I’d wager not.
In a union campaign, the way to answer a question like this is through a structure test. Before going on strike, organizers know that they’ll need a supermajority of workers to authorize the strike, given that a vicious anti-union drive by the boss will likely reduce their numbers. Some campaigns might have a mobilization where workers do something like wearing pro-union attire in order to gauge support. Ideally, this would be one of several escalatory structure tests meant to evaluate a worker’s risk tolerance as well as how effective the channels of communication are in terms of getting the word out. In other words, a structure test measures the strength of an organization and its ability to mobilize towards a specific goal.
Chicago DSA (and the DSA in general) is not a union. However, as a prospective mass-membership party that anyone can join, our level of organization is low. We should think and act more like a union fighting a campaign. Amidst conversations of leadership burnout, tremendous uncaptured membership growth, and increasing need for urgency in the political landscape (no source needed), Chicago DSA is at an impasse. What we do next will shape the organization for years to come. While we are poised to become a major player in the labor movement and Chicago politics, failing to build our organizational cohesion risks souring newcomers and leadership to the movement. Instead, it’s time we seize the moment and live up to our vision.
CDSA Vision – What are we organizing towards?
When discussing strategic choices for the direction DSA will take, it is important to center the conversation around our shared vision. We are working towards democratic socialism, or the demand that “our economy should be run to meet human needs for all, not to make profits for a few” (https://chicagodsa.org/). Different people have different ideas of what this might look like. Many of us will think of universal healthcare, a Green New Deal, or of recent national and local politicians in the limelight, but being a democratic socialist and a member of CDSA is more than a positive feeling towards items on this agenda, as laid out on our chapter’s website:
“Our primary tasks are to organize the working class, make more socialists, and lay the foundation for an independent mass party capable of conquering political power and transforming our society” (https://chicagodsa.org/).
As socialists, we care about a lot of issues, from protecting our trans and immigrant comrades who have been the latest targets of the Trump administration’s attacks, to issues like environmental justice, prison abolition, overpolicing, and countering American imperialism. We need to be fighting on all of these fronts. However, as emphasized by our tasks above as an organization, we need to continue asking the question: “how are we building power?”. Without the crystallization of short-term mobilizations such as the “No Kings” protests into long-term organizational capacity, we will forever be putting out fires and responding to crises rather than proving that a better world is possible and leading the fight.
How do we build working-class power?
Working-class power is our ability to force elected officials, the government, and the owning class to meet our demands. This power comes from the fact that we, the working class, work the jobs that make society run. Also, as workers comprise a huge majority of the population, we can vote to elect people to represent our interests in government. However, the nature of these two sources of power is not the same.
First, let’s start with the weaker of the two: electoral power. Elected officials are–in theory–held accountable to their constituents through their desire for reelection. This power is diluted by the fact that elections are increasingly decided by spending and fundraising. This gives capitalists a decisive advantage in influencing and subverting democratic elections. Given the current lax campaign spending laws and skyrocketing levels of wealth inequality, elections are increasingly determined by the sheer volume of money poured into a given campaign, which is a losing position for the working class. Nevertheless, recent campaigns have found success with a grassroots or “Mass Movement Electoralism” approach. For example, Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 Mayoral campaign managed to mobilize 100,000 volunteers to knock doors thanks in large part to NYC’s DSA chapter as well as its active left ecosystem. The problem is, no matter how a working-class-friendly politician is elected, two things remain true: there are certain things an elected official cannot do (especially with regards to challenging capital’s interests), and there is little recourse for working people to hold them accountable.
Luckily, working people have another, more reliable, source of power: the ability to withhold our labor. To build working class power, we need to organize workplaces into fighting unions. This is the crux of the left’s emphasis on organized labor and the recent excitement surrounding the idea of a general strike. It is not just a commitment to fairness and equality in the workplace, but an understanding that working people as a class are the only ones who can transform society. Work stoppages hit the capitalist class where it hurts: their profits. This is what gives the working class its greatest leverage and transformational power.
Then, to answer our question of what it takes to build working class power, it is clear that we must organize workplaces and unions to be capable of militant strike action, using their political power to aid the working class in electoral politics and thus building power independent of state institutions.
What is organizing, really? Where does the DSA fit in?
At its core, organizing is bringing people together into a long term structure to “mobilize” for certain tasks and work towards a bigger goal. Almost any organization can build a hierarchical structure to accomplish a goal, but as democratic socialists, we must accomplish our goals while simultaneously modeling and prototyping the kinds of radically democratic structures we are fighting to build and sustain. In line with the Labor Notes tradition of democratic organizing this means relying on a “leadership-dense” model. Carla Villanueva and Michael Belt, organizers with UAW, define a leader of a union drive as someone, a worker:
“…who is willing to fight for the union, receptive to feedback on how to speak with coworkers, and capable of moving their coworkers into action. Leaders are those who are public and willing to speak to their coworkers when the time is right. Throughout the campaign, leaders are given a steady flow of training and tools to better answer their coworkers’ questions. This approach is grounded in a belief that workers in any industry can understand and make complex strategy decisions and are able to have difficult organizing conversations with their coworkers.”
A leadership-dense model of organizing depends on finding workers willing and able to build a union, and developing them into organizers. The more leader-organizers that can be developed, the better. Furthermore, we need to trust that average workers are capable of organizing themselves when given access to structure, resources, and guidance. This requisite belief in the competency of workers is more than a principle; it’s foundational to our strategy and is essential to winning. Any worker can be a leader. The benefit to this orientation is that worker-organizers are constantly training new organizers, building the project’s capacity. Also, after a certain point, there is no single organizer or identified “leader” who is carrying the bulk of the work on their own; the campaign is self-sustaining and can recover and succeed even if a key organizer needs to take a step back from the work..
Another way to think about organizing is as an ideal. Just as there is no way to achieve “democracy”, there is no such thing as a “perfectly organized” workplace, either. There are certainly workplaces and institutions which are more organized or democratic than others, and what sets those apart is the strength and number of connections between people. Put differently, what we are organizing is a network of people, within which each node has a varying number of connections with varying levels of strength. To build the network, existing connections must be strengthened or new connections added. To do this more effectively, individual “nodes” must be trained and developed.
At last, we can see how our definition of “organizing” can be applied outside the workplace and to our work with Chicago DSA. Many of those reading this may be among the most active in the chapter and already fill leadership roles in various committees and working groups. We are the DSA’s version of the worker-organizer, the “member-organizer” or cadre. As member-organizers we may already have this orientation; we view our chapter as a network of relationships and are willing to fight for its vision. But are we using tried-and-true fundamental organizing skills to get there? Are we developing new member-organizers to apply those same skills and build further organizational capacity? Our ability to strengthen and expand this network depends on our utilization of fundamental organizing skills.
Conclusion
With recent wins nationwide like Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, the wave of left flank democrats bringing excitement to primary elections, our own local DSA chapter’s worker organizer job fair and successful bid to get Byron Sigcho-Lopez on a ballot, the future of democratic socialist politics is brighter than ever. Despite this, we need to seriously reconsider our organizational structure and strategy if we expect to contend for power and build the foundation for our aspired-to independent mass party.
As mentioned previously, we struggle to retain both leadership and new members, something which costs us institutional knowledge, skills, and growth. In “Middle-Level Organizing: The Key to a Successful CDSA”, Monk lays out this problem in detail as well as its solution: organizing fundamentals. We conduct political education for new members, yet struggle to convey skills like organizing conversations, making asks, and how to run a meeting. These things are just as important as understanding our long-term vision and past. The history of social movements is the history of organizers.
One of the important lessons Monk reminds us of is to “Clarify Your Goals”. With changing leadership and a flux of new membership, it’s fair to say that we might not all be on the same page. In fact, we can prove it. We should conduct a survey of every member in Chicago DSA. Surveys are used in union drives as structure tests to gauge support. Rather than texting out a form for people to fill out, a proper structure test requires being systematic and having one-on-one conversations with everyone. In these conversations we can gauge members’ understanding of our vision, hear about their theory of change and power, invite them to action in a specific way, and simply get to know them.
As a collective, we can struggle with the questions of how we actually contend for power. Do we recruit people to organize workplaces and the labor movement where so much of our power resides? Do we run our own candidates or support others who match our vision to communicate our politics to a broad base and win non-reformist reforms? How do we weave the fights that are already happening across the city into something cohesive? Together, we can find out. Together, let’s organize Chicago DSA!
