Anti-War

The Anti-War Working Group is dedicated to countering US imperialism and resisting US regime-change operations and interventions in foreign wars and conflicts. Our goal is to disrupt the US war machine in New York City by building grassroots power and working with other anti-war groups. Our struggle will advance the fight for a truly international socialism, in which all people, regardless of nationality, are liberated from want, fear, violence, and coercion.

Debt & Finance

The Debt & Finance Working Group organizes with people in debt to build power against the financial institutions and government entities that profit from our indebtedness. Today many people are under-employed, unemployed, or paid so little that they are forced to take out loans to access basic needs. Indeed, the rising power of finance is one of the defining characteristics of neoliberalism. The ability of creditors to extract from us is both coercive and alienating, and reinforces a system that is unambiguously dependent upon white supremacy, sexism, and the degradation of workers. The Debt & Finance Working Group sees debtor organizing as a key to building bonds of solidarity across New York City, and an organizing effort that is critical to the broader struggle for democratic socialism.

Ecosocialist

The Ecosocialist Working Group is concerned with building an environmentalism for the working class. We work with coalitions fighting for legislation that seek to push the boundaries of traditional environmentalism and climate politics beyond the narrow focus on the environment as a separate sphere from human social life. We are currently working with a coalition of labor unions, community groups, and grassroots climate activists called NY Renews to ensure that New York state passes the most progressive climate legislation in the country in 2017. We are also engaged in a number of research and writing projects on local and statewide policy and organizing that will help guide our future work.

Electoral

The Electoral Working Groups are focused on recruiting and supporting socialist candidates for local office. They also develop educational resources that explain how local and state government work, so that socialists can be better equipped to participate in elections, and building a field program so DSA can effectively support our endorsed candidates. The Electoral Working Groups meet in boroughs.

Healthcare

The Healthcare Working Group is organizing for a universal single-payer system that prioritizes the health of working-class Americans over the profits of insurance companies and their billionaire executives. We aim to take on these moneyed interests by reaching out to people not already politically engaged in order to build a mass movement capable of replacing our inhumane for-profit system with a system that works for all of us. We believe that a single payer health care system is an essential step to achieving healthcare justice in our country.

Housing

The Housing Working Groups are fighting to make housing a human right in New York City. The groups are fighting for:

• Expanded tenant protections: Good Cause Eviction protections and an Eviction Free NYC!
• More public and truly affordable social housing: Housing for People, not for Profit!
• An end to gentrification and displacement in NYC!
• An expanded and increasingly powerful tenants movement!

In Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, members of the Housing Working Group are working in coalition with the Broome Street Tenants Alliance, the Crown Heights Tenant Union, Housing Justice for All, and other community groups to fight an impending wave of evictions stemming from COVID-19’s economic devastation.

Immigration Justice

The Immigrant Justice Working Group is currently collaborating with local immigrant justice organizations to strengthen the local Sanctuary Movement, to fight for workers’ rights, and to combat Broken Windows policing practices that contribute to the criminalization of immigrants. As socialists, we believe all people deserve a dignified existence, no matter their citizenship status. Therefore, we reject the scapegoating of immigrant communities and the criminalization of undocumented residents. We affirm the rights of immigrants to remain and thrive in the location of their choosing and we will fight against anti-immigrant sentiments that have terrorized immigrant communities.

Queer Caucus

The NYC-DSA Queer Caucus seeks to provide a space of community building, support, and advocacy for trans and queer comrades within a largely cis and straight organization. The Queer Caucus is a core group in organizing the annual Queer Liberation March, which in its first year mobilized 45,000 to march for queer liberation and against rainbow capitalism and corporate Pride. Recognizing the essential intersection between queer liberation and dismantling the police and carceral state, exemplified in the community uprising that was the Stonewall Riots, the Caucus has also incorporated abolitionist reading, letter writing to incarcerated individuals, sex worker advocacy, as well as other solidarity work. We meet monthly for general Queer Caucus meetings and additionally host social and other events throughout the year.

Racial Justice

The Racial Justice Working Group is currently working to (1) reform suspension and disciplinary policy in NYC public schools with Organizing for Equity, NY (OFENY), (2) replace NYC’s Civilian Complain Review Board with an elected, empowered alternative as a part of the Campaign for an Elected Civilian Review Board, (3) provide low-cost, consumer-driven financial services through the Postal Service with the American Postal Workers Union, and (4) deepen our understanding of the history, theory, and practice of racecraft through an anti-racist framework in our Anti-Racism Reading Group.

Religious Socialism

As religious socialists, we see human dignity, equality, and human rights as socialist principles that are also rooted in our respective faiths. The Religion and Socialism working group provides a much needed pluralistic, welcoming, safe, and inclusive space for people of faith who are in the socialist movement as we build coalitions across the Religious Left by organizing and mobilizing clergy and lay leaders in our faith communities. We strive to be a space where socialists of all belief systems can connect, collaborate, and build community.

Socialist Feminist

The Socialist Feminist Working Group seeks to fight the oppression of cis women, trans people, and gender nonconforming people on a local and national level by focusing on economic and social issues.  The working group fights for economic policies that equitably redistribute wealth and resources, and for overturning traditional gender roles. Our main campaign right now is fighting to pass the New York Health Act, a bill that would provide single-payer healthcare throughout New York state. 

Tech Action

The Tech Action Working Group is developing a socialist perspective on the use of technology and strategies for resisting the tech industry’s hegemony in politics, economics, and culture in NYC. We believe that if properly harnessed, technological innovation could help establish a truly democratic and cooperative society on a global scale. However most new technologies are made available to us, and controlled by, large corporations hiding behind a sheen of innovation and altruism that obscures their worst capitalistic impulses. As it stands, the joys, freedoms, and socialist potential of technology are tightly bound by the chains of capitalism, tied to the inhumane logic of profit and competition. Our aim is to increase awareness and understanding — both within DSA and in the broader public — about these issues; to build political power to confront abuse and corporate overreach where it is already occurring; and to create publicly owned and operated alternatives.