Groundwork NPC Reflections on One Year: Eleanor B.
The National Political Committee of DSA is the organization’s highest political body, elected every other year by delegates at DSA’s convention. 23 at-large members join 2 National Co-Chairs and 2 YDSA Reps to manage DSA’s day to day affairs, direct resources, and set the organization’s political direction. This 27 person body forms the organization’s legal board and is tasked with representing the breadth of political opinion and experience in DSA . Despite this extraordinary responsibility, NPC members are often at a distance from the general membership of the org- their work is frequently behind the scenes or only visible to those members who opt in. Groundwork, who holds the largest bloc on the 2025-27 NPC, tasked our NPC members with providing report backs on the first year of their term, a milestone we hit this August. We will be publishing their responses as a series over the coming days, starting with Eleanor B. of New York City DSA:
What I’m reading: End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Current Earworms: Cupid de Locke by The Smashing Pumpkins, Stupid Song by Olivia Rodrigo
Meals I’ve enjoyed recently: My coworker brought me a baked sweet potato for lunch the other day. As event planners, our schedules are often odd and some weeks we work over 50 hours, so it can be easier to eat leftover cheese cubes than to cook for ourselves. My coworker randomly bringing me something nutrient rich that she knows I enjoy was an unexpectedly touching display of solidarity. I’ve also been making a dupe of the Xi’an Famous Foods Spicy Cumin Lamb Noodles that goes absolutely crazy. I’ve been obsessed with anything that has Szechuan peppercorn in it, I’m not sure why but I’ve been on a kick for over a year now.
What I’m working on right now: Recently I’ve been working to support the National Labor Commission in setting up a national Election Defense Campaign. The goal is to offer a political framing on this issue for those who look to DSA in these moments and to provide chapter leaders with the tools and training needed to do election defense work in their chapters. I believe that we need to be prepared to resist any potential election interference as Trump has already encouraged his supporters to “cheat like hell”, paired with this admin’s record of using immigration enforcement to crack down on their political opponents. It is true that the real substance of the Trump admin’s coup has already been carried out in the courts, or is expected to be carried out in the courts in the coming months, as the Supreme Court has dismantled the Voting Rights Act, giving states the right to disenfranchise massive swaths of Black people across the American South, and is expected to strike down the injunction against Trump’s executive order that would prevent absentee ballots from being counted. However, whether or not our rapid response and poll watching efforts will be the intervention necessary to actually stop the election from being stolen this November, it is regardless the task of socialists to engage in massive resistance in these times of crisis. It is the task of socialists to defend the civic freedoms which, as Ralph Miliband puts it in Marxism and Politics, “however inadequately and precariously form part of bourgeois democracy, are the product of centuries of unremitting popular struggles” so that we can “make possible their extension and enlargement by the removal of class boundaries”. Moreover, it is our task to meet millions of Americans in the political realm that they are engaged in and politicize them into the mass action required to win a world without billionaires, without genocide, without ecological collapse, where every worker has ample leisure time and lives a life free of alienation.
Speaking of how this era can feel apocalyptic, I have also been working to help DSA chapters table at Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s book tour stops for their new book End Times Fascism. Klein and Taylor expressed an interest in working closely with DSA throughout their book tour and even launched the tour on a DSA mass call, citing the Zohran campaign as the ‘antithesis of fascism’ and thanking DSA for offering the world hope.
Lastly, I’ve been working with Francesca and Ella on passing priorities. The need to do this came about as a result of staff needing more direction as well as the national organization’s lack of a unifying vision for where we want to be in the next few years, let alone in the next few months. I was originally skeptical of this project despite believing that it is necessary because I didn’t see it as something that could disentangle the national organization’s many inefficiencies. I thought it was a bureaucratic fix to a political problem. The national organization is bloated with committees that exist as fiefdoms for various tendencies. I worried that the solution that Priorities would offer would only serve to reentrench this as a given rather than bolstering work that has proven itself effective or supporting campaigns with energized organizers behind them. However, I’m proud of the work we’ve done to create a version of this that is hopefully helpful for staff as well as fair, not only to the NPC “left/right/and center” but also to the members and chapters who rely on us for support.
Reflections on my first year on NPC:
No one has the time, energy, or capacity to effectively do the work that needs to be done. Anyone claiming that this is not the case for them is just campaigning for their own reelection.
Behavior drives more conflict than political differences.
Political majorities for the kinds of things that grow DSA are built more frequently on a shared willingness to prioritize organizing over bureaucracy. These majorities exist not in the absence of politics, but in a willingness to find common ground despite the chasms between the politics.
We need to bring back the art of cold calling people.
