Reportback from YDSA Convention 2026

The following is a transcribed interview Sarah Milner, R&R’s representative on DSA’s National Political Committee, conducted with newly-elected R&R members of the YDSA National Coordinating Committee Tomás J and Kaeden B.

“We want to build the structures where we’re organizing the working class in our campuses so that we can actually shift the balance of power so that questions on ICE, academic freedom, and bodily autonomy on our campuses are no longer in the hands of the institutions of capital and so that we can contest power as workers and students: that is the main goal.”

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Sarah: YDSA held its annual convention this weekend. You and Kaeden were both elected. Can you give me a brief overview of convention and its results? How do you feel about these results?

Tomás: So this past convention, our 2026 convention, both Kaeden and I ran in a very tough and competitive [race]. We put forward a strong platform to build YDSA from the bottom up, to build YDSA into the youth wing of a socialist party. We argued that we can shift the balance of power on our campuses, and we put forward proposals for a strategic Sanctuary Campus campaign on all fronts to continue our last anti-ICE campaign. We also put forward strong resolutions like Developing YDSA Leaders so that, as we recruit people, we’re building the socialist cadre that will help lead us in our struggles moving forward. In the end, convention favored this and approved it. That’s why me and Kaeden were elected, and that’s why our resolutions passed. Some were amended a little bit, but they still continue to have the same spirit that we put them forward with.

Kaeden: I think convention broadly ushered in a lot of pragmatism around the core ideological planks of YDSA, which had existed prior to our election. This is most clearly seen in the resolution Class Struggle Internationalism, from Bread & Roses (B&R), finally passing in a form that’s centered around labor organizing. This year’s intervention on diversity showed ideological or member continuity with past interventions on diversity. It seems the resolution authors went back and looked at the old convention resolutions and tried to do something different and more specific than just saying “We need to increase diversity.” Overall I’m excited about it, but it’s going to be hard.

What were the key things this convention decided, and how did it decide them?

Tomás: I think our position on internationalism was a big shift. Previously, our political line on internationalism revolved around the more campist tendencies in YDSA and DSA. The last two conventions have witnessed long-standing battles around attempts to shift towards a more class-struggle and internationalist politics, which Bread & Roses has pushed for and which we have also supported. So far, these attempts have largely failed. This is the first time that it has really changed. There was an amendment to B&R’s resolution, trying to remove the larger changes it proposes, but the shift in the convention was pretty strong and the amendment failed. I’m not sure if it’s because the politics of DSA are changing from campism to non-campism or if the factions that have opposed class struggle internationalist resolutions in the past were not as well organized this time around […] The difference and why it passed this year is because the resolution had a more concrete focus on orienting our international work towards May Day and worker struggles, something more tangible than holding conferences or exchanges that may not have concrete material organizing endeavors behind them. I think that is one of the major shifts. To echo what Kaeden mentioned, this year diversity and race came to the forefront differently than in previous years. I think that we see it both with Global Majority Slate coming together as it did and also in the cross tendency group of other people of color not part of Global Majority coming together to put forward a floor amendment to the diversity resolution with tangible steps to improve diversity in YDSA.

Kaeden: We talked about this during the NCC onboarding; I think one of the major mandates passed by this convention is Resolution 28, which is focused on intervening on May Day 2028. May Day 2028 is a planned nationwide general strike that was called for by Shawn Fain two years ago. It’s something that labor partners and organizations on the left have been building towards: an intervention centered on getting every chapter to establish a labor committee in order to conduct salting, which is the practice of intentionally getting a job at a workplace in order to unionize it. Chapters that aren’t salting will want to focus on labor solidarity, because every chapter has some role to play in this intervention. We don’t just want [it] to be our chapters that have strong student worker unions already. It also mandates us to join the May Day Strong coalition, which is composed of a lot of labor unions and movement partners, like Sunrise, and others.

Another major mandate was Resolution 29, which is a push to be prescriptive around how we connect our national curriculum to local chapter’s political education work. That really matters, because it reflects a commitment to a level of centralization that you don’t typically see in DSA or YDSA. Imagine if at DSA convention there was a resolution that described how every single committee would work together under the leadership of the NPC, in order to teach DSA members how to organize. What is the year round curriculum that we teach? How do we teach it, and how do these things connect together? This is a level of granularity that really tries to reorient basically everything around lessons learned from our strongest chapters. I think it reflects a commitment to a level of centralization that we haven’t seen before and a level of centralization that doesn’t exist in DSA either. But I think it comes from the fact that many YDSA chapters have broadly similar conditions, compared to the different conditions between DSA chapters.

Could someone explain to me what “campism” is? Could you define that for me?

Tomás: The way I would define campism is the approach that some comrades take towards international politics that sees global conflict as divided into two camps: the anti-imperialist camp and the imperialist camp. But the anti-imperialist camp can be very broad: it doesn’t have to be socialist, but sometimes is socialist. It’s about giving support to the camp that is against the imperialist west.

In the leadership elections, who won? What were the results?

Tomás: For co-chair, the victory was pretty clear with Bread & Roses winning both seats. We know last time around B&R ran two candidates for co-chair and didn’t win either. This time around, B&R has a strong mandate in that sense. R&R didn’t contest the co-chairship this year.

One of the candidates representing Global Majority and Springs of Revolution had a major controversy that ended with convention deciding to take her off the ballot, that being Raisa, leaving Max as the only opposition. But, based on the priorities that convention showed voting for Class Struggle Internationalism, it made sense that Bread & Roses would take the victory there. But the NCC at-large members are not solely from B&R. We in Reform & Revolution won two seats by campaigning around an intervention in May Day 2028, our partyist approach to labor, and our priority of building cadres to fulfill that dual task. We also saw the victory of two Labor Independents, Roxy and Jacob G, who we cross-endorsed and who also fulfilled the growing desire in YDSA for an intervention in May Day 2028. Those are victories. We [also] saw the entrance of a member of Global Majority, who focused on improving issues of diversity and race, which have been serious in YDSA.

Kaeden: I think that when you look at the results, overall, you might get the impression that YDSA is distinctly Trotskyist, that the factions most influenced by Trotskyism are the ones who, year over year, constitute either a majority or a plurality of leadership. A little bit of context I’d like people to get is that historically Bread & Roses, prior to 2021 when Constellation formed the first bulwark against [their] domination of YDSA, was the only faction who really prioritized this part of our organization. This level of focus provides you an institutional advantage because year over year you already have the pipeline set up, while everyone is building theirs. And so a lot of the reason we see the results that we do is less [because] YDSA is deeply Trotskyist, but rather that the most effective organizers and chapters and biggest interventions into how we run our national organization have been made by Bread & Roses. [These interventions include,] for example, the Rank and File Strategy, the leadership of the University of California Santa Barbara — and the broader [UC] system — and the University of Oregon student worker union project, which was by and large spearheaded by people from that ideological tendency. Additionally, Reform & Revolution’s push for the mass-campaigning approach has basically come to define how we talk about and work through political issues in the organization.

A large part of why we see the results we do is because factions like Springs of Revolution, Groundwork, SMC (Socialist Majority Caucus), & Global Majority, haven’t come up with coherent, long term strategic interventions into how YDSA works. Springs of Revolution pays a lot of lip service to community defense and rapid response networks, but when it comes to how they organize their YDSA chapters, they don’t have a big successful project that they can point to and anchor themselves in as a model for how they can get people to commit to their style of politics. Likewise I think Constellation lacks a lot of the same, which is why they struggle to self-replicate. And I think Groundwork and SMC share the same trouble of not really having a strong electoral program running through YDSA chapters that allows them to gain the foothold that they typically have in DSA. You can see a little bit of Groundwork & SMC processing this and starting to try to make this intervention in YDSA through the passage of Resolution 8 and through forming a 15-member voting bloc […] We were able to leverage this bloc in order to get ourselves elected by critically supporting Resolution 8 as a useful experiment in YDSA electoralism, but, by and large, the other factions haven’t figured it out in the same way that Bread & Roses and R&R have. [Still,] if we are going to see a rise of a new faction in YDSA, after this year, it’s likely going to be Groundwork and SMC, because they’re the only ones trying to pioneer their broader strategic vision in a concrete way within YDSA.

Which resolutions did R&R bring, and how did these resolutions fare?

Tomás: From the campaign side of things, I, alongside R&R, co-authored R9: For a Strategic Sanctuary Campaign on All Fronts. Initially, it was an endeavor with Maxon from University of Cincinnati but later we combined [our work with] a Springs of Revolution resolution. It proposed to continue the sanctuary anti-ICE campaign that we built last year, but focusing more tangibly in this next year by targeting corporate contracts with businesses that are complicit with ICE … to continue the momentum from last year. ICE is still a present threat and we wanted to create a tangible campaign where the chapters could organize together nationally.

Secondly, as part of that resolution, I proposed Amendment 3 that passed on the consent agenda, which basically set forward building a bidirectional pipeline between our campaigns and efforts to build student worker drives on our campuses. We want to make sure that our campaigns are vehicles for organizing the working class. R&R focuses on the triple crisis of organization, leadership, and consciousness of the working class and so these campaigns are vehicles to build YDSA as an organization to address those crises. But also we need to build unions, and so we want to use YDSA campaigns to recruit workers and then develop them to lead student-worker drives on their campuses. I think the unique partyist approach that R&R brings is that we want to build a bidirectional pipeline, where those YDSA workers politicize their worker drives, strengthening them, and bring political demands such as the sanctuary campus campaign… and then they’re recruiting union members back to YDSA. I think those are some practical ways we are building the party.

Also, one of the important motions that passed was my amendment to R25, which was the recharter of the Strategic Campaign Committee. [The amendment] organizes our campaign around national cohorts, which pair chapters with campus conditions together. In order to continue party building and building a national structure, which is something that is just developing in YDSA, we needed some sort of national structures that are connecting chapters together, where they can build their campaigns together beyond the more local or regional approaches, that are important but cannot be the sole structures [used to] build the youth wing of a party.

Kaeden: We had a few interventions with R05.Developing Political Leaders, R14.For a Convention of All Chapters, and R21.Resolution to decide NCC stipends via convention, and R03.Effective National for an Effective Youth Wing. I think these resolutions reflect a commitment to build YDSA specifically, as well as to build up YDSA members’ politics in light of the flaws of past factional interventions. For example, R5 builds on the intervention made by 2022’s R7.Developing Leaders in YDSA, which focused on implementing the now recurring, reliable, and very high quality training, formerly called Basics of Organizing – now called Recruitment and Development – that the Youth Growth & Development Committee runs. And this was a useful intervention at the time, but in the modern day, I think a lot of what chapters are feeling is that we don’t actually teach people our politics, what we believe about the world, and why we think it is the way it is. Resolution 5 landed so firmly with delegates that it got a 98% yes vote on the delegate survey. Resolution 14 commits us to expanding our scholarship budget and making our internal democracy more accessible with a variety of calls, which are meant to pass on the institutional democratic knowledge and skills to new delegates who typically don’t have a venue to receive those kinds of skills well ahead of the resolution writing deadline.

We put forward Resolution 21, which removes the National Coordinating Committee’s ability to deliberate its own pay, a problem which [arose] this past year, and which a lot of delegates found frustrating and absurd… especially in the context of two members of the NCC being censured. All three of those, as well as R3: An Effective National for an Effective Youth Wing, which commits national YDSA to an internal campaign to recruit members into the national machine along explicitly partyist political lines, resonated and passed overwhelmingly. They resonated with people because we all recognize that our local power isn’t really sufficient to get the big wins on issues that we’re trying to fight around. We don’t have the same ability of DSA chapters to try to capture a city council or the largest union in your city. These are projects that take years and years, they’re not really things that can be achieved within the span of a four year gate, which is typically the time scale that our projects can exist on, outside of recurring factions facilitating more long term projects. I think that we did well, and it reflects the commitment to a particular political vision of party-building.

How do you feel this convention compares to the last one? Are there any noticeable political shifts or developments?

Tomás: Absolutely. I was there last convention, and I think focusing first on the debate we mentioned earlier – the [failed] Class Struggle Internationalism resolution that Bread & Roses proposed – and debate on internationalism was much more divided than this time. I think that last year there was much more debate on labor than this year. This convention felt like there was a consensus around committing to practical steps of organizing: we have to build labor, we have to build international work. I mean, our resolution for the priority campaign was the only campaign brought forward, and there were amendments to it, but nobody presented a different campaign this year. […] I think a lot of the political debates were much more on practical questions of how we do things, and less on the political side of things, which was interesting to see. I think that perhaps part of the reason why this happened is because I think each faction went inward into a niche they wanted to focus on and there wasn’t much more contention than outside of those things. We saw that some tendencies from last to this one were not in the same game. Where was Marxist Unity Group for example?

Kaeden: Yeah, last convention was really polarized around the student union debate almost entirely. Student unionism swallowed up an hour and 10 minutes of debate at the last convention. And I think the biggest difference to me that I saw was Bread and Roses taking a much more team player approach to how they engage politically, and how they framed their resolutions. They didn’t really try to take the same oppositional and entrenched approach that they did last year. I also think that our interventions as a faction were more laser focused. Last year, we had a scatter shot of the things we wanted to make changes on, in a larger slate, whereas this year, we leaned a lot on our organizing resumes, alongside our politics, in order to communicate that not only will we give voice to your opinions about the direction thatYDSA should go in, but that we are also going to execute that effectively. This year also, I think, in the classic form of what I call YDSA short term thinking, we finally got around to a really big full conversation around May Day, even though last year we had that on our minds already. Last year, everyone who was familiar with labor was talking about it at the last convention, but we didn’t have any full group conversation about it, and we didn’t pass many resolutions oriented towards it. Whereas this year, we realized “Oh shit, that’s in a year and a half! We need to lock the fuck in.”

Also this year we saw a real presence from Groundwork and SMC, that we didn’t last year, and I already mentioned Resolution 8. I think this convention is best characterized by arguments not over what we do, but how we do it. Last year really focused on what we do, with the major debates last year being around student unionism vs the youth wing, whereas this year, we’ve decided we’re committed to labor, building the youth wing, and party building, so the big question was, okay, how do you do those things?

Much of this year’s debate revolved around how we approach diversifying YDSA. Could you elaborate on R&R’s approach to this?

Tomás: I think diversity and race have been a persistent issue in both YDSA and DSA. We lack a diverse membership of people of color and specifically, Black working class members. This year, I think this came into the forefront because every year, some way or another, we have tried to commit towards diversity, but the results have been difficult to come by. Thus we saw the rise of Global Majority and then the response to it through a cross tendency floor amendment to the Global Majority section resolution that R&R, and specifically giving a lot of credit to Kaeden here, took the lead on. We need to really center the class struggles of the diverse working class – whether it’s Black, Latine, women and non-men who are large sections of the working class – into the main priorities that we are taking on as DSA. They are not separate, they are the main priority and we use campaigns as a vehicle to tap into the masses of workers. Those campaigns need to encompass those diverse struggles to tap into the diverse working class and recruit from it and politicize it. That campaigning approach towards recruitment and reaching out to diverse sections of the working class is something that we view as key.

On top of that, we need to build strong recruitment pipelines and a diverse socialist cadre. But it takes multiple fronts. There is still a lot of work that we have to do, whether it’s working on misogyny or chauvinism – these are things that manifest in YDSA just because we’re part of society, but must still work on. So it is a cultural front of the strong political battle we have as we continue to develop our program. Any of the resolutions that we pass are towards that and mean that we can be more targeted in developing that diverse cadre of socialists. I think that the things that we introduced in the floor amendment to the Global Majority resolution section were with the understanding that while tackling racism within YDSA, antiracist practice has to happen everywhere in the organization. Everybody has a burden and responsibility towards that. I think failures of past attempts have been that they were siloed to committees, or specifically to black and brown members, to deal with. The point we want to make is that those struggles literally have to happen in every committee nationally, not just a specific committee designed to improve diversity. We have to incorporate it in all our curriculum and all trainings with chapters. I think that is the approach that we have to take to tackle those problems.

Kaeden: All I want to emphasize is that our approach is really focused on making sure that every part of National YDSA is talking about and implementing changes to our programming to be more welcoming for different communities. We don’t really view that this is something that can be changed by just a committee or intervened in by one committee that is focused on it, but only by making everyone have the conversation and talk about what we need to do to make our organization more diverse.

YDSA voted to prioritize strategic campaigning again for the upcoming year. Can you explain what the strategic campaign is and explain our goals for campaigning through the SCC and the coming year?

Tomás: There are two fronts here: the convention rechartered the strategy campaign committee, which is the committee in charge of executing our national campaign in practical terms under the purview and direction of our National Coordinating Committee. This year’s campaign is taking the sanctuary campus campaign of last year, which was more of a broad anti-Trump sanctuary campus, against ICE, against attacks on LGBT students, against attacks on academic freedom, et cetera and specifying it more officially for this year in terms of fighting ICE, keeping the political demands of getting ICE off campus, of fighting the 287(g) agreement that deputized university police to carry out immigration law enforcement and other political demands around non-compliance with ICE. But now we bring a new set of campaigning targets, which are corporations: Palantir, OpenAI, Oracle, and others that have contracts with are complicit with ICE and imperialism abroad, and we bring chapters together to fight those corporate contracts through a shared target.

We want to make sure that we’re using this campaign as a broader vehicle to shift the balance of power on our campuses. It’s not just about getting policy concessions and changing a contract from one corporation to another. It’s about us using this campaign to build power structures in our campuses, whether it is YDSA chapters, organizing our departments and colleges around the campaign, or whether it is through the campaign kickstarting worker drives. We want to build the structures where we’re organizing the working class in our campuses so that we can actually shift the balance of power so that questions on ICE, academic freedom, and bodily autonomy on our campuses are no longer in the hands of the institutions of capital and so that we can contest power as workers and students: that is the main goal. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier in the interview, we proposed the labor amendment to the Strategic Campaign Committee; that is a plan for this year as we move forward. Through it, we’re developing a national cohort program to help cohere this campaign nationally. We want to make sure that we no longer run isolated campaigns where each chapter has their own campaigns and their own timelines. That’s why we’re developing something more national, more united as we’re building the party.

YDSA voted to prioritize labor organizing May Day 2027 and 2028. Can you elaborate on this and talk about our approach to these organizing questions?

Tomás: Yeah, obviously, one of the major priorities of this convention is that we’re heeding the call of May Day 2028 and that we want to build tangible steps to it. One thing for certain is that May Day 2028 is a guaranteed thing, it is something that we all have to contribute to. I think as we saw from resolutions that passed this year, YDSA can really contribute towards May Day 2028 with the power that we have in our campuses compared to other organizations that haven’t made the same inroads and aren’t able to use student worker drives to organize towards May Day 2028 as we can. I think what we saw is that the true power that we as YDSA can contribute towards May Day 2028 is through the kind of labor organizing we’re doing on campus. I think May Day 2028 is also bringing our campaigns together. It’s bringing our international work together, where our tangible goals and steps, as we’re connecting with workers and organizations from other countries, are building towards May Day 2028 and cross-border labor organizing.

Kaeden: Our main approach to labor organizing in May 2028 for the upcoming year is centered around using the mass campaign approach as a vehicle to show students that they can engage in struggle and that it is possible to organize. I think a lot of students deal with apathy and lack of belief in the idea that anything can change because, up until you’ve hit college, you haven’t really been able to be a part of anything. The mass campaigning approach can be used to identify organic leaders and to have organizing conversations to build majorities within our constituencies. We can use organizing techniques to engage socialists in struggle against the university administration and ICE and through this people gain experiences that allow them to believe that maybe it’s possible to fight elsewhere. We can use these experiences as practice reps and use organizing to build a pipeline, for example, to go salt and build a union because I think typically, it’s actually really hard to convince people that salting is worth their time or even going to be successful but part of the strength of our approach is that it gives students that experience in a lower stakes situation. Like if you fuck up an organizing conversation with another student, there’s 39,000 more, but if you fuck up an organizing conversation with your coworker that may be burnt turf for the next 3 months.

YDSA voted to begin a campaign process for the 2028 election. Could you explain how this process works and R&R’s thoughts on it?

Tomás: I believe it was called Preparing for a Class Struggle 2028 Presidential Election, Resolution 18, it passed at convention. Basically, it set forward a plan because we see that there’s a possible DSA presidential endorsement coming and this resolution seeks to get ahead of it. The resolution set forward that YDSA would begin planning for a potential presidential DSA endorsement, developing resources and combining with what resources DSA is already working on so that we can be ready if such an endorsement happens to have resources and the tool kits for chapters. It set forward that YDSA would request NPC to expand two seats in the DSA presidential exploratory committee to add two YDSA seats in it. The resolution also set forward YDSA being able to have a more independent line in a campaign or a presidential endorsement. We want to use the presidential campaign as a vehicle to express DSA’s program, Workers Deserve More and to express YDSA’s program and platform, and for YDSA to control its contribution to the DSA endorsement. I think the big political question here if there is a DSA presidential campaign in the spring of 2027 is whether YDSA would take this as a priority, which will go to the NCC for a vote. If the NCC doesn’t approve it then it would be dealt with in the 2027 YDSA convention. I think it is going to be the big political debate. As Reform & Revolution, we really haven’t debated in the YDSA context where we want it to go, but I think the first important part of this resolution is saying that we keep a critical line for a DSA endorsed candidate for the likely missteps they may make, so that, depending on those missteps, we can reduce or even withdraw our support as YDSA from the presidential campaign.

But in reality, the resolution doesn’t necessarily push forward any concrete or quantifiable thing, that we can measure, and so, in the end, we will find out whether it was just words on paper, or if the “conditional support” that folks in Bread & Roses point to mean something. Secondly, I think there is the issue of whether this should be YDSA’s full priority, which will be up for debate for the NCC in the spring. I think that will be a major debate, especially when we have our own priority campaign, and it will also continue at the 2027 YDSA convention.

Reform & Revolution has a line on the possible presidential endorsement for 2028, where we think that DSA should run an independent expenditure campaign. We believe in a critical approach to any potential endorsement because we understand that the likely candidates that we’ll have as options, whether it’s AOC or even Shawn Fain are gonna be people that make mistakes and that are not of our, let’s say, flavor. We also think that convention should decide these topics. I think the question in YDSA is different, and the question for YDSA is what role should we play in this campaign? Clearly convention approved that YDSA should play a role. I think the question for now for us is whether a DSA endorsement of a presidential campaign should be the full priority of YDSA as well, or if YDSA should participate in a presidential campaign, but also have our own campaigns, for example as we have with bodily autonomy, with anti-ICE work, and we have this year targeting corporate contracts with companies complicit with ICE. I think that’s a separate question that I look forward to developing a line on.

R&R made membership growth and development a key priority of our campaign. Could you explain our membership growth and development goals and strategy for the coming year?

Kaeden: Fundamentally, our intervention relies on the existing paradigms: YDSA recruitment, growth and retention… but what does that mean? It means that we believe we can recruit through campaigns, it means that we believe in the organizing cycle as a useful model for building membership engagement. It means that we generally believe that campaigns should be widely & deeply felt, materially relevant, and should build transformative power for students. So what is it actually that makes us different? I think the main thing is that we believe that we can increase membership growth, development, and retention through politicization. We believe that we need to commit ourselves to making sure that YDSA members are consistently taught: “here’s what we believe about the world, and here’s how we think we can change it, and here’s why we hold those beliefs,” in order to build stronger buy-in for our collective project. When we don’t have those things, the buy-in we build across chapters and with members is going to be more based around interpersonal relationships or at least very self-selected and surface level, rather than one built around a mass politicization of students at large.

Political education tied to “doing the work” of campaigns that we’re running is useful but it doesn’t always necessarily communicate the fundamentals of what we believe, nor has it really shown itself to be able to move people in YDSA towards a particular political perspective, which is necessary for building a really strong cause. I think a big reason that caucuses build a strong cadre out of YDSA members is because they fundamentally provide a vehicle for people to have relatively advanced politics about how to intervene in the world that YDSA currently doesn’t even provide the basics of. It is often harder to communicate to others what you believe if you don’t have a strong political grounding. The politicization that we want to see out of our approach this year should produce members who are more quickly and more confidently able to talk to their friends and co-workers and say: “this is something that I believe in, here’s why I believe in it, and why you should be a part of it too.”