Join the Housing & Homelessness Committee! Continue reading

Join the Electoral Politics Committee! MISSION STATEMENT The Electoral Politics Committee of DSA-LA exists to help the chapter gain the power and knowledge necessary to work towards and realize its various goals using the existing power of the state as channeled through elected office.   At the moment, many of the chapter’s goals—achieving universal healthcare, universal housing, universal education, universal bread, universal roses, and destroying capitalism—involve appealing to the power of elected officials to enact, enforce, and repeal laws. Save some rare instances of individual moral decisionmaking, elected officials make decisions because of financial, social, or political pressure—in other words, they do things for money, fame, or votes. Continue reading

Join the Mutual Aid Committee! What is Mutual Aid? Mutual aid is a voluntary exchange of resources and services for the mutual benefit of all people involved. It involves comrades coming together to work as equals for the common good by assessing what people need and what people can provide. Mutual aid projects come from and are run by the community rather than nonprofit workers, foundations, or charity programs created by the ruling classes. No one is made to feel inferior for receiving help, as it is fundamentally an organic and egalitarian social relationship, not a material one based on hierarchy, and everyone provides what they can rather than separating into “givers” and “receivers.” It is with this in mind that we maintain that mutual aid is not charity. While charity often has altruistic motives and can be helpful to people’s material conditions, it reinforces hierarchies rather than undermines them, and often is delivered with the explicit or implicit aim of control or conversion. We are deeply committed to organizing mutual aid networks that allow people with material needs to organize the solutions to their own problems. By doing so, we reject a charity framework which would limit the scope of our work to aiding only those deemed “worthy” by the capitalist class. Continue reading

Join the Prison Abolition Committee! Mission Statement The DSA-LA Prison Abolition Committee works toward a future of total prison abolition, which entails the abolition of all forms of the carceral state, including policing as well as public and private prisons. We work toward building well informed and researched alternatives that foster a fair and equal society that come in many forms: rehabilitation, medical and mental care, health care in the form of food, housing, physical and community support. We wish to collectively demystify the idea of prison abolition and work toward a future void of punitive and vindictive justice where every person's humanity is realized. Continue reading

Join the AgitProp Committee! Mission Statement If you say the word “socialism” to the average American what do they think of? After decades of corporate and capitalist propaganda it’s probably something negative. While the door has been broken open for discussion around democratic socialist ideals, it is our obligation to change the narrative once and for all.   Continue reading

Join the Membership Committee! Mission statement The mission of the Membership Committee is internal and external. In our internal capacity, the Membership Committee will work to retain and activate existing members to contribute their time and skills to committee work, campaigns, direct actions and other DSA efforts. Our external mission is to develop and implement strategies, processes and resources that will lead to growth in membership, particularly organizing new members not well-represented within the current membership. Continue reading

Join the Political Education Committee! Mission Statement Capitalism has taught us that a society structured around an endless quest for profit and the pursuit of individual self interest is natural; as socialists, we identify capitalism as an artificially imposed set of relations in which owners appropriate the value produced by society's workers. The Political Education Committee seeks to challenge what is understood to be “common sense” under capitalism and offer ongoing opportunities to expand our collective understanding of socialist concepts, histories, and strategies. As an Internal Resource and Organizing Committee, we aim to revive socialist pedagogies that support the goals of the chapter as a whole. We are committed to dismantling hierarchical structures traditionally associated with education, and to providing opportunities for educating and learning to all people. As members of a multi-tendency organization, the Political Education Committee’s work will prioritize productive debate and the respectful exchange of socialist ideas and viewpoints rather than the pursuit of absolute political agreement among members. We will work in partnership with all other DSA-LA committees and working groups to develop educational resources and programming which introduces the broader public to socialism, raises our own membership’s level of participation and knowledge, and expands ownership of our collective struggle for the fullest possible imagining of freedom, liberation, and power for all people. Continue reading

Join the NOlympics Working Group! NOlympics LA and the Road to 2028: A Platform for Changing the Conversation & Winning   Continue reading

Comrades! During our 6-month term, one of the interim Steering Committee’s foremost priorities has been to develop and democratically ratify a revised set of Bylaws that supports our growing chapter and aligns the realities of our organizing work with formal governing standards. Continue reading

Now that another GOP attempt at stripping tens of millions of vulnerable citizens of their healthcare appears to be over, DSA and the country at large must look to the best way forward for the future of our health care and the betterment of our society. It is clear the only manner by which health can be accessed without exception is a universal Single-Payer, Medicare For All distribution system. This goal is one our organization has prioritized nationally, and the path forward is becoming clear.  Continue reading