by Travis Wayne
I’ve co-chaired the North Carolina Triangle chapter of DSA for the past year. This report attempts to follow the example of our national leaders on the 2023-2025 National Political Committee issuing transparent write-ups on their political perspectives and rundowns of national meetings. This report is also a collective self-criticism and a historical record about this particular moment of DSA as experienced in one of the largest chapters in the South.
I interviewed a couple dozen core members before writing this up and coded members’ perspectives into thematic categories. Out of that process came four masses – mass meetings, mass organization, mass work, and mass movement-building. These are the four metrics that seem to be most useful for assessing our chapter right now.
Mass Meetings
In 2023, we more than doubled participation in chapter decision-making.
Average general meeting attendance went up by ~122%. Attendance was static at about 30 attendees for two consecutive general meetings at the end of 2022; one year later, this month’s general meeting was attended by 48 members. That means general meetings have experienced a 60% increase in participation. As to why, some comrades mentioned that more business is getting done and more useful information is getting conveyed at meetings. That might be part of the reason, but data shows the dramatic increase in participation coincided with when we started organizing mass meetings in addition to general meetings. We consistently turn out ~85 members to mass meetings, almost triple (183%) the previous average attendance. The total (122%) increase is calculated based on an average of general and mass meeting attendance.
Mass meetings come from two influences: compromise with a local convention and political education on organizing methods from movement ancestors. There was no consensus or timeline that worked for a local convention, so instead we opted for a mass meeting where we aimed to assemble a much broader number of active members directly into democratic decision-making. Our political education working group discussed mass meetings organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) a few months before we began organizing mass meetings. One member leader in the political education working group slammed a fist on the table and exclaimed that we “don’t know how to organize a mass meeting.” So, we figured it out. One core member connected our mass meeting organizing with the communist lineage: William Z. Foster’s classic Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry - recently studied by Red Star – covers mass meetings extensively.
Comrade Foster wrote that mass meetings are so fundamental to organization that the culmination of organizing itself should be the mass meeting since “one good mass meeting is better than two dozen indifferent ones.” In mass meetings, far more people participate directly in democratic decision-making as a broad collective, meaning more mass participation that gives more people more chances to become protagonists of their own lives as active and core members of the chapter.
Mass meetings require legwork. Mass meetings have to be “thoroughly prepared, and all the batteries of publicity, organizers, etc. should be coordinated.” That means aggressive internal organizing. We focus heavily on turnout. We doubled the amount of Spoke campaigns recruiting attendees, up to four phonebanks, mobilizers individually inviting their mobilizees to attend mass meetings, core organizing through individual outreach to all core members of the chapter, and invitations sent to all coalition partners. We branded mass meetings as exactly what they are and aspire to be: seasonal summits of the socialist movement in the Triangle. During the mass meeting, we utilize music to set vibes and to remind the chapter of our chapter playlist that we all created together, a shared project aimed at building a collective culture of solidarity and camaraderie.
Mass meetings are hybrid, to allow for as many means to participate as possible, so democratic decision-making has to be equally accessible to all members. That requires a few roles that we tweaked over the course of the year. We include breaks for accessibility to disabled comrades – turns out people are willing to sit through long meetings of chapter business when treated well. We also dispatch four roles for the in-person components of each mass meeting, including tech support, a tabler, and soft mobilizers to individually greet new attendees and bring them into the pipeline for mobilization into the local chapter.
Mass meetings are an experiment. So far, they’re relatively successful. We can tweak as needed. One change that one comrade has proposed is integrating branch updates so that the entirety of membership can have some understanding of the material conditions and strategic assessments of the collective in parts of the Triangle in which they don’t live, since our chapter’s region sprawls across many municipalities. That would increase the power of our mass meetings because more people could participate equally in decisions made about specific areas. More people knowing more things makes for better decisions. Both I and other comrades also personally believe we should integrate more space for generative debate into future mass meetings, since mass meetings have the potential to grow alongside our movement as the summits where we – the multiracial working class in the Triangle – make our decisions.
Mass Work
Mass work means organizing our own places in our own everyday lives – fighting rent with our neighbors, waging battles for better wages with our coworkers, struggling for community goods with our people. Mass work means practicing politics at the base. Mass work means building our own organizations of oppressed people conscious of our oppression, organizations that can activate us as subjects of our own lives. Mass work is not optional. It’s the bread and butter, the “direct organizational spadework that makes explosive classwide collective action possible.” We need mass work to sustain and nurture political revolution.
We’re contributing to three mass work projects as a chapter: the Triangle Tenant Union (TTU), a local Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), and neighborhood base-building for reproductive justice. The TTU is the most significant; the union is currently focusing efforts on tenant-led organizing drives at several buildings and neighborhoods in the Triangle. The union was started by DSA organizers and many core members of the union are also DSA members. While functionally autonomous, the Triangle Model (more on this later) allowed the TTU to become a section while sorting out member dues, which made the Triangle Model a logistically helpful infrastructure for the union in a time of need.
The labor working group has also set up a local EWOC as of – literally – this month. Local EWOCs connect rank-and-file leaders from different shops to larger movement constellations and provide infrastructure for winning small shop organizing drives. Results remain to be seen, but most members feel hopeful. Strike solidarity built relationships with other rank-and-file members that we brought into the organization. Members democratically decided to donate funds raised to reform caucuses and to the Durham sanitation workers, who went on a wildcat strike that won $6.5 million in bonuses for city workers, and to which our chapter was the largest supporter during their community fundraiser. The Membership Survey gave us data we can use to organize labor circles. A steady trickle of core members have taken rank-and-file jobs in the logistics industry and work all hours of the day and night across the Triangle.
Community bases are our most experimental form of mass work. Part of our New Strategy in the Fight for Bodily Autonomy, the socialist feminist working group has organized increasingly large monthly pickets of anti-abortion centers paired with deep canvasses of surrounding neighborhoods to build a mass base for larger campaigns for reproductive care in North Carolina. Base-building campaigns against anti-abortion centers has the potential to unify disparate parts of the working class, since unconnected segments of our class share a material interest in reproductive care. The community base is united in struggle against a base-level antagonist – the anti-abortion center – while fighting for a broader goal of building a mass base for complete and liberatory bodily autonomy.
Most of the growth of the community base so far has been students. The strategy drew in more participants from outside DSA intent on shutting down the so-called “crisis pregnancy center.” These included individual members from other student groups, coordinated by YDSA, leading to picket turnout. Other consistent attendees have been repeat visitors from the community, engaged in multiple organizing conversations with our cadres. Comrades generally feel that momentum is building – but slowly.
Overall, our chapter is engaged in a significant amount of mass work – but maybe we can do more. For one, we don’t have a consistent pipeline through which to convert core members into mass work organizers, nor is there any expectation of members to do mass work. We could engage in other forms of mass work, like organizing a transit riders’ union as part of our ecosocialist campaign for mass transit. We could turn new members into mass work organizers by further building on core development.
Mass Organization
Core Membership
Core membership has increased to 53 members – a change that’s felt moderate, steady, but unevenly distributed across the chapter. I’m defining a core member as someone who takes on action items at meetings and participates actively in internal chapter life, since that makes them an irreplaceable component of the chapter collective. We wouldn’t have been able to calculate the number of core members with any kind of systematic metric until this year, when we created a chapter formation index to track overall participation in the chapter.
We emphasized core development most this year. Core development means cultivating core members into better organizers. Core development is the foundation of making DSA an organization of organizers. Core members were the focus of four organizing bootcamps on hard asks, deep canvassing, narrative power, and leadership development. The Triangle Model increased the number of members taking on leadership roles doing social or political work for the chapter between meetings, the practice for the theory from the organizing bootcamp. Finally, we held 4 member leader forums to try to bring member leaders into discussion with one another – sharing projects, ideas, and organizing skills. Building more member leaders out of core organizers and creating shared forums was all to encourage more core member involvement needed for a healthy mass organization with lots of participation.
Most members approve of core development, but it’s less clear what members think we should do next. Some members want more core development, but others pointed out that working group capacity remains about the same as it was before. That’s because growth has been uneven. Some working groups have absorbed several new members, associations and sections have activated more, but other formations have experienced only mild growth in people taking on action items. Should we prioritize core development or core recruitment? If we both, how do we build and then share capacity so as to not overburden any of our comrades?
Active Membership
Even though core membership has not increased evenly across the chapter, active membership has doubled. Based on meeting, social, and working group attendance numbers, the total number of active members at the end of 2022 was about 50. Like I said before, our core membership hovers around 50 members now. That means our core membership at the end of 2023 is about the same size as our active membership was at the end of 2022.
But while last year’s number is an educated estimate, our membership committee successfully completed a massive Membership Survey project involving textbanking, phonebanking, emails, and core coordination to map our chapter through 10 minute surveys of members this year. The point of the survey was to provide valuable data for intentional recruitment, tenant and labor organizing, and other strategic goals. But it serves a dual purpose of recording our approximate active membership for the year, because if you’re gonna volunteer personal information and ideas for ten minutes in a survey for DSA members, you are probably an active member or close to one. Based on the Membership Survey, the chapter had 112 active members at the time of our Fall Mass Meeting. That was before October 7, after which we experienced another small bump, so the number of active members in the chapter is probably higher now. We should be able to calculate recent membership gains and make a more precise comparison once we complete the next Membership Survey.
There are a few probable reasons for the increase in active membership. Beyond the mass movement for Palestinian liberation, other factors include the intentional steps taken by our chapter to expand our external organizing. This year was the first year we organized our efforts into a priority campaign defined by three main avenues of direct engagement with the working class: bodily autonomy base-building, a municipal issue campaign for a greenway, and an electoral campaign to elect a cadre member to city council. A few members also joined by following avenues through tenant and labor-oriented mass work.
The Membership Survey showed that our chapter is composed of tech workers, campus workers, retail workers, teachers, healthcare workers, farmers, warehouse workers, nonprofit workers, lawyers, journalists, librarians, electricians, and students across the Triangle. 10% of the chapter are caregivers for children or parents; 35% identify as LGBTQIA+ but almost half don’t identify as straight; 52% of the chapter are cisgender men and 48% identify with other genders. 27% of active members belong to a labor union, which is far higher than the statewide unionization rate of 3%. In other words, our members are disproportionately unionized but still need to get more unionized. But about 70% of active members are white, showing we have a long way to go before we are representative of our multiracial working class base, as well as underscoring the continued need to support comrades of color’s self-organization, prioritize cultural competency and language justice in organizing projects, and fight white supremacy culture in the organization.
Organizational Culture
Our chapter is multi-tendency. Comrades that belong to formal caucuses currently belong to one of four formations: Communist Caucus, Red Star, Marxist Unity Group, and the Socialist Majority Caucus. Libertarian socialist thought is an unorganized yet influential current, too. Members of the first three caucuses organized into the Triangle Reds, of which a majority of officers are members, which currently acts as a large and informal coalition for chapter communist politics. Our 2023 Convention delegate election was highly competitive, but officer elections remain only somewhat competitive. A lot of members said they still think of officer roles as too much to take on at their current capacity. That’s a problem: a participatory mass organization needs “more people doing less.”
Conflict resolution has improved but the internal understanding of our harassment and grievance officers (HGOs) still needs improvement. Last year, influenced by Mariame Kaba, we adopted an abolitionist and restorative justice approach to the way in which we handle conflict as a chapter. Multiple members talked about how conflict has improved considerably since then. Fewer people have left the chapter burned and hurt, but as one comrade noted, we’re still struggling with conversations grounded in respect for one another. One member straight up said they just feel stupid in DSA, and that that hasn’t changed. But many comrades still see HGOs as HR, probably because the membership that bought into and voted for our restorative approach was half the size in 2022 as now, and many members don’t know they can work with HGOs to mediate interpersonal and political conflict of all kinds and scales. We’ve made some, but not enough progress in moving towards a healthier organizational culture characterized by respect for one another.
We’ve politically matured, but still need more spaces for political discussion. Debates are more and more openly political, instead of hiding behind exclusionary insiderism or interpersonal beefs. We arranged for big member summits about the 2023 Convention where members could ask delegates questions, started up a wiki that we still need to flesh out, and made transparent report backs from delegates a headline of the Fall Mass Meeting. Multiple comrades remarked on how they felt we, as a chapter, had become a collective large and cohesive enough to learn political lessons together. But actual formal debate space for mass participation in debates about political strategy and direction hasn’t manifested. Moving forward, we could integrate debates as a mass meeting staple.
We endorsed a pandemic policy involving strict and proactive masking and the creation of a health and safety committee (HSC) early in the year to protect our collective’s communal health. The HSC’s whole point is to provide a base of resources for us as DSA to protect ourselves during the ongoing public health crisis of COVID-19. The government certainly won’t. Capitalism is built with greed and mountains of corpses. After one mass meeting, one new attendee – a healthcare worker – was so excited at HSC’s work that they got mobilized and are now a steadfast member of the HSC.
Many members still view HSC as policing how to run in-person meetings and events. The cultural shift in understanding health as something we all want to collectively protect is unfinished. It’s a shift from individualism to collectivism. The fact that we haven’t been able to make as much progress on cultural change as we’d like is deeply frustrating to comrades in HSC, committed cadres that feel that members viewing HSC as policing is disrespectful to their contributions to the collective.
Since so much of HSC’s work has to do with in-person meetings, hybrid balance matters. Right now, only mass meetings are officially hybrid. Other working group meetings are hybrid on an ad hoc basis. 90% of chapter business is conducted remotely but focuses on planning and then mobilizing out to in-person canvasses, events, socials, rallies, or council meetings. On one hand, one comrade called for far more in-person meetings and events. There is no clear roadmap on how to logistically coordinate that without overburdening the HSC. At the other end of the spectrum are members who have questioned the need for an office – which we voted to pursue, thanks to matching funds from the Growth and Development Committee of the national DSA – when we have functioned perfectly fine up till now and decision-making can be done remotely. There’s no consensus among members as to the correct hybrid balance.
The Triangle Model
Internal Life
During the May Mass Meeting, members voted for the Triangle Model as part of an overall bylaws reform. Now, our chapter has committees and working groups, but also sections (organized around identities) and associations (organized around interests). The Triangle Model was supported by our membership committee, where it was first developed, and endorsed by cadre members from multiple caucuses and political tendencies. Section and association self-organization is extremely flexible, with bylaws and internal governance left entirely up to members. Members can invite non-members into section and association events, making these formations especially flexible grounds for creating social bonds with members of the working class beyond our organization.
After a rapid proliferation of self-organization in the summer, a few sections and associations went dormant as their members jumped into organizing on chapter electoral projects and then Palestine solidarity. That’s okay. Cadres pivoting as the turbulent river of the movement requires is a good thing. But it also means we still have a ways to go in building out more durable working class formations to weather political winds.
The Triangle Model has led to an explosion of activity across the chapter. We have five active sections and six active associations at the end of 2023. Caregivers in the chapter self-organized as a section and now meet regularly to discuss both school board campaigns and making the chapter more accessible for caregivers. Afrosocialists and socialists of color welcome socialists from beyond DSA to both their events and to be voting members of the section. The caregivers section activated more members who could only make meetings later at night than the rest of the chapter, after their children’s bedtimes, which accommodates caregivers as respected cadres and activated more members. The youth section has united four campus chapters in a shared forum under the chapter umbrella. Disabled comrades meet for monthly socials. The Triangle Tenant Union is also technically a section, as mentioned before, bringing in more members through mass work.
The hiking association organizes occasional chapter hikes on the weekends, protest support works out logistics for our continued mobilization for Palestine rallies that punctuate the broader movement, and comrades in the self-defense association work on physical movement (as opposed to fitness) plans in pairs while meeting up for and connecting each other to self-defense training friendly to queer people and people of color. The tabletop association meets up for — you guessed it – tabletop socials, and the gaming association has traded hands a few times to maintain regular gaming nights. We have a chapter Minecraft server now, thanks to the association’s leader. Finally, our chapter has organized two teams to participate in the working class collaborative competition known as the Hunt. Cadres are embedded on teams with working class people from outside the organization to complete 100 team-bonding activities in 72 hours, which builds social bonds between us as socialists and other working class people.
Building a Party
Building a party is not just building the independent infrastructure for electoral work we agreed upon at the 2023 Convention. Building a party as a mass organization also means building a working class social fabric, just as it did for the mass socialist parties of the past. That is especially the case now. Our society has completely robbed us of shared community. We’re not used to democracy, solidarity, or collectivity. The Triangle Model is the way our local chapter has expanded from building a party as an independent electoral apparatus to building a party as a nascent working class social fabric where party-affiliated formations (sections and associations) organize both DSA and non-DSA members by intentionally focusing on our social lives as political arena.
Such experimentation is urgent. In North Carolina, mass organization is even lower than in most of the United States. Our state’s unionization rate is 3%. The workers’ movement is weak, unions rare. Tenants only began organizing as tenants in 2020, but the initial infrastructure fell apart and we’re only now rebuilding. The white supremacist power structure leftover from Jim Crow remains intact, paralyzing nearly all democratic impulses from the masses in the amber of Southern repression. Ballot measures and municipal efforts like rent control remain banned by a state government that gerrymandered the bourgeois electoral map. They’ve criminalized multiple types of protest and both conservatives and fascists seem primed to advance a far-right agenda to seize the rights of our queer and trans comrades, which a potential future presidential victory by Trump will only embolden.
If we’re serious about winning power in North Carolina, we need to build the party in more ways than our current strategic arsenal allows. We prioritize developing community and culture as a strategic approach for building deeply-organized tenant unions in the Communist Caucus. The Triangle Model is the same but for our local chapter. Essentially, it expands the turf of where we do politics. We can both create and embed ourselves within not only our workplaces and neighborhoods, but also the other arenas in which collectives form. We can intentionally be socialists in our identity communities, in our friend groups, in our churches, in our sports teams, in our Dungeons and Dragons nights, in parent groups, in our classrooms. That way, DSA cadres can become even more connected with the minutiae of social forces that bubble up in the pot of American life at every moment.
All of us are scattered across different geographies and dynamics and personal circumstances. We are rooted in different parts of the working class already. That defines DSA’s nature as a mass organization. Beyond pursuit of the rank-and-file strategy that allows us to root ourselves in organized labor in particular, we can become agitators on multiple layers of unorganized social forces in which self-organization may occur. Finding flexible ways as members to politicize our presence in our communities, to participate and create collectives under DSA’s structure, is a potential huge advantage of DSA’s composition that remains untapped. The Triangle Model is one attempt to activate the dormant parts of our multifaceted political identities so that we’re more in tune as political beings with social forces. That way, we can build out a working class social fabric that makes us more of a party that can “facilitate the coming together [of social forces] into a broader unity” over time: the party as articulator.
Trends So Far
Members didn’t vote unanimously to adopt what became the Triangle Model, but after 8 months since we did, nearly all members think of the move as an unconditionally good step. For many, it creates opportunities to bring more people into the socialist movement. That was the main reason many comrades supported adopting the Triangle Model. Those hopes panned out: within one week, we had 17 supporters requesting mobilization into the chapter – a 300% increase over the week before. Beyond new active members, most sustained growth has come from active members becoming core members in the chapter. The Triangle Model also formalized the structure for some formations that members had already organically catalyzed but lacked support for, like caregivers, as well as helped with core development by empowering more core members to become member leaders.
So far, the biggest trends can be loosely grouped into three:
One Hundred Flowers Bloomed and Fifty Survived the Winter
Members self-organized into sections and associations rapidly. That energy petered out for some formations that have since become inactive. However, of the original plethora of associations and sections that self-organized, half found stable footing and leadership. They have been joined by new associations as members explore what the Triangle Model actually means for the work, creating protest support as an official association and temporarily sheltering the tenant union as an official section (“tenant” is an identity) to clear up logistical hurdles during a union emergency.
Overall, members are fine with the fact that not every organizing effort under the Triangle Model led to long-term activity. It’s to be expected, one comrade said. But the continued exploration of the Triangle Model’s benefits will require continued commitment from membership in building out sections and associations. Part of that calls for member participation from core members, in particular. Right now, some comrades deprioritize sections and associations spaces in order to participate only in working groups. But the socialist movement is a marathon. Cadres working only on political work without engagement in the broader working class social fabric we need to create leaves members vulnerable to burnout and prevents us from building the layer of trust and camaraderie across membership needed to sustain organization.
We need community. We need care.
The Youth Movement, from a Trickle to a Flood
At the end of 2022, we had one informal connection through one comrade to NC State YDSA. The connection was not formalized and led to a limited number of benefits. We didn’t have any other social ties to any other YDSAs in the region.
At the end of 2023, we now have a youth section in which a large number of YDSA members from four established YDSA chapters and one high school YDSA organizing committee participate as a shared forum between campus and non-campus young workers. There are three established YDSA chapters on two public university campuses (NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill) and one community college campus (Wake Tech), plus one university outside of our region that has no anchor DSA chapter (Eastern Carolina). A recently-mobilized member is also in the process of organizing the Triangle’s first high school YDSA (Durham School of the Arts), supported by the youth section infrastructure that connects them with comrades at other YDSA chapters. All of these connections can be made within a shared communications channel housed under the chapter server, so that we can communicate with YDSA leaders and members more easily, too. Two YDSA leaders were elected as delegates to the 2023 Convention by the rest of our chapter.
YDSA has made significant advances this year. The flood of youth chapters is causing significant interest on their campuses. YDSA organizers filled a whole public university auditorium with interested college students at the beginning of Fall 2023. YDSA members have added significant capacity to the chapter priority campaign, taking on action items and trainings from the socialist feminist working group to target anti-abortion clinics, and have helped establish DSA as a leader in student movements for reproductive justice on campuses in the Triangle. When the campus chapter of Planned Parenthood’s local leaders resigned in protest towards national Planned Parenthood’s gag order on Palestine, they pointed followers to YDSA and our chapter’s priority campaign for bodily autonomy.
The Internal Social Life of the Chapter Has Massively Expanded
At the beginning of the year, we organized quarterly socials. Now, it’s more likely to have several socials a month across the chapter organized by various sections and associations on top of the quarterly chapter-wide socials.
The Triangle Model changed the social game. In essence, we have created a nascent working class society. You can move to the Triangle, join DSA, and suddenly have multiple activities available to do pretty much any day. Members can hike with the hiking association on Saturday morning, then go to the mass meeting in the afternoon, before attending the branch social at the park as the sun sets. They can wake up the next day to plan a march before meeting up with their friend from the tenant union for lunch, before joining other afrosocialists at the bar in downtown Durham. Then – of course – they can attend a working group meeting during weekday nights in between pickets at anti-abortion centers and canvasses for DSA-endorsed candidates. That social fabric can provide space for friendships, relationships, inside jokes, and shared dreams, on top of our existing chapter playlist and appreciation notes that undergird our organizational culture.
Mass Movement-Building
The New Strategy
Most comrades feel we’ve become a more serious political organization since the beginning of the year. A major reason is the programmatic axis on which much of our chapter’s work is oriented: the New Strategy. The New Strategy underlies our priority campaign that connects the struggles for democracy and civil rights and bodily autonomy to the same fight against the anti-democratic North Carolina state government. Building the New Strategy took many meetings between multiple working groups – socialist feminists, queer and trans solidarity, and electoral, to name a few. The chapter endorsed the campaign only after most details had been ironed out across all the different political tendencies and member formations, resulting in a consensus resolution from a sizable part of core membership instead of a competition between competing political visions. The New Strategy has significant buy-in and incorporates the work of many disparate working groups. In other words, our priority campaign has stabilized the chapter in a shared and multi-tendency political analysis and direction at our conjuncture.
Class Independence and Leading Coalitions
During the 2023 Convention, national membership solidified our commitment to building an independent party – which we have been hard at work doing. A party is not a ballot line. A party is also not an electoral third party. A party is an organization where “workers have control over their own political apparatus, strategy, brand, and politicians.” Under the umbrella of our New Strategy, our chapter won electoral victories in a municipal greenway campaign and a competitive city council race. Both solidified an independent political identity and apparatus building an increasingly large capacity to organize strategic campaigns that advance our priority campaign for bodily autonomy.
In Carrboro, we targeted a wedge issue to build a left-led political coalition in which DSA holds the dominant position. A local greenway proposal was staunchly delayed since 2008 by an entrenched NIMBY group of the local bourgeoisie. Local politics was at an impasse. We started knocking doors for months for a municipal petition and overwhelmed the city council with local resident testimony, turning residents out while uniting more YIMBY-aligned groups under democratic socialist leadership. We won the campaign, got recognition, and now have a winning coalition to participate in new stages of the campaign for bodily autonomy, as well as to support electoral slates for tribunes of the people to agitate against the state government’s tyranny in favor of bodily autonomy.
Meanwhile, in Durham, we endorsed the electoral campaign of Nate Baker – a DSA member, whose campaign was managed by a DSA cadre and chapter HGO. Baker was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the chapter after answering our extensive questionnaire and going through our multi-stage process, including answering yes in commitment to BDS, which we have required of endorsees since 2022. The electoral field was crowded, including with at least one other self-described socialist, but Baker secured first place in both the primary and general election. There were three major reasons for his victory over opponents: our far-larger canvassing operation, turning out dozens of DSA members to knock doors; the endorsement of UE150 city sanitation workers, who Baker walked out of planning meetings in support of during their wildcat strike; and an equal and winning coalition with a century-old PAC building power for the Black working class that now, seeing how powerful we are together, is eager to explore uniting for future races as well.
These successes, as well as aggressive internal organizing, contributed to the electoral working group tripling in membership. Now, having organized winning coalitions in which we hold political leadership across two municipalities and secured one city council seat, we have the power to follow through by mobilizing those same coalitions for priority campaign goals – like a name change fund for trans folks in Durham. Our trans and queer solidarity working group has built connections with LGBTQ+ Center in Durham through the name change fund campaign and now the LGBTQ+ Center is openly advertising their affiliation with DSA’s petition. Members are currently working on lining up name change fund strategic pressure with the city council’s budgetary calendar, even as the queer and trans solidarity working group is forced to continue to conduct rapid response in defense of our communities.
Membership also moved to formalize a broader endorsement process – one that includes the process of “adoption” for elected officials, which was particularly contentious, prompted by a sitting Raleigh city council member who joined DSA, got mobilized into our internal chapter, and has taken a bold and unapologetic stance in favor of a ceasefire in Palestine. “Adopting” politicians requires candidates go through the same endorsement process as everyone else. The change also formalized our chapter’s socialists in office (SiO) committee composed of elected officials, electoral working group leadership, and chapter leadership. Central to our SiO is a simple interface group chat with everyone involved to make sure elected officials can easily and quickly communicate with DSA as an institution.
Targeting Anti-Abortion Centers
Our bodily autonomy campaign is continuing to build slow momentum. Generally, many comrades most closely involved to anti-abortion picketing feel hopeful. But a couple of other members said the pickets felt somewhat directionless. Building trust in the community to then build up base organization is “slow, respectful work,” but not all members seem totally persuaded by the tactic’s utility.
The anti-abortion center pickets have made progress in three ways so far: expanded capacity, expanded operations, and further political leadership over the movement for reproductive justice. We endorsed the anti-abortion center pickets as a tactic during the May Mass Meeting. We’ve been picketing ever since. But as NC State YDSA became more tightly connected to our chapter and its priority campaign during the summer of 2023, socialist feminist working group leaders trained YDSA organizers to then take over organizing components of anti-abortion center pickets. That reliance and trust in our youth section has built further capacity for the priority campaign. The socialist feminist working group also expanded operations to include training on deep canvassing, informational materials and other means to engage neighbors.
Finally, the anti-abortion center pickets have consolidated our position in the political leadership of the movement for bodily autonomy. The original kernel of our socialist feminist working group were the organizers of the post-Roe protests in Raleigh, so the center of local organizing for reproductive justice was incorporated into DSA. But since we began picketing, other groups invested in bodily autonomy but strategically directionless have followed our lead in mobilizing members to our pickets. Planned Parenthood didn’t allow their student leaders at NC State to make statements regarding Palestine, so those leaders resigned and pointed followers to DSA because we both had a strong Palestine stance and led the campaign to confront anti-abortion centers.
Structural Challenges
The priority campaign has stabilized and led to significant wins for the chapter already. But through the course of the priority campaign so far, some challenges have already emerged for many members. For one, using consensus to create a resolution in which many but not all working groups were incorporated limited the potential for a sharp debate between different political visions. The process of consensus-building created significant buy-in from some parts of the chapter – those involved in the priority campaign. Others have struggled to find direction.
Another issue that’s come up is the lack of bottomliners for the priority campaign. We didn’t dissolve working groups and committees into the priority campaign structure when we changed our bylaws, which meant working groups continue to build trust and maintain coordinating bodies for issues under their umbrella. But the lack of priority campaign stewards to bottomline the effort means most member leaders involved in the priority campaign continue to primarily operate in their own working groups, as the first priority. That has created a siloed fiefdom dynamic. Some of the most committed core members involved in the priority campaign indicated they don’t know what other working groups were doing and feel hurt when other working groups don’t reciprocate organizational energy. Three different members independently strongly opined that we needed bottomliners focused specifically on the campaign holistically, rather than any of its attached working groups, to strengthen the priority campaign. Priority campaign stewards would allow our chapter to hold individuals accountable for the central coordination of the priority campaign goals we democratically agreed upon.
Palestine Solidarity
October 7 changed the year for NC Triangle DSA, too.
For one, huge numbers of members immediately pivoted to Palestine solidarity led by the internacional working group – a merger of our international solidarity and Spanish-language infrastructure working groups at the beginning of the year. That merge expanded the capacity and strength of the group, by all accounts, uniting language justice with anti-imperialist programming. That includes our chapter’s hosting of Mexican journalist José Luis Granados Ceja during the Mexico Solidarity Tour, in which we discussed how MORENA's policies have improved the lives of the Mexican working class. That followed our previous hosting of the 2022 delegation of Venezuelan feminists. Maybe we accidentally started a tradition of hosting international socialists in North Carolina as a cardinal stop on tours of the United States.
But since October 7, much of the internacional working group’s work has been focused on Palestine solidarity. We’ve co-sponsored and mobilized for a dozen rallies, as well as one school occupation, handing out water bottles to keep protesters hydrated and make ourselves a constant presence. People mobilized from across the chapter to participate. Some formalized protest support as an association to work out logistics, self-criticism, and improvements. Meanwhile, the working group mobilized dozens of members to one city council hearing on ceasefire resolutions after another – turning municipalities into centers of pressure on Congresswoman Valerie Foushee, an AIPAC-funded federal official, exactly as we envision they should in the New Strategy. Our elected officials have held the line on Palestine with total discipline: Nate Baker’s first action as a Durham City Council member was to call for a ceasefire and we secured the first ceasefire resolution passed in North Carolina with the help of DSA cadre and Carrboro town councilor Danny Nowell. Meanwhile, our presence in Palestine spaces has borne some success – one in-person meeting that we held at a cafe owned by a Palestinian organizer, in the heat of the movement, was attended by 30 people.
While members are generally positive about how we have responded to October 7, some members worry we haven’t centrally coordinated enough phonebanking to pressure congresspeople to issue ceasefire calls as we focused on municipal arenas. Other members expressed different opinions on which coalition partners we should strategically focus on building relationships with. Others thought we could have outmaneuvered the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) to take the main lead in organizing the rallies, but others thought this was an unnecessary diversion of chapter resources.
Overall, I hope this presents a snapshot of a chapter in motion. Some efforts I have left unmentioned. Our security committee handles sensitive information. Our ecosocialist working group has spent much of the year building internal capacity, mutual understanding, and strategy to set the year off with a shared collective campaign with buy-in. In terms of projects, many are ongoing – including fundraising and a dues drive and the search for a physical office. Some members feel bad we never finished those projects; to the contrary, we can commit to doing so in the new year.
Thank you for reading this reflection. Hopefully, doing so was educational and sparks some ideas for your own chapter as we continue to build and improve our own here in North Carolina!
Travis Wayne
Co-Chair of NC Triangle DSA