To Win Workers, We Need A City That Works; Nithya Raman Is Our Pothole Populist

The following article was written by a broad, multitendency group of DSA-LA members: caucused and un-caucused, “left” and “right,” from both DSA and YDSA. Regardless of our affiliations, we all believe that endorsing Nithya Raman is a vital intervention for DSA-LA that will strengthen the organization and the socialist movement. Our reasoning is presented below; we hope you will join us in voting YES on endorsing Nithya Raman for mayor. You can do so through the OpaVote link in your email until Tuesday, September 1st.

If you go canvassing in LA’s City Council District 9, one of the things you will hear at door after door is a sense of disempowerment. The people of these working class communities—heavily Black and Latino, ensconced within the heart of the city—feel abandoned by their current City Council representative and by the city’s administration in general. Residents will show you streetlamps that have been out for years, cracked sidewalks, and roads with potholes so big you can physically lay down in them. One resident, exasperated, talked about how her street regularly had a truck cab parked askew across a worn-down sidewalk. She expressed skepticism that anything could change, and said that she was checked out of politics. She reported calling and calling the city, but no one ever answered. She said she was fed up with a city that no longer cared for her. This is a story that you will hear repeatedly across South LA. The people are fed up; the people are tired; the people are disengaged.

The opportunity to reach these Angelenos and build out our organization is clear: nowhere else is there such a relevant, clear battle line drawn over who our city should serve than in the Los Angeles mayoral race. It is a fundamental task for socialists today to show that the left can use state capacity and collective action to improve the life of the average citizen, and this is the opportunity that endorsing Nithya offers DSA-LA.

Much ink has already been spilled over whether or not DSA-LA should support Nithya: by proponents, opponents, and everyone else in between. The debate has largely centered around nitpicking her record, her closeness to DSA, and whether or not she’s “one of us.” However, we propose that this mayoral race allows us to fundamentally put our politics into practice, employing sewer socialism—which Nithya has leaned into—to politically agitate working class people and deliver immediate improvements in their lives.

In other words, socialists must lead in this race by delivering a strong alternative to the establishment austerity regime that currently controls the city. Opponents to endorsement have suggested staying out of the race, waiting four years, and trying to find an alternative candidate rather than deal with the contradictions of running this campaign; we say that these sorts of contradictions are a consequence of actually developing and using socialist power, and that it is better to win and have to engage with the realities of governance through an inside-outside strategy, than refuse to try to gain power to help working people.

To build class consciousness and a socialist Los Angeles, we must actively contest and obtain power, and deliver for the people who live in this city. Socialist leadership therefore means endorsing Nithya Raman.

The Current Moment

Los Angeles has been many things over its history: a gold town, an oil town, a capitalist wonderland, an aerospace laboratory, a suburban hellscape, a tinderbox. Now it is a battleground over the future of American politics—the shore on which the rolling wave of socialist victories in America will crash. It is also a city where the neoliberal system of American city governance has completely broken down over the last decade. As an example, the city has completely given up resurfacing roads because it is required by law to update sidewalks with safety and mobility features when it does so. Because it costs more to be legally compliant than not, the city simply avoids resurfacing the whole road—instead doing patch-job repairs on roads with curbs, which costs nearly the same amount but is significantly less effective.

Meanwhile, police helicopters waste millions of dollars idly criss-crossing the skies while our streetlights wink out one by one; in the morning light, one might see a plume of smoke from a fire in a warehouse whose owner was a donor to our current mayor, leaving behind the smell of rotting meat for months afterward.

Where is the mayor? Standing at a podium claiming that air thick with visible smoke is safe to breathe, or perhaps missing in Ghana at the time that another fire starts despite warnings about powerful winds, or—most likely—consorting with her top three donors: the police union, Airbnb, and the Douglas Emmett corporation, one of LA’s largest corporate landlords. Perhaps she’s trying to delay the Metro K Line expansion for the sake of her rich friends, calling on the state attorney general to settle landmark antitrust lawsuits, or asking the Governor to veto legislation allowing denser housing near transit.

One thing she’s not doing is fixing a pothole; in an absurd video imitating Zohran Mamdani’s 24-hour pothole fixes, Bass says she can’t fix a pothole because there’s a car over it, but she hopes that putting a no parking sign up will allow them to maybe fix the pothole at some far-flung future time. Then, she wanders into a burger joint in a completely unconnected series of images. The video has sparked a viral trend, although perhaps not for the reasons her campaign had hoped.

Pity Karen Bass: once a communist (even hardline Maoist) who supported the Cuban Revolution, worn away year after year by lack of engagement with a mass movement until she became a husk that could be puppeted by business interests, landlords, the more reactionary segment of labor, and a smattering of liberal NGOs. She’s become the current standard-bearer of what DSA-LA describes as the Status Quo Coalition, who invoke “progressive values” while standing for bog-standard neoliberal austerity. Several years ago, Bass greatly expanded the police budget despite a roughly $1 billion funding gap by aggressively cutting city services. She has collaborated closely with her main ally on City Council, Marqueece Harris Dawson, to gut charter reform provisions that would have expanded City Council and provided greater oversight of the police.

Bass’s term in office has completely discredited the Status Quo Coalition’s rule, and left the citizens of LA searching for alternatives. It is in this vacuum of leadership that the Democratic Socialists of America, Los Angeles (DSA-LA) are trying to assert ourselves—and where we face an opportunity to win real socialist victories that not only root our organization in the working class, but obtain real benefits for ordinary people. This is the political conjuncture.

Socialists Must Lead

Much has been said about Nithya, a lot of it in the previous article Geese published opposing her endorsement. Opponents of the endorsement have proposed, essentially, that DSA abstain from intervening in this election and cede the field to a Democratic Party establishment made up of establishment interests like developers, landlords, business groups, and business unions. Just as DSA launches our national Workers Deserve More program, we would be saying, unequivocally, that workers deserve less—that the people of LA deserve a city that works solely for the interests of a capitalist class.

Rather than present a positive vision or alternate plan for the chapter, opponents are suggesting a timid approach where we simply allow the lives of working people to get worse for four years while we try to find an alternative mayoral candidate. But if we sit this election out, we will not only lose our best chance at unseating a tremendously unpopular mayor, we will squander the opportunity to build the kind of ambitious, bold, mass organization necessary to win a mayoral election. In essence, we will preemptively capitulate.

This is no time for capitulation. Nithya has proven—in her thorough trouncing of Spencer Pratt and her strong challenge to the Bass status quo in the primaries—that there is a wave of grassroots socialist populism already in motion. It’s a movement of thousands of newly-minted and aligned socialists, all prepared for a radical transformation of Los Angeles. These are socialists who may not yet have the political vehicle capable of unleashing the full potential of their rage against the status quo, but who can be pulled further left if we meet them in the current moment; socialists who we find asking us two questions when beginning their engagement with socialist politics for the first time: “How can we help get Nithya elected?” And most importantly, “How can we make sure the dream of a socialist Los Angeles becomes a reality with her election?”

If we follow a timid, unambitious vision for this electoral cycle, we let a wave of genuine hope and excitement dissipate on the shores of Venice Beach. We would be leaving our city waiting for years for another wave of energy, and leaving those brand-new potential members of our movement directionless in their efforts to build beyond Nithya and elect a full socialist bloc. By abstaining in the mayoral race, we tell the working class we purport to represent that we are not an organization that is serious about doing the hard work of using the levers of democracy to effect material change.

Every politician has their own particular issues, and Nithya is no exception. Like all of our SIOs, she at times has to be organized; like all of our SIOs, we sometimes have to navigate interests working at cross purposes. She can be overly fixated on details, slightly thin-skinned, obtuse, and argumentative—something that could be said of the vast majority of DSA members.

But let’s not forget that Nithya also has a long list of positive attributes as well: she is an exceptional administrator—reducing homelessness in her district by 49% through careful service provision; she is extremely thoughtful on policy, with a strong background in housing (even helping build social housing in Kerala); she is a masterful fundraiser who brought in an enormous fundraising haul off of matching contributions; though she is not Zohran, she is a well-spoken and charismatic speaker with a lot of charm. Nithya has been one of the foremost leaders on tenants’ rights and housing in the city, balancing the need to build more housing in general with the need to protect tenants and vulnerable communities. She has been our best representative on climate, even being removed from the South Coast Air Quality Management District because of her relentless support of greater environmental protections. She was our first Socialist in Office (SIO), and despite the differences that we have had with her, she has never disavowed DSA—even when it would have been convenient for her to do so. And she knows how to win—increasing her margin of victory from her initial race in 2020 to her re-election in 2024, despite a backroom gerrymander that added scores of reactionary homeowners to her district.

Detractors have accused Nithya of having “wonk politics” as a pejorative, as if having a strong understanding of technical subject matter is a detriment. She is, however, keenly aware that she needs the backing of a mass movement in order to be successful with the transformational agenda she seeks to implement. Nithya knows that she will need that kind of support, and her coming to DSA-LA a second time in this election cycle seeking our endorsement—knowing the expectations and conditions that come with that endorsement—shows that she is committed to partnering with the organization.

There is no other race at the moment that has this level of engagement—not our City Attorney race, or our City Council races. Even Nithya’s detractors will spend the time to write lengthy takedown pieces on her, and extensively relitigate her record. The question of“is Nithya one of us” is answered by the amount of time we spend discussing her—what greater pastime is there in DSA than endlessly discussing other members?

This is the most high-salience election currently happening in LA, and our entry into the race would be a widely-publicized challenge to the powers-that-be of the Los Angeles establishment. Through channeling the newfound excitement and momentum for Nithya, we can greatly expand our organization, directing a mass movement of volunteers larger than our current membership—more than 8,000, with 20+ canvasses a week— into other electoral campaigns like Estuardo Mazariegos and Marissa Roy. A massive organization will not only help keep Nithya accountable, but will fuel our ability to win a transformative program for the city. We can deliver real results for Angelenos through leveraging a socialist mayor, a socialist bloc on city council, and a socialist city attorney—giving people a taste of what democratic socialism brings. We can build out a long-term project of co-governance that rebuilds our civic capacity, positions DSA-LA as one of the foremost political projects in the city, and shows the value of a socialist mass movement in governance—all by building a sewer socialist project centered around the needs, desires, and movements of ordinary people.

Sewer Socialism and Pothole Populism

Last Independence Day, the Democratic Socialists of America hit 120,000 members and became the largest socialist organization in America’s 250-year history. But to find the most deeply organized socialist movement in our nation’s past, we need to look to early 20th century Milwaukee, WI. For roughly half a century, Milwaukee was governed by the so-called “sewer socialists,” a pejorative name meant to mock and undermine the kind of governance that this type of socialism championed—specifically, the epithet referred to the frequent typhoid outbreaks caused by sewage dumped in Lake Michigan. However, the sewer socialists became known for expanding public services, protecting striking workers, and hosting public picnics, parades, and concerts. It’s not hard to imagine the talking heads on Fox News labeling us something just as derogatory today (Toilet Trots? Limousine Leninists? Sidewalk Stalinists?), but despite the mocking label, the sewer socialists captured power and led the city of Milwaukee, and much of the state of Wisconsin, for half a century. They did this by slowly amassing power through the City Council (never with a majority), seizing the Mayor’s seat, and enacting good governance reforms and real working class wins through an inside-outside strategy.

Milwaukee’s unmatched success with sewer socialism is often associated with the German immigrant population (perhaps because its founder, Victor Berger, was himself German), but the most overwhelming support for the sewer socialists in Milwaukee came from Black residents. Mayor Daniel Hoan railed against the Ku Klux Klan as Berger fought to criminalize lynching from Washington, D.C.; the sewer socialists were also the sole group fighting for the economic interests of the Black community, and often the two fights went hand in hand. Mayor Hoan’s letter did not mince words about the KKK: "Let me state that for law and order Milwaukee stands first among all the cities in the world. Consequently, for you to comehere…to tell our people that they need this organization, with its hoods and nighties, to insure [sic] law and order is in itself ridiculous." While Milwaukee’s sewer socialists never defunded the police, they nevertheless pushed for major public safety reforms—they knew that safety comes from providing for people’s basic needs, and better living conditions built a safer city. At the same time, they exploited police labor disputes to drive a wedge between the Police Chief and rank-and-file cops. There’s more than one way to neuter a Police Chief; while the class character and composition of the police have changed significantly since the first half of the 20th century, today’s sewer socialists have other ways of taking them on, such as challenging lavish police contracts, moving funds from armed officers to unarmed crisis response, and tackling police unions in order to shift city funds away from policing to essential services.

If 20th-century Milwaukee had sewer socialism, Los Angeles in 2026 is experiencing a surge in pothole populism, and we are only likely to see more enthusiasm build around this issue as LADWP’s aged pipes burst, flooding major thoroughfares and opening sinkholes, while our city’s coffers run dry due to liability payouts for police misconduct and settlements for disabled Angelenos unable to navigate our broken sidewalks. On many days, LA looks like the set of a disaster movie that might have been filmed on our streets before production started leaving the city. It was a populism born of a reaction to this neglect—fed by broken infrastructure, bureaucratic red tape, and corruption in City Hall—that paved the way for mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, as populism can just as easily be co-opted by the right as it can by the left. If we don’t step into the yawning chasm left by Los Angeles’ failing infrastructure, someone else will.

Enter Nithya Raman. Nithya has been decried by some DSA members as a wonk and a technocrat, and her colleague Imelda Padilla, perhaps most well-known for hating street lights and tall buildings, has attacked her for running the Housing and Homelessness Committee (recently dissolved by Mayor Bass superfan Marqueece Harris Dawson) “like a lecture hall at a university.” Mayor Bass shouted “Where were you?” at her ally-turned-opponent during the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association-hosted first debate of the general election, gassing herself up for work she did in Congress 17 years ago. She was apparently unaware that Nithya would have just completed her Master's in Urban Planning at MIT at the time and was more than a decade away from entering City Hall. Nithya is a bit of a nerd, but she just might be the nerd that can dig our city out of this crisis.

What Can Nithya Actually Do?

What does a technocratic nerd with a Master's in Urban Planning have to do with socialism? A lot, actually. Nithya is a sewer socialist in the tradition of Victor Berger, Zohran Mamdani, and DSA-LA’s own Rick Cole, and she has developed a platform that will provide real and immediate improvements for working people in Los Angeles. Mayor Mamdani spoke on the enduring importance of sewer socialism in an interview with The Nation after his historic upset to become the Democratic nominee in New York City:

“What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks. You win someone’s trust through an outcome, and that is what I am working backward from: an outcome of an affordable city and a desire to show that government can in fact live up to its responsibilities to working residents.”

Building on the success of the historic rent stabilization changes Nithya enacted in partnership with the minority socialist bloc of City Council—and outside pressure from DSA and the Keep LA Housed Coalition—Nithya will launch the city’s first ever Office of Tenant Protections that will break down departmental silos and work in partnership with the City Attorney (luckily, DSA has already endorsed the leading candidate for the office). She will enact good governance reforms that cut red tape and streamline processes in the city; she will thoughtfully but aggressively expand transit connectivity, increase frequency, and prioritize safety for riders, and will appoint people to the Metro Board based on qualifications rather than cronyism; she will be able to reduce homelessness in Los Angeles by 50% through a comprehensive homelessness services plan, as she did in her own district; she will write a Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) into the city’s charter, fix the broken lights and sidewalks, and—yes—fill the damn potholes and repave the streets.

Residents of Council District 9 have been left without adequate representation for too long. Their termed-out Councilmember, Curren Price, has been ordered to stand trial on 12 felony public corruption charges, including “embezzlement of public funds, perjury and financial conflicts of interest,” resulting in increasingly frequent recusal from votes in City Hall. His former chief of staff and would-be successor, José Ugarte, has already begun his record of corruption before ever entering office and is backed by the same villains as Karen Bass. In contrast, the DSA-endorsed candidate, Estuardo Mazariegos, offers a different vision for the future of CD9: rather than a South LA where representation belongs to the highest bidder while Abuelitas lament broken streetlights and working parents trip over sidewalks that have been waiting 8 years for repair, his campaign focuses on “delivering the basics and fixing what’s broken.” Voter turnout in CD9 is among the lowest in the city, while its residents are arguably in the most need of help.

Nithya and Estuardo already align on centering workers and enacting good governance reforms; their campaigns offer parallel platforms that address so many of the repeated issues we’ve heard from voters at the doors in CD9. They boast shared endorsements from South LA’s own ACCE (where Estuardo served as executive director), Working Families Party, LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia, and a growing left-labor coalition focused on good governance and real improvements for the working class. They are already both seeing opposition from the same corrupt status quo entitled political class that has left CD9 in disrepair and has left its residents despondent. CD9’s political future is still unwritten: a mayoral candidate who promises to deliver “A City That Works” could sway undecided Black and Latino working class voters en masse, and even strip away jaded Bass supporters. That’s one of the foremost reasons why ACCE, a radical, member-based organization deeply rooted in the Black and Latino communities of South LA, considers this to be a fight they must take on, both at the legislative and executive level—the intelligentsia of DSA who argue that we should be listening to these exact communities might do well to actually listen to what they have to say.

Nithya’s campaign represents light for a district that has quite literally been left in the dark. Mayor Berger was critical of less successful contemporary socialist movements who relied on simply preaching socialism to the working class rather than doing the dirty work to improve the working class’ living conditions and show them that a better world isn’t just possible, but is imminent:

“The most formidable obstacle in the way of further progress—and especially in the propaganda of Socialism—is not that men are insufficiently versed in political economy or lacking in intelligence. It is that people are without hope…Despair is the chief opponent of progress. Our greatest need is hope.”

A democratic socialist mayoral campaign can galvanize that hope not only in the short-term, but in the long term. Staggering challenges await the socialist movement in the future, and a democratic socialist government capable of providing real improvements in the lives of working class people is a precondition to win the kind of power we need to meet those challenges and build a socialist city—both now and in the long term.

The Road to ‘28: the Olympics and the Presidential Moment

Opponents of the endorsement have graciously commended us for identifying 2028 as a year of particular importance to the socialist movement locally and nationally—but have come to the wrong-headed conclusion that having a mayor will somehow hurt, rather than help, our efforts to fight back against the depredations of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The 2028 Olympics are, at this point, an inevitability the city will have to face. Make no mistake, these are Trump’s Olympics—he has said as much. The Olympics occurring during a presidential election year, when DSA may be running its first presidential campaign, makes the situation even more fraught. The conflict between our socialism and the paternalistic, fascist brand of capitalism espoused by the current establishment will turn Los Angeles into a battleground in a very real way— and with Trump’s promise of supplementing local law enforcement with ICE, it’s entirely likely that that battle will go from the merely metaphorical to the literal and dangerous, as clashes between protesters and law enforcement erupt.

On August 12, the Los Angeles City Council voted 10-4 (with Nithya among the dissenters) to approve LA28’s Enhanced City Resources Master Agreement (ECRMA), which leaves the city on the hook for exorbitant expenses, including excess expenses related to outsourcing the Games’ security to the federal government. Nithya has been a consistent voice against the financial waste of the Olympics, the glaring lack of oversight of LA28, and LA28’s retention of Casey Wasserman on their executive committee. She has also been a voice against ICE and outsourcing of the Games’ security to federal police and troops. Having influence in the mayor’s office, even if it’s as slight as some of her detractors assume it will be, allows us to deploy an inside-outside strategy against the worst aspects of hosting the Games—mobilizing the masses in the streets, while using the powers of the city government against the occupying agents.

The 2025 summer occupation by ICE, the US Marines, and the federalized National Guard will be dwarfed by the Olympics’ federal “security” forces. While no concrete number has been stated, the federal government has allocated $1 billion toward the Games’ security, making the 2025 deployment’s cost of $120 million for approximately 5,000 troops over 60 days seem like a pittance. With the Games only lasting 16 days (plus mobilization and demobilization time), the allocation signals the presence of a much larger, and likely better equipped, federal police force deployed for the Olympics. During the MacArthur Park raid by federal troops last summer, Karen Bass tried to exploit the chaos for some much-needed positive press, only to be recorded confirming, “They have completed their mission here?” revealing she hadn’t even arrived at MacArthur Park until after the federal operation had already ended.

With Nithya at the city’s helm, the chapter has the opportunity to be a guiding hand for her office in the face of an unprecedented struggle for power between the local and the federal levels. No chair at these tables is ever left empty, and if our chapter denies itself an opportunity to shape the city’s response, we will also be partially to blame for the potentially cataclysmic outcome of this event. Failing to endorse Raman means leaving that chair occupied by corporate interests.

In fact, Karen Bass has already committed to allowing federal law enforcement to maintain their role in our city, and has routinely capitulated to the interests of YIMBYs and tech capitalists like Airbnb looking to exploit the city’s already-insufficient housing stock. In the 2026-27 budget cycle, Bass snuck legislation into the city budget that would have created nearly 31,000 new deregulated short-term rental units on top of the 9,000 that we already have. She did this, allegedly, in exchange for a measly $50 million tax pre-payment by Airbnb to pad the budget during an election year—and while swift organizing put a stop to her plan, it is entirely likely that she will continue to try to sell off the city wholesale to corporate interests. Opposing this kind of predatory capitalist hawking of our city must be one of the primary tasks of the socialist movement, and requires the office of the mayor.

Beyond Deliverism: Building the Socialist Bloc.

This does not mean all of our work must be centered on the Mayor’s office; in fact, it cannot be done exclusively via the Mayor’s office. Our slate, which includes Marissa Roy as City Attorney and Estuardo Mazariegos in CD9, is monumentally important for creating a political engine in Los Angeles that can be leveraged by the chapter. Having more DSA elected officials in office also naturally provides more avenues for pressure and accountability on Nithya as our co-governance with her office develops.

Socialism is not the politics of a single person, and purity tests as to whether or not a single personality is “socialist enough” miss the moment where we should be looking at how broader strategies centered on the office (regardless of who resides in it) can advance the cause of the working class. With a DSA mayor, five DSA city councilmembers, a DSA city attorney, and a DSA-friendly controller, we gain the ability to steer the nation’s second-largest city in a way that not only fights back against the crises of the Olympics and beyond, but creates the foundation to build Los Angeles into a socialist city.

Building this kind of bench will have long-term multiplicative power for our organization. DSA-LA can act as a nexus between our electeds, paving the way for DSA-LA to extend our reach into the city’s powerful commissions. A united bloc of SIOs will make appointments to the Police, Airport, Harbor, and other Commissions far easier, allowing the City of Los Angeles to maintain increased sovereignty in the face of a more severe federal invasion—as well as engage in the long-term project to make sure that our city is compliant with domestic and international law by blocking arms shipments to the Israeli state, which Nithya committed to doing in her DSA endorsement questionnaire. Presence on these commissions will also enable us to protect protesters fighting to boycott, divest, and sanction the Israeli state—which Nithya also promised to protect to the fullest extent possible at last Saturday’s endorsement forum. All of these international issues flow through LA, and will require power at the executive level to move the needle.

This will also be a crucial campaign in terms of building our capacity as a chapter—a campaign like this has the ability to bring swathes of Nithya sympathizers into the fold, increasing our capacity as an organization. Building up the infrastructure necessary to win a city-wide race—the canvassers, the field leads, the comms infrastructure—builds up our capacity to run more ambitious races and fills our bench with the member-leaders who can stand for those elections. In 2028, we will be facing a presidential election in which we will likely have a democratic socialist candidate—securing Los Angeles for that candidate will be incredibly important for ensuring their victory, and having the experience necessary to win that election will be vital. We may also run races for Congress, for state legislature, for more council districts; all these races will benefit from this experience as well. Once elected, those candidates will be vital to helping us fight back against the crises awaiting us in the future.

Organizing against those impending crises will require continually applied pressure, however, and at times that pressure will need to be applied toward the very offices we’ve helped elevate our candidates into. This is not a betrayal of our endorsees or a sign of the organization’s weakness, but a continuation of the mass politics we’ve committed ourselves to and a measure of our strength. It is well understood that governing as a socialist in a capitalist system presents near-impossible contradictions, and it is an abdication of our responsibility for us to elevate someone to their office and then declare our job done. DSA is not a machine that just knocks doors; we are a sociopolitical force. Continuing to pressure our electeds to maintain our strategies, both locally and nationally, in the face of these contradictions is part of the work in both building and maintaining that power. We have successfully organized Nithya multiple times in the past when her positions have diverged from ours, and building our organization through her campaign ensures we will have ample ability to do it again if needed. Simply throwing up our hands and preemptively deciding that our electeds will go completely unchecked by the chapter during a crisis is an admission that we are powerless and incapable of doing the work to organize them to our positions.

In order to win the fights against Airbnb, the LAPD, federal invasion, rapidly climbing housing costs, the increasingly brutal enforcement of anti-homeless ordinances, the presidential race, etc., we will need to be constantly organizing alongside our coalition partners within and outside government. Organizing our electeds will become even more effective the more offices we win, and the more they act in concert, making it possible for the chapter to engage in a more effective inside-outside strategy. Our strong, visible stances in these crises will also bring more members to DSA-LA, making the organization and the broader movement that much harder to ignore. Like in New York, we can work with the Office of Tenant Protection to expand tenant protections with actual state power behind it, held in both the mayoral and city attorney’s offices, delivering material relief to a heavily burdened Angeleno renter base.

Opponents of the endorsement have proposed engaging in hypothetical party-building some time in the future; we support building a party in the present moment. Galvanizing a working class terrorized by ICE and abused by police into affirming and leading their own political moment becomes easier with a mayor who is already integrated with a movement focused on mass politics like DSA. This galvanization becomes even more powerful when the movement is behind such a mayor, and when we can demonstrate that we can hold her to the task when competing interests threaten co-governance. To claim we’re not powerful enough to organize Nithya Raman once elected is more so an indictment of our chapter than it is of her.

Socialist Leadership Means Endorsing Nithya

In 2023, we passed a national resolution to build DSA into an independent socialist party, and in 2026, at over 120,000 members, DSA has become the only organization in the United States that can feasibly do so. Building a true party apparatus out of an organization of activists and organizers will take trial and error; it’s going to take experimentation and bold swings. If we’re going to move to a more advanced electoral strategy that includes congressional races and executive offices, waiting until we find an ideal candidate where “a real relationship of accountability exists,” rather than building that relationship by running the office itself, misses the urgency of this pivotal moment.

Eleanor Babaev, a member of DSA’s National Political Committee and member of the Groundwork caucus, lays it out plainly in her article titled “Why We Run for Executive Office”:

Mayors, governors, and presidents also have limited structural avenues for directly improving workers’ lives—this often unglamorous work is done on the shop floor, at the bargaining table, and in legislative majorities. But what executives can do is use their bully pulpit to coalesce and pressure lawmakers into passing legislation that makes it easier for workers to organize.

Babaev also correctly points out, when talking about a potential Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidential run, “the lack of favorable conditions for an executive to operate in should not alone dissuade socialist seizures of executive power.” The same is true with Nithya. Similarly, Nithya “would likely deviate to a significant degree from our national Workers Deserve More Program (WDM)—if not in policy, then in messaging,” but would be able to “mobilize working people [and] provide ample material for party building worth our investment.” By endorsing and running an executive, we are boldly stating that we are willing to do the work of party building.

No candidate is perfect, and as Babaev explains, co-governance is hard, even with electeds like Zohran. Co-governance takes experimentation and collaboration; it takes building a “system that supports them in accomplishing their goals—whether they be legislative or agitational—that rivals those of our class enemies.” Socialists in Los Angeles have not yet had the same opportunities to experiment and develop the structures and practices necessary for this kind of collaborative organizing to the extent NYC-DSA has. If we balk at an opportunity to build out these structures ahead of 2030, we will be behind the curve and facing these same questions anew for a mayoral repeat and the newly electable county executive, but without the practice, lessons, and data that can be gleaned from these experiments in co-governance with Raman.

It has taken New York City DSA almost ten years, and they too had their imperfect candidates that maintained imperfect relationships. Babaev is explicit in stating that, one who voted [for Mamdani] did so with the impression that we could always hold him accountable, that our working groups would have as much access to him as they do our legislators, or that he could govern without making significant concessions to public and private entities that have been building institutional power…”. Taking these risks in experimentation and building bridges has allowed NYC-DSA to position themselves to elect socialists to state and federal bodies, deliver vital tenant protections, take steps toward public ownership of utilities, and lead the national conversation (sometimes to the chagrin of smaller chapters) in what building socialism as a movement truly looks like.

It is through these imperfect relationships that NYC-DSA has been able to build out its electoral program and shape it into the machine that brought us Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and so many others. It is through the struggles of failed runs, betrayed loyalties, and incorrect estimations of access to power that their chapter became more practiced at navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, and if we shy away now, we will remain shorebound when it comes time for the next odyssey into the halls of power.

Many in the Los Angeles chapter would like our socialist organization to show deference to reactionary or liberal NGOs and labor unions. With this endorsement in front of us, we have the opportunity to stake a claim as an independent political organization, and lead a coalition rather than tailing others. We should embrace this campaign to build sewer socialism and differentiate “democratic socialism” from garden-variety liberal progressivism, and we should use this opportunity to do it. We should further embrace this campaign to build out our internal structures and learn from the process of co-governing with Raman so we can influence her and become a political engine worthy of the ire we already inspire among the establishment’s loudest screamers.

We should do this not just because Karen Bass is bad, which she is, but because Nithya herself is a good choice for our organization. If we achieve the transformational program that she has laid out—and which aligns with our own organization’s Democratic Socialist program—we’ll have not only completely changed the fabric of the city we live in for the better, but advanced the socialist movement by extending the frontier of the possible. Doing this benefits all people across the city, rather than just the pockets in which DSA is strong, especially if the candidate advancing this movement is attentive to detail and knowledgeable on the issues. It builds our presence among the broad multiracial working class.

In an offensive paragraph of their essay in Geese that deserves real scrutiny, the opposition argues that endorsing Nithya would reveal DSA-LA to be “transplants”—a strange turn of phrase to use against a woman who immigrated to this country from Kerala. But beneath the coalition-math of their argument sits an unstated assumption: first, that Black and Latino Angelenos are, by nature, resistant to socialist politics and second, that any candidate who also draws support from wealthier or whiter constituencies must therefore be betraying the “real” working class. This unfounded assertion ignores that a strong left-labor coalition will necessarily include people of all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, and the inclusion of white affluent constituencies does not preclude the representation of Black and Latino working people. Historical coalitions like the sewer socialists described earlier in this article provide examples to the contrary. That paragraph instead urges the chapter to “focus on campaigns that ground us in the lived realities and daily experiences of the broader multiracial working class in LA. This language may sound substantive, but it is an insubstantial statement compared to the concrete policy they dismiss Raman for pursuing. It’s worth noting that zoning and land use are not some elite abstraction removed from working class life. The real technocrats and neoliberals would prefer workers stay out of zoning fights altogether because in a city that often functions like one giant real estate transaction, land use is class struggle. When we refuse to participate in that struggle, that inaction leads to the most vulnerable communities in LA getting exploited and displaced. This is the material reality and daily experience of much of the multiracial working class in LA, and exactly why DSA must participate in this struggle in a tangible and substantial way.

Rather than launder the right-wing talking points used against Zohran, Darializa, Claire, Melat, and so many others, we urge these authors to consider: there is no more urgent campaign to ground us in the lived realities and daily experiences of the multiracial working class than this one. This is a campaign that affects every corner of the city, from Boyle Heights to South Central to Sun Valley—a campaign that directly affects the real everyday conditions of the multiracial working class. By engaging in this campaign, we’d be placing ourselves at the head of a powerful coalition of working class interests—Western Carpenters, United Auto Workers, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the Working Families Party, the Committee of Interns and Residents, and a growing number of other organizations.

Ultimately, to build a socialist city that can defeat tech fascism, defend against federal invasion, insulate our most vulnerable neighbors from violence, enhance renter protections, improve transit, repair lights, and fill those damn potholes, we need to lay the first stone along our path. As socialists, we cannot shy away from contradiction, or refuse to engage in struggle because it will not take place in ideal circumstances—as Marx famously said, we “do not make [history] under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Nithya is already seen as the DSA candidate due to our long history together, and her success and failure—and that of the socialist project in the city itself—will rest largely on whether we choose to seize this moment and use it to build the kind of fighting mass organization that can deliver on the promise of her run. We urge our comrades to bring our politics from the meeting hall to City Hall, and ensure that we offer working people real solutions to the issues of our time by joining us in voting YES to endorse Nithya Raman for mayor.