Key Votes Today
YES – CR10-A01 – A Partyist Labor Strategy
YES – R22 – For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA
NO – R01-A01 – Align with the BDS Movement
Events
Dolls At the Pool @ 2pm, Hyatt Hotel Pool – Trans Swim Meetup!
‘Weapons Are Weapons’ Says Rashida In Shot At AOC
Fiery Speech Opens Convention With Standing Ovation
The keynote address delivered by Rashida Tlaib to convention on Friday afternoon was an example of what we should hope for from socialist electeds. Her speech emphasized that there is a majority which can be, and in many respects already has been, won to many of the basic positions DSA advances: raise the wage, lower the rent, stop the deportations, end Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. “The working masses are ready for revolutionary change,” she declared. We agree!
Most notably, comrade Tlaib’s speech took all but direct aim at AOC’s persistent defense of her vote to fund Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense program, a cornerstone of the occupation forces’ military infrastructure. Emphasizing that “A weapon is a weapon,” she took aim at “legislative sellouts” and called on her colleagues to “stop making excuses.” Like many moments of demarcation in the history of our movement, imperialist war has exposed the inherent contradiction faced by DSA electeds: align yourself as part of a “governing coalition” in office or in waiting, or link up consistently with the wider mass movement? AOC and Rashida have made their respective choices, and the contrast is clear.
DSA members widely understand the need for candidates and electeds which represent our fundamental consensus, and the incredible enthusiasm comrade Tlaib’s address was met with shows this hunger for socialist leadership in elected office. We need a set of endorsement standards and a shared document laying out DSA’s tasks, A Fighting Socialist Program.
First Day of Convention Shows Balance of DSA Still Up For Grabs
Votes Contradict Delegate Survey
The convention delegate survey which was released prior to convention suggested that this convention would be a significant shift to the right. But a number of votes on Friday laid blows to the right caucuses and showed that this convention is still up for grabs.
- CB04: STV Delegate Elections PASS 63/37% – While the delegate survey predicted a 55-45% failure, the resolution mandating STV for all delegate elections passed by overperforming 8% towards the left.
- CB02: 1M1V for NPC FAIL 40/60% – Not only was this far below the 66% needed to change the DSA Constitution, it underperformed the delegate survey by about 5%. This could have been due to comments by the pro side comparing its opponents to slave-holders.
The Right wing were not the only ones who seemed to have over-estimated their strength, as the hard left also came up short in several important votes.
- CB01: DemComm Division FAIL 20/80% – Red Star and Springs of Revolution failed to divide the Democracy Commission omnibus to vote against NPC expansion and the rechartering of the DemComm by a massive 60% margin, showing a severe low peak for their most critical
- CR05-A02: One DSA, Toward A Unified Endorsement Process Fail 31/68% – Springs of Revolution bet big on their resolution to address the dissonance between local and national endorsements. But they fell short below even their delegate survey results. This represents SoR’s high peak of support.
As ever, convention will be decided by who can unite the center with either the right or the left wing. Neither has a decisive amount of votes to win on their own, even on major issues.
- B&R holds the swing votes, R35-A01: Stipend the NPC went 45/55%, whereas R35: For Working Class Member Leadership unamended went ~55/45%. This indicates that B&R has about 10% of the votes.
We can estimate that the hard left has about 33%, the right has 40%, and the center and center-left has the remining 27%.
To Program Or Not To Program
Will this convention be a left convention, move to the right, or keep the status quo?
The return of Megan and Ashik as co-chairs is suggestive that DSA will remain largely dominated by the feud between the hard-left and the opportunist right. And on the wider, now-expanded NPC, the odds are that, even if there is a shift to the NPC, it will only be by one or two seats. It seems very likely that convention will return an NPC where Bread and Roses continues to hold the balance between left and right.
So the key question is whether this NPC will be guided by convention adopting a revolutionary program or a reformist one.
We have found through multiple sources, including relatively public discussions, that Red Star agreed to support the MUG-R&R program in a last minute decision that ended up, along with other factors, influencing MUG to support Megan Romer’s bid for co-chair (along with grumblings around whether said decision was properly democratic or not). And the MUG-R&R program seems widely popular with left-leaning independent delegates.
Bread and Roses is almost certain to oppose the MUG-R&R program in favor of their own reformist program, under the argument that “convention isn’t ready,” a self-fulfilling prophecy for the caucus that holds the balance of forces.
YDSA Goes Trotskyist!
R&R Wins Co-Chair, 2 At-Large Seats As YDSA Convention Backs Proposals
Reform & Revolution made big strides at the 2025 YDSA Convention. Between the passing of all our submissions with votes ranging from 85.955% to 98.874% in favor and the election of our slate, we have shown that through sustained, intentional intervention, alongside principled arguments, our ideas have become mainstream in YDSA. We elected one Co-Chair, Daniel Salup-Cid, and two at-large members, Eli Knier and Sofia Baker, to the YDSA National Coordinating Committee. We now have one-third of the NCC seats, the most of any caucus, and a member of the NPC with a full vote, following the passage of CB01: Democracy Commission Comprehensive Structural Reform Proposal at the DSA Convention. These comrades ran on the following platform:
Building the Youth Wing of a Socialist Party by expanding YDSA off campus and recruiting non-student youth to municipal chapters. These city-wide formations are based on our experiment in Milwaukee YDSA, where a pilot program we built throughout the 2024-25 term had seen incredible success both in on-campus campaigns and off-campus growth. Our resolution R25: Building the Youth Wing of a Socialist Party: The Next Step proposed expanding this experiment to at least three strategic sites to continue to gauge how municipal chapters work to execute region-wide campaigns, grow both student and non-student membership, and empower YDSA members to engage with the broader DSA ecosystem through integration with their local DSA.
Campaigning for a Larger and More Diverse YDSA through strategic campaigns centered on transitional demands that engage the multi-racial, gender-diverse working class, bringing them to revolutionary conclusions, and developing them into lifelong socialist organizers. We pushed for the strengthening of our campaign apparatus with R17: For a Strategic Campaign Committee, establishing a new national committee which would help chapters to build the skills to carry out healthy and effective campaigns and house work related to any future national campaigns. R22: For Coalitions That Strengthen YDSA, had YDSA adopt united front coalitions as their strategy for engaging with organizations when running these strategic campaigns. L
Our resolution outlining strategies for YDSA to adopt to earn political credibility with marginalized groups on their campuses and intentionally recruit and develop members from these communities into leaders was merged with the recharter of the Chapter Health and Intersectionality Committee as R9: Developing A Diverse YDSA Through Political Means and accepted as part of the consent agenda.
Developing Stronger Pipelines for the Future Vanguard into DSA and labor. As a part of our strategy to ensure YDSA members become lifelong socialist organizers, we proposed Amendment 6-1 to R6: Building the Path to a YDSA to DSA Pipeline, calling on chapters to push for the campaigning approach in their parent DSA chapters to encourage integration of campaigns. It encourages chapters to push for an allocation of their chapter’s monthly budget and representation on its steering committee via a YDSA coordinator position, providing YDSA members with both more resources from and meaningful engagement in DSA. Our Amendment R13-3 to R13: Rechartering the Youth Labor Committee called for the politicization of our labor strategy via a class-struggle intersectional approach, uniting labor struggles with socialism, Palestinian liberation, and immigrant justice. The amendment tasked the YLC with mentoring chapters on how to build a symbiotic relationship between the union or organizing committee and the chapter, with the chapter serving as a place to generate salts and the union serving as a terrain to develop more socialists.
Reform & Revolution’s NCC members will now implement this vision for YDSA, building the foundations of the youth wing of the Socialist Party, that our NPC candidate, Sarah Milner, hopes to build in DSA.
For A Partyist Labor Strategy!
The amendment to the DSA National Labor Committee Consensus Resolution, A Partyist Labor Strategy, was a collaboration between comrades from the Reform and Revolution caucus and the Marxist Unity Group, presenting a revolutionary vision to organize DSA within the labor movement which begins by centering the key political questions. Concretely, A Partyist Labor Strategy puts forward an organizational plan to coordinate DSA members in the labor movement, connecting the NLC to chapters and connecting DSA members by industry and by large national unions where it makes sense.
The amendment takes on a debate that held huge prominence on the labor left a century ago and has continued to inform labor organizing ever since: Should we reduce the labor struggle to economic demands? We say no. Rather, we must infuse the labor struggle with revolutionary politics in order to make each fight against the boss a fight for the whole working class. The lack of a larger political movement that could expand the struggles of local unionists to the working class at large hinders the growth of the labor movement and our ability to fight back in the class war.
There is certainly a balance to this, as it’s possible to get lost in revolutionary rhetoric and lose relevancy. However, by rooting ourselves in the day to day struggles it is possible to connect shop floor issues to our larger goals in ways that make sense to our co-workers. As rank-and-filers in labor struggles, we often see our most engaged co-workers – those who do the most to support new organizing – are not just motivated by wage and benefit increases. They are also committed to winning back their sense of dignity over the daily injustices of the workplace, and the related potential for unions to address larger issues of racism or sexism on the shop floor.
Politicized rank and filers are often written off as just GenZ workers radicalized around BLM, trans rights, or Palestine, however, this is a shallow view of the most active contingent of rank and file activists. We saw in 2016 and 2020 that the vast majority of left-unionists who became radicalized and began organizing for change within their unions did so on the political basis of the Bernie campaigns, not on pure bread-and-butter reforms. Politicized workers are not an anomaly or divorced from the movement, they are the beginnings of a larger movement that we should seek to expand.