The Revolutionary Cocktail: Why DSA Needs Electoralism, Direct Action, and Mutual Aid to Win

A colleague of mine once said that his revolutionary cocktail for the systemic change we needed as a movement entailed three key elements: direct action, mutual aid, and electoralism. This concoction has stuck with me and rolled around in my head since he said it over a year ago in his millennial-style car vlog that he posted on Instagram. I've since expanded these three components into conceptualized processes:

Direct Action is the means by which existing conditions are confronted head on to the point of rupture in the mode of production.

Mutual-Aid is the logistical metric for satisfying the consumption of a community by an organized grassroots network of distribution and production. 

Electoralism is the competition between politically organized factions over the attention economy of the electorate, aka, the 30-60% of the population that is allowed to vote.

With the recent primaries across the country, my own personal hajj to NYC, and of course the lovely DSA discourse on X the Everything App, this revolutionary cocktail has only come to sit evermore in the front and center of my thinking about how to organize internally around a variety of issues my comrades feel passionately about—especially in light of those issues seemingly being at odds with one another. 

I’ll state explicitly now that I fundamentally disagree with the framing of these three tactics as being antagonistic towards each other. In fact I would go as far to state that the distilled critiques which a proponent of direct action or mutual aid might level against electoralism and a staunch electoralist against the proponents of mutual aid or direct action, are all the same. None of these tactics are an end in and of themselves. 

Standing alone, Mutual-Aid is mere charity at best, or bandaids for bullet holes at its worst; Direct Action is frankly adventurism at best, or in the worst case acts as a revolutionary release valve; and Electoralism may demonstrate a shift in the Overton Window, but at the expense of cooptation and complacency with a tepid reformism. 

It is only together, united by a coherent and democratically decided strategy, that its potency for revolutionary change can be actualized. 

That's enough theory for now, but I want this conceptual engine to be humming in the background as you read this piece. 

Personally, since I was a young man, I have always strived to be a well-rounded organizer, a Jack of All Trades, if you will. My mother would call me a metiche (nosey?), but that's neither here nor there. The way that manifests in my organizing today is that I have a tendency to stick my fingers in every pie within arm’s reach. I run the political education committee as an elected leader in my chapter, founded and am an active participant of our migrants’ rights subcommittee, am the former mentor for the electoral working group and current campaign manager of a chapter cadre campaign, a proud member of the Springs of Revolution network championing our national priority Labor for an Arms Embargo locally in conjunction with our Palestine Solidarity and Labor working groups, and last, but certainly not least, my day job is as an organizer for a statewide non-profit that leans towards tenant organizing. All that to say is, six years into my organizing journey, I have yet to pigeonhole myself into just one avenue of organizing. I may not have done it consciously initially, but I try to embody the concoction of this revolutionary formula in my day-to-day organizing projects. 

Through my experience, I believe there is something to be abstracted from the overlaps in these tactically diverse projects and campaigns.

Allow me to explain.

I will start with direct action as it is probably the most contentious and certainly the most volatile element of the cocktail. I want to clarify now that I am not necessarily talking about the high risk civil disobedience operations of a Palestine Action or of a civil uprising nature; though assuredly those too have their place in the cocktail. The primary methods of direct action organized by DSA San Diego are pro-Palestine banner drops, anti-ICE community defense, and strike line support. 

In my opinion, banner drops are a sort of guerrilla political education and agitation. Of the near dozen banner drops we have organized or supported in the last year, they have proven to be opportunities for some of the most frank organizing conversations amongst the membership and with the general public. I recall one instance during a banner drop in the South Bay, a predominantly Latine working class community, where a woman began to lightly criticize us; not for being pro-Palestine, but genuinely interrogating us as to how hanging a piece of painted cloth over a bridge helps the Palestinian people. The working group cochair and I explained to her that our intentions were to keep Palestine in the public’s mind— nearly three years into the genocide and almost a year into Trump’s regime, it almost feels as though, with the onslaught of tragedy after tragedy domestically, people might forget or deprioritize Palestinian liberation in order to deal with the struggles we have to overcome at home. What we were really trying to do was emphasize that the struggle in Palestine was the same struggle we faced here.

In the same vein, our anti-ICE community patrols are another form of direct action. Just like the genocide in Palestine was a result of a century of development by the Zionist entity, experimenting with different methods of occupation and disenfranchisement— Trump and the Department of Homeland Security are fomenting the early stages of an ethnic cleansing of working class black and brown people from our communities. When I was motivated to prioritize community self-defense in the chapter, I was met with some well-intentioned pushback. The main worry was the high risk nature of the work and associating with organizations like Union del Barrio (which had just been the target of a congressional investigation for their role in the LA resistance to ICE occupation). Ultimately, enough members of the working group reasoned that, if DSA defending migrant communities was unlawful, then that long arm would eventually come for us anyway. 

We spent the first three months investigating how radical projects like this had been executed in the past. We examined the Black Panthers and engaged with the plethora of resources that organizations like CrimeThinc, SiempraNC, and Front Line Defenders had compiled on ICE tactics and strategy. We read historical and contemporary pieces of theory on how a ragtag group of socialists could even stand a chance at hampering in any way an imperial terror machine like the US government. As we grew and developed, we realized that patrolling the community was beginning to inspire discourse on the notion and structures of public safety. This consciousness was spreading not just among patrollers, but within the communities themselves. The patrols became prefigurative for how a community protects itself from an entity that wishes to do it harm, and our chapter was a driving force in that.

Direct action also takes the form of labor work. We are lucky enough locally to have a talented and knowledgeable Labor working group chair that keeps tabs on every union in contract negotiations, prepping for a strike, or already on the strike line. By the time they have begun, we are already actively organizing in support of it. We are turning out members to the strike line, donating to strike funds, and even anchoring strike kitchens. My experience walking strike lines has displayed (and tested) the vast spectrum of revolutionary optimism that can emerge out of solidarity with militant workers fighting against unfair labor practices. It is almost a form of political education similar to what occurs during a banner drop, except no one is wondering what exactly the picketers are trying to accomplish–it’s right there on the signs! 

Most recently, on a 24-hour Teamsters picket line, I got to talk to workers about everything from the World Cup to the Iran war. But the most consistent topic the workers brought up was that, in spite of the risk they were taking, they felt deeply convinced that they could win this fight. It was deeply inspirational and, in my mind, demonstrated the potency of direct action as not just a tactic for fighting the good fight, but as a method for motivating workers that a better world was in fact possible. All they needed was to take the risk to fight for it.

Now, there was an invisible through line in all three of the examples of local direct action— and that is mutual aid. 

When I was a ‘baby leftist,’ developing my sea legs, organizing with the PSL, mutual aid was cast aside as functionally useless anarchist praxis. It was considered band-aids for bullet holes, I was told. However, when I was cutting my teeth during the Student Intifada, organizing alongside Dutch anarchists at the University of Amsterdam, the mutual aid component to the encampments was unavoidable. In fact, it was practically baked into the whole concept! If we wanted to sustain an encampment or occupation, we simply needed supply lines that could feed and water the several hundred students, staff, and faculty demanding the university divest from Israel. 

This got me thinking; if we were serious about revolutionizing society, did that merely entail commandeering existing supply chains, hitting the Teamsters and Longshoremen with a coat of red paint, prefixing big chain supermarkets with “The People’s Grocery Outlet,” and calling it a day? 

I sat with this thought. In the midst of encampments and occupations, I was also finishing up my Master's thesis on the way that geographic conditions shape organizing strategies; examining the differences and similarities of urban versus rural approaches to radical politics. A core pillar of the thesis was exposing the extractive relationship between cities and the countryside as being a microcosm of the relationships perpetuated by capitalist-colonialism, i.e., between imperial cores and their peripheries. The relations of production and distribution are inseparable from the mode of production in which they exist. That might seem abundantly apparent at a theoretical level, but the implications for local organizing are tremendous. Obviously, we want logistics and grocery workers to have strong protections and safe working conditions, where they make good money for the work they contribute to maintaining our supply chains. But simply putting these logistics networks under control of the workers won't change the fact that rural communities suffer from severe underdevelopment and precarious access to goods and services, and it certainly won't fix the “noble savage” view of urban dwellers against their rural counterparts. 

I’ll be the first to say that DSA won't be the organization that fixes this structural imbalance in the supply chain or be the mechanic to the relationship between urban and rural communities. That is a long term problem that will require a serious overhaul in how we shape production and distribution both at home and abroad (good thing we are an anti-imperialist socialist organization!). However, what I want to emphasize here is that the projects and campaigns being worked on by DSA San Diego’s Ecosocialist working group and our mutual aid collective are not simply acts of kindhearted charity but deeply rooted in a theory of building sustainable community power.

Seeding Food Sovereignty is an active campaign by EcoSoc that prioritizes building out community gardens throughout the city that can supplement the caloric intake of the local community. The organizational concept is that by proliferating community garden infrastructure, urban and especially suburban communities can reduce their dependence on alienated supply chains that function to obfuscate where their produce originates. Rather than an intermediary of fluorescent lighting and underpaid service workers, our gardens are sites of community building over the labor it takes to feed one another. The program functions on the old Marxian adage “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” It’s no secret that gardening can be back-breaking work, but the organizers of each garden work day take each person's ability into account by offering a variety of tasks scaled by intensity. From pulling weeds and picking fruit to digging up tree stumps and building planters, there is always something for everybody. 

Too often, I see criticisms of mutual aid endeavors made in the same tone with which my PSL comrades once castigated it to me: mutual aid is just noble charity which doesn't really turn the dial forward in terms of growing organizational power and is ultimately futile in the face of deeply inequitable and imperial supply chains. However, it is important to understand that the motivation behind this campaign is not to merely patch gaps in the system of distribution. Nor will mutual aid ever be able to outright replace a deeply embedded and globalized supply chain. Rather, the purpose of mutual aid such as these gardens is to cohere a community of individuals around the physical labor of building infrastructure that supports a community’s basic needs. This is an integral aspect of building a meaningful socialist project that proves we have the vision, means, and ability to build novel production and distribution structures that do not perpetuate capitalist-colonialist relations and are organized in common rather than at the direction of capital. 

Another similarly effective mutual aid project of the San Diego chapter is our Fix the 215 campaign. The 215 is a local bus line with the highest ridership in the city; beginning at the train station in downtown and terminating at the local state university, it takes about 50 minutes from start to finish for a total of 9 miles(and that is if the bus does not break down midway through). Our demands were quite simple: dedicated bus lanes, all door boarding, and bus priority at intersections. The most recent action related to this project was Race the 215, where we partnered with our cyclist and urbanist advocacy partners to facilitate a competition between bicycle riders and the 215 bus line to see which group could finish the route faster. Needless to say, the cyclists won after the bus broke down three stops into the race. The event itself had a tinge of direct action blended into it, but the project of public transportation advocacy more broadly demonstrates a priority for reinforcing and expanding an existing working class community infrastructure that is centered around accessibility and the freedom of movement. 

A project such as this, however, will not be completed simply on its merits alone, and we are under no illusions that, by merely documenting significant flaws in the public transportation system and advocating for meaningful solutions, these issues will ever be fixed. We will need buy-in from the elected officials that sit on the governing authority for public transportation, the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), a multi-member body made up of elected officials from the City and County of San Diego as well as various periphery cities. 

At the end of the day, we are in the business of politics. That means running candidates, raising money, and winning races. It is unmistakable that DSA is in the shape that it is because we have proven ourselves to be a viable alternative to decades of austerity at the ballot box. But as our comrades in any of the various groupuscules and sectariana will always remind us, the road to electoral victory is paved with opportunists and reformism. Is simply changing the flag flown at city hall to a red rosy handshake actually building a sustainable socialist project? 

Working people obviously lead busy lives, and mundane political engagement is taxing enough, let alone organizing. Yet, through an Electoralist strategy, reforms can be fought for and won in local institutions that can alleviate some of the burden of our neoliberal hell while also demonstrating the upper ceiling of capitalist reforms (centering this concept in messaging is crucial; there will always be a box that needs breaking out of). Putting your comrade Fran or Ken in charge of the state is only the firing gun for change at the structural level. Once in office, passing policy becomes the flipside of Electoralism that can really make or break its efficacy as a grand strategy. And if the executors of the administrative bureaucracy cannot impose the will of the masses on captured political structures, then those structures prove why they must be altered or abolished. Zohran is not a good mayor because he agrees with me and is the same type of communist as I am, he is a good mayor because he actually uses his position to advance and entrench the interests of his constituents at large. Taking power where we can, then wielding it accordingly, is truly the base spirit of this whole cocktail. 

The point of engaging in Electoralism is not about taking power for power's sake, it is in order to soften material conditions so that the most politically advanced of the masses can build a holistic movement that includes the work of direct action against defenders of the capitalist order and building the dual power infrastructures that will eventually render the state obsolete. When all three happen at the same time, that is prefiguring. This will occur most literally at the hyper-local level; i.e. organizing a residential building to lower their rent by forming a tenant union and passing a local rent control ordinance through an allied alderperson. Through participation in that struggle, those tenants will have lower rents, giving them more free time, while simultaneously demonstrating that DSA are people who get shit done–and that is better recruitment and development than any list someone could whip up.

Electoralism also serves as a test of reach and effect. The worst outcome of a solely Direct Action and/or Mutual Aid strategy is organizing oneself into a bubble that is alienated from the masses at large. For better or for worse, ~150m Americans believe that voting is the ultimate form of political participation. If our work is resonating with communities, that should be reflected in every single primary and general election. Voting maps and district research become data points for targeted outreach strategies in support of mutual aid projects that aim to serve communities before, during, and after election day. Getting these projects started early and in election off years demonstrates to a community that DSA are not Johnny Come Lately’s, but that we come from and have deep bonds to the communities we wish to represent. 

Another holistic aspect of Electoralism is directly related to the attitude of the administrative and elected personnel of the government apparatus who manage the relations of production under which Direct Action and Mutual Aid efforts play out. These electeds can swing favors significantly for grassroots infrastructure initiatives and allow for closer coordination with allied power brokers in negotiations. Even allied elected officials, by nature of their position within the capitalist mode of production, will naturally be restrained by the rigidity of the system, and thus must rely on their organized base to agitate for more concessions from the ruling class and deeper structural reforms. If the state is not capable of satisfying community interests, then its resources can be leveraged to build novel community-based institutions by and for the people. 

DSA San Diego, despite our size, is still building up our electoral program and is currently vying for the mayorship in two distinct periphery cities within the county. Each presents unique conditions in the project of building socialism and exciting opportunities for changing the dynamic between citizens and the city, easing the financial burden of existence, and creating novel infrastructure that supports working class liberation. Being in a democratic organization, politics plays out at every level–from chapter organizational priorities to who we endorse for public office. As we build our electoral muscles, the team sports tradition so thoroughly embedded in American politics manifests as an internal tension between two camps: the chapter institutionalists, intent on building a sustainable political machine, and the political firebrands, who see winnable seats as platforms to agitate and disrupt business as usual. 

I want to emphasize that I find this tension to be a constructive one. Watching the various camps emerge just within the ecosystem of electoralism has exposed natural leaders and demanded their creativity in deploying organizing tactics that can win the support of chapter membership. The institutionalists remind us that power requires endurance— you can't govern if you can't win. The firebrands, on the other hand, remind us that winning is meaningless if you do not use the platform to build movement power and shift the terms of debate. Both are necessary, as the dialectic of building and agitating plays out in real time. Only time will tell if our comrades ascend to their respective Mayoralties, but, at the very least, the chapter will have gained ambitious new leaders and experienced structural innovation that builds a culture of excitement and progress. 

In the end, the left movement in the US is ultimately in a period of strategic fermentation, maturing into the grown up world of congressional primaries and talking head interviews, while trying to maintain an optimistic vision of what a socialist future can be if only we can win the moment in the now. Through a balanced synthesis of these three tactics, the revolutionary cocktail is brewed, but only if united by a holistic strategy that balances the strengths and weaknesses of each component of the concoction. Our task is not to predetermine the lines of development, but to embrace the unity of our work and the necessity of that unity for the most thorough advance of our movement. Without tapping into the essence of elections, mutual aid, and direct action–each of them lose the potency to be genuinely revolutionary.

I'll leave you with this axiom.

If an industry or institution for a service exists, then you unionize it through direct action or capture it electorally; and if the structure does not yet exist, then you build it through mutual aid.