Author: Tacoma DSA This piece is brought to you by our comrades in Tacoma DSA. In Tacoma, Washington, DSA built a large coalition behind a successful ballot initiative campaign to win the strongest protections for renters in the state. Organized as Tacoma For All, the campaign faced a corporate opposition that shattered all spending records for Tacoma elections. Despite this deluge of out-of-state dark money, voters approved Initiative 1 in November, establishing a “Tenant Bill of Rights” for over 100,000 renters. Ramy Khalil talked with Jennifer Barfield and Ty Moore about how Tacoma for All ..read more

Author: Duncan H. I drafted R3: Acting Like a Party to set out a definition and process for endorsements that suits what DSA is. To me, DSA is something that’s constantly moving and changing. What is certain to me though is that while we may not have the right legal fiction registered under our name (and perhaps it’s better that we don’t), we’re moving in the direction of an independent working class political party. We have a sovereign, dues-paying membership. We have regular congresses of the membership with freely elected leadership. We have chapters with vibrant local creativity. We even h ..read more

This piece is intended as the formal motivation for the resolution: Endorse House Our Neighbors Initiative to Fund Social Housing (I-137) House our Neighbors (HON) is a coalition of housing advocates and organizations that began in 2021 as an effort to defeat business backed efforts to pass an amendment to the Seattle city charter enshrining sweeps of homeless encampments.  Fortunately, King County Superior Court struck the amendment from the ballot on legal grounds.  With Seattle facing an unrelenting housing and homelessness crisis, the HON coalition decided to run an initiative to ..read more

Collaboratively Written by: Carl T, Shiloh B, and Sean C This piece is intended as the formal motivation for the resolution: Toward an Anti-Zionist Seattle DSA. The Palestinian people, the global status quo, and our socialist movement all find themselves on a knife’s edge. In October, the Israeli settler-colonial regime unleashed the most intense phase of the genocide against Palestinians since the slaughter and expulsion of 80 percent of Palestine’s Arab population in the Nakba of 1948. Since October, the Israeli army has murdered more than 30,000 Palestinians and driven 2 million people ..read more

To the management of Index Media, Well, this is an easy one. Workers at various Index Media properties, like The Stranger, Portland Mercury, and Everout, are unionizing with CWA-News Guild. As Seattle residents and fans of The Stranger, we have some earnest advice for the higher-ups at Index: you gotta recognize the union. For your own sake. The Stranger has stood with working people, and with unions, in their fights for justice in Seattle and beyond. Their endorsements highlight pro-union candidates, and shame assholes endorsed by Seattle Chamber of Commerce and other anti-union groups. The S ..read more

Let’s imagine it’s the year 2032. We’ve landed safely through the storm of the turbulent twenties, survived fifty years of Culture Wars, and even seen the Democratic Party’s resistance to Progressivism give way to acceptance. In this imaginative scenario, the recently elected President along with most of the House and Senate are members of the Democratic-Socialist Party. There is no bipartisan barrier to doing what needs to be done. Our government focus would be on creating a comprehensive social safety net, addressing the root causes of homelessness, and ensuring that every citizen has access ..read more

Delegates from chapters across DSA gathered in Chicago August 4 through 6 for our biennial National Convention. The Convention is DSA members’ main opportunity to come together to debate—and set—the direction and strategy of DSA as a whole. This Convention represented a shift in DSA strategy away from class collaboration in the interest of short-term gains, which has shown diminishing returns, toward a greater focus on independent working-class institutions. Internally, delegates’ votes on resolutions and on election of NPC members reflected desires for more member input and better transparenc ..read more

We are republishing this article from Seattle DSA member Tom Barnard. It first appeared in the South Seattle Emerald. In Seattle, many of us encounter our actual landlord maybe once, if at all. Most corporate landlords hire a combination of software portals and property managers that handle rent, maintenance, fees, and anything else that empties your bank account. Often you don’t even know who actually owns your unit. You pay your rent; next year (or next month), you pay more rent, and you hope your income keeps up with it. When it doesn’t, you move. Your rent increase, affordable or not, is ..read more

Late one night last June, a stray firework found its way inside the locked alley next to Glo’s, the beloved Capitol Hill restaurant I’ve worked at for the last seven years. It had been hot and dry that week, and the spare chairs and miscellaneous junk we stored there quickly caught fire, spreading to the side of the building, melting our utility panel, and filling the restaurant with smoke. The space was unusable, and my coworkers and I were out of a job. After a couple weeks of uncertainty, we found out we’d still be paid our average wages through fire insurance while we awaited the opening o ..read more

“Most left podcasts have hitherto only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point is to change it!” We are very excited to announce the launch of SOCIALIST SOUND, Seattle DSA’s new podcast. Please take a listen wherever you get your podcasts, or directly on our website at SeattleDSA.org/podcast. Hit that subscribe button and leave a friendly review! We’ve dropped two excellent episodes already – “Raise the Wage Renton” and “Social Housing Victory in Seattle” – with a third now in production. SOCIALIST SOUND will dig into the strategic challenges facing frontline labor organizers, commun ..read more