2020 Platform

What We Built Through Bernie

Our chapter is coming off our biggest mobilization yet: a highly organized, all-volunteer, independent campaign for Bernie Sanders. Early on, Bernie wasn’t expected to win the Bay Area. East Bay DSA’s campaign led the way to Bernie’s victory here.

Dozens of new members became the leaders who developed our “Build the Bay for Bernie” program, distributed canvasses, fundraising, and socials. Through these efforts, we politicized and activated working people across the East Bay.

Despite the Democratic Party lining up behind Biden, the working class rallied around Bernie’s platform and won California with a diverse coalition and exceptional support from young people and people of color, particularly Asian American, Pacific Islander and Latinx people. Hundreds of thousands in the East Bay voted for Bernie, and through our efforts we contacted and identified five thousand of them.

The Triple Crisis

In the months since Bernie’s California victory, conditions have changed drastically, and we now face a triple crisis — a global pandemic that has killed thousands, a severe economic recession, and the political crisis of the global right wing’s racist response.

COVID-19 has already claimed the lives of thousands of working-class people, disproportionately Black and Brown, and our country’s uniquely cruel healthcare system has left millions in danger due to lack of equipment and inability to pay. Massive unemployment is costing more workers their health insurance every day.

The powerful are using this disaster to muscle through their agenda of profiteering, austerity, and privatization. We’ve already seen massive budget cuts and corporate bailouts, and more are on the horizon. Meanwhile, millions can’t pay rent and are going into debt to afford basic necessities.

A rising far right blames immigrants, seeking to restrict their freedom of movement, strip them of rights, and imprison them and their families. As economies collapse, political instability and jingoism increase, the level of hostility escalates, and so does the likelihood of international conflict. Climate change remains a looming threat, while prospects for international collaboration on climate issues evaporate.

Meanwhile our flawed democratic institutions are being further eroded through mass voter disenfranchisement, consolidating political power for the capitalist class and their allies.

The Working Class Fights Back

But workers are fighting back! Frontline workers, disproportionately women and people of color, are taking action to get better pay and protections, and tenants are withholding rent.

Prior to the crisis, the Bernie campaign heightened class consciousness and an appetite for democratic socialist politics across the multiracial working class. Between raised expectations from the Bernie campaign and increasing desperation from the economic crisis, there are thousands of newly radicalized working-class people in the East Bay.

Right now, DSA's task is to bring newly inspired Bernie supporters and newly activated workers together into one movement powerful enough to challenge the ruling class. On the one hand, we must root "Not Me, Us!" in the working class who, by withholding their labor, have the power to bring capitalists to their knees. On the other, we must inspire organized labor and new militants to wage campaigns for structural reforms that combat oppression and protect and expand vital public services.

1. Rank-and-File Worker Power!

Rebuilding a militant, democratic, and left-wing labor movement by supporting and joining the rank-and-file

COVID-19 has made it clearer than ever that there are two classes — owners, who send us to work where we might catch a deadly virus, and workers whose only interest is survival. This has spurred workers to organize to shut down workplaces and get personal protective equipment and hazard pay. We need to build this upsurge of rank-and-file militancy.

We support a rank-and-file strategy to rebuild a militant, democratic, and left-wing labor movement. The key to this strategy is developing rank-and-file worker-leaders permanently organizing in the workplace. These leaders are often, but not always, self-identified socialists. Rank-and-file takeovers of labor unions will turn enormous resources towards strikes and organizing the unorganized, at a greater scale than NGO-style organizing efforts can.

We can rebuild this militant layer in a few ways — taking union jobs where we can identify and cohere organic leaders and reform existing unions, taking jobs in non-union workplaces in order to organize, and supporting workers already taking action. Concretely, East Bay DSA should:

• Build a rank-and-file jobs pipeline in our chapter. With many members furloughed or unemployed, we can organize ourselves into strategic industries and build working-class militancy, including in unorganized workplaces. We should support YDSA activists joining the rank-and-file as they graduate. Activists entering the labor movement should get resources and mentorship from seasoned organizers.
• Support the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee (EWOC), a collaboration between DSA and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America that provides direct support to workers organizing during COVID-19 and is building a wave of worker militancy. Our members should participate in EWOC as it grows, and support local workers organizing through it.
• Continue local solidarity work, organizing with Oakland Education Association teachers against school closures and budget cuts, SEIU 1021 healthcare workers fighting for PPE, and AC Transit workers of ATU 192 and support and promote new organizing, standing with the Tartine Union and other workers fighting for recognition.

2. Fight Racism and Oppression

Run campaigns tackling racism head-on and root our organization in the multiracial working class

We must always connect our fight back to the struggle against racism — especially as the pandemic devastates communities of color suffering disproportionate infection and mortality rates.

The roots of this disparity go back to this country’s racist foundations and the perpetuation of racism as a ruling ideology. People of color are more likely to work low-paid jobs, are less likely to have benefits, be able to work from home, have savings, and be able to afford not to work. This has meant vicious segregation of Black and Latinx people by employers, landlords, and banks. Austerity, gentrification, and police brutality have crushed the promise of Oakland’s working class.

Solidarity means uniting the multiracial working class against oppression and exploitation. We must demand universal programs that guarantee Black and Brown people housing, food, medical care, education, and the full fruits of their labor — and we must confront particular oppressions by fighting to defend and expand reproductive rights, end housing and job discrimination, and win open borders and an end to deportations.

We must commit to fighting capitalism, racism, and oppression and rooting DSA in the multiracial working class. This year, we should:

• Prioritize diversifying East Bay DSA by launching a recruitment campaign, taking rank-and-file jobs that place socialists among the multiracial working class, and actively recruiting from our diverse lists of contacts.
• Build campaigns to tackle capitalist racism head-on, like our Classroom Justice Campaign against school closures, which defends Oakland communities of color from the billionaire-backed charter school lobby and school board. Our AHS Solidarity campaign defends the multiracial workforce on the frontlines of the pandemic and shores up the safety net for the diverse communities of Alameda County.
• Build the strength of labor to win anti-racist demands and protect frontline workers. Workers of color are doing the majority of “essential work” during the pandemic, and we must support them through EWOC and solidarity work as they organize, demand PPE and other safety measures, and win hazard pay. This work saves lives and builds the militancy of the multiracial working class.
• Integrate anti-oppression politics into all our campaigns, communications, and political education. Our calls for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal should foreground demands to repeal the Hyde Amendment and end environmental racism. Majority should continue covering struggles against gentrification and policing. We should incorporate socialist feminism, anti-racism, and internationalist perspectives into our political education to deepen our collective analysis of how to combat all forms of oppression.

3. Fight Austerity and Privatization

Reversing privatization, winning Schools & Communities First, and organizing tenants and the unemployed

As a depression economy takes hold, we can expect a wave of corporate bailouts, budget cuts, and privatizations, even as a lack of strong public programs cost lives before COVID. Only an organized movement against austerity can reverse this destruction of the public good.

Our natural allies in the fight against austerity are rank-and-file public sector workers and their unions. We should try to unite public workers across workplaces to oppose all cuts and privatization and lay blame for the crisis on the capitalist class.

Fighting austerity also means expanding social services and taking privatized services public with a clear socialist framework that demands taxing the rich. To this end, we should:

• Fight budget cuts in Oakland Unified School District and the Alameda Health System through our Classroom Justice and AHS Solidarity campaigns.
• Win Schools and Communities First in November to tax corporations and secure an additional $12 billion per year in revenue for public services.
• Develop local strategic campaigns against austerity and privatization.We should run campaigns that materially impact the lives of the East Bay’s working class and lift up mass demands — such as connecting making PG&E a public utility to the Green New Deal, preventing the sale of public land and demanding Housing for All, or winning a robust public health system while calling for Medicare for All.
• Organize tenants and the unemployed and underemployed against landlords and billionaires and leverage their power to demand rent forgiveness, eviction moratoriums, fully-funded universal social programs, and a jobs guarantee with a living wage.

4. Message Towards the Masses

Investing in communications and political education with a mass reach

We can’t reach millions of Bernie voters and newly radicalized workers through one-to-one interactions alone. Especially under quarantine conditions, building mass communications platforms will be key to recruiting new militants to the democratic socialist project.

Political education is key to developing lifelong socialist thinkers and organizers and should be as accessible as possible. Our Night School brings in 40 to 70 attendees each session and during the lockdown, we’ve seen how virtual events can reach an even wider audience.

Through our communications and political education, we need to win Bernie supporters and rank-and-file workers to our long-term vision and get them involved in the socialist project. To grow our reach, we should:

• Develop Majority into a powerhouse that competes with local media and reaches a broader audience. Majority has run stories about worker struggles in the Alameda Health System and the Oakland Unified School District read by tens of thousands. Some were shared by media figures and Bernie campaign advisors alike and Majority’s writers often go on to publish nationally.
• Expand our capacity for investigative journalism and multimedia. We should keep highlighting worker struggles, train more reporters on investigative research, and keep building our social media and video teams to create media that appeal to a mass audience.
• Earn press coverage for our campaigns and actions. News outlets took notice of our Bernie campaign, and we should capture this momentum by regularly sending out press releases and developing relationships with local press.
• Expand our Socialist Night School programming. We should host debates and panel discussions and offer more advanced political education programming for developing leaders. We should also develop curricula to highlight struggles around the world and understand capitalism’s reaction to the pandemic on a global scale.

5. Build a Multiracial, Democratic DSA

Growing East Bay DSA and Rooting it in the Multiracial Working Class

The first step in becoming a mass organization that can carry out mass political action is rooting ourselves in the multiracial working class. Bernie’s campaign demonstrated that democratic socialism excites a diverse base, but East Bay DSA’s composition doesn’t reflect that. This should be urgently addressed.

If we want multiracial, working-class recruitment, we need dedicated organizing and recruitment. We should root this work in our campaigns and build on tactics from the Bernie campaign like our successful “Build the Bay for Bernie” canvass series, distributed organizing team, and relational organizing models. We should also launch recruitment-focused events across the East Bay, starting in areas like San Leandro, Hayward, East Oakland, and Richmond where we deepened our roots through campaigning for Bernie.

Becoming a mass organization also requires us to make our chapter more democratic and give members control over substantive decisions while limiting procedural debates and avoiding infighting. The Steering Committee shouldn’t be a purely administrative body, but a political body that seeks to identify and frame important political questions and build a culture of engaging, comradely debate at our General Meetings and throughout the chapter. To build a diverse and dynamic chapter, we should:

• Launch a recruitment campaign to diversify the chapter. We should develop efforts to diversify our ranks by organizing recruitment events, continuing to build YDSA chapters around the East Bay that recruit young organizers from varied backgrounds, and proactively recruiting from our lists from Bernie and other campaigns.
• Expand our Spanish-speaking capacities and multilingual materials to reach a broader audience by identifying more multilingual comrades and building our translation team.
• Build leadership development engines that promote the development of non-white and non-male leaders. As we diversify our organization, we need to prioritize diversifying our leadership as well.
• Expand our mobilizers program with three goals — to check on our members and contacts during COVID-19, plug them into campaigns and political education, and activate them as socialist organizers. We should also continue our organizer trainings and more explicitly link them to our campaigns.
• Take an organizing approach to our democracy. We should actively turn out members to our General Meetings and loop them into relevant debates, so they can decide where they stand on the substantive political questions facing our chapter.

6. Bigger than Bernie

Uniting Bernie’s multiracial supporters to fight for democratic socialism

Over 2 million Californians voted for Bernie in 2020. Through DSA’s Bernie campaign we spoke to over five thousand Bernie supporters throughout the East Bay and DSA has seen its membership surge in the wake of his campaign. At the same time, labor unions, cultural organizations, and groups like Mijente, Dream Defenders, and the Sunrise Movement endorsed Bernie and fought for his democratic socialist platform.

These are our allies in struggles for our shared priorities and DSA should bring these Bernie supporters and groups together into a broad, diverse, democratic socialist movement.

Bernie didn’t win the primary, but his campaign activated millions of new socialists across this country. For those inspired by that campaign, who fought for someone they didn’t know, DSA is their political home. Our job is to welcome them home. To do that, we should:

• Unite Bernie supporters by adopting the Bernie platform as DSA’s and encouraging partner organizations to co-sign this platform. We also should deepen ties with these partners by co-hosting events and running campaigns together centered on these demands.
• Recruit Bernie activists and supporters into DSA. We need to organize these new socialists, starting with those we identified through the campaign.
• Develop a roadmap to form an independent working-class party in partnership with Bernie coalition organizations. In the near term, we should continue running class-struggle electoral campaigns that tactically use the Democratic Party ballot line.
• Recruit DSA members and allies to run for office in 2022. We should begin researching strategic races, recruiting candidates, and building coalitions to contest elections and win big in 2022.