Our Organization

DSA San Diego holds a number of events throughout the month. Each event is organized by our steering committee, a branch committee, a working group, or a caucus.

  • Steering committee: Members elected annually to manage the chapter’s affairs for one year.
  • Branch committee: Members permitted by the chapter to meet due to shared geography, language, or non-DSA affiliation.
  • Working group: Members permitted by the chapter to organize externally in the chapter’s name.
  • Caucus: Members permitted by the steering committee to use the chapter’s communications to schedule meetings.

Below you will find a brief description of each branch, working group, and caucus of DSA San Diego.

North County Branch

Our North County branch is composed of chapter members from the northern half of San Diego county. The North County branch’s monthly chapter meeting is held in Vista, California.

Direct Action Working Group

Our Direct Action working group (“DAWG”) is about going directly into the community and agitating against the capitalist class, the landlord class, and their cronies in the State. The working group helps coordinate and facilitate other organizations and groups in their struggles against imperialism, settler colonialism, and against those who which to keep them in that position. DAWG has three areas of activity: mutual aid to comrades in need, direct action in the community (actions, rallies, protests, demonstrations), and security and self-defense for events.

Ecosocialist Working Group

Our Ecosocialist working group (“EcoSoc”) advances ecological perspectives within the chapter by highlighting the capitalist, imperialist, and systemic oppressions that cause and exacerbate ecological crises. The working group is focused on ensuring that the transition to socialism in the United States is based upon sound ecological principles, while bearing in mind the historic and contemporary inequities imposed by society, and the working group hosts a committee pursuing public ownership and control of San Diego’s energy infrastructure, replacing the investor-owned power monopoly, SDG&E, whose fifty-year monopoly contract expires in 2021.

Electoral & Healthcare Working Groups

Our Electoral Working Group develops campaigns in support of candidates and ballot measures, prioritizing support of measures jointly endorsed by the chapter’s issue-specific working groups. Support of all electoral campaigns by the chapter must be initiated through a structured endorsement process, described in our chapter bylaws.

 

The Electoral Working Group participates in CA DSA meetings and activities focused on statewide campaign planning. While the focus of the working group is on electoral campaigns, the group may also support political pressure campaigns organized by other working groups or committees. Current projects include joining with the Ecosocialist Working Group in support of the Let’s Go San Diego ballot measure planned for the 2024 general election and strategizing for upcoming elections generally.

Housing Justice Working Group

Our mission is to ensure full, safe, decommodified housing in the United States using an approach based on socialist principles. Our Housing Justice Working Group seeks to help our chapter build collective working-class power to fight against the landlord class; decriminalize and end homelessness in San Diego; and promote a vision of universal, socialized housing. We are working to build the base of support for socialist politics by working to strengthen and expand the current working-class institutions of power. We believe that socialism can only be achieved by organizing the working class and in doing so, building a base of support for socialism in the future.

If you want to get involved in building power within San Diego, please reach out to our (HJWG) through their email () or through our organizer In-take form.

Statement on the Conflict with the San Diego Tenants Union (SDTU): https://dsasandiego.org/on-the-conflict-with-san-diego-tenants-union

Labor Working Group

Libertarian Socialist Caucus

The Libertarian Socialist Caucus is an organization of members of the Democratic Socialists of America who believe that libertarian socialist values are the fullest embodiment of this democratic socialist vision. We cherish the DSA’s status as a multi-tendency mass socialist organization and wish to create a space within the DSA to discuss and organize for the development of socialism beyond the state.

We take libertarian socialism to encompass those parts of the socialist movement (including syndicalists, council communists, anarchists, cooperativists, and municipalists, among many others) which have historically seen the surest path to socialism as residing in the creation of independent institutions in civil society that give the working class and ordinary people direct power over their live

Revolutionary Marxist Caucus

The Revolutionary Marxist caucus is a home for revolutionaries in DSA San Diego. Building a revolution starts in organizing the masses, and leads to the overthrow of the capitalist ruling class. The revolution means decolonization, Black liberation, Queer liberation, women’s liberation, and the liberation of the working classes worldwide. The caucus focuses on organizing the unorganized and developing class consciousness by joining communities in their ongoing struggles, agitating and educating for the development of working class power independent of the bourgeois.

Mental Health Caucus

Chapter members interested in discussing the corrosive impact of capitalism upon our collective and individual mental health.