Reflection, Analysis, and Tasks for 2024

Ratified by Worcester DSA’s membership on February 11, 2024

Reflection

Founded in 2017, Worcester DSA lost its leadership in 2020 and ceased to hold regular meetings in the second half of that year. But starting from early 2021, a new group of members, many new to DSA, began the process of reviving the chapter. This largely coincided with the nurses strike at St. Vincent Hospital, the 301-day duration of which provided a stable and obvious campaign — strike support — for us to concentrate our energies on and build the chapter around. From informal meet-ups at pre-strike informational pickets on Summer Street in January to our first General Meeting in March and the inauguration of a new Steering Committee in May, the chapter returned to regular functioning and worked closely with the Massachusetts Nurses Association and other DSA chapters to mobilize members to the picket line and hold events there.

The nurses strike ended with a contract ratification on January 3, 2022, and this second year of the revived chapter lacked a campaign of that significance to provide us the same direction and purpose. Too much responsibility was concentrated in the Steering Committee, which was too overburdened with week-to-week administrative tasks to put sufficient work into other local organizing that could grow the membership and provide for more delegation of responsibilities. The chapter continued to function, but it may have been headed toward unsustainable levels of leadership burnout.

This strain began to be relieved in the course of 2023 as new members, intentional and walk-in recruits, grew both our active and core membership and added to the chapters’ capacity.

Participation, gauged by the number of members attending at least one chapter event or action per month, has gone up by a third since October. After two years of our core membership and chapter work being concentrated in the chapter’s five-member Steering Committee, the part of the membership involved in doing work for the chapter has increased, with the appointment of two harassment and grievance officers (HGOs), a Discord mod, a Vibes Committee chair, two secretaries for our joint reading group with the WPI Graduate Workers Union, and solidarity captains for the UPS Teamsters’ contract campaign and the UAW autoworkers’ strike.

We have benefitted from a more steady flow of local labor actions and have held more regular chapter socials. Our first hybrid General Meetings began in May, sometimes followed by some kind of social or other activity, and we have transitioned from drawn-out online voting to votes at General Meetings, including votes on our first resolution (and amendment) in November, increasing the importance of the General Meeting as the chapter’s deliberative body. We have tried to offer short political education sessions at General Meetings to help develop a common foundation of knowledge for discourse in the chapter, but we will need more member involvement in planning these to make it work.

In June, the chapter made the switch from using a group chat on Signal to using Discord, and though there have been less consistent membership emails and texts this year, we have returned to sending monthly membership emails since November.

Also since June, for the first time, it has become a regular occurrence for there to be one or more members in good standing attending Steering Committee meetings to observe, and this month we also began using a #steering-committee channel on Discord that is viewable by members in good standing.

We have potentially entered a virtuous cycle, in which increases in capacity allow us to do more things that in turn activate more members. The Steering Committee has sought to seize on this to delegate certain areas of work to captains or new committees to expand chapter capacity, involve other members, and make serving as a Steering Committee member a more manageable role.

Since the beginning of October, the chapter has gained some additional active members looking to get involved in Palestine solidarity. With the end of the autoworkers’ strike at the end of October, the chapter has oriented more toward this work but can do more to structure and expand international work heading into 2024.

Political Analysis

National and international developments have always had a bearing on socialist organizations. This is no different for DSA, and so it is impossible to discuss political conditions without discussing Joe Biden.

In 2020, the Democratic Party, the graveyard of social movements in this country, succeeded at dissipating the George Floyd protests by redirecting righteous anger against racist police violence into “defeating Trump.” Of course, for the Democrats that more specifically meant electing Biden, who then declared to great applause in his first State of the Union address that “the answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police.” Subsequently, in 2022 and again in 2023, police killings in the United States rose to new record highs.

In 2020, the Sunrise Movement settled for the lesser of two evils, deciding to redirect resources and the urgency felt by their 20,000 young members into the general election victory of a candidate they awarded an “F” grade on climate policy. Biden has subsequently signed off on long-term commitments to increase the supply of and demand for fossil fuels in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act. Under his administration, the United States is producing more oil than any country in history, with production surpassing 13 million barrels a day. This is more than double what was produced a decade ago and exceeds the peak under Donald Trump’s administration. U.S. liquefied natural gas production is likewise at an all-time high.

As expected, Biden’s inauguration also corresponded with a meaningfully reduced inflow of new members to DSA as the media in this country shifted from a narrative of seemingly near-daily crisis under Donald Trump to promoting a back-to-brunch “return to normalcy.”

In office, Biden’s administration and his party have gone to work dismantling COVID protections and the early-pandemic expansion of social programs, ending expanded unemployment benefits, restarting student loan payments, claiming powerlessness against the Senate parliamentarian to raise the federal minimum wage, and maintaining Trump’s enhanced Cuba strangulation policy.

In one about-face from the Trump administration, Democrats no longer weep at the inhumanity of children in cages or denounce the administration’s approach to the border as almost fascistic. Instead, President Biden has eagerly offered to throw immigrants under the bus to win Republican support for the funds to further prolong a bloody, stalemated U.S.-Russia proxy war to the very last Ukrainian. Leaning into this as a pillar of their 2024 campaign, Democrats now loudly complain that they did everything in their power to push for a draconian immigration crackdown, that the one and only thing standing in their way was Republicans, and that you should remember who wanted “the harshest immigration policy in decades” when you vote in November.

Liberals, who might have otherwise decried these moves if it were a Republican in office, trip over themselves excusing them now that it’s the blue team in the White House.

…

The Democratic Party is not fighting the right; their policies are building it.

The Democrats’ House majority ended 2022 by helping Biden crush a potential rail strike, setting up a disastrous derailment in East Palestine, OH. The Republicans’ House majority then began 2023 with an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote to denounce “the horrors of socialism.”

At the state and local level, Democrats have been little better — with the governors of states like California, New York, and Minnesota vetoing pro-worker legislation; blue city mayors and city councilors across the country using their powers to pad police budgets and hound homeless people; and Democratic state lawmakers in New Hampshire supplying the votes to send anti-trans legislation to the desk of their Republican governor and those in Florida dancing with Republicans in the aisle of their state House chamber before legislating new attacks on women, queer and trans people, undocumented immigrants, and tenants.

In this state, Democrats in the legislature undermined voters’ 2022 passage of the millionaires tax ballot question by nearly unanimously passing a package of $1 billion in tax cuts, including deep cuts to the estate tax to benefit some of the state’s richest residents. Championed and signed into law by Gov. Maura Healey (D), the tax cuts were followed two weeks later by Healey turning out her pockets like the Monopoly Man to announce that the state could no longer afford and would cease to honor a 1983 right-to-shelter law that guarantees emergency housing for homeless families. In the new year, the governor has announced spending cuts will need to be extended to a range of other state-funded programs and projects across Massachusetts to balance the budget.

The move to cut revenue comes at a time when the state’s transit system is visibly decaying and as the cost of housing continues to soar.

…

And yet, almost overnight, Joe Biden’s choice to give full-throated U.S backing for the ongoing genocide in Gaza and other crimes of the Zionist apartheid regime in Palestine has thrown U.S. imperialism into stark relief, contributing to a new upsurge of radicalization and reviving an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement in the United States, with the country’s first widespread mass street protests since George Floyd.

This moment has opened the eyes of some left liberals. Those who supported the election of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) thinking that he would be a kind of “progressive” counterexample to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) have instead been confronted by his reversal in office — rejecting the “progressive” label and becoming one of the loudest and proudest backers of genocide. The liberal zionism of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who immediately endorsed Biden’s reelection bid, has also come back into the consciousness of the left as his reluctance to support a ceasefire in Gaza has earned him praise from the likes of AIPAC.

And at the top of the Democratic Party, President Joe Biden is setting himself up to lose to Trump in November all because he can’t control his enthusiasm for slaughtering Palestinians — and for bombing Yemen for trying to stop it.

…

To be clear, there are subsections of the working class that have benefited under Biden — but time and again, when presented with the opportunity to fight for the working class, Democrats have instead chosen to punch left and punch down, linking hands with Republicans and setting the table for Trump.

Approaching the presidential election in November 2024, it cannot be stated clearly enough that it is not within our power or responsibility as socialists to single-handedly save the unpopular presidency of a man who boasts “I’m a capitalist.” Nor is it in our power or responsibility to rescue the electoral fortunes of a party that regularly joins in condemning socialists and DSA and that actively works against us in multiple arenas of struggle.

Liberals will tolerate genocide and apartheid, while drawing the line at not voting for the person enabling it, but we are not going to be lectured by people chanting “four more years” as tens of thousands die under U.S. bombs.

It is hard to predict how people might react to the potential reelection of Donald Trump, but the chapter should prepare for all eventualities — whether a wave of demoralization in which some people give up on the U.S. working class and turn to adventurism or another upsurge in radicalization that opens still more people to socialism and creates opportunities to bring large numbers of new members into DSA as organized socialists. Of course, we also should not completely rule out the possibility that Biden is again able to win the electoral college.

…

While the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic and a tight labor market has produced a nascent labor revival — with organizing at Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Amazon and strikes by the Writers, Actors, and Auto Workers — U.S. union density continues to fall and most major unions remain undemocratic, bureaucratic, and oriented toward labor peace.

There are hopeful but early signs of new reform efforts in UFCW and the Teamsters, and under new reform leadership, the UAW has shown potential with the partial strike at the Big Three this fall, their efforts to organize non-union automakers, and their call for aligning contract expirations for May Day 2028.

Liberals’ initial post-November 2020 rhetoric about Biden becoming “the most progressive president since FDR” or leading “the most pro-union administration in American history” has given way to nodding sheepishly toward the National Labor Relations Board and then pointing emphatically at Trump. Yet many unions and the AFL-CIO quickly endorsed Biden’s re-election — despite his move to stop a rail strike, his refusal to boot Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, and his lack of interest in attempting to pass the PRO Act — and the UAW has since followed.

Despite meaningful successes, many unions continue to only cautiously approach new organizing and workers largely still struggle to organize and get a first contract — the NLRB and its General Counsel be damned.

Besides supporting federal spending that will benefit the building trades and some other unions, the AFL-CIO has largely failed to serve the labor movement — supporting Biden’s rail deal and silencing central labor councils that spoke out early on Palestine, while announcing at the end of 2022 the “Largest Organizing Drive in History… to Mobilize Workers for Elections.” Locally, the Central Mass AFL-CIO often supports reactionary municipal candidates in Worcester who are backed by the police union and business interests in the city.

Socialists must continue to build in the labor movement and seek to make political interventions.

…

The socialist movement in this country remains centered on DSA, and our 2023 National Convention highlighted that the organization itself remains a site of struggle.

While betrayals by opportunist politicians can inspire nihilism, in Worcester DSA, we reject anti-politics and the idea that the weakness of the working class is solely a problem of organization that can be solved by base-building for numbers alone. The working class needs a unified political expression in the form of a mass party — and we need to develop principled socialist candidates who reject reformism and agree to act as extensions of DSA under the organization’s democratic discipline.

We must discard tailism — the idea that socialists have no leading role to play in the labor movement and that we should hide our beliefs or reduce our socialism to the median politics already held by workers. In fact, socialist leadership is indispensable if we are to construct a powerful labor movement, and we must build an openly socialist pole of attraction in the major unions.

We also reject liberal individualism in favor of democratic decision-making and investment in a collective project. At times it may be tempting to sink into acrimony, withdraw from active involvement or even membership in DSA, or dedicate ourselves to individual pursuits as a result of disagreements over strategy or tactics or frustrations built-up in the course of the decision-making process. But common struggle makes comrades, and comrades can dream together, work together on many small tasks and that one big one of remaking the world, and even oppose each others’ plans from a place of mutual respect and good faith.

Tasks

We believe capitalism is the problem, that socialism is the solution, and that the working class is the agent of change to bring about the overthrow of capitalism.

Our principle task is building a socialist movement of the working class — not another dogmatic sect or a popular front with a local ecosystem of liberal organizations, but ultimately a mass party that can function as the unified expression and political home of all those who struggle for control of the means of production and the liberation of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world.

In Central Mass, we will continue to develop our chapter as a convening site for socialists to engage in collective political organizing and action, political discussion and education, and camaraderie and mutual social support.

We are workers. We are radicals. We are socialists. We are internationalists. We commit ourselves to each other, to the working class, and to the cause of socialism.

Membership

While taking steps to protect the personal information of the membership, the Steering Committee should place great urgency on standing up a Membership Committee to increase capacity for member recruitment, onboarding, and retention.

By the end of 2024, the Membership Committee will aim to grow by 45% our membership in good standing — defined by the National Organization as members who have paid dues at least once in the past year. We will also aim to double our active membership — those chapter members who attend at least one event or action per month. The Membership Committee should consider ways to do this that help our membership come to better reflect the working class in this area and that engage members not only in the immediate Worcester area, but across Central Mass.

The Membership Committee will develop and carry out plans for targeted recruitment, produce related print and digital materials, and help arrange prospective member 1-on-1s where people interested in joining DSA can talk with current members. Special effort will be given to reaching public high school students and building YDSA chapters at schools and colleges in the area.

It will also build out an onboarding process that welcomes and orients new DSA members, as well as recently moved DSA members who are new only to our chapter, and a steward-like system that provides support to new members and continuously engages existing ones.

Beyond simple attendance, it is important that efforts be made to develop active members’ politics and to engage all active members in committee work — developing them as socialists and as organizers, increasing the chapter’s capacity, and fostering new generations of DSA leadership.

The Membership Committee will also attempt to re-engage inactive and lapsed members and to renew them and members who have ceased paying dues. The chapter will make every effort to encourage members to become monthly duespayers, and our Steering Committee will seek to organize other chapter leaders to join together to encourage DSA’s National Political Committee to eliminate non-recurring dues payment options.

Political Education

A Political Education Committee should be established to facilitate both internal and external-facing political education. The committee will be tasked with: planning a political education session for each General Meeting, assisting the reading group as needed, and establishing regular external-facing public education sessions.

The WorcDSA-WPIGWU Reading Group should continue to hold regular meetings for the political education and new member recruitment opportunities it presents; its content should be targeted toward specific issues below, including labor and internationalism. Material discussed therein should be used for political education sessions and presentations at General Meetings.

The Political Education Committee should also explore the potential for movie screenings.

Communications

The Steering Committee should strive to develop greater visibility of DSA and a stronger public presence for our chapter in Central Mass. This may include a more developed social media strategy, a press strategy, and the formation of a Communications Committee to add capacity for both. The Steering Committee should also continue to support Working Mass as a dedicated DSA publication.

Member Democracy and Structure

With more of a critical mass of active and core members in Worcester DSA, we must empower the membership to democratically direct the chapter, and their chosen elected leadership, through collective decision-making.

That means developing our General Meetings into politicized mass membership meetings where members can introduce resolutions (and amendments) and then debate and vote on them during the meeting — either in-person, on Zoom, or by proxy.

Proxy voting will allow members who cannot attend a given General Meeting to still participate in decision-making by designating a proxy to listen to debate and then use their best judgment to vote on their behalf.

The Steering Committee will continue to make its meetings, agendas and notes, and Discord channel accessible to members in good standing. It should work to recruit volunteer meeting notetakers from the membership or explore the potential for a rotation. It will also consider suggestions for Steering Committee and General Meeting agenda items submitted by members in good standing.

The Steering Committee will send consistent monthly membership emails and regular, though not too frequent, mass texts. The Steering Committee will also ensure there are end-of-year report backs and generative discussion at our November General Meeting and debate and voting on a new majority-approved political analysis, reflection, and tasks compendium at our December General Meeting.

The Steering Committee will actively work to educate the membership about their rights and the processes of the chapter and National Organization.

The Steering Committee should strive to offer proposed amendments to our outdated bylaws at the February and March General Meetings that realign the portfolio of responsibilities held by each officer on the Steering Committee. These proposed amendments will be agreed upon by a majority of the Steering Committee, with the minority and other members in good standing able to offer amendments to the proposed amendments for debate and a vote at the General Meeting. The minority and other members in good standing may also submit their own proposed bylaws amendments.

A bylaws review committee will be established to review the current bylaws, and offer a proposed revised edition by the September and October General Meetings. The committee should be elected by the membership and open their meetings to all members to attend. Committee members should solicit input and feedback from the membership. All members may propose amendments to the proposed revised bylaws during the General Meeting in which they are brought up.

The Steering Committee, charged by the membership with leadership of the chapter, will direct all other committees — with both a Steering Committee member designated to coordinate with each committee and a non-Steering facilitator for each committee who is provisionally appointed by the Steering Committee and then confirmed at a General Meeting. The membership may also provide direction to committees by proposing resolutions and passing them at General Meetings. Committees will provide updates about their work to the Steering Committee and will report to the membership on their work and progress toward their goals once per quarter — at the February, May, and August General Meetings — with an end-of-year report at the November General Meeting.

The Steering Committee should continue to work to build out committees and should strive to prevent them from developing into silos that become disproportionately dominated by one political tendency or that isolate different groups of the membership from each other’s work and the chapter. It should maintain a clear line of democratic decision-making through General Meetings and the membership’s chosen elected leadership on the Steering Committee and not allow committees to deform the chapter into a loose confederation of commonly-branded but functionally independent projects.

If a YDSA chapter or chapters are formed in Central Mass, the Steering Committee should make efforts to fully integrate YDSA members into the work and democratic life of the chapter.

Labor

The Steering Committee will work to stand up a Labor Committee that coordinates the chapter’s labor work: labor solidarity, new worker organizing, rank-and-file organizing in existing unions, and membership recruitment.

The Labor Committee should continue and formalize the chapter’s efforts to quickly mobilize members to support workers’ struggles on picket lines and at other labor actions — in an organized and visible fashion, rather than an individual and anonymous way. Our intention should be to talk with rank-and-file workers as they are developing class consciousness and to openly identify as socialists. This work will help ground our members’ politics in the on-the-ground realities of the class struggle and build trust and continuing connections between DSA members and workers.

This means politically educating our members and developing them as organizers. In other words, preparing members not to merely proselytize and hand out newspapers, but to have fluid and political conversations with workers, identify leaders among them, serve as local solidarity captains, collaborate with workers to plan our own DSA solidarity actions, and provide resources needed by the workers.

We must, however, reject a labor politics that can conceive of little role for socialists in the labor movement beyond merely cheerleading unions and workers from the roadside as the misleaders of labor continue to lead unions down the path of class collaboration and irrelevance.

We must take an active role as a chapter in organizing the unorganized. The Labor Committee should support members who want to organize where they are, but it and the Steering Committee should especially direct significant time, resources, and funding to supporting our active union drive at [REDACTED]. This should include recruiting, training, and supporting salts; aiding the political education of workers; and working with the organizing committee to plan a powerful public-facing solidarity campaign that can help apply pressure to the employer to recognize and bargain a strong first contract with the workers.

We must also recognize, however, that an increase in union density alone is not our salvation. Even doubling union density, an almost unthinkable accomplishment today, would only bring the labor movement back to the already weakened and declining position it held in the early 1980s. More than apolitical new organizing, we must struggle within the existing labor movement to change its political character, orienting the unions toward class struggle and political action independent of the capitalist class and its parties.

With members working in more than one large union shop, the Labor Committee should support members in organizing other rank-and-file members of their unions and encouraging them to engage in solidarity work both within but also beyond their own shop and union. Our goal is to move workers into action and to help them develop a working class identity that goes beyond affinity for their coworkers or pride in their particular union.

We should support our members in seeking out steward and other leadership positions in their unions and in educating their coworkers on socialist and labor theory (and history) in order to strengthen the ideological foundation of a strong, well-organized, member-driven workplace capable of waging class struggle against not only the boss, but the ruling class.

Internationalism

Capitalism is international, so is the class struggle, and so must be our working class solidarity.

As a tool for political education, new membership recruitment, and applying pressure on state and corporate interests, the chapter should continue and expand its work mobilizing the Central Mass community for protests, demonstrations, and other actions around international issues, in particular through our new International Committee.

The chapter’s public presence at mobilizations — coordinated by the chapter — show potential and should be targeted toward specific issues as with Palestine.

All members should commit to the targeted consumer boycotts according to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement as individuals; should openly encourage their comrades and coworkers to do the same; and should seek paths for furthering BDS and advocating for Palestinian liberation in their workplaces through resolutions and campaigns to sever ties — financial and otherwise — held by their unions with the Zionist apartheid regime and the Histadrut.

Cross-chapter contact and collaboration

From the beginning of its revival, Worcester DSA has been influenced by observing and learning from the strengths and struggles of neighboring chapters. The Steering Committee should continue to appoint cross-chapter liaisons to maintain contact with other chapters in the state and region and explore the potential for greater collaboration on events and actions, campaigns, and internal functions.