Whither YDSA?
Steven R analyzes YDSA’s 2025 National Convention as an important milestone in building the youth wing of a mass socialist party.
Pioneers at Artek Youth Camp, Unknown Photographer, found on comradegallery.com
The Balance Sheet
YDSA had an unprecedented level of internal political organization at its National Convention, held this August. Unlike past years, dominated by the rivalry between Bread and Roses (B&R) and Constellation, there was no clear “two-caucus system.” Multiple well-established political tendencies, and some newer arrivals, competed for YDSA’s political center of gravity. Who won, and who lost?
Reform & Revolution was the most obvious winner. The caucus won one-third of the seats on the National Coordinating Committee (NCC), including a national co-chair (Daniel SC) and two at-large members (Eli K and Sofia B). Whereas the last two NCCs were split between similarly-sized B&R and Constellation blocs, R&R is now the unrivaled plurality faction on YDSA’s national leadership body, giving it a clear mandate to set the agenda for this term. Convention also adopted all of R&R’s proposals by wide margins.
Marxist Unity Group also secured major victories, expanding our political footprint in YDSA for the third consecutive year. Where we lost an NCC bid in 2022, won an NCC seat as a junior partner to Constellation in 2023, and defended our seat with a small but dedicated base of our own in 2024, this year our candidate Claire IJ crushed the win number for an at-large seat with over a quarter of the total first-choice votes in a crowded field. All MUG proposals passed by large margins, including our flagship resolution, “R19: Building Socialist Sanctuaries to Win the Battle for Democracy.” Two years ago, MUG fought hard to win close votes on symbolic resolutions advocating our political line; this year, concrete proposals reflecting MUG’s revolutionary-democratic theory of change passed overwhelmingly. From R19:
“RESOLVED, the purpose of the Socialist Sanctuaries campaign shall be to explicitly challenge the legitimacy of the undemocratic capitalist state and the Democratic Party’s false opposition to Trump’s war on working and oppressed people. Through social media, internal messaging, campaign materials distributed to chapters, and earned media when applicable, YDSA national comms promoting the campaign will focus on:
(1) The illegitimate authority of the imperial Presidency, unrepresentative Congress, and unelected court system carrying out these attacks,
(2) The struggle for democratic student-worker control of our campuses against undemocratic administrations and police repression,
(3) The need for an independent mass party of the working class and a new democratic political system.”
This resolution was adopted unanimously—196 votes for and 0 against. YDSA also adopted a national political program, which, while drafted by the multitendency Program Committee, contains aspects of MUG’s programmatic vision. It was heavily associated—derisively—with MUG during debate on the floor before passing with 85% of the vote. MUG’s politics, marginal only a few years ago, are approaching cultural hegemony in YDSA.
Springs of Revolution, an informal slate of delegates united around anti-Zionist politics, also notched victories. SOR played a key role in electing its favored co-chair candidate (Sara A), and passed all of its endorsed proposals. A decisive bloc of delegates, more than ten percent of the total delegation, followed the slate’s voting recommendations in the NCC race.
Bread & Roses suffered a clear defeat. Its flagship resolution, “R23: Building Campus Consciousness, Democracy, and Militancy Through Student Unions” was rebuked nearly two-to-one, and B&R proposals on student-centered internationalism and cooperation with the non-DSA Rank and File Project were likewise voted down. The caucus elected neither of its co-chair candidates and won only two NCC seats, its smallest bloc on the body since it first began its organized intervention in YDSA over five years ago.
Constellation has officially been retired from YDSA. Once half of the two-caucus system that dominated YDSA in 2023-2025, Constellation went from one-third of the NCC and one of two co-chairs to zero NCC seats in a single convention. After winning and successfully implementing much of its vision to build a national YDSA bureaucracy over the last two convention cycles, the caucus was unable to reproduce its leaders or convince a new generation of YDSA members that its politics and leadership style are suited to steer the organization they helped build into a new era. Convention passed the proposals Constellation brought forward this year—and entrusted others with implementing them.
The Communist Caucus deserves an honorable mention. Despite only fielding one delegate and one resolution, CC secured a hearing on the floor for its proposal to refocus YDSA’s labor organizing efforts from on-campus student worker organizing to Amazon salting. In the process, it passed a version of the resolution and proved that a large base of YDSA’s active membership desires a bold labor strategy beyond what Bread & Roses and its historical monopoly on labor organizing expertise has to offer.
YDSA’s Third Period
To understand why YDSA’s highest decisionmaking body voted the way it did this year, we must take the long view to provide historical context for what was at stake in the 2025 Convention. From the vantage point of 2025, we can divide the modern history of YDSA into two periods, bookended by the end of the first Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and the aftermath of last year’s Palestine solidarity encampments. After this year’s convention, YDSA is now entering a new period with a new set of tasks.
2017-2022: The Uneven Period
The “Bernie bump” that multiplied DSA’s membership by an order of magnitude from 2016 to 2020 also took hold in YDSA: The number of campuses with YDSA chapters grew exponentially from around 12 before the first Sanders campaign to around 130 after the second.
In this period, YDSA attempted to organize its first national priority campaign under the banner of College For All, but lacked the organizational infrastructure to build nationwide buy-in. Some of the principal organizers involved in this effort joined the Bread & Roses caucus as it coalesced in 2019 out of the recently dissolved Spring Caucus and external organizations like Solidarity. B&R and its forerunners were the first organized tendency in DSA to recognize campuses as a strategic site of organizing and dedicate serious energy to YDSA. As a result, B&R achieved hegemony over YDSA’s internal politics during these early years.
Along with the Sanders-era revival of democratic socialism in the electoral arena, the first wave of undergraduate labor organizing was the other major trend that shaped YDSA in this period. It was during this time that Bread & Roses led the fight to establish the Youth Labor Committee to mentor student worker union drives and build a pipeline for recruiting graduating members into the labor movement as rank-and-file organizers—two of the caucus’s most enduring contributions to YDSA which form the bedrock of our labor strategy today.
YDSA’s growth from 2017 through 2022 was massive but highly uneven. Because national-level infrastructure was limited, the skills and knowledge needed to reproduce a chapter’s core organizers were not universally distributed. The rapid proliferation of chapters, especially as Students for Bernie chapters began affiliating with YDSA en masse after 2020, was counterbalanced by a high rate of turnover. YDSA lacked institutional means to consistently develop members into national leaders. As a result, the layer of members that stepped into national leadership was primarily composed of Bread & Roses cadre or individual uncaucused members from a handful of strong chapters who lacked a unifying political vision.
2022-2025: The Bureaucratic Period
The balance of forces in YDSA began to shift during the 2022-2023 NCC term. The first “Basics of Organizing” training calls, spearheaded in the fall 2022 semester by uncaucused members of the NCC, were YDSA’s first move towards systematic, institutionalized cadre development on the national level. Meanwhile, a cohort of former 2022 convention delegates polarized against B&R’s leadership coalesced into Constellation, a new formation united by its positive program of building out YDSA’s national bureaucracy and deepening its integration with DSA.
The 2023 convention moved YDSA decisively into a new period. Constellation and members of the massive University of Central Florida chapter, approximately representing the left and right wings of the emerging bureaucratic-developmentalist tendency in YDSA, elected one co-chair and one at-large member of the NCC each. This bloc of four formed a loose majority coalition with the support of Marxist Unity Group’s first NCC member (Hailey S). Convention passed most of the bureaucrats’ agenda, chartering the Youth Growth & Development Committee (YGDC) and Campaign Organizing Committee (COC), standardizing the national committee and working group infrastructure, and defining the responsibilities of the NCC. For two NCC terms, the bureaucrats became the drivers and shapers of YDSA’s national project.
Bread & Roses, meanwhile, lost both co-chair seats and fell out of the majority on the NCC for the first time. During this period, B&R’s outlook on YDSA was shaped in large part by experience in undergraduate worker union drives at places like the University of Oregon and the University of California system, developing a theory of change that the caucus implemented as the driving force behind the YLC’s labor mentorship program and Red Hot Summer training series.
As a dual convention year, 2023 was also significant for the cross-tendency effort to pass a historic budget for YDSA at that year’s DSA convention. Among the provisions won that year—and defended during the 2024 DSA budget crisis—were monthly stipends for the NCC, fundamentally transforming the way the national organization related to chapters by making the NCC a full-time organizing body. Over the ‘23-‘24 and ‘24-‘25 terms, the NCC reoriented itself to function more like a union OC, dividing YDSA’s chapters into organizing turf and forming deep one-to-one relationships with chapter leaders. This made it possible, in theory, for the organization’s political leaders to move large numbers of YDSA chapters to take concerted action around national priorities, which had been lacking during the College For All era.
Theory did not immediately translate into practice. The ‘23-‘24 “Trans Rights and Abortion–No Surrender!” (TRANS) campaign culminated in a relatively high-participation national day of action, but failed to live up to the ambition of a “mass socialist campaign for trans rights and bodily autonomy,” even with the attention of the COC and a newly stipended NCC. YDSA briefly caught lightning in a bottle with the Palestine solidarity encampments in April 2024, but again failed to translate that energy into a sustainable, nationally coordinated campaign in the following NCC term, leaving the organization at a crossroads.
In the ‘24-‘25 term, the NCC had to cope with the steady disintegration of the national Palestine focus adopted at the 2024 convention. The failure of DSA’s National Political Committee to adopt a complementary election strategy that could have helped develop YDSA’s “No Votes For Genocide” orientation into a meaningfully coordinated pressure campaign, the stagnation of most campus BDS campaigns in the fall, the lack of chapter buy-in for executing convention’s mandate to build towards a nationwide student strike for Palestine, and the shift in membership’s priorities towards reactive mobilizing against the new Trump administration all culminated in YDSA’s official pivot to sanctuary campus organizing as a national priority at the 2025 Winter Conference in March.
2025: New Tasks for a New Period
This year’s YDSA convention was, in a sense, the first “post-encampments” convention. In 2024, delegates were elected by members who joined YDSA at least a month before the encampments began, and at the time of convention in July the tenor of discussion reflected a belief that the encampment moment—the “Student Intifada”—was ongoing, not dissipating.
In 2025, YDSA members who had enrolled during and after the encampments and the second “Trump bump” had an appreciable role in delegate elections for the first time, and the major tendencies of YDSA all oriented their interventions, explicitly or not, around the need to adapt to what is now self-evidently a post-encampment era of campus organizing.
The various political groupings in YDSA, more diverse and well-organized than ever before, proposed to chart a number of different courses forward: (You can read all 2025 YDSA convention proposals here.)
In Marxist Unity Group’s analysis, the most successful aspect of the Student Intifada was the unity of diverse tactics (encampments, occupations, referenda, strikes) around a set of universal demands (BDS). The encampments ultimately failed, in part, because the isolation of students from the broader working-class movement left the energy on campus with nowhere to go during the summer recess.
MUG’s interventions in 2025 centered around the need to construct a mass socialist party to bridge the gap between student activism and what Lenin called the “class point of view”—the battle for democracy on the road to socialism. For MUG, YDSA is already the organization with the best shot at becoming a political home for masses of working-class youth. It should seize that opportunity by embracing nationwide struggle against the police state (R19), unifying under a political program to connect sanctuary campus and city campaigns to our long-term horizons (R7), and taking a revolutionary defeatist, campaign-focused approach to internationalism in order to translate the spontaneous energy of upsurges like the encampments into long-term organizing against empire (R12).
Bread & Roses diagnosed the failure of the encampments as a case of acute disorganization. They focused their analysis on the lack of structure-based mass organizations of students and workers on college campuses, and put forward the thesis that YDSA is a cadre organization (not a mass one) that suffers from a preoccupation with organizing within the narrow activist layer of the student body at the expense of the unactivated majority. To remedy this, the caucus proposed transcending the activist coalition model by focusing on building student strike power in classrooms and academic departments through student unions (R23) alongside strike power in the workplace through labor unions (R13-2) in the leadup to May Day 2028.
Reform & Revolution’s diagnosis of the failure of the encampments was situated in its broader analysis of the “triple crisis” facing the left today: the lack of working-class organizations, the lack of broad socialist consciousness, and the lack of clear socialist leadership. As part of the “dual task” of resolving this crisis by both building up an organized working-class movement and building the hegemony of socialist politics within it, R&R proposed adjusting YDSA’s national bureaucracy to the needs of nationwide campaign work (R17), committing to recruiting masses of non-student youth by constructing municipal all-youth YDSA chapters (R25), and taking a united-front approach to coalition work to bring YDSA into struggle alongside mass workers’ organizations (R22).
Springs of Revolution approached the collapse of nationwide Palestine work in the ‘24-‘25 term as a problem of misplaced priorities. They sought to guard against the danger of opportunism and revive the spirit of the encampments in three main ways: reprioritizing BDS campaigns (R16 as amended by R16-1), seeding YDSA chapters on new campuses to open up new fronts in the struggle (R24), and electing a veteran Palestine solidarity organizer (Sara A) to oversee the next NCC term as co-chair.
As the organization faces the paramount question of how to deploy the organizational capacity built up during the outgoing bureaucratic period, these contending strategies reflect three broad trends in YDSA: Partyism, embodied by MUG and R&R’s aim to construct the youth wing of a mass socialist party through programmatic campaign work; base-building, defined by B&R’s aim to overcome student-worker disorganization on as broad a basis as possible; and Third-Worldism, best reflected by SOR’s aim to ground YDSA’s organizing work in the continuation of the Student Intifada.
The other formations openly contesting convention this year—Constellation, Communist Caucus, and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus—lacked distinct and comprehensive visions of their own, and largely fell into the three categories in their respective order. The delegation as a whole was majority-uncaucused and not always cleanly split between partyist, base-builder, and Third-Worldist poles, but the debates this year bore out along those lines more often than not.
Partyism Rising
If one thing is clear after this convention, it’s that partyism is ascendant. The long arc of YDSA since the first Bernie Sanders campaign has bent slowly, painstakingly, towards the creation of a nationwide party infrastructure, nationally coordinated campaign work, and a unifying program. We have arrived at a consensus theory of change: the working class can, will, and must create a new socialist world by forming an independent mass party that can win the battle for democracy, and youth have a unique role to play in that transformation by building new labor unions in our workplaces, industrializing to revitalize socialist militancy in the labor movement, and leading struggles for reforms to turn our peers into lifelong socialists.
Visions of the year 2028 loomed large over convention. If we want to seize the potential of a coordinated mass strike wave in May 2028, enormous tasks await us over the next three years. But what is to be done?
Most immediately, the gains YDSA has made over preceding periods of development must be defended and expanded. YDSA needs stipended national leadership, staff support, a discretionary budget, and the ability to build our chapters through dues sharing to fulfill our potential as the youth wing of a socialist party. All of this is contained in CR07, the YDSA consensus resolution deferred from this year’s DSA convention to the new National Political Committee (NPC). The NPC must pass CR07 in full and invest in the future of the socialist movement.
With those gains secured, we must make good on the promise of the socialist sanctuaries campaign. In the uneven period, YDSA was unable to move chapters to fight for shared demands on a national scale. In the bureaucratic period, we struggled to sustain that national work in a coordinated way. A unanimous convention mandate building on work dozens of chapters are already engaged in is an unprecedented opportunity to do both.
Nearly 1.3 million students and tens of thousands of staff and faculty live, study, and work at schools where YDSA chapters are already running or planning socialist sanctuary campaigns. Millions more non-student youth live in cities where multiple chapters are running or planning some form of noncompliance campaign. Through a nationwide socialist sanctuary campaign, YDSA will have a potential audience of millions to agitate against the antidemocratic system that gave us Trump, and more than that, to offer a concrete solution: join us in YDSA to fight this reign of terror and create a political crisis that can bring that system down.
We should throw ourselves into the fight for sanctuaries without illusions, knowing full well that any concessions we win will not, on their own, be durable checks on the power of the Trump administration. The military occupation of Los Angeles proves that institutional noncompliance with ICE is only real insofar as regular people are prepared to enforce it in a mass, organized, sometimes extralegal way. Our school administrations and city governments cannot offer us genuine sanctuary from ICE raids, anti-trans laws, or austerity no matter how much pressure we put on them. But by organizing our peers, neighbors, and coworkers to win those concessions and enforce them through collective action, YDSA can. The socialist movement and the mass party we are building can become the sanctuary that working and oppressed people deserve.
Amassing strike power in the workplace will be critical to defending and expanding whatever victories we win as YDSA. The NCC and YLC should help chapters recruit new workplace leads and salts through their campaign work so that, in addition to bringing masses of students into the battle for democracy, the nationwide socialist sanctuary campaign also accelerates the campus labor movement. The YLC is already mentoring union drives in workplaces with a combined total of nearly 150,000 student workers. That number will only grow with redoubled efforts to translate campaign work into new workplace organizing in the coming years.
Coordinated recognition strikes by hundreds of thousands of student workers could give socialist labor organizers a platform to politicize the 2028 strike wave with common-good demands connected to YDSA’s fight against the police state. If this model proves successful, it could be replicated beyond 2028, as organizers graduating out of YDSA make inroads in the logistics industry and teachers’ unions, making progressively larger strike waves possible—and with them, progressively deeper crises for the capitalist state and riper conditions for a mass socialist party to put forward an alternative.
Delegates departing from this year’s convention set out into uncharted territory. These are demanding times. The possibilities are vast, the difficulties in rising to meet them no less so. There are questions to be called and no certain answers. Every member of YDSA, from the incoming to the graduating, should swell with pride—you have the rare opportunity to change the course of world history, and to confer that grave and thrilling responsibility to countless others by welcoming them to your side in the youth wing of a mass socialist party.
Youth, lead the way!
