Sign on to our shared principles
1. Our urgent task is to build a socialist majority.
To build a socialist majority, we need to engage working people in effective campaigns around immediate demands. We need to organize in a way that recognizes and combats white supremacy, patriarchy, and all other systems of oppression as well as capitalism. We need to help build a powerful labor movement and work to elect democratic socialist candidates to office. We need to operate in a democratic way within our organization, while holding each other to a standard of generous and comradely behavior.
2. Organizing the working class around immediate and radical demands is our path to power.
Policies once viewed as radical, like a $15 minimum wage, have become overwhelmingly popular because millions of working people have advocated for themselves through campaigns that speak to their conditions and aspirations. Socialists should advance these issues, connect them to a long-term vision of democratic socialism, and build DSA—and a new socialist majority—in the process.
3. Effective, well-targeted campaigns around specific demands are at the heart of DSA’s political work.
Campaigns that win specific concessions from particular power centers, using tactics that large numbers of people can participate in, build confidence, skills, and power for the working class.
4. DSA should embrace a democratic, bottom-up model of campaign development that connects local struggles with broader movements.
Campaigns developed and tested at the local level should inform national priorities through democratic processes.
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7) DSA works most effectively in coalition with organized progressive and working-class groups.
Millions of working people across the country are fighting for their own interests by organizing themselves in groups like labor unions, tenant and neighborhood associations, and other community organizations. DSA should build strategic and sustainable relationships with these organizations by campaigning for working-class demands and should also foreground the structural analysis that connects disparate issues to a democratic socialist program.
10) We will strive to practice solidarity with each other, even in disagreement, in a way that transforms us as individuals and strengthens us as a collective.
Comradely conversation and debate over ideas, tactics, and strategies is the lifeblood of a democratic organization like DSA. Toxic or factionalized disagreement fails to change minds and fails to move our work forward. We want to uphold norms of debate, of democratic governance, and of communication that prioritize treating one another as comrades in mutual struggle rather than adversaries to be torn down.
5. Dismantling racist and oppressive institutions is central to our fight.
The working class, both in the U.S. and internationally, is multiracial. We will not be able to build a socialist majority without tackling white supremacy, imperialism, and other forms of oppression head on, in society, in our coalitions, and in DSA.
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8) Socialists should engage the labor movement at all levels to build a united, fighting working-class movement.
Building a militant, progressive and democratic labor movement is a central task for socialists. DSA members have a wide variety of roles to play, including organizing as members of the rank-and-file, as union staff or officers, in our own non-union workplaces, and in targeted strategic industries. All labor movement work that advances our class struggle is important to building a socialist majority.
6. Socialist feminist praxis informs our organizing and organizational culture.
Our organizing practice should recognize that all members of the working class have multiple identities, including gender, sexual attraction, race, ability, and others, that shape their experience of oppression. Building a socialist majority will require consciously building bridges across the divisions that various forms of oppression have created.
9) DSA can and should be the face of the democratic socialist electoral movement growing across the country.
The electoral campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other democratic socialists at all levels of government have engaged millions of working people in discussion of socialist demands, and have played an important role in DSA’s growth. Electoral campaigns should be a key part of DSA’s strategy to forge a socialist majority.