Twin Cities DSA

Author: Shane M., former Co-Chair of the Street Corps Working Group and a member of the Mass Work Caucus

Contradictions and A Movement Out Of Touch

When I started Street Corps back in 2021, I had the goal of doing my part to address our organization’s lack of presence among the working class community of the Twin Cities. I tried to apply a regional organizing approach mixed with visible community mutual aid projects. Over time, this mission became more developed, with the goal of using a “mass work” approach combined with thorough social investigation & class analysis and continuous community engagement, with a particular focus on helping and organizing our homeless neighbors. Our goal has always been to bring in those individuals who we do not see widely represented in Twin Cities DSA nor the wider Socialist movement: those who are poor, those who are black or brown, those who are indigenous, those who are muslim, those who are immigrants, those who make their money in the underground economy, those who have faced addiction, those who are homeless, and so many more. 

Our efforts have had us wrestle with the central contradiction of the organizer and the organized. The contradiction between mostly white, middle class, university educated, english speaking, male leftists and essentially everyone else. This contradiction also has had us wrestle with the very mixed and varied class consciousness of many lower income folks we engage, who certainly are not to be idealized as some perfect blank-slate proletarian base, which is a mindset I am not meaning to imply in this writeup. We have not solved this contradiction, but we have learned a lot and our efforts have put a new lens on the positionality of our organization. Where are we located in the community? What section of our class do we really represent and fight for? In essence: Who is our movement for?

The answer is not a mystery, it’s something we have heard repeatedly mentioned but never really addressed. We represent a majority white, economically stable, and politically activated section of the community alienated and segregated from the incredibly large segment of lower income and incredibly varied neighbors who make up our wonderful Twin Cities. We appeal to and often find ourselves representing the interests of a certain segment of “activists,” college educated folks, and politically engaged progressive nerds. While a debated term, the term “Professional Managerial Class” is an apt description of not just a strata of our own membership but a part of the community that we appeal to and are under the influence of. These are the folks who will engage in the opinion polls, who feel comfortable contacting their legislators, who will fill the halls of campaign and nonprofit staff groups, who will take time to write Op-Eds in the Strib or other media outlets, and more. We repeatedly try the same up on high “build it and they will come” strategies, strategies that have time and time again failed to simply summon the wider community to our cause. Being honest, most people have not a clue who we are and their eyes likely glaze over when they try to decipher what we are saying half the time.

I have been slowly drafting this over the past few weeks but the thing that got me to finish this up was the damning sight that not a single district in North Minneapolis went to Fateh. The largely neglected community of North Minneapolis, who we have failed to engage for years now yet who I am sure we see as a segment of the community we fight for, was completely unmoved by our electoral efforts. Electoral efforts that were supposed to rally the community for us right? The efforts that were supposed to build real power and a mass movement for us right? Where are those thousands of progressive voters now in our so-called mass movement? Is this the fault of our canvassers or the Electoral Committees efforts this year? No, electoral outcomes, like any organizing outcome, are the result of hard on the ground basebuilding and struggle over the course of years. Basebuilding and struggle that we as a chapter as a whole force have failed to carry out in several key working class and often blue collar constituencies and community enclaves, including but certainly not limited to: 

• The Black Community of North Minneapolis
• The Somali & East African Community of Como-Marcy
• The Hmong Diaspora of St Paul
• The Hispanic and Latine Community of South-Central Minneapolis
• The Indigenous Community of Little Earth

To change our organizations priorities, its culture, and ultimately who it fights for and wins over, we must consciously shift our base to be these sectors of the community. The organizer and organized transform one another, and the fighting party of the working classes must transform and be transformed by the working classes it organizes for.

Not Just Getting Our House In Order, But Getting Out Of It 

We all likely know the cliche definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting things to change. So how do we change? What are some elements of a course correction?

Rectifying Our House

Our organization suffers from several issues that have been pointed out time and time again by comrades: Chauvinism (White and Male variations specifically), sexism, and racialized behaviors of Whiteness which alienate members of color. Our many comrades who, like I, come out of the ranks of the middle classes, are white, and are male who help run projects and carry out campaigns in the chapter, must really reflect on what assumptions and attitudes we bring into our work. How are we contributing to an aura of undesirability and alienation to the rest of the community we claim our organizing is to support. We need to carry our weight in projects and ensure the brunt of the load is not always falling on our fem-identifying or BIPOC comrades. If our spaces are not majority or at least significantly lower income working class and/or non-white, then fundamentally how we work, where we work, the language we use, and more should be thoroughly reviewed and changed. We must strive for wider and principled accessibility, and that starts with bringing our daily internal operations more in contact with and accessible to the wider community as well.

A first step is that we need to be openly far more honest with one another and self-criticize far more. Building a culture of consistent checking in with our comrades across the chapter, getting honest feedback on what we are doing well and what we are not is key to this work. No more behind the scenes maneuvering or simply keeping our heads down in our own little organizing area bubbles, ignoring the rest of the chapter or internal “distractions.” Routinely engage our members, ask them questions, get feedback, and be humble and ready to admit missteps and correct them.

A second step is language. Not just the use of academic and vague theoretical terms, which while valuable, must be defined and only used with folks after they understand them. Literally, I mean the language we speak and write. English is how we conduct all of our business. Significant numbers of our community do not speak English as their first language. We have started the first steps toward addressing this issue this past year with some language training opportunities and a TCDSA 101 held in Spanish. But to begin our organizing push into the rest of the community, we need to recruit and train a cadre of bilingual comrades who can help serve as a Translation Corps in our chapter, helping to translate our materials, presentations, and communications into several of the most common local languages and spearheading outreach teams. We do this and we can start truly having a house of the multicultural and multilingual working classes, not just a house of english speaking and majority white comrades.

Out Of Our House And Into The Masses

Quite simply, the opposite of hoping people will come to us is that we must go out to the people. If our movement is for the wider community, then we need to immerse the movement in, and let the movement be transformed by those we wish to fight for and with. We need to push through and resolve the contradictions laid out in the beginning of this article, through the hard work of struggling and embedding the organizers with the organized. We cannot strive for simple voter turnout or just mere sign ups, one time actions that do not engage folks beyond a moment. The chapter at large needs to get out of our bubble and out into the actual streets, community spaces, and apartments of the community sectors that have been left out of our movement. Not just once, not twice, but continuously. Weekly, if not almost daily. Let us go to North Minneapolis. Let us go to Cedar-Riverside. Let us go to East St Paul. Let us go to Little Earth. Let us go everywhere where we are not.

What going there will look like will take many forms but must share the same substance. First, going there must put us in more sustained casual but intentional contact. We should be in positions to have more casual conversations and first learn from and get to know our neighbors. Who are the respected community leaders? Where do folks congregate? What do people do for fun or to build community? What are the local concerns? Let us not march in thinking we have the solutions first. Let us learn from and then after rigorous discussion and synthesizing of what we have learned suggest the campaigns to solve those issues and see if the progressive segments of the local community agree and take them up themselves. Why the progressive segments first and foremost? Because it is those segments who will be key to pulling in their more general neighbors to rally and take up the work as well.

We should be designing campaigns that mobilize and involve community members to address their problems directly while also increasing folks’ consciousness with basic integrated political education. Our work should not be technocratic and above the community, simply mobilizing them for simple petitions or pleading to “call their legislators” to take action on their behalf. Class consciousness grows from struggle, and folks will develop an organizing mindset organizing in their immediate community area first far before they do so by coming to our many (too many) organizational meetings. If there are issues of safety, how do we organize and support folks to step in themselves to patrol or intervene in their community area? If the issue is poor housing conditions (or lack of housing entirely), how do we mobilize folks in large numbers to disrupt the landlords or the governmental housing authorities? If there is an exploitative local business, how do we get the community to boycott it? How do we develop or enhance local institutions of worker power such as local associations, local unions, and more? If folks are not involved in making change themselves, how do we expect them to want to continue further in our own organization?

These efforts cannot be siloed projects, handled by every committee, branch, and working group separately or in an ad hoc fashion. We must work in joint efforts, and use our chapters’ priority process to strategically target and organize those sectors of the community left out of our movement. We have a growing network of local neighborhood and regional cells forming. Let us use these and new ones as the connecting points to combine Electoral, Tenant, Labor, Environmental Justice, Political Education, and Street Corps efforts into coordinated and multi-pronged organizing campaigns. Let us organize, let us teach, and let us most importantly learn from and trust our neighbors.

Let us pull together and change, so in a year or two’s time, we find ourselves in an organization positively unrecognizable to ourselves today, filled with throngs of comrades from all walks of life in our cities, building a local Socialist movement beyond our wildest dreams.