In the last year, we’ve seen our organization Democratic Socialists of America quadruple in size from 7,000 members to over 31,000 members. More important than just membership growth, new members took up the task to start over 100 new chapters across the country, turning DSA into a 47-state organization that’s more powerful than it has ever been in our 35-year history. In the last 6 months, we’ve seen our youth wing YDSA go from being on 50 campuses to over 325 nationwide which places them alongside Students for a Democratic Society at its height in the late 60s. In the last few days, we’ve seen 15 DSA members get elected to office in a wave that the socialist left in this country hasn’t seen in generations.

My story with DSA begins in 2014 when a friend recommended to me “The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington” but doesn’t more officially start until 2016 during one of the most disappointing nights of my life. I’d spent the last 6 months pouring everything I had into Bernie’s run for President and was sitting at a watch party in a New Jersey fire hall dejected that both my time with the campaign and the campaign itself were coming to an end when I saw a young guy at another table wearing a DSA shirt. This was the first time I’d seen or met another member in my home state and was a sober reminder that we had to continue the political revolution we’d talked about so much for the last year but likely under different banners with different leaders long after the campaign finished. Over the next 6 months, that young guy in the DSA shirt would become my comrade Russell Weiss-Irwin and we went on to work together to make our organization which once had a large Central NJ chapter in the 90s vibrant again but this time all across the state. That summer transitioning to organizing with DSA to build our organization in New Jersey was a humbling one as we had basically no members, money or central place as the few members we had lived far away from each other. My first two DSA meetings were at a pizza place where there were so few of us that we could share a single pizza and then in the back of a liquor store with two comrades that are older than my parents. But we persevered and moved from a group that shared a public library space for meetings and marched with a painted Disney bedsheet for a banner at demos to an organization that now has 3 chapters across the state and over 700 members in less than a year.

While I was helping to build the organization in New Jersey, I also started helping staff and people I knew in national leadership out with getting DSA to integrate digital and distributed organizing to build it up nationwide. The lessons of distributed I learned from Bernie 2016 were lessons I knew DSA could use to build new chapters where we didn’t have any to fight for democratic socialism in both the places where the campaign had performed poorly like the South and had won like parts of the Rust Belt, Appalachia and states like Hawaii and Alaska. It was shaky but slowly but surely the pieces started to come together as we moved from a 20 to a 25 state organization which gave some of us the motivation to keep pushing for a 50 state organizing strategy. Our plans and strategies all had to be reconsidered as the far right took all three branches of government in the 2016 election and suddenly thousands of curious onlookers became members of our organization to show socialism or barbarism isn’t just a slogan but a life or death proclamation for the working class.

In the last year, we’ve moved from being a marginal organization that had no right surviving as long as it did other than sheer stubbornness that amounted to a profound act of faith for our older comrades who’ve been around since the beginning who refused to let the flame burn out no matter how dim it got year after year to a serious force to be reckoned with in American politics. This growth has not been without mistakes, faults in the road and structural challenges but I’ve seen glimmers of our force and potential whether it be 70 chapters turning out to support CWA on picket lines on less than 3 days notice, chapters staging sit-ins and taking arrests in crucial swing vote Senate offices on less than a days notice to halt healthcare repeals and advocate for Medicare for All, to No Ban/No Wall rallies organized nationwide within hours, to chapters sharing creative campaigns they’re working on and redeveloping them from East Bay to New Orleans, to chapters taking on powerful politicians with our own and winning in Virginia and Georgia. Much of the last year we’ve spent on the defensive and we’re just touching what we can accomplish when we go on the offensive together. DSA has provided a home for me and us all to organize on all fronts for racial, reproductive, environmental and economic justice and to fight capitalism with everything we have.

Whether it be midweek meetings with hundreds of people chanting “Fight Back!” in unison with vigor after a long day at work, over a thousand delegates singing “Solidarity Forever” together with socialist leaders from across the globe at our convention in Chicago, seeing people emerge as leaders over time, or seeing chapters like Pittsburgh grow from 7 members to 350 and Seattle not existing a year ago to being a major force in the city now, I’ve been taken aback time and again by how wonderful this organization we’re building is. This is a fight that won’t be won in a year — this is the fight of our lives. This movement is bigger than any one of us and so much stronger when we’re all engaged in the struggle together. We must take the torch our older comrades kept aflame for so many years and use it to light the torches for thousands and thousands of others to run forward ahead with for many years to come. The sun of capitalism is setting; the sun of socialism is rising. To serve this organization is the greatest honor of my life and I hope you’ll join me in renewing membership and switching to monthly if you have the means to do so.

— Christian Bowe is on DSA’s National Political Committee and was previously the chair of Central NJ DSA.