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Building Campaigns

ICE Out of Our Swamp!

287(g) and the New Right’s Grip on Public Universities

On November 5th, 250 University of Florida students stood in front of the locked doors of the administration building chanting ‘El pueblo unido jamás será vencido’ while staff watched us from above. We tried to deliver our 1,500 signature petition demanding that UF cut its 287(g) agreement, offer legal services for international students, and respect students’ civil liberties. Acting President Donald Landry kept the doors locked. However, this wasn’t just one bad administrator, it crystallized everything our campaign had been teaching for months: the university is not neutral, it is an arm of the Republican Party.

This campaign began on March 28th when ICE detained UF student Felipe Zapata Velásquez and placed him in the brutal conditions of Krome Detention Center (“Alligator Alcatraz”) until he ‘chose’ to self deport. Despite having few active members, UF YDSA organized a 150-student protest on April 9th and committed to a sanctuary campus campaign. Three days after our protest, UF Police signed a 287(g) agreement with ICE, which lets local police act as immigration agents, checking status and detaining people. In Florida, state law requires sheriffs, prisons, and state police to sign, but not local police or universities. Florida has 337 out of 1,205 such agreements. Before the recent surge fewer than 150 agreements existed nationwide.

Along with immigrant communities, DeSantis and the New Right have made public education a main target. Since taking office he has purged New College’s board of trustees, imposed a statewide DEI ban, dissolved eight adjunct unions representing 8,000 workers, and escalated repression of student protests. These aren’t isolated culture war stunts; for the New Right, public universities are strategic terrain. They produce the state’s professional workforce, shape political norms, and shelter pockets of labor power and multicultural life that contradict the governor’s ideological project. Immigration enforcement fits directly into this agenda by disciplining students, chilling dissent, and reinforcing a racialized hierarchy. In 2025 alone, DeSantis appointed his former Lt. Governor Jeannette Núñez to run FIU and placed the self-described “most partisan Republican in Tallahassee” to run FAU. This is their ideology — entrenching control through Christian nationalism with market logic, while hijacking and plundering public goods — the locked doors on November 5th were just one example of it.

Building Power Through Sanctuary Campus Organizing

Against this terrain, UF YDSA chose a patient, base-building approach. Our main campaign focus was a petition drive, which, while it has many built-in limits and should not be our end goal, can be a useful organizing tool. By making every signature a conversation, we used the drive to fuel future organizing. Then, when the administration locked us out, we already had 1,500 people on our email list and dozens of newly trained members accustomed to political work. By centering routine outreach, the chapter built a stable core of organizers rooted in consistent base-building rather than one-off mobilizations. We also tabled in the same spot most weekdays, gave out hundreds of red cards, and held Know Your Rights trainings with the NAACP. We flyered weekly and canvassed across the city: No Kings, a pride festival, even stadium entrances on game days.

We built a coalition with Latin cultural organizations while leaning on the Alachua County Labor Coalition to reach workers beyond campus. As we organized, new leaders emerged. People who’d never been on a campaign before now table every week. Hispanic students especially joined and took initiative, going from a minority of members to the entirety of the Steering Committee. By organizing around material danger rather than symbolic protest, students most targeted by ICE emerged as organic leaders. We also confronted real limits. Our coalition work faced repeated friction over tactics and messaging. A petition campaign can reach thousands but isn’t class politics. We built strong multiracial YDSA participation, but links to international students and campus unions remain incomplete. And we’re no closer to winning short-term gains for the community. These weaknesses shape the next phase.

Gainesville is just one front in a much larger fight. Over 100 chapters are fighting for sanctuary campus policies, including at University of Central Florida, Florida International University, and Florida State University. On November 18th in Charlotte, 30,000 students walked out to protest local ICE raids. This semester, multiple Florida chapters formed a statewide federation called Florida YDSA with sanctuary campus organizing as the main focus of one of its four committees. A protest by UCF YDSA and Orlando SDS drew support from UFF President Robert Cassanello. What happens in Gainesville matters because UF is the flagship university of the largest far-right state government, a state whose Governor is openly eyeing the Presidency. If socialist organizing can take root there, it can take root anywhere.

No single campus fight will create a mass movement, but each one grows the layer of people capable of leading it. YDSA’s sanctuary campus work has forced thousands of students to confront the university as a political institution built around interests opposed to theirs. Each campaign draws clear political lines, fosters multiracial organizing, develops militancy, builds new democratic structures, and gives many students their first concrete experience of class struggle. For DSA members reading this, reach out to your local YDSA chapter to explore joint actions or sharing resources.

Matthew de le Riva is a member of University of Florida YDSA and a member of Reform & Revolution Caucus.

Leading A National Campaign, Locally

In Dublin Southwest (DSW) it was People Before Profit (PBP) leading the local Catherine Connolly campaign for president of Ireland this past Autumn.

We set up the meetings, opened space for volunteers, and proposed events and canvasses that would appeal to the broadest base of supporters. At every opportunity, we sought to build a movement – from sponsored walks and Super Saturdays to the debate watch party and public rally we organized for Catherine. This not only helped to elect Catherine, it brought new people into local activism – many joined the anti-racist coalition PBP DSW founded – and helped build our local PBP branch.

DSW for Connolly had tremendous potential that unfortunately was never fully reached. Our local WhatsApp group grew from around 30 members to almost 150 over just two months, though the vast majority were not active on the ground. We continued to meet new volunteers even in the last week who didn’t want to miss their chance to be a part of this mass movement.

PBP was alone in attempting to turn supporters into canvassers and leaders in the campaign. All the other parties were focused on getting the doors knocked, the posters put up, and the votes in. While this shouldn’t be surprising because our theory of change rests on the active participation of working class people, whereas the other parties are focused on change through elections, it meant we never had the capacity to organize the support we knew was there.

PBP used our leadership of the local campaign to popularize the slogans and demands we thought would be most impactful: defending Irish neutrality, demanding action for Gaza, and a president willing to speak truth to power. This was mirrored in the speeches Paul Murphy gave at the national events for Catherine Connolly. While every other party leader would highlight Catherine’s personal achievements and gush about her achievements in the Dáil, Paul focused his message on the uphill battle we had to climb, against not only the other candidates but also a hostile media, and the politics that would get us to the top.

Jess Spear is a councilor for People Before Profit on the Dublin Southwest County Council, and a member of RISE, the Irish sister group of Reform & Revolution, active as a network within PBP.

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Shop Floors, Picket Lines

Salting Job Fairs – Offering Socialist Alternatives To The Masses

As socialists, we understand the necessary role of developing consciousness in the working class. Very often this work is done from within the workplace, with organizing efforts utilizing oppressive labor dynamics to highlight class cleavages and orient workers towards solidarity in campaigns. We see effective labor-based organizing work in union efforts across the country and the world. A small initial cohort tasked with planting seeds and building a union by organizing workers from their pool of coworkers.

For well over ten iterations, the Socialist Job Fair has been a recurring event put on by Portland DSA connecting labor organizers to job-seekers who want to organize at their work. Spearheaded by longtime labor and socialist activist Jamie Partridge, nearly everyone who gets involved in labor organizing in Portland DSA at some point has engaged with or helped organize one of these fairs. The event utilizes a robust flyering campaign across the entire city, subsequent phone calls for contacts, and gathering a number of different organizing committees at a central location- acting as a connection to a less active layer of potential worker organizers and budding socialists.

On our posters the largest text reads “Get a Job with Comrades”, amongst hooks like “wish you had a union?”, “tired of your job?” and other open appeals to solidarity as a means to escape the exhaustion we all know. Agitprop with the side benefit of serving as an initial screen of participants. It’s these themes that are earning broader appeal thanks to the work of all our comrades, and we need to acknowledge that these hooks to initiate organizing contact are not only becoming more effective, but are appealing to increasingly nascent socialists.

Labor Notes’ ubiquitous Secrets of a Successful Organizer gives us a model of escalating tiers of organizing buy-in formed as a bullseye with the most active core (1s) in the center and the least active, motivated, or even hostile workers in the out most ring (5s). Events such as the Socialist Job Fair create mass-appeal, and minimal-barrier salting pipelines that we can enlarge our organizing nets and expand the local labor movements outer layers. Bringing in job-seekers even just slightly primed to see organizing as a path to better material conditions is an opportunity to salt a workplace with those outer rings of supporters and activists, many of whom will move themselves in towards the bullseye as they gain organic exposure to organizing activity within a campaign. Organizers currently organizing at their shop are given a useful opportunity to prime job seekers to engage in organizing activity before they become potential co-workers. We can expand the supporter and core rings beyond who’s currently employed at a target company – within the limits of the retention and hiring patterns.

With some variation between events, the primary elements of the fair involve bringing job-seekers and labor organizers into a common space, offering words on organizing, socialism, and the importance of unions, followed by time for organizing committees from various unions and unionizing workplaces to present their organizing projects to all present. In addition to these communication functions, DSA organizers facilitate contact exchange, and use the established channel to encourage follow up and share any relevant follow-on events. The fairs require at least 10 or so connections to local organizing projects or unions for job seekers to pick and choose their interest – most organizing committees walk away with over 15 new contacts to then engage in salting their workplace.

The biggest weakness of the event is the hardest task in labor organizing – moving folks from showing mild interests in unions and labor organizing to becoming consistently active and engaged in the labor movement. Most contacts that organizing committees walk away with from the fair will not acquire jobs at their workplace and disengage. Most job-seekers will not become active with DSA or labor organizing after a one off event. While there certainly are new DSA members and labor organizers who are pushed into activity by this event, there is also an opportunity to engage more with subsequent connected events such as political education, steward trainings, or another sequence of events that engages the large central contact list gained by the initial flyering campaign back into the world of DSA and labor organizers with more events, more opportunities for conversations with organizers, and more potential for politicizing and radicalizing new socialists.

Presently, we’re seeing the discourse around socialist labels shifting. Even as authoritarian language dominates official spaces under a second Trump presidency here in the US, candidates are running for office and winning with openly socialist associations. Zohran Mamdani stands as a flag bearer of this miniature zeitgeist, though it’s a moment still larger than NYC’s mayoral seat. Here in Portland in our last cycle, we saw 4 DSA socialists elected to Portland’s newly-formed 12 person city council.

It’s this populist thread that can be identified and drawn upon to bring in workers whose only exposure to socialism is what’s being peddled electorally, and who might be unmobilized beyond elections. However, many of these potential labor organizers and socialists will need to be brought into the fold by genuine connections with current organizers and repeated conversations, not just large events such as the job fair. Organizers in Portland have and will continue to engage these workers to fight against their bosses, win concessions for their co-workers, and build the power of the working class.

Harlow is a member of Portland DSA and Reform & Revolution.

The Starbucks Strike and the Long Memory of the Kitchen

The modern figure of the chef did not begin in a luxury dining room. It began in the barracks, in hunger, in political upheaval. Marie-Antoine Carême—the man later called the “King of Chefs and Chef of Kings”—was born in 1784 to an unemployed laborer on the outskirts of Paris. He was one of eight children. His father, overwhelmed by poverty as the French Revolution unfolded, took him in the city at the age of ten with a single instruction: find work and survive.

Carême did. He washed dishes, swept floors, and cooked in exchange for food for his 8 brothers. He was a worker before he was an artist. He lived in the same uncertainty as the masons and stonecutters who built Paris. From them he absorbed a way of seeing structure, symmetry, order. And in the heat of revolutionary France, surrounded by ruins and construction sites, he began shaping pastry as if it were stone—edible monuments that echoed the geometric clarity of the nation’s new architecture.

His pièces montées—towering sculptures of sugar, dough, and caramel—borrowed from the building language that would later inspire Le Corbusier and the architects that remade modern France. Carême believed that architecture and cuisine were parallel disciplines: both required discipline, engineering, creativity, and respect for labor. He designed not only dishes, but the first chef’s jacket—white, double-breasted, practical, proudly worn by cooks to this day. A uniform built for workers.

Nearly a century later, during the upheavals of the 1930s, another chapter of kitchen history unfolded—not in Paris, but in Minneapolis. The Great Depression crushed wages and pushed millions toward starvation. In 1934, as the city’s Teamsters strike escalated, workers built a commissary to feed thousands of strikers, supporters, and families. It was not a restaurant. It was a lifeline: a kitchen to keep people warm, sheltered, nourished, and alive. A place where food was not a commodity but a collective defense. In the middle of police beatings and freezing nights, workers cooked vats of stew, baked bread, treated injuries, and protected each other. The commissary became an engine of solidarity.

This is a pattern in American labor history. When a crisis arrives, kitchens appear. They appear because eating every day is a fundamental human need, and because the ability to feed each other is one of the oldest acts of resistance.

The soup lines of the 1930s, the civil rights kitchens of the 1960s, the mutual-aid networks after hurricanes and pandemics—all extend the same lineage that began with Carême the child laborer building pastry monuments for a nation under reconstruction.

And today across Austin, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, New York City, Providence, Boston, Minneapolis and more, volunteer cooks and labor activists assemble meals for the Starbucks strikers.

Dozens of cooks, friends and supporters of the Starbucks workers participated in elaborating meals for the picket lines. Several menus came together based on the proposal of cooking foods from Palestina, South America, Vietnam as well as traditional midwestern comfort food in memory of the 1934 teamsters strike, where the kitchen commissariat started.

These solidarity kitchens are not charity. They are infrastructure—built by food workers, baristas, cooks, organizers, and community members who understand that the fight for wages, safety, and dignity runs through the stomach as surely as through the picket line.

At this moment, the national Starbucks strike honors that tradition. The young baristas are stepping into the long memory of labor in the United States. They are showing that the struggle for better conditions is never just about pay.

From Antoine Carême shaping pastry like architecture, to the Minneapolis commissary nourishing an entire strike in 1934, to today’s kitchens supporting Starbucks workers—the lesson is the same: food is a collective act of dignity.

Carlos B. is a member of Boston DSA and the Workers Resist caucus. This story was originally published in Working Mass.

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Community Building

Breaking Bread and Discussing Roses: How Sharing A Meal Can Build The Movement

One night in early 2025, my husband, Michael, and I were walking our dog and chatting about revolution. This has become something of a ritual in our household; it’s where some of our best ideas are born – a space for banter, debate, ranting, and sharing. At the time I’d been spending a lot of time thinking about how to grow the socialist movement and Seattle DSA. My instinct – which is virtually universally shared among organizers – was that advancing our politics would hinge entirely on building relationships. One question in particular kept rattling around in my head: how do we [DSA] become ‘a pillar of the community’?

We joked about obituaries and award ceremonies – the venues where people tend to use that sort of language – but, in earnest, managed to piece together a list of characteristics associated with the kind of people who are described as “pillars.” Generous. Steadfast. Reliable. Welcoming. Dedicated. By the end of the conversation, it was apparent that there was no shortcut or cheat code for building a resilient, principled, and high-trust community within Seattle DSA or the fight for socialism more broadly, but I felt confident that nurturing such community could be one of the best ways to advance our politics. Given current political conditions – living in a world where federal agents are terrorizing and snatching our neighbors off the street – I felt even more confident that it would be necessary for this work to start hyper-local.

Seattle DSA is structured around, predominantly, issue-based working groups. There are working groups for housing justice, Palestine solidarity, immigrant justice, electoral priorities, eco-socialism, and more. Personally, I’ve always had kind of a hard time connecting to this semi-compartmentalized approach to politics, and was surprised that I didn’t really see much in the way of neighborhood-based organizing. The Seattle DSA Slack channel for my City Council district was pretty defunct, as far as I could tell, so – as is tradition – I started a new Signal group chat. I first added other DSA members I met while tabling outside a grocery store in my neighborhood, and began posting invitations to join the group in whatever general discussion and informal channels I could. My only pitch was that I wanted to be more intentional about building relationships with comrades in my neighborhood. Slowly but surely, the group chat began to grow, so I suggested a meet-up at a nearby pub.

That first time, only one comrade showed up – a woman in her 70s, Jean, who was new to DSA and expressed that she had often felt intimidated by other DSA events on the calendar that seemed more politicized. She was participating in some reading groups and joining the occasional chapter meeting over Zoom, but as someone new to a politic that demands more than showing up to vote every four years, didn’t really know how to engage in socialist organizing. She, Michael, and I had two beers and agreed to spend time together again soon.

About a month later, I invited folks in the neighborhood group chat to come over for what would become a monthly dinner. We had five guests that time: Jean, her husband, another couple who’d recently moved to the city and joined DSA, and one other person who, a few weeks prior, walked up to the our chapter’s booth at a community event in a different part of the city and just so happened to ask if there were ever any DSA events in our neighborhood. “Actually,” Michael told him, gesturing to me, “my wife here just started doing exactly that.”

Month after month, the group chat and dinner parties grew. While these gatherings didn’t include a specific political ask, I saw their organizing potential. Socialists and revolutionaries, after all, have a long history of theorizing and organizing over a drink or a meal.

Historically, many movements and strikes were born in pubs, but in the Black radical tradition, and in a world where Black people have so frequently been excluded from public life – from enslavement to Jim Crow and the de facto segregation of modern racial capitalism – Sunday Dinner has often filled this role. I remembered reading that the Black Panther Party emerged over drinks in Bobby Seale’s living room. “If it was good enough for the Black Panthers,” I’d say, “it’s good enough for me.”

In his memoir, Revolutionary Suicide, Huey P. Newton explains: “We drank beer and wine and chewed over our political situation, our social problems, and the merits and shortcomings of other groups. We also discussed the Black achievements of the past, particularly as they helped us to understand current events. In a sense,” writes Newton, “these sessions… were our political education classes, and the Party sort of grew out of them.” Drinking and dining together was so essential to the Panther’s organizing that they even had their own signature cocktail: Bitter Dog.

Made by mixing sweet wine and lemon juice, Bitter Dog – which was also sometimes known by more vulgar names like Panther Piss and Bitter Mothafucka – was the favorite drink of Li’l Bobby Hutton, who was killed by police in 1968.

After his murder, Panthers all over the country took to drinking Bitter Dog to honor his legacy as the first recruit to join the Party, thus transforming an idea shared over a cocktail into a movement.

I came to this experiment in relational organizing through dinner parties with the hypothesis that most people crave community and that community is a powerful political tool. In a matter of months, we built one from scratch over a handful of recurring dinner parties. People who didn’t know each other before now meet up for coffee and put up fliers in the neighborhood. They make protest signs, collect signatures, do mutual aid, and carpool to meetings. They share resources, and – of course – meals. The group continues to grow, and it has become abundantly clear that it’s giving people hope and making socialist politics more digestible, especially for those who are new to DSA.

The parties have been so successful, in fact, that any time someone signs up for Seattle DSA’s new member orientation and shares my zipcode, they are immediately given a link to our neighborhood group chat.

Our most recent dinner – a decolonial, non-Thanksgiving comradely fall feast – tested the limits of our home’s dining capacity with eighteen attendees, nearly half of whom were brand new DSA members. As a result of this type of relational organizing, we’ve seen the amount of time it takes from sign-up to volunteering for tasks in the chapter shrink, and a few “paper members” have become more engaged.

So much of political life in the United States revolves around fear and outrage. As a socialist, I feel a responsibility to communicate a vision for what a better future could look like. Yes, it includes transit, climate action, healthcare, housing, and a worker’s economy, but we must also address the loneliness and alienation that stems from living under a capitalist system.

We can achieve this by creating vibrant and accessible communities that nurture connection and fulfillment. Like the revolutionaries who came before us, to be effective, we should embrace the tradition of using hospitality as a mechanism for building the movement.

Taylor LeGore (she/her) is Seattle DSA’s Arts & Culture co-chair, a criminology researcher, and member of Reform & Revolution.

Hosting A Block Party For My Tenants Union

On October 5, 2024 in Allston, Mass, Greater Boston Tenants Union staged the first-ever Tenants Fest, a free outdoor afternoon/evening music festival on Commonwealth Avenue outside the Warren Ave T Stop. Local bands and DJs performed for a crowd of over a hundred, with over 300 attendees coming through over the course of the evening. The tenants union, DSA, and anti-war campaigners tabled on-site to collect sign-ups and donations. A completely guerrilla undertaking, the event opened a window into the social side of socialism.

We wanted to throw an event where organized tenants, local activists, and people totally new to tenant organizing could come together, have a good time, and become interested in joining an internationally-minded and locally-rooted tenant movement. We chose Allston (sometimes called “Allston Rock City” or “Allston Rat City”) because it’s the base of one of our strongest tenant associations, Fineberg Tenants Union. There are many young people and recent college graduates in the area, and the underground/basement show music scene was part of the culture. Organizers distributed flyers as the emcee extolled on paying your dues as the basis of a democratic organizer that can host things like this. We got 70 new sign-ups for GBTU that day.

We set up in front of a low-income/Section 8 apartment building where GBTU had started organizing, one block away from the building where a historical plaque honors the second-story apartment where the original members of Aerosmith lived in the early 1970s. We recruited GBTU musicians to play, and we invited other local acts who supported the cause. We recruited a mix of underground rock, metal, electronic and hip-hop acts to cater to the diverse musical preferences of the working class.

We got a block party permit from the city to block the street, rented a portable power station and a porta-potty, and the bands lent the musical equipment. A member gifted GBTU a powerful PA system a few years back for rallies that we used for the emcee and vocals. Passively powered PAs are relatively cheap, maybe $100-200 used for a volume that can easily rock the block. The electric power bank (basically a big battery with power outlets) worked perfectly, allowing us go full volume for hours, using only about half the charge over the whole night. We had a backup gasoline generator rented from Home Depot in case it failed, but it didn’t end up being needed. Volunteers posted flyers all over the neighborhood in the weeks leading up to it.

In total, we spent about $500, which was easily paid for through GBTU’s reserves from our 200+ members’ $5 monthly dues collections. A few people told us they hadn’t even heard about the event beforehand, but they were drawn in by the music, blocks away. Many tenants from the Section 8 building also came out, having seen our flyers on their front door beforehand.

We also built a huge art wall using salvaged 2x4s and a large roll of paper that tenants could write on with markers and paint brushes. People filled in the bubble letters “TENANT POWER” with beautiful drawings, quotes, jokes and reflections. It was an incredible sight, hundreds of working class people out in the street on a beautiful, warm early October evening, singing and dancing to the music, celebrating community and creativity, with the Palestine flag flying high above the massive “Tenant Power” display. Every 15 minutes, the MBTA Green Line trolley passed by behind the band, a new load of commuters got off at the stop up the road.

Overall, Tenants Fest was an enormous success. It was a party for us Fineberg tenants who had just narrowly averted a rent strike after a years-long collective bargaining campaign resulted in rent increase reductions and maintenance improvements. We were able to share those victories with other tenants and tell them how we achieved them.

Nothing like this has ever been done or seen before in this area. There have been community street fairs, thrift pop-ups and street vendor festivals sponsored by local civic groups, but never with politics injected except for the standard local commerce and Democratic Party varieties, let alone with radical politics at the forefront.

We brought socialism to the masses, showing people a window into a future where working people can reclaim their community and celebrate the power that we have when we come together. Our slogan was “We pay the rent, we make the culture, and we have the power.”

This year, the GBTU and DSA Allston Brighton chapters have continued to grow, fight back against ICE and racism in the area, and GBTU South in Roxbury and Dorchester has started meeting regularly as well. We are part of an local (and international) tenants movement that, in coalition with the progressive wing of the labor movement, has put rent control on the ballot in 2026 in Mass. GBTU aims to build autonomous working class power, but with something as directly beneficial to the working class as the redistribution of landlord wealth back to us (in the form of the statewide, 5% yearly cap language that made it to the ballot), you better believe we’ll be doing everything we can to pass it.

Tenants Fest is a model that’s easily replicable in any neighborhood. We plan to host the next one next year and go even bigger, probably in a different neighborhood.

We’d be happy to share any insights with any organizers interested in bringing it to their area. If you want to get in touch, hit us up at bostontenants@protonmail.com.

Dan Albright is a member of Boston DSA, and a member of Greater Boston Tenants Union.

Organizing A Clothing Swap In My Chapter

Denver is a city with a growing socialist movement, and this last presidential election led to an influx of new members with new ideas into Denver’s DSA chapter. The transgender rights group, founded this year, played a significant role in campaigning for the Kelly Loving Act, which was signed into Colorado law this past May. Since the passage of this legislation, the group has emphasized building connections and community, which is a core part of politics that is often overlooked.

A recent event that the trans working group hosted this past September was a gender-affirming clothing swap. This wasn’t simply an event where we threw clothes in buckets and hoped people would show up; rather, it was a place inviting people to connect and socialize. Clothing swaps play a crucial role for individuals who have recently come out and may not be prepared to shop for clothes in a retail setting; they offer a place to discover clothing that brings joy among supportive persons.

I argue these events, which are focused on mutual aid and building community, can serve their own important role in building a socialist movement. While the events themselves may not be explicitly political, they are not a waste of time and effort. As socialists, our core goal is building a movement capable of advancing our society beyond capitalism, but we cannot only rely on tactics from the past. We live in a very different world now, so we must adapt our methods in order to build connections to gather others to join our movement. Mutual aid and charity are something that religious organizations have excelled at using effectively to spread their message, while my experience with other leftist movements is that many push mutual aid aside and see it as a waste of resources. Though in practice building these connections and a sense of community provides the opportunity to get involved and serves as an effective recruitment method.

The modern society that capitalism has pushed on us is one of loneliness and isolation, and we are told that the cure is to consume by buying unnecessary gadgets to cope with our stress with the little money we are given for our labor. We as socialists must cultivate an environment that challenges this notion and teach others that true joy is created from belonging and inclusion.

True belonging and inclusion can only be created when we dismantle the structure that capitalism has trapped us in. Hosting public events in our communities is just a first step to teaching others that the answer is socialism!

Rachel is a member of Denver DSA, and a member of Reform & Revolution.

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Propaganda

I Started a Library for my Chapter. Here’s How.

Membership political education has been my primary focus since joining DSA. I consider it essential that we as socialists have a solid foundation in the work of historical socialism, regardless of tendency.

When I first joined, there were many within the Chapter who wanted to explore socialist theory more, but felt overwhelmed with the vast amount of works available or simply lacked the funds. So, I took it upon myself to build my Chapter’s DSA Library.

First order of business was to decide what works I wanted in the library. This involved researching several reading lists of foundational texts and compiling what I saw as the most recurring and most important texts into a Primary Works list, and what I considered supplementary works into a Secondary Works list.

I then went to the Steering Committee to ask for any funds. As supportive as my SC was, we really didn’t have the funds to dedicate to such a project, even with thrifty book stores, so I would have to find other ways of raising money or collecting the works. Such is the experience of smaller Chapters.

After making a complete list of works, I appealed to my Chapter membership at meetings and through our group communications. I had hoped to collect perhaps 10 foundational works to get the library started. I was blown away with the response.

Within a few weeks, I had amassed a collection of 30 works ranging from foundational theory to secondary works that spoke to issues like the rise of modern fascism, how health impacts marginalized communities, and even the official translations of educational material from Vietnam.

From there, I developed simple rules for checking a book out. It boiled down to: DSA members could rent any book, non DSA members could rent if a DSA member vouched for them. Rentals were for 1 month at a time, and could be renewed for up to 3 months before the Librarian would ask for the book back. There were small fines for loss or severe damage that required replacement, and penalties if a member was regularly negligent. Membership approved, and the library is now live.

I take the library to as many regular meetings and events that I can attend. Our Political Education lectures are also book drives, where I keep an updated list of requested books to send out with the announcements. To date, we’ve amassed over 50 books in our library, and spent a grand total of $0 from the Chapter’s fund. We’re even in talks with IWW and PSL branches that we’ve worked with to develop a cross-library loan system. The library is still in its infancy, but I am happy with the progress so far and the solidarity that has been shown from the members of the Chapter in bringing this idea to life.

Seth Funk is a member of Frederick DSA and a candidate member of Reform & Revolution.

Founding (And Funding) a Local Publication

It has been more than 5 years now since I helped to found Working Mass, the labor publication of several chapters of Massachusetts DSA. The project started out as an offshoot of the Boston DSA’s Labor Working Group, launching in October of 2020. After five years, we have published more than 200 articles, launched a bi-monthly print edition (which was the inspiration for this year’s R&R magazine re-design), and secured enough financing to bring on a part-time staffer.

From early on, we set the target of publishing one article per week. And when our team was excited by unfolding struggles, this was totally achievable. Consistency, however, was the hardest hurdle; maintaining this pace week-in, week-out for months and years. For the first few years, Working Mass experienced periods of high activity followed by lulls—there were even months when the outlet fell completely silent. Ultimately, it came down to whether one comrade or another could take it on themselves to ensure the projects success.

It wasn’t until we made the commitment to hire a part-time staffer that true consistency finally locked into place. I never accepted the idea that we had to remain an amateur, volunteer run outlet forever. But it would be a lie to say that everyone in our chapter believed that growing beyond this arrangement was possible or desirous. We eased into the framework, first paying some comrades informally out of our own pocket, then bringing on formal staff on a trial basis, showing that it was both possible and beneficial. In reality, securing the funding and figuring out the legal logistics of hiring staff was far easier than convincing skeptics that it could be done. Now that we have staff, no one gives it a second thought. Such is organizing in DSA.

In terms of funding, a few tools were helpful. Hosting house parties was an easy way to bring in a few hundred dollars and also helped build community around our project. Then we moved to asking for monthly donations, and it helped to relay concrete needs, like camera equipment to help our on-the-ground reporting. Finally, we launched our print edition, which in reality is a fundraising tool, not an end in itself. This made it easier psychologically to ask for money, since we were selling something we were proud of, not asking for charity.

I believe we have written some very strong articles, exploring historical events, the internal dramas of the labor movement, and even breaking national news several times. However, it was not our articles but the community and sense of purpose we built around the project that made people want to support Working Mass. This was most clearly demonstrated during the Palestine encampment movement, where we provided on-the-ground live reporting of protests in the Boston area. We were the only reporters on scene when Emerson was brutally raided by the Boston Police, with one of our reporters arrested just for filming. And we were at Northeastern overnight, the first to report on SWAT forming up to raid that encampment, and helping to overturn Northeastern University’s blatant slander of its students, getting cited in the NY Times.

We had slowly built a platform over the years, and in the height of struggle we used it to tell the stories the media wouldn’t cover, and to share voices of the struggle directly from the barricades. We had built our project into the voice of the movement, and when we asked for support, the movement had our back.

Henry De Groot is a member of Boston DSA, an editor of Working Mass, and the Managing Editor of Reform & Revolution magazine.