Our Platform
Advancing Local Autonomy
Decision making power in DSA has tended to accrue to a small number of large, well-established chapters, mainly in large cities. This means that DSA lacks a vision on how to pursue or implement socialism in RSSC areas. To ensure that RSSC areas can respond to their political situations appropriately, we seek to enact these measures. We also seek to connect at-large members to make sure everyone in DSA can participate in political organizing across sometimes daunting logistical barriers.
- Assistance without Direction: To defray the costs of organizing, the national organization should provide material assistance to local chapters without political strings attached.
- Self-Determination: Branches should be given the option to form as their own chapters if and when they are ready. This should address the legacy issue of chapters in cities having coverage over suburban areas where there previously hadn’t been any significant independent organizing and which, for logistical and other reasons, are awkward to fit into one chapter as outlying branches grow.
- Enfranchising At-Large Members: We support a bylaws amendment to ensure that the at-large delegation is calculated at the same rate as chapter delegations. If this results in “too many” at-large delegates, streamline chapter formation.
- New Chapter Grant: To help improve the likelihood of success for a new chapter, the DSA should delegate funds for their establishment. From travel to posters to renting rooms, the logistics of running a chapter are not cheap. Offsetting those costs increase the financial accessibility and ensures a more diverse base.
- Fostering Statewide and Regional Orgs: We want to see national policy support, not just allow, the formation of state and regional organizations to better help chapters focus on political priorities at a scale between the local and the national. We therefore call for an actual set of draft constitutions to be available (as the DSA Constitution and Bylaws require) and for a state/regional organizing committee process to clarify the steps involved.
Ecosocialism
Without denigrating the potential of national programs for addressing climate change like the Green New Deal, we recognize that environmental politics are local as well, and that resilience in the face of the crisis will mean building up local sustainability projects and experiments in ecosocialist infrastructure and organizing.
- Stand with Frontline Communities: We seek to direct DSA’s resources to help frontline communities hardest hit by the environmental crisis and petro-capitalism, and to encourage DSA members to support their struggles.
- Community Agriculture Trust: DSA nationally should provide resources for chapters wishing to experiment with food sovereignty and ecosocialist sustainability practices at the local level.
- Energy Democracy: DSA should stand for local control over energy production and distribution. Local communities should be encouraged to form power aggregation (community choice aggregation) programs and use them to move toward 100% renewable energy, as well as local community ownership of solar and wind farms and other renewables, and community grid ownership.
Transportation and Housing
Ecosocialism, transportation, and housing are all interconnected issues. In RSSC areas, decades of infrastructure decisions guided by lobbyists and car culture mean that cars are often a necessity. The need for a car causes housing and other architectural projects to revolve around driving. While many solutions to this issue are based in mass transit systems that have been best implemented in cities, commuting by car from suburbs to cities is still rampant even with some of the best mass transit systems available, and any long term solution must enable people in rural areas to still get around. To truly work towards the elimination of personal vehicles we must incorporate RSSC areas from the beginning, not as an afterthought.
- Tenant and Rider Unions: We support national resources being put to fostering the organizing of tenant and bus/train rider unions.
- Brake Light Clinics for All: Brake light clinics are an excellent, creative DSA intervention in local issues of policing, racism, and the burden of car culture on poor and marginalized people. Along with projects like Narcan trainings and debt clinics, they are opportunities for outreach, community protection, and to put our values into practice. We seek to create a trust of funding to help chapters that want to start brake light clinics and other mutual aid and community outreach programs.
- Public Transit and Housing Demands: The DSA should encourage and foster campaigns for expanded, quality public transportation and housing.
Always Anti-Fascist
Too often, we’ve heard DSA members and leaders write off the threat of hard-right reaction as “LARPers” who should not be given attention. In RSSC areas, we know that these groups are real present threats to vulnerable communities and will enact violence if they think they aren’t outnumbered. What’s striking is that modern fascism isn’t even a threat exclusive to our areas, though, as they will operate in big cities as well as small towns. This is one area where DSA members should all be standing together for our own mutual defense.
- DSA Bail Fund and Legal Aid: We support measures to actually put money in the bail fund. Furthermore, we seek to establish systems of legal aid for activists.
- Direct Action Network: We support national programs for medic and marshall training.
- Local Anti-Racist Action: The far right isn’t just active in the streets, it’s active in the city halls and school boards and police departments. It’s in the de facto racial segregation of our communities. We seek a national policy on training democratic socialist activists to pack courtrooms, city council meetings, and school board meetings to demand anti-racist policy.
Political Education and Outreach
People join the DSA to change the world. Years of reactionary propaganda has left many unsure about what socialism even is. To better equip our members, we propose developing a political education curriculum to help them explore socialism. Political education is particularly important outside of large cities where socialism may be seen as especially strange and threatening.
- Educational Resources: We need an internal education plan that includes classics and modern readings, and takes the ideas of different tendencies within DSA’s “big tent” seriously. We also need online resources (videos, podcasts, websites) for people who aren’t best served by reading books and magazines.
- A More Versatile Democratic Left: We seek to make this a high quality resource that we can distribute when doing outreach to people who aren’t familiar with socialist ideas.
- Fostering Local Media Infrastructure: Repeatedly, issues relevant to the well established DSA chapters in urban cores are disproportionately represented in DSA media. This leaves many in RSSC areas out of important conversations. By helping to establish regional/statewide media projects, members will be able to engage with each other more frequently and more aware of their particular political situations. The ability for frontline and marginal communities to speak for themselves is at the heart of this idea.
RSSC Slate
We seek to endorse a slate for the NPC with other caucuses committed to protecting DSA’s big tent nature organized around the theme of under-represented groups in DSA. We represent a part of DSA’s geographic under-representation.
- We would endorse at least one candidate from a rural, a suburban, and a small city area.
- We want to reach out to existing regional caucuses such as the Southern Caucus and Rust Belt Caucus about the possibility of a combined unity slate for underrepresented regions.
