The Political Moment
As the far-right grows globally with Trump as its political leader, the working class is suffering from austerity, antidemocratic attacks, and limitations on our civil liberties. The capitalist class continues to gain wealth and power while their greed makes it increasingly difficult for us to thrive — or even just get by.
In the student movement, Trump’s government has attacked student activists who are fighting for Palestine and academic freedom, most notably Mahmoud Khalil, in order to “break the back” of social movements. The full-scale repression of the student movement is an effort to suppress mobilizations against Trump’s agenda. Further, ICE’s intensifying immigration raids and militarization have devastated immigrant communities with deportations and fear.
It is, however, not all bleak. Workers, students, and marginalized communities have shown a willingness to fight back. DSA won the Democratic mayoral primary election for Zohran Mamdani, an open democratic socialist who ran on making life more affordable by taxing the rich and did not shy away from solidarity with Palestine. University of Oregon Student Workers, a union that came out of a YDSA-driven campaign, won a historic first contract that includes increased wages, base pay of $16 per hour, sick leave for work-study, harassment protections, and more. We are rebuilding connections between the labor movement and the socialist movement and are organizing toward United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain’s call for a general strike in 2028, as DSA members take jobs in strategic industries to build a more militant, strike-ready labor movement.
During the first six months of Trump’s presidency, we have seen large-scale protests, including the Hands Off actions and the “No Kings Day” mobilization. Despite the liberal character of these actions, they turned out millions to oppose Trump. We unite with all forces mobilized against Trump because we seek to fight the right and end Trump’s attacks on students, immigrants, and workers. Socialists should join and strengthen mobilizations against Trump while advancing our independent politics within this mass movement. In this moment, our two tasks are to build a mass movement against Trump and to build a viable political alternative. We can join protests against Trump, organize students and workers, and win them over to our vision for socialism. At the same time, we should advance slogans and demands that will further anti-Trump resistance and show the need to break with capitalism and organize toward a working-class political party.
As we see renewed interest in YDSA during the Trump administration, we must build a durable organization that sustains its membership growth and develops new organizers. We can achieve this by engaging in mass organizing that politicizes students toward democratic socialism and wins substantive reforms on our campuses, from better pay for student workers and divestment to, ultimately, free public college.
Mass Organizing
Mass organizing is a practice YDSA highlights as a crucial component of our organization. While the right is growing exponentially across the globe and collaborating with the mega-rich to further the oppression and exploitation of the multiracial working class, it is apparent that YDSA must sharpen its understanding of mass organizing in principle and practice if we wish to defeat the right and spark class formation. Presently, there is an internal debate concerning what strategy will promote the highest level of working-class and student mobilization. As socialists and as Bread and Roses, a caucus dedicated to mass organizing, we assert that this political moment requires our ambitious tactics to unite the left and the politically disorganized.
As a caucus, we believe that campaigning as YDSA alone is not sufficient to win over the masses to socialism. We acknowledge that effective mass organizing must involve a mass struggle and a central unifier. For workers, that unifier is class. For students, the unifier is our struggle against university administrations and bureaucracies that silence our political dissent and student needs. We must expand our project by creating student unions and student worker unions. As socialists, we have a job to do: create structures where mass struggle can occur and where we may intervene to provide a unique, revolutionary political perspective. The concept of mass organizing is frivolous if YDSA cannot fully immerse itself in the broader student movement or engage non-socialist students in mass-struggle campaigns. If our identity as socialists is built upon our vision of working-class emancipation and involves long-term investment in building this vision, we must fully commit ourselves to expanding that project by utilizing effective, experimental avenues of organization.
The Labor Movement
The call for a general strike on May Day 2028 by UAW President Shawn Fain presents a critical moment for workers to flex their muscles as an independent force from the political duopoly. Despite US union density sitting below 10%, there has been an inspiring uptick in labor militancy alongside a growing pro-union sentiment, and young workers are playing a leading role. YDSA, alongside the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, the Rank-and-File Project, and other drives, is actively training a new generation of effective, lifelong socialists in the labor movement. Following the success of student-worker union drives steered by YDSA, such as those at the University of Oregon and Macalester College, we as YDSA are ready to build towards May 2028.
But for a major labor action that aims to be a general strike, we must dramatically scale up our systematic rank-and-file efforts, supporting young organizers industrializing into strategic sectors. The concurrence of the UAW strike with the 2028 Presidential election also provides socialists a clear opportunity to connect labor’s economic struggle with political struggle if DSA endorses a candidate.
By organizing in the labor movement during this moment of rising fascism and unprecedented state violence, our efforts and solidarity can bring new working-class leaders and communities into the struggle for socialism. From immigrant farm workers to Starbucks baristas to warehouse workers, we must help inspire the average working person, who is often ridiculed and abused, with the confidence and skills necessary to fight and take back control over our lives.
The Student Movement
Following the aftermath of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment movement, where coalitions took the reign and divestment efforts largely failed, it is clear that another path needed to emerge. The only school in the country to originally take this path and successfully win divestment was San Francisco State University (SFSU). They did not do this through a coalition of organizations. The coalition model relies on the leaders of organizations to mobilize their small bases, but often, they are unable to expand beyond this base. They are not democratic in that the leaders of organizations make decisions, rather than the full membership. This lack of democracy reduces the buy-in of those in the coalition, making only a small few feel like they have a real part in the movement.
Instead, San Francisco State University won the divestment through a student union. A student union is truly democratic in that it relies on mass assemblies to gather input from everyone and make a decision. Student unions are not only comprised of socialists, but also of every student who wants to engage in struggle, drawing in broad layers. It relies on organizing people outside of its base — inside classrooms and through academic departments. Through having this democratic site of mass struggle, SFSU’s students were able to achieve their goals. Where almost everyone else in the country failed, they were one of the few schools to succeed through mass organizing and collectively bargaining with their university’s administration in open meetings.
Student unionism is not a new concept, but one that is tried and true across the world and throughout history. Student unions with the same ethos in Quebec have led student strikes involving over 300,000 students, successfully stopping tuition hikes. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 60s was a site for political struggle that socialists engaged in and even led, but it was a site of struggle for all. The unifier in all of these is our struggle against the university administration and engaging in a broader student movement. It was because of the willingness of socialists to engage in a broader student movement, not restricting themselves to only socialists. We, as a caucus, believe that student unions are an avenue for this goal. They will take years to build and, no doubt, have some failures, just as every organizing effort has. However, no great victories that student organizers have achieved have ever been easy; yet, they have been accomplished. If student organizers laid down their arms every time something seemed hard or the conditions were not perfect, they would have never done anything worth noting. Only by laying the groundwork and starting unions with structures in place and long-term strategies in mind can sites of struggle for student power be achieved. Only then can our universities be radically transformed. We must attempt this ambitious organizing project that will enable us to grow the power of the student movement and grow YDSA alongside it, politicizing students and creating a sea of struggle for socialist students to swim in across the country.
How We Must Organize
Right now, as the right has become more emboldened than ever to enact its fascist actions, YDSA cannot afford to become stagnant in its ability to organize the masses. As a socialist organization, we have a responsibility to articulate our revolutionary principles and stand in solidarity with our peers in class struggle. We have seen the fruition of militant and dynamic social projects, such as the student workers' strike at the University of Oregon and divestment at San Francisco State University. This shows that despite the overwhelming repression enacted by the ruling class, we can continue to build power through mass action.
It is vital that we continue this momentum through the support of ambitious and experimental long-term projects that can last beyond a single campaign. Mass organizing should transform our campuses through the use of student unions that can reach beyond the activist layer to fight back against universities’ bureaucratic oppression, as well as student worker unions that enable students to take up rank-and-file positions and consolidate our labor into real power. YDSA cannot continue to play it safe with our organizing efforts—not while the capitalist system continues to oppress the multiracial working class across the world, not while we have gained so much footing in our ability to engage through class struggle, and not while there's still a world to win.