by Julia T

Whit Strub has played a major role in shaping the chapter as North New Jersey DSA’s co-chair following an increase in membership in 2016. A professor at Rutgers University and department representative for AAUP-AFT, Whit was on the frontlines when faculty went on strike for better working conditions and common good reforms just a few weeks ago. This profile is part of a series spotlighting longtime organizers with a wealth of knowledge and experience on the U.S. left.

How long have you been an active member of the NNJDSA chapter? What has your experience been like?

I joined DSA in either late 2016 or early 2017, but I had basically grown up on “the left.” Previously, I had experience with the Green Party and was radicalized by Ralph Nader’s campaign. I later be- came involved with the Socialist Workers Party, but eventually became disillusioned by their insistence on 3rd party politics. Prior to the “Bernie Bump” of DSA when an influx of members joined in 2016, DSA was mostly read by young people as a book club. However, the night of former President Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017, I was living in downtown Newark and jumped over to get to a protest. There was quite a large DSA contingent, and I was really impressed by how they mobilized for such a large direct action. I have been a member since and was also an active part of the #AbolishICE campaign to get migrants out of detention. What I like about DSA is that it’s not a 3rd party structure and the least sectarian version of what I’d encountered in the past. My experiences in DSA have overall been very positive: even though there are real tensions and disagreements, we’ve been able to work through them as members and I’m a big booster of the organization.

I owe my socialist politics to Kurt Cobain from the band Nirvana, who led me to punk rock, which through liner notes (especially Propagandhi and J Church) and zines like Punk Planet and Maximum Rocknroll led me to AK Press, PM Press, Noam Chomsky, etc. These all helped shape the inchoate class resentments I felt growing up working-class in rural Alaska into something closer to class analysis.

What other organizations and movements have you been part of?

I am a member of the Rutgers faculty union and, in many ways, I am very lucky because union politics can be very challenging The last few weeks of the strike were pretty intense after bargaining was taking place. Thankfully, Rutgers-Newark has a remarkably left-leaning union with 100% participation.

We are inspired by the work of the Chicago Teachers Union in bargaining for the common good along with better contracts. Our union supports Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, recognition and liberation of Palestine, and asking unions to not endorse politicians who do not support these policy positions. When I was on the executive council of the union, we drafted a proposal to end ICE contracts, which was a pretty radical resolution for a mainstream trade union to take on. We have active members in DSA who help uphold our values, and I see DSA and our union as working in tandem with each other in a symbiotic relationship.

I am a big believer in our union’s leadership. I was part of the bargaining committee sequestered at Governor Murphy’s office in the Trenton State House for a week, and I think it was a sweeping win by the standards of labor rights. We won a 40% raise and longer contracts for adjuncts, which is a great victory against the neoliberal, gig economy reality of contingent workers. I think you’re going to see this inspiring faculty at other colleges and universities.

What kind of organizing work do you primarily take part in?

I was active in the anti-war movement in the Bush years more as a foot soldier than an organizer. Since coming to Newark, I’ve been involved in the LGBTQ+ community as a member of the Rutgers Queer Newark Oral History Project and the LGBTQ+ Community Center board, which ties deeply into my academic work in Gender Studies and History. I learned more about solidarity from this experience than anything else I’ve done– I was very aware of my positionality amongst a group led by Black, queer women, but also used this opportunity to practice solidarity over allyship. I put in a lot of sweat and work and learned a lot about the value of shared struggles within a local, grass-roots organization. I believe these experiences are really helpful for those who are of more privileged identities.

What are some issues you hope our chapter will take on?

The task of the left is to perform an impossible double gesture: be realistic and pragmatic, but also challenge what is possible. We cannot succumb to hegemonic ideals and must do our part to make real changes. Calibrating pragmatism and militism has been challenging– as we have seen, Biden’s administration offers a unique set of challenges vs. the ones presented under Trump. My own personal vision for DSA would be continued electoral organizing and strident militarism in rank and file unions. The most immediate challenge for our chapter would be to reinvigorate and re-engage our members. I would like to continue our strategy of mobilizing ourselves through external external campaigns like Right to Counsel that are radical, but still doable and help bring new people in.

Check out Whit’s article on the Rutgers strike at https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/rutgers-strike-ends-com-mon-good-wins/

The post NNJDSA “Red (All) Stars:” An Interview with Whit Strub first appeared on North NJ DSA.

by Karl S.

Red states like Florida and Missouri have been all over the news for their ongoing assault on public and school libraries, banning books, and curtailing curricula. Unfortunately, deep blue New Jersey is not immune from the right-wing assault on these beloved public institutions. So called “parents rights” groups in towns and school districts across the state have been making life a living hell for librarians and depriving children of a fulfilling education by attempting to ban books with LGBT and racial justice themes.

This past winter, hundreds of residents in Glen Ridge turned out to defend their public library when the ironically named group Citizens Defending Education at- tempted to have six books with LGBT characters removed from the shelves. Running on a parents rights platform, a recently elected school board slate in predominantly Republican Sparta called ‘Students First’ banned a book from a middle school library where the main character is a lesbian after a small number of organized parents spoke out at a school board meeting. A school librarian in Roxbury, a conservative leaning town in Morris County, was so viciously smeared as a “groomer” by a group of parents that she is suing them for defamation.

It’s hard to know if these parent groups are legitimate expressions of grassroots discontent, but extensive reporting in the NY Times has revealed that many of these organizations, which have popped up in school districts in New Jersey from Sussex to Cape May County, are being funded by outside conservative networks with deep pockets.

The most notorious of these groups, ‘Moms for Liberty’, whose members regularly threaten school workers with violence, claims to have 260 chapters across the country, six of which are based in New Jersey. In addition to advocating for book bans and lobbying for laws so extreme that librarians could be imprisoned for ordering the wrong books, Moms for Liberty has been a major force in bringing parents who were upset about school closures and mask mandates into a neo-fascist movement.

It’s worth asking why this moral panic around libraries is happening now. I went to Rutgers for a degree in library science right before the Republican Party’s embrace of Qanon, election denial, and anti-vax conspiracy theories. As a young librarian, I never expected book bans to be something I had to be particularly worried about as they seemed like relics from a less enlightened time period, but I couldn’t have imagined the delusional direction conservative politics was heading.

These moral panics around books are not new. New Jersey writers like Judy Blume and Philip Roth, who are now embraced as cultural icons, were highly controversial figures throughout their careers for writing about taboo topics like teenage sexuality. The current wave of book bannings has many similarities with the attempts five decades ago to censor Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Portnoy’s Complaint, but I believe that if we only focus on the lewd nature of the books being targeted, as much of the media has done when discussing frequently banned titles like Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue, we are missing out on the greater picture of what the right is trying to accomplish with these books bans.

There are two dominant ideologies among the right in America: extremist libertarians who do not believe in any form of taxation or public services and Christian nationalists, who view all of our democratic institutions as corrupted beyond repair by secular liberal values. These groups are more than happy to see public libraries disappear from our communities entirely. By attacking librarians as “groomers’’ and peddlers of pornography, the right is attempting to build support for the complete elimination of public libraries. If this agenda sounds extreme, it is, and it’s already happening in Missouri, where the House of Representatives has attempted to reduce state funding of libraries to $0.

The movement to ban books should not be seen as only concerned parents who have been worked into a moral panic. These parents may be the most visible culture warriors on the front lines of local battles and the easiest to mock, but the driving force behind groups like Moms for Liberty and other “parents rights” groups are innocuously named conservative think tanks like The Council for National Policy and The Leadership Institute which have pumped millions of dollars into the movement. These groups are invested in creating a moral panic around libraries in order to destroy a secular and publicly funded institution which they see as a threat to their Christo-fascist, ultra libertarian worldview.

Public libraries are worth defending. Throughout my career, I have worked in public libraries that offer free services such as English and GED classes, free lunches, appointments with social workers, expungement clinics, and overdose prevention tools.

In many communities, the library is the single most important provider of. In many communities, the library is the single most important provider of social services and the only free indoor space people have access to, making them especially vital institutions in poor and working class communities.

The parents rights movement has some wins against public and school libraries under their belt, but their agenda is deeply unpopular, even in many conservative communities. Because they are well organized and highly funded, they have been able to hold schools and libraries hostage with a small and vocal minority of supporters. These groups have successfully turned the phrase “parents rights” into an agenda that opposes public health measures, the basic human rights of LGBT people, and classroom instruction that honestly portrays the history of racism in America, but in communities across the US there are millions of working class parents who disagree with the fascist politics of this movement and are looking for an alternative. The parents rights movement is fundamentally reactionary and deprives children of their agency.

At a time when red state legislatures are loosening child labor laws, the parents rights movement is surprisingly silent on the very question of whether children should be stripped of their childhoods and forced into the marketplace. Rather than asking what rights parents have to dominate and exploit their children, socialists can fight this pernicious movement by focusing on the basic rights children should have but are so regularly denied.

We believe children should have the right to attend schools with universal free lunches, clean drinking water, and air-conditioned classrooms. Children should be able to express their gender identity however they choose to and receive the proper healthcare when necessary.

Why don’t our children have the right to live in a society where climate change won’t destroy their future and mass shootings aren’t accepted as inevitable? Why are children so regularly denied access to books that accurately depict the racist history of the United States? The only way to fight back against the parents rights movement is with a robust movement for the rights of children.

The post Assaults on Public Libraries and Book Banning first appeared on North NJ DSA.

by Brett R.

On March 3, 2032, the police were called when Najee Seabrooks, an anti-violence interventionist with the Paterson Healing Collective, was experiencing a mental health crisis. In his moment of greatest need, he pleaded for his mother and begged fruitlessly to see his colleagues from the Paterson Healing Collective, who were on-site and trained to intervene in just these types of situations. Instead, the police met his crisis with mockery, laughter, threats, and tragically, a hail of bullets.

This was a police execution. Paterson Black Lives Matter leader and North Jersey DSA member Zellie Thomas described Najee’s murder: “After cajoling Najee to exit the bathroom, police behind anti ballistic shield with protective gear, shot Najee with live ammunition and killed him.” Thomas noted that “you can only justify that if you do not value human life.” In the aftermath of Najee’s murder, and in acknowledgment of a long history of a murderously violent and entirely out of control police department, the Attorney General of New Jersey took the unprecedented step of taking over the operation of the Paterson Police Department (PPD).

In a listening session in Paterson, AG Matthew Platkin was surprisingly straightforward, acknowledging that Paterson residents were justified in having no trust in the PPD. When he said that some officers will probably need to be removed, the crowd pushed back, asserting that the PPD is not just “a few bad apples” but a thoroughly rotten basket. Platkin then acknowledged that indeed there may be a more wide-spread problem. While Platkin mostly said the right things, and seemed to genuinely listen to community concerns, we should not hold our breath and expect to see a bright new future of police and community collaboration on the horizon. We have to go beyond reforms and ask what the police are for in the first place.

It is easy in the aftermath of a horrific police killing to scrutinize the particulars of a situation. To say, why wasn’t the Paterson Healing Collective called in to help Najee?

To ask for so-called “less lethal” interventions to be considered before re-sorting to bullets and chokeholds. To say that this or that police department needs more training in dealing with mental health crises.

While any of these things MAY have saved Najee Seabrooks life, or Michael Brown’s life, or George Floyd’s life, or Breonna Taylor’s life, we misunderstand the function of police in our society if we accept the premise that police exist to provide safety to citizens. Police exist to protect and preserve capital, and the system of racial capitalism that protects and grows the fortunes of billionaires.

As abolitionist scholars Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie make clear, police are “violence workers” who “don’t promote safety, they prevent it”.

The struggle for black lives, the fight against the violence of the police state, and the push for abolition of police and prisons is an inherently socialist struggle. So too, we must see that the road to a socialist future is inherently intertwined with the abolitionist struggle. As Joshua Clover and Nikhil Pal Singh wrote:

“It is difficult for us to imagine an emancipatory politics in the current moment that does not run through the precinct house, the national guard station, or the military base, those sites of local, national, and global police power whose voracious demands on budgets, public priorities, and political imaginations have shaped the broad organization of US society over the past half-century, if not longer.”

It is our obligation as the largest socialist organization in the country to wholeheartedly join the fight against the violence of the police state. In this country, it is both a historical and contemporary truth that the most meaningful movements for liberation have been rooted in struggles against the chains of slavery, segregation, police, and prisons as a part of struggles against white supremacist capitalist exploitation. We must commit ourselves to this ongoing struggle in Paterson, across North Jersey, the US, and the world.

We will not allow the murder of Najee Seabrooks to be swept under the rug. We cannot permit Paterson to make cosmetic changes before resuming violence as usual. We must commit to justice, accountability, and to the long abolitionist struggle.

The post Police Don’t Promote Safety, They Prevent It first appeared on North NJ DSA.

by Nate H.

The prolific modernist architect and urban planner Le Corbusier once said that houses are “machines for living in.” He believed the sole function of a house should be to enable its inhabitants to thrive.

For renters in New Jersey, houses are quickly becoming machines for bleeding us dry.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, over 50% of New Jersey’s renter house- holds are rent-burdened and the problem is most acute among the state’s most vulnerable. There are only 45 available and affordable housing units for every 100 New Jerseyans defined as “very low income” (making 50% of the area median income).

Once an essential part of the American Dream, housing has become just another commodity for investors to squeeze profits from. Affordable homes are increasingly unavailable on the market because investors are buying up properties with the intention of turning them into AirBnBs or hiking the rents as high as they will go.

In Newark, investors account for nearly two-thirds of residential real estate sales. Hudson County recently made national news after residents complained of rent increases as high as 40%, and in 2019, AirBnB spent over $4 million in a failed bid to overturn an ordinance limiting short term rentals in Jersey City. (Ed: See What’s Wrong With Airbnb, written by NNJ DSA chapter comrades about this campaign!)

To compound the high cost of existing housing stock, new housing construction is also increasingly investor-driven instead of community-driven. As a result, most of the new construction we see is in private, luxury developments, often in working class, minority neighborhoods (see the massive projects underway in Jersey City’s Journal Square neighborhood or the horrifying rebranding of Hackensack as ‘The Sack’). These projects are clearly being built with future, more affluent residents in mind and not the current members of the neighborhood who are at risk of displacement.

The real-estate funded “Yes In My Backyard” or ‘YIMBY’ movement argues that this is not a problem at all. They believe that we need housing policies that attract private investment into the construction of new homes to achieve what they refer to as “housing abundance.” They insist that all new housing construction, regardless of its target consumer, will lead to greater affordability through a process called ‘filtering’. The idea is that as wealthy people move into the new luxury housing, old homes become free for others to move into, and so on, in a process reminiscent of ‘trickle-down’ economics.

Many YIMBYs position themselves as progressives, with some YIMBY groups even trying to enter DSA. It should be clear that anyone pushing Reaganite economic policy as a solution to the housing crisis is not a friend of working people.

As socialists, we understand that the cause of the present crisis is not that there is too little private investment in housing, but that there is too much.

As long as housing is an investment vehicle, it will never be affordable. A home should be a place where we rest, not a place that makes an increasingly smaller number of us rich.

To truly achieve housing abundance, we should follow a two-pronged strategy. The first step is to attack the idea of housing as a commodity from which to profit. We can do this by organizing with our fellow tenants, engaging in rent strikes, and forcing reforms that weaken capital’s ability to profit from housing. The next is to win massive public investments in housing, which should include upgrading existing public housing, taking over private housing, and building new public units.

The Fair Share Housing Center has identified 1,100 parcels of at least 0.5 acres currently owned by the state. They recommend choosing parcels in areas that have good access to transportation, are at low risk of flooding, and where the housing crisis is most acute to target for subsidized housing development. Why not go further and make these developments fully public?

To be fair, the current state of public housing in the United States may not engender confidence in such a plan. Our existing public housing is often seen as a crime-ridden symbol of urban decay. But that is not the result of anything inherent to the housing itself, but rather the neglect and dis-investment driven by racism and the profit system. The reality is that public housing in the U.S. was set up for failure and never meant to challenge real estate capital. It is reserved for those with very low incomes, ensuring that there is not enough money for maintenance, and its construction was paired with slum clearance so that the supply of available units did not actually increase.

Public housing can and does work in cities like Vienna, where 60% of the population lives in government owned housing, and rents are lower than any major city in Europe. Contrary to the post-Reagan consensus, public resources can provide an equitable and decent standard of living.

It is time for New Jerseyans to realize that we can do better. To demand that we do better. Instead of begging for crumbs from for-profit developers, we can have abundant, livable housing that is democratically controlled and permanently affordable.

The post To Solve The Affordable Housing Crisis, We Need To Build, Build, Build Public Housing first appeared on North NJ DSA.

by Liam P

The cost of prescription drugs in New Jersey is rising at an unsustainable and inhumane rate. People with chronic conditions who need these drugs face difficult choices, sometimes forgoing life saving medications. Those who don’t end up impoverished may pay with their health—or all too often, with their lives. The Health Justice Working Group of the North Jersey DSA has been hard at work pushing for legislation to set a price cap on life-saving prescription drugs such as insulin, EpiPens, and asthma inhalers.

On February 14, 2022 a post on the official website of the state of New Jersey announced that, “Governor Phil Murphy, Senator Troy Singleton, Senator Vitale, Senator Pou, and Assemblyman John McKeon today announced their support for a legislative package to make prescription drugs more affordable.” According to the New Jersey Legislature, this package includes S1614/A2839, which would require that health insurance companies provide coverage for EpiPens and asthma inhalers and would limit cost sharing for health insurance coverage of insulin; S1615/A2840, which “establishes certain data reporting requirements for prescription drug supply chain” and “requires Division of Consumer Affairs to issue annual report on emerging trends in prescription drug pricing”; and S1616/A536, which would establish new transparency standards for pharmacy benefits manager business practices. Over a year later, the bills have yet to become law.

The Building Health Justice in NJ(HJNJ) campaign has been putting pressure on the bill’s sponsors, demanding that they pass the bills but also amend them to include two key protections. The first of these protections is that price caps must cover all formularies of EpiPens, asthma inhalers, and insulin drugs, not just the preferred brands of insurance companies. As it stands, our state lawmakers are crafting these laws behind closed doors, with the usual roundtable of “experts” – the state’s pharma and insurance lobbyists. The only person telling us which drugs we can take should be our doctors, not the people who profit off of these life saving medications. The second amendment extends price caps to cover uninsured and undocumented folks. While S1614/A2839 does limit cost sharing for health insurance coverage of insulin, this law does not protect New Jersey’s most vulnerable residents.

In the words of Assemblywoman Carol Murphy, “No one should have to go without the medicines they urgently need.” But according to the New Jersey Legislature website, S1614/A2839 passed the Senate on June 29 unanimously and was sent back to the Assembly Appropriations Committee where it has languished ever since. This is deeply concerning as it is all too common for important bills to “die in committee.”

For that reason, Building Health Justice in NJ urges the public to reach out to their state legislators. It is especially important to put pressure on the sponsors of this legislative package: The complete legislative roster can be found at https://www.njleg.state.nj.us/legislative-roster. Our petition and calling script can be found at https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/pass-prescription-drug-price-caps-in-new-jersey/.

In the coming months the HJNJ campaign will begin work for Medicaid expansion. We want to get the NJ Legislature to increase the state’s income eligibility threshold for Medicaid to at least 400% Federal Poverty Level (FPL) or higher (depending on household size). The FPL in New Jersey is woefully low given the high cost of living here. And to create a fairer cut off rate to give Medicaid Access to more working class families.

The post Prescription Drug Caps & Medicare For All first appeared on North NJ DSA.

by Mary R.

On May 10, 2023, Rutgers University union members voted 93% to ratify a new contract, after nearly a year without one. Three unions bargained together, betting that this unprecedented coalition would be able to secure bigger gains for the most vulnerable educators on our campuses. The bet paid off–but only after we showed our solidarity by going on strike.

For five days, starting on April 10, picket lines marched through all Rutgers campuses (including North New Jersey DSA members, employees and alumni), professors canceled classes and the union bargaining team and management were summoned to Trenton by Governor Murphy. Less than a month, and hundreds of grueling hours of negotiating later, the university agreed to contracts that substantially adopted the unions’ demands.

Pay for adjuncts, who teach at least one-third of classes offered at Rutgers, according to their union, will increase by 44% between now and 2025. They will also have more job security as people who have taught for two or more years will now be given con- tracts for more than one semester at a time, called “presumptive renewal.” Previously, adjuncts were hired on a per-semester basis, which made it almost impossible for people to plan for the future.

Graduate students, who teach classes, work in labs, and conduct their own research, will see their salaries rise to $40,000 annually by 2025. Incoming PhD students will be guaranteed five years of funding starting in 2024. Students whose research was disrupted by the Covid pandemic are eligible for additional funding. Full-time faculty will gain 14% pay raises over the contract’s four-year term. The full text of the contract can be found at rutgersaaup.org.

Rutgers administration did not meet all of the unions’ demands. One of our boldest strategies was Bargaining for the Common Good, which linked our labor with issues affecting undergraduate students and residents of the communities where Rutgers campuses are located. In New Brunswick, for example, Rutgers is the largest landlord. Students report inadequate living conditions at the same time that Rutgers is increasing rents. While we were unable to get the rent freeze that we bargained for, we won a $600,000 Common Good fund, paid for by the state.

Rutgers workers, like other educators at Temple University, University of California, Columbia University, and The New School, aren’t only fighting for better pay. We raised our voices together against the neo- liberalization of universities. Rather than caring about our core mission–education–the neoliberal university applies capitalist ideas to running the university to increase its so-called efficiency and profit. Universities become focused on growing endowments while reducing the numbers of secure tenure track jobs in favor of low-paid, insecure adjunct positions. While our jobs may be different, university workers are fighting for the same ideals of equity, dignity, and security as our fellow workers at Amazon or Starbucks and the writers currently on strike with the Writers Guild of America.

The post Historic Rutgers Strike Brings a Win first appeared on North NJ DSA.

Our vote tracker has launched. Find out where your Jersey City Council rep stands on a Right to Counsel for ALL and use this script to get them to vote YES:

The Right to Counsel (RTC) would guarantee legal representation for all tenants facing eviction or other issues with landlords. NO tenant should have to fight for their homes alone!

**Calling Script**

Hello, my name is [your name] and I am calling to ensure [council member] is supporting the Jersey City Right-to-Counsel ordinance in its fullest capacity. Let’s make sure this includes universal coverage for all renters regardless of income!

Landlords and developers have accelerated the soaring rent costs that make Jersey City the most expensive city in the United States to live in. With [council member]'s support, residents will no longer fear facing eviction alone.

Can we count on your support to vote for a Right to Counsel for all tenants paid by developer fees?

**Send an Email**

Dear [council member],

My name is [your name] and I am calling to ensure [council member] is supporting the Jersey City Right-to-Counsel and Developer Fee ordinances in their fullest capacity. Let’s make sure this includes universal coverage for all renters regardless of income!

Landlords and developers have accelerated the soaring rent costs that make Jersey City the most expensive city in the United States to live in. Landlords more often than not have legal representation in housing court, tipping the scales in their favor. With [council member]'s support, residents will no longer fear facing eviction alone.

In nearby NYC, evictions were reduced by an estimated 30% after the passage of their Right to Counsel program. Let’s pass one of the strongest RTCs in the nation by making sure all tenants are protected from eviction, landlord malfeasance, habitability issues, illegally high rents, and more!

Can we count on your support to vote for a Right to Counsel for all tenants paid by developer fees?

Best,

[your name]

Silicon Valley Democratic Socialists of America Chapter Committee condemns the recent introduction of Assembly Bill 642, legalizing law enforcement use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in California. We further condemn the recent co-sponsorship of AB642 by SV-DSA member and District 25 State Assemblymember Alex Lee. Only determined and militant social movements can chart a safe and just future for Californians and for the world.  AB 642 will open the door  to intensified surveillance on already over-policed communities and movements that challenge the status quo.

Assemblymember Lee retweeted the claim AB 642 is needed to institute oversight over facial recognition, given the impending sunset of the extant FRT ban and the Assembly’s failure to extend it last year. We reject this logic wholesale – the place of socialists is at the leading edge of the struggle for a just society, not tinkering at the margins in the vain hope of staving off further defeat. Another bill attempting to re-extend the FRT ban (AB 1034) is already in committee –  Lee should show real leadership by putting his support behind it.

We condemn AB642 in the strongest terms and call upon Alex Lee to withdraw his co-sponsorship immediately.

The post Chapter Committee Statement on Assemblymember Alex Lee and AB642 appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

Member Bruce Nissen shares his thoughts on our work with the labor movement

One of the more “foundational stances” of the DSA is support for organized labor. Both in written positions and (less consistently) in practice, the DSA positions itself as unequivocally a pro-labor organization. Some DSA chapters have no working relationship with unions beyond rhetorical support; others like the Pinellas DSA have some of our members actively involved in individual unions and in broader union formations like the local central labor council (CLC).

It is not hard to understand why the DSA has this pro-union orientation. Democratic Socialists believe in democracy and favor struggle with our 1% overlords, the capitalists. Unions are among the most important U.S. forces for democracy. Although they do not have the clout with elected officials that corporations do, unions nevertheless have much more influence than almost any left-wing organization, so their support for basic democracy is important. The unions consistently oppose attempts (usually by Republican lawmakers) to restrict the franchise, make it harder to vote, implement right-wing populist or fascistic measures, or cut back the influence of ordinary Americans by any other means. Research has shown that countries with higher union densities are more equal and more democratic than those with low union densities.

By their very nature unions are also adversaries of large corporations and capitalists. This is simply because bargaining and enforcing a collective bargaining agreement with an employer brings opposing economic interests into contention, at least to a degree.

Therefore, a strong alliance between Democratic Socialists and labor unions seems like a clear plus. That said, socialists often find practical limitations to their work in the labor movement. One stems from the Cold War legacy. Many Americans equate socialism with dictatorship and loss of freedoms for individual workers and their families. Nationally prominent Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) counter this image, especially among younger workers. DSA member behavior within the labor movement also dispels this misconception. I expect this obstacle to diminish over time.

Nevertheless, young DSA members who join and get involved in unions are frequently confounded. This is part of a pattern of American workers in generally often not understanding what unions are or how they work. A young DSA member first thinking about involvement in a union at their workplace may expect to see a dynamic organization on the move; what they often find is a bureaucratic, uninvolving outfit with few interests beyond protecting the contractual protections of its own members and few external activities beyond supporting Democratic Party candidates irrespective of how progressive those candidates are or are not. (Of course, this is not an accurate depiction of all unions — some are dynamic, progressive, internally democratic and involving — but these are the exceptions to the rule in today’s American labor movement.)

Given this “state of the unions,” some young DSAers may ask, “Why is it worthwhile to involve oneself actively in union or labor movement affairs? Isn’t it mostly a waste of time that would be better spent elsewhere?” I think this question deserves a serious answer.

The labor movement must be at or near the center of our focus because unions are the only institutions of any size in American society that are composed entirely of workers and are devoted entirely to the interests of workers. They are unique working-class institutions in a society that has attempted to obliterate even the notion of “working class” by lumping us all into a broad “middle class.” With all their flaws, unions are the only organizations we’ve got if we want to reach workers on a self-organized basis. And reaching workers on a self-organized basis I so crucial because working class people asserting themselves at the workplace (the “point of production”) is the only way that transformative change occurs, and historically this is the only way it has ever happened.

To illustrate this, consider the difference between putting our socialist energies into union work vs. putting them into a party like the Democratic Party. In the labor movement, you are working to build and contest politically within a clearly working-class institution that, however backward its leadership may be, is still at its core an organization composed of and answerable to workers. In the Democratic Party, you are working in a multi-class institution largely funded by and certainly answerable to a core of multi-millionaires and billionaires. Even if the political perspectives coming out of the leadership of both institutions should be identical there still would be a world of difference concerning which is worth serious socialist engagement.

To me, that means that we Democratic Socialists should view the Democratic Party in a totally opportunistic fashion: use it when you can (for example, use its ballot line in most cases) and soak it for support whenever that’s possible for our objectives and candidates, but don’t waste your time trying to internally build this organization that has no clear class basis and no internal discipline except for the discipline exerted by its funders. In contrast we should view the labor movement as fertile terrain for serious involvement and contestation over political and organizing/mobilizing orientation. We have a strong foothold for building class power to the extent that we are able to establish socialist influence and ultimately leadership within it. That means we have to build the labor movement; help it to thrive and then work to make it a better instrument to enhance the power of all workers.

That’s why I believe that an unshakable commitment to the labor movement and to establish and build a socialist current and ultimately socialist leadership within it to be absolutely crucial to the work of the DSA. Given the political and bureaucratic outlook of many labor leaders, that may seem a discouraging prospect but there is no alternative. The members of U.S. unions are much like other workers in our country, and we can’t expect unions to magically be way more advanced than their own membership. Building a socialist working class and ultimately a socialist America is a long-term task — work in the labor movement is crucial, but we must think of ourselves as long-distance runners.

(I want to thank Richie Floyd for incisive commentary on an earlier version of this blog, helping me to make it much better.)

The state chapter of the ACLU, the New Jersey Working Families Party, and the Fair Share Housing Center are among nine endorsing the right to counsel proposal in Jersey City.

The other groups lending their endorsement to the cause are the Latino Action Network (LAN), Housing Rights Initiative (HRI), Make the Road New Jersey (MRNJ), Our Revolution New Jersey, North New Jersey Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (NNJDSA), and the New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP).

Read “ALCU, NJWFP, & Fair Share Housing among 9 endorsing Jersey City right to counsel” in Hudson County View