A U.S. House Committee is demanding access to a union’s internal communications after it passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza—a move that threatens both the Palestine solidarity movement and the rights of organized labor. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent the subpoena to the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA-UAW Local 2325) in March, after the union passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire, an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and support for workers’ political speech.  Association of Legal Aid Attorneys members rally in March 2018 ..read more

The following article is adapted from posts on DSA’s National Discussion Forums. Hundreds of members watched the National Political Committee deliberate over our budget these past few weeks. As we navigate the difficult decisions about how to move forward collectively, it’s worth reviewing the recent history of our budget process during the years of peak growth for the organization. Revenue and expense data from 2017-2022: ProPublica. Data from 2023: DSA open budgeting documents (member-only). 2017: The Trump Bump DSA members at the 2017 National Convention in Chicago. Photo courtesy: Chicag ..read more

Herbert Shore was a founding member of DSA in 1982 and of the San Diego chapter until he passed away in February of 2024. November 18, 1939 – February 12, 2024 In Herb’s own words “I was born in 1939 in Brooklyn, New York to secular, Jewish, working class parents. My parents were not actually Communist Party members, but our lives revolved around the ‘fellow traveling’ milieu that existed until the mid 1950s. So you might say I was born into the socialist movement; though no one in my family knew Karl Marx from Groucho Marx.” Those roots stayed with Herb throughout his life. After graduating h ..read more

American complicity is rooted in decades of US investment in Israeli apartheid — and Biden’s personal commitment. He won’t blink unless we make him. In 1986, then-Senator Joe Biden described Israel as the United States’ number one “3 billion dollar investment.” Speaking on the Senate Floor, Biden argued that if there were no Israel, we’d need to “invent” one “to protect US interests in the [Middle East].”  The US and Israel have long shared a ‘special relationship.’ Israel is by far the largest recipient of US military aid — nearly $300 billion between 1946 and 2023. Providing ‘investment ..read more

Since December 2023, Brett Chalupa has been documenting the process of restarting a chapter in the Lancaster, Pa., region on the National Discussion Forums. The following is an excerpt adapted from his posts. There was a DSA chapter in Lancaster before I moved here. It’s tough to tell why it went defunct. It appears to have lost momentum around 2020 or maybe a little earlier. Lancaster is a rural-ish county in south-central Pennsylvania situated between Harrisburg and Philadelphia. The county has about 500,000 people, with a city at the heart of it also named Lancaster, with a population of ne ..read more

Since 2021, working people in Atlanta have been fighting against the mayor’s plans to build Cop City, a $90 million militarized police training center. Atlanta city government aims to demolish large parts of the South River Forest, land from which the Muscogee Creek people were forcibly displaced, and build the new cop fortress on the ruins of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, a former forced-labor camp and slave plantation home to countless atrocities. In the past year, the movement to “Stop Cop City” has grown exponentially through a novel referendum strategy rooted in nonviolent, mass working-cl ..read more

In the mid-aughts, as New York City DSA struggled to rebuild as a chapter, the late Michael Hirsch, then a national DSA leader, remarked in a planning discussion that “the only presentable person we have is Maria.” That Maria, of course, was Maria Svart. At the time, Maria was the co-chair of Young Democratic Socialists (now Young Democratic Socialists of America, or YDSA) and I was its National Youth Organizer. Like hundreds if not thousands of socialists activists, I would not have been as active in DSA without her organizing chops, leadership, and mentorship. On January 14, Maria Svart resi ..read more

In October 2023, undergraduate student workers at the University of Oregon (UO) made history when they cast ballots to form a union, UO Student Workers (UOSW). The union comprises around 4,900 student workers in every workplace around campus: dining halls, student housing, the rec center, research and teaching assistants, and many others. UOSW isn’t the first union formed by undergraduate student workers. It’s part of a growing movement to organize RAs and other student employees at colleges like Kenyon, Wesleyan, and Tufts. But UOSW was the first undergraduate union breakthrough at a big publ ..read more

This issue’s spotlight is on our Ohio chapters, which organized together throughout 2023 for a major abortion rights win in a battleground state. Throughout the spring and summer, our Ohio chapters took a strong stand against a measure which would have made all future ballot initiative work in the state impossible — and defeated it! This measure was conjured up by Ohio’s GOP legislature to make citizen-led amendments to the state constitution nearly impossible, and the August vote on this measure was deliberately timed before a November ballot measure to protect abortion. But despite massive c ..read more

Biden just recently bypassed Congress to rush 14,000 tank shells to Israel and AIPAC pledges to take out the Squad. Meanwhile, Trump boasts openly of his plans to invoke the Insurrection Act and become a dictator. What is a democratic socialist organization to do less than a year before the presidential election? DSA operates on many terrains — in the economy through our labor work, in the electoral arena through our candidate and issue campaigns, and in the war of ideas through our ideological work. Through our chapters, and through organizing that systematically engages people outside DSA, w ..read more