Building Power and Fighting for Ecosocialism on DSA’s National Political Committee

A few months ago, when the infamous IPCC report telling everyone that we had 12 years left to solve climate change (which wasn’t exactly what it said, but who’s counting) was released, comrades in my local DSA chapter in Chicago reached out to discuss what this report meant and what we could do about it. Mainly, they wanted to talk about how scary and overwhelming it felt to face the inescapable truth of the scale and depth of the crisis we are facing.

I didn’t have all the answers for those comrades — but I did have some ideas about what we could do in the immediate, and I made it clear that we were in this fight together, no matter what.

I’ve been having conversations like that since 2012, when I joined a climate justice collective on campus at my university where we were fighting for passage of a BDS resolution alongside our fossil fuel divestment resolution, and where we knew that buying pizza for striking AFSCME 3299 workers was just as important as providing zero-waste options for other student organizations that we worked with.

Now, seven years and many political homes and campaign fights later, I am throwing my hat in the ring to serve on DSA’s National Political Committee and build our organization’s campaign for a socialist Green New Deal.

As the Ecosocialist Working Group’s GND Principles lay out clearly, “The radical Green New Deal we need will not be introduced in a single bill or resolution — it can only emerge from the grassroots struggles of working people and social movements. Together with our allies, we can organize a powerful multi-faceted movement to catalyze the major left turn in American politics and massive structural changes that are necessary to ensure climate justice and human survival.”

As a participant of the Ecosocialist working group involved in the creation, revision, and ratification of these principles, I believe that we need a strong voice dedicated to working on implementation of the many components of these principles that will be required in order to establish DSA as a strong voice in the fight for a Green New Deal. This will include :

• Building the internal structures necessary to launch a national coordinated campaign that can intervene in federal policy and mobilization around the Green New Deal.
• Supporting staff, working group, and chapter leaders to connect local and regional climate justice campaigning work to the larger strategy and public narrative of a socialist Green New Deal (such as the proposal for a Great Lakes Authority and the multiple chapter campaigns to municipalize/take public control of their utilities).
• Investing in more comprehensive infrastructure for the training and political education of DSA members (like the trainings discussed in the Socialist Organizer Trainings resolution and the political education work discussed in the Invest in Political Education resolution).
• Sharpening the contradictions between DSA’s climate strategy & analysis, and that of other organizations currently driving the narrative & strategy on the Green New Deal; while also deepening local, regional, and national relationships with other organizations who may be fighting for solutions similar to ours (especially in the labor and environmental justice movements, like the Climate Justice Alliance and Labor Network for Sustainability).
• Identifying connections between other parts of DSA’s work — from Medicare for All and the DSLC, to local chapters’ campaigns to elect Bernie Sanders and other down-ballot candidates — that will continue to be a core component of DSA’s ecosocialist politics as they are more clearly defined through political struggle.
• Identifying tactics to build the fundraising/dues-sharing capacity and mentorship support from larger chapters & national staff, as discussed in the Resolution on Grassroots Fundraising and Small Chapter Growth.
• Experimenting with how to use an ecosocialist framework to engage unactivated members of the working class — like rural-electric-cooperative electricity ratepayers with no idea of their latent democratic control over their power, queer folks disillusioned by the state of the LGBT “movement”, and rank-and-file union members who want assurance of a truly just transition when their jobs in disappearing industries will be replaced by millions of low/no-carbon care work and clean energy jobs.

As August approaches, I’ll have more to say on why I’m running, why delegates should vote for me, and reflections on strategic possibilities for DSA.

We’re in the fight of our lives to transform society and decarbonize the world — I’m asking for your support as a DSA member, and your vote if you are a delegate to Atlanta in August.

Onwards!