by All around the country, DSA members, including our own from Reform & Revolution, are building the socialist movement and fighting the bosses and the billionaire class. Despite being a nationwide organization the fact is that the vast majority of our active members are doing work and engaging with DSA at the local level. And the same is true of DSA itself – the vast majority of DSA members are active primarily or exclusively at the chapter level.
Recently there’s been more discussion in DSA about how local chapters are able to grow and retain members, trying to find some underlying pattern both in the objective conditions around the chapter and a subjective one based on the actions chapters take. As Marxists, it behooves us to take a more thoughtful look at these questions, based both in the existing data and the experiences we’ve witnessed in chapters.
National vs Local?
A consistent topic of debate in DSA is whether we should prioritize work at the local or national level, or perhaps to what extent we support each of them.
This tension comes to a head most concretely during budgetary debates. For example, a major item at the 2025 DSA Convention was on the size of dues-share to local chapters and on stipends for DSA’s national leadership. In the past, during the 2024 budget crisis, the question of cutting either national staff or temporarily decreasing dues-share also came up.
More broadly, there’s a general debate on forums, chats, and so on about the topic, usually in a very general sense. Some comrades feel that DSA national is a distant body whose only impact on their work is to take 70 percent of their member’s dues.
At a very basic level, the fact is that the vast majority of active members seriously engage only through their local chapter. If we added every member of every national committee along with the membership of every DSA caucus, this would only equal a few thousand of an estimated 15,000-20,000 active DSA members.
The real base of the organization, the thing that makes us a mass movement, is our membership at the chapter level, where members are organizing local campaigns, engaging in strike support, building solidarity with their neighbors, and electing candidates. It is through work at the chapter level that our tens of thousands of members reach hundreds of thousands and millions of workers and young people. And even when our nationally-led campaigns do achieve similar levels of engagement, like DSA’s Strike Ready campaign, this is largely achieved through the campaigns being carried out at the chapter level, rather than participation in a separately organized national space. In other words, it is our chapter-level organizing that connects DSA with the masses.
However, to limit the scope of how we view our organization to the chapter alone would be extremely reductive. For one, major actions in one part of the country can have a nationwide effect, such as how DSA has grown tremendously around the country from Zohran Mamdani’s election victory. Perhaps more dubiously, many of our bumps in membership come not from our own actions alone, but from large events rocking the country, such as Trump’s election victories (in 2016 and 2024), the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. It’d be very easy to simply argue that local work will grow DSA as a whole, but the answer is much more complicated than that.
National DSA can also be more than just an umbrella under which a practical confederation of chapters operate. National campaigns like DSA for Bernie, UPS Strike Ready, and TRBA have helped provide chapters with a framework to organize locally, sharing common strategy, branding and messaging, as well as distilling organizing skills and lessons rapidly, thereby allowing organizers at the local level to more efficiently use their time and resources. While our national campaigns have not been able to truly activate our organization’s potential to affect change in the world and gain headlines in the way things like Mamdani or AOC’s election have, they have been vital sources of internal coordination and development.
As we learn more lessons on doing campaigns effectively, grow as an organization, and increase our internal cohesion, having a national campaigning approach could be the difference between continuing to rely on events around us to grow and doing so on our own.
What Makes Local Chapters Grow?
A valuable and somewhat understudied question in DSA is considering how different chapters grow. Naturally, chapters which have a larger and denser population will have more members, but even with population taken into account, there’s a lot of variation in chapter size to population. On the upper end, New York City and Portland have some of the highest rates of DSA members per person, while relatively large cities like El Paso or Jacksonville only have nascent DSA chapters.
Demographics, the political climate, and the group culture of different areas will naturally play a role, but there has to be some degree in which the subjective factor of our decisions as organizers plays a key part. DSA’s Growth and Development Committee did a preliminary study of member data over the years, and found few strong results beyond the fact that some chapters over and underperformed in recruitment. But this raises the question – what makes chapters succeed above their relative peers across different times? If we could understand this and replicate it across the board, it would be a major difference to our recruitment.
In R&R, we have a theory based on our own organizing experiences that the two major factors that we can control as organizers that could increase local recruitment and strength as an organization are: externally facing organizing, and a democratic culture. A democratic culture is one where members are free to discuss and deliberate on proposals and ideas. Some chapters may not have the most developed history of doing resolutions and amendments, but the more important thing is that members are free to speak their mind and discuss items without fear of being shamed or aggressively attacked. But the more important one is a focus on externally facing campaigns, especially in moments of crisis (like in 2020). Externally facing campaigns are those where we speak with the wider working class, like elections and referendums, public strike support, or broadly visible social movement campaigns. This is opposed to overly focusing on internally facing work, like internal political education, mobilizations mainly with other activists, etc. Not all internal work is bad, and some of it is downright necessary for us to succeed, but this work should be in the service of developing ourselves to be more able to effectively intervene in the wider world, in the ocean of people who aren’t won over to socialist or even working-class ideas at all.
Before we go any further, it should be said that neither of these two points are exclusive to the “left” or “right” of DSA. Many of the “right” or moderate chapters have been leaders in exciting external facing work, along with “left” ones like Portland DSA. In addition, chapters with both sides of DSA’s main political divide have open or closed chapter culture. In fact, even though New York City DSA has a relatively closed structure, it has achieved great success in doing strong external work. There’s an argument to be made that in terms of sheer growth, the most vital thing is in fact strong external work. Consider the exceptional chapters noted in the Democratic Left article on recruitment – Los Angeles and Las Vegas DSA in 2020, Philadelphia DSA in 2019, these chapters were all actively engaging in mass movements or strong electoral campaigns – or both! The point being that our analysis of chapter success isn’t just a useful shot across the bow for the “partyist” wing of DSA, but a more serious contribution to the discussion.
Building a Campaigning Chapter
If these visible, externally facing campaigns help chapters grow, the question is: how do we make our own chapters like this? The answer is simple: we have to convince people to make them so. Members of R&R are active in building and leading strong campaigns in our YDSA and DSA chapters. While maintaining Marxist principles, we believe that in order to actually win a new society, we need to struggle alongside the working class with demands that connect to the consciousness of radicalizing layers. Not to mention, successful work like this can not only grow a chapter, but give a great boost to morale for all of our members – we’ve made a real impact in our community!
Naturally, that requires us to be active in our chapters and being bottom-liners for these campaigns, but we also want a strong national infrastructure to make this kind of work easily replicable. National work organizing national campaigns like the 2022 YDSA Abortion Rights campaign and the 2023 YDSA TRANS campaign were massively educational to me and to the organization in figuring out how we can actually help chapters do this work. To create a truly national organization that can help chapters succeed requires a lot of simple, but hard work: cohort calls, check-ins, training sessions, materials, and more. And this work has to be done consistently, it’s not just a one and done deal.
On a practical level, some steps comrades can take towards these ends is to identify the key issues in your local area that people care about – and not just the politically active milieu, but the actual broad base of working people. In Tacoma, Washington, our comrades identified that working people, including a decisive chunk of members of UFCW Local 367, were hit with massive rent hikes of up to 43% over the last few years. To help fight back on this widely and deeply felt issue, Tacoma DSA formed a large coalition of working class organizations and put forward a ballot initiative that ended up winning a narrow majority despite intense lobbying and spending from landlords and developers. Choosing a ballot initiative is important because it directly puts DSA members out in the community, talking to a myriad of people who may not know anything about socialist ideas or even organizing, but still want to improve their lives. The issues and tactics that will work best in your organizing context can’t be written out in an article like this – it’s up to you to figure that out alongside your fellow organizers!
On an individual level, comrades will need to also actually build support for this kind of approach and the capacity to implement it. Rather than a passive approach of just promoting our ideas here and there, we need to take a much more active and intentional role as members of our organization. That means finding people who agree with you, setting up times to have organizing conversations, developing the skills needed to actually work on these campaigns by putting yourself forward for other tasks, and mapping out your chapter and local area. A democratic culture where we can discuss and debate different ideas is naturally a part of this process, and efforts which move us in that direction are also a part of the broader shift towards a vibrant, externally facing chapter. It’d be remiss to imagine that one comrade can effect such a change on their own, which is why and how the question of caucuses comes into play.
Why Do Caucuses Matter for Local Work?
The truth of the matter is that there might be opposition, or at least skepticism, towards this kind of campaigning approach. Mass oriented work takes a lot of preparation, effort, and knowledge. Some chapter members, in our experience, have wondered if we’re prepared for this work, or that perhaps it’d be better to support focusing more on internal political education and other more simple forms of work. It’d be idealistic to just imagine that by writing this article, every chapter will find ways to shift towards our approach. This is why we have members in caucuses who push for their ideas to gain traction in their chapters. A caucus at its core is an organization of members who have shared perspectives of how we can best grow the socialist movement to win – of course they matter, because the decisions we make at the chapter level themselves matter.
Still, caucus members in chapters face a danger of overly focusing on promoting their politics to the point of neglecting their duties to the movement writ large. Not only does focusing on this too much take their energy from actually doing the chapter work we’re describing, but it also is just plain ineffective from even a pragmatic point of view. It’s not by endless promotion that people are won to ideas, but by engaging in the movement, by taking on tasks and responsibilities, and from there actually implementing our approach with the actual buy-in of our comrades. On the flipside, there’s also a danger for Marxists of practically abandoning the goal of actually changing the chapter in a positive direction by promoting their ideas and winning people over to them. This doesn’t happen consciously, and often comrades have very good intentions to help steward the functions of the chapter. The issue is, if we believe our ideas can improve the long-term growth of a chapter and the worker’s movement in general, then it is important that we don’t put off that task endlessly.
Local Today, National Tomorrow
The campaigns and work we do in our own towns and communities are the building blocks of the revitalized socialist movement in the US. Still, blocks alone don’t make a structure, and certainly not one that can end the capitalist system. In order to achieve our tasks as Marxists – the political conquest of power by the working class, we will need to build an organization capable of affecting change and inspiring people in their city, county, state, and even around the country. Thus, we can’t get trapped in a mindset of limiting our horizons to just what’s happening in our chapter. To be pithy: you can’t build socialism in one city.
One of the incredible things about DSA is that by having so many different chapters operating relatively autonomously, we essentially have a laboratory of socialist organizing. Different ideas, tactics, contexts, are taken into account, with each approach being reflected on. I previously talked about how national campaigns can help coordinate work to be more than the sum of our parts; in this case, having a nationwide organization can do this even without a specific campaign or mobilization. This issue has a collection of organizing reports from all around the country, and historically our publication has strived to include articles, interviews, and online even videos of members discussing in detail the successes (and difficulties) they’ve had in their own organizing. Part of breaking the de facto localist mindset so many of us have is by increasing this kind of national exchange of experiences and ideas.
As mentioned previously, national campaigns can facilitate this process to an even greater extent with consistent training, cohort calls, organizing reports and workshops, and with the ability to collate all of these experiences as we reflect on the effort as a whole. These kinds of campaigns would also be good to help plug new chapters into an easily adaptable local project to take on, connecting them not just to their field organizer, but to other leaders around the country. As a sidenote, a national campaign needs capable leaders with organizing experience gained locally to actually mentor chapters and develop local leaders. A national campaigning organization can then develop a “middle layer” of leaders who are taking on broader responsibilities from the leaders coming out of their chapters. While DSA isn’t large enough to make headlines or have a real ‘national target’ when we take a campaign and set of demands on yet, our experience over the last few years makes us believe that this kind of work is vital to building our muscles as an organization, and if done properly shouldn’t be seen as being separate from the work being done locally in chapters, but as a means to boost it with the support of our national apparatus.
The struggle we’re fighting here in our communities, heck, even in the United States, is shared with comrades around the world, from Ireland to Nigeria and Venezuela to the Philippines. Each of our local efforts is the basis for all of our ambitions to change the world, one person at a time. We act locally today to build the base of support, the experience, and the connections needed to win our global struggle tomorrow.
Ruy Martinez
Ruy Martinez, he/him, helped found Harvard YDSA in 2020 and has been in DSA since 2016. He is on the Steering Committee of Reform & Revolution.
