#dsacon2017

Everything was coming up roses on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. Red rose symbols were emblazoned on scarlet T-shirts, branded on pinback buttons affixed to messenger bags and backpacks, printed on brochures and pamphlets, and projected onto the walls of a lecture hall in the student center on the east side of the school's grounds. One would've been forgiven for mistaking the gathering for a conference of professional florists.

All of the floral iconography was in fact political in nature. During the first weekend of August, UIC played host to the national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America. The image of the rose, which has served as a symbol employed by leftist movements for more than a century, is a central emblem of the DSA. Two "red scares" and the cold war have chilled much legitimate talk about socialism over the course of the last century, but the ubiquity of rose-bedecked swag was just the most visible sign that the anti-capitalist movement is blossoming.

The size of the DSA's proverbial rose garden that weekend was larger than any in the nonprofit organization's 35-year history. The convention drew 1,000 attendees from 49 states, including 697 delegates and about 300 observers. One DSA official called it a "historic moment," noting that a single room was packed with more people than had attended the previous three conventions combined. The sight of the rose-filled student center prompted Harold Meyerson, editor at large of the progressive political magazine the American Prospect and a DSA member since 1975, to marvel to a fellow longtime member, "Look at all these new faces. I can't believe it!"

The most prominent of those new faces was a man whose last name—fittingly enough—is Spanish for the word "rose": Chicago alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who joined the DSA in March. On the eve of the convention's first day, the 28-year-old councilman, a red rose pinned to the lapel of his dark suit jacket, delivered a rousing welcome speech that made it clear he wasn't there simply to serve as a city ambassador. "I address you tonight not as an emissary of the mayor of the 1 percent or the class of City Hall," he said, "but as your comrade. As a proud Democratic Socialist, I welcome you." Amid cheers and applause, the alderman paused briefly to smile.

(During the DSA National Convention in early August, delegates voted on a range of issues, from membership dues to socialized national health care.)

The three days that followed were rarely so exhilarating. "The trouble with socialism," Oscar Wilde is often quoted as saying, "is that it takes up too many evenings." He was talking about all the meetings, and indeed the DSA convention's days and nights were overstuffed with lengthy, frequently heated, sometimes hiss-filled debates on administrative rules about dues collection and formal votes governed by tedious parliamentary procedure. But ultimately the DSA collectively agreed to leave the Socialist International—a loose confederation of worldwide member parties—and expressed support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. It also advocated for a socialized national health care system devoid of the profit motive, endorsed Black Youth Project 100's Agenda to Build Black Futures, and elected to create a national Afro-socialist caucus.

By the close of the weekend, the DSA had managed to push its political priorities further to the left than ever before. For recent converts like Ramirez-Rosa—many of them young, female, queer, and people of color—it was one hell of a coming out party, and a glimpse of the promise of the new wave of socialism.

If you followed Bernie Sanders’ resurgent campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in even a cursory way, you heard about the scourge of the “Bernie Bro.”

He’s portrayed as a particular type of white man, one who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton (sexism!), backed Sanders (spoiler!), and is now trying to take the Democrats down a peg by joining up with the Democratic Socialists of America (racism, or something!).

That person exists. He’s taking up space in independent bookstores and talking too much in social justice circles the nation over. It’s also an appealing and convenient stereotype, a carefully crafted straw man, for anyone who makes their living churning out an opinion column a week.

But erasing people of color from the narrative is deeply ahistoric at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Martin Luther King Jr. espoused socialist ideals, Cornel West was an honorary DSA chair, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) are both members of the progressive congressional caucus; Princeton Professor Keenanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes extensively about black liberation in a socialist context, and University of Pennsylvania Professor Adolph Reed Jr. has condemned identity politics as “neoliberalism.” Communists organized against racism in Depression-era Harlem and to desegregate the blood supply of the Red Cross during World War II.

And it’s not just in the past: socialists of color are running for office across the country and winning, like khalid kamau (who capitalizes his name in the Yoruba tradition) a city councilman and Democratic Socialist in South Fulton, Carlos Ramirez Rosa, a 26-year-old queer and Latinx activist elected to Chicago’s City Council, and Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a radical leftist who was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.

Still, the trope has straddled the DSA, which was once largely irrelevant in national electoral politics but has seen its membership grow by 400% since Sanders campaigned openly with socialist ideas, with something of a perception problem—the idea that socialism is for white dude bros only.

Splinter spoke with several of these activists—gathered in Chicago last weekend to set the DSA’s agenda for the next two years—about how to abolish capitalism while creating an inclusive movement, what socialism has to offer communities of color, and why the time is now to embrace an alternative to the two-party system.

Cathy Garcia, Santa Fe

When did you join DSA?

December 2016

What made you want to join up?

What made me actually realize I wanted to join up was realizing the folks in my local area who wanted to start the chapter were badasses, they were amazing folks.

I come from a union background, so I’m used to organizing to win, I’m used to organizing to fight, and I’m used to organizing around issues. And while I feel like I have a strong ideology that underlies that, I don’t like sitting in a room full of folks who are just there to talk about how great their ideas are. That’s cool, I’m glad folks have an ideology, I’m glad they have time to read, I’m glad they have time to kind of deep-dive into those things. I’ve always fundamentally felt that if we aren’t making tangible changes in folks’ lives, then I don’t give a shit what you believe or what philosophy you’ve read or your course of study, it just doesn’t matter.

So from a strong background in labor organizing, how did that evolve into desire to be involved in socialist politics?

I feel like I was born radicalized. I come from a Mexican background, my mom was from Michoacán, Rancho, a rural area of Mexico. When she was around 15, she got documents to come into the United States. My dad was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico City. They both made it to the United States in the ‘60s during that wave of immigration and through luck and hard work, my dad really made the American Dream happen. He moved us into the suburbs of Los Angeles, we were well-established in the middle class, but that was certainly not true for the rest of our family. They were all kind of spread over Los Angeles and East L.A., so as a very young girl, really coming to confront the class difference of our privilege and how that class privilege insulated me from certain oppressions, but not all.

Everyone’s liberation is tied up with our own. You can’t be free if I’m in chains.

THE OUTLINE

by Emmett Rensin

On Sunday, the 2017 convention of the Democratic Socialists of America came to a close in Chicago with the singing of the Internationale. The group of some thousand delegates and journalists and alternates and observers were not the same people who had arrived four nights earlier, hoping to meet and drink and “do socialism,” whatever that meant to them then.

I can confess that I came to the convention expecting to be disappointed. I’m not cynical, but I’m a pessimist, by impulse and by training. I expected at best to see a juvenile party, at worst a madhouse descending into bitter mutual recrimination. What I found instead was not perfect, but it was something that has broken, for the moment, my pessimism’s long winning streak. For a moment, the desire for a better world that has lately taken up residence in the ambitions of more and more of us, the impulse to act in service of that better world that has so far largely been a vague and often angry shout into the ether of an indifferent polity, the urgency with which these desires and impulses have been felt despite their existence in largely incorporeal formats, all of these things congealed, at least briefly, in a real room in a real city, where people could see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices and feel, perhaps for the first time, that their hopes were a solid, breathing thing in the world. If nothing else had come of this convention, that alone might be enough to keep us going for a while.

But more did come of the convention. The DSA has made its first substantial grasps toward a vision of itself that can win. Its politics, from the endorsement of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement, to its electoral and labor and emancipation priorities, are far more radical than those the organization adopted just two years ago. The newly elected National Political Council is, in large part, the most ambitious that the DSA has ever seen. Despite several contentious votes, the convention saw its dues, its organizational structure, and its internal policy procedures begin to pivot toward the degree of seriousness required to build a movement that lasts longer than an election cycle or a fad. Even where the proceedings became tedious, or a vote came out contrary to what I thought would have been wiser, or the procedural machinations descended into the inevitably parody of any unruly body operating under Robert’s Rules of Order, the very fact of a real and at times contested display of political organizing will help transition what has for many been a largely online tendency into a real task worth dedicating a life to.

No matter what comes of the DSA, many of its members will join with the many unionists and activists and organizers who have already spent their lives working in thousand different groups and causes for the dignity and sustenance of all people. The convention was messy, as messy and fun as it should have been, but I am not kidding when I say that events began with the reading of a budget report. And there’s value in a little tedium. It’s cold water for how much thankless drudgery this fight is going to take.

Still, my pessimism creeps around the edges. There is the superficial worry, of course. Even a day out, how terribly silly it feels to have been rapturous about scarcely a thousand people attempting to conduct politics in a drafty room, how troubling it is that the desire not to feel silly and earnest still dominates so much of the culture that the DSA is growing in — in two years, will they come back, or was it just about the novelty of meeting some faces you follow on Twitter?

But I have deeper worries, too. I can imagine that the rapture is justified, that the commitment of the delegates in Chicago and their chapters back home is deep and total, that in the coming years the DSA will only grow, gaining millions of members and a real weight in American politics. But then — so what? How rapturous did Eugene Debs feel in 1912 when he got one million votes for president from prison? Did his supporters believe that 1916 would bring them victory? That year, Debs ran for a lowly Congressional seat in his native Indiana and he lost.

THE ONLY CHOICE IS TO BELIEVE THAT CHANGE MIGHT BE POSSIBLE THIS TIME.

Some members of congress are trying to criminalize support for the campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its occupation of Palestinian territories.

The U.S.’s new premiere left-wing organization, however, is moving the other way, undaunted by the threat of legislation against the BDS movement, as it is known.

The Democratic Socialists of America, which gathered this weekend in Chicago for its biennial convention, passed a resolution on Saturday to endorse the BDS movement. The vote in favor was so overwhelming, with so few dissenters — more than 90 percent supported the resolution — that no formal tally was taken. It marked the first time in the group’s 35-year history that it has taken a position on the issue.

“I expected it to pass, but it did surprise me how overwhelming the support was,” said Rawan Tayoon, a Palestinian DSA activist from Los Angeles. Tayoon helped draft the resolution as part of a group that began its work in the spring.

Another drafter, Benjamin Balthaser, a Jewish Voice for Peace-Chicago member, who joined the DSA last year, said it was especially important for people from the Jewish community to make their voices heard on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The Israeli government says it represents all Jews in the world,” Balthaser, who is Jewish, told The Intercept. “And I think it’s very important for the Jewish community to say, ‘We don’t feel represented by an apartheid government. We don’t feel represented by a military occupation.'”

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