vision, we will grow, our capacity will grow, and our ability to affect change will grow. 

The membership of DSA Cleveland must treat each Priority Project as a step to build the skills of membership, the experience of the chapter, and the capacity we have. Taking each project as a definite step towards our goals will make it easier for us to take on bigger and more varied work in the future. Right now our capacity is limited. Our chapter has not yet successfully run two simultaneous Priority Projects. When we are able to string together several properly supported projects, we will grow our capacity and will need to add more projects to properly organize membership. If we squander our capacity and burn members out without building towards our goals, we will remain at our current size and ability, or worse.

I want to build a DSA Cleveland and a DSA that can take on the world. I want to ensure we, the working class of Northeast Ohio, build the future we want for ourselves. I have great ambitions for this chapter and am sure that we can build it into something great and powerful. If this vision of the future resonates with you, work with me so we can build it together.

1.  At the 2025 DSA National Convention, we adopted the Principles for Party-Building resolution. This resolution is an excellent framework for us to use as we pursue our electoral goals. I want to call special attention to points two, five, and eight.
2.  Northeast Ohio is our chapter’s area of operation, but our struggle is a global one and we cannot lose sight of that.
3.  We must build a concrete set of goals for our chapter and our organization. These goals are what we will fight for and implement when we win power. Our big tent–which brings us strength through a diversity of thought and perspective–can be raised over these points and debate over how to pursue and achieve them can flourish.
4.  You can read the chapter’s PDF copy in our drive. I believe it is essential reading for our organizers.

The post A Positive Vision for DSA Cleveland appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Markus Sokol represented Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) at the 2025 DSA National Convention and discussed the challenges facing left-wing organizations against the rise of fascism and the far right around the world.

The post Partido dos Trabalhadores Participates in the DSA Convention in the USA appeared first on Democratic Left.

Even before Donald Trump became president for a second time and began enacting a systematic attack on LGBTQ+ people—trans and nonbinary people especially—their lives and rights were at risk. Across the U.S., state after state under GOP leadership has begun doing everything they can to strip away hard-earned rights to privacy, personhood, and life-saving, gender-affirming care. 

Trans and nonbinary folks are some of the most vulnerable in our society to homelessness, lower wages, mental illness, workplace discrimination, violence, and suicidal ideation. The anti-trans rhetoric and policies that have surged in recent years have only made things more dire. 

As a result, the Cleveland DSA chapter decided to do something to protect trans and nonbinary comrades in our organization and the community at large. Enter the Trans Liberation Priority Project.

Our Vision

Started in 2025, the Trans Liberation Priority Project of the Cleveland DSA’s strategic vision is to: 

• Pass a Trans Sanctuary City resolution in the cities of Cleveland and Lakewood similar to resolutions passed in other cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland Heights that will deprioritize the enforcement of any laws that would harm trans people such as laws penalizing the provision of gender-affirming care.

• Provide support and resources to the trans community in Cleveland DSA’s region.
• Work towards developing organized, sustained, militant, anti-capitalist trans politics in and around Cleveland.

Recap

Cleveland DSA recently reauthorized our trans rights work in August for a second term. This term will be building on the work we did over the course of that first term which included: 

• Hosting clothing swaps where anyone in the community could donate and/or pick up clothing
• Running a Name Change Clinic where community members were able to receive legal aid as well as financial aid to file Name Changes and amend Gender Marker documentation.
• Organizing 2 fundraising events where we raised $1190

In our first month of this new term we’ve hit the ground running with our efforts for the Sanctuary City Resolution by collecting over 700 signatures from the community in support of our resolution. We’ve also begun mobilizing members and the community to the Lakewood City Council meetings to keep the pressure on our elected officials to pass this resolution. We have also started ramping up our collaboration with other local nonprofit and activist groups that are also working to protect trans and nonbinary rights.

What’s Next?

The fight is far from over. We aim to continue to do everything we can to push the Trans Sanctuary City resolution in Lakewood and eventually, through working alongside other organizations and local government reps, the City of Cleveland. We will canvas and collect signatures in support of trans sanctuary legislation in our region, continue organizing other mutual aid events, and spreading literature about trans rights throughout local municipalities. 

Now is the time to act—are you ready to join us? 

The post Trans Liberation Priority Project: Protecting Lives and Rights of a Community Under Threat appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

By: Travis Wayne

BEACON HILL, MA – On the morning of September 9, 2025, organizers from an anti-Zionist coalition of Massachusetts residents arrived at the Massachusetts State House to rally with supporters for their cause: stop a partnership signed by Governor Maura Healey with Israel’s largest medical system to launch an Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup accelerator in the Bay State.

Sheba Medical, its primary site in operation since the Nakba, is funding its AI arm under the name ARC: Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate. ARC aims to shape healthcare by “connecting entrepreneurs and clinicians, advancing the development and implementation of new technologies.” The main goal of the ARC startup accelerator is to create pipelines, to make it easier for experimental products to be used in clinical settings, with a particular focus on three kinds of technology: diagnostic tools, digital health platforms, and “workforce support technologies.”

Sheba ARC is thus poised upon its 2026 launch to fundamentally alter the management of both patients (through diagnostic tools and digital health platforms) and workers (through workforce support), making both more heavily integrated and reliant on AI technology from the State of Israel.

Start-up Accelerator Against a Backdrop of Genocide

The Governor’s Office announced the partnership back in May 2025. While Governor Healey at the time mainly focused on Massachusetts’ status as a “global hub for healthcare” ready for the accelerator to contribute to the state’s so-called “innovation-based economy,” the Consul General of Israel to New England Benny Sharoni was more explicit about the contract’s actual impact:

Opportunities for deeper collaboration between Israel and Massachusetts are both real and exciting—especially in biotech and life sciences, where both are global leaders. Together, the innovation ecosystems of Israel and the Greater Boston Area can drive breakthroughs in science and medicine for the benefit of all.

The benefit of all pointedly does not include benefits to the Palestinian healthcare system. While Sheba floods money into an AI accelerator to make patient and worker management less human, accessing Massachusetts’ healthcare as a “soft landing pad” in U.S. markets, Gaza’s healthcare system is in total collapse, with Israel killing more than 55,000 Palestinians less than forty miles from Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv.

“The Israeli medical establishment in general identifies with Israel’s colonial project and puts the colonial project over the most basic ethical principles of their profession,” wrote Neve Gordon, the former inaugural director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and one of three authors who wrote “The Shame of Israeli Medicine” cited by the organizers of Sheba Out of MA, which describes the ways in which the apartheid system is endemic to Israeli medicine. The authors call for the total boycott of Israeli medical institutions like Sheba.

Or as one organizer read: “we must not partner with entities that serve as arms of the regime.”

Taxpayer Coalition Petitions the Governor

The ways in which Sheba ARC will make Massachusetts even more complicit in the U.S.-Israeli genocide, taxpayer dollars even more blood-soaked, is what drove the taxpayer coalition to the steps of the State House.

The Sheba Out of MA coalition is led by Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, assembling together signatories from 38 other local organizations including thirteen neighborhood-based pro-Palestine formations, Doctors Against Genocide, Physicians for Humanity, United American Indians of New England, and the Boston Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Jordana Laks, an organizer with the Healthcare Workers for Palestine, read from the letter to the gathered crowd while other organizers delivered the letter itself. They shared the words of one signatory after another from across Massachusetts. One Weston medical professional wrote that, “as a physician, I find it particularly appalling to welcome an Israeli healthcare company when Israel has made [destroying Gaza’s medical facilities] its priority.” Another taxpayer said it was a true shame for the Governor to forge such a partnership, “especially in the name of AI technology.”

Around noon, organizers returned from delivering the signed letter to the Governor’s Office.

Speaking to Working Mass as the crowd dispersed, Laks said:

We want safe homes, abundant food, excellent schools, healthcare as a human right–not financial and moral support for Israel. Call Governor Healey to stop Sheba ARC from pervading Massachusetts healthcare.

Sheba isn’t the first such partnership that anti-Zionist coalitions have forced to end in the Greater Boston area. In April 2025, BDS Boston successfully forced MIT-ILP to cancel its lucrative contract with Elbit Systems.

You can sign the Sheba Out of MA petition as an individual or organization or call the Governor’s Office to call for Sheba Out of MA.

Travis Wayne is the deputy managing editor of Working Mass and a member of Boston DSA.

The post Sheba Out of MA: Taxpayers Deliver Letter Demanding No Israeli AI in MA Healthcare appeared first on Working Mass.

By: Taina Santiago

When summer ended and the school year began again, parents were racing to check off their supply lists. For working class families, this task can be time-consuming and expensive. In response, Metro Detroit DSA’s Black and Brown Alliance (BBA) organized a back-to-school backpack drive.

The event took place Saturday, August 30, at the Eastside Community Network (ECN) building in Detroit, where other community services like free vaccines for children and free pizza for families were set up as well. ECN also runs a free store packed with clothes, shoes, and toiletries.

This space fostered the socialist principle of meeting the needs of the working class in real ways. With a “Solidarity Metro Detroit DSA” banner proudly displayed, a dozen DSA volunteers throughout the day distributed 140 backpacks filled with folders, markers, pencils, and other school supplies.

Why Mutual Aid?

Mutual aid is a form of community service that expects nothing in return from those you are lending a helping hand. It functions under the philosophy that we always show up for each other in our communities. BBA has been talking about doing a mutual aid project for a few months now, with members eager to get started on something actionable. BBA Secretary Rodney Coopwood had a personal connection to the idea: “Growing up in Detroit, there were times when I myself didn’t have what I needed for school. I had to wait for supplies well after classes started.”

BBA was also inspired by the Black Panthers and their ability to radicalize people through community services. BBA Co-chair Jon Mukes said, “[Mutual aid is] how a lot of Black people from various other socialist traditions organized. Free breakfast programs, free health clinics, etc., were incredibly revolutionary. Historically one of the reasons why socialism grew is because socialists and communists fed the people when the capitalist system failed.”

Because of the Black Panthers’ example, it was clear to the BBA that there had to be educational and community-building elements in the project to avoid doing one-and-done, detached charity work. So along with handing out supplies, we also gave literature about DSA to parents and had deliberate conversations with members of the community about socialism.

Recruitment Potential of Mutual Aid

One of the BBA’s goals is to diversify Metro Detroit DSA. Black and Brown socialists have always been the backbone of the larger movement and there should be many more people of color in our organization. Mukes said, “One of the many reasons that our chapter is incredibly white is that we aren’t visible/doing work in Black and Brown communities.” While a delegate to DSA’s national convention this year, Mukes says he “made a point to hang around and talk to other POC comrades and I asked about how they recruited Black and Brown members. A backpack drive for Black people in their communities came up a lot.”

BBA’s mission of diversity in the chapter also informed where we chose to hold the backpack drive: in Detroit. Volunteers spent the day informing Black parents about DSA’s September general meeting, giving interested people an actionable next step to get involved, and collecting contact information for further communications. An event that makes DSA visible and allows us to have one-on-one conversations with people of color has great recruitment potential for working class Black and Brown comrades.

Another goal of the BBA — and DSA as a whole — is to change the narrative around socialism. Decades of Red Scare propaganda have painted socialists as the enemy of the people when the opposite is true. Socialists want to bring working class people together and events like the backpack drive do just that.

“If we approach them with more actions and fewer words, they see us as people of purpose. We give their kids backpacks. We provide water when they’re thirsty, heat when they’re cold,” Coopwood said. “When we were there, I expected to be brushed off, but people were very open to talking about socialism. They may not sign up for DSA, but they’ll know that DSA and socialists are there to help. So when an open socialist is on the ballot, holding a rally, or pushing an agenda to publicize a private corporation or implement ranked-choice voting, they’ll be open to us.”

Lessons on Organizing

As important as the event itself was all the planning, budgeting, location scouting, and prepping that had to be done in a short window of time. When BBA voted to put the backpack drive into motion, there were only a couple of weeks before the school year began. Within a couple of days, Coopwood had drawn up a fully mapped out proposal to take to the steering committee. In another week, Mukes was ordering supplies and a week after that, those supplies were in the hands of working class families.

This speed of turning talk into action was a testament to BBA members’ organizing skills and served as a confidence booster to fuel more projects. Coopwood said, “I realized I’m much more capable as an organizer than I originally thought. This was my first time doing something like this. I applied what I do at work as a researcher, made an action plan, and it worked — I was very proud of that.” Mukes sang the praises of fellow organizers, saying, “My biggest takeaway was how quickly a handful of dedicated people can set something like this up.”

These kinds of mutual aid projects would give the chapter more opportunities to build up experienced organizers, giving members projects to try out, learn from, and succeed at. The DSA volunteers who have conversations with strangers about socialism will improve their skills there too. The members who put events like the backpack drive together will take valuable lessons into subsequent projects, bringing ideas from the abstract into reality with effectiveness and efficiency.

As Coopwood pointed out, these events “give action-oriented members an outlet to effectively aid communities, and those communities know exactly who assisted them, building unity and loyalty. This unity will be reflected when we need to run electoral candidates or launch campaigns like Michigan for the Many,” which is a campaign we actually gathered signatures for at the backpack drive. He continued, “This is how we get the public — who intrinsically value actions over promises — to know what Metro Detroit DSA is and bring them to our side.”

Just the Beginning

As socialists, getting the material needs of the working class met is an important element in our ideal political and economic system, so we should put our socialist money/action where our mouth is. The backpack drive is not a one-off event, it is a kick-off to a greater focus of the BBA on mutual aid in general. Our direct involvement in communities of color — getting to know people and cultivating camaraderie — will be invaluable to building our movement.

And it isn’t just about the big picture goals. It’s also about the small moments that keep us connected to the human-driven purpose of everything we are doing, which Coopwood highlighted: “I got to see kids pick out their favorite color backpacks, and in the grand scheme of trying to stop capitalism and imperialism from destroying the world, it’s nice to see a kid pick their favorite color backpack.”

BBA Rings in the School Year with Backpack Drive was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Note: posts by individual GMDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

After reading that Burlington’s legendary music spot Nectar’s had permanently closed, GMDSA Secretary David Wilcox wrote to Seven Days to propose municipalizing the venue. His letter, printed on 8/20/2025, is republished below.

In response to the shutdown of Nectar’s, I’d like to suggest a solution: Why not have the city government take over and run Nectar’s? There’s nothing radical or unprecedented about the City of Burlington running a popular music venue, given that it owned and operated 242 Main for 30 years. And I would argue that a venue like Nectar’s, one that’s synonymous with the general idea of what Burlington is, contributes far more to the city’s bottom line than its own financial numbers would indicate.

Without venues like Nectar’s, Burlington loses its aura as a cool, desirable place to live. And if Nectar’s has seemed like a shadow of its former self in recent years, why not try to revitalize it under new (public) ownership? Especially since the final shutdown of Nectar’s was due to a dispute with a landlord. The city has already forced the sale of one Handy property (184 Church Street) for the greater good of the community. Surely, there’s a way to make all this happen with enough political will.

I, for one, am sick and tired of passively accepting the loss of important places and services due to “the market,” which is every bit as much a human-created institution as laws and governments. The Burlington renaissance began with then-mayor Bernie Sanders (whose administration founded 242 Main) refusing to accept the market dictating that we couldn’t have nice things. If we want Burlington’s glory days to return, we need to rediscover that energy.

David Wilcox
Winooski

The Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) denounce Milwaukee Police Association president Alex Ayala’s comments calling for a National Guard presence in Milwaukee, noting that such an escalation would harm communities across the city.

“If enacted, the deployment of military violence on the streets of Milwaukee will only cause harm to the citizens,” said Pamela Westphal, Milwaukee DSA co-chair. “Now, more than ever, the citizens of Milwaukee need to build solidarity with their neighbors as the increase of police and military violence grows every day.”

Ayala’s comments come after President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard against protestors in Los Angeles and against the people of Washington D.C., and he has suggested doing likewise in other U.S. cities, as near to Milwaukee as Chicago.

“We must remain strong together in every city facing militarization,” Milwaukee DSA co-chair Andy Barbour said. “We oppose this proposed violation of the safety of our community and are committed to the fight against fascism.”

DSA organizers intend to work with other organizations and community members across the city and beyond to keep our communities safe from increased militarization in Milwaukee. 

As part of that work, the organization is calling on city leaders to follow the likes of Alderman Alex Brower and Alderwoman Larresa Taylor, who released a statement Thursday breaking down both legally and logically why a Milwaukee National Guard deployment would spell disaster for people here.

“We need our local government to advocate on behalf of the communities fearing for their lives here in Milwaukee,” Barbour said. “Working people will notice which of their representatives leave them in danger by remaining silent.”

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

The 2025 DSA Convention featured a panel on “Building DSA’s Cultural Organizations,” featuring panelists who started DSA sports leagues, choirs, and more. They made the case that these cultural organizations can become institutions of collective action. 

The post Culture is Collective Action appeared first on Democratic Left.

By: Freddy Oswald

From Viral Attention to Volunteer Action

Perhaps the most distinct feature of Zohran Mamdani’s primary campaign was his ‘man on the street’ videos.

Talking directly to the camera, often while walking, Zohran captivates audiences on social media with his humor and energy. And every video seemed to end with just about the same appeal: “get signed up to join a canvass in your area.”

To win June’s Democratic primary, Mamdani’s campaign mobilized an army of volunteers. More than 50,000 people signed up to volunteer and upwards of 30,000 or more actually attended a canvass, led by over 400 field leads and augmented by around 40 paid canvassers with fluency in key languages: together they knocked 1.6 million doors, holding more than a quarter of a million conversations with voters.

Behind those numbers sat not just good vibes or a popular working class election platform, but a piece of infrastructure that translated viral attention into material turnout: Solidarity Tech, a CRM designed by organizers for organizers and rooted in the organizing methods of the labor movement.

Mamdani’s campaign excelled at social media, producing attention-grabbing content that cut through timelines and inspired action. But crucially, that attention didn’t dead-end on Instagram, X, or TikTok. Instead, it linked to a volunteer sign-up page where supporters could commit to canvass shifts in their neighborhoods, which fed into the campaign’s Solidarity Tech database.

Once signed up, the CRM handled the unglamorous but decisive follow-up: automatic confirmation emails, text reminders, and calendar invites. These nudges dramatically boosted attendance, reducing the rate of no-shows. Unburdened from manually sending texts or doing constant event-reminder phonebanks, campaign field leads could focus on leading in-person canvasses and driving the face-to-face interactions with new volunteers and voters alike which are so crucial to deepening engagement with any campaign.

The combined system turned Mamdani’s charisma into an attention-to-action pipeline: from virality, to sign-ups, to turnout, to door-knocks, to earning the trust of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. 

Technology Built By Organizers, For Organizers

In some sense, Solidarity Tech is like every other Contact Relationship Management (CRM) software. Just like Action Network or Salesforce, the system is a contact database, helping its users collect, store, and sort information about the people they engage.

But Solidarity Tech is different for two main reasons: it is independent from the Democrats, and it was designed with worker organizing in mind.

Unlike the dominant CRMs in U.S. electoral politics (NGP VAN, NationBuilder, or Action Network) Solidarity Tech was not born inside the Democratic Party ecosystem. This is crucial because the Democratic establishment has a history of weaponizing its control over this infrastructure to undermine progressive, anti-establishment campaigns. For example, in 2015 the DNC shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to NGP VAN. Others, like Justice Democrats challenging incumbents, have in the past been denied access to NGP VAN’s VoteBuilder software entirely in some states. 

And the Democratic establishment doesn’t even try to hide it. “We talk about growing the Democratic Party, so how do you grow the Democratic Party if you go after incumbents?” Steve Brown, a spokesperson for the Illinois Democrats, told Wired in 2017. In the same article, another then little-known Justice Democrat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to purchase VoteBuilder for $6,000 only to find a  stripped-down voter file. “It was all gone,” Ocasio-Cortez told Wired, referring to the information about vote preferences and past support which is collected by VoteBuilder and usually made available to candidates. It should be no surprise that the establishment Democrats have no interest in facilitating their own undoing. 

But Solidarity Tech didn’t come from inside the Democratic Party. Instead, it was designed by a worker-organizer and software engineer, Ivan Pardo.

After working briefly in big tech, Ivan left to build Buycott, a website to facilitate consumer boycotts, with a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) effort as its second largest campaign. Then Ivan got involved as a volunteer organizing in Rideshare Drivers United (RDU), the Uber/Lyft driver association based out of Los Angeles. To help his team organize, he started building a CRM that eventually turned into Solidarity Tech.

Ivan’s model took many lessons from the traditional worker-organizing framework developed by labor unions. But the problems of organizing Uber and Lyft drivers, with hundreds of thousands in California alone, many part time, were vastly different from running a campaign to unionize 100 grocery store workers or 1000 machinists at a manufacturing plant.

And there was another problem: no money. Unlike traditional organizing campaigns where well-resoured unions bet big on viable campaigns in the hopes of recouping costs later, RDU has never able to raise more than enough to fund one or two staffers. 

To meet these twin challenges, organizers adapted classic labor frameworks, including assessments, the organizer bullseye, and leadership ladders, into an organizing workflow that could operate at mass scale. Assessments became the first line of contact: short conversations or digital surveys that gauged support, identified leaders, and sorted drivers into tiers. The organizer bullseye framework was adapted for distributed conditions: core leaders in the center training volunteers, with volunteers engaging wider layers of supporters over the phone. Every RDU member was asked to become an organizer, with the core team distributing lists to get drivers phonebanking fellow drivers, onboarding peers, and reporting assessments back into the CRM. 

And this work often happened in drivers’ own native languages, allowing a diverse handful of driver organizers to reach hundreds and thousands of drivers in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Arabic, Korean, and more. Out of the necessity of organizing a multi-lingual, largely immigrant workforce, and enabled by a technology which easily tracked language preference and assigned calls by language, Solidarity Tech approximated the logic of workplace mapping and the union strategy of building representative leadership committees.

The journey began by answering the question of how to find drivers in the first place. The most direct way was the meet drivers at the airport, signing them up one by one, and following up with them later to recruit new volunteers. But other ways were possible too. At the time, protests against Uber and Lyft received outsized attention – so this ‘earned media’ could be used to capture drivers attention. All of this was coordinated by Rideshare Drivers United through Solidarity Tech, relying on just one paid organizer and a handful of lead volunteers. 

The software was built to solve problems of scale and independence: how to mobilize tens of thousands without substantial centralized resources, and how to retain ownership of organizing data rather than depend on institutions that might restrict access.

And with this work, by drivers organizing drivers, they were able to win Assembly Bill 5 in 2019, which kicked off a massive multi-year battle with Uber and Lyft. 

The Real Secret: NYC-DSA

In theory, Solidarity Tech excels at relational organizing and volunteer development: tracking who knows whom, mapping social and workplace ties, pairing volunteers with lists by language or region, and identifying and tapping organic leaders. In practice, Mamdani’s campaign didn’t make use of all of these features.

This wasn’t because these aspects weren’t necessary, but because NYC-DSA provided much of the relational infrastructure already. As Mamdani field director Tascha Van Auken, former campaign manager for Julia Salazar, outlined in her interview with City & State New York, the campaign began in December 2024 with many of the initial canvassers being DSA members with experience leading canvasses. Van Auken outlines how this effort expanded over time, as volunteers were trained into leads, scripts were sharpened, and the operation was scaled up. And core campaign staff, like Van Auken herself, had cut their teeth on earlier DSA campaigns.

It would be totally silly to argue that the Mamdani campaign was won because of Solidarity Tech, rather than the real secret sauce which was NYC-DSA’s political machine, built up over a decade. But Solidarity Tech played a role in super-charging the growth of this machine, constantly feeding it with new volunteer sign ups and driving increased turnout at a scale which likely would have been impossible to keep up with if done manually.

DSA as the backbone of the campaign also explains why the campaign didn’t need to rely on the relational tools within Solidarity Tech. With dozens or hundreds of experienced field leads integrated into a pre-existing semi-mass city party, the chapter could staff canvass launches, orient new volunteers, and maintain neighborhood continuity without depending on the CRM for leader development. 

Instead, the campaign treated ST primarily as a volunteer funnel and reminder system, serving as a bridge between grabbing a supporters attention and leading them on a canvass in person. And even though relational features weren’t maximized in the software, they still mattered in practice. Every volunteer who showed up was greeted by a local organizer—a neighborhood lead who had likely run the same canvass sites multiple times. That consistency created trust and continuity, allowing volunteers to feel rooted in their own community rather than in an abstract campaign machine.

Similarly, DSA had the internal capacity to tap the full capacity of new volunteers who wanted to do more than knock doors. That meant the campaign didn’t need to rely on ST’s follow-up and leadership-development workflows, because the campaign didn’t need to manage those tasks at all; instead, those functions were handled through the chapter’s own committees, working groups, and recruitment pipelines.

In this way, Mamdani’s field operation blurred the line between high-tech automation and low-tech relational organizing. Social media and the CRM got volunteers to the door; DSA organizers kept them coming back.

Moving Forward For DSA

Although the Mamdani campaign was able to forgo some of these features and workflows focused on ‘deep organizing’ in Solidarity Tech, they remain highly valuable for any DSA chapter which seeks to follow in NYC’s lead.

Campaigns outside of New York will have far less infrastructure than what the Mamdani campaign began with, and building up this infrastructure – i.e. recruiting and training volunteer organizers and campaign leads – will require months of work. Even a DSA chapter which has not yet launched a campaign can begin deploying this toolkit, in order to prime their existing list while they decide which campaigns to put forward. The work of organizing a core crew, recruiting volunteers to phonebank, and deploying these volunteers to call through the list remains the same. 

This work of priming the list is crucial to activate as many “paper members” as possible ahead of election time, funneling them into trainings or working groups, so that come election day there is a larger pool of potential volunteers, and a trained team ready to scale up outreach operations.

Organizing At Scale

Mamdani’s campaign demonstrated a truth often lost in the consultant-driven world of politics: organizing at scale is not just about quantity, but about structure.

The Mamdani campaign shows how insurgent campaigns can combine mass attention with deep organizing. Social media grabbed attention. Solidarity Tech captured and converted that attention. And DSA provided the relational glue that turned volunteers into repeat actors.

The lesson isn’t just about one candidate or one election. It’s about how the left can own its own infrastructure, adapt worker-organizing models for electoral scale, and prevent its capacity from evaporating once a campaign ends.

For a generation of activists, Solidarity Tech represents a bridge: from the deep organizing traditions of the labor movement, to the scale of modern internet-driven campaigns. The challenge now is to use that bridge not just for one race, but for the long road of building movements that last.

The tools of the labor movement—assessments, leadership ladders, the organizer bullseye—emerged from shop-floor campaigns which were 10x, 100x, or 1000x smaller than the Mamdani campaign. Today, they can be scaled for tens of thousands of volunteers, if the right infrastructure is in place.

With the right tools we can translate deep organizing into the digital age.

Freddy Oswald is a member of Boston DSA and a contributor to Working Mass.

The post Deep Organizing at Scale: How Solidarity Tech Helped Power Zohran Mamdani’s Volunteer Wave appeared first on Working Mass.

by Reese A

This piece was written 08/15/25

Last week, I had the honor of representing the Liberal Arts and Science Academy chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), at YDSA’s 2025 annual national convention. It was a true honor to be their co-chair, and to serve them once more as their delegate.

Ultimately, however, I came away from the convention concerned for our political future as a movement: We were decisively against organizing students. We failed to pass crucial resolutions that would strengthen the student movement, including R23: Building Campus Consciousness, Democracy, and Militancy through Student Unions and R10: Building an International Student Movement. R23 would have provided crucial support to mass student organizing in the form of student unions, a formation that can mobilize large numbers of students in solidarity in a way that YDSA cannot. The success of the student union formation is outlined below with Students United by LASA YDSA, and I think that failing to bet on mass student organizing via student unions will remain one of the biggest lost opportunities of the convention. Additionally, R10 centered our internationalism around building relationships with student organizations as YDSA, something that must be centered in order to build an international coalition to win student demands and ultimately socialism.

Instead, we focused on gatekeeping durable socialist organizing to only people with “real” ties to the class struggle (current laborers) and building value-pure socialist groups to recruit students into. We passed resolutions like R12: For a Campaigning Internationalism and R18: Recommitting to Running Strategic Campaigns as Unapologetic Socialists, which aren’t obviously bad, but show a clear focus away from larger mass movement organizing of students towards socialist groups. This tendency fundamentally doesn’t believe that students have a claim to power, but rather we must take a backseat to the “real” working class and focus on political education, supporting their cause, and running smaller campaigns as socialists to pressure the campus. It doesn’t believe in the mass student movement or their own claim to power and representation.

This is a mistake. If we want to win material change, at our schools and in the world, we have to be comfortable organizing the people around us, having conversations, and building power. As students, we represent some of the most diverse, progressive and willing bodies of people in America, and our organizations should strive to organize and mobilize as many students as possible to win. Some might argue that students don’t have the correct “class character,” and I must disagree. We are forgetting what the root of working class is – people who are not owners, people who do not control capital. Just as unemployed people are part of the working class, so are students. Additionally, others argue that students inherently aren’t worth organizing because they’re a transient group. The student movement has built some of the strongest organizations and movements in American history, from Vietnam and Students for a Democratic Society, to divestment from South Africa and winning the collapse of apartheid, to fighting for a free Palestine today. Turnover is not a valid reason to avoid organizing – if that were true, we wouldn’t be organizing Starbucks and Amazon. Yet regardless of the excuses people give for abandoning students, none of them give a valid reason to leave them unorganized and retreat to our comfort zone of like-minded socialists. They’re progressive, willing to fight, and have organized throughout history. It would be a shame for YDSA to give up on student mass organizing, let alone for the wider socialist movement to do so, yet increasingly that seems to be the trend.

It’s important that we organize the entirety of the working class by building durable organizations to fight for change, not because that we think only the working class can win socialism, but because we truly believe in each and every one of our neighbors as people. In this time of rising fascism, believing in people is more important now than ever if we want to defeat it. Yet the socialist movement seems to be retreating into hiding, requiring that people come to our doorstep instead of organizing our neighbors en masse for change, because we no longer find hope in them. We vote down student organizing, we vote down protest organizing, we stop committing to the rank-and-file strategy and make connections with the union leaders instead. This is what fascism wants of us: to feel hopeless and that your neighbor is untrustworthy, to build division in order to cement the ruling class. Instead, we must meet neighbors where they are, with organizations that can represent them both to their schools and to the wider world, and build committed comrades out of this bond.

At LASA YDSA, we organized a student union, Students United, to serve as a durable student bargaining representative to fight for fairer learning conditions and mental health support. We currently have over 8% of the student body supporting our bid to unionize by signing Union Authorization Cards. This union attracted a wide range of people because it was rooted in a collective movement, representation, and demands for change – a movement from which we were able to build committed socialist organizers out of. While YDSA could never legitimately claim to be a representative of students and demand bargaining rights, a union could, because a union’s legitimacy comes exclusively from its status as a representative of the students instead of ideology or self-interest. YDSA can lead the movement, YDSA can build organizers from the movement, but YDSA must commit to empowering the working class to seize power for themselves. This is an important distinction because it’s both an optical, political and communal one – it’s the difference between one-party rule and a worker’s state for the people. Democratic socialists should commit to people power and democracy first and foremost, not try to make a utopian socialist society concocted out of thin air and imposed on the people.

We will not win by building a cadre vanguard that people do not feel a connection to. We will not win by treating our neighbors as peasants to be strung along. We will win through class struggle and a mass movement of each and every one of us, that, through solidarity, can be built in any community and especially within students. We must not give up on student and wider working class solidarity. We must not give up on our own communities. We must commit more, organize for power, and organize to win socialism.

The post In Defense of the Student Movement first appeared on Red Fault.