Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
How
Democratic Socialists Are Building on Bernie's Momentum
Jennifer Swann
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Rolling Stone
"Has
anybody been angry before about capitalism?" Hannah Allison, a 29-year-old
organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America, asks from the stage of a
recent meeting in Los Angeles.
The nearly
100 DSA members who've gathered at the Friendship Auditorium in Griffith Park
on this Saturday afternoon erupt in cheers and applause, after hours of
presentations by speakers at least twice Allison's age.
Allison,
who's based at DSA's New York City headquarters, has been visiting the group's
local chapters around the country on a mission to get new members – especially
younger and more diverse individuals, including those catalyzed by Bernie
Sanders' campaign – excited about organizing toward so-called democratic
socialism. There are signs her efforts are starting to pay off. The group,
which officially formed in 1982 but has roots in the early-20th-century
socialist movement, has experienced a renaissance of late. The LA gathering is
one of the group's largest in 25 years. And since last March, the DSA's
membership has nearly tripled, to more than 15,000 members, with 90 local
groups in 37 states.
Relative to
other political groups, the DSA's numbers are still small, but the group is
poised to become a leader in the national resistance against Trump's
administration, if it can figure out what to tackle first. The independent,
member-funded organization has attracted a legion of social-media-savvy young
followers at a time when progressives are feeling angry and disillusioned with
the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. With
its DIY ethos – members are encouraged to form their own chapters, organize
niche committees and run for a position on its board of directors – the DSA
offers get-your-hands-dirty activism as an antidote to what its members see as
the corporate, stuffy fundraiser culture in Washington. But its greatest appeal
– an egalitarian approach, combined with a desire to smash capitalism – may
also prove to be its biggest challenge when it comes to having a lasting impact
on U.S. politics.
Credit
Bernie Sanders for DSA's explosion in growth. The Independent Vermont senator
ran for president last year as a Democrat but has long identified as a
democratic socialist – or, as he defined it in a 2006 interview [1], someone
who believes in a democracy that's not influenced by Wall Street. At the time,
he described democratic socialism as a system in which the government plays a
strong role in ensuring all of its citizens have access to health care,
childcare and a college education, regardless of income. "It means we do
not allow large corporations and moneyed interests to destroy our environment,
that we create a government … not dominated by big-money interests," he
said. "I mean, to me, it means democracy, frankly."
Most
members of the DSA would agree with that statement. In fact, the group's
website includes similar language: "Democratic socialists believe that
both the economy and society should be run democratically — to meet public
needs, not to make profits for a few," it reads, also calling for a
radical transformation "through greater economic and social democracy so
that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our
lives." (The DSA supported Sanders during the 2016 primary, praising his
proposals and campaigning on his behalf, but Sanders has never been a member.)
"Bernie
Sanders did a great service to us by saying, 'I'm a democratic socialist.' You
then had a ton more interest coming in because of that, and I think interest in
socialism [in general]," says DSA organizer Brandon Rey Ramirez, 26.
"I think people want something different, and they want to be part of
something where they feel like it's not super bureaucratic." Ramirez, like
many of DSA's members, is a former Sanders supporter who critiqued Hillary
Clinton's presidential campaign for its reliance on Wall Street funding and
neo-liberalism, or "the trust of free markets over labor" and
regulation, as he puts it.
DSA members
point to Sanders' involvement in the Young People's Socialist League - a former
student group under the umbrella of what was then the Socialist Party of
America - while attending the University of Chicago in the early Sixties as
evidence of his alignment with their ideologies. The DSA, too, is largely
modeled after the Socialist Party of America, a fringe party that formed in
1901 and dissolved by 1972. Decades later, many of the party's former leaders,
like Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, are revered as cult idols by young DSA
members. Still, many Americans continue to think of "socialism" as a
dirty word, likely thanks to its associations with communism and the Cold War.
A Gallup poll from last May found that Americans of all ages favored capitalism
to socialism, with one exception: people ages 18 to 29, whose views of each ideology
were equally positive.
But with
income inequality rising steadily in every state - a trend that's likely to
continue thanks to Trump's plans to deregulate Wall Street and fight federal
minimum-wage increases - some members of the DSA see socialism as the only path
to economic parity in the United States. That includes members like Max
Belasco, an IT worker at UCLA who says he had to sleep in his car for three
months after moving to Los Angeles because he couldn't afford to pay rent, and
his friend Tyler Wilson, who says workers from a temp agency he used to work
for were routinely taken advantage of by corporations - or, as he calls them,
"sexual harassment factories" - who viewed them as little more than
disposable help. Belasco founded the unions and labor committee within DSA's
Los Angeles chapter last month in an attempt to organize and align with union
members throughout the city.
Membership
in the DSA nationally has been further bolstered over the past several months
by celebrities like Rob Delaney touting it on Twitter as the new cool kids'
club for people who want to make a difference. "My web-page's sole purpose
now is to lure teens & millennials into the #ripped arms of feminist
socialism," the Catastrophe star tweeted to his 1.3 million followers last
month with a link to the DSA's website. Other new members credit their interest
in the DSA to the popular podcast Chapo Trap House, whose hosts frequently
roast the Democratic Party in favor of socialist and even nihilist ideas. The
organization's most enthusiastic members proudly feature the rose emoji - an
iteration of the DSA's logo - in their Twitter handles.
But for all
its great intentions and recent growth, the DSA has its work cut out for it to
be able to make a measurable impact in Trump's America. One hurdle it could
face is focus: The organization's goals tend to fluctuate depending on the
individual chapter and local leadership. (Organizers say that's the point,
dubbing the DSA a "big-tent" organization.)
Organizers
are also grappling with a diversity issue. "Because of the way it's passed
along on Twitter, we do have a lot of white dudes, which was much less true
before [the election]," says LA organizer Miranda Sklaroff, 30. The DSA
has struggled to recruit both women and people of color - the populations the
DSA most aims to stand in solidarity with. It's a challenge that has not gone
unnoticed by the organization's national leadership. The group's constitution -
a series of organizing principles last amended in 2001 - mandates that half of
the 16 slots on the DSA's board of directors be reserved for women, and a
quarter of them for people of color. But at the recent event in Los Angeles,
the sea of mostly white, male 20-somethings is jarring, even as the solidarity
with other groups is evident. "Black Lives Matter is real important,"
says DSA member Bernie Eisenberg, a Korean War vet who wears a "Veterans
for Peace" trucker hat and a nametag describing himself as "the other
Bernie." "I notice we have the signs up, but we need more people of
color here to really move forward."
Eisenberg
and other old-timers like self-described anarchist Carol Newton, 77, and
90-year-old retired social worker Jack Rothman are living evidence of one of
the group's advantages: It's intergenerational, with activists from the Sixties
passing along their knowledge to those of the social media generation, and vice
versa. Ramirez recalls, for example, being amazed to learn about the time
Newton knocked over a bus during a protest against the Vietnam War. "Somebody
just goes, 'How the hell do you knock over a bus?' She's like, 'You just keep
on pushing.' And it was just like, Jesus Christ, she has this awesome
attitude.''
The most
important thing the DSA might offer at this point is what Chapo Trap House
co-host and longtime DSA member Amber A'Lee Frost called during a recent
episode "a place to find comrades." That's how Sklaroff sees it, too.
The DSA "is like a good balm for the existential dread and anxiety to go
out and work and meet people who want to change the world just like you
do," she says. "Right now we need everyone to just get together in a
room and start working." For her part, she co-organized a museum workers'
strike on Inauguration Day, participated in the Women's March and protested in
front of Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office last month to encourage her to vote no
on Trump attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions.
With new
activist groups forming on a near daily basis in response to the Trump
administration, Ramirez also sees the DSA's decades-long foundation as an
asset. "What's interesting about DSA is that it's the long history of
organizing, laying the intellectual groundwork - it's built from both activists
and academics, and now it's getting injected with this new kind of activist:
the person who had been at Occupy, or they were activated by the Bernie Sanders
campaign, or they want to resist Trump," says Ramirez.
For Newton
and other DSA leaders, Trump's unexpected victory leaves them with conflicting
thoughts: They see his administration wreaking havoc on the country and are
doing everything they can to help those affected, but they also recognize that
it's been a boon to their own organization. "We've been trying so hard for
so long to build a chapter," Newton says. "Now look at all we have to
do. We're going to be busy now for at least four years."
Toward the
end of her speech, Allison, the New York DSA organizer, puts the dilemma in
blunter terms. "Trump is awful, right? But ... as socialists, he's created
this really good moment for us where we don't have to sugarcoat things or lie
anymore. We can say we're socialists, right?" she says. "And that's
why I think this particular moment, while dangerous, is so important."
To seize on
the moment, she says, the DSA must build an inclusive movement with space for
everyone to participate, and rely on its network of chapters to implement
direct action at the local level. "We want to be a force that the
neoliberal Democrats have to reckon with, that the GOP has to reckon
with," she says. "That the racists and white supremacists have to
reckon with."
Of course,
accomplishing that will also require socialists to do something they're
generally averse to: accumulating money. "But it's really important,"
Allison says on stage, "because nobody else is going to fund the overthrow
of capitalism, so we've got to fund this **** ourselves."
The crowd
laughs, and several people take out their wallets to pay their dues, passing
envelopes back to Newton. Some members rush off to sign up for Sklaroff's
feminist socialist committee or Belasco's unions and labor committee. There's
talk of organizing a carpool to attend a protest happening at the airport that
day, while others spread the word about upcoming actions. There's a lot of work
to be done.
Links:
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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