r/dsa

The sentences expose the class character of the judicial system and the advanced stage of the assault on democratic rights under the Trump administration. The punishments handed down by federal judges in Texas far exceed those imposed on all of the fascist militants who participated in the January 6, 2021 coup attempt. While President Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,600 participants in the attack on Congress, including members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of violently assaulting police officers, anti-ICE protesters, the vast majority of whom did nothing but light fireworks and vandalize government property, have now been condemned to decades behind bars.

Benjamin Hanil Song received a sentence of 100 years in prison. Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years. Cameron Arnold, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris, Elizabeth Soto and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada received sentences ranging from 30 to 50 years.

The sentence imposed on Sanchez-Estrada is particularly revealing. Although he was not present at the protest itself, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for “corruptly concealing a document” after his wife Rueda, from jail, requested he remove some anarchist magazines the couple had in their home. His punishment alone exceeds the sentences received by numerous January 6 foot soldiers who were captured on video violently assaulting police officers while participating in an effort to overturn a presidential election. Fascists seeking to establish a dictatorship are rewarded, while opponents of mass deportations and state repression are branded “terrorists” and sentenced accordingly.

As someone who finds myself on the left of DSA, I’ve been thinking of ways to find common ground with my DSA comrades who are primarily focused on winning reforms. I believe the easiest way to find this is looking at Medicare For All. Whether you are on the DSA Left and support this as a Minimum program, or the DSA Right and support this as an end goal, it remains something we can agree on. It also is something we all recognize as a moderate Social Democratic reform for a developed nation. The issue we all need to acknowledge about M4A is I don’t think it’s possible. At least not as things stand.

Let’s say the DSA continues its electoral success within the Democratic Party, gets rid of the filibuster, and wins enough support for M4A in Congress and the White House to get it passed. That seems great, but we can’t ignore the impact of the current Supreme Court. The court is overwhelmingly conservative and is unlikely to let something even as admittedly moderate as M4A happen. And if somehow it does get upheld, it won’t matter because we won’t govern forever. The Republicans will inevitably win back power in a few years no matter how well we govern. A newly birthed national healthcare system will not survive a Republican government. The ACA was nearly killed and that was not half as threatening to the capitalist class that the Republican Party serves. Additionally, as a national service, the Republican government will have a much easier time hamstringing it until it is politically acceptable to do away with it entirely.

Where does this leave us? What is the future of this movement if even our most basic of Social Democratic demands is made impossible by the system of government we have? To me, it is clear the only way forward for any ideology in DSA is the remaking of the government itself. There is no M4A with a far-right party sitting in wait to undo every bit of progress made. That is why even SocDems cannot support M4A while rejecting the calls for radical changes in our government. Unfortunately, the US Constitution is written in a way to make passing any of the amendments we would need infeasible no matter how popular they are. There is no path for us through the US Constitution.

With that in mind, I think all of us need to back a new Constitution that does not allow parties to undo the gains of the working class in favor of corporations, and that is truly democratic and accountable to the people. Because if we do not accomplish that, we can’t accomplish anything.

This is a pretty rough write up, but I wanted to hear what people think. Even if you disagree with my final conclusion, I hope it can get us all thinking about what will be necessary to create the changes we want to see beyond winning elections. Let me know why you agree or disagree and I hope to take that in to refine my argument.

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The Commons Platform — A Proposal to the DSA

An Open Source Gig Economy Framework

An idea submitted to the Democratic Socialists of America for consideration.

A Note Before Reading

This is one person's idea on how to make in roads with labor that have been largely abandoned by the mainstream lefty establishment politicians. The right-wing has worked its way into business associations, churches, gun groups, and conservative talk radio and fox news plays in work trucks and on bar and gym tvs. The populism of the right has laid siege where the establishment Dems have retreated and left a void. This idea instrumentally bridges a gap the left desperately needs and it can translate into real political capital that can outlast an election cycle the same way the rights messaging seems capable.

The gig economy employs roughly 59 million Americans, and most of them lose 25 to 30 cents of every dollar they earn to platforms that own nothing but an app. That is a huge group of working people with a pretty obvious grievance. The left has not really found a serious foothold there yet.

What follows is a sketch of how DSA's existing infrastructure, without major restructuring or new resource commitments, might be a home for an open source alternative that gives that margin back to workers. Every part of it can be revised. The idea itself is the thing on the table.

The Problem

Uber does not own the cars. DoorDash does not own the bikes. TaskRabbit does not own the tools. These platforms own software — matching, credentials, payment, ratings — and they take a cut of every transaction that software helps create.

None of that technology is especially exotic. None of it needs to stay proprietary. The only reason workers do not own it themselves is that nobody has built the alternative and handed it to them.

The Idea

An open source gig economy platform — worker owned and cooperatively governed — that connects workers to customers directly, without a profit-extracting middleman.

At the simplest level, it needs to do four things: accept a worker profile, accept a customer request, match them, and process payment. Everything else hangs off that.

Three pieces sit around that core:

An open source matching protocol

Connects workers to customers in whichever gig categories make the most sense to launch with first. That choice should come from people closer to the actual need.

A portable worker credential system

Workers own their rating, work history, and certifications. That data follows them instead of being trapped inside a platform they do not control.

A cooperative governance layer

Workers using the platform have a real say in how it runs. The exact form that takes is something people with more organizing experience than I have can help shape.

How It Could Start Small

The biggest problem any new platform runs into is the chicken-and-egg problem: no workers without customers, no customers without workers. The simplest way around that is to start inside DSA membership.

DSA members in one or two willing chapters could direct spending they are already making: rides, deliveries, home repairs, freelance work, to DSA member workers using the platform. No outside marketing. No trying to compete with Uber on day one. Just an internal closed loop that stress-tests the platform, builds the first worker reputation profiles, and generates real transaction data before anyone outside the membership sees it.

This costs very little to try and answers the main question early: does this actually work? If it does not, the experiment ends without much lost. If it does, the case for going further makes itself.

The platform would launch as a Progressive Web App — it runs in a phone browser and installs to the home screen like a normal app. No App Store approval. No Google Play gatekeeping. No platform cut on transactions. Any member with the link can use it right away.

Where DSA’s Existing Infrastructure Fits

This does not require building a whole new organization from scratch. DSA already has working groups whose focus lines up with what a small pilot would need. The ask to each one is modest and additive, not disruptive

Technology Working Group

A small number of volunteer developers — maybe 3 to 5 — to build a basic version over a few months. The broader open source community can help after that. No full-time commitment needed to start.

Legal Working Group

Getting the legal entity right at the beginning matters, because that is hard to fix later. Advice on cooperative structure, licensing, and worker classification in pilot states. This would be more of a consultation than an ongoing burden.

Labor and Working Class Caucus

A natural bridge to gig workers who are not yet in DSA and to unions in sectors where gig classification has blocked traditional organizing. No new infrastructure needed, just existing relationships pointed in a new direction.

Communications Working Group

Framing the platform for gig workers who do not already know DSA. The economic benefit should lead. The politics can follow naturally from the structure.

Finance Working Group

Worker cooperative foundations exist for projects like this — Democracy at Work Institute, National Center for Employee Ownership, labor philanthropies. Grant writing should go there instead of using DSA's own budget.

Mutual Aid Networks

DSA's mutual aid work already connects to working class people who need money. Those relationships could help recruit the first wave of worker members without much extra outreach.

Pilot Chapter Volunteers

A pilot chapter would need maybe 6 to 8 volunteers in clear roles: someone to maintain the local server, someone to onboard workers, a small team to verify credentials, and a few members to handle disputes.

A Modest Starting Timeline

The goal of the first year is not to build a national platform. It is just to find out whether this is real.

Months 1–3

Find volunteer developers. Set up an open source repository. Find one or two chapters interested in piloting. Start the legal structure conversation.

Months 4–6

Build the minimum viable platform. Run a closed beta inside DSA membership only. Train the small volunteer team in the pilot chapters.

Months 7–12

Open carefully to member networks. Collect income comparison data between the Commons Platform and corporate platforms. Let the data decide whether it is worth going further.

If the pilot produces nothing useful, it will not have cost much to find out. If it produces something real, the case for the next step becomes stronger than any proposal could make it.

What This Proposal Cannot Know

This proposal cannot determine the exact chapter, legal, or staffing setup that would make a pilot work in practice. It also cannot know which DSA bodies should handle each function, or what specific problems would show up once the work starts.

Those are questions for people with real organizing, legal, technical, and chapter-level experience. The point of the proposal is not to answer them in advance, but to identify a serious direction worth pressure-testing by people who understand the consequences.

The Ask

A conversation. That is all this is asking for right now.

If people with relevant DSA experience think it is worth exploring, then the proposal has done its job. The question is whether this is worth some political capital, and whether the idea gets stronger when people start picking it apart.

The name can change. The launch category can change. The governance model can change. Even the details can change. The core claim is just that the technology exists, the worker base exists, and DSA has the infrastructure to bring the two into contact in a way that could build real leverage.

Feasibility aside, I think this would be a great bi-partisan issue to run on or advocate. In addition to appealing to the MAGA crowd who partially voted for Trump for this reason, this would bring Production back home where we won’t have to overly rely on imports and foreign goods, as well as create jobs for much of the unemployed. Additionally for us, It‘ll be easier to struggle for labor rights and democratization, as the “means of production” would be here again. Even if we can’t do it, for a DSA president to run on this would at least get us a sizable section of the vote with how popular it is.

So I'm in this server on Discord, and there's this guy who says he supports the KIDS Act because it's a "common sense" bill because we need to protect Kids/minors from all the bad stuff on the Internet (pornography and bad influence figures like Andrew Tate, etc).

Now I've tried explaining that the KIDS Act was inherently flawed and that it compromises our privacy rights, security, and anonymity. But he says I'm overreacting and that it doesn't violate the Constitution, and it's not about control or censorship. Etc etc.

So here's my question.

Question: Would REAL Progressives/Dem Socialists Support the "Flawed" KIDS Act? Or would they call for a carefully written Bill that actually protects minors while still protecting the rights of privacy, security, and anonymity?

New to DSA, is Philly the only chapter with a committee akin to AFROSOC? If so how do we expand and integrate this committee into other chapters across the country? People of color are very open to socialism but in my experience are wary of DSA. Everyone here knows this movement needs POC, and I feel more committees of this sort is a great way to make them more open to organizing

The words of the Declaration of Independence, like those of all great revolutionary documents, come suddenly alive in periods of social struggle. Its denunciation of George III, a ruler “marked by every act which may define a Tyrant … unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads today like a condemnation of the Trump administration. As the historian Adam Hochschild observed in the webinar held by the World Socialist Web Site on June 25, the Declaration’s indictment of the king reads as if it “were written this morning.”

In the language of the Declaration, the military has been rendered “superior to the Civil Power” through the deployment of troops into American cities. Immigrants are “transported beyond Seas” without charge or trial to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Federal agents are protected “from punishment for any Murders which they should commit,” as in the cases of the ICE agent who shot Renée Good and the CBP agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

The Declaration’s statement that “all men are created equal” stands as an indictment of a society that has just minted its first trillionaire, Elon Musk. Nearly 1,000 billionaires command $8.4 trillion, and the top 1 percent holds as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. American society is mired in corruption and criminality, with President Donald Trump having reaped $1.43 billion in a cryptocurrency scam during his first year in office. 

If we truly believe in the promise of a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” then we must be willing to examine whether our current systems live up to that ideal. Reform is not a rejection of America’s founding principles—it is an effort to fulfill them. A stronger democracy is not one where one party wins forever. This is a deep dive into MAGA Mike Johnson's attempt to make the DSA look "dangerous." But his examples from the DSA platform are hardly a threat...