Hegemony In The Hinterlands: The Need for Rural Organizing

Rural areas were once a hotbed for socialist organizing. During the 1910s, the Socialist Party of America held sway in many rural areas such as Crawford County, Kansas and Beckham County, Oklahoma, where they won thirteen elected offices between 1912 and 1913 and elected a Socialist state representative. Socialists also won numerous mayorships and other smaller positions around this time in other rural areas, including Taylor, Texas.

However, over the last century, and especially within the last thirty years, the Republican party has painted rural America a different shade of red, peddling hatred and isolationism. The results of this change have been barren town squares, oceans of land without hospital access, dilapidating rails and transportation, illness-inducing food deserts, and general poverty.

Even when Democrats win an election in these areas, they often just replicate the policies of the Republicans or are impotent to stop the Republican state legislature from overturning it. So what are socialists to do?

So far, DSA has primarily focused on and succeeded in urban metro areas. This makes sense: more people are tightly clustered in cities. People in cities are able to easily communicate and reach each other, even without access to cars. However, in order to form a movement that can beat the capitalist class, socialists and DSA must develop a dedicated rural organizing strategy.

For one, people live in rural areas. Census data indicates that about 20% of the entire population lives in “rural” areas, and that’s not counting those who live in small towns with their own hinterlands, the hubs to the rural spokes. We can’t just ignore a fifth of the United States. The second reason is that the Democratic Party is basically non-existent in these areas, or is a derelict social club run by a few people with no interest in seriously contesting for power. In that space, socialists can become the only real opposition group. We are potentially leaving huge swathes of potential members on the table, just because we don’t know how to organize in rural areas.

However, it’s also been difficult for DSA chapters to succeed in rural areas. While some chapters have been able to have an organized presence consistently in their area, that hasn’t always been the case. One major difficulty is that “rural” refers to a massive range of areas. Naturally, there will be differences between rural Hawai’i and Columbus, Texas, or between two counties in the Great Plains, but we don’t even have a general set of guidelines to follow when considering what a DSA chapter will do in those places. Some chapters focus on a small area, like in Yolo County DSA in California, whereas others like Northwest Ohio DSA have a massive region under their jurisdiction. We also don’t have a good generalized analysis of industries and strategic targets in rural areas, further resulting in some chapters succeeding whereas others are not very active.

This is why I have written a resolution, “Take the Fight to the Rural Front”, to form a Rural Organizing Working Group that will investigate these issues and help cohere rural DSA organizers to talk shop and find solutions. To avoid it becoming silo’d off and more of an affinity group, like some working groups have been, I’ve tasked the working group to have clear goals for the next DSA Convention in 2027 in terms of producing materials, reports, and to consistently hold one-on-one conversations with chapter leaders to help improve DSA’s organizing in these areas.

While it will take time to research best practices in DSA chapters and historically, I do think there are things that I have seen that are helpful for my own Organizing Committee in Southeast Kansas. We’ve generally kept our Organizing Committee’s jurisdiction to the size of about the state of Rhode Island with about an hour and a half at most needed to drive from all corners of the jurisdiction to our central meeting spot in Parsons. That ensures that members can get to events or happenings outside of their town without being exhausted. We are also setting up autonomous branches on the county level so we can increase organizational capacity in each area ensuring no place gets left behind.

We’ve also found a lot of opportunities with nonpartisan elections in our small towns, and have run and gotten our own candidate appointed. Having one of our members appointed to an elected position may be controversial, but we did so with our member, Zac Sellers in Altamont, Kansas, while being very open about his political views and positions, rather than hiding them. As a city councillor, he has done town halls when Republicans were scared to do so, and showed up at protests and ran protests socialist message. Electoral politics is absolutely possible and useful even in a small town of just over one thousand people — the smallest town with a DSA office-holder, even!

For those still in doubt, thinking that it’s hopeless to organize in the rural US, I would ask you to think about recent events in these areas. UAW won a major strike in Tennessee and won another in Iowa against John Deere. In Kansas, a referendum restored abortion rights, and Missouri’s population voted for recreational marijuana, abortion, and a $13.75 an hour minimum wage. The people here are hungry for change, and it’s up to DSA to be the force that can help bring that. Otherwise, all of this energy will fade away and the right-wing will continue to entrench itself.

If you’d like to support rural organizing in DSA, please sign onto “Take the Fight to the Rural Front,” and talk to members of your chapter about it. Not only will this resolution help provide more one-on-one mentorship and training, but it’ll help us improve our general organizing by having our experienced chapter leaders investigating the actual process of organizing for socialism in the rural US, finding the best strategies to train leaders all around the country with. It’ll take some trial and error and time for us to succeed like the socialist parties of old, but there’s no reason not to start working on it right now.