2024 YDSA Summer Convention

The 2024 YDSA Convention will be held online from Friday, July 19 to Sunday, July 21. For more information, please check official YDSA convention website.

The Bread & Roses caucus is excited to introduce our slate for the 2024 National YDSA convention: Carlos C (Cal Poly Pomona) and Uma C (UC Santa Barbara) for National Co-Chairs, and Daniil S (Hunter College) and Jeffrey C (Oakland University) for at-large NCC seats. Sign on to support Bread & Roses’ vision for YDSA here.

The Political Moment

The crises of capitalism can be felt across the United States and around the world. Working people are facing the brunt of corporate greed as inflation and skyrocketing rent eat away at our paychecks. Instead of investing in our campuses and communities, our tax dollars and tuition are being used to fund the military-industrial complex, funneling money into the genocide in Gaza, war abroad, and building cop cities at home. In Gaza, the US war machine funds Israel as it wages genocide against the Palestinian people; abroad, the working class in Ukraine, Russia, and countries around the world are caught in the war of the rich; at home, we experience the brutal violence of the police who oppress us for protesting a genocide. The Democratic Party has shown their true colors as a tool of the rulling-class and US empire: funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, enacting austerity budgets, failing to cancel student debt and protect abortion rights, passing inhumane and abusive immigration policies, and calling in the police to repress students. The resurgence of the far-right and conservative politics can be seen worldwide, as the capitalist class use xenophobia and nationalism to redirect the anger of the working-class away from themselves and towards each other. Younger people, sick of politics as usual, increasingly turn away from the two-parties of the ruling-class.

Despite all of this, there are reasons to be hopeful for the future. The labor movement continues its historic resurgence, as workers continue to form unions in droves and leaders like Shawn Fain push their unions to wage class war on the shop floor. This resurgence was encouraged by the efforts of socialists and labor militants organizing within their unions for decades, and it has made its way to the campuses where undergraduate student workers continue to organize unions and win historic contracts. We’ve also seen the historic Palestine solidarity encampment movement rock the world, with YDSA chapters playing a leading role on many campuses. These actions brought tens of thousands of students from the sidelines into the struggle and gave us invaluable experience with mass action, new organizing tactics, and showed the importance of democracy and flexibility in our organizing. We must share our experiences and analyses of this moment, the largest student movement of the twenty-first century, to move forward as a stronger and more committed YDSA.

How do we meet the moment?

There’s only one way forward for the socialist movement: building long-term power through mass action. Millions of young people across the United States are being radicalized as they watch their tax dollars fund a genocide while their schools crumble and their communities are threatened by climate change. The only way to beat the ruling class, and its trillions of dollars defended by the armed wing of the state, is through our numbers and organizing ourselves as workers. We must meet the movement where it is at. That means injecting dynamism into social movements, like the movement for a free Palestine, experimenting with new outward-facing tactics and strategies to push millions of people into the streets and the struggle. That means recruiting and developing thousands of new YDSA members across the country from the recently politicized masses. That means fighting for democratic practices to facilitate the development of flexible, sustainable, and engaging movements and movement organizations to make our organizing more successful and beat the administrators and capitalists who are content to wait for our organization to crumble.

Engaging in movements alone is not enough. We need to build power that will last beyond a campaign and beyond the four years that many of us spend on our campuses. We need to organize student worker unions amongst our coworkers and colleagues to withhold our labor and demand meaningful change from administration. We should also take inspiration from the student unions in Brazil and other parts of the world to create the infrastructure for student strikes and other mass action on campus. By organizing student unions and student-worker unions, we can leverage our structural power as students and workers and force our administrators to concede to our demands.

YDSA’s goal is not just to win power in the here and now but to change the world. YDSA plays a special role as a socialist “boot-camp:” through engaging in class-struggle and building mass organizations on our campuses, we are able to develop generations of life-long socialist organizers. By encouraging young socialists to take strategic rank-and-file jobs after graduation, YDSA can reinvigorate the labor movement from the bottom-up and build a base for a future worker’s party.

Empowering YDSA to Meet the Moment

We know that we have to help develop democratic, militant, dynamic social movements and organize student unions and student worker unions on our campuses. But the methods we use to achieve these goals will vary based on geographic region, campus conditions, and the broader political moment. YDSA, therefore, must experiment with new tactics, strategies, and structures to meet its goals. We also must be flexible and adaptable to respond to crucial moments, like the wave of Gaza Solidarity Encampments this Spring. To be able to experiment and be flexible, we must continue to advocate for YDSA autonomy.

That is the ability of YDSA, through its Convention and elected leadership , to make our own decisions and direct our own organizing. Having our own independent member-led Comms committee helped YDSA meet the political moment during the encampment upsurge. To continue to meet the moment, we must further commit to YDSA autonomy. This means giving YDSA control over its own budget and fundraising efforts so that we can adjust our resources based on what is most strategic as organizing conditions change. It also means giving YDSA control over our international organizing so that we can more efficiently and effectively connect with new organizations around the world and share tactics and experiences. YDSA has grown to its current size and scale through our dynamic and exciting organizing on our campuses. As we find ourselves in another upsurge in campus organizing, we must continue to focus our efforts outwards, not inwards, to continue YDSA’s exponential growth and be ready to meet the next moment that comes our way.

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