OUR PLATFORM

Over the last four years, we’ve elected four LA city councilmembers, 2 LAUSD School Board members, and 1 Burbank city councilmember. What could we do with 6,000 members? To achieve this ambitious membership goal, we need an organizing program based on the best practices from the labor movement. The chapter will shift the Growth & Development subcommittee to an Organizing Committee model that trains DSA-LA members in one-to-one organizing; leadership identification and development; and listwork so chapter members can drive recruitment as a committee. By the end of 2026, 250 comrades will have recruited at least one new member into DSA. To ensure that our membership across all branches is representative of LA's rich diversity, we will focus on building relationships with Black community organizations and jointly organizing to address the community’s local material needs. We will also work to build the physical and administrative infrastructure for the chapter to hire our first staff member.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory showed that when DSA members commit to an ambitious goal, the working class wins. California should be the bulwark of a nation-wide democratic socialist movement, and DSA-LA must be ready to support left candidates in the 2028 presidential election. A multi-year, power-building plan to contest offices at the state and federal level will give Los Angeles socialists the kind of power base that we currently only have in New York City and Detroit. The chapter will build a program of candidate research, recruitment, and training to develop cadre candidates from within DSA and contest seats beyond municipal government by 2028, working in particular with labor to identify potential candidates. We’ll expand member participation in research and policy, growing our ability to co-govern by creating tangible policy gains for the working class, as well as through constituency services, to address immediate material needs.

The Trump administration has promised and delivered increasingly cruel attacks on migrants to uphold white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. We’ll continue the chapter’s commitment to migrant rights and mutual aid, especially community defense patrols, through political education, organizing, and counter-propaganda. Building on our community defense and tenant organizing efforts in June, the chapter will expand our Know-Your-Rights (KYR) canvassing and block walk operations through our electoral and priority campaigns, equipping field leads with a training curriculum and campaign-branded KYR literature. We’ll also build off our efforts to defend day laborers at Home Depots, preparing members to resist additional ICE raids, and preparing the chapter for mass action against ICE.

Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to build the left wing of labor by running joint campaigns for socialist candidates, immigrant defense, and an arms embargo on Israel. Recent recruitment efforts have brought union leaders into our ranks, and our members are ready to grow the labor movement and fight joint political campaigns. In collaboration with local unions and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Center (EWOC), we will institute an labor organizer training program so members can gain the skills to organize their workplace. Our Labor Committee will work closely with the Electoral Politics Committee to bring our candidate recruitment and training process to local unions, so that DSA-LA is working with organized labor to build governing power. We’ll build towards a union affiliate program to coordinate our relationship with labor partners, consolidating our resources to deliver socialist champions at the ballot box. Through the union affiliate program we will integrate unions into the chapter and establish a member-led process for the creation of a labor seat on the Steering Committee.

Building on the ties DSA-LA has established with tenant organizations such as ACCE and LATU, the chapter will organize tenants to collectively address issues in their buildings and with their landlords by developing a tenant organizing program for the chapter. Focusing on both policy campaigns and the direct organizing of tenants in their apartment buildings, we’ll extend our reach beyond just the city of LA, and work to build and support nascent tenant unions in the San Gabriel Valley. We will also build on the momentum created by the Power to the Tenants campaign and recent LA city LARSO wins to develop further pro-tenant policy campaigns that defend existing gains and confront policy loopholes used by landlords to exploit tenants. Through these efforts, we will continue to build tenant power across Los Angeles.

Building a mass movement requires orienting our chapter’s goals around coherent, shared priorities in addition to specializing our work across working groups. To this end, we will structure chapter and branch meetings as interactive spaces where members learn new skills, cohere their political positions, strategize collectively, and decide our chapterwide priorities. We will also restructure chapter leadership meetings to focus on strategy, project implementation, and quantitative campaign evaluation, identifying shared goals and creating opportunities to share lessons learned and document best practices. By aligning around shared organizing methodologies, we can focus on bringing more members into the chapter, growing new leaders, and expanding our collective power.