Why I Joined DSA and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus
I have spent much of my life close to institutions that claim to protect people while controlling them.
I have experienced incarceration, homelessness, reentry, recovery, and the long reach of the criminal legal system. I have also worked inside social services and watched organizations try to help people while operating within structures that monitor, classify, restrict, and sometimes punish them. Those experiences taught me to pay attention to the difference between what institutions say they do and what they actually produce.
They also taught me that individual hardship is rarely individual in origin.
When the same outcomes keep appearing—homelessness, incarceration, poverty, untreated illness, displacement, and political exclusion—the question cannot remain, “What is wrong with these people?” We have to ask what arrangements keep producing those outcomes, who benefits from those arrangements, and what would have to be built for people to live differently.
That is the political road that eventually led me to the Democratic Socialists of America.
Why DSA
I did not join DSA because I suddenly adopted a label or decided that one organization had all the answers. My politics were already taking shape through lived experience, community work, organizing, study, and years spent watching powerful institutions manage human suffering without changing the conditions producing it.
I joined because DSA gives people with different socialist traditions a shared place to organize around material conditions. Its stated vision calls for ordinary people to exercise meaningful democratic power in their workplaces, neighborhoods, economy, and government. It supports collective control of major economic institutions and rejects both capitalism and authoritarian versions of socialism. DSA describes democratic socialism as extending democracy into economic and social life, not merely holding elections inside an economy controlled by concentrated private wealth.
That distinction matters to me.
I work in homeless services. I know what happens when housing is treated primarily as a commodity. I have lived inside the criminal legal system. I know what happens when punishment becomes the default response to poverty, addiction, mental illness, trauma, and harm. I have watched working people struggle to afford healthcare, transportation, food, and rent while wealth and decision-making become more concentrated.
DSA’s published program includes universal healthcare, social housing, stronger labor rights, economic democracy, immigrant protections, restoration of voting rights for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and steps toward ending mass incarceration and the police-and-prison system. It also opposes American militarism and supports Palestinian self-determination. Those positions overlap substantially with commitments I had reached independently through my own experience and political development. DSA’s current political program sets out those positions in detail.
I am especially drawn to the emphasis on worker power. Too much progressive politics treats working people as an audience to be persuaded, a constituency to be managed, or a voting bloc to be activated every few years. That is not democratic power. Worker power means people organizing where economic decisions are made—inside workplaces, unions, tenant organizations, neighborhoods, and community institutions.
Elections may change the conditions under which that organizing happens. They can reduce harm, block some forms of repression, or create openings. But elections cannot substitute for organized people capable of acting together.
That is part of why DSA made sense to me. It operates in electoral politics, but it is not limited to electoral politics. Its members also organize unions, support tenants, conduct political education, participate in direct action, and build campaigns around housing, healthcare, racial justice, labor, climate, immigration, and war.
Still, joining DSA did not erase my concerns about hierarchy, state power, political parties, bureaucracy, or the dangers of organizations becoming more invested in managing themselves than changing society. Those questions led me to the Libertarian Socialist Caucus.
Why the Libertarian Socialist Caucus
My political outlook sits on the anti-authoritarian left. Abolitionism is my moral core. Anarchism gives me a way to examine hierarchy and domination. Democratic socialism offers practical tools for meeting material needs and reducing harm while deeper alternatives are being built.
The Libertarian Socialist Caucus gives that combination a political home inside DSA.
The caucus brings together anarchists, communalists, libertarian Marxists, and other anti-authoritarian socialists. Its published points of unity reject capitalism while also questioning whether centralized state power can produce liberation. It emphasizes decentralization, direct democracy, mutual aid, worker and tenant organization, direct action, and the construction of democratic institutions outside the control of capital and the state. The caucus describes its principles and strategy through its Points of Unity and its writing on dual power.
That does not mean refusing every interaction with government. I work within public and nonprofit systems because people need housing, healthcare, income, protection, and support now. Government action can reduce suffering, redistribute resources, restrain private power, and create space in which people can organize.
But using an institution is not the same as trusting it.
The state can provide healthcare and deploy police. It can protect workers and criminalize migrants. It can fund housing and enforce displacement. It can expand civil rights and construct systems of surveillance. Those contradictions cannot be resolved by assuming that government is always the solution or always the enemy.
The question is what an institution is doing, who controls it, who can challenge it, and whether its actions expand people’s power over their own lives.
That is where libertarian socialism speaks most clearly to me. It holds together collective responsibility and personal freedom. It rejects the false choice between abandoning people to the market and placing them under centralized bureaucratic control. It asks whether communities can create forms of coordination in which authority remains limited, transparent, accountable, and removable.
The caucus’s emphasis on dual power is particularly important. Dual power means more than protesting existing institutions. It involves building organizations and relationships through which people can meet needs, make decisions, defend one another, and exercise power with less dependence on institutions that dominate them. The caucus’s foundational essay, “Dual Power: A Strategy to Build Socialism in Our Time”, presents this as a long-term strategy of developing democratic counter-institutions alongside resistance to capitalism and state domination.
That approach fits my understanding of social change.
Resistance has to interrupt harm, but interruption alone is not transformation. We also have to build housing arrangements, worker organizations, mutual-aid networks, community safety practices, cooperative economies, political education, and democratic forms of decision-making that people can actually use.
Without resistance, alternatives can be crushed or absorbed. Without alternatives, resistance can become an exhausting cycle of reacting to whatever powerful institutions do next.
Belonging Without Surrender
Neither DSA nor the Libertarian Socialist Caucus is a substitute for independent thought. I do not agree with every DSA member, every elected official associated with the organization, or every position advanced by every caucus. A democratic organization should contain disagreement. If everyone must think alike, democracy has already failed.
I also do not treat membership as an identity that excuses me from examining what an organization actually does. Organizations can drift. Leaders can become insulated. Electoral access can become more important than movement accountability. Internal procedure can consume energy that should be directed toward organizing. Radical language can become another kind of performance.
Membership does not require silence about those possibilities. It creates a responsibility to pay closer attention to them.
I joined DSA because people need organized power capable of confronting capitalism, racism, exploitation, incarceration, displacement, and authoritarianism. I joined the Libertarian Socialist Caucus because I want that struggle to remain accountable to freedom, decentralization, self-management, and opposition to domination.
DSA provides a broad political organization in which people can contest power together. The Libertarian Socialist Caucus helps me remain clear about the kind of power worth building.
I am not interested in replacing one group of rulers with another. I am interested in helping people develop enough collective capacity to exercise meaningful control over their workplaces, communities, resources, and lives.
That is not something a political organization can give us.
It is something an organization can help us learn to build.
